Hong Kong: Paul Lam to visit Vietnam Secretary for Justice Paul Lam will depart this afternoon on a three-day visit to Vietnam, where he will attend the 13th China-ASEAN Prosecutors-General Conference and deliver a speech at a plenary session. As a member of the Chinese delegation, Mr Lam will attend bilateral meetings between the delegation and member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The justice chief will also meet with representatives from Vietnams legal and commercial sectors to exchange views on issues of mutual interest. Mr Lam will return to Hong Kong on December 6. During his absence, Deputy Secretary for Justice Cheung Kwok-kwan will be Acting Secretary. This story has been published on: 2023-12-04. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Xi stresses expediting building Shanghai into modern socialist int'l metropolis Xinhua) 08:22, December 04, 2023 Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) SHANGHAI/YANCHENG, Jiangsu, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed the need to speed up building Shanghai into a modern, socialist and international metropolis by focusing on the construction of international centers of economy, finance, trade, shipping and sci-tech innovation. Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks during an inspection tour in Shanghai that ran from Tuesday to Saturday. Xi urged Shanghai to accelerate building itself into a modern, socialist and international metropolis with global influence, and play a leading and exemplary role in advancing Chinese modernization. He inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange on Tuesday afternoon as soon as he got off a train. Xi urged the exchange to speed up the construction of a world-class exchange, and make greater contributions to exploring the futures regulatory system and business model with Chinese characteristics and building an international financial center. When visiting Zhangjiang Science City in the Pudong New Area, Xi said promoting Chinese modernization can not be separated from the strategic support of science and technology, education and talent, and that Shanghai should take a lead in this respect. On Wednesday afternoon, Xi visited a residential community in Minhang District that is dedicated to providing affordable rental housing for new urban dwellers, young people and frontline workers. Xi said he was pleased to see city builders from all over the country living and working here with joy and contentment. Migrant workers who come to make contributions in Shanghai are also masters of the city, he said. On Friday morning, Xi was briefed on the city's work by the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee and the Shanghai municipal government. Xi noted that accelerating the construction of Shanghai as international centers of economy, finance, trade, shipping and sci-tech innovation is an important task entrusted to the city by the CPC Central Committee. Xi stressed that Shanghai should intensify its research to achieve breakthroughs in core technologies in key fields, boost the transformation and upgrading of its traditional industries, and continuously enhance its status as an international center of economy and its influence in global economic governance. More efforts should be made to promote high-level financial opening-up to better serve the real economy, sci-tech innovation, and the joint development of the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi said. He noted that the city should implement its strategy of upgrading its pilot free trade zone in full, promote the development of the international trade center, and enhance its capability of global allocation of shipping resources. Xi stressed that Shanghai should comprehensively deepen reform and opening-up from a higher starting point, urging the city to devote significant energy to promoting pioneering reform and opening-up on all fronts. Shanghai should also foster a world-class business environment, stimulate the vitality of various business entities, and strengthen its attractiveness to high-end resources at home and abroad, he noted. Xi pointed out that Shanghai should explore a new path of modernization in megacity governance with Chinese characteristics, and that improving people's living standards and well-being is the original aspiration and ultimate goal of urban construction and governance. He highlighted efforts to deepen culture-related institutional reforms and invigorate the innovation and creativity of culture. Noting that Shanghai is the birthplace of the Communist Party of China, Xi emphasized the importance of making good use of local resources to carry forward the great founding spirit of the Party and build a team of high-caliber, professional officials that matches the standards of a modern, socialist and international metropolis. On his return journey to Beijing on Sunday, Xi visited a memorial hall of the New Fourth Army in Yancheng, a city in east China's Jiangsu Province. Cai Qi, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and director of the CPC Central Committee general office, was also on the inspection tour. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Ju Peng) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Ju Peng) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Shen Hong) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, visits a memorial hall of the New Fourth Army in Yancheng, east China's Jiangsu Province, Dec. 3, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in Shanghai from Tuesday to Saturday. On his return journey to Beijing on Sunday, Xi visited the memorial hall in Yancheng. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) ITOCHU Corporation, leading Japanese trading and investment company, signed a crude oil sales and purchase agreement 2024 with the Ministry of Energy and Minerals (MEM) on November 29, 2023, to mark its 50th-anniversary celebrations in Oman. The agreement was signed on the sidelines of ITOCHUs anniversary celebrations for its long-term business relationship with the Sultanate. Since the first contract year of 1974, ITOCHU has consistently been the Ministry of Energy and Minerals one of the longest private off-takers, responsible for lifting Oman crude. The 50th sales and purchase agreement for the year 2024 was signed by Salim Al Aufi, Ministry of Energy and Minerals, and Masaya Tanaka, President of Energy and Chemicals Company, Executive Officer, ITOCHU Corporation, at a gala event held at InterContinental Hotel in the presence of several dignitaries including Nasser Al Jashmi, Secretary General, Ministry of Finance, Mohsin Al Hadhrami, Undersecretary of Ministry of Energy and Minerals and Jota Yamamoto, Ambassador of Japan to the Sultanate of Oman. The evening commenced with an introduction by Mr. Daigo Takeishi, General Manager, ITOCHU Muscat Office, and opening remarks by Masaya Tanaka, ITOCHU Corporation. This was followed by Salim Al Aufi, Ministry of Energy and Minerals, addressing the gathering. The programme also featured a presentation on ITOCHU Oman Leadership Program by Zakiya Al Azri of PDO, Ahmed Al Sukaili of OIA, and the ITOCHU Oil Exploration Seminar by Ali Al Hajri, OQ Upstream. Kenji Otsuka, CEO of the Middle East bloc, ITOCHU Corporation, delivered the closing remarks. Tetsuya Yamada, Chief Operating Officer of ITOCHU Corporation's Energy Division, emphasised the significant growth of ITOCHU's operations in Oman spanning five decades. The company plans to extend its reach into low-carbon energy sectors, specifically Hydrogen/Ammonia, as well as renewable energy business, including energy derived from waste. These are aimed at making substantial contributions to the In-Country Value (ICV) initiative in the forthcoming years. In addition to its involvement in Oman's energy sector, ITOCHU is also a shareholder of both Oman LNG and Qalhat LNG and has been lifting liquefied natural gas (LNG) since 2006, in addition to its crude oil contract. The company is also the largest shareholder of Barka Desalination Company, which started its commercial operations in June 2018 as the largest desalination plant in Oman. --OGN/TrdaeArbaia News Service An Asian student is standing up for a University of Pennsylvania law professor who faces losing her tenured position due to racist viewpoints that sparked massive protests on the Ivy League campus in recent weeks. Despite her growing reputation for sparking racial controversies by suggesting the superiority of white culture, professor Amy Wax has found an unexpected advocate in Charlie Cheon a third-year law student who wrote a letter to school administrators late last month expressing support for his beleaguered teacher. It remains uncertain, however, if Cheon was aware of Waxs controversial statements, including the assertion that the United States would be better off with fewer Asians and her remarks that Blacks and Asians are resentful of Western peoples outsized achievements. University of Pennsylvania Professor Amy Wax said Blacks and Asians are resentful of Western peoples outsized achievements. (Screenshot/YouTube/ Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard) For now, Wax who has taught at Penn Law since 2001 remains on the university staff despite growing calls for her to resign due to racist comments and writings that have stirred anger among students and a wide range of cultural and social justice advocates during her long tenure. Previously, the National Black Law Students Association, the National Asian Pacific American Law Student Association, and the North American South Asian Law Students Association released a letter in April 2022 calling for Wax to be ousted from the campus and barred from talking to students after she made openly made racist remarks in and outside a lecture hall. At the time, the Penn Law School had already faced several years of blowback due to the professors remarks. The school has also disciplined Wax but has also taken more than 20 months to review a litany of claims against the professor while she continues her offensive rants in the classroom. Previously, a group of student leaders called for Wax to be suspended until her grade books from the past 21 years could be reviewed, but school officials never responded to the demand. In the latest episode, the university said it had initiated a legal process to fire Wax for alleged disparaging statements shes made during her time at Penn, which recently prompted the professor to launch a legal defense fund that faces accusations of promoting itself as a tax-deductible charity, potentially violating federal tax laws. Wax ignited the most recent firestorm when she twice invited white supremacist Jared Taylor to speak in front of her Conservative Legal Thoughts class, adding fuel to the broader uproar over her teaching methods while also sparking massive campus protests and complaints to academic administrators. Many voices in the broader academic community have also expressed concerns that Wax was attempting to whitewash Americas history of racism. Not everyone was on board with the backlash, however, as Cheon filed a complaint with Penn administrators about the escalating tempest. I write to you to express my sincerest displeasure with regards to the way some students are handling the invitation of a guest by Professor Wax, Cheon, who is Asian, says in a letter posted to his YouTube channel in late November. I was quite incensed to see flyers posted all across the school smearing Professor Waxs character. In my opinion, this along with the fact that some of her students in the Conservative Legal Thoughts class were harassed (boo-ed and hissed at) shows an effort to intimidate, indicating a lack of respect for civil discourse. Cheons YouTube channel declares he is a law student living in Philly while also emphasizing he is strongly opinionated about political concerns. I like to share my opinions on matters important to me, and I hope you get to hear them. No hard feelings if you disagree, he proclaims in his profile statement. In late November, Cheon invited his 136,000 YouTube followers to Read my letter to the Dean of my law school regarding an incident that happened today with the woke mob before adding, I really cannot stand them a reference to those who were railing against the professors controversial viewpoints. The letter raises specific concerns regarding how some students were reacting to the controversy involving Wax, with Cheon citing major discord in Waxs classes, including the distribution of racist propaganda and an overall atmosphere of harassment during class time. Cheons statement also attempts to outline the troublesome aspects of the Wax situation that was disrupting student life as the fall semester neared the Christmas break. Cheon kicks off the complaint by citing his general displeasure with students who protested following Waxs apparent embrace of Taylor despite his position as an avowed white nationalist. In the letter, Cheon also expresses concerns about the principles of free speech and complains that conservative students might feel restricted from expressing genuine viewpoints in such a politically charged environment where people wear their emotions on their sleeves. He also calls on college leaders to communicate to protesters that dissenting views are valid and not inherently harmful or violent. He also casts doubt on the self-righteous mindset of some protesters and urges the administration to consider this perspective in their decision to deal with Wax. The letter then makes an awkward attempt to support the protesters right to free speech and peaceful protest. To be clear, I understand that there are principles of free speech at play here, Cheon says. Students have a right to protest events which are not to their liking. I am not suggesting that the administration suppress their ability to share their viewpoints. With several quiet days of weather in store for the week ahead, we have plenty of time to focus on our next big weather-maker. This one appears to roll in just in time for the weekend. Rain will likely be moving in Friday night as our system approaches. Wind will ramp up from the south as well, warming temperatures into the mid-60s by Saturday morning. With strong upper-level dynamics in place for this set up, the Storm Prediction Center has already highlighted a slight risk area for central and south Arkansas on Saturday. While this system does have severe potential, the timing of its arrival and exit could result in limited impacts at home. With a fast-approaching cold front rolling in from the northwest, there may be a short window of time in which severe storms could take place. In other words, once that front passes, our severe risk comes to an end. If that happens earlier in the day, we could get through this without a hitch. Behind the front, temperatures begin to fall. We expect that to be the case sometime Saturday afternoon. By sunset, temperatures may already be in the upper 40s. The next big question is: Will there be enough moisture behind the front for some wintry mix? If you put much stock in the European model, which is shown below, it suggests that may be the case late Saturday night into Sunday. But the American model, seen below, is much faster with the system as a whole. In fact, it has all the moisture out of here by Saturday afternoon. So when the cold air finally arrives, there is no moisture to work with. So if youre looking for winter weather, it simply cannot be guaranteed. There is a lot that is working against that possibility. And on that same note, a lot that is working against the risk for severe weather as well. But there does appear to be plenty of moisture, especially Saturday morning. Even if we dodge the risk for severe storms, flash flooding is something well need to watch out for as rainfall totals could exceed 3 or 4 inches in spots. Regardless, we will be monitoring this set-up and will keep you updated in the coming days. Download the Arkansas Storm Team app To make sure you are staying up-to-date with the forecast, download the Arkansas Storm Team app to get updates anywhere at any time. To watch the latest video updates from the Arkansas Storm Team, you can check them out here. The Arkansas Storm Team is a collaboration of two stations to bring you the largest weather team in the state when covering Arkansas weather. Be alerted as soon as severe weather coverage begins by downloading the Arkansas Storm Team app from the App Store or on Google Play. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KARK. High-ranking members of Atlantas police department have been using Signal, an encrypted phone app, to communicate about the controversial police and fire department training center known as Cop City to each other, to other police departments and to companies involved in building the project, the Guardian has learned. The departments move to Signal occurred some time earlier this year, after several years of public outcry about a lack of transparency regarding the project on such basic issues as cost and environmental impact. It appears the department began using the app around the same time multiple police agencies entered a forested public park where protesters were camped about a mile from the planned Cop City site on 18 January, resulting in state troopers shooting and killing Manuel Paez Teran, AKA Tortuguita. Related: Its alarming: diary of killed Cop City activist to play role in Georgia lawsuit Its alarming. Decisions are being made about controversial developments and theyre creating private, ephemeral means of communication, further eroding lines of trust with the public, said Alejandro Ruizesparza, co-director of Lucy Parsons Labs, a digital transparency research organization. Users can set the app to automatically delete messages, at which point they are not even available for retrieval on computer servers, as with standard texts. First amendment and digital transparency experts say police or other government officials using encrypted apps like Signal to communicate about official business raises serious concerns about the press and the publics ability to access information afterward, in accordance with freedom of information or open-records laws. The solution, they said, is to legislatively prohibit public officials from using such apps for official business. In order to make sure the police are doing their important job correctly, its necessary to have transparency and accountability, said Adam Schwartz, privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties organization. A significant part of that is public access to records including communications. The thing we have a growing concern about is [that] police may be trying to avoid public records laws by using off the books communications channels. In the last few years, the practice has been uncovered by reporters in both Arizona and Michigan. In 2021, Michigan passed a law prohibiting state agencies from using such apps. A community member sent the Guardian 13 emails detailing the Atlanta police departments conduct. The Atlanta Community Press Collective, a local outlet covering Cop City and other issues, saw the original open-records request and confirmed the authenticity of the emails which also contain phone numbers of various officials, all of whom the Guardian separately confirmed are on the app. One Capt Tommy Atzert has Signal on a phone he describes in an email as his personal cell but does not have the app on another he labels a city phone. The emails begin on 27 December. Claude Moore of Atlanta police departments (APD) planning, research and accreditation unit, asked a colleague at the Boston police department about any policies and procedures on using Encrypted Apps, such as Signal App and WhatsApp. The concern my captain has is if the use of the encrypted apps violates the Open Records Act, because information is not preserved, Moore wrote. Two days later, Francis DeLuca responded: To my knowledge, the Boston Police Department has no such policy. On 11 January, Moore told his captain that he made the same inquiries to 50 police departments, 10 of which responded and none had policies on the issue. Those included Cincinnati, Ohio, El Paso, Texas, and Raleigh, North Carolina. An Atlanta police spokesperson, Chata M Spikes, did not respond to queries from the Guardian about the departments policies on using Signal or other encrypted apps. Meanwhile, on 18 January, Ken Burns Jr, COO of Atlas Technical Consultants a firm linked to the police training center emailed Maj Jessica Bruce of the Atlanta police, and Casey Patterson, at the Georgia bureau of investigation (GBI), about sending some videos. Bruce replied: try sending over the signal app. Within a week, concerted efforts to get multiple officers to download Signal proceeded apace. On 22 January, Lt Jason Sokloski asked four colleagues to do so, because it is the preferred method for group communication from the Major and Captain. The following day, on 23 January, Bruce informed a dozen agencies, As we get closer to the building of the Acadamy [sic] I wish to keep everyone informed in a timely manner and that she would be adding everyone receiving the email to a Signal group. Email addresses listed include police departments from Atlanta and Cobb and DeKalb counties in the Atlanta metro area as well as the GBI and the federal agencies, the FBI and the ATF. Police from Norfolk Southern railroad are also copied. On 24 January, Lt Roger Nalls, of the homeland security department at Cobb county police department, asked Bruce at APD: [Y]ou good with adding my two contacts with NYPD Intel onto the new Signal thread referring to New York Citys police department. The continuing expansion of agencies appearing to use Signal is seen in a 6 February email from Bruce. In that email, she indicated that communication between HLS [homeland security] and SRS [Strategic Response Section] will be crucial during this time. SRS coordinates and manages large scale events and protest management, according to the APD website. The same email points to Signal as important for communicating with stakeholders to ensure they stay vigilant. In Michigan, the 2021 law prohibiting state agencies from using such apps came about after Jim Fett, an employee attorney representing two Michigan state troopers, discovered that higher-ups in the state police were using Signal. A series of stories in the Detroit Free Press followed, and the legislature soon acted. Before the law was passed, the app was widely used by police so they would not get in trouble for what they were doing, Fett told the Guardian. Afterward, he said officers were kinda ribbing me, saying things like Not only do we have to deal with body-cams now youre able to get our messages. Freddy Martinez, co-director of Lucy Parsons Labs, noted that the average beat cop is not thinking about why transparency is critical to democracy. What weve been seeing nationally is that public officials are basically allowed to download whatever they want on their phones, Martinez added. Were years behind where we need to be. David Loy, legal director for the First Amendment Coalition, a government transparency organization, said that losing access to public records through the use of apps such as Signal is particularly important when it comes to police, as compared to other public agencies. Transparency issues are more important when it comes to law enforcement because the powers of law enforcement are the most potentially extreme of anyone in government, he said. They carry guns, and have the power to detain or kill. Loy added: What would be appropriate is that government agencies may not use disappearing messages apps full stop. This article was amended on 4 December 2023 to correct Alejandro Ruizesparzas name, which was erroneously written as Ruiz. The Atlantics newest issue is sounding the alarm over a potential second term by former President Trump, warning that another four years under the former president would be worse than the first. For The Atlantics January/February issue, the magazine published a 24-article project titled If Trump Wins to outline what a second Trump presidency would look like. The magazines editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote an editors note titled, A Warning, to introduce the series, which largely argues against another Trump term. He wrote that for a short-lived period he believed Trump would never be a candidate for the White House again. He said this period lasted only from Jan. 6, 2021, to Jan. 28, 2021 the date when former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) visited the former president at his Mar-a-Lago residence. And so here we are. It is not a sure thing that Trump will win the Republican nomination again, but as I write this, hes the prohibitive front-runner. Which is why we felt it necessary to share with our readers our collective understanding of what could take place in a second Trump term, Goldberg wrote. Our team of brilliant writers makes a convincingly dispositive case that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. The country survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse, Goldberg continued. Goldberg emphasized that The Atlantic is not a partisan magazine, noting that its issues with the former president do not stem from him being a Republican. We believe that a democracy needs, among other things, a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party in order to flourish. Our concern is that the Republican Party has mortgaged itself to an antidemocratic demagogue, one who is completely devoid of decency, he wrote. David Frum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, used his piece to argue that Trump would lurch the country into a constitutional crisis if elected again. Frum was a speechwriter for former President George W. Bush. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Frum wrote that his article argues that Trumps attempt to destroy the legal system will lead not to dictatorship but to chaos, to the paralysis of the presidency, the US government, an open door to US enemies. The New York Times also published an article Monday pushing back on a second Trump term that argued his win could lead to a more radical term than the first. As he runs for president again facing four criminal prosecutions, Mr. Trump may seem more angry, desperate and dangerous to American-style democracy than in his first term. But the throughline that emerges is far more long-running: He has glorified political violence and spoken admiringly of autocrats for decades, according to the article. Trumps campaign dismissed The Atlantics articles in a statement to The Hill. This is nothing more than another version of the medias failed and false Russia collusion hoax, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement. The Atlantic will be out of business soon because nobody will read that trash. This story was updated at 1:57 p.m. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. AUSTIN (KXAN) The Austin Police Department is looking for volunteers to help spread some cheer this holiday season. APDs Operation Blue Santa program is enlisting volunteers to help deliver presents and food to Austin families on Dec. 16. The following locations will operate as part of the Blue Santa delivery network: Blue Santa Warehouse: 4101 S. Industrial Drive, Ste. 260, Austin Green Garage at the Domain: Feathergrass Court, next to Dillards APD East Substation: 812 Springdale Road, Austin APD South Substation: 404 Ralph Ablanedo Drive, Austin Ideal volunteers include those with a valid drivers license as well as individuals who operate a four-wheeled sleigh, APD officials said. Bonus points are given to those on Blue Santas nice list or who are willing to blast holiday jams during the delivery. TRENDING NOW: Restaurants open in Austin on Christmas Eve, Day Volunteers can show up to any of the four sites on Dec. 16, with APD adding no reservation or sign-up is required. Those interested in bringing a trailer to deliver boxes or those with boxes thatll be exposed to open air during deliveries are asked to bring straps and tie-downs to secure the boxes, as well as any waterproof tarps in the event of rain. Operation Blue Santa is a 50-plus-year tradition at APD, with officials adding last years 50th anniversary operation serviced 5,000 families and more than 17,000 Austin children. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KXAN Austin. An investigation is underway after a man was killed in a rollover crash on Interstate 495 in Haverhill on Friday, authorities announced Monday. Troopers responding to a report of a crash on the southbound side of the highway just before the Route 97 overpass around 3 p.m. learned that a 2017 Honda CRV exited the road, entered the median, struck a guardrail, and rolled over onto its roof, according to Massachusetts State Police. The driver, 62-year-old David Ziembko, of New Britain, Connecticut, was rushed to Lawrence General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Investigators are still looking into the facts and circumstances of the crash, and whether Ziembko may have suffered a medical event. There were no additional details available. 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 A 50-year-old Wichita man shot and killed by a Wichita police officer during a domestic violence call Sunday has been identified by the Sedgwick County Sheriffs Office. Authorities responded to the call at 2:16 p.m. at a home in the 4200 block of East Gilbert Street. A woman told 911 that her partner, Daniel Stowe, was outside the home making suicidal statements, Wichita Police spokesperson Kristopher Gupilan previously said. At 2:40 p.m., four police officers arrived at the home. One officer went inside to talk to the woman while the other three spoke with Stowe, who was standing in the street in front of the home, sheriffs office Lt. Nathan Gibbs said. Officers learned that Stowe was known to carry firearms and attempted to pat him down. He refused and said he intended to escalate the situation despite the officers attempt to deescalate the situation, Gibbs added. Stowe pulled out a Glock handgun from his right hip and held it down on his side. Officers gave him numerous commands to drop his weapon, a news release from the sheriffs office said. At 2:43 p.m., Stowe raised the gun and pointed it directly at one of the officers, Gibbs said. Another officer fired a handgun four times, striking Stowe once in the right torso. Stowe fell to the ground where officers rendered medical aid until he was taken to a hospital by Sedgwick County Emergency Medical Services. He died from his gunshot wound at 3:07 p.m., according to the release. The sheriffs office released body camera photos from officers who encountered Stowe. Investigators confiscated a loaded Glock 27 handgun at the scene, Gibbs said. It is unknown if the officer who fired the gun was immediately placed on administrative leave. The sheriffs office was not immediately available for more details. The investigation will be presented to the Sedgwick County District Attorneys Office. SIMI VALLEY, Calif. Preliminary testing of a portable jammer soldiers can sling to their backs and use to manipulate electronic signals while on the move was successful, according to its makers and a U.S. Army official. The service in November put the Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team Manpack, or TLS-BCT Manpack, through an operational demonstration at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. CACI International-owned Mastodon Design months earlier won a $1.5 million contract to prototype the system, built utilizing the companys existing Beast and Kraken electronic-warfare products. I think we were very happy with what we saw and where its going, Todd Probert, CACIs president of national security and innovative solutions, said in an interview at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California. Were not sleeping on the last test. Were continuing to look to new modes of capability. The TLS-BCT Manpack is designed to give troops a mobile means of molding the electromagnetic spectrum to their advantage. It is a smaller offshoot of the TLS-BCT, to be installed aboard Stryker and Armored Multi-Purpose vehicles, and the longer-range TLS-Echeclons Above Brigade, envisioned for use by divisions and corps amid preparations for fighting with Russia and China. A key consideration of the backpack version is its physical load: size, weight and power, often referred to as SWaP. Soldiers carry dozens of pounds of gear; adding to the pile can be annoying at least and debilitating at most. Were already asking people to carry too much stuff. In my judgement, those parts of the defense industry that can deliver an exquisite capability that doesnt break the back of the operator, literally, is going to be a premium, Michael Nagata, a CACI strategic adviser, senior vice president and retired Army lieutenant general, said in an interview at the forum. I mean, my average combat load when I was in service was well over 60 pounds. US Navy champions digital weaponry as decider of future fights The Army is attempting to reinvigorate its electronic warfare arsenal after years of complacency. While such tools were used in the Greater Middle East, threats posed by larger world powers are motivating the U.S. military to rethink its strategies and spending. Contracts for the TLS line have so far totaled tens of millions of dollars, with Lockheed Martin winning much of it. CACI is collaborating with the company on the TLS-EAB as well. Army Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, the leader of the Program Executive Office for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, or PEO IEW&S, in a statement said the demonstration of the manpack last month set the standard for future users. Army Forces Command contributed to the evaluation. They were highly motivated, highly competent, innovative problem-solvers, Barker said. They excelled at not only learning and operating the manpack system, but also demonstrated how their teams can successfully operate and influence the battlefield. CACI in 2022 earned $4.3 billion in defense-related revenue, securing the No. 27 spot on the Defense News Top 100 list of the worlds largest defense contractors. The company bought Mastodon Design for $225 million in 2019. Global multi-energy company TotalEnergies has signed an agreement with Government of Kazakhstan to set up the country's largest ever wind energy project at an investment of $1.4 billion. The Mirny project aims to build a 1 GW onshore wind farm of up to 160 turbines combined with a 600 MWh battery energy storage system for a reliable power supply. On completion, it will supply low-carbon power to more than 1 million people in the Central Asian country, thus cutting emission of 3.5 million tonnes of CO2 annually in the country. The Agreement on Investment (AoI) was signed in the presence of Patrick Pouyanne, Chairman and CEO of TotalEnergies, and President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev on the sidelines of the COP28 in Dubai. Mirny is a prime example of TotalEnergies ability to leverage its position as a major partner in the upstream sector to speed up the development of renewable energy in Oil & Gas countries, said Pouyanne. This AoI comes close on the heels of the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) in June for the Mirny project, the first to be signed in the country for a wind project of such scale, he stated. The French group is developing the Mirny project in partnership with the National Wealth Fund Samruk-Kazyna and the National Company KazMunayGas, which will each own a 20% stake in the project. "At COP28, more than 110 nations committed to tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030. TotalEnergies supports this call. With this innovative wind and battery project, our company is making a direct contribution to this ambition and to the energy transition in Kazakhstan," noted Pouyanne. "The signing of this Agreement on Investment will allow to launch the Mirny project, which will help TotalEnergies triple its power generation from 33 TWh to more than 100 TWh by 2030," he added.-TradeArabia News Service Scioto Township Trustee Ralph Wolfe wipes tears away during a meeting on Thursday, Nov. 30, 2023, in which about 50 residents called on fellow trustee Barton Fannin (far right) to resign. In a previous meeting, Fannin used a racial slur to describe the Juneteenth holiday. Ray Marcano is a long-time journalist with writing and editing experience at some of the countrys largest media brands. Many people are up in arms because Scioto Township trustee Barton Fannin used the N-word to describe the federal holiday Juneteenth. As Dispatch report puts it, he "squirmed in his seat and held his hand over his mouth" for two hours Thursday as residents gave "tearful, angry and threatening testimony" against his behavior. He refused to resign despite calls for him to do so. This is all interesting. Fannin represents a community thats 94% white, so logic dictates that despite the clear passion expressed from those who want him gone at least some of his constituents feel the same way he does. About 50 people filled the Scioto Township Trustee meeting in northern Pickaway County on Thursday, Nov. 30, with many people calling on Trustee Barton Fannin to resign after using a racial slur to describe Juneteenth at a previous meeting. Scioto Township trustee Barton Fannin is not along in his views That problems obvious. Fannin broke decorum, threw politeness to the wind, and, as distasteful as it is, said what he believes. He simply made the mistake of saying aloud what many people think. Fannin, at the Nov. 17 meeting caught on tape, said he had no frickin idea of Juneteenths holiday status. Hes not alone. Most Americans know nothing about Juneteenth. Just three out of 10 white people have any clue about what Juneteenth is, its historical significance, and why its important to Black people. More from Ray Marcano: Bigoted, intolerant will win if anti-LGBTQ, freedom sign resolution passes Just 13% of Republicans believe Juneteenth should be a federal holiday, so its likely at least some of the countrys residents feel the same thing. In the 2020 presidential election, the county went 70% for Trump. Barton Fannin said what others think But even if people feel like Fannin, chances are they wont say so, at least not so people can hear them. Ohioans follow the rules of the false niceties of the Midwest. Theyll smile and make chit chat, and then go home and pray that some Black guy doesnt show up at the house to date their daughter. Fannin set a flame to those niceties and blew them up. Now, he really didnt mean to. He wanted his slur erased from the official recording of the meeting when he said, You might want to rewind the tape a bit. He started making excuses, like he thought the language was normal because he grew up around it. Using a biased environment as justification for racist proclivities today isnt novel, but it sure is dumb. Thats like saying, I let a Sieg Heil salute fly because my buddies loved Nazis, so I figured, must be OK. His colleagues on the commission did the right thing by criticizing his remarks. Rape is rape. Married or not. Rep. Bill Dean, your pro-spousal rape vote is disgusting. Fannin is under some pressure to resign but says he wont. Continuing his trend of foot in mouth comments, he said his words werent directed at anyone, and he would apologize to anyone who needed one. Really? So if you get caught on tape approving of domestic violence, thats OK because its not directed at anyone? That logic is so twisted it might as well be a pretzel. And spare me the non-apology apology, the old Im sorry if I offended anyone line. How generous (he says sarcastically). Ray Marcano, a longtime journalist, is the former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists, a two-time Pulitzer juror, and a Fulbright fellow. It would be far more refreshing if Fannin and people like him would simply say, yup, I said it, and I mean it. These verbal gymnastics and flimsy excuses are far more insulting because he thinks people are dumb enough to buy them. I am not buying what youre selling. No one else should either. Fannins already shown his true color. Its the one he doesnt embrace. Now, everyone knows it. Time will tell if that matters. Ray Marcano is a long-time journalist with writing and editing experience at some of the countrys largest media brands. He is a regular Dispatch contributor. This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: What Scioto Township trustee's racist comments say about white people This weekend saw yet another escalation in the battle of the Red Sea. The Iranian-backed terrorist organisation, the Houthis, currently squatting in Northwest Yemen, started the battle shortly after 7 October by firing four missiles and fifteen drones up the Red Sea towards Israel. Fortunately, the US destroyer Carney was on patrol there and, in what can only be described as a good day at the office, successfully shot them all down. Not long after that another Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, USS Thomas Hudner, stepped into the breech whilst Carney was reloading and engaged drone attacks on two separate occasions. The Houthis then diversified and boarded a merchant ship, MV Galaxy Leader, by helicopter, taking the crew hostage. This was followed two days later by a long-range drone attack on another merchantman, CMA CGM Symi, and then an aborted traditional piracy attempt using small boats on the MV Central Park in the Gulf of Aden. When this failed, the Houthis fired one or two (reports vary) ballistic missiles towards the USS Mason another destroyer which had captured the Central Park attackers which fell short. Up until this point, all these merchant vessels had a connection with Israel, even if it was a distant one. As a result, the Israeli shipping line Zim Integrated Shipping Services rerouted all its vessels away from the area. Larger carriers such as Maersk followed suit. And then came Sunday. Four different attacks on three different ships, two of whom seemingly have no connection with Israel. The MV Unity Explorer was fired at twice, the second strike hitting and causing minor damage, though no casualties. Either side of this second strike, two drones were launched into the area. These were likely sent in after the missiles to conduct damage assessment. This doesnt mean they werent a threat though, so the Carney dealt with both. By mid-afternoon MV Number 9 had been hit by a missile, again causing damage but no casualties. An hour later MV Sophie II was hit without casualties. The follow-up drone after the Sophie strike was also destroyed by the Carney. In total, there were four missile attacks of which three hit and three drone follow-ups, all in the space of seven hours. How long can this be allowed to go on for? I have written up the situation in the region five times now since 7 October and each time have been increasingly confident that the US was about to take punitive action for the ongoing attacks. This is based on many years operating alongside them at sea and also the fact that in 2016, missiles were fired at USS Mason and this was met almost immediately with Tomahawk counter-strikes on key Houthi radar sites. This used to be the way, and all the US destroyers in the area will have Tomahawks aboard. Clearly it isnt the way now, although there are plenty who would agree with Obama-era CIA Director and Defence Secretary Leon Panetta who stated over the weekend: I would be much more aggressive. I want to go after those who are firing missiles at our troops and make sure they understand that when they fire a missile they are going to die. The US Navy has many options apart from its Arleigh Burke destroyers and their land-attack Tomahawks. The Dwight D Eisenhower carrier strike group passed through the Red Sea during the early exchanges as did the USS Florida, an Ohio class nuclear-powered submarine armed with up to 154 Tomahawks and probably carrying a force of Navy SEAL special forces. Two ships of the Bataan amphibious ready group, carrying elements of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (26 MEU) are still in the Red Sea. All of these could conduct either kinetic or surgical strikes in retaliation. But still, nothing. The Pentagon seems to be going the other way and is at pains to say nothing was aimed directly at us on each occasion. This may or may not be true but if you were to flip it and wanted an excuse to strike, there have now been plenty. This feels very much like the US mantra in the Gulf during recent years of disciplined restraint. In other words, be ready, but dont be the one that starts it. This makes a lot of sense when operating in a delicately balanced environment. Does it make the same amount of sense in the Red Sea given how unbalanced things are becoming there? US Navy SEAL special-warfare operators in training. It's likely that there are SEALs aboard the submarine USS Florida, known to have passed through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea recently - Senior Chief Mass Communication Specialist Jayme Pastoric/US Navy It is worth remembering at this stage that this is not something happening over there. This is an important international choke point through which billions of dollars of goods and hydrocarbons pass, some en route to your house. Shipping companies who service this route require insurance which will now increase, possibly to the point where it becomes cheaper to go round the Cape of Good Hope. The situation is complicated further by the fact that many of the rules governing international behaviour at sea are configured for state actors, not non-state militias such as the Houthis. Egypt is dependent on the Suez Canal for income and would certainly have a view if this carries on and too many start taking the long way around. There are a range of solutions to this current situation. None of them are clean, most need to be done concurrently and all of them attract a resource bill. First are ongoing diplomatic discussions. Channels will be open with Tehran right now to make it clear that they need to bring the Houthis to heel. Whatever was said to them to keep Hezbollah from bursting into action post 7 October needs to be repeated. However, despite supplying the weapons, intelligence and master plans, Iran might not have the level of day to day control over the Houthis that people assume. Either way, the Dwight D Eisenhower group sitting in the central Gulf just now is the physical manifestation of these discussions. Second is the measures ships themselves can take to protect themselves against further acts of piracy. Many of these were considered normal during the quite recent heyday of Somali piracy off the Horn of Africa and should be reinstated. Basic measures such as barbed wire and fixed fire hoses need to be in place, escalating to hiring armed guards where appropriate. Governments get uncomfortable with this measure as they dont like armed groups operating up-threat under a different set of Rules of Engagement, but there is no doubt that a small team of armed guards on the deck of the MV Galaxy Leader could have prevented the helicopter boarding. As an aside, it was only on 20 July this year that US Marines were set to be put on tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz in the face of the increasing Iranian threat there. These marines were to come from the 26 MEU who are now in the Red Sea. Could they be used in the manner outlined for The Gulf? That threat was piracy though, this one is piracy and missile attack which could complicate things if a vessel with US Marines onboard is then hit. Practically, you also have to get them on and off which requires ships stationed at either end with associated resource and logistics bill. Third is escorting. This has been done many times over the years and there are people drawing parallels with whats happening here and the Tanker Wars of the 1980s. One look at how many warships contributed to that task and you quickly realise that it is not repeatable now, in that form at least. The odd ship, maybe, but no more. And like the armed guard scenario above, who do you choose to protect? In the 80s, tankers flew a US flag to assure protection but that wouldnt work now given the Houthis indifference to the flags being flown so far. The US Navy is stretched thin right now this is not a task America will want to take on alone. There would need to be commitment by other nations as was the case with the anti-piracy patrols in the late noughties and early teens, but there is little evidence of that today. However the US ships in the region will be pleased to be joined by HMS Diamond, currently approaching Suez from the North. She cant deal with ballistic missiles like her US siblings (both Carney and Thomas Hudner are equipped for ballistic defence) but in all other respects will add a great deal to the safety of ships trying to pass through there. A US destroyer fires a Tomahawk missile in 2017. The US ships in the Red Sea will all be armed with Tomahawks - Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Ford Williams/US Navy Fourth, and not least, is counter-strikes. The US has many options here, from Tomahawk strikes as seen in 2016, to Special Forces insertions to rendering intelligence and targeting information to Saudi forces. The Saudis have been locked in a battle with the Houthis since late 2014 but it was abating this year and so its possible that, with one eye on their improving relations with Iran, they dont want to take this option. To know if strikes of this sort work, one only has to look to Russias Black Sea Fleet to see the effect a well-aimed set of land strikes can have on fighting effectiveness and morale. The Houthis would be similarly demotivated if every time they approach a launch site they wonder if it is to be their last. The problem with allowing the Houthis free rein is that sooner or later there will be a miscalculation. Yesterday at around the time the Houthis were getting trigger happy, a 114,000-ton liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier was passing through the Bab el Mandeb carrying its explosive cargo northbound. What if that had been hit by mistake? Or what if the Houthis strike or board a vessel with a largely American crew, or Chinese? Or, what if they get lucky and one of their missiles hits a US warship? There is no such thing as a 100 per cent probability of getting a kill when shooting at an incoming missile. Without layered defence, eventually, something gets through. The best layer is the one where the weapons system is taken out before it gets airborne. All of this points to taking short, sharp action now alongside the diplomatic and protection suggestions above. This isnt to warmonger, its to stop things from getting worse. Influencing Hamas, the Houthis and Hezbollah, the three Hs of Iranian-sponsored malfeasance, whilst hostage negotiations continue, and then determining what Russia and China make of it all is being done by people paid more than me. They believe that for now, disciplined restraint is the order of the day. I hope theyre right. Tom Sharpe is a former Royal Navy officer and warship captain 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. In 1950, when he was just a wee 14 year old, Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter began big-time preaching as an assistant pastor at a Baptist church in Ridgeland, South Carolina. Eikerenkoetter, who was considered anointed, quickly embraced the life of an evangelist, traveling across the rural coastal Sea Islands conducting preaching, teaching and healing services that drew people by the thousands. Miracles, they say, would sometimes occur when he preached. The real miracle may have been how this son of the south shot to world wide fame, reaching millions with an unconventional Christian message and making millions along the way. Once, Eikerenkoetter lent his voice to a hit country song penned by country great Hank Williams Sr. And he may have even inspired the rock legend John Lennon of The Beatles. After his rapid rise following his humble beginnings, Eikerenkoetter became so well known he was just Rev. Ike. He was so popular, said Bishop Jack Bomar, the presiding bishop of United Church in Beaufort. Rev. Ike launched the church 61 years ago and it helped launch him to elite heights of evangelical preaching. Bomar was at the United Church Tuesday where around 100 members of Rev. Ikes first church, his son and wife and guests sang and prayed to mark the beginning of construction of the Rev. Ike Resource Center on the Duke Street property. The center will cement the legacy of the Ridgeland to riches story of the famous preacher who got his start in the Beaufort area. The 4,000 square-foot exhibit hall will be a global destination that will inspire and introduce visitors to the message, the ministry, the man and the mind known as Rev. Ike, according to the church, while serving as a repository of the celebrated evangelists artifacts, personal belongings, writings and recordings. After a stints at Bible college and in the Air Force, Eikerenkoetter and others started United Church of Jesus Christ for All People in Beaufort in 1962. His Sunday sermons were also heard across the region on WBEU-AM, Beauforts first commercial radio station. It was just the beginning. He headed north, first to Boston, then New York. By the 1960s and 1970s, the world was the congregation for the handsome, charismatic and sometimes controversial prosperity preacher who dressed to the nines and owned a fleet of fancy cars. The teenage preacher from the Lowcountry of South Carolina became one of the most well-known televangelists in the country, with his voice and positive message reaching millions over countless radio and television stations and packing venues like Madison Square Garden in New York. Rev. Ike looked more like a 1950s rock star than a pious religious leader. Eikerenkoetters patented dress leather loafers, decorated with rhinestones and metal, are even on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The book jacket for Reverend Ike - An Extraordinary Life of Influence, that will be published in mid-December. It was co-written by the reverends son, Xavier Eikerenkoetter and Chicken Soup for the Soul book series co-author Mark Victor Hansen But his real legacy and talent was his motivating and nontraditional messages on the science of living aimed at helping the poor overcome. He was destined to do this, Bomar said. An architects rendering of the future Rev. Ike Resource Center, right, attached to the existing United Church separated by a garden. On Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2023, Rev. Ikes family members, church members and friends attended a ground breaking for the future center. Almost 15 years after his death at age 74 in 2009, Rev. Ike and his catchy credos such as You Cant Lose With the Stuff I Use and Some may say money is the root of all evil, but being in poverty is a damn shame! seem to be as relevant as ever, thanks in part to social media platforms like TikTok, where clips of his preaching routinely garner more than 100,000 views. Some people at the Beaufort ceremony, Bomar pointed out, probably dont know what a TikTok is. You are not going to get anywhere in life spiritually or otherwise until you come to that point where you dont give a damn what people think about you, Rev. Ike, dressed in a flashy pink suit, says in one TikTok message in which he advised religious folks to cover their ears. Besides construction of the new resource center, a new book on Rev. Ikes life, co-authored by his son, Xavier Eikerenkoetter and Chicken Soup for the Soul book series founder Mark Victor Hansen, is set to be released in December. Xavier Eikerenkoetter, who lives in Napa, Calif., and Rev. Ikes wife, Eula, who lives in Newport News, Va., attended the groundbreaking. I love this today, said Eula, who played a major role in managing her husbands ministry, told the Beaufort congregation. Two things she wanted to see happen before she transitions, she said, was the publishing of the book about her husband and construction of the center honoring his legacy. Annette Eikerenkoetter, left, and Xavier Eikerenkoetter, and Xaviers mother, Eula stand for a photo at United Church on Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2023 in Beaufort. Eula is the wife of the preacher who got his start in Beaufort and went onto considerable fame as a televangelist. Xavier is his son. The Eikerenkoetters were in Beaufort to attend the groundbreaking of the future Rev. Ike Resource Center, at United Church in Beaufort, where Rev. Ike got his start. The Rev. Dr. Kevin Kitrell Ross, who Rev. Ike mentored, said Eikerenkoetter was raised by a single mother in abject poverty. But he was brash and brilliant and he used those attributes along with his good looks to dominate prime time TV and radio in the 1960s and 1970s and fill stadiums preaching a message free from dogma of traditional Black churches of the time, he said. The message, Ross says of the Rev. Ike, is a transcendent message. Rev. Ike was criticized for taking advantage of the poor, Ross said, but Eikerenkoetter countered that the less fortunate were shackled by slave theology that made them feel inferior. They could escape their situations, he thought, if they changed their self image. Preaching a science of living and God in you philosophy, he taught that people can be and have what they want in the here and now, not in the sweet by and by. I am, Rev. Ike told the New York Times in a 1972 story, the first black man in America to preach positive selfimage psychology to the black masses within a church setting. In this April 28, 1998 file photo, Bishop Bernard Johnson, left, listens to Rev. Ike during a pre-prayer service interview in Rev. Ikes office in New York. Reverend Ike, who preached the gospel of material prosperity to millions nationwide, died in 2009. His first church was in Beaufort. Rev. Ikes message reached far beyond Black audiences. In 2005, May Pang, the former personal assistant to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, claimed the refrain in Lennons 1974 hit, Whatever Gets You Thru the Night, came from Rev. Ike. Lennon, she said, was channel surfing one night when he came across Rev. Ike and heard him say that line, which he liked and ended up using in the song. In 1986, Hank Williams Jr. recorded a song originally written and performed by his father, Hank Williams Sr., called Mind Your Own Business. Featuring not only Hank Williams Jr. but also rocker Tom Petty and country greats Reba McEntire and Willie Nelson and evangelist Rev. Ike the remake topped the country singles charts for two weeks. Rev. Ike preached many of his messages in a former Loews movie cathedral at the corner of Broadway and 175th Street in New Yorks Washington Heights. His ministry bought the famous theater in 1969 and renamed it United Palace. It served as a glitzy home base for weekly healing and blessing services and the television ministry for more than 50 years, with some calling it the longest running show on Broadway. Close your eyes and see green, Reverend Ike would tell his 5,000 parishioners from a red-carpeted stage at his United Church Science of Living Institute headquarters in the former Loews film palace, according to the Times story. Growing up in New York City, John Crouch heard some of Rev. Ikes messages. Today, hes an architect who lives in Charleston. He was hired to design the Rev. Ike resource center that will be constructed next to United Church in Beaufort. Crouch still cant believe it. Full circle is exactly what I did when it came to Rev. Ike, Crouch said. Rev. Ike has come full circle now, too. A recreation of the landmark miracle star of faith that crowns the dome of the United Palace in New York where he once preached to thousands and millions more via radio and TV will sit atop the new center honoring him in Beaufort where his journey began. The existing United Church photographed on Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2023 located along Duke Street in Beauforts Historic District. The future Rev. Ike Resource Center will be attached to the church at the back of the property. (WHTM) The United States Department of Agriculture has announced that a food company is recalling over 700 pounds of ready-to-eat beef and poultry products that may have been contaminated with listeria. The RTE products were packaged on dates between Oct. 25 2023 through Nov. 20, 2023. A full list of products can be seen by clicking here. The products subject to recall bear the establishment number EST. P44121 inside the USDA mark of inspection. These items were shipped to retail and institutional locations in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania DOH issues lead alert over childrens stainless steel cup recall If eaten, food contaminated with L. monocytogenes can cause listeriosis which is a serious infection that primarily affects older adults, persons with weakened immune systems, and pregnant women and their newborns. There have been no confirmed reports of illness or adverse reactions due to these products, according to the department. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now WHTM Morning Weather The United States Department of Agriculture stated they are concerned that some products may be in consumer or institutional refrigerators or freezers. Consumers are urged not to eat these products and institutions are advised not to serve them. These products should be thrown away or returned to the place of purchase. Consumers with questions regarding the recall can contact Eliezer Franklin, Chief Executive Officer of Pelleh Poultry Corp., at 845-425-4559 or eli@pellehpoultry.com. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to ABC27. Mazad, a company mandated with overseeing the Kingdom of Bahrains public and electronic auctions, has signed a co-operation agreement with Aluminium Bahrain (Alba), one of the world's largest aluminium smelters, to launch a project to dismantle and sell two of Albas power stations through its digital platform. A local portfolio company of Bahrain's sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat, Mazad said it is in line with Mumtalakats efforts to develop collaborative opportunities between its companies. This co-operation brings together two companies from the portfolio of Mumtalakat, the sovereign wealth fund of the Kingdom of Bahrain. The agreement stipulates the dismantlement of the power stations, in addition to the removal of structures and equipment, including turbines, generators, spare parts and other fixtures; in order to auction the items through Mazads digital auction platform enabling clients to purchase assets through a streamlined and transparent process. "We are fully committed to following the principle of transparency through reliable business operation practices, further supporting our resilient efforts to diversify and strengthen our asset portfolio and contribute to the advancement of the national economy," said its CEO Talal Al Araifi. The auction of Albas power stations will create a competitive environment for investors, and we strive to reach the highest number of buyers through this sale. Alba CEO Ali Al Baqali said: "We are pleased to be partnering with Mazad to sell the assets of power stations 1 and 2, while maintaining the best practices in line with Albas governance principles. Through this partnership, we strive to receive the best value for our assets which date back to the Company's inception." "This cooperation also comes as part of our efforts to promote a circular economy in line with our Environmental, Social and Governance Roadmap as well as contribute to reducing waste through the repurposing of assets, he added.-TradeArabia News Service Cryptocurrency mining, mainly with Bitcoins and Ethereum, has always been controversial due to the energy and resource consumption required to mine the currency. However, Bitcoin has a new concern, as a recent report outlines that it uses 4,227 gallons of fresh water for every single transaction, either for buying or selling. Because of these transactions, many countries, such as the United States, could face freshwater shortages if the currency becomes more widely adopted. This detailed report emphasizes Bitcoin's impact on worldwide water security while comparing it to Kazakhstan, which has much larger freshwater consumption and some mitigation solutions. This study was done by a data scientist at DNB and a researcher for VU Amsterdam, Alex De Vries, who stressed that its water consumption footprint has increased over the years. He also calculated that the computational process behind the Bitcoin network uses 8.6 to 35.1 billion liters of water annually in the United States or roughly one swimming pool's worth of water per transaction. How Is the Freshwater Consumption Calculated? The study includes both direct and indirect water footprints, both of which are from freshwater sources. These data centers consume water for cooling systems and air humidification to maintain these servers. Other sources of freshwater consumption are from its usage for electricity production required to keep these servers active. The consumption of electricity is constant, and so is the use of water. From this observation, it is then calculated that 4,227 gallons of fresh water is used during every transaction. Annualized water consumption by Large scale bitcoin miners in the United States as of March 2023 In the United States, as of March 2023, there has been an annual total consumption between 93.5 to 120 Gigalitres, equivalent to the average water consumption of about 300,000 American households; most of the bitcoin mining occurs in Texas, whose consumption is 53.1 to 68.4 GL of freshwater. These consumptions are calculated from large-scale Bitcoin operations. To frame a perspective of its volume, one gigalitre (GL) is equivalent to 1,000,000,000 liters (264,172,052 gallons) or 1,000 megaliters. The studies also observe the bitcoin mining operation in Kazakhstan, which could face a significant freshwater shortage of 997.9 GL by 2030. This is mainly because China banned Bitcoin operations, and as a consequence, many mining operations shifted there, making the country the largest hub for Bitcoin mining. However, the consumption by the United States isn't tiny, but specific solutions can be implemented to benefit the local population. Differentiating between direct and indirect water consumption is essential as it identifies and helps implement an alternative method to save precious usable water for human, animal, and environmental consumption. Solutions for a Growing Problem Many pragmatic solutions can be implemented quickly, such as immersing mining servers in dielectric fluid for cooling instead of water cooling. Indirect water consumption can also be reduced if power stations switch to sources that do not use water, such as wind, solar, and thermoelectric power generators using dry cooling systems. Switching to non-fresh water sources also helps, especially in states with a coastline. While it may not address all of the freshwater consumption problems created by this operation, it can help mitigate while addressing other concerns, such as electronic waste. The Ethereum network, in comparison, has reduced its power consumption by modifying its central ecosystem and software. However, the Bitcoin community is reluctant to make such software changes. A bill called the Crypto-Asset Environmental Transparency Act would force crypto mining operations and such data centers to disclose emissions mandatorily, giving more water usage data. This implementation isn't exclusive to cryptocurrency, and Meta announces its water footprint, providing a blueprint of how its impact can be calculated and made to be declared. While most Bitcoin mining happens outside the US, this will act as a framework for other countries should they be willing to implement it accordingly. Kristin Hills is at her wits' end with how to handle the behavior problems in her preschool classrooms. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, children at the state preschools she oversees in Mendocino County have been acting out. Biting has become more frequent among the 3-year-olds. Hitting and kicking are commonplace. A few children have started hurling wooden blocks and even chairs across the classroom. In at least a third of her 17 classrooms, she said, the behaviors may endanger other children and teachers. In the past, Hills might have called a parent to come pick up their ill-behaved child early. Now her options are limited, and preschools like hers must manage difficult behaviors on their own. California began passing a series of highly lauded laws that restrict state-funded child care centers from suspending or expelling children two years before the pandemic. The legislation was part of a national wave that followed a 2014 Obama administration statement condemning preschool expulsion and clarifying that the practice was banned at federally-funded Head Start programs. At least 29 states now have policies restricting or eliminating exclusionary discipline. It was a great thing for California, and I believe it will be a great thing for children, especially small Black boys, said Khieem Jackson, co-founder of Black Men for Educational Equity, which co-sponsored the bill. Its a tool that will help us mitigate the preschool-to-prison pipeline. But the lingering effects of the pandemic on children's behavior has made for stressful times in many preschool classrooms, and early childhood educators say the new discipline regulations are proving difficult to implement. Schools must go through a specific series of steps and work with a family before removing a child from school, and families have a right to appeal such decisions, a process that can take more than six months. While most policies in other states apply to all types of child care settings, the California law only applies to programs receiving state funding; private preschools set their own rules. I dont know anyone who disagrees with the need for this. No one wants to suspend and expel children, said Hills. But its hard. Developmental specialist Josefina Andrade listens to students at a Kidango child care center in Dublin, Calif. (Josh Edelson / For The Times) When a student acts out, Hills says theres little they can do. They cant call the parents to come pick up their child, something the legislation considers suspension. Even separating the child from the group is difficult, because the law requires that a fully qualified teacher be with them, rather than an aide. In her small centers, there just arent enough high-level staff. There is universal agreement based on decades of research that exclusionary discipline in preschool is harmful to children. One month ago, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement detailing the "dire" consequences of expulsion. The practice, it wrote, can cause lifelong harm and disproportionately affects children of color, children with disabilities, and children with adverse childhood experiences , including poverty, abuse, neglect and instability. Developmental specialist Josefina Andrade works with children at a Dublin, Calif., child care center. (Josh Edelson / For The Times) The pediatrics academy statement also offered proven solutions. At such a young age, childrens brains are still malleable, and teachers can learn to work with even the most severe behaviors. Studies suggest that providing classroom visits from mental health consultants, for example, can improve behavior and lower expulsion rates. The California legislation provides additional funding to programs that hire mental health consultants. But some child care directors say the funding is not enough, and the shortage of mental health providers makes consultants difficult to hire. Hills said that with intensive behavioral support, behaviors often improve. But the challenge is immediate. If I have a site supervisor who's melted down because she's got three kids who are melting down, I need to get her through the rest of her day before I can go searching for a counselor, said Hills. It's so easy to say here's this list of solutions, when you don't have time and energy to get to them because youre putting out fires every day, she said. How many preschoolers are expelled? A 2016 national survey of child health by the federal government showed that 17,000 3- and 4-year-olds had been expelled in the previous year, and another 50,000 had been suspended across public and private programs a rate of about 250 children involuntarily leaving preschool each day, according to an analysis of the data by the Center for American Progress. Black children were more than twice as likely to be expelled than white children, and children with a diagnosed disability or social-emotional challenge were 14.5 times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their peers; 82% of the children suspended or expelled were boys. A seminal 2005 study found that at the time, expulsion was three times more common in preschool programs than elementary, middle and high school. Study author Walter Gilliam, who runs the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska, says it is simply easier to expel in child care settings. Beginning in kindergarten, he explained, children are legally entitled to an education, and expulsion can be an arduous process. But there is no legal right to a preschool education; without specific policies banning the practice, early child care settings can expel students with impunity. These are things for which nobody is proud. Parents aren't proud. The teacher isn't proud," said Gilliam. "Its easy for it to be a very quiet problem." California does not yet have data to determine whether the new laws have succeeded in reducing exclusionary discipline at state-funded child centers. But the practice remains common at private preschools, where children may be expelled for hitting, kicking, pushing, biting, throwing objects, acting defiantly, throwing frequent tantrums, running away or because they struggle to function independently, experts said. All of these behaviors can be developmentally appropriate among preschool children to some degree, but educators say when they happen too often, children may be asked to leave. Research suggests that teachers experiencing job stress, depression or who work in classrooms with too many students and inadequate support are more likely to use exclusionary disciplinary tactics. The spate of recent laws recognized that children of color are more likely to be suspended or expelled, a problem researchers have tied to implicit bias among teachers. In a 2016 study published by the Yale Child Study Center, Gilliam and colleagues used eye-tracking technology to show that teachers were more likely to closely monitor Black children especially Black boys for challenging behaviors, even when no problems were occurring. The consequences of an early expulsion can be far-reaching. Children who have been expelled from child care settings are 10 times as likely to drop out of high school, and face an increased risk of later being incarcerated. In the nearer-term, their families face hardship from the sudden disappearance of the child care they rely on and contend with a shame that they say can haunt them for years. Tunette Powells two sons, who are Black, were suspended a combined 12 times during a single year at a child care center on an Air Force base in Omaha, Neb. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on the expulsion of Black children in preschool, speaking with dozens of parents in the process. The most damning thing for me was what it did to the parents psychologically, and the way it impacts how they parent and how they love, said Powell. One parent she interviewed described how the family car ride to preschool went from being a daily moment of connection while listening to music to a stern disciplinary lecture on how the child needed to sit still. Beatriz Saleeda, left, and Josefina Andrade work with a child at a Kidango child care center in Dublin, Calif. (Josh Edelson / For The Times) For parents in rural areas in particular, finding a new child care provider can be difficult. Some have to drop out of school or switch jobs to care for their children instead. Why do kids get expelled? Children with disabilities experience some of the highest rates of expulsion. In a recent UC Riverside study of parents of autistic children, one in six reported that their children had been expelled from a child care program. Often the children were expelled for behaviors that were interpreted as being defiant, but were actually linked to an undiagnosed disability. One mother of a 5-year old boy in Arcadia who was expelled three times suspects he that has an undiagnosed developmental disability. She has been struggling first with her insurer and now with the school district to have him assessed for autism and ADHD. She worries the expulsions have affected his sense of self. He once told her, I have to go to another school because I cant stop being bad. When you get expelled from preschool, thats a tough way to start out your school career. We think kids dont remember, but they do, said Rahil Briggs, a psychologist and national director of Zero to Threes HealthySteps program, which focuses on the health of babies and toddlers. Briggs said the terrible twos and challenging threes are known as such for a good reason. "Childrens executive functioning and their frontal lobes are not developed to the point where we can calmly sit down and talk to them about the consequences of their behaviors. Yet generally, the providers who care for them are paid the least and offered the fewest supports, said Briggs. Redirecting a young child's frustration requires a level of creativity and patience that can be challenging in the classroom. During the pandemic, Briggs said, many families have suffered under the stress of job loss, financial hardship and illness, which can cause behavioral issues in school. Many children also have missed out on valuable social interactions in classrooms and are still struggling to catch up on their social-emotional development. In a safe and stable environment, she explained, the areas of the brain connected to learning, memory and language are activated. In an environment with a great deal of stress, aggression or fear, those areas get activated instead. The pandemic was not good for families who were living on the margins already, Briggs said. But from the perspective of some California state preschool programs, the behaviors that children are now exhibiting have grown too difficult to manage. Folks arent equipped with what to do with those children if they cant expel them, said Nina Buthee, executive director of EveryChild California, a membership association for child care centers. Its having really negative consequences on teacher and student well-being. Often, she said, administrators face pressure from teachers and the families of other children in the classroom who do not feel safe and threaten to leave. Is there a solution to expulsion? California's preschool expulsion legislation offers an alternative: funding for mental health consultations. I realized that just because you outlaw expulsion doesnt mean you address the root causes, said Scott Moore, the chief executive for Kidango, a large child care provider with 57 centers across Northern California, who co-sponsored and helped write the legislation. With 3,500 students, Kidango employs 21 full-time, state-funded mental health consultants who make weekly visits to each of their classrooms, focusing on helping teachers manage their own stress and respond to their students' needs. A companion program for early intervention and inclusion sends developmental specialists into classrooms to help teachers work with children with special needs. A child who frequently ran away from circle time to climb on the furniture, for example, was able to be redirected with the help of pictures to help illustrate the day's schedule. On a recent day, mental health consultant Cherry Chan visited one of Kidangos state preschool classrooms in Newark. She observed the children silently, notebook in hand, as they galloped around the playground to a song playing on a speaker. A few children held back, drawing with chalk on the concrete or looking on dubiously. Chan made careful notes about the classroom environment: Did the teachers seem happy or stressed? Were they connecting one-on-one with the children? Afterward, she spent an hour talking alone with two of the teachers. Teacher Cheyenne Crook said the weekly sessions have helped her manage the stress that can make her more irritable in the classroom. Chan has also given her a new lens through which to see a child's behavioral problems. "Sometimes you get to the point where you're like, 'I feel like I've tried everything. What am I going to do now?' But learning that a tantrum might really be about separation anxiety or trauma at home, she said, has made a difference. Tena Sloan, who runs Kidangos mental health program, says the work is challenging, and in many cases, there are no simple solutions to classroom conflicts. But the goal is to interrupt the patterns that tend to become entrenched in a classroom. A child that refuses to sit still at circle time, for example, might be labeled as defiant, instead of stressed or overwhelmed, Sloan said. That determines, do we have empathy for that child? Are we trying to be supportive of that child? Or are we perceiving it as a discipline issue that needs to be punished with stricter and stricter measures? This article is part of The Times early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed. Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Blue Shield of California's corporate headquarters in Oakland. An unknown number of Blue Shield members may have had their information compromised in a security breach. (Getty Images) Some Blue Shield of California members were recently notified that their personal data may have been compromised by a global cybersecurity breach this spring. A third-party vendor that provides vision benefits for many of Blue Shield's customers was one of "thousands of companies and governmental agencies" that were swept up in a global data security breach earlier this year that impacted more than 60 million individuals worldwide, said Mark Seelig, a spokesperson for Blue Shield. Read more: Blue Shield of California customer data stolen in cyberattack "Blue Shield took immediate steps to safeguard its network and at this time there is no indication that our systems have been infiltrated or that any data on our systems was inappropriately accessed, used or disclosed," Seelig said. The insurance provider did identify "potentially impacted" individuals, who were notified in mid November about their compromised data. The notification included access to one year of free credit monitoring and the contact for a dedicated customer care center where live agents can assist them. Members who have questions can call (866) 983-2632, Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Central time, excluding major holidays. Here are some steps you can take to secure your personal information and minimize the risk of identify theft. Read more: My wallet was stolen at a bar. Then my identity theft nightmare began How to protect your personal information now Review credit reports. The Federal Trade Commission recommends that you review your credit reports and account statements. You can obtain a copy of your credit reports every 12 months from Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, by visiting annualcreditreport.com or calling (877) 322-8228. When you receive your report, look for credit inquiries that you didn't initiate or do not recognize as well as inaccurate information such as an incorrect home address or Social Security number. When reviewing your report, if you see something you dont understand, call the credit reporting agency at the telephone number on the report. If you detect any suspicious activity on an account, you should promptly notify the financial institution or the company that maintains the account. You should also report any fraudulent activity or any suspected incidents of identity theft to law enforcement. Sign up for bank alerts. Most major banks and credit unions offer text or email alerts for big-ticket purchases or when someone tries to open a new bank or credit account in your name. Update passwords. Bank, email and other sensitive accounts should have unique passwords. If you use the same password for all your online accounts, the accounts are vulnerable. You can set up a two-factor authentication when available. The option is available on Gmail, for example, and let's you verify who you are typically by text or an app. Establish a security freeze. A security freeze prevents new lines of credit from being opened in your name without the use of a personal identification number that is issued when you initiated the freeze. In order to place a security freeze, you may be required to provide the consumer reporting agency with information that identifies you, including your full name, Social Security number, date of birth, current and previous addresses, a copy of your state-issued identification card and a recent utility bill, bank statement or telephone bill. The only downside to a security freeze is that it may delay your ability to obtain credit. Set up fraud alerts. If you were alerted to possibly being a fraud victim, you can set up a fraud alert. You can establish one with Equifax or any of the three major credit reporting agencies, and it prompts lenders to take extra steps to verify your identity before granting new credit. An initial fraud alert is free and will stay on your credit file for at least 90 days. If you are the victim of fraud or identity theft, you should file a police report and provide police with copies of your credit reports, any relevant correspondence and copies of disputed bills. For your records, keep a log of your conversations with creditors, law enforcement officials, and other relevant parties. Read more: Are you the victim of identity theft? Heres what to do Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. By Emma Farge GENEVA (Reuters) -The World Health Organization's executive board will hold a rare emergency session on Dec. 10 to discuss the health crisis in Gaza and the West Bank, with the Palestinian envoy seeking more medical aid and access for foreign healthcare workers. The WHO confirmed on Monday it had received a request from 15 countries to hold the session, which will be convened by Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in consultation with the Qatari chair. The Palestinian ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Ibrahim Khraishi, said the meeting would focus mostly on Gaza, engulfed by war between its Hamas rulers and Israel, but also cover attacks on the health sector in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. "We want to empower the WHO and call for the Israeli side not to target the medical sector. We want to allow for fresh medical supplies," he told Reuters, adding that his diplomatic mission was drafting a motion to be reviewed by the board. "One idea is to send more doctors in from around the world," he added, saying many countries had offered. The "Occupied Palestinian Territory" is a WHO observer rather than a member state but has influence in the organisation through supporters. Israel said the session was an example of the "double standards and disproportionate attention towards Israel in the multilateral arena". Only a fraction of Gaza's hospitals remain operational due to Israeli bombings and a lack of fuel, and those that are still functioning are increasingly overwhelmed by a new wave of wounded arriving. A WHO database shows there have been 427 attacks on healthcare facilities in Palestinian territories since the Oct. 7 cross-border Hamas attack on Israel, and the latter's retaliatory aerial blitz and invasion of Gaza. The database does not touch on who is seen as responsible for the attacks. Israel has accused Hamas of using ordinary Gazans as human shields by placing command centres and weapons inside hospitals and other civilian buildings. A senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday Israel would facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza's civilians as fighting there resumed after a week-long truce collapsed. The WHO has also warned of spreading disease which it has said could kill more people than bombardments in Gaza, with diarrhoea cases among children rising to about 100 times normal levels. As many as 80% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have fled their homes, the U.N. humanitarian agency OCHA says. The WHO's governing board is made up of 34 members and typically meets every January to fix the agenda for its annual assembly. Membership is split among regional groups and the United States, Qatar, Senegal, Australia and China are among seat holders. (Reporting by Emma Farge; Editing by Matthias Williams and Alison Williams) Bob Marley fans will soon get a more intimate glimpse into the life of the renowned musician. The upcoming film, Bob Marley: One Love, follows the Jamaican icon as he overcomes adversity to become the most famous and notoriously beloved reggae musician in the world. This is a really, deeply, deeply spiritual man, said Kingsley Ben-Adir, who portrayed Marley in the film, told Blavitys Shadow and Act in an exclusive interview. The film also stars Lashana Lynch as Marleys wife, Rita. Photo: Paramount Photo: Paramount Photo: Paramount Photo: Paramount Photo: Paramount He believed in God and Rastafari was his life and I want the film to really show that and how his beliefs around God and Rastafari are completely connected to his music and all a part of the same thing, he said. He believed that he was carrying the message of His Imperial Majesty to the people so that they understand and that was his life. He dedicated his life to that. No stranger to portraying historical figures through his artistry, Ben-Adir admits that his approach to those roles isnt different from any other character he steps into. I honestly dont think there is that much of a difference because really what its about at the end of it all is like, whats the story about? said the One Night In Miami star. Then once you understand what that is, its about trying to support that story in the best way you can to the characterization. Obviously, they were real people, but I think you kind of have to forget that they are iconic and that they do mean so much to so many people. At some stage, your focus has to be on just supporting the story. On casting Ben-Adir, in a previous interview with S&A, director Reinaldo Marcus Green said, We were looking for the best actor for the role, and we found that in Kingsley Ben-Adir from his very first audition tapeand we went through several hundred. It was a lot. We scoured every island in the Caribbean that we could. And when I saw that tape, I know Ziggy and I, we looked at each other and were like, The foundation is there. He just had he had the ability to tap into the essence. And we knew from there it was just the foundation. From there, the real work began. He had to lose weight. The physical transformation of learning to play guitar, learning to sing, learning dialect all of that had to take place. It was like a boot camp of how he was going to be able to do that. And he did that times ten. He really went deep into the research. He provided an incredible performance as an actor and showed that he is just a real talent, and somebody that was militant in his commitment to honoring that. And thats what we were looking for somebody that was committed to going on that journey, you have to be a little like me. You have to be a little crazy to take this on. You cant fake it. Youve got to be bold to be able to do that. And Kingsley is bold. He was bold in his performance. He was bold in his choices. I cant say enough about his commitment to that, to the project. And I think we found the right person for the job. Whats more, with One Love being supported by Marleys family (his children Ziggy and Cedella along with his widow Rita serve as producers), Ben-Adir relished in the fact that he got to spend a lot of time with his loved ones throughout the process of bring ing his story to the big screen. It was amazing, Ben-Adir said. So crazy. He [Ziggy] was there every day and one of Bobs best friends, Neville Garrick was there every day and obviously, its pretty nerve-wracking. The first day was pretty intense, you know, with the family watching you on take one. There were a few conversations about just trying to find him and ease into his essence, not caricature, but after a day or two they became an invaluable source. Theyre so involved that it really became a collaborative experience. And not just the family and Neville, but the support with the Jamaican cast, who flew into London a week before we started. This completely elevated the whole thing. With that upward mobility within the project, Ben-Adir also found inner growth himself after its completion. For him, the biggest lesson learned was one of self-love and feeling peaceful and safe. And what it takes for each of us to find that in ourselves, he added. Spending that amount of time thinking about Bob in those terms is impossible without thinking about it for yourself and Id say we had a lot in common in many ways. The deeper I go into the film and understand his humanity, not his music or his talent or his ability to reach, not that, but just on a much more simple level. I got to understand that he really was a man from the ghetto and he found music and he was lucky. He loved music and music saved him in a massive way, and I really identify with that. When it is all said and done and the world can take a deep dive into One Love, Ben-Adirs hope is that people are willing to go beneath the surface level of who Marley was as just a musician, but rather to focus on the true essence of his humanity. The process of studying him over a period of months really opened my eyes to what the true message of what he was saying and how his stance on Marcus Garvey and the unification of Africa and of that is at the heart of what he believed in, said Ben-Adir. Its not always clear in those little two-minute video clips of him talking about weed that the West loves to latch on. One Love is set to premiere in theaters on Feb. 14 Days after a body was found, a young man and woman were arrested, the Sumter County Sheriffs Office said Monday. Sumter residents Lamont Terrell Ortiz-Bossie, 20, and Savannah Desaire Patrick, 21, were taken into custody Nov. 30, four days after a deadly shooting, the sheriffs office said in a news release. Ortiz-Bossie was charged with murder and possession of a weapon during a violent crime, according to the release. Patrick was charged with accessory after the fact to a felony, the sheriffs office said. Both Ortiz-Bosie and Patrick were taken to the Sumter County Sheriffs Office Detention Center, where Ortiz-Bossie remains after his bond was denied, according to the release. Patricks cash bond was set at $10,000, the sheriffs office said. At about 10 p.m. on Nov. 26, deputies responded to a report of a shooting in the area near the intersection of Seminole Road and Cone Street, according to the release. Thats near Lakewood High School. At the scene, deputies spoke to witnesses and began searching for evidence, which was when they discovered a mans body lying on the ground, the sheriffs office said. The man, later identified as Shaquan Malik Logan, died at the scene after being shot multiple times, according to the release. No other injuries were reported. Information about how law enforcement identified Ortiz-Bossie as the shooter was not available, but he was taken into custody by members of the sheriffs office last Thursday, according to the release. Patrick was interviewed by investigators and charged accessory after the fact because of her involvement with the shooting, the sheriffs office said. Further information about Patricks involvement was not available. Patrick was out on bond from a May 2022 arrest when Logan was killed, Sumter County court records show. She is facing two pending charges for attempted murder, and a single count of discharging firearms into a dwelling from the 2022 arrest, according to court records. Her bond was set at $80,000 on the combined charges from the 2022 arrest, court records show. Ortiz-Bossie was also out on bond when Logan was killed, according to court records. Hes still facing pending charges from a January 2023 arrest when he was charged with three counts of attempted murder, discharging firearms into a vehicle while occupied, possession of a weapon during a violent crime, and conspiracy, court records show. His bond was set at $75,000 from the January arrest, according to court records. There was no word on a motive for Logans fatal shooting, but the sheriffs office said the investigation is ongoing despite the arrests. Anyone with information on the shooting is asked to call the sheriffs office at 803-436-2000, CrimeStoppers at 888-CRIME-SC or submit an online tip. The body of a Quincy man was found in a Washington, D.C., alley Thursday morning, according to multiple news reports. The man was identified as 41-year-old Alan Chi Chen. His body was discovered in the alley along the 100 block of W Street in the Northwest section of the city. Investigators believe his body was dumped by the driver of a white Porsche at about 11:18 p.m. Wednesday, Fox 5 TV in Washington reported. An image of the driver was captured on surveillance video, authorities said. FOX 5 spoke to Chen's aunt, who said he worked in sales and visited the area for months at a time for work. She said police told her that Chen was pushed from his own car, but police would not confirm that to FOX 5. A Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson in the District of Columbia said investigators are awaiting the results of an autopsy, Boston 25 News reported. The TV station reported that a person reached out to police Nov. 30 and said he ... witnessed on his camera someone dropping a body out of a vehicle in the alley. This article originally appeared on The Patriot Ledger: Quincy man's body found in Washington, D.C., alley Boise firefighters rescued a man from a crashed vehicle on Bogus Basin Road on Friday afternoon as they dealt with snowy conditions and tricky terrain, officials said in a Facebook post. The Boise Fire Department shared photos of the rescue effort on social media over the weekend. According to the departments post, it received a request for aid from Idaho State Police and Boise County Sheriffs Office for a crash between mileposts 10 and 11, about 2 miles downhill from the Stack Rock trailhead. Photos show a red SUV that had gone off the road, down a steep embankment and into a stand of trees. The circumstances of the crash werent immediately clear. Officials said Friday snow and the steep hillside made the rescue challenging. Firefighters were lowered about 100 yards down the embankment, where they removed the man from the wrecked vehicle and transported him back up the embankment to an ambulance. No further details were given on the mans condition. Officials said he was the sole occupant of the car. The department said Bogus Basin ski patrol members were key in coordinating the rescue response and assessing the patient for injuries before fire crews arrived. About 2500 trucks are waiting in line at the Ukrainian-Polish border Approximately 2,500 trucks were waiting to enter Ukraine at the Ukrainian-Polish border as of the morning of Dec. 4, according to Interfax-Ukraine, citing Ukrainian State Border Guard Service spokesman Andriy Demchenko. The largest number of trucks, almost 900, was located at the Rava-Ruska checkpoint. Some vehicles were crossing the border both to and from Poland. The most intense traffic was in the direction of the Krakovets checkpoint. "Unfortunately, the blockade continues, Demchenko said. These are four directions: the checkpoints of DoroshuskYahodyn, KorczowaKrakovets, and HrebenneRava-Ruska, where the blockade began on Nov. 6. On Nov. 23, the direction of the ShehyniMedyka checkpoint was added. As of this morning, there were approximately 2,500 vehicles queued in total on these routes towards Ukraine within the territory of Poland." As of the morning of Dec. 4, there were almost 650 trucks in queues opposite the UzhhorodVysne Nemecke checkpoint (border with Slovakia). "We are now recording a decrease, not critical but noticeable, in the number of trucks arriving at the Uzhhorod checkpoint from Slovakia," Demchenko added. Approximately 750 trucks are recorded opposite the Tisza checkpoint (on the border with Hungary). The State Border Guard Service noted an increase at the Hungarian border, citing difficulties in traffic flow through other directions that are currently blocked. Polish protesters reported their intention to allow four trucks per hour to enter Ukraine, and the movement of trucks from Ukraine would not be blocked, along with the movement of humanitarian and other essential goods. Cargo trucks are again being processed at the Uhryniv-Dolhobyczow checkpoint on the border with Poland, Ukraines State Border Guard Service reported on Dec. 4. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki earlier said that the country wants to propose to reinstate permits for freight shipments coming from Ukraine at the European Union level. The Polish protesters are demanding the return of the permit system for Ukrainian freight carriers. Amid the full-scale war, the EU suspended the permits for entry into the EU at least until June 30, 2024, to liberalize freight transport. Ukraines Deputy Infrastructure Minister Serhiy Derkach said that the issue of a "cargo visa-free regime" is fundamental for 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 Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 Boris gets grilled by the Covid Inquiry on Wednesday and is expected to deliver one of his Hugh Grant-style apologies: Golly, gosh, sorry for, uh, killing your grandma. Things augur badly. The Inquiry has turned into an indictment of Boriss No 10, with reports of him delaying action and making the brave argument that Covid was natures way of dealing with old people. The fact that he nearly died himself has been curiously forgotten. But beneath the tweetable clips a more complicated narrative is emerging, one that contradicts the Inquirys approach and makes Boris look better than it thinks. If I were him, Id play the Kerry Packer defence (Ill explain what that is later on). The Inquiry is meant to examine what happened and what we can learn from it, but partly because of the prominence given to the families of the bereaved, it presumes that something in Britain went uniquely and disastrously wrong. Blame is pinned on Brexit populists. Scientists get an easy ride. We are being drip-fed the thesis that Britain would be better run by unelected experts. In the latest module, the KCs have examined a narrative they consider axiomatic - that the UK should have had the wit to shut its borders in January 2020 and, failing this, to lockdown far sooner than March 23. Yet Neil Ferguson testified that Britain never had any significant chance of preventing the infection entering the country, and that globally containment did not work. Humanity was operating in the dark. The rate and nature of the contagion were unknown. Officials had to balance a threat they didnt understand against the likelihood of public compliance with control measures - a debate that punctures the notion of innate scientific consensus, for every discipline has its perspective. Sir Patrick Vallance, a physician and clinical pharmacologist, called Chris Whitty, a public health expert concerned about lockdowns wider effects, a delayer. Even when prophesying that thousands could die a day, Ferguson - an epidemiologist - warned that the cure... could be worse than the disease. Britain relied on rumours from China and scary footage from Italy, and calculated its odds on whiteboards. Imagine the task - Boris task - of sifting through a pile of terrible options to pick what seemed to be the least awful strategy, hence his legitimate questions about the balance of harms to health, economy and liberty. Those sweary WhatsApps weve heard so much about made precious little difference. The Inquiry has found that there was about a week between concept and implementation of lockdown, the length of time it would take any government to implement such a policy (Vallance does not think actual error cost the country anything more than a few days.) Matt Hancock, whose reputation has sunk so low that soon Im a Celebrity contestants will be forced to eat him, insists a lockdown shouldve occurred three weeks earlier, and that he recommended one on March 13. But this would only have saved us 10 days; he admits there is no evidence that he said this; and given that many have testified that he claimed the situation was initially under control, his word is far from trustworthy. The key thing is that Britain acted darn close to when the rest of the West did, and our death rate sits around the middle of international tables. Some witnesses have expressed frustration at the Governments strategy during the rest of 2020 - eat out to help out, the circuit breaker etc - but what we now know about the impact on waiting lists or childrens education validates Boris concerns about social cost. So, we have discovered that the Brexit government, cobbled together from prima donnas and chancers, was dysfunctional. But through observing the KCs, weve also seen what really motivates them: their obsession with diversity, with gossip, and a cult of expertise that the experts themselves dismiss. For example, scientists are not trained in economics, and during Covid, to quote Vallance, the science was there for everyone to see but the economic advice wasnt. In that spirit, the Inquiry has displayed little interest in the fate of business during the lockdown, even though it was supermarket cashiers who kept us fed while NHS nurses did the Macarena in empty wards. If I were Boris, Id point out such omissions and make my pitch for a more common sense-based philosophy. In 1991, the Australian parliament called the media mogul Kerry Packer to testify on the subject of corporate tax avoidance, in the expectation that they would make mincemeat out of him. It backfired, turning a villain into a folk hero. Packer opened by stating I appear here this afternoon reluctantly. He stared the MPs down and ridiculed pompous questions that made no sense. The affair climaxed in an exchange about tax that you can watch on YouTube and remains justly famous in Australia. Denying that he evaded tax, he nonetheless boasted about minimising it, for if anybody in this country doesnt minimise their tax they want their head read. As a government, I can tell you youre not spending it that well that we should be paying extra. Boris should emulate Packer and expose the inquiry for what it is: not a neutral court but the prosecuting body of a class ideology. 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. A Massachusetts woman died after being attacked by a shark while paddle boarding in the Bahamas on Monday morning. Royal Bahamas Police identified the 44-year-old local woman as Lauren Erickson Van Wart. Van Wart was traveling from Boston with a male relative to Sandals Royal Bahamian resort in Nassau, Bahamas for vacation. Police said she and her relative were paddle boarding away from the shoreline at the rear of a resort in western New Providence when she was bitten by a shark. A lifeguard on duty rescued Van Wart and her relative by boat. CPR was administered to the victim. However, she suffered serious injuries to the right side of her body, including the right hip region and also her right upper limb, police said. Van Wart was pronounced dead on the scene, police said. Dr. Gavin Naylor is the director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the University of Florida He says, from what is known about shark behavior, this fatal attack while the victim was paddle boarding, not surfing, is out of the ordinary. It was a bit of a surprise that she was paddleboarding. Surfers get bitten far more frequently than paddleboarders because they are lying down and they are splashing. Dr. Naylor says there are dozens of shark species in the Caribbean, including large tiger and bull sharks. But says that even those large predators seek to avoid human contact. Research biologists will study this fatal attack to better understand what happened, and how these encounters can be avoided. Greg Skomal, a shark biologist with the Mass. Division of Marine Fisheries is also looking into the cause of the attack. What we would try to get as much information as possible that would try to give us a sense of why this happened, Skomal told Boston 25. This is the third fatal shark attack since September of 2022 for the country. Only two weeks ago a German woman went missing after a shark encounter while diving. In September 2022, a 58-year-old American woman was killed in a shark attack while snorkeling with her family in the waters of New Providence. A couple of species have been implicated in attacks in the Bahamas the bull shark certainly the tiger, said Skomal. Skomal advises everyone who travels to potentially shark-infested waters to keep on the lookout for potential prey, stay close to safety, and learn what threats may be lurking below. These are things to be taken seriously and people needed to be educated about them, he added. Dr. Naylor echoed that sentiment. I think people planning to go on vacation in the Caribbean should continue to do so. And should enjoy themselves, enjoy the water, but dont be reckless, he said. Dr. Naylor said he would best advise people not to go swimming alone, and avoid swimming at night, or at dawn or dusk when sharks are feeding. This remains an active and ongoing investigation. 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 Miguel Solorio, who spent 25 years in a California prison after being convicted of a fatal drive-by shooting, was exonerated and ordered freed by a judge after the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office said it had "confidently and definitively" concluded he was wrongly convicted. Solorio was convicted, in part, by eyewitness testimony that may have been tainted by detectives showing them his photo repeatedly. Four witnesses did not initially identify him, and some even pointed out someone else. But officers continued to present his photo until some of the witnesses eventually IDed him as the suspect. The post Brickbat: The Wrong Man appeared first on Reason.com. UPDATE: Christian Ziegler has been removed as head of the Republican Party of Florida. Florida Republican political circles were rocked in December when then-state GOP leader Christian Ziegler was accused of sexual assault against a woman with whom he and his wife Bridget had planned a three-way sexual encounter. Christian Ziegler has not yet been charged with any crimes, but the investigation is ongoing and police filed an affidavit seeking access to his Google accounts after he admitted he had uploaded a video he had made of the encounter. Ziegler's attorney has said the charges are politically motivated and he will be exonerated. Ziegler, who was Republican Party Chair at the time, was removed from the position on Jan. 6. Gov. Ron DeSantis and other top Florida elected officials asked him to step down voluntarily bit he refused, and on Dec. 17, the Republican Party of Florida's executive board voted to censure the chair, strip him of authority and drop his salary down to $1. Christian and Bridget Ziegler are well-known as a Republican power couple and staunch advocates for morality and conservative principles in Florida political circles. While he moved upward from Sarasota County commissioner to Florida Republican Party Chair, she fought against COVID-19 measures in schools, co-founded a national organization dedicated to expunging what it considered offensive material from classrooms, and stood behind the governor as he signed the Parents Bill of Rights bill (derived by critics as the "Don't Say Gay" bill") based on her work into law. Here's what to know about Bridget Ziegler. Who is Bridget Ziegler? Bridget Ziegler speaks to voters before Gov. Ron DeSantis takes the stage at the Sahib Shriner Event Center, in Sarasota, as part of his Education Agenda Tour across the state in August 2022. Bridget Anne Ziegler, 41, was born in Schaumburg, Illinois, raised in Wheaton and then in Michigan as the youngest of three children. She attended Florida International University in Miami with plans to work in the fashion industry, according to the Washington Examiner, but left school to continue her job in sales and later department manager at Gucci in Bal Harbour, Florida. In the fall of 2010, she visited her retired parents in Sarasota and ended up staying, working at ADP and then rising up through various insurance companies for the next 10 years. She also met Christan Ziegler, an up-and-coming politician, and they married. The Zieglers have three daughters. In 2014, Christian suggested she run for the Sarasota School Board. Then-governor Rick Scott appointed her to the open position in June, and she won a four-year term later that year. Bridget Ziegler then spent the next seven years as one of the few conservatives on the board, regularly losing when votes came up. She joined other frustrated conservative school board members in 2015 to form the Florida Coalition of School Board Members as a rival to the Florida School Boards Association, which they saw as liberally biased. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ziegler advocated to drop the mask mandates in Sarasota County schools, arguing that there were no metrics to determine when it could be lifted. Organization at the emotionally charged debates at school board meetings during this time led to the creation of a national movement, the right-wing activist group Moms for Liberty. What is Moms for Liberty? Christian Ziegler, then a Sarasota County commissioner, and his wife, Sarasota County School Board member Bridget Ziegler, arrive at the first Moms for Liberty National Summit in July 2022 in Tampa. She co-founded Moms, a right-wing activist group. Based in Melbourne, Moms for Liberty was incorporated Jan. 1, 2021 by Ziegler, former Brevard County School Board member Tina Descovich and former Indian River County School Board member Tiffany Justice. The organization's stated goal was to empower parents and help them better understand how school districts operate and how to influence district policies. Moms for Liberty leaders have said the group is nonpartisan but grounded in "conservative values," although all three leaders had Republican ties and the group received funding from Republican leaders. The group grew rapidly into a national organization with 285 chapters in 45 states as of July 2023, with chapters in 32 counties in Florida alone. Moms for Liberty has seen great success in getting conservative members onto school boards, teaching others how to speak up at school board meetings, and helping restrict transgender rights and teaching about so-called critical race theory in schools and universities. Moms for Liberty has been at the forefront of the recent movement to ban books in school classrooms and libraries. Critics have called Moms for Liberty positions bigoted, homophobic, and racist fear-mongering. In June this year, the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled the group extremist and anti-government. "Moms for Liberty activities make it clear that the groups primary goals are to fuel right-wing hysteria and to make the world a less comfortable or safe place for certain students primarily those who are Black, LGBTQ or who come from LGBTQ families," the Southern Poverty Law Center said. Ziegler left the organization in the spring of 2021 to concentrate on her other obligations. She has defended the group but is no longer affiliated with it, and she is not listed as one of the founders on the Moms for Liberty website. Bridget Ziegler and Ron DeSantis Both Zieglers have been influential in Florida politics, especially after disagreements during the COVID pandemic led to a wave of conservative activism in schools. Bridget Ziegler helped draft the original bill in 2019 that later became the Parental Rights in Education Act after the Sarasota School Board wrongly, in her opinion approved guidelines that would make it optional for school officials to tell parents of elementary school children if they requested to go by a different pronoun. Previously she had spoken out against transgender students using restrooms that matched their gender identities. When DeSantis signed the bill, which prohibits the mention of gender identity and sexual orientation, bans discussions that aren't "age-appropriate" without defining what that means, and allows any parent to sue a school district over teaching they don't like with the district paying the bill, Ziegler was standing behind him. The anti-mask-and-COVID-vaccine movement, combined with what critics called the "Don't Say Gay" law, kicked off DeSantis' campaign to eradicate "wokeness" and seemingly any acknowledgment of gender identity, sexuality and the racial issues mistakenly called critical race theory from the state. DeSantis gave a speech at a Moms for Liberty annual summit and took the unusual step of endorsing Ziegler for her re-election. After he entered into a feud with Disney World when then-CEO Bob Chapek criticized the Parents' Bill of Rights law, he moved to dissolve its governing board and establish a new board filled with his appointees. Ziegler was one of them. What is Bridget Ziegler doing now? Protestors, including Judy Nadler of Sarasota, with her "Don't Say 3-way" sign, gather outside the Sarasota County School Board Tuesday evening, Dec. 12, 2023, calling for school board member Bridget Ziegler to resign. Following the demonstration, the school board approved a symbolic resolution calling for Ziegler to resign after admitting to involvement in a three-way sexual relationship. Ziegler was formerly the chair of the Sarasota County School Board but remains a member, and she is a member of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District overseeing Disney World infrastructure. She was serving as the director of school board programs for The Leadership Institute, a national nonprofit that trains conservatives to run for office but apparently resigned after the scandal as her profile no longer appears on the staff directory. On Tuesday, Dec. 12, the Sarasota School Board approved a ceremonial resolution calling for Ziegler's resignation. Despite the resolution and hours of public comments mostly criticizing her for hypocrisy, she did not indicate she planned to. Ziegler's term expires in 2026. Has Bridget Ziegler been charged with a crime? No. Nor has her husband, Christian Ziegler, at this time. There have been increasing calls from Republican leaders for Christian Ziegler to resign, calls for Bridget Zielger to step down, and several prominent Democrats have called the couple out for what they call hypocrisy. As leaders in the Florida GOP and Moms for Liberty, the Zieglers have made a habit out of attacking anything they perceive as going against family values be it reproductive rights or the existence of LGBTQ+ Floridians," Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said in a release. "The level of hypocrisy in this situation is stunning. What was Christian Ziegler accused of? According to a police affidavit, a Sarasota woman Ziegler has known for 20 years said she was sexually assaulted on Oct. 2 at her apartment. "The victim and Christian Ziegler agreed to have a sexual encounter that included Christian's wife Bridget Ziegler," according to the affidavit. "When the victim learned that Bridget Ziegler could not make it, she changed her mind and canceled with Christian." But Ziegler showed up anyway, entered her apartment and allegedly assaulted her. 'She told me she was raped': Listen to 911 call in Christian Ziegler sexual battery probe Ziegler has said the sexual encounter was consensual. Both the woman and Bridget Ziegler have admitted to detectives that there was a previous sexual encounter between the three of them more than a year ago. Police have recorded phone calls and messages between Christian Ziegler and the woman talking about that day, in which Ziegler denied assaulting her, and have recovered phone video Ziegler took of the encounter. Investigators also are looking into whether Ziegler broke state law against video voyeurism, as the victim was unaware the video was taken. Contributors: Zac Anderson, Sarasota Herald-Tribune; Cheryl McCloud, USA TODAY NETWORK - Florida Editor's note: Ziegler's status on the school board has been corrected. This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Bridget Ziegler: What to know about wife of GOP leader accused of rape Leadership has become so dumbed down that some bosses are being handed 40-page documents telling them how to answer a question. Reeling off drivel from an instruction manual might help marketing teams sleep better at night, safe in the knowledge that nobody is about to put their foot in it, but it doesnt offer much inspiration to young colleagues on the lookout for a role model. The next generation will hardly be encouraged to dream big if those at the top are only trusted to talk shop when armed with a list of bland pre-written responses (pretty normal, beams the young author of one such handbook). There is a wider societal problem when a lack of inspiration in the workplace follows a lack of inspiration at school. Masterminds are at risk of becoming so-called lost Einsteins when education, and then the workplace, fails to nurture them. Business leaders wondering where all the talent has gone have started to clock that their problems actually begin at the school gates. Schooling and exposure to certain role models make all the difference in whether or not someone fulfils their potential or becomes a lost Einstein, Americas Equality of Opportunity Project once said. Innovation drives economic growth, and yet for many young geniuses with the ability to spot a life-changing discovery it can be hard for them to see the opportunity. There is little room for enlightenment when exhausted teachers in underfunded schools are dealing with violence and collapsing ceilings. A headteacher last week said that he had been in tears over the amount of violence in the Kent school where he and other teachers have been striking over their safety. As teachers are forced to divert their attention away from promising pupils in order to tackle increasingly violent behaviour (more than one in 10 teachers reported being physically assaulted in the year to April), bright students are ending up lost and overlooked. A damning study last year concluded that the UK education system was failing on every measure with 60pc of parents believing that schools dont prepare children for work. Problems in the classroom filter straight into the boardroom. Go and talk to business people like me and a lot of them will complain that they cant get the skills that they need in the UK, Santanders UK chairman William Vereker, the former business envoy of ex-prime minister Theresa May, tells me. The end of free movement post-Brexit has hardly helped the issue. Bosses at companies big and small admit behind closed doors that they have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of suitable candidates in recent years. My word weve been through some, sighs the co-founder of one start-up. We get sick of having to do so much spoon-feeding, Im amazed that schools and universities dont do more to actually prepare you for life at work. Its a problem that ultimately impacts us all. Big ideas that could revolutionise certain sectors never see the light of day because people never get a chance. A teenager with the ability to become the next star inventor has already had their education disrupted by Covid and could now be studying in a school where teachers are distracted by violence or a roof that might cave-in because of dangerous concrete almost 200 schools in England have reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete on their premises. Santanders UK chairman might be among the many who are fed up with worker shortages, but teachers do not have the capacity or budget to dream up ways to make the recruitment process easier for businesses with a 54bn market cap. Vereker is well aware of that fact. He believes that companies must stop relying on the state to fix the countrys skills gap and invest more in education themselves, arguing that theres too much expectation on Whitehall to come to the rescue. Its a call to action that comes at an apt time. As schools crumble and universities haemorrhage cash (30 universities reported financial losses in the last academic year), Jeremy Hunt has just unveiled what he called the biggest business tax cut in modern British history. If managers really are as fed up as they say they are with the lack of talent around, then now seems like a decent time to do something about it. The bump businesses get from those tax cuts could be sprinkled across the cash-starved education sector and poured into learning, eventually benefiting everyone. The focus needs to be on inspiring these potential Einsteins before they become lost. The country doesnt need hundreds of new stationery cupboards, it needs something for students to aspire to and get excited about. A number of big conglomerates, including IBM, AT&T and Verekers Santander, have already made efforts to fill the skills gap by retraining staff, sponsoring degrees or setting up free courses and hopefully there is more of that to come. But more support is needed at an earlier age, when pupils are starting to wonder what they want to do with their lives. Companies could offer inspiration lacking in underfunded schools. Hyundai is now sponsoring school trips across the country after finding that children are missing out owing to the cost-of-living crisis and staffing issues. Nomura bankers are teaching high-school students in Japan how to invest future money. These small contributions could make a big difference. Instead of moaning about labour shortages from the comfort of their boardrooms, its time for big business to get to the root of the problem. 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. A UK citizen has been sentenced to three months in jail in Dubai after insulting airport staff who were slow to bring his mother a wheelchair. The unnamed man was originally issued a Dh 10,000 (2,150) fine, but his appeal against this failed and his punishment was extended to a jail term on 6 November. The Court of Appeal heard that the man began to insult staff at Dubai International Airport after they told him that they couldnt immediately bring his mother a wheelchair, reports the Daily Mail. The incident happened in February 2022. An airport employee told the court that the man swore at her after she had explained the airports wheelchair policy to him, telling him that a wheelchair would be made available before boarding the bus. I saw the traveller repeatedly asking an airport desk employee about the wheelchair and expected that he might have not understood her explanation, she said, reports The National. When I tried to explain it to him, he insulted me using very bad language. I told the traveller that using such offensive language is not allowed at Dubai airport but he responded that he didnt care. The employee then called the police, and a case was filed against the man in Dubais Criminal Court. Following an appeal, which he lost, the fine was escalated into a jail sentence, followed by immediate deportation. The Independent has contacted the Dubai court system for comment. The Emirate is known for its strict laws over what it deems offensive behaviour. In October, an American student briefly faced a year in prison after being accused of assaulting staff during an altercation. In 2017, a British tourist was also sentenced to a brief jail term after making rude gestures and touching a mans hip in a bar. Having been poisoned last week, Marianna Budanova, wife of Ukraine's Military Intelligence (HUR) chief Kyrylo Budanov, remains in stable condition, HUR spokesman Andriy Yusov told Ukrainian TV broadcasters on Dec. 4. Budanova has completed a treatment regimen at a Ukrainian clinic. Read also: Budanov wife & associates poisoned, unusual UZ procurement, Sentsov on info policy Her condition is satisfactory following the therapy, said Yusov. Budanova is doing well, thanks to the professionalism and quick work of the medical personnel, he said. The medical team will continue its supervision, with ongoing follow-up examinations, acknowledging the process will be extensive. Read also: Ukraine spy chief's wife poisoned, hospitalized, but life not in danger The HUR spokesman added that investigations into the poisoning are still underway. On Nov. 29, sources within the intelligence community disclosed to NV that Budanova had been poisoned by heavy metals, including arsenic and mercury. The early detection of the toxic substances reportedly prevented more severe health outcomes. Read also: Ex-spy chief on how Budanov became a target for Russian special services interview The possibility of the poisoning occurring through contaminated food is being considered. The sources also suggested that additional HUR staff might have been targeted in the attack. 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 Gov. Brian Kemp said Monday he will ask Georgia lawmakers to provide additional tax relief during the upcoming legislative session by accelerating a state income tax cut lawmakers adopted last year. House Bill 1437 set in place a reduction in the states income tax rate from 5.75% to 4.99%, to be phased in over several years. Kemp said he will propose amending the 2022 legislation by moving up the timetable for the reductions, which would set the tax rate in tax year 2024 at 5.39% rather the 5.49% set by the current version of the bill. The Governors Office of Planning and Budget estimates accelerating the tax cuts would save taxpayers $1.1 billion during the tax year starting Jan. 1. The governor touted his proposal as the latest in a series of tax cuts in Georgia, including $2 billion in income tax rebates during the last two years, more than $1 billion in property tax relief, and two temporary suspensions of the state sales tax on gasoline that saved motorists more than $2.2 billion. While big government and big spenders in Washington and states like California and New York further their tax-and-spending policies were choosing a different path in the Peach State, said Kemp, referring to the states budget surplus. We believe in the principle that tax dollars belong to those who earned them in the first place, added Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington. Lt. Gov. Burt Jones welcomed the new proposal as moving Georgia toward his eventual goal of eliminating the state income tax altogether. Jones, who presides over the state Senate, praised the gradual approach the governor is taking. We need to do it in a fiscally responsible manner, he said. Georgia can easily afford the tax cuts. The state has built up a surplus of $16 billion during the last few years, including $11 billion in undesignated funds. Bulgaria has permitted licensed imports of Ukrainian sunflower, rapeseed, corn, and wheat, the Bulgarian Ministry of Agriculture and Food said in a post on its website on Nov. 30. Agriculture ministers Kiril Vatev of Bulgaria and Mykola Solskyi of Ukraine agreed on implementing a licensing regime for the export of these agricultural products during an online meeting, finalizing the details of its application, the ministry said. "The Ministry of Agriculture and Food has fulfilled its promise to limit imports of this agricultural produce to the maximum by Nov. 30, following the memorandum signed between the government and the initiative committee of the protesting farmers," the Bulgarian ministry quoted Vatev as saying. Following this period, the two countries will "strictly monitor to ensure that there is no market distortion and that the interests of Bulgarian producers, processors, and consumers are not undermined," Vatev said. Read also: Import and data exchange between the two countries will continue, the Bulgarian ministry said. The European Commission reportedly announced on Sep. 15 that it would not extend restrictions on agricultural product imports from Ukraine to neighboring countries (Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia) under certain conditions. Read also: Slovakia extends and expands ban on agricultural imports from Ukraine The restrictions, imposed on May 2, affected wheat, rapeseed, sunflower, and corn. These five Eastern European EU member states argued that Ukrainian agricultural products, under duty-free entry into the EU, harmed their local agricultural sectors. After the restrictions were lifted, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia introduced unilateral bans, expanding the list of prohibited products to include rapeseed press cake and grist, as well as corn bran, wheat flour, and derivatives. Hungary brought this list to 24 positions. Ukraine filed a WTO lawsuit against Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia, alleging discriminatory treatment of its agricultural products. Current negotiations involve Ukraine seeking the introduction of a mechanism for licensing the export of Ukrainian agricultural products with mandatory verification in each of the five countries. Bulgaria is considering lifting a ban on sunflower imports from Ukraine introduced in September, with local vegetable oil producers demanding access to supplies of Ukrainian sunflower seeds, the Bulgarian media outlet Agricensus reported on Nov. 23. 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 Bulgarian President Rumen Radev has vetoed a bill passed by the legislature that would have allowed Ukraine to receive armored vehicles free of charge, news outlet Nova Bulgaria reported on Dec. 4. MPs did not have the opportunity to objectively assess whether the equipment provided was necessary, he argued. Read also: Bulgaria can provide Ukraine with ammunition that can turn the tide of war, ex-Defense Minister The head of state noted that neither the wartime tasks assigned to the Ministry of Internal Affairs nor the needs of the Main Directorates of Border Police and Fire Safety and Public Safety were taken into account. The armored vehicles provided to Ukraine could have been used to protect the Bulgarian border and provide assistance to the population in the event of disasters and accidents, particularly in hard-to-reach areas, Radev said. Read also: Bulgaria moves closer to transferring stock of faulty S-300 missiles to Ukraine "I am guided by the belief that the safety, health, and lives of Bulgarian citizens should be the priority," the president said. The Bulgarian parliament ratified on Nov. 22 an agreement between the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Bulgaria and the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine to provide Ukraine with armored vehicles, relevant weapons, and spare parts. Read also: Bulgaria ready to send MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine but with some conditions The agreement between the Bulgarian and Ukrainian ministries was signed in Sofia on Aug. 8 and in Kyiv on Nov. 13. A statement from the country's parliamentary defense committee said that the Bulgarian Interior Ministry no longer needed the vehicles. 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 Bulgarian President Rumen Radev has vetoed a bill passed by the legislature that would have allowed Ukraine to receive armored vehicles free of charge, news outlet Nova Bulgaria reported on Dec. 4. MPs did not have the opportunity to objectively assess whether the equipment provided was necessary, he argued. The head of state noted that neither the wartime tasks assigned to the Ministry of Internal Affairs nor the needs of the Main Directorates of Border Police and Fire Safety and Public Safety were taken into account. The armored vehicles provided to Ukraine could have been used to protect the Bulgarian border and provide assistance to the population in the event of disasters and accidents, particularly in hard-to-reach areas, Radev said. Read also: Bulgaria ready to send MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine but with some conditions "I am guided by the belief that the safety, health, and lives of Bulgarian citizens should be the priority," the president said. The Bulgarian parliament ratified on Nov. 22 an agreement between the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Bulgaria and the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine to provide Ukraine with armored vehicles, relevant weapons, and spare parts. Read also: Bulgaria can provide Ukraine with ammunition that can turn the tide of war, ex-Defense Minister The agreement between the Bulgarian and Ukrainian ministries was signed in Sofia on Aug. 8 and in Kyiv on Nov. 13. A statement from the country's parliamentary defense committee said that the Bulgarian Interior Ministry no longer needed the vehicles. 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 Bulgarian President Rumen Radev said on Dec. 4 that he had vetoed Bulgaria's agreement with Kyiv to provide Ukraine with 100 armored vehicles, returning the deal to the parliament, the Bulgarian news portal Novinite reported. Radev has repeatedly argued against military assistance for Kyiv and has been accused of taking a pro-Moscow stance. His position has put him at odds with Prime Minister Nikolai Denkov's pro-Ukrainian government. The agreement, signed between the Bulgarian Interior Ministry and the Ukrainian Defense Ministry in Sofia on Aug. 8 and in Kyiv on Nov. 13, was finally ratified by the Bulgarian parliament on Nov. 22. It provides for the supply of 100 older armored vehicles from the Interior Ministry's stocks together with armaments and spare parts, free of charge. Denkov believes that the parliament will overcome Radev's veto. Bulgaria's legislature has the right to override the veto and send the agreement further without any changes by a simple majority vote. "This veto will be overcome, so I don't see anything to comment on," the prime minister said. The president justified his opposition by underscoring potential domestic needs for the vehicles. He said they could be used for protecting Bulgaria's borders or for assisting citizens during disasters in remote areas. The parliamentary defense committee approved the agreement with a comment that the vehicles are no longer needed at home and could, therefore, be supplied to Ukraine. Bulgarias Soviet stockpiles and large defense industry may be key to Ukraines success Bulgaria has had to walk a fine line, trying to covertly support Ukraine without provoking Russia. The Balkan state has been historically influenced by Moscow. Opinions on Ukraine are split among its 6.7 million people, many of whom buy into Kremlin propaganda. The new coalition government elected The Kyiv IndependentAsami Terajima Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. The Central Coast YouTuber who pleaded guilty to deliberately crashing a plane in Californias Los Padres National Forest to generate online views in a moneymaking scheme was sentenced to six months in federal prison, the U.S. Attorneys Office said Monday in a news release. Lompoc resident Trevor Daniel Jacob, 30, began his solo flight from the Lompoc City Airport destined for Mammoth Lakes on Nov. 24, 2021. Only Jacob never planned on arriving in Mammoth, the release said. Rather, he intended to eject from his aircraft during the flight and record himself parachuting to the ground as his airplane descended and crashed. Jacob pleaded guilty to one felony count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation on June 30. It appears that (Jacob) exercised exceptionally poor judgment in committing this offense, prosecutors said in the release. (Jacob) most likely committed this offense to generate social media and news coverage for himself and to obtain financial gain. Nevertheless, this type of daredevil conduct cannot be tolerated. Jacob is an experienced pilot, skydiver and former Olympic athlete, the release said. According to previous Tribune reporting, Jacob competed in the 2014 Winter Olympics as a snowboarder when he was a Paso Robles resident. Central Coast man who crashed plane for YouTube video admits to obstructing investigation How did YouTuber fake and attempt conceal crash? Jacob received a sponsorship from a company and had agreed to promote the companys wallet in the YouTube video that he would post. According to the release, the YouTuber mounted several video cameras on different parts of the plane and equipped himself with a parachute, video camera and selfie stick prior to taking off on Nov. 24, 2021. After flying for approximately 35 minutes, he ejected above Los Padres National Forest near Santa Maria, the release said. Video later showed him claiming the planes engine had cut out. He then videoed himself parachuting to the ground. The airplane crash was recorded with the various cameras, the release said. Once he had parachuted safely to the ground, he then hiked to the location of the wreck and recovered the video recording of his flight and crash. Two days later on Nov. 26, 2021, Jacob notified the National Transportation Safety Board about the crash. The agency then launched an investigation and told Jacob he was responsible for preserving the wreckage so the agency could examine it. He agreed to determine the crash location and provide the coordinates and video of the crash to agency investigators. The Federal Aviation Administration launched its own investigation three days later. The release said Jacob lied to investigators that he did not know the location of the wreckage. But on Dec. 10, 2021, Jacob and a friend flew to the wreckage by helicopter to retrieve it and transported it to Rancho Sisquoc in Santa Barbara County, where he loaded it into his pickup truck. He then drove the wreckage to an airplane hangar at Lompoc City Airport, the release said, where he cut up and destroyed the aircraft. He unloaded the detached parts of the plane into trash bins at the airport and elsewhere which was done with the intent to obstruct federal authorities from investigating the November 24 plane crash, the release said. On Dec. 23, 2021, Jacob uploaded a YouTube video titled I Crashed My Airplane that showed him parachuting out of his plane and the aircrafts crash, while including the sponsored wallet promotion. Jacob intended to make money through the video, the release said. The release said Jacob lied to federal investigators when he filed a report that falsely indicated his plane lost full power approximately 35 minutes into the flight. He also lied to a Federal Aviation Administration aviation safety inspector when he said he had parachuted out of the plane when the airplanes engine had quit because he could not identify any safe landing options. We may know this week if the deposed speaker wants to stake a claim to the right side of history. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press) Days after making history as the first House speaker to be booted from the job, Rep. Kevin McCarthy said he mischievously told fellow Republicans, I am a free agent now, arent I? If so, he's squandered it so far, with alleged kidney punches and vague electoral threats aimed at his House enemies. If only he'd use his free agency to burn his well-trodden bridge to Mar-a-Lago, and to the Orange Jesus who deserted his disciple (My Kevin) in McCarthys time of need. With his post-Jan. 6 pilgrimage, McCarthy did more than anyone to restore Donald Trumps political viability, only to become the umpteenth Trump toady to learn that loyalty, for the disgraced former president, runs just one way. This week, with the approach of Californias filing deadline for 2024 candidates, we should learn what McCarthy plans for life after defenestration: Will he stay or go? Hints and speculation, including his own, have been all over the map. But we can pretty much bank on McCarthy not doing what he should do, and give the shiv to Trump. He doesnt have former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheneys courage and commitment to the Constitution. Hell do whatever he thinks is best for Kevin, period. McCarthy, who at nearly 59 is young by current Washington leadership standards, said soon after losing the speakership that he would run for reelection, seeking a 10th term from his red, Bakersfield-based Central Valley district. And hed probably win, though he already has Republican opposition from his right, as well as Democratic and independent challengers. Read more: Can Liz Cheney defeat 'Orange Jesus'? Her anti-Trump book sure feels like a campaign memoir Yet in recent days, the media has reported that McCarthy has confided to allies that hes exploring a career beyond the halls of Congress read: lobbying and that he might even "get the hell out by years end rather than serve out his current term. That would be a shiv of sorts to House Republicans, who need every vote they have given the partys hair-thin and fractious majority. Colleagues took note of a photo McCarthy posted on Instagram, standing in his district office that looks to be in the process of dismantlement. Hint, hint. Still, McCarthy professed indecision last Wednesday, when he sat down in Manhattan for an interview at a New York Times conference. If I decide to run again, I have to know in my heart that Im giving 110%. I have to know that I want to do that, he said. I also have to know, if Im going to walk away, that Im going to be fine with walking away. Read more: Calmes: Trump promises power grabs and vengeance if he wins in 2024. Here's the plan. Its a gut call ... , he added. "Look, if you just got thrown out as speaker, youd go through a [sic] different stages, would you not? I dont know what McCarthy has been going through, or what hell do now. But given how he debased himself to get the speakership, especially his servility to Trump, I can guess that his dethroning by Trumps MAGA acolytes in the House hurt a lot. Hes all but said hes out for revenge and willing to use whats left of his political machinery and rich campaign treasury against them. The question he's asking himself is, can he do that better from within the House, or outside it? It must be particularly galling that his fellow House Republicans, led by new Speaker "MAGA Mike" Johnson, are doing exactly what McCarthy was dumped for doing: accepting compromises with the Democrats who happen to control the Senate and White House. His far-right nemeses in the House Freedom Caucus even put out word last week that they finally accept reality , in the form of the spending limits that McCarthy negotiated with President Biden last spring, the same limits that provoked the right's initial threats to can McCarthy. Read more: Calmes: Has the Republican Party grown so anti-government that it cannot govern at all? And yet McCarthy remains wedded to those Republicans' real leader, Trump, so much so that McCarthy's office last week denied a highly credible Washington Post report that, in a phone call after his ouster, hed told Trump, F you, when the former president ticked off the reasons hed declined to defend the then-speaker against the plotters. Trump groused that McCarthy had failed to expunge his two impeachments an impossibility, which Trump would know if he accepted that laws and norms apply to him and that McCarthy hadnt (yet) endorsed Trump for reelection in 2024. Why deny dropping the F-bomb? Because in McCarthys mind, staying publicly attached to Trump is key to remaining politically relevant. Its Trumps party, after all. Just look at what Cheney got for her anti-Trump, pro-Constitution stand: Instead of remaining on a track to become the first Republican woman speaker, shes a party pariah. At least she, unlike McCarthy, retains her dignity and a place on the right side of history, the pro-democracy side. And now she has a book coming out Tuesday, Oath and Honor, in which she razes whatever remains of McCarthys dignity. Read more: Calmes: McCarthy flopped, but blame the chaos on the entire Republican Party According to CNN reports , Cheney discloses that McCarthy told her just two days after the 2020 election that Trump knew hed lost. Yet that very night on Fox News, McCarthy insisted Trump won. And she adds this bit of comedy at McCarthy's expense: He claimed to her that he went to Mar-a-Lago three weeks after Jan. 6 because Trump aides summoned him to help buck up the boss spirits: Trumps not eating, so they asked me to come see him. Given the grief McCarthy deservedly has taken for that Mar-a-Largo trip, imagine what he must have thought last month when his successor, Johnson, made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago, and, amid the gilt, posed for a eerily similar photo with the master there. Now its Johnson whos decidedly not a free agent. But McCarthy is he said so himself. He should act like one and redeem himself: Get out of the House and try to get rid of the Trump taint. Don't hold your breath. @jackiekcalmes Get the latest from Jackie Calmes Commentary on politics and more from award-winning opinion columnist. Sign me up. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. The Camden County Board of Elections & Registration (BoER) has announced several new polling locations to comply with applicable state laws. >>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<< The County announced on Mon., Dec. 4, that the modification of several polling places and voting precinct boundaries in advance of next years elections will improve the voter experience throughout Camden County. According to BoER the changes were made to the following voting locations: North Kingsland & Kingsland Consolidated all of the former North Kingsland Precinct with the majority of the Kingsland Precinct to form a new Historic Kingsland precinct. The polling place has also been relocated to the Kingsland Municipal Court. North St. Marys Increased voter numbers at the North St. Marys polling place by modifying boundaries north of Asbury Court, off Spur 40. The polling place for these impacted voters will change to St. Marys Church. St. Marys Consolidated portions of the Mush Bluff Precinct into the St. Marys Precinct by modifying boundaries. Voting will continue to be at Agape Christian Center. Browntown and West Kingsland Modified boundaries and consolidated precincts to form the West Kingsland Precinct. Voting will continue at the Harbor Worship Center. Voters affected by these changes can visit the Camden County website for the latest maps. The county has also said that all precinct locations are also available by clicking here. You may also contact the Elections & Registration office for further assistance. New precinct cards will be mailed to voters residing in the above areas in the coming weeks. If you are interested in registering to vote, click here to visit the Georgia My Voter Page (MVP). [SIGN UP: Action News Jax Daily Headlines Newsletter] 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. When shopping for the ones you love, there are a lot of things you can consider, from the thought behind the items chosen to the impact on the economy. If you want to keep the presents for those on your list local and your loved ones have a penchant for food and drink, there is no shortage of great local businesses to support during the holiday season. More: 21 food gifts every foodie will love Here are more than a dozen local food and beverage shop, brand and product ideas that are sure to inspire your holiday giving. Gift baskets and bags with a variety of items and price levels are available at Gourmet Gallery. 1. Gourmet Gallery, 3325 S Boulevard #107 in Edmond Not sure what to get someone? Custom curate a basket filled with gourmet food, drink and gift options from Edmond's Gourmet Gallery and you can't go wrong. Choose from Made in Oklahoma products and items from farther away as well. To create a basket, just head into the store, choose your basket size and items to go inside and pay. Or, if that's too stressful, you can choose from a selection of carefully crafted baskets made by the owners who have been putting together sought-after gift baskets for individuals and companies alike for decades. 2. Sailor & The Dock, 617 W Sheridan Ave. At Sailor & The Dock you'll find a variety of shops to choose from, including options for food, beverage and beyond. Whether you're buying a gift card for coffee or tea at Hunny & Honey, shopping sustainable eats and goods at Re:Supply, or picking up pasta, olive oils and other gourmet groceries from Della Terra Pasta and The Oil Tree, there's something for everyone at Sailor & the Dock. Gift options extend well beyond food and beverage with fitness, clothing, book, plant and other shopping options available on-site, as well. 3. Mollycoddled Hashslinger, 12100 N Rockwell Ave., Suite 7 Another great option for Made in Oklahoma items is Mollycoddled Hashslinger. This Oklahoma confectioner makes candy in-house but also sells a selection of items from other Oklahoma brands. With their lines of marshmollys, candy floss, caramels and more, you're sure to find something the sweets lover on your list will enjoy. Single scoop cards for Boom Town Creamery ice cream make great stocking stuffers. 4. Boom Town Creamery, multiple locations Grab your ice cream-loving friends and family single scoop cards to stuff their stocking with, or go big with a pint of the month card, which gives them a pint of their choosing every month, all year long. For store location information, go to https://boomtowncreamery.com/index.php/location/. 5. Woody Candy Company, 922 NW 70 St. Have a family member who can't get enough of Aunt Bill's Brown Candy? Then perhaps you should head into Woody Candy Company and buy a box to stow under the tree. While you're there, check out the company's selection of brittles, hard candies, clusters, fudge and more. "Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine" 6. 'Corn Dance: Inspired First American Cuisine' by Loretta Barrett Oden This cookbook, written by Potawatomi chef Loretta Barrett Oden with contributions by Beth Dooley, will allow the recipient to tap into Oden's Oklahoma upbringing and Indigenous heritage through the flavors she's grown up using in her own cooking. Another must-have cookbook for the Oklahoma-loving cook comes this collection of recipes and stories from Oklahoma's Country Queen herself: Reba McEntire, with a foreword by fellow country star and Oklahoma native Garth Brooks. Featuring photos and stories from Reba's life and recipes from her own kitchen, along with those of her loved ones and her restaurant, this book isn't likely to let anyone down. For the experimental home cook, spice blends from The Spice Girl Kitchen feature global flavors free of salt and sugar, to punch up the palate of any dish without unnecessary additives. Find blends ranging from Cajun to Cuban, Greek to Thai and beyond online. The brand even has a signature Okie Rub and recipes you can make with its blends available online. More: Shop these Reviewed-approved gift ideas for home cooks Here is a selection of the various chocolates available at Good Girl Chocolate, including the 13-piece heart assortment, center, given to stars at this years Grammys. If it's good enough for the Grammys, it's good enough for the family. Choose from individual bars, bar assortments and truffles from this black- and woman-owned local chocolate business that makes dairy-free, soy-free, non-GMO single origin chocolates sweetened with organic plant-based sweeteners. From designer cookie houses and cookie and cake kits to a full line of Glittery Sugar, your beloved baker can take their creations to another level with this woman-owned Oklahoma City-based company. Named to The Women Presidents Organization list of 50 Fastest Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies for the second year in a row, bakery bling offers the first 100% edible glitter made with FDA-approved ingredients. The company's products are also dairy-free, nut-free and certified kosher. A bar kit is one of many gift options available at Barkeep Supply in Oklahoma City. 11. Barkeep, 1121 N Walker Ave. Grab a variety of cocktail accoutrements from glassware and bar tools to specialty ingredients, or spring for a group gift you can all experience together when you book a cocktail making class at Barkeep. There's even novelty items like scented candles for the cocktail lover in your life. 12. Savory Spice Shop, 4400 N Western Ave. From specialty spice blends to baking supplies and kitchen tools to cocoa mixes and other specialty snacks and foods, Savory Spice Shop is a playground for homecooks, bakers and adventurous eaters alike. Head in and peruse the wide variety of flavorful items available and pick up some delicious stocking stuffers or gifts for everyone on your list. The Jones Assembly has a special Disco Nap ornament to commemorate one of its signature cocktails. If you have a family member or friend that adores The Jones Assembly or loves their Disco Nap cocktail, this ornament is a great gift to celebrate that. Order online or visit The Jones Assembly, 901 W Sheridan Ave., in person to purchase. 14. Local beer The beer lover in your life and OKC's local breweries will both benefit from your purchase of a six-pack, growler or gift-card to use at a local brewery on products of their choosing. More: 23 of the best gifts for beer lovers Marcus Smith roasts coffee beans at Elemental Coffee. Oklahoma City has a number of locally owned coffee shops with great gift options. 15. Local coffee Instead of buying a giftcard to Starbucks for your coworker this year, head to one of OKC's local coffee shops and grab one of theirs, or a bag of whole beans or ground coffee. We have a great list of local coffee shops here, that would love your support and are happy to brew up great drinks for your friends and family just as deliciously as the chains. 16. Gift cards for local restaurants Give your friends and family the gift of trying a new local restaurant or visiting one of your favorite spots in town by buying gift cards. Great as a stocking stuffer or gift, pair gift cards with a bottle of wine, movie or theater tickets, as a way to gift a couple a much-needed date night. OKC Soda Co. offers pop in flavors like Strawberry Shortcake, Blueberry Acai, Root Beer and Lemon Lime. Even more local brands and stores to shop for food and beverage gifts This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Shop local: Gifts for your favorite foodie you can find in Oklahoma SAN DIEGO (KSWB) California employers will soon be barred from discriminating against employees or applicants based on cannabis use outside of the workplace. On Jan. 1, a new set of state laws Assembly Bill 2188 and Senate Bill 700 that expand the states Fair Employment and Housing Act to add certain employment protections for those who engage in marijuana use will go into effect. AB 2188 was passed and signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022. SB 700, which was signed this year, clarified and expanded certain provisions of AB 2188 before it was set to go into effect in 2024. Illegal marijuana grow farms raise national security concerns Under the new laws, it will be illegal for employers with five or more employees to penalize potential or current workers for off-duty cannabis use. SB 700 specified at this protection prohibits an employer from asking an applicant about their prior use of the substance, except if they are permitted to consider a criminal history with cannabis-related crimes. The laws also bar employers from reprimanding workers who fail an employer-required drug screening test with a positive test of non-psychoactive cannabis metabolites. These metabolites are a dormant footprint of cannabis that is stored in ones body after the Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) metabolizes. Experts say most drug tests from employers primarily screen for these metabolites as opposed to active THC. Unlike active THC, the presence of metabolites usually does not indicate impairment and has not been found to lead to higher risk for workplace accidents, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). However, these new laws do not bar other measures that employers may take to maintain a drug-free workplace. According to AB 2188, employers can still screen workers for the presence of active THC and take disciplinary measures against employees who are impaired in the workplace. Certain types of employers like those in construction trades or in workplaces that receive federal funding who are required by federal law to test for controlled substances are exempt from these testing protections. While there is consensus that no one should ever show up to work high or impaired, testing positive for this metabolite has no correlation to workplace safety or productivity, Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva, who authored AB 2188, said in a 2022 report. Testing for THC may indicate an individual is impaired at work and is a better way to maintain work place safety. AB 2188 is a balanced solution that will protect the rights of employees and employers. California voters legalized marijuana for recreational use by adults in the 2016 referendum, Proposition 64. The ballot measure came about a decade after voters approved the removal of restrictions for medicinal cannabis use in the state. Despite being legal, advocates say that workplace discrimination against employees who use cannabis lawfully remains a pervasive issue one that disproportionately impacts Black communities. Newsom vetoes cannabis cafe bill According to a study from the American Addiction Centers, Black people are more than twice as likely to be reprimanded or fired for failing a drug test compared to their white counterparts, who reported more leniency from employers. California joins seven other states with laws on the books aimed at protecting employment rights for recreational and medicinal marijuana users: Washington, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Montana and Rhode Island. Twenty states including Arkansas, Delaware, Illinois, Maine and Pennsylvania only prohibit workplace discrimination against medical marijuana users. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to FOX 5 San Diego. Blockade of the Polish border. Cargo trucks are processed at the Uhryniv-Dolhobyczow checkpoint Cargo trucks are again being processed at the Uhryniv-Dolhobyczow checkpoint on the border with Poland, Ukraines State Border Guard Service reported on Telegram on Dec. 4. The trucks are following the general queue order as they pass through the checkpoint, the service said. Read also: One border crossing to be unblocked for empty trucks exiting to Poland "As of the morning of Dec. 4, border guards at the Uhryniv checkpoint on the exit from Ukraine processed 30 heavy-duty vehicles with a total permitted weight of over 7.5 tons," the statement said. A meeting of the EU Transport Council is scheduled for Dec. 4 in Brussels. The Polish side has proposed discussing the consequences of the agreement between Ukraine and the EU that came into force on July 1, 2022. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki earlier said that the country wants to propose to reinstate permits for freight shipments coming from Ukraine at the European Union level. Read also: Polish protesters are demanding the return of the permit system for Ukrainian freight carriers. Amid the full-scale war, the EU suspended the permits for entry into the EU at least until June 30, 2024, to liberalize freight transport. Ukraines Deputy Infrastructure Minister Serhiy Derkach said that the issue of a "cargo visa-free regime" is fundamental for 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 New Delhi Heavy rain and flooding brought by the approaching Cyclone Michaung snarled life in the South Indian city of Chennai Monday. Streets in most parts of the city home to some 12 million people were water-logged as the severe cyclonic storm bore down on India's coastline ahead of an expected Tuesday landfall. Parts of Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu state, and neighboring districts got almost an inch of rain overnight as the powerful storm churned toward India's southeast coast in the Bay of Bengal. Chennai's airport halted operations until at least Monday evening as heavy rain submerged its runway and strong winds whipped up. Airport authorities cancelled 70 flights and diverted more than 30 others to Kempegowda airport in neighboring Bengaluru city. People move in a boat past partially submerged vehicles in a residential area following heavy rains ahead of Cyclone Michaung in Chennai, India, Dec. 4, 2023. / Credit: STRINGER/REUTERS Videos posted online showed airport ground crew members in water almost knee-deep checking parked aircraft. Indian media outlets showed videos of several cars being swept away by floodwater in Chennai streets. The waterlogging also forced the cancellation of least six trains in the coastal state. State authorities issued alerts ahead of the cyclone's expected landfall on Tuesday morning. Schools and colleges were closed and employees urged to work from home as the rains started pouring down Monday. Thousands of people were evacuated from coastal areas and officials set up 5,000 relief camps for them on higher ground. Cyclone Michaung was a "severe cyclonic storm" Monday in the southwest Bay of Bengal, moving north-northwest toward the coast at about 9 miles per hour. It was forecast to make landfall Tuesday in the coastal state of Andhra Pradesh with sustained winds up to 62 mph and gusts close to 70, India's national weather office warned. Commuters make their way down a flooded road after heavy rains in Chennai, India, Dec. 4, 2023, a day before the expected landfall of Cyclone Michaung. / Credit: R. SATISH BABU/AFP/Getty More than 7,000 people had already been evacuated from eight coastal districts in that state as of Monday. The warm waters of the Bay of Bengal have spawned several deadly cyclones over the past few years, causing massive destruction in both India and Bangladesh. In 2020, Cyclone Amphan killed at least 80 killed people in India and left thousands homeless. In 2019, Cyclone Fani claimed at least 89 lives and displaced millions in Odisha, another coastal Indian state. In 1999, a super cyclone killed about 10,000 people as it slammed into Odisha. Scientists have linked the rising frequency and intensity of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal with global warming. "The Indian Ocean is warming, and we know that warm ocean water is the first, and perhaps the key ingredient for the formation of tropical cyclones, so the system is primed for more storms," Simon Wang a climatologist at Utah State University, told CBS News in 2020. What's next for Rush? Cary Grant: The man we thought we knew Companies, countries battle to develop quantum computers | 60 Minutes In todays American criminal legal system, courts impose fines and fees as a means to punish people and hold them accountable for legal violations. At times, people are sentenced to pay without incarceration, but frequently people across the U.S. are sentenced to both jail time and fiscal penalties. Those costs are assessed by individual courts and include processing and filing charges, jury fees and fiscal penalties such as interest charges and late penalty fees. The collected money is then used to pay for costs such as the administration of court-appointed attorneys, probation, detention and diversion programs. But these fines and fees are often levied without any consideration for an individuals ability to pay and can add up to thousands of dollars. Given the potential consequences of legal debt on people unable to pay, including the loss of the right to vote and further criminal infractions, we conducted a multistate study on the impact of fines and fees. What we found is that these types of sanctions do not improve public safety or serve as an effective deterrent in reducing further crime. More troubling is that the negative consequences of fines and fees are disproportionately felt by people of color and those who are poor. Because of these potential financial hardships and adverse effects, U.S. lawmakers have begun to limit the types and amounts of fines and fees that can be charged. What the research shows In our study of eight states California, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Washington, Georgia, Missouri and Texas we found extreme variations in how court-imposed fines and fees were used. Some states had statutes mandating a minimum amount of fines and fees to be imposed on people for specific crimes and infractions; other states did not. Some local judges sentenced people unable to pay to jail as a violation of their sentence; other judges in different counties within the same state did not. To collect outstanding debts, some states even sued formerly incarcerated people for the cost of their room and board; other states did not. In Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, for instance, our research there showed that financial burden increased the chances among juvenile offenders to commit additional crimes within two years of their initial arrests. In another statewide study in Florida, we found that fees increased recidivism and, in particular, that Black youth with restitution fees had a higher recidivism likelihood. Our study further found that Black and Hispanic youth tended to receive higher fees compared to white youth regardless of the alleged crimes. The average fees for Black juveniles was US$709.50, and $633.30 for Hispanic youths. In stark contrast, the average fees for white juveniles was $426.50. A wealth of research has illustrated how unpaid court fines and fees force people to make decisions regarding housing, medical care, education and even food and medication. In an April 23, 2023, letter, the U.S. Department of Justice warned court officials and state agencies that imposing fines and fees on offenders who cannot pay may result in them losing their jobs, drivers license, right to vote or even their home. Changes across the country Depending on the crime, Arizona juveniles and their parents faced a slew of costs, including probation supervision fees, family counseling services, drug and alcohol screenings and even a $25 administrative fee for court-appointed attorneys. But a new law says they dont have to pay any of those anymore. Though the law does not put an end to fines relating to restitution charges or driving under the influence of alcohol charges, it does eliminate all fees assessed by a juvenile court for court-appointed attorneys, probation, detention and diversion programs. Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has eliminated various fines and fees for juvenile offenders. Rebecca Noble/Getty Images Arizona was not alone. Indiana, Illinois, Montana, California, Louisiana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas and Virginia have also enacted similar laws that eliminate or reduce juvenile fines and fees. As these states have learned, monetary sanctions do far more harm than good and inflict disproportionate hardship on those least able to pay them. These fees put unnecessary financial stress on children and their families when they should be focused on rehabilitation, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs said in October 2023. They hold individuals back at a time in their life when what they really need is help moving forward. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Alexes Harris, University of Washington and Alex R. Piquero, University of Miami. Read more: Alex R. Piquero received funding from Arnold Ventures to undertake the study in Florida referred to in the article. Professor Piquero receives no funding at this time from any sources and no external sources of funding were used to prepare this piece. PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) As Oregon lawmakers look at making possible changes to Measure 110 the voter-approved measure that decriminalized possession of small amounts of drugs the public will get a chance to speak. On Monday, public comment is being taken by the Joint Legislative Committee, the bipartisan group working against the clock to come up with changes to Measure 110 before the next short legislative session begins in Salem in February. Does Measure 110 need a combination of coercion? Gov. Tina Kotek has said the addiction crisis is one of her top priorities in the session. The public comment begins at 9 a.m. in the State Capitol. The voter-approved measure garnered the votes of 58% of Oregon voters in 2020 to not criminalize drug addiction and to instead put more money into treatment. Measure 110 removed drug users from the criminal justice system and offered voluntary treatment. A flow chart of what happened before Measure 110 was passed (KOIN) A flow chart showing how Measure 110 works, 2023 (KOIN) A flow chart on how Measure 110 amendments would work, November 2023 (KOIN) Since its passage, the drug crisis has grown exponentially. Supporters of Measure 110 maintain it needs more time to show returns on investment. Opponents want to put the brakes on it and have proposed different ways to change it. Strong atmospheric river bears down on Oregon; heavy rain forecast KOIN 6 News will have more information later in the day. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KOIN.com. PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) A Dodge Charger crashed through an apartment garage in the early hours of Sunday after allegedly fleeing from a traffic stop by a Washington Couty deputy. Around 1:15 a.m. the deputy spotted the 2008 Charger with no front plate and an expired registration. Authorities said the driver, later identified as Joseph Kinoa Taafulisia of Seattle, took off and slammed into the garage about a minute later. Alaska Airlines to buy Hawaiian Airlines in $1.9B deal A 911 caller said the Charger slammed into the empty shared garage at the West on Murray Apartments, near SW Murray and Walker, authorities said. Taafulisia then allegedly ran from the crash scene but was quickly surrounded by deputies and a K9 team.. The 21-year-old was booked into the Washington County Jail for attempting to elude police, reckless driving , hit-and-run plus a warrant from the Washington Department of Corrections. No injuries were reported. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KOIN.com. Former Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), once a top-ranking Republican in the House, warned over the weekend that a GOP majority in 2025 presents a threat to the United States. I believe very strongly in those principles and ideals that have defined the Republican Party, but the Republican Party of today has made a choice, and they havent chosen the Constitution. And so I do think it presents a threat if the Republicans are in the majority in January 2025, Cheney told CBS Newss John Dickerson in an interview that aired on CBS Sunday Morning. Cheney has been especially outspoken against former President Trump since the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol. She is releasing a book Tuesday titled Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, which takes aim at the state of the Republican Party and its response to the attack on the Capitol. Cheney served as the vice chair of the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attacks. She lost her August 2022 primary after becoming a frequent critic of her party and the former president. Dickerson noted Cheneys new book details how Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who at the time was a little-known congressman, was involved in laying the groundwork for Trumps attempt to overturn the election. Mike [Johnson] was willing time and again, to ignore the rulings of the courts to know what state and federal courts have done and said about the elections in the states in order to attempt to do Donald Trumps bidding, she said. Dickerson asked what would happen if Johnson was the Speaker in January 2025, when Congress is slated to certify the 2024 presidential election. He cant be, she said. Were facing a situation with respect to the 2024 election where its an existential crisis, and we have to ensure that we dont have a situation where an election that might be thrown into the House of Representatives is overseen by a Republican majority. She also warned that the United States is sleepwalking into dictatorship if Trump is reelected. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. CHESTERFIELD, Va. (WAVY) A 31-year-old Chesterfield County woman is in need of a double organ transplant. The woman, Reyna Sustaita, is a housekeeper at Chesterfield Heights Gracious Retirement Living in Midlothian, near Richmond. Sustaita, according to a GoFundMe page set up to raise money for her medical expenses, had a heart attack Nov. 3 and had a pacemaker put in three days later, and returned to work two weeks after that. She was told in the hospital that her heart was functioning at less than 10%, according to a report from WAVY NBC affiliate WWBT. That was her second organ failure. Last year, doctors told Sustaita that her kidneys were failing her. According to the GoFundMe for Sustaita, she is living with her parents because of her medical condition and is looking to raise money for medical expenses. She has end stage renal disease and is on a waiting list for a kidney and heart transplant, having started dialysis in February, switching to home dialysis in March so she could continue working. In July, doctors told her she had heart failure and would not be able to withstand a kidney transplant with such a weak heart, so she would need to have both transplants at the same time. You can donate to Sustaitas GoFundMe here. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WAVY.com. Chicago is poised to see a double-digit percentage drop in homicides in 2023, welcome news for a freshman mayor and a police superintendent who took the reins of the department just a couple of months ago. But the small measure of success may not be exactly as it seems, a Tribune analysis of police data has found. While citywide figures show improvement, a closer look shows that neighborhoods that have for decades shouldered the brunt of disenfranchisement have paid for at least some of the gains. A review of Chicago Police Department data on the district level shows that killings have actually increased or remained flat in many of the neighborhoods that have historically struggled the most with violence. That may be because the downturn in fatal and nonfatal shootings has coincided with a huge spike in armed robberies and carjackings across the city, and police have shuffled resources around to deal with it sometimes at the expense of the most troubled areas. On the Southwest Side, the Chicago Lawn District has seen one of the largest year-over-year increases in fatal violence. CPD says 31 slayings have occurred in the district so far in 2023, a 29% increase over last year. Jason Huff, one of the three Chicago Lawn police district councilors, said the districts uptick in killings stems from officers being temporarily reassigned to cover other parts of the city. The districts size is a challenge, too, Huff said, and the areas aldermen have asked residents if theyd prefer the Chicago Lawn District to be split in two. The main, consistent storyline that you hear across the city is the same thing that you will hear in the 8th District, Huff said. Its a staffing issue. Sometimes some of their officers are being reallocated to other, more important events, maybe downtown, for things that are going on downtown, if theres an uproar there. Overall, (with) the size of the district, its just hard to respond to call after call after call and not be able to do any proactive policing because of the size and volume of calls that theyre getting, Huff added. It is difficult to find a direct correlation between police staffing levels and homicides across the entire city, but there are examples. Data from the citys Office of Inspector General shows the Englewood (7th) and Austin (15th) districts two that saw their killing totals rise this year have dozens fewer officers assigned than they did in December 2022. Meanwhile, dozens of officers were added to districts on the North and Northwest sides where homicides fell this year. But correlation does not always mean causation, as several districts with lower or nearly flat 2023 homicide totals also have seen a slight bump in the number of officers on patrol, according to OIG data. The Harrison District (11th) has long been the citys most violent. Roughly bounded by Roosevelt Road, Division Street, Western Avenue and Cicero Avenue, the district covers the epicenter of the citys narcotics trade. In 2022, the Harrison District saw 72 killings through late November, and so far this year, the district has recorded 73 homicides, according to police data. This time last year 353 officers were assigned there, and 361 are currently deployed. The Englewood District, where new police Superintendent Larry Snelling was born and raised and where he worked as a patrol officer, has seen an 8% increase in killings this year, with 55 as of Nov. 26. The Grand Crossing District (3rd) in South Shore has notched an 18% increase. The Austin District on the citys West Side saw 32 killings through late November 2022 the same total for the district so far in 2023. Asked about the review of data, police officials pointed to their successes. Steep declines in killings have occurred in the CPD districts that cover Bronzeville, Kenwood, Pullman, Roseland, Brighton Park, McKinley Park, Back of the Yards, Bridgeport, Lawndale, Little Village and Morgan Park, police records show. Protecting the safety of all Chicagoans is the Chicago Police Departments most important mission, a CPD spokesperson said in an emailed statement to the Tribune. This year, we have seen a significant decrease in shooting victims, shooting incidents and homicides. So far this year, there have been approximately 537 fewer shooting victims, 340 fewer shooting incidents and 75 fewer homicides compared to last year. Though progress has been made, we know there is still more work to be done to bolster safety in every neighborhood, the statement continued. As we head into 2024, we will continue to tailor our public safety strategies to each individual neighborhood to ensure our residents are receiving the resources they need to feel safe and be safe. The department has rarely discussed deployment shifts or changes. And the number of officers assigned to each of the CPDs 22 patrol districts varies. As of this month, the Harrison and Englewood districts have the most, according to the citys Office of Inspector General. One change that has been discussed is an end to tiered deployment, a controversial tactic aimed at combating violence and frequently used under former Superintendent David Brown, which often resulted in officers losing their scheduled days off. As a close-to-32-year veteran on this job right now, I know the importance of having your time off when youre working a job like this, because officers deal with vicarious trauma on a daily basis, Snelling said during the Chicago Police Boards November meeting at CPD headquarters. As a result of that we made sure that we got rid of tiered deployment, so our officers will get their days off. A perception issue? Theres little question that crime has been hounding Mayor Brandon Johnson during the first months of his tenure and increasing pressure on Snelling, his newly chosen police boss. With armed crews sometimes committing waves of robberies in short periods in neighborhoods not used to seeing such crimes, the police have promised to meet the challenge. And even in areas where homicides have dropped substantially, the perception of safety still has yet to follow. The Wentworth District (2nd), which covers Hyde Park, Kenwood, Bronzeville and Washington Park, has seen homicides go down by more than a third in 2023. District Councilor Julia Kline doesnt think that decrease has registered with her constituents and neighbors. I have not heard anybody talking about change and certainly not a positive change, Kline said. Everybody seems to have a perception that the crime is bad and getting worse. And it has gotten worse in some categories: Police Department data shows that motor vehicle thefts, for example, are up by more than half. But Kline said she hears some conversations about violence in the city that blow the problem out of proportion. Some people think, Oh my God, if you step out of your car anywhere inside of Chicago city limits, youre gonna get murdered, she said. Thats crazy. She said shed like to see a resource that visualizes the number of people who walk through a given neighborhood or intersection and do not experience crime. I think that if people could see how many millions of people go up and down the streets every day completely free from crime, it would help to decrease their feelings of being unsafe, she said. I would love to be able to open up an app and see a green dot that represents every single person that has passed through a given intersection in the last hour, five minutes, whatever time period, to whom no crime has happened, she said. It remains to be seen how Mayor Johnson will react, but so far he appears to be moving away from adding sheer police manpower. Johnsons first proposed budget eliminates more than 800 vacant street cop positions. It does create almost 400 new civilian positions, which his administration said will free up more officers to patrol the streets. Meanwhile, Snelling said at Novembers Police Board meeting that the department has hired more than 660 officers this year. But, Snelling told the Tribune in October, about 400 officer positions remain vacant. A definite decrease Chicago Police Department statistics show that, so far in 2023, homicide detectives have opened 569 murder investigations, a 12% decrease from the prior year. According to the Cook County medical examiners office, the city recorded 599 homicides as of Nov. 27. In that same time frame last year, there were 692 homicides across the city. The drop in killings has been felt across Chicago, from the Jefferson Park District (16th) on the Northwest Side to the Morgan Park District (22nd) on the Far South Side. Nonfatal shooting incidents are down 13% this year, too. In the Morgan Park District, homicides are down by more than 50%. Police district Councilor Lee Bielecki attributed that drop to a culmination of efforts by the District Advisory Council, a good relationship between area residents and law enforcement and the efforts of police officers themselves. As for whether the drop in homicides was registering among his constituents, Bielecki said 80 people attended the district councils most recent meeting to hear more about a pair of Beverly car thefts that were captured on video earlier this month. He said that while crime has gone down since his days working as a Chicago police officer, the crime that does occur is more visible and easily shared thanks to social media and cable TV. Regardless, he said, everybody wants to feel safe in their community I dont care if its in the 22nd District or in Englewood. Permanent answers elusive Snelling, like all other superintendents in recent memory, has often called for a collaborative approach to reduce the citys entrenched gun violence. After he assumed leadership of the Police Department two months ago, Snelling told the Tribune, Weve allowed others to dictate how we should respond to violent crimes and acts of violence, which has led us and not us as a police department but as a society to forget about the victims and put the victims on the back burner. The Southwest Organizing Project was founded in 1996 and is among the organizations that make up Communities Partnering 4 Peace. As its name implies, SWOP operates in several neighborhoods on the South and Southwest sides, and in half of the police beats that make up the Chicago Lawn District. Along with violence prevention, SWOP works to connect program participants with job training, education and immigration resources. The organization aims to foster partnerships among different religious institutions, schools and other community stakeholders, too. After instances of gun violence, SWOP outreach workers will visit the area where the shooting occurred. During those canvasses were looking to run into community members, stakeholders, perpetrators of violence and also victims of the perpetrators of violence and try to get them to come into the office (to learn) about the mentoring services that we have to try to help get them from Point A to Point B and to Point C, Calvin Brown, SWOPs system program director, told the Tribune. You can tell them all day, Hey, put your guns down. But what we do is we ask them, What can I help you with? Do you need a job? Do you need your ID? Do you need a birth certificate? What do you need? Do you need a resume? Brown added. And once we get them focused on that, they dont have time to focus on what they were doing out in the streets. Call for coordinated efforts In the Grand Central District (25th), homicides are up by half. District Councilor Angelica Green said the causes of the increase werent clear to her. But she said neighbors needed to work more with each other to reverse the trend not just by calling law enforcement to share information, but by gathering with neighbors and keeping their streets and blocks clean. She wants to see more block clubs activated. When you form block clubs, you form a community, she said. When you form a community, people see that they cant come on this block and they cant sell drugs, they cant just linger. Green said shed like to see district officers gather feedback from residents about what their neighborhoods need. She observed that depending on what part of the district people live in, their concerns range from noise ordinances to increased gang activity. Given the wide range of needs in the district, Green said she wanted to see police ask, What is it that you need on this block that you think that can help? Do you think you need to have more officers? Do you need to have (fewer) officers? She observed that district coordination officers were particularly well positioned to do this work from within the Police Department, but called for collaboration among residents, law enforcement and civic leaders. Unless we do it together, its not going to happen, she said. When were divided, crime will always outweigh us. ____ China on Monday accused the littoral combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords of having violated its sovereignty when it transited near the Second Thomas Shoal in disputed waters of the South China Sea. Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Brenton Poyser/U.S.Navy Dec. 4 (UPI) -- China on Monday accused the U.S. Navy of violating its sovereignty when the USS Gabrielle Giffords warship sailed near a submerged reef in disputed waters of the South China Sea. China's Southern Theater Command issued its protest in a statement, saying the littoral combat ship "illegally broke into the waters adjacent to Ren'ai Reef ... without the approval of the Chinese government." Located in the Spratly Islands of the South China Sea, the Second Thomas Shoal, which is called the Ren'ai Reef in China, is claimed by Beijing, as well as the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. Manila operates an outpost as part of a resupply mission on the reef and its ships have repeatedly come into confrontation with Chinese vessels in the region. In October, the Armed Forces of the Philippines accused Chinese Coast Guard vessels of colliding with one of its supply boats. On Monday, China said the United States "deliberately disrupted" the South China Sea, "seriously violated" its sovereignty and security and undermined regional peace and stability when the USS Gabrielle Giffords transited near the shoal. It described the U.S. action as having "seriously violated international law and basic norms governing international relations." "This fully demonstrates that the United States is the biggest threat to peace and stability in the South China Sea," it said, while claiming "indisputable sovereignty" over the body of water. The U.S. Navy rejected the accusation, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune that the USS Gabrielle Giffords was conducting "routine operations" in international waters of the South China Sea. "These operations demonstrate we are committed to upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific region where all nations, large and small, are secure in their sovereignty, can resolve disputes without coercion and have the freedom to navigate and fly consistent with international laws, rules and norms," Cmdr. Megan Greene, a public affairs officer with U.S. 7th Fleet, said. The accusation comes weeks after U.S President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping of China met in mid-November in San Francisco for a summit aimed at lowering tensions between the world's two largest economies. Biden had described the talks as "constructive and productive." Concrete achievements included the restoration of military-to-military direct contact. China claims much of the South China Sea via its controversial Nine-Dash-Line maps, which have been rejected by several nations, including the United States. The Hague's Permanent Court of Arbitration also disregarded the maps in a 2016 decision in a case that was brought against China by the Philippines. China has accused a U.S. Navy ship of violating its sovereignty after the USS Gabrielle Giffords appeared near the Second Thomas Shoal, a submerged reef in the South China Sea. The appearance of the ship seriously violated Chinas sovereignty and security, a statement from the Chinese military said, reported by Bloomberg. The ship undermined regional peace and stability and demonstrated that the U.S. is the biggest threat to peace and stability in the South China Sea. President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping smoothed over international tensions between the two countries at a meeting last month, but the governments remain at odds over American military activity in the area. The face-to-face meeting between Biden and Xi was months in the making after several top Biden administration officials traveled to China to ease tensions. Biden came away from the meeting saying they came to several agreements, including resuming military to military communication. The accusation Sunday highlights the strained relationship between the two countries. Its not the first time the Chinese military has hit the U.S. In late October, Chinas defense ministry said the U.S. was the worlds biggest disruptor of peace and stability in the region after the Pentagon released an analysis of Chinese military threats. The analysis claimed that China is growing its nuclear arsenal more quickly than believed. Chinese officials denounced the report as false and shot back at U.S. threats and worldwide military activity. The site of the incident Sunday has been a location where China, the Philippines and the U.S. have recently been involved. In October the U.S. renewed warnings to China that it will defend the Philippines against any attack after the island nation accused Chinas coastguard of intentionally hitting its vessels in the South China Sea. The Philippines ships were headed toward the Second Thomas Shoal when Manilas supply boat and coastguard ship were hit, the nations Secretary of Defense said. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. The Chinese military has accused a U.S. warship, the USS Gabrielle Giffords, of "seriously violating" Chinese sovereignty in the South China Sea, Bloomberg reported on Dec. 4. The U.S. military, responded that it had acted in line with international law. The incident with the U.S. warship occurred near the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea on Dec. 4. Read also: On outcomes of US-China talks The Chinese military accused the ship of illegal actions that "demonstrated that the United States is the biggest threat to peace and stability" in the region. In response, the commander of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, Megan Greene, said that the U.S. ship was "conducting routine operations in international waters" that were in accordance with international law, Bloomberg wrote. Read also: Keeping an eye out for China's next move "We will not be deterred from continuing to work alongside our allies and partners in support of our shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific," Greene said. Earlier, on Nov. 3, the United States and China held "candid talks on maritime issues," including the disputed South China Sea. Washington emphasized its concern over China's "dangerous and illegal" actions there. On Nov. 20, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said that the situation in the South China Sea, where his country and China have a territorial dispute, was deteriorating. China is showing interest in atolls and shoals that are "closer and closer" to the Philippine coast. Read also: What to expect from the Biden-Xi meeting On Nov. 25, representatives of the Chinese Ministry of Defense announced that their military had pushed out the U.S. destroyer USS Hopper, which allegedly illegally entered the country's territorial waters in the South China Sea. On Dec. 3, the U.S. military announced plans to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range missiles in the Indo-Pacific region in 2024. The deployment of such missiles will take place for the first time since the Cold War. 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 (Bloomberg) -- China criticized the US for seeing it as a threat after Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo defended efforts to deprive the Asian nation of cutting-edge semiconductors, underscoring the fragility of recently stabilized ties. Most Read from Bloomberg The US should stick to the right perception and work with China to deliver on the common understandings reached in the San Francisco meeting, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said at a regular press briefing in Beijing on Monday, referring to a sitdown last month between the leaders of the two nations. The US should stop seeing China as a hypothetical enemy and saying one thing but doing another, he said. Read: Raimondo Says Commerce Needs More Money to Halt China Chip Drive Raimondo said Saturday at a forum in California that she needed more funding to prevent the Asian nation from catching up on chips that can be used for military purposes. She said this was the biggest threat weve ever had, adding that China is not our friend. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met for the first time in a year last month in the US, scoring a handful of small victories they hope will stop a surge in tensions that threatened global economic growth. But the two left that encounter with major issues such as Taiwans status and the US tech restrictions in place, meaning theyll likely need to make constant efforts to manage their differences. Underscoring that dynamic, China criticized the US on Monday after an American warship sailed in disputed waters in the South China Sea. The US Navy said it was acting lawfully. In a sign that the two nations are still working to improve ties, Chinas economy czar, Vice Premier He Lifeng, met on Monday in Beijing with Richard Haass, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations. They discussed economic and trade cooperation among other topics, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. He also told Haass that Beijing was willing to work with Washington to implement the consensus that Xi and Biden reached, and to promote cooperation in economy and trade. Also: China Says US Navy Ship Seriously Violated Its Sovereignty Raimondo visited Beijing in August as the two nations worked to repair ties. That trip coincided with Huawei Technologies Co. releasing a new phone with an advanced chip that alarmed politicians in Washington. In her comments on Saturday, she signaled that US had no intention of backing down on preventing China from getting high-end semiconductors. Were going to deny them our most cutting-edge technology, she said. Wang, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that stance exposed the Cold War mentality of the US and its desire for hegemony. He also indicated that his nation would get around the tech curbs eventually. The violation of the rules and regulations of the free-trade market is just like building a dam with a sieve, he said. No matter how hard you try, the water will just flow through it. More: Huaweis Chipmaker Turned US Sanctions Into China Success Story (Updates with He-Haass meeting.) Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2023 Bloomberg L.P. HONG KONG Chinas military said Monday that a U.S. warship had illegally entered waters near the Second Thomas Shoal, an atoll in the South China Sea that is claimed by China, the Philippines and others. Chinas Southern Theater Command said it had sent a naval force to follow and monitor the USS Gabrielle Giffords, a littoral combat ship designed for operations near shore, accusing the United States of raising tensions in the region. The U.S. infringes Chinas sovereignty and safety, disrupts regional peace and stability and violates international law and the basic norms of international relations, a spokesperson said in a statement on the Southern Theater Commands official WeChat account. The U.S. Navy rejected Chinas accusation, saying the USS Giffords was conducting routine operations in international waters in the South China Sea, consistent with international law. Every day the U.S. 7th Fleet operates in the South China Sea, as they have for decades, deputy public affairs officer Kristina Wiedemann told NBC News via email. The operations demonstrate we are committed to upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific region. China lays claim to virtually all of the South China Sea, a vital shipping route that is rich in natural resources, despite a 2016 ruling by an international tribunal in The Hague that its claims have no legal basis. Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam also have various territorial claims in the region that have given rise to disputes with China and each other. China in particular has been accused of harassment and intimidation in its efforts to assert its sovereignty claims. According to the 2016 ruling, which Beijing has never recognized, the Second Thomas Shoal lies entirely within the Philippines exclusive economic zone. China and the Philippines, a U.S. treaty ally, have had multiple confrontations in the area in recent months as China tried to block the Philippines from resupplying a rusting warship that has served as a military outpost since it was intentionally run aground by the Philippine government in 1999. Over the weekend, the Philippines deployed two coast guard vessels to another reef off its coast that it said China was swarming with more than 135 boats. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Monday that the reef was Chinese territory and that operations by Chinese fishing vessels in the area were reasonable and lawful. This article was originally published on NBCNews.com (Bloomberg) -- China criticized the US after an American warship sailed in disputed waters in the South China Sea, underscoring lingering military tensions between the nations. Most Read from Bloomberg The appearance of the USS Gabrielle Giffords near the Second Thomas Shoal on Monday seriously violated Chinas sovereignty and security, according to a statement from the Chinese military. The littoral combat ship undermined regional peace and stability, the military added, demonstrating that the US is the biggest threat to peace and stability in the region. The US vessel was conducting routine operations in international waters that followed international law, Commander Megan Greene of the US Seventh Fleet said in a statement. We will not be deterred from continuing to work alongside our allies and partners in support of our shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific, she added. While a meeting in the US last month between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping helped stabilize overall ties, the two nations remain at odds over American military activity. Top-level military links have been cut since then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022, a trip the Peoples Liberation Army responded to with unprecedented military drills. While US officials said China agreed in the Xi-Biden sitdown to policy-level discussions with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Beijing has yet to name a replacement for ousted Defense Minister Li Shangfu. The continued lack of communication raises the risk that an accident in the South China Sea could spiral into a conflict. See: China, US Release Dueling Videos With Accusations of Provocation In October, the US and China each released video footage they said showed provocative or unprofessional actions by military craft in and around the body of water that Beijing claims mostly as its own. The Second Thomas Shoal is the site of recent tense encounters between Chinese and Philippine vessels over a World War II-era ship that Manila placed in the shoal more than two decades ago. The Philippines said that move was in response to Chinas occupation of nearby reef. Also: A Rusty, Stranded Ship Is Fueling China and Philippine Tensions The Philippines coast guard said Sunday that it monitored more than 135 Chinese maritime militia vessels around the Whitsun Reef, which is just west of the Second Thomas Shoal. (Updates with comments from US Seventh Fleet and more context.) Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2023 Bloomberg L.P. FILE - In this handout photo released by Armed Forces of the Philippines, Philippines BRP Jose Rizal (FF150), right, and USS Gabriel Giffords (LCS 10) during a tactical exercise between Philippines and the United States in the West Philippine Sea on Thursday Nov. 23, 2023. The Chinese military said on Dec. 4 that American naval ship USS Gabriel Giffords had "illegally intruded" on Monday into waters near the Second Thomas Shoal, the site of a hot territorial dispute between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. (Armed Forces of the Philippines via AP, File) BEIJING (AP) The Chinese military said that an American naval ship had illegally intruded on Monday into waters near the Second Thomas Shoal, the site of a hot territorial dispute between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. A Chinese naval force was mobilized to track the USS Gabrielle Giffords during the operation, according to a statement from the People's Liberation Army Southern Theater. The U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet said the ship "was conducting routine operations in international waters ... consistent with international law." Chinese and Philippine naval and coast guard ships have confronted each other repeatedly around the shoal in the Spratly Islands in recent months as China tries to prevent the Philippines from resupplying and repairing a rusting warship that it intentionally ran aground in 1999 to serve as a military outpost. Dwarfed by Chinas military might, the Philippines has sought America's help in its multiple territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. agreed to an expansion of the U.S. military presence in the country early this year and launched joint sea and air patrols with the United States late last month. China accuses the U.S. of meddling in waters far from its shores and renewed its charge that America is the one raising regional tensions following the sailing of the USS Giffords near Second Thomas Shoal. The ship is a littoral combat ship designed to operate in coastal areas. The U.S. deliberately disrupted the situation in the South China Sea, seriously violated Chinas sovereignty and security, seriously undermined regional peace and stability, and seriously violated international law and basic norms governing international relations, fully demonstrating that the U.S. is the biggest threat to peace and stability in the South China Sea, the statement from the Chinese military's Southern Theater said. China has staked claim to virtually all of the reefs and other outcroppings in the South China Sea, building some into islands with runways that could be used by the military. Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei also say they are the rightful owners of territory in the same waters in a complex web of overlapping claims. The U.S. has long been the major military power patrolling the South China Sea, an important shipping lane and fishing grounds, operating out of bases in the Pacific. China's emergence as a military power and its ambitions to be a regional and global power are challenging American long-standing dominance. A statement from the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet, based in Japan, said its operations in the South China Sea demonstrate a commitment to upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific region where all nations, large and small, are secure in their sovereignty, can resolve disputes without coercion, and have the freedom to navigate and fly consistent with international laws, rules and norms. The Philippine coast guard said Sunday that it had sent two ships to Whitsun Reef, another disputed territory in the Spratly Islands, to challenge and document what it estimated to be more than 135 Chinese vessels massing in the area. The Philippines called them a maritime militia and said their presence is illegal. The vessels did not respond to radio challenges, the coast guard said. China, as in similar incidents in the past, said the reef belongs to China and that the nearby waters are an important operating area and shelter for Chinese fishing boats. It is reasonable and lawful for Chinese fishing boats to operate and take shelter in the waters, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said. The Philippine side should not make irresponsible remarks about that. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko at a welcome ceremony in Beijing By Joe Cash and Liz Lee BEIJING (Reuters) -Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko met China's leader Xi Jinping in Beijing on Monday for the second time this year, with the diplomatically isolated leader talking up his country's economic ties to the Asian giant amid biting Western sanctions. The close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin is on a "working visit" to the Chinese capital and was received by Xi at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse for a "working lunch" and three hours of talks, according to Belarussian state media. Lukashenko, the president of Belarus since 1994, backed Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 by allowing Moscow to use its territory to launch the war, but is faced with a crippled economy that is heavily reliant on trade with Russia. "China is willing to continue to strengthen strategic cooperation with Belarus, promote practical cooperation and deepen bilateral relations," Xi told his guest, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua. "The two sides should implement projects like the China-Belarus Industrial Park and promote more achievements in China-Belarus industrial cooperation," Xinhua reported Xi as saying. The world's second-largest economy was Belarus' seventh largest trading partner in 2021 and before the war in Ukraine, according U.N. Comtrade data. China was Belarus' second-largest import partner, but the Eastern European country bought around three-quarters less from China than it did from Russia. Lukashenko highlighted the scope to grow his country's commercial ties with China, Belarussian state media said, and lauded the "more than 120" two-way visits made by Chinese and Belarussian parties since the leaders last met in March. Quickening the pace of cooperation between China and Belarus was "the only issue" Lukashenko wished to discuss with Xi on this visit to the Chines capital, the report added. Xi told Lukashenko that both countries should improve cross-border transport facilitation and promote economic and trade initiatives like the China-Belarus Industrial Park, as well as people-to-people exchanges, according to Xinhua. Belarus faces sanctions from the United States, European Union, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, and a number of other countries over its support of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and longer standing issues surrounding political repression. Lukashenko told Xi that the world would thank China for its efforts to bring countries into his flagship Belt and Road Initiative, "unlike Western countries that are trying to cut everything into pieces," Belarussian state media reported. Xi offered to enhance coordination and cooperation between China and Belarus in multilateral mechanisms such as the United Nations and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Xinhua report said. "China and Belarus are important forces in the reform and construction of the global governance system," it quoted Xi as saying. (Additional reporting by Ella Cao and Lidia Kelly; Editing by Kim Coghill and Jamie Freed) Water from Stockton Lake discharges from a pipeline into Fellows Lake on Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2022. Low water levels at Fellows Lake necessitated the pumping of water. City Utilities has taken the first step to ensure it has enough water to support the Springfield area past 2060. The Board of Public Utilities approved an agreement expressing CU's intent to buy additional water in the future from Stockton Lake. The agreement is between CU and the Southwest Missouri Joint Municipal Water Utility Commission. The commission is requesting a total of 94,750 acre-feet of water storage space in the lake to be reallocated for drinking water supply. If approved, CU would purchase a little more than 29,000 acre-feet of the allocation, according to a news release. One acre-foot is equal to almost 326,000 gallons. The agreement is estimated to cost CU $15 million if the commission receives approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This would be CU's third allocation from Stockton Lake, which would support the water supply during drought conditions and secure water supply for future generations. More: Considering drought and future needs, experts chart course to preserve water in the Ozarks A 30-mile pipeline has run from Stockton Lake to Fellows Lake since the early 1990s to supply water to Springfield during droughts. In 1993, CU secured a contract with the Corps to purchase a 25,0000-acre-feet allocation, followed by purchase of a second allocation in 2013. These cost a total of $12.4 million, according to the release. Currently, CU has access to a total of 50,000 acre-feet to supplement the existing water supply sources. Most recently, the Stockton Lake pumps were activated in July to address drought experienced by the region. As previously reported in the News-Leader, last year Stockton Lake was identified as a solution to regional water supply concerns during a study by the Corps. Marta Mieze covers local government at the News-Leader. Contact her with tips at mmieze@news-leader.com. This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: City Utilities plans for Springfield water needs from Stockton Lake MEMPHIS, Tenn. A 68-year-old man was shot in the chest, and a 58-year-old was arrested, police in Clarksdale, Mississippi said. Police said they responded recently to a shooting in the 600 block of McKinley Street, although they did not specify the exact date. They found T.J. Pam shot in the chest. He was taken to a local hospital. Top Regional Stories: Willie Carter was charged with aggravated assault and taken to the Coahoma County Jail. It was one of several shootings in Clarksdale over the weekend. Another woman was injured when someone shot up her house on Douglas Street, police said. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WREG.com. Dubai was always an interesting choice of venue for the UNs annual climate change conference. As one of the worlds leading producers of oil and gas, the United Arab Emirates was not the most obvious host for around 70,000 delegates, most of whom want to end its source of wealth, preferably overnight. The evident thinking was that staging Cop28 in the UAE was a demonstration that even petro-economies had bought fully into the pressing need to reduce global CO2 emissions and had endorsed the science behind it. As it turns out, however, the hosts are not that convinced after all. The president of the summit, Dr Sultan Al-Jaber, has claimed there is no science indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to the UN target of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Moreover, he said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development unless you want to take the world back into caves. Inevitably, Dr Al-Jaber, who is also the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates state oil company, Adnoc, has been denounced for comments verging on climate denial, an offence considered in some quarters nowadays to be a crime against humanity. Few, if any, of the delegates attending the conference would say what he has said even if they believed it. The science is said to be settled and brooks no doubt. It is reported on media outlets like the BBC as a fact. Yet Dr Al-Jaber is not resiling from a commitment to a low carbon future but rather questioning the feasibility of eradicating fossil fuels in a world that still relies heavily upon them. That is still a circle the campaigners have yet to square. 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. By Simon Jessop, Hadeel Al Sayegh and Yousef Saba DUBAI (Reuters) -Money pledges stacked up at COP28 in Dubai on Monday as delegates sought to address the huge gap between what is needed in climate finance and the amounts so far on offer. The United Arab Emirates, the host of this year's conference, pledged to mobilise $270 billion in green finance by 2030 through its banks, and several development banks announced plans to increase their funding efforts, including by agreeing to pause debt repayments if a climate-related disaster hits. But leaders of the region's biggest economy and biggest OPEC oil producer Saudi Arabia have so far not attended the U.N. summit, in contrast to their participation in last year's COP27 conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. On Monday, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, energy minister and the key climate negotiator, for the kingdom, was a no-show at the Saudi Green Initiative, a side event showcasing the country's clean energy plans. De facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman also did not deliver a speech to world leaders as scheduled on Friday. As tensions ran high over differing visions for the future of fossil fuels, COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber defended his role after the Guardian newspaper quoted him as questioning the science behind the need to "phase out" fossil fuels. Al Jaber has also drawn criticism linked to his role as CEO of ADNOC, the UAE's state-owned oil company. "I am quite surprised with the constant and repeated attempts to undermine the work of the COP28 presidency," Al Jaber told a news conference. "We very much believe and respect the science." VAST NEEDS The amount of cash needed for the energy transition, climate adaptation and disaster relief is overwhelming. A report released on Monday estimated that emerging markets and developing countries will need $2.4 trillion a year in investment to cap emissions and adapt to the challenges posed by climate change. "The world is not on track to realise the goals of the Paris Agreement. The reason for this failure is a lack of investment, particularly in emerging market and developing countries outside China," said co-author Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. The 2015 the Paris conference set a goal of limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), while aiming for a cap of 1.5C. "The central challenge is to accelerate and implement the fostering and financing of this investment from a range of sources," Stern said. Vulnerable countries that are already being hit by costly climate disasters are asking for billions more through a newly formed disaster fund. Pledges to the fund so far total around $700 million. "Unless we have an urgent set of decision-making, we are going to suffer what every parent suffers from - exciting expectations and being unable to deliver," said Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, a prominent voice in global discussions about mobilising climate finance. In a news conference, she urged countries to go beyond voluntary pledges and pleas to charities and private investors and instead consider taxes as a way to boost climate funding. A global 0.1% tax on financial services, for example, could raise $420 billion, she said, while a 5% tax on global oil and gas profits in 2022 would have yielded around $200 billion. "The planet needs global governance not in a big stick way, but in a simple way of us cooperating with each other to be able to work with the institutions that we have," she added. Other delegates, including U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, have called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies which have hit a record $7 trillion per year. Activists with the Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development said they worried the sums pledged would be inadequate. "The climate finance that they have pledged at this COP28 is simply not enough," said Pakistani activist Zaigham Abbas, whose country was devastated last year by flooding. "We are not looking for charity here ... The scale of the catastrophe that we are staring at is unprecedented." MOVING MONEY The biggest pledge on Monday came from the UAE's banking system, joining peers in other regions in pledging to lend more to green projects. It followed a pledge on Friday of $30 billion for climate-related projects from the oil producing Gulf state. Elsewhere, France and Japan said they would support an African Development Bank drive to leverage IMF Special Drawing Rights for climate and development. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, meanwhile, said it would include climate resilient debt clauses in new loan deals with some poorer countries. Danish investment firm Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners announced plans to raise $3 billion for renewable projects in emerging markets. This year is marked by the biggest representation of business yet at the annual U.N. summit, fostering hopes for more private investment toward climate causes. The emirate of Abu Dhabi teamed up with private sector partners including BlackRock and HSBC to launch a climate research and advisory hub to boost financing options in the region. "The scale of the climate crisis demands urgent and game-changing solutions from every industry," Jaber said. "Finance plays a critical role in turning our ambitions into actions." For daily comprehensive coverage on COP28 in your inbox, sign up for the Reuters Sustainable Switch newsletter here. (Reporting by Simon Jessop, Yousef Saba, Maha El Dahan and Hadeel Al Sayegh; Additional reporting by Alexander Cornwell, Elizabeth Piper and David Stanway; Editing by Katy Daigle, Miral Fahmy and Barbara Lewis) CNN anchor Dana Bash pressed Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) on the silence from some fellow progressive leaders on Hamass use of rape as a weapon of war against Israeli women, in a tense exchange in a Sunday interview. It is kind of remarkable that this issue hasnt gotten enough attention globally, widespread use of rape, brutal rape, sexual violence against Israeli women by Hamas, Bash said. I have seen a lot of progressive women, generally speaking, that are quick to defend womens rights and speak out against using rape as a weapon of war, but downright silent on what we saw on Oct. 7 and what might be happening inside Gaza right now to these hostages. Why is that? Bash continued. Jayapal contested the premise. I mean, I dont know that thats true. I think what we always talk about the impact of war on women, in particular. In fact, I remember, 20 years ago, I did a petition around the war in Iraq, saying that Bash cut in, asking whether Jayapal has talked about it since Oct. 7, when the U.S.-designated terrorist organization Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israels southern border, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking more than 240 hostages. Oh, absolutely. And I have condemned what Hamas has done. I have condemned all of the actions. Jayapal said. Specifically against women? Bash asked. Absolutely, the rape, the of course, Jayapal answered, before pivoting her answer to focus on Israel, noting it is a democracy and is held to a higher standard if they do not comply with international law. And, frankly, morally, I think we cannot say that one war crime deserves another. That is not what international humanitarian law says, Jayapal added. Bash pointedly noted Jayapals diversion. OK, with respect, I was just asking about the women, and you turned it back to Israel. Im asking you about Hamas, Bash said. I already answered your question, Dana. I said its horrific, Jayapal said. And I think that rape is horrific. Sexual assault is horrific. I think that it happens in war situations. Terrorist organizations like Hamas obviously are using these as tools. However, I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians, she continued, adding, Fifteen thousand Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes, three-quarters of whom are women and children. Bash responded directly: And its horrible, but you dont see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women. Well, Dana, I think were not were not I dont want this to be the hierarchy of oppressions, Jayapal said. The Hill has reached out to Jayapals office for additional comment. The condemnation of Hamas for sexual violence during its rein of terror on Israel has also become a flashpoint for tensions in the United Nations. More than 80 House lawmakers accused United Nations (UN) Women of disregarding the militant group Hamass attacks on women specifically in a bipartisan letter last week. The failure by UN Women to publicly stand up for Israeli women and condemn Hamas systematic atrocities undermines UN Women and highlights its one-sided approach, the lawmakers wrote Wednesday to UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. At least nine relatives of a CNN producer were killed in an Israeli strike in northern Gaza, according to the news outlet. CNN reported that Ibrahim Dahman, 36, was informed Sunday at least nine of his relatives who were trapped in northern Gaza were killed when a strike hit his aunts home in Beit Lahia. Dahmans uncle, his uncles wife, their daughter and two grandchildren, along with his aunt, her husband and their two children were among those killed, according to CNN. At least two others remain in critical condition, while more relatives are buried under the rubble. They were extremely peaceful and simple people, and their entire lives were devoted solely to work and raising their sons and daughters, Dahman said, per CNN. They have no affiliation with any organization or group. Pray to God to have mercy on them all. CNN reported Dahmans uncle relocated with his family to his sisters house two days prior to the strikes, after bombing ramped up around his home in Sheik Zayed in northern Gaza. Dahmans childhood home was also destroyed in a separate strike that hit a nearby building in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza City, according to CNN. No one was at the home when the war broke out in October, though Dahman said he left all of his belongings at the home. I will never be able to forget every stone and corner of the house in which I was born and raised and in which my children were born, Dahman said. Before escaping to Egypt last month, Dahman reported from besieged Gaza, where he covered Israels ongoing war with Hamas sparked by the terrorist groups Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Hamass attacks killed more than 1,200 people, including hundreds of civilians, while an estimated 240 people were taken hostage. At least 100 hostages were released last month under a temporary cease-fire deal between Israel and Gaza. Israel has bombarded Gaza in response through airstrikes, bombings and ground attacks, vowing to eliminate Hamas and its military capabilities. More than 15,800 people have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Hamas-ruled Health Ministry in Gaza. In a piece published Nov. 10, Dahman recounted living through the beginning of the violence in Gaza and his familys relocation to a hotel in Gaza City in the days after Oct. 7. Dahman and his family later traveled south to Khan Younis, where they stayed for three weeks with a family member. Dahman detailed how his family had to ration food, water and power. He reported he was informed Nov. 3 that he, along with his pregnant wife and two children, would be allowed to cross into Egypt with the assistance of CNN and the U.S. embassy in Israel. Dahman said his children and wife had never left Gaza before, and he was the only one with a passport. Once entering Egypt by the Rafah border crossing, Dahman said each of his family members were given a one-time travel document from the Palestinian embassy in Cairo. Once there, Dahman and his family met with CNN colleagues who helped the family get settled. While he said the escape brought relief, Dahman was aware his parents and siblings remained trapped in the enclave. Ive covered many wars through the years. Nothing compares to the current conflict. Entire quarters in Gaza have been eviscerated, thousands of women, children and elderly have perished. What have civilians done to deserve this? Dahman wrote in his Nov. 10 piece. There are increasing concerns over the safety of journalists and their families caught in the crossfire of the Israel-Hamas war. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CJP) reported Monday that at least 61 journalists and media workers are among the thousands killed in the conflict. The CJP said it is also investigating several unconfirmed reports of other journalists being killed, missing, detained, injured or threatened along with damage to media offices and journalists homes. CPJ emphasizes that journalists are civilians doing important work during times of crisis and must not be targeted by warring parties, said Sherif Mansour, CPJs Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. Journalists across the region are making great sacrifices to cover this heart-breaking conflict. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. Update: 4:30 p.m. Monday: The National Weather Service has updated snow totals at various weather gauges. A gauge near Rabbit Ears Pass recorded 49 inches of snow as of Monday morning. Another gauge just north of that site in the Mount Zirkle Wilderness recorded 44.8 inches. A gauge at Mount Audubon, about 20 miles northwest of Boulder, recorded 33.6 inches. One near Longs Peak and Cameron Pass recorded 26.6 inches. Steamboat Ski Resort reported 33 inches at mid-mountain. Original story A powerful weekend weather system that produced as much as 40 inches of snow and wind gusts in excess of 50 mph in Colorado's central and northern mountains closed highways, prompted an avalanche warning and capsized a kayaker, who is presumed dead. A weather gauge at Rabbit Ears Pass, about 20 miles east of Steamboat Spring, recorded 40.5 inches. Wind gusts reached 52 mph in Livermore, 41 mph in Red Feather Lakes and 37 mph in Estes Park. Here's a look at the chaos from the weekend storm, including impressive snowfall totals. When will the snowstorm clear out from Colorado's mountains? Much of the snow dropped Saturday, but the central and northern mountains remained under a winter storm warning until 5 a.m. Monday. Snowstorm makes some Colorado mountain highways impassable U.S. Highway 40 from Kremmling to Steamboat Springs bore the brunt of the storm. It was closed for hours, as were Colorado Highway 14 from Walden west to U.S. Highway 40 and U.S. Highway 34 north of Grand Lake. Highways that included Rabbit Ears, Muddy, Berthoud and Loveland passes were all closed for hours. All roads are open as of Monday morning. Here is the storm total snowfall analysis of this past weekend's storm. The big winner was at the Columbine SNOTEL site, near Rabbit Ears Pass, where an estimated 49 inches of snow fell! #COwx pic.twitter.com/KMRFgZt0dB NWS Boulder (@NWSBoulder) December 4, 2023 Avalanches a concern in Colorado's backcountry after heavy snow and strong wind The Colorado Avalanche Information Center issued an avalanche warning through Monday for the Park Range from about Steamboat Springs north to the Wyoming state line as well as Ruby Range and Elk Mountains in central Colorado. Very dangerous avalanche conditions exist in these area and backcountry travel is not recommended. Four people have been caught in avalanches in Colorado this winter, but none have died as of Monday. Kayaker feared dead after waves capsized his vessel on Lake Granby On Monday, searchers were expected to resume searching for a 21-year-old man from the Denver area whose kayak was capsized by strong winds in open water of Lake Granby on Sunday morning. Sunday's search was called off due to heavy snowfall, blowing and drifting conditions and zero or near-zero visibility, according to the Grand County Sheriff's Office. Favorable weather conditions were expected Monday. Two men had camped on the lake's Deer Island on Saturday night and were attempting to return to their vehicle on shore Sunday morning. While paddling through open water, wind capsized one of the vessels and the kayaker fell into the frigid water. The other kayaker told responders he was unable to save his friend before he went underwater. He was able to safely paddle to shore. Searchers found the man's body around 7:30 p.m. Dec. 4, according to the sheriff's office. Colorado mountains, ski areas receive much needed snow Here are snowfall totals as of Monday morning, according to the National Weather Service: Rabbit Ears Pass (1 mile north-northeast): 49 inches Mount Zirkle Wilderness (4 miles southeast): 44.8 inches Mount Audubon (3 miles north-northeast): 33.6 inches Cameron Pass (7 miles south-southeast): 26.6 inches Longs Peak (4 miles north-northwest): 26.6 inches Berthoud Pass (1 mile north-northwest): 26.6 inches Loveland Pass (1 mile south-southeast): 19.6 inches Eldora (1 mile southwest): 18.2 inches Winter Park: 18 inches Copper Mountain: 18 inches Breckenridge (3 miles southwest): 17 inches Keystone (4 miles southeast): 13 inches Fort Collins forecast calls for highs in the 60s this week Here's the city's forecast this week, according to the National Weather Service: Monday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 56 degrees but wind northwest at 13 to 18 mph increasing to 20 to 25 mph in the morning and gusting to as high as 40 mph. Low around 26 degrees. Tuesday: Sunny, with a high near 55 degrees, light wind around 6 mph. Low around 30 degrees. Wednesday: Sunny, with a high near 63 degrees, wind around 6 mph and low around 31 degrees. Thursday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 60 degrees and low around 27 degrees. Friday: A chance of snow with high around 45 degrees and low around 20 degrees. Saturday: Slight chance of snow, mostly sunny with a high near 40 degrees and low 17 degrees. Sunday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 46 degrees. This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Weekend storm drops double-digit snow totals on Colorado ski areas Fort Collins has received a $25,000 grant to help make a confusing intersection safer for pedestrians by using asphalt art. A Bloomberg Philanthropies grant will fund an asphalt art project at the intersection of three streets near The Lincoln Center: Magnolia Street, Canyon Avenue and Sherwood Street. The idea is to create a traffic circle and add curb extensions using paint, which will cue drivers to slow down and yield to pedestrians, according to the city and Bloomberg. The Magnolia-Canyon-Sherwood intersection was identified a few years ago as a candidate for the use of painted infrastructure, but city engineers weren't yet ready to take that step, said Anna Kelso, the city's Active Modes specialist. Currently the intersection uses stop signs, and there's a lot of confusion about right-of-way, she said. Using paint and posts, the project will provide a visual cue for drivers that pedestrians or cyclists are in the area, Kelso said. The design is meant to slow traffic by creating a narrower path for vehicles. And with painted areas serving as curb extensions past parked cars, it improves visibility and shortens the pedestrian crossing, Kelso said. The city has already installed asphalt art at a few locations, mostly mid-block locations where there isn't a high level of traffic, to beautify, create community engagement and calm traffic. Projects have been installed on four roadways in Fort Collins, including in the Andersonville, Alta Vista and Hickory Village Mobile Home Park neighborhoods. Those murals are beautiful and have humanized the streets by creating a more welcoming environment, Kelso said. But with the paint in the path of vehicles, they can be fairly short-lived and are not necessarily the highest and best use of what can be done with asphalt art. Another project, at Maple Street and Roosevelt Avenue, goes farther as infrastructure. Paint extends the pedestrian area past parked cars, and white posts provide another visual boundary. An asphalt art project at Maple Street and Roosevelt Avenue in northwest Fort Collins extends the curb through paint and pylons to give pedestrians greater visibility and cue drivers to slow down. It's so "Fort Collins," said Kim Donegan, who has lived in the neighborhood for 15 years. At first, a colorful mural was painted to cover the entire roadway, where Roosevelt Avenue zags through Maple Street, just down the street from Putnam Elementary. Donegan's daughter helped paint it, as part of the asphalt art program's community participation aspect, where residents are invited to come out and "paint by numbers" under the guidance of the artist. But last year, the city modified the design, installing white pylons and using paint only on the extended curb area. An asphalt art project at Maple Street and Roosevelt Avenue in northwest Fort Collins extends the curb through paint and pylons to give pedestrians greater visibility and cue drivers to slow down. Now it's also more helpful for pedestrians, Donegan said. Kelso cited a study by Bloomberg Philanthropies and Sam Schwartz Consulting in 2022 that looked at 22 asphalt art projects and reported a 50% drop in the rate of crashes involving pedestrians or cyclists and a 27% increase in the rate of drivers yielding to pedestrians with the right of way. Other cities have done similar projects. Portland, Oregon was a model for the city's program. An intersection in Asheville, North Carolina uses paint for curb extensions. What's next? The design of the Magnolia-Canyon-Sherwood intersection isn't final, as the city works with businesses and property owners in the area to make sure the design meets their needs, Kelso said. In early 2024, the city will host three community outreach events as part of the project and extend a call for artists through the city's Art in Public Places program. Installation is expected in September. The $25,000 grant is expected to cover the entire project, including the community outreach, the artist stipend, paint and pressure washing. The paint will also be more durable than past projects, Kelso said. What the asphalt art program hopes to achieve A mission of the city's asphalt art program is to build community and bring typically underserved neighborhoods to the table when deciding what their built environment looks like, according to previous Coloradoan reporting. With each street mural, the city hosts community events in its surrounding neighborhood so neighbors can discuss issues like bike and pedestrian safety with city staff. There's a cultural aspect to the program, as well. It boosts local artists, and past projects have honored the histories and cultures of chosen neighborhoods. The program also aligns with the city's "Vision Zero" action plan, which has a goal of achieving zero traffic fatalities or serious injuries by 2032. Not only are the projects a low-cost way to change the built environment, but they're also a way for community to come together, Kelso said. Coloradoan reporter Erin Udell contributed to this report through her previous reporting. This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Fort Collins intersection will be resigned using asphalt art Correction: Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner (D) will be finishing out his term in the coming weeks. A previous of this story included incorrect information. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), who is running for Mayor of Houston, released a campaign advertisement urging supporters to vote, except the advertisement had the wrong day. Jackson Lee is running in the runoff election to replace Mayor Sylvester Turner (D), which takes place Saturday, Dec. 9. Her advertisement, which has been confirmed by Mediaite to have aired on Houstons television markets, tells voters to head to the polls on or before Dec. 7th. In the advertisement, Jackson Lee shows off her record serving in Congress and city council. Houston, Ive spent my entire career fighting for you from fighting to keep our kids safe from guns when I was on city council, to my days in Congress fighting to protect womens reproductive freedom and for funding for our police, schools and small businesses, she said in the video. Now, Im running to be your mayor, because if were going to bring down crime, fix our streets and bring good paying jobs here, then Houston needs a champion whos ready to fight for whats right. And I am, she said in the video, which concluded with a graphic with the incorrect date of the election. The election initially had 16 candidates, but Jackson Lee is now up against state Sen. John Whitmire (D), who took an early lead. The two candidates breezed past other contenders in a race that has been focused on crime, infrastructure and potential budget shortfalls, The Associated Press reported. Other candidates included former Harris County Clerk Chris Hollins (D), Houston City Council Member Robert Gallegos, former Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority Chair Gilbert Garcia and former City Council Member Amanda Edwards, the Texas Tribune reported. Jackson Lee, who represents Texass 18th District, assumed office in 1995. She announced in March that she is running for mayor in the already crowded field. She said to the people of Houston that she has served them for 28 years and wants to come home to be mayor. If she were to be elected, Jackson Lee would be Houstons first Black female mayor. The Hill has reached out to Jackson Lees campaign for comment. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. As Gov. Ron DeSantis battles Disney, a public relations firm with ties to some of his top conservative allies has been working behind the scenes for the new Central Florida Tourism Oversight District he now controls. The Disney oversight district is working with Washington-based Athos, which is also promoting books written by New College of Florida president Richard Corcoran, conservative education activist Christopher Rufo and controversial former White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, according to its website. The firm was hired after legal counsel recommended bringing in communications support when it became clear that litigation with a corporate powerhouse was inevitable, said Martin Garcia, chairman of the tourism oversight districts board. In turn, we contacted Athos a Washington, DC-based firm renowned for its achievements in high-stakes public relations, Garcia said in a written statement provided by Athos. Retaining an established PR firm is routine for high-profile litigation, particularly in instances like this where it is essential to enhance transparency by providing information about a government agency to the public. But the details of the districts arrangement with Athos are shrouded in mystery. The district hasnt revealed how much it has paid Athos, the terms of any contract it has with Athos, or whether it considered proposals from other firms. An Orlando Sentinel public records request asking for the contract has yet to be fulfilled. The district is a public entity that provides fire protection, utilities and other government services to Disney World and nearby properties. Disney and its affiliates fund almost all of the districts budget, paying about 86% of property taxes. For more than 50 years, Disney effectively controlled the districts board. That was upended in 2022 as DeSantis feuded with Disney over what critics called the dont say gay law limiting classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity. That dispute is now being settled in state and federal court. With a new leader Glen Gilzean in place, the district shook up its in-house communications department. Last week, Gilzeans administration fired communications director Eryka Washington Perry with no explanation. She was hired by the previous Disney-friendly leadership and stayed on after the new DeSantis-aligned board took over in February. Corcoran, a former GOP Florida House speaker who served as education commissioner in DeSantis administration, has high praise for Athos. Corcoran thanked the firm in a social media post in December 2022 for making his book possible. The book, Standing Our Ground: The Inside Story of Ron DeSantiss Rise and Battle for Freedom, will be released next month. Athos also touts Rufos book Americas Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything and Atlas A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House on its website. The three men have helped to advance DeSantis conservative agenda. DeSantis named Rufo to the New College of Floridas Board of Trustees as part of a conservative takeover of the small liberal arts college in Sarasota. New College hired Richard Corcoran to serve as president with a compensation package of up to $1.3 million per year. Atlas, a COVID-19 adviser to former President Donald Trump who promoted the idea of herd immunity that many pandemic experts severely criticized, has appeared with DeSantis at roundtable discussions and news conferences. He also delivered the keynote speech at New Colleges graduation in May. Athos CEO and co-founder is Jonathan Bronitsky, who Garcia said moved to Delray Beach in 2021. Before launching the firm, Bronitsky served as former U.S. Attorney General William Barrs chief speechwriter and senior adviser at the U.S. Department of Justice during the Trump administration. In September 2022, DeSantis appointed Bronitsky to the Judicial Qualifications Commission, which investigates allegations of misconduct involving judges. Disney and state officials are battling in state and federal court. Disney sued DeSantis and state officials, alleging a targeted campaign of government retaliation over its stance on the dont say gay law. The district sued Disney in state court, asking a judge to declare development agreements limiting its authority void. Other politically connected firms have landed work with the Disney district since the state takeover. The district hired the boutique Washington law firm Cooper & Kirk to lead its legal fight against Disney. One of the partners in that firm is Adam Laxalt, a longtime friend of DeSantis who was picked to serve as a chairman of a Super PAC supporting his presidential bid before stepping down on Friday. The district also selected Lawson Huck Gonzalez, a firm launched earlier this year by former Florida Supreme Court Justice Alan Lawson. The district came under scrutiny for a $242,500 no-bid contract awarded to Figgers Communication to help upgrade its 911 network. That companys founder and CEO is Freddie Figgers, who served with Disney district administrator Gilzean on the Florida Commission on Ethics. The district insisted the deal followed its purchasing policy, but officials canceled the contract and put it out to competitive bid at Figgers request. Garcia praised Athos work in the statement the PR firm sent to the Sentinel. We are incredibly pleased with Athos work product, he said. To the task at hand, its team has brought principle, dedication, and its unparalleled experience interfacing with national media in both the private sector and at the highest levels of the federal government, specifically at the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Nearly all animals need some form of sleep to survive, but not all of them sleep in the same ways as humans. Take chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarcticus), the adorable two-foot-plus waddling birds named for the distinctive and dignified black stripes at the bottoms of their heads, which are indigenous to the islands and shores of the Southern Pacific and Antarctic Oceans. Now a new study in the journal Science reveals that chinstrap penguins have a very unique way of sleeping. Instead of getting six-to-eight hours at night like humans, chinstrap penguins sleep thousands of times per day in four second spurts but accumulate a daily 11 hours of sleep in the process. Researchers from France, Germany and South Korea learned this by studying 14 chinstrap penguins sleep patterns with an electroencephalograph, which measures brain activity. While the chinstrap penguins swam in the ocean or nested on King George Island, which is near Antarctica, they regularly faced threats such as aggression from other penguins or predatory birds like the brown skua pursuing their eggs. As a result, sleeping for lengthy periods can be risky, so they evolved an ability to enter rest states in spurts of up to four seconds. This results in chinstrap penguins sleeping more than 10,000 times each day. As the authors concluded, "The investment in microsleeps by successfully breeding penguins suggests that the benefits of sleep can accrue incrementally." Of course, just because the scientists proved that the penguins achieved some level of sleep during those four second bursts, the exact quality of the sleep is another matter entirely. It is entirely possible that the chinstrap penguins pay for their so-called "microsleeps" by not being fully restored when they wake up just like humans who experience dementia-like cognitive ability when too sleep deprived. "Although we did not directly measure the restorative value of microsleeps, the chinstrap penguins large investment in microsleeps, characterized by potentially costly momentary lapses in visual vigilance (eye closure), and their ability to successfully breed, despite sleeping in this highly fragmented manner, suggest that microsleeps can fulfill at least some of the restorative functions of sleep," the researchers wrote. They theorized that even though the neuronal silence only lasts for a few moments, each period could provide enough of a window for rest and recovery that the advantages "could accumulate irrespective of the duration of SWS bouts." This comes with many benefits, including that it "may give animals the flexibility to partition sleep into short or long bouts, depending on their ecological demands for vigilance." Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. The next question that one might have is whether chinstrap penguins are unique in this regard. Are there other birds that might acquire slow-wave sleep (SWS), the most restorative type of sleep, through this unusual method? The authors report that bouts of avian SWS are known to be short compared to the same process in mammals, but write "thousands of microsleeps lasting only 4 [seconds] is unprecedented, even among penguins." Non-breeding emperor penguins held in captivity do frequently alternate between waking and short-wave sleep patterns in a state called "drowsiness" that resemble the microsleep patterns observed in chinstrap penguins. There is a significant difference, though, between the two: those penguins only spent 14% of their time while drowsy, and spent another 37.5% of their time in their own version of SWS. Likewise the New Zealand species known as little penguins (Eudyptula minor) show similar bursts of slow waves when in a state of so-called "quiet wakefulness" that is similar to micro sleep in chinstrap penguins. Yet those birds' spurts of SWS on average lasted more than ten times as long at 42 seconds. "The difference between sleep continuity in these penguins and chinstrap penguins is likely related to the recording context (captive and alone as opposed to wild in a colony) and the birds reproductive state," the authors speculated. Sleep is vital to good health for humans. When humans lack quality sleep because of common medical conditions like apnea, or because they are overworked at home or their jobs, their bodies and minds pay a steep price. Although humans would be ill-advised to try getting all of their sleep in four-second bursts, that does not mean humans cannot benefit from getting rest in unexpected places. For instance, there is growing evidence that napping in the middle of the day provides health benefits. The News COP28 has been dominated today by the climate summits most controversial question: Should fossil fuels be phased out or down? Sultan al-Jaber, the summit president, outraged activists and many delegates here Sunday afternoon following the publication of a video from November in which he claimed there is no science to support a full phase-out. But the U.S. remains open to that commitment, White House climate advisor Ali Zaidi told Semafor in a brief interview on the summits sidelines. The uproar has overshadowed efforts to address another question: To what extent is it possible to decarbonize oil and gas production and consumption? And over the weekend, there were several breakthroughs on this front, mostly dealing with emissions of the highly potent greenhouse gas methane. They add up to what Mark Brownstein, senior vice president for the energy transition at the Environmental Defense Fund said may be the single most important day in the history of COPs in terms of addressing temperature rise. Know More On Saturday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced rules restricting methane emissions from oil and gas operations that will eliminate flaring, require firms to monitor and correct leaks, and allow third-party observers, especially nonprofits equipped with satellite monitoring tech, to call in complaints about unrestricted leakage. The rules will shave total U.S. emissions by 2% by 2030, and follow similar regulations implemented by the European Union last month (the EU rules also apply to any company wishing to export gas to the EU, giving them a global reach). Meanwhile, 50 of the worlds largest oil and gas companies, including Saudi Aramco and ExxonMobil, signed on to a voluntary pledge to eliminate their methane emissions by 2030, and to reach net zero for all operational emissions by 2050. Bloomberg Philanthropies concurrently said it would spend at least $40 million, in conjunction with environmental groups, to monitor companies progress toward those pledges. The World Bank, U.S., EU, and philanthropic groups also raised a total of $1 billion to support methane elimination efforts across all industries in developing countries, climate envoy John Kerry said. Tims view Pledges are a dime a dozen at COP. What makes the suite of methane announcements feel more lasting is its structure, involving a novel, strategic combination of voluntary corporate peer pressure, high-dollar philanthropy, cutting-edge tech, and new regulation all tilting at the same aim. Altogether, the methane rules add up to a seemingly reliable outcome on curbing a molecule that is responsible for about 30% of global warming. You have to build real accountability mechanisms if youre going to get anything done, and the COP28 work on methane is sort of a visit from the ghost of Christmas future on how we should approach many challenges of the climate crisis, Brownstein said. Still, picking off methane was relatively easy, Zaidi told me: You cant build that kind of momentum against all CO2 all at the same time. Instead, he said, the U.S. strategy is to try to displace oil and gas demand one sector at a time, through support for electric vehicles, alternative aviation fuels, and renewable energy. The EPA is also finalizing CO2 emissions regulations for power plants that agency administrator Michael Regan said in an interview will be published in April and are designed to withstand inevitable legal challenges from industry groups. The hardest part of replicating methanes success with other gases will be the companies, which have a financial interest in curbing methane, since leaks are ultimately just gas they cant sell. No such financial incentive exists yet for their CO2 emissions, and those companies are still obstructing efforts to take responsibility for Scope 3 emissions from the use of their products, which is by the far the largest piece of their carbon footprint, said David Turk, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy. If youre an oil and gas company, you cant just say Scope 3 is someone elses problem. They need to step up and really invest more in the transition and lobby for the policies that are going to make a big impact and allow us all to move forward. Room for Disagreement To some extent, the phase-out vs. phase-down debate misses the point, because its too narrowly focused on the supply side of the industry, said Jason Bordoff, director of Columbia Universitys Center for Global Energy Policy. Oil company executives hands are tied by their shareholders, who have tended to punish them for moving faster to curb oil production than the global economys willingness to curb demand. Once that changes, the politics will be very different, he said: Oil demand is still going up every year. Lets make demand start falling, and then we can debate whether the final answer is zero or something much smaller than today that isnt zero. The View From Small Island States Some of the negotiators pushing hardest for a phaseout say their big victory on another issue on the COPs first day the adoption of a climate reparations fund is now being turned against them behind closed doors. Theres a sense of, you got what you want, now be quiet, said Michai Robertson, an advisor to the Alliance of Small Island States. We will not be quiet. Semafor Signals NEWS COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber on Monday said his comments claiming there was no science behind demands to phase-out fossil fuels to limit global heating were misinterpreted. Al-Jabers comments, made during an event last month, were reported by The Guardian on Sunday, sparking condemnation from climate scientists and threatening to overshadow what was otherwise a successful weekend at the ongoing climate conference. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is whats going to achieve 1.5C, al-Jaber said during a live online event on Nov. 21. But on Monday the COP leader, who also heads the state-run Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC), said there has been a misinterpretation" of his comments, saying he very much respected the science. The phase-down and the phase-out of fossil fuels is essential. It needs to be orderly, fair, just and responsible. SIGNALS Semafor Signals: Global insights on today's biggest stories. Al-Jabers presidency of the climate summit has been controversial from the start, with his parallel role as ADNOC president immediately raising concerns among critics. Last month, the BBC reported that the United Arab Emirates planned to use the COP28 conference to make oil deals, a claim al-Jaber has denied. At ADNOC, al-Jaber is currently heading the companys expansion of oil and gas output, The Intercept reported in October, and at least a dozen of the companys staff have been appointed to positions within the COP28 hosting team. Aside from the controversy, the summit made progress over the weekend with 50 oil and gas firms promising to repair leaky methane systems no later than 2030. Among the companies which agreed to the framework were fossil-fuel giants ExxonMobil and Aramco. Methane emissions are responsible for about 25% of global warming, and mitigating leaks along oil and gas lines could go a long way to reducing overall fossil-fuel emissions. Around 10% of leaks create 50% of all methane emissions, one analyst told NBC News. Governments from 118 nations pledged over the weekend to triple the worlds renewable-energy capacity by 2030. If countries stick to their promise, it will mean a phase away from fossil fuels. A smaller group of countries also promised to ramp up their nuclear energy programs. By Gloria Dickie DUBAI (Reuters) - COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber defended his role in hosting this year's U.N. climate summit on Monday and insisted he understood and respected the science of climate change. In a news conference, Al Jaber responded to a Dec. 3 report in the Guardian newspaper on comments he made last month on the phase-out of fossil fuels that have sparked criticism at COP28. "I am quite surprised with the constant and repeated attempts to undermine the work of the COP28 presidency," Al Jaber said on Monday. The Guardian story quoted Al Jaber saying during a Nov. 21 online event that "there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5C". During Monday's news conference, Al Jaber complained to reporters that "one statement taken out of context with misrepresentation" had received "maximum coverage". The U.N. climate science agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050 requires greatly reducing the use of fossil fuels and eliminating the use of unabated coal. IPCC Chair Jim Skea joined Al Jaber at the news conference and said he had held several meetings with the COP28 chief on climate science. "Dr. Sultan has been attentive to the science as we have discussed it, and I think he fully understood it," Skea said. (Reporting by Gloria Dickie; Editing by Katy Daigle and Alison Williams) World media leaders gather to address common challenges, boost confidence Xinhua) 08:30, December 04, 2023 GUANGZHOU, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- World media leaders gathered in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou on Sunday to build consensus in addressing common challenges and boosting global confidence. The 5th World Media Summit (WMS) released a joint statement during an opening ceremony and plenary session at its main venue in the Nansha District of Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province. The statement noted that the world is undergoing accelerated changes unseen in a century, and that uncertainties and unforeseen factors are on the rise. It called on global media to build a bridge of communication to answer the questions posed by the world, by the times and by history. The summit attracted more than 450 representatives of nearly 200 institutions from over 100 countries and regions, including media outlets, think tanks and international organizations. Focusing on the summit's theme of "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," attendees took part in extensive discussions to contribute media power to the construction of a brighter future. Fu Hua, executive chairman of the World Media Summit and president of Xinhua News Agency, addresses the opening ceremony of the 5th World Media Summit in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Liu Bin) BOOSTING CONFIDENCE Confidence is a key word for global media leaders. Fu Hua, president of Xinhua News Agency, said in a keynote speech at the opening ceremony that confidence is more valuable than gold when facing difficulties. "History development, civilization prosperity and human progress require the media to shoulder the responsibilities of fostering unity and boosting confidence," Fu said. He called on the attendees to use media to convey positive energy, amplify voices that promote the development of human society, and encourage countries to join hands in addressing the challenges facing humanity. Iqbal Surve, chairman of Independent Media and the African News Agency, said that the media should help people boost confidence to build a better world. Delegates attend the opening ceremony of the 5th World Media Summit in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Deng Hua) ADHERING TO TRUTH Misinformation was a hotly debated issue at the summit. Fu said that in the era of the internet, people obtain information from unprecedentedly convenient and diverse channels, but they also face the assault of various types of false information. "Truthfulness is the lifeblood of news," Fu said, underlining the importance of adhering to objectivity and truth to enhance the credibility of the media. "The media should consider facts as the source of news, reflect the objective truth, oppose false news, and ensure that reporting is accurate, fair, authoritative and trustworthy," Fu said. Serik Korzhumbayev, editor-in-chief of Delovoy Kazakhstan newspaper, also noted the grave challenges that fake news poses to the media industry. He called on media outlets to shoulder their responsibilities in verifying facts and disseminating credible information. Delegates talk during the opening ceremony of the 5th World Media Summit in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Liang Xu) EMBRACING GAME-CHANGERS Media leaders attending the summit acknowledged the challenges posed by new technologies, and discussed the importance of seizing the opportunities of sci-tech transformations by better harnessing game-changing innovations such as AI. Calling on his peers to strengthen research into and the application of technologies such as 5G, AI, and cloud computing, Fu said that media should "embed new technology into the entire process of news communication, improve production efficiency, enrich product forms, and release more news reports that are popular and enjoyable to their audiences." If AI tools are used correctly, they can help media outlets increase productivity, freeing up resources for more on-the-ground reporting, said Michael Mainville, member of the AFP Executive Committee and AFP Asia-Pacific regional director. "We also need to work together, as an industry, to adopt the use of AI in a responsible way that protects the integrity of news," Mainville said. DEEPENING COOPERATION To address common challenges, media outlets across the globe need to strengthen exchanges and collaboration, the attendees agreed. Fu noted that the WMS serves as an important platform for media communication and cooperation between countries, and said efforts should be made to improve this multilateral mechanism and utilize it to its fullest extent, tap into the potential for cooperation, innovate collaboration models, and expand cooperation channels. Xinhua on Saturday signed agreements with foreign media outlets and institutions to deepen cooperation in areas such as news exchanges, personnel exchanges and visits, and integrated media development. Xinhua will enhance communication and consultation processes with media organizations from various countries, and work with these organizations to construct and utilize the summit mechanism effectively, Fu said. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station (ISS) took manual control of an incoming cargo ship carrying tons of supplies after its automated rendezvous system suffered a glitch. The unpiloted cargo ship, called Progress 86, docked to the station's Russian-built Poisk module under remote control by Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, who tracked its approach from inside the ISS. Kononenko took control of the cargo ship remotely using a system called TORU, while the Progress 86 craft was flying around the station at a range of about 150 meters, apparently due to an issue with the cargo ship's own Kurs automated rendezvous system. A Russian spacecraft with the Earth behind. "During the flyaround, the Progress vehicle started drifting away from the expected attitude and was not aligned with the docking target," NASA spokesperson Anna Schneider said during live commentary. "The crew aboard the International Space Station has taken over manual control and recovered the expected attitude." Kononenko docked the Progress 86 spacecraft with the ISS at 6:18 a.m. EDT (1118 GMT), ending a two-day spaceflight that began Friday (Dec. 1) with a successful launch atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The cargo ship completed 37 orbits of Earth before docking. "Contact confirmed, capture confirmed," Kononenko radioed to Roscosmos mission control near Moscow. The Progress 86 and ISS were sailing 260 miles over the western Pacific Ocean. A rocket launching into a blue sky. Related Stories: ISS astronauts watch Russian cargo ship burn up in Earth's atmosphere (photos) Soyuz spacecraft suffers 'fairly substantial' leak at space station, cancels spacewalk by Russian cosmonauts Russia's replacement Soyuz spacecraft arrives at space station Progress 86 is carrying 5,600 pounds (2,540 kilograms) of supplies for the seven crewmembers currently living and working on the ISS. That haul includes food, equipment, supplies and science experiment gear tp be used by long-duration crews during their six-month stays on the station. Russia's Progress spacecraft are one of several different vehicles used to periodically resupply the ISS. They are disposable and are designed to burn up in Earth's atmosphere at the end of their months-long missions. SpaceX's Dragon cargo ships and Northrop Grumman's Cygnus spacecraft also resupply the station. Brekke Wagoner looks out the windows of her home in North Carolina and sees disaster coming. Not immediately, but someday, as hurricanes and other storms supercharged by climate change barrel up the Eastern Seaboard, drenching neighborhoods, knocking out power and destroying roads. But it's not the storms she worries about, not exactly. Instead, she worries that an incompetent federal government run by someone like current Republican front-runner and former President Donald Trump will botch the humanitarian response to a predictable disaster. She's one of a growing number of people on both sides of the political divide who are preparing for the possibility of a disastrous collapse of society after the 2024 election. Wagoner, 39, represents a relatively small but growing segment of Americans who consider themselves "preppers" people prepared to survive without government assistance during disasters. Those disasters could encompass anything from a major storm to widespread looting sparked by election anger. Supplies stockpiled inside a survival compound in Southern Colorado owned by the Fortitude Ranch "prepper" community. More Americans preparing for disaster ahead of election In the past 12 months, 39% of millennials and 40% of Gen Zers reported having spent money on prepping, according to Finder.com, which has collected similar data since at least 2017. Overall, almost 30% of Americans surveyed reported taking some steps toward emergency preparedness last year, up from about 25% in 2017, according to the annual Finder survey. "On the left, you have people afraid (Trump) is going to declare himself dictator of the United States and people on the left are going to end up as targets in some sort of authoritarian system," said prepping expert and author Brad Garrett. "On the right, it's general malaise and a fear of society unraveling. They point to these smash-and-grab robberies, riots and protests." One expert consulted by USA TODAY said a failure or perceived failure of government is almost always the trigger for people to begin prepping. He said the number of younger, more liberal people prepping indicates a loss of trust in government. "That's the impetus for all the preppers I've ever dealt with: They saw something and felt the government could not or would not help, said Chad Huddleston of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, a professor and anthropologist who has studied the prepping community extensively. Huddleston said its important to distinguish between the large numbers of people who consider being prepared for emergencies their civic and family responsibility and those who are, sometimes eagerly, awaiting societal collapse. But he said the number of people deliberately preparing for a crisis tied to a Trump-Biden election is growing. On one side, people think Trump may bring a New World Order and they will come and get us, so we need to be ready," he said. "And then on the other hand you have the communities who think things will get just get worse so we have to help ourselves." Count Wagoner among those people. She sees climate change as a worsening existential threat the government isn't prepared for, especially if a Republican is in charge. "The intensification of our natural storm seasons is the No. 1 thing that's going to happen to you," she said. "An electromagnetic pulse that takes out the electrical grid could happen. A nuclear war might happen. A civil war might happen. But a storm will happen." Prepping is becoming increasingly diverse Though the movement has long been associated with libertarian-fueled apocalyptic scenarios like a zombie infestation or the collapse of modern society, as highlighted by the 2020 television show "Doomsday Preppers," Wagoner is among younger, more liberal people who say the Trump administration flubbed its responses during the 2017 hurricane season, particularly in Puerto Rico, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, prepping appears to reflect the deep uncertainty many Americans feel: A recent USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll found that 67% of Americans think the country is facing either bigger problems than usual or is in the most troubled state they've ever seen. The poll of 1,000 registered voters, taken Oct. 17-20 by landline and cellphone, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Experts say younger preppers like Wagoner reflect broad concerns for the nation's future as we choose our next president. Some are stockpiling weapons and medical supplies in armored bunkers. Others are urging their neighbors to set aside enough food to survive for weeks or months without outside help. "If you can be prepared, you won't be a drain on the resources needed to help the people who didnt prepare, said Wagoner, who has a 90-day supply of food set aside for her six-person family. Wagoner, who works for a nonprofit, runs a YouTube channel where she offers prepping advice to young people, urban residents and people who have small homes. "In the face of an apocalypse, I want to come out and calmly help people, she said. I want to be able to create a society that instead of wanting to shoot every stranger, understands our interdependence and creates a better society. Many disaster response experts say the ideas espoused by Wagoner is the most reasonable and responsible approach for Americans to take, building off the assumption that neighbors, churches and nonprofits like the Red Cross or Salvation Army will always play a front-line role in helping recover from a disaster, filling in the gaps until the federal government gets organized. Drew Miller, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, pictured at the southern Colorado location of Fortitude Ranch emergency preparedness or "prepper" community, which has multiple emergency shelters into which members can retreat during a societal collapse. Guns and bunkers: Some preppers are focused on their own survival If Wagoner represents one end of the spectrum focused on community, interdependence and cooperation retired U.S. Air Force Col. Drew Miller represents the other. He's prepared for a full societal collapse caused by war, a nuclear explosion or rampaging mobs angry at election results. Miller's "Fortitude Ranch" has built seven compounds around the country, including Nevada, Wisconsin and outside Washington, D.C., where members can retreat for up to a year, armed and isolated from whatever may come. In addition to stockpiles of food, propane and whiskey, the compounds are outfitted with solar panels, wells and two-way radios. And lots and lots of guns. Their plan during a collapse: Members will immediately flee to the closest compound, poach wildlife for meat, surround their compound with log walls and shoot any "marauders" who approach too close. USA TODAY toured one of the compounds in southern Colorado, where Spartan accommodations await members who pay a minimum of $1,200 a year for what Miller calls a different kind of life insurance. Well have decent chow here come a collapse, he said. We guarantee a year of food, but not of toilet paper. Fortitude Ranch in Colorado has about 100 members, Miller said. He acknowledges the cost of joining would be a financial burden for many Americans, but he pulled out a $300 pistol to argue that being prepared doesn't have to cost a fortune. He said the ultra-rich have their own compounds but will depend on paid staff to protect them, while he believes individual families in cities will become targets for armed gangs, especially if people get hungry and desperate. His advice for city dwellers stockpiling supplies in their homes: "The first rule of prepping is to not tell people you're a prepper." Inside Fortitude Ranch's Colorado compound, which includes an armored guard post, sniper positions and underground bunkers, members aim to remain isolated for as long as needed. Members have added their own beds, furniture and ammunition stockpiles to the group supplies cached around the property. Drew Miller, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, shows off a ballistic helmet and firearms at the southern Colorado location of Fortitude Ranch emergency preparedness or "prepper" community, which has multiple emergency shelters into which members can retreat during a societal collapse. Among the weapons: a .50-caliber rifle to disable oncoming vehicles, hunting rifles to kill deer, and plenty of pistols. Members also have cupboards filled with first-aid kits and have recruited doctors and people with military medical training to help keep their fellow preppers healthy. The group's plan is to ride out any collapse and then be positioned to take advantage of business opportunities opened up by widespread urban deaths. That's what happened when the Black Death killed tens of millions of Europeans and Asians in the 1300s: It concentrated wealth and resources among survivors. Miller said the compounds are primarily set up to be defensive, and while they'd be open to bartering with their neighbors during a collapse, they wouldn't help non-members who came begging for food or assistance. Otherwise, he said, no one would pay to join Fortitude Ranch until times got tough. Miller worries about a wide variety of problems, from a pandemic that kills a large majority of Americans to a nuclear detonation that wipes out the nation's electrical grid and our modern electronic devices. He said many of his clients started thinking seriously about survival during the protests and riots that came after George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis in 2020. The overwhelming majority of protests were peaceful, although some caused significant property damage in multiple cities and drew threats from Trump that he would send the military to stop them. "There could easily be a civil war during a Biden-Trump election," he said, referencing the violent 2020 clashes in Portland between armed federal agents dispatched by Trump against Black Lives Matter protesters, some of whom shot fireworks at officers. Miller's group deliberately avoids getting into the political debate, although he acknowledges many members have military training. And scattered around the compound are multiple copies of his 2011 novel "Rohan Nation," a libertarian-focused tale of survivalists written as a call to break "nation's addiction to socialist entitlements and return to Constitutional, strictly limited government, focused on security." Miller said your politics don't matter in a cataclysm only your willingness to work with the small number of survivors in the compound to get through the first worst months of a crisis so you can launch a business to take advantage of vacant real estate and free-market needs. I want middle-class Americans to survive, and we make it affordable to do that," Miller said. I think eventually things will recover and I want to be alive for that. Drew Miller, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, shows off a small reconnaissance drone and other supplies at the southern Colorado location of Fortitude Ranch emergency preparedness or "prepper" community, which has multiple emergency shelters into which members can retreat during a societal collapse. 'Unfortunate arms race' for conservative, liberal preppers ahead of election Garrett, the author and academic, spent three years visiting eight counties and interviewing hundreds of preppers for his 2020 book "Bunker," which explores the philosophies driving the prepper movement. He said Miller's Fortitude Ranch reflects a typical libertarian-focused prepper mindset in which the government is inherently incompetent and that everyone is more or less on their own. But he said some liberals, especially younger ones, were shocked into action by the pandemic and the federal government's response to the George Floyd protests they had never personally experienced such government failure or hostility before and suddenly feel vulnerable. He said the upcoming presidential election is only sharpening those concerns on both sides of the nation's divide. "We do have this authoritarian streak running through the right, and prepping plays into that. They are prepared for violence, no question," he said. "But you're also seeing an increase in militancy on the left. I'm seeing a lot of liberal preppers buying guns, saying that they waited too long. It's an unfortunate arms race that I do think we're going to see escalating as we head into the election, particularly if it's Trump versus Biden." Garrett said many of the younger preppers, while worried about a fascist federal government under a second Trump administration, are also concerned about the growing impact of climate change. He said there's a shift back toward being prepared for disasters in a way people routinely were 100 years ago, especially in rural areas. "You're seeing a lot of people who are not worried about the apocalypse but if the power goes out for three days," he said. "You're seeing more prepping but less extreme prepping." Drew Miller, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, shows off a radiation detector at the southern Colorado location of Fortitude Ranch emergency preparedness or "prepper" community, which has multiple emergency shelters into which members can retreat during a societal collapse. Prepping can help others Back in North Carolina, Wagoner would consider herself among those who take responsible, reasonable steps to prepare. She and her husband got rid of some of their books and camping gear to make room for their food stockpile. And they eschew having guns, even though they'd be prepared to use them in self-defense, she said. For Wagoner, being prepared comes with an explicit addendum: so she can help others. On her YouTube channel, Wagoner said she tries to help people understand that being prepared doesn't need to be expensive, and that gradually building up a stockpile of nonperishable foods like pasta and rice is an easy way to be self-sufficient in a crisis. She explicitly rejects the philosophy of what Garrett calls "dread merchants" people capitalizing on fear to sell packs of freeze-dried meals, "bugout bags," battery banks or guns and encourages her audience to think about how prepping will help their community. "When I talk about preparedness, I start with 'What's most likely'?" she said. "You have to ask, what are you prepping for? Are you prepping to survive for a Max Mad world? Because if that's what prepare for, that's what you'll ultimately create. And I'm prepping for community survival. My perspective is that we are better together." She added: "Jesus would slap the s--- out of anyone who had food and refused to help their neighbors who were hungry." This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 2024 election chaos has some 'preppers' ready for society's collapse Independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. gives a campaign speech at the Marriott Cincinnati North in West Chester in October. Joe Cunningham is convinced Ohioans want another option for president in 2024. The former South Carolina congressman now serves as national director for No Labels, which is trying to get on the November 2024 ballot in Ohio and other states. Its mission: Provide voters with an alternative to the presumptive major-party nominees, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Americans want another choice, and were preparing to give it to them," Cunningham said in an interview. "Were responding to the majority of Americans who feel disaffected or unheard." No Labels doesn't have a candidate yet. But the organization and campaigns of Robert Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West have spurred debate about whether 2024 is the year for third-party politicians to shine. A recent Harvard/Harris poll found nearly 60% of voters would consider an independent candidate if there's a Biden-Trump rematch. Despite that, third-party challengers face an uphill battle in a system driven by Republicans and Democrats. They can affect the final outcome by tearing votes away from major candidates but even that requires a certain level of support that's hard to come by. And while third-party candidates are courting Ohio, it's no longer the presidential bellwether it used to be. Voters overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2016 and 2020, and political scientists say it'd be hard for someone like Kennedy or West to put a meaningful dent in those margins. "I don't always love this, but we live in a two-party system," U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, said. "If you want to really change the system, I think the way to do it is to try to do it within one of the political parties. I think that was the path that Trump took. I don't think that any of these guys are going to get more than 10%, and it's not going to be a real factor nationally or in the state of Ohio." Trump remains popular in Ohio There's still a long way to go before Nov. 5, 2024, but early signs look promising for Trump in Ohio. A July USA TODAY Network/Suffolk University poll showed Trump leading Biden 44% to 38% in a potential matchup including West, who got just 2% of the vote. Over 8% of voters said they would back an unnamed independent candidate, and 6.4% were undecided. Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally for then-U.S. Senate candidate J.D. Vance at Dayton International Airport in 2022. Nearly 48% of Ohio voters had a very or somewhat favorable view of Trump in an October Baldwin Wallace University survey. Biden trailed him with a favorability of 37%. "Any effect were talking about for third parties is up against a pretty substantial Trump advantage," said Christopher Devine, a political scientist at the University of Dayton. "Its hard to see them taking enough of the vote to make a difference between Trump and Biden." Despite the odds, No Labels filed a petition seeking third party status in Ohio. A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Frank LaRose said boards of elections are reviewing the signatures, and a final decision about the group's placement will be made by July. The November 2024 ballot will be finalized in late August. Kennedy, meanwhile, visited the Columbus and Cincinnati areas in October. "(Trump) is very far right, not like Nazi right, obviously, I don't think that," Cedarville resident Tyler Scott told the Cincinnati Enquirer during the West Chester event. "But he's more farther right than most, and then Biden and others are a little far left. And I feel like we need someone a little more in the middle." Cunningham believes Ohio voters are independent-minded and crave substance from politicians, something he thinks No Labels can provide. But historically, third-party candidates haven't stood much of a chance here. The most successful example was Ross Perot, who got 21% of the Ohio vote in 1992 as part of a better-than-average showing nationwide. In 2016 another year of disgruntled Republicans and Democrats Libertarian Gary Johnson got just 3% of the vote in Ohio, while Green Party candidate Jill Stein didn't even crack 1%. President Joe Biden speaks in Covington in January about the bipartisan infrastructure law that will fund changes to the Brent Spence Bridge. A 'wasted vote'? Since third-party contenders don't win, they instead can serve as a spoiler for one or both major-party candidates. They have the potential to flip outcomes because the electorate is so closely divided, said Justin Buchler, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. That has some Republicans and Democrats sweating ahead of 2024. Kennedy got over 20% of the vote in six battleground states in an October New York Times/Sienna College poll, which cost Trump leads in a few states. Some Democrats worry West could erode support for Biden. A third-party candidate has no chance to win the presidency in 2024. Period," said Liz Walters, chairwoman of the Ohio Democratic Party. "Theres too much at stake next year to allow a third-party candidate to play spoiler and risk four more years of extremism, corruption and anti-democratic values in a Republican-controlled White House." Still, experts say frustrated voters in Ohio and nationwide will eventually come home to either the Republican or Democratic Party. Devine said many people who claim to be independent reveal strong partisan preferences when you dig a little further. In the end," Devine said, "they usually come back to the idea that its a wasted vote and you cant win anyway." Haley BeMiller is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio. This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: 2024 presidential race: Why Ohio is tough for third-party candidates Leaders of the Texas Republican Party rejected a resolution to ban party members from associating with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers, just two months after a prominent state conservative activist was seen meeting with white supremacist Nick Fuentes. The Texas GOP executive committee voted 3229 on Saturday to remove a clause that would have banned meeting with neo-Nazis from a pro-Israel resolution. About half of the board also tried to prevent a record of the vote being kept, which floored some members, The Texas Tribune reported. The rejected clause stated, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the Republican Party of Texas have no association whatsoever with any individual or organization that is known to espouse anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi sympathies, or Holocaust denial. Some committee members felt the language was too vague, with one member, Dan Tully, insisting such a ban could put you on a slippery slope. But members who supported the ban were livid with their colleagues, pointing out that many regularly accuse political opponents of antisemitism. I just dont understand how people who routinely refer to others as leftists, liberals, communists, socialists, and RINOs dont have the discernment to define what a Nazi is, committee member Morgan Cisneros Graham told the Tribune. The vote comes two months after neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who has called for a holy war against Jews, was seen meeting for seven hours at the offices of Pale Horse Strategies, a consulting firm for far-right candidates. Pale Horse is owned by Jonathan Stickland, who founded the PAC Defend Texas Liberty, which has donated to multiple Texas politicians on the right, including the lieutenant governor and attorney general. Defend Texas Liberty quietly ousted Stickland as its president following the meeting with Fuentes. But multiple members of the PACs leadership team have made viciously antisemitic posts on social media, praised Fuentes, and donated to an anti-immigration organization connected to Fuentes. Texas GOP Chairman Matt Rinaldi was seen entering the Pale Horse office building while Fuentes was there. He denied meeting with Fuentes. On Saturday, Rinaldi abstained from the vote, but he argued that antisemitism is not a serious problem among Republicans. I dont see any antisemitic, pro-Nazi, or Holocaust denial movement on the right that has any significant traction whatsoever, he said. Rinaldi couldnt be more wrong. Fuentes has met with Donald Trump, who is currently the front-runner in the Republican presidential primary by a massive margin. That meeting was also attended by Kanye West, who has said he identifies with Hitler. The House Judiciary Committee Republicans had a tweet up for months expressing support for Trump, West, and X (formerly Twitter) owner Elon Musk. All three men have made openly antisemitic statements. The committee only deleted the tweet after West made his pro-Hitler comments. So its safe to say that antisemitism has a pretty strong foothold on the right. MUSKEGON, Mich. (WOOD) A judge ruled Monday morning that an evidentiary hearing will take place in mid-January as Ottawa Countys top health official tries to force the county into a $4 million lawsuit and employment settlement. An exact date for the hearing was not decided on. Administrative Health Officer Adeline Hambleys lawyer, Sarah Howard, is expected to call five witnesses during the hearing to discuss what happened in closed session on Nov. 6. The hearing is expected to take two hours. Howard said she has subpoenas out to the county Clerk Justin Roebuck, Ottawa Impact co-founder and Commission Chair Joe Moss, and commissioners Doug Zylstra, Jacob Bonnema and Roger Bergman. Judge Jenny McNeill added that she will be reviewing the minutes from the commissioners closed session. Howard is asking the court to bind the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners to a deal that would include a $4 million payout to Hambley. In exchange, Hambley would leave her position and Deputy Health Officer Marcia Mansaray would resign with a severance of one years pay. Health officer, Ottawa County bringing in mediator Howard argued she and her client believed the deal had been reached but that county leaders tried to back out because of negative backlash to details that were published in the press. The countys attorney, David Kallman, said nobody ever agreed to anything. A hearing on the motion was supposed to happen last week but was delayed because the judge needed time to review motions to quash subpoenas for four county commissioners and the county clerk to testify. The motions argued the subpoenas sought the illegal disclosure of what was discussed in closed session. Howard also filed a motion last week asking to amend her complaint to include claims that the board violated the Open Meetings Act in how it handled the scheduling of a hearing for Hambleys removal and why it went into closed session as the hearing continued, the Holland Sentinel reported. On Monday, the court decided to grant the motion. Conservative county commissioners backed by political action committee Ottawa Impact have been trying to oust Hambley all year, voting in their first meeting in January to remove her. She sued, saying that was illegal. Commissioners countered that she was never properly appointed by their predecessors. The Michigan Court of Appeals finally ruled that Hambley was rightfully appointed, but also that the board could fire her if it could prove cause under state law. A September document signed by Moss laid out a case for cause, alleging misconduct in the way she handled this years budgeting process. The hearing for Hambleys removal got underway Oct. 24 and included two days of testimony in which Hambleys lawyer tried to show her client simply wanted to ensure the Ottawa County Department of Public Health could operate properly. Hambley testified she went to the press because she believed the general fund dollars to the agency would be limited to $2.5 million, which she said would cause it to close. Commissioners ultimately decided the health department would get about $4.8 million from the general fund but its total allocation for the fiscal year was less than the year prior. Commissioners held off voting after the conclusion of testimony. The following week, they pushed the vote back again. On two subsequent days, there were hours of closed-door negotiations before the hearing was recessed again. Hearing over Ottawa County health officers $4 million settlement delayed When it reconvened last week, there were a few more hours of closed session before the county and Hambleys attorney announced they were bringing in a mediator to help them reach a settlement. The county will pay for the mediator. If (the county is) willing to mediate, I will accept that as hopefully moving in a good direction and well make every attempt to work with them on it, Howard said last week. I believe its a positive direction, its a positive step and its a good faith step by the board to show that they are really serious about trying to resolve issues, David Kallman, the commissioners lawyer, said. The removal hearing will remain paused while mediation is underway. Its unclear how long discussions would take or what the outcome could look like. New 8 Reporter Byron Tollefson contributed to this report. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WOODTV.com. At a Pilsen schools gym, 12-year-old Sofia Lemus sat down to get her third COVID-19 shot. The seventh grader, who wore stacks of friendship bracelets on her wrists, pulled up her sleeves, saying she wanted to get the vaccine so she didnt get sick. I was a little bit scared, because I thought it was going to hurt, Lemus said. But it didnt hurt so I was OK. About a dozen kids received free vaccines Sunday at a clinic organized by Peoples Resource Network and the Chicago Department of Public Health at St. Procopius Dual Language School. They offered flu, COVID-19 and other childhood vaccines, except for chickenpox, to children from 6 weeks to 19 years old. COVID-19 hospitalization rates have started to rise again in Illinois, with health officials urging residents to get fully protected with booster shots and the flu vaccine in time for the holidays. During the week of Nov. 25, about 1,000 new people were admitted to hospitals with COVID-19, a 20% increase compared with the previous week, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Illinois Department of Health reported that hospital data also shows increases in flu and RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, across the state. The hospital admission level in Cook County is considered low, however, according to the CDC. About 500 hospitalizations were recorded in the week ending Nov. 25, a 14% increase from the previous week. Dr. Howard Ehrman, the co-founder of Peoples Resource Network, said its important to meet people where they are when distributing vaccines. Undocumented, uninsured and African American kids and adults generally have lower immunization rates, putting them at higher risk of getting sick, Ehrman said. Numbers are going up everywhere, including Chicago and Illinois, he said. So if you dont get vaccinated, you run a much higher risk of getting really sick, being hospitalized and dying. The CDC recommends that children ages 6 months or older get vaccinated against COVID-19 and the flu. Ehrman also warned of declining measles, mumps and rubella vaccination rates in schools nationwide, including at Chicago Public Schools. He said many people dont realize the importance of vaccines until its too late. We want people to reestablish the whole idea of community and the fact that we have to care about each other. Were not just here as individuals, he said. We go to work, we go to school, we go shopping, we take the bus, were part of a community. And if we dont take care of everybody, people are going to get sick and die. Lonette Sims, the chair of the Peoples Resource Network, said they had another clinic a few weeks ago for adults, where they vaccinated about 150 people. More clinics are in the works for next year, she said. The group is pushing for the Take Vaccine to the People Chicago Ordinance, to give more resources to the Department of Public Health. People should get vaccines to protect their health, and it can also protect people within the community who might not be able to get a vaccine, she said. For Denis Lemus, Sofias dad, protecting his kids is top of mind. Lemus, who attends St. Procopius Catholic Church, also got a COVID-19 and flu shot at the clinic for adults. I believe wholeheartedly in the vaccine, he said. If everyone were to get it, (infection rates) would probably slow down. rjohnson@chicagotribune.com Remember the heady dreams some investors had during the lockdowns? The ones about homebound habits persisting and companies such as Zoom and Peloton justifying their sky-high valuations? As the world has reopened and workers have returned to their offices, those dreams have mostly been dashed. But not every company whose shares were lifted by lockdowns has come crashing down since. Take Stride, the American online education provider whose sales and shares soared as Covid struck and classrooms shut, to be replaced by virtual versions. It had seemed a textbook example of investor euphoria: in the space of just five months in the summer of 2020 the shares tripled, and as a result came to be priced at 65 times their forecast earnings. The slump in the shares that followed in the months when vaccines were developed was predictable. But while Strides lofty lockdown valuation didnt stick, something more substantial has. A surge in sales and profits during the pandemic has proved anything but a flash in the plan: both have continued to build momentum in the years since. As have Strides shares: they have surpassed 2020s peak, but crucially are now trading at a much more sensible 14 times forecast earnings for the next 12 months. All of this has not gone unnoticed by some of the worlds best fund managers. Eleven of these investors, each among the top-performing 3pc of the 10,000 equity fund managers tracked by the financial publisher Citywire, own shares in the company. Stride receives a top AAA rating from Citywire Elite Companies, which rates companies on the basis of their backing by the best-performing fund managers. Progress this year has been particularly strong. In October the company announced that sales and profits targets for 2025, set three years ago, should be met a year early. Brokers responded by raising their profit forecasts for the next 12 months by a fifth and the shares have climbed by 39pc. Now management has its sights on the next target: to more than double earnings per share over the next five years. Progress is already evident: adjusted operating margins have risen from 6pc in 2020 to nearly 11pc last year and a target of close to 17pc set for 2024. Through its general education business, which accounts for just over 60pc of sales, Stride offers online teaching from kindergarten all the way through to the end of high school. Its smaller but faster growing career learning division aims to prepare students for jobs and provide workers with new skills. Of the companys 7,800 staff, 4,400 are teachers. It also manages 3,400 teachers employed by the schools it works for. Most sales come from what it calls school as a service. This offers pretty much everything needed to set up and run a virtual or hybrid school, including the curriculum, technology, teaching and administration. From when Stride welcomed its first 900 virtual learners in 2001 through to today, it has taught more than 3 million students. It offers general education through 81 schools in 31 American states and career learning though 52 schools in 27 states. Contracts are normally for five years or more. It also operates private online schooling. While management believes virtual school fulfils all the needs of only a small percentage of students including those with special social needs, victims of severe bullying and children with certain disabilities the market is nevertheless large and growing. Prospects are underpinned by shortages of teachers in America, increased dissatisfaction with public schools and rising spending per pupil. Stride is also looking to expand into new states and targeting growth areas such as online tutoring, esports and higher-margin adult learning. Growth in higher-margins sales and increased scale are two reasons the company is confident that profitability will continue to improve over coming years. So too is technology: Stride believes artificial intelligence could cut the amount of time teachers have to devote to non-teaching work such as planning and marking. An increased acceptance of digital learning materials is also expected to cut costs. The valuation of Strides shares, at 14 times earnings forecast for the next 12 months, certainly does not price in the improvements management hope for. In fact, the shares have rarely been cheaper on that measure since the company floated on the New York Stock Exchange in 2007. Sentiment could be helped by managements prediction of a jump in free cash flow this year. Brokers forecast that the company will have net cash from next year, although this could be affected by acquisitions. Management is on the lookout for businesses that could enhance overall margins and organic growth rates. The big long-term prize is for Stride to become a substantially more profitable company, which could dramatically improve the shares rating. Its lockdown valuation may have become divorced from reality in 2020s manic market, but now it seems that investors arent giving the company the credit it deserves for the progress it has made. Questor says: buy Ticker: NYSE:LRN Share price at close: $61.09 Algy Hall is investment editor of Citywire Elite Companies Read the latest Questor column on telegraph.co.uk every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 6am Read Questors rules of investment before you follow our tips 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. FILE PHOTO: A Swiss flag is pictured above a logo of Swiss bank Credit Suisse in Bern NEW YORK (Reuters) - Credit Suisse has reinstated an independent reviewer to oversee an investigation into the servicing of Nazi clients and Nazi-linked accounts, according to U.S. lawmakers who have probed the issue. Credit Suisse has agreed to reinstate Neil Barosky, who had previously been removed form his role as ombudsman to oversee the bank's internal investigation, Chuck Grassley and Sheldon Whitehouse of the Senate Budget Committee said in a joint statement. THE TAKE The reinstatement comes after the Senate committee said the Swiss bank hampered a multiyear investigation into allegations levied by a human rights organization that the bank held potential Nazi-linked accounts. The lawmakers' probe found the bank "inexplicably terminated" Barofsky. THE QUOTE "A clear-eyed and historically complete evaluation of Credit Suisses servicing of Nazi-linked accounts demands painful facts to be met head on, not swept aside," the lawmakers said in their statement. THE RESPONSE UBS, which acquired Credit Suisse this year, and Barofsky did not immediately respond to requests for comment. (Reporting by Chris Prentice; Editing by Bill Berkrot) Chris Herrod, GOP primary candidate in Utahs 3rd Congressional District, talks during a GOP primary debate in Salt Lake City on June 1, 2022. Herrod announced Monday that he will enter the 3rd District race to replace Rep. John Curtis if Curtis runs for Senate. | Laura Seitz, Deseret News Former state Rep. Chris Herrod intends to enter the 3rd Congressional District race if Rep. John Curtis runs for Senate, he told the Deseret News Monday. Herrod has had his eyes on the seat which represents the Wasatch Front from Provo to Sandy and nearly all of eastern Utah for multiple election cycles. He made a 3rd District bid in the 2017 special election that saw Curtis elected to Congress. Herrod proceeded to challenge the incumbent congressman in 2018 and 2022, winning the state Republican Partys convention nomination both times but losing to Curtis in the primary. With his high name-ID among party delegates, a consistent message focused on key issues and leftover material from past campaigns, Herrod said he is well positioned to enter the race once Curtis decision to swap the House for the Senate is finalized. Related I think its a perfect timing for me, Herrod told the Deseret News, joking, they might be tired that I stay around (but) I believe in these issues. The Republican Party has forgotten its roots, according to Herrod, who said he has proved his conservative bona fides on issues like immigration and crime while serving as a state lawmaker from 2007 to 2012. People know that I havent changed, Herrod said. Ive been consistent for 20 years on these issues. A future Herrod campaign would prioritize issues such as border security, parental rights in education and high housing costs, Herrod said. A handful of other candidates have also shown interest in a 3rd District run if Curtis leaves the seat open for contestation. State Sen. Mike Kennedy, R-Utah County, is exploring a campaign for Utahs 3rd District, he told the Deseret News last week. State Auditor John Frugal Dougall and Roosevelt Mayor Rod Bird Jr. also confirmed with the Deseret News that they were being encouraged to enter the race. While Curtis has not publicly announced his intention to forego his 2024 House reelection effort, it is widely speculated that his eyes are now firmly set on the U.S. Senate. Related People should keep a battery-powered radio, a torch and candles to hand in the event of a cyber attack, the Deputy Prime Minister has suggested. Oliver Dowden said householders needed to be ready for the potential collapse of digital devices in the event of a cyber attack sparking a power outage that could thrust Britons back to an analogue age. Speaking during a visit to Porton Down, the top secret defence establishment in Wiltshire, he said it was the Governments duty to review individuals resilience in the event of a catastrophic disaster that could knock out conventional communications and other systems. He announced that the Government would launch a resilience website next year that will explain to Britains 28 million households what they might need to do to cope with a catastrophe and what they could do to help others who may be more vulnerable. Oliver Dowden being shown laboratories at Porton Down where scientists investigate the biggest biological and chemical threats Mr Dowden, the minister responsible for ensuring the UK is prepared for a disaster, said this meant being resilient not only in a digital era but also in an analogue age. What were looking at is making sure that people are resilient if, for some reason, you have loss of power, he said. Do people still have in a cupboard under the stairs a torch or candles or whatever else. Individual resilience is something that Im revisiting again. What should we be saying to people to make sure that theyre just just prepared and personally resilient? Another example is radios. It always used to be the case that everyone would have access to a battery-operated FM radio. How many people actually have that kind of communication device that isnt reliant on digital and electric? If it was a public health emergency, the relevant officials would be on [the radio] and wed need to be able to communicate with people. We need to think about whether we have those resilient communications capabilities. So we shouldnt assume that the kind of resilience that we had as individuals when we were growing up is the same now because society has so massively digitised. During his visit, Mr Dowden was shown the laboratories at Porton Down, where scientists from the Ministry of Defence and NHS work on investigating and preparing contingencies for the biggest biological, chemical and physical threats to Britain. His visit came ahead of his presentation to Parliament on Monday of the first annual statement on the risks for Britain and its resilience in face of a natural or man-made disaster. It could be tomorrow that one of these things hits, said Mr Dowden, adding this was why the Government was looking to set up a resilience website. Its no good for me as a minister once the crisis hits suddenly thinking: What about the resilience of the individual? Thats not to take away from government responsibility, but part of my job is to try and co-ordinate that whole of society approach. Volunteering hub on new website The website will include a volunteering hub that will aim to harness peoples willingness to help vulnerable people in the aftermath of a disaster in the same way that during Covid volunteers worked at vaccination centres directing traffic or people, or transported food to others who had to self-isolate. Britons will be invited to sign up to the volunteering hub and detail their expertise such as first aid, medical or practical skills and experience working with children, the vulnerable or sick. It will be coordinated with volunteer organisations such as St John Ambulance. Mr Dowden also warned that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could turbocharge threats to the UK. The proverbial teenage kid in their bedroom with the application of AI is going to be a much better hacker than they were previously, he said. The ability of lone, malign individuals to be able to have greater capabilities to understand how to develop biological threats increases with AI. Likewise with chemical risks. AI should help us with our defences but it certainly enhances the risk landscape. 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. COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) Columbus police are searching for the driver of a vehicle that struck a cyclist on the east side of the city Sunday night. Just after 8:30 p.m. an adult riding a bicycle on East Livingston Avenue, just past the Browning Avenue intersection in Eastmoor, was struck by a dark colored vehicle, which was traveling westbound. The driver reportedly fled the scene, continuing west on E. Livingston Ave. Mall at Tuttle Crossing under new ownership as stores close The victim was taken to Grant Medical Center and listed in stable condition. The Accident Investigation Unit has opened a case into the hit-skip crash and asks that anyone with information to call the AIU at 614-645-4767. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to NBC4 WCMH-TV. NICOSIA (Reuters) - Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides will visit Egypt and Jordan on Tuesday as part of an initiative to establish a humanitarian aid corridor to Israeli-besieged Gaza. Cyprus, the closest European Union member state to the Middle East, has offered to host and operate facilities for sustained aid directly into the Gaza Strip once hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian militant Hamas group cease. Christodoulides planned to meet Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and King Abdullah of Jordan. There were "technical discussions" on the matter between Cypriot and Israeli officials on Sunday. The Cypriot plan is aimed at expanding capacity for humanitarian relief directly to the coastal Gaza Strip beyond limited deliveries being made through the Rafah crossing between Egypt and the Palestinian enclave. Such an aid corridor faces logistical, political and security challenges - Gaza has no port and its waters are shallow. Britain, which sent 80 tonnes of Gaza-destined aid in the form of mostly blankets and tents to Cyprus last week, has offered watercraft able to access the coastline without the need for special infrastructure if the corridor ever materialises, a source with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. As many as 80 percent of Gaza's 2.3 million people have fled their homes in an Israeli bombing campaign that has reduced much of the crowded coastal strip to a desolate wasteland. (Reporting by Michele Kambas; editing by Mark Heinrich) An 80-year-old woman died after she got trapped under a car in the driveway of her home in North Reading last week, officials announced Monday. Officers responding to a report of a person stuck under a car in her driveway near the corner of Fieldcrest and Hollywood terraces just before 8 p.m. on Nov. 29 freed the victim from underneath a Buick Regal, according to Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan and North Reading Chief of Police Mark Zimmerman. The woman, whose name hasnt been released, was taken to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead. A preliminary investigation suggested that the car belonged to the woman and that there was no occupant in the car at the time of the incident. It wasnt immediately known how the woman ended up under the Buick or what caused her to get trapped, but Ryan and Zimmerman said foul play isnt suspected. State troopers assigned to Ryans office are assisting North Reading police with the investigation. 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 Demonstrators gathered outside Austin Police headquarters to protest against law enforcement violence toward people of color on June 4, 2020. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune The Travis County district attorney dismissed criminal charges against a majority of Austin police officers accused of excessive force during May 2020 protests over police brutality and social justice, the office announced Monday afternoon. Instead of pursuing those charges, District Attorney Jose Garza also announced his office and the city of Austin have requested the U.S. Department of Justices Civil Rights Division investigate the police response to the protests. Garza was elected months after the 2020 protests on a platform to hold police accountable for abuse. Of the 21 police officers charged with aggravated assault during the 2020 protests, 17 officers have been cleared of charges, according to the Austin American-Statesman, who first reported the development. These announcements will allow police officers, whose lives were upended by the indictments, to return to their services to our community, Austin Mayor Kirk Watson said in a statement Monday. And the request for a targeted third-party performance review is meant to enhance transparency for our community and inform future actions as we continue our focus on building respect and trust for our police. Garza told the Statesman that in the two years since his office has investigated the Austin Police Department, systemic change is really necessary to make sure this never happens again in our community. An investigation by the Department of Justice was the best way to achieve that, Garza said. In April 2020, Austin police officer Christopher Taylor shot and killed Michael Ramos, who was Black and Hispanic. One month later, a white Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, setting off months of civil unrest and demonstrations against police brutality toward people of color. Ramos became the face of Black Lives Matter protests in Austin. Garzas effort to charge Taylor with murder ended in a mistrial, the second time this year, after the jury deliberated for four days last month, but could not agree if the Austin police officer murdered Ramos. Those protests, during which 21 officers were accused of using excessive force, resulted in a traumatic brain injury and broken bones after police used less-lethal munitions such as bean bag rounds and rubber bullets. The city has since paid protestors more than $18 million in civil lawsuits. There are eight civil lawsuits pending, according to the letter sent to the Department of Justice. Since then, the city stopped the use of less lethal shotgun munitions and cycled through two police chiefs. Garza and Watson requested the federal government conduct a pattern-or-practice investigation into the Austin polices response to demonstrations that took place May 30 and 31, when a number of protestors were injured by bean bag rounds in an effort to control crowds and protect property. The Justice Department declined to comment on The Texas Tribunes inquiry as to whether the federal agency would launch an investigation Monday evening. The district attorneys office said it would continue prosecuting four of the original 21 Austin police officers, but it was not clear Monday evening which individuals were still under indictment. Sacramento County authorities are investigating after a dead woman was spotted floating in a south Sacramento creek on Sunday. A woman called 911 dispatchers at about 2:06 p.m. saying she saw a woman floating in Morrison Creek near Steiner Drive. Sgt. Amar Gandhi, a spokesman for the Sacramento County Sheriffs Office, said her death wasnt deemed suspicious and referred inquiries to the Sacramento County Coroners Office. The Coroners Office went to nearby 53rd Avenue to retrieve the body. She hasnt yet been identified, and a cause of death hasnt been released. Firefighters with the Pacific Fruitridge Fire Protection District came to the scene to help lift the womans body out of a nearby canal, according to sheriffs dispatch audio. This is an undated photograph of Impala Platinum mine shaft 11, provided by Implats on Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2023, near Rustenburg, South Africa. An elevator suddenly dropped around 200 meters (656 feet) while carrying workers to the surface in a platinum mine in South Africa, killing 11 and injuring 75, the mine operator said Tuesday. It happened Monday evening at the end of the workers' shift at a mine in the northern city of Rustenburg. The injured workers were hospitalized. (Implats via AP) JOHANNESBURG (AP) The death toll from a mining tragedy last week in South Africa that involved an elevator has risen to 13 people after a worker died at a hospital, the mine operator said Monday. Impala Platinum said that the worker died Sunday from injuries sustained when the elevator plummeted around 200 meters (650 feet) down the shaft of a platinum mine while carrying workers to the surface after their shift on Nov. 27. Eleven workers died that day, while the latest victim was the second mineworker to die at a hospital. The mine operator said that 50 workers remained hospitalized, with eight of them in critical care. Impala Platinum and the South African government announced an investigation into what mine officials called a highly unusual tragedy. The industrial elevator was carrying 86 workers to the surface when it suddenly dropped back down into the shaft, which is a kilometer (about a -mile) deep. The mine in the northern city of Rustenburg was the world's biggest platinum producer last year. South Africa is by far the world's biggest platinum-producing country. Impala Platinum said it would hold a day of remembrance on Wednesday, when it would release the names of the workers who died. ___ AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa A decades-long tradition continues as dozens lined up and donated at a Roswell Walmart for this years Clarks Christmas Kids. For 33 years, WSBs Consumer Advisor Clark Howard has worked to make sure foster kids in Georgia get at least one gift for the holidays. On any December day it would be busy at Walmart, but this Sunday, volunteers were there to collect all the Christmas toys Georgias foster kids could want. [DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] I got books candy, Legos, lots of Legos, said Erin Flanagan who, along with her father, Steve, also brought a television for this years Clarks Christmas Kids. My dad, hes done this before and of course, I want to help the kids. Clarks Christmas Kids is no small undertaking. Thousands of kids across Georgia are in need. Currently, there are a little over 10,000 kids in care in the state of Georgia. Through our warehouse here in East Point we are going to serve about 7,000 of them, said Darrel Hooker with St. Vincent De Paul Georgia. This is just one of many steps to get these toys into the hands of those who could use the Christmas cheer. Were collecting toys from different sources. People here today at Walmart will buy toys with their own money and donate it to the project. We have corporations whove donated money, we will shop for those toys ourselves. Were going to get them all to the warehouse, were going to put a label on that kids Christmas wish list, so he or she is going to have all the three or four toys that they want, added Hooker. A caseworker will then deliver the toys in the days leading up to Christmas. For many, they donate year after year, including Grey Eatons class of special needs young adults. TRENDING STORIES: It was a lot of fun. The kids have been talking about it for the last 3-4 months, so they have a great time, said Eaton. They hope they can reach every Georgia foster child, making sure they feel special this holiday. If you want to donate online, you can shop, here. There are also two other chances to donate in person: Dec. 9 from 9 a.m.-noon: Walmart at 2635 Pleasant Hill Road, Duluth, GA 30096 Dec. 10 from 1 p.m.-3 p.m.: Walmart at 210 Cobb Pkwy SE, Marietta, GA 30060 [SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter] IN OTHER NEWS: MOBILE, Ala. (WKRG) Almost every day of the year has some sort of national or international observance associated with it, but what is so special about December 3rd? After all, the question consistently trends on Google. So, you might wonder about the significance. This article will dive into what Dec. 3 is all about. What is so special about the 3rd of December? The national day celebrated on Dec. 3 is National Roof Over Your Head Day, according to National Today, which tracks daily, weekly, and monthly observances. It was created to give people a day to be thankful for what they have, which typically starts with a roof over their heads. But the international day celebrated on Dec. 3 is International Day of Persons with Disabilities, according to the website. In 1992, the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution with this annual observance. This is the observance well explore in this article. The UNs goal is to promote the rights and well-being of people with disabilities. And to raise awareness of the political, economic, social and cultural aspects that disability affects worldwide. One billion people on the planet have a disability, which is about 15% of the population, according to the UNs Office for Outer Space Affairs. On the web, people raise awareness for the International Day of Persons with Disabilities with these hashtags: #InternationalDayOfPersonsWithDisabilities and #DayOfPersonsWithDisabilities. What is the theme of the Disability Day 2023? According to the United Nations website, the theme for International Day of Persons with Disabilities 2023 is United in action to rescue and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals for, with and by persons with disabilities. The United Nations website says its committed to fulfilling all human rights for disabled people. How the United States Observes Dec. 3: In 2023, President Joe Biden proclaimed Dec. 3 as International Day of Persons with Disabilities. I call on all Americans to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies, activities, and programs, Bidens proclamation reads in part. During International Day of Persons with Disabilities, local organizations may hold fundraisers for area nonprofit organizations that support disabled people, while others host award ceremonies to recognize disabled people and their achievements. Oftentimes, guest speakers will discuss the physical, mental, and societal issues that people with disabilities face or share personal stories. Other ideas to observe the day include educating children to respect people with disabilities and donating to an organization that supports disabled people. Alabama and Florida Resources of People with Disabilities: Alabama and Florida have several resources for helping people with disabilities. Here are a few examples. Protection and Advocacy Organizations: These organizations provide help to people with disabilities to expand and defend their rights with self-advocacy groups and legal assistance. These organizations are part of the Disability Rights Network. Aging and Disability Resource Centers: These organizations provide services for older adults and people with disabilities, including home health care and assistive technology. Other Disability Advocacy Organizations: These organizations help protect and advocate for civil and human rights for people with disabilities. Alabama: The Arc of Alabama Florida: Florida Center for Inclusive Communities Family Network on Disabilities The Arc of Florida Statewide Independent Living Council: This council removes barriers to independent living for disabled people and increases necessary support and services. Both are part of the National Council on Independent Living. Other State Agencies: These agencies help people with disabilities, their families and caregivers get free or low-cost services. Regional Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Center: This center provides information, training and guidance on disability access and statewide disability services. Developmental Disabilities Services: These services address the needs of people with developmental disabilities and advocate for community inclusion and access to disability services statewide. Mental Health Services: These services address the needs of people with mental illness and promote mental health. Some offer free or low-cost group counseling and education programs. Physical Disabilities Services: These services provide free or low-cost disability services for people of all ages, with physical therapy, employment and education access, independent living support, and assistive technology. Traumatic Brain Injury Services: These services provide information and resources for those who have experienced traumatic brain injuries and their families. Addiction and Substance Abuse Services: These services provide information and resources for those with substance abuse and their families. ALSO ON WKRG.com: Moss Point man arrested for voyeurism in Mobile County to face Grand Jury For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WKRG News 5. Video of an abandoned hospital in northern Gaza taken by a journalist appears to show the decaying bodies of several premature babies who had to be left behind as Israeli forces closed in on the facility earlier this month. The footage was shot by Emirati TV channel Al-Mashhads Mohammed Baalousha from inside the pediatric intensive care unit of al-Nasr Childrens Hospital during the weeklong ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, around two weeks after the hospitals staff were told to leave. Both The Washington Post and NBC News obtained and reviewed the footage, which the Post said it had verified by comparing it to images of the facility from before the war. The video, which was partially blurred when aired by Al-Mashhad, showed the molding bodies of at least three of the five babies left behind, according to NBC. A terrible and horrific scene, Baalousha told the Post. Dr. Mustafa Al-Kahlot, the hospitals director, told NBC that the babies, several of whom had been on oxygen machines, could not have been safely evacuated. Read it at The Washington Post Read more at The Daily Beast. Ukraines Defence Ministry has issued a warning to Telegram users about fake accounts allegedly belonging to Defence Minister Rustem Umierov. Source: Defence Ministry on Facebook Quote: "Unknown individuals are using the name of the Ukrainian Defence Minister to collect information from Ukrainian citizens. These people have created an account on Telegram using the name of the Ukrainian Defence Minister. Today they started harvesting data, pretending to be an official channel of information. Please note that Rustem Umierov does not have a Telegram account. Please do not provide any information requested by the individuals who run this account, and send in a complaint about it." Details: Later, the Ministry of Defence noted that thanks to the efforts of Ukrainians, the account in question has been labelled as fake. However, there is another fake account purporting to be run by Umierov: https://t.me/Umerov_Rustem0/34. Support UP or become our patron! LBT is well-known for its 6094 Plate Carrier On November 28, 2023, the Department of Homeland Security announced a settlement of nearly $2.1 million to be paid by London Bridge Trading Company, Ltd. for the sale of fraudulent products to the U.S. government. Based in Virginia, LBT was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations Norfolk, the Defense Criminal Investigative Services Mid-Atlantic field office, the Armys Criminal Investigation Divisions Major Procurement Fraud field office, the General Services Administrations Office of Inspector General and the Defense Logistics Agency. Something's not quite right here (DHS) Since at least 2008, LBT made false claims that its products are 100% American-made in compliance with the Buy American Act and Berry Amendment . However, the investigation revealed that many of LBT's products were actually made in Peru, Mexico and China. Upon their importation into the U.S., the foreign manufacturer's tags were removed and replaced with "Made in USA" tags. Beyond its government contracts, including those with the Department of Defense, LBT sold these fraudulent products on the GSA Advantage website, where government agencies can purchase from contracted vendors. Boxes of LBT tactical equipment (DHS) The DHS announcement notes that the Defense Logistics Agency's Columbus, Ohio, supply center purchased a variety of textile-based products from LBT. These included clothing, armor, boots, belts, bags, rope, slings, backpacks and medical pouches. The settlement the company was ordered to pay specifically addressed load-out bags violating the Trade Agreements Act and the Berry Amendment. "We greatly appreciate the steadfast, thorough and collaborative work on this case by each of the federal agencies involved," U.S. Attorney Kenneth L. Parker said in the announcement. "This office takes very seriously the duty of government contractors to meet all of their obligations under government contracts and we will pursue anyone falsely certifying compliance with the Buy American Act." An ABU-pattern LBT product with conflicting tags (DHS) The settlement also resolves a claim made against LBT by an employee of the company under the qui tam provisions of the False Claims Act. They provide for a private party, known as a realtor, to file an action on behalf of the United States. As a result, the realtor is entitled to 15-25% of the government's recovery. In the case of LBT's fraud, the realtor had a personal stake; her son was killed in action in Iraq in 2004. She believes that the fraudulent equipment sold by the company posed a threat to the safety of troops who used it. An LBT 6094 with a Made in Peru sticker (DHS) "The London Bridge Trading Company deliberately deceived their customers and the U.S. government into believing they were buying American-made products, while selling them cheaper foreign merchandise," HSI Washington, D.C. Special Agent in Charge Derek W. Gordon said in the announcement. He went on to echo the realtor's concerns, saying, "LBT potentially put the lives of our military personnel at risk by selling our government inferior protective equipment produced overseas." Foreign-made Mechanix gloves are extremely popular in the military (U.S. Marine Corps) While government purchases must comply with legislation like the Buy American Act, foreign-made products are not necessarily inferior. For example, Mechanix gloves are a mainstay in the U.S. military but are made overseas, largely in China. To that end, LBT offers many of its products under its London Bridge X brand. These products are marked as made overseas but still include the company's lifetime warranty. However, their origin is presented truthfully and their price reflects this. A death investigation is underway after a man was found dead in front yard of DeLand home, according to the Volusia County Sheriffs Office. Deputies responded to the 800 block of South Massachusetts Avenue after a 911 caller found the adult male victim unconscious in the front yard. WATCH CHANNEL 9 EYEWITNESS NEWS When deputies arrived, around 10:45 p.m., they found the victim 50-year-old Hector Hernandez Pasquale with gunshot wounds. The victim was pronounced dead at the scene, Read: Family and friends continue desperate search for missing Mount Dora mother of three Deputies have not said whether the victim lives at the house. Detectives are actively investigating and pursuing potential leads, according to a news release. Read: Man accused of double murder is in custody of Orange County Sheriffs Office Anyone with information can contact the Sheriffs Office at 386-248-1777, call Crime Stoppers of Northeast Florida at 888-277-TIPS, or submit a tip via the P3 Tips app. Read: New indoor ice skating rink opening in Orlando Click here to download our free news, weather and smart TV apps. And click here to stream Channel 9 Eyewitness News live. Residents in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Koreatown flooded the streets Sunday to protest the citys approval of an historic rent increase next year. Tenants from across the neighborhood, along with members of the Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU) began the morning demonstration by marching from the Normandie Recreation Center at 1550 South Normandie Avenue. Other groups, including the Palestinian Youth Movement, Jewish Voice for Peace and the L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America also participated in the march. Google apologizes for sending SoCal-bound drivers on road to nowhere LATU is demanding that the L.A. City Council and the mayors office put an end to the rent increase as well as any evictions and the cancellation of any COVID-related rent debt. Members said that they want to see secure housing and a healthy neighborhood life centered on community needs. Demonstrators march to protest city's approval of rent hikes in L.A. We think this is an outrage when salaries are not increasing, but rent is increasing, Magdelano Rosales, an organizer with LATU told KTLA. In fact, we think that rent is more than high enough. In fact, rent should probably be way lower than it is. The approval of the rent increase means that hundreds of thousands of L.A. families could see their rents going up by about 6% in the next year. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KTLA. GRAND HAVEN, Mich. (WOOD) Ottawa County sheriffs detectives say a faith leader accused of sexually assaulting a teenager through a Catholic church in Ottawa County is suspected of molesting others. Deputies say they found computer evidence showing more possible victims. James Jimmy Beauchamp, 55, of Kentwood, is accused of second-degree criminal sexual conduct, child sexually abusive activity, using a computer to commit a crime and furnishing alcohol to a minor. The allegations, deputies say, involved a 17-year-old boy. Obviously, its a disturbing case with some serious allegations and serious charges, Ottawa County Sheriffs Capt. Jacob Sparks said. We suspect there may be other people out there that were victimized by Mr. Beauchamp, Sparks added. Beauchamp, who has no known criminal record, was working as a faith leader for teens and young adults at St. Patrick-St. Anthony Catholic Parish in Grand Haven. His position provided him access to those youth, Sparks said. I dont know if he was using it to target them, but he had access to the kids because of his position. Deputies say it happened at the Rodeway Inn in Grand Haven, less than three minutes from the church. Beauchamp is accused of providing the victim with alcohol, sexually assaulting him and taking photographs without the teenagers consent. The sheriffs department said it started investigating in August. In a statement, the Catholic Diocese of Grand Rapids said that when the allegations were brought to the diocese, it reported them to authorities. Calling the charges deeply troubling, it said Beauchamp was fired after the allegations came to light. Full statement from Catholic Diocese of Grand Rapids Court records show Beauchamp had most recently worked for Wedgwood Christian Services in Kentwood, where deputies said he was arrested. They said the allegations dont involve his work at Wedgwood. A Wedgwood spokesman said Beauchamp worked in the office and had no contact with patients. Hes since been fired. The sheriffs department asked any other possible victims to come forward. During our review of the digital evidence, our investigation has led us to believe there could be other victims out there that have not yet reported these crimes to law enforcement, and thats what leads me to ask for any of those victims to come forward, Sparks said. Anyone with information can contact the sheriffs office at 616.738.4025 or Silent Observer at 1.877.88.SILENT (745368) or mosotips.com. Beauchamp is being held in the Ottawa County Jail on a $500,000 bond. Hes expected in court later this month to determine if theres enough evidence to stand trial. News 8s Madalyn Buursma contributed to this report. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WOODTV.com. Derek Chauvin has returned to prison after the former Minneapolis police officer was stabbed 22 times by a fellow inmate, his attorney said. Chauvin, who was convicted in the 2020 murder of George Floyd, was allegedly stabbed with an improvised knife Nov. 24 while in the law library at Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, Arizona, by inmate John Turscak, 52, according to a criminal complaint. Chauvins attorney Gregory M. Erickson, said in a statement Sunday that he spoke with Chauvins family Saturday and they confirmed that this medical condition has improved to the extent that he has been removed from the trauma care facility at a local Tucson hospital and returned to prison custody for his follow up care. His family is very concerned about the facilitys capacity to protect Derek from further harm. They remain unassured that any changes have been made to the faulty procedures that allowed Dereks attack to occur in the first place, Erickson added. Turscak has been charged with attempted murder, assault with intent to commit murder, assault with a dangerous weapon and assault resulting in serious bodily injury in connection with the stabbing, according to federal prosecutors. Attorney information for Turscak was not available Monday. He told federal prosecutors he chose that day to attack Chauvin, the day after Thanksgiving commonly known as Black Friday, to symbolize the Black Lives Matter movement and the black hand symbol of the Mexican mafia. Turscak also told corrections officers that he would have killed Chauvin had they not responded to the attack so quickly, according to the criminal complaint. "Dereks family did receive confirmation from Derek himself that the facts contained in the charging document are accurate; the attack was made in the law library, where the perpetrator attacked Derek from behind with an improvised knife," Erickson said. The attorney echoed Chauvins family's safety concerns about the prison, saying when he tried to get information regarding changes in the prisons procedures, he was told to make a Freedom of Information Act request. "It remains a mystery how the perpetrator was able to obtain and possess dangerous materials [that were able to be formed into an improvised knife], and how a guard was unable to reach and apprehend the perpetrator until Derek had been stabbed twenty-two times," Erickson said. "Why was Derek allowed into the law library without a guard in close enough proximity to stop a possible attack? His family continues to wonder." "We will continue to try to ascertain what additional measures are being made to protect Derek and will pursue any avenues available under the law to ensure his continued safety," he added. Chauvin is serving a sentence of 22 years for kneeling on Floyds neck for 9 minutes while the Black man said he couldnt breathe and went limp. The former officer is simultaneously serving a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyds civil rights and a 22-year state sentence for second-degree murder. This article was originally published on NBCNews.com Two people are accused of kidnapping an ex-girlfriend and holding her hostage for several hours before seriously injuring her with a vehicle and a knife. Jordan Mangum, 40, of Indianola, has been charged with first-degree kidnapping, willful injury and violation of a no-contact order. Mangum allegedly took his ex-girlfriend from her Des Moines home at about 2:30 p.m. Saturday, bound and blindfolded, to his home in Indianola, according to court documents. Jessica Wheeler, 34, was charged Monday evening with first-degree kidnapping. He allegedly held her there for a "period of time" before driving her to an unknown location about 15 minutes from the Clarke County Hospital in Osceola, the criminal complaint says. That's where he allegedly assaulted the victim, court documents and police say. Des Moines Police announced Wheeler's arrest in a Facebook post. The department did not detail her involvement but said "evidence indicates that she is a co-conspirator" in the case. The victim was choked, run over by the vehicle, and had her throat cut, said a Facebook post from the Des Moines Police Department. The victim pleaded for her attacker to stop. The victim was placed back in the vehicle and was driven to the Clarke County Hospital and dropped off in the street. Sgt. Paul Parizek, spokesperson for the Des Moines Police Department, said it took the victim about five minutes to get herself inside the hospital. She was hurt bad obviously, but she was able to get herself into the building," he said. The woman was taken to a Des Moines hospital for surgery, DMPD's Facebook post said. The Facebook post states that officers worked nearly 24 hours straight over the weekend on the investigation, which began at roughly 9 p.m. Saturday when Osceola police notified Des Moines police of the crime. Parizek said the speed of the investigation was in part due to inter-agency cooperation between the Des Moines, Osceola and Indianola police departments. It was incredibly helpful to have officers down there gathering information for us in real time with the victim and gathering evidence for us, Parizek said. When the victim was transferred up here to the Des Moines hospitals, there wasn't a lot of work that we needed to do down on that Osceola end. Mangum was arrested late Sunday afternoon and is being held in the Polk County Jail on a $1 million cash bond. Wheeler was arrested Monday evening. A bond has not yet been set. Biong M. Biong is a reporter for the Register. Reach him at bbiong@dmreg.com. This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Police arrest two in kidnapping, bond set at $1 million Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley are neck-and-neck for second place in the 2024 GOP primary, new polling shows, while former President Trump holds onto first with a wide lead. A NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ poll found 11 percent of Republican voters picked DeSantis as their first choice, and 10 percent picked Haley. The pair of White House hopefuls have been jostling for the second-place slot behind Trump, hoping to narrow the former presidents lead. Trump snagged 60 percent support, a wide double-digit lead over his two closest competitors, according to the survey. The other candidates have struggled to close the gap. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy scored around 6 percent, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) saw roughly 3 percent. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) each got just 1 percent or less. DeSantis was long considered the former presidents closest rival, but Haley has seen boosts from her debate performances over the last few weeks and has appeared to close in on the Florida governor for the runner-up slot in some states. Qualified GOP presidential candidates are headed this week to the partys fourth debate in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where theyll go head-to-head in whats likely one of their last opportunities to make their case to a wide Republican audience before voting kicks off in January. Trump, who skipped the first three debates, plans to sit this one out also. Instead, he is scheduled to attend a private fundraiser in Florida, a source familiar with the plans confirmed to The Hill. The former president faces a number of hurdles as he tries to return to the White House, including multiple ongoing legal battles. A 57 percent majority of all survey respondents, including 29 percent of Republicans, said they support disqualifying Trump from the ballot if he is convicted in one or more of the criminal cases he faces. The NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ poll surveyed 1,090 registered, self-identified Republican voters between Nov. 26-27, and it has a margin of error of roughly 2 percentage points. NewsNation, who will host the Dec. 6 debate, is owned by Nexstar Media Group, which also owns The Hill. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. TALLAHASSEE With Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump turning attacks on prosecutors into a central part of his campaign, his nearest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, faces a pivotal moment of his own after punishing an elected state attorney. Monique Worrell, removed by DeSantis in August as prosecutor for Orange and Osceola counties, goes Wednesday before the Florida Supreme Court in a bid to get her job back. The only elected Black state attorney in Florida, Worrell was ousted for what the governor said was her political agenda. He accused Worrell of being fundamentally derelict in her job and tried to make his case by citing records showing that a number of gun criminals, drug-traffickers and other offenders received reduced sentences or had charges lessened or dismissed in her Central Florida circuit. Gov. Ron DeSantis' ouster of two Democratic state attorneys may have overtones of former President Donald Trump's pledge to go after prosecutors. She was the second elected Democratic state attorney suspended by DeSantis. Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren is still appealing in federal court his ouster last year over what DeSantis viewed as his progressive political stance. Warren was removed after joining with more than 80 prosecutors around the country signing a pledge that they would not prosecute people who seek or provide abortions or transgender health care. DeSantis sought out prosecutors ripe for removal Records show Warren was suspended after DeSantis had directed staff to search for prosecutors who could be portrayed as going easy on criminals. DeSantis has touted his removal of Warren and Worrell repeatedly during his flagging presidential campaign, most recently during Thursdays Fox News debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Worrell, in her filings with the Florida Supreme Court, says DeSantis is acting outside the law. The suspension power is not a limitless 'take my word for it' license for the governor to suspend anyone with whom the governor has a policy dispute, attorneys for Worrell told justices in her petition for reinstatement. They added that DeSantiss action creates uncertainty for any elected official, particularly state attorneys, as to how their conduct might lead to suspension and potential removal from office. Ouster over policy means, 'Katie bar the door' State Attorney Dave Aronberg in a portrait at the State Attorney's Office in West Palm Beach, Fla., on February 6, 2023. Dave Aronberg, one of only four Democrats still serving as prosecutors across Floridas 20 judicial circuits, agreed. He removed her over policy differences. When you start down that road, its Katie bar the door, Aronberg said. The Southern Poverty Law Center also filed a federal lawsuit Thursday in Orlando challenging DeSantis suspension of Worrell, claiming it violates the constitutional rights of the voters who elected her. DeSantis, in his now longshot White House campaign, where he has fallen far behind Trump, promotes Florida as a law and order state. Trump also has demonized prosecutors he didnt agree with and has proved particularly vicious toward those who have filed criminal charges against him in Georgia, New York, Washington, D.C., and Florida. Hes promised, if elected next year, to conduct sweeping civil rights investigations into local district attorneys offices, mostly in Democratic cities. Trump has fanned claims that people, like himself, are being targeted merely for their conservative ideas, although he does face 91 felony counts for a range of alleged criminal offenses. Trump promises investigations of prosecutors Donald Trump arrives in court for his arraignment April 4, 2023. Trump earlier this year in Manchester, New Hampshire, pledged, On day one of my new administration, I will direct the (U.S. Department of Justice) to investigate every radical district attorney and attorney general in America for their illegal, racist ... enforcement of the law. While scores of analysts warn that the language used by Trump and DeSantiss actions defy the long-established rule of law and democracy, theyre seen as appealing to the Republican voting base. DeSantis ousts second Dem prosecutor: DeSantis suspends Central Florida prosecutor, points to her 'political agenda' Proposal to redraw circuits rejected: GOP idea to overhaul Florida judicial circuits rejected by panel In Trumps case, it reinforces his arguments about all this being a witch hunt, said Michael Binder, a political scientist and pollster at the University of North Florida. DeSantis is a different story, going after prosecutors on policy grounds. Thats an entirely different motive, but they both potentially play well with a Republican primary electorate, which is all that matters for both guys. In his own filings with the Supreme Court, where he has appointed five of the seven justices who will hear Worrells case, DeSantis defended her removal as part of his constitutional responsibility. She did not fulfill that public trust, lawyers for the governor wrote of Worrell, elected in 2020 with 67% of the vote in Orange and Osceola counties. Instead, Ms. Worrell adopted practices and policies that seriously impeded the pursuit of justice and thwarted the will of the Legislature, they wrote. Gov. Ron DeSantis therefore carried out his constitutional responsibility entrusted to him by all the people of Florida to suspend her for neglect of duty and incompetence. Attorney Monique Worrell of the 9th Judicial Circuit, which serves Orange and Osceola counties, speaks during a press conference, Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2023, outside her former office in the Orange County Courthouse complex in Orlando, Fla. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Worrell on Wednesday, again wielding his executive power over local government in taking on a contentious issue in the 2024 presidential race. Worrell vowed to seek reelection next year and said her removal was political and not about her performance. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel via AP) Crime down in Central Florida circuit Worrell has countered that crime had decreased in her circuit during her two-and-a-half years in office. But she drew fire from Central Florida law enforcement and seemed to catch DeSantis eye after declining to bring more serious charges following several high-profile shootings and other violent crimes. Three months before her removal, Worrell accused DeSantis of pursuing this witch-hunt to establish a basis for the removal of another duly-elected prosecutor, when she learned that a Central Florida Republican Party official had sought prosecution data from her office regarding human-trafficking cases. DeSantis replaced Worrell with Andrew Bain, an Orange County judge. But Worrell said she plans on running for reelection next year. Warren who is also considering running again for his old job, fought back with a federal lawsuit, challenging his removal. U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle in January ruled his suspension violated the Florida Constitution and U.S. Constitution. Hinkle, however, said he lacked the authority to reinstate the prosecutor, a decision Warren is now appealing. When Worrell was removed by DeSantis, Warren called it another illegal and unconstitutional attack on democracy by a small, scared man who is desperate to save his political career. Binder said justices may be wary about endorsing DeSantis move in the Worrell case. Members of the judiciary do hold the judiciary to a different standard than the political process, he said. Viewing a political intrusion like this, its possible they might say, Hey, with threats like this, maybe he comes after us next. John Kennedy is a reporter in the USA TODAY Networks Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jkennedy2@gannett.com, or on X at @JKennedyReport. This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Courts: Trump and DeSantis target prosecutors, rattling rule of law Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) suggested at a campaign stop Saturday that he would move part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to Iowa if elected to the White House. The GOP presidential candidate said at a campaign stop in Newton, Iowa that under his administration, he would be laser focused on returning power to the states, including potentially moving agencies out of the nations capital to states. He said that Iowa could be the new home to the USDA if elected president. A number of people said that they dont like USDA, Washington bureaucrats interfering with how people are farming, and they would much rather have this agency be run with people from their own communities, he said. We will answer the call and what people suggested here in Iowa, you guys will have first dibs on the Department of Agriculture, he added. Well send it to Iowa, and you guys take care of it. He also reiterated his campaign promise to slash the size of federal agencies by 50 percent. DeSantis has repeatedly vowed to eliminate several federal agencies and move several of them out of Washington, D.C. The Florida governor has said that he plans to reduce the size of the agencies by 50 percent through layoffs, transferring employees out of D.C. and through attrition after people retire. DeSantis has also projected confidence for his campaign in Iowa as the state caucuses approach in a little over a month. He said Sunday on NBCs Meet the Press that he is going to win the caucus, adding that he expects the GOP primary field to narrow by then. A late October poll by Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa found DeSantis tied for second place with former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who surged 10 points since August. Forty-three percent said former President Trump was their first-choice candidate, giving him a 27-point lead over his closest challengers. DeSantis secured a key endorsement last month from Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R), who had previously said she would stay neutral in the 2024 primary. He also kept his promise to visit all 99 counties in Iowa a milestone known as the full Grassley. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. So now its Ron DeSantis announcing plans to go after Obamacare. Sounds awfully familiar and exceedingly out of touch with voters. It was only last week that former President Donald Trump made threats against Obamacare, the increasingly popular healthcare insurance program that Florida has embraced more than any other state. He said on social media that he was seriously looking at alternatives and urged Republicans to Never give up! Not to be outdone by his opponent for the Republican nomination for president and as the January Iowa caucuses creep ever closer DeSantis had something to say during a TV interview over the weekend. He also attacked the Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare) and promised to come up with a better plan. And yet, like Trump, theres no actual plan to discuss. Conveniently, the Florida governors plan wont be released until spring. The way things are going, its pretty unlikely hell be a presidential contender at that point. This all feels so old and tired. How long have we been hearing about how Republicans would repeal and replace Obamacare? At least back to 2017, when Sen. John McCain stymied their efforts to ditch the ACA. Republicans really have to come up with something else to say. It doesnt matter how they dress it up, either. Trump has his alternatives while DeSantis promised to replace and supersede. Its all the same thing in different words, and it hasnt gotten anywhere. Meanwhile, more and more people continue to enroll in Obamacare plans, making the prospects of repealing it even tougher and potentially alienating a whole lot of voters who depend on their insurance plans if they are pulled out from under them. A record 3.2 million people in Florida had obtained health insurance under the ACA as of early this year, a 19% increase over the previous year. Nationwide, that number reached 15.7 million. And Obamacare was signed into law 13 years ago. Thats a pretty long time, long enough for people to get used to it. All this talk of replacing it with no real actual way to do it is a political ploy, nothing more. People may not love their insurance plans on Obamacare, but you could say that about a lot of insurance plans, even the ones provided by employers. Trump, of course, is great at this kind of thing. He loves to casually toss out ideas with no intention of pursuing them. He knows most people wont follow up or remember the promises he made and broke. He just riles up the crowd and moves on. DeSantis, Trumps protegee, apparently has learned at least that lesson from the ex-president. The governors NBC Meet the Press interview featured a bunch of great-sounding words more transparency, more consumer choice, more affordable options, less red tape, less bureaucracy weighing everybody down but no concrete plan. But he did use that opportunity to try, once again, to make the case that hes not just another Trump-like figure on the campaign trail. He criticized Trump for not following through on multiple vows to dismantle Obamacare, saying: This is part of a pattern where hes running on things that he didnt do. The interview was conducted as DeSantis announced hed held events in all 99 Iowa counties, part of his big bet on the state to give him momentum heading into the early primaries. And yet Trump continues to lead the GOP field by wide margins, as much as 40% ahead of DeSantis. Maybe thats what gave DeSantis the impetus to offer his version of a healthcare fairy tale, just like Trump. Heres what I will do. What I think theyre going to need to do is have a plan that will supersede Obamacare that will lower prices for people so that they can afford healthcare while also making sure that people with pre-existing conditions are protected. Promises, promises. LAS VEGAS (KLAS) Las Vegas Metro police detectives found a Nevada State Police badge inside the car of a driver who allegedly drove impaired and collided with two state troopers, killing them last week, the 8 News Now Investigators have learned. Police arrested Jemarcus Williams, 46, at an apartment complex near MLK Boulevard and Owens Avenue around 9 a.m. Thursday, the 8 News Now Investigators first reported. A judge set Williams bail at $500,000 during his first court appearance Friday. Williams ordered a bottle of Hennessy and four vodka drinks with another man at the Palms Casino Resort before the hit-and-run, according to documents the 8 News Now Investigators obtained. In a second document the 8 News Now Investigators obtained Monday, detectives said Williams also ordered a drink at about 9:30 p.m. Wednesday, shared the bottle service with several people and then ordered another drink. Around 1 a.m. Thursday, Willams and another man were recorded on surveillance video entering the Palms, police said in documents the 8 News Now Investigators obtained. The men then ordered the bottle of Hennessy and the three vodka drinks at the propertys Ghost Bar, police said. Jemarcus Williams, the man accused to hitting and killing two Nevada State Police officers, appears in court for the first time on Dec. 1, 2023. (KLAS) At 3:01 a.m., Williams returned to the casino floor but then took the elevator to the Ghost Bar again, police said. There, hotel security officers approached him. Two minutes later, security [generated] a report that they are escorting an intoxicated man out, documents said. At 3:15 a.m., Williams left the casino with the security officers, police said. Williams then hid behind a tree and, six minutes later, got into the car, prosecutors said. The crash, which killed Sgt. Michael Abbate and Trooper Alberto Felix, was reported around 3:24 a.m. The impact caused the two men to fall from the offramp to the road below, sources said. Police arrested Williams around 9 a.m. and took two samples of his blood one around noon and one around 1 p.m. Williams first blood draw returned a blood-alcohol level of 0.19; the second a 0.17, documents said. The legal limit in Nevada is 0.08. During a vehicle search, police said they found a Nevada State Police metal badge in the car, documents said. It was unclear how the badge ended up in the car, which police said was registered in Williams wifes name. Documents also indicate prosecutors suspect THC or marijuana affected Williams ability to drive, documents said. Williams was facing two felony counts, each of DUI resulting in death, reckless driving resulting in death, and failing to stop at the scene of a crash. Prosecutors added three charges to the case on Monday, including speeding and failure to decrease speed for an emergency vehicle. Sources told 8 News Now Investigators he smelled of alcohol when officers took him into custody. The crash and ensuing investigation resulted in the northbound lanes of I-15 through the Spaghetti Bowl being closed for around 12 hours. Judge Daniel Westmeyer scheduled Williams next court date for Dec. 5. Should Williams post bail, he would have to wear an ankle monitor with GPS and alcohol monitoring. Palms Casino Resort is fully cooperating with Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department regarding its investigation into the tragic hit-and-run incident involving two Nevada Highway Patrol officers, a spokesperson for the Palms said Saturday. All of us at Palms Casino Resort extend our deepest sympathies to the officers and their families. Felixs service was scheduled for Friday, Dec. 8 at 10:30 a.m. at Central Church in Henderson. Abbates service was scheduled for Monday, Dec. 11 at 10:30 a.m. at Central Church in Henderson. Both memorial services are open for the community to attend. The services will also be available to live stream on NSPs YouTube channel. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KLAS. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan listens as Wayne County Executive Warren Evans talks about the city's drop in homicides Monday at a news conference at the Guardian Building downtown. Detroit is close to recording its fewest number of yearly homicides in nearly 60 years, according to a gun violence reduction partnership among city, state and county officials who announced the data on Monday. As of Nov. 30, the city had recorded 228 homicides this year, an 18% drop compared to the 276 homicides during the same time last year. In 2018, Detroit recorded 261 homicides, the city's fewest since 1966, a year prior to the Detroit riot in 1967. Total nonfatal shootings in the city are down 13% and carjackings are down 36% compared to this time last year, Detroit police data indicates. Leadership, teamwork and a commitment to the community were key components of this initiative, said Wayne County Executive Warren Evans, who took the lead in coordinating efforts among the agencies and the courts. Our data shows that 50 fewer Detroiters will lose their lives to gun violence in 2023 and 100 fewer will suffer gunshot injuries." The coordinated effort targeted seven key areas: Reducing felony gun case backlogs in Wayne County Circuit and 36th District courts; increasing staffing for the Wayne County Prosecutor's and Sheriff's offices, as well as the Detroit Police Department; increasing coordination between the Wayne County prosecutor and DPD on shooting and homicide cases; increasing accountability for defendants released on tether to the Wayne County Sheriff's Office; increasing accountability from the Michigan Department of Corrections for those on probation and parole; and the implementation of the FAST unit, a joint fugitive apprehension unit of DPD and the Sheriff's Office, which apprehended nearly 1,000 individuals with outstanding felony warrants this year, prioritizing those wanted for gun crimes. "The commitment and dedication of all of the stakeholders involved in these efforts have resulted in positive and significant progress," said 36th District Court Chief Judge William McConico, who also was part of this coordinated effort. "Our community has and will continue to benefit by the work that has been done, and I am eager to see how we build upon these impressive outcomes." In addition to Evans and McConico, the officials who make up the gun violence reduction coalition include Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, Detroit Police Chief James White, Wayne County Sheriff Raphael Washington, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, Wayne County Circuit Court Chief Judge Patricia Fresard and Michigan Department of Corrections Director Heidi Washington. The coalition was created in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when cities nationwide recorded particularly bloody years and court backlogs wreaked havoc within the criminal justice system. It received $2.5 million in state funding in 2021 and $12.5 million in 2023 toward public safety initiatives, members said. "This is a day that we've been waiting for for a long time," Duggan said at a Monday afternoon press conference. He described the number of children in Detroit who hear gunfire when they go to bed at night, or the number of teenagers who know someone killed by gun violence, as "heartbreaking." Worthy called the decline in total homicides "unprecedented progress made." And White said this is a moment "we need to really embrace." While Detroit's total homicides and nonfatal shootings are on the decline, Detroit police data shows some individual precincts still struggle with an uptick in violent crime: Homicides in Detroit's 2nd Precinct on the city's northwest side have increased 17% compared to this time last year; homicides in the 4th Precinct in southwest Detroit increased 44%; and homicides in the 5th Precinct on the east side increased 21%. Nonfatal shootings in the northwest 2nd Precinct and east side 7th Precinct both have increased about 28% so far in 2023. Detroits population has fallen from 1.58 million people in 1966 to an estimated 620,376 in 2022, according to U.S. census data. Coalition touts reductions in felony gun case backlog and more One of the key factors helping to drive down violence in the city has been aggressively targeting the backlog in felony gun cases. Felony gun cases pending trial in Wayne County Circuit Court have decreased from 4,000 in January 2022 to 1,330 in November 23, a 67% reduction, according to the coalition. In 36th District Court, more than 2,000 pretrial felony gun cases were pending in January 2022, according to the coalition. By November 2023, that number had dropped 80% to 415 cases. Judge Fresard said Monday that the courts came back from the COVID-19 pandemic stronger due to the coalition's efforts. The coalition also said it believes increased wages for Detroit police officers and Wayne County Sheriff's deputies have helped fill agency vacancies. Also, better coordination and communication between the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office and Detroit police, including bringing back the "community prosecutors" initiative where assistant prosecutors are working inside Detroit's 12th, 2nd, 8th and 9th precincts, have reduced pending homicide warrants by 25%. And, officials said, they are looking to expand that program to even more precincts in the future. This collaboration is unique in that issues are identified, solutions discussed, and these solutions are implemented. It is not just talk, talk, talk, Worthy said. "We have and continue to tackle serious issues gun violence, lack of resources, backlogs, training, recruitment and retention, police officer no shows, and other system failures that needed fixing. Many of these are longstanding problems that we have been successfully tackling in a very meaningful way." Andrea Sahouri covers criminal justice for the Detroit Free Press. She can be contacted at 313-264-0442 or asahouri@freepress.com. This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit close to fewest homicides in nearly 60 years (WHTM) The history of Christmas trees dates back to the times of ancient Egypt, but the modern tradition was started in 16th century Germany. Christians in Germany placed wood pyramids inside their homes and adorned them with evergreens and candles. When German settlers made their way to Pennsylvania they brought the tradition with them. According to History.com, the German settlers began putting up community trees in Pennsylvania in 1747, but the first recorded Christmas tree display was in the 1830s. Still, many Americans didnt accept the tradition until after the 1840s because they saw the trees as a pagan symbol. Queen Victoria helped popularize Christmas trees when a drawing of her and her family gathered around a decorated tree was published in the London News in 1846. Those on the East Coast of America followed the British with the latest fad of putting up Christmas trees. Ornaments became popularized in America in the 1890s and Americans started to favor tall Christmas trees that touched the ceilings of their homes and buildings. These are the most magical Christmas towns in Pensylvania In the early 20th century most Americans had begun making their own decorations for their trees. German-Americans like those settled in Pennsylvania stuck to their traditions of using apples, nuts and marzipan cookies, according to History.com. Later once electricity was invented string lights led to more grand, bright and less fire-prone Christmas tree displays. They were a safer alternative to the traditional method of placing candles on the trees branches. Christmas trees continued to become more popular inside peoples homes. Community displays also reached new heights that the German settlers who put up the first tree display in Pennsylvania couldnt have imagined. New York City, the most populated city in the United States, now showcases an iconic, larger-than-life Christmas tree every year at the Rockefeller Center. The symbolic Christmas tradition dates back to 1931. Many other cities and towns across the country have community Christmas trees coupled with tree-lighting ceremonies to mark the start of the holiday season. Pennsylvania has kept its connection to Christmas trees. According to the National Christmas Tree Association, Pennsylvania is one of the top states for Christmas tree production. Pennsylvania ranks second for the state that has supplied the most Official White House Christmas Trees in history with keystone state trees having been used 11 times. The official 2022 White House Christmas Tree was grown by Evergreen Acres Christmas Tree Farm in Auburn, Pennsylvania, which was crowned the 2022 Grand Champion Grower in the National Christmas Tree Associations annual competition. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now This Week in Pennsylvania The Christmas Tree Capital of the World is also located in the Keystone State in Indiana County. The Carnegie Museum of National History cites that Indiana County, Pennsylvania earned the title when about 700,000 trees were cut there in 1956. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to ABC27. (WHTM) When people think of the Grand Canyon, they probably think of the one out west with its bands of red rock and its enormous size. But did you know that Pennsylvania has a geological feature that is also considered the be a Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania is called the Pine Creek Gorge and is located in Tioga and Lycoming Counties. Two state parks are on opposite sides of the canyon: Leonard Harrison State Park and Colton Point State Park. The gorge is 47 miles long and is 1,000 feet deep. According to Visit Potter-Tioga, at the southern end, the canyon reaches a depth of 1,450 feet. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now WHTM Morning Weather The area was recognized in 1968 when it was designated to be a National Nature Landmark by the US government. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, the gorge was cut during the Ice Age as a result of water overflowing from a former glacial lake and eroding a rock formation between the two state parks. The Wellsboro, Pennsylvania website states that the exposed rock formations look similar to those that are found out west in the Grand Canyon. These formations are normally best seen before May or after October. Governor Shapiro highlights funding for Pennsylvania state parks In the gorge runs Pine Creek, which flows into the Susquehanna River. Many water activities such as rafting kayaking or fishing can be done along the creek. There is also a Pine Creek Rail trail, which is a 62-mile trail that runs along the creek. More information regarding Pennsylvanias Grand Canyon can be found here. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to ABC27. Director Editi Effiong Of Netflixs The Black Book On Making Space For More Nigerian Storytellers: Its All About Access | Photo: sutiporn somnam via Getty Images The world is tapping into the talent of the African diaspora. This year, weve seen Afrobeats artists continuously top music charts, and now the same is happening for films associated with the continent. The Black Book debuted on Netflix in September. The action thriller made history as the first Nigerian-made movie to land on the platforms global Top 3. Produced by Anakle Films, The Black Book has made the top 10 lists in over 69 countries, and it has caught the attention of over 20 million viewers so far, according to Enspire. The Black Books director, Editi Effiong, knew the film would be impactful due to its ability to pull at the viewers heartstrings. The intense plot about Paul Edima, a deacon and former hitman who reverts to his old tactics to find justice for his son who was wrongfully slain by corrupt police officers, is the perfect setup for an emotional roller coaster. Every human has access to the basic emotions of love, happiness, joy, sadness and grief. But grief is an emotion on its own, Effiong told Blavity. He continued, People dont realize that [unless] grief is predicated by a thing not existent, and theres a hole that cant be filled. And everyone has those emotions. While The Black Book is Effiongs first effort as a director, the former tech professional has honed his skills for bold reactions and visualizing grand scenes on movie sets in previous roles. He served as an executive producer on the 2018 drama Up North and the 2021 sci-fi adventure Day of Destiny. My style as a director is setting up a scene that I want you to be part of, whether I want you to be inside or outside of the scene, he said. The gripping scenes from The Black Book explore the West African countrys conflicted history with military dictatorship, drug trafficking and politics through a retired hitmans journey to seek justice. Numerous titles within the Nollywood film genre reference conflicts that occurred in Nigeria. The director states that while the film encompasses more than that, those situations are the reality for people living there daily. Effiong said that unwarranted attacks on the youth and individuals within the creative and tech industries inspired him to use murder as the trojan for his message. I wanted to elevate the story by going back into Nigerian history. Before Nigeria returned to democracy, we were ruled mainly by military government, he said. Military governments are utilitarian, and so theres a lot of all sorts of things happening. Under our last dictator, a lot of people were executed. Effiong added the unknown members of the killing squads associated with the previous regime were an inspiration for Pauls buried past as a hitman. These men never went to jail. Those men still live among regular people, he said. People dont know who they are. What if someone killed the son of one of these guys who was a hitman back in the day? What would that person do? That is the inspiration. The Black Book had an impressive budget of $1 million, funded by Effiong and several investors, Wired reported. The budget ensured he could make a film meeting Hollywoods standards. For African films to be seen as successful, they have to be at the same level as Hollywood films. The standards have to be the same, if not better, he said. Although Hollywoods monetary and creative standards were top of mind for the director, he said is very much committed to the tradition of African storytelling. He recalled being a young child fascinated by his mother and her ability to tell a story or sing songs in a traditional way. We were all based on traditional storytelling, he said. We had these stories as children, but we had never had access to tell them on a global scale. Effiong credits his sister with getting the ball rolling by bringing the film to Netflix, and he is delighted to be the catalyst for the celebration of Nollywood cinema on a global scale. Access to global platforms is slowly growing for African creatives. The Black Book is in good company on Netflix, with over 40 titles from Nollywood since the streaming platform launched its presence in Nigeria in 2020. With the right platforms, African films can rule the world, he said. They can exist shoulder to shoulder with some of the best movies in the world. Its all about access. The Black Book is available for streaming on Netflix. Check out the trailer below! Renowned expert on Civil War photography to speak at Brunswick Civil War Round Table Garry Adelman will present a dramatic presentation entitled, Civil War Photography Extravaganza. Adelman will present a fascinating photographic presentation covering Civil War events, people and places at Brunswick Civil War Round Table meeting. The meeting will be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 5 at the Hatch Auditorium on Caswell Beach. Registration begins at 6:15 p.m. The visitor fee is $10, which can include a spouse, and can be applied toward the $25 annual membership dues. For more information: John Butler at Brunswickcwrt@gmail.com, 404-229-9425 or https://brunswickcivilwarroundtable.com/. More: With role in new Disney movie, Brunswick native living out her dreams Fort Sumter 1861 Museum of Coastal Carolina The Museum of Coastal Carolina presents several programs in December. The Sea Tales family program will be "The Gingerbread Pirates" by Kristin Kladstrup Blow me down! What if Captain Cookie stood up to Santa? Embrace your inner pirate as this adventurous pirate tale beginning at 11 a.m. Thursday, Dec. 7. Participants will also make pirate hats. Touch Tank feeding with staff and trained volunteer assistance, gently touch sea stars, urchins, anemones, conchs, horseshoe crabs, and hermit crabs. Also trained volunteers would feed the animals, participants will learn more about the sea creatures that call the museum home. The program is at 11 a.m. Friday, Dec. 8. Coastal Creations will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 9. Participants can dive into "Water Wonders" by examining organisms that cant be seen with the naked eye. Participants can also complete a watercolor craft. The museum is located at 21 E. Second St., Ocean Isle Beach. North Carolina Maritime Museum at Southport From noon-4 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 8, the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Southport in conjunction with the city of Southport will hold its annual "Winterfest" tradition. The theme will be "historic holidays." The staff and volunteers will be dressed out in period attire. Also there will be historic activities to partake in and participants can make crafts to take home. The event is free and appropriate for all ages. The museum is located at 204 E. Moore St., Southport. Bolivia Christmas Parade The Bolivia Christmas Parade will be held on Saturday, Dec. 9 at the new Bolivia Volunteer Fire Department, located at 3848 Old Ocean Highway. The parade will begin at 11 a.m. with an open house at the fire department. Details: 910-253-5025 or 910-520-6843. Southport Flotilla The Southport Flotilla will be held Saturday, Dec. 9. The Southport Flotilla's lineup will start at 6 p.m. beginning at Morningstar Marinas going toward Indigo Plantation Marina. The flotilla will continue proceeding past downtown Southport cruising to Deep Point Marina. The flotilla will turn around back past Southport, the extended route will cruise to Midway Bridge, down to Veterans Park just past St. James Marina. More: Brunswick man wins big on NC Lottery scratch-off ticket STAY CONNECTED: For more news about whats happening in Brunswick County, follow us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/BrunswickToday. This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Brunswick County, NC events Dec. 5-10 Phoenix and Scottsdale are considering plans to recycle water for drinking in the next few years. The tap water that emerges from this Advanced Water Purification process which typically involves additional filtration, ozone treatment and reverse osmosis should be super clean. And, even better, it would offer a relatively drought-proof, renewable water source that could supplement dwindling groundwater or Colorado River supplies. But if thats the case, why isnt everyone pursuing this technology? Perhaps the answers to common reader questions will help explain the limitations: Why don't farmers use this water? Actually, some are, mostly near major cities. But theyre not treating it to drinking standards, as the water produced by Advanced Water Purification would be. Tapping this supply is less likely for farms in rural groundwater basins, for one simple reason: There probably wouldnt be enough of it. Want rural water regulation? Don't hold your breath Yes, technically, all water has been recycled. But what many folks consider to be recycled water the stuff that is captured in drains and sewers, then flows to treatment plants is largely generated by homes and businesses. Small towns might be able to generate enough recycled water to supplement their populations, but they wouldnt have enough to make a dent in the water needed for nearby farmers to grow food. And even if they did, theyd need the infrastructure to deliver it to fields miles from the treatment plant. Which probably wouldnt make financial sense for cash-strapped cities or farmers living on razor-thin profit margins. Could small towns use recycled water? That certainly is a goal driving forthcoming state regulation. Officials want to ensure that recycled water is safe to drink, without making the cost of compliance so high that small- and medium-sized water providers could never afford to build or maintain a plant. They want small towns particularly those that rely solely on limited groundwater, or that struggle with arsenic or so-called forever chemicals tainting the quality of the water they do have to consider Advanced Water Purification as a potential solution for their water woes. Even still, none of this will be cheap, and its widely presumed that small providers would need financial help, perhaps through federal or state grants, to pencil out the cost of such an investment. Which likely would come after the early adopters, like Phoenix and Scottsdale, send this water to taps. Why isn't every major city doing this? Phoenix is talking to other cities in metro Phoenix about joining a regional project at its 91st Avenue wastewater treatment plant. But its unclear which cities will jump onboard, or how much water theyll bring to the table. Every city may want to free up a portion of their recycled water to treat and directly return to taps as drinking water. The rub is that nearly all recycled water is already in use to irrigate turf, replenish the aquifer, cool the Palo Verde nuclear plant or share with farmers in irrigation districts. Cities may be slow to convert, for example, if it requires a significant amount of new infrastructure to move water from treatment plants, or if folks that rely on recycled water for other uses protest it going to taps. In other words, there are plenty of complicating factors that could crimp the impact of Advanced Water Purification. Well just have to see how it plays out. Want to learn more? Weve assembled a panel of industry experts to discuss the future of recycled water in Arizona: Troy Hayes, Phoenix water director. Brian Biesemeyer, Scottsdale water director. Randall Matas, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality water division deputy director. Arturo Ruiz, lead brewer at Desert Monks Brewing. Join us from 6-7 p.m. Dec. 11 at Desert Monks Brewing, 1094 S. Gilbert Road, Suite 101, in Gilbert. Admission is free, and the beer we brewed with recycled water is available for purchase. Reach Allhands at joanna.allhands@arizonarepublic.com. On X, formerly Twitter: @joannaallhands. If you love this content (or love to hate it hey, I won't judge), why not subscribe to get more? This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Recycled water has promise for Arizona, but also limitations A driver is accused of nearly hitting several people during Freeport Boroughs Christmas parade and then leading officers on a high-speed chase. Southern Armstrong Regional Police Department Chief Christopher Fabec put out a press release on Monday addressing concerns from the community about the incident that took place on Dec. 2. around 5:20 p.m. During the event, an officer blocking one of the major intersections for the parade heard a vehicle accelerate and then saw a blue car driving at a high rate of speed with the horn blaring the entire time. Police said almost immediately after, their department received a call from Armstrong County 911 for a blue Ford sedan driving recklessly on Riverside Drive and nearly hitting people attending the parade. The officer that first spotted the vehicle attempted to stop it, but police said the driver continued at a high rate of speed on State Route 128, reaching speeds of over 100 miles per hour, according to the complaint. The car eventually came to a stop about a mile onto Ford City Road. Police said the driver, later identified as Zachary Zecca, 22, was not complying with the officers commands. After more than 15 attempts to try and get Zecca to comply and put his hands behind his back, police said he was tased. Zecca was then taken into custody. Police said he wasnt injured and denied medic transport to the hospital after being tased. I wanted to take the time to explain this incident as much as I could. As the vehicle exited the borough, at no point was the crowd attending the parade in any danger, therefore that is why we did not issue a warning at that point, Fabec said in a release. Also, we received calls from citizens that witnessed different parts of the above. I wanted to make sure that everyone has the entire incident, rather than just bits and pieces. Should you have any questions please feel free to contact me or Lieutenant Arce and we will answer your questions the best we can. Zecca was taken to the Armstrong County Jail where he was later released on bond. He is facing several charges including fleeing or attempting to elude officers, resisting arrest and recklessly endangering another person. Download the FREE WPXI News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Channel 11 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch WPXI NOW TRENDING NOW: Beaver County mother accused of suffocating, strangling her 2 children to death Steelers fan asks for help finding sentimental Terrible Towel lost amid crowd sheltering from rain Woman scratches off $25M lottery winner, hides ticket, goes on vacation VIDEO: Man killed in overnight Carrick shooting DOWNLOAD the Channel 11 News app for breaking news alerts The Ukrainian energy conglomerate DTEK said on Dec. 4 that it signed a memorandum of understanding with the Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas on a project to construct what would be the largest wind farm in Eastern Europe. The Tylihulska Wind Power Plant project, which will involve an investment of more than 650 million euros ($702 million), is a joint venture that includes DTEK, the Ukrainian and Danish governments, and Western banks. The first phase of the project, which was financed by a 200 million euro ($216 million) investment from DTEK, became operational in May 2023 and consists of 19 Vestas-supplied wind turbines at a wind farm in Mykolaiv Oblast. DTEK described it as the "worlds only wind farm being built in a major conflict zone." The plans for the second phase will consist of the delivery of 64 new wind turbines from Vestas, which is expected in the second half of 2024. If the project comes to fruition, the wind farm will have a total of 84 wind turbines and be able to provide power for 900,000 homes, DTEK said. "The Tyligulska windfarm will significantly increase the stability of our energy system, help strengthen the country's energy security, and enable Ukraine to become a decarbonization leader that can act as an energy hub for Europe," said DTEK CEO Maksym Timchenko. "This is further evidence of Western investors strong confidence in DTEK Group as (a) responsible partner in Ukraine." In turn, Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen said, "Infrastructure projects of this size in Ukraine currently require additional risk guarantees, and we believe supporting a project as ambitious as this can re-emphasize the EUs support to Ukraine. I want to recognize the visionary leadership of DTEK thank you for the trust you have in Vestas. As sanctions bite, Russia eyes Ukraines mineral resources to fund its invasion Russias 2024 federal budget brought little in the way of surprises, the country is gearing up for a long war. Signed by President Vladimir Putin earlier this week, it ushered record levels of military spending a sign of Moscows commitment to its war against Ukraine. While part of the Russian The Kyiv IndependentKatie Marie Davies Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. Smoke rises following an Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel on Monday, Dec. 4, 2023. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg) THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) Human rights lawyers went to court in the Netherlands on Monday to call for a halt to the export of fighter jet parts to Israel that could be used in attacks on Gaza. The organizations allege that delivery of parts for F-35 jets makes the Netherlands complicit in possible war crimes being committed by Israel in its war with Hamas. The civil case in The Hague opened as the Israeli military renewed calls for mass evacuations from the southern town of Khan Younis, where tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge in recent weeks, as it widened its ground offensive and bombarded targets across the Gaza Strip. The rights lawyers want The Hague District Court to issue an injunction banning the exports of F-35 parts that are stored in a warehouse in the town of Woensdrecht. The state must immediately stop the delivery of F-35 parts to Israel, lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld told the court. Citing government documents, Zegveld said that Dutch customs asked the government if it wanted to continue exports after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas that triggered the Israel-Hamas war. The warning that the fighter jets can contribute to serious breaches of the laws of war does not, for the (Dutch) state, outweigh its economic interests and diplomatic reputation. Government lawyer Reimer Veldhuis urged the court's single judge to reject the injunction, saying that even if it were to uphold the rights lawyers' legal arguments and ban exports, the United States would deliver these parts to Israel from another place. He added that Israel has the right to self-defense. Israel must be able to respond to threats from the region. That must, of course, happen within the framework of international law, Veldhuis said. He added that the government believes that a clear risk of serious breaches (of international law) through the use of F-35s cannot at the moment be established. A ruling is expected within two weeks and can be appealed. ___ Full AP coverage of the Israel-Hamas war at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war A man accused of shooting at a 12-year-old girl in a domestic violence incident Sunday morning went into cardiac arrest shortly afterward and died at a hospital, police said. READ MORE: CMPD investigating after man found dead in south Charlotte The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said they were called to the northwest Charlotte home on Palm Breeze Lane for a welfare check around 4:30 a.m. Sunday. Police said when they got to the residence, they found evidence that the suspect had fired his revolver multiple times and fled the scene in his car. The suspect crashed into two cars two streets down on Windy Valley Drive, broke into a home, and terrified the family inside before the police got there, officials said. CMPD said the suspect was acting erratically, but they managed to detain him before calling MEDIC. Police the suspect was still conscious when more units arrived However, the man went into cardiac arrest while being evaluated by paramedics. They took him to a hospital where he died. CMPD labeled the mans death as an in-custody death because officers had detained him before the cardiac arrest. Investigators identified him as Larry Qwuntray Brown, 41. Em Aban lives across the street from where the incident ended and said its left her rattled. Its just scary, Aban said Monday. I feel like its not safe. The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations is handling the in-custody death investigation while CMPD Internal Affairs investigates the officers actions. CMPD said it followed the guidelines for handling a suspect who was resisting. READ MORE: Video shows officer hitting woman several times; CMPD says she resisted arrest CMPD Violent Crimes is investigating the domestic violence incident that led to the rest of the situation. A woman said Sunday she didnt see anything but her daughter heard fighting earlier. I didnt, but my daughter did tell me this morning that she did hear some altercation at around 4 to 4:30 in the morning, said the woman, who didnt want to be identified. She said after she heard the arguing she heard a big bang. She wasnt sure if it was gunshots or a car hitting another car. (WATCH: Judge approves CMPD to release all video of controversial arrest) Liberal-leaning professors at Florida's public universities are giving up their positions many of them coveted tenure roles and blaming their departures on Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' efforts to reconfigure the state's higher education system to align with his conservative principles. According to The New York Times which interviewed a dozen academics in an array of fields who have left the state's public colleges or given their notice and, in some cases, plan to move to liberal areas those professors, while acknowledging the hundreds of top academics who remain in the state, have raised concerns that the governor's policies have become indefensible to scholars and students. Just four years after he started at the University of Florida, Dr. Neil H. Buchanan, a prominent economist and tax law scholar, has given up his tenured position and moved north to teach in Toronto. Buchanan left George Washington University to work for the Florida college in 2019 shortly after DeSantis took office that year. In a recent column on a legal commentary website, Buchanan accused Florida and its Republican leaders of open hostility to professors and to higher education more generally. "They have shown in every way possible that they want to get rid of people like me," he wrote. "In this case: Mission accomplished." The University of Florida told the Times that its turnover rate is not unusual and remains below the 10.57 percent national average. The hiring rate, it said, is also higher than the departure rate. Florida State University and the University of South Florida released similar numbers. DeSantis' office did not respond to the Times' requests for comment. But Dr. Sarah D. Lynne, the chair-elect of the University of Florida's faculty senate, said that not much has changed except that her campus has garnered national, political attention. Most people who leave the university, she told the Times, do so for reasons completely outside the realm of politics. Florida isnt really a unique scenario when it comes to the politicization of higher education, said Lynne, who teaches in the Department of Family, Youth and Community Sciences. Its a beautiful state to live in and we have amazing students, so were staying. Data from several schools, however, show that departure rates have risen. At the University of Florida, overall turnover went from 7 percent in 2021 to 9.3 percent in 2023, figures released by the university show. A report by the university's faculty senate found some departments were hit especially hard. The school of arts, which includes art, music and dance, struggles to hire or retain good faculty and graduate students in the current political climate, the June report said. In the liberal arts, the report said, Faculty of color have left. Danaya C. Wright, a law professor and the chair of the University of Florida's faculty senate, told the Times she sees job candidates avoiding the state. We have seen more people pull their applications, or just say, no, Im not interested its Florida, she said. At Florida State, Vice President for Faculty Development Janet Kistner commented during a September faculty senate meeting that the political climate in Florida had contributed to an upturn in faculty turnover with 37 professors departing for reasons other than retirement in the last year compared to an average of 23 during the past five years. Dr. Paul Ortiz, a history at the University of Florida and a former president of the college's faculty union, told the Times he is leaving after more than 15 years to join Cornell next summer. If the academic job market was more robust, then a lot more people would be leaving, Ortiz said. Dr. Walter Boot, a tenured psychology professor who has secured millions in grant money for Florida State, is joining Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, where he will continue developing technology for the elderly. Boot said he started at Florida State in 2008 and immediately felt at home on its Tallahassee campus. This was the place I could see myself spending the rest of my career great department, great university," he told the Times. Things changed, however, when the DeSantis administration began to push its education policies, he added. Boot, who is gay, cited a 2022 that limits when educators can discuss gender and sexuality in elementary schools. Though the legislation was not targeting universities, it did fuel a fearsome environment, Boot said. The run-up and aftermath of its passage involved hostile rhetoric painting queer and trans individuals as pedophiles and groomers, rhetoric that came not just from citizens but from state officials, Boot wrote recently in the Tallahassee Democrat. He noted that shortly after the bill passed, a man threatened to kill gay people on Florida State's campus. Its been very difficult, from a day-to-day perspective, not feeling comfortable or even safe where I live, Boot told the Times. Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course. Other gay professors pointed to recent state sanctions aimed at transgender employees and students who do not comply with a May law restricting access to bathrooms as well as state restrictions on transgender medical procedures. Dr. Hope Wilson, a former professor of education at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, had served as an advisor to the college's Pride club and worked with the L.G.B.T.Q. center. She told the Times that she particularly opposed what she regarded as intrusive requests from the state for information to which her school responded on everything from how many students had received transgender care to expenditures for D.E.I. initiatives. It just felt very dystopian all the way around, she said. Her professional discomfort came alongside personal fears because her child is transgender. Florida isnt a state where I can raise my family or do my job," said Wilson, who now works at Northern Illinois University. For Christopher Rufo, a conservative writer and activist whom DeSantis appointed a trustee of New College of Florida this year, the faculty departures are a positive outcome. To me, this is a net gain for Florida, he said in a statement to the outlet, railing against transgender medical care and diversity programs. Professors who want to practice D.E.I.-style racial discrimination, facilitate the sexual amputation of minors, and replace scholarship with partisan activism are free to do so elsewhere. Good riddance. The University of Florida's law school has also seen a significant drop this year, with a 30 percent faculty turnover rate. Some of those professors told the Times that political interference played a role in their departures, while other faculty said the state's reputation had dissuaded professors from other places from joining. Maryam Jamshidi said that after a 2021 law allowed students to record professors in the classroom, liberal-leaning professors feared they would find videos of their lectures on Fox News. As a Muslim woman who works on issues of racism and American power, I didnt feel like U.F. was a place I could safely be myself and do my work, said Jamshidi, who now teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder. Questions about gender and race are at the core of an array of legal arguments from constitutional law to criminal justice and workplace discrimination. But in May DeSantis signed a bill that regulates what can be said in classrooms and prohibits university spending on diversity programs. Kenneth B. Nunn, one of several Black law professors who have recently departed, had already decided to leave by that time. In 2021, Nunn had been blocked from signing a brief challenging state restrictions on voting by felons. Nunn told the Times that signing such a document is something that is considered a matter of course for faculty to do anywhere else. The university later doubled back on the question of whether Nunn could sign but he took the incident as a sign of the university's direction. He chose to retire from the law school and is currently a visiting professor at Howard University. For Buchanan, the final straw was the implementation of a review process for tenured faculty, which he saw as the end to academic freedom. Its not just that the laws are so vague and obviously designed to chill speech that DeSantis doesnt like. Its that they simultaneously took away the benefit of tenured faculty to stand up for whats right, he said. Its tenure in name only at this point. Since Buchanan writes on tax policy through a progressive lens, he said he felt that he could become a target at any time. The Republicans who are running Florida, he told the outlet, are squandering one of the states most important assets by driving out professors who otherwise wouldnt have wanted to leave. Plot Hole A new deep dive into the history of OpenAI includes some surprising details about one of the firm's erstwhile cofounders, Elon Musk including that he was apparently dumbfounded when another would-be artificial intelligence guru pointed out a basic flaw in his much-hyped plan to colonize to Mars. As the New York Times reports based on dozens of insider interviews, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis and Musk began talking about the Red Planet soon after they first met in 2012 at a conference that their shared investor had organized, PayPal's infamous founder Peter Thiel. Hassabis was, per the NYT's retelling, very skilled at convincing rich men to fund his dream of creating artificial general intelligence (AGI), and his interaction with Musk was no different. During a tour of SpaceX's headquarters, the South African-born billionaire began bragging about his plans to take humanity to Mars to escape global overpopulation and the other issues facing our planet and Hassabis agreed, with one caveat: if AI surpassed human intelligence, it could easily follow us off-planet and kill us there, too. Don't Speak Musk was, per the NYT's reporting, "speechless" apparently having not considered that Earthbound problems could simply follow humans to Mars. Soon after, he invested in DeepMind, though years later, he ended up trashing the firm in the same newspaper, calling it his "top concern" when it came to AI. "Just the nature of the AI that theyre building is one that crushes all humans at all games," Musk told the Times' Maureen Dowd back in 2020, referencing the firm's early innovation in AI that can outplay humans at old-school video games. "I mean, its basically the plotline in 'War Games.'" The exchange, which Hassabis also recounted to Musk biographer Walter Isaacson, is surprising not only because it's hilarious to imagine the notorious tycoon at a loss for words, but also because it shows yet another hole in his longstanding pipe dream to colonize Mars. While it's certainly optimistic to hope for a reprieve from suffering on Earth found on the Red Planet, there's no reason things like viruses or killer robots or nuclear war couldn't simply join us on our planetary neighbor and in 2012, at least, Musk had apparently never considered that possibility. More on Musk: Twitter CEO's Internal Email About Elon Musk's Bizarre Interview Leaks Elon Musk's social media platform X has fueled far-right disinformation in Ireland and played a key role in riots last month in the country's capital Dublin, experts tell CBS News. The violent clashes erupted on Nov. 23 between about 200 civilians and riot police in central Dublin as demonstrators vented rage after a stabbing incident that left multiple people wounded earlier in the day, including a 5-year-old girl who was hospitalized with serious injuries. False reports circulating on social media had suggested the stabbings were carried out by an illegal immigrant. The alleged assailant was in fact a naturalized Irish citizen originally from Algeria, the Irish Times reported. The violence, which saw a tram and a bus set on fire and stores looted, was partially incited by far-right local actors with significant followings on X, which was called Twitter before Musk bought the platform. Police at the scene in Dublin as riots broke out following a stabbing incident in which five people were injured, including three young children, Nov. 23, 2023. / Credit: Brian Lawless/PA Images via Getty Images "What we saw at the beginning of the riot was what started out to be a protest, you know, either organized by the far-right or if it wasn't organized by the far-right, the far-right wasn't far behind," Matthew Donoghue, an assistant professor in social policy at University College Dublin, told CBS News. "The fact that we saw attacks on the [police] cordon and the crime scene, these are clearly organized and orchestrated activities which need quite a lot of background organization this is where we see the far-right's use of X," he said. "They were able to get a lot of people there very quickly to basically take control of that situation, direct it." Eileen Culloty, a deputy director of the Institute for Media, Democracy and Society at Dublin City University, told CBS News the riots had been plotted by "a core group" of prominent right-wing influencers on X who "have a relatively high profile within that kind of alternative, right-wing world. Some of them will be alternative media outlets, some of them are right-wing anti-immigration activists." "They went into overdrive in the lead-up to the riots," Culloty told CBS News. "They were posting lots of public messages on Twitter [X], but also on Telegram and other platforms from lunchtime onwards and urging people to act. A lot of the hashtags they used were promoting this ethno-nationalist idea that Ireland is full, that Ireland belongs to the Irish." A study conducted by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an independent nonprofit think-tank that studies and offers policy advice on extremism and disinformation, just days before the riots in Ireland had also found that Twitter (X) is "used by virtually all of the most prominent actors in the Irish mis- and disinformation ecosystem." The study focused on the growing online influence of the far-right in Ireland over the past three years, analyzing 13,180,820 posts from 1,640 accounts across 12 online platforms. X had the highest number of far-right accounts of those analyzed by the researchers. Following his October 2022 takeover of the platform, tech billionaire Musk has dismantled core features of the platform including its verification system and its Trust and Safety advisory group, as well as broader content moderation and hate speech enforcement. As the Associated Press reported in October, experts who study disinformation have said that X has deteriorated under Musk to the point that it's not merely failing to detect and remove misinformation, but is favoring posts by accounts that pay for the platform's blue-check subscription service, regardless of who's running them. Crucially, according to Culloty, with respect to the violence in Dublin, the core group of far-right accounts suspected of inciting the violence had previously been removed from the platform for violating the company's safety policies, but were reinstated following Musk's takeover of the company. "They were able to move back to X and a lot of people who had been banned were able to come back," she said. "It's notable that there are more people not trying to conceal their identity [in the aftermath of Musk's takeover.] So they now feel quite comfortable making these incendiary statements." In the aftermath of the riots, other prominent figures from the right-wing of American politics have pushed a conspiratorial, anti-immigration narrative on X in an attempt to vindicate the violence in Ireland. Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, who now streams his own show on X, told his millions of followers last week that "the Irish government is trying to replace the population of Ireland with people from the third world." Carlson's interviewee on the show, former White House adviser and Trump ally Steve Bannon, called Ireland "a powder keg." Musk himself has weighed in on the violence in Ireland on X and took aim at the Irish government last month. In a post the day after the scenes played out in Dublin, Musk said Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, "hates the Irish people," after the Irish government announced that it would aim to pass new laws against hate crimes and hate speech in response to the riots. Speaking to the Irish parliament last week, Justice Minister Helen McEntee said X had refused to comply with requests from the Garda Siochana, Ireland's national police force, to take down inflammatory posts in real time as violence flared in Dublin. McEntee said she'd spoken with a detective "who was actively engaged with the social media companies" throughout the evening of the riots, Irish state broadcaster RTE reported. Other social media companies including TikTok and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, "were responding, they were engaging with gardai and they were taking down these vile posts as they came up," McEntee said. "X were not. They didn't engage. They did not fulfill their own community standards." Responding to those specific accusations from McEntee, X's Global Government Affairs Unit posted a message on the platform Tuesday calling the comments "inaccurate" and saying X had "proactively taken action on more than 1,230 pieces of content under our rules relating to the riots." This is inaccurate. We have proactively taken action on more than 1,230 pieces of content under our rules relating to the riots. We met with the Coimisiun na Mean on November 24 to discuss our response. The Gardai did not make any formal requests to us until late Monday 27th https://t.co/nHGMDg45Mu Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) December 4, 2023 The company said the Irish police "did not make any formal requests to us until late" on November 27, four days after the riots, at which point it said it "responded promptly" to the appeal relating to "a single post." Musk and X are facing a major advertising withdrawal as brands like Disney, Apple, Coca Cola, CBS News parent company Paramount Global and other large companies have removed paid ads from the platform after Musk endorsed an antisemitic post on X that claimed Jews fomented hatred against White people. Musk's comment on the post called it "the actual truth." While the controversial billionaire has subsequently apologized for his comment, he's criticized companies who have suspended advertising on X. At the 2023 DealBook Summit in New York on Wednesday, Musk told the audience: "If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f--- yourself. Go. F--- yourself. Is that clear?" X owner Elon Musk speaks during the New York Times annual DealBook summit on Nov. 29, 2023 in New York City. / Credit: Michael M Santiago/Getty The decline in advertising could deprive X of up to $75 million in revenue, according to a New York Times report. Responding to Musk's comments, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a post on X last week that Musk's remarks were an "explicit point of view about our position" and added: "We're a platform that allows people to make their own decisions... And here's my perspective when it comes to advertising: X is standing at a unique and amazing intersection of Free Speech and Main Street and the X community is powerful and is here to welcome you." CBS News has reached out to X for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication. Companies, countries battle to develop quantum computers | 60 Minutes Greta Gerwig: The 60 Minutes Interview Trump supporter challenges hundreds of voters' qualifications in Georgia Calumet City Mayor Thaddeus Jones prevents aldermen from meeting with city employees and attempted to override a program the City Council already agreed to fund, three separate email chains obtained by the Daily Southtown show. First Ward Ald. Michael Navarrete sent an email Sept. 12 to set up a time to meet with Calumet Citys economic development director Donald Alesky and Valencia Williams, who works for the small business resources and assistance office. Navarrete proposed a monthly meeting with them so both parties can be better aligned on development proposals and zoning issues. Nine days later, Navarrete followed up with city attorney Dominick Lanzito and Alesky and said he had not received a response and again asked for information on zoning matters. Despite not being included in the original emails, Jones interjected and responded to Navarrete Sept. 21. In the future, please do not send these communications to my employees, Jones wrote in reference to the Navarretes messages to Alesky and Lanzito. Further, I have instructed Don Alesky and Attorney Dominick not to meet with you and to forward all of your communications to my office for review and responses. Navarrete responded by asking to set up a monthly meeting and then followed up with Jones again Nov. 15, after receiving no response. He wrote that he went to City Hall to meet with Alesky and was told Alesky was in a meeting. He waited in the lobby for Alesky, but the meeting did not conclude until the day ended at which point Navarrete asked again to set up a meeting. I was told that there is a rule that the Mayor must setup the meeting and that we could not talk to each other in the meantime, he wrote in the email. Please provide some clarity on how you would like to move forward as it is obvious that Director Aleksy is uncomfortable communicating with me under your previous directive. Jones responded Nov. 16 and described Navarretes actions toward Alesky as examples of workplace bullying and intimidation. He concluded by saying he will consider allowing the two to meet only after Navarrete submits an apology and a list of topics he wants to cover with Alesky. Jones, Alesky, Valencia and a city spokesman did not respond to requests for comment. Lanzito declined to comment. In another chain from earlier in the year, Navarrete inquired specifically about the GreenAlley Project upgrades that are planned in his ward with funding from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago. In 2022, Calumet City received a grant from MWRDs Citywide Green Alley Program to create four green alleys using permeable pavers, an information packet produced by Calumet City, Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and the MWRD explained. In the email dated Aug. 21, Navarrete contacted city engineers Ken Chastain and Matt Buerger to request a status update on the project and included photos of large puddles as evidence of the urgent need for the upgrade. Again Jones, though not a recipient of the email, responded. I will review your submission with Ken and Matt, and I will make a decision on which alleys we include in the next round of green alleys, Jones wrote. The next morning, Navarrete responded by clarifying he is not asking for permission on which alleys will receive the upgrade funds but rather a status report on the progress of the work as he said City Council already approved the upgrades in the 1st ward. After another back and forth in which Navarrete included evidence the City Council signed off on the upgrades, Jones responded by writing he has final say. You can provide all of the information you want, please submit your list and I WILL make the decision on which alleys get funded or started in this program! Jones wrote Aug. 22, stating he secured the funding and started the project. You never even thought of this project before 2021, so you can write and submit all that you want to submit. A final email chain, between 6th Ward Ald. James Patton and Jones, arose from Patton confirming that a sign went up outside a church, something Patton had addressed the City Council about. In his email, Patton expressed frustration it took more than three months to get the sign reinstated. Patton wrote the mayor Nov. 16 saying he was disappointed with the Public Works Department and asked if it was the policy to ignore the 6th Ward, as Ive been informed from several current and former employees is the directive down there. Jones responded in an email that Patton later called snarky. People make mistakes sometimes. Please dont give yourself that much credit, Jones wrote. Until you start providing respect to others and stop blaming and lying on the city, you will always believe someone is against you. Jones wrote that he treats every ward equally and will continue to make sure the 6th Ward receives the necessary attention. I am sure that you are going to share this email with the Tribune, he concluded. Please just make sure that they spell my name correctly. Professor Josh Jackson, a visiting professor at the Paul Simon Institute at Southern Illinois University, reviewed the emails and said they suggest real communications problems between the politicians. I think its certainly clear to me that (Navarrete has) the responsibility and the right to try to set up those meetings, he said. Of Carbondale and of the southern Illinois towns that I am familiar with, I cannot think of a situation that has been quite this sort of personal. hsanders@chicagotribune.com Four people were killed and another hospitalized with potentially life-threatening injuries following a wreck along the northbound Texas 130 service road in southeastern Travis County, officials said on Sunday. Drivers are encouraged to find alternate routes to avoid the area as the road has been closed for an extended time for an investigation into the wreck near Maha Loop, officials said. The wreck was first reported at 4:24 p.m., according to Austin-Travis County EMS. Two STAR Flight helicopters were sent to the scene. The injured person was taken to St. Davids South Austin Medical Center in serious condition. A sixth person involved in the wreck refused treatment, EMS reported. FINAL Vehicle Rescue 10500blk S SH 130 Svrd NB: Total of 4 deceased on-scene pronouncements have been obtained, 1 transported to St David's South by STARFlight, & 1 refusal. Expect EXTENDED closures for investigation. Continue to avoid this by selecting alternate routes. ATCEMS (@ATCEMS) December 3, 2023 of 4 deceased on-scene pronouncements have been obtained, 1 transported to St David's South by STARFlight, & 1 refusal. Expect EXTENDED closures for investigation. Continue to avoid this by selecting alternate routes. ne person was killed and three people injured in a wreck on Texas 130 South, Austin-Travis County EMS said Sunday afternoon. Two STAR Flight helicopter were sent to the scene near Elroy Road and medics were performing CPR on three patents, officials said. The wreck was reported around 4:30 p.m. Drivers are urged to avoid the area. This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: EMS: 4 dead, 1 injured in wreck on Texas 130 South Longtime Lexington nurses and a top health department official are among those expressing reservations about Fayette County Public Schools ending a 49-year nursing contract with the Lexington-Fayette Health Department, set for discussion at Mondays school board planning session. I am concerned about the potential loss of quality nursing care to the children in our schools caused by the recommendation to select a bid that is significantly less than the one from our health department; a community partner in our schools for many years, said Sharon Holmes, who was assistant dean of academic assessment and operations in the University of Kentucky College of Nursing when she retired in 2016 and director of nursing for Kentucky Childrens Hospital from 1986-2010. FCPS officials announced Nov. 27 they had chosen another vendor to provide school nurses. School district officials released a document showing the new vendor, Maxim, outbid the health department. The health department bid $4,565,138 for services. Maxim bid $3,143,850. Each bid was scored was based on cost (30%), the technical proposal (30%) which included qualifications, licenses, tracking and reporting, references (10%) and the interview (30%). After all scores were calculated, Maxim Healthcare was the highest score at 391.4, and was recommended. The health departments score was 241.1. The bid document will be on the agenda for the December 4 Fayette school board planning meeting. A final vote is scheduled for December 14. The number of nurses impacted by the decision is between 54 and 58, district spokesperson Dia Davidson-Smith has said. Officials with Maxim told the school district they are willing to interview and hire the current nursing staff members if they are interested in staying with the current school where they work, she said. Carol Komara, a nurse and former Fayette school board member, is among those speaking out. As a school nurse advocate, and as a member of the Kentucky Nurses Association school nurse task force, I am very disappointed that the current model and partnership with the FCHD is being discontinued, Komara said. For 10 years now, our local advocacy group has worked with staff from the FCPS to cooperatively advise, offer resources and work toward the goal of having a school nurse in every school, every day, all day. With financial funding and a commitment from the local school board, Komara said her group realized this goal could be reached. Consistent nurse staffing where children, parents and faculty can engage daily with the school nurse is paramount, said Komara. In response to the concerns, Davidson-Smith told the Herald-Leader Saturday her earlier comment stood: FCPS is in no way compromising student health care or employee access to employment. Nursing practice in a school setting is a very autonomous role, said Holmes, noting that nurses provide care and support to students, parents, teachers and staff. They must have support from supervisors who are experienced nurses themselves and are readily available to the nurse who is the only healthcare provider in a school setting. Certainly there needs to be a close look at what is guaranteed in both contracts to assure the needs of students, faculty and staff in schools are met, Holmes said. At a meeting of the Fayette County Board of Health executive committee Nov. 30, interim chief administrative officer Jack Cornett said, It is a bit confusing to us. From our vantage point, quite frankly, we view it as a mistake, but it is their mistake to make, WLEX reported. Health Department spokesperson Kevin Hall confirmed the statement and told the Herald-Leader Saturday that Jack was referencing a move away from LFCHD as the school health program as being a mistake. Wendy Wheeler-Mullins, an advocate for students with disabilities as a board member of the Autism Society of the Bluegrass, said having a consistent, long-term nursing staff makes a big difference in the kind of care students receive. She said her children, now adults, benefited from school nurses in Fayette County Public Schools. School nurses do far more than just dispense medications to students during the school day, Wheeler-Mullins said. They manage the health of diabetic students, address general health problems for all students, and end up being a trusted unofficial go-to-person for some children. They have important relationships with pupils that help them provide better care. This is not a position where the emphasis should be on saving money, said Wheeler-Mullins. Dear Becky, In the mid-1980s I worked for a company which provided a company pension. When I left the company I did nothing with it, as I was advised I would still get my pension when I retired. Unfortunately, my pension was with the Johnson Group and the pension fund was invested with Equitable Life which, I am sure you are aware, collapsed after government intervention. I recently discovered that the Government under David Cameron established a compensation scheme for those losing their pensions, which has apparently closed now. I was not advised of this scheme, let alone its closure. I receive a small amount from this company pension, of 135 per month. Is there anything I can do to claim this compensation now, or get my full pension? Thanking you in anticipation, Yours faithfully, Mr D Dear reader, Around a million people suffered serious losses and reduced pension payments as a result of the collapse of Equitable Life, which could lay claim to being the biggest pension scandal in living memory, and continues to have an effect on many peoples lives including yours. You are correct that the Coalition government offered a compensation fund. It passed the Equitable Life (Payments) Act 2010, which established a 1.5bn compensation scheme for affected policyholders far less than the 4-5bn estimate for what was owed. The Parliamentary Ombudsman concluded that victims losses were directly attributable to a decade of serious, serial regulatory maladministration and not just the fault of the company. The inadequacy of the compensation fund, after the Ombudsman further judged that victims should receive full compensation, remains a big issue. People have died waiting for payouts that have never materialised. The compensation scheme closed at the end of 2015 and unfortunately, there is little you can do to claim further compensation from it. However, there is still pressure for full compensation for the thousands of others in a similar position to you through the Equitable Members Action Group (EMAG), and the all-party parliamentary group for justice for Equitable Life policyholders, chaired by Bob Blackman MP, which has 300 MPs as members. Rather than continuing to request the full compensation, this group recently tried a different approach by requesting more information from the Treasury on how payouts were calculated, believing that the methodology wasnt clear, and stating that some policyholders with very similar circumstances were being paid different amounts. So, one possible avenue to go down would be to investigate how your payout amount was calculated by asking for this information. Or if you prefer, you could pass details of your case to the campaign group. This work is ongoing and could be your best chance of receiving a higher payout, in time. Write to Pensions Doctor with your pension problem: pensionsdoctor@telegraph.co.uk. Columns are published weekly 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. An 18-year-old connected to an Erie street gang has been sentenced to 55 years to life plus another 20 years for first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of 13-year-old Kasir Gambill three years ago a killing that sparked other violence in Erie months later. Deangelo J. Troop Jr., the lead defendant in the case, was sentenced on Monday. He was 15 when Kasir was murdered in December 2020, but was prosecuted as as an adult. Erie County Judge John J. Trucilla sentenced Troop to state prison for Troop's guilty plea to first-degree murder and other charges, including the first-degree felony of aggravated assault. "You acted like a hardcore criminal," Trucilla told Troop. Despite Troop being 15 at the time of the killing, Trucilla said, Troop "showed the maturity level of a calculated adult." Troop would have received a mandatory life sentence with no parole for first-degree murder had he been 18 or older when the murder occurred. Kasir Gambill, 13, was killed in a gang-related shooting in Erie on Dec. 5, 2020. After U.S. Supreme Court ruled that juvenile offenders cannot receive mandatory life sentences with no parole, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court set 35 years as the minimum sentence for a defendant convicted of carrying out a first-degree murder a premeditated killing as a juvenile. Troop will not be eligible for parole until he is around 76 Trucilla sentenced Troop to 55 years to life on the murder charge, and sentenced him to five to 20 years on the charge of aggravated assault. He ran the sentences consecutive to each other and gave Troop concurrent sentences on two other charges: criminal conspiracy and carrying a firearm without a license. Trucilla also said Troop must serve the sentence of 55 years to life plus 20 years after he completes a sentence of 3 to seven years he received in January. The combined sentences mean that Troop will not be eligible for parole until he completes a minimum sentence of 58 years, or when he is about 76 years old. Troop was sentenced in the earlier case after he pleaded guilty in September 2022 to being one of three people who sprayed the neighborhood at East 22nd and Reed streets with 56 bullets at about 4 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 20, 2022. Investigators said Troop and two others fired the 56 bullets toward two people. Some of the shots hit Holy Trinity Catholic Church, at 2220 Reed St. A priest was inside at the time. No one was injured. "One of the most dangerous juveniles in Erie," is how a prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Emily Downing, described Troop at his sentencing in the shooting case. Troop, co-defendant were after someone else In the homicide case, Troop pleaded guilty in October to fatally shooting Kasir on Dec. 5, 2020, in what the Erie County District Attorney's Office and Erie police described as a gang-related shooting. The person Kasir was with was the intended target, but Kasir was shot instead, the prosecution said. Kasir was shot in the head as he was trying to climb a fence to evade gunfire at East 20th Street and Franklin Avenue in Erie at about 9:25 p.m. Kasir, who had just left a relative's house, was shot three times and died at a Pittsburgh hospital 10 days later. The Erie police charged Troop and a co-defendant, James I. Garcia, in Kasir's death in June 2022, capping a 1-year investigation that involved an extensive review of surveillance video and cellphone data. Garcia was also 15 at the time of the shooting and is now 18. He pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in September and was prepared to testify against Troop at trial. Trucilla is scheduled to sentenced Garcia on Dec. 19. The intended target of the shooting was a 17-year-old boy who was with Gambill, police said. The 17-year-old was connected to an Erie gang called the Stacked Bread Boys, while Troop and Garcia were members of a rival gang called the Five, or the 5ive, according to statements at Monday's sentencing. The Five is based near East Fifth and Ash streets and the Stacked Bread Boys the name is slang referring to the making of money is based near East 19th and Thompson streets, around the Harbor Homes public housing complex, according to evidence the prosecution presented on Monday. The evidence showed that Troop and Garcia drove to the neighborhood of the Stacked Bread Boys looking for the 17-year-old member of that gang, and opened fire on him and Kasir. Troop's lawyer asks for a sentence of 35 years Troop tried to withdraw his guilty plea in the homicide case in November, but Trucilla rejected the request. He said Troop had failed to provide "a fair and just reason" for the withdrawal. Trucilla said Troop pleaded guilty following a lengthy plea hearing at which his lawyer vouched for the deal that Troop was accepted. Troop said little at the sentencing. He refused to answer Trucilla's specific questions about the case, including why he killed Kasir. "I want to apologize," Troop said. Troop's lawyer at the sentencing, Douglas Sullivan, asked Trucilla to consider Troop's age, guilty plea and family background in requesting a minimum sentence of 35 years. He said Troop's mother and father have been in and out of prison throughout his life, and that Troop's grandparents adopted him when he was younger than 2 years old. "He is still young, and still an impressionable individual," Sullivan said. "There is a good person inside of him if he can set aside the pressures he has acquiesced to." Troop's mother, Chytoria Graham, told Trucilla that she was sorry on behalf of her son, and she said her family and the Gambill family are intertwined. Graham said she has a girl with a relative of the Gambill family. She and her family, Graham said, "give our condolences." Trucilla thanked Graham for her comments in court, but took issue with her statements, made in a letter she sent the judge, that Kasir's death was an accident. "This was not an accident," Trucilla said. He said Troop "really went out of his way to make this happen. He was not at the wrong place at the wrong time. He put himself there." Kasir Gambill's father went on killing spree over son's death Kasir's death marked another deadly example of violent crime among Erie juveniles, many of them connected to street gangs. Both Garcia and Troop were charged with firing the shots that led to Kasir's death. They fired as many as 14 to 16 shots, the prosecution said. Erie County Judge John J. Trucilla is presiding over the case of the two defendants who pleaded guilty in the fatal shooting of 13-year-old Kasir Gambill in Erie on Dec. 5, 2020. "The impact on the community was devastating," the prosecutor, Chief Deputy District Attorney Jeremy Lightner said that the sentencing. He said Troop and Garcia "hunted" Kasir as the two co-defendants opened fire on the 17-year-old rival gang member. He said Kasir knew some of the rival gang members, but was not actively involved in a gang. "He was not on the same path as Mr. Troop," Lightner said. Kasir's mother, Alliesheia Gambill Brown, told Trucilla that Kasir was known as a fun-loving teen and a class clown who knew how to brighten a room. She said his death had torn apart her family. "This whole situation has changed my life for the worse," she said. Kasir's death led to more violence in Erie. In response to the killing, Kasir's father, Danny Nicholson II, went on a shooting spree that included the murders of two people on March 3, 2021, at Bogey's Tavern, 2105 Buffalo Road. One of the murder victims, Jason D. Wells, 41, was the father of Erie resident Jayzhon Goodwin, 21. The District Attorney's Office and Erie police identified Goodwin as a leader of the Five, the gang whose members included Troop and Garcia, according to court records. Nicholson, 40, pleaded guilty in July 2022 to six charges, including two counts of third-degree murder. Erie County Judge Daniel Brabender sentenced him in August 2022 to 45 to 90 years in state prison. Brabender called the fatal shootings of Wells and the other victim, Mauris Pacley, 37, "revenge killings," and he criticized Nicholson for choosing violence to deal with the death of his son. "Street justice is illegal," Brabender said in that case. Kasir's mom: 'I pray for these little boys' At Monday's sentencing, Lightner said Kasir's case showed how "violence begets violence begets violence." Alliesheia Gambill said the violence unraveled Nicholson to the point that he also became a killer. "He loved Kasir with all his heart," Gambill said. "His mind is going, his father's. Mine is slipping away." Of the gang violence, she said: "I pray for these little boys. They are lost. They are lost." Trucilla said Troop's case called for a lengthy sentence as a way to try to end the chain of violence that continue to plague Erie's streets. "They have to learn that this cannot happen," Trucilla said of those involved in gang activity. "There has to be some message that this cannot happen." "Everyone in this courtroom would agree: This has to stop," he said. Ed Palattella at epalattella@timesnews.com. Follow him on X @ETNpalattella. This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Erie teen gets 55 years to life for of Kasir Gambill, 13 Nationally, school districts and charter schools have poured billions of federal pandemic relief dollars into staffing. Most states dont detail that spending precisely, but North Carolina does. A FutureEd analysis of how North Carolina is spending its last and largest round of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief money suggests that localities across the state, especially rural school districts, put larger shares of that money into short-term staffing fixes than into long-term personnel commitments. This decision could potentially ease their fiscal pain when the funds run out. Of the $3.6 billion the state received in the third and final round of federal relief, about $2.3 billion had been spent or earmarked as of Oct. 31, including $1.2 billion on staffing. Stressing the Short Term Notably, given warnings of looming post-ESSER teacher layoffs, the largest share of North Carolinas staffing investments and the single largest last-round expenditure of any sort went to one-time expenditures. About 55% of North Carolinas local education agencies spent some of their third-round ESSER dollars on staff bonuses. That translated to $445 million, or 20% of the final federal installment spent so far. Most of these expenditures occurred in fiscal year 2022, likely reflecting pandemic-related challenges in recruiting and retaining staff. North Carolinas state-level data do not show whether bonuses were distributed across the board to thank teachers for their efforts during COVID or targeted to hiring and retention in hard-to-fill areas. But an earlier FutureEd analysis of the nations 100 largest school districts third-round ESSER plans found that nearly half the districts considering bonuses intended to target them toward specific hard-to-fill positions, hard-to-staff schools or effective teachers. FutureEds current analysis of ESSER spending in selected North Carolina school districts revealed that several are using bonuses strategically to hire and keep staff in hard-to-fill jobs. Research has found targeted bonuses to be more effective than across-the-board stipends in attracting and retaining teachers. Statewide, staff bonuses were most likely in rural areas. A lot of the more rural districts already face competition [for teachers], especially if theyre bordering a county or a district that is urban and can offer a larger [salary] supplement, said Rachel Wright-Junio, director of North Carolinas office of learning recovery and acceleration. So, I would understand why they would take advantage of awarding bonuses to try to attract and retain teachers. Though our analysis suggests that bonuses may have been a wise use of one-time funds, especially when targeted to fill hard-to-staff positions, interviews with North Carolina district leaders suggest that they have also forced some districts to compete for teachers, as some were able to offer higher bonuses than others. Wright-Junio expressed concern that rural districts may see worse teacher and bus driver shortages when the bonus funds run out. Spending May Not Equal New Hires North Carolina districts and charter schools have spent nearly $369.3 million of their final round of ESSER funding on staff salaries, with about one-third of the money going to classroom teachers. An additional $50.2 million went for recurring extra payments to attract and retain highly effective educators. These salary supplements are typically set at the local level and paid for with local funds. Though bonuses represent North Carolinas largest ESSER expenditure, teacher salaries emerged among the top spending priorities in two-thirds of local education agencies. We found that the number of North Carolina teachers supported by federal funds rose by 23% between 2018-19 and 2022-23 an increase of 1,300. But the total number of teachers statewide has declined slightly, by 720, from pre-pandemic levels. This suggests that at least some ESSER money has funded existing educators, not new personnel. While some districts might be paying existing staff with ESSER dollars to free up other funds, our analysis indicates the statewide student-teacher ratio has declined, from 15.1 in 2018-19 to 14.7 in 2022-23. Pandemic funds may have made it possible for school districts to keep teachers they might otherwise have had to let go due to student enrollment declines. Related With More Teachers & Fewer Students, Districts Are Set up for Financial Trouble This doesnt necessarily mean all these positions will automatically disappear when the ESSER money runs out. You dont know the counterfactual, which might be that the district would have hired for that new position anyway and used other spending for it, said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research and a FutureEd research adviser. I think it probably indicates that some of those teachers are, in fact, going to go when ESSER disappears. But you dont know that for sure. Looking Forward The North Carolina Department of Education has developed several tools to help local education agencies assess which of their investments are most important to sustain. For example, it created a framework for sustainability, called an investment grid, to help districts use performance data to gauge the value of their investments. State education officials are also helping school districts and charters find additional funding for summer learning, tutoring and other priorities. They developed a strategy for districts to align their ESSER investments with existing federal funding programs so they can potentially transition to other federal funding. Ultimately, North Carolinas local education agencies are going to face staffing choices as the deadline for spending the states remaining $1.2 billion in federal COVID school aid approaches. Their education leaders have spent the largest share of their last round of ESSER monies on bonuses and other short-term investments may make the task a little easier. Estonian border guards at the checkpoint in Narva have begun to inform residents of the country heading to Russia about a possible border closure. Source: Kremlin-aligned news agency RIA Novosti Details: The leaflets that border guards have given to travellers claim that in recent weeks Moscow has been sending groups of foreigners to the border who have no legal right to enter the EU. The border guards said if such actions continue, they would have to close the border points "to ensure state security and protection of public order", as Finland did earlier. Last week, the Estonian authorities started installing additional concrete barriers at the Narva border checkpoint. Later, Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna announced his readiness to close the border with Russia in case of "hybrid attacks". Background: Eva Kalmus, Head of the Border Guard Department of the Estonian Police and Border Guard Board, said that the border with the Russian Federation could be closed very quickly after a corresponding government decision. Support UP or become our patron! The permanent representatives of 27 EU member states will start discussing the decision of the forthcoming EU summit concerning the start of accession talks with Ukraine and other members in Brussels on 5 December. Source: European Pravda with reference to Reuters Details: The initial project of the decision of the 14-15 December EU summit to be discussed by ambassadors contains the following wording: "The European Council decides to open accession negotiations with Ukraine and with Moldova." It is also stated there that the negotiations with Bosnia and Herzegovina will start "once the necessary degree of compliance with the membership criteria is achieved", and Georgia will receive a candidate status if Tbilisi fulfils all criteria as well. The information on wording concerning Kyiv, Kishinev and Tbilisi were partially confirmed by Rikard Jozwiak, a Radio Liberty journalist. He states that the start of membership talks with Ukraine and Moldova in the project of summit decisions was put in brackets, which means the absence of a final decision. EU diplomats and officials Reuters talked with say that the project will be changed. So far it is unknown in which way exactly. Background: In the report published on 8 November the European Commission has recommended that EU states start accession negotiations with Ukraine, but Kyiv must implement further reforms. The Ukrainian government is sure that Ukraines readiness level for EU accession is high and promises to end the talks in two years. The decision whether to start the negotiations with Ukraine will be discussed at the EU leaders summit in December. Hungary, which is promising to block the positive decision for Kyiv, might hinder the decision. Recently, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban wrote a letter to the President of the European Commission in which he threatened to block EU aid for Ukraine and its movement towards EU membership if the EU leaders do not agree to review the whole strategy of supporting Kyiv. Support UP or become our patron! In face of Orbans criticism, EC defends decision to start talks on Ukraine joining EU The European Commission has responded to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's claim that the plan to start negotiations on Ukraine's accession to the EU was "poorly prepared," saying its stands by the recommendation and does not consider it unreasonable. Ana Pisonero, a representative of the European Commission, gave the ECs response to Orban during a briefing on Dec. 4. "We stick to our proposal and our recommendation," the European Commission representative said. No, we do not think that its unfounded or poorly prepared. I think that Ukraine has done impressive work in speed and in content. And this has been highlighted by the President (Ursula von der Leyen - ed.) on numerous occasions. And obviously, now itll be for member states to take decisions on the basis of our enlargement package. Earlier, Viktor Orban called the European Commission's proposal for Ukraine's accession to the EU "unfounded and poorly prepared." "There is no place for it on the agenda," the Hungarian prime minister wrote on his X (Twitter) account on Dec. 3. Read also: How Zakarpattia Hungarians view the Kyiv-Budapest conflict Orban has been opposing the start of negotiations on Ukraine's accession to the EU since the European Commission gave the green light to start membership talks in November. The Hungarian prime minister sent a letter to Charles Michel on Nov. 22 demanding that he revise the strategy of supporting Ukraine. Orban stressed that otherwise Budapest could block new tranches and Ukraine's future accession to the bloc. During a speech on Nov. 26, Viktor Orban said that Ukraine would not be able to defeat Russia on the battlefield. At the same time, he argued that the West and the European Union had made a "strategic mistake" by deciding to help Kyiv. Read also: Orban disrupts EU over Ukraine aid report On Nov. 27, he threatened to disrupt the December summit of EU leaders, which is supposed to discuss financial assistance to Kyiv and the issue of starting negotiations on Ukraine's accession to the EU. 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 The European Union stands ready to assist Ukraine in investigating Russia's environmental crimes since their magnitude is enormous, yet the legal context of these crimes is not well defined. Source: DW, citing Nils Behrndt, Deputy Director-General of the European Commission's Directorate-General for Justice Details: The official noted that "the scale of the suspected environmental crimes committed in Ukraine is enormous". "We cannot recall anything like this in the past. However, the legal context of these crimes is unclear," he acknowledged. However, Behrndt noted that the European Commission and the EU member states' relevant authorities stand ready to assist Ukraine in investigating Russia's suspected environmental crimes. To this end, Nils Behrndt also stressed that there have been cases in modern history when countries have received compensation for environmental damage suffered during military conflicts. DW reported that Kyiv estimates the damage to Ukraine's environment caused by the war to be 56.7 billion. The country ranks among the first worldwide by the area of mine-affected territories, accounting for 30% of its territory. Ruslan Strilets, Ukraine's Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, labelled the blowing up of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant dam in June this year, likely committed by the Russian military, the biggest crime of Russian ecocide in Ukraine. The minister says it will take at least 20 years to revive the forests and national parks where hostilities are raging. In addition, Strilets reported that the hostilities have led to "additional emissions of 150 million tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere". The Ukrainian authorities not only record the damage that the Russian army, as they estimate, inflicts on the country's natural resources daily but also document the specific actions that are causing it. Kyiv has officially recorded 2,900 such crimes since the beginning of the full-scale war. Support UP or become our patron! This 2019 file photo shows a man smoking an electronic cigarette inside a vape shop in Washington, D.C. Oregon environmental regulators have fined a vaping liquid manufacturer and distributor $32,700 for multiple hazardous waste violations at its facilities in Eugene and Springfield. Oregon environmental regulators have fined a vaping liquid manufacturer and distributor $32,700 for multiple hazardous waste violations at its facilities in Eugene and Springfield. Vape Game was fined for transporting hazardous waste without a manifest, failing to determine whether wastes generated were hazardous, storing hazardous wastes for longer than allowed without a permit and failing to prepare contingency plans at the facilities. The nicotine-containing waste you generate is acutely hazardous waste, which is highly regulated in small amounts, the state Department of Environmental Quality wrote in its penalty order. DEQ also cited the company, without a financial penalty, for other hazardous waste violations. Vape Game owner Dalton Baarstad said he plans to appeal the fine. Baarstad said he accumulated the nicotine wastes over the eight years he has been in business but was cited when he tried to arrange for its proper disposal. Theres no real instruction for new industries such as a vaping industry to follow these formats, he said. DEQ is using a collection of regulations based off what they have, which doesnt really include my industry. Its extremely frustrating, Baarstad said. Oregon DEQ issues 17 fines in October The fine against Vape Game was among 17 DEQ issued in October, totaling $305,021. Other violations included a city discharging untreated sewage and a trucking company not immediately reporting and cleaning up an oil spill. They also include a previously announced combined $134,378 penalty to the Winchester Water Control District and Terra Firma Foundation Repair for water quality violations during Winchester Dam repairs. Recipients can appeal their fines by requesting a hearing within 20 calendar days of receiving their penalty letter. DEQ sometimes reduces or eliminates fines after appeals. Recipients also may be able to resolve part of their fines by completing sponsoring an environmental improvement project instead of paying a penalty. Here are the other citations: This embedded content is not available in your region. Winchester Water Control District, Winchester, $106,778: For violating at least 10 conditions of a permit for a dam repair project, including failing to install erosion and sediment controls, discharging concrete into the North Umpqua River, installing tire mats in the river, operating equipment in the flowing channel of the river, failing to install a turbidity curtain upstream of the dam gates, failing to fully isolate the in-water work area, failing to report concrete discharges, performing in-water work outside the approved window and failing to maintain unobstructed fish passage. City of The Dalles, $35,616: For discharging about 100,000 gallons of untreated sewage to Mill Creek, posing a threat to public health; for discharging sewage that exceeded limits for E. coli; and for failing to conduct required monitoring. TerraFirma Foundation Repair, Winchester, $27,600: For discharging uncured concrete and placing mats made of heavy truck tires into the North Umpqua River. Boise Cascade Wood Products, Elgin $18,368: For discharging wastewater from its log deck sprinkling operations to Phillips Creek without a permit and for failing to collect monitoring data. Triangle Oil, Mount Vernon, $17,981: For underground storage tank violations, including failing to maintain spill prevention, overfill prevention and release detection equipment, as well as failing to report a suspected release of fuel and failing to conduct required equipment testing. City of North Powder, $11,692: For violating conditions in an agreement it made with DEQ following previous violations. The city failed to collect monitoring data, submitted false, inaccurate or incomplete information, and exceeded its permitted bacteria limit by a factor of five or more. Jasper Wood Products, Jasper, $10,800: For failing to complete required monitoring and for exceeding its permitted limit for total suspended solids. Alpha Omega Trucking, Brookings, $10,400: For failing to immediately report and clean up an oil spill at its facility. Boring Auto Wrecking, Boring, $9,931: For failing to collect required stormwater discharge samples. Hull-Oakes Lumber Co., Monroe, $7,200: For exceeding limits in its water quality permit. NWFF Environmental, Philomath, $3,600: For transporting 1,064 pounds of fire debris from another party to its facility without a hazardous waste manifest. Bushnell's Warehousing and Trucking Corp., Portland, $3,300: For hazardous waste violations including failing to determine whether a drum of waste generated at its facility was hazardous waste. Oregon Department of Transportation, Roseburg, $3,450: For allowing concrete dust to settle on the surface of the South Umpqua River during the Conn-Ford Bridge Replacement Project. S&P Oil, Halsey, $2,595: For operating an onsite wastewater treatment system without a proper water quality permit. PacifiCorp, Roseburg, $1,600: For failing to characterize waste generated at the North Umpqua Hydroelectric Project as hazardous waste. Debris generated from a truck fire at the facility contained hazardous levels of lead. Sisters of St. Mary of Oregon Maryville Corp. dba Maryville Nursing Home, Beaverton, $1,410: For underground storage tank violations at a fuel tank for an emergency generator, including failing to have adequate release detection and failing to conduct monthly walkthrough inspections. Tracy Loew covers the environment at the Statesman Journal. Send comments, questions and tips: tloew@statesmanjournal.com or 503-399-6779. Follow her on Twitter at @Tracy_Loew This article originally appeared on Salem Statesman Journal: Vape Game fined for hazardous waste in Eugene, Springfield If you know the history of Israel, that the country was created after one-third of the world's Jewish population was murdered by Nazis (it has yet to fully recover), it's difficult to stomach protesters who often slip from supporting the Palestinian cause to gloating over Hamas's terrorism and the prospect of destroying the Jewish state. There's not a lot of good will in projecting "Glory to Our Martyrs" on buildings or chanting "from the river to the sea"let alone explicit endorsements of the attack. But even assholes have speech rights. That's because all individuals have rights, however they use them, and because free expression only works if it's available to everybody, not reserved as privilege for the "right" ideas. And, importantly, respecting free speech lets people show us who they are. Unfortunately, political officials' natural distaste for dissent can combine with honest revulsion at despicable sentiments to produce a reaction that would violate the right to free expression. Fighting Hate with Authoritarianism "Today, Congressman Mike Lawler (NY-17) announced that the House passed two amendments he put forward to the House's appropriations bill for Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education (LHHS) to combat antisemitism on college campuses," the New York Republican announced November 15. "His second LHHS amendment, rescinding federal funding for college campuses that give a platform to antisemitism hate, was adopted with broad, bipartisan support." One reaction to this is that the federal government shouldn't be funding colleges to begin with. I agree. But so long as it is handing out cash, those funds shouldn't be used to bypass legal protections for individual rights. And no, just deciding to reject federal money might not be enough; Hillsdale College did that to escape federal regulation and now faces efforts to subject the school to control just because it has tax-exempt status enjoyed by many institutions. The only way to keep authoritarians from getting a foot in the door is to defend liberty as a principle. Unconstitutionally Targeting a Viewpoint The amendment, now appended to the appropriations bill, "is too vague and overbroad to constitutionally serve as a basis for whether campus administrators must forbid expression," objects the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in a letter to Congress. "If Congress enacts this provision into law, colleges and universities will be highly motivated to stamp out speech on one side of a hotly debated issue," FIRE Legislative and Policy Director Joseph Cohn and Legislative Counsel Greg Y. Gonzalez add. "The policies that institutions will adopt to avoid losing federal dollars will be viewpoint-based prior restraints and they will likely be draconian. These policies will chill constitutionally protected speech as students and professors will rationally choose to alter what they say (but, importantly, not necessarily what they think) to avoid harsh penalties." Among the problems of legislation that would (already problematically) suppress disfavored speech is that the definition of "antisemitism" the amendment uses is that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an organization based in Germany where speech standards are different than in the United States. As working examples of antisemitism, the definition includes "applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation," and "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis." "Applying double standards may be worthy of criticism, but the First Amendment protects speakers from liability for hypocrisy. And to be perfectly clear, the First Amendment allows comparing every country in the world's policies to those of Nazis," point out Cohn and Gonzalez. The terms "Nazi" and "literally Hitler" have been so overused as part of political discourse in recent years that Americans might appreciate a break. But that break can't be applied by declaring one target off-limits. It's one thing to regard the use of such language with contempt, but the government can't impose legal sanctions on people who throw around such terms. Suppressing Speech Doesn't Erase Ideas Cohn and Gonzalez also make a strong point when they write that government action "will chill constitutionally protected speech (but, importantly, not necessarily what they think)." A protest full of people chanting hateful slogans isn't just an expression of free speech rights, it's a live-action advisory to people disgusted by such ideas of who they might want to avoid. When some students at my son's college walked out of class and staged a pro-Palestinian protest that crossed over into support for Hamas, my son dropped by to look over the crowd for familiar faces. He didn't have to wonder who among the people he knew should be added to his personal shit list for future reference (thankfully few, it turned out). He was also happy to see Jewish organizations free to exercise their own free-speech rights in the form of a vigil for the hostages held by terrorists. When free-speech rights are respected and protected, they're available for everybody to use out in the open. If one side is suppressed, its supporters may not be able to publicly air their views, but they still hold them and share them in privateand may feel that much more justified because of state action. Open, loud, and peaceful speechno matter how objectionableis far preferable to the alternative. The killing of Paul Kessler in California and the shootings of Kinnan Abdalhamid, Tahseen Ali Ahmad, and Hisham Awartani in Vermont remind us that there are far worse forms of expressing strongly held sentiments than harsh words. Target Actions, Protect Speech "Rather than try to define 'antisemitism,' Congress should help institutions consistently recognize and apply the distinctions between protected expression, categorically unprotected speech, and non-expressive conduct that lies beyond the First Amendment's protection," FIRE's Cohn and Gonzalez remind Congress. They recommend that lawmakers focus their efforts on ethnic and religious discrimination at educational institutions, and on actual cases of harassment. That may not be satisfactory to people outraged by sometimes hateful protesters and the sentiments they express. But this moment will pass, and other disagreements will emerge. If we protect speech rights now, free expression will remain available and unconstrained for use in those disputes. And if hateful sentiments once again emerge in those debates to come, the people expressing such ideas will be on public display, like those among us now, to tell us who they are so we don't have to wonder. The post Even Hateful Protests Are Protected, Free Speech Group Reminds Congress appeared first on Reason.com. A top American diplomat who used to be the US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested for allegedly secretly working as a Cuban spy. Manuel Rocha, 73, was taken into custody in Miami on Friday in what marked the culmination of a long-running FBI counterintelligence investigation, according to the Associated Press. Two sources told the agency that Mr Rocha is accused of secretly working to promote the Cuban governments interests. Investigators allege that this is a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act a law which requires any individual lobbying and doing the political bidding of a foreign government on US soil to register with the Justice Department. Further details about the 73-year-olds alleged work as a Cuban government agent are expected to be revealed on Monday when he appears in federal court. Neither the DOJ or Mr Rocha has yet publicly commented on his arrest. Mr Rochas wife Karla Wittkop Rocha refused to comment and hung up the phone when reached for comment by the AP. The bombshell arrest comes after Mr Rocha has spent 25 years working as a top US diplomat in several Latin American countries. His diplomatic postings included a stint at the US Interests Section in Cuba during a time when the US lacked full diplomatic relations with Fidel Castros communist government. Born in Colombia, Mr Rocha was raised in a working-class home in New York City and went on to obtain a succession of liberal arts degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown before joining the foreign service in 1981. Manuel Rocha was arrested on Friday (Supplied) He was the top US diplomat in Argentina between 1997 and 2000 as a decade-long currency stabilisation program backed by Washington was unraveling under the weight of huge foreign debt and stagnant growth, triggering a political crisis that would see the South American country cycle through five presidents in two weeks. At his next post as ambassador to Bolivia, he intervened directly into the 2002 presidential race, warning weeks ahead of the vote that the US would cut off assistance to the poor South American country if it were to elect former coca grower Evo Morales. I want to remind the Bolivian electorate that if they vote for those who want Bolivia to return to exporting cocaine, that will seriously jeopardise any future aid to Bolivia from the United States, Mr Rocha said in a speech that was widely interpreted as a an attempt to sustain US dominance in the region. The gambit worked but three years later Bolivians elected Morales anyway and the leftist leader would expel Rochas successor as chief of the diplomatic mission for inciting civil war. Mr Rocha also served in Italy, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, and worked as a Latin America expert for the National Security Council. Following his retirement from the State Department, Mr Rocha began a second career in business, serving as the president of a gold mine in the Dominican Republic partly owned by Canadas Barrick Gold. More recently, hes held senior roles at XCoal, a Pennsylvania-based coal exporter; Clover Leaf Capital, a company formed to facilitate mergers in the cannabis industry; law firm Foley & Lardner and Spanish public relations firm Llorente & Cuenca. New subdivisions are under construction in Lake Hamilton, just south of Scenic Terrace Elementary. The town recently annexed 626 acres just to the east where more housing is planned. The Town of Lake Hamilton is poised to expand its land mass by more than 20% through an annexation that has been winding its way through approvals by the Town Council. Mayor Michael W. Kehoe said in a recent phone interview that at just over four square miles, Lake Hamilton is small and getting compressed by developments in Haines City and Dundee. If we do not allow annexation and development, the Town of Lake Hamilton we will have our centennial next year we will disappear, Kehoe said. We have to expand our town to survive. And everyone on the council; this has been a discussion for years, he said. The council has already voted to annex 626.82 acres during its Nov. 7 meeting. It then voted in favor of a zoning change to accommodate an expansion of the Hamilton Bluff subdivision. That's planned on the land being developed by a Cassidy family business shown in town records as GLK Real Estate LLC. The zoning change passed initially and now requires a second reading before a final vote that is currently slated for the council's December meeting. The process hit a snag with the required state approvals and some of the process will have to be restarted. With the annexation complete, the towns planning commission will have to review options for the land, Kehoe said. The land has to be rezoned, and the comprehensive plan will be sent to the state of Florida for approval. The council will then approve the comprehensive plan, he said. According to Lake Hamiltons senior planner Chris Kirby, an emergency planning commission meeting was held Nov. 13 to deliberate on the zoning change for additional single-family homes on the land, he said. The four-member planning commission approved the zoning change by a 3-0 vote with Mike Floridino absent. Map shows 626 acres in red that were recently annexed into Lake Hamilton, increasing the town's size by more than 20%. The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity requires that a planning commission review applications for annexations over 50 acres, he said. Lake Hamilton also has a similar requirement per its ordinances. The emergency planning commission meeting was not listed on the towns website. Kirby said the meeting was "advertised locally." 'A lot of room to grow' Lake Hamilton is 4.104 square miles, or 2,626.56 acres. With an additional 626.82 acres, its land mass would swell to 3,253.38 acres an increase of more than 20%. According to the Florida Legislative Office of Economic and Demographic Research, the town's current population was 1,571 as of April. Rich Doty, a research demographer with the University of Florida, said the state data that he helps to calculate is based on electric utility customers primarily, as well as building permits. The data does not include seasonal residences per state law. "That whole area is growing fast and Lake Hamilton is not a big city but there may be some annexations and obviously they have got a lot of room to grow," Doty said. "I wouldn't be at all surprised to see their population double over the next 10 years or more than that." Lake Hamilton is already seeing exponential growth based on the number of building permits. According to Kirby, the city issued 261 this year through Thursday, compared with only one in 2022. 'We have an active development presence' In a presentation to the School Board, Public School Development Solutions projected 12,000 single-family homes could be built within the vicinity of Lake Hamilton, Haines City, Dundee and Winter Haven in the county's fast growing northeastern region. Several corporations registered with the Florida Department of State and listing Cassidy family members as managing members have purchased large swaths of acreage along the Lake Wales Ridge within Polk County over the past decade, state and Polk property records show. The voluntary annexation application lists GLK Real Estate LLC as the applicant with Heather E. Wertz representing the landowner, the application said. The address for GLK is 346 E. Central Ave. in Winter Haven, which is located in the Cassidy Office Campus, county property records show. Steve Cassidy, president of Cassidy Homes, said the Hamilton Bluff community is expected to break ground in the first quarter of 2024. The land annexed by Lake Hamilton is owned by GLK Real Estate, which is in turn owned by Cassidy Homes. We have an active development presence on the ridge," said Steve Cassidy, president of the company. We have an active development presence on the ridge, and Lake Hamilton happens to be one of the towns that we have available land position in and we are intending to develop in, he said. As a developer providing finished lots to home builders, the impact fees for the infrastructure to support a subdivision would be due when the builder applies for a building permit, Cassidy said. There are about a dozen or so fees at the moment that can go as high as $25,000 per unit. Citing a moral obligation, Cassidy said his firm has started working with Polk County on transportation projects to provide new residents moving into Cassidy subdivisions with road improvements. In Lake Hamilton, Cassidy also helped fund the construction of a new wastewater treatment plant that recently was built, he said. Were taking on certain projects that we dont have to because, as one of the major developers in this market, we feel like there is a certain responsibility that we have, Cassidy said. Since we are putting in the houses and drawing people into the market, we should try to do our part to try to facilitate that and not put it on the back of the county to figure out 10 years from now. Were trying to figure it out today. 'They support us' In addition to the pending zoning change, there is also an ordinance to change the towns comprehensive plan, which would include changing the current land use from agricultural rural to a Planned Unit Development. The agricultural-rural land designation allows one house per five acres while a PUD allows higher densities of homes per acre. If we do not allow annexation and development, the Town of Lake Hamilton we will have our centennial next year we will disappear, Lake Hamilton Mayor Mayor Michael W. Kehoe said. We have to expand our town to survive." "Regarding the number of units allowed for the acreage, it would depend on the required percentage of open space and amenities," Kirby said. "A conservative approximate number for this amount of acreage would be 1,600 units." He said the town has not received a site plan at this point in the process. During the November meeting, there was zero discussion about the annexation before it was unanimously approved by the five-member council. Nor did the minutes to the prior meeting in October show any discussion by the council members on the town's expansion. There were no requests from the public to discuss the annexation before the vote, either. When asked about the lack of discussion prior to the vote, Kehoe said he was unopposed in the last election because the people in Lake Hamilton are "very happy about what we are getting done." "I've always supported the residents of Lake Hamilton and they support us," he said. This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Lake Hamilton grows by 20% with 626-acre annexation. More homes coming PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) The Portland Bureau of Transportation is working to stay one step ahead of the storms taking aim at Oregon. An extra 45 PBOT staffers were called in to help clear nearly 350 storm drains on Saturday alone, with extra crews back out on Sunday to help reduce the threat of street flooding. Oregon dominates list of US counties most at risk for landslides PBOT reminds residents to clear surface debris only. Call PBOT Maintenance Dispatch 24/7 at 503.823.1700 for any emergency hazards or if the drain is still clogged after removing surface debris. PBOT crews clear storm drains during a rain storm, December 3, 2023 (KOIN) But with the forecasted floods and winds expected to continue through Wednesday, power companies are also trying to be proactive. Portland General Electric spokesperson John Farmer told KOIN 6 News theyve also bumped up staffing and are tracking the storm in real time to best respond to any outages. We saw some outages yesterday (Saturday), not a lot, nothing that we werent expecting. But we were prepared and were able to take care of those pretty quickly and get everybody back up and running with power, Farmer said. A flood watch remains in effect through Wednesday everywhere west of the Cascades. Small stream flooding is possible, as the rainfall picks up. Rainfall picked up across the Portland metro in the early hours of Sunday as another in a series of Pacific frontal systems takes aim at the region. KOIN 6 News wil have more information later. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KOIN.com. On a warm Kentucky summer day, roughly 20 people from across the state gathered in Frankfort. They weren't there to rally or protest a bill. They were there to come up with solutions for a critical health and safety issue the shortage of veterinarians in the state. Across Kentucky, there are 257.9 million livestock animals, more than 200,000 horses, and thousands of household pets that demand the attention of the state's veterinarians. As of May 2022, only 1,160 licensed veterinarians were employed and working in Kentucky, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated at least 500 counties across 46 states faced critical shortages of veterinary care. In Kentucky, about 72% of the state is experiencing a critical veterinarian shortage. "I think that the problem is that if we don't have sufficient coverage out there and something untoward was to happen, the economic and social impacts could be pretty significant," said Kentucky Department of Agriculture State Veterinarian Dr. Steve Velasco. Outgoing Commissioner of Agriculture Ryan Quarles led the meeting of the Vet Shortage Working Group, which was initially formed in May 2022. This task force of veterinarians, producers, educators and other agricultural stakeholders from Kentucky spent 18 months working to find solutions for the veterinarian shortage plaguing rural Kentucky. The group is focused on the shortage of large or food animal veterinarians who tend to the state's cows, hogs, sheep and other animals raised on farms, often for the food supply. The working group is focused on the salary-to-student-debt ratio for veterinarians, the rate of burnout, the need for a pipeline of vet school graduates heading to rural Kentucky, and ways to quickly identify and support students who may be interested in veterinary medicine. Dr. Luel Overstreet of Corydon, Ky., pulls on a long plastic glove before he performs an exam on a mare at his farm outside Henderson, Ky. Overstreet's son, Kevin Overstreet, in background, helped control the horse during the exam. Sept. 6, 2023. Nationwide, only 5% of veterinarians practice on large animals, and in Kentucky, it's even fewer with just 3% of all veterinarians having a dedicated large animal practice, according to the Kentucky Department of Agriculture. The Problem: Where did all the veterinarians go? Shortage across Kentucky impacts pet owners, farmers More: Kentucky has 15 practicing veterinarians over age 85. Here's why some are still working There is not one easy solution here, Quarles said, "its going to take many different approaches and time to strengthen the availability of rural and food animal veterinarians in Kentucky." Heres a look at what it could take to slow and eventually reverse the veterinarian shortage in Kentucky. Forgive student loan debt Student loan debt is a major issue for veterinarians, with the average debt after graduation being around $200,000. In rural regions, where large animal vets are more likely to work across the commonwealth, some veterinarians are making less than $50,000 annually. Its not a battery plant with 3,000 jobs, but it is an important professional service provider, Dr. Cris Young, a professor of practice at Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine, said during the working group's meeting in June. Much of the future of large animal veterinary medicine in Kentucky is dependent on making the field desirable and attainable for people who may be interested. As owner Judy Lunsford watches, Dr. Andy Roberts checks a horse's joint during a visit at Shawnee Run Farm visit outside Harrodsburg, Ky. recently. Roberts, 56, is a large food/animal vet; and one of only 54 vets that provide care to all the farm animals across Kentucky. One potential solution for Kentucky is to enact a student loan forgiveness plan that places requirements on the participants to practice in rural areas identified as in need of veterinary care. Theres conversations around a loan forgiveness program that the [agriculture] development board would fund over the next two years so that we could stand that up as early as 2024, prove that it works, then ask the General Assembly to fund it from that point on, Keith Rogers, the Kentucky Department of Agriculture chief of staff and Vet Shortage Working Group member, said in a Nov. 1 task force meeting. Both teachers and nurses have similar programs lined up through the state, with commitments if they teach at least five full years in a low-income school in an eligible district or are a registered nurse and agree to work full time for at least two years in a critical shortage facility." While the federal government has a couple of aid programs to help veterinarians afford to stay in the field, particularly in rural areas that struggle to attract and retain large animal practitioners, the programs cannot provide funding to every veterinarian or geographic area in need. Reduce burnout, compassion fatigue of young vets Dr. Luel Overstreet of Corydon, Ky. has been a veterinarian for five decades and horse trainer and owner as well. He says there's been fewer vets entering the profession. Sept. 6, 2023. Nearly 40% of Kentucky's veterinarians are within 10 years or less of retirement age. The oldest practicing vet in the state is 93, according to the state agriculture department. On top of the physical demands, veterinarians often face compassion fatigue, being on call nearly 24/7, and high stress from clients who want their animals to receive quicker and cheaper care. According to American Medical Veterinary Association statistics, one in six veterinarians has contemplated suicide. A report released in 2020 by the AMVA in partnership with Merck Animal Health, showed veterinarians are nearly three times more likely than the general public to die by suicide, the Wisconsin State Farmer, part of the USA Today Network, previously reported. If we dont address the primary sources of burnout, well never fix the problem itself no matter how many new veterinarians or veterinary technicians we add to the workforce, a 2021 AVMA report said. Provide Kentucky students with veterinary medicine programs Anna Stoltman kisses her goat Taleah while waiting for judging at the 2023 Kentucky State Fair Thursday morning. The pair are from Lincoln County, Ky. Aug. 17, 2023 Murray State University hopes to help solve the shortage. In August, the university announced its intent to "examine the statewide shortage of veterinarians and work toward the development of a School of Veterinary Medicine." Once completed, this school will be the first in Kentucky. Annually, 41 Kentucky students are accepted to veterinary medicine programs at out-of-state schools, Auburn University and Tuskegee University, where the state has partnerships. Statistics indicate that there are an insufficient number of veterinarians to meet the growing needs both within Kentucky as well as nationally, Murray State University President Robert Jackson said in an email to The Courier Journal. Further, we have a responsibility to address this increasing shortage of veterinarians in the commonwealth, coupled with ensuring that our prospective pre-veterinary students are able to locate a veterinary school to attend since all Kentucky students must go out of state today. ... We have a tremendous obligation to continue to identify needs and create opportunities for our region and the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Currently, there are 33 accredited veterinary colleges in the U.S. In a 2006 publication of the Journal of Veterinary Medical Education, researchers forecasted an increasing shortage of academic food-animal veterinarians, or veterinarians employed by academic institutions, would amplify shortages wherever food-supply veterinarians are needed. Murray State University Hutson School of Agriculture Dean Dr. Brian Parr anticipates costs in Kentucky "will be over $100 million" to build and complete the school. Parr is confident the new veterinary school will be of benefit not only to the veterinary industry but to interested students in Kentucky. According to a release from Murray State, the Hutson School of Agriculture has the largest estimated pre-veterinary medicine and veterinary technology enrollment of any Kentucky university and is one of only three AVMA fully accredited programs in the state. Parr said when combining the pre-veterinary and veterinary technology students, there are currently more than 400 students in those two majors, noting the campus is seeing a growing interest in these fields. "There's no doubt that the critical need is there," Parr said. "That demand is there obviously from our students that are looking to pursue veterinary medicine as a career, too." Parr said the new vet school will be rooted in a "distributed education model," which calls on clinics and veterinarians in the state to provide internships for veterinary students. This approach is also more cost-effective and will prevent the university from needing to build a veterinary teaching hospital. STLL FROM VIDEO: A cow and her calf at the 2023 Kentucky State Fair Parr said the timing of the proposed vet school is crucial for Kentucky because the state is expecting large dairy cow operations to move into Western Kentucky within the next few years, with at least one of these operations bringing in another 5,000 cows. "We're in desperate need of large animal veterinarians, and we feel that is going to increase as we see these dairy herds come back to our state," Parr said. To ensure Kentucky students interested in becoming a veterinarian have a pathway to vet school before the Murray State school opens, the task force will lobby the General Assembly to expand the number of seats the state pays for at out-of-state vet schools. The University of Georgia is offering Kentucky 10 seats for students starting as early as the fall 2024 semester, and Lincoln Memorial University is also working on a proposal to provide Kentucky students with spots at its vet school in the future. It will be up to the state legislature during the 2024 General Assembly, which will review and approve a state budget, to accept or decline the seats offered in Georgia. The state has been retaining in-state tuition levels for aspiring vet students at Auburn for 72 years, and the task force believes by further expanding seats at the Alabama-based university or other vet schools, more students will have a chance to become veterinarians and hopefully return home to Kentucky. Other possible solutions for the state's vet shortage Dr. Andy Roberts preps a horse for castration during a visit at Shawnee Run Farm visit outside Harrodsburg, Ky. recently. Roberts, 56, is a llarge food/animal vet; and one of only 54 vets that provide care to all the farm animals across Kentucky. In a Nov. 28 meeting in Frankfort, the Vet Shortage Working Group presented a 25-page draft with formal proposals and recommendations for the industry, many of which will require legislative action. The draft, which was unanimously passed, will be available online by mid-December and will be given to leadership in the Kentucky General Assembly in 2024. Here are some of the proposals from the working group: Start the veterinary recruitment pipeline sooner and grow Kentucky agriculture programs for educating primary and secondary school students about veterinary medicine. Create state-funded student-loan forgiveness plans through the General Assembly for veterinarians in rural Kentucky. Kentucky's agricultural leadership and organizations will assist in the development and funding for preceptorship and externship programs to provide students an opportunity to work in rural Kentucky during veterinary school. Provide statewide systems of financial literacy training and mental health support to aspiring vet students while also securing sustainable funding for students to prevent financial barriers and assist in wellness. Have state agriculture leaders assist with connecting and transitioning the new veterinarians in the rural Kentucky community they will serve via local outreach, veterinarian organizations and agricultural producers. Recommend the state expand business support for rural veterinarian clinics, including the potential development of a tax credit program to incentivize a retiring vet to sell their practice to a young, independent veterinarian. In 2022, the state compiled its first set of comprehensive data on licensed vets, which pointed to the severity of the vet shortage and initially spurred the creation of the Vet Shortage Working Group. By June 30, 2025, the state plans to have all veterinary facilities registered with the Kentucky Board of Veterinary Examiners. "A key factor in understanding shortages is having good data on available services to inform decisions about programming," the draft stated. Dr. Andy Roberts does blood work on a horse during a visit at Shawnee Run Farm outside Harrodsburg, Ky. recently. Roberts, 56, is a llarge food/animal vet; and one of only 54 vets that provide care to all the farm animals across Kentucky. This shortage of large animal veterinarians is not just a Kentucky issue, its something were facing nationwide, Quarles said in a June statement. But in Kentucky, were one of the few states who are facing the challenge head-on by creating this task force to look for solutions. Contact business reporter Olivia Evans at oevans@courier-journal.com or on Twitter at @oliviamevans_. This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Vet shortage in Kentucky: How the state plans to solve the issue Claim: On Jan. 6, 2021, just prior to the start of the U.S. Capitol riot in Washington, D.C., Rep. Mark Green said of Republicans' support of then-President Donald Trump, "The things we do for the Orange Jesus." Rating: Rating: Unproven In November 2023, the @AccountableGOP X account reshared an old post with a video that featured then-U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. The video was recorded on Sept. 19, 2022. In the clip, Cheney had delivered remarks in front of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, in which she claimed that on Jan. 6, 2021, just prior to the start of the U.S. Capitol insurrection carried out by supporters of then-President Donald Trump, an unnamed House GOP colleague referred to Trump as "the Orange Jesus." More than one year after Cheney's remarks, on Nov. 28, 2023, the name of the colleague she claims made the "Orange Jesus" remark was revealed by CNN, which was said to have received an early copy of Cheney's upcoming book, "Oath and Honor." According to CNN, Cheney claimed in her book that that colleague was none other than U.S. Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn. According to Liz Cheney, it was Rep. Mark Green who said, The things we do for the Orange Jesus as he signed his name to the electoral vote objection sheets on January 6. https://t.co/Bb4HZn4qc9 Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) November 28, 2023 Was this true? Did Green refer to Trump as "the Orange Jesus"? Conservative political commentator Todd Starnes reported on Nov. 29 that Green himself said he denied having made the "Orange Jesus" comment. Starnes published that Green had told him (or another person associated with Starnes), "I heard the statement. We were in a crowded room, but it wasnt me." By email, Snopes reached out to Green's office seeking confirmation of the response published by Starnes. Instead, we received the following statement attributed to a "spokesman from Rep. Green's office": Liz Cheneys accusation is false. She and her publishers would know this had they reached out to Rep. Green or his office. There was a large crowd in the cloak room that day and Congressman Green unequivocally denies making this comment. We continued our correspondence with Green's spokesperson, asking, "Referencing Starnes' claim, additionally, in the case that the phrase truly was spoken by someone in the room, is Rep. Green able to provide the name of that representative?" In response, the spokesperson told us, "I havent spoken to him about this, but I know he will not do so." Cheney's Story About 'Orange Jesus' In the September 2022 video, Cheney described what she claimed that she heard but did not mention Green by name. Our transcription of the clip is below: In the cloakroom on Jan. 6, before the attack happened, I was in the Republican cloakroom. I was working on my remarks, because I was supposed to speak that day. And there were sheets of paper laid out on the desks. And I asked one of the staffers in the cloakroom, "What are these sheets of paper?," because members were coming in and signing them. And this person said to me, "Well, those are the objections sheets," because, you know, it's only actually required that one House member object, but there were so many who wanted to show they were objecting that they had set up these signup sheets in the cloakroom. And as I was sitting there, a member came in and he signed his name on each one of the state's sheets. And then he said under his breath, "The things we do for the Orange Jesus." And, I thought, you know, you're taking an act that is unconstitutional. CNN's Paraphrase of the Story in Cheney's Book The CNN article from Nov. 28 basically told the same story that Cheney did in the September 2022 video. However, again, it was in her book that Green's name was mentioned for the first time: On Jan. 6, before the attack on the Capitol, Cheney describes a scene in the GOP cloakroom, where members were encouraged to sign their names on electoral vote objection sheets, lined up on a table, one for each of the states Republicans were contesting. Cheney writes most members knew it was a farce and another public display of fealty to Donald Trump. Among them was Republican Congressman Mark Green of Tennessee, Cheney writes. As he moved down the line, signing his name to the pieces of paper, Green said sheepishly to no one in particular, The things we do for the Orange Jesus. CNN also printed the same statement that Snopes received that was attributed to a "spokesman for Greens office," which, again, called Cheney's claim "false." Conclusion In "he said, she said" cases like this one where there is no available audio or video to confirm whether or not Green or another representative made the remark in question, we simply do not have enough evidence to make a firm determination of whether or not it truly occurred. In cases like these, we apply a rating of Unproven. This rating does not mean that the rumor is true or false. Rather, it simply indicates that the available evidence was insufficient. Sources: @AccountableGOP. According to Liz Cheney, It Was Rep. Mark Green Who Said, The Things We Do for the Orange Jesus as He Signed His Name to the Electoral Vote Objection Sheets on January 6. X, 28 Nov. 2023, https://twitter.com/AccountableGOP/status/1729635950588776661. Cheney Identifies Congressman Who Called Trump Orange Jesus in New Book. YouTube, NBC News, 29 Nov. 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5muuwQGP-c. Gangel, Jamie, et al. Exclusive: Liz Cheneys New Book Blasts GOP as Enablers and Collaborators of Trump, Whom One Member Called Orange Jesus | CNN Politics. CNN, 28 Nov. 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/28/politics/liz-cheney-trump-mccarthy-book/index.html. January 6 U.S. Capitol Attack| Background, Events, Criminal Charges, & Facts. Brittanica.com, https://www.britannica.com/event/January-6-U-S-Capitol-attack. Starnes, Todd. LIAR! Liz Cheney Falsely Accuses Rep. Mark Green of Calling Trump Orange Jesus - Todd Starnes. ToddStarnes.com, 29 Nov. 2023, https://www.toddstarnes.com/politics/liar-liz-cheney-falsely-accuses-rep-mark-green-of-calling-trump-orange-jesus/. Wong, Scott. Cheney Says GOP Leaders Are Treating Trump like a King by Defending Him in Mar-a-Lago Probe. NBC News, 20 Sept. 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/cheney-says-gop-leaders-are-treating-trump-king-defending-mar-lago-pro-rcna48455. COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) The family of a woman shot and killed in a Hilltop neighborhood is searching for answers 10 months after her death. In the early hours of Jan. 21, Columbus police officers arrived at the 80 block of Belvidere Avenue in the Hilltop neighborhood on the reports of a shooting. They found Jamika Summerville, 25, had been shot, and she was taken to Grant Medical Center before dying of her injuries. Summerville, who was employed at Highland Elementary School as a special education instructional assistant, was a beloved member of the school community. She was a friend to staff, students, and the community and presented a positive impression in the classroom, Columbus City School District spokesperson Jacqueline Bryant said at the time. She was also a proud graduate of Columbus City Schools. Nearly a year later, there are no known suspects or motives for Summervilles murder. According to Det. Derek Corbin, there were no indications anyone would have had a reason to target the victim. Homicide began investigating the incident and learned that Miss Summerville, who is a teachers assistant for Columbus Public, did not live there, did not have any threats or anything against her, Corbin said. It is unknown at this point why she was targeted in this incident. Evidence suggests that there could have been more than one shooter, Corbin said. Theres multiple gunshots, and from ShotSpotter, it appears that there may have been two shooters, he said. The way the shots sound on the recording it sounds like there may be two guns going off at the same time. Columbus police urge anyone with information to come forward and help the investigation for the sake of Summervilles family. Her family deserves to have justice just as much as anybody else, Corbin said. Corbin may be reached at 614-645-2685 or dcorbin@columbuspolice.org. Anonymous tips can be submitted to Central Ohio Crime Stoppers at 614-461-TIPS. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to NBC4 WCMH-TV. FILE PHOTO: Protest calling for the immediate release of hostages, in Tel Aviv FILE PHOTO: Protest calling for the immediate release of hostages, in Tel Aviv By Eli Berlzon HOLON, Israel (Reuters) - Yosi Shnaider watched a home video on his phone from his apartment near Tel Aviv. In the video, a smiling, red-headed baby sits in a bouncy chair. His big brother, just a few years older with the same fiery hair, leans into the frame and kisses the head of the baby, who then lets out a joyful giggle. They are 10-month-old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel Bibas, the last, according to Israeli officials, of the young children still being held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. "Ariel and Kfir are the last ones, the last ones. Kfir is the smallest baby in captivity, the youngest. And he's got left behind," said Shnaider, a cousin of the boys' mother, Shiri Bibas, who is also in captivity along with her husband Yarden. Hamas infiltrators seized the Bibas family, along with more than 200 other people, during the Oct. 7 killing spree through southern Israeli towns that sparked the devastating war in Gaza. More than 100 hostages were freed in a week-long truce that ended on Friday, but the Bibas family - two children and their parents - were not. "Some of the kidnapped people, when they came back they told stories about the conditions they were held (in), one of the things that the kids said is that they always asked them to be quiet," Shnaider said. "And I'm thinking to myself, a young baby, small baby like Kfir, is crying. He has his first teeth going out right now, he's crying. So, how do you keep a baby from crying? What do you need to do to do that?" Hamas has said that Kfir, Ariel and Shira Bibas were killed during an Israeli bombardment, but the Israeli military said the information was not verified. Hamas also released a video of the father Yarden, sitting in front of a white wall in captivity, choking back sobs, begging that his family be buried in Israel. Israel's military called the video a "cruel documentation" and "an act of psychological terror." Shnaider said it shows Yarden, who appears to have lost a lot of weight, in a grave situation. "But you see that he's alive. So again, there's a light," he said. After two months in captivity, their age and ginger hair have caused the Bibas children to stand out among the scores of hostages. "There is an orange light, a very strong and bright orange light, that is glowing somewhere inside my heart and my head, and I'm 100% sure that they are alive and that they will come back." (Reporting by Eli Berlzon and Michal Yaakov Itzhaki; Writing by Ari Rabinovitch; Editing by Howard Goller) LAS VEGAS (KLAS) The FBI has raised the cash reward for information leading to the arrest of a Las Vegas man accused of shooting and killing his girlfriend, Tabitha Tozzi, earlier this year, according to a release from the FBI. In April a warrant was issued for Oswaldo Nathanael Perez-Sanchezs, 27, of Las Vegas arrest, charging him with open murder with the use of a deadly weapon, coercion constituting domestic violence with threat or physical force, robbery with the use of a deadly weapon, and grand larceny of a motor vehicle. Oswaldo Nathanahel Perez-Sanchez (LVMPD) The FBI raised the award from $10,000 to $30,000 for information leading to his arrest. According to a news release from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, on April 22, Perez-Sanchez allegedly confronted Tozzi in her home in Las Vegas and then shot her during an argument. He then allegedly carjacked a witness and fled the scene. Authorities search for man who police say killed his girlfriend Officials from the Clark County Coroners Office said Tozzi died a few days later, on April 24, with the manner of death being a gunshot wound to the head. The release describes Perez-Sanchez as white (Hispanic), 190 pounds, 59, with black hair, and brown eyes. He also has tattoos on his chest. According to the FBI, Perez-Sanchez has ties to or may visit Southern California and Mexico. If you have any information concerning this Perez-Sanchez, please contact your local FBI office or the nearest American Embassy or Consulate. The Las Vegas FBI Field Office can be reached at 702-385-1281. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KLAS. The new year will see another change at the top of Chicago Public Media, with CEO Matt Moog announcing Monday he is stepping down two years after combining NPR radio station WBEZ and tabloid newspaper Chicago Sun-Times under the same nonprofit banner. Moog, a Chicago tech entrepreneur who was elevated from interim to permanent CEO of Chicago Public Media in 2021, will remain in the role while the board conducts a new CEO search early next year. Advertisement I plan to return to my roots as a technology entrepreneur, Moog said in a news release. A board member since 2010, Moog oversaw a dramatic evolution at Chicago Public Media during his tenure as CEO, notably the merger of its flagship public radio station WBEZ-FM 91.5 with the Sun-Times in January 2022, creating a potentially groundbreaking model for nonprofit journalism. Advertisement But in the two years since its consummation, the merger has also led to significant and abrupt leadership changes at Chicago Public Media. In January 2023, Sun-Times CEO Nykia Wright stepped down following a leave of absence, putting Moog directly in charge of overseeing both the radio station and the newspaper. Wright, who had led the Sun-Times since 2018, was named interim CEO of the Chicago-based National Association of Realtors in November. The newspaper and radio station operate separate newsrooms but share content and resources. Under Moogs leadership, Chicago Public Media has filled 35 new roles over the last two years, with 80% of those in the newsroom, according to the news release announcing his imminent departure. Matts experiences as a longtime board member and technology entrepreneur uniquely qualified him to create one of the largest nonprofit newsrooms in the country, Robert Pasin, chair of Chicago Public Media, said in a news release. His impact spanned raising significant funds from major foundations and donors, developing a new strategic plan, and accelerating a digital transformation. Chicago Public Media raised $61 million in philanthropic support to finance the merger, with the money pledged over five years to fund the Sun-Times operation, including commitments to deepen and broaden its journalism, maintain the print newspaper and invest in a digital future. The Sun-Times had been losing money for years as a struggling for-profit newspaper, facing a series of existential challenges during the new millennium, including a 2009 bankruptcy and several subsequent fire sales. An investor group that included the Chicago Federation of Labor bought the Sun-Times for $1 in 2017, after Tribune Publishing was thwarted in its own bid to buy the newspaper by Justice Department antitrust concerns. Still bleeding red ink, in 2021 the Sun-Times began exploring a merger with WBEZ and a transition to a nonprofit news organization. Advertisement The merger was completed in January 2022. As a nascent nonprofit, the Sun-Times showed an operating loss of about $1 million during its first six months in 2022, excluding fundraising revenue and expenses, according to its Form 990 tax return filed with the Internal Revenue Service. Since then, the Sun-Times dropped its paywall in October 2022, opening up its news content to all readers and shifting to a voluntary digital membership program, which solicits annual donations of about $78 per reader. The nonprofit newspaper has signed up about 20,000 members to date, according to the news release The tax return for fiscal year 2023, which ended in June, has not yet been posted online. Michael Sacks, chairman and CEO of Chicago-based asset management firm GCM Grosvenor and a former Sun-Times investor, helped secure the agreement and finance the newspapers transition to the nonprofit venture, according to Chicago Public Media. Other financial supporters included the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Pritzker Traubert Foundation and Chicago Community Trust. Efforts to reach Sacks were unsuccessful Monday. Advertisement Chicago Public Media said the acquisition of the Sun-Times more than doubled its audience to 4.5 million weekly listeners and readers across broadcast, print, and digital platforms. The nonprofit parent organization of WBEZ has been going through growing pains and a number of leadership changes over the last decade. Digital media veteran Goli Sheikholeslami arrived in 2014 and expanded the news department, turning it into a consistent top-10 Chicago radio powerhouse before leaving for the same role at New York Public Radio five years later. In 2019, Steve Edwards, then chief content officer for WBEZ, took on a dual role as interim CEO of Chicago Public Media. He wore the two hats a little longer than planned when incoming hire Andi McDaniel withdrew in September 2020 following an investigation into personnel issues at her former public radio station in Washington. Edwards relinquished his CEO duties in October 2020 and Moog assumed the interim role as the board pledged to take a fresh look at the search process for a CEO. By April 2021, Edwards had stepped down as chief content officer at the station, while the search for a new CEO had yet to begin. Moog was elevated from interim to permanent CEO in October 2021. Next year, the search will begin anew. rchannick@chicagotribune.com ESCAMBIA COUNTY, Fla. (WKRG) The Florida Department of Transportation will host a hybrid public meeting regarding State Road 295s resurfacing, rehabilitation and restoration design project in January. Someones killing dogs and cats in Baldwin County Baldwin County The project on S.R. 295 will take place on a 3.7-mile stretch of road from north of Barrancas Avenue to S.R. 727/295. This project is aimed at preserving and extending the service life of the existing pavement, including existing travel lanes, auxiliary lanes, median crossovers, and paved shoulders, according to a news release from FDOT. Maps and drawings will be displayed at the meeting, and FDOT representatives will discuss the proposed improvements. The meeting will be held online and in person on Jan. 11 from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. The in-person meeting will take place at the Pensacola State College, Warrington Campus. Preregistration is required for the virtual meeting and encouraged for the in-person meeting. More stop signs coming to busy Destin road where boy was killed The last day to submit comments about the public meeting is Jan. 22, 2024. ALSO ON WKRG.com: 20 minors arrested at Mobile bar for underage drinking For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WKRG News 5. Mainly covered by dense rainforest, the country of Guyana, on the North Atlantic coast of South America, is not an obvious flashpoint in 21st-century global affairs. However, a referendum in neighboring Venezuela has led to genuine fears about a possible land grab by authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro, who has his eyes on a portion of Guyana containing extensive oil and mineral reserves. The territory in question is known as Essequibo, is roughly the size of the U.S. state of Alabama at 61,600 square miles, and makes up around two-thirds of Guyana. Around 120,000 of Guyanas population of approximately 800,000 people live there, equivalent to 15 percent. A map of Essequiba; the area shaded in orange is the area claimed by Venezuela. Wikimedia Commons Venezuela has long argued that this land was stolen when the border was drawn up between the two countries at the end of the 19th century more on that later. As well as valuable minerals primarily gold and copper the territory provides access to significant oil reserves in the Atlantic, the extent of which only became clear in 2015 . Now, the claims over Essequibo have become a rallying point for Venezuelas Maduro, a president who has been regularly accused of authoritarianism and even dictatorship . In recent years, the legitimacy of his rule has been actively questioned, including extending to a short-lived U.S.-supported attempt to oust him . President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, greets supporters before giving a speech as the National Electoral Council issued the results of the consultative referendum on Venezuelan sovereignty over the Essequibo, in Caracas on December 3, 2023. Photo by PEDRO RANCES MATTEY/AFP via Getty Images In a recent referendum, Maduro asked the Venezuelan population if they supported establishing a state in the disputed territory, granting citizenship to current and future residents, and rejecting a United Nations ruling that attempted to solve the disagreement between the two countries. https://twitter.com/AssLatam/status/1731663583811908078 Multiple reports suggest that turnout for the referendum appeared to be low , although the countrys National Electoral Council claimed that more than 10.5 million ballots were cast, out of a total of around 20 million eligible voters. The council also claimed that more than 95 percent of voters approved of the territorial claim over Essequibo. At the same time, electoral officials said that there had been massive participation and the polls, planned to be open for 12 hours, were kept open for an additional two . A member of the Bolivarian Militias stands guard at a polling station during a consultative referendum on Venezuelan sovereignty over the Essequibo region controlled by neighboring Guyana, in Caracas on December 3, 2023. Photo by PEDRO RANCES MATTEY/AFP via Getty Images Regardless, the result showed that Venezuelans approved the claim, increasing concerns in Guyana that Maduro may now act upon it, potentially invading the territory or otherwise promoting instability that could lead to annexation. It has been a total success for our country, for our democracy, Maduro told supporters after the results were announced. https://twitter.com/SA_Defensa/status/1730975428951642218 https://twitter.com/ConflictsW/status/1730973220726030582 Ahead of the referendum, officials in Guyana were voicing their alarm, Foreign Minister Hugh Todd saying People in the border region are very concerned. Todd added: Maduro is a despotic leader, and despotic leaders are very hard to predict. Guyanese Foreign Minister Hugh Hilton Todd speaks to reporters after his country was elected as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council at the UN headquarters in New York, on June 6, 2023. Loey Felipe/UN Photo/Handout via Xinhua As well as in Guyana, there is disquiet in the United Nations, where on Friday the International Court of Justice (ICJ) warned Venezuela against taking any action that could undermine Guyanas control over Essequibo. ICJ President Joan E. Donoghue said that Venezuelas government appears to be taking steps with a view toward acquiring control over and administering the territory in dispute. Furthermore, Venezuelan military officials announced that Venezuela is taking concrete measures to build an airstrip to serve as a logistical support point for the integral development of the Essequibo, she added. The establishment of a new airstrip at La Camorra, in the state of Bolivar, close to the border with Guyana, has been identified as a possible preparation for a military move against Guyana. Venezuelan news reports described the airstrip as having been built for the logistical development of Essequibo. Members of the Venezuelan Army take part in a military parade in Tumeremo, Bolivar State, in Venezuela, about 56 miles from the border with Guyana, on July 21, 2015. FEDERICO PARRA/AFP via Getty Images Brazil, which shares borders with both Guyana and Venezuela, has responded to the situation with military measures. The Brazilian Ministry of Defense has announced that it has intensified its defense actions and increased its military presence in the region, including deploying more troops closer to the border region. The border dispute has long and complex roots. The current frontier dates back to 1899 when international arbitrators not including Venezuelan representatives established it. Before that, during the Spanish colonial period, Essequibo was within Venezuelas borders. For Guyana, the established border is legally binding, and it has requested the ICJ rule in its favor, although it has yet to do so. Venezuela considers that it was cheated out of the territory by the international arbitrators back in 1899. It argues that a 1966 agreement to resolve the dispute effectively dissolved the original ruling. That latter agreement was also referred to in the referendum, one of the questions describing it as the only valid legal instrument. A member of the Venezuelan Army reserve is pictured before a military parade in Tumeremo, Bolivar State, in Venezuela, during a previous period of tensions with Guyana in 2015. Photo by FEDERICO PARRA/AFP via Getty Images The dispute has more recently become a rallying cry for Maduro and his supporters, with claims over Essequibo being promoted as a point of national pride and a symbol of support for the president. There have also been claims that the entire referendum has been driven as a means of salvaging Maduros falling popularity ratings. In military terms, Venezuela totally outclasses Guyana, with what is, on paper, one of the most capable armed forces on the continent. While there have been some concerns about its professionalism , its sheer size would present Guyana with huge problems in any conflict. https://twitter.com/KawsachunNews/status/1731494817895448743 Venezuela has steadily increased its defense spending in recent years, from an estimated 1.8 percent of GDP in 2015 to 5.2 percent in 2019. This supports a force of between 125,000 and 150,000 active military personnel, while approximately 200,000 to 225,000 more serve with the Bolivarian Militia. The country has historically procured arms from a variety of sources, including the United States, which prohibited any further defense sales to Venezuela in 2006. More recently it has forged close military relationships with China and Russia , who have provided various items of advanced equipment, including Su-30 multirole fighters and S-300V air defense systems , as well as other support and cooperation, including military exercises and deployments . Russian-made Venezuelan Air Force Su-30MKV multirole fighters overfly a military parade to celebrate the 206th anniversary of Venezuelan independence in Caracas on July 5, 2017. FEDERICO PARRA/AFP via Getty Images Powerful Venezuelan ground forces are spearheaded by around 21 combat brigades that include armored, artillery , infantry, motorized cavalry, and special operations forces, while the Venezuelan Navy is geared toward coastal defense and includes two frigates and a handful of ocean-going patrol ships; its two attack submarines are thought to be no longer operational. Venezuelan Army soldiers in a Russian-made T-72 tank during a military ceremony to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of President Hugo Chavez, in Caracas on March 5, 2014. Photo by JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images In contrast, the Guyana Defense Force receives only around 0.6 percent of GDP and has approximately 3,000 active-duty military personnel. Much of its equipment is procured secondhand and it operates no combat aircraft, tanks, or heavy artillery. In practice, the primary role of the GDF is border security, as well as assisting civil authorities with law and order and disaster response. Nevertheless, the GDF maintains close relationships with Brazil, China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Soldiers from a multinational force perform assault maneuvers while participating in joint military exercises with troops from the United States Southern Command at Camp Stephenson in Timehri, Guyana, on July 26, 2023. Photo by KENO GEORGE/AFP via Getty Images In a statement, Vladimir Padrino Lopez, Venezuelas interior minister, stoked tensions earlier this month by telling soldiers: We are ready to defend [Essequibo] to the last drop of blood and sweat. For its part, Guyana is stepping up its efforts to reinforce relationships with the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) organization and the Commonwealth. Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo has also raised the possibility of foreign military bases being established in Guyana. Any one of our international partners in the democratic free world will want to support Guyanas cause because we have always followed the rules, procedures, and principles, Foreign Minister Todd said . Venezuela is doing the contrary to that. They are on the wrong side of international law, and they are on the wrong side of history. Members of the Venezuelan Army take part in a military parade in Tumeremo, Bolivar State, in Venezuela, not far from the border with Guyana, on July 21, 2015. FEDERICO PARRA/AFP via Getty Images For Maduro and Venezuela, there appears to be a lot to lose. Short of allies on the international stage, Maduro had, more recently , been coming in from out of the cold somewhat. There had been reports of him allowing opposition groups to be more active in politics, selling oil to the United States, cooperating with the U.S. in Interpol investigations , and more. At the same time, especially since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Maduro had been making efforts to distance himself from Moscow, once a very close ally . A move against Guyana now would only leave him further isolated. Whatever happens, and however the international community responds, theres little doubt that tensions between the two countries are at a greater level than at any other time in the recent past. Maduros call to incorporate a relatively huge portion of a neighboring sovereign state into his own country is, on the one hand, fairly unsurprising behavior for someone widely seen as an unpredictable leader. Now, emboldened by the result of a referendum, theres an even bigger fear as to what might happen next. Contact the author: thomas@thedrive.com Some of Floridas most powerful Republicans including Gov. Ron DeSantis are demanding that state GOP Chairman Christian Ziegler resign amid an allegation that he raped a woman. The vast majority of state GOP lawmakers, however, are staying silent. On Monday, following the release of a search warrant affidavit that revealed new details of the allegations against Ziegler including a description of concerned phone calls and messages to the alleged victim in the days and weeks following the alleged rape Tallahassee Republicans seemed more eager to talk online about the snubbing of Florida State Universitys football team from the College Football Playoffs. Other prominent Republicans keeping things quiet include former President Donald Trump, whose allies supported Ziegler for the state party chairmanship over Florida GOP Vice Chairman Evan Power during a heated party election earlier this year. Representatives of his presidential campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The lack of public discussion from Republicans in the Legislature, a body that in recent years has fallen in line with DeSantis on most political and policy decisions, underscores the delicate situation the party finds itself in with four months left before the Florida GOP presidential primary. It also accentuates Republicans hesitancy to oust members of their own party, even in cases when they are accused of committing acts that are seen as a stain on their partys reputation and values. I wont be calling on him to resign, state Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola, said on Monday. A single accusation made by an unnamed individual shouldnt be enough to force anyone to resign. Ziegler, 40, is accused of rape by a woman with whom he and his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, previously had a three-way sexual encounter, according to the search warrant affidavit. He has told detectives he is innocent and that he took video of the encounter, which he maintains was consensual. Detectives say Ziegler told investigators that he initially deleted the video of the encounter, but uploaded it to his Google Drive once he found out about the allegation against him. Investigators havent been able to locate that video, according to a search warrant affidavit. As details on the sexual scandal spill into public view, Ziegler has refused to step down. We have a country to save and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for this process to wrap up, Ziegler wrote in a memo to Florida Republicans on Saturday. Zieglers defiant tone has led some Republicans to question why members of the party have stayed silent and refused to back DeSantis, who has called on Ziegler to resign. This embedded content is not available in your region. I am surprised that no more have asked him to resign, state Rep. Spencer Roach, R-North Fort Myers, said about fellow Republican colleagues. In Roachs view, Ziegler would be delusional to think he is benefiting the party by staying on. DeSantis position has been echoed by some Republicans with sway. House Speaker Paul Renner and Senate President Kathleen Passidomo both called on Ziegler to resign on Monday. It is untenable for Christian Ziegler to continue as Chairman of RPOF and I recommend he resign his post, Renner said in a statement. The serious allegations at issue require his full attention and we need someone who can provide the singular focus the party needs. Passidomo echoed that sentiment. The Governor is the leader of our Party. I agree with his position, Passidomo said in a statement Monday that misspelled the chairmans name. The allegations are serious, and will require Chair Zeiglers full attention. Following those statements, Sen. Dennis Baxley, an Ocala Republican, said he supported the position taken by DeSantis and Passidomo, and said Ziegliers accusations have become a distraction from the important work of our party for the future of our state. Most Republican lawmakers have avoided taking a public position on the matter but Roach hopes the floodgates will open in support of Zieglers resignation now that Passidomo and Renner have publicly backed DeSantis, the de facto leader of the state party. The Miami Herald sought comment from incoming House Speaker Daniel Perez, R-Miami, and incoming Senate President Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, on the matter. Neither responded to requests for comment. The governors office also did not respond when asked whether he believes Bridget Ziegler should step down from her posts in the Sarasota County School Board and the board DeSantis has appointed to oversee Walt Disneys theme parks. Roach, for example, said he believes Bridget Ziegler should resign. The hypocrisy is the number one reason they should resign, Roach said, pointing to the Zieglers push for traditional values in public schools. I dont see how they ever get past that. Sarasota School Board member Bridget Ziegler and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, seen on Sunday, Aug. 21, 2022. Neither Christian nor Bridget Ziegler responded to messages seeking comment. In a statement last week, Christian Zieglers lawyer Derek Byrd said that his client was cooperating with law enforcement in their investigation and insisted that Ziegler would eventually be cleared of any wrongdoing. Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikki Fried was among the first state leaders to call for Ziegler to step down, saying in a statement last Thursday that he cant possibly continue to lead the Florida GOP under these conditions. Making the situation even worse for Ziegler, she said, is his and his wifes outspoken advocacy for conservative cultural values and criticism of anything that could be construed as a non-traditional sexual relationship. State Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book, of Plantation, also called for Zieglers resignation on Monday. House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell, of Tampa, said the decision to have Ziegler resign his post from the state party should not be viewed through a partisan lens. With allegations this serious that is the only answer, Driskell told reporters on Monday. For him not to resign, frankly, would send a chilling message to the women of Florida about how the Republican Party views sexual assault. An argument at a North Carolina drive-thru escalated into a shooting that injured multiple people, police said. Three people were shot at Rocky Mount Drive-Thru, including an 8-year-old boy, according to a Dec. 3 Rocky Mount Police Department news release. Police are searching for one person involved in the shooting, while two others are either in custody or awaiting arrest. Officers arrived at the scene after receiving a shooting with injury call, where they found 41-year-old Tiffany Vick injured with gunshot wounds, police said. Before the shooting, investigators said Arkeem Shields, 24, was sitting with an 8-year-old in his car, waiting in the drive-thru. Vick walked up to his car, and a verbal altercation ensued, investigators said. According to police, the two were said to have known each other. A shootout began, and Shields car was shot through several times, police said. The boy was hit in the leg. Shields sped off to drive the child to the hospital, police said. There was also an 11-year-old and 14-year-old with Vick, police said, which led to child abuse charges being filed against Vick and her wife, Crystal Vick. A 24-year-old bystander was grazed by gunfire and was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, police said. Vick collapsed in the parking lot with two gunshot wounds, police said, and she was taken to UNC Nash Health General Hospital. She was later transferred to ECU Health Medical Center in Greenville. There is no update on the boys condition nor Vicks as of Dec. 4, Rocky Mount Police Department Public Information Officer Typhani Gray told McClatchy News. Before officers arrived to the scene, Crystal Vick was said by police to have taken Tiffany Vicks gun away, which obstructed the investigation. After issuing search warrants for three locations, police found two pistols thought to have been used during the shooting, police said. Crystal Vick was booked at Nash County Jail on a $25,000 bond and, along with child abuse, was charged with aiding and abetting, and resisting public officers, police said. Tiffany Vick will be taken into custody after recovering in the hospital, according to police. She faces additional charges, including assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, assault on a minor and shooting into an occupied vehicle. The North Carolina Department of Social Services was informed by police of the involvement of minors in the shooting and is conducting its own investigation, police said. Shields was not located during the initial investigation, and police were searching for him as of Dec. 3. Rocky Mount is about 60 miles northeast of Raleigh. 7-year-old killed as driver fleeing burglary crashes car, Florida cops say. Hes indicted Man fatally shoots dad then runs to school, Texas cops say. Hes shot dead by officer Man opens fire through wall of restaurant, injuring 6 people, North Carolina cops say Finland plans to use Poland's experience with border security amid the ongoing migrant crisis on the Finnish-Russian border, the Polish Radio reported on Dec. 3. November saw an unusually high number of third-country asylum seekers arriving at the Finnish border from Russia without proper documentation. Helsinki accused Moscow of orchestrating the migrant influx as retribution for the country's entry into NATO. Finnish representatives arrived in Poland to observe the local system of border protection with Belarus, Polish Border Service spokesperson Anna Michalska said. They were mainly interested in Polish experience with regulatory documents and interoperability with the military and other services, according to the spokesperson. Finnish authorities seek to apply this knowledge at home after adapting it to the Finnish context, Michalska added. Belarus Weekly: Putin attends the CSTO summit in Minsk, Armenia skips Belarus hosts the CSTO summit, with the notable attendance of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the absence of Armenias representative. Ukraine imposes sanctions on Russian and Belarusian defense sectors for 50 years after the end of the war. The OSCE designates Malta as the organizations hea The Kyiv IndependentMaria Yeryoma Two Polish border guards arrived in Finland last week as part of the EU's Frontex operation, with more to come this week. The migrant crisis on the Finnish border echoes the strategy used by Belarus against its NATO neighbors. Minsk has been facilitating flows of third-country migrants to the Baltic countries and Poland since 2021. According to Michalska, Moscow bears responsibility for the situation on the Finnish and Polish borders. Helsinki announced on Nov. 28 that it would close its only remaining crossing with Russia at Raja-Jooseppi from Nov. 30 to Dec. 13. "We have made this decision to protect Finland's national security against this Russian hybrid operation," said Finnish Interior Minister Mari Rantanen. Finland to close entire border with Russia for 2 weeks Finland will shut the border crossing point of Raja-Jooseppi from Nov. 30 to Dec. 13, which means its entire border with Russia will be closed for two weeks, the Finnish government said on Nov. 28. The Kyiv IndependentDinara Khalilova Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. A park in Wichitas North End named after a Hispanic veteran from the neighborhood is on track to be developed after sitting empty for 14 years. The park, at 25th Street and Wellington, will have fitness equipment, artificial turf and a flagpole to honor veterans. I just know that the whole thing would mean a lot to my dad. Being a North Ender, a Hispanic and a veteran, Patrick Garcia II said in a phone call. That checks all the micro groups that one can be a part of and this thing would just put a really put a giant smile on his face because he liked spending time outside. Patrick D. Garcia grew up in the area of 23rd Street and Park Place after moving from Garden City with his family. He served in the U.S. Army from 1968-70, then returned home to attend Wichita State University. His work in the public sector included being an assistant to former U.S. Rep. Daniel Glickman and a U.S. Department of Justice Immigration officer. He died in April 2000 at the age of 50 from complications of a brain tumor. Patrick D. Garcia in 1997. Courtesy /Martha Garcia A dream come true for a kid After his death, family and friends wanted to honor Garcia as a war veteran, so they started looking for land they could get as a donation. J.W. Baum donated the land in honor of his brother, B.E. Baum, who was also a veteran, said J.W.s daughter, Janiece Baum Dixon. B.E. and J.W. Baum were lifelong residents of the North End. In 2008, the one-and-half acre plot near where Garcia grew up was named Pat Garcia Veterans Memorial Park in his memory. Robert Chavez is a community activist and a member of the American G.I. Forum, a community-based organization that addresses the needs of U.S. veterans. Chavez said his family and Garcias grew up together and are longtime friends. Chavez said the development of the park has been discussed for some time now. He and other community members advocated for the park to be used as a fitness area and to honor veterans. [We wanted] a basic military training style park where you can do activities like pull ups, push ups and 40-yard dashes, Chavez said. North End residents, including Chavez, expressed continued interest in developing the park, Wichita District 6 council member Maggie Ballard said. Some people from the community came and talked to me and I saw that it was a priority to that area, Ballard said. The North End has been underdeveloped for some time, and there seems to be interest in this project from community members. The Wichita City Council voted unanimously last month to spend $155,000 to develop the park, including the installation of a Fitness Court by the National Fitness Campaign, a wellness consulting firm based in San Francisco, California. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas, through a sponsorship with NFC, will provide a $50,000 grant toward the fitness court. The city will pay the remaining $105,000 by reallocating funds budgeted in 2028 for Kiwanis Park in west Wichita, according to a City Council meeting agenda. Shifting this funding and initiating it in 2023 will allow the City to reduce the overall cost of these improvements by taking advantage of the pricing offered by NFC, city park and recreation staff said. The 1.6 acre plot of land where the park is located will see the installation of a fitness equipment court next year. Eduardo Castillo/The Wichita Eagle The fitness court equipment is scheduled to be purchased by the end of the year and arrive by early spring 2024. Hopefully we can get everything installed by the end of spring, early summer, Wichita Director of Parks and Recreation Troy Houtman said. The project will address the citys parks and recreation goals for diversity, equity and inclusion by providing more amenities for an underserved population of Wichita. Wichitas North End is predominantly Hispanic, and the neighborhood where the park sits is El Pueblo. It is classified as low to moderate income, according to the U.S. Census. All of this would be a dream come true for a kid in that neighborhood, Garcia II said. Growing up, you know, something right down the street to go blow off some steam and play some ball with the neighborhood kids. (Bloomberg) -- Five bodies have been found along with the submerged wreckage of a US military Osprey aircraft that crashed in southwestern Japan last week, the US Air Force said. Most Read from Bloomberg The bodies of two of the crew members have been recovered and efforts are underway to recover the other three, Air Force Special Operations Command said in a statement late Monday. The identities of the five have yet to be determined and the ongoing operation includes combined US and Japanese divers and surface ships. The CV-22 Osprey with eight people aboard and operated by the Air Force plunged into the sea Wednesday off the island of Yakushima, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) southwest of Tokyo. The body of one victim was found the same day, and he was later identified by the Air Force as Staff Sergeant Jacob Galliher, 24. The coalition of military, coast guard, law enforcement, mariners, and local volunteers remain steadfast in locating and bringing the US Service Members back to their units and their families, the command said in its statement. Tokyo has called for US Forces in Japan to suspend the use of the Osprey, which has been involved in several fatal crashes, until checks can be made. The US side appears to have effectively rejected the request, in a step that could worsen often difficult ties between its forces and the local communities that host them. According to a statement issued earlier by Japans Ministry of Defense, the US has six CV-22 Ospreys at Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo and 24 MV-22 Ospreys at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma on the southern island of Okinawa. The US continued to operate Ospreys on the island after the Japanese government request on Nov. 30, the ministry said. Read more: US Rejects Japanese Request to Ground Ospreys After Deadly Crash Pentagon deputy spokeswoman Sabrina Singh released a statement Friday saying Osprey flights have been suspended in the Air Force unit that flew the crashed plane. She said the tilt-rotor aircraft in Japan operate only after undergoing thorough maintenance and safety checks. In August, three US Marines were killed and five others critically injured after a V-22 Osprey went down while performing drills off the coast of Darwin in Australias Northern Territory. Prior incidents with the V-22 Osprey included a crash in 2000 that killed 19 Marines in Arizona. The accident was blamed on pilot error. (Updates with confirmation of five additional bodies found from US military.) Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2023 Bloomberg L.P. Many races on the ballot next year have already started to take shape, but over the next two weeks, the field of candidates running for everything from governor and attorney general to legislative seats that will determine the balance of power in the General Assembly will be finalized. Candidate filing for most 2024 election contests begins at noon Monday, and will end at noon on Friday, Dec. 15. Over this two-week period, every candidate running for federal, statewide, legislative and local office in North Carolina has to file with state or county election boards. Those contests include: all 14 of the states congressional seats; the governors race, the attorney generals race, eight other statewide races including lieutenant governor, state auditor, and state treasurer; a seat on the N.C. Supreme Court and three on the N.C. Court of Appeals; all 170 state House and Senate races; and several other local races across the state. While many candidates have already announced and begun campaigning months before filing starts, the process can yield some unexpected, last-minute candidacies. It also confirms which rumored plans ended up materializing, and which didnt. Here are five things to watch for this year. Open races in the General Assembly Between some state lawmakers opting to run for other offices, and others deciding to retire, there will be several open races without an incumbent next year. Rep. Jon Hardister, a Republican from Guilford County, is running for labor commissioner. GOP Rep. Jeffrey Elmore of Wilkes County is running for lieutenant governor, as is Democratic Sen. Rachel Hunt of Mecklenburg County. GOP Rep. John Bradford and Democratic Rep. Wesley Harris, both of Mecklenburg County, are running for state treasurer, leaving their seats open. House Speaker Tim Moore, meanwhile, is running for Congress from the states 14th district, vacating his Cleveland County seat after spending nearly two decades in the legislature. And Democratic Rep. Caleb Rudow of Buncombe County is running for Congress from the 11th district. Rep. John Autry, a Mecklenburg Democrat, and GOP Reps. Kristin Baker of Cabarrus County and John Faircloth of Guilford County have all decided not to seek reelection, leaving their seats open next year, too. Most recently, Sen. Dean Proctor, a Catawba County Republican, announced he was retiring as well. As filing gets underway, that list is likely to grow. Will swing Democrats face any primary challengers? Frustrations in the Democratic Party with a small group of House Democrats who frequently voted with the GOP, started before Republicans regained a supermajority with the party switch of Rep. Tricia Cotham, and grew over the course of the year. In September, five House Democrats who broke ranks with the rest of their party and voted for the Republican budget faced strong criticism from within their party, and in particular, from youth leaders in the party, who said they should start acting like Democrats, and indicated that they could face primary challenges next year. Last month, one of those groups, the Young Democrats of North Carolina, took the additional step of launching a fund to raise money to support potential primary challengers against certain sitting Democrats. What about GOP Senate leader Phil Berger? The Republican proposal this summer to approve four new casinos in North Carolina, which was ultimately shelved after it failed to gain enough support in the House, could become a campaign issue, particularly as Senate leader Phil Berger, the legislations chief proponent, says that it could be reconsidered during next years legislative short session. Last week, Rockingham County Sheriff Sam Page, a vocal critic of the casino proposal, told The News & Observer that a poll requested by an anonymous group showing him leading Berger by a substantial margin among Triad Republicans had encouraged him to consider launching a primary challenge against the GOP leader. Asked about it last week, Berger said he felt its generally unwise to put any credence in an anonymous poll, and said he hasnt received a reception from constituents in his district that would make him think the polling was even remotely accurate. In congressional races, its decision time for Democrats Democratic Reps. Kathy Manning and Wiley Nickel were drawn into districts that are distinctly Republican. Neither has declared their plans for 2024, but the next two weeks will solidify whether they fight for their seats or give up. Rep. Don Davis, who represents North Carolinas far northeastern counties, was drawn into the states only swing district, covering an area that both parties have won. He has not announced a run, but in October he tweeted a plea for money to help him win our #NC01 race. Republicans including former Rep. Mark Walker and High Point Mayor Jay Wagner join a legion of Republicans vying for Mannings Triad-based seat that is now primed for a Republican. Nickel, of Cary, didnt live in his Triangle-based district in the first place. Nickel lives in Rep. Deborah Ross nearby district, but on the border of Rep. Valerie Foushees, who lives in Orange County. Both Foushee and Ross remain in Democratic seats, and Nickel hasnt said if he will take one of them on, run again for his own seat or walk away altogether. In Nickels reconfigured district, Republicans like Brad Knott and Fred Von Canon have already cleared state Rep. Erin Pare from the field. Both Reps. Jeff Jackson, a Democrat from Charlotte, and Dan Bishop, a Republican from Waxhaw, are leaving Capitol Hill to take a run at state attorney general. Bishop is leaving on his own accord, but Jackson was another Democrat drawn into a Republican district. Moore, a Republican from Kings Mountain, is vying to take Jacksons seat. But hes in for a tough race with Pat Harrigan, a military veteran and gun manufacturer. Then theres Reps. Patrick McHenry, a Republican from Denver, and Richard Hudson, a Republican from Southern Pines, who have made names for themselves within the party. Hudson leads the National Republican Congressional Committee and McHenry served for three weeks as interim House speaker after party infighting left the chamber without a leader. So far no one has tried to challenge either, but its anyones guess what the next two weeks might show. Will last-minute legal challenges delay filing? Even though filing is slated to start Monday and continue through the end of next week, the entire process could be disrupted or delayed if litigation challenging new electoral maps comes before a sympathetic judge. One lawsuit has already been filed, which argues that the new state Senate map illegally dilutes the voting power of Black residents in Eastern North Carolina. The judge in that case declined a request for an expedited schedule, meaning he likely wont decide whether to block the maps before filing ends. However, more lawsuits are expected to come, which could challenge the states new congressional or House maps. If a judge decides to grant an injunction blocking the maps before filing begins or while it is still ongoing, the process would likely be delayed, at least for the candidates running in disputed maps. This happened in 2021, when the state Supreme Court halted candidate filing and delayed the states primary election in response to gerrymandering lawsuits. COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) The woman behind a longstanding central Ohio flag business has died, her family announced on Monday. Mary Leavitt, known in Clintonville as the Flag Lady, died at age 87, a family source told NBC4. She was preceded in death by her husband, Thomas Benson Leavitt. She was a woman who loved her god, her family and her country with every fiber of her being, Leavitts family wrote on her business Facebook page. While we mourn today, we are encouraged that her legacy will live on through the business she founded for many generations to come. Mall at Tuttle Crossing under new ownership as stores close Her nickname mirrored the business she founded as a door-to-door saleswoman in 1977. After having a vision on her family farm, she began selling American flags from the trunk of her car during the Iranian crisis, according to the business website. Leavitt progressed to opening her first storefront by 1987, and in 1990 moved into The Flag Ladys current home at 4567 N. High St. Alongside the American flags Leavitt originally sold, her business also saw orders for flags from other nationalities in later years. With the beginning of the war between Russia and Ukraine, demand for Ukrainian flags skyrocketed in central Ohio. The Flag Lady in particular received enough orders to the point that they were producing about 30 of the nations flags a day. Leavitt retired in 2017, after operating The Flag Lady storefront for around 40 years. Upon retiring, she sold the business to her daughter, Lori Leavitt Watson. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to NBC4 WCMH-TV. Fighter jets in round-the-clock flight training China Military Online) 08:32, December 04, 2023 A fighter jet attached to an aviation brigade of the air force under the PLA Western Theater Command takes off for a round-the-clock flight training exercise on November 26, 2023. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Yu Zeqi) Fighter jets attached to an aviation brigade of the air force under the PLA Western Theater Command soar in the sky during a round-the-clock flight training exercise on November 26, 2023. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Yu Zeqi) (Web editor: Tian Yi, Liang Jun) William Schejbal, left, and Zane Green work in the kitchen at Will's Place, a nonprofit cafe opened by Joan Hallagan to employ people with disabilities, in Skokie on Nov. 28, 2023. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune) When her physically and intellectually disabled son William was aging out of his high school vocational training program, Joan Hallagan was concerned about his future and that of his community. At 22 years old, these young adults are on their own, she said. Advertisement According to a 2022 Bureau of Labor Statistics figure, approximately 21% of disabled people are employed. Compelled to help, she and her sister Cathy Maassen opened Wills Place, a nonprofit cafe employing people with disabilities. William reports there for work several days a week to help in the kitchen and welcome customers. Advertisement Hallagan and Maassen are joined by others trying to address the issue of disability unemployment with the creation of unique workforce training programs. Beyond raising awareness and support for an often-overlooked population, these bakeries and cafes provide opportunities for problem-solving and relationship building. Stephen Tai, from left, Will Schejbal, Jackie Hammond, Julia Gleason and Zane Green, the staff at Will's Place, a nonprofit cafe opened by Wills mother, Joan Hallagan, and aunt, Cathy Maassen, to employ people with developmental disabilities, as seen on Nov. 28, 2023. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune) William is a very social young man, so when school ended, I think he deeply missed the community and friendships he had made, Hallagan said. At the restaurant, the responsibility of being needed and doing a good job has made a difference in his self-confidence. To see and support the work these places are doing throughout Chicagoland, visit any of these venues for coffee, pastries and memorable service. Dorothys Sweet Shoppe at Gateway to Learning When Dorothy and Roger Hough were told that their two developmentally and intellectually disabled children couldnt learn, they refused to accept that answer so in 1974 they started Gateway to Learning, an organization serving disabled adults. Gateway provides learning opportunities by promoting active inclusion at home, at work and in the community. In 2013, the team expanded on their day services programming with Dorothys Sweet Shoppe, a retail bakery and cafe that offers participants the chance to gain valuable job and life skills while interacting with the community. Find the team here at work in the front of house and kitchen, whipping up a daily array of cookies and chocolates (thanks in part to appliances from Sophie Evanoff of Lincoln Parks Vanille Patisserie). Dont miss favorites like kolaczkis and brownies (and for your four-legged friends, the Barleys Biscuits dog treats the team makes on-site with spent grain from Half Acre Brewery). Gateway will celebrate its 50th anniversary in April. 9 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 9 a.m.-1 p.m. most Saturdays, and at the Lincoln Square Farmers Market on Tuesdays from June through October; 4925 N. Lincoln Ave.; more information at dorothyssweets.com and 773-784-3200. Gerrys Cafe In her years as a special-education teacher, Natalie Griffin was excited for her students to enter the workplace after graduation but when she saw that many of them could not find employment, she wanted to do something to help. In 2018, she partnered with former restaurateur Amy Philpott to start the nonprofit organization Brewing Opportunities, and together this August they opened Gerrys Cafe, a restaurant honoring Amys aunt, Geralyn Wehmer, who had Down syndrome. The cafe employs more than 40 individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities in various positions, from bagel toaster to baking assistant, with the goal of preparing them to step into other roles within the cafe or beyond. Visit for a wide array of housemade breakfast and lunch items, including pastries, salads, sandwiches, and quinoa bowls, along with a full espresso barista line of hot and cold coffee drinks. Try signatures like the gluten-free blueberry muffins or Big Ed sandwich (with bacon, turkey and buttermilk ranch on toasted sourdough), and stop by this December for seasonal debuts (think holiday cake pops and peppermint mochas). Advertisement Eat. Watch. Do. Weekly What to eat. What to watch. What you need to live your best life ... now. By submitting your email to receive this newsletter, you agree to our Subscriber Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy > 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays at 1802 N. Arlington Heights Road, Arlington Heights; go to gerryscafe.org for more information. Hearts & Flour Bakery and Cafe at Misericordia Misericordia opened in 1921 to offer residential services and recreational programming for those with developmental and intellectual disabilities, and today it serves more than 600 children and adults across Chicagoland. In April 2022, helping to realize the dream of Sister Rosemary Connelly, former executive director, the team opened Hearts & Flour Bakery and Cafe, an American-style bakery providing residents the chance to work and interact with the community. Each day sees several Misericordia residents on-site, helping with everything from serving customers to scooping cookies just one of the specialties they offer alongside coffee, breakfast and lunch items. Visit midday for a medley of soups and salads, or come early for the best selection of from-scratch pastries (opt for the almond croissant). Those on-the-go can pre-order online or visit the bakerys drive-thru and ship to family and friends via their website. 6 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, 7 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturdays, 7 a.m.-2 p.m. Sundays at 6130 N. Ravenswood Ave.; more information at misericordia.com and 773-564-8403. Wills Place Opened this July, this nonprofit cafe employs 17 young adults with disabilities. The restaurant is open five days a week for breakfast and lunch, serving pastries, salads, sandwiches, and their house specialty and Williams favorite chocolate chip cookies. Visit on Thursday mornings, when a different guest celebrity barista spends time with the staff, helping to make coffee drinks (with past visitors including state senators and representatives, mayors, police chiefs and superintendents). Keep an eye on their calendar other events include open mic nights, scavenger hunts and special holiday programming. 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays at 7927 Lincoln Ave., Skokie; more information at willsplaceskokie.com and 224-251-7363. Advertisement Nicole Schnitzler is a freelance writer. The defiant chair of the Florida Republican Party has denied allegations of rape made against him by a woman he and his wife were having a consensual affair with, as disturbing new details have emerged about the alleged attack. Christian Ziegler, 40, told members of the state GOP that he and wife Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of the far-right Moms for Liberty parents rights group, were being unfairly targeted because they are such loud political voices. According to a search warrant affidavit filed with the Sarasota County court, the accuser told detectives she agreed to a sexual encounter with Mr Ziegler and his wife Bridget on 2 October. When the woman learned that Ms Ziegler was unable to make it, she cancelled, according to the affidavit which was provided to The Independent by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, who were first to report on the allegations. She told detectives from the Sarasota Police Department that when she opened her door to take her dog for a walk, she found Mr Ziegler waiting in the hallway. He then forced his way into her apartment and sexually assaulted her, the affidavit states. Republican Party of Florida chairman Christian Ziegler, left, greets former president Donald Trump at the RPOF Freedom Summit in November (Orlando Sentinel) The woman told detectives she was not in a position to consent as she had been drinking tequila on a day off from work, and that Mr Ziegler did not use a condom. He then reportedly told her: Im leaving the same way I came in. Mr Ziegler was seen arriving at the apartment complex on surveillance cameras, police said. During a police interview with his lawyer present, Mr Ziegler told detectives the sexual encounter was consensual and that he had filmed it, according to the affidavit. He said he had deleted the footage before uploading it to a Google Drive after the allegations of rape and sexual battery were made. Police have not been able to recover the video, according to the affidavit. The accuser later told Mr Ziegler over Instagram messages that she was terrified of him and had been left too traumatised to work, according to the affidavit. In a separate interview, Ms Ziegler told police that she and her husband had a consensual three-way sexual encounter with the accuser about a year before the October incident. A heavily-redacted police report provided to The Independent by the Sarasota Police Department shows that the woman filed a complaint of sexual battery and rape on 30 October. An attorney for Florida GOP Party Chair Christian Ziegler said he expected to be fully cleared of sexual battery accusations (Florida Republican Party/Facebook) In an email to state Republican Party members at the weekend, Mr Ziegler did not address the group sex claims he admitted to in his police interview but said he was innocent of the rape allegations. My family is rock solid. My wife is behind me 150 per cent and we have methods in place to protect our (three) children, just as we have with all previous attacks that we have faced, he wrote, according to the Associated Press. Mr Ziegler, who has not been charged, is resisting growing bipartisan calls from Governor Ron DeSantis and state Democrats to stand down. I dont see how he can continue with that investigation ongoing given the gravity of those situations, Mr DeSantis said in comments after his debate with California governor Gavin Newsom. Hes innocent till proven guilty, but we just cant have a party chair that is under that type of scrutiny. Evidence that the Zieglers, both power players in Florida politics, were having group sex with a woman have led to accusations of hypocrisy from Democrats and LGBTQ groups. As leaders in the Florida GOP and Moms for Liberty, the Zieglers have made a habit out of attacking anything they perceive as going against family values be it reproductive rights or the existence of LGBTQ+ Floridians, Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried said in a statement. The level of hypocrisy in this situation is stunning. Bridget Ziegler, second from left, is a members of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District Board of Supervisors appointed by Ron DeSantis to govern Walt Disney World (AP) The Zieglers have both touted their commitment to family values while running for public office. Mr Ziegler is a long-term GOP official and former Sarasota County commissioner who was elected chair of the state party in February. Bridget Ziegler is a former school board official who co-founded the parents rights group Moms For Liberty in 2021. The right-wing activists initially focused on anti-Covid lockdown measures but have since expanded nationwide on a platform of trying to combat gender ideology and critical race theory in schools. Moms for Liberty was at the forefront of efforts to pass Floridas dont say gay bill, and was named an anti-government extremist organisation by the Southern Poverty Law Center in June. Ms Ziegler received Mr DeSantis personal endorsement for her Sarasota school board seat earlier this year. She was also appointed by the governor to the newly-formed Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, after he rescinded Disneys special district status after a political fight with the Magic Kingdom. The Zieglers have not responded to several requests for comment by The Independent. Mr Zieglers attorney Derek Byrd told The Independent last week that he was confident his client would be fully exonerated. GOP power couple Christian and Bridget Ziegler have been celebrated for their pro-family values. But a recent rape allegation against Christian Ziegler undermines the principles they tout. A search warrant revealed the couple previously had a threesome with the woman. Scathing details of a rape allegation against Christian Ziegler, the Florida GOP chairman who has become an influential figure in the modern conservative movement, clash with the pro-family, Christian values that Ziegler and his Moms for Liberty cofounder wife, Bridget, have been praised for. A heavily redacted report from the Sarasota Police Department published by the Florida Center for Government Accountability revealed that Ziegler is under an active criminal investigation involving "rape" and a "sexual assault allegation" that occurred on October 2. A search warrant affidavit obtained by the same watchdog group additionally showed that Ziegler and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, cofounder of the conservative "parental rights" group Moms for Liberty, had a three-way sexual encounter with the woman accusing the state GOP chairman of rape. The affidavit stated that the woman and Bridget Ziegler both individually told police they had a three-way sexual encounter with Christian Ziegler more than a year before the alleged October incident, according to the watchdog group. The Zieglers made another plan to have sex on October 2, according to the affidavit, but the woman canceled the arrangement after she learned that Bridget Ziegler could not make it, The Washington Post reported. "Sorry I was mostly in for her," she said in a message, according to the affidavit. Christian Ziegler, however, still showed up at the woman's apartment and raped her, the woman told Sarasota police, according to the Post. Bridget Ziegler's apparent admission of having a three-way sexual encounter with another woman represents a stark contrast with her crusade to implement Florida's so-called "Don't Say Gay" law that has been expanded to restrict classroom instruction on LGTBQ+ topics for K-12 a bill that opponents say will only encourage a hostile environment for LGBTQ+ students. Meanwhile, the rape allegation against Christian Ziegler is a profound step away from the "pro-family" values his supporters have celebrated him for. An attorney for Christian Ziegler did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent during the weekend. A GOP power couple Florida GOP chairman Christian Ziegler greets former president Donald Trump at the Republican Party of Florida Freedom Summit. Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images Republican colleagues have praised the Zieglers for being "principled" conservatives as they've quickly climbed the political ladder in recent years. A few years ago, Christian Ziegler was a little-known Sarasota County commissioner who ran on a platform emphasizing low local taxes and pro-business values. Sen. Rick Scott, Florida's then-governor, endorsed Ziegler, describing him as a "life-long principled conservative," according to Florida Politics. A spokesperson for Scott could not provide a statement before the time of this story's publishing. In February 2023, Ziegler was elected chairman of the state Republican Party. John Stemberger, an evangelical leader and president of Florida Family Action, which promotes conservative family values and has led efforts against same-sex marriage, endorsed Ziegler for the position in December 2022. "I wholeheartedly endorse Christian Ziegler. He is a pro-life, pro-family and strong social conservative," Stemberger said in a statement that has since been removed from the Florida Family Action website. Business Insider viewed a cached version of the page. A spokesperson for Florida Family Action did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent during the weekend. A school board mom's rise to prominence Similarly, Ziegler's wife gained prominence in 2021 for her role in co-founding Moms for Liberty, which began in Florida and has since gained national traction. The organization has been focused on shaping local school boards across the US by supporting conservative candidates who oppose discussions of LGBTQ+ rights, gender and sexuality, critical race theory, and discrimination in schools. The group has also been leading a nationwide crusade to ban school library books that touch on LGBTQ+ subjects. The organization's influence, however, was recently rebuked by voters in Iowa as only one of 13 candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won a local election. Bridget Ziegler left the organization in late 2021. Still, she was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to a seat on the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District Board, the special taxing district that manages Disney World. DeSantis also took the unusual step of endorsing her for reelection in 2022 on the Sarasota County School Board. "We need (school board members) like Bridget Ziegler, we should have her in every county," DeSantis said at a dinner hosted by the Republican Party of Sarasota in 2021. However, recent allegations against Christian Ziegler have some Republicans stepping back their support for the GOP power couple and questioning their adherence to conservative values. DeSantis told reporters after his debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom that Christian Zeigler should step down from his position. "I don't see how he can continue with that investigation ongoing given the gravity of those situations, and so I think that he should, I think he should step aside," the governor said. Florida Rep. Spencer Roach told the Post that the allegations are "an absolute body blow to the Republican Party" and go against the principles the couple represented. "They have held themselves out to be paragons of the Christian conservative family values, a prototype," Roach told the Post. "And I think there's a very heavy sense of betrayal, certainly within the Republican Party." The Zieglers did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent during the weekend. The embattled Florida GOP chairman said in a statement sent to state Republicans on Saturday that he would not resign over the allegations and that he and his wife are being targeted because they are "such loud political voices," The Associated Press reported. Read the original article on Business Insider (Bloomberg) -- A bombing that killed four people and wounded dozens in southern Philippines early Sunday was perpetrated by foreign terrorists, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said. Most Read from Bloomberg At least 50 were injured in the blast during a Catholic mass at a gymnasium in Mindanao State University in Marawi City, according to the Philippine military. The military said tactics used in Sundays attack were similar to how the January 2019 explosions in a cathedral that killed at least 20 people in Jolo town in Mindanao, were carried out. Security alert is heightened to ensure the safety of our people, Philippine military spokesman Colonel Medel Aguilar said in a mobile phone message, declining to confirm media reports pointing to Islamic State terrorists taking responsibility for the attack. In early 2019, suicide bombers carried out the Jolo attack days after voters endorsed a new autonomous Muslim region to end decades of violence in the restive south. In mid-2019, a blast in Sulu province killed five and wounded nine others. At that time, martial law was still in place in Mindanao two years after clashes between government troops and militants backed by foreign terrorists erupted in Marawi City in 2017. Marcos on Sunday urged the public to remain calm as authorities stepped up security. I have instructed the Philippine National Police and the Armed Forces of the Philippines to ensure the protection and safety of civilians and the security of affected and vulnerable communities, Marcos said in the statement. Additional security personnel are also being deployed. Extremists who wield violence against the innocent will always be regarded as enemies to our society, Marcos said. The US condemned in the strongest terms the horrific terrorist attack and added its in close contact with our Philippine partners, according to a State Department statement on Nov. 3. The five-month fighting in Marawi in 2017 killed more than 1,000 people, displaced tens of thousands and destroyed much of the city that is taking a long time to rebuild. --With assistance from Ian Fisher. (Adds background in third paragraph, US statement in ninth paragraph.) Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2023 Bloomberg L.P. MIAMI A former U.S. ambassador was arrested on charges of secretly working for Cuba and boasting that his decades of work for Havana had "strengthened the revolution immensely," authorities said Monday. Victor Manuel Rocha, the onetime U.S. envoy to Bolivia, appeared to choke back tears at the defense table as family members entered the courtroom of Chief Magistrate Judge Edwin G. Torres in Miami. The judge asked Rocha, 73, whether he understood the charges, and the defendant responded, I understand. Attorney General Merrick Garland said the arrest "exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent." "Those who have the privilege of serving in the government of the United States are given an enormous amount of trust by the public we serve," Garland told reporters Monday. "To betray that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the United States while serving a foreign power is a crime that will be met with the full force of the Justice Department. U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha (Gonzalo Espinoza / AFP via Getty Images file) Rocha is being accused of working to promote the Cuban governments interests, which is not a crime unless it's done on U.S. soil without registering with the Justice Department as a foreign lobbyist. The government claims Rocha has been working on behalf of Havana from November 1981 to now. He faces at least three criminal counts: conspiracy to act as foreign agent to defraud the U.S., acting as an illegal agent for a foreign government and use of passport obtained by false statement. Additional charges are expected to come later this week, the government said. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan D. Stratton said Rocha should be held without bail, claiming hes a flight risk with dual citizenship. The defense said Rocha will make all court appearances if hes granted bail. A heading on that matter was set for Wednesday. An undercover FBI agent allegedly reached out to Rocha via WhatsApp in November last year. "Good Afternoon ambassador, my name is Miguel and I have a message for you from your friends in Havana," FBI special agent Michael Haley wrote in a criminal complaint, quoting the undercover agent. "It is in regard to a sensitive matter. Are you available for a telephone call?" That led to meetings on Nov. 16, 2022, and Feb. 17 and June 23 of this year, when Rocha allegedly boasted about his longtime loyalty to Havana, according to the complaint. In that final meeting, Rocha allegedly took offense when the undercover agent questioned whether he was still loyal to Havana, a "companero." Rocha then used crude terms, saying such an inquiry is "like questioning my manhood." "I am angry. I'm pissed off," Rocha allegedly said. "It's like you want me to drop them ... and show you if I still have testicles." Rocha repeatedly called the U.S. "the enemy," according to Garland. "He told the undercover that his efforts to infiltrate the United States government were "meticulous" and 'very disciplined,' " Garland said. "And he repeatedly bragged about the significance of his efforts saying that, 'What has been done has strengthened the revolution immensely." Messages left for the defendant's wife and current employer, a Miami-based public affairs consultant, were not immediately returned Monday. Defense attorney Jacqueline Arango declined to comment after Monday's brief hearing. Maria Pinero reported from Miami and David K. Li and Helen Kwong from New York City. This article was originally published on NBCNews.com A former Columbus Police Department assistant chief has died after entering hospice care, according to Muscogee County Coroner Buddy Bryan. Gil Slouchick died Sunday morning with his family by his side, according to Bryan. He was 67. Slouchick spent 44 years in the Columbus Police Department and was promoted to assistant chief in November 2017 and served in the position until his retirement in September 2020, according to CPDs Facebook page. His contributions to Support Services (911), Patrol, and Investigative Services were invaluable, the post said. Our deepest condolences go out to his family and friends during this difficult time. Rest in peace, Asst. Chief Slouchick. You will be missed but never forgotten. His career included such honors as being officer of the month in October of 1988 and being named officer of the year that same year, according to CPD. A prominent disinformation researcher who worked at Harvard University alleged her project was thwarted and her position ended early after the university received a $500 million donation from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, according to a whistleblower disclosure released Monday. The researcher, Joan Donovan, alleged that Harvard blocked her and her team at the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School from continuing their research and eventually ended Donavans employment before the end of her contract after the Chan Zuckerberg initiative committed a $500 million donation to a university center on artificial intelligence in December 2021. Donovan, represented by Whistleblower Aid, the nonprofit group that previously worked with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, requested an investigation into appropriate influence at the Harvard Kennedy School, according to the disclosure sent last week to Harvards president, as well as the U.S. Department of Education and the Massachusetts Attorney Generals Office. Details of the disclosure were first reported by The Washington Post. The $500 million donation from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative came after Donovan began a project called the Facebook Archive, which aimed to make the internal Facebook documents released by Haugen publicly available, the disclosure stated. Whistleblower Aid CEO Libby Liu said Meta is following the playbook of Big Tobacco, Big Energy and Big Pharma, of influencing and co-opting research to protect their lies, their profits and evade accountability. Whether Harvard acted at the companys direction or took the initiative on their own to protect Metas interests, the outcome is the same: corporate interests are undermining research and academic freedom to the detriment of the public, Liu said in a statement. Harvard pushed back strongly on the allegations. James Francis Smith, a spokesperson for the Harvard Kennedy School, said in a statement the disclosures allegations of unfair treatment and donor interference are false. The narrative is full of inaccuracies and baseless insinuations, particularly the suggestion that Harvard Kennedy School allowed Facebook to dictate its approach to research, Smith said. Smith said research projects at Harvard Kennedy School need to be led by faculty members, and Donovan was hired as a staff member to manage a media manipulation project. When the original faculty leader of the project left Harvard, the school unsuccessfully tried to identify another faculty member to lead the project and gave the project more than a year to wind down. Joan Donovan was not fired, and most members of the research team chose to remain at the School in new roles, Smith added. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative said in an email, CZI had no involvement in Dr. Donovans departure from Harvard and was unaware of that development before public reporting on it. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a philanthropic organization set up in 2015 by Chan and Zuckerberg, who both attended Harvard. Donavan worked at Harvard, most recently as director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project, between December 2018 and August 2023. The disclosure alleges that in August of last year, Douglas Elmendorf, dean of the Kennedy School, put Donovan on a hiring and fundraising freeze and told her she did not have academic freedom or even the legal rights to her own research. Although Donovan was contracted to continue her role through December 31, 2023, on July 12, 2023 she was informed by the Kennedy School that they were ending her program and her employment effective August 31, 2023, according to the disclosure. Donovan is now an assistant professor at Boston Universitys College of Communications. She is also the author of the book, Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online battles Upending Democracy in America, and has testified before Congress. In February, Harvards student-led newspaper The Crimson reported that Harvard was ending Donovans project and restricting her from raising new funding or conducting additional hiring, which Harvard spokesperson Smith said at the time was due to the project lacking a full faculty member. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. Palestinians displaced by the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip gather at a tent camp, in Rafah, southern Gaza strip, Monday, Dec. 4, 2023. (Fatima Shbair/AP) DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip Israeli warplanes heavily bombarded an area around Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Monday as the military ordered mass evacuations from the town in the face of a widening ground offensive that is pushing Palestinians into a progressively shrinking portion of the besieged territory. The expanded assault posed a deadly choice for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either stay in the path of Israeli forces or flee within the confines of southern Gaza with no guarantee of safety. Aid workers warned that the mass movement would worsen the already dire humanitarian catastrophe in the territory. Advertisement Another wave of displacement is underway, and the humanitarian situation worsens by the hour, the Gaza chief of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, Thomas White, said in a post on X. Adding to the chaos, phone and internet networks across Gaza collapsed again Monday evening, the Palestinian telecom provider PalTel reported. The network has broken down multiple times during the war, making it largely impossible for residents to communicate with each other or the outside world for hours or sometimes several days until it is repaired. Advertisement Israel has vowed to eliminate Gazas Hamas rulers, whose Oct. 7 attack into Israel killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and triggered the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian violence in decades. The war has already killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced over three-fourths of the territorys population of 2.3 million people. Palestinian health officials say bombardment has killed several hundred civilians since a weeklong truce ended Friday. Already under mounting pressure from its top ally, the United States, Israel appears to be racing to strike a death blow against Hamas if thats possible, given the groups deep roots in Palestinian society before any new cease-fire. But the mounting toll is likely to further increase international pressure to return to the negotiating table. Airstrikes and the ground offensive in northern Gaza have reduced large swaths of Gaza City and nearby areas to a rubble-filled wasteland. Hundreds of thousands of residents fled south during the assault. Now around 2 million people most of the territorys population are crowded into the 90 square miles of southern and central Gaza, where Israels ground offensive is now moving, threatening to render even larger areas uninhabitable. Since the truces collapse, the military has ordered the population out an area of about 24 square miles in and near Khan Younis, according to the evacuation maps issued by the Israeli military. That further reduces the space available for Palestinians by more than a quarter. Fighting in Central Gaza Constant bombardment on the edges of Khan Younis, Gazas second-largest city, lit up the sky over the town Monday evening, and a stream of ambulances carrying wounded, including several women and children, flowed into the main hospital. Over the past few days, Israeli strikes have been on a ferocious scale, said Mohammed Aghaalkurdi, an aid worker with the group Medical Aid for Palestinians in Khan Younis. Barely has any kind of aid been delivered to the people, nor is there any food left in shops. Advertisement He said neighborhoods and displaced shelters were emptying as people fled. Leaflets dropped by the military warn people to go south toward the border with Egypt, but they are unable to leave Gaza, as both Israel and neighboring Egypt have refused to accept any refugees. The area that Israel ordered evacuated covers about a fifth of Khan Younis. Before the war, that area was home to some 117,000 people, and now it also houses more than 50,000 people displaced from the north, living in 21 shelters, the U.N. said. It was not known how many were fleeing. Some Palestinians have ignored past evacuation orders, saying they do not feel any safer since areas where they are told to flee have also been bombed. Many also fear they will never be allowed back to their homes. It was not clear where Israeli troops have moved into southern Gaza, but the military told people to stay off the main road between Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah, suggesting forces were moving between the two towns. Israeli media also reported intense fighting between Israeli troops and Hamas militants in northern Gaza in the Jabaliya refugee camp and the Gaza City district of Shijaiya, both scenes of intense bombardment and battles in recent weeks. Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, said the army is pursuing Hamas with maximum force in the north and south while trying to minimize harm to civilians. Advertisement He pointed to a map that divides southern Gaza into dozens of blocks in order to give precise instructions to residents on where to evacuate. Most are urged to flee south, but, confusingly, a map posted on X by the military Monday urged people to flee into Fakhari, a district east of Khan Younis that the military ordered evacuated a day before. The level of human suffering is intolerable, Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said during a rare visit to Gaza. It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, and with a military siege in place, there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible. She also called for the immediate release of scores of hostages still held by Palestinian militants since the Oct. 7 attack. In a letter to the Red Cross chief, a group of released Israeli hostages asked to meet her while she is visiting the region and called for more help from the organization to free the remaining 137 captives. Every day that passes could be their last, and the suffering they endure is inhuman, wrote the eight freed captives and 102 relatives of hostages still in captivity. Rising toll Advertisement The Health Ministry in Gaza said the death toll in the territory since Oct. 7 has surpassed 15,890 people 70% of them women and children with more than 42,000 wounded. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths. Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said hundreds have been killed or wounded since the cease-fires end, with many still trapped under rubble. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah received 32 bodies overnight after Israeli strikes across central Gaza, said Omar al-Darawi, an administrative employee. Associated Press footage showed women in tears, kneeling over the bodies of loved ones and kissing them. The military said aircraft struck some 200 Hamas targets overnight, with ground troops operating in parallel, without elaborating. It said troops in northern Gaza uncovered two militant tunnel shafts that held explosives and weapons in a school after coming under attack. It is not possible to independently confirm battlefield reports from either side. Israel says it targets Hamas operatives and blames civilian casualties on the militants, accusing them of operating in residential neighborhoods. Still, it does not provide accounting for its targets in individual strikes. Advertisement Israel claims to have killed thousands of militants, without providing evidence. The military says at least 81 of its soldiers have been killed. U.S. pressure The U.S. is pressing Israel to avoid more mass displacements and civilian deaths, a message underscored by Vice President Kamala Harris during a visit to the region. She also said the U.S. would not allow the forced relocation of Palestinians out of Gaza or the occupied West Bank, or the redrawing of Gazas borders. But its unclear how far the Biden administration is willing or able to go in pressing Israel to rein in the offensive, even as the White House faces growing pressure from its allies in Congress. The U.S. has pledged unwavering support to Israel since the Oct. 7 attack, including rushing munitions and other aid to Israel. Israel has rejected U.S. suggestions that control over postwar Gaza be handed over to the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority as part of a renewed effort to resolve the overall conflict by establishing a Palestinian state. Ronald Gibbs worked as a partner for the 'magic circle' law firm Linklaters - Champion News A former leading lawyer faces losing a 4 million London house in a court battle with a Saudi princess. Ronald Gibbs, who worked as a partner for the magic circle law firm Linklaters, has been locked in warfare with Saudi royals after agreeing to set up and manage a $25 million (19.7 million) investment fund for Princess Deema Bint Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in 2011. He bought shares for the princess in a boat-building company he controlled, a multi-million pound apartment in Montenegro and a 17-million, 40-metre superyacht. But the princess and her brother, Prince Khalid Bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, complained that he failed to liquidate the assets and return the princesss millions after being first asked to do so in 2013. Ronald Gibbs agreed to set up and manage a 19.7 million investment fund for Princess Deema Bint Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in 2011 - Champion News Mr Gibbss 4 million house on Kings Road in Richmond, west London, that he bought for his family in 2012, is now at the centre of the long-running legal battle. Princess Deema, who is suing him at the High Court in London, is seeking an order for sale of the house to satisfy a 2.2 million interim damages and costs order that he owes. But the former lawyer is resisting, claiming most of the beneficial interest in the house is owned by his former wife and children. Mr Gibbs, an asset finance lawyer who became a partner at Linklaters, one of the top five London commercial legal firms, agreed to manage the 19.7 million investment pot handed to the princess by her father, former Saudi defence minister Sultan bin Abdulaziz. The money was ultimately invested in an apartment at the Regent Hotel in Porto, Montenegro, superyacht company Silver Arrows Marine Limited and a Sunseeker 131 superyacht named Elysium. The money was invested in an apartment at the Regent Hotel in Porto, Montenegro Simon Atrill KC, representing the princess, said Mr Gibbs had in 2018 agreed to liquidate the investment portfolio by selling the assets, but by 2021 he had not complied. This led to the princess suing him for breach of the 2018 agreement, the High Court heard. After the summary judgment was entered against him for breach of the agreement, he was ordered to pay 582,077.49 interim damages and 1.64 million costs to the princess and her lawyers. Mr Atrill told John Linwood, the High Court judge, that Mr Gibbs has never repaid a penny of the money despite accepting his obligation to do so ... and having the means to do so. In relation to the house at the centre of the claim, the barrister continued: In 2021, Mr Gibbs said including by way of sworn affidavit and through his solicitors that he owned the property 100 per cent beneficially. Mr Gibbs, an experienced solicitor, now seeks to deny that this is what he really meant. A 4 million house in Richmond, that Mr Gibbs bought for his family in 2012, is now at the centre of the long-running legal battle - Champion News Mr Atrill said Mr Gibbs claims that when the house was purchased in 2012, he granted a 50 per cent beneficial interest to Sandra Gibbs, his former wife from whom he separated in 2006, and a 25 per cent beneficial interest to their three children. Mr Gibbs and his former wife are representing themselves at trial. Mrs Gibbs told the judge she cant find the original trust deed, but have provided certified copies, while Mr Gibbs asked the court not to expect him to have legal superpowers because of his former job. In the hearing earlier this year, Mr Gibbs had claimed the costs and damages orders would ruin him, saying: This is warfare against me. The claims were disputed by Mr Atrill. Judgment was reserved. 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. Former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia accused of spying for Cuba for decades Washington A former top U.S. diplomat who most recently served as America's ambassador to Bolivia was arrested last Friday and charged with acting as a foreign agent of Cuba, according to court documents. Beginning as early as 1981 and continuing through to the present day, Victor Manuel Rocha a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Colombia and currently living in Miami allegedly spied on behalf of the island nation's intelligence agency, referred to the U.S. as "the enemy" and supported Cuba's clandestine intelligence-gathering mission, according to prosecutors. A federal grand jury in Miami indicted Rocha on 15 counts on Tuesday, including charges that he acted as an illegal agent of a foreign government and wire fraud as part of alleged scheme to "act as a clandestine agent" of Cuba and "harm the interests of the United States." As part of his employment at the State Department, prosecutors said Rocha had periodic high-level security clearances and gained access to top secret information. While an affidavit filed in support of a criminal complaint did not provide details about the information that prosecutors allege Rocha shared with the Cubans during the decades he is accused of working with them, charging documents describe an ongoing relationship he fostered with Cuban handlers. Working with unnamed conspirators inside Cuba's intelligence community, Rocha allegedly "agreed to act and did act as a clandestine agent of the Cuban government," the affidavit said. First, as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic, Rocha moved his way up through various diplomatic posts in the region, charging documents say, including as director of Inter-American Affairs for the U.S. National Security Council. That role, according to prosecutors, gave him special responsibility over Cuban policy. Investigators said Rocha signed nondisclosure agreements and was required to "affirm his loyalties to the United States and absence of covert activity on behalf of any foreign nation." And from 2006 through 2012, Rocha was an adviser to the commander of the joint command of the U.S. military in the region, which included Cuba. Court documents say unspecified evidence from the investigation, coupled with numerous meetings in recent years between Rocha and an undercover FBI agent, led prosecutors to bring the charges. Over three meetings in 2022 and 2023, investigators allege Rocha discussed his decades-long partnership with Cuban intelligence, telling the undercover agent during their first meeting outside a Church in Miami, "My number one priority was any action on the part of Washington that would would endanger the life of of the leadership... revolution itself." "I have to protect what we did because what we didthe cement that has strengthened the last 40 years," Rocha allegedly told the undercover agent during their second meeting. "What we have done ... it's enormous. ... More than a grand slam." This image provided by the Justice Department and contained in the affidavit in support of a criminal complaint shows Manuel Rocha during a meeting with a FBI undercover employee. / Credit: Department of Justice / AP And in June 2023, during their last meeting, the undercover agent asked Rocha if he was "still with us." "I am angry. I'm pissed off It's like questioning my manhood," Rocha allegedly responded. Attorney General Merrick Garland said at an event Monday, "This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the U.S. government by a foreign agent." The Cuban Embassy did not respond to a request for comment, and Rocha's attorney also did not immediately return request for comment. Rocha's initial appearance in court took place Monday, and he will be arraigned later this month. The charges against Rocha come almost a year after another a Cuban spy was freed from prison after more than 20 years behind bars. Ana Montes, a former analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, spied for Cuba for 17 years, revealing the identities of the United States' undercover intelligence officers and its highly sensitive collection capabilities, until her arrest in 2001. Novak Djokovic: The 60 Minutes Interview Ukrainian civilian resistance fighters stepped up after Russias invasion | 60 Minutes Shohei Ohtani | 60 Minutes Archive A former U.S. ambassador with a long career in the federal government has been charged with working secretly since the early 1980s for Cubas intelligence services as an unregistered covert foreign agent in the United States, according to an FBI complaint unsealed Monday in Miami federal court. Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, a former ambassador to Bolivia who had also worked as a senior diplomat in the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba, spent the weekend in custody at the Federal Detention Center in Miami and made his first appearance in federal court Monday. Prosecutors said they plan to file a grand jury indictment on Tuesday and seek his detention at a bond hearing on Wednesday before Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres, who signed the complaint for Rochas arrest on Friday. His defense attorney, Jacqueline Arango, a former Miami federal prosecutor with a national security background, declined to comment but plans to argue for Rochas release before trial. His arraignment is scheduled for Dec. 18. Although the FBI complaint does not charge Rocha with spying for the Cuban government, the nations top law enforcement official characterized him that way in a statement released Monday by the Justice Department that harkened back to the Cold War and frosty relations between Cuba and the United States. This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said. Under U.S. law, it is required for anyone working as an agent for a foreign government in the United States to register with the Attorney Generals Office in the Department of Justice. The FBI criminal complaint charges Rocha, who was born in Colombia and naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1978, with conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government and to defraud the United States, acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government, and use of a passport obtained by a false statement. Over the span of 40 years as an employee in the State Department and private sector, Rocha secretly supported the Republic of Cuba and its clandestine intelligence-gathering mission against the United States by serving as a cover agent of Cubas intelligence services, according to an affidavit filed with the FBI complaint. In his covert role, Rocha secured diplomatic positions in the U.S. government that provided him access to nonpublic information, including classified information, and the ability to affect United States foreign policy. This embedded content is not available in your region. After his [government] employment ended [in 2002], Rocha held other positions and engaged in other acts intended to support Cubas intelligence services, states the affidavit, adding that Rocha provided false and misleading information to the United States to maintain his secret mission, traveled outside the United States to meet with Cuban intelligence operatives, and made false and misleading statements to obtain travel documents. The 22-page complaint with affidavit says that the FBI received a tip in November 2022 that Rocha had been working as a covert agent. The affidavit alleges that an FBI undercover agent posing as a covert Cuban General Directorate of Intelligence representative met in Miami with Rocha during a series of video-recorded meetings over the past year in which Rocha repeatedly admitted his decades of work for Cuba that spanned 40 years. When the FBI undercover agent told Rocha he was a covert representative here in Miami whose mission was to contact you, introduce myself as your new contact, and establish a new communication plan, Rocha answered Yes, according to the affidavit. Rocha then went on to describe and celebrate his activities as a Cuban intelligence agent. Throughout the meetings, Rocha behaved as a Cuban agent, consistently referring to the United States as the enemy, and using the term we to describe himself and Cuba, according to the affidavit. Rocha also praised the late Fidel Castro as the Comandante, and referred to his contacts in Cuban intelligence as his Companeros (comrades) and to the Cuban intelligence services as the Direccion. Rocha described his work as a Cuban agent as a grand slam, states the affidavit, filed by prosecutor Jonathan Stratton. In particular, Rocha noted he was deputy principal officer of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana between 1995 and 1997, when the Cuban government orchestrated the conspiracy to shoot down two Cuban exile planes flown by four pilots for Brothers to the Rescue over the Florida Straits in February 1996. According to the affidavit, Rocha described the international controversy as the knock down of the small planes. ... That was a time of a lot tension ... that was the time of the Brothers to the Rescue and other similar people ... who were pushing politics towards unnecessary provocations. Rocha also told the FBI undercover agent that his last trip to Cuba was in 2016 or 2017. Word of Rochas arrest on Friday was kept secret by U.S. authorities over the weekend. On Sunday, FBI spokesman James Marshall declined to comment on Rochas arrest at his Miami area home. The U.S. Attorneys Office spokeswoman, prosecutor Sarah Schall, did not respond to several text, email and voice mail messages seeking comment on Sunday. After the AP broke a story that evening about Rochas arrest, Schall said later that she could not comment. Rochas most recent former employer, the Foley & Lardner law firm in Miami, where he worked as a senior advisor on international business, said he left the office in August. We are neither representing nor providing legal assistance to Ambassador Rocha, a spokeswoman said Sunday afternoon. The charge brought against Rocha under the Foreign Agents Registration Act has been used by prosecutors in the U.S. Attorneys Office in the past, including a pending case against former Miami Congressman David Rivera, who is accused of lobbying on behalf of the Venezuelan government without registering as a foreign agent. The offense was also among several charges brought against a Cuban spy ring in the late 1990s, when a group of Cuban government operatives were accused of espionage and a conspiracy to shoot down two Brothers to the Rescue planes in the Florida Straits, killing three U.S. citizens and one Cuban American. Rocha, who gradated from Yale University and obtained graduate degrees from Harvard University and Georgetown University, had a long diplomatic career working in various foreign posts in the Caribbean, Mexico and South America for the U.S. government, including his service as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia during the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. A former colleague said it was hard to believe that Rocha was charged with being an unregistered foreign agent for the Cuban government. This is shocking, said a former U.S. official who knew him. Manuel would not be in the list of people I would think would be working for these guys. While serving as ambassador to Bolivia, Rocha gained some notoriety when he warned voters ahead of the 2002 election that if socialist Evo Morales were elected president, the country would risk losing U.S. aid. He was considered sort of a conservative career officer, said the former official, who did not want to be identified. [He] spent a lot of time licking these wounds over Bolivia, where he drew a lot of fire and criticism because of what he said about Evo Morales in the middle of an election, with people later claiming that those comments got Morales elected. Rochas term as ambassador ended in August 2002. Until that controversy, Rocha was known as a versatile diplomat who moved from one U.S. embassy post to another, starting in the early 1980s during the Reagan administration. Along the way, he also served as deputy principal officer of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, as well as the director for Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council in Washington, D.C. In his lucrative post-government life, as the FBI described his career in the affidavit, Rocha was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and served on the University of Miamis International Advisory Board. He also served on the advisory board of the Cuba Transition Project at UM and as a special advisor to the U.S. military commander of U.S. Southern Command in Miami between 2006 and 2012. He was also a member of the late Henry Kissingers International Council on Terrorism. In addition, Rocha was director of government relations for Arcos Dorados Holdings, which owns and manages most of the McDonalds restaurants in Latin America. The former US ambassador to Bolivia has been charged in federal court with acting as a secret foreign agent of Cuba, according to court documents unsealed Monday. Manuel Rocha, the 73-year-old former American diplomat, secretly supported the Republic of Cuba and its clandestine intelligence-gathering mission against the United States by serving as a covert agent of Cubas intelligence services, prosecutors wrote. Rocha served as the US ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002 and as the deputy principal officer of the US Interests Section in Cuba in the 1990s. Rocha also worked for the US Embassy in the Dominican Republic in the 1980s as well as the US Consulate in Italy, and served in different roles for US embassies in Mexico and Argentina. In several meetings with an undercover FBI employee posing as a member of Cuban intelligence, Rocha repeatedly referred to the US as the enemy and praised Cuban revolutionary and politician Fidel Castro, according to court documents. Rocha described being in charge of what he called the knock down of the small planes which prosecutors believe to be an incident during Rochas tenure working for the State Department in Havana when Cuba shot down two unarmed airplanes operated by members of Brothers to the Rescue, a US-based group opposed to Castros government, killing four men. In the indictment, prosecutors say the Cuban government has worked for years to recruit persons within the United States to assist with intelligence gathering, including individuals within the US government. As an employee of the State Department, Rocha had unique access to non-public government information, prosecutors said. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Monday that the case against Rocha exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent. Rocha is facing three federal charges, including acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government. Rocha was arrested and had an initial court appearance Monday in Miami, where federal prosecutors asked a judge to keep him detained until trial. Rocha was represented by Miami attorney Jacqueline Arango with the Akerman law firm, where shes the co-chair of white-collar crimes and government investigations. US Chief Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres set a pretrial detention hearing for 1 p.m. Wednesday, and Rocha will remain in custody until that time. Assistant US Attorney Jonathan Stratton said the government plans to bring additional charges with a grand jury, saying those will hit the docket Tuesday. Torres also set a preliminary hearing and arraignment for December 18. FBI undercover officer approaches Rocha An undercover FBI employee posing as a Cuban intelligence agent messaged Rocha on WhatsApp in November 2022 soon after investigators were tipped off to Rochas alleged covert work, court documents say. In the message, prosecutors say, the undercover employee said that they have a message for you from your friends in Havana. It is in regards to a sensitive matter. Rocha allegedly replied: I dont understand but you can call me. The former ambassador agreed to meet the undercover employee in Miami to talk. During the meeting, Rocha allegedly took several precautions to make sure that he wasnt followed, including taking a longer route to their rendezvous, and asking the undercover employee to talk at a food court with only low-level employees. So, there is no possibility for for anyone to see me. During their first meeting, Rocha allegedly told the undercover employee that the Cuban intelligence agency, called the Direccion General de Inteligencia, asked me to lead a normal life, and said that he has created the legend of a right-wing person. I always told myself, The only thing that can put everything we have done in danger is - is someones betrayal, someone who may have met me, someone who may have known something at some point, Rocha said, according to a recording of the meeting cited in court documents. He allegedly added: My number one concern; my number one priority was any action on the part of Washington that would - would endanger the life of of the leadership, or the or the revolution itself. During another meeting several weeks later, Rocha allegedly described obtaining his State Department employment to the undercover employee, saying, I went little by little. It was a very meticulous process very disciplined. I knew exactly how to do it and obviously the Direccion accompanied me they knew that I knew how to do it. Its a long process and it wasnt easy, he said, according to prosecutors. Rocha also allegedly boasted about his decades of work on behalf of the Cuban government, saying that it strengthened the revolution over the last 40 years, and lamented the blows that the enemy, allegedly referring to the US government, has dealt to the current revolution. Rocha worked at consulting firm LLYC USA as a senior international business advisor at the time of his arrest, according to court documents. LLYC said in a statement to CNN Monday that Rocha is no longer associated with LLYC, effective immediately and that it will collaborate fully with the authorities if required. This story has been updated with additional details. CNNs Denise Royal and Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report. For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com The Justice Department charged a former State Department official for secretly serving as an agent for the Cuban government. Federal prosecutors allege Victor Manuel Rocha, a 73-year-old resident of Miami, Fla., secretly supported Cuba and its clandestine intel-gathering efforts by serving as a covert agent of the countrys General Directorate of Intelligence. Rocha provided false and misleading information to the United States to maintain his secret mission; traveled outside the United States to meet with Cuban intelligence operatives; and made false and misleading statements to obtain travel documents, the DOJ stated. The DOJ said, when confronted by an undercover FBI agent within the last year, Rocha admitted his ties to the country's government and referred to the U.S. as the enemy. Authorities charged Rocha with conspiracy to act as an agent of the foreign government, acting as an agent of a foreign government and using a passport obtained by a false statement. Rocha is expected to make a court appearance in Miami on Monday. Rocha began serving on the National Security Council in 1994 and as the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia between 2000 and 2002. Rochas actions come as several high-profile U.S. leaders have been charged or investigated for having improper relationships with other countries. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) was charged with serving as an unregistered agent for Egypt and New York City Mayor Eric Adams is being investigated by the FBI to determine whether he conspired with the Turkish government during his 2021 mayoral campaign. This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. A former U.S. diplomat is accused of conducting a more than 40-year secretive campaign to spy on behalf of the Cuban government. The Department of Justice (DOJ) said Monday it was charging Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, of working as a covert agent with Cubas General Directorate of Intelligence since at least 1981 the year he was hired to work in the State Department. Rocha, who served in multiple federal roles including as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002, is accused of using access to classified information and foreign policy influence to benefit Cuba, including traveling outside of the U.S. to meet with Cuban representatives. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Rochas mission was one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent. Those who have the privilege of serving in the government of the United States are given an enormous amount of trust by the public we serve, Garland said in a statement. To betray that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the United States while serving a foreign power is a crime that will be met with the full force of the Justice Department. Rocha faces counts of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government, acting as an agent of a foreign government and using a passport obtained by false statement, according to the DOJ. He was arrested Friday in Miami and made an initial court appearance in Florida on Monday. It wasnt immediately clear if Rocha had obtained a lawyer. The DOJ said Rocha allegedly revealed Cuban ties during a series of meetings with an undercover FBI agent in 2022 and 2023. In the meetings, Rocha allegedly called the U.S. the enemy, praised Cuba and the late Cuban President Fidel Castro and referred to his decades of alleged covert work as more than a grand slam while acknowledging the work was not easy, according to the DOJ complaint. Rocha also allegedly said at another meeting with the undercover agent that his work strengthened the revolution of his country, according to the complaint. Cuba and the U.S. have had a strained relationship since the Cuban communist party seized power in 1959. Rocha is from Colombia and became a lawful permanent resident after obtaining U.S. citizenship in 1978, according to the DOJ complaint. During his time in the State Department, Rocha served in various countries in North America, South America and Central America, including Honduras, Mexico, Argentina and the Dominican Republic. He also served with the National Security Council from 1994 to 1995 and as an advisor to the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, which has a jurisdiction covering Cuba, from 2006 to 2012, according to the DOJ. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. This image provided by the Justice Department and contained in the affidavit in support of a criminal complaint, shows Manuel Rocha during a meeting with a FBI undercover employee. (Department of Justice/AP) MIAMI A former career American diplomat was charged Monday with serving as a secret agent for communist Cuba going back decades in what prosecutors portrayed as one of the most brazen and long-running betrayals in the history of the U.S. foreign service. Manuel Rocha wept as he sat handcuffed in Miami federal court on charges that he engaged in clandestine activity on Cubas behalf since at least 1981 the year he joined the U.S. foreign service including by meeting with Cuban intelligence operatives and providing false information to U.S. government officials about his contacts. Advertisement The complaint is short on specifics of how Rocha may have assisted Cuba. But it provides a vivid case study of what American officials say are long-standing efforts by Cuba and its notoriously sophisticated intelligence services to target U.S. government officials who can be flipped. This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. To betray that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the United States while serving a foreign power is a crime that will be met with the full force of the Justice Department. Advertisement The 73-year-old Rocha, whose two-decade career as a U.S. diplomat included top posts in Bolivia, Argentina and the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, was arrested by the FBI at his Miami home Friday. He was ordered held following Mondays brief court appearance pending a bond hearing Wednesday. His attorney declined to comment. The Justice Department did not reveal how Rocha attracted the attention of Cubas intelligence operatives nor did it describe what, if any, sensitive information he may have provided while working for the State Department and in a lucrative post-government career that included a stint as a special adviser to the commander of U.S. Southern Command. Instead, the case relies largely on what prosecutors say were Rochas own admissions, made over the past year to an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence operative named Miguel. Rocha praised the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro as Comandante, branded the U.S. the enemy and bragged about his service for more than 40 years as a Cuban mole in the heart of U.S. foreign policy circles, the complaint says. What we have done its enormous more than a Grand Slam, he was quoted as saying at one of several secretly recorded conversations. To cover his tracks, Rocha referred to Cuba as the island and led a normal life disguised as a right-wing person, he said in one of the recordings. Former colleagues and friends described Rocha as a vocal admirer of former President Donald Trump, who took a hard line on Cuba. John Feeley, who ended a long diplomatic career serving as U.S. ambassador to Panama, said he was surprised how his mentor, who had served administrations of both parties, had so fully embraced Trumps politics. It is beyond ironic that he cultivated this cartoonish persona, he said, and that everyone apparently bought it. Advertisement Washington and Havana restored diplomatic relations in late 2014 after a half-century of Cold War acrimony, though the Trump administration reimposed sanctions on Cuba and, in 2021, redesignated it a state sponsor of terrorism. The Biden administration has moved more gingerly to restore some Obama-era concessions. The charging document traces Rochas illegal ties to Cuba to well after his departure from the federal government, when he took on lucrative private sector jobs most recently as a senior business adviser to an international public relations firm and prominent U.S. law firm. The FBI learned about the relationship last year and arranged a series of undercover encounters in discrete locations a church and outdoor food court in downtown Miami. Rocha deliberately strayed from the most-direct route to those encounters, pausing along the way in what prosecutors allege was classic, counter-surveillance tradecraft taught by Cubas spymasters. Its what Ive always been told to do, Rocha told the undercover agent at one of those meetings. At another meeting, Rocha referred to Cuba shooting down two unarmed planes sent by the Miami-based group of exiles, Brothers to the Rescue, in which four opponents of Castros government were killed in 1996. Theres no indication in the complaint that Rocha aided the Cubans with the military operation a major flashpoint in more than a half-century of brinksmanship between the communist-ruled island and its right-wing opponents in Miami. But at the time he served as a senior political officer at the U.S. special interest section in Havana. Advertisement I lived through it, because I was in charge, Rocha was quoted as saying. That was a time of a lot of tension. Rochas service to Cuba may have gone back even earlier than the start of his U.S. diplomatic career. The complaint cites Rocha telling the undercover agent that he first proved his loyalty in Chile in 1973 the year Gen. Augusto Pinochet, with U.S. backing, overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende. They must have told you something because you mentioned Chile, Rocha told the undercover agent, who presented himself as having reached out to him at the request of higher-ups in Cubas National Intelligence Directorate. That inspired trust in me. Born in Colombia, Rocha was raised in a working-class home in New York City and obtained a succession of liberal arts degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown before joining the foreign service. He was the top U.S. diplomat in Argentina between 1997 and 2000 as a decade-long currency stabilization program backed by Washington was unraveling under the weight of huge foreign debt, triggering a political crisis that would see the South American country cycle through five presidents in two weeks. Advertisement At his next post, as ambassador to Bolivia, he intervened directly in the 2002 presidential race, warning weeks ahead of the vote that the U.S. would cut off assistance to the poor South American country if it were to elect former coca grower Evo Morales. I want to remind the Bolivian electorate that if they vote for those who want Bolivia to return to exporting cocaine, that will seriously jeopardize any future aid to Bolivia from the United States, Rocha said in a speech that was widely interpreted as an attempt to sustain U.S. dominance in the region. The comments backfired, angered Bolivians and boosted support for Morales, who joked that Rocha was his best campaign chief. When Morales was finally elected three years later, the leftist leader expelled Rochas successor as chief of the diplomatic mission for inciting civil war. Rocha also served in Italy, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, and worked as a Latin America expert for the National Security Council. Criminal cases against American officials accused of doing Cubas bidding are rare but not unprecedented. A former State Department official, Kendall Myers, was sentenced in 2010 to life in prison for providing classified information to Cuba, and Ana Montes, a former U.S. defense intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying for Cuba, was released from prison in January after a lengthy sentence. But of all the spy scandals in the last 40 years, Rocha is believed to be the first member of Americas elite foreign service to have been accused of betraying their oath, said Kevin Whitaker, a former U.S. ambassador to Colombia. Advertisement If this is true, Rocha has stained the institution of the foreign service, he said. Its infuriating. Tucker reported from Washington. Dr. Dani Mathisen had made careful plans for her daughter. Mathisen, a Fort Worth native, and her husband decided they wanted to get pregnant during Mathisens last year of medical school at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Right on schedule, Mathisen learned she was pregnant. The high school sweethearts joked about whether their daughter would attend Mathisens Fort Worth alma materTrinity Valley School or his. But their careful plans couldnt account for everything. When Mathisen, now 28, went to get an anatomy scan in September 2021, when she was about 18 weeks pregnant, the ultrasound was clear: Her daughters brain had not developed, there was a hole in her spine, and she had just one kidney, among other issues. Mathisens doctor told her the diagnoses were fatal, but had few options for the devastated parents. At the time, Texas Senate Bill 8 had just gone into effect, and all abortions after six weeks gestation were outlawed. Mathisen decided to travel to New Mexico to get an abortion. Today's top stories: New details in investigation of head-on crash that killed Fort Worth CEO, 2 kids North Texas resident shoots elderly man who crashed into home in medical episode Man pleads guilty in bizarre murder after forcing victim to get neck tattoo Get free alerts when news breaks. A little more than two years later, Mathisen has joined 19 other Texas women who were denied abortions and who are now suing the state over its abortion regulations. The plaintiffs, who also include two doctors, are seeking greater clarity on when doctors are allowed to perform abortions in cases of a medical emergency. Technically, Texas abortion laws do make exceptions for cases when the pregnant persons life is in danger. But doctors have said the language is too vague for them to feel confident providing an abortion and risk going to prison. Youre already making the hardest decision of your life, Mathisen said about her pregnancy and subsequent abortion. And then on top of that, you have to be made to feel like a criminal because you cant do it in your own state. Mathisen, who herself is an obstetrician gynecologist, had planned to join a long line of Fort Worth doctors in her family. But after her pregnancy, she decided to go to a residency program in Hawaii, in part because abortion remains legal there. Mathisen said she needed the training and to be able to offer her patients the options that she herself did not have. Theres nothing that resembles a normal brain structure Mathisen was overjoyed when she learned she was pregnant in 2021. She carefully planned how to reveal the news to her husband. She got a baby onesie with Hi printed on the front, and hid it in their pile of laundry. While the two were folding clothes, he came across the babys clothes and realized what it meant. He makes the highest pitch sound Ive ever heard this man make, she said. They couldnt wait to be parents, she said. The early weeks of Mathisens pregnancy progressed normally. Their baby would be the familys first grandchild. At 18 weeks, Mathisen and her husband went in for an anatomy scan. They expected a chance to take cute photos and see their healthy girl in black and white on the ultrasound screen. Instead, Mathisen immediately knew something was wrong. She had just completed her ultrasound rotation in medical school, and knew what a healthy pregnancy was supposed to look like. Instead, there were a number of troubling signs: There was something at the base of her daughters spine that wasnt supposed to be there. There was only one kidney. Her hands and feet were malformed. Shes scanning the brain, and theres nothing that resembles a normal brain structure, Mathisen said. After the scan, Mathisen met with her OB-GYN, who was also her aunt, in her office. Is it lethal? she asked. Yes, her aunt said. With Senate Bill 8 in effect, Mathisens aunt couldnt offer much additional guidance, except to tell her that her daughter was almost certain to die during the course of the pregnancy. There was a small chance she could survive the pregnancy, but if she did she would likely die in her first few days of life. Mathisen and her husband decided that ending the pregnancy was the best option. They began a frantic search for a clinic that had open appointments. Abortion clinics in Colorado were completely booked, Mathisen said. They eventually found an appointment at a clinic in New Mexico. Mathisen ended her pregnancy in the clinic with a doctor she didnt know and with most of her loved ones back in Texas. Because of COVID-19 restrictions, her husband couldnt join her, and she was alone. As she decided where to continue her training as an OB-GYN, Mathisen realized she had to leave her home state. This is something I have to learn how to do for my patients, she said about providing abortions as part of the full range of obstetrical and gynecological care. And I couldnt stay in Texas anymore if it was not going to be an option to learn about it. A challenge to Texas state law About nine months after Mathisens pregnancy ended, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, paving the way for a Texas state law to go into effect banning all abortions except in rare cases. After the landmark case was overturned, Mathisen decided to share her story publicly on social media. Her message took off, reaching thousands of people. She was later invited to speak with President Joe Biden about her experience. The case Mathisen joined was first filed in March by the Center for Reproductive Rights on behalf of five Texas women who were denied abortions. Since then, Mathisen and 14 others who were denied abortions have joined the suit. In August, a Texas district judge sided with plaintiffs, and issued an injunction blocking the states abortion ban with regards to patients with complications. The state attorney general immediately appealed the decision, and the case is now before the Texas Supreme Court. All state laws regarding abortion remain in effect. Attorneys for the state have said the laws do not prohibit doctors from providing abortions in the cases cited in the suit, and that the plaintiffs plaintiffs sustained their alleged injuries as a direct result of their own medical providers failing them. Nick Kabat, an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights, said many Texans wrongly believe that abortions can be easily provided during medical emergencies. But the definition of a medical emergency is open to interpretation, he said. For doctors, they have to make a guess at what the attorney general or a local district attorney will think is permissible or not, he said. Theyre getting no guidance. And if they guess wrong, theyre looking at 99 years in prison, loosing their license, and financial ruin through very heavy penalties. Under Texas law, performing an abortion is a felony and punishable by up to life in prison, and the attorney general can also seek a civil penalty of at least $100,000, plus attorneys fees. A ruling is expected from the Supreme Court sometime on or before June 28, which is the last day when the court will issue orders for its current term. And while Mathisen is waiting for a ruling in the case, shes also waiting for something else: She is pregnant again, and was able to breathe a sigh of relief after she made it through the anatomy scan that showed a healthy baby. PARIS, ROME and COLOGNE, Germany War is officially on Germanys agenda. The prevention of it, that is, and the countrys defense during one, if it ever came to be. But in a nation haunted by the militaristic ghosts of its past, the recent demand by Defence Minister Boris Pistorius that Germans should ready themselves for the possibility of actual war still came as a shock. Semantically, the adjective kriegstuchtig, first floated by the minister in an October interview with German TV station ZDF, lives somewhere between becoming war-capable and war-proficient, nuances guaranteed to make Germans uncomfortable. Formally, it is now part of the ministrys nomenclature that makes up the latest written guidance for the future of Germanys armed forces. https://www.c4isrnet.com/global/europe/2023/05/09/french-vision-for-an-autonomous-europe-proves-elusive/ Critics quickly seized on the term, construing it as warmongering or lamenting the lack of a more pronounced defensive focus. But what has become clear is that the fighting in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, combined with an upcoming U.S. presidential election, could define Europes trajectory no matter the semantic bickering about what is, or isnt, war. Defense News asked European analysts about what the year 2024 will hold for the continent. Pervasive in the interviews was a sense of urgency in the face of Russias assault on Ukraine and the fallout for the continent. Russias delayed but now-massive buildup of its arms industry has experts worried President Vladimir Putins war machine will be trigger-happy toward its neighbors long after the fighting there stops. Today we are in a situation where we need to make real decisions, not discuss the need for making decisions, Hanno Pevkur, Estonias defense minister, told his colleagues at a November meeting in Brussels. Letting go? While the European Union has long had a defense agenda, it has struggled to meet a key prerequisite: a sense of unity among its members on questions of war and peace, held together by a shared threat perception. Mechanisms like the European Defence Fund or Permanent Structured Cooperation security initiative aim to grease the wheels of defense cooperation between member countries, hoping years spent on cooperative development projects spur a sense of shared ownership. Mechanisms like the European Defence Fund aim to grease the wheels of defense cooperation between member countries. (Jacques Demarthon/AFP via Getty Images) But overall, the idea that there is a unified military mindset in the EU is highly questionable, with many countries considering European defense first and foremost a matter for NATO and therefore the United States, said Yannick Queau, the director of the Brussels-based think tank GRIP. In that sense, pressing a defense-minded spirit onto an organization molded for maximizing peacetime potential may ultimately be a bridge too far, other analysts said. The heterogeneity will only increase, said Christian Molling, deputy director of the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations Research Institute. He pointed to a future round of EU expansion, including applicant Ukraine, that would further stretch common defense objectives. The blocs genes are that of an institutional administrator effective at regulating markets or resolving health and energy crises, but not at organizing a common defense, according to Molling. We may have to say goodbye to the idea of the EU as an actor in defense. Lucio Caracciolo, the editor of Italian geopolitics publication Limes, argued theres no point holding out for Europe to emerge as a united player on the world stage. Its impossible Europe is not a geopolitical player; there are too many different interests at play, he said. While the Baltics, Scandinavia and Poland are hostile to Russia, Germany will want to rebuild the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Russia the moment there is a cease-fire in Ukraine, he added. Explosions damaged the gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany in September 2022. Great expectations France and Germany will have to show significant progress in 2024 with their marquee defense projects to uphold the promise that close European allies can translate their goodwill into weapons although it would take almost two decades, analysts said. On the table are a sixth-generation suite of air weaponry called the Future Combat Air System, or FCAS, and a new tank called the Main Ground Combat System. Both have shaky histories because leaders in Berlin and Paris saw their political ambitions of next-gen weaponry, made in Europe by two lead nations, held up by industrial infighting. A mock-up of a new-generation fighter for the Future Combat Air System program was on display during the 2023 Paris Air Show. (Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images) It would be good if we can end this back-and-forth lobbying about whether or not were going ahead with the project, said Queau, referring to periodic news stories about one or the other partner considering to call it quits. There has to be a more clearly stated political commitment at [a] very high level. But without such a decision in 2024, well fall further behind, he added. The Franco-Germany tandem has failed to light any sparks, and Russias war in Ukraine, paradoxically, has sucked a lot of oxygen out of efforts to advance defense cooperation. The Franco-German [cooperation] has been stalled for some years now, said Helene Masson, a senior research fellow at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research. At the same time, the war in Ukraine has led to more bilateral and multilateral cooperation between countries sharing security challenges and supporting Ukraine, with Poland particularly active in building a web of defense and armaments partners. In addition, EU members seeking closer ties with European defense heavyweight Britain, which is no longer in the union, and with the United States already are used to constructing a patchwork of bilateral and multilateral initiatives outside bloc channels. The draw of Atlanticism is prevalent, Masson said. This environment makes the Franco-German [partnership] increasingly difficult to sustain. The two countries are partners, sure, but theyre also competitors in numerous areas, which makes the situation more complex, she added. Each is seeking to consolidate their position through cooperation: France in the fighter aircraft segment, Germany in the field of land armaments. Wildcard USA After leaning on the U.S. for security guarantees for decades, Europe may find fewer friends in Washington if former President Donald Trump is reelected next year and implements his brand of isolationism. Though the election isnt until Nov. 5, 2024, and Trump has ample legal trouble that could create an uphill battle in the presidential race, polls show him as the presumptive Republican nominee to go against incumbent President Joe Biden. Given Trumps disdain for NATO, and Europe in particular, a Trump victory could upend the continents security calculus. He famously threatened at the alliances 2018 summit in Brussels to withdraw from NATO over laggard European defense spending and has since made plans to follow through if given the chance, Rolling Stone reported in October. Then-U.S. President Donald Trump, center, stands during a NATO summit on Dec. 4, 2019, in Watford, England. (Steve Parsons/Getty Images) Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers floated legislation over the summer that would make it harder for a president to pull the country out of the alliance, requiring a two-thirds majority in the Senate. The measure is now part of conference negotiations between both chambers of Congress. Notably, in 2018, experts pointed out American withdrawal mechanics may not matter: If adversaries have reason to believe a U.S. commander-in-chief would wobble on NATOs mutual-assistance pledge, their appetite for military adventurism would increase exponentially. Indeed, some in Europe say Trumps return to office could be the one thing capable of catalyzing Europes defense ambitions. Yohann Michel, a research analyst in Berlin with the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank, said big-ticket defense projects could see a boost. The French-German FCAS fighter program and the European main battle tank program were both spurred by Trumps first term, and could consolidate and strengthen if he returns, he said. Trump would make the EU face up to hard choices, but the question is: Will it have the means to make those choices if we still dont have enough ammunition to supply Ukraine or ourselves? Gaspard Schnitzler, a senior research fellow at the Paris-based French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, agreed. From a cynical point of view, a Trump reelection would be a good thing for European defense, with countries no longer able to count on U.S. aid therefore forced to strengthen EU defense, he said. Dick Zandee, a defense analyst at the Clingendael Institute, based in The Hague, said there wouldnt be much of a silver lining. Im not sure that even if the pressure is that high, well be able to solve our problems. And there is a guy watching in Moscow, and he will make use of every situation to test us, he said, referring to Russian President Putin. Plant-based defense Orchestrating a ramp-up in ammunition production for both Ukraine and EU members may be the blocs best hope in finding its defense groove over time, analysts said. Though the production rate for materiel like 155mm artillery shells and mortar rounds is lagging, companies plan to expand their output as well as build or restart production plants. The process is expected to take years, but at least the to-do list is clearly defined, according to experts. Ammunition is really a key constraint for a lot of European militaries, said Ed Arnold, a research fellow for European security at the Royal United Services Institute in London. We just dont have enough ammunition. So forget about the end use of what mission this might be on, and what we want to do with it. Its got to exist on the shelves first. That is quite expensive initially, to reopen production lines. Ukrainian troops fire a D-30 howitzer toward Russian forces in Bakhmut on April 19, 2023. (Tom Mutch/Staff) But theres no real alternative, he added. Estimates in Europe vary on the number of years it would take Russia to reconstitute its forces after the war in Ukraine ends. While Estonian intelligence estimates four years, Arnold expects it to be at least a decade. So the Europeans have a bit of time, but considering how long all of these things take, its actually not a lot, he said. An estimate by the German Council on Foreign Relations pegs the time horizon as somewhere between six and 10 years. According to Molling, one of the think tanks analysts, European governments should prioritize production of tried-and-true equipment at the expense of some development-heavy programs. Mass stockpiling, he said, is the new yardstick for deterrence. But bottlenecks remain. For example, the entire industry faces a shortage of raw materials and components, with Europes aeronautics sector having to replace Russia as the supplier of 40% of its titanium, according to French analyst Schnitzler. An EU strategy for the defense industry, initially scheduled for November, was pushed to the first quarter 2024, but delayed for a good reason, Schnitzler said. The European Commission will use the time for consultation with member states, industry and think tanks to reach a consensus proposal, he explained. Amid the strategic urgency, the process is still rife with political drama. The commission is walking on eggshells because some member states consider that it exceeds its powers, Schnitzler said. Its not uncommon for onetime Republican members of Congress to move to cable news after leaving the House. Its a path taken by Jason Chaffetz, Trey Gowdy and Joe Scarborough but dont expect recently expelled congressman George Santos to join their ranks. Mediaite recently asked the major news networks if there was a chance they might hire the New York Republican in any capacity, be it as news host or pundit. The response from Fox News, MSNBC and CNN was an emphatic (and were paraphrasing here) no f-ing way. A source at both NBC News and MSNBC said they have no plans of working with Santos, and a CNN spokesperson said they dont even plan on speaking with him. Meanwhile, a Fox News source told Mediaite they have no intention of entertaining that notion, an opinion shared by NewsNation. Even the very conservative One America News Network denies interest, though the response of a network spokesperson wasnt an outright denial. We are unaware of Mr. Santos seeking a position in media. Nor have we reached out to him, the network told Mediaite. Newsmax, where Santos has frequently appeared in recent weeks, did not respond to HuffPosts request for comment. Comedian John Oliver does think George Santos is perfect for TV but not for anything connected to news. On Sundays episode of Last Week Tonight, he made a case for Santos next gig: a reality star on Bravo TV. Just think of everything he packed in during his brief time on the national stage, like when he implied that his young niece had been kidnapped from a playground in Queens, possibly in retaliation for his comments about China. Or the 9/11 claimed my mothers life, even though she wasnt even in New York at the time. That kind of messiness isnt just friends of behavior, its full-on Housewife! he said. Santos delivered hard for us, he added. And I dont want him to be in my government, and I dont want him to sit next to him on an airplane, but I definitely want him in Andy Cohens menagerie of damaged human beings. Meanwhile, Santos could be on TV screen in a slightly fictionalized version. Thats because HBO Films recently optioned the rights to a book about Santos titled The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, Deadline reported Saturday. TV news may not be calling for Santos, but he is hoping to make bank by offering his services as a former Congressional icon on Cameo. Related... A Fox News host interrupted the network's live broadcast of Donald Trump's speech at a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Saturday to fact-check the former president. Well, the former president finally got around to some campaign promises amid lots of cheering, as you heard, anchor Arthel Neville told viewers. "Many untruths. The 2020 election was not rigged. It was not stolen, she continued, counteracting Trumps false claim that he won the vote over President Joe Biden and was deprived of the win due to unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud. Neville's fact-check upset supporters of the 2024 GOP nomination frontrunner on X, formerly Twitter, with one raging it was a "bullst opinion." In April, the conservative network reached a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over baseless claims its anchors made that Dominion's voting machines were tampered with to ensure Trump's electoral defeat. A defamation lawsuit from voting tech company Smartmatic, which is suing Fox Corp. for $2.7 billion, is ongoing. Last year while on air, Neville called for gun law reform following a string of mass shootings. As weve said before, prayers are not enough. We have to do something. Weve got to get the lawmakers to do something, Neville said at the time, contrasting with the largely pro-gun comments made by her colleagues at the network. The former president has previously fired off online about Neville, asserting that she should instead work for CNN, a network he has repeatedly dubbed "fake news." The Youngkin administration dodged questions about First Amendment Rights and attendees felt barred from speaking to the press at a summit billed in support of free speech that was not publicized. The invite-only event, hosted by the Youngkin administration on Nov. 29, drew a crowd of more than 100 university and college leaders from public and private institutions across the Commonwealth to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Their charge was to discuss a perceived affront to diversity of thought a term that has quickly become a buzzword among Conservatives on college campuses. Several college and university leaders who attended the event, titled The Higher Education Summit on Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity, declined to talk with the press, noting that they were prohibited from doing so. A spokesperson for the Youngkin administration said it was not their policy that barred university and college leaders from talking on the record with reporters. A University of Virginia spokesperson also said they were unaware of any policy or prohibition on speaking to the media. I myself am rather rattled by this, Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and a speaker at the event, said about the leaders unwillingness to talk to the press. Unfortunately, we are seeing a high level of disregard for these core freedoms. Freedom of the press is in our DNA, he said. Im genuinely perplexed that a school would tell faculty and administrators Dont talk to the press. Mum on 'Unite the Right' Wednesday's summit was the first of its kind that focused on freedom of speech and freedom of expression in Virginia, Youngkin said in his address. University leaders werent the only people unwilling to answer questions from the press. Youngkin's Secretary of Education, Aimee Rogstad Guidera, repeatedly dodged questions from USA Today about whether speech by white nationalists who attended the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 should be considered free and protected under the First Amendment. Charlottesville garnered national attention in August 2017 when white nationalists gathered at Emancipation Park to protest the planned removal of the city's Robert E. Lee statue. Counter protesters clashed with the white nationalists and the melee culminated in the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was struck and killed when a rally participant rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protestors. The driver, James Alex Fields Jr., was found guilty in December 2018 of five counts of aggravated malicious wounding, three counts of malicious wounding, one hit and run count for injuring many others, and first-degree murder in connection to Heyer's death. Youngkin briefly touched on the tragedy in his keynote address but didnt elaborate on whether the speech of white nationalists or counter-protestors should be considered free and protected. It was nearby that a series of tragic events, terribly violent events, unfolded in 2017, and so we cannot look the other way or mask ourselves in protecting unbridled expression of anything while violent rhetoric escalates to physical violence, he said during his address, but demurred from directly condemning the white nationalists who took part in the 2017 rally. Youngkin was not available to press before or after his speech and his office did not respond to repeated requests for comment. No promotion, little protest There was little demonstration from students or faculty during Wednesdays summit, despite the looming shadow of the "Unite the Right" rally. A group of roughly two dozen students did arrive, after the governor had left the event, to protest quietly outside of the Newcomb Hall ballroom with signs in support of gun control measures but they did not appear to know what the summit was about. They left after about 30 minutes. Planning for Wednesdays summit began roughly a year and a half ago, Rogstad Guidera said. No information could be found online about the event prior to Wednesday, and the press was notified via advisory one day in advance. The University of Virginia offers a calendar of campus-offered or sponsored events. While Wednesdays event was held on campus, it was conceived of and organized by the governors office. They were responsible for its structure and publicity, a spokesperson for the University of Virginia said. Its our typical procedure, the week of the event well send out an advisory to notify the press, I cant speak to how invites went out for the actual event, Macaulay Porter, a spokesperson for the governors office, said. I cant speak to when public notice went out. Laura Ornee, University of Virginia chapter chair for the United Campus Workers of Virginia - a union that represents both students and faculty - and a Ph.D. candidate who teaches undergraduate students, said she neither heard about the event from her students, or from the university as a student or as a faculty member. I am sure that if it was properly announced, there would have been many more students protesting, Ornee said. We get daily updates from UVa about stuff going on, on campus and this would normally, definitely be in an email, she said. Its a little ironic, right? Having an event on free speech but then making it sort of secret and not giving people the opportunity to practice their free speech in case theyre in opposition. Not yet a mandate, but a due date With his back to the sunlight shining through the Newcomb Hall ballroom windows, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin ended his keynote address with a call to action: For each college and university across the Commonwealth to form a task force and create an action plan to promote diversity of thought on their campus. Those action plans, while not mandated, did come with a due date of March 1, 2024, Poliakoff said. It was unclear if those plans are to be submitted to Youngkin's office but literature passed out to attendees outlined the following criteria: A summary of what the university or college representative or leader learned at the summit, What actions they plan to take on their own campuses to support freedom of speech and intellectual diversity, What resources they need to take those actions, And to identify the person at the university or college who will lead the task force. Poliakoff reiterated his support for the governors charge in an interview after the summit. "Schools need to do this because otherwise its likely to be mandated, he said. I dont want anybody to take this as a threat but, as one looks around the country, as one looks at survey data, public support for higher education is plummeting." This article originally appeared on The Progress-Index: Free speech and diversity of thought task force on campuses requested French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Catherine Colonna prepares to address the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra, Monday, Dec. 4, 2023. Foreign Minister Colonna said on Monday she was open to any resettlement request from tiny South Pacific nations threatened by rising sea levels, similar to Australias agreement with Tuvalu. (Lukas Coch/AAP Image via AP) CANBERRA, Australia (AP) French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said on Monday she was open to any resettlement request from tiny South Pacific nations threatened by rising sea levels, similar to Australias agreement with Tuvalu. Colonna said France had watched with great interest last month when Australia offered Tuvalu a lifeline to help residents escape the rising seas and increased storms brought by climate change. At a meeting of Pacific leaders in the Cook Islands, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a plan that will initially allow up to 280 Tuvaluans to come to Australia each year. Tuvalu has a population of 11,000, and its low-lying atolls make it particularly vulnerable to global warming. Colonna said she was not sure if the French Pacific territories of French Polynesia and New Caledonia had the capacity to make similar offers. Im open to consider any specific request, Colonna told the National Press Club. But ... the size of the Australian continent makes a big difference with the size and beauties of French Polynesia and New Caledonia, she added. Colonna said the Australian deal initiated by Tuvalu was one way to address some of the challenges posed by climate change. Id rather see climate change being controlled and mastered, Colonna said. Preemptive action maybe is better than taking some corrective measures when it is late, she added. She said she did not know the details of the Australia-Tuvalu treaty but was confident it respected basic principles of international law. The treaty commits Australia to assist Tuvalu in response to major natural disasters, health pandemics and military aggression, Albanese said in a statement. It also gives Australia veto power over any security or defense-related agreement Tuvalu wants to make with any other country such as China. Tuvalu Prime Minister Kausea Natano said the new arrangement with Australia respected both nations sovereignty and committed each country to supporting the other through such challenges as climate change. Colonna spoke to the media ahead of a meeting at Parliament House with Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong. The two ministers signed a bilateral agreement on Pacific development cooperation. Defense Minister Richard Marles also met with French Armed Forces Minister Sebastien Lecornu on Monday at New Caledonia where they have gathered for a conference with their South Pacific counterparts. Colonna said Marles and Lecornu were negotiating an agreement on reciprocal access to Australian and French military facilities in the region and increased joint activities. Wong said Australia was keen to work more closely with the French military, particularly in the Pacific. France and Australia's relations have improved with the election of Albanese's government last year after a previous administration angered Paris in 2021 by canceling a 90 billion Australian dollar ($66 billion) contract for a fleet of French-built submarines. One of Donald Trumps co-defendants in the Georgia election subversion case, Trevian Kutti, posted a video to Instagram last month in which she appeared to make disparaging remarks about a witness in the case. The Fulton County district attorneys office is now considering whether to try to get Kuttis bond revoked, according to a source familiar with the situation, by arguing her remarks on the Instagram Live video violated the terms. Kutti, a Chicago-based publicist who worked at one time with musicians R. Kelly and Kanye West, has been accused by prosecutors of pressuring a Fulton County elections worker in early 2021 during a meeting filmed by Cobb County police officers in the Atlanta suburbs. Prosecutors say Kutti sought the meeting with Ruby Freeman, who was among the election workers falsely accused by Trump and his allies of helping rig the election in Georgia, supposedly by counting fake mail-in ballots. In the Instagram video shared on the website Meidastouch.com she appears to refer to Freeman, saying: Theres a woman sitting somewhere who knows this whole thing is a lie, who knows I never did anything to her, who knows I never who knows she begged me for help. Theres a woman sitting somewhere who knows that Im going to f**k her whole life up when this is done. Kuttis lawyer said his client did not do anything wrong. People have the right even when they are out on bond to comment on their cases. She didnt threaten anybody. She said that she didnt do anything wrong, which is a fact, Steve Greenberg, Kuttis defense attorney, told CNN. There was absolutely nothing wrong with what she said. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis office declined to comment. Kutti has pleaded not guilty to all three charges against her in the sprawling Fulton County case, including racketeering and influencing witnesses. Fulton County prosecutors were unsuccessful sending Harrison Floyd, another co-defendant in the case, back to jail after he posted comments on social media about Georgia election officials likely to be called as witnesses in the case and about former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, who has pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. The Fulton County judge overseeing the racketeering case declined to send Floyd to jail but added a restriction on his social media activity to his bond agreement. It now prohibits Floyd from making social media posts of any kind on any platform, whether public or private, concerning any codefendant or witness in this case or concerning any person specifically named in the indictment, according to the modified bond agreement. A trial date has not been set yet. CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the description of Kuttis comments on the video. A previous version misattributed the contents. CNNs Nick Valencia contributed to this report. For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com People gathered over the weekend to remember a Fayette County fire chief, and captain killed in a mechanical lift accident late last month. >>ORIGINAL COVERAGE: Ohio fire chief, captain dead after mechanical lift accident Saturday A procession of law enforcement and emergency personnel went from a church to the cemetery for the burials of Concord-Green Fire Chief Ralph Stegbauer and Fire Captain Jeffrey Skaggs, according to our news partner WBNS in Columbus. A fire engine carried both caskets and community members saluted the procession as it made its way through town, WBNS reported. >>RELATED: Everybodys just devastated; Community mourning death of 2 Ohio firefighters News Center 7 previously reported both Stegbauer and Skaggs were killed after a mechanical lift they were in overturned on November 25. The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) posted their thoughts and prayers on social media after the accident. Calls for service in the area are being handled by surrounding fire agencies in Fayette County, according to WBNS. It is unknown when the Concord-Green Fire Department will be back in service. A former Illinois Senate candidate is working to rally support for Rockford's planned passenger rail line to extend out to Freeport in an area he describes as a "transportation desert." Gerald Podraza, a Galena resident and former candidate for Illinois Senate District 45 in northwest Illinois, is asking area elected officials to seek a new state or federally funded feasibility study that would evaluate the "economic viability and everyday usefulness" of extending the planned Metra Rockford-Chicago line another roughly 30 miles to Freeport. "We have a big challenge regarding transportation issues in northwest Illinois," Podraza said. "This is a campaign regarding the extension of the Metra, from Rockford to Freeport. And the results of that will be a bunch of both economic and other kinds of input, both into Freeport and Rockford." Podraza said he is working with a loosely organized group of area residents he calls the Coalition to Extend Metra Rockford to Freeport. He has already won an endorsement for a feasibility study from the Stephenson County Board, with the clear stipulation that the county is not willing to put any money behind it. More: Chicagoland Metra service comes with a sales tax, but Rockford's won't. Here's why Former General Assembly candidate Gerald Podraza poses for a portrait in front of railroad tracks located in downtown Rockford on Nov. 30, 2023 in David Park. Podraza is seeking a similar endorsement from the Winnebago County Board next. Freeport Mayor Jodi Miller did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. He is also planning an informational meeting at 6 p.m. Dec. 7 at the Freeport Public Library, 100 E. Douglas St. in an effort to drum up community support. Illinois Gov. JB Prtizker visited Rockford over the summer to announce that passenger rail service would be restored via an intercity route between Rockford and Chicago with stops in Huntley, Elgin and Belvidere. The announcement followed an agreement being reached between Metra and Union Pacific. Pritzker had worked with the Illinois General Assembly to set aside $275 million in Rebuild Illinois capital improvement funds for extensive improvements to Union Pacific-owned tracks needed to convert the freight tracks to use by passenger trains. It will not only pay for new train stations to be built in Huntley, Belvidere and Rockford, it will also be used to improve tracks, signalization and road and river crossings to prepare the Union Pacific tracks between Rockford and Elgin for passenger rail. Construction is expected to proceed over two years from 2025 to 2027. Metra already owns the tracks and operates passenger rail service between Elgin and Chicago. More: Now boarding: Everything you need to know about Rockford's new Metra line to Chicago Illinois Sen. Steve Stadelman, D-Loves Park, said that the focus right now is on restoring passenger rail service between Chicago and Rockford. Plans are to operate two daily round-trips each taking the 90-mile trip in about two hours. Stadelman said although there are significant challenges, an extension to Freeport can't be ruled out. But Stadelman said years ago when a passenger rail line from Chicago to Dubuque, Iowa was being pursued, Canadian National which owns tracks west of Rockford seemed uninterested in converting them for passenger use. "Metra has in its messaging indicated that eventually it would potentially consider going west of Rockford at some point," Stadelman said. "I don't have any type of timeline obviously, but I don't think Metra has said 'no' to that possibility down the road." Jeff Kolkey writes about government, economic development and other issues for the Rockford Register Star. He can be reached at (815) 987-1374, via email at jkolkey@rrstar.com and on Twitter @jeffkolkey. This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Galena man campaigns for extending Rockford's rail line to Freeport When it comes to inventions, there are game-changers like the internet and penicillin. Then, there are conveniences, amusements, and life-improvers like crosswalks, Jenga, and pizza delivery . At the bottom of the list is this robotic gas station attendant, which is intended to improve our quality of life in some way, how exactly I'm not quite sure. This video, which appears to have been filmed in China, shows a specialized robot opening the fuel door on a white Audi . It spins the gas cap with some dexterity, places it aside, and then retrieves the gas pump. A Google search for gas pump robot reveals that the technology has been tested in China for a couple of years , and a similar test is underway in Finland, according to a Freethink article from February of this year. This video was my first time seeing it in action, though. The big question I have is: Why? The technology isnt simple, requiring a large, dextrous robot with programming to accommodate a variety of vehicle heights and gas cap types. And the payoff? A fill-up thats about as fast as a human could do it, if they werent in a particular hurry. Why would you create a fairly complex robot and saddle it with a task that isnt a particularly big deal? I can understand the use case for disabled drivers, but theres a simpler solution, and its called a gas station attendant. You can see three of them milling about in red jackets during the clip, perhaps tending to the machinesor standing by, ready to take over if something goes wrong. If one of these robots ever ends up in New Jersey , itll have its arm ripped from its metal socket within a week, guaranteed. Well all be driving EVs within a decade or two, and Im excited to see charging methods evolve there. Wireless juice, hot-swappable batteriesbring it on. Until then, let me pump my gas and breathe in hydrocarbons in peace, please. Got tips? Send 'em to tips@thedrive.com Former Chicago Ald. Edward Burke leaves the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in Chicago on Dec. 21, 2023, after being convicted by a federal jury of racketeering conspiracy and a dozen other counts. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune) Zohaib Dhanani was a 20-something executive from Texas in charge of renovating nearly two dozen Chicago-area Burger Kings when he had his first-ever encounter with an elected official. And it wasnt some county hack. It was Edward M. Burke. Advertisement In March 2017, Dhanani received an email from a colleague warning Burke was angry over issues with their rundown Burger King on South Pulaski Road, from complaints about trucks parking overnight to what he perceived was a lack of philanthropy on their part, according to testimony in Burkes corruption trial Monday. Since they needed Burkes OK to go forward, it would be wise to make him happy, the colleague, Jeff MacDonald, made clear in the email. Advertisement Next to the mayor, Burke is arguably the most powerful politician in Chicago, MacDonald wrote. He has been in office for 48 years ... without his signature, we cannot get a permit. MacDonald closed by saying there was one more catch. Once we satisfy his desires, he wants to meet with you and/or your dad. He wont sign off until he does. Dhanani testified he forwarded the email to his father, Shoukat Dhanani, founder of their company, and asked if they could go meet with Burke in person. Dealing with an alderman was uncharted territory for me, and I wanted his help in navigating (it), Zohaib Dhanani told the jury. Prosecutors allege that their meeting with Burke, which took place on June 14, 2017, was the beginning of a scheme by the then-Finance Committee chairman to shake down the Dhananis for legal work for his law firm, Klafter & Burke. When the Dhananis dragged their feet in hiring Klafter & Burke to do property tax appeals, Burke allegedly enlisted the help of his longtime ward aide, Peter Andrews Jr., to shut down the Burger King project over drummed up permit issues, according to the charges. Zohaib Dhanani, whose direct examination will continue Tuesday, is the latest member of the Burger King renovation team to testify about the alleged extortion, which is one of four main episodes charged in the sweeping racketeering indictment. Burkes defense team, meanwhile, has painted Burke as a responsible steward of his ward who never tied the hiring of his law firm to any official action. The Dhananis indeed had failed to update the driveway permits necessary to do the work, and in the end they never even hired Klafter & Burke, the defense has argued. Advertisement Near the end of testimony Monday, prosecutors played a wiretapped phone call between Dhanani and Burke in advance of their first meeting to tour the Burger King site in June 2017. Ill be in Chicago, not next week, but the following week, so I would love to come by and meet you and talk about things, a nervous-sounding Dhanani said on the call. Burke suggested Dhanani and his father meet him for dinner. He then asked Dhanani, who had just moved back to Texas after living in Chicagos Streeterville neighborhood for two years, how he liked the city. Oh, I absolutely loved living in downtown Chicago, Dhanani said. Now Im back in a small, quiet suburb of Houston and its a night and day difference, I can tell you that. Yeah, its a great town, Burke replied. Earlier Monday, another Dhanani Group executive, Jimmy Wachaa, told the jury he went against his own boss instructions to hire Burkes law firm on a gut feeling about their competence. Advertisement Wachaa testified he procrastinated in hiring Klafter & Burke for months, first getting the number of restaurants under the proposed contract whittled down to about 20 before ultimately deciding not to hire Burkes firm at all. More or less it seemed ... like we werent getting the type of service I was getting with (their current firm), which was speed accuracy and organization, Wachaa testified. Wachaa also testified about getting a quick education in old school, Chicago-style bureaucracy when MacDonald, the same executive who warned Dhanani about Burkes power, emailed him about a meeting where the alderman had warned him their driveway permit was out of date. Driveway permits are basically another money grab by the city, MacDonald wrote to their group after his meeting with Burke in March 2017. They charge us annual fees for each driveway connecting to city streets. ... Also these fees must be up to date on ALL Tri City stores or the permit request will be rejected. Wachaa testified that the process was all new to him, and that he did not follow up with updating the permits. Eight months later, the situation came to a head after Burke allegedly instructed Andrews to shut down the remodeling project. Advertisement Thats when Wachaa said he was told by Shoukat Dhanani to hire Klafter & Burke. Though he originally sent a lawyer at Burkes firm a list of all 150 Chicago-area restaurants, that was later pared down after Wachaa raised a red flag. Are we done with whatever we needed from Alderman Burke? Wachaa wrote to his bosses in May 2018. I prefer not to give them our portfolio. I can say we signed a three-year contract with our current agent who is very organized and nationally known. Burke, 79, who served 54 years as alderman before leaving the City Council in May, is charged with 14 counts including racketeering, federal program bribery, attempted extortion, conspiracy to commit extortion and using interstate commerce to facilitate an unlawful activity. [ Ed Burke trial: What you need to know ] Andrews, 73, is charged with one count of attempted extortion, one count of conspiracy to commit extortion, two counts of using interstate commerce to facilitate an unlawful activity and one count of making a false statement to the FBI. A third defendant, Lake Forest developer Charles Cui, 52, is charged with one count of federal program bribery, three counts of using interstate commerce to facilitate an unlawful activity and one count of making a false statement to the FBI. Advertisement The Burger King scheme was back in the spotlight Monday as the corruption trial entered a fourth week of testimony. Prosecutors had interrupted their presentation of the Burger King episode after an attorney for Andrews fell ill with COVID-19 over the Thanksgiving break. [ Ex-Ald. Edward Burke corruption trial: Evidence seen and heard by the jury ] U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall has said shes trying to keep the high-profile trial on track to finish by the Christmas holiday, despite two COVID-related delays. When the case was called Monday, Kendall announced that one of the jurors, a west suburban woman who works as a therapist, was being excused due to an unidentified illness, and that one of the alternates would take her place. That leaves the trial with three more alternates. In a somewhat unusual situation, the jury Monday heard from a witness called out of order by Burkes legal team because of health-related issues. Gabriella Martinez-Garcia testified for the defense that she started working for Burke at his ward office in 2001 when her family was having financial hardships. She mostly handled constituent complaints and requests for garbage cans, tree trimming. Asked what Burkes demeanor was, she testified, Serious but kind. Martinez-Garcia eventually became the chief administrator at Klafter & Burke, where she was in charge of checking for conflicts of interest between the firms clients and items on the City Council agenda or that were scheduled for votes in Burkes committees. Advertisement Every month, Klafter & Burke would receive a stack of agendas from City Hall via interoffice envelope, Martinez-Garcia said, which she would screen for any conflicts by searching names, addresses in the firms client database. Martinez-Garcia said she hated doing the conflict screenings because they were incredibly stressful and time-consuming and she didnt want to miss anything and have Burke vote on something he wasnt supposed to. On direct examination by Burke attorney Robin Waters, Martinez-Garcia was shown paperwork that appeared to show Klafter & Burkes internal records had failed to update the owner of the Sullivan Center, a downtown building that prosecutors allege was part of an effort by Burke to extract legal business from the developers of the old main post office. The incorrect address meant the Sullivan Center would likely not have been flagged when Burke voted to approve $18 million in tax-increment financing for the post office project in September 2018, according to her testimony. On cross examination, however, Assistant U.S. Attorney Diane MacArthur pointed out that the contingency fee agreement to represent the Sullivan Center was signed by Burke a month before his vote in favor of the post office TIF. Martinez-Garcia acknowledged that Burke never told her hed been having ongoing discussions with the new owners of the Sullivan Center about hiring the firm. Advertisement MacArthur also pressed Martinez-Garcia about Burkes importance to Klafter & Burke, particularly since he was the firms only surviving partner. Melvin Klafter, a former federal prosecutor, died in 1988 at age 73. Afternoon Briefing Weekdays Chicago Tribune editors' top story picks, delivered to your inbox each afternoon. By submitting your email to receive this newsletter, you agree to our Subscriber Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy > After Martinez-Garcia said she wasnt aware of how much business Burke brought in, MacArthur asked, Mr. Burke had the name recognition, didnt he? Yes, she answered. You knew Mr. Burkes prominence in the city of Chicago at that time? MacArthur asked. Martinez-Garcia paused before answering, Yes. Advertisement [ Ed Burke trial: What you need to know ] jmeisner@chicagotribune.com mcrepeau@chicagotribune.com rlong@chicagotribune.com TAMPA (BLOOM) The Gasparilla Music Festival, is gearing up to make some major waves in 2024. This year, the festival is moving to a brand new location the picturesque Julian B Lane Park promising an even more dynamic and immersive experience for music lovers. Scheduled for February 16-18, the festival will expand its musical horizons across five stages, showcasing a diverse lineup of talent. And heres a heads-up for all you early birds discounted tickets go on sale this Tuesday, December 5, at 10 AM. Its a golden opportunity to snag your passes at unbeatable prices. David Cox, the Executive Director of the Gasparilla Music Foundation, is bubbling with excitement over the new venue. Were thrilled about the endless possibilities Julian B Lane Park opens up for us, he said. Thanks to our community partners, we can continue offering our fans affordable pre-sale tickets, keeping the festival experience accessible and enjoyable for everyone. These Early Bird tickets are limited in quantity, so make sure to mark your calendars. With prices like $60 for a 2-day pass and $75 for the full 3-day extravaganza, these deals are music to any festival-goers ears. And for those seeking the VIP experience, tickets range from $150 to $200, promising a premium festival experience. The Gasparilla Music Festival, now in its 13th year, has consistently been voted Tampa Bays #1 festival. Its legacy includes performances by big names like Brandi Carlile, The Avett Brothers, and Portugal the Man. This non-profit, volunteer-driven event is not just about great music; its a celebration of Tampas vibrant culture and community spirit. And its not just for the grown-ups! The festival includes a Kids Fest with family-friendly performances and interactive activities, making it a perfect weekend outing for the whole family. The Gasparilla Music Foundation, the driving force behind this event, is a cornerstone of Tampas cultural landscape. Theyre not just about putting on a great show; theyre deeply invested in nurturing local talent and supporting music education in the community. So, Tampa Bay, are you ready to rock at the Gasparilla Music Festivals new home? Grab your tickets, spread the word, and get set for an unforgettable musical journey! For more information or to get involved, reach out to the Gasparilla Music Foundation at info@gasparillamusic.com, or check out opportunities for vendors, volunteers, and sponsors. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WFLA. Several Palestinian journalists who have amassed millions of followers on social media for their on-the-ground coverage of Gaza are struggling to maintain hope while having to balance survival and their reporting amid Israels continued bombardment. Sunday marks 58 days since Hamas launched a deadly attack on Israel, leading to an escalation of violence in Gaza from Israel. The massacre, which human rights groups say amounts to ethniccleansing, has resulted in at least 15,500 Palestinians killed since Oct. 7 the majority of whom are women and children according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Amid the slew of online disinformationand government propagandathat has unfolded since Oct. 7, journalists who call Gaza their home have become the worlds way of seeing the harsh realities Palestinians face in the enclave. Every day, followers from all over the world carefully watch the Instagram accounts of 21-year-old Plestia Alaqad, 24-year-old Motaz Azaiza, 25-year-old Bisan Owda, 28-year-old Hind Khoudaryand 35-year-old Ali Jadallah; not just to receive updates on Gaza, but to make sure these journalists are safe and alive. I traveled yesterday, and this was literally one of the hardest decisions that I took, Alaqad said in a Nov. 22 video after evacuating Gaza, a decision she made due to fears that her role as a journalist was threatening her familys safety. Even though the purpose of press gear is to protect journalists, Alaqad said that she had stopped wearing her vest and helmet due to feeling like they put a target on her back. The violence in the region has become the deadliest conflict for journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists started gathering data three decades ago. As of Friday, 61 journalists and media workers have died since Oct. 7 54 Palestinian, four Israeli and one Lebanese. According to Khoudary, Palestinian journalist Montaser Al-Sawaf was killed over the weekend by an Israeli airstrike while standing in front of his house with his brother and cousins. Al-Sawaf had bled for 30 minutes, and because there were no ambulances in the area, no one was able to save him. We, his colleagues, were obligated to write breaking news on his killing. We reported his killing with our tears. We have been reporting on the killing of our beloved ones since day one, Khoudary wrote on Saturday. Montaser chose to stay in Gaza. He was one of the few colleagues that stayed and risked his life to report on what was happening in the north. Before we evacuated we spent three weeks in the office living together, we cried, we laughed, she continued. We were scared we strengthened each other. For journalists who are still alive in Gaza, it has been 58 days of documenting the violence against their people, the targeting of their colleagues, the destruction of their homes and the deaths of their own loved ones all while trying themselves to survive bombing, starvation and sickness. Some have had to separate from their families out of safety, unsure if or when they will see them again. A screenshot from the public Instagram account of Gaza photojournalist Ali Jadallah, who says his wife and children have escaped Gaza to safety. A screenshot from the public Instagram account of Gaza photojournalist Ali Jadallah, who says his wife and children have escaped Gaza to safety. My wife and children made it out of the Gaza Strip. After 58 days of displacement, homelessness, grief and bombardment they will leave the City, Jadallah wrote in a post Sunday on his Instagram stories. A video posted by Azaiza shows Jadallah saying goodbye to his wife and two children as they get ready to cross the border into Egypt. I did not leave with them I am still in Gaza. I am happy they are safe now, wishing them a safe travel, he continued. Jadallah has already lost several members of his family, including older brother and fellow journalist Belal Jadallah. Gazas journalists have become somewhat a symbol of hope and bravery to their followers, who often reply to their posts thanking them for their courage to continue reporting on the devastation and for forcing the rest of the world to bear witness to what apartheid and mass destruction have done to Palestinians. But while it takes courage to report on Gaza Azaiza was chosen as GQ Middle Easts Man of the Year journalists in the enclave have expressed exhaustion that comes with covering so much death while counting the days they have left. The phase of risking my life to show the world whats happening is now over. A new phase has begun the phase to survive, Azaiza wrote on Instagram on Saturday, according to an Arabic-to-English translation. I showed the world enough and God knows it was all for Him and for my country. Azaiza continued to say that Palestinians are completely surrounded by Israeli forces, and that Israeli tanks encompass central Gaza from both the north and south. Our situation is tragic beyond understanding, he said. Remember, we are not just content to be shared. We are a group of people being killed. We are a cause fighting to survive. How alone are we! Despite efforts by Gazas journalists to show the reality of Israels attacks, there appears to be no permanent cease-fire in sight. A temporary truce between Israel and Hamas allowed for governing entities to exchange hostages and for Palestinians in Gaza to dig loved ones out of the rubble, but the truce ended on Friday. Despite widespread calls by the public and human rights groups for a permanent cease-fire, many Western nations, including the U.S., still openly support Israels actions. I no longer have any hope of survival like I had at the beginning of this genocide, and I am certain that I will die in the next few weeks or maybe days, Owda wrote Saturday on Instagram, adding that she has been sick for days with an infection and is experiencing nightmares that make it difficult for her to discern what is reality. The 25-year-old called out governments from around the world who are supporting and helping finance Israels continued bombardment. The post includes a photo she took of herself looking exhausted, with the rubble of Gaza behind her. My message to the world: You are not innocent of what is happening to us, you as governments or peoples that support Israels annihilation of my people, she said. We will not forgive you, we will not forgive you, humanity will not forgive you, we will not forget, even if we die, the history will never forget. Mustafa abu Breij, center, sits with his family in the house he built over years in the Maghazi refugee camp in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip. His wife, who gave her name as Umm Muhammad, bakes bread on a wood stove, using furniture as fuel. (Special correspondent / Los Angeles Times) Umm Walid Hissi sat by a cart loaded with hastily packed belongings, waiting for her home to be bombed. Until Sunday morning, she lived in Hamad Town, a collection of residential towers in southern Gaza's Khan Yunis neighborhood. But on Saturday came the missiles, pounding down like a giant fist on one tower, then another, and another. A day later, word came to Hissi's neighbors that their tower would be struck as well. "They told us we had an hour," Hissi said. "We honestly didn't believe it, so we stayed. But then the police came and urged us to take the threat seriously." So she and more than two dozen family members fled, loading what they could in a donkey cart. They managed to salvage mattresses, a few bags of flour, clothes. (Hissi was still angry about leaving behind the gas canister for cooking.) They wrangled their load to an area not too far from the towers to see whether the Israelis would carry out their threat, but were warned to move farther away. They waited to see whether their home, like so many others hit in Israeli strikes, would be reduced to rubble. And they started to wonder where they would go next. It's a question being asked over and over in the Gaza Strip, with Israel ramping up its bombardment after the collapse of a temporary truce with Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza. The fighting reached areas that had so far been relatively safe, as the Israeli military pursues what appears to be a new phase of a ground invasion in southern Gaza where most of the territory's 2.3 million residents had gathered after Israel ordered people to evacuate from the north. The latest war in Gaza began Oct. 7, when Hamas operatives attacked communities in southern Israel, killing at least 1,200 people, mostly civilians, authorities say, and kidnapping some 240 others. Since then, Israel has responded with a blistering air campaign, blockade and ground war that have killed more than 15,000 Palestinians, local health officials say, the majority of them women and children. Read more: Two strangers a Palestinian and an Israeli tell the story of a region's pain On Sunday, Gaza health authorities said more than 700 Palestinians had been killed in a 24-hour period, making it one of the war's highest daily death tolls. Palestinians wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip are brought to the hospital in Deir al Balah on Sunday. (Hatem Moussa / Associated Press) Khalil Degran, a doctor at the Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al Balah, in central Gaza, stood in the pediatrics department's reception area and looked around. Every part of the hallway every surface, every corner, even the reception desk was claimed by the wounded and their families. "We have no choice but to put them here. We just don't have any space," Degran said, glancing at a family that had staked out what was considered prime real estate in Gaza these days a seating area with carpet and sofas. Read more: Harrowing stories emerge as Hamas frees more hostages taken from Israel Things had improved during the weeklong truce between Israel and Hamas, which ended Friday and had provided a desperately needed respite from the carnage of Israel's military campaign in Gaza. It had given the hospital staff a moment to breathe, a chance to empty out overcrowded hallways. But with the skies filled once again with missiles and bombs, the deluge of casualties had resumed. "This isn't a place for patients. How do you treat people here?" Degran asked, frustration edging into his voice. "What can we do?" Like Hissi, Mohammad Sami, a 38-year-old accountant, also lived in the Hamad towers in Khan Yunis. But now he sits in a tent in Maghazi, a refugee camp in Deir al Balah that the Israeli military had designated as a safe zone. Read more: Gaza diary: What life is like under daily airstrikes, blackouts and scarcity "We tried to rent in Rafah, but no one would take us," he said, despite his willingness to pay 2,000 shekels, or $538 twice the now-standard asking rate. He sent his wife and 5-year-old daughter to stay in a relative's house in Rafah, and bought wood and and nylon strips to construct the tent for the men in the family. Truce or no truce, warnings or no, Mustafa abu Breij, a 51-year-old day laborer in Gaza, made up his mind he was going nowhere, even though the home he'd built in the Maghazi camp was badly damaged in a bombing. "There's no place where we can live with our dignity other than home," he said. The strike, which happened before the truce, had targeted a neighbor's home. Abu Breij was on the street when the missile struck, killing two of his nephews and knocking him unconscious. Now the living room's walls were in shreds, mostly gone, and his family his wife, four boys and four girls were squatting on the rubble-strewn floor, their chairs destroyed or used for their wood. Read more: Scores of Palestinian minors sit in Israeli prisons. He wanted his 13-year-old son to join them Abu Breij's wife, who gave her name as Umm Muhammad, 38, was baking bread on a wood stove. Getting cooking fuel was difficult during the truce; now, it was impossible. Umm Muhammad was using her bedroom furniture as kindling. Building the house had been a grueling endeavor. Abu Breij had taken loans, saved as much as he could so his children "would have the kind of home I never had as a child," he said. "We didn't even have a working bathroom when we first moved in," he said, his voice modulating as he tried to stop himself from crying. When it was finally finished, "it was like a dream." Now, he said, "the dream is gone, buried." Though he wasn't sure he would build again, he had come to accept, he said, "that walls and homes are no measure of a person's existence." "Your determination and your will to live," he said, "that's all that matters." Near his old home in Hamad Town, Hissi waited with her relatives, watching the towers, waiting to see whether her home would survive or the Israeli military would destroy it. "I think they will do it," she said, exasperated. "I just don't know where we'll go." Times staff writer Bulos reported from Jerusalem and a Times special correspondent, who cannot be named for security reasons, reported from Deir al Balah. Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Semafor Signals NEWS Israel widened its offensive across Gaza and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country would keep fighting until its goals were met, signaling a new stage in the Israel-Hamas war. The expanded operation means it is unlikely that Israel and Hamas will come to a new ceasefire agreement after negotiations to extend a temporary one-week truce broke down on Friday. This weekend, Iran-backed Houthi fighters fired missiles at ships in the Red Sea, prompting the U.S. military to shoot down three Houthi drones. SIGNALS Semafor Signals: Global insights on today's biggest stories. Fears continued to circulate that the conflict risks expanding throughout the Middle East. If the war crimes committed by the Israeli regime ... are not stopped, the scope of the war in the region is likely to deepen and expand, Irans Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said in a phone conversation with European Union foreign policy head Josep Borrell. Iran may be exploiting the war to aid its goal of expelling U.S. forces from the Middle East, the Institute for the Study of War noted: Iran, alongside leaders from its so-called Axis of Resistance is operating on the theory that relatively low levels of militant pressure gradually diminish the willingness of the US political establishment to sustain deployments in the Middle East. The expanding war is impacting U.S. domestic politics. Third-party challengers for the presidency are capitalizing on the situation in Gaza to launch their presidential bids, and the hostilities have angered Democrats 70% of whom are displeased with the actions of the Biden administration. Some voters are threatening to abstain from the election entirely, Semafors David Weigel reported. U.S. President Joe Biden simply didnt have a problem on his far-left flank in 2020 and now, he does, Weigel noted. Israel said it has reached a dead-end in talks with Hamas, and withdrew its officials from meetings in Qatar. Negotiations broke down after Israel pushed for the release of a group of women and Hamas refused, a source familiar with the discussions told CNN. Israel said during the temporary ceasefire that it would extend the truce for one day for every 10 hostages released, but negotiators believed last week that Hamas was running out of hostages that fit the criteria, CNN reported. Negotiators understood that once Hamas was unable to meet the criteria provided by Israel, fighting would resume. Former Congressman George Santos has told satirist Ziwe that hed be interested in taking part in a pay-per-view interview. Writing on X/Twitter, Ziwe asked: .@MrSantosNY would you be interested in a pay-per-view interview? youd be an iconic guest Santos responded: Lets do it @ziwe along with the winking emoji with its tongue out. Hours later, the politician tweeted Great chatting with you just now at Ziwe, apparently confirming that the interview had taken place. Earlier, Ziwe had responded to an X user who posted photos of Santos and Ziwe with the caption: This interview would irreversibly change the course of history. Ziwe replied by calling the proposal my literal dream. Santos was expelled from the House of Representatives on Friday after more than a hundred Republicans joined almost all Democrats in voting to remove him from the chamber. In total, 311 members voted to remove Mr Santos, easily crossing the two-thirds threshold of 290 114 members voted against his removal, two voted present, and eight didnt vote. Santos is one of only a handful of lawmakers ever to be ousted from such a role, following a damning 56-page report from the House Ethics Committee which outlined substantial evidence that Mr Santos violated federal law. He has already become a figure of ridicule in popular culture. The disgraced congressman was mercilessly parodied on Saturday Night Live with Bowen Yang playing him at a news conference on the steps of the Capitol before singing a lament to the tune of Candle in the Wind. Ziwes talk show, Ziwe, debuted on Showtime in 2021 and ran for two seasons before its cancellation in April this year. It was recently announced that Santos dramatic rise and fall will be adapted into a movie. HBO Films has obtained the rights to the new book The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos by Mark Chiusano, which was published on 28 November. Frank Rich, who produced the political satire Veep and the Murdoch empire-inspired Succession series on HBO, is bringing the story of Mr Santos to the big screen as one of the executive producers. Mike Makowsky, the writer and producer of Bad Education, wrote the film and is also an executive producer, while Mr Chiusano is a consulting producer. The film has been described as following the Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on truth and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American Dream. No release date has yet been announced for the proposed interview between Santos and Ziwe. Georgia deputies who helped stop an active shooter last year were recently rewarded for their heroism. On Oct. 22, 2022, Crisp County deputies responded to calls of an active shooter at 16 East Bar and Grill in Cordele. When they arrived, they found multiple customers suffering from gunshot wounds. Eventually, they were able to apprehend the shooter. [DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] They put their safety aside and ran to the threat to deal with it before any other person could be harmed, the Crisp County Sheriffs Office wrote in a news release. Both Cpl. Jack Masters and Deputy Kendall Evans received the Act of Heroism Award at the Governors Public Safety Awards Ceremony. Gov. Brian Kemp was on hand to present Evans and Masters the awards. Deputy Evans and Corporal Masters displayed an act of extraordinary heroism at the imminent personal hazard of life in the intelligent performance of Law Enforcement Duty, the department wrote. TRENDING STORIES: [SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter] IN OTHER NEWS: German-made Gepard self-propelled anti-aircraft systems have shown the best results in shooting down Russian drones in terms of cost-effectiveness. Source: Yurii Ihnat, spokesman of Ukraine's Air Force, in an interview with RBC-Ukraine Quote: "Therefore, it is necessary to increase the number of assets that will be rational for shooting down UAVs. Today, Gepard is the best in this regard in terms of cost-effectiveness. But it also has a limited range 4.5 kilometres to shoot down, using ground-based projectiles. Therefore, we need more of them, both Gepard systems and their analogues." Details: He also said that in six months of attacks on the energy facilities (from 9 September 2022 to 12 March 2023), Ukraine shot down 750 cruise missiles, while about 1,100 were launched. Ihnat added that Russia currently has 870 of Kinzhal hypersonic missiles and both types of Iskander missiles (meaning ballistic and cruise ones), as well as Kh-22, Kalibr, Kh-101, and Kh-555 cruise missiles. Support UP or become our patron! Few countries are more aware than Germany of how important it is to keep public finances in order. But few countries have indulged in more creative accounting. As Germanys highest court ruled current spending plans unconstitutional, it finally destroyed the nations cherished myth of fiscal prudence. The stakes could not be higher for Germany and its neighbours. Former chancellor Angela Merkel liked to evoke the idea of a frugal Swabian housewife when she lectured others on sensible economics. It was her government that enshrined a debt-break into the constitution in 2011. German governments have pretended to stay within this strait jacket, while wriggling out of it. In 2020, Covid spending was the excuse. But the crises didnt stop there. The war in Ukraine brought a painful energy crisis and a U-turn on defence policy. Last year, Chancellor Olaf Scholz won approval for a 100 billion (86 billion) fund to whip the countrys armed forces into shape. Arguing that the debt brake hampered essential investment, Scholzs coalition reallocated Covid funds to green projects and industrial subsidies. But a constitutional court ruling declared such relabelling illegal, blowing a 60 billion hole in public finances. The money had been allocated to everything from semiconductor and battery factories to infrastructure and subsidies for the steel industry. Half of it had already been spent; the government declared 2023 as another emergency year to make this legal in retrospect. With big question marks over the remaining funds, German industry is deeply concerned about its future. Economy minister Robert Habeck warned of a 0.5 per cent drop in growth next year while Scholz told lawmakers that the ruling marked the beginning of a new reality, one which makes goals more difficult for our country to achieve. This new reality will bring more than economic problems, piling pressure onto a fragile and unpopular coalition government a record 8 out of 10 Germans are unhappy with its work. The necessary cuts will hit Germans amid a cost-of-living crisis. The number of Germans not being able to heat their houses properly has already doubled since 2021. Such public discontent is dangerous when coupled with political division. No country knows this better than Germany. Priding itself in learning from its history, it hasnt forgotten that it was almost exactly a century ago that a deep economic crisis nearly toppled its fragile, inter-war democracy. Massive borrowing temporarily created an illusion of prosperity but the debt-fuelled economy of the Golden Twenties crashed badly a decade later, allowing the Nazis to rise to power with devastating consequences for Germany and the whole world. Economic instability triggers existential fears in Germany. Waiting in the wings to benefit from the situation is the Right-wing Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), currently the second most popular party with the backing of over a fifth of the electorate. Next year, elections will be held in three eastern German states where the AfD leads the polls. In Thuringia, it might even win outright, which would pass the state premiership to Bjorn Hocke, a far-Right firebrand previously charged with using Nazi rhetoric. Germanys belief in its own bouncebackability has been shaken to its core. Berlin is no longer in a position to lecture, or indeed bail out, fellow European states. As the fog of Germanys self-delusion lifts, the deep cracks underneath are visible to all. 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. Every few months, a math problem goes viral on social media. Disappointingly often, it lacks mathematical meat. It seems over half of them boil down to the order of operations. Some tweet will get thousands of likes claiming that the Internet is divided over an arithmetic problem like: what does 62(1+2) equal? Its fine if people dont remember how to evaluate expressions like this. But its not so interesting when you just have to Google the order of operations and follow the instructions (it equals 9). In a similar vein, you may have seen fruit math memes circulating across your feed in which simple systems of equations have x and y replaced with bananas and pineapples, usually captioned with Only geniuses can solve or Only 1% of MIT graduates got this. Heres a hilarious prank that some Internet devil cooked up to lash out at frivolous math clickbait: Read more Banana = 36875131794129999827197811565225474825492979968971970996283137471637224634055579, Pineapple = 4373612677928697257861252602371390152816537558161613618621437993378423467772036 Indeed, 95% of people cannot solve this. Despite its simplistic appearance, the problem requires highly advanced math and wasnt solved until 2014. This weeks puzzle comes from a real problem on a math test given to students in Singapore. It is neither trivial nor a prank, but it went viral for causing rifts among solvers. Its a tricky exercise in logic unlike any exam problem from my school days. Did you miss last weeks puzzle? Check it out here, and find its solution at the bottom of todays article. Be careful not to read too far ahead if you havent solved last weeks yet! Puzzle #22: Cheryls birthday Albert and Bernard just became friends with Cheryl, and they want to know when her birthday is. Cheryl gives them a list of 10 possible dates. May 15, May 16, May 19 June 17, June 18 July 14, July 16 August 14, August 15, August 17 Cheryl then tells Albert the month of her birthday and Bernard the day of her birthday separately. Then the following conversation takes place: Albert: I dont know when Cheryls birthday is, but I know that Bernard also does not know. Bernard: At first I didnt know when Cheryls birthday is, but I know now. Albert: Then I also know when Cheryls birthday is. When is Cheryls birthday? Youll be relieved to hear that the solution does not involve 80-digit numbers. It does, however, require some careful logic. Ill be back next week with the solution and a new puzzle. Do you know a cool puzzle that I should cover here? Message me on Twitter @JackPMurtagh or email me at gizmodopuzzle@gmail.com Solution to Puzzle #21: Impossible Geography How did you navigate last weeks weird geography quiz? If you find the first two answers hard to believe, play around with Google Earth to see them for yourself. Shout-out to Executor32 for nailing all three. Which U.S. state is closest to Africa? Many people think Florida, but its actually Maine by a long shot. Africa sits more north than you might picture. Executor32 points out that if Puerto Rico ever became a U.S. state, it would beat Maine in this contest, because Puerto Rico sits east of Maine. If you fly due south from Key West, Florida, which South American country will you hit first? You actually wont pass over any South American country if you fly south from Key West. Youll soar west of the whole continent. I am in an East Coast U.S. state and I call my friend who is in a West Coast U.S. state. It is exactly the same time of day for both of us. How is this possible? Typically, theres a three-hour time difference between East Coast and West Coast states. Well close this gap one hour at a time. Although Florida is an East Coast state, the part of the panhandle under Alabama actually dips into the central time zone. Likewise, an eastern swath of Oregon (a West Coast state) observes mountain time. So there are regions in Florida and Oregon whose clocks only differ by an hour. To bridge the final gap, I place the call on Daylight Savings Time in the fall when the clocks roll back an hour. At 1:59 am in parts of Florida on this day (just before the clock falls back), it will be 12:59 am in parts of Oregon. In the next minute, Florida will fall back and it will be 1:00 am in both places. I then have an hour to place my call before Oregon falls back. This phone call can only occur within this specific hour of the year between these two specific regions of the country. More from Gizmodo Sign up for Gizmodo's Newsletter. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. A Chicago woman is facing charges for the death of a 52-year-old cyclist killed after being hit in a bike lane in Lincoln Square, Chicago police said. Kali Rynearson, 30, of the North Center neighborhood, faces one felony count of aggravated DUI along with six traffic violations and an ordinance violation, according to police. Advertisement Donald Heggemann, a 59-year-old ceramist from the Edgewater neighborhood, was hit and killed on the night of Oct. 23 in the 5100 block of North Damen Avenue in the Lincoln Square neighborhood, according to police. Heggemann served as an office administrator for Northeastern Illinois Universitys Department of Art and Design and studied ceramics at the school, according to the university. Witnesses flagged down police after Heggemann, who was riding northbound in the bike lane, was struck by a Volvo driven by Rynearson driving in the same direction, according to a police report. Officers tracked the car down and pulled over Rynearson, who consented to a Breathalyzer test. The test results showed Rynearson had a 0.20% blood alcohol content, more than twice the legal limit, according to the report. Advertisement Heggemann was one of three cyclists to die in Cook County over three weeks in October. In early October, 16-year-old Josh Anleu was hit and killed riding his bike in his Portage Park neighborhood. The morning of Oct. 24, 52-year-old James Bowan, of the Belmont Cragin neighborhood, was hit and killed by a vehicle in Melrose Park. After the Oct. 23 crash, Ald. Andre Vasquez, 40th, who represents Lincoln Square and Edgewater, said his office was in contact with the citys Department of Transportation to implement safety measures for cyclists and pedestrians. Everyone deserves safe streets, and our office is committed to ensuring that we do everything we can to protect bicyclists and pedestrians in our ward, he said. PHILADELPHIA Protesters marching in Philadelphia against the bombardment of Gaza chanted about genocide Sunday outside an Israeli-style restaurant, leading Gov. Josh Shapiro to call the demonstration antisemitic. In Philadelphias Center City and University City neighborhoods, hundreds of people marched to criticize Israels military actions in Gaza, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. However, it was unclear why some specifically protested the restaurant. A video of demonstrators outside of Goldie Falafel depicted people chanting, Goldie, Goldie, you cant hide, we charge you with genocide, which garnered backlash from the Democratic governor. Shapiro first addressed the protest on X, formerly known as Twitter. Later Monday, appearing at an unrelated event in suburban Philadelphia, the governor said he was in touch with Michael Solomonov, one of the restaurants owners, to make sure he and his staff know that the governor will support them. Solomonov is a prominent Israeli chef who has co-authored three cookbooks and received several James Beard awards. He and Steve Cook, the co-owner, are both Jewish. The purposeful gathering of a mob outside of a restaurant simply because it is owned by a Jewish person. Well, thats antisemitism, plain and simple, Shapiro said at a separate news conference Monday in suburban Philadelphia. Representatives of the restaurants group, CookNSolo, declined comment on the protest. Goldie Falafel is a vegan kosher restaurant that has five locations in Philadelphia. Requests for comment were left with the Philadelphia Palestine Coalition. CookNSolo operates a number of well-known restaurants with Israeli fare in Philadelphia. A message seeking information on any possible arrests was left with the Philadelphia Police Department. We should have a spirited debate, dialogue, peacefully and respectfully about whats happening in the Middle East, Shapiro said. I dont want to rob anyone of the ability to do that peacefully, but when it crosses a line and becomes blatant antisemitism, its critically important that we all speak up. While campaigning last year, Shapiro talked about his Jewish faith and how it inspires him toward public service. A line of people stretched into the street outside of Goldie on Monday afternoon, with many coming out to get food and to show support. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates called it completely unjustifiable to target restaurants that serve Israeli food over disagreements with Israeli policy. Hamas Oct. 7 attack on Israel triggered the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian violence in decades. The war has killed thousands and displaced over three-fourths of Gazas population of 2.3 million people, who are running out of safe places to go. The war has sparked protests against the war across the U.S. and abroad. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) responded to former Rep. Liz Cheneys (R-Wyo.) dire warnings about a potential second term for former President Trump by claiming President Bidens reelection would be much worse for the country. Cheney warned in an interview with CBSs John Dickerson that the United States is sleepwalking into dictatorship as the possibility of Trump winning another term in the White House in 2024 looms. Graham responded to her comments on CNNs State of the Union on Sunday, arguing Trump was a better president than Biden. I think a continuation of the Biden presidency would be a disaster for peace and prosperity at home and abroad, Graham said. Our border is broken. The only person who is really going to fix a broken border is Donald Trump. When he was president, none of this stuff was going on in Ukraine. Hamas and all these other terrorist groups were afraid of Trump. I think Lizs s hatred of Trump is real, he added. Graham has been a staunch ally of the former president and has repeatedly defended him as he faces numerous criminal cases. The South Carolina senator said Sunday that if Biden is reelected, then we wont recognize America and the world will be truly on fire. Cheney, a prominent Trump critic, has been on a media tour to promote her forthcoming book, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning. She has been repeatedly warning against electing Trump to the White House again, suggesting doing so could spell the end of American democracy. She also said in the CBS interview that reelecting a GOP majority in the House presents a threat to the country. She added that members of the Republican Party havent chosen the Constitution. Cheney served as the vice chair of the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. She later lost her August 2022 primary after becoming a frequent critic of her party and the former president. In a separate interview Monday on NBCs Today, she said she will never vote for Donald Trump and will do whatever it takes to make sure that Donald Trump is defeated in 2024. She also said Trump would refuse to leave office at the end of his second four-year term if reelected to the White House. Hes already attempted to seize power, and he was stopped, thankfully, and for the good of the nation and the republic, she said. But he said he will do it again. Hes expressed no remorse for what he did. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. A group of would-be thieves crashed a car into a retailer on Chicagos Magnificent Mile early Monday morning, but ditched the vehicle after it failed to break into the store, police said. The failed burglary was attempted at 4:33 a.m. on the 700 block of North Michigan Avenue, according to police. News reports showed the attempted crash-and-grab targeted Neiman Marcus, where a Nissan sedan was still sitting, lights on, early Monday morning in videos. The burglars werent able to get inside the store and nothing was taken, police said. They then got into three different cars and fled eastbound on Chicago Avenue, police added. No injuries were reported, and no one is in custody, though detectives are investigating, police said. Similar car-involved burglaries have long occurred in Chicago and sparked outcry in the Wicker Park neighborhood recently, where several sneakers stores were targeted in high-profile attacks. Across the city, burglaries are down 1% this year and 22% compared with 2019, according to police data. However, burglaries are up 15% this year and 18% since 2019 in the Near North District (18th) where Mondays attack took place. Russian and Chinese-linked cyber groups have hacked a major nuclear waste site in the U.K., a year-long investigation by the Guardian revealed on Dec. 4. Sellafield, on England's northwest coast, is one of the most hazardous nuclear sites in existence. It has been used to dump nuclear waste from atomic power generation and weapons programs since 1959, turning it into the world's largest store of plutonium. Security officials see cyber-attacks by Russia and China on civil infrastructure such as nuclear sites as one of "the biggest threats to the U.K.," the Guardian said. Sellafield's insecure servers resulted in foreign hackers gaining access to high-level confidential material, which could include radioactive waste movements, leak monitoring, and fire checks. The Guardian reported that emergency planning documents, used in case the U.K. comes under foreign attack, could have also been compromised. "Sources suggest it is likely foreign hackers have accessed the highest echelons of confidential material at the site." Breaches were first discovered in 2015, but "the authorities do not know exactly when the IT systems were first compromised," the Guardian said. The plant also failed to alert the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) for "several years," sources told the newspaper. The scale of the issue was revealed when external staff "found that they could access Sellafield's servers and reported it to the ONR." US: Major Russian cyberattack compromised 632,000 Pentagon, DOJ email addresses The report issued by the Office of Personnel Management says hackers used flaws in the file-transfer system MOVEit to gain access to wide-ranging sensitive information. The Kyiv IndependentLance Luo While the ONR "confirmed Sellafield is failing to meet its cyber standards," the regulator declined to comment on breaches or claims there had been a "cover up." Lax security protocols appear to be a broad issue. The Guardian noted that in July 2022, login details and passwords for Sellafield's IT systems were momentarily shown during an episode of a popular BBC nature series filmed at the site. Amid the ongoing full-scale invasion, Ukraine frequently reports attempted Russian cyber-attacks and hacks. Reuters reported in September that Russian hackers were targeting computer systems at law enforcement agencies in Ukraine in an attempt to gather intelligence on war crimes probes. The National Security and Defense Council warned in February that the number of Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine has almost tripled compared to 2021, targeting logistics, military facilities, government databases, and information resources. Government appoints new top cyber defense official The Ukrainian government appointed Yurii Myronenko as the new head of the State Special Communications Service after the previous chief was charged with embezzling public funds, the service announced on Dec. 1. The Kyiv IndependentDinara Khalilova Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. In 2021, the Democratic majority in the Illinois legislature drew new district maps. Last year, citizens cast around 70,000 more votes statewide for Republican rather than for Democratic candidates for the Illinois House. The results: Democrats won 78 seats; the GOP, 40. In the state Senate, it was 40 Democrat to 19 Republican seats. Such is the state of our gerrymandered democracy in Illinois. This was accomplished by packing Republican voters into nearly pure GOP districts and by contorting the remainder of districts some districts look like dangling earrings and beer can openers so that Democrats would win. Advertisement All this in a state where the Illinois Constitution in two places specifically requires that districts be compact, contiguous and substantially equal in population. To support that principle, the Illinois Supreme Court (with a Democratic majority) in 1981 declared a district that looked like a barbell unconstitutional, a district arguably more compact than many in the 2021 districting. It appears obvious that harmed parties, i.e., the GOP caucuses in the General Assembly, as well as the state Republican Party, should challenge the maps in state court. Advertisement So, why havent they? Lawyers for GOP party leaders hold a profoundly cynical perspective that the present 5-2 Democratic majority on the state high court would ever throw out maps drawn by its own party organization, which put them on the bench, regardless of constitutionality. The Republican attorneys point to an Illinois high court decision in 2016 to make their point. The last-minute opinion by the Democratic court majority rejected the plea of more than 563,000 petition signers, who asked that the question of an independent mapping process be put on the ballot for voters to decide. The Illinois Constitution specifically provides for such a voter initiative. If the court can knock that off the ballot, one attorney said, there is no way they would now reject a districting map drawn by their Democrat chieftains, even one that on its face screams unconstitutional. [ Madeleine Doubek: To prevent a repeat of the Madigan debacle, ethics must control state government ] We say, lets go ahead anyway, and force the state high court judges to show their hands. The case is open and shut: 1. Are the districts noncompact? Yes. 2. Are the current districts necessary to support minority representation? Absolutely not. Chicago Tribune Opinion Weekdays Read the latest editorials and commentary curated by the Tribune Opinion team. By submitting your email to receive this newsletter, you agree to our Subscriber Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy > 3. Can reasonably compact districts be drawn? Of course. There is software to do just that. Who knows, we might actually embarrass the judges into upholding their oath of office. Should they fail to declare districts like those mentioned here to be unconstitutional, we have a comeback. The GOP could ask voters if such judicial conduct is akin to the misbehavior continually paraded past Illinoisans, as at present, in Chicago political corruption trials, an obvious state campaign issue in 2024. Advertisement If something isnt done to make the maps fairer, Illinois is saddled with overwhelming Democratic control of the legislature until at least 2042. How so? The legislature would be in charge of redistricting in the wake of the 2030 census. Even if there were a GOP governor, the legislatures overwhelming Democratic majorities could easily override a gubernatorial veto. Further, there will be a vote in 2028, required by the state constitution, as to whether voters want to hold a new constitutional convention. If adopted, the Democratic-controlled legislature would then determine how delegates are selected, thus also controlling what should be a high-toned activity with broad citizen input. Sustained, unchallenged one-party control, by any party, has never been healthy. It breeds corruption, and policy overreach, for lack of checks and balances and compromise. But such is the state of democracy in Illinois, with dangling earrings and beer can openers masquerading as legislative districts. Ray LaHood was a Republican member of Congress (1995-2009) and U.S. secretary of transportation under President Barack Obama (2009-2013). Jim Nowlan is a former Republican state representative and professor of politics. Both live in central Illinois. Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com. Elon Musk on stage at the New York Times Dealbook Summit on Nov. 29 in New York City. (Slaven Vlasic / Getty Images for the New York Times) In the eyes of many Americans, Elon Musk is still a great man. The myth often goes unquestioned by powerful men with access to him: be it his biographer Walter Isaacson or interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin at last weeks New York Times DealBook Summit conference. Ive done more for the environment than everyone than any single human on Earth, Musk said at the conference, where he told advertisers fleeing his social media platform X, once Twitter, Go f yourself. Sorkin didnt challenge Musks claim, although electric cars made by his company Tesla have a much bigger carbon footprint than once believed, according to the companys disclosures this year. And experts worry that rocket launches, including those of Musks SpaceX, may be changing the planets atmosphere and hurting sensitive habitats. Regardless of whether Musk has helped or harmed the Earth, dozens of major brands paused advertising on X after he posted his agreement with a white supremacist and antisemitic comment on the platform. As his company bled advertising revenue, Musk did damage control, traveling to Israel and apologizing for his post. But then he seemed to double down. What I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it, Musk said. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good, while doing evil. F them. Read more: Elon Musk tells off Disney's Iger and other fleeing advertisers in DealBook interview It was a riveting, self-pitying performance. If Musk wants to be judged by his deeds, then it should matter that he is transforming a major social media platform into a racist cesspool. It should matter that he went to the U.S.-Mexico border to scaremonger about immigrants, and that his companies face multiple lawsuits alleging horrible acts of racist discrimination. It should matter that Musk, who claims hes a free speech absolutist, has suspended the accounts of journalists who were critical of him, complied with censorship requests from foreign governments and filed lawsuits against two watchdog groups, Media Matters for America and the Center for Countering Digital Hate , that reported on the spread of hate on X. He claims hes about transparency, but hes suing California over a state law requiring social media companies to be more transparent. He claims to value truth, but he repeatedly boosts debunked conspiracy theories. Read more: Column: I stayed off social media for just one week and rediscovered awe Why, then, does the perception of Musk as a hero endure, including among liberals and independents who forgive his right-wing antics? Where critics see an erratic megalomaniac , fans see a visionary working toward our long-term survival. Yahaira Cueva, a 27-year-old electrical engineer in Austin, Texas, told me she doesnt agree with everything Musk says, but she sees him as a powerful role model for persevering through adversity and opposition, including a difficult childhood. Whenever Im wanting to do things that seem very much out of reach, hes a really good example to me, she said. Salina Marie Gomez, a 44-year-old writer in Denver who identifies as an independent, found hope in Musks story after her 2017 suicide attempt. She told the Verge that while reading his tweets and watching his videos during her recovery, she realized she had been too focused on what humanity has been doing wrong, and not what weve been doing right. Read more: Guerrero: I once fell for the fantasy of uploading ourselves. It's a dangerous myth She was later turned off by Musks threats to sue the Anti-Defamation League. But after his visit to Israel, she chose to see the good again. I think hes just a really capable human being with a disposition toward being militant, which makes him really, really successful, she told me. In a world filled with negativity, Musks admirers are trying to see him in a positive light: If he werent such a bully, perhaps he wouldnt be able to send humanity to other planets or save the Earth from climate change. Elio Morillo, author of The Boy Who Reached for the Stars, a memoir about his journey from Ecuador to NASA, understands the awe that people like Musk can inspire. But he pushes back against Musks glorification. After interning at SpaceX, Morillo, a 30-year-old L.A.-based engineer, came to strongly believe that Musks team was responsible for the companys great feats not Musk. If Elon were to disappear, SpaceX would be fine, Morillo told me. Musks achievements would, of course, be impossible without other people. But among his fans, including Isaacson, Musks singular greatness is assumed . Indeed, that assumption is the raison d'etre for the book itself, Brian Merchant, The Times technology columnist, wrote in a review of Isaacsons book. The author, Merchant notes, failed to explore the most difficult and pressing questions, such as the societal costs of Musks businesses and behavior. In searching Isaacson's book for insights about Musks character, I was struck by accounts of the harrowing abuse Musk endured as a child, including physical assaults at school. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place or felt threatened, it took him back to the horrors of being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground, Isaacson wrote, referring to Musks acquisition of Twitter, the worlds ultimate playground. But the worst abuse came from Musks father. According to Musks brother, their father sometimes forced them to just stand there as he subjected them to hours of scarring and evil comments. Isaacson traces some parallels between Musk and his father, observing that the billionaire often went into a demon mode. But he doesnt question Musks toughen-up-and-take-it attitude, which he exhibits most often on X. Instead, Isaacson frames his dark side as integral to his success. That narrative frame is practically a cliche, so often is it used to excuse the misbehavior of great men. Its one of popular cultures most insidious ideas. As long as we believe it, well keep elevating bullies like Musk. @jeanguerre If its in the news right now, the L.A. Times Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. CARACAS (Reuters) - Guyana will remain vigilant after a Venezuelan referendum rejected an international court's jurisdiction over a territorial dispute between the neighboring countries, Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo said on Monday. Bilateral tensions over the potentially oil-rich Esequibo region rose in recent weeks ahead of the five-question referendum, which Guyana unsuccessfully asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to bar. The U.S. State Department said on Monday it supports a peaceful resolution of the dispute and that the issue could not be solved by a referendum. Venezuelans on Sunday backed the rejection of ICJ jurisdiction over the dispute and the creation of a new state in Esequibo. Analysts have said the vote was an attempt by President Nicolas Maduro to gauge his government's support ahead of a 2024 presidential election. The ICJ has prohibited Venezuela from taking any action which would change the status quo in the region, though a court ruling on the overall dispute could be years away. Maduro has assured Caribbean countries that he will not invade the region, Jagdeo said, but Guyana will not let its guard down. "The leadership in Guyana cannot just take assurances from the Maduro government that they will not invade the country," Jagdeo told local media in an interview from Dubai, where he is attending the Conference of the Parties (COP28) climate summit. "We have to be prepared for any eventuality." "We have to be very vigilant in this upcoming period because the Venezuelan leadership has shown itself to be very unpredictable," Jagdeo said, urging Guyanese to remain calm and saying the country has ramped up defense coordination with allies. Venezuela has reactivated its claim over the 160,000 square km (61,776 square mile) territory around the Esequibo river in recent years, after the discovery of offshore oil and gas. The maritime border between the two countries is also in dispute. Venezuela's electoral authority said on Sunday that all questions passed with more than 95% approval and at least 10.5 million votes were cast for 'yes'. On Monday the authority's head said the 10.5 million figure applied to voters, not to votes. Jagdeo called the vote "rigged" and questioned turn-out figures. Reuters witnesses saw several poorly attended polling places on Sunday. "Popular mandate is sacred," Maduro said at an event on Monday. "That is the path with which, as head of state, I'll take all my actions and all our actions from here forward." "A new era in the fight for our Guayana Esequiba has begun," he added, using the proposed name for the new Venezuelan state. "Now we will recover Venezuela's historical rights." (Reporting by Mayela Armas and Deisy Buitrago in Caracas and Julia Symmes Cobb in Bogota; Editing by Richard Chang) (Bloomberg) -- German Economy Minister Robert Habeck canceled a trip to the COP28 climate conference and the Middle East to attend talks in Berlin on solving the countrys budget crisis. Most Read from Bloomberg Chancellor Olaf Scholz requested that Habeck stay in order to make further progress in the talks on the 2024 budget following the ruling of the Constitutional Court, an Economy Ministry spokeswoman said in a statement Sunday. Scholz, Habeck and Finance Minister Christian Lindner of the pro-business Free Democrats had talks on Sunday evening and are expected to continue them throughout the week. Germany has been struggling with the budget dilemma since mid-November, when the countrys top court ruled that the allocation of 60 billion ($65 billion) in unused Covid-19 pandemic aid for climate protection to special funds outside the regular budget was unconstitutional. The Finance Ministry froze the current budget and the two largest special funds, and the government declared an emergency for 2023 in order to restore this years budget. Lindner has identified a 17 billion gap for next year and favors plugging it with cuts in social welfare spending. Scholzs Social Democrats and Habecks Greens want to suspend the so-called debt brake, a limit on net new federal borrowing, in 2024 and take up new debt to cover the shortfall in order to invest in Germanys clean-energy transition. Habeck, who is also the vice chancellor and in charge of climate affairs, expressed optimism late Sunday that the coalition is well on the way to reaching an agreement. I cant speak for everyone, but I repeat that I believe we are making good progress, Habeck said in an interview with public broadcaster ARD. It is a laborious process, that is clear, but it is making progress. Habeck had planned to attend the UN climate conference in Dubai on Tuesday, followed by visits to Oman, Saudi Arabia and Israel. The trip was postponed until the next possible date, the spokeswoman said. --With assistance from Iain Rogers. (Updates with Habeck comments starting in sixth paragraph) Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2023 Bloomberg L.P. An Israeli military base where nuclear weapons are said to be stored, was struck by a missile fired by Hamas on Oct 7, according to a media report. The report said while the nuclear-capable missiles themselves were not hit, the attack triggered a blaze close to storage facilities and other sensitive weaponry. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has so far refused to comment on the claims, made in a report by The New York Times. The report said the Hamas rocket hit inside the perimeter of the Sdot Micha base, which is located 25 miles north-east of Gaza and 15 miles west of Jerusalem. It struck at 10am and appeared to land in a small ravine. The explosion started a fire in the dry vegetation. The assertion, based on photographic evidence, comes as the Israeli military continues its operations throughout Gaza, and with partners such as the US calling on Israel to minimise the number of civilian casualties. The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the death toll in the territory since Oct 7 has now surpassed 15,500. If the report is confirmed it would only trigger more concern in Israel and the wider region. Hamass Oct 7 assault on Israel, which killed at least 1,200 people and saw up to 250 taken hostage, began with the firing of thousands of rockets by Hamas into Israel from Gaza. The intention was to act as both a diversion and overwhelm Israels Iron Dome air defence system. An Israeli tank fires on Hamas positions on Monday - GETTY IMAGES The report said it was unclear whether the strike at the base was simply part of general barrage, or if Hamas knew it was striking a base with nuclear-capable missiles. Hamas has yet to comment on the report. In what it has termed a tactic of intentional strategic ambiguity, Israel has never confirmed or denied reports of possessing a nuclear arsenal. But reports say it may have developed its first weapon in the late 1960s, after the end of the 1967 Six-Day War. The Washington-DC-based non-profit The Arms Control Association calculates that Israel possesses around 90 warheads. If that it the case, Israel would be 8th in a list of nations possessing nuclear weapons, behind Russia, the US, China, France, the UK, Pakistan, and India. It would be ahead of North Korea, which is believed to have 30 such weapons. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, told The Telegraph it was unclear whether Hamas targeted that facility because they thought that it might involve nuclear armed Jericho missiles or not. He added: But this is one of the inherent risks when a country thats armed with nuclear weapons, is involved in a hot war. Mr Kimball said: The same kind of risks exist at times in Pakistan, when you have terrorist networks operating. Pakistani military facilities have been subjected to attack in the past. So this is similar. Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists Nuclear Information Project, told The New York Times that there could be 25 to 50 nuclear-capable so-called Jericho missile launchers at the base, which was built in 1962. These missiles are equipped to carry nuclear warheads. He said even if the fire had reached the missiles, their underground storage facilities were built to protect them. Nevertheless, he added: All sorts of things can go wrong. The IDF did not respond to inquiries. 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. One woman had to have her womb removed after being traumatised by the horrific abuse (Getty/iStock) Women in the armed forces have been raped, sexually assaulted and bullied by fellow colleagues, with one woman having to have her womb removed after being traumatised by the horrific abuse, a series of harrowing testimonies have revealed. The accounts, published by the defence committee, detail multiple allegations of serious sexual violence and harassment, with women saying they felt unable to report the incidents for fear of their careers being ruined. The testimonies, which will inform MPs wider inquiry into women in the armed forces, claim that: One former army soldier was raped in an army barracks and then refused medical care Another woman did not receive the right care for 35 months after a serviceman broke into her room and raped her A junior officer was sexually assaulted after a social function and felt unable to report it A woman was told to drive a senior and influential army colleague back to his mess and talk about work. When they arrived in his room, he proceeded to strip off his clothes and she left A serviceman sexually harassed a soldier to the point of attempted suicide. The same man was found using a computer to search for indecent images/videos of children, with the senior command team apparently aware of his behaviour A pregnant servicewoman was sexually harassed at a party but believed speaking up would have 100 per cent ruined my career A woman in the RAF was stalked, groped and called a thick f***ing b**** for making an error The testimonies are part of evidence to the Women in the Armed Forces Inquiry being run by the defence committee, which had its first hearing in November. The inquiry is building on an ongoing investigation, launched by MPs in 2021, into the experiences of servicewomen. Some of the accounts are from women who left the services many years ago, but the majority are from those who have left only recently or who are still in the forces. In the anonymous testimonies published by the defence committee, one former soldier in the army, who joined in 1994 at the age of 22, said that she had been raped and what I deem as tortured in the British army in a British army barracks. She said her career was stripped from her when the British army refused me medical care/treatment and failed to involve the military or civilian police. Chair of the defence committee, Robert Courts MP, said change within the armed forces had been too slow (Getty) She added that she was coerced into giving what clothing I had on me, any evidence that may have been left. This eventually led to her getting her womb taken out in a hysterectomy in her late forties, explaining: With what occurred in army service I came to hate my womanhood, my vagina, my womb, and that damaged part of me I still feel hurts and haunts me. One woman in the army described her difficulties with accessing help after a serviceman broke into her room and raped her. From the point of rape to receiving specific trauma-informed care took 35 months, she wrote. I made continued attempts to access support, retelling the trauma 67 times. Another servicewoman said a male colleague had sexually harassed one of her junior soldiers to the point that she attempted to take her own life. She added: The full truth of his behaviours never came out until he was found to have been using a non-MoD office computer to search for child pornography it transpired that the whole of the senior command team had been aware of his behaviours. One junior officer, who had recently decided to leave the army, said she had been consistently sexually objectified. She recalled an incident earlier in her career when she was sexually assaulted after a social function, while the perpetrators friend watched. She felt unable to report the assault, scared of the rumour mill that would spring up if she did. Another woman who has since left the army said during her time in the Ministry of Defence a serving married naval officer would not take no for an answer. She explained: This was the closest Ive ever come to being raped, but physically I pushed him away from me and he stopped... The next day he came up to me and laughed and said I sexually assaulted you last night. He continued to harass her on the phone after this incident until she threatened to inform his wife, the police and his vetting officer, she said. The harassment had pushed some women to leave the armed forces, with one former servicewoman saying that by the time she received a decision from the service complaints system confirming she had been subjected to sexual harassment she had already decided to quit. One servicewoman explained that she had been sexually harassed when she was pregnant at a work party (Getty) One woman in the RAF said she thought that if she rose through the ranks she would be able to make a difference to the culture but this is simply not the case. She recounted that in her first few years in the RAF, she was groped, called a thick f***ing b**** for making an error, accused of having affairs, stalked for several months by a male colleague, and had to deal with a male colleague entering her room late at night demanding sexual attention. When she reached her current rank, a male colleague told her she was simply another female being pushed by the RAF to stop men like him promoting, she wrote. The testimonies come after an investigation found that the sexual harassment of Gunner Jaysley Beck by her boss was almost certain to have been a factor in her death in 2021. Last month, a report also found a degrading and humiliating environment for women within the Red Arrows display team, while it was reported that senior women at the MoD have alleged sexual harassment by male colleagues. Chair of the committee, Robert Courts MP, thanked those who had come forward with their stories. He said: The accounts of sexual assault and the culture of normalisation of sexual harassment are particularly disturbing and make for difficult reading. While the Ministry of Defence and armed forces have made some progress since our 2021 report on women in the armed forces, this has been too slow, and the underlying culture has been hard to shift. Lucy Baston, lawyer at the Centre for Military Justice, who represents many servicewomen bringing complaints and discrimination claims against the MoD, said: These submissions demonstrate the need for urgent reform many describe completely appalling behaviours which were either not reported at all, for fear of the complainant losing her career, or, if they were reported, poor outcomes. The handling of serious complaints must be taken away from the single services themselves. An MoD spokesperson said: Sexual offences and unacceptable sexual behaviour have no place in the armed forces. All allegations are taken extremely seriously and crimes are investigated by the service police. We have set up an independent defence serious crime unit, created a victim witness care unit and strengthened our ability to discharge from service anyone who has committed an offence or engages in unacceptable sexual behaviour. Rape Crisis offers support for those affected by rape and sexual abuse. You can call them on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, and 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland, or visit their website at www.rapecrisis.org.uk. If you are in the US, you can call Rainn on 800-656-HOPE (4673) NEW PHILADELPHIA, SCHUYLKILL COUNTY (WBRE/WYOU) A Schuylkill County mom grieving the loss of her teenage son who was murdered is feeling a sense of comfort thanks to a woman with a big heart and a passion for sewing. 28/22s Gianna Galli was there Sunday exclusively for a special moment between both women. Previously, 28/22 News covered Christina Elamma, Thread Artist for Thread and Ink Designs LLC, better known on Facebook as Christina Leake. The thread artist runs the business thread and ink designs. She wanted to do something special for the mothers of two teenagers who were murdered eight weeks ago. What she crafted led to an emotional moment Sunday with one of the mothers during a heartfelt handoff. What started as a hug was just seconds away from a sea of emotion when Leake revealed what she was hiding behind her back. A teddy bear, but this one is special. Kate Mock, mother of 18-year-old Hunter Mock, reached into the bag and pulled out a pink bear made in memory of her 18-year-old son, Hunter. Sewn with love and sympathy, the memory bear was created by Leake in remembrance of Mocks son Hunter who was murdered on October 8. My son was always the person that would hold me together and after my father passed my son stepped up and said Im your bear now, Kate said. From the pink color of the bear to the lightning bolt on its upper chest, it all holds meaning. My son always used to scream real men love pink. Camouflage, obviously, my son Hunter was named Hunter for a reason. and the lightning bolt. When I was six weeks pregnant with my son, I was struck by lightning, Kate explained. The bears eyes shimmer gold for what mock described as Hunters sunflower eyes. The right paw, stitched Sparky, her sons nickname. It really touched my heart that its going to bring her comfort and something to hug, Leake said. A hug that Leake has been offering through these memory bears for three years now. Before this latest work of thread and needle, Leakes very first memory bear went to a former co-worker who came up with the idea, and wanted to bring comfort to someone in her family. My niece, she never got to meet her uncle so I got her uncles clothing and had the bear made for her. I was extremely happy that Christina pulled that off to make such a fantastic item, said Pottstown resident Betty Murphy. NEPA for Palestine rally outside Scranton ammo plant From her first one to now this one, Leake has crafted nearly 150 bears. Its a difficult world we live in right now and just any little bit of you know, smile, I could give to somebody means a lot to me, Leake said. She wants it to mean even more to those who are in need of something to hold on to. I just want them to be able to have something they can hug when they are missing their sons. That they could just sit there, hug, and remember their good memories. It hurts when you lose someone very close. Its very, It takes time, Leake added. Leake says she has been in contact with the mother of Angelo Caraballo, the other New Philadelphia teenage murder victim. That mom will also get a memory bear when she feels ready to receive it. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to PAhomepage.com. EVANSVILLE Indiana officials dont know how many Evansville dogs have been stricken with a mysterious respiratory illness but they do know the numbers continue to increase statewide. Denise Derrer Spears, communications director for the Indiana State Board of Animal Health, said the kennel-cough-like sickness has infected dogs in at least Evansville, Bloomington, Indianapolis and Fort Wayne. But since it isn't an official reportable illness such as parvo or distemper, it's impossible to say exactly how prevalent it is. All the examples theyve fielded have come from courtesy calls from local vets. Its crept up a lot in the last couple weeks, she said Monday. We started getting a little bit of feedback in July, so its been floating around for a while. A mysterious respiratory illness has sickened dogs in Evansville and in various spots across the U.S. in recent months. What is it? Derrer Spears compared the issue which has no known name or cause to kennel cough: a type of contagious canine bronchitis dogs can pick up when theyre cloistered together. Problem is, the new illness doesnt respond to the same treatments, causing the issue to linger. Animal health officials told WANE in Fort Wayne that symptoms include, among others: Coughing Sneezing Difficulty breathing Lethargy Fever Pneumonia How do you treat it? And is it fatal? Right now the only official recourse is symptomatic therapy, Derrer Spears said, or treating each symptom one by one. Owners should also make sure their pets are up-to-date on their vaccinations especially if you plan to travel with your dog around the holiday season. And if your dog is sick, keep them away from other animals. The has only fielded one reported death, she said, but the numbers could be higher. Another Indiana State Board of Animal Health official told WANE that pet owners shouldnt panic. They should just be vigilant. Does it have anything to do with the weather changing? For humans, respiratory illnesses such as COVID and influenxa ramp up as the weather turns cold and we all start huddling inside. But Derrer-Spear said the changing season doesnt seem to be a factor, since reports have been popping up since the summer. Has it been reported outside Indiana? According to USA Today, veterinarians in at least 14 states have reported similar illnesses. Illinois is the only other Midwestern state, with the rest popping up in places like California, Texas, Florida and a few spots in New England. Dogs come in with an array of symptoms and somehow test negative for all known respiratory infections. The Indy Star reported that the cost of treatments has sometimes ballooned to as much as $17,000 as dogs are given breathing treatments, IVs and antibiotics. In severe cases, it sometimes requires a long hospital stay. This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: What we know about strange illness sickening dogs in Evansville, U.S. Lubbockites and first responders from around the region gathered Monday to honor Matt Dawson, a firefighter remembered for his service and advocacy after he suffered serious injuries in a January 2020 on-duty crash that left him seriously injured and killed two other first responders. Hundreds gathered at a funeral service for Dawson at 1:30 p.m. Monday at Cook's Garage in south Lubbock County after he died unexpectedly in his home on Nov. 26. He was 34. Lubbock firefighter Matt Dawson remembered for fight, advocacy after deadly crash Many others lined Lubbock thoroughfares for a procession ahead of the service. And a visitation was held Sunday evening at The Venue on Broadway. Chanda Dawson, second from left, becomes emotional while watching her husband, firefighter Matt Dawson's, memorial service, Monday, Dec. 4, 2023 at Cook's Garage. The Matt Dawson Act, which was passed by state lawmakers and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott this spring, amends the labor code to extend lifetime workers' compensation benefits to first responders who, while on the job, sustain "a serious bodily injury that permanently prevents the employee from performing any gainful work." The bill was authored by Burrows along with Rep. Carl Tepper, R-Lubbock, and others, and was sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, according to past Avalanche-Journal reporting. Dawson, for whom the bill is named, was one of three first responders injured while responding to a Jan. 11, 2020 wreck on icy roads on I-27 north of Lubbock. A public memorial service is held for Lubbock firefighter Matt Dawson, Monday, Dec. 4, 2023 at Cook's Garage. While emergency crews were working a pair of accidents in the northbound lanes, a pickup truck traveling southbound on I-27 crossed over into the median and struck Dawson, Lubbock Fire Rescue Lt. Eric Hill and Lubbock police Officer Nicholas Reyna. The crash killed Hill and Reyna. Dawson was 30 at the time of the crash. Dawson suffered a traumatic brain injury and bone fractures in his legs, wrist, ribs and skull, the Avalanche-Journal reported previously. After months of recovery at a specialized rehabilitation facility in Colorado, Dawson returned to Lubbock to a hero's welcome in August of 2020. He continued to work at LFR into 2022 before he retired. In August 2021, Dawson and his family received the keys to a new mortgage-free home during a dedication ceremony at the home site in South Lubbock. Lubbock firefighters served as pallbearers during Matt Dawson's casket memorial service, Monday, Dec. 4, 2023 at Cook's Garage. Dawson was also among several first responders honored by Prosperity Bank and The Rotary Club of Metropolitan Lubbock co-hosted the 19th Annual Unsung Heroes Award Ceremony in August 2022. Matt Dawson This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: A hero remembered: Lubbock mourns firefighter, advocate Matt Dawson Motivated by stories told to me in the 1970s and 1980s by pioneer residents of Miamis Colored Town, now known as Overtown, I saved the historic Lyric Theater from destruction as an example of resilience in Black Miami during the 20th century. Those who knew Gedar Walker, the businessman who built the Lyric Theater in 1913, recalled the concern he and his wife, Henrietta, showed for the community. Their businesses provided food, entertainment and employment for residents. With pride, the pioneers said, Mr. Gedar Walker built the Lyric Theater for the community; it must not be torn down. It must be saved. In 1980, while driving by the then forsaken Lyric Theater, I saw an attached notice stating that the structure was scheduled to be condemned. Having heard the pioneer stories the notice became my personal Call to Action. For nearly two decades, as a volunteer and on my own, I decided to take action and began researching Miamis local Black history. As a full-time employee of Dade County Public Schools, after getting my family settled, I stayed up from midnight until 6 a.m. for nearly a decade figuring out how to save the countys Black history I had already established The Black Archives by assembling a board of directors and a board of trustees from the community. With their encouragement, I presented the theaters history before the Zoning Department. The presentation stopped the demolition. Later, I wrote the grant to the state requesting funds to purchase the theater, wrote the first grant to the City of Miami to restore the original theater, led the board in hiring staff, accepted money from my mothers pension to pay staff salaries and conducted the research for the Lyric Theaters National Register designation report. The rest is history. In 1974 when I called the main library downtown asking for books about local Black people, I was told, we only have a folder with obituaries I guess those people dont care enough about themselves to write their history. That was absolutely not true. Those words coupled with the pioneer stories propelled me into Black History. It became my lifes work not a job or career, but the soul of my being. It became important for me to seek formal training. Instead of assuming that I knew what to do, I sought academic training as the Black Archives Historic Lyric Theater evolved. I earned a certificate in archives administration and secured student loans and finances from my family to earn a masters degree in curriculum and instruction; and then I completed coursework for a doctorate in public administration. At age 50, I returned to graduate school and earned a Ph.D. in public history. The Black Archives, home of the historic Lyric Theater, is built on scholarship for the purpose of recording the history or the Black experience in Dade from 1896 to the present. As the founder, I pledge appropriate infrastructure, accountability and transparency of this organization to the community. The Lyric Theater, built in 1914, as seen in 1996. It was a state-of-the-art theater when it was built in 1913. In the midst of gentrification and redevelopment, the historic Lyric Theater continues to stand majestically in Miamis Overtown as a physical reminder of what came before us, notes Dr. Dorothy Fields. Throughout the decades my biggest supporters and cheer leaders were my mother, Dorothy J. McKellar; my mothers oldest brother, Dr. S. H. Johnson, M.D.; and advisor to my doctoral committee, scholar historian Dr. John Hope Franklin, Ph.D. Individually and collectively, the pioneer stories were compelling. Among those who shared stories were Stanley Sweeting, Miami Times columnist; Marie White, nurse; Atri Richardson, funeral director; Elaine Johnson Adderly, home economics teacher and nursery school teacher; Roberta Johnson Thompson, elementary school teacher, and Dr. S. H. Johnson, a board-certified medical doctor and South Floridas first Black Radiologist. Adderly and Thompson were my mothers sisters. The pioneers fondly recalled Mrs. Walker was fashionable wearing wigs and long bouffant dresses adorned with jewelry. Before World War I, the Walkers traveled to Paris, France, then returned to Miamis Colored Town/Overtown, sharing stories about the fashions they saw and opera houses they visited. Not long after that, Walker built the Lyric Theater next to his ice cream parlor and cafe on Avenue G, now Northwest 2nd Avenue between 8th and 10th streets adjacent to downtown Miami. This was the Jim Crow era in the United States when Black people and White people were separated by law and custom. Hence, Colored Town was assigned and restricted to Colored people, then called Negroes. During that era, Black male laborers from the southern states and the Bahamas living in Overtown and Coconut Grove were the primary workforce in Miami-Dade County. In addition to the Lyric Theater these laborers were mainly responsible for the construction of historic sites throughout Miami-Dade County including Villa Vizcaya in 1910; the Miami Womans Club in 1913; Plymouth Congregational Church in 1917; the Freedom Tower in 1925; The Kampong, David Fairchilds home in 1928; Fisher Island, William K. Vanderbilts estate in 1929, Booker T. Washington Jr./Sr. High School (original building) in 1926; and Miami Senior High School (new building) in 1928. Black laborers built the Lyric Theater. Blacks managed and operated it, too. Indeed, this was a source of community pride when it opened for vaudeville shows and silent movies. According to a full-page ad in a 1915 edition of The Miami Metropolis (forerunner of The Miami News) [the Lyric Theater] is equipped with everything that is needed for modern theatrical performances. It is now, and always has been, operated by competent negro men. Its moving picture machines are thoroughly understood by its well trained negro operators. Except for a short time in the 1950s when the Lyric Theater was owned and operated by WOMETCO enterprises, it was operated and managed by residents from our community. At one time, some of the operations of the Lyric Theater were handled by members of the Eve family, pioneer residents of Colored Town/Overtown. For many years, brothers Charles and Nathaniel Eve operated the movie projectors and their sisters Lillian and Beatrice Eve collected tickets at the booth. One of their great grandnieces is Davyre Gibson Smith, daughter of Vennda Rei Harris Gibson and granddaughter of Millicent Louise Eve Spicer. Available on Amazon Davyres 2021 memoir titled, The Women Who Raised Me, highlights the women in her ancestral village. The tradition of hiring and training neighbor residents at the theater continues. Former Black Archives Historic Lyric Theater Executive Director Timothy Barber glamorized the theaters interior and hired community residents for operations. Executive Director Kamila Pritchett continues that practice. Many others have contributed to the Lyric Theaters success. Thank you all! In the midst of gentrification and redevelopment, the historic Lyric Theater continues to stand majestically in Miamis Overtown as a physical reminder of what came before us. Located two blocks north of the Brightline train station and Metrorail to the airport, it connects us to the global future providing a sense of identity and continuity for future generations. Long live the historic Lyric Theater! Dorothy Jenkins Fields, Ph.D. is a public historian, certified archivist and founder of The Black Archives, History & Research Foundation of South Florida, Inc. Though Galen Beery wasnt Hmong himself, he had the unique opportunity to photograph Hmong people and their culture by capturing life experiences in war-torn 1960s Laos. Photos taken by him and Lee Seng, his assistant, offer glimpses into what life was like at the airfield and USAID station where Beery worked. The only posed images appear to be the ones of groups, class-photo style, of Americans and Southeast Asians. The two documented everything from the mundane, a group of Hmong women chatting through a window, to the heartbreaking, a mother mourning the loss of her husband and child. Beery, a Southern California native, spent over a decade working in Southeast Asia, taking photographs to document history, as the region was at war: secret bombing missions happened across Laos and Cambodia while the United States fought in Vietnam. After Beery returned stateside, he helped hundreds of Hmong and Laotian people find refuge in America in the aftermath of the war. Now, Fresno State is exclusively displaying more than 400 of his photos. The Galen Beery Legacy collection and exhibit launched in November with hundreds of digital images donated by the Hmongstory Legacy Project. The collection is the first piece of a planned, in-depth history and culture archival repository that will include more than 30,000 documents and artifacts contributing to the preservation of Hmong history. This image is titled, Riding Shotgun, where Galen Beery (center) is looking at the camera within an aircraft flying over Laos when he was USAID worker in 1970. The Hmongstory Legacy Project is an organization dedicated to the preservation and sharing of Hmong history and culture based in Fresno. California is a top state for Hmong residents, and Fresno has the second largest Hmong population of any U.S. city, according to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center. Lar Yang, one of the Hmongstory Legacy Project co-founders, knew Beery and is proud of the partnership forged between Fresno States Library and his organization, not only for the Hmong communitys benefit but also for everyone who sees these photographs, he said. To me, as a refugee kid, Yang said, my understanding of what it means to be an American hero is people like Galen Beery, who go out into the world to change it. Hmong people are an ethnic group with their own language and culture who originated from China and have over 4,000 years of history. However, much of that history isnt recorded or is lost because the Hmong had to constantly migrate to Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Burma because of decades of persecution by the Chinese government as the Hmong wanted to retain their cultural and spiritual practices. In the early 1960s, the CIA recruited Hmong people to help fight against North Vietnam and the communist party in Laos, known as the Pathet Lao. The operation, also known as the Secret War, lasted from 1962 to 1975. It resulted in the Pathet Lao taking over Laoss governance and thousands of Hmong and Laotian people seeking refuge in the United States in 1975. In this image, USAID Personnel #12, Galen Beery (USAID) is photographed working next to Naikhong Zueker Moua (USAID) in Ban Xon, Laos in 1971. Though he was a conscientious objector and did not enlist in the armed forces, Beery still found himself close to the front lines in Southeast Asia. After graduating with a history degree from the University of La Verne in 1959, Beery headed to Laos and Cambodia with the International Voluntary Service (IVS) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). While working to help communities around him, he documented what he saw during the war as Hmong and Laotian communities suffered the armed conflicts effects. Soon after he returned to the United States, Beery worked as a translator, held directorial roles in resettlement programs and worked with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in San Diego. Internationally, he also worked as chief of the American Council for Voluntary Agencies in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, continuing to help refugees resettle. Yang met Beery in 2014, when Hmongstory was working on its 40-year commemoration exhibit, marking a surge of Hmong migration from Southeast Asia to the United States in 1975. In the two years before Beery died unexpectedly in a fatal car accident, he donated thousands of original pieces negatives, prints, objects, documents to the Hmongstory Legacy Project. Galen Beery photographed displaced people, including Hmong and Laotian individuals, waiting to board evacuating flights leaving Laos at the Sam Thong airstrip in 1970. Together, Hmongstory and Beery also recorded a video interview, where Beery explains how he became so involved with the Hmong community, which is publicly accessible within Fresno State Librarys exhibit. He had been preserving all this history for the future generations, Yang said. Wanting to share Hmong history and Beerys photos, Yang said Hmongstory approached Fresno State because having the documents included in an American database makes it easier for them to be searchable and viewed by more people. Renaldo Gjoshe, head of digital services at Fresno States Library, encouraged everyone to access the collection and exhibit, and reflect on Beerys work. If history isnt documented, Gjoshe said, then its forgotten. Titled, Hospital Patients, Galen Beery captured one of the main patient halls of the Ban Xon hospital in Laos, in 1971. The Hmong History Digital Archive and Repository is funded by Fresno States presidents office, said Tammy Lau, Fresno State Librarys Special Collections Research Center head librarian. Lau said the special collections team will also be seeking grant funding to expand and enhance this project. There is a need to identify more historical Hmong community materials within the Central Valley, she said. There is also a need for volunteers, especially those who know the Hmong language. To continue growing the Hmonh history repository, Lau said there are plans for many more digital galleries to be created and talk of recording oral histories with people in the community. Those interested in helping and/or contributing can reach out to Fresno State Librarys Special Collections Research Center by calling 559-278-2595 or emailing scrc@mail.fresnostate.edu. Also, those wanting to volunteer at Hmongstory Legacy Project can sign up online on their website. For community members who want to contribute to documenting Hmong history, they can email Lar Yang at laryang@yangdesign.net. The Galen Beery Legacy exhibit is available for everyone to browse online through Fresno State Librarys website at https://bit.ly/410Unpg. A Georgia homeowner is helping to make spirits bright this season through his love of the Georgia Bulldogs. Larry Dorne sent Channel 2 Action News video of his synchronized light show set up at his home along Sweetbay Parkway in Hamilton, Georgia. The display features the Georgia Bulldogs logo across Christmas trees and other light displays across the front yard of his home. This is just one theme that plays at the home during the Christmas season. TRENDING STORIES: In a post on the Listentotheselights Hamilton Ga Facebook page, it said the displays play every night from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. and go until 10:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Outside surround sound plays with the display, but you can also hear the music through your cars radio by tuning into 101.1 FM. Dorne also uses the display to raise money for FOCUS Ministries, which is a faith-based nonprofit that provides emotional, financial, and educational programs to the residents of Harris County. IN OTHER NEWS: Chinese property giant Evergrande Group won a temporary reprieve from likely bankruptcy Monday after a Hong Kong court unexpectedly granted it more time to try to restructure debts of more than $300 billion. File Photo by MNXANL/Wikimedia Commons Dec. 4 (UPI) -- Chinese property giant Evergrande Group won a temporary reprieve from possible bankruptcy Monday after a Hong Kong court gave it more time to try to restructure debts of more than $300 billion. Justice Linda Chan adjourned a hearing on a winding-up petition by one of its creditors, Top Shine Global, to Jan. 29 after pleas for more time to discuss newly revised debt restructuring proposals with creditors went unopposed by Top Shine's counsel. The decision gives Evergrande eight more weeks to prevent possible liquidation. Top Shine filed the winding-up petition back in June 2022 over Evergrande's failure to honor a $110 million buyback agreement for shares Top Shine bought in its Fangchebao subsidiary. The petition would put liquidators in charge of selling off Evergrande's assets to pay its creditors. Monday's development saw Evergrande shares jump 9% in Hong Kong to end the day at 3.3 cents, but remain down almost 85% from the beginning of a year that in addition to offshore creditors demanding controlling stakes as part of the restructuring, has seen founder and chairman Hui Ka Yan placed under house arrest prompting regulators to suspend share trading. Hui was reportedly placed under residential surveillance by Chinese authorities in September along with other current and former executives. Hui's whereabouts and whether he had been charged with any offense remain unclear. Trading in shares of China Evergrande Group, Evergrande Property Services, and China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle Group have all since resumed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. Evergrande, which first defaulted in 2021, has been fighting to stave off insolvency under the crushing weight of liabilities totaling about $328 billion with Chan warning at the last hearing Oct. 30 that unless a restructuring plan was submitted before Monday, she was "highly likely" to grant a winding-up order. The company racked up its massive debt during a 15-year splurge to become one of China's largest businesses with much of it owed to prospective homebuyers with down payments on apartments and houses that are half-built, or on which work has yet to start. Suppliers are also highly exposed to the company's cash-flow difficulties. In August, Evergrande filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection in a court in New York saying it was seeking recognition of restructuring talks underway in Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands. In July, the group reported that it had lost a combined $81.1 billion in 2021 and 2022, mostly through payments to suppliers and lenders, as it struggled to complete more than 1,000 thousand projects across 280 cities. FILE - Hong Kong activist Agnes Chow arrives at a court in Hong Kong, Monday, Nov. 23, 2020. One of Hong Kongs best-known pro-democracy activists, who moved to Canada to pursue further studies, said she would not return to the city to meet her bail conditions, becoming the latest politician to flee Hong Kong under Beijing's crackdown on dissidents. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu, File) HONG KONG (AP) One of Hong Kongs best-known pro-democracy activists who moved to Canada to pursue her studies said she would not return to the city to meet her bail conditions, becoming the latest politician to flee Hong Kong under Beijing's crackdown on dissidents. Agnes Chow, a famous young face in the city's once-vibrant pro-democracy movement, was arrested in 2020 under a Beijing-imposed national security law that was enacted following 2019 anti-government protests. She was released on bail but also served more than six months in jail in a separate case over her role in the protests. After Chow was released from prison in 2021, she had to regularly report to the police. She said in an Instagram post on Sunday night that the pressure caused her mental illnesses and influenced her decision not to return to the city. Many of her peers have been jailed, arrested, forced into self-exile or silenced after the introduction of the security law in 2020. The suppression of the city's pro-democracy movement highlights that freedoms promised to the former British colony when it returned to China in 1997 have been eroded drastically. Both Beijing and Hong Kong governments have hailed the security law for bringing back stability to the semi-autonomous Chinese city. Chow said the authorities in July offered to return her passport so she could pursue studies in Canada under the condition that she traveled to mainland China with them. She agreed, she said, and her trip in August included a visit to an exhibition on China's achievements and the headquarters of tech giant Tencent. The authorities later returned her passport. After considering the situation in Hong Kong, her safety and her health, Chow said she probably won't return" to the city again. I don't want to be forced to do things that I don't want to do anymore and be forced to visit mainland China again. If it continues, my body and my mind will collapse even though I am safe, she wrote. Chow told TV Tokyo on Monday that she was still weighing her next steps, including the option of seeking asylum in Canada, the broadcaster reported. Asked whether she would take up political activism there, she said she wanted to do something in Hong Kong's interest, TV Tokyo said. Hong Kong police on Monday strongly condemned Chow's move, without naming her, saying it was against and challenging the rule of law." Police urge the woman to immediately turn back before it is too late and not to choose a path of no return. Otherwise, she will bear the stigma of fugitive for the rest of her life, the police said in a statement. The police did not respond to questions from The Associated Press on Chow's mainland China trip. Asked about Chow's case at a daily briefing, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Hong Kong is a law-based society and no one has a privilege beyond law. Any illegal acts will be punished, he said. Hong Kong leader John Lee said during a weekly briefing on Tuesday that police had given Chow lenient treatment but were deceived. Lee said those who supported offering her leniency must find this utterly disappointing" and that police would learn from their experiences and continue to safeguard law and order. He said some residents had underestimated the threat posed by foreign forces to national security and that Hong Kong's own national security law, scheduled to be completed next year, must proceed with full strength." Similar legislative efforts were shelved in 2003 after fears about lost freedoms sparked a massive protest. The Hong Kong government also strongly condemned Chow's acts in a statement and said her credibility had gone bankrupt." Unless fugitives surrender themselves, otherwise they would be pursued for life, it wrote. Chow rose to fame with other prominent young activists Joshua Wong and Nathan Law as a student leader, including in pro-democracy protests in 2014. She co-founded the now-defunct pro-democracy party Demosisto with Wong and Law, but the party was disbanded on June 30, 2020, the same day the security law was enacted. Wong is now in custody and faces a subversion charge that could result in life imprisonment if convicted. Law fled to Britain and the police in July offered a reward of 1 million Hong Kong dollars ($127,600) for information leading to his arrest. Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow arrives at the West Kowloon Law Courts building in Hong Kong in 2020. After being freed from jail and on bail, she recently fled to Canada and announced on Sunday that she will not return to Hong Kong. File Photo by Jerome Favre/EPA-EFE Dec. 4 (UPI) -- Prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow announced on Sunday that she will not return to China from Canada, where she had been attending school despite being on bail and under investigation. Chow, 27, wrote on Instagram that it was she intended to jump bail and not return to Hong Kong. Chow was arrested in 2020 during the original sweep of young Hong Kong pro-democracy activists connected to widespread protests in Hong Kong in 2019. She was released from prison in June 2021 and left Hong Kong three months ago for Canada. She said the pressure from law enforcement left her with depression and anxiety. She said she had completed her first semester at a university in Toronto. "I want to tell you that I was originally scheduled to return to Hong Kong at the end of December to report to the police on national security law," Chow said in her lengthy message on social media. "After careful consideration, including considering the situation in Hong Kong, my own safety, my physical and mental health, I decided not to go back and probably never go back for the rest of my life." Although Chow served jail time for taking part in anti-government protests, she remained under investigation for "collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security." "I have felt for years how precious freedom from fear is," Chow said. "There is still a lot of unknowns in the future, but what can be known is that I finally don't have to worry about being arrested anymore and can say what I want to do." The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, though, issued a stern public statement on Chow Monday, saying it would "spare no effort" to bring her back to Hong Kong to face justice. "She blatantly claimed in social media that she planned to jump bail, which is a total disregard of law and order," the Hong Kong government said in the statement. "Chow Ting's flagrant disregard for police bail terms showed that she is completely devoid of integrity. "Fugitives should not have any delusion that they could evade legal liabilities by absconding from Hong Kong. Fugitives will be pursued for life unless they turn themselves in." House Republicans ramping up their impeachment inquiry are touting subpoenaed financial records that show President Biden received monthly payments from a business account for his son Hunter Biden in between his time as vice president and president. But Hunter Bidens attorney is pushing back at the House GOP, saying that the monthly $1,380 transfers were made to repay his father for a truck payment that Hunter Biden was unable to finance himself. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.), who is leading an impeachment probe into Biden based in part on his familys foreign business dealings, released subpoenaed bank records showing monthly direct payments to Joe Biden from Hunter Bidens Owasco PC business account, noting that the company did business with Chinese-state linked companies and other foreign nationals and companies. This wasnt a payment from Hunter Bidens personal account but an account for his corporation that received payments from China and other shady corners of the world, Comer said in a video alongside the release of the subpoenaed records. The Hill is told that the committee is aware of three monthly payments of $1,380 each to Joe Biden from the Owasco PC account, on Sept. 17, 2018; Oct. 15, 2018; and Nov. 15 2018 all after Bidens time as vice president and before he announced his 2020 presidential bid. House GOP leaders, who are preparing for a formal impeachment inquiry vote in the coming weeks, shared the news of the payments to argue that Joe Biden had knowingly benefited from his familys foreign business dealings. Joe Biden and the White House cant continue to claim he wasnt involved with his sons shady businesses now, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. But Hunter Bidens legal counsel, Abbe Lowell, pushed back. There Chairman Comer goes again reheating what is old as new to try to revive his sham of an investigation, Lowell said in a statement. The truth is Hunters father helped him when he was struggling financially due to his addiction and could not secure credit to finance a truck. When Hunter was able to, he paid his father back and took over the payments himself. Reporting from the New York Post in April 2022, based on leaked emails from a hard drive purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden, had previously highlighted a list of Hunter Bidens bills that his then-personal assistant said in an email would temporarily be covered by Joe Biden as Hunter transitions in his career. Included in that was a regular $1,380 payment for a 2018 Ford Raptor truck. Payment to JRB from RHB autopay owasco acct, said notes on the 2019 spreadsheet reported by the New York Post. Purchased June 2018 after selling Silverado & Colorado trucks, it added, along with Insured by Chubb; JRBs policy. Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) pointed to the New York Post story in response to Comers release. Chair Comer is digging up old public reporting, distorting the facts, and presenting it as breaking news, Raskin wrote in a post on X. As a private citizen, Joe Biden made car payments for his son, who paid him backits right here in the NY Post. Oversight Republicans and Comer did not mention anything about a truck when they released records of the payments. But they argue that the records are adding to their overall goal of showing that the current president benefited from his familys foreign business dealings. There is now a pattern of members of the Biden family using their bank accounts that have been funded by Chinese and other foreign entities to send money to Joe Biden, an Oversight Committee spokesperson said in a statement. Based on witness testimony, Joe Biden knew and participated in his familys influence peddling schemes. The checks and payments weve uncovered reveal Joe Biden benefitted from them. Release of the records comes as Comer and Hunter Bidens legal counsel are tangling over a subpoena for him to sit for a closed-door deposition before the committee next week. Hunter Bidens legal counsel has said he could testify only publicly for fear of the Republicans trying to manipulate his testimony, but Republicans have rejected that offer saying a closed-door deposition is necessary before a public hearing. The White House did not immediately comment on Comers release. Updated at 4:14 p.m. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. FILE PHOTO: The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Carney sets sail in the Bosphorus in Istanbul By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Waves of attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi group in Yemen may not be targeting U.S. warships, even though the U.S. Navy has responded by shooting down drone aircraft and missiles in recent weeks, the Pentagon said on Monday. The United States has blamed the Houthis for a series of attacks in Middle Eastern waters since war broke out between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas on Oct. 7. In the latest incidents, three commercial vessels came under attack in international waters in the southern Red Sea on Sunday. The Houthis acknowledged launching drone and missile attacks against what they said were two Israeli vessels in the area. The Carney, a U.S. Navy destroyer, shot down three drones on Sunday as it answered distress calls from the commercial vessels. The U.S. military says the three vessels were connected to 14 separate nations. "The Carney took action as a drone was headed in its direction. But again, we can't assess that the Carney at this time was the intended target," said Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh. The United States and Britain have condemned the attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, blaming Iran for its role in supporting the Houthi militants behind them. The Houthi group, which controls most of Yemen's Red Sea coast, had previously fired ballistic missiles and armed drones toward Israel and vowed to target more Israeli vessels. U.S. national security officials are concerned about the risk of a sudden, deadly regional escalation as the Israel-Hamas war rages, given the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and separate attacks by Iran-backed militia against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. The Pentagon said it killed five militants in Iraq on Sunday as they prepared to attack U.S. troops with a drone. Singh stopped short of using language that could suggest any imminent U.S. retaliation against the Houthis. "There have certainly been irresponsible actions taken by the Houthis, especially when it comes to targeting commercial vessels that are transiting international waters," she said. Asked if the United States might retaliate, Singh said: "If we decide to take action against the Houthis, it will of course be at a time and place of our choosing. "I won't get ahead of the (defense) secretary. I won't go ahead of the president on any actions. But we always reserve the right to respond," Singh said. At the White House, President Joe Biden's national security adviser told reporters that talks were ongoing about a maritime task force "of sorts" to ensure the safe passage of ships in the Red Sea. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan declined to say what the exact structure would look like and it if would be a part of a multinational task force that already exists and focuses on maritime security efforts in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb and Gulf of Aden. "At a broad level the idea that we would work with other countries and their naval vessels to try to provide a greater level of security through the Red Sea, that's something that we're actively discussing with our colleagues," Sullivan said. Sullivan's comments could suggest that the focus is on policing the waterway rather than retaliatory measures. Yemen erupted in civil war after the Houthis, members of the Zaydi sect of Shi'ite Islam, seized Sanaa, the capital, in 2014. A Saudi-led coalition intervened the following year. Although a U.N.-brokered ceasefire collapsed in October 2022, Yemen has enjoyed relative calm as the Houthis and Saudi Arabia negotiate a settlement. The White House has left open the possibility of potentially designating the Houthi rebel group a terrorist organization, which would reverse one of the Biden administration's first acts after Biden took office as president in January 2021. (Reporting by Phil Stewart, Idrees Ali and Jeff Mason; Editing by Leslie Adler and Bill Berkrot) Amazons Housing Equity Fund underwrote the 80-unit Howard Manor renovation with a low-interest loan of $31.3 million to restore the edge-of-campus complex. Howard University and Amazon teamed up to renovate 80 units at a low-income housing complex on the edge of campus that university officials and others showed off Friday. Amazons Housing Equity Fund underwrote the Howard Manor renovation with a low-interest loan of $31.3 million. According to The Washington Post, employees and low-income families were forced out of the rent-controlled building over five years ago as part of plans to restore and sell the decaying complex. Amazons affordable housing initiative invests in such housing to alleviate concerns that the megacorporations presence in the Washington area will elevate house prices and cause evictions of lower-income residents. Howard University and Amazon have teamed up to renovate 80 units at Howard Manor, a low-income housing complex on the edge of the Washington, D.C., campus. (Photo: Screenshot/YouTube.com/WUSA9) There was a time when Howard Manor was a jewel on Georgia Avenue, Howard Universitys president, Ben Vinson III, told those gathered. We are standing on the foundation of new hope and new community promise. Officials tied the initiative to Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowsers long-standing objective of creating 12,000 more affordable housing units in Washington, D.C., by 2025. University authorities shared on Friday that two of the buildings previous inhabitants would return once repairs are completed. The rehabilitation of Howard Manor began in 2021, when Howard collaborated with UIP Cos., a real estate investment business, to renovate the structure. UIP committed to transforming Howard Manor into a mixed-use building featuring ground-level retail and storefronts. The structure originally opened its doors in 1950 and has long provided low-cost lodging for graduate students, seniors, young faculty members and others associated with Howard University. However, as the region surrounding the HBCU gentrified and property values skyrocketed, the revered institution began to sell real estate to relieve some of its financial burdens. Selling vacant buildings often yields more money than selling ones that are still occupied, so Howard sought to relocate dozens of low- and moderate-income tenants in 2017. Vinson said the development project is a shining example of what is possible when public-private partnerships work, noting that it would provide affordable housing to dozens of Washington families. Studios and one- and two-bedroom units will be rented to families earning 60 percent or less of the citys median family income. According to federal government limitations, that equates to an annual income of around $85,400 for a family of four. Shonta High was among onlookers drawn to Howard Manor on Friday. Highs apartment building in the Park Morton public housing complex, less than a mile away, is being demolished as part of the capital citys controversial New Communities Initiative. The city initiated the effort in 2005 to address the issue of redeveloping public housing units without displacing inhabitants, pledging to preserve every public housing unit in the programs four communities while developing alternative, inexpensive housing choices. High expressed concern about the commitment to demolish the old buildings and relocate occupants to new mixed-used complexes and how long it could take before she can move into whatever replaces Park Morton. On Friday, she and her daughter, Amarissa, 8, took time to look inside closets at Howard Manors newly remodeled apartments. Anthony Freeman, an assistant vice president and special assistant to Howards president, said the decision to make the building affordable at 60 percent of median area income was made collaboratively and was based on what the university and Amazon considered to be in line with the type of workforce that building stakeholders hope to see in the complex: university faculty, hospital workers and possibly some graduate students. Most of Amazons housing equity funds have been used to build or preserve affordable homes for households earning 60 to 80 percent of the areas median income, excluding some of the Districts poorest inhabitants, who do not earn enough to qualify for apartments like those at Howard Manor. Several former Howard Manor residents claimed the tactics to convince residents to leave were severe, forcing some families to leave the area or the city altogether in pursuit of more affordable housing. They got rid of us so they could do what they were going to do, said Lestor Liburd, who had lived in the Howard Manor building for over 20 years, The Post reported. Never miss a beat: Get our daily stories straight to your inbox with theGrios newsletter. The post Howard, Amazon renovate low-income housing complex after former residents allegedly pushed out appeared first on TheGrio. Rockland County Executive Ed Day's takeaway from the the recently revealed congestion pricing scheme to charge $15 for drivers to enter Midtown Manhattan? "An insult." The reaction comes on the heels of a draft report obtained by the USA Today Network in New Jersey. Congestion pricing: Drivers may have to pay $15 to enter midtown Manhattan under draft plan Drivers who head into Midtown below 60th Street would be hit with the $15 toll, according to November's draft report from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Traffic Mobility Review Board. Earlier predictions had put the Midtown toll around $23, but some officials in the Lower Hudson Valley were still rankled. A big sticking point: The exclusion of a toll credit for drivers who use the George Washington Bridge to get to Manhattan. Only drivers who use the Lincoln and Holland, Hugh Carey and Queens-Midtown tunnels would get a daytime toll credit of $5. The discount discussion has focused on crossings that link directly to Manhattan, taking the Cuomo Bridge crossing at the Tappan Zee off the table. West-of-Hudson 'value gap' Day said that the toll discount plan is "blatantly exclusionary" to west-of-Hudson commuters. "At a minimum," Day said, drivers deserve credit for the George Washington Bridge crossing tolls. Day said many residents of Rockland are excluded from the benefit of a one-seat ride via commuter rail, making it more convenient to drive to the city. That includes a significant contingent of New York City police and firefighters. Residents wait for the train to arrive at Pearl River train station on Aug. 15, 2018. Rockland already experiences a $40 million "value gap" from the MTA, meaning the amount of local taxes and other revenue poured into MTA coffers is higher than the value of MTA services provided within the county. And there's no plan to change that with the expected windfall from Midtown tolls, Day said. Opposition in NJ, Congress Day's not the only west-of-Hudson official blasting the plan. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has called the process opaque, ill-conceived and unfair. Nov 1, 2023; Fort Lee, NJ, USA; U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer speaks during a press conference about a lawsuit filed this week in an attempt to undo New York's congestion pricing plan. U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican whose district includes all of Rockland and Putnam counties plus a portion of Westchester and Dutchess, has opposed congestion pricing and panned the draft plan. One-seat ride: For some at groundbreaking of Gateway rail tunnel, there was a feeling of deja vu Lawler and a bipartisan coalition of Congress members introduced legislation called the Anti-Congestion Tax Act. He also co-chairs the House Anti-Congestion Tax Caucus. "I will continue working with my colleagues to stop congestion pricing dead in its tracks," he said. Like Lawler, state Sen. Bill Weber, a Republican who represents most of Rockland, likened congestion pricing to another new tax for suburbanites. Seeing some positives The toll set at $15 was viewed as a positive by Joan McDonald, Westchester's director of operations. A toll as high as $23 had been floated in earlier iterations. She also lauded a cap on charging the toll just once a day, no matter the number of trips. McDonald demurred at the idea that Westchester leadership was supportive of congestion pricing. Instead, she said, they have been realistic about the need. "We know that the MTA has a hole to fill in their capital budget," said McDonald, the state's commissioner of transportation during the Andrew Cuomo administration. "And we also know that the congestion has significant negative health impacts and economic impacts that go into the city." With three Metro-North lines and Bee Line bus service directly to the 242nd Street NYC subway station, McDonald said many Westchester residents "do have good options for transit." Gov. Kathy Hochul has supported some level of congestion pricing. Next steps The next step: A review by the MTA board at its Dec. 6 meeting. Then a series of virtual and in-person public hearings, with a 60-day comment period, will be held. After reviewing public input, the MTA board will schedule a vote on whether to adopt the tolls. A congestion pricing scanner is shown above the north-bound side of Broadway, between West 60th and 61st St. in Manhattan, Thursday, November 2, 2023 The Midtown congestion pricing plan is expected to start in 2024. "There's still a lot of time in the process," said Lisa Daglian, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. As for west-of-Hudson concerns, Daglian said, "That's a conversation that needs to continue." Details of report Other details in the draft report include: Motorcycles would be tolled $7.50. Trucks would be charged a $24 or $36 toll in the congestion zone depending on their size. For-hire vehicles and taxis would charge customers $2.50 and $1.25, per ride, respectively. Low-income vehicle owners who qualify could receive a 50% discount on the daytime auto toll after the first 10 trips made by that vehicle in a calendar month. Tolls would be charged for vehicles only when entering the zone, not leaving it. Passenger vehicles, motorcycles and automobiles with commercial license plates would be charged only once per day. Tolls overnight between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m. would be reduced 75%. Cashless tolling, with overhead gantries reading E-ZPass transponders, will be used to collect tolls. Toll exemptions would be available for vehicles carrying people with disabilities, certain emergency vehicles and buses or commuter services vehicles. The tolling zone doesn't include the highways on the edge of Manhattan. This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Congestion pricing for Midtown Manhattan revealed Hudson Valley reacts House Republicans released more of Hunter Bidens bank records on Monday, claiming they showed illicit payments to his father, Joe Biden. In reality, the documents likely showed repayments for a truck. Republicans have claimed for months that Biden has benefited from his sons foreign business dealings, but they have yet to produce any actual evidence of wrongdoing by the president. Mondays revelation appeared to be yet another major miss. Today, the House Oversight Committee is releasing subpoenaed bank records that show Hunter Bidens business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden, Representative James Comer, who chairs the committee and has spearheaded the investigation into the Bidens, said in a video. This wasnt a payment from Hunter Bidens personal account but an account for his corporation that received payments from China and other shady corners of the world. The payments did come from an account linked to Owasco, a company Hunter Biden set up to handle income from foreign business deals. The Oversight Committee released one bank statement showing Owasco transferred $1,380 to Joe Biden on September 17, 2018when Biden was not in office. What Comer does not say is that Hunter made only two additional payments to his father in the same amount, on October 15, 2018, and November 15, 2018, a committee aide told the Washington Examiner, speaking anonymously. (Thats a total of less than $4,500.) Comer also does not mention the previously reported emails from Hunters laptop that indicate those transfers were paying his father back for a pickup truck. Instead, he makes it seem as though Hunter has been making shady monthly payments to his father for years. In 2019, Hunters then personal assistant, Katie Dodge, sent multiple messages regarding his bills. In one, sent on January 17, she said that Biden would pay his sons bills in the short-term as Hunter transitions in his career. That email included a PDF of the payments Hunter needed to make. The document showed Hunter owed $1,380 to his father for a 2018 Ford Raptor truck. Dodge had reminded Hunter about the $1,380 truck repayment he owed his father in an email she had sent three days earlier. The truth is Hunters father helped him when he was struggling financially due to his addiction and could not secure credit to finance a truck, Hunters lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said in a statement Monday. When Hunter was able to, he paid his father back and took over the payments himself. Republicans repeatedly cite Hunter when arguing that the president is guilty of corruption. House GOP leaders could move this week toward a vote on formally opening an impeachment probe into Biden. But Republicans consistently fail to show that Biden is guilty of anything. CAMBRIDGE Baristas at The Human Bean began pouring coffee and other specialty beverages at 2149 Southgate Parkway last week. The new business offers specialty grade coffee, real fruit smoothies, whole leaf teas, and hot breakfast items in a drive-thru setting. Local owners, Chad and Lynn Fix along with their daughter Rachel Kinnison, said the staff looks forward to providing products and exceptional customer service, along with the signature chocolate-covered espresso bean on top. The Human Bean opened at 2149 Southgate Parkway in Cambridge on Nov. 28, 2023. Located in the same parking lot as Sheetz and Tractor Supply, the shop offers coffee, pastries and more. Weve got an excited team who have been training and preparing for this, Chad said of the recent grand opening. With a reputation for cheerful baristas and sustainably sourced coffee, The Human Bean coffee company has grown from a single location in southern Oregon to a nationwide brand over the last 25 years. Drive-thru stands throughout the U.S. are primarily owned and operated by individual franchisees like Fix. Our mission is to inspire authentic human connections with every cup. This new drive-thru opening is another opportunity to do just that spread kindness and foster connections in the communities where The Human Bean is served, said Dan Hawkins, the CEO of The Human Bean Franchise. Customers can participate in several fundraising events throughout the year, including the brand-wide Coffee for a Cure Day in October and Mochas for Men in June. All of the money raised by the Cambridge drive-thru location will stay in the community and be given to a local organization of the staffs choosing. The Human Bean of Cambridge is open from 4:45 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. This article originally appeared on The Daily Jeffersonian: The Human Bean offers specialty grade coffee and more in Cambridge The Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, has appealed to the Red Cross and the UN Monitoring Mission after a video emerged of Russians apparently killing surrendering Ukrainian soldiers. "Today I have already addressed them, I have officially sent them letters," Lubinets told public broadcaster Suspilne on Dec. 4. This is not the first case, and we can assume that, unfortunately, it will not be the last case when the Russian Federation cynically violates the Geneva Conventions and the entire spectrum of international humanitarian law. The commissioner said he does not expect "any breakthrough results" from the Red Cross and the UN. At the same time, Ukraine should continue to appeal to these organizations, as it is the Red Cross that has a unique mandate to record violations of the rights of prisoners of war, he said. Ukraine, as defined by international humanitarian law, is in the midst of a "Russian-Ukrainian international military conflict." And during this time, the Red Cross, according to the ombudsman, has done nothing to respond to Russian violations. Read also: Russians who shot Ukrainian prisoners-of-war already eliminated, says Avdiivka municipal administration Unlike the Red Cross, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission, which is permanently operating on the territory of Ukraine, records these facts, Lubinets said. "As of this moment, I have no information, I cannot confirm publicly that I have information about who exactly was shot by the Russians," he added. A video was posted on social media on Dec. 2 showing two Russian soldiers shooting two Ukrainian servicemen who were holding their hands behind their heads, surrendering. Later, the Strategic Communications Department of the Armed Forces of Ukraine confirmed that the Russians had shot two Ukrainian prisoners of war. Read also: Russian forces accused of shooting surrendering Ukrainian soldiers video According to preliminary data from the Office of the Prosecutor General, the incident occurred near the village of Stepove, Pokrovsk district, Donetsk Oblast. The Prosecutor General's Office announced the launch of an investigation into the shooting of Ukrainian prisoners by Russians. The Armed Forces of Ukraine reported on Dec. 4 the elimination of Russian soldiers who shot two unarmed Ukrainian soldiers. At the same time, Ukraines Defense Intelligence statedthat this information needs to be further verified. 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 Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto reportedly confirmed on Dec. 4 that Ukraine's former President Petro Poroshenko planned to meet Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, which the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) presented as justification for barring Poroshenko from leaving the country. Orban is broadly regarded as the most Kremlin-friendly EU leader, and his country has repeatedly obstructed aid for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia. The SBU said on Dec. 2 that it had asked the parliament to cancel Poroshenko's request to leave Ukraine, explaining that Russian intelligence services planned to leverage the meeting for propaganda purposes. Due to martial law, Ukrainian men aged 18-60 are forbidden from leaving the country, barring special circumstances or official permission. Szijjarto claimed that the planned meeting was initiated by Poroshenko and noted that Orban is happy to negotiate with anybody, including foreign ex-leaders. "So if ex-President Poroshenko was considering such an opportunity, we didn't want to stand in the way of that," Szijjarto said during a hearing at the Hungarian parliament. Poroshenko said on Dec. 1 that border guards prevented him from leaving the country even though he had previously received official permission. Oleksandr Korniienko, deputy speaker of Ukraine's parliament, released a video later in the day saying that Poroshenko had a legitimate reason to be initially granted permission to leave the country but that he had received a letter marked "for official use," which caused him to retract the approval. Korniienko said that he could not disclose what the letter said. It is unclear if the letter Korniienko referred to contained the request from the SBU. Rise of populism in Ukraines neighborhood: Not as gloomy as you think Slovakias new Prime Minister, Robert Fico, is consistent in his comments that his country will stop providing aid to Ukraine. He also regularly parrots Russian propaganda, blaming Kyiv for Russias invasion. This makes two of them, with Hungarys Prime Minister Viktor Orban long being accused of b The Kyiv IndependentMartin Fornusek Poroshenko claimed that the cancellation was for political reasons and hinted that the decision came from high up. The former president and the opposition European Solidarity party leader said his reason for traveling outside Ukraine was to go to Poland and help negotiate an end to the ongoing blockade by Polish truckers and then to the U.S. to meet with House Speaker Mike Johnson. Zoltan Kovacs, the Hungarian government spokesperson, said in a response to the SBU's statement on Dec. 2 that "Hungary does not wish to play any part in President (Volodymyr) Zelensky's internal political struggle." Kovacs branded the incident as an "indication that Ukraine is not yet ready for European Union membership." Budapest has repeatedly warned that it would not support the launch of Kyiv's membership talks during an upcoming EU summit in December. Poroshenko, who was elected president in 2014, lost his reelection bid in 2019 to Zelensky in a bitter campaign that often included personal attacks. The ex-president was previously blocked from leaving Ukraine in May 2022 for a NATO summit but was eventually allowed to exit the country on his third try. Opinion: For Ukraine, elections can wait Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made headlines when he confirmed his belief that general elections should be postponed until after Ukraine wins the war. Despite some calls from Western allies to field elections sooner rather than later, polling shows that a majority of Ukrainians agree with Z The Kyiv IndependentMichael Druckman Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said that former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko actually wanted to meet with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, which the Security Service of Ukraine used as an explanation for not allowing Poroshenko to travel abroad. Source: Szijjarto on Monday at a hearing in the Hungarian parliament, reported by Telex Details: Szijjarto said that Orban was happy to negotiate with anyone, including former foreign leaders. Szijjarto noted that the meeting was to be held on the initiative of Petro Poroshenko. At the same time, he did not talk about the topics of the meeting that did not take place. "Let's not go into such science fiction," Szijjarto said. Background: On Friday, Ukrainian MP and fifth president Petro Poroshenko said that border guards did not let him leave Ukraine to attend international meetings in the US and Poland. On 2 December, the Security Service of Ukraine announced that Poroshenko was planning a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and Russian intelligence services supposedly planned to use this meeting to carry out PSYOP against Ukraine. Hungary responded by saying that it "does not want to play any role in President Zelenskyy's internal political struggle" and that such news is "another indication that Ukraine is not yet ready for EU membership". Support UP or become our patron! Photo: Minnesota Department of Corrections (Getty Images) On Friday, charges were filed revealing John Turscak as the inmate accused of stabbing former police officer Derek Chauvin. Turscak, 52, has been charged with attempted murder, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault to commit murder and assault resulting in serious bodily injury. The attempted murder and assault with intent to commit murder charges are individually punishable by a maximum of 20 years in prison. Read more In 1997, he became an FBI informant and provided crucial information about the gang as well as recorded conversations he had with various associates and members. In August 2022, Chauvin was sent to FCI Tucson from a maximum-security Minnesota state prison to serve a 21-year federal sentence for violating George Floyds civil rights and a 22-and-a-half-year state sentence for second-degree murder. In November, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Chauvins appeal of his murder conviction. However, hes currently trying his hand at overturning his federal guilty plea, stating that new evidence shows he wasnt the reason for Floyds death. More from The Root Sign up for The Root's Newsletter. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled Thursday that people may obtain records about their own Firearm Owners Identification cards, but they may not use the states Freedom of Information Act to do so. In a 7-0 ruling, the court said the Illinois State Police acted properly when it denied FOIA requests from individuals who sought copies of letters explaining why their FOID cards had been denied or revoked. But the court also said those individuals could have obtained those records through other means. ISP does not dispute this point but simply maintains, as we have found, that FOIA is not the proper means for obtaining the requested information, Justice Joy Cunningham wrote for the court. The case revolved around a 2011 amendment to the Freedom of Information Act that exempts from public disclosure the names and information of people who have applied for or received FOID cards or concealed carry permits. According to briefs filed with the court, state lawmakers passed that amendment after the Associated Press filed a blanket FOIA request seeking the names of all FOID cardholders in the state, along with the expiration dates of their cards. Thursdays ruling involved two unrelated cases from Madison County in which Sandra Hart and Kenneth Burgess Sr. sought copies of documents related to their FOID cards, including records explaining why their cards had been revoked. Thomas Maag, an attorney who argued the cases at the Supreme Court, said in an interview Thursday that both individuals claimed they had lost the original documents and that they sought copies so they could appeal the revocations. In both cases, ISP denied the requests, citing the exemption in the Freedom of Information Act. But in both cases, the Madison County Circuit Court sided with the applicants and ordered ISP to hand over the requested information. In 2022, the 5th District Court of Appeals upheld those decisions, saying the FOIA exemption was never intended to prevent individuals from obtaining records pertaining to themselves. Both the trial court and the appellate court pointed to the use of plural language in the 2011 amendment that prohibits the release of names and information of people who have applied for or received permits. They argued the use of plural words indicated lawmakers did not intend to prevent people from accessing their own information. But the Supreme Court rejected that analysis, saying the use of the plural words does not, in itself, mean that a request for ones own information would be permissible under the 2011 amendment. The courts ruling noted that the individuals could have obtained their FOID card applications and revocation letters through the Firearms Services Bureau, which is the division of ISP that processes FOID cards. Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government. It is distributed to hundreds of newspapers, radio and TV stations statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, along with major contributions from the Illinois Broadcasters Foundation and Southern Illinois Editorial Association. This is a photo of students standing in line for school lunch. This article was originally published in Oklahoma Voice. Two thumbs up to the groups that are working to erase over $76,000 in student lunch debt. The two advocacy groups Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition and Oklahomans for Public Education announced that they are partnering to launch a fundraiser to eliminate the debt generated by students who eat at their schools. As Nuria Martinez-Keel reported the $76,000 covers overdue bills for just seven school districts. At $37,003, Stillwater Public Schools had the largest debt from last school year. Support The 74's year-end campaign. Make a tax-exempt donation now. Martinez-Keel reported that lunch debt in Oklahoma is on the rise, following the end of a two-year program during the COVID-19 pandemic under which the federal government allowed all students to eat for free at school. Typically, the free food is only offered in low-income areas or to those living in poverty, she reported. The federal program ended June 2022. In August, the Marlow Public Schools Superintendent Corey Holland told The Oklahoman that the district had about a $20,000 unpaid student meal tab. He said its been difficult to get families used to paying for food and dealing with the bureaucratic hurdles of filling out applications. Hed like to see some form of the free meal program return. In El Reno, one school official said some students have stopped eating lunch because they know their parents cant afford it. Related Newark Coalition to Revamp School Lunches After Years of Parent Complaints According to Hunger Free Oklahoma, over 1 in 5 or 208,110 children arent getting the nutrition they need. Oklahoma is also 1 of 5 states that has a food insecurity rate greater than 14.5%. The group reports that food insecure children are more likely to have lower reading and math scores, more significant behavior and social problems and low high school graduation rates. In other words, if Oklahoma children are hungry, theyre not learning. In that context, the recent state report card results released by the state Department of Education arent particularly surprising. Only 27% of students tested at grade level in math, reading and science. State Superintendent Ryan Walters said Oklahomas academic outcomes are stagnant and simply unacceptable given the record investments in public schools. Schools provide a multitude of services. Hunger is something that is largely out of local districts control, but it is definitely something that could be alleviated if lawmakers are willing to think outside the box. Maybe its time to rethink how we feed our public school students. We have billions in our state savings. Now might be a good time to pilot a universal free meal program to see if providing free food to every child, regardless of income, could help reshape our struggling student outcomes and chronic absenteeism. Lawmakers like to complain that theyre investing historic amounts of money into public schools, but not seeing the expected return on their investment. Maybe thats because were simply throwing money at something without examining the root causes. We could have the best curriculum and teachers, but a child who goes to school hungry isnt going to be focused on learning. Schools are uniquely positioned to help tackle childhood hunger with the right legislative investment. After all, they touch the lives of over 700,000 children each day. Related Ryan Walters: How a Beloved Teacher Became Oklahomas Top Culture Warrior Offering meals at no charge means that schools no longer have to collect unpaid meal fees from families or foot the bill for meals served when children do not have money to pay, the The Food Research and Action Center reported. Removing this dynamic between families and schools allows school nutrition staff to focus on preparing and serving healthy meals to children, and it eliminates a significant financial burden for school districts and families. Districts have a lot to worry about. Maybe we shouldnt be making them debt collectors too. Students have a lot to worry about too. Maybe we should make sure its not food. Lawmakers want increased student outcomes. Maybe we can all win here by trying something new, and focusing on a policy discussion that could have a far-reaching benefit and bolster the overall quality of life of hundreds of thousands of children and their families. Oklahoma Voice is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com. Follow Oklahoma Voice on Facebook and Twitter. From the The Morning Dispatch on The Dispatch Happy Monday! They say crime doesnt pay, but the Australian woman who stole a delivery van thatunbeknownst to herwas carrying 10,000 Krispy Kreme doughnuts may beg to differ. Quick Hits: Todays Top Stories Making an International Murderer Activists of the Dal Khalsa Sikh organisation, a pro-Khalistan group, stage a demonstration demanding justice for Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was killed in June 2023 near Vancouver, after offering prayers at the at Akal Takht Sahib in the Golden Temple in Amritsar on September 29, 2023. (Photo by NARINDER NANU/AFP via Getty Images) Sometimes the plots of those ubiquitous network TV cop shows are totally outlandish and unbelievableand sometimes the writers probably wish they could come up with a tale as wild as actual, real-life Department of Justice indictments. Such was the case Wednesday, when the DOJ unsealed a superseding indictment against Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national who prosecutors allege was part of a foiled murder-for-hire scheme targeting a U.S. citizen and Sikh activist. The indictment comes on the heels of a related accusation earlier this fall from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who alleged before the Canadian parliament that the Indian government was responsible for the June murder of a Sikh leader who was also a Canadian citizen. The U.S. allegations against Gupta and his unindicted and unnamed government contactwhich will now play themselves out in federal courtare serious, and could place additional strain on Washingtons burgeoning relationship with India, as the nation is fast becoming an important bulwark against China. The DOJs 15-page superseding indictment filed in the Southern District of New Yorkwhich builds on a short, nondescript document from earlier this yearlays out a harrowing plot to kill an unnamed Sikh activist living in New York City. That activist is reportedly Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, an American citizen who serves as general counsel at the U.S.-based organization Sikhs for Justice, which advocates for an independent Sikh state, called Khalistan, in and around the Punjab region of India. The separatist movement has a violent history in India, even if its now mostly alive in the Sikh diaspora: In the 1980s, two Sikh bodyguards assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi after she allowed Indian troops to storm the holiest Sikh temple in the Sikh-dominated Punjab. Pannun has been banned from India for his political activity and is also facing terrorism charges there, which he disputes. This story began in May of this year, when an unnamed Indian government official, whom prosecutors characterize as a Senior Field Officer with responsibilities in Security Management and Intelligence, reached out to Gupta. Gupta lives in India and, according to the indictment, is involved with global narcotics and weapons trafficking. The two of them collaborated to hire a hitman through a go-between in New York Citya covert informant for law enforcementwho dutifully found one for Gupta. And wouldnt you know, the hitman was an undercover cop. Gupta negotiated a $100,000 payment for the hitmanahem, the undercover copin exchange for killing Pannun, including an up-front payment of $15,000. Gupta arranged for that money to be delivered to the hitman on June 9, the indictment says, though that payment wasnt the only thing Gupta gave the would-be assassin: CC-1 (or co-conspirator 1, the Indian official) apparently also provided details about Pannuns daily life, his address, and his phone numbers, which Gupta passed along. Keen TMD readers will remember June as a big month for U.S.-India relations, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made an official state visit to the U.S., and capped his three-day tripwhich included a chat with Elon Musk and a speech before Congresswith a state dinner at the White House. The indictment alleges Gupta may have been sensitive to that fact in early June: Gupta directed the [undercover cop] to carry out the murder as soon as possible, but Gupta also specifically instructed the [undercover cop] not to commit the murder around the time of anticipated engagements scheduled to occur in the ensuing weeks between high-level U.S. and Indian government officials. On June 11, Gupta sent the Indian official surveillance footage of Pannun. It looks promising [] but we have today only [] if it doesnt happen today it will be done after 24th of June, the official replied. Modi was scheduled to depart the U.S. on June 23. June was a pivotal month for another reason: Only days before Modi landed in the U.S., an Indian-born Sikh leader in Canada, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was murdered by several masked gunmen in the parking lot of his temple outside Vancouver, British Columbia. He, too, was active in the Khalistan movement and faced terrorism charges in India. The indictment alleges the New York plot and Nijjars killing were linkedthe Indian official sent Gupta video of Nijjars body in his truck after he was shot, and Gupta told the undercover law enforcement officer that Nijjar was also the target, but that they had so many targets. On June 29, Gupta explicitly instructed his assassin to kill Pannun, and the next day Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic for his connection to the conspiracy to kill the activist. The DOJ charged him with two counts of murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire. While that might have been the end of the assassination plot, the political fallout had only just begun. In September, only days after an ascendant India hosted the G20 summit, Trudeau took to the floor of the Canadian House of Commons to accuse the Indian government of involvement in the plot to kill Nijjar. Over the past number of weeks, Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a visibly rattled Trudeau told members of parliament. Last week at the G20, I brought [the allegations] personally and directly to Prime Minister Modi in no uncertain terms. Biden, too, brought concerns over Nijjars death to Modi during the summit, and the Financial Times reported that Biden had also discussed the plot to kill Pannun with Modi then, though a spokesperson for the National Security Council did not respond by the time of publication to TMDs request to confirm the substance of that conversation. Following Trudeaus announcementwhich was potentially made possible with help from contextual intelligence from the U.S.Indo-Canadian relations took a nosedive. As we wrote in September: The Khalistan issue has long been a sticky one for India and Canada. India has often claimed Canada is too sympathetic to Sikh separatists. But if things had chugged along alright before, despite their differences, Trudeaus claims kicked off a diplomatic doom spiral. Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat, which India reciprocated with a Canadian envoy. Ottawa tabled a new trade agreement between the countries, originally set to be negotiated at a meeting in October. Both countries have issued dueling travel warnings for their citizens. In a dramatic move Thursday, India suspended its visa program for Canadians wishing to travel to India and asked Ottawa to downsize its diplomatic presence in India. The U.S. wasnt sitting idly by as allegations swirled in public andit increasingly seemsin private. Senior U.S. intelligence officials were reportedly dispatched to New Delhi through the late summer and fall to press their Indian counterparts on the allegations. CIA Director William Burns traveled there in August, followed by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in October. Its still unclear how high up in the Indian chain of command this conspiracy goesor if the official in question was even working on behalf of the Indian government at all. According to federal prosecutors, Guptas co-conspirator was employed at all times relevant to this Indictment by the Indian government, resides in India, and directed the assassination plot from India. Be that as it may, the indictment never specifies that he was acting at the behest of the Indian government, to say nothing of links to Modi himself or members of his cabinet. In September, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar called the Canadian allegations not consistent with our policy. In response to the indictment, a spokesperson for the Indian external affairs ministry, Shri Arindam Bagchi, said U.S. officials had shared some inputs pertaining to nexus between organized criminals, gun runners, terrorists and others which India takes seriously. Those inputs, he added, are being examined by relevant departments. The Indian government also set up a high-level enquiry committee to look into all the relevant aspects of the matter. In response to the U.S. indictment, Trudeau has pushed the Indian government to increase cooperation with Canadas investigation. In an interview last Sunday on Canadas CTV News, the Indian High Commissioner to Canada Sanjay Kumar Verma said the Indian government was aiding the U.S. investigation, and not the Canadian inquiry, because U.S. authorities had shared more information than their Canadian counterparts. There is no specific or relevant information for us to look into in the Canadian investigation, he claimed. The latest indictment comes against the backdrop of several significant strides toward closer U.S.-India relations in the last year, which have been bolstered by both countries unease with Chinese actions and ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region. As we explained in June, the stakes are high: For the United States, India is a crucial counterweight to Chinas heft in the Indo-Pacific. For India, 2020 border clashes with Chinaand Chinas too-cozy relationship with Pakistandrove home the rising threat its neighbor poses. What you have now is an acute awareness in India that it needs to do something about China, says Manjari Chatterjee Miller, a senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. And similarly, if we see China as our number one threat in the next decade or two decades, then we absolutely need India, we cannot afford to alienate India. Will the new allegations in this indictment derail the progress? Certainly, [the indictment] will be something that the U.S. has to consider going forward, Clayton Allen, U.S. program director at the Eurasia Group, told TMD. This does not seem like something thats going to dramatically limit or substantially impact the pretty substantial progress thats been made in the larger bilateral relationship. Its also worth commenting that this seems to have, at this point, somewhat of a tangential link to the Indian government. That plausible deniabilityat least for nowmay be the saving grace for the U.S.-India relationship. Only time will tell how plausible that deniability will remain as the allegations are eventually tested in a court of law. Indeed, so far theres been limited diplomatic falloutand nothing even remotely resembling the reaction to Trudeaus bombshell accusations. The White House has been largely mum on the issue, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken was circumspect when asked about the indictment in Tel Aviv, Israel, on Thursday. A number of us have raised this directly with the Indian Government in past weeks, he said. The government [of India] announced today that it was conducting an investigation, and thats good and appropriate, and we look forward to seeing the results. Here Lies a Good Judge Sandra Day O'Connor testifies before the Senate Judiciary committee during confirmation hearings in 1981 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images) Sandra Day OConnor, the first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, died on Friday at the age of 93 due to complications related to advanced dementia and respiratory illness. While her nomination immediately made history, it was her judicial recordpragmatically seeking a middle position on a number of pivotal issuesthat cemented her legacy as one of the most influential justices on the bench, and the most politically powerful woman in the country at the time. Born in Texas in 1930, OConnor grew up working on her familys cattle ranch before graduating from Stanford University and Stanford Law School (where she was classmates with her future benchmate, Chief Justice William Rehnquist). Despite graduating third in her class, OConnor struggled to get her first job in lawreceiving only one offer to be a legal secretary. She started her own private practice before embarking on a career in Arizona state politics, becoming the first woman nationwide to serve as majority leader of a state senate. During his 1980 campaign for president, Ronald Reagan promised to appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court. In 1981, after the retirement of Justice Potter Stewart, Reagan made good on that pledge through his nomination of OConnor. She is truly a person for all seasons, he said, possessing those unique qualities of temperament, fairness, intellectual capacity, and devotion to the public good which have characterized the 101 brethren who have preceded her. OConnor was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in a 99-0 vote. OConnor ruled in cases involving affirmative action, the separation of church and state, states rights, and discrimination while on the Supreme Courtwithout a clear judicial ideology to predict her vote. Hers was a philosophy that analyzed each challenge on a case-by-case basis, seeking the middle ground. When Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey came before the Supreme Court in 1992, once again putting the issue of abortion in the spotlight two decades after Roe v. Wade, OConnor sided with the majority and upheld the constitutional right to an abortiondespite describing the practice as abhorrent in a pre-nomination meeting with Reagan. She, along with Justices Anthony Kennedy and David Souter, penned a joint opinion explaining their decision to protect abortion access, warning that undoing Roe would have both profound and unnecessary damage to the courts legitimacy, and to the nations commitment to the rule of law. The ruling was indicative of OConnors judicial philosophy: one that was not ideological, but practical. Rare indeed is the legal victoryin court or legislaturethat is not a careful byproduct of an emerging social consensus, she wrote in 2003. For much of her 24-year tenure on the bench, the judicial body was referred to as the OConnor Court, in reference to the critical importance of her swing vote. In July of 2005, a still-young (by historical standards, at 75) Justice OConnor announced that she would retire upon the confirmation of her successor, citing her duty to care for her husband, whose Alzheimers disease has taken a turn for the worse. She was eventually replaced by Justice Samuel Alitobut not for several months, as Rehnquists sudden death in September 2005 put a priority on naming a new Chief Justice. In her later years, OConnor advocated for further research into Alzheimers disease, and founded iCivics, a nonprofit organization that encouraged a broader study of civics in U.S. classrooms. Tributes to the late justice poured in over the weekend. President Joe Biden called OConnor an American icon, and noted that while the two did not always agree, he admired her decency and unwavering devotion to the facts, to our country, to active citizenship and the common good. In a statement on behalf of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts celebrated OConnor as a beloved colleague, a fiercely independent defender of the rule of law, and an eloquent advocate for civics education. As the first woman on the Supreme Court, questions of legacy followed OConnor throughout her careerand though her life served as an inspiration and model to women pursuing the legal profession, she remained decidedly focused on her greatest responsibility. Ive tried to deal with the tombstone question in the past, she once told ABC News. And Ive always just said that I hope, at the end of the day, it can be said on my tombstone: Here lies a good judge. Worth Your Time If you thought tomatoes were basically fine as they are, think again: Seed companies are harnessing the power of R&D to build a better fruit. Plant breeders at the Woodland, Calif., facility of German pharmaceutical and agriculture giant Bayer are testing whether tomatoes meant for processing into pizza sauces and ketchup can survive on a fraction of their traditional water needs, without sacrificing taste or juiciness, Patrick Thomas reported for the Wall Street Journal. Bayers tomatoes are one example of how the agriculture industry is now trying to stay ahead of a changing climate that could disrupt the food supply chain and drive up prices for consumers. Partly it is defense. Droughts and rising temperatures globally have taken a heavy toll on agriculture in recent years, and some scientists and agriculture officials expect a changing climate to make extreme weather events more common. At Kraft Heinz, executives said conditions in California have prompted the ketchup maker to consider Washington state for growing tomatoes needed to help produce the seeds for 40 percent of all tomato products sold in grocery stores worldwide. Presented Without Comment NBC News: Police Charge Director of Miss Nicaragua Pageant With Running Beauty Queen Coup Plot Nicaraguan police said Friday they want to arrest the director of the Miss Nicaragua pageant, accusing her of intentionally rigging contests so that anti-government beauty queens would win the pageants as part of a plot to overthrow the government. Also Presented Without Comment The Seattle Times: U.S. Rep. Adam Smiths Bellevue Home Spray-Painted with Demands for Gaza Cease-Fire Toeing the Company Line Alex answered your questionsand provides some cocktail recipesin Novembers Dispatch Monthly Mailbag ()! In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics team took a look back at 2015 to see how Trumps 2023 primary campaign stacks up, Jonah drew a comparison between the illiberal left and the post-liberal right, and Chris previewed () this weeks Haley-DeSantis debate showdown. On the podcasts: Jonah ruminated on Henry Kissingers legacy on The Remnant and Jamie debates Shadi Hamid about the U.S. role in Israels war in Gaza on the Dispatch Podcast. On the site over the weekend: Evan Ellis marked the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine with a look at what it might mean today, Sherif Girgis celebrated the 30th anniversary of Robert P. Georges seminal work, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, and Marvin Olasky examined the intersection of quantum physics and theology. On the site today: Philip Wallach bids adieu to George Santos and Nick Hafen explains the Purdue Pharma case before the Supreme Court. Let Us Know If the allegations of the murder-for-hire plot are accurate, should the United States rethink its burgeoning partnership with India? Do concerns about countering China outweigh these incidents? Read more at The Dispatch The Dispatch is a new digital media company providing engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary, informed by conservative principles. Sign up for free. At least 11 hikers were killed, and another 12 are missing after a volcano in Indonesia erupted on Sunday. Mount Marapi, located in West Sumatra, spewed thick clouds of ash reaching heights of 9,800 feet. The latest At the time of the eruption, 75 mountaineers were climbing the volcano. Local officials confirmed that 52 of them were evacuated by West Sumatras search and rescue agency. Motorists ride past by as Mount Marapi spews volcanic ash during its eruption in West Sumatra, Indonesia, on Monday. (Ardhy Fernando/AP) On Monday, rescue efforts to locate those missing had been affected by smaller sporadic eruptions. However, Jodi Haryawan, a spokesperson for the rescue team, said the search was not brought to a halt. Once it was safer they continued the search, he said. Some of the 120 rescuers who had been involved in the search worked through Sunday night to locate missing hikers. At least three people were found alive near the volcanic crater after suffering severe burns. Pictures of the recovery operations show rescuers maneuvering through the rough terrain, evacuating victims down the slopes of the volcano. Rescuers carry a hiker down Mount Marapi. (Fairuz Syaugi/AFP) They are being carried down manually. Rescuers are taking turns bringing them down, Abdul Malik, West Sumatras search and rescue agency head, told AFP. We cant do an air search with a helicopter because the eruption is ongoing. Of the three found alive at the crater, Malik described their conditions as weak. The mother of Zhafirah Zahrim Febrina, a rescued 19-year-old climber, said her daughter was going through tremendous trauma after enduring a night of pain from her burns. Febrina was one of 18 students who were on a hiking trip when the volcano erupted. Were climbers allowed on the active volcano? Since 2011, Mount Marapi has been at the third-highest alert of four levels, meaning locals and climbers are prohibited from traveling farther than 2 miles below the peak. As Mount Marapi erupted, it sent hot ash and other volcanic debris 1.8 miles into the sky. (Yasin Demirci/Anadolu via Getty Images) This means that there should be no climbing to the peak, Hendra Gunawan, the head of the Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation, said. However, despite the warning, Gunawan said, many climbers broke the rules to fulfill their satisfaction to climb further. Is this unprecedented? Mount Marapi is the most active volcano in West Sumatra and has been erupting intermittently since 2004. The deadliest eruption was in 1979 when close to 60 people died. Marapi is just one of the more than 120 active volcanoes in the country. The largest living population in the world to live near a volcano, roughly 8.6 million people, is located in Indonesia. Ukrainian blogger Myroslav Oleshko, considered controversial for urging Ukrainian men to flee the country, has himself left Ukraine on allegedly false papers, Ukrainian news network TSN reported, citing anonymous sources in law enforcement, on Dec. 4. According to TSNs sources, Oleshko fled Ukraine through the Starokozache checkpoint in the Odesa region on Aug. 28, 2023. As able-bodied men are barred from leaving the borders of Ukraine during martial law, Oleshko is believed to have purchased a forged medical certificate exempting him from duty. After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, Oleshko moved from Kyiv to Ternopil, where he received a summons for a medical examination in late April. The blogger was summoned to the districts military draft office and underwent a medical examination at the Ternopil Regional Military Medical Commission. The Ternopil Commission found no health issues, and he was issued a certificate of fitness for military service. On May 13, 2022, Oleshko was supposed to report to the military enlistment office to join the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but according to government records, instead returned to Kyiv. TSN TSNs law enforcement source emphasized that several aspects of the medical certificate used by Oleshko to leave the country indicate that it was a forgery. "The corner stamp on the fitness certificate is embossed, not printed, as on the certificate, the source explained. Also, on Oleshkos identification and certificate, there are corresponding stars on the heraldic seal of the Military Commissariat, which has not been on the original seal for a long time. The identification number 014326/2 is invalid because /2 does not exist in such a form. Under the number 014326, a completely different person is registered. That source added that forged medical certificates are often available for purchase for around $5,00 to $8,000 from current or former employees of the draft system, with an additional $3,000 surcharge for entering the forged certificate into the digital Oberih database used by the Ukrainian border service. Thus, the total cost of fleeing the country likely ran the blogger anywhere from $8,000 to $11,000. TSN Oleshko last appeared on Ukrainian television two weeks ago when he claimed on Kyiv-24 TV channel that he left legally but could not provide more details. TSN reports that corrupt military officials helped him to leave the country, adding that it turned out he suffers from "numerous disorders of the nervous system, the heart of an 88-year-old grandfather, and complete unsuitability for military service." After his escape abroad, Oleshko announced on social media that he was in Austria and urged others to follow his example and leave Ukraine. Later, the blogger deleted this video from his YouTube channel. Comments left by Ukrainian netizens on his content have been largely derisive, negative, and mocking. 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 Since the Black Sea humanitarian corridor opened in August, 200 ships have passed through it, carrying 7 million metric tons of cargo from Ukrainian ports, including almost 5 million tons of Ukrainian agricultural products, Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said on Dec. 4. As of the time of his announcement, Kubrakov said that 31 ships are currently loading cargo at ports in Odesa Oblast, and another 30 are transiting through the corridor. U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink said on Nov. 13 that the 100th ship had passed through the corridor and that 3.7 million metric tons of food and goods had been transported since it was opened. Kubrakov's figure represented a significant increase in the total less than one month later. The humanitarian corridor was opened after the Black Sea Grain initiative fell apart in July following Russia's unilateral withdrawal. Russia then threatened that all ships sailing to Ukrainian ports would be considered legitimate targets. The corridor hugs the coastlines of Ukraine and NATO members Romania and Bulgaria rather than going directly towards the Bosphorus Strait. Although many ships have passed through the corridor safely, their safety is not guaranteed. A Russian missile hit a civilian ship at a port in Odesa Oblast on Nov. 8, killing one crewmember and injuring four others. Russian forces have also attacked Ukrainian infrastructure more than 20 times since the collapse of the initiative, damaging more than 160 infrastructure facilities, including 122 vehicles. In addition, there is the danger of mines and other explosive devices that have been placed in the Black Sea. Is Ukraines new Black Sea corridor working? Experts say it has potential Perplexing reports earlier this week that Ukraine had suspended its temporary grain corridor in the Black Sea sparked confusion and concern. Kyiv-based Barva Invest consultancy reported on Oct. 26 that Ukraine had temporarily halted the use of its new trade route in the Black Sea due to the potenti The Kyiv IndependentDominic Culverwell Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. FILE PHOTO: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks to the media prior to departure from Al Maktoum International Airport in Dubai FILE PHOTO: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks to the media prior to departure from Al Maktoum International Airport in Dubai By Steve Holland, Simon Lewis and Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden is relying on a small group of veteran advisers to help navigate the Israel-Hamas conflict that has killed thousands, split Western allies and risks spiraling into a wider war. ANTONY BLINKEN - SHUTTLE DIPLOMAT A long-serving foreign policy adviser to Biden, Blinken, 61, has traveled to the Middle East three times since the conflict erupted, including six visits to Israel, juggling the need to show solidarity with Israel after the Hamas attacks with an effort to tamp down regional tensions. Shuttling between Israel and neighboring majority-Muslim states, he has pushed back on calls for a ceasefire, while also pressing Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza notably during nine hours of negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet in October. Often seen as a policy wonk, the soft-spoken Blinken invoked his Jewish heritage and held emotional encounters in Tel Aviv with survivors of the Oct. 7 attacks. A father of two young children, he has spoken repeatedly about being personally affected by images of children suffering on both sides of the conflict. JAKE SULLIVAN - THE LAST GUY IN THE ROOM Biden often turns to Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, when he is considering final options and looking for advice and counsel. "He develops and puts forward the policy options before the president for him to decide," said one U.S. official. "Jake is often that last guy in the room giving the president his advice and counsel and his recommendations on the way forward." Sullivan, 47, was national security adviser for Biden when he was vice president and deputy chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He gathers policy options from across government agencies and prepares them for Biden to consider, the traditional role of the national security adviser. "He's really kind of the conductor of a very vast and fast-moving orchestra," the official said. BRETT MCGURK - THE NEGOTIATOR When Biden needed an envoy to help negotiate the release of hostages seized by Hamas militants during their deadly rampage through towns in southern Israel on Oct. 7, he sent Brett McGurk, the 50-year-old National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa. McGurk, who held national security roles for presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, is known for diving into the details with top officials across the Middle East. Before the Israel-Hamas conflict, McGurk led negotiations to strike a deal for Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for stronger defense commitments for the Saudis from the United States. The Hamas war froze that effort. When Israel and Hamas agreed to a hostage swap in a deal mediated by Qatar on Nov. 21, McGurk was in Doha meeting with the Qatari prime minister to work out the deal's structure, U.S. officials said. McGurk relies on a wide array of contacts inside and outside governments in the region. "The president and Jake (Sullivan) rely heavily on Bretts expertise and his ability to pick up the phone to talk to whoever he needs to, to move things along," said the U.S. official. BILL BURNS - THE INVISIBLE MAN Long before he became the United States' chief spymaster, CIA Director Bill Burns handled some of the most sensitive U.S. national security issues, including the secret talks that led to the Iran nuclear deal, as a career diplomat. It's a role that Burns, 67, still performs for Biden, most recently traveling to Qatar to meet the head of Israel's Mossad spy agency and the Qatari prime minister to discuss how to free the hostages seized by Hamas. Since his 2021 swearing-in as CIA director, Burns has made at least four dozen foreign trips, the vast majority in secret, said a source familiar with the matter. Those have included Moscow in 2021 before Russia invaded Ukraine and Ankara in 2022 to warn Russia's intelligence chief against using nuclear weapons against Ukraine. The CIA declined comment on Burns' travel. Burns is brought in "when things need to get done quietly," said a U.S. official, describing his approach as "more subtle, more driven toward issues of intelligence and what we know and what we don't know and how do we make up the difference." LLOYD AUSTIN - STARK WARNINGS By the time U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin traveled to Israel after Hamas' Oct. 7 assault, he had already spoken with his Israeli counterpart on at least four occasions in just six days. That heavy pace has kept up ever since. The calls with Yoav Gallant, 24 of which have been publicly disclosed by the Pentagon, can often last anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, a senior U.S. defense official said. In Israel, Austin, 70, compared Hamas to the Islamic State militants he helped combat as a U.S. Army general before retiring. Hamas, like ISIS, offered nothing but "but zealotry and bigotry and death," he said. He has also warned Israel about the failure to protect civilians in Gaza and the risks of radicalization. "If you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat," he said. KAMALA HARRIS - POST-CONFLICT PLANS Vice President Kamala Harris, who recently met with several Arab leaders on the sidelines of the COP28 climate conference, has focused her attention extensively on the thorny issue of post-conflict planning. In Dubai, Harris stressed three elements for a post-conflict Gaza: reconstruction, security and governance. "No forcible displacement, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, no reduction in territory and no use of Gaza as a platform for terrorism, she said. Palestinian Authority security forces must be strengthened to assume security responsibilities in Gaza and the West Bank, she said. "We want to see a unified Gaza and West Bank under the Palestinian Authority (PA), and Palestinian voices and aspirations must be at the center of this work," she said. JON FINER - ASKING QUESTIONS Sullivan relies heavily on his deputy national security adviser, Jon Finer. Finer, 47, previously served as special adviser for the Middle East and North Africa and foreign policy speechwriter for Biden when he was Obama's vice president. "He ... is frequently the guy in the room who says 'Hey this doesn't make sense, have we thought about doing it this way?'" the official said. As Sullivan's deputy, Finer also helps coordinate among U.S. government agencies and helps develop and shape policy options. He was John Kerry's chief of staff when Kerry was Obama's secretary of state, and was a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, including from the Middle East. (Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed, Nandita Bose; Editing by Don Durfee, Heather Timmons and Deepa Babington) Four killings in four days. Three of them were homeless men. Hunted and shot to death as they slept on the streets of Los Angeles, a city facing a glaring homelessness crisis. The suspected serial killer was finally identified as 33-year-old Jerrid Joseph Powell after police discovered he was already in custody for another murder that happened during his alleged killing spree the same week. Mr Powell was arrested on Wednesday for a botched robbery that left Nicholas Simbolon dead at his home in San Dimas, 28 miles east of Los Angeles. By Saturday, investigators connected him to the murders of the three homeless men using his car and the murder weapon, a gun, that they found inside, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore announced at a press conference. I am grateful that this suspect in this case is in custody and no longer a threat to our community, Chief Moore said. News of the arrest came just a day after authorities sounded the alarm of a possible serial killer targeting homeless people in the downtown area with city officials announcing an urgent plea for the homeless to be on high alert for the killer preying on the unhoused. The suspected serial killer was identified as 33-year-old Jerrid Joseph Powell (LAPD) No motive in the violent four-day killing spree has yet been determined. Heres what we know so far: A timeline of the killings Los Angeles authorities said the first victim Jose Bolanos, 37 was found dead with a gunshot wound around 3am on Sunday, 26 November on a couch outside in an alley in South Los Angeles. Police Chief Michel Moore said at a news conference on Saturday that the man was killed brutally and ruthlessly. On Monday, 27 November, Mark Diggs, 62, was shot and killed while pushing a shopping cart around 5am, near downtown, according to officials. It was chilling, Mr Moore said Saturday, recalling video footage of the killing. The coldblooded manner in which he walks up and shoots this individual without any hesitation, no interactions, and then leaves that location and and we now know to follow home an individual, a young father of two, whos simply charging his car. The third homeless shooting occurred Wednesday about 2.30am, in the Lincoln Heights area, where the body of a 52-year-old man was found on a sidewalk where he had been sleeping. Police did not immediately identify him pending notification of family. All three men were asleep in the open areas like alleys or sidewalks when they were shot and killed, Chief Moore said. It was believed the suspect approached each victim as they slept, opened fire then walked away, according to Moore. Surveillance video showing suspect (LAPD) Early the next morning, Powell was arrested after the Beverly Hills Police Department conducted a vehicle stop. Police believed the vehicle had been used during a robbery gone wrong in San Dimas the night before. It was also later connected to the three homicides, Moore said. Less than 24 hours before Mr Powell was arrested, Nicholas Simbolon, 42, who was not homeless, was found dead in the garage of his home in the city of San Dimas, 28 miles east of Los Angeles, at 6.48pm. Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said it appeared the suspect had followed Simbolon home from an electric vehicle charging station about 12 miles from his house. The suspect, later identified by police as Mr Powell, robbed Simbolon of some personal belongings before shooting him and fleeing. How investigators connected the dots At Saturdays press conference, Chief Moore revealed how investigators connected the dots between the shootings. He said investigators working on the cases of the fatal shootings discovered that the shell casings in the two cases on Monday and Wednesday were similar and that there had been a similar case on Sunday in another bureau. One vehicle, a 2024 BMW M440 that was seen in footage all three shootings, was the key and a task force worked on locating it. Sheriff Robert Luna said Beverly Hills police used what he described as an automatic license plate reader system to identify the car. We know theres controversy out there about the usage of this system, he noted. But let me tell our community something: If we did not enter that plate into this system, this individual that we believe is responsible for at least four murders may have been out there and re-offended. He was victimizing, as was said, some of our most vulnerable community members." Detectives then tracked it to Beverly Hills, where police had conducted the traffic stop and found the firearm inside, authorities said. The vehicle was in custody of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Office in connection with the San Dimas homicide. Inside the vehicle was a gun, the murder weapon used in all four homicides, Chief Moore said. A car linked to the killings (LAPD) Authorities do not believe there was any connection between Mr Powell and the victims. The chief said authorities worked quickly to identify the suspect, aided by surveillance technology. Had they not had access to those tools, this individual, I am convinced, would still be moving about the city and the region, and killing individuals, Moore added. No motive has yet been determined. Botched robbery victim was a father-of-two described as gentle Nicholas Simbolon was a county employee known to his two young children, wife and family as Noli. I cannot even express my feelings, how devastated we are right now, the victims aunt, Fanny Prentice, told KTLAs Shelby Nelson. Ms Prentice described the moment she heard the news about his death. He says, Noli died, just like that, she said. I mean, how can you hear this? Died? Noli died, what? I just saw him Saturday, said goodbye. That will be his last goodbye to me. Simbolon had worked as a business systems analyst for the superior court and in 2019 joined the IT staff of the chief executives office as a principal systems analyst, officials said. He was a prolific developer who had recently completed an innovative IT system to process our countys budget process, Kathyrn Barger, a member of the county Board of Supervisors, noted at a press conference. His coworkers describe him as a kind, gentle, and hardworking person. All of the men were killed outside (KTLA) Suspected LA serial killer is a convicted felon with violent background Authorities are asking anyone with information about the suspect, including other crimes he may have committed, to come forward. LA County Sheriff Luna described Mr Powell as a convicted felon who had violence in his background. We want to make sure that anybody who may have been a victim of this individual that they come forward and notify your own police department, Luna added. Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon said they are working on further charges. The residents of Los Angeles County can breathe a sigh of relief today. Once a case is presented, our team will ensure that justice is served, Gascon added. Authorities said they cant ignore the possibility that Mr Powell might have committed other crimes. Based on his criminal history, he didnt just start doing this a week ago, Sheriff Luna said. Mr Powell was set to appear in court on Monday. His bond is set at $2m. The locations of the shootings (LAPD) Killings push city officials to create a task force The killings pushed city officials to create a task force to help get the homeless off the streets. Los Angeles County is the nations most populous county, with about 10 million people, and was home to more than one in five of the nations homeless people, according to a 2022 federal tally. As of January, the last official count, more than 75,000 people were homeless across the county on any given night. There was a push to open emergency shelters that are typically relegated to harsh weather to get as many homeless people off the street as possible. The rate of homeless homicide has spiked this decade, data from the Los Angeles Police Department revealed the total for this decades three years exceeds all of last decades, The Nation reported. In 2017, 29 homicide victims in Los Angeles were homeless. By 2022, that number had jumped to 74. You have an epidemic of homelessness and living outside, and an epidemic of gun violence, said Barbara DiPietro, senior policy director for the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. No one should be surprised to see that this is increasing. We throw vulnerable people to the wolves every day. As Nazis infamously looted art, jewelry and other valuables from the many cities and towns across Europe during the Second World War, Adolf Hitlers protege Julius Streicher had other, more debased collectibles on his mind: pornography. Born on Feb. 12, 1885, in the Bavarian town of Fleinhausen, Streicher was once considered a rising star on the radical right. The school teacher-turned-soldier fought in the First World War and in 1919 helped launch the Nuremberg wing of the Deutschsozialistische Partei or, German Socialist Party which espoused right-wing ultra-nationalist, anti-Catholic and antisemitic principles, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Three years later, Streicher persuaded his followers to merge with the National Socialist German Workers Party the Nazi party under Hitlers command. Considered among the old guard in the party, it was Streichers oratory skills, much like the Nazi leader, that drew the attention of his comrades. In 1923, Streichers passion for propaganda coalesced with his lecherous mind when he launched Der Sturmer, a virulent anti-Semitic newspaper that featured crude, graphic anti-Jewish cartoons, photographs and articles. Week after week, month after month, for nearly 22 years, Streicher tied together accusations of blood libel with pornography, which has come to be considered the very nadir of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda. These grotesque, often pornographic cartoons of Jewish stereotypes, which were drawn by Philipp Rupprecht, accompanied the propaganda Streicher disseminated, saturating the consciousness of Germans during the Third Reich and contribut[ed] to the capacity of many Germans to accept the Nazi program, according to Michael D. Bulmash, whose family collection of Holocaust-related propaganda is accessible via Kenyon College. In a July 1946 article titled Portrait of a Pervert, author Herbert Eisen detailed the lascivious mind of Streicher. Its pages abounded with tales of rape by non-Aryans often negroes of fair German virgins, described with all the details of smut and bawdry which a lecherous mind can invent, Eisen wrote in the Australian magazine The Pertinent. The [Nazi] excesses which have now too late become notorious, even among the most indifferent, and which have their origination in sexual aberrations skillfully enhanced and implanted over two decades, must be regarded as Streichers main contribution to the cause of Nazism, Eisen continued. These lurid sexual assault stories Streicher propagated were largely consumed by the young men of Germany, and, with Streichers prominent place within the Nazi party, Der Sturmers graphic cartoons and pictures became the most accessible pornography of its time. But Streicher didnt just produce fanciful, smutty and violent content. He also consumed it. Vast amounts, in fact. Streicher even went as far during World War II as ordering the local Nuremberg police and troops to seize all the pornography they discovered for research purposes, according to the popular podcast Behind the Bastards. Upon the Allied victory in May 1945, Streicher was arrested as Jew-Baiter Number One near his home in Nuremberg by Maj. Henry Plitt of the 101st Airborne Division. As American paratroopers tore through the Nazis home, they stumbled upon what might have been the largest stockpile of pornography in the world at the time. Streicher was later convicted during a trial at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal on the charge of crimes against humanity, with the court deeming the Nazi culpable for murder and extermination within the pages of Der Sturmer. Yet his putrid newspaper wasnt the only topic of conversation during the trial. According to Joseph Maier and Sender Jaari, who worked as researchers for the prosecution during the Nuremberg Trials, Streicher was without a doubt the dirtiest man in Nuremberg. His collection of pornographic literature was the largest we have ever seen. Julius Streicher was executed by hanging in October 1946. What became of his erotic collection, however, remains somewhat of a mystery. Archivists, do your thing. Two sets of lawyers are bringing competing complaints against the insurance company they accuse of mishandling an Iowa medical malpractice lawsuit that resulted in a record-setting $97 million jury verdict. Andrew and Kathleen Kromphardt won the massive award in Johnson County against Obstetric and Gynecological Associates of Iowa City and Mercy Hospital after their son suffered serious brain injuries during birth in 2018. The jury award, believed to be the largest malpractice verdict in Iowa history, includes money for anticipated lifelong 24/7 care for the couple's son. The massive verdict was one factor Iowa legislators cited when they passed laws to cap noneconomic damages in future malpractice cases an outcome that, according to the clinic's lawyers, may have been the insurance company's goal from the start. Attorney Nick Rowley, representing the clinic, sued Minnesota-based insurer MMIC on Nov. 21, accusing the company of acting in bad faith in refusing to settle the Kromphardts' case before trial, pressuring the clinic to improperly declare bankruptcy to avoid paying the bill, and using the resulting catastrophic results to lobby Iowa legislators to pass tort reform the company had been seeking for years. But on Tuesday, attorneys representing the Kromphardts filed their own lawsuit over MMIC's alleged bad faith conduct toward the clinic. Attorneys for the family say they control the rights to that claim to go toward the roughly $65 million they are still owed by the clinic. Their attorneys say a judge will have to decide who has the right to assert the clinic's claims going forward. However the case proceeds, the parties are looking for significant money. The Kromphardts' complaint seeks damages from MMIC of more than $100 million. Rowley's goals are even more ambitious. The attorney previously told the Iowa Capital Dispatch he intended to sue the insurer for "more than $1 billion." MMIC, for its part, is fighting back in multiple courts, including asking a federal judge to grant a restraining order preventing Rowley from further meddling in the Kromphardts' case against the clinic. A spokesperson told the Register the new lawsuits against MMIC contain "assertions that are simply untrue" and the company expects both will be dismissed. Two arguments allege bad faith by MMIC Even the Kromphardts' lawyers, who have no love for the clinic, allege the insurer poorly served the doctors there. "The arrogance of MMIC is well beyond anything I've ever seen in my 45 years as a lawyer," attorney Jack Beam told the Register. "They never offered a penny (to settle), even though the doctors desperately wanted the case to settle." The Kromphardts' complaint cites emails between the clinic's attorneys before trial, showing the doctors trying without success to get their insurer to agree to negotiate. Ultimately, facing an unpayable debt to the Kromphardts worth tens of millions of dollars, the clinic sold itself to Mercy Hospital Iowa City, with its shareholder doctors becoming Mercy employees. The complaint states the shareholders "lost millions of dollars in reasonably expected profits and potential sale of the practice in the future." Rowley, in his complaint, offers a motive for MMIC's alleged failure to deal in good faith, as well as subsequently pressuring the clinic to declare bankruptcy. The attorney, who has raised similar allegations in other lawsuits against MMIC, believes the insurer was trying, and succeeded, to pressure legislators into passing the tort reforms it wanted. Attorney Nick Rowley "This is a badly behaved insurance company that has a long history of bad behavior in Iowa," Rowley said in a statement. "MMIC needs to be held accountable for perverting their duties to insured Iowans, and for its successful efforts to defraud Iowa lawmakers into passing legislation that fundamentally violates the constitutional rights of Iowa healthcare patients. Where is the money, and who gets to sue? The dueling lawsuits set up an awkward fight between the clinic and the Kromphardts, even before MMIC files any reply in court. Court filings show that, to satisfy the outstanding jury verdict, the Kromphardts in July sent sheriff's deputies to take legal possession of the clinic's potential causes of action against MMIC, meaning the family gets to bring those claims on the clinic's behalf and, if successful, keep the proceeds. Matt Patterson, another of the Kromphardts' attorneys, said they intend to argue to the court that they are the ones entitled to bring the clinic's claims against MMIC. "(We will) intervene in the (clinic's) case and have the issues/cases consolidated for the judge to rule who is prosecuting the cause of the action, which we believe will be ruled on in our favor," he said in an email. Rowley, via email, said he does not believe the Kromphardts can extinguish the clinic's right to bring its own claims, and that the family's attorneys are "jumping on the train that we have set in motion because we have the case against MMIC that has teeth to it." Even if a court rules the Kromphardts have sole rights to the clinic's claims, Rowley said, his suit also brings claims on behalf of the three individual doctors who owned it, claims that the Kromphardts do not own meaning the two sides will still likely have to cooperate against their mutual foe. "The practical effect is that the (clinic) and the Kromphardt estate will have to work jointly to prosecute the case against MMIC under the law," Patterson said. Supreme Court delays case, and MMIC responds The back-to-back filings have roiled an already sprawling dispute. In addition to suing MMIC, Rowley's complaint also brings legal malpractice claims against the Shuttleworth & Ingersoll law firm, which defended the clinic at the malpractice trial. The law firm, which did not respond to a request for comment, subsequently withdrew from that case over the resulting conflict of interest two weeks before the clinic's appeal was to be argued before the Iowa Supreme Court. On Tuesday, citing the shakeup of the legal team, Rowley asked the Supreme Court to postpone those oral arguments and allow more time for settlement negotiations. The same day, the court agreed, imposing a 60-day stay on the case. In response, MMIC filed several motions Thursday asking the Supreme Court to lift the stay and let the case proceed. While the Shuttleworth law firm now has a conflict of interest, the clinic still has other competent appellate attorneys on the case, the company argued. More importantly, the company says, Rowley has no right to postpone the case, conduct settlement negotiations or do anything else about the case, because the clinic's insurance policy gives MMIC the full right to control its legal defense. "MMIC believes in the propriety of Dr. (Jill) Goodmans care and has merely sought to have her conduct reviewed by this court," the insurer's attorneys argue. "It is telling that attorney Rowley is set on avoiding such review." MMIC is also fighting back in federal court. In June, after Rowley was first hired by the clinic and began threatening to negotiate a settlement, the company asked a federal court to rule that it had the exclusive right to manage the clinic's legal defense, and that if the clinic were to dismiss or otherwise interfere with the appeal, it would void its malpractice insurance and abandon any bad faith legal claim against MMIC by doing so. The federal court has not yet ruled in that case, and after Rowley asked the Iowa Supreme Court to postpone the case, MMIC returned to the federal court Wednesday with an emergency motion for a restraining order to prevent any further "interference" by Rowley. The motion cites numerous examples of what the company believes are bad faith and conflicts of interest on Rowley's part. MMIC accuses Rowley of filing his lawsuit earlier this month specifically to force the Shuttleworth law firm off the case and delay the malpractice appeal; of colluding with the Kromphardts' attorneys despite, nominally, being opposing parties; and of acting against the clinic's legal interest to further his own grudge against MMIC. With multiple pending cases, what next? The timeline for the expanding dispute to move forward is unclear. The Iowa Supreme Court has not scheduled a new oral argument date, or responded to MMIC's motion to lift the stay Rowley requested. The Kromphardts have not filed to intervene in Rowley's suit against MMIC, and MMIC has not yet filed a response to either of the bad-faith suits against it. In MMIC's federal case, the court has given Rowley until Dec. 8 to respond to the emergency restraining order request. William Morris covers courts for the Des Moines Register. He can be contacted at wrmorris2@registermedia.com, 715-573-8166 or on Twitter at @DMRMorris. This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Insurer MMIC accused of bad faith in $97M Iowa medical malpractice case By Blake Brittain WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. appeals court on Monday threw out a $2.18 billion patent-infringement award won by patent owner VLSI Technology against Intel Corp, overturning one of the largest verdicts in the history of U.S. patent law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed the jury's 2021 verdict that Intel infringed one VLSI patent, and sent the case back to Texas for a new trial to determine how much Intel owes for infringing a second VLSI patent. Patent holding company VLSI is owned by investment funds managed by Fortress Investment Group. Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Co agreed to acquire a majority share of Fortress from Japan-based Softbank Group Corp this year. Representatives for VLSI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the decision. An Intel spokesperson said the company was pleased with the ruling and will argue at the new damages trial that VLSI's patent is "of little value." VLSI has sued Intel in multiple U.S. courts, accusing it of infringing several patents covering semiconductor technology. A jury in Waco, Texas awarded VLSI $2.18 billion in the first trial from the dispute. The jury found that technology in Intel microprocessors infringed patents that VLSI had acquired from Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors. The Federal Circuit on Monday ruled that there was insufficient evidence for the jury to have found that Intel infringed one of the two patents at issue, which had accounted for $675 million of the verdict. The Washington-based appeals court affirmed that Intel infringed another VLSI patent, but said that problems with the damages analysis justified a new trial to determine the proper award. The jury had awarded VLSI $1.5 billion in damages for Intel's infringement of the patent. Intel stock was down more than 4% on Monday morning. Other major chipmakers were also seeing declines. Intel defeated VLSI's bid for more than $3 billion in damages in another Waco jury trial later in 2021. A separate jury in Austin, Texas decided that VLSI was entitled to nearly $949 million from Intel in a third patent case last year. The companies later agreed to dismiss another potential multi-billion-dollar case in Delaware. Another trial in Northern California is set to begin in 2024. (Reporting by Blake Brittain in WashingtonEditing by David Bario, Will Dunham, Chizu Nomiyama and Sharon Singleton) The author is former CEO of Nucor Corp. in Charlotte and co-founder and vice chair of Coalition for a Prosperous America. Its hard to find much that Americans agree on these days. And yet, in poll after poll, voters unite on one issue China. Across the political spectrum, Americans believe China poses a serious economic and military threat to the United States. Theyre right to worry since Beijing has aligned itself with Russia and Iran, continues to hack U.S companies, and is threatening Taiwan. It should be a no-brainer then to make sure that Americas investors dont fund any of Chinas military ambitions. And yet our very own Congressman, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, is inexplicably blocking bipartisan congressional efforts to limit U.S. investments in China. Dan DiMicco It would be great if we could wave a magic wand and make sure that not one dime of Wall Street money goes to Beijing. But capital markets are a huge arena, and its difficult to police the literally trillions of dollars flowing around the globe each day. However, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Bob Casey, (D-Penn.) have offered a pragmatic solution in this years National Defense Authorization Act. Theyve introduced an amendment that would require Americans to notify the U.S. government of potential investments in technologies tied to Chinas military. Sounds simple, right? U.S. investors shouldnt help China develop technologies intended to kill American soldiers. But, as Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, McHenry is actively blocking the Cornyn-Casey proposal. Why would McHenry take such a position? For starters, he believes this would limit the ability of Americans to sit on the boards of Chinese companies. In a joint letter to colleagues, he said that it would be desirable to have Americans on the boards of Chinese companies spreading Western standards. Thats a wildly naive view. But McHenry also believes that U.S. investment in China has reached a 10-year low and thus should be of little concern. This, too, is seriously misguided. In October, the Financial Times reported that Vanguard Group Inc., the worlds second-largest asset manager, was channelling investment into 60 companies within Chinas military industrial complex. The article was so damning that Vanguard has subsequently moved to close its China fund. Its not just Vanguard, though. BlackRock, MSCI, and other Wall Street firms continue to offer investment funds containing the very companies currently building and modernizing Chinas military. And Fidelity International just introduced its first fixed income mutual fund in China. If anything, the problem is getting worse. There are literally thousands of Chinese companies tied to Chinas military included in investment products sold by leading Wall Street fund managers such as BlackRock, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, State Street and PIMCO. McHenry is far out of step with the will of the American people on this. And the Cornyn-Casey proposal passed in the Senate this summer by a vote of 91-6. Senator Cornyn recently noted that it would be a slam-dunk in the House, too, saying, Almost everybody in the House agrees with us. Its Chairman McHenry whos the one who derailed it. The wider issue is whether the U.S. can continue to compete with China. Beijing is rapidly modernizing its military and China has also openly demonstrated its brutality through the use of slave labor in Xinjiang. The prudent move would be to take every possible step to limit investment in China. Yet, McHenry is actually on record as favoring more private investment in China. This is dangerously foolish. We no longer have the luxury of courting Beijing and hoping that China will westernize and democratize. The Pentagon is already focused on Chinas military escalation, including the growth of its nuclear program and its increasing military presence overseas. Congress must be equally vigilant. The American people want strong action on China. Lawmakers must go over McHenrys head and use every means possible to block Beijing from accessing U.S. investment that can further develop Chinas military. Dan DiMicco is former CEO of Nucor Corp., headquartered in Charlotte. The Israeli military struck terrorist infrastructure targets in the Gaza Strip during the final hours of 1 December. Source: Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Quote: "The targets included operational command centres in which Hamas terrorists were operating, underground sites, and a military compound from which anti-tank missiles were launched at [IDF] soldiers earlier today [1 December]." Details: In addition, the IDF destroyed a number of terrorist cells throughout the Gaza Strip, including one with more than 10 terrorists. This cell operated alongside the ground forces and was discovered by IDF observation soldiers. Also, in the course of joint ground and air operations, IDF forces disrupted the activities of two terrorist cells that had fired mortar shells towards IDF forces in the Gaza Strip. pic.twitter.com/vJnMi7d28O (@idfonline) December 1, 2023 pic.twitter.com/7ZpQhtfb3s (@idfonline) December 1, 2023 Previously: The IDF said it had resumed operations against Hamas in the early hours of 1 December as the terrorist group broke an operational pause. Since the end of the ceasefire, the Israeli Air Force has carried out airstrikes on about 200 targets in the Gaza Strip. Background: Israel and Hamas agreed to extend the temporary ceasefire in the Gaza Strip for an eighth day. Support UP or become our patron! Xinhua research report sheds light on China's approach to humanomics Xinhua) 08:35, December 04, 2023 This photo taken on Dec. 3, 2023 shows a copy of the research report titled "The Humanomics in the New Era" in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province. (Xinhua/Liu Mengqi) GUANGZHOU, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- Xinhua News Agency on Sunday unveiled a research report during the ongoing 5th World Media Summit, shedding light on China's practice of a new development format that underscores the symbiotic relationship between humanities and economy. The report, titled "The Humanomics in the New Era," was released by New China Research (NCR), the think tank under Xinhua, in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Structured into seven parts, it offers an overview of China's new development format focusing on a people-centered approach and the integrated development of culture and economy in the process of advancing Chinese modernization. Addressing the report launch ceremony, Fu Hua, president of Xinhua and chairman of the academic committee of NCR, said that the Communist Party of China, along with its people, has persistently expanded the Chinese path to modernization on the new journey of the new era. China is progressing toward high-quality development as it pursues the symbiotic interaction of humanities and economy, creating a new model for human advancement and attaining globally acclaimed achievements, Fu added. "Humanomics in the new era" has gradually taken shape, demonstrating distinct features that emphasize the symbiosis of culture and economy, promote a people-centered philosophy of development, and highlight the integration of tradition and modernity, he noted. Xinhua News Agency anticipates fostering exchanges and collaboration with media outlets worldwide using platforms including the World Media Summit, propelling new advancements in the reporting and research of humanomics in the new era, Fu said. Other speakers who shared their insights at the event include Martin Jacques, former senior fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University; Zheng Yongnian, chairman of the Guangzhou Institute of the GBA; Maria Bernarda Llorente, president of Telam in Argentina. They agreed that China has explored a path where human and economic development thrive together as it pursues high-quality development, adding that this experience is worth studying. A central thread running through the Xinhua think tank report is the distinctive character of Chinese modernization from that of the West, said Jacques. Zafar Uddin Mahmood, president of Understanding China Forum, a Pakistan-based think tank, believes that humanomics can be developed into a science, saying that the report proposed a new direction regarding the relations between humanities and economy. Hailing China's remarkable achievements, Victoria Panova, vice rector of Russia's National Research University-Higher School of Economics, said that the report released by Xinhua introduced a new concept, which is of great importance to the world. She called for drawing inspiration from the finest achievements of each other's civilizations. The Chinese version of the report, along with English, French and Russian versions, was simultaneously released across the globe. The bilingual edition of the research report, titled in both Chinese and English, has been published by Xinhua Publishing House. Fu Hua, president of Xinhua News Agency and chairman of the academic committee of New China Research (NCR), addresses the launch ceremony of a research report titled "The Humanomics in the New Era" during the ongoing 5th World Media Summit (WMS) in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Liu Bin) Guests attend the launch ceremony of a research report titled "The Humanomics in the New Era" during the ongoing 5th World Media Summit (WMS) in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Liu Mengqi) Zheng Yongnian, board director of Guangzhou Institute of the Greater Bay Area, speaks at the launch ceremony of a research report titled "The Humanomics in the New Era" during the ongoing 5th World Media Summit (WMS) in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Li Ming) Guests attend the launch ceremony of a research report titled "The Humanomics in the New Era" during the ongoing 5th World Media Summit (WMS) in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Liu Mengqi) Guests attend the launch ceremony of a research report titled "The Humanomics in the New Era" during the ongoing 5th World Media Summit (WMS) in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Li Ming) This photo taken on Dec. 3, 2023 shows a copy of the research report titled "The Humanomics in the New Era" in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province. (Xinhua/Liu Mengqi) (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) Gazas main road is a battlefield, the Israel Defense Forces has said, as it claimed it was opening a new humanitarian corridor for civilians to evacuate. The advance of Israeli forces in the north and east of Khan Younis means civilians can no longer travel along the Salah al-Din road that runs through the Palestinian territory, it said. The road constitutes a battlefield, so it is extremely dangerous to go there, it said. The IDF said it had opened a new bypass route for civilians to the west of Khan Younis. It comes as Israeli tanks pushed further south into the Gaza Strip. 04:52 PM GMT Today's blog is now closed Thank you for reading Mondays live coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. Todays top developments: Israeli tanks pushed south into the Gaza Strip as the IDF begins a new phase of the war. Israel said the IDF is coming face-to-face with terrorists and killing them. Israel ordered residents of Khan Younis - the main city - to evacuate ahead of intense bombardment Israel claims it carried out 200 overnight strikes across Gaza, including striking a terror structure at a school Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Argentine President-elect Javier Milei and thanked him for his intention to move Argentinas embassy to Jerusalem A US warship came under attack in the Red Sea in an escalation of a series of maritime attacked linked to the Israel-Hamas war. Israel accused Iran and proxies such as Yemens Houthi Rebels of directly jeopardising global commerce and maritime security by targeting commercial ships in key trade routes The Hamas-run health ministry in the Gaza Strip on Monday said 15,899 people had died in the Palestinian territory since the start of the war with Israel, with 42,000 wounded. An unconfirmed report by a Palestinian news agency claimed 50 people were killed by an Israeli strike on two schools where displaced people were sheltering Please join us again tomorrow for the latest updates on the Israel-Hamas war. 04:35 PM GMT Palestinian Christian spreads Christmas cheer Issa Kassissieh, the only accredited Santa Claus in Israel, visited Jerusalem on Monday in his festive attire. Mr Kassissieh hopes his presence will bring joy to children amid the ongoing war. Palestinian Christian Issa Kassissieh, dressed as Santa Claus, rides a camel on the Mt. of Olives overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem 04:25 PM GMT Pictures from the conflict A convoy of Israeli tanks maneuvers near Israel's border with Gaza Israeli soldier gestures towards a tank crew member as it crosses a road near the country's border with Gaza 04:21 PM GMT 50 killed in Israeli strike on two schools, Palestinian news agency claims A strike reportedly hit two schools sheltering displaced people in the Daraj neighbourhood in the north of Gaza City, the WAFA agency said. The reports have not yet been verified. A spokesperson for the Israeli army said it was looking into the claims. Earlier on Monday, Israel ordered Palestinians to leave parts of Gazas main southern city, Khan Younis. 03:47 PM GMT Israel accuses Iran of threatening international trade Yemen's Houthi rebels, backed by the Iranian regime, are escalating attacks on commercial ships in key trade routesdirectly jeopardizing global commerce and maritime security. Iran and its proxies pose a serious threat to the free flow of international trade. pic.twitter.com/TnjU6C8jJB Israel (@Israel) December 4, 2023 03:41 PM GMT Turkey warns Israel: dont target Hamas on our soil Turkey has warned Israel of serious consequences if it tries to target Hamas members living outside Palestinian territories, including in Turkey, a Turkish intelligence official said on Monday. Necessary warnings were made to the interlocutors based on the news of Israeli officials statements, and it was expressed to Israel that (such an act) would have serious consequences, the official said. Israels public broadcaster Kan reported on Sunday that the head of Israels domestic security agency Shin Bet said the country would hunt down Hamas in Lebanon, Turkey and Qatar, even if it takes years. It was unclear when Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar made the remarks or to whom. 03:30 PM GMT Israel and Palestine accuse each other of genocide at UN Both sides made the claims at a UN Human Rights Council event in Geneva ahead of the 75th anniversary of the convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The attacks by Hamas on October 7 were motivated by a genocidal ideology, Yeela Cytrin, a legal advisor at the Israeli mission in Geneva, told the diplomats. Meanwhile, Palestinian representative Dima Asfour insisted the man-made catastrophe resulting from Israels massive bombing campaign and ground offensive was a textbook case of genocide. 03:16 PM GMT Palestinians flee from Khan Yunis after Israel tells civilians to evacuate Palestinian flee from Khan Yunis to Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on December 4, 2023, after the Israeli army called on people to leave certain areas in the city, as battles between Israel and Hamas militants continue 02:54 PM GMT Netanyahu thanks Milei for his support of Israel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Argentine President-elect Javier Milei and thanked him for his intention to move Argentinas embassy to Jerusalem, Mr Netanyahus office said. Mr Netanyahu congratulated Mr Milei on his election win and thanked him for his support of Israel during the war with Hamas. The prime minister thanked the president-elect for his intention to move the Argentina embassy to Jerusalem, and invited him to visit in Israel, it said. 02:50 PM GMT Gaza map 02:36 PM GMT 15,899 people killed in Gaza, claims Hamas-run health ministry The Hamas-run health ministry in the Gaza Strip on Monday said 15,899 people had died in the Palestinian territory since the start of the war with Israel, with 42,000 wounded. Among the victims, 70 per cent were women and children, it added. The latest figures come as the Red Cross president called for the protection of civilians in Gaza, warning that the human suffering there was intolerable. 02:16 PM GMT Israeli tanks push south in new phase of war Israeli tanks have pushed south into the Gaza Strip as the IDF begins a new phase in the war. The press towards the main city of Khan Younis came after Israel ordered many of its residents to evacuate, telling people to head further south amid intense aerial bombardment. Israeli forces largely captured the northern half of Gaza in November, and since a week-long truce collapsed on Friday they have swiftly pushed deep into the southern half. Witnesses told the AFP news agency that dozens of Israeli tanks had entered the enclave near Khan Younis on Monday. The road that divides the city from Deir al-Balah further north has reportedly been cut off. Many of those who have taken shelter in Khan Younis were displaced from other areas in the central and northern Gaza Strip during the first phase of Israels ground offensive. 02:03 PM GMT Pictured: Relatives of the victims of the Israeli attacks on Nuseirat refugee camp Relatives of the victims of the Israeli attacks on Nuseirat refugee camp - Anadolu/Anadolu 01:46 PM GMT Main Gaza road is 'battlefield,' says IDF Gazas main road is a battlefield, the Israel Defense Forces has said, as it warned it was taking aggresive action against Hamas in Khan Yunis. The advance of Israeli forces meant that in the north and east of the city, civilians could no longer travel along the Salah al-Din road that runs through the Palestinian territory, it said. The road constitutes a battlefield, so it is extremely dangerous to go there, it warned. The IDF said it had opened a new humanitarian corridor to the west of Khan Yunis. 01:29 PM GMT IDF blow up Gaza's main courthouse Israel has blown up Hamass main courthouse in Gaza, footage appears to show, as its forces pushed south in a new phase of their offensive. Footage shows the IDF demolishing Hamas's main courthouse in the Gaza Strip, known as the Justice Palace.https://t.co/MhoaTgrcHa pic.twitter.com/6UAuiLknwf Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) December 4, 2023 The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) demolished the building in the central Gaza Strip, known as the Justice Palace, in a controlled blast, The Times of Israel reported. It comes nearly two weeks after the Israeli armys Nahal Brigade captured the site. The Telegraph has not been able to independently verify the footage. 01:20 PM GMT Israeli goals in northern Gaza 'almost met,' says commander The commander of Israels armoured corps said that his and other ground forces were close to achieving their war mission in the northern Gaza Strip and were operating elsewhere in the Palestinian enclave against Hamas. The goals in the northern section have almost been met, Brigadier-General Hisham Ibrahim told Israels Army Radio. We are beginning to expand the ground maneouvre to other parts of the Strip, with one goal: to topple the Hamas terrorist group. The military released footage of troops patrolling in tanks and on foot, in fields and in badly damaged urban areas, and firing from weapons, without specifying the location in Gaza. 12:45 PM GMT Suffering in Gaza 'intolerable,' says Red Cross chief The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross said that she had arrived in war-torn Gaza, warning that the suffering in the Palestinian territory was intolerable. I repeat our urgent call for civilians to be protected in line with the laws of war and for aid to enter unimpeded, Mirjana Spoljaric said on X, formerly Twitter, adding that the hostages must be released and ICRC allowed to safely visit them. It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, and with a military siege in place there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible, she added in an ICRC statement. 12:23 PM GMT WHO board to hold emergency session on Gaza health situation The World Health Organisation (WHO) will hold an extraordinary session of its Executive Board on Dec. 10 to discuss health conditions in the Occupied Palestinian territory, a document from the UN global health agency showed on Monday. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had convened the session after receiving a request from 14 members of the WHOs board, the WHO document said. A WHO spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 11:48 AM GMT Guarantee 'realistic' protection to Gaza civilians, Berlin urges Israel Germany has urged Israel to guarantee realistic protection to civilians in the Gaza Strip, as Israel moved ground forces into the south of the territory in its war on Hamas. Smoke billowing after an Israeli strike in the Gaza Strip - JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP Something we expect from Israel is that they not only urge civilians to leave the danger zone, but that they are in a realistic position to find safe shelter elsewhere, foreign ministry spokesman Sebastian Fischer told a regular press briefing. Too many civilians have already been killed in this war, he said. 11:41 AM GMT IDF fighting Hamas 'across Gaza' after pushing into south The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) says it is fighting Hamas across the Gaza Strip after pushing into the enclaves south. The IDF continues to extend its ground operation against Hamas centres in all of the Gaza Strip, spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters in Tel Aviv. The forces are coming face-to-face with terrorists and killing them. Hamas said it had engaged Israeli troops one mile from the southern city of Khan Younis. Residents told Reuters they could hear tank fire. On Sunday, the IDF ordered civilians to evacuate some areas in and near the city but made no announcement of any new southern ground assault. It marked the clearest indication yet that Israel has now started its widely expected planned ground offensive in southern Gaza as its renewed offensive enters its fourth day. 11:14 AM GMT Pictured: Palestinian citizens inspect the destruction caused by air strikes on their homes in Khan Yunis, Gaza Palestinian citizens inspect the destruction caused by air strikes on their homes in Khan Yunis, Gaza - Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images Europe 11:00 AM GMT We are not ignoring hostage families, insists Netanyahu Benjamin Netanyahu has denied claims that he is ignoring the hostage families [see post at 10:14]. The Israeli Prime Minister said a meeting between the war cabinet and the families of the hostages was already scheduled for Wednesday, a statement from his office said. Due to the request from the families, the possibility of bringing it forward is being examined, the statement said. 10:33 AM GMT Six Thai hostages back from Gaza A second group of Thai hostages who were released by Hamas in the Gaza Strip were brought home on Monday, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Families of the six Thai farmer workers rushed to hug their loved ones at Bangkoks Suvarnabhumi Airport. Im glad to be back, said Owat Suriyasri, 40, thanking the governments of Thailand and Israel. One of the returnees sustained injuries in the abdomen while being held by Hamas, according to Thailands Labour Ministry. 10:14 AM GMT Hostage families demand to meet with Cabinet Families of hostages who remain in Gaza are demanding to meet with the Israeli cabinet this evening. Yael Adar, the mother of the hostage Tamir Adar, said the families wanted reassurance that freeing the hostages was the governments priority,. All we ask is that the cabinet meet with us today, we deserve it, this ignoring us is humiliating, she told a press conference, noting that families would meet at the entrance to the IDF Defence Ministry and stay there. If they dont meet with us by eight tonight we will need to ask what look into what to do to step up our protests, she added. 09:42 AM GMT Erdogan says Netanyahu will be tried as war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu will be tried as a war criminal over Israels ongoing offensive in the Gaza Strip, Turkeys president has said. Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a speech that Gaza is Palestinian land and will always belong to the Palestinians. Mr Erdogan was speaking in Istanbul at a meeting of the standing committee for economic and commercial cooperation, part of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). 09:13 AM GMT Pictured: Young children injured in Israeli airstrikes arrive at hospital Young children injured in Israeli airstrikes arrive at Nasser Medical Hospital - Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images Europe 09:03 AM GMT 75 Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza since war began The Israeli army said three more soldiers had been killed in fighting in the Gaza Strip, raising the number of troop deaths there to 75 since the war began. All three died in northern Gaza on Sunday, the military said. The deaths brought the total number of Israeli defence personnel killed since October 7 - among them those who died in the Hamas attacks themselves, and including soldiers, reservists, kibbutz guards and others - to 401. 09:02 AM GMT UNICEF: 'A night of utterly relentless bombardment' UNICEF spokesperson James Elder has posted a video on X, formerly known as Twitter, in Khan Younis. Despite what has been assured, attacks in the south of #Gaza are every bit as vicious as what the north endured. Somehow, it's getting worse for children and mothers. Your voice matters. We must believe we can be a part of Stopping The War on Children ... Silence is complicity pic.twitter.com/1kYV18YMT3 James Elder (@1james_elder) December 4, 2023 In a separate video posted yesterday, he said: I feel like Im almost failing in my ability to convey the endless killing of children here. 08:32 AM GMT Three Israeli soldiers injured in shelling from Lebanon Three Israeli solders were injured in shelling from Lebanon overnight, the Israel Defense Forces has said. Overnight, a number of mortal shell launches from Lebanon toward IDF posts in the area of Shtula were identified. As a result, three IDF soldiers were lightly injured and evacuated to receive medical treatment, it said. Further shelling from Lebanon was identified this morning, the Israeli army said, adding that in response its troops struck the sources of the fire. 08:19 AM GMT We are not trying to displace anyone, says Israel Israel said it was not seeking to force Palestinian civilians to permanently leave their homes, even as it acknowledged conditions in the besieged Gaza Strip were tough. Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus said: We are not trying to displace anyone, we are not trying to move anybody from anywhere permanently. We have asked civilians to evacuate the battlefield and we have provided a designated humanitarian zone inside the Gaza Strip, he said, referring to a tiny coastal area of the territory named Al-Mawasi, as he acknowledged the situation in Gaza was tough. We are perfectly aware that there is limited space and limited access and that is why it is so important to have the buy-in and support of international humanitarian organisations to help with the infrastructure in the Al-Mawasi area, he added. In its latest estimate, OCHA said around 1.8 million people in Gaza, roughly 75 per cent of the population, had been displaced, many to overcrowded and unsanitary shelters. 08:15 AM GMT Israel issues new orders to Gazans to evacuate to areas further south Avichay Adraee, the Israel Defense Forces spokesman for the Arab media, issued a directive for residents of certain blocks to evacuate to shelters. He attached a map, dividing the Gaza Strip into areas and neighbourhoods. # . : ( 36 54-38 221-219) pic.twitter.com/UkyB5cW6Yn (@AvichayAdraee) December 4, 2023 07:51 AM GMT Israel claims it carried out 200 overnight strikes across Gaza Israel claims it carried out 200 strikes overnight across Gaza. In a statement on Telegram, the Israel Defense Forces claimed troops struck terror infrastructure inside a school in Beit Hanoun. In addition, an IDF aircraft struck vehicles containing missiles, mortar shells, and weapons, thwarting an imminent attack against IDF soldiers, it said. An additional IDF aircraft struck military infrastructure designated for ambushing the troops with anti-tank missiles. 07:35 AM GMT Pictured: Aftermath of an Israeli strike in Khan Younis Palestinians inspect a house destroyed in an Israeli strike in Khan Younis - IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA/REUTERS Palestinians displaced due to Israeli attacks take refuge in Nasser Hospital as the attacks continue in Khan Yunis, Gaza - Anadolu/Anadolu 07:28 AM GMT Israeli medical committee declares some Gaza hostages dead in absentia Israel has been declaring some of the missing as dead in captivity, a measure designed to grant anxious relatives some closure. A three-person medical committee has been poring over videos from the Oct. 7 rampage by Hamas-led Palestinian gunmen in southern Israel for signs of lethal injuries among those abducted, and cross-referencing with the testimony of hostages freed during a week-long Gaza truce that ended on Friday. That can suffice to determine that a hostage has died, even if no doctor has formally pronounced this over his or her body, said Hagar Mizrahi, a Health Ministry official who heads the panel created in response to a crisis now in its third month. Designation of death is never an easy matter, and certainly not in the situation embroiling us, she told Israels Kan radio. Her committee, she said, addresses the desire of the families of loved ones abducted to Gaza to know as much as possible. Of some 240 people kidnapped, 108 were freed by Hamas in return for the release by Israel of scores of Palestinian detainees as well as boosted humanitarian aid shipments to Gaza. 07:26 AM GMT US warship among vessels attacked in Red Sea A US warship came under attack in the Red Sea, the Pentagon said on Sunday, in an escalation of a series of maritime attacks linked to the Israel-Hamas war. Several other commercial vessels came under fire off the coast of Yemen, including a UK-owned ship hit by rocket fire. A US military statement said guided-missile destroyer USS Carney shot down three drones in the attacks after responding to calls for assistance. Read more here 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. By Arafat Barbakh and Mohammed Salem GAZA (Reuters) -Intense Israeli air strikes hit the south of the Gaza Strip on Monday, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians, including in areas where Israel had told people to seek shelter, residents and journalists on the ground said. Israeli troops and tanks also pressed their ground campaign against Hamas militants in the south of the enclave after having largely gained control of the now-devastated north. At the United Nations, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed to Israel to avoid further action that would make the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza worse, and to spare civilians from more suffering. "For people ordered to evacuate, there is nowhere safe to go and very little to survive on," U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said. Israel's closest ally the United States has repeatedly urged it to do more to protect civilians and said the Israeli offensive in the south should not repeat the "massive" civilian toll it has had in the north. About 900 people have been killed in Israeli air strikes since a truce ended on Friday, Gaza health authorities said. On Monday, top U.S. officials said it was too early to make a definitive assessment on whether Israel was following U.S. advice to take concrete steps to ensure protections for civilians, although a State Department spokesperson called some aspects of the offensive in southern Gaza an "improvement". U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Washington expected Israel to avoid attacking areas identified as "no-strike" zones in Gaza. Early on Monday, Israel ordered Palestinians to leave parts of Gaza's main southern city, Khan Younis. But residents said that areas which they had been told to go to were also coming under fire. Israel's military posted a map on social media platform X with around a quarter of Khan Younis marked off in yellow as territory that must be evacuated at once. Three arrows pointed south and west, telling people to head towards the Mediterranean coast and towards Rafah, a major town near the Egyptian border. Desperate Gazans in Khan Younis packed their belongings and headed towards Rafah. Most were on foot, walking past ruined buildings in a solemn and silent procession. But the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza (UNRWA), Thomas White, said people in Rafah were themselves being forced to flee. "People are pleading for advice on where to find safety. We have nothing to tell them," he said on X. In the territory's northern part, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA said at least 50 people were killed in an Israeli air strike that hit two schools sheltering displaced people in the Daraj neighbourhood of Gaza City. The Gaza health ministry could not be reached for comment on the report and it was not immediately possible to verify it independently. A spokesperson for the Israeli army said it was looking into the report. Separately, the health ministry said at least 15,899 Palestinians, 70% of them women or under 18s, have now been killed in Israeli bombardments of the Hamas-ruled enclave in eight weeks of warfare. Thousands more are missing and feared buried in rubble. Israel launched its assault to wipe out Hamas in retaliation for an Oct. 7 cross-border attack by Hamas gunmen. They killed 1,200 people and seized 240 hostages, according to Israeli tallies - the deadliest single day in Israel's 75-year history. Over 100 of the hostages were freed during a seven-day truce. Israeli authorities say seven civilians and an army colonel died in captivity, while 137 hostages remain in Hamas-run Gaza, their condition not always known. 'NO SAFE AREA' Bombing at one site in Rafah overnight had torn a crater the size of a basketball court out of the earth. A dead toddler's bare feet and black trousers poked out from under a pile of rubble. Men struggled with their bare hands to move a chunk of the concrete that had crushed the child. Later they chanted "God is greatest" and wept as they marched through the ruins carrying the body in a bundle, and that of another small child wrapped in a blanket. "We were asleep," said Salah al-Arja, owner of one of the houses destroyed at the site. "They tell you it is a safe area, but there is no safe area in all of the Gaza Strip." Israel accuses Hamas of putting civilians in danger by operating from civilian areas, including in tunnels which can only be destroyed by large bombs. Hamas denies it does so. As many as 80% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have fled their homes in the Israeli bombing campaign that has reduced much of the crowded coastal strip to a desolate wasteland. Israeli forces largely captured the northern half of Gaza in November, and since the truce collapsed on Friday they have swiftly pushed deep into the southern half. Tanks have driven into Gaza from the border fence and cut off the main north-south route, residents say. The Israeli military said the central road out of Khan Younis to the north "constitutes a battlefield" and was now shut. The commander of Israel's armoured corps, Brigadier-General Hisham Ibrahim, told Army Radio the military had almost achieved its goals in northern Gaza. "We are beginning to expand the ground manoeuvre to other parts of the Strip, with one goal - to topple the Hamas terrorist group," he said. (Reporting by Mohammed Salem in Gaza, Maayan Lubell, Ari Rabinovich and Emily Rose in Jerusalem, Maggie Fick in Beirut, and Andrew Mills in Doha; Writing by Peter Graff, Angus MacSwan and Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Mark Heinrich, Jane Merriman and Rosalba O'Brien) JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday spoke with Argentine President-elect Javier Milei and thanked him for his intention to move Argentina's embassy to Jerusalem, Netanyahu's office said. Netanyahu congratulated Milei on his election win and thanked him for his support of Israel during the Gaza war. "The prime minister thanked the president-elect for his intention to move the Argentina embassy to Jerusalem, and invited him to visit in Israel," the statement said. Milei's team declined to comment on the matter on Monday, though the libertarian economist said during the campaign for last month's election that he intended to move the country's embassy to Jerusalem. Only a handful of countries have their Israel embassies in Jerusalem, with most others maintaining diplomatic representation in the economic hub of Tel Aviv. Milei, who says he intends to convert to Judaism, visited the tomb of a well-known orthodox Jewish rabbi during a recent trip to the United States. He has repeatedly said he will take a strongly pro-Israel stance on foreign policy. While Israel considers Jerusalem its eternal and indivisible capital and wants all embassies based there, most of the world does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the entire city, believing its status should be resolved in negotiations. Palestinians want the capital of an independent state of theirs to be in the city's eastern sector, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed in a move never recognized internationally. (Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem and Lucila Sigal in Buenos Aires; Editing by Howard Goller, Alison Williams and Christina Fincher) TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) Seconds after Palestinian gunmen began shooting up a busy Jerusalem bus stop last week, Yuval Castleman raced toward the scene and opened fire on the attackers, only to be shot and killed by an Israeli soldier who apparently suspected he was also an assailant. The shooting of Castleman, who in security camera video is seen kneeling, raising his hands and flinging open his shirt to indicate he isnt a threat, underscores what critics say is an epidemic of excessive force by Israeli soldiers, police and armed citizens against suspected Palestinian attackers. He took all the necessary steps so that he could be properly identified, Castlemans father, Moshe, told Israeli Army Radio on Sunday, and they kept shooting at him. Castlemans shooting mirrors previous incidents where Israeli security forces or civilians have opened fire on attackers who no longer appear to pose a threat, or on suspected assailants or unarmed civilians deemed to be threats. The incident comes as tensions have been inflamed by the war between Israel and Hamas, with Israelis on edge and bracing for further attacks. It also coincides with a drive by Israels national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, to ramp up the number of gun-toting civilians. Palestinians and human rights groups have long accused Israeli forces of using excessive force, killing attackers who no longer posed a threat and even harming innocent people mistaken for attackers and then skirting accountability. Early Thursday, as the entrance to Jerusalem was swelling with traffic, two Hamas militants exited their car at a bus stop and opened fire on waiting commuters, killing three. In security camera footage, Castleman is seen running from the other side of the busy highway, brandishing his gun and shooting at the attackers. Soldiers are also seen opening fire. Castleman, a 38-year-old lawyer who was on his way to work, is seen appearing to flee the gunshots. He then kneels, raises his arms and opens his shirt before he is shot. His family is demanding to know how the heroism of their son culminated in his killing. Israeli authorities are investigating the incident and police said initial findings showed one of the soldiers mistakenly suspected Castleman was an attacker. Castleman, a resident of a Jerusalem suburb, had previously worked in the Israeli security forces, according to his father, and used his own gun against the attackers. He was shot in the jaw, chin and stomach. The Israeli military issued a statement Sunday expressing sorrow for Castlemans death. It said the soldier suspected in the shooting was questioned under caution a step that often precedes criminal charges. The soldier, identified by Israeli media as reservist Aviad Frija, told Israeli Channel 14 TV that he was active among hilltop youth a term used to refer to radicalized Jewish teen squatters on hilltops in the occupied West Bank who have been known to attack Palestinians and their property. Frija was not asked about Castlemans shooting. But he boasted about killing the attackers, saying doing so was every soldiers goal. Hilltop youth are politically aligned with Ben-Gvir, a disciple of a racist rabbi, who as the minister in charge of police has been leading a drive to proliferate arms among civilians by loosening the criteria for acquiring a gun permit. Ben-Gvir said Thursdays attack proved his policies were needed. Weapons save lives. We see this time after time. Everywhere there are arms, citizens, police, soldiers save lives, he said at the scene, without referring to Castleman. Ben-Gvir has also pushed for a national guard force he says is meant to fill in gaps where police are spread thin. Critics say it would amount to his own personal militia. Asked about the shooting on Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he supported Ben-Gvirs policy to increase access to weapons even if it meant civilians like Castleman could be killed. The presence of armed civilians many times saved the day and prevented a bigger disaster, he told reporters. It could be that we will pay a price for it. Thats life. Netanyahu rival-turned-wartime ally Benny Gantz called for an investigation into the proper use of guns and the regulations surrounding their use. Thats not life, but a warning sign, he posted on X, formerly Twitter. After an uproar over his comments, Netanyahu reversed course on Sunday, calling Castlemans death a terrible tragedy. He is an Israeli hero, Netanyahu said. He promised a thorough investigation and said he had called Castlemans father to offer condolences. Thursdays incident had echoes of previous ones that have shed light on Israeli open fire rules. Most infamous was the 2016 shooting death by an Israeli soldier of a badly wounded Palestinian assailant as he lay on the ground. The shooting by Sgt. Elor Azaria, which came as Israel was battling a low-level wave of Palestinian attacks, divided the country. While Israels top generals pushed for the prosecution of a soldier they say violated the militarys code of ethics, large segments of the public, including politicians on Israels nationalist right, sided with Azaria. Even Netanyahu, in a nod to his nationalist base, gave only lukewarm support to his military. Similarly, in 2015, after a deadly Palestinian attack at a bus station in the southern city of Beersheba, an Eritrean man was shot and beaten to death by a mob after being mistaken for an assailant. Two men charged with the death were acquitted, with the court siding with their claim that they believed he was an attacker. Critics said Thursdays incident was especially severe because Castleman took what they said were clear steps to prove that he was not an attacker. It was an execution, wrote Shelly Yacimovich, a former leader of Israels liberal Labor Party, on the Ynet news site. Against the law, against open fire regulations, the sanctity of arms. Immoral. And all that would be true even if he was a terrorist. Moshe Karadi, a former police chief, said he believed the background of the soldier who allegedly shot Castleman influenced his thought process. The finger is lighter on the trigger there than in other places, he said, referring to the West Bank, where settler violence has flared during the war. Karadi said Ben-Gvirs crusade to arm more civilians would lead to untrained and unqualified arms carriers. He said greater access to guns would spark increased violence against minorities and women and lead to more incidents like Thursdays killing of an innocent civilian. Diana Buttu, a Palestinian analyst, said the incident reflected a reality that Palestinians have long lived with. She said how Castleman died arms raised, knees to the ground didnt surprise her given the heightened tensions since the war, coupled with what Palestinians see as the systemic use of excessive force and a drive to have more Israelis carry arms. It was really just a question of time until someone was gunned down in that way, she said. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WFLA. A convoy of Israeli tanks moves into postion near the border with Gaza - AMIR COHEN/Reuters Israel sent tanks into southern Gaza on Monday as it launched an aggressive new phase in its ground offensive. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out airstrikes on the main southern city of Khan Younis overnight and urged residents in some neighbourhoods to flee. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israels prime minister, has vowed to root out Hamas in the densely populated south of Gaza. The US has urged him to restrain any operations, given that hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled to the south and cannot escape into Egypt because the border is closed. On Monday morning, the IDF published a map online with around a quarter of Khan Younis marked off with an order to evacuate. Three arrows pointed south and west, telling people to flee 20 numbered blocks and head further towards the Mediterranean sea and the Egyptian border. Dozens of tanks were later seen heading towards Khan Younis down the main north-south road in the territory, Salah-al Din. The IDF said it was taking aggressive action against Hamas and other terrorist organisations in the city. Yoav Gallant, Israels defence minister, said that the fate of Hamas battalions in the south would be the same and those in the north and worse. Israeli tank firing towards the Palestinian territory as IDF urged residents in some neighbourhoods to flee - JACK GUEZ/AFP Israeli soldier gestures towards a tank crew member as it crosses a road near Israel's border with southern Gaza - AMIR COHEN/REUTERS An Israeli soldier walks next to a convoy of tanks - AMIR COHEN/REUTERS Israels war cabinet was later on Tuesday set to agree to significantly increase the amount of aid allowed into Gaza, according to reports. The US has demanded it permit 200 aid and fuel trucks to enter per day, Axios news website said. Israeli officials say they have provided a safe zone for civilians in Al-Masawi, but aid agencies argue the tiny coastal area, about the size of Heathrow airport, is too small to accommodate fleeing civilians. Also on Monday, IDF troops demolished the main courthouse in Gaza in the centre of the Strip, releasing footage of the five-story building crumbling to the ground. Palestinian residents of Khan Younis spoke of confusion and terror amid the round of airstrikes and evacuation orders. Samia Adel, a 39-year-old doctor, said she was desperate to escape but had no idea where to go. I dont know what Im doing its a nightmare, she told the Telegraph. Im looking for somewhere to go. I thought they would have allowed us to return to Gaza City when they started in the south. I cant find words to describe how I feel. Its grim. Residents in one neighbourhood of the city told The Telegraph they had not received orders to evacuate before an airstrike hit on Sunday night. Photographs from the scene showed blown-out windows and dust rising from destroyed buildings. Rents have risen dramatically in Rafah, on the Egyptian border, and many families are being pushed to sleep out in the open in freezing temperatures. A man reacts as Palestinians, who fled their houses amid Israeli strikes, shelter at a United Nations-run school - IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA/REUTERS Destroyed apartments in a residential housing block following Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis, Gaza - AHMAD SALEM/BLOOMBERG Khan Youniss population of 200,000 has risen sharply since 1 million Palestinians were ordered out of North Gaza. UN-run shelters are 10-times oversubscribed and there are widespread shortages of food and water. Aid groups on Monday demanded an immediate ceasefire, saying civilians had nowhere to hide from the conflict. The level of human suffering is intolerable, said Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who visited Gaza on Monday. Utterly relentless bombardments James Elder, a spokesman for Unicef, said Khan Younis had endured a night of utterly relentless bombardments. I dont think there was a period of more than five minutes throughout the course of the night where something wasnt flying overhead or the sky being lit up, he said. Save the Children warned there is nowhere safe in the enclave as Israel intensifies its military operations. Families are being warned by Israeli authorities to move, once again, forcibly displacing them into smaller and smaller areas with no guarantee of safety or return, said Jason Lee, the charitys country director for the Palestinian Territories. Smoke rises at the site of a house destroyed in an Israeli strike - IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA/REUTERS An explosion takes place during Israeli air strikes in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip - IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA/REUTERS Meanwhile, in Israel, families of the remaining hostages were pressing the government to resume talks to save their relatives. Daniel Lifshitz, the grandson of kidnapped Oded Lifshitz and Yocheved Lifshitz, who was later released from captivity, said relatives were urging the cabinet to go back to talks without any delay and at any costs. Oded Liftshitz, 83, remains missing, presumed to be one of the estimated 140 captives still being held in the Gaza Strip. Families of the hostages planned to stage a sit-in outside the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv on Monday evening and stay there until talks are resumed. Under an agreement between Israel and Hamas, 80 Israeli hostages were released in exchange for three times as many Palestinian prisoners during a seven-day truce that ended on Friday. Another 25, mostly Thais, were freed separately. 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 Russian state is censoring relatives of mobilized Russian personnel on social media for fear of their protests' possible negative effects on Vladimir Putin's still unannounced 2024 presidential campaign, the Institute for the Study of War reported in their daily assessment on Dec. 3. ISW cited a post from BBC Russia describing a series of online bots with fake profiles accusing the relatives of mobilized Russian personnel in their "Way Home" Telegram channels of having connections to imprisoned opposition figure Alexei Navalny. According to the BBC, the "Way Home" group issued a manifesto late last month demanding an end to the "indefinite" mobilization. The group has appealed to the Russian government for the release of relatives from military service and better treatment of Russian servicemen. In response, the Russian government has reportedly made efforts to censor this group by prohibiting them from protesting publicly. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's presidential campaign is expected not to focus on the war in Ukraine. The ISW suggested that the relatives of mobilized personnel represent one of the greatest threats to the campaign. Additionally, the ISW reported on efforts by Ukrainian officials to involve international organizations in an investigation into an "execution" style killing of two surrendering Ukrainian soldiers. Earlier this week, the Strategic Communications Directorate of Ukraines Armed Forces confirmed that Russian troops killed two Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered as prisoners of war (POW) in Donetsk Oblast. In a video published by the Ukrainian DeepState Telegram channel on Dec. 2, a group of soldiers appear to kill two other soldiers emerging from a trench. One of the two had his hands behind his head. The Donetsk Oblast Prosecutors Office has launched an investigation into the violation of the rules and customs of war. Killing of POWs violates the Geneva Convention and constitutes a war crime. According to prosecutors, Russian troops entered Ukrainian positions near the village of Stepove in Donetsk Oblast. When two Ukrainian soldiers were forced to surrender, the Russian soldiers shot them dead. The Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets appealed to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations to investigate this violation of international law. Read also: Ukraine war latest: Russian infantry activity rising in southeast, general says Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. Surveillance footage captures Jaclyn Elmquists last known movements (NBC New York) As the holiday season gets into full swing, crowds across New York are making the most of the festive season, whether visiting the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, skating at Central Parks ice rink or spending time with family and friends. But for one family, a holiday party has ended in unfathomable tragedy and a Christmas season ahead without their loved one. It was the night of 30 November and Jaclyn Elmquist was celebrating the holidays with colleagues at a work party in Chelsea. She then vanished after leaving the event and, hours later, her body was found at the bottom of a trash chute in a luxury Manhattan condo building. Jaclyn Elmquist was found dead in a trash chute in Manhattan (Jaclyn Elmquist family) Amid the horror, many questions remain unanswered around what happened to the 24-year-old woman: How did she end up in the trash compactor? How did she die? And was foul play involved? Heres what we know so far: Disappearance after a holiday party Elmquist went missing on the night of 30 November after a holiday party near Chelsea Market. According to her family, who live in Minnesota, the 24-year-old was at a party with her colleagues at Manhattan-based recruitment agency Mission Staffing. She was last seen getting into a yellow cab at Catch Steak on West 16th Street and Ninth Avenue, a missing persons poster revealed. But, the 24-year-old failed to make it home to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, sparking fears for her safety. Unable to contact her, Elmquists concerned family members raised the alarm, urging anyone with information to come forward. My cousin Jackie Elmquist has been missing since last night after she left a work party in Manhattan she didnt come home or show up for work this morning please spread the word so people in the area can see it since all of her family lives here in Minnesota, her cousin Kat posted on X. We believe her phone is still in that area of Manhattan, the missing poster added. Chilling final footage Chilling footage has revealed the last known movements of the 24-year-old. Surveillance footage, obtained by NBC New York, captures Elmquist stumbling down West 28th Street in Chelsea at around 11.45pm on Thursday, after leaving the holiday party. Surveillance footage captures Jaclyn Elmquists last known movements (NBC New York) In the video, she is seen swaying and clutching the doorways and walls of buildings along the sidewalk. Elmquist also appears to try to open doors along the way before she is seen appearing to enter one building. This is believed to be the last time she was seen alive. Grim discovery At around 3pm on Friday, emergency services were called to the luxury +Art condo building at 540 West 28th Street after the body of a woman was found at the bottom of a garbage chute in the basement. A building employee reportedly made the harrowing discovery when they went to take out the trash. Police and EMTs rushed to the building but the 24-year-old was pronounced dead at the scene. The identity of the woman was not immediately clear. Police on the scene of the tragic discovery (CBS/Screengrab) On Sunday, the NYPD confirmed that the body found in the trash compactor belongs to Elmquist. What happened to Jaclyn Elmquist? Elmquists cause and manner of death remain a mystery, with several questions still unanswered as to what happened to her. Elmquist did not live in the building where she was found and it remains unclear how she may have gained access to it and how she could have then ended up in the chute. However, law enforcement officials so far believe there is no sign of foul play. A police source told The New York Post that it hasnt been determined if she was intoxicated but its a possibility. Jaclyn Elmquists family shared this missing poster online as they searched for the 24-year-old (Jaclyn Elmquist family) The 24-year-olds devastated family has described her death as tragic and a bad situation. Speaking to The New York Post outside his daughters apartment in Crown Heights on Sunday, her father James Elmquist broke down. Were going through Jackies things now. Its tragic and, uh, its just a bad situation I cant really talk, he said. The New York City medical examiners office will carry out an autopsy to determine Elmquists cause and manner of death. The Independent has reached out to the NYPD for further information. You are here: Arts Tourists visit the ancient city of Pingyao in Jinzhong city, North China's Shanxi province, on Feb 8, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua] China issued a set of special stamps featuring the ancient city of Pingyao in north China's Shanxi Province, to mark the 26th anniversary of the ancient city's inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The set of three stamps and a miniature sheet displays overall scenes and representative architecture of the ancient city. The selling price of the whole set is 9 yuan (about 1.27 U.S. dollars). With a history of over 2,700 years, Pingyao is famous for its well-preserved ancient architecture. It was named a world heritage site by UNESCO in 1997. Feng Yuquan, an official with Pingyao County, where the ancient city is located, expressed his hope that the stamps would further boost the popularity of the ancient city. This undated aerial photo shows a view of the ancient city of Pingyao, north China's Shanxi Province. [Xinhua] John Lennons last words have been revealed by the concierge working on the front desk of the building where the Beatles star was shot and killed. A new Apple TV+ documentary series, John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial, is narrated by Kiefer Sutherland and investigates the shooting by obsessed fan Mark David Chapman on 8 December 1980, along with its aftermath. It also explores the many conspiracy theories that have emerged since Lennons death and features audio from Chapman speaking to his lawyers while applying for parole. The title refers to the fact that Chapman pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on the eve of his trial, after which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Jay Hastings was working on the front desk of the Dakota building in New York, where Lennon, 40, lived with his wife, Yoko Ono, and their young son, Sean Ono Lennon, on that fateful day. He runs past me. He goes, Im shot, he recalls in the documentary. He had blood coming out of his mouth. He just collapsed on the floor. I half rolled him to his back and took his glasses off, put them on the desk. And Yoko was screaming, Get an ambulance, get an ambulance, get an ambulance. Taxi driver Richard Peterson also said he witnessed the shooting while sitting in his parked car outside the Dakota building. John and Yoko in 1969 (Getty Images) Lennon was walking in and this kid says, John Lennon, he says. He was a chunky guy. Im looking at him through the front window of my cab. Im looking at him shoot him. This guy just shot John Lennon. I thought they were making a movie, but I didnt see no lights or cameras or anything so I realised, Hey, this aint no movie. The Dakota, the New York City building John Lennon lived in and was murdered outside of (Andrew Burton/Getty Images) Apple says the three-part documentary will reveal shocking details of Lennons tragic murder and include interviews with some of his closest friends, along with Chapmans defence lawyers, psychiatrists, detectives and prosecutors. Mark David Chapman, pictured in 2020 (New York State Department of Corrections) Asked by his legal team why he shot Lennon, Chapman refers to the Beatles song when he says, All You Need Is Love, have you ever heard that? Well, this is what I say to that: all you need is love and 250 million dollars. He was the biggest, phoniest bastard that ever lived. Chapman 68, is currently being held at Green Haven Correctional Facility in New York. He has repeatedly been denied parole his next opportunity will be in February 2024. At his 2020 hearing, he apologised to Lennons widow, Ono, calling the shooting a despicable and extremely selfish act. Im sorry for the pain that I caused to her, he said. I think about it all of the time. The Beatles recently relelased what has been dubbed the last Beatles song, Now and Then, which used AI technology to retrieve vocal stems recorded by Lennon at his piano in the Dakota apartment. John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial is out on 6 December. HOLDEN Finding that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, a Superior Court judge Friday approved the Town of Holden's motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Central Massachusetts Housing Alliance and two individuals over the town's decision not to comply with a state law designed to increase housing. Worcester Superior Court Judge Daniel M. Wrenn ruled Friday that a complaint filed on behalf of the Central Massachusetts Housing Alliance, Westborough resident Lydiana Morales and Holden resident Jennifer Lish did not prove that the town's decision had caused any direct harm or injury to the plaintiffs. The lawsuit was initially filed in August in Supreme Judicial Court and was later moved to the Superior Court. Holden has thus far refused to comply with a 2021 state law, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority Communities Act, which mandates cities and towns with access to public transit change zoning to allow for more multifamily housing, particularly near transit stations. Holden is one of 177 municipalities subject to the zoning law. According to a Monday news release from the town, Holden is still in the process of deciding whether it will "participate in the Commonwealth's MBTA Communities Program." Holden Town Manager Peter Lukes said in a statement that the town has received dozens of calls from residents and municipal leaders about where it stands. We have not been able to respond due to the pending litigation, but now that it is resolved at this stage, Holden is prepared to advise other municipalities of our stand and share our legal rationale behind these decisions, Lukes said. Lukes previously said the town views complying with the MBTA Communities Act as voluntary, while Gov. Maura T. Healey and Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell have said it is mandatory, and Campbell has issued an advisory to that effect. In February, Lukes said, The Town of Holden wants to zone the way the Town of Holden wants to zone. He added that local officials felt changing zoning to meet the MBTA Communities Act would not fit the character of the town, which is lined with single-family homes. The lawsuit had sought to establish that complying with the act is mandatory. The complaint was filed by Lawyers for Civil Rights and Brown Rudnick LLP. According to court documents, Morales is a multiracial Hispanic woman who is unable to work due to disabilities and moved to a Westborough emergency shelter. Lish is a Holden resident who fears the town would lose out on funding because of its decision not to comply, as well as the opportunity to build a more diverse community through new housing production, according to court documents. Holden could lose access to state grants including grants through the MassWorks Infrastructure Program and some funding for its housing authority as a result of noncompliance. In his judgment, Wrenn wrote that the housing alliance and Morales had not established proof of direct harm. "The complaint makes clear that CMHA and Morales are overburdened by a lack of affordable housing in Massachusetts," Wrenn wrote. "But the complaint contains no allegations connecting the town's failure to comply [with the MBTA policy] to any harm or specific injury to CMHA and Morales." Wrenn said the housing alliance and Morales allege a general harm suffered due to a lack of affordable housing in the state. Furthermore, he notes that the housing alliance operates in Worcester County, where Holden is but one of many towns and Holden is just one of many towns Morales could consider living in if more affordable housing were available. While Lish has more of a connection to Holden as a town resident, Wrenn wrote that her speculation about how noncompliance may hurt the town and its residents does not add up to a specific claim of harm. Leah Bradley, CEO of the Central Massachusetts Housing Alliance, referred a request for comment to Lawyers for Civil Rights. Jacob Love, an attorney with Lawyers for Civil Rights, said the organization was disappointed in the decision to dismiss the lawsuit "on purely procedural grounds." "It is important to note that this decision does not constitute the end of the legal process and that we anticipate filing an appeal," Love said. "In the meantime, as the case proceeds, Holden is still required to comply with the law." In a Monday statement, Lukes celebrated the dismissal of the lawsuit. This is a huge win for the Town of Holden, Lukes said. The CMHA sent out press releases to every media outlet in the state over a week prior to the town receiving notice that the action was even filed in the Court. It appeared that the entire purpose of this frivolous lawsuit was to intimidate and embarrass Holden through the CMHA's false narrative. We were clearly not intimidated and frankly the only people who should be embarrassed are the ones who brought this inappropriate legal action and wasted everyone's time." This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Lawsuit against Holden for defying MBTA zoning law is dismissed A federal judge is allowing a Charlotte womans lawsuit against the city to move forward. Judge Max Cogburn has officially denied the city of Charlotte's request to dismiss Stephanie Walker's case. She's suing the city after sewage destroyed her home. The city gave her $45K but she says her expenses are much higher. Previous story: https://t.co/00S7GZdJwx Joe Bruno (@JoeBrunoWSOC9) December 4, 2023 Judge Max Cogburn denied the citys motion to dismiss Stephanie Walkers lawsuit. Walker is suing the city after sewage destroyed her home nearly a year ago. Her home was flooded with raw sewage when it backed up, spewing from her bathroom. Her floors, cabinets, furniture and many belongings were destroyed. PREVIOUS STORIES: At first, the city was only offering Walker $15,000 for the raw sewage damage to her home. But after our first report, the city kicked it up to $45,000. But Walker said her expenses are greater than $45,000. The case now moves into the discovery phase. (PREVIOUS: City of Charlotte seeking dismissal of womans lawsuit after her home was destroyed by sewage) A case to determine how much ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani owes two Georgia poll workers for falsely claiming they helped steal the election from former President Trump will be heard and decided by a jury, a Washington, D.C., federal judge ruled late Sunday. In a sharply worded ruling, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell denied Giulianis request to hold a bench trial instead of a jury trial, meaning the judge would have decided the case instead of a jury. She chided him for the significantly tardy motion, having set an October deadline for all pretrial motions. Perhaps Giulianis submission is titled a Trial Brief, rather than a motion seeking to convert the scheduled jury trial to a hearing, in a fairly blatant effort to avoid being called out for filing an untimely pretrial motion, Howell wrote in a footnote. In the wake of the 2020 election, Giuliani made a series of false statements about the work Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss conducted at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, where ballots were counted. He and other Trump allies baselessly claimed the election workers a mother-daughter duo committed election fraud by processing suitcases of illicit ballots. A series of probes led by three law enforcement agencies Georgias secretary of States office and special agents with the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found those allegations against the poll workers were false and unsubstantiated. The two election workers sued Giuliani, and as their case proceeded, he failed to turn over evidence despite repeated reminders from the court. Howell in August found Giuliani civilly liable for Freeman and Mosss claims of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, civil conspiracy, and punitive damage, citing the longtime Trump allys willful shirking of his discovery obligations. In her Sunday opinion, Howell again cited Giulianis discovery misconduct as reason to deny his request for a bench trial. This Court will not reward him for conduct that has already resulted in significant prejudice to Plaintiffs,' Howell wrote, quoting her earlier decision. Ted Goodman, a political advisor to Giuliani, suggested Howells biases and prejudices are well known in a statement to The Hill. In the fullness of time, this will be looked at as one of the darkest chapters in Americas justice system and the District of Columbia unfortunately is at the core of much of it, Goodman said. The jury trial, which is scheduled to begin Dec. 11 in Washington, D.C., will determine the amount of damages Giuliani owes the Georgia election workers as a result. Updated at 6:30 pm. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. EVANSVILLE A man accused of child neglect and domestic battery was scheduled to go to trial Monday, but Vanderburgh County prosecutors dropped their case against him before jurors ever took their seats. In an unusual move, Tremain Vanness Cabell, 48, objected to prosecutors' request that his charges be dismissed, public records show. Circuit Court Judge Ryan C. Reed ultimately sided with the state and ordered Cabell released from custody Monday. Had Cabell gone to trial, jurors would have determined if he committed two offenses: Neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury, a Level 3 felony Domestic battery with serious bodily injury to a person under the age of 14 years old, a Level 3 felony And prosecutors would have asked jurors to deem Cabell a "habitual offender," which, under state law, would have allowed a judge to lengthen his sentence. Monday's dismissal capped months of courtroom proceedings in a severe child neglect case. Cabell came to the attention of law enforcement last year when a doctor at Peyton Manning Children's Hospital reported that a child in Cabell's care suffered abuse so serious it could have proven fatal without medical treatment, according to a probable cause affidavit filed in the case. Indiana Department of Child Services reports showed the child suffered from a pattern of unexplained injuries, and previous injuries appeared to be healing poorly. Of particular concern to the doctors was a "large knot" on the child's head that had caused blood to build on the surface of the child's brain, according to Cabell's arrest affidavit. Cabell allegedly told investigators he "didn't give the injury much attention." The police arrested Cabell in May 2022, and his case has wound through Vanderburgh County's courts ever since. More: Together in life and death, Evansville couple get a fairytale ending to 70-plus-year story On Friday, just ahead of Cabell's scheduled trial, he rejected a plea deal offered by prosecutors. Cabell also objected to lead prosecutor Ian Blair's motion to continue the case, court records show, though Cabell filed his own unsuccessful motion to continue. Attorney Foster O'Daniel of the Evansville-based law firm Foster, ODaniel, Hambidge & Lynch represented Cabell. The docket in Cabell's case does not state whether prosecutors could refile charges at a later date. The Courier & Press forwarded questions Monday to Diana Moers, the county's top prosecutor, seeking to clarify the status of any future charges. Cabell's counsel, O'Daniel, did not return a phone call seeking comment as of Monday morning. The victim's mother previously pleaded guilty to neglect. Her case zigzagged through probation and work-release programs The child at the center of Cabell's case suffered abuse nearly from the time they were born, according to police, prosecutors and a review of court records. In 2018, the police arrested the then-newborn's mother, Alizay Renea Hunt, on one count of neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury, a Level 3 felony. At the time, investigators said the baby required intensive medical care after Hunt found her child unable to breathe, according to an affidavit filed in that case. The baby's urine tested positive for methamphetamine, which Hunt admitted to smoking in close proximity to her child on multiple occasions, police said. Doctors at Ascension St. Vincent Evansville determined the baby suffered permanent brain damage. More: IHSAA girls basketball: What we learned from the North Basketball Showcase In October 2018, Hunt pleaded guilty as charged and received a 5-year prison sentence, with the first 2-and-one-half years to be executed at Rockville Correctional Facility, a sentencing memorandum states. On June 22, 2020, upon her release, Hunt was placed under the supervision of Drug Abuse Probation Services. Within weeks Hunt was back in jail after she tested positive for methamphetamine, thus violating the conditions of her release. Circuit Court Magistrate Kelli Fink ordered Hunt to return to adult probation at that time, according to court records. Since then, Hunt is alleged to have violated the terms of her probation on multiple occasions: In February 2021, Circuit Court Magistrate Celia Pauli ordered Hunt to serve 2 years and 182 days on "therapeutic work release" with credit for time served for one such violation. By April 2021, prosecutors filed yet another petition to revoke Hunt's probation, court records show. During an April hearing, Hunt admitted to having committed the violation and agreed to return to work release under a new "zero tolerance" policy, a docket entry states. Less than one month later, a judge revoked Hunt's probation yet again. Circuit Court Judge David Kiely issued a warrant for Hunt's arrest, according to court records. Kiely ultimately sentenced Hunt in July 2021 to serve two years and 182 days in the Indiana Department of Corrections with 153 days credit for time already served. Court records: Cabell has a history of battery against minors Cabell is no stranger to Vanderburgh County's criminal justice system. In December 2017, he pleaded guilty to one count of felony domestic battery in exchange for prosecutors dismissing three other charges: Criminal confinement of a person under the age of 14 years old, a Level 5 felony Domestic battery resulting in serious bodily injury, a Level 6 felon Strangulation, a Level 6 felony For his 2017 conviction, Vanderburgh County Superior Court Judge Robert J. Pigman sentenced Cabell to serve approximately one-and-a-half years in prison. More: Site of Evansville's former tallest building remains barren two years after demolition As of Monday morning, court records provided little clarity as to whether prosecutors hoped to charge Cabell a second time in his most recent case. The Courier & Press called Moers and sent a subsequent message asking to clarify whether Cabell's charges were dismissed with or without prejudice. Under Indiana law, charges dismissed with prejudice cannot be refiled. Houston can be contacted at houston.harwood@courierpress.com This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Jury trial suddenly canceled in Evansville child neglect case Johnnie McClendon, a 14-year-old boy who played basketball for Garinger High School, was killed in a shooting on Sunday. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department charged 19-year-old Myhijee Major with involuntary manslaughter after he turned himself in Tuesday morning. A teenager has been charged in the shooting death of a 14-year-old Garinger High School student and basketball player, according to police. On Tuesday, 19-year-old Myhijee Major turned himself in to police, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department wrote in a news release. Major is charged with involuntary manslaughter after Johnnie McClendon, 14, was shot and killed in his home on Sunday. McClendon was shot in the 400 block of Keswick Avenue which is across from Camp North End in the Lockwood area between North Graham Street and North Tryon Street at about 7:40 p.m. Sunday. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools confirmed the victim was a Garinger High School student. Hed just made the basketball team, said Will Adams, an activist fighting to end gun violence among local youth with his organization TruBlue. It was McClendons first step in trying to follow Kyrie Irvings famed legacy, Adams said. When Adams visited the house on Keswick Avenue on Sunday, he said he went to shake the hand of McClendons father. But the father wouldnt. He still had his sons blood in between his fingers. Death can be difficult for us to understand, especially when it is sudden, LeDuan Pratt, Garinger principal, wrote in a statement to families. ...Counselors will be highly visible throughout the building and available to assist with grief counseling. Ten minutes before the shooting of McClendon, police found another person shot in east Charlotte on the 7100 block of Snow Lane. Officers pronounced the victim dead at the scene. Anyone with information on either homicide is asked to call the CMPD Homicide Unit at 704-432-TIPS. Anonymous tips can be offered through Crime Stoppers at 704-334-1600 or http://charlottecrimestoppers.com. Fugitive on run since 2020 found when deputies spot trap door under rug, NC cops say 911 caller reports finding 5 bodies while visiting home, NC cops say. Names released Man trying to help fallen biker is fatally struck by passing vehicle, NC police say This aerial photo taken on April 13, 2023 shows the Fuxing (top) and Lane Xang electric multiple unit (EMU) trains at the Mohan railway station of the China-Laos Railway in southwest China's Yunnan Province. [Photo/Xinhua] The high-profile China-Laos Railway has facilitated roughly 24 million passenger trips and hauled about 29 million metric tons of cargo over the past two years, injecting vitality into regional socioeconomic development, according to China State Railway Group. Saturday marked the railway's two-year anniversary. As of that day, 24.2 million passenger trips have been handled along the line, with 3.74 million in the Laotian section. The railway has transported 29.1 million tons of cargo, 6 million of which were cross-border goods. The railway department has focused on improving service quality to better serve passengers' needs. Passengers can buy tickets by using apps on their mobile phones that are linked to local bank accounts. More ticket booths have been set up in Vientiane, capital of Laos, and Luang Prabang, a popular tourism destination in the country. In the Chinese section, 20.46 million passenger trips were recorded over the past two years. Every day, an average of 51 trains were operated during that period, with the daily peak number of passenger trips hitting 83,000. In the Laotian section, 3.74 million passenger trips were recorded during the period. The number of trains operated every day increased to 10 from four when the rail service began operating, and the daily peak passenger trip number reached 10,197. International passenger train services between Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, to Vientiane began on April 13. Since then, about 95,000 passengers from 72 countries and regions have used the service to travel between the two cities, and the number of international passenger trips has increased from about 600,000 to 1.1 million every month. The convenience of the service has boosted international passenger travel in Laos and has also improved cross-border cargo transportation in the region. The number of cross-border freight trains has increased from two to 14 every day. About 400 are involved in cross-border operations as part of the Lancang-Mekong Express freight train service, including those that run on the China-Laos Railway. Cargo transported on the line has been delivered from 31 major cities in China to 12 countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative, including Laos, Thailand, Vietnam and Myanmar. The establishment of the China-Laos Railway and the China-Europe freight train service has led to the creation of new international logistics routes and transportation modes. With these services, freight transportation between Southeast Asian countries, including Laos and Thailand, and Europe can be reduced to about 15 days. A freight yard tailored for cargo loading and reloading in Vientiane to meet the width of the tracks in Thailand was put into operation last year, linking railway networks in China, Laos and Thailand. Since the yard's opening, 101 trains carrying 3,838 containers have completed loading and reloading. The railway department has cooperated with tourism departments from China and Laos to open a number of tourism routes between Kunming and Vientiane, which has promoted the rapid development of the tourism economy in Xishuangbanna in Yunnan and Luang Prabang in Laos, according to the company. A Beijing resident surnamed Wang is considering taking her family to spend the Spring Festival holiday in Laos via the China-Laos Railway. One of the main reasons is the convenience of the service. "With the kid and parents, I'd prefer a place that is warm and convenient that we can visit on a reasonable budget," she said, adding that having no luggage limit on trains also attracted her. Her friend has been to Luang Prabang by train and strongly recommended it to her. The 1,035-kilometer China-Laos Railway is an electrified line that links Kunming with Vientiane. The railway stretches 422.4 km within Laos, linking the northern border city of Boten with Luang Prabang, Vang Vieng and other cities, including the capital. Before the China-Laos Railway opened, Laos only had a 3.5-km railway that transported cargo to and from Thailand. Kansas Citys Black Pantry Expands To Include More Black Entrepreneurs: Weve Become A Trusted Space, Where It Feels Like Home | Photo: 10'000 Hours via Getty Images A Kansas City-based business that helps other Black-owned enterprises connect with consumers has launched its second location. The Black Pantry, founded by Brian Roberts, is an inclusive premium brand shop that serves as a resource to support Black makers, creators and artists nationwide who are looking to get more exposure not only to the Black community but people from all backgrounds, according to Startland News. The success of his business model grew a fanbase of supporters through pop-up shops, TBPs site, and his first location within Made in KCs midtown store, a shop that carries various retail products made by local community members. Weve become a trusted space, where it feels like home, Roberts said, per Startland News. The art on the walls looks like me, the books on the tables look like me, and the people who work here look like me. So now I have a sense of home, even outside of my home. Businesses that offer home goods and self-care services are the types of organizations Roberts is looking to fill the areas retail corner and shelves. In addition, customers can expect to see a coffee shop, wine bar, and an outdoor patio for studying, fellowshipping, eating, and more when they visit. Its still going to have the same vibe. I want it to be light, bright and colorful, the TBP creator told Startland News. I know the core of our business is philanthropic and intentional, but I still want it to be fun. View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Black Pantry (@theblackpantry) The budding business hubs success wouldnt be possible without local partnerships, and some of the Black-owned brands people will be able to get familiar with are The Prospect KC, Matties Foods vegan selections and spirits from Vine Street Brewing, Rally Gin and Kin Seltzer. I want to encourage businesses to take the next step. I know its scary, so heres a progressive in-between step so that they have their own sense of ownership, Roberts said. The purpose of the new location, which spans an entire block on the prominent Troost Avenue, is for it to become a recognized hub for entrepreneurs of color. The boutique owner wants more Black entrepreneurs to be motivated when scaling and elevating their business endeavors to help them invest in themselves and their communities. We get the opportunity to build upon all that excitement, Roberts said. It takes a lot of us that really come from here to build something thats impactful for everybody to champion. The businessman feels TBP will majorly enrich Kansas Citys economic infrastructure, which he wants everyone to see. The challenge I have with this is getting the city to understand how big of a deal this could be, Roberts said. Because my thought is not just one space, my thought is to scale out multiple spaces. So economically, as I scale, all the entrepreneurs scale at the same time. Theres more in store for TBP as Roberts has a mission to continue buying commercial real estate to encourage his people, especially the youth, to believe that the sky is the limit. Furthermore, the entrepreneur hopes for more Black Americans in the city to mirror his sentiments of feeling seen and inspired by having a safe space they can walk into that reflects their culture created by people of the culture. Its cool that they get to see these stores coming from people that are from our blocks, he said. A reader who emailed me over the weekend about an interview Kari Lake gave in which she touted what she called her commonsense policies said it took him three times to hit the send button on his computer because he was laughing so hard. Im not sure who is advising Lake during her run for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, but apparently she is being told that campaigning as the unglued extremist she is might be the wrong way to go. Which has her saying with a straight face hilarious things like, Ive always touted commonsense policies and solutions. She actually said that in an interview published in the Washington Examiner. Kari Lake says it's all the media's fault Lake also said, I think the media has tried to label me as somebody who has extreme views. Which led me to marvel at the self-control of the reader who sent me the note about Lake and to respond, Only three times? According to Lake, it is the media that has labeled her an extremist. Not, for example, her own words and actions. Like the fact that she has spent the past couple of years grifting off her constantly disproved claims of a stolen election, following up on her loss in the governors race by filing failed lawsuit after failed lawsuit while raking in the cash from gullible MAGA conspiracy cronies. Forget about Lake's many failed lawsuits Most recently, Lake lost her attempt have access to the green affidavit envelopes mailed to Maricopa County voters, from which her camp could have procured your name, address and signature. Lake still is facing a defamation lawsuit from Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer over ridiculous unproven claims against him. This endorsement of Lake is great: For Democrats About which Richer has said, Lake has continued to repeat these falsehoods, despite multiple court rulings that found her attacks to be unfounded. Along those lines, Lakes attorneys were fined by the Arizona Supreme Court for making unequivocally false claims in court about 35,000 ballots added to last years election vote count. Ignore her cruel beliefs and kooky cronies As for commonsense policies, would one of those include a ban on medication abortion pills, which Lake said she would welcome? Then there is her praise for a century-old Arizona abortion ban, saying, Im incredibly thrilled that we are going to have a great law thats already on the books. And the time she called abortion the ultimate sin. Lake is now trying to backpedal on issues like this, as if no one heard her say that stuff. How about Lake calling Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar the GOAT? The same Gosar who used his official House newsletter to post material from an extremist website that praised Hitler and called the Holocaust the Holohoax. The same Gosar who has had a cozy relationship over time with white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Never mind the time spent at Mar-A-Lago And there is Lake calling state Sen. Wendy Rogers a hero at the same time she trashed the late-Sen. John McCain, saying, We dont have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Get the hell out! It was the party of McCain. It was bad. Arizona has delivered some losers, havent they? But we have some winners as well. We have Wendy Rogers who is the toughest woman I know. We have so many heroes just like Wendy here in this state. This is Rogers, who praised white nationalists while suggesting her enemies should be hanged. Lake also embraced the social media platform Gab, founded by notorious antisemite Andrew Torba, a Christian nationalist who said Jews arent welcome in his movement until they repent and accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. Then there is all the time Lake has spent during the past couple of years at Mar-A-Lago, where she desperately tried to garner the role of Vanna White in Donald Trumps twisted reality version of Wheel of Misfortune. Sure, common sense. Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com. For more opinions content, please subscribe. This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake hilariously fails at claiming 'common sense' SHAWNEE, Kan. A Kansas City, Kansas man is facing multiple charges in connection to a hit-and-run crash in Shawnee that left a 9-year-old child critically injured. The Johnson County District Attorneys Office charged 25-year-old Matthew Alexander Jacobo DUI, aggravated battery, failure to stop at a crash involving personal injury and possession of a firearm under the influence. Deadly crash closes I-70 at Benton curve in Kansas City On Friday, Dec. 1, the Shawnee Police Department responded to a hit-and-run crash just before 7 p.m. involving a white truck and a black Sedan near Johnson Drive and Bell Road, just east of I-435. A 9-year-old child was taken to the hospital in critical condition. Police say the driver of the truck, later identified as Jacobo, allegedly left the scene. He was later located by a K9 Unit and taken into custody. Suspect hospitalized after police shooting at KCK apartment complex A walk/run is scheduled Tuesday evening in support of the 9-year-old, identified as Nolan Davidson, and his family at the Foundry Church of Lenexa. The family shared on their GoFundMe page that Nolan and his father, Aaron, were on their way from one basketball game to another Friday night when they were struck by a drunk driver. There were dozens of vehicles, police and ambulances, and fire trucks, said Rich Hillblade, who lives near the crash scene. Nolan suffered face and skull fractures. This was probably about 8 or 830, or so they were running through trying to find this person. Apparently, they didnt know if he was armed or whatever, but basically, the guy got out of his truck and started running and ran over here, Hillblade said. I did see him get caught, and I saw him hauled off. The family shared on its GoFundMe page that Nolan is in a medically induced coma while they wait for the swelling on his brain to subside. I know he is still in intensive care and critical care, but hopefully it is all going to work out, and hes going to make it, Hillblade said. Its very sad, I mean, and I was very shocked to hear the guy ran away very shocked to hear that, but yeah, just a sad day. People are asked to meet at the Foundry Church in Lenexa at 5:30 Tuesday night for the benefit walk and run in support of Nolan and the Davidson family. Everybody is asked to wear blue, Nolans favorite color. Close family friends of the Davidsons described Nolan as Amazing, kind, hardworking, and a great teammate. Hes just really an outstanding young man, and we are all impacted by this tragedy, said Mo Loridon Nolans soccer coach. Organizers hope to see a big turnout at the benefit walk and run Tuesday evening in Lenexa. We are all here for Nolan and for his whole family. We need to uplift them and bring joy and thoughts and prayers for them so they can stay positive and try to heal as well, Loridon said. Let them know we are here and fighting for them and they are not alone, said Lyndsay Farnsworth-Dick a family friend and walk organizer. We are all here lifting them up and wishing them the best and praying for them on the tens. Nolan is #10 on his basketball and soccer team. His dad Aaron made a request on the familys CaringBridge page asking for loved ones to think of and pray for Nolans recovery on the 10th minute of every hour on Monday. Jacobo made his first appearance in court Monday afternoon. HIs next court appearance is scheduled for Dec. 14 at 11 a.m. Hes currently being held in the Johnson County jail on a $1 million cash bond. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports. The Big Sandy Regional Detention Center has reached an agreement with the federal government requiring the facility to ensure people with opioid use disorder receive access to their FDA-approved medications, required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). On Monday, U.S. Attorney Carlton S. Shier IV announced the agreement with the Big Sandy Regional Jail Authority, which operates the detention center. The settlement requires Big Sandy to revise policies to provide access to all three forms of FDA-approved medications methadone, buprenorphine and Naltrexone to people with opioid use disorder. The ADA prohibits state and local governments from discriminating against individuals with disabilities and protects people in recovery from OUD (opioid use disorder), including individuals who are taking OUD medication at the direction of a medical provider, the U.S. Attorneys Office said in a news release. Opioid use disorder is the medical terminology used to define opioid or drug addiction. Despite the ADA protections, people still have trouble accessing medication they were previously taking while inside local jails and prisons. According to the settlement agreement, the Department of Justice opened an investigation of Big Sandy under Title II of the ADA after receiving a complaint by a medical provider on behalf of a patient identified in court documents as J.F., who was lawfully prescribed buprenorphine to treat his opioid use disorder. The settlement alleges that once the inmate was booked in Big Sandy, he was denied his medication a direct violation of Title II of the ADA regulations. As part of its investigation, the United States substantiated allegations that Big Sandy effectively bans medications for addiction without an evaluation of a medical professional, according to the settlement agreement. Decisions about treatment will now be based on an individualized determination by qualified medical personnel. The facility will be required to evaluate all individuals with opioid use disorder upon arrival and ensure individuals who were receiving medication from a licensed treatment provider before their incarceration are continued on that medication. If an inmate was not receiving medication before incarceration, the detention center will now be required to offer medication options, according to the settlement. Eastern Kentucky has long been on the front lines of the opioid epidemic and our office remains committed to a comprehensive approach to fighting this public health crisis, including enforcement of the ADAs requirements safeguarding treatment, said Shier in the release. Considering the impact this crisis has had on our area, treatment must be a critical tool in our efforts to fight back. Access to medications that treat opioid use disorder saves lives, and we are pleased we were able to reach a settlement with the Big Sandy Regional Detention Center to better ensure access to this important treatment for the people in its custody, Shier said. This announcement comes more than one year after the same group agreed on a settlement which would require similar measures at the Fayette County Detention Center. In November 2022, the U.S. Attorneys Office found the Lexington facility did not provide most individuals with access to methadone and buprenorphine, or stopped their access. In our sister paper on Sunday, Sir Keir Starmer wrote, Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurism. The praise was hardly effusive, but it has provoked angry reactions from the Labour Left, as was intended. I do not think the Left should be too alarmed, however. It is highly doubtful whether Sir Keir by experience and ideology a government lawyer would recognise natural entrepreneurism if it walked up to him in the street and shook him warmly by the hand. The context of his remark is purely political and its character is Blairite not Thatcherite. As he elucidated in a BBC interview, Sir Keir wants to distinguish among post-war leaders between those that had a plan ... and those who drifted. There is a sort of cross-party apostolic succession here which passes over Harold Wilson and Ted Heath and goes from Clement Attlee to Mrs Thatcher to Tony Blair. They succeeded, Sir Keir is saying, so shall I. In speaking thus, Sir Keir is repudiating, without directly saying so, the long line of Labour leaders who either underrated Mrs Thatcher or hated her so much that they could never learn from her political success. These ranged from Jim Callaghan on the partys Right, through the moderate John Smith to Ed Miliband, to Michael Foot and finally to the far shores of Leftist Utopia inhabited by Jeremy Corbyn. The list even includes Gordon Brown, who was always uneasy with the Blair/Mandelson attitude to Mrs Thatcher, though he did invite her to tea at No 10 when he was prime minister. The only Labour leader who really studied her was Tony Blair, assisted by Peter Mandelson. As Sir Tony explained to me for my Thatcher biography, By the time I became leader [1994], I was ready to say that if wed been in government we should have been doing some of what she was doing Her finest achievements had been as a moderniser against old-fashioned collectivism. This included her insistence that trade unions should operate within a legal framework. He wanted to make Labours acceptance of this explicit. Blair did not like Mrs Thatchers social policies or share her devotion to the nation state, which he regarded as nostalgic, but he wanted to channel her decisiveness, energy and toughness. The idea was to steal the strong bits of Thatcher and then triangulate to another part of the political playing field. Peter Mandelson calls this the politics of and, rather than the politics of or . It scoops up lots of people, including some Thatcherites fed up with the present Conservative Government, so its electoral attractions are obvious, though voters tend to see through such tricks over time. But time is now short, so I expect this semi-fiction will not be rumbled by voters until after polling day. Urgency in Ukraine Charity workers tell me there is consternation at Ukraines western borders. New Ukrainian border rules applying to all humanitarian cargo state that those delivering vehicles for repurposing as field ambulances etc must declare which military unit they will be sent to. The new rules came into force on Friday. Few could operate them. The system kept crashing. The queues are days long. The temperatures are minus 10-15C. Mission Ukraine, one of the organisations involved, tells me that, with Christmas approaching, it cannot send out new volunteers if they do not know when they can return. Patrick McIntyre, a volunteer for Cars4Ukraine who was at the border last Friday, says he has six vehicles in Britain ready to leave, but now wont bring them: Ill just get stuck. Everything is made worse by the Polish hauliers strike there, a quite separate dispute. In the confusion, there have even been official objections to the importation of right-hand drive vehicles (RHDs) almost all of which come from Britain and Ireland even though, under martial law, RHD importations are explicitly permitted. In the past, the vehicles could be registered with a Ukrainian charity and let through. Now they must be registered with a military unit, and Ukrainian military rules declare RHDs incompatible with army requirements (though in practice they are extensively used in this war). I am told that over 70 per cent of military commanders are currently refusing RHD vehicles. The two laws have not been reconciled. The purpose of the new rules is sensible: to unify the register of the Ukrainian charities involved; but they remove from the importing organisations their previous discretion to import the vehicles and then judge which military units need them most. There is a fear that, without this discretion, some vehicles will be corruptly co-opted for personal use. The people who work so hard to get vehicles to Ukraine are very upset: the British are, Im told, by far the biggest foreign contributor. RHDs also help Ukraine because they are significantly cheaper than continental 4 x 4s. Mr McIntyre reckons that 70 per cent of the vehicles helping at the front line are British, with possibly more than 30,000 in Ukraine. If the current mess persists, that supply will soon dry up. The consequent suffering of the wounded would be grave. The full facts of this story are not yet clear, but there is real urgency. No one doubts the Ukrainian government has the will to sort this out, but it needs to find a way fast. 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 Essex County DAs office says the death of 42-year-old Patrick Kenney Jr. outside Saugus Kowloon Restaurant Saturday night was a tragic accident. But investigators are still trying to unravel the events that caused his death. A law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation tells Boston 25, it appears Kenneys death was caused by a knife necklace that he was wearing, and that he accidentally tripped in the Kowloons parking lot, and somehow cut himself with his knife. Patrick Kenney, Jr.: Man killed from knife wound in Kowloon parking lot was loving father and husband, family says A Google search of knife necklaces reveals that the items are sold on the internet. But we dont know the brand or size of the knife necklace that Kenney was reportedly wearing Saturday night. A law enforcement source confirms that Kenney was at the Kowloon celebrating a birthday with a group of people. And that the incident happened after the party was over, when he was walking towards a bus the group rented to take them to Kowloon and back home. Man killed from knife wound in Kowloon parking lot was loving father and husband, family says Patrick Kenney lived in Milton with his wife and two young children. His family is asking for privacy and issued this brief statement: Our family is mourning the loss of Patrick, focused on his wife Lauren and two young children, and trying to make sense of this horrific tragedy. Patrick was a loving father and husband, brother, son, and loyal friend to many. This is a horrible tragedy. The Wong family, longtime owners of the popular North Shore staple also expressed their condolences. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims family. Nothing else matters at this time. We ask that people dont jump to conclusions until an investigation is completed, the Wong family said. The official cause of Kenneys death has not yet been determined. The situation comes less than two weeks after an unacceptable and disgusting brawl broke out inside the packed Kowloon Restaurant on Thanksgiving Eve. The incident is under investigation by the Essex County District Attorneys Office, State Police, and Saugus Police. 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 Twenty-three people have died after a volcano erupted in West Sumatra, Indonesia, on Sunday. Bodies of all the victims have been found, though not yet all identified, local authorities confirmed Wednesday, after the last missing climber was located a few yards away from the eruption site. Video footage showed plumes of ash spluttering 9,800 ft. into the air around Mount Marapione of the nations 127 active volcanoesover the weekend. Seventy-five hikers were in the vicinity when the 9,485 ft. volcano erupted. Initially, 49 people were evacuated to shelter, and rescuers evacuated another three survivors found near the crater later on Monday. Some suffered from burns because it was very hot, and they have been taken to the hospital, Rudy Rinaldi, head of the West Sumatra Disaster Mitigation Agency, told Agence France-Presse of the rescued hikers. Those who are injured were the ones who got closer to the crater. Ten climbers remained missing as of Tuesday but were presumed dead because of their proximity to the eruption, West Sumatra deputy police chief Edi Mardianto said. By Wednesday, West Sumatra police chief Suharyono told reporters, 20 bodies had been taken to hospital for identification. As of Tuesday evening, only 11 of the dead had been identified. Efforts to retrieve bodies have been hampered amid continuous eruptions. Marapi is still very much active. We cant see the height of the column because its covered by the cloud, Ahmad Rifandi, the head of a monitoring station at the volcano, told AFP on Tuesday, adding that there were five eruptions from midnight to 8 a.m. local time. The mother of Zhafirah Zahrim Febrina, a hiker who is receiving treatment in hospital, told AFP her daughter has incurred tremendous trauma. Rani Radelani, 39, said: She is affected psychologically because she saw her burns, and she also had to endure the pain all night. Efforts to locate remaining missing hikers were paused on Monday following another smaller eruption. Its too dangerous if we continue searching now, said Jodi Haryawan, a spokesman for the search and rescue team. Local residents are forbidden from going within 3 km (1.86 mi.) of the crater, and officials have confirmed that climbing routes have been closed. Since 2011, the volcano has been placed on the third highest alert level on a four-level scale. But officials raised it to the second highest alert level in the aftermath of Sundays eruption. Hikers were prohibited from attempting to reach the peak, but according to Hendra Gunawan, the head of the Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation, some hikers broke the rules to fulfill their satisfaction to climb further. Marapis last eruption, which took place in April 1979, was its deadliest, having killed 60 people. Sumatra is part of Indonesias archipelago, located on the Pacific Oceans Ring of Fire, where tectonic plates can converge and invite high volcanic and seismic activity. National Geographic notes that around 90% of all earthquakes take place along the ring, while 75% of the earths active volcanoes are located in the region. Write to Armani Syed at armani.syed@time.com. Puedes leer esta historia presionando aqui. Japan is a bucket list destination for many tourists. Although there is a common notion that it is an expensive destination, there are many ways to save if you decide to take the trip to the land of the rising sun. Here are some basic tools to prepare for your first trip to Japan on your own. U.S. citizens do not need a visa to enter. However, you must complete an immigration declaration and another for Customs when entering the country. You can do it online to save time when arriving at some of its airports or ports of entry. How do I move around in Japan? The first thing you should do is download the official application of the Japanese Ministry of Tourism. It is a tool that will help you organize your trip. Although you can use Google Maps, I suggest downloading the Navitime app (iOS and Android). It is very efficient at identifying the best subway and public transportation routes and includes activity recommendations that will be of great help. Public transportation: The public transportation system is excellent. To pay on the subway, trains or buses, I recommend adding the Suica or Pasmo cards to your mobile device. You can download both to your Apple or Android wallets and pay directly from your device every time you need it. You just have to go to the transportation card area and search for them by name. You can add balance directly from your credit cards. Save when traveling: How to use low-cost airlines without having to pay too much Visa or vaccines? How to know your international travel requirements Is the Japan Rail Pass worth it? The answer will depend on the duration and plans of your trips in Japan, although I can tell you that it is expensive. For example, if you are only going to the cities of Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto and the duration of your trip will not be more than 7-10 days, it will probably not be cost-effective to buy it since the greatest savings are when you use it on bullet trains between big cities. If your plan is to stay for more than a week and you plan to move between several of its large cities, such as Tokyo, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Nagoya, Osaka or Sapporo, it is very likely that it will be very cost-effective for you to acquire the JR Pass. I recommend that you do the mathematical exercise of comparing the cost of purchasing the individual passes versus the pass. How do I find, book activities? To book most activities in Japan you can use the Klook app (iOS and Android). In it, you can get everything from tickets to the Universal Studios parks to reservations at your cafes or immersive experiences. It is important that you know that most of the most famous restaurants require reservations. It is highly recommended that you book them at least two to six weeks before your trip. Skip the line: 4 tools to help you move through airports faster Off the beaten path: 4 spectacular (and cheap) European destinations How do I communicate? Google Translate (iOS and Android) can be your best ally in a country where you don't speak the local language. Although it is always recommended that you learn between 10 to 20 basic phrases of the language of the destination you are going to visit, the Japanese are distinguished by their kindness and service, and this will facilitate the communication process. Wilson "Wil" Santiago Burgos is the founder of Mochileando.com, one of the largest travel platforms in Puerto Rico and the Latin American market in the U.S. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What do I need to travel to Japan? Here are the basics. Dec. 12 will be a busy day in Frankfort, as Kentuckians gather for Gov. Andy Beshear's inauguration. And he won't be the only notable name in attendance. Beshear, who won four more years in office by defeating Republican challenger Daniel Cameron in the November election, will be sworn in alongside Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman for a second four-year term, with a full day of events planned leading up to the ceremony at the Kentucky Capitol. That ceremony is just one part of an eventful schedule. A parade through town will take place along with a Grand March to recognize the governor and other Kentucky political figures. And country music star and Eastern Kentucky native Tyler Childers will take the stage at the inauguration ceremony, along with a reading from Silas House, the state's poet laureate. You're invited, but attendees are asked to RSVP. That form is available on the inauguration event's website at Kentucky.gov/inaguration. As part of the inauguration, kids around the Bluegrass State are invited to take part in a poster contest, with winners and their families invited to the Dec. 12 festivities. This year's theme is "Forward, Together," and children participating should "think about how Kentucky has met recent challenges ... with love, compassion and empathy for each other" and draw a picture of "the goal they want to see Kentuckians accomplish." Two winners will be selected from three age groups ages 6-9, ages 10-13 and ages 14-17. Entries should be submitted on paper no larger than 12-by-16-inches and are required to be drawn by hand. Entries must be postmarked by Tuesday and mailed to: Kentucky State Capitol ATTN: Poster Contest Panel 700 Capitol Ave., Suite 112 Frankfort, KY 40601 More information about the poster contest and submission requirements is available on the event website. Here's a quick look at the schedule in Frankfort on inauguration day: 8:30 a.m. Inaugural Breakfast Reception at the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History 9:30 a.m. Inaugural Worship Service at First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Inaugural Parade 1:30 p.m. Inaugural Prelude on the Capitol steps 2 p.m. Swearing-in Ceremony at the Kentucky Capitol 6 p.m. The Grand March at the Capitol Rotunda 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. Inaugural Ball at the Capitol Grounds (ticketed event not open to the public) The Inaugural Parade, Swearing-In Ceremony and Grand March will be televised live on KET. Reach Lucas Aulbach at laulbach@courier-journal.com. This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear inauguration set for Dec. 12. What to know China has made new progress in vertical farming by launching its first "autonomous veggie factory" in Chengdu City, the capital of southwestern China's Sichuan Province. Vertical farming is believed to be the future of agriculture because it allows people to grow crops in upright trays and save precious land space for other human activities. China's new vertical farm has 20 stories, the most in the world to date, and utilizes "industry-leading" autonomous technology, according to Gan Bingcheng, deputy head of the research institution that built the farm. Like other typical vertical farms, this farm was built indoors, with large vertical shelves and hundreds of LED arrays. The plants looked like they were living in a 20-story apartment building with rooms tailored to their requirements. Improved efficiency While vertical farms cut down on land usage, the earlier forms came with their own challenges, that of efficiency. In contrast to regular horizontal farms, which would see practically all the plants get equal amounts of sunlight and water, vertical farms, with their compact space, proved a little bit more problematic because of their upright nature. However, according to a China Media Group (CMG) report, the team at the Institute of Urban Agriculture (IUA), Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) has solved this problem. The Chengdu-based farm uses robots and can grow and harvest a crop of lettuce in just 35 days, thanks to an AI-based control system that can fine-tune the amount of light and fertilizers fed to the plants. Different light combinations for different plants "We can combine different amounts of red, blue, yellow, near-ultraviolet and near-infrared lights during different stages of the plant's lifecycle," Wang Sen, a researcher at the IUA, told CMG. "We have built a database of 1,300 combinations for 72 types of crops." According to Wang, the team's initial research results found no significant difference between lab-grown plants and those from traditional farms. Indoor farms can "produce" vegetables faster regardless of the surrounding environment, making them ideal for urban areas, wastelands and deserts. "We can harvest over 10 crops of vegetables every year," said Li Zonggeng, assistant researcher at the IUA. "It's way more efficient." The farm can also act as a breeding accelerator, shortening the breed time of wheat, cotton and soybean plants by at least 50 percent, the researchers said, adding that with this new technology, they no longer need to travel to tropical areas like China's Hainan Island in winter, saving more resources in the breeding process. The IUA said on its official website that they are in talks with listed companies like Foshan NationStar Optoelectronics to commercialize their vertical farm. Palestinians flee from Khan Yunis to Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on December 4, 2023, after the Israeli army called on people to leave certain areas in the city, as battles between Israel and Hamas militants continue. Israel expanded its offensive against Hamas militants in besieged Gaza, as international concern deepened over the mounting civilian death toll in a war sparked by the October 7 attacks. Credit - Mahmud HamsAFP/Getty Images Gazans are facing new mass evacuation notices after the Israeli military said on Sunday that its ground assault in Gaza had expanded to include all of the Palestinian enclave. On Monday, Israeli forces urged residents to evacuate central Gaza and the southern city of Khan Younis, which has since faced a campaign of heavy bombing. The IDF has posted an illustrative map with numbered conflict zones on social media, telling Palestinians to head south towards Rafah, which has also faced bombardment, or to the West of the strip. "The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) continues to extend its ground operation against Hamas centers in all of the Gaza Strip," spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters in Tel Aviv. "The forces are coming face-to-face with terrorists and killing them, Hagari added. Israels government spokesperson, Eylon Levy, claimed that the military has struck over 400 targets. The Jabaliya refugee camp is also among Israels renewed targets. But localsmany of whom have already been evacuated from the Northsay there are no safe places left to go. OCHA estimates that 1.8 million people have now been displaced in Gaza, amounting to 75% of the population. The move comes two days after a temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas broke down on Friday, with both sides blaming each other for breaching the deal. During the seven-day pause, 105 hostages were released by Hamas, in exchange for 240 Palestinian women and children who were held in Israeli prisons. On Sunday, Ismael al-Thawabteh, the director general of Gaza's governmental media office, told Al Jazeera that as many as 700 Palestinians had been killed in a 24-hour period. As such, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza has said that a total of 15,523 Palestinians have been confirmed killed since Israel began its bombardment of Gaza. In Israel, 1200 were killed on Oct. 7 alongside 248 who were taken hostage by Hamas. As the ground attack intensifies, heres what to know about Israels latest evacuation orders. More From TIME Evacuation orders cause confusion Israel initially dropped leaflets telling residents to evacuate the Southern Gaza area which is already hosting over 1.1 million refugees who fled from the North during the Israeli operation in Gaza city. Dina Matar, the chair of center for Palestine studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, said that the initial evacuation orders were difficult for civilians to understand. The original leaflets had a QR code that they would have to use their phone to access and then read a veryalmost dystopiannumbered map of Gaza, says Matar. In the map, Gaza was divided into hundreds of numbered districts, with different areas designated as safe or unsafe. With internet connection being sporadic since the beginning of the war and electricity access highly limited, Matar says the map was inaccessible to many ordinary Gazans. Additionally, for the people who were able to access the map, the numerical labeling of the areas was difficult to understand. Even for someone who knows every single neighborhood, it is difficult to navigate that map, she says. Matar says that Israel has updated the leaflets today and since dropped leaflets naming specific regions in the west and south of Gaza for residents to flee to, but the complicated logistics of packing up and finding transport make it impossible for many. Expecting people to move collectively, in a short period of time is difficult, given the fact that people don't have many forms of transport except on foot or maybe on donkeys, she says. Even in the places that civilians have been encouraged to evacuate to, like Rafah in the South, there have been reports of Israeli bombs being dropped in civilian areas. Food, water, and medicine remain in short supply Food and clean water are also hard to come by in the strip, where aid trucks have been unable to meet the demand of a population of over two million people. During the truce between Israel and Hamas, which lasted one week, approximately 200 aid trucks entered the strip per day from Egypt. However, since the truce ended on Friday, the number of aid trucks permitted to enter has decreased. The Palestinian Red Cross last confirmed it had received 100 aid trucks on Saturday, Dec. 2 but has not announced receiving any aid trucks since. Clean water is a rare commodity, says Matar. People have to queue up and fill up cans of water in order for them to be able to drink it, use it for cooking, and things like that. Many of the displaced people who fled during Israels operation in the Northern part of the strip who were not able to find relatives or friends in the South who could open their homes to them are living in tents and using communal facilities. People have to queue up to use facilities like the toilet, it's a very rudimentary arrangement, says Matar. Residents have also been lacking essential medicines since the start of the war. In the South hospitals have been performing operations without anesthetics since October. The World Health Organization has warned that eventually disease will kill more people than the bombs as basic sanitation becomes impossible to maintain. Diarrheal diseases are extremely common among populations living in crowded living conditions with unclean water, and are responsible for 15% of child deaths around the globe. "Everybody everywhere has dire health needs now because they're starving because they lack clean water and (theyre) crowded together," the WHO's Margaret Harris said at a U.N. briefing in Geneva on Nov. 28, referring to the situation in Gaza. Write to Armani Syed at armani.syed@time.com. The Libre Initiative, an advocacy group affiliated with mega-donor Charles Kochs political network, will announce Monday four endorsements in key congressional races. Libre is endorsing Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), Monica De La Cruz (R-Texas) and Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.) for reelection and Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sam Brown, who is challenging Sen. Jacky Rosen (D). Those four Republicans are all running in jurisdictions where the Latino vote will play a key role, and which could impact the results of the presidential race. As we all know, the Latino vote will play a crucial role in shaping the nations political landscape, said Jose Mallea, senior adviser to the Libre Initiative Action, the organizations political wing. Elected officials and candidates running for office need to know that Latinos across the country are eager for solutions that grow the economy, expand opportunity, and empower them and their families. The four endorsements are strategic and could swing majorities in either chamber of Congress. Our community, and our nation, needs strong principled policy champions on Capitol Hill leading by example. That is why we are endorsing and mobilizing our grassroots army of Latino volunteers and voters to support these candidates in these key races, Mallea said. Salazars second reelection would consolidate Republican control over a south Florida district that was once seen as moving toward Democrats. In a year when Democrats are confident they can recover a House majority, Republicans cant afford to lose her district. De La Cruz is in a similar position, though she represents a district exclusively represented by Democrats since its creation in 1903 until she flipped it in 2022. Though redistricting has made the seat less accessible to Democrats, De La Cruz is all but certain to face a rematch of 2022 against Democrat Michelle Vallejo. In 2022, De La Cruz bested Vallejo by 9 percentage points, but with different dynamics in a presidential election year, De La Cruz could face a strong challenge. Ciscomani is also likely to face a 2022 rematch against former state Sen. Kirsten Engel, who lost their first match-up by fewer than 6,000 votes, or 1.5 percentage points. Mexico-born Ciscomani is seen as a model for a younger, conservative Latino politician, and he has been close to GOP leadership in the House during his first term. And Brown, a Purple Heart-decorated Afghanistan veteran, is running a statewide race in a heavily-Latino state that Democrats cannot afford to lose, either for the Senate or the presidential race. These candidates are committed to fighting for policies that pave the way for economic growth and opportunity all while limiting the increased role of big government. LIBRE Action is proud to endorse these policy champions and we look forward to mobilizing the full force of our grassroots capabilities in support of these candidates, Mallea said. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. KYIV, Ukraine Ukrainian officials on Sunday launched an investigation into allegations that Russian forces killed surrendering Ukrainian soldiers a war crime if confirmed after grainy footage on social media appeared to show two uniformed men being shot at close range after emerging from a dugout. The video shows the servicemen, one of them with his hands up, walking out at gunpoint and lying down on the ground before a group of Russian troops appears to open fire. It was not immediately possible to verify the videos authenticity or the circumstances in which it was filmed, and it was unclear when the incident took place. The Ukrainian General Prosecutors office on Sunday launched a criminal investigation, hours after the Ukrainian militarys press office said in an online statement that the footage is genuine. The video shows a group in Russian uniforms shooting, at point-blank range, two unarmed servicemen in the uniform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who were surrendering, the prosecutors office said in a Telegram update on Sunday. The Russian defense ministry did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. As of Sunday evening, there were no public statements from the Russian government or military on the video. Kyiv, its Western allies and international human rights organizations have repeatedly accused Moscow of breaching international humanitarian law since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Kremlin denies these allegations. The video first appeared Saturday on DeepState, a popular Ukrainian Telegram channel covering the war. The post claimed the footage came from the front lines near Avdiivka, a Ukrainian holdout in the countrys part-occupied east where there has been fierce fighting in recent weeks. The General Prosecutors Office on Sunday said that the alleged killing took place in the Pokrovsk district, which includes Avdiivka and surrounding areas. Its clear from the video that the Ukrainian servicemen are taking the necessary steps that show they are surrendering, Ukraines human rights chief, Dmytro Lubinets, said hours after the footage emerged on Saturday. In a statement posted to Telegram, Lubinets described the incident as yet another glaring example of Russias violations of international humanitarian law. Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military grouping that is fighting near Avdiivka, was cited by Ukrainian media as saying the video was glaring confirmation of Moscows disrespect for the laws of war. In March, footage of a man exclaiming Glory to Ukraine before being gunned down in a wooded area sparked national outcry in Ukraine, as senior officials alleged that he was an unarmed prisoner of war killed by Russian soldiers. Last summer, Kyiv and Moscow also traded blame for a shelling attack on a prison in occupied eastern Ukraine that killed dozens of Ukrainian POWs. Both sides claimed the assault on the facility in Olenivka was aimed at covering up atrocities, with Ukrainian officials charging captive soldiers had been tortured and executed there. The U.N.'s human rights chief in July rejected Moscows claim that a rocket strike had caused the blast. Also on Sunday, Ukraines energy ministry reported that close to 1,000 towns and villages suffered power outages that day, with hundreds of settlements in the west battered by wintry weather and others affected by ongoing fighting. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, late on Saturday assessed that military operations have slowed down all along the frontline in Ukraine due to poor weather, with mud bogging down tracked vehicles and making it hard for lighter equipment and infantry to advance. Even so, Shtupun, of Ukraines Tavria military command that oversees the stretch of frontline near Avdiivka, said in a separate statement Sunday that Russian infantry attacks had intensified in the area over the past day. In a Telegram post, he insisted Ukrainian troops were holding firm in Avdiivka and another nearby town. In the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, at least two people died and seven more were wounded after Russian forces on Sunday shelled a high-rise apartment block and other civilian buildings, the head of the citys military administration said in a series of Telegram posts. One of the updates by Roman Mrochko featured a blurred photo of what he said was the body of a deceased civilian, apparently lying on a dirt road or in a yard outside the high-rise. The photos authenticity could not be independently verified. Regional Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin separately reported on Sunday that Russian shelling that day damaged two of Khersons hospitals. He did not immediately reference any casualties. Earlier in the day, a 78-year-old civilian died in a village northeast of Kherson after Russian shells slammed into his garage, according to a Telegram update by the regional Ukrainian military administration. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) detained a Kyiv resident who allegedly aided a Russian missile strike against the capital on Dec. 31, 2022, the SBU said on Dec. 4. Russia launched a large-scale missile attack on Kyiv on Dec. 31 last year, damaging a building of the Taras Shevchenko National University. The 40-year-old suspect left for Russia via a third country at the end of 2022 and offered to work with Russian intelligence services in exchange for promised Russian citizenship, according to the SBU. To prove his loyalty, the man immediately provided information on the supposed location of Ukrainian defenses around Kyiv, which Russia used for an attack a few days later, the security service said. The suspected spy was then reportedly trained by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) in Moscow and sent back to Ukraine to collect intelligence on military targets in Kyiv and Zhytomyr Oblast. SBU officers reportedly exposed the man and detained him in his Kyiv flat. Searches uncovered a phone used to communicate with Russian handlers, Russian symbols, and documents needed to register for Russian citizenship, the SBU reported. The suspect faces life in prison. Ukraines fight to heal millions of children scarred by Russias war Editors note: The childrens full names are not revealed in this story to protect their identity. The location of the camp they attend is also not revealed for security reasons. Western Ukraine At the Gen.Camp tucked away in western Ukraine, children spend much of their day throwing The Kyiv IndependentAnastasiia Malenko Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. Keir Starmer will not have been surprised by the predictable criticism he has received since he chose to utter some restrained words of praise for Baroness Thatcher in an article for the Telegraph. The Labour leader may also see such carefully sculpted outrage for what it is: performative and unconvincing. And, ultimately, irrelevant. For all the online theories about Starmers electoral calculation in deliberately antagonising his partys Left a fresh attempt to reassure unhappy Conservative voters that its once again safe to switch their support to Labour there is little consideration of the possibility that he meant what he said. Every moment of meaningful change in modern British politics begins with the realisation that politics must act in service of the British people, rather than dictating to them, he wrote. Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Since Starmer is right, why have his words caused such (faux) offence to the faithful? Labour leaders either try to change their parties in order to make them more popular, and therefore more likely to win office; or they go with the flow, indulge their activists prejudices and hope that the electorate, rather than their party, will change. Ed Miliband fitted neatly into the latter category, as did his immediate successor, Jeremy Corbyn, and both reaped the electoral rewards their strategies deserved. But Sir Keir prefers to follow in the footsteps of Labours most effective election winner, Tony Blair. Some Labour strategists suggest that his words are unnecessary, or worse, that they will damage the partys drive for unity in the crucial run-up to next years general election. They are wrong. Labours opinion poll lead has been large and consistent for two years now. But it would be strange indeed if its 20 point lead were to translate into a similarly sized advantage when votes are counted on election night. Had Tony Blairs opinion poll leads been replicated at the ballot box, his margin of victory in May 1997 would have been more than 20 points rather than the rather more modest (but still impressive and decisive) 12 per cent. In other words, while the public may have made up its mind that this era of Conservative government should now end, the size of Labours victory is still unknown. Between now and polling day, if history is any guide, there is likely to be a swing back to the Conservatives, albeit one not large enough to save them from defeat. It is Starmers job to minimise that swing. But what about the truth of his tribute to Mrs Thatcher? Its odd that the younger the Labour activist, the more intense (and ill-informed) their hatred towards Britains first female prime minister becomes. People who are too young even to remember the early years of Blairs government are happy to vent their anger at Thatchers administration and its sins. That many of these privatisation, the selling off of council homes, support for Britains nuclear arsenal are also supported by todays Labour Party is neither here nor there. Being a member of the Labour Party is a juggling act: how to convey to others that your Left wing, radical, socialist conscience is alive and well, while maintaining your support for a party that falls short of your aspirations? How to keep open the possibility, however distant, of one day being selected as a candidate for office while at the same time broadcasting your thirst for social justice? Expressing personal hatred for Mrs Thatcher is one way to achieve it. In doing so, however, its convenient to ignore that Mrs Thatcher was elected to Number 10 thanks to the support of Labour voters, those same voters who supported the premierships of Harold Wilson and even Clement Attlee years but who were, by 1979, thoroughly disillusioned by their leadership and tired of policies which were lowering their living standards. Council house tenants, trade unionists and even the unemployed voted in large numbers for Mrs Thatchers party throughout the 1980s. In truth, Keir Starmer need lose no sleep about the chorus of condemnation from his own party supporters. In recognising the importance of Mrs Thatcher and the changes she introduced and the necessity of those changes he is simply accepting history, however uncomfortable it might be. Perhaps one day the rest of his party will follow suit. 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. A Lafayette firearms store owner and his wife were found guilty of dealing in firearms without a license, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorneys Office Western District of Louisiana. A jury trial that began in federal court Nov. 27 ended Nov. 30. The jury found the couple from Broussard, Jeremiah Micah Deare, 37, and Sarah Elaine Fogle, 30, guilty of conspiracy to engage in the business of dealing in firearms without a license after hearing from more than 20 witnesses. Trial testimony and evidence revealed that Deare was the owner of Daves Gunshop and the responsible party for Daves Federal Firearms License, which was located in Lafayette. Numerous trial exhibits demonstrated the illegal sale and attempted illegal sale of hundreds of firearms out of their residence and at gun shows as an unlicensed business. Federal Courthouse in Lafayette Two hundred forty six firearms were seized from the couples home, many with price tags, and were brought into court for the jury to inspect, the release states. The indictment also seeks forfeiture of a total of 619 firearms that were involved in the commission of these offenses. The couple originally were indicted in 2021 for conspiring to deal firearms without a license, making false statements in records required to be kept by a licensed firearms dealer and failing to file sales reports in connection with their firearms business located in Lafayette. A compliance inspection was conducted at Daves by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in August 2019. At a warning conference Sept. 19, 2019, in Baton Rouge, Deare and Fogle were warned for numerous violations, including failing to complete a background check form ATF-4473 (one time), failing to accurately keep acquisition and disposition records for dispositions (67 times), failing to accurately keep acquisition and disposition records for acquisitions (62 times), transferring firearms without having a final response from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (twice), inaccurate completion of ATF-4473 forms (111 times), and for missing firearms. Trial evidence confirmed that the ATF investigator provided an Acknowledgement of Federal Firearms Regulations to inform Deare of their responsibilities as a Federal Firearms License holder, and about laws relating to engaging in the business of selling firearms at gun shows that was signed by Deare acknowledging that he understood he was responsible for familiarizing himself with the laws and regulations. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, during trial, testimony and evidence showed that Deare and Fogle, after being warned, willfully engaged in the business of dealing in firearms without a license by buying and selling firearms without complying with the recordkeeping and background check requirements required by federal law. Deare and Fogle sold firearms at gun shows to non-Louisiana residents for which no ATF-4473 or background checks were ever completed. Their failure to conduct background checks resulted in the sales of firearms to persons prohibited by law from possessing or purchasing firearms. Deare faces a sentence of not more than five years in prison on the first two counts and not more than 1 year on the third. Fogle faces a sentence of not more than five years in prison on the first count. Each defendant also faces up to three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $250,000 on each count. Deare was remanded into custody, where he will remain until the sentencing April 2, 2024. Fogle will remain out on bond, with a restriction prohibiting her from traveling outside the State of Louisiana. This article originally appeared on Lafayette Daily Advertiser: Lafayette gun store owner convicted for selling firearms without license Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua] Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed the need to speed up building Shanghai into a modern, socialist and international metropolis by focusing on the construction of international centers of economy, finance, trade, shipping and sci-tech innovation. Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks during an inspection tour in Shanghai that ran from Tuesday to Saturday. Xi urged Shanghai to accelerate building itself into a modern, socialist and international metropolis with global influence, and play a leading and exemplary role in advancing Chinese modernization. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua] He inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange on Tuesday afternoon as soon as he got off a train. Xi urged the exchange to speed up the construction of a world-class exchange, and make greater contributions to exploring the futures regulatory system and business model with Chinese characteristics and building an international financial center. When visiting Zhangjiang Science City in the Pudong New Area, Xi said promoting Chinese modernization can not be separated from the strategic support of science and technology, education and talent, and that Shanghai should take a lead in this respect. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua] On Wednesday afternoon, Xi visited a residential community in Minhang District that is dedicated to providing affordable rental housing for new urban dwellers, young people and frontline workers. Xi said he was pleased to see city builders from all over the country living and working here with joy and contentment. Migrant workers who come to make contributions in Shanghai are also masters of the city, he said. On Friday morning, Xi was briefed on the city's work by the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee and the Shanghai municipal government. Xi noted that accelerating the construction of Shanghai as international centers of economy, finance, trade, shipping and sci-tech innovation is an important task entrusted to the city by the CPC Central Committee. Xi stressed that Shanghai should intensify its research to achieve breakthroughs in core technologies in key fields, boost the transformation and upgrading of its traditional industries, and continuously enhance its status as an international center of economy and its influence in global economic governance. More efforts should be made to promote high-level financial opening-up to better serve the real economy, sci-tech innovation, and the joint development of the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi said. He noted that the city should implement its strategy of upgrading its pilot free trade zone in full, promote the development of the international trade center, and enhance its capability of global allocation of shipping resources. Xi stressed that Shanghai should comprehensively deepen reform and opening-up from a higher starting point, urging the city to devote significant energy to promoting pioneering reform and opening-up on all fronts. Shanghai should also foster a world-class business environment, stimulate the vitality of various business entities, and strengthen its attractiveness to high-end resources at home and abroad, he noted. Xi pointed out that Shanghai should explore a new path of modernization in megacity governance with Chinese characteristics, and that improving people's living standards and well-being is the original aspiration and ultimate goal of urban construction and governance. He highlighted efforts to deepen culture-related institutional reforms and invigorate the innovation and creativity of culture. Noting that Shanghai is the birthplace of the Communist Party of China, Xi emphasized the importance of making good use of local resources to carry forward the great founding spirit of the Party and build a team of high-caliber, professional officials that matches the standards of a modern, socialist and international metropolis. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, visits a memorial hall of the New Fourth Army in Yancheng, east China's Jiangsu Province, Dec. 3, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua] On his return journey to Beijing on Sunday, Xi visited a memorial hall of the New Fourth Army in Yancheng, a city in east China's Jiangsu Province. Cai Qi, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and director of the CPC Central Committee general office, was also on the inspection tour. This Lawyer Is On A Mission To Become The First Black Female Chess Master: I Do Wanna See More Black Girls Playing Chess | Photo: DEV IMAGES via Getty Images Rochelle Ballantyne, a New York lawyer, is pursuing her dream of becoming the first Black female chess master. Ballantyne said she has been trying to reach her goal for over a decade. Reuters reported that the 26-year-old was featured in the 2012 documentary Brooklyn Castle, highlighting a chess club at a middle school in New York City. Ballantyne, who is in her first year working as a lawyer after attending law school at New York University, said she learned chess at 8 from her grandmother. The rising chess star continued to sharpen her skills by competing in various tournaments. As she continued to climb up the rankings, Ballantyne realized that few people in chess looked like her. As I got better, there were less and less girls, she said in an interview with Today. Ballantyne has now aimed to inspire more Black girls to participate in chess. I do this becuase I do wanna see more Black girls playing chess, she said. I do this because I grew up poor and this was a way for me to get into college for free. Ballantyne especially strives to be an example for her 10-year-old sister. She told Reuters she wants her sister to know that there isnt anything she cant do if she works hard enough to do it. Ballantyne said people at chess tournaments would sometimes mistake her as the help. She added that people advised her to wear pants when she plays because she might distract boys. People just werent aware of how their statements impacted or left impressions on a little Black girl, Ballantyne told Reuters. Race always matters. And I think more people should understand that and recognize the effects of race in every aspect of our life, not just chess. Ballantyne worked three jobs to get through law school while interning for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund simultaneously. Additionally, her loved ones used GoFundMe to help her cover travel and chess tournament expenses. Tony Rich, executive director of the St. Louis Chess Club, told Reuters that players who score 2,200 are considered chess masters. Ballantyne has achieved a rating of 1,962 in the past year. Ballantyne will continue to honor her grandmother and represent Black girls as she moves forward with her chess career. First and foremost, its for my grandma, she said. Secondly, theres so many more Black girls, little Black girls playing chess now, and its so cool to inspire them. (from left) Gov. Phil Murphy shakes hands with Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin as Senate President Nick Scutari looks on before Murphy's budget address at the New Jersey Statehouse on Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2023. State leaders announced the six people who will lead a task force to implement the StayNJ initiative. Members of the new group will be responsible for creating a plan to implement the property tax relief plan that is supposed to launch in 2026. The program was created as part of the 2024 fiscal year budget process in an effort to cut property tax bills for seniors in the hopes of keeping them in New Jersey during their retirement years. Who will serve on the StayNJ task force? Gov. Phil Murphy, Senate President Nick Scutari and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin each appointed a member to the StayNJ task force. Scutari and Coughlin also shared a joint appointment. The task force is rounded out by representatives from the state Treasury and the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs. The members include: The State Treasurer, or the State Treasurers designee: Deputy State Treasurer Aaron Binder The Commissioner of Community Affairs, or the commissioners designee: Dr. Christopher Wheeler, Chief Data Officer, NJDCA One public member appointed by the Governor, who may be an Executive Branch employee: Chief Policy Advisor Dennis Zeveloff, Office of the Governor One public member recommended by the Senate President: Jessica Cohen, former Director of Public Policy for the Senate President One public member recommended by the Assembly Speaker: Woodbridge Mayor and former State Treasurer John E. McCormac One public member jointly recommended by the Senate President and the Assembly Speaker: Plainfield Mayor Adrian O. Mapp What did Gov. Phil Murphy say? Murphy said that the members of the task force bring a wealth of public policy experience to the table, particularly when it comes to the impact property taxes have on our local communities. We need to ensure this program launches smoothly with a seamless application process and benefit distribution, Coughlin said. The task force will review all of the States existing property tax relief programs and present a report to the governor and the Legislature by the end of May. The report will include recommendations on how to restructure and consolidate the various programs into one streamlined property tax relief program for seniors through a singular application, with a target implementation date of January 1, 2026. Murphy also announced that former Director of the Office of Management and Budget David Ridolfino will be the executive director of the task force. Charlie Stile: Craig Coughlin has a StayNJ windfall to sell to seniors. Will it ever pay off? Dominated spring headlines The program dominated headlines this spring after Coughlin first introduced a version of it in his chamber. Scutari joined him by introducing a companion bill in the state senate. Murphy was not initially on board with the program. He said at the time that there are a few things about the bill that are concerning, with the "biggest one" being the expense added to the budget, where "we've got revenues that are softening already," and another being that it "would be for everybody," so even millionaires like Murphy would get a break. The governors office was said to be preparing for all possibilities, including a government shutdown, though the governor himself noted that he has a great relationship with Coughlin and the Legislature overall and that both sides are "focused on seniors and making the state more affordable." After negotiations, the bill was amended to include the expansion of the Senior Freeze program, which Murphy included in his proposed budget for fiscal year 2024. The expansion of eligibility would include seniors earning up to $150,000, a $50,000 increase, and would decrease the residency requirement from 10 years to three years. It remains in the new agreement. The program is expected to cost about $1.3 billion and with a "significant focus on equity." The program includes around $140 million being set aside in fiscal years 2024 and 2025. The state is expected to set aside about $100 million, $200 million and $300 million for each of the next three years respectively. There are funding caveats included for other budget priorities, though, including a full pension payment, fully fund school aid payments and maintaining a large surplus. Katie Sobko covers the New Jersey Statehouse. Email: sobko@northjersey.com This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: StayNJ property tax program task force nominees named Students walk on campus at UC Berkeley in 2019. (Josh Edelson / For The Times) To the editor: I sympathize with the anguish of young Asian Americans looking for the secret sauce that will get them into an elite college. ("Post-affirmative action, Asian American families are more stressed than ever about college admissions," Nov. 26) Something your article does not mention is the simple fact that there are not enough spaces in elite college admissions programs to admit everyone who is qualified. As a former Stanford alumni volunteer who helped recruit applicants at college fairs, Ive listened to more than one high school counselor express shock that their star student didnt get into Stanford despite having stratospheric grades and test scores and extracurricular achievements galore. I note that most of the students and families profiled in your article have the wherewithal to hire consultants to help them with the admissions process. At least this gives them a leg up over students whose families cannot afford such assistance. Agustin Medina, South Pasadena .. To the editor: I have been a teacher at an ethnically mixed high school for the last 49 years. First, of course the bar goes up. Schools only have so much space, and more students are applying. Second, college admissions are opaque, because if the schools listed exactly what they wanted to see, then every student would try to supply exactly that, and the process would only get more confused. And, students would feel even more pressure to do exactly what the schools wanted. Third, members of one ethnic group aren't any smarter than members of another. Fourth, the best colleges probably do not have room for even one top student from every high school, let alone more. California alone has more than 400,000 high school seniors. Fifth, parents tend to see their child as the best without any reference to all the other students applying. Monty Armstrong, Irvine .. To the editor: Perhaps more parents should consider the decision of the "student known as a genius" to attend Pasadena City College as a choice, not a failure. Theresa Lopez, Glendale This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Buckeye Lake branch of Licking County Library system. BUCKEYE LAKE The Licking County Library plans to close its Buckeye Lake branch in the spring, but supporters hope the branch's 20-year service to the community can continue. Pam Reed, president of nonprofit Friends of the Buckeye Lake Library, said the Licking County Library Board notified the group of its intention to close the Buckeye Lake branch in a letter received on Nov. 21 or 22. Reed said there was no prior discussion with the Buckeye Lake group about closing the library. We got nothing, and that is in such poor taste, Reed said. Its very troubling. We had no idea, and we were blindsided. They dont understand the community. They dont find value in the library at Buckeye Lake. Julia Walden, who became executive director of Licking County Library about two weeks ago, said the plans are to merge the current Hebron and Buckeye Lake branches into one 4,200-square foot space at 620 E. Main St., in the Arrowhead Shopping Plaza in Hebron, near Kroger. We are experiencing a duplication of services, resources, staffing, collection, Walden said. Buckeye Lake usage continues to decline, and Hebron is expanding. The Licking County Library Board Finance Committee meets 4 p.m. Dec. 13 at the downtown Newark branch, immediately followed by a special meeting of the full board at 4:30 p.m. The topic of the special meeting is to discuss the final terms of the lease for the new Lakewood branch. I think theyre intending to get this resolved on the 13th, Walden said of the board. On Dec. 20, the Library Board is scheduled to meet again in a special session to discuss the Lakewood branch. The board's letter to the Friends group invited them to attend that meeting but did not mention a Dec. 13 meeting. Walden said Friday that the Friends group has also was invited to the Dec. 13 meeting, when the final vote is expected. The letter, dated Nov. 17, states the decision was already made to close the Buckeye Lake branch. "After deep consideration and a thorough review of various factors, such as usage statistics, county demographics, and operational needs, the Library Board of Trustees has decided to merge its Hebron and Buckeye Lake locations into a singular location," the letter states. The Hebron branch is currently housed at 934 W. Main St., in the Hebron Municipal Complex building. The Buckeye Lake branch is located at 4455 Walnut Road, in a shopping center with village offices. The Library Board letter states the move into the new Lakewood branch location will happen in the spring, as construction and design plans remain in development. In the meantime, operations at the Buckeye Lake branch could continue on a month-to-month basis, according to the letter. Reed said Buckeye Lake residents without cars will now be expected to walk along Ohio 79 over Interstate 70, and through other intersections, and enter a busy parking lot to go to the library. To me, thats an accident waiting to happen, Reed said. From a safety standpoint, it doesnt make any sense. Walden said Licking County Library recently received a replacement for its old bookmobile, which exceeded its useful life, and will use it to serve Buckeye Lake residents. We value that community, and we have investigated ways to continue to deliver services to that area with a brand new mobile library," Walden said. "So, we plan to still have a presence in the community, just in a different vehicle, literally. Reed said an agreement made 20 years ago with then-director Steven Hawk, has been a success and theres no reason to cancel it now. Twenty years ago, my neighbor and I felt we needed to offer something for our kids," Reed said. "We had the highest poverty in Licking County and the highest illiteracy in Licking County. He made this deal with us, and for 20 years, weve kept our end up. The Friends group has raised money to pay for the branch's operating expenses, lease, insurance, taxes, security, utilities and cleaning, about $20,000 a year, Reed said. She said the Licking County Library only pays for staffing, materials and programming. We have raised funds for 20 years to get that money to keep the doors open," Reed said. "We have even sponsored some of the programs in the past. Reed said usage of the library may be down, but thats because the Library Board cut branch hours, programming and marketing. Before COVID, we had a great partnership with the library and administration folks, and we would market the library and put articles in the local paper and pass out flyers and did a lot of things to beef up visibility. Were not allowed to do the marketing like before. I feel they have created the (usage reduction). The Licking County Library system also operates branches in downtown Newark, west Newark, Johnstown and Utica, and 24-hour kiosks in Pataskala and Hanover. kmallett@newarkadvocate.com 740-973-4539 Twitter: @kmallett1958 This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Licking County Library may close Buckeye Lake branch despite opposition Lithuania contributed 1 million euros ($1.08 million) to the Ukraine Solidarity Fund, a fund managed by the Council of Europe Development Bank (CEB) to help finance Ukraine's reconstruction, as well as improve the current living conditions of Ukrainians, the CEB announced on Dec. 4. The fund was created in 2022 with 1 million euros ($1.08 million) in seed money from Ireland, and it has since received 2 million euros ($2.2 million) from Germany and 700,000 Czech Koruna ($31,000) from the Czech Republic. Lithuania stands firm in support of Ukraine," said Lithuanian Finance Minister Gintare Skaiste. "Ukraines strength lies in its people and their determination to fight against the aggressor, so it is important to provide not only military and budgetary support, but also to address the social consequences of the war to ensure the basic needs of internally displaced persons. This is why we have decided to contribute to the Ukraine Solidarity fund that will help to reconstruct and strengthen the country's social infrastructure." A combination of individual countries and institutions like the EU and the European Investment Bank (EIB) have pledged billions of dollars for Ukraine's reconstruction. U.S. officials have also suggested that Russian money currently frozen by Ukraine's allies in the West will not be returned until Moscow pays for Ukraine's reconstruction. Estimates on the cost of Ukraine's reconstruction have varied. A report by the World Bank in March 2023 put the figure at $411 billion, but others have put the number at higher than $1 trillion. We have to speed up: European Investment Bank head Hoyer calls for swift reconstruction of Ukraine Werner Hoyer, the head of the European Investment Bank (EIB), and its vice-president Teresa Czerwinska visited Kyiv on Nov. 27 to announce a new 450-million-euro package ($493 million) to Ukraine and inaugurate the banks new regional hub in the capital. The sum, approved by the EIB on Nov. 15, The Kyiv IndependentAlexander Query Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. WASHINGTON Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., warned Monday that if Donald Trump is elected president next year for a second term, he will try to remain in power beyond those four years. "There's no question," Cheney said about that possibility in an interview on NBCs TODAY show with host Savannah Guthrie in advance of the release Tuesday of her book, "Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning." Asked if she believes Trump would try to stay in power forever, Cheney said, "Absolutely. He's already done it once," referring to his efforts after the 2020 presidential election to overturn Joe Biden's victory and to stop its certification on Jan. 6, 2021. President Trump Signs Bills That Nullify Measures Put In Place During Obama Presidency (Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty Images file) The U.S. could become a dictatorship if Trump is re-elected, Cheney warned. "I think its a very, very real threat and concern. And I dont say any of that lightly and frankly, its painful for me as someone who has spent her whole life in Republican politics, who grew up as a Republican to watch whats happening to my party and to watch the extent to which Donald Trump himself has basically determined that the only thing that matters is him, his power and his success." Cheney said it's "naive" for Americans to think the country would survive another Trump presidency. She argued that Americans cannot count on a House led by Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to stop Trump or a Senate whose members include Republicans Josh Hawley, of Missouri, or Mike Lee, of Utah. Asked what would happen if Trump tried to overturn the election again with Johnson as House speaker, Cheney said it's "too dangerous to even contemplate going down that path" because, she said, they all had a "practice run" in 2020 and 2021. Cheney suggested it would be safer for the country for Democrats to take control of the House, saying emphatically that Johnson and the Republicans currently serving there cannot be in the majority in 2025, especially if it has to determine the outcome of the presidential election. "I think what we have seen is that you cannot count on this group of elected Republicans to uphold their oath," she said. Cheney repeated that she would "never vote for Donald Trump" and that she would "do whatever it takes to make sure that Donald Trump is defeated in 2024." Asked if that means she would vote for Biden, she repeated, "I will do whatever it takes." A vote for Donald Trump may mean the last election that you ever get to vote in," she warned. "A vote for Donald Trump is a vote against the Constitution." The former congresswoman and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney said she would see how the presidential race unfolds over the next couple of months before deciding if she would try to launch her own White House bid. This article was originally published on NBCNews.com Subway franchisees have been able to opt out of deals made through the chain's app. Starting December 28, the chain is forcing franchisees to honor all digital deals. The move comes as the chain's sale to Jimmy John's owner is reportedly under review. Subway franchisees have long rebelled against the chain's constant string of footlong deals and cheap sub promotions. Some Subway operators have chosen not to honor deals, frustrating customers. But soon, all franchisees must "honor all digital programs and promotions," according to a leaked internal memo sent to franchisees in September and viewed by Business Insider. The policy change comes as the chain hopes to complete its sale to private equity firm Roark Capital and as the sale has reportedly come under scrutiny from the FTC. "Effective Dec. 28, 2023, all restaurants will be required to honor all digital programs and promotions, including loyalty rewards and digital discounts," the memo says. "In addition, loyalty incentive programs designed to attract new loyalty members are mandatory and will not be reimbursed by Subway." The chain told Business Insider that "dedicated digital promotions generate a lift in digital sales for our franchisees." "Healthy business growth is key to helping increase franchisee profitability," Subway told Business Insider in a statement. "The majority of digital transactions represent incremental sales for many of our franchisees, and the Subway app continues to be one of our strongest growth channels." The app currently shows a deal for 50% off a footlong when you buy one at full price. Subway app The Subway app currently shows a deal for 50 % off a footlong sandwich when you buy one at full price. In the past, franchisees have been able to opt out of accepting these types of digital promotions. A Subway franchisee from California questioned the legality of forcing operators to accept low-margin deals via the app. The operator asked to remain anonymous as franchisees are discouraged from talking to the media. The operator's identity is known to Business Insider. "Isn't it considered price fixing to force people to take special offers," the franchisee said. "In the past, we've always had people opt out. I don't understand how they can do this." The California franchisee said they honor digital deals to maintain good customer relationships. "I don't opt out because I don't like to piss off the customers, but I know plenty of franchisees who have," the franchisee said. Subway told the industry trade publication Restaurant Business that 90% of franchisees accept digital coupons. The new app policy comes as Subway's $10 billion sale to Roark, which owns Arby's and Jimmy John's, is being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission, according to Politico. "The Federal Trade Commission is investigating if the $10 billion purchase of Subway creates a sandwich shop monopoly with Jimmy John's and Arby's," the publication reported in late November, citing sources. "The government is focused in part on whether the addition of Subway gives Roark too much control of a lucrative segment of the fast food industry." An FTC spokesperson declined to comment. Subway didn't respond to a request for comment on the alleged probe. Subway's has spent the past few years shuttering thousands and trimming corporate staff. It has struggled with relevancy and has faced criticism over its menu, including a suit that cast doubt on the legitimacy of its tuna. Since 2021, the chain has overhauled its menu, adding new ingredients and deli-sliced subs to boost sales. Are you a Subway insider with insight to share? Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at nluna@insider.com or via Signal encrypted at 714-875-6218. Read the original article on Business Insider This photo taken on Dec. 2, 2023 shows the opening ceremony of the 2023 Understanding China Conference (Guangzhou) in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province. [Photo/Xinhua] China's high-level opening-up was in the spotlight at the 2023 Understanding China Conference (Guangzhou), with attendees from home and abroad sharing their insights and perspectives on the topic. This year marks the 45th anniversary of the beginning of China's reform and opening-up. Through the decades, China has been committed to its fundamental national policy of opening up to the outside world and pursued a mutually beneficial strategy of opening-up. Today, it is also pursuing high-quality development and high-level opening-up. Conference participants said that China has made significant contributions to the growth of the world economy, continually sharing development opportunities with the world through the process of opening-up. Through high-level opening-up, China can provide not only powerful impetus for its own economic development, but it can also offer robust support for the construction of a community with a shared future for humanity. Shang Fulin, a former banking regulation official, stressed that since the beginning of its reform and opening-up, China has embraced globalization actively and made full use of the opportunities brought about by economic globalization. By adhering to its fundamental policy of opening-up, China has unleashed significant social productivity and deepened its ties with the world economy, he added. China's average contribution to global economic growth was in excess of 30 percent from 2013 to 2021, emerging as a crucial stabilizer and driving force for global economic expansion. In the face of challenges such as intense geopolitical competition, rising unilateralism and protectionism, China remains committed to opening-up, becoming a crucial force driving globalization, Shang said. To propel high-level financial opening-up, Shang called for the promotion of institutional opening-up, the improved facilitation of cross-border investment, and the active establishment of a fair competition environment that aligns with high-level opening-up. "It also requires the effective leveraging of the vast potential of the domestic market, strengthened international cooperation and the sharing of China's development opportunities. Additionally, China should participate actively in global economic and financial governance, contribute to the reform of global governance systems, and engage in the formulation of global economic rules," Shang added. Fred Hu, founder and chairman of investment firm Primavera Capital Group, said that China needs to persist in its high-level opening-up, promote high-quality development, and foster a market-oriented international business environment with the rule of law. Efforts should also be made to improve relationships with major trade and investment partners, and to reduce geopolitical uncertainties. "China still possesses tremendous advantages and limitless potential. It will remain a primary destination for global foreign direct investment, and continue to serve as a powerful engine for world economic growth," Hu said. CP Pharmaceutical Capital Group, a multinational group covering various industries, was among the first foreign companies to enter China after the country adopted its reform and opening-up policy in the 1970s. "Our company has witnessed the miracle of China's economic development. We are also among the participants and beneficiaries of China's reform and opening-up. China's reform, opening-up and engagement in economic globalization have brought about a new and promising development outlook for both China and the entire world," said Tse Ping, chairman of the group. "Economic globalization has been disrupted by various factors. However, the Chinese government is advancing its higher-level opening-up in a timely manner, which has provided visionary entrepreneurs with new development opportunities," Tse noted. Toshinobu Umetsu, president and CEO of Shiseido China, said that Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido Group has benefited from the rapid growth of the Chinese economy and is willing to participate in and promote China's high-level opening-up. A Macys security guard was killed and another injured in a stabbing by an alleged shoplifted at the department store in Philadelphia. Police said that the attack took place at 10.40am EST on Monday when a man allegedly tried to steal hats from the Center City store. Officials said that the security guard confronted the man, backs off, gets the merchandise back, allows the male to go on. But the suspect returned 15 minutes later and is accused of attacking the two security guards with a knife, say police, reported news station WPVI. Both victims were taken to hospital by police, where one of them was pronounced dead at 11.19am EST. The suspect fled from the scene on the citys SEPTA system, and dropped a knife, police said. He was taken into custody at the Somerset station at around 12pm EST and has been positively identified by witnesses, Interim Police Commissioner John Stanford told reporters. Security guard killed and another injured in stabbing at Macys store in Philadelphia (WPVI) Just a tragic situation, a few weeks before the holiday, these security officers are just doing their job, theyre here to make sure that people can come to this location and shop in a safe manner, Commissioner Stanford said. Police said that the guard killed was 30 years old and suffered a stab wound to the neck. The other victim is 23 years old and suffered wounds to his face and left arm. He remains in hospital in stable condition. Neither of the security guards, one who had worked there several years and the other just a few months, has been identified. Security guard killed and another injured in stabbing at Macys store in Philadelphia (WPVI) Commissioner Stanford told reporters that the Macys store has filed more than 250 reports of retail theft in 2023. We are heartbroken about the incident that took place today at Macys Center City, Macys said in a statement. The store will temporarily remain closed as we work with law enforcement on this investigation and defer any further comments about the case to them. Ensuring the safety and well-being of our customers and colleagues is always our top priority. The Venezuelan government claimed an overwhelming victory in the referendum held on Sunday to acquire blank-check powers to invade Guyana, saying it had obtained 10.55 million votes, or 97.8% of the total cast, in its favor. But the reported participation did not match the empty voting stations seen during the day and was more than twice as high as that of independent exit polls. In what was declared as an existential threat by Guyana, the Caracas socialist regime held the five-question referendum asking Venezuelans if they were in favor of creating a new state to be called Guayana Esequiba, in what would amount to adding to the Venezuelan map about three quarters of the land occupied by Guyana. The Nicolas Maduro regime held the vote despite a decision from the United Nations International Court of Justice ordering Venezuela to refrain from taking any action which would modify the situation that currently prevails in the territory in dispute, which is currently under the control of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana. Late Sunday night, Maduro celebrated the results announced by the National Electoral Council. Today the people spoke loud and clear and we are going to begin a new, powerful stage, because we carry the mandate of the people, we carry the voice of the people. We must fight for our Guayana Esequiba. May this help us fight for peace. But there were very few voices outside the regime that accepted the results, with international news agencies reporting that the numbers provided by the government-controlled electoral council were not credible, amid the empty streets and even emptier voting stations seen throughout the day. A wire story from the EFE news agency reported that less than 12% of those registered had voted in different centers in Caracas three hours before they were scheduled to close. The 10.55 million vote announced by the electoral council translate to a participation of more than 51% of the 20.69 million of Venezuelans registered to vote, but those numbers were doubtful, even among local news reports claiming that regime officials were forcing public employees into participating. Ruben Chirinos, whose polling firm Meganalisis monitored the elections, said participation did not surpass 22% of registered voters. The electroal councils ability to conduct fair and transparent elections has been questioned for decades, given that it is completely controlled by the regime and lacks independent supervision. Claims that Maduro committed fraud during the 2018 election led to the United States and 50 other nations to declare that he was usurping the presidency. While it is unclear what Maduro plans to do with the announced results, the referendum sought a blank check from voters to seize a chunk of land slightly smaller than the state of Florida, which would alter the rights and citizenship of more than 230,000 Guyanese who have no ties to the Spanish-speaking country. In dispute is the oil- and mineral-rich Essequibo region, which Maduro claims belongs to Venezuela despite an 1899 ruling by international arbitrators that established the current borders between the two countries. The border dispute has been before the U.N.s international court for years. In September, Maduros National Assembly approved a resolution to put the question about the territorys ownership before voters. Observers have noted that a U.N. court decision on the larger border dispute is still years away. However, in its ruling the court warned that both Guyana and Venezuela shall refrain from any action which might aggravate or extend the dispute before the Court or make it more difficult to resolve. The court said that Guyana is the one currently administering and exercising control over the area under dispute and that the Court, considers that, pending the final decision in the case, Venezuela must refrain from taking any action which would modify that situation. The Court emphasizes that the question of the validity of the 1899 Award and the related question of the definitive settlement of the land boundary dispute between Guyana and Venezuela are matters for the Court to decide at the merits stage, the court said. (Bloomberg) -- Nicolas Maduros attempt to rally patriotic Venezuelans in a referendum over a border dispute fell short of his goals, signaling a rocky start to his presidential campaign. Most Read from Bloomberg Polling centers were largely deserted on Sunday as most voters ignored his calls to mobilize. The governments report that 10.4 million voters took part met widespread skepticism, but even that fell short of Maduros target of 12 million. The referendum posed five questions on whether an oil-rich piece of territory about the size of Florida should be governed from Caracas. Virtually all Venezuelans believe that this region, known as the Essequibo, belongs to them rather than to neighboring Guyana, so the result was never in doubt about 95% of voters backed the governments position, according to the electoral authority. Read more: Venezuela Stirs Nationalism in Dispute With Guyana Over Oil Voter turnout, however, contrasts dramatically with expectations, due to what was seen in voting centers yesterday and what participation for these events have been in the past, said Luis Vicente Leon, director of Caracas consultant Datanalisis. For the government, its obvious that the referendum results failed to generate the success story it was looking for. The vote represented a significant test of the ruling partys capacity to mobilize its supporters ahead of the 2024 election. Maduro is under pressure from the US to hold a clean election in return for an easing of economic sanctions. The US wants the government to lift the ban on opposition candidates including Maduros main rival, primary winner Maria Corina Machado, from running for public office, among other concessions. Machado said Venezuelans showed their discontent by not participating. She has said Venezuela should defend its position before the International Court of Justice. Read more: Venezuelas Primary Sweep Puts Maduro and Biden in the Hot Seat One of the reasons to hold the referendum would have been to test the public mood, wrote Nicholas Watson, a political risk analyst at consultancy Teneo Holdings. If Maduro remains nervous about how to manage the electoral challenge, he may opt to keep the border dispute simmering in an attempt to rally nationalist sentiment. The dispute intensified in recent years following massive oil discoveries off the coast of Guyana by majors such as Exxon Mobil Corp. The small, English-speaking nation is now one of the fastest-growing crude producers in the world. Mistrust in the reliability of the referendum results published could undermine confidence in the electoral authority ahead of next years vote, according to Jesus Castellanos, a former Venezuela electoral authority official now based in Chile. Everything the electoral authority did in this process is contrary to an authentic or democratic popular consultation process, Castellanos said. Its not just the regime who lost, but the electoral body. --With assistance from Fabiola Zerpa and Nicolle Yapur. Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2023 Bloomberg L.P. An ambitious multi-million-dollar project begins Monday to improve safety and traffic flow along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, including the area where four Pepperdine University students were killed in a crash in October. As part of the Traffic Signal Synchronization Project, crews will install communication lines between existing traffic signals on PCH between John Tyler Drive and Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Officials said this will allow signals to be controlled remotely by Caltrans to lower speeds and reduce congestion. Pacific Coast Highway The new equipment will capture real-time traffic data and send it to the traffic signal controllers, which will use state-of-the art software to adjust the traffic signal timing to actual traffic volume, the city of Malibu said on its website. Vehicles going the speed over the speed limit will encounter red lights, while those going the speed limit will encounter green lights. The project also includes new surveillance cameras at each intersection, new signal poles, electronic message signs and other improvements. Protesters demand safety improvements along PCH where 4 Pepperdine students were killed The $34.6 million project was approved by the Malibu City Council in 2017 to deal with traffic flow and safety concerns, well before the Oct. 17 crash that claimed the lives of Pepperdine students Niamh Rolston, Peyton Stewart, Asha Weir and Deslyn Williams. Authorities say a speeding driver slammed into parked cars that struck the students as they walked along PCH near the Malibu Pier. The driver, 22-year-old Fraser Bohm, faces four counts of murder. His attorney claims he was being chased by another driver. PEPPERDINE CRASH VICTIMS Since 2010, 58 individuals have died in accidents on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, and it is no surprise that improving safety on this iconic highway has been a top priority for our City, said Mayor Steve Uhring. Once completed [the project] will make PCH safer for our residents, for the 40,000 commuters who pass through Malibu every day and for the 15 million visitors who visit Malibu every summer. According to Caltrans, PCH handles approximately 40,500 vehicles per day during peak hours in the summer. The project is expected to take up to a year to complete. Drivers and residents can expect alternating lane closures and lower speed limits in the construction zones. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KTLA. Ukraine is manufacturing "the absolute majority" of UAVs used at the battlefield, from budget FPV (first-person view) to long-range strike drones, Strategic Industries Minister Oleksandr Kamyshin said in a Telegram post on Dec. 4. Kamyshin noted Ukraine imports only a few drone models for its military. Read also: Russians now producing Irans Shahed drones on their own, to be main feature of winter strikes on UA "Our production now outputs a significant number of Ukrainian-made drones," he said. Read also: Defense Ministry approves new UAVs for the military under expedited procedure Also on Dec. 4, Deputy Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Ivan Gavrylyuk revealed Ukraines Defense Forces would receive significantly more drones in December than in November, with additional funds being allocated by the ministry. Gavrylyuk stated that Ukraines Armed Forces currently operate about 70 UAV models and more than 20 types of UAV munitions. Read also: Army of Drones initiative praised by former MP and UAV Squad Commander Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov reported in September that drone production in 2023 surged more than 100-fold compared to last year, potentially increasing even more by year's end. Fedorov reported on Nov. 21 that approximately 200 Ukrainian companies are engaged in UAV production. 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 Looking to buy a reliable car? An electric vehicle may not be your best bet for reliability, according to a new survey from Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports has released its list of Top 10 Most reliable brands, most of which are headquartered in Asia. Five other Japanese or Korean brands are in this years top 10, joined there by the German trio of Mini, Porsche, and BMW. While consumers are buying electric vehicles in growing numbers, poor reliability remains an issue, according to the latest Annual Auto Reliability Survey data from Consumer Reports, a nonprofit research, testing, and consumer advocacy organization. Electric pickups, in particular, are the least reliable category of vehicles, the survey found. On average, new electric vehicles have 79 percent more problems than vehicles with fuel-powered Internal Combustion Engines, the survey found. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles fare even worse with an average of 146 percent more problems. Hybrids, on the other hand, continue to be a bright spot, the survey found. They experience 26 percent fewer problems than vehicles with fuel-powered Internal Combustion Engines on average. Electric vehicles are still in their relative infancy as mainstream vehicles, so its really not surprising that manufacturers, by and large, are still working out the kinks, Jake Fisher, senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports, said in a statement. That said, we are seeing signs of movement in the right direction. And as our data has consistently shown, reliability-minded consumers would be best served by forgoing brand new vehicles in their first model year. Lexus and Toyota take the top two spots in brand level rankings for 2023, according to the survey. Acura ranks fourth this year, followed by Honda in fifth. Subaru ranks sixth, Mazda is seventh, and Kia rounds out the top 10. The survey found only one Lexus model, the NX, has just average predicted reliability, due to some minor transmission, electrical accessory, and in-car electronics issues reported by owners. The NX Hybrid, ES, ES Hybrid, RX, and RX Hybrid are all above average, while the UX is well above average. Toyotas 4Runner is the most reliable model, the survey found. The only Toyota with a below-average rating is the Tundra, with owners reporting body hardware, paint and trim, in-car electronics, and brake issues. The Crown, new for 2023, is average, along with the Sienna and the bZ4X EV. The redesigned Prius and Prius Prime are well above and above average, respectively. All other Toyotas are above average and the Camry Hybrid, Camry, and RAV4 Prime are well above average. Fourth-ranked Acuras RDX and TLX both have above-average reliability, and the MDX and Integrawhich are recent redesignsare both average, the survey found. MDX owners reported issues with the in-car electronics and paint and trim. Most Hondas score average, including the Passport, Pilot, Odyssey, CR-V Hybrid, Ridgeline, Accord, and Civic, the survey found. The Accord Hybrid and CR-V are above average, and the HR-V is outstanding. Pilot owners reported issues with body hardware and paint & trim, while Odyssey and Passport owners reported in-car electronics and electrical accessories issues. Subaru, ranking sixth, hit some snags with its Solterra EV, the survey found. Owners say they experienced problems with charging, while the Outback and Legacy have in-car electronics issues, and the Ascent SUV has climate system and brake problems, though all rate average for reliability. The BRZ, WRX, Forester, and redesigned Crosstrek score above-average. Mazda, in seventh, has all of its models in the above-average predicted reliability category, including the MX-5 Miata, 3, CX-50, CX-30, and CX-5, the survey found. All Kia (10th place) models score average or better, the survey found. The Sportage Plug-in Hybrid is well-above average, and the Carnival, Forte, Niro, and K5 are all above average. The EV6 is average, as some owners reported issues with EV charging, while Sorento and Soul owners noted some transmission problems. All other Kias are average. Most of 11th-ranked Hyundais models are average or above average, the survey found. But the Ioniq 5 EV scores below average, with owners reporting trouble charging, along with EV battery and climate system problems. The Palisade, Ioniq 6, Tucson, and Elantra are above average. The Venue, Santa Cruz, Elantra Hybrid, Tucson Hybrid and PHEV, and Sonata are average. Infinitis (13th place) Q50, QX50, and QX60 all scored average predicted reliability, the survey found. Nissan lands in the number 17 spot, and has two below-average models, the Pathfinder and Frontier, the survey found. The new Ariya EV is above average, and the Kicks, Altima, Murano, Leaf, Rogue, and Sentra are all average. The Pathfinder and Frontier have reports of build quality issues, along with transmission problems for the Frontier. Number 18 Genesis is a mix, with the GV80 and GV70 SUVs scoring below average while the GV60 EV, G70, and G80 are all average. GV70 owners told CR about fuel system, drive system, and body hardware problems. European brand rankings Mini is this years most reliable European brand, ranking third overall, the survey found. Both the Cooper and Cooper Countryman scored above average reliability. BMW, its corporate cousin, ranked 9th. The X5 is one of the 10 most reliable models in the survey. The X3, 4 Series, and 2 Series are above average. All other models are average, including the i4 and iX EVs, X5 Plug-in Hybrid, the 3 series, X1, and X7. BMW i4 is average, although some owners reported EV charging issues. Porsche landed in the number eight spot. The Cayenne and Macan SUVs, both score above-average, the survey found. Nineteenth-ranked Audis A5 scored above average, while the A3, Q7, Q4 E-Tron, Q8 E-Tron, A6, Q3, Q8, Q5, and A4 are all average, the survey found. The Q5 PHEV is below average, and has problems with the EV motor and EV charging, along with climate system issues. Volvos (25th place) XC60 and XC90 remain below average, joined by the XC60 PHEV, the survey found. However, the XC40 and S60/V60 have average reliability. XC60 owners had issues with the brakes, in-car electronics, climate system, and electrical accessories. XC60 PHEV owners reported most of those, along with EV battery and charging system problems. Volkswagen landed in 27th place. Every model in its lineup has below average predicted reliability, the survey found. The Taos is one of the least-reliable vehicles in the survey, with owners noting issues with the brakes, electrical accessories, transmission, engine, electric system, in-car electronics, and noises and leaks. Mercedes-Benz is the lowest-ranked European brand, in 29th place. All its models are predicted to be below or well-below average. The GLE has climate system and build quality issues, including body hardware, electrical accessories, and noises and leaks. Domestic brands Buick, in 12th place, is the highest ranked domestic automaker, the survey found. The Enclave, Encore GX, and Envision are average, with body hardware issues. The Encore GX also has climate system and in-car electronics problems. Ram lands in the middle of the pack at number 15. Its 1500, 2500, and 3500 have average predicted reliability, the survey found. Owners of the 1500 reported in-car electronics issues, and some CR members with heavy duty 2500 trucks mentioned transmission and electrical accessory issues. All Cadillac (16th place) models in CRs survey score average reliability, the survey found. Of note, XT5 owners reported problems with the brakes and exhaust. Chevrolets (20th place) Blazer, redesigned Colorado, Tahoe, Suburban, and Silverado 1500 have below-average predicted reliability, the survey found. The Corvette, Equinox, Trailblazer and 2500HD/3500HD trucks are all average. Silverado 1500 owners reported major engine problems with the lifters, some paint & trim, and in-car electronics issues. Dodge is 21st in this years brand ranking, the survey found. The Durango is rated average. Twenty-second ranked Fords scores cover a wide range, the survey found. The Maverick and Edge are above average, while the F-150, F-150 Lightning, Escape, Bronco, Bronco Sport, and Explorer are all below average. The F-150 Hybrid is among the least reliable models, scoring well-below average. F-150 Lightning and Hybrid owners noted issues with their EV/Hybrid batteries, while F-150 Hybrid owners also had transmission, drive system, and exhaust problems. Lincoln ranks 23rd, the survey found. The Aviator is below average, and the Corsair is average, with owners noting body hardware problems and noises & leaks. GMCs (24th place) Sierra 1500, Yukon, Yukon XL, and redesigned Canyon are below average, while the Sierra 2500/3500HD trucks and Terrain are average, the survey found. Sierra 1500 owners also report major engine issues with the lifters, as well as paint and trim and in-car electronics. The Compass is the only Jeep (26th ranked) with average reliability, the survey found. The Gladiator, Renegade, Wrangler, Grand Cherokee, and Grand Cherokee L are below average. Grand Cherokee owners reported problems in the areas of suspension, electrical accessories, drive system, in-car electronics, body hardware, and noises and leaks. The R1T and R1S from EV automaker Rivian (28th place) both score below average, the survey found. R1T owners told CR about issues with the drive system, climate system, body hardware, and EV charging. Chrysler lands in last place in this years rankings in 30th place, the survey found. The Pacifica is average, but the Pacifica Hybrid is the least reliable car on the list, with owners reporting problems with the electric/hybrid battery, electric charging, drive system, and in-car electronics. There was insufficient data to create brand rankings for Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lucid, Maserati, Mitsubishi, and Polestar, according to Consumer Reports. For more information on Consumer Reports 2023 car reliability findings, visit this website. 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 This photo taken on Nov. 4, 2022 shows an evening view of the Lujiazui area in east China's Shanghai. [Photo/Xinhua] An air route linking east China's Shanghai with Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, was launched on Saturday, marking the start of a direct flight between the two destinations. The round-trip service, operated by an Airbus A320 aircraft, is currently scheduled for every Saturday. The air service will be expanded to operate twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, starting from Dec. 20, according to Shanghai Airport Authority. The opening of the direct flight route will build a new bridge for the "air Silk Road" in South Asia, which will better promote the economic and trade exchanges, cultural exchanges and tourism development between China and Nepal, the airport authority said. At present, 101 airlines operate regular flights from the Shanghai Pudong International Airport and the Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport, connecting 274 destinations in 45 countries. A 39-year-old man is dead after he was shot Sunday evening in the Austin neighborhood, according to Chicago police. A witness told police the man was driving a vehicle that came to a stop in the 1700 block of North Lotus Avenue. The witness saw four other men inside the vehicle flee after shots were fired at about 5:36 p.m., police said. The Cook County medical examiners office identified the victim as Mohammed K. al Hijoj, a resident of the Dunning neighborhood. Al Hijoj sustained several gunshot wounds, police said. He was transported to Loyola University Medical Center in critical condition, where he died at 6:17 p.m. Police said they recovered a handgun a few feet away from the vehicle. No suspects are in custody, and police said they are investigating the shooting. rjohnson@chicagotribune.com An armed and dangerous North Carolina man who allegedly hitchhiked to Georgia is back in police custody. [DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] The North Carolina Cherokee County Sheriffs Office said on Nov. 30. a citizen picked a man and woman, later identified as Jordan Hedden and Stephanie Neace, who were hitchhiking. After the duo got into the vehicle, deputies said thats when Hedden kidnapped the citizen, forcing her into the back seat and driving the vehicle. Neace was arrested and taken into custody in Georgia. Authorities did not specify where she is being held. TRENDING STORIES: On Saturday, authorities said Hedden entered a Tennessee home with a gun. After the gun was confiscated, he hitchhiked into Georgia. On Monday, the Gilmer County Sheriffs Office announced that Hedden was taken into custody in Union County. No other details were released. [SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter] IN OTHER NEWS: ST. LOUIS A St. Louis man appeared in federal court on Monday and admitted to a pair of carjackings in the summer of 2022, one of which was fatal. Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Eastern District of Missouri said Loyse Dozier, 21, committed the crimes over a three-week period in July and August 2022. The first carjacking took place on July 10 at the Raqqa Mart, located in the 300 block of Chambers Road in Riverview. The victim, Laruth Jones, was standing near the store entrance when she saw Dozier, who was wearing a full-face mask, enter her Mercedes CLA 250. Jones, who was armed, went out to confront Dozier. Dozier and Jones exchanged gunfire, and Jones was killed. Dozier took Jones firearm and fled in the stolen Mercedes. The vehicle was later found torched in a St. Louis alley. Man makes dash for it as city tries towing car with expired tags On Aug. 1, Dozier shot a woman three times during a carjacking outside a Walgreens in the 1400 block of North Grand Boulevard. In that incident, the victim was sitting in her car, a Kia Optima, when Dozier, who was masked and armed, walked up to the vehicle and demanded the womans keys. The victim complied and handed over her keys. Dozier shot her twice before getting into the car. An off-duty Florissant police officer was working security inside the store when he heard the gunshots and ran outside. Dozier got out of the car and ran off, but left his phone in the Kia. Nine days later, officers with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department saw Dozier at a gas station at West Florissant and Adelaide avenues. He ran off and attempted to discard a handgun and a bag containing 5.76 grams of fentanyl. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now Daily News That firearm hed attempted to discard was a .45-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun, which hed stolen from Jones after killing her. That same weapon was used in the second carjacking and shooting. Dozier was already a convicted felon and thus prohibited from possessing a firearm. He also had 25 plastic baggies on his person containing cocaine base, as well as a magazine for the handgun. Dozier pleaded guilty to carjacking resulting in death, attempted carjacking resulting in serious bodily injury, being a felon in possession of a firearm, and possession with intent to distribute fentanyl. Dozier will be sentenced on March 11, 2024. As part of the plea agreement, both the prosecution and defense agree to recommend the judge impose a 32-year sentence. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to FOX 2. WASHINGTON (DC News Now) The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) is investigating a homicide that happened on Dec. 1 in Northeast, D.C. At about 6:30 p.m., officers responded to a shooting in the 900 block of Rhode Island Ave., N.E. There, they found a man who had been shot. He was taken to a hospital where he later died. Three-vehicle crash in Howard County, multiple injured He was identified as 23-year-old Brandon Lewis from Southwest, D.C. On Friday, the same day, 22-year-old Clarence McKnight was arrested and charged with second-degree murder while armed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to DC News Now | Washington, DC. CLEVELAND (WJW) Cleveland police report a man is now in custody after he had barricaded himself inside a residence in the citys Glenville neighborhood. Police said they were called to the 700 block of Linn Drive around 2 p.m. for reports of a domestic violence incident. So heartbroken: Thieves targeting Hopkins Airport travelers At the time, police had told residents to avoid the area as it was an active scene. The 28-year-old man was arrested reportedly without incident. It is not clear if anyone was injured in the home. Police said charges are pending. No further information has been released at this time. Check back for updates on this developing story. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to Fox 8 Cleveland WJW. **Related Video Above: Body cams capture moment officer was dragged by car.** SOLON, Ohio (WJW) A man who dragged an officer with a car after hed pulled over for a traffic stop was sentenced, following a postponement last week. Termaine Tyrone Jackson, 28, was charged with one count of Failure To Comply and one count of Assault of a Peace Officer. He turned himself in to Solon police three days after the incident back in June and pled guilty last month. Suspect wanted after man run over outside local gentlemans club, sheriffs office says Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge Maureen Clancy sentenced Jackson to six months in prison for one charge and six months for the other, which are going to run consecutively. His drivers license is also suspended for six years and hes to serve two years probation upon release. According to Solon police, officer James Cervik, a 31-year veteran of the force, pulled over Jackson on US Route 422 eastbound for a speeding violation. During the traffic stop marijuana was reportedly wafting from the vehicle and Jackson eventually admitted to being a convicted felon and that he had a gun. Despite a second officer also enlisted to help, Jackson refused to leave the vehicle. Suspected shoplifter stabs 2 security guards, killing 1 at Philadelphia store When he drove off (as seen in the video at the top of the story), Cervik was reportedly dragged a short distance before rolling onto the highway, suffering bruises and road rash. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to Fox 8 Cleveland WJW. Ronnie Keith Williams, the man sent to death row for murdering a pregnant teenager 30 years ago only to be sent back to Browards court system, agreed Monday to spend the rest of his life in prison. Hell serve two life sentences back to back for the murder of Lisashante Lisa Dyke, a pregnant 18-year-old, and the homicide of her child, Julius Dyke. The victims son survived the attack: Julius lived paralyzed for two decades, and his death in 2016 also was ruled a killing, the result of the attack on his mother. In exchange for Williams plea of no contest to two counts of first-degree murder, prosecutors ended their efforts to send him to his death, with now no risk of him ever being released. Under the laws in 1993 when the crime happened, the 62-year-old man could have been eligible for parole in 25 years. On Jan. 4, Williams is expected to be sentenced to the two life consecutive sentences instead. On Monday morning, Williams made his plea of no contest before Judge Martin Fein, confirming his age and high school education to the judge. His right eye was bandaged, the recovery from his second cataract surgery. The case has lingered for decades. After 30 years, we were able to reach an agreement that brings finality to both sides, said Joe Kimok, Williams lawyer. Since there will not be any appeals, this plea means the case is finally over. Lisa Dykes mother, Margaret Dyke, said she is relieved her nightmare of court hearings is over. I dont want to keep being reminded, Dyke said. Every time they bring it up it hurts so bad. A killing in 1993 On Jan. 26, 1993, Lisa Dyke was babysitting for a friend in Wilton Manors. She was in the kitchen, making toast and watching the womans 9-month-old son when Williams came to the apartment. Police said he was presumably looking for his girlfriend, the womans sister, who had broken up with him the night before. And Dyke was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Prosecutors and police say Williams stabbed Dyke repeatedly in her chest and back with a 15-inch knife and bit her across her body. They say Dyke identified Williams to a 911 operator and again on her hospital deathbed by pointing him out in a photo lineup. In the hospital, when her mother asked her daughter what happened, Dyke, unable to speak because of the tubes in her throat, wrote, I played dead until he left, called police. Her baby Julius Dyke was born by Caesarean section two days after the stabbing. He suffered brain damage because of his mothers wounds and weighed 4 pounds, 11 ounces. Julius who spent his entire life in bed, paralyzed, unable to walk or talk died in 2016 at age 23. Margaret Dyke cared for her grandson Julius around the clock when he was alive, at her own financial peril, and mourned the life he never had. I couldnt run with him, and buy him clothes he could try on, she said. All she could do was shower him with all the love I could find. An attack in 1984 It wasnt Williams first killing. When Williams murdered Lisa Dyke, he was recently released from prison for the 1984 murder of 21-year-old Gaynell Jeffrey of Fort Lauderdale. He stabbed her to death at her home, then dumped her in an abandoned field. Williams was dating Jeffreys sister, who dumped him after finding out about a pending criminal charge involving a child. Although Williams pursued his girlfriend, it was big sister Gaynell Jeffrey who hung up the phone on him. In the early morning of Sept. 12, 1984, while the family slept, Williams walked up to their house and Jeffrey opened the door. Williams stabbed her in the back, then eight more times in the chest, according to the police report. She never had time to scream. As prosecutors readied their murder case for Jeffreys death, they added a charge from another, unrelated crime the indecent assault on a child. For the two cases, he was sentenced to 17 years but served only seven because of prison crowding. Facing court cases Eight months after walking out of prison for the murder of Gaynell Jeffrey, Dyke was now also dead. A jury convicted Williams in 1996 of Dykes murder and voted 11-1 to recommend death. But that conviction was overturned because a juror had an emotional collapse. Williams had a second trial in 2003 that ended in a mistrial. In 2004, a new Broward jury found Williams guilty of first-degree murder, rejecting his defense that he was too drunk on vodka and high on cocaine to have planned the attack. The same jury recommended he receive the death penalty. But in 2016, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty cannot be imposed without the unanimous support of a jury. And that sent Williams back to Broward for a new sentencing hearing. And prosecutors tacked on the additional charge for Julius death. After consulting with the family of the victims, the decision was made to waive the death penalty because of the certainty of imposing two consecutive life terms in prison and because the defendant was giving up his right to appeal, said Paula McMahon, spokeswoman for the State Attorneys Office. The family told prosecutors they just wanted to be sure that he would never get out of prison. Gaynell Jeffreys sister, Robin Jeffrey, said Monday that her family will have to find peace with the latest legal development. I wanted him to have the death penalty though. He deserved to die, Jeffrey said. Prosecutors had no choice, I get it, I get it, she said. Of Williams now remaining in prison, she said, Its better than having him walk the streets absolutely. She said, There is that blessing. She said her mother has spent almost 40 years waiting for justice. Of course, my mother will be at peace, she said. Margaret Dyke, who wasnt in the courtroom Monday, broke into sobs when she heard Williams entered a plea in the case. Im tired, Im tired, she said. Ive been trying to be strong but I have to be honest, its been hard. Every time I see someone with their daughter, or talk about their daughter, my heart is destroyed. Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sunsentinel.com. Follow on X, formerly Twitter, @LisaHuriash Ronnie Keith Williams, the man sent to death row for murdering a pregnant teenager 30 years ago only to be sent back to Browards court system, agreed Monday to spend the rest of his life in prison. Hell serve two life sentences back to back for the murder of Lisashante Lisa Dyke, a pregnant 18-year-old, and the homicide of her child, Julius Dyke. The victims son survived the attack: Julius lived paralyzed for two decades, and his death in 2016 also was ruled a killing, the result of the attack on his mother. In exchange for Williams plea of no contest, prosecutors ended their efforts to send him to his death, with now no risk of him ever being released. Under the laws in 1993 when the crime happened, the 62-year-old man could have been eligible for parole in 25 years. On Jan. 4, Williams is expected to be sentenced to two life consecutive sentences instead. On Monday morning, Williams made his plea of no contest before Judge Martin Fein, confirming his age and high school education to the judge. His right eye was bandaged, the recovery from his second cataract surgery. The case has lingered for decades. Lisa Dykes mother, Margaret Dyke, said she is relieved her nightmare of court hearings is over. I dont want to keep being reminded, Dyke said. Every time they bring it up it hurts so bad. A killing in 1993 On Jan. 26, 1993, Lisa Dyke was babysitting for a friend in Wilton Manors. She was in the kitchen, making toast and watching the womans 9-month-old son when Williams came to the apartment. Police said he was presumably looking for his girlfriend, the womans sister, who had broken up with him the night before. And Dyke was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Prosecutors and police say Williams stabbed Dyke repeatedly in her chest and back with a 15-inch knife and bit her across her body. They say Dyke identified Williams to a 911 operator and again on her hospital deathbed by pointing him out in a photo lineup. In the hospital, when her mother asked her daughter what happened, Dyke, unable to speak because of the tubes in her throat, wrote, I played dead until he left, called police. Her baby Julius Dyke was born by Caesarean section two days after the stabbing. He suffered brain damage because of his mothers wounds and weighed 4 pounds, 11 ounces. Julius who spent his entire life in bed, paralyzed, unable to walk or talk died in 2016 at age 23. Margaret Dyke cared for her grandson Julius around the clock when he was alive, at her own financial peril, and mourned the life he never had. I couldnt run with him, and buy him clothes he could try on, she said. All she could do was shower him with all the love I could find. An attack in 1984 It wasnt Williams first killing. When Williams murdered Lisa Dyke, he was recently released from prison for the 1984 murder of 21-year-old Gaynel Jeffrey of Fort Lauderdale. He stabbed her to death at her home, then dumped her in an abandoned field. Williams was dating Jeffreys sister, who dumped him after finding out about a pending criminal charge involving a child. Although Williams pursued his girlfriend, it was big sister Gaynel Jeffrey who hung up the phone on him. In the early morning of Sept. 12, 1984, while the family slept, Williams walked up to their house and Jeffrey opened the door. Williams stabbed her in the back, then eight more times in the chest, according to the police report. She never had time to scream. As prosecutors readied their murder case for Jeffreys death, they added a charge from another, unrelated crime the indecent assault on a child. For the two cases combined, he was sentenced to 17 years but served only seven because of prison crowding. Facing court cases Eight months after walking out of prison for the murder of Gaynel Jeffrey, Dyke was now also dead. A jury convicted Williams in 1996 of Dykes murder and voted 11-1 to recommend death. But that conviction was overturned because a juror had an emotional collapse. Williams had a second trial in 2003 that ended in a mistrial. In 2004, a new Broward jury found Williams guilty of first-degree murder, rejecting his defense that he was too drunk on vodka and high on cocaine to have planned the attack. The same jury recommended he receive the death penalty. But in 2016, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty cannot be imposed without the unanimous support of a jury. And that sent Williams back to Broward for a new sentencing hearing. And prosecutors tacked on the additional charge for Julius death. After consulting with the family of the victims, the decision was made to waive the death penalty because of the certainty of imposing two consecutive life terms in prison and because the defendant was giving up his right to appeal, said Paula McMahon, spokeswoman for the State Attorneys Office. The family told prosecutors they just wanted to be sure that he would never get out of prison. Margaret Dyke, who wasnt in the courtroom Monday, broke into sobs when she heard Williams entered a plea in the case. Im tired, Im tired, she said. Ive been trying to be strong but I have to be honest, its been hard. Every time I see someone with their daughter, or talk about their daughter, my heart is destroyed. -------- Four family members were killed in a stabbing spree in Queens early Sunday morning that also wounded another person in the home and two officers, the New York Police Department said. Police responded to a Far Rockaway residence at 5:10 a.m. after a young girl called 911 to report her cousin was killing her family members, NYPD Chief of Department Jeff Maddrey said. Two responding NYPD officers encountered a man later determined to be the suspect a family member of the victims in a driveway. Police said he was leaving the residence and carrying luggage when they stopped him to ask a couple of questions. After engaging in casual conversation for about 10 seconds, the suspect pulled a knife on the officers, stabbing one in the neck and striking the other in the head, Maddrey said. One officer pulled out his weapon and shot the suspect, identified as Courtney Gordon, 38. He was taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead on arrival, police said. Police said more officers responded to the home and found an 11-year-old girl lying in front of the house. She did not survive her injuries. Officers attempted to make entry into the home to reach the rest of the victims but were stopped by a fire that had been lit in the living room, according to Maddrey. The New York City Fire Department responded and put out the fire. NYPD Chief of Detectives Joe Kenny said police believe the suspect lit a couch on fire while leaving the home. Officers found four more victims in the two back bedrooms of the home. Three of the victims a 12-year-old boy, a 44-year-old woman and a man in his 30s died in the attack, Maddrey said. A 61-year-old woman is in critical condition and is being treated at a hospital for multiple stab wounds, he said. The officers were taken to local hospitals, where they are being treated for their injuries. Both are expected to be OK, Maddrey said. Maddrey said officers recovered a typical kitchen steak knife" at the scene, which was the weapon used to injure the police officers. No other weapon has been recovered and a motive is not known. The 911 caller was being interviewed by police. Kenny said they believe the suspect, a Bronx resident, was visiting his family in Far Rockaway when the attack occurred. This article was originally published on NBCNews.com Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to the 2023 Imperial Springs International Forum held in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, on Monday. Xi noted that since its establishment, the Imperial Springs International Forum has brought together people of insight from all over the world to discuss in depth many issues affecting world peace and stability, sustainable economic development, cultural exchanges and mutual learning, playing a positive role in promoting international cooperation and enhancing closer people-to-people ties. Facing unprecedented changes in the world, the times, and history, the human society must unite, uphold mutual learning, openness, inclusiveness and win-win cooperation, advocate common values of humanity, and jointly build a better world, Xi said. It is hoped that all the distinguished guests will brainstorm their ideas, speak out for the practice of real multilateralism, and contribute to the building of a community with a shared future for humanity, Xi added. With the theme of "Multilateralism: More Exchanges, Greater Inclusiveness and Cooperation," the 2023 Imperial Springs International Forum, jointly held by the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, the Australia China Friendship and Exchange Association, the Guangdong provincial government, and the World Leadership Alliance-Club de Madrid, opened Monday in Guangzhou. NEPHI, Utah (ABC4) A man was found dead in his semi-truck outside of 7/11 in Nephi on Sunday morning. At approximately 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 3, the Nephi City Police Department received reports of a deceased male found in his semi-truck, according to the department on social media. The man is from out of state, police said. Salt Lake City ranks top 10 in US metros that offer best lives for middle class His truck was reportedly parked in the east parking area of the 7/11. The Nephi Police Department, Juab County Sheriffs Office, and Juab EMT responded to the incident. The State Bureau of Investigations and the Utah State Crime Lab are currently investigating. Police say at this time, there appears to be no foul play and no threat toward the public. There is no further information at this time. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now ABC4 Daily News For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to ABC4 Utah. A man dropped off five laced pills for a 15-year-old, whose younger brother and grandmother found him dead in his bedroom the next morning in California, federal prosecutors said. The high school freshman believed the pills were pharmaceutical grade Percocet pills, a brand of medication containing oxycodone, an opioid, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Central District of California. However, Alexander Declan Bell Wilson, 23, of Rolling Hills gave the teen pills laced with the synthetic opioid fentanyl in May 2020, prosecutors said. After the teen consumed the pills, Wilson mocked him online as he was overdosing in the early hours of May 15, 2020, prosecutors said. As (the teen) ... was slowly dying and losing consciousness, (Wilson) bullied and mocked him in text messages, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. In those messages that were exchanged for nearly four hours, Wilson chastised the teen for chewing the pills then shared their conversation to Snapchat for his followers to see, according to prosecutors. Later that morning, the boys grandmother and his 13-year-old brother found him lifeless in bed, prosecutors said. After (his) death, (Wilson) showed no remorse for his crimes, prosecutors wrote in the sentencing memo To the contrary, he lied to police about his conduct, deleted incriminating evidence from his phone, and minimized his role in the offense. Indeed, (Wilson) blamed (the victim) for his own death, boasting that (the victim) did that to himself. The sentence On Dec. 1, a judge sentenced Wilson to 20 years in prison on a charge of distribution of fentanyl resulting in death, the attorneys office announced in a news release. Wilson was convicted of the charge on May 19 after a five-day trial, the release said. Caleb Mason, one of Wilsons defense attorneys, told McClatchy News in a statement on Dec. 4 that they plan to appeal Wilsons conviction. We presented a strong factual defense contesting our clients guilt, based on forensic evidence, toxicology, and contemporaneous communications, Mason added. According to prosecutors, Wilson agreed to deliver five Percocet pills and gave them to the boys 13-year-old brother, who then gave them to the teen inside their home. At trial, an expert testified that the teens death was caused solely due to fentanyl poisoning, prosecutors said. In court, the boys grandmother said that the teens two brothers continue to struggle with his death, according to the Daily Breeze newspaper. People say as time goes on it will get easier for us, she said, the newspaper reported. Thats not true. Losing a child is the hardest heartbreak anyone can experience. It feels like someone not only tore your heart apart but took part of it with them. Wilson also spoke out in court and apologized to the teens family, according to the Daily Breeze. I am forever ashamed and regret every bad decision I ever made, he added. Even during the trial, I really wish I could have just been able to tell you Im sorry. In their sentencing memo, prosecutors wrote Wilson had a violent history during his youth, including being involved in the beating of an autistic high school student. Wilson, who is the son of former Rolling Hills Mayor Patrick Wilson, and another individual were charged in connection with the beating of an 18-year-old autistic man in March 2019, CBS Los Angeles reported. As part of Wilsons sentencing in the federal case, he must pay $2,364 in restitution, prosecutors said. His prison sentence will be followed by 12 years of supervised release, according to prosecutors. In commenting on his clients sentencing, Mason said the widespread availability of fentanyl is a national crisis. Fentanyl is estimated to be 100 times stronger than morphine and a major contributor to overdoses in the U.S., according to the CDC. Every one of these cases is a tragedy, Mason added. As a society, we need to come to grips with the consequences of the demand for and easy availability of narcotics. This means addressing importation of precursors, illicit manufacturing and distribution, and all of the factors contributing to addiction. The U.S. opioid crisis Overdoses are a leading cause of injury-related death in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2021, there were nearly 51,000 overdose deaths in the country, according to CDC data. In the past 21 years, drug overdoses have killed more than 932,000 people, the CDC reported. The majority of overdose deaths involve opioids. Deaths involving synthetic opioids (largely illicitly made fentanyl) and stimulants (such as cocaine and methamphetamine) have increased in recent years, the CDC said. For every drug overdose that results in death, there are many more nonfatal overdoses, each one with its own emotional and economic toll. Millions of people in the U.S. have an opioid addiction, according to the CDC. Addiction is a chronic and relapsing disease that can affect anyone. Rolling Hills is about 25 miles southwest of Los Angeles. Gas station heroin banned in 9 states. What is tianeptine and why is it dangerous? Pain management doctor unlawfully prescribed opioids to patients for years, feds say Mom put fentanyl in baby formula to calm her son, Florida cops say. He never woke up Nurse had sex with patients, prescribed dangerous pill combinations, feds say IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (ABC4) A 34-year-old man was killed in an officer-involved shooting in Idaho Falls early Monday morning, according to Idaho State Police. On Dec. 4, at around 1:10 a.m., an Idaho state trooper made a traffic stop near the Candlewood Suites Hotel at 665 Pancheri Dr. During the stop, the trooper reportedly called in additional units for assistance. As Idaho Falls Police officers arrived to the scene, a 34-year-old male passenger of the vehicle that was stopped reportedly fired at the officers and ran from the car. Infant allegedly abducted by Idaho man found dead Officers chased the man on foot, and it is believed that the ISP trooper and two IFPD officers exchanged gunfire with the man during the incident which concluded in the area of the car dealership on the corner of Pancheri Drive and Yellowstone Highway, a release states. Police said the exact dynamics of the incident remain under investigation. After the gunfire exchange, law enforcement provided the man with medical aid. Idaho Falls EMS also responded to the incident, but the man reportedly died at the scene. His identity is not being released at this time, pending notification of family. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now ABC4 Daily News Roads surrounding where the incident took place are currently closed for the investigation. Drivers are advised that Pancheri Drive is closed between S. Capital Ave and Yellowstone Hwy (I-15), including the intersection of Pancheri Drive/17th Street and Yellowstone. Please find alternative routes, the release states. More information on this incident is expected to be released at a later date. No further information is available at this time. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to ABC4 Utah. A Georgia man has pleaded guilty to illegally possessing an assault weapon he used during a 2022 shootout, according to Department of Justice officials. Jayvon Latrez Anthony, 30, of Jeffersonville, Georgia, pleaded guilty to one count of illegal possession of a firearm. [DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] Anthony used an AK-47 style pistol during a shootout with TreVonte Tharpe in Twiggs County on July 22, 2022. Both Anthony and his mother were struck by bullets in the shootout, according to officials. Officers recovered 17 spent rounds from Anthonys assault pistol and one 9mm round fired by Tharpe. Im pleased to know that another violent offender is off the streets and is no longer a threat to our community, said Twiggs County Sheriff Darren Mitchum. I commend my deputies and investigators for the thorough job they did with this investigation. It was only by the grace of God that no lives were lost due to such a careless act. TRENDING STORIES: Officers eventually searched Anthonys home and found an AK-47 style pistole and firearm magazine under the kitchen which Anthony used during the shootout. The gun was still covered in blood, according to officials. Anthony had a prior felony conviction for aggravated assault in Bibb County. Anthony is not eligible for parole, according to officials. [SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter] IN OTHER NEWS: FILE - The affidavit to support the arrest of Arian Taherzadeh and Haider Ali is photographed on April 6, 2022. Taherzadeh, accused of pretending to be a federal agent and offering gifts and free apartments to Secret Service officers, has been sentenced Friday, Dec. 1, 2023, to nearly three years in prison. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick, File) WASHINGTON (AP) A man accused of pretending to be a federal agent and offering gifts and free apartments to Secret Service officers has been sentenced to nearly three years in prison. Arian Taherzadeh, 41, was sentenced to 33 months in prison Friday. He and a second man, Haider Ali, were indicted in April 2022, accused of tricking actual Secret Service officers, offering expensive apartments and gifts to curry favor with law enforcement agents, including one agent assigned to protect the first lady, prosecutors said. Ali, 36, was sentenced in August to over five years. Attorneys for the two did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Monday. Prosecutors alleged Taherzadeh falsely claimed, at various times, to be an agent with the Department of Homeland Security, a former U.S. Air Marshal, and a former U.S. Army Ranger. He used his supposed law-enforcement work to trick owners of three apartment complexes into letting him use multiple apartments and parking spaces for fake operations, the Justice Department said in a statement. Taherzadeh pleaded guilty to conspiracy, a federal offense, as well as two District of Columbia offenses: unlawful possession of a large-capacity ammunition feeding device and voyeurism. He was also ordered to pay restitution of more than $700,000. The case was thrust into the public spotlight when more than a dozen FBI agents raided a luxury apartment building in southwest Washington in April 2022. They found a cache of gear, including body armor, guns and surveillance equipment, as well as a binder with information about the building's residents, prosecutors said. Taherzadeh also installed surveillance cameras in his apartment and made explicit content that he showed to others, prosecutors said. Taherzadeh provided Secret Service officers and agents with rent-free apartments including a penthouse worth over $40,000 a year as well as electronics, authorities said. In one instance, Taherzadeh offered to purchase a $2,000 assault rifle for a Secret Service agent who is assigned to protect the first lady, prosecutors said. The plot unraveled when the U.S. Postal Inspection Service began investigating an assault involving a mail carrier at the apartment building and the men identified themselves as being part of a phony Homeland Security unit they called the U.S. Special Police Investigation Unit. Taherzadehs lawyer has previously said he provided the luxury apartments and lavish gifts because he wanted to be friends with the agents, not try to compromise them. ALEXANDRIA, Va. (DC News Now) Alexandria police said they are searching for the suspect involved in an armed robbery on Sunday night. At about 7:20 p.m., officers with the Alexandria Police Department (APD) responded to the call of an armed robbery at a tobacco mini-mart in the 100 block of West Glebe Road. Pick up free winter home weatherization at these DC public libraries A man had pulled out a gun at the store and taken money a spokesperson for APD said the amount of money was undisclosed. He then fled the scene on foot. No one was injured in the incident. Anyone with information is asked to call (703) 746-4444. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to DC News Now | Washington, DC. EAST ST. LOUIS, Ill. Marcus Weekfall has been sentenced to five years in federal prison for breaking into an Illinois home, threatening the childs mother, and taking their child to St. Louis. Weekfall pleaded guilty to interstate extortion with a threat to injure. Man makes dash for it as city tries towing car with expired tags The incident occurred on May 28, 2022, when Weekfall entered the home at 4 a.m., waking the sleeping 10-year-old and demanding the child leave with him. A surveillance camera alerted the mother, who called the police. Despite officers attempts to secure the childs safe return, Weekfall refused and threatened harm. After five hours, another individual returned the child to the mother. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to FOX 2. An 88-year-old man who got out of his stopped car on Route 13 near Seaford Sunday night died after being hit by another car, Delaware State Police said. Troopers were called to the south side of the road, just south of Ockles Road, about 9:15 p.m. for reports of the crash. There, they found the man in a grass median. He'd been thrown there after being hit, police said. He died at the scene. Detectives learned that the man had stopped his Dodge Grand Caravan on the right shoulder and had gotten out. It's not yet known what prompted him to stop and exit the car, police said. READ: How a deadly DUI and a brave family helped change Wilmington's reporting of fatal crashes At some point, the man ended up in the right lane and was hit by a Lincoln Town Car being driven by a 68-year-old from Delmar. That driver was not hurt. Police said they will release the man's name once family has been notified. Got a tip? Send to Isabel Hughes at ihughes@delawareonline.com or 302-324-2785. For all things breaking news, follow her on Twitter at @izzihughes_ This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Seaford-area crash kills Laurel man Sunday night PHOENIX Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey became the first elected female governor of her state last year, and one of the first two openly lesbian women elected governor anywhere in the U.S. Now, shes set to take over as the new chair of the Democratic Partys Women Governors Fund, an initiative started by the Democratic Governors Association in 2018 that seeks to put more women in statewide executive office. Its a national platform for one of the partys rising stars in state office one that Healey can use to seek out and boost more future governors who may one day draw attention as national party leaders. When I was attorney general, I looked at the women who were governors and had been governors. I came to know many of them over the years, and I just had so much respect and admiration for them, Healey told NBC News in an interview at the DGAs annual holiday gathering in Phoenix. I saw what they did in their states. I saw the actions that they took that made a huge impact on the lives of their residents. And they really showed the way for somebody like me in terms of thinking about what it means to be a governor, what it means to have executive power, Healey added. In the five years since the Women Governors Fund began, the DGA has spent over $80 million supporting female candidates for governor, including each of the current female Democratic governors: Healey, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Maine Gov. Janet Mills and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. And 2023 set a record for the number of female governors serving at once, with eight Democrats and four Republicans all in office. Multiple female Democratic governors told NBC News that electing women isnt just about diversifying executive leadership, but its also about bringing issues to the forefront that have historically been labeled as women's issues. Weve also seen that the issues that people tend to think of as womens issues, theyre not womens issues. You know, education is not a womens issue, Kelly told NBC News. The Kansas governor added, Weve been able to show that those issues that people have always sort of dismissed as womens issues, whether it was education, whether its child care, whether its having a roof over your head thats exactly what our business community cares about. Healey echoed Kelly, adding that women are elected to bring attention to priorities that matter to other women. People understand its all the more important to have women as governors in this country to make sure that health care is protected, to make sure that education is protected, to make sure that women have access to the reproductive health care that they need, and medication abortion, she said. Weve been able to elevate those issues and take them out of the womans world to give them the status that they should have, and it is absolutely essential to the function of states, Kelly said. Healey hopes to elevate even more women to executive office in her new position. Were now eight, and its just, you know, its exponentially greater, but theres more work to do, and we want to see more women join the ranks. But thats a sizable number. And when we get together, you know, were like a team, Healey said. A desire to elect women Beyond driving policy thats beneficial to women and Democrats, the Women Governors Fund has tapped into a political desire for more women politicians and executives. People really see governors as the stars of the Democratic Party, the DGAs executive director, Meghan Meehan-Draper, told NBC News. Thats evident in the groups ever-increasing fundraising numbers. In 2015, the DGA raised just over $30 million. This year, the group is on track to raise $70 million by the end of 2023, according to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who chaired the committee in 2023. And donating to support female candidates is especially popular, Meehan-Draper said, with not only abortion rights but also other policy issues motivating a subset of the Democratic donor community right now. There is a class of donors that only want to give to women, she said, adding: The most efficient investment you could make is to governors [and gubernatorial candidates]. The bond between the female Democratic governors already in office has grown strong, Healey and other governors say. Some of it is just the moments that you have in sharing your experiences, talking about what happened in your day or whats going on right now in your state, Healey said. She added, I also think its, you know, these roles, these jobs are hard. They can be lonely. ... Its really nice to have a network there that you can tap into. And there are also things unique to serving as a woman, some of the way that society or media will focus on certain aspects of you that they may not for our male counterparts. Arizonas Hobbs echoed Healey, telling NBC News, These jobs are hard, and they can be lonely. Its nice to have a network there to tap into. The group hopes to strengthen their connections in the next few years and to grow the number of women in the fold. We have really formed a bond. Its just reassuring that on a day in and day out basis, we know somebodys got our back. We know somebodys watching out for us. We know we can make a call. We know that the support system is in place, Kelly said. In that vein I will do everything I can to ensure that we increase the ranks ... not only because of the internal support that that provides for us, but also as I look at what women governors have accomplished over the time that Ive been in office, its pretty amazing, she added. This article was originally published on NBCNews.com At roughly 0.1% of the citys recently passed $16.77 billion budget, the initial cost of Mayor Brandon Johnsons effort to begin reopening Chicagos city-run mental health clinics is minuscule. But the political ramifications are potentially huge. Johnson rode into office on a progressive wave powered by unions and activists who have long advocated that Chicago should return to having 19 city-run clinics, as it did in the 1980s, instead of just five. The mayors answer in his first budget was far from a full response. While he cautioned supporters that reopening the clinics would take time, his budget called for restoring only two clinics and placing them in yet-to-be-determined locations. Still, by including $5.2 million to expand mental health services and $15.9 million to double staffing for the citys team of behavioral health professionals who respond to mental health and substance abuse crises, Johnson is trying to show he isnt dropping the ball on the issue while preaching patience and signaling a more robust response is yet to come. Those behind the Treatment Not Trauma campaign would have a right to be skeptical. Mayors Richard M. Daley and Rahm Emanuel both closed mental-health clinics, and Mayor Lori Lightfoot backed away from a campaign promise to reopen the city-run facilities, arguing instead that funding third-party clinics was a more effective use of resources. Johnson himself in September cautioned that while he is committed to reopening mental health clinics, how many we can reopen within the first four years to be perfectly frank with you all thats still to be determined. There are real budgetary dynamics that we have to address, and Im committed to doing that, he said. But, so far, the Treatment Not Trauma advocates have applauded Johnsons moves, while at the same time saying they expect more to be done down the road. This is very much a down payment toward getting Chicago to a better place, said Arturo Carrillo a social worker who directs violence prevention and health initiatives for the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, part of the broad Treatment Not Trauma coalition. We count it as a win, but not an overall win. In addition to wanting to reopen as many as 14, and possibly more, of the centers closed by Daley and Emanuel, those behind the movement also hope the centers grow far beyond offering just clinical services to also become bases for expanded nonpolice emergency response teams and a corps of new community care workers. The sweeping plan featuring clinical services at the reopened sites; a community care worker corps centered around trained nonprofessionals working in neighborhoods to administer basic services to prevent crises; and first-responder teams and crisis call lines to support nonpolice response for emergency calls with mental health components is an answer activists found for lofty questions. What does public care infrastructure look like and how does it serve? What do we need? said Cheryl Miller, public health organizer for Southside Together Organizing for Power, or STOP, and another coalition member. Build the plane while were flying it The Treatment Not Trauma coalitions plans to get clinics reopened and boost mental health care across the city are rooted in the backlash Emanuel faced when he moved to close six of the 12 city-run clinics in operation at the start of his first term, a decision unanimously approved by the City Council. Protests to keep the clinics open, supported by public unions whose members faced losing their jobs, resulted in City Hall melees and the arrests of dozens of demonstrators who barricaded themselves inside one Woodlawn clinic. None of it was ultimately successful. The coalition briefly found hope in Lightfoots upstart 2019 campaign when she said of course the clinics should be reopened and she pledged to spend $25 million to do so while also investing more in the citys mental health infrastructure. But that hope faded after Lightfoot took office and she decided it made more sense to fund private and nonprofit clinics already operating in low-income areas. Johnsons campaign again revived the coalitions aspirations when the former Chicago Teachers Union organizer used Treatment Not Trauma as a chief piece of his platform. After Johnson took office in May, the promises got a boost in September when the City Council passed an ordinance introduced by Ald. Rossana Rodriguez, 33rd, to establish a working group to examine implementation. The working group, which isnt expected to come back with recommendations until May, gives Johnson more time before he must make larger decisions about mental health issues and, in the meantime, allows him the opportunity to promote the smaller goal of reopening the two clinics. We are at the very beginning, said S. Mayumi Umi Grigsby, Johnsons chief of policy. We want to build the plane while were flying it. Grigsby said the location of the two clinics likely wont be determined until after the working group releases its report in May. She also declined to say how many new mental health workers might be hired or clinics reopened in coming years. Regardless, the Johnson administration is in lockstep with the activist coalition on the major priority, she said, describing the effort as a way to add well-paying jobs and improve safety by addressing the root causes of violence. The specific goal is to just ensure that we are being expansive, Grigsby said. Members of the coalition told the Tribune they view the proposed investments as a strong start. This is a first step, a good faith investment in the larger project toward Treatment Not Trauma said Kennedy Bartley, executive director of United Working Families, a progressive political organization that strongly backs Johnson. That would see the reopening of many more mental centers. Bartley said she hopes the first two centers reopen in 2024. A report put out by the coalition calls for the city to operate 19 centers by the end of Johnsons first term. But the challenges the city will face in opening up the first two clinics and possibly expanding far beyond them were quickly highlighted during an October budget hearing between aldermen and officials with the Department of Public Health. CDPH officials told aldermen nearly half the departments budgeted positions were unfilled and the officials were unable to say how much money is being spent by different city departments on mental health care. I understand that we have a lot of challenges when it comes to hiring, Rodriguez said. It always takes us so long to be able to hire staff. Department officials also said the department was targeting early-career therapists to staff the centers. It feels like were having a very specific and acute challenge with hiring mental health clinicians, added Ald. Daniel La Spata, 1st. We got to dig a little deeper here to understand whats the holdup. We are in crisis As the department struggles with staffing, Diane Adams, a longtime client who has witnessed firsthand how the city-funded clinics have dwindled, is facing another hurdle. Her therapist for years retired and was replaced two months later by another therapist, who is now out on maternity leave, she said. Adams once took two buses to get to a clinic on 79th Street in Auburn Gresham. When that location closed, she followed her therapist to the citys Englewood site, a move that added a train ride to her journey. The long trip is a small price for therapy Adams says has made her a very strong woman. She began using the city clinics in 1997 after her son DeAndre Adams, 18, was shot and killed at a gas station. Facing depression, bouts of anger and a drug addiction, she tried to take her own life a year after his death. If you saw Adams then, you wouldnt recognize her now, she said. I had no feelings, no emotions, nothing, Adams said. The psychosocial rehab she received has taught her again how to be part of a community, be accountable and set goals, she said. More broadly, she said, it inspired her and taught her how to do things for herself, including owning an apartment and controlling her own money. I pay my bills, and I know how to take care of myself and my responsibilities, said Adams, who is a member of STOP. Im the woman that I should have been a long time ago. Adams said shes sure shed be worse off without city-run clinics. She thinks other providers are more focused on money, rely too heavily on prescriptions and are less accountable than the citys centers. The therapists with the city, theyre more compassionate and understanding, she said. Many activists claim public centers are a better option than the private, nonprofit clinics that serve many Chicagoans because the city clinics have more oversight, focus on outcomes over cost and have a more substantial community connection. Still, the emerging overhaul isnt without critics. In her term as mayor, Lightfoot argued funding third-party clinics was a better use of money as she expanded the CDPHs mental health budget from $12 million to $89 million. Johnsons administration is spending $43.1 million on city-run clinics, but did not provide an amount for total spending on mental health in 2024. Last January, the Lightfoot administration said the CDPHs five clinics served 1,782 in 2022, while the city-funded mental health care served 60,000 people. A singular reliance on city delivered services would never effectively scale services to the number of people that need them, a CDPH spokesperson said at the time. In October, Johnson said he didnt know if the conversation surrounding reopening clinics should be about whether or not is it cost-effective and how many. If we serve one, if we serve 100,000, we have to serve more than who we served. And thats what I made a commitment to doing, he said. Chicagos nonprofit clinics are already seeing long waitlists and intense acuity, said Alexa James, CEO of the Chicago chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Ive never seen anything like this, James said. We need more and more and more. And what we also need is to make sure that there arent interruptions in services. James, who served on Lightfoots Health & Human Services transition committee, said its unclear if the citys efforts to reopen public clinics will take city funding away from nonprofits like NAMI Chicago in the near future. Johnson seems to view the health department less as a convener and funder, and more as a provider, she said. While she supports the idea of opening more mental health clinics in Chicago, she is not convinced doing so through the citys health department is the fastest, most efficient way to provide more service. We are in crisis. There has to be a continuum of care built, she said. We cant politicize this mental health crisis. The reopening effort has drawn strong support from the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees. The union, a major Johnson supporter in his mayoral campaign, lost dozens of positions for members when clinics closed. Some of the private clinics underpay workers and dont employ enough people, hurting care, Bartley said. Union representation at the centers would lead to living-wage salaries and oversight on staffing levels, she said. The government should be investing in good public jobs. The government should be investing in access to good public mental health care, Bartley said. When asked about how AFSCMEs support of the administration affects the effort to reopen clinics, Grigsby said the goal is creating jobs for more than just AFSCMEs members. If one of the byproducts of building a public health infrastructure and building a bench of community health workers is that there are people who have access to good paying jobs and jobs that are fulfilling, then I think we would have accomplished our goal, she said. Chicago Tribunes Alice Yin contributed. jsheridan@chicagotribune.com Guitar Lesson DOVER On Monday, Dec. 4 at 6 p.m. drop in to the Dover Public library for a free guitar class taught by Mike Rieder from A&M Studios. Bring your own guitar, as they will not be provided. This program is open to participants ages 10 and up. Snowflake bath fizzes DOVER On Monday, Dec. 4 at 6 p.m. teens in grades 6-12 are invited to the Dover Public Library to make snowflake-shaped bath fizzes. All supplies will be provided. Registration is required for this event. Gaming Nights to benefit the Portsmouth Lions Club PORTSMOUTH The Gaming Nights at Filotimo Casino at the Dover Bowl will benefit the Portsmouth Lions Club on the nights of Dec. 4 to 6 and Dec. 12 to 16. Grab some friends and play some games such as poker and others, all for a good cause. For more information, check out Portsmouth Lions Club of NH on Facebook and Instagram or email harbordoc@aol.com. Learn to Bake a Holiday Favorite with Fearless Baker Chef Erin Jeanne McDowell DOVER On Tuesday, Dec. 5 at 7 p.m., Dover Public Library will welcome Chef and Bestselling Author Erin Jeanne McDowell to the virtual stage as she demonstrates how to make one of her favorite recipes, while answering any burning questions the audience may have. This program is free and open to the public. For more information or to get a link to this virtual program, visit library.dover.nh.gov or call 603-516-6050. Rochester Writers Night ROCHESTER Rochester Writers Night, the monthly literary event for the Lilac City and its writers, is holding its first Rochester Area Authors Fair on Wednesday, Dec. 6, at 6 p.m. The Fair will be held in the second-floor Community Room of the Rochester Public Library, located at 65 South Main St. Rochester. Book lovers are invited to come enjoy live readings, buy books for everyone on their holiday gift lists, and get their books signed by the authors. For information visit facebook.com/rochesterNHwriters. Explore Girl Scouts ROCHESTER Come explore Girl Scouts Wednesday, Dec. 6, from 6 to 7 p.m. at the Rochester Library, 65 South Main St., Rochester. Girls in grades K-3 and a caregiver are invited to learn about opportunities to get involved in your community. Try out sample activities and see the many ways to get involved. Girl Scouts to host unicorn parties in Barrington and Madbury BARRINGTON/MADBURY Come explore Girl Scouts on Wednesday, Dec. 6, both from 6 to 7 p.m. at the Barrington Middle School library, 51 Haley Drive, Barrington. See details at https://bit.ly/3uuyG52 or Moharimet Elementary School, 11 Lee Road, Madbury. See details at https://bit.ly/madburygs. Girls in grades K-3 and a caregiver are invited to learn about opportunities to get involved in your community. The Spirit of Christmas Past: Four Centuries of Christmas in America DOVER Trace the development of the celebration of Christmas at Dover Public Library on Wednesday, Dec. 6 at 6:30 p.m. in The Spirit of Christmas Past: Four Centuries of Christmas in America. This is an in-person program with the option to stream live from home. This program is free and open to the public. For information, or to get a link to watch virtually, visit library.dover.nh.gov or call 603-516-6050. Kittery Historical and Naval Museums holiday open house KITTERY, Maine Kittery Historical and Naval Museum will hold a holiday open house at 200 Rogers Road, Kittery, Maine on Dec. 7, 8 9, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Finish your holiday shopping at the museum. There will be lots of gift cards from area merchants, silent auction items, book signings by local authors and a bake sale. Free admission and 20% off all gift shop items. 1623: The Untold Story of New Hampshires Founding Family PORTSMOUTH 1623: The Untold Story of New Hampshires Founding Family will be presented on Thursday, Dec. 7 at 7 p.m., in the Portsmouth Public Librarys Levenson Community Room. This program is free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Learn more at portsmouthpl.librarycalendar.com/event/1623-founders. Meat raffle to benefit Portsmouth Lions Club PORTSMOUTH A meat raffle will be held on Thursday, Dec. 7 from 7 to 9 p.m. at Gibbs Garage Bar & Grille in Portsmouth. Free and open to the public, anyone can attend and take chances at $1 or $2 each to win 24 different cuts of meat for your holiday dinner celebrations. Therell also be a raffle and a 50/50 cash drawing. Proceeds will support the Lions Club. Christmas fair Christmas fairs are being held across the Seacoast. GREENLAND An old-fashioned Christmas fair returns to the Community Parish House at 44 Post Road, Greenland, Saturday, Dec. 9, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Arts at the Airfield NORTH HAMPTON The Hampton Airfield, 9A Lafayette Road, North Hampton, will host the fourth annual holiday fair on Saturday, Dec. 9 and Sunday, Dec. 10, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. You'll find a variety of treasures from each artist: functional thrown stoneware, hand-crafted jewelry, Plaice Cove Design, fiber art & tapestries, resin ocean creations, lifelike paper flowers, joyful acrylic paintings, mystical candles, organic soaps, functional art, built-to-last woodworking, and sewing seeds for hope. Rain or shine. No entry fee. Free parking. Restaurant on site. Watercolor Holiday Cards DOVER On Saturday, Dec. 9 at 2:30 p.m. come to the Dover Public Library and hand-paint greeting cards just in time for the holidays. All materials will be provided. Registration required. Winter Gift Making DOVER On Saturday, Dec. 9 at 11 a.m. join the Dover Public Library for a fun, winter gift making activity. We'll have three different crafts and plenty of festive spirit. Registration is required. Cocoa and Carols PORTSMOUTH On Sunday, Dec. 10, at 4 p.m. come to North Church on Market Square and sing your favorite holiday carols as you get ready for the season. Songs, popcorn, treats, and more. This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Meat raffle, Christmas fair, holiday art: Community events Dec. 4-10 Russian intelligence services planned a series of disruptive activities to try to prevent, or at least hinder, Sweden and Finland's accession to NATO, the Finnish media outlet YLE reported on Dec. 4, citing leaked Russian intelligence documents. The documents were initially obtained by the independent Russian anti-corruption project Dossier Center, YLE said. The planned activities, which YLE said did not appear to have actually taken place in Finland, sought to increase discord between Turkey and other NATO countries, especially Sweden, as the two Nordic countries began the process of joining the alliance. Russia allegedly tried to inflame tensions that erupted after a series of public burnings of the Quran in Sweden in early 2023, which resulted in protests breaking out around the Muslim world. The Quran burnings also caused a diplomatic dispute between Sweden and Turkey, complicating the process of Sweden's accession to NATO. The Swedish government accused Russia of spreading disinformation about the incidents, saying that it had sponsored the publication of articles in Arabic that claimed that the Swedish government was in favor of the Quran burnings. Both Sweden and Finland applied to join the alliance in May 2022 following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Turkey initially blocked both bids but gave the green light to Finland's accession in March. A unanimous vote of all members, including Turkey, is required for a new member to be admitted. The leaked documents also included plans to mock Turkey and its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, including promoting anti-Turkish protests and spreading anti-Erdogan graffiti around Europe. Although Erdogan signed a long-awaited protocol on Sweden's NATO accession on Oct. 23, its final approval has been delayed by the Turkish parliament. Ukraine war latest: Russian infantry activity rising in southeast, general says Key developments on Dec. 3: * Ukraine investigates Russian troops allegedly executed 2 Ukrainian POWs * Tarnavskyi: Russian forces have intensified infantry activity on the southeastern front line * Russian attack on Kherson kills 2, injures 7 * Official: Russia has lost over 7,200 troops, 530 The Kyiv IndependentAlexander Khrebet Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. Three environmental groups are threatening to sue the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control over what they say is a failure to protect the states rivers from industrial scale crop farms. A 2010 water law was supposed to prevent rivers from being sucked dry by farms, factories and drinking water plants, but DHECs interpretation of the law has left rivers and creeks vulnerable from farm withdrawals across South Carolina, the environmental groups say. In short, the department wrote rules that conflict with the 2010 law and those regulations go easy on industrial-scale farms, said Carl Brzorad, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charleston. Regulations written by agencies are supposed to support state laws, but in this case, they did not, he said. A petition the law center filed Monday with DHEC says the agency has 30 days to change the rules to match state law, or conservation groups may exercise their right to initiate a civil action against the department. The Southern Environmental Law Center is a legal service representing the S.C. Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Edisto and American Rivers. The DHEC rules allow major agricultural corporations to take all the water for themselves, according to a statement from Frank Holleman, a senior law center attorney who works with Brzorad. Were asking that DHEC follow the law passed by our elected representatives and stop writing blank checks to de-water South Carolinas rivers. Depleting rivers takes away water that other farms might need for irrigation, as well as drinking water utilities need to provide customers. Not enough water in a river also makes it hard to dilute wastewater discharges, while taking away fish habitat and places for people to boat or kayak.. The letter to DHEC questioning the states effectiveness at protecting rivers from overuse is the second of its kind in less than two years. In May 2022, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the states 2010 water withdrawal law and accompanying regulations dont prevent rivers from being pumped dry. Among other things the EPA letter said the law is not scientifically sound, doesnt preserve fish and wildlife, and actually allows overuse of rivers, instead of protecting them. South Fork of the Edisto River. This river is threatened by water siphoning from mega farms, critics say. Industrial-scale farms dispute that. Despite the EPAs admonition, neither the Legislature nor DHEC have made recommended changes to the law or to the regulations, environmentalists say. DHEC, whose mission is protecting the states environment, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The environmental groups lawsuit threat is the latest dust up in a disagreement that has simmered since soon after the water law took effect more than a decade ago. Critics say the surface water law and its regulations are so filled with loopholes that they dont provide much protection for rivers. In this case, the environmental groups are challenging the regulations. They say the law needs improvement, but the regulations are worse. At the very least, the rules need to match the law, Brzorard said. The biggest issue through the years has been the lack of oversight of huge farms that, in some cases, have already taken a toll on groundwater in rural areas of South Carolina. Those farms, often referred to as megafarms, are massive massive crop-growing operations that have cleared thousands of acres of forests. Unlike industries, megafarms arent required to get permits to withdraw large quantities of water from rivers, The State reported in a 2017 series on the impacts of megafarms on South Carolina. That allows the farms to gain approval without receiving the same level of scrutiny from DHEC as industries. Farms also dont have to notify the public of their plans to take major amounts of water from rivers. The trigger for concerns over the 2010 surface water withdrawal law was the opening of a large potato farm east of Aiken. The farm gave no public notice it was opening or that it would take water from the South Fork of the Edisto River because the law didnt require it. Walther Farms, an agribusiness from Michigan, gained approval to siphon away billions of gallons from the South Fork to water its potatoes. People living in the area were incensed and began pushing for changes to the states rules and regulations overseeing large water withdrawals. But while megafarms are not regulated as tightly as industries, they do have to comply with a section of the water withdrawal law, known as safe yield, that was intended to protect rivers from over-pumping. That section of the law is intended to make sure some water is left in rivers after big farms siphon water away for irrigation. But DHEC has interpreted that in such a way that it allows rivers to be drained completely, say environmentalists and some state river experts. The agency allows those seeking to withdraw water the ability to take 80 percent of a rivers capacity, based on a mean annual daily flow. But at certain times of the year, river flow is below the daily annual mean, which would allow a waterway to be completely drawn down. It is not known if rivers or streams have, at any point, dried up as a result of too much pumping by large farms, but statistics provided by the Southern Environmental Law Center show that some rivers are in trouble. Rivers that often exceed the safe yield include the South Fork of the Edisto between Columbia and Aiken; the Reedy River, which runs through Greenville; and the Tyger River near Spartanburg, according to the environmental groups petition to DHEC. Doug Busbee, a Wagener businessman who has fought for tougher surface water controls on megafarms, said the battle over river withdrawals needs to end in the publics favor. Busbee was so upset with the law that he applied for and won DHEC approval to use all of the capacity in parts of the upper Edisto River basin. He is not using the water, but sought the approval to prove a point that the law is flawed. Since Busbee is not using the water, his actions have saved some parts of the basin from new withdrawals by megafarms. Weve got a law that is dangerous, and the bottom line is I hope our lawmakers will listen to the people who understand the complexity of dealing with this situation, Busbee told The State newspaper. I hope they will try to come together to get us a law that would be safe for everyone. Neighbors say mega-farms like this 3,700-acre potato farm in Aiken County threaten the water supply. Such growing operations clear forested land to the horizon line to make room for crops. Two Ohio men have pleaded guilty in a string of armed robberies of mail carriers, federal officials say. One Columbus man and one Westerville man, both 20 years old, were accused of robbing four mail carriers at gunpoint, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorneys Office, Southern District of Ohio. The men stole service keys, which they then used to steal mail from USPS receptacles, officials said. The men stole personal and business checks and altered them to reflect new payees and payment amounts, authorities said. The men also recruited others to deposit the altered checks into their bank accounts and would split the profit, officials said. On Dec. 29, 2022, officials say the Columbus man robbed a postal carrier at gunpoint. The Westerville man, who was on probation wearing a GPS ankle monitor, helped the Columbus man with the gun and recruited two juveniles to help with the robbery, officials said. In January, the Columbus man pushed a mail carrier into her mail truck, then pushed a gun into her side and stole her keys, officials said. The Westerville man acted as a lookout from his vehicle nearby, using the cover of making DoorDash deliveries to evade his home confinement, according to officials. Later that same day, the two worked together to rob another mail carrier of her personal keys and USPS keys, officials said. On May 11, the Columbus man robbed a postal worker at a post office retail store. He approached the worker while she was outside on a break, officials said. (He) asked the victim for her keys, and when she asked, What keys? he pistol-whipped her in the head with his handgun, officials said in the news release. (He) forcibly accompanied the victim into the post office to retrieve her service keys. Officials said the Westerville man got another gun for the Columbus man to use during this robbery and picked him and others up after the robbery took place. Then he paid the robbers several hundred dollars, according to officials. When authorities carried out a search warrant at the Westerville mans home, they discovered $22,000 in cash, hundreds of washed and altered checks, two postal keys and hundreds of pieces of stolen mail, the release said. They also found a scanner and small printer with printed checks located next to it, a large box containing more than 100 checks, most of which were blank, and numerous checks stuffed inside toilet bowls, according to a criminal complaint. As part of a plea deal, the Columbus man is being recommended for a sentence of 20 to 25 years in prison. The Westerville man faces a minimum of 20 years up to life in prison, officials said. The two men are the latest of at least a dozen defendants charged in the Southern District of Ohio in 2022 and 2023 with crimes related to postal robberies, the news release said. In August 2022, a man in Columbus was sentenced to 78 months in prison in two armed robberies of postal workers. Westerville is about 16 miles north of Columbus. Postal carrier seen pepper spraying dogs behind fence, owner says. Just to be mean Postal worker dies after mail truck falls on him in hit-and-run crash, Texas cops say Postal worker stole money customers used for stamps as part of $18,000 scheme, feds say EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) The City of El Paso, the County of El Paso and the Borderplex Alliance announced on Monday, Dec. 4, they have taken major steps to support Meta, formerly known as Facebook, to develop a new hyperscale data center in El Paso which is an estimated $800 million investment. While the announcement marks progress towards bringing Metas data center to El Paso, additional work remains before the project is finalized, according to El Paso officials. The Council and Commissioners decisions are a critical first step in securing the companys presence in El Paso, a spokesperson said in a press release on Monday. Once established, the project will represent a long-term investment in the community, introducing a new industry that will promote innovation and create quality career opportunities, according to El Paso officials. The City of El Paso is thrilled at the steps taken to establish Metas Hyperscale Data Center that will completely transform our community, said Mayor Oscar Leeser. This partnership not only signifies a significant milestone in our technological evolution but also reaffirms our dedication to becoming a hub for innovation, job creation, and economic prosperity. Our region has the workforce, infrastructure, and business climate to support the needs of data center operators. We look forward to the City supporting the final stages of this project. Todays vote marks a first step toward a potential Meta data center project that could bring economic opportunities to El Paso County. I want to thank my colleagues, the Commissioners Court and the entire staff for their partnership. I appreciate Metas continued interest and investment in our County. Together, we can leverage new partnerships like this to help write an even brighter chapter for the future of El Paso County, said County Judge Ricardo Samaniego. We are grateful that Meta is taking steps to place their hyperscale data center in El Paso. I congratulate city and county leaders for their foresight and commitment to job growth. Through firsthand experience and previous projects, I can attest that Meta is a fantastic company, and we would be thrilled to welcome them to the Borderplex region, said Jon Barela, CEO of The Borderplex Alliance. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KTSM 9 News. An East St. Louis man accused of taking a boy from his home and threatening to harm him unless the childs mother agreed to meet with him has been sentenced to five years in federal prison. Marcus L. Weekfall, also known as Conehead, 39, pleaded guilty to one count of interstate extortion with a threat to injure. The case was filed in the U.S. Court for the Southern District of Illinois because Weekfall forcibly took the 10-year-old boy from his home in Illinois and transported him to St. Louis, according to court documents. The defendant targeted a child to mentally and emotionally abuse both the victim and the victims mother, said U.S. Attorney Rachelle Aud Crowe. His actions were calculated and dangerous, thus warranted this prison sentence. According to court documents, the child was asleep in bed when Weekfall broke into the mothers home in the Orr Weathers Apartment Complex in East St. Louis around 4:20 a.m. on May 28, 2022, and demanded the boy and his two sisters leave with him. The two girls ignored him and went back to bed, according to a detectives affidavit. The boy said in an interview with police that he went with Weekfall because he was scared and didnt want Weekfall to get mad, because when he gets mad, he breaks things and beats his mom, the affidavit stated. Weekfall and the childs mother were previously in a romantic relationship, but Weekfall is not the childs father, the criminal complaint states. The mother contacted police after seeing Weekfall on a surveillance camera inside the apartment. Officers with the East St. Louis Police Department contacted Weekfall by phone and requested the child be returned safely, but Weekfall refused. Weekfall called the mother several times and threatened to harm the child if the mother declined to meet with him. After five hours, Weekfall had another individual return the child to the mother at the MetroLink light rail station at Fifth and Missouri in East St. Louis, the court records say. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves is of paramount importance to the FBI and all of law enforcement, said FBI Springfield Field Office Special Agent in Charge David Nanz. Due to swift action and coordination with our law enforcement partners, the child was returned safely and Weekfall will spend five years behind barsgiving him ample time to consider the gravity of his actions. In addition to the prison sentence, Weekfall will serve three years of supervised release. FBI Springfield Field Office, the Public Safety Enforcement Group (PSEG) of the Illinois State Police and the East St. Louis Police Department contributed to the investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ali Burns prosecuted the case. Michigan has opened nearly 100 additional beds for youths in the juvenile justice system who need residential placement, one of several efforts the state is making to address the need for more treatment options for youths. The majority of the placements 60 of the nearly 100 are in Wayne County and will relieve crowding within the Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility. Another 20 are in the new St. Clair Youth Treatment Center, which is within but separate from the detention side of the Macomb County Juvenile Justice Center in Mount Clemens. That new program is focused on helping Wayne County, but ultimately could take youths from across the state. Youth justice advocates say the availability of space within the Macomb County facility is a testament to the county's efforts to reduce juvenile incarceration an approach to juvenile justice that, thanks to recent legislation, will likely become a statewide priority. Macomb County Juvenile Justice Center in Mount Clemens, where in a separate section will be housed the new St. Clair Youth Treatment Center for boys ages 13 to 18 years old. "There remains a waitlist for children who need treatment in residential facilities, and obviously we continue to work every single day on finding more residential placements," said Suzanna Shkreli, director of juvenile justice reform for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. "That's while we work toward keeping more youth in their communities so that they don't require secure treatment." Juvenile justice reforms should reduce need for placements The expansion of placement options comes as Michigan works to reform its approach to juvenile justice statewide. A recent package of bills passed in the Legislature took aim at the reliance on detention, setting the foundation for more juveniles to be diverted into community-based programs. The bills include changes in the way state money can be used for diversion and emergency placements, and require risk and needs assessments to be conducted throughout a childs justice involvement, starting immediately. These tools would help identify community-based services that might help them avoid or step down from a residential placement or detention. Meanwhile, Shkreli said courts continue to order juveniles into secure facilities every day. Since March, MDHHS said it secured new juvenile justice placements beyond the Macomb County spots, including: 12 at Highfields Inc., headquartered in Ingham County. Three at Holy Cross Children's Services in Saginaw. Two provided by Bethany Christian Services in Grand Rapids. 40 at Spectrum Human Services in Highland Park. 20 at Team Wellness Center at Eastern Market in Detroit, which operates a day treatment program for juvenile justice-involved youths. Spots at St. Clair Youth Treatment Center, five of which have been filled since opening Nov. 20 with youths from Wayne County, will be reserved for youths who previously were being held in the Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility. The Wayne County facility has come under scrutiny for its dangerous conditions, including overcrowding. The Free Press reported in October that two children may have been sexually assaulted during their stay there, and another was beaten so badly by a staff member that he required hospitalization. A host of licensing investigations are currently open; state officials took corrective action just over a month ago, and the facility has a state monitor present around the clock. More: Problems we found at the Wayne County juvenile jail A focus on rehabilitation The St. Clair Youth Treatment Center is for boys ages 13 to 18 who have a history of delinquent behavior and mental health, substance use disorder and/or other behavioral needs. Nevada-based Rite of Passage won the contract to run the facility, where justice-involved youths will have the opportunity to continue their schooling and receive mental health treatment and family and group therapy as well as job or vocational training. The center features single rooms and employs locally hired staff, said Ray Moss, program director. Staff-to-youth ratio is to be 1-to-4 during the day and 1-to-8 at night. Moss said the center allows families to visit at least nine times a month in addition to family therapy. "We encourage, and we really want, a lot of family interaction with the kids," he said, adding if a family member is indigent or doesn't have transportation, the center, for example, can provide an Uber for them to get to the facility. Youth generally will stay for nine months to a year before being released, Moss said, and continue to receive follow-up care for at least a year, either through the program or available community programs. "We want to be part of the ecosystem that the state of Michigan is trying to create, off-ramps out of home placement ... to create better outcomes for youth," Moss said. Deidra and her son Ricco Artecki pose for a portrait on Feb. 17, 2023, at their Cedar Springs home. Artecki's other son was involved in the juvenile justice system after he was charged with felonious assault and truancy last August. A best-practice intervention with a big price tag MDHHS Director Elizabeth Hertel said her department did its due diligence before selecting Rite of Passage to run the new facility in Macomb County, the group's first residential program in Michigan. State officials met with officials from courts that had remanded children to Rite of Passage care at other centers and visited a similar program the organization runs in Indiana. The nonprofit was established in 1984 and operates 55 programs in 16 states for 2,000 youths, according to its website. Problems have been reported at some of the locations, including a criminal sex charge at a Cincinnati-area facility, after which Hamilton County terminated its contract with Rite of Passage. Input from Michael Dempsey, executive director of the national-level Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators, assured Michigan decision-makers that Rite of Passage is well above best practice standards and a "go-to provider" for both secure and nonsecure programming. "Most importantly, they really care about the youth and the work that they do," Shkreli said. "They want to build a compassionate, caring environment, reduce incidents of violence, get the youth the treatment that they need and to build a trauma-informed environment." But its services come at a high cost. The daily rate for a boy to be placed at the St. Clair Youth Treatment Center is $875, according to MDHHS. Thats in addition to rent the state must pay Macomb County, and nearly $1 million in grant agreements to pay for facility renovations and startup costs, including onboarding staff. The state's proposed rental agreement with Macomb County is more than $11,000 a month. The county's Board of Commissioners is to vote later this month on the agreement with MDHHS, as well more than $255,000 in building modifications for which the state is reimbursing the county. Rite of Passage in 2021 had revenue of over $21 million and expenses $1 million above that. 'We all have a vested interest in helping at-risk youth' The St. Clair Youth Treatment Center is housed in, but physically separated from, the county's juvenile detention center. The detention side has 20 to 40 boys and girls at any one time from Macomb or other counties, such as St. Clair and Lapeer, which contracts with Macomb County per bed per day as needed. Some youths from Wayne County previously were housed in Macomb County's detention center, said Andrew McKinnon, Macomb County deputy executive. Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel said courts have been good about finding options other than confinement for youths and that "confinement should never be a substitute for treatment." He said he has had conversations with state officials, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Hertel, and others in the area of juvenile justice. He said he would like to come up with ideas, maybe a regional approach, on what he called "incredible challenges" with administrative rules and legislation that is hindering the ability to manage youths who are violent or turning violent toward other youths or staff. Conversations about managing youths' behavior, as well as discussions about a $230 million project for the Macomb County Jail that includes a central intake center with services for adults brought in with mental health and substance abuse issues, were part of the reason state officials turned to Macomb County to house the new St. Clair Youth Treatment Center, county leaders said. State lawmakers approved $40 million for the jail project, helping the county. Now, the county is helping the state with space for the new youth treatment center. "We want to be a good regional and state partner," McKinnon said, adding he hopes the youths in the new center "have good outcomes and treatment and hopefully, they'll be successful." "I think we all have a vested interest in helping at-risk youth," he said. A 'once in a generation' chance for reform Shkreli said MDHHS will continue to work with courts to get the best data possible about the true need for residential placements. In the meantime, the department will continue to look for additional placement options including those that would be open to girls. MDHHS has also requested a grant from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention that would fund the department to assess and plan community-based services across the state to understand where there are gaps. Hertel said she's keeping her fingers crossed that the state gets the grant, and also receives further funding to actually build out needed community services. Hertel said she is excited for the "once in a generation" chance to reform the juvenile justice system. As her department looks for opportunities to make more placements available, she said she looks forward to the new diversionary tools and funding courts can use to keep more and more children out of them. Contact Christina Hall: chall@freepress.com. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @challreporter. Jennifer Brookland covers child welfare for the Detroit Free Press in partnership with Report for America. Make a tax-deductible contribution to support her work at bit.ly/freepRFA. Reach her at jbrookland@freepress.com. This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan works to get more justice-involved youth treatment options Three people are in federal custody after a migrant landing on Key Biscayne Monday morning, according to the U.S. Border Patrol. The landing happened at Bill Baggs State Park, according to Border Patrol statement. Two of the people caught are from Haiti and the other from Albania, Samuel Briggs II, acting chief patrol agent for the agencys Miami sector, said in the statement. As of noon, agents and police were still searching the area to determine if any other migrants had made it to land, said Adam Hoffner, division chief for U.S. Customs and Border Protections Miami operations, told the Miami Herald. The Border Patrol released a photo of the center console, twin engine boat with a Bimini top that brought the people to shore. This story will be updated as more information becomes available. The group of Russian soldiers who were recorded executing two Ukrainian prisoners of war (POW) in Donetsk Oblast has been killed, Oleksandr Shtupun, the spokesman for the Tavria group of forces, said on air on Dec. 4. Footage published on Dec. 2 by the Ukrainian Telegram channel DeepState appeared to show a group of soldiers killing two other soldiers emerging from a trench, one of whom had his hands behind his head. The channel said the Ukrainians were from the 45th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade. The Strategic Communications Directorate of Ukraine's Armed Forces then confirmed later on Dec. 2 that Russian troops killed two Ukrainian soldiers who had surrendered as prisoners of war. "I can confirm that in the course of further hostilities, the group of Russian occupiers who committed this crime ceased to exist," Shtupun said. Shtupun earlier told the Kyiv Independent on Dec. 3 that there were reports that the group of Russian soldiers had been killed. The Donetsk Oblast Prosecutor's Office has launched an investigation into violating the rules and customs of war. Killing of POWs violates the Geneva Convention and constitutes a war crime. According to prosecutors, Russian troops entered Ukrainian positions near the village of Stepove in Donetsk Oblast. When two Ukrainian soldiers were forced to surrender, the Russian soldiers shot them dead. "Russia has once again proved that it is a terrorist country for which there are no laws and norms of international law," Ruslan Stefanchuk, a speaker of Ukraine's parliament, said on X on Dec. 3. Ukraine war latest: Russian infantry activity rising in southeast, general says Key developments on Dec. 3: * Ukraine investigates Russian troops allegedly executed 2 Ukrainian POWs * Tarnavskyi: Russian forces have intensified infantry activity on the southeastern front line * Russian attack on Kherson kills 2, injures 7 * Official: Russia has lost over 7,200 troops, 530 The Kyiv IndependentAlexander Khrebet Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. Alan Beal, the chief executive of the fledgling Armed Forces Brewing Company, was scouting locations in Florida to buy a brewery in January when he got a call from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The governor let me know that Virginia would love to have us relocate and open a brewing facility and employ Virginians, Beal said in a classified briefing video for the companys investors. Virginia already had more than 340 breweries, but Youngkin wanted at least one more. So the state came a-courting. The Virginia Economic Development Partnership created Project Seawolf, offering for sale Norfolks OConnor Brewing and more than $300,000 in tax incentives, details first reported by Dave Infante in his Fingers newsletter about drinking. Armed Forces sealed the deal in July, taking control of a trailblazing brewery that had helped transform what was once a depressed, largely industrial neighborhood into a hip, bustling enclave of businesses, restaurants and apartments known as the Railroad District. City Council members, who are typically consulted on big business moves happening in their backyard, learned about the sale when Youngkins office issued a press release. In the investor video, Beal called Norfolk " just a great community for us to locate, noting there were 100,000 military family members in the area in addition to its 82,000 active-duty personnel. Bringing a military tribute craft brewery to the home of the worlds largest naval base and its thousands of personnel sounded like a perfect marriage until neighborhood residents found out. Rather than Ooh-rah, their reaction was Oh no. Hundreds posted their opposition on social media. More than 800 filed objections to the brewerys application for a required conditional use permit. In a surprise vote last month, Planning Commission members recommended denial, contradicting a staff recommendation. The final say sits with Norfolks City Council, which is scheduled to vote on Dec. 12 on whether to approve the companys application to operate a brewery and a tasting room. Beal has said the company will sue if the application is denied. Much hangs in the balance. The company has raised $7.5 million from investors but has operated $1.5 million in the red over the past two years while contracting out its brewing, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. But the fight over Armed Forces Brewing Company is more than just a neighborhood spat. It mirrors increasingly divisive national battles about free speech and the ways in which businesses appeal to politicized niches of the public. To its supporters, Armed Forces is simply a brewery that wants to replace another with different branding, as portrayed by Tim Anderson, the firebrand delegate who represented the company at the planning commission. To others, notably some neighborhood residents, its a divisive business that glorifies violence, threatens LGBTQ people and says those with different views dont love America. Beer as community Over the past decade, as the number of craft breweries nationwide has grown to more than 9,500, they have become local hubs, many explicitly representing themselves as progressive places welcoming all comers (and their pets). Armed Forces is different. Its the anti-craft beer, craft brewery, as conservative as Coors but with a $14 six-pack price tag. The companys branding and its leaders cater to a specific niche, mocking hipster, woke culture and appealing to Fox News viewers. Beals social media posts show him wearing a Trust in Beer, Not in Government shirt, supporting indicted former President Donald Trump and mocking President Joe Biden. It chose as its brand ambassador Robert ONeill, the SEAL Team 6 member who claims to have killed Osama bin Laden. Eli Wilson, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico and the author of Beer and Society: How We Make Beer and Beer Makes Us, said hes not heard of a similar controversy over a brewery, but he is not surprised by the battle in Norfolk. The companies and people drawn to craft beer champion a kind of authenticity, he said. Often, he noted, they are outspoken about their progressive social values. But thats not the only way that kind of authenticity the view that my company is an expression of who I am, and what I believe can be presented. It can certainly manifest on the other side of the political spectrum, he added. An image of Armed Forces Brewings planned military tribute brewery in Norfolk used in the companys marketing. (Courtesy of the Virginia Mercury) Wilson said the controversy raises the thorny issue of people trying to stop a business only because it doesnt align with their views. To not be hypocritical with how we approach the world, if were going to be okay with some folks leading with very strongly progressive values and holding events and supporting certain charities, I think we have to look at a little bit of symmetry and see the ethical value in allowing folks to make equal gestures in the opposite direction, as long as theyre not directly hurting anyone, he added. For as much ire as Armed Forces has attracted locally, its also garnered passionate supporters nationwide. The company raised $7.5 million from 9,300 investors who ponied up a minimum of $200 in what was essentially a crowdfunding campaign. Contributors got rewards ranging from stickers and hats for smaller amounts to a signed copy of ONeills book, The Operator, for a $10,000 investment. Investors have no voting rights, and the company says it is uncertain if it will ever issue dividends. The stock cannot be sold on the open market. Armed Forces was founded by two Gallaudet College mates. They hooked up with Beal, a college dropout who had been running a consulting business branding bars, and created Seawolf Brewery in Annapolis, a Navy-themed company that debuted with its Special Hops IPA at the Military Bowl in December 2017. Sales were negligible. According to an SEC filing, Seawolf had $30,881 in revenue from Jan. 1, 2018, through Dec. 31, 2019. The latest stock offering shows the company operated at a loss in both 2021 and 2022, kept afloat by offerings. It paid no income taxes in 2022 because it had no taxable income. In Norfolk, Armed Forces Brewing does not own the former OConnor property, according to the October filing. SEC filings show a 72% share of the property is owned by a third party, Ironbound AFBC Properties, LLC, while Armed Forces has a 10-year lease and an option to purchase the property. The third-party owners appear to include Evan Almeida, the owner of a New Jersey real estate investment firm and the multimillion-dollar Empire ATM Group who is listed as a principal of Ironbound. Almeida and his brother, Michael, appear as $50,000 to $99,000 investors on the Armed Forces site. He did not return a call seeking information about his holdings. Diverse opposition A Norfolk flagship would be almost certain to change the companys financial position. But in the months since the July purchase announcement, the military tribute brewery in a military town has come under fire on social media for its testosterone-fueled, chest-beating and jingoistic marketing. Many of those critics were especially unhappy with swaggering statements by ONeill, Armed Forces brand ambassador. He drew the bulk of unfriendly fire for his social media posts criticizing the Navy for using a drag queen in a recruitment ad, mocking transgender people and refusing to wear a mask on an airplane during the pandemic. In a cartoonish video courting investors that was widely shared online by critics, including veterans, ONeill, assisted by a cleavage-forward blonde in tight military couture (the companys marketing advisor, Amber Miller), rails against craft breweries while promoting a craft brewery. He pours a can of p water into a toilet and destroys it with a grenade. He uses a Vulcan grip to immobilize a slackster or coffee house misanthrope who wants a hoppier brew (a role played by Beal clad in plaid and a porkpie hat), and he calls in a drone strike on a pretentious foreign brewery. In August, ONeill was arrested in a Dallas suburb for public intoxication and misdemeanor assault. A security guard who attempted to help him from a bar to his room told police he called him a racial slur. In Hampton Roads, hundreds posted their opposition to Armed Forces and its ambassador on Facebook. I cannot believe they are putting that BS in Norfolk, one wrote, calling the company this sexist, gun culture glorifying, hipster hating, racist magnet. The discontentment spread beyond social media. Del. Jackie Glass, D-Norfolk, held a town hall in a prominent gay bar noting anti-LGBTQ comments by ONeill on social media and questioning whether the brewery was a good fit for the neighborhood. The local civic league as well as the neighboring one voted to oppose a use permit for the brewery. Alan Beal (left) looks on at a local civic league discussion of a proposal by his company, Armed Forces Brewing, to bring a military tribute craft brewery to Norfolk. (Jim Morrison/the Virginia Mercury) Andrew Coplon, a Norfolk resident and founder of Craft Beer Professionals, an online industry forum with nearly 17,000 members, was a leader of the opposition. He said the ONeill video promoting Armed Forces caught his attention, but he initially viewed it as borderline offensive and in poor taste. Once we dove deeper into the company and what they stood for and what their leadership represented, thats when it truly became something that I did not believe reflects the values we have in our wonderful community, he said. He also said he was worried that Armed Forces goal of brewing the equivalent of 500,000 to 700,000 cases per year a level of production that dwarfs OConnors 200,000 annual output would cause problems in what has become a more residential neighborhood as trucks move in and out. At this Novembers Planning Commission meeting, opponents like Jeff Ryder, head of Hampton Roads Pride, told the commissioners the brewerys values as expressed by ONeill didnt fit the neighborhood. We have been challenged and dismayed to see Armed Forces Brewery coming into Norfolk and dont feel that they are a business that will support our community or be a safe place for queer folks in Norfolk, he said, noting that there is rising hate and unfortunately, again, an increase in violence against queer people. Some veterans, too, opposed permit approval. Tom Wilder, a veteran who has operated Young Veterans Brewing Company in Virginia Beach for a decade and is soon opening a Norfolk location five blocks from the planned Armed Forces Brewing site, aired concerns about the companys military-themed branding. He noted that when Young Veterans got approval to open in Norfolk, we were told if the civic leagues didnt give us their blessing, the case was closed. What you see from us (is) to never appear to be flag waving to sell our product. To never appear to make guns or warfare look too cool so as not to appear to be recruiting for military service or political parties, he said. Armed Forces have not taken those strides. Marketing a military-themed brand with American flags, guns and ammo is the low-hanging fruit of creativity. All the while, their CEO is not even a veteran. The Planning Commission voted 4-2 to recommend the denial of the permit despite a staff recommendation to approve, stunning Beal, who in another investor video called it a shshow. Beal has been clear hes not a veteran and has said the company is committed to hiring veterans as 70% of its workforce. Of the 13 members of the management team listed on the brewerys site, four are veterans. Anderson, answering questions after the planning meeting, said Armed Forces is a good fit for the neighborhood. Its just misunderstood. Theres been a lot of misinformation in the very beginning that has caused a part of the community to hate this company, he said. The misinformation is that Robert ONeill is Armed Forces Brewery and thats not the case. ONeill, he noted, is a 4% owner but has been removed as brand ambassador. A now-deleted tweet from former Armed Forces Brewing brand ambassador Robert ONeill. Theres been no anti-LGBTQ, anti-race or racist or any kind of comments from the Armed Forces Brewing Company, he said. Individuals on their own Twitter pages are just what those are individual comments. Coplon isnt buying that. People truly equal brand and you cannot separate the personal behaviors of a company leader from their organization, he said. The actions that Armed Forces Brewing Companys leadership has demonstrated is lack of good moral character. And I truly believe that their continued actions are problematic. Anderson predicted the City Council would approve the permit because its gonna be hard to say you cant operate the exact same business that operated there for nine years. Last month, Beal urged supporters to email council members and city officials. They received nearly 9,600 emails, according to a city spokesman. The Armed Forces counteroffensive Armed Forces Brewing has not reached out to mend fences with local civic leagues and other opponents. If anything, its become more pugnacious. Beal declined to answer questions after the Planning Commission meeting but later issued a statement decrying a vocal minority who believe their personal social agenda places them above the law, and above the rights of the Hampton Roads military and veteran community that have overwhelmingly supported us. He also threatened legal action against opponents. Those who defamed Armed Forces Brewing Company publicly at this hearing and leading up to it will learn that there are legal repercussions to publicly lying and affecting our 9,300 shareholders, he said. Pam Catindig, the brewers outside public relations consultant, offered to take questions but responded to none of them, including one seeking examples of defamatory statements and another about the number of employees who are veterans. Wilson, the University of New Mexico professor, notes the booming industry he got into a dozen years ago as the beverage director at a craft brewery has become far more competitive. Building a brand viewed negatively by a portion of the community is a perilous move, he said. That is a dangerous, risky business strategy during times in which many craft brewers are really struggling to stay in the black for them to go increasingly, socially and politically niche at a time when so many craft brewers are just desperate to cling on to enough business to keep them afloat, he added. Interesting decision. This story by Jim Morrison was originally published on https://virginiamercury.com. The Virginia Mercury is an independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan news source covering Virginia government and policy. Access the original story here. Sheynnis Palacios after winning the 2023 Miss Universe pageant. Miss Palacios was the first Nicaraguan to win the contest - Marvin Recinos / AFP via Getty The winner of the Miss Universe beauty pageant has been embroiled in an alleged foreign-backed plot to overturn the countrys authoritarian government. Sheynnis Palacios became the first Nicaraguan to win the Miss Universe competition last month, after winning a national contest earlier this year. At first, president Daniel Ortega called Miss Palacios victory a moment of legitimate joy and pride. But the celebrations turned sour after photos of the 23-year-old at mass anti-government protests in 2018 went viral on social media. Authorities have charged Karen Celebertti, the director of the countrys national beauty pageant, with engineering a foreign-backed plot over Miss Palacios show of support for the pro-democracy demonstrations. Karen Celebertti, director of Nicaragua's beauty pageant, is wanted by police on conspiracy charges Ms Celebertti is wanted by police on conspiracy charges after allegedly rigging the competition and other beauty events to ensure anti-government contestants won. Government forces killed more than 300 people five years ago as they crushed the three-month-long demonstrations against Mr Ortegas administration, which authorities blamed on foreign interference. Officials have since outlawed protests, but after Ms Palacios win in November, many defied the ban and took to the streets to celebrate. Celebrations outside the home of Miss Palacios after she won Miss Universe 2023 - the blue and white flag is a symbol of protest Some carried the national blue and white flag, a symbol of protest and a jailable offence, instead of Mr Ortegas red and black Sandinista banner. Miss Palcios wore a white dress and blue cape during the Miss Universe ceremony, which some took to be a reference to the banned flag. In these days of a new victory, we are seeing the evil, terrorist commentators making a clumsy and insulting attempt to turn what should be a beautiful and well-deserved moment of pride into destructive coup-mongering, said Mr Ortegas wife and vice president Rosario Murillo. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega alongside his wife and Vice-President Rosario Murillo address supporters in the capital of Managua - AFP via Getty Images Meanwhile, Ms Celebertti was banned from entering Nicaragua when she flew home after the Miss Universe pageant on Nov 23. She is reported to be in Mexico. Her husband and son have been detained on conspiracy charges dating back five years after being arrested at their home in the capital Managua. Traps and political ambushes financed by foreign agents Police said Ms Celebertti had used spaces supposedly dedicated to promoting innocent beauty pageants, in a conspiracy orchestrated to convert the contests into traps and political ambushes financed by foreign agents. The former beauty queen, who has run the Miss Nicaragua contest since 2001, was also charged with money laundering and spreading fake news. Police claimed she had actively participated in organising anti-government protests, including those which gripped the Central American nation in 2018. They said she had remained in contact with the traitors since. Ms Palacios, who won the Miss Nicaragua contest in August to earn the right to compete in Miss Universe, was not named in the police statement. Sheynnis Palacios, winner of the Miss Universe 2023 contest, has not been named in any police statements - Hector Vivas / Getty She has moved to New York for her Miss Universe duties and has not made any public comments about Nicaraguan politics. But she has emphasised her Catholic faith at a time when Mr Ortega has cut off diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Her old Facebook page, which showed photos of her at the protests, has been taken down. Mr Ortega, a 78-year-old former Leftist revolutionary hero, has jailed opposition leaders, imprisoned Catholic clergy and cracked down on media freedoms during his presidency. He won a fourth consecutive term in office in January last year, in a vote the United States branded a pantomime election. 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 Rankin County Sheriffs Office in Mississippi announced reform measures that have been adopted by the department after five of the department employees pleaded guilty to torturing two Black men earlier this year. Will new training keep the Goon Squad from being revived? Eddie Parker and Michael Jenkins said they were brutally beaten, sexually assaulted and tortured for 90 minutes by five Rankin County deputies and one local officer who conducted a botched raid in their home in January. Read more In a news release, Sheriff Bailey said deputies and jailers with the department have completed a training session taught by the FBIs Civil Rights Unit, an internal affairs investigator had been recruited to help foster impartiality and fairness in our reviews, and the department also updated its compliments/complaints process. Sheriff Bailey said in Tuesdays news release his department took immediate action to remove the officers once the true facts were discovered. Bailey told CNN he will continue to work to repair the damage of the so-called Goon Squad. I had a group of thugs wearing badges that got out and went and committed a home invasion against two innocent men, Bailey said. It was completely criminal. The updated officer manual says deputies should use objectively reasonable force to stop a perceived threat and determine whether force should be used based off a list of criteria including the severity of the crime. The manual also advises officers to attempt to resolve incidents without immediately resorting to a use of force which obviously wasnt a consideration in the case of Jenkins and Parker. Angela English, Rankin County NAACP President, said the department changes are cute and all but what would look even better is Baileys resignation. The only change that I can see that would really help Rankin County is for him to step down at this point, English said to WJTV. To be perfectly honest, the fact that a man of his age and during this time would have not come in and made those changes initially, thats very disappointing and shows poor leadership. More from The Root Sign up for The Root's Newsletter. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. Reality Check is a Star series holding those in power to account and shining a light on their decisions. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email tips@kcstar.com. With the clock ticking to get a measure enshrining the right to an abortion on a statewide ballot in 2024, Missouri abortion rights supporters appear to be split on strategy and have not unified behind one version of the proposal. The lack of a campaign, as well as a series of legal battles with anti-abortion Republican officials that kept the abortion rights petitions tied up in court for months, have cast some doubt on the ability for supporters to craft an expensive and time-consuming campaign to get a version of the measure on the 2024 ballot. That timeline is going to be really, really tough, said Emily Wales, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which has not backed a version of the proposals. Missourians will have access restored. I dont know that it will be possible for them to vote on this in 2024. Failure to get a measure on the ballot would be a huge missed opportunity in a year in which abortion rights are expected to be a key issue. Missouri voters are expected to turn out in droves in 2024, with abortion rights also crucial in races across the board, including governor, U.S. Senate and president. If a measure does reach the ballot, Missouri, the first state to ban abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, could become the first state to reverse a near-total ban on the procedure through a ballot initiative. But one new complication for the abortion rights ballot push is the emergence of a Republican-led campaign that would legalize abortion up to 12 weeks and add exceptions for rape and incest. Jamie Corley, a former Republican congressional staffer who is leading the effort, has pitched her proposal as a middle ground between the states near-total abortion ban and the more expansive abortion rights petitions. Despite this pitch, some abortion rights groups, health care providers and Democratic lawmakers remain skeptical of Corleys effort, arguing that her proposal would give lawmakers too much room to regulate reproductive health care. Advocates have also criticized a requirement that women seeking an abortion following a rape report the assault to a hotline. Mallory Schwarz, the executive director of Abortion Action Missouri, in a phone interview said Corleys petitions were misleading, contending that they were written in a way that would not actually allow health care providers to begin providing abortions again. She very clearly didnt consult with the providers of abortion care in our state or regionally to understand what abortion care looks like in practice, she said. Corley, in a phone interview, pushed back on criticism of her petitions, saying that the group seeking the more expansive proposals was looking for an all or nothing policy where women are left with nothing. We have a dynamic that we have an extreme anti-abortion group and then a pretty extreme pro-abortion group, Corley said. In a follow up statement, she said it was really confusing to voters to watch pro-choice groups try to sabotage a bipartisan effort to restore access to abortion in a state that doesnt even allow rape victims access to care. Competing abortion rights proposals Anna Fitz-James, a retired St. Louis doctor, filed the more expansive abortion rights petitions in March on behalf of the group Missourians for Constitutional Freedom. After the series of court battles with Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Attorney General Andrew Bailey, both staunch anti-abortion Republicans, supporters have not crafted a formal campaign or rallied behind one version of the measure. Abortion rights supporters who spoke with The Star largely pointed to the lengthy delay caused by the legal battles between the ACLU of Missouri and anti-abortion Republican officials. The different petitions range in how far to go in legalizing abortion. One would legalize abortion outright, removing the ban at any stage of gestation. The others would offer state lawmakers some room to regulate, including allowing abortions to be banned after 24 weeks or after so-called fetal viability the ability of a fetus to survive outside the uterus. Schwarz, whose organization has not taken an official position on a version of the measure, said it was committed to the most expansive policy possible. Wales, with Planned Parenthood, said its preference is to see a world where we dont have political, non-medical restrictions placed on care. At the same time, we want Missourians to have access to as much as they can have, Wales said, saying the group has not come out in favor or against any of the proposals. Missouri Abortion Fund, which raises money to help Missourians access abortions, in a statement posted on social media last month said it gives pause to any ballot language that puts an increased burden on patients and providers. The inclusion of viability language, which will set legal standards for decades, is not in line with our values as an abortion fund, the statement said. Pamela Merritt, a longtime abortion rights activist originally from Missouri now heads Medical Students for Choice, an international group that trains students about reproductive health care. Merritt, in a phone interview, said she was part of the coalition pushing for an abortion rights ballot measure in Missouri, but stepped away from the effort in July. While she would support the one measure that would outright restore the right to abortion, she said she had deep concern it felt like they were considering languagethat is essentially restrictive. I dont think we have a strategy beyond the ballot which gives me pause, she said. Im also concerned about the fact that these ballot measures at their best might protect abortion access to people who are already able to access some abortion care as opposed to centering the people most impacted by the ban. Merritt pushed back on the urgency that some supporters feel to get an abortion rights measure on the ballot right now. Nobody has convinced me that right now is the only time we have to move this, she said. Im a little concerned that there might be a push to advance a version that has restrictions because people are convinced that we have to do it now and theyre making assumptions about the electorate that havent been tested. While supporters have been energized by victories for abortion rights in other states such as neighboring Kansas and Republican-controlled Ohio, many acknowledge that Missouri is its own state a state where anti-abortion activists and officials have for years worked to limit access to the procedure. Most abortion supporters would like for this to be a conclusion that government doesnt get to interfere in a womans rights, said state Rep. Deb Lavender, a Manchester Democrat. And then we have to have language that passes in Missouri. And I think thats whats being weighed right now. Lavender said that once supporters decide on a path forward, it will unleash thousands of women across the state that are ready to go to collect signatures. But we need to get to the start line. Schwarz, in a phone interview, pointed to the onslaught of anti-abortion attacks from Ashcroft and Bailey, saying that the campaign has looked a lot different than it would have months ago when Fitz-James first filed the petitions. For a Missouri effort, its important to do it right, she said. And be intentional and think about the breadth of the challenges and launch a campaign that can win. Schwarz pushed back on the idea that disagreement among supporters was the chief concern for the proposals. Missouri, she said, is fortunate to have a diverse coalition of people pushing to restore abortion access. This issue is popular and important to people even in red states, she said. As advocates, however, we also have to look at the ways that Missouri differs from other states, ways that our electorate differs from other states and the resources available to us. Wales said the values of the groups involved in discussions about the petitions are the same but there are some differences in strategy. While supporters study how best to move forward with getting resources and building a campaign on one of the more expansive proposals, Corley and her new group Missouri Women and Family Research Fund have pushed forward with a version of their competing ballot measure. Corley filed a slew of proposals in August, which are tied up in similar legal battles with statewide officials over the wording and cost of the measures. Despite this, however, Corleys group has started campaigning on a version of the petition that would legalize abortion up to 12 weeks and allow exceptions for rape, incest and health or safety of the female seeking an abortion. Corley, in a phone interview, attacked the states near-total abortion ban as extreme. But she also criticized the supporters of the competing ballot measures for being unwilling to compromise. Its really time for the other coalition to fish or cut bait, she said. We have put forth a passable solution. All theyre doing right now when they are stalling is creating the very confusion they claim to dislike. But while Corley paints her proposal as compassionate and rational, some abortion rights supporters say its misleading. Its deceptive it doesnt really bring back true access to abortion and to reproductive freedom, said state Rep. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Kansas City Democrat, pointing to arguments that Corleys petitions would keep in place laws that had whittled away access to abortion across the state before Roe v. Wade was overturned. Corley, in a statement, pushed back on this argument, saying that her amendment does not grandfather in targeted restrictions on abortion providers or TRAP laws. As we all know, there is not a single ballot initiative that can magically make all of the TRAP laws disappear not even the ACLUs, she said. Just like in Ohio, our amendment doesnt change any underlying laws, but it does change the constitutional standard for evaluating both existing and prospective laws. Beyond that, its up to the courts, regardless of which amendment passes. Missouri Healthcare Professionals for Reproductive Rights, a group of medical professionals led by Jennifer Smith, an OB-GYN in the St. Louis area, penned a letter criticizing provisions in Corleys petitions in September. While we applaud their recognition that our current laws make Missouri [look] draconian, punitive and unsafe for families, we find their proposals dangerous substitutes for the more expansive petitions filed by Fitz-James, the group wrote. Smith, in an phone interview, pointed to the petitions language, which would requires rape and sexual assault survivors to report it to a crisis hotline before an abortion can be performed. Im not really sure logistically how that would work out if a patient has to report it and then I have to hunt down her report, she said. Why should a patient whos had this horrible experience have to do more to get necessary health care? As a physician, its just ridiculous. But Corley, in a statement, said her amendment is stronger with a reporting requirement and has the added benefit of staving off any attempts by the Missouri Legislature to add a police reporting requirement which they will do if given the chance to draft these exceptions themselves. May deadline approaches Anti-abortion activists, for their part, have capitalized on the dueling campaigns, attempting to point out the apparent divisions among abortion right supporters in Missouri compared to other states. In no other state other than Missouri has there been this intense infighting and public disagreement among pro-abortion groups about which measure to support, Sam Lee, a longtime anti-abortion lobbyist, said in a lengthy text to The Star. With the two competing groups, Lee said, it is looking less and less likely each passing day that either group will get enough signatures by the early May 2024 deadline. To get a version of one of the measures on the 2024 ballot, supporters will have to collect more than 170,000 signatures from voters by May. If they receive enough signatures, the measures would appear on the November ballot unless Republican Gov. Mike Parson calls a special election. If both measures reach the ballot, the messaging surrounding what each proposal would do will be important, Nurrenbern, the Kansas City Democrat, said. Nurrenbern acknowledged that Missouri may have to take a bit more of a moderate approach to make sure an abortion rights measure passes. But I think it doesnt matter who you talk to in the state from conservative Republicans in rural Missouri, they think that women and families should be able to make decisions in their doctors offices without interference from politicians in Jefferson City, she said. Despite the tight deadline, Schwarz said shes never seen this level of support for abortion access. That is incredible and heartening and exciting about what is in front of us and what is possible and the power that we have in our state when we come together and take action to demand better to demand the liberated future of abortion access that Missourians deserve, she said. Correction: A previous version of this article said Yolanda Coale pled guilty as part of a no-contest plea; however, she pled guilty. MOBILE, Ala. (WKRG) A Mobile woman accused of beating a 4-year-old to death pled guilty to manslaughter on Monday. Mobile City Council to consider ban of pre-dawn and no-knock warrants Yolanda Coale, 55, was arrested in February 2022 after King Lyons, 4, was found dead at a home on Jacob Drive. Originally, Kings 9-year-old sister was arrested for assault after Coale accused her of hitting King with a broom. The sister later said she did not hit or injure King. Detectives said they saw that King had bruises and cuts all over his body, which were in different healing stages. 20 minors arrested at Mobile bar for underage drinking, owner speaks out The minimum sentence for Coale is two years, and the maximum is 20 years. Coale will remain out on bond until she is sentenced. Sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 15 at 9 a.m. ALSO ON WKRG.com: 20 minors arrested at Mobile bar for underage drinking, owner speaks out For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WKRG News 5. Initiative to protect glaciers launched at COP28 China Pavilion Xinhua) 08:40, December 04, 2023 This aerial photo taken on June 16, 2023 shows a view of the Baishui River No. 1 Glacier on the Yulong Snow Mountain in Lijiang City, southwest China's Yunnan Province. (Xinhua/Chen Xinbo) DUBAI, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- An initiative to protect the world's glaciers was launched here on Sunday at the China Pavilion of the COP28 climate change conference. At the side event of COP28, or the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, delegates and scientists shared their views on the risks of melting glaciers and ways to slow down that process. Visitors pose for photos in front of the China's pavilion at the Green Zone of the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, Dec. 3, 2023. Green Zone of COP28 opens to the public at the Expo City of Dubai on Sunday. (Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen) A project named "Memory of Glaciers: Global Exploration Initiative" was launched to step up research and protection of glaciers as well as raise public awareness. Glaciers bear witness to the history of climate change on the planet, and melting glaciers will bring a series of risks aside from rising sea levels, delegates said. Potential risks will include damage to high mountain ecosystems, increased hazards of landslides and floods, as well as losses of tourism and cultural assets, delegates added. Measures that need to be taken include limiting global warming through reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing adaptation strategies which can help reduce hazardous impacts. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) A Nashville man is accused of following teenage girls in the dark of early morning to their school bus stop, then trying to lure them to his car as one teens mother confronted him, police said. Three girls, ages 13 and 15, told police they were followed by 31-year-old Levi P. Combs as they walked to the bus stop for school just before 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 30, according to a Dec. 4 news release from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department. Combs was first noticed by one teen as she walked alone toward the bus stop and Combs began to follow her, police said. When she realized she was being followed, the teen started to walk faster, and Combs matched her speed, according to the release. Combs called out to the girl and told her to stop, police said, causing the teen to instead take off running. The teen contacted her mother and told her she was being followed, police said. A second teen then joined the first, and Combs continued to follow them, according to the release. Combs used a breezeway to hide himself from the girls as he pursued, police said. A third teen walked up to the bus stop and found one girl crying as Combs stared at them and walked closer, police said. Thats when the first teens mom arrived at the bus stop and confronted Combs, according to the release. She told Combs to go away and leave them alone as Combs continued to stare at the girls, police said, before she asked what Combs wanted. He told the mother he wanted to talk to them in his car, according to police, referencing his BMW sedan parked nearby. The mother took photos of Combs that were shared with Youth Services detectives, the department said. Just hours later, Combs was spotted trying to get inside a preschool building, police told WZTV. Combs, who lives just a mile from the school bus stop, turned himself in to police after being contacted by detectives Dec. 1, according to the release. Combs was charged with three counts of attempted kidnapping and three counts of assault by intimidation, police said. Combs lives in the Hermitage neighborhood of Nashville, on the citys east side. Metro Nashville Council Public Safety Committee Chair Erin Evans told WZTV the neighborhood is notoriously dark and not well lit. The girls were walking to their bus stop before sunrise, the outlet reported, and Evans said incidents like this support Nashville Mayor Freddie OConnells efforts to adjust school start times. Its definitely something if I were a parent, Id be wanting to investigate further in how we could help improve the safety considerations related to school safety and start times, she told WZTV. 14-year-old found shot to death in a neighborhood in north Charlotte 14-year-old driver loses control, sending SUV full of teens sliding off cliff, cops say Man kidnaps woman with dementia from hospital and steals thousands from her, feds say Man sexually assaulted four unconscious women and recorded it, Colorado officials say A woman was arrested after telling authorities she killed her two young children, according to Pennsylvania police and news reports. Officers went to a Harmony Township home Saturday, Dec. 2, for a report of a 4-month-old child not breathing, WPXI reported, citing a criminal complaint. The child was pronounced dead at the scene. The babys mother, 27-year-old Quanesha Lindsey, was interviewed by police and admitted to killing the child, according to the complaint obtained by WTAE. She is accused of using a mannequin to show how she suffocated the baby to death.. While making the admission, Lindsey also said she killed her 2-year-old son in October, police told KDKA. She said she strangled the 2-year-old, according to police. Text messages sent in October show Lindsey acknowledged the childs death, but police were not notified until a relative called them, police said, according to WPXI and WTAE. Lindsey was charged with murder, strangulation and abuse of a corpse, court records show. She was placed in the Beaver County Jail and denied bail. A motive for the killings is unclear. Harmony Township is about 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. Foster mom starved and beat children for years as punishment in South Dakota, feds say 9-year-old found dead in her home, California cops say. Mom arrested while shopping Mom charged after 6-year-old son is found stabbed inside burning apartment, GA cops say This embedded content is not available in your region. Good evening. A new package of measures to cut record net migration will see the number of people moving to the UK fall by 300,000, James Cleverly told MPs on Monday. Elsewhere, a group of the worlds most senior central bankers has warned Covid handouts have made people less willing to work. New measures will slash migration arrivals by 300,000, says Cleverly A new package of measures to cut record net migration will see the number of people moving to the UK fall by 300,000, James Cleverly told MPs on Monday. The Home Secretary announced a five-point plan that included a ban on foreign care workers bringing dependants, a big increase in the salary required for skilled foreign workers to get a visa to 38,700, and the scrapping of companies being allowed to hire cut-price labour from overseas for roles where there is a shortage of workers. Covid handouts have made people less willing to work, central bankers warn Covid handouts have made people less willing to work, a group of the worlds most senior central bankers has warned. The Bank of International Settlements said workers preferences have shifted in favour of fewer working hours since the pandemic. An unwillingness to work longer hours has been most pronounced in countries that gave citizens the biggest handouts during the pandemic, it said Schools closed early with more than 100 flood alerts in place Schools closed early across the South West on Monday following heavy rain which saw more than 40 flood warnings issued across the country. A Met Office yellow weather warning for rain is in place across parts of southern England, south-east Wales, Devon, Somerset and the Midlands, which will last until 6pm on Monday. Evening Briefing: Todays essential headlines Somerset | A coroner has issued a warning about the inability of foreign care staff to speak English following the death of a 91-year-old woman trapped under a stair lift. Ukraine: The Latest | US aid to Ukraine will run out by end of month Today, as well as news from the frontlines, we analyse news from the US and the EU as decisions regarding funding Ukraines war effort loom large in western politics. We also speak to journalist Jen Stout about her reporting and long form journalism from Ukraine. Comment and analysis World news: Miss Universe winner claimed to be at centre of alleged plot to overthrow Nicaraguan government The winner of the Miss Universe beauty pageant has been embroiled in an alleged foreign-backed plot to overturn the countrys authoritarian government. Sheynnis Palacios became the first Nicaraguan to win the Miss Universe competition last month, after winning a national contest earlier this year. Feature of the day This woman is Spains hottest model but shes not real AI-created Aitana Lopez was conjured as a solution to the inefficiencies of dealing with human models - @fit_aitana via Instagram Aitana Lopez doesnt complain, doesnt get ill and can work 24/7 no wonder AI influencers are rapidly becoming big business. Read the piece Business news: Barclay family regains ownership of The Telegraph after Lloyds loan repaid The Barclay family has regained ownership of The Telegraph after paying 1.2bn in debts owed to Lloyds Banking Group. The high street lender said repayment had been made in full, meaning both The Telegraph and The Spectator magazine have been released from receivership. Live business news: Pension fund ownership of UK stocks hits record low Editors choice Television | Meet TVs (very unlikely) new King Arthur Property | Why Britons keep paying a premium for long century homes Cars | We cant go uphill the 20mph speed limit makes no sense Sport briefing: Todays essential headlines Sign up to our free Sport Briefing Newsletter to receive the latest sporting news, direct to your inbox every weekday morning. Three things for you If you want to receive twice-daily briefings like this by email, sign up to the Front Page newsletter here. For two-minute audio updates, try The Briefing - on podcasts and smart speakers. 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. Candidates line up at the Illinois State Board of Elections building in Springfield Monday, Nov. 27, 2023 to file to get on the ballot for the 2024 primary election on March 19. Monday is the filing deadline for candidates for federal, state, county and judicial offices to get on the ballot for the 2024 primary election. Candidates will need to file at the Illinois State Board of Elections by 5 p.m. or the Sangamon County Clerk's office by 4:30 p.m. Last Monday was the first day candidates could file. Candidates who were in line by 8 a.m. were guaranteed top-of-the-ballot status or were eligible for a lottery for the top slot if there was more than one candidate for the same office. On your mark: Candidates line up early on first day of filing for the March 19 primary The general election is Nov. 5. There has been some filing action since the initial flurry. State Rep. Mike Coffey Jr., R-Springfield, of the 95th District now has an opponent in the Republican primary after Kelvin Coburn of Chatham filed Monday morning. Kristen Chiaro, a Village of Chatham trustee, filed on the Democrat side Thursday afternoon. The Springfield native was reelected to a four-year term as trustee in the spring. Coffey was selected by the Republican Central Committee chairpersons in Christian, Macon and Sangamon counties to fill out the term of former state Rep. Tim Butler, R-Springfield, who stepped down Dec. 31 to become president of the Illinois Railroad Association. Coffey filed to run on Monday. Two Republicans will square off in the primary for an open seat in the 99th District in west central Illinois. Eric R. Snellgrove of Beardstown filed Thursday to challenge Kyle A. Moore of Quincy. In September, Rep. Randy Frese, R-Paloma, announced that he would not seek reelection after eight-and-a-half years in the house. The other incumbent state representatives from the area William Hauter, R-Morton, from the 87th District; Sue Scherer, D-Decatur, from the 96th District; Christopher "C.D." Davidsmeyer, R-Murrayville, from the 100th District, and Wayne Rosenthal, R-Morrisonville, from the 108th District all filed Monday. None currently have opponents in the primary or general elections. Sangamon County Coroner Jim Allmon was the first candidate in line at the county clerk's office on Nov. 27. Allmon is running for reelection. Candidates have until 4:30 p.m. Monday to file for the March 19 primary. In Sangamon County, no other candidates have filed in county-wide races. On Wednesday afternoon, Roseanne Pulido of Springfield filed for the 12th District seat on the county board. She is the only Republican to file and would challenge incumbent Marc Ayers in the general election. Fourteen of the 29 county board seats are up in the fall. Precinct committeepersons also have until the end of Monday to file at the clerk's office. Objections to petitions can be filed through Dec. 11. For the presidential election, filing will take place on Jan. 4-5. The final primary ballot will be certified on Jan. 11 at ISBE's January meeting. This story will be updated. Contact Steven Spearie: 217-622-1788; sspearie@sj-r.com; X, twitter.com/@StevenSpearie. This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Monday is the deadline for candidates to file for March 19 primary Flash This photo taken on Dec. 3, 2023 shows the opening ceremony of the 5th World Media Summit (WMS) in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province. [Photo/Xinhua] The 5th World Media Summit (WMS) held an opening ceremony Sunday morning in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province. Themed "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," the 5th WMS has gathered over 450 participants from 101 countries and regions, including representatives of 197 mainstream media outlets, think tanks, government agencies and diplomatic missions to China, and UN agencies and international organizations. Hu Heping, executive deputy head of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said in his remarks that the 5th WMS is a grand event for the global media circle, and called on media outlets to stay unbiased, promote mutual learning between civilizations, and deepen pragmatic cooperation to contribute their wisdom and strength to building a community with a shared future for humanity and building a better world. Fu Hua, executive chairman of the WMS and president of Xinhua News Agency, called on media outlets in his speech to build consensus and boost confidence in development, uphold objectivity and truth to enhance media's credibility, and deepen exchanges and collaboration to contribute to building an open, inclusive, clean and beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal security and common prosperity. UN Undersecretary-General Melissa Fleming and other guests also delivered speeches to the ceremony. They agreed that as humanity is facing a lot of global challenges, only by deepening communication and strengthening cooperation can we boost confidence and build a shared future. A document titled "Joint Statement for the 5th World Media Summit" was released at the opening ceremony and plenary session. During the summit, attendees will hold discussions on human development and security, new technological opportunities and challenges, media and market in the new era and other topics of common concern. They will also visit a number of places in the provinces of Guangdong and Yunnan and hold exchanges. The event, co-hosted by Xinhua News Agency and the provincial governments of Guangdong and Yunnan, runs from Dec. 2 to 8 in the cities of Guangzhou and Kunming. A casino restaurant was among four kitchens in South Mississippi to fail their latest health inspections, three of them for the first time. One restaurant got its third C since 2021. Circle K at 7100 Mississippi 63 in Moss Point was inspected Nov. 21 for a permit renewal. It received a C for having no certified manager, a critical violation. The kitchen was cited for the same violation in November 2021 and June 2022. Restaurant owners in Mississippi must provide a copy of the food safety managers certificate, showing they received the necessary training. Restaurants and other food service establishments in Mississippi are rated A if they pass the health department inspection, B if violations are corrected during the inspection and C if the violations are critical. Health Department records indicate these kitchens havent failed a prior health inspection. They include: Treasure Bay Casinos Blu Bar/Grill was inspected Dec. 1 for a permit renewal. It received a C, being cited for: Required records not available shell stock tags parasite destruction (records that show shellfish parasites have been destroyed). This was the first C dating back to 2010. Ninja Express, 402 West Canal St., Picayune, was inspected Nov. 20, and received a C, following a complaint. Corrected during the inspection were: Food separated and protected Food contact surface cleaned and sanitized A follow-up inspection on Nov. 30 showed no violations and the restaurant got a B. This is the first C dating back to 2020. Hardees, 11041 U.S. 49, Gulfport, had a scheduled inspection Nov. 29. It received a C, being cited for: Sewage wastewater not properly disposed. Corrected during the inspection was: Food separated and protected This was the first C dating back to 2008. Most restaurants inspected since Nov. 18 in South Mississippi had no violations, with 134 kitchens scoring an A and 27 a B. A jury verdict in a historic consumer rights trial recently delivered justice against the real estate industrys rampant price fixing but justice will fall short if the National Association of Realtors chooses to appeal rather than change its ways. For years, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) has imposed a rule requiring home sellers to offer set commissions to any buyers agent involved in selling their home. The policy enabled large brokerages like HomeServices of America and Keller Williams to inflate their fees, costing homeowners billions of dollars in home equity annually. But homeowners fought back. More than 500,000 plaintiffs filed a class-action lawsuit arguing that the NAR rules violated federal antitrust law by allowing price fixing. The stakes were immense, given NARs political clout as Americas largest trade association with over 1.5 million members. Many legal observers doubted a group of homeowners could prevail against such a real estate juggernaut. But prevail they did. In court, we called the worlds most powerful people in real estate to the witness stand in Kansas City, Missouri. After reviewing clear evidence of collusion, the jury resoundingly found NAR and the top corporate real estate companies guilty of conspiring to fix commissions and awarded plaintiffs a historic $1.8 billion in damages. This unequivocal verdict confirmed that anti-competitive practices in home sales amounted to illegal price fixing. NAR, however, continues to argue that this illegal price-fixing scheme protects consumers. This absurd argument insults Americans intelligence, and the jury wisely saw through such deception. The verdict sent an unmistakable rebuke to NAR: Your unethical actions harmed home sellers to enrich your industry. No trade group is above the law. More than 500,000 plaintiffs filed a class-action lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors and several large brokerage firms. A federal jury on Oct. 31, 2023, found the defendants liable to pay $1.78 billion in damages for conspiring to artificially inflate commissions for home sales. Verdict shows need for reform of real estate industry So, where does NAR go from here? The organization quickly declared plans to appeal the verdict and damages. But prolonging the legal fight will only further batter NARs tattered reputation and waste resources to deny the undeniable. Crucially, it distracts from making reforms to rectify the problems this case exposed. The wise path forward is humility and honesty. NAR should agree to change its ways, focusing its energy on returning the money to the victims of this scheme and taking transparent steps to regain trust. What the system needs is consumer protection, fair commission models and an end to NARs monopolistic powers over home sales. This class action lawsuit brought to the surface systematic corruption in real estate. But the underlying disease remains untreated. And it continues to harm American homeowners through inflated, outdated fees that obstruct the dream of affordable homeownership. Homeownership and the American dream: Buying a home was a dream for millennials like me. For many, it won't be possible. Thus far, NAR is stuck in denial, unwilling to confront the gravity of its offenses. In public statements, the group conveyed confidence that appeals will vindicate them. Rather than lengthy and wasteful appeals, NAR should move to address the significant issues it faces, namely a lack of transparency, fairness and competition in real estate practices. Come to the table with regulators and attorneys on new consumer protections, antitrust compliance and transparency around commissions and services. Embrace fee-for-service pricing and variable commissions. Stop clinging to outdated models that harm consumers to protect broker commissions. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. Technology has changed how homes are bought and sold Critically, the real estate industry must adapt to how technology has transformed home buying and selling. Americans are increasingly purchasing homes online with minimal broker assistance. Yet, theyre still charged inflated fees based on a charade of full service representation. Lack of housing hurts workers: Could you enjoy the luxury that Sedona, Arizona, offers knowing that 'the help' sleeps in cars? Why should consumers pay for services they neither want nor use? Its like being forced to pay a travel agent commission when booking a flight directly online. This verdict is the perfect catalyst for NAR to modernize real estate and align it with how people buy and sell homes today. The public expects meaningful reforms in exchange for closing this disgraceful affair. This could be a transformative moment for the industry to scrap its insular ways and renew its focus on the people it claims to serve. Michael Ketchmark is an attorney with Ketchmark and McCreight P.C. He was the lead attorney in a class-action lawsuit against the National Association of Realtors and real estate brokerage firms. You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What percentage do realtors charge? Your agent may be getting too much The Eccles and First Security Heritage Mural is on display in the lobby of the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023. Images used in the mural are courtesy of The George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Foundation and Wells Fargo Corporate Archives, in collaboration with the Wells Fargo Community Mural Program. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News The mural is on the lobby level of a Salt Lake City skyscraper, with a clear view of Main Street. Thats appropriate. Because metaphorically speaking, youd be hard-pressed to point to a family thats had more to do with Salt Lake City having a Main Street. In one way and another, the progenitors of William Eccles, a nearly blind Scottish convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who brought his family to Utah in 1863, are architects of a legacy second to none when it comes to giving and receiving. First they became world-class capitalists, then they shared their wealth to become world-class socialists. No small feat. Commissioned by Wells Fargo, with assistance from the George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Foundation, the mural encompasses 170 years of Eccles family history on a single 8-foot-by-10-foot canvas. Also no small feat. But its all there if you look close enough and read the explanations on the legend off to the side. David Eccles, Williams son, kicks things off in the upper right hand corner. He was 14 years old when his dad brought the clan across the ocean on the back of an LDS perpetual immigration loan. The Eccles started out in the hole. But David (upper left as a grownup) was a visionary and a hard worker, an enviable combination in 19th century America. He foresaw that lumber was the future; that railroads, in particular, would require mountains of wood for ties to connect the country. Over time that single enterprise evolved into an Eccles empire that grew to more than four dozen businesses, among them railroads (upper left), banks (bottom center) and the Utah Construction Company (top upper left) that among other things built the Hoover Dam. At the bottom (lower right) is Davids son, Marriner, who took over the family businesses when his father died of a heart attack at the age of 63. There was no succession plan in place because everyone thought David might be immortal. First, Marriner stepped in and saved the family empire, after which he stepped in and saved the country. That may be hyperbole, but only slightly. Consider that not only did Marriner, at 22 and with no college education, actually expand what his dad had gotten started, but when the Great Depression came in the 1930s, he kept the doors open to all 28 banks in the Eccles-run First Security Corporation while 40% of banks nationwide were closing theirs. That so impressed President Franklin D. Roosevelt that he summoned Marriner to Washington, D.C., and put him in charge of the Federal Reserve System, where he helped structure the New Deal that righted the ship. (On the lower right, Marriner is standing in front of the Federal Reserve Building in Washington, a building that bears his name to this day.) In the center of the mural, Marriner is talking with his brother George, who, after Marriner went to Washington, took over the reins to First Security Corp. and ran the bank for 40 years until his death in 1982. To George and Marriners left with his arms folded is their nephew, Spencer Fox Eccles, who assumed command of First Security when George passed. Spencer F. Eccles speaks at the unveiling of the Eccles family mural in the Wells Fargo Building in downtown Salt Lake City on Nov. 14, 2023. | Lee Benson, Deseret News It was Spence, at 89 a living connection to all things Eccles past and present, who two weeks ago pulled the cord that unveiled the mural in the lobby of the Wells Fargo Center at 299 S. Main. Its quite the mural, isnt it? he said. The Wells Fargo team did an amazing job. Looking at his younger self staring back at him, Spence said, Believe me, I am honored and humbled to be there in tall cotton for sure surrounded by such remarkable individuals whose giant footsteps I have endeavored to follow. Below Spence is the entrance to Rice-Eccles Stadium at the University of Utah. Next to that is a Salt Lake 2002 Olympic banner, while to the right of that is the Eccles Theatre on Main Street just three of the countless Utah causes funded and supported by Eccles descendants dedicated to giving away, through their nonprofit foundations, David Eccles money. The largest of these family philanthropies is the George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Foundation, which by itself has awarded grants approaching $1.5 billion. In 2023, the Eccles business machine, great as it was, is fading into history, its remaining parts owned and operated by someone else. Utah Construction Company was absorbed by General Electric in 1976 in what was then the largest corporate merger in U.S. history. In 2000, Spence Eccles deftly negotiated the merger that brought First Security Corp. under the umbrella of Wells Fargo, the venerable nationwide banking company launched by the California Gold Rush. One proud relic that belongs to the golden age of Eccles finance still stands tall in downtown Salt Lake: the iconic First Security Bank sign (center bottom) that remains atop the building on the corner of First South and Main that was once the banks headquarters. A reminder of things that shouldnt be forgotten. And now, theres the lobby mural in the Wells Fargo Center on Main Street. It is my hope that the people and places reflected on this mural the remarkable progress they represent and the extraordinary stories behind them will inspire all who view it to dream big and contribute in their own ways to strengthen the economic vitality of our state and enrich the lives of all Utahns in future generations , said Spence Eccles at the unveiling ceremony. Then he paused before adding the words that have been closing his speeches for more than half-a-century, a kind of Eccles anthem: ... Ensuring that, yes indeed, the best is yet to come! The Eccles and First Security Heritage Mural is on display in the lobby of the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023. Images used in the mural are courtesy of The George S and Dolores Eccles Foundation and Wells Fargo Corporate Archives, in collaboration with the Wells Fargo Community Mural Program. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News Historical photos are on display next to the Eccles and First Security Heritage Mural in the lobby of the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023. Images on display are courtesy of The George S and Dolores Eccles Foundation and Wells Fargo Corporate Archives, in collaboration with the Wells Fargo Community Mural Program. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News A detail of the Eccles and First Security Heritage Mural is on pictured in the lobby of the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023. Images used in the mural are courtesy of The George S and Dolores Eccles Foundation and Wells Fargo Corporate Archives, in collaboration with the Wells Fargo Community Mural Program. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News A historical photo is on display next to the Eccles and First Security Heritage Mural in the lobby of the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023. Images on display are courtesy of The George S and Dolores Eccles Foundation and Wells Fargo Corporate Archives, in collaboration with the Wells Fargo Community Mural Program. | The George S and Dolores Eccles Foundation and Wells Fargo Corporate Archives MT. JULIET, Tenn. (WKRN) Two Nashville juveniles face charges related to burglary after they were discovered with stolen items by Mt. Juliet Police in a Goodwill parking lot. According to the Mt. Juliet Police Department, an officer in the Providence area spotted two teenage males acting suspiciously in the parking lot of the area Goodwill. While investigating the teens, the officer discovered multiple credit cards, keys to different cars and marijuana on the teens. Mt. Juliet Police said the juveniles, both 14 years old from Nashville, were involved in crimes related to car burglary and car theft and had just burglarized an unlocked car located at the Creekside Apartments on Providence Parkway. The teens were in possession of the victims credit cards when the officer discovered them. CRIME TRACKER | Read the latest crime news from Middle Tennessee The victim was reportedly unaware their car was burglarized, police said. Both juveniles were charged with crimes related to burglary, possession of stolen items, and marijuana possession. The investigation is still ongoing, according to Mt. Juliet Police, particularly in relation to their connection to other crimes in Nashville. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WKRN News 2. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned there could be bad news coming out about Ukraine, as fears grow of a stalemate with Russia and allies such as the U.S. debate whether to send more aid to the country. Wars develop in phases. We have to support Ukraine in both good and bad times. We should also be prepared for bad news, Stoltenberg said in an interview with German broadcaster ARD on Saturday, according to Politico Europe. Stoltenberg said Ukraines small victories are important in ending the war, despite Ukraines recent counter-offensive not resulting in major headway. However, Ukrainian troops secured a victory last month by pushing Russian forces back on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River. These are big victories even though they havent been able to move the front line, Stoltenberg said. The NATO chief also urged allies to continue sending support to Ukraine in the interview. The more we support the Ukraine, the faster the war will end, he said. Stoltenbergs comments come just as the White House issued a warning Monday saying it will run out of funds to provide weapons to Ukraine in its fight against Russia without congressional action by the end of the year. Additional aid for Ukraine has hit a wall in the House, while Senate Republicans are looking to tie support for Kyiv with border security changes. We are out of money to support Ukraine in this fight. This isnt a next year problem, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young wrote in a letter addressed to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). The time to help a democratic Ukraine fight against Russian aggression is right now. It is time for Congress to act. The Biden administration outlined a roughly $106 billion national security supplemental funding request in October that included money for Israel in its war against the militant group Hamas and Ukraine. It also included investments in the Indo-Pacific, funding humanitarian aid and border security measures. This also comes as some Ukrainian officials have warned that the war has come to a stalemate. Ukraines commander in chief, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, said in an interview last month that only a significant technological breakthrough could help move the war forward. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. Nato must be prepared for bad news in Ukraine, says Stoltenberg Ukraines Western allies must keep up their support for the country through a difficult winter to come in its war with Russia, Natos secretary general Jens Stoltenberg has said. Mr Stoltenberg admitted Ukraines long-awaited counteroffensive this summer had failed to make significant territorial gains, but described Russias failure to capture any more major cities as a strategic defeat for Vladimir Putins invading forces. Wars develop in phases. We have to support Ukraine in both good and bad times. We should also be prepared for bad news, the Nato chief said in an interview with German broadcaster ARD. Mr Stoltenberg said Ukraine was fighting a war unlike any in history, and hailed the countrys efforts on the battlefield that have frustrated Russias advance. These are big victories even though they have not been able to move the frontline, he said. The Nato chief warned that a victory for Putin would not only be a tragedy for Ukraine but also present a danger for the alliance. The more we support Ukraine, the faster the war will end, he said. And he called on Nato members to ramp up military production, saying European nations were not able to work as closely together as we should on their support for Ukraine. His comments come as a new watchdog report on Monday said many Western arms companies did not ramp up production in 2022 despite a sharp surge in demands for weapons and military equipment. Ammunition manufacturing companies were hit by labour shortages, soaring costs and supply chain disruptions which were amplified by Russias invasion of Ukraine. The revenues of the worlds largest arms-producing and military services companies last year stood at $597bn a 3.5 per cent drop from 2021, said the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Many arms companies faced obstacles in adjusting to production for high-intensity warfare, said Lucie BeIraud-Sudreau, director of the independent institutes Military Expenditure and Arms Production Program. The revenues of the 42 US companies on the list, responsible for 51 per cent of total arms sales, dropped by 7.9 per cent to $302bn in 2022. We are beginning to see an influx of new orders linked to the war in Ukraine, said Nan Tian, a senior researcher with SIPRI. The Navy has provided details about how it recovered a P-8A aircraft that overshot the runway and ended up in Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii last month. The U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol plane that ended up in Hawaii's Kaneohe Bay on November 20 is finally out of the water. The plane was floated from where it had come to rest using inflatable airbags and then slowly rolled sometimes at a pace of just five feet per hour across those bags back onto the runway. Much of the aircraft remains intact, including its landing gear, and the Navy is hopeful that it can return to service after what are expected to be significant repairs. U.S. Navy and Marine Corps officials provided an update on the status of the P-8A at a press conference earlier today. The jet, which belongs to the Navy's Patrol Squadron Four (VP-4) based at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington State, ran off the runway at Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe Bay last month. The installation is part of Marine Corps Base Hawaii . The aircraft was returning from a routine training mission at the time. The circumstances surrounding the mishap remain under investigation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXe_B19A75w Work has been ongoing since the incident occurred to assess the state of the P-8A and mitigate impacts to the local environment, including coral that was damaged when the jet entered the water. After overshooting the runway, the aircraft continued for a short distance and pivoted to the left before coming to a stop. The actual process of getting the plane off the coral below and back onto the runway, which private contractors also supported, began last Thursday when the necessary equipment first began arriving. Preparations to move the aircraft were underway by Friday and then, on Saturday morning, the jet was successfully raised using airbags. Navy divers confer on Friday, December 1, about preparations to float the P-8A from its resting place in Kaneohe Bay. USN The retrieval effort then involved rolling the aircraft along a row of airbags, first back into alignment with the runway and then into position to get it back ashore, as can be seen in the graphic shown at the process conference below. USN capture "It took about the next seven hours to move in these next 100 feet, because we started at high tide, the water was going down as the tide was going out, so it was getting a little shallow in here," Navy Rear Adm. Kevin Lenox, the assigned incident commander, explained today about the initial movement after the jet was floated. "The team spent a lot of time we had those float bags that I described to you, different sizes those float bags, three-meter bags, two-meter bags, different pressures on those, and we use this to make minute adjustments of the aircraft." The P-8A in the process of being rolled back to the runway on airbags. USN Divers were in the water the entire time to observe the aircraft's progress from below, including whether the landing gear was in danger of hitting more coral or other obstacles. In addition to recovering the jet, limiting the extent of any environmental impacts from the mishap has been a major focus for the Navy and the Marines. "At times, it was taking us about an hour to maneuver the aircraft, get it specifically in position, to pull it maybe five feet," Lenox added. By the time a decision was made to stop work on Saturday, the aircraft's main landing gear was back on the runway, but its nose gear was still in the water. The jet was pulled completely out of the water after several hours more work yesterday. "This company [that helped with the salvage and recovery effort] said ... they've moved a lot of stuff with these roller bags, [but] this was the first time they pulled an aircraft out of water with roller bags," according to Lenox. The P-8A seen partially recovered on Saturday, December 2. USN "Right now it is sitting on the 'piano keys' at the end of the runway," the Navy's incident commander said today, referring to the white stripes painted at the end of the runway to mark its threshold. The P-8A was initially lowered onto jacks as a precaution, but its landing gear was subsequently determined to be structurally sound. "We're going to tow it over to a wash rack here at the south end of the airfield. We'll go ahead and rinse all the saltwater off the bottom of it. ... And then, finally, we'll tow it over to its final parking spot," Rear Adm. Lenox said at today's press conference. The "investigation Team will take control of it and will continue their investigation. ... Additionally, Maritime Patrol Wing 10 [sic; Patrol and Reconnaissance Wing 10 ] will take control the aircraft, and they will begin what is expected to be a fairly extensive salvage and remediation process on that aircraft." The Navy, together with the Marine Corps, are also helping authorities in Hawaii assess the full extent of the impacts to local fauna (especially coral) and flora from the accident. The P-8A was defueled while it was in the water, and the Navy and Marine Corps say they have not detected any subsequent leaks of fuel or other contaminants as part of the recovery process. The Navy is hopeful that the P-8A will be able to eventually return to service, but the full extent of the damage to the jet remains unclear. Salt water, which the jet was sitting in for around two weeks, can cause serious damage through corrosion. The aircraft's engines were largely submerged the entire time, which could have led to major damage to fan blades and other internal components. The underside of the Poseidon is also lined with antennas and apertures, and it is unclear how much water may have seeped into the weapons bay or other spaces inside the aircraft. The jet's nose cone, and the radar behind it, are also missing and it is not clear what the condition of those components might be now. The P-8A from VP-4 sitting in Kaneohe Bay on November 20 after the mishap. USN There is clearly an interest on the part of the Navy in making this P-8A operational again. Each one of these jets, which are based on the Boeing 737 Next Generation airliner, costs just over $171 million, according to Navy budget documents . So repairing even a seriously damaged example could be cheaper than buying a brand-new one. This is the first major mishap one of the Navy's P-8As has suffered since the type first entered service in 2013. The service intends to acquire a fleet of 128 of these aircraft, which will supplant the P-3 Orion maritime patrol plane and related types, such as the EP-3E Aries II intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft. Though typically described as a maritime patrol or anti-submarine warfare plane, the P-8A is actually a very capable multi-mission aircraft with extensive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. The abilties these aircraft offer are in high demand now, especially to help monitor Chinese maritime activity across the Pacific. The need for Posiedons has also become more pronounced due to growing fears about advanced Russian submarines and other naval movements , in the Atlantic and the Pacific , as well as the Arctic, in recent years. Russian and Chinese navy deployments in and around the Arctic, now sometimes together , have raised additional concerns. Whatever the case, some two weeks after the P-8A from VP-4 ended up in Kaneohe Bay, the aircraft has now been successfully recovered after a slow and exacting process. Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com Flash The Chinese embassy in Bangladesh has donated the second smart classroom to the South Asian country under the China-Bangladesh Friendship Talent Development Project. A ceremony was held to launch the smart classroom at Sofir Uddin High School And College in the eastern city of Sylhet on Sunday. Addressing the ceremony, Chinese Ambassador to Bangladesh Yao Wen noted that the Chinese side hopes the smart classroom will open a window of science and technology for the local young people, and called on the students to study hard to contribute to the realization of a Smart Bangladesh envisioned by the Bangladeshi government. Md. Roshid Ahmad, head of Sofir Uddin High School And College, thanked the Chinese embassy for the donation of the smart classroom as well as the friendly support from the Chinese people to the school's students. The smart classroom is equipped with the advanced learning solution with Huawei IdeaHub, which will allow teachers and students to have advanced onsite and online teaching and learning platforms. Huawei South Asia has worked as a technical partner of the smart classroom project. Pan Junfeng, president of Huawei South Asia Region and CEO of Huawei Bangladesh, said that Huawei South Asia will continue to help digitize the education sector of Bangladesh. Previously in March, the Chinese embassy and Huawei South Asia donated the first smart classroom to Bangladesh's Chandpur Government Technical School And College. The state Democratic Party officially recognized a recently formed Jewish Caucus on Sunday, a few weeks after an earlier vote to do so narrowly failed, drawing national attention and criticism from some prominent North Carolina Democrats. N.C. Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton, announcing the successful vote in a statement Sunday night, said the partys recognition of the Jewish Caucus sent the message that the Democratic Party will always be a big tent party. It was incredibly important to us to call this meeting to ensure the Jewish Caucus gets official recognition, Clayton said. In a time of divisiveness and heightened emotions and fear, I am proud that tonight we made sure to go into 2024 united. The North Carolina Democratic Party stands against Islamophobia, antisemitism, and any form of hatred against marginalized communities. In a statement, caucus president Jeffrey Bierer said the caucus was pleased to have been approved, and grateful for the partys strong statement condemning antisemitism, which he said came during a time that has become very fraught for the Jewish people around the world. Our values as Jews in such areas as reproductive rights, fighting voter suppression, combating global warming, supporting reasonable gun control, opposing Muslim bans, and favoring a robust immigration program are reflected in the platform of the Democratic Party, Bierer said. The partys executive committee voted 31-4 on Sunday to approve the caucus, with four other members abstaining, according to WFAE. During a vote on Nov. 12, the committee voted 17-16 to deny the caucus formal recognition, according to Jewish Insider. Sixteen other members, including Clayton and all three of the partys three vice-chairs, voted to abstain. After that initial vote, a party spokesman said that procedural issues led to many of the no votes cast that day. Speaking to WFAE about the vote, however, Ryan Jenkins, president of the partys Progressive Caucus, said that members of the Jewish Caucus had done nothing but whine and play the victim and attack people, and said each of the 16 votes to abstain was a no vote that didnt want to get targeted. After the caucus was denied recognition, multiple Democratic members of North Carolinas congressional delegation, as well as Attorney General Josh Stein, the partys presumed front-runner for governor, said they were disappointed in the outcome of the vote, and called on the party to hold another vote and recognize the caucus as soon as possible. The vote also drew criticism from Republicans, including Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who is his own partys presumed front-runner for governor, and who has in the past made antisemitic remarks himself. Robinson said the failed vote was another sad example of North Carolina Democrats refusing to stand with Israel and the Jewish people against terrorism. In a statement after Sundays vote, Stein said he was pleased the party had accepted the Jewish Caucus, and said that Democrats would come together to stand up against antisemitism and other forms of hate. Every North Carolinian has value and something to contribute, and the North Carolina Democratic Party welcomes all, Stein said. Kathryn Mooney Wall holds up a photo of several quilt squares, including one with her name on it, from a nearly century old Friendship Quilt. Kathryn Mooney Wall is a sprightly 94 years old and a treasure trove of history. In her Shelby home off Grover Street, she has a photo sitting on the dresser in her bedroom of her as a small child sitting on her great-grandfathers lap. Hes missing an arm in the photo and Wall said he lost it fighting in the Civil War. She has lived through the Great Depression and World War II and remembers blacking out the windows at her home in Earl during the war. Wall spent the first five years of life in Alexander Mills in Rutherford County with aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins all around until the mill shut down, the family moved to Earl and her dad got a job as a traveling salesman selling Rawleigh products in four townships in and around Cleveland County. Ive had a very fascinating life, Wall said. For the past year, Wall has been involved in a special project to preserve a piece of history that is nearly as old as she is and contains ties to the Golden Valley community in Bostic. Forty years ago, after her aunt passed away, Wall discovered a quilt that had been kept stored in a cedar chest. She found her maiden name - Kathryn Mooney - stitched in bold black cursive into the fabric along with 24 other women. She was able to determine that the quilt, called a Friendship Quilt - was made around the time she was born in 1929 and contained a history rich as the colors of the dresses that made up the 25 squares of the quilt. Those 25 women - friends, family, and community members - had come together in a home in Golden Valley to stitch together the squares of fabric. Wall knew she wanted the quilt to be displayed where others could see it, and it would be preserved. After a year of searching for a home for the nearly 100-year-old heirloom, it is now hanging up at the Golden Valley Community Club on Jonestown Road in Bostic. It was a fitting place for the quilt, and it is the very ground where it began its story. Wall, who has lived in Shelby for many years, said her grandparents lived on the Golden Valley Sunshine Road near Duncans Creek, not far from the community club. Buried in the church across the street, are five of Walls grandfathers whose graves date back to the 1700s. The old Center School was located on the nearby corner lot near Walls grandparents home and Beadie Melton taught at the school the year Wall was born. Melton boarded with Walls grandparents along with her nephew, Foy Melton, and her niece, Eloise Melton. Both Eloise and Beadie Melton have their names included on the quilt, and Wall said she was able to deduce the age of the quilt from those names. To me, Golden Valley is hallowed ground and will always be a special place in my life, she wrote in a statement detailing the history of the quilt. Many names on this quilt are familiar to me as neighbors and family. Wall spent her childhood visiting grandparents, attending church services, memorials, weddings, funerals, corn shuckings, peanut pickings, wheat thrashings and many gatherings in the Golden Valley community. Wall said her grandmother, aunt and various women in the community came together to sew the quilt using pieces of their dresses and adding their names to the center of each square. There are 25 names and 25 squares. After I got it, I realized it had to be made around the time I was born, she said. She is now the only surviving person whose name is on the quilt. Wall said her friend Janet Berry was instrumental in helping the heirloom find a permanent home where it could be preserved for future generations, and Cleveland Lumber Company built the shadow box where it is safely ensconced. Through her research of the quilt, Wall said shes learned more about her family history and rekindled childhood relationships. After rediscovering the blanket, Wall reached out to some of the people whose names or mothers names, were included on it, including Foy and Elouise Melton. She found Eloise living in Charlotte and Foy in South Carolina. Ten years older than her, she said Foy remembered holding her as a newborn baby. She was able to visit both Foy and Eloise and went to Foys 100th birthday party and later, his funeral. She said several years ago, a man was paving her driveway and when she found out he was from Golden Valley, she showed him the quilt and he found his mothers name on it. He brought his wife, who was a librarian at Sunshine School, to see the quilt and she invited Wall to bring it to their Founders Day celebration at school. She was able to show the quilt to the kids and explain its history. Eventually, Walls nephew told her she needed to find a place to display the quilt, and she made it her mission to find it a home. Now that its on display, it is attracting a lot of attention. Wall said many people have stopped by the Golden Valley Community Club building just to see the quilt. Some find family members names on it. It has been featured in several newspapers and along with local media, the Friendship Quilt will be featured in Our State magazine. I called the associate editor and told him, Youve got a 90 year old magazine, and Ive got a 90 year old quilt, Wall said. The heirloom will be featured alongside other North Carolina quilts in the magazines January issue. She said the age of 94 has been a new era for her, and although Wall has grieved the loss of some of her independence when she recently sold her car, she has found and forged new connections through the Friendship quilt. I've made new friends all over Golden Valley, she said. This article originally appeared on The Shelby Star: Local woman helps historic quilt find its way back to Golden Valley A Newbury Park man, 21, will face a murder charge after allegedly attacking his mother with a hammer on Nov. 19. The woman died Friday. Prosecutors are planning to file a murder charge against a 21-year-old Newbury Park man accused of attacking his 63-year-old mother with a hammer in the wake of the woman's death on Friday. The victim identified as Alison Marshall died Friday afternoon at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, Capt. Dean Worthy, a spokesman for the Ventura County Sheriff's Office, confirmed Sunday. Prosecutors had earlier charged her son, Scott Goldberg, with Marshall's attempted murder after the incident on Nov. 19 inside what's believed to be the family home on Mayfield Court in Newbury Park. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon against his 64-year-old father, who was allegedly also attacked with the hammer but survived. The District Attorney's Office is making arrangements to shift the case to the more serious charge of murder starting Monday, said Erin Meister, a supervising senior deputy DA. Scott Goldberg The defendant was initially held in county jail in lieu of approximately $500,000 bail. But Superior Court Judge Patricia Murphy granted the prosecution's request to deny bail of any amount Wednesday, barring him from being released before trial. Goldberg has not yet entered a plea to the original charges. He had been scheduled for arraignment on Dec. 20, but it wasn't immediately clear whether the upgraded charge would impact court dates. Goldberg remained in custody Sunday at the county's main jail in Ventura. This story may be updated. Kathleen Wilson covers crime, courts and local government issues for the Ventura County Star. Reach her at kathleen.wilson@vcstar.com or 805-437-0271. This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Woman dies after Newbury Park hammer attack; son faces murder charge Hotels pile on so many charges, you might feel like you need an accountant to decipher your bill. Earlier this month, Lynette Eastman, general manager of the Surfjack Hotel and Swim Club in Honolulu, delivered some shocking news to a guest. It concerned her bill. The vacationer had called the Waikiki property requesting the total amount of an upcoming stay. She specifically asked about a resort fee, the sneaky charge that hotels often slip in at the last minute of the booking process and bury among the other taxes and fees. Eastman told her the Surfjack did not have a resort fee, though that was not always the case: The hotel had suspended the $26.18 fee in spring 2020 but never restored it, even after nearby properties reinstated theirs. Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. "That was great because I got to experience her surprise," Eastman said of the guest's happy reaction. "Do I think a lot of hotels are going to start waiving fees? Possibly, if the business is in a location that doesn't pick up, like in Hawaii. But my guess is that the fees will continue to be charged." According to the American Hotel and Lodging Association, roughly 6 percent of U.S. properties exact a mandatory fee that hotels claim covers a grab bag of perks, such as WiFi, bike rental, fitness center or a food and beverage "credit." Yet, the fee seems inescapable in many vacation destinations and is just one more financial burden placed on guests at check in. Hotels pile on so many charges, you might feel like you need an accountant to decipher your bill. In addition to the room rate, there may be a bundle of city, state and local taxes, plus a resort fee, which goes by many names and is also taxed. During check-in, the front desk employee will place a hold on your credit card for incidentals. The amount can range from a couple Jacksons to hundreds of dollars per night. Guests with credit cards won't feel the pinch, but people who use debit cards cannot access that amount during their stay and may need to be careful with their expenditures. As long as you don't trash your room or drain the minibar without paying, you will get the money back. This is not the case with resort fees. Even if you don't use the WiFi, bike, fitness center or credit, you're still stuck with the fee. "We can perceive both of these as friction points and annoyances for the hotel guest," said Mehmet Erdem, a professor of hospitality at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, "though technically they're separate accounting-wise and procedural." - - - Fees by many names Like a shifty character in a true-crime novel, the fee often hides in the shadows and goes by several aliases, such as resort, amenity, facility or destination. Some hotels also tack on a "room safe fee," though the charge for having a safety box in your room is significantly less (a couple dollars a day) than the amenity fee (according to an analysis commissioned by AHLA, an average $26 per night). Chekitan Dev, a professor at Cornell University's Nolan School of Hotel Administration, dates the current incarnation to 1997. Nearly two decades later, Lauren Wolfe founded Kill Resort Fees after a Key West hotel refused to hand over her room key until she forked over an extra $20. "Over a decade ago, we started to see resort fees in places like Hawaii, and then they started to creep into places like Las Vegas." Wolfe said. "Then it spread like wildfire." This summer, Wolfe turned up the heat as chief legal officer for Travelers United, a consumer advocacy group. In August, the nonprofit organization sued Hyatt and Sonesta Hotels, alleging false advertising and deceptive fees. The following month, it filed a class-action lawsuit against Hilton. "These hotels are not paying attention to any sort of law in their state, whether it be basic advertising laws that protect consumers from unfair, deceptive practices or alcohol laws that forbid people from essentially being forced to buy alcohol," said Wolfe, referring to properties that include a cocktail in their resort fee. Since 2019, state attorneys general in a handful of states and D.C. have been suing some of the world's biggest hotel chains for allegedly violating consumer protection laws. Some of the cases are still ongoing, such as Nebraska and Hilton and D.C. and Marriott. Others have been settled, such as the lawsuit that pitted attorneys general in Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Texas against Choice Hotels. As part of the September deal, the chain agreed to disclose all mandatory fees on the first page of its booking website and include them in the total price. This year, state and federal legislators also started tackling junk fees. In July, two U.S. senators introduced the bipartisan Hotel Fees Transparency Act. In October, California passed a pair of similar bills, including a law that will ban the hotel industry's deceptive practice of drip pricing, in which companies list a partial price and does not reveal additional charges until later in the purchasing process. It goes into effect next July. Last year, the Biden administration called out these fees and rallied government agencies, Congress and the private sector to curtail the unfair practice. In October, the president revisited the issue, introducing a proposed Federal Trade Commission law that will require businesses, including hotels, to be upfront with their prices. The agency is accepting public comments through Jan. 8. Since Nov. 9, more than 20,200 people have submitted complaints. "I think if the pressure from the government and the regulations and the state attorney general offices and the lawsuits creates enough of a headache, then the industry will do something collectively about it," Erdem said. - - - What hotels aren't talking about The American Hotel and Lodging Association as well as individual hotels, such as Hilton, have expressed their support for legislation that requires transparency in pricing. However, the conversation about resort fees seems be ignoring some glaring issues. For one, the hotels are forcing guests to pay for services or perks that they might not want or need. (When was the last time you made a long-distance phone call on a hotel room phone?) On their websites, most properties bury the list of amenities associated with the fee, so consumers have to pick through the small print. Even when they find it, the descriptions can be indecipherable. Finally, a mystery surrounds the number itself. In a sampling of hotels in Washington, the amenity fee with tax ran the gamut, from zero (Citizen M, the Jefferson, Conrad Washington) to $23.19 (Washington Hilton), $28.99 (Marriott Marquis) and about $35 (the George, Yotel). The incidentals and security deposit was equally vast, ranging from $50 at the Days Inn to $200 at Hotel Washington. Travelers might discover higher charges in swankier destinations or at luxurious properties with fancy decor. At the Aria, on the Las Vegas Strip, the resort fee is $51 and the incidental hold runs from $150 for a standard room to $500 for a villa. Grand Beach Hotel Surfside in Florida hits guests with a $64.38 resort fee; the credit card hold is kinder, at $100 a night. The hotels contacted for comment declined to explain the calculations. One can only guess the financial outlay for, say, printing assistance at the front desk, a downloadable self-guided walking tour or a pool chair. "It's a black box, let's-see-what sticks approach," said Dev, adding that hotels typically consider supply, demand and competition when formulating the fee. During a trip to New York City, the professor could not fathom why the Even Hotel in Times Square charged $25 for what he called "overpriced and useless amenities." He and his wife passed on the Citi Bike passes ("I'd have to have a death wish"), local and long-distance calls ("This is a joke"), package handling ("Huh?") and laundry credit ("With the average stay being one to two nights, my garment might not make it back."). They did, however, take advantage of the free welcome drink: two bottles of water valued at $2. - - - To avoid fees, ask nicely then contact an attorney general It's not hopeless. You can dodge resort fees. First, use your purchasing power. A NerdWallet analysis singled out the hotels with the highest average fees relative to room rate. Wyndham ranked first, with fees costing $30 and $50 per night, followed by Hyatt, IHG, Hilton and Marriott. Best Western, which is not really known as a playground of perks, came in last, with the lowest fee. You can also shop around for fee-free hotels. Kill Resort Fee's lists hotels with fees in 15 destinations, so avoid those. (Look under "Offenders.") In our D.C. sample, more than half did not charge a resort fee. On Surfjack's website, the hotel promotes its lack of fees. A pop-up box exclaims, "Wipe out fees!" "We are definitely seeing a trend of hotels distinguishing themselves by not offering them at all," said Sally French, lead writer with NerdWallet. If you are a loyalty hotel member, you can avoid the fees by booking with points, depending on the program's policy. Also, the higher up you go on the status pole, the fewer extraneous fees you will have to pay. Some travel credit cards will also reimburse resort fees. In your kindest voice, you can also ask the front desk to remove the fee, especially if an amenity or service is not available during your stay. "If you're checking in at 11 p.m. and checking out at 7 the next morning and you're just using the hotel as a place to sleep, maybe that hypothetical trolley ride doesn't even run during that period," said French, referring to a perk at the Marriott Marquis. "It doesn't hurt to tell the desk there was no way you could have taken that trolley ride and ask them to waive the resort fee." Wolfe does not recommend pushing the issue. After two times, she says to quit. The next step is to send your complaint to the attorney general who serves your home state or the hotel's. You can only pick one, so choose the location with the strongest consumer protection laws. "In Washington, D.C., it works great," she said, "but it does not work in states where the attorneys general are not taking this issue seriously. A good example would be Nevada. We have not yet heard of one person having success with them." Related Content What home schooling hides: A boy tortured and starved by his stepmom Defending his 2020 fraud claims, Trump turns to fringe Jan. 6 theories Kennedy Center Honors: Off-script moments energize the stately affair If men were angels, James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, no government would be necessary. Similarly, if men were angels, we wouldnt have to tax unrealized capital gains. Its really awkward to tax an increase in the value of an investment that has not been cashed out. Doing so removes capital from the economy, and, if the value of the investment later falls, the justification for the tax may vanish. Also, a rise in an investments value doesnt (usually) enable consumption the way cash income does. Given the choice between taxing unrealized income and taxing cash income, taxing cash income is almost always going to be better. But men (and women) are not angels, especially rich men and women, most especially when they are required to pay taxes. They shift assets offshore and employ various other tricks to avoid paying anything like their fair share. This is equally true of corporations; if, as the Supreme Court argued in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), corporations are people, I think we can all agree that they arent very civic-minded people. Consequently, its necessary sometimes to tax their unrealized capital gains. Charles Moore is a former software developer at Microsoft who lives in the Seattle area. Hes the son of Thomas Gale Moore, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and author of a 1998 book titled Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldnt Worry About Global Warming. Moore fils takes exception to the taxation of unrealized income. So, backed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where Moore pere is a former board member, Moore fils sued the United States over a $15,000 tax bill he doesnt want to pay. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case, Moore v. United States, on Tuesday. The tax Moore doesnt want to pay is called the mandatory repatriation tax, or MRT. It was imposed on his investment in an India-based farm equipment company called KisanKraft that was started by a friend and former Microsoft colleague. Moore says hes never received a distribution, dividend, or other payment from the company and that consequently he shouldnt have to pay the tax. The MRT was created as a pay-for for President Donald Trumps 2017 tax cut, which very recklessly dropped the top individual tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent and the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. To help pay for this, the 2017 tax bill levied a one-time tax on American investors share of profits in companies located abroad. The provision was projected to raise $340 billion over 10 years. To answer your next question: No, this one-time tax doesnt come close to filling the hole Trumps tax cut blew in the federal budget. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the 2017 law will have cost the Treasury $3.5 trillion by 2034. Coverage of Moore v. United States has tended to focus on the danger that the Supreme Court will declare a wealth tax unconstitutional before Congress gets around to passing one. But contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, a wealth tax isnt the same thing as a tax on unrealized income. A wealth tax is a tax on what you have. A tax on unrealized income, by contrast, is a tax on what you acquired over the past year. It isnt an everything tax, its an increase-in-value tax, which is why its best described as a kind of income tax. Its certainly possible that a Supreme Court ruling, in addition to barring taxation of unrealized income, would also bar taxation of wealth. But these arent the same thing. Instead of worrying what the Supreme Court might say about the constitutionality of some hypothetical wealth tax thats unlikely ever to become lawand would anyway, in my view at least, be kind of a dumb ideaI invite you to worry what the Supreme Court might say about taxing unrealized income. You should worry about that because it isnt hypothetical at all. Paul Ryan, who was the Republican House Speaker when the 2017 tax bill passed, has been arguing strenuously against Moore because he thinks a ruling in Moores favor would expand the budget deficit catastrophically. Im not for a wealth tax, Ryan said at a Brookings Institution event last September, but I think if you use this as the argument to spike a wealth tax, youre going to basically get rid of, I dont know, a third of the code. I leave the legal nuances to The New Republics Matt Ford, who wrote about Moore v. United States in September. Im more interested in how Moore and his many supporters in this lawsuit (Landmark Legal Foundation, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, etc.) pretend no tax on unrealized income was ever conceived in the mind of man before a Republican president and a Republican Congress dreamed one up in 2017. Until now, said the Chamber in an amicus curiae brief, realization has been the defining event that turns something from an asset holding value to income subject to federal tax. A ruling in favor of taxing unrealized income, said the Landmark Legal Foundation in its amicus curiae brief, would free Congress from nearly all constitutional restraints on the taxing power. Bullshit. As Ryan pointed out, Congress routinely taxed unrealized income well before 2017, and the sky did not fall. As Stephen M. Rosenthal of the nonprofit Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings, explained last fall, the first such tax dates to 1937, when Congress slapped a tax on unrealized gains from foreign personal holding companies established to dodge U.S. taxes. For much the same reason, Congress in 1962 slapped a tax on unrealized shareholder income in foreign subsidiaries of U.S.-based corporations. In 1969 Congress slapped a tax on unrealized gains from zero-coupon bonds that didnt pay full interest until they matured. It did this to bring tax treatment of deducted interest in line with tax treatment of imputed interest. Taxing income not yet received was also part of a 1981 law shutting down tax straddles, a con that Treasury Secretary Don Regan was hip to because Merrill Lynch, where previously hed been chairman, made a fortune off them. The Justice Departments brief in opposition to Moores claim cites additional examples. In all these cases, and in the case of the MRT, Congress resorted to taxing unrealized income in response to ethically unsound tax-avoidant behavior. As a rule, the IRS doesnt ask civic-minded people to pay taxes on unrealized capital gains. President Joe Biden has proposed broadening the practice to people who might, at least in theory, be civic-minded (mostly very, very rich people). But Congress hasnt taken the bait. Is Charles Moore civic-minded? The Washington Post doesnt seem to think so. In a Page One story this week, the Posts Ann Marimow and Julie Zauzmer Weil report that Moore and his wife, Kathleen, appear to have closer ties to the company central to the case than they disclosed in court filings. For example, Moore served on KisanKrafts board for five years, and he was reimbursed by the company $14,000 for a trip to India. That contradicts a filing in which the couple says they were without any role in KisanKrafts management. It also undermines Moores posture in his lawsuit as a passive investor. That raises some question why this case is before the Supreme Court at all. It isnt clear the Supreme Court will take Moores evasions into account. Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption, observes Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warrens All the Kings Men, and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. Granted, Stark is himself a morally compromised character modeled on Huey Long. But its not a bad rule of thumb when taxing the rich. I would like to live in a world where taxing unrealized capital gains was not necessary. But were a long way from that paradise today. A New Hampshire woman was sentenced to prison time on Monday for her role in a 2015 murder where the victim was found burned near MBTA train tracks, according to authorities. 47-year-old Shannon Squires pleaded guilty to one count each of manslaughter and kidnapping in the murder of 29-year-old Ashley Bortner from New Jersey. Squires was sentenced to serve 8-10 years in state prison followed by 5 years probation under the order of Judge William Sullivan. She has been incarcerated since November 2015. The Plymouth County DAs Office says on November 3, 2015, Bridgewater Police received a report of a fire burning alongside MBTA train tracks just before midnight. Arriving officers determined it was a human body on fire, later identified as Bortner. According to investigators, Bortners body had been burned over 70 percent, she had been gagged by clothing, her face wrapped in a towel and her hands and feet bound behind her. Three people, including Squires, faced charges for Bortners murder. Fernando Owens, who had fled to the Dominican Republic immediately after the killing, was convicted of her murder in June 2023. He was sentenced to life in prison. Authorities say Owens believed Bortner had somehow played a role in the Suffolk County murder of his son. 48-year-old Julian Squires, a co-defendant in this case, was charged for his role in assisting Owens to kill and dispose of Bortners body, the DAs office says. He is serving life in prison. Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW Nigel Farages children have said that theyre proud of the Brexit party leader for showing Im A Celeb viewers who he really is. On Sunday nights episode of the reality TV show (3 December), the former Brexit campaigner received a letter from his four children: Thomas and Samuel, who he shares with his first wife Grainne Hayes, and Victoria and Isabelle, who he shares with his wife Kirsten Mehr. This Mornings Josie Gibson read Farages letter to camp, in which his family said the politician had shown viewers a different side to himself. The letter said: To Dad, youve achieved so much over the years but nothing has made us prouder than showing people who you really are. Why are we not shocked at you effortlessly sinking those dirty pints? it continued. During his time on the reality TV show, Farage has been keen to get involved in the grisly Bushtucker Trials because, in his words, the challenges take up 25 per cent of the air time of each episode. In his first challenge, the politician who has reportedly been paid 1.5m to appear in the series kept a straight face as he tucked into a pizza topped with a cows teat and a camels udder. Meanwhile, ITV figures show that during its first episode of the 2023 series, the programme lost 2 million viewers on last year, with many commentators attributing the fall in numbers to the controversy surrounding Farages casting on the show. Farage, who is known for espousing right-wing views on subjects ranging from immigration and has been accused of inciting xenophobia over the years, has found himself involved in several heated arguments with his fellow campmates during his time in the jungle. First Dates star Fred Sirieix and Farage clash (ITV) First Dates star Fred Sirieix grew infuriated with the former UKIP leader following a chat about the environment, during which he told Farage he was fixated on blaming things on other European countries. This is not the first time Sirieix and Farage have clashed. Earlier on in the series, Sirieix confronted Farage over what he described as a shameful 2016 Brexit poster depicting a line of desperate refugees trying to reach Europe under the headline Breaking Point. Sirieix told Farage the poster demonised migrants. Meanwhile, YouTube star Nella Rose confronted Farage over his political views and accused him of being anti-immigrants. The pair had been getting along after they bonded during their first Bushtucker Trial but Rose took issue with Farages political views. Apparently youre anti-immigrants, the YouTuber said. As they both stood in the bath area of the camp, Rose asked: Why dont Black people like you? Farage claimed: Youd be amazed, they do. If you came with me through south London, youd be astonished. She then asked: So everyone hates you for no reason? Not that everyone hates you, that was so bad. Sorry. Nigel Farage on Im a Celeb (ITV) Farage responded: You can disagree with somebody, but to chuck around accusations the way theyve been chucked around is grossly unfair. Anti-immigrant, right? No, no, all Ive said is we cannot go on with the numbers coming to Britain that are coming. Rose pressed Farage on the problem of immigration and said she was also one of those numbers. She told the former politician: Im stopping you getting a GP appointment? Youre not getting an appointment because the NHS is lacking funding. I bet you anything if every single immigrant or from immigrant descent was to leave the UK, all your doctors gone, most of your doctors are Asian right? Most of your nurses are African women, right? You want us gone, thats all I understood, she said. Farage claimed that Rose was not listening to him, before adding: We can agree to disagree. Im a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! airs Sunday to Friday at 9pm and Saturday at 9.30pm on ITV. From the Dispatch Politics on The Dispatch Happy Monday! We hope youre not reading this to procrastinate on your Christmas shopping. Up to Speed Never Back Down, the Ron DeSantis-supporting super PAC that has played an unusually central role in the Florida governors presidential campaign, is experiencing remarkable personnel turmoil just a month and a half out from the Iowa caucuses. Never Back Down chief executive Chris Jankowski stepped down on November 22; Adam Laxalt, chair of the super PAC, announced Friday he would do the same. Then, over the weekend, several key operatives were reportedly fired, including Jankowskis interim successor Kristin Davison, Director of Operations Matt Palmisano, and Communications Director Erin Perrine. Meanwhile, the DeSantis campaign suggested in a donor memo last week that, while it was still counting on Never Back Downs early-state field operation, it had greater trust in the TV-ad operation of a newly formed pro-DeSantis super PAC, Fight Right. DeSantis himself this weekend completed his campaign tour of each of Iowas 99 counties with a Saturday event in the small town of Newton. The fact that Im willing to do this, that should show you that I consider myself a servant, not a ruler, DeSantis told the crowd, and thats how people that get elected should consider themselves. On Sunday, DeSantis was asked on NBCs Meet the Press whether Iowa was do or die for his campaign. Were going to win Iowa, DeSantis responded. I think its going to help propel us to the nomination. But I think well have a lot of work that well have to do beyond that. Former president Donald Trump also spent his weekend in Iowa. At rallies in Ankeny and Cedar Rapids, he continued to air his grievances against Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds for choosing to endorse DeSantis. I mean, that was her choice to do this. But I believe in loyalty, Trump complained to the Ankeny crowd. How do you endorse somebody thats 40 or 50 points down? The Trump campaign also released a minute-long ad Saturday, stitching together clips of Reynolds praising Trumps leadership during his first presidential term. Congress is running out of time to pass additional aid to Ukraine, White House Office of Management and Budget director Shalanda Young warned in a letter to congressional leaders Monday. Without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from U.S. military stocks, Young wrote. There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of moneyand nearly out of time. Haley Donors Plot to Entice Christie Out of GOP Primary Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie speaks alongside former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley during the NBC News Republican Presidential Primary Debate on November 8, 2023, in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Wealthy campaign contributors supporting Nikki Haleys presidential bid have approached counterparts backing Chris Christie to broach whether they might be willing to encourage the former New Jersey governor to exit the Republican primary, multiple sources tell The Dispatch. Haley, the former South Carolina governor and ex-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has momentum in the race among second-tier GOP candidates to emerge as the consensus alternative to overwhelming frontrunner Donald Trump. But Haleys financiers fear she will not put herself in a position to challenge the former president, one-on-one, absent more consolidation in the primary. So in recent days, they have contacted counterparts who are funding Christie to raise the issue of convincing him to drop out. There are conversations about that; I was asked to help, a Christie donor told us Saturday. I said no. Separately, at least one veteran Republican donor supporting Haley confirmed awareness of such discussions during a brief telephone interview. Sources on both sides emphasized that these talks were being initiated by Haley financiers and did not involve Haley campaign officials. Trump leads the Republican field nationally with 61.2 percent support in the RealClearPolitics average. The former president leads ahead of the January 15 Iowa caucuses with 47 percent and leading into the January 23 New Hampshire primary with 45.7 percent. October and November saw consolidation among the group of second tier candidates, as former Vice President Mike Pence and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott suspended their campaigns. Haley, already on the rise beforehand, has benefited. But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is running second behind Trump in Iowa, backed by a massive voter turnout operation and endorsements from Gov. Kim Reynolds and evangelical activist Bob Vander Plaats. And with Christie competing directly with Haley for votes in New Hampshire, the former ambassadors moneymen are eager for a further culling of the candidates. Haley supporters are increasingly confident that DeSantis will burn himself out, and there is little worry about biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. But there are worries about Christie. The New Jerseyan has squarely focused on New Hampshire, and he is attracting voters who dislike Trump and who would likely back Haley if he folded his tent. Because Christie is now garnering 11.3 percent support in the Granite Stategood for third behind Haleys 18.7 percent and ahead of DeSantis 7.7 percentsome Haley backers believe it is imperative that the former governor drop out before the primary to ensure the South Carolinian has an opportunity to take on Trump directly. If Christie stays in and she loses that 11 percent to 12 percent [in New Hampshire,] that makes it significantly harder; not impossible, but harder, the Haley donor said. As of early Monday, Christie contributors appear unmoved. Late last week, the former governors finance committee met virtually and outlined plans for four to five fundraising events prior to years end. It was all-go, full throttle, a second Christie donor said. The Haley campaign declined to comment for this story. The Christie campaign did not respond to a text message requesting comment. Trump: BLM Is Good, Actually For Donald Trump, the central question of politics is: With me or against me? This has been evident since his 2016 campaign, when he famously dragged his feet when asked if he would repudiate the endorsement of former KKK grand wizard David Duke. But the phenomenon doesnt just extend to the far rightas Trumps endorsement this week by a self-proclaimed founder of Black Lives Matter Rhode Island showed. Were not stupidthe brothers are not stupid, Mark Fisher, who also founded the Maryland-based group BLM INCORPORATED, said in an interview on Fox & Friends last Wednesday. [Democrats] policies are basically racist policies. I believe its a racist party. Donald Trump is just the opposite. Hes going to tell you how it is. Hes going to give it to you straight. Fishers connection to the broader Black Lives Matter movementa largely decentralized one, although many organizations use the termis murky. Certainly his views on Trump are not widely shared among Black Lives Matter activists: The Black Lives Matter Global Network and Black Lives Matter Rhode Island PAC denounced on Thursday Fishers comments as a publicity stunt, huffing that the right wing continues to use and amplify fringe Black voices to create an idea of broad support for their corrupt candidates. Regardless, Trumps response was remarkable. In the past, hed regularly denounced Black Lives Matter, particularly during the summer of racial unrest following the police murder of George Floyd. On the campaign trail, BLM has often made it into his litany of evil organizations that must be stamped out for the good of the nation. Heres an idea, Trump said during a speech in Illinois last year. Instead of targeting Republicans, conservatives, Christians, and patriotic parents, the Biden administration should try going in and dismantling the Crips. The Bloods. MS-13. How about BLM? How about Antifa? And the other savage street gangs who are turning our communities into war zones? Get one endorsement on Foxs morning programming, though, and things change a bit: Spoke with Mark Fisher yesterday, a great guy, very honored to have him and BLMs support, Trump posted on his website Truth Social. I have done more for Black people than any other President (Lincoln?), including 10 year funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, where they had none, Opportunity Zones, Criminal Justice Reform, and much more. In the frenzy of in-group signaling that is todays GOP politics, not just any Republican could get away with this. Take one example: For very online Trump fans, Sen. Mitt Romneys participation in an evangelical Black Lives Matter march in June 2020 leapt instantly to the top of the heap of his RINO betrayals. Ron DeSantiswho relishes rare opportunities to attack Trump from the righttried to drive in the knife: BLM praising Donald Trumpand Trump celebrating itmakes perfect sense. When BLM was burning down cities and assaulting police officers in cities across this country, Trump did nothing but sit in the White House tweeting LAW & ORDER! We did it differently in Florida. I didnt just tweet. I took action and called up the National Guard. We were not going to let our cities burn. As president, I will not sit idly by and watch rioters torch American cities. Trump, however, makes his own in-group. Did you see where a very respected representative of Black Lives Matter New England endorsed Trump? he crowed at his Saturday Cedar Rapids event. He didnt necessarily say the Republican Partyhe said Trump, because what we have done in terms of opportunity zones and jobs for everybody, frankly. Its a great honor, he added. The crowd cheered. Notable and Quotable I believe very strongly in those principles and ideals that have defined the Republican Party, but the Republican Party of today has made a choice, and they havent chosen the Constitution. And so I do think it presents a threat if the Republicans are in the majority in January 2025. Former Rep. Liz Cheney, asked by CBS whether she would prefer for Democrats to retake the House in next years election, December 3, 2023 Read more at The Dispatch The Dispatch is a new digital media company providing engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary, informed by conservative principles. Sign up for free. Flash A man evacuates the injured from the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli military operation in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis Nov. 17, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua] The death toll of Palestinians from Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7 has reached 15,523, the Hamas-run health ministry said on Sunday. Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qidra said during a press conference that the number of injured people in the Palestinian enclave had surpassed 41,000, amid a collapse of healthcare services. Al-Qidra said that hundreds of wounded people were being treated on the ground with extremely limited medical resources, as hospitals in northern Gaza "have become increasingly incapable of providing necessary healthcare." He added that all hospitals in the Gaza Strip were overwhelmed beyond their medical and bed capacities, lacking the necessary surgical resources to handle critical cases. Al-Qidra slammed the slow mechanism for allowing the wounded to seek treatment abroad, saying that only 403 people had been allowed to leave the Gaza Strip since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict. He reiterated the demand for safe humanitarian corridors to ensure the flow of medical supplies, medications, and fuel, and called for efforts to allow the wounded and patients to travel abroad to receive treatment. File. View of the sermigold mine in Arequipa, Peru (Associated Press) Nine people were killed, and at least 20 were injured after a gang of armed men raided the Poderosa mining company in Pataz province of Peru, taking hostages and seizing security staff, according to the interior ministry. Attackers armed with explosives and other weapons entered the mine shaft on Saturday night and took four people hostage, the ministry said. The incident occurred in a sinkhole where the company extracts ore, according to Peru daily, El Comerico. The attackers raided the mine violently confronting internal security personnel from the company and taking four people hostage, the ministry said. Police took control of the situation after the raid with the help of special forces. Seven people have been arrested and their weapons have been seized. According to preliminary investigations, the suspects had reportedly been requesting a revised material distribution plan from the mining company. The bodies recovered from outside the mine showed signs of burns, seemingly resulting from the detonation of explosive devices. The assault comes one year following the impeachment and apprehension of the leftist former president Pedro Castillo, triggering months of violent protests that disrupted operations at mines in the Andean nation. Months of deadly protests ensued, disrupting mining operations across and creating an environment conducive to illicit activities, including killings, extortion and violent land invasions. Peru is the worlds second-largest producer of copper and an important silver and gold producer. Authorities launched a clampdown on illegal mining in 2019 in what was known as Operation Mercury. The goal of the campaign was to clean up La Pampa, home to about 25,000 people, to combat illegal gold mining. Meanwhile, the interior ministry expressed solidarity with the families of the nine deceased workers on Sunday. The Florida Democratic Party is standing by its decision to scrap its presidential primary after it submitted only President Joe Bidens name for the 2024 ballot. The move has evoked anger and threats of legal action from Bidens longshot primary rivals, who say that the party is depriving voters of the ability to choose their own presidential nominee at a time when polls suggest a majority of Americans are frustrated with Bidens performance. Were not trying to create a conflict here, progressive political commentator Cenk Uygur, who launched a presidential bid last month, said during a Friday press conference alongside fellow 2024 hopeful Marianne Williamson. Were just trying to do the bare minimum of getting on the ballot. And weve all earned it, and theres no need for this conflict. Williamson and Uygur said they sent a letter on Friday to the Florida Democratic Party asking that their names be submitted to the Florida Secretary of States office so they can be put on the primary ballot. Another candidate, Democratic U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, is preparing to send his own letter to the party, a spokesperson for his campaign said. Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Phillips, said that the campaign was looking at a range of options to try to get the Minnesota congressmans name on the Florida primary ballot, including a potential lawsuit or an effort at the 2024 Democratic National Convention to challenge the credentials of Floridas delegates. Were consulting with lawyers now and I think well take a multi-pronged approach, he said. A lawsuit if appropriate, an appeal to the Democratic National Committee and, if none of those resolve this problem, a credentials challenge at the convention, which could result in Florida losing all its delegates. The cancellation of the Floridas Democratic presidential primary comes as polls show a majority of Americans souring on Bidens performance. A poll of Florida voters released last month by the University of North Florida found that nearly two-thirds of Floridians held an unfavorable view of the president, including a quarter of Democrats in the state. There are roughly 4.5 million registered Democrats in Florida. In 2020, the last time Democrats voted in a primary for president, about 1.7 million voters participated, with 38% casting a ballot for Bidens opponents. Florida is expected to award 250 delegates to the winner of the Democratic primary on March 19. Republicans will go to the polls that day to vote for their preferred presidential candidate. But the Democratic party says the decision was made weeks ago, and its hands are tied. The deadline for the party to submit its candidate list to the Florida Secretary of States office was Nov. 30. Under state law, if a political party lists only one presidential candidate, that person will be declared the automatic winner of the primary and no vote will be held. The party chose its roster of candidates at a meeting of its state executive committee in October a decision that went under the radar. Eden Giagnorio, the Florida Democratic Partys communications director, said that Biden was the only candidate nominated for the ballot and was consequently the only one whose name was submitted to the Secretary of States Office. She said that the process by which the party determines which names to submit for the primary ballot was routine and had been made available on the partys website months ago. It was posted for months. It wasnt a secret. There was no conspiracy, Giagnorio said. They didnt get any votes. Its not our responsibility to whip for them. The partys delegate selection plan, however, doesnt give candidates a deadline to ask the party to be placed on the ballot. Phillips campaign said that it first sent the Florida Democratic Party two letters on Nov. 7 providing the party with points of contact for his campaign and expressing his interest in participating in the primary. A spokesperson for his campaign said that Phillips team didnt hear back from the Florida Democratic Party for quite some time. It wasnt until Nov. 22 that the party confirmed that it was in contact with Phillips campaign, the spokesperson said. Giagnorio disputed that timeline, saying that the party didnt hear from Phillips campaign until the day before Thanksgiving. It wasnt until two days before the Nov. 30 deadline that party leadership was made aware that Phillips wanted his name submitted for the ballot, she said. By then, there wasnt enough time to give the state executive committee the required 10 days notice to hold a vote, Giagnorio said. She also said that the Democratic National Committee had reached out to Phillips campaign weeks ago to offer help on the state party processes, but the campaign did not take up the offer. Phillips, Williamson and Uygur have cast the Florida Democratic Partys decision as an anti-democratic maneuver to coronate Biden as the 2024 nominee. Im running for president because I believe in the value of democratic choice, Phillips said in a statement. It is absolutely appalling to see that an element of my party, the Florida Democratic Party, has decided to throw away the fundamentals of American government. We need to repair our Democracy, not erode it. But Giagnorio reiterated that the party was simply following the rules. I think what would be anti-democratic would be us bending the rules for latecomers, she said. For the past two winters, Florida wildlife biologists have experimented with feeding lettuce to hungry manatees along the states east coast in the Indian River Lagoon as the animals natural food source, seagrass, declined because of pollution. This winter, though, there wont be another feeding trial. Wildlife experts say there are two main reasons for that decision. According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, theres enough seagrass in the Mosquito Lagoon, where manatees linger during the colder winter months. Part of the massive Indian River Lagoon, the Mosquito Lagoon stretches along Brevard and Volusia counties. Also, there are currently no signs that manatees in this region are in a poor or compromised body condition due to a manatee die-off that began in 2021, the commission said in a statement. A record 1,100 animals died that year, many from starvation in a human-fueled seagrass famine. A federally designated Unusual Mortality Event is still underway for manatees on the Atlantic coast, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced in October the agency is reviewing whether manatees should be reclassified as an endangered species. The decision to discontinue feeding comes after state wildlife experts met with staff from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and reviewed data from the previous two winters, according to the Florida wildlife commission. After careful consideration, the agencies are not providing manatees with a supplemental food source at the beginning of the winter season, reads the announcement from Florida wildlife experts. However, staff developed a contingency plan for supplemental feeding which they will implement if needed. Patrick Rose, an aquatic biologist and executive director of Save the Manatee Club, said he supports the decision to end the feeding trial, but added that there needs to be regular monitoring to ensure manatees in the Indian River Lagoon are staying healthy. Theres much more vegetation available than there was at the worst part of the Unusual Mortality Event. But theres still a long ways to go for the system to be fully recovered, Rose said in a Monday interview. By no means is the Mosquito Lagoon in great shape, Rose said. But its not at a point where it would be appropriate to continue the supplemental feeding. The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP28, is underway, and is already generating significant controversy. Sultan Al Jaber of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the president of COP28, came under fire Sunday for recent comments that denied the basic scientific realities of climate change. The controversy began when Jaber was being interviewed by Mary Robinson, a former UN special envoy for climate change, for the She Changes Climate event. After insisting that he would not participate in any "alarmist" conversation, Jaber insisted that "there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is whats going to achieve 1.5 C," referring to limiting the global temperature rise. After Robinson noted that Jaber's company is investing in fossil fuels, he doubled down, adding that any phase-out of fossil fuels would "take the world back into caves" and that "I dont think [you] will be able to help solve the climate problem by pointing fingers or contributing to the polarization and the divide that is already happening in the world. Show me the solutions. Stop the pointing of fingers. Stop it." Jaber attempted to walk back his comments on Monday, telling reporters that "I have said over and over that the phase down and the phase out of fossil fuel is inevitable." He received support from Professor Jim Skea, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who insisted that Jaber "has been attentive to the science." Jaber is the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), while the UAE is one of the world's top 10 oil and gas producers. Despite Jaber's claims to the contrary, scientists overwhelmingly agree that climate change is both real and primarily caused by humans burning fossil fuels. Water projects, prison spending and core state funding obligations for the upcoming fiscal year could be on the docket Tuesday for the Governors Budget Address. Gov. Kristi Noem will give the budget address at the Capitol in front of 105 lawmakers and other government officials. The address will set what she sees as the states main funding priorities for the 2025 fiscal year. Governor Kristi Noem gives the annual budget address on Tuesday, December 6, 2022, at the South Dakota State Capitol in Pierre. Expected to be included in her speech will be a plan for the remaining millions in American Rescue Plan Act dollars that have yet to be allocated, funding for the so-called Big Three priorities and a return to a budget similar to the pre-COVID-19 era. Noem already warned South Dakotans the states budget would be tight in her weekly column back in late October. "...there are many members of our state legislature that have not experienced a 'normal budget year,'" Noem wrote. "These legislators are used to having huge revenues and surpluses to spend on whatever they want. They have not had to do what more and more families across America are having to do stick to a tight budget." More: 98th regular Legislative session ends with historic tax cut, funding increases Top lawmakers in the South Dakota Senate and House of Representatives, along with state government experts, say the tight budget is synonymous with budgets prior to COVID-19 pandemic when the state benefited from a large influx of federal dollars and saw increased revenues. Im new to learning about the South Dakota state budget. What are the Big Three? The Big Three are the states core budget priorities: funding education, health providers and state employees. This past year, health providers were reimbursed at a 100% rate where in previous years, providers were reimbursed at a lower rate. Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities benefit from these reimbursements. Hospitals also received a 5% funding increase. More: Sioux Falls School District talks about its legislative platform for 2024 Legislature Based on recommendations from a summer study, long-term care facilities will also be a legislative priority for lawmakers when they return Jan. 9 to Pierre for the start of the 99th Legislative Session. Educators and state employees across the state also got a bump in pay over the last year. Its unclear if another pay raise is in the cards for educators or state employees. The 2024 fiscal year budget came in at a record-setting $7.4 billion and included a hard-fought temporary sales tax cut. More: Gov. Kristi Noem approves $7.4 billion budget for South Dakota in 2024 What projects could the remaining ARPA funds go toward? In the past few years, a majority of the ARPA funds have gone toward infrastructure improvements across the state such as housing, broadband and environmental projects. The state received $974.4 million in federal ARPA funds. The funds that we did have as a state, we were really diligent about making sure those were one-time investments that produced a long-term return for the people of South Dakota, said Senate Majority Leader Casey Crabtree, R-Madison. Significant funding from the American Rescue Plan Act also went to help South Dakota municipalities improve their sewer and water systems. The central question the state is asking ahead of the budget address is where will the remaining $104.6 million in ARPA funds that have yet to be put into an infrastructure project go? All ARPA funds the state received must be obligated by the end of 2024 and then must all be spent by the end of 2026. Bureau of Finance and Management Commissioner Jim Terwilliger told appropriators Nov. 13 that Noem will lay out a plan for the $104.6 million to be spent during her budget address. A slide from a presentation by the South Dakota Bureau of Finance and Management updating lawmakers on the expenditures of American Rescue Plan funds as of Sept. 30, 2023. She will look forward to having that conversation when the time is ready, he said. One Republican lawmaker from Rapid City, Sen. Helene Duhamel, has been pushing for the funds to go toward water infrastructure improvements in the western side of the state that has critical water needs because of its drier climate. Duhamel has brought two bills in the past two years to dedicate a portion of the ARPA funds to water projects, including a $3.5 million study of a West River water pipeline. Her bill in 2023 passed the Senate but failed in the House by two votes. "Every dollar invested in water pays dividends to every citizen of our state," she said. "For us to unlock our potential in western South Dakota, we need a reliable source of clean water." Crabtree said Duhamel has done an incredible job to champion the water needs in the western side of the state and added northeast South Dakota would also benefit from water infrastructure. More: South Dakota Republicans criticize program that provided $3.8B to state The legislature, really as a whole, has a pull toward wanting to put what they can for ARPA funds that remain into water infrastructure projects. That provides a good return, weve got a need across the state, Crabtree said, adding the water projects are just one part of the overall remaining ARPA fund conversation. The state is also facing down major prison projects, including the construction of a 1,500-bed mens facility in Lincoln County that will replace the current state penitentiary and continuing the construction of a new 288-bed womens prison in Rapid City. Its possible some ARPA funds could be used in those projects. More: DOCs lack of transparency about new SD prison could have long-term consequences, expert says A return to normal For Michael Card, a professor emeritus in the politics department at the University of South Dakota, hes not sure how different the states spending will be during the upcoming fiscal year from the past few years. He said that although state revenues are estimated to decrease by 2%, because of the general sales tax cut, which sets the stage for a tight budget, there are still millions in ARPA funds that have been obligated for projects but remain unspent. How do we deal with these unobligated funds? How do we deal with some expenditures that havent been made? Card asked. Sun sets on the South Dakota State Capitol on Monday, January 11, in Pierre. House Majority Leader Will Mortenson and Crabtree agree the upcoming budget will be a return to normal. It makes the budgeting process easier in that we know which core priorities we have to fund, Mortenson said. This year will be about needs, not wants. The Pierre Republican remembers working for the Daugaard administration in 2011, when the state faced deep budget cuts, and said the Legislature is working hard to avoid a repeat of that in the future. The key to avoiding it is being frugal in the times that you have money and not overextending the obligations of state government, he said. I think weve been pretty prudent in the last few years, but this year is going to demand additional prudence. When is the South Dakota budget address? South Dakotans can watch or listen to the Governors Budget Address at 1 p.m. Central, 12 p.m. Mountain on Tuesday, Dec. 5 at sd.net. This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: South Dakota's next state budget address is Tuesday: What to know In this photo provided by South Korea Defense Ministry, the third test flight of solid-fuel space rocket is launched from a barge in waters near Jeju Island, South Korea, Monday, Dec. 4, 2023. (South Korea Defense Ministry via AP) SEOUL, South Korea (AP) North Korea on Monday accused the United States of double standards, slamming it for letting rival South Korea launch a spy satellite from U.S. territory after condemning the Norths earlier satellite launch. Last Friday, South Korea launched its first domestically built spy satellite into space from Californias Vandenberg Space Force Base. That came after North Korea put its own military spy satellite into orbit for the first time on Nov. 21. Unlike the South Korean launch, North Koreas satellite liftoff drew immediate, strong rebukes from Washington, Seoul and their partners because it violated U.N. Security Council resolutions. The world body views any North Korean launch using ballistic technology as a cover for testing its missile technology. North Korea maintains it has the right to launch satellites and test missiles in the face of what it calls U.S.-led military threats. It is a space-level tragicomedy that the U.S., going frantic with illegal denunciation and sanctions moves over the exercise of (North Koreas) sovereignty, has shown behavior based on double standards by launching a spy satellite of (South Korea) in a shameless manner, an unidentified spokesperson for the Norths National Aerospace Technology Administration said in a statement. The statement said if the gangster-like logic of the U.S. is connived and tolerated, global peace and stability will be exposed to an irrevocable grave danger. North Korea has said its spy satellite transmitted imagery with space views of key sites in the U.S. and South Korea, including the White House and the Pentagon. But it hasnt yet released any of those satellite photos. Many outside experts question whether it can send militarily useful high-resolution imagery. North Korea has said itll launch additional spy satellites to better monitor its rivals moves and enhance the precision-guided strike capability of its missiles. South Korea also plans to launch four more spy satellites by 2025 under a contract with SpaceX. The establishment of its own space-based surveillance network would ease its dependence on U.S. spy satellites to monitor strategic facilities in North Korea. Experts say launching a satellite aboard a SpaceX rocket is more economical and that South Korea also needs more tests to ensure the reliability of a launch rocket. Earlier Monday, South Korea conducted a third test flight for a solid-fuel rocket near its southern Jeju island, according to the Souths Defense Ministry. A ministry statement said the launch was successful and put a civilian commercial satellite into orbit. Solid-fuel rockets require shorter launch times and cheaper development and manufacturing costs than liquid-fuel rockets. Experts say solid-fuel rockets are used to launch smaller spy satellite because they have weaker thrust force than similar-sized liquid-fuel rockets. They say the development of solid-fuel rockets can help improve South Koreas missile technology as well. After the North Korean satellite launch, South Korea said it would resume frontline aerial surveillance in response. South Korea said North Korea reacted by restoring border guard posts. Both North and South Korean steps would breach their earlier agreement to ease military tensions along their border. The North Korean satellite liftoff followed two earlier launch failures. South Korea suspects North Korea likely received Russian technical assistance for a satellite launch program as part of expanding cooperation between the two nations, both locked in separate confrontations with the United States. Flash The death toll from the El Nino-induced heavy rains and flash flooding have killed at least 110 people and affected more than 2.4 million others in Somalia, the UN humanitarian agency said on Sunday. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the devastating floods which have exacerbated Somalia's hunger crisis have displaced more than one million people in at least 36 districts. "At least 37 boats have been deployed to deliver supplies or evacuate tens of thousands of people who are trapped by flood water in 10 locations in Hirshabelle and Jubaland states," the OCHA said in its latest Update released in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. The raging flash floods which began in October have also disrupted infrastructure, trade, education and food supply services across the country. The floods followed the worst drought in the country in four decades which has decimated livestock and crops, pushing the country to the brink of famine. According to the OCHA, concern continues to grow over the likely spread of water-borne diseases with suspected cases of Acute Watery Diarrhoea (AWD)/cholera being reported in Hirshabelle and Galmudug states. "An outbreak would pose a significant threat to communities with limited healthcare facilities," it warned. The agency said humanitarians, authorities and local communities have assisted at least 820,000 people, about 30 percent of those affected. It said light rain is forecast over the coastal areas of Middle Shabelle and Lower Juba, and Banadir until Dec. 5, and dry conditions over the rest of the country and Ethiopian highlands. It however said water levels remain high along the Shabelle river basin, with flooding reported in several areas. "Twenty villages to the east of Jowhar town in Hirshabelle State are reportedly inundated. Mahaday town, which has been deluged for a month, has seen its sanitation facilities and some houses collapse," the OCHA said. According to humanitarian agencies, the floods are the latest in a series of extreme weather events in recent years to hit Somalia, where communities find themselves at the sharp end of the global climate crisis. This photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un applauds in the National Mothers Meeting in Pyongyang, North Korea on Dec. 3, 2023. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: "KCNA" which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP) SEOUL, South Korea (AP) North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has said it is a duty of women to halt a fall in the countrys births in order to strengthen national power, state media said Monday, as his government steps up the call for the people to have more children. While getting a detailed read on North Koreas population trends is extremely difficult because of the limited statistics it discloses, South Koreas government assesses that the Norths fertility rate has declined steadily for the past 10 years. That is a concerning development for a country that depends on mobilized labor to help keep its broken, heavily sanctioned economy afloat. Kim's latest appeal for women to have more children was made Sunday during the countrys National Mothers Meeting, the first of its kind in 11 years. Stopping the decline in birthrates and providing good child care and education are all our family affairs that we should solve together with our mothers," Kim said in his opening speech. According to South Koreas government statistics agency, North Koreas total fertility rate, or the average number of babies expected to be born to a woman over her lifetime, was at 1.79 in 2022, down from 1.88 in 2014. The decline is still slower than its wealthier rival South Korea, whose fertility rate last year was 0.78, down from 1.20 in 2014. South Korea's fertility rate, the lowest in the developed world, is believed to be due to a potent cocktail of reasons discouraging people from having babies, including a decaying job market, a brutally competitive school environment for children, traditionally weak child care assistance and a male-centered corporate culture where many women find it impossible to combine careers and family. While North Korea is one of the poorest nations in the world, the change in its demographic structure is similar to that of rich countries, some observers say. Many families in North Korea also don't intend to have more than one child these days as they know they need lots of money to raise their kids, send them to school and help them get jobs, said Ahn Kyung-su, head of DPRKHEALTH.ORG, a website focusing on health issues in North Korea. Ahn, who has interviewed many North Korean defectors, said the smuggling of a vast amount of South Korean TV dramas and movies in the past 20 years that showed an elevated social status for women has also likely influenced women in North Korea not to have many children. North Korea implemented birth control programs in the 1970-80s to slow a postwar population growth. The countrys fertility rate recorded a major decline following a famine in the mid-1990s that was estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people, the Seoul-based Hyundai Research Institute said in a report in August. Given North Korea lacks resources and technological advancements, it could face difficulties to revive and develop its manufacturing industry if sufficient labor forces are not provided, the institute report said. According to North Korean state media reports this year, the country has introduced a set of benefits for families with three or more children, including preferential free housing arrangements, state subsidies, free food, medicine and household goods and educational perks for children. South Koreas statistics agency estimates the Norths population at 25.7 million. The Hyundai institute report said that North Korea was expected to experience a population shrink from 2034 and forecast its population would decrease to 23.7 million by 2070. Ahn, the website head, said that Kim Jong Un's repeated public appearances with his young daughter, Ju Ae, are also likely be efforts to encourage families. Other experts said the daughter's appearances were more likely an attempt to show she's her father's heir. ___ Associated Press writer Jiwon Song contributed to this report. North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un attends the 5th National Meeting of Mothers in Pyongyang North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un attends the 5th National Meeting of Mothers in Pyongyang By Hyunsu Yim SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has called for efforts to tackle the isolated country's falling birth rates, describing the challenge as "everyone's housekeeping", state media KCNA reported on Monday. Kim made the comments during an event for mothers in Pyongyang on Sunday. "Preventing a decline in birth rates and good childcare are all of our housekeeping duties we need to handle while working with mothers," Kim said at the event. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that as of 2023 the fertility rate, or the average number of children being born to a woman in North Korea, stood at 1.8, amid an extended fall in the rate during recent decades. The fertility rate remains higher than in some of North Korea's neighbours, which have been grappling with a similar downward trend. South Korea saw its fertility rate drop to a record low of 0.78 last year, while Japan saw its figure drop to 1.26. The dwindling birth rates in South Korea have caused a shortage of pediatricians, while one city is hosting matchmaking events to boost birth rates. North Korea, which has a population of about 25 million people, has in recent decades also had to contend with serious food shortages, including deadly famine in the 1990s, often a result of natural disasters such as floods damaging harvests. The North Korean leader thanked mothers for their role in strengthening national power. "I too always think about mothers when I have a hard time dealing with the party and the state's work," Kim said. (Reporting by Hyunsu Yim; Editing by Ed Davies and Gerry Doyle) Northwestern University, ranked as the ninth-best college or university in the country, maintains a 7 percent acceptance rate, making it one of the most competitive institutions to gain admission to. Students accepted into this prestigious university typically achieve SAT scores of 1500 and above. Now, 16 incarcerated persons from the Illinois Department of Corrections have made history and can count themselves among the elite graduates from the school after their commencement this month. Graduating class of Northwesterns Prison Education Program (Photo: Northwestern.edu) In partnership with Oakton College, Northwestern University successfully launched its Prison Education Program, making it the first top-10 university to provide a bachelors degree program to incarcerated students. The cohort began in 2018 with students selected from the Statesville Correctional Center, a multi-security prison in Crest Hill, Illinois, who wanted to work toward their associate degrees. In December 2021, Northwestern University stepped up and said it would allow those students to continue matriculation through their program to pursue a bachelors. Over a dozen students were enrolled in a full-time course load throughout all four quarters of each academic year and earned a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in social sciences. Jennifer Lackey, founding director of NPEP and the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones professor of philosophy and law at Northwestern, said it changed her life as an educator. It is often said that education is transformative, and I believe this even more wholeheartedly with each passing day in our community, she said in a statement. But I have also been powerfully moved by the way you all have transformed education. You have radically expanded what it means to be a Northwestern student. You have enriched Northwestern University in ways that will echo for decades to come. Ta-Nehisi Coates, the National Book Award winner and journalist, said it was a high honor to be the Nov. 15 graduations keynote speaker. When I got the invitation to come here to address you, wild horses couldnt stop me because Im addressing myself. This is a tremendous achievement you guys have done, he said to the audience of about 300 guests. Later, the Howard University professor was asked by ABC News what it meant for him to speak to the class, and he said, I was deeply, deeply inspired. I teach kids who struggle to get to class in the morning, he continued, to see these guys struggling with what they had to struggle with and managed to get you know an education from a prestigious university, its a big deal. One of the most inspirational stories was from Bernard McKinley, a man recently paroled after spending 22 years behind bars. He said, As I prepare to reenter society in a few months, this is one of the most memorable moments that Im going to be proud to write in my story. Another part of this story for McKinley is taking the LSAT and applying to law school. He hopes with his life as an example, he will help break the cycle that keeps Black and Brown bodies on track to prison, believing education is the key. When you send young Black and Brown bodies to prison, uneducated, he explained, And then throw them back into society uneducated it does nothing but perpetuate systemic racism. This is something that the Department of Justice knows to be true. According to a Justice Department study, around 68 percent of state prison inmates are rearrested within three years of release. However, education can significantly change this outcome. A 2018 study in the Journal of Experimental Criminology revealed that prisoners participating in post-secondary education programs are 48 percent less likely to be re-incarcerated compared with those who dont go to school. Additionally, obtaining education during incarceration enhances the likelihood of securing employment after release by 12 percent. Several law enforcement departments searched for the missing hiker (Calaveras County Sheriffs Office) The remains of a missing woman have been located by authorities in California. Ann Herford, 66, was reported missing on 15 November after she failed to return from a hike on the Arnold Rim Trail in the central Sierra Nevada Mountains. Herford, a travelling nurse from Michigan, had been expected to work a shift at Adventist Health in the city of Sonara but she didnt show up. Following dozens of searches by air and ground in the dense forest by several law enforcement departments, Herfords remains were found on a 35-degree sloped hillside beneath dense foliage, the Calaveras County Sheriffs Office said on Thursday. Several law enforcement departments searched for the missing hiker (Calaveras County Sheriffs Office) The discovery was made near the area where her vehicle had been left parked on 12 November, the department said. California Highway Patrol aircraft helped extricate the remains from the terrain. An investigation into Herfords death is underway, but the sheriffs department said it does not appear to be suspicious. Family members reportedly told law enforcement that Herford liked to go out on short hikes, but did not have the skills to survive in the wilderness, according to The Detroit News. PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) A 36-year-old doctor from New York was convicted on child sex charges in Washington County stemming from more than 7000 exchanges in a one-month period in 2019 with an underage girl. In September 2019, the girls mother found the messages on her daughters phone and called the Tualatin Police Department. In the messages the girl clearly stated her age and her high school. The Washington County District Attorneys Office said there were also messages where the doctor, Daniel H. Rock, told the girl to delete their communications, which included calls, texts, nude photos and sex act descriptions. Change Measure 110? Public comment on drug law taken The mother called Rock, who pleaded with her not to report what she found to the police and said he would lose his family. But forensic investigators went through the girls phone, which led to Rocks arrest. On November 30, he was convicted of using a child in display of sexually explicit conduct plus 2 counts of luring a minor. His sentencing is set for December 29. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KOIN.com. CHICAGO The holidays are stressful, but it could be worse. You could work in an airport. In one of the busiest airports in the world. For free. You could work in an airport for free and sit for five hours a day wearing a blue vest and invite strangers bring me your tired, your hungry, your flight-delayed, your missed connections, your abusive, your entitled, your perpetually turned-around, your extremely frustrated, your actual refugees seeking asylum to complain to you, to ask countless questions, to ensure their trajectory. For no money. You could do this because you are a good person who wishes to experience the satisfaction of being helpful in an unhelpful environment. You could work at an information desk at OHare International Airport. More than 2 million passengers passed through OHare Thanksgiving week alone, a confusing place even if you visit regularly. Not McCormick Place confusing. (Nowhere else in Chicago is that confusing.) Finding help is not quite finding-an-employee-at-Home-Depot difficult. But it often seems easier to find a Nuts on Clark at OHare than a person with answers. This is where the saints of the information desk come in. They are the 125 volunteers of Travelers Aid Chicago, they have been at OHare since it first opened to commercial traffic in 1955, and from what I could tell by spending time with them, youve never given them a second thought. You take them for granted. You barely notice them. But they can tell you the number of Nuts on Clark at OHare (four) and what to do if youve been stranded at OHare without a passport. Theyll tell you where to take a service dog that needs to poop and can offer decent directions to the Blue Line. They bill themselves as the oldest nonsectarian social welfare movement in America, but their constituents are swaggering tech bros and people who have never been to an airport, business owners and military vets, travelers with special needs, people in the visible grasp of trauma, children scared of flying for the first time, wide-eyed exchange students, grandparents without boarding passes, runaways, newlyweds, migrants; until recently, they carried adopted babies through OHare to new parents outside of security. Take, for example, Jon Ziomek, who stands behind a podium on a Thursday morning, listening to a very nervous woman explain, and explain, she doesnt know where to walk. With a pause of calm, he points her down the right hallway, then turns to me and says quietly, Going to Zurich through London then transferring. I didnt ask why not book direct from Chicago? Why make someone feel bad about their flight choices? After all, working an information desk at OHare at a time when understaffed airlines leave gates looking like ghost towns of customer service can mean absorbing anger. We are often the first official-looking person a frustrated traveler sees so we get it. They are insulted, cursed at, told they move slow. When I met Kim Heiferman her Travelers Aid vest pinned with almost 37 pieces of flair after a decade with the group she had been on her shift for about an hour and already handled 76 people. After each interaction, they press a clicker to keep track. She said: Today, Ive gotten Where can I smoke? Where is baggage claim? Where is my gate? Where is Garrett Popcorn? As she talked, a tired man stopped before her: Curious. Whats the best place to eat? I got two hours. I mean, I dont need to eat, you know? Im overweight, as you can see, of course. But look, can you just tell me where? She patiently offered suggestions, then turned to me: Some will swear at you. Some are very, very angry. I love talking to people, and yet I had this one guy walking down the hall just screaming at me, which is a dagger in your heart, because you are not paid, youre here to help. Usually, people arent harsh. Still ... Travelers Aid says it has about 900,000 passenger interactions a year in OHare. And even if you dont consider the people who approach them experiencing medical issues, the people who approach them fleeing domestic abuse, the people who approach them so stoned theyre not sure what city they landed in, the people who approach them with nothing but a strip of paper with the faded number of a distant relative, there is just the stress of being in a big airport: the lost luggage, the expenses, the crowds, the missed flights, the indifference. John Ishu is the director of Travelers Aid Chicago and has been with it for 25 years. He thinks of OHare as a midsize metropolis. One with a population of more than 200,000. They speak 40 languages. And every 24 hours, seven days a week, the population changes. Its a place of transition and people in crisis, and theres no stopgap for that. So were there. The next time you see someone at OHare behind a blue desk with a button reading Ask Me, remind yourself, theyve been doing this for 172 years. Before airports. Travelers Aid Chicago even predates its own agency, the Heartland Alliance. (Indeed, when Jane Addams created Heartland in 1888, it was among the first services offered.) Travelers Aid and its many sister organizations in 20 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Canada and Australia dates to 1851, when philanthropic former St. Louis Mayor Bryan Mullanphy gave his city $500,000 in his will to help pioneers going West in covered wagons. They helped with sick horses, broken axles, families running out of food. By the 1940s, when Travelers Aid became one of the agencies that helped form the USO, the group could be found nationwide in railroad and bus stations, often assisting returning war veterans. But fundamentally, it served migrants, domestically and internationally. In the early 20th century, that often meant immigration from Europe. These days, it can mean asylum-seekers from everywhere, as well as the migrants who are put on planes in San Antonio, Texas, several times a day, bound for OHare. Most of the time, a Travelers Aid volunteer will meet them at their gates, provide them with fresh diapers, socks and toys for children, then guide them to resettlement agencies. Ziomek stepped around his podium to greet a large group of migrants being resettled elderly, millennial, children representing a half-dozen countries in Europe and South America. They gathered behind a staff member with the International Organization for Migration. They looked around the chaos of the airport and smiled at Ziomek who beamed back. So wheres everyone going? Ziomek asked. USA, the leader said. Specifically? Ziomek laughed. The man waved his hand airily theyre headed all over. Ah, Ziomek said, instinctively grabbing a stack of free coloring books for the kids. Ziomek has been doing this for eight years, several times a week. Though most Travelers Aid volunteers stick with a single desk, Ziomek floats about, working at all nine information desks scattered around OHare. (Midway Airport does not have a Travelers Aid office, but a spokesperson with the Chicago Department of Aviation said its being discussed.) Ziomek has a trim gray beard and a serene demeanor. He has calmed so many hysterical people he could qualify as a hostage negotiator. Its the rare shift he doesnt meet someone openly weeping, he says. He keeps boxes of tissues on hand. Quick, memorize this binder, he jokes, handing me the groups thick laminated folder containing information on everything from cabs to the location of Chicago hot dogs. Hes handled only 19 people in the past 20 minutes, which he says is a little slow. He doesnt know if he always helps. In a way, a job like this is a reminder of just how much the human eye can take in. There are signs all over this place that probably answer a lot of the questions that people have, but there is also a limit of how much we can absorb. He notes that theres a terminal where one sign for the baggage-claim area points straight up, but 20 feet beyond that sign, a different sign for the same baggage area points straight down. He notes that there is a Terminal 5 but no Terminal 4 (which has become the bus and shuttle center). American Airlines airport code is AA yet Spirit Airlines is NK. JetBlues ticket counters are in Terminal 2, yet its gates are in Terminal 3. (To make this even more confusing, the blue information desks near several baggage areas are staffed by parking-lot businesses and have nothing to do with Travelers Aid.) Now imagine all that but you dont speak much English, and you dont know anyone, and maybe you dont even know where youre headed you just hope someone might help when you get there. Ziomek recalls a woman who came up to me at the desk and just said Sri Lanka. I said that there were no direct flights, and I went on and on explaining and when I was done, she just repeated, Sri Lanka. Among the 125 volunteers, they speak 26 languages. There is also a language-translation phone service, so Ziomek called and as they tried to understand what language the woman was speaking, her daughter called her cellphone. She explained that her mother was flying to Doha in Qatar and then transferring to Sri Lanka. The daughter hung up. Ziomek told the woman that she could wait there for the flight. Then she handed him a small note. It read: I have dementia. About eight years ago, a 14-year-old girl from the Netherlands arrived at a Travelers Aid desk, unsure how to get to Rockford. She lived with her grandparents who agreed to let her come here to meet someone she knew online, said Tony Medina, volunteer manager. She was waiting awhile for her pickup. All she had was a Rockford address, but when Travelers Aid did an online search, they got an image of a vacant lot. The person she was meeting wouldnt return phone calls from us. The girl received a return plane ticket. Most likely, Medina said, we avoided a human trafficking situation. Ziomek and Lorenzo Vasquez stood behind an information desk in Terminal 3 and spoke quietly and casually. It was Vasquezs first day with Travelers Aid. He wore a porkpie hat and listened to Ziomek explain the job and occasionally looked up to scan the clamor from another rush of passengers: fathers with visible sweat stains carrying children, couples bickering softly, armies of matching teenagers in volleyball sweatsuits. It takes a special personality to do this, Medina told me with a public-service gene, to be specific. Vasquez, a former Chicago firefighter who also volunteers with the USO, has it. You scan for distress, Vasquez said. You read faces. Its a skill you pick up. Occasionally, Ziomek would call into the ether: Help? Anyone? Like many Travelers Aid volunteers, theyre retired. Ziomek taught and was assistant dean at Northwestern Universitys Medill School of Journalism, as well as its director of editorial masters programs. (Disclosure: I took a class with Ziomek myself at Northwestern, about 30 years ago.) There are two 17-year-old volunteers (the minimum age to join) but most are retired professionals, at least 60. They include Chicago police, firefighters, dentists, plumbers and teachers; many were airport employees, airline workers and even pilots who miss airport life. If they do six months of this, Ishu said, they stay years, even decades. Heiferman was a nurse who volunteered eight hours a day, five days a week, for nine years. But shes cut back a little after the pandemic. I cant pinpoint exactly what changed for me, but people in this place are on edge all the time now. And I still love it. People, to generalize, expect to get screwed over at an airport. They will be mistreated, inevitably. Volunteers report passengers who zone out in the middle of gate directions, passengers who wander off in midsentence, passengers who shake their heads furiously when told to call airline customer service, as if theyd been sentenced to death. Elisabeth Adams, a former Pan Am employee and 10-year Travelers Aid vet, gets it. Shes not paid to get it, but she does. She stands at a desk in Terminal 5 on a Friday morning. She has the short graying hair, thin eyeglass frames and the Glinda-the-Good-Witch smile of a preschool teacher. She doesnt witness many tears, she says, but she knows to anticipate something she cant anticipate. She has the image of a passenger seared into her brain who, trapped in OHare airport limbo, began shouting that hes been wearing the same underwear for two days, then reached into his pants and gave himself a massive wedgie, to illustrate his despair. Adams looks up. A woman stands before her and explains very quickly that shes been trying to get home to Texas for days and she has a sick child there waiting for her and she may start to cry. Please dont, Adams whispers to me, then Ill be a liar. She turns back to the passenger: OK, how can I help? _________ Flash An injured child is seen at a hospital in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, on Nov. 10, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua] Israel's military chief Herzi Halevi said on Sunday that the military has expanded the ground operation against Hamas to the southern Gaza Strip, an area previously considered as a "safe zone." "We fought strongly and thoroughly in the northern Gaza Strip, and we are also doing it now in the southern Gaza Strip," Halevi, the chief of the General Staff of Israel Defense Forces (IDF), said during a tour at Israel's Gaza Division outside the besieged enclave, according to a statement released by the military. He said that the Israeli ground troops, in combination with air and sea forces, have almost completely "dismantled" two Hamas brigades, killing brigade commanders, company commanders, and "many" operatives. Halevi said that on Saturday morning, a day after a fragile seven-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas had collapsed, the forces "started the same process in the southern Gaza Strip." He vowed that the offensive in the southern Gaza Strip "will be with no less strength than that, it will be with no fewer results than that, and Hamas commanders will meet the IDF everywhere in a very, very strong way." Halevi added that the offensive in the northern Gaza Strip would continue with full force. The expansion of Israel's ground operation has heightened concerns over the severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza. "People have lost everything, and they need everything," the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), wrote on the social media platform X. "Gaza's population will soon begin dying from diseases as well as Israeli bombardment," the agency warned. Meanwhile, rocket fire from Gaza continued on Sunday, targeting mainly southern Israeli communities. Rockets and anti-tank missiles were launched at northern Israel from Lebanon, lightly injuring at least four people in the community of Beit Hilel in the Galilee, according to Israel's Magen David Adom rescue service. In the Golan Heights, originally Syrian territory that was annexed by Israel, two projectiles were identified crossing from Syria in two separate incidents, the Israeli army said in a statement, adding that troops fired towards the area from which the projectiles were launched. Despite the continuation of rocket fire, Israel's Homefront Command announced that all restrictions on schools and workplaces have been lifted, allowing the resumption of all activities, except in the southern communities adjacent to the Gaza Strip, where schools have been closed since the beginning of the war and remained so. More than 15,000 people were killed in Gaza since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, with 75 percent of them being children, women, and the elderly, and 41,316 others were injured, according to the Gaza-based Media Office. Israeli authorities said about 1,200 people were killed on the Israeli side. Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska told how her husband, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has changed during the full-scale war in an interview with Asian media on Dec. 1. Zelenska revealed how often she sees her husband in a conversation with media representatives from Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Cambodia, Thailand, Mongolia, and Singapore. Read also: First Lady Olena Zelenska warns: if Ukraine tires, Russian aggression will spread "We cannot live together permanently because he is constantly here (in the Presidents Office), Zelenska said. I and the children find the opportunity to meet with him once or twice a week. Fortunately, such an opportunity exists." People are noticing Zelenskyy's external changes, the First Lady said, admitting that it is difficult for him. It is an unspeakable responsibility to be the president of a country at war, she said. Read also: Ukraine's president and First Lady open up about family life and challenges during war He is a very resilient person; he endures. He finds ways to draw strength that keeps him going. His confidence that he has to lead our country to victory is the main driving force. This is his motivation, and it does not allow him to stop. I, for my part, try to support him. Of course, we have political conversations. I ask about the war; I want to know something that no one knows, for example, whether victory will come tomorrow. Unfortunately, I do not get such answers. And I believe that if there is such news, I will learn about it along with all Ukrainians." During rare meetings with her husband, Zelenska said she tries to talk to him about things that bring them back to normal life. Read also: First Lady Zelenska named Top 25 most influential women of 2023 in Heroes category Financial Times Today we discussed what gifts we can get for the children for St. Nicholas Day, she said. We haven't reached an agreement yet. I always share updates about the children how they are faring at school and university. When we spend time together, I try to focus on topics that bring us back to normal life for at least a few hours." 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 This story has been updated to identify the man who died. Tyriq Bridgwaters of Bloomington was killed and another man was wounded during a Sunday morning shooting police say happened after three men were denied entrance to a Bloomington house party because one had a gun. The incident occurred at 2 a.m. in a residential neighborhood in the 500 block of South Park Avenue, near the intersection with East Second Street. Bloomington Police Department officers who arrived after reports of shots fired found Bridgwaters with a gunshot wound to the chest; he died at the scene. A 19-year-old man also shot was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, according to a news release from BPD Lt. Mike Baker. Witnesses at the party described the suspect, a large-build man wearing a pink sweater, and said he produced a handgun and began firing into a crowd. An Indiana State Police trooper stopped a vehicle soon after the shooting, and a passenger resembled the man partygoers had described. Police said a handgun was found inside the vehicle. All three occupants were taken into custody and questioned. Isaiah Joseph Deleson Ramos, 21, of Linton, was booked into the Monroe County Jail on preliminary charges of murder and criminal recklessness. More in crime: Armed with bear mace, Bloomington man tracks stolen bike to Switchyard Park Detectives spoke to witnesses who said Ramos and the two others in the vehicle weren't allowed into the party because one had a handgun visible in his waistband. "The three men demanded entry into the party and a physical altercation ensued which made its way into a nearby alley," the news release said. "At that time, witnesses stated that they observed Ramos begin firing a handgun into the crowd." Monroe County Coroner Joani Stalcup said an autopsy is being conducted in Terre Haute. The investigation continues. Anyone with information about the shooting is asked to call BPD Detective Rob Shrake at 812-339-4477. Contact H-T reporter Laura Lane at llane@heraldt.com or 812-318-5967. This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Tyriq Bridgwaters killed in shooting at Bloomington house party The rampant increase of hate messages on social media is a scourge in todays technology-infused society. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia and even personal attacks on people who have the audacity to disagree with someone elses political opinion these and other forms of online hate present an ugly side of humanity. The derision on social media appears in vile and profane terms for all to see. Obviously, the sole purpose of posting online hate is to harass and harm ones victims, right? Not necessarily, according to recent studies about hate messaging in social media. Although seeing hate comments is unquestionably upsetting, new research suggests theres a different reason people post hate: to get attention and garner social approval from like-minded social media users. Its a social activity. Its exhilarating to be the nastiest or snarkiest and to get lots of thumbs-ups or hearts. Anecdotal evidence makes a good case for the social basis of online hate, and new empirical research backs it up. In over 30 years of research about online interaction, Ive documented how people make friends and form relationships online. It now appears that the same dynamics that can make some online relationships intensely positive can also fuel friendly feelings among those who join together online in expressing enmity toward identity groups and individual targets. Its a hate party, more or less. Online hate is a social phenomenon When you look at online hate messages, you start to notice clues that suggest, more often than not, that hatemongers are posting messages to each other, not to those their messages implicate and denigrate. For instance, white supremacists and neo-Nazis often include codes and symbols that have shared meaning for the in-group but are opaque to outsiders, including the very people that their messages vilify. Including 88 in ones message, hashtag or handle is one such code; the Anti-Defamation Leagues lexicon of hate symbols explains that the 8th letter of the alphabet is H. And 88, therefore, is HH, or Heil Hitler. Another clue that hate is for haters is the way it has shifted somewhat from mainstream social media to fringe sites that have gotten so hateful and disturbing that its hard to imagine any member of a targeted group wanting to peruse those spaces. The fringe sites say they promote unfettered free speech online. But in doing so, they attract users who write posts that are widely unacceptable and wouldnt last a minute on mainstream sites with community standards and content moderation. The kinds of messages that would quickly be flagged as hate speech in any offline setting come to dominate the threads and discussions in some of these spaces. Users curate meme repositories for instance, the anti-Jewish, anti-LGBTQ and new (n-word) collections that are hideous to most people but funny to those who partake in these secluded virtual backrooms. Theyre not spaces where the targets of these epithets are likely to wander. Ganging up builds community Further research lends credence to the hypothesis that haters are in it for social approval from one another. Internet researchers Gianluca Stringhini, Jeremy Blackburn and their colleagues have been tracking what they call cross-platform raids for a decade. Heres how it works. A user on one platform recruits other users to target and harass someone on another platform the creator of a specific video over on YouTube, for instance. The originators post contains a link to the YouTube video and a description of some race or gender issue to prey on, instilling the urge to act among prospective accomplices. Followers head to YouTube and pile on, filling the comments section with hate messages. The attack looks like its purpose is to antagonize a victim rather than building ties among the antagonists. And, of course, the effects on the targeted person can be devastating. Online posters cheer on the toxic messages of their peers and savor their social approval. ianmcdonnell/E+ via Getty Images But backstage, the attackers circle back to the platform where the plot was organized. They boast to one another about what they did. They post screen grabs from the YouTube page to show off their denigrating deeds. They congratulate each other. It was for getting attention and approval after all, consistent with the social approval theory of online hate. Social approval eggs users on to greater extremes More direct evidence of the effect of social approval on hate messaging is also emerging. Online behavior researcher Yotam Shmargad and his collaborators have studied newspapers online discussion websites. When people get upvotes on antisocial comments theyve posted, they become more likely to post additional antisocial comments. A recent study by my colleagues Julie Jiang, Luca Luceri and Emilio Ferrara looked at users of X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and what happened when they received signs of social approval to their xenophobic tweets. When posters toxic tweets got an unusually high number of likes from other users, their subsequent messages were even more toxic. The more their messages were retweeted by others, the more posters doubled down with more extreme hate. These findings do nothing to diminish the real hurt and anger that justifiably arise when people see themselves or their identity groups disparaged online. The social approval theory of online hate doesnt explain how people come to hate others or become bigoted in the first place. It does provide a new account for the expression of hate on social media, though, and how social gratifications encourage the ebb and flow of this problematic practice. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Joseph B. Walther, University of California, Santa Barbara. Read more: NEW YORK (AP) Jonathan Majors listened silently, head-cocked and eyes down, as a Manhattan prosecutor and his defense attorney offered competing accounts of a violent confrontation in the backseat of a car that led to assault charges against the film star and put his rapid Hollywood ascent on pause. The opening statements Monday in the trial against Majors centered on whether the actor assaulted his former girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, after she read a romantic text message sent to his phone by another woman. Prosecutors say Majors grabbed the womans hand so hard he fractured her middle finger, then twisted her arm behind her back and struck her on the side of the head the latest outburst in an alleged pattern of physical and emotional abuse. An attorney for Majors argued that her client was the true victim, claiming he was left bloodied by the attack, while she spent the rest of the night clubbing. That the competing versions of the struggle were presented to a jury was itself unusual, a rare instance of a misdemeanor assault case going to trial. For Majors, a 34-year-old rising star, the stakes may be higher than the one year in prison he could face if convicted. In her opening statements, the actor's attorney, Priya Chaudhry, described the allegations as a revenge plot to ruin Jonathan Majors and take away everything he has spent his whole life working for. Pointing to Majors' breakout roles in Creed III and his emergence as a key supervillain in the Marvel multiverse, Chaudhry said her client's career seemed unstoppable until he ended his relationship with Ms. Jabbari and she, hours later, made these false allegations. Since his arrest in March, an ad campaign for the U.S. Army featuring Majors has been pulled and the release of Magazine Dreams," a Sundance award-winning filming that he starred in, has been postponed. Chaudhry also invoked Majors race he is Black, Jabbari is white as a potential reason that he was arrested the day after the confrontation. In his own opening statements, assistant district attorney Michael Perez described the alleged assault as the culmination of a cruel and manipulative pattern of psychological and physical abuse that Majors directed at his partner of two years. The trial, he said, would show that Majors demanded total compliance from his girlfriend, at one point telling her that she needed to model herself after Michelle Obama or Coretta Scott King. If she didn't meet that standard by staying out late with friends or going to a music festival, for example Majors would often become angry, throwing household objects or shouting at her, the prosecutor said. Both prosecution and defense offered clashing narratives about the aftermath of the alleged assault as well. Once the driver pulled over, Majors fled the scene with his phone as Jabbari chased him "on foot, through traffic, like in a movie, according to Chaudhry. Unable to find Majors, she met three strangers and followed them to a Manhattan night club, where she spent the next few hours drinking and dancing, the defense attorney said. The prosecutor, meanwhile, said Majors picked Jabbari up and threw her inside the car on multiple occasions after the driver pulled over. He said she accepted the invitation of bystanders in hopes of temporarily blocking out the abuse committed by Majors. She returned home after a few hours at the nightclub, took two sleeping pills and fell asleep on the floor of her bathroom, he said. Jabbari awoke the next morning to Majors standing over her with police officers. Though Perez said she was initially reluctant to report the abuse because of how hes manipulated her in the past and trained her to stay silent, she soon told police about the alleged assault, leading to the arrest of Majors. She was hospitalized with minor injuries. Six months later, she was arrested by police after Majors brought a counter-claim against her for assaulting him in the vehicle. Those charges were dismissed by the Manhattan DA the following day. Perez referenced the arrest on Monday, telling jurors that Majors' attempts to control and intimidate Ms. Jabbari extended well after he assaulted her. Jabbari is expected to testify against her former partner in the coming days. Majors did not speak to reporters as he entered and exited the courtroom on Monday. BRUSSELS Present trends are racing our planet down a dead-end three-degree temperature rise, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently warned. He is right. Unless we act decisively beginning at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) underway in Dubai the threat that climate change poses to humanity will become nothing short of existential. Already, climate change is a major risk multiplier for conflict and instability. Extreme weather events like floods and heatwaves have led to the forcible displacement of more than 20 million people each year since 2008. By 2050, more than one billion people may have insufficient access to water, and more than 200 million may be forced to migrate. Water scarcity and food shortages are fueling violent conflicts in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and other parts of the world. Of the 20 countries that are most vulnerable to climate change, 12 are mired in conflicts. Authoritarian countries are taking advantage of the turmoil, attempting to gain influence over fragile governments and secure access to raw materials. Unless our mitigation and adaptation efforts are equal to the climate crisis, these trends will accelerate and spread, with truly catastrophic results. The European Union is doing its part to avoid such an outcome. With the European Green Deal, we are aiming, by 2030, to reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 55%, ensure that more than 42.5% of our energy comes from renewable sources, and increase energy efficiency by at least 11.7%. We strive to become climate-neutral by 2050. As sanctions bite, Russia eyes Ukraines mineral resources to fund its invasion Russias 2024 federal budget brought little in the way of surprises, the country is gearing up for a long war. Signed by President Vladimir Putin earlier this week, it ushered record levels of military spending a sign of Moscows commitment to its war against Ukraine. While part of the Russian The Kyiv IndependentKatie Marie Davies Central to our strategy for achieving these goals is putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions. But imposing a carbon price only on EU production risks simply pushing carbon-intensive activities beyond our borders. Such carbon leakage would mean losing jobs in the EU without achieving any reduction in global emissions. That is why we implemented the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which ensures that the most carbon-intensive imports are subject to a carbon price in line with that put on European goods. This is not protectionism. Rather, it is a necessary step to ensure that our ambitious decarbonization measures are helpful for the global climate. We also want to take responsibility for the greenhouse-gas emissions caused outside the EU by our consumption of imported goods, which why we are greening our trade policy. In particular, we want to ensure that the products we import no longer contribute to deforestation one of the greatest threats to the climate and biodiversity. We know that the requirements stemming from this EU law are causing tensions with some of our partners. We are ready to support them in implementing these measures and to address together the challenge of deforestation. The green transition will shake up the global balance of power. For the EU, this process implies both benefits and risks. On one hand, it will reduce our dependence on fossil fuels a dependence that, as Russias war against Ukraine has demonstrated, carries high political and economic costs. On the other hand, it could create new dependencies, such as on producers of critical raw materials. Avoiding that outcome and bolstering our security requires us to ensure diversity of supply. To that end, we must strengthen our ties with Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, developing tailor-made partnerships that allow for value-addition and job creation in our partner countries. While Europe bears an important historical responsibility for climate change, we account for just 7.5% of global emissions today, meaning that the actions we take at home can have only a limited impact on the worlds climate. The only solution to climate change is a global one. At a time when multilateralism is under growing pressure, agreement on how to meet the targets set at COP21 in Paris would not only ensure a safe future for our children, but also would show that multilateral institutions can still deliver. COP28 must shift the world into higher gear. The EU is committed to pushing for the phase-out of unabated fossil fuels and all fossil-fuel subsidies, the doubling of energy-efficiency measures, and the tripling of renewable-energy capacity worldwide. But to make this happen, we need the buy-in of the other industrialized economies, as well as China, which, despite its tremendous progress in renewables, still burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. Francis Farrell: Ukraine could still lose the war. Lets get some things straight This November has been a particularly grim one here in Ukraine. Over the past month, two media sensations in big Western magazines served as a sober wake-up call about the state of the war. First, Simon Shusters profile in TIME magazine on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskys lonely fight The Kyiv IndependentFrancis Farrell The green transition will succeed only if it is just and benefits all. The most climate-vulnerable countries have contributed little to climate change but risk bearing the brunt of it. While they must be part of the global race to net-zero emissions, they need and deserve greater support when it comes to climate adaptation and the green-energy transition. The EU is prepared to deliver such support and help our partners avoid repeating our past mistakes. The EU, its member states, and the European financial institutions are already the largest contributors of public climate finance to developing economies, having delivered 28.5 billion euros ($30 billion) in 2022. Moreover, the developed economies are finally on track to meet the goal of mobilizing $100 billion annually for climate adaptation and mitigation in the developing world. But we must think beyond this pledge, which ends in 2025. It is time to align both public and private financial flows with the goals laid out in the Paris climate agreement, and take climate finance from billions to trillions. At the same time, the international financial institutions and multilateral development banks need to be reformed, so that they can do more to support the delivery of global public goods. And the new Loss and Damage Fund needs the appropriate financial firepower. The first substantial pledges are encouraging. Here, too, China will be an indispensable partner. In an increasingly multipolar world, shaped by the return of great-power politics, concerted international cooperation might seem far-fetched. But in the face of such a global existential challenge, we must succeed. Editors Note: Copyright, Project Syndicate. This article was published by Project Syndicate on Dec. 1, 2023, and has been republished by the Kyiv Independent with permission. The opinions expressed in the op-ed section are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of the Kyiv Independent. Submit an Opinion Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. More than 80% of Gazas population 1.8 million people have been displaced since Israel began its retaliatory operations against Hamas. At least 60% of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed, with much of the northern region turned into an uninhabitable moonscape, according to the Associated Press. Even before the pause in fighting that began Nov. 24, Israel had begun to shift its attack to the south. As the fighting resumed, towns and cities in southern Gaza have been targeted for evacuation, and men, women and children already pushed out of the north may need to move again. Where can Gazans go? Israel has reportedly asked Egypt to allow temporary refugee camps in the Sinai Desert. If internally displaced Gazans become refugees in Egypt or elsewhere, they will only add to the now 75-year-old Palestinian refugee crisis, creating predictable lasting global repercussions. Both Israel and the United States have a lot to lose. Forcing Palestinians out of Gaza would stoke existing narratives about long-term Israeli annexation of the Palestinian territories. That could produce further blow back in the Middle East against Israel and by extension the United States making escalation into a regional war more likely. It would also further erode Israels longer-term prospects for peace with its neighbors, including a pending normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia . Read more: Israeli warplanes strike Gaza as cease-fire expires, with warnings of attacks in the south The chances that Palestinian refugees would return to Gaza is low. On average, only 30% of refugees return to their country a decade after hostilities end. For a conflict that is ongoing or unsettled, the rates are even lower. It is no leap to think that if refugee camps were established in the Sinai, Gazans would live out their lives there. So would their children. Palestinian history only adds to this tale of caution. The descendants of Palestinians displaced in 1948, when partition and war created the Israeli state, and in 1967, after the Six-Day War, today number 5.9 million . A third still live in 58 camps in Gaza (some of which have now been destroyed), the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Palestinian refugees in camps in the Sinai could be destabilizing in the region. Egypt already contends with Islamic State in the Sinai, and Hamas is a spinoff of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt designates a terrorist group and struggles to control. Some refugee populations in the past have become radicalized : In the 1970s, Palestinian refugees contributed to civil war in Jordan and insurgency in south Lebanon. Read more: Two strangers a Palestinian and an Israeli tell the story of a region's pain Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi, clearly cognizant of this history, sent tanks to the border with Gaza early in October, and his government has continued to limit who may cross even for medical treatment . Egypt already hosts 9 million migrants, 80% of them from war-torn Sudan, Syria, Yemen and Libya. Up to 2.3 million more would not be trivial. Sisi also says that displacement outside Gaza would be the end to hopes of a Palestinian state, and it could further inflame a global refugee crisis as well. Worldwide, the number of people forced to flee violent conflict has more than doubled in the last 10 years to 108.4 million (including refugees, internally displaced persons and others). Nearly 7 million of them live in refugee camps. In 2014 the United Nations adopted a policy to discourage the use of camps , acknowledging that people tend to be stuck in them for decades, if not generations. For example, the Zaatari camp for Syrian refugees in Jordan was established in 2012 with tents that were later replaced by now-deteriorating caravans. Zaatari today hosts 82,000 people , making it among Jordans largest cities. Read more: Opinion: How to break the cycle of aiding Gaza only to see it destroyed again Refugee camps are miserable places, essentially imprisoning millions who committed no crime. Nearly all of those registered as refugees live in abject poverty, dependent on informal work and humanitarian assistance. Half of refugee children globally are out of school. Refugees have low access to banks; they cannot save money beyond the day to day or interact with the electronic economy. Many Middle Eastern governments never signed the U.N.-sponsored 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and therefore do not grant refugees the right to legal employment. Egypt opens almost no jobs to refugees, and those held in the Sinai would encounter few opportunities anyway. Camps there would be isolated, hot and particularly terrible. None of this is meant to suggest that being displaced in Gaza is anything but dire. Nearly two-thirds of Palestinians who have fled the north are sheltering in now-overwhelmed U.N. facilities, hospitals, churches, schools and other public buildings, with the remainder living with host families. Humanitarian aid has trickled in in larger amounts since the cease-fire and the hostage exchange began, but food, shelter and medical care are woefully inadequate, with winter approaching. None of the options for protecting Gazas civilians is good or without grim trade-offs. Even when combat ends permanently, returning civilians to the evacuated communities will be a grinding endeavor. It will require not just a massive cleanup but the slow and dangerous removal of unexploded ordnance and the rebuilding of all the infrastructure electricity, water, sewage, schools, homes, hospitals to support a population nearly the size of Houston. It could take decades. The least bad of all the bad options? Keep displaced Gazans in Gaza, providing protection and humanitarian assistance where they are. That will at least improve their chances of remaining in their homeland, contributing to the rebuilding of Gaza and participating in a potential future Palestinian state a vision that President Biden said remains U.S. policy and that has been re-energized since the beginning of this conflict. The alternative may seem like a good short-term solution, but Gazan refugee camps in Egypt or elsewhere could only deepen the long-lasting, generational devastation of war. Shelly Culbertson is an expert on forced displacement and the director of the Infrastructure, Immigration, and Security Operations Program at the Homeland Security Research Division of the Rand Corp. If its in the news right now, the L.A. Times Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban appears determined to derail the decision to open accession negotiations with Ukraine to the European Union, calling it "poorly prepared" on X (Twitter) on Dec. 3. "There is no place for it on the agenda," the prime minister wrote. Orban skoken against Ukraine's accession talks since the European Commission gave the green light to the start of membership negotiations in November. Read also: The EU leaders are to decide on the negotiation plan at the Brussels summit on Dec. 14-15, if Orban does not derail the process. 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 You are here: World Flash Major General Vladimir Zavadsky, deputy commander of Russia's 14th Army Corps of the Northern Fleet, has died on duty in the special military operation zone, Governor of Russia's Voronezh region Alexander Gusev confirmed Monday. In a Telegram post, Gusev said the major general had died "at a combat post in the special operation zone," and "chosen his calling as a defender of the Fatherland and was faithful to it until the end." According to the governor, Zavadsky had served as commander of the fourth Guards Kantemirovskaya Tank Division until August 2021. A Palestinian college student who was shot in Vermont over Thanksgiving weekend is paralyzed from the chest down after the attack and may never walk again, his family said. Three 20-year-old students were walking in Burlington, Vermont, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving when they were approached by a white man. Police allege Jason Eaton, 48, approached the trio as they were speaking in a mix of English and Arabic, didnt say anything, and then pulled out a handgun before opening fire. Eaton is being held without bail and police are investigating the shooting to determine if it was a hate crime. Elizabeth Price, the mother of one of the students, Hisham Awartani, told NBC News on Sunday he was shot in the spine and that he may never be able to walk again. We are thankful that all three will survive this attack, and Hishams friends are expected to make a full recovery, a GoFundMe started by his friends and family reads. For Hisham, however, one of the bullets that struck him is lodged in his spine and has left him paralyzed from the chest down. He has demonstrated remarkable courage, resilience and fortitude even a sense of humor even as the reality of his paralysis sets in. Fom the left, Tahseen Ali Ahmad, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Hisham Awartani, stand together for a photograph. Fom the left, Tahseen Ali Ahmad, Kinnan Abdalhamid, and Hisham Awartani, stand together for a photograph. Price told NBC her son will go into intensive rehabilitation later this week and his family hopes that will help with his prognosis. She said he had feeling in his toes but wasnt able to move them. The two other students, Tahseen Ali Ahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid, were also treated at the hospital for their injuries. Price told the Guardian the trio had comforted each other after the attack. I would say that they are brothers, she told the publication. And when they got shot, the hospital very kindly put all of them in one ICU room, and I think that was very instrumental in helping them to deal with the trauma of the experience. Tamara Tamimi and her son, Kinnan Abdalhamid, 20, speak about the Nov. 25, 2023, shooting that injured Kinnan and his two friends, an attack being investigated as a possible hate crime, during an interview on Dec. 1, 2023, in Burlington, Vermont. Tamara Tamimi and her son, Kinnan Abdalhamid, 20, speak about the Nov. 25, 2023, shooting that injured Kinnan and his two friends, an attack being investigated as a possible hate crime, during an interview on Dec. 1, 2023, in Burlington, Vermont. The shooting comes amid the war between Israel and Hamas and a surge in both antisemitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric around the globe. Awartani said the shooting was emblematic of the broader conflict in a statement after the attack, which was read aloud to students at a vigil at Brown University, where has been studying. I am but one casualty in this much wider conflict, he said in the statement. Had I been shot in the West Bank where I grew up, the medical services which saved my life here would likely have been withheld by the Israeli army. The soldier who would have shot me would go home and never be convicted. This is why when you send your wishes and later, candles for me today, your mind should not just be focused on me as an individual, but rather as a proud member of the people being oppressed. Related... One of the three Palestinian American students shot in Burlington, Vermont last week is paralyzed, but is still hoping to start his upcoming college semester on time, his family announced in a fundraising statement. Hisham Awartanis family said he is paralyzed from the chest down after he and his two friends, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Ali Ahmad, were shot while walking in Burlington late last month. The three men, all 20 years old and of Palestinian descent, were in Burlington to visit one of the victims families for the Thanksgiving holiday. Two of the men wore keffiyehs when the shooting occurred, Burlington police said last month. We are thankful that all three will survive this attack, and Hishams friends are expected to make a full recovery, Awartanis family wrote in a GoFund Me post. For Hisham, however, one of the bullets that struck him is lodged in his spine and has left him paralyzed from the chest down. The fundraiser for Awartani raised over $950,000 as of Monday through an estimated 13,600 separate donations. His family said the money will go towards the costs related to his recovery, including for rehabilitation, adaptive living needs and travel. Awartani told his college professors he is determined to start the next semester on time, his family said. Awartani attends Brown University where he is pursuing a dual degree in math and archaeology. Hell [Awartani] change the world though his sprint, his mind and his compassion for those much more vulnerable than himself, especially the thousands of dead in Gaza and many more struggling to survive the devastating humanitarian crisis unfolding there, Awartanis family wrote in a statement. Abdalhamid, one of the other victims, was released last week from the hospital. It was not immediately clear if Ahmad, the third victim, has been released. Abdalhamid and Ahmad are students at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and Trinity College respectively. Jason Eaton, who was arrested a day after the shooting, pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted second-degree murder on Monday. The 48-year-old was held without bail ahead of his next court appearance. Attorney General Merrick Garland said last week the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, along with the FBI, are investigating the shooting as a possible hate crime. In an interview with The New York Times last week, Abdalhamid said the incident is very hard to grapple with, and made him question his sense of security and safety in America. In the West Bank, were not safe because of the occupation, and as a Palestinian American, Im not safe in America because of people like this that might come out, Abdalhamid told The Times. The shooting further fueled fears on U.S. campuses, which have seen tensions increase amidst Israels war with Hamas, which began in October after the militant groups Oct. 7 attack that left 1,200 people dead in Israel. More than 15,800 people have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Hamas-ruled Health Ministry in Gaza. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. Tian Tian will return to China after attempts to produce a cub were unsuccessful - Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images Two giant pandas who have lived in the UK for the past 12 years will travel in first-class accommodation on their return to China, according to the chief executive of Edinburgh Zoo. Yang Guang and Tian Tian were loaded onto a lorry in separate crates on Monday as they left the Scottish capital on a specially chartered plane bound for Sichuan, China. David Field, the chief executive of Edinburgh Zoo, said the animals had learned to sleep and eat in the metal structures where they will be kept for the 13-hour flight. Describing the crates as first-class bedroom accommodation, Mr Field said it was likely that the pandas would sleep for the majority of the journey barring the occasional snacking on the odd bit of bamboo. Asked how the pandas would cope on the plane, Mr Field told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: They are in comfortable, warm, low-level light surroundings and they are just going to sleep for most of the time as we all do in first class. Bamboo being loaded onto the cargo plane at Edinburgh Airport as giant pandas Yang Guang and Tian Tian begin their journey back to China - Jane Barlow/PA Rab Clark, Edinburgh Zoos blacksmith, built the crates with sliding padlock doors, urine trays and removable screens so keepers can monitor the animals during the flight. Four passengers will board the plane at Edinburgh airport: an Edinburgh Zoo keeper, a Royal Zoological Society of Scotland veterinarian, a Chinese keeper and an official with China Southern Airlines will sit behind the pilot and co-pilot. Responsibility for the pandas welfare will transfer from the UK to China in a handover of keys at the halfway stage of the flight, according to Darren McGarry, from Edinburgh Zoo. Michael Livingstone, a senior animal keeper at Edinburgh Zoo, will be among those accompanying Yang Guang and Tian Tian on their return to China. Describing how looking after the pandas had been the highlight of his career, Mr Livingstone said the handover marked a sad and emotional time for him and his colleagues. The pandas inside metal crates being loaded onto a cargo plane - Jane Barlow/PA He said: Theyre very different to look after, as a team we have looked after many different species of bear and we were fairly confident we knew what kind of hurdles we might need to cross and jump over for looking after pandas, and when they arrived it was completely different to what we thought. They are a very sensitive, very specialised species so we very quickly learned all the different things we needed to do with them or around them. Yang Guang and Tian Tian arrived at Edinburgh Zoo in 2011 as part of a 10-year agreement between the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and the China Wildlife Conservation Association. Following a two-year extension, the animals will return to China after attempts to produce a cub from Tian Tian were unsuccessful. 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. External financing for Ukraine has fallen short of the countrys end-of-year needs, announced the parliamentary chairman of the taxation committee, Danylo Hetmantsev, in a Telegram post on Dec. 2. Hetmantsev noted that as 2023 comes to a close, Ukraine had received approximately $37.43 billion of external financing in the current fiscal year, including an inflow of about $2 billion in November. However, initial estimates for necessary funding for the government placed Ukraines needs at $42.3 billion. Following budget adjustments in October, this figure rose to approximately $44.5 billion, the MP explained. The National Bank of Ukraine had assessed the total need at around $45 billion, averaging $3.7 billion per month. However, with 11 months' results now available, actual receipts amount to $3.2 billion. With one month remaining in the fiscal year, efforts are underway to maximize external financial assistance. Read also: Hetmantsev noted that while Ukraine maintained a lead or adhered to the external aid schedule for the majority of the year, the pace of acquisitions tapered towards its end. He also noted that the December figures are poised to surpass November's, as the anticipated grant support from the United States and the upcoming tranche from the International Monetary Fund are expected in the last months of the year. The MP emphasized that December would be pivotal for securing external financing for the next year. To cover potential gaps in December, he advised the government to intensify the placement of government bonds and strengthen liquidity management in the unified treasury account. Hetmantsev concluded by stating that the committee continues to work on internal revenue plans and awaits positive developments from Washington and Brussels. 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 Following the results of the daily meeting with his Staff, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that partners had supplied scarce missiles for existing air defence systems and new modern anti-aircraft systems. Source: Zelenskyy on social media Quote: "We continue to implement important defence agreements with our partners. We have received both scarce missiles for existing air defence systems and new, modern anti-aircraft systems. I am grateful to our friends." Details: Zelenskyy said that Ukraine is increasing its own weapons production. "For the first time, we have reached the figure of six Bohdana self-propelled howitzers per month, and we already see how to increase it further," the president added. In terms of the grain corridor, Ukraine has exceeded the mark of 7 million tonnes of cargo shipped from Ukrainian ports. Zelenskyy received intelligence reports and reports from the front line. Kherson Oblast Military Administration and Kherson City Military Administration are overcoming the consequences of another barbaric attack and helping those who were injured. Zelenskyy added that the Defence Forces are implementing a plan to make the Russians drop the idea of terrorising the city. Read more on the topic: Bohdana's first battle. How a Ukrainian Self-Propelled Howitzer forced the Russians to make a "gesture of goodwill" at Zmiinyi Island Support UP or become our patron! Pasco will charge developers a higher fee if theyre unable to transfer existing water rights over to the city for their new construction projects. The city council voted 5-2 last week to increase its water rights acquisition fee by more than 140%. Those extra dollars will go directly to a fund the city uses to buy water rights at market rate that the developers need. Water sources in Washington belong to the public and cant be owned by any individual or group, according to the Washington Department of Ecology. Water rights allow a person or group the use of water for a specific time, place and purpose. For many years, the city of Pasco had been charging developers an acquisition fee of $1,725 per acre foot of needed water rights, or about a half-penny per gallon, if they were unable to sell or lease their water to the city. But beginning this week, the city will charge them a market rate of $4,150 per acre foot, or about 1.3 pennies per gallon. A sign on Glade Road North displays the population to drivers traveling south into the Pasco city limits from rural Franklin County. The vote also included a decision to place a 50% surcharge fee on developers or property owners who relinquished their water rights within the past 10 years and were asking the city to supply water rights for new buildings. The change will increase the citys ability to continue buying market-rate water rights for future development. City staff say Pasco does not have enough water rights remaining to serve all of the new developments and projects currently in line for review and approval. The city currently leases or owns about 18,883 acre feet in water rights about 6.2 billion gallons of potable water drawn from the Columbia River and groundwater. The city used about 84% of that last year and will need to purchase more to meet expected growth. WAs fastest growing city Pasco is among the fastest growing cities in Washington. Over the next 20 years, the citys population will increase by 60,000, and the city needs to add 23,000 housing units just to keep up. At the moment, there are currently more than 2,000 homes being reviewed by the city for development. Construction worker build new homes in a new housing development on the southeast corner of the intersection of Road 68 and Argent Street in west Pasco. The market value of water rights has increased significantly in recent years and exceeded the citys previous water rights acquisition fee. The value has actually increased so much that developers are choosing to pay the citys acquisition fee and request water service from the city, then sell their existing water rights at a higher price on the market. That just doesnt seem fair to the city. Wed rather have the water rights than the fee paid, said Steve Worley, Pascos public works director. That loophole doesnt just impact the city. Its ultimately the water customers who are left paying the higher price tag for the city to buy new water rights, Worley said. The more water rights we have to purchase, the more it impacts the rate that their customers have to pay, he said. Construction crews work on building a new 3.5 million gallon 165-foot tall elevated skirted tank water reservoir off Burns Road near Road 90 in west Pasco. The new water storage project being built to help meet increasing demand of new business and housing developments. The cost of the project is about $17 million, said project manager Brian Cartwright. In another trend, property owners also are showing more interest in leasing their water rights to the city than outright selling them. The lease approach puts cities like Pasco in a position of owning nothing after making 20 years of lease payments, which does not seem to be a prudent course of action, read agenda documents drafted by staff for the council. The ordinance to increase the fee was approved by Mayor Blanche Barajas, Mayor Pro Tem Irving Brown Sr. and Council members Joseph Campos, Melissa Blasdel and Zahra Roach. Councilmen Pete Serrano and David Milne voted against the ordinance. Serrano and Milne supported delaying the vote until after the new year to garner more feedback from developers and new city council members. City staff hosted a meeting with developers on Oct. 23 to discuss the revisions, but some felt one meeting wasnt enough to flesh out the issue. A man was arrested after police said he hijacked a public transit bus, then took it on a joyride that ended outside Georgias Stone Mountain Park. Officers were called around 5 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 3, about a person accused of stealing a Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority bus in DeKalb County, WSB-TV reported, citing MARTA police. Officials said the man, 28, boarded the bus without paying and threatened the driver when he was told he couldnt ride, Sgt. Ron Philistin told WANF. Another passenger paid his fare, but the man became disorderly and continued to hurl threats at the driver. Fearing for his safety, the driver pulled over at a gas station and got off the bus, police said. The suspect followed him and started making more threats, Philistin told WSB Radio. The operator continued to the gas station; and once he got inside, he saw the suspect boarding the bus and closing the door. The man took off, taking the bus on a 20-minute drive, police told the station. At one point, authorities said he dropped another passenger off at a Waffle House. The man was eventually arrested at Stone Mountain Park and charged with hijacking, a police spokesperson told WXIA. McClatchy News reached out to MARTA police on Dec. 4 and was awaiting a response. Woman pulls over to check GPS and is forced out of car by armed men, Texas cops say High school football coach was lured to his death in carjacking scheme, feds say Stolen excavator was driven through 2 buildings, including Walmart, Florida cops say SIMI VALLEY, Calif. Pentagon leaders warned Congress that without a full-year budget, key programs, from uncrewed aircraft to hypersonics, could hit lengthy delays and risk Americas standing in what the Defense Department sees as a technological race with China. We cannot waste time, said Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall in a panel discussion at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum here. In the last two years, the Air Force has introduced a set of goals meant to outcompete Chinas military among them systems like the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, uncrewed planes meant to fight alongside F-35s later this decade. The CCA itself is an important platform, Kendall said, but more important is the larger goal it represents: finding faster and cheaper systems. The loss of time just from when we started this concept, when we came up with the idea to today, is two years, he said. If we dont get a 24 budget, we may lose another year. Sitting next to Kendall on the panel, Heidi Shyu, head of research and engineering in the Pentagon, said the inconsistent funding has slowed the testing of hypersonics, another key technology. The Defense Departments Test Resource Management Center requested more funding for these efforts in FY24, but it cant move forward without an appropriation. Shyu said her office will send Congress later this month a list of systems with state-level data of systems in her portfolio that would be affected by a yearlong continuing resolution, or CR. China spends an enormous amount of money on test assets, Shyu told reporters. This is where we have [a] shortfall. The U.S. government has been funded through CRs for the past two months, after a last-minute deal in Congress. These bills freeze spending at last years levels and halt new starts and new money. The current short-term bill has a staggered expiration date, ending in mid-January and early February. Because the government so often fails to pass funding bills on time, the Pentagon plans its budget knowing it may not be able to start new contracts in the first quarter. For that reason, Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told Defense News, the effects of these last two CRs have been limited. That changes if there isnt a spending deal by January or beyond, he said. In that case, Bush added, much of the Armys plans for next year will be delayed. I have dozens of programs that are hitting important new milestones in FY24 in the areas of air defense, long-range strike, intel systems, TITAN, Bush said, referring to the Armys new targeting system planned for later this decade. Weve got a wide range of things that are right in the middle of either finishing development or going into production. Adding to the urgency is part of a bill passed earlier this year to raise the debt ceiling: If all 12 of Congress appropriations bills arent passed before January, there will be a 1% cut in all government spending. That provision has made it much harder for Pentagon employees to plan for future spending levels, said the Defense Departments top acquisition official, Bill LaPlante. What we told everybody as they were building their budget [was] ... remember, this is not like previous years, LaPlante said in a gaggle with reporters. Theres going to be some hard choices. Detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department were investigating a shooting Sunday in downtown L.A. that sent a person to the hospital, authorities confirmed to KTLA. Police responded to reports of the shooting at 16th and San Pedro streets at around 2:20 p.m., LAPD said. At the scene, officers located one victim suffering from a gunshot wound. Medical personnel with the Los Angeles Fire Department responded and took the person to the hospital in unknown condition. LAPD on the scene of a shooting in downtown L.A. on Dec. 3, 2023. (KTLA) LAPD on the scene of a shooting in downtown L.A. on Dec. 3, 2023. (KTLA) Video of the scene shows what appears to be a homeless encampment in the area, with tents lining the sidewalk and RVs parked at the curb just across the street. L.A. sheriffs deputy busted for sexual activity with female inmate Details are limited and its unclear what led to the shooting. Authorities did not provide any information on the shooting victim, nor did they whether are searching for anyone in connection with the incident. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KTLA. WARSAW, Poland Polands outgoing National Defence Minister Mariusz Baszczak has signed what is likely the last major weapon acquisition contract inked before the nations forthcoming change in government, ordering some 152 self-propelled howitzers from South Koreas Hanwha Defense. Under the deal, Polands Army will receive six K9A1 and 146 K9PL howitzers in the years 2025 to 2027. The contract has a net value of some $2.6 billion, the Polish Armed Forces said in a statement. The deal also includes a training and logistics package, and the delivery of a substantial stockpile of 155mm ammunition, comprising several tens of thousands of units, the statement said. To enable the future production of K9PL howitzers in Poland, Hanwha Defense has signed an agreement with the countrys state-run defense group PGZ. Last October, Polands opposition won the countrys general election. Since then, a coalition of center-right, liberal and left-wing parties has taken over control in the parliament. A new Cabinet is expected to be sworn in by the end of the year, replacing rule by the right-wing Law and Justice party that implemented an unprecedented spending spree on defense gear in the aftermath of Russias invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, some politicians from the parties that are readying to form the new government are criticizing the ministrys latest move. Pawe Bejda, a lawmaker for the Polish Peoples Party, stated the acquisition could be detrimental to the domestic production of the Krab, a self-propelled howitzer manufactured by PGZ. To make the Krabs chassis, PGZs subsidiary Huta Stalowa Wola purchased a license for the technology used in the chassis of the K9 Thunder howitzer from Hanwha Defense. All the deals whose implementation will be the responsibility of the new government should be signed by that government, Bejda said in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Update 12/4, 11 a.m. The Oklahoma City Police Department says the shooting was a result of an argument between 42-year-old Ralph Jones and one of the victims. Mugshot of Ralph Jones Jones is currently in the Oklahoma County Detention Center on a $50,000 bond for Assault and Battery with Deadly Weapon, Maiming and Carry or Possess Firearm by Convicted Felon. Original Story OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) One person was taken into custody following a shooting in SW Oklahoma City Sunday afternoon. It happened around 4:30 p.m. Sunday at a home on Southwest 39th and Western. Police told News 4 one person was found at the home and another victim showed up at an area hospital. The victim found inside the home was in critical condition while the second victim was considered stable. Police were able to make an arrest in the shooting shortly after the incident took place but did not provide details into what led to the shooting. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KFOR.com Oklahoma City. A wine store employee in Dedham was allegedly assaulted by a group in front of the store Sunday night. Dedham Police Chief Michael J. DEntremont told Boston 25 that a group of 6-8 individuals attacked an employee of Total Wine on Route 1 as they were leaving the building. The male victim was evaluated by an ambulance but refused to be transported to a hospital. Police say the victims phone was taken during the encounter. DEntremont says the group may have been refused service on Saturday. At least one knife was displayed during the incident, DEntremont said. The incident occurred outside and nothing was taken from inside the store, police say. An investigation is active and ongoing. Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW Nations urged to boost common development 08:43, December 04, 2023 By Zheng Caixiong ( Chinadaily.com.cn President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter on Saturday to the 2023 Understanding China Conference (Guangzhou), which was held in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, over the weekend. Li Shulei, head of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, read out the congratulatory letter at the event's opening ceremony on Saturday. "Today, confronted with a weak global economic recovery and escalating geopolitical conflicts, humanity has once again come to a crossroads in history. It is all the more important that countries work together to meet various global challenges, promote common development and improve the well-being of humanity," Xi said in the letter. "To understand China, the key lies in understanding Chinese modernization. China is advancing the noble cause of building a great country and national rejuvenation on all fronts through a Chinese path to modernization, and promoting the building of a community with a shared future for mankind," he said. "China's future is closely linked with the future of the entire humanity." Xi said that China is pursuing high-quality development through high-standard opening-up, and the country will continue to foster a market-oriented, world-class business environment underpinned by a sound legal framework, and steadily expand institutional opening-up with regard to rules, regulations, management and standards. China is committed to broadening the convergence of interests with other countries, and will continue to provide the world with new growth momentum and opportunities through its own development, Xi said. "China looks forward to working hand in hand with the rest of the world to realize global modernization that features peaceful development, mutually beneficial cooperation and prosperity for all," he said. Xi expressed his hope that participants to the conference will make their contributions to the exchanges and cooperation between China and the world, to common development and prosperity, and to building a community with a shared future for mankind. Huang Kunming, secretary of the CPC Guangdong Provincial Committee and a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, addressed the conference's opening ceremony. The conference was co-hosted by the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy, the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs and the Guangdong provincial government. More than 600 participants, including officials, experts, entrepreneurs and diplomats, from over 30 countries and regions attended the event, which ended on Sunday. Message lauded The participants said that Xi's congratulatory letter scientifically analyzed the general trend of the world today, and China has acted as a responsible major country and made significant contributions to resolving common problems and improving the well-being of humanity. They called on all countries to expand their convergence of interests and lay a solid foundation for the construction of a community with a shared future for mankind. The participants highly praised the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative and called on countries involved in the BRI to strengthen cooperation, in order to deal with global crises and common issues. They also discussed and exchanged views on various important issues, including the Chinese path to modernization, China's high-quality development and high-level opening-up, as well as the construction of a world-class Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Mulatu Teshome, former president of Ethiopia, said the joint building of the BRI has now become an international practice, going from concept to action and from vision to reality in the past decade. The joint building of the BRI has brought tangible benefits to relevant countries, including Ethiopia, he said in his keynote speech. In Africa, the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway and the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway have successively begun operation, becoming important channels to promote the development of East Africa and the whole continent, Teshome said. The joint building of the BRI has also brought remarkable and profound changes to the world over the past decade, and has become a landmark event in the history of human social development, he added. Wolfgang Schussel, former chancellor of Austria, said that faced with global changes and challenges, no country and region can stand alone. "We all live on the same planet and are interconnected, and must seek cooperation from neighbors and partners." The trade volumes between China and the United States, China and Europe, and the US and Europe are on the rise, Schussel said, adding that all countries must cooperate with one another, as globalization is the key to getting out of poverty and moving toward prosperity, and no one can stay out of it. Zheng Bijian, founding chairman of the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy, said the conference has been committed to promoting the understanding of China, the world and the unprecedented global changes from the beginning. "If the conference can help the world understand China and the Communist Party of China more effectively, and at the same time, help China understand the world and its unprecedented changes more effectively, then the 'understanding deficit' will be mitigated through the conference after enduring efforts," Zheng said. "And it will be a blessing for China and the entire world when it is achieved." The conference, which was first held in 2013, has become an important international platform for exchanges between China and the rest of the world. Themed "China's New Endeavors Amid Unprecedented Global Changes Expanding the Convergence of Interests and Building a Community of Shared Future", this year's event included parallel seminars, thematic conferences, luncheon speeches and closed-door seminars. Xinhua contributed to this story. (Web editor: Tian Yi, Liang Jun) PRINCE GEORGES COUNTY, Md. (DC News Now) The Prince Georges County Police Department said theres a free online system that will help you keep your items safe as well as track them if they go missing. Proposed crime bill targets organized retail theft in DC ReportIt allows users to store serial numbers, item descriptions, pictures, and scans of receipts to keep a safe, online record of valuable property, making it easier for police to recover your items. As the holidays soon approach, PGPD is encouraging its residents to make use of the service. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to DC News Now | Washington, DC. Prince Harrys three-day High Court case against the Home Office over UK security arrangements for his family begins tomorrow, as a royal race row continues to rumble on. The Duke of Sussex is challenging the February 2020 decision of the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (Ravec), governed by the Home Office, when it ruled that Prince Harry and his family would not be granted the same degree of protection when visiting the UK. The Ravec decision was announced after Prince Harry and wife Meghan stepped down as senior members of the royal family before relocating to the United States. Harry subsequently won the right to partially challenge the High Courts decision not to grant him automatic police protection last July, with lawyers for the duke arguing the new security arrangements were invalid due to procedural unfairness. At the hearing last July, counsel for the duke argued that he wasnt aware that the royal household was involved in Ravecs decision to deny him police protection, after it emerged that the late Queens private secretary Sir Edward Young and the Earl of Rosalyn, the master of then-Prince Charless household, were on the Ravec committee. Attorneys for Prince Harry claimed Sir Edward should not have been part of the Ravec verdict considering there were significant tensions between them. Harrys application to bring a second challenge against the UK government over the Home Offices decision to refuse his request to pay privately for police protection was refused in a ruling this May. The hearing comes on the heels of a royal scandal concerning the Sussexes and two senior members of the royal family, with royal reporter Omid Scobies new book Endgame at the heart of the controversy. Buckingham Palace is said to be considering all options including legal action, after the Dutch version of Scobies book named King Charles and Catherine, Princess of Wales, as the royals who speculated about the colour of Prince Harry and Meghans firstborn baby while the duchess was pregnant. The claim was first sensationally made by the duchess, during a 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, when she alleged there were concerns and conversations within the palace about how dark Prince Archies skin might be. Prince Harry later denied Meghan was accusing the royal family of racism. However, the row was reignited last month after an alleged translation error led to Charles and Catherines names being included in the Dutch version of Endgame. While Scobie, 42, denied ever writing any version which included the royalss names, it has now been revealed in a report by The Sunday Times that the authors UK agent United Travel Agency (UTA), sent the books Dutch publishers an early draft which named Charles and Catherine as the senior members in connection with the Sussexess allegations. The Independent has contacted UTA and Scobie for comment. Neither the couple nor Buckingham Palace have publicly addressed the contents of Scobies book. Russian President Vladimir Putin should "assess the consequences" of attending the G20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro in November 2024, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva warned on Dec. 4. The Brazilian president was seemingly suggesting that Putin could be arrested under the outstanding warrant from the International Criminal Court. If Putin comes to the G20 meeting in Brazil, he knows what could happen, Lula said during a press conference in Berlin with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, quoted by Brazilian news outlet Terra. Read also: Putins speech at virtual G20 full of false narratives, event ignored by Biden and Xi Brazil has ratified the Rome Statute and is obliged to enforce warrants issued by the ICC. On March 17, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin on suspicion of committing war crimes related to the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. Read also: Russian Orthodox Church forces parishioners to pray to Saint Putin on giant screen - video Putin now faces arrest in 123 countries that have ratified the Rome Statute. 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 Russian dictator Vladimir Putin will visit the UAE and Saudi Arabia this week, where he will hold talks. Source: Russian propaganda agency RIA Novosti with reference to Putin's aide Yuriy Ushakov Details: Ushakov said that this will be a "working visit", which involves talks, first of all, with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Before that, Putin will fly to the Emirates with another "working visit". Background: After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin visited the neighbouring countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as Iran and China. The trip to China was Putin's second trip abroad since the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued a warrant for his arrest in March. Support UP or become our patron! I proudly stand with Israel as an American, as a father, and as a member of Congress. On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists launched an unprecedented and unprovoked surprise attack by land, air, and sea against our closest ally in the Middle East, the sovereign and democratic nation of Israel. The savagery and cruelty with which the jihadists carried out the attack cannot be overstated. Within hours, Hamas had crossed the border from Gaza into Israeli kibbutzes, homes, businesses, concert venues, and even schools to slaughter over 1,200 innocent civilians, kidnap more than 230 people, rape women, execute parents in front of their children, pull families from their vehicles and burn them alive, and behead victims including babies. This was ISIS on steroids; war crimes against the Jewish people not seen since the Holocaust. Hamas murderous rampage was an affront to our values and to our shared humanity. This is a war of good versus evil, right versus wrong, and I stand with Israel. Those who question Israels response to enter Gaza, destroy the terrorist organization Hamas and bring back their kidnapped citizens should ask, what would we do if 3,500 terrorists poured into our country and massacred our fellow Americans? All wars are horrific and lead to terrible tragedies and death. In this case, both innocent Israelis and Palestinians are suffering and dying. But make no mistake, this war is entirely Hamas fault. Hamas spent the past 16 years deliberately embedding itself among the Palestinian people outrageously using them as human shields. It used the al-Shifa Hospital as its command and control center. It stores weaponry in mosques, schools, and private homes. It has built a massive terrorist tunnel network snaking through civilian neighborhoods. All of these actions are war crimes. Israel, in contrast, has continued to provide innocent Palestinians with humanitarian assistance and uphold the laws of armed conflict even as it fights an enemy who deliberately breaks them. Moral clarity is required in this moment. This war started when Hamas broke a ceasefire and attacked Israel. It was Hamas, and its patron Iran, who brought this war on Israel and on the people of Gaza. As the Representative of Kentuckys Sixth Congressional District, I will continue to not only fight for what is right, but fight for the will of my constituents as a whole. In a recent poll of our district, 74% of those surveyed said that they did not support a ceasefire in this conflict until Hamas is destroyed and all of the hostages in Gaza are freed. I took this poll to heart, and it reaffirmed what I already knew to be true: Israel has an unqualified right to defend itself against terrorists and on this I will not waiver, no matter how militant the minority opposition may be. Those who wish to end this conflict peacefully should be leading the call for Hamas to disarm, surrender, and release all the hostages. Until that unlikely scenario happens, I will stand by our ally and the people of Israel, as they fight against the genocidal forces of evil on their borders just as we would. Andy Barr has represented Kentuckys 6th Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives since 2013 and serves on the Foreign Affairs Committee, Financial Services Committee, and the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. The Central Louisiana Regional Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon cutting for Ritchie Real Estate new office in Pineville at 919 Highway 28 East and one for their next door neighbor Khmericano Coffee. The Central Louisiana Regional Chamber of Commerce held a ribbon cutting for Ritchie Real Estate celebrate the opening of their new Pineville branch at 3919 Highway 28 East and also held one for their next door neighbor, Khmericano Coffee. "This is a secondary branch location for Ritchie Real Estate, said Matt Ritchie, owner of the real estate brokerage in Alexandria. Its great to see a Pineville office for Ritchie Real Estate. This is our 20th year in business in Central Louisiana. The office will be staffed by Jennifer Byrd who also lives closer to the Pineville location than the Alexandria location so it made sense for her to have an office here, said Ritchie. Jennifer Byrd, who has been with us for four years, is the number one agent in the market. She just keeps breaking records and helping folks and families move and buy and sell and has just done a phenomenal job and this is the result of it, said Ritchie. To help celebrate the opening of the new office and Khmericano Coffee, Byrd invited high school students from some local schools for two reasons. The first one was because she invited a Louisiana Tech recruiter and her friend Sam Speed to talk to them about the school. She and her husband Warren Byrd are both La. Tech graduates, and the school was a big part of their journey. I always try to spread the La. Tech love, said Byrd who majored in business. The second reason was because she wanted the students to see entrepreneurship at work so they can appreciate the monumental risk that business owners, like Khmerican Coffee owners Kristen and Bebe Leang, take just to serve them a cup of coffee. Khmericano Coffee, owned by Kristen and Bebe Leang, has been open since June and recently expanded their shop to include a seating area, study room and playroom. The Leangs started Khmericano Coffee as a coffee truck that was a converted horse trailer before making their dream of opening a brick-and-mortar a reality. They are the most incredible people that you will ever meet. They have such a passion for life, for God, and for serving other people and, just to give you a spirit of a wonderful joy over a cup of coffee, said Carlina Rika, a customer and friend. And every time you come in, you can't meet them without a beautiful smile, and they will go out of their way just to make you feel welcome. I keep coming back and coming back not for business just, but because I love them as a couple. Dupree told them that it was a great accomplishment in going from a food truck to a standing location. We have another success story just up the road with Jim Deggys. He started as a food truck in a vehicle that a military vehicle that he converted for that purpose and that the demand for that became such that he had to move into a brick-and-mortar location. Same thing here. So I'm glad that two very successful food truck entrepreneurs now call Pineville home, said Dupree. Id like to mention that were in Pineville a lot lately and what a great thing that is. Theres so much happening. And I think were going to keep cutting ribbons on this side of the river, said Chamber president Deborah Randolph. This article originally appeared on Alexandria Town Talk: Ritchie Real Estate, Khmericano Coffee celebrate Pineville openings China playing its part by ensuring its steps to address climate challenge are meaningful: China Daily editorial Chinadaily.com.cn) 08:46, December 04, 2023 A photographer takes photos beside a logo of COP28 in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, Nov 29, 2023. [Photo/Xinhua] This year has been the hottest on record. The latest in a sweltering series of record-breaking years in which too many climate-related disasters have been witnessed. UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell was not crying wolf when he lamented in Dubai at COP28 that the world is "taking baby steps" and making progress "far too slowly" to curb the cataclysm-heralding rise in the global temperature. "We are paying with people's lives and livelihoods," he warned. Stiell urged those attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place in the United Arab Emirates from Nov 30 until Dec 12 to rise to the challenge and he called on governments to "teach climate action to run". That requires ramped-up nationally determined contributions and the willingness to ensure that they are more than just lip service to meaningful action, as well as the honoring of financing pledges and greater resolve to shrink the climate action funding gap. This photo taken on Nov 29, 2023 shows the China Pavilion of COP28 in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. [Photo/Xinhua] China's efforts in this regard have been widely recognized and it is regarded as a crucial agent and catalyst of the change required to realize the essential green transition. This is because the country has moved decidedly and effectively with the green transition in mind. By 2022, the carbon dioxide released in China had dropped over 51 percent from the level in 2005. Besides, the Chinese government has also arranged 20 billion yuan ($3.1 billion) in special funds to support South-South climate cooperation. Climate response is increasingly taking over from the past pursuit of fast growth as the shaper of China's modernization path, and it is a key area for cooperation between China and the developed countries as well. In his speech at the COP28, Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang highlighted three steps that are of critical significance to effectively addressing climate change: Practice multilateral cooperation, accelerate the green transition, and take actions to honor commitments that have already been made. Proceeding from common but differentiated responsibilities, Beijing has been consistent in urging developed countries to help developing nations with their climate change responses. At the same time, despite being a developing country itself, China is shouldering its responsibility as the world's second-largest economy and offering climate assistance. The COPs are the world's only multilateral decision-making forum on climate change. This year's COP, with almost the complete participation of every country, has set a record itself, witnessing the biggest participation in any COP while highlighting the sense of urgency that prevails and the widening consensus that no country can stay out of the picture as the impacts of climate change leave no country unscathed. (Web editor: Tian Yi, Liang Jun) Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet meets with He Weidong, visiting vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Dec. 4, 2023. (Photo by Ly Lay/Xinhua) PHNOM PENH, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet met with He Weidong, visiting vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission, here on Monday. During the meeting at the Peace Palace in Phnom Penh, Hun Manet said that since the establishment of their diplomatic relations 65 years ago, the ironclad friendship between Cambodia and China has developed constantly, with the two countries now enjoying a comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation. He reiterated that the new Cambodian government firmly supports the one-China policy, resolutely opposes external forces interfering in China's internal affairs, and will further carry on the bilateral traditional friendship. Hun Manet also extended his thanks to China for its timely helping hand when Cambodia was faced with difficulties, and to the Chinese military for its strong support for the modernization of the Cambodian army. He said that in recent years, the relationship between the two militaries has been continuously consolidated and developed, and expressed the hope that the practical cooperation in various fields will continue to be strengthened in the future. For his part, He Weidong said China and Cambodia have been true ironclad friends. The senior Chinese military official said the two countries have supported each other in maintaining national stability and promoting prosperity and development, and made joint efforts to defend international fairness and justice, setting an example for building a new type of international relations. He added that under the strategic guidance of the leaders of the two countries, the two militaries have sustained high-level cooperation in the fields including high-level exchange, mechanism building, joint drills and exercises, and personnel training. He said China is willing to work with Cambodia to maintain communication at various levels, strengthen overall planning, intensify multilateral collaboration, and continuously consolidate and expand practical cooperation in various fields, making greater contribution in jointly building a China-Cambodia community with a shared future in the new era. During the visit, He Weidong also met with Samdech Techo Hun Sen, president of the ruling Cambodian People's Party, and held talks with Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Tea Seiha, exchanging views on bilateral relations, military cooperation, and international issues of common interest. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet meets with He Weidong, visiting vice chairman of China's Central Military Commission, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Dec. 4, 2023. (Photo by Ly Lay/Xinhua) A Thai student (2nd L) discusses the use of mining machinery with his colleagues at the Guangxi Liugong Machinery Co., Ltd. in Liuzhou, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Oct. 26, 2023. (Xinhua/Lin Shuting) by Xinhua writers Nie Xinyu, Lin Shuting NANNING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Following teaching videos, groups of Indonesian students have been collaborating to assemble torque converters as part of their coursework at a vocational school in the city of Liuzhou, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. They began to study mechanics at the Liuzhou Vocational & Technical College in September and will further their training at Guangxi Liugong Machinery Co., Ltd. They are looking forward to prospective employment opportunities within Liugong's Indonesian subsidiary after graduation. Industrial cooperation between China and Southeast Asia has deepened in recent years. China's advancing research and technology have brought increasing demand for a diverse pool of multinational professionals, and many people from Southeast Asia seek technical training that aligns with global standards. This synergy has created a mutually beneficial scenario, breaking down national, cultural and language barriers. In 2022, Guangxi Liugong Machinery Co., Ltd. and the Liuzhou Vocational & Technical College began to collaborate with some overseas institutes to train technical talent in engineering machinery. This cooperation not only addresses the demand for skilled overseas talent among enterprises, but also contributes employment opportunities for young people in ASEAN member countries. A college-enterprise cooperation project in Thailand, for example, has successfully trained over 20 highly skilled professionals, seven of whom have completed internships at Liugong and will work at its overseas subsidiaries. Over 70 percent of the staff currently working at Liugong's overseas subsidiaries are local employees. "Our training covers everything related to our equipment, from maintenance to operations, and all necessary theories are explained clearly," said Peng Zhifeng, a technical training expert at Liugong. Peng has observed a strong eagerness to learn among his overseas students. Many workers, who had never received theoretical education despite working in car repairs for years, said they were "very moved" after participating in the training, according to Peng. He highlighted the universality of the skills the trainees learnt, noting that they are not limited to working at Liugong and can contribute their expertise to other companies. Somporn Pandam, deputy secretary general of Vocational Education Commission of Thailand's Ministry of Education, said that vocational education is of great significance to national development. Recognizing the professionalism, leadership experience and forward-thinking approach of China's vocational education, he expressed confidence that it would offer Thai students valuable language skills and career prospects. The cooperation between vocational education institutions and enterprises will make Thailand's vocational education more adaptable to global market demand, help Thailand cultivate more outstanding talent, and enhance the employment competitiveness and salaries of young Thai people, he said. PHNOM PENH, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia got 6.375 million euros (about 7 million U.S. dollars) in grants from the European Union (EU) on Monday to support the reform of the fisheries sector of the Southeast Asian country. Igor Driesmans, ambassador of the EU to Cambodia, announced the release of the grants during a meeting here with Cambodian Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Dith Tina, according to an online press statement from the EU side. The grants will be used to support key areas of the fisheries reform, such as monitoring, control and surveillance, flooded forest protection, conservation of marine fisheries, transfer of grants to community fisheries, research and food safety. Tina said the agriculture sector including fisheries and forestry are facing global challenges that continue to require strong partnership with all stakeholders to mitigate and adapt to its negative impacts and transform constraints into opportunities. As for the fisheries sector, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries is fully committed to supporting its sustainable development in both inland and marine areas, through the whole value chain for the benefit of the fishermen, aquaculture farmers and entrepreneurs, as well as consumers, the minister was cited as saying in the statement. "We are also committed to the protection and conservation of our aquatic habitats and resources," he added. Driesmans said the EU-Cambodia partnership on fisheries sector is large and strong, despite the immense challenges. TEHRAN, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Nasser Kanaani said on Monday that the country has access to its recently released 6 billion U.S. dollars deposited in Qatari banks and can use the money to meet its needs. He made the remarks at a weekly press conference in the Iranian capital Tehran, while reacting to bids by the U.S. Congress to block Iran's access to the money released by South Korea earlier this year under a prisoner swap agreement between Tehran and Washington, by accusing Iran of "playing a role in the Hamas attack on Israel." Kanaani said that within the framework of its international commitments and the indirect agreement it reached with Tehran, the U.S. government was duty-bound to honor and fulfill its obligations with regard to Iran's released assets. He also stressed that "it is unacceptable that the U.S. Congress is turning a blind eye to the crimes against the Palestinian people, putting the blame on Iran and seeking to wriggle out of its legal commitments toward the Iranian government and people." The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bipartisan measure on Thursday that would reportedly block Iran's access to the released money. Iran and the United States reached an agreement that eventually led to a prisoner swap in September, releasing five detainees from each side. As part of the agreement, Iran transferred 6-billion-dollar of its assets frozen in two South Korean banks to six Iranian accounts in two Qatari banks. While voicing support for Palestinians, Iranian officials have repeatedly rejected any involvement in the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7. SAO PAULO, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- There is a possibility that negotiations to sign the trade agreement between the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) and the European Union (EU) may fail, as a result of protectionism advocated by the Europeans, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Sunday. "If there is no agreement, be patient, it was not for lack of will. The only thing that has to be clear is that they can no longer say that it is Brazil's fault or South America's fault, but that the rich countries do not want to make an agreement," Lula said. "And we are no longer colonized, we are independent. We want to be treated only with the respect of independent countries, that we have things to sell and the things we have, have a price. What we want is a balance," he added. The president made his remarks during a press conference after his participation in the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which runs from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. In 2019, Mercosur, consisting of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, and the EU reached a comprehensive trade agreement, which is still pending after Mercosur rejected environmental clauses that the EU attached to the trade deal earlier this year. * This year marks the 60th anniversary since China began to send its first medical team to aid Algeria in 1963. Over the past six decades, China has dispatched over 30,000 medical personnel to 76 countries and regions across the world, providing medical services to nearly 300 million patients. * Statistics revealed that Chinese medical teams dispatched abroad have trained over 100,000 local medical personnel, significantly enhancing the healthcare expertise in recipient countries. * Six decades on, the determination and spirit of Chinese medical team members have been passed down through generations. At present, Chinese medical teams are still braving various diseases and sowing the seeds of health in 56 countries. CHONGQING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Over the past six decades, China has dispatched over 30,000 medical personnel to 76 countries and regions across the world, providing medical services to nearly 300 million patients. This year marks the 60th anniversary since China began to send its first medical team to aid Algeria in 1963. Since then, countless heartfelt stories about Chinese medical personnel have surfaced, showcasing their significant contributions to global public health and the well-being of people worldwide. TREATMENT Ethiopian resident Gezahegn Tilahun endured a "mysterious illness" for over two years, losing 21 kg of weight and experiencing sallow skin and eyes. He visited four hospitals without finding the cause of the pain. He was finally received by the Armed Forces Comprehensive Specialized Hospital of Ethiopia, where Chinese medical teams have been offering aid for nine years, and was diagnosed with a pancreatic tumor. Despite the hospital's lack of prior experience in such surgeries, Wang Xiaojun, leader of the 9th medical team sent to Ethiopia, collaborated with local doctors to perform an 8-hour-long lifesaving operation on Tilahun, earning recognition from Ethiopian colleagues. "My true gratitude is beyond words. The doctors have given me a brand-new life," said Tilahun. "As a mother, I was overwhelmed with fear and uncertainty. It is your calmness and professionalism that gave me hope and comfort." This was from a handwritten letter from Josephine Inapi to a Chinese medical team in Papua New Guinea for saving her newborn baby's life. In May, Inapi's less than one-month-old baby faced severe health issues. Despite treatment with antibiotics and pulmonary artery pressure-lowering medications, the baby's oxygen saturation continued to drop, posing a grave risk of multi-organ damage, and cardiac and respiratory arrest. Members of a medical team pose for a group photo before departure for Barbados to provide medical aid, in southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, Sept. 8, 2023. (Xinhua) Thanks to the collaboration between the Chinese medical team and local experts from the Port Moresby General Hospital, including the introduction of neonatal mechanical ventilation skills, the baby's vital signs returned to normal. To express her gratitude, Inapi asked for a Chinese name for her baby to commemorate the Chinese doctors. Liu Zhenqiu, the Chinese medical team leader, named the boy "Taile," which is pronounced similar to "Taylor" in English, symbolizing "safety" and "happiness" in Chinese. SHARING Apart from providing treatment for the patients, Chinese medical teams also shared their expertise and technologies with local doctors. In the same hospital where Inapi's baby stayed, a local doctor recently performed the country's first laparoscopic minimally invasive surgery under the guidance of Xian Peng, a urologist from the 12th Chinese medical team. "We should not only introduce new technologies but also make them take root here. Therefore, we carry out training for the local doctors," Xian said, adding that the Chinese medical team has organized a series of training courses for the local doctors since February this year. Statistics revealed that Chinese medical teams dispatched abroad have trained over 100,000 local medical personnel, significantly enhancing the healthcare expertise in recipient countries. China's altruistic medical assistance has garnered immense appreciation globally. On Dec. 1, a medical expert team from China dispatched to Laos was awarded a medal for their outstanding contributions to medical aid in the country. The medical team of 10 members arrived in Laos in June, said Cai Yue, the team leader, adding that they helped establish Laos' first chest pain treatment center, organized a medical academic exchange conference, and introduced advanced concepts in medical technology and management. Cai Yue, team leader of a medical expert team of the People's Liberation Army of China dispatched to Laos receives a medal awarded by the Lao People's Army, in Vientiane, Laos, on Dec. 1, 2023. (Xinhua) Statistics from China's National Health Commission indicated that China has so far initiated pair-up cooperation with 46 medical institutions in 41 countries and regions. Although the medical teams cannot stay there forever, the methods and technologies they provide continue to benefit the local people. Chinese medical teams have also introduced Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) overseas. In many countries, acupuncture has become a popular choice for patients. "The locals know little about the TCM and stay doubtful at the beginning. However, many patients become TCM fans after experiencing its curative effects," said Liu Chun, a veteran member of Chinese medical teams who has been dispatched to Kuwait three times. TCM treatments have successfully aided local patients in recovering from conditions like tinnitus and facial paralysis. Six decades on, the determination and spirit of Chinese medical team members have been passed down through generations. At present, Chinese medical teams are still braving various diseases and sowing the seeds of health in 56 countries. (Video reporters: Yang Shiyan, Wang Ping; video editors: Wu You, Mu Xuyao, Zhang Yuhong, Jia Xiaotong, Ma Ruxuan.) Artists from home and abroad gather in east China to promote exchanges Xinhua) 08:59, December 04, 2023 Tourists visit the Liangzhu Museum in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, Nov. 7, 2023. (Xinhua/Xu Yu) HANGZHOU, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- A sub-forum on artist exchanges and mutual learning was held as a sideline activity of the Liangzhu Forum in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, from Friday to Saturday. Approximately 150 artists from over 80 countries attended the two-day sub-forum, which consisted of two parts: speeches and dialogues. During the event, Ecuadorian artist Gonzalo Hernan Illescas Coronel said that using art as a medium to promote exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations requires the establishment of a continuous exchange of cultures and ideas. Moreau epouse Kouassi Mathilde, an artist from Cote d'Ivoire who uses Chinese calligraphy in her work, also shared her own views on the topic during the sub-forum. Culture and art know no national boundaries and belong to people all over the world, and language will never become a barrier to our communication, she said. With the theme of cultural exchanges and mutual learning in the eyes of Chinese and foreign artists, the event was co-hosted by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Zhejiang provincial government and the China International Culture Association. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) The Philippines has signed a partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF) to boost the countrys coastal ecosystem restoration and conservation efforts to tap the rapidly rising demand for carbon credits. The cooperation agreement was announced at the COP 28 in Dubai by the World Economic Forum. In a statement, the WEF said the Philippines is the second nation after Indonesia to join the World Economic Forums so-called Blue Carbon Action Partnership that helps countries craft a national roadmap on blue carbon that will allow them to access climate financing. Indonesia signed that cooperation agreement with the WEF in Davos, Switzerland in January this year. Blue carbon is the carbon from the atmosphere and the ocean stored in coastal and marine ecosystems like mangrove forests, tidal marshes and seagrass meadows. According to the Blue Carbon Project by the University of the Philippines, these [m]angrove forests, tidal marshes and seagrass meadows sequester carbon hundred times faster than terrestrial forests and store more permanently in their sediments. Blue carbon ecosystems are widely recognized for their critical role in regulating greenhouse gas levels and in climate change mitigation, it added. When blue carbon benefits are recognized and valued by governments and businesses, who commit and invest in the restoration of mangrove, seagrass and salt marsh ecosystems around the world, everybody wins people, nature, climate and ultimately, the planet, Alfredo Giron, Acting Head of the Ocean Action Agenda and Friends of Ocean Action at the World Economic Forum, said in a statement released on Monday. Environment Secretary Antonia Loyzaga said in the same statement that the Philippines will work with the WEF in unlocking the Philippines' potential to provide nature-based climate solutions for the rest of the world whilst supporting our programs for protected areas and preparing the country for participating in the new blue economy. In a live streamed panel discussion on the sidelines of COP28 in Dubai, Environment Undersecretary Analiza Teh said the country is studying its carbon policy. "We are in the process of formulating our blue economy roadmap and also the blue carbon economy in partnership with UNDP and Canada," she said. "Right now, we have already issued guidelines on carbon accounting verification certification system. But we want to expand this by developing a carbon policy regulatory framework and the carbon pricing policy. Meanwhile, the Asian Development Bank said it would allot $10 million in climate support to help the Philippines reach its climate action goals. RELATED: DENR: PH at COP28 to urge developed nations to fulfill climate commitments The battle against climate change will be won or lost in Asia and the Pacific and nowhere is this more evident than in the Philippines, ADB president Masatsugu Asakawa said at a dialogue during the COP28 on Monday. The High-Level Dialogue on Finance Coalitions was attended by the ADB, Finance Secretary Benjamin Diokno, and Secretary Loyzaga, among other delegates. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has continuously rallied for support in the fight against the effects of climate change. While Marcos was not present at COP28, in his speech read by Special Assistant to the President, Antonio Ernesto Lagdameo Jr. said he wanted support for the country to host the climate 'loss and damage' fund designed to help nations most vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change. RELATED: PH calls for action vs. climate change, adherence to rules at UNGA According to the ADB, the Philippines is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. CNN Philippines' Lois Calderon and Pia Garcia contributed to this story Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) Commuters taking the Metro Rail Transit Line 3 (MRT-3) may pay more by early next year as its management prepares to file a fresh fare hike petition within the week. During a briefing on Monday, Jorjette Aquino, Department of Transportation (DOTr) assistant secretary for railways and MRT-3 officer-in-charge and, said they are proposing to raise the distance fare (0.21) and boarding fee (2.29). She noted that the planned fare adjustments were similar to the approved hikes of the LRT Lines 1 and 2. Aquino said processing the proposed fare hike may take three months, with the target implementation date eyed by the end of March or early April. Once the MRT-3s petition gets the go signal, the current minimum fare of 13 will increase to 16, while the end-to-end fare of 28 from North Avenue to Taft Avenue stations will increase to 34. The DOTr official said the government has been running the train system at a loss as it has been nine years since the last fare hike. While there was a 20% increase in annual passenger ridership from around 98 million in 2022 to 170 million from January to October this year, Aquino said there is an existing 6.2-billion deficit because passengers should have been paying 69 for end-to-end trips instead of 28. As a result, the DOTr said the government has been subsidizing each end-to-end MRT-3 passenger by 41. Citing the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) comments on the petition, the DOTr said the proposed 16 minimum fare petition and end-to-end fare of 34 will increase the government subsidy. "Additional revenue will provide financial support to the DOTr, which in turn, will actually ease yung [the] pressure from the national government to increase its subsidy for MRT-3," Aquino said. She said proceeds from the fare adjustment will be spent on the maintenance and operating expenses of the train line. In particular, Aquino identified the purchase of travel safety equipment and configuration of four-car train sets, which she said can cater to 1,576 passengers for each train set. Aquino also said that NEDA is seeing a minimal effect on inflation with the proposed MRT-3 fare hike. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) The chairperson of the House Committee on Dangerous Drugs is urging Congress anew to consider the reimposition of the death penalty, especially for drug-related offenses, after China executed two Filipinos for drug trafficking. Two Filipinos convicted of drug trafficking in China were executed in November, 10 years after their arrest, the Department of Foreign Affairs disclosed on Dec. 2. In a statement on Monday, Surigao del Norte Rep. Robert Ace Barbers said that the country is extending "kid's gloves treatment if not VIP treatment" to foreigners, especially Chinese nationals, arrested and convicted for drug trafficking in the Philippines. "While we condemn in no uncertain terms any and all illegal drug activities, we urge the two houses of Congress to take a serious look at the reimposition of the death penalty most especially on drug-related offenses," he said. "If other countries treat illegal drugs as a threat to their citizenry and the whole society, why are we so soft in treating this menace in our own territory?" he added. Barbers claimed deterring foreign suppliers of the illegal drug trade in the country would send a "strong signal that our people are not guinea pigs of their drugs." Based on official data, there are 92 Filipino death penalty cases in China in which all but one are drug-related. Of the total count, two cases have been reduced to life imprisonment, while 86 have been commuted to fixed term. This means two remain pending and are being appealed. House Bill 1543, which Barbers refiled in the current Congress to revive the death penalty on certain heinous crimes, especially on drug-related offenses, is pending at the chamber's justice panel. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) The Department of Health (DOH) on Monday said no local cases of the so-called walking pneumonia were currently reported in the Philippines as the illness infects more people in China and other countries. So far this has not been reported simply because these are not being routinely tested, DOH Undersecretary Eric Tayag told CNN Philippines New Day. This contagious disease is caused by the pathogen Mycoplasma pneumoniae. Several countries, including China, have been reporting an increase of cases related to this especially among children. Tayag explained the Philippines has recorded the illness before, but physicians nowadays would immediately prescribe antibiotics to a suspected patient once they detect the illness symptoms. The DOH said last week there has been a slow down in the number of influenza-like cases. Its latest data showed 182,721 patients were infected as of Nov. 11, most of which were cases of Influenza A and B, and COVID-19. Tayag said there was only clustering of cases and no outbreak of infections was reported in any region. To prevent the further spread of the disease, Tayag advises the public to practice minimum health standards like washing of hands, social distancing, wearing of masks especially among the vulnerable and those who have cough and colds, and getting vaccinated. The DOH earlier allayed fears as China reports more Mycoplasma pneumonia especially among children. The department has said there is "no evidence of novel pathogens" or a new infectious disease in the Philippines. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) The Philippine Embassy in Egypt on Monday said eight more Filipinos and a Palestinian relative were able to safely cross the Rafah border from Gaza to Egypt. Ambassador Ezzedin Tago said the group crossed the Rafah border on Dec. 2 and traveled around 10 hours by land before arriving in Cairo on Dec. 3. Tago added a team led by Vice Consul Crystal Ann Dunuan was stationed at the Egyptian side of the Rafah border to assist the group. The envoy said the group will take the earliest available flight to return to the country. As of Dec. 3, only 18 Filipinos remain in the war-torn enclave, according to the envoy. Out of 137 Filipinos who were in Gaza when the war between Israel and militant group Hamas broke out, a total of 119 had already crossed over to Egypt for safety. The Israel-Hamas war began on Oct. 7 when Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping over 200 more. Israel launched a ground offensive in Gaza after launching airstrikes in retaliation. At least 15,207 people were killed and at least 40,652 others were injured as a result of Israeli attacks in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to spokesperson Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra for the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza. The Department of Migrant Workers reported 335 overseas Filipino workers have been repatriated from Israel. However, four Pinoys have been killed since Oct. 7. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) Hundreds of food delivery riders marched to protest against Grab Philippines continuous implementation of the new fare matrix as well as the unjust suspension of some drivers. In a statement on Monday, the National Union of Food Delivery Riders said more delivery riders joined to call out Grab for implementing a fare scheme that drastically reduced the riders' already meager income. During the protest late last week, riders were seen holding placards, calling on Grab to respect its delivery partners. The group said the new fare rate was reduced to 35 from the previous 45, while the per kilometer compensation of 10 was cut to 7. They also demand the reinstatement of those riders who were "unjustly" suspended after attending rallies. Late in October, Sen. Risa Hontiveros also expressed her disappointment over the alleged abusive practices. If the goal of this new fare matrix is to ease the burden on Grab's customers, it should not come at the expense of the platform's riders, Hontiveros said in a previous statement. Reacting to this, Grab maintained the new commission scheme ensures fairer compensation. The new model was designed to address long-standing concerns about compensation for pick-up efforts and extended wait times, while also providing a guaranteed minimum fare to protect our partners' earnings, it said Monday. Grab said it wanted its delivery partners to earn substantially above the minimum wage, adding it offers the most competition earning model. The company expressed openness to holding a dialogue to address its delivery partners concerns. READ: Grab PH revamps earnings structure for delivery riders amid sticky inflation Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) Authorities in Lanao del Sur said they are working to restore a sense of normalcy in the province to encourage students of the Mindanao State University to return to campus following an explosion that killed four people on Sunday. Governor Bombit Adiong told CNN Philippines on Monday that several students left for their homes after the incident because of fear, but the local government is now working to encourage them to come back. The university also suspended classes for a week, he said. "Kinukumbinse natin ngayon yung mga parents ng mga estudyante na bumalik na sa Mindanao State University dahil stable na tayo dito sa Marawi and Mindanao State University," he said [Translation: We are trying to convince parents of the students to make them return to Mindanao State University because it is now stable here in Marawi and the university.] The Philippine National Police and the military will provide added security to students and residents, said Adiong. "Pati po ang province, gusto naming tumulong. Yung mga estudyanteng nakauwi, mag-eextend kami ng assistance para mabigyan sila ng sasakyan pabalik dito sa MSU," he added. [Translation: Even the province wants to help. We will extend assistance to students who went back to their homes, so they will have vehicles to use when they return to MSU.] Following the incident, the PNP said alerts were raised in Mindanao as well as Metro Manila, which would mean increased police patrols and intelligence gathering. Police said they have at least two persons of interest and have formed a special task group to investigate the deadly explosion. Adiong said he has seen CCTV footage of the two individuals who left a black bag inside the gym, but added they are still waiting for investigators to find out their identities. The governor said they had no information regarding a threat of a bombing, adding that things have been peaceful in the city after the Marawi siege. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) A Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) official on Monday cited several reasons behind the swarming of over 135 Chinese maritime militia vessels at Julian Felipe Reef on Dec. 2. The PCG reported the incident on Sunday, noting the number increased from 125 last month. These were monitored around the low-tide elevation of the Kalayaan Island Group located 175 nautical miles west of Bataraza, Palawan, still within the countrys 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Speaking to CNN Philippines The Source, PCG spokesperson for the West Philippine Sea Commodore Jay Tarriela said most of these maritime militia are also deployed at Ayungin Shoal as a reinforcement for Beijings coast guard vessels to interfere with Manilas resupply mission. It is also possible that these Chinese maritime militia vessels are occupying particular maritime features to be able to carry out reclamation activities, he added. Tarriela also said Beijing may be only showing off its capabilities. Based on footage collected, the PCG official said it appears the ships do not have any crew manning them. Once the Chinese ships leave, Philippine authorities discover massive coral damage, he noted. Tarriela said videos of Chinese ships they collect will be continuously published for transparency amid the growing tensions in the disputed waters. We know everytime we expose them and they are being criticized, not just here domestically in our country but by the international community for their illegal actions the Peoples Republic of China eventually withdraws their Chinese maritime militia, he said. A 2016 arbitral ruling invalidated China's expansive claims in the South China Sea. The tribunal largely ruled in favor of the Philippines in areas of its EEZ and continental shelf that are being claimed by China. Beijing continues to reject the ruling. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) The Philippine National Police (PNP) has identified at least two persons of interest (POIs) who could be linked to the blast at the Mindanao State University in Marawi City that killed four people on Sunday. "Based din sa nakalap na ebidensiya, including witness accounts, meron nang tinitingnan na dalawang persons of interest," PNP spokesperson Jean Fajardo said Monday. "At base dun sa mga pinakita nilang larawan dun sa rogues' gallery ay may mga positive identification dun sa dalawang POIs na yun." [Translation: Based on the evidence gathered, including witness accounts, there two persons of interest. And based on the pictures they showed in the rogues' gallery, there is positive identification of those two POIs.] Fajardo said the Bangsamoro Provincial Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Canine Unit recovered fragments from a 60 mm mortar, which are being probed to identify the improvised explosive device (IED) used. The explosion left four people dead and at least 46 wounded, five of whom were in critical condition. "Yung five reported in critical condition ay they are now in stable condition. So far ay anim na lamang ang nasa ospital but all these six are all in stable condition," Fajardo said. [Translation: The five reported in critical condition are now in stable condition. So far only six are in the hospital but all six are in stable condition.] Meanwhile, a special task group has been created to investigate the deadly explosion that ripped through a Catholic mass service at the university gym. To date, the PNP official said authorities only have surveillance video from outside the university as there was no available CCTV footage inside the campus. Fajardo further clarified that police and even military forces are limited to "roving patrols" in the university area and that they can only enter MSU only if requested. Full alert status has been raised over the whole of Mindanao, including intensified border control inspections, to prevent further attacks. READ: PNP: Red alert up in Mindanao, heightened alert raised in NCR over Marawi blast ISIS has reportedly claimed responsibility for the deadly explosion in a communique, saying its fighters detonated an explosive device on a large gathering of Christian disbelievers in Marawi City." Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) Former President Rodrigo Duterte did not personally appear on Monday at the preliminary investigation in relation to the grave threats complaint filed against him by ACT-Teachers Party-list Rep. France Castro. READ: Castro files grave threat complaint vs ex-Pres. Duterte Castros legal counsel, lawyer Rico Domingo, said Duterte was represented by two female lawyers. Ang kanilang sinasabi ay hindi pa nila natatanggap ang subpoena at complaint affidavit ni Congresswoman France Castro. Kaya ang ginawa ng piskal binigyan sila ng another copy na they officially received this afternoon, he told reporters. [Translation: They said they did not receive the subpoena or Castros complaint affidavit so they were instead given another copy which they officially received this afternoon.] The lawmaker filed a fresh supplemental complaint-affidavit on following continuous threats from the former president even after he was slapped with a court summons. In her new affidavit, Castro said Duterte made new threats on the November 16 episode of his program on SMNIs GIkan sa Masa, Para sa Masa. READ: Ex-President Duterte threatens Castro again after court summons Inulit niya pa. Nakalagay dito kaya ikaw France, how do you solve the problem now? Kaya yung statement ko na yung komunista dapat patayin, kasali ka dapat, Castro said, quoting Duterte. [Translation: He even continued making threats. Its written here what about you France, how do you solve the problem now? Thats why you should be part of my statement on killing communists.] Domingo explained that they filed the new affidavit to prove that Duterte had continued to threaten the lawmaker. Castro, meanwhile, was disappointed by Duterte's absence and urged the former president to personally appear, after he said he would rather go to jail. Well sundin na lang niya yung tamang proseso ng hustisya sa ating bansa. Dahil sa ganung statement siya parang hindi siya sumusunod sa hustisya, she said. [Translation: He should follow the right process for justice in our country. Because of his statement, its as if he isnt complying with justice.] Dutertes camp was supposedly given 10 days or until Dec. 14 to respond, under the Revised Penal Code. However, the prosecutor set the preliminary investigation for Dec. 15 at 2:30 pm. Wala na pong delay yan. Wala na po yang another exemption or extension. Kaya ayon pa rin ito sa due process, Domingo said. [Translation: There will be no more delays, exemptions, or extensions. This is still compliant with due process.] He added that this case will be a test of the prosecutorial and justice system of the country. The former president is expected to file his counter-affidavit and supplemental complaint-affidavit on Dec. 15. In a statement after the investigation, former presidential spokesperson Harry Roque said: No need to appear since we have not received summons nor copy of complaint affidavit. FPRRD [Duterte] will file his counter affidavit in due course Castro said she was expecting Roque to represent Duterte on Mondays preliminary investigation. Despite his absence, Duterte's supporters still showed up at the Hall of Justice in Quezon City to back him. Just meters away from Duterte's camp, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers Philippines, teachers, and advocates also held a noise barrage in front of the Hall of Justice in support of Castro. Police presence was heavy in the area to ensure security. Green Zone of COP28 opens to public Xinhua) 09:02, December 04, 2023 Visitors walk at the Green Zone of the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, Dec. 3, 2023. Green Zone of COP28 opens to the public at the Expo City of Dubai on Sunday. (Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen) Visitors queue to enter the Saudi Arabia's pavilion at the Green Zone of the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, Dec. 3, 2023. Green Zone of COP28 opens to the public at the Expo City of Dubai on Sunday. (Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen) A visitor scans a shared scooter at the Green Zone of the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, Dec. 3, 2023. Green Zone of COP28 opens to the public at the Expo City of Dubai on Sunday. (Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen) Visitors pose for photos at the Green Zone of the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, Dec. 3, 2023. Green Zone of COP28 opens to the public at the Expo City of Dubai on Sunday. (Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen) People visit the Green Zone of the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, Dec. 3, 2023. Green Zone of COP28 opens to the public at the Expo City of Dubai on Sunday. (Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen) Visitors pose for photos in front of the China's pavilion at the Green Zone of the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, Dec. 3, 2023. Green Zone of COP28 opens to the public at the Expo City of Dubai on Sunday. (Xinhua/Wang Dongzhen) (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) The Senate wants to have an executive session with defense and intelligence agencies to be briefed on the deadly blast at the Mindanao State University (MSU) in Marawi City on Sunday. At the chamber's plenary on Monday, Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri told the Senate secretary to invite the Department of National Defense, the Philippine National Police, the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the National Security Council, and the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency to an executive session on Wednesday. "We appeal to our people not to be afraid and not to be cowed by this incident. We continue to do our daily lives and show them that we are not afraid and we will continue to stand up against violence," Zubiri added. Sen. Ronald Dela Rosa, who chairs the Senate committee on public order and dangerous drugs, delivered a privilege speech on the bombing, which killed four people and injured 46 others during a Sunday morning Catholic service at a gymnasium inside the MSU campus. "I am a living, breathing witness, regardless of your religion, peace and love constitute the rule rather than the exception for all at MSU," said Dela Rosa, an alumnus of the university. "This is how and why I'm so certain that this is a terrorist attack. It is not rooted in any authentic acceptance of God and holiness," he added. The speech and other manifestations of senators were referred to the Senate committee on national defense and security, peace, unity, and reconciliation and the Dela Rosa-led panel. Sen. JV Ejercito also filed on Monday a resolution expressing the sense of the Senate "strongly condemning in the highest possible terms" the bombing, as well as urging military and law enforcement agencies to take necessary steps to bring the perpetrators to justice. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the deadly explosion. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. also blamed foreign terrorists in his statement Sunday. READ: ISIS claims deadly blast at Catholic mass in southern Philippines Prior to his speech, Dela Rosa told reporters that there might be a possible "failure of intelligence" in the attack. "Dahil hindi na-monitor or kung na-monitor man nila [It's because they have not monitored the incident, or if they monitored it], failure to act on intelligence... No intelligence is still failure of intelligence," he said. But the senator said it would be very unfair if security forces are made accountable for failing to monitor information that was probably "below the radar." According to Dela Rosa, many MSU students have also decided to leave the university and go home. He said police have deployed additional personnel to secure the MSU compound. Zubiri also asked the government of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao to help authorities in catching the perpetrators. CNN Philippines correspondent Eimor Santos contributed to this report. A large Mills County development site just got a boost in attracting a new business. The Mills Crossing mega site, just east of Glenwood, has earned the location a certified site designation from Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad. Were really excited about it, said Andrew Rainbolt, executive director of the Mills County Economic Development Foundation. It certainly a confirmation that we have a competitive site. The Mills County site was one of three locations that the railroad recently awarded this designation to. The others being in Fort Madison and DeSoto, Kansas. We are pleased to add these three new locations to our list of growing certified sites across BNSFs network, said Chris Danos, assistant vice president of economic development. Its a win-win for our customers, who are ready to develop their business offerings through rail, saving them several months of construction time. To be considered, sites must undergo a thorough analysis, which includes an evaluation of environmental and geotechnical standards, available utilities, site availability and existing and proposed infrastructure. The goal of the program is to provide an inventory of rail-served sites that are available for immediate development. The Mills County site covers about 1,700 acres about a mile or so east of Glenwood. Its close to two interstate highways via a four-lane highway and is within the Omaha metropolitan area. The site is adjacent to the Burlington National main line through the county, Rainbolt said. It is also fully served by the electric and natural gas systems of MidAmerican Energy, he added. The site has also been certified by the Iowa Economic Development Authority. The site, currently used as farm ground, has received some serious interest from potential tenants, Rainbolt said. Ideally, the site would be home to a major business with enough land for smaller ones, possibly in support of the major business, he said. Development of the site is particularly important now that the countys largest employer, the Glenwood Resource Center, is closing, Rainbolt said. We need economic development," he said. "We need jobs. Some local drivers for a trucking company that's a major contractor for the U.S. Postal Service recently voted to unionize. Thirty-six employees of 10 Roads Express based in Carter Lake, Council Bluffs and Omaha joined the Teamsters, according to a news release. We need this union to hold our bosses accountable on improving operations and showing drivers more respect, Timothy Rozell, a driver with 10 Roads for 14 years, said in the release. As we fight for our first contract, we need to stick together and keep communicating. There is no going back. Solidarity is a full-time commitment. The company is headquartered at 2200 Abbott Drive in Carter Lake. A national organizing effort also unionized 30 drivers at 10 Roads in Kansas earlier this year. Unionizing workers at the 10 Roads headquarters will serve as a great foundation for recruiting more Teamsters at the company, John A. Murphy, Teamsters national freight director, said in a release. More and more drivers are coming to understand the only way to get something from their bosses is to take it." The company is the second largest supplier to the U.S. Postal Service after FedEx, according to data cited by price reporting agency FrightWaves. In 2022, 10 Roads brought in more than $700 million in business for the U.S. Postal Service. Local 554 represents workers across Nebraska and Iowa who work in industries such as airlines, construction, passenger transportation and dairy. Find more information at local554.org. Operating from 36 terminals across the U.S., 10 Roads Express delivers to 47 states. It operates more than 3,500 company-owned tractors and 5,000 company-owned trailers. Find more information at 10roadsexpress.com. Weather Alert ...WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 3 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO 9 PM CST FRIDAY... ...WIND CHILL ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM MIDNIGHT TONIGHT TO NOON CST FRIDAY... ...WIND CHILL WARNING NOW IN EFFECT FROM 9 PM FRIDAY TO NOON CST TUESDAY... * WHAT...For the Winter Storm Warning, heavy snow expected. Total snow accumulations between 5 and 8 inches. Winds gusting as high as 35 mph. For the Wind Chill Advisory, very cold wind chills expected. Wind chills as low as 25 below zero. For the Wind Chill Warning, dangerously cold wind chills expected. Wind chills as low as 50 below zero. Coldest wind chills are expected Saturday night into Sunday morning. * WHERE...Portions of east central, northeast, and southeast Nebraska. * WHEN...For the Winter Storm Warning, from 3 PM this afternoon to 9 PM CST Friday. For the Wind Chill Advisory, from midnight tonight to noon CST Friday. For the Wind Chill Warning, from 9 PM Friday to noon CST Tuesday. * IMPACTS...Travel will be hazardous. Areas of blowing snow will reduce visibilities, even after snow has stopped falling. The hazardous conditions will impact the Thursday evening and Friday commutes. The dangerously cold wind chills could cause frostbite on exposed skin in as little as 10 minutes. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Avoid outside activities if possible. When outside, make sure you wear appropriate clothing, a hat, and gloves. If you must travel, keep an extra flashlight, food, and water in your vehicle in case of an emergency. The latest road conditions for the state you are calling from can be obtained by calling 5 1 1. && The European Union is very concerned about the consequences of the latest decision by Nigers military leaders to revoke an EU-backed law criminalizing transportation of migrants north from Agadez to Libya and Algeria for onward transition to Europe. Over the weekend, Nigers junta government signed an order abrogating the controversial legislation, known as Law 2015-36, designed to curb the smuggling of migrants from West Africa heading north toward Europe. The law was enacted in 2015, under heavy pressure from the EU, at the height of the European migrant crisis. The law made it illegal for migrants to travel from Nigers ancient crossroad town of Agadez towards the countrys northern border and it also criminalized the work of the local ferrymen who transported these migrants towards Libya and Algeria. The announcement effectively ended an eight-year security partnership between the EU and Niger that has seen the 27-member bloc paying 1.2 billion in development aid to the third poorest country in the world. Before Niger enforced its 2015 anti-smuggling law, at least 4,000 migrants travelled through Agadez, heading northwards to Europe, every week without travel documents, according to UN estimates. The route from West Africa to the Sahara has also become a lucrative place for people smugglers. The number of migrants transiting through Niger and onto Europe dropped sharply over the years because of the law. But experts and analysts have criticized the law, among other things, for the fact that the EU heavily influenced its passage and also since it disrupted many livelihoods dependent on the migrants in a region suffering from a drastic economic decline in the decade before its introduction. For example, a study by the Centre for Africa-Europe relations (ECDMP) found that migration provided an economic buffer because one-third of respondents in Agadez had earned some form of income from the migration industry. The East African Community (EAC) regional force led by Kenya has begun its withdrawal from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after Kinshasa accused the force of failing its mission. The process began Sunday December 3 and it comes after Congolese authorities refused to renew the mandate of the force which arrived November last year in Congos restive eastern region fertile land for armed groups and rebel groups, including the powerful M23. Congolese authorities called on the force to free the areas taken by the rebels. DR Congo President Felix Tshisekedi openly called out the international force, except Burundi, arguing it has failed its mandate. Following a Summit on 25 November, the EAC announced that the DRC would not renew the mandate of the regional force beyond 8 December 2023. A first group of around 100 Kenyan soldiers from the regional force which also includes Ugandan, Burundian and South Sudanese soldiers left from Goma airport bound for Nairobi. The forces are leaving amid ongoing fighting between the M23 group and the DRC army. The rebel group indicated on Sunday December 3 that it would retake areas vacated by the regional force following the departure. For the wellbeing of the civilian population, the M23 will recover and occupy all its areas that it handed over to the EAC-RF at the beginning of the peace process, Lawrence Kanyuka, the rebel groups spokesperson said in a statement. The M23 reiterates its commitment to resolve peacefully the ongoing conflict in eastern DRC, he added. Congolese authorities have accused Rwanda of backing the rebel but Kigali has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and counter-attacked Kinshasa of supporting armed groups opposed to the regime of Paul Kagame. Mali has launched an investigation into several ethnic separatists and al-Qaida-linked jihadist leaders for terrorism and money laundering, which also includes a probe into the Tuareg rebel leaders who signed a peace agreement in 2015 and now accuse the government of failing to comply with it. The instructions issued by Malis judiciary this week show that the individuals being investigated include a Tuareg militant and leader of al-Qaida-linked coalition Support Group for Islam and Muslims (GSIM) and radical Fulani preacher who belongs to the same group. The list also includes six Tuareg leaders belonging to an alliance of armed groups that recently relaunched a rebellion against the state, despite signing a 2015 peace deal in Algiers. The government of the West African nation has referred to the rebels as a terrorist group. The public prosecutor said the investigation was launched not only against the terrorist leaders but also other members who were signatories to the 2015 peace agreement and have tipped over into terrorism. This has led experts to express concern that the deal crucial to establishing a measure of stability in the countrys north may crumble. The developments could prompt more violence in a region already under threat from fighters linked to al-Qaida and where both UN peacekeepers and French forces have withdrawn in recent months. The Tuareg rebellion in Malis north has been a source of conflict for decades, though in 2015 the Tuareg rebel groups inked the peace deal with the government. However, in recent months, some rebels have abandoned the agreement, signaling a rise in tensions between them and Malis military junta. We can effectively say that the 2015 peace agreement has collapsed, said Shaantanu Shankar, country analyst for Africa at the Economist Intelligence Unit. Global donors pledged Sunday December 3 at the 2023 Reaching the Last Mile Forum, held part of the ongoing COP28 in the UAE, a collective $777.2 million to help control, eliminate, and eradicate neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) in Africa. The event hosted by Reaching the Last Mile (RLM), the global health initiative driven by the philanthropy of Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, took place on the first ever Health Day. The pledge is a landmark push to accelerate progress towards achieving the goals outlined in the World Health Organizations 2030 roadmap on NTDs. To date, 50 countries reportedly have eliminated at least one NTD, and 600 million people no longer require treatment. Cases of some diseases that have plagued communities for centuries, such as Guinea worm disease and sleeping sickness, are at an all-time low, the Last Mile Forum reports. The commitments will help finance essential programs and treatments, support new research and innovations, and strengthen frontline health systems and workforces, among other investments. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) State seismologists have recorded a series of earthquakes that shook the towns of Hinatuan and Cagwait in Surigao del Sur after the two areas were hit by a magnitude 7.4 and 6.8 quake, respectively. In separate earthquake advisories on Monday, Phivolcs logged another magnitude 5.5 quake in Hinatuan at 2.08 p.m., while a magnitude 5.2 aftershock was felt at 10:10 a.m. On the same day, Phivolcs also recorded that Cagwait town experienced a magnitude 5.6 quake at 5:43 a.m. and a magnitude 5.7 quake at 10:38 a.m. At 1:08 p.m., the agency's data showed a magnitude 5.2 tremor in Marihatag town, which is approximately 69 kilometers from Cagwait town. On Saturday evening, a magnitude 7.4 quake hit Hinatuan town. Immediately after the tremor, Phivolcs warned of tsunamis expected to hit areas including the cities of Tandag and Bislig in Surigao del Sur, but canceled the alert early Sunday morning. Early Monday morning, Cagwait town was shaken by a magnitude 6.8 quake. While tagged as a separate quake from the Saturday tremor in Hinatuan town, Phivolcs said the 6.8 quake was similarly caused by movements in the Philippine Trench. Kuwaits Al Shaya group which operates Swedish ready-to-wear stores H&M and US brand cafe chain Starbucks in the MENA region and in Europe said it maintains business in Morocco, denying news reports that it was going to phase out from the country. Last week, Maroc Hebdo weekly said the Kuwaiti group will withdraw the two brands from Morocco, citing slow business. In a statement relayed by Moroccan media, Al Shaya said the two brands will stay in the north African Kingdom. The group continues to make regular assessments of its portfolio in order to guarantee an adequate operation of its stores in places most convenient for its clients, Al Shaya told Le360 news outlet without elaborating. Starbucks was among the brands targeted by a boycott campaign waged mostly by Islamist groups in solidarity with Gaza. Morocco is among the three Arab countries selected for the Blue Mediterranean Partnership which aims to support transition to a sustainable blue economy in the southern Mediterranean region. The announcement has been made by the donors and partners of the initiative at COP-28 currently held in UAE. Besides, the North African Kingdom, Egypt and Jordan will benefit from 1 billion investments to be provided by Partners & various financial institutions. According to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Blue Mediterranean Partnership will start in early 2024. It aims to tackle the threats the Mediterranean Sea faces by coordinating the financing of blue economy projects in the Mediterranean and Red Sea regions. Managed by EBRD, the initiative is supported by the European Commission, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the French Development agency, the European Investment Bank (EIB), the German KfW Bank, the Italian Development Bank (Cassa Depositi e Prestiti) and several other financial institutions. EBRD President Odile Renaud-Basso said The Mediterranean region has tremendous potential to spur economic growth if it is protected and developed sustainably. EIB Vice-President Ambroise Fayolle said the initiative will help restore ocean health and foster biodiversity & climate resilience of Mediterranean coastal areas. Supporting the wellbeing of coastal communities and investing in the sustainable blue economy makes sense economically and is also vital in tackling global challenges like food security, nature protection and climate change, he underlined. UfM Secretary General Nasser Kamel said, the Mediterranean region, with diverse ecosystems, is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels, water scarcity and extreme weather events. European Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries Virginijus Sinkevicius said: We are putting the sustainable blue economy at the top of the agenda in the broader Mediterranean region. We believe this Partnership can contribute to the prosperous future of the Mediterranean countries, so that our seas can keep providing for future generations. The Mediterranean Sea basin is a recognized marine biodiversity hotspot and a vital resource of economic activities for 480 million people living in the regions 22 countries. Its ecosystem is under threat from habitat loss and degradation, over-fishing, pollution and climate change. The Blue Mediterranean Partnership focuses on plastic waste reduction, coastal resilience investments, sustainable tourism, wastewater treatment, circular economy, and marine biodiversity. Moroccos Neo Motors said it released its cars in the market making the first delivery of a first car manufacturing company with Moroccan capital. Morocco is already Africas top car manufacturer thanks to investments by French carmakers Renault and Peugeot. Speaking at a ceremony marking the first car deliveries, Nassim Belkhayat, Neo Motorss CEO, said the factory was part of a push to meet Moroccos industrial sovereignty. Neo Motors plans to expand its existing factory near Rabat to meet what project owners describe as rising demand. The ceremony was attended by industry minister Ryad Mezzour who said Neo Motors was an example of productive investment by Moroccan enterprises. Last May, King Mohammed VI lifted the curtain on Neo Motors prototype and another hydrogen-powered car by a different manufacturer. The event should serve as a spur for Moroccan capital to engage in productive investments that build on already existing eco-systems. Industry represents some 25% of Moroccos GDP with the automotive sector in particular topping manufactured exports in 2022 with 111 billion dirhams or 11 billion dollars, up 33%. The prototype already received a go-ahead to drive the cars by the countrys road safety authority. The unveiling of the two prototypes takes place in a context Morocco seeks a new industrial strategy to build on the results of the industrial acceleration plan which helped Morocco become an African and Mediterranean powerhouse in the aerospace sector as well. Morocco is leading the way for countries in the Middle East and Africa region in climate action, thanks to its leadership and pioneering commitment in the fight against climate change, said Razan Al Mubarak, COP28 High-Level Climate Champion. The countries of our region and Africa should be incredibly proud of Moroccos inspiring vision, and take advantage of it as a way forward, she said at a Side-event held on Sunday in Dubai by the Mohammed VI Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, as part of COP28 activities. Al Mubarak stressed that speaking at an event organized by Morocco has, for her, many positive connotations, recalling the role of the Climate Change High-Level Champion, which was made operational in Marrakech at COP22 in 2016. There can be no transition, whether in the field of energy or food, without non-state actors, she emphasized, at this meeting organized at the Morocco Pavilion of COP28 in partnership with CGEM and UNIDO, under the theme Tracking Africas Climate Action Journey: Successes and Opportunities. She underlined: We also recognize, from a regional perspective, how much we welcome and appreciate the work of the Moroccan government and people, who have truly embraced the climate action agenda, not by talking, but by leading the way. Morocco is one of the few countries that, according to climate data, was already compliant with the Goal of limiting temperature to 1.5 degrees C, when it submitted its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in 2016, added the Emirati High-Level Climate Champion, who was speaking alongside Minister of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development, Leila Benali. The meeting, which featured several high-profile officials and chairman of the Moroccan employers confederation, Chakib El Alj, showcased innovative, meaningful, and impactful climate solutions led by local authorities, the private sector and civil society to build more resilient communities for the good of Africa and the world. Participants at this event, co-organized with the CGEM, and UNIDO, also focused on the situation in Africa since the Paris Climate Agreement, while taking a forward-looking, solutions-oriented approach to the global situation. By holding this event, the Mohammed VI Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, chaired by Princess Lalla Hasnaa, is pursuing a vision of positive commitment to climate action, not only in Morocco, but also in Africa, the same vision that has been fostered by King Mohammed VI. Photo: John Taggart As a rule, judges dont like to be the center of the story. New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron has found that he doesnt have much of a choice. This is thanks mostly to one particularly belligerent defendant, but the Bob Dylanquoting, former Creedence Clearwater Revivalcovering drummer and ex-cabbies unwillingness to be Donald Trumps punching bag doesnt hurt, either. The 74-year-old Engoron, who presides downtown and lives on Long Island, has for three years now been engaged in a low-boil back-and-forth with the former president thats only recently turned into full-on tabloid bait. His displeasure with Trumps soliloquies has become obvious: Please, no speeches, he warned the ex-president in early November, before turning to one of his lawyers and informing him, This is not a political rally. But its Trump who cranked up the temperature calling the judge extremely hostile and a political hack who RAILROADED this FAKE CASE through a [state] Court at a speed never before seen earlier this fall. Before long, Engoron had slapped a gag order on the former president, and he expanded it to his lawyers after they increased their public criticisms of Engoron to include his clerk, whom the ex-POTUS called Chuck Schumers girlfriend and later accused of co-judging. Cover Story Reasons to Love New York Right Now See All By the middle of November, Trump had demanded a mistrial, which Engoron quickly rejected, defending the gag order as necessary given the volume of threats to his staff. When it was lifted on appeal, Trump wasted no time sharing his true thoughts once again: His Ridiculous and Unconstitutional Gag Order, not allowing me to defend myself against him and his politically biased and out of control, Trump Hating Clerk, who is sinking him and his Court to new levels of LOW, is a disgrace. Trumps contempt-of-court fine total is now up to $125,000; the judges commute is now under the protection of security, as credible threats mount exponentially, in the words of one Public Safety Department official. Engoron punctuated a September footnote rubbishing a Trump team argument with As Chico Marx, playing Chicolini, says to Margaret Dumont, playing Mrs. Gloria Teasdale, in Duck Soup, well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes? Trump is by far the highest-profile defendant to have come before Engoron just two years before the judge reaches mandatory-retirement age. He was born less than four miles from Trump in Queens and has a resume that doesnt look like most judges. Thrice married, he drove a taxi nights as an undergraduate student at Columbia. A Vietnam protester and Woodstock attendee, he struck out as a drummer in Berkeley before attending NYU Law, then tried again to make it as a musician before returning to the citys courts for good in his 40s. To maintain an image of impartiality, he wont do interviews or talk outside court while the trial drags on. But he moonlights as the editor of his high schools alumni newsletter (go Wildcats!), which offers some glimpses of his life off the bench: Engoron is apparently not above sharing gym selfies in it, and hes mentioned working on a screenplay a Holocaust-era love story. But this case is his legacy-maker. Engoron seems especially aware of this, as his every move is dissected not just by Trumps supporters but also by his anxious liberal critics, worried that any clever jab will become more campaign-ad fodder. The case isnt just bleeding into election season; it may be existential for the Trump brand. In the wake of Attorney General Letitia Jamess investigations into the ex-presidents business fraud, he, his sons, and their executives could lose control of their real-estate empire, including their eponymous tower, and face a quarter of a billion dollars in fines. Trumps wallet is on the line; so may be his self-conception as a swaggering real-estate mogulslashbillionaire with a golden tower thats taller than yours. That, and the possibility even some of his fans might finally wise up to his con if the fraud ruling is dramatic enough, are two big reasons Trumps allies have been ramping up their complaints about Engoron, trying to destroy his credibility with daily attacks on the Democratic judge, accusing him of not just the crime of having a personality but of being hopelessly biased. In the past, Engoron has been pretty clear when hes run out of patience; in one 2018 ruling, he wrote that the states process for reviewing new housing seems like Rube Goldberg, Franz Kafka, and Marquis de Sade cooked it up over martinis. These days, that energy doesnt feel far off. An X-ray of a pneumonia patient. Photo: Giovanni Mereghetti/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Over the past several weeks, you might have noticed a flurry of ominous headlines about mysterious or unusual outbreaks of childhood pneumonia and/or white-lung syndrome in China, Europe, and even here in the U.S. with some of the coverage suggesting the outbreaks are linked and that there may be a new novel pathogen on the loose like there was when COVID emerged four years ago. On Friday, a group of Senate Republicans even went so far as to call for a ban on travel to the U.S. from China in light of the reports. According to public-health officials and infectious-diseases experts, however, the outbreaks are neither mysterious nor unexpected but rather represent another return to post-pandemic normal when it comes to ebb and flow of respiratory-illness cases. Below, a look at the outbreaks and why there is definitely no reason to panic. Whats happening in China? Since the middle of October, there has been a surge of flulike respiratory illnesses in northern China, including a significant increase, compared with previous years, in the number of respiratory illnesses such as pneumonia among children. There have also been reports of hospitals in northern China being swamped with pediatric admissions, prompting Chinese health authorities to ask parents to avoid bringing children with mild illnesses to large hospitals and first seek treatment at other health-care facilities. There has also been a reported increase, over several months, in pediatric cases of mycoplasma pneumonia, which is caused by a lung infection from the antibiotic-resistant bacterium Mycoplasma pneumoniae. The reports prompted the World Health Organization to send China an official request for data about the surge. Chinese health authorities said in response that, in effect, the surge was nothing to worry about explaining that they had not detected any novel pathogens but were rather detecting a range of known respiratory diseases among children, including RSV, bacterial infections, the flu, and the common cold. Chinese authorities linked the rise to the reemergence of the various illnesses following the end of COVID restrictions in the country, which were finally lifted late last year. This has been, in other words, what happens when seasonal germs and non-COVID respiratory diseases get the chance to bounce back following the end of Chinas zero-COVID policy. China has hardly been transparent or cooperative with the world in the past about new respiratory illnesses circulating in the country, and Chinese officials notoriously attempted to hide and downplay COVID cases after the novel coronavirus first emerged there in late 2019 and early 2020. In this case, however, there is no evidence to suggest something similar is happening now. Per the Associated Press: Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britains University of East Anglia, doubted the wave of infections was sparked by a new disease. If it was (a new disease), I would expect to see many more infections in adults, he said in a statement. The few infections reported in adults suggest existing immunity from a prior exposure. Francois Balloux of University College London said China was probably experiencing a significant wave of childhood infections since this was the first winter since lockdown restrictions were lifted, which likely reduced childrens immunity to common bugs. What is mycoplasma pneumonia, and where and why is it on the rise? There have been reported increases in recent cases of childhood mycoplasma pneumonia not only in China but Singapore and several countries in Europe (Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands). There have also been a handful of recently reported cases in one county in Ohio. The Mycoplasma pneumoniae bacterium that causes this lung infection is typically spread by respiratory droplets, and its often the cause of what is known as walking pneumonia, which has its name because its a typically mild illness. The bacterium is also more resistant to antibiotics than other strains that can cause pneumonia. That means the typical go-to antibiotics used for bacterial pneumonia (like amoxicillin) wont be effective against mycoplasma infections, but other antibiotics (like azithromycin) should still work. As one epidemiologist recently summed up for Nature, antibiotic resistance may be one of the reasons children in China have been hit harder by mycoplasma pneumonia this year than kids in other countries post-pandemic: Although pneumonia caused by the bacterium is usually treated with antibiotics known as macrolides, an overreliance on these drugs has led to the pathogen developing resistance. Studies show that resistance rates of M. pneumoniae to macrolides in Beijing are between 70% and 90%. This resistance might be contributing to this years high levels of hospitalization from M. pneumoniae, because it can hinder treatment and slow recovery from bacterial pneumonia infections, says [Benjamin Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong]. And a new study published last month in The Lancet Microbe reported that the bacterium is now staging a comeback around the world following a decline in detected cases owing to COVID restrictions but noted that in countries where M pneumoniae has re-emerged, case numbers are comparable to pre-pandemic (endemic) numbers. We can now confirm the re-emergence of M. pneumoniae in many countries. We anticipate the most recent data collection for the ESGMAC MAPS study to be online for early December 2023. pic.twitter.com/qHRUPJBbZt Mike Beeton (@mike_beeton) November 23, 2023 Adds University College Londons Francois Balloux in an X thread: Mycoplasma pneumoniae infections happen all year round with a peak in winter. There is also a ~3-7 year periodicity, with a bigger epidemic roughly every ~4 year. This pattern predates the Covid-19 pandemic and has been observed over the past decades. 2/https://t.co/4b0CcgskgZ pic.twitter.com/T2kAWBjQav Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) December 1, 2023 First, circulation of Mycoplasma has been reduced during the pandemic and hence fewer people, in particular young kids, have acquired immunity to it over the last 3.5 years. 4/ Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) December 1, 2023 Second, the last big wave of Mycoplasma happened 4 years ago in the 2019/2020 winter. Thus, as Mycoplasma pneumoniae epidemics tend to peak about every fourth year, we might have been up for a big wave this winter, even in the absence of the Covid-19 pandemic. 5/ Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) December 1, 2023 Though the vast majority of mycoplasma infections don't require treatment with antibiotics. Drug resistant mycoplasma can make rare, severe cases hard to treat, but drug resistance doesn't make it more transmissible or virulent, and it is not to blame for the current wave. 7/ Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) December 1, 2023 Whats happening in Ohio and Massachusetts? Health authorities in Ohios Warren County recently reported an outbreak of 145 cases of childhood pneumonia beginning in August without any resulting in severe illness or death. In some of those cases, mycoplasma was detected, but the Ohio outbreak has not been linked to the one in China or any other ones abroad. Meanwhile in Massachusetts, what local health officials describe as a typical seasonal increase in pediatric pneumonia has been erroneously reported as another U.S. outbreak, as the Washington Post explains: Widespread media coverage of a pneumonia spike in western Massachusetts was dispelled Friday by pediatrician John Kelley, whose comments to a local news outlet about how children with RSV sometimes develop pneumonia were inaccurately reported as confirmation of a second outbreak. Kelley told The Washington Post he is not seeing unusual pneumonia trends or any parallels to China in his office. Massachusetts health officials said a statewide increase in pediatric pneumonia is expected this time of year, with no evidence suggesting a link to mycoplasma. The CDC said on Friday that it is monitoring the increases in respiratory illnesses around the world and reported that the current rates of pediatric pneumonia in the U.S. are roughly similar with previous years. White-lung syndrome isnt really a thing. Some of the coverage of the recent childhood-pneumonia outbreaks has described the illness as white-lung syndrome. As Stanford infectious-diseases doctor Jake Scott emphasized in an X thread on Friday, white lung is a made-up term which public-health authorities never use that just literally describes what the lungs of anyone with pneumonia or some other respiratory illnesses look like when seen on an X-ray or a CT scan: White lung syndrome is a made-up term. Any pneumonia appears as a white opacity on an x-ray or CT, which is partly how the diagnosis of pneumonia is made. But its not specific to pneumonia, and its certainly not specific to Mycoplasma pneumoniae, which is not mysterious. Mycoplasma pneumoniae is a bacterium, not a virus. (Its one of the smallest free-living organisms.) It can cause pneumonia in kids age 5-17 and can be severe but is very uncommonly fatal. Radiographic findings vary but can look worse than anticipated from the physical signs Making up scary terms to describe infectious diseases weve been dealing with for a long time doesnt help anyone. It just causes confusion and anxiety. And it causes doctors like myself a headache. The United States and 21 other countries have pledged to triple their respective nuclear energy capacities by 2050, saying incorporating more nuclear power in their energy mix is critical for achieving their net zero goals in the coming decades. The United States, alongside Britain, France, Canada, Sweden, South Korea, Ghana and the United Arab Emirates have signed the declaration at the COP28 climate summit currently underway in Dubai. Although tripling their nuclear energy output will go a long way in helping Europe become more energy independent, its likely to come at a heavy price. Consider that in the majority of advanced economies, home to nearly 70 percent of global nuclear capacity, investment in nuclear energy has mostly stalled thanks to massive cost overruns, incessant project delays as well as never-ending public opposition. Indeed, all 31 nuclear power plants that have been constructed since 2017 belong to China and Russia. But the leaders attending the climate summit are confident they can overcome these hurdles. John Kerry, President Bidens climate envoy, says there are trillions of dollars available that could be used for investment in nuclear energy. We are not making the argument to anybody that this is absolutely going to be the sweeping alternative to every other energy source no, thats not what brings us here. But you cant get to net-zero 2050 without some nuclear power, he told reporters. Related: Al Jaber Says Fossil Fuel Phase Out is 'Inevitable' Frances President Emmanuel Macron has said that nuclear energy, including small modular reactors, is an indispensable solution in the fight against climate change. France is Europes largest nuclear power producer, deriving ~70 percent of its electricity from nuclear stations. But not everybody is buying that nuclear renaissance thesis. Masayoshi Iyoda, an activist from Japan with 350.org, says that nuclear power is a dangerous distraction from decarbonization goals, It is simply too costly, too risky, too undemocratic, and too time-consuming. We already have cheaper, safer, democratic, and faster solutions to the climate crisis, and they are renewable energy and energy efficiency, he has said in a statement, citing the Fukushima nuclear accident. First SMR Launch Tanks Unfortunately, it appears that nuclear power, including the small modular reactors Macron has alluded to, is not about to become an easy sell. NuScale Power Corporation (NYSE:SMR), a developer of modular light water reactor nuclear reactors, has been forced to terminate the Carbon Free Power Project with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) thanks to high costs and low interest by end users. The plan was to build a novel nuclear power plant comprising six small modular reactors (SMRs), each generating 77 MW. But the project fell apart after prospective customers for its electricity backed out and costs more than doubled to $9.3 billion. The cancellation has come even after the Department of Energy, in 2020, approved $1.35 billion over 10 years for the plant. NuScale was the first U.S. company to secure regulatory approval for modular reactors. As you might expect, the critics have wasted no time coming out of the woodworks. "The termination of NuScale's contract signals the broader challenges of developing nuclear energy in the United States. Placing excessive reliance on untested technologies without adequate consideration of economic viability, practicality, and safety concerns is irresponsible and clearly wont work,"Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, has told Reuters. Short-seller Iceberg Research has followed up last month's negative report with a new, even more damning report saying the company's Standard Power contract is "a pipe dream that was designed to divert attention from the loss of UAMPS." Iceberg claims NuScale has touted Standard Power as a credible partner because its investors comprise "ultra high net worth family offices and financial institutions [with] access to capital in excess of $10B." However, the short seller remains skeptical because of Standard Power's small size as well as the lack of identification among its investors. Further, Iceberg has faulted NuScale managements claims to having a solid balance sheet, with $197M of cash and no debt at the end of Q3, saying this overlooks the company's $153M cash burn during the last 12 months and does not take into account the hit to its books by the UAMPS contract termination, which adds ~$63M in liabilities. Iceberg estimates NuScale has a mere 11-19 month cash runway. Full-Size Mock Up Of NuScales SMR ADVERTISEMENT SMRs have been touted as the nuclear reactors of the future thanks mainly to their smaller footprint which allows them to be sited on locations not suitable for larger nuclear power plants. Prefabricated SMR units (similar to NuScales) can be manufactured, shipped and installed on site, making them several times cheaper to build than large power reactors. Additionally, they can be deployed incrementally to match increasing power demand. Another key advantage: SMRs can be refueled every 3 to 7 years compared to between 1 and 2 years required for conventional nuclear plants. By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Following a chaotic day of OPEC+ meeting decisions that resulted in additional voluntary cut among cartel members, the dust is now settling, and the market is fairly disappointed, with Brent counterintuitively falling right after the announcement before gaining slightly early on Friday. The cuts mean that the surplus everyone was forecasting for the first quarter of 2024 has now disappeared. In its place will be a deficit, though small. ING Bank sees this coming first-quarter deficit as lending some upside to oil prices. With that in mind, ING sees some upside in its current $82/barrel forecast for the quarter and its $88/barrel full-year 2024 forecast. Whether there is actually an upside, says ING, largely depends on how OPEC+ goes about unwinding these cuts and obviously on how demand plays out next year. Normally, that upside would have manifested itself immediately after the announcement on Thursday. Instead, the market reacted in the reverse most likely because of the nature of the cartels output cut delivery. The fact that the cuts will be voluntary remove a bit of the sting. These voluntary cuts suggest it is becoming difficult for members to agree on OPEC+ cuts, writes ING. Therefore, if further action is needed in future, it will become increasingly difficult for the group to respond.The meeting got off to a rocky start, delayed for four days as African cartel members haggled for higher quota targets, while the Saudis have been bearing the bulk of the burden of recent cuts. Once things finally got sorted out, the final decision on increased output cuts lost its weight due to the fact that everything is voluntary. Related: U.S. Oil Drillers See More Gains As OPEC+ Agrees to Cut Production In other words, the cartel seems to have lost the essence of a cartel, replacing it instead with a sort of gentlemans agreement that may or may not have any impact on markets. If the markets were looking for direction here, it wasnt forthcoming. Specifically, eight members of the expanded cartel announced voluntary cuts of around 2.2 million barrels per day for the first-quarter of next year. That volume already includes Saudi Arabias current voluntary cuts of 1 million barrels per day, as well as Russias 500,000 bpd voluntary cuts. That leaves us with additional, voluntary cuts of less than 900,000 bpd that hasnt already been priced in. Additional voluntary cuts were pledged from Iraq, UEA, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Oman. As for the African nationsparticularly Angola and Nigeriawho have been operating at diminished capacity latelyyet were loath to see their production quotas reduced furtherAngola saw its quota cut to 1.1 million bpd and Nigeria saw its raised to 1.5 million bpd. Angola, however, says it wont follow the quota, further undermining the cartels authority. Had the cuts been agreed across the entire group of OPEC+ members, they would have delivered a far greater punch to oil prices. Instead, the eight individual members were given a long leash to determine this on their own, in a non-binding manner. As it stands, the less-than 900,000 bpd set to be voluntarily taken off the market in the first-quarter, may never even happen. If the markets are strong, those barrels will simply be put back into the flow. The New York Times assessed the emerging situation succinctly when it described OPEC as losing power in the oil market at a time when oil is losing power with cost-wary and climate conscious consumers, noting that U.S. production accounted for a whopping 80% of the rise in global oil supply this year. What the Thursday OPEC+ meeting lays bare is the true nature of the power of the cartel to move markets. About a month prior to the Thursday meeting, the Cato Institute opined in a lengthy report that OPEC at large is just about politics, not actual oil fundamentals. Its a convenient bit of political leverage, with evidence suggesting that the attention paid to OPEC is mostly about political benefits to both OPEC members and Western leaders. In other words, its not an actual ability to control the oil market. OPEC members, the Cato Institute notes, view oil output as an international bargaining chip. In turn, this perception of influence over the West lends it a certain legitimacy. But the West benefits, as well, because this same perception of influence allows it to set up OPEC as a scapegoat when oil prices are hypervolatile. This theory supports the New York Times note that the bulk of additional oil supply this year has come from the U.S. It also negates the theories behind the push for NOPEC (No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels), for which a group of bipartisan U.S. senators in March reintroduced legislation. If passed, it would change U.S. antitrust law to revoke sovereign immunity protecting OPEC+ members from lawsuits over price collusion. ADVERTISEMENT The Thursday OPEC+ decision for voluntary cuts, which largely suggests that its now each cartel man for himself, might further erode the legitimacy on which the above-mentioned charade relies. By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, whose appointment as president of the UNs COP28 climate summit has caused controversy, defended his commitment to keep 1.5 within reach. We fully understand the urgency behind the matter, we very much believe and respect the science, he said while speaking to reporters on Monday, during the fourth day of the summit in Dubai. COP controversy Al Jaber was apparently responding to a recent report in the British newspaper Guardian, which reported comments he made in a public forum last month when he said there is no science showing a phase out of fossil fuels is required to limit global warming to 1.5C degrees. Forty-three percent of global emissions must be reduced by 2030, that is 22 gigatons, he said on Monday. The science says, we must get to net-zero emissions by 2050. We need to make that happen to keep 1.5 within reach. Al Jaber went on to say, My job, in this mission, is to ensurewe stay laser-focused on our north star, and that is keeping 1.5 within reach. I have said, over and over, he continued, that the phase-down and the phase-out of fossil fuel is inevitable, in fact it is essential. And it needs to be orderly, fair, just, and responsible. COP momentum The CEO of ADNOC, the worlds 12th largest oil company by production, largely defended himself by pointing to remarkable progress at the COP28 summit so far. There is a real sense of momentum, positivity and excitement, he said of the first four days of the climate talks. A special thing is happening in Dubai. Al Jaber said that positive progress was signaled on day one when the agenda for the 2-week event was approved quickly. This was followed by some significant announcements. These include what Al Jaber called a breakthrough agreement on the first day, to not only operationalize but also to fill a global loss and damage fund. He said this only occurred thanks to negotiations after a pre-COP conference in Abu Dhabi last month. We havemobilized over $57 billion in just four days, he said, including $725 million pledged so far for the new loss and damage fund. Al Jaber listed several financial commitments, including his countrys (the UAE) pledge of $30 billion to a new private investment vehicle that will seek to raise $250 billion over six years for climate-related investment in developing countries. Another item in his list was $1.2 billion for methane emission reduction. Al Jaber said he is putting methane reduction at the top of his agenda, as he hailed a recent US and China commitment to reducing methane and other non-CO2 gasses. Methane momentum Much of the momentum that Al Jaber sees in the summit so far came on Saturday when he announced that 50 oil companies joined a decarbonization pledge called the Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Charter. A centerpiece of this is their pledge to reach near-zero methane emissions, and to end routine flaring, by 2030. Among them are state-owned Saudi Aramco, ADNOC, Brazils Petrobras, Angolas Sonangol, and oil majors including BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies. The announcement received mixed reviews from environmentalists, some of whom criticized the methane pledge as addressing a symptom rather than the cause of climate change, for which a full phase-out of fossil fuels is required. Others saw it as an important sign of progress. In related news at the summit on Saturday, the administrator of the US EPA announced rules sharply reducing methane and other harmful air pollutants from the oil and natural gas industry. The agency said such rules will promote the use of cutting-edge methane detection technologies. Such strict regulations may be required to enforce oil and gas companies methane commitments, analysists have said. ADVERTISEMENT Tripling renewables and nukes The COP28 Presidents office also announced on Saturday that 118 countries have pledged to triple the worlds installed renewable energy capacity by 2030, to bring global renewable energy generation capacity to at least 11,000 gigawatts. This pledge was anticipated some weeks ago, when the COP28 Presidency, the International Renewable Energy Agency, and the Global Renewables Alliance issued a report, Tripling Renewable Power and Doubling Energy Efficiency by 2030. Notably absent from joining the pledge were China and India, apparently concerned that such a pledge is linked to a phase down of coal-fired power production. Also on Saturday, more than 20 countries including the United States signed a Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy, which would triple nuclear power capacity by 2050. The declaration calls on international financial institutions to encourage the inclusion of nuclear energy in energy lending policies. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, who is at the Dubai summit, said in a statement that the world cannot achieve net-0 emissions without building new reactors. By Alan Mammoser for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: After long delays, last week saw OPEC+ announce oil production cuts way below what many oil traders had been expecting, causing the benchmark Brent oil price to drop over 2 percent immediately on the news, to just over US$80 per barrel (pb). Saudi Arabia announced merely a rollover of its previous voluntary 1 million barrels per day (bpd) cut, and Russia did the same for its 500,000 bpd cut (although only 300,000 bpd of this is crude oil, with the remainder being refined products). Both these rollovers will run from 1 January until 31 March, whereupon they will be reviewed again. Consequently, the only price-swing element in the OPEC+ oil supply cuts was a collective reduction of 696,000 bpd of crude oil from other members. Given the previously cavalier leadership of the OPEC members of the broader OPEC+ group by Saudi Arabia characterised by the desire to raise oil prices significantly for sustained periods the question for oil traders is what does the latest muted action mean for prices going forward? The key to this is to determine what the key factors were behind this damp squib of a decision, and one of the two principle reasons was China. Since the mid-1990s, Beijing had been banking on extremely strong economic growth to enable it to equal and then surpass the U.S. as the top economic and military superpower on the planet. For many years, the plan seemed to be on track, with the economy growing at a double-digit rate, which in turn fuelled Chinas appetite for the energy to drive this growth, which in turn made it the catalyst for the commodities supercycle seen during those years. As late as 2017, its high rate of economic growth allowed it to overtake the U.S. as the largest annual gross crude oil importer in the world, having become the worlds largest net importer of total petroleum and other liquid fuels in 2013. This pivotal role in the global oil and gas sector provided China with the ideal lever for it to advance its broader economic and political objectives into the key providers of these energy sources across the Middle East, under the cover of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). These BRI programmes have been characterised by massive loans extended by China to around 150 countries, with little hope of some of them ever being able to repay what is owed. An inability to do so contractually allows China to exercise various Draconian penalties, including the seizure of key assets in these indebted countries, as analysed in depth in my new book on the new global oil market order. In short, these Hotel California-style BRI deals (You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave) and its oil and gas buying power - have given China a vice-like grip over several of the Middle Easts top energy producers. Related: Gold Drops After Spiking To Record High of $2,130 When Beijings plan was still going strong, it was happy enough to allow OPEC+ to do largely as it wished in the matter of attempting to increase oil prices by a lot for as long as it wanted. That period coincided with a time when China wanted to see the rift between the Middle East and its former previous top superpower sponsor the U.S. grow as much as possible. The Trade War between Beijing and Washington was at its height, and the U.S. had never been so vulnerable in the Middle East as it was then. From 2014-2016, Saudi Arabia and its OPEC brothers had launched, fought, and lost the Second Oil Price War with the U.S., leaving the Middle Eastern economies in ruins and anti-U.S. feeling running high, as also analysed in depth in my new book on the new global oil market order. Shortly afterwards, in May 2018, the U.S. had unliterally withdrawn from the nuclear deal with Iran, leaving Saudi Arabia and several of its OPEC brothers more exposed than ever to their long-term nemesis. And shortly after that, the U.S. began a wholesale drawdown of its on-the-ground presence in the Middle East, including from Syria in 2019, Afghanistan in 2021, and from Iraq in December 2021. China gleefully stepped into the power vacuum created by the U.S. through its BRI projects and by leveraging the influence that Russia had built up in the region over decades, especially across the Shia Crescent of Power, centred on Iran and Syria. Things are different now in China and have been so since its disastrous handling of Covid when it emerged there at the end of 2019. With its zero-Covid policy involving repeated instant shutdowns of major cities, the economy plummeted, and growth has remained difficult to come by since the country officially reopened from Covid at the end of 2022. It is likely to achieve its economic growth target this year of around 5 percent, but the going has been extremely difficult, and has involved some uncharacteristic recent financial maneuverings out of Beijing. In addition, the spectre of a hugely indebted property sector which comprises at least 30 percent of Chinas entire economy hangs over the country, looking ready to implode at any moment. By contrast, the U.S.s economic recovery from the Covid years has been strong, and it may well be that Chinas moment to overtake it as the worlds top superpower, either economically or militarily, has now been paused, perhaps lost entirely. Chinas delicate economic position, then, means that it cannot afford any further shocks, and this includes a dramatic reduction in demand from the West for its exports. Of course, China can buy oil and gas at 30 percent or more discounts from its key suppliers by dint of various agreements made by it since the U.S. withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran in May 2018. In this sense, then, rising energy prices would have little direct effect on it, and its long-term contracts with Middle Eastern suppliers guarantee no supply disruptions as well. Crucially though in Chinas calculations is the fact that the economies of the West remain its key export bloc. The U.S. still accounts for over 16 percent of Chinas export revenues on its own. According to a senior source in the European Unions (E.U.) energy security complex, and another source in a similar role in the U.S., both spoken to exclusively by OilPrice.com recently, the economic damage to China directly through its own energy imports and indirectly through damage to the economies of its key export markets in the West would dangerously increase if the Brent oil price remained over US$90-95 pb for more than one quarter of a year. Chinas fragile economic position also means that it has once again needed to be more cognisant of U.S. concerns, especially when one of its key geopolitical allies Russia continues its war against Ukraine, threatening the Washington-led NATO security alliances eastern flank. Chinas more diplomatic stance in recent months as its economic recovery has struggled to assert itself has been seen in its assistance to the U.S. in preventing the Israel-Hamas War from widening out, using the very same levers that it had established to aid its own advance across the Middle East over the past five years in particular. For the U.S., as also analysed in detail in my new book on the new global oil market order, Washington has long targeted a ceiling Brent oil price of US$75-80 pb, and a floor of US$40-45 pb. During the presidency of Donald Trump, this US$75-80 pb ceiling was seen as the price after which economic threat becomes apparent to the U.S. and its allies, and a political threat looms for sitting U.S. presidents. The US$40-45 pb floor was regarded as the price at which U.S. shale oil producers can survive and make decent profits. When Saudi Arabia (with the help of Russia) was pushing oil prices up over the US$80 pb of Brent level in the second half of 2018, Trump in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly said: OPEC and OPEC nations are, as usual, ripping off the rest of the world, and I dont like it. [] We defend many of these nations for nothing, and then they take advantage of us by giving us high oil prices. Not good. We want them to stop raising prices. We want them to start lowering prices and they must contribute substantially to military protection from now on. In short, during Trumps entire presidency, the US$80 pb oil price ceiling was breached only once for a period of around three weeks from the end of September 2018 to the middle of October 2018. Trump may well be back as President at the end of 2024, but even if the Democrats win again, they have shown the same desire to keep oil prices within that range. By Simon Watkins for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 4) The United States and Israel have condemned the deadly bombing at the Mindanao State University (MSU) in Marawi City on Sunday. In a statement, the State Department said it condemns in the strongest terms the horrific terrorist attack and that it was in close contact with our Philippine partners and stands with the people of the Philippines in rejecting this act of violence. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has blamed foreign terrorists for the blast which killed four people during a Sunday morning Catholic service at a gymnasium inside the MSU campus. We mourn those killed in the attack, and our thoughts are with the injured, the State Department's statement said. READ: Marcos condemns Marawi blast 'perpetrated by foreign terrorists' In a separate statement, the Embassy of Israel in Manila also denounced the attack. Israel is in solidarity with the Philippine government and Filipino people in face of this despicable terrorist attack. Terrorism is a global threat that needs collective unity among nations to safeguard the well-being of all people and communities, it said amid Israel's war with militant group Hamas. Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro also said the bombing had all indications of the involvement of foreign elements which authorities are looking into. According to international reports, the Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attack. Not enough shareholders of Australias top energy retailer, Origin Energy, backed on Monday a takeover bid from a Brookfield-led consortium of investors, leading to a collapse of a proposed $11-billion deal. A total of 68.92% of the votes cast by Origin Energys shareholders were in favor of the bid, short of the required 75% majority necessary to approve the proposal and move the deal forward, the Australian company said today. A consortium led by Brookfield and EIG has proposed to acquire Origin Energy Limited and its best and final proposal of AUS $9.53 per share significantly raised the cash consideration, Origin Energy said last month. Origin Energys shareholders were expected to vote on the proposal on November 23, but Origin Energy adjourned the vote to December 4, after receiving on the evening of November 22 a non-binding and indicative proposal from the Brookfield-led consortium of investors and EIG to amend the current Revised Proposal. The top shareholder in Origin Energy, pension fund AustralianSuper with a stake of more than 17%, has said that it would vote against the proposed terms of the acquisition. This latest low-ball offer strengthens AustralianSupers view that the offer remains substantially below our estimate of Origins long-term value, AustralianSuper said in a statement last month. AustralianSuper is resolute the value and future value of Origin is better in the hands of AustralianSuper members and other shareholders than a private equity consortium planning to shortchange them." Blair Thomas, CEO of EIG, told Reuters in an interview in November that the consortium was done talking to AustralianSuper. Commenting on Mondays vote that failed to win 75% of shareholder support, Origin Energys chairman Scott Perkins said We look forward to the continuing support of our shareholders as we focus on delivering on our strategic priorities, accelerating investment in cleaner energy and storage and pursuing our ambition to lead the energy transition. AustralianSuper, for its part, said on Monday, as carried by The Wall Street Journal, We have never wavered in our belief that the value and future value of Origin is better in the hands of members and other shareholders rather than a private-equity consortium seeking to make a quick return. ADVERTISEMENT By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Adani Green Energy, the biggest renewable power producer in India, plans an additional $22 billion in investment to boost its installed clean energy capacity fivefold by 2030, the companys CEO told Bloomberg Television in an interview on Monday. Adani Green Energy, part of Adani Group of Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, has announced earlier plans to invest $70 billion by 2030 in its green energy operations to become the largest producer of renewable energy in the world. In 2022, the plans included investments in three gigafactories that would manufacture solar modules, wind turbines, and electrolyzers for green hydrogen production. Adani Green Energy will first look to invest domestically before expanding with more operations abroad as it will aim to meet part of Indias soaring electricity demand, CEO Amit Singh told Bloomberg today. During the first half to September 30 of its 2023/2024 fiscal year, Adani saw its operational capacity increase by 24% year-on-year to 8,316 MW, the company said at the end of October. Thanks to the capacity additions, revenue, EBITDA, and profits at Adani Green Energy surged between April and September compared to the same period of 2022. Adani Green Energy has an overall locked-in portfolio of 20.4 GW including projects that are operating, under construction, or awarded to investment-grade counterparties, it said. Adani and Reliance Industries, chaired by another Indian billionaire, Mukesh Ambani, have recently announced grand plans to invest in renewables and the supply chain as India aims to expand clean power generation. Reliance Industries, for example, said in early 2022 it would invest as much as $76 billion in green energy projects in India over the next 15 years. Reliance had already announced the year prior a commitment to invest more than $10 billion in three years in a new business unit that would build solar modules, battery storage, electrolyzer, and fuel cell factories. ADVERTISEMENT By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: In the aftermath of new attacks by Houthi missiles on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, war risk insurance premiums have risen for this trade route. "It has now become clear the Houthis will attack anything at sea with links to Israel or Israelis, regardless of how feeble the links may be, and regardless of the potential for collateral damage to non-Israelis, for example crew members," Jakob Larsen, head of maritime safety & security with BIMCO, told Reuters. On Sunday, Yemens Houthis attacked three ships off the Red Sea coast of Yemen with ballistic missiles, while a U.S. warship shot down three Houthi drones These attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security, the U.S. militarys Central Command said in a statement. They have jeopardized the lives of international crews representing multiple countries around the world. Last month, the Houthis seized a cargo ship linked to an Israeli businessman, sparking speculation that more such attacks will follow against Israeli-owned vessels. A second hijacking took place shortly after, but was determined to have been Somali pirates taking advantage of the chaos in the Red Sea in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, and Israels aggressive response in Gaza. Sundays attacks were claimed by the Houthis who claimed the vessels were linked to Israel, though U.S. Central Command said the three vessels were connected to 14 nations and not to Israel. Following the Sunday attacks, an Israel military spokesman cited by Reuters said, there is little a merchant ship can do to protect itself against weapons of war. Rerouting away from the area is a valid consideration, especially for ships at heightened risk. Insurance risk premiums have risen as of Monday from around 0.03% prior to Red Sea attacks last week to between 0.05%-0.10% of the value of a ship, according to Reuters. The heightened risk means that commercial vessels will be forced to pay higher insurance or to use longer routes, which can increase transportation costs by tens of thousands of dollars. By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Crude oil prices whipsawed between an early gain and a loss in a matter of hours in pre-noon trade in Asia today locked between bullish and bearish events. On the bullish side, Venezuelans voted in a referendum about what essentially would amount to an annexation of two-thirds of neighboring Guyana. Reports then emerged that the Houthis had fired missiles at three commercial ships in the Red Sea, marking a further escalation in the region. On the bearish side, OPEC+ production cuts agreed last week have left traders unimpressed. Instead of causing a race to buy oil as many had expected, the decision led to the opposite as the market focused on demand pessimism. "Crude seems to be under continued pressure from the OPEC+ decision ... Some degree of discounting of the deeper OPEC+ cuts is justified, but as of now, the crude complex has completely disregarded them," oil market analyst Vanadana Hari from Vanda Insights told Reuters. Traders are likely to stay cautious given OPEC discord and rising non-OPEC oil production, Charu Chanana, Saxo Capital Markets strategist, told Bloomberg. A concern for the market is the fact that these announced cuts were voluntary rather than OPEC+ wide cuts, INGs head of commodity strategy Warren Patterson wrote in a note following the announcement. These voluntary cuts suggest that it is becoming difficult for members to agree on OPEC+ cuts. Therefore, if further action is needed in future, it will become increasingly difficult for the group to respond. Meanwhile, the end of the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel gave oil a little bit of upside potential that got realized in early morning trade in Asia today. The reversal that took place later, however, suggests the war premium is no longer a factor to be reckoned with in the absence of a major escalation event. We are re-entering a supply-driven market, one that more closely resembles the decade leading into Covid rather than the demand-led market seen in the post-pandemic era, RBC analyst Michael Tran wrote in a note cited by Bloomberg. And those types are markets are often fraught with bull traps. Early on Monday morning, oil prices were falling - with WTI testing the $73 mark while Brent was trading at $77.80. ADVERTISEMENT By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: An overwhelming majority of Venezuelan voters who took part in a referendum regarding most of the territory of neighboring Guyana voted in favor of claiming sovereignty over it. Per the Venezuelan government, as much as 95% of voters supported the claim, with 10.5 million votes counted, Reuters reported. The referendum took part despite the fact that the disputed territoryan oil-rich region called Essequibois part of an active case at the International Court of Justice, where Guyana is suing Venezuela for trying to take away most of its territory. Essequibo lies between Guyana and Venezuela, with both claiming sovereignty over the territory. The 61,000+ square mile territory equates to two-thirds of Guyanas territory and is also close to the site of a string of huge offshore oil discoveries by Exxon. Those discoveries, the first of which was announced in 2015, have re-invigorated Venezuelas claim on the territory. Last month, Guyana asked the International Court of Justice to stop the referendum but the government in Venezuela said they will not recognize the authority of the court. The Essequibo dispute is not new, to put it mildly. In fact, it dates back to the late 19th century when an arbitration court gave control of the territory to Guyana. The dispute flared up as the U.S. lifted oil sanctions on Caracas temporarily in a bid to increase the supply of heavy crude for Gulf Coast refineries. Guyanas government is worried that the referendum is the first step to an annexation of Essequibo by Venezuela. The International Court of Justice ordered Caracas to not take any steps regarding Essequibo but, as expected, the Venezuelan government did not comply. ADVERTISEMENT In confirmation to Guyanese worries, the president of the ICJ said, as quoted by the AP, that Venezuelan military officials announced that Venezuela is taking concrete measures to build an airstrip to serve as a logistical support point for the integral development of the Essequibo. By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: MIAMI A former American diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested in a long-running FBI counterintelligence investigation, accused of secretly serving as an agent of Cubas government, The Associated Press has learned. Manuel Rocha, 73, was arrested in Miami on Friday on a criminal complaint and more details about the case are expected to be made public at a court appearance Monday, said two people who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss an ongoing federal investigation. One of the people said the Justice Department case accuses Rocha of working to promote the Cuban governments interests. Federal law requires people doing the political bidding of a foreign government or entity inside the U.S. to register with the Justice Department, which in recent years has stepped up its criminal enforcement of illicit foreign lobbying. The Justice Department declined to comment. It was not immediately clear if Rocha had a lawyer and a law firm where he previously worked said it was not representing him. His wife, Karla Wittkop Rocha, hung up when contacted by the AP. Rocha's 25-year diplomatic career was spent under both Democratic and Republican administrations, much of it in Latin America during the Cold War, a period of sometimes heavy-handed U.S. political and military policies. His diplomatic postings included a stint at the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba during a time when the U.S. lacked full diplomatic relations with Fidel Castros communist government. Born in Colombia, Rocha was raised in a working-class home in New York City and went on to obtain a succession of liberal arts degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown before joining the foreign service in 1981. He was the top U.S. diplomat in Argentina between 1997 and 2000 as a decade-long currency stabilization program backed by Washington was unraveling under the weight of huge foreign debt and stagnant growth, triggering a political crisis that would see the South American country cycle through five presidents in two weeks. At his next post as ambassador to Bolivia, he intervened directly into the 2002 presidential race, warning weeks ahead of the vote that the U.S. would cut off assistance to the poor South American country if it were to elect former coca grower Evo Morales. I want to remind the Bolivian electorate that if they vote for those who want Bolivia to return to exporting cocaine, that will seriously jeopardize any future aid to Bolivia from the United States, Rocha said in a speech that was widely interpreted as a an attempt to sustain U.S. dominance in the region. The gambit angered Bolivians and gave Morales a last-minute boost. When he was finally elected three years later, the leftist leader expelled Rochas successor as chief of the diplomatic mission for inciting civil war. Rocha also served in Italy, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, and worked as a Latin America expert for the National Security Council. Following his retirement from the State Department, Rocha began a second career in business, serving as the president of a gold mine in the Dominican Republic partly owned by Canadas Barrick Gold. More recently, hes held senior roles at XCoal, a Pennsylvania-based coal exporter; Clover Leaf Capital, a company formed to facilitate mergers in the cannabis industry; law firm Foley & Lardner and Spanish public relations firms Llorente & Cuenca. Our firm remains committed to transparency and will closely monitor the situation, cooperating fully with the authorities if any information becomes available to us, Dario Alvarez, CEO of Llorente & Cuencas U.S. operations, said in an email. XCoal and Clover Leaf Capital did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Foley & Lardner said Rocha left the law firm in August. The Omaha-based Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Midlands will merge with its fellow youth mentoring organization in Nebraskas capital city, Big Brothers Big Sisters Lincoln. The two organizations will officially combine Jan. 1. By merging, they hope to support more families, improve the impact of their programs, ensure their sustainability, increase community awareness and employ more staff for recruitment and donor engagement, according to a press release from the organizations. Together, we are amplifying the positive influence of mentorship and creating a brighter future for the youth in our communities, Nichole Turgeon, president and CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Midlands, said in a prepared statement. Kyle Miller, board chair of Big Brothers Big Sisters Lincoln, said the collaboration will lead to a stronger, more resilient organization that can better serve the Lincoln area with more mentorship opportunities. The Omaha-based Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Midlands serves five Nebraska counties Douglas, Sarpy, Washington, Cass and Saunders plus Pottawattamie and Mills Counties in Iowa. Big Brothers Big Sisters Lincoln, a much smaller organization, serves Lancaster and Seward Counties. The Big Brothers Big Sisters Lincolns office will remain open in Lincoln. Their four employees will continue working there, and more people are being hired to join the Lincoln staff, said Emma Steeve, marketing and outreach manager for Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Midlands. Theyre going to keep their own identity, she said. Theyll still be Big Brothers Big Sisters Lincoln ... but theyll just operate under the Midlands umbrella. The organizations planned press conferences for Monday and Tuesday in Lincoln and Omaha to provide more details about the merger. Photos: New skate park opens on Omaha Nation Reservation HOMESTEAD, Fla. In New York, migrants at a city-run shelter grumble that relatives who settled before them refuse to offer a bed. In Chicago, a provider of mental health services to people in the country illegally pivoted to new arrivals sleeping at a police station across the street. In South Florida, some immigrants complain that people who came later get work permits that are out of reach for them. Across the country, mayors, governors and others have been forceful advocates for newly arrived migrants seeking shelter and work permits. Their efforts and existing laws have exposed tensions among immigrants who have been in the country for years, even decades, and don't have the same benefits, notably work permits. And some new arrivals feel established immigrants have given them cold shoulders. Thousands of immigrants marched recently in Washington to ask that President Joe Biden extend work authorization to longtime residents as well. Signs read, Work permits for all! and I have been waiting 34 years for a permit. Despite a brief lull when new asylum restrictions took effect in May, arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico topped 2 million for the second year in a row in the governments budget year ending Sept. 30. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of migrants have been legally admitted to the country over the past year under new policies aimed at discouraging illegal crossings. The growing wave of arrivals make our immigration advocacy more challenging. Their arrival has created some tensions, some questioning, said U.S. Rep. Jesus Chuy Garcia, a Chicago Democrat whose largely Latino district includes a large immigrant population. People have been waiting for decades for an opportunity to get a green card to legalize and have a pathway to citizenship. Asylum-seekers must wait six months for work authorization. Processing takes no more than 1.5 months for 80% of applicants, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Those who cross the border on the Biden administration's new legal pathways have no required waiting period. Under temporary legal status known as parole, 270,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela arrived through October by applying online with a financial sponsor. An additional 324,000 got appointments to enter at a land crossing with Mexico by using a mobile app called CBP One. The administration said in September that it would work to reduce wait times for work permits to 30 days for those using the new pathways. By late September, it had blasted 1.4 million emails and texts reminding who was eligible to work. Jose Guerrero, who worked in construction after arriving 27 years ago from Mexico, acknowledged many new arrivals felt compelled to flee their countries. He says he wants the same treatment. All these immigrants come and they give them everything so easily, and nothing to us that have been working for years and paying taxes, said Guerrero, now a landscaper in Homestead, Florida, about 40 miles south of Miami. They give these people everything in their hands. The White House is asking Congress for $1.4 billion for food, shelter and other services for new arrivals. The mayors of New York, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston wrote to Biden in October seeking $5 billion, noting the influx has drained budgets and cut essential services. The mayors also support temporary status and work permits for people who have been in the U.S. longer but have focused on new arrivals. All of the newcomers arriving in our cities are looking for the chance to work, and every day we get calls from business leaders who have unfilled jobs and want to hire these newcomers, the mayors wrote. We can successfully welcome and integrate these newcomers and help them pursue the American Dream if they have a chance to work. Many new arrivals are indisputably in dire circumstances, including some who hoped to join relatives and friends but find their calls blocked and messages unreturned. Angel Hernandez, a Venezuelan who walked through Panamas notorious Darien Gap rainforest, where he witnessed corpses, was sorely disappointed when he reached New York. The construction worker said he and his aunt, uncle and their two children left Colombia after more than three years because work dried up. Hernandez, 20, planned to settle with his uncles brother, who settled in the United States about a year earlier and lives in a house with a steady job. His job search has been fruitless. Everyone is out for themselves, he said outside the Roosevelt Hotel, a Midtown Manhattan property that was closed until the city opened it for migrants in May. The influx has put many immigrant services groups in a financial bind. For decades, the Latino Treatment Center has provided help with drug abuse to many immigrants living in Chicago without legal status. It started helping new arrivals sleeping at the police station across the street, fixing a shower in the office for migrants to use a few days a week and offering counseling. It is such a unique situation that we werent set up for, said Adriana Trino, the groups executive director. This has been a whole different wheelhouse, the needs are so different. The Washington rally reflected an effort by advocates to push for work permits for all, regardless of when they came. It is a system that has strained our city and, at this moment, it brings conflict between neighbors. Lawrence Benito, head of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said at a Chicago rally last month. DUBAI, United Arab Emirates Filling in for President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris flew to the Middle East to tackle a pair of challenges that have flummoxed White Houses for decades: climate change and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Each carries the risk of political blowback going into next years presidential elections. She spent barely 24 hours on the ground in Dubai, less time than it took to get to the United Arab Emirates and then back to Washington. At the U.N. climate conference, when it was announced that her excellency Kamala Harris was taking the stage Saturday for remarks, she was not even in the room. Harris' chair sat unoccupied as world leaders assembled for the panel spoke. When she arrived, she gave a short speech, then dashed off quickly, only to be summoned back for a group photo. Harris was delayed because she was on the telephone with the emir of Qatar regarding the Israel-Hamas war. And she was in a hurry after the climate event for more meetings with Arab leaders as Israeli bombardments resumed in Gaza after a temporary cease-fire. The awkward double booking during Harris hastily arranged Dubai trip illustrates a set of tricky and at times potentially contradictory policy and political crosscurrents. The Biden administration with its diverse coalition of voters is trying to navigate these crosscurrents just as the 2024 presidential race is heating up. When Harris spoke to reporters after her day of diplomacy, her prepared remarks skipped over the U.S. pledge to commit an additional $3 billion to a climate fund, a development she had cited in her conference speech. To the media, she focused on steps to resolve the war and prepare for what would come next. We all want this conflict to end as soon as possible, and to ensure Israels security and ensure security for the Palestinian people, Harris said. We must accelerate efforts to build an enduring peace and that begins with planning for what happens the day after the fighting ends. Climate and conflict are matters that require a balancing act at home as a possible Biden rematch with former Republican President Donald Trump unfolds. The Democratic administration is staking much of the U.S. economy's future on renewable energy, yet voters are frustrated by gasoline prices that are higher than when Biden took office. Similarly, the war that began on Oct. 7 has exposed a divided between Democrats over Washington's support for Israel and the suffering of Palestinian civilians. As the 81-year-old Biden seeks a second term, Harris, 59, has taken on a larger role promoting his campaign to younger voters. During a monthslong college tour to campuses across the country, the vice president spoke at every stop about the existential threat of climate change, only to have audience members frequently express concern that the administration and the rest of the world are not doing enough. In Dubai, Harris said it was our duty and our obligation to do more to move the world away from fossil fuels and limit the increase in average global temperatures. She said the U.S. would contribute $3 billion to a global fund meant to help developing countries better confront climate change and was joining 90-plus nations in promising to double energy efficiency and triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. JL Andrepont, a senior policy analyst at the environmental group 350.org, said the funding pledge was a cautious but hopeful sign of the power of public pressure. But Harris stopped short of calling for a phaseout of fossil fuels, something many environmental groups want in order to stop the emissions causing climate change. We will continue to celebrate the global wins that support justly sourced and implemented renewable energy for all and we wont stop advocating for a fast, full phaseout of all fossil fuels, including oil and gas, Andrepont said. There is a similar level of tension among Democratic supporters over the Israel-Hamas war. Polling by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research has shown that 50% of Democrats approve and 46% disapprove of how Biden has dealt with the war. Harris reaffirmed the administration's position that Israel must be able to defend itself. Yet her words after hearing from Arab leaders conveyed some frustration with the scale of Israel's response. She described the scale of civilian suffering as devastating" and said Israel must do more to protect the lives of Palestinians not involved in the fighting. Biden has previously declared the U.S. relationship with Israel was ironclad and his administration is seeking more than $14 billion to support Israel's war efforts. Harris also stressed the importance of a rebuilding process for homes and hospitals in Gaza region. Amber Sherman, chair of the Black Caucus of the Young Democrats of America, said Harris' comments were encouraging. Sherman had previously put out a statement on X, formerly Twitter, that said the Palestinians were revolting against occupation by the Israeli government, just as Black Americans had fought against slavery and white supremacy. It's important that people call out what's happening in Palestine, Sherman said. We do want Gaza to be rebuilt and it's important that she mentioned that. As she flew from Dubai, Harris spoke by phone with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and separately with Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, according to the White House. Harris reiterated U.S. concerns with Herzog that actions were escalating tensions. With Abbas, Harris again stated U.S. support for the Palestinian peoples right to security, dignity and self-determination, according to the readout. While Harris was on her way back Sunday, White House national security spokesman John Kirby applauded Israel for having published online a map of where Gaza residents could go to avoid the fighting. Theres not a whole lot of modern militaries that would do that, Kirby said on ABC's This Week, to telegraph their punches in that way. So they are making an effort. LINCOLN Theres guarded optimism that a collaborative effort by the Lincoln Airport and the Nebraska Attorney Generals Office will soon lead to the repayment of all remaining refunds to Red Way ticket buyers. We still need to see proof that its happening, though, said John Olsson, chairman of the Lincoln Airport Authority. Its one thing to hear about it. Im going to hold out celebrating until we see the substantiation that the refunds have happened. Olssons statement came shortly after Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers announced Friday that the last of the refunds, affecting about 670 people, are being processed. As of Friday afternoon, there was still a smattering of people awaiting their refunds. The Attorney Generals Office said consumers should be receiving a confirmation that a refund has been issued, but the process may take a few days. Olsson said Friday he had heard from some people awaiting their refunds, and he cautioned them to wait until Saturday before taking action. Im hearing that things are starting to flow, Olsson said. Well keep an eye on it. Im going to give it the day to kind of see what happens. He credits the end to the monthslong stalemate to a joint effort that started with a resolution by the airport authority that was followed by Hilgers getting involved at the state level. We knew (Hilgers) was applying pressure, Olsson said. I think this was a good collaborative effort. As of October, the failed airline, which went out of business in August after flying for less than three months, still owed about $450,000 to ticket holders for flights that never took place. The airport authority passed a resolution at its October meeting to withhold payment for Red Ways final invoice until the refunds were made. Thats when Hilgers launched his investigation. When it became apparent that the refunds were getting roadblocked by a business dispute, our office stepped in to ensure those refunds were processed efficiently and quickly, Hilgers said in a written statement. Getting consumers their hard-earned money back is a top priority for our office. Lancaster County approved the final invoice payment to Red Way $707,300 in October. The payment was capped to not exceed the $3 million $1.5 million each from the city of Lincoln and Lancaster County in American Rescue Plan Act funds that was used to help launch the airline. It was recently moved into a trust and will stay there until all of the refunds are received. Our best Omaha staff photos & videos of November 2023 Aboard HMCS Ottawa (CNN) A nighttime transit through the Taiwan Strait is a test of nerves, seamanship and political awareness in an environment where a slight miscalculation could potentially lead to an international conflict. Its the first night in November. Its dark ink black before the moonrise and Royal Canadian Navy Cmdr. Sam Patchell is taking that test. His 4,800-ton warship, the frigate HMCS Ottawa, weaves and dodges between dozens of commercial fishing boats and merchant vessels at speeds of up to 24 mph, all the while tasked with staying outside boundaries dictated by international law, including the recognized territorial waters of China. The Ottawas radar tracks Chinese warships, which, as they try to keep up with the Canadian frigate, are also weaving in and around the red and green lights of the commercial vessels plying their trade in one of the worlds most crowded waterways. As the captain of a Royal Canadian Navy frigate, Patchell keeps a lawyer and a public affairs officer by his side, because, for Canada and other Western allies of the United States this is all about upholding the rules-based international order, and if the Canadian ship violates the law of the sea by intruding in territorial waters, or gives adversaries a chance to spin Ottawas course as provocative, Patchells 12-hour cruise would swiftly become an international incident. And hes not just acting for himself. A mile behind the Ottawa, a US Navy destroyer follows Patchells lead. That oncoming fishing boat might miss Ottawa, but if he leaves too little space for it to maneuver then it will be the US destroyer that could run into trouble. It is just one of the tense moments CNN gets to see played out in some of the worlds most contested waters as it joins the Ottawas crew for a voyage spanning more than 3,500 miles (5,600 kilometers). There are live-fire exercises, with the guns of three navies trying to blast a speedboat drone to smithereens. There are nail-biting refuelings at sea, during which the 440-foot-long Ottawa slices through the waves less than 200 feet away for supply ships as big as 680-feet long (thats longer than two football fields). And there are Chinese warships, almost always on the horizon, looking shadowy as they move in and out of the rain showers that so frequently occur across the warm waters of the South China Sea. Other times, the Chinese presence is in the air, and it can be threatening as the crew of the Ottawas helicopter discovered when it was twice intercepted by Chinese fighter jets over international waters. The Chinese jets executed maneuvers that put the safety of all personnel involved at unnecessary risk, Canadas Defense Ministry said. But it isnt all tension. There are also barbecues, burgers and beers, a Halloween movie night, and an outrageous crossing-the-equator ceremony, complete with a homemade wooden dunking tub and sentences handed down by King Neptune. A dangerous place The Taiwan Strait, the 110-mile wide waterway separating mainland China from the democratically-ruled island of Taiwan, is considered one of the most potentially volatile portions of sea in the world. While conflict rages in Gaza and Ukraine, many analysts fear that these waters could be the next arena for war. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has vowed to take control of Taiwan, which the Chinese Communist Party considers part of its territory despite never having ruled it and by force if necessary. But the United States is committed to providing the island the means to defend itself, and Washington has been regularly sending warships through the strait to demonstrate that ships have the right of free passage through it under the international law of the sea. The November 1 transit of USS Rafael Peralta is the sixth this year by US Navy or Coast Guard ships, according to a database kept by Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. Beijing calls these sailings a provocation and a violation of Chinese territory. The Royal Canadian Navy has joined the US Navy on some of sailings, including one last June during which a Chinese warship came dangerously close to the American vessel USS Chung-hoon so close that the US captain had to take action to avoid a collision. Chess on the water That incident is on the mind of the commander of HMCS Ottawa as his ship enters the strait from the south in the early evening of November 1 with the Rafael Peralta close behind. We just want to get through here safely, Patchell, the Ottawas captain, says. The Chung-hoon incident is something Im thinking about. Patchell explains his plan for the 12-hour strait crossing. Hell stick as close as possible to a line that keeps his ship at least 24 nautical miles from the coasts of both mainland China and Taiwan. Although the internationally recognized limit for territorial waters is 12 nautical miles, theres another 12 outside of that called the contiguous zone. Its a buffer zone to allow mainland China or Taiwan, in this case, to warn ships away from their territorial waters, he says, but passing ships have every right to be in it. Still, the Ottawas course prompts a warning from Taiwans military, which has ships in the strait monitoring the progress of the Ottawa and Rafael Peralta. A voice over the radio advises Patchell to alter course to avoid Taiwans zone. But he says his bigger concern are the green-and-red-lit commercial fishing boats that keep popping up in front of the Ottawa. Avoiding a collision with them is Patchells most immediate priority. He instructs the crew on minor course changes to weave Ottawas way between the lights. And as if he were playing chess, he tries to think several moves ahead. You have to be careful not to solve one navigation problem and then create three more, he says. Throughout the night, as the Ottawa weaves, Patchell does all he can to prevent his ships bow from pointing in the direction of China. That can send the wrong message, he says. And as day breaks, and the Ottawa heads into the East China Sea at the north end of the strait, Patchells navigation plan has worked. Chinese warships have stayed well away and havent even hailed the Ottawa by radio. There is no Chung-hoon repeat on this November night. This is Chinas lake Though the Peoples Liberation Army Navy doesnt hail HMCS Ottawa this time, they are always watching, visible on radar if unseen by the naked eye in the dark of night. In fact, the PLA Navy seems to have at least one shadow on the Ottawa almost constantly after the fourth day of the cruise, after the Canadian ship approaches the Spratly Islands, a chain in the southern portion of the South China Sea where Beijing has built military installations on manmade islands in contested territories despite Xis pledge not to do so and disregarding the ruling of a United Nations tribunal that some of these territories dont even belong to China. China claims almost all of the 1.3 million-square-mile South China Sea as its sovereign territory. But portions of it are also claimed by governments in Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan. None of those governments make claims as sweeping as Beijings. And Beijing has no shortage of ships to assert its claims. Xi has overseen a naval construction boom that has seen Chinas navy surpass the US as the worlds largest. The crew of Ottawa is kept keenly aware of the Chinese presence. Each morning at 7 a.m., a wakeup/breakfast call over the ships loudspeakers is followed by a report on the ships situation. The type and hull number of the Chinese warships tracking Ottawa are part of that situation report. There are other reminders, too. For much of the trip, especially in the vicinity of Chinese-held islands, cell phones are not allowed on the ships open decks, in case they become hacking targets. A paper sign on hatches leading to the outside reminds crew members not to take their devices outside. In daylight hours in the South China Sea, from Ottawas flight deck or outdoor bridge wings, Chinese warships are often visible to the naked eye. At dusk, their silhouettes sometimes give them away against the setting sun. On October 29, things take a potentially dangerous turn, one that could have cost lives and ratcheted up tensions in the South China Sea to new levels. While searching for a previously noted submarine contact east of the Chinese-claimed Paracel Islands, the Ottawas helicopter, with its crew of four, reports two close encounters with Chinese fighter jets, the latter coming within 100 feet of the Canadian helicopter and, on the second occasion, releasing flares in front of it that could have caused it to crash, Canadian officials said. The risk to a helicopter in that instance is the flares moving into the rotor blades or the engines, so this was categorized as both unsafe and non-standard, unprofessional, says Maj. Rob Millen, air officer aboard the Ottawa. The incident is far from rare. US defense officials said in October theyd seen almost 200 coercive and risky examples of Chinese flying in the previous two years over the South and East China seas. The Canadians see it also. Just two weeks earlier, a Royal Canadian Air Force patrol plane reported an unsafe intercept by a Chinese jet. Beijing has pushed back, accusing Canada of smearing China in the chopper episode and lecturing Washington on the location of such close encounters. (They) were in the waters and airspace around China, not in the Gulf of Mexico or off the US West Coast. said a Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman on October 26. How can the Chinese military intercept the US aircraft and warships if they dont come? The flare incident is on the mind of a CNN reporter flying in the same helicopter over the East China Sea a few days later. There is no Chinese intercept on this day, but CNN spots three Chinese warships during just a three-hour flight. They are just a fraction of an active fleet the Pentagon estimates at more than 340 warships. Two radar operators in the cabin of the copter look for warship contacts on their instruments while in the cockpit two pilots search for the long wakes that are an indication of ships moving at high speeds. That looks warshippy, they say when spotting something suspicious. Live-fire drills Day four of the 12-day journey sees Ottawa in the southern portion of the South China Sea, in a warship troika with USS Rafael Peralta and the Australian destroyer HMAS Brisbane. The three surface combatants line up with Peralta leading and Ottawa trailing for a chance to test their big guns, five-inch weapons on the bigger Peralta and Brisbane and a 57mm-gun on Ottawa. But Ottawa has the star player of the exercise, the Hammerhead target drone, otherwise known as an unmanned surface vehicle target (USV-T). Its essentially a 16-foot remote controlled speedboat capable of speeds up to 40 mph. The Hammerhead USV-T replicates high-speed naval tactics and a variety of operational guidance plans including straight-on high-speed attacks, crossing patterns, zig zag patterns, and other evasive maneuvers, the UK-based manufacturer Qinetiq says on its website. Radio operators aboard Ottawa announce over international frequencies that the drill is about to start, and they repeat the warning at 15-minute intervals as it takes place. They identify themselves as coalition warship 341 thats Ottawas hull number as seen just behind its bow and remark how strange it is not to call themselves Canadian warship 341 as would be standard practice. But its a reflection of the cooperation being fostered in the region by Washington and its allies and partners. The live-fire drill is part of exercise Noble Caribou, which involves ships and aircraft from five countries the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and New Zealand. Units from each of the five move in and out of the exercises depending upon daily priorities. Only Canada, the US and Australia are participating in the live-fire drill. As Peralta, then Brisbane and finally Ottawa test their big guns with smoke bursts out over the open water of the South China Sea, the Hammerhead gets ready to make simulated attack runs at them. Peralta fires first at the speeding boat, shooting off rounds to test the destroyers aim but not necessarily sink or disable the Hammerhead. After a few shots, the US ships gun misfires. Controllers on the Ottawa start the Hammerhead on a run at Brisbane and the Australian destroyers gunners are honed in. An explosive shell disables the remote-controlled speedboat in a puff of black smoke and large splashes of shrapnel. But the Hammerhead isnt sunk and for safetys sake it could be a navigational hazard to other ships if left on the surface it must be sent to the bottom. Thats Ottawas job, but the commanding officer, Cmdr. Patchell, doesnt want to use shells from the ships main gun, which cost more than $7,000 each, to do the job. Ammo from the .50-caliber machine gun on the ships bridge wing should be able to sink the Hammerhead much more cheaply. After a few bursts, flames pour from the 16-foot drone, quickly consuming it as leaking fuel burns on top of the water. Hammerheads bow rises up and it slips beneath the surface, leaving fuel and oil burning for a minute or two. Lt. Sean Milley, operations officer on the Ottawa, says the live-fire drill was a success. The Americans dont have drones like the Hammerhead, he says, so US gunners love the chance to be tested by the Canadian drone in exercises like these. Refueling at sea Ottawa has a range of almost 11,000 miles (17,600 kilometers). That is more than enough to cover the distance it will travel during the voyage from Singapore to Okinawa on this trip. But the ship must constantly be ready for all eventualities, says Lt. Cmdr. Christine Hurov, the Ottawas public affairs officer. So, it keeps fuel tanks for its two gas-turbine and single diesel engines topped up through replenishments at sea, known as RAS to the crew. Ottawa takes on average about 40,000 gallons (150,000 liters) of fuel in an RAS event. Thats about a quarter of the capacity of its fuel tanks. It does four refuelings during the trip from Singapore to Okinawa, one from a New Zealand supply vessel, two from an American one, and onee from an Australian one. The refuelings are tests of nerves, seamanship, communications and coordination for the crews of both the supply ships and the frigate. During the first RAS, with the New Zealand Navys largest ship ever, HMNZS Aotearoa, Cmdr. Patchell cautiously moves his ship alongside HMNZS Aotearoa, which at 24,000 tons is about five times Ottawas size. The Ottawas crew crouches for cover behind anything solid as the supply ship fires lines across that will carry fuel hoses and distance markers. Once the fuel hose is locked into the receptacle for Ottawas tanks, Patchell and his crew try to maintain a constant 16 mph speed with the supply ship and hold the distance at between 160 feet to 200 feet. Patchell and his ship drivers are also fighting physics. The rushing, turbulent seas between the two ships are real-life applications of what is known as Bernoulis principle pressure changes due to the speed of the waters could pull Ottawa into the much larger tanker. Patchell issues course corrections of one or two degrees to keep Ottawa lined up and the fuel hoses connected. The refueling takes about 90 minutes, and when the fuel lines have been drained and the connection is broken, its celebrated, as all RAS are aboard Ottawa, with blaring music, on this occasion from Canadian artist the Weeknd, with Blinding Lights. A later RAS, on a Saturday with the American ship USNS Wally Schirra, is appropriately ended with Loverboys Working for the Weekend. But the crew of Australias HMAS Stalwart probably get the award for music during the Ottawas 11-day cruise. Midway through a nighttime refueling in the East China Sea, the Australian vessel began blaring Oh Canada (not the Canadian national anthem) from rapper Classified across the waves as the opener of a set of tunes. Coupled with the glow sticks that help illuminate the work areas on Ottawa, it makes the ocean seem more like a dance party than a military maneuver. The lighter side of the South China Sea Like the Australians, the Canadians try to make sure theres a balance to what they do in these contested waters. So there is a beer, burger and hotdog barbecue on the rear flight deck. For Halloween there are decorations, costumes and a movie night featuring a scary flick on a big screen watched from personal lawn chairs under an almost full moon (and the watchful eyes of a Chinese warship). But the highlight of this voyage for many aboard the Canadian frigate is a crossing the line ceremony, an event that marks the first time a sailor crosses the equator. Dozens aboard Ottawa earned their spot in the ceremony when the frigate dipped into the Southern Hemisphere to the south of Malaysia and Singapore earlier in its Pacific deployment. The ritual involves soakings, eating unappetizing food, a court presided over by King Neptune, god of the sea, and eventually a dunking in a specially constructed hot tub on the rear flight deck of Ottawa. At the end, first-time crossers are issued cards to prove their status that they will treasure for the rest of their sea-going days, lest they be sentenced by Neptunes court again. One enlisted crewman describes getting the card as Christmas come early with the best present ever. Its the kind of thing Patchell wants to hear from his crew. He doesnt want his crew wound too tight, and he also wants to show that what Ottawa is doing is routine, moving through international waters in ways allowed by international laws and norms. We dont have whats called freedom of navigation operations, he says. He goes over Ottawas planned route. Its international waters, and we want to go in that direction. Well go in that direction, as were allowed to do, he says. We dont make it a thing. This story was first published on CNN.com, "CNN took an 11-day cruise through some of the most-contested waters on Earth. Heres what we learned" How Time Flies is a daily feature looking back at Pantagraph archives to revisit what was happening in our community and region. 100 years ago Dec. 4, 1923: Declaring themselves in favor of the establishment of a court of tax appeals, the Bloomington Association of Commerce unanimously adopted a resolution to that effect. The resolution drafted by lawyer members finds fault with the revenue laws now in force and suggests measures whereby the defects could be corrected. 75 years ago Dec. 4, 1948: An ordinance reducing electric rates 10% for the city light plant's 1700 customers was passed by Bloomington City Council. The rate cut, which brings the city rate slightly below the Illinois Power and Light company rate, is effective Dec. 1. 50 years ago Dec. 4, 1973: Arguments were on the heated side as the Normal City Council voted 5-2 to locate the new city hall-police station complex on the southeast edge of the business district. The site is bordered by Phoenix Avenue, Parkinson Street, Illinois Central Gulf Railroad tracks and the west line of property fronting on Linden Street. 25 years ago Dec. 4, 1998: Despite financial challenges and job cuts, Mitsubishi apparently intends to stay parked in the Twin Cities. The Normal auto plant is seeking to extend a 13-year-old enterprise zone agreement for 13 years. However, this time the company plans to seek only state incentives and not to extend the millions of dollars in local tax breaks it now receives. Vintage Pantagraph newspaper ads for medicine, 'magic' remedies Clover Blossom Extract - Nov. 15, 1883 St. Jacobs Oil - July 14, 1887 Castoria - July 26, 1892 Rheumatic Ring - May 29, 1894 Beefmalt - May 29, 1894 Wakefield's Cough Syrup - Feb. 13, 1908 S.S.S. - April 23, 1908 Olive Tablets - Nov. 20, 1911 Cold-go - Dec. 11, 1911 Dr. Danby - Dec. 11, 1911 Allcock Plasters - March 2, 1917 Olive Tablets - Feb. 23, 1918 Laxative Bromo Quinine - Oct. 16, 1918 Bayer Tablets of Aspirin - April 24, 1919 Bayer Tablets of Aspirin - April 29, 1919 Snake Oil - Nov. 22, 1919 Beecham's Pills - Nov. 22, 1919 Snake Oil - Nov. 29, 1919 Doan's Kidney Pills - March 8, 1920 Bayer Tablets of Aspirin - Sept. 21, 1920 J.C. Hutzell's Eczema Treatment - Nov. 11, 1922 Gude's Pepto-Mangan - April 2, 1923 O-Joy Corn Wafers - March 4, 1930 Dr. Pierce's Favorite Prescription - March 19, 1930 666 Tablets - March 25, 1930 Cuticura - March 25, 1930 Geo-Mineral - Dec. 8, 1948 Anacin - Jan. 16, 1963 Liquiprin - Aug. 27, 1970 Icy Hot - Nov. 20, 1977 GRANITE CITY The Illinois Department of Labor says it has issued a subpoena to U.S. Steel, in an effort to determine whether the company properly notified Granite City workers ahead of hundreds of layoffs. The company announced in September that it planned to idle the last operating blast furnace at the plant, and some 400 workers would be temporarily laid off. Company leaders attributed the move to the United Auto Workers strike, which had just begun a few days earlier, and said it expected the furnace would be idled for less than six months. Under the state and federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification requirements, businesses must notify workers and state and local agencies, in certain circumstances, ahead of mass layoffs. The federal WARN Act is usually not triggered by layoffs lasting less than six months. Illinois state WARN Act also defines loss of employment as a layoff that exceeds six months. The auto workers reached new tentative labor deals and began returning to work at the end of October. But last week, U.S. Steel said it was extending the shutdown of the blast furnace beyond the expected six months, and that the furnace would be idled indefinitely. The company sent WARN notices to workers and government agencies, advising that an additional 600 employees were at risk of layoffs. The company said it expected that, of the 1,000 total workers who had received notices, 60% might ultimately be affected. Steel rolling and finishing operations at the site will continue, using metal slabs from other facilities. A company spokeswoman said in an email Thursday that the blast furnace was initially idled due to the autoworkers strike, and the decision to extend the shutdown was made because the company can meet customer demand through its other sites. U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski, a Democrat from Springfield whose district includes parts of Central Illinois, called for the state labor department to look into the issue. On Thursday, Budzinski sent a letter to the departments director, requesting that she open an investigation into whether the company appropriately followed the WARN Act. The company did not file a WARN notice in September. The Illinois labor department said it was first notified of layoffs at the plant on Tuesday. The lack of WARN notice in September left 400 employees, their families and the Granite City community without the dignity, respect and time to prepare that they deserve, Budzinski wrote. The department said in a press release that businesses that fail to provide proper notice under the WARN Act can be liable for back pay and benefits, plus civil penalties of up to $500 for each day of the violation. The possibility of reductions at the Granite City plant has loomed since last summer, when U.S. Steel revealed plans to sell a portion of the facility to Chicago-based SunCoke Energy in a deal that would eliminate nearly 1,000 of 1,450 jobs at the plant. The companies are still in discussion, and no final agreement has been announced. Lending further uncertainty to the situation, over the past few months multiple companies have made offers to buy U.S. Steel. The company said in August that it was reviewing its options, and has not made any public announcements about a sale agreement. The Education Ministry says all SHS 1 students across the country will be using the same prospectus. According to the ministrys spokesperson, school heads have no right to issue any other prospectus which has not been authorized by the ministry. Kwesi Kwateng in an interview with NEAT FMs morning show, Ghana Montie urged parents to spurn prospectus from the schools. No parent should accept any prospectus; we are using a harmonized one, he told host Mac Jerry Osei Agyemang. First-year senior high school students across the country are expected to report to their respective schools on Monday, 4th December, despite calls for reconsideration of the reopening date. Parents and other relevant stakeholders have called for an extension of the reporting date, citing various reasons, but the Ghana Education Service (GES) insisted on the December 4 date. Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/peacefmonline.com/ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Former PNC General Secretary, Atik Mohammed has asked the Special Prosecutor to stop lamenting about the Judiciary and concentrate on his corruption cases ensuring he executes them to the end. To him, the Special Prosecutor's behavior is unacceptable, stressing if he feels he has strong evidences to back his cases and they are dismissed in court, he has the option of seeking appeal at the Court of Appeal. He questioned the Special Prosecutor, Kissi Agyebeng's logic in organizing press conferences and complaining about Judges throwing out his cases. Kissi Agyebeng, speaking to the press on Wednesday, November 29, pointed out some frustrations he is having in prosecuting his cases. He described the trend as troubling saying "we do not force feed cases, we do not force feed our prosecutions. It is our belief that it is not a matter of us going beyond our mandate but rather a case of hasty dismissiveness and lack of regard because if you take the four cases I tabled out over a period of time spanning from July 2022 to Monday, there is a troubling trend". He added; Indeed I have had several calls from well-meaning lawyers admonishing me that they have heard talk that our friends who have been elevated to the bench and presiding over cases in court do not take very kindly to criticism, especially of the public calling out variety as we do. And that if the office persists in the media releases, the judges will gang up against the office and throw out all our cases. It will be absolutely of no good should it be the case that the OSP is set against the judiciary or that the judiciary is against the OSP. That will surely spell disastrous consequences for this republic, especially in the fight against corruption to the glee of corrupt persons. I do not intend to sound as though Im predicting doom but we are facing doom. With this development, it will not be long, [before] a suspected murderer or armed robber will boldly walk to court with the unthinkable prayer that the court should injunct law enforcement agencies from investigating him, Mr. Agyebeng cautioned. But to Atik, the utterances and actions of Kissi Agyebeng betray the office of the Special Prosecutor. "If you strongly believe in your case that what you did was lawful and you were bounced, what do you do? You move up; you don't come and organize a press conference and tell us that there seems to be a grand conspiracy against you. Are you the only one who goes to court? Are you the only person who is a lawyer?", he slammed. Atik reprimanded the Special Prosecutor stressing "we set up this office for good reason and his behavior and actions are betraying the very objects of this office. We set it up to be able to fight corruption but I can't see any corruption case he has fought successfully to the end". Delivering his submissions on Peace FM's "Kokrokoo" morning show, he admonished Kissi Agyebeng to up his game and stop the numerous complaints, stating he should seemingly resign if he feels he cannot do his job. "Is he telling me that he always goes to one court or only one Judge presides over all his cases? It cannot be that all the Judges work in a league to frustrate you alone. Are you the only one leading an anti-corruption agency in this country? The Attorney General, himself, who does even more cases than you is not complaining that there is conspiracy against him...You have no room to lament. He should up his legal game", he said. Atik further noted that what Kissi Agyebeng is seeking is to get the Judges to favor him but that, to him, is "an invitation to unfairness, injustice". 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. Featured Video QNET, a global direct selling and e-commerce company with the aim of dispelling myths and misconceptions while sharing insights about its brand, brought together a group of seasoned journalists from media houses across the country for an eye-opening webinar. The virtual event was organised to familiarise journalists with the true QNET brand and to discuss the first-hand experiences some journalists had when they attended the 2022 and 2023 V-Convention in Malaysia. The VCON is the largest gathering of QNET independent representatives (distributors) and partners pooling 15,000 and more people at the same time. Insight and knowledge sharing The webinar which had QNET officials present, saw 5 seasoned journalists from top-tier media organisations share their experiences and key take-aways from VCON 2022 and 2023 and their visit to the QNET office and QI University in Malaysia. They interacted with QNET CEO, top management, and also witnessed and experienced the VCON in its thrilling and euphoric display. They visited QNET product booth and had a feel of a wide array of authentic QNET products. Topics discussed during the webinar include QNET products and the science behind them, VCON; the aura, atmosphere and belief in the brand, the misconceptions about the brand and the fight against scam and getting to know QNET from an investigative angle. One journalist revealed that he had heard a lot of negative buzz surrounding the QNET brand and as an investigative journalist, he decided to verify that information. I was surprised to find out that QNET had been in existence for 25 years and had presence in 25 countries. Visiting Malaysia and seeing their huge Headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, and experiencing firsthand the ethical standards the company has, proved to me that it was a very credible organisation that has an unfair negative tag due to the actions of a few miscreants. QNET is a genuine and ethical company that unfortunately fraudsters are taking advantage of and the lack of understanding of the direct selling business in this part of our world fuels the unfortunate narrative. But for me, my perception has changed and I am glad to be sharing this revelation with my colleagues in the media industry. QNET Products and the science behind them Another senior journalist could not hide his amazement after experiencing the wellness and lifestyle products that QNET offers and the science behind them. I was sceptical about the products that QNET offered and their perceived way of doing business. The media junket to VCON and the QNET headquarters left me amazed. The level of research that goes into every product left me wishing that this kind of technology could be adopted in some sectors of our country. My favourite product is the Home Pure Nova water purifier that turns tap water into clean safe drinking water using nine stages of purification. Mr Biram Fall, Regional General Manager for QNET sub-Saharan Africa revealed At QNET, we uphold the ethical and legal standards of every country we operate in and we continue to educate the public on how the e-commerce direct selling business works. We are committed to upholding our values and ethics while promoting wellness and making positive social impacts in the country and beyond. We look forward to further collaborations and initiatives that will strengthen our partnerships and empower the youth. Next year, we are embarking on many initiatives that will enable us improve our reputation and weed out the few bad nuts tarnishing the image of QNET in Ghana. Testimonials Other participating journalists from locations outside Accra, especially those from the Volta region who were privy to the misconceptions about QNET before the webinar, revealed that, the virtual event was insightful and helped address the myths and misconceptions surrounding the brand. 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 The Paramout Chief of Wala Traditional Council, Naa Alhaji Fuseini Seidu Pelpuo VI, has honoured Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia with the royal title "Meyiri". At a ceremony at his Palace in Wa on Monday, December 4, 2023, the Wa Na said the title which means "builder of the house" is in recognition of Dr. Bawumia's efforts and commitment as Vice President to building and supporting communities. The Vice President, who privately informed the Wa Na prior to his public announcement of his intentions to run for the NPP flagbearership, was in Wa to express gratitude to the Wa Na and his elders for their prayers and encouragement. The Wa Na congratulated Dr. Bawumia on his historic election as NPP Flagbearer and urged him to continue with his good works and efforts at doing his best for communities and the nation as he seeks to be President of Ghana. Dr. Bawumia thanked the Wa Na for the honour which, to him, serves as extra motivation for him to continue his good works. This honour is the latest royal title conferred on Dr. Bawumia by major Chiefs in the Northern Region. The Nayiri and the Yagbonwura have all conferred similar titles on Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia. The Vice President was accompanied by the National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, Stephen Ayensu Ntim, former General Secretary of the party, Kwabena Agyepong, Upper West Regional Minister Hafiz Bin Salih, former Suhum MP, Frederick Opare Ansah, among others. 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. Featured Video The Ghana Army in collaboration with the Ghana Navy and Ghana Air Force will be conducting its annual Counter Terrorism Field Training Exercise codenamed EXERCISE EAGLE CLAWS 2023 from Monday 4 to Thursday 7 December 2023. The theme for the Exercise is Countering Violent Extremism and Terrorism for Sustainable Peace and Development. The exercise will take place in the northern frontiers of Ghana specifically in the Savanna, Northern, North East, Upper East and Upper West Regions. As a result, the Military and other sister Security Services would be moving their vehicles, equipment and personnel to the general areas of the Exercise. The Ghana Armed Forces therefore wishes to inform the general public not to panic but cooperate for a smooth and successful conduct of the Exercise. It also wishes to assure the general public of its commitment and readiness to execute its mandate to ensure that the country is peaceful and its citizens are safe always. A MARTEYE Lieutenant Colonel for Director General Public Relations Source: GHANA ARMED FORCES 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 Minister for Information, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, has called for more stringent action against individuals responsible for attacks on journalists. Expressing concern over the escalating incidents of violence targeting the media, the Minister urged judges to expedite severe penalties, emphasizing the need for swift and decisive justice, regardless of the culprits' social status or political affiliations. Freedom of expression is the cornerstone of every democratic society; it is a fundamental right that must be protected and upheld. We cannot, however discuss freedom of expression without press freedom and recognising the important role journalists play in our society. It is our duty to create an environment where journalists can carry out their work without fear of violence or intimidation. We must condemn any form of violence against journalists and take concrete steps to provide them with the necessary protection and support, the Minister said. The call was made during the opening ceremony of a training workshop for judges held on Monday, December 4, 2023, in Accra. The workshop focused on the critical importance of safeguarding freedom of expression and ensuring the safety of journalists. In line with creating a conducive and safe environment for journalists, he said government through the Ministry of Information has initiated several programmes aimed at supporting the media sector. Since 2019, these efforts have resulted in the development of key interventions to confront the challenges faced by the media industry. One significant initiative was the inauguration of the Office of the Coordinated Mechanism on the Safety of Journalists (CMSJ) under the National Media Commission (NMC). This office operates with a framework designed for use by all stakeholders to create a secure environment for journalism practice, prevent violence against journalists, protect those in danger, and prosecute perpetrators of violence. Through its Media Capacity Enhancement Programme (MCEP), the ministry is actively providing training for 250 journalists on emerging issues in journalism. This collaborative effort aims to bolster the sector, which has faced increasing challenges in recent times. Additionally, the full rollout of the Right to Information (RTI) Law includes the training and deployment of RTI officers in nearly 600 government offices nationwide. The establishment of the RTI Commission has played a crucial role in ensuring compliance by public offices with the RTI Act. Further, the Ministry facilitated a comprehensive consultation on a new Broadcasting Bill, designed to enhance state institutions' ability to regulate the broadcasting sector effectively. These initiatives collectively underscore the government's commitment to supporting and fortifying the media landscape in the face of evolving challenges. Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/peacefmonline.com/ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video A video showing the moment a Caucasian woman tried to block President Tinubu during a group photograph with King Charles and other dignitaries at the 28th UN Climate Change Conference COPE28 held in Dubai. President Tinubu, King Charles and other dignitaries had filed out for a group picture when the woman walked all the way to the front to exchange pleasantries with King Charles who was standing next to President Tinubu. After the exchange of Pleasantries, she stood in front of President Tinubu so she could be in the group photographer. Tinubu's aide who was making the video immediately called for the woman to move as she was blocking the President of Nigeria. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lindaikejiblog (@lindaikejiblogofficial) 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 View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@utvghana) Notorious Chinese national, En Huang, also known as Aisha Huang, has been sentenced to four years and six months in prison for engaging in illegal mining and re-entering Ghana after being deported. She has also been fined GH48,000 and ordered to be deported again after serving her jail term. The Criminal Division of the Accra High Court, presided over by Justice Lydia Osei-Marfo, found her guilty on the charges of undertaking a mining operation without a licence, facilitating the participation of persons engaged in a mining operation, the illegal employment of foreigners, and entering Ghana while prohibited from re-entry. The court ruled that the state, led by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) Yvonne Atokora Obuobisa, had proven beyond reasonable doubt that Aisha committed the crimes. The court also noted that Aisha contradicted herself in her defence statements in the trial, which lasted for one year and two months. Aisha, who appeared calm and collected in the dock, wearing a nose mask and a white scarf, was convicted on her own plea on the charge of entering Ghana while prohibited from re-entry. She had entered into a Plea Bargaining agreement with the State (office of the Attorney General) on May 3, this year. Her counsel, Miracle Attachey, pleaded with the court to impose a fine and deport his client instead of a custodial sentence, arguing that a jail term would exert another financial burden on the state, especially the prison service. He also said that his client had made the work of the prosecution and the court move expeditiously regarding her re-entry charge. However, the DPP opposed the plea, saying that the sentence should reflect the impact of Aishas actions on the people of Ghana, the communities that she had permanently impaired, and the livelihoods that she took away. She said that Aisha had operated with indignity and had shown no remorse for her offences. Aisha Huang was accused of being in the thick of affairs of illegal mining, also known as galamsey, especially in the Ashanti Region. She was deported from the country in 2018, after the Attorney General decided to discontinue her trial in which she was accused of engaging in small-scale mining without a licence. However, she was said to have sneaked back into the country to allegedly engage in the same activities for which she was deported. In October 2022, the Attorney General then decided to prosecute her for the alleged crimes before her deportation and new ones committed since her entry back into the country. It is the case of the prosecution that Aisha had an illegal mining concession at Bepotenten in the Amansie West District in the Ashanti Region and also operated a mining support services company; she had pleaded not guilty to undertaking a mining operation without a licence, facilitating the participation of persons engaged in a mining operation, the illegal employment of foreigners, and entering Ghana while prohibited from re-entry. But on May 3, this year, Aisha pleaded guilty to entering Ghana while prohibited from re-entry contrary to section 20(4) of the Immigration Act, 2000, Act 573. Source: UTV/theindependentghana.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 (CNN) Mirna El Helbawi sits on a Cairo rooftop, her face illuminated by the moonlight and a phone in her hands, as she texts a terrified father whose wife and children are trapped in Gaza. I dont want a single thing from this world right now, he writes to her in Arabic, except to be able to talk to them, even if its for the last time, let me tell them goodbye. El Helbawi, more than 200 miles away, cant shield his family from the Israeli missiles raining down. But she can provide them with the chance to say one more I love you. The Egyptian writer and activist is the founder of Connecting Gaza, a grassroots initiative that uses eSIMs or virtual SIM cards to help Palestinians skirt telecommunication blackouts amid Israeli airstrikes across the territory. El Helbawi, along with a small group of volunteers and a legion of international donors, says theyve restored telephone and internet connection to more than 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and will continue the effort until the devastating war between Israel and Hamas is over. The right to telephone and internet access is a basic human right just as important as food and water, El Helbawi, 31, told CNN. Without the ability to communicate, Palestinian civilians caught in the line of fire are unable to check on each other or call for help; emergency and medical workers cant coordinate their responses; and journalists cant document atrocities on the ground, including possible war crimes, she says. After all this pain, they cant even share their grief with the world or scream for people to demand a ceasefire. They have to endure bombardment and attacks in absolute silence, El Helbawi said. Its like being murdered while someone is putting a hand over your mouth, so you cant even scream for help. Gaza falls silent El Helbawi, like millions of others, has been anxiously watching the war unfold since October 7, when Hamas launched a brazen attack in Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 240 others hostage. Israel responded by imposing a siege and launching deadly airstrikes across Gaza, destroying homes, schools and hospitals in the densely populated territory. An estimated 15,200 Palestinians, 70% of whom are women and children, have so far been killed in the attacks, and 40,000 others wounded, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which draws its figures from sources in Hamas-run Gaza. Almost immediately, telecommunication services experienced disruptions. Israel cut electricity to the territory and service providers said the bombardment destroyed vital network infrastructure. Some Palestinians were still able to make telephone calls and access the internet, but connection was spotty. For weeks, El Helbawi followed the news closely. Images and videos posted on social media broke her heart entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble; doctors struggling to treat patients without medicine; parents mourning the deaths of their children. Then on October 27, as Israel prepared to expand its ground operations, Gaza fell silent. We regret to announce a complete disruption of all communication and internet services with the Gaza Strip in light of the ongoing aggression, Paltel, the leading telecommunication company in the Palestinian territories, said in a statement. It was the first of several blackouts to strike Gaza. Fearful that a blackout could provide cover for war crimes, El Helbawi became consumed with finding a solution. At first, she joined others on social media platform X, calling for Elon Musk to deliver his Starlink satellite internet service to Gaza and was excited when Musk said he would. But when talks on those plans stalled, El Helbawi decided to try something else. At the suggestion of a social media follower, she purchased an eSIM with roaming service and had a friend try to connect to a foreign network. To her surprise, it worked. I felt it in my whole body the moment we realized there was hope even if it was very small hope that we found a solution, El Helbawi said. It was the light at the end of a very dark tunnel. Within 24 hours, she posted on X and Instagram asking followers who wanted to help restore telephone and internet for Palestinians to donate eSIMs by purchasing them online and sending her the QR codes. El Helbawi felt confident she could find people in Gaza with service to distribute the eSIMs throughout the territory. Giving voice to victims As El Helbawi began executing her plan, Ahmed Elmadhoun was in Gaza struggling with how to report on the war without telephone or internet service. As one of the few journalists on the ground, Elmadhoun felt obligated to keep the world informed of the latest news, sharing photos and videos of the aftermath on social media. Its a significant responsibility, Elmadhoun, 27, told CNN. People here are dying in silence, and no one can hear them. We are the voice of all these victims. He also worried about his family, who were displaced throughout Gaza and could not be reached. More than 40 of his relatives were killed in airstrikes, Elmadhoun says. Gaza was incredibly isolated, with only fear present. We were alone, very alone, he said. We couldnt reach our families or inquire about them, and the airstrikes were incredibly intense. Even the ambulance and emergency teams couldnt determine the locations of the bombings or reach the injured. Amid his fears, Elmadhoun managed to access the internet using an Israeli SIM card before it was blocked. In that time, he posted on X asking: Someone told me about an eSIM who? Minutes later, El Helbawi saw his question and responded: Me! Me! Me! Send me a message urgently. El Helbawi quickly gave Elmadhoun an eSIM QR code and helped reconnect him to the internet, making him the first person in Gaza to get one. At that moment, Connecting Gaza was born. The solution goes viral News of the initiative quickly spread on social media, with concerned people from all over the world buying and donating eSIMs. Donors have sent QR codes from as far as the United States, Switzerland, Pakistan and the Netherlands, El Helbawi says. Most buy them on mobile apps like Simly and Airalo, which allow donors to see when the eSIMs are activated and top them off when funds run low. Graeme Bradley, a donor from Scotland, says he was drawn to the initiative because its an easy way to have a big impact on a conflict where so many lives are at stake. Its horrific to see the level of destruction and death inflicted on innocent civilians living in an occupied territory with nowhere to go, Bradley, 38, told CNN. There is no escape for them. By helping Palestinians tell their stories, he hopes theyll be able to turn public opinion and pressure world leaders to call for a ceasefire. But not everyone who gets an eSIM lives long enough to tell their story. Noha Elkomi, a 25-year-old donor from Egypt, says she excitedly watched on her app as a Palestinian activated the eSIM she donated. But when it fell inactive, her heart sank. She shared her concerns with El Helbawi, who told her, You never know what happens, Elkomi recalled. I understood what she said. Maybe the first one who took it is gone. Maybe they got killed. This is the reality of it, as sad as it is. Every minute counts and you dont know how long they are staying, Elkomi said. An eSIM can only be activated once, and it can go inactive depending on where in Gaza the person is trying to connect. If they move to an area with weaker signal, the eSIM might not work. This gave me a little bit of hope but at the same time it made me start imagining, what would the person be going through? Where are they now? Elkomi said. I started feeling as if I know them personally. The first eSIM she donated eventually lost signal altogether, Elkomi says, but she wont stop giving more. Days later, tears streamed from Elkomis eyes as she saw her second eSIM go online and connect another person in Gaza. I will say that regardless of what stops in front of them, they (Palestinians) find a way to go around it or climb on top of it or to break through it and continue thriving and this is what they want to show the world, Elkomi said. The blackout was, yes, some darkness, but theres always going to be light shining through the darkness. This is humanity El Helbawi admits shes obsessed with Connecting Gaza. Its the first thing she thinks about in the morning and the last thing at night. We barely sleep, connecting eSIMs is our first priority in life, she said. Even though I feel like Im doing something big for Gaza, I can never stop feeling that still we are not doing enough. To date, an estimated $1.3 million worth of eSIMs have been donated to Connecting Gaza for distribution, according to El Helbawi. The initiative, which partnered with Simly for a time, connects more than 1,000 Palestinians daily, and each person can turn a phone into a hotspot for five others, she says. Connecting Gaza has been so successful that El Helbawi recently leveraged her growing social media following into a nonprofit organization called Connecting Humanity, through which she hopes to reconnect vulnerable people in other conflict zones. The eSIMs are not cheap. To know that so many people are spending their time and money to help says so much about the solidarity the world has with Palestine, El Helbawi said. Some people donate eSIMs and then wait for their next paychecks to send another. They do this to save someones life. This is humanity. The war has significantly changed since the first blackout. There was a short-lived truce, some hostages released, and more aid allowed to enter Gaza. But the violence has resumed and more than a million Palestinians remain displaced, their homes destroyed, little access to health care, food, clean water or electricity and no means of escape. The grief and isolation Palestinians feel is compounded by the frequent blackouts, Elmadhoun says: Whats happening in Gaza is a massacre. Theres no safe placeand we feel like we are alone. But El Helbawi, along with thousands of donors across the world, says she refuses to let Palestinians suffer in silence. We are sending a message to Palestinians, she said. We do not stand for this. We will not let you lose your connection with the world. This story was first published on CNN.com, "When Gaza lost phone and internet connection under Israeli attack, this activist found a way to get Palestinians back online" The Chancellor of Wisconsin International University College, Ghana, Dr Paul Kofi Fynn, has urged the youth, especially graduates, not to depend on the government for jobs as they come out of school. He said most of the youth depended solely on the government for jobs, which added to the number of unemployed youth in the country. At the maiden Gathering Place Summit - 2023 in Accra at the weekend, Dr Fynn, however, called on the government to create the conducive environment that would empower young people to establish their own businesses. The problem we are facing these days is the dependency syndrome; the youth now sit and wait for the government to come and do something for them; it will never happen. They will make huge promises to you to vote for them, then nothing happens, he said. Dubbed: Strengthening The Rising Generation Through Skills Acquisition, the summit was to discuss challenges facing the emerging generation, youth empowerment through entrepreneurship and personal commitment to becoming self-reliant, among others. Dr Fynn said the youth needed to be empowered, liberated and inspired to live their dreams, and admonished them to also come up with ideas that would help them and the nation. The academic and entrepreneur expressed the hope that a review of the countrys educational system would shift the system towards more practical teaching and learning to help position students to apply the knowledge they acquired for the development of the country. Gathering place A gathering place is an initiative designed by the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day for young single adults (YSAs) of the church and their friends to gather and participate in wholesome activities and experiences that bring them closer to one another and to God. It is also to learn career and life skills that will lead the youth to become self-reliant and responsible future leaders. The programme has been rolled out to about 180 locations in the Africa West Area, where the youth come to these gathering places of the church to learn the various skills such as fashion and decor, Photography, Video Editing, Data Analysis, Sewing, Wig Making, Bakery and Soap Making. Employment The First Counsellor, Africa West Area Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Elder Jorg Klebingat, said the initiative would enable the youth to gain employment through the skills acquired and have enough to provide for themselves and families. He urged the government to make available the right resources and opportunities for the youth to chart a course and establish something for themselves. Mr Klebingat said the initiative also aimed to simply help the youth to remain faithful in their church worship habits. The youth are showing us that when you provide them with the opportunity, they will make something for themselves and so as long as the youth bring their own energy and enthusiasm and do what they can do the church will be there to continue providing these resources, he added. Commitment The Director for TVET, Ministry of Education, Ghana, Rejoice Dankwa, said relevant skills acquisition would empower the youth to be innovative and self-reliant, adding, it will equip them with the right tools to face the challenges of the future job market and solve critical problems in the country. She said the ministry had put in place relevant policies and guidance such as CTVET to prepare the youth to meet the demands of the 21st Century. Attention The spokesperson of the National Chief Imam, Sheikh Armiyawo Shaibu, said much attention needed to be given to the youth, saying, to neglect the needs of the youth is to spell doom of every community. He advised the youth to explore the new job market and understand the skills needed to make themselves more competitive and relevant. Source: graphiconline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Siavash Sobhani, arespected medical doctor and long-time resident of North Virginia, has been stripped of his citizenship at the age of 61. Sobhani, who was born in the US, told The Washington Post that he received a letter from the US State Department in February, following his application for a new passport, stating that his father was a diplomat at the Iranian Embassy and he should not have been awarded citizenship at the time of his birth. The letter states that children born in the United States to parents enjoying diplomatic immunity do not automatically become citizens of the United States. It said Sobhani enjoyed diplomatic immunity from the jurisdiction of the US at the time of his birth and so he did not acquire citizenship. But this is Sobhanis first experience with this problem in his more than thirty years of practicing medicine. Every time his passport was reissued during his life, the US State Department again verified that he was an American citizen. Siavash Sobhani, who turned 62 recently, had begun to consider retiring. He and his spouse intended to travel the world for a year in search of a neighbourhood where they could purchase a house. He must now apply for lawful permanent residence and fulfil the State Departments guidelines. He disclosed to The Washington Post that he has already incurred over USD 40,000 in legal expenses and is uncertain about the potential resolution date of his case. Im waiting for an interview, but does that mean I wait another year for an interview? Then another three years for the next step? Then another 10 years before I can travel outside of the country? he told the Post. Additionally, he has written to the senator from Virginia and his congressional representative, asking for their assistance. Gerald Edward Connolly, the congressman representing Virginias 11th congressional district, corresponded with US Citizenship and Immigration Services on the physicians behalf subsequent to Sobhanis letter. Siavash Sobhanis future is uncertain because he has spoken out against the Iranian regime and is therefore unable to live there safely. In addition, hes not sure if hell get a passport in time to travel to Portugal for his sons wedding the following year. The physician is unable to even see his gravely ill father-in-law, who resides in Lebanon. 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 The deputy Minister of Trade and Industry Nana Ama Dokua Asiamah-Adjei has attributed her victory in the just ended parliamentary primary on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Okaikwei North to the superior message she sold to the delegates. Asiamah-Adjei over the weekend garnered 341 votes to beat her main contender Alberta Afia Akoto who polled 228 votes. Veteran editor of Daily Searchlight newspaper Kenneth Kwabena Agyei Kuranchie polled 27 votes, Prince Owusu Mensah had six votes. The other two Nyarko Stephen Adipa garnered 108 votes while the former MP Fuseini Issah managed 114 votes. Speaking on the Asaase FM Monday (4 December), Ama Dokua said she will reach out to her competitors to foster unity ahead of the 2024 elections. I went to every delegate; I organised meetings and I sold them my message and I think they bought into my message and that is what made me victorious in this election, she said. Every constituency have different dynamics and having studied the dynamics of the Okaikwei North constituency, there were a few things that needed to be addressed. Some key issues that I touched on was welfare, equity, ensuring that we support artisans and traders and organise programmes to cater for their healthcare as well as provision of access to government opportunities, these are the message I went out with, Ama Dokua added. Source: Asaase FM 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 Host of Metro TVs Good Evening Ghana, Paul Adom-Otchere, has accused the Special Prosecutor, Kissi Agyebeng, of working with an evil group of individuals who do not seek the best interests of Ghanaians. In one of his shows, Mr Adom-Otchere noted that he was quite familiar with the individuals in question but failed to disclose their identities. He was, however, convinced that these individuals, together with Mr Agyebeng, are not working for the betterment of the country. He works with those clad faces; he works with evil people. Yes, Ill say it evil again; they are evil people. Those his cabal; thats his ring; they are evil. I know them well, they are evil people. That ring that he belongs to they are evil people, he said. Mr Adom-Otchere made this allegation against Mr Kissi Agyebeng while also accusing him of hiring a majority of individuals who lack legal background or legal education at the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP). According to the journalist, there are 300 individuals working at the OSP and out of this total figure, just 10 are legal practitioners. From the information that we picked up yesterday, here is this guy who has employed in his office 300 people. The OSP has employed 300 persons at a matter of public record. Now look at the distribution here, only 10 of them are lawyers. He employs 300 in his office. The 300 on the taxpayers money, only 10 are lawyers. Office of Special Prosecutor, what work are they doing there? Prosecutors work, when you go to the attorney generals division where they are prosecuting and you see 100 people, 99 of them are lawyers because it is a lawyers work, its not marketing peoples work, he said. He further noted that some 80 individuals have been employed to take up research and media work. Mr Adom-Otchere such a figure is preposterous as big-time media houses in the country do not employ the services of such a number of research workers. Now check out, 80 of the people he has employed are media and research. Is he a TV station, he has employed 80 people as media and research sitting at the office of the special prosecutor. Even we here Metro TV even the GBC they have plenty people other big TV stations, TV3 do they have 80 media research staff? Whats he doing there, what are they doing there and who and who does he work with? he quizzed. He has therefore called on the Special Prosecutor to render an account to Ghanaians. Last week, the Office of the Special Prosecutor held a press conference where Mr Agyebeng condemned the interference by the judiciary in the OSPs work. VIDEO Source: theindependentghana.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 Former Adenta constituency lawmaker and a former member of the governing New Patriotic Party, Yaw Buaben Asamoa has lashed out at Ex-President and leader of the opposition National Democratic Congress, John Dramani Mahama, over his 24-hour economy promise. John Mahama has assured Ghanaians that if re-elected President, he will ensure the economy runs 24 hours stressing this is part of his manifesto to improving the living standards of the citizenry as he believes the New Patriotic Party led by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has failed them. "A new NDC administration will work urgently to equip our youth with the entrepreneurial knowledge and skills needed for a sustainable future. We will introduce a 24-hour economy with incentives and tax breaks for manufacturers who will run extra shifts to create more room for employment. "We will work to ease the burden of taxes imposed by this NPP administration on Ghanaian businesses and investors, which has robbed Ghana of its envious position as one of Africa's leading destinations for investment", he promised. Commenting on Peace FM's morning show "Kokrokoo", Yaw Buaben Asamoa, now Spokesperson for Alan Kyerematen's Movement for Change (MFC), challenged the efficacy of Mahama's promises to Ghanaians. To him, the 24-hour economy promise is only a slogan, stressing Mr. Mahama has nothing new to offer Ghanaians. "Whatever he can do for Ghana, he's done it already. His 24-hour economy is nothing but a slogan; there is nothing new in it", he opined. Meanwhile, there was a massively patronized political walk in Kumasi in the Ashanti Region over the weekend, with supporters of the Movement for Change (MFC) raising placards with inscriptions that associated the 24-hr economy to Alan Kyerematen.With fluttering butterflies as the symbol for MFC, the enthusiastic supporters brandished placards proclaiming the ingenuity of Alan's Government Transformation Plan (GTP), led by the 24-hour economy.The symbolism of the butterfly, representative of transformation and evolution, aligns seamlessly with Kyerematen's vision for a progressive and dynamic Ghanaian economy. 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. Featured Video The Minister of Parliamentary Affairs (MOPA), Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, has urged Parliament to enact into law the proposed Property Rights of Spouses Bill. He said the passage of the bill was critical as it would direct the distribution of spousal property among spouses going through a divorce or separation. The minister, who is also the Majority Leader, reminded the House that the Article 22(2) of the Constitution enjoined Parliament to ensure that spousal rights to property were protected, a reason lawmakers must promise to fulfil the dictates of article 22(2) to actualise the passage of the bill as soon as practicable. It appears the blame for non-passage of the Property Rights of Spouses Bill has been rightly laid on the doorstep of Parliament because the bill has been laid twice, referred to the committee and allowed to lapse, he said. Article 229(1) states that A spouse shall not be deprived of a reasonable provision out of the estate of a spouse whether or not the spouse died having made a will. And 22(2) says Parliament shall, as soon as practicable, after the coming into force of this Constitution, enact legislation regulating the property rights of spouses. Equity must prevail At an engagement with the core leadership of Parliament last Friday, Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu expressed worry about how in the absence of such a law, the courts and judicial activists had gone ahead to pass some judgements which had become guidelines for the distribution of property acquired during the subsistence of a marriage upon dissolution. The current measures in use by the courts are only focused on parties in monogamous marriages, leaving out those in the polygamous setting. In all this, there is no certainty and as such the law is needed to ensure that equity prevails, he said. The event, which was themed: Revisiting the Property Rights of Spouses Bill of Ghana, was aimed at craving the commitment of the leadership of Parliament to support the processes when the bill was re-laid, hopefully, at the next session. It drew the leadership of Parliament and the members of the Queen Mothers Association in Ghana to discuss the challenges hampering the passage and to strengthen institutional collaborations for the passage of the bill. It was organised by MOPA. Fully-fledged bill needed The Majority Leader said it had been 30 years since the 1992 Constitution came into effect it took 16 years to present the first draft of the Property Rights of Spouses Bill to Parliament and another seven years to consider the bill. Besides, he said 8,366,466 Ghanaians were married per the 2021 Housing and Population Census and over 950,000 marriages in Ghana were currently divorced or the couples were separated. He gave the breakdown as 553,065 marriages dissolved while 405,090 had separated, saying that these are just the official figures. Out of the almost 8.4 million married Ghanaians, 6,748,622 of them have not registered their marriages, with only 1,617,844 registered, he said. Ordinarily, he said the passage of the of the Land Act 2020 should be celebrated by supporters of the bill for the commendable depth of the provisions on the Spousal Rights to Property. However, he said it was simply not enough and could not replace the urgent need for a fully-fledged Property Rights of Spouses Law. My study of the two draft bills that were presented to Parliament in 2009 and 2013, but failed to pass, shows that they contained germane and beneficial provisions, he said. Consider diversity The National Democratic Congress MP for Asawase, Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka, blamed the differences in cultures, ethnic, marriages and religious backgrounds of the Ghanaian society as a major hurdle to the passage of the bill. He, therefore, drummed home the urgent need for a second look at the bill to incorporate all the differences in society to facilitate the passage of the bill. We need to have a bill that will be able to, for example, regulate marriages because of the way we are intermarrying. But if you want to assume that we want to do it one size fits all, the bill will continue to have the kinds of challenges it is facing, he advised. Expedite bills passage The President of the Queen Mothers Association in Ghana, Nana Otubea, expressed worry about how in certain jurisdictions in the country women were often thrown out of their marital homes when their husbands passed away. She, therefore, urged Parliament to expedite the passage of the Property Rights of Spouses Bill to protect the rights of women in marriages. Pull quote It appears the blame for the non-passage of the Property Rights of Spouses Bill has been rightly laid on the doorstep of Parliament because the bill has been laid twice, referred to the committee and allowed to lapse. Source: graphiconline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Vice President and flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has called for contestants in the party's just-ended parliamentary primaries in orphan constituencies to close their ranks and present a united front for next year's elections. The NPP, over the weekend, held parliamentary primaries in constituencies the party does not control parliamentary seats and many of the outcomes showed close contests, thereby raising concerns of possible division. Addressing NPP Bono East Regional stakeholders in Takyiman on Monday, December 4, 2023, Dr. Bawumia said the contests are over and appealed to the winners to bring their contenders on board for a united approach to snatching seats from the National Democratic Congress. "By the nature of elections, only one person will emerge the winner, out of the many good people wo contest. Just as the flagbearership, contest, only one person emerged winner of the many good people who contested", the NPP Flagbearer said. "To win, we need unity across, from polling station level to national. Once we are United, we will win both the Parliamentary and Presidential elections." Using himself as an example to underline his call for unity, Dr. Bawumia said he has been reaching out to all those he contested with in the NPP flagbearer race because they all have roles to play to make the party stronger. "The election in 2024 is much about our internal unity as it is with our battle with the NDC. That's why I'm trying to make sure I bring all those who contested with me together because everybody who wants to lead this party has something that they want to offer", he said. He asserted; "We want to bring them in. I am not somebody who will say you did not support me so I am not going to talk to you to support the party. I'm so happy we have many people who think about the party more than themselves. One of such persons, who is here with us is Mr. Kwabena Agyapong." On his part, former General Secretary, Kwabena Agyapong reiterated the call for unity, saying the "voice of the people is where there is the Lord's blessing". He commended Dr. Bawumia for his humility and urged members of the party to uphold the spirit of unity and volunteerism to help Dr. Bawumia lead the party to victory in 2024. Dr. Bawumia's delegation included the National Chairman of the NPP, Stephen Ayensu Ntim, the former General Secretary, Kwabena Adjei Agyapong and former Member of Parliament for Suhum, Fred Opare Ansah among others 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. Featured Video NPP flagbearer, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has charged the rank and file of his party to commit to their obligation to making the New Patriotic Party a stronger force, particularly for the next generation. Addressing NPP Upper West Regional stakeholders in Wa on Monday, December 4, 2023, Dr. Bawumia called on all the party folks to exercise their responsibility through hard work towards fortifying the NPP and ensuring it becomes victorious in both parliamentary and presidential elections next year. "We are all temporary custodians of the party in our position; whether you are a flagbearer or a polling station executive." "Because we are all temporary custodians of the party, you want to build the party and hand it over stronger to the next generation", Dr. Bawumia said. Dr. Bawumia emphasized the need for unity among the party members, stating "the election in 2024 is much about our internal unity as it is with our battle with the NDC. That's why I'm trying to make sure I bring all those who contested with me together because everybody who wants to lead this party has something that they want to offer". "We want to bring them in. I am not somebody who will say you did not support me so I am not going to talk to you to support the party. I'm so happy we have many people who think about the party more than themselves. One of such persons, who is here with us is Mr. Kwabena Agyapong", he accentuated. Dr. Bawumia therefore urged both winners and losers of the NPP parliamentary primaries in orphan constituencies across the country to come together and collectively face next year's parliamentary elections. "By the nature of elections, only one person will emerge the winner out of the many good people who contest. Just as the flagbearership, contest, only one person emerged winner of the many good people who contested", the Vice President advised. He added; "To win, we need unity across from polling station level to national. Once we are united, we will win both the parliamentary and presidential elections because the NPP is the natural governing majority in Ghana if you look at the data." Dr. Bawumia's delegation included the National Chairman of the NPP, Stephen Ayensu Ntim, the party's former General Secretary, Kwabena Adjei Agyapong and former Suhum lawmaker, Fred Opare Ansah among others. 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. Featured Video 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: Mining foreman R. Thornburg shows a small cage with a canary used for testing carbon monoxide gas in 1928. Credit: George McCaa, U.S. Bureau of Mines Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, canaries were used in coal mines to assess the risk of toxic gases. If the birds became ill or passed away, their fate served as a warning for miners to vacate the premises. Similarly to how a canary detects unseen risks, the insurance industry is responsible for matching assets to liabilities based upon risks, according to Francis Bouchard, the managing director for climate at the insurance company Marsh McLennan. Bouchard spoke at Duke University on November 10 to discuss the insurance sector's responsibility to tackle risks as a result of climate change. Historically, the insurance industry has served as a catalyst to influence safety regulations for the welfare of citizens, as opposed to a canary that withers under risks. Take, for instance, the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It was the first time in history "anyone would deploy electricity on a large level," Bouchard said. Therefore, an insurance company sent an engineer to examine the security of the electricity and determine the hazards for attendees. Consequently, the brightest minds of this sector banded together to create the Underwriters Laboratories, which is now the largest testing laboratory in the United States. But more recently, the insurance sector has not acted as a catalyst in its role to address climate risk. Several policies and systems "distort the purity of the risk signals insurance companies send." First, its inability to combat systemic level risks as they are providing individual incentives. The industry is highly effective in "handling individual risk and incentivizing immediate actions to address an immediate risk," Bouchard said, but this method cannot translate on a systemic level. Second, the insurance sector provides a "temporal mismatch" as they sell 12 months of risk, but the lasting impacts of climate change will not occur within a year. Therefore, their "ability to capture in a 12 month policy, decades worth of climate change risk is impossible." Third, the regulations for insurance differ between states. In most states, the insurance commissioner dictates the price of insurance based upon the company's risk assessment because when "risk goes up, price of risk also goes up." When citizens cannot afford insurance, commissioners are more likely to side with the experts of the insurance companies as opposed to their disadvantaged constituents. Finally, their climate model is not advanced enough to estimate how specific cities will change within a few decades due to climate change. Therefore, it cannot entirely predict its risks either. The insurance industry has been successful in its asset-liability matching "in committing some of its capital to advancing climate technology or green technology." However, this sector receives "publicity around insurance companies withdrawing capital from wildfire or climate exposed jurisdiction." This system is explained by the TCFD Filing, which was created by the Bank of International Settlements to discover insurance companies exposure to climate transition issues, physical risks from climate change, and their strategy to aid clients. Essentially, most insurance companies are not "concerned about physical risks" as they would simply reprice their 12-month insurance policy if there is a heightened threat to physical risk. According to Bouchard, the "insurance industry has already signaled through its TCFD filings precisely what their strategy is: 'we're gonna play this game as long as we can and then we're going to withdraw.'" Therefore, an insurance company would continue to increase their cost until a person can no longer afford its price or actually endures physical damage to which they would cease providing insurance. "These last resort-type mechanisms are when the government steps in," Bouchard said. He even estimates that the government will control 30% of this $1 trillion industry ($2 trillion globally) within 10 years. This is dangerous as the government is already enduring fiscal dilemmas and will not be equipped to manage the complexity of the sector. Bouchard, with 30 years of experience in this industry, said he "truly, truly believes in the social role that the industry plays. I'm petrified that we're not going to be there to help society cope with climate with the technical knowledge we have, the expertise we have, the mechanisms we have, and the money." If the sector continues upon this path, they will dissolve under the risks, similarly to a canary in a mine. Francis Bouchard's work in combating climate battles with insurance is of the utmost necessity. Continued global warming will force citizens to rely on this industry for aid against climate disasters. The most recent Conference of Parties, created by the United Nations for climate change discussions, recognized the insurance industry as a "key finance player in climate transition alongside private industry and government because the world is recognizing that we have a key part to play." This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: Khaled Akacha from Pexels Some commentators have criticized Israel for causing what is claimed to be disproportionate harm to civilians in its military response to Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack. Others have defended Israel's actions, claiming that such forceand the risk to civilians involvedis necessary to eliminate Hamas, which some Israelis believe poses an existential threat to Israel. As of Nov. 25, according to health officials in the Gaza Strip, more than 14,000 Palestinians have been killed, the majority of whom are women and children. But one of the arguments given by defenders of Israel's actions is that, tragic though these deaths are, the harm inflicted on civilians is proportionate because it is outweighed by the importance of destroying Hamas. But what does "proportionate" mean in the context of civilian deaths? And how should we assess Israel's claims of proportionality against critics who argue that Israel's actions have caused disproportionate harm to civilians? As a scholar of war crimes and military ethics, I argue that to assess these claims requires careful thought about what it really means to value civilian lives. If all civilian lives are morally equal, as international law holds, then the lives of civilians on both sides of a conflict should be treated with the same degree of respect. Why targeting civilians is wrong International humanitarian law, or IHL, prohibits direct attacks on noncombatantsa category that includes civilians as well as wounded and surrendered soldiers. IHL also prohibits direct attacks on civilian objects such as schools, religious centers and hospitals and other civilian infrastructure. However, because it is impossible to avoid all harm to civilians in a war zone, IHL permits attacks on military targets that are likely to cause harm to civilians if two conditions are met: First, the foreseeable harm to civilians must be proportionate to the military advantage sought by the attack. And second, the choice of tactics and weaponswhat is referred to in IHL as the "means and methods"must also aim to minimize risk to civilians, even if it means putting more soldiers in harm's way. The prohibitions on directly targeting civilians and exposing civilians to disproportionate risk of harm exist because, under IHL, civilians have protected status as long as they take "no active part in the hostilities." This means that, as stated in the Geneva Conventionsthe set of international treaties governing the conduct of armed conflictall civilians must be "treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, color, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria." Directly targeting civilians or exposing them to disproportionate harm is therefore wrong for the same reasons that it is wrong to kill or harm innocent people in peacetime. People who pose no threat to others deserve respect and protection from violence regardless of their nationality or group identity. To violate that respect in war is not only a war crime but a moral crime, which is why Hamas' massacre of at least 1,200 Israeli citizens and the taking of 240 hostages is rightly condemned as an atrocity. How should the lives of innocent people be weighed against important military objectives? Proportionality and moral assessment The condemnation of Hamas' crimes is based on the same moral principle as the laws that protect noncombatants in war: All innocent people deserve protection. However, scholars and legal experts disagree about how the legal framework laid out in the Geneva Conventions should be applied in war zones. For example, in 1987 the International Committee of the Red Cross argued that the definition of "military advantage"the advantage against which potential civilian harm must be weighedshould only include "ground gained" and "annihilating or weakening the enemy armed forces." But the 2016 U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual claimed that "military advantage" should also include other goals such as "diverting enemy forces' resources and attention." There is also disagreement about what counts as "civilian harm." For example, scholar Emanuela-Chiara Gillard argues that "civilian harm" should include psychological and physical harms; legal expert Dr. Beth Van Schaack argues that long-term harms should also be considered. In short, there are no easy answers to questions about how to weigh harms against civilians against the value of military objectives. But while answers are difficult, there is a different way to frame this question: What does it meannot just legally, but morallyto treat all civilian lives as equal, as the law requires? As scholar Matthew Talbert and I argue, the first step in answering this question is to ask what a military force would accept if it were "their" civilians who were at risk of harm from military action. That is the standard we should apply when assessing potential military actions that threaten harm to enemy civilians. We call this standard the "principle of the moral equality of noncombatants." For example, Israel argued that its attack on Shifa hospital was justified because, it claimed, Hamas was hiding a command base and weapons under the hospital. The hospital, which was running low on fuel, food and water, housed patients, including premature babies, and civilians seeking refuge from the conflict. According to footage shown in news reports, the attack left the hospital seriously damaged, filled with debris and lacking essential supplies for the remaining patients, who include the elderly and infirm. Israel has released footage supporting its claim that there was a Hamas command center under the hospital. Does that mean Israel's attack on the hospital meets the requirements of proportionality? In other words, was the harm to civilians caused by the attackincluding the ongoing harm resulting from the loss of a major hospitalproportionate to the military value of destroying a Hamas command base? In applying the principle Talbert and I proposed in our paper, the question would be phrased as follows: If Hamas was hiding a control base under an Israeli hospital and it was Israeli civilians at risk, would Israel think that attacking the hospital would be justified? If the answer is "no," then the attack against Shifa hospital is also not justified. This is because if the risk to Israeli lives outweighs the benefits of capturing a Hamas command base, then the risk to Palestinian lives should be given the same weight and lead to the same conclusion. Under IHL, all civilians are legally entitled to the same protection, regardless of their nationality. Taking civilian lives seriously Unfortunately, the debate about proportionality in the conflict between Israel and Palestine is only the latest of many debates about proportionality and civilian deaths in war zones. For example, since 2001, the United States' drone program has killed at least 22,000 civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere. A New York Times report on these deaths found multiple instances of "flawed intelligence," cover-ups and cases of mistaken identity. Despite this record, civilians deaths still occur. Using the principle of the moral equality of noncombatants to assess this track record would reveal whether the U.S. military is taking sufficient care to avoid harm to civilians. If the U.S. military would not accept these deathsand the policies and practices that contribute to themif U.S. civilians were at risk, then these deaths are unjustified. This would mean that the drone program must change in order to treat civilians in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere with the respect to which they are legally and morally entitled. This example illustrates that to meet the standards of IHL and the moral principles that underlie those standards, military forces must apply the principle of the moral equality of noncombatants. There is no legal or moral justification, I argue, for treating some civilians lives as less important than others. This is a demanding principle. Applying it would be difficultmilitary and political leaders would have to accept that there might be military objectives that are not important enough to justify risk to civilian lives. And it would require acknowledging that some military objectives might be so important that even harm to "their" civilians might be justified. But one of the functions of IHL is to "limit the suffering and damage caused by armed conflict." This principle reflects the moral and legal status of civilians in IHL and could lead to greater respect for and protection of all civilians during conflict. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Los Angeles (CNN) On Monday, the Supreme Court will take on one of its highest-profile bankruptcy cases in recent memory: Whether or not to approve OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharmas controversial agreement that would give billions of dollars to victims of the opioid epidemic while protecting members of the Sackler family, who owned the company, from current and future opioid-related civil lawsuits. While the up-to-$6 billion deal was initially approved by a New York court in May, it was blocked from moving forward after the US Trustee Program, a division of the US Justice Department, requested that the highest court review the settlement. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on Monday. Purdue Pharma, which was owned and operated by the families of the late brothers Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, has said there will be no $6 billion settlement without releasing family members from liability, but the US Trustee has argued that such an arrangement is unprecedented. At its core, the issue facing the Supreme Court is one of grave national importance: the fate of a company and its leaders who produced and promoted a highly addictive drug, OxyContin, in the early days of an opioid crisis that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans and shattered many more and whether victims could ever again hold the Sacklers accountable in court. What is in Purdue Pharmas settlement? The bankruptcy deal in question would have the Sackler family personally pay out between $5.5 billion to $6 billion over 18 years to help fight the ongoing opioid epidemic. Most of the money would go to states, local governments and Native American tribes. The deal also sets aside $700 million to $750 million to pay individual victims and families of victims. The fund would pay out between $3,500 to $48,000, with payments to some victims spread out over 10 years. Purdue has said its bankruptcy deal is the only major opioid settlement to provide meaningful recoveries to victims. If the deal were to be approved by the Supreme Court, Purdue Pharma would cease to exist and a new company, Knoa Pharma, would be created in its place. Knoa Pharma would develop and distribute opioid addiction treatments and overdose reversal medicines, while continuing to produce Purdue Pharma products, including OxyContin. The company would be governed by a new independent board, and would have a public-minded mission, according to Purdue Pharma. In exchange for the deal, members of the Sackler family would be granted immunity from all other civil (though, not criminal) lawsuits. In a brief submitted to the Supreme Court, Purdue Pharma argued that it was necessary to release members of the Sackler family from other claims, so as not to deplete the assets set aside for the agreed-upon bankruptcy settlement. A historic case for the Supreme Court All 50 US states either supported or no longer opposed Purdue Pharmas bankruptcy plan by its initial approval in May, the company said. At the time, the families of Mortimer and Raymond Sackler said they were satisfied with the courts decision. The Sackler families believe the long-awaited implementation of this resolution is critical to providing substantial resources for people and communities in need, the families said. But the US Trustee petitioned the Supreme Court to review the deal, calling it an abuse of the bankruptcy system. Barring individual victims from pursuing their own lawsuits against the Sackler family raises serious constitutional questions, the department argued. The plans release absolutely, unconditionally, irrevocably, fully, finally, forever and permanently releases the Sacklers from every conceivable type of opioid-related civil claim even claims based on fraud and other forms of willful misconduct that could not be discharged if the Sacklers filed for bankruptcy in their individual capacities, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in court papers, adding that the families withdrew approximately $11 billion from Purdue in the eleven years before the company filed for bankruptcy. Experts say its unclear how the Supreme Court will rule in this case. They say it is one of the biggest bankruptcy cases the court has taken on in years, not only because of the national interest in the opioid crisis but also because of the question of whether a bankruptcy judge was allowed to shield the individual members of the Sackler family from future lawsuits in a bankruptcy proceeding for the company they once owned. My take is that its the biggest bankruptcy case to go to the Supreme Court in 30 or 40 years. Its huge, Anthony Casey, a law professor at the University of Chicago and director of the schools Center on Law and Finance, said. An ongoing epidemic Purdue Pharma first introduced the opioid drug OxyContin in the 1990s as a painkiller. The company and its founders have been accused of helping to fuel the opioid epidemic in the United States by aggressively marketing the drug as safer and less addictive, encouraging doctors to prescribe the drug over longer periods of time. OxyContins commercial success helped the Sackler family earn billions of dollars and the family became known for philanthropy around the world. The Sackler name appeared on university buildings and museums like the Guggenheim in New York and the Louvre in Paris. Many institutions have since removed it. As the countrys opioid crisis worsened, attention shifted to the role played by Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. In 2007, an affiliate company, Purdue Frederick, pleaded guilty to misbranding the drug and paid a fine of $600 million, but additional lawsuits began to pile up. Many of the suits allege that the Sackler family knew of OxyContins addictive properties but, nevertheless, continued to promote the drug. The Supreme Court hearing comes at a time of devastating losses due to drug overdoses in the US. From 1999 to 2021, nearly 645,000 people died from an opioid overdose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Purdue Pharma, you have a court system thats not designed to solve societal problems dealing with the aftermath of a societal crisis, Lindsey Simon, a bankruptcy law associate professor at Emory University, said. But bankruptcy isnt intended to please everyone. Its rules and procedures are made to help the parties find the fairest possible outcome in an inherently bad situation. This story was first published on CNN.com, 'US Supreme Court to scrutinize controversial opioid crisis settlement that would give Sackler family immunity' 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: The Pyramid Observatory at night. Important for the researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA): The climate station has recorded hourly meteorological data for nearly three decades. Pumori Peak (Nepal) in the background. Credit: Franco Salerno Himalayan Glaciers fight back to preserve themselves, but for how long? An international team of researchers, co-led by Professor Francesca Pellicciotti of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), explains a stunning phenomenon: rising global temperatures have led Himalayan glaciers to increasingly cool the air in contact with the ice surface. The ensuing cold winds might help cool the glaciers and preserve the surrounding ecosystems. The results, found across the Himalayan range, were published in Nature Geoscience. Is global warming causing Himalayan glaciers to melt like ice cream on a hot summer day? Previously, scientists documented an elevation-dependent warming effect: they showed that mountain tops "felt" the effect of global warming stronger and warmed up faster. Yet, a high-altitude climate station at the base of Mount Everest in Nepal showed an unexpected phenomenon: the measured surface air temperature averages remained suspiciously stable instead of increasing. How could this data be interpreted? The Pyramid International Laboratory/Observatory climate station, located at a glacierized elevation (5,050 m) on the southern slopes of Mount Everest, alongside the Khumbu and Lobuche glaciers, has continuously recorded hourly meteorological data for nearly three decades. Now, an international team of researchers led by new ISTA Professor Francesca Pellicciotti and National Research Council of Italy (CNR) researchers Franco Salerno and Nicolas Guyennon cracked the code. The warming climate is triggering a cooling reaction in the glaciers: it is causing cold windskatabatic windsto flow down the slopes. But how long can the glaciers locally counterbalance the effects of global warming by cooling themselves? And which characteristics allow the glaciers to do so? The Pyramid Observatory. Important for the researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA): The climate station has recorded hourly meteorological data for nearly three decades. Pumori Peak (Nepal) in the background. Credit: Franco Salerno The devil is in the detail To explain the observed phenomenon, the team had to examine the data thoroughly. "We found that the overall temperature averages seemed stable for a simple reason. While the minimum temperatures have been steadily on the rise, the surface temperature maxima in summer were consistently dropping," says Salerno. The glaciers are reacting to the warming climate by increasing their temperature exchange with the surface, Pellicciotti explains. Global warming causes an increased temperature difference between the warmer environmental air over the glacier and the air mass in direct contact with the glacier's surface. "This leads to an increase in turbulent heat exchange at the glacier's surface and stronger cooling of the surface air mass," says Pellicciotti. As a result, the cool and dry surface air masses become denser and flow down the slopes into the valleys, cooling the lower parts of the glaciers and the surrounding ecosystems. Himalayan glaciers react to global warming. Schematic diagram of the air cooling in the surroundings of Himalayan glaciers. Credit: Salerno/Guyennon/Pellicciotti/Nature Geoscience What makes glaciers fight back? Going beyond the ground observations uniquely available at Pyramid, the team drew on the latest scientific advances in climate models: the global climate and weather reanalysis called ERA5-Land. ERA5-Land reanalysis combines model data with observations from across the world into a globally complete and consistent dataset using the laws of physics. Interpreting this data allowed the team to demonstrate that the global warming-induced katabatic winds occurred not only on Mount Everest but in the entire Himalayan range. "This phenomenon is the outcome of 30 years of steadily increasing global temperatures. The next step is to find out which key glacier characteristics favor such a reaction," says Pellicciotti. Ultimately, the researchers seek to understand which glaciers can react this way to global warming, and for how long. "While other glaciers are experiencing dramatic changes right now, the glaciers in High-Mountain Asiathe Third Poleare very large, hold more ice masses, and have longer response times. Thus, we might still have a chance to 'save' these glaciers." Thus, Pellicciotti and her team will soon investigate whether the world's only stable or growing glaciers in the Pamir and Karakoram mountains, to the north-west of the Himalayas, are also reacting to global warming by blowing cold winds down their slopes. "The slopes of the Pamir and Karakoram glaciers are generally flatter than in the Himalayas. Thus, we hypothesize that the cold winds might act to cool the glaciers themselves rather than reaching lower down into the surrounding environments. We will be able to tell in the next couple of years," says Pellicciotti. The scientists discussing the findings during a field trip. From left to right: Nicolas Guyennon (IRSA-CNR), Francesca Pellicciotti (ISTA), Thomas Shaw (ISTA). Credit: Franco Salerno The Pyramid Observatory covered in snow. Important for the researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA): The climate station has recorded hourly meteorological data for nearly three decades. Credit: Franco Salerno The Pyramid Observatory. Important for the researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA): The climate station has recorded hourly meteorological data for nearly three decades. Pumori Peak (Nepal) in the background. Credit: Franco Salerno The Pyramid Observatory. Important for the researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA): The climate station has recorded hourly meteorological data for nearly three decades. Credit: Franco Salerno Glacier tipping point? "We believe that the katabatic winds are the response of healthy glaciers to rising global temperatures and that this phenomenon could help preserve the permafrost and surrounding vegetation," says Guyennon. Glaciers are indeed essential in maintaining the water security in their ecosystems. But how long can healthy glaciers fight back? The glaciers on the southern Himalayan slopes are classical examples of "accumulation-ablation glaciers": they accumulate mass at high altitudes from the Indian subcontinent's summer monsoons and, at the same time, lose mass from the continuous melting. However, the katabatic winds are now shifting this balance: the colder air masses flowing down from the glaciers are lowering the altitude at which precipitation takes place. This leads to the glaciers missing a key mass input while they continue to melt. Thus, perceived cool temperatures flowing down from glaciers are an emergency reaction to global warming rather than an indicator of glacier long-term stability. Does this mean that the glaciers are approaching their preservation tipping point? "They are in some places, but we do not know where and how," says Pellicciotti. Yet, she does not lose heart easily: "Even if the glaciers can't preserve themselves forever, they might still preserve the environment around them for some time. Thus, we call for more multidisciplinary research approaches to converge efforts toward explaining the effects of global warming," she concludes. These efforts could prove instrumental in changing the course of human-caused climate change. More information: Local cooling and drying induced by Himalayan glaciers under global warming, Nature Geoscience (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-023-01331-y Journal information: Nature Geoscience 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: AFP has also identified hundreds of events revolving around carbon credits at COP28, many led by companies seeking a way to compensate for their carbon footprint. The COP28 climate talks have been flooded with announcements hyping controversial carbon credits before rules for them have been hammered out, with environmental groups fearing "greenwashing" on a massive scale. The concept behind the credits has taken a major hit recently as scientific research has repeatedly shown claims of reduced emissions under the schemes are often hugely overestimatedor simply non-existent. Carbon credits allow corporationsor countries under certain conditionsto offset their greenhouse gas emissions. One credit equals the reduction or removal of one tonne of CO 2 from the atmosphere, often in developing countries by projects focusing on things like fighting deforestation. Scientists stress that any offsetting should not be used as a passport to continue polluting, with emissions needing to fall by almost half this decade to meet global warming goals. US climate envoy John Kerry declared on Sunday that his country's Energy Transition Accelerator for developing nationsone of a number being toutedas a "bold new idea" . However environmental groups quickly expressed skepticism, pointing to the past failures of similar schemes. The initiativea partnership between the US government, the Rockefeller Foundation and billionaire Jeff Bezos's Earth Fundaims to shift developing countries from dirty to clean fuel. Under the scheme, companiesand potentially countrieswill be able to buy credits for carbon emissions from projects that do things like boost renewable energy, build electrical transmission lines or "retire" coal plants. An area in Colombia which has been been the target of a deforestation project linked to carbon credits. 'Smoke and mirrors' Amazon, Bank of America, Mastercard, McDonald's, Morgan Stanley, PepsiCo and Walmart are some of the US corporate giants lining up to pilot projects in Chile, the Dominican Republic and Nigeria. Kerry said the initiative could generate tens of billions of dollars, insisting the credits will be "high integrity" and "not the kind of carbon crediting that you read about in some headlines." He was referring to a series of investigations in recent months that have raised doubts about the effectiveness and integrity of the vast majority of carbon credits already in circulation. Erika Lennon, a lawyer for the Center for International Environmental Law, said the announcement was "merely smoke and mirrors distracting from the US's paltry contribution to climate finance". Washington said it was working with the World Bank to ensure the quality of the credits. Separately on Friday, the World Bank said it had plans to help 15 developing countries in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America to earn money from carbon credits by 2028 for forest protection. Such projects have previously been shown to be the least reliable for reducing emissions, but the World Bank insisted its scheme would be of "high integrity". AFP has also identified hundreds of events dedicated to carbon credits at COP28, many led by companies seeking a way to compensateat least on paperfor their carbon footprint. Price plunge for carbon credits. Vagueness Many different players have rushed to set up their own carbon credit rules, slowing down negotiations for a common regulatory framework, according to environmental groups. This absence of common rules has given companies free rein to engage in widely-criticized offsetting as part of a voluntary carbon credit market. At COP28, negotiators have been tasked with looking into applying Article Six of the 2015 Paris Agreement. It allows countries to cooperate on hitting their emissions-reduction targetsincluding by swapping carbon credits. It also envisages a reform of the global carbon credit market that has been dragging on for years. The Climate Action Network, which brings together hundreds of environmental groups, was scathing about the lack of ambition. "Just like last year, we feel the draft (agreement) is more likely to remove ambition from climate action than carbon dioxide from the atmosphere," it added. The network also criticized the vagueness of planned rules for a future UN supervisory body overseeing a global carbon market, which it said could leave the "door too wide open for risky practices" and to protect the rights of the communities involved. These contentious rules could still be pushed through by countries impatient to start offsetting their emissions, led by wealthy and oil-producing nationsand possibly developing countries keen to reap vast sums from the market. On Friday, around 10 countries including the United States, France and the UAEas well as Colombia, Kenya and Senegalcalled for carbon markets to be "complementary" to efforts to reduce emissions. They said that there must be "transparency" and "high-integrity standards" for these markets to reach their potential. 2023 AFP 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: Poposaurus, from a group of extinct relatives of the crocodile known as Poposauroidea. This crocodilian was around four meters long and lived alongside dinosaurs from 237 to 201.3 million years ago. Credit: Jagged Fang designs A research team, led by scientists at the University of York, mapped the family tree of the ferocious ambush-predators and their extinct relatives known as Pseudosuchia. They then compared this with data from the fossil record to understand why crocodiles have so few living species, while there are 11,000 species of their closest living relatives, birds. The researchers found that climate change and competition with other species have shaped the diversity of modern-day crocodiles and their extinct relatives, but the findings also reveal ecologywhether species live in the sea, in freshwater or on landplayed an unexpectedly key role in survival. The study found that when global temperatures rose, the number of species of the crocodile's sea-dwelling and land-based relatives went up, while increases in competition for resources, perhaps with sharks, marine reptiles or dinosaurs, likely brought about their extinction. By contrast, the crocodile's freshwater-dwelling relatives were not affected by temperatures, but were put at greatest risk of extinction by rising sea levels. The study, "Decoupling speciation and extinction reveals both abiotic and biotic drivers shaped 250 million years of diversity in crocodile-line archosaurs," was published in Nature Ecology and Evolution With seven species of crocodile categorized as Critically Endangered and a further four species identified as vulnerable, the findings of the study provide important insights for conservation efforts of crocodiles and other species as the climate continues to change. Senior author of the study, Dr. Katie Davis, from the Department of Biology at the University of York, said, "The fossil record is a rich source of valuable information allowing us to look back through time at how and why species originate, and crucially, what drives their extinction. By examining this record and mapping it against the crocodile family tree, our research reveals how important it is to think about ecology when we're trying to predict how species might respond to today's climate change." Poposaurus, from a group of extinct relatives of the crocodile known as Poposauroidea. This crocodilian was around four meters long and lived alongside dinosaurs from 237 to 201.3 million years ago. Credit: Jagged Fang Designs "With a million plant and animal species perilously close to extinction, understanding the key factors behind why species disappear has never been more important. In the case of crocodiles, many species reside in low-lying areas, meaning that rising sea levels associated with global warming may irreversibly alter the habitats on which they depend." Crocodiles and birds share their heritage with dinosaurs, and together with pterosaurs they form a group known as archosaurs or "ruling reptiles," who date back to the Early Triassic. Pseudosuchia is a group of archosaurian reptiles, defined as all species more closely related to crocodiles than to birds. For the study, the researchers built a large phylogeny, which is like a family tree, for all crocodiles and their extinct relatives, allowing them to map out how many new species were being formed and how many species were going extinct. They then combined this with data about past climate change, in particular temperature and sea level, to assess whether the emergence and extinction of species was linked to climate change. The researchers also explored whether interactions between species, for example competition, might have played a role, so they calculated estimates of numbers of species at any point in time and compared these against new species and extinctions, using a type of mathematics called Information Theory. This allowed the scientists to produce an estimate of whether climate change and species interactions had a direct impact on whether new species were emerging or going extinct. Dr. Davis added, "Crocodiles and their extinct relatives offer unique insights into climate change and its impact on biodiversity in the past, present and future. Our findings advance our understanding of what factors have shaped, and continue to shape, life on Earth." More information: Decoupling speciation and extinction reveals both abiotic and biotic drivers shaped 250 million years of diversity in crocodile-line archosaurs, Nature Ecology & Evolution (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41559-023-02244-0 Journal information: Nature Ecology & Evolution This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain As California grapples with worsening cycles of drought, a proposal to create a new water district in Butte County has sparked fears of a profit-driven water grab by large-scale farmers and outside interests. In the walnut and almond orchards along State Route 99 near Chico, agricultural landowners have led a yearslong campaign to form the Tuscan Water Districtan entity they say is vital for the future of farming in this part of Northern California. They say having the district will enable them to bring in water and build infrastructure to recharge the groundwater aquifer. Yet some residents argue the district would open the door to water profiteering, claiming the plan would connect local supplies to California water markets, and allow the state to demand transfers during drought emergencies. The proposal, which will be decided Tuesday via mail-in balloting, has generated debate about the use of partially depleted aquifers to store imported water. Although major water suppliers in other parts of the state, such as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, have invested in efforts to bank water underground for times of drought, the concept has met with deep suspicion in Butte County. "You put in the infrastructure, you start taking over the groundwater basin for private profit, and it changes everything," said Barbara Vlamis, executive director of AquAlliance, an organization focused on protecting water resources in the Sacramento Valley. "It becomes this economic engine for these people that want to take over ownership." Supporters deny the charges of seeking to sell or export water. They say the district is necessary to address the local groundwater deficit and achieve sustainability in the coming years, as required under California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA. "This is the most important development in local agriculture in a hundred years," said Richard McGowan, a farmer who is one of the campaign's leaders. Local nut and fruit orchards depend entirely on groundwater, which because of overuse is projected to require reductions in pumping to meet state-mandated sustainability goals. McGowan said the district, once formed, could plan projects to transport water to the area and use that water instead of pumping from wells, or use it to recharge the groundwater basin. Another benefit of forming the agency, he said, would be the ability to apply for government grants to fund infrastructure projects. "We're going to have to become sustainable," McGowan said. "This gives us a great opportunity to work together to preserve this water resource we have. And now water has become such a hot topic, and the state has now become involved with it, that it almost dictates that we do something like this." Those who are fighting the district say it's unnecessary. Vlamis argued the area's current overuse of groundwater, which is not as severe as other parts of the Central Valley, could easily be addressed through conservation, estimating that if growers would save about 5%, that would be enough. She and others argue that if infrastructure is built to bring in water for groundwater recharge, the imported water that's stored in the aquifer would become a privately owned asset, effectively creating a water bank. They say the groundwater basin could then be drawn down and filled with banked water, which could be sold and shipped elsewhere for profit. Such water banks have been established by various entities elsewhere in the state, such as the southern San Joaquin Valley. Vlamis said banking water would require a drawdown of the aquifer to create storage space, which would diminish the flow of streams, threaten groundwater-dependent trees and put shallow domestic wells at risk of running dry. "I think it is a damaging effort that could potentially destroy this region as we know it," Vlamis said. Opponents formed a political action committee called Groundwater for Butte, which has warned that establishing the district is a "water grab by Big Ag and the state." "When they begin to pump water into the ground, from surface water that is already owned by private parties, those companies or those interests will own the water in the ground under my house," said Jeffrey Obser, executive director of Groundwater for Butte. "That public status of the water will slowly be erased." Supporters of the Tuscan Water District called such claims unfounded, saying they do not intend to transfer any water out of the areaand that measures are in place to prevent that from happening. They pointed out that the resolution outlining the district's authority specifically states that it will not "have the powers to export, transfer, or move water" outside the local Vina and Butte subbasins, and that the district will not transfer any imported water outside its boundaries. "That's an important restriction," said Tovey Giezentanner, a consultant and spokesperson for the Tuscan Water District. "It was formed without the power to export water out of the county." Another of the conditions adopted by the Local Agency Formation Commission says the district must submit proposed projects, such as those focusing on aquifer recharge, to the local groundwater agency to ensure consistency with the area's state-required groundwater sustainability plan. Those conditions "will ensure that the water stays local," Giezentanner said. Supporters note that Butte County also has since the 1990s had an ordinance that requires a county review process for any transfers of local groundwater outside the county, or for so-called groundwater substitution transfers, in which a property owner would sell surface water that would otherwise be used locally and, as a substitute, would pump groundwater. McGowan touted those measures, saying the effort to create the agency "is not about shipping water out of the county." But Vlamis said the district's bylaws could easily be changed to allow for water to be moved out of the area, and the county ordinance simply outlines a procedure that would have to be followed. "Even if that's not their intention, to transfer water out of here, all it takes is an emergency proclamation by the governor, and all local ordinances and everything are thrown out," Vlamis said. "You may have honorable intentions, but once the state wants more water, and you've put in the infrastructure to facilitate this, all bets are off." The water district's proposed 102,000-acre territory covers a portion of the Tuscan Aquifer around Chico. It would overlap with part of the local Vina Groundwater Sustainability Agency's territory. State regulators have endorsed the area's groundwater management plans, but Vlamis' group AquAlliance is suing to challenge the Vina plan, as well as two other local plans. The group cites various failures in the plans, saying they would allow for substantial declines in groundwater levels, threatening wells and streams. Vlamis said she's convinced there is a longstanding interest among state and federal water officials to "integrate" the county's groundwater into the state's supplies, allowing for water to be transferred out of the area. The state Department of Water Resources denied that. Landowners have been casting ballots in the mail-election election. The balloting is weighted based on assessed land value, so the largest landowners, some of which farm thousands of acres, will have the biggest influence in the result. Critics have objected to this type of vote, saying they believe a one-vote-per-person system would be fairer. Richard Harriman, a lawyer in Chico, called the effort to form the district a "Trojan Horse," saying out-of-county landowners are seeking control of the area's water "for purposes that are not for the public interest in Butte County." "It is absolute folly to think that the water is going to stay in Butte County, in that water bank, once the price of water is higher than the economic value of that water to agriculture. It will be gone. The water will follow the money," Harriman said. Farmer Ernie Washington said in a letter to the Chico Enterprise-Record that he initially was concerned about the potential to export water from the county. "Conspiracy theories abound in the water world and I'm not naive enough to think that there aren't plenty of outside interests with designs on our groundwater," Washington wrote. But he added that he's satisfied measures are in place to address that "as well as it can be," and believes the intent of those seeking to form the district is to "preserve our groundwater resource," as well as farmers' livelihood and way of life. 2023 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. 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: Scatter pattern produced by doughnut-shaped beams of light bouncing off of an object with a regularly repeating structure. Credit: Wang, et al., 2023, "Optica" In a new study published in Optica, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have used doughnut-shaped beams of light to take detailed images of objects too tiny to view with traditional microscopes. The new technique could help scientists improve the inner workings of a range of "nanoelectronics," including the miniature semiconductors in computer chips. The discovery was also highlighted in a special issue of Optics & Photonics News. The research is the latest advance in the field of ptychography, a difficult-to-pronounce (the "p" is silent) but powerful technique for viewing very small things. Unlike traditional microscopes, ptychography tools don't directly view small objects. Instead, they shine lasers at a target and then measure how the light scatters awaya bit like the microscopic equivalent of making shadow puppets on a wall. So far, the approach has worked remarkably well, with one major exception, said study senior author and Distinguished Professor of physics Margaret Murnane. "Until recently, it has completely failed for highly periodic samples or objects with a regularly repeating pattern," said Murnane, a fellow at JILA, a joint research institute of CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "It's a problem because that includes a lot of nanoelectronics." She noted that many important technologies, like some semiconductors, are made up of atoms like silicon or carbon joined together in regular patterns like a grid or mesh. To date, those structures have proved tricky for scientists to view up close using ptychography. In the new study, however, Murnane and her colleagues devised a solution. Instead of using traditional lasers in their microscopes, they produced beams of extreme ultraviolet light in the shape of doughnuts. The team's novel approach can collect accurate images of tiny and delicate structures that are roughly 10 to 100 nanometers in size or many times smaller than a millionth of an inch. In the future, the researchers expect to zoom in to view even smaller structures. The doughnut, or optical angular momentum, beams also won't harm tiny electronics in the processas some existing imaging tools, like electron microscopes, sometimes can. "In the future, this method could be used to inspect the polymers used to make and print semiconductors for defects without damaging those structures in the process," Murnane said. Pushing the limits of microscopes The research, Murnane said, pushes the fundamental limits of microscopes: Because of the physics of light, imaging tools using lenses can only see the world down to a resolution of about 200 nanometerswhich isn't accurate enough to capture many of the viruses, for example, that infect humans. Scientists can freeze and kill viruses to view them with powerful cryo-electron microscopes, but can't yet capture these pathogens in action and in real-time. Ptychography, which was pioneered in the mid-2000s, could help researchers push past that limit. To understand how, go back to those shadow puppets. Imagine that scientists want to collect a ptychographic image of a very small structure, perhaps letters spelling out "CU." To do that, they first zap a laser beam at the letters, scanning them multiple times. When the light hits the "C" and the "U" (in this case, the puppets), the beam will break apart and scatter, producing a complex pattern (the shadows). Employing sensitive detectors, scientists record those patterns, then analyze them with a series of mathematical equations. With enough time, Murnane explained, they recreate the shape of their puppets entirely from the shadows they cast. "Instead of using a lens to retrieve the image, we use algorithms," Murnane said. She and her colleagues have previously used such an approach to view submicroscopic shapes like letters or stars. But the approach won't work with repeating structures like those silicon or carbon grids. If you shine a regular laser beam on a semiconductor with such regularity, for example, it will often produce a scatter pattern that is incredibly uniformptychographic algorithms struggle to make sense of patterns that don't have much variation in them. The problem has left physicists scratching their heads for close to a decade. Doughnut microscopy In the new study, however, Murnane and her colleagues decided to try something different. They didn't make their shadow puppets using regular lasers. Instead, they generated beams of extreme ultraviolet light, then employed a device called a spiral phase plate to twist those beams into the shape of a corkscrew, or vortex. (When such a vortex of light shines on a flat surface, it makes a shape like a doughnut.) The doughnut beams didn't have pink glaze or sprinkles, but they did the trick. The team discovered that when these types of beams bounced off repeating structures, they created much more complex shadow puppets than regular lasers. To test out the new approach, the researchers created a mesh of carbon atoms with a tiny snap in one of the links. The group was able to spot that defect with precision not seen in other ptychographic tools. "If you tried to image the same thing in a scanning electron microscope, you would damage it even further," Murnane said. Moving forward, her team wants to make their doughnut strategy even more accurate, allowing them to view smaller and even more fragile objectsincluding, one day, the workings of living, biological cells. More information: Bin Wang et al, High-fidelity ptychographic imaging of highly periodic structures enabled by vortex high harmonic beams, Optica (2023). DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.498619 Journal information: Optica 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: Mosquito in amber. Credit: Dany Azar Researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on December 4 have found the earliest-known fossil mosquito in Lower Cretaceous amber from Lebanon. What's more, the well-preserved insects are two males of the same species with piercing mouthparts, suggesting they likely sucked blood. That's noteworthy because, among modern-day mosquitoes, only females are hematophagous, meaning that they use piercing mouthparts to feed on the blood of people and other animals. "Lebanese amber is, to date, the oldest amber with intensive biological inclusions, and it is a very important material as its formation is contemporaneous with the appearance and beginning of radiation of flowering plants, with all what follows of co-evolution between pollinators and flowering plants," says Dany Azar of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Lebanese University. "Molecular dating suggested that the family Culicidae arose during the Jurassic, but previously the oldest record was mid-Cretaceous," says Andre Nel of the National Museum of Natural History of Paris (Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris). "Here we have one from the early Cretaceous, about 30 million years before." The Culicidae family of arthropods includes more than 3,000 species of mosquitoes. The new findings suggest that male mosquitoes in the past fed on blood as well, according to the researchers. They also help to narrow the "ghost-lineage gap" for mosquitoes, they say. Head, ventral view; scale bar 100 mm. Credit: Current Biology/Azar et al. Female mosquitoes are notorious for their blood-feeding ways, which has made them a major vector for spreading infectious diseases. Hematophagy in insects is thought to have arisen as a shift from piercing-sucking mouthparts used to extract plant fluids. For example, blood-sucking fleas likely arose from nectar-feeding insects. But the evolution of blood feeding has been hard to study in part due to gaps in the insect fossil record. In the new study, Azar, Nel, Diying Huang, and Michael S. Engel describe two male mosquitoes with piercing mouthparts, including an exceptionally sharp, triangular mandible and elongated structure with small, tooth-like denticles. They report that the mosquitoes' preservation in amber extends the definitive occurrence of the mosquito family of insects into the early Cretaceous. It also suggests that the evolution of hematophagy was more complicated than had been suspected, with hematophagous males in the distant past. In future work, Nel says the team wants to learn more about the "utility" of having hematophagy in Cretaceous male mosquitoes. They're also curious to explore "why this no longer exists," he says. 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: Yang Guang, a male giant panda, has been at Edinburgh Zoo since 2011. The UK's only giant pandas left Edinburgh for China on Monday after spending 12 cubless years in the Scottish capital. It was hoped that female Tian Tian ("Sweetie") and male Yang Guang ("Sunshine") would produce a cub during their stay at Edinburgh Zoo. But the bears, who even had a special black, white, gray and red tartan created in their honor, never succeeded in conceiving. "It's sad that Tian Tian hasn't bred here, we would obviously really have liked her to have done so, but this is not unusual with giant pandas," said Simon Girling, head of veterinary services at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS). "I think we're all quite sad to see them go, they are two lovely individuals, lovely characters, and we've got to know them really well." The pandas were transported to the airport in metal crates and loaded into a cargo plane with a pallet of bamboo ahead of their flight back to China. They will spend time in quarantine on arrival in China before being re-homed at a sanctuary in Chengdu, the capital of southwestern China's Sichuan province. The pandas arrived at Edinburgh Zoo in December 2011 as part of a 10-year agreement between the RZSS and the China Wildlife Conservation Association, which was later extended by two years. During their stay in Edinburgh, the popular pair even had a special tartan created in their honor, in black, white and gray representing their fur, and red to symbolize China. Yang Guang was accompanied by Tian Tian on the trip from China. Difficult to breed But it was soon clear the two were not eager to breed. The zoo and veterinarians from China made eight attempts at artificial insemination between the pair. There was also a failed attempt to artificially inseminate Tian Tian in 2013. The giant panda breeding program was stopped in 2021 after Yang Guang was castrated after being treated for testicular cancer. Giant pandas are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity, with bears losing interest in mating the natural wayor simply not knowing how. A female panda has a single oestrous cycle in the spring in which she is fertile for only 24 to 36 hours, according to the Pandas International conservation organization. "We have made a significant contribution to our understanding around giant panda fertility, husbandry and veterinary carewhich has been of real benefit to efforts to protect this amazing species in China," said RZSS chief executive David Field. Attempts to breed pandas in captivity first began in China in 1955. In 1963, Ming Ming, the first giant panda bred in captivity, was born at the Beijing zoo. Pandas are found in the wild in southwest China, along the Tibetan Plateau. 2023 AFP 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 barge carries coal to the dock next to the Suralaya coal-fired power plant in Cilegon, in Indonesia's Banten province. Sania sits in front of her home in Indonesia, less than a kilometer from Southeast Asia's biggest coal complex, where chimneys pump dark gray smoke and a chemical smell into the air. As countries gather in Dubai for crunch climate talks, the future of polluting fossil fuel coal will be high on the agenda. For some, the age of coal is now clearly over, and Indonesia has committed to moving away from the fuel despite being the world's top exporter. But it is adding two more units to the Suralaya power plant, in Banten province next to the capital Jakarta, and has plans for new plants to power its nickel industrykey to the electric vehicle boom. Sania, a 37-year-old housewife, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, is dreading the Suralaya expansion. "I am very worried. It's been very scary. I want to move out if I can because our house is too near to the plant," she told AFP. "If the units start to operate, the dust here will be much worse. I mop the floor two to three times a day. The noise makes my head ache. The smell is terrible." It's a story repeated across Indonesia, where the government's pledge to end construction of new coal plants has been tempered by loopholes allowing existing expansions like that at Suralaya to proceed. Local residents talk about air pollution during an interview with AFP near the Suralaya coal-fired power plant in Cilegon, in Indonesia's Banten province. The government's promise also excludes so-called captive coalplants that power industry rather than feed into the grid. Indonesia is one of the world's top coal producers, and is heavily reliant on the fuel for power generation. But it is also the recipient of a Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), which promises to mobilize $20 billion to wean the country off coal. Under the deal, Indonesia moved up its energy transition goals, pledging net-zero power sector emissions by 2050, and to boost the share of electricity generated from renewable sources to 44 percent by 2030. Solar and wind power each currently account for less than one percent of Indonesia's power mix. 'Cheapest, most reliable' Its JETP calculations do not however account for captive power plants, with more than 13 gigawatts (GW) already installed and another 18 GW planned as of 2022, according to Jakarta-based energy think tank the Institute for Essential Services Reform (IESR). Indonesia views these plants as vital to its growing role in the electric vehicle revolution, powering facilities that process nickel for batteries. Indonesia is one of the world's top coal producers, and is heavily reliant on the fuel for power generation. It has even mooted designating as "green" coal-powered plants that power EV industry activities. "There's a major issue around captive coal power stations in Indonesia, that runs the risk of derailing or slowing that JETP process," said Leo Roberts, an analyst at climate think tank E3G. It could mean the deal is not "an effective whole economy transition for Indonesia", he said. The Indonesian government, JETP secretariat and state-owned power company PLN did not respond to AFP's requests for comment. But Hendra Sinadia, executive director of the Indonesian Coal Mining Association, said efforts to push the country away from the fossil fuel were misguided and some coal-powered energy generation remains necessary. "Coal is Indonesia's natural wealth. Indonesia has a significant potential for coal," he told AFP. "Coal remains the most relied-upon energy source to drive smelter development, allowing us to become one of the main players in the electric vehicle ecosystem." Closing existing power plants is complicated by the relative youth of many of Indonesia's facilities. The Suralaya coal-fired power plant in Cilegon, in Indonesia's Banten province, is Southeast Asia's biggest coal complex. That makes them expensive to retire because of the years of potential returns on investment left. "I believe choosing to phase out isn't a wise decision," said Sinadia. "Coal remains the cheapest, most reliable, and most accessible energy source." 'Beleaguered' But activists say that analysis ignores the planet-warming implications of unrestricted coal use as well as its serious health consequences. Data modeling by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air suggests emissions from the country's coal-fired power plants in 2022 were responsible for 10,500 deaths. "This 'cheap' label doesn't take into account the external costs due to environmental damage and health impacts caused," said Bondan Andriyanu, a researcher at Greenpeace. Fisherman Hawasi, 55, also blames the Suralaya plant for pollution offshore that has depleted his livelihood. Despite Indonesia's promise to move away from coal, it is the world's top exporter and it is adding two more units to the Suralaya power plant in Banten province. "There are no more catches in the waters near the shore. We have to sail far," he told AFP. "We have been beleaguered by pollution from all directions." IESR says Indonesia should retire nine GW of coal generation by 2030 to meet its commitments under JETP. But an energy ministry study released in September proposes retiring just over half that amount by 2030. This month, PLN's chief executive Darmawan Prasodjo announced plans to build an additional 31.6 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2033. But that is expected to largely cater to growing demand, with most existing coal plants left running until the end of their lifetimes. "We will do a coal phase down, not a coal phase out," Prasodjo told parliament. 2023 AFP This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Scientific debate is getting heated over what to do about airplane contrailsthe wispy lines of water vapor you often see trailing behind a jet. Those harmless-looking vapor trails sometimes spread out to form thin cirrus clouds. Environmental activists and nonprofits focused on climate change routinely assert contrails contribute more to global warming than the carbon dioxide emitted from jet engines. The aviation industry, under pressure to do something, has stepped up research into contrails. In October, Boeing and NASA conducted flight tests out of Everett with a NASA DC-8 research plane flying behind a 737 MAX 10 to sniff its exhaust and analyze its contrails to test if so-called sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, may reduce their incidence. And Google, in a partnership with researchers at Breakthrough Energythe Seattle-based climate action research group founded by Bill Gatesconducted a small experiment with American Airlines to test whether commercial pilots could avoid regions of the atmosphere likely to induce contrails. A larger trial with multiple air carriers, including Alaska Airlines, is planned for next year. But last week, the consensus that contrails are so bad for the planet that we need to quickly find ways to reduce them was shattered. David Lee, author in 2021 of the most influential study of the impact of aviation on the climate and chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's aviation working group, published a new and trenchant assessment of the myriad scientific uncertainties around the subject. Co-authored by prominent U.K. climate researchers, the paper concludes that "the fundamental premise" that contrails are important enough to mitigate "is not yet established." Beyond the uncertainty in the scale of the contrail warming effect, Lee points to a related cooling impact that could potentially cancel it out. Lee argues that the data on aviation's non-CO 2 impactschiefly the contrails and the effect of engine emissions on cloud formationis so uncertain that any action to mitigate them "may be of limited effect or have unintended consequences." He notes that rerouting planes to avoid airspace susceptible to inducing contrails means burning more fuel and emitting more CO 2 , which remains in the atmosphere for centuries while contrails dissipate in days. Complex science and possible approaches Contrails form when water vapor condenses around aerosols emitted by jet enginesparticles and droplets, mainly soot and sulfurto form ice crystals in the high altitude cold. Most contrails dissipate quickly. Some spread out and persist as high, thin cirrus clouds. These clouds can partially cool the planet during the day as they reflect sunlight away from Earth. However, the high, cold clouds also trap surface heat that would otherwise escape into spacea "greenhouse effect" parallel to that of CO 2 . The overall impact of the contrail-induced clouds is warming, especially at night when there is no solar reflection. The science is so complex that the scale of the contrail impact on the climate has always been very uncertain. It varies not only according to the time of day or night but to the type of surface below. The scientific models of cloud formation remain highly imperfect. Yet in recent years environmental activists have settled on data in Lee's 2021 assessment as proof that the warming effect of contrails is greater than that of the CO 2 spewed from the engines. Although the cited data comes with a colossal margin of error, that assertion has been repeated in the press and become the accepted basis for efforts to reduce contrails. In an interview, Marc Shapiro, director of Breakthrough Energy's contrails project, cited the most recent IPCC assessment, which is based on Lee's 2021 paper: that contrails contribute between 1% and 2% of total human-caused climate change. "That's staggering," Shapiro said. "Most people are astounded to hear that." So Breakthrough, in collaboration with Google, is focused on finding ways for airplanes to avoid making contrails. For this year's initial trial, Google used artificial intelligence to analyze satellite imagery, weather and flight data, and develop contrail forecast maps on 35 American Airlines routes. Going one way, pilots flew over or under regions where the models indicated atmospheric conditions favored contrail formation. On the reverse leg, they flew straight through, ignoring the possibility of contrails. The avoidance measures resulted in a 54% reduction in contrail-induced clouds, Shapiro said. Next year, they plan "a much larger trial with multiple airlines," repeating the experiment on thousands of flights. Shapiro acknowledged the fuzziness in the data about the impact of contrails but said the uncertainty "is overstated by the academic community." It tends to lead to a conclusion that there's nothing to be done, he said, "and I really disagree with that." Echoing that view, Matteo Mirolo, sustainable aviation manager for Transport & Environment, Europe's leading clean transportation advocacy group, said in an interview it's "important not to cross the line, where uncertainty is taken as an excuse for inaction." Mirolo said operational changes to reduce contrails, like those Google and Breakthrough are promoting, should be an easy and cheap way to reduce aviation's contribution to global warming compared with reducing CO 2 emissions. In a phrase often used by climate activists on the subject, he called contrail prevention "low-hanging fruit" for the aviation industry. But Lee, a professor of atmospheric science at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, pointedly dismissed that notion in an article posted on his university's website highlighting the new paper. "There are no simple silver bullets or low-hanging fruit to solve the problem," Lee said. Smaller impact Political pressure to reduce contrails has grown strongest in Europe. Beginning in 2025, European airlines will be required to monitor, report and verify the non-CO 2 climate effects of their flights. By 2028, after an impact assessment, the European Commission has to make a proposal to address these effectswith contrails as the most salient. This political push is premised on the belief that contrails are much worse for the earth's atmosphere even than greenhouse gases, and that belief arose from data in Lee's major 2021 assessment. The analysis is cited by the IPCC, environmentalists, Boeing and NASA, and remains the definitive study of aviation's climate impact. But interpretations vary, hence Lee's new effort to clarify its meaning. The 2021 paper had offered "best estimates" from an analysis of multiple research studies that pegged contrails as by far the largest of aviation's non-carbon impacts, with just 34% of aviation's total warming effect contributed by carbon emissions and fully 57% by contrails. However, that quantitative estimate for contrails is exceptionally mushy. It comes with an error margin of plus-or-minus 70%. Drew Shindell, a professor of Earth Science at Duke University who assessed climate impacts for the IPCC, said the lack of rigor in the analysis of clouds and their formation creates the "enormous uncertainty" around the impact of contrails. The latest IPCC estimate of the contribution of contrails and aviation-induced cirrus clouds to total global warming from all human activity is 0.7% to 3.7%. Shindell said recent studies suggest it is "likely towards the low end of the [IPCC] range." "The overall assessment is that it's probably in fact, very small," he said. "I don't personally think that it is something we have to worry about more than the CO 2 . I don't think the science supports that." Even Shapiro of Breakthrough, whose research focus is on reducing contrails, said that "to be totally frank, our numbers are coming up on the low end of David Lee's [2021] estimates as well." "There is kind of a growing consensus, the numbers in that paper are too high," he said, though quickly insisting that "it's not like coming out as insignificant." Efforts to reduce contrails questioned Lee's new assessment sharply critiques the misreading of his data. The new paper states that the uncertain warming effect of contrails may be offset because the aircraft aerosols that trigger contrails also change how clouds form in complex ways that have an even less clear, but possibly larger, cooling effect. Because of the uncertainty around how aerosols interact with clouds, with numerous studies showing wildly different results, the 2021 assessment hadn't even ventured an estimate for that. Lee's new paper concludes that these competing factors taken together "could have a net positive or net negative" effect on global warming. Lee specifically criticizes contrail avoidance solutions such as Breakthrough's. In an email, Lee expressed concern about the "seemingly large (and in my view, ignorant) enthusiasm for navigational avoidance of contrails" because of the extra CO 2 emitted. The warming effect of that additional CO 2 "lasts virtually forever," Lee wrote. In addition, his paper says forecasting of atmospheric conditions is currently not sufficiently accurate to provide reliable contrail predictions. His paper argues for more research and "careful analysis in order that perverse outcomes are avoided, and strategic investment decisions are based on a solid evidence base." Breakthrough's Shapiro, responding to the Lee paper's rejection of contrail avoidance, counters that flying above or below contrail regions injects the same aerosols into the air, and so their likely cooling impact on cloud formation will be unaffected. And Google's account of the American Airlines trial cites research suggesting that with sophisticated contrail avoidance "the total fuel impact could be as low as 0.3%." "I believe this caution comes with a real climate opportunity cost," Shapiro wrote in an email. Shapiro said that even if contrails end up being half a percent of total human climate impact rather than 2%, "that's still astounding." "I'm not sure that changes my motivation or my approach to the problem," he said. David Fahey, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Chemical Sciences in Boulder, Colo., and a co-author with Lee of the influential 2021 paper, called the newly published assessment by Lee and his collaborators "stunning." Fahey concurred that the uncertainties in the scientific models undermine the case for rushing to implement solutions. He said climate activists pushing for immediate action on contrails are "painting a target in the sky and saying, "That's the enemy.'" Because there are so many unknowns, "we need to not do that," Fahey said, adding that Lee's new paper is "an antidote to the Kool-Aid drinking that's going on." Boeing and NASA team up to study contrails In the NASA/Boeing contrail study in October, pilots were not avoiding contrails but hunting them to gather data. NASA research pilot Andy Barry flew the four-engine DC-8 research plane loaded with emissions sensors and cameras behind the Boeing MAX 10, which was painted in the colors of its eventual owner, United Airlines. For three weeks, they took off on 5-to-6-hour flights seeking the right atmospheric conditions for contrails. On the MAX, instruments drew in outside air and analyzed it. In the much larger, heavier NASA chase plane, more instruments drew in the air from the MAX engines' exhaustwhether contrails were visible or notand analyzed its composition. Since a big part of the study was to examine how fuel might reduce contrails, the MAX was fitted with partitioned fuel tanks. The wings held a low-sulfur version of regular kerosene-based jet fuel. The center tank held 100% sustainable aviation fuel produced from biomass, oils and waste. Both fuels burn cleaner than regular jet fuel, producing less soot and aerosols. With eight to 10 engineers in the back monitoring the instruments, the pilots flew one flight segment burning one type of fuel, then turned back and repeated the maneuver in the same air space burning the second fuel. For Barry, it was tricky and demanding flying. Communicating via radio with the Boeing jet, the NASA pilots aimed for a target air space about 200 feet wide and high, some 4 to 5 miles behind the Boeing jet. They had to avoid the wake coming off the Boeing jet's wingtips that generated whirling vortices of doughnut trails behind it. And on days when there were strong crosswinds, they had to adjust laterally to find the exhaust stream. "It's a small piece of sky to be in a moving environment," said Barry, interviewed in the DC-8 cockpit. "It's a highly turbulent environment, and that's why everyone's strapped in with five-point harnesses." "We're doing this for 400-mile legs, and hand-flying all of this. Let's just say it's fatiguing," he said. "No autopilot is going to put you in this sweet spot to sample the data." The complexity and uncertainty around contrail formation was illustrated on days when the pilots would spot an airplane in a neighboring pocket of air with a 20-mile contrail. Barry said he'd think "it's gonna be easy today" to find contrails"then we start getting on condition and there's nothing or it's a half-mile contrail." Lee's new paper, while it warns contrail avoidance may increase carbon emissions, states that reducing contrails by burning SAF that also reduces carbon "could potentially be a 'winwin.'" The results from the October flight tests will be published next year. Aside from the work on contrails, the outcome should confirm a separate, substantial public health benefit from SAF. The lower aerosol emissions from the fuel will reduce pollution around airports all over the globe. Dilemma for aviation The aviation industry's goal of reducing carbon emissions to "net zero" by 2050 is fraught with major costs and heavy uncertainty. Developing new aircraft technologies while vastly scaling up production of SAF is both immensely expensive and perhaps unattainable. In contrast, reducing contrails, while not easy, seems enticingly possible. Lee asserts that reducing carbon emissions should remain the priority. Via email, he summed up aviation's dilemma and urged caution. "As environmental scientists, we operate routinely with uncertainty," Lee wrote. "However, what is far more difficult to deal with is the uncertainty of being completely 'wrong' and doing permanent damage to climate in the process." 2023 The Seattle Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: Yan Krukau from Pexels For decades, researchers have debated the long-term impact of early childhood education, sharing evidence that while some children experience positive long-term outcomes, others see initial benefits fade outor even experience detrimental outcomes. Now, a study published in Education Sciences is adding to a growing body of research indicating that high-quality early care and learning programs can positively impact children for years into the future. But there is one caveat: children need to be enrolled early, in infancy or early toddlerhood, to reap these benefits. Beginning in 2010, researchers in Tulsa, Oklahoma, followed a cohort of 37 children who were 19 months or younger when they enrolled in Tulsa Educare, a high-quality, early-learning program. A team from the Early Childhood Education Institute at the University of Oklahoma- Tulsa, regularly evaluated the children's academic outcomes and executive function through the end of third grade. These outcomes were then compared to a cohort of 38 children, serving as a control group, who were unable to get a spot at Tulsa Educare. (Children in the control group were cared for by relatives or family friends, enrolled in family childcare homes or attended a public-school preschool program or local Head Start program.) "To me, the results show the importance of starting early if you want to have large and sustained effects from high-quality early childhood programs," said Diane Horm, the founding director of the Early Childhood Education Institute at OU-Tulsa and a George Kaiser Family Foundation Endowed Chair of Early Childhood Education. A "sustained and large dose" of a high-quality early childhood program prior to kindergarten, Horm said, seems to be key to the lasting, positive results. "If we start early, we can prevent the achievement gap from forming." More information: Diane M. Horm et al, Kindergarten through Grade 3 Outcomes Associated with Participation in High-Quality Early Care and Education: A RCT Follow-Up Study, Education Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.3390/educsci12120908 (CNN) US forces killed at least five Iran-backed militia members in a drone strike after the US identified an imminent attack was likely to be launched by militia forces in Kirkuk, Iraq, on Sunday, a US official said. It wasnt immediately clear which group the forces killed on Sunday belonged to. Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said Monday that the militia members were preparing to launch a one-way attack drone, and the US responded with an armed US uncrewed aerial system killing all five militants and destroying the drone. Iraqi security forces were notified of the strike, Singh said, and she confirmed the death of the militants and destruction of the drone. The number of attacks by Iran-backed proxy groups on US and coalition forces in Iraq and Syria has risen to 76 since October 17, a defense official told CNN. The latest attack occurred on Sunday morning, when a multi-rocket attack was launched against US and coalition forces at Rumalyn Landing Zone, Syria; no infrastructure damage or injuries were reported. The near-daily attacks on US and coalition forces by Iranian-backed groups began in the weeks following Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. The US has responded to these near-daily attacks in recent months by launching strikes in eastern Syria and Iraq, targeting weapons depots and storage facilities being used by Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxy militia groups. The US has built up its military presence in the region in an attempt to send a stronger message deterring Iran or other actors from exacerbating the Israel-Hamas conflict and seeing it spread into the region, sending two Carrier Strike Groups, an Amphibious Readiness Group and Marine Expeditionary Unit, and additional ground troops and air defense systems. The US has also launched several air strikes in Syria and Iraq since October 17, targeting facilities associated with Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxy groups. And while US officials have repeatedly said they believe deterrence is working to contain the conflict between Israel and Hamas, attacks on US assets as well as commercial vessels have not appeared to slow. Iran-backed groups have continued their drone and rocket attacks in Iraq and Syria and launched at least one ballistic missile attack. Last month, the US fired on and killed an unknown number of hostile forces after multiple close-range ballistic missiles were fired at US and coalition forces at Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq. There have also been a number of drone and ballistic missile attacks on ships. On Sunday, the USS Carney, an Arleigh-Burke class destroyer, shot down at least three drones in the southern Red Sea from Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Carney also responded to distress calls from commercial vessels in the area who were attacked by ballistic missiles. Singh said Monday that the current assessment is the Carney was not the intended target of the drones, though she added that the drones came close enough that the Carneys commander felt that it was a threat and needed to engage and shoot down the drones. On Friday, the Carney shot down a drone from Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen heading in the direction of the ship, and a week ago, two ballistic missiles were fired toward the USS Mason in the Gulf of Aden. A press release from US Central Command on Sunday made clear that while the attacks were launched by Houthis in Yemen, the US has every reason to believe that these attacks are fully enabled by Iran. The United States will consider all appropriate responses in full coordination with its international allies and partners, the release said. 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: Utqiagvik, 2022-05-08. Credit: Elisabeth Kruger, World Wildlife Fund Polar bears are icons of the Arctic, elusive and vulnerable. Detailed monitoring of their populations is crucial for their conservationbut because polar bears are so difficult to find, we are missing critical data about population size and how well-connected those populations are. Scientists have now developed a new tool to help: DNA analysis using skin cells shed in the bears' footprints in the snow. "It is particularly challenging, expensive, and time-consuming to find polar bears in the Arctic, let alone count them and understand how they are coping with climate change," said Dr. Melanie Lancaster of the World Wide Fund for Nature Global Arctic Program, senior author of the study in Frontiers in Conservation Science. Every contact leaves a trace The scientists were inspired by forensic techniques that can be applied to tiny, degraded DNA samples. With these techniques, it isn't necessary to physically capture bears, which can be stressful and dangerous for both bears and humans, and is a source of concern to some local Indigenous communities. Instead, scientists can look at sources of DNA shed in passingenvironmental DNA. "Many Inuit express concern about invasive research methods," said Elisabeth Kruger of the World Wildlife Fund, an author of the article. "People are concerned about the welfare of the individual polar bear and the health and safety of people who may harvest the bear later. This is one of the reasons we are so excited about new methods like thisthe person collecting the sample never needs to even see or be seen by the polar bear." A common form of environmental DNA is deposited when animals defecate. However, the DNA quality is not always good enough for the individual-level analysis needed for conservation. Additionally, for territorial animals like the two other species the scientists testedlynxes and snow leopardssampling feces could affect the animals' behavior. So the researchers turned to skin cells in snowy footprints. "The tracks usually contain fresh cells, and the DNA is intact because of the cold 'storage' temperature. DNA that has passed the gut is much more degraded and therefore more challenging to work on," said Dr. Micaela Hellstrom of MIX Research Sweden AB, lead author. Walking in their footsteps The scientists collected snow from individual tracks made by Alaskan polar bears and Swedish Eurasian lynxes in the wild and in captivity. They also collected snow from tracks made by a captive snow leopard. Additional materials like hair, saliva, and mucus were sampled, confirming that the tracks provided accurate genotypes. In all, 24 wild polar bear tracks and 44 wild lynx tracks were sampled. The researchers melted and filtered the snow to collect environmental DNA, then carried out microsatellite analysis. Although the concentrations of DNA retrieved from tracks sampled in the wild were very low, it was possible to retrieve nuclear DNA from 87.5% of wild polar bear tracks and 59.1% of wild lynx tracks. 13 of the wild polar bear samples could be genotyped, identifying 12 different individuals. Only 11% of the lynx tracks could be genotyped, but when the scientists only looked at the tracks sampled by trained personnel, this rose substantially. They were able to retrieve nuclear DNA from 76% of samples collected by trained personnel, and to genotype 24% of those sampled. A paws-off approach This technique has huge potential to inform conservation of these animals, to better understand their populations and behavior, and to manage conflict with humans through accurate identification of animals. Although non-invasive sampling has a lower success rate, ease of collection means that it can significantly expand sample sizes. "We hope this method will be taken up by the polar bear research community, with the involvement of hunters, volunteers, and Indigenous communities, as a new way to collect information on polar bears," said Lancaster. "We also hope the method will be expanded to other animals living in snowy environmentswe have shown it works for lynx and snow leopards as a start." More information: Capturing environmental DNA in snow tracks of polar bear, Eurasian lynx and snow leopard towards individual identification, Frontiers in Conservation Science (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fcosc.2023.1250996 Provided by Frontiers This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: ??Amol Nandiwadekar from Pexels A study of older U.S. South Asians examines relationships between religious service attendance (temple, mosque, etc.), anxiety and feelings of emotional neglect by fellow congregation members. The research finds that among U.S. South Asians, those who attend religious services more often are also more likely to experience higher levels of anxiety. Further, much of this relationship can be attributed to feelings of being ignored or neglected by other members of the congregation. The study, "Why is Religious Attendance Linked to More Anxiety in U.S. South Asians? The Mediating Role of Congregational Neglect," is published in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. It relies on a sample of 936 South Asian adults living in the San Francisco and Chicago areas. The research sheds light on how religion and well-being are associated among U.S. South Asians, an understudied group in the religious landscape. "Most of the research in this area is on white, predominantly Christian populations," said Blake Victor Kent, associate professor of sociology at Westmont College. "That literature, which centers on Christian congregations with regular Sunday attendance patterns, shows that attendance is often linked with lower anxiety. But that may not hold among South Asians." For the analysis, religious service attendance was measured from "never" to "several times a week," while anxiety was assessed using the Spielberger trait anxiety scale. Neglect was measured by asking a question: "How often do you feel ignored or neglected by people in your congregation or religious community?" with answers categorized as never vs. once in a while or more. "We found that more attendance means more anxiety, and we wanted to understand what is driving that," Kent said. "Usually religious communities are linked to positive outcomes, and we think it's important to understand what's going on in the South Asian community." The authors note several differences between majority-white Christian and South Asian religious communities that could explain the finding. "First, there is no expectation of weekly temple attendance in Hinduism, as in the Christian community," noted lead author Samuel Stroope, professor of sociology at Louisiana State University. "And motivation for attendance may also differ. It could be about fulfilling family obligations or preserving ethnic identity." The researchers, who include Alka M. Kanaya (University of San Francisco), Anna B. Schachter (Harvard University), and Alexandra E. Shields (Harvard University), note that previous research on religious congregations shows that negative religious interactions and stressful congregational experiences can have damaging effects on mental health. "In India, 32% of adults report that being religious is about culture and ancestry, not religious conviction per se," Kent said. "This approach to religion may give us clues about what's happening in South Asians here. It may set some people up for negative interactions when others question their motives." Further, different sectarian and regional groups often share worship facilities in the U.S. due to limited space. "That means religious sites can be characterized by interaction between dominant and non-dominant groups, which could lead to negative interactions," Stroope said. Armed with this knowledge, the researchers suggest religious leaders can take proactive steps to safeguard attendees in their places of worship. One is to actively seek input from those more likely to experience neglect. Another is to intentionally regard regional, linguistic and sectarian diversity. "Religious participation is associated with many goods, from having a place to belong to boosts in mental and physical health," Kent said. "When negative outcomes and patterns are identified, hopefully that knowledge can lead to corrections for more productive and life-giving interactions." More information: Samuel Stroope et al, Why Is Religious Attendance Linked to More Anxiety in U.S. South Asians? The Mediating Role of Congregational Neglect, Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s40615-023-01764-6 This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A very large percentage of South Africans who are released from prison end up being rearrested and being convicted for crimes again. The country has one of the highest recidivism rates in the world. Criminologist Casper Ltter sets out his findings in a recent paper on what can be learned from Finland's experience in reducing this trend. What's the difference between the two countries' approaches? About 9 out of 10 ex-offenders reoffend in South Africa. Expressed as a percentage of 90% of the prison population of roughly 260,000 at any one point in time, this is one of the highest and most unsustainable in the world. The US has a rate of recidivism of around 67% while China, an authoritarian country where mass executions of recidivists are the norm, has a rate between 6% and 8%. In Finland, a liberal democracy, the rate is a very acceptable 31%. The primary cause of reoffending in South Africa appears to be the state's unwillingness or inability to clear up areas of conflict in society which either breed criminality or fuel reoffending. Examples of these are inequality (a breeding ground for violent crimes), poverty in an otherwise affluent society, chronic unemployment and government practices that marginalize and stigmatize people. Not only has the state failed to keep citizens safe from preventable crime and harm, but politicians have also used the issue to campaign on a "tough on crime" ticket. South Africa also has a harsh stigmatizing shaming culture, as opposed to an integrative shaming culture, when it comes to people convicted of crimes. In a stigmatizing shaming culture, ex-offenders often experience discrimination and ostracisation. This drives them away from mainstream culture and its values and towards criminal subcultures. The US has a similar culture. In an integrative shaming culture, ex-offenders are encouraged to reintegrate into society. They are provided with employment and other opportunities to ease their transition into mainstream society. China and Japan are examples of this. This approach is also widespread in African cultures, such as those found in Mali, Kenya and even Nigeria. The reason for this? In most African countries with a history of colonialism, a connection has been established between imprisonment and slavery. Significantly, the leading Australian comparative criminologist John Braithwaite has argued that stigma is "counter-productive" and fuels reoffending. Though recidivism (reoffending) is a significant problem in criminology, there are no easy answers on how to fix it. The problem is both complex and nuanced. Alternative approaches In a recent paper, I looked at alternatives. For example, Finland has a hybrid culture. It has a stigmatizing shaming culture that is heavily influenced by integrative shaming features. A well-known Chinese proverb proclaims that nuance is everything. These characteristics are evident in the Finnish prison setting as well as the post-incarceration environment. Strenuous efforts are made to provide ex-offenders with employment opportunities or financial assistance after their release from prison. And offenders' concerns are attended to during incarceration. Prison protests, such as hunger strikes, are unheard of in Finnish prisons. In South Africa they are common. But the most glaring characteristic of the Finnish system is an admirable rate of recidivism of about 31% (with deincarceration at 53 individuals imprisoned per 100,000 in the national general population). Deincarceration is the result of efforts to limit recourse to imprisonment as much as possible. In South Africa the rate of recidivism (reoffending) is between 86% and 94%. So, even though South Africa's rate of incarceration (the number of convicted criminals who go to prison) is almost five times higher than that of Finland, Finland has only one third of South Africa's reoffending rate. The question is why, since both these countries exhibit stigmatizing shaming cultures. In my research I identified specific features within the Finnish system that makes it a good model for the South African Department of Correctional Services to follow. These include: Punishment as a mere loss of liberty. Other features of incarceration, such as torture, forfeiture of privileges (such as family visits), degrading or insulting treatment and solitary confinement are not evident in the Finnish system. All of these are evident in South Africa. Reintegration into society. Offenders are provided, as far as possible, with employment opportunities and other measures to help them return to mainstream society. This helps them survive in a harsh stigmatizing shaming culture. Promotion of normal humane conditions in the prison environment. Prisons in Finland are not surrounded by barbed wire, and prison wardens are dressed in normal civilian clothing. Everything possible is done to normalize the prison environment. Just and respectful treatment of prisoners, upholding their human dignity. Research has shown that treating offenders in humiliating ways damages their sense of self and complicates their integration into society. Responsiveness to offenders' concerns. Understanding their problems allows them to feel they are part of the system and breaks down their resistance to cooperation with authorities. What lessons can be learned My research shows that South Africa could benefit from Finland's approach. South African academic Gavin Bradshaw, an expert on deep-rooted societal conflict as well as social cohesion, say, "Most recent research work on negotiation also supports the fact that integrative approaches are usually far more effective {than power bargaining}." Recognition of the formerly incarcerated's basic human needs, as Bradshaw indicates, is bound to have a significant impact on South Africa's rates of recidivism. I found that Finland's great achievement is a result of recognizing the basic human needs of offenders and ex-offenders, thereby eliminating this primary source of human conflict. Those needs include employment, where possible, basic accommodation, dignity, and responsiveness to their concerns. In a country where 9 out of every 10 offenders reoffend, it is perhaps time to reevaluate the rehabilitation paradigm. Finland's experience shows the value of applying sensible conflict transformation perspectives in the management of crime. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. 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: Quadrupole mass spectrometry with superconducting single particle detection. (A) Proteins are volatilized using electrospray ionization charge-reduced in bipolar air by a corona discharge. Panel (B) shows an electron micrograph of two pixels (SSPDs), each with a size of 20 20 m2 (D 1 ), while (C) shows a close-up image of a detector pixel (D 2 ) that has a 100 times larger area and a 500-nm line width. Credit: Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj2801 An international research team led by quantum physicist Markus Arndt (University of Vienna) has achieved a breakthrough in the detection of protein ions: Due to their high energy sensitivity, superconducting nanowire detectors achieve almost 100% quantum efficiency and exceed the detection efficiency of conventional ion detectors at low energies by a factor of up to a 1,000. In contrast to conventional detectors, they can also distinguish macromolecules by their impact energy. This allows for more sensitive detection of proteins and it provides additional information in mass spectrometry. The results of this study were recently published in the journal Science Advances. The detection, identification, and analysis of macromolecules is interesting in many areas of life sciences, including protein research, diagnostics, and analytics. Mass spectrometry is often used as a detection systema method that typically separates charged particles (ions) according to their mass-to-charge ratio and measures the intensity of the signals generated by a detector. This provides information about the relative abundance of the different types of ions and therefore the composition of the sample. However, conventional detectors have only been able to achieve high detection efficiency and spatial resolution for particles with high-impact energya limitation that has now been overcome by an international team of researchers using superconducting nanowire detectors. In the current study, a European consortium coordinated by the University of Vienna, with partners in Delft (Single Quantum), Lausanne (EPFL), Almere (MSVision) and Basel (University), demonstrates for the first time the use of superconducting nanowires as excellent detectors for protein beams in so-called quadrupole mass spectrometry. Ions from the sample to be analyzed are fed into a quadrupole mass spectrometer where they are filtered. "If we now use superconducting nanowires instead of conventional detectors, we can even identify particles that hit the detector with low kinetic energy," explains project leader Markus Arndt from the Quantum Nanophysics Group at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Vienna. This is made possible by a special material property (superconductivity) of the nanowire detectors. Getting there with superconductivity The key to this detection method is that nanowires enter a superconducting state at very low temperatures, in which they lose their electrical resistance and allow lossless current flow. Excitation of the superconducting nanowires by incoming ions causes a return to the normal conducting state (quantum transition). The change in the electrical properties of the nanowires during this transition is interpreted as a detection signal. "With the nanowire detectors we use," says first author Marcel Strau, "we exploit the quantum transition from the superconducting to the normal conducting state and can thus outperform conventional ion detectors by up to three orders of magnitude." Indeed, nanowire detectors have a remarkable quantum yield at exceptionally low impact energiesand redefine the possibilities of conventional detectors: "In addition, a mass spectrometer adapted with such a quantum sensor can not only distinguish molecules according to their mass to charge state, but also classify them according to their kinetic energy. This improves the detection and offers the possibility for have better spatial resolution," says Marcel Strau. Nanowire detectors can find new applications in mass spectrometry, molecular spectroscopy, molecular deflectometry, or quantum interferometry of molecules, where high efficiency and good resolution are required, especially at low impact energy. More information: Marcel Strau et al, Highly sensitive single-molecule detection of macromolecule ion beams, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj2801 Journal information: Science Advances 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: The image depicts an experiment in which heavy particles(illustrated as the moon), cause an interference pattern (a quantum effect), while also bendingspacetime. The hanging pendulums depict the measurement of spacetime. The actual experiment istypically performed using Carbon-60, one of the largest known molecules. The UCL calculationindicates that the experiment should also be performed using higher density atoms such as gold. The other two images represent the two experiments proposed by the UCL group, both of whichconstrain any theory where spacetime is treated classically. One is the weighing of a mass, the otheris an interference experiment. Credit: Isaac Young A radical theory that consistently unifies gravity and quantum mechanics while preserving Einstein's classical concept of spacetime has been announced in two papers published simultaneously by UCL (University College London) physicists. Modern physics is founded upon two pillars: quantum theory on the one hand, which governs the smallest particles in the universe, and Einstein's theory of general relativity on the other, which explains gravity through the bending of spacetime. But these two theories are in contradiction with each other and a reconciliation has remained elusive for over a century. The prevailing assumption has been that Einstein's theory of gravity must be modified, or "quantized," in order to fit within quantum theory. This is the approach of two leading candidates for a quantum theory of gravity, string theory and loop quantum gravity. But a new theory, developed by Professor Jonathan Oppenheim (UCL Physics & Astronomy) and laid out in a paper in Physical Review X, challenges that consensus and takes an alternative approach by suggesting that spacetime may be classicalthat is, not governed by quantum theory at all. Instead of modifying spacetime, the theorydubbed a "postquantum theory of classical gravity"modifies quantum theory and predicts an intrinsic breakdown in predictability that is mediated by spacetime itself. This results in random and violent fluctuations in spacetime that are larger than envisaged under quantum theory, rendering the apparent weight of objects unpredictable if measured precisely enough. A second paper, published simultaneously in Nature Communications and led by Professor Oppenheim's former Ph.D. students, looks at some of the consequences of the theory, and proposes an experiment to test it: to measure a mass very precisely to see if its weight appears to fluctuate over time. For example, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France routinely weigh a 1kg mass which used to be the 1kg standard. If the fluctuations in measurements of this 1kg mass are smaller than required for mathematical consistency, the theory can be ruled out. The outcome of the experiment, or other evidence emerging that would confirm the quantum vs. classical nature of spacetime, is the subject of a 5000:1 odds bet between Professor Oppenheim and Professor Carlo Rovelli and Dr. Geoff Peningtonleading proponents of quantum loop gravity and string theory respectively. For the past five years, the UCL research group has been stress-testing the theory, and exploring its consequences. Professor Oppenheim said, "Quantum theory and Einstein's theory of general relativity are mathematically incompatible with each other, so it's important to understand how this contradiction is resolved. Should spacetime be quantized, or should we modify quantum theory, or is it something else entirely? Now that we have a consistent fundamental theory in which spacetime does not get quantized, it's anybody's guess." Co-author Zach Weller-Davies, who as a Ph.D. student at UCL helped develop the experimental proposal and made key contributions to the theory itself, said, "This discovery challenges our understanding of the fundamental nature of gravity but also offers avenues to probe its potential quantum nature. "We have shown that if spacetime doesn't have a quantum nature, then there must be random fluctuations in the curvature of spacetime which have a particular signature that can be verified experimentally. "In both quantum gravity and classical gravity, spacetime must be undergoing violent and random fluctuations all around us, but on a scale which we haven't yet been able to detect. But if spacetime is classical, the fluctuations have to be larger than a certain scale, and this scale can be determined by another experiment where we test how long we can put a heavy atom in superposition of being in two different locations." Co-authors Dr. Carlo Sparaciari and Dr. Barbara Soda, whose analytical and numerical calculations helped guide the project, expressed hope that these experiments could determine whether the pursuit of a quantum theory of gravity is the right approach. The weighing of a massan experiment proposed by the UCL group which constrain any theory where spacetime is treated classically. Credit: Isaac Young Dr. Soda (formerly UCL Physics & Astronomy, now at the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics, Canada) said, "Because gravity is made manifest through the bending of space and time, we can think of the question in terms of whether the rate at which time flows has a quantum nature, or classical nature. "And testing this is almost as simple as testing whether the weight of a mass is constant, or appears to fluctuate in a particular way." Dr. Sparaciari (UCL Physics & Astronomy) said, "While the experimental concept is simple, the weighing of the object needs to be carried out with extreme precision. "But what I find exciting is that starting from very general assumptions, we can prove a clear relationship between two measurable quantitiesthe scale of the spacetime fluctuations, and how long objects like atoms or apples can be put in quantum superposition of two different locations. We can then determine these two quantities experimentally." Weller-Davies added, "A delicate interplay must exist if quantum particles such as atoms are able to bend classical spacetime. There must be a fundamental trade-off between the wave nature of atoms, and how large the random fluctuations in spacetime need to be." The proposal to test whether spacetime is classical by looking for random fluctuations in mass is complementary to another experimental proposal that aims to verify the quantum nature of spacetime by looking for something called "gravitationally mediated entanglement." Professor Sougato Bose (UCL Physics & Astronomy), who was not involved with the announcement today, but was among those to first propose the entanglement experiment, said, "Experiments to test the nature of spacetime will take a large-scale effort, but they're of huge importance from the perspective of understanding the fundamental laws of nature. I believe these experiments are within reachthese things are difficult to predict, but perhaps we'll know the answer within the next 20 years." The postquantum theory has implications beyond gravity. The infamous and problematic "measurement postulate" of quantum theory is not needed, since quantum superpositions necessarily localize through their interaction with classical spacetime. The theory was motivated by Professor Oppenheim's attempt to resolve the black hole information problem. According to standard quantum theory, an object going into a black hole should be radiated back out in some way as information cannot be destroyed, but this violates general relativity, which says you can never know about objects that cross the black hole's event horizon. The new theory allows for information to be destroyed, due to a fundamental breakdown in predictability. 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: Nations are divided over where to handle climate-related trade disputes, a matter never before discussed at COP gatherings. Inside the negotiating rooms and on the sidelines of the COP28 climate talks, simmering tensions over wealthy countries' "green trade" policies have been bubbling to the surface, with developing nations fearful they will be penalized. A particularly sore point has been the European Union's new carbon border tax, which sets a price on imported goods based on the emissions involved in creating them. While the EU deems the tax necessary to ensure everything entering the bloc meet its climate goals, powerful emerging economies at COP28 have labeled such policies as protectionist, saying they disadvantage poorer trading partners. Concerns have also been raised that these kind of climate policies mayeven though they cut emissions from one countrymake it harder for another nation to sell their goods or access clean energy technology. "Trade regulations can have unintended consequences, and we should be a little thoughtful about that," World Bank president Ajay Banga told a side event packed with prime ministers, business executives, trade bosses and diplomats at the talks in Dubai. Nations are divided over where best to handle a rising number of climate-related trade disputes, a matter that has never been discussed at COP gatherings. The World Trade Organization has received about 18,000 complaints over green policies yet trade was still often overlooked by climate policymakers, WTO director general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said. Brazil, China, India and South Africa applied to have "concerns with unilateral and coercive climate change-related measures" added to the COP28 agenda, but their call was not taken up. However the subject still forced its way into discussions at this year's talks, which on Monday hosted the first-ever "trade day" held at the climate negotiations. The friction over green trade has spotlighted what experts say could evolve into a major sticking point in future climate negotiations if left unchecked. "This is becoming a very heated issue," Alden Meyer of the think tank E3G told AFP after a panel on the subject in Dubai. 'Don't discriminate' Complaints over "protectionist" climate policies have accompanied calls for the nearly 200 nations at COP to reconsider trade rules as they relate to the global race to decarbonize economies and meet emissions targets. Observers say the impact of the EU's carbon border tax on poorer countries, particularly in Africa, has been a particular focus. China has been vocally critical of the scheme and in Dubai called for globally-agreed trade standards to be set. "For products that meet these standards, we must allow them to go into the market, and to be traded freely, and not set any barriers," China's climate envoy Xie Zhenhua told the same high-profile event attended by Banga and other policy heavyweights this week. Some developing nations want this regulatory rift addressed at COP conferences because they pertain to domestic climate policies. Wealthy nations, meanwhile, believe the UN climate talks are inappropriate for such deliberations and the WTO is more suitable. Left unchecked, this friction risks "percolating and bubbling over in different settings," said Trevor Sutton, research director at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. 'Not a trade-off' Observers said the perception that wealthy countries were protecting their own industries at the expense of everyone else risked eroding trusta critical ingredient at COPs where decisions are made by consensus. "If there is a trust deficit, many of the countries just think this is for protectionist measures... an obstacle for their development," UN trade chief Rebeca Grynspan told an audience in a palatial theater in the sprawling COP28 venue on Monday. The tension also comes as so-called Global South nations urge richer countries to make good on promises to pay for the devastating impacts of global warming. "There has to be a much more thought-out program for changing trade rules," Lidy Nacpil from the Asian Peoples' Movement on Debt and Development told AFP. "One that doesn't discriminate against the South, but one that actually hastens equitable greening of our planet." Okonjo-Iweala said green trade presented an opportunity, "not a trade-off". "We have to lift poverty, enhance people's living standards at the same time as going green, and trade is essential," she said. 2023 AFP This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Universities will do the environment a good service and trim deforestation levels if they turn their campuses paperless, according to a study published as part of the 2022 Advances in Science and Engineering Technology International Conferences (ASET). The call comes as hundreds of renowned environment academics and scientists are taking part in COP28 climate conference currently convened in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The conference is the largest annual meeting convened by the United Nations. More than 70,000 delegates are reported to have flocked to Dubai for the conference, among them hundreds of climate scientists and academics. "Our study underlines the environmental and financial benefits of a paperless approach in higher education," says Prof. Imad Alsyouf, one of the co-authors. "The study emphasizes the need for digital literacy in modern education and highlights the role of universities in promoting sustainability." The study's five authors happen to be from the University of Sharjah based in the UAE, which is about 30 kilometers away from COP28 venue. Higher education and sustainable development are a well-researched topic, and COP28's different conference facilities showcase pavilions where universities in the region and beyond exhibit activities on how to make their campuses as sustainable as possible. "Evidence suggests that the traditional use of paper-based processes in daily working practices results in numerous flaws, risks, and financial burdens," write the scientists. "Many higher education institutions are currently adopting this initiative of going paperless to make their operations more cost-effective, seamless and efficient." Higher education institutions, home to environment science, promote their sustainability achievements and vie for top places in the global sustainability assessment agency UI GreenMetric World University Rankings. The annual global higher education green metric employs a six-point approach, covering six areas: infrastructure, energy and climate change, transportation, waste, water and education. Besides making their operations more cost-effective, seamless, and efficient, going paperless boosts their chances of winning better slots on the coveted international ranking of the sustainability performance of world universities. A dedicated campaign by higher education institutions to go paperless is bound to set a good example for other organizations to reduce the use of paper, maintain the scientists. They write, "Paper industry is one of the main players of deforestation, and more than 900 million trees are cut every year for paper industries. Nowadays, papers are being produced more, and even more trees are being cut, and this leads to negative consequences in the future. "Higher education institutions and universities play a critical role in saving the environment and raising awareness. Many administrative and educational works implemented at the universities are highly based on papers. This means using high amounts of papers and cutting more trees. In addition, this requires more storage places to store the papers and sometimes these papers could get lost or damaged." In their paper, the scientists investigate the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in accelerating the transition towards paperless campuses, using the authors' home institution, the University of Sharjah, as a case study. They analyze paper consumption data over three academic years, encompassing the pre-pandemic, peak pandemic, and post-pandemic periods. The results, according to the study, reveal "a huge drop in paper usage during September 2019 to August 2020 and [a] cost percentage drop of 53% in September 2019 to August 2020 academic year, [followed] by a 38% decrease from September 2020 to August 2021." The timeframe of the study includes the peak of the pandemic (20192020) when university campuses across the world went digital. It also covers the post-pandemic period of 2021 which saw many universities returning to pre-pandemic practices of relying on paper to implement their administrative and education duties. "Our paper demonstrates a practical framework for universities aiming to reduce paper usage. It offers insights into implementing digital solutions in educational settings, encouraging broader adoption of paperless practices," says Prof. Alsyouf, adding that the primary goal behind undertaking the project was to "establish a more sustainable, efficient, and digitally advanced educational environment, aligning with global trends in environmental consciousness and digitalization." Although the study does not explicitly discuss industry interest or external engagement, the outcomes and methodologies could be appealing to institutions, and organizations focusing on sustainability and digital transformation. The pandemic, the study observes, was a period in which the University of Sharjah, the target of the investigation, achieved substantial cost reductions through decreased paper usage and associated expenses. It highlights evidence that the traditional use of paper-based processes in daily working practices results in numerous flaws, risks, and financial burdens. Asked about the practical implications of the findings, Dr. Iman Abdel Shahid, a co-author, points to "the need for digital literacy in modern education and highlights the role of universities in promoting sustainability. As our concern for the environment is progressively growing, the transition to a paperless environment has become a driving force behind sustainable development." Despite its many benefits, a paperless campus is not easy to attain and sustain at the same time, the authors point out. They warn of many challenges ahead as going green in any aspect or area necessitates substantial steps and drastic changes. "Shifting to a paperless system is not a task that can be accomplished in few days or weeks. It is not an easy task, and it requires patience, great efforts, and contributions from students and employees from all levels," they write. To accomplish a paperless campus successfully, the scientists offer the following recommendations: A reliable Wi-Fi network that can be accessed faster without any interruptions. Adequate training programs for the staff that are not very familiar with the advanced devices. Sufficient training and workshops regarding the new web applications that are being utilized for the academic and administrative purposes. Launch of awareness campaigns to promote the benefits of going paperless. More investment in robust digital infrastructure. More information: Bushra Hussein Al Jaberi et al, The Role of Covid-19 in Moving Towards a Paperless Campus: The Case of University of Sharjah, 2022 Advances in Science and Engineering Technology International Conferences (ASET) (2022). DOI: 10.1109/ASET53988.2022.9734887 This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: Antiquity (2023). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2023.160 Just south of the Arctic Circle, within the vast forests of northern Finland, lies a sandy field dotted with dozens of "unusual" pits. Workers stumbled upon the site, known as Tainiaro, six decades ago, and since then, its origins have remained elusive. But now, upon conducting a comprehensive analysis of the site, researchers have determined it is likely a sprawling hunter-gatherer cemetery dating back some 6,500 years, according to a study published on Dec. 1 in the journal Antiquity. "Such a large cemetery at such a high northerly latitude does not necessarily fit preconceptions about prehistoric foragers in this region," researchers affiliated with Finland's University of Oulu said, adding it may be time to "recalibrate our expectations." During excavations conducted in 2018 and an analysis of archival fieldwork, researchers identified an estimated 115 to 200 pits. Most were rectangular in shape with dimensions around 7 feet in length and 2.5 feet in depth. No human remains were found inside, but thousands of artifacts, including pottery, ochre and burned animal bones, were located. Skillfully crafted chisels and "hand-sized stones that could be fashioned into smaller bladed tools" were also among the objects found, Aki Hakonen, one of the study's authors, told McClatchy News. By comparing these pits to other Stone Age archaeological findings, researchers concluded that they were likely burial sites used by roaming peoples who would have foraged, hunted and fished in the region. "Tainiaro should, in our opinion, be considered to be a cemetery site," researchers said, "even though no skeletal material has survived at Tainiaro." Complicating their conclusion, though, was the evidence of burned material found inside some of the pits, suggesting they may have been hearths. However, the traces of charred material were insufficient to prove pyrotechnic use. This finding, though, indicates the possibility that the site was not solely used for burying the dead. "Indeed, it has recently been argued that Mesolithic places for the dead were also places for the living and some sites previously interpreted as cemeteries were in fact habitation sites with burials dug beneath the dwellings," researchers said. With that possibility in mind, researchers said Tainiaro should not be considered a single-purpose site, but rather it may have served multiple aims. If it was used, at least partly, as a gravesite, it would rank among the most sizable Stone Age cemeteries in northern Europe. Finland alone has more than 200 Stone Age burial sites, most of which are exceedingly small, Hakonen said. "There are a few sites with around 20 burials, but even these are anomalies," Hakonen said. "But more than a 100 burials is perplexing, and more than 200 is astounding." The Tainiaro site is particularly astonishing because it's located in a forbidding sub-Arctic region with heavy winter snowfalls and temperatures that drop below 20 degrees Fahrenheit. "This is not a place where you'd expect Stone Age foragers to gather in large groups," Hakonen said. "But perhaps they did." More information: Aki Hakonen et al, A large fifth-millennium BC cemetery in the subarctic north of the Baltic Sea?, Antiquity (2023). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2023.160 Journal information: Antiquity 2023 The Charlotte Observer. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. It's fair use for AI to learn from human writers By Thomas M. Sipos web posted December 4, 2023 AI (artificial intelligence) was a key issue in the recent Hollywood actors' and writers' strikes for two reasons. One, the worry that union workers might be replaced with AI generated actors and scripts (AI as competition), and two, the claim that actors and writers should be compensated because AI in some way copies their faces and scripts (AI as infringement). I'm not sure that AI is an issue for actors. CGI images are an issue, because they increasingly resemble real people who might compete with actors. But is that really AI? As I understand the term, AI is when a computer creates something that it wasn't specifically programed to do; it uses its own logic and data base of knowledge to create something original. AI image generators do exist, but AI is not required to create CGI images. AI poses a greater threat to writers. Theoretically, I can foresee a day in which an AI program writes an original play the equal of Hamlet. Of course, most Hollywood scripts are formulaic hack work that fall far short of Hamlet, so perhaps writers' cause for concern is more urgent. How good are AI's literary skills today? Plenty of free AI generators exist online. I assume that Hollywood studios and Big Tech firms have access to more advanced programs, but I tried the AI generator at Toolbaz.com, just to test its skills. I input "Christian crusader knight defeats Muslims." Many online AI generators claim to filter out "hate" but, at least for now, Toolbaz had no issue with Christians defeating Muslims. Here is the story that Toolbaz wrote for me: John was a Christian crusader knight who had been sent to the Middle East to defend the Christian faith against the Muslim forces. He had been training in the art of war for many years and was prepared to do whatever it took to uphold the Christian faith. For weeks, John clashed with the Muslim forces, but the tide of battle was not in his favor. The Muslim forces were much larger and better equipped than he was, and it seemed unlikely that he would be able to win the fight. But then, something changed. While on a scouting mission, John stumbled upon a secret weapon that belonged to the Muslim forces. He studied the weapon and realized that it could be used to his advantage. With the help of his allies, he was able to turn the tide of battle and eventually defeat the Muslim forces. The victory was a great one for John and the Christian faith. The people of the Middle East praised him for his courage and strength, and many of them converted to Christianity in the wake of his victory. John was hailed as a hero and remembered in Christian history for centuries to come. Okay, that's not terrible. Grammar and spelling are accurate. The story structure is solid. A protagonist seeks a goal. He encounters conflict. He is about to be defeated. But then, by his own actions and some luck, he overcomes adversity and wins. Not bad. But not Hamlet. The story is solid, but hackneyed and unoriginal. Nuance and details are also lacking. Even so, this story can serve as an outline for a hack writer to flesh out. Certainly, the story is no more hackneyed than thousands of direct-to-video and made-for cable movies. I can see how AI might provide ideas and outlines for hack writers suffering from writer's block. A sitcom writer once told me the staff writers on his show kept a supply of old TV Guides. Whenever they were stuck for ideas, they perused the episode descriptions of past sitcoms. Ever notice how so many sitcoms have episodes in which the characters defend themselves in court rather than hire an attorney, or compete with jealous coworkers for an award? How so many sitcoms still borrow ideas from I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners? No wonder hack writers fear AI. But if writers can't stop AI, they can still demand compensation from tech and media companies. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association offered a typical argument for such compensation in their statement to the U.S. Copyright Office, on October 30, 2023: The current crop of artificial intelligence systems owes a great debt to the work of creative human beings. Vast amounts of copyrighted creative work, collected and processed without regard to the moral and legal rights of its creators, have been copied into and used by these systems that appear to produce new creative work. These systems would not exist without the work of creative people, and certainly would not be capable of some of their more startling successes. I was a member of SFWA for about ten years. It's their mission to lobby for writers' interests. But their argument is erroneous. They argue that because AI learns from reading writers' books and scripts, these writers should be compensated. But that's how all writers learn their craft, AI and human. In Zen and the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury discusses his youth, when he was a voracious consumer of culture, both popular and literary. It's how he learned to write. When did it all really begin? The writing, that is. Everything came together in the summer and fall and early winter of 1932. By that time I was stuffed full of Buck Rogers, the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the night-time radio serial "Chandu the Magician." Chandu said magic and the psychic summons and the Far East and strange places which made me sit down every night and from memory write out the scripts of each show. ... If I hadn't stuffed my eyes and stuffed my head with all of the above for a lifetime, when it came round to word-associating myself into story ideas, I would have brought up a ton of ciphers and a half-ton of zeros. Read the entire book. Bradbury cites many novels, comics, films, and radio programs as influences. His point is, he learned how and what to write by absorbing other writers, filmmakers and artists. The same way all children learn to write and think. The same way AI learns to write and think. Many writers were voracious readers as children. The books that went into us shaped our literary tastes, skills and sensibilities. Without reading the James Bond novels at 13, and Ayn Rand and various horror tales, and my foreign travels, I could not have written Vampire Nation at 35. Everything I've ever read and seen suffuse my supernatural, satirical spy thriller. AI can be compared to a child who reads hundreds of books (or with AI, tens of thousands), absorbs them, and then uses his own mind (the computer's algorithms) to create something original. When a human learns to write by reading books, that's a Fair Use of those books. No copyright is infringed. No additional payments are owed to the writers of those books. Just the one time cover price. The same logic applies when an AI program learns to write by reading books. It's a Fair Use of those books. No copyright is infringed. You would think that science fiction writers would understand that. It's not what human writers want to hear; they want royalties from AI programs. But applying the doctrine of Fair Use to AI learning is logical. Any Vulcan would agree. Thomas M. Sipos writes satirical novels and film criticism. His website is CommunistVampires.com . Home By Mabinty M. Kamara Following a press statement from the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) condemning the latest shooting incident in Freetown, an envoy from the regional block and the government of Nigeria have recommitted their support in ensuring the stability of President Julius Maada Bios government. ECOWAS stands ready to support Sierra Leones national security including deploying a standby force if need be. I want to call on the people of Sierra Leone to be law-abiding. I will also appeal to the security forces to follow the rule of law and not engage in witch-hunt. ECOWAS calls on all stakeholders to promote dialogue, said Dr Omar Touray, the President of the ECOWAS Commission. However, he urged and entreated the government to ensure that the security measures instituted do not infringe on fundamental rights and freedoms and do not impact negatively on national cohesion. Dr Touray highlighted ECOWAS's commitment to preserving democracy and good governance across the sub-region while assuring of their readiness to work with the Sierra Leone government toward forestalling any future security occurrences, emphasizing the zero-tolerance by ECOWAS for unconstitutional changes of government in the region. Special envoy, Nuhu Ribadu conveyed the Chair of the ECOWAS Authority, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu's gratitude to President Bio for standing with the people of Sierra Leone, and for democracy. President Tinubu is a life-long defender of democracy and will always stand by what is right. He will defend democracy, good governance, justice and freedom. The events yesterday (Sunday) have touched Nigeria directly. Nigeria is with Sierra Leone, ECOWAS is with Sierra Leone, he assured. In his statement, President Bio said he wasnt surprised that Nigeria and ECOWAS came through If Sierra Leone is a peaceful nation today, we owe it to Nigeria and ECOWAS. He assured the delegation that his government is committed to democracy, justice, the well-being and safety of the citizens. President Bio said the countrys leadership position in key institutions across the globe will be preserved. He expressed gratitude for the outpouring of support from key allies around the region and the world. Some of us have fought for this country and must protect it. We have seen the consequences of war and when I see people creating the conditions for war, it saddens me. Ever since I won in 2018, it has been one issue after the other, he said. That notwithstanding, he said his government has made gains in so many areas despite the binding constraints we have been confronted with as a nation, including our deep-seated politics. My party campaigned extensively and won the 2023 elections, but when the results were announced, the main opposition could not accept it. We agreed to dialogue all in the name of peace, and yet again, they decided to cause mayhem. This is not the first time; they did it on August 10, holding weapons and killing police officers, and yet, called it a civil protest, he said. The focus of his administration Bio said is food security, which is a development imperative. The team, which included Nigerias National Security Adviser, Malam Nuhu Ribadu, Nigerias Chief of Defense Staff, General Christopher Musa, its Chief of Defence Military Intelligence, Major General Emmanuel Udiandeye, and President of the ECOWAS Commission, Dr Omar Alieu Touray was in Freetown on the 27th of November a day after the state security breach. Copyright 2023 Politico (01/12/23) By Sorie Ibrahim Fofanah Bodyguards of the former President, Ernest Bai Koroma, were involved in the attempted coup of 26th November 2023, according to Chief of Defence Staff, Lieutenant-General Peter Lavahun. Lavahum made this statement at the governments weekly press conference held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tower Hill, Freetown on 28th November 2023. He said most of the attackers were the former Presidents bodyguards such as Leather Boot, Sorieba, and others. He however could not ascertain whether the attempted coup was linked with former President Ernest Bai Koroma, noting that maybe they, the assailants, acted on their own. He added that there is an ongoing investigation, and promised that they would inform the public on the outcome of the investigations. He said the assailants broke into the Wilberforce Barracks armory at around 2 a.m., and one of them was killed. With the combined forces, he said they repelled the assailants. They later attempted to attack the Joint Logistics Unit (JLU) at Murray Town, he said, adding that they were repelled. One of the attackers Idrissa nicknamed Leather Boot was shot in the foot and died of his wounds. Two other soldiers who were in hiding in the military facility were also arrested, he said, adding some of the assailants escaped. He noted that the breakage at the armory was done by outsiders and not those who were on duty. To say there are people within, that also needed to be investigated, and that is what we are doing, Lavahum said. The officer said they were mopping up in chasing the attackers, saying they conducted what he termed as hot pursuit. We were at Orogu and up the hills at Allen Town, where we were able to recover two vehicles that contained arms and ammunitions, such as RPGs, Six bombs, and fifteen AK47 riffles that they carted away with he added. He said the commander of the Wilberforce barracks has been arrested for investigations. He said the commander had the responsibility to ensure that the armory was under tight security. In his remarks, the Minister of Information and Civic Education, Chernor Bah said fourteen military personnel, a Police officer, and one correctional officer were killed. Three of the assailants lost their lives, he added. Bah said thirteen military personnel and one civilian are in custody. In his remarks, the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), William Fayia Sellu said they are investigating a failed coup, saying there were several gun battles in parts of the city. He said they are investigating those who were involved in the November 26 incident. The Former president has in a press release dated 26th November 2023 condemned the security breach. In the statement, he alleged that a military guard assigned to him by the state was killed at his Goderich residence in Freetown. Corporal Eddie Conteh was reportedly shot at point blank range while his colleague, Warrant Officer John Swarray was whisked away to an unknown location a part reads. Koroma in his release emphasized that any action, event, or pronouncement that threatens to undermine the political and social stability of the state should have no place in democracy. He stated, While it is imperative to restore law and order, I urge for calm and for all stakeholders to continue on the path of peaceful dialogue in resolving differences. His party the All Peoples Congress Party in a press release dated 27th November 2023 also condemned the incident describing it as the dastardly acts of violence. However, the partys release also noted with dismay President Julius Maada Bios statement to the high-powered delegation from the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) which pointedly associated the APC with the August 10 protests, and attributed their partys contestation of the June 24 elections results to the violent. The party categorically condemns any attempt to associate our party to any form of violence. As a responsible political party, we strongly believe in the assumption of power through the ballot box and not through the barrel of a gun. That is why we have maintained, in no uncertain terms, our vehement condemnation of the use of brutal force by any party to gain and/or retain power, part of the release reads. Copyright 2023 Politico (01/12/23) ANOTHER SERIOUS DISRUPTION IN THE PEACE OF SIERRA LEONE Once again the people of Sierra Leone have another date to reckon with on the calendar its 26th November, the day urban combat returned to Freetown. The quietness of the capital was badly shaken by armed men who are now accused of trying to seize state power. Traumatized Sierra Leoneans in Freetown are now either hiding in their homes or are ready to close businesses at the slightest scare. Police have made some arrests and have declared many wanted. The nation is waiting to get the full details of whats really going on. Meanwhile: 1. People should simply cooperate with the authorities and give as much information as possible to the authorities to help them arrest those who attacked the city and are now on the run. 2. We urge prisoners that were released from lawful custody to peacefully hand themselves in to the authorities. There is no HIDING PLACE. Even the neighboring countries are totally unsafe these days for criminals. 3. We applaud the police for the bounty placed on the head of the fugitives. We hope it will encourage people to be active in the search. We also kindly ask the police to protect people who may be left exposed after helping them get any of the wanted people. They need to be protected. We are dealing with very dangerous people. 4. For the sake of the peace of this country we call on our brothers and sisters on social media to stop causing panic with their incendiary posts. We need confidence to return to the streets as soon as possible so that people can get on with their normal lives. Many Sierra Leoneans are absolutely FED UP with disruptions in their daily activities. ARE DOGS REALLY MISSING FROM KONO There was an intriguing headline in one of our local newspapers the other day claiming DOGS were missing in Kono. We have not made any effort to fact-check for this column but in our usual way we have joined the search for the missing dogs. For starters lets make the following suggestions: 1. Maybe the people of Kono dont really like to keep dogs as pets and with time the few ones that were around have died. Thats a possibility. 2. Maybe the people of that Diamond rich district have suddenly discovered that dog meat was a fantastic delicacy and have been helping themselves. Why not? 3. We know that a neighboring country and another one not too far from us enjoy eating dog meat. Could it then be that suddenly suppliers in Kono have signed contracts and are under pressure to supply? If that is the case then even pet owners in districts around Kono should pay attention to the dogs. 4. Another possibility is that this is the hunting season and dogs have been taken to the bush by their masters for the hunt. Lets observe the situation for the next two weeks to confirm or reject what our colleagues published. 5. All said and done, this could all be one of those stories journalists run on a slow news day to get things running. Readers are encouraged to read and move on. In fact just smile and dont allow it to spoil your breakfast. AWARD SEASON IN UPON US AGAIN As we approach the end of year we enter what we now know as the AWARD SEASON. Between now and the middle of January 2024 organizations with all times of names and mandates would pass on awards to people, mainly those in big state offices and private corporations celebrating them for God knows what. Nice pictures of the smiling awardees and the heads of these organizations will be all over social media backed by heavily sexed up commentaries telling us about our new national angels. We dont have anything against organizations giving certificates of merit to people they believe are doing well in their areas of work for the benefit of our country but we have some concerns about some of the things that happen in AWARD SEASONS. 1. Some of the organizations making these awards are not even registered under our laws; they are on the hard drives of laptop computers kept in a few briefcases. Surely, it makes no sense to receive and feel proud of such awards but our people in public life are looking for every opportunity to be on social media so that they take even the dodgiest ones. 2. In fact a good many of those distributing awards actually get those receiving the awards to pay through their noses for those awards. We cant really understand why people fall for such cheap tricks every year. 3. We have reached a point where we believe the government should step in and stop this naked criminal behavior. At least the government should insist on the awarding bodies registering with the government and that criteria are established for ordinary people like us to be able to understand why people actually merit what they get. SLAVE MASTERS MUST PAY REPARATION FOR THE SLAVE TRADE The President of Ghana may be having a rough time with his economy at the moment like many other presidents given the harsh economic realities of today but when he appeared at the UN the other day he re-opened a conversation we always like to take part in. He called on those who enslaved Africans for many years to try and make amends for that. This is not the first time civic and political leaders from Africa have made that call. The guilty parties in the industrialized West have always played down the issue. Nana Akuffo Addo has thrown that debate wide open again and this time we believe we should push things so hard that we will eventually reach a conclusion. For some people every time we mention reparation they think only in terms of container loads of money being sent down to Africa. Yes we want all the money they refused to pay us for work done in those plantations and in building certain cities but thats not all. 1. Lets start with an apology that is genuine an apology that comes from the heart. We are not impressed by those qualified apologies they keep churning out. They apologize but quickly tell us that our ancestors also played a part in the trade. We dont want to litigate that here again. Give us an unqualified apology and lets take the next step. 2. End the unfair world economic practices forced upon Africa in particular. We are talking about the system operated by the World Bank and IMF. The burden those bodies have put on Africa is on that we cannot carry. We want a seat among the permanent members of the UN Security Council with full VETO powers. 3. Stop encouraging and sometimes participating in wars in Africa. All those arms shipments and mercenaries are not needed in Africa. The beneficiaries are those who enslaved Africans all those years ago. 4. Stop racism in the West. Theres a constant racist KNEE on the NECK of the African diaspora. Lets start with these actions while we calculate the amount of cash we deserve. The pay day MUST come NOW. Copyright 2023 Politico (01/12/23) Atlantic City Electric says it has reached a tentative labor agreement with its workers union. The new contract with IBEW Local 210 will include pay increases, more vacation and holiday time for employees and a work-from-home option for some, A.C. Electric said in a statement Sunday. Zach Story, business manager for the union, confirmed the agreement by telephone. He said the agreement was signed between the two parties Friday night. Story said there will be a ratification vote Tuesdayat 9 a.m.. If all goes as planned, union members will return to work Wednesday. The union is eager to get back to work, to once again provide the quality electric service the rate payers of South Jersey deserve, Story wrote via email in his official statement. I am proud of the solidarity that the members of 210 displayed during this entire process! It was truly inspirational to witness the support from the community and local businesses as we fought for a better future! In its statement, the power company said it was pleased to have reached the tentative agreement. We feel confident we have bargained in good faith and reached an equitable and competitive agreement that is fair for employees and customers, the statement read. ... We value our strong relationships with our labor unions and represented employees and look forward to welcoming them back. Nothing is more important to Atlantic City Electric than the safety and well-being of our employees, contractors, customers and communities and this contract balances the needs of our employees with those of our customers and communities we serve. A spokesperson for the electric company said the final contract details are confidential but that the agreement includes: Making Veterans Day a fixed holiday for IBEW Local 210 employees, which increased the total holidays for most employees by one day a year, to 13 per year Pay premium increases Meal stipend increase Clothing allowance increase Shift differential increase Additional vacation days, military leave enhancements, training pay increase and a work-from-home option for certain classifications About 400 union workers walked out Nov. 5 after their previous contract expired Nov. 2, and the two sides could not reach an agreement. Atlantic City Electric brought in an outside work force to handle calls for the last month. Story said service for the companys customers wasnt to the standards it would have been with its regular work force. The normal work was backing up pretty far from what I understand, he said. A Sea Isle City man accused of hitting a Philadelphia television reporter during an event at a local bar pleaded guilty to aggravated assault Monday. A plea deal in the case against Patrick Iannone, 22, calls for him to attend anger and alcohol counseling, according to court records obtained Monday. The deal also places him on probation. Iannone pleaded guilty before Cape May County Superior Court Judge Christine Smith, records show. He is scheduled to return to court for sentencing Feb. 12. His attorney, John Tumelty, did not immediately return a request for comment after Monday's hearing. Patrick Iannone, 22, pleads guilty to assaulting @BobKellyFOX29 this morning in Cape May County. Plea deal calls for probation, anger & alcohol counseling. Iannone punched Kelly in a Sea Isle bar. He said in court he did not know who the Fox29 reporter was at the time. pic.twitter.com/FLxXv6rK5A Amy S. Rosenberg (@amysrosenberg) December 4, 2023 Iannone was indicted in September after hitting Fox 29's Bob Kelly in July at the Oar House Pub on 42nd Place. He struck Kelly to the point that the television personality lost consciousness, according to an affidavit of probable cause. Kelly was treated at Cape Regional Medical Center for a gash above his eye. Iannone, prosecutors said, poured beer on Kelly while he was emceeing an event at the bar. After being doused with the beverage, Kelly was punched by Iannone. Kelly addressed the incident on his first appearance back to work several days afterward. He said he believed the assault emanated from a TikTok challenge, similar to an incident involving recording artist Cardi B in which a liquid was splashed onto the rapper while she was performing. Kelly did not respond to an emailed request for comment. According to municipal court records, Iannone was previously charged with simple assault and criminal mischief in an incident at the Dead Dog Saloon on Landis Avenue in Sea Isle. He pleaded not guilty to the charge earlier this year. SOMERS POINT Crammed inside American Legion Post 352, about 50 people on Sunday remembered the day that still lives in infamy. In a small, somber ceremony, members of the American Legion, local officials and guests gave tribute to the 2,403 U.S. personnel and civilians who died in the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Its been said many times, if you dont remember and learn from your history, youre doomed to repeat it, said Tom Innocente, base commander for the Atlantic County Chapter of the US Submarine Veterans. Hopefully by remembering, well never forget. Innocentes chapter, based in Egg Harbor Township, has been holding an annual ceremony for about 20 years, he said. This was the second time they held it at the Somers Point post. The ceremony was slated to be held on the beach at Municipal Beach Park at New Jersey and Bay avenues but was moved just up the road to the American Legion due to the weather. Following the ceremony, the city planned to honor the late Oscar Schmidt Jr. by dedicating a street in his name. That ceremony will be rescheduled. Among those present Sunday were Somers Point Mayor Jack Glasser and Mayor-elect Dennis Tapp, U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-2nd, and Assembly members Don Guardian and Claire Swift, both R-Atlantic. Van Drew said there are always lessons to be learned from the 1941 attack that drove the United States involvement into World War II. On Dec. 7, a terrible thing happened, and we cant forget it. That is why we are here, Van Drew told the crowd. Do not believe we are safer now than we were then, because we are not. Do not believe that the sacrifice of those men and women didnt matter. It does. He said that in times of history, flashpoints in history, the country must be strong and stand up for this great republic. Jayne Sullivan, president of Post 352s Auxiliary, told stories of some of the 82 women who were stationed at Pearl Harbor, many who answered the call during the Pearl Harbor attacks. There was Betty McIntosh, an undercover reporter who detailed the attack; Annie Fox, a nurse on the frontlines during the attack and the first woman to be awarded a Purple Heart for combat; and Grace Lally, a chief nurse during the attack who helped set up emergency wards that assisted nearly 300 wounded people. Usually a wreath made for the ceremony is placed in the water off Somers Point, but because the event was moved indoors, they ran a simulation as taps was played. Patriotic songs were sung, including God Bless America, which ended the ceremony. I think its especially gratifying to see so much patriotism displayed by the citizens of Somers Point and the surrounding area, Innocente said. It goes a long way, especially in some of the things going around the nation today. Honor delayed Somers Point still plans to dedicate nearby Gibbs Avenue to Schmidt, Innocente said. Schmidt, who was born in Philadelphia, was one of only 17 sailors to earn a Congressional Medal of Honor during World War I. After 25 years in the Navy, he retired in Somers Point, where he was a member of American Legion Post 352 and frequented VFW Post 2189. World War I vet gets permanent home at Somers Point American Legion SOMERS POINT Sally Ent learned through a local news story she spotted at Chesters Pastry Schmidt died March 24, 1973, one day before his 77th birthday, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. On the Congressional Medal of Honor Society website cmohs.org, Schmidt received the award for the following reason: For gallant conduct and extraordinary heroism while attached to the U.S.S. Chestnut Hill, on the occasion of the explosion and subsequent fire on board the U.S. submarine chaser 219. Schmidt, seeing a man, whose legs were partly blown off, hanging on a line from the bow of the 219, jumped overboard, swam to the sub chaser and carried him from the bow to the stern where a member of the 219s crew helped him land the man on the afterdeck of the submarine. Schmidt then endeavored to pass through the flames amidships to get another man who was seriously burned. This he was unable to do, but when the injured man fell overboard and drifted to the stern of the chaser Schmidt helped him aboard. A plaque honoring Schmidt was installed in front of American Legion Post 352 in November 2022. GALLERY: Somers Point remembers attack on Pearl Harbor UPPER TOWNSHIP Pumping has begun to add sand to beaches in the south end of Ocean City, part of a $33.7 million federal contract, but about a mile and a half south, things are looking desperate in the north end of the Strathmere section of Upper Township. Where there had been steep cliffs eroded into the side of the sand dunes in the seaside village by the end of the summer, there are now no dunes at all. On a recent morning, waves slapped against a wall of rocks that was installed more than a decade ago as a last-ditch protection against the sea. Those rocks were buried in sand added as part of a previous federal beach project. Today they are all that stands between the water and the roads and houses in the north end of Strathmere. Its pretty bad, said Ted Kingston, a longtime Strathmere resident. He said the beaches are not in the worst shape hes seen. That was around 2008, when erosion had damaged structures and threatened a steel bulkhead put in place not long before then. The current beach erosion extends beyond the north end, with undercut dunes and eroding beaches extending multiple blocks. Its a little less stressful with the beach fill two weeks away, Kingston said. Kingston described a time years ago when the beach along Corsons Inlet on the north side of the island was also whittled away, and there was no beach project even under consideration. The Army Corps of Engineers announced in October it had awarded a $33.7 million contract with Great Lakes Dredge and Dock of Illinois to build beaches in Ocean City, Strathmere and Sea Isle City. The huge dredge can be seen just off of Strathmere, but the project will build Ocean City beaches first. That city saw a beach project last winter, adding sand to the north end, and now work has started in the far south end of the city. Work is expected to begin in Strathmere in mid-December, and continue into January, according to Gary DeMarzo, the Upper Township administrator. After that, the project will continue in Sea Isle City, which shares a barrier island with Strathmere. Even if erosion is not at its worst in Strathmere history, the rapid retreat of sand dunes that already were eroded since the end of summer has put properties in a precarious position until sand can be pumped back. We got blasted, DeMarzo said. DeMarzo cited a recent report that said the area had been subjected to unusually strong wave action over the past several months, accelerating the erosion process. He said the township has been working closely with the Army Corps and the state Department of Environmental Protection. Were doing the best we can to protect property values and lives and our way of life, but were up against Mother Nature and Father Time, DeMarzo said. He said he recently attended a status conference on the project, which will require more sand to be added than originally planned. The Township Committee has approved the local contribution to the project cost, estimated at $1.3 million, but an expanded project will increase those costs across the board. The numbers have ticked north, DeMarzo said. The cost will not delay the work, he added, saying the state and federal partners understand that beach project is a public safety issue. Plans also call for the removal of timbers that were once part of a jetty system designed to stave off erosion. DeMarzo said they were put in place from the 1930s until the 1950s. They have been submerged for some time. The additional erosion has now exposed eight section of timbers, where there were four before. DeMarzo described the submerged timbers as a safety hazard. Plans are to remove those timbers, DeMarzo said. The Army Corps approved the contract with Great Lakes Dredge and Dock of Illinois for the beach work. Strathmere is set to receive about a half-million cubic yards of sand, according to a project description posted by the Philadelphia District of the Army Corps. The contract includes rebuilding dune crossovers, as well as fencing and other features, according to the Army Corps. The dredge arrived in the area Thursday, and pumping operations began Friday morning, Ocean City Mayor Jay Gillian told residents in his weekly message. The work started between 56th Street and 57th streets, with plans to close 1,000 feet of beach at a time as the work moves north to 45th Street, with a plan to add 257,000 cubic yards of sand. This work allows a healthy dune system to grow and to protect property throughout Ocean City. Thank you for your patience and understanding as this important project continues, Gillian said. Actress Prachi Desai has revealed how Manoj Bajpayee and Naga Chaitanya Akkineni pampered her with sumptuous meals during the shoot of 'Silence 2', and 'Dhootha' respectively. Prachi's acting path has included stories of friendship that have extended beyond the frames, most notably with her last two co-stars, Naga Chaitanya from 'Dhootha' and Manoj from 'Silence 2...The Night Owl Murders.' Despite the projects' differences, both actors shared a touching dedication to Prachi's well-being, particularly through the universal language of food. Chaitanya distinguished himself on the set of 'Dhootha' not only as a competent co-star but also as a culinary companion. In addition to scenes and writing, he took it upon himself to spoil Prachi with a variety of delectable delicacies from his cloud-kitchen. Switching gears to 'Silence 2', Prachi found herself under the nurturing wing of Manoj. Renowned for his generosity, Manoj took the art of co-star care to another level. Not only did he provide sage advice and acting wisdom, but he also ensured Prachi was well-fed. From cooking sumptuous meals himself to exploring local delicacies, Manojs thoughtful gestures translated into a culinary journey that paralleled their on-screen collaboration. Talking about the same, the actress said: "Working with Naga and Manoj felt like sharing a meal of memories on and off-screen -- where their kindness became the secret ingredient that made every project special." Naga Chaitanya has marked his debut on OTT with the supernatural suspense thriller series Dhootha. The actor plays the role of Sagar, an ambitious and successful journalist who finds himself engulfed by supernatural events that are at the nexus of many mysterious and gruesome deaths, and are now shadowing over his family. The casualty figures in Gaza are a scam By Lenny Ben-David web posted December 4, 2023 I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I'm sure innocents have been killed, and it's the price of waging a war. I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using. President Joe Biden, remarks at the White House, October 25, 2023 Like a bad penny that always turns up, the inflated numbers of dead Gazans always appear in news accounts and pundits' codswallop. On November 27, 2023, the press reported that 15,000 were killed, of whom 6,150 (41%) were children and 4,000 women (26%). The source for the figures is the "Ministry of Health" in Hamas-run Gaza. Nathan Thrall, a New York Times writer, quotes the United Nations that "more than 74% of the Palestinians killed in Gaza are children, women, and the elderly." And what is the source of these statistics in the press? The Gaza Ministry of Health is a government ministry, or in other words, the Hamas government's ministry and keeper of the secrets. Every news report from Gaza quotes the Ministry of Health as its authoritative source; too few add that it is a Hamas establishment through and through. Dr. Munir al-Borsh, Director General of the Palestinian Health Ministry, was recently profiled by the investigative journalist David Collier, who characterized Borsh as "literally part of government and therefore a paid Hamas mouthpiece." Men, Women, Children The Hamas ministry does not reveal how many of the men are civilians and how many combatants. Nor are reporters aware of the vast discrepancy between women and children casualties in 2023 and those who died in previous Gaza engagements when the Hamas Health Ministry did publish such numbers and statistics. By 2023, Hamas realized how their presentation of real numbers hurt their case. When Hamas quietly buries its battlefield dead in mass graves in the desert, the percentage of civilians killed is larger. To recap, Hamas claimed in 2023, as of this writing, that 15,000 Gazans were killed: 6,150 (41%) were children, and 4,000 were women (26%). The press, editorial writers, and government officials worldwide have reported and repeated these figures as gospel. Hamas claimed that the remaining 5,000 (33 %) dead were men both combatants and civilians. Note the percentages the Hamas Ministry of Health released in a chart in the New York Times in 2014. Out of 1,900 casualties, only 16% were children, 15% were women, and men constituted 66 percent (55 + 11 unidentified men), with male civilians and "militants" lumped together. The New York Times noted that some ages in the population were "most likely to be militants." Those ages are between 15 and 39 (although the Times erroneously omitted ages 15 19 men as likely combatants). Female and Male Children 0 14 years old: 16% Females 15 59: 11% "Elderly" women 60 80+ 4% Men 15 59: 55% + 11% "unknown" "Elderly" men No figure given The New York Times listed the "Palestinian Ministry of Health" as the source for its chart. Why such a vast change? First, after October 7, 2023, Hamas stopped giving details about the casualties' age and sex. The unchallenged numbers issued by Hamas' ministry and repeated by the press are fanciful propaganda statistics. Where did the first count of Hamas casualties in 2023 take place? In Israel's desperate defense of civilian communities inside Israel on October 7 and 8, it is estimated that 1,500 fighters half of the 3,000 invaders were killed. The dead Hamas terrorists just at Kibbutz Be'eri numbered in the dozens. (Be'eri counted more than 100 of its members dead, and dozens were kidnapped to Gaza.) In the 2014 Gaza war, the New York Times' Jodi Rudoren revealed the secret for pumping up the numbers of Gaza civilian dead: Ashraf Al-Kidra, the Health Ministry's keeper of statistics, sits in an office at Gaza City's Shifa Hospital and receives casualty reports from hospitals and emergency services. Al-Kidra uses a very broad definition of civilians, saying the term applies to anyone who has not been claimed by one of the armed groups as a member. [Armed Palestinian fighters don't always wear uniforms and can appear as civilians.] Rudoren's analysis and chart show that "the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll: They are 9 percent of Gaza's 1.7 million residents, but 34 percent of those killed whose ages were provided. Unfortunately, Rudoren's population breakdown errs significantly in one aspect: Hamas' fighters are not mainly in the 20-19 age range. Large numbers are also in the 15-19 age range, opening Hamas to charges of child soldiers. In the 2023 battles, Israel's Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated that 4,000 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters died in the fighting as of November 16. That number shakes the Hamas ministry's current statistics to the core. Israel repeatedly warned Gazan residents of north Gaza to evacuate their homes. Leaflets were dropped in their neighborhoods, and even private phone calls were made by IDF Arabic-speaking soldiers. An estimated one million Gazans took the warnings seriously and avoided Hamas attempts to keep them in the north as human shields. Lower casualty rates of women and children should have reflected their leaving the north. During the Hamas-IDF pauses of fighting at the end of November, however, many Gazans moved back to the north despite Israeli warnings. Photographs and videos of the travelers showed that most were men of military age. Are they reinforcements for Hamas' northern Gaza army? Doing What Comes Naturally More than 750 Gazans died in the 50 days after October 7, but not at the hands of Israel. They died of natural causes. According to the CIA's statistics, an estimated 15-16 Gazans die every day from natural causes, or 750 over 50 days. Does anyone doubt that Hamas added their numbers to the casualties of the war and blamed Israel? Show Us the Bodies According to Hamas' Ministry of Health, two Israeli bombings in Gaza caused mass casualties: the purported destruction of the Al-Alhi hospital on October 17, 2023, and the bombing of the Hamas headquarters under the Jabalya refugee camp on October 31, 2023. The world's leading newspapers and agencies received press releases from the ministry, and they immediately ran reports of 400 500 killed at each site. The phantom casualties were then added to the Hamas Ministry of Health's numbers of dead. So much was hinky with the reports. Few bombs can cause so many casualties, and Israel has been cautious with its targeting. Then reports began to surface that the al-Alha hospital was not hit, just its parking lot, and the explosion failed to produce an expected bomb crater. Reports emerged that the weapon was an errant rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Foreign intelligence services and wiretaps confirmed the PIJ's responsibility. Even the anti-Israel Human Rights Watch absolved Israel after weeks of research. The Palestinian Health Ministry reported on October 31, 2023, that more than 400 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza. Videos from the scene, however, show little rescue activity at the site. Follow the trail of photographs from the scenes of the bombings at al-Ahli and the Jabalya tunnel to the cemeteries. The pictures there show about 40-50 dead (not 400-500) and, noting the mass/bulk of the large majority of the bodies, almost all appear to be men. The death of any civilian during a war is tragic, but in the case of Israel's attacks on Hamas, such deaths are inevitable since Hamas facilities and leaders hide behind civilians and under schools and hospitals. Hamas fighters block civilians from evacuating. And then, Hamas quietly buries its combatants in the sand, and Hamas' Ministry of Health inflates the civilian casualty figures. Lenny Ben-David worked for AIPAC for 25 years in Washington and Jerusalem. In 1997, he left to open an independent consulting firm, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tapped him to serve as Deputy Chief of Staff in Israel's Washington Embassy. He is the author of the book American Interests in the Holy Land Revealed in Early Photographs, and he is completing his next book, Secrets of World War I in the Holy Land Revealed in Early Photographs. He is the Director of the Institute for U.S.-Israel Relations at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Home A nine-year-old live-in relationship turned sour after the woman, a software engineer, complained about her partner to the police over stalking and molestation. This, she claimed, happened after she refused to marry him. A case of molestation, stalking, and obscenity has been registered at Yerwada police station when a 26-year-old woman complained that she was being harassed by her partner. According to her complaint, she was being stalked and sent obscene messages by her partner. The incidents took place in May in the Kalyani Nagar area and Yerawada. The police have registered the case against Manish Dnyaneshwar Tekale (28), a resident of Moshi. Sub-inspector Dattatray Nangre, who is investigating the case, said, Both the victim and the accused have known each other since college days and both were pursuing engineering and worked in the same place. Their parents also know that they have been in a live-in relationship for the past nine years. But one day, the victim realised that her partner was not compatible as a life partner and because of this both were having fights. Eventually, they decided to end the relationship. However, the accused wanted to marry her and proposed to her. But the victim refused, and in May, their relationship turned bitter and differences grew between them. Then they separated and started staying with their parents. But later, he started stalking her as well as sending objectionable messages on her mobile phone. The victim was mentally harassed which prompted her to approach her aunts house in Yerawada. After she filed the complaint with the police, Manish has been on the run. We shall arrest him soon. In a harrowing incident that unfolded between one and two o'clock on a Sunday beneath the East Court Building in Viman Nagar, an unsettling plot to murder a wife emerged, shrouded in suspicions about her character. The Airport police swiftly intervened, apprehending the alleged assailant, identified as Ashok Laxman Adhav, a 31-year-old resident of Rajiv Gandhi Nagar in Viman Nagar. The victim, Sneha Raju Sakhre, aged 28 and residing in the same locality, bravely reported the incident, shedding light on a distressing sequence of events. Sneha had been at the Hotel Backstage in Viman Nagar when Ashok confronted her. The confrontation escalated quickly as he accused her of allowing their child to be in the company of other boys, leading to a physical altercation within the confines of the hotel. As the situation escalated, with Ashok persistently casting doubt on Sneha's character, the confrontation spilled out onto the streets. There, the alleged assailant subjected Sneha to further physical violence, expressing an intent that was far more sinister. Uttering ominous words, "Not leaving you. The sailor does," Ashok attempted to carry out a horrifying act, stabbing Sneha with a sharp knife. The gravity of the situation became apparent when the airport police intervened, arresting Ashok on charges related to the attempted murder of his wife. The incident serves as a stark reminder of the volatility that can lurk beneath seemingly ordinary domestic situations, highlighting the importance of swift legal intervention in cases of domestic violence and attempted harm. Members of the Moline Fire Department extinguished a fire in a mobile home just before 7 a.m. Monday morning. The fire department was dispatched to a structure fire in the 3800 block of 29th Street, where the first company found smoke coming from the residence. The home had working smoke detectors and the occupants were able to exit prior to the arrival of the department. The first company entered the home, located the fire and extinguished it within 10 minutes. The Red Cross was called to assist the two residents who were displaced from their home. No injuries were reported. The fire is currently under investigation by the Moline Fire Department Bureau of Investigations. Moline Fire Department receives new engines The Illinois appellate courts have started ruling on detention appeals related to the Pretrial Fairness Act, giving more insight into the long-term function of Illinois' new cashless bail system. The act, which abolished cash bail, went into effect on Sept. 18. Now criminal charges fall into one of two broad categories detainable and non-detainable. When people facing charges are eligible for detention, a judge must decide at hearings whether to hold them or release them on conditions. The new law allows for both defense counsel and prosecutors to challenge the judges decision. The appellate courts resolve those challenges. In the first few days the law was active, the Rock Island County courts held numerous detention hearings for defendants for whom the new law now applies. Many of the resulting rulings were challenged. As of late November, appellate judges had ruled on the cases of at least five of those Rock Island County defendants, according to court records. Antwon M. Hayes, 30, Moline Charge: first-degree murder. Allegation: Hayes shot Robert E. Rhone, 35, Moline, on March 4, 2022, near Hamilton Elementary in Moline. Bail under old rules: $2 million with a $200,000 bond required for release. Circuit courts decision on detention: Hayes should remain in custody. Appellate decision: The appellate affirmed the circuit courts decision to detain Hayes. Hayes made several arguments in his appeal, including that the appellate should reverse the circuit courts decision based on the defenses arguments during the detention hearing. The appellate court stated in its opinion that both the prosecution and defense detailed specifics of the case in their arguments during the detention hearing. We do not find the circuit court abuses its discretion in granting the States petition because the defendant was a danger to the community and a high risk of willful flight, the appellate opinion states. Another of Hayes appeal arguments was that the state did not have the authority to file a detention petition in the case of a defendant who remained in custody after the court set posting bond as a condition of release. The appellate court rejected this argument because of when Hayes posed it, stating that he did not raise the issue first in circuit court. Jacob E. Martin, 21, Rock Island Charges: multiple felony charges filed in a number of cases. Allegations: include possession of a stolen motor vehicle and aggravated fleeing or attempting to elude a peace officer. Bail under old rules: A total of $250,000. Release required a $25,000 bond. Circuit courts decision on detention: Martin should remain in custody. The appellate decision: returned to the circuit court so Martin could have a new detention hearing. Martins arguments on appeal included that the state failed to provide sufficient facts to prove Martin was a danger to the community, court documents state. Martin also argued the court and prosecutors failed to provide enough facts to show a lesser set of conditions would ensure Martin appeared for court and did not get charged with additional crimes. The appellate opinion states that the circuit court did not provide enough detail as to why detention was required in Martins case instead of some lesser condition of combination of conditions. The appellate judges therefore ordered Martin get another detention hearing. That hearing occurred Thursday and the local court again ruled Martin remain in custody. Matthew Tolentino, 33, Rock Island Charges: unlawful possession of a weapon by a felon, a felony, and no firearm owners identification card, a misdemeanor. Allegations: That Tolentino illegally had a pistol on June 27, 2023. Bail under old rules: $75,000. Release required a $7,500 bond. Circuit courts decision on detention: Tolentino should be released but must meet certain conditions to remain free. Those conditions include GPS monitoring. The appellate decision: The appellate judges affirmed the circuit courts ruling. The Rock Island County States Attorneys Office appealed, arguing the circuit court erred because it did not deem Tolentino a threat to the community or a flight risk, the appellate opinion states. The appellate court rejected states argument about flight risk because prosecutors did not raise the issue during the detention hearing. As far as his risk to the community, the opinion states the appellate judges found no abuse of discretion on the part of the lower court. The court plainly found convincing defense counsels interpretation of the facts presented in the States verified petition (to deny pretrial release), the opinion states. Robert D. Young, 26, Rock Island Charges: misdemeanor charges of criminal trespass and possession of drug paraphernalia. Allegations: That on Sept. 20, 2023, Young had a glass pipe with the intent of using it with a controlled substance and trespassed at a Rock Island retail store. Bail under the old rules: The case against Young opened after the PFA went into effect. Circuit courts decision on detention: The states petition to detain Young was denied. Young was released with conditions he must abide by to remain free. The appellate decision: The appellate court affirmed the circuit courts ruling. The appellate court upheld the circuit decision, stating that the charges were not among the detainable defenses listed in the PFA. It also argued it affirmed the initial ruling because the states petition to deny pretrial release was not in the case record. Carey L. Crowder, 53, Rock Island Charge: failure to report weekly/no address second offense Allegation: That Crowder is a sex offender required to report changes of address or the fact that he is homeless to the authorities and failed to do so. Bail under the old rules: $10,000 with a $1,000 bond required for release. Circuit courts decision on detention: The court ruled Crowder be freed but must meet specific conditions to remain so. Appellate decision: affirmed the local ruling. The states attorneys office appealed the county courts ruling, arguing the court erred on several points, including by finding that less restrictive conditions of release would get Crowder to appear for court and by finding that the state did not prove he was a danger to the community. The appellate court ruled that the state forfeited arguments related to the argument about the communitys safety because prosecutors did not raise that issue first before the circuit court, according to the opinion. The state only argued about Crowder as a potential flight risk. The appellate judges further ruled that the state did not challenge the circuit courts decision that there was insufficient proof of Crowder being a flight risk, according to the opinion. Proof of that risk in this circumstance was a necessary part of the test for determining whether Crowder could be detained. The Rock Island-Milan school board approved new high school courses and union agreements. Board president Terell Williams and Nicole Cisne Durbin were absent. During board reports, Gary Rowe gave an update on the district's Head Start preschool-for-all program, noting the following: October 2023 enrollment: 259 Twenty-six students currently have an Individualized Education Plan, and 23 students require an interpreter. By the end of Head Start's fall reporting period, 68% of students were meeting or exceeding developmental expectations. These results show a return to pre-COVID levels, Rowe said. Among other district work and programs, Rowe also noted the Rock Island-Milan Education Foundation's donation of more than $500,000 to district students, staff and schools in the 2022-23 school year. These dollars funded 99 PRIME (Promoting Rock Island Milan Education) grants to 117 educators and 97 scholarships. Board vice-president Michael Matherly noted ongoing district infrastructure concerns, specifically, continued HVAC issues at Rock Island High School. Interim Superintendent Alan Boucher elaborated during his report, noting how the district plans to bypass these issues amidst ongoing system replacements. He also recognized the following district students and staff: Tonya Davis, head of student security at Rocky, and Dr. Kathy Ruggeberg, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, for earning monthly "Honor Employee" awards from the Rock Island Regional Office of Education. Rocky's theatre department, for being selected to perform "Pure as the Driven Snow" at the annual Illinois High School Theater Festival. After unanimously approving all routine matters, the board did the same for action items. Highlights: Offering three new high school courses starting next school year: Spanish for Heritage Speakers I, AP Chemistry and Global Awareness and ELA (English Language Arts). Curriculum leaders said AP Chemistry was largely prompted by student feedback. Starting in the 2025-26 school year, offering a Spanish for Heritage Speakers II course. The Spanish for Heritage Speakers courses will focus on biliteracy and maintaining Spanish-speakers' native fluency much like Moline-Coal Valley's dual language program. Adopting the district's e-learning plan in lieu of emergency days. A resolution to transfer $2 million each from the district's operations and maintenance (O&M), educational and transportation funds into its capital projects fund. This money will go toward the district's remaining HVAC system replacements at Ridgewood, Eugene Field and Earl Hanson Elementary Schools. A three-year contract with the Local 822 American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO (AFSCME) union for more competitive wages. Nicole Berry, director of early childhood education, also presented the Head Start program's corrective action plan. She said the program received a letter of deficiency from the Department of Health and Human Services in October. The district began a corrective action plan in November, to conclude in March with site visits from HHS and Head Start officials. District CFO Jen Barton said the most notable changes would come in the latter two, relating to proposed levy notices and bidding thresholds. For all board reports and discussions, watch Tuesday's meeting livestream on the district's website: https://www.rimsd41.org/apps/pages/BOE. The board adjourned in an executive session to discuss personnel matters. Next meeting: Tuesday, Dec. 12 at 6 p.m. Nearly 100 people gathered late Wednesday afternoon at Davenports 5th and Warren streets for a "ground blessing" for a new building that will expand a nonprofits free, after-school and summer programs for neighborhood children and teens. Heading up the ceremony was Ann Schwickerath, executive director of Project Renewal, the nearly 50-year-old nonprofit that provides young people with a safe environment in which to learn and have fun in an existing building at 510 Warren St. called the Treat House. The nonprofit has received commitments for about $900,000 of its $1.8 million campaign goal that will pay for the new building as well as renovation work at the Treat House and another building at 906 W. 5th used for staff housing and offices, Schwickerath said. The new building will allow the organization to expand its services, a point made in the statement We Are Growing written on paper butterflies taped to sticks, handed out at the ceremony by children from the after-school program. If weather permits, the foundation might be dug yet this winter, with construction beginning in spring with completion in summer. Turning ceremonial shovels were Jim and Michelle Solis Russell, owners of Russell Inc., and John Anderson, CEO of Quad-City Bank & Trust, all benefactors of Project Renewal; Amy Novak, president of St. Ambrose University; Alex Cahill, president of the Project Renewal board, and the Rev. Thom Hennen, pastor of Sacred Heart Cathedral, Davenport. Just over three years ago, the site on which they stood was occupied by a four-unit rental house that had been a source of trouble violence, suspected trafficking and drugs for the nearly 30 years that Schwickerath had lived across the street. The last straw was a shooting in May 2020 that left bullet holes in Project Renewal property. Schwickerath and the non-profits 11-member board began working on a strategic plan that eventually included a fundraising campaign to buy the building. Not only would this eliminate a long-standing problem, but the board hoped the building could be renovated to expand services. But once workers from general contractor Russell got inside, they found it too far gone. Problems included major termite damage, roof and floors rotted by water, shoddy construction practices and joists charred by fire. The building was razed in May. The replacement building will look like a two-story house to blend in with the neighborhood, with space in the downstairs for programming aimed at health and wellness, including yoga and dance, plus musical, culinary and visual arts programs. The upstairs will contain two apartments for staff. The new construction will provide 3,700 square feet of space, compared with 2,700 if the problem building had been renovated, Schwickerath said. The reason Project Renewal provides apartments on site is to continue the vision of its founder, Sister Concetta Bendicente, a member of the Catholic religious order called the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ. She wanted staff to have the perspective of neighbors" and to provide a loving presence in the area. Schwickerath teared up several times during her opening statement in which she said she hopes she is living up to the strength, compassion and feistiness of Sister Concetta and the Rev. Marvin Mottet, who helped Bendicente to establish the organization. Subsequent speakers said they have no doubt the founders goals are being carried out, extending praise to Schwickerath for the job she, her staff and volunteers are doing. Michelle Russell recalled her first visit to Project Renewal when she was blown away by a young boys politeness, studiousness and sense of right. He and the others coming to the Treat House are an extension of her (Schwickerath) and a reflection of her, she said. Most people in the community dont even know that Project Renewal exists, Russell said. We are lucky to have you. St. Ambrose president Novak explained that the colleges students have been volunteering at Project Renewal for many years, having the opportunity to be the hands and feet of Christ to be part of a greater vision. Many students, she said, have been fundamentally transformed by the experience. Anderson, of Quad-City Bank & Trust, spoke of his involvement helping execute a financial literacy program for students, making sure they know how to balance a checkbook, invest and use credit wisely. The good that is done at Project Renewal continues to give me goosebumps every day, he said. Shwickeraths say-do ratio is 100%, he said. This is someone with whom we have great trust. We all need to support her. Project Renewal serves 65 children from kindergarten through 12th grade, with about 30 in the elementary-age, after-school program. (Many of them were among the 100 or so people at the ceremony.) The organization also provides stability in what is one of the most resource-poor neighborhoods in the city and provides advocacy for people who may feel they have no voice. The organization counts as a win for the future every child who becomes a solid citizen with a job. Helping to jump-start the organizations capital campaign were grants from Duncan J. Cameron, Bettendorf, former owner of Vanguard Distributing Corp., Anderson and the Russells. Other contributors, cited by Project Renewals Cahill, are the Bechtel Trusts, the Regional Development and Scott County Regional authorities (the nonprofit entities that hold the gambling licenses for Rhythm City and the Isle, respectively), the Doris and Victor Day Foundation, Dennis and Lynn Quin, Bitco Insurance, RSM and Ray German. HOW TO HELP To help with Project Renewals fundraising campaign, send a check to Project Renewal, 905 W. 5th St, Davenport, IA 52802-3403, or use PayPal by going to the organizations website, projectrenewal.net. For questions, call 563-324-0800 or email to ann@projectrenewal.net Water projects, prison spending and core state funding obligations for the upcoming fiscal year could be on the docket Tuesday for the Governors Budget Address. Gov. Kristi Noem will give the budget address at the Capitol in front of 105 lawmakers and other government officials. The address will set what she sees as the states main funding priorities for the 2025 fiscal year. Governor Kristi Noem gives the annual budget address on Tuesday, December 5, 2023, at the South Dakota State Capitol in Pierre. Expected to be included in her speech will be a plan for the remaining millions in American Rescue Plan Act dollars that have yet to be allocated, funding for the so-called Big Three priorities and a return to a budget similar to the pre-COVID-19 era. Noem already warned South Dakotans the states budget would be tight in her weekly column back in late October. "...there are many members of our state legislature that have not experienced a 'normal budget year,'" Noem wrote. "These legislators are used to having huge revenues and surpluses to spend on whatever they want. They have not had to do what more and more families across America are having to do stick to a tight budget." Top lawmakers in the South Dakota Senate and House of Representatives, along with state government experts, say the tight budget is synonymous with budgets prior to COVID-19 pandemic when the state benefited from a large influx of federal dollars and saw increased revenues. What are the Big Three? The Big Three are the states core budget priorities: funding education, health providers and state employees. This past year, health providers were reimbursed at a 100% rate where in previous years, providers were reimbursed at a lower rate. Nursing homes and other long-term care facilities benefit from these reimbursements. Hospitals also received a 5% funding increase. Based on recommendations from a summer study, long-term care facilities will also be a legislative priority for lawmakers when they return Jan. 9 to Pierre for the start of the 99th Legislative Session. Educators and state employees across the state also got a bump in pay over the last year. Its unclear if another pay raise is in the cards for educators or state employees. The 2024 fiscal year budget came in at a record-setting $7.4 billion and included a hard-fought temporary sales tax cut. What projects could remaining ARPA funds go toward? In the past few years, a majority of the ARPA funds have gone toward infrastructure improvements across the state such as housing, broadband and environmental projects. The state received $974.4 million in federal ARPA funds. The funds that we did have as a state, we were really diligent about making sure those were one-time investments that produced a long-term return for the people of South Dakota, said Senate Majority Leader Casey Crabtree, R-Madison. Significant funding from the American Rescue Plan Act also went to help South Dakota municipalities improve their sewer and water systems. The central question the state is asking ahead of the budget address is where will the remaining $104.6 million in ARPA funds that have yet to be put into an infrastructure project go? All ARPA funds the state received must be obligated by the end of 2024 and then must all be spent by the end of 2026. Bureau of Finance and Management Commissioner Jim Terwilliger told appropriators Nov. 13 that Noem will lay out a plan for the $104.6 million to be spent during her budget address. She will look forward to having that conversation when the time is right, he said. One Republican lawmaker from Rapid City, Sen. Helene Duhamel, has been pushing for the funds to go toward water infrastructure improvements in the western side of the state that has critical water needs because of its drier climate. Duhamel has brought two bills in the past two years to dedicate a portion of the ARPA funds to water projects, including a $3.5 million study of a West River water pipeline. Her bill in 2023 passed the Senate but failed in the House by two votes. "Every dollar invested in water pays dividends to every citizen of our state," she said. "For us to unlock our potential in western South Dakota, we need a reliable source of clean water." Crabtree said Duhamel has done an incredible job to champion the water needs in the western side of the state and added northeast South Dakota would also benefit from water infrastructure. The legislature, really as a whole, has a pull toward wanting to put what they can for ARPA funds that remain into water infrastructure projects. That provides a good return, weve got a need across the state, Crabtree said, adding the water projects are just one part of the overall remaining ARPA fund conversation. The state is also facing down major prison projects, including the construction of a 1,500-bed mens facility in Lincoln County that will replace the current state penitentiary and continuing the construction of a new 288-bed womens prison in Rapid City. Its possible some ARPA funds could be used in those projects. A return to normal Michael Card, a professor emeritus in the politics department at the University of South Dakota, said hes not sure how different the states spending will be during the upcoming fiscal year from the past few years. He said that although state revenues are estimated to decrease by 2%, because of the general sales tax cut, which sets the stage for a tight budget, there are still millions in ARPA funds that have been obligated for projects but remain unspent. How do we deal with these unobligated funds? How do we deal with some expenditures that havent been made? Card asked. House Majority Leader Will Mortenson and Crabtree agree the upcoming budget will be a return to normal. It makes the budgeting process easier in that we know which core priorities we have to fund, Mortenson said. This year will be about needs, not wants. The Pierre Republican remembers working for the Daugaard administration in 2011, when the state faced deep budget cuts, and said the Legislature is working hard to avoid a repeat of that in the future. The key to avoiding it is being frugal in the times that you have money and not overextending the obligations of state government, he said. I think weve been pretty prudent in the last few years, but this year is going to demand additional prudence. Custer State Park officials will work alongside South Dakota Wildland Fire to burn slash piles in the park this winter. The goal is to burn large machine-made slash piles and smaller hand-built piles. Park staff and Wildland Fire will provide personnel and equipment to conduct and monitor the burns throughout the winter. The piles are created from leftover unsalable woody debris generated by timber sales and small tree thinning projects. The burns are designed to reduce the amount of fuel available for fires and to lessen the risk of fires starting or spreading. Piles can be expected to continue burning for days after ignited. Firefighters will continually monitor the piles until they are out. For more information, contact the Custer State Park Office at 605-394-2693 or by email at custerstatepark@state.sd.us. The South Dakota Department of Transportation is planning to hold a public meeting open house on Monday, Dec. 18 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. regarding the proposed design alternatives to the U.S. Highway 85 project that runs from the Wyoming state line to U.S. Highway 14A. The meeting will be held at Spearfish Canyon Lodge, 10619 Roughlock Falls Road in Lead. It's an informal gathering with one-on-one discussion with design staff. Representatives from SDDOT will be available to answer questions, discuss the project, and receive community input. Information will be available on the acquisition of right-of-way and relocation assistance. A short presentation is planned for 5:30 p.m. DOT asks area residents, business owners and daily commuters to attend and participate. For those who cannot attend the open house or desire additional information on the overall study, information is available online at dot.sd.gov/projects-studies/projects/public-meetings#listItemLink_1948. Written comments on the public meeting will be accepted until Friday, Jan. 5. For more information, contact project manager Jennica Wilcox at 605-773-1973 or via email at Jennica.Wilcox@fhueng.com. Black Americans are being led astray by politicized pastors By Martin Baker web posted December 4, 2023 In 1954, then-Senator Lyndon Johnson introduced an amendment to the Internal Revenue Code that specifically prohibited any 501(c)(3) non-profit organization from endorsing or opposing political candidates or political measures. Those non-profits also included entities such as churches. This, however, has not prevented pastors of black congregations from inviting candidates to their pulpits. Black congregations have historically, from a theological standpoint, been conservative. Yet many parishioners, at the behest and suggestions of their spiritual leaders, have voted more liberally. This is nothing new. In 1939, Margaret Sanger, the founder of what is now Planned Parenthood, advocated the need for recruiting ministers to aid in speaking to congregations with the aim of increasing birth control services in black communities in the South. She was quoted as saying, "The minister's work is also important, and he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation, as to our ideals and the goal we hope to reach. The minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." You read that correctly, a prime advocate of racist eugenics policy wanted to seek the aid of black pastors in her efforts. While Sanger's policy worked out exceedingly well for the racists of the eugenics movement, it decimated black communities and has led to the termination of more than twenty million black babies since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1973. Additionally, Sanger's push for abortion is largely responsible for black Americans no longer being the largest minority group in the country, having now been surpassed by Hispanics, whose abortion rates are less than half that of black women. Black ministers have been led down the primrose path by the usual race hustlers who promise increased influence and larger congregations, if they preach certain ideological political beliefs, generally liberal, to their parishioners. This is an obscene disservice to their weekly followers, who come to these houses of worship for hope and guidance, but instead find pulpit lectures on gloom and doom and hateful political rhetoric that has no place in the house of God. Ironically, after now-President Lyndon Johnson initiated his War on Poverty, one of the first communities to embrace its so-called "possibilities" and introduce it to their peers and congregants was the black ministerial community. At the behest of the ministers, families were torn asunder, and the black community, which for generations had been the model of self-sufficiency and provident living, became the testbed for the endless cycle of government subsidies. Poverty was not defeated by these policies; in fact, studies show it has been exacerbated, and only curtailed by conservative policies that had added more accountability and transparency. At what point will ministers realize that their words and sermons do matter? In a recent conversation with a minister who officiated the funeral of a relative, I asked why black congregations have so easily been taken advantage of by the words of politicos who abandon the black community after election time. He expressed his dismay that they "visit the black churches and admit they are born again believers, but when you contact their offices, they are never available." He further elaborated how the politicians know "what to say to excite the black community by discussing how they will bring jobs, prosperity, public safety and all that is needed and have come to the Saints of God to bring it home together", but it can only be addressed if that "Christian candidate" is elected. In 2017, then-President Donald Trump utilized the power of an executive order to limit the Johnson Amendment. The executive order limits enforcement of the Johnson Amendment or any other adverse action against any individual or religious organization for speaking about moral or political issues from a religious perspective. Even with that in place, the black community is still one of the most politically misinformed, and a lot of that is still from ministers who are still stuck in an agenda of congregation building through smoke and mirrors. When will the theological conservatism mesh with the political conservatism that is better serving our nation? Only time will tell, but the sooner the better. Project 21 Ambassador Martin D. Baker has worked for various political campaigns and is a co-founder of the Move-On-Up.org black conservative organization. This was first published at Human Events. Home DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) Ballistics missiles fired by Yemen's Houthi rebels struck three commercial ships Sunday in the Red Sea, while a U.S. warship shot down three drones in self-defense during the hourslong assault, the U.S. military said. The Iranian-backed Houthis claimed two of the attacks. The strikes marked an escalation in a series of maritime attacks in the Mideast linked to the Israel-Hamas war, as multiple vessels found themselves in the crosshairs of a single Houthi assault for the first time in the conflict. The U.S. vowed to consider all appropriate responses in the wake of the attack, specifically calling out Iran, after tensions have been high for years now over Tehran's rapidly advancing nuclear program. These attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security, the U.S. military's Central Command said in a statement. They have jeopardized the lives of international crews representing multiple countries around the world. It added: We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran. The attack began around 9:15 a.m. local time (0615 GMT) in Houthi-controlled Sanaa, Yemen's capital, Central Command said. The USS Carney, a Navy destroyer, detected a ballistic missile fired from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen at the Bahamas-flagged bulk carrier Unity Explorer. The missile hit near the ship, the U.S. said. Shortly afterward, the Carney shot down a drone headed its way, although it's not clear if the destroyer was the target, Central Command said. About 30 minutes later, the Unity Explorer was hit by a missile. While responding to its distress call, the Carney shot down another incoming drone. Central Command said the Unity Explorer sustained minor damage from the missile. Two other commercial ships, the Panamanian-flagged bulk carriers Number 9 and Sophie II, were both struck by missiles. The Number 9 reported some damage but no casualties, and the Sophie II reported no significant damage, Central Command said. While sailing to assist the Sophie II around 4:30 p.m. local time (1330 GMT), the Carney shot down another drone heading in its direction. The drones did no damage. The Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, has shot down multiple rockets the Houthis have fired toward Israel during that nation's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It hasn't been damaged in any of the incidents and no injuries have been reported on board. The Defense Department initially described the assault as simply an attack on the Carney before providing more details. Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree claimed two of Sunday's attacks, saying the first vessel was hit by a missile and the second by a drone while in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Saree did not mention any U.S. warship being involved. The Yemeni armed forces continue to prevent Israeli ships from navigating the Red Sea (and Gulf of Aden) until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops, Saree said. The Yemeni armed forces renew their warning to all Israeli ships or those associated with Israelis that they will become a legitimate target if they violate what is stated in this statement. Saree also identified the first vessel as the Unity Explorer, which is owned by a British firm that includes Dan David Ungar, who lives in Israel, as one of its officers. The Number 9 is linked to Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, while the Sophie II is linked to Japan's Kyowa Kisen Co. Ltd. Managers for the three vessels could not be immediately reached for comment. Israeli media identified Ungar as being the son of Israeli shipping billionaire Abraham Rami Ungar. Iran has yet to directly address the attacks. However, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian threatened that if the current situation continues, the region will enter a new phase over the Israel-Hamas war. All parties who are after igniting a war are warned, before its too late stop the killing of women and children, of which a new round has started," Amirabdollahian said. Iran's top diplomat described his comments as coming after conversations with resistance forces in the region a description Tehran uses for the Shiite militias it backs, including groups in Iraq, the Houthis and Lebanon's Hezbollah, as well as the Sunni fighters of Hamas. All have threatened or attacked Israel, Iran's regional archrival, during the war. The Houthis have launched a series of attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, as well as launching drones and missiles targeting Israel. Analysts suggest the Houthis hope to shore up waning popular support after years of civil war in Yemen between it and Saudi-backed forces. The U.S. has stopped short of saying its Navy ships were targeted, but has said Houthi drones have headed toward the ships and have been shot down in self-defense. Washington so far has declined to directly respond to the attacks, as has Israel, whose military continues to try to describe the ships as not having links to their country. Global shipping had increasingly been targeted as the Israel-Hamas war threatens to become a wider regional conflict even as a truce briefly halted fighting and Hamas exchanged hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. However, the collapse of the truce and the resumption of punishing Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and a ground offensive there had raised the risk of more seaborne attacks. In November, the Houthis seized a vehicle transport ship also linked to Israel in the Red Sea off Yemen. The rebels still hold the vessel near the port city of Hodeida. Missiles also landed near another U.S. warship last week after it assisted a vessel linked to Israel that had briefly been seized by gunmen. Separately, a container ship owned by an Israeli billionaire recently came under attack by a suspected Iranian drone in the Indian Ocean. The Houthis had not directly targeted the Americans for some time, further raising the stakes in the growing maritime conflict. In 2016, the U.S. launched Tomahawk cruise missiles that destroyed three coastal radar sites in Houthi-controlled territory to retaliate for missiles being fired at U.S. Navy ships at the time. ___ Colleen Curran Living Editor Follow Colleen Curran Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today The sno-balls are moving out and hard cider is moving in to Carytown. Bryants Cider is moving into the Suzy Sno spot in Carytown at 3423 W. Cary St. Suzy Sno, which serves New Orleans-inspired sno-balls, is merging with Ruby Scoops, its parent company, to form one business. Ruby Scoops is currently at 120 W. Brookland Park Blvd., but the ice cream and sno-ball shop will be moving into a new construction building at 310 W. Brookland Blvd. next year. We wanted to bring both concepts under one roof, owner Rabia Kamara said. The new location will more than triple the space, going from 940 square feet to 3,700 square feet. Kamara expects to make the move in the first part of 2024. Nathan Hughes at Sperity Real Estate Ventures represented Suzy Sno in subleasing its space. Ann Schweitzer Riley from One South represented Bryants Cider. Jerry Thornton, founder of Bryants Cidery and Brewery, is selling the building in Shockoe Bottom where Bryants is located. In the interest of gaining more foot traffic and visibility, he wanted to move Bryants Cidery and Brewery to Carytown. The new spot will offer cider tastings, flights and pints as well as non-alcoholic cider, mulled hot cider, coffee and hot cocoa for the winter months. A challenging road for breweries, cideries Bryants Cider launched in Nelson County in the old Bryants Farm House in 2018. It opened a tasting room in Jackson Ward in 2019. At the start of the pandemic in 2020, Thornton moved Bryants to Shockoe Bottom. We bought the building at 2114 E. Main St. and renovated it, Thornton said. The plan was to build out a cidery and brewery production facility in the space. In the meantime, Thornton lived above it. I love the neighborhood. But after COVID, the foot traffic never came back, Thornton said. Thornton weathered the pandemic, but it wasnt easy. Its been a difficult time for all of us in the brewery and cidery industry, Thornton said. Many of us have had to go back to our previous jobs. Now married and with a baby, Thornton moved to the Forest Hill area and returned to his full-time job in corporate finance to stay afloat, while working on Bryants hard cider at night and on the weekends. He decided to move Bryants Cider to Carytown with the goal of gaining more foot traffic and visibility. Virginia wineries are able to open remote taprooms to gain more visibility and get their product to market, Thornton said. Thats what well be doing in Carytown. Thornton plans to open Bryants Cider by the end of the week to capitalize on holiday shopping foot traffic in Carytown and to operate in soft opening mode for the month. In January, he will work on renovating the space. Its common knowledge that breweries and cideries are struggling this year, specifically with decreased demand, Thornton added. Bryants is known for its dry, gluten-free ciders with no sugar, such as its popular Unicorn Fuel. While Bryants originally focused on dry ciders, Thornton has been branching out into sweeter ciders, branded as Bryants Basic. Weve transitioned to 50% of the dry cider that were known for and 50% of the newer, sweeter products, Thornton said. Castleburg Brewery to shut in Richmond; Isley has closed "The beer industry has changed over the last few years since COVID," one owner said. Basic Pineapple is set to drop in a few days. Other sweet flavors include Basic Very Berry, Basic Pear and Mojito. Bryants will also be branching out into nonalcoholic cider, which is currently offered on draft now. Bryants Cider in Carytown will be about 1,500 square feet, similar to the Shockoe Bottom taproom, with occupancy for 20 to 25. Were hoping for a more intimate setting. Like an old school Richmond spot: a quaint, comfortable place where people want to have a good time, Thornton said. Suzy Sno originally debuted in Jackson Ward in late 2021, after Kamara won $20,000 on the Food Network show Ben & Jerrys: Clash of the Cones. It was the second frozen treat venture from Kamara, who launched the successful ice cream shop Ruby Scoops on Brookland Park Boulevard in 2020. Suzy Sno briefly moved to the former Sweet 95 location on North Arthur Ashe Boulevard before moving to Carytown earlier this year. Kamara decided to leave her lease early to combine the two businesses into one under the Ruby Scoops umbrella. We love being in North Side. We didnt want to leave. But its been a situation of surviving, not thriving. Weve been completely out of space, Kamara said. The new location will allow us to finally be able to make enough ice cream to look for more locations, she said. Ruby Scoops recently won a Black Kitchen Initiative grant from Heinz, The LEE Initiative and Southern Restaurants for Racial Justice. The grants, in the amount of $5,000 to $25,000, were awarded to 62 Black food entrepreneurs. In the Richmond area, Elegant Cuizines, The Sweetest Thing bakery, Buna Kurs and Charlottes Southern Deli and Tapas were also grant recipients. The grant will go toward purchasing equipment for the new space at 310 W. Brookland Blvd., which will have more seating and a patio. And Richmond, youll have to wait for sno-balls. Under the new umbrella, the sno-balls will be seasonal, running from Mardi Gras until September. But right now, you can get the December flavors such as Egg Nog, Gingerbread, Coquito, Atlanta Santa and Peppermint Brownie. Richmond area restaurants that opened in 2023 Farm + Oak Floris Session Nuevo Mexico #2 sign Carytown Indian Cuisine Wishbone Food Shop Fanboy Echelon Urban Wine Bar Sincero Dumpling & Noodle Cart And Dim Sum Bonchon Juan More Taco Maple Street Biscuit Company Harry's At Hofheimer Intermission Beer Co. Hot Pot 757 Gold Lion Community Cafe Honey Baked Bee OMG OCPs Gramophone Basically Halal Rams House Bar + Kitchen Tequila Sunrise Mexican Kitchen & Cantina Reviresco Coffee Co. Red Hibachi & Beer Torchy's Tacos Midlothian Burtons Grill & Bar Ellie's Hot Dogs & Ice Cream Click A Wine Spot Smashed RVA Shake Shack Luxe New American Bar & Grill Slurp! Slay Burgers Mariscos Mazatlan Eggs Up Grill Seafood Palace VA A Taste of Nostalgia 88 Street Food Acacia Midtown Odyssey Lost Letter RVA Stanley's Hibachi House Main St. Dragon Nokoribi Revel Market & Bar Genovas Pizza Station & Take Out Kitchen Brick House Diner Mayu Sushi & Thai Boiling Crab Richmond Torchy's Tacos Raising Cane's ChefSuite BigWife's La Fogata Grit Coffee The Brass Tap Penny's Wine Shop A.M. Kitchen Company Verseau Bistro Chic'n & Beer Bar West Sidecar Cocktail Lounge Soul N Vinegar Wong's Tacos Elegant Cuizines Rio Grande Tex-Mex Grill Mi Casita Restaurant Blue Cow Ice Cream Co. Diablo Doughnuts RVA Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams Getting started on a farm is hard these days, with land prices so high so high in fact that many farmers are selling out to developers. Not many young Virginians start farms. But Chris and Katherine Myer grew up on farms and, when they spotted 42.5 acres of rich-looking ground just outside the town limits of Mineral, they thought they had found a way to get back to the land. Problem was, after buying the land in February, they learned that Louisa County zoned it for residential use. So they have taken the rare step of asking a county to approve the less intensive use of running a few cattle, letting their 7- and 8-year-old daughters have some horses, and cutting hay in the back 40. We just wanted to be completely above board, Chris Myer said. At a cost of a $690 fee, he asked the county to say its okay to farm on land that the county had for more than half a century intended for new homes as the town of Mineral grew but that the family of the previous owners had farmed since 1900. Still, as recently as a couple of years ago, drafting the countys 2040 comprehensive plan, new houses were still what everyone had in mind. Myer figured his youth growing up on the family farm in Clarke County and Katherine Myers youth on a corn-wheat-soybean operation on the Northern Neck offered another option. Wed like to have a few steers, some horses for my daughters, and whatever other animals the girls get into, Myer said. He plans to cut hay to feed the steers and maybe sell any extra to other farmers. The 42.5 acres isnt a big farm, of course. Like many Virginia farmers, even some with hundreds of acres, the Myers will keep their day jobs. Itll be supplemental income, Chris Myer said. Well probably have 12 or 15 steers the USDA (Department of Agriculture) says you should have 1 to 2 acres per steer, depending on how big they are, he said. Were not going to be a commercial cattle operation. ... Well sell high-quality, locally grown beef for the freezer, maybe do meat shares, he said. Myer said his plan is to rotate the cattle around the farm, to avoid overgrazing and soil erosion. He also plans to expand the lands existing buffers and natural spaces to encourage wildlife. It is an unusual case, said Louisa County Director of Community Development Josh Gillespie. And while the area to the east of Mineral has long been designated for residential use, theres been little development since along Old Tolersville Road after a handful of homes went up in the 1980s, he said. While this proposed use may delay low density residential development of the Property and surrounding parcels ... At the present time, the proposed request supports the Countys goal of maintaining areas of rural character and maintaining and managing growth, county planning staff said in recommending the Myers request to the Planning Commission. It approved the proposal, which goes before the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. The primary goal of the countys comprehensive plan the same one that sees the area east of Mineral as a site for new homes is to preserve and protect rural heritage, the planners noted. Since 2015, Virginias farmland has shrunk from approximately 8.1 million acres to 7.7 million acres, with around 3,200 farms lost, according to the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation. Rising real estate values mean its tempting for farmers to sell out in order to cope with the squeeze in recent years on their margins the gap between what they sell their crops and livestock for and what it costs to raise them and pay off mortgage and equipment loans, said Tony Banks, senior assistant director of agriculture, development and innovation for the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation. And while the Myers are fourth- and fifth-generation farmers, many young people who grew up on farms decide that it makes better financial sense for them to live and work in cities or suburbs. On top of that, high startup costs prohibit many from entering farming, Banks said. But small-scale operation and niche markets can be a way for Virginians to start farming, said Rachel Henley, Virginia Cooperative Extension agent in Powhatan County, where some landowners in the countys Agricultural and Forestal District program are raising pumpkins and sunflowers. This land always was a farm, Chris Myer said. Were just going to keep it that way. Counties with the most farmland in Virginia #25. Surry #24. Orange #23. Amelia #22. Dinwiddie #21. Northumberland #20. Culpeper #19. Northampton Fauquier County #17. Caroline #16. Russell #15. Franklin #14. Bedford #13. Hanover #12. Mecklenburg #11. Sussex #10. Wythe #9. Suffolk #8. Essex #7. Pittsylvania #6. Isle of Wight #5. Halifax #4. Rockingham #3. Accomack #2. Augusta #1. Southampton Quiet and seasonable weather Tuesday will give way to a quick moving system pushing across Richmond on Tuesday night and Wednesday; it will bring a shot of colder air for a couple of days before a substantial warm-up leads into the weekend. The system pushing through on Tuesday night and Wednesday will approach from the northwest and will weaken as it crosses the Appalachians. As a result, most of its precipitation will fall on the windward side of the mountains, leaving Richmond with very little, if any, precipitation during that time. However, there may be just enough left in that storm to produce some sprinkles or perhaps even a few snow flurries that persist for 30 minutes or less in Richmond. No accumulating rain, much less snow is expected, but do not be surprised if a few surfaces are damp on Wednesday morning or you see a few flurries flying in the air before lunchtime on Wednesday. More noticeable will be the north winds on Wednesday, averaging 10 to 20 mph in the afternoon with temperatures stalled in the 40s. Cool but otherwise quiet weather returns for Thursday and Friday before a larger storm takes shape for the weekend. Initially, the system will form in the Mississippi Valley on Saturday, so we will remain far enough away to stay dry. The rain from that storm will cross Richmond on Sunday. Whether it is focused on the morning or the afternoon is still an open question, but either way, we will have temperatures similar to last weekend, well into the 50s when the rain falls. Of course, the rain is needed. Even after the rain last weekend, Richmond has had 56% of normal rainfall since Oct. 1. This coming system looks to bring between 0.75 and 1.25 inches. This weekends storm will be an especially energetic one, so there may be a thunderstorm mixed within the area of rain, although this same system is likely to produce thunderstorms in Arkansas and Louisiana on Saturday as it begins to come together. The cold side of the storm will produce snow from Missouri through Michigan on Sunday, but the precipitation will be long gone over Virginia before the colder air arrives Monday. No precipitation is expected the following workweek (Dec. 11-15) and even though temperatures will average a bit below normal during that time, no especially cold periods more than a day or two are forecast. Further, there is no sign of a truly polar air mass invading Virginia in the next two weeks keeping temperatures in the 30s all day or sending multiple nights into the teens. Earliest sunsets of year upon us Richmond will have its earliest sunsets of the year 4:51 p.m. through this weekend. Afterward, sunsets will incrementally begin to occur later in the evening, reaching the 5 p.m. threshold on Dec. 30. But because Earths orbit is not a perfect circle around the sun, and its speed through its orbit varies during the year, the latest sunrises of the year do not come until the first two weeks of January 7:24 a.m. In between comes the winter solstice on Dec. 21, marking the first day of astronomical winter and the day of the year with the shortest amount of daylight 9 hours and 34 minutes in Richmond. PHOTOS: Ice on the James River over the past 70 years Colonial Penn, a life insurance company that focuses on older Americans, has been soliciting Virginians with misleading advertising, according to a State Corporation Commission Bureau of Insurance review. The company agreed to revise Virginia ads and to immediately stop using an application form that had been altered but without Bureau of Insurance approval. In addition, Colonial Penn settled the bureaus complaints with a $30,300 payment. In agreeing to the settlement, Colonial Penn said doing so did not mean it admitted to any violation. Company spokeswoman Valerie Dolenga declined to comment further. The bureau said Colonial violated a state regulation that ads cannot omit material information if doing so can mislead or deceive policyholders or potential buyers of its coverage, the bureau review found. Disclosures the state requires were minimized and hard to make out in ads, the bureau said. The review also found the company had advertised its coverage as affordable without showing that it was, which Virginia regulations require when making such claims. With its ads that it offered lifetime or permanent coverage, Colonial Penn also did not include a required disclaimer that customers needed to keep making premium payments for its policies. The bureau said one ad also violated a state regulation that bars saying an offer of coverage has to be taken up in a limited period of time. Colonial Penn sells whole life policies to people ages 50 to 85, with death benefits of up to $50,000. Unlike most such policies, the company does not require a medical exam or health questionnaire. Its premiums can be higher than those charged by companies that do require health information. Your car insurance rates aren't going to go down: Here's why Your car insurance rates aren't going to go down: Here's why The impact of age and experience, and the role of location The influence of vehicle type and modifications The effect of driving record, claims history, and credit score A Virginia judge has dismissed felony charges against a former county elections official accused of misconduct in the 2020 election, a decision made after state prosecutors said a key witness changed his story. At the prosecutors request, the judge on Friday dismissed a felony charge of corrupt conduct and one for making a false statement, both of which had been levied against former Prince William County Registrar Michele White. She still faces trial next month on a misdemeanor charge of willful neglect of duty. Very little has been publicly revealed about exactly what prosecutors believe White did wrong. Court records merely indicate that the case revolves around 2020 election returns, including the presidential race. Prince William election officials have previously said Whites successor reported discrepancies in results to state officials, but that those discrepancies would not have affected the outcome of any race. Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney declares candidacy for governor Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney launches bid to become Virginia's next governor. The case was brought by Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares last year. Shortly after his office obtained the indictment against White, it launched an election integrity unit. The move prompted critics to accuse Miyares of pandering to supporters of former President Donald Trump, who falsely blamed his defeat on election fraud. In Whites case, Assistant Attorney General James Herring filed a motion ahead of Fridays hearing in which he alleged that an elections worker conveniently and quite surprisingly provided a different version of events than the witness had previously recounted. As a consequence, the Commonwealth is confronted with significant inconsistent statements, Herring wrote. Whites lawyer, Zachary Stafford, said he interviewed the same witness and found nothing inconsistent in his statements. The election worker rather filled in a hole that the initial investigation did not address about who asked him to make changes in the state voter registration system, Stafford said in a statement. The system is being replaced after an audit questioned its reliability and functionality. Stafford said the witness has reported that White did not ask him to make the changes now under scrutiny and that it was a poor choice of words for prosecutors to refer to the witnesss updated testimony as convenient. Miyares office declined to comment beyond the court filing, citing the ongoing misdemeanor case. The waiting is over for Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, who declared on Monday that he is running to become Virginia's next governor and the second African American to hold the office touting practical experience gained from almost seven years as mayor of the state capital city and his commitment to giving all people what he called "a fair shot at success." Stoney, 42, launched his candidacy with a video announcement that sets the stage for a Democratic primary showdown with U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-7th, for the party gubernatorial nomination in 18 months. Spanberger, 44, declared her candidacy in a similar fashion three weeks earlier, forgoing reelection to a fourth term in Congress for a bid to become the first woman to serve as governor. Whoever wins the nomination is likely to face a formidable Republican opponent, either Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia, or Attorney General Jason Miyares, the first Hispanic elected to statewide office in Virginia. The 3-minute video focuses on Stoney's personal journey as the child of unwed parents who was raised by his working-class father and grandmother in York County. It also cites his accomplishments as mayor that have less to do with big economic development projects that failed such as a twice-rejected proposal for a casino resort or the failed Navy Hill redevelopment of downtown than nuts-and-bolts improvements in the city's finances, repair of roads and sidewalks, a reduction in poverty, and increased investments in schools and affordable housing. "We brought down Confederate statues that don't reflect our values and built up schools that do," he said in a reference to the city's removal of monuments to the Confederacy after nightly protests that erupted in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and targeted the statues as symbols of entrenched racism. Stoney: State 'looking for a governor who gets things done' In an interview with the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Sunday, Stoney said, "I just believe Virginians are looking for a governor who gets things done." A political protege of former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, Stoney has made no secret of his interest in running for governor, which he first hinted to The Times-Dispatch in April and then confirmed by filing his statement of organization last week for the coming campaign. But he said his candidacy was not a long-held ambition, but instead came from the executive experience he gained in two terms as the mayor of a city facing multiple challenges. "I've grown in this job," Stoney said in The Times-Dispatch interview in advance of his announcement. "Did I have a front-row seat at watching a governor lead a state? Absolutely!" he said in reference to his role as Secretary of the Commonwealth under McAuliffe. "I also knew I needed experience first." Stoney will try to use that executive-level experience against Spanberger, a three-term congresswoman who has represented both the Richmond and Northern Virginia suburbs. His political base has been Richmond's Black voters, but he contends that his two mayoral victories with pluralities against multiple candidates shows his broader appeal. "I have run tough races in the city," he said. "That made me have to build a broad-based coalition." Stoney's campaign launch also takes a shot at Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who defeated McAuliffe for governor in 2021 and was touted as a potential candidate for the presidency before Democrats won control of both chambers of the General Assembly in elections in November. "Right now, families across Virginia are struggling, just like mine did," Stoney says in the video. "Kids aren't getting the education they deserve, just because they live in the wrong ZIP code." "And we have a governor who is more worried about his own agenda that yours and more focused on taking away people's rights than lifting them up." Stoney is relying heavily on his personal story, which dominates his campaign video, "Hands." The video is a tribute to his father, Marvin, who died in 2011 at age 49 after working multiple low-paying jobs, including janitor at a high school, to pay for his son's education. "My dad's hands say it all," he says at the beginning of the video. "They were so calloused, so tough. He worked so hard for us." "I remember him telling me, 'I don't want you to ever have hands like mine.' Like all parents, he just wanted me to have it a little easier than he had."' A contrast to his opponent Stoney, who remarried in February and now expects his first child, intends to use his upbringing to reach voters who have faced similar challenges. "I grew up in a poor, working-class family," he said Sunday. "I know what it feels like to struggle. I think a lot of Virginians relate to that." His campaign is also likely to contrast his story with that of Spanberger, who grew up in a middle-class family in the Richmond suburbs and went on to a career in law enforcement, first at the U.S. Postal Service and then at the CIA. "We obviously have different backgrounds. We have different upbringings. ... I respect her service," he said. Stoney also acknowledged that some Democrats have urged him to run instead for lieutenant governor, as then-state Sen. Doug Wilder did before becoming the nation's first elected Black governor in 1990 and then-Richmond Mayor Tim Kaine did before becoming governor in 2006. "For those who think I should run for another office, I think being mayor has given me the necessary experience to be an executive at the state level," he said in the interview. Gallery: Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney delivers State of the City speech Concrete lid that gave way on Playa del Carmen pedestrian avenue replaced Playa del Carmen, Q.R. A concrete lid that that broke under the weight of a pedestrian along Fifth Avenue has been replaced. The double-sized concrete lid was replaced by a proper cover Saturday. Personnel of the CFE replaced the lid themselves after an incident that left a Playa del Carmen tourist trapped on Fifth Avenue. Earlier in the day, a tourist from Chile was walking the Fifth Avenue shopping area when she stepped on a concrete CFE lid that broke under her step. He left leg went down into the CFE box, leaving her trapped. Police and firemen were called who, using tools, were able to free her leg from the jagged concrete lid. Later that same day, the entire lid was replaced. CFE personnel install two new street covers after a tourist fell through a thinner cast lid. Photo: SPC December 2, 2023. The SPC (Secretaria de Proteccion Civil, Prevencion de Riesgos y Bomberos de Solidaridad) said firefighters responded to an accident involving a person who was injured when she fell into a light register on 5th Avenue. The CFE company, with the support of operational elements, changed the cover to prevent another accident. The woman received only minor injuries in the incident. CFE personnel are seen installing a thicker concrete lid along the busy pedestrian walkway. Photo: SPC December 2, 2023. The lid that broke was part of the remodeling project done by the previous administration. Last week, private businesses along sections of the remodeled Fifth Avenue had begun corrective work of their own due to the deterioration of the three-year-old project. It is not known if the CFE lid that broke was cast by the Comision Federal de Electricidad (CFE) or the company that remodeled Fifth Avenue. Womans 80 year prison sentence upheld by Superior Court Othon P. Blanco, Q.R. A woman who appealed her 80 year prison sentence has had it upheld. On Saturday, a Superior Court judge upheld the 80-year sentence handed down to Silvia Gabriela N in 2022. Silvia Gabriela N was given an 80-year sentence for the 2021 kidnapping of a person in the municipality of Othon P. Blanco. According to a statement, the State Attorney Generals Office said the kidnapping victim was of legal age and the judge found evidence presented was beyond all reasonable doubt. In December of the year 2022, the aforementioned, who, together with other active subjects, committed the crime of aggravated kidnapping to the detriment of a person of legal age whose identity is withheld, their report read. The court considered the sentence of the convicted woman to be unfounded, who, in her appeal filed, indicated that the testimonies lack veracity to support an accusation. However, the judge highlighted that the work carried out by the social representation allows, beyond all reasonable doubt, to objectively confirm and overcome the presumption of innocence of the accused, the statement said. An officer-involved shooting Sunday afternoon while Roanoke police were investigating a homicide, according to department news release late Sunday. Police responded to the 1600 block of Lawrence Ave SE at approximately 11:30 a.m. for a well-being check on an individual, according to the release. Officers located the adult male victim with what appeared to be critical stab wounds in the residence. Roanoke Fire-EMS pronounced the man deceased on scene, according to the release. Its unknown exactly when the homicide occurred, but its believe to have been as early as mid-week, according to the release. Police almost immediately identified a suspect in the homicide investigation and began working to locate him. Then, at approximately 4 p.m. Sunday, officers observed the suspect walking in the 3000 block of Melrose Ave Northwest and attempted to stop the man to speak with him. The suspect produced a gun and fired towards the officers and multiple shots were exchanged between police officers and the suspect, according to the release. One officer was struck by gunfire and that officer was transported to LewisGale Medical Center by Roanoke Fire-EMS for treatment of what appeared to be serious and life threatening injuries, according to the release. The suspect was also struck by gunfire and was pronounced dead by city Fire-EMS personnel, according to the release. In accordance with department policy, Virginia State Police were notified and will be investigating this incident and the officers involved will be placed on administrative leave, per department policy, according to the release. No other information was released Sunday night. - The Roanoke Times Areas around Poyang Lake thrive on bird-watching tourism People's Daily Online) 09:26, December 04, 2023 Nearly 1,000 white cranes were recently seen flying, foraging, or resting at the Wucheng protection and administration station of the Poyang Lake National Nature Reserve Administration Bureau in east China's Jiangxi Province. From a distance, visitors used telescopes to watch the cranes on a bird-watching platform that is over 20 meters high. Photo taken on Nov. 29, 2023 shows visitors in Wucheng, known as the "Migratory Bird Town," also a popular bird-watching destination, in Yongxiu county, east China's Jiangxi Province. (Photo courtesy of the Wucheng protection and administration station) Poyang Lake, China's largest freshwater lake, is a wetland of international importance and one of the most important wintering sites for migratory birds along the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. The best time for bird watching in Poyang Lake is from November to the following March. The Poyang Lake National Nature Reserve, the Poyang Lake Nanji National Wetland Reserve, and Wucheng, known as the "Migratory Bird Town" beside Poyang Lake, have become popular bird-watching destinations. Located in Yongxiu county, Wucheng lives up to its reputation as the "kingdom of migratory birds," attracting throngs of visitors. Wucheng has built bird-watching sites, waterside walkways and hotels, wetland parks, ring roads, and other facilities. Official data showed that in the first three quarters of 2023, Wucheng received 754,600 domestic and overseas tourist visits, bringing prosperity to locals through the development of bird-watching tourism. Photo taken on Nov. 29, 2023 shows migratory birds at the Wucheng protection and administration station of the Poyang Lake National Nature Reserve Administration Bureau in east China's Jiangxi Province. (Photo courtesy of the Wucheng protection and administration station) "Bird watching is gradually becoming a popular winter recreational activity," said Li Yue, former head of the migratory bird nature reserve administration of Duchang county, Jiangxi. Li added that the bird-watching boom has boosted the development of local ecotourism, facilitating the construction of facilities like migratory bird monitoring platforms and agritainment facilities. Yongxiu county has collaborated with over 40 travel agencies and educational tour institutions. Since the beginning of this year, the county has received over 30,000 visits of education tours, generating nearly 5 million yuan ($706,000) in revenue. Han Zhiyu, deputy head of the Jiangxi provincial department of culture and tourism, said that bird-watching tourism in Poyang Lake has global appeal. Han added that Jiangxi has introduced premium Poyang Lake eco-tourism routes, plans to develop birding-themed tourism projects, and built China's best bird-watching destination that is also internationally renowned. Thanks to the effective protection of the wetland environment in areas around Poyang Lake, the number and species of migratory birds wintering here have been rising every year. So far, about 600,000 birds of 58 species have been recorded in areas around Poyang Lake, according to the latest monitoring data. Photo taken on Nov. 24, 2023 shows Eurasian spoonbills flying over Poyang Lake in Hukou county, east China's Jiangxi Province. (Photo/Zhang Yu) (Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun) Looking at the structural problems of Canadian conservatism at the end of 2023 (Part One) By Mark Wegierski web posted December 4, 2023 It must be said that Canadian conservatism has not made too many extensive and discernible advances in Canada, despite the winning of a majority government in the federal Parliament, by the Harper-led Conservative Party, in the federal election of May 2, 2011. The Conservatives ended up routed in the federal election of October 19, 2015. They had manifestly failed to create some kind of independent conservative infrastructures during the propitious time of their majority government. The Conservatives also failed to defeat the Trudeau Liberals in the federal election of October 21, 2019, as well as in the federal election of September 20, 2021. However, the recent winning of the Conservative Party leadership by the young, dynamic Pierre Poilievre, may offer some hope. What is most sorely lacking are some kind of major infrastructures outside the framework of the federal Conservative and provincial Progressive Conservative parties. In provincial politics in Quebec, the centre-right is grouped around the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ); in Alberta, the Wildrose Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives have merged as the United Conservative Party; in Saskatchewan, there is the centrist Saskatchewan Party; while in British Columbia, there is one large centrist Liberal Party (now renamed B.C. United). There also are or were a series of minor parties the People's Party of Canada/Parti populaire du Canada; the Manitoba Party; the People's Alliance party in New Brunswick, the Christian Heritage Party Canada; the Family Coalition Party in Ontario; federal and provincial Libertarian Parties; the Freedom Party of Ontario; and the Cultural Action Party of Canada. In the 2022 provincial election in Ontario, at least two minor parties ran with great ambitions the New Blue Party, and the Ontario Party, but they ended up playing a minimal role in the election, both of them failing to win a single seat. In the 2022 provincial election in Quebec, the Conservative Party of Quebec won 13 percent of the vote but not a single seat. As a result of burgeoning Western Canadian alienation, a federal Wexit Party had been formed in Alberta, and other Western provinces. It was renamed the Maverick Party around September 2020. Also, the Freedom Conservative Party and Wexit Alberta merged to form the Wildrose Independence Party of Alberta (WIPA). In Saskatchewan, Wexit Saskatchewan was renamed as the Buffalo Party. ("Buffalo" was the proposed name of a larger province that would have included Alberta and Saskatchewan, before it was decided that the two smaller provinces would be formed.) There are also a number of well-known foci, for what could be broadly considered conservatism, outside of the major party structures. These would include the Fraser Institute, the National Citizens' Coalition (NCC), and the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation (CTF). However, all three organizations are almost exclusively focussed on economics, and all have a relatively low profile, compared to the multifarious infrastructures of left-liberalism. Indeed, such groups as ideological feminists receive huge funding from various levels of government. The right-leaning economist, Brian Lee Crowley, has established a think-tank called The Macdonald-Laurier Institute. In 2010, the Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada was established. In the Western provinces, there is the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (FCPP), and in the Atlantic provinces, there is the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS). After the failure of The Western Standard some years ago, there arose in 2011 two new, broadly right-of-centre publications The Dorchester Review (which is named after the British nobleman who gave Canada the Quebec Act of 1774), and The Canadian Observer (which in its first issue, announced its ambitions to be a Cite Libre [1] of the Right). However, it appears to have failed subsequent to the appearance of the Spring 2012 issue. The remnants of the long-standing Report newsmagazines in Western Canada (which had reached a height of about 80,000 subscribers, mostly in Alberta) are now represented by the Citizens' Centre for Freedom and Democracy (CCFD). The main, broadly right-leaning "ginger group" in Canada is Civitas, which has endeavoured to raise its profile somewhat in the last few years. Its main activity is the annual conference. Civitas was somewhat of a successor to the short-lived Charlottetown Society of the early 1990s, which failed when its main founder untimely passed away. There has also arisen in recent years the Manning Centre for Building Democracy (MCBD), which could be seen as existing both inside and outside the Conservative Party. The Manning Centre was renamed as the Canada Strong and Free Network in 2020, at the personal request of Preston Manning. The Manning Centre has helped to launch a prestigious e-journal: c2cjournal.ca . There has also arisen in recent years the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF), as well as the Runnymede Society. After three highly successful annual conferences on legal and cultural issues, the CCF had decided to focus most of its efforts on litigation. The annual conferences, all of which took place in Toronto, were very warmly received, and it is unfortunate that there was such a long break (between 2009 and 2015), in their holding. John Carpay, who had been one of the founders of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, has subsequently founded the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), which is especially devoted to freedom of speech issues, especially at Canadian university campuses. However, he was put on a leave of absence from the Presidency of the JCCF, after a scandal where he had hired a private investigator to monitor whether the Chief Justice of Manitoba was following COVID protocols. But after seven weeks, he was nevertheless brought back as President. Joseph Ben-Ami, a well-known conservative activist, has established a small think-tank called the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies (now, I believe, reconfigured as The Arthur Meighen Institute for Public Affairs). By 2023, there have arisen two new conservative outfits The Democracy Fund (which held a conference for young journalists); and the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy Championing Reason, Democracy and Civilization. The Aristotle Foundation brought out a number of books, including The 1867 Project: Why Canada should be cherished not cancelled, a collection of essays rejecting the overheated left-wing rhetoric about Canada. To be continued. Footnote: [1] Cite Libre was the name of the intensely left-wing and intensely intellectual journal founded by Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his associates in 1950s Quebec when the prospects for the Left in Quebec and Canada seemed very thin indeed. Cite Libre was arguably the launch-pad for the so-called Quiet Revolution in Quebec, and the somewhat later "Trudeau revolution" in all of Canada. Mark Wegierski is a Canadian writer and historical researcher. Home The police officer who was shot by a homicide suspect in northwest Roanoke Sunday is recovering and in stable condition, according to a department news release Monday. The department has not identified the injured female officer but has said that its staff are incredibly grateful for the outpouring of support from our community and public safety partners during this difficult time, according to the release. The officer was shot at about 4 p.m. Sunday in the 3000 block of Melrose Avenue Northwest, where officers attempted to make contact with a male homicide suspect, police reported. He produced a firearm and fired it toward the officers, and the parties exchanged multiple shots, according to police. The man was struck by gunfire and pronounced dead at the scene. Police had identified him as a suspect in a fatal stabbing at a residence in the 1600 block of Lawrence Avenue Southeast, according to a department account of what occurred. The Roanoke department said Monday that its detectives are continuing to investigate the stabbing incident, but they are not seeking additional suspects. No additional information about the homicide could be provided Monday, according to the release. Caitlyn Cline, the departments public information official, said the city police would not identify the man who was killed Sunday. Virginia State Police investigate all of our officer-involved shootings. Any information regarding the [officer-involved shooting] will come from them, and that includes the identity of the suspect who is deceased, Cline wrote in an email Monday. Rick Garletts, a state police public information officer, said that the agency will not identify the deceased subject until notifications for the next of kin have been made. We do not release the names of the officers involved, Garletts added in an email Monday. Those come from the agency involved in the shooting, if they choose to release them. As a preteen, Becky Coffman, now 67, took charge of balancing her single mothers checkbook, so it only made sense that when it was time to choose a career, she decided on accounting. That background came in handy in January, when she volunteered to process checks for Roanoke Area Ministries Emergency Financial Assistance Program, which is supported by The Roanoke Times Good Neighbors Fund. Its served me well, she said about her professional background. Coffman downplays her contribution to the charity, saying the job only takes about two and a half hours a week, but to RAMs Executive Director, Melissa Woodson, the assistance is invaluable. She saves me about 20 hours a month so I can do other important things for the RAM House, Woodson said in an e-mail. She is such a joy on our administrative team. I know she has had a lot of struggle in her life, and it is incredible to me how much she gives back to the community. Coffman does admit the work she does makes things easier for Woodson, who used to write the checks herself. Its not that difficult, she said, but you have to be able to focus, and with all of the different hats Woodson wears, it was challenging for her sometimes. It frees her up to do what she needs to do. Shes got a great vision for this place and for where she wants to go, Coffman explained. In writing the checks, I try to think like an auditor, Coffman said. You need everything nice and neat with careful supporting documentation. Everyone here is very conscientious about the contributions that come in, she said. Besides, she added, I enjoy it because Im a nerd. Coffman grew up in Louisiana and moved to the Roanoke Valley in 1997 with her husband and son, in search of a climate that would make dealing with her childs allergies easier. They chose this location, she said, after driving through on a trip back to Louisiana from Maine. We just sold all of our stuff and moved here, she said. In 2005, the family moved to Botetourt County, where Coffman still lives today in an historic home in Fincastle. When she retired in May 2021, Coffman said, volunteering at RAM wasnt on her radar. At first, she had vague ideas of spending most of her time doing outdoorsy activities. I love hiking and walking, she said. She also wanted to help out at Roanokes West End Center, which provides after-school programs for children in that inner-city neighborhood. I love being with kids, she said. Im a sucker for third-graders. After working for 20 years as an accountant, Coffman said, she decided to become a special education teacher instead. I got bored, she said about her accounting career. Its a thankless profession. You only hear back when something is wrong. So West End seemed like a good fit. But Coffman had barely begun working there when her husband, who had been ill for a few years, grew worse. She had step away from that job in the months before he passed away. That trauma was followed by having to deal with another family members illness. With her life seemingly out of her control, I learned a lot about acceptance, Coffman said. In December 2022, Coffman came to Roanoke Area Ministries with a friend to drop off coats for the clothes closet the charity maintains for its homeless clients. I was more familiar with the [Roanoke] Rescue Mission, she said, but she was interested in the work RAM was doing. While she was there, she said, she and Woodson talked for an entire hour, and Coffman agreed to come help out. By that time, she said, things had calmed down. The Good Neighbors Fund was established in 1984 by Walter Rugaber, then-publisher of The Roanoke Times. Its mission is to offer emergency financial assistance to those who need help with rent, utilities or medication when a sudden expense threatens to make them homeless. Applicants dont have to be eligible for government social service programs. They simply have to prove they are in need by providing pay stubs and copies of bills. There is very little red tape involved, and the grants are made as quickly as possible to keep interest and late fees from being added in. Once an application is approved, Coffman writes a check to the utility, the landlord or the drug store. Although she doesnt spend that much time at RAM, being in the building has allowed Coffman to see the workings of the charity and the Good Neighbors Fund up close. They dont waste any money, she said about RAMs staff. If it wasnt for the contributions, it would be hard. She has a special compassion for those who spend time in RAMs day shelter, which offers the homeless a quiet place to get off the streets, a free, hot, meal and access to laundry facilities. Im so impressed with the clients, and with how they handle being unhoused, she said. I dont know if I could cope with that. Meeting them and talking with them brings you closer to humanity. As for those who apply for help from the Emergency Financial Assistance Program, which distributes donations to the Good Neighbors Fund, Coffman quickly found out that many of the recipients are middle- and working-class. They often put in 40 hours a week or more at several jobs and are still unable to make ends meet when something goes wrong. Their pay is so minimal and rents are so high, she explained, that they have to piecemeal everything together. Conditions are especially hard on older people on fixed incomes, she said. They can only squeeze so much out of what theyve got. As a result, many of RAMs clients also experience chronic stress. Its a vicious roller coaster, she said. Coffman is also back working at the West End Center. She said she learned early in her teaching career that as much as shed like to help everyone out of poverty and fix everything that is wrong in the world, theres only so much one person can do. She said she often thinks back on what she described as the best job I ever had. When she was living in Louisiana, she said, her husband was a chef and her job was to drive a truck a few towns over and pick up loads of crayfish for the restaurant. On the way back, she said, other drivers would gesture to her, asking to buy the seafood right then and there. That experience reminded her of how easy it is for people to bond over an informal shared meal. A lot of the worlds problems could be solved around a crawfish boil, she said, wistfully. CHRISTIANSBURG Montgomery County supervisors are moving toward using automatic cameras to crack down on speeding around schools spurred partly by a traffic study conducted by a company that would take a cut of the penalties handed out to speeders. The company, Blue Line Solutions, found that an overwhelming majority of drivers exceeded the speed limit in some county school zones, and said its system could solve the problem. At a meeting last week, each of the six supervisors present said they were in favor of setting up traffic cameras. Chairwoman Sherri Blevins directed county staff to work with the sheriffs office to take the next steps toward implementing a system. Supervisor Todd King echoed several of his colleagues comments, saying, Anything we can do to keep citizens safe, especially in a school zone. Supervisor Sara Bohn was not at the meeting. The camera discussion came during a Monday work session where supervisors reviewed the results of a study that found speeding was common in some county school zones. County Administrator Angie Hill said after the meeting that the study was conducted by Blue Line Solutions, a vendor that she said has been in talks with the county sheriffs office about bringing its camera system to Montgomery County. Assistant County Administrator Brad St. Clair walked supervisors through the results of Blue Lines look at county school zones, which was conducted during five days in November 2022 and included four school zones marked with flashing lights that signal when the speed limit is lowered in mornings and afternoons. The company recorded the number of vehicles that came through the zones during the flashing light periods, and counted those going more than 10 mph above the school zone speed limit. On U.S. 460 near Eastern Montgomery High School, the company found that 98% of afternoon drivers were traveling at least 10 mph faster than allowed, St. Clair said. Among morning drivers, 90% were speeding at least 10 mph above the limit. The situation was similar at Belview Elementary School, where 88% of morning drivers on Peppers Ferry Road were going 10 mph or more too fast. In the afternoons, it was 79% of drivers, according to the companys data. The percentage of speeders was lower at Prices Fork Elementary School, with 19% of morning drivers and 12% in the afternoon hitting the threshold of 10 mph or more too fast. And in the Auburn school zone, the percentage of drivers on Virginia 8 going 10 mph or more above the school zone limit fell to 9%, according to Blue Line Solutions. The total number of drivers counted by the company ranged from 5,914 in the mornings and 5,778 in the afternoons at the Auburn schools down to 1,299 in mornings and 1,772 in the afternoons at Eastern Montgomery High School. In 2020, Virginia authorized localities to set up cameras for traffic enforcement in school and work zones. St. Clair said that he and the sheriffs office had been looking at systems that capture the license tag of vehicles traveling at least 10 mph above the speed limit. A law enforcement officer reviews the footage and if it approved, a summons that imposes a civil penalty of up to $100 is mailed to the vehicles registered owner. The citation does not affect driving records or insurance rates, St. Clair said. The amount of the penalty is set by the local government and the vendor that operates and maintains the system takes a percentage, usually around 25%, St. Clair said. He said that he did not think the sheriffs office would need to add personnel to monitor the citations. On Thursday, Blue Line Solutions spokeswoman Gena Sullivan wrote in an email that there would be no out-of-pocket expense to the county to put the companys system into action. There is no cost. Blue Line Solutions assumes all risk, costs & fees associated with installation, implementation and ongoing support, Sullivan wrote. At the supervisors meeting, St. Clair said that he had limited data on the systems effectiveness but the expectation was that a camera system would generate a large number of penalties at first, but these would fall off quickly as drivers learned about the automatic cameras and slowed down. Signs warning that cameras were in place would be posted in the zones where they are installed, St. Clair said. If an owner receives a citation but says that someone else was driving the vehicle, they can avoid the penalty by completing a sworn affidavit saying who was driving the vehicle when it sped through a school zone, St. Clair said. The company that was talking to the county claimed that it installed school zone cameras in three areas in Wythe County and that the number of drivers going 10 mph or more above the speed limit fell from almost 4,000 to 165, St. Clair said. Chatham County, Georgia, had a 91% reduction in violations in a three-month period, and Montgomery County, Maryland, had a 59% drop in drivers going 10 mph or more too fast and 19% fewer crashes involving serious injuries or deaths, St. Clair said, citing information from the same vendor. Supervisors said that they liked the numbers. And Supervisor April DeMotts said that she was impressed by the vendors sales skills. Of the cameras, DeMotts said, I do think it retrains bad behavior. How quickly can we do this? When can we start? Hill said after the meeting that it remains to be determined whether the county needs to ask for bids for a camera system or if theres an existing statewide contract for camera systems that the county could use. When was the last time you went for a jog? How about the last time you did some aerobics? Statistics show it might have been a while. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 28% of Americans meet its recommended guidelines for physical activity. Heres a question: What are you doing to look and feel younger? Some people will do anything to retain that youthful appearance. Theyll spend thousands on plastic surgery or expensive skin or hair loss treatments. But theres one method that has proven capable of rejuvenating your mind and body, and it neednt cost much at all. To get fit and feel young, few strategies are as effective as physical exercise. How Exercise Turns Back the Clock When it comes to staying young, there are numerous things you could be doing. Eating well and drinking plenty of water are important. You can find an effective anti-aging treatment online that can help reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. Getting the recommended seven or more hours of sleep each night will improve everything from your cognition to your complexion. But none of these trumps exercise. So what exactly makes physical activity so crucial to making people look and feel younger? When youre working out your muscles via strength training, they break down and repair, burning calories in the process and boosting your metabolism. Cardio raises your energy levels, increases bone strength, reduces stress, and promotes better balance, decreasing the risk of falls. Yoga likewise improves balance and lowers stress levels, and it can even combat sagging skin. Read on to learn more about various fitness routines that can help you be the most youthful version of yourself. Strength Training Exercises Push-Ups/Pull-Ups These exercises may remind you of middle school gym class, but push-ups and pull-ups are great at strengthening arm and back muscles. Tensing your abdominal muscles while doing push-ups serves to strengthen your core. Like any physical activity, start by doing what youre comfortable with, then intensify your workouts. Lunges Walking lunges work to strengthen your leg muscles while developing your core and balance. You can do these standing in place or alternate legs as you do them. Adding dumbbells or a kettlebell incorporates an upper body element into a lunge workout. Deadlifts Begin deadlifts simply doing the motion without weights. Progress by bringing in weights such as a kettlebell or barbell. Lifting with the right posture helps strengthen your back muscles. Do five reps and break, increasing weight as possible. Strength and resistance exercises are excellent ways to achieve the muscle tone and balance of a much younger person. Cardio Exercises Jumping Jacks Its a basic exercise, but jumping jacks are great for getting your heart rate up. By increasing your heart rate, your body sends oxygen-bearing blood to your muscles more efficiently. In turn, your body expends more calories and reduces your cholesterol. Try doing 20 jumping jacks at a time to begin a good cardio workout. Walking/Jogging A simple approach to getting your heart rate up is to take a brisk walk or go jogging. Not only is it good for your heart, but it works out various muscle groups and strengthens bones. The faster you walk or jog, the greater the benefit for your body, so challenge yourself and get moving! Dancing A fun way to recapture your youth is dancing. Increasing your heart rate is just one benefit of dance exercise. Studies have found that dance improves everything from balance and gait to cognitive processing in aging adults. So find a local dance class to join and get busy burning calories and improving your mind. Yoga Exercises Downward Dog Yoga can have amazing health benefits that can make your body and mind feel younger. This particular pose inverts your body to face down in a V-shape. Not only is it good at stretching your muscles, the downward dog pose lets blood flow to your face. This helps in delivering nutrients to your skin and giving it a youthful glow. Cobra Pose Lying on your stomach with your arms at your sides and legs extended, slowly raise your torso. The cobra pose strengthens your core muscles and tones your glutes. If youre experiencing lower back pain, this pose can also work to alleviate that discomfort. Mountain Pose This yoga pose feels much like youre simply standing. That doesnt mean the mountain pose is void of benefits, however. By standing, pressing into the four corners of your feet, and rolling your shoulders, youre working various key muscle groups. Along with other yoga poses, the mountain pose promotes healthy breathing, which can reduce anxiety. HIIT Exercises High intensity interval training, also known as HIIT, is a great way to feel younger. Studies show HIIT can boost your metabolism for up to 48 hours, helping to burn fat and calories post-workout. Effective HIIT workouts include sprinting, plyometrics, and circuit training. High-intensity yoga is also beneficial in increasing mobility and giving you energy. There are countless methods you can use to reverse aging. But the multiple benefits of regular exercise cant be denied. If youre not regularly active, consider some of these workouts to get in a place of feeling better and younger. Start slow and do what your body can handle. Then ramp up each week as you settle into a good fitness routine. Find a good balance of cardio and strength training to develop different muscle groups. Youll find over time that both your body and mind will be more energized and full of youth. Lee Enterprises newsroom and editorial were not involved in the creation of this content. MULLINS, S.C. Mullins Police Department Lt. Justin Turner is teaching students how to lead. Turner is working with the Law Enforcement Against Drugs & Violence to Teach the programs curriculum in the classroom. Turner instructs fifth graders at McCormick Elementary School on the Harms of drugs and violence. He was trained by L.E.A.D., a nationwide nonprofit that works with communities to help students. Turner works during the day with students in Mullins on why avoiding drugs and violence is vital as well as teach them how to set attainable goals, manage their emotions and make wise decisions. Were thrilled that our program is growing throughout South Carolina, and we know that Lt. Turner will do an excellent job helping us to continue achieving our goal of strengthening police-community relationships. Were pleased to welcome him into our family, L.E.A.D. official Nick DeMauro said. We look forward to seeing the positive changes that will ensue among the fifth graders in Mullins, given that L.E.A.D. not only teaches students how partaking in alcohol, drugs and violence can negatively impact their lives, but it helps them to build skills surrounding effective communication, conflict resolution and social and emotional competency, for example, as well. The 10-week program is something Turner is ready to teach. Its exciting to partner with the Marion County School District to implement a top-notch program on drug and violence prevention into McCormick Elementary School, Turner said. A strong curriculum that teaches kids why its critical to steer clear of alcohol, drugs and violence is needed today more than ever, so Im thrilled that were working with the school district and have decided on teaching the L.E.A.D. program to fifth grade students in Mullins. Turner said students will learn about the significance of goal setting and making good decisions. The way that L.E.A.D. is set up will make it simple for them to understand how becoming involved in dangerous matters would get in the way of achieving their goals and making intelligent decisions, so Im certain that the program will be successful in preventing our fifth graders from doing so. Turner said he looks forward to gaining trust from the children that hell be instructing, which he hopes will prevent crime and acts of violence in the Mullins community. Im grateful that I have the chance to teach the L.E.A.D. program as it will enable me to closely interact with some of the students at McCormick Elementary School, which I wouldnt normally have the opportunity to do, he said. Having the ability to instruct the schools fifth graders on such a vital subject matter will allow them to see me in a role that Im not normally in, one that I hope will make them realize that Im a person theyll be able to rely on and trust for the rest of their school careers and beyond. I feel confident that forming a level of trust that may not have been present between the school children and our police officers will contribute to a stronger, safer community in Mullins with less misdemeanors. Residents of HDB flats may soon be able to own up to two pet cats per household. (PHOTO: Getty) (Isabel Alcala via Getty Images) SINGAPORE Each Housing and Development Board (HDB) household may soon be able to own up to two pet cats, while residents of private premises can keep a combination of up to three cats or dogs under a proposed cat management framework announced by the Animal & Veterinary Service (AVS) on Saturday (2 December). The proposed framework, which aims to improve the management and welfare of cats, was developed following reviews from a public survey launched in September 2022 that garnered over 30,000 responses, and focus group discussions with stakeholders including cat owners and non-cat owners in 2023. AVS is currently seeking views on the proposed cat management framework via an online survey. Included in the proposed framework is a mandatory licensing and microchipping scheme to improve the welfare and traceability of pet cats. Licensing conditions include requiring all new pet cat licence applicants to complete a free online responsible pet ownership course. A two-year transition period was proposed to allow pet owners sufficient time to meet the licensing conditions, after which pet cat licensing conditions and cat ownership limits will kick in. In addition, the framework also proposed a Trap-Neuter-Rehome/Release-Manage (TNRM) programme for community cats. Currently, the programme is only for free-roaming dogs. The framework also included new education and outreach efforts on responsible pet cat ownership and community cat caregiving. Current rules on HDB cat ownership Currently, HDB residents are not allowed to own pet cats, and offenders may be fined up to S$4,000 if found to have a pet cat in their flat under the HDB rules. However, it is not actively enforced action is taken only on owners whose pet cats cause nuisance to the public. Story continues The public can now share feedback on the proposed framework through an online survey. The online survey will be open until 1 February 2024. AVS added that it would review the feedback received once the survey has concluded and will further refine the framework where needed before launching the finalised framework in the later part of 2024. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. When you turn 65, you start receiving your monthly retirement payouts. But before that, you can actually start withdrawing money from your CPF account when you turn 55. (PHOTO: REUTERS/Edgar Su) (Edgar Su / reuters) SINGAPORE The Central Provident Fund (CPF) helps working Singaporeans and Singapore permanent residents set aside funds for retirement. Contributions to CPF are split into three accounts: - Ordinary Account (OA) which can be used for housing, insurance, investment, and education. - Special Account (SA) which is for retirement savings and retirement-related investment. - MediSave Account (MA) which can be used for healthcare expenses. When you turn 65, you start receiving your monthly retirement payouts. But before that, you can actually start withdrawing money from your CPF account when you turn 55. When can you withdraw money from your CPF account? Here's what happens when you turn 55: Your Retirement Account (RA) is automatically created, and savings from your SA, followed by OA, are transferred to make up your retirement savings called Full Retirement Sum (FRS). The FRS is adjusted by the CPF Board annually and will depend on the year you turn 55 and is fixed for the rest of your life. For example, for those turning 55 in 2023, the FRS is S$198,800 and will remain at that amount. If you have friends who are a few years younger or older than you, chances are, your FRS will not be the same as theirs. You will be able to make CPF withdrawals from your OA and SA, and in some cases, even your RA. The total sum you're eligible to withdraw at 55 years old depends on a few criteria. How much can you withdraw from your CPF at 55 and 65? At 55, for anyone born in 1958 or after, you can withdraw up to S$5,000 unconditionally from your CPF savings. This amount will be withdrawn from your OA and SA. If you already have your FRS in your RA, you are also eligible to withdraw any remaining savings you have in your OA and SA. If you own a property with a lease that lasts until you are 95, you have more flexibility and can also withdraw from your RA as long as you maintain half of your FRS, which essentially makes up your Basic Retirement Sum (BRS). For those turning 55 in 2023, the BRS is S$99,400. Story continues At 65, for anyone born in 1958 or after, you will start receiving your monthly payouts and can withdraw an additional 20 per cent of your retirement savings, excluding the S$5,000 you are eligible to withdraw at 55. Note that the CPF Board implemented a default online CPF withdrawal limit of S$2,000 a day for those aged 55 and above, effective 30 November 2023. This was introduced as a precaution to prevent fraudulent withdrawals online. This default daily withdrawal limit can be adjusted to any amount online any time, subject to Singpass Face Verification and a 12-hour cooling period to prevent unauthorised adjustments. How do you withdraw money from your CPF account? To make a CPF withdrawal, use Singpass to log into your account and access CPF online services. Once logged in, look for "Retirement" under "my cpf". Click "Withdraw for immediate retirement needs" and select "Withdraw savings". From here, you will be asked to enter the withdrawal amount and to select payment details. Sending funds to a PayNow NRIC-linked bank account is almost instant, while sending funds to other bank accounts may take up to five working days. Can you withdraw from your CPF account before 55? You are not allowed to make withdrawals before turning 55. However, you can apply to withdraw your CPF savings earlier if you have a medical condition that reduces your life expectancy, or causes you to be permanently unfit for work or lack mental capacity permanently. Are CPF withdrawals taxable? The CPF savings you withdraw at age 55 and above are not taxable. However, any unpaid taxes or MediShield Life premiums may be deducted from your CPF savings. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. SIOUX CENTER, Iowa Activation Church, displaced from its former worship space this past week by a fire at an Orange City venue, saw one of our largest crowds ever Sunday morning in Sioux Center, pastor Michael De Jong said. The church, formed in the Sioux Center home of Michael and Jenna De Jong in 2020, had hosted weekly services at The Triple Box, a popular events space outside Orange City, since Reformation Day (Oct. 31) 2021. Before that, De Jong said, we were preaching in fields and barns and you name it. In the early morning hours Thursday, law enforcement arrived at the home of Justin and Vicki Schrock. The Triple Box, which they operated on an acreage south of Orange City, was on fire. Burned to the ground, its a complete loss, Schrock told The Journal. On a typical Sunday, Activation Church attracts 100 to 150 worshippers; De Jong said the church has an orbit of 200 to 300 people. The church had, in effect, three days to find a place if services were to be held Sunday. And the church found a place, roughly the same size as The Triple Box, at the House of Missions + Equipping, which De Jong described as a house of prayer at 101 19th St. SE, Sioux Center. Honestly, we had one of our largest crowds ever this Sunday morning, De Jong said. And we had about 10 to 12 college students receive Christ today for the first time. At present, the church has no definite plans for a future space, though De Jong said that in the next few weeks a plan should be taking form. Were in prayer. Were, this week, just really kind of praying about that direction, whether were going to be renting a space or we have had thoughts of purchasing a building as well, De Jong said. So were just truly leaning in this week, for direction from the Lord. The future of The Triple Box is similarly unsettled. During the course of a year, the venue typically hosts roughly 145 events, on average four a week or so weddings, reunions, company events and the like, Schrock said. After the fire, the family had to notify quite a lot of people that their scheduled events couldnt go on at The Triple Box as planned. We were about 85 percent booked for 2024, Schrock said. The State Fire Marshal examined the wreckage Friday, Schrock said; an electrical malfunction is suspected of being the culprit, though thats not certain. The Schrocks are meeting with their insurance agent Monday; how that pans out might play a role in determining next steps, and Schrock said he wants to see how the buildings cement foundation fared. Were not afraid to rebuild. Were just going to have to wait and see, Schrock said. Like a lot of people in the world, we might have been underinsured. The Triple Box was formed about seven years ago, when the Schrock family completely retrofitted an existing, 162-foot-by-48-foot cattle shed on their acreage for an events center, complete with a licensed catering kitchen and bar. I always joked, since I have five daughters and one son, that Id be money ahead if we had an events center, Schrock said. Many of the decor pieces in The Triple Box were special things, Schrock said the kinds of things that are difficult to replace. (Everything had a story, as he put it.) Their bar was an old checkout counter from a downtown Orange City clothing store, believed to date back to the 1920s. Theres nothing salvageable, its crazy, Schrock said. IDA GROVE, Iowa An Ida Grove woman has been arrested and charged with the death of her 3-year-old son in May. Billie Mosier, 23, is charged with one count of child endangerment resulting in death, a Class B felony that carries a 25-year prison sentence. Mosier turned herself in on Thursday and was released from custody after posting a $25,000 bond. Her initial appearance is scheduled for Thursday. On May 4, Mosier called 911 for first responders to come to her home in Battle Creek because her son, Jordan Reed, was unresponsive. The child was transported to Horn Memorial Hospital in Ida Grove and then to Children's Hospital in Omaha. He was pronounced dead on May 5, and an autopsy was performed the following day by the Iowa State Medical Examiner's office. The Ida County Sheriff's Office and Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation launched an investigation into Jordan's death. According to a complaint filed in Ida County District Court, Mosier told investigators she had driven home, found Jordan slumped over in his car seat when she arrived and believed he had fallen asleep and strangled on the chest strap of his car seat. The autopsy concluded Jordan died of strangulation, but his injuries were not consistent with Mosier's explanation. In a September interview, Mosier admitted she had found Jordan hanging from the rear driver's side window, the complaint said, and witnesses had reported seeing Jordan with his head or upper body out the same window during Mosier's drive home from Ida Grove to Battle Creek. Witnesses and videos found on Mosier's phone revealed she regularly left Jordan unsecured while driving. SAC CITY, Iowa The Louisiana-based nonprofit group that has been searching for missing Wall Lake, Iowa truck driver David Schultz said Sunday night they "may have exhausted any potential search locations in the area." In a Facebook post, the United Cajun Navy said they also have started raising funds for a reward to help locate Schultz, 53, who vanished two days before Thanksgiving. A married father of 10-year-old twin boys, Schultz was last heard from in the early morning hours Nov. 21, according to the Lake View Police Department. He was scheduled to pick up a load of baby pigs at a confinement near Eagle Grove, Iowa, and deliver them to a farm near Sac City. His semi-trailer truck was found the afternoon of Nov. 21 northeast of Sac City, parked on northbound U.S. Highway 71, near its intersection with U.S. Highway 20. The truck was reportedly turned off, but it wasn't pulled completely off the side of the road. The pigs also were still in the trailer. More than 100,000 acres in the vicinity of his route have been searched, according to a United Cajun Navy Facebook post Sunday. The search began in Sac County and was later expanded to Calhoun, Webster and Wright counties since his disappearance two weeks ago. Hundreds of volunteers have turned out, with many bringing along horses or all-terrain vehicles to cover more ground. "Searches may resume as early as Wednesday, but we need a few days to step back and find any information and work with law enforcement to find any more designated search areas," United Cajun Navy Midwest team leader Jake Rowley said in the Facebook post Sunday night. Rowley said the group has started working with a local bank and other local businesses to "try to put together as substantial of a reward fund as possible to try and bring new information to David's disappearance." The campaign is called "Make Them Squeal," a name suggested by Schultz's wife, Sarah. Multiple law enforcement agencies have been involved in the investigation into David Schultz's disappearance, including the Sac County Sheriff's Office, the Lake View Police Department and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. David Prichard, center, flanked by Glenn Deadmann, left, and David Montpas, talks Monday, Dec. 4, 2023, outside the Bexar County Courthouse in San Antonio about a lawsuit he filed on behalf of Fermin Rajunov's Southside Affordable Development LLC against Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America Inc. and the city of San Antonio challenging a restriction that largely prohibits development within three miles of Toyota's South Side plant. William Luther Toyota opened its plant on San Antonio's South Side in 2006. Courtesy of Google Earth David Prichard talks Monday, Dec. 4, 2023, outside the Bexar County Courthouse in San Antonio about a lawsuit he filed on behalf of Fermin Rajunov's Southside Affordable Development LLC against Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America Inc. and the city of San Antonio challenging a restriction that largely prohibits development within three miles of Toyota's South Side plant. William Luther A physical copy of a lawsuit filed on behalf of Fermin Rajunov's Southside Affordable Development LLC against Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America Inc. and the city of San Antonio challenging a restriction that largely prohibits development within three miles of Toyota's South Side plant is seen Monday, Dec. 4, 2023, during a press conference outside the Bexar County Courthouse in San Antonio. William Luther Employees work on the assembly lines at Toyota's manufacturing plant in San Antonio. Toyota Texas/TNS A 2022 Tundra is driven around the factory floor at Toyota's San Antonio plant. The facility manufactures Tundra and Sequoia vehicles. Sam Owens/San Antonio Express-News David Prichard, center, flanked by Glenn Deadmann, left, and David Montpas, talks Monday, Dec. 4, 2023, outside the Bexar County Courthouse in San Antonio about a lawsuit he filed on behalf of Fermin Rajunov's Southside Affordable Development LLC against Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America Inc. and the city of San Antonio challenging a restriction that largely prohibits development within three miles of Toyota's South Side plant. William Luther Back in 2003, the city of San Antonio entered into a contract with Toyota Motor Corp. as part of an effort to persuade the automaker to locate a massive plant on the South Side. Known as the Starbright agreement, it created a 3-mile buffer zone around the plant site to discourage residential development and other uses Toyota considered incompatible with an auto manufacturing facility. Fast forward 20 years, and the owner of a nearly 100-acre tract within the buffer zone near Texas 16 and Watson Road wants to sell about 34 acres to a multifamily residential developer for construction of more than 700 affordable apartments. But the city denied Southside Affordable Development LLCs request to rezone the property for multifamily residential. Advertisement Article continues below this ad On Monday, Southside sued the city and Toyota Motor Manufacturing North America LLC, alleging they entered into an unconstitutional contract zoning that gives the manufacturer veto power over proposed developments within the buffer zone also known as the Enhanced Zoning Area. The city had no business abdicating its zoning authority to Toyota to give Toyota a say, David Prichard, a San Antonio attorney representing Southside, said Monday morning at a news conference outside the Bexar County Courthouse. Thats the citys responsibility, not Toyotas. Prichard also said the city illegally ceded its governmental authority to appease a corporate sacred cow that controls elected officials and threatens to either relocate or to not expand its manufacturing presence if multifamily development occurs within the buffer zone. The citys decision comes as residents are grappling with a housing shortage and higher rents and prices, Prichard added. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Southside wants a court to declare the zoning agreement unconstitutional (under the Texas Constitution), void and unenforceable, along with ordinances that changed the zoning of the property first to mixed light industrial use and then to commercial use only. A spokesperson for Toyota declined to comment. City Attorney Andy Segovia said the city had not been served with the lawsuit as of early Monday afternoon. Inflammatory rhetoric does not substitute for facts and sound legal arguments. There have been many zoning cases in the area surrounding the Toyota facility. Some have been approved and some have not, but always with consideration of factors allowed under zoning laws, Segovia said in a statement. We will defend the lawsuit and rely on the facts rather than hyperbole and misinformation. The suit was filed in state District Court in San Antonio. Unconscionable Advertisement Article continues below this ad A lots at stake for Southside. The developer has the 34 acres under contract to San Antonios Louis Poppoon Development & Consulting Ltd. for a price of up to $15 million, the lawsuit says. If the property remains zoned for commercial use only, Southside says its value tumbles to as little as $3 million a decline of as much as 80%. This fall, the suit says, the city rebuffed Southside and Poppoons efforts to rezone the property to allow for development of the apartments. That left Southside principal Fermin Rajunov bewildered. It is unconscionable that COSA and Toyota would continue to hold developers hostage and kill affordable housing at a time when more than 250,000 residents are on a waiting list, he said in a statement. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Rajunov previously got the green light from the city for zoning for single-family homes adjacent to where the apartments would be built, Prichard said. About 500 houses have been constructed, and an additional 700 are slated to be built on 432 acres at Texas 16 and Watson as part of The Preserve at Medina master-planned community. Rajunov is convinced that Toyota played a role in nixing the rezoning for the apartments, though the company was not explicitly mentioned in the citys rejection. When city officials hashed out the Starbright agreement with Toyota, they said the buffer would discourage inappropriate land uses near the plant and allow the company to expand its operations in the future. Toyota executives also expressed concerns about security and complaints from residents about noise, light, smells and traffic if houses were to spring up near the plant. Recent plans for the area describe a smaller zone. A draft of the citys land use plan for the area around Texas A&M University-San Antonio states that only nonresidential developments are appropriate within 2 miles of Toyotas plant and that the city will not support residential projects there. Outside that radius, in the citys extraterritorial jurisdiction, residential development with the appropriate amenities and supporting infrastructure may be appropriate. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Toyotas fingerprints Southsides lawsuit includes as an exhibit a June 28 email Rajunov received from Manny Pelaez, city councilman for District 8 and an attorney who served as Toyotas senior counsel as it proceeded with plans for the auto plant 20 years ago. I was in the room when COSA teams and Toyota teams promised each other to never let that (buffer) line move without giving Toyota the ability to veto, Pelaez wrote. Toyota extracted a promise from COSA to never move the line without their consent. This was made with the sometime implied and sometimes explicit threat of never expanding the plant. Pelaez also wrote that Toyota officials had gotten complaints about smells from people residing near its other manufacturing plants and wanted to avoid similar problems in San Antonio. But he then said to Rajunov, "We discovered that the prevailing winds never blew towards your property." Near the end of the email, Pelaez said he wondered if Southsides failed rezoning efforts amounted to an unconstitutional taking of the property. Maybe. Probably, Pelaez said, answering his own question. But what is not up for debate is that it was a very cynical move to keep you and others from maximizing the best use of your property. Im sad to say that the reasons that COSA has given over the past 20 years for not moving that line are, at best, pretextual. Im not surprised that this has finally come to a head. This isnt the first time the city has faced litigation over building restrictions in the area. Earlier disputes A year before the $800 million plant began operating in 2006, the city and Bexar County created the City South Management Authority to guide development in a 63-square-mile area bounded roughly by Interstate 35 to the west, Loop 410 to the north, Interstate 37 to the east and Loop 1604 to the south placing more restrictions on what could be built in the area. Landowners protested the Toyota buffer and City South, arguing the city was infringing on their right to develop their property as they wished and forcing them to pay the price for the citys promises to Toyota. Ernest and Jesus Chacon, brothers who own 212 acres on or near West Jett Road, and some other property owners sued the city and the authority in 2008 to recover more than $4 million for the loss in value of land that they said was caused by the buffer zone. The Chacon brothers wanted to sell their land to pay for their retirement, but a lack of flexible zoning made it far less attractive to potential buyers, they said. A federal judge largely dismissed their claims in 2010. The heirs of barbecue entrepreneur and restaurateur Bill Miller also were concerned about the buffer zone impeding development of their property, which included more than 600 acres near the Toyota plant. The ranch land once had been their familys farm. They wanted to build residential subdivisions and other projects on part of the land for employees at Toyota and other nearby businesses But then-Mayor Ed Garza worried that the property was within the buffer zone and would affect Toyotas decision-making on whether to expand its plant in the future. City officials ultimately conceded that the Miller family had the vested property rights to build the houses, but their rights to construct the projects expired in 2007. A potential land swap with the city did not pan out. They sold the property in 2021 to a company affiliated with former Austin technology executive J.R. Carter, which plans to build a solar farm. In an embarrassing gaffe in 2008, then-Councilman Philip Cortez pushed through a zoning change that would have allowed the construction of houses within the buffer zone. Toyota executives objected, Cortez backtracked and said he was not aware that the zoning proposal would violate the citys agreement with Toyota, and the change was reversed. The city dissolved the authority in 2014. It has since annexed thousands of acres on the South Side. South Side evolution At the time Toyota opened its roughly 2,000-acre campus, the South Side was largely rural. There are still swaths of undeveloped land, but that acreage is shrinking as builders erect thousands of single-family homes and apartments along with stores and restaurants. Development on the South Side has accelerated in recent years in part because of the areas swelling workforce and because theres more and less expensive land, compared with other parts of the city. Major employers, besides Toyota and its surrounding suppliers, include heavy truck-maker Navistar, Texas A&M University-San Antonio, TJX Cos., and manufacturers and other businesses at Brooks. JCB, a manufacturer of construction and agricultural equipment, plans to begin work on a plant early next year. Prices are lower, another factor drawing more families to the South Side at a time when housing costs are climbing. Residents of Poppoons proposed apartments would save an average of $6,000 a year in rent compared with what they would pay for market rate apartments, or the equivalent of a $3-an-hour raise, according to the lawsuit. That could be attractive to workers at Toyota and other nearby manufacturing facilities. CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa A Rock Rapids, Iowa, man has pleaded guilty in federal court of manipulating weights of hogs in order to defraud producers. Robert Bickerstaff, 52, entered his plea Friday in U.S. District Court in Cedar Rapids to one count of wire fraud. He faces a possible maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000. A sentencing date has not been set. Bickerstaff was a regional manager for an Iowa livestock dealer from 2018 to 2021 and oversaw livestock buying stations in Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota and also counted, classified and weighed hogs at the stations periodically. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Bickerstaff personally or directed others to fraudulently lower the weights, numbers and classifications of hogs producers had delivered to the dealer's buying stations. He also manipulated hog weights manually or by using a crowbar, paddle or other object to defeat the electronic scales on which the hogs were weighed and created fraudulent "sort sheets" and scale tickets for producers' hogs for transmission to the dealer's headquarters. After becoming concerned about a potential investigation in 2021, Bickerstaff, a pork producer who in 2022 won an award from a statewide pork producers' association for his role promoting pork, had others destroy records with his name on them. SIOUX CITY -- An early morning Monday shooting sent a man to the hospital, then to jail. At 2:35 a.m. Monday, police were dispatched to an apartment building at 17th and Nebraska Street for a report of shots fired. When officers arrived, they found Wesley John Moniz, 30, with a single gunshot wound to his arm. Moniz was transported to a local hospital for minor injuries. Officers discovered evidence of a shooting at the scene. According to a news release, Moniz wasn't cooperating with investigators, refusing to say how or why he was shot. Police discovered Moniz had a warrant for a probation violation. After he was treated for his injuries, he was arrested and transported to the Woodbury County Jail. SIOUX CITY -- Police are looking for a suspect involved in a homicide that took place in Sioux City late Sunday night. At around 11:58 p.m. Sunday, police were alert to an incident on the 500 block of Ninth St. Officers arrived on the scene and located a man suffering a single gunshot wound. The victim was pronounced dead at the scene. Investigators conducted a canvas of the area, locating evidence of the shooting. The incident appears to be a targeted incident through the general public is not believed to be in any danger. Anyone with information in the incident can call the Sioux City Police Department at 712-279-6440 or anonymously at 712-258-TIPS (8477). When Hayao Miyazakis last feature film, The Wind Rises, was released 10 years ago, that movie, the fictionalized story of a real-life aviation pioneer whose designs were used by the Japanese military to deadly success, was hailed as an appropriately somber farewell for the then-73-year-old filmmaker. Miyazakis own company, the legendary animation house Studio Ghibli, announced the masters retirement at the films premiere, in full awareness that similar vows had for years been made later to be rescinded; every film since Princess Mononoke in 1997 has been rumored, if not outright declared, to be the last to issue straight from Miyazakis fertile brain and pen. But the imagination that generated such enduring characters as the benevolent forest spirit Totoro, the indomitable fish-turned-girl Ponyo, and the fear-conquering young heroines of movies like Spirited Away and Kikis Delivery Service is not an easy force to control. By 2016, Miyazaki was at work on another project, described by a studio spokesperson as his most autobiographical to date. The work advanced slowly thanks to the masters insistence on using hand-drawn 2D animation for every frame (working with a team of about 60 co-illustrators), and was later delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The story of the new film also underwent a change in focus in 2018 when Miyazakis longtime friend and mentor Isao Takahata, the animator with whom he co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985, died at the age of 82. An homage to Takahata is visible in The Boy and the Herons far-from-kid-friendly opening sequence, as 12-year-old Mahito awakes to the sound of air-raid sirens. Its 1943, and an Allied bombing has set the local hospital on fire with Mahitos mother inside. While it wasnt clear to me, at least from the English subtitles, whether his mother works at the hospital or is a patient there, the image of a mother stranded in a faraway institution is a recurring theme in Miyazakis filmography, one he has said is based on the childhood experience of his mothers lingering but ultimately not fatal illness. In a terrifying scene reminiscent of Takahatas World War IIset 1988 masterpiece The Grave of the Fireflies, the boy races through the burning streets of Tokyothe old Tokyo of low-slung traditional houses and narrow streets, about to be changed forever by warbut by the time he reaches the hospital, the building has collapsed, killing his mother. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement A year passes, and the fiercely private Mahito, still in deep mourning, is unwillingly relocated to the country with his father, an emotionally closed-off munitions manufacturer, and his new stepmother Natsuko, who is the younger sister of his lost mother. Though their new house in the woods has the isolated feel of a fairy-tale castle, Natsuko is far from an evil stepmother: She seeks a connection with her new charge and is anxious to make him feel like an older sibling to the baby shes now carrying. But he regards her presence as an imposition and finds her solicitude overbearing. The school he enrolls at is also a disaster. After Mahito is bullied the first day, he responds with an act of startling self-destructiveness (young kids in the audience might struggle once again with the violence of this brief but haunting scene). Advertisement On Mahitos lonely walks around the family property, he notices a gray heron that at times seems to be following him, and at others to be deliberately pestering him, perching outside his bedroom window issuing ungodly screeches before suddenly flying off. The bird is not exactly friendly, yet it seems intent on establishing contact with the boy. The reason for that will become clear soon enough, when the elegant waterfowl transforms into a far-from-elegant man-bird hybrid with a warty humanoid head that peers up disturbingly out of the birds throat, essentially wearing the open beak as a hoodie. Its a tribute to this movies thoroughgoing commitment to unexplained dream logic that the guy-inside-a-bird-head creature comes to seem like an all but standard-issue sidekick after only a few scenes of his and Mahitos adventures. Together they explore an abandoned tower on the property that once belonged to Mahitos late great-uncle, a local eccentric and reputed sorcerer who was said to have gone mad after reading too many books. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement What happens once the boy and the bird begin to unveil the secrets of that crumbling tower is best left for the reader to discover, not least because the writer is not sure she entirely understood it. It can at least be said that there are multiple discrete worlds, both physical and metaphysical, to be passed through before Mahito can accomplish what he has been sent to the tower to do. Among the life forms Mahito will encounter are adorable floating bubble-spirits known as the warawara, a young girl who joins the boy and the bird on their quest, and a marauding tribe of what are described briefly but accurately in my viewing notes as fascist parrots. The stories that interweave in the movies long, dreamy middle section play out sometimes as political allegories (those goose-stepping parrots!) and sometimes as psychological riddles. Symbolic decisions in the tower-world, its suggested, could have dire material consequences back in Mahitos everyday reality. But how to move back and forth between ordinary life and the magical shadow-world, and whether its worth the effort to learn to manage the boundary between those realms, become the problems the young hero must solve. Its in its most dreamlike and least logical stretches (which are also, by no accident, its most dazzlingly animated, with a plangent piano-based score by Joe Hisaishi) that Miyazakis film feels most autobiographical. An inner life like his, densely packed as it is with imaginary critters and alternative worlds, must have been tough terrain to navigate as an early adolescent growing up in a time of war and violent upheaval. Though the film never sets itself up as an artists coming-of-age storyMahitos quest has to do with the need to get past his paralyzing grief, not with his self-invention as a future creatorThe Boy and the Heron cant help but feel like a work of introspection on the directors part. Its a film about finding both the courage to accept the often unbearable circumstances life places us in and the internal freedom to imagine other circumstances and other possible lives. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Related From Slate Is Natalie Portman a Bad Actress, or Is She Just a Master of Playing One? Read More The Boy and the Heron may not have moved me emotionally as much as some of Miyazakis earlier classics, but it left me intellectually and aesthetically dazzled, and profoundly grateful for this late-life glimpse into the autobiography of one of films great living artists. And while I dont predict that it will become a film Ill want to watch again countless times, the way I have the much gentler My Neighbor Totoro, it may not be fair to measure every Miyazaki film against the one I once helped select as the first full-length movie my daughter would ever watchand one that, for several years afterward, became almost the only one she wanted to see. (At age 17, she still places it among her all-time favorite films.) Advertisement The straightforward English-language title The Boy and the Heron suits this films yearning, contemplative tone far less than the original Japanese title, which translates as How Do You Live? That phrase was taken from the title of a 1937 novel for boys that Miyazaki recalls reading in his youtha book that appears at one point in The Boy and the Heron, though the films storyline has nothing to do with the novels plot. In a New York Times interview from 2021, asked what his own answer was to the question of the title, Miyazaki replied, I am making this movie because I do not have the answer. For his entire career, going on six decades now, Miyazaki has been one of the few living filmmakers in any genre whose movies persistently leave the viewer asking that very question: Like venerable folk tales or fairy tales, they enchant us with fantastical visions while posing moral conundrums that are far from simple to solve. If Miyazaki has more movies in him left to makea possibility that his fans should know by now never to rule outits unlikely he will ever make one that couldnt take its title from that unanswerable, endlessly tantalizing question. There is a revolution taking place in public schools across the United States. More precisely, it is a counter-revolution, the aim of which is to initiate minor children into the hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation that have long structured American life. Part of the strategy of this counter-revolution is to offer students a distorted vision of Americas past. Floridas recently updated social studies curriculum, which now includes the slightly surreal claim that enslaved Black Americans benefited from slavery, is a case in point. Yet to focus on factual distortions or telling omissions is to miss the broader goal of Republican education reform, which is to introduce minor children to the performative cruelty and taste for dominance that have become central to the contemporary Republican Party. If Trumpist politics are driven by a resentful nostalgia for the status hierarchies of old, the rights current fixation on minor children is an attempt to preserve these hierarchies for future generations. For these hierarchies to persist, children must be taught their place within them. Consider, for example, Republican objections to social emotional learning, an approach to education that emphasizes empathy and cooperation. As proponents of SEL have argued, social emotional competence is not only good for children, it is essential to a pluralistic democracy, which ultimately cannot survive without a citizenry capable of considering a diverse range of experiences and viewpoints. To leading right-wing activists like Christopher Rufo, however, SEL is a radical pedagogy that seeks to soften children at an emotional level. The fear that children will become softthat is, empathetic and cooperativelikely helps to explain why Florida has banned not only SEL but also AP African American History and AP Psychology. Teaching straight students or white students to consider how race, gender, and sexual orientation shape ones experience might lead some to reflect on the lives of their nonstraight, nonwhite peers, which in turn may lead to deeper questions about the justness of a social and political system that makes these characteristics so determinative of life outcome. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Much of this is performative, but it is part of a broader politics of dehumanization centered around children. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, was a relatively unknown candidate until his campaign garnered international headlines after releasing a disturbing campaign ad in which he teaches his 1-year-old daughter to build the wall with stacking blocks. Of course, it is LGBTQ+ youth who are the targets of the Republican Partys most intensely felt disgust, particularly in DeSantis home state. Florida students at all grade levels are now banned from learning about or discussing sexual orientation and gender identity, and many other states are following suit. Floridas all-out campaign against LGBTQ+ youth has led, predictably, to an increase in bullying and harassment targeting LGBTQ+ students. Yet even as hate crimes targeting the LGBTQ+ community are on the rise, schools in a number of states have investigated, disbanded, or made it more difficult for students to form or join LGBTQ+ inclusive clubs. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkins administration went so far as to remove an LGBTQ+ suicide-prevention hotline from the Virginia Department of Health webpage. Advertisement What is so galling about Republican attempts to teach children hierarchy is not just that they are cruel but that they are antithetical to the American tradition of treating public schools as sites of democratic socialization. For founding figures like John Adams, public education in America was for the common people, whose education would be as nearly equal as their birth. Advertisement The Supreme Court has repeatedly advanced this view of public schools as spaces in which minor children are educated in democratic values. In the 1979 case Ambach v. Norwick, for example, the court noted that public schools bring together diverse and conflicting constituencies on a broad but common ground. Teachers in particular, the court wrote, have a special role to play in promote[ing] civic virtues, such as tolerance of divergent political and religious views and a willingness to consider the sensibilities of others. Advertisement Advertisement Most importantly, public schools are spaces in which minor children learn to see themselves and their peers as equals. This was the essential holding of Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregation in public schools on the grounds that it generates a feeling of inferiority in Black children unlikely ever to be undone. Similarly, in the 1982 case Plyler v. Doe, the court, citing Brown, struck down a Texas law that banned undocumented children from the classroom. These children will one day become community leaders and citizens, the Plyler majority reasoned, and thus they cannot be relegated to a permanent underclass. The courts major gay rights cases, though less focused on education, evince a similar concern for protecting minor children from laws that impair their developing sense of equal citizenship. In United States v. Windsor, for instance, the court struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, which limited marriage in federal law to heterosexual unions, on the grounds that it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples. Likewise, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the court struck down state laws banning same-sex marriage. Children of these marriages, the majority argues, should not be made to suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement In several recent cases, the court has acknowledged that minor children should be protected from harmful social influences, suggesting that it may be receptive to arguments that Republican educational policies stigmatize minority children. These arguments have started to gain momentum at the appellate level; at least two federal appellate courts have struck down trans-exclusionary school policies on the grounds that they stigmatize trans students. Over the long term, however, the views of the current court majority will become less and less relevant. A 73-year-old Supreme Court justice has little understanding of how sex and gender norms have changed and even less right to control the futures of LGBTQ+ youth. The issue ultimately belongs to Gen Z, and public opinion polling indicates that they overwhelmingly reject conservative attempts to demean LGBTQ+ identity. Ironically then, and despite their best efforts, Republicans may end up teaching children a lesson about democratic values after all. It is a lesson about standing up to bullies. Last month, a federal judge heard arguments that the U.S. government is violating the rights of thousands of children seeking asylum through its Remain in Mexico program. This was on the heels of the Biden administrations offering temporary legal status to thousands of immigrant children who were ripped from their parents under Trumps zero tolerance 2018 border policy. Both lawsuits raise questions about the U.S. governments treatment of immigrant children, who are provided few accommodations in the immigration system and often must represent themselves in deportation proceedings if they cannot hire an attorney. The one child protection that does exist in immigration law is called special immigrant juvenile status. Congress created this humanitarian classification for children who have been abandoned, abused, or neglected, in order to create an expedited pathway to lawful permanent residence and citizenship. Unfortunately, this protection is not working as Congress intended, and new research weve just released demonstrates that more than 100,000 children have been negatively affected by an oversight in the law. How the system is supposed to work is this: After a state court makes a determination about custody and the harm the child has suffered, the child may petition the immigration agency for special immigrant juvenile status. If approved, the child should be on the path to lawful permanent residence. But a technical oversight in the law is preventing thousands of children from accessing the stability and protection of the SIJS program in a timely manner. Confoundingly, the visas SIJS children need to obtain permanent residence come from the same pool, with strict annual limits, as for people seeking employment-based green cards. So, children whom Congress, the immigration agency, and the courts recognize as deserving of this special protected status have been forced into a growing, yearslong green card backlog, trapped in foster care systems, facing labor exploitation, and unable to obtain federal student aid to go to college and reach their dreams. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Related From Slate The Most Broken Court in America Read More As immigration lawyers who represent children, we have seen firsthand the devastating consequences of this legal limbo. One young person, Claude, sought safety in the United States after years of abuse from his dad and after being hospitalized from violent homophobic attacks. A straight-A student, Claude won a scholarship to attend an American college but had to drop out when he couldnt cover the cost of education and couldnt access federal student aid. After getting his SIJS approval, Claude thought he would finally be able to restart his life. But when he realized that he would have to wait at least five more years to apply for his green card, he was despondent, saying, Weve already been abused in so many ways; weve never had stabilities throughout our lives. Its just a matter of time, and this question thats haunting you, when is it going to stop? Advertisement For the past three years, we have been working with the National Immigration Projects End SIJS Backlog Coalition, a group of impacted youth and advocates, to push Congress to fix the backlog. When we first met with members of Congress, they wanted to know how many young people were affected and where they lived. We made a public records request and had to sue the immigration agency for them. We obtained more than 200,000 SIJS-related records. On Monday, we published a report, False Hopes: Over 100,000 Immigrant Youth Trapped in the SIJS Backlog, based on these records and firsthand testimonials. In the report, we reveal that the SIJS backlog has more than doubled in the past two years, with more than 107,000 SIJS youth now trapped. SIJS youth affected by the backlog come from 151 countries and live in all 50 states, with the highest populations in New York, California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Texas, New Jersey, Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and North Carolina. Advertisement Advertisement To fix the backlog, Congress needs to pass the amendments in the Protect Vulnerable Immigrant Youth Act that would exempt SIJS youth from the visa caps that prevent them from seeking green cards. In the meantime, the Biden administration should act to improve the lives of youth stuck in the backlog by encouraging the immigration agency to terminate SIJS youths deportation cases, making sure they have timely access to work permits to protect them from labor exploitation, and ensuring access to federal student aid. Another impacted youth, Kasey, told us, I dont think about the future anymore because I dont want to have false hope. As Congress and the Biden administration consider how to help vulnerable immigrant children, we urge them to act quickly to fix the backlog. Claude, Kasey, and tens of thousands of other young people are waiting to live their fullest livesits shameful to allow a technical oversight in the law to keep holding these young people back. This is part of Opening Arguments, Slates coverage of the start of the latest Supreme Court term. Were working to change the way the media covers the Supreme Court. Support our work when you join Slate Plus. The Supreme Court is one of the most scientifically illiterate bodies in government, but why dont we let it take over federal regulation? That is the basic question behind Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, scheduled for argument next month at the Supreme Court, and it should scare you. To those only recently paying attention, the courts disdain for the scientific consensus, as evidenced in cases like West Virginia v. EPA, may seem surprising. However, even before the installation of its conservative supermajority, the court had long viewed scientific evidence that runs contrary to its policy preferences with contempt. Skepticism of an inconvenient scientific consensus is nothing new for the Supreme Court, particularly for the conservatives. In Stanford v. Kentucky, the 1989 case on the constitutionality of capital punishment for 16- and 17-year-olds, Justice William Brennan pointed out the conservative majoritys evident but misplaced disdain for scientific evidence, particularly that of the social sciences. In Lockhart v. McCree, Justice William Rehnquist took it upon himself to disregard 14 of 15 submitted peer-reviewed studies, stating that the only reliable study happened to be the one that supported his position, contrary to the scientific consensus. Chief Justice John Roberts has gone so far as to call certain fields sociological gobbledygook. Advertisement Conservatives dislike of science does not stop at social sciences, though. In recent years, conservative justices have made statements completely at odds with the scientific consensus, including saying that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and taking the position that a surface connection between navigable waters is necessary for pollution of wetlands to matter. There is a strong scientific consensus contrary to each of these contentions, but the conservative justices chose to disregard it in favor of their prior opinions. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Related From Slate The Supreme Court Has Figured Out How to Gut a Bunch of Crucial Federal Laws at Once Read More This is one of the reasons that Chevron deference, which says that courts should defer to agencies reasonable interpretations of their controlling statutes, and which is at issue in the Loper Bright case, is so important. U.S. administrative agencies are staffed by experts in their fields, people who have dedicated their lives to the study of their respective sciences. Judges and other court employees, on the other hand, are experts in the law who ideally would rely on scientists to inform their opinions of scientific issues, and Chevron deference ensures this reliance. As Justice Stephen Breyer has written, the law must seek decisions that fall within the boundaries of scientifically sound knowledge, but also that a judge is not a scientist, and a courtroom is not a scientific laboratory. Judges cannot make scientifically sound decisions if they disregard the scientific consensus. Advertisement However, as Roberts said during the Dobbs v. Jackson, this court is more interested in putting the data aside. In Loper Bright, a decadeslong conservative crusade against Chevron deference, seeking to put more power in the hands of conservative judges skeptical of the policy recommendations arising from scientific research is coming to fruition. Conservatives main problem with federal agencies seems to be that the scientists and policy experts who staff them are the ones regulatingand increasing costs fortheir wealthy allies. While agency regulation is responsible for ensuring food safety, environmental health, workers rights, and more, it can also impose significant costs on corporations. Conservative donors and nonprofits connected to Leonard Leo have been pushing for the court to overturn Chevron for decades. Their investment appears to have paid off, with a majority on the court openly hostile to Chevron. Justice Clarence Thomas has even changed positions on the issue over time, turning against Chevron and hypothesizing that almost all regulations may actually be unconstitutional. Advertisement Advertisement This opposition to Chevron is generally couched in terms of conservative ideas like the nondelegation and major-questions doctrines. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has described federal agencies as threat[s] to individual liberty, joined by many other conservatives in claiming that deferring to expert agencies is antidemocratic because agencies are less politically accountable than elected officials. Setting aside the fact that members of these agencies can be replaced and/or explicitly directed by elected officials, the major issue with this idea is its proposed solution, in which unelected judges are essentially the final word on science policy, granting themselves the power to second-guess the experts. Chevron may be on the chopping block, but efforts have been made to codify the doctrine by statute, clarifying Congress intent that agencies should be empowered to exercise their best expert judgment in addressing the issues they are responsible for, without judges personal biases getting in the way. Others have considered stripping the court of jurisdiction over certain matters, which could be extended to laws turning on scientific consensus. Even further engagement by scientists and the public with the science that the court relies on could be helpful. Considering the courts history with science, it is alarming that it wants to take a stronger hand in setting U.S. policy, but Loper Bright presents exactly that scenario, and those who care about science and public policy need to start planning. On Friday, two federal courts in Washington rejected parallel claims by former President Donald Trump for immunity from the legal process, dealing a blow to Trumps effort to delay his March 4 criminal trial date. In doing so, those courts fortified our constitutional republics basic message: No one, including a former president, is above the law. One Trump defeat on Friday came in his appeal of three civil actions against him for allegedly inciting Jan. 6s violence. An even more important loss came hours later from federal district court Judge Tanya Chutkan. Trumps criminal prosecution is scheduled to begin in her courtroom in March, and she rejected Trumps request to dismiss the case based on absolute presidential immunity. Crucially, the ruling in the civil case bolsters the ruling in the criminal case at a critical juncture. The district courts decision rejecting Trumps claims of immunity from prosecution is a judicial tour de force. The opinion carves his arguments with surgical precision while taking care not to decide questions of a constitutional nature unless absolutely necessary to a decision. That conservative jurisprudential approach aligns Judge Chutkan with appellate court Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee, in his concurring opinion in Fridays appellate rejection of Trumps claim to civil immunity. The district courts ruling is the focus here because a pretrial appeal of the decision is Trumps most potent weapon for sidestepping his federal prosecution for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Advertisement First, no one should miss how artful the court opinion is. Judge Chutkan concludes her comprehensive analysis with this eloquent statement: Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Defendants four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens. The opinion is meticulously crafted with the Supreme Court in mind. The decision deploys every methodology of constitutional interpretation, including textualism, each variety of so-called originalism, attention to constitutional structure and underlying premises, functional considerations, and history. All point ineluctably to her conclusion. Related From Slate The D.C. Circuit Court Revealed the Huge Flaw in Trumps Gag Order Claim Read More Take, for example, Trumps textual claim. Absurdly, he stakes it on the Constitutions impeachment clause, claiming that because he was acquitted after he had left office of insurrectiona verdict that came largely because he was no longer president at the timehe is immune from being prosecuted. The district court lacerates the argument simply by restating it: Advertisement Defendant argues that because a President who is impeached and convicted may be subject to criminal prosecution, a President who is not convicted may not be subject to criminal prosecution. Good litigators learn that its better to leave such illogic on the cutting-room floor and stand on their stronger arguments. In Trumps immunity motion, however, his other contentions have little more to commend them. He relies primarily on the Supreme Courts 1982 ruling in Nixon v. Fitzgerald. It held former presidents immune from civil lawsuits arising from actions performed within the outer perimeter of [their] official responsibility. Advertisement The district court answers that criminal conductlike conspiring to obstruct Congress, as alleged in the indictmentis not part of the necessary functions performed by public officials. Advertisement Trump also claimed that potential criminal liability would have a chilling effect on the Presidents decision-making. The courts pointed rejoinder is that its a benefit, not a defect if the prospect of a subsequent prosecution encourages a sitting President to reconsider before deciding to act with criminal intent. Advertisement The opinion states that a former Presidents exposure to federal criminal liability is essential to fulfilling our constitutional promise of equal justice under the law. The court is saying precisely what Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a 2020 concurring opinionthat the principle that no one is above the law applies, of course, to a President. Ultimately, Trumps claims are little more than props for the significant delay that he hopes will come from his pretrial appeal, as legally flawed as it will be. Ordinarily, criminal defendants cannot suspend the trial court proceedings against them by filing an appeal before trial. Rather, they must wait until after a conviction to seek review. Advertisement But Trumps immunity claim may be an exception. If so, the crucial issue is whether the appeal consumes enough time that he can get his trialand the prospect of convictionpostponed until after November. If so, and he is elected, he will either self-pardon or have his Justice Department drop the case, avoiding accountability altogether. Judge Chutkan has made that less likely by ruling promptly and definitively. Advertisement Advertisement Even so, Trump wins by losing if the appeal takes 10 months or more. Appellate judges have wide latitude about how quickly to move an appeal. In this case, there is a neutral and important reason to step on the gas. The American people are entitled to vote next November with full information about the candidates they are choosing. Trump is on his way to becoming the Republican nominee for president. The interests of informed voting are served by Americans having a jurys decision, based on court-tested evidence, as to whether he is innocent or guilty of the federal charges lodged against him. Advertisement With willing appellate courts, that can happen. The appeal from Judge Chutkans ruling will go to the same appellate court whose panel ruled Friday on parallel civil issues. Thus, the court has a running start in resolving the new appeal. Advertisement Moreover, no less than three times since Trump left office, the same court has expedited major appeals he has brought: 1. Once in November 2021 over the House Jan. 6 committees subpoenas; 2. Once in March over whether Evan Corcoran, Trumps lawyer, had to testify before the grand jury investigating the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case; and 3. Most recently, last month, by scheduling briefing and hearing oral argument in Trumps gag order appeal weeks after his appeal was filed. Advertisement Similarly, in 2022, the Supreme Court acted with unusual speedtwo monthsto reject Trumps petition to have one of his important Jan. 6 cases heard. The pattern reflects appellate jurists impatience with Trumps attempts to exploit the time courts take to act so he can run out the clock on congressional or judicial processes for discovering the truth. As Trump runs for president, he has not shied away from informing voters of his authoritarian plans if electedfor example, to use the Justice Department for revenge or to set up detention camps in the Texas desert for immigrants. But he is aiming to avoid a trial that will establish facts and truths that the same voters should have about what he did or didnt do in the run-up to Jan. 6. Whether he succeeds will soon be up to the federal appellate court in D.C., and then the Supreme Court. They must decide whether to expedite Trumps appeal on presidential immunity to help ensure that Americans know before choosing our next president whether, in the eyes of the law, he committed crimes against the nation. Spying and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did. Before the internet, putting someone under surveillance was expensive and time-consuming. You had to manually follow someone around, noting where they went, whom they talked to, what they purchased, what they did, and what they read. That world is forever gone. Our phones track our locations. Credit cards track our purchases. Apps track whom we talk to, and e-readers know what we read. Computers collect data about what were doing on them, and as both storage and processing have become cheaper, that data is increasingly saved and used. What was manual and individual has become bulk and mass. Surveillance has become the business model of the internet, and theres no reasonable way for us to opt out of it. Spying is another matter. It has long been possible to tap someones phone or put a bug in their home and/or car, but those things still require someone to listen to and make sense of the conversations. Yes, spyware companies like NSO Group help the government hack into peoples phones, but someone still has to sort through all the conversations. And governments like China could censor social media posts based on particular words or phrases, but that was coarse and easy to bypass. Spying is limited by the need for human labor. Advertisement A.I. is about to change that. Summarization is something a modern generative A.I. system does well. Give it an hourlong meeting, and it will return a one-page summary of what was said. Ask it to search through millions of conversations and organize them by topic, and itll do that. Want to know who is talking about what? Itll tell you. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The technologies arent perfect; some of them are pretty primitive. They miss things that are important. They get other things wrong. But so do humans. And, unlike humans, A.I. tools can be replicated by the millions and are improving at astonishing rates. Theyll get better next year, and even better the year after that. We are about to enter the era of mass spying. Advertisement Mass surveillance fundamentally changed the nature of surveillance. Because all the data is saved, mass surveillance allows people to conduct surveillance backward in time, and without even knowing whom specifically you want to target. Tell me where this person was last year. List all the red sedans that drove down this road in the past month. List all of the people who purchased all the ingredients for a pressure cooker bomb in the past year. Find me all the pairs of phones that were moving toward each other, turned themselves off, then turned themselves on again an hour later while moving away from each other (a sign of a secret meeting). Similarly, mass spying will change the nature of spying. All the data will be saved. It will all be searchable, and understandable, in bulk. Tell me who has talked about a particular topic in the past month, and how discussions about that topic have evolved. Person A did something; check if someone told them to do it. Find everyone who is plotting a crime, or spreading a rumor, or planning to attend a political protest. Advertisement Theres so much more. To uncover an organizational structure, look for someone who gives similar instructions to a group of people, then all the people they have relayed those instructions to. To find peoples confidants, look at whom they tell secrets to. You can track friendships and alliances as they form and break, in minute detail. In short, you can know everything about what everybody is talking about. Advertisement This spying is not limited to conversations on our phones or computers. Just as cameras everywhere fueled mass surveillance, microphones everywhere will fuel mass spying. Siri and Alexa and Hey Google are already always listening; the conversations just arent being saved yet. Knowing that they are under constant surveillance changes how people behave. They conform. They self-censor, with the chilling effects that brings. Surveillance facilitates social control, and spying will only make this worse. Governments around the world already use mass surveillance; they will engage in mass spying as well. Advertisement Corporations will spy on people. Mass surveillance ushered in the era of personalized advertisements; mass spying will supercharge that industry. Information about what people are talking about, their moods, their secretsits all catnip for marketers looking for an edge. The tech monopolies that are currently keeping us all under constant surveillance wont be able to resist collecting and using all of that data. Advertisement Advertisement In the early days of Gmail, Google talked about using peoples Gmail content to serve them personalized ads. The company stopped doing it, almost certainly because the keyword data it collected was so poorand therefore not useful for marketing purposes. That will soon change. Maybe Google wont be the first to spy on its users conversations, but once others start, they wont be able to resist. Their true customerstheir advertiserswill demand it. We could limit this capability. We could prohibit mass spying. We could pass strong data-privacy rules. But we havent done anything to limit mass surveillance. Why would spying be any different? Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Are you looking to start your entrepreneurial journey and need some ideas? Here are 25 cash flow business ideas you can start. These small businesses are easy to start, require little up-front investment, and generate a consistent flow of income. Lets get started! What are the Characteristics of a Good Cash Flow Business? Having a steady cash flow business with recurring income is important for small business owners. Here are five characteristics of a good cash flow business: Discover the Zoho Ecosystem Sell Your Business ChatGPT Prompts for Business Advertise Your Business Here Low Overhead Costs A business with low overhead ensures that a significant portion of the revenue isnt eaten up by fixed and variable costs. Its the foundation of sustainability. Less money spent on essentials like rent, inventory, and equipment means more profit at the end of the day. Scalable A scalable business model is a gem. This means as the business grows, the increase in profits outpaces the increase in costs. It allows entrepreneurs to expand their reach, tap into new markets, or introduce new products/services without proportionally increasing their expenditure. Recurring Revenue The magic of recurring revenue is its predictability. Businesses that have a steady and consistent income stream, such as subscription models, can plan better, reinvest with confidence, and ensure stability even in volatile markets. High-Profit Margins Profit isnt just about making money; its about keeping it. Businesses with high-profit margins have the advantage of being able to reinvest in their growth, weather economic downturns, and provide returns to stakeholders while still maintaining a healthy bottom line. Simple to Operate Simplicity is efficiency. If a business model doesnt require extensive efforts in areas like marketing, customer service, or daily operations, it means the entrepreneur can focus on strategic growth. Such businesses often have streamlined processes, clear value propositions, and require less micromanagement. READ MORE: What is Cash Flow? Criteria for Choosing Cash Flow Business Ideas: Our Methodology To guide entrepreneurs towards business ventures with strong cash flow potential, we use a specific set of criteria. These criteria help in identifying opportunities that are likely to generate steady, positive cash flow. Each criterion is rated on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 indicates the least importance and 5 the highest importance: Low Initial Investment and Startup Costs Importance: 5 Business ideas that require minimal initial investment and startup costs are preferred, as they reduce the financial burden and facilitate quicker cash flow positivity. High Demand and Market Viability Importance: 5 We assess the market demand for the product or service. High demand and a strong market presence indicate a quicker and more sustainable cash flow. Quick Turnaround of Inventory or Services Importance: 4 Businesses that can quickly turn over inventory or deliver services in a short time frame are ideal, as this accelerates cash flow. Recurring Revenue Model Importance: 5 Business models that facilitate recurring revenue, such as subscription services or repeat client business, provide a more predictable and stable cash flow. Low Overhead and Operational Costs Importance: 5 Keeping overhead and ongoing operational costs low is crucial to maintain positive cash flow and profitability. Scalability and Growth Potential Importance: 3 The ability to scale the business and grow the customer base without significantly increasing expenses can enhance cash flow over time. Payment Terms and Collections Efficiency Importance: 4 Efficient invoicing and collections processes, as well as favorable payment terms with suppliers, can significantly impact cash flow management. Flexibility and Adaptability to Market Changes Importance: 3 The ability to adapt to market changes and pivot operations if necessary can help sustain cash flow under varying economic conditions. By applying these criteria, our goal is to identify business ideas that not only have the potential for high revenue generation but also maintain manageable costs, leading to strong and sustainable cash flow. 25 Amazing Business Ideas with High Cash Flow Potential If youre looking for the best cash flow businesses, we have some amazing ideas and business models below. Many of which are businesses that make money right away. Small Business Deals 1. eCommerce Store Starting an eCommerce store to sell online is a great way to get started in the business world. Not only do you have low startup costs, but you can also reach a global audience with your products and enjoy simple, quick transactions. 2. Consulting Services A consulting business is a great way to earn money while helping others. You can offer your services to businesses or individuals, and youll be able to set your own rates. Many consultants also work with clients on an ongoing basis, leading to predictable payments. 3. Local Businesses Having a local business is a great way to build a steady flow of cash. You can offer services or products that people in your community need, and youll have a loyal customer base. READ MORE: Small Business Ideas for Beginners 4. Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing is one of those businesses that make money fast, it helps you make a great passive income, doesnt require a down payment like real estate, and requires a low initial investment. Successful affiliate marketers know to promote quality products in a popular niche like weight loss to increase the chances they make a lot of money quickly. 5. Freelancing Writing and Editing By leveraging platforms like Upwork or Medium, you can tap into a global client base. Offering your services to businesses or individuals, and setting your own rates can be empowering. Furthermore, with the rise of digital content and the need for high-quality writing across various industries, the demand for skilled writers and editors has soared. Specializing in niches like technical writing, SEO content, or grant writing can also fetch premium rates. 6. Dropshipping With dropshipping, you sell products that are shipped directly to the customer from the supplier. It eliminates the need for inventory and reduces overhead costs. Its a low-cost way to start a business and create a steady, positive cash flow. By focusing on niche products and targeted marketing, one can build a loyal customer base. Integrating customer reviews and offering excellent customer service can differentiate your brand in a competitive marketplace. 7. Food Truck Business Food trucks are not only a trendy dining option but also a great way to start a business with low overhead costs. By gauging local tastes and preferences, you can offer a variety of unique and tantalizing food options to customers. The mobility of the business model allows you to operate in multiple locations, catering to various events or shifting to high-footfall areas during peak times. Collaborating with local businesses for special promotions or events can also boost visibility. 8. Niche Franchise Niche franchises can be a great way to start a business with high cash flow potential. Because these high cash flow businesses are focused on a specific area or market, they tend to be more successful than general franchises. 9. Dog Walking and Pet Sitting With the growing number of pet owners and their busy schedules, starting a Dog Walking and Pet Sitting business can be both rewarding and profitable. Not only do you have low costs to get started, but you can also set your own rates and hours in this in-demand industry. By offering additional services such as grooming, training, or pet transportation, you can diversify your income sources. Building trust through reviews and recommendations is crucial in this industry. 10. Graphic Design Services Graphic design is pivotal in the modern digital landscape. As a graphic designer, you can work with businesses or individuals, helping them enhance their brand identity by designing logos, business cards, websites, and more. The demand for eye-catching and functional designs is ever-increasing. By specializing in certain areas, like UX/UI design or animation, you can cater to specific high-demand segments. Building a portfolio and showcasing your work on platforms like Behance or Dribbble can attract higher-paying clients. 11. Vending Machines Starting a vending machine business can be a lucrative endeavor with healthy cash flow potential. You can easily buy a vending machine online which could pay for itself in less than a year if you place your vending machines in high foot traffic locations. 12. Social Media Management Being a social media manager could be the perfect way to turn your passion for social media into a career while doing social media marketing on various social media channels for other business owners. This can be a recurring business model, and provides opportunities for scaling over time. 13. Digital Course Creator As a digital course creator, you can create online courses and sell them on sites like Udemy or Skillshare. You can create an online course on pretty much any topic. 14. Create a Blog Creating your own website or blog can be a great way to extra cash while sharing your passion with the world. You can offer content that is helpful, informative, or entertaining while earning ad revenue. 15. Starting an App or SaaS Product Starting an app or SaaS (software as a service) business is a great way to earn an income while creating awesome apps people can use daily in their personal or professional lives. 16. Piggyback off another Business idea If have a small business thats using a successful business model and already generating a positive cash flow, then you can piggyback off of it to generate another revenue source. For example, if you have a brick-and-mortar store that sells products and an internet connection, you can begin selling those same products online. 17. Invest in Dividend Paying Stocks When it comes to generating passive income, dividend stocks are a great option. Not only do they offer the potential for capital gains like real estate investing, but they also provide an annual cash flow. 18. Landscaping and Lawn Business Landscaping business owners are responsible for providing all of the services their customers need, including lawn care, planting and maintenance, snow removal, and more. Enjoy simple transactions and a recurring business model by providing excellent service to clients. 19. Photography Business If youre an amazing photographer and know how to use photo editing software, then starting your own business in photography could be a great way to earn an income. 20. Event Planning Planning events involves organizing and coordinating resources to ensure that an event is successful. Project management is a critical skill for event planners. 21. Finance and Insurance Not only is there the potential to make a great deal of money in finance and insurance, but this type of business can also provide a much-needed service to people and businesses. 22. Real Estate Rental Property Owning rental properties is an amazing way to make more money and build wealth. Its a business that can be very passive, yet still provide a steady stream of income. As property values typically appreciate over time, not only do you earn from monthly rent, but you also stand to gain from the long-term appreciation of the property. Furthermore, tax benefits associated with property investments can also enhance profitability. Leveraging property management can further simplify the process, making it even more passive. And this is a recurring business model with steady payments coming in each month. 23. Social Assistance and Health Services A social assistance and health services business can be a very profitable and very rewarding way to make a difference in peoples lives. 24. Makeup Artist Being a makeup artist is a very creative and lucrative business. Its a business that can be very portable, so you can take it with you wherever you go. With the rise of social media platforms, especially visual platforms like Instagram and YouTube, makeup artists now have more avenues to showcase their skills and gain clients. Personal branding, collaboration with influencers, and conducting workshops can further enhance ones reach and income. 25. Child Care Services Starting a Child Care Services business can be a very rewarding way to make a difference in the lives of children and families. It can also provide you with a consistent income stream. Given the busy lives of modern parents, reliable childcare is in high demand. By ensuring a safe environment, hiring qualified staff, and incorporating educational activities, you can stand out in the market and command premium rates. Furthermore, expanding to after-school programs and offering additional services can also diversify revenue sources. READ MORE: 12 Ways to Increase Your Cash Flow Cash Flow Business Ideas Summary Table Business Idea Highlights / Description eCommerce Store Low startup costs, global audience reach. Consulting Services Offer services to individuals or businesses; set own rates. Local Businesses Serve local community needs with a loyal customer base. Affiliate Marketing Passive income with low investment; promote popular niche products. Freelancing Writing and Editing Use platforms like Upwork; specialize in niches for premium rates. Dropshipping Low-cost business without inventory; niche products can gain loyal customers. Food Truck Business Low overhead costs; operate in multiple locations. Niche Franchise Focus on a specific market; tried-and-tested blueprint. Dog Walking and Pet Sitting Low startup costs; diverse services like grooming. Graphic Design Services Cater to high-demand segments; showcase work on platforms like Behance. Vending Machines Lucrative with machines in high foot traffic locations. Social Media Management Turn passion for social media into a career; handle marketing for businesses. Digital Course Creator Create and sell online courses on platforms like Udemy. Create a Blog Share passions, offer valuable content, and earn ad revenue. Starting an App or SaaS Product Develop apps for daily personal or professional use. Piggyback off another Business idea Use existing business models to generate additional revenue. Invest in Dividend Paying Stocks Generate passive income and potential for capital gains. Landscaping and Lawn Business Offer diverse services from lawn care to snow removal. Photography Business Combine photography skills with photo editing for income. Event Planning Organize and coordinate events with project management skills. Finance and Insurance Provide essential services to people and businesses with high earning potential. Real Estate Rental Property Passive income with steady cash flow; potential property appreciation. Social Assistance and Health Services Profitable avenue to make a significant difference in lives. Makeup Artist Portable business with opportunities in social media platforms. Child Care Services Offer services in high demand; ensure safe environment for premium rates. What is the Best Passive Income Idea? The best idea to create a passive income stream yourself really depends on your personal skill set and interests. However, some of the best ideas include being a service provider, creating digital courses, investing in stocks that pay dividends, or starting a blog. What is the Most Profitable Business on the Cash Flow List? While buying a dividend stock, dropshipping, consulting, and other businesses on the list are great ways to earn money consistently, real estate is the most profitable and best business idea. Real estate has made 90% of the worlds millionaires. So its a great way to generate a high income. Make Ready Market is located at 203 8th St. in downtown San Antonio. Paul Stephen/Staff Make Ready Market is located at 203 8th St. in downtown San Antonio. Paul Stephen/Staff Buje inside Make Ready Market sells juice, smoothies and Super Human shots containing turmeric, ginger and other healthy ingredients. Paul Stephen/Staff Garaje Cantina inside Make Ready Market serves beer, wine and cocktails. Paul Stephen/Staff Garaje Cantina inside Make Ready Market sells wine, beer and cocktails, as well as slices of pizza from Sofia's Pizzeria. Paul Stephen/Staff The Fair Goods inside Make Ready Market sells leather goods, among other items. Paul Stephen/Staff The Fair Goods shop inside Make Ready Market sells clothing, jewelry, vintage glassware and more. Paul Stephen/Staff Make Ready Market is located at 203 8th St. in downtown San Antonio. Paul Stephen/Staff Make Ready Market is located at 203 8th St. in downtown San Antonio. Paul Stephen/Staff Buje at Make Ready Market specializes in juices, smoothies and flavored lemonades. Paul Stephen/Staff Thai Bird at Make Ready Market isn't open yet, but diners have been able to sample its food at recent pop-up events. Paul Stephen/Staff Buje inside Make Ready Market sells juice, smoothies and Super Human shots containing turmeric, ginger and other healthy ingredients. Paul Stephen/Staff Half of the business that will eventually populate Make Ready Market are now open. Paul Stephen/Staff Make Ready Market features several indoor and outdoor seating areas. Paul Stephen/Staff Make Ready Market features several indoor and outdoor seating areas. Paul Stephen/Staff Casa Morgana Gelatos at Make Ready Market sells unique gelato flavors including goat cheese with figs (left) pears and red wine (center) and lavender and lemon (right). Paul Stephen/Staff Casa Morgana Gelatos at Make Ready Market is now serving sweet frozen treats. Paul Stephen/Staff Make Ready Market is located at 203 8th St. in downtown San Antonio. Paul Stephen/Staff San Antonio's newest food hall is almost ready. Make Ready Market, which eventually will be populated with a wide range of food, beverage and retail options, is now operating at roughly half capacity following a weekend debut from multiple operators. Located in the former Cavender Cadillac dealership at 203 Eighth St., Make Ready Market currently hosts four operators: the juice bar Buje, Casa Morgana Gelatos, retail shop The Fair Goods and Garaje Cantina, which serves beer, wine and cocktails, as well as slices from Sofia's Pizzeria. We paid the new space a visit over the weekend to check out what's available, and here's what we found. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Buje: Pronounced like "bougie," this drink stand currently offers flavored lemonades, smoothies and fresh-squeezed orange juice. If you want to turbocharge your day, consider starting with a Super Human shot, made with high-octane ingredients that include turmeric, ginger, sea moss and other ingredients served in a prescription bottle. Casa Morgana Gelatos: This Mexico-founded outfit, which also has a shop near Stone Oak, currently serves eight types of gelato. Unique options such as fig and goat cheese, lavender lemonade and pears in red wine give these desserts an upscale flavor and feel. The Fair Goods: If you have a tough cookie to shop for this holiday season, this retail shop may have the perfect solution. The store is stocked with leather goods, quirky clothing made from recycled materials, jewelry and a small but impressive collection of vintage glassware that would give any home bar a swanky midcentury vibe at modest prices. Garaje Cantina: This quick-service bar pours beer, wine and cocktails ranging from $3 Lone Stars to drinks, at a top price of $8, such as a seasonal Spiked Cherry Eggnog or a glass of sparkling rose. Garaje Cantina is also serving slices from Sofia's Pizzeria, which eventually will open its own stall inside Make Ready Market. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The coming weeks will bring several more restaurants to the Make Ready lineup. In addition to pizza from Sofia's, diners can look forward to Thai-style fried chicken from Thai Bird, a burger joint dubbed EET UP, Venezuelan fare from a shop called Four Brothers and Mexican street food from Pescado Bravo. At the moment, Make Ready Market feels as half-realized as it is, but the potential is impossible to miss. The cavernous space, designed by San Antonio-based developer Hixon Properties, has a slick, industrial feel with ample natural light and a breezy atmosphere. The neighboring Idle Beer Hall & Brewing has found a loyal base of customers since it opened in early October, and the two spaces share a manicured courtyard that encourages a natural flow between the two. In todays fast-paced world, small business owners seeking the best voice recorder app need quick, efficient solutions for recording and sharing ideas while mobile. Whether its for capturing spontaneous thoughts without a notebook or avoiding typing on your phone, a top voice recorder app can be your ideal tool. Our Methodology: How We Chose the Best Voice Recorder App In choosing the best voice recorder app, we assess features that contribute to recording quality, ease of use, and versatility, crucial for various recording needs. Our methodology for this selection employs a scale from 1 to 10, with each criterions score reflecting its importance in providing a high-quality recording experience. Sell Your Business Discover the Zoho Ecosystem ChatGPT Prompts for Business Advertise Your Business Here Higher scores, closer to 10, are given to features that are particularly vital for an effective voice recorder app, such as audio quality, user-friendliness, and file management capabilities. Audio Quality and Clarity (10/10) The most critical aspect is superior audio quality, ensuring clear and crisp recordings without background noise or distortion. User Interface and Usability (9/10) An intuitive and straightforward interface is highly valued for easy operation and accessibility, especially for users who need to record on the go. Small Business Deals File Management and Organization (9/10) Efficient file management, including easy organization, labeling, and searching of recordings, is essential for handling multiple audio files. Sharing and Export Options (8/10) The ability to easily share and export recordings in various formats is crucial for compatibility with different platforms and use cases. Recording Length and Size Limits (8/10) Apps allowing extended recording lengths without significant restrictions on file size are preferred for versatility in different recording scenarios. Integration with Other Apps and Services (7/10) Integration capabilities with cloud storage services and other productivity apps add significant value for seamless workflow. Transcription Features (7/10) Automatic transcription capabilities are beneficial for converting audio recordings to text, useful in various professional and personal contexts. Customization and Advanced Settings (6/10) Customization options, such as adjustable quality settings and recording sensitivity, cater to specific recording needs. Reliability and Performance (6/10) Consistent performance and reliability, with minimal crashes or errors, are key for dependable recording experiences. Security and Privacy (6/10) Robust security measures to protect sensitive recordings, especially for confidential or personal content, are essential. Background Recording Capability (5/10) The ability to record in the background while using other apps is a useful feature for multitasking. Our methodology is designed to guide users toward voice recorder apps that not only provide high-quality audio recordings but also offer a range of features for efficient file management, sharing, and versatility in use. By focusing on these key aspects, we aim to highlight apps that are practical, user-friendly, and adaptable to various recording needs, from professional to personal use. Best Voice Recorder App List There are plenty of different apps with this function for both Android and iOS devices, some with unique features. Here are 20 different options to consider. Voice Memos The voice recorder app that comes standard on iOS devices, Voice Memos gives you the ability to record, pause, and save your memos on your device. You can also send them via email or share via social media. So if all you need are the basics, you might simply choose to stick with this standard option. Voice Recorder An free iPhone app with a few features that go beyond what is offered in the Voice Memos app included on those devices. Voice Recorder offers unlimited recordings, transcription, and audio editing. Some advanced features are offered as in-app purchases. Audio Recorder A simple recording option from Sony, Audio Recorder offers memo recording, transcription, and editing features. You can also save and upload your recordings to cloud platforms. Just Press Record This app prides itself on simplicity. Just Press Record lets you tap to record from the app or even your phones home screen. Then it backs up the recordings in iCloud, transcribes them, and even lets you send them to other apps with audio and text functionality. The cost to purchase is $4.99. Easy Voice Recorder A simple solution for Android devices, Easy Voice Recorder offers an option to hit record right from the home screen. You can also take and save long recordings, in case you need to record meetings or lectures. Then you can also share and organize your recordings into different categories. Parrot Parrot offers a completely customizable voice recorder experience for Android devices. It includes HD voice recording that you can edit and configure to your exact specifications. It also includes some video and call recording options. iTalk Recorder Premium A fully-featured recording app, iTalk Recorder Premium is available for iOS devices for $1.99. It offers simple recording and then the ability to share your files via email, iTunes File Sharing, and AirDrop. Smart Recorder This Android app features a simple user interface and high quality sound recording. You can use Smart Recorder to record long conversations or thoughts or even music. Voice Record Pro A professional voice recorder with plenty of editing options, Voice Record Pro lets you record MP4, MP3 and WAV files and even convert to different formats. You can also save and share your recordings once theyre completed. Cogi Cogi is an Android app that lets you record memos with one click. Then you can add images, notes and even hashtags to find the most relevant memos later on. You can also back up memos to the cloud. Say&Go Say&Go is a voice recorder app for iOS that is meant for quick notes. You can set it to automatically save and share each message. You can even use them as reminders for specific tasks. Snipback Snipback is like the DVR for your phone. You can leave it on your phone and then go back to record something that happened up to 30 seconds ago. Say youre having a really thought provoking conversation and someone shares a thought you want to remember. Even if you werent recording, you can go back to save that thought. Its available for both iOS and Android devices. Rev A transcription service that will turn your recordings into written content, Rev also offers mobile apps for both iOS and Android devices. The apps themselves are free, and transcription costs $1 per minute. 360 Recorder 360 Recorder is a fully featured app that offers recording, transcription and phone call options so that you can save both musings and conversations. Its available for free on iOS devices with in-app purchases available. RecForge II RecForge II is an Android app that can be used to record voice memos as well as things like music. It includes some advanced features like the ability to skip silences and adjust tones. Evernote Evernote isnt just a voice recorder its a mobile and web app that you can use to take all different types of notes and organize your information. But voice recording is a feature thats included in the free mobile apps for both iOS and Android. OneNote Microsofts note taking platform OneNote also offers a variety of different note-taking features. In the free Android and iOS apps, voice recording is one of the functions available. Hi-Q MP3 Voice Recorder This voice recording option is meant for those who need high quality sound, like those who might want to record thoughts speeches to share on their websites or email lists. Hi-Q MP3 Voice Recorder is available for free for Android devices. Call Recorder If youre ever in need of a solution to record phone calls, like interviews or brainstorming sessions with team members, Call Recorder offers a solution for Android devices. It does have a regular voice recording feature as well, but not as many advanced options as other voice recorders. Tetra Another app that specializes in call recording, Tetra lets you make calls through the app, flag important moments that you want to go back to, and then take notes and share snippets of the conversation afterward. This one is available for iOS devices. Comparing The Best Voice Recorder Apps To help you choose the right voice recorder app for your needs, heres a comparison table highlighting the key features, platforms, and pricing of the top apps listed in the article. App Name Key Features Platforms Price Voice Memos Basic recording, sharing iOS Free Voice Recorder Unlimited recordings, transcription, editing iOS Free, with in-app purchases Audio Recorder Memo recording, cloud upload Android, iOS Free Just Press Record One-tap recording, iCloud backup, transcription iOS $4.99 Easy Voice Recorder Home screen recording, long recordings, organization Android Free Parrot HD recording, editing, video/call options Android Free iTalk Recorder Premium Simple recording, file sharing iOS $1.99 Smart Recorder High quality sound, simple UI Android Free Voice Record Pro Multi-format recording, editing Android, iOS Free Cogi One-click recording, note/tag addition Android Free Say&Go Quick notes, auto-save/share iOS Free Snipback Retroactive recording, conversation capture Android, iOS Free Rev Transcription service, recording app Android, iOS Free, transcription at $1/min 360 Recorder Recording, transcription, call options iOS Free, with in-app purchases RecForge II Music and voice recording, advanced features Android Free Evernote Note-taking with voice recording Android, iOS Free OneNote Note-taking platform with recording Android, iOS Free Hi-Q MP3 Voice Recorder High-quality sound recording Android Free Call Recorder Call and voice recording Android Free Tetra Call recording, note-taking, sharing iOS Free Key Considerations When Choosing a Voice Recorder App Choosing the right voice recorder app is essential for ensuring high-quality recordings and ease of use, whether for personal, educational, or professional purposes. Here are the key factors to consider in making your selection: Platform Compatibility Recording Quality Editing and Transcription Features Ease of Use Sharing Capabilities Price Special Features Platform Compatibility The first step is to make sure the voice recorder app is compatible with your devices operating system, whether its iOS, Android, or another platform. This ensures seamless operation and access to all features. Recording Quality High-quality audio recording is a must, particularly for professional use such as podcasts, interviews, or music. Look for apps that offer clear, crisp sound and have settings to adjust recording quality as needed. Editing and Transcription Features If you need to edit your recordings or transcribe them into text, select an app with built-in editing tools and transcription services. This can save time and streamline your workflow, especially if you handle a lot of audio content. Ease of Use An app with a user-friendly interface makes recording, saving, and retrieving audio files more efficient. Features like one-tap recording and straightforward navigation can significantly enhance the user experience. Sharing Capabilities Depending on your needs, the ability to share recordings easily can be crucial. Look for apps that offer seamless integration with various platforms, including social media, email, and cloud services, for easy sharing and backup. Price While many voice recorder apps are available for free, they might offer limited features. Paid apps or those with in-app purchases often provide more advanced features. Assess whether the additional cost aligns with the benefits youll receive. Special Features Unique features can be a major selling point. For instance, retroactive recording (recording starts before you hit the record button) can be invaluable for capturing spontaneous moments. Integration with other apps, like note-taking platforms, adds convenience and functionality. By considering these aspects, you can choose a voice recorder app that best fits your requirements, ensuring that your recordings are high quality, easy to manage, and accessible when you need them. Marketing your small business, whether online or off, is a time intensive process. As your business grows, managing lead capture, nurturing, converting and relationship management become too big to handle manually, which is why small business owners turn to marketing automation software to manage the load. In general, automation brings many benefits to your small business including speed, lower costs, and time savings. Discover the Zoho Ecosystem ChatGPT Prompts for Business Sell Your Business Advertise Your Business Here However, because the promotion, selling, and relationship management processes involve so many steps, many of which are repeated for each customer, marketing is particularly suited to automation. And thats where marketing automation software comes in. Benefits of Marketing Automation Software for Small Businesses Marketing automation software revolutionizes how businesses approach their marketing strategies, offering a plethora of benefits that streamline processes and enhance efficiency. By automating repetitive tasks, these tools allow companies to focus on strategic, creative aspects of marketing, ensuring better use of time and resources. They provide insightful data analytics, enabling businesses to make informed decisions and tailor their marketing efforts to target audiences more effectively. Moreover, marketing automation fosters consistent, personalized communication with customers, enhancing customer engagement and loyalty. Benefits of marketing automation software include: Efficiency in Operations : Automates repetitive tasks, saving time and reducing manual errors. : Automates repetitive tasks, saving time and reducing manual errors. Enhanced Customer Experience : Delivers personalized content and communication, improving customer engagement. : Delivers personalized content and communication, improving customer engagement. Data-Driven Insights : Offers valuable analytics and reporting for informed decision-making. : Offers valuable analytics and reporting for informed decision-making. Lead Management : Streamlines lead nurturing processes, enhancing the conversion of leads to customers. : Streamlines lead nurturing processes, enhancing the conversion of leads to customers. Scalability : Adapts to the growing needs of a business, making it easier to scale marketing efforts. : Adapts to the growing needs of a business, making it easier to scale marketing efforts. Cost-Effectiveness : Reduces labor costs and increases ROI by optimizing marketing strategies. : Reduces labor costs and increases ROI by optimizing marketing strategies. Consistent Brand Messaging : Ensures consistent brand communication across various channels. : Ensures consistent brand communication across various channels. Integration Capabilities : Seamlessly integrates with other tools and platforms, providing a unified marketing approach. : Seamlessly integrates with other tools and platforms, providing a unified marketing approach. Campaign Management : Facilitates the creation, management, and tracking of marketing campaigns. : Facilitates the creation, management, and tracking of marketing campaigns. Enhanced ROI Tracking: Provides clear metrics on marketing campaigns, helping to track and improve ROI. Small Business Deals Methodology for Selecting Marketing Automation Software In our journey as small business owners or entrepreneurs to find the ideal marketing automation software, its critical to weigh several key factors. These criteria ensure the software not only aligns with our marketing goals but also integrates seamlessly with our existing operations. Heres an overview of the criteria we considered when crafting our list: Ease of Use and User Interface Scale of Importance: 9/10 The software should have an intuitive interface and be user-friendly, ensuring that our team can easily navigate and utilize its features without extensive training. Integration Capabilities Scale of Importance: 8/10 Its crucial that the software integrates smoothly with other tools and platforms we are already using, like CRM systems, email platforms, and social media. Scalability Scale of Importance: 7/10 The software should grow with our business, capable of handling increased demands as our marketing efforts expand. Feature Set Scale of Importance: 8/10 Essential features like email marketing, social media management, lead nurturing, and analytics should be included. The more comprehensive the feature set, the better the software can cater to our diverse marketing needs. Cost Efficiency Scale of Importance: 7/10 While ensuring quality, the software should also fit within our budget. It should offer a good return on investment, without hidden costs or exorbitant upgrades. Customer Support and Training Scale of Importance: 7/10 Reliable customer support and access to training resources are important for troubleshooting and getting the most out of the software. Data Analytics and Reporting Scale of Importance: 9/10 Robust analytics and reporting capabilities are vital to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and to make data-driven decisions. Compliance and Security Scale of Importance: 8/10 The software must adhere to data protection regulations like GDPR and ensure the security of our and our customers data. Customization and Personalization Scale of Importance: 6/10 The ability to customize and personalize marketing campaigns to address our specific audience segments enhances the effectiveness of our marketing efforts. Automation and Workflow Capabilities Scale of Importance: 9/10 The core functionality should include robust automation and workflow capabilities to save time and resources while ensuring consistent marketing efforts. Marketing Automation Software Happily, there are many marketing automation software options for small businesses. These solutions can handle a few, or all types, of automated marketing techniques. In other words, they include various automation features such as: Forms and landing pages, Automated email campaigns, Trigger emails based on set or custom rules, Built-in eCommerce functionality or integration with eCommerce platforms; Lead scoring, Built-in CRM or CRM integration, Smarter segmentation and Website behavior tracking. Note: Not all solutions offer every feature. While you may be hesitant to try one because of either cost or learning curve, you should be aware that many marketing automation software vendors: Charge based on use (number of customers, features used, etc.) so the cost scales, and is manageable, as you grow; and Offer solid help as you learn to use their tool including free training, customer support representatives, comprehensive documentation and a supportive user community forum. Are you considering marketing automation for your small business? If so, heres a list of marketing automation software solutions to consider. GetResponse GetResponse calls itself the all-in-one online marketing platform to grow your business and a look down the features on their home page shows just how complete the software is. While its one of the most affordable solutions on this list, GetResponse brings the same, if not more, of the features and functionality offered by the more expensive solutions on this list. That said, the price does increase with use, but a small business should be able to handle the increase as it grows. ActiveCampaign Another affordable solution, ActiveCampaign, offers everything a small business needs to automate its marketing efforts including a robust, built-in CRM system. GreenRope Calling itself a small business CRM, GreenRope is almost a small business management suite. Starting with marketing automation, youll find website tracking, landing pages and more in this affordably-priced solution. GreenRope also offers sales and operations functionality setting the tool apart. Keap One of the more well-known marketing automation software options, Keap (formerly Infusionsoft), offers everything your small business needs at a reasonable price. One feature that shows off the power of this solution is the flexibility of the campaign builder. This tool enables you to create elaborate workflows one time and then implement them again and again. These workflows can include many types of steps including eCommerce, appointments, behaviors and actions, webinar attendance and many more. Additional Resources HubSpot The only tool on the list to offer a website builder, HubSpot aims to integrate your entire marketing effort in one place. One of the more powerful features of the tool is the ability to personalize your website with smart content based on a number of factors. Additional Resources Act-On Act-On offers a robust marketing automation platform. The software offers automation workflows and triggers as well as website behavior tracking, integration with many popular CRM platforms, and more. One of the more interesting, and useful, features of Act-On is its funnel reporting. By setting up a sales funnel, you can track the effectiveness of your overall marketing efforts. Heres a sample: Additional Resources Marketo Marketo Engage, a product run by Adobe, offers a powerful solution with many features. One thing that stood out however was their customized product bundling, an approach that may make the tool attractive for small businesses that want to dip their toe in the water. SharpSpring In addition to its marketing automation features, SharpSpring offers additional features including a blog builder and VisitorID tool which attempts to identify anonymous visitors to your website. Also, the vendor enables you to use your buyer personas to automatically offer unique, targeted content by segmenting your customers based on how closely their profiles match. Additional Resources SALESmanago While a look at SALESmanagos home page may make you run, dont let the complexity of the vendors offerings chase you away. This solution literally has it all and, if thats what you need, then its certainly worth a look. Software Key Features Pricing Structure Unique Selling Points Standout Functionalities GetResponse All-in-one marketing platform, comprehensive features Increases with usage Affordable, feature-rich compared to pricier options Wide range of marketing tools at a competitive price ActiveCampaign Marketing automation, robust CRM Affordable pricing Robust built-in CRM system Comprehensive marketing automation with integrated CRM GreenRope Marketing automation, website tracking, landing pages Affordably priced Sales and operations functionality CRM and business management suite suitable for small businesses Keap Campaign builder, eCommerce, appointments, webinars Reasonable pricing Flexible campaign builder Elaborate workflow creation for various business processes HubSpot Website builder, "smart content" personalization Not specified Integrated marketing solution with website builder Personalization of website content based on visitor behavior Act-On Automation workflows, CRM integration, funnel reporting Not specified Funnel reporting feature Detailed tracking and analysis of marketing funnel effectiveness Marketo Customized product bundling, comprehensive features Not specified Adobe-backed powerful solution Tailored product bundling suitable for diverse business needs SharpSpring Marketing automation, blog builder, VisitorID tool Not specified Unique content targeting using buyer personas Identifying anonymous website visitors and personalized content delivery SALESmanago Comprehensive range of features Not specified Extensive functionalities All-in-one solution for complex marketing needs Wrapping Up No matter which marketing automation software solution you select, make sure youre getting the most out of the tool. And remember, you can automate processes beyond marketing, too, so be sure to consider how leveraging other tools can help streamline your small business. If you run a business that relies on clients making bookings, adequately scheduling appointments can help your business run smoothly, and ensure appointments are never missed. One of the easiest ways to efficiently schedule appointments is to embrace automated appointment scheduling software. Small Business Trends takes a look at 20 online appointment scheduling apps designed to make appointment scheduling more seamless and efficient. Benefits of Online Appointment Scheduling Software for Small Businesses Appointment scheduling software offers numerous benefits for small businesses, streamlining their operations and enhancing customer experience. One of the most significant advantages is the improved efficiency in managing appointments. This type of software automates the scheduling process, reducing the need for manual input and minimizing the likelihood of errors. As a result, small business owners and their staff can focus more on core business activities instead of administrative tasks. Key benefits of appointment scheduling software for small businesses include: Time-Saving : Automates the booking process, reducing the time spent on scheduling and rescheduling appointments. : Automates the booking process, reducing the time spent on scheduling and rescheduling appointments. 24/7 Availability : Allows customers to book appointments outside of regular business hours, providing greater convenience. : Allows customers to book appointments outside of regular business hours, providing greater convenience. Reduced No-Shows : Automated reminders can be sent to clients, decreasing the number of missed appointments. : Automated reminders can be sent to clients, decreasing the number of missed appointments. Increased Revenue : Efficient scheduling can lead to more appointments and, consequently, higher revenue. : Efficient scheduling can lead to more appointments and, consequently, higher revenue. Customer Satisfaction : Enhances the customer experience with easy and quick booking, contributing to customer loyalty. : Enhances the customer experience with easy and quick booking, contributing to customer loyalty. Data Management : Centralizes client information and appointment history, aiding in better customer relationship management. : Centralizes client information and appointment history, aiding in better customer relationship management. Customization and Flexibility : Can be tailored to fit the specific needs of the business, including managing multiple staff members and services. : Can be tailored to fit the specific needs of the business, including managing multiple staff members and services. Mobile Accessibility: Many scheduling solutions offer mobile apps, allowing both business owners and customers to manage appointments on the go. Methodology for Selecting Online Appointment Scheduling Software As small business owners or entrepreneurs, choosing the right online appointment scheduling software involves a thoughtful consideration of various factors. These criteria ensure the software not only meets operational needs but also enhances the customer experience. Heres a detailed look at the factors we considered when compiling our list: Small Business Deals User-Friendly Interface Scale of Importance: 9/10 The software should be easy to navigate for both our team and our customers, with a clear and intuitive interface. Integration with Existing Systems Scale of Importance: 8/10 Its crucial that the software can seamlessly integrate with our existing website, CRM systems, and other digital tools. Customizability Scale of Importance: 7/10 The ability to customize the software to fit our specific business needs, branding, and scheduling preferences is important. Automated Notifications and Reminders Scale of Importance: 9/10 Automated email or SMS notifications for appointments can reduce no-shows and keep both staff and customers informed. Scalability Scale of Importance: 7/10 The software should be capable of handling an increasing number of appointments and users as our business grows. Cost-Effectiveness Scale of Importance: 7/10 We need to balance robust features with affordability to ensure the software is cost-effective for our business size and budget. Reliability and Uptime Scale of Importance: 8/10 Dependable software with minimal downtime is crucial to avoid disruptions in scheduling and maintaining customer trust. Mobile Compatibility Scale of Importance: 8/10 The software should be accessible and fully functional on mobile devices, catering to the increasing number of mobile users. Data Security and Privacy Scale of Importance: 9/10 Ensuring the security and privacy of customer data within the scheduling system is non-negotiable. Support and Maintenance Scale of Importance: 7/10 Reliable customer support and regular updates are essential to keep the software running smoothly and to address any issues promptly. Online Appointment Scheduling Software Visibook Visibook is a powerful tool for professionals and businesses to manage client appointments. This newly-launched scheduling software app allows entrepreneurs to manage client appointments. Clients can see appointment availabilities on a shared calendar, and schedule, track and manage appointments, consequently streamlining the whole appointment scheduling process for both parties. The software includes booking links that businesses can share with clients and automatic 24-hour reminders prior to appointments. Reservio With a 24/7 online booking system, Reservio enables businesses to streamline appointment scheduling and never miss an appointment. More than 75,000 businesses from 35 countries use Reservio every day to schedule appointments and improve their business. Users can take advantage of a free plan with 40 monthly bookings and basic scheduling features. Agile CRM Agile is an all-in-one CRM, which features online appointment scheduling software. The app enables clients to schedule appointments in calendars, which business owners can sync with other calendars. One particularly effective feature of Agile is the fact the calendar link can be embedded into email marketing campaigns, enabling clients and prospects receiving the emails to select a convenient time and date to schedule a meeting. A starter version of Agile is available at just $8.99 a month. BookSteam BookSteam is a smart online appointment scheduler that provides freelancers, entrepreneurs and business owners with a simple way for clients to schedule appointments online in real time. With a customizable platform BookSteam allows users to create a bespoke calendar designed to book and attract new customers online. BookSteams pricing starts from $19.95 a month for the Solo package, designed for one staff member. Sign In Scheduling Sign In Scheduling (formerly 10to8) is an effective appointment management system which sends out automated text reminders. More than 34,700 businesses around the world use Sign In Scheduling to efficiently coordinate with clients without multitasking and, with smart texts and email reminders, reduce no-show rates by as much as 90%. This 24/7 online booking app offers a free plan, followed by three more pricing options, the most comprehensive being the Enterprise Plan. Timely Timely enables business owners and freelancers to streamline their appointments. Timelys powerful calendar allows users to add, move and cancel appointments with ease and without any delay, and see whats coming up. Clients can check into the online bookings feature of the app and search for available appointment slots and book in at their leisure. Such online booking requests are then automatically updated in the calendar. Timely offers a three-tiered payment structure, starting from approximately $20 a month. Booksy Booksy (formerly Versum) offers powerful appointment scheduling software for professionals operating within the hair and beauty salon industry. Hair and beauty freelancers and businesses can gather all information on appointments, and manage their schedules conveniently. This advanced software gives individuals and businesses instant access to a clients appointment history, discounts and preferences. Hair and beauty specialists can try Booksy free of charge for 14 days. Appointy For businesses which are heavily reliant on social media, Appointy could be the most effective online appointment scheduling app for their business. This advanced software enables businesses to book appointments from the different social media channels. Appointments can then be embedded into the appointment calendar on the businesss Facebook page. Appointy has a free monthly plan, rising up to an Enterprise Plan, which starts at $59.99 a month. vCita vCita is an all-in-one business management app for SMBs. Calendar management is a key feature of vCita, in which clients can set appointments on a businesss online calendar and reschedule at any time via the companys website, mobile, social network profiles, or even on the emails a business sends. With automated email and text, professionals and businesses can save time on back and forth coordination around calendar management, as well as reducing cancellation and no-show rates. vCita offers a basic online calendar for free, ranging to a business plan, which starts at $39.90 a month. Kickserv Kickserv Field Service Software includes customer servicing and scheduling, designed to ensure business owners, freelancers and start-ups always know when an appointment is approaching. Kickservs sophisticated calendar filtering options enables users to drag and drop appointments and dynamically filter calendars. With color-coding, businesses have an accurate picture of their day, week or month ahead. Kickserv starts from $26 per month. BookedIN Aiming to calm your appointment scheduling chaos, BookedIN allows users to set up an online appointment scheduler within minutes and invite clients to book and pay for appointments online. This hassle-free online booking system for entrepreneurs and their clients has a tiered payment structure, starting from $24 a year to $69 annually. FrontDesk FrontDesk helps to simplify client management and allow professionals grow their business through effective client management software for those in the fitness and arts industries. Businesses and clients can save time on front desk tasks, such as appointment scheduling, through mobile-friendly and easy-to-use online scheduling for clients and staff. FrontDesks pricing starts from $129 per month. Bookafy Bookafy is online appointment booking software that is rich in features. Individuals can schedule meetings, calls, demos and services to help grow their business by waving goodbye to time-consuming email and phone-based appointment scheduling. Appointments can be synced with Google Calendar and Outlook and payments and can also be collected at the booking stage. For individuals wanting effective scheduling software, Bookafy costs just $19 a month. SetMore SetMore allows freelancers, entrepreneurs and business owners to book and manage appointments via Web, Android and iOS apps. Users can set SMS and email reminders to help them stay on top of all their appointments. SMS reminders can also be sent to customers to remind them of their future appointments. For a premium scheduling software service, businesses can choose from $25 a month or $199 a year plans. Acuity Scheduling Acuity Scheduling has been hailed as being a superhero for your schedule. This appointment scheduling software helps business owners, entrepreneurs and freelancers arrange appointments and their calendars with ease and efficiency. Acuity Scheduling allows clients to view availability quickly in real-time and self-book their own appointments, and even reschedule in just a click. Acuity Scheduling offers a four-tiered pricing structure, ranging from $0 for a freebie up to $34 a month for the Powerhouse Player tier. Xola Xola is available for freelancers and individuals wanting to grow their business by making their appointment scheduling considerably more professional and seamless. Xolas easy-to-use system is designed to save individuals time and accelerate business growth. Xolas Professional Plan costs $99 a month. Calendly Calendly can be synced with Google calendars and allows users to receive requests for appointments rather than merely booking meetings straight up. Once the meeting has been accepted, the appointment is added to the Outlook or Google calendar of all meeting invitees. Calendly offers a free trial, a Premium account for $8 a month, and a Pro account for $12 a month. Vagaro Vagaro is a web-based solution for businesses in the health and fitness industry to connect with customers and benefits from complete appointment booking controls. The software boasts 24/7 scheduling, enabling health and fitness businesses to streamline their clients booking experience. Health and fitness clubs and professionals can use Vagaro for just $25 a month. SuperSaaS SuperSaas offers affordable, flexible and easy-to-use appointment scheduling features for entrepreneurs and businesses working within any industry. SuperSaaS enables users to accept online appointments for their business, use an online booking calendar for events, workshops and conferences, and much more. SuperSaas offers a free version that limits the maximum number of upcoming appoints for 50. PunchPass If you run a yoga or personal training business then Punchpass could be an effective tool in crafting a more seamless scheduling system for clients to book onto classes and fitness sessions. Instead of relying on the phone or email to make class reservations, customers can book for classes and appointments online with this simple-to-use and flexible appointment management software. PunchPass starts from $34 a month. Software Name Target Industries Key Features Pricing Visibook Various Shared calendar, booking links, automatic reminders Not specified Reservio Various 24/7 online booking, 40 monthly bookings in free plan Free plan available, other plans not specified Agile CRM Various, with a focus on CRM integration Online scheduling, calendar sync, embeddable calendar links Starting at $8.99/month BookSteam Freelancers, entrepreneurs Customizable platform, real-time online scheduling Starting at $19.95/month Sign In Scheduling (formerly 10to8) Various Automated text reminders, 24/7 online booking Free plan available, other plans not specified Timely Various Powerful calendar, online booking, automatic updates Starting from approx. $20/month Booksy (formerly Versum) Hair and beauty salon industry Appointment history, discounts and preferences tracking Free 14-day trial, other plans not specified Appointy Social media reliant businesses Social media integration, Facebook page embedding Free plan available, Enterprise Plan starting at $59.99/month vCita SMBs All-in-one business management, automated reminders, calendar management Basic online calendar free, business plan from $39.90/month Kickserv Various, including field service Customer servicing and scheduling, sophisticated calendar filtering Starting from $26/month BookedIN Various Online appointment scheduler, payment collection $24/year to $69/year FrontDesk Fitness and arts industries Client management, mobile-friendly scheduling Starting from $129/month Bookafy Various Online booking, calendar syncing, payment collection Starting at $19/month SetMore Various SMS/email reminders, Web/Android/iOS app support $25/month or $199/year Acuity Scheduling Various Real-time availability, self-booking and rescheduling $0 to $34/month Xola Various Easy-to-use system, professional plan $99/month Calendly Various Syncs with Google and Outlook, request-based appointments Free trial, $8 to $12/month Vagaro Health and fitness industry 24/7 scheduling, booking controls $25/month SuperSaas Various Online appointments, event/workshop booking Free version available, other plans not specified PunchPass Yoga and personal training Online class/appointment booking Starting from $34/month Do you run a business and rely on automated appointment scheduling to help book and manage important appointments and meetings? If so, wed love to know which appointment scheduling software you use. Valaliky will become a centre for electromobility. The construction of the industrial park is already changing the look of the region. The construction works on the site where the industrial park in Valaliky will stand. (Source: TASR) Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Share When representatives of the Eduard Heger government announced a major investment by Volvo Cars in July 2022, the mayor of Valaliky, a village near the site of a planned new industrial park, was not surprised. The village of Valaliky had designated the area in question as an industrial park in its master plan more than 20 years ago, Stefan Petrik, mayor of the village, which is 15-minutes drive from the eastern Slovak city of Kosice, told The Slovak Spectator. Investment Advisory Guide Well-arranged information about the economy, labour market, investor support, legislation, and real estate as well as investment opportunities in Slovakia. For more details visit our online shop. The location had once been offered to automaker PSA, but it eventually decided to build its car manufacturing plant in Trnava, in western Slovakia. And when BMW was considering nearby Haniska as the site for a potential investment, its prospective subcontractors were expected to be located in Valaliky, he added. Representatives of the industrial park and the Kosice Self-Governing Region, and other observers, point to several advantages the locality offers investors, while the arrival of Volvo Cars is also expected to benefit the whole wider region. We consider the decision to place the industrial park in Valaliky a positive new impulse for the development of the economy of the whole of eastern Slovakia, Katarina Minova, regional manager of the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Slovakia, told The Slovak Spectator. Related article Related article Kosices potential to become a Central European hub is huge, according to new AmCham Slovakia head Read more In her opinion, the arrival of Volvo Cars and related supplier investments will be the fourth major transformation of Kosice and the local region. The previous three were the arrival of U.S. Steel and the related development of industrial production, the arrival of Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions Slovakia and the subsequent growth in the local IT sector, and Kosices selection as European Capital of Culture in 2013. Apart from the expected benefits of the new investment, Minova also pointed to the challenges it will bring, as well as steps that have to be taken before Volvo launches the project. How a cancer survivor and refugee from Ukraine didnt waste her time after Russias invasion and started to also help Slovaks. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Share Ukrainian version | Slovak version As the weather outside gets colder, it is getting busier in Hanna Semenovas salon in Bratislava. People are hoping that the Ukrainian aesthetician will help them prepare their skin for the winter. If she isnt in her salon, which she runs with other Ukrainian women, applying skin care products to a clients face, Semenova may be offering consultations to Ukrainian women or writing skin care protocols for Slovak clients. The skin care specialist even squeezed in a few tips on how to make your skin look better during an interview with The Slovak Spectator, recommending professional cosmetic products selected by a specialist, leading a healthy lifestyle and self-massaging your face. At least one and a half minutes during face washing in the morning and in the evening, the opponent of facial injections says about the length of a self-massage. Ideally, you should do a 20-minute massage during the day with special facial products. She believes that a person can look good regardless of age or health problems. Semenova knows it well. Hanna Semanova at work. (Source: Archive of H. S.) Cancer made her aesthetician Ten years ago, she was diagnosed with cancer. After a while I realised that I dont look very good. I really wanted to have good skin, she says. But doctors, unlike aestheticians, did not allow her to undergo any cosmetic treatments. She wasnt the only woman dealing with the same problem and striving to look great at the same time. So she herself decided to become an aesthetician. She says that she chose aesthetic cosmetology because it doesnt require medical education, and doesnt involve any serious interventions such as facial injections. The treatments she offers to clients, like facial cleaning, do not have an immediate effect, but week after week she claims that the condition of a clients skin improves. Maybe a person does not feel that wow effect the first time, but over time you see how your face and skin have changed, the Ukrainian says. To be sure that she uses top products, the Ukrainian adds that she always tests all the cosmetics she uses at work on herself at first. When someone makes an appointment to consult their skin care with her, Semenova always asks for their facial photo and about cosmetic products they use as well as potential health problems to be of help to the client. For example, cosmetics containing seaweed cannot be used by people with thyroid problems, the Ukrainian explains. Then, in addition to a consultation, cleaning the clients face can begin. Read also: Read also: Ukrainian photographer helps young refugees on Bratislavas rugby pitches Read more Queen of disinfection Starting a business in Slovakia was not a walk in the park. Semenova found herself in Slovakia three days after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. My house is 30 km away from the Russian border. I saw how the invasion began, the Ukrainian recalls. A real war started. The Kharkiv native packed her stuff in 15 minutes and left the city with her family and grandchildren, except her husband, in a car. Slovakia wasnt a big unknown to Semenova. She had visited Bratislava before the war to see her niece. However, her situation was different and confusing. At first it was a shock, we did not know where to start and what to do next, she recalls, It was difficult to accept the situation. But after Ukrainian refugees were granted temporary refuge in Slovakia, things were gradually starting to settle down for Semenova. Soon she found a job at Medirex laboratories, where she cleaned and disinfected five floors of offices and laboratories until January of this year. It was not an easy job, she notes. But if you see the positives in every job, it brings satisfaction. She was then telling herself that she was the queen of disinfection. Apart from work, Semenova also took up free Slovak lessons in the hope of going back to her profession as aesthetician in Slovakia later on. Her colleagues at Medirex also used to read childrens books with her to help her overcome the language barrier. Slovaks are very open people and are always ready to give help and support, the building designer-turned-aesthetician says. After passing the necessary exams in Slovakia, Semenova received certificates that would help her open a salon in the Slovak capital. In her opinion, Slovak women are very cautious when it comes to cosmetic products. They sometimes dont understand what some treatments are for, the aesthetician says. Ukrainian women are more interested in cosmetics and learning about it, Semenova thinks. In their salon, Ukrainian women from Odessa, Kyiv and Kharkiv and she work together. They all met at cosmetology courses in Bratislava. In Ukraine, each had their own salon. Hanna Semenova in her Bratislava salon. (Source: Archive of H. S.) In love with Slovak cuisine If she doesnt work, Semenova usually spends her free time with family and grandchildren. The aesthetician also continues to work on her Slovak skills. Moreover, she and her sister are Nordic walking enthusiasts. Semenova hopes that other Ukrainians will learn from Slovaks and share their experience with Slovaks in return. Despite the invasion, she says, Ukrainians shouldnt waste their time, embracing the opportunities offered to them and the culture that they have found themselves in. If we respect the residents of other countries, we will be treated the same way, Semenova says. Unlike Slovak health care, which the cancer survivor finds overcomplicated, the Ukrainian woman fell in love with Slovak cuisine. She adores local knedliky (dumplings) and chlebova polievka (bread soup). She says that in Slovakia, traditions and family always come first. Ukrainians, unfortunately, often forget about these things, Semenova thinks. At Christmas, for example, Slovak families usually gather together. I would like to take this tradition with me to Ukraine - as well as the understanding that people need to rest and take time for themselves. This story was published with support from the International Press Institute's Ukraine regional reporting fund. Svetlana Martynovskaya and her teenage son fled Ukraine last March. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Share Ukrainian version | Slovak version Svetlana Martynovskaya, a middle-aged Ukrainian dollmaker, has one simple rule that she always follows before she picks up the needle: If shes not in a good mood, she never sews. Its because I pass all my emotions on to the rag doll, she explains. And Id like the child or grown-up who buys my doll to feel my positive energy. She does not perceive any of the rag dolls that the Ukrainian has ever made as a thing. In fact, she doesnt even say that she sews dolls. Instead, the artist prefers to describe it as giving birth to dolls. To her, every doll she makes is a character with a soul. Martynovskaya, a mother of two, has loved dolls since she was a little girl. She played with and sewed clothes for them. It was indeed a matter of time before she developed a great liking for sewing and make her first toy. The talent seems to be in the family. Martynovskayas mother used to sew and knit, and her sister has also been knitting for a long time. In addition, she also learned how to sew in school. At Christmas, when their family house was traditionally decorated with toys, she decided to make her first sewn toy. It was supposed to be a moose. But it turned out to be a Christmas angel in the style of a whimsical Tilda character (a rag doll produced by the Norwegian fabric brand Tilda). It may not have been perfect. Yet, it was a real wow for everyone, the Ukrainian recalls. She rediscovered the craft of sewing dolls during her pregnancy 13 years ago. Since then, she has been improving her techniques. Martynovskaya has made around 400 rag dolls to date. Each is different, the dollmaker says. What she cant quantify is how much time she spent on those 400 dolls, as she says she loses herself in space and time when sewing them. Thanks to the dolls, Ive extended my childhood, Martynovskaya says about her hobby. (Source: Archive of S. M.) From Voznesensk to Trencin Over the years, her dolls have found new homes in many countries. Even in Slovakia where she and her teenage son, Nikita, fled from Voznesensk, a town of 33,000 near Odessa, a month after Russia invaded Ukraine last February. Following the invasion, at first Martynovskaya continued going to work and tried to help Ukrainian soldiers. But after they survived a heavy shelling in early March, they found themselves standing in the middle of a destroyed yard and realised that they didnt know what to do next. Grocery stores were nearly empty, people were leaving the town, and Martynovskaya feared that her son would go hungry. This was the moment when I realised that I myself was responsible for my family. Just me, the Ukrainian mother says. I thought that Im a mother more than a citizen. I gave life to this child, I have to save it. Because her son is a swimmer, they were first offered to moving to Germany where he could continue swimming. But free places had run out before she and her son made a decision. In the end, they agreed to move to Slovakia. They arrived in the country with one suitcase. Apart from documents, tracksuits and Nikitas swimming clothing, Martynovskaya managed to pack her favourite sewing patterns into the suitcase at the last minute. After a stay in a camp for refugees, they moved to Puchov, a town in western Slovakia, where Nikita joined a local swimming team, Matador. The Slovak swimming community has provided temporary shelter to more than 100 swimmers from Ukraine. You probably won't believe this, but we initially lived in the local fire department with firefighters, the Ukrainian recalls. We slept on benches. It was a difficult time, but an interesting one. Later, they got a place in a dormitory. Simultaneously, Martynovskaya, a former cashier, began to work for the KMF machine shop in the neighbouring city of Trencin to get by. She had to wake up at three in the morning to reach work by train before they had the chance to move to Trencin. At first, I didnt understand what I could do there since this field was unfamiliar to me. But the Ukrainian mother has seen the experience as a task rather than a problem: Hey, Svetlana. How will you cope with this task? Her creative thinking, she says, has always helped her in such situations. She adds that she always looks for the positive, because only the positive has always helped her. Today, her son swims for the Slavia club in Trencin, is fluent in Slovak and studies at a local school. Martynovskaya herself was well-received by her colleagues. She says that they were even interested in buying her rag dolls, which are made from the White Angel fabric for doll-making, as soon as she showed them pictures. When orders from Slovaks started to come in, I realised that I had nothing to sew them with, recalls the Ukrainian. Like many years ago in Ukraine, she had to buy threads, fabrics, scissors and needles. The sewing machine was a gift. Despite her circumstances, she hasnt given up on dreaming. I dream very much about my own workshop where a person can come in and see how a doll is created, the Ukrainian reveals. And if you are wondering about the names of th dolls made by the Ukrainian artist, there are none. She thinks its not right for her to give them names. She leaves it up to its owner. (Source: Archive of S. M.) Becoming calm Almost two years into her stay in Slovakia, she says that the country is beautiful and very friendly. She also appreciates the fact that children in Slovakia, unlike children in Ukraine, are not pressured to excel in school and deliver excellent results in their after-school activities. The Ukrainian admires that Slovak people forget about work at the weekend and focus on their families, too. Ive learned to be calm, accept everything as it is and not to rush, Martynovskaya notes. Her priority is still her son and his well-being. She doesnt know what her life in Ukraine would be like if they were to return home, but the mother knows that her son doesnt have to have any fear in Slovakia. It's said that every mother should give her child peace, a carefree childhood, she says. Her son, Nikita, and children in general inspire her when she creates dolls in her free time. She says that she wants to teach them that they dont have to give up, even if their situation looks difficult or like they may lose everything. In addition, as she goes on to say, knowledge is something that cannot be taken away from anyone. In those two years, she herself has learned not to plan things for the future as nobody knows what the future holds for them. Maybe tomorrow my dream will come true. I will have my own workshop and I will do what pleases me. This story was published with support from the International Press Institute's Ukraine regional reporting fund. Little has changed in Slovakias support for Ukraine, but major changes planned at home should ring alarm bells. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Share Welcome to your weekly commentary and overview of news from Slovakia. Mixed messages over Slovakias support for Ukraine. Fico IV is rushing to adjust the state to its needs. Sutaj Estok survives no confidence vote, and Sefcovic is Europes Mr. Fix It. Plus a viewing tip. If you like this newsletter, recommend it to your friends. If you have a suggestion on how to make it better, let me know at michaela.terenzani@spectator.sk. Changes will be big and fast There remains no definite answer to where exactly the fourth government of Robert Fico stands on Ukraine, especially not after last Thursday, when Fico met (separately) with both the US and the Russian ambassadors. This was shortly after Foreign Minister Juraj Blanar met his Ukrainian counterpart and prompted a small sigh of relief among his NATO partners when he showed a much more welcoming face than the one Smer displayed throughout its pre-election campaign, during which it mainly echoed Russian propaganda messages. But back home in Slovakia, any sigh of relief would be an act of sheer folly. Ficos government has started moving fast and is bending the state administration to its advantage for a comfortable term ideally, from its point of view, one that will stretch into many more. Rapid steps are being taken and not just in the Interior Ministry, which is the most closely watched, given the history of Ficos former governments. Whats the line on Ukraine? Puneet Dhiman, a 28-year-old Indian citizen, runs a unique food truck in Bratislava called Rolltown. Font size: A - | A + Comments disabled Share https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1681783509&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true Puneet Dhiman and his business partner have created a special fusion of Indian and Turkish food that is now known to many diners in the Slovak capital for its great taste and because of the colorful decorations on the food truck from which they sell it. Moving to Slovakia was a cultural shock for Dhiman, especially considering the fact that he had always been a vegetarian. "When I came here as a student in 2018, there was no concept of vegetarian food. I was a vegetarian till the age of 24. I never ate meat, and then I came here and I had no option, so I had to eat everything," he says. He explains how the relocation required him to change his way of life, and how he adapted to a new culture. Not only did he struggle, at least at first, with the choice of food; he also faced some challenges communicating. To this day, he is still learning the Slovak language. Since marrying the Slovak podcaster Miska (creator of the Sexualna Vychova, or Sex Education, podcast), he says that she has been helping him not only to learn the language but also to understand Slovak culture and the distinctive ways that Slovaks communicate. According to Dhiman, it is relatively straightforward to get a working visa and to start your own business in Slovakia if, like him, you were already living and studying in the country before you applied. One of his goals in the near future is to spread the tastes and culture of India to other European countries, and take his food-truck business to the next level. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/australia-developing-secret-cloud-initiative-interoperable-with-us-uk---intelligence-chief-1115378054.html Australia Developing 'Secret Cloud Initiative' Interoperable With US, UK - Intelligence Chief Australia Developing 'Secret Cloud Initiative' Interoperable With US, UK - Intelligence Chief Australia is working to develop a "top secret cloud initiative" that will be "interoperable" with US and UK intelligence agencies, its director-general of national intelligence said Monday. 2023-12-04T17:14+0000 2023-12-04T17:14+0000 2023-12-04T17:14+0000 military australia united kingdom (uk) cloud service intelligence aukus us /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e7/0c/04/1115377878_0:265:2698:1783_1920x0_80_0_0_545ac6524e06ced58789c32ad294b384.jpg "In Australia, we are working very hard on a top-secret cloud initiative...what that will do is obviously transform how we do our work as agencies but also it'll open up a shared collaborative space," Andrew Shearer said at a talk hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Shearer added that the initiative would make Australia "interoperable" with the US and UK intelligence communities. He said that the project was being designed with "interoperability with our most important partners right from the start." Shearer said that post 9/11, Australia's intelligence agencies had been going through a "similar journey" to those of the US to heighten collaboration. He also suggested that collaboration stood to be improved across the Five Eyes international intelligence alliance. https://sputnikglobe.com/20210706/jedi-is-dead-all-hail-new-jedi-pentagon-kills-its-cloud-computing-project-only-to-start-new-one-1083320885.html australia united kingdom (uk) Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Sputnik International aukus, australia, cloud service, cloud initiative, secret cloud initiatinve, intelligence, australia-us-uk cooperation https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/bulgarian-president-vetoes-transfer-of-decommissioned-armored-vehicles-to-ukraine-1115368417.html Bulgarian President Vetoes Transfer of Decommissioned Armored Vehicles to Ukraine Bulgarian President Vetoes Transfer of Decommissioned Armored Vehicles to Ukraine Bulgarian President Rumen Radev has returned to the parliament for further discussion the draft law on the ratification of the agreement on the free transfer of 100 decommissioned armored personnel carriers to Ukraine, according to the president's office. 2023-12-04T09:47+0000 2023-12-04T09:47+0000 2023-12-04T09:47+0000 world bulgaria ukrainian crisis ukraine rumen radev /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/19222/86/192228662_0:0:2536:1427_1920x0_80_0_0_a3b3fa983be1cd2fd5530cce2ce1b971.jpg Last month, the parliament ratified the agreement between the Bulgarian Interior Ministry and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense on the free provision of a batch of old armored personnel carriers to Kiev. "The justification for the veto notes that the lawmakers were not sufficiently familiar with the specific parameters of the donation, which deprives them of the opportunity to objectively assess whether the equipment provided is no longer necessary," the office said in a statement. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/ukraine-faces-50-billion-euro-underfunding-risk--report-1115366279.html ukraine Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Sputnik International ukrainian crisis, western arms for ukraine, bulgarian decommissioned vehicles, ukraine decommissioned The San Antonio Food Bank is planning to build a 51-unit transitional housing complex next to its New Braunfels branch. The project has been in the works for several years, and the organization is hoping to begin construction in early 2024. Courtesy of the San Antonio Food Bank After three years of delays, planning and fundraising, the San Antonio Food Bank is aiming to start construction early next year on a 51-unit apartment complex in New Braunfels, its first-ever housing project. The $12 million project, called Apple Seeds Apartments, will offer transitional housing to families with children, said Eric Cooper, CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank. The complex could be operating as early as January 2025, he said. It will be built on 2 acres on South Seguin Avenue next to the New Braunfels Food Bank, which is a branch of the San Antonio Food Bank. Of the 29 counties served by the food bank, Comal County presents some of the biggest affordability challenges, Cooper said. The workforce is struggling with affordable housing, and its pushing a lot of residents out of the community that just cant afford to live and work in the same community, he said. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The San Antonio Food Bank is planning to build a 51-unit transitional housing complex next to its New Braunfels branch. After several years of planning and delays, construction could begin as soon as January, CEO Eric Cooper said. Courtesy of the San Antonio Food Bank The organization serves about 3,000 people per month from the New Braunfels Food Bank facility, and housing costs are the No. 1 challenge that families are dealing with, Cooper said. Housing just doesnt leave enough money to put food on the table. The citys population has increased by 80% since 2010, climbing from 57,740 people to almost 105,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the Four Rivers Association of Realtors, the median home price in New Braunfels is $347,500, while the median price in Comal County was $410,000 as of October. Both are down from last year, but Comal County has seen housing prices rise consistently over the past three years. Since November 2020, the median price in New Braunfels has risen by almost 28%, while the median price in Comal County has increased by 24%. HILL COUNTRY HEADLINES: Top stories from the booming region The transitional housing project will look to address just one component of the housing shortage: helping working families who are struggling with living costs. It will be limited to families with children and to households earning 80% or less of the areas median income. Rents will be set based on that income limit, but Cooper said its too early to estimate amounts, as rent also will be based on construction and operating costs. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The housing complex will be focused on families whose members are employed and on an upward trajectory, but has risk of the realities of the economy and life taking them off track, Cooper said. The San Antonio Food Bank is planning to build a 51-unit transitional housing complex next to its New Braunfels branch. Residents will need to meet income limits and will participate in educational programming while they live in the apartments. Courtesy of the San Antonio Food Bank While living in Apple Seeds Apartments for 24 to 36 months, residents will participate in programming that educates them on topics such as nutrition and personal finance, with a goal of helping them move on to permanent housing. Although the apartments will offer only temporary housing, it wont be a transient population, he said. Apartments will change residents every two to three years. Residents will receive a stipend upon completion of the program, which is intended to help with moving into permanent housing, Cooper said. The development has been years in the making. The McKenna Foundation helped purchase the property where the New Braunfels Food Bank was built, and with NB Housing Partners, a nonprofit focused on housing issues in the region, then asked the San Antonio Food Bank to take on the project. The land was part of a 5-acre parcel on Seguin Avenue purchased for the New Braunfels branch of the food bank, which opened in 2017 on half of the property. The city purchased the remaining land from NB Housing Partners in 2016, according to Comal County Central Appraisal District records. New Braunfels paid $249,836.50 for the land, city spokesman David Ferguson said. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The food bank in March 2020 entered an agreement to build and operate the apartment complex, and at one point aimed to start construction in the spring of 2021. But a perfect storm pushed the project back, Cooper said. The San Antonio Food Bank is planning to build a 51-unit transitional housing complex next to its New Braunfels branch. Apple Seeds Apartments is aimed at helping working families struggling with the high cost of living in the fast-growing city, by providing affordable housing for two to three year periods. Courtesy of the San Antonio Food Bank During the coronavirus pandemic, the food bank was called upon in such a major way, he said, so the organization had to focus its efforts there. The housing boom that followed also caused delays as architects, engineers and city officials alike were inundated with work, Cooper said. The costs of the project have risen due to the delays. After an initial estimate that the project would cost $9 million, the cost has climbed to $12 million. Cooper said thats because the price of materials and supplies have increased substantially. The San Antonio Food Bank is still working on raising money to close that gap, but has obtained interim financing allowing it to move forward, he said. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Its taken a long time to get to the end zone, and its felt like its been at the 99-yard line for a long time, he said. A milestone was reached last week, when the New Braunfels City Council voted to approve selling the property to the food bank. The organization will pay $250,000 for the land, well below the appraisal districts market value of $638,760, because of the public purpose it will serve, according to council documents. The food bank is expected to recover that money from rent payments once residents move in. Cooper said the sale of the property clears the way for construction to begin. The food bank hopes to close on the sale in December, which means work could start in January. Its expected to take about a year to complete the three buildings, he said. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/ex-pentagon-analyst-ossified-mic-to-prevent-us-from-ramping-up-counter-drone-system-production-1115376867.html Ex-Pentagon Analyst: Ossified MIC to Prevent US From Ramping Up Counter-Drone System Production Ex-Pentagon Analyst: Ossified MIC to Prevent US From Ramping Up Counter-Drone System Production The Pentagon will have trouble getting weapons makers to mass produce counter-drone weapons for quite a while, due to its entrenched, decades-old acquisition system dependent on the US being the worlds foremost military power. 2023-12-04T17:30+0000 2023-12-04T17:30+0000 2023-12-04T17:30+0000 karen kwiatkowski pentagon bill laplante counter-drone technology counter-drone system drones military us us department of defense (dod) /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e7/09/03/1113082901_0:85:3072:1813_1920x0_80_0_0_191adb6c26254b003b57551bcefabd1e.jpg A top Pentagon official said the US needs to dramatically increase its production of counter-drone systems to maximum capacity during the Reagan National Defense Forum in California over the weekend.The production for counter-UAS [has] to go through the roof, US Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante told forum-goers, comparing the need to that faced a year ago when the US was rapidly running out of 155-millimeter artillery shells after having sent its entire stockpile to Ukraine.According to US media reports, LaPlante and other top Pentagon officials have been using a chart of the growth of 155-millimeter artillery shell production capacity over time as part of their efforts to pressure defense contractors into pumping out more anti-drone weapons and loitering munitions, which are also called kamikaze or suicide drones.The industrial base has to be able to produce these at high numbers, LaPlante said.Retired US Air Force and former Pentagon analyst Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski told Sputnik that the privately-owned military-industrial firms face a slew of obstacles to ramping up production of brand-new systems like counter-drone weapons, including research and development (R&D), questions of demand for buyers, and stability in Congress for funding such contracts.Production costs are reduced at scale, but Mr LaPlante and the Pentagon confuse Congressional demand with market demand. Market demand and market signals are faster and more accurate than the political signals that drive and control the US defense industry. Smaller and more agile international producers may have an advantage over the big five American firms that make counter-drone and loitering technologies and munitions.However, she said that the identification of a persistent demand globally was the first obstacle to ramping up production - something that could be highly dependent on the White Houses foreign policy. Demand for anti-drones systems is likely to become less acute if a more isolationist government replaces the present interventionist-minded one.Another part of the equation is Congress, which must be convinced to pay for this newer and costly segment of Pentagon spending, Kwiatkowski said.The third obstacle, of course, is the ramp-up speed of the US manufacturing sector for these technologies. As we have seen with aid to Ukraine, mass munitions and small arms, as well as complex technological consumables, even with tens of billions of dollars made available for pre-existing technologies and existing production lines, it was not enough to make even the slightest difference in the Ukraine war. "The first money that is spent profits the corporations, their pay and bonuses, and upgrades to infrastructure and manpower (factory upgrades, manpower hires, and other corporate investment). Then you see the output increase, and as many of these wars that are driving the counter-drone (and drone) demand are relatively short-lived, by the time the infrastructure and manpower improvements are in place, the demand is less urgent. The system then lobbies for the longer run, and cost plus contracts for the next time, she explained.Kwiatkowski highlighted that for decades, the Pentagon has been able to rely on endless upgrades for off-the-shelf equipment, which has streamlined much of its acquisition policies. However, that system was dependent on US global dominance - something that can no longer be taken for granted, making the recent funding issues created by Congress into a threat for the development of new systems like anti-drone weapons.Just like the US consumes produced end items from the rest of the world, the US defense industry is also dependent on production capabilities from the rest of the world, and has a long acquisition history of buying off the shelf. As the world bifurcates into multipolar and shifting alliances, this approach that the US has invested in for decades, can become another weak point. It's not just consistent funding, it's how to actually shift how the Pentagon is invested - and that is like moving a mountain. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231020/nato-poised-to-adopt-first-counter-drone-doctrine-1114370733.html https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/us-central-command-says-destroyer-shoots-down-3-drones-launched-by-houthis-in-red-sea-1115365120.html Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Fantine Gardinier Fantine Gardinier News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Fantine Gardinier can the us mass produce counter-drone weapons, does the us have anti-drone technology, what can stop a drone https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/houthi-attack-on-commercial-ships-in-red-sea-a-warning-to-israel-and-us---experts-1115378539.html Houthi Attack on Commercial Ships in Red Sea a Warning to Israel and US - Experts Houthi Attack on Commercial Ships in Red Sea a Warning to Israel and US - Experts Three Bahama- and Panama-flagged commercial vessels, allegedly belonging to Jewish businessmen, were subjected to a Houthi missile attack in the Red Sea on Sunday. A US warship in the region reportedly shot down three drones in self-defense. 2023-12-04T18:10+0000 2023-12-04T18:10+0000 2023-12-05T09:24+0000 middle east analysis hassan nasrallah red sea israel houthi hamas israel defense forces (idf) cargo ship us /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e7/08/16/1112797484_0:353:2992:2036_1920x0_80_0_0_6f1360bf7bafb892215038a32124dfe0.jpg A recent escalation of tensions in the Red Sea has come on the heels of the resumption of the military operation in Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).The Red Sea is considered one of the most important trade routes in the region. It extends southeastward from Suez, Egypt, to the Indian Ocean through the Bab el Mandeb sound and the Gulf of Aden. Over 10% of global trade passes through the Red Sea annually. On Sunday, multiple commercial vessels were simultaneously attacked by Houthi militants for the first time in the Israel-Hamas war."Both of the cargo ships targeted by the Houthi in November and a few days ago were not Israeli-flagged ships, but they were owned by Israeli businessmen. That was the aim of the direct target of the pro-Iranian government," the scholar continued.Last month, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah linked Shiite attacks on US military bases and personnel in Syria and Iraq to the unfolding Gaza war. "To the Americans, I say: If you want the secondary fronts to stop, you must cease the aggression on Gaza," he said on November 11. On November 20, Houthi rebels seized an Israeli-linked cargo ship that passed the Red Sea and took its 25 crew members hostage. During the week-long truce between Israel and Islamist Palestinian group Hamas militants across the region appeared to hit the pause button. However, after the humanitarian pause ended, tensions have grown even higher.Per Saad, one might expect that Houthi and Shiite militants are likely to proceed with their attacks as long as the US-backed Israeli military is continuing their operation in Gaza. He doesn't rule out that the situation may run out of control if the number of civilian casualties continues to grow in the strip.For its part, the Israeli government has made it clear that it is determined to eradicate Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization by Tel Aviv. Israeli policy-makers argue that the Islamist group is using Palestinians in Gaza as "human shields" while launching attacks from the strip. At the same time, Israel has come under criticism from Arab states and the UN over the skyrocketing death toll among civilians. As Tel Aviv and Washington don't demonstrate any inclination to scale down the intensity of military actions, the situation on the ground is deteriorating. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231128/us-warns-ships-to-exercise-caution-in-red-sea-gulf-of-aden-after-ship-attacks-1115262080.html https://sputnikglobe.com/20231127/four-reasons-us-troops-should-pull-out-of-syria-and-iraq-asap-1115238924.html red sea israel gaza strip Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Ekaterina Blinova Ekaterina Blinova News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Ekaterina Blinova red sea, israel, middle east, hamas, israel-hamas war, houthi attack on three commercial vessels, gaza war, the gaza strip, hassan nasrallah, yemen, iraq, syria, shiite militants https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/hundreds-protest-osprey-flights-as-us-refuses-japans-request-to-ground-crash-prone-aircraft-1115380703.html Hundreds Protest Osprey Flights as US Refuses Japan's Request to Ground Crash-Prone Aircraft Hundreds Protest Osprey Flights as US Refuses Japan's Request to Ground Crash-Prone Aircraft The US has more than 50,000 troops in Japan at nearly two dozen bases, part of a presence maintained since Japan surrendered to the US at the end of World War II. 2023-12-04T20:00+0000 2023-12-04T20:00+0000 2023-12-04T19:58+0000 okinawa japan v-22 osprey grounded flights us air force asia /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/101861/37/1018613723_0:0:5014:2820_1920x0_80_0_0_75f1bdc92f22ba2688552ffc001602f6.jpg At least 200 people rallied on Okinawa on Monday to protest against continued flights over Japan by US Air Force V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft after Washington refused a request by Tokyo to ground the aircraft. A day prior, the wreckage from a crashed Osprey and the remains of five crewmembers were discovered in the waters of nearby Kagoshima Prefecture.The demonstrators gathered in Kadena in front of the headquarters of the Okinawa Defense Bureau, one of the Japanese Defense Ministrys eight regional bureaus. Protesters delivered a letter to bureau officials demanding the Ospreys be blocked from flying until an investigation into the crash last week can be completed, and they chanted slogans against the tilt-rotor aircraft, which is notoriously crash-prone.The US has two massive air bases on Okinawa: Marine Corps Air Station Futenma and Kadena Air Force Base, along with a host of other facilities. The problems caused by the US military, which include falling debris, noise, and pollution, have aroused a strong activist movement that has frustrated attempts to expand the Pentagons presence on the island. More recently, the possibility of a US war with China or North Korea have provoked protests at US military sites across Japan that are likely to become targets, preventing the construction of several Aegis Ashore anti-missile bases.The cause of the accident is not yet known, although one fisherman told Japanese media he saw the aircrafts left engine on fire as it plummeted into the sea. The plane has a unique tilt-rotor system that allows its huge propellers to either spin vertically or horizontally, enabling it to fly either like a helicopter or a fixed-wing aircraft. While theoretically it makes the Osprey a nimble transport and patrol aircraft, in reality the plane has become infamous for its deadly crashes.After the plane went down on Wednesday, Tokyo grounded all 14 of its Ospreys and asked Washington to do the same until a probe into the crash could provide answers. The aircraft has been grounded several times in the past, most recently last year, following a series of safety check failures.Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno, the main spokesperson for Prime Minister Fumio Kishidas government, called Washingtons decision deeply regrettable, saying that "flights are being carried out without sufficient explanation about safety, despite repeated requests from Japan."It is so scary; it could have crashed in Kadena, she said. They must not fly and must be withdrawn. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231122/s-korea-us-japan-planning-to-hold-joint-exercise-this-weekend---reports-1115127162.html https://sputnikglobe.com/20230913/us-deployments-in-japan-could-chain-gang-tokyo-into-conflict-with-china-1113350821.html okinawa japan Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Fantine Gardinier Fantine Gardinier News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Fantine Gardinier are ospreys still flying in japan, us military in japan, okinawa protest https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/iran-vows-response-to-deaths-of-2-military-advisers-in-syria--1115372519.html Iran Vows Response to Deaths of 2 Military Advisers in Syria Iran Vows Response to Deaths of 2 Military Advisers in Syria Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said on Monday that the country would respond to any actions against its military advisers in Syria, following a missile attack on Damascus that left two Iranian personnel dead over the weekend. 2023-12-04T13:11+0000 2023-12-04T13:11+0000 2023-12-04T13:11+0000 world middle east iran syria islamic revolutionary guard corps (irgc) /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e5/08/15/1083680723_0:134:2551:1568_1920x0_80_0_0_f2962583527e8fc774e821647cf67ffa.jpg This past Saturday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), an elite branch of the Iranian armed forces, said two of its military advisers stationed in Syria died during an Israeli missile attack on the Syrian capital of Damascus. This marks the first official announcement of casualties among IRGC members since the start of the escalation of the conflict in the Gaza Strip. "No action against the interests and security of Iran and our military advisers in Syria will go unanswered, we already have experience in such situations," Kanaani was quoted by media. From time to time, Israel carries out attacks on Syria saying its operations are aimed at countering the Iranian military presence in the Arab republic. Damascus condemns such attacks as violations of Syrian national sovereignty. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231121/us-may-want-wider-war-in-middle-east-to-take-out-iran-1115085990.html iran syria Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Sputnik International iran, syria, iran-syrian partnership, revolutionary guard corps, iran advisers, syria strike https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/israel-has-crossed-its-rubicon-1115381012.html Israel Has Crossed Its Rubicon Israel Has Crossed Its Rubicon A few weeks ago, from an international and domestic-U.S. PR standpoint, Israel might have been able to bring its war in Gaza in for a hard landing. Now, it has painted itself into a corner. 2023-12-04T20:48+0000 2023-12-04T20:48+0000 2023-12-05T09:24+0000 analysis opinion palestine-israel conflict palestinians benjamin netanyahu middle east israel palestine hamas israel defense forces (idf) /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e7/0b/19/1115198896_0:122:2340:1438_1920x0_80_0_0_7c1df7b1c09fe959ff1d5ac2565b2dab.jpg Gaza has been destroyed. By this time next year, so will Israelnot its physical plant, but its current status as a privileged, funded, protected nation-state.The damage inflicted thus far is so severe and thorough that the Gaza Strip will be uninhabitable for the foreseeable future, at least several years. All or most of its 2.3 million residents, transformed into refugees, will be permanently displaced.Nothing can change that. If a left-wing Israeli government were to come to power, unilaterally end the war and offer the Palestinians their own sovereign independent republic side-by-side with Israel, Gaza would need to be rebuilt at a cost of tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. In the meantime, the Jewish state would have to provide long-term housing and public assistance for more than 2 million Palestinians throughout years of reconstruction. Youll end up having displaced people living in tents for a long time, Raphael Cohen, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told US media. But where?Assuming that a new regime could muster the necessary political consensus and address the ensuing security concerns surrounding a massive population of internally displaced people, Israel is a small nation of fewer than 10 million people with high unemployment and an aging population; it cant afford such a massive undertaking or the demographics to quickly absorb 2 million traumatized Palestinians.De facto, Gaza has been been ethnically cleansed. Gazans have been herded from the north, which has been flattened, to the south, against which IDF airstrike targeters and ground forces have recently turned their attention. The vast majority of the population of Gaza is now massed a few miles away from the Rafah border crossing to the Sinai Peninsula. All that remains is for the Israelis to expel the traumatized and radicalized Palestinians into the Egyptian desert.More likely, Israel will open the gate. The Gazans enter the Sinai of their own accord. Where else can they go? There is no home to which they can return. This second Nakba will occur early next year.Which will leave the ruins of Gaza desolate and dangerous. Spurred by legitimate public-health concerns, Israeli bulldozers will cart away the rubble and the tens of thousands of rotting corpses trapped underneath. Demining experts will have to find and disarm tens of thousands of unexploded bombs, a process that can require decades.The end result: 141 square miles of prime beachfront property. Real-estate developers abhor nothing more than a vacuum along a scenic coastline. Sandals Gaza City will look smashing jammed next to Club Med Khan Younis.This was the thinking behind the Israeli intelligence officials who wrote a thinking memo that suggested the situation be exploited as a rare opportunity to drive out all the locals so they could seize and annex the entire territory of Gaza. The revelations that Netanyahus government obtained Hamas plans for the incursion a year ago, viewed video showing Hamas fighters training (jihadi culture requires those about to stage a raid to warn their enemy in advance), received a warning from Egypt that Hamas was about to attack days prior, and that the IDF failed to respond for at least eight hours after Israels high-tech smart fence around Gaza was breached (despite receiving an instant alert) prompts the cynic in me to wonder whether the Israeli government let October 7th happen on purpose.What - Netanyahu and his colleagues may have asked themselves - are a few hundred or even a few thousand Israeli lives compared to the chance to get rid of half the Palestinians in Palestine, and join Gaza to Israel in the bargain?If so, they miscalculated. US officials have conveyed to their Israeli counterparts that Israel only has a few weeks left before losing international support and suffering a strategic defeat. Israel plans to continue for months.The US assessment is too optimistic. The die is cast. Defeat is inevitable.Public opinion is trending in favor of Palestine against Israel. By this point next year an appalled world, including a huge majority of American voters, will have witnessed the abject misery and injustice of the forced displacement of more than 2 million innocent civilians. Oceans of tents in the desert, screaming orphans and wounded ex-Gazans will fill high-definition social media and broadcast screens day after disgusting day. Public support for Palestine, already at historically record levels, will be so overwhelming that governments everywhere will find the pressure impossible to ignore. It will no longer be just the usual suspects in the Arab world who issue formal protests. From Tokyo to Ottawa to Paris to Rome, it will be politically untenable for any government to allow itself to be seen as complicit with the most outrageous war crime since the Vietnam War.Eventually, the US will have to ghost Israel. No more emergency war packages, no more $4 billion a year in military and other foreign aid. Even under a second Trump administration, the US might recall its ambassador.Israel cant see it yet. But it is well on its way to international pariah status at a scale which apartheid-era South Africa, its close Cold War ally which also went too far, could never have imagined.(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Teds hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.) https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/safe-corridor-in-central-gaza-turned-into-battlefield---idf-statement-1115371752.html https://sputnikglobe.com/20231201/report-israel-obtained-hamas-battle-plan-over-a-year-before-october-attack-1115336635.html https://sputnikglobe.com/20231201/was-resumption-of-gaza-war-linked-to-blinkens-visit-1115333089.html israel palestine gaza strip Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Ted Rall https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e5/02/13/1082125340_0:0:360:360_100x100_80_0_0_1ed1a3494a53cde87e19521c3658fe92.jpg Ted Rall https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e5/02/13/1082125340_0:0:360:360_100x100_80_0_0_1ed1a3494a53cde87e19521c3658fe92.jpg News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Ted Rall https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e5/02/13/1082125340_0:0:360:360_100x100_80_0_0_1ed1a3494a53cde87e19521c3658fe92.jpg palestine-israel conflict, israeli actions in gaza, what are israeli objectives in gaza strip https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/israel-shells-lebanon-in-retalitory-move--statement--1115368224.html Israel Shells Lebanon in Retaliatory Move Statement Israel Shells Lebanon in Retaliatory Move Statement The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement that they had documented shelling from Lebanon towards IDF outpost and opened fire in response. 2023-12-04T09:20+0000 2023-12-04T09:20+0000 2023-12-04T09:39+0000 world palestine-israel conflict israeli-palestinian conflict israel-gaza conflict israel defense forces (idf) gaza strip hamas hezbollah middle east /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e5/05/0e/1082885751_0:161:3070:1888_1920x0_80_0_0_ca92aac5c4f83c3ebbaa84fd77ae2c45.jpg A number of mortar shell launches from Lebanon toward an IDF post in the area of Yiftah were identified. In response, IDF artillery struck the sources of the fire, the Israeli army said on its official Telegram channel. Earlier, another round of shelling was documents, which resulted in three injured Israeli soldiers. Three IDF soldiers were lightly injured and evacuated to receive medical treatment. Their families have been notified, the statement read. The situation in South Lebanon heated up after Israel had its launched military operation in the Gaza Strip against Hamas. The Lebanese militant organization Hezbollah started shelling Israeli territory, with the IDF responding in kind.West Bank Death Toll From Israeli Fire Reaches 464 Since Early 2023 - Palestinian MinistryThe death toll in the West Bank as a result of clashes with Israeli forces has reached 464 since the beginning of 2023, including 256 since October 7, the Palestinian Health Ministry said on Monday."The death toll in the West Bank from Israeli army fire is 464 since the beginning of the year, including 256 since October 7," the ministry said in a statement. gaza strip Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Sputnik International israel-hamas conflict, gaza strip crisis, israel-palestinian conflict, middle east crisis Gaza May Get Even More Hellish With Humanitarian Operations Unable to Respond - UN Official Conditions for delivering humanitarian aid in Gaza are very challenging but it can get even worse with humanitarian assistance not being able to respond at all, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory Lynn Hastings said on Monday. "The conditions required to deliver aid to the people of Gaza do not exist," the statement of Lynn Hastings said. "If possible, an even more hellish scenario is about to unfold, one in which humanitarian operations may not be able to respond." The health system is "on its knees," and the people are on the verge of collapse physically and mentally, she added. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/putin-russia-will-continue-to-contribute-to-resolution-of-acute-problems-1115376258.html Putin: Russia Will Continue to Contribute to Resolution of Acute Problems Putin: Russia Will Continue to Contribute to Resolution of Acute Problems Russia will continue to contribute to the resolution of acute regional and global problems, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday. 2023-12-04T15:45+0000 2023-12-04T15:45+0000 2023-12-04T17:26+0000 russia vladimir putin russia germany brics un security council (unsc) eurasian economic union nord stream united kingdom (uk) slovenia /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e7/0c/04/1115376098_0:0:3110:1750_1920x0_80_0_0_572b2fdec4451e9eaff9bb960d2b3d56.jpg "Russia, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, will continue to "contribute to the settlement of acute regional and global problems, consistently defend approaches to ensure equal and indivisible security," to form a fair system of international economic relations, "free from unfair competition, unilateral sanctions and politically motivated restrictions," Putin said during the presentation of credentials ceremony in the Kremlin.At the same time, Russia pursues an independent foreign policy, and does not accept block confrontation, the president added.Putin noted, that Russia plans to expand humanitarian and cultural partnership with foreign countries.As the future chair of BRICS, Moscow intends to promote the organization's role in addressing pressing issues on the global agenda, he added."In the upcoming 2024, Russia will have to perform a number of important foreign policy functions. We were the first to preside over the expanded BRICS association and we will do everything possible to help the new members of the association harmoniously integrate into the working regime of this organization. In general, we intend to do everything possible to enhance the role of the association in addressing topical issues on the global agenda, make efforts to strengthen comprehensive strategic partnership within the framework of BRICS, develop cooperation in economic, financial and other spheres," Putin said.Russia will seriously prepare for the holding of the BRICS summit in Kazan in October 2024 in a broader format, the president added."We will also actively develop integration processes in the Eurasian Economic Union and deepen cooperation within the framework of the Collective Security Treaty Organization [CSTO]. We will pay special attention to working with partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which, after the inclusion of India, Pakistan and Iran, has become an institutional pillar of greater Eurasia," Putin noted.Russia also considers expansion of investment cooperation with Kuwait its priority, and will continue cooperation with the Arab country considering its membership in the OPEC.Russia Sending Grain to Six African Countries in NeedRussia is sending grain to six African countries in need, and some ships are already unloading at the destination points, Russian President Vladimir Putin said."By the way, I want to say that ships with Russian grain are being sent to six countries to help these countries that need food. Some ships are already being unloaded, some are now at sea, some are being loaded in Russian ports," Putin said during the presentation of credentials ceremony in the Kremlin.Russia will also continue providing assistance to Mali, including food aid, Vladimir Putin said.Russia will continue to provide the Malian people with comprehensive assistance and support, including supplies of necessary food, fertilizers, and industrial goods. Recently, a large shipment of Russian grain was sent to the republic [Mali] for free, he said.Putin praised Algeria's balanced political course, and noted that Russian-Algerian cooperation is developing well."Russian-Algerian trade and economic cooperation is developing at a good pace. The trade turnover has already exceeded two billion dollars. Humanitarian ties are consistently expanding. We appreciate the balanced foreign policy course of the Algerian leadership," Putin said.In 2024-2025 Algeria will receive a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Putin recalled."And, of course, we will intensify coordination with Algerian partners on topical issues on the international and regional agenda," the president added.Relations With South KoreaSpeaking about relations with South Korea, Putin said that Russia is ready to get back to the constructive course but the final decision depends on Seoul."As you know, bilateral relations between Russia and the Republic of Korea are, unfortunately, going through hard times It depends on official Seoul whether it will be possible to return Russian-Korean cooperation to the trajectory of such a beneficial partnership for our countries and peoples We [Russia] are ready for this," Putin said during the presentation of credentials ceremony in the Kremlin.Relations With AustraliaBilateral communication between Russia and Australia has been suspended, and Moscow can not ignore Canberras participation in bloc structures.Bilateral contacts have been suspended in literally all areas. We cannot but be concerned about Canberra's active participation in the closed bloc structures being created in the Asia-Pacific region, which does not l contribute to strengthening the atmosphere of trust and cooperation in this part of the world at all, Putin said during the presentation of credentials ceremony in the Kremlin.In past, Russia and Australia were allies, Putin added.Realtions With SloveniaRussia ready to return to mutually-beneficial cooperation with Slovenia, and even improve relations."The bilateral dialogue has now been suspended. We regret this. But if there is a similar approach from the Slovenian side, we are ready to return to mutually beneficial cooperation and even improve it," Putin said.Relations With SwedenThere are completely no political contacts between Russia and Sweden, trade, economic and humanitarian cooperation has been curtailed, and Stockholm's rejection of the policy of non-participation in military blocs only raises questions, the Russian president said on Monday."There are completely no political contacts, trade and economic cooperation, cultural and humanitarian ties have been curtailed," Putin said.Each state determines the best ways to ensure its own security, the president said."But Stockholm's rejection of the 200-year policy of non-participation in military blocs cannot but raise questions. Such a policy it is obvious to everyone brought the Swedish side undeniable dividends, played an important role in creating a general atmosphere of stability and security in the Northern European region," Putin said.The current situation in bilateral relations does not meet the interests of either country, the region, or Europe as a whole, Putin concluded.Relations With GreeceMoscow hopes that the traditional closeness, mutual sympathy and respect of the Russian and Greek peoples will eventually help to revive both mutually beneficial partnership between the states and normal business relations."Therefore, of course, it is impossible not to worry about the current situation in bilateral affairs. We hope that the traditional bonds of spiritual closeness, mutual sympathy and respect of the Russian and Greek peoples will eventually help to revive both mutually beneficial partnership between our states and normal business relations," Putin said.For more than two centuries Russia and Greece had been building cooperation in a constructive and friendly manner, which helped them jointly achieve good results in economic and humanitarian cooperation, Putin added.Relations With Luxembourg"Our relations with Luxembourg have a long history Russia, one might say, stood at the origins of Luxembourg's statehood in the 19th century. And in general, Russian-Luxembourg cooperation has been developing in a constructive manner in the political, economic and humanitarian fields until recently," Putin said during the presentation of credentials ceremony in the Kremlin, adding that Russia stands for the cooperation to return to the traditional positive direction.Relations With GermanyThe interrupted cooperation between Russia and Germany is not beneficial to either Berlin or Moscow, and Russia stands for equal cooperation."The current frozen state of relations with Russia, and not at our initiative, I want to emphasize this, is not beneficial to either us or you, but, above all, in my opinion, Germany," Putin said in the Kremlin.In addition to political and economic ties, contacts in the scientific, educational, cultural and humanitarian fields, as well as civil society ties, have also been suspended, the president added."Russia, I stress, has always advocated and stands today for building Russian-German relations on the principles of equality, mutual benefit, and respect for each other's interests. I repeat, such relations are important not only for the two countries, but also for the whole of Europe," Putin said.Russia and Germany have been able to develop pragmatic cooperation for decades, but it has been undermined, including in connection with the terrorist attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, Putin said.Relations With the UKMoscow and London previously managed to build relations for stability, but the current state of affairs is known, and Russia hopes that this changes for the better."The current state of affairs in the dialogue with London is well known, let us hope that the situation, after all, in the interests of our two countries and peoples, will change for the better," Putin said.Relations With Turkiye"Russia's partnership with the Republic of Turkiye is at a high level, based on many years of experience in effective cooperation in various fields, and both sides are determined to further develop ties based on the principles of good neighborliness, partnership and mutual benefit. All key bilateral issues are on the agenda of our regular contacts with [Turkish] President Erdogan," Putin said during the presentation of credentials ceremony in the Kremlin.Russia is actively cooperating with Turkey in the energy sector, the president added."I would like to emphasize that Russian-Turkish cooperation in the energy sector is of a truly strategic nature. [Russian state nuclear corporation] Rosatom continues to build Turkiye's first Akkuyu nuclear power plant. Close cooperation has been established in the gas sector within the framework of the operation of the Blue Stream and Turkish Stream pipelines. Work is underway to create a gas distribution hub in Turkey," the president said.In conclusion of his speech, President Putin said that all ambassadors of foreign states can count on the support of Russia, the leadership, executive authorities, business and parliament in their work:"Dear ladies and gentlemen. In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that Russia attaches great importance to relations with each of the states that you represent. In the course of your diplomatic activity, you can certainly count on support from our side, from the Russian leadership, executive authorities, business and public circles, parliament, of course." https://sputnikglobe.com/20231128/putins-civilizational-approach-russia-is-key-factor-in-global-fight-for-sovereignty-1115262541.html https://sputnikglobe.com/20231202/russia-to-ship-200000-tons-of-grain-to-africa-1115341925.html https://sputnikglobe.com/20230815/why-merging-aukus-and-nato-would-pose-serious-danger-to-asia-pacific-1112617375.html https://sputnikglobe.com/20231103/putin-says-attempts-to-instigate-hostility-sentiments-in-russia-doomed-to-fail-1114690838.html russia germany united kingdom (uk) slovenia qatar turkiye sweden south korea greece Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Sputnik International vladimir putin, foreign ambassadors, kremlin https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/putin-says-west-demonstrates-political-bias-russophobia-1115380072.html Putin Says West Demonstrates Political Bias, Russophobia Putin Says West Demonstrates Political Bias, Russophobia The West is demonstrating bias and Russophobia, while the process of degradation of international politics continues, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday. 2023-12-04T18:50+0000 2023-12-04T18:50+0000 2023-12-04T18:50+0000 russia russia vladimir putin human rights migrants /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e7/0c/04/1115379911_0:0:3078:1731_1920x0_80_0_0_dcf4f3ab3590586fb9afced2b7bd0fff.jpg "December 10 marks the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortunately, we are celebrating this anniversary in a difficult situation, when the process of degradation of the international system of ensuring and promoting human rights continues. Its institutions, which are actually controlled by the West, demonstrate political bias, hypocrisy and undisguised selectivity," Putin said during a meeting with members of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights.At the same time, Putin noted that Russia's withdrawal from a number of international human rights institutions does not mean that it is ignoring human rights, on the contrary, Moscow is ready to cooperate to build an equal and fair system of ensuring human rights."As you know, Russia has withdrawn from a number of international human rights organizations. However, this does not mean that we abandon the principles laid down in the declaration [Universal Declaration of Human Rights]. On the contrary, we are ready to cooperate with all interested countries and partners, to find solutions for the formation of an effective, fair, equal system for ensuring human rights for all," Putin said.Civil institutions, due to their flexibility, are more adapted to a prompt search for possible solutions in this area, Putin said.Russia Should Ensure Rights of Migrants, But Put Interests of Russians FirstRussia should ensure the rights of migrants, but put the interests of Russians first, President Vladimir Putin said."This is a large range of issues, and it is very important that the interests of the Russian citizens are put first in all areas, we must consider these issues in a complex," he said during the meeting with members of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights.Maintaining the ethno-cultural balance is important in the situation with migrants in Russia, the president added."There is a very acute issue about the rights of migrants, this is understandable. Here I cannot but agree that an ethno-cultural balance must be maintained. Of course, everything that happens in this area is primarily dictated by the interests of the economy the shortage of workers. But it is necessary, of course, to prepare these people. We need to attract such labor resources that meet the interests of the Russian economy," Putin said. https://sputnikglobe.com/20220408/russias-suspension-from-human-rights-council-shows-deep-erosion-of-un-system-scholars-warn-1094584237.html russia Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Sputnik International russia, russophobiz, vladimir putin, russian civil society, human rights, human rights council, migrants https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/sputnik-correspondent-russell-bentley-awarded-film-prize-1115369874.html Sputnik Correspondent Russell Bentley Awarded Film Prize Sputnik Correspondent Russell Bentley Awarded Film Prize The Front Line International Film Festival was held in Rostov-on-Don from November 29th to December 3rd. It was organized by the association "Mius-Front" with the support of the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives, the Russian Military Historical Society, the Union of Journalists of Russia, the television company "Don 24" and many others. 2023-12-04T12:15+0000 2023-12-04T12:15+0000 2023-12-04T12:15+0000 russia documentary movie award sputnik rostov-on-don /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e7/0c/04/1115370455_0:0:1920:1080_1920x0_80_0_0_d2586a65267275bf2f7fffa191d8c934.jpg Over 120 patriotic films about Russia's wars, history, and culture were submitted from around the world, of which 41 were selected to be screened for the final competition, among which were films from Serbia, the US, Costa Rica, Iran, and Kazakhstan. And of course, many films from Russia, including the Donbass Republics.Sputnik's Russell Bentley's short (14 minute) film, 'The Monastery' was among those selected. It was well received at the screening, and ultimately won the 'Immortal Regiment Award' for "Preserving the Memory of Heroes of Donbass". Other award-winning films included "Treble Clef" by Artur Khodyrev, starring violin virtuoso Maryanna Vasilyeva and poet Alexander Pelevin, about their journeys to front line positions to entertain and inspire our troops. Master classes were also held, including "The Work of War Correspondents in the SMO", conducted by RT's Olga Kiry and Ruslan Gusarov. We attended many other classes and films during the 3 day festival, and were very impressed with the excellent work of the organizers, under the direction of Festival President Andrei Kudryakov and the Mius Front. The festival was held at the opulent Horizont shopping complex and Radisson Hotel in Rostov. Many new friends and connections were made, and a grand time was had by all.Such events as the Front Line International Film Festival, and the films that were shown there, are an important and integral part of the Information War that now is being waged around the world. The Information War is simply the political/cultural variant of the Economic and Military wars that Russia is currently embroiled in. In order for Russia to defend itself and its future, and to bring about a new multipolar world, we must win on all three Fronts. As Pablo Picasso once said, "Art is a weapon." Thanks to the artists and correspondents, participants and organizers of the Front Line Film Festival, who have done some great work on the Information Front, and will continue to do so. We look forward to covering and participating in this event next year. russia rostov-on-don Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Russell Bentley https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e6/03/1d/1094281697_332:0:1182:850_100x100_80_0_0_f4d7604e530b3861449b2db55c72f353.jpg Russell Bentley https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e6/03/1d/1094281697_332:0:1182:850_100x100_80_0_0_f4d7604e530b3861449b2db55c72f353.jpg News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 The Monastery by Russell Bentley The Monastery by Russell Bentley 2023-12-04T12:15+0000 true PT14M06S 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Russell Bentley https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e6/03/1d/1094281697_332:0:1182:850_100x100_80_0_0_f4d7604e530b3861449b2db55c72f353.jpg front line international film festival, international film festival in russia, russel bentley, documentary Santiago Ramirez, 26, of Dallas, has been indicted for allegedly smuggling 187 firearms in a hidden truck compartment at the border in Del Rio. Associated Press A Texas man has been indicted after he was caught in Del Rio near the Texas-Mexico border allegedly smuggling 187 firearms in a hidden truck-trailer compartment. Santiago Ramirez, 26, was driving a Dodge 1500 pickup hauling an enclosed box trailer about 1:30 a.m. Oct. 30, heading to Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers inspected his truck after noticing that an inside wall of the trailer appeared to have been tampered with, according to an affidavit supporting his arrest. Officers X-rayed the trailer and saw what they believed to be guns inside its back wall. After searching the trailer, they found 187 firearms wrapped in cellophane in the wall, the affidavit said. Advertisement Article continues below this ad CBP called in the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, whose agents interviewed Ramirez. The truck and trailer had license plates from Alabama, but agents found that Ramirez is from Dallas. According to the affidavit, Ramirez told the ATF that he had been trafficking firearms for someone known to him as El Tio (The Uncle), whom he met in Mexicos southern state of Oaxaca. Ramirez said El Tio offered him $6,000 each time Ramirez smuggled firearms from the United States to Mexico. Ramirez said he would drive the box truck from Oaxaca to Dallas, where he would drop it off at a supermarket. Someone else then would hide firearms inside the trailer, and he would drive it back to Oaxaca. He said he had smuggled guns twice before, but this time El Tio told him to buy 10 of the guns that he was hauling back, and that El Tio sent another man to give Ramirez money so Ramirez could buy them, the affidavit said. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The affidavit added that Ramirez said he bought four .22-caliber rifles that week from a man at a gas station in Dallas for $2,000 and six more .22-caliber rifles from another man at a gas station in Dallas for $3,000. Ramirez said neither he nor El Tio had a license to export firearms from the U.S. to Mexico, the affidavit said. The indictment charges him with one count of conspiracy to traffic firearms, one charge of trafficking firearms, one count of conspiracy to smuggle goods from the U.S. and a charge of smuggling goods from the U.S. The ATF is still investigating the case, including tracing the guns serial numbers, records show. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/taiwan-to-finalize-upgrading-140-us-made-f-16s-by-year-end---reports-1115379671.html Taiwan to Finalize Upgrading 140 US-Made F-16s by Year-End - Reports Taiwan to Finalize Upgrading 140 US-Made F-16s by Year-End - Reports BEIJING (Sputnik) - Taiwan is about to finish upgrading 140 US-made F-16 jets in its fleet by late December, with no new flight tests on the schedule, Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday, citing a military source. 2023-12-04T18:33+0000 2023-12-04T18:33+0000 2023-12-04T19:03+0000 military military & intelligence tsai ing-wen kevin mccarthy taiwan beijing ukraine lockheed martin /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e7/05/16/1110518147_0:191:1600:1091_1920x0_80_0_0_067b5a5133d0b71c2d7c4ebca1e4f6bf.png According to Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA), the last retrofitted F-16V aircraft has already passed flight tests, while Taiwan's Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation (AIDC) and US arms giant Lockheed Martin proceed with modifications. The project of modernizing 140 US-made F-16A and F-16B warplanes to F-16 Block 20 for the Taiwanese air force is estimated to be worth 140 billion Taiwan dollars ($4.45 billion) and is financed by AIDC and Lockheed Martin. In addition, Taiwan has acquired 66 new F-16V Block 70 jets from the United States. In late November, a Bloomberg reported cited a group of US Republican lawmakers, saying that two F-16 fighter jet programs for Taiwan were at considerable risk of falling behind. The matter has gotten worse due to rising questions as to whether the US could be overextending its capacity to provide aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan all at once. 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 after Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen met with the then-US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the United States. Beijing responded by launching massive three-day military drills near the island in what it called a warning to Taiwanese separatists and foreign powers. In August and September, the Taiwanese armed forces reported multiple sightings of Chinese naval and air patrols in the island's vicinity. On September 18, the ministry reported a record high of 103 Chinese aircraft seen near the island in one day. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231114/taiwanese-parties-joining-ranks-to-unseat-pro-us-cabinet-mend-ties-with-beijing-1114953833.html taiwan beijing ukraine Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Sputnik International us, china, taiwan, f-16 jets, f-16, taiwan's central news agency, cna, f-16a, f-16b, warplanes, us republican lawmakers, republicans, us senate https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/uk-fm-cameron-says-will-try-to-persuade-us-govt-to-continue-providing-help-to-ukraine-1115365257.html UK FM Cameron Says Will Try to Persuade US Govt to Continue Providing Help to Ukraine UK FM Cameron Says Will Try to Persuade US Govt to Continue Providing Help to Ukraine UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron said on Sunday that next week, during a trip to Washington, he would try to convince the US government to continue to provide assistance to Ukraine. 2023-12-04T02:10+0000 2023-12-04T02:10+0000 2023-12-04T02:10+0000 world us united kingdom (uk) ukraine joe biden david cameron congress us arms for ukraine /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e7/0b/10/1114996176_0:144:2740:1685_1920x0_80_0_0_7263117dd3b2bb58f2e19a19bbbf8022.jpg In October, the White House announced that the funds approved by Congress for further military assistance to Ukraine were almost exhausted, which is why the volume of aid packages had been consistently reduced. US President Joe Biden submitted a $106 billion supplemental request to Congress that includes $61 billion for Ukraine along with aid for Israel.In November, the US House of Representatives passed an Israel aid bill, separating the assistance from the broader request from the Biden administration, which also included aid for Ukraine. Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer rejected the proposal, instead favoring the joint aid request. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231129/lack-of-planning-for-ukraine-success-causing-hitch-in-bidens-funding-request---house-panel-1115291260.html united kingdom (uk) ukraine Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Sputnik International uk foreign secretary david cameron, cameron trip to washington, west arming ukraine, us spending money on ukraine, billions for ukraine https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/us-airstrike-on-headquarters-of-iraqi-armed-formations-leaves-5-people-dead--reports-1115365544.html US Airstrike on Headquarters of Iraqi Armed Formations Leaves 5 People Dead Reports US Airstrike on Headquarters of Iraqi Armed Formations Leaves 5 People Dead Reports Five people have been killed as a result of a US airstrike on the headquarters of Iraqi armed formations, Iraqi news agency Shafaq News reported on Sunday, citing a source in the security agencies. 2023-12-04T03:08+0000 2023-12-04T03:08+0000 2023-12-04T03:09+0000 world us iraq hasakah kirkuk pentagon airstrike /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/102734/13/1027341398_0:314:3055:2032_1920x0_80_0_0_e6e75cc0cc9e1f28564fbe060856cdd8.jpg Earlier, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which includes Shia Muslim militant groups, said that it had attacked a US military base in the Syrian province of Al Hasakah using drones. The source said that it was unclear whether the strike was carried out by a drone or a fighter jet, while the location of the airstrike is yet to be disclosed. The strike allegedly took place in the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, according to the Lebanese broadcaster Al Mayadeen. On Thursday, Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said that US forces in Iraq and Syria had been attacked 74 times since October 17. iraq hasakah kirkuk Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Sputnik International us airstrik, iraqi armed formations, syrian province of al hasakah, shafaq news, city of kirkuk in northern iraq, soldiers movement, us airstrike https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/us-may-lose-arms-race-with-china-due-to-budget-gridlock--pentagon--1115367557.html US May Lose Arms Race With China Due to Budget Gridlock Pentagon US May Lose Arms Race With China Due to Budget Gridlock Pentagon Spending plans are often scrutinized in US Congress due to political factionalism. This sometimes can be a real obstacle for Pentagon. 2023-12-04T09:57+0000 2023-12-04T09:57+0000 2023-12-04T09:57+0000 military us china us-china relations frank kendall congress pentagon /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e5/05/1a/1082997697_0:17:1150:664_1920x0_80_0_0_20f5823fa8f104208bb2246338b75232.jpg Pentagon officials have cautioned Congress about the potential ramifications of not having a comprehensive budget for the entire year, and warned that this could result in significant delays in important military programs, such as the development of hypersonic weapons and UAVs. Top military brass fear that these delays may compromise America's position in its competition with China.We cannot waste time, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall stressed in a panel discussion.Lately, the US Air Force placed significant emphasis on the development of Collaborative Combat Aircraft and other military systems, aimed at outperforming the Peoples Liberation Army.The loss of time just from when we started this concept, when we came up with the idea to today, is two years, Kendall added. He concluded that without a 24 budget, we may lose another year.Another participant of the discussion, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu, stressed that China spends an enormous amount of money on tests while the US is having a shortfall.Pentagon leaders have urged Congress to come to a compromise on a spending plan by January, emphasizing the importance of avoiding anything that could undermine the security of the United States. One of them added that the US army has dozens of programs that are hitting important new milestones in FY24 and that consistent funding of these projects is crucial. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231201/scott-ritter-us-pushing-nuclear-arms-race--can-only-have-tragic-ending-1115332523.html https://sputnikglobe.com/20231116/biden-xi-talks-modified-tone-but-not-substance-of-us-china-relationship-1115010360.html china Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Sergey Lebedev Sergey Lebedev News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Sergey Lebedev us defense spending, pentagon spending, budget rows, pentagon budget, us china tensions https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/watch-thrilling-footage-of-russian-forces-storming-artyomovskoye-village-1115369503.html Watch Thrilling Footage of Russian Forces Storming Artyomovskoye Village Watch Thrilling Footage of Russian Forces Storming Artyomovskoye Village The reports about liberation of Artemovskoye came in the end of November. This is another blow to already weakened morale of Ukrainian army. 2023-12-04T10:57+0000 2023-12-04T10:57+0000 2023-12-04T11:23+0000 russia's special operation in ukraine ukrainian crisis russias airborne forces (vdv) /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e7/0c/04/1115369050_10:0:1318:736_1920x0_80_0_0_1dc0a669b55c50a5fca41a76c5096ae1.png Russias Ministry of Defense has published footage that shows the liberation of the village of Artyomovskoye in the special military operation.The operation was organized in several steps that were carefully planned by Russian commanders. Initially, enemy fire positions were suppressed and command posts were demolished using artillery. Following this, Ukrainian fortified positions were targeted and struck by aviation. Subsequently, air assault troops, along with the assistance of IFVs and FPV drones, stormed the positions. As a result of the military operation, most Ukrainian forces fled, leaving behind the wounded and dead, while some laid down their weapons and surrendered. Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Sergey Lebedev Sergey Lebedev News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Storming of Artyomovskoye Storming of Artyomovskoye 2023-12-04T10:57+0000 true PT1M17S 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Sergey Lebedev liberation of artemovskoye, special military operation, ukrainian crisis https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/white-house-warns-ukraine-money-may-dry-up-by-years-end-without-congressional-action-1115373745.html White House Warns Ukraine Money May Dry Up by Year's End Without Congressional Action White House Warns Ukraine Money May Dry Up by Year's End Without Congressional Action Washington faces mounting opposition in the Republican-controlled House, where a spate of lawmakers remain downbeat about the US continued assistance to the Kiev regime. 2023-12-04T14:18+0000 2023-12-04T14:18+0000 2023-12-04T14:18+0000 americas us white house joe biden ukraine aid us congress assistance /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e7/0c/04/1115374543_0:0:3078:1731_1920x0_80_0_0_0d83b325ca8e63339acd210cfa7121dd.jpg The White House is set to run out of money to provide more weapons to Ukraine "without congressional action" by the end of the year, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young has warned.In a letter to House and Senate leaders, she pointed out that "there is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment" and that the US is "out of moneyand nearly out of time."She recalled that US security assistance packages to Ukraine had already become smaller and the deliveries have been more limited. With US allies around the world stepping up to do more, US support is critical and cannot be replicated by others, according to the her.The letter comes after a classified Capitol Hill briefing for the top House and Senate leaders, to who Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made clear that "Ukraine needs the aid soon."The proposal, however, faced flak from an array of Republicans in the House of Representatives who have questioned delivering more to Ukraine and tried to tie any additional funding to demands for security measures at the US-Mexico border.The US lawmakers previous disagreements over aiding Ukraine brought America to the brink of a government shutdown in late September, which was followed by then-GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy being ousted by his own party for cutting a deal with President Joe Biden to continue funding the Zelensky regime.The US, along with its NATO allies, ramped up funding to Kiev shortly after the start of the Russian special military operation. Moscow has repeatedly warned that such assistance adds to the prolongation of the conflict in Ukraine. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231117/ukraine-will-have-to-suck-it-up-after-us-passes-budget-bill-devoid-of-aid-1115028790.html https://sputnikglobe.com/20231114/us-senator-says-will-take-100-years-to-determine-whether-aid-for-ukraine-worthwhile-1114957367.html americas ukraine Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Oleg Burunov https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e4/09/0b/1080424846_0:0:2048:2048_100x100_80_0_0_3d7b461f8a98586fa3fe739930816aea.jpg Oleg Burunov https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e4/09/0b/1080424846_0:0:2048:2048_100x100_80_0_0_3d7b461f8a98586fa3fe739930816aea.jpg News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Oleg Burunov https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/07e4/09/0b/1080424846_0:0:2048:2048_100x100_80_0_0_3d7b461f8a98586fa3fe739930816aea.jpg us aid to ukraine, russian special military operation in ukraine, office of management and budget director shalanda young's warning of exhaustion of us aid to kiev https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/why-eu-funding-to-ukraine-may-soon-fade--1115374023.html Why EU Funding to Ukraine May Soon Fade Why EU Funding to Ukraine May Soon Fade European conservatives are skeptical of further spending on Ukraine and have vowed to reshape the Old Continent's politics after the forthcoming EU parliamentary elections where they are projected to take more seats. What could this mean for Kiev? 2023-12-04T14:34+0000 2023-12-04T14:34+0000 2023-12-05T09:24+0000 europe analysis gillbert doctorow geert wilders viktor orban ukraine kiev brussels european union (eu) alternative fuer deutschland (afd) /html/head/meta[@name='og:title']/@content /html/head/meta[@name='og:description']/@content https://cdn1.img.sputnikglobe.com/img/102495/97/1024959725_0:371:1805:1386_1920x0_80_0_0_eec2a784ed15626e01bcd544eaafec81.jpg A recent 50 billion EU allocation for Ukraine is reportedly at risk as member states fail to reach an agreement on a common budget, according to the Financial Times. The newspaper particularly cites the victory of the right wing in the Dutch elections last month and a recent German court ruling limiting government borrowing.International observers have recently drawn attention to the rise of the right wing across Europe, suggesting that the Ukraine conflict and the Gaza war could have become a catalyst for the trend. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is currently polling 21%, second only to CDU/CSU (30%). The AfD is highly skeptical about the bloc's funding and militarizing the Kiev regime. Similarly, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban shares a similar stance. Moreover, he has recently signaled that he is against discussing Ukraines accession to the EU during the union's December summit. In November, he threatened to use Hungarys veto power to block the provision of a planned 50 billion for Kiev.Meanwhile, European conservatives are closing ranks ahead of the EU parliamentary elections, scheduled to be held on June 6-9, 2024. During the gathering, EU conservatives criticized Western sanctions against Russia and the futility of funding Ukraine that "cannot win." Per them, Brussels' Ukraine agenda comes in contrast to national interests of EU member states. That said, some divisions on approaches to Russia persist among the European right wing movement, AfD lawmaker and ID Vice-President Gunnar Beck told Politico, a conclusion which Doctorow agrees with.Similarly, right-wing parties don't have a unified position on Ukraine, echoes Kartheiser:"Regrettably, right-wing parties have no unified position on Ukraine. Most of them follow traditional, national lines of reasoning. This is even more surprising since many of the Republican presidential candidates and even some Democrats in the US take their distances from the Biden-policy on Ukraine. At this stage, only right-wing parties in some of the major European States can contribute to a change of policy, namely in France and Germany and, of course, in the Netherlands. However, in a few months from now, this can evolve because the war is less and less popular and the approach of the European elections might make them reconsider their positions," the Luxembourg Parliament MP concluded. https://sputnikglobe.com/20231126/rise-of-right-how-ukraine-conflict-and-gaza-war-affect-eus-political-balance-1115214954.html ukraine kiev brussels gaza strip Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 2023 Ekaterina Blinova Ekaterina Blinova News en_EN Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 1920 1080 true 1920 1440 true 1920 1920 true Sputnik International feedback@sputniknews.com +74956456601 MIA Rosiya Segodnya 252 60 Ekaterina Blinova eu, europe, european parliament elections, eu right-wing parties, rise of eu right-wing parties, eu aid to ukraine, eu conservatives aid to ukraine, viktor orban, geert wilders, volodymyr zelensky Alma Jean Caddey, known as Jean to her friends and family, passed away with her family by her side on Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023, in Ingersoll, Ont., at 91 years of age. Alongside her late husband, Jim, who predeceased her in 2018, Jean found joy and success as a Standardbred racehorse breeder and owner. Their partnership extended beyond their marriage into a shared enthusiasm for the harness racing world, leaving a legacy within the Standardbred community. She is survived by her daughter, Colleen (Brent) Belore, and her adored grandchildren, Alana and Dylan Belore. Her guidance and love will continue to be a guiding light in their lives, as they carry forward the values and lessons she instilled in them. Jean was a beloved sister to Grace Schnurr and Leslie Craig. Though she was predeceased by her brother Rand (Carol) Craig, brother-in-law Allan Schnurr and sister-in-law Mary Jean Craig, the bonds of family extended through her many nieces, nephews and extended family members who survive her. Jean's early years as a school teacher were a testament to her intelligence and analytical mind. She imparted wisdom and knowledge to her students within the walls of her classrooms. Cremation has taken place. A private family burial will take place at the North Embro Cemetery at a later date. In lieu of flowers, contributions to the Embro Pond Association would be appreciated and may be arranged through the Brock and Visser Funeral (845 Devonshire Ave., 519-539-0004) or visit www.brockandvisser.com. Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the family and friends of Jean Caddey. Losing a loved one who died by suicide can present an entirely different emotional challenge. People present a number of emotions, from being angry with their loved one for leaving, grieving their loss and or even experiencing feelings of guilt. In a region where mental health services are already hard to come by, officials with Panhandle Public Health District are working to develop a support group and new resources for those who are struggling with their loss. PPHD recently started a support group for those 19 and older who are struggling with the loss of a loved one who died by suicide. Currently, the group meets every first and third Tuesday of the month from 5:30-6:30 p.m. over Zoom. There are also plans to start in person meetings. The group is led by PPHD Community Prevention Coordinator Liz MacDonald. MacDonald said she herself lost a friend who died by suicide and is working to help support those who have shared in this loss. The main impetus for it getting started is quite frankly, because our friends, our families, our neighbors, are dying in what are oftentimes preventable deaths, she said. She said that the dangers of severe depression and suicidal ideation can be felt acutely in areas like the Panhandle. In the last 20 years, she said, in rural America, suicide rates have increased by 46% as opposed to 27% in urban areas. While these losses on their own are tragic and point to the continued need for the development of mental health services in the community, they also leave behind loved ones searching for answers. These meetings offer people the opportunity to discuss their loss and the feelings they still carry with them. MacDonald said she felt it was especially important to discuss because of the stigma that mental health issues can carry. She described losing a loved one who died by suicide as a completely different experience to other causes of death, and that it can be difficult to reconcile. The guilt piece is especially strong, MacDonald said. I hear so many people say, If I would have done more, if I would have been there. She said she hope that people who turn to the support group would be able to find some relief discussing their loss and hearing from others who have experienced the same things. While the group is just starting, MacDonald already has expansion on her mind. My dream is to have an in-person group in all of the major areas of the Panhandle, MacDonald said. For now, that dream is contained to virtual meetings. There are plans to start in person meetings for groups in Scottsbluff and Alliance, with other communities on the horizon. She said they are working hard to get things up and working, but there are a number of barriers between where they are now and where they hope to be. The first of which is funding, both to help train volunteers and to find a space to use for their meetings. Foremost on their list of barriers is a venue to host their meetings. MacDonald said they do not have the money to rent a space and have had difficulty finding free spaces like government buildings that are open after hours. Those are kind of the details that were still trying to hammer out. Thats the only thing holding things up, because we dont have funding to pay to rent a space, MacDonald said. Training volunteers to facilitate the discussions also requires funding. Although MacDonald said they have volunteers for the upcoming meetings in Scottsbluff and Alliance, when they expand they will need more. She said that the qualifications for the volunteers are somewhat loose, although she would like them to have experienced their own losses so that they can better empathize with participants. According to role, the volunteers role is just to get things rolling, and sit back and let them talk. She also stressed that the meetings are noncommittal and participants are by no means required to remain in attendance the entire time, especially if they are uncomfortable. Other steps people can take to help include signing up for what is referred to as Question, Persuade, Refer, or QPR training, which is offered free of charge once a month at PPHD. More than anything, MacDonald asked that people take special care to check on their loved ones during the holiday season. We just need to live up to our Nebraska Nice name and just take care of each other, MacDonald said. Those interested in volunteering or for information about the group can reach MacDonald at her email at lmacdonald@pphd.ne.gov. Persons interested in QPR training can register online at tinyurl.com/2p8kb837 If you are in crisis looking to help someone else, reach out to the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988. Roger Artega Gonzalez, 31, was arrested Sunday and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Atascosa County Sheriff's Office Authorities have arrested a man in connection with a woman who was found beaten, stabbed and rolled up in plastic on the side of the road in Atascosa County. Roger Artega Gonzalez, 31, was arrested Sunday by Atascosa County sheriff's investigators and San Antonio police at his home on the South Side, according to a news release. His bail has been set at $275,000. Gonzalez is accused of leaving a woman for dead Friday in the 4000 block of Eichman Road just northwest of Poteet. Atascosa County deputies found the woman around 4 p.m. near the side of the road, rolled up in plastic. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Authorities said she had been beaten and stabbed and had her throat slashed. She was taken to a San Antonio hospital in serious condition but is now stable, the sheriff's office said. Gonzalez was wearing an ankle monitor during the incident, the sheriff's office said. Investigators followed up on leads and obtained an arrest warrant for Gonzalez on Saturday for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, a first-degree felony. Update: Dec. 5 According to a Virginia State Police investigation, leaking propane gas from a wall heater apparently caused Friday's explosion. Police believe the gas ignited when the resident attempted to operate the heater. The resident is expected to make a full recovery. **** Police are fire officials are continuing to investigate a Friday evening explosion that injured a Wytheville man and severely damaged his mobile home. According to Wytheville Fire Chief Christopher Slemp, crews were dispatched to the 505 Holston Road residence at 4:20 p.m. on Friday. On arrival, first responders found that a mobile home had exploded and suffered catastrophic damage, Slemp wrote in a press release. They also observed a small fire in the back portion of the structure. Slemp said the occupant had self-extricated and was outside the residence. He was treated by paramedics and taken to a nearby hospital. No one else was in the mobile home and no other injuries were reported. Slemp said surrounding structures suffered minor damage from flying debris. On Friday, windows in a neighboring trailer appeared to have been broken out from the explosion. Slemp said Wytheville Fire and Rescue asked for assistance from the Virginia State Police to determine the origin and cause of the explosion. Personnel from the Max Meadows Fire Department, Wythe County Emergency Services and Wytheville Police Department also assisted. This article includes excerpts from past editions of The Floyd Press. Dec. 13, 1934 The death of a 90-year-old Civil War veteran was reported in the Dec. 13, 1934, edition of The Floyd Press, along with some details of his deep Floyd County roots. The parents of Giles M. Whitlow first came to the county from Montgomery County in 1850. Whitlow was a prominent citizen of Floyd and served as a Justice for the Peace for 11 years. He was on the school board for 12 years and land commissioner for many years. Whitlow served in the War Between the States for the Confederacy in the 21st Virginia Cavalry, and he was wounded in the battle of Fishers Hill. His paternal grandmother was a War, a direct descendant of the Rolfes of Virginia, descendants of Pocahontas, the paper said. Whitlow was survived by three children (Pat Whitlow of Floyd, Mrs. Lather Hylton of Florida, and Lee Whitlow of Bluefield, W. Va.) and one sister (M.A. Spencer of Roanoke). A large crowd attended the funeral and burial notwithstanding the cold weather, the paper reported. Dec. 1, 1960 An article in the Dec. 1, 1960 edition of The Floyd Press featured four sets of twins who were taking classes at Floyd High School. Every grade in high school can boast a set of twins, though the eighth and ninth grades must share their set, the paper said. The twins were Dale and Gayle Agee (seniors), Mildred and Mary Smith (juniors), Danny and David Turman (sophomores), and Ronald and Donald Light (freshman and eighth grader, respectively). They were all asked questions about what it was like to be so close to someone. When somebody says something to make one of us mad, it automatically makes the other one mad, too then we can gang up on them! the Agee twins said. Gayle added that she and her brother had never been punished for the other twin. I guess its because when one gets into trouble, the other one is usually in it, too, she said. The paper said that unless consolidation brings more twins into Floyd high, Double vision is on the way out. There are no twins in the elementary school and only two sets (first graders) in the primary school. Dec. 28, 1972 Christmas services were held at Pleasant Valley Church of the Brethren in 1972 despite a fire having almost completely destroyed it. The Dec. 28, 1972, edition of The Floyd Press reports the fire and the damage it left behind. Faulty wiring was the cause of the blaze, according to the paper. Church member Edsel Duncan was working on the electrical wiring one night and heard a noise in the sanctuary, where he discovered the fire. All of the upstairs portion of the church was destroyed, the paper said. Ninety-two church members attended the churchs Christmas service, which was held in the basement since it was not badly damaged. One preacher at the church, Everett Reed, said there would be an effort to restore the building. The church was founded in 1860 and the [building being used in 1972] was erected in 1905, the paper said. Pleasant Valley Church of the Brethren is still active at 3883 Alum Ridge Rd. The UAE is currently engaged in dialogue with both the Syrian regime and Russia to revive the provision calling for the removal of Iranian militias from the Golan Heights, according to Syria TV. Syria TV has obtained information from diplomatic sources regarding ongoing multilateral discussions aimed at reinstating the terms of the 2018 settlement in Syria. This agreement notably entailed the withdrawal of Iranian militias from the Golan border to a depth of 85 kilometres. The initiative gained momentum as the United States of America, alongside certain regional nations, committed to halting support for the Syrian opposition. Furthermore, Russia has assumed the role of a guarantor for effectively implementing these agreements. Sources indicate that the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a key participant in the original settlement, is currently engaged in dialogue with both the Syrian regime and Russia. Their objective is to revive the provision calling for the removal of Iranian militias from the Golan Heights. This diplomatic effort is motivated by a desire to preempt potential military actions by Israel, such as border incursions into Syria, and to avert the need for Israel to take unilateral measures in removing the militias. Russian opportunity On November 29th, 2023, Vassily Nebenzia, Russias permanent representative to the United Nations, issued a warning during a session of the UN Security Council about Russias potential involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He spoke of the risk of Syria being drawn into a large-scale confrontation without further details. Simultaneously, the Charge daffaires of the Syrian regimes delegation to the United Nations appealed to the Security Council to halt Israeli attacks on Syrian territory, emphasizing the repeated strikes on Damascus International Airport. Sources familiar with the matter informed Syria TV that despite the threats made at the Security Council, the Syrian regime and Russia have an agreement not to escalate tensions with Israel on Syrian soil. Their rationale is rooted in a desire to maintain stability, avoid exposing regime forces to heightened risks, and prevent destabilization. These sources emphasized that while Russia does not obstruct the transfer of personnel and weaponry by the Revolutionary Guards to Syria, it has not yet consented to the transfer of advanced equipment such as air defence systems or precision-guided missiles. Notably, Russia has opened the Hmeimim and Palmyra airports to Iran for equipment transfers. The sources suggest that Russia perceives the regional escalation as an opportunity to reclaim its role as a guarantor of Israels security. This strategic move is driven by the hope that Israel will cease its intelligence support to Ukraine. Russia aims to capitalize on its improved relations with Tel Aviv and leverage its active lobbyists in the United States and the West to influence the level of support provided to Ukraine. From 2016 until the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war in early 2022, Moscow and Tel Aviv maintained a robust channel of communication and effective coordination on Syrian territory. This collaboration allowed Israel to conduct precise airstrikes against Iranian militias. In return, Israel influenced Washingtons decisions within certain regional contexts, persuading some countries to cease support for the Syrian opposition, particularly in the southern region. However, this coordination significantly deteriorated after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Iranian position There is a possibility that Iran might demonstrate an understanding of the interests of the Syrian regime, as it seeks to strengthen its relationships with regional and international entities. Iran may not be averse to genuinely reducing its military activities in southern Syria, opting instead to integrate more discreetly within the official structures of the Syrian regime. Throughout the escalation in Gaza, Tehran has displayed a reluctance to involve itself or its proxies in an extended confrontation. Notably, Iran consistently denied responsibility for attacks against U.S. forces in the Red Sea, Iraq, and northeastern Syria. Its worth mentioning that these attacks posed minimal threats to the lives of American soldiers. The frequency and intensity of these attacks decreased notably after the initiation of indirect communication channels between Washington and Tehran, facilitated by the Sultanate of Oman. There is speculation about the potential for the United States to grant Iran additional exemptions, coupled with the release of new funds from Iraqs banks. This suggests that Tehran is amenable to negotiations that could yield more significant benefits for itself or its proxies. 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. Syrians who opt to volunteer in the Army stand to gain significant advantages, including a high salary, according to Athr Press. The Director General of the General Administration at the Ministry of Defense, Major General Ahmed Suleiman, addressed key aspects of the recent decree on reserve service for individuals aged 40 and above in a televised interview with Syria TV on Saturday. A qualitative army based on volunteers Initially, Major General Suleiman disclosed that substantial efforts are underway to transition towards a qualitative, advanced, and professional army, primarily relying on volunteers. Despite disruptions and delays caused by the ongoing war, a decisive step has been taken to initiate reform within the military institution. This process unfolds discreetly and covertly, avoiding public attention. The recent amnesty decree for desertion offences, volunteer enlistment calls, and the latest decree concerning individuals failing to meet reserve service obligations were not coincidental. They are part of a strategic initiative aimed at realizing the objective of establishing a high-calibre, advanced, and professional army that heavily depends on volunteers. Those who opt for volunteer service stand to gain significant advantages, including a minimum salary of one million and 300 thousand increases. For a qualitative and professional volunteer army, rigorous preparation and qualification are imperative, making volunteers the optimal choice. Temporary volunteer contracts also emerge as a favourable option in this context. Determination of reserve period and expected discharge In a different context, Major General Suleiman emphasized a comprehensive revision of the reserve concept, indicating that significant changes are imminent. This overhaul, which will be elucidated in the coming days, signals a departure from the current framework. Major General Suleiman stressed that individuals will not be compelled to endure prolonged periods of compulsory service. He unveiled forthcoming amendments, highlighting the potential dismissal of a considerable number of those engaged in reserve service. Major General Suleiman elaborated, stating, We have established a concise timetable to limit reserve service duration to a maximum of two years, whether served continuously or intermittently. Importantly, he clarified that not everyone who completed compulsory service would necessarily be obligated to undertake reserve service, as it may not be required in all cases. It is noteworthy that President Bashar al-Assad, on December 1st, issued a legislative decree as part of the broader efforts to regulate the state of combat readiness within the armed forces. The decree, directly tied to field conditions and the percentage of those enrolled in compulsory service, allows individuals aged forty and above, who have not yet enrolled in reserve service, to opt for a cash allowance amounting to $4,800 or its equivalent in Syrian pounds as an alternative to fulfilling the legal duty in reserve service. For those already in reserve service and aged forty or above, the decree permits them to pay the mentioned cash allowance, with a deduction of $200 or its equivalent in Syrian pounds for each month already served in reserve duty. The Ministry of Defense has recently announced recruitment contracts featuring 5-year and 10-year terms, introducing key provisions to enhance the overall structure of military service commitments. 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. Tasnim News, Iran's news agency, quoted the IRGC's public relations, stating that two "advisers were killed by the Zionist entity", according to Enab Baladi. Iran has reported the deaths of two Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) advisers, Mohammad Ali Ataye and Taqizadeh, in an Israeli bombardment in Syria on Saturday. The attack occurred near the Syrian capital, Damascus. The Israeli shelling targeted multiple locations in the early hours of the morning. Tasnim News, Irans news agency, quoted the IRGCs public relations, stating that the advisers were killed by the Zionist entity during their advisory mission in Syria. Official Syrian media did not mention casualties, only reporting that air defences repelled the missile aggression near the capital at 1:35 am, causing material damage without providing further details. Israel did not claim responsibility for the bombing in Damascus. This marks the second time in a week that Israeli aircraft conducted raids in Syria. The previous incident on November 26 targeted points in and around Damascus, including Damascus International Airport, which temporarily went out of service. The Ministry of Defense in the Syrian government at the time attributed the air aggression to missiles from the direction of the occupied Syrian Golan. Iran moves through its proxies Iran refrained from direct involvement in the Israeli escalation against the Gaza Strip that commenced on October 7th. Despite criticism from certain Hamas leaders seeking a more robust response and increased support, Iran has chosen not to explicitly engage in the war. Simultaneously, Iran has directed affiliated militias to conduct attacks on U.S. bases in Syria and Iraq. Additionally, it has supported launching missiles and rockets from southern Lebanon, but these actions have so far been limited to skirmishes. The Israeli bombardment of Damascus followed the failure to extend the truce in Gaza, concluding a week-long period of relative calm amid the broader Israeli escalation. This period also witnessed renewed hostilities on the southern border of Lebanon and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq threatening to resume operations against U.S. bases after a pause during the truce. 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 al-Shuhada school in the village of Afs east of Idleb was targeted by artillery shelling from regime forces during official school hours, according to Zaman al-Wasl. The White Helmets have reported a perilous escalation by regime forces in their recent attack on a school in the countryside of Idleb. This act resulted in injuries among both child students and educational staff, some of whom are in critical condition. This incident is seen as part of the regimes ongoing strategy to disrupt the educational process and instill fear in northwestern Syria. According to the organization, on Saturday, December 2nd, the al-Shuhada school in the village of Afs east of Idleb was targeted by artillery shelling from regime forces during official school hours. The attack left three children and a teacher injured, creating a state of fear and panic among students and staff. The continued shelling in the village further hindered the movement of parents within the area. The organization emphasized that the targeting of schools and educational facilities by the regime and Russia peaked in October, with 15 reported attacks, including the bombing of the Hussein Hajj Abboud School in Sarmin on October 3rd, Najib al-Daqs School in al-Bara, and Ibn Khaldun School in Binnish on October 5. Subsequent attacks occurred in Jisr al-Shughur on October 7th and Abzmo on October 8th, all during a period of heightened escalation by the regime forces and Russia in Idleb amd the western countryside of Aleppo. In November, regime forces continued their assaults, targeting a school in the village of Sarja on November 2 and another in Afs on November 10. The White Helmets have documented 23 attacks on schools in northwestern Syria by regime forces, Russia, and allied militias from the beginning of 2023 until the end of November. The organization asserted that these military offensives on northwestern regions, particularly the targeting of vital facilities and schools, are part of a wider strategy causing civilian casualties, displacement, and obstructing students ability to pursue education. The persistent attacks on educational institutions, it argues, are not only intended to destroy infrastructure and harm children but also to jeopardize Syrias future. The White Helmets called for an immediate cessation of these systematic attacks, urging the international community to ensure the security and stability of Syrians in the near future. 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. Syrian human rights activist Ahmed Katie was arrested by Turkish authorities without disclosed reasons, prompting concerns and legal action from his wife. At the same time, the first Iranian bank in Syria is set to start operations, strengthening economic ties between Tehran and Damascus after discussions during President Raisis visit. In parallel, children of ISIS brides from the UK are being repatriated from Syria and discreetly put up for adoption, with at least 10 youths involved. All this comes while a rocket fired from Syria at northern Israel prompted the Israeli army to return fire with artillery shelling at the source of the attack. Syrian human rights activist arrested by Turkish authorities The Syrian opposition website Enab Baladi has reported that Ahmed Katie, a Syrian human rights activist, was reportedly detained by Turkish authorities last week. The arrest was made without providing any details about the background or reasons, as confirmed by another human rights activist. Katie has ceased all communication with his relatives since 5:00 pm on Monday, November 27. His wife stated that she had appointed a lawyer to find out the reason for his arrest. She also mentioned that some of his relatives are reaching out to various human rights organizations and government agencies to uncover the circumstances surrounding the detention. Katie is active in the defense of the rights of refugees in Turkey and was preparing to move to France where was given asylum. First Iranian bank to open in Syria to boost trade, cooperation The Kurdish News Agency North Press has reported that the Governor of the Central Bank of Iran, Muhammad Reza Farzin, announced that the first Iranian bank in Syria will soon start operating. In early May, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi visited Damascus and reaffirmed with his Syrian counterpart, Bashar al-Assad, developing trade and economic relations, as well as enhancing cooperation regarding the reconstruction phase after 12 years of war. The Iranian news agency IRNA reported that during a meeting between Farzin and his Syrian counterpart, Muhammad Hazim, the former stated that Tehran and Damascus are interested in enhancing banking, commercial, and joint investment relations. Children of ISIS brides from UK repatriated from Syria for adoption The British News website has written that children of ISIS brides from Britain are being discreetly sent back to the UK and put up for adoption. At least 10 youths are believed to have been repatriated to this country from detention camps for families in Syria following the fall of ISIS. Among them, it has been reported, are two siblings, both aged under eight, who are currently being fostered in the southeast of England. Grammy Award-winning artists Mark and Maggie OConner are bringing An Appalachian Christmas to Columbia Theatre in Longview. Kelly Ragsdale, managing director of the theater, said the duo puts an Appalachian flair to classic Christmas songs. The fiddle-playing pair is set to perform Dec. 14, and cover songs like Away in a Manger, O Christmas Tree, Sleigh Ride, What Child is This?, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and more. Mark, who grew up in the Seattle area before moving to North Carolina, said he learned to play the fiddle from a famous Kalama musician. He fondly remembers coming to Longview to play when he was 11 years old. ... I went to a little fiddle contest in Longview, Washington, where I saw my eventual teacher, Benny Thomasson, a legendary Texas fiddler play in a competition there, and I write about that in my new memoir, Crossing Bridges that came out this year, he said. Thomasson lived on the Kalama River, near Longview. Mark took lessons from him for two-and-a-half years, so his mother would drive him down every other week from Seattle for fiddle lessons that would last all day long, and sometimes for the entire weekend. During that time, he gave me my best fiddle, and it was a beautiful gift, and I could add, the best Christmas gift that I could have ever imagined, he said. If You Go What: An Appalachian Christmas." When: 7:30 a.m., Dec. 14. Where: Columbia Theatre, 1231 Vandercook Way, Longview. Cost: Tickets range from $50 to $55 for adults; $50 for seniors and military; and $20 for children ages 17 and under. (Plus, applicable ticketing fees.) Info: www.columbiatheatre.com. Connect with Mark and Maggie OConnor online at www.markandmaggieoconnor.com. At the concert, Mark will read an excerpt from Crossing Bridges about receiving that gift. As a child prodigy, Crossing Bridges covers a lot of Marks childhood years. I had a unique childhood experience in music because I was a traveling musician, playing concerts, and entering competitions all around the country, he said. So, I wanted to document that as well as all of the American music legends that I met during those years. Mark said the groups album An Appalachian Christmas reached No. 1 on some charts, when it was first released about 12 years ago, which prompted the Christmas tours. My agency at the time said, You should do some Christmas touring, and were still doing it, he said. We love it, and audiences just really respond to our renditions of Christmas music, songs, carols, instrumentals, and vocals, especially played on the fiddle. An Appalachian Christmas tour kicked off Dec. 1 in Grass Valley, California and will travel to 11 cities in December, including Longview. Over the years, songs have been added, and changed-up for the tour. A few songs on the set list will include What Child is This?, The Cherry-Tree Carol, and Jesu, Joy of Mans Desiring. Plus, Appalachia Waltz and Silent Night will be performed as a medley. Mark and Maggie will also perform Loves in Need of Love Today, off of their new, upcoming project Life After Life. Some of the songs will feature Maggie on vocals and the fiddle, while Mark will sing harmony, play guitar, mandolin and mandocello as well as the fiddle. I love our arrangements that celebrate the fiddle, and add an Appalachian feel to these Christmas classics, Maggie said. Mark said playing Christmas songs in his classic American style is a longstanding holiday tradition in his family. In my history of growing up playing music, I have fond memories during the Christmas season, where there would be jam sessions and people dropping by, and we would always mix some classic Christmas carols with good old fashioned American music, he said. The idea of crossing those bridges between Americana, fiddling, bluegrass, and Christmas music is the theme of this tour, this project, and really, of my upbringing in music. KSAT will lose another anchor. On Saturday, Tim Gerber, investigative reporter and anchor for the KSAT Defenders team, announced that he would be leaving the station in January. Gerber said he'll be heading back to Ohio, where he was born, along with his family. "It's time to go home," Gerber wrote in a social media message. "On January 26 next year I will reach my 20th Anniversary working here. Five days later, I will walk out the doors for the final time." Advertisement Article continues below this ad During a family trip to Ohio last year, Gerber said he was reminded of "what was missing in my life outside of Ohio." After living away from family for so long, he and his wife, Anne, decided to go home "for good." "Walking away from the job you've worked for two decades certainly isn't easy, but it is a decision I am fully at peace with," Gerber wrote. "This wasn't a snap decision made in a vacuum. It's one I've wrestled with probably for the past 5 years. It was also the subject of many conversations with my wife about our future." Gerber said five years ago, when he signed his current contract with KSAT, he had the suspicion it could be the final contract he signed. Gerber also noted that not only is he walking away from KSAT, he's also retiring from being a reporter. It's a "big change," as Gerber wrote that he's been in the news business since college. KSAT-12 television station on St. Mary's Street near downtown San Antonio. KSAT will lose another anchor in January as Tim Gerber departs after 20 years. Monte Bach "Being a reporter has truly given me a front row seat to history," Gerber wrote. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Gerber was greeted with an outpouring of support from fellow KSAT staff as many shared memories. To be honored as a school counselor of the year is to acknowledge an often-misunderstood profession, says Jorge Torres. Torres was named 2023 School Counselor of the Year by the Washington School Counselor Association and was one of five finalists and the only male counselor in the running for the national School Counselor of the Year award. He did not receive the national award. But he was honored to be nominated. I was this kid, the son of migrant farmworkers, who qualified as homeless, who had the resiliency of not giving up and being hopeful for the future. With my experience, I think Im able to provide promise and hope for the future generation, he said. At Foster High School in Tukwila, Torres and the three other school counselors Liz Hepner, Laura Linde and Jenni Standard are assigned to more students than there are days in a school year. Their strength and stamina in managing everything from master schedules to mental health crises comes from working collectively as a team for more than a decade, said Torres. Torres is in his 16th year as a counselor for Foster and 24th year in the profession; he started in the Wenatchee School District. Torres is also a rare representative in the school counseling field. The majority of counselors are white and female, according to the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). Torres comes from a family of 10 siblings raised by Mexican migrant farmworkers. He attended 11 elementary schools, three middle schools and three high schools between the U.S. and Mexico, as his family faced illness, death and uncertainty. Its those experiences, and Torres own resilience, which have helped him best support his students. I just had a new student coming in today. A refugee from South America who was basically sleeping out in the cold, but coming in with a smile telling me theyre excited to be here and looking forward to coming to school, Torres said on Tuesday. It was humbling. We asked Torres about working with a diverse student body, the evolution of the role of guidance counselor to school counselor and what keeps him in this increasingly challenging role. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. Q: How did you become interested in being a counselor? A: When my older brother dropped out to help my family, it struck me. He was one of the smartest people that I knew. When it came to math, I could see that he thrived. I found some information on a high school completion program and shared that with him. He ended up going to school and getting his GED and did really well for himself. I realized it made me feel really good to help get my brother resources and encouraged me even more. I wondered what other kids are in need. Q: How has your role changed over the years? When I was in high school, school counselors were commonly known as guidance counselors because at the time, that was what was needed. The ASCA student standards have three domains, which include academic development and support, college and career readiness and social-emotional development and support. When you look at all those pieces over the years, the social-emotional has become more of a focal point for many different factors, including societal and technological changes. Suicidal ideation rates have increased [among youth]. AI (Artificial Intelligence) is now a thing. We have to think about how that is going to impact our students, and communities in general. Q: And school counselors arent trained therapists, right? A: I hope in working with the state we can look at the missing parts of our system. We all talk about mental health, right? But we dont have enough providers. As school counselors, were not mental health therapists. Were not trained to do therapy. But many times, we are it for students. There are limits to how many clients even full-time therapists can take. I would say its improving to a degree but taking longer to connect students with therapists than before COVID. So, we rely on other structures of support we can provide. Q: What keeps you in this role? A: The students, honestly. I love my job. The best part of my job is when Im sitting with students, talking about college or doing check-ins. There are a lot of needs. It is difficult. And Im not going to lie, its increasingly stressful figuring out how to navigate that. But we have a great community of staff and other school counselors. All of us on my team have been around for at least 10 years and thats very uncommon. Each of us does a lot of stuff behind the scenes. PayU has been named the exclusive payments partner for Motorola as it establishes its own online store in collaboration with VTEX, the global enterprise digital commerce platform. With PayUs comprehensive payment options and industry-leading transaction success rates, Motorola aims to deliver a seamless and secure payment experience for its customers in India. As a part of this partnership, Motorola would gain access to PayUs industry-leading Affordability Suite that helps maximize sales by offering 150+ payment methods, including Credit Card EMIs, Debit Card EMIs, Cardless EMI, and Buy Now Pay Later. Motorola uses PayUs Affordability Suite to make purchasing easier for a wider customer base. Using PayUs Affordability Widget, Motorola can now make EMIs and many other payment options more discoverable. The brand will also manage its entire offer lifecycle sourcing, running, reconciling offers and settlements using PayUs Offer Engine. The strategic partnership between PayU and VTEX also benefits Motorola through PayUs comprehensive analytics and reporting features that provide the brand with valuable insights into payment performance. With comprehensive transaction tracking, success rates, and other key metrics, Motorola can make informed strategic decisions for its business plans in India. Commenting on the collaboration, Nikhil Mehta, Senior Vice President Partnerships & Payments Strategy at PayU India, stated, We are thrilled to be the exclusive payments partner for Motorolas online store. By leveraging PayUs wide range of payment options, industry-leading Affordability Suite & Offers Engine, advanced security measures, and easy integration capabilities, Motorola can provide a seamless, accessible, and secure online shopping experience to its customers, fostering business growth. Shivam Ranjan, Head of Marketing at Motorola Asia Pacific, expressed his enthusiasm about the partnership, stating, Partnering with PayU India and VTEX allows us to enhance our customers online shopping journey by offering a diverse range of payment options, top-notch security, and streamlined payment processes. We are confident this collaboration will contribute to the success of our new online store. In this Motorola case, and many others, the strategic alliance between VTEX and PayU offers companies a ready-to-use, pre-integrated payment solution that shortens time-to-revenue and provides exceptional checkout services. Prakash Gurumoorthy, general manager at VTEX EMEA & APAC, said, Unified Commerce has transitioned from a desirable feature to an absolute necessity. He also highlights the teams collective commitment to delivering a digital commerce platform that helps enterprises grow while staying relevant for convenience-driven consumers. Prakash states: Our collaboration with PayU strengthens our composable and complete commerce platform for enterprise brands and retailers in India. With this pre-integrated payment solution, VTEX clients can access various payment methods, enabling a faster time-to-revenue. 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: The tasks examined in our study and the average quantity of carbon emissions they produced (in g of ?? 2 ) for 1,000 queries. N.B. The y axis is in logarithmic scale. Credit: arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2311.16863 So you program your thermostat to save heating costs, recycle glass and plastic, ride a bicycle to work instead of driving a car, reuse sustainable grocery bags, buy solar panels, and shower with your mateall to do your part to conserve energy, curb waste and lower your carbon footprint. A study released last week may just spoil your day. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Hugging Face, a machine learning community website, report that you might still contribute to climate change if you are one of the 10 million-plus users who tap into machine learning models daily. In what they term the first systematic comparison of costs associated with machine-learning models, the researchers found that using an AI model to generate an image requires the same amount of energy as charging a smartphone. "People think that AI doesn't have any environmental impacts, that it's this abstract technological entity that lives on a 'cloud,'" said team leader Alexandra Luccioni. "But every time we query an AI model, it comes with a cost to the planet, and it's important to calculate that." Her team tested 30 datasets using 88 models and found widespread differences in energy usage between varying types of tasks. They measured the amount of carbon dioxide emissions utilized per task. The greatest amount of energy was expended by Stability AI's Stable Diffusion XL, an image generator. Nearly 1,600 grams of carbon dioxide is produced during such a session. Luccioni said that is roughly the equivalent of driving four miles in a gas-powered car. On the lowest end of the scale, basic text generation tasks expended the equivalent of a car driving just 3/500 of a mile. Other categories of machine learning tasks included classifying images and text, image captioning, summarizations, and answering questions. The researchers stated that generative tasks that create new content, such as images and summarizations, are more energy- and carbon-intensive than discriminative tasks, such as ranking movies. They also observed that using multi-purpose models to undertake discriminative tasks is more energy-intensive than using task-specific models for the same tasks. This is important, the researchers said, because of recent trends in model usage. "We find this last point to be the most compelling takeaway of our study, given the current paradigm shift away from smaller models fine-tuned for a specific task towards models that are meant to carry out a multitude of tasks at once, deployed to respond to a barrage of user queries in real-time," the report said. According to Luccioni, "If you're doing a specific application, like searching through email do you really need these big models that are capable of anything? I would say no." Although the numbers of carbon dioxide usage for such tasks may appear small, when multiplied by millions of users relying on AI-generated programs daily, often with multiple requests, the totals show what could amount to a significant impact on efforts to rein in environmental waste. "I think that for generative AI overall, we should be conscious of where and how we use it, comparing its cost and its benefits," Luccioni said. The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server. More information: Alexandra Sasha Luccioni et al, Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2311.16863 Journal information: arXiv 2023 Science X Network 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: Alaska Airlines is set to purchase mid-size US carrier Hawaiian Airlines -- if it can gain regulatory approval. Alaska Airlines announced Sunday that it would buy Hawaiian Airlines for $1.9 billion, consolidating its position as the nation's fifth biggest carrier if it can attain regulatory approval. Both brands will continue to exist under the terms of the agreement, which could take up to 18 months to finalize, according to a joint press release. The combined airlines would have a fleet of 365 narrow and widebody aircraft, and reach 138 destinations. Based in Seattle, Alaska Airlines mainly serves the western United States. The Hawaiian capital of Honolulu would become its second main hub. Residents of Hawaii would benefit from expanded service to the continental United States, the two companies said, and the merger would create "new connections to Asia and throughout the Pacific for travelers across the US." The two airlines both provide service to areas "uniquely reliant upon air travel"the Pacific archipelago and the frontier state of Alaska. "Commitment to Hawaii remains steadfast," the companies said, including maintaining robust service between islands. "With the additional scale and resources that this transaction with Alaska Airlines brings, we will be able to accelerate investments in our... technology, while maintaining the Hawaiian Airlines brand," Hawaiian Airlines chief executive Peter Ingram said in the statement. Federal regulatory approval of the purchase is not assured. US airlines have faced cutthroat competition in recent years, seeking to consolidate against financial pressure even as they endure federal antitrust scrutiny. The administration of President Joe Biden last year blocked an alliance between American Airlines and JetBlue Airways, and is seeking to halt JetBlue from buying Spirit Airlines, arguing that consolidation may not favor consumers. 2023 AFP This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: CC0 Public Domain In a move to embrace sustainable steelmaking, British Steel has unveiled a 1.25 billion plan to replace two blast furnaces at its Scunthorpe plant with electric arc furnaces. This follows the UK government's commitment in September to invest up to 500 million towards an electric arc furnace at Tata Steel's Port Talbot plant in south Wales. This method of steelmaking can use up to 100% scrap steel as its raw material, resulting in a significant reduction in carbon emissions. It is the future of steelmaking. Steel is an incredible material and for good reason. It's the world's most commonly used metal because it's strong, durable and recyclable, making it the perfect material for everything from skyscrapers to electric vehicles and solar panels. More than 1.8 billion tons of crude steel were produced globally last year. That number is only expected to grow as the world transitions to a more sustainable future. The UK uses around 12 million tons of steel each year. And in 2022, it produced just under 6 million tons, contributing to around 2.4% of the country's greenhouse gas emissions. Electric arc furnaces There are two main steel production methods. Currently, Port Talbot and Scunthorpe use the blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace method. The purpose of the blast furnace is to separate iron ore extracted from the ground into its component parts: iron and oxygen. A form of carbon, normally coal, combines with the oxygen in the iron ore. The outputs of this process are iron and carbon dioxide. The basic oxygen furnace is then used to convert the iron into steel. As a global average, this method of steelmaking emits around 2.32 tons of CO per ton of steel produced. An electric arc furnace works by generating a high-temperature arc between graphite electrodes, using electricity as the energy source. This arc is then used to melt metal inside a chamber. Using this method, up to 100% scrap steel can be used as the raw material, while the blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace method can only use a maximum of 30% scrap. A switch to the electric arc furnace method could reduce emissions to 0.67 tons of CO per ton of steel produced when using 100% scrap steel. In the future, it is also possible the electricity needed for electric arc furnace processes could come from 100% renewable sources, whereas a form of carbon will always be needed to reduce iron ore when using the blast furnace method. Recycled steel Steel is the most recycled material in the world, and so scrap steel is quickly becoming a crucial raw material. In 2021, the global steel industry recycled around 680 million tons of scrap steel. This equates to savings of almost 1 billion tons of CO emissions, compared to using virgin steel production. In 2021, more than 8.2 million tons of steel scrap was exported from the UK. If collected and sorted more carefully, using this material domestically could provide both environmental and economic value, by helping to meet growing national demand for steel. We know that steel produced with an electric arc furnace can have different properties to blast furnace produced material. A large factor in this is the quality of scrap steel used in the electric arc furnaceif the scrap steel quality is low, then so will the quality of the output. With that in mind, there is a need for research, innovation and skills development to ensure this transition to lower-carbon steelmaking methods is successful. Finding and sorting the right types of scrap material, confirming material properties and increasing supply chain understanding of electric arc furnace steelmaking are all necessary for a wide range of steel products to continue to be made in the UK. Sustainable steelmaking There is a race across Europe to secure investment for sustainable steelmaking technologies. Hybrit is a fossil-free steel project in Sweden between several major steel producers and is already underway. This follows plans to invest almost 40 billion (almost 35 billion) in low-emission steelmaking technologies over the next 20 years. Also in Sweden, the company H2 Green Steel has secured 3.5 billion (3 billion) to build a hydrogen-powered steel plant. In July 2023, the German government announced 2 billion (1.7 billion) of support for Thyssenkrupp, the steel multinational. And that was on top of the 3 billion (2.6 billion) it had previously announced to support the country's industrial green transition. A ArcelorMittal, the second largest steel producer in the world, has also announced green investment in their plants in Belgium and Spain, totaling more than 1.2 billion (1.5 billion). While the UK government has no published industrial strategy, other organizations have produced roadmaps for decarbonized steelmaking in the UK. A report by the Energy Transitions Commission, a global coalition of energy leaders committed to net-zero emissions, outlined plans for investing in low-emission steelmaking in early 2023. With the right level of government and private sector investment, the UK could become a world leader in green steelmakingbut only it acts now. As global temperatures continue to rise and the climate emergency deepens, the need for a decarbonized steel industry is greater than ever. Lower carbon methods of steel production are the future of the industry both in the UK and around the world. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. 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: MEP scores for Denver are mapped for (a) drive and (b) e-bike modes. Each pixel is 1 km2. The highest e-bike MEP score across all locations was 178 while the highest drive MEP score was 220. Credit: National Renewable Energy Laboratory Do electric bikes (e-bikes) improve the overall quality of mobility for certain groups in a region? Do they provide a similar level of time-, cost-, and energy-efficient access to opportunities as cars? To garner real-world data to answer such questions and enable in-depth evaluation of emerging transportation modes such as e-bikes, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) researchers brought together two pivotal tools: an open-source travel data collection applicationthe Open Platform for Agile Trip Heuristics (OpenPATH)and a multidimensional mobility metric that quantifies the efficiency of a region's transportation systemthe Mobility Energy Productivity (MEP) metric. Together, these tools can provide transportation practitioners and planners with timely insights into the impacts of these emerging modes to help them deliver the maximum benefits for sustainable, equitable, and efficient mobility. NREL demonstrated the integration of these tools in action to quantify the impacts of providing e-bikes to low-income essential workers in Colorado. "Tapping into OpenPATH data from nearly 50,000 trips, MEP calculations showed that several locations in downtown Denver provided time-, cost-, and energy-efficient access to opportunities using e-bikes compared to driving," said Christopher Hoehne, NREL mobility systems research scientist. "We also found that providing e-bikes to low-income essential workers was meaningfulthey used them most frequently to commute to work, although driving was still their most frequent travel mode in general." NREL's analysis results are highlighted in the "Mobility Energy Productivity and Equity: E-Bike Impacts for Low-Income Essential Workers in Denver" article authored by NREL's Hoehne, Max Hanrahan, K. Shankari, and Venu Garikapati and published in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board. Building on accessibility theory, MEP quantifies the ability of an area's transportation systemvia any or specific travel modesto connect individuals to goods, services, employment opportunities, and other activities while accounting for time, cost, and energy. In other words, MEP measures how efficiently connected or reachable a place is by various forms of mobility. "Integrating MEP's modeling capabilities with local mobility data collected via OpenPATH ensures analysis results are locally relevant," said Shankari, an NREL director's fellow who developed OpenPATH. "With MEP, we can generalize and expand our data collection results to explore physical infrastructure consideration, such as bike paths, that support alternative transportation modes." This map shows the ratio of e-bike MEP to drive MEP across metro Denver. A value of 50% corresponds to a location with an e-bike MEP score half the magnitude of a drive MEP score. Credit: National Renewable Energy Laboratory Researchers found that the overall e-bike MEP for Denver was 34, slightly more than a quarter of the drive MEP (129) but more than twice as high as the bike MEP (16) for the same region. The analysis showed that e-bikes provided twice the amount of time-, energy-, and cost-efficient access to opportunities compared to manual bikes. Meanwhile, the e-bike MEP was comparable in magnitude with the drive MEP in Denver's central business district due to its high concentration of opportunities coupled with its well-connected network of pathssuch as trails through parksaccessible to bikes and e-bikes but not to cars. Conversely, the lowest scores in some locations were zero MEP for walk, bike, and e-bike because of limitations in infrastructure connectivityfor example, bikes, e-bikes, and pedestrians are not permitted on highways. "E-bikes provided the best travel alternative to driving in locations where they could be used to access opportunities at a shorter distance or duration, such as in denser neighborhoods," said Garikapati, senior transportation data analytics researcher and MEP project leader. "The e-bike MEP was highest in downtown Denver, where the highest density of activities and jobs exist. This advantage fades away in exurbs and suburbs due to urban sprawl, where the time advantage of driving more significantly outweighs the cost and energy to access the sparser opportunity space." When comparing the e-bike-to-drive MEP ratio across Denver, researchers found 12 areas where the e-bike MEP was comparable in magnitude to the drive MEP, providing 80% or more of the energy-efficient access provided by a much faster mode such as driving. The location with a score most comparable in magnitude for e-bikes, providing 94% of the drive MEP, was near the Colorado State Capitol. Spotlight on sustainability and equity Research has shown that density is a significant predictor of urban mobility trends, with a higher number of shorter-distance trips occurring in regions with higher densities. Meanwhile, car-centric urban planning has led to large amounts of land in cities dedicated to driving and parking personal cars, and urban sprawl leads to higher amounts of driving and energy use per capita. Vehicle electrification, coupled with a decarbonized electric grid, can play a vital role in reducing transportation-related greenhouse gases. E-bikes, which are among the smallest electric vehicles that anyone can own, are more cost and energy-efficient than automobiles. "New mobility technologies such as electrified and shared mobility, combined with supportive policies and incentive programs, can help address sustainability and equity issues in transportation planning," Hoehne said. "While micromobility modes such as e-bikes are an attractive option due to their lower cost and energy use per mile than personal cars, they are best suited for shorter-distance intra-urban trips in dense areas." More information: Christopher Hoehne et al, Mobility Energy Productivity and Equity: E-Bike Impacts for Low-Income Essential Workers in Denver, Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board (2023). DOI: 10.1177/03611981231193628 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: The lab settings, including the robot Pepper (SoftBank Robotics) in front of a web camera, while the experimenter in the back is controlling the robot using the Wizard of Oz technique. Credit: International Journal of Social Robotics (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s12369-023-01076-z People interacting with social robots disclosed more about themselves over time and reported feeling less lonely, according to a new study. The researchled by the University of Glasgow and published in the International Journal of Social Roboticsalso found that interacting with a social robot improved people's moods over time, suggesting social robots could be used as an effective intervention to support peoples' emotional health in the future. The study aimed to examine the long-term, repeated use of social robots, examining people's continued engagement, particularly with peoples' self-disclosure, with such a novel concept. The research, which took place online during the peak of the pandemic, saw people introduced to social robot "Pepper" over Zoom video chats, 10 times over five weeks. The studywhich involved 39 people from across the U.K.found that people disclosed more to the robot over time, speaking for longer durations and sharing more information. People also perceived the robot to be more social and competent as time progressed; and across the sessions with the robot, participants also found the robot's responses increasingly comforting, reporting mood improvements and a reduction in feelings of loneliness. A secondary data analysis from this same study, published in the 2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), revealed that individuals experiencing negative emotions (such as low mood, loneliness, and stress) and introverted individuals, as well as those who perceive the robot as more comforting, are more likely to open up and share more with robots. Prof Emily Cross, Honorary Professor at the University of Glasgow, and a full Professor at ETH Zurich said, "We're really excited by the findings of our new study, which sets the stage for using social robots as conversation partners in future. While interactions with social robots are novel and exciting for many people, we were unsure to what extent people's engagement with them could be sustained over time. "The results of our study suggest there are contexts in which people are willing to engage with these robots long-term, and social robots could be used as a tool to allow people to talk about themselves, to help support people's emotional health." Dr. Guy Laban, Affiliated Research Associate at the University of Glasgow and Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, said, "Our study lays the foundation for building relationships with robots, positioning them as valuable conversational partners, and providing crucial evidence for their potential inclusion in interventions supporting emotional health. "It is exciting to see how this technology can be used for social good, providing meaning and a safe space to those in need. When conducting the experiment during the pandemic, we observed how a robot could lift people's mood amid very dark and isolated times. "Considering the recent advances in AI (e.g., generative AI and Large language models, like GPT), studies like this are crucial. They help us better understand how humans establish healthy and constructive relationships with AI agents, such as robots, supporting the ethical and responsible deployment of this technology in the future." More information: Guy Laban et al, Building Long-Term HumanRobot Relationships: Examining Disclosure, Perception and Well-Being Across Time, International Journal of Social Robotics (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s12369-023-01076-z Guy Laban et al, Opening Up to Social Robots: How Emotions Drive Self-Disclosure Behavior, 2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (2023). DOI: 10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309551 When Spotify Wrapped dropped last week, many rushed to discover their top artist and songs of 2023. But one San Antonian's year-end highlight reel looked a little different. Timothy the Hippo, the San Antonio Zoo social media star, had his own version of "Wrapped" dominated by Fiona, the Cincinnati Zoo's own famous hippo. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Taking up spots 1 through 5 in Timothy's "Top Hippos" of the year, Fiona didn't have to worry about competition. Timothy's Wrapped, which has garnered more than 1,300 likes on Facebook, also featured 145,829 "minutes napped" (the equivalent of more than 101 days) and "Top Snacks," including watermelon, pumpkins and cantaloupe. Timothy has attempted to garner Fiona's interest since at least 2019, gifting love letters and mariachi bands. In April 2022, Timothy also wished Fiona good luck in becoming a big sister. In alignment with a nationwide initiative to construct and renovate 350 affordable homes for families, the Wells Fargo Foundation has awarded a $15,000 grant to the Grand Island Area Habitat for Humanity. This grant supports the construction of a new home for the Findley family a single mom and her three young sons actively participating in the build project at 2037 Nelson Lane. Volunteers from local Wells Fargo branches played a role in the project, collaborating in pouring the foundation of Habitat house 115. This not only symbolizes the importance of homeownership for the family but also marks the initial step in constructing safe, decent and affordable housing. The efficiency and dedication displayed by the Wells Fargo team, accustomed to the concept of teamwork, were evident as they completed a project that typically takes four hours in just one hour and five minutes showing a level of commitment similar to their work with banking clients, Wells Fargo noted in a press release. The $15,000 grant is part of a $7.5 million donation to Habitat for Humanity International through the 2023 Wells Fargo Builds program, aimed at expanding access to affordable housing across the United States. Wells Fargo volunteers, acknowledged for their exceptional teamwork and contribution, will be invited to the dedication of House 115. They will have the honor of presenting the keys to the new homeowner this coming spring, celebrating a significant milestone in the journey toward affordable homeownership. Vietnam, WB to promote projects worth $5-7 bln in next 3 years By Minh Anh Mon, December 4, 2023 | 10:57 am GMT+7 Vietnam and the World Bank have agreed to quicken the implementation of existing projects and promote game-changing projects within the framework of the latters $5-7 billion loans for Vietnam in the next three years. The agreement was reached between Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh and WB President Ajay Banga in Dubai on December 2 on the sidelines of the 28th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28). Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh (right) and World Bank president Ajay Banga meet in Dubai on December 2, 2023. Photo courtesy of the government's news portal. Potential large-ticket projects include those in the Renewable Energy Accelerating Change Project (REACH), one million hectares of high-yield, low-carbon rice, Hanoi-Hoa Lac high-speed railway, climate change-resilient infrastructure development in the Mekong Delta, digital transformation, and green transformation. The scale of the loans was first mentioned during a meeting of the two on the sidelines of ASEAN summits in Jakarta, Indonesia on September 7. Minister of Transport Nguyen Van Thang and WB country director for Vietnam Carolyn Turk in mid-October discussed potential projects for WB funding. The Vietnamese prime minister thanked the WB for its effective cooperation with Vietnam, especially in policy consultation, financing, contributing to socioeconomic development projects and poverty reduction. The WB is restructuring its operations globally, so Chinh proposed the bank establish a regional center with an office in Vietnam, promising the best possible conditions for operations. In response, Banga welcomed Chinhs proposal, and said he would ponder the idea. The president affirmed that the WB considers Vietnam an important partner and will continue to accompany and support Vietnam in meeting its development goals. He spoke highly of the Vietnamese governments efforts aimed at green transformation, climate change response and sustainable development, especially in implementing the one-million-hectare low-carbon rice project. Banga proposed Vietnam join the global carbon credit market and affirmed the WBs willingness to accompany and support the country in this process. A team led by Clemson University is receiving a second multimillion-dollar federal grant to continue research into the nations most devastating citrus disease, an arboreal affliction that costs Florida alone $1 billion annually. Feng Luo, the Marvin J. Pinson Jr. 46 Distinguished Professor in the School of Computing, is the principal investigator on the project, funded with $4.1 million from the U.S. Department of Agricultures National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). Students in Feng Luos group have the opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research. Those pictured are (from left): Pei Xu, Zhijie Li, Mingqi Li, Dan Zhang, Luo, Jing Wang, Melanie Lambert, Feiyang Cai, Xiaoyan Han and Grayson Byrd. With the funding, the team will deepen its research into Huanglongbing (HLB), known commonly as citrus greening disease, which has posed a significant challenge to citrus farmers. Co-principal investigators on the project include: Yongping Duan and Matthew Mattia, both of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Fred G. Gmitter, Zhanao Deng, Mark A. Ritenour, John M. Chater, Zhengfei Guan, Jude W. Grosser, all of the University of Florida; Olufemi Alabi of Texas A&M; and Chandrika Ramadugu of the University of California, Riverside. Despite the severity of the disease, efforts to curb HLBs spread and mitigate its effects have been piecemeal. The research aims to counteract the disease and ensure that the future citrus varieties developed are both hardy and economically viable for commercial production. At Clemson University, were dedicated to delivering a top-tier educational experience for our students while making impactful strides in research, said Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Robert H. Jones. This grant, led by Feng Luo, exemplifies our ambition to push boundaries in research and, in the process, enact positive change both in our nation and globally. Our endeavors in addressing citrus greening disease underscore our commitment to transformative solutions that transform our world. HLB is a bacterial disease that affects citrus trees, leading to misshapen, bitter fruits and eventually killing the tree. It is transmitted by the Asian citrus psyllid insect. Since its arrival in Florida in 2005, citrus production has declined by more than 80% in the state. The grant will enable Luo and his team to explore various ways of developing citrus cultivars that are highly tolerant or resistant to HLB. Cultivars are plant varieties that have been produced by selective breeding to be used by growers in cultivation. By employing artificial intelligence algorithms, the team will be able to sift through the genetic information of citrus plants at a speed and precision unachievable by traditional methods. This not only accelerates the identification process of HLB-resistant variants but also ensures that the selections will enable sustainable production for the citrus industries. The research builds on a previous study that began in 2017 and was funded with $4.3 million from NIFA, also with Luo as principal investigator. In that first phase, researchers demonstrated that citrus plants that are resistant or tolerant to HLB can be selected in commercial groves and breeding orchards for large-scale cultivation. However, the selection and evaluation process still requires a long time, and the second phase will be aimed at finding ways to speed it up. Researchers also plan to use the second phase to transition from the lab to the field, conducting evaluations in Florida, Texas, and California to test the real-world efficacy of their findings. Our goal here is about more than scientific exploration, Luo said. Its about practical solutions that can help growers more quickly. The selected citrus cultivars will be the most durable, eco-friendly, and cost-effective solution to this devastating disease so far. Gmitter said he was excited to collaborate on the project. Working alongside such a dedicated team, were channeling our collective expertise to identify citrus varieties that can stand tall against HLB, he said. Through our combined efforts and expertise, were aiming to develop solutions that are both scientifically sound and practically applicable in the field. Duan agreed. Its truly exciting to collaborate with such a passionate team, he said. As we dive deeper into the genetic intricacies of citrus plants, this collective endeavor brings us closer to turning the tide against HLB and ensuring a prosperous future for our citrus growers. Amanda Montoya is escorted into the courtroom for sentencing after being convicted of aggravated assault in the May 2016 death of her boyfriend Cesar Gallegos, 47. Jessica Phelps A judge sentenced a San Antonio woman who fatally shot her boyfriend in 2016 to five years in prison for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. The jury in the case was unable to agree on a punishment for Amanda Montoya, 50, but she opted to have state District Judge Christine Del Prado sentence her, avoiding the need to impanel a new jury to rehear evidence. The jury took 11 hours on Nov. 17 to find Montoya not guilty of murder in the death of Cesar Gallegos, 47, on March 24, 2016. Instead, jurors convicted her on the assault charge but then hopelessly deadlocked on her punishment. Del Prado declared a mistrial Nov. 20. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The case was reset for another jury to decide punishment, but Monday morning Montoya said she wanted the judge to do it. Because the aggravated assault was classified as family violence, the charge was bumped up from a second-degree felony with a punishment range of two to 20 years in prison to a first-degree felony, punishable by five to 99 years. Amanda Montoya reacts after hearing her friend, Reina Baptista, testify in her defense at her sentencing hearing. Montoya was convicted of aggravated assault in the May 2016 death of her boyfriend Cesar Gallegos, 47. Jessica Phelps It was the second mistrial in Montoyas case. She previously went to trial on the murder charge in 2020, but that jury couldnt agree on a verdict. Shortly after that, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person court proceedings for nearly 13 months. Testimony at Montoyas retrial in November established that she and Gallegos were drinking and dancing to Tejano music on a patio in the backyard of a home in the 100 block of West Ansley Boulevard on the South Side. Advertisement Article continues below this ad A neighbor alerted Gallegos to a noise outside the home, so he picked up his gun, took a look and returned. Montoya asked Gallegos to put the gun away, so he passed it to her, but then grabbed her and the gun went off, according to defense attorneys, who contended the shooting was a tragic accident. READ MORE: Will Northside ISD Trustee Karla Duran Be Allowed to Drive? He died at the scene, and Montoya was still holding the weapon when she told arriving San Antonio police officers that she had accidentally shot her boyfriend. Prosecutors Oscar Pena and Kathryn Pollard argued that because Montoya has three DWI convictions, she is a danger to the community. Prosecutors asked for 10 years, while her attorneys Arlene Gay and Karen Corby asked that Del Prado consider no more than five years for their client. Del Prado sentenced Montoya to five years in prison. She will have to serve at least half of that time before she is eligible for parole. Cotton farmers worldwide have long witnessed Fusarium wilt strip leaves from their crops, leaving plants with bare stems withering away in the fields. Fusarium Symptoms of FOV4 on Upland cotton include dark and continuous vascular staining on the upper tap roots and lower stems of plants. Scientists from Clemson University and Australia are collaborating to create Fusarium-resistant germplasm for use in United States and Australian cotton-breeding programs. Christopher Saski, a geneticist in Clemsons Plant and Environmental Sciences Department, is working with Warwick Stiller, a plant breeder in Australias Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, to develop germplasm to combat the Fusarium Race 4 (FOV4) strain in Upland cotton. Fusarium wilt is a primary disease affecting production in many growing areas in the United States and Australia, both of which rely on exports to sustain their production systems, Saski said. A soilborne pathogen causes the disease and can live in the soil for many years. Chemical controls and cultural practices are ineffective, making genetic-resistant plants a viable solution for controlling FOV4. We want to gain a deeper understanding of plant defense mechanisms and identify potential targets for genetic manipulation so that we can release varieties with durable genetic resistance much faster, Saski said. New breeding tools will help determine if recently discovered genes that provide resistance to FOV4 in United States cotton can also provide resistance in Australian cotton. We will use cutting-edge research and collaboration to empower breeders with the tools and knowledge they need to optimize cotton production, thus helping secure the future of this vital crop, Saski said. Stiller said cross-disciplinary collaboration is essential to opening discussion and sharing methodologies, technology and experience across research groups. Although significant progress can be made, no single research group can solve the disease challenges across the global cotton industry, Stiller said. Through the dedicated efforts of two leading laboratories, the similarities and differences of resistance to FOV4 and the Australian biotype of FOV will be identified. The outcomes will benefit Australian and U.S. cotton growers by sharing information and genetic resources so both countries can continue to develop cultivars with increased resistance to these diseases. The severity of Fusarium wilt is increasing because of climate change caused by weather fluctuations. Fusarium wilt is a serious threat to cotton production in the United States and abroad, said FFAR Chief Scientific Officer Angela Records. This insidious pathogen strips leaves from crops and jeopardizes farmers profit. Cotton farmers need access to resistant plants as soon as possible. This research is helping to speed relief by developing tools to better understand the fungus and aid in faster breeding to combat it. This project is funded by a $750,000 grant from the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) as a Next Generation Crops research project, research conducted in part to improve crops resilience to climate change. Matching funds come from Clemson University, Cotton Incorporated and CSIRO for a total $1,922,439 investment. Symptoms of FOV4 Symptoms of FOV4 on Upland cotton include dark and continuous vascular staining on roots. As the fungus continues to grow, more tissues decay. In severely infected plants, damage is seen as stunting, wilting and death; while other infected plants may only be stunted and still survive the growing season. To monitor for Fusarium wilt, walk the fields, pull random and symptomatic plants and, then, cut roots and inspect for taproot staining. A global economy requires business graduates with a global mindset. One way South Carolina State Universitys College of Business and Information Systems is fulfilling that goal is by developing a relationship with schools in other nations. A delegation of SC State students, faculty and staff visited the African nation of Ghana this past summer to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between CBIS and the School of Business at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. The trip also provided an opportunity for discovery and personal reflection. As South Carolinas only public historically Black college or university, SC State gives young scholars the opportunity to explore ancestry and culture. Students Kennedy Grace Smith, Asia Rayna Crump and Eric J. Byrd seized the opportunity. The kindness we received from people in the country -- unlike the feeling of separation we are sometimes made to experience in the U.S., for once, made me feel like I belonged, said Byrd, a management major. Before our plane landed in Ghana, I felt the energy as we got closer to Africa, I felt a rush, a vibration, and it was so strong. It felt like something was pulling me toward the country. That, I believe, must have been my ancestors, Byrd said. I felt so connected to my ancestors for the first time when I was in Ghana, especially when I was standing in the river where the captured slaves took their First Bath. Upon returning to the U.S., I realized a total change in me. This experience would help me thrive in everything I will do in the future no more holding back, he said. CBIS Dean Matthew Waritay Guah considers experiences like visiting Ghana to be critical in creating a visionary minority population needed to transform Americas future. While students in colleges all over the U.S. participate in study abroad programs, the lack of diversity and equal opportunities continues even in this area, Guah said. Studies show that only 6% of study-abroad students are Black or of African descent. We see a similar trajectory in industry, where only 2% of leaders, entrepreneurs, and US managers are of African descent, he said. SC States College of Business and Information Systems is working to address this gap in diversity and talent by creating the next generation of global leaders and entrepreneurs who are proud of their African heritage, confident in their innovative aspirations and connected to the African continent. The agreement between SC State and the University of Cape Coast includes: Joint research activities, including the exchange of faculty members and research students. Joint teaching or supervision of students. Staging of joint seminars, conferences and academic meetings. Special academic programs. Education Abroad on the part of undergraduate and graduate students, including short-term cultural immersion visits, exchanges, internships, electives and practicums. Exchange of academic materials and other information. Collaborative academic programs that may involve cultural activities and a strong field visit component. These may be for groups or for individuals on independent guided study programs. Joint collaborative grant proposals. Along with the students and the dean, the SC State delegation included Dr. Learie B. Luke, director of SC States Office of International & National Student Exchange Programs ( OINSEP); Dr. David J. Jamison, associate professor of marketing; Dominique Rolle, OINSEPs international education coordinator; Gary S. Robinson, executive director of the Orangeburg Regional Innovation Center; Patricia Gibson-Haigler, assistant program director for TRIO/GEAR UP; and Dr. Ruth A. Hodges; dean of SC State Miller F. Whittaker Library. When deciding where students go for study abroad, we want a program that is challenging and in a country that pushes them to explore their interests, said Jamison, who also serves as coordinator for the CBIS International Program. Our business students are frequently fascinated by how countries grow and develop. Ghana is a country that is presently rebuilding its economic systems and serves as a perfect place to take a travel abroad trip. Most of our students are first-generation college students who have never previously been out of the country, Jamison said. Such experience would make a world of difference. For any student who is on the edge of whether to study abroad or not, I would say that it is 100 percent worth it." During the nine-day trip, the SC State team visited cultural sites, museums, two universities, a top-quality high school, and a very poor primary school with less-than-inadequate facilities. The team also saw businesses led by native Ghanaians and helped make native African fabric. Crump plans to someday return to Africa in hopes of impacting development as part of her dream of global leadership. She said the trip ignited her desire to influence reform, economic decisions, and infrastructure to collaboratively strengthen African businesses and local communities in Africa. "Textbooks quite often do not explain the full story, Crump said. "But by being there, I was able to ask my own questions and really get my brothers and sisters in Africa to elaborate in a way that I was able to understand the answers properly. In addition to the agreement with Cape Coast, the SC State delegations visit to Divine Kids Academy, a nearby primary school, led to the creation of the Friends of Jukwa Project, spearheaded by Luke. This project will lead to four different initiatives by the Bulldog team for the children and people met during the trip: School Fencing for the Divine Kids Academy. School cafeteria. Sanitation facilities for the Sefwi Village. Community Center for the Sefwi Village. Gibson-Haigler, an SC State graduate, said the trip gave her husband and her an unexpected sense of closure. Prior to the Ghana trip, I had a lot of pent-up resentment and antagonism due to a history that I felt my people had no say in, she said. Born and bred in South Carolina, our history, according to the textbooks, starts with slavery. I was doubtful and kind of cynical about what the future held not only for me as an individual but also for Black people as a whole. After years of wondering where she fits into a world where her ancestors were stifled and doubting the connection between Africa and those who were forced to leave, Gibson-Haigler finally got the answers to all her unspoken questions. We may not speak the same language, but the foods we eat, the way we carry ourselves, the way we relate to one another, and our deeply ingrained spirituality reflect a bond that is still there, she said. There is a sense of inner peace and ease I now have, that wasnt there before. I can move forward with my life, with intention behind everything I do. An emotional part of the trip was tracing the path of enslaved ancestors into the Cape Coast Castle. The team got a detailed narration of the story of enraptured slaves, as they stood in the Door of No Return any slave entering this doorway was either put on the ship to western captivity or thrown into the sea for being unfit to be sold. If you imagine all of the challenges that our forefathers went through just for simple survival, Robinson said. Giving their great-great-grandchildren something visionary, knowing that its going to help us become a worthy people in the new world is an inspiring promise. One of the things I take from this visit is if all my people back home knew what our ancestors really went through, we would be proud of our heritage and anxious to learn about our history, culture and ancestry, Robinson said. We wouldnt be too concerned about insignificant matters but would be thinking about how the world should be our oyster. Such trips give SC State students an opportunity to explore their cultural roots and allow them to gain an understanding of the history and contributions Africans and people of African descent have made in the world. To be able to have an opportunity like this is really amazing, Hodges said. A trip like this serves as a catalyst for students to pivot their lives. We want them to understand that young people have always been part of what makes a society better, and how their voices can make a difference in their community and the world at large. Meanwhile, six students of the CBIS are traveling to Kenya as part of a CBIS delegation to the U.S. International University-Africa (USIU-Africa) in Nairobi, Kenya. The SC State Team is to participate in a signing ceremony for the MOU agreement between the CBIS and the USIU-Africa School of Business. The delegation will also learn about Kenyan culture and experience the natural beauty and diversity of the African nation. Students who experienced the Ghana trip encouraged other SC State students to take advantage of the opportunities to travel abroad. I most definitely achieved the purpose for taking this trip to Africa and learning about my culture, Smith said. I thank Dr. Luke, Dr. Jamison and the college administration for this opportunity. I think I returned to the U.S. as a changed person. You can sometimes reignite your lifes goals by learning a whole other culture from a different continent, Smith said. Two retired major generals from Elloree will host a special program at the Elloree Heritage Museum, 2714 Cleveland St., Elloree, at 7 p.m., Tuesday. There is no charge, but reservations are required. Call 803-897-2225. Maj. Gen. (Ret.) William H. Brandenburg is a native of Elloree. He graduated from The Citadel, where he received a commission in the Infantry. He holds a masters degree in management from Troy State University. Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Rodney O. Anderson is also an Elloree native. He graduated from Wofford College, with a degree in Economics and a regular Army commission in the US Army Field Artillery. You have reached a premium content area of Transitions. To read this entire article please login if you are already a Transitions subscriber. Not a subscriber? Subscribe today for access to: Full access to the website, including premium articles videos, country reports and searchable archives (containing over 25,000 articles). Missing 10-month-old Zeke Best was found dead Saturday morning. Bonneville County dispatch received a call from individuals who were hunting on Kepps Crossing Rd. east of Idaho Falls, the Bonneville County Sheriffs Office said in a statement. The caller located a man in a sleeping bag on the side of the road, the statement said. The caller stated the man was naked and making odd statements. Bonneville County Sheriffs Office deputies identified the man as Jeremy, who was wanted by the Teton County Idaho Sheriffs Office for homicide, the statement said. Deputies found Jeremys vehicle down an embankment off the road, the statement said. They also located a child, identified as Zeke, dead at the scene. Jeremy was booked for the outstanding Teton County warrant after a medical clearance, the statement said. Jeremy Albert Best was booked into Bonneville County Jail over the weekend and will remain incarcerated until arraignment, the Bonneville County Sheriffs Office in Idaho Falls, Idaho announced in a statement. On Thursday morning, Bonneville County deputies responded to a disturbance at the Swan Valley General Store, a separate statement said. A man was walking naked through the store. Deputies identified the man as Jeremy, the statement said. He was evaluated by EMS at the scene and transported by ambulance to Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center. A Bonneville County deputy followed the ambulance, and Mr. Best was turned over to the hospital staff for further medical and mental health concerns, the statement said. Authorities decided to release this information to clarify that it was prior to the incident in Teton County, the Bonneville County Sheriffs Office said in a Facebook post. During Jeremys contact with officials, his medical and mental wellbeing outweighed any criminal issues known at that time, the post said. There was not an indication at that time his behavior would continue, escalate, pause, change or stop which is why he was taken to the appropriate place, the post said. Officials are unable to discuss nor do we know what kind of action was taken at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center, the post said. We must work within the bounds of the law in every situation based on what we know at the time, the post said. Later that day, the Teton County Sheriffs Office received a 911 call from a residence on the 4600 block of Skyline Loop in Victor, Idaho. It came in around 11:39 p.m. Deputies were dispatched to respond to a disturbance heard over the line by the 911 dispatcher, the Teton County Sheriffs Office said in a statement. When they arrived, a non-responsive woman was found at the scene. She was identified as Kali Jean Randall, 38, of Victor Jeremys wife. The Teton County Sheriffs Office and the Idaho State Police are investigating Randalls death as a homicide, the statement said. Jeremy allegedly fled the residence with his infant son Zeke, the statement said. An Amber Alert was issued early Friday morning in an attempt to locate Zeke. Additional information about this case may become available at an appropriate time in the future as the investigation is still ongoing, a Bonneville County Sheriffs Office statement said. Our thoughts are with the family of the victims involved in this case, the statement read. Your news on your smartphone Your story lives in Wyoming, and our new mobile app is designed to make sure you dont miss breaking news, the latest scores, the weather forecast and more. From easy navigation with the swipe of a finger to personalized content based on your preferences to customized text sizes, the Star-Tribune app is built for you and your life. Dont have the app? Download it today from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. PARKADE: The San Fernando Parkade located along Kings Wharf, which was officially opened on August 30. The facility, built by the Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (UDeCOTT) at a cost of $132 million, is accessible 24-hours with daily and monthly parking available. It offers over 1,000 covered parking spots. Photo: TREVOR WATSON Texas Governor Gregg Abbott speaks during a rally at the South Texas International Airport in Edinburg, TX, where he gave his official endorsement for President to former President Donald J. Trump on Sunday, Nov. 19, 2023. Marvin Pfeiffer/Staff Photographer Workers place scaffolding by buoys on the Rio Grande south of Eagle Pass, Texas, Wednesday, July 12, 2023. Jerry Lara/San Antonio Express-News Gov. Greg Abbott may have lost the latest legal round, but his options, while slim, are far from over to keep the floating buoy barrier in the Rio Grande. Abbott said Texas plans to petition the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its decision last week upholding a lower courts order to remove the barriers. The state has two weeks to file that petition, which could prolong the time the buoys are in place near Eagle Pass, where they have been in the river since July. Advertisement Article continues below this ad And if we lose there, we will be taking that to the United States Supreme Court, Abbott told FOX News host Maria Bartiromo in an interview Sunday. That could push back any removal date until well into January. Requesting a new hearing by the full court, called an en banc review, could be an uphill climb. Appeals courts rarely accept them, said Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond School of Law. Last year, the 5th Circuit granted just nine en banc petitions out of more than 200. Abbott has said hes using the 1,000-foot string of rotating buoys as one of many tools to address a surge in border crossings near Eagle Pass. The Justice Department sued Abbott in August, arguing that the state needed permission from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The department has pointed to the federal Rivers and Harbors Act, which gives the federal government oversight over all navigable waterways in the United States. Advertisement Article continues below this ad In court, Texas attorneys say the 1,200-mile Rio Grande should not be considered a navigable river because boats dont go up and down that section often a point Abbott made again in his interview Sunday. It is not navigable by definition when you have literally thousands of people able to walk across it every single day, Abbott said. It is not used for transportation of boats up and down that riverway. So its completely not navigable. The Justice Department has pointed out that Abbotts own contractors used boats to install the barriers and said in court that the barriers were intended to prevent migrants from using vessels to cross the river. Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. The Ministry of Works and Transport is being asked by citizens why it issued no warning to d Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Dr Keith Rowley, second right, is join by bp executives David Campbell, president bp Trinidad and Tobago, Interim Chief Executive Officer, Murray Auchincloss, and Energy Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Stuart Young, during bi=partisan discussion at bp's London headquarters on December b4, 2023. Realizing a joke from Dumb and Dumber went over my head made me feel like the title of the movie. But sometimes, a comedy is so dense with jokes that its nearly impossible to pick up on every callback, background gag and Easter egg on a first viewing and, other times, we, the audience, are just dense. While there are films like The Big Lebowski that are layered with secrets and between-the-lines brilliance, everyone has a blind spot where obvious jokes in a movie script simply slip past us. Whether were too young to pick up on an innuendo or too European to get the American reference, at some point, a joke is going to fly over everyones head. Sometimes, one specific joke flies over everyones head until decades later when we find out that Guns N Roses wrote a song for Terminator 2: Judgement Day and the disguise that the T-800 used for his signature shotgun was actually a wink to those in the know. Over in the r/Movies subreddit, cinephiles recently came forward with their favorite movie jokes, subtle or otherwise, that went over their heads until embarrassingly recently. Here are their top picks 10 The first several times watching Grease when younger, Rizz says to her friend that she skipped a period and they were all concerned. I always took it as she skipped one class period and everyone was concerned for her academically. Rallye_Man340 9 The Goonies : The pirate name One-Eyed Willy is a pretty dirty name, and I had no clue til I was like 35 years old. ecdc05 8 In The Mask when Jim Carrey was making balloon animals for the gang members he reaches for another one and pulls out a condom instead. Whoops, wrong pocket. I thought it was just a defective balloon. beelzybubby 7 I was far older than I care to admit before I realized that Michael J. Fox played both of his children in the Back to the Future sequel. I watched that movie so many times with no idea that he played the role of his daughter. Slightly embarrassing. ArchonOfThe4thWAH Advertisement Advertisement 6 The line in Beetlejuice, where a character says, S he s still upset because someone dropped a house on her sister. I saw the movie when it came out, only realized that was a reference to The Wizard of Oz a couple of years ago. A three decade long doh moment for me. GondorHasNoPants 5 In Dumb and Dumber when they were trying to think of Marys last name. They looked at the briefcase and saw the brand name Samsonite and figured that was her last name. Then later in the movie, the kidnapper pointed a gun at them and said he was the rightful owner of the briefcase so they called him Mr. Samsonite!!! I crack up every time I see that part now. crazycarl36 Advertisement Advertisement 4 In Toy Story 2, Al says dont touch my mustache to the Japanese business guy because thats him mangling doitashimashite, which is youre welcome in Japanese. whitepangolin 3 In Mean Girls, Regina stops being friends with Janis after thinking shes a lesbian. At the end of the movie we find out that Janis is Lebanese. Which means Regina is so dumb she confused Lebanese with lesbian. soCalifax Advertisement Advertisement 2 The scene in Terminator 2 where Arnie pulls his shotgun out of a box of roses. It s guns and roses, who provided the soundtrack songs. Took me a while to notice that pun. GondorHasNoPants The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer: According to Pima County statistics, our population has grown by 7.2% since 2010. Far fewer individuals resided here during the tenure of Jim Kolbe, who valiantly served us in Congress from 1985 to 2007. Having grown up in Tucson, I was fortunate to be under Jims mentorship, which greatly influenced my understanding of good governance. Now, I am immensely privileged to be named the inaugural Jim Kolbe Fellow by the Common Sense Institute, a non-partisan research organization committed to providing facts and data on economic policy. In the 1980s, during my years at Utterback Middle School, I served on the newly established Congressmans Youth Advisory Committee. This engagement furthered during high school when I interned with Jim, where, during an impressionable time in my life, I witnessed political courage in action. Following his initial term as a Republican Member of Congress, Jim and like-minded individuals boldly called for the resignation of the sitting Republican Governor, Evan Mecham. This was my first but certainly not my last exposure to how ugly political discourse could be and what political courage looked like. While assisting with phone duties in the office, I heard firsthand the strong convictions held by individuals from both sides of the aisle. Remarkably, Jim took to answering the phones, a testament to his humility and willingness to understand his constituents. He listened diligently, grasped the nuances of the arguments, and stood by his convictions amidst the substantial political pressure. Transitioning to my college years at the University of Arizona, I had the opportunity to intern and work for Jim in his Washington, D.C. office. Arriving in Washington during the winter of 1991, I vividly recall the sharpshooters positioned on the rooftops of Capitol Hill amidst the backdrop of Operation Desert Storm we were a nation at war. It was a tumultuous yet historic period, and I saw it unfold with my own eyes. Throughout the subsequent year, I observed Jim navigate the monumental challenge of steering the North American Free Trade Agreement through the House of Representatives, securing the support of 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats. This experience showed me how much perseverance was needed to champion causes one firmly believes in, especially when aiming for bipartisan support. Now, as I near the age Jim was during those impactful years, I am inspired to be just as thoughtful about the impact of my work on future generations. I am driven to honor Jims legacy by sharing what he taught me about good governance. My gratitude extends to the Common Sense Institute for awarding me this fellowship, allowing me the opportunity to honor Jims legacy. Jims support for CSI stemmed from his appreciation for their mission to examine the fiscal impacts of policies, initiatives, and proposed laws, ensuring Arizonans are well-informed on the issues that impact their lives. Jim always fought for Southern Arizona, striving to make it the best place to live, work, and raise a family. I want to do the same through this fellowship. I want to understand Southern Arizonas issues better, what drew a portion of our community to migrate here in the past decade, and what factors have anchored the rest of us here, cherishing the Tucson area as our home. What avenues hold promise for our economy to flourish, and what policies could potentially thwart the future of our economy? Over the ensuing year, Ill explore these questions and I invite you to join me. Share your thoughts with me at julie@csinstituteaz.org. The Common Sense Institute is vested in the prosperity of Arizonans, and I am honored to contribute towards honoring Jim Kolbes legacy by supporting what he cherished dearly: Southern Arizona. Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton Tulsa World Staff Writer Follow Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today Application window: Sapulpa Public Schools is accepting spring 2024 enrollment applications for its virtual academy through 11:59 p.m. Monday. Applications are available through the districts website. Students must be in at least the sixth grade to attend the virtual academy. Parent workshop: Tulsa Public Schools Parent Resource Center, 525 E. 46th St. North, will host an online digital safety workshop at 6 p.m. Tuesday. Registration is available online at tinyurl.com/TPSsafety Emergency certification update: Without discussion or debate, the Oklahoma State Board of Education approved 156 additional emergency teacher certifications at its meeting Thursday. Since the start of the fiscal year on July 1, the board has approved 3,744 emergency certification requests. Calendar conversation: Sperry Public Schools is soliciting community feedback on options for the 2024-25 academic calendar. The survey is available online at tinyurl.com/SperrySurvey. Gobble gobble: TPS Parent Resource Center has holiday turkeys available for families with students attending Burroughs, Celia Clinton, John Hope Franklin, Hawthorne, Springdale and Whitman elementary schools. Families are asked to contact their sites parent involvement facilitator for more information or to request a bird. Rosin up your bow: Oklahoma Quartz Mountain Institute is accepting student and faculty applications through Feb. 12 for its summer 2024 institute. More information is available online at oaiquartz.org. Stay home days: Monday is a distance-learning day for Liberty. Friday is a distance-learning day for Jenks. School board calendar: The boards of education for Broken Arrow and Sand Springs have regular meetings scheduled for Monday. Broken Arrow has a special meeting set for Monday. Lone Stars board will meet Tuesday. The boards of education for Catoosa and Keystone will meet Wednesday. The new Tulsa World app offers personalized features. Download it today. Hong Kong: Education chief to depart for Japan Secretary for Education Choi Yuk-lin will depart for Tokyo, Japan, tomorrow to attend a launch symposium on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development in Asias latest Programme for International Student Assessment results. Ms Choi will also participate in a panel discussion session at the symposium. During the trip, Ms Choi will visit local schools and educational establishments, as well as Hong Kong students studying in Japan. She will return to Hong Kong on Friday. During her absence, Under Secretary for Education Sze Chun-fai will be Acting Secretary. This story has been published on: 2023-12-04. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. 10 years on, experts from around the world convene for Understanding China Conference Xinhua) 09:28, December 04, 2023 GUANGZHOU, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- The opening ceremony of the 2023 Understanding China Conference (Guangzhou) was held in Guangzhou, the capital of south China's Guangdong Province, on Saturday. Under the theme of "China's New Endeavors amid Unprecedented Global Changes -- Expanding the Convergence of Interests and Building A Community of Shared Future," officials, experts, entrepreneurs, foreign envoys and representatives of international organizations and multinational companies have engaged in discussions and exchanged ideas on some of the most pressing global topics, such as global security and development issues. "The Understanding China Conference celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Over the past decade, we have witnessed the rapid development of China amid global changes. Knowledgeable individuals in China and worldwide have increasingly recognized a significant 'understanding deficit' between different countries and civilizations, and this deficit has adverse effects on fostering mutual trust," said Zheng Bijian, founding chairman of the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy. Zheng noted that the conference has consistently upheld the principle of three "understandings" -- understanding China, understanding the world, and understanding the changes of the century. "If this conference could more effectively help the world understand the country and the Communist Party of China, while also assisting China in better comprehending the world and the changes of the century, then through sustained efforts, we can certainly reduce the 'understanding deficit,'" he added. Former President of Ethiopia Mulatu Teshome said that China's socio-economic development since the beginning of its reform and opening-up has been remarkable, making China's modernization endeavor a reality. The Belt and Road Initiative has contributed to the sound development of economic globalization and helped shore up the global governance system by opening a new path for all humanity to realize modernization. Former Chancellor of Austria Wolfgang Schussel said that China is a shining example of free trade and globalization. He hopes that China will continue to build a market-oriented business environment, governed by the rule of law and internationalized, demonstrating its commitment to fairness, openness, transparency and dialogue. Both China and the world stand to benefit from these efforts. British scholar Martin Jacques noted that China was not well understood when the conference was held 10 years ago, particularly in the West. Over the past decade, the conference's importance has been widely acknowledged for fostering an increased understanding of China, promoting global exchanges and cooperation, and working toward a shared and prosperous future. Zheng Yongnian, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), said that the key to understanding China lies in understanding Chinese modernization. Chinese modernization is the modernization of a population of 1.4 billion people, and Chinese modernization is not achieved in isolation but in an open state. "China's modernization will also inject vitality into the development of the world economy and globalization." The Understanding China Conference was initiated in 2013 and has become an important international platform for exchanges between China and the rest of the world. The 2023 conference was co-hosted by the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy, the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs and the Guangdong provincial government. Seminars cover a wide range of topics, and a series of activities will be held during the three-day event. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) Reports surfaced Sunday, December 3, that there was an assault on a warship belonging to the US and some other commercial boats in the Red Sea. This new discovery may signal the beginning of a string of devastating maritime attacks in the Middle East that are connected to the conflict between Israel and Hamas. Assaults on USS Carney, Other Commercial Boats A Pentagon spokesperson informed Fox News that they are aware of reports about assaults on the USS Carney and commercial boats in the Red Sea. They promised to share more information when it becomes available. The story of the attacks broke originally on AP News. The USS Carney, a guided-missile destroyer of the Arleigh Burke class, has been engaged in a recent campaign of shooting down drones and cruise missiles fired by the Houthi rebels, an organization supported by Iran, who have claimed blame for Sunday's strike. The US Central Command (CENTCOM) is anticipated to provide an update soon. US military official confirmed to Fox News that the USS Carney fired down two Houthi drones over the Red Sea on Sunday. "Houthi missiles struck some commercial ships in the Red Sea. The Carney has been lending assistance and shot down at least two UAVs headed in its direction." Without providing any more details, the British military had previously said that explosions and what they believed to be a drone strike had occurred in the Red Sea. Prior to this, the Pentagon did not say where it thought the fire originated. However, according to Houthi military spokesperson Brigadier General Yahya Saree, the strikes occurred in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. He said that a missile damaged one vessel, and a drone attacked the other. Before the strike, he said, the ships had reportedly disregarded warnings from Houthi authorities. Saree failed to indicate that any US vessel was being involved in the assault, though, said AP News. Unity Explorer, a Bahamas-flagged bulk carrier owned by a British corporation that contains Dan David Ungar, an Israeli citizen and an executive of the firm, was reportedly the first vessel assaulted. The second was Number 9, a container ship associated with Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement that carried the flag of Panama. Attacks in Sanaa, Yemen, started at about 10:00 AM local time and continued for up to five hours, according to an anonymous US official who spoke to the AP News on intelligence issues. The Houthis did not immediately respond. An "important" statement, said a Houthi military official, is expected to be issued soon. See Also: US Navy Warship Shoots Down Iranian-Made Houthi Drone Launched From Yemen Increasing Attacks on US Forces Ahead of news of an assault on a US warship in the Red Sea, Leon Panetta, a former Obama administration CIA director and defense secretary, addressed the growing number of attacks by Iranian proxy groups against US forces in the Middle East on Saturday, December 2. At least 75 attacks have targeted US soldiers in the Middle East since mid-month. This figure does not include assaults against US vessels at sea, as per the Pentagon. See Also: Houthi Rebels Fire Missiles Against US Navy as Tensions Escalate After American Troops Free Tanker From Pirates @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Randy Krehbiel Tulsa World Staff Writer Follow Randy Krehbiel Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today Prayer-ority: State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is considering legal action against a Wisconsin-based group calling for his resignation, he said last week. To think theyre going to continue to bully teachers is outrageous, Walters said, referring to the Freedom from Religion Foundation. The options were looking at are very wide, very broad. Could be legal memos. Could be lawsuits. Walters and the FFRF took turns calling each other bullies after the organization complained to Prague Public Schools about Christian prayers being including in the elementary buildings daily activities. The district agreed to discontinue the prayers. In response, Walters inaccurately linked the group to conservatives boogeyman George Soros and said it was attacking religious freedom. He referred to a largely discredited video that disputes the concept of church and state separation. FFRF then issued an open letter to Walters, saying, You regularly misuse the official governmental social media afforded to your public office and treat it as a pulpit from which to preach your personal religious views and Christian nationalist propaganda. Walters is a full-throated supporter of Christian teaching in public schools, including the use of taxpayer dollars for a proposed Catholic virtual school. On Thursday, he complained about FFRFs criticism of a public school teacher who had painted Bible verses on her classroom walls. Presidential primary: Filing for Oklahomas March 5 presidential primary is Monday through Wednesday. Filing for school board seats across the state occurs during the same period. Filing for Oklahomas presidential primary is not something many people do on a whim. The filing fee is $5,000, although it is waived with the submission of a petition signed by at least 1,000 registered voters who are eligible to vote for the candidate (i.e., same party affiliation) from each of the states five congressional districts. Few if any candidates have ever gotten on the ballot by petition. Also, Oklahoma recognizes only three political parties Republican, Democrat and Libertarian which further narrows the possible entries. Unaffiliated voters can vote in the Democratic primary but not enter it as candidates. Bynum speaks: Mayor G.T. Bynum headlines a Tulsa Press Club Page One luncheon at 11:30 a.m. Dec. 13 at Baxters Interurban Grill, 717 S. Houston Ave. Bynum will respond to questions from Press Club moderator Tim Landes and the audience. See tinyurl.com/4p9azpm6 for tickets and information. Employment numbers: The Tulsa metro area and Oklahoma as a whole had both more employed and unemployed people in October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. Tulsa metro non-farm payrolls grew by about 1,400 from September and 8,200 from October 2022, reaching 465,500. Tulsas unemployed figures were mixed, with Octobers 17,751 virtually unchanged from September but about 2,000 greater than for the same month a year ago. The unemployment rate stood at 3.5%, compared to 3.4% in September and 3.2% last October. Oklahomas October unemployment rate was 3.4%, unchanged from September and up from 3.1% a year earlier. Employment in the state continued its post-COVID rise, to 1,743,700. 2A turbulence: While conservatives skepticism about the justice and efficacy of the death penalty seems to have grown in recent years, last weeks execution of Phillip Dean Hancock particularly alarmed some Second Amendment activists. Thats because Hancock argued that he acted in self defense when he killed two men in 2001. Gun rights activists have worked diligently to expand the self-defense standard, and some see Hancocks execution as a possible setback. Meetings and events: Heart of the Party, the Tulsa Chapter of the Oklahoma Federation of Democratic Women, will collect gifts for Saint Francis Childrens Hospital patients during its 6:30 p.m. Monday meeting at Baxters Interurban Grill, 717 S. Houston. A member gift exchange is also planned. Second District Congressman Josh Brecheen will have a telephone town hall at 7 p.m. Tuesday. Those wishing to participate should call 888-480-3675 or follow it on the congressmans Facebook page. Tulsa County Commissioner Kelly Dunkerley has three State of the District events coming up: 5 p.m. Saturday at the Tulsa County District 3 Barn, 4959 E. 171st St., Bixby; 4:30 p.m. Dec. 11 at the Buddy LaFortune Community Center, 5202 S. Hudson Ave.; and 4:30 p.m. Dec. 13 at the South Broken Arrow Library, 3600 S. Chestnut Ave., Broken Arrow. County Clerk Michael Willis and County Court Clerk Don Newberry will speak to the Republican Mens Club of Tulsa County at 11:30 a.m. Dec. 13 at Oklahoma Joes, 6175 E. 61st St. RIP: Gerald Grimes, an Oklahoma City Democrat who served as the states insurance commissioner from 1975 to 1991, died last week at 82. During his tenure, Grimes successfully advocated for creation of the insurance guarantee fund to protect policyholders whose insurers become insolvent. Randy Krehbiel, Tulsa World Ginnie Graham Tulsa World Editorials Editor Follow Ginnie Graham Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. {{description}} Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. Save Manage followed notifications Close Followed notifications Please log in to use this feature Log In Don't have an account? Sign Up Today On the University of Oklahoma campus 30 years ago, a packet of hard-to-turn-down freebies was given to each student getting an HIV test. It was still a hard sell. The centerpiece was a T-shirt sponsored by the trendy and now-closed Harolds clothing store that stated, Get educated get tested get safe time to act! It was a cool shirt. Throw in free pizza, snacks, movies and other discounts, and I definitely took that deal. A friend and I took our first HIV tests while walking to class. That night, we were going through the swag bag in the community room where we lived. A girl walked in and quickly got judgmental. You cant wear that T-shirt on campus. People will know you got tested, and thats a bad look, she said. I still have my shirt. I havent seen that girl in decades. Much has changed since then, from lowering the stigma to advances in the prevention and treatment of HIV, which is the virus leading to AIDS. World AIDS Day has been celebrated on Dec. 1 since 1988 to raise awareness and honor the lives affected by the epidemic. Originally, those were more somber events. Past Tulsa World stories profiled candlelight vigils, memorial services, musical performances and AIDS quilt showcases. Art and writing contests were held. A focus for years was on children living with HIV. Interfaith groups and Oklahomans for Equality led these citywide observances. At the 10-year World AIDS Day, Tulsa closed two streets for a candlelight march sponsored by several local churches. In 2003, Tulsa hosted two days of events that included an education fair and red balloon release. A youth AIDS conference was held in 2000. In 1989, two Tulsa art galleries went dark to honor the day. The decades have profiled Tulsans who died from and are living with the HIV virus. In the early days, those with AIDS often faced shameful treatment, especially in their final days. Even after death, some funeral homes would not provide services for them. More is known about HIV, including that its not limited to the LGBTQ+ community or spread by mosquitos or swimming pools. Medical advancements can suppress the virus, allowing for people with HIV to live as long as their peers. Testing can be done with a simple finger blood stick. This year Tulsa doesnt have any public events planned for World AIDS Day. It may be a lingering post-pandemic concern about big gatherings putting immune-compromised people at risk. More likely, the sense of urgency has lessened over time. Thats worrying, because HIV is still very much with us, and its spread is preventable. Last year, Oklahoma was named among seven states as having the highest rural burden of HIV. The lack of Tulsa World AIDS Day events was noticed by Jeremy Simmons, director of training and volunteer services for HOPE Testing. He remembers the days when testing was a secretive, behind-closed-doors thing and shame surrounded the disease. Now, people are open about their sexual health and dont dehumanize those with HIV. Its a good thing, but we also dont want it to be so normalizing, he said. Im glad the stigma is gone. But people still need to get tested, get into treatment quickly if needed and not avoid prevention behaviors and options. Even with the changes in culture and medical progress, people ought not forget the 1.2 million Americans who died from the virus as of 2021. Of those, 13% did not know they had contracted the virus. This is definitely a time to commemorate people we lost and the impact that had on us, Simmons said. We can do this while making sure those living with HIV have access to care and resources and be encouraged. The Oklahoma Health Department stated last year that 21% of new HIV cases were among late testers, referring to people who received an AIDS diagnosis less than three months after their first positive HIV test. Its estimated that about 17% of Oklahomans have HIV, but dont know it. While the U.S. experienced a 12% drop in newly diagnosed HIV cases from 2017-2021, Oklahomas cases went up nearly 21%. In 2021, Oklahoma had 6,948 people living with HIV. That year, 387 people were newly diagnosed with the virus. But these days, with early treatment, medications can bring down the virus to undetectable levels, preventing the spread from an infected to an uninfected person. HOPE Testing performs between 1,200 and 1,500 HIV tests a year. The nonprofit also tests for hepatitis C and other sexually transmitted diseases. It has mobile vans that go into 15 surrounding counties to offer testing with community partners. It also offers mail-order testing kits. Resistance to testing is rare today, and most people seek tests for all STIs such as syphilis and gonorrhea, for which Oklahoma ranks sixth in the U.S. Its a more rounded message about overall health, Simmons said. Even though effective treatments are available, HIV alters peoples lives, just like any chronic health disorder would. It requires specialized medical care, which varies in cost depending on insurance and physician availability. For every $1 spent on prevention, $7 is saved on treatment, Simmons said. Just because people are less likely to avoid testing doesnt mean they are enthusiastically going in to do that regularly, he said. Thats why we have partners to go to where people are. It would be nice one day for that 1993 World AIDS Day T-shirt to be a relic of an eradicated virus. Until then, there is a need for World AIDS Day. The new Tulsa World app offers personalized features. Download it today. PrEP: Preventative HIV Drug Shows 86% Effectiveness Leaders of businesses and investment funds from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) expressed their interest in cooperating with Vietnam to develop seaports, renewable energy projects, and a finance hub in the Southeast Asian nation during their meeting with Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh on Sunday. The meeting gathered Minister of State for Foreign Trade Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi of the UAE and leaders of nine major UAE enterprises and funds, including Mubadala Investment Company, Masdar Energy, Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. PM Chinh and the UAE minister shared the view that both countries have significant cooperation potential to further promote their economic, trade, and investment ties, including the UAE funds investment in renewable energy and infrastructure development projects in Vietnam. The UAE minister thanked PM Chinh and a Vietnamese delegations active contribution to the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), held in Dubai from November 29 to December 12. Minister of State for Foreign Trade Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi of the UAE said the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement between Vietnam and the UAE could be signed in 2024. Photo: Vietnam News Agency Thanks to the huge efforts of both nations leaders, Vietnam and the UAE have made considerable headway with negotiations on the bilateral Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA), which could be signed in 2024, the UAE minister said. PM Chinh lauded the UAE businesses and funds for exploring the possibility to expand investment in Vietnam, suggesting that the latter develop seaport cities or financial centers in the Southeast Asian nation. The UAE business executives at the meeting pinned their hopes on the upcoming official signing of the CEPA, which would enable them to foster cooperation with Vietnam in the fields of infrastructure development, seaports, renewable energy, offshore wind power, healthcare, agriculture, as well as in building a financial hub in Ho Chi Minh City. The Vietnamese government leader and the UAE minister also witnessed the exchange of memoranda of understanding on cooperation between Abu Dhabi Ports Group and the Vietnam Maritime Administration as well as between Sirius International Holding, a subsidiary of the UAE conglomerate International Holding Company, and the Vietnamese Ministry of Information and Communications National Digital Transformation Agency. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Vietnams budget airline VietJet and UAE-based Novus Aviation Capital entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on jointly setting up an aircraft financing and leasing firm in Vietnam, the carrier has said. The MoU was signed at a ceremony in Dubai on Saturday, in the presence of Vietnams Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, who was there to attend the 28th United Nations climate change summit (COP28), Vietjet said in its press release on the same day. According to the memorandum, the newly-established joint venture will initially focus on financing and acquiring 15 new aircraft ordered by VietJet from Boeing and Airbus. Deliveries for these aircraft are scheduled to commence next year. The company is anticipated to undergo expansion to offer comprehensive financial support to Vietjet in the future. Simultaneously, Vietjet also signed another MoU with SAF One, Novuss established and dedicated sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) platform, to develop the supply and use of SAF in Vietnam. SAF is a type of fuel produced from waste materials, such as used cooking oil. SAF offers a significant reduction in environmental carbon emissions compared to traditional fuels. This collaboration will contribute to building a greener aviation environment and reducing carbon emissions in the global aviation industry. The signing ceremony of an MoU between Vietjet and SAF One, a SAF platform of Novus Aviation Capital, to cooperate in the supply of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Photo: Vietjet The MoU makes Vietjet a pioneering airline engaging in research, development, and utilization of SAF. Partnering with Vietjet on these ventures is a testament to Novus Aviation Capitals commitment to advancing the aviation industry through developing innovative solutions and structures, said Hani Kuzbari, co-CEO of Novus Aviation Capital. This partnership will aid Vietjet in advancing the expansion of its fleet and in achieving its long-term aviation strategies, Kuzbari said. He emphasized that the collaboration between his company and Vietjet, facilitated through SAF One, for the development and provision of technology-agnostic SAF solutions in Vietnam, exemplifies the company's commitment to providing global solutions to the aviation industry. Vietjets deal with Novus is poised to enhance the carrier's financial capacity, enabling it to meet the demands of growth, investment, and the expansion of its flight network and aircraft fleet in the coming period, Vietjets CEO Dinh Viet Phuong told the ceremony. The carrier also intends to implement cutting-edge solutions aligned with global aviation trends, ensuring the delivery of high-quality air travel products to customers worldwide, Phuong added. The use of sustainable aviation fuel is a crucial step in the sustainable development of the aviation industry, and Vietjet is proud to be at the forefront of airlines committed to contributing to this collective effort, he concluded. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A video capturing the spirited moment of a high school principal, dressed in a white shirt, standing in the schoolyard and wholeheartedly applauding and welcoming every student on the inaugural day of his new role in Thua Thien-Hue Province, central Vietnam, has garnered significant attention on social media. The video began circulating on social media on Friday last week, marking the first day that Le Trieu Son took on the role of principal at Hai Ba Trung High School in Hue City, Thua Thien-Hue Province. Numerous teachers at the school were surprised to witness the new principal standing and warmly greeting each student, a scene that also took many students aback. Following the school drum signaling the commencement of the school day, Son took advantage of the 15-minute bellwork period in each class to visit every classroom, extending personal greetings to students and homeroom teachers. During these visits, Son humbly introduced himself to the students and teachers, saying, "I have been assigned by the Department of Education and Training of Thua Thien Hue Province to serve as the school principal, and today marks the beginning of my job." I hope you will join hands with me to transform this hundred-year-old school into a happy place. In response to the principals sincerity, many students expressed interest and asked to shake hands with him. Le Trieu Son visits every classroom on the first day of his new role as the principal at Hai Ba Trung High School in Thua Thien-Hue Province, central Vietnam, December 1, 2023. Photo: Anh Thu / Tuoi Tre Son, confirming the incident to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper, said that he extended this personal greeting not only to morning classes but also to afternoon classes on Friday. Reflecting on the motivation behind his actions, Son explained that upon arriving at the school, he noticed the hurried faces of students rushing to their classes. In response, he headed to the schoolyard, greeted the students, and reminded them to walk slowly to avoid tumbles. I remained standing to welcome the students until the start of the class, Son said. Subsequently, I visited every classroom to personally meet with all the students and their respective homeroom teachers throughout the entire school. The fulfillment of my assigned tasks at this school hinges on the cooperation and engagement of the students. The Department of Education and Training in Thua Thien Hue Province has designated Son, the former principal of Gia Hoi High School in Hue City, as the new principal of Hai Ba Trung High School. This decision comes in the aftermath of Ngo Duc Thuc's resignation due to financial management violations. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! JAKARTA -- Eleven climbers were found dead in Indonesia on Monday following the eruption of the Marapi volcano in West Sumatra, a rescue official said, as a search to find 12 more missing was temporarily halted over safety concerns. Three survivors were found on Monday along with the bodies of the 11 climbers, among 75 in the area at the time of Sunday's eruption, said Jodi Haryawan, spokesperson for the search and rescue team. The 2,891-meter (9,485 ft) high volcano spewed ash as high as three kilometers into the sky on Sunday. Authorities raised the alert to the second-highest level and prohibited residents from going within three kilometers of the crater. Video footage showed a huge cloud of volcanic ash spread widely across the sky and cars and roads covered with ash. A small eruption on Monday prompted the search to be suspended, Jodi said. "It's too dangerous if we continue searching now," he said. There were 49 climbers evacuated from the area earlier Monday and many were being treated for burns, he said. Marapi is one of the most-active volcanoes on Sumatra island and its most deadly eruption was in April 1979, when 60 people died. This year, it erupted between January and February and was spewing ash around 75 meters-1,000 meters from the peak. Indonesia sits on the Pacific's so-called "Ring of Fire" and has 127 active volcanoes, according to the volcanology agency. Indonesia rescue team evacuate a victim of the eruption of Mount Marapi in Agam, West Sumatra province, Indonesia, December 4, 2023. Photo: Reuters Mount Marapi volcano spews volcanic ash as seen from Nagari Sungai Pua, in Agam, West Sumatra province, Indonesia, December 3, 2023. Photo: Reuters Mount Marapi volcano spews volcanic ash as seen from Nagari Batu Palano in Agam, West Sumatra province, Indonesia, December 4, 2023. Photo: Reuters Students are seen at school as Mount Marapi volcano spews volcanic ash as seen from Nagari Batu Palano in Agam, West Sumatra province, Indonesia, December 4, 2023. Photo: Reuters MANAUS, Brazil -- The Amazon rainforest's record-breaking drought hit home for Raimundo Leite de Souza one October morning, he said, when he woke to find the stream that runs behind his house had dropped nearly a foot overnight, stranding his skiff in a mudflat. As weeks passed, Souza said, rotting fish washed up on the banks of the Jaraqui, a tributary of the Rio Negro. Rodents thrashed in the mud searching for water. Carcasses of caimans and cobras turned up in the forest. Finally Souza, an innkeeper and community leader in Bela Vista do Jaraqui, said he rallied two dozen neighbors to drill a 60-meter well in the heart of the world's largest freshwater basin. "Never in my 37 years have I seen anything like this happen to our stream," he said. Driven by climate change, the drought gripping northern Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana and parts of Venezuela and Colombia has sapped the Amazon River and four of its biggest tributaries to their lowest levels in at least half a century. It has killed endangered river dolphins and triggered deadly riverbank collapses. With rivers forming the backbone of transportation across the Amazon region, the drought has disrupted access to food and medicine in dozens of cities. And, in one of the world's top food producers, it has wiped as much as 10 million metric tons off initial forecasts for next year's soybean crop. In a threat to the global climate, the drought could also double the mortality rate of the rainforest's largest trees, releasing the huge amounts of climate-warming carbon they collectively store in their wood, according to scientists. The Amazon, the world's largest rainforest, is regarded by scientists as a bulwark against climate change because its dense vegetation absorbs carbon and emits oxygen. "Even if we don't knock down one more tree, the Amazon could reach its point of no return," Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva warned the United Nations COP28 climate summit on Friday. The worst may be yet to come, with experts predicting an even more intense drought next year. Reuters interviewed nine scientists who said the drought, which began in April, is likely to weaken the annual rainy season now underway, and last until the next rainy season in late 2024. Five of those scientists said the Amazon is unlikely to make a full recovery before early 2026, at best, because it may take two healthy rainy seasons to restore the forest's normal soil moisture. "This is the overture," said Michael Coe, director of the tropics program at the U.S.-based Woodwell Climate Research Center, and one of the scientists expecting the effects of the drought to linger into 2026. "Where we are now, we're just getting started." The five researchers predicting a 2026 recovery said the effects of the drought could endure even longer if El Nino is prolonged. The naturally occurring phenomenon roils global weather every two to seven years, warming waters off the Pacific coast of South America and pulling rains in that direction while depressing precipitation in the Amazon. Four of the scientists said it was hard to predict precisely when the rainforest would recover from this drought, given the uncertainty in any long-term weather forecast. A researcher from the Mamiraua Institute for Sustainable Development retrieves dead dolphins from the Tefe lake effluent of the Solimoes river that has been affected by the high temperatures and drought in Tefe, Amazonas state, Brazil, October 2, 2023. Photo: Reuters 'Double whammy' The scientists said the drought is being caused by warming in the tropical North Atlantic Ocean and off South America's Pacific Coast, phenomena that are becoming more extreme with climate change. Coe called it a "double whammy." Rains tend to track the hottest areas of the ocean. Seawater evaporates and is carried high into the atmosphere by rising air currents. North Atlantic temperatures soared to all-time highs in August and September, with water off Florida's coast reaching hot tub temperatures of 38.4 degrees Celsius (101 F). Those warmer waters pulled the band of rains known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone further toward North America and away from the Amazon, making May to October - the jungle's dry season - even drier this year. Meanwhile, the rains that would typically deluge the Amazon starting in November are being dampened by the effects of El Nino. "We've had climate models showing that you get super El Ninos because of global warming, which is what we're having now," said Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research. The lack of rain is draining the soil deep beneath the Amazon forest and that moisture is unlikely to recharge until heavy rains return, around November next year, the scientists told Reuters. "In the last 15 years, this is probably the fourth 'drought of the century' over the Amazon," said Henrique Barbosa, a physicist who studies tropical forests at University of Maryland, Baltimore. "This is way worse than the ones we had before." Volunteers at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum hold a pink dolphin rescued along with others from shallow water after the dolphins were unable to follow the natural course of the Rio Grande riverbed, in Rio Grande, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia November 27, 2023. Photo: Reuters 'Overwhelm our structures' The drought has played havoc in a vast region - larger than Western Europe - that relies on its rivers for food, transportation and commerce. Brazil's Amazonas state, the hardest hit, declared a public emergency in September, and has delivered drinking water and more than 1,000 tons of rice, beans and other staples via aircraft and smaller boats that can navigate shallow waters. The state has deployed helicopters to airlift the sick to hospital and set up remote learning for some 7,000 students who can no longer get to school. Brazil's federal government has pledged 628 million reais ($129 million) toward relief, including medical supplies, reinforcements to fight forest fires and dredging to ease boat traffic, with plans for more dredging next year. A dead dolphin is seen at Tefe lake, which flows into the Solimoes river, that has been affected by the high temperatures and drought in Tefe, Amazonas state, Brazil, October 1, 2023. Photo: Reuters "The issue we're confronting now is adaptation to these climate changes, and the cost is still unimaginable," Amazonas Environment Secretary Eduardo Taveira said in an interview in the state capital Manaus. Outside, smoke from forest fires blotted the horizon. "One abnormal year or maybe two, three in a row it starts to overwhelm our structures," Taveira said. The economic costs for Brazil, the world's 11th largest economy, are mounting. In Itacoatiara, near the meeting of the Amazon and Madeira Rivers, part of a $15 million port collapsed in October as dry, loose soil gave way, just five years after its inauguration. The port of Manaus recorded its lowest water levels in 121 years, disrupting access for container ships for more than 50 days. Assembly lines idled at the Manaus free trade zone where Honda, LG and other companies assemble consumer goods from imported parts. Electronics maker Positivo Tecnologia (POSI3.SA) slashed its 2023 revenue forecast by 15-35 percent, warning of disrupted deliveries for the Christmas season. The barges that carry more than 40 percent of Brazil's grain exports to northern ports have been running at half capacity. In farm country, the drought has forced many producers to plant one crop this year instead of two, knocking millions of tons off next year's soy and corn forecasts. Volunteers at the Noel Kempff Mercado Natural History Museum set a perimeter with a net as they rescue pink dolphins trapped in shallow water after they were unable to follow the natural course of the Rio Grande riverbed, in Rio Grande, in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia November 27, 2023. Photo: Reuters Ivalmir Silva searches for water on Puraquequara Lake, which has been affected by drought, in Manaus Brazil, October 6, 2023. Photo: Reuters Giants at risk The forest itself is also being pushed to its limit, scientists said. Trees, stressed by hot and dry conditions, are shedding more leaves and leaving more debris on the ground to feed forest fires. "That is just the perfect combination for a big barbecue of the Amazon," said Paulo Brando, an ecologist at Yale University. Severe and repeated droughts affect the moisture levels deep in the soil where the largest trees plunge their roots. The loss of these jungle giants may push the forest even faster toward a point of no return, leading large sections of the forest to die off, he said. Brando estimates that the normal big tree mortality rate can double to 3 percent or more in extreme drought years which could have huge impacts on global greenhouse gas emissions. "The big trees, if they start dying at a higher rate, they store most of the carbon," Brando said. If drought-like conditions become permanent with climate change, as some long-range climate models suggest, the Amazon biome could lose one-sixth to one-half of its area, or 1 million to 3 million square kilometers (386,000 to 1.2 million square miles), according to computer simulations run by Barbosa. That would release huge amounts of carbon dioxide, contributing to climate change and wiping out a wealth of plant and animal species found only in the Amazon. "The effects that we're seeing this year, if they were to persist, that would be tragic," Barbosa said. A project to expand a 600-meter section of Luong Dinh Cua Street in Thu Duc City, under Ho Chi Minh City, remains unfinished even though the project was launched in as far back as 2001, making the area a bottleneck at the citys eastern gateway. In July 2001, the then-Vietnamese prime minister issued a decision to take back over 87.3 hectares of land and hand it over to Ho Chi Minh City Urban Development Service Company, now known as Thu Thiem Real Estate JSC, to conduct the An Phu Urban Area project. The company used over 85 hectares of the land to develop the key technical infrastructure of the urban area and the remaining 22,000 square meters to expand the Luong Dinh Cua Street section within the confines of the urban project. The 600-meter street section starts at an intersection with Nguyen Hoang Street and ends at the under-construction An Phu Intersection. As per the approved plan, the street section would be widened to 30 meters with six lanes. However, Thu Thiem Real Estate JSC has yet to work out a plan to expand the section, according to inspectors of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Natural Resources and Environment. The company has yet to complete compensation and site clearance work. Meanwhile, the street section holds a crucial position in the city, experiencing a significant influx of traffic due to its strategic location. During peak hours, it is severely congested. Nguyen Thi Dieu, a resident of Thu Duc City who traverses the street section daily, voiced her frustration over the prolonged wait caused by traffic congestion. Dieu highlighted that cars often form extensive queues at the section, aggravated by traffic lights lasting over 100 seconds. Motorbike riders are compelled to navigate through the stationary cars, adding to the overall congestion. It is dangerous and exhausting to pass through the section, she complained. The Department of Natural Resources and Environment has suggested that the municipal government delegate the responsibility for compensation and site clearance for the project to the administration of Thu Duc City. Ho Chi Minh City vice-chairman Bui Xuan Cuong has urged Thu Thiem Real Estate JSC to promptly assess the funding required for compensating households affected by the project.. A representative of the Transportation Works Construction Investment Project Management Authority of Ho Chi Minh City told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that the authority endorses the proposal put forth by the Department of Natural Resources and Environment. They recommended that the authorities of Thu Duc City expedite the site clearance efforts, aiming to conclude the task before the third quarter of the upcoming year. This targeted timeline is set to ensure the completion of the street section expansion by April 30, 2025. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Read what is in the news in Vietnam today: Politics -- Vietnams National Assembly Chairman Vuong Dinh Hue on Monday morning left Hanoi for Laos to attend the first Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam (CLV) Parliamentary Summit and pay a working visit to the neighboring country through Thursday. -- Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, his spouse, and a Vietnamese delegation arrived in Hanoi late on Sunday, concluding their working trip to attend the World Climate Action Summit within the framework of the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), bilateral activities in the UAE, and pay an official visit to Turkey from November 29. Society -- In collaboration with various units, police in Ho Chi Minh City organized a ceremony on Sunday to unveil mural paintings on numerous streets in District 3. These artworks replaced the previous graffiti, disarray, and unauthorized advertising that had marred the walls along those roads. -- A fishing boat unexpectedly exploded in Ca Mau Province, southern Vietnam on Sunday while preparing to set out to sea, resulting in severe injuries to three fishermen who were then transported to Ca Mau General Hospital for urgent medical care. Business -- Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh has asked the United Arab Emirates to support Vietnam to build an international financial center in Ho Chi Minh City, as both countries agreed to expand economic and trade cooperation during a meeting with vice president Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan on Sunday. Lifestyle -- The Saigon Central Post Office has secured a spot on the list of 100 interesting attractions in Ho Chi Minh City for 2023. -- Artist Le Huu Hieu, also known as Henry Le, will become the first Vietnamese representative at the 60th Biennale Venice in Italy, scheduled for April 20, 2024 to November 24, 2024, according to the Vietnam News Agency. World News -- A magnitude-6.8 earthquake struck Mindanao in the Philippines in the early hours of Monday morning, Reuters quoted the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) as saying. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A woman crashed her Mercedes-Benz into a house in the Old Quarter in Hanoi early on Monday morning, leading to the partial collapse of the building. The car was traveling on Hang Bac Street in Hoan Kiem District at about 3:00 am on the day, when it lost control and rammed the house on the street. After the crash, the car was stuck in the rubble. An official from the Peoples Committee of Hang Bac Ward told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that the collision caused no casualties. The car was carrying two people when the accident happened, said the official. The affected house was identified as an ancient building. Though its part collapsed, its pillars and roof were not damaged by the crash. After the accident, police officers quickly approached the scene for an investigation. They blocked part of the street to remove the car from the rubble. The house is under repair, and the driver of the car pledged to pay compensation to the owner of the home, said the official. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Police officers fatally shot a New York City man during a standoff after the suspect allegedly killed four of his extended family by stabbing them. The victims included two children and the crime was conducted at a home in the Queens borough of the city on Sunday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said that a girl called in to report about the crime in Queens' Far Rockaway neighborhood. She said that "her cousin is killing her family members." New York City Stabbing The suspect was later identified as a 38-year-old who stabbed two police officers who responded to the scene. Law enforcement authorities also noted that during the standoff, one of the officers shot the man dead. Police said that the individual was previously arrested over a domestic violence incident and the latest confrontation resulted in two officers being taken to a hospital but are expected to recover. The four victims included a 12-year-old boy, an 11-year-old girl, a 44-year-old woman, and a man in his 30s, as per Reuters. The suspect was also related to the stabbing of a fifth person, a 61-year-old woman who was sent to the hospital in critical condition. The man was believed to have set fire to a couch in the home's living room, forcing officers to wait for the arrival of the fire department before entering the building. When police arrived at the scene, the suspect reportedly threw a steak knife at them, hitting one in the neck and chest and striking another in the head. NYPD Chief Jeffrey Maddrey said during a news conference on Sunday that one officer drew his weapon and fired in response. The suspect was named Courtney Gordon, who was taken to a hospital after being shot but was later pronounced dead. The police chief commended the two responding officers, a 28-year-old young man and a 16-year veteran. Maddrey said they could have easily let the person walk past them with his luggage, but instead, they did their due diligence and asked questions before walking up. He then suddenly attacked them, revealing that he was the suspect. NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said that the attack seems to have been family-related, according to CNN. Read Also: Google Intern Killed by Israel Airstrike Sparks Outrage Among Tech Employees Police Officers Respond A female neighbor who asked to remain anonymous said on Sunday that she awoke to the sound of gunshots in the morning. She noted that five shots were probably fired, but there could have been more. The woman said that after she got off the bed, she looked out and saw a man on the ground. He was near the telephone pole near the street, and she probably could not see much of him then. It was the time when two officers were both holding on to each other after confronting the suspect. Another person who lived a block away from the house where the incident occurred, Issac Ferguson, said things were "getting the way it used to be." He added that people were somehow becoming more and more violent, said the New York Post. Related Article: Derek Chauvin Reportedly Stabbed 22 Times During Prison Attack @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Three family members, including a newborn, were hospitalized on Monday after they were found lying unconscious on their bed next to a warm coal pot in an enclosed 10-square-meter room in Ha Tinh Province, north-central Vietnam. They were admitted to the Ha Tinh General Hospital at around 8:40 am, when they were diagnosed with carbon monoxide poisoning, confirmed a representative of the hospital on the same day. The victims included Nguyen Thi Anh Tuyen, 26, her mother Hoang Thi Hong, 59, and Tuyens 12-day-old child. Tuyen and her mother were severely poisoned and were set to be transferred to an upper-level hospital for further treatment, while the baby was receiving oxygen therapy. Earlier, concerned local neighbors contacted Nguyen Xuan Thong, Tuyens husband, urging him to return home promptly upon noticing unusual signs at her residence in Loc Ha District around 7:00 am on the same day. Thong, along with the neighbors, forcibly broke open the door of the house and found the three victims lying unconscious on the bed beside a heated coal pot. Local police and healthcare workers were dispatched to the scene to give the victims first aid before rushing them to the hospital. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Traffic police officers in Ho Chi Minh City have fined a 22 year-old girl for carrying a German man, who wore no helmet and sat back to back with her on a motorbike, while another girl knelt on another motorbike to film the act, police said on Saturday. A 22 year-old man faced the same fate as he carried the girl who filmed the former couples acts. A video of their acts has made the rounds on TikTok since Thursday last week. A video screenshot shows a girl kneeling on a motorbike to film a German man wearing no helmet and sitting back to back with another motorbike driver. The case happened on the Tran Hung Dao Street section from Calmette Street to Le Loi Street in District 1. The local traffic police later found that the girl carrying the German man was T.A.T., residing in Binh Thanh District, and the man riding the other motorbike was N.V.L., a resident of District 8. A video screenshot indicates a German man sitting back to back with a woman who is riding a motorbike in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City. T. admitted she was the girl in the video and the German man, named Thomas C., had returned to Germany. L. declared that he carried D.V.M., who recorded videos and took photos of Thomas C.. T. and L. faced a fine of VND400,000-600,000 (US$16.5-24.7) each. A girl carries a German man, who wears no helmet and sits back to back with her on a motorbike in Ho Chi Minh City while another girl kneels on another motorbike to film the acts. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! The World Bank (WB) will provide a loan of up to US$7 billion for Vietnam to develop a number of key projects, including a 39km express railway in Hanoi, according to a recent agreement between the WBs leader and Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh. WB president Ajay Banga and the Vietnamese government leader reached a consensus on Friday when they met on the sidelines of the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), which opened in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, last Saturday. Accordingly, a WB loan of $5-7 billion will be provided for Vietnam in the next three years to finance a number of important projects in various fields. Prominent among these projects is the Van Cao-Hoa Lac high-speed railway, a 39km metro line connecting Van Cao Street in Hanois Ba Dinh District to Hoa Lac, a satellite urban area of the capital. As one of Hanois priority projects, this metro line, with a 6.5km underground section, is expected to cost VND65.4 trillion ($2.48 billion). Another large project is the Vietnam Renewable Energy Accelerating Change (REACH), while the others are intended for planting one million hectares of high-yield and low-emission rice, for building infrastructure in adaptation to climate change in the Mekong Delta, and for digital and green transition models. Amid the WB's global restructuring efforts, Prime Minister Chinh has proposed the establishment of a regional center with its office based in Vietnam. He further pledged that the Vietnamese government would facilitate optimal conditions for the office to oversee WB-funded projects in Vietnam and other countries in the region. PM Chinh also thanked the WB for its support for Vietnam over the past years, particularly in policy consultancy and funding, which have significantly contributed to socio-economic development, hunger eradication, and poverty reduction in the nation. Banga expressed high appreciation for Chinhs suggestion and conveyed his commitment to carefully consider setting up a regional WB center. The bank president congratulated Vietnam on its recent considerable economic achievements and attributed them to the effective leadership of the national government. WB treats Vietnam as one of its important partners and will continue giving support to the Southeast Asian country, Banga stressed. He commended the Vietnamese government for its efforts and determination in advancing the green transition, responding to climate change, and fostering sustainable development. The president recommended that Vietnam explore participation in the global carbon credit market, while pledging to support the country throughout this endeavor. This support extends to Vietnam's pursuit of its climate commitments and targets, including the ambitious goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! With deep love for abandoned and orphaned children, Huynh Tan Hung, a war veteran living in Phu Ninh District under Quang Nam Province, located in central Vietnam, is fostering these star-crossed children. His house has become a safe shelter for the poor kids. The man recounted that he just wanted to land a stable job to provide for his children and brighten their fate instead of fishing for any praise for his act of kindness. His road to kindness has lasted for over 15 years. A warm-hearted foster father Located near a rice paddy, his tile-roofed house serves as a playground, study space, and sleeping quarters for these kids. Hung and some volunteer babysitters are busy caring for these children from morning until night. Huynh Tan Hung. Photo: Tuoi Tre Vet Huynh Tan Hung is a weird man, said Nguyen Dinh Vung, head of Tan Thinh Quarter in Phu Thinh Town under Phu Ninh District. Over 15 years ago, a single mother in the area got Hung to take care of her ailing child so that she could leave for work. Due to his affection for kids, many disadvantaged households sent their children to his house. In the initial stage, they brought their kids to Hungs home in the morning and picked them up in the evening. These children were attached to him, and he did not charge poor parents for looking after their children. Subsequently, he fostered more abandoned kids. Hung said that he is a war veteran who returned to Vietnam from Cambodia. He lives as a compassionate individual, often extending a helping hand to those in need as a way of giving back for his life, especially considering the loss of his comrades during wartime. Before establishing a nursing center for orphans, he had spent his money building houses for many underprivileged people. He has never scolded these children; instead, he treats them with tolerance and benevolence. Consequently, they affectionately refer to him as 'daddy.' The orphan-raising center features several lines of rooms, including dining rooms, playgrounds, bedrooms, reading rooms, and classrooms, but it includes just a small chamber to house him. He said that he is over 60 years old and requires nothing for himself, but his desire is to provide the best for the children under his care. In his room, there is a sturdy mattress and a fan, while the children's rooms are furnished with softer mattresses and air conditioners. His kindness has garnered support from numerous volunteers who visit his center to perform household tasks, cook, clean, and take care of the children. Dinh Thi Hong Duc, a babysitter at his center, shared that she had heard a lot about Hung's home. However, it was not until 2014, when her child was frequently ill, that she decided to bring her kid to his house. Thanks to his nursing skills, Hung helped Ducs child become well again. She is touched by the kind-hearted man, who dedicates his life as a senior citizen to looking after orphans and poor children. As such, she asked him to allow her to share his work. Besides Duc, some others came to his house to help Hung and his wife care for these children. Hungs biological children who reside in neighboring Da Nang City and other localities often buy rice, clothes, and books for the kids. The foster children attend school daily, including university students and mature young individuals. Periodically, they return to his house to assist in caring for the other kids. Dinh Thi Hong Duc, a volunteer at Huynh Tan Hungs caregiving center, looks after one of the children. Photo: Tuoi Tre The father deserves praise On November 11, the chairman of the Quang Nam Province Peoples Committee sent an introductory letter to the Central Emulation and Commendation Council, suggesting the recognition of Hung as a model citizen for the 2021-25 period. According to the introductory letter, since the establishment of the center, around 200 children who were cared for at the facility have been successfully reunited with their families. Additionally, more than 200 others have grown up under the care of the center. These children have received proper education and have been given the opportunity to attend school, with four of them having landed a job after their graduation. Hung has helped multiple disadvantaged households in the district over the past many years. The magnanimous man and his wife while not wealthy, sustain themselves on their pension and income from their rice fields. Nurtured within the warmth of such a caring home, these orphans can sense the love and compassion provided by Hung, even though he is not their biological father. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! TCN Staff Hyderabad Support TwoCircles After making its mark in Karnataka in May 2023, Indias grand old party INC (Indian National Congress) has now won the Telangana Assembly Elections held on 30th November 2023, the results of which have been declared yesterday, 3rd December. With this win, the INC has gained power in two southern states of India. A Clear Lead for Congress The INC has bagged 64 seats of the total 119 seats thus making a sweeping victory compared to its performance in the previous elections when they had got just 19 seats. The former ruling party Bhart Rashtra Samithi (BRS, formerly known as TRS) that was confident of winning for the third time managed to get 39 seats. While in 2018 it had emerged as the sole winner with 88 seats in its kitty. The BJP bagged 8 seats but did much better than the previous elections in 2018 wherein they had won in just one constituency. This time the vote share of the party has clearly increased making them victorious in 8 constituencies. The AIMIM (All India Majlis Itehadul Muslimeen) that has been continuously retaining the 7 constituencies from 2009 has retained the seats in this election too but have lost much of their clout managing a win with a narrow margin in Yakutpura and Nampally . Less Voter turnout The state recorded 71.34% voter turn after the polling time was extended in some booths till 9.30 pm. There has been a slight decrease in the voter turnout as compared to 2018 assembly elections where the percentage was 73.74. This time about 0.74 percentage of voters opted for NOTA (None of the Above). Many constituencies recorded less than 50% of voter turnout. There were 2290 candidates contesting the elections this time with 221 women and one transgender. KCR resigns Chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao submitted his resignation disappointed over the failure of his party BRS to win a hattrick. The KCR-led Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) had formed the maiden government of the newly formed state Telangana in 2014 and emerged victorious in 2018 as well. His son KTR the working president of the party posted on, grateful to the people of Telangana for giving BRS party two consecutive terms of Government. Not saddened over the result today, but surely disappointed as it was not in expected lines for us. But we will take this in our stride as a learning and will bounce back. Congratulations to Congress party on winning the mandate. Wishing you Good Luck! Congress to form Government Revanth Reddy president of the Telangana Congress and other delegates met the governor Tamilisai Soundararajan staking claim to form the government in Telangana State. Dedicating the partys success in the assembly election to Telangana martyrs, Reddy said his party will deliver all the promises made by them. Some of their promises include cash transfers, pension schemes, free electricity, cylinders and land to a wide base of voters to the people of the state. Rahul Gandhi, in a post in Hindi on X, said, We humbly accept the mandate of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan the battle of ideology will continue. I am very thankful to the people of Telangana we will definitely fulfil the promise of making Prajalu Telangana. Heartfelt thanks to all the workers for their hard work and support, the former Congress chief said. The swearing in ceremony is likely to be held in the LB Stadium and former chief Ministers, senior party leaders from Delhi and other chief Ministers are expected to attend the event that is scheduled for December 9. The list of contenders for the states CM post includes state congress president A Revanth Reddy, senior leaders Bhatti Vikramarka Mallu and Danasari Anasuya Seethakka. Glenys and Neil Kinnock arriving at the Labour Summer Party in Camden in 2014 - PA Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead, who has died of complications of Alzheimers disease aged 79, was the wife of Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader who became a European Commissioner, and a formidable member of the European Parliament, a Foreign Office minister under Gordon Brown and a high-profile campaigner for the developing world. Elegant, radical and gregarious, Glenys Kinnock was the ideal consort for an ambitious but impulsive politician trying to revive a party that had alienated most of the electorate. Widely reckoned the brains behind her husband, she provided the driving force for his career and a secure family life, and he responded with lasting adoration. Although they took almost every decision affecting him together she even drove him to hospital for his vasectomy both strenuously denied that she was Labours real leader. On the campaign trail and at party conferences she took a step back, but once elected an MEP in 1994 she showed her strengths, especially in campaigning to end poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. During Neil Kinnocks nine-year leadership which revived Labours fortunes but could not oust the Conservative government, Tory critics scorned his wife as an eminence rouge. She might have remained a conscientious remedial teacher living her political life through her husband had he not peaked so early; he was barely 50 when he gave up the leadership. Almost uniquely for a political wife, Glenys Kinnock pursued an agenda of her own without embarrassing her husband. There were suspicions that she held him back from ditching Labours commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament, but when Neil Kinnock let his CND membership lapse in 1991, so did she. Glenys Kinnock at a CND march in 1983 - Hulton Archive/ Getty Images Nuclear disarmament had been her lifes passion. She joined CND at 16, before the Labour Party, and in the movements last flowering in the 1980s took a leading part in mass rallies and joined the peace women at Greenham Common. Her unilateralism tailed off into a moderate if persistent feminism. Story continues Glenys Kinnock was a passionate opponent of apartheid. She refused a gold wedding ring lest the metal originate from South Africa. And when she paid the first of many visits to Africa with her husband in 1985, she made a point of visiting a school in Tanzania run by the then-outlawed African National Congress; The Daily Telegraphs correspondent was excluded. That same visit triggered her passionate concern for the developing world, when she met women who had walked for days to a hospital in Addis Ababa after childbirth had gone wrong. She went on to form the development lobbying group One World Action and play leading roles in War on Want from which she resigned in protest at alleged financial mismanagement and Unicef. She became a popular speaker at United Nations conferences on womens and development issues. Her campaigning against apartheid was rewarded in the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africas president in 1994, with the Kinnocks on hand as EU observers. She supported Nicaraguas Left-wing Sandinistas with equal enthusiasm, only to see them eclipsed at the polls. Politically correct she may have been, but she moved with the times; Welsh Labour old-timers reproached her for shopping at Sainsburys instead of the Co-Op. Glenys Kinnock shouldered with deep sadness but some style the defeats Labour suffered with her husband at the helm. That of 1987 was no surprise despite her sparkling performance on the campaign trail and in Hugh Hudsons Kinnock video which briefly fuelled Labour euphoria; she held back from hiring a furniture van for the move to Downing Street. John Majors victory in 1992 was a shock, although she had never quite assumed Labour would win. She said the moment her husband conceded was hard. I didnt care about myself or anything else. I just felt for him. But after a gloomy barbecue for his staff at their Ealing home, she helped him pick up the pieces. Before long, Europe beckoned them both. Glenys Kinnock got there first, elected to the European Parliament for Wales South-East in 1994 by 124,247 votes, a record for a British election. Her husbands subsequent appointment as a Commissioner meant their rebasing from London to Brussels, though always maintaining their ties with Wales and their interest in domestic politics. From 1999 she was one of the MEPs for Wales as a whole. Co-opted to the parliaments Development Committee, she urged a near 50-fold increase in EU development aid, and denounced human rights abuses in China, Nigeria, Rwanda and Burma, which she visited in mufti. She became vice-president of the African, Caribbean and Pacific/EU joint assembly. Days after she left the Parliament in 2009, Gordon Brown appointed her Minister for Europe, with a life peerage. She held the portfolio for just four months, devoting much time to the unsuccessful campaign for Tony Blair to become the EUs first president. That October she took ministerial responsibility for Africa. Reunited with her favourite causes, she was particularly concerned at the Sudans disintegration into a renewed civil war. On Labours defeat in May 2010, she moved to the back benches. Neil and Glenys Kinnock in the cockpit of a BAE 146 during a visit to British Aerospace in Hatfield in 1987 - PA/PA Wire Although she was the most loyal of wives, Glenys Kinnock considered her husband too much of a daredevil. His habit of persuading RAF pilots to take him into a power dive, or hanging out of aircraft dropping supplies to famine victims, led her to christen him Biggles. When he deserted her for the cockpit during one long-haul flight, she observed: Neil wants to be a pilot when he grows up. Yet she was not above taking risks herself. Her narrowest scrape came in 2000 when she and the Conservative MEP John Corrie were among international mediators shot at in the Solomon Islands. Escaping, their aircraft attracted a hail of bullets. She remarked: I heard a noise, but I didnt know it was gunfire; to Corrie it was very hairy indeed. One frightening experience she shared with her husband: in 1988 when, arriving unannounced from Mozambique at a Zimbabwean air base, their entire party was locked in a tin hut by over-zealous security guards. Neil Kinnock gave the heavily-armed man in charge a dressing-down; a fawning apology from Robert Mugabe followed. Glenys Elizabeth Parry was born at Roade, Northamptonshire, on July 7 1944. Her father, Cyril Parry, was a railway signalman and Labour activist who moved the family back to his native Holyhead when she was three. A Welsh speaker, she attended Holyhead High School before going to Cardiff University, where she met Neil Kinnock. Her first words to him were: Are you the man from the Socialist Society? Their relationship had an unpromising start she helped him home drunk from their first date but they ran the society together for three years and she helped to engineer his election as Students Union president. Contemporaries named them the power and the glory. Glenys Kinnock at a demonstration in 1987 - Mike Lawn/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images She went on to teach in secondary, primary and special schools, first in South Wales and later in Brent, continuing part-time throughout her husbands rise in the Labour Party. She also became an accomplished writer and broadcaster in support of her favourite causes. When her husbands successful No campaign against Welsh devolution in the late 1970s led extreme Nationalists to kick their front door in, she insisted they move with their young children to London. They settled in Kingston, then moved to Ealing to avoid the 11-plus, which they strongly opposed. Glenys Kinnock founded One World Action (originally The Bernt Carlsson Trust) in 1989, after Carlsson, the UNs Commissioner for Namibia, was killed in the Lockerbie disaster. She was also a leading light in Saferworld, Drop the Debt, Parliamentarians for Global Action, the Burma Campaign UK, the Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture, the National Deaf Childrens Society, the International Aids Vaccine Initiative, the National Breast Cancer Coalition, Crusaid, the Elizabeth Hardie Ferguson Trust, VSO, Britain in Europe and the British Humanist Association. She was president of Coleg Harlech, and vice-president of the University College of Wales, Cardiff from 1988 to 1995. Her husband received his life peerage in 2005; she retired from the Lords in 2021. Married in 1967, the Kinnocks had a son Stephen Kinnock MP, married to the former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and a daughter, Rachel. Glenys Kinnock, born July 7 1944, died December 3 2023 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. New fears of Russian escalation across Europe have emerged after a German think tank said Western countries must prepare for a direct attack from Russia. In a statement the German Council on Foreign Relations wrote: With its imperial ambitions, Russia represents the greatest and most urgent threat to Nato countries. Once intensive fighting will have ended in Ukraine, the regime in Moscow may need as little as six to ten years to reconstitute its armed forces. Within that timeframe, Germany and Nato must enable their armed forces to deter and, if necessary, fight against Russia. Only then will they be in a position to reduce the risk of another war breaking out in Europe. But, the head of Polands national security agency estimated that Russia could attack Nato countries within three years in an interview with Nasz Dziennik. Jacek Siewiera suggested that an attack could come from Natos eastern flank which includes countries such as Poland, Estonia, Romania and Lithuania. He estimated they had three years to prepare for a confrontation. The Ukraine-Russia conflict has been raging for nearly two years and now experts say it could spread to the rest of Europe (Anadolu via Getty Images) The minister said that analysts at the German think tank were too optimistic. If we want to avoid war, Nato countries on the eastern flank should adopt a shorter, three-year time horizon to prepare for confrontation. This is the time when a potential must be created on the eastern flank that would be a clear signal deterring aggression. Therefore, it is necessary to further increase the number of Polish troops. President Zelensky has also urged Europe to keep Ukraine at its forefront (AFP via Getty Images) It comes as the White House warned that the US was running out of money to support Ukraines defence and could be out of resources by the end of the year after supporting the nations defensive military action following a full-scale invasion by Russia for almost two years. However, Lord George Robertson, a former Nato secretary general warned that the worlds attention must stay on Ukraine, stating that any distraction from the conflict would benefit Vladimir Putin and nobody else. Just weeks ago, Lord Robertson warned against Western nervousness of Russian escalation. He said: Instead of the West being nervous of Russian escalation...we need to breed in the military hierarchy in Moscow the worry that if they overdo what is being done in Ukraine then an actual and not fictious war with Nato might be the result. Your slice of the headlines in Ukraine. Daily. Monday, December 4, 2023. Russian forces shot surrendering Ukrainian soldiers, military confirms The Strategic Communications Department or SCD of the Ukrainian militarys General Staff confirmed on Telegram on Dec. 2 the authenticity of a video circulating online of two unarmed Ukrainian soldiers being shot by Russian forces as they were surrendering. US-Ukraine arms conference set for historic debut next week The United States and Ukraine are set to conduct their inaugural conference on arms production next week, Ukraine's President's Office said on Dec. 3 US aims to halve Russias oil and gas revenues by 2030 The United States will do everything possible to halve Russias oil and gas revenues by 2030, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources Geoffrey Pyatt said in an interview with the Financial Times on Dec. 2. Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Plant blackouts pose Fukushima-level threat, warns Ukraine's energy minister Every blackout at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhya NPP represents a threat of a major accident comparable to that at Japans Fukushima plant, Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko said on national television on Dec. 2. Army of Drones initiative praised by former MP and UAV Squad Commander In an exclusive interview with Radio NV on Dec. 1, former MP and current UAV Squad Commander Yehor Sobolev lauded the Ministry of Digital Transformations Army of Drones initiative as one of the most effective endeavors of the past two years. Zelenskyy reveals covert prisoner exchanges with Russia to free captured soldiers outside public glare Prisoner-of-war exchanges with Russia have not stopped, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with the Associated Press, the full version of which was published by the press service of the Presidents Office on Dec. 2. Story continues Boryspil will be the first Ukrainian airport to open once security situation allows, Kyiv says Ukraine is planning to reopen the Kyiv-Boryspil Airport first, but only after security issues related to the ongoing war are resolved, Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Andrii Sybiha said on Dec. 1. Ukraine, Poland discuss steps for unblocking the border Ukraine and Poland have agreed upon a series of steps to lift the blockade of the border between the two countries, the Ukrainian Infrastructure Ministry said on Dec. 1. Poroshenko barred from leaving Ukraine over planned meeting with Orban source Former Ukrainian President and sitting MP Petro Poroshenko was not permitted to leave the country because he planned to meet with Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, a government source told NV on Dec. 1. Lavrovs OSCE speech adds ambiguity to Russias intentions ISW Conflicting reports from Russian war correspondents regarding advancements near Avdiivka, Donetsk Oblast, coupled with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrovs OSCE speech have raised questions about Moscows war plans, U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in its Nov. 30 report. How Kyrgyzstan and other Central Asian countries help Russia import sanctioned goods Kyrgyzstan has sharply increased its import of goods from all over the world and their export to Russia over the past year and a half. Some product categories have increased tenfold. What other countries re-export Western goods to Putins Russia? The war has made holding Presidential elections in Ukraine impossible Zelenskyy The war has made it impossible to hold a presidential election in Ukraine, originally slated for March under the constitution, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with the Associated Press published on Dec. 1. MiG-31K takeoffs are paralyzing the nation, Ukrainians split on how to respond survey Half of Ukrainians (51%) advocate for a consistent declaration of air alarms during takeoffs of potential carriers of Kinzhal missiles on MiG-31K, according to a recent survey conducted by the Rating sociological group on Nov. 22-23, while 40% believe it should be contingent on the specific situation and perceived threat. World Bank to provide $1.2 billion loan to support 10 million of Ukraines most vulnerable citizens The World Bank will provide Ukraine with a $1.2 billion loan that will be guaranteed by the Government of Japan. Ukrainian Air Force studying downed drone to see how Russia uses Ukrainian SIM cards Experts study everything from downed Russian drones, including the purpose of a Kyivstar SIM card recently found in one of the downed Shahed kamikaze drones, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat said on national television. 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 French law enforcement authorities believe that Islamist extremism was the main driving force in the Paris attack that resulted in one dead and two others being injured. On Sunday, German and French officials expressed shock after the incident that resulted in the death of a German tourist. The incident occurred on Saturday night at the Quai de Grenelle, located on the River Seine banks near the Eiffel Tower. Horrific Paris Attack In a statement, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said that the horrific attack was an "abominable crime." On the other hand, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that her thoughts were with the family and friends of the "young German" who was killed in the attack. In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Baerbock wrote that the deceased "had almost his whole life ahead of him." She added that hate and terror do not have a place in Europe. As per DW News, French President Emmanuel Macron also stated on Saturday evening. He said that his condolences went out to the family and loved ones of the German victim of the Paris attack. He also said that his thoughts were with the people who were injured and were being treated. On the day of the crime, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin spoke to reporters and said that the attacker first assaulted a German tourist couple while armed with a knife. The official added that the attacker then crossed the Bir-Hakeim bridge over the Seine before police arrived on the scene. Darmanin noted that the suspect had tried to attack two more people using a hammer while being pursued by police. He injured one and caused the other one to suffer symptoms of shock. The French official said that after being arrested, the suspect said he could no longer bear Muslims dying in Afghanistan as well as in the Palestinian Territories. Read Also: France: Yoga Guru Arrested for Alleged Sexual Exploitation of Female Followers Potential Islamist Extremism The attacker was heard shouting "Allahu Akbar," which translates to God is Great, during the attack. Prosecutors handling the case later added that three people who were close to the assailant were being held in custody on Sunday afternoon, according to The Local. The suspect was later identified as 26-year-old Frenchman Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, born to Iranian parents in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Security forces knew of the individual and he was imprisoned in 2016 for four years after a failed terror attack plot. It was a knife attack in the Paris business district of La Defense. After being released from jail, Rajabpour-Miyandoab was put on a terror watchlist because of his radical Islamist views. Darmanin added that the suspect also had mental health issues as he was diagnosed with psychosis but had stopped treatment in the summer of 2022. During a news conference in Paris, France's top anti-terrorism prosecutor, Jean-Francois Ricard said that the suspect had shown "persistent radicalization." He added that the attacker had been in contact online with jihadists who are responsible for terrorist attacks in the country, said the New York Times. Related Article: London Hospital Violations Exposed: Inquiry Discovers Staff Engaged in Necrophilia With 100+ Corpses for 15 Years, Undetected @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Kuwait City, Dec 4 (UNI) Kuwait Integrated Petroleum Industries Company (KIPIC) announced Sunday the successful operation of the third and final unit of the Al-Zour Refinery, which has increased the country's maximum refining capacity to 615,000 barrels per day. In a statement released by Kuwait's official news agency, the KIPIC said that it has achieved one of the most important goals in Kuwait's oil company strategy, which is to reach the maximum refining capacity of 615,000 barrels per day. Walid Al-Bader, CEO of KIPIC, said that the Al-Zour Refinery project is considered one of the world's biggest projects, executed through five packages by global contractor alliances. For his part, Ali Al-Ajmi, Executive Vice President of Operations at the Al-Zour Refinery, said that the Al-Zour Refinery has achieved widespread and continuous success. The first refinery began commercial operation in November 2022, with many products, including kerosene, petrochemical naphtha, high-quality aviation fuel, as well as low sulfur fuel and extremely low sulfur diesel, exported to the global market. UNI/XINHUA GNK HA NOI Hanoi Midnight Sale, a large-scale concentrated promotion event that took place in the capital city from November 24-25, attracted about 2.4 million shoppers who enjoyed more than 3,000 promotion programmes worth over VN25 trillion (US$1.03 billion), up 20 per cent over last years edition. This years event drew about 200 businesses, trade centres and producers, and fashion brands. There were over 10 million visits to the online shopping website. A highlight of the event is a flash sale display area at Big C Thang Long supermarket with the participation of nearly 20 brands offering discounts of up to 70 per cent. A representative from Big C stated that the supermarket experienced a significant spike in visits, almost 230 per cent higher than on other days of the week. Online shopping through the Zalo app also doubled. Key discounted items such as groceries, fresh produce, fast-moving consumer goods and non-food items were in high demand. The Winmart chain also reported a 140 per cent increase in sales and visits compared to other days of the week. Japan's AEON reported that sales and foot traffic at AEON Mall Ha ong and AEON Mall Long Bien increased by nearly 200 per cent during the three-day event. The website and mobile app traffic for shopping also nearly tripled compared to regular weekdays. According to a representative from the BRGMart supermarket chain, they saw a sales increase of over 130 per cent. BRG's shopping website saw approximately double the usual shopping traffic. The Hanoi Midnight Sale event concluded the Ha Noi concentrated promotion programme, which took place in May, July and November, with more than 2,000 outlets engaging all economic sectors, aiming to stimulate consumption, reduce inventories and promote Ha Nois economic growth. VNS Maui children still face a mental health crisis and housing insecurity after the deadly wildfire nearly four months ago in Hawaii on August 8. The August 8 wildfire was recognized as the deadliest in modern US history, killing 100 people and displacing 11,000. Maui Children Face Mental Health Crisis, Housing Insecurity The survivors of the deadly wildfire described scenes of melting cars and bodies in trees, which caused severe mental health implications for children. They developed trauma due to temporary living adjustments and still process their grief more acutely than adults. Maryann Kobatake, a Native Hawaiian, said her 18-year-old nephew helped a friend's grandmother and cousins run for safety. She said that her nephew heard screams and witnessed the carnage that still haunts him while on the drive out of a burning Front Street. The nephew still has not discussed further details on what he had seen with her or other family members. Kobatake thinks that his nephew does not want to relive the event by talking, and she said that she was still trying to get him to open up to her. She said she was worried that her nephew's habit of suppressing his emotions might result in PTSD symptoms and triggers since he has to drive by the destroyed town on his way to school every day. Kobatake's nephew has been staying with her and her husband at a temporary home arranged by the Red Cross sheltering program, and they were continuously adjusting to their new reality of sharing donated clothes, food, and water from family-run distribution hubs. Since schools in Lahaina reopened in mid-October, the Maui County certified community behavioral health clinic has seen increasing reports of parents seeking counseling and psychotherapy for their children. John Oliver, the clinic's director, said that instability, loss, and fear of the unknown were some of the greatest challenges children are confronting post-fire, the long-term impact of which could include depression, anxiety, and increased risk of substance abuse. Miguel Ceballos, a resident and a father of four, shared that his biggest concern was housing insecurity as the fire destroyed their three-bedroom rental apartment. They have been displaced seven times already and once placed in a one-bedroom unit where they had to take turns sleeping on couch cushions on the floor. He said that the displacement affected his son as he lost interest in going to school and refused to wake up in the morning. His daughter also became sad and withdrawn. Read Also: Ohio's Pneumonia Outbreak: Is China's Mysterious Illness to Blame? What to Know About Mycoplasma Pneumonia Infection Therapists Suggest Healthy Coping Behaviors Skye Horie, a licensed marriage and family therapist at the clinic Play Therapy Maui, said that adjusting to a new normal of moving around could be particularly traumatizing for young people. She said, "Until they have more permanent housing, there will be that ongoing stress of not feeling safe and settled." Horie encouraged parents to share their thoughts and feelings about the fire with their children, including what went wrong and what could have been done differently. She said the kids will do the same if parents avoid discussing the incident. Oliver, of the behavioral health clinic, witnessed some patients express frustration with repeatedly checking in with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) and the Red Cross to continue receiving benefits. Furthermore, other barriers include medical bills and a lack of transportation to and from services. Oliver said people need more transparency in what is happening to them as everything feels so out of control. Related Article: Los Angeles I-10 Freeway Could Trigger Massive Traffic After Fire Prompts Shut Down @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. ROME Vietnamese handicraft producers are among nearly 2,600 companies from 86 countries taking part in "Artigiano in Fiera", an international craft exhibition running in Milan, Italy from December 2 to 10. The Viet Nam pavilion showcased high-quality decorative items and silk products from eight companies of Ha Noi, including Musa Pacta One Member Ltd Co, Viet Nam Handicraft Co Ltd, Hanhsilk Joint Stock Company and Huong Anh Handicraft Trading and Production Co Ltd. The pavilion, along with booths of some Vietnamese companies attending separately, attracted crowds of visitors right from the opening day. This is a good opportunity for Vietnamese enterprises to expand their customer network and learn more about foreign businesses experience, thereby improving the quality and design of their products to meet the tastes of European consumers. At a working session with Vietnamese Ambassador to Italy Duong Hai Hung, Antonio Intiglietta, President and CEO of Gestione Fiere, the organiser of the event, appreciated Viet Nam's participation at the event, noting that the Southeast Asian country's strong products are ceramics and silk products. He also said that he would visit Viet Nam in the near future to coordinate with and support Viet Nam to take part in next years edition. The two sides discussed a number of specific activities and preparations that need to be implemented regarding Viet Nam's participation at the fair in the coming years. The "Artigiano in Fiera" is the biggest event for handicraft businesses worldwide held since 1996 where artisans from all over the world show their typical products. VNS HA NOI Retailers in Viet Nam are increasing inventory and have launched promotions in anticipation of opportunities in the year-end shopping season, as there are just over two months left until the Lunar New Year (Tet) the biggest festival in a year of Vietnamese people. Experts predict that from now until the end of this year, retail sales of goods and services may increase again as the domestic economy is gradually recovering and disbursement of public investment continues to be promoted. It is forecast that consumer demand for essential goods will surge during the Lunar New Year, so many businesses have implemented plans to stock up on goods and negotiate with suppliers to ensure supplies. Keeping pace with the market, major retailers such as Saigon Co.op, Aeon, Lotte Mart, Winmart, MM Mega Market have been continuously conducting major promotions in all commodity groups. On November 24-25, Ha Noi Midnight Sale, a large-scale promotion event, attracted about 2.4 million shoppers who enjoyed more than 3,000 promotion programmes worth over VN25 trillion (US$1.03 billion), up 20 per cent over last years edition. This year, it drew about 200 businesses, trade centres and producers, and fashion brands. There were over 10 million visits to the online shopping website. A highlight of the event is a flash sale display area at Big C Thang Long supermarket with the participation of nearly 20 brands offering discount of up to 70 per cent. A representative from Big C stated that the supermarket experienced a significant spike in visits, almost 230 per cent higher than on other days of the week. The Winmart chain also reported a 140 per cent increase in sales and visits compared to other days of the week. Japan's AEON reported that sales and foot traffic at AEON Mall Ha ong and AEON Mall Long Bien malls increased by nearly 200 per cent during the three-day event. The website and mobile app traffic for shopping also nearly tripled compared to regular weekdays. Vu Thanh Son, general director of the Hanoi Trading Corporation (Hapro), said that to meet increasing consumer demand during the Lunar New Year 2024, Hapro's affiliated units and member companies have made plans to reserve goods worth up to VN1 trillion ($41.2 million). The Big C supermarket chain shared that since September, the unit signed agreements with partners to supply goods for Tet with a 20 per cent increase in volume compared to the previous Tet. At the Co.op Mart supermarket system, the amount of goods to serve Tet will rise by about 30 per cent over the same period last year and 50 per cent compared to normal days. According to Le Viet Nga, deputy director of the Domestic Market Department under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the ministry will continue to coordinate to closely monitor market developments, ensure sufficient supply of essential goods, especially during holidays and Tet, to prevent product shortages or price wars. VNS HA NOI Viet Nam is learning from international experiences to develop a carbon market to ensure its appropriateness to the countrys legal framework and infrastructure system. The carbon market is one of the important carbon pricing tools towards the net-zero goal by 2050, Ho Thi Hang, deputy director of the Legal Department under the Ministry of Finance, said. Hang said learning international experiences in developing and operating carbon trade exchanges is important to choose a suitable exchange design and build roadmaps for implementation in Viet Nam. Pham Phan Dung, from the Environment and Ecology Institute, said that besides regulations related to taxes, Viet Nam has developed regulations for the carbon market, but the legal framework is not sufficient for the formation and operation of the carbon market. It is necessary to build a carbon trade exchange to promote the development of the carbon market in Viet Nam, he said. Two options are proposed for the carbon trade exchange design. The first is to establish an exchange based on the infrastructure system of the stock exchanges. The second option is to build an independent exchange of stock exchanges, which will be run by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. Dung opted for the first option, proposing a pilot plan to operate a carbon trade exchange using the stock exchanges infrastructure system. In particular, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment will be in charge of designing, building, and managing this market with activities such as establishing a carbon credit and quota registration system, issuing regulations about Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV), and setting requirements for quotas, credits, and participants. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Finance will manage the carbon trade exchange with the participation of the State Securities Commission, Viet Nam Exchange, and Viet Nam Securities Depository and Clearing Corporation (VSD). What needs to be done by 2025 is to complete regulations for the domestic carbon market, including the legal framework, registration system, and infrastructure development for trading, he said. Starting from 2028, the market will be piloted and put into full operation after that, he added. According to carbon expert Albert de Haan, many countries have developed emissions trading systems (ETSs) as an important solution to implement nationally determined contributions (NDCs). For example, the ETS of the UK has the annual cap for 2023 at 147.2 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. He stressed that the important message of the carbon market is to increase the efficient use of energy. Many countries have achieved success in implementing ETSs, from which Viet Nam can learn. For Viet Nam, he said the Government should be in charge of establishing regulations for ETS and managing its operation. It is important that Viet Nam finds the most suitable model for ETS, its operational scope, and the market participants, he said. Sharing experiences from the Republic of Korea, Hyun Shin Park from Ecoeye said the carbon trade exchange is an important part of the ETS, which plays a role in facilitating the trading of carbon credits to ensure transparency. Besides clear regulations about market participants, it is necessary to have a user-friendly, safe, and effective platform, together with an analysis of market data and trading products, she said. She recommended that Viet Nam develop detailed and consistent regulations and instructions based on the environment law. Viet Nam could take advantage of the existing infrastructure to save time and resources, she stressed. The carbon market was first mentioned in the Prime Ministers Decision No. 1775/Q-TTg dated November 21, 2012, about approving the project on managing greenhouse gas emissions and carbon credit trading to foreign markets. In 2020, the National Assembly passed the Law on Environment which regulates in detail the development of the domestic carbon market. Decree No 06/2022/N-CP about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and protecting the ozone layer also sets specific goals for developing the domestic carbon market. VNS HCM CITY The HCM CITY People's Committee has ordered relevant agencies and departments to add an additional 4,000 hectares of land for industrial production. The Office of the municipal People's Committee has announced that the committee requested the citys Department of Natural Resources and Environment to urgently review land funds which can be used to develop projects around industrial clusters. This aims to support businesses, promote public-private cooperation, encourage investment and call for social contributions as well as improve the competitiveness of businesses in the city by 2025. The municipal People's Committee also asked businesses to submit their proposal of adjustments for worker housing projects to the city People's Committee. It asked the HCM City Industrial and Export Processing Zones Management Board (HEPZA) to coordinate with the citys Department of Planning and Architecture and the Department of Industry and Trade to review the land fund and add suitable land for the building of more concentrated industrial parks in the city. Relevant departments should coordinate with authorities of Thu uc City and districts to speed up site clearance progress in industrial parks to create land funds to serve the needs of businesses. Related agencies should review land funds directly managed by the State, or land for social housing projects in areas around industrial parks, to propose the municipal People's Committee conduct bidding to select investors for worker housing projects by exchanging the value of land use rights to create a worker housing fund. They should give advice to the People's Committee that the city authorities allow economic organisations that are paying annual land rents should have the right to mortgage, transfer land or lease rental rights in land lease contracts. The Department of Planning and Architecture will be responsible for evaluating and adjusting industrial development orientations associated with a sustainable urban development model with synchronous infrastructure. The department will adjust the planning of industrial parks according to advanced models that apply and promote models of marine economy, circular economy, and digital economy with high land use efficiency. It will review, study and adjust the planning of existing industrial zones and clusters, aiming to form smart, high-tech industrial zones or industrial complexes, and business parks - modern urban services to integrate into the legal regulation of the city general planning. HEPZA will work to give advice to the municipal People's Committee on solutions to accelerate the establishment of Vinh Loc 3 Industrial Park and Hiep Phuoc Industrial Park - phase 3, and solutions to solve problems in Le Minh Xuan Industrial Park. VNS DUBAI Standard Chartered Vietnam and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of Viet Nam hosted the Mobilising finance to achieve Viet Nams commitment on climate change event in the United Arab Emirates last week on the sidelines of the United Nations climate change conference COP28. The closed-door event welcomed Viet Nam Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, representatives from ministries and local authorities, Standard Chartered executives, including Bill Winters, the banks Group Chief Executive, and Michele Wee, the banks Chief Executive Officer in Viet Nam, as well as international and local business leaders. The industry participants also discussed solutions to further mobilise finance through international resources, enhance capabilities, and propose climate change projects to attract investments and promote the active participation and delivery of the private sectors in addressing climate change. In doing so, the Viet Nam Government and the bank exchanged five memorandums of understanding (MoUs), valued at approximately US$3 billion in sustainable financing to support five local businesses in achieving their sustainability goals. These include signings with SOVICO Group (a multi-sector investment group) on wind power and green projects; The Green Solutions Corporation on green hydrogen production plant in Tra Vinh; GuarantCo (a part of Private Infrastructure Development Group) on financing climate change and the energy transition, a master agreement with BIDV on sustainable finance transactions and a MoU with The PAN Group (a pioneering agriculture and food group) on sustainable projects. Michele Wee, CEO of Standard Chartered Vietnam, said: COP28 is a critical moment for the sustainability agenda to engage a broad range of stakeholders on climate change. As a global bank, we aim to contribute credible and meaningful dialogue that helps turn commitments into action on climate. Now is the time for outcomes to be delivered where they matter. Finance can enable and accelerate the just transition to a net zero, towards a nature-positive economy. We are committed to sustainable social and economic development through our business, operations and communities by enabling clients and communities to adapt and mitigate the climate risks they face, while also looking to promote sustainable economic development and prosperity. On the same day, Standard Chartered also had an exclusive bilateral meeting with PM Chinh, where the bank highlighted the most recent developments of its sustainability work, as well as its commitment to continue to support Viet Nam Government in the nations sustainability plan. Standard Chartered Bank has committed to reaching net zero carbon emissions in its own operations by 2025, and in financing activity by 2050. The Bank aim to provide $300 billion in sustainable finance by 2030. Standard Chartered collaborated with the government in hosting strategic global business events, including those at COP26 in the UK, in 2021, and COP27 in Egypt in 2022 and COP28 this year in the United Arab Emirates. These events have showcased Viet Nam's resolute commitment to sustainability and helped facilitate high-quality foreign direct investments into the country. VNS TUYEN QUANG The forestry sector in Tuyen Quang Province is a vital force propelling the province's economic and social development. Assessed by the Vietnam Administration of Forestry, Tuyen Quang ranks among the top three provinces for wood production in the Northern Mountainous region, boasting the third-highest national forest coverage at 65 per cent. Benefiting from ecological advantages, with 88 per cent of the workforce engaged in forestry-related activities, Tuyen Quang has strategically harnessed natural and social strengths. The province has effectively implemented governmental policies, exemplified by the resolution on sustainable forestry development for the 2021-30 period. Key objectives include achieving an annual growth rate of 9 per cent in forestry production value, expanding large timber forests to 89,000 hectares, and attaining sustainable forest management certification for 90,000 hectares. The province aims to be a sustainable forestry development example by 2025, contributing to new rural area construction and eco-tourism. Achievements include establishing 190,000 hectares of planted forest, annual harvested wood volume reaching 900,000 cubic metres, leading the country in extracting timber from planted forests. Additionally, 48,318.5 hectares of forests in the province have Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification, the highest in the nation. Adhering to FSC standards ensures responsible practices, making Tuyen Quang's wood products globally competitive. The forestry sector's contribution to GDP exceeded VN1.75 trillion (US$73 million) in 2022, creating employment for 40,000 workers and 175 per cent to the GRDP of the agriculture, forestry, and fisheries sector. Wood processing accounts for 14 per cent of the province's industrial production value. Technological advancements The widespread application of scientific and technological advancements, especially high-tech methods in forestry production and wood processing, has been a significant aspect of development in the province. Programmes supporting high-quality seedlings and the transfer of advanced scientific and technical knowledge are implemented annually to facilitate rapid progress in production. Tuyen Quang, recognised "capital" of planted forest wood processing, has become a magnet for substantial investments in the sector. Currently, there are nine wood processing plants in the province that have invested in expansion and capacity improvement, including An Hoa Pulp and Paper Factory with a capacity of 1,300,000 cubic metres per year, and Woodsland Tuyen Quang with a capacity of 680,000 cubic metres per year. These companies have successfully penetrated markets in the EU, the US, Canada, Russia and Japan, contributing to the increased export value and industrial development of the province. The province aims to establish itself as a centre for the application of high-tech forestry and wood processing. By 2030, the province plans to establish a research and development centre for forestry seedlings, supplying 20 per cent of the seedling demand for the North Central and Northern Mountainous regions. Simultaneously, the province seeks to develop sustainable raw material areas, enhance the productivity of planted forests, attract investment in the development of wood processing and non-wood forestry industries, specialise in wood products, and connect with international e-commerce platforms to promote the consumption of processed wood products and forestry products. In addition to existing conditions, enhancing the productivity and quality of planted forest wood is crucial for increasing output and income for forest owners. Nguyen Ba Ngai, Deputy Chairman of the Vietnam Forest Owners Association, suggests that to improve wood production and quality, forest owners must change their perception of forest planting, from selecting seedlings to caring for the growth of trees. Looking ahead to 2050, Tuyen Quang envisions becoming a regional centre for the wood processing industry, wood and paper production, firmly positioned in the value chain of the region's wood and forestry sector. The successful implementation of the project is expected to increase economic value by 200 per cent compared to the present. VNS BINH DUONG Viet Nam has successfully implemented economic reforms to drive its economic growth into the next decade, speakers said at one of Asias largest economic forums in Binh Duong Province. More than 650 delegates, including leaders, government officials, and top business executives from Viet Nam and across Asia, are participating in the 2023 Horasis Asia Meeting that opened on Monday. Speaking at the opening ceremony, Vo Van Minh, chairman of the provincial Peoples Committee, said the Horasis event was an important international event in the province after it was recognised by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) as the Intelligent Community of the Year. Binh Duong Province will continue fostering investment, expanding international cooperation, and improving Viet Nams position in the economic community in Asia and the world, he said. Dr. Frank-Jurgen Richter, chairman of the Horasis Asia Meeting, said: Were very impressed with the potential of the Vietnamese economy and Binh Duong Province, which is one of the countrys major economic hubs with strong industrial development. Thats why we chose Binh Duong to host the Horasis Asia Meeting again this year. Binh Duong is home to a well-established ecosystem with good infrastructure with a state-of-the-art conference centre, and we have had great support from the local government as the host of our meeting, he noted. Viet Nams easing of business regulations, particularly those that support inward investment, would help create jobs for young people and increase exports for the countrys new green industries, experts noted. The Horasis Asia Meeting aims to identify the trends that will shape the countrys economic development and drive it towards new global growth. The event will host two symposiums focused on Binh Duong Province, delving into the Binh Duong Smart City development strategy and the challenges related to innovation and creativity in the province. The forum will also feature six plenary sessions and 28 dialogue sessions, which will provide an opportunity for organisations, businesses, and managers in Binh Duong to access knowledge, visions, and new trends in the 4.0 technology era. This years Horasis Asia Meeting, the fourth of its kind held in Binh Duong, is co-organised by Binh Duong Province and Becamex IDC in Binh Duong New City. Established in 2005, the Horasis Asia Meeting is an international investment promotion organisation that connects multinational groups of investors. It has become the leading annual meeting for Asian business leaders and their global counterparts. In addition to the Horasis Asia Meeting, Horasis also hosts the annual Horasis Global Meeting, Horasis China Meeting, Horasis India Meeting, and others. Binh Duongs industrial production index in 2023 expanded by 6.5 per cent compared to the previous year. The provinces exports reached US$31.8 billion, while its investment attraction was estimated at $1.4 billion as of the end of November. VNS HA NOI The Am Nhac Mua Thu (Autumn Music) contest, organised by the ministry of cultures Department of Performing Art and related entities, celebrated and identified talented musicians on Saturday in Ha Noi. At different age categories, pianists Tran Quang Minh, Nguyen Hoang Phuong Thy, and Ho Thien Phuoc secured the first prizes. In the violin section, Nguyen Vu Truong Giang and Cao Hoang Lan emerged as winners. A collective comprising flutist Le Thu Huong, pianist Tran Thi Tam Ngoc, and oboist Hoang Manh Lam clinched the first prize in the chamber music ensembles category. The competition attracted 170 participants, including 52 pianists from the Viet Nam National Academy of Music (VNAM) and the HCM City Conservatory. "New talents were found at the contest," said Prof Ngo Van Thanh, former of VNAM. At the 2023 National Opera - Choir Competition held by the ministry, top contestants were honoured at the same time. Tran Quang Canh and Le Thi Minh Ngoc are the winners in group A for 18-23 years old. The winners in group B for 24 years old and up are Nguyen Thi Ha My, Tran Quoc at and o Vu Lan Nhung. The two contests were held from November 26 to December 2 in Ha Noi. The organisation at the same time is important and necessary for the development of professional music training in Viet Nam, according to Acting Director of the Department of Performing Arts Tran Ly Ly. "The contests are also opportunities for art managers and researchers to evaluate music training nationwide over recent years," Ly said. "Through the contests, solutions in training, discovering young talents and providing human resources are designed with a view to regional and international integration." The contests are chances for local audiences to enjoy classic musical works composed by international and Vietnamese musicians. VNS A NANG A tree planting event marking the 50th anniversary of Viet Nam-Japan diplomatic ties (September 21, 1973 - 2023) was held by the central citys Union of Friendship Organisations and the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in a Nang City (JCCID) in a Nang. The tree plantation, an initiative of the JBAD with contributions from Japanese enterprises in a Nang, is one of a series of activities throughout the year 2023, promoting the relationship between Viet Nam and Japan, as well as Japan and a Nang, Vice Chairman of the Union Nguyen Thi Kim Tuyen said. She said star apple trees, grown at Lien Chieu Districts Park, will imprint a deeper and closer relationship between the two countries, and a Nang with Japanese partners. Head of JCCID, Hirayama Keiji, said these star apple trees act as a typical symbol of the longer and stronger ties between Japan and Viet Nam. He said the tree growing event not only marked the 50th anniversary of Viet Nam-Japan diplomatic ties but also contributed to a greener earth as Viet Nam and Japan look towards a green future. Keiji Hirayama said that the event also welcomed the elevation of the comprehensive strategic partnership between Viet Nam and Japan. Shimonishi Kiyoshi, Deputy Head of the Japanese General Consulate in a Nang, said many cultural exchanges and activities have been held in Viet Nam, including a Nang, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the diplomatic ties between the two countries. A painting and writing competition on Japan was organised among students at schools in the city. Free community concerts by the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra (JPO) Five, as well as the annual Japanese Cultural Day in a Nang, were held, he said. a Nang was a stop for the Japanese Crown Prince Akishino and Crown Princess Kiko as part of their official trip to Viet Nam. The city is home to 228 investment projects from Japan, worth US$1.04 billion, creating 40,000 jobs for provinces in central Viet Nam. a Nang has been calling for stronger and deeper investment from Japanese businesses in Kisarazu, Yokohama, Osaka, Chiba, and Kanagawa, in Japan. More than 300 students from the a Nang-based private university have been employed by Japanese companies for work and study in Japan since 2017. Nine cities in Japan, including Fukuoka, Yokohama, Maebashi, Chiba, Shizuoka, Tokyo, Tottori, and Nagasaki, and 82 Japanese businesses, have inked cooperation deals for human resources training and employment from central Viet Nam. The a Nang Mikazuki Japanese Resort & Spa, which was put into operation in Lien Chieu district, has been seen as the largest investment from Japan in a Nang. Four prefectures from Japan, including Kisarazu, Kawasaki, Sakai, and Yokohama, have inked friendships and cooperation with a Nang, and the annual Viet Nam-Japan Cultural Exchange Day has been organised in a Nang since 2014. Japan upgraded its Consulate Office in a Nang City to a General Consulate just a year after it was founded in 2020. VNS HCM CITY Six outstanding Italian movies are being screened at the Italian Film Festival 2023 held in HCM City until November 8. The festival is organised by the Consulate General of Italy in HCM City in coordination with the Asian Film Festival in Rome, COLAB Vietnam, and CGV Cinema, to offer Vietnamese audiences a glimpse into contemporary Italian cinema. Italian Consul General Enrico Padula said, Italian cinema has always been highly appreciated in Viet Nam for its artistic qualities and as a window into its society, past and present. This film festival offers HCM City audiences the latest movies coming from Italy, well representing the contemporary evolution of its cinema. The screening features one comedy, three drama and two crime action movies, some of which have won accolades at prestigious festivals. The films are curated by Antonio Termenini, Artistic Director of the Asian Film Festival in Rome, who will join the audiences of each film in Q&A sessions. The works tell the tales of urban life, depicting modern Italian society in the face of new challenges while also trying to connect with and maintain its age-old traditional heritage. The award-winning drama Leonora Addio directed by Paolo Taviani recounts the daring adventure of Pirandellos ashes and the eventful journey of the urn from Rome to Agrigento. The film won the FIPRESCI (the International Federation of Film Critics) Prize at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival in 2022. Giulia Louise Steigerwalts September is a journey of three characters who realize that the life they find themselves in is not the one they had dreamed of. The film earned Steigerwalt Best New Director awards at the annual David di Donatello Awards given out by the Academy of Italian Cinema in 2023, and the Silver Ribbon Awards by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists in 2022. The crime action series Diabolik (2021) and Diabolik Ginko Attacks (2022) by directors Antonio Manetti and Marco Manetti are set in the fictional state of Clerville in the late 1960s. The films follow a battle between master thief Diabolik and his accomplice Eva Kant with inspector Ginko, who tries to stop his evil plans. Meanwhile, Francesca Archibugis drama The Hummingbird (2022) is about the life of fateful coincidences, loss, and loves of the male protagonist Marco Carrera, or the hummingbird, based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Sandro Veronesi. Another drama, The Return Of Casanova (2023) directed by Gabriele Salvatores, tells the story of an experienced and acclaimed director at the end of his career, who has no intention of accepting his own decline. All screenings will start at 7pm at CGV Ly Chinh Thang at 83 Ly Chinh Thang in District 3. Admission is free. VNS The United States has intensified its response following a series of attacks by Houthi rebels on three commercial vessels in the Red Sea. These incidents, which involved Iran-backed militants, have prompted the US to consider all appropriate responses as tensions escalate in the region, as per Politico. US Destroyer Engages Houthi Drones in Defensive Action On Sunday, the USS Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, engaged in defensive action by shooting down three aerial drones launched by the Houthi rebels. This response, as reported by US Central Command, follows the distress calls from the targeted commercial vessels. This incident marks a significant rise in hostilities, being the second attack on the USS Carney by the Houthis within two weeks amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. The Pentagon, acknowledging the situation, stated they are monitoring the developments and will provide further information as it becomes available. These attacks, which lasted for nearly five hours, did not result in any damage to the US warship or injuries to its crew. The Houthi rebels, taking credit for these attacks, have been increasingly aggressive in the region. They have been targeting not only commercial vessels but also directly engaging with US naval forces. This includes the recent shooting down of a US MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Red Sea. Former Ambassador to Iraq, Nathan Sales, emphasized on Fox News the critical role of Iran in these attacks. He stressed the need for a robust US military response to counter these threats, suggesting that actions should target not only the Houthi proxies but also their Iranian backers. US Central Command has confirmed multiple attacks from Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen, funded by Iran. These incidents pose a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security, endangering the lives of various countries, according to Washington Examiner. Read Also: Ukraine Investigates Ukrainian POW Execution Allegations Against Russia US Considers Houthi Terrorists, USS Mason Attacked Sales also discussed the possibility of re-designating the Houthis as a terrorist organization, a status removed shortly after President Biden took office. Meanwhile, the USS Mason, another US Navy destroyer, was involved in a confrontation off the coast of Yemen. The destroyer responded to a distress call from a hijacked tanker in the Gulf of Aden, leading to the surrender of the attackers. Hours later, the USS Mason was targeted by two ballistic missiles from Houthi-controlled Yemen, underscoring the severity of the situation. The Biden administration is considering re-adding the Houthis to the terrorist organization list in response to their recent actions, including the seizure of the cargo ship Galaxy Leader and targeting civilians. This consideration comes as a shift from the early decision in Biden's presidency to lift the designation, which was initially aimed at facilitating humanitarian aid delivery to Yemen. This sequence of Houthi rebel assaults, their deliberate targeting of United States naval forces, and Iran's participation serve to underscore the intricate and intensifying geopolitical situation in the Middle East. Presently, the United States is confronted with the task of formulating a strategic approach that not only mitigates these perils but also maneuvers through the intricate geopolitical intricacies of the area, Mail Online reported. Related Article: Ukraine's NATO Membership Being Finalized, But Recommendations for Kyiv's Needed Reforms Still Under Discussion @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. HA NOI The first high-level meeting among the National Assemblies (NA) of Cambodia, Laos, and Viet Nam (CLV), to be held in Vientiane in the next few days, aims to enhance the friendship, solidarity, and comprehensive cooperation among the three countries, including their legislative bodies, Vice Chairwoman of the Lao NA Sounthone Xayachak said. In a recent interview granted to the Vietnam News Agency in the capital city of Vientiane, Laos, Vice Chairwoman of the Lao NA Sounthone Xayachak stated that it is an honour for the Lao NA to host the first high-level meeting, an important event in the histories of the three NAs. Since 2009, the three NAs have rotationally held annual committee-level meetings such as those among the committees for external relations; defence - security; and planning, finance, and auditing. At the sixth session of the committees for external relations in Laos in 2018, they agreed to hold their meeting biennially. From October 17 to 21, 2022, the three committees for external relations held a consultation to discuss the organisation of a high-level meeting among the three NAs. Also last year, the three NA leaders signed a joint statement approving the upgrade of the committee-level meeting to the one at the NA chairperson level. The official said the coming high-level meeting is intended to promote the NAs role in supervising, encouraging, and stepping up the implementation of the cooperation agreements, programmes, and projects signed among the CLV Governments, along with the multilateral deals to which the three countries are parties. It will boost the sharing of information, experience, and lessons about activities and the roles of the NAs. The event will also discuss and integrate the targets of the CLV Development Triangle Area into socio-economic development plans of the countries and their localities through the state budget allocation and the mobilisation of investment from domestic sources and international development partners to the Development Triangle Area and others. The meeting, which will focus on strengthening the parliaments role in promoting comprehensive cooperation among Cambodia, Laos, and Viet Nam, will look into three cooperation fields, namely politics - diplomacy; economy, culture, and society; and defence -security, she continued. Suggesting measures for enhancing cooperation to boost the countries economic integration to secure sustainable development, the Vice Chairwoman of the Lao NA stated that the three NAs should work together to accelerate the implementation of the cooperation agreements, programmes, and projects signed among the CLV Governments, as well as the multilateral deals to which their countries are parties. The parliaments need to keep strengthening defence - security cooperation to guarantee borders of peace, friendship, and sustainable development cooperation. They should also continue encouraging the legislators of the provinces located in the Development Triangle Area to share opinions and monitor and report outstanding and urgent problems to the three countries NAs and Governments. The official pointed out the need to establish NA friendship committees at the local level in the CLV Development Triangle Area and rotationally host annual meetings to review the implementation of cooperation agreements in the area. Besides, it is also necessary to step up mutual visits by leaders of governmental and legislative agencies to turn the Development Triangle Area into an area of peace, friendship, and sustainable development cooperation. Ahead of NA Chairman Vuong inh Hue's visit to Laos to attend the first Cambodia-Laos-Viet Nam (CLV) Parliamentary Summit and pay a working visit to the country from December 4 to 7, Vietnamese Ambassador to Laos Nguyen Ba Hung stated that the upgrade of the high-level meeting has helped perfect the cooperation mechanism among the three NAs. In addition, it has enhanced the mechanism for meetings and working sessions between the leaders of the three countries. This is particularly unique and perhaps unparalleled in the solidarity relations among the three Indochinese countries. Upgrading the conference to a meeting mechanism among the three NAs has also met the requirements and demands of the new situation. The upgrade of the committee-level meeting to the one at the NA chairperson level has brought significant importance for the NAs, he stressed. It contributes effectively to implementing the foreign policies of each country, including promoting the trilateral cooperation through parliamentary channels. It helps strengthen the friendship and comprehensive cooperation, promoting the exchange and sharing of information and legislative supervision experience among the three NAs. It enhances monitoring of the implementation of cooperation agreements and projects signed between the governments of CLV, as well as coordinating the implementation of multilateral agreements among the three member countries. And finally, it strengthens exchanges on ways to coordinate activities to mobilise funding from internal and external partners in the CLV region for the implementation of projects in the CLV Development Triangle Area and other priority areas of cooperation for the three countries, he said. VNS VIENTIANE Chairman of the National Assembly Vuong inh Hue arrived in Vientiane on Monday, beginning his working trip in Laos to attend the first Cambodia Laos Viet Nam (CLV) Parliamentary Summit from December 4 to 7. The trip was made at the invitation of Chairman of the Lao National Assembly Saysomphone Phomvihane. During his stay in Laos, the Vietnamese top legislator will have meetings with high-ranking leaders of the Lao Party, State and National Assembly to discuss measures enhancing the bilateral cooperation in the coming time. He will also join in several economic and cultural events, including meetings with Lao people who used to study in Viet Nam, and the Vietnamese businesses and Vietnamese community in Laos. Following activities in Laos, the Vietnamese NA leader will attend the parliamentary summit of Cambodia, Laos and Viet Nam (CLV), with three topics covering foreign affairs, economy, culture-society, and defence-security. The Vietnamese top legislators attendance in the first summit aims to enhance the friendship, solidarity, and comprehensive cooperation among the three parliaments for their countries sustainable development in the CLV Development Triangle Area and the three economies connectivity. At the 43rd General Assembly of the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (AIPA) in November 2022, NA Chairman Hue and his counterparts Heng Samrin of Cambodia and Saysomphone Phomvihane of Laos signed a joint statement on establishing the CLV Parliamentary Summit mechanism, held biennially and co-chaired by the three NA chairpersons. The establishment of the parliamentary summit is a move that helps concretise the outcomes of the high-level meeting among Party leaders of Cambodia, Laos and Viet Nam in September 2021. The first summit in Laos is a milestone in the cooperation history of the three parliaments, helping elevate the collaboration to the highest level, and contributing to consolidating and enhancing the traditional relations and special solidarity among the three Parties, States and peoples. VNS HA NOI The top legislators of Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia will discuss measures to strengthen the parliament's role in promoting the cooperation, solidarity and political partnership among the three countries during the Cambodia-Laos-Vietnam (CLV) Parliamentary Summit in Laos, according to deputy head of the National Assembly (NA) Committee for External Relations Le Thu Ha. In order to foster collaboration among the three countries in the parliament channel alongside the Party and State channels, during the 43rd General Assembly of ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (AIPA-43) in November 2022, Vietnamese NA Chairman Vuong inh Hue, President of the Cambodian NA Samdech Heng Samrin and Lao NA Chairman Saysomphone Phomvihane signed a joint statement on the establishment of the biennial CLV Parliamentary Summit mechanism to be co-chaired by Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodian top legislators. Ha stressed that the organisation of the first CLV Parliamentary Summit marked an important milestone in the history of cooperation among CLV parliaments and the elevation of the partnership among the three legislatures to the highest level, contributing to reinforcing and promoting the special traditional solidarity, close attachment and mutual support among the three Parties, States and peoples. She added that the event also affirmed the determination of the CLV parliaments in further deepening their partnership and cooperation, benefiting the people of each country. Sending out the message of peace, friendship, solidarity and cooperation for prosperity and sustainable development, the top legislators of the three countries would deliver important speeches on strengthening the role of CLV parliaments in beefing up cooperation, partnership, solidarity and prosperity among the three countries, she said. According to Ha, the summit will listen to a report by the Coordination Committee for the CLV Development Triangle area and another report on field survey results in provinces in the Development Triangle area of three CLV countries, to be presented by the NA delegations of three CLV countries. CLV Committees on Politics-Diplomacy, Economy-Culture-Society and Defence-Security Cooperation will convene their meetings within the summits framework, with the participation of Government agencies and representatives from localities in the CLV Development Triangle area. The CLV Parliament Summit is scheduled to issue a joint statement demonstrating the political determination and commitments of leaders of the three legislatures in further expanding and deepening their partnership, thus promoting the comprehensive cooperation of the three countries in all areas of politics, culture, economy, external relations, security and defence for the socio-economic growth in each country and the common interest of the people in the CLV Development Triangle area, said Ha. The deputy head of the Vietnamese NA Committee for External Relations said that as the initiator of the upgrade of the CLV committee-level conference mechanism to the CLV Parliament Summit, the Vietnamese NA had actively proposed ideas and coordinated closely with the first summit's host - the Lao NA, to build the agenda and decide main discussion topics of the summit as well as CLV committees. The Vietnamese NA had also actively engaged in the drafting of the joint statement of the summit, giving many ideas to complete the documents in a constructive, goodwill and responsible spirit, contributing to promoting consensus, she said. Ha expressed her belief that the summit would be a success, laying the official foundation for multilateral cooperation at the highest level among the CLV parliaments, thus continuing to develop the political ties among the three countries, contributing to reinforcing solidarity, cooperation and mutual support among them, and bolstering the bilateral relations between Viet Nam and Cambodia, Viet Nam and Laos, and Cambodia and Laos at the same time. Regarding NA Chairman Hues visit to Laos on the occasion of the summit, Ha said that the NA leader was scheduled to hold meetings and talks with leaders of the Party, State and NA of Laos to inform them on the situation of Viet Nam, the outcomes of the NA sixth session as well as the countrys external relations and major orientations for the future, and discuss measures to further strengthen bilateral ties in the coming time. The meetings would also mention regional and international issues of shared concern. The NA Chairman Hue would also meet Lao alumni and students who studied in Viet Nam and the Vietnamese businesses and community in the neighbouring country, she added. VNS HA NOI Vietnamese Minister of Defence General Phan Van Giang and his Malaysian counterpart Dato Seri Utama Haji Mohamad Bin Haji Hasan had official talks in Ha Noi on Monday, reviewing defence cooperation and setting out orientations for the future. Minister Giang stressed the significance of this visit by the Malaysian defence chief, stating it had practical contributions to the celebration of the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries as well as promised to bring new impetus, and foster further development of defence ties between Viet Nam and Malaysia. Viet Nam and Malaysia are friendly neighbours in the Southeast Asian region, sharing many similarities in culture and history. Both are active and responsible members of ASEAN, providing each other with mutual support on important international issues. The two countries are actively implementing the Action Programme to Implement the Strategic Partnership for the 2021-25 period in all areas, including defence cooperation. Mohamad Hasan said that this was his first official visit to Viet Nam in his capacity as defence minister of Malaysia, expressing his belief that the defence relationship has been on a positive development trajectory on the basis of the Memorandum of Understanding on Defence Cooperation signed in 2008, particularly since the establishment of the two countries' Strategic Partnership in 2015. The Malaysian defence minister expressed his desire for the defence relationship to reach new heights in the future. Both sides agreed that defence cooperation was assuming an increasingly important role in the Strategic Partnership, receiving attention from both countries' leaderships. Some highlights in the bilateral cooperation could include delegation exchanges, robust cooperation between the armed forces, capacity training, consultation and collaboration at regional and international security forums. The two defence chiefs noted that the potential and space for cooperation between the two sides were still vast. They suggested continuing to implement the signed documents and agreements effectively, with a focus on areas such as increased contact, delegation exchange, early establishment of consultation-dialogue mechanisms, enhanced collaboration between the armed forces, as well as in other areas of needs such as defence industry, logistics, military medicine, search and rescue, and mutual support in security forums, especially at ADMM and ADMM+. During the talks, both sides also shared views on the global and regional situation and issues of common concern. They concurred that amid the complex global and regional situation, ASEAN-led mechanisms continued to play a central role in the region, promoting dialogue and cooperation among member countries as well as external partners for the peace, stability, and development of the region. Both sides also underscored the importance of maintaining peace, security, safety, freedom of navigation, and aviation in the East Sea (known internationally as the South China Sea). They stressed the need to earnestly implement the Declaration of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC) and actively work towards early conclusion of negotiations for a substantive and effective Code of Conduct in the South China Sea (COC) in accordance with international law, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. On this occasion, Minister Giang invited Minister Hasan, along with the leadership of the Ministry of Defence and the Armed Forces of Malaysia, to attend and showcase at the second Viet Nam International Defence Exhibition scheduled for the end of 2024. At the end of the talks, the two ministers signed a Memorandum of Understanding on defence cooperation. VNS HA NOI The Vietnamese Party, State, Government and people highly value the stable, sustainable and long-term development of strategic partnership with Malaysia, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh told Malaysian Minister of Defence Dato Seri Utama Haji Mohamad Bin Haji Hasan during a reception in Ha Noi on Monday. PM Chinh believed that Malaysia will successfully implement its New Industrial Master Plan 2030, elevating the country to a high-income nation with an increasing position on the international arena. He described Malaysia as Viet Nam's second largest investor in ASEAN, ranking 10th out of 140 countries and territories investing in the country, with a total capital of US$13 billion. Viet Nam now has 21 investment projects in Malaysia with a total registered capital of over $850 million. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, two-way trade hit nearly $15 billion last year, up 17 per cent annually. The PM expressed his wish to further deepen bilateral strategic partnership in all areas, including the exchange of all-level delegations, investment, trade, culture, education-training, tourism, and people-to-people exchange. He suggested Malaysia assist Viet Nam in having yellow card warning lifted, developing the Halal industry, and opening the door for Vietnamese Halal products. Informing his guest about Viet Nam's foreign policy and the "four nos" defence policy, he affirmed that the Vietnamese Government always creates the most favourable conditions for the development of cooperation between the two defence ministries. The Malaysian Minister of Defence affirmed that Viet Nam is an important partner of Malaysia in the region and the only country in ASEAN with which Malaysia has established a strategic partnership. Briefing the host about the outcomes of his talks with the Vietnamese Defence Minister, he said in the near future, both sides will increase the exchange of delegations, soon establish mechanisms for consultation and dialogue, strengthen coordination among military forces, step up collaboration in areas where both sides have strengths and needs such as training, defence industry, logistics, medical services and disaster relief while offering active consultation and mutual support at global and regional security forums. In reply, PM Chinh suggested the two defence ministries continue working closely together, for the sake of peace, cooperation and development of each country, the region and the world. Both sides need to continue realising the signed cooperation documents fully and effectively, enhance collaboration in areas of their strength and potential, support the law enforcement agencies at sea to strengthen information exchange and crime prevention, cooperate in training and assist each other's fishing vessels and fishermen in distress at sea, explore and expand potential cooperation areas such as defence industry, logistics, and military medicine, Chinh said. He wished that, as two active and influential members of ASEAN, Malaysia and Viet Nam would continue to support and propose practical initiatives and actions to uphold the internal solidarity and central role of ASEAN in the regional security architecture. He called for the effective implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea (DOC), toward early conclusion of a substantive and effective Code of Conduct in the East Sea (COC), guaranteeing the security, safety, freedom of overflight and navigation, the settlement of disputes by peaceful means in line with international law, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and the interests of the parties, contributing to creating an environment of peace, stability, cooperation and development in the East Sea (known internationally as the South China Sea). VNS VIENTIANE National Assembly Chairman Vuong inh Hue had a meeting with General Secretary of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) Central Committee and President of Laos Thongloun Sisoulith in Vientiane on Monday, as part of his trip to attend the first Cambodia-Laos-Viet Nam (CLV) Parliamentary Summit and visit Laos. Hue took the occasion to propose that Viet Nam and Laos closely coordinate and seriously implement their high-level agreements, and well prepare for meetings between their high-ranking leaders and for the 46th Meeting of the Viet Nam-Laos Inter-Governmental Committee. Highly appreciating recent outcomes in the Viet Nam-Laos relations, which has seen significant contributions of their legislative bodies, the Lao leader recommended the nations continue to coordinate in resolving issues remained and make breakthroughs in their economy-trade-investment cooperation, transforming these areas in terms of quality to be commensurate with their political relationship. He said the sides need suitable policy mechanisms to boost their bilateral trade and investment and connect their economies. Sisoulith hoped that Viet Nam would continue to encourage its enterprises to expand investment and business in Laos, prioritising such sectors as energy, transport connectivity, and minerals. The two leaders affirmed Viet Nam and Laos will continue their close coordination and mutual support at international and regional forums, especially the United Nations and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), as well as sub-regional cooperation mechanisms. Hue stated that Viet Nam always supports and is ready to provide maximum assistance for Laos to successfully assume its 2024 role as the chair of ASEAN and ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, helping enhance the countrys role and position in the region and the world. VNS HCM CITY Seeing strong demand for human resources in the semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) technology industry in Viet Nam, Viet Nam National University-HCM City (VNU-HCM) targets to train about 1,500 engineers and 500 master's degree students in IC design by 2030. VNU-HCM chancellor Vu Hai Quan said the university had set a goal of providing in-depth training in IC design to meet the need for high-quality human resources for the development of the semiconductor IC technology industry in the country and the world. This target helps affirm VNU-HCMs position domestically and internationally, contributing to the implementation of the universitys goal to be among the leading higher education institutions in Asia, he said. Accordingly, its member universities will train and grant industrial and international certifications in IC design to around 15,000 engineers over the next seven years. Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh has recently emphasised the need to increase investment in the development of human resources for the research of semiconductor IC technology in Viet Nam. Many local universities have begun enrolling and training students in IC design and IC Technology majors to meet labour market demand in this field. However, training human resources in this field requires the schools to have good facilities, modern laboratories, training programmes, experienced teaching staff, and cooperation networks. Among member universities of VNU-HCM, the HCM City University of Technology has been a pioneer in training the semiconductor IC design industry for over 20 years, providing about 300 students with expertise related to IC design to the labour market each year. So far, more than 6,000 students have graduated in this field from the university. The HCM City University of Technology Principal Mai Thanh Phong said the semiconductor IC supply chain was divided into four stages: design, production, packaging and testing, and equipment manufacturing. Viet Nam has many advantages to participate deeply in IC design for the global semiconductor IC supply chain, which accounts for 53 per cent of the added value of a product, he said. Many big IC companies, such as Samsung, LG, Sharp and Foxconn, were reported to be planning to expand in Viet Nam, creating a demand for high-quality semiconductor IC human resources and huge opportunities for the country. Therefore, Viet Nam needed stronger human resources to serve the growing IC demand and create greater investment opportunities. To meet this urgent demand, the HCM City University of Technology stayed ahead of the world's science and technology development trends, Phong said. The universitys vision is to become an excellent scientific research and training centre that plays a pioneering role in leading the domestic semiconductor IC field, according to Phong. Its training programmes in IC are developed and taught by a team of 200 lecturers from the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Department of Materials Technology. All lecturers graduated with PhD degrees from countries with advanced semiconductor IC industries such as the US, Germany, France, Australia, Japan and the Republic of Korea. In the upcoming 2024-25 academic year, the university will officially begin two new majors, IC design and Semiconductor IC. Graduates from the university with bachelor's degrees in IC Design will be able to find a job at most IC design companies both locally and abroad. The Semiconductor IC major at the post-graduate level will provide advanced knowledge and skills in designing and manufacturing ICs. The majors are expected to supply high-quality human resources for the semiconductor IC industry," Phong added. Solutions Huynh Phu Minh Cuong, deputy head of the Faculty of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at the HCM City University of Technology, said training high-quality IC design engineers required modern laboratories, good training programmes, experienced lecturers, and collaboration between domestic and international training institutions. Since 2013, the university set up a lab for microchip and high-frequency systems which specialises in the design and testing of semiconductor ICs, with modern equipment and a research team of about 40 people. The research team of the lab successfully designed the three microchips of CMOS RF DVB-T2 TUNER, attached with the university logo, which had been manufactured in Taiwan (China). Everyone is working hard to show the skills of the universitys professional team and the effectiveness of the training programmes here, he said. The HCM City University of Technology has established cooperation relationships in training and scientific research in the field of semiconductor IC with many famous universities in the world such as the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Texas A&M University in the US, and KAIST in the Republic of Korea. The school has also cooperated with large organisations and businesses such as Marvell Technology and Synopsys, and received copyright sponsorship of specialised software systems from Synopsys and Cadence - the world's two largest companies providing IC design tools. To achieve the goal of in-depth training in IC design, Vu Hai Quan said it would be necessary to invest in a system of laboratories in both the north and south of the country for common use by universities in research and training in IC design. Through these laboratories, Viet Nam can develop a number of innovative startups in the field of semiconductor IC technology, he said. He proposed that the Government soon issue a strategy for developing the semiconductor technology industry, including investment resources for training and research. He also recommended policies on promoting links and cooperation between universities and businesses; international cooperation; and cooperation with universities around the world to expand and develop advanced training programmes on IC design. VNS GUANGZHOU Deputy General Director of the Vietnam News Agency (VNA) oan Tuyet Nhung is leading the agencys delegation to the fifth World Media Summit (WMS) that opened in Guangzhou, the capital of Chinas Guangdong Province, on December 3. Addressing a discussion on the media response to opportunities and challenges from digital technologies, Nhung said that besides the opportunities that digital transformation brings about, press agencies also face a strong influence from information on social networks, even the risk of being led by fake news and lack of verification. In the fight against fake news, news agencies needed to assert their role in leading the mainstream information flow, providing accurate, verified and fast information with large coverage, thereby regaining public trust in official information, she said, stressing that news agencies must increase their presence on media platforms to dominate cyberspace and, at the same time, counter false information and raise public awareness, especially among the young people. The official said that the VNA was developing into a national key multimedia agency. "The agency constantly promotes the application of technology and artificial intelligence in all stages of information production in order to reduce human resources and costs, while diversifying distribution channels to improve information efficiency. At the same time, the VNA is one of the leading press agencies in digital transformation in Viet Nam with modern and impressive information products, and also a pioneer in the fight against fake news and false news with many creative initiatives and solutions," she said. Nhung underlined that in order to seize opportunities and effectively respond to the challenges caused by digital transformation, press and media agencies must constantly be innovative and creative, while increasing investment in technological resources. Journalists must constantly improve and update new skills, she said, adding that the exchange, coordination and sharing of experiences among press agencies and media organisations on a global scale is extremely necessary. On the sidelines of the summit, she had a meeting with Vice President of Xinhua News Agency Yuan Bingzhong, during which the two sides agreed to further strengthen cooperation between the two news agencies, and to continue effectively implementing the professional collaboration agreement so as to promote the traditional friendship and comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership between Viet Nam and China. Themed "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development", the event draws 450 delegates representing 197 mainstream media agencies, research institutes, State agencies and international organisations across the globe. Hu Heping, executive deputy head of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, called on media outlets to promote exchange and cooperation to contribute their wisdom and strength to building a community with a shared future for humanity and building a better world. Meanwhile, Fu Hua, President of Chinas Xinhua News Agency, called on media agencies to build consensus and boost confidence in development, uphold objectivity and truth to enhance medias credibility, and deepen exchanges and collaboration to contribute to building an open, inclusive, clean and beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal security and common prosperity. Participants also discussed a wide range of issues, including the role of the media in promoting growth and human security, as well as the media response to opportunities and challenges from new technologies and markets in the digital era as well as global media cooperation for a better future. The event will take place until December 8. VNS HCM CITY HCM City's transport department and HCM City-based private Nutifood Nutrition JSC on Monday signed an agreement on the company's sponsorship of VN1 trillion (US$41.2 million) for the city's pedestrian bridge over Sai Gon River. Chairman of the HCM People's Committee Phan Van Mai, at the signing ceremony, stated that this was an important and iconic project for the southern city, which promises to be a popular "check-in site" for residents and tourists alike. According to the agreement, Nutifood will sponsor the entire construction cost of the project based on the approved principles, planning, and design by the city. After the signing ceremony, HCM City People's Committee will hand over the site and design plans to Nutifood. Tran Bao Minh, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of Nutifood, said the company's funding of the pedestrian bridge across the Sai Gon River was a gesture of gratitude to the people and the city. It would also serve as motivation for the company to strive even harder. Truong Trung Kien, Deputy Director of the HCM City Department of Planning and Architecture, said the pedestrian bridge is approximately 500m long, stretching from Bach ang Park (District 1) to the central square of the new Thu Thiem urban area (Thu uc City). The bridge is designed in the shape of a nipa palm leaf, a familiar image of the Southern region in its pastoral past. The bridge will also have a lane for cyclists and people with disabilities. In emergencies, ambulances can also move onto the bridge. "This pedestrian bridge connecting the two banks of the Saigon River is not only a transportation facility, a passage between the two banks, but it is also an architectural work, a highlight of the Saigon River, which is already a highlight of HCM City," the city's leader said. HCM City People's Committee Chairman also suggested that relevant departments and agencies recognise this as a "symbolic project of the city" and participate in ensuring that the construction process meets high technical, safety, and artistic standards. All relevant parties should urgently prepare for the groundbreaking ceremony before April 30, 2025, commemorating 50 years of the liberation of the South and the reunification of the country. VNS The investment capital flow from China into Vietnam has increased sharply, and the demand for industrial real estate, especially in the country's northern region, is sought after. Commenting on the trend of China increasing investment in Vietnam, experts say that Vietnam is holding many advantages to attract foreign investment. Mr. John Campbell - Deputy Director, Industrial Services Department, Savills Vietnam, said that China's leading solar energy companies are expanding production in Vietnam, not only to penetrate the Eastern market. South Asia, but also use it as a "springboard" to participate in the European and American markets. China is increasing investment in production in Vietnam. Over the past 5 years, China has always been one of the top 5 countries with the largest investment in Vietnam. Data compiled by the General Statistics Office show that in 2011, China's registered capital (including Taiwan) was 1.3 billion US dollars. By 2017, China's registered capital increased 2.7 times, an average annual increase of about 18%. In particular, since the US-China trade war broke out, Chinese investment in Vietnam has increased sharply. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, China still registered to invest heavily in Vietnam and always ranked 3rd and 4th among countries and territories investing in Vietnam. According to the latest data released by the General Statistics Office on November 29, Singapore is the investor out of 70 countries and territories with newly licensed investment projects in Vietnam in the 11 months of 2023, with the largest investment with 3.31 billion USD, accounting for 20.2% of total newly registered capital. Next is Hong Kong (China), with 3.15 billion USD, accounting for 19.2%; China, 3.06 billion USD, accounting for 18.7%; Taiwan (China) 2.05 billion USD, accounting for 12.5%. Regarding investment volume, by the end of September, data from the Ministry of Planning and Investment showed that China had invested 2.92 billion USD in Vietnam, ranking second after Singapore (3.98 billion USD). Up to now, Chinese investors have invested in Vietnam in over 4,032 projects, with a total registered capital of over 26 billion USD, according to Cong Thuong newspaper. The reason why Chinese investors flock to Vietnam According to a report just released by Savills Vietnam, the demand for solar energy product production is increasing in Vietnam, especially in the Northern region. Trina Solar, a large corporation in Chinese solar batteries, is the largest investor in Yen Binh Industrial Park, Thai Nguyen province, with two factories operating steadily. Trina also proposed implementing phase 3 of the Energy Development Plant Project in Thai Nguyen with an expected investment of 420 million USD. This is the Group's largest investment abroad in the field of photovoltaics. The Banking Times also cited the explanation of Mr. John Campbell - Deputy Director, Industrial Services Department, Savills Vietnam, on why Vietnam attracts Chinese businesses, especially companies in the field of solar energy production. According to Mr. John Campbell, the first is the geographical location advantage. Vietnam is adjacent to China, creating favorable conditions for transporting goods, raw materials and production lines. In addition, Vietnam's northern key economic region has a geographical location close to China, with the advantage of competitive industrial land prices compared to the southern region, thereby creating attraction for the provinces in the region for Chinese investors. Mr. John Campbell noted that Vietnam's high level of economic integration is remarkable. In particular, Vietnam also possesses an abundant labor force, including a highly skilled workforce with competitive labor costs. According to experts, Chinese enterprises are expanding production in Vietnam, not only to penetrate the Southeast Asian market but also to use it as a springboard to enter the European and American markets more easily. Hunting for industrial real estate Deputy Director of the Industrial Services Department, Savills Vietnam, said the recorded demand from businesses manufacturing electronic and solar energy products is huge. To meet the increasing requirements of manufacturing units, many investors in Vietnam are gradually improving the quality of construction of their industrial parks and ready-built factories. Also: Bright prospects for Vietnams industrial real estate market Vietnam News - Latest Updates and World Insights | Vietreader.com CNCTech is one of the most active investors, with significant investments in 6 provinces across Vietnam with 19 industrial parks spread over 5,487 hectares. The most prominent is the project in Vinh Phuc. Currently, industrial parks nationwide generally have high occupancy rates (over 80%), of which the occupancy rate in key northern provinces reaches 83% and 91% in key southern provinces. Ready-built factories and warehouses also recorded an occupancy rate of 83% nationwide. Therefore, experts note that finding vacant and suitable premises is a challenge for manufacturing businesses, and it is essential to receive support from experts and investors with a clear process. Campbell emphasized that the industrial real estate market is changing with the participation of more investors. As the manufacturing and logistics industry grows, products such as prefabricated factories, warehouses, multi-story facilities, combined facilities, temperature-controlled buildings, and custom construction become increasingly diverse. Therefore, industrial parks and ready-built real estate developers should focus on developing high-value-added services and incentives to attract the best businesses. Experts also say that the Government needs to continue investing in infrastructure and improving skills for Vietnam's workforce to improve productivity and efficiency. The Vietnamese government must also promote supporting industries and strengthen the supply chain. Simplifying investment and land use procedures and promoting digitalization are also key issues. Also read: Supply chain transformation: Opportunities for Vietnamese businesses Vietnam News - Latest Updates and World Insights | Vietreader.com Similarly, CBRE recently noted that in the first 9 months of 2023, investors from China, Vietnam, Japan, the United States and the European Union sought the industrial real estate market. Actively searched for industrial land and warehouses in the Vietnamese market, accounting for about 70 - 80% of rental inquiries to CBRE in the Southern and Northern regions. VnEconomy quoted CBRE's forecast as saying that in the next two years, industrial land rental prices in Vietnam are expected to increase by 6-10%/year in both the North and the South. Positive demand from industry groups and tenant nationalities helps boost rental price growth in many localities. Additionally, ready-built warehouse rental prices are forecast to increase slightly by 2-4%/year in the next 2 years. Thanks to the advantages of an export-oriented economy with many supporting policies, strategic geographical location, and preferential operating costs, experts consider the Vietnamese market a popular destination for investment options. Chancellor Rishi Sunak is reportedly taking action regarding the persistent challenge of asylum seekers arriving in the UK through small boats. It is alleged that Sunak intends to allocate an additional 15 million to secure a treaty with Rwanda in an effort to resolve this matter, as per to Independent. Controversy Over Rwanda Asylum Funding Increase This funding comes on top of the 140 million already provided to Rwanda as part of the plan for the East African nation to accept asylum seekers deported from the UK. The move follows the Supreme Court's ruling that the previous plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was unlawful, prompting the government to seek alternative solutions. Home Secretary James Cleverly aims to unveil a new Rwanda treaty in the coming days. Downing Street defended the decision to provide additional funding, stating that it represents value for money in the long run compared to the daily cost of housing small boat arrivals in hotels, which amounts to 8 million per day. The situation has sparked debate and controversy, with some expecting legal and political challenges. According to sources, Chancellor Sunak is prepared to call a snap election if obstacles continue to impede progress on the issue. Former Home Secretary Lord Howard supported Sunak's commitment to the Rwanda plan, emphasizing its importance in addressing the asylum seeker challenge. Chancellor Sunak, while en route to the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, asserted that getting the Rwanda plan right will lead to substantial long-term savings, although specific details were not provided. He expressed confidence that the revised plan complies with international obligations. The plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is a central component of Sunak's efforts to deter small boat crossings across the English Channel. Critics argue that the high daily cost of housing asylum seekers in hotels is due to lengthy application processes and restrictions on employment while awaiting status confirmation, according to The Sun. Read Also: Vladimir Putin Urges Russian Women To Have 8 or More Children as Russia's Population Decreases Amid Ongoing War With Ukraine Conservative MPs Split on Human Rights, Asylum The issue has divided Conservative MPs, with some advocating for tough legislation that includes clauses preventing judges from applying protections in the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to asylum cases. Others have called for the UK's withdrawal from the ECHR altogether. However, more than 20 Conservative MPs, including former senior cabinet minister Damian Green, have urged Sunak not to abandon the UK's human rights commitments. They emphasize the importance of defending the rule of law and upholding international obligations. Government lawyers have cautioned against instructing courts to ignore the ECHR, as it could open up legal challenges to deportation flights based on breaches of convention obligations. In response to these challenges, Prime Minister Boris Johnson expressed his determination to address the issue and stated that he won't allow a foreign court to block deportation flights. He emphasized that the government and the country are united in their position on this matter and underscored the need to find a solution to the ongoing asylum seeker situation. Sunak remains committed to implementing the Rwanda scheme as part of a comprehensive approach to resolving the small boat crossings issue, BBC reported. Related Article: Broadened Medicaid Coverage Expected to Help 600,000 of Adults in North Carolina @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Boehringer Ingelheim's animal health marks 15 years of success in Vietnam This milestone was celebrated with a special event attended by nearly 190 customers, highlighting the companys commitment to customer-centricity and collaboration in delivering first-in-class innovative solutions for the livestock and companion animal segments. Since its establishment in 2008, the animal health business in Vietnam has forged strong relationships and partnerships with its customers and business partners. Armin Wiesler, country managing director and head of Animal Health, Regional Operating Unit ASEAN, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand said, This anniversary serves as a testament to the unwavering trust and support of our customers and business partners. Their collaboration has been instrumental in our journey towards sustainable growth and enhanced healthcare for animals in Vietnam. Driven by the purpose of bringing Value through innovation, Boehringer Ingelheim has launched more than 40 animal health products over the past 15 years in Vietnam. Our portfolio includes vaccines, parasite-control products, and therapeutics complemented by diagnostics and monitoring platforms to help protect and treat disease in pets and livestock. Many of them became best-in-class brands, such as Parasiticides of the Frontline and Nexgard family as well as Recombitec vaccines in pets, Ingelvac PRRS MLV, Ingelvac CircoFLEX, Ingelvac MycoFLEX and the Enterisol vaccine range in swine, Vaxxitek, Newxxitec, PREVEXXION RN and Gallimune range of poultry vaccines. Armin Wiesler, country managing director and head of Animal Health, Regional Operating Unit ASEAN, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand Torsten Hardge, director of Animal Health, Boehringer Ingelheim Vietnam said, Innovation and our expertise in animal health are at the core of Boehringer Ingelheims business activities globally and in Vietnam. We are passionate about bringing cutting-edge innovations to our customers, and integrating smart digital technologies like Soundtalks which supports early detection of respiratory disease in pigs and introducing e-commerce solutions for convenient access to our pet products. As a result, we are positively impacting the lives of animals and humans in Vietnam. Apart from the relentless effort to bring innovative pharmaceutical solutions for humans and animals, Boehringer Ingelheim commits to contributing its expertise and heritage to make meaningful advances towards rabies elimination, especially in under-served communities. Through STOP Rabies programme in Vietnam, in collaboration with the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development in Duc Hue District People's Committee, 20,000 dogs and cats have been vaccinated against rabies since 2021 and are on track to eliminate dog-mediated rabies in the Long An province by 2025. In addition, 1,000 students have been educated about rabies and dog bite prevention, in efforts to raise awareness and knowledge about rabies in communities, especially among children. Working towards to carbon neutrality in our company operations by 2030, Boehringer Ingelheim Vietnam will continue to reduce our carbon footprint and operational waste of our solutions to mitigate the environmental impact of the business. Boehringer Ingelheim strengthens commitment to transforming lives in Vietnam The Vietnamese market holds significant potential as compared to other Southeast Asian countries and the region. Cyndy B. Galimpin, general manager of Boehringer Ingelheim Vietnam, discussed the company's accomplishments and its future with VIRs Bich Ngoc. Work continues on a rabies-free future Germany's Boehringer Ingelheim, along with Eco-Business, unveiled its 'STOP Rabies' whitepaper at the Federation of Asian Veterinary Association (FAVA) Congress on November 4 in Malaysia. Held alongside the 2023 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), the high-level forum was co-chaired by Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, and Ben Backwell, CEO of GWEC - an organisation that represents renewable energy developers responsible for 70 per cent of global wind power capacity. The business forum convened ministerial leaders, local authorities, international organisations, and experts in the offshore wind supply chain. Major wind power developers, potential renewable energy buyers, and top financial institutions also participated. Renewable energy is key in facilitating the green transition. Energy sourced from renewables is expected to increase from 28 per cent in 2021 to 69 per cent in 2030, accounting for 11,000GW. Among the renewable energy sources, offshore wind stands out as a provider of sustainable economic growth and jobs over the long term. Vietnam currently boasts a significant potential wind power capacity of 600GW. The country has an opportunity to unlock the economic prospects of renewable energy and fulfill its net-zero commitments through wind power development. The business forum facilitated discussions between domestic and international delegations to develop the financial and policy frameworks needed to accelerate Vietnam's green transition, especially in offshore wind development. The policies aim to unleash the country's wind energy potential, positioning the country as a top renewable energy supply chain hub and attracting significant private sector investments. Ben Backwell, CEO of GWEC said, "Offshore wind is a cost-effective and price-predictable renewable energy solution for countries planning their energy transition. GWEC recognises wind power's pivotal role in tackling climate change and energy security, and we applaud Vietnam's commitments to prioritise wind energy for sustainable economic growth and large-scale renewable energy generation." PM Chinh, currently leading a senior Vietnam's government delegation in Dubai, communicated the Vietnam's progress towards the net-zero target at COP28. Vietnam is participating in a political declaration on establishing the Just Energy Transition Partnership, and Power Development Plan VIII aims for 150GW and 573GW of energy capacity from all sources, requiring investments of $120 billion and $511 billion for power sources alone by 2030 and 2050, respectively. Collaboration between the Vietnamese government, developed countries, international organisations, and the global business community is essential to meet the country's renewable energy investment needs. GWEC is working closely with government ministries in Vietnam to push for the transition to wind energy. The organisation is also collaborating with the Vietnam Energy Partnership Group, the World Bank, and various other multilateral organisations and stakeholders. There were several recommendations proposed at the forum to encourage investment in Vietnam's green transition, including urging the government to prioritise the establishment of a clear framework for offshore wind. The need to establish an inter-ministerial committee dedicated to streamlining procedures for offshore wind projects was also suggested. This committee would facilitate collaboration within the government and play a crucial role in allocating sites for pilot projects in the offshore wind sector. Jim Andrew, executive vice president and chief sustainability officer of PepsiCo, said, "Allowing direct power purchase agreements would accelerate our transition to 100 per cent renewable electricity across our significant operation in Vietnam. We look forward to collaborating with the government and others to make this a reality." $6.7 billion in wind power investment in Vietnam at risk without COVID-19 relief The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) and the global wind industry is calling on the Vietnamese government to postpone the feed-in tariff (FiT) deadline for wind projects by at least six months as a COVID-19 relief measure for the wind sector in Vietnam. European corporations take part in growing Vietnam's green economy Regional business executives of leading European corporations in various sectors met with Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh at the Green Economy Forum and Exhibition (GEFE) 2022 on November 28 in Ho Chi Minh City. A wind turbine tower collapses in China According to the New Insight of Wind Power newswire in China, a serious accident occurred in the first week of November at the 600MW wind power project in Barkol Kazakh autonomous county - a part of Hami Prefecture in Xinjiang. What is your assessment of the role of green finance (GF) in Vietnams green growth strategy? Nguyen Ba Hung, principal country economist from the Asian Development Bank in Vietnam GF plays a crucial role in Vietnams green growth strategy. Currently, this strategy has been enacted by the government, and Vietnam is in the process of detailing this strategy into action plans. In addition, Vietnam has also demonstrated its strong commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. With this, investment capital flows to green sectors are expected to increase, with the support of international financial institutions. At the same time, banks and businesses have also been promoting loans and investment in green growth projects. In fact, GF resources in Vietnam are relatively limited. The development of green banking activities at many credit institutions in Vietnam are still facing numerous challenges. However, the GF market still has a lot of potential for further development, especially GF products based on existing financial products such as green credit, green bonds, and green stocks. In addition, the carbon credit market, once established, will also create a channel for GF development. More broadly, the GF trend in the world and the region has been growing exponentially in less than a decade, including through the pandemic. In addition to the emergence of green and sustainable financial products, legal regulations on environmental, social and governance (ESG) impact reporting in business operations has been developed in many markets, strengthening the bases for the GF market to continue to improve. This shows that green and sustainable development in general, and the development of the green financial market in particular, are both an inevitable trend and a requirement that is gradually becoming urgent, and countries that deploy this early can take plenty of advantage from it. Other countries lagging behind will take more time to access and comply with increasingly expanding and more complex regulations on ESG issues. What opportunities can you see in the development of the GF market in Vietnam? In terms of the legal framework, Vietnam is actively participating at the ASEAN regional level - where GF standards are already in place. Vietnam is an ASEAN member, and it can apply the regions GF standards to its own legal frameworks to govern the domestic GF market. This is a great opportunity. Among important regulations to promote green economy and GF is the criteria for the green economic activities, from which we can decide whether their financing green or not green. These green criteria need to be shaped by all players in the market, from capital users to capital providers. That is the next development that the market needs to do based on mandatory or voluntary frameworks. From a market perspective, we can look at the current GF sources that Vietnam can access. There are relatively many external sources, coming from international organisations or foreign governments supporting climate change activities and green investment activities. Many green capital sources from abroad have significant incentives, which can become a driving force for the development of the GF market. In the world, finance mobilised through the market plays a major role, but less preferentially. Meanwhile, domestic green capital sources are still limited, since the Vietnamese government still does not have dedicated capital for green investment to support green growth. Other financial sources in the market also do not have specific green requirements, so they have yet to create a strong motivation to develop the GF market. Furthermore, the national mechanism for carbon credit certification and market for carbon trade would also be a strong measure to open new opportunities for GF market development. The most important thing is that the government develop an appropriate legal framework and create incentives for businesses and markets to promote GF. The banking system plays a huge role in promoting green credit growth and managing environmental and social risks in credit granting activities. What is your take on the provision of green credit by commercial banks in Vietnam? The banking system plays a substantial role in the GF market in Vietnam, and currently, a number of banks have been providing green credit to businesses. However, overall, the pace of such development is quite slow. It is also important to note that in developing the GF market, in addition to the banking system, other channels of the capital market also need to be greened. One of the main reasons is that banks and businesses lack incentives to lend and borrow green capital. When banks have their own green criteria, they will decide for themselves whether the activities of the borrowing enterprise are green or not, depending on whether the activities and projects of the enterprise are in line with the banks criteria. In addition, if businesses have enough capacity to formulate their own green criteria in accordance with the law and ensure market reliability, they can proactively access green financial sources - including in the capital market such as green bonds. Banks, when providing capital according to business criteria, will also become GF providers. At this time, banks will be able to disburse green loans to businesses even if the bank does not have its own criteria. However, it is necessary to understand that, compared to conventional financial markets, GF transactions must meet both credit standards and green criteria, meaning additional conditions are required, and costs could increase. So there needs to be some more incentives for enterprises to carry out green projects. Some international financial institutions such as ADB have an active role and can provide green loans to the government, localities and businesses in Vietnam. For the 2021-2023 period, ADB has signed three green loans for businesses in Vietnam in the fields of solar power, wind power and electric vehicles. Do you see any barriers in providing GF in Vietnam? At present in Vietnam, developing the GF market has been one of the governments priorities, and it has directly contributed to the governments green development orientation. This means that in Vietnam, green lending and borrowing are not facing subjective barriers, and are even highly encouraged. However, the challenge in providing GF in Vietnam comes from the fact that it is difficult to do and motivation is lacking. Firstly, developing GF markets would be in tandem with developing financial markets in general, especially capital markets. In Vietnam today, bank credit still plays a key role in the economy, so developing green banks is an important immediate requirement. In addition, other capital mobilisation channels in the market such as bonds and stocks also need to be greened during the development process. Secondly, when it comes to the driving force for GF development, currently, not only in Vietnam but also in other countries, some banks and businesses use GF with benefits from marketing or branding, although they might not be mandatory compliance requirements. Meanwhile, the financial benefits could still be low. In countries that have mandatory annual reporting in the areas of ESG, businesses must comply with reporting according to their own standards, or applicable regulatory standards, when they list on the exchange and attract investors and customers. If Vietnam has ESG standards for each specific sector, enterprises will have a concrete basis for implementation, and green credit providers can apply these standards before providing loans. However, in Vietnam, there is regulations on the provision and receipt of GF, and there is no obligation to implement GF. Neither the supplier nor the recipient of green credits has any clear motivation and pressure on rights and obligations. Thats a big challenge. What should the Vietnamese government do to develop the GF market, contributing to realising the commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050? To implement the net-zero commitment by 2050, Vietnam is developing financial mechanisms and policies to form and operate the domestic carbon market according to the provisions of the revised Law on Environmental Protection enacted in 2020. Under the governments roadmap, the policies and mechanisms will be piloted from 2025, and the legal framework will be completed by 2027 before putting the carbon credit exchange into operation from 2028. Establishing the carbon credit market will contribute to achieving the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, promoting the application and development of low emission technologies, and improving the competitiveness of domestic enterprises, while heading towards developing a low-carbon economy and contributing to fight climate change. Regarding the green financial market, the Vietnamese government needs to promulgate a clear legal framework, identify specific green criteria, and clarify what green responsibility is as well as accompanying rights, obligations, and incentives. The general trend in the world is to start with the ability of businesses to self-assess the green level in their operations. When a business identifies their activities are green, the financial source for those activities will be eligible as GF. Perhaps the most important factor is that the Vietnamese government needs to create incentives to develop the green economy, as a basis for the GF market. That is, it is possible to allocate a separate budget to promote the implementation of the countrys green goals, including supporting both credit providers and businesses to borrow green credit. Green finance and management essential for sustainable future On November 22, the Vietnam Institute of Directors will hold its annual Corporate Management Forum and its Board of the Year awards. Chairwoman Ha Thu Thanh talked to VIRs Thuy Linh about the current state of green finance and green management in Vietnam and inspirations for this years award. Green vision rises in finance-banking Experts are to shine a light on Vietnams efforts towards realising its committed green vision, particularly in the finance and banking sector. Vietnam Investment Review on December 4 hosted a conference themed Lighting the Path for Green Financing in Hanoi, attracting executive representatives from foreign financial institutions, the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV), domestic banks, and experts in the field. The event comes as leaders take part in the COP28 climate summit in Dubai to reinforce their net-zero goals and offer up new solutions and ambitions to mobilise financial resources for the transition process. Tran Thi Khanh Hien, head of Research at MB Securities JSC, said that green finance is becoming an inevitable trend worldwide with the participation of international institutions and governments as well as the financial systems of countries around the world gearing towards sustainable economic development. As one of the 150 countries committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, Vietnam has taken immediate actions, Hien said. It approved tasks and solutions to expedite the countrys commitments made in 2021 and approved the national strategy on climate change. At the same time, it provided a comprehensive roadmap to realise the committed climate goals by creating a legal corridor, promoting and supporting the business community, industries, and localities to jointly take responsibility for reducing net emissions. Vietnams commitments also promote demand for green finance, providing a great opportunity to develop green credit, bonds, and capital. The World Bank estimates that Vietnam needs to invest an additional $368 billion by 2040, equivalent to 6.8 per cent of GDP per year, to adapt to climate change implications. Of which, investment in resilience is about $254 billion along with $114 billion for the decarbonisation journey, according to commitments with the international community. While many banks have strongly participated in the transformation journey and harvested initial inspiring results, it is also deemed necessary to have the participation and close cooperation from international financial organisations with their commitment for support provision. According to Pham Thi Thanh Tung, who is deputy general director of the SBVs Department of Credit for Economic Sectors, the deployment of solutions from the banking sector would orient credit investment flow into environmentally friendly projects, from there playing a part in realising the national strategy on green growth and sustainable development. The SBV has proactively integrated the monetary policy in the management process, building solutions and programmes in credit and banking activities, contributing to supporting the economy in transforming the growth model in a sustainable manner and responding to climate change, Tung said. The SBV has crafted a green banking development orientation through integrating related measures into the sectors development strategy for the rest of this decade. It aims to help increase awareness and social responsibility of the banking system in protecting the environment and gradually greening banking operations. According to Nguyen Tung Anh, head of Green Finance Services at FiinRatings, Vietnam has recorded significant progress with green credit. From 2017 to 2021, outstanding green credit debt showed an average annual growth rate of over 25 per cent, higher than the overall credit growth rate of the economy. But despite this positive trend, the proportion of green credit is still relatively modest, accounting for only 4.3 per cent of the total outstanding debt of the entire economy, indicating that there is still much room for it, Anh said. Although the green finance market and related bonds have been promoted plenty in recent times, many limitations still persist. Green finance for a sustainable future Sustainability is no longer just desirable, there is mounting pressure for businesses and individuals to play their part in addressing the climate crisis. Green finance and technology solutions for net-zero emissions As climate change has become a serious international issue, many countries have taken action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. In Vietnam, the government has made a tremendous effort to combat climate change by ratifying the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, pursuing the National Green Growth Strategy for 2021-2030, and implementing the Law on Environmental Protection which came into effect at the beginning of 2022. Green finance and management essential for sustainable future On November 22, the Vietnam Institute of Directors will hold its annual Corporate Management Forum and its Board of the Year awards. Chairwoman Ha Thu Thanh talked to VIRs Thuy Linh about the current state of green finance and green management in Vietnam and inspirations for this years award. Customers that buy a brand-new, sixth generation Honda CR-V, Honda City, Honda BR-V, Honda HR-V, Honda Civic, or Honda Accord and complete the payment procedure by the end of December, will be eligible for certain promotions such as one year's free insurance, a free two-year warranty extension, free maintenance for three years or up to 30,000 km, whichever comes first, or half off for the registration fee. Launched in Vietnam in October, the all-new sixth generation Honda CR-V is a premium SUV model with many outstanding new features, taking SUV standards to a new level. The CR-V has an inherently sporty design with bigger dimensions to help create a majestic appearance. Enjoy a more exciting driving experience with its 1.5L VTEC turbo engine, a superior telecommunications connection system, Honda CONNECT, and advanced safety features. Following the success of the fifth generation Honda City, the new Honda City was launched to create a 'more sporty with more safety' saloon with a diffused-shaped exterior to increase strength, a more stylish design, and a luxurious leather interior. The Honda BR-Vis the perfect combination of a charismatic SUV, and a multi-usage MPV, with the exciting driving feeling with a 1.5L DOHC i-VTEC engine, which delivers a more enjoyable drive while giving outstanding fuel economy. The design of the second generation HR-V had the appearance of an SUV coupe with a larger size, helping to enhance the inherent sporty styling of Honda models. Now, for the first time, the Honda HR-V has added the RS grade that raises the sportiness to another level at an extremely attractive price, offering various options to meet the different demands of customers in the B-SUV segment. The current Honda Civic is an excellent representative of Honda's spirit. The Civic ensures absolute safety for customers with an advanced safety driving assist system. The Civic received many prestigious awards last year, including 'Car of the Year 2022' from by VnExpress. Since its launch, the Honda Accord has made a strong impression on users thanks to its elegant and classy design. The model is equipped with a 1.5L VTEC TURBO engine that offers powerful performance. FPT Software Japan, Honda expand cooperation FPT Software Japan Co., Ltd. (FPT Softwares subsidiary in Japan) and Honda Motor Co., Ltd. have signed an agreement to expand cooperation in IT service management. Honda introduces the Transalp to Vietnam Honda Vietnam has just introduced the 2023 Transalp model to Vietnam, which promises to offer a unique riding experience and the perfect choice for travel enthusiasts who love adventure, whether it's on-road or off-road. This investment round was led by global investment firm Eurazeo through its insurtech fund, supported by BNP Paribas Cardif. The round also saw participation from Openspace and La Maison, previous backers in Igloo's Series B and Series B+ rounds, signalling their continued trust in Igloos solid business foundation. Eurazeo's contribution came from its dedicated fund for disruptive insurtech innovations, while Openspace invested through OSV+, a fund specialising in Series C and D rounds for transformative tech companies in Southeast Asia. Matthieu Baret, managing partner, Venture, Eurazeo said, We are thrilled to invest in Igloo alongside the insurer BNP Paribas Cardif. With our investments in China, Indonesia, India, and Singapore, were extending our footprint with the ambition to become a leading player in Asia. We have been following Igloo for some time now and have been impressed with their evolution into a diversified insurance platform across various channels and products. The insurance market in Southeast Asia is still very underpenetrated, and we believe Igloo is in a strong position to help solve this by making insurance more easily accessible and understandable for consumers, said Albert Shyy, managing director, Eurazeo. This latest funding follows Igloo's Series B+ round just 10 months prior, with a total capital raise of $100 million to date. Igloo has seen a notable 50 per cent valuation increase since its 2022 Series B+ round, moving towards profitability by 2024. The company is on course to double its 2022 Gross Written Premiums with a low burn rate, thanks to its robust engineering and data-focused approach. Jessica Huang Pouleur, partner at Openspace Ventures, said, "We're always thrilled when the opportunity arises to keep investing in a company at the mid-stage that weve previously backed and Igloos recent growth and steps towards profitability have given us further confidence in the businesss ability to capture and expand the insurance market in Southeast Asia." Our team has been actively involved in working with Igloo to this point, and those existing relationships will enable us to seamlessly continue adding operational and commercial value as the business integrates, acquires, and strengthens capabilities, Pouleur added. Raunak Mehta, co-founder and CEO at Igloo, said, The support from our investors is a testament to Igloos steady growth and resilience amidst macro headwinds and a validation of our strategy. We are the only insurtech in Southeast Asia with a robust profit-and-loss statement, a diverse multi-product portfolio, and an extensive distribution line. "With an insurance penetration rate of just 3.3 per cent, Vietnam presents significant growth potential for the insurance industry and remains a key market for Igloo. We are well-positioned to advance our mission to make insurance accessible for all. This additional funding will empower us to drive initiatives for further expansion in Vietnam," said Tri Nguyen, country manager Vietnam, Igloo. Igloo stands out in Asia's burgeoning insurance market, particularly in emerging economies like Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, where underinsurance is prevalent. Its innovative solutions address critical challenges in the insurance value chain, catering to insurers, sales intermediaries, retailers, and consumers. The insurer has issued over 500 million policies and has established more than 75 partnerships across six countries, expanding its offerings to include consumer finance, e-commerce, and logistics. The company was named Insurtech of the Year by the Asia Fintech Awards in August. Sun Life Vietnam charts sustainable path to long-term client and community value Sun Life Vietnam, part of Canadian insurance giant Sun Life, is navigating a sustainable path by offering enduring value to its clients while making contributions to the larger Vietnamese community. Vietnam joins ASEAN Compulsory Motor Insurance system The ASEAN Compulsory Motor Insurance (ACMI) system promotes the cross-border movement of goods and vehicles between ASEAN member states. Tokio Marine Insurance donates over 2,000 helmets to Binh Duong students On November 14, Japanese-backed non-life insurer Tokio Marine Insurance Vietnam partnered with the National Traffic Safety Committee (NTSC) to launch the Helmets for children campaign, delivering over 2,050 quality helmets to secondary pupils in Binh Duong province in the south of Vietnam. There were multiple samples submitted from roughly 10 countries, including Cambodia, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and others. With a variety of entries, the top three finalists were Cambodia (the 2022 champion) with fragrant rice, Vietnam (a former winner) with fragrant rice, and for the first time, India, with Basmati rice. The winner of the World's Best Rice was chosen unanimously by all chefs in the contest, though it was a close battle with other finalists. The distinguished winner of the 2023 world's best rice award was Vietnam, including Loc Troi 28 and Nang Hoa 9 rice varieties from Loc Troi Group JSC in Vietnam. Huynh Van Thon, chairman of Loc Troi Group said, Loc Troi is delighted with the victory of Vietnamese rice. We are very honoured and proud to have contributed to this victory with two special rice varieties, namely Loc Troi 28 and Nang Hoa 9. With this victory, we have more pride and confidence in the stature of Vietnamese rice in the international market." Loc Troi 28 is an inbred rice variety that is the result of a cross between Loc Troi 1 and Basmati. Loc Troi 1 reached the Top 3 of the World's Best Rice in 2015, while Basmati is famous as a national product of India, the world's largest rice exporter. Loc Troi 28 stems from the aspiration of Huynh Van Thon, chairman of Loc Troi Group, to increase the price of Vietnamese rice to be around $1,000 per tonne, as with Basmati rice. Since then, the scientists of Loc Troi Group have continuously made efforts to breed, select, and create Loc Troi 28. Loc Troi Group has implemented 10 seasons of pedigree selection to create a product that possesses the hybrid advantages of the Loc Troi 1 rice variety, which is soft, sticky, and fragrant, and the Basmati rice variety, which has a unique taste, aroma, and texture. The rice variety has a long and slim body and clear and gorgeous skin. The cooked rice is soft and chewy, with a strong flavour blending between jasmine and pandan leaf. As a speciality fragrant rice variety suitable for the high-end market, Loc Troi 28 has exported more than 1,000 metric tons of rice all over the world and meets the requirements of the EU market. Meanwhile, Nang Hoa 9 has inherited the outstanding characteristics of the Jasmine 85 and AS 996 varieties. It is alum-tolerant with a high yield, long grain, shiny ivory-white colour, and an amylose content of 1819 per cent. As a high-quality rice product, Nang Hoa 9 has a short growing time of 9095 days, tolerates alum well, can adapt to many different lands, and has a high head rice recovery rate. The rice variety has an elongated body, ivory-white seeds, and the ability to produce sticky, soft, and sweet rice with a light and long-lasting aroma. The rice is soft and not lumpy. Nang Hoa 9 is one of nine fragrant rice varieties on the list of varieties that enjoy tariff quotas for export to the European Union under the Vietnam-EU Free Trade Agreement. Nang Hoa 9 has exported more than 30,000 metric tons per year around the world. Loc Troi and FMO sign $90-million credit package to advance sustainable rice production On November 2, Loc Troi Group JSC (LTG) announced the signing of a Letter of Intent for a $90-million credit package between LTG and the Dutch Entrepreneurial Development Bank (FMO). Loc Troi Group innovates biological products and applies green development To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Loc Troi Group innovates biological products, applying circular economy and green development, according to CEO Nguyen Duy Thuan at VIR's Sustainable Development conference in Hanoi on November 16. How did 2023 pan out for you, and what do you expect for next year? Minh Ngo, general manager at Wyndham Grand Phu Quoc Next year is expected to be a prosperous one for the hotel and tourism economy, with many more charter flights connecting Phu Quoc to potential international markets. But visitor traffic to the island this year was still lower than our expectations and far from the peak of 2019. Currently, there is still only a few direct flights to the island, and the number of flights connecting Phu Quoc these days is only one-fifth in comparison to five years ago. The choice and price competition cause the most problems at the moment. Multi-transit requirements also make travellers consider longer in choosing Phu Quoc for their next destination. In addition, the travel costs and high price of air tickets also reduce the attraction of the island, impacting bookings and private spending sharply in the upcoming holiday season. Wyndham Grand Phu Quoc joined the MarketHub conference in Bangkok in November. What benefits can such events bring to promoting Vietnams hotel and tourism industry? Wyndham Grand Phu Quoc is proud to be the only Vietnamese representative joining the Hotelbeds event in Bangkok. It is one of the largest platform channels in the travel industry, trusted and known by travellers worldwide. With Hotelbeds positive development for both direct connectivity channel and retails distribution, they have brought up new messages and important information, such as the growing trends in the hospitality industry. Participating in this event was a great opportunity for Wyndham Grand Phu Quoc to bring its image and brand closer to international customers around the world. It was a great opportunity for us to meet and share with hundreds of agents in worldwide the natural beauties and professional services of Vietnam, Phu Quoc, and our Wyndham brand hotels. Through the event, we can set up connection to lead to long-term cooperation between our resort and international sales channels in the coming times. What bold lessons have you gained for Vietnam to upgrade services to adapt effectively to the requirements of international travellers? We realise that international businesses are very active and dynamic in adapting the travellers requirements and demands, while their government support them strictly by offering favourable incentives and hosting various promotion campaigns inside and outside their countries. Thailand is a typical example of quickly catching up the return waves of travellers from potential markets like Russia, China, and India. They opened the door, and ran promotion campaigns widely and earlier than Phu Quoc and Vietnam for more than a year. Thailand also extended its supported flights to pull in international tourists to ensure and balance the travel spendings after suffered heavily in the pandemic. From such lessons, we realise that Phu Quoc really needs the support and close corporation between airlines, agencies, and hotels to work together to attract international travellers in 2024 and to adapt to their requirements and needs, just like how it was achieved in 2019. Phu Quoc changes to better serve tourists, investors Phu Quoc island in the southern province of Kien Giang is making it new to welcome tourists and investors as it plans to reopen its door to international tourists from this November. Seoul - Phu Quoc direct flights to be launched Korean Air will start direct flights connecting Seoul to Phu Quoc resort island in southern Vietnam, also known as the Pearl Island, from the end of November 2023 to meet the increasing travel demand of Korean tourists to Vietnam's largest island. South Korean airlines lay on more direct flights to Phu Quoc Following Korean Air's lead, two other South Korean airlines, Jeju Air and Jin Air, are set to launch direct flights from Seoul to Phu Quoc. This decision comes in response to the growing allure of Vietnam's largest island among South Korean tourists. The event was taking place for the first time The reality show, called Students of a New Generation 2023, is dedicated to creating exciting competition for Vietnamese university students to learn and practice their soft skills and develop creative thinking. The final round of the competition, featuring the top three finalists, took place on November 11, and was broadcast live on VTV3. The three teams that qualified for the final round were the Ho Chi Minh City University of Medicine and Pharmacy with their project on first aid skills for the community; Thai Nguyen Medical University with their project on preventing tuberculosis; and the Ho Chi Minh City Economics University with their project using the circular economy to increase farm produce value. Students from Ho Chi Minh City University of Medicine and Pharmacy won the top prize The three finalists went through four intense competition rounds: presenting their project summary report; team counterargument; calling for investment; and students of a new generation. With the most convincing performance, the University of Medicine and Pharmacy team was named the winner of the competition. We are very impressed by the talent, knowledge, creativity, and environmental, social and governance awareness demonstrated by these Generation Z students. This partnership with VTV3 aligns with our strong commitment to supporting people who strive to thrive and realise their full potential, said Vu Van Thang, general manager for Herbalife Vietnam and Cambodia. I hope that all relevant stakeholders and the wider community will continuously support the young generation, Gen Z students in particular, in their pursuit of dreams. In addition to valuable prizes with $4,200 for the champion and $2,100 for the runners-up, the champions and runners-up also received meaningful support from sponsors, who pledged to provide communications sponsorship to help the projects by the University of Medicine and Pharmacy and Thai Nguyen Medical University become more widely known to the Vietnamese public. Organised for the first time this year, Students of a New Generation received active participation from thousands of Gen Z students from 40 universities nationwide. Students were excited about the opportunity to learn and compete in a variety of competencies comprising teamwork, leadership, presentation, project management, and creativity. Herbalife Vietnam renews partnership to improve nutrition for over 1,100 children In June, Herbalife Vietnam organised a series of partnership renewal ceremonies with seven Casa Herbalife partners nationwide. VTV3 to launch student reality show with support of Herbalife Vietnam Dedicated to creating exciting competitions for Vietnamese university students to learn and practice soft skills and develop creative thinking, the reality show "Students of New Generation 2023" will be broadcast on August 31 on VTV3. Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh (left) met with Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, photo: VNA During a three-day visit to Turkey last week, Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh underlined that to create major breakthroughs in trade and investment cooperation between the two economies, both nations need to boost some specific solutions including the early study of kicking off negotiations of the Vietnam-Turkey Free Trade Agreement at a suitable point of time. He also proposed that Turkey soon recognise Vietnam as a market economy. What is more, the Vietnamese leader also suggested the early organisation of the eight meeting of the Vietnam-Turkey Intergovernmental Committee in Ankara in 2024, in order to review and remove obstructions for cooperation projects, and to negotiate and ink new cooperation deals in the sectors of security and defence, labour, and agriculture. He also proposed an increase in organising activities on investment and trade promotion between both nations enterprises and localities, with a continued opening of markets for each other including the facilitation of exports of both sides into their respective markets with the removal of barriers including anti-dumping measures for their respective goods and services. Turkish Minister of Trade Omer Bolat told PM Chinh that more and more Turkish businesses are increasingly interested in Vietnams market, particularly in fields like construction, industrial production, and production of consumer goods. Bolat said he will lead a business delegation to visit Vietnam next year to explore the market and potential projects. Do Son Hai, Vietnamese Ambassador to Turkey, said that in an aim to expand trade and investment, Turkey is implementing cooperation initiatives with various regions. Specifically, Turkeys Asia Anew Initiative and strategy on strengthening trade with far nations are both aimed at increasing trade and investment with ASEAN, in which Vietnam is considered a big market with great potential for increasing trade and investment. With the Asia Anew Initiative, Turkey has determined a long-term cooperation strategy covering many pillars including elevating bilateral ties with Vietnam, boosting the connectivity between the private sectors of both countries, increasing research cooperation, and promoting connectivity between the two countries people. In the Turkish strategy on strengthening trade with far nations, Vietnam is among 18 target nations. In the strategy, action plans with 12 solutions have been developed, with focus placed on many sectors such as e-commerce, agriculture, energy, and transport. I do believe that the Vietnam-Turkey relations will see major positive changes in the coming time, said Ambassador Hai. Vietnam and Turkey forged diplomatic ties in 1978. Two-way trade between the two countries hit more than $2 billion last year up 26.3 per cent on-year, and nearly $1.9 billion in the first 10 months of this year with $1.54 billion of Vietnamese exports and $360 million of Vietnamese imports. Both nations last week set a target of achieving $5 billion in the coming years. Cumulatively as of November 20, Turkey had 36 valid projects in Vietnam with a total registered capital of $974.3 billion, ranking 26th out of 143 nations and territories investing in Vietnam, according to Vietnams Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI). Meanwhile, PM Chinh last week flew to the UAE, where he will attend COP28 and meet with the countrys leaders. He also engaged in meetings with local businesses, corporations, and investment funds, thus opening up more markets for Vietnams exports, attracting high-quality investment capital, and expanding cooperation in science and technology, clean energy, digital transformation, and innovation. Economic cooperation, meanwhile, remains a crucial pillar and a bright spot in the panorama of Vietnam-UAE cooperation. The UAE is now Vietnams largest trade and investment partner in the Middle East, with bilateral trade turnover in recent years reaching approximately $5 billion. In the first 10 months of this year, the figure came at nearly $4 billion, up 1.8 per cent on-year. The two nations are striving to increase the figure to $10 billion and even higher in the coming years. When it comes to investment, according to the MPI, cumulatively as of November 20, the UAE boasted 39 projects registered at $71.5 million. In energy, Vietnam consistently considers the UAE as one of its most important partners in the Middle East. Currently, Vietnam and the UAE are making preparations for kick-starting negotiations on a bilateral comprehensive economic partnership agreement. It is expected that the signing will provide a legal foundation for the two economies to increase cooperation in the exploration and exploitation of oil and gas, exchange technical expertise, export of Vietnams key items including textiles and garments, footwear, agricultural products, and also train high-quality human resources for various sectors. Under a joint ministerial statement on the CEPA reached in mid-2023, the agreement should be mutually beneficial and comprehensive, covering trade in goods and services, investment facilitation, other areas to be agreed upon, and cooperation in related matters, so as to serve the economic objectives set by the two parties of substantially increasing the volume of bilateral trade and investment. Over past years, Vietnam and the UAE have been boosting cooperation in oil and gas. Vietnam has suggested that both countries sign a new MoU on energy cooperation and create stronger conditions for UAE partners to soon work with Vietnam in the oil and gas sector. It is also suggested that both sides consider a possibility of constructing a centre for transporting and storing crude oil and petrochemical products in Vietnam, which will be provided for Asian markets. It was also recommended that UAE oil and gas companies and PetroVietnam be facilitated to boost cooperation in investing in exploring and exploiting oil and gas in Vietnam, exchanging technical skills and expertise, and training high-quality human resources. In addition, both nations are also expected to increase cooperation in developing electricity transmission lines in Vietnam. The UAE is among the worlds 10 largest oil producers. About 96 per cent of this countrys roughly 100 billion barrels of proven oil reserves are located in Abu Dhabi, ranking number six worldwide. The UAE produces an average of 3.2 million barrels of petroleum and liquids per day. More than 70,000 delegates are expected to attend COP28, including the member states of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Business leaders, young people, climate scientists, indigenous peoples, journalists, and various other experts and stakeholders are also among the participants. Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh led a Vietnamese high-ranking delegation to attend COP28 in the UAE. The trip reaffirms Vietnams consistent policy on green growth and climate change response, as well as its role and position on the regional and international stage. Do Hung Viet, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs The World Climate Action Summit within COP28 is of great importance in the context that climate change remains the biggest challenge and the greatest public concern globally this year. More than 130 heads of states and prime ministers participate in the event to discuss and seek long-term solutions in coping with climate change. Globally, grave impacts of climate change require nations need to take prompt and strong actions in order to reach goals under the Paris Agreement of keeping the global temperature rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius. This would mean the need to bridge the gap between advanced commitments and realised commitments, especially when it comes to greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction, and climate finance (including finance for adaptation) and support for developing nations to overcome losses and damage caused by climate change. Response to climate change would need a global and whole-people approach, ensuring climate quality and justice, and based on a firm foundation of international solidarity, in which developed nations should play a leading role, creating motivation for climate actions, and at the same time increasing support for developing countries. Thats why at COP28, Vietnam hopes that the conference will achieve practical progress, especially in the four top areas of concern. Firstly, countries continue to take strong actions to reduce GHG emissions and carry out energy transition in a sustainable and equitable way. Secondly, developed countries realise their commitments, especially in providing finance and supporting technology transfer to developing countries in this process (including implementing commitments with the goal of mobilising $100 billion each year and increasing commitment up to 2025 and 2030). Thirdly, it is necessary to pay due attention to activities involving climate change adaptation and provide a clear and feasible global adaptation goal framework. Lastly, it is needed to put the Loss and Damage Fund into operation soon so as to have a new, larger financial source to support developing countries and those most severely affected by climate change. The Vietnamese government, ministries, sectors, and localities have been taking drastic and concrete actions to help us reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and, at COP28, PM Chinh will announce new initiatives and commitments of Vietnam in global joint efforts against climate change. Vietnam cashew industry flags suspected UAE fraud The Vietnam Cashew Association (Vinacas) has raised concerns over suspected fraudulent activities impacting one of its members and two other companies, ostensibly perpetrated by a client or financial institution in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Agriculture business association needed for Vietnam, UAE: Official An agriculture business association between Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) needs to be established to facilitate bilateral cooperation in this field, Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Phung Duc Tien told at a regular press conference held by the ministry on August 1. Turkey's Hayat Kimya invests $250 million to produce FMCG products in Binh Phuoc Hayat Kimya, a leading Turkish company in the FMCG industry, has made a $250 million investment in the southern province of Binh Phuoc. When the "I Am Legend" movie was released in December 2007, it broke many hearts. First, many were saddened after Dr. Robert Neville's (Will Smith) dog, Samantha, died after getting attacked by some zombie canines. After that, tears fell after the movie ended with Dr. Neville dying just to let two strangers survive the attack of fast-running zombies. However, after a few days, fans saw a leaked alternate ending showing Dr. Neville surviving the explosion. Viewers waited for almost 15 years for the alternate ending's confirmation. Finally, Will Smith decided to break his silence and announced that his character would indeed return to the new movie, "I Am Legend 2." Will Smith Confirms Returning to 'I Am Legend 2'! According to Business Insider's latest report, Will Smith confirmed the arrival of the "I Am Legend 2." However, he said that he wasn't interested in returning. But, experts said that the idea of Michael B. Jordan co-starring in a mystery role could have inspired Will Smith to reprise his role as Dr. Robert Neville. In February, the movie's writer and producer, Akiva Goldsman, confirmed that the sequel will follow an alternate ending instead of the one fans saw in theaters. This December, Will Smith gave an update to the new film after appearing at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia. "I have a call with Michael B. Jordan tomorrow. The script just came in... I'm probably giving away too much information," said the Oscar-winning Hollywood actor via CBR. "We're going with the mythology of the DVD version where my character lived. I can't tell you any more but Michael B. Jordan is in [it] and we're doing it," he added. Read Also: Jada Pinkett-Smith Reveals Secret 7-Year Split from Will: 'We're Still Figuring It Out' What To Know About 'I Am Legend' Alternate Ending In the original ending, Neville, together with Anna and Ethan (the two strangers who saved him from a hoard of zombies), went inside his laboratory as they ran from Darkseekers. To their surprise, they discovered that the zombie woman Dr. Robert had held hostage was finally cured, thanks to his special blood. He prepared a vial of his blood and gave it to Anna. He asked Anna and Ethan to go hide inside a coal shute, which is located at the back of his lab. After that, he activated a grenade and ran towards Darkseekers to save the two strangers. At the end of the film, Anna and Ethan can be seen going to a fortified area where people are kept safe from Darkseekers, but Dr. Robert Neville is nowhere to be seen, proving that he died. This original ending is quite different from the alternate ending. In the alternate ending, Neville is able to make peace with the Darkseekers by giving them the female zombie he had been experimenting on. He decided to do this after understanding that these zombies only attacked him because they saw Neville as a "monster" that they needed to protect themselves from. After his conflict with Darkseekers, Dr. Robert is seen leaving New York City, together with Ethan and Anna, to find other human survivors. Related Article: Will Smith Speaks Out About People Boycotting 'Emancipation' Film, Claims He Is 'Going Through Something' When Oscar Slap Happened @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) Deputy Minister Do Thang Hai National e-commerce Week and the 10th annual Vietnam Online Shopping Day kicked off on December 1, and to mark the occasion, the Department of e-commerce and Digital Economy under the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) organised the Vietnam e-commerce Development Conference. Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) Deputy Minister Do Thang Hai said, "Vietnam's e-commerce sector has recorded outstanding growth annually since the beginning, and has now become a vital component in the country's digital economy." However, e-commerce still faces many challenges such as ensuring the quality and origin of goods, the safety and security of customer information, and a logistical infrastructure struggling to keep pace with growth. To promote the sustainable development of e-commerce, Le Hoang Oanh, the director general of the MoIT's Department of e-Commerce and Digital Economy, highlighted the need for stable growth, along with a focus on green development and environmental protection, improved human resources, and consumer protection. Vietnam's e-commerce market is among the top 10 in the world and is expected to continue to grow over the next two years. In addition, representatives of the National Competition Commission announced policies at the conference to protect consumer rights online. Many observers agreed that consumer confidence is paramount to ensuring the continued growth in e-commerce, and so to increase faith in online transactions, proposals such as a system of regular inspections, examinations, and supervision, along with amending laws and regulations on protecting consumer rights, were made. E-commerce tax compliance required Local authorities have announced intentions to reinforce tax declarations and payments, as numerous e-commerce platforms have been found to provide inadequate tax information. Cashless payments in e-commerce to account for 50 per cent by 2025 The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) has set a target to increase the cashless payment ratio in e-commerce, especially e-payments through payment intermediaries or applications, to 50 per cent by 2025. Logistics landscape changing through e-commerce overhaul The promising e-commerce sector in Vietnam, which has seen exponential growth and is projected to surpass regional counterparts such as Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore, has had a profound impact on the logistics industry. PM Pham Minh Chinh (centre) presents the Resource Mobilisation Plan to EC President Ursula von der Leyen and the UK government representative. (Photo: VNA) The RMP is part of the JETP, which was agreed between Vietnam and the International Partners Group (IPG) in December 2022 and will help the country deliver on its climate targets. The partnership supports Vietnam to deliver on its net-zero 2050 goal and 2030 targets to accelerate and reduce the peaking of its greenhouse gas emissions and transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy. The RMP is an important first step towards the implementation of the JETP and will be a living document, updated regularly as implementation progresses. It includes an assessment of priority investments, which will help Vietnam deliver on its pathway to net-zero emissions and identify a set of priority policy actions and regulatory reforms to develop an enabling environment for investment, to boost renewables and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. The plan also identifies priority ventures in JETP-related areas, and includes building blocks for a framework to analyse and monitor the just aspect of the energy transition, with the objective to leave no one behind in the green transition. Moving forwards, strong partnerships will be required to implement the policy actions outlined in the RMP, particularly on improving the regulatory framework to facilitate the flows of necessary public and private investments. The RMP provides further details on $15.8 billion of finance that has been committed to the JETP, $8.08 billion being provided by IPG and $7.75 billion by the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. The IPG public funds will be channelled via various financial instruments and mechanisms, such as grants, concessional loans and risk-sharing instruments over a period of three to five years. These funds will help to mobilise the much larger volume of private finance for the just energy transition. With the release of this plan, Vietnam makes an additional step to work towards achieving the JETP targets agreed to in the Political Declaration: bringing forward the projected peaking date for all greenhouse gas emissions in Vietnam from 2035 to 2030; reaching peak annual power sector emissions of 170 megatons CO2 by 2030; limiting Vietnams peak coal-fired generation capacity to 30.2 GW; and accelerating the adoption of renewables so that renewable energy accounts for at least 47 per cent of electricity generation by 2030. Vietnam and the IPG will continue to work together to implement the RMP. The JETP Secretariat and four Working Groups (WGs) have been set up to progress on the implementation. As part of these WGs, the IPG will support technical analytic work to guide future investment and policy actions in view of achieving JETP ambitions. These combined efforts are designed to help catalyse additional investments in Vietnams energy transition to enable the achievement of Vietnam's JETP targets. Civil society also plays a crucial role for the advancement and acceptance of measures and impacts related to the energy transition. It is vital that civil society is actively involved transparently at all stages of the JETP to make sure the necessary transition will be just and inclusive. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen said, "The launch of the RMP is a great milestone for the implementation of the Just Energy Transition Partnership. It demonstrates Vietnams leadership in paving the way for a clean energy future. The EU is proud to be part of this partnership, and we remain committed to working with Vietnam to support the necessary reforms for speeding up crucial investment into renewable energy and a green economy. European Investment Bank commits 500 million credit package in Just Energy Transition The European Investment Bank (EIB) and Vietnam have signed an Mou to collaborate on shared goals designed to deliver Vietnams Just Energy Transition. Vietnam continues completing JETP resource mobilisation plan To implement the Political Declaration on establishing the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), Vietnam is drafting a JETP Resource Mobilisation Plan (RMP). The Vietnam Logistics Forum is an annual event organised by the MoIT since 2013 to promote the development of logistics services, create connections linking logistics with production and import-export as well as serving as a venue for dialogue and providing update regarding urgent issues of logistics services in Vietnam and around the world. With the theme, "Logistics and Digital Transformation for the Mekong Delta," VLF 2023 attracted over 500 delegates and representatives of domestic and foreign businesses. During the discussion session titled 'Logistics: Facing the Challenges of Digital Transformation and Green Transformation,' Bui Le Hai Nguyen, Chief Information Officer of Dongtam Group said, "The National Digital Transformation Program by 2025 with orientation to 2030 has been approved by the Prime Minister, in which logistics is one of eight industries that needs to be prioritised for digital transformation. Digital transformation plays a crucial role in logistics operations to improve performance, save costs, enhance service quality, increase competitiveness, and promote transparency in transportation." "In response to the integration trend, Long An International Port has been adopting comprehensive digital transformation systems for the improvement of the entire value chain, enhancement of automation for the entire operating and service processes, and evolution towards becoming a green and smart port. Consequently, the port has been operating and providing a full range of seaport and logistics services such as general cargo and container handling, warehousing, international freight forwarding, barge transportation, and customs brokerage." Long An International Port has recently signed a Letter of Intent to establish a sister port relationship with Long Beach Port (California, US) during the Conference of the California Port Authority and signed an MoU with the Port of Oakland (California, US). This signing ceremony is important in fostering cooperation not only for trade purposes but also towards the common goal of sustainable development, combating climate change, and the protection of the environment. Sustainable port development has become one of the top priorities and an inevitable trend not only for port operators but also for foreign governments and international associations. Long An International Port is steadfast in its goal of becoming a green and smart port," said Vo Quoc Huy, chairman of the Board of Directors of Long An International Port. Topics of particular importance include the promotion of green ports, clean energy, energy-saving methods, application of IT, proper resource usage, and environmental protection. In addition, Long An International Port strengthens ties between relevant parties, builds consensus, and encourages action towards the common goal of sustainable development of Vietnam's logistics industry." In recognition of its previous efforts, Long An International Port is honoured to receive a Certificate of Merit from the Ministry of Industry and Trade for its outstanding achievements in developing Vietnam's logistics service industry in 2023. This honourable achievement marks a memorable milestone in the journey of Long An International Port towards sustainable development. NEW YORK With sales of non-alcoholic beverages recently becoming a nearly half-billion dollar industry, even Target is becoming sober curious. The chain is partnering with Sechey, an online retailer that sells alcohol-free spirits and wines, to add a selection of popular brands rolling out to 450 Target stores across the U.S. ahead of the typically booze-filled holiday party season. Drinks in the lineup include two celebrity-backed companies: Kin Euphorics, a trendy brand co-founded by model Bella Hadid, and Katy Perrys De Soi, which makes non-alcoholic aperitifs. Other brands include NOPE and Ghia, both of which produce non-alcoholic canned cocktails, and alcohol-free wine company Surely. Target said in a statement that its adding the selection for customers to enjoy as they prepare to entertain for the holiday season and beyond. The company regularly partners with external companies to lure in customers, and this holiday season added a collection from jewelry designer Kendra Scott. Sechey is a great curator of non-alcoholic brands and will help Target to really elevate its offer, Neil Saunders, retail analyst and managing director at GlobalData Retail, told CNN. This is good for the younger generations that Target already attracts, its also a sensible way of creating some interest in the grocery side of the business. Booze-less boom Drinkers, or perhaps non-drinkers, are increasingly looking for elevated offerings instead of water and soda. Also, younger people are ditching alcohol and emphasizing wellness. That has created a boom in sales for non-alcohol spirits, wine and beer, which surpassed $500 million this year according to research firm NIQ. Both big brands and celebrity-backed startups are taking note. Earlier this year, beer maker Molson Coors launched a zero-proof canned cocktail called Roxie, which was created when the company noticed that its customers were moderating their alcohol intake. Roxie lets consumers to stay in the moment while they are drinking their favorite alcoholic beverage, but can also vacillate between an alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverage as well, Jamie Rotnicki, vice president of innovation for Molson Coors, previously told CNN. For Katy Perry, helping to make De Soi with cofounder Morgan McLachlan was the result of the superstar taking breaks from drinking, often when she was touring or writing her music and wanted an alternative. We created this line out of my desire for still wanting to be part of the party, but wanted to wake up the next morning with full clarity and control, Perry told CNN. Perry, who still drinks in moderation, said shes often approached to promote various alcoholic drinks but that she would rather sell an empowering product since alcohol is really fun but could be really challenging for some people. This year, De Soi added new retailers including Whole Foods and Fresh Thyme supermarkets, and the company told CNN that it expects sales to more than double year over year in 2024. ___ Everything Richard Hunt did, he did with maximum effort. As a navigator and bombardier in the United States Air Force, Hunt never missed his target during drills, his son Dan said. Richard Hunts drive and attention to detail he showed in the military carried over to his business career and being a visible community figure in Blair, Washington County and Omaha. Hunt maintained an active profile right up until his death at the age of 89 last week. He believed that anything you do, you do 100%. You either do it right or you dont do it at all, Dan said. After Richard completed his military service, he came back to Nebraska to work and lead the family telecommunications business HunTel. As the companys chief engineer, Richard took on a pioneering role in carrying out several innovations for his familys telecommunications company. According to Dan, some of HunTels innovations include being the first company in Nebraska to bury all of its cables underground. Other HunTel innovations include being the states first company to provide single-party landline phone service. Richard Hunt also appeared before Congress and lobbied for federal legislation and policy to ensure rural Nebraskans would have access to telecommunications on par with major cities. We would fight for our customers and make sure that they would get the service that they needed, Dan said. The service that you could get in rural Nebraska wouldnt be any different than you could get in downtown Boston. Richard Hunts contributions to Nebraskas telecommunications industry led to him being inducted into the Nebraska Business Hall of Fame in 2002. Outside of the telecommunications field, Hunt donated his time and money to organizations and causes he was passionate about. In Omaha, Hunt was a longtime member of the Omaha Symphony Association. He also served on the board at Immanuel. He also was on the World Affairs Council, an organization that brought speakers into Omaha to talk about international issues and advocate for peace. In Blair, Hunt was a major donor toward the expansion of Memorial Community Hospital & Health System. He was a longtime member of the Blair Kiwanis Club. Hunt also supported the Washington County Community Foundation and Washington County Historical Association. He was very proud of the community in which he lived, Dan said, adding that community encompassed all of Nebraska. Hunt was also a member of the nonprofit GASP Group to Alleviate Smoking Pollution of Nebraska, Inc. Hunt and his fellow GASP members sought to keep public places free of second-hand smoke. At least in part, Hunts passion for clean air traces to breathing issues he faced during his life. As a child, he suffered from asthma. As an adult, Hunt was afflicted with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Ultimately, Dan said, his fathers breathing problems led to having weak lungs and a weak heart. On Sunday, Richard suffered a fall in which he did not recover from. Richard died in his wife Maureens arms, Dan said. After Maureen cradled her husbands head and told him she was there, Richards final word was, Good. In addition to Dan and Maureen, Richard is survived by his two other sons David and Nathan and Maureens four children. Richard is also survived by numerous grandchildren, who include Nebraska State Sen. Megan Hunt, and two great-grandchildren. A celebration of Richards life will be held Saturday at one of his favorite restaurants in Blair Marina. Best public colleges in Nebraska Best public colleges in Nebraska #3. University of Nebraska at Kearney #2. University of Nebraska at Omaha #1. University of Nebraska - Lincoln PRESS RELEASE The Commemorative Air Force (CAF) Airbase Base Georgia is participating in the 2023 Twelve Planes of Christmas, an annual online giving campaign to support the all-volunteer organizations education mission of restoring and flying vintage military aircraft. Airbase Georgia has two aircraft in the program this year, to help fund the completion of a World War II-era Republic P-47N Thunderbolt fighter and Boeing N2S Stearman Kaydet. Both aircraft are well into the restoration process. This campaign gives the public an opportunity to support the Stearman project dedicated to Rosie the Riveter, the cultural icon representing women who worked in factories and shipyards during World War II, helping transform America into the Arsenal of Democracy. Once completed, the Stearman will become part of the organizations fleet of historic aircraft. The Airbase Georgia restoration team includes several female members dedicated to carrying on the Rosie legacy through a community outreach program that inspires youth to explore American History and careers in aviation. Airbase Georgias P-47N is one of the CAFs original aircraft acquired by CAF founder Lloyd P. Nolen in 1963. The Thunderbolt did not see combat during World War II. After the war, the aircraft was assigned to the Puerto Rico Air National Guard before transfer to the Nicaraguan Air Force, eventually seeing combat in Central America. While this particular Thunderbolt did not see combat while serving with the US military, it did have an interesting career south of the border in Central America. Back in 2016, we received a great article on her Latin American history from Augusto de Leon Fajardo, and thought our readers would enjoy learning more about this historic airframe. The campaign to raise funds for the two aircraft begins Dec. 1 and continues through Dec. 31, 2023. The goal is to raise $50,000 to help purchase ailerons and flaps for the P-47N. During the same period, Airbase Georgia is seeking $10,000 to purchase a new radio, avionics, and instrument package for the Stearman. The Ray Foundation, Inc. has offered to match up to $50,000 in donations to the Thunderbolt, while an anonymous donor has offered to match up to $2,800 for the Stearman. The Ray Foundation, Inc. was co-founded by James C. Ray, a distinguished World War II pilot who believed that American youth could benefit from the lessons learned in aviation. The Ray Foundations and an anonymous donors generosity has inspired our volunteers and will make a tremendous impact in restoring the Thunderbolt, said Airbase Leader Joel Perkins. Twelve Planes of Christmas is a perfect way for us to help the public participate in our mission. To support the two projects, please click HERE for the N2S Stearman and HERE for the P-47N Thunderbolt. Aircraft Development and Operational Histories The Kaydet, a two-seater biplane introduced in 1934 by Stearman Aircraft Division of Boeing in Wichita, Kan., became an unexpected success during World War II. The aircraft had fabric-covered wooden wings, single-leg landing gear and an over-built welded-steel fuselage. More than 8,428 Stearman were manufactured for the United States to train military pilots. During 11 years of service, more American military pilots learned to fly in the Stearman than any other similar airplane. In addition to the U.S. Navy and the Army Air Corps, the trainers were sold to Canada, China, the Philippines, Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil for military and civilian uses. The P-47, affectionately nicknamed Jug, was one of the most famous United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) fighter planes of WWII. Originally conceived as a lightweight interceptor, the P-47 was developed as a heavyweight fighter and made its first flight on May 6, 1941. The first production model was delivered to the USAAF in March 1942, and in April 1943 the Thunderbolt flew its first combat mission over Western Europe. Used as a high-altitude escort fighter and a low-level fighter bomber, the P-47 quickly gained a reputation for ruggedness. Its sturdy construction and air-cooled radial engine enabled the Thunderbolt to absorb severe battle damage and keep flying. During WWII, the P-47 served in almost every active war theater and in the forces of several Allied nations. By the end of the war, more than 15,600 Thunderbolts had been built. The Thunderbolt also had a strong presence in the Georgia Air National Guard after the war, when the 128th Fighter Squadron at Marietta Army Airfield was equipped with F-47N Thunderbolts. The 158th Fighter Squadron, activated at Chatham Army Airfield, Pooler, also flew F-47Ns. About the CAF Airbase Georgia Warbird Museum CAF Airbase Georgia, based in Peachtree City, Ga., was founded in 1987. The Airbase is one of the largest units of the Commemorative Air Force (CAF). The group maintains and flies six vintage military aircraft including a P-51 Mustang, an FG-1D Corsair, an SBD Dauntless, an LT-6 Mosquito, Tuskegee Airmen PT-19 Cornell, and a P-63A Kingcobra. The Airbase, composed of more than 500 volunteer members, is a founding partner of the Georgia WWII Heritage Trail launched in 2021. The Airbase is part of the CAF, a non-profit, tax-exempt organization that relies on contributions of time and funds to conduct its mission. For more information, go to https://airbasegeorgia.org/. Check out the latest video update about the P-47 Thunderbolt. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (November 30, 2023) Novelist Jim JK Kelly today announced the launch of his latest book, The Lost Bird, a crime thriller novella about the theft of a World War II warbird during an air show. A retired Marine returns home to Texas from his job in the Arabian Gulf to say goodbye to his ailing father. There, he learns that his younger brother was somehow involved in stealing a restored World War II bomber during an airshow. Chris Boone is then forced to form an awkward partnership with the aging pilot who surrendered the plane to keep his brother out of jail, help restore the pilots reputation, and find the national treasure. But someones kept a secret for decades After spending a lot of time in a B-17 I wanted to develop a project around one but set in a modern-day crime thriller, Kelly said. This is about a very special warplane thats been stolen and a retired Marine and a devastated pilot who risk their lives to find her. Its about two patriotic families thrown together by chance and criminals without conscience. The Lost Bird is Kellys seventh work of fiction, and his past works include the Formula One/CIA spy thriller Deadly Driver, The Export series, Found In Time, The Lost Pulse, and his autobiography titled Fuelin Around. I wanted to write something emotional and action-packed that would grab readers and I think this will, Kelly continued. But I also wanted to honor the flying fortress and their brave crews while possibly introducing a warbird to fiction readers who might not know anything about them. The Lost Bird is now available in print and eBook on Amazon and wherever thrillers are sold. For more information visit JKKelly.com or write to Info@JKKelly.com. For some years now, a dedicated team of volunteers with the Yankee Air Museum (YAM) has been hard at work restoring a Consolidated PB4Y-2 Privateer maritime patrol bomber at their facility in Willow Run, Michigan. The work is currently being undertaken in the very same hangars where the Ford Motor Company once built the types older sibling, the B-24 Liberator at the rate of one every 63 minutes during peak production in April, 1944. With respect to YAMs Privateer, it originally emerged from the Consolidated-Vultee (later Convair) plant in San Diego, California during the spring of 1945. The U.S. Navy accepted her for service as BuNo 59876 on April 27th, 1945, taking delivery on August 1st. The Navy first assigned the aircraft to Camp Kearny Naval Auxiliary Air Station (now Marine Corps Air Station Miramar). Alongside numerous other freshly-built Privateers, BuNo 59876 provided conversion training for naval aircrew transitioning from the types forebear, the PB4Y-1 Liberator (a navalized B-24). The men of Patrol Bomber Squadron 197 (VPB-197) were amongst those making use of 876 at this time. Though 59876 would remain in the San Diego area for most of its naval career, it did spend time with other units, such as Weather Reconnaissance Squadron 1 (VPW-1) and as an element of Fleet Air Wing 14 (FAW-14). YAMs Privateer also had a brief stay at NAS Corpus Christi, Texas, but soon after found itself in storage at Naval Air Station Litchfield Park (now Phoenix-Goodyear Airport), in Goodyear, Arizona. It would remain in the desert sun until the U.S. Coast Guard ordered it out of mothballs on September 18, 1952. The Coast Guard had the one-time patrol bomber modified into a search and rescue variant, a P4Y-2G. On January 30, 1953, the U.S. Navy officially transferred 876 to the US Coast Guard, although the Privateer retained its original Bureau Number. The Coast Guard flew 876 primarily from Barbers Point, Hawaii, although it did make occasional deployments to Guam and Wake Island. With the availability of newer aircraft types, however, the WWII-era Privateers soon found themselves phased out of active maritime patrol service. In February 1954, 876 returned to storage at Litchfield Park, where she awaited an uncertain fate. Thankfully, instead of the scrappers torch, this Privateer found a new career in the civilian sector. On December 27th, 1957, the Lysdale Flying Service of St. Paul, Minnesota purchased P4Y-2G 59876, registering her with the FAA as N6813D. The 1960s would see the old Privateer fly with several different owners as an aerial sprayer, working over farms from California to Montana. Despite her new role, the aircraft still wore much of its original Coast Guard livery, with yellow and black stripes on the tail and wingtips. On November 25th, 1969, Hawkins & Powers (H&P) Aviation of Greybull, Wyoming acquired N6813D. This famed company was the primary postwar operator of surplus Privateers in the fire bomber role. N6813D was in a sorry state at this point, sitting engine-less at the local airport in Grass Valley, California. Hawkins & Powers soon spruced her up though, and equipped the Privateer with Wright R-2600 engines in place of the usual Pratt&Whitney R-1830s, with cowlings coming from surplus B-25 Mitchells. The R-2600 offered more horsepower than the original powerplant, which made the aircraft more responsive under heavy loads. With its fire bomber conversion complete, N6813D began flying on contracts for the US Forestry Service and the Department of the Interior. The aircraft wore three different side codes over the course of its firefighting career, starting with A25, then changing to B25 and finally wearing C125 (as Tanker 125). H&Ps Privateers would fly far from Greybull for much of the year, fighting forest fires across the western United States. This role would eventually lead to Tanker 125s final flight. During the summer of 1975, H&P sent Tanker 125 to fight fires in Alaska, basing her out of Anchorage. With the fire season nearing its end, Tanker 125s pilots were told to fly back home to Greybull. On the evening of August 8th, 1975, Tanker 125 took off on the first leg of this journey, following the coastline down the Alaskan panhandle, bound for Ketchikan to refuel, as recounted by Todd Hackbarth in a 1993 article for Warbirds International. Things didnt get off to a good start, however, as one of the four engines began to run rough, forcing the crew to shut it down and feather its propeller. To make matters worse, the weather in Ketchikan was poor, and Tanker 125 overshot the runway. Rather than return for a second attempt, however, the crew pressed on down the coast. In the pre-dawn hours of August 9th, Tanker 125s fuel reserves began to run dry. Fortunately for them, the airport at Port Hardy on Vancouver Island was nearby, some 370 miles down the coast from their original destination at Ketchikan. With only one engine running, they came in on the final approach. However, the pilot felt they were still too high and decided to go around. In the darkness, however, the Privateer struck the ground, plowed through the airport perimeter fence, crossed the nearby beach with rocks and logs strewn about, and plunged into the cold waters of the Queen Charlotte Strait, settling in a hundred yards or so offshore. The airport authorities called up their emergency services, who first looked to see if the plane had come down short of the runway. Meanwhile, in the Privateer, water rushed into the cockpit almost immediately. Thankfully, the two pilots were able to use the cockpits overhead hatches to escape the stricken firebomber. Since the plane hadnt completely submerged, the two men could stand atop the fuselage. They soon spotted a seat cushion and used it to help them swim ashore. Initially too cold and exhausted to stand, they eventually regained their whits and wandered over the logs and through the bushes to the airport fence. By then, the fire crew was driving to the runways, figuring correctly that the aircraft had run through the fence and into the water. The Privateers pilots soon flagged them down, and made their way, a little scratched and bruised, to the relative warmth of the firetruck. Tanker 125 was not so fortunate, remaining battered and forlorn where she lay in the water as night turned into day. A recovery team subsequently pulled Tanker 125 from the water, but she was obviously in a bad state of repair and had received a thorough dousing in salt water; clearly, her flying days were done. With the insurance claim settled, Tanker 125 remained derelict at Port Hardy Airport for the next six years. The Canadian Museum of Flight and Transportation (CMFT), then in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, took an interest in adding the Privateer to its growing collection. They purchased the wreck from Aircraft Supply Ltd, but were then unable to raise the funds to transport the airframe from Port Hardy to Richmond, a distance of some 220 miles. By 1981, with the Privateer in significant disrepair and becoming a target for local vandals, the airport authorities wanted to get rid of it as soon as they could. Thankfully, a Michigan businessman decided to purchase the aircraft from CMFT, intending to modify the Privateer to represent a B-24 Liberator for static display. Unfortunately, rather than disassemble the airframe at its production breaks, the transportation team focused more on speed, cutting the aircraft up into more manageable sections for the journey to Michigan. They severed the fuselage from top to bottom forward and aft of the wings and cut the outer wing panels off, just a foot from their attachment points. Furthermore, they did not detach the propellers from the engines but rather cut some of the blades shorter to keep the overall width within the maximum permissible on the wide-load permit. The Privateer reached its destination in 11 large chunks, but upon its arrival in the Detroit area, the pieces were initially locked away in a nondescript pole barn. On May 30th, 1986, the businessman donated what remained of Tanker 125 to the Yankee Air Force (now the Yankee Air Museum). It finally arrived at Willow Run Airport during the following October. Many volunteers at the time believed that the task of restoring the so-called Scrap-a-teer, even to static condition, was too great a task. However, they got to work and within nine months the Privateer was back on its landing gear again, with its fuselage patched back together. It went on static display in the museums air park nearby the main museum building, a vintage WWII-era hangar. Oddly enough, while being outside in the elements wasnt ideal, the Privateer was spared further tragedy when the museums hangar (and much of its contents) were consumed in a massive fire during 2004. The museum, thankfully, rebounded from that horrific setback, and has gone from strength to strength ever since. They have continued to dedicate effort to restoring the Privateer in the subsequent decades, and have gradually returned the airframe from its Coast Guard guise back to its earlier naval configuration, which has included replacing the inauthentic powerplants and cowlings as well as adding the correct (and extremely rare) gun turrets to the airframe. This work remains ongoing, now inside the hangars of the former Willow Run B-24 plant. The museums Joe Amend recently provided us with some excellent details regarding the Privateers current status. Amend is one of the museums volunteers and has been working on the Privateer since 2006 (he also serves as the flight engineer on the museums B-17G, Yankee Lady). We have almost completed the bow turret, Amend stated. The turret is completely functional on 28-volt DC. No working guns of course. We could not find the bow turret mount, so after two trips to NAS Pensacola, we fabricated it in-house. In October, we installed the last of four engines on the plane. It had the R-2600s on from Hawkins & Powers. We went to Idaho and pulled non-serviceable parts to build up four R-1830s, which we did over the last two years. We had found a set of nacelles in California with the engine mounts, back in 2008 or 2009. They needed some work before they could be installed. We are currently working on the stern turret, and the plan is to make it functional as well. The hydraulic pack is done, and the cylinders on the turret are completed as well. The control section will be this winters project. We are also working on the nacelle sheet metal and covers. It looks like we will have to do some metalwork on the wing attachments. Amend also described some of the earlier work the team has performed: We had to make new formers at the bottom of the port fuselage about 10 feet [near the pilots side of the cockpit]. This was damaged from dragging her out of the water onto the beach. We had to change the port side main landing gear and the front landing gear and framework. While we had her up on stands, we foam-filled all three tires. When I started on the plane in 2006, we were short the starboard blister turret. We had two portside one mounted, and the other mounted on a rolling frame. Both were complete with the gun carriage. We found the starboard blister in California, however, it was an empty shell. We pulled the gun carriage from our extra port and installed it into the new blister and installed it into the plane. We have both Martin top turrets installed. We plan to switch the front turret, as the one we have is not the correct dash number for the PB4Y-2. We have secured that turret, and it is under restoration off-site. Much remains to be completed on the Yankee Air Museum Privateer, but the aircraft which was once considered a write-off has already come a long way since its arrival at Willow Run back in 1986. For those wishing to stay up to date on this project or who would like to contribute to the restoration project, please visit the Yankee Air Museums website HERE. WATERLOO A Waterloo teen has been arrested for allegedly shooting a gun at a passing vehicle in February. On Friday, Andrew Spates III, 18, was arrested for reckless use of a firearm causing property damage, carrying weapons and felon in possession of a firearm. Bond was set at $50,000. Witnesses reported seeing Spates stand outside and shoot at a black car that drove by in the area of Linn and Oliver streets around 5:10 p.m. Feb. 18. No injuries were reported but one of the bullets entered a nearby home and struck a TV in the living room. Officers found 20 spent .40-caliber shell casings. Police searched Spates home at 2235 E. Fourth St. on June 27 and found clothing he was allegedly wearing during the February shooting, according to court records. Spates is also awaiting trial for a June incident where police found a loaded 9 mm Glock 17 pistol in a car in the 1200 block of Franklin Street. Authorities said Spates is prohibited from handling firearms because of a 2021 adjudication in juvenile court of an intimidation with a weapon charge. Photos: Teens press for gun control in 'lie-in' outside White House Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump WATERLOO A group of University of Northern Iowa students has been looking for creativity across the Cedar Valley and finding it in all sorts of places. During a new course this fall called The Creative Experience, students were challenged to conceive, plan, and deliver a four-event series that immersed them in creative experiences. The Waterloo Career Center was the location for one of the events in the Creative Cedar Valley series. The 15-20 UNI students and others who attended the event on a November night were looking for glimpses of how creativity is alive and well for high schoolers enrolled in the centers programs. They toured the Waterloo Community School District facility, learned how a students average day goes and what classes are taught there. The class is a call to action to shift the narrative of what creativity is and how it affects the community. Ive been teaching creativity at UNI since 2005, said Professor Gary Gute, instructor for the class. I hear from time to time that there are just not enough spaces in the Cedar Valley to be creative. I wanted to change that thinking for my students. Part of the problem ... is that we have people believing that creativity is just for the artist and that becomes, for them, a self-fulfilling prophecy. They think Im not creative, so what can I do? Then they live their lives accordingly. Creativity is a mindset shift, said Emily Stowe, editor and creator of Mag Pie magazine. She came aboard as a sponsor for Creative Cedar Valley after learning of Gutes philosophy. I was interested in being a sponsor because its the whole reason I created Mag Pie. ... I know a lot of people who live here and believe that we dont have any culture, she said. Thats not true at all. There are lot of cool things happening. I think a lot of the perception that people have that there is nothing culturally important happening here is because people have a very limited notion of what creativity is, Gute said. I think its our job to help educate people about creativity, what it is and how essential it is to families, communities, and organizations within the Cedar Valley. Previous events in the series were held at the 415 Walnut Project on Oct. 10 and Three Pines Farm north of Cedar Falls on Oct. 17. Students learned how the former Waterloo church building is starting to become a performance space and a revitalization project for the Walnut neighborhood. Students spoke to artisans who have taught classes or shared space within the creative community at the farm. Cedar Falls Community Theatre Executive Director Greg Holt, who is partnering with the class, said the students efforts to create the series are essential to its success. The more people that you have collaborating, bringing their ideas to the process in turn makes it more vivid and fully realized at the end, Holt said. Gute has a simple takeaway for each student: If you are open to the possibility of seeing yourself as a creative person, even though you may not be an artist, and doing things or making something, you can live a creative life. Initially students planned to make a final presentation but that has been cancelled. To learn more about Creative Cedar Valley including the spring semesters events contact Gute at gary.gute@uni.edu or (319) 273-6149. Photos: Wartburg football vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater in NCAA quarterfinal, Dec. 2 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 1 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 2 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 3 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 4 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 5 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 6 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 7 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 8 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 9 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 10 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 11 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 12 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 13 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 14 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 15 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 16 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 17 FBall Wartburg vs. Wisconsin-Whitewater 18 Spotify made another staff lay-off after this year it announced on Monday (December 4) that it would cut 1,600 jobs in the company, equivalent to 17% of its current total workforce. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said that he made the "difficult" decision with economic growth "dramatically" slowing. The Stockholm-based company currently employed about 9,000 people, with Ek saying that, while the cuts would be "incredibly painful" to those affected, "substantial action to rightsize" its costs was needed to allow the firm to meet its objectives. "I recognize this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions," he said. "To be blunt, many smart, talented and hard-working people will be departing us." Spotify said it would start informing affected employees by Monday. They would be able to get about five months of severance pay, holiday pay, and healthcare coverage for the severance period. The company would also offer immigration support for employees whose immigration status was connected to their employment, especially or its headquarters and offices in Sweden. Read Also: Taylor Swift Tops Spotify's 2023 Global Artist List Making Spotify Cost-Effective The announcement was made about six months after it cut 200 jobs in its podcast department. In its third quarter results, Spotify reported a profit of 65 million ($70.7 million) - its first figure on the black for over a year - thanks to price rises and higher subscriber numbers. Spotify has been aiming to expand its global reach, with a goal of reaching a billion users by 2030. Currently, it has 601 million, an increase from 345 million by the end of 2020. Ek stated that the latest results would make the job cuts "feel surprisingly large" for many people. He added that the company would consider making smaller job cuts by 2024 and 2025. Other factors that affected Spotify's decision to let go of some staff included securing exclusive content, such as the podcast created by Prince Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The deal with the estranged son and daughter-in-law of King Charles III cost a reported $25 million over a span of just 12 episodes before the deal ended in June. "The truth of the matter is some of it has worked, some of it hasn't," Ek told the BBC last September. 2023 was a year where major tech companies have reduced their staff numbers following a boom during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. Some companies that laid off their employees include giants like Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google's parent firm, Alphabet. Related Article: Spotify Cuts 200 Jobs in Podcast Department in Reorganization Plans @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. WOODSTOCK, Ala. Police shot and killed a man featured in the hit podcast "S-Town," which chronicled events in a rural Alabama community, during a weekend standoff in the town, authorities said Monday. Officers shot and killed Joseph Tyler Goodson, 32, of Woodstock, after he barricaded himself inside a home and "brandished a gun" at officers early Sunday, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency claimed. The agency's statement said the Woodstock Police Department initially responded to a "call for service" early Sunday and the standoff ensued. Multiple law enforcement agencies converged on the home. The state agency did not describe what led to the initial call to the home. "Police bout to shoot me down in my own yard," a message posted early Sunday on Goodson's Facebook account read, according to news outlets WIAT and al.com. The state agency is reviewing the shooting and will turn its findings over to the Bibb County district attorney. The 2017 podcast, which won a Peabody Award, told the story of an Alabama man named John B. McLemore, who died before the show came out. McLemore's use of an expletive to describe his hometown gives the podcast its abbreviated title. "S-Town" begins telling the story of a reputed killing and another death but winds up focusing on McLemore and his tortured relationship with the town of Woodstock. Several people in his life were also featured, including Goodson. "I know that everyone wants answers and details, myself included," Woodstock Mayor Jeff Dodson said in a statement Monday. "Tyler was well known and loved by myself, his family and this community. That love extends far beyond due to the S-Town podcast. "Please remember at this time that he is so much more than a character to the fans who loved him. This young man was a father, son, brother and friend to many," the mayor added. Woodstock, with a population of about 1,500 people, is about 35 miles southwest of Birmingham. HAILEY, Idaho Paul Rytting had been director of the Risk Management Division at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for around 15 years when a 31-year-old church member told him that her father, a former bishop, had sexually abused her when she was a child. Rytting flew from church headquarters in Salt Lake City to Hailey, Idaho, to meet with Chelsea Goodrich and her mother, Lorraine, to discuss what he said was a "tragic and horrendous" story. By that time, Chelsea's father, John Goodrich, had made a religious confession to a bishop with the church, widely known as the Mormon church, with details of his relationship with his daughter. Following church policy, Bishop Michael Miller had called a church Helpline, established to take calls from bishops about sexual abuse, and John Goodrich was quickly excommunicated. After the excommunication, Chelsea and Lorraine reported Chelsea's claims of abuse to Mountain Home, Idaho, police. They backed up their accusations with recordings of conversations with John Goodrich in which he admitted to climbing into bed with his daughter when he was sexually aroused, though he insisted there was no direct sexual contact. Nevertheless, Mountain Home police arrested him and charged him with a variety of sex crimes. At their meeting with Rytting, Chelsea and her mother had one overarching question: Would the church allow Miller to testify at John Goodrich's criminal trial? Over the next four months, during multiple conversations, Rytting told Chelsea, Lorraine and Eric Alberdi, a fellow church member acting as Chelsea's advocate, that a state law known as the clergy-penitent privilege prevented Miller from testifying without the consent of the alleged perpetrator, John Goodrich. Without Miller's testimony, prosecutors dropped their case. Next, Rytting offered Chelsea and her mother $300,000 on the condition that they agree to not use Chelsea's story as the basis for a lawsuit against the church and to never acknowledge the existence of this nondisclosure agreement. Today, Goodrich, who did not respond to questions from the AP, remains a free man practicing dentistry, with access to children. The Mormon church, in comments to the AP, said, "the abuse of a child or any other individual is inexcusable." The church also noted that Miller would not be able to testify without the permission of Goodrich, and that the confidentiality agreement with Chelsea and Lorraine did not preclude Chelsea from telling her story. All the conversations with Rytting, Chelsea, Lorraine, and Alberdi were recorded, and provided by Alberdi to The Associated Press. Takeaways from the AP's investigation: THE CLERGY-PENITENT PRIVILEGE An earlier investigation by the AP revealed that more than half the states maintain the clergy-penitent privilege, which provides a loophole for clergy who are otherwise required to report child sex abuse to police or local welfare officials. As a result, some child predators who reveal their crimes to clergy in a confessional setting and do not turn themselves in to police are allowed to remain free, able to continue abusing children while presenting a danger to others. Although child welfare advocates have attempted to change or eliminate the privilege, the AP found that lobbying by religious institutions including the Catholic Church, the Mormon church, and the Jehovah's Witnesses have persuaded state legislators throughout the country to maintain the loophole. Indeed, the AP catalogued more than 100 attempts to amend or eliminate the privilege, all of which failed. NONDISCLOSURE AGREEMENTS Nondisclosure agreements, also known as confidentiality agreements, have been used frequently by the Mormon church and other organizations, including the Catholic Church, as well as individuals, to keep sex abuse allegations secret. Twenty-one years ago, the Catholic Church approved a Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in which it pledged to eliminate the use of confidentiality agreements to settle child sex abuse claims, except in cases where the victims requested anonymity a recognition of the role NDAs play in the cover-up of child sexual abuse. The Mormon church does not have a similar policy. THE HELPLINE The earlier AP investigation found that the Helpline plays a central role in the cover-up of child sex abuse in the Mormon church, even as the church claims its purpose is to provide bishops with guidance about sexual abuse reporting requirements. Initiated in 1995, when financial claims for sexual abuse against religious institutions were on the rise, the Helpline fields calls from bishops about child sexual abuse and directs the most serious cases to attorneys with the firm of Kirton McConkie, which represents the church. According to the church, all information about child sexual abuse passed from church members to their bishops is confidential under the clergy-penitent privilege, and all information passed from the Helpline to church attorneys is confidential under the attorney-client privilege. Meanwhile, Rytting and other church officials have said in sworn testimony that the Helpline either keeps no records or destroys all records at the end of each day. Or does it? During his conversations with Chelsea and Lorraine, Rytting said he could find out whether John Goodrich had previously "repented" for his relationship with Chelsea by checking Helpline records, seeming to contradict his sworn testimony in another child sex abuse case against the church. In its comments to the AP, the church declined to answer questions about the apparent contradiction. ___ Rezendes reported from New York. ___ The Ray Leonard Players from Claremorris are celebrating an historic victory this morning, after taking national glory in the All-Ireland One-Act Drama Finals last night. The competition took place in Castleblayney, Co Monaghan, across the weekend, with the winners announced late on Sunday night. Performing Carl Nuzums powerful play, A Night Without Stars, The Ray Leonard Players were named overall winners in the Confined section of the competition, with the groups leading lights, Robert Holden and Vera Kilgallon, named Best Male and Best Female Actors respectively. This is the first time The Ray Leonard Players stepped onto the One-Act circuit, while also marking a directorial debut for Tim Oates. Alongside Tim, Mary Esler came on board as Producer, with Billy Freeley on sound and light. The show starred Robert Holden (Man), Vera Kilgannon (Tara), Marion Walsh-McGuire (Bridie), Brid Roe (Francie), John Fallon (Mike), and Des Pollard (Priest). The Ray Leonard Players faced stiff competition on the festival circuit in recent weeks, meeting the best of the best in the national competition over the weekend. An excellent achievement to qualify for the All-Ireland Finals, the cast and crew were not expecting to take the top spot on Sunday night. Speaking after the prize-giving ceremony, Director Tim Oates said: We are absolutely delighted with the result and to be honest, its still sinking in. Our win tonight in Castleblayney comes down to a really fantastic team effort. We had great teamwork from everyone right from the very beginning, and it was a hugely positive experience for all of us. We definitely didnt expect to win, but its an amazing feeling and Im thrilled for the entire cast and crew, and of course for Robert and Vera who also took the Best Male and Female Actor Awards. Only in being a few short years, The Ray Leonard Players was established to honour and perpetuate the memory of the late Ray Leonard, who was synonymous with drama across the west of Ireland throughout his life. Ray who passed away in 2005 was a director, producer and mentor who made an outstanding contribution to drama, musicals and stagecraft. He was a great friend and a massive inspiration to the groups founding members, and to countless other performers around the region. He was passionate about the stage and was affectionately known as Mr Drama in Claremorris and indeed all across the west of Ireland. By Jonathan McCambridge, PA Stormont rules should be urgently reformed so that a speaker can be elected by a two-thirds majority of MLAs, a Westminster committee has recommended. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee has also proposed that the same threshold should be used to elect first and deputy first ministers. As part of a raft of proposals which the committee said would assist in restoring and stabilising the powersharing institutions, it also recommended rebranding the first minister roles and making them open to politicians from beyond the largest unionist and nationalist parties. The DUP has been blocking powersharing at Stormont for more than a year and a half in protest at the internal UK trade barriers created by Brexits Northern Ireland Protocol. Sir Jeffrey Donaldsons DUP is currently blocking the operation of the Stormont powersharing institutions (Liam McBurney/PA) The party has been involved in negotiations with the British government about the Windsor Framework, which reformed the protocol, and is seeking further assurances, by way of legislation, over Northern Irelands place in the UK internal market. Senior civil servants have been left in charge of devolved departments and the Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris had to intervene to set a budget. During the lengthy suspension, the DUP has blocked several attempts to elect a Speaker, which is required before ministers can be nominated to form an executive. The Westminster committee has been carrying out an investigation into the effectiveness of the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement; the historic peace deal which created the Stormont Assembly. Within current rules, votes from a majority of MLAs within both the nationalist and unionist traditions are needed to secure the posts of speaker, and first and deputy first ministers. During its evidence, the committee heard that with the growth of the proportion of Northern Ireland society identifying as neither unionist nor nationalist since the agreement, supermajority voting would effectively equate to cross-community consent. Among the measures it recommends in its report are calls for the UK Government to urgently reform the Assembly speaker election rules so that a candidate can be elected by a two-thirds supermajority of MLAs. It recommends the same method should be used to elect first and deputy first ministers. The report adds that, in recognition of their equal status, the roles should be rebranded as joint first ministers with the position open to any two MLAs of any two parties rather than just the largest parties. Under current Stormont rules, Sinn Feins Stormont leader Michelle ONeill is entitled to claim the position of first minister (Brian Lawless/PA) Under current rules, Sinn Feins Stormont leader Michelle ONeill is entitled to claim the position of first minister as her party emerged with the largest number of MLAs following last years Assembly elections. The committee said the changes would require consultation with the Irish Government as co-guarantors to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, as well as the parties of Northern Ireland. It said that the 1998 Northern Ireland Act that came from the agreement, which enshrines power-sharing government and devolution in Northern Ireland, would also need to be changed. Sir Robert Buckland is the chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee (Stefan Rousseau/PA) Committee chairman Robert Buckland said: When Stormont collapses critical public services are cast adrift. Health, education, policing; all are feeling the strain while important decisions go unmade, and the people of Northern Ireland suffer. More stringent safeguards are needed to protect against the cycle of restoration and collapse that has dogged Stormont. He added: The short-term measures weve proposed will shore up the stability of Stormont increasing the incentives to keep the institutions moving and enabling the Assembly to run without an executive in place. In the longer run, we feel that a full independent review into the effectiveness of the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement should be conducted with input from all stakeholders. This should include the North-South and East-West elements, but a fully functioning Stormont is the foundation on which the rest stands. The Stormont powersharing institutions have been collapsed on several occasions previous to the current political impasse, including by Sinn Fein in 2017 in protest at the DUP handling of a green energy scheme. On that occasion the institutions remained dormant for three years. On Sunday Nevada Donor Network hosted a ceremony in honor of Alicia MacAleese, who passed away from cancer in 2021 at the age of 41. She donated her organs, and her corneas. A delicate dance Pam,* 70, from Jacksonville, Florida, moved in with her mother when her father passed away. A few years later, after her brother died from ALS, her once independent mother, began to give up on caring for herself. First, shed ask me to wash her hair, recalls Pam. When I reminded her that she could do it herself, she would beg me to help. Little by little, her mom, suffering from depression, began to give up other activities that Pam knew she could still do, from making meals to getting dressed. Its like she gave up and wanted me to do everything, says Pam. In the end, it was often easier doing things myself than making her do things I knew she could do. Pams best advice is to try to realize the person you are caring for did not ask to be in the position theyre in. I cant say I coped extremely well, she says. But when you love someone, you do what you have to do. 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Its extremely difficult for family caregivers who are struggling to care for a family member or friend who they know didnt take good care of themselves prior to becoming ill, or who refuse to do things that would help them feel better and be easier to care for now, says Goyer. It can affect a caregivers motivation and build resentment. As a longtime caregiver of multiple family members, including her late mother and father, she has personal experience with several family members who either didnt adjust their diets or wouldnt do exercises that would ease their pain in the long run. As a caregiver, I had to accept the fact that I cant make others do things, says Goyer. I can offer suggestions and be honest with them about my feelings, but I cannot change them. They have a right to make their own decisions, even if we perceive them as bad choices, and theres a delicate dance between pushing a bit and pushing too far. The burden of solo caregivers As an only child, Sam,* 50, from Sonoma, California, always understood he would be caring for his parents alone. We lived in a tumultuous state for most of my life, moving 15 times, usually for financial reasons, which was destabilizing, he says. As he got older, Sam became the responsible child, and both parents leaned on him more and more for support, from financial assistance to caregiving. You want to idolize your parents, but its hard not to feel angry that a lifetime of bad decision-making on their parts has led to their health issues, he says. Sams father smoked and had poor eating habits, which led to diabetes. He is also addicted to opioids, all of which has landed him in the hospital numerous times. His lack of care drove me nuts, Sam says. Id get resources and set up appointments, and he wouldnt go to the doctor. His edema would go untreated for too long, and instead of being proactive, hed routinely end up in an ambulance headed to the ER. Instead of hammering his father with phrases like, We wouldnt be here if youd taken care of yourself, Sam focuses on what he can do going forward. I tell myself that I cant change him, but what I can do is try to make this hospital stay better and push to get him home faster, he says. Those are the kinds of things I had to focus on to not live in resentment. Italy's most handsome man in 2019, Edoardo Santini, announced that he is now quitting modeling to pursue priesthood and become a man of God. The 21-year-old Italian man surprised his fans after confirming that he will become a priest. For some people, this is surprising since he is renouncing his modeling career for his faith. They have a point since Santini spent a lifetime studying dance and drama to achieve his dream of becoming a star. But his decision to serve God with all his life should still be respected. Here's what Edoardo Santini explained regarding his new life of becoming a priest. Italy's Most Handsome Man To Become Priest On Saturday, Dec. 2, Edoardo Santini confirmed his decision to join the priesthood. He said he found himself on the path towards becoming a priest at 21 years of age, claiming that he already joined a seminar near Florence. "I've decided to give up modeling work, acting, and dance, but I won't abandon all my passions, I'll just live them differently, offering them up to God," said the former Italian model via The Daily Mail UK. Edoardo thanked his fans, saying he had the opportunity to meet young people like himself who gave him the strength to investigate the question about God he had been carrying since he was a little kid. "In recent years I have met wonderful people who have given me so much and allowed me to experience art. I won't abandon everything, because my passions are part of me but I will live them and propose them again in different contexts," he said. Before his announcement, Santini shared that in 2022, he was given the chance to live with two priests, which he described as the most beautiful experience of his life. Living with the two priests really inspired him to become a man of God. Because of this, he went to study theology and worked in two parishes of the Florentine diocese. He said he was initially terrified since he would be leaving his life as a model and becoming a priest. However, Edoardo said he would never regret choosing the path God gave him. Read Also: Kylie Jenner's Firm Faces Lawsuit For Allegedly Paying its Model Late | HNGN - Headlines & Global News What Netizens Say About Edoardo Santini's Decision Many of his fans congratulated him for his decision and wished him luck in becoming a man of God. However, some individuals questioned his priesthood. In his official Instagram post's comment section, an IG user asked how "such a handsome man and arrogant guy" put himself into a "cult" that promises heaven. Another netizen asked how a young man like Edoardo can believe in "fantasy readings." He was referring to the Bible and Gospel, claiming that seeing the universe as an infinity would be better. On the other hand, other Instagram users said those questioning Edoardo should respect his decision instead since anyone can choose their own path in life. Many of his fans said they are pleased since Edoardo Santini found the courage to pursue a life focused on God despite what others say about it. Related Article: Italy PM Giorgia Meloni Ends Relationship With Long-Time Journalist Partner Over Misogynistic Remarks @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. If seeing the northern lights is on your wish list, 2024 may be the year to check it off that list. Liz MacDonald, a space scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, says 2024 will be a prime viewing year to see the natural phenomenon. The northern lights, also known as aurora borealis, occur when solar winds with electrically charged particles enter the Earths magnetic field. The particles collide with atmospheric gases to create blue, green, red and violet curtains of light in the sky. The sun is entering its most active time, called solar maximum, which means the northern lights will be more strong and frequent than usual, MacDonald says. This will be the first solar maximum where peoples cellphones can capture the lights easily, which means great opportunities to share these photos and help others get accurate, real-time alerts of visibility. AARP Membership Join AARP for $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 Keep in mind that clear and dark skies are the magic ingredients needed for the celestial event to reveal itself. In the United States, head to the far north for the best possible viewing chances from September 2024 through April 2025. Activity is expected to steadily increase until fall 2024, when the lights will be at their brightest, says Mark Miesch, a scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Although there is no guarantee you will see the northern lights, you can get information on visibility conditions before you go. For example, Aurorasaurus, founded by MacDonald, offers enthusiasts accurate, real-time alerts of visibility. NOAAs Space Weather Prediction System Aurora tracker provides 30- to 90-minute forecasts. To increase your chances of seeing the northern lights in the U.S., consider a trip to the following locations. Empire Acquires Gas Plant for Carpentaria Project Sydney, Dec 4, 2023 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Empire Energy Group Ltd ( ASX:EEG ) ( EEGUF:OTCMKTS ) has acquired AGL Limited's ( ASX: AGL ) RPGP for $2.5 million in cash, significantly accelerating the path to Pilot Project gas production. The cash consideration was funded from Empire's existing cash at bank. Comments from Managing Director Alex Underwood: "This is a material development for Empire, its shareholders and all stakeholders involved in the development of the Beetaloo Sub-basin, and the substantial economic benefits and energy security that Empire's Beetaloo project can provide for all Australians. The Rosalind Park Gas Plant has been very well managed by AGL during its time processing gas for supply into the Sydney market and meets the specifications Empire requires for processing its low CO2 Beetaloo gas for supply into NT market and Australian East Coast markets from the EP187 Carpentaria Pilot Project, and in future larger scale development scenarios. This comes at a critical time for energy security for the NT market, given that existing sources of supply continue to decline. Success at the Carpentaria Pilot Project would achieve two critical goals for Empire and its shareholders: one, the generation of material cash flow to support our ongoing growth, and two, demonstration of the long-term deliverability of development wells in the Beetaloo Basin, all while reducing the emissions that would otherwise result from flaring test gas. The Empire team continues its hard work progressing towards a final investment decision for the pilot project, and is targeting the field installation of the RPGP, drilling of development wells and connection of the project to the McArthur River Pipeline in next year's dry season, which would result in gas sales commencing in 2025." The RPGP previously supported the Camden Gas Project ("Camden") which had been producing natural gas from the Sydney basin since 2004. The Camden Gas Project was comprised of 144 coal seam gas wells. The RPGP was located in Menangle, New South Wales, where natural gas was collected via low pressure underground gathering lines, then dried, compressed, and transmitted into the Greater Sydney natural gas network. Decommissioning of Camden commenced in August 2023 and the site is now being progressively rehabilitated. Prior to its closure, Empire identified the RPGP as a fit for purpose facility that met all Pilot Project specifications. RPGP passed Empire's stringent technical due diligence process. As part of Camden decommissioning, AGL disassembled and preserved the RPGP, following which Empire transported the entire equipment suite to storage facilities in Roma, Queensland. These storage facilities are proximal to service providers where the RPGP will be refurbished in advance of transportation and reassembly at the Carpentaria Pilot Project in 2024 (subject to regulatory approvals and Carpentaria Pilot Project FID in the coming months). The benefits to Empire of the acquisition of the RPGP include: - Cost Saving: Empire estimates that acquisition of the RPGP may result in cost savings of more than $30 million when compared with new build alternatives for midstream infrastructure alternatives; - Accelerated Timeline to First Gas: Due to current global supply chain issues for gas compressors, procurement of either new or other used gas processing plant alternatives would add an additional ~12 months to the timeline to first gas. Empire is now well positioned to meet its timeline for 2025 first gas subject to regulatory approvals and FID; - RPGP has a long history of strong operational performance and following refurbishment is expected to continue to operate for many years; - RPGP has a design capacity of 42 TJ / day, providing throughput for additional gas volumes well in excess of Empire's target of 25 TJ / day for the Pilot Project; - The acquisition package includes the physical assets as well as all historical maintenance / inspection records, engineering design documentation, operation / maintenance manuals and procedures. There is also a potential opportunity to redeploy AGL RPGP employees to the Carpentaria Pilot Project to ensure continuity of operations and retention of knowledge / expertise within Empire. Empire continues to work with APA Group under its Initial Agreement which may result in the funding of the engineering and construction of midstream infrastructure assets, if further approvals are obtained and long form agreements are entered into. *To view figures, please visit: https://abnnewswire.net/lnk/W5957ZFD About Empire Energy Group Ltd Empire Energy (ASX:EEG) (OTCMKTS:EEGUF) holds over 14.5 million acres of highly prospective exploration tenements in the McArthur and Beetaloo Basins, Northern Territory. Work undertaken by the Company since 2010 demonstrates that the Eastern depositional Trough of the McArthur Basin, of which the Company holds 80% has very considerable conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon potential. The Beetaloo sub-Basin, in which Empire holds a substantial position, has independently assessed world class hydrocarbon volumes in place with a major ramp up in industry activity underway to appraise substantial discoveries already made by major Australian oil and gas operators. Empire Energy is an experienced conventional oil and gas producer with operations in the Appalachia region (New York and Pennsylvania). Empire has been successfully developing and producing oil and gas since 2006. Related Companies State Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington Washington D.C. West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming Puerto Rico US Virgin Islands Armed Forces Americas Armed Forces Pacific Armed Forces Europe Northern Mariana Islands Marshall Islands American Samoa Federated States of Micronesia Guam Palau Alberta, Canada British Columbia, Canada Manitoba, Canada New Brunswick, Canada Newfoundland, Canada Nova Scotia, Canada Northwest Territories, Canada Nunavut, Canada Ontario, Canada Prince Edward Island, Canada Quebec, Canada Saskatchewan, Canada Yukon Territory, Canada Zip Code A24 Movie Baz Luhrmann who directed Elvis Presley biopic hasn't watched the Sofia Coppola-directed film about the late King of Rock and Roll's ex-wife Priscilla Presley. Dec 4, 2023 AceShowbiz - Baz Luhrmann has not had the time to watch "Priscilla" yet. While Baz helmed the 2022 "Elvis" biopic, he admitted he has been too busy to watch Sofia Coppola's recent movie about Elvis Presley's relationship with Priscilla Presley but insisted he is looking forward to it. "[Sofia is] a really good friend. I haven't seen the film, I've just been so busy. But I'm dying to see it. Unfortunately, people think festivals are glamorous, but I'll be watching three films a day in a dark room. That's what I'm going to be doing. But I will see Priscilla at some point, believe you me!" Baz, who is the head juror at the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where "Priscilla" is screening, told The Hollywood Reporter. And, Baz has no issues with the two movies being released so close together. He said, "Elvis' life was so big in such a short time and is such an important part of the fabric of contemporary culture. But he has been somewhat removed from it. He's sort of been turned into wallpaper and a joke. But all it does is say, if you want to look at the modern American epoch from the '50s on, you can't not look at the canvas of Elvis Presley's life." "I'm sure there'll be many more films about Elvis and Priscilla told with other characters and told from very different points of view. Because it just proves the validity of the story in terms of culture in America." You can share this post! Cover Images/John Rainford Celebrity Britain's conservative politician is seeking to lawfully ban royal family members from speaking 'trash' about the institution following racism scandal involving King Charles and Kate Middleton. Dec 4, 2023 AceShowbiz - The Duke and Duchess of Sussex could be stripped of their royal titles if a bombshell "nuclear option" law is passed by the UK Parliament. Prince Harry, 39, and his ex-actress wife Meghan Markle, 42, land again at the centre of a storm after writer Omid Scobie, 42, claimed in his new book "Endgame" the duchess accused two senior royals of raising "concerns" about her son Archie's skin colour. Conservative MP Bob Seely is now seeking to adapt laws that were originally passed in the First World War to deny German nobles their British titles - which would force the House of Commons to consider turning the Sussexes into Mr. and Mrs. Mr. Seely said the "nuclear option" was "in support of the monarchy" and aims to respect the decision of those who no longer want to be royals by removing "their titles and privileges." He said in an article written for the Mail on Sunday, "I'm not a republican and support the monarchy, but after the latest instalment of the couple's feud with the rest of the royal family, I believe that Parliament and the Privy Council should consider a nuclear option." "The Duke and Duchess can be Mr. and Mrs like the rest of us. My Titles Deprivation 1917 Act Amendment Bill would allow a vote in Parliament to advise the ancient advisory Privy Council to strip a member of the royal family of their titles. "My aim is simple, if someone doesn't want to be royal, that is a decision we respect - but they should not keep the titles and privileges if they trash an institution that plays an important part in our nation's life." Writer Omid Scobie, 42, who has been dubbed "Meghan's cheerleader", included the claim in "Endgame" that in private letters the duchess wrote to King Charles she named two members of the royal household she claims took part in the "conversations" about Archie's skin tone. A Dutch version of the book named the two royals alleged to have asked the question, but Omid denies including their identities - which have been revealed by 58-year-old TalkTV host Piers Morgan. You can share this post! Cop28 and the United Nations body responsible for overseeing the annual climate conference are facing criticism for their lack of clarity regarding the safety of activists who wish to demonstrate outside the conference area in Dubai. This situation has raised concerns about the potential risk faced by civil society, considering that protests are typically prohibited in the country. With at least 80,000 people registered to attend the conference, including thousands of activists and members of civil society, concerns about their safety are mounting, as per The Guardian. Rare Public Protests at UAE's COP28 Climate Talks The United Nations' COP28 climate talks on Sunday saw a rare sight in the United Arab Emirates - public protests. From the largest demonstration since the start of the Israel-Hamas war to environmental issues, activists allowed into the UAE can protest under strict guidelines in this autocratic nation. This sets a unique precedent in a country that has typically limited dissent and stifled freedom of expression. Among those allowed into the country are human rights researchers from organizations that have long been banned. For some, this marks the first opportunity in a decade to offer criticism, although they are aware that it might prevent them from returning in the future. While the acceptance of limited protests at COP28 may create a false image of the UAE as a country that respects rights, critics argue that it is an opportunity for the UAE government to improve its international image. The UAE bans political parties and labor unions, and laws strictly restrict speech. The majority of the population is made up of low-paid expatriate laborers who are hesitant to voice their concerns due to fears of losing their livelihoods. Moreover, the UAE's diplomatic ties with Israel further complicate matters, making protesting on behalf of Palestinians a contentious issue. Despite the challenges, the UN and the UAE agreed to allow free expression during COP28. Activists have had to seek approvals from organizers for their demonstrations, and strict guidelines are in place. Demonstrators are prohibited from waving national flags or singling out specific countries. However, over 100 people gathered in a solidarity protest on behalf of Palestinians, only a short distance from Israel's pavilion at Dubai's Expo City. Israeli security personnel observed from a distance, according to Associated Press. Read Also: Satellite Technology Could Dominate Numerous Sectors, Experts Claim Protest Limits and Surveillance Concerns at COP28 Criticism of Israel's conduct in the war has been voiced by world leaders and activists, many of whom wore the traditional Palestinian checkered keffiyeh. However, unlike previous COP summits, there haven't been large-scale marches outside the venue. While the loosened rules for COP28 are seen as a positive development by some, concerns about surveillance and restricted political space persist. Participants have reported extensive security measures, including thousands of security cameras, mass surveillance, and suspected cases of phone hacking. Despite these challenges, activists at COP28 are using humor and creative tactics to draw attention to the climate crisis. American activist Alice McGown dressed up as a dugong, holding a sign that read "No More Fossils," in protest of the planned expansion of offshore gas operations in a protected marine area. Overall, COP28 in Dubai presents a unique dynamic for activists and civil society members, offering an opportunity to voice their concerns on a global platform. However, uncertainties and restrictions surrounding their safety and freedom of expression remain, raising questions about the true extent of free speech in the UAE, Rauters reported. Related Article: UK: Children's Books With Racially Minoritized Characters Increase by 30%! @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Cover Images/Dutch Press Photo Celebrity In other news related to the royal family, it's said Kensington Palace are considering 'all options,' including taking a legal action, after King Charles III and Kate Middleton are named as the 'racist royals.' Dec 4, 2023 AceShowbiz - Meghan Markle and Prince Harry were slammed for remaining mum on the drama following the release of Omid Scobie's new biography. A source close to the British royal family urged the couple to speak out after King Charles III and Princess Kate Middleton were named as the "racist royals" in the Dutch edition of "Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy's Fight for Survival". "For the couple that talked about 'death by a thousand no comments,' the silence at this point is deafening," the source told Daily Mail. It was also said that Prince William demanded an action as his wife was accused as one of the royals who were allegedly concerned about Archie's skin color before he was born. In other news related to the royal family, it's said that Kensington Palace are considering "all options," including taking a legal action, in the wake of the ordeal. "Discussions are being had, and we'll continue those discussions this week," a source told The Telegraph in a report published on Saturday, December 2. The source added, "Conversations will be had and decisions made with care and time and professionalism rather than rushed over a weekend." The new reports came after it was revealed that Harry and Meghan are snubbed by longtime pal Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster. According to the Sunday Times, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are not among the guest list for Hugh's wedding to Olivia Henson in June. "It's incredibly sad it has come to this," said a friend of Harry and Hugh, who is one of the godparents to the couple's son Prince Archie. As for the reason, the insider explained, "[Hugh] wanted to avoid anything overshadowing the day, especially for Olivia and doesn't want any awkwardness." "Hugh is one of very few close friends of William and Harry's who has maintained strong bonds and a line of communication with both. He wishes they could put their heads together and patch things up, but realizes it's unlikely to happen before the wedding," the source continued. In response to the report, a spokesperson for Hugh said in a statement to PEOPLE, "We are not in a position to comment on the guest list." Hugh and Olivia are scheduled to change vows at Chester Cathedral, in northwest England on June 7. You can share this post! Cover Images/BauerGriffin TV In a new interview, the 72-year-old responds to allegations that he misrepresented his career as a former restaurant owner on the spin-off of ABC's 'The Bachelor'. Dec 4, 2023 AceShowbiz - Gerry Turner may be happily engaged to Theresa Nist now, but he has some things to clarify about. In a new interview, "The Golden Bachelor" star responded to allegations that he misrepresented his career on the ABC series. Gerry, who was introduced to viewers as a retired restaurateur, set the record straight after The Hollywood Report pointed out that his LinkedIn profile listed hot tub installment and maintenance work at a health center in the Davenport area among his careers. "The comments about what I did later in life, with you know, hot tubssome of the mentally challenged things - I did those after I retired," he told Katie Couric. "I retired at 55 and didn't want to do anything. And so I was very happy kind of giving back to the community, doing something that was worth something to other people." The 72-year-old further explained, "I really didn't work as a handyman for the money. I did it because I knew I was doing something good for people who needed help. That's kind of the funny part of that article. There's just enough truth in it, but the reality is, it's not of concern to me now. I have so many positives that I have to think about that I haven't given that article a whole lot of thought." Gerry also appeared to downplay a recently-released expose by his ex-girlfriend, who went by pseudonym Carolyn for privacy reasons. Insisting that he didn't live in the past, he said, "I wanna focus on what's going on now. The important thing for me is where I'm at today. And looking back on those things, to me, is no benefit," he emphasized. He also defended himself by saying that he had in fact dated a number of women, just like "any guy." He noted, "It becomes an issue of how do you define if you're in a relationship or not." Similarly, he previously told The New York Times, "I guess I haven't really looked at it as how accurate it is. I've more looked at it in terms of timing, and how it really doesn't fit with all of the positive things that are going on in my life right now." He continued, "I mean, I'm sitting across from Theresa right now, and I look at her, and she's the love of my life. And I really don't have time to think about some of the other stuff." In The Hollywood Reporter article, Carolyn shut down Gerry's claim that he hadn't been kissed since the death of his wife Toni in 2017 because they dated for three years just one month after Toni's passing. Among other allegations, Carolyn additionally said that Gerry refused to take her to his high school reunion after she gained 10 pounds. "I'm not taking you to the reunion looking like that," Gerry allegedly told her. That seemed to be the final straw as they broke up after the incident. You can share this post! Cover Images/Faye's Vision TV The 'Grey's Anatomy' alum and the 'One Tree Hill' vet take to their respective social media accounts to react to 'SNL' jokes about 'A Cowboy Christmas Romance'. Dec 4, 2023 AceShowbiz - Sarah Drew and Jana Kramer are happy for free promotion. The "Grey's Anatomy" alum and the "One Tree Hill" vet took to their respective social media accounts to react to "Saturday Night Live" jokes about "A Cowboy Christmas Romance", their upcoming Christmas movie on Lifetime. "My new movie made SNL," Jana wrote via Instagram Story on Sunday, December 3. The 40-year-old TV star also attached a video of the NBC comedy show's "Weekend Update" segment from the Saturday, December 2 episode. As for Sarah, who wrote the flick, she posted on Instagram Stories, "Well, @nbcsnl made a joke about my movie #acowboychristmasromance. Does that mean I've made it?!" The official Lifetime Instagram account also responded to the shout-out, writing, "Lifetime officially made the naughty list," alongside a video of the skit. Sarah Drew and Jana Kramer reacted to 'SNL' jokes about their new movie. In the latest episode of the long-running NBC series, Michael Che delivered news about the movie, which sets tongue wiggling as it's the first Christmas film that will feature sex scene. "Next week, Lifetime will air their first Christmas movie featuring a sex scene," Michael shared. "The sex scene will finally explain why Santa named that one reindeer Vixen. That's a weird name for a reindeer, man." According to its logline, "A Cowboy Christmas Romance" centers on real estate agent Lexie (Jana) who returns to her Arizona hometown to reclaim land belonging to rancher Coby Mason (Adam Senn). As the two begin to form a connection, Lexie starts to question her own life choices and tries to mend her relationships with her father and brother. Last month, Jana teased the flick in an episode of her "Whine Down" podcast. "It's the first [Lifetime] Christmas movie that has a sex scene," she said. "When I read it, I was like, 'Well, this is gonna be interesting.' I'm like, 'How are we gonna do this with the baby belly?' " She continued, "We're on this - spoiler alert - he lays me down on some hay, and then we, you know And then, you know, obviously, it's still Lifetime, it's still family. But it was pushing limits there, too." You can share this post! Cover Images/Dutch Press Photo Celebrity Nelson Mandela's daughter Ndileka Mandela insists it is important that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are allowed 'room to voice out whatever their misgivings are' about the institution. Dec 4, 2023 AceShowbiz - The Duke and Duchess of Sussex had to "find their own voice," just like Nelson Mandela, the former South African president's granddaughter has insisted. Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle have faced criticism for speaking out against the royal family since stepping down to start a new life in the U.S. almost four years ago, but Ndileka Mandela has insisted it is important they are allowed "room to voice out whatever their misgivings are" about the institution. The activist compared the couple's situation to that of the famed anti-apartheid campaigner, who fled to Johannesberg in 1941 to avoid an arranged marriage set up by his guardian. Appearing on "Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg", Ndileka was asked if she felt the couple had been victims of racism and said, "I believe that Harry and Meghan had to find their own voice, in a similar way that grandad had to find his own voice when he had to run away from an arranged marriage. So they should be given, like any other person, room to voice out whatever their misgivings are. I cannot speak to whether Harry and Meghan's children have been discriminated. I don't have first-hand information of that. However, I can say that he should be allowed to voice out whatever it is that he wants to voice out and to choose his own path. Had grandad not chosen his own path when he ran away from an arranged marriage, we would not have the South Africa that we talk about today. So people should be allowed to present different journeys and should be allowed to walk different journeys in life." Despite speaking up in support of Harry and Meghan, who have children Prince Archie, four, and Princess Lilibet, two, together, Ndelika previously hit out at the couple for using her grandfather's words in their Netflix documentary series "Live to Lead". But revealing how the move left her "deeply upset," Ndileka told The Australian, "Harry needs to be authentic and stick to his own story, what relevance does grandads life have with his?" In the trailer for the documentary, which focuses on inspirational public figures such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Greta Thunberg, Harry is heard saying, "This was inspired by Nelson Mandela... who once said what counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived." Meghan added, "It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead." Ndileka fears the couple are drawing a comparison between her grandfather's release from prison and their decision to leave Britain when they stepped down as senior members of the royal family. She added, "Their marriage can never be compared to the celebration of grandad's release... that's chalk and cheese, there is no comparison. I don't believe he nor Meghan have ever properly met granddad, maybe when Harry was young at Buckingham Palace, but they are using his quotations in the documentary to draw in people and make millions without the Mandela family benefiting. I know the Nelson Mandela Foundation has supported the initiative but people have stolen grandfather's quotes for years and have used his legacy because they know his name sells Harry and Meghan are no different from them." You can share this post! Cover Images/Seth Browarnik Celebrity One day after filing a defamation lawsuit against his estranged wife, the plastic surgeon alleges that the 'Real Housewives of Miami' star bragged to a friend about cheating on him. Dec 4, 2023 AceShowbiz - Lenny Hochstein has accused Lisa Hochstein of cheating amid their ugly divorce. One day after filing a defamation lawsuit against his estranged wife, the Miami-based plastic surgeon alleged that the star of "The Real Housewives of Miami" was unfaithful during their marriage. On Saturday, December 2, the 57-year-old went public with his claim via Instagram Story. Over a black screen, he wrote, "Lisa was well aware and knew we were getting a divorce and already had a divorce attorney on retainer when I shared with her that I plan on asking my now-fiancee out on a date for the first time." Lenny went on to write, "Despite Lisa's ongoing smear campaign and trying to paint me in the light of a cheater and my fiancee as a mistress, these claims are completely false. There was no blindside, Katharina is in no way responsible for the end of my marriage and the decision to leave Lisa." The surgeon further elaborated, "I was especially disheartened by the fact that she bragged about her ongoing affair at the time on multiple instances." He mentioned that it happened "days before our daughter was born and on our 10 year wedding anniversary." In follow-up Stories, Lenny uploaded screenshots of Lisa's Instagram Direct Message with a friend, showing that Lisa cheated on him. Some of Lisa's messages reportedly read, "I can't wait to find my new man. My new boyfriend. Im [going] to have my first affair. I can't wait." Lenny Hochstein claimed that Lenny Hochstein cheated on him during their marriage. The cheating accusation came shortly after Lenny filed a defamation lawsuit against Lisa. He submitted the legal documents on Friday, December 1 and is seeking damages up to $100,000 as well as attorneys' fees. In the docs, he explained that he was not abusive to Lisa and did not cause an injury on her arm. Lenny reportedly wrote, "It came about because [Lisa] as usual was yelling at and berating [Lenny] when he came home from work, as she did almost daily telling him how he never does anything right, so [Lenny] attempted to walk away and started walking up the stairs and [Lisa] walked in front of [him] going backwards up the stairs so she could continue yelling in [his] face and [she] lost her balance and fell on a stair." In contrast, Lisa claimed via Instagram Story on November 22, "I'm being threatened and harassed through the court system and through 'others' by Lenny and it needs to stop. This was almost 2 weeks old from last season." She added, "You may have caught this bruise on the episode when I opened up to the women on the show about the divorce." You can share this post! Cover Images/BauerGriffin Celebrity Days after deleting a post condemning Israel on her Instagram account, the supermodel is photographed looking stern during a sighting at JFK in New York City. Dec 4, 2023 AceShowbiz - Gigi Hadid was seen looking stern in the first sighting after she made headlines for her controversial Instagram post. Days after deleting a post condemning Israel, the supermodel was pictured in New York City on Friday, December 1. In some pictures circulating online, Gigi was seen wheeling her luggage through JFK airport. The mom of one opted for an oversized leather jacket that she paired with a gray undershirt and black straight-legged pants for the outing. Completing her style, Gigi wore a matching belt, orange-tinted shades and gray sneakers. Gigi's sighting came after she deleted a post accusing Israel of the "abduction, rape, humiliation, torture [and] murder of Palestinians years and years and years before Oct 7 2023." The said post included photos of Ahmed Manasra, a Palestinian who was convicted on two counts of attempted murder in relation to stabbings at a Jewish settlement in 2015. Following the backlash, the sister of Bella Hadid issued an apology for not doing "fact check" before posting. "As someone of Palestinian descent, the endless heartbreaking news and imagery coming out of Gaza has been painful and often overwhelming," she wrote on Instagram last month. She continued, "It is important to me to share the real stories about the hardships that Palestinians have endured and continue to endure, but this weekend I shared something that I did not fact check or deeply think about prior to posting." Gigi, who has been a vocal supporter for Palestine, elaborated that her accidental sharing of misinformation was an attempt to "show the ways in which international law is being undermined by the Israeli government." She noted, "In this case, I was trying to highlight how Palestinian children who are arrested by the [Israel Defense Forces] are often not given the same rights as an Israel child accused of the same crime would," before sharing that she felt regretful for using the "wrong example." "My focus was intended to be on human rights issues. That is why I also want to reiterate that attacking any human, which of course includes Jewish people, is NEVER OK. Taking innocent people hostage is NEVER OK. Harming someone BECAUSE they are Jewish is NEVER OK. It is wrong," the catwalk beauty went on stressing. "To want freedom and humane treatment for Palestinians and to also want safety for Jewish people can both be important to the same person - including myself." You can share this post! Cover Images/Instagram/Machettepix Celebrity If a new report is to be believed, the couple is facing another marital problem and it has something to do with the Yeezy architectural designer's 'spending problem.' Dec 5, 2023 AceShowbiz - Kanye West and Bianca Censori reportedly face yet another marital issue after reuniting in Dubai. If a new report is to be believed, the couple is "taking time apart" again due to a financial problem. A source told OK! Magazine, "There's been trouble brewing between them," adding that it had something to do with the Yeezy architectural designer's "spending problem." According to the insider, the 28-year-old Australian native has "been burning a hole through his credit cards and using cash to buy jewelry and designer bags." Ye reportedly wasn't happy with her shopping habit as "he feels like she's taking advantage of his generosity." It was also said that the hip-hop star's trip to Dubai "doesn't bode well" for their relationship. The insider added that the "Donda" artist was "pushing Bianca away. Kanye is hot and cold, and hes gone cold on Bianca" as he's "been focusing on his kids." Prior to this, it was reported that Bianca's decision to join Ye in Dubai wasn't voluntary. The former husband of Kim Kardashian allegedly gave Bianca, who was in her native country Australia when Ye was already in Dubai, the "ultimatum" as a source claimed, "He told her if she didn't come to Dubai, then they were done." That aside, it seems like Ye and Bianca's overseas trip will continue until the end of the year. "Ye has loved being out of L.A.," a source spilled to The Sun U.S. "He's never been a huge fan of the city and has no immediate plans to return, despite having a place here and his Yeezy HQ." The insider said that after Bianca "spent time back in Australia," the couple is "getting back on track and planning what to do for the holidays." It was also revealed that the twosome considered returning to Italy for Christmas. "There is talk of them returning to Italy in the next few weeks where he's renting a place and having Kim fly the kids there, but it's up in the air at the minute," the source continued, referring to Ye's ex-wife Kim and their four children together, North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm. You can share this post! Cover Images/Jennifer Graylock Celebrity Upon learning that Susan has issued a public apology, the former host of 'The View' bluntly declares that the 'Dead Man Walking' actress is 'a classic example of the horse shoe theory.' Dec 4, 2023 AceShowbiz - Meghan McCain has reacted to Susan Sarandon's apology for the actress' anti-Jewish rant. Upon learning that Susan has issued a public apology, the former host of "The View" called out the "Dead Man Walking" actress via social media. On Saturday, December 2, the 39-year-old TV personality made use of X, formerly known as Twitter, to voice her thoughts on Susan apologizing for her controversial remark. In a tweet, Meghann penned, "Susan Sarandon is a classic example of the horse shoe theory - where woke progressives try and outwoke each other to the point that they are in fact just actually exposing themselves to be racist bigots. Like the tiki torch lunatics - they are all poison, presented differently." Meghan's statement came shortly after Susan revealed that she "deeply" regretted making the controversial remark about Jews. On Friday, December 1, she issued a statement via Instagram that read, "This phrasing was a terrible mistake, as it implies that until recently Jews have been strangers to persecution, when the opposite is true." "As we all know, from centuries of oppression and genocide in Europe, to the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, PA, Jews have long been familiar with discrimination and religious violence, which continues to this day," she continued. "I deeply regret diminishing this reality and hurting people with this comment. It was my intent to show solidarity in the struggle against bigotry of all kinds, and I am sorry I failed to do so." Near the end of the statement, Susan stated, "I will continue my commitment to peace, truth, justice, and compassion for all people. I hope that we can meet with love and willingness to engage in dialogue, especially with those with whom we disagree." Meghan McCain slammed Susan Sarandon over the actress' apology for her controversial remark on Jews. Previously, Susan got candid with her thoughts on Jews living in the U.S. when she was joining a pro-Palestine rally. During the November 17 protest in New York City, she stated, "There are a lot of people that are afraid, that are afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence." In the wake of the statement, Susan was met with criticisms and dumped by a Hollywood talent agency. On November 21, it was confirmed by a spokesperson for UTA that the talent agency, who has a Jewish CEO named Jeremy Zimmer, does not represent her any longer. She reportedly "extremely hurt" some "staffers at UTA" with her comments on "frightened Jews." You can share this post! Warner Bros. Pictures Movie Paul King knew Timothee would be perfect for the 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' prequel after watching old footage when he was student at a New York performing arts school. Dec 4, 2023 AceShowbiz - Timothee Chalamet's "digital footprint" prompted him to land his role in "Wonka". The 27-year-old actor had to be able to sing to play chocolatier Willy Wonka in the "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" prequel, and fortunately, thanks to old footage from his time at LaGuardia performing arts school in New York already being shared online, director Paul King was already aware his musical abilities wasn't something he'd have to worry about. "Because we live in this ridiculous century, some of Timmy's high school performances are on the internet and have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. If mine were on the internet I would never work again," Paul said to The Times newspaper's Saturday Review when explaining he cast Timothee on the strength of "all the great movies he's been in." Timothee laughed, "Digital footprint. I grew up in the arts district in New York and I went to performing arts high schools, so I feel lucky that I didn't have a traditional upbringing in that way." But the actor insisted his teenage experiences didn't "really prepare" him for the scale of the performances in the film. He said, "It was a brand new challenge. I sang a little bit in high school, but that doesn't really prepare you." While Timothee was very familiar with Gene Wilder's portrayal of Wonka in the classic 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl's beloved story, he didn't think it was a bad thing to have the performance on his mind when he was filming his own scenes. He said, "The Gene Wilder film I grew up on, like many kids in America. That is the quintessence of a magical, mysterious, wonderfully light but also dark figure." Asked if it was hard to get the movie out of his head, he replied, "No because this movie is really the companion piece to that film." And the "Call Me by Your Name" actor thinks he has a lot in common with his confectioner alter ego. His co-star Keegan-Michael Key noted, "There's a wiliness to Gene Wilder's portrayal that Timmy also has, but at the same time being very optimistic and childlike. Timmy found that balance beautifully." Timothee replied, "I'd like to think maybe I have that quality in life. But I could be dead wrong. Time will tell." You can share this post! Warner Bros. Pictures Movie While he loves his involvement in getting the script done, the 'Game of Thrones' actor admits he was really nervous when presenting his ideas to the director and producers. Dec 5, 2023 AceShowbiz - Jason Momoa feels "extremely proud" of his writing credit on "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom". The 44-year-old actor was involved in working on the script for the concluding picture in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) - in which he reprises his role as Arthur Curry/Aquaman - and is delighted to have helped craft the story for a character he adores. "It's pretty much all me, and I love it. I'm extremely proud of it. There's a lot of things you want to do and fulfil as an actor, and also for the fans, and for myself. When we finished the first one, I had a lot of ideas. And I started to put them down, just put down in my heart and my love for the character," Jason said at the CCXP convention in Sao Paulo, Brazil on Sunday, December 3. The "Game of Thrones" actor also recalled the "nerve-wracking" experience of pitching his ideas to director James Wan and bosses from both DC and Warner Bros. Jason said, "I've never done that before." "I pitched my own idea but I'm like, 'They can't fault me on this, because I love this character and I've played it for so long. Here's some ideas that I would like to do.' And they responded really well to it, and then James liked a lot of ideas, and then they took that and ran with it and took it another level." The movie is set for release later this month and Wan previously revealed that climate change will feature as a key plot point in the superhero sequel. The 46-year-old filmmaker told The Hollywood Reporter, "I think people are going to be excited to see that this movie is quite different from the first movie in terms of tone. It's a little bit more serious, and we're dealing with issues like climate change." "We're not afraid to lean into that in a big way, because the 'Aquaman' comic book, even way back when, has always been environmentally conscious. He's always been someone who's fought to keep the ocean clean, and it feels more relevant in the world that we're living in today. So this movie has something to talk about, but it's still a fun action-fantasy movie." You can share this post! Shanghai honors 50 expats with prestigious Magnolia Silver Award for 2023 09:38, December 04, 2023 By Huang Lanlan ( Global Times Photo: Huang Lanlan/GT Fifty foreign nationals in Shanghai were honored with this years Magnolia Silver Award, an award specifically honoring expatriates in Shanghai for their contributions to the city. This year, the award winners are from 15 countries and are engaged in various fields including economy and trade, finance, science and technology, shipping, education, medical care, and culture, as introduced by Kong Fuan, director-general of the Shanghai Municipal Foreign Affairs Office, on Sunday. With their talent, passion, and dedication, they have contributed to the openness, vitality, prosperity, and progress of Shanghai, making the city a better place, Kong said in a speech he delivered at the awards presentation ceremony in downtown Shanghai on Sunday. Each of the award winners has moving stories that contain expatriates sense of belonging, integration, and love for the city of Shanghai, he added. In his speech, Kong cited four of the winners connections with and contributions to Shanghai. They included Alexander Rhys Gregg-Smith, the Senior Vice President of Bureau Veritas (BV) Group and the Chief Executive of BV Marine &Offshore North Asia and China. The Port of Shanghai, the worlds busiest container port, has been at the forefront of the development of the whole of China and driving global trade, Gregg-Smith said in a speech he delivered at the ceremony on behalf of all the award recipients. The rapid development of Shanghai provides us with a vast stage, he said. Speaking of himself, Gregg-Smith mentioned that he has lived and worked in many countries and cities around the world, but his love for Shanghai is deeply embedded in his heart. It is not just a place for work; it is my spiritual home. For him, the award is more than a mere medal or title, it is a symbol of the enthusiastic support and warm welcome consistently felt in this truly international megacity, Gregg-Smith added. Ahead of the ceremony on Sunday, Gregg-Smith shared with the Global Times his excitement about winning the award. Its a great pride and honor to me. Its fantastic to be recognized, he said. Gregg-Smith mentioned that he and his colleagues now have many dealings with the Shanghai government, working on assisting the shipbuilding and international shipping in this city. Gregg-Smith was one of the many expats who witnessed the rapid development of Shanghai over the decades. My first time in China was in 1998, and between 1998 and 2023, the GDP of Shanghai has increased some 10 times, he told the Global Times. So at least for me, it is the number one city. Im really happy to be here and [to witness] these years exciting developments. Astrid Poghosyan, who works at the development department of Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, is one of the youngest winners of the award this year. The award not only shows Shanghais appreciation to those who make significant contributions to the citys development but also embodies its recognition and encouragement for the international young people who make efforts in pursuing their dreams in China, Poghosyan said to the Global Times on Sunday. Coming to Shanghai at the age of 16, Poghosyan, now 30, said that over the years she has well integrated herself into this city, from professional work to daily life, as well as community voluntary services. Ive been here for 14 years, she told the Global Times in fluent Putonghua. I grew up here, and most of my friends are Chinese. Im an expat from appearance, but I have a very Chinese heart. Shanghai began honoring expatriates in 1989 with the Magnolia Silver Award and added the gold award and honorary citizenship to the system in 1992 and 1997, respectively, according to the official website of the municipal government. These awards have honored more than 1,827 foreigners in the past 34 years. (Web editor: Tian Yi, Liang Jun) Europe's right-wing leaders, representing the Identity and Democracy (ID) group, rallied in Florence on Sunday, marking the start of their EU-wide election campaign. This follows the unexpected victory of the Netherlands' anti-Islam leader, Geert Wilders, in November's general elections. The ID's Euroskeptic members, addressing approximately 2,000 supporters at a 16th-century fortress, pledged to transform the political landscape in Brussels, as per Politico. Salvini Urges EU Center-Right Alliance to 'Liberate Brussels' Matteo Salvini, Italy's far-right League leader, urged the European People's Party (EPP) to collaborate and "liberate Brussels" from what he termed as illegal occupiers. Salvini, a key figure in Italy's coalition government, advocated for unity among center-right factions in the EU, highlighting the success of such an approach in Italy. In Florence, Salvini hailed the gathering as a "historic day," suggesting a "Renaissance of Europe" based on work and rights, presenting a stark choice between freedom and fear, rights and extremism. He emphasized the importance of a united center-right force to free Brussels from illegal occupation. Despite the League's success in 2019, it has since seen a decline in support, with Meloni's Brothers of Italy party rising to 29%, while the League stabilizes at 9.3%. The League aims to capture votes from Forza Italia, which is currently at 7.4%. Projections for the 2024 EU elections by Europe Elects indicate a significant gain for the far-right, potentially becoming the fourth largest power in the EU House. To form a majority, a coalition would need 352 lawmakers, and the far-right, along with the EPP and the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), could amass 344 MEPs. With additional non-attached members, such as Hungary's Fidesz party, they could achieve a slim majority. However, this prospect faces challenges within the EPP, particularly its liberal fraction. EPP Secretary General Thanasis Bakolas, in a September interview with Euractiv, dismissed any collaboration with the far-right and ECR, emphasizing the role of EPP, Socialists, ALDE, and the Greens in moving the EU forward, according to Euractiv. Read Also: Kathniel's Breakup Could Also Impact Philippines' Showbiz Industry Europe's Right-Wing Leaders Rally in Florence Based on current forecasts, a coalition of the EPP, Socialists, Liberals, and Greens could secure a majority of 457 MEPs, potentially isolating far-right forces. This shift in power dynamics reflects the evolving narrative of Europe's far-right parties. Instead of anti-EU rhetoric, they now advocate for reforming Europe from within, with migration as a central issue. France's Marine Le Pen and National Rally President Jordan Bardella emphasized migration as a crucial issue, while Belgian leader Gerolf Annemans called for collaboration against the current EU establishment. Ben Habib, a senior Brexit advocate in the United Kingdom, drew attention to a provision within the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) with Brussels that has the potential to impede British border control. The debate intensified within the Conservative Party over whether to abandon the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), with a European Parliament report indicating that leaving the ECHR could violate the TCA. This development underlines the intricate relationship between national and EU-level politics, influencing both internal and external policy decisions, Express reported. Related Article: Kyriakos Mitsotakis Slams Rishi Sunak for Canceling Meeting Over Parthenon Sculpture Row @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Cover Images/KOI SOJER Celebrity The 'Black Panther: Wakanda Forever' star shows up in court for his first trial in domestic violence case and is accused of trying to 'manipulate' and 'control' then-girlfriend. Dec 5, 2023 AceShowbiz - Jonathan Majors is facing accusation that he assaulted his ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari to hide his infidelity and "establish control." The "Creed" actor, 34, began his trial over the alleged attack on Monday, December 4 at Manhattan Criminal Court, New York, and walked into the hearing carrying a Bible and a notebook - while holding hands with his girlfriend Meagan Good and another older woman. He received a huge boost at the beginning of proceedings when the judge dismissed four of the seven counts after an agreement between the prosecution and the defence. Jonathan has denied assault with intent to cause physical injury, assault recklessly causing physical injury, aggravated harassment and harassment. Prosecutor Michael Perez said they wanted the multiple assault charges "merged" into one charge "based on the nature of the injuries and the acts alleged." Jonathan is alleged to have slapped Grace Jabbari on a ride home before apparently grabbing her hand and throwing her back into the vehicle when she got out. He is alleged to have got into the apparent row after Grace saw a text from another woman which said, "Wish I was kissing you right now." Prosecutor Michael Perez of the Manhattan District Attorney's office used his opening statement in the trial to claim Jonathan beat up his then-lover to cover up his infidelity." He added to the jury, "Domestic violence is a pattern of behavior that betrays an intimate partner's trust and has historically taken place behind closed doors. It can take many forms on March 25th 2023, the defendant, Jonathan Majors, committed domestic violence against his then romantic partner Grace Jabbari when he used physical violence to manipulate her, control her and physically hurt her." "The defendant over the course of relationship with Grace Jabbari used a cruel and manipulative pattern of psychological and physical abuse that culminated in the tragic end of their relationship." In her opening statement, Jonathan's lawyer Priya Chaudhry called the allegations "false" and painted Grace as the aggressor in the pair's relationship. She said Grace had concocted the claims against the actor as "revenge" after seeing the text from another woman. Majors has denied six counts of assault in the third degree, one count of aggravated harassment in the second degree and one count harassment in the second degree. You can share this post! Bitget, the worlds leading cryptocurrency exchange and Web3 company, has announced the shortlisted top 10 projects that have applied for its start-up pitch program under the Blockchain4Youth $10 million initiative. Bitget hosted its first shortlisting round of cohorts for pitching on November 26, 2023 in Bengaluru. The top 10 shortlisted start-ups will now get the opportunity to present to industry leaders, and VCs along with Bitget, at the Build for WEB3 Summit on December 4, 2023. From the selected start-ups, the high potential start-ups stand a chance to get fundings up to $100K subject to due diligence under the Bitgets Blockchain4Youth $10 million initiative. These start-ups, shortlisted from over 120 will present live during BUIDL for Web3 Summit 2023 as part of the BUIDL.so SPOTLIGHT segment. Having launched the Blockchain4Youth initiative earlier this year, Bitget has pledged a vast $10 million investment pool towards uplifting blockchain innovation, with a high focus on young entrepreneurs, budding web3 founders, and start-ups. A recent survey conducted by Bitget Academy observed that 46% of millennials own cryptocurrencies and GenZ and Millenials have the highest rate of crypto adoption among all population groups. Through the Blockchain4Youth initiative, innovators that have the potential and relevant ideas can get the required funding, guidance, and technical expertise to create sustainable business models that further contribute to the growing web3 innovation landscape. The SPOTLOGHT session will be held at the BUIDL for Web3 Summit, Indias premier multi-chain summit, organised by Lumos Labs and BuidlersTribe, powered by Bitget. Nexus Network 2023 - A sustainable user onboarding infrastructure for layer 2s - A sustainable user onboarding infrastructure for layer 2s Blockflow - A simplified tool to build data backends dApps - A simplified tool to build data backends dApps BitSave - Worlds first crypto based mutual fund application - Worlds first crypto based mutual fund application Lync - A web3 game launcher simplifying blockchain complexities - A web3 game launcher simplifying blockchain complexities Sadaiv - A developer reputation protocol - A developer reputation protocol 0xRivendell - A zk-powered modular intent layer A zk-powered modular intent layer network - A workflow automating protocol for on-chain communities - A workflow automating protocol for on-chain communities Plena Finance - A crypto super app streamlining crypto investing and trading through personalization and automation - A crypto super app streamlining crypto investing and trading through personalization and automation Reax - A synthetic decentralized finance ecosystem - A synthetic decentralized finance ecosystem Wallet X - A decentralized smart wallet browser extension Our goal is to augment web3 and crypto adoption throughout Asia. The new generation of innovators and founders will come from the Millennials and GenZs, hence, our Blockchain4Youth initiative ensures holistic development needed to accelerate this adoption and support new-gen developers. Weve met with some high potential start-ups and are looking forward to nurturing and being a part of the journey of the next big crypto unicorn from India, said Simran Alphonso, PR and Communications Lead, Bitget. The web3 technology start-up sector is a highly inclusive and innovation driven space that can become the breeding ground of ideas, new inventions, and modern tech solutions, as has been observed by Buidl.so very closely. At the BUIDL.so SPOTLIGHT, we will further witness the innovation prowess of young Indian founders, builders, and developers with the goal of encouraging them further and fostering decentralised innovation, said Raghu Mohan, Founder, Buidlers Tribe. The BUIDL for Web3 Summit 2023 aims to unite global leaders, top innovators, and job opportunities worldwide, creating a platform for the next era of innovation. At the BUIDL.so SPOTLIGHT, we're poised to observe the innovation potential of 10 emerging web3.0 startups. We are looking forward to extending continued support to these selected start-ups on their start-up journey, playing a role in the broader expansion of web3 adoption, said Kaavya Prasad, Founder, Lumos Labs. As in the case of almost every field, Artificial Intelligence has started making deep inroads into advertising as well. It functions as a highly intelligent computer companion, lending its expertise to brands in crafting their campaigns. Picture it as a magical wizard working behind the scenes, enhancing everything with its brilliance. Whether they are working on regular advertisements or preparing something special for festive occasions, every brand desires to incorporate AI capabilities. So, whats the big deal about AI? Its akin to having an exceptionally smart friend who understands peoples preferences. Brands aim to utilise AI to grasp what we, the customers, like, creating ads that are super personalised. Especially during festivals, brands are seen moving beyond traditional ads and diving into the world of AI. They aspire for their advertisements to be more than just promotional material they want them to be captivating stories that resonate with the consumers emotions. And guess what? AI is the secret ingredient that helps them achieve precisely that! Hence, every brand, regardless of its size, aspires to incorporate AI into their campaigns. Its not just about embracing advanced technology; its about crafting ads that feel unique and leave a lasting impression in our minds. It signifies a fresh approach to the advertising realm, and everyone is eager to be a part of this exciting transformation. Mondelez triggered a paradigm shift with its groundbreaking Not just a Cadbury Ad campaign, unleashing a tidal wave of transformative AI-powered initiatives in the realm of festive advertising. This pioneering move served as a catalyst, compelling brands across diverse industries to re-evaluate and revolutionise their marketing strategies. In the dynamic landscape of marketing and advertising, artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as an undeniable game-changer, fundamentally altering how brands connect with their audience, particularly during the celebratory fervour of the festive season. Emphasising the critical role of AI in reimagining both customer and employee experiences, Mehernosh Pithawalla, SVP & Head of Brand & Strategic Insights, Godrej & Boyce, said, The adoption of AI will play a critical role to further re-imagine the customer experience and enhance employee experience. At Godrej & Boyce, weve embraced digital investments to elevate customer experiences and foster loyalty. For instance, our Smart Care Whatsapp chatbot expedites query resolution, enhancing our B2C and service-oriented B2B interactions. Leveraging AI-powered Programmatic Advertising has been instrumental in our targeted outreach, amplifying the impact of our digital campaigns. Technologys evolution in marketing is pivotal, enabling far superior personalisation and revolutionising customer experiences. In the festive season, we have had strong campaigns across OTT, digital, and print that focuses on our wide range of offerings. Our business, Godrej Appliances is connecting with consumers through interactive commercials using Augmented Reality as part of their #AyushmannBhavaForever festive campaign. Shuvadip Banerjee, Chief Digital Marketing Officer, ITC Foods, highlighted the massive change in consumer and business interactions brought about by AI and Gen AI. He noted, In the digital era, consumer and business interaction has undergone massive change, especially with the advent of modern tech such as AI and Gen AI. Through the usage of Artificial Intelligence, we have been able to craft communication and campaigns which are more personalised and help us establish a deeper connection with our consumers. During the recent Durga Puja in West Bengal, brands leveraged AI to create campaigns that resonated with the overall celebration mood of the Bengali community and the arrival of Goddess Durga. Citing an example of Sunfeast Moms magic, Banerjee said, Sunfeast Moms Magic created one-of-a-kind 1008 Durga Avatars of real mothers using AI. The entire Ahiritola Puja Pandal in Kolkata was decked up with these avatars, which generated a lot of eyeballs from eminent personalities, celebrities as well as the public. Likewise, Aashirvaad team installed a booth powered by Gen AI at the Baghbazar Pujo pandal, where mothers had the chance to embody Maa Durgas avatar through the use of technology. One unique initiative deployed by Aashirvaad was they used sensor-based tech to generate electricity through the participation of women in Dhunichi dance competition and used this electricity to light up many homes in a village. Sheena Kapoor, Head - Marketing, Corporate Communications & CSR, ICICI Lombard, noted, The festive season in India presents a prime occasion for brands in every domain to establish deeper connections with consumers on a personal level. AI has empowered us to craft exceptionally personalised and pertinent content, ranging from product recommendations to tailored messaging. Especially during the festive season, the impact of personalised marketing campaigns is more pronounced, fostering stronger resonance with consumers and subsequently boosting engagement and conversion rates. As we look ahead, the next 24 months are poised to be transformative and pivotal, signifying a paradigm shift in our approach and strategies. As AI technology continues to advance, its role in shaping creative marketing and influencing consumer spending is expected to expand further, both during festive seasons and beyond. She further said, From a marketing perspective, AI has probably opened up newer avenues that one couldnt have imagined before. In todays ever-evolving world, endless opportunities and transformative experiences are opening before us. Its essential for all brands to continue to adapt and embrace emerging technologies and platforms. AI has made marketing easier for brands. It helps understand what consumers want and then cater to their preferences accordingly. It can also help improve existing products, create new ones, and build better relationships with customers. Marketers are leveraging martech platforms and intelligent bots that continuously evolve through NLP and deep learning techniques. AI will continue to dominate and shape the content landscape in the months and years to come, augmenting human intelligence throughout the customer journey. ICICI Lombard recently launched an industry-first groundbreaking AI-led digital campaign, Claim your Calm, that aimed to create behavioural changes in the underpenetrated Indian market, emphasising the synergy between protection through Insurance and a tranquil state of mind. The campaign brilliantly showcased our commitment to innovation. AI Midjourney Tool was instrumental in scripting, voicing, and visualising the campaign, Kapoor elaborated. Events like Machinery and Trade Expos can help revive industries which collapsed during the Covid pandemic, Ernakulam MP Hibi Eden said here on Wednesday. He inaugurated the third edition of Malayala Manorama Quickerala Machinery and Trade Expo at Marine Drive Kochi. The expo featuring products by nearly 130 machine manufacturers and 31 products manufacturers with over 225 stalls was conducted from 15th to 18th November. Joy Mathew, Vice President, Marketing Services & Solutions, Malayala Manorama chaired the inaugural meet. P.J Jose, General Secretary , Kerala State Small Industries Association ; Mujeebur Rahman, President , All Kerala Distributors Association ; V P Abdul Salim, District President, Bakers Association ; K V Karthikeyan , Deputy General Manager, Small Industries Development Bank of India and Pradipta Kumar Pradhan , Deputy General Manager, State Bank of India, spoke at the event. The exhibition featured a huge collection of small and big machineries from industry majors across the country. The items lined up for display include food packing and food processing machines, jalebi makers, laundry machines, waste insinuators, water purifiers, paper bag making machines, solar products, modern technology pumps, CNC cutting machines, bakery equipments and machines, ice cream making machines, different types of power tools, napkin vending machines, interlock manufacturing machines, chapathy making machines, copra machines, electric coconut graters, flour mill machines, diesel generators and oil cleansing machines. A discount fair of household items was held as part of the event. Items such as furniture, coir products, fencing materials, massagers, mop and water tank cleaners, tower fans, chapati makers, popcorn making machines, power saving bulbs, optical lens and car wash machines was available at the fair. The event was organized by kerala's own search engine Manorama Quickerala.com in association with the Kerala State Small Industries Association , Cochin Chamber of Commerce and Industry , All Kerala Distributors, Association and Bakers Association. The expo's banking partner State Bank Of India , Automative Partner Maruti Suzuki Nexa, MSME partner Small Industries Development Bank Of India and furniture partner Wood Look Furniture have arranged exclusive stalls at the event. Thousands of people thronged the Marine Drive ground to visit the Malayala Manorama Quickerala Machinery and Trade Expo featuring a wide array of small and large machinery by manufactures from across the country. The three day expo entered its second day on Thursday and the enthusiasm of the small and medium business community , and the public was evident from the crowd gathered. The third edition of Malayala Manorama Quickerala Machinery and Trade Expo features products from nearly 130 machine manufactures in over 200 stalls. Two seminars aiming to help entrepreneurs were held as part of the expo on Thursday. In the first one, Najeeb P A , general manager, Department of Industries, Ernakulam, spoke on the " The New Business Opportunities and Prospects in Kerala". He explained the various government schemes introduced to help entrepreneurs in the state. On the first day , K V Karthikeyan , deputy general manager, the Small Industries Development Bank of India - Cochin branch , spoke on the schemes and financing for micro, small and medium enterprises. On the following days, various experts sessions were conducted by governments officials, among the sessions the most exclusive session was on Food Business in Kerala handled by Master Chef. Sri, Suresh Pillai (founder & chef and restaurateur). The changing market conditions and momentum has been building up a new culture which influences the future generation to build a business of their own to scale up their living standards. The expo has even marked more than 25 crores business bookings at an average for each and every participated companies. The major categories participated were food packing machines, food processing machines, CNC cutting machines, industrial generators, printers, 3d printers, industrial refrigerators, bakery equipment, ovens, laundry machines, power tools and trade and franchise stalls were are highlights of the event. State Bank of India (SBI), Small Industries Development Bank (SIDBI), Maruti Suzuki NEXA, Woodlook were the category partners for this year's manorama quickerala machinery & trade expo. The event has maintained its standards to be retained as the Top Rated Machinery & Trade Expo. The expo will be hosted in various other parts of the State as well. The attendance growth started with 18,050 in the year 2019 with 73 stalls at Calicut thereafter last it marked an attendance of 68,823 with 138 stalls and the above mentioned current year attendance brings an outlook that the interest towards the business development and establishment is increasing day by day. The expo was promoted targeting the audience from pan Kerala. The machines weighing tons with Live demonstrations were the major core highlights of the event. The entry was FREE for all participants to avail the entry pass online ticket portal was introduced. The massive crowd experience in the event days under intense heat conditions were the points to mark the need of Manorama Quickerala Machinery & Trade Expo in Kerala. The next edition will be announced soon, The feedback from the entire participated brands were at its peak, which is the keen key to mark the success. Yantra Tech Innovation Labs Pvt Ltd. (Yantra), a leading management and technology services provider offering a suite of dynamic industry-specific business transformation solutions across diverse industries today announced its plans to invest Rs. 100 crore in Indias Gen AI market. In line with this, Yantra is planning an aggressive hiring strategy of onboarding 500 highly skilled individuals from across the country in a span of two years. This strategic expansion comes in response to the company's continued growth and commitment to delivering cutting-edge cloud technology solutions to its clients. As the world grapples with economic challenges and shifting landscapes, Yantra is focused on channeling progress with technological advancement in the next generation of Artificial Intelligence in India. With global offices in Pune, San Francisco, Toronto, and Manila, Yantra works with the offices of CFOs and CIOs on progressively innovative ideas to invest in Gen AI-led solutions for finance, operations, and business transformation initiatives. Commenting on this announcement, Vikram Bhandari, Founder, and CEO, of Yantra, said, Businesses are increasingly adopting cloud platforms, and we believe that integrating generative AI will bring automation of repetitive tasks, data-informed decision-making, and enhanced efficiency. GenAI will benefit large corporations and SMEs, across various industries and verticals like finance and accounting, HR, supply chain and operations, sales and marketing, and customer support. Our significant investment in Indias GenAI space aligns seamlessly with our vision for growth, reinforcing our position as industry leaders committed to pushing boundaries and setting new benchmarks. To support this initiative, we aim to attract, recruit, and train top talent in the Indian job market by providing a platform for young, innovative minds. Yantra's Rs 100 crore investment in India's GenAI market underscores confidence in the country's artificial intelligence potential. Committed to fostering innovation, this investment aims to expand service offerings and enhance the capabilities of Yantra's Centre of Excellence in Pune. Yantra looks forward to welcoming fresh perspectives that contribute value and enrich its innovative culture, playing a pivotal role in shaping the future of GenAI in India. Commenting on this monumental decision, Rajesh Pawar, Director of Indian Operations, Yantra said, Amidst a slowly tightening job market, we see a strategic window to attract top talent. With a team boasting unique skills and powered by GenAI, our focus is on elevating efficiency and intelligence in business operations. Significant investments in India's GenAI market will drive broader technological advancements, fostering a potent ecosystem for stronger, more progressive organizations. The Congress said its performance in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh was disappointing, but it was within striking distance of the BJP, going by the vote share. Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said the good vote share of the party in these states is a reason for hope and revival. It is true that the performance of the Indian National Congress in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan was disappointing and far below our own expectations. But the vote shares tell a story of a Congress that is not very behind the BJPin fact, it is within striking distance. This is the reason for hope and revival, Ramesh said in a post on X. Giving details, he said in Chhattisgarh that while the BJPs vote share was 46.3 percent, that of the Congress was 42.2 percent. In Madhya Pradesh, he said the BJP had a vote share of 48.6 per cent while the Congress had 40.4 percent. In Rajasthan, Ramesh said that while the BJP had 41.7 per cent of the vote share, the Congress had 39.5 per cent. He also posted the tagline of opposition bloc INDIA, which plans to take on the BJP unitedly in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections on X: Judega Bharat, Jeetega INDIA. The BJP swept Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh on Sunday, inflicting a resounding defeat on the Congress to tighten its stranglehold in the Hindi heartland. The Congress ousted the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) in Telangana to make it 3-1 for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the latest round of Assembly elections billed as a semi-final before next years poll showdown. To look at Gregory Brown, hes a man fully capable of living life to the full. Its his voice a soft, dry rasp thats barely above a whisper that signifies what the cancer is doing to him. Theyre saying six months to a year with treatment, he said. And six months to a year without treatment. Up until about Labor Day, Brown was living the life of many Lower Alabama musicians, hopping from gig to gig. His home in Foley put him him close to coastal clubs and restaurants catering to vacationers, making it easy to capitalize on the busy summer season. Over the years hed occasionally made his mark in bigger ways. In 2002, as Mobile celebrated its tricentennial, he paired up with Charles Weinacker Jr. and set Weinackers poem Ol Mobile to music. It got some airplay on WZEW-FM 92.1 and became, in Browns words, kind of an unofficial album of the tricentennial. No doubt a few listeners will remember that ode to the charms of the area. Life went on. He lost his wife, Melanie Brown, to cancer in 2004 and remarried, to Lisa Darlene Brown, in 2018. His ability to make a living through music remained a constant until the closing days of August. Hed noticed some swelling in his thyroid, so he set up an appointment with an endocrinologist. He kept playing six shows a week, but by the end of the month, he noticed his voice starting to get a little rattly. That didnt alarm Brown at first. He just saw it as something that happens when youre singing a lot. But then on September first, the voice was just gone, he said. It took a little while to narrow things down. Biopsies were inconclusive. Surgery removed most of the tumor, but the news was still bad: Doctors found that what theyd removed was Sarcomatoid Anaplastic Thyroid Carcinoma, a rare and very aggressive cancer. Information from the National Institutes of Health says the disease constitutes less than 5% of clinically recognized thyroid malignancies but it accounts for more than half of the deaths for thyroid cancer, with a mortality rate that is over 90% and a mean survival of six months after the diagnosis. Brown lost some gigs because he couldnt sing anymore, but he kept a few where venues were okay with instrumental performances. Hes also teaching guitar lessons, though anything that makes him use whats barely left of his voice is exhausting. But with the summer season over, Brown had plenty of time to face up to the situation. Medicare helps with the medical expenses, he said. But with his wife unable to work following an accident a couple of years ago and three children living at home, paying the bills weighs heavily on his mind. Hes hoping to see the bread that hes cast on the waters over the years come back to him now, in his time of need. Theres a GoFundMe drive he set up in October. Hes hoping to raise $100,000. As of early Dec. 4, he had a little over $5,000. My biggest concern at this point is I cant work because I dont have a voice. Ive always given it to the communitymy time and my music and Im just hopeful that the community could give back, he said. Whos ever asked me to do fundraisers, to do charity work, it was never a question, he said. Its what musicians do. We dont usually have money extra, but we give of our time to help raise that money for others. Some of those benefits have been for fellow musicians. He remembers being of many who rallied around Hank Becker, a pillar of Mobiles music scene, before his death in 2012. God, I think about him a lot, Brown said. Theres no 401k, theres no savings. Its gig to gig, he said. It works, when youre young and healthy. But age creeps up on you all of a sudden. Brown said hes found his perspective changing, and thats something hed like to share with his fellow performers. Especially with family, you know, you let your family go to the back burner, he said. You let your family go to the back burner because theres gigs to play, theres work to be done, theres money to be made. And in the end, none of that really matters. All that mattered was your family. And I wish I had spent more time on that. I think thats the thing that I think of most, because at the end of all the gigs and the money-making, you still end up with no money. And here I sit wondering how the hell Im gonna take care of the kids for Christmas, and my wife, for Christmas, and how were gonna pay the bills. Hes still working, despite it all: playing a weekly instrumental gig at Wolf Bay Lodge in Orange Beach, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesdays. Hes hoping to line up a few more things in the new year. If nothing else, his prognosis has at least given him time to put things in order, and to brace for tough choices. Right now I dont hurt, he said. I just get exhausted trying to talk. But I dont hurt. You try to make things right with everybody that you can, he said. I hope that Ive given everyone a smile that saw me play, he said. I hope that my music has just been part of the Gulf Coast, which I love. Fellow musician Wes Loper has weighed in to say that Brown has done that and more. This friend of mine has always been so encouraging and supportive of me and my musical journey, Loper said in a Facebook post urging people to donate. His smile is so infectious and his songs are uplifting and positive. A true reflection of the light of the world. Brown said the treatment path for his cancer is harsh: radiation that will be hard on his throat, leaving him on a feeding tube for a while, along with chemotherapy, all followed by months of recovery with the likelihood itll only add a month or two to his life. I dont know about that, he said. For now, hes got the time hes got, and hes got a message to share. The most important thing -- As a musician, were busy all the time, he said. Were either gigging globally or regionally or nationally. Were always working and we tend to take family for granted. I did. What I would like to tell people is to put family first, put your wife and kids first. Your jobs important. But its not that important because life is short. I think thats what Ive learned. For more information, visit https://www.gofundme.com/f/thyroid-cancer-scare. The City of Birmingham hosted a Christmas tree lighting and block party in front of City Hall on Sunday night. Hundreds of people gathered on the street in front of City Hall at Linn Park, with a concert by Fly Dave and the Party Rockers on a music stage facing the Christmas tree and food trucks lining the street. The Regions Center downtown is decorated for Christmas and the Jefferson County Courthouse is lit with green and red. Churches on Sunday observed the first Sunday of Advent, the Christian liturgical season of preparation for Christmas. That includes the lighting of candles on Advent wreaths. Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and ends on Christmas Eve, so this year it will be observed from Dec. 3-Dec. 24. Christmas falls on Monday, Dec. 25. Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, will be Dec. 7-15. There will be a menorah lighting in front of City Hall on Tuesday, Dec. 12 at 4 p.m. The grand menorah lighting at The Summit shopping center, Saks Plaza, will be held Sunday, Dec. 10, at 4:30 p.m. See also: Regions building lights up Birmingham for Christmas For many, a $200 traffic ticket can devastate their households savings and finances. A collaboration between the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice and the Center for Justice Innovation and Applied Research Services aims to help people who are struggling with court fines and fees. Collaborators hope to reduce disparities among those who owe court fines and fees to limit the harm that debt often has on peoples well-being by changing the way municipalities assess and collect fines and fees. Nobody likes to get a traffic ticket and nobody likes to owe money. But not everybody experiences debt the same way. And thats been something weve had to really help lawmakers and leadership in the state understand. A $200 traffic ticket might be a very minor inconvenience for some people, a significant inconvenience for others, and totally life changing for others. And its the people who its totally life changing for that were worried about, Leah Nelson, Alabama Appleseeds research director, said. The $2.5 million grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance will allow the collaborators to provide support for five jurisdictions across the nation. The locations have not yet been identified. The money will be used to pair experienced practitioners and researchers to address the specific needs of each jurisdiction. Each site will collaborate with a local advocacy, research or public policy organization to create solutions that make sense for the local community. State and municipal criminal justice systems are increasingly turning to government fines and fees to raise revenue and make up budget shortfalls. In April, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter to judges across the nation urging states to stop aggressively issuing fines and fees and pushing that court practices are constitutional and nondiscriminatory. The national letter mentioned a federal lawsuit involving Brooksides practice of issuing fines and fees, which was first reported on by AL.com. The letter referenced a statement from the DOJ in the Brookside case, saying, Courts, prosecutors, and police should be driven by justicenot revenue. Brookside revenue from fines and forfeitures rose 640% between 2018 and 2020, and came to provide 49% of the towns income. The letter also referenced a 2018 Alabama Appleseed survey, Under Pressure, which found that fines and fees disproportionately impacted low-income communities and communities of color, specifically African-American communities in Alabama. Excessive debt creates enormous problems for people, Nelson said. Black families are not able to save money or keep the money that theyve saved or spend it how they want because they have to spend it on fines and fees. And thats really troubling. Thats a demonstration of the community impact of this debt and the generational impact. The centers researchers surveyed 980 Alabama residents from 41 counties and found: More than 80% of participants cut back on basic needs like rent, food, medical bills, car payments, and child support to pay down their debt. Almost 40% committed a crime to pay off their debt. 44% used payday or title loans to pay off their debt. Almost 50% shared that they thought they would never be able to pay off their debt. When people are unable to pay their traffic tickets, the state will sometimes suspend their drivers licenses until the debts are paid off. This often results in people losing their jobs, which results in them being unable to pay the ever accumulating fees. When I talk with judges, or lawyers, prosecutors, lawmakers, theres a general understanding that its true that there are people who owe so much money that its kind of like imaginary money that will never be collected, Nelson said. Peter Jones, associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at UAB, said the system is inefficient for both individuals and the state. When someone cant drive and loses their job, the state loses money on income tax and sales tax on everyday goods. Jones said only 10 to 15 percent of what someone pays for a traffic ticket is actually the fine. A majority of the payment goes toward paying court fees. All of the expenses that states have to incur to track people down, that costs money if someone owes fines and fees. You have to keep records of that and that costs money. And then you have to send the notices and that costs money, Jones said. Theres better ways to think about funding that system that are more efficient, less harmful to people and maybe dont align with incentives such as the government or law enforcement having to go out and write more tickets or go out and create higher fees, Jones said. Jones said the project will start with mapping and analyzing fine and fee structures in each jurisdiction to evaluate the benefit of existing practices. Organizers will then choose which jurisdictions to implement the initiatives based on their findings. Its just a system that has not been carefully examined, and its been worsened over the years by the addition of fees, Nelson said. What the data says is that the system isnt working. Its not working for anyone. Jurisdictions are spending a lot of resources chasing people for money that they dont have and they will never have. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have released a video alleging that Hamas is using mosques in Gaza to conceal underground tunnels. The video presents a deep tunnel within a building, which IDF soldiers identify as a mosque, along with several other tunnels they claim are being used by Hamas in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, as per Mail Online. IDF Destroys 500 Hamas Tunnels in Gaza It has been reported that Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) ground troops have made their way into Khan Younis, located in the southern region of Gaza. This marks the first time that such a move has been observed. In the aftermath of the expiration of a seven-day ceasefire, a series of aerial and naval attacks have been launched, targeting more than 400 locations within the enclave. IDF spokesman Lt-Col Peter Lerner informed The Sun that approximately 800 tunnel access points have been identified since the war's onset, with around 500 destroyed. The IDF has developed various technologies over the past decade to counter what they perceive as Hamas's reliance on subterranean warfare. These methods include using drones to detect hidden structures and planes to destroy deeper defenses with specialized bombs. Armored bulldozers, attack dogs, unmanned vehicles, and robots are also employed to explore and clear underground areas. The IDF has also introduced innovative "sponge bombs," chemical devices that generate a foam explosion, solidifying into an airtight barrier to seal tunnel entrances. This tactic is intended to incapacitate Hamas troops by trapping them underground. Lt-Col Lerner highlighted the discovery of booby traps in tunnels, houses, and along transport routes. Former deputy head of Israel's National Security Council, Itamar Yaar, recommended collapsing the tunnels rather than entering them unless absolutely necessary. The IDF is reportedly executing operations with extreme caution to avoid endangering hostages. The IDF's slow and methodical approach is justified by Lt-Col Lerner, citing Hamas's 16-year preparation period for such a conflict. He also mentioned that the terror group and its commanders might possess a more extensive network of tunnels than the previously estimated 250 miles, according to The Sun. Read Also: Arizona County Officials Indicted, Charged With Interference for Allegedly Delaying Midterm Election Results IDF Targets Sinwar, Reveals Weaponized Hamas Tunnels Some of these tunnels have been found to contain rocket silos, allowing Hamas to continue missile launches into Israel. Others are equipped with electricity, water, and solar-powered air conditioning units. The IDF's most wanted list includes Sinwar, 61, held responsible for the October 7 incident that resulted in 1,200 Israeli deaths and over 240 hostages. Lt-Col Lerner stated that Sinwar, by financing and approving these operations, has effectively signed his own death warrant, with the IDF committed to employing all means to eliminate him. Moreover, the IDF reported the killing of Hamas battalion commander Wissam Farhat in an airstrike on Saturday. Since the beginning of the ground operation in Gaza on October 27, Israeli forces have discovered 800 shafts leading to Hamas's extensive underground network, destroying more than half. Hamas had previously claimed to have hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, likened to the New York subway system, serving both as protection and operational bases. These tunnels, often located in civilian areas near schools, kindergartens, mosques, and playgrounds, have been prime targets for Israeli strikes. The IDF's statement on Sunday summarized its anti-tunnel operations, noting the destruction of "many miles" of main tunnel routes through detonation and sealing. The civilian impact of the war has raised concerns among global powers, with Washington urging Israel to exercise caution in its operations, Rauters reported. Related Article: Israel Expands Ground Operations Against Hamas Across Gaza Strip @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. A Birmingham teen has been charged with more than a half dozen crimes after authorities said he crashed into a Mountain Brook jewelry store during a weekend police chase. Ricardo Antoine Adams Jr., 19, is charged with attempting to elude, first-degree criminal mischief, first-degree receiving stolen property, unlawful breaking and entering a vehicle, resisting arrest, second-degree possession of marijuana and being a minor in possession of alcohol, police announced Monday. Adams is being held in the Jefferson County Jail on bonds totaling $301,000. The crash happened about 2:40 a.m. Saturday at Brombergs in Mountain Brook Village. Police said an officer was conducting routine patrols around 2:35 a.m. in the 3600 block of Montevallo Road when a vehicle traveling recklessly and at a high rate of speed was spotted. The officer attempted to make a traffic stop, but the driver continued until losing control while crossing Cahaba Road and crashing into the storefront. Authorities said Adams then fled into to the store and was taken into custody about 25 minutes later. A police chase early Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023, ended with a crash into Brombergs in Mountain Brook Village.(Contributed) The Nissan Titan pickup truck Adams was driving was stolen, police said. Ricky Bromberg, company president, said Saturday, It looks like a bombs gone off. Its a blessing nobody was here, nobody got hurt. Had the truck been just about 10 feet to the left, it would have crashed through the ground-to-roof glass store front. That would have been a complete and utter disaster, Bromberg said. There is significant property damage, but no merchandise was lost. Its a big deal but it could have been a disaster, he said. The store has remained open despite the damage. Jail records show Adams was arrested last month on charges of receiving stolen property certain persons forbidden to possess a firearm during a violent crime. Anyone with information is asked to call Det. Nichols at 205-802-3856. Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr Sunday reiterated his belief that death row inmate Toforest Johnson deserves a new trial. Speaking to more than 100 people at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Birmingham, Carr went through his concerns with the conviction of Johnson of the 1995 murder of Jefferson County Sheriffs Deputy William Hardy, killed while working off-duty at a hotel. Carr said in an interview after his talk that even if the court ordered a new trial, he wasnt sure he could proceed with one. More from Alabama Reflector If we could, but I dont think we could because all the witnesses are deceased to be honest with you, Carr said in an interview after the event about a future prosecution should the case be retried. And with the evidence that we have, I dont know if that is enough to go forward. We have to meet probable cause first. We dont have an eyewitness. We dont have any other evidence other than a person saying, I heard someone say something on the phone. Carr didnt comment when asked he would retry the case, only that, if that is all we have, we will have to wait and see. Leadership isnt about being right, it is about making things right, Carr said to the more than 100 people who attended the event. Johnsons conviction has been questioned by Carr and others, mainly over the reliability of witnesses. The Alabama Supreme Court last year rejected Johnsons request for a new trial. Johnson in 2020 petitioned the Jefferson County Circuit Court for a new trial, citing the concerns Carr raised. Johnson was convicted of Hardys murder in 1998. No physical evidence links him to the crime. Several people later said that Johnson and another man, Ardragus Ford, were at a bar at the time of the shooting, but these people did not testify. Questions about Johnsons conviction have centered in two witnesses. One, Yolanda Chambers, gave inconsistent accounts of what she saw that evening, and was called a liar by a prosecutor at a first trial of Johnson and Ford. But prosecutors put her on the stand as a key witness in the second trial in 1998, in which Ford was acquitted but Johnson convicted. Another witness, Violet Ellison, claimed to overhear a person identifying himself as Toforest admit to murdering Hardy as part of a three-way telephone conversation. Ellison sought and was later paid a $5,000 reward for information in the case, a fact that was never disclosed to the defense. Ms. Ellison had never met Toforest Johnson, and she had never heard his voice, the 2020 filing said. The filing seeking a new Rule 32 hearing argues that the district attorneys review of the case creates new material evidence that warrants a vacation of the conviction. The lead prosecutor in the case has also requested a new trial. The Alabama Attorney Generals Office opposes a new hearing for Johnson, arguing that the issues Carr raises were already addressed by the court. According to the law, the court shall not grant relief on a successive petition on the same or similar grounds on behalf of the same petitioner. Indeed, these factors are successive grounds because they were previously raised in Johnsons first Rule 32 proceeding, wrote Jon Hayden, assistant attorney general, in a response to the petition last year. Carr was one of several who spoke at the Faith Rally in support of Johnson and his effort to secure a new trial to secure his release. Moderator Beth Shelburne, who wrote and reported a podcast that she created about Johnsons case took the audience through the circumstances surrounding Hardys death, along with the subsequent investigation that led to Johnsons arrest and the problems that arose from the investigation and the following court proceedings. Johnsons family would weigh in during the different segments that were aired for the audience to hear. Dont get me wrong, I am totally, totally for justice, said Antonio Green, Johnsons cousin. Anyone who has committed a crime, especially of this magnitude, should be punished. But we should be sure we are punishing the person that committed the crime. The percentage of people visiting the hospital for respiratory illness continues to grow in Alabama. According to the Alabama Department of Public Health, the percentage of emergency department visits reporting symptoms of a respiratory virus last week in Alabama was 5.89%, up 4% from the previous week. The majority of the visits 3.42% - reported flu-like illness, followed by Respiratory Syncytial Virus, or RSV, at 1.5% and COVID at .97%. READ MORE: What is phishing and smishing? IRS issues warning Nationally, Alabama is one of 11 states reporting high levels of flu. The highest levels were in Louisiana and South Carolina, which were classified as having very high levels of flu-like illness, followed by high levels in Alabama, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, Tennessee and Texas. Flu season appears to have arrived early this year. At this point in 2022, flu levels were minimal in every state, according to tracking by the Centers for Disease Control. This year, activity is increasing in almost every part of the country, most notably the southeast, southcentral, mountain and west coast regions. The CDC estimates there have been at least 1.8 million flu cases this year with 17,000 hospitalizations and 1,100 deaths, including 8 pediatric deaths. Five of those pediatric deaths were reported for the week ending Nov. 25. CDC recommends everyone 6 months and older get an annual flu vaccine. There are also prescription flu antiviral medications that can be used to treat flu, but they should be started as early as possible, the CDC said. A man was arrested Sunday after allegedly stealing a MARTA bus with a passenger aboard, dropping them off at a Waffle House and then driving it to Stone Mountain Park, according to officials. Jamaurie Lee, of Stone Mountain, boarded the bus at Lawrenceville Highway and Steel Drive in Tucker around 5 p.m. and began threatening the driver, MARTA police told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The threats came after the driver told the 28-year-old that he didnt have enough money for the fare, according to 95.5 WSB Radio. When the bus driver went to report the threats, the suspect stole the vehicle, police said. For unknown reasons, he drove roughly eight miles to the park, but not before dropping off the passenger at the all-day breakfast joint, the radio station reported. Lees escapade was cut short when he tried to make a U-turn at the park entrance but didnt know how to put the bus in reverse, park police spokesperson John Bankhead confirmed to the AJC. A park officer spotted the bus and immediately suspected something was wrong, Bankhead said. The officer approached Lee and asked him if he was the driver. When he said no, he was detained, and MARTA police arrived to make the arrest. No injuries were reported, and the bus was not damaged, police said. Lee faces multiple charges, including second-degree hijacking a motor vehicle, terroristic threats and theft. He could face additional charges if police can locate the passenger who was dropped off. 2023 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Visit at ajc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney on Monday speculated on why Sen. Tommy Tubervilles blockade of military promotions is continuing into its 10th month. Cheney, speaking to NPRs Morning Edition, is promoting her new book, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, a memoir of her time in Congress dealing with the Republican partys response to President Donald Trumps efforts to stay in office after losing the 2020 presidential race, and the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Cheney, who lost a re-election bid, said there would be no restraining factors on Trump, should he win another term in 2024. You will not be able to count on, you know, a House of Representatives led by (Speaker of the House) Mike Johnson, and full of individuals who have already pledged allegiance to Donald Trump, Cheney said. They wont restrain him. United States Senate, with people like Mike Lee, Rand Paul, they wont restrain him. Tommy Tuberville, holding nominations for the most senior positions at the Pentagon. Cheney went on to speculate about a reason for Tubervilles hold on promotions. Why is Tommy Tuberville doing that? she said. Its causing great damage to this nations military readiness. Is he holding those positions open so that Donald Trump can fill them? Whats he doing? Its certainly not serving the purposes of the United States of America. Tuberville began the hold back in February, in response to the Pentagons policy allowing travel expenses for military members to states where abortion is legal. Tuberville has made several comments over the last few weeks about possible ways to end the blockade, which affects more than 300 promotions. Efforts to reach Tubervilles office for comment were not immediately successful. Cheney credited a handful of Republicans in state and federal offices from stopping the worst of what could have happened. But she cautions that many of those people wont be there should Trump once again take office. An attorney representing Mike Tyson said the former heavyweight champion will not pay a pre-litigation settlement demand of nearly half a million dollars to a man who says he was punched repeatedly in the face by Tyson on a plane at San Francisco International Airport last year. Attorney Jake Jondle sent a letter last week on behalf of client Melvin Townsend III to Tyson attorney Alex Spiro asking for $450,000 in an effort to resolve this matter prior to protracted litigation. The letter has been viewed by The Times. In exchange for that amount, Mr. Townsend will provide your client with a mutually-agreeable release that will bar him from filing a future lawsuit, as well as reasonable terms requested by your client, Jondle wrote in the letter. If we are unable to reach an agreement, we will continue to prepare Mr. Townsends case for the filing of a lawsuit. In a statement emailed to The Times, Spiro said his client has no intention of making a shakedown payment to Townsend. I have received a shakedown letter related to some instigators harassment of Mike a year ago and the aftermath, Spiro wrote. There will be no shakedown payment. Jondle did not respond to multiple requests for comment by The Times. The incident between Tyson and Townsend occurred April 20, 2022, when Townsend was seated in the row directly behind Tyson on a JetBlue Airways flight set to depart from San Francisco for Florida. Townsend appeared intoxicated and was allegedly making rude remarks toward passengers, San Mateo County Dist. Atty. Steve Wagstaffe told The Times in May 2022. Matt Morgan, an attorney for Townsend, told TMZ last year that Townsend denies reports he threw a water bottle at Tyson. Video posted by TMZ appears to show Tyson standing and reaching over his seat to repeatedly punch Townsend in the face, while at least one other passenger calls for him to stop. In his letter last week, Jondle presented Townsends account of the incident. It is our position that Mr. Townsend was excited to see your client on the flight, began discussing the marijuana industry and psychedelic mushrooms with him, and Mr. Tyson became annoyed, Jondle wrote. Mr. Tyson then reached over the seat, grabbed Mr. Townsend by the shirt collar, and proceeded to repeatedly punch him in the head. As a former undisputed heavyweight champion, the potential to cause severe injuries to another person goes without questions. There were several other remedies available to Mr. Tyson, but he chose physical violence. Wagstaffe told The Times last year that neither Townsend nor Tyson wanted charges to be filed. The D.A. obliged. This case doesnt belong in criminal justice, Wagstaffe told The Times in May 2022. If the parties want to file a civil suit, that can still happen irrespective of this decision. In the letter dated Nov. 28, Jondle indicated his client intends to do just that if his demand isnt met. He writes that Townsend, who was 36 in May 2022, immediately suffered a severe headache and neck pain following the incident and due to his lack of health insurance and living in an isolated area of Northern California at the time, he was unable to seek consistent medical treatment. He is still suffering with the effects of the assault to this day, wrote Jondle, who added that Mr. Townsend experienced the loss of several jobs due to the unfortunate notoriety he experienced as a result of your clients actions. The letter also mentions a 2022 appearance by Tyson, now 57, on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show, during which the retired boxer laughs about the incident but also seems to express remorse over it. I was wrong, that shouldve never happened, Tyson said on the show. Thats me back in my primitive child stages, I shouldnt have done that, but I was just irritated, tired, high and pissed off. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. 2023 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Elizabeth Vargas has had a diverse and fascinating 40-year career in broadcast journalism traveling the world in covering wars, interviewing world leaders, and anchoring the nightly news on ABC. Few career bucket list items remain. But there is one thing she hasnt done: Moderate a presidential primary. I didnt have it officially on my list but ever since I went down with my bosses, the president and vice president of NewsNation to meet with the (Republican National Committee), its been on my bucket list, Vargas said. Im thrilled to check it. Its really exciting for me. Moderating a debate is very different from conducting a live interview. Im comfortable in doing live interviews. This is very different. I am working super hard to prepare as humanly as possible. The Dec. 6, 2023, Republican presidential primary debate will be moderated by (from left to right): the Washington Free Beacons Eliana Johnson, NewsNations Elizabeth Vargas, and SiriusXM's Megyn Kelly.Image provided by NewsNation Vargas will jump into the presidential political fray on Wednesday at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa when she is joined on the debate table inside the Frank Moody Music Hall with media personality Megyn Kelly and Eliana Johnson, editor-in-chief of the conservative Washington Free Beacon. The debate will be broadcast live from 7-9 p.m. on NewsNation. Its the first time NewsNation, an upstart cable TV news network that began in 2021, is hosting a presidential debate. We know Alabama is a really red state, Vargas said. A lot of Republican viewers and voters and we are excited to have this debate there. This debate is for Republican voters. We know lots of Americans will be watching of all political stripes, but its a Republican debate meant to serve Republican (primary voters). A specific theme for the debate has not been announced. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy have reached the polling and fundraising criteria to participate. The RNC has not confirmed whether former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has qualified. Former President Donald Trump, who holds a significant lead over his Republican rivals in the polls, intends to skip the debate. Vargas was recently interviewed by AL.com ahead of the debate, the first presidential debate ever hosted in Alabama. The following Q&A is edited for clarity. Q: Hugh Hewitt, the conservative media personality, wrote in the Washington Post that the most recent debate in Miami offered the perfect layout for a debate. One of the reasons why, Hewitt said, was that moderators allowed the candidates to talk, gave them 90 seconds to respond, and killed the Right to replay. He also said debates shouldnt be showcases for moderators. Your thoughts on all of that? A: I didnt read that. Thats interesting for him to say since he was a moderator (during the Miami debate). I did watch his moderated third debate. I think hes absolutely right. Its not about the moderators. Its about the candidates. I do think there were things that worked in the 3rd debate and 2nd, and weve watched them carefully. We like that idea, but lets toss out this. My overall (takeaway) from the three debates is we need more specificity. We need to get them all off their slogans and canned talking points and have them explain specifically (what they plan to do). It would be nice to have a conversation than a debate and more than a resuscitation of talking points. Thats what were aiming to get them to do during the debate (in Tuscaloosa). Q: One of the criticisms the debate formats have gotten is about the crowds and the reactions that entices candidates to put on a show more than providing policy details. Will this format at the University of Alabama be less disruptive than other debates? (Note: The crowd inside the Frank Moody Music Hall will be considerably smaller than in recent previous debates. The RNC confirmed that all tickets are distributed to the campaigns and debate partners, meaning there are not tickets available to the public). A: I am so excited to be doing Alabamas first debate. It is my first debate. I have a lot in common with the state of Alabama. I think the audience will be great. I did a town hall with Robert Kennedy Jr. in front of a live crowd, sitting a few feet away. I understand what its like to work with a crowd. Th crowd is there to cheer and boo their candidate. I am sure Alabamians are polite. I think doing it with a crowd makes it exciting. There are people to react to and play off of. Sure, the candidates fuel a lot of energy on stage. There was a hefty and very loud boo for Ramaswamy in the 3rd debate after criticizing (Nikki Haleys) mothering skills. It raises the stakes. Its immediate reaction. Candidates will feed off that and play off that. Whats most important is we have our audience there at the University and they will be sitting there but there is a wider audience across the country and that is who we are trying to serve who are hearing from them the candidates themselves. Republican presidential candidate businessman Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during a Republican presidential primary debate hosted by NBC News, Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023, at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County in Miami. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)AP Q: Vivek Ramaswamy has been very critical about the moderators in past debates, and the TV networks in which they have been on. He recommended debates be moderated by Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson. Instead, three women will be moderating a debate on a network that does not offer nightly right-wing punditry. Are you prepared for what seems like an inevitable clash with this candidate? A: You know, sure, he can do and say what he wants to say in his allotted time to answer the questions. The voters and viewers will see and judge accordingly. This debate is for Republican voters. This will help people decide who they want on the ticket facing the Democratic nominee whether that is Joe Biden or anyone else in the fall (of 2024) in what will be one of the most important presidential elections in U.S. history. Voters are smart. They will see a candidate dodge a question and a decision to hurl insults might work with some and might not work with some others. Ive had Ramaswamy on my show. I had his wife on my show, who by the way is a lovely woman. He was fine with me. But Ive seen him do interviews in the past couple of days in which he was aggressive. These candidates all know we are closing in. We are in crunch time. This debate happens in six weeks before the Iowa Caucuses. If they have any shot of overtaking Donald Trump in the front runner of the candidates in the nomination process, then they have to make their move. If that is what Ramaswamy thinks will make that, well see. Q: What does it mean to have Megyn Kelly return to the presidential debate forum in which so many people are reminded of her encounter with Donald Trump back in 2015? A: Megyn is a veteran of these debates. She is smart. Very smart. Its been a real honor and joy to work alongside her in the preparation process. Yes, she has her own history with Donald Trump. As we speak, Mr. Trump has not joined the debate as of yet. We are hoping he does so. It would be a reunion of sorts between the two of them. Megyn and I have the same goal in mind we want a smart debate. We want our viewers and voters to come away better educated. (Note: Trump, through media reports, is expected to be at a political fundraiser Wednesday in Hallandale Beach, Fla.). Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks to Texas state troopers and guardsmen at the South Texas International Airport, Sunday, Nov. 19, 2023, in Edinburg, Texas. AP Photo/Eric Gay, File Q: It doesnt appear Trump will be there. Does that hurt the impact and legacy of what is the first presidential debate hosted in the state of Alabama? A: Of course. Listen, maybe Alabamans can convince him to join the stage. I think that every person running to be President of the United States and the most important job on planet earth should be on that stage to explain why they are the person to do this. I think that is something hes done in the past and should not be afraid of doing now. We hope he will be there. I think it will do a lot to educate Republican voters on who they should support. While its important to remember he is way ahead of candidates in polling, we are still less than a year out from the election. An enormous amount can happen in a year. I think anyone who says, Donald Trump will just win this thing and What are these people talking about? it is a dangerous position to take. We dont know what will happen between now and next November. Its important that everyone be fully aware of these candidates and what their positions are and get a sense of who they are as people, to see them interact and how do they interact with the other candidates on stage and with the moderators and audience. Thats information too. Its an important election, and perhaps the most important in our history. To say, I will tune out (because the frontrunner isnt there) is dangerous. I think people need to be aware of who these candidates are. Anything can happen in a year. Its a long time in politics. Q: Megyn Kelly talked with you recently about the tough talk of Republicans running for president, but that they were light on policy details. How are you prepared to get some specifics out of these candidates, and what are your goals for how this debate plays out? A: We need to (ask) questions that are written in a way to push these candidates to talk about specifics and to get them off their talking points. I dont think Im revealing anything because its such a huge area for so many Americans. Sealing the boarder. No one has said how they will do that. To seal the border on Day 1, (but) What do you mean? Tell me what that looks like. My frustration as a viewer and a voter is to listen to a sometimes really great answer from these candidates, but to be still left wondering How do you do that? I think that is our challenge. That is why we are all, as a team, working very hard together to write these questions to elicit specific answers and if they chose to dodge they still have the opportunity sometimes to answer the question and (the viewer) can see a non-answer then spouted in front of them. That is our aim and I hope the viewers notice when (a candidate) refuses to provide those details when they were given the chance to do so. Activists and others who oppose the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade gather for an abortion rights rally on Saturday, July 2, 2022, in downtown Mobile, Ala. (John Sharp/jsharp@al.com). Q: Abortion politics in the Republican Party is proving to be a difficult topic, and you and Kelly talked at length about it during an interview on NewsNation. Alabama is among the most conservative states in the nation, where abortion is illegal. But states where ballot initiatives are allowed (they are not allowed in Alabama) are showing that voters view this subject differently than Republican politicians and candidates. How do you plan to get these candidates address the political realities on abortion against the conservative pro-life message they are so used to delivering on this issue? A: I am not going to get into our questions specifically. We saw that this issue came up in the third debate in that we saw a resounding victory for the pro-choice movement in deep red Ohio. I am sure it will come up. It is an issue. Election after election in many purple states and deep red states, and not blue states have shown that most Americans, even Republicans, agree that you can be against abortion and still be in favor a personal decision a woman makes with her doctor. For many, many years, the Republican Party has argued this is not a federal issue but a state issue. Its interesting to hear that people can now switch positions on that and still advocate for a federal ban. Im sure its an issue that will come up (during the debate in Alabama) and it has shown to be and correct to point out that for the Republican Party, they recognize this is a problematic political issue in that when voters go to the polls and even voters in deep red states it is (an issue) that has caught the Republican Party by surprise. Q: Trump has vowed to take an even tougher stance on immigration policies if he is elected massive migrant camps, reallocating military funds to support mass deportations, travel bans and more. How important is it to get the candidates on stage and the Republican Party, in general, to respond to Trumps hardline proposals? A: The southern border is one of the most important issues to Republican voters according to every poll weve read. Well obviously talk about what their plans are on the southern border. As former President Trump offers solutions on the border that are certainly extreme, you know, it will be interesting to get the candidates thoughts on what they would do and perhaps what their ideas would be particularly because at least two of the candidates on the stage DeSantis and Chris Christie are both lawyers. Governor Christie is a former prosecutor. They would know the law. You can say a lot on the campaign trail. That is the beauty and power of the debate. Its one thing to say something at a rally or on Twitter but another thing to be on stage to defend the position before voters. Its a shame former president is Donald Trump (is opting not to participate). Q: NewsNation bills itself as an engaging bipartisan network. Chris Cuomo, Dan Abrams and more are on the network. In an era of hyper partisanship, where conservatives migrate to Newsmax or Fox and liberals are watching MSNBC at night, is there a long-term market for NewsNations programming? A: Listen, you are right. We have an incredibly fractured and polarized environment now. It cannot continue. At some point people have to come out of their partisan silos and meet on common ground. Its the only way this country will be great and be a leader in this world stage that it needs to be and strives to be. NewsNation is not hyper partisan. We serve the moderate majority. Yes, you have an engaged fringe partisan audience. But we are committed to serving the vast majority of Americans who are in the middle, the center left and right. Thats where our audience is. I dont think its good for our country to (have TV viewers) go to cable news networks and for affirmation instead of information (and where) you want people to echo their own political talking point. There are a lot of people who are not aware of the network. If I have a dollar for everyone who asks, How do I watch your show? (Vargas encourages viewers to go to https://www.newsnationnow.com/channel-finder/ to find a way to watch the channel in their market). This is an opinion column. I cant tell you if Im going to be writing this again. Wish I could. Wish I could tell you the folks charged with awarding licenses in Alabama to companies that will play a role in getting medical cannabis into our hands (at some point) got it right this time. The third time. I cant. For now, I can only say this: Last Friday, the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission, in their third go-round, awarded licenses to cultivate, process, test, transport and sell marijuana products to 20 companies. Licenses were previously awarded in June and August, yet each of those rounds was nullified by AMCC miscueslike using third-party evaluators with potential conflicts and votes taken behind the shadiness of closed doors without companies being able to state their case before the groupand, oh, a plethora of lawsuits by aggrieved non-awardees. This time, after a settlement allowing a new round of evaluations and awards under agreed-upon conditions (like making the voting public, something too often anathema to public officials, boards, and agencies in this state), the AMCC may have finally gotten it right. May have finally started the clockfor real this time, after a six-month fumbleon when medical marijuana products like gummies, tablets, capsules, tinctures, patches, oils, and other forms allowed by the legislation may finally be accessible to Alabamians suffering from chronic pain or myriad other conditions and symptoms. (Youll need a doctors signoff for a medical marijuana card.) So maybe I wont have to write this again: Not only is providing access to medical cannabis a what-took-us-so-long no-brainer39 states, including us, have approved production and usage of medical marijuana, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.it is also imperative that minority firms not be left out this new Oklahoma Land Rush or Californian Gold Rush. By 2028, just four years and couch-change from now, cannabis is projected to be a $70 billion business. Last year, it accounted for 428,059 full-time jobs, according to the 2022 Leafly Jobs Report. The dearth of minority participation thus far in this geyser of new wealth has been a source of frustration nationwide since California became the first state to legalize marijuana in 1996. African American entrepreneurs, for instance, account for less than two percent of cannabis business owners in the nation, according to the 2021 Leafly Jobs Report. Thats worse than in 2017 when 4.3% were Black. (That year 81% of cannabis business owners were white, 5.7% Hispanic, and 2.4% Asian.) The cannabis industry must show true commitment to equity as it expands, so the wealth generated by this new opportunity will uplift minority communities, the 2021 reports stated. If it cannot we will continue to see these communities struggle in the shadow of white supremacy without a fair shot. Fortunatelyand amazingly in these unique timesminority participation in our nascent cannabis industry is mandated by the state law, passed in 2021, making it legal to grow and distribute medical marijuana in Alabama. At least a quarter of the awardees in all but one category (integrated facility) must be at least 51% minority-owneddefined as individuals of African American, Native American, Hispanic, or Asian descent, according to the law. So how did the AMCC 3.0 do? Five of those licenses awarded last week went to companies that qualified as majority owned by members of an historically underserved group. Thats three fewer than were awarded to minority-owned companies in August, one fewer than were awarded in June. Yes, I wrote both of the linked stories in the above paragraph. So, here we go again: These are the five minority companies now with licenses are (applicationsmost are heavily redactedare linked): I AM FARMS (cultivator), Native Black Cultivation (cultivator) 1819 Labs (processor), GP6 Wellness (dispensary) and Pick Up My Things (secure transporter). Birmingham-based XLCR, which was awarded a secure transporter license in August, was not among the awardees in the category last week. Theres one caveat to this total: Last week, the AMCC did not announce companies being awarded integrated licenses, which allow a company to cultivate, process, transport, and sell medical cannabis products. That category was the source of most of the legal fire. Those licenses will be awarded on Dec. 12. There are 38 integrated license applicants; the law caps integrated awardees at five. In the last round, two minority-owned integrated companiesTheraTrue Alabama, LLC and Southeast Cannabis Company, LLC were awarded licenses. For now, at least two of the awardees are pleased and hopeful. Being a minority-owned business and securing a license in the burgeoning cannabis industry in Alabama is a significant achievement, shared Allen Forrest, owner of Pick Up My Things. This presents a valuable opportunity to participate in a growing market, contributing to the economic landscape and paving the way for further diversity and inclusivity within the industry. Allen Forrest, owner, Pick Up My ThingsCourtesy Allen Forrest Back in August, Antoine Mordican, CEO of Native Black Farm, which has been growing hemp at its Jefferson County facility since 2020, told me it was disheartening to be denied a license a second time. Hes now encouraged that the commission was able to acknowledge how we can serve as an asset to the people of Alabama, he shared with me over the weekend. I am excited to work with the commission, the Department of Agriculture and look forward to providing evolving insight into our new emerging industry. This diverse allocation of licenses is a positive step in addressing historical inequalities in drug policy enforcement and ensuring equitable participation in a growing industry, added Forrest. It reflects a commitment to inclusive economic growth and represents an opportunity for minority entrepreneurs to contribute significantly to the emerging medical cannabis market in Alabama. To obtain a medical marijuana product to treat chronic pain or myriad other conditions and symptoms, youll need a recommendation from a doctor. Companies awarded licenses have until Dec. 15 to pay their fees. Companies denied licenses have until the same date to request a hearing before the AMCC. Im a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and a member of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. My column appears on AL.com, as well as the Lede. Check out my podcast series Panther: Blueprint for Black Power, which I co-host with Eunice Elliott. Subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, The Barbershop, here. Reach me at rjohnson@al.com, follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj Tyler Goodson, the popular S-Town podcast character, was killed by police over the weekend. Goodson, 32, posted this on Facebook Sunday: Police bout to shoot me down in my own yard. Woodstock Mayor Jeff Dodson said officers were called to Goodsons home. Dodson said multiple law enforcement agencies responded to Goodsons home. He did not release the nature of the initial 911 call. They spent three hours trying to talk Goodson out of the house before he was shot. The State Bureau of Investigation is leading the probe. Dodson released this statement Monday morning: Yesterday, I woke up to the news of a tragedy. I received requests from the media to comment and release this young mans name within hours of his passing. I dont believe that I had the right to do that until 24 hours had passed in order to allow his family to be notified. Now that this time has passed I am devastated to let you know that Tyler Goodson was the young man involved. Woodstock Police were dispatched to a 911 call, they requested backup upon arrival, and were assisted by multiple agencies. The Alabama State Bureau of Investigation is now in charge. I know that everyone wants answers and details, myself included. Tyler was well known and loved by myself, his family and this community. That love extends far beyond due to the S-Town podcast. Please remember at this time that he is so much more than a character to the fans who loved him. This young man was a father, son, brother and friend to many. Alabama Law Enforcement Agency Sgt. Jeremy Burkett said shooting happened early Sunday near the 500 Block of Georgia Loop in Woodstock in Bibb County. Goodson, Burkett said, had barricaded himself in the residence and a stand-off ensued. During the course of the incident, Goodson brandished a gun at officers and Goodson was shot, Burkett said. Burkett said once the investigation is complete, the findings will be turned over to the Bibb County District Attorneys Office. Goodson and the small Bibb County town of Woodstock were featured in the hit podcast S-Town, from the makers of Serial and This American Life. The podcast was downloaded 40 million times worldwide within a month of its March release. S-Town focused on a man who lived in Woodstock named John B. McLemore. Podcast host Brian Reed begins the podcast to investigate a murder, but the story changes when McLemore dies instead. McLemore and Goodson were close friends and were described in the podcast as having a father-son relationship. Goodson said in the podcast that McLemore promised him, in the event of his death, McLemores land and custody of his mother Mary Grace; however, McLemore did not leave a will and the estate went to his mother. Mary Grace was eventually placed in the care of McLemores cousin, and Goodson was warned by law enforcement not to go back onto the property without permission. However, Goodson said he went back to the property numerous times and took several items he claimed were his. In 2017, Goodson pleaded guilty to charges of third-degree burglary, third-degree theft of property and third-degree criminal trespassing in connection with McLemores land. Following his plea, Goodson received a suspended 10-year sentence with five years of probation. Even without the promise of U.S. Space Command, people are moving to Huntsville. City officials such as Mayor Tommy Battle estimate the citys population growth to be between 3,000 and 5,000 a year. The fact that U.S. News & World report has ranked the Rocket City as the best place to live and the second place to live in the U.S. the past two years hasnt hurt. Although housing affordability is becoming an issue in Huntsville, homes are still more affordable than most large cities across the country. The city ranks high on many quality of life lists and wage growth has made Huntsville attractive. The FBI, Blue Origin, aerospace industry and advanced manufacturers are also expanding their workforce. There are up to 14,000 jobs available in Huntsville, according to job seeker sites Indeed and Glassdoor. The White House is now warning about Ukraine funds nearly running out. Because of this, the U.S. Congress is being urged to take action before 2023 ends. White House Budget Chief Shalanda Young opened this topic after sending letters to party leaders in the Senate and the House on Monday, Dec. 4. She said that lawmakers don't have much time to approve more financial assistance and military aid to Ukraine to help it fend off invading Russian soldiers. White House Says Ukraine Aid is Nearly Running Out Shalanda Young said that the lack of funding from the United States could cripple Ukraine in the ongoing war against Russia. "I want to be clear: Without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine," said the White House budget chief via Politico. Shalanda said that the lack of congressional action will also hinder Ukraine from receiving equipment from the U.S. military stocks. "There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money - and nearly out of time," warned Young. The top White House official's letters were sent specifically to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Speaker Mike Johnson, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Shalanda Young's warning is the latest one coming from the U.S. government as the Biden Administration seeks to get the $61.4 billion emergency funding for Ukraine, which was recently proposed by U.S. President Joe Biden. Reuters reported that this is a part of the $106 budget request to fund ambitious plans for Israel, Ukraine, and the U.S. border security. Read Also: Ukraine Investigates Ukrainian POW Execution Allegations Against Russia; Victims Reportedly Unarmed When Killed Ukraine's Entering New War Phase Recently, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that they are entering a new war phase against Russia because winter is setting in. He said that although they are fighting the second-best army in the world, they will never back down. However, he admitted that they are losing a lot of people against Russia because of a lack of military equipment and manpower. Although this is the case, Zelenskyy said that they did their best to achieve faster and more satisfying results. "We are losing people, I'm not satisfied. We didn't get all the weapons we wanted, I can't be satisfied, but I also can't complain too much," said the Ukrainian leader. This is why getting the financial assistance and military aid of the U.S. is a big deal for Ukraine. As of writing, the Congress hasn't confirmed if they will approve the billion-dollar budget request of Joe Biden. Related Article: Putin Orders 170K More Military Troops as Number of Casualties Continues To Grow @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Joel Daves has served on the Mobile City Council since 2013, representing District 5. A graduate of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and Stetson University College of Law in Florida, Daves had a 30-year career in banking before joining the council. Daves is also active statewide in the arts and philanthropy. He previously served as chairman of the Alabama State Council on the Arts from 2017-2019, and as chair of the board of trustees for the Alabama Department of Archives and History. A proposed warehouse park in Theodore has drawn ire from some residents, environmental groups and one member of the Mobile City Council, who argue that the parkwhich would require filling in wetlands would damage the Rabbit Creek ecosystem, and by extension, the entire Dog River watershed. The citizens of Mobile and the environment of Mobile are being sacrificed for somebodys economic interest, and Im not sure its even ours, Cade Kistler, leader of Mobile Baykeeper, an environmental advocacy group, says. A second Escambia County School Board member has been arrested for allegedly revealing grand jury secrets. Cindy Jackson was arrested Monday and indicted for allegedly obtaining and disclosing information from a grand jury subpoena, according to court records. Jacksons arrest and indictment comes after fellow school board member Sherry Digmon, who is also publisher and co-owner of the Atmore News, was charged in late October with the same offense. Atmore News reporter Don Fletcher was also arrested at the same time as Digmon, as was Ashley Fore, a bookkeeper at the school system. The arrests stemmed from an Oct. 25 article on an Escambia County District Attorneys Office investigation into federal COVID-19 funds that were possibly improperly paid to seven former Escambia County School System employees, the newspaper said on its Facebook page. A sidebar accompanying the main article on the investigation reported phones belonging to Digmon and Jackson were seized by sheriffs deputies. Both Digmon and Jackson voted against renewing Superintendent Michele McClungs contract -- an issue that has deeply divided the Escambia County School Board. The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the governmentlest it come to dominate our lives and interests. Patrick Henry Periodically, the world produces a demonic leader who challenges the legitimacy of established order with force or an ideologue who does the same with utopian ideas. Nevertheless, Americas Founders refused to prevent those people from pursuing political office within the bounds of legality. Instead, with their foresight, they crafted the Constitution not to prevent those individuals rise to power but to safeguard against their destructive impulses via constitutional restraints. Unbeknownst to many, though, Wilsonian progressives broke one of those restraints in 1913, mortally wounding the American experiment. When the Founders set out to keep tyranny from infecting the federal government, two of the most important and interrelated safeguards were the separation of powers and federalism. Because so many Americans are not fully acquainted with their countrys history, we must revisit the original provisions of the United States Constitution, which laid the foundation for this great country. The U.S. Constitution emanated from the Great Compromise of 1787. At that time, the United States was a union of independent states trading some of their independence for the common defense, collective security, and general welfare. To preempt usurpation of power, the federal governments authority was split between three branches of equal weight. Although the Founders did not explicitly articulate in the Constitution itself what they were doing, the overriding impetus was to contain the Executive branch because its control over the armed forces and government bureaucracy meant it had the greatest ability to challenge the other branches of government to alter the established pattern of constitutional authority. Image: The United States Senate floor. Public domain. The states, in turn, joined the Union on the condition that their sovereignty would be protected. The House of Representatives was intended to be a Peoples House, with representatives directly elected by the people in their respective districts. Senators were to be selected by state legislatures to represent the states to ensure their sovereignty. To emphasize this point, the Senate was never intended to represent the interests of the people per se; it was intended to represent and zealously guard the interests of the states. By giving elective power to the states, the framers of the Constitution had constrained the role of the federal government solely to the responsibilities delineated in the Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, explained in Federalist Paper No. 45: The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State. Those restraints on the executive were irreparably damaged following the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, on Woodrow Wilsons watch. That amendment established the direct election of U.S. senators by popular vote. This effectively took power from the states, de facto nullifying the Tenth Amendment. The senators elected by the people for six-year terms no longer represent the interests of the states. While we the people are represented by the House, the senators de facto represent nobody but themselves. They become committed to their respective parties agendas and personal gain. Since then, every president has relentlessly pushed and often succeeded in expanding federal boundaries, resulting in an unstoppable growth of governmental size and influence. The arrival of the Marxist socialist government of Barack Obama further exposed the fatal flaw of the Seventeenth Amendment. A constitutional scholar, Barack Obama was imbued with a mission to fundamentally change the established order and replace it with an ideologically inspired system. He understood early on that there was practically no legal recourse within the government itself for violating the Constitution and ignoring Congress. Not bound by constitutional constraints, the socialists began the process of gradually dismantling the established law and order. Institutions of marriage and religion, capitalism, the judicial system, individual liberty, and the English languageall have come under assault after having been branded as antiquated, biased, and intolerant. Moreover, Democrats even altered the voting laws to ensure the Democratic Partys electoral supremacy. Some may say that it is an exercise in futility to consider what could happen if Nevertheless, if not for the Seventeenth Amendment, the Senate would not be controlled by political parties, and the states would have a say in any proposed legislation. Obamacare, the skyrocketing deficit, generous welfare programs, the government-run education system, the departments of Energy and Agriculture, open borders, climate change, and a host of programs and executive orders, plus volumes of intrusive government regulations, would never have seen the light of day. The Seventeenth Amendment trashed the key provision of the Constitution and made the powers of the federal government infinite and undefined. The immense transfer of power away from the democratically elected representatives of Congress to the executive branch has produced an extraordinary imbalance between power and legitimacy. That is how the Republic was lost, fatefully fulfilling the grim warning of the second president, John Adams: Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Alexander G. Markovsky is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, a think tank that examines national security, energy, risk analysis, and other public policy issues. He is the author of Anatomy of a Bolshevik and Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It. Mr. Markovsky is the owner and CEO of Litwin Management Services, LLC. He can be reached at alexander.g.markovsky@gmail.com. I know this is repetitive, but we currently have climate change gabfest number 28 going on in a country that is wealthy because of oil. The United Nations, rich elitists, politicians, bureaucrats, and others are gathering to see how quickly they can destroy highly advanced, and prosperous, countries around the world, but especially the United States. They fly in their private jets, live in multiple mansions, and sail on their private yachts as they lecture us about our carbon footprint. It is all a massive fraud to control us. If they can destroy reasonably priced energy that makes economies thrive, they can control everything, and that is their goal. Anyone who thinks China, Russia, Iran, or all these other oil producing countries, or the extravagantly wealthy jetsetters patronizing these conferences, will give up their oil and quality of life if the working class people in the first world do, needs to have their heads examined. Buying worthless pieces of paper called carbon credits does not reduce the emissions of private jets; it is a fake way to signal concern. In 1922, the WaPo had a front page story about how the ice caps were melting fast and coastal cities would soon disappear. It was essentially the same warning as we see today/. The predictions were 100% wrong, and the globe went into a cooling period from 19401975. It had cooled enough that on the first Earth Day in 1970, the predictions of doom and gloom changed from overheating to a coming ice agebillions would soon die from starvation!most of the media just regurgitated these warnings with no questions or research. (Here are 18 Spectacularly Wrong Prophecies from the First Earth Day if youre looking for a laugh and some vindication.) If the earth cooled while all the things we are told cause warming (population growth, CO2, oil use, coal use, cars, cows, etc.) increased rapidlywhich it did then the narrative that these things cause warming is false. It is common sense and clear, evidence-based facts. There is no valid argument on the other side. It is clearly not settled science no matter how often it is repeated. Then in the 1980s after the warnings of a coming ice age proved false, the green pushers, including the media, educators, politicians, scientists, bureaucrats, and others colluded to scare everyone with the same warnings of the 1920s. Facts clearly dont matter. For the last forty years we have been told we have little time left to control temperatures and the climate. They have worked very hard to indoctrinate people into capitulation. Each subsequent prediction becomes more dire, and they always say there are only a few years to solve the problem. The solution is always more government. Humans, CO2, cars, and our use of natural resources do not cause warming or cooling. We have had many warming and cooling periods over billions of years, and they all occurred cyclically and naturally, just as they do today. Therefore, replacing gas cars and appliances with machines powered by the highly flammable pollutant Lithium will not change temperatures. This has never been about controlling temperatures or the climate. It has always been about a power-hungry government confiscating more political authority and money from the people and then redistributing a huge amount of money to green pushers who vote for Democrats. They show how little they care about the poor and middle classes when they destroy them with huge costs to comply. The existential threat to our survival as a great, prosperous, and free country, is not a gradual temperature rise or fall or storms, but an insatiable tyrannical government. Image generated by AI. Much has been said by many trying to excuse bad behavior. Inner cities have crime because racism. Blue cities are dirty and noisy because racism. White flight happens because racism. Black unwed motherhood is on the rise and has become epidemic because racism. No other reasons are given by black leadership for the failures of blacks to thrive except for racism. But racism does not account for these failures. Failure accounts for these failures: Failure to educate. Failure to instill a work ethic. Failure to be good and to do good. Failure to teach respect and good manners to young children. Failure to revere and promote healthy two-parent families. Failure to discourage sexual profligacy. Failure to demand excellence. Failure to reject profanity and embrace decency and honor. Instead, too many in the Black community have embraced the dysfunction within the Black culture with pride, claiming a unique historical experience that they say no one understands but other Black people. It has been long enough making excuses for Black failures and it is past time for the respectable Black people of America to rise up against the jealous race-baiters and say No more. There is nothing preventing Black success that a Judeo-Christian perspective cannot address successfully. Love your neighbor means dont steal, dont do the crime. Be nice to each other. Respect the property and lives of others. Be on time (terribly unfashionable among anti-racists), work hard (ditto), have a plan to succeed, and above all get educated at a school that does not indoctrinate but educates, which excludes most urban government schools. Unasked-for advice: Do not respect, honor, or adopt the malignant principles of those who teach anti-white racism in the guise of Critical Race Theory, Diversity-Equity-Inclusion, or Anti-Racism (anti-white racism with an oxymoronic name.) When a group blames others, they will not succeed because they are always relying on those others to change. When the blamed ones dont change, the professional victims believe that its perfectly okay to steal, cheat, lie, and break other peoples stuff in the name of reparations. That is not the path to success or to a better place in life, although it is a temporary frisson of schadenfreude. Crime in Blue cities is off the charts because Soros-appointed district attorneys have banded together to excuse crime committed by Black perpetrators. This harms Black people first, then Black neighborhoods, Black aspirations and in itself is criminal. When you teach theft, you get theft. When you get theft, good businesses leave your neighborhood. When they do leave, they take the economic base with them, and who gets hurt? Innocent, freedom-loving, decent people get hurt because theyre often stuck there with the crime they tolerated. The raped businesses will leave and set up shop where they are welcomed. No one is helped by trying to make a silk purse out of a sows ear: The sows ear cannot up and leave the sow. And silk is never made from putrefying pig flesh. The time is now for decent Black people everywhere to confront those among them who are committing the crimes. Refund the police. Create deterrence to crime by actually prosecuting it, from Broken Windows to retail theft, to murder. Dont be Chicago, LA, or NYC. And for Gods sake, stop blaming others for the failures of your own house. Blame is not a strategy that keeps very long without starting to rot. Image: Library of Congress The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the bomb attack on a Catholic Mass inside the Mindanao State University in the southern Philippine city of Marawi on Sunday (December 3) that killed at least four people and injured 50 others. In a statement on its Telegram channel, the terrorist group said that its operatives "detonated an explosive device on a large gathering of Christians... in the city of Marawi." Philippine security officials earlier said the blast from an improvised explosive device might have been a retaliatory attack for a series of military operations against Islamist militant groups in recent days. However, Bangsamoro regional police public information officer Lt. Eirene Mazon told Filipino broadcaster ABS-CBN that investigators were "still gathering information" on the Islamic State claim. "We are accepting all the possibilities," she said. "As of now, we have persons of interest and we are also looking at several angles about the cause of this incident." Police in the Muslim-majority Bangsamoro region are now tasked with hunting down at least two suspects connected to the attack. Earlier, Washington officials have also condemned the incident, calling it a "horrific" attack on Christians inside a Muslim city. Japan, Australia, Britain, China, and Canada have also voiced their condemnation of the incident. Read Also: Philippines: At Least 4 Dead in Explosion During Catholic Mass in Marawi Pope Francis Prays for Victims of Marawi Bomb Attack In his Sunday Angelus address, Pope Francis urged the congregation gathered in St. Peter's Square in Rome to pray for the victims of the bombing attack in Marawi. "I would like to assure you of my prayers for the victims of the attack in the Philippines this morning, where a bomb exploded during Mass," he said. In the hours since the attack, the Vatican sent a telegram to the territorial prelate of Marawi, Bishop Edwin de la Pena. The message, signed by Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin told the bishop that the Holy See was "saddened" with the injuries and loss of life caused by the bomb attack. Cardinal Parolin added that Francis had asked de la Pena "to convey his spiritual closeness" to the victims. I wish to assure my prayer for the victims of the attack that occurred this morning in the Philippines, where a bomb exploded during Mass. I am close to the families and the people of Mindanao, who have already suffered so much. December 3, 2023 Separately, the pope posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, that he would be praying for those who were affected by the bombing. Archdiocese of Manila Statement on the bombing in Marawi City https://t.co/PPkyf7g0KL pic.twitter.com/kmMgBEomN2 rcamaoc (@rcamaoc) December 4, 2023 Meanwhile, Manila Archbishop Cardinal Jose Advincula said the killing of innocent Christians in Marawi was ironic as it happened merely days after "Red Wednesday," a commemoration held by the Catholic Church every last Wednesday of November to remember Christians persecuted, harmed, or killed for their faith. Related Article: Marawi Terrorist Bombing of MSU Catholic Mass Condemned by US Govt. @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Well, this is undoubtedly a net positive! Yesterday, The Daily Mail reported that the sun is setting on liberal professors in the Sunshine State as Ron DeSantiss anti-woke initiatives in education have begun to take effect. From the article: The sun is setting on liberal professors in the Sunshine State as Ron DeSantiss war on woke starts to bite, with some accusing the governor of open hostility to higher education. Turnover has jumped by a quarter in the last two years at the University of Florida after a slew of new laws cracked down on diversity, trans rights and jobs for life. And the number of tenured professors leaving Florida State University is up by half with college authorities struggling to attract replacements, and the states academics look as far as Canada for new opportunities. Theyre actually leaving the state, sometimes even the country (sorry about your bad luck Canada). Is this how we clean up academia? Or at least the colleges in red states? Seems like a pretty good start. Then, from an article in The New York Times, we read this: Many are giving up coveted tenured positions and blaming their departures on Governor DeSantis and his effort to reshape the higher education system to fit his conservative principles. Whats funny though, is those conservative principles are really just Western values and disciplinescall them secular if you likeand theyre exactly what made American education great in the first place. Without an understanding in masonry, engineering, or chemistry, would we have Memorial Hall in Cambridge? Without courses in Western politics and war, history, or ethics, would we have a Declaration of Independence or a Constitution? Since the left has been at command of the education ship, what began as a dumpster fire is now a 5-alarm fireHarvard offers Taylor Swift courses, Princeton teaches you about Getting Dressed in the morning, and at Emerson College, you can learn about Deconstructing TVs Buffy for real college credits, all while the taxpayer satisfies the terms of your loaneven Jeff Bezoss Washington Post was forced to report on the alarming decline in education. As Christopher Rufo noted of the departures, Good riddance. Hat tip: Arnold Cusmariu. Image generated by AI. Too bad for Disney, The Dirty Dozen was already taken, so the company settled on The Naughty Nine and got to workbut The Naughty Nine isnt a movie with themes of hardened masculinity, sacrifice, courage, redemption, and killing German Nazis, its the latest Christmas feature depicting a group of children on a heist job at the North Pole with queer dads and a prepubescent gay boy using the term hottie to describe his crush. Naturally, the homosexual agitprop overwhelms the story line. From Warner Todd Huston at The Western Journal yesterday: One of the characters named Jon (Deric McCabe), who is portrayed as exhibiting obvious gay characteristics, is talking with another boy about his own line of clothing. The character then tells his friend he offered his [sic] sell his designs to a boy, and says, I told that hottie over there Id sell it to him for $200. Later in the movie, Jon refers to another male child (Andy) as cute and given the context, the obvious implication is highly suggestive; Eleanor Bartow at The Federalist says this: Its not clear how old Jons character is supposed to be, but Andy is a fifth-grader and a couple of the Naughty Nine kids in the movie appear much younger than him. Fifth-graders are usually around 10 or 11. Maybe Jons a fifth-grader too, since hes following a fifth-grader on a mission to see Santa, and kids dont tend to take orders from younger kids. Either way, Jon is using sexually charged language with a fifth-grader and with little kids watching the movie. As I noted above, the production is sold as a Christmas flick, but as expected, its a calculated and misleading bait-and-switch to indoctrinate children into the LGBTQ++ cult. Just take a look at how Disney describes the film, and notice whats missing: Mischievous fifth grader Andy finds himself without a visit or presents from Santa on Christmas morning. Realizing he must have landed on the naughty list and feeling unfairly maligned, Andy pulls together a team of eight other naughty listers to help him execute an elaborate heist at the North Pole to get the presents they feel they deserve. Along the way, the group comes to realize that the very best way off the naughty list is to redirect their unique talents for good instead of mischief. Unsurprisingly, theres no mention of the presence of men engaged in sexually-deviant lifestyles around children, or little boys vocalizing their sexual attraction to other boys. The LGBTQ++ cult is just another vehicle of cultural Marxism, so understandably, propaganda, but in this case agitprop, plays a crucial role; as perversion and corruption through media is particularly insidious, we need to be particularly scrutinous, but The Naughty Nine doesnt even pass the sniff test. Image generated by AI. As if killing over 1,200 humans in the most barbaric manner and kidnapping over 200 more werent enough, additional graphic and horrifying details of the violent, bestial Hamas attacks are just being exposed. This author, when merely attempting to show parts of the actual attack in October 7, was blocked by X, and admonished by LinkedIn, although the latter allowed showing parts of the attack video. Facebook allowed my postings. But by that 2/3 social media standard, its perfectly fine to commit the acts but not to talk about or display them and their deadly consequences. Secretary Antony Blinken has said that Israel doesnt have the credit to wage a long war. So 1,200+ deaths and over 200+ hostages are not enough credit to wage war, retaliate, and exact revenge for the destroyed and broken part of your population? Just what does Israel have to do to earn credit to defend and avenge the attack? How much credit are you going to give for an Israeli baby burned alive? Or for a beheaded Israeli baby? Or for an unborn Israeli baby ripped from its pregnant mothers stomach? How much credit are you going to give for the brutal gang rapes of Israeli underage, teenage and young Israeli women who were then shot in the head? How much credit are you going to give for the young woman who was gang raped, murdered, stripped naked, and paraded through Gaza in the back of an open vehicle, while masses of deranged men spat at her corpse and cheered? How much credit will you give for the Israeli women who were gang raped then murdered with knives and other foreign objects shoved up their genitalia? How much credit are you going to give Israel for the hostages being tormented by Hamas and their families torn apart with fear, despair and grief? How much credit are you going to give for the population in Gaza who cheered on these cowardly butchers as conquering heroes for their brutal rapes and bestial murders? When are you going to give Jews here in America credit for the hate Jewish students are encountering on college campuses? When are you going to give American Jews credit for the false moral equivalency between real hegemonic anti-Jew sentiment against a faux Islamophobia? When are you going to give American Jews credit for their houses or worship that are being desecrated and their business that are being boycotted? When are you and President Biden going to stand up before the American people and say Jew hatred is a crime and throngs of people threatening and terrifying Jewish people and entities is not a protest? So far, never. So where do you get the moral stature to withhold credit from Israel? Image: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service As the Commonwealth of Virginia gears up for the 2023 legislative session, one bill to watch is VA SB 1382, called the Assault firearms and certain ammunition feeding devices; purchase, possession, etc., prohibited bill. The bill is an AMENDMENT IN THE NATURE OF A SUBSTITUTE which was proposed by the Senate Committee on Finance and Appropriations on Jan. 25, 2023. Specific language and current status can be found here. Similar bills to prohibit the sale and ownership of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines have been introduced in the Virginia legislature, but for one reason or another have not been enacted. Under Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam, a similar bill came close to passage. However, after strong pushback by concerned citizens, and the Second Amendment march on Richmond in January 2020, several Democratic members of the legislature wisely voted against it. The current bill is similar to others, but there is one striking difference. Specifically, the bill states An 'assault firearm' does not include any firearm that is an antique firearm, has been rendered permanently inoperable, is manually operated by bolt, pump, lever, or slide action, or was manufactured before July 1, 2023. Thus, on face value initially, any assault weapon manufactured before this date would be excluded from the ban or grandfathered once the measure is enacted. As thousands of assault weapons are already owned by law-abiding citizens, what impact can/will this have on curbing gun violence? The short answer is none - most crimes are conducted with handguns, not assault rifles and thousands of legal assault rifles are already in circulation in the Commonwealth. If this is the case, then what is the intent and purpose of this grandfathered exemption? It does not take an astute political scientist to surmise that this revised language will make this legislation an easier sell to those moderate Democrats and perhaps some Republicans who would otherwise push back on an outright ban. In short, If this bill is passed other more strident measures perhaps leading to an outright ban are sure to follow and down the slippery slope, we go See here, here, and here. One of the bills sponsors, Creigh Deeds, prides himself on being endorsed by fomer Rep. Gabby Giffords who has called for banning the sale and manufacture of these uniquely dangerous weapons. Her website is funded by the Americans for Responsible Solutions PAC. Giffords PAC claims to be bipartisan; however, this PAC has overwhelmingly supported Democrats and opposed Republicans in both endorsements and financial support. Even the left-leaning PolitiFact has criticized the Giffords PAC for taking facts about gun policy out of context. At the end of the day, SB1382 is more than a piece of feelgood legislation. It's the proverbial Trojan Horse presented as a gift with an ulterior motive, and we have seen this sleight of hand before across the nation. Yes, many of my Democratic friends have repeatedly told me they are not coming after my guns. I beg to differ, and SB 1382 is merely the start of a calculated strategy to infringe upon my Second Amendment rights. Caveat emptor! Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License Doel is a 700 year old village situated near the river Scheldt in Belgium, that is currently facing the threat of demolition. Its only crime is that its located too close to the port of Antwerp. Somewhere in the 1970's it was decided that the Antwerp harbour needed to expand, and Doel quickly became a target for demolition. The construction of a large dock and container terminal capable of receiving deep-sea ships is already underway on a site immediately next to the village, and the Port Authority proposes building a second one where the village now stands. When the plan to scrap the village was announced, the residents protested and successfully held off the demolition for several decades, but the government was insistent. Sometimes it dealt with a heavy hand in 2008, a 100 strong squad of riot police was sent to the village in order to force evacuation. The once thriving village now looks like a war torn zone with streets strewn with rubble, and big ugly gaps appearing in between the houses. Some residents are still holding out but by the 90s many had already moved out. As residents started departing, a different set of newcomers began moving in artists, from all over Europe and they are slowly turning Doel into one huge artistic canvas. Entire building facades and wall of this abandoned settlement are now dominated by massive graffiti - a giant black and white sniffing rat, weird looking humans, cartoons and aliens. The village might be devoid of humans, but the colorful and awe-inspiring graffiti has kept it alive. For the most part of the villages long history, Doel enjoyed a peaceful and culturally rich existence. The village has many historic buildings, including the oldest stone windmill of the country (1611), and the only windmill on a sea wall, the Baroque Hooghuis (1613) the holdings of the famous 17th century Antwerp painter, Peter Paul Rubens, and many historically unique farmhouses such as the Reynard Farm with its monumental barn. The village is also famous for the nearby nuclear power station which still dominates the skyline with its twin towers. The tug-of-war between the residents and the government has been dragging on for forty years but the demolition appears imminent as fewer than 200 inhabitants are left today, most of them are squatters. The residents were served a final notice more than two years ago, and we suspect it won't be long before Doel and its wonderful street art will cease to exist. Photos by Romany WG In its most recent update, Chrome has addressed a total of seven security bugs. Among them is CVE-2023-6345, which stands as the only zero-day vulnerability. In the update, Google acknowledged that an exploit for CVE-2023-6345 exists in the wild. This marks the seventh zero-day vulnerability Chrome has tackled since the beginning of the year, as reported by The Hacker News. Zero-day vulnerabilities pose a significant threat as they are security flaws that hackers can exploit before developers can release a fix. This leaves organizations exposed and needing more preparation time to protect their systems. The complexity required for their discovery makes these vulnerabilities rare and valuable to attackers. Cybersecurity efforts are concentrated on rapid detection and collaborative actions to mitigate the impact of such threats. Advertisement Advertisement Google has confirmed the presence of a zero-day exploit for CVE-2023-6345, initially identified by Googles Threat Analysis Group on November 24, 2023. The company has exercised caution in sharing details about this specific flaw. It is a common practice among tech companies, especially if they identify a flaw internally, to refrain from public exposure. While specifics about CVE-2023-6345 are limited, we know it is an integer overflow weakness affecting Skia. Skia is the open-source 2D graphics library within the Chrome graphics engine. Googles update to Chrome notes that the exploit could potentially perform a sandbox escape via a malicious file. Chrome zero-day vulnerability CVE-2023-6345 has a security severity of High Lets break down what all this means. Chrome uses SKIA, a 2D graphics library, to render web graphics. Its the software behind Chromes visual components, significantly contributing to the display of graphics. Integer overflows occur when an arithmetic operation on integers surpasses the maximum representable value for the data type, potentially leading to unpredictable behavior and posing security risks. Exploiting such weaknesses can result in serious consequences, including buffer overflows, memory corruption, and other security issues. Hence, addressing integer overflow is common in software development to ensure the security of applications. CVE-2023-6345 exploited an integer overflow in Skia to potentially breach the sandbox. A sandbox is a protective mechanism designed to confine web content within a restricted environment, preventing access to sensitive system resources. The method of exploitation involved a malicious file, indicating that interacting with this file could enable an attacker to execute code or actions beyond the sandbox. Users being able to access data beyond the scope of what Chrome intends is a significant threat. CVE-2023-6345 has a security severity of High. The US Senate is tightening the grip on social platforms over childrens safety. The CEOs of Meta, X, TikTok, Snap, and Discord are subpoenaed to testify before the Senate on January 31, 2024. The hearing is focused on online child exploitation and platforms measures to protect minors. The Senate Judiciary Committee formally issued a subpoena in November to CEOs of X (formerly Twitter), Discord, and Snap following repeated refusals over weeks of negotiations by the three Big Tech leaders to testify. The committee also requested Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg TikToks Shou Zi Chew to participate in the hearing voluntarily. Advertisement Advertisement Big Tech CEOs to testify before US Senate over online child exploitation The subpoena was issued by Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). These Senators claimed that online platforms failed to protect kids online. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, X CEO Linda Yaccarino, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, and Discord CEO Jason Citron will finally appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 31. The US Senate held a hearing on childrens safety earlier this year with advocates and experts. Senators Durbin and Graham say tech platforms first were upset about not getting invited to the hearing. However, when they got the invitations, some refused to accept a subpoena. Senators added they look forward to hearing the CEOs testimony. All platforms whose CEOs must testify before the Senate have previously been accused of violating childrens privacy and failing to protect their underage users. The arising concerns prompted lawmakers to introduce the Online Safety Act (KOSA). The bill aims to control kids access to sensitive information on social platforms. School districts across the US have recently filed a lawsuit against Meta, ByteDance, Alphabet, and Snap over designing platforms to be addictive to kids. Arturo Bejar, a former director of engineering for Protect and Care at Facebook, also appeared before the Senate to testify about firms polices to protect children. He claimed Meta cant be trusted with our children. The US Senate has so far introduced some bipartisan bills to stop the exploitation of kids online. Each state is also introducing its own bill to make social platforms safer for kids. Utahs bill requires kids to obtain parental consent before signing up for a social platform. Louisiana and Mississippi bills are also focused on age verification. The Xiaomi 14 Ultra wont launch until next year. In fact, chances are we wont see it until early Q2 next year. Still, a well-known tipster has just revealed the Xiaomi 14 Ultra battery capacity, and also its wired and wireless charging speeds. The Xiaomi 14 Ultra battery capacity & charging speeds get revealed This information comes from Digital Chat Station, one of the most prominent tipsters from China. He referred to the phone by a codename, Venti, and claims that a 5,180mAh battery will be included. Advertisement Advertisement The Xiaomi 14 Ultra is also said to support 90W wired, and 50W wireless charging. That basically means itll have the same wired charging speed as the Xiaomi 14, not the Xiaomi 14 Pro. The wireless charging speed will remain the same. Youll likely be able to charge the phone in around half an hour Either way, 90W charging should be able to get the phone from 0 to 100% in around 30 minutes. Needless to say, thats plenty fast for pretty much everyone. Also, a charger will be included in the package. The Xiaomi 13 Ultra launched in mid-April this year. That leads us to believe that its successor will also arrive in Q2. There is, of course, a chance that Xiaomi will push up its launch, in which case it may arrive in Q1. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will fuel the Xiaomi 14 Ultra This smartphone will be fueled by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC, just like the Xiaomi 14 and Xiaomi 14 Pro. The Xiaomi 14 Ultra is expected to feature an even better camera setup, though. Leica will be a part of the package, of course. The phone is tipped to include variable aperture, instead of the dual aperture its predecessor offers. This should make it a more versatile camera smartphone. Huawei is a company that takes advantage of a 10-stop variable aperture, and it does an outstanding job. The device will likely differentiate from the Xiaomi 14 and Xiaomi 14 Pro to a degree. Xiaomi will want this phone to stand out, and its camera module will likely be larger too. Sultan Al Jaber, president of COP28, has reportedly said that "no science" suggests that fossil fuels must be phased out to limit global warming to 1.5C. Al Jaber allegedly stated that sustainable growth cannot be achieved by eliminating fossil fuels "unless you want to take the world back into caves," Al Jaber allegedly stated. Some have raised concerns about the apparent conflict of interest between Al Jaber's roles as CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), the state oil corporation of the United Arab Emirates, and his role as organizer of COP28 in Dubai. The Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is a worldwide climate summit where leaders from across the globe get together to discuss and brainstorm ways to combat climate change. This year's event was the 28th summit, hence the name COP28. Heated Debate Over Fossil Fuel Phaseout According to The Guardian, the contentious remarks were delivered by Al Jaber in a heated reaction to questions posed by Mary Robinson, a former UN special envoy for climate change and head of the Elders group, during a live online session that took place on November 21. During a She Changes Climate event, Robinson and Al Jaber had a talk. Robinson expressed: "We're in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone ... and it's because we have not yet committed to phasing out fossil fuel. That is the one decision that COP28 can take and in many ways, because you're head of Adnoc, you could actually take it with more credibility." The COP28 chief answered in a dismissive manner, stating that he wanted to have a "sober and mature conversation" and declining to engage in "any discussion that is alarmist," as heard on audio produced and released by The Guardian. "There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5C," Al Jaber pointed out. See Also: Millions of Dollars in Donation at the COP28 Climate Summit Is Pressuring Wealthy Nations To Pledge Contributions Alarming Remarks From COP28 Chief Himself That view contradicts the strong stance taken by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who said on Friday, December 1, that the 1.5C target can only be achieved by trying to put an end to the combustion of all fossil fuels. He said, "The science is clear," as reported by Common Dreams. Scientist Joelle Gergis, who headed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Working Group I in the Sixth Assessment Report, criticized Al Jaber's comments as "disgraceful." Despite Al Jaber's claims that his remarks have been misrepresented, his position as CEO of a major fossil fuel company makes him an obvious candidate unfit to preside over a climate meeting. A study published over the weekend by Global Witness indicated that ADNOC is on course to become the second-largest oil producer in the world by 2050. Also, Al Jaber is accused of exploiting his position as COP28 president to promote oil and gas agreements. See Also: 'I Am Not Well': Pope Francis Makes First Public Appearance Since Lung Inflammation Episode @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The Barclay family has repaid the nearly 1.2 billion that it owed to Lloyds Bank, opening up its chance to transfer control of the Telegraph newspaper to an Abu Dhabi-backed fund. However, the Government has launched a probe into the proposed takeover of the newspaper and fellow publication The Spectator by the fund, amid concerns over the security and free speech implications. Lloyds confirmed that it had received the money on Monday, after seizing control of Telegraph Media Group in June over the unpaid debt. It then tried to sell the newspaper group and the Spectator, which are both read closely by Conservative Party politicians and supporters. The offices of the Telegraph Media Group in central London (Stefan Rousseau/PA) Lloyds said the debt of Penultimate Investments Holding Limited (PIHL), the holding company, had been repaid and the titles have been removed from receivership. We can confirm the repayment of the PIHL facilities has now completed, it said. We are always keen to work constructively with customers who get into difficulty with their repayments to reach an amicable solution. Wed like to thank all parties for their role in reaching this point. The Barclays had last month reached a deal with RedBird IMI to get help to pay back the debts. RedBird IMI would then take over control of the newspaper group. RedBird IMI is led by the former boss of CNN, Jeff Zucker. It is part owned by US firm RedBird Capital. But it is the other joint owner, International Media Investments of Abu Dhabi, which has worried the Government. IMI is part of a sovereign wealth fund linked to Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the royal family in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Last week the Culture Secretary, Lucy Frazer, asked watchdog Ofcom to launch a probe into whether the sale to RedBird IMI would impact the accurate presentation of news and freedom of expression in the Telegraph titles. Ms Frazer said there may be public interest considerations with the change of ownership which warrant further investigation. The regulator has until January 26 next year to report back to the minister. RedBird IMI said that it would co-operate fully with the Government and regulator. A British man hurt in a suspected terror attack in Paris was attacked from behind with a hammer in front of his wife and child, according to French media. The 66-year-old English tourist, identified in reports as Melvyn J, was one of three people allegedly targeted by French national Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, 26, near the Eiffel Tower on Saturday evening. A tourist of German and Filipino nationality, named only as Collin B, 23, was stabbed to death by the attacker, while a 60-year-old French man was also injured. Le Parisien reported Melvyn was with his wife and child when he was attacked from behind with a hammer, suffering an eye injury. The attack took place near the Eiffel Tower (Peter Byrne/PA( Frances anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said on Sunday an investigation into the attack had been opened. He said Rajabpour-Miyandoab had posted a video on X before the attack pledging his allegiance to the so-called Islamic State alongside other recent posts in which he made references to the Israel-Hamas war. Rajabpour-Miyandoab received psychiatric treatment and was under surveillance for suspected extremism having previously been imprisoned for four years in 2016 on a charge of planning violence, the prosecutor confirmed. After killing Collin B on the Quai de Grenelle, the attacker crossed the bridge to the citys right bank and assaulted the British and French nationals while being pursued by police, authorities said. The Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office and authorities in France did not confirm the identities of the British and French victims on Monday. Any changes to the functioning of the Stormont Executive should be put to the people of Northern Ireland, UUP leader Doug Beattie has said. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee has said Stormont rules should be urgently reformed and the first and deputy first minister roles should be rebranded as joint first ministers. In a report following an investigation the committee also recommended that the Stormont speaker should be elected by a two-thirds majority of MLAs, and that the same threshold should be used to elect first and deputy first ministers. The DUP has been blocking powersharing at Stormont for more than a year and a half in protest at the internal UK trade barriers created by Brexits Northern Ireland Protocol. DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson (PA) Sir Jeffrey Donaldsons party has been involved in negotiations with the Government about the Windsor Framework, which reformed the protocol, and is seeking further assurances, by way of legislation, over Northern Irelands place in the UK internal market. During the latest suspension, the DUP has blocked several attempts to elect a speaker, which is required before ministers can be nominated to form an executive. Within current rules, votes from a majority of MLAs within both the nationalist and unionist traditions are needed to secure the posts of speaker, and first and deputy first ministers. During its evidence, the committee heard that with the growth of the proportion of Northern Ireland society identifying as neither unionist nor nationalist since the agreement, supermajority voting would effectively equate to cross-community consent. The committee said the changes would require consultation with the Irish Government as co-guarantors to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, as well as the parties of Northern Ireland. It said that the 1998 Northern Ireland Act that came from the agreement, which enshrines power-sharing government and devolution in Northern Ireland, would also need to be changed. The Stormont powersharing institutions have been collapsed on several occasions previous to the current political impasse, including by Sinn Fein in 2017 in protest at the DUP handling of a green energy scheme. On that occasion the institutions remained dormant for three years. File pic of DUP MP Carla Lockhart (Niall Carson/PA) DUP MP Carla Lockhart, who sits on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, said she has grave concerns about its recommendations. The last 25 years couldnt have happened without inbuilt protections for both unionists and nationalists and this report is just trying to set that aside, she told the BBC. Its trying to undermine that fact that unionism does not support what the Government has done in recent months around the protocol and the Windsor Framework. We want to get back to consensus politics and we dont believe that any sweeping new ways of working should be introduced to Northern Ireland and the assembly at this time. In a statement Sinn Fein said that 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement, its imperative to learn lessons around what has worked, but also what hasnt. Mr Beattie said his party has always called for a factory reset to the settings of the 1998 agreement, which received the support of over 71% of the electorate in a referendum at the time. A number of changes were made to the original accord at the St Andrews talks in 2006. The UUP leader said any changes to the process of governing must be put before the people of Northern Ireland. The principle of consent needs to be at the heart of any change, he said. Stephen Farry (PA) Alliance MP Stephen Farry said the report is a strong endorsement of the need for reform. The report is a significant and strong endorsement of reform of the structures and institutions of the Good Friday Agreement. It was always envisaged the agreement would evolve to meet changing demographics and circumstances, whilst respecting and preserving its underlying principles, he said. The past 25 years have demonstrated an underlying instability, unfairness and lack of effectiveness of the institutions. In particular, the institutions have only been operational for 60% of that time. Even if the Assembly and executive is restored in the near future, the risk of a further collapse remains. The committee recommendation for an independently-led comprehensive review is absolutely crucial. In particular, reform will only happen if and when the UK and Irish provide leadership and drive the process. Home Secretary James Cleverly will unveil a package of measures intended to bring down net migration after figures hit a record high. He is expected to tell the Commons on Monday that the minimum salary requirement for a skilled worker from overseas will be significantly hiked to around 38,000, a Whitehall official said. The increase from 26,200 a year for visas to work in Britain was said to feature in a wider package to be announced as Rishi Sunak comes under huge pressure. (PA Graphics) The Prime Minister has vowed to do what is necessary to bring down net migration in the wake of an official estimate saying levels had peaked at 745,000 in 2020. The salary figure is lower than the 40,000 in the deal Mr Sunak allegedly agreed with his since-sacked home secretary Suella Braverman to win her support for the Tory leadership. Privately, two sources said, Mrs Braverman and immigration minister Robert Jenrick had pushed for the cap to go even higher, to 45,000. The first official confirmed that the number of dependents that social care workers are permitted to bring into Britain will also be reduced in the package. The changes will raise concerns about how the key roles will be filled if migrants are either prevented or dissuaded from coming. The general secretary of the Unison union Christina McAnea said the measures would be cruel and disastrous for the social care sector. The trade union leader told BBC Radio 4s World At One programme: We already know that theres massive shortages in social care and indeed in health. This will be an utter disaster because what theyre doing is basically sending out a really strong message to those migrant workers who are basically propping up the care sector and indeed in many cases the health sector and saying youre not welcome here. Downing Street declined to discuss the specifics ahead of Mr Cleverlys announcement on Monday afternoon, but insisted that the package is about striking the right balance. The Prime Ministers official spokesman added: We do believe there is a significant pool of people who can be assisted back into the workforce. Sacked home secretary Suella Braverman had been arguing for a higher requirement (Stefan Rousseau/PA) He said there is evidence of abuse in the system and thats what we will clamp down on following changes introduced over successive years. Mr Sunak has been under growing pressure from Tory MPs after the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revised its net migration figure to put 2022 at a record high of 745,000. Detailing the difference between the number of people arriving in the country and leaving, the figure for the year to June 2023 is estimated to have been slightly lower, at 672,000. The Prime Minister has sought to blame the very large numbers on his predecessors, saying he had inherited the levels. They stand three times higher than before Brexit despite the 2019 Tory election manifesto promising to bring overall numbers down. He is also facing a challenge to deliver his pledge to stop the boats crossing the Channel, after his flagship asylum policy was deemed unlawful by the Supreme Court. Mr Cleverly is expected to head to Kigali to finalise a new treaty with Rwanda this week, which ministers hope will help convince judges otherwise. No 10 said they were still working urgently to secure the deal and to produce emergency legislation that was promised after the legal defeat last month. Stormont rules should be urgently reformed so that a speaker can be elected by a two-thirds majority of MLAs, a Westminster committee has recommended. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee has also proposed that the same threshold should be used to elect first and deputy first ministers. As part of a raft of proposals which the committee said would assist in restoring and stabilising the powersharing institutions, it also recommended rebranding the first minister roles and making them open to politicians from beyond the largest unionist and nationalist parties. The DUP has been blocking powersharing at Stormont for more than a year and a half in protest at the internal UK trade barriers created by Brexits Northern Ireland Protocol. Sir Jeffrey Donaldsons DUP is currently blocking the operation of the Stormont powersharing institutions (Liam McBurney/PA) The party has been involved in negotiations with the Government about the Windsor Framework, which reformed the protocol, and is seeking further assurances, by way of legislation, over Northern Irelands place in the UK internal market. Senior civil servants have been left in charge of devolved departments and the Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris had to intervene to set a budget. During the lengthy suspension, the DUP has blocked several attempts to elect a Speaker, which is required before ministers can be nominated to form an executive. The Westminster committee has been carrying out an investigation into the effectiveness of the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement; the historic peace deal which created the Stormont Assembly. Within current rules, votes from a majority of MLAs within both the nationalist and unionist traditions are needed to secure the posts of speaker, and first and deputy first ministers. During its evidence, the committee heard that with the growth of the proportion of Northern Ireland society identifying as neither unionist nor nationalist since the agreement, supermajority voting would effectively equate to cross-community consent. Among the measures it recommends in its report are calls for the UK Government to urgently reform the Assembly speaker election rules so that a candidate can be elected by a two-thirds supermajority of MLAs. It recommends the same method should be used to elect first and deputy first ministers. The report adds that, in recognition of their equal status, the roles should be rebranded as joint first ministers with the position open to any two MLAs of any two parties rather than just the largest parties. Under current Stormont rules, Sinn Feins Stormont leader Michelle ONeill is entitled to claim the position of first minister (Brian Lawless/PA) Under current rules, Sinn Feins Stormont leader Michelle ONeill is entitled to claim the position of first minister as her party emerged with the largest number of MLAs following last years Assembly elections. The committee said the changes would require consultation with the Irish Government as co-guarantors to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, as well as the parties of Northern Ireland. It said that the 1998 Northern Ireland Act that came from the agreement, which enshrines power-sharing government and devolution in Northern Ireland, would also need to be changed. Sir Robert Buckland is the chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee (Stefan Rousseau/PA) Committee chairman Sir Robert Buckland said: When Stormont collapses critical public services are cast adrift. Health, education, policing; all are feeling the strain while important decisions go unmade, and the people of Northern Ireland suffer. More stringent safeguards are needed to protect against the cycle of restoration and collapse that has dogged Stormont. He added: The short-term measures weve proposed will shore up the stability of Stormont increasing the incentives to keep the institutions moving and enabling the Assembly to run without an executive in place. In the longer run, we feel that a full independent review into the effectiveness of the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement should be conducted with input from all stakeholders. This should include the North-South and East-West elements, but a fully functioning Stormont is the foundation on which the rest stands. The Stormont powersharing institutions have been collapsed on several occasions previous to the current political impasse, including by Sinn Fein in 2017 in protest at the DUP handling of a green energy scheme. On that occasion the institutions remained dormant for three years. Facebook owner Meta is up against a massive legal battle and damages claim in Spain. The plaintiffs argue that the ad tech giant should pay them for a competition violation since it has been processing people's data for adverts without a clear legal basis for years, in accordance with European Union data protection regulations. 'Systematic, Massive Non-Compliance' The lawsuit is being supported by AMI, a group of newspaper owners that counts more than 80 members, including the publishers of El Pais, ABC, and La Vanguardia, among others. Meta is being sued for what the plaintiffs call its "systematic and massive non-compliance" with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). They are aiming for over 550 million (about $600 million). In a press release, the media group said Meta has consistently disregarded the legislative requirement that individuals must provide their agreement before their data may be used for advertising profiling, thereby failing to comply with EU data protection regulations. "The systematic and massive use of personal data of users of Meta platforms, tracked without their consent throughout their digital browsing, would have allowed the American company to offer the sale of advertising space on the market based on an illegitimately obtained competitive advantage," the statement reads, as reported by TechCrunch. The group is establishing that their lawsuit contends that 100% of Meta's regional revenue was unlawfully obtained. See Also: Meta Warns China, Iran, Russia Plan 'Foreign Covert Influence Operations' Ahead of 2024 Elections Requirement for Consent Ignored? Allegedly, Meta has willfully disregarded the need for individuals to get their permission before their data may be used for advertising profiling. In January, Meta was fined 390 million ($422 million) by EU data protection regulators for tracking and profiling users to target adverts against a contract. The final GDPR ruling established that the tech giant was in violation of the legislation, which paved the way for private privacy lawsuits like this one to be brought. Thus, other cases like this will likely emerge. According to ABC News, Meta's ad processing from May 2018, when the GDPR went into effect until July 2018 is the focus of AMI's complaint. In light of what the complainants term "Meta's persistence in its non-compliance," however, they are not ruling out the prospect of extending the duration of their lawsuit if necessary. For ad processing in the area, Meta has changed its claimed legal basis twice since the January penalty. It first switched to asserting what it termed "legitimate interests" as its foundation. Nonetheless, in July 2022, the CJEU ruled that Meta's super profiling was also invalidated, ending a separate and lengthy competition and privacy challenge launched by Germany's competition authority. The AMI's challenge cites an October 27 urgent binding decision by the European Data Protection Board, issued after Norway's data protection authority requested it due to Meta's continued processing of personal data without a legal basis. See Also: Meta Intentionally Designs Platforms To Pursue Millions of Underage Users To Sign Up, Court Document Claims @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Film director Christopher Nolan will be honoured with the British Film Institutes most prestigious accolade, a BFI Fellowship. Nolan, who holds dual UK-US nationality, is being recognised for his extraordinary achievements and enormous contribution to cinema, and for constantly pushing the limits of what large-scale filmmaking can be whilst retaining a reverence for the history of the medium and the primacy of cinema-going, the BFI said. He will be presented with the Fellowship at the BFI Chairs Dinner on February 14 next year, which is hosted by BFI chairman Tim Richards. Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas attend the world premiere of Dunkirk at the Odeon Leicester Square in London (PA) The 53-year-old, whose films include Oppenheimer, the Dark Knight trilogy, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk and more, said: I am thrilled and honoured to be accepting a BFI Fellowship from an organisation so dedicated to preserving both cinemas history as well as its future. Nolan made his directorial debut with 1998s Following and two years later came Memento, the film that unlocked Hollywood for him. It stars Guy Pearce as a man with memory loss desperately trying to discover who attacked him and killed his wife. The film received two Academy Award nominations, for best original screenplay and best film editing, and was also a blockbuster success. Following the well-received Memento, Nolan directed Insomnia, a psychological thriller starring Al Pacino as a detective on the hunt for a killer in an Alaskan town. From left: Emma Thomas, Jefferson Hall, Trond Fausa Aurvag, Ludwig Goransson, Kenneth Branagh, Rami Malek, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Cillian Murphy, Christopher Nolan, and Robert Downey Jr attend the UK premiere of Oppenheimer (PA) It was another critical and commercial smash the beginning of a gilded run for Nolan. In 2005 he made the first film in the Dark Knight trilogy, with Christian Bale playing the titular role in Batman Begins. That was followed by drama The Prestige in 2006, which starred Bale and Hugh Jackman as rival magicians in Victorian London. The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises followed in 2008 and 2012 respectively, with both films grossing more than one billion US dollars worldwide. In 2010 Nolan directed sci-fi action film Inception, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio as a professional thief who steals ideas from victims unconsciousness. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning four. Nolan received his first best director Oscar nomination for 2017s Dunkirk, which depicts the Allies retreat from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk during the Second World War. Nolan has been described as a blockbuster auteur (PA) In 2019 he collected his CBE from Buckingham Palace, having been recognised for services to film in the New Year Honours. He said of the honour: As a passionate advocate of film and the importance of film culturally, it is really thrilling to me that film would be honoured in this way and is considered worthy of this kind of honour. I think film is one of the great collective pastimes, one of the great art forms. It is lovely to see it accorded this kind of status. Nolan, described as a blockbuster auteur and champion of cinema, has also long advocated for his films to be seen on the medium they were shot on, the BFI said. Mr Richards said: Im delighted to be honouring and recognising Christopher Nolan with a BFI Fellowship. Christopher Nolan is one of the greatest filmmakers of the 21st century, creating hugely popular movies that have grossed over six billion US dollars worldwide. His movies are all made for the big screen to challenge and entertain audiences around the world. Christophers commitment and support of the cinema industry is legendary. He has also been at the forefront of preserving celluloid through his involvement with The Film Foundation and his own support via the Morf Foundation for the BFIs photochemical work. All done to ensure that current and future audiences will be able to continue to enjoy and learn from our incredibly rich history of cinema for many years to come. Other BFI fellows include Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles, Barbara Broccoli, Michael G Wilson and Spike Lee. A knifeman stabbed, cut and slashed his girlfriend and her family members to death in a violent and brutal drug and alcohol-fuelled attack, a trial heard. Joshua Jacques, 29, is accused of fatally stabbing girlfriend Samantha Drummonds, 27, her mother Tanysha Ofori-Akuffo, 45, her grandmother Dolet Hill, 64, and Ms Hills partner, Denton Burke, 58, on April 25 last year. Prosecutors say Jacques left a bloodbath in his wake. Police were called to Ms Hills terraced home in Delaford Road, Bermondsey, south London, in the early hours of the morning, finding Mr Burkes body at the foot of the stairs and the three women in the kitchen. They all suffered numerous stab wounds with one or more knives and were pronounced dead at the scene. Joshua Jacques appearing in the dock at Westminster Magistrates Court last year (Elizabeth Cook/PA) Tom Little KC, prosecuting, told jurors at the Old Bailey on Monday: This case involves not one death, not two deaths, and not even three deaths but four violent and brutal deaths at the hands of this defendant. All of those deaths occurred during the same incident on the night on the night of Sunday April 24 into Monday April 25 2022. In killing four people the prosecution say that the defendant murdered three generations of one family. There is no dispute or issue other than that it was the defendant that killed all four of the victims and that he did so by attacking them. He did so by stabbing them, cutting them and slashing them. What you will have to decide is why he did so and what his state of mind was at the time. The prosecution case is that this is a clear case of murder or more accurately a clear case of quadruple murder. We say that the defendant killed his victims with murderous intent, and theres no dispute about that, and that when he did so his ability to form a rational judgment and to exercise self-control were not substantially impaired by any psychiatric condition and indeed that his conduct on that night was brought about by self-induced intoxication, taking drugs and drinking alcohol. This, we say, led to a transient psychotic disorder not meeting the requirements for the defendant to make out a partial defence of diminished responsibility. Partners Dolet Hill and Denton Burke were killed (Metropolitan Police/PA) It was the second time Jacques had visited the house where Mr Burke and Ms Hill lived, the court heard. Ms Ofori-Akuffo, also known as Racquel, sometimes stayed at the property to care for her mother who was receiving treatment for cancer, while Ms Drummonds had been living there as her own flat was undergoing renovation, Mr Little told jurors. In the days before the attack, Ms Drummonds told her best friend Ayo Omosuyi she believed Jacques was having an episode and had been chatting all night and was fixated on topics. In a voice message sent to Ms Omosuyi on April 24 2022, she said: Literally like this weekend has just been a myth, like basically in a nutshell Josh is basically getting to the point where he could basically have an episode, like I dont know whats triggered him. Its just a myth innit obviously tomorrow is Monday and obviously doctors are gonna get. He just needs to get his medication innit. Tanysha Ofori-Akuffo was also known as Racquel (Metropolitan Police/PA) Jacques, from Minard Road, Lewisham, south-east London, has pleaded guilty to their manslaughters but denies murdering them. The trial continues. A family has paid tribute to a relative killed in an explosion in the Scottish capital. James Findlay Smith, 84, died in a blast at a house in Baberton Mains Avenue, Edinburgh, on Friday night. There are no suspicious circumstances, police said previously. In a statement released through Police Scotland, Mr Smiths loved ones paid tribute to him. They said: It is with deep regret that our father/papa/father in law, James Findlay Smith, sadly lost his life in the tragic events at Baberton Mains Avenue on December 1 2023. Our thoughts are with everyone involved and our well wishes go to the impacted families. We would like to thank the emergency services and the neighbours who went above and beyond for their support and help on the evening and following days. We request that you respect our privacy at this time. The scene in Baberton Mains Avenue, Edinburgh (PA) Cammy Day, leader of Edinburgh City Council, previously said: This is incredibly sad news for the city and all of our thoughts are with those affected. Were very grateful to the emergency services who responded so quickly and tirelessly last night, evacuating the scene and making the surrounding area safe. I know that council officers assisted into the early hours of this morning and continue to stand ready to support all agencies and the local community. Such a tragic turn of events last night. As a result of the incident in Baberton Mains Avenue yesterday evening, a man has sadly died & a number of families will now be homeless The impact across the community is significant Please give generouslyhttps://t.co/XTMUlMMRs8 Sue Webber MSP (@SueJWebber) December 2, 2023 Sue Webber, a Scottish Tory MSP for the Lothian region, previously wrote on social media: Such tragic news, in such a close community. Thank you to all the emergency services that attended. My thoughts and prayers are with those impacted by this incident. An investigation into an explosion at a house in Edinburgh that claimed a mans life is focusing on the internal gas installations at the property. The man, named locally as James Smith, 84, died and a 43-year-old woman and 54-year-old man were taken to hospital following the blast in Baberton Mains Avenue on Friday evening. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) said it is focusing on installations inside the house rather than on the gas network. Emergency services were called to the Baberton area at 10.25pm on Friday after multiple reports about the blast. The explosion happened on Friday evening (Jane Barlow/PA) A house was destroyed in the explosion and bricks and debris were left strewn across the road. It is understood that Mr Smith was in a neighbouring property. An HSE spokesperson said: The focus of our investigation relates to the internal gas installations at the property and not the network. Our thoughts are with the friends and family of the man who sadly lost his life. People were evacuated from a number of homes in the area following the blast. Neighbours said they felt their homes shaking while one person said they heard the explosion from inside a cinema in nearby Wester Hailes. The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service said five engines attended and two people were rescued from the ruins of the property before their arrival. Rubble was strewn across the street (Lesley Martin/PA) A Scottish Gas Networks (SGN) spokesperson said: After a thorough investigation, the Health and Safety Executive have confirmed the incident in Baberton on Friday night was not related to SGNs network. Our deepest sympathies are with the family of the 84-year-old man who tragically died in this incident. Our thoughts also remain with the couple injured as a result of the explosion. We initially worked with the emergency services to ensure the immediate vicinity was made safe in our role as the gas emergency service. Were working with Edinburgh Council to offer support to residents evacuated following the explosion. Wed like to reassure the local community that their gas supply is safe to use. SGN reminded people that if anyone smells gas inside or outside they should call the national gas emergency service on 0800 111 999. Former prime minister Lord Cameron will travel to the United States this week for the first time since returning to frontline politics. The Foreign Secretary, who was a surprise appointment during Prime Minister Rishi Sunaks reshuffle three weeks ago, is set to visit Washington DC for talks about the conflict in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East. Due to fly out on Wednesday, the Foreign Office said he will undertake a programme of bilateral meetings with key members of US president Joe Bidens administration. The itinerary includes a meeting with his US counterpart, secretary of state Antony Blinken, as well as discussions with Republican and Democratic congressional figures. Lord Cameron has previously met on a number of occasions with Mr Biden, who formerly served as vice president to Barack Obama, including in Washington shortly after entering Downing Street in 2010 and again in London in 2013. The Foreign Secretary first announced his trip to the US capital in an article for The Sun On Sunday. The Conservative peer said he would be reassuring American allies that Britain will stay the course in Ukraine as a debate rages Stateside about how long US support for Kyiv should continue. The battle in eastern Europe has been raging for almost two years following the decision by Russian president Vladimir Putin who Lord Cameron has labelled a warmonger to order his troops to invade the neighbouring country in February 2022. Writing in the tabloid newspaper, Lord Cameron said it was hard to recall a previous time in recent memory of such danger and uncertainty in the world, before arguing that Britains response should be one of strength, resilience and unity. Lord Cameron and Joe Biden have met previously in their former roles (Stefan Rousseau/PA) The Cabinet minister wrote: We need to build up our defences, stay close to our strongest friends and partners, and reach out to new allies. That is why next week I will be heading to Washington DC to work with our closest and strongest ally, the USA. The debate there about how much to help Ukraine and for how long is under way. I know the arguments that European security is American security and that dictators shouldnt be appeased will win the day. But I want to reassure them that we will stay the course and galvanise other allies too. Frankie Dettori has said he celebrated after finding out he was the first contestant to be voted out of Im A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! because he knew he was never going to win it. The jockey said it was a bittersweet moment when his name was called after it was revealed that he and YouTuber Nella Rose had received the fewest votes from the public and were up for elimination. He told ITVs Good Morning Britain: Obviously I wanted to get to the final but with characters like Sam (Thompson) and (Nigel) Farage and Tony (Bellew) and Marvin (Humes) and Josie (Gibson), I was never going to win, so actually the thought of spending the one more week there maybe was going to be a bit hard for me. Hes been an amazing sport, but champion jockey Frankies wild ride through the Jungle is now over! #ImACeleb pic.twitter.com/OoobwbxCZS I'm A Celebrity (@imacelebrity) December 3, 2023 So it was bittersweet the sweet part is I got to come out and meet my lovely wife, have some time here in the Gold Coast waiting for my other campmates to come out and greet them when they come out. During the Italian jockeys 12 days in camp, he was a team leader for a period, won the camp a breakfast of champions and took on a number of trials. Discussing the time he spent with former Ukip leader Farage in the jungle, he said: I met Nigel before I went to the jungle. He is a character, larger than life, he is very interesting, very knowledgeable, he is actually a good laugh. I never got to talk to him about politics because Im not interested, I dont know that world, but when he comes one on one as a person he is very interesting and always good fun as well. The first I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here evictee of 2023 is @FrankieDettori pic.twitter.com/E9PFkCObCJ Good Morning Britain (@GMB) December 4, 2023 However, Dettori said he would back Made In Chelsea star Thompson to win the ITV series over Farage. He said: My bet would be Sam. He brings a lot to the table, hes entertaining, he is silly, he sings, he is happy and I think what people is going to like about him is all of that. That to me is the winner. Sometimes I wish you could hit the pause button. I talk a lot, but he talks non-stop. Im A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! continues on ITV. The Government has pledged 3.9 billion for a rail project which will improve connectivity in northern England. The cash injection will accelerate the Transpennine Route Upgrade between Manchester, Huddersfield, Leeds, and York which will bring faster and more frequent journeys, the Government said. It has already invested 3 billion into the project which is expected to deliver electrified tracks by the middle of the decade. The announcement comes after the planned HS2 route between Birmingham and Manchester was axed earlier this year. Rail minister Huw Merriman (David Woolfall/UK Parliament) In November, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he would repurpose the money for the proposed HS2 route to deliver mass transit in Leeds. Rail Minister Huw Merriman said: The Transpennine Route Upgrade represents the first major step in delivering transformed east-west connectivity in the north and Im delighted to announce this multibillion-pound funding boost to move to the next stage of delivery. Todays announcement demonstrates this Governments commitment to delivering its Network North plan which will improve journeys, help to level up regions and grow the economy. The funding will be invested in doubling the number of tracks from two to four between Huddersfield and Ravensthorpe, allowing faster trains to overtake slower stopping services and freight journeys. Once complete in the mid-2030s, the upgrade will offer up to eight trains per hour, hundreds of extra seats and cut journey times between Manchester and York by 10 minutes, the Government said. The investment will also support digital signalling along the route to allow trains to run closer together, leading to more frequent and reliable services. Neil Holm, managing director for the Transpennine Route Upgrade, said: Transpennine Route Upgrade is well under way with building the infrastructure that bring passengers more frequent, faster, greener trains, that run on a better, cleaner and more reliable railway for generations to come. This commitment by the Government to our programme allows us to move two of our largest projects from design into construction and delivery. Christmas has come early for a 13-strong EuroMillions work syndicate after they landed a 1 million win. The group of waiters, office, maintenance and spa staff at Ye Olde Bell Hotel, near Retford in Nottinghamshire, scooped the prize in the UK Millionaire Maker draw on Friday November 3. Members of the syndicate normally see a few small wins during the year, and use the money to pay for a Christmas meal in January, having worked together throughout the festive party season. After scooping 76,923 each, the group are planning an extra-special traditional post-Christmas party, but in the meantime they are looking forward to a stocking full of yuletide treats, including a trip to Lapland for syndicate leader Darren Gargan. The 52-year-old maintenance manager said: As the song says Its the most wonderful time of the year and to see the faces of everyone who always work hard, but will now also play hard this Christmas, means the world to me. Mr Gargan, from Doncaster, bought the syndicates winning EuroMillions ticket via the National Lottery App but did not realise for a week that the group had a winning ticket. Describing how he felt when a message flashed up on his iPad, he said: I had the usual email telling me about the draw, and didnt really bother because I was busy at work. I saw there was 6.30 in the account and thought no more of it. The next week I was repairing the hotel driveaway when I had another email. I checked again and asked fellow syndicate member and sales office manager Lindsey to look at the email. She was sure it was a winner so we agreed I would call the National Lottery. I called and, unbeknown to me, Lindsey was already running up and down the hotel corridors finding the other syndicate members to tell them that I was on the phone and she thought we had won 1 million. By the time Id finished the call, shed also phoned members not at work. Im not 100% sure what happened next, its a bit of a blur. Lindsey Fraser, 53, from Retford, said: I was so excited, I was screaming and shouting around the sales office and then went off to find who else was working that day and was in the syndicate. Unfortunately only two were on site so I had to phone the rest. It was a mad but a lovely few hours, telling everyone the amazing news. The syndicate stretches across the hotel and spa, which is nice. We have the general manager and deputy general manager, spa director, people in accounts, a receptionist and of course Darren and myself. The syndicate at the hotel has been running for 17 years, with Mr Gargan taking over as its leader 15 years ago. Mr Gargan, who is married with two children, added: Ive got lots of things I want to do with the money but I feel a few foreign trips are on the horizon. The first is a trip to Lapland with the family. Ive always wanted to take a trip to Lapland at Christmas and its now top of my list. My wife has a brother in Australia and another in the USA so we hope to visit them too. As for the rest of the money, well spend it on Christmas, our house and paying off bills. He continued: The win will make such a difference to so many people, not just the syndicate members, but their families and friends too. And to win just before Christmas is perfect timing. Christmas is the hotels busiest period so we are putting our syndicate celebration on ice, but I cant wait for our get-together, it is going to be very special. Kasabian said fans can enjoy Leicester becoming the centre of the world when they return to their hometown. Members of the rock band were speaking at the citys De Montfort Hall ahead of a performance at Victoria Park for Summer Solstice II on July 6. Kasabian played at the venue in 2014 for their Summer Solstice gig before going on to headline Glastonbury that year. Kasabian will perform at Leicesters Victoria Park next July (PA) Guitarist Serge Pizzorno told the PA news agency: The first one was so just huge. He said the next generation of fans who were 10 maybe during the first gig can come and just enjoy a day where Leicester becomes the centre of the world. I mean, in our eyes anyway. He said: People travelling in from all over the world, city shuts down, the albums are blaring from all the shops, and then the vibe. I mean, its just insane and we cannot wait to get out there, man. Bassist Chris Edwards said their original gig has taken on a kind of folklore as parents tell their children about the Leicester-formed bands performance and said they now can experience it for themselves. He said: So although its been 10 years, it doesnt seem like it. Its come around pretty quick. Pizzorno said new record Happenings will have big tunes when it is released next year. Its just melody, huge songs, really. I mean, thats kind of the best way to describe it, he said. Drummer Ian Matthews and guitarist Tim Carter are among Kasabians members. Tom Meighan, the former frontman of Kasabian (PA) Former frontman Tom Meighan left in July 2020, citing personal issues. He later admitted assaulting his partner Vikki Ager and apologised for his behaviour, saying he struggled for many years with alcohol addiction. Meighan described the attack as a wake-up call for me, for who I was, and what I was becoming. The first record since his departure, The Alchemists Euphoria in 2022, gave Kasabian their sixth UK number one album. Tickets for the Victoria Park show go on sale from 9.30am on Friday. A man accused of spraying antisemitic graffiti on an MPs office building is being hunted by police. Investigators have released a CCTV still of the suspect, with his hood up and wearing a blue face mask, after Feryal Clarks office in Hertford Road, Enfield, north London, was vandalised just after 11pm on Thursday November 21. Pc Louis Blackburne-Maze, who is leading the investigation said: This was a racially aggravated crime. There is no place for hate in London and its important that everyone feels safe on our streets. Officers want to speak to this man after antisemitic graffiti was sprayed on an office building in #Enfield on 21 November. Call police on 020 8246 9386, quoting Operation Brocks and the image ID or tweet @MetCC. Call Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 to remain anonymous. pic.twitter.com/7wRWNp4Hx1 Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) December 4, 2023 We are very keen to speak to this man so if you know who he is or have any other information that could help, we encourage you to get in touch with police. Antisemitic crime in the UK has risen sharply amid the renewed conflict in Gaza, with more than 1,000 incidents logged by Jewish charity the Community Security Trust since the attack by Hamas on October 7. Anyone with information about the graffiti can call police on 020 8246 9386 quoting the reference CAD 1361/04DEC23, or contact the force on X @MetCC. To remain anonymous contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 or online. Philippine President Bongbong Marcos contracted COVID-19 as confirmed by the Presidential Communications Office. The positive COVID-19 result of the Filipino leader was announced on Monday, Dec. 4. PCO said that the president will be observed for five days while he is being isolated. However, instead of showing empathy for the sick Filipino president, many netizens questioned his COVID-19 infection. This is because the leader suddenly gets ill after the bombing in Mindanao and a strong earthquake happened. Here's what Filipinos said about the latest COVID-19 infection of Bongbong Marcos. Bongbong Marcos' COVID-19 Infection Questioned by Filipinos According to Rappler's latest report, Philippine President Bongbong Marcos has been infected by COVID-19. Since the Asian country suffered from a bombing and earthquake, many residents question the sickness of the Filipino leader. They are asking if the COVID-19 infection will make Bongbong Marcos miss important meetings and announcements (again). However, the Presidential Communications Office promises that the president will still continue his scheduled meetings. "The President remains fit to carry out his duties and will be continuing his scheduled meetings via teleconference," said PCO via its official Facebook announcement. PCO officials also said that more updates regarding the health of Bongbong Marcos will be provided soon. While the leader's health is being monitored, the office said that Bongbong highly encourages Filipinos to take precautions when going out to the public. PCO said that Marcos suggests getting vaccinated and voluntarily wearing facemasks when visiting places with crowded people. This is not the first time that Bongbong has been infected by COVID-19. The Philippine president also got sick because of the novel coronavirus; specifically in March 2020 and July 2022. In another case, Bongbong also became sick on Nov. 23. Because of his illness, he wasn't able to attend the Asia-Pacific Parliamentary Forum. Hopefully, his latest health condition will not hinder him from making important announcements and attending critical meetings. Read Also: Philippines: Broadcaster Shot Dead While on Air in Mindanao Island Radio Station Filipinos Disappointed With Bongbong's COVID-19 Announcement Many Filipinos were disappointed with the announcement of PCO regarding Bongbong's COVID-19 infection. This is because some of them believe that the president is making another excuse to become absent from important meetings. Others said that Marcos is only using the COVID-19 sickness excuse to avoid addressing the latest bombing in Marawi, which four individuals and injured over 40 people. Meanwhile, some Filipinos are doubting the sickness of Bongbong Marcos, saying that the Philippines is the only remaining country where people are still contracting COVID-19. These are just some of their opinions about Bongbong's latest positive COVID-19 test results. You can click here to see more of their comments. Related Article: Philippines: Marawi Terrorist Bombing of Mindanao State University Catholic Mass Condemned by US Government @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Low-cost airline Ryanair has said more than 960 flights were cancelled last month due to the war between Israel and Hamas. It comes after the Irish carrier cancelled over 870 flights in October as a result of the conflict in Gaza. Airlines have suspended flights to Tel Aviv and neighbouring Jordan after Hamas militants launched an attack on Israel on October 7 and due to the subsequent escalation of the war. Rival easyJet said last week that conflict and the threat to stability across the Middle East has also affected demand for flights in destinations such as Egypt, while it saw bookings impacted across the board in October and November due to the war. EasyJet has been affected the war in Gaza (David Parry/PA) EasyJet warned that it does not expect to narrow losses in the first quarter of its new financial year as flights and wider demand are affected, but it said booking appetite had started to recover in recent weeks. Ryanairs latest passenger statistics showed it operated over 66,400 flights in November, with a 4% increase in people flown, at 11.7 million, despite the cancellations. London-listed Hungarian airline Wizz Air said on Monday that it has decided to suspend operations in Israel until early January next year. The budget airline said it continues to monitor the situation on the ground closely, and stands ready to redeploy capacity should conditions stabilise. It carried 29.3% more passengers in November, at 4.8 million. Wizz Air said it had also restarted inbound flights to Chisinau, Moldova, in Eastern Europe having suspended flights to the country in March due to tensions linked to Russias war with Ukraine. It said the move follows a comprehensive evaluation of safety factors, adding that the group intends to gradually reintroduce operations, including reopening its base in Chisinau, while ensuring safe and secure operations for its crew and passengers. A man who allegedly killed a German tourist and injured a British national in a suspected terror attack in Paris had pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State, authorities said. The man, named by AP as Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, is accused of stabbing the German-Filipino man to death before using a hammer to injure a British man and a French national on Saturday near the Eiffel Tower. Frances anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said he had opened an investigation into the attack on Sunday. He said Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a French national, had posted a video on X before the attack pledging his allegiance to IS alongside other recent posts in which he made references to the Israel-Hamas war. A man jogs past a blood stain at the site where a man targeted passers-by (Christophe Ena/AP) Mr Ricard said Rajabpour-Miyandoab, born in 1997, converted to Islam at the age of 18 and in 2016 planned on joining IS in Syria before being imprisoned for four years on a charge of planning violence. He received psychiatric treatment and was under surveillance for suspected extremism, the prosecutor confirmed. Three other people from Rajabpour-Miyandoabs entourage and family have been detained by police for questioning, Mr Ricard said. After killing the tourist, the attacker crossed the bridge to the citys right bank and injured the British and French nationals, authorities said. Mr Ricard said both of them were able to get back home on Sunday. Emmanuel Macron sent condolences to the family and loved ones of the German national who died (Peter Dejong/AP) The suspect cried Allahu Akbar (God is great) and a police officer twice tasered the suspect before arresting him, authorities said. French interior minister Gerald Darmanin reportedly said that when questioned by police, the suspect expressed anguish about Muslims dying, notably in Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, and claimed that France was an accomplice. Mr Darmanin said this person was ready to kill others, and praised the quick response of the police. In a statement to the PA news agency, a spokesperson for the British Foreign Office said: We are supporting a British man who was injured in Paris and are in contact with the local authorities. Writing on X on Saturday, Frances president Emmanuel Macron said: I send all my condolences to the family and loved ones of the German national who died this evening during the terrorist attack in Paris and think with emotion of the people currently injured and in care. My most sincere thanks to the emergency forces who made it possible to quickly arrest a suspect. The resumption of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza is unconscionable, Irelands deputy premier has said. Micheal Martin condemned the latest attacks on the region, insisting innocent civilians were being killed. Israel has intensified its assault on Gaza as it seeks to eliminate Hamas following the militant groups deadly attack on October 7. The Israeli military has widened its offensive following the end of the week-long ceasefire. (PA Graphics) It has called for the mass evacuation of the town of Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Tanaiste Mr Martin said it was critical to bring the war to an end. I said before the resumption of the war that it was unconscionable that the war would resume and I believe that, he said. We know from the bombardment of north Gaza that the protection of civilian life was not prioritised, and far too many innocent men, women and children were killed and are now being killed in southern Gaza as a result of this bombardment and I condemn that, that is wrong. Speaking to reporters in Dublin, Mr Martin added: Well continue to work with all of the parties Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar and others to first of all get hostages out, to get remaining civilians out, but more critically to get the war ended. And I think there is a lot of pressure on and that pressure will continue. An atmospheric river that has streamed into the Pacific Northwest over the last few days has soaked the region with rounds of rainfall and blanketed mountain ranges with feet of snowfall in some cases. Forecasters warn that additional wet weather will spread across the region into midweek. The latest round of rain that began on Sunday will continue through Wednesday. AccuWeather meteorologists anticipate that locations across Washington, Oregon, Northwest California, northern Idaho and western Montana will pick up anywhere from an additional 1-2 inches of rain to 4-8 inches along the coast. The AccuWeather Local StormMax for rainfall is 18 inches. There have been numerous reports from the start of the weekend of flooded roadways, travel disruptions, rock and mudslides from Northwest California to western Washington. Residents are warned that additional rain to target the Northwest through Wednesday could further worsen conditions for locations already impacted by the deluge of rainfall over the previous days. The highest population centers of the Pacific Northwest, Seattle and Portland, Oregon, could potentially total a month's worth of rain in the first six days of December as the prolonged stretch of rain continues. "As of Tuesday morning, 2.99 inches has fallen in Seattle since the start of the month, while Portland has recorded 2.48 inches. Both cities are expected to receive an additional 2-4 inches of rain through Wednesday. The historical average rainfall for the month of December is 5.72 inches in Seattle and 5.77 inches in Portland," explained AccuWeather Meteorologist Elizabeth Danco. Over 1.36 inches of rain were recorded on Monday alone in Seattle, with an additional 0.06 inches being recorded in Portland. Flood warnings, watches and advisories were put in place for numerous counties across western Washington and Oregon through Wednesday night due to the steady stream of rainfall that will continue to spread inland. "The combination of liquifying snow at rather high elevations, combined with torrential rain will have small streams and rivers that flow out of the Cascades, Olympics and Coast Ranges in Washington and northern Oregon surging rapidly into Wednesday," AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski said, adding, "Due to the rapid rise of these streams, dangerous and life-threatening conditions may evolve." This image shows the water level forecast from National Weather Service hydrologists along the Skagit River, near Concrete, Washington. Some of the rivers in western Washington that will experience rapid rises into Tuesday night include the Skagit, Snoqualmie, Snohomish, Grays and Nisqually. These areas are not strangers to ample amounts of rainfall over a short period of time, especially during the winter months from November to January. However, locations across western Oregon and Washington are currently enduring levels of moderate to severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Cities such as Seattle have endured a relatively dry summer, setting the stage for the drought to set in. Observations from Seattle showed that they collected approximately 2.51 inches of rain from May through the end of August this year when the normal precipitation during this timeframe is nearly double that at 4.67 inches. Forecasters say that although the generous rainfall totals expected over the upcoming days may be impactful in terms of travel disruptions, road closures and major flooding, the persistent rainfall could gradually help to improve the drought conditions. In the wake of rounds of snow that have turned the Northwest mountains into a winter wonderland and impacted travel across passes such as Willamette, Santiam, White and Snoqualmie late last week into the weekend, snow levels have risen significantly as warmer conditions set in since Sunday. "Rising temperatures through Wednesday can lead to snow melting, especially in the Cascades where over a foot of snow has fallen. The snowmelt, in addition to the heavy rain Monday and Tuesday, can lead to flooding concerns and dangerous travel, especially in the mountains and foothills," explained AccuWeather Meteorologist Haley Taylor. GET THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP Have the app? Unlock AccuWeather Alerts with Premium+ Danco also added that along with the flooding risk, heavy rain falling in the mountains amid rising temperatures could cause the snowpack on steep mountain slopes to become more unstable, increasing the risk of avalanches. The Northwest Avalanche Center issued avalanche warnings on Saturday and Sunday, stating that areas along the slopes of the Washington Cascades, Mount Hood, Stevens Pass and Snoqualmie Pass would face a level four-high avalanche danger. Forecasters say that although the steadiest rain will taper off late Wednesday, there will likely be a break in the lingering damp conditions by Thursday night. "Looking ahead to later this week, a storm moving into the Northwest can bring colder air back into the region on Thursday, allowing for temperatures to drop closer to the historical average. However, the stormy pattern should shut off," stated Taylor. Mainly dry conditions are expected to continue on Friday, but another round of rain and mountain snow can sneak back into the Pacific Northwest by late Friday into Saturday. 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. The UK Defence Secretary has condemned what he described as an outrageous and unlawful attack in the Red Sea which saw a British-owned ship come under assault. Grant Shapps said Britain is committed to protecting maritime security and ensuring regional stability after the drone and missile strike on Sunday. The US military said the Bahamas-flagged Unity Explorer, owned by a UK company, was among three commercial vessels targeted in an attack by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. US military Central Command said the Unity Explorer sustained minor damage. I strongly condemn the outrageous and unlawful attacks on ships by Iran backed Houthi militants. The UK is committed to protecting maritime security & deterring escalation, with HMS Diamond deploying to the region as part of the UKs efforts to ensure regional stability. Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP (@grantshapps) December 4, 2023 Two other ships registered in Panama were also hit by missiles, with the Number 9 reporting some damage and the Sophie II suffering no significant damage, according to Central Command. A military statement said guided-missile destroyer USS Carney shot down three drones after responding to calls for assistance. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Mr Shapps said: I strongly condemn the outrageous and unlawful attacks on ships by Iran backed Houthi militants. The UK is committed to protecting maritime security & deterring escalation, with HMS Diamond deploying to the region as part of the UKs efforts to ensure regional stability. According to the Associated Press, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have claimed responsibility for the attack on the Unity Explorer and one of the other attacks. US Central Command said the attacks represented a direct threat to maritime security and commerce. It said: We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran. Yemens Houthis have been launching attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, as well as launching drones and missiles targeting Israel, in response to its war against Hamas in Gaza. Earlier in November, the Houthis seized a vehicle transport ship also linked to Israel in the Red Sea off Yemen. Missiles landed near another US warship last week after it assisted a vessel linked to Israel that was briefly seized by gunmen. The Prime Ministers official spokesman said: We condemn the attack on commercial shipping in the Red Sea by Houthi militants. As weve previously said, Iran has long provided political and military support to Houthi militants and it bears responsibility for the actions of its proxies and partners. These waters are vital routes for global trade and incidents like these show the importance of the Royal Navys presence in the region. By Gabriela Baczynska and Andrew Gray BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban demanded on Monday that a summit of European Union leaders next week avoid any decision on Ukraine's coveted goal of getting a green light for membership talks even as the country fights Russia's invasion. Orban, who has maintained ties with Moscow even as the EU has imposed sweeping sanctions against Russia over its war in Ukraine, has been proclaiming for weeks that Kyiv is not ready to begin EU accession negotiations. His stance is at odds with the view of the European Commission, the EU's executive body, which recommended last month that the bloc's leaders give Kyiv the thumbs-up to begin talks as soon as it has met some final conditions. Any such decision, however, requires the unanimous support of EU leaders. Orban put his demand in a letter on Monday to Charles Michel, president of the European Council of EU leaders. He also said the summit should not decide on a budget plan that includes 50 billion euros ($54.11 billion) in economic support for Kyiv. "I respectfully urge you not to invite the European Council to decide on these matters in December as the obvious lack of consensus would inevitably lead to failure," Orban wrote. "The European Council must avoid this counterproductive scenario for the sake of unity, our most important asset." EU membership talks would be a major boost for Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that has been struggling to repel a full-blown Russian military invasion for nearly two years. A spokesperson for Michel declined to comment on the letter. But other EU countries have made clear they do want to discuss Ukraine's membership prospects and the budget proposal at the summit, which takes place in Brussels on Dec. 14 and 15. Diplomats from EU countries that strongly support Ukraine have voiced concern that a lack of agreement on membership talks and financial aid at the summit would be big political blow to Kyiv in the midst of war and be seen as a boost to Moscow. But if Orban sticks to his position on membership talks and broader budget wrangles prevent a deal on the financial aid, diplomats say another summit early next year may be needed. DIPLOMATIC DISCUSSIONS Envoys from the EU's 27 member countries will meet on Tuesday to start work on the written conclusions of the summit, which is also expected to discuss the membership prospects of Moldova, Georgia and Bosnia. EU diplomats and officials said the first draft text prepared for discussion was bound to change. Dated Dec. 4 and seen by Reuters on Monday, the draft text reads: "The European Council decides to open accession negotiations with Ukraine and with Moldova." For Georgia, it said the Caucasus republic would get EU candidate status "on the understanding" that Tbilisi implements outstanding conditions. For Bosnia, the initial draft stated the bloc was "ready to open EU accession negotiations... once the necessary degree of compliance with the membership criteria is achieved". In what was widely seen as a bid to convince Budapest to back Ukraine, the Commission announced in recent days that it would unlock billions in EU aid to Hungary that had been frozen over rule of law concerns, including corruption. Michel also travelled to Budapest last week but there was no immediate sign that he managed to sway Orban on Ukraine. One EU diplomat said Michel left Budapest "empty-handed", while an official with the bloc said on Monday it was "very, very difficult" to secure among all 27 a deal to launch membership talks with Ukraine. ($1 = 0.9241 euros) (Reporting by Gabriela Baczynska, additional reporting by Jan Strupczewski, editing by Mark Heinrich and Marguerita Choy) Mercedes-AMG Mercedes-AMGs Experiences department last week announced an all-new, four-day winter off-roading expedition in Northern Sweden. A select few customers will tackle immense scenery and enjoy some of the finest hospitality that Scandinavia has to offer from the front seat of a range of G-Class models starting this January. The expedition will take a group of just 8 enthusiasts across Sweden, journeying between the cities of Arvidsjaur and Kirunam. The route will present plenty of opportunities for drivers to experience the capability of the G-Class, ranging from the Mercedes G 500 to the AMG G63 and G63 G 4x4 offerings. The photos shared by Mercedes-AMG are pretty spectacular, with the route seeming to provide some great 4x4 testing. Not solely a wheeling trip, Mercedes has also arranged for a guided snowmobile tour to ensure you really enjoy the sub-zero surroundings. Mercedes-AMG The evenings will be dominated by the luxurious accommodations fit for AMG customers, including a stay at the original IceHotel, the Silverhatten Hotel, and the Arctic Bath Hotel. Food is set to be an experience in its own right, with reservations at gourmet restaurants along the route, as well as some champagne receptions for highfalutin mingling. Of course, the program isnt cheap, with pricing starting at just under $10,900. You must also be at least 21 years old and maintain an international driving license to be able to participate. The new off-road program joins the existing Mercedes-AMG Experience on Ice programs, where customers can travel to Lake Galtisjaure near Arjeplog. The lake's surface features nearly two feet of ice, making it the perfect place for some loose-surface shenanigans. Theres even an ice circuit that traces the path of the Nurburgrings Nordschleife. The program includes a range of AMG vehicles, including the C63, SL63, and the G63 models. Pricing is a bit more approachable than the off-road package, ranging between $2,300 for the basic three-day course, up to $13,700 for the all-inclusive Pro Plus package. Regardless of which package you go for, there are certainly worse ways to spend your time while freezing. Mercedes-AMG You Might Also Like The final Republican primary debate of 2023 is set for Wednesday in Tuscaloosa, Ala. The clash comes amid a race that has been unusually static. Former President Trump has retained a massive lead in national polls, as well as in the key early states of Iowa and New Hampshire. The drama up to now has mostly been around the battle for second place, with former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley on the brink of eclipsing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in part due to strong debate performances. Trump has declined to participate in the three debates so far and he appears unlikely to change his tune for Wednesday. The debate is hosted by NewsNation. The Hill and NewsNation are part of Nexstar Media Group. Still, even though this years primary contest seems stable, there is a big historical caveat. Previous nomination battles have shifted markedly in the final stretch before the first contests or after one startling result. Here are five dramatic moments in the past 20 years, drawn from both major parties, where expectations were upended. Democrats, 2004: Howard Dean surges then stumbles, clearing way for John Kerry John Kerry shakes hands with Howard Dean after they both spoke to people at a campaign event May 18, 2004, in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images) The 2004 Democratic race was defined by the debate over the war in Iraq, which had begun in March 2003. Many leading Democrats had voted to authorize President George W. Bush to use force in Iraq. Electorally, some in the party worried that being seen as soft on terror could be deadly to the partys chances of winning the White House back in 2004. Yet enormous numbers of grassroots Democrats were viscerally and presciently, as it turned out opposed to the Iraq War. Howard Dean, a previously low-profile former governor of Vermont, became the standard-bearer for the anti-war Democrats a dynamic helped along because Dean was also more liberal on other issues such as health care. When Dean fever was at its peak, it allowed him to blow past other significant figures such as then-Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and John Edwards (D-N.C.). Just a few weeks out from Iowa, the caucuses were shaping up as a fierce battle between Dean and former House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.). In the final weeks, it all changed. The ferocity of the attacks Dean and Gephardt unleashed against each other turned off Iowans, sending them looking for alternatives. Dean and Gephardt even ended up withdrawing negative ads heading into the final weekend of Iowa campaigning. But it was too late. When Iowans went to caucus, Kerry won, narrowly holding off Edwards. Dean and Gephardt trailed in third and fourth respectively. Dean tried to buck up disappointed supporters on the night with a loud, whooping speech. The Dean Scream became a political disaster all by itself. Kerry, resurgent, went on to win the nomination relatively easily, though he would lose to Bush that November. Republicans, 2008: Mike Huckabee sinks establishment favorite Mitt Romney Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee participate in a televised debate at Saint Anselm College on Jan. 5, 2008, in Manchester, New Hampshire. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) 2008 is one of the campaigns often cited by aides to todays non-Trump candidates as evidence that early polls mean nothing. Its a self-serving argument, but its not wrong. At this time in the 2008 cycle, one ABC News/Washington Post poll put former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani 6 points clear of the rest of the field, followed by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, actor Fred Thompson and then-Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). The picture was complicated in 2008, however, because Giuliani opted for an unusual strategy of downplaying Iowa and to some extent New Hampshire in favor of concentrating on later big-state primaries, most notably Florida. In Iowa, Romney led in polls for months. He was 23 points clear in the Hawkeye State in one October 2007 poll. But Romney, a vastly wealthy businessman and a relative moderate on social issues, was loved more deeply by the GOP establishment than by the caucusgoers of Iowa. The late-surging candidate in Iowa was Huckabee, who had recently ended an 11-year tenure in the governors mansion in Little Rock. Back in 2008, his political persona was that of an avuncular Southern preacher. He said he was a conservative but not mad at anybody. He popped up on the Jay Leno-era Tonight Show playing bass guitar. And, come caucus night, he walloped Romney in Iowa by almost 10 points. Huckabee was never a good fit for New Hampshire. But his defeat of Romney destroyed any chance the latter had of taking a firm grip on the 2008 race. It also opened the door for a comeback for McCain. McCain won New Hampshire and rolled on to the nomination. Giulianis strategy proved disastrous. Romney came back four years later to finally win the nomination. Meanwhile, the Huckabee political brand is now carried forward by Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The former White House press secretary under Trump won the Arkansas governorship in November 2022, marking the first time a daughter and father have served as governor of the same state. Democrats, 2008: Barack Obama stuns inevitable Hillary Clinton, who falls to third Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton after debating at the Austin Democratic Debate on Feb. 21, 2008, in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Ben Sklar/Getty Images) Looking back at the Obama story now two terms in the White House, the nations first Black president, resilient popularity its easy to forget what a huge upset he pulled off in 2008. Obama had come to national prominence with a speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, promising to transcend the divides of red and blue America and summarizing his own story as that of a skinny kid with a funny name. At the time, he was an Illinois state senator seeking a U.S. Senate seat. He won that battle easily in November 2004. He went on to launch his presidential campaign before his Senate term had reached its halfway point. Standing in his way was Clinton, then a senator representing New York. She had large swaths of the party establishment behind her. Beltway conventional wisdom held that the former first lady was all but inevitable. In late December 2007, she led Obama nationally by roughly 20 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average. But the situation was always more precarious for Clinton in Iowa. The state had, at the time, never elected a woman to either the Senate or the House, or as governor. Obama had the advantage of hailing from an adjoining state. More importantly, Obamas elevated rhetoric and charisma sparked intense devotion among the partys grassroots. Obama was obviously coming on strong in the final days. But the caucuses dawned with big questions still remaining about whether an overwhelmingly white and rural state would throw its backing to a Black first-term senator. The answer was emphatic. Obama won by 8 points, while Clinton was nudged down to third place by John Edwards, making his second bid for the nomination. Obama and Clinton went on to duke it out in an extraordinary and prolonged primary fight. But, after Iowa, he never ceased to be the front-runner. Her campaign never fully recovered. Republicans, 2012: Rick Santorum gives Romney another scare Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney talk after participating in a debate sponsored by CNN and the Republican Party of Arizona at the Mesa Arts Center on Feb. 22, 2012, in Mesa, Ariz. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) The next cycle in 2012 offered another reminder that polls in December can be a bad predictor of who wins the nomination. At this time 12 years ago, former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) was leading the Republican race by double digits nationally. The significance of the messy 2012 GOP primary has become far clearer in retrospect. It was the last time the GOP establishment was able to stave off deep discontent among the grassroots. Activist conservatives looked for several candidates to scratch their itch early in the cycle, including Gingrich and businessman Herman Cain. Then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry raised hopes but never fulfilled them in a campaign best remembered for one especially disastrous debate performance. It turned out to be former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) who gave Romney the worst shock on his way to the nomination. Santorum was, at root, a more ascetic version of 2008s Huckabee. He had clear political limitations. He had previously won two Senate terms in Pennsylvania but had been thrashed by almost 20 points when he sought a third. His ostentatious religiosity helped propel him to a shock victory in Iowa, though his campaign was deprived of a surge in momentum because the margin was so tight roughly one-tenth of 1 percentage point that the result only became official more than two weeks later. Neither Santorum nor Gingrich could sustain their support for long enough to derail Romney. But the problems encountered by the establishment-friendly nominee were a sign of what was to come. Democrats, 2020: Biden, buried in Iowa and New Hampshire, is resurrected by South Carolina Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris appear on stage just before the start of the Democratic Presidential Debate at Texas Southern Universitys Health and PE Center on Sept. 12, 2019, in Houston. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) Its not necessary to look back into the mists of time to see how primary fights can change on a dime. Just look at the current president. President Biden was, to be fair, always strong in national polls of Democratic voters. Among the reasons: name recognition, durable loyalty from Black voters, in part because of his service as Obamas vice president, and a belief among moderates that he offered the best chance of defeating then-President Trump. But at one stage, it looked like none of those things would save Biden in the primaries. His performances in the first states were dismal. He came in fourth in the Iowa caucuses behind former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The New Hampshire primary was even worse, as Biden dropped to fifth behind those three candidates as well as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). But Biden had long put his faith in South Carolina, the first primary state with a significant Black population. The states voters repaid that faith, handing Biden a victory of almost 30 points. The emphatic win was the catalyst for several other candidates, spooked by the possibility of the left-wing Sanders becoming the nominee, to drop out. In a campaign constrained by COVID-19 restrictions, Sanders never really recaptured the magic of his 2016 bid that had run Hillary Clinton surprisingly close. Meanwhile, the center-left coalesced around Biden. The rest is very recent history. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. BERLIN (Reuters) -German Economy Minister Robert Habeck on Sunday cancelled a planned trip to the Middle East to focus on talks over a hole in Germany's 2024 budget and said he was "very optimistic" a solution would be found. The economy minister was due to fly to Dubai on Monday evening to attend COP28 and then to Oman, Israel and Saudi Arabia but was asked by the chancellor to postpone the trip, a spokesperson said. The coalition government is in intensive talks over how to tackle a 17-billion-euro ($18.50 billion) gap blown in the 2024 budget by a constitutional court ruling last month. Finance minister Christian Lindner proposed in an interview on Saturday cutting social spending, international climate financing, development cooperation and some subsidies to fill the gap. Asked about Lindner's proposal on the Sunday evening Anne Will talk show, Habeck said all parties were putting forward suggestions in line with their views but that this was "not a contribution to solve the problem." "I am very optimistic that we are on a good path to reach an agreement," the economy minister added, declining to give further details before an agreement had been reached. ($1 = 0.9187 euros) (Reporting by Andreas Rinke, Victoria Waldersee; Writing by Victoria Waldersee; Editing by Sharon Singleton and Chizu Nomiyama) The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia The top-tier Buick Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. Jesus R. Garcia Ive always had a fondness for the Buick brand, even though my generation only saw them as vessels for AARP cardholders. The cliche of Grandmas Buick was burned into the mind of anyone born during the 1990s. The brand nevertheless has survived economic recessions and a Werthers Original hard candy reputation without losing sight of why people like Buicks. The 2024 Encore GX, the smallest in the Buick lineup, serves as the gate greeter to attract and introduce young car buyers to the brand. With a reasonable price and attractive styling, the Buick Encore is a suitable option for people looking for a luxury-type compact crossover. Moreover, Buick did not make the mistake of trying to look young to attract a younger audience. Instead, they built a sincerely comfortable SUV with practical features while focusing on the one key luxury aspect: space! Anyone with memories of riding in the marshmallowy seats of a Buick sedan can agree that this brand understands comfort. Advertisement Article continues below this ad 2024 Buick Encore GX Avenir Engine: Turbocharged 1.3L four-cylinder Transmission: 9-speed automatic 0 to 60: 8.8 seconds Starting Price: $25,600 Price as Shown: $35,740 For 2024, Buick tweaked the styling on the Encore with a sleek, narrow set of headlights sporting the brands updated Tri-Shield logo that could stare down Clint Eastwood. Its a rather handsome crossover SUV with sculpted bodylines that add some definition to an otherwise bland profile. This top tier Encore GX Avenir hosts all the goodies. A leather interior, heated front seats, an auto-dimming rear-view mirror and adjustable lumbar support. Its combination of Ocean Blue metallic with Whisper Beige upholstery was a refreshing visual in todays modern sea of gray, white and silver-painted traffic. The Avenir trim level also sets itself apart with 19-inch Pearl Nickel aluminum wheels and a Hollywood smile front grille. The interior features a 19-inch curved digital dashboard housing the infotainment screen and instrument gauges. Stepping inside the spacious and minimalist interior gave me a nostalgic feeling for the bench seat lounges of 20th-century sedans. Interior cargo space is further amplified by the rear and passenger seats folding flat, providing the necessary room to haul the bounty from your local visit to Costco or IKEA. The available 7-speaker Bose audio system fills the air with whatever ambient noise you desire, unless you prefer to travel in silence. In that case, the Encores cabin cancels out the noises of the outside world. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Driving impressions are what youd expect from a vehicle like this. It wont make your hair stand on end or provoke a surge of adrenaline. But it will cradle you in its soft seats and numb but effortless steering. Its small size makes navigating urban congestion a breeze with modern tech to aid you, like blind spot detection, forward collision alerts, automatic emergency braking and a safety setting for teen drivers. Surprisingly, the Buick Encore has two engine options, depending on trim level. Entry level models feature a turbocharged 1.2L three-cylinder engine developing 137 horsepower and managed by a continuously variable automatic transmission (CVT). Higher trim Encores and all-wheel drive variants receive a turbocharged 1.3L four-cylinder engine making 155 hp and 174 pounds-feet of torque with a nine-speed automatic transmission. Both engines wont launch off the line when you feed it a boot full of throttle but they are plentiful enough to surf through city traffic while averaging 31 mpg. A baby in Idaho was found dead by his father's car a day after an Amber Alert was issued for him, authorities say. Bonneville County Sheriff's Department issued an Amber Alert for 10-month-old Zeke Best on Friday. His father, Jeremy Best, 48, was suspected of kidnapping him. The Teton County Sheriff's Department had been searching for the baby since Thursday night when they responded to open line 911 call from his home in Victor, Idaho. Dispatchers sent deputies after hearing a disturbance through the call. When they arrived they found Best's wife Kali Jean Randall, 38 , dead on the scene. Her death is being investigated as a homicide and deputies believed Best fled with his 10-month-old son. Baby found dead, father found naked nearby At around 9:15 a.m. on Saturday, police received a call from hunters that man was in a sleeping bag on the side of the road near Kepps Crossing Rd, about 20 miles east of Idaho Falls. The hunters said the man was naked and making odd statements. Responding deputies identified the man as Best, and put him in a patrol car until an ambulance arrived. They also found his black Chevy SUV, down an embankment off the roadway and Zeke dead on the scene. "Our thoughts are with the family of the victims involved in this case," the Bonneville County Sheriff's Department said. Best was booked into jail in connection to his wife's death, after being medically cleared. He'll remain in Bonneville County Jail until his arraignment hearing. Tragedy: Shooting in Dallas kills 4, including toddler; suspect at large Suspect transported to medical center morning of wife's death According to a press release from Bonneville County Sheriff's Department, about 12 hours before his wife was found dead, Best was found walking around the Swan Valley General Store naked at around noon on Thursday. He had been transported to Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center by ambulance, but it's unclear exactly when he'd been released from the medical center. "There was not an indication at that time his behavior would continue, escalate, pause, change, or stop - which is why he was taken to the appropriate place, the hospital, for evaluation," the Bonneville County Sheriff's Department said in a Facebook comment. "We cant discuss nor do we know what kind of action was taken at the hospital, other than to say with everyone weve dealt with in similar situations our experience has been they are taken care of appropriately and to the best of their ability, as much as patients and family members will cooperate in that effort. We must work within the bounds of the law in every situation based on what we know at the time." Idaho news: Biden administration asks Supreme Court to keep abortion access in red-state emergency rooms This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Idaho baby found dead after Amber Alert issued, authorities say By Arafat Barbakh and Mohammed Salem GAZA (Reuters) -Intense Israeli air strikes hit the south of the Gaza Strip on Monday, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians, including in areas where Israel had told people to seek shelter, residents and journalists on the ground said. Israeli troops and tanks also pressed the ground campaign against Hamas militants in the south of the enclave after having largely gained control of the now-devastated north. At the United Nations, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed to Israel to avoid further action that would make the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza worse, and to spare civilians from more suffering. "For people ordered to evacuate, there is nowhere safe to go and very little to survive on," U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said. Early on Monday, Israel ordered Palestinians to leave parts of Gaza's main southern city, Khan Younis. But residents said that areas which they had been told to go to were also coming under fire. Israel's military posted a map on social media platform X with around a quarter of Khan Younis marked off in yellow as territory that must be evacuated at once. Three arrows pointed south and west, telling people to head towards the Mediterranean coast and towards Rafah, a major town near the Egyptian border. Desperate Gazans in Khan Younis packed their belongings and headed towards Rafah. Most were on foot, walking past ruined buildings in a solemn and silent procession. But the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza (UNRWA), Thomas White, said people in Rafah were themselves being forced to flee. "People are pleading for advice on where to find safety. We have nothing to tell them," he said on X. In the territory's northern part, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA said at least 50 people were killed in an Israeli air strike that hit two schools sheltering displaced people in the Daraj neighbourhood of Gaza City. The Gaza health ministry could not be reached for comment on the report and it was not immediately possible to verify it independently. A spokesperson for the Israeli army said it was looking into the report. Separately, the health ministry said at least 15,899 Palestinians, 70% of them women or under 18s, have now been killed in Israeli bombardments of the Hamas-ruled enclave in eight weeks of warfare. Thousands more are missing and feared buried in rubble. Israel launched its assault to wipe out Hamas in retaliation for an Oct. 7 cross-border attack by its gunmen. They killed 1,200 people and seized 240 hostages, according to Israeli tallies - the deadliest single day in Israel's 75-year history. BIG CRATER Bombing at one site in Rafah overnight had torn a crater the size of a basketball court out of the earth. A dead toddler's bare feet and black trousers poked out from under a pile of rubble. Men struggled with their bare hands to move a chunk of the concrete that had crushed the child. Later they chanted "God is greatest" and wept as they marched through the ruins carrying the body in a bundle, and that of another small child wrapped in a blanket. "We were asleep and safe," said Salah al-Arja, owner of one of the houses destroyed at the site. "There were children, women and martyrs," he said. "They tell you it is a safe area, but there is no safe area in all of the Gaza Strip." Israel accuses Hamas of putting civilians in danger by operating from civilian areas, including in tunnels which can only be destroyed by large bombs. Hamas denies it does so. As many as 80% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have fled their homes in the Israeli bombing campaign that has reduced much of the crowded coastal strip to a desolate wasteland. Israeli forces largely captured the northern half of Gaza in November, and since a week-long truce collapsed on Friday they have swiftly pushed deep into the southern half. Tanks have driven into Gaza from the border fence and cut off the main north-south route, residents say. The Israeli military said the central road out of Khan Younis to the north "constitutes a battlefield" and was now shut. Hamas said its fighters clashed with Israeli forces in northern Khan Younis overnight. ISRAEL'S GOALS IN NORTH ALMOST MET The commander of Israel's armoured corps, Brigadier-General Hisham Ibrahim, told Army Radio the military had almost achieved its goals in northern Gaza. "We are beginning to expand the ground manoeuvre to other parts of the Strip, with one goal - to topple the Hamas terrorist group," he said. Military footage showed troops patrolling in tanks and on foot, in fields and in badly damaged urban areas, and firing from weapons, without specifying the location in Gaza. Israel says its evacuation orders are aimed at protecting civilians from harm, and called on international organisations to help encourage Gazans to move to the areas labelled safe on Israeli maps. The United Nations said the areas in the south that Israel has ordered evacuated in the three days since the truce ended had housed over 350,000 people before the war - not counting the hundreds of thousands now sheltering there from other areas. In Khan Younis, many of those taking flight on Monday were already displaced from other areas. Abu Mohammed told Reuters it was now the third time he had been forced to flee since abandoning his home in Gaza City in the north. "Why did they eject us from our homes in Gaza (City) if they planned to kill us here?" he said. Israel's closest ally the United States has urged it to do more to safeguard civilians in the southern part of Gaza than in last month's campaign in the north. But about 900 people have been killed in Israeli air strikes since the truce ended on Friday, Gaza health authorities said. The head of the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, visiting Gaza on Monday, said the level of human suffering was intolerable. In a statement, Mirjana Spoljaric called for the protection of civilians, respect for the laws of war, and for the release of hostages held by Hamas. "It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, and with a military siege in place there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible," she said. (Reporting by Mohammed Salem in Gaza, Maayan Lubell, Ari Rabinovich and Emily Rose in Jerusalem, Maggie Fick in Beirut, Andrew Mills in Doha, Writing by Peter Graff and Angus MacSwan; Editing by Alex Richardson, Mark Heinrich and Jane Merriman) Amanda Edwards/WireImage Jennifer Garner is showing Reese Witherspoon just how much she loves her through a grand gesture and dance moves. My friend Reese sent me a DM yesterday, Garner, 51, began her video posted to Instagram on Saturday, December 2, in a joint post with the Radio City Rockettes official account. The Family Switch actress then shared a screenshot of an Instagram direct message between her and Witherspoon, 47. The Morning Show star sent Garner a post from the Rockettes account and wrote, Please go dance with the Rockets [sic]. Garner replied: What would I give. Little did she know I happened to be in New York, Garner said in the video. And, for our whole friendship, I pretty much do anything she says. Jennifer Garners Life Career Though Years Jennifer Garner became a household name thanks to her starring role on Alias. In the two decades since, shes played a variety of unforgettable parts in beloved projects. Even in the early days of her career, Garner had a big vision for what Alias could become. I hope this show is included with all of [] In the next clip, the 13 Going on 30 alum showed a screenshot of the pairs text conversation, where she sent Witherspoon a picture of her feet on top of the Radio City Music Hall doormat. For you, Garner wrote. Wait!!! What??? Am I psychic??? Witherspoon replied in a series of text messages, to which Garner said, Nope. You manifested it. Courtesy of Jennifer Garner/Instagram The following clip showed the Rockettes assembled in a single line, with each dancer moving to the side to unveil Garner, who stood in the back and strutted alongside them. Garner was all smiles as she joined the Rockettes in their famous kickline. To close the video, the Rockettes shouted Merry Christmas, Reese! as they waved at the camera. Heres to twenty years of yes maam, with my buddy @reesewitherspoon. Thank you, @therockettes for playing alongyou are incredible! Garner captioned her post. Reese Witherspoon Through the Years - 030 What, like its hard? Reese Witherspoon has had quite the evolution throughout her career as an actress, producer and businesswoman. The southern belle made a splash with her debut film, 1991s The Man in the Moon, at the ripe age of 14. While she briefly put her acting aspirations on hold following her high [] Witherspoon, for her part, gushed about her pals sweet gesture, taking to her Instagram Story to write that Garner made her whole holiday season. Ummm. This might be the greatest gift Ive ever received from this glorious, joy-seeking / dance-loving woman! Jen, you made my whole holiday season Witherspoon captioned her own Instagram post on Saturday, alongside the video. Courtesy of Reese Witherspoon/Instagram The Rockettes also joined in on the fun, posting Garners video to their Instagram Story on Saturday and wrote, Wed love to dance with you too @reesewitherspoon! While the pair recently collaborated on the AppleTV+ mystery series The Last Thing He Told Me, which starred Garner and was executive produced by Witherspoon, their friendship runs even deeper. In October, Garner recalled the support she received from her pal during a very public, very hard moment. BFF Goals! Jamie Lee Curtis Makes Michelle Yeohs Golden Globes Win Into Shirt Check out photos of Hollywood's hottest famous pals She was right there and the way I needed to get through it was dance cardio, Garner shared during a panel discussion at Hello Sunshines inaugural Shine Away Event. And I danced cardiod so hard, we broke her foot, but she kept going! Just keep dancing, ladies, Witherspoon joked. Just keep dancing. A man putting an engagement ring on a woman. Winter will be here soon, and that means peak wedding season is almost over. But wedding planners say theyre already planning for another busy year in 2024, so it got us thinking, why do we wear wedding rings? "If you like it, then you shoulda put a ring on it." We all know the words of Beyonce. But where did this tradition come from? Contrary to what your newly engaged friend might want you to think, they did not invent the wedding ring. Like a lot of old traditions, the exact history of wedding rings is murky. But one belief dates back to ancient Egypt. Egyptian pharaohs believed rings symbolized eternity because of their circular shape, with no beginning and no end. Egyptians also believed in the vena amoris, or vein of love. They thought there was a vein in the fourth finger on the left hand connected directly to the heart. Thats why its still common to wear a wedding ring on that finger. When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, the Greeks adopted the tradition of gifting a ring to show devotion. The tradition carried on when the Romans conquered the Greeks. SEE MORE: How people are cutting wedding costs amid economic fluctuations Some accounts say the Romans viewed the ring as a symbol of a husbands ownership over his bride as opposed to a sign of love. As time went on, the types of rings and motifs shifted. Rings became more popular in the West during World War II, when men going off to fight gave them to their wives-to-be as a promise to wed when they returned. During this time, more men started wearing rings, too. Men wore them while deployed. to remind them of their spouse back home. For many years, rings had different types of stones. In 1947, the diamond company Da Beers helped popularize a diamond ring thanks to its famous slogan, "A diamond is forever." The marketing strategy popularized diamond rings for wedding and engagement bands. According to a survey from The Knot, 86% of engagement rings in the U.S. include a diamond center stone today, and the average ring costs $6,000. We think that might be just a little more than the ancient Egyptians planned on spending. Sheynnis Palacios after winning the 2023 Miss Universe pageant. Miss Palacios was the first Nicaraguan to win the contest - Marvin Recinos / AFP via Getty The winner of the Miss Universe beauty pageant has been accused of being embroiled in an alleged foreign-backed plot to overturn the countrys authoritarian government. Sheynnis Palacios became the first Nicaraguan to win the Miss Universe competition last month, having won a national contest earlier this year. At first, president Daniel Ortega called Miss Palacioss victory a moment of legitimate joy and pride. But the celebrations turned sour after photos of the 23-year-old at mass anti-government protests in 2018 went viral on social media. Authorities have now charged Karen Celebertti, the director of the countrys national beauty pageant, with engineering a foreign-backed plot over Miss Palacioss show of support for the pro-democracy demonstrations. Karen Celebertti, director of Nicaragua's beauty pageant, is wanted by police on conspiracy charges Ms Celebertti is wanted by police on conspiracy charges after allegedly rigging the competition and other beauty events to ensure anti-government contestants won. Government forces killed more than 300 people five years ago as they crushed three-month-long demonstrations against Mr Ortegas administration, which authorities blamed on foreign interference. Officials have since outlawed protests, but after Ms Palacioss win in November, many defied the ban and took to the streets to celebrate. Celebrations outside the home of Miss Palacios after she won Miss Universe 2023 - the blue and white flag is a symbol of protest Some carried the national blue and white flag, a symbol of protest and a jailable offence, instead of Mr Ortegas red and black Sandinista banner. Miss Palcios wore a white dress and blue cape during the Miss Universe ceremony, which some took to be a reference to the banned flag. In these days of a new victory, we are seeing the evil, terrorist commentators making a clumsy and insulting attempt to turn what should be a beautiful and well-deserved moment of pride into destructive coup-mongering, said Mr Ortegas wife, Rosario Murillod, who is also vice president. President Daniel Ortega, alongside Rosario Murillo, his wife who is also vice-president, in the capital of Managua - AFP via Getty Images Meanwhile, Ms Celebertti was banned from entering Nicaragua when she flew home after the Miss Universe pageant on Nov 23. She is reported to be in Mexico. Her husband and son have been detained on conspiracy charges dating back five years after being arrested at their home in the capital, Managua. Traps and political ambushes financed by foreign agents Police said Ms Celebertti had used spaces supposedly dedicated to promoting innocent beauty pageants, in a conspiracy orchestrated to convert the contests into traps and political ambushes financed by foreign agents. The former beauty queen, who has run the Miss Nicaragua contest since 2001, was also charged with money laundering and spreading fake news. Police claimed she had actively participated in organising anti-government protests, including those which gripped the Central American nation in 2018. They said she had remained in contact with the traitors since. There has been no public response from Ms Celebertti, her husband and son to the charges levelled against them. Ms Palacios, who won the Miss Nicaragua contest in August to earn the right to compete in Miss Universe, was not named in the police statement. Sheynnis Palacios, winner of the Miss Universe 2023 contest, has not been named in any police statements - Hector Vivas / Getty She has moved to New York for her Miss Universe duties and has not made any public comments about Nicaraguan politics. But she has emphasised her Catholic faith at a time when Mr Ortega has cut off diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Her old Facebook page, which showed photos of her at the protests, has been taken down. Mr Ortega, a 78-year-old former Leftist revolutionary hero, has jailed opposition leaders, imprisoned Catholic clergy and cracked down on media freedoms during his presidency. He won a fourth consecutive term in office in January last year, in a vote the United States branded a pantomime election. 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. Four teenagers were injured when a 14-year-old driver lost control of an SUV, causing it to slide off a cliff in North Dakota, according to officials. The Ford Escape was traveling at a high rate of speed just north of Mandan at 8:22 p.m. on Dec. 1, according to a news release from the North Dakota Highway Patrol. Officials said the driver went over railroad tracks and lost control of the SUV. The vehicle then went through a barbed wire fence and slid about 50 feet down a cliff, toward the Missouri River, highway patrol said. The SUV overturned on the way down, before coming to a rest on the shoreline, officials said. Four teenagers were inside the vehicle, a 15-year-old, two 16-year-olds and the 14-year-old driver. None were wearing a seat belt, officials said. One 16-year-old had to be extricated from the vehicle and was taken to a hospital, the release said. The other teens were able to walk up the stairway, and two were taken to a hospital. The other teen was released to a parent. Mandan is about 6 miles northwest of Bismarck. Hurt kids show up at Texas home, leading cops to site of fatal ATV crash, officials say Climber slides 30 feet down mountainside and hits head in Colorado, rescuers say Paraglider leaps off top of mountain and crashes into icy slope, Wyoming rescuers say Mark Ruffalo has revealed he wore pads and corsets underneath his costume for his forthcoming role as Duncan Wedderburn in Yorgos Lanthimos dark comic fantasy Poor Things. Speaking to Robert Downey Jr as part of Variety s Actors on Actors series, Ruffalo said: Do you know I had an ass pad in? My legs were like four inches bigger... [Lanthimos] really wanted the silhouette. Ruffalo went on to explain that the Greek filmmaker wanted his character to resemble a bird. I had this whole built-out chest piece that never made it because it was just too much, he said. But the big ass pads, the leg pads, the thigh pads, the calf pads, those were all playing. So when you look at that and youre like, Wow, he looks great now you know, I was just wearing what the Avengers wear, but underneath my clothes. The pair also discussed Ruffalos discomfort shooting the films nude scenes. I was like, Do I have to? All I can hear is, Nobody wants to see your old ass anymore. Maybe you shouldnt be doing movies like that anymore, Ruffalo recalled. I mean, its my least favorite part of it, but I also saw it as an extension of the physical comedy that we were already finding. So it was just another way to tell the story. Willem Dafoe and Emma Stone in Poor Things (Searchlight Pictures) Poor Things tells the story of a dead woman, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), who is brought back to life by a mad scientist who embeds her unborn babys brain in her head. In a four-star review for The Independent from Venice Film Festival, Geoffrey Macnab wrote: Bella elopes with someone else, however: a seductive cad played by Mark Ruffalo, in fine comic form. Their travels take them to Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris, Bella using the journey to embark on a search for sex and adventure. Each new city is created in fantastical style, with Lanthimos rekindling memories of the work of Wes Anderson, or old Georges Melies silent films at their most artificial. He concluded: It will be intriguing to see whether Poor Things becomes an Oscar contender. It may prove too subversive and oddball for more mainstream tastes, but its an exquisitely made film. As for Stone? She gives a wildly inventive star turn. Poor Things is scheduled to be released in the United States on 8 December, and in the United Kingdom on 12 January 2024. Israeli ground forces brought their pursuit of Hamas militants into southern Gaza on Monday, as civilians already unnerved by repeated airstrikes were left with diminishing options for finding safety. Tanks, armored vehicles and troops were posted just outside the southern city of Khan Younis, whose outskirts were subjected to heavy bombardment earlier in the day. Israel had told Palestinians in Khan Younis, Gazas second-largest city, to head south toward the border town of Rafah to avoid getting caught in the anticipated combat. That led to massive displacement, in many cases of the same people who had fled the battered north, further deteriorating the enclaves humanitarian crisis. The evacuation area represented about one-fifth of Khan Younis, whose pre-war population of 117,000 has swelled during the conflict. "For people ordered to evacuate, there is nowhere safe to go and very little to survive on," U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said. Thomas White, director of the U.N. agency for Palestinian aid known as UNRWA, described roads heading south jammed with people carrying what little they have in cars and carts pulled by donkeys. Even in Rafah where people are being forced to flee the sound of airstrikes punctuates the day, White said in a post on the X platform. People are pleading for advice on where to find safety. We have nothing to tell them. The Israeli military said its aircraft struck about 200 Hamas targets in Gaza overnight, and ground troops were operating in parallel. Reuters reported an airstrike in Rafah left a crater the size of a basketball court, killing a toddler. We were asleep and safe, said Salah al-Arja, one of the homeowners whose house was destroyed. They tell you it is a safe area, but there is no safe area in all of the Gaza Strip. Bombing resumes: Israel expands ground offensive in Gaza Developments: Phone and internet service was again down across Gaza on Monday evening, Palestinian telecom provider PalTel reported, keeping residents largely incommunicado from the outside world. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet Tuesday with families of hostages held in Gaza, who are seeking more information about efforts to free their loved ones after negotiations for further releases of captives broke down. Netanyahu's corruption trial, which began in 2020 and was put on hold after the Oct. 7 attacks, resumed Monday. He faces charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. CNN said at least nine family members of its producer Ibrahim Dahman were killed by an Israeli airstrike on his aunts northern Gaza house Sunday. Dahman, 36, had evacuated his young family to Egypt but his childhood home in Gaza City was destroyed by another strike the same day. Thousands of Israelis attended the funeral for Col. Asaf Hamami, 41, the commander of the Gaza Divisions Southern Brigade, even though his remains are being held by Hamas in Gaza. Hamami was killed during the Oct. 7 Hamas assault on Israel. Palestinians displaced by the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip gather at a tent camp in Rafah, southern Gaza strip, on Dec. 4, 2023. US blames Hamas for end of cease-fire The White House said again Monday that a weeklong cease-fire between Israel and Hamas ended because the Palestinian militant group failed to deliver hostages who should have been released. Hamas is refusing to release civilian women who should have been part of the agreement, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said. And it is that refusal by Hamas that has caused the end of the hostage agreement, and therefore the end of the pause in hostilities. Israel resumed its assault on the Gaza Strip on Friday after the release of more than 100 hostages held by Hamas, in exchange for Israel freeing 240 prisoners. Israel said Hamas "violated" the cease-fire and fired toward Israel. Hamas officials blamed the Israelis, saying they turned down offers to release elderly captives as well as the bodies of hostages. Michael Collins UN hears testimony of Hamas rapes during Oct. 7 attacks Evidence aimed at proving Hamas committed crimes of sexual violence during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel was presented at a U.N. meeting hosted Monday by the Israeli ambassador to the global body. Gilad Erdan said the U.N. and its organizations "completely ignored for almost 60 days and still cast doubt" on the assaults. The evidence includes reports from first responders at the sites where militants struck and from military reservists who worked to identify the bodies of those killed, Erdan said. Hamas issued a statement denying its militants committed sexual assaults, dismissing the claims as an effort to distort the Palestinian resistance and the "humane and moral dealings with detainees" militants have shown. "The world has to decide who to believe," said Sheryl Sandberg, former Meta CEO and founder of the nonprofit group Lean In. "Do we believe the Hamas spokesperson who said rape is forbidden, therefore it couldn't possibly have happened on Oct. 7? Or do we believe the women whose bodies tell us how they spent the last minutes of their lives?" Sandberg told the gathering that "rape should never be used as an act of war" and that "silence is complicity." U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said last week that the reports of sexual assault "must be vigorously investigated." Gaza Health Ministry death tally on par with Israel's The Israeli military tacitly confirmed Monday the Gaza Health Ministry's death tally, which has been questioned by many including President Joe Biden, by saying at least 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza have died during the war. The ministry's updated figure Monday was 15,899, not far from the estimate by Israel, which says 5,000 of the fatalities involved Hamas militants. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths. Its spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said women and children account for 70% of those killed. Though the ministry is under Hamas rule, its death tolls from previous wars have stood up to scrutiny, and humanitarian agencies regard them as reliable. But as the fatality count in Gaza rose to alarming levels, the numbers were questioned by Israeli officials and even Biden, who on Oct. 25 said, "I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using. Did Hamas use advance knowledge of attack to get rich in stock market? Hamas may have profited from stock deals that resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for traders who short-sold some Israeli issues in advance of Hamas's brutal Oct. 7 attack. "Trading on Terror?" a study led by two American researchers, says the traders may have known the attack was coming and would drive some Israeli stocks sharply lower. The report, published in the SSRN journal by Robert Jackson Jr. from New York University and Joshua Mitts of Columbia, does not mention Hamas but found that some traders with advance knowledge may have made hundreds of millions of dollars. "Our findings suggest that traders informed about the coming attacks profited from these tragic events," the study says. "We do identify a sharp and unusual increase, just before the attacks, in trading in risky short-dated options on these companies." Shorting a stock involves investing with the expectation a stock will decline in value. The Israel Securities Authority told Reuters the issue "is known to the authority and is under investigation by all the relevant parties." Pentagon unsure whether USS Carney was target of attacks The USS Carney responded to attacks against commercial ships and shot down three drones over the Red Sea on Sunday, but the warship may not have been a target of the hostilities, the Pentagon says. The Carney was on patrol in the Red Sea when it responded to distress calls, the Pentagon said in a statement issued late Sunday. The warship detected an anti-ship ballistic missile attack fired from Houthi controlled areas of Yemen toward Unity Explorer, a Bahamas-flagged, U.K.-owned and operated bulk cargo ship crewed by sailors from two nations. The Carney shot down a drone launched from Houthi controlled areas in Yemen that appeared headed toward the warship "although its specific target is not clear,'' the Pentagon said. "We cannot assess at this time whether the Carney was a target of the UAVs." The incident comes after Israel resumed bombardment of the Gaza Strip following a weeklong truce with Hamas, whose vicious Oct. 7 border attack on Israeli communities sparked the war. Israeli forces, which had been pounding northern Gaza, are now intensifying their efforts in southern Gaza as well. "We are determined to continue to fight, dismantle Hamas, and bring all the hostages home," said Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari. There was no damage or injuries reported on the Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. The Pentagon initially described the incident as an attack on the Carney before providing more details. The Houthis claimed responsibility for assaults on commercial ships they believed were linked to Israel but made no mention of the U.S. warship. Contributing: The Associated Press This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Israel Hamas war live updates: Ground forces chase Hamas in south Gaza Saraneka Martin is checked by volunteer medics after she was shot in the abdomen and back with less-lethal rounds while protesting at Austin police headquarters on May 30, 2020. Prosecutors in Texas are planning a sweeping dismissal of nearly every indictment against Austin police officers for their uses of force during the May 2020 social justice protests. The development marks a striking reversal for Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza, who pursued the cases launched nearly two years ago. The decision to drop the charges comes with a request by Garza and Austin Mayor Kirk Watson for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the police departments practices concerning use of force. A letter sent to the justice department seeks a "pattern and practice" investigation focused on the protest response. It is not clear whether federal officials will accept the invitation, expected to be sent this week. The dismissal of cases against 17 of 21 officers and to seek the federal inquiry marks a shift in approach by Garza, whose decision to go forward with charges drew backlash from police supporters and praise from law enforcement reformers and those injured by police. It helped define Garzas first term in office, which started in 2021, and dramatically intensified polarization between prosecutors and police. Months after the protests, Garza, a Democrat, resoundingly won a bid to unseat incumbent Margaret Moore on a platform of police accountability, promising to seek indictments against officers who abuse their positions. The responsibility of our office is to seek just outcomes, Garza told the Austin American-Statesman, part of the USA TODAY Network, in a one-on-one interview. During the two-year investigation into the Austin Police Department and the city of Austin and their conduct during the 2020 protest, it became clear that systemic change is really necessary to make sure this never happens again in our community, and the best way to achieve that outcome, to achieve systemic change, is through an investigation by the Department of Justice. In the three years since the protests, the department has churned through two police chiefs, banned as a crowd control method injurious weapons used during the protests and paid $20 million in civil settlements to injured protesters. It is clear to me there is still a ways to go, Garza said. This has been a difficult chapter for Austin. I look forward to turning the page," Watson said in a statement. "These announcements will allow police officers, whose lives were upended by the indictments, to return to their services to our community. And the request for a targeted third-party performance review is meant to enhance transparency for our community and inform future actions as we continue our focus on building respect and trust for our police, Watson continued. The names of officers whose cases will go forward were not immediately available Monday. Garza said those cases had aggravating circumstances, such as conduct that was flagged by other officers as inappropriate, that make clear a just outcome requires continued prosecution and the opportunity for our community to weigh in. The other officers, most of whom have been in non-patrol assignments, will be allowed to return to the street. The decision comes three weeks after a jury deadlocked in another high-profile case against an Austin police officer, with eight voting to acquit and four voting to convict Officer Christopher Taylor in the April 2020 shooting death of Michael Ramos. During his interview with the Statesman, Garza confirmed publicly for the first time that he will absolutely take Taylor to trial again. Austins social justice movement and use of force charges The size and intensity of the social justice protests largely caught the Austin Police Department unprepared, and officers turned to what they describe as less lethal shotguns to fire projectiles onto the crowd. Police leaders, including former Chief Brian Manley, said at the time that in some instances, protestors hurled rocks, frozen water bottles and other objects at police, prompting officers to use force against them. But many injured, Garza said, showed no aggression toward officers. The police projectiles seriously hurt several protesters, who have said they were innocent bystanders, leaving some with permanent wounds and brain injuries. More: 19 Austin police officers charged for handling of 2020 George Floyd protests, union president says Garza said in the Statesman interview that prolific use of the weapons showed that those actions were part of a culture within the Austin Police Department. It is really important that we take this opportunity to change that culture, he said. It is a culture where it was permissible to fire a deadly weapon over 700 times into crowds of unarmed people. After 13 months in office, Garza obtained the indictments of 19 officers on charges that include aggravated assault by a public servant and deadly conduct, a move that sparked national headlines. Prosecutors brought four additional charges in May 2022 and in June. The indictments pitted law enforcement some of whom banded together with social media profile pictures to 19 Strong against Garza, painting him as anti-police and assailing the indictments as political grandstanding. The matter also saw the recusal of longtime state District Judge Julie Kocurek from four police cases assigned to her court after Garzas office filed court documents alleging Kocurek expressed concern to a prosecutor that the indictments were the consequence of a politically motivated campaign on the part of Jose Garza. More recently, two of the cases have unraveled. In February, Garza dropped charges against Nicholas Gebhart, charged with seriously injuring protester Brad Ayala. Garza said in a statement that new evidence and information significantly complicated the ability to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, and prosecutors also said Ayala no longer wanted the office to pursue the case. In October, prosecutors also dropped a case against Rolan Rast but did not provide a reason. Then-Police Chief Brian Manley kneels for 8 minutes, 46 seconds in memory of George Floyd at the police headquarters on June 6, 2020. Several Austin police officers and protesters kneeled while other protesters called the event a hollow gesture and a photo op. Use of force cases are hard to convict In recent weeks, as possible trial dates approached, attorneys representing some of the officers told the Statesman that they believe prosecutors would have difficulty obtaining convictions against officers. Ken Ervin, who represents multiple officers, said he believes jurors will understand that officers used the projectiles in compliance with training and were doing as directed by the highest levels of the department, who were on the scene of the protests. More: Austin settles with another injured protester bringing payout to $18.9 million He also said that based on evidence he has reviewed, ballistics experts in some instances said they had difficulty conclusively determining that a projectile that struck a protester came from a specific officer. "That is part of the problem here is that these indictments came well before the investigation was complete, Ervin said. Defense attorney Ken Ervin makes a closing argument in the murder trial of Austin police officer Christopher Taylor at the Blackwell-Thurman Criminal Justice Center on Nov. 7. The jury couldn't agree on a verdict, and Taylor will be retried, District Attorney Jose Garza says. Steve Toland, who represented Rast and one other officer, said he believes volumes of video will show that officers displayed restraint when using force on protesters and that jurors will empathize with the difficult circumstance. The evidence is pretty overwhelming that some people were in the middle of rioting and illegal behavior," he said. Garza said he believes prosecutors would have prevailed at trial. People help a man after he was shot with a rubber bullet under Interstate 35 during a protest over the police killing of George Floyd on May 30, 2020. The law is quite clear about when law enforcement may use deadly force, and I think the facts are quite clear that the circumstances under which it was used in the protests were unlawful, Garza said. Politically, Garzas decision comes the week before a deadline for an opponent to file to run against him in the March primary. He currently has no opponent. There is no timeline for when the justice department will respond to the investigation request. The last time the justice department investigated Austin police was in 2007 at the request of the Texas Civil Rights Project and the Austin NAACP. Federal officials issued multiple recommendations about how officers report force encounters and the implementation of an early warning system to identify potentially troubled officers, but found before closing the investigation in 2011 "no reasonable cause to believe that APD has engaged in a pattern or practice that violated the Constitution or laws of the United States. This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: DA to drop charges against Austin police officers in 2020 protests A silver Torah crown and finials are among the numerous historical Jewish religious and cultural artifacts from the mid to late 18th and early 19th centuries on display during a media preview, Nov. 30, 2023, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, permanent Judaica exhibit. Kirk Sides/Staff photographer Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, curator, Christine Gervais, and consultant Beth Schneider, provide details of the numerous mid to late 18th and early 19th century Jewish religious and cultural artifacts on display in the new permanent Judaica exhibit at the Albert and Herzstein Gallery for Judaica in Houston. Kirk Sides/Staff photographer Historical Jewish religious and cultural artifacts from the mid to late 18th and early 19th centuries are on display during a media preview, Nov. 30, 2023, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, permanent Judaica exhibit. Kirk Sides/Staff photographer A silver, silver-gilt and paste stone Torah crown is one of numerous historical Jewish religious and cultural artifacts from the mid to late 18th and early 19th centuries on display during a media preview, Nov. 30, 2023, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, permanent Judaica exhibit. Kirk Sides/Staff photographer Historical Jewish religious and cultural artifacts from the mid to late 18th and early 19th centuries are on display during a media preview, Nov. 30, 2023, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, permanent Judaica exhibit. Kirk Sides/Staff photographer An ornate Hanukkah lamp is among the numerous historical Jewish religious and cultural artifacts from the mid to late 18th and early 19th centuries on display during a media preview, Nov. 30, 2023, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, permanent Judaica exhibit. Kirk Sides/Staff photographer A cloth Torah binder is among the numerous historical Jewish religious and cultural artifacts from the mid to late 18th and early 19th centuries on display during a media preview, Nov. 30, 2023, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, permanent Judaica exhibit. Kirk Sides/Staff photographer The journey to a permanent collection of artworks made for Jewish communities at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston began in 2018, with a prayer book. "The Montefiore Mainz Mahzor" (circa 1310-20), a rare, illuminated Jewish manuscript, became MFAH's second piece of Judaica amid the museum's roughly 60,000 works and objects. "The big question was, 'Why don't we have more?'" said MFAH Director Gary Tinterow on Thursday. The answer, the Albert and Ethel Herzstein Gallery for Judaica, opened Dec. 3 inside the Caroline Wiess Law Building. Gray and intimate, the jewel box completes a suite of galleries dedicated to Houston's diverse communities as part of MFAH's World Faith Initiative. Adjacent spaces are devoted to art from Korea, Japan, India, China and Islamic worlds. Advertisement Article continues below this ad "The World Faith Initiative brings recognition and consciousness to the religious qualities," Tinterow said. "Their symbolic, religious or spiritual function are in concert with their beauty, creation and fabrication." Last summer, "Beauty and Ritual: Judaica from the Jewish Museum" introduced Houston audiences to Judaica and the ongoing partnership between the two fine art institutions. There are two dozen works on view in the Herzstein Gallery, including several loans from the Jewish Museum in New York. Over the past three years, MFAH has amassed some 30 objects; some were acquired at auctions. Director of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gary Tinterow, left, curator, Christine Gervais and consultant, Beth Schneider, provide details of the new permanent Judaica exhibition at the Albert and Herzstein Gallery for Judaica in Houston. Kirk Sides/Staff photographer Unlike Christian or Muslim art, Judaica is extremely rare, Tinterow explained. Jewish communities have faced frequent round of oppression, forced migration and the Holocaust. Significant volumes of art were lost. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Albert and Ethel Herzstein Gallery for Judaica When: Now exhibiting Where: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Audrey Jones Beck Building, 5601 Main Details: All access tickets, $20 and up; mfah.org, 713-639-7300 This posed another question for Christine Gervais, the Fredricka Crain director of Rienzi and MFAH decorative arts curator: "Where have these communities landed as they moved?" The Herzstein Gallery answers that, too. A counterclockwise tour begins with a video showcasing synagogues from around the world. "People stand transfixed for the full nine minutes," Gervais said. Because Jewish artists were forbidden to join guilds across Europe, many works are attributed to Christian artisans. "Torah Crown" (mid-18th century), crafted in Venice, draws attention to the year 1509, when Jews were first allowed to settle within the Italian city. In 1516, a Venetian senate mandated they be sequestered to a former foundry turned ghetto. Advertisement Article continues below this ad "We don't know if a Jew worked on this (piece) because they weren't allowed in silver-making workshops," said Beth Schneider, consultant and former MFAH education director. Objects along the far left wall are grouped geographically. "Synagogue Lamp" (1891) hangs near the far right corner. The silver-and-colored stones metalwork by Dublin firm John Smyth & Sons bears a Hebrew dedication around its exterior to commemorate a temple forced to close a century prior, in 1792. "This object is letting us know how people lived," Gervais said. An illuminated manuscript on parchment is among the numerous historical Jewish religious and cultural artifacts from the mid to late 18th and early 19th centuries on display during a media preview, Nov. 30, 2023, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, permanent Judaica exhibit. Kirk Sides/Staff photographer The far right wall highlights rituals surrounding Jewish holidays such as Hanukkah and Passover. It's also where visitors will find "The Montefiore Mainz Mahzor." Advertisement Article continues below this ad Ann Herford was a traveling nurse from Michigan who was found dead after she disappeared while on a hike in California more than two weeks ago. For days, hundreds of California rescuers held out hope of finding a Michigan woman who had disappeared while hiking alone through mountainous terrain in the central Sierra Nevada Mountains. Unfortunately she was found dead, officials announced. Unmanned drones whizzed through the skies providing support from above, while on the ground, search teams with canines and all-terrain vehicles scoured the vast wilderness for any sign of 66-year-old Ann Herford. But a week after officials announced they had reined in their search efforts and nearly two weeks after Herford first went missing rescue teams found the body of the traveling nurse. Around 9 a.m. local time on Thursday, Herford was found dead on a steep hillside beneath heavy tree canopy and dense foliage, according to the Calaveras County Sheriff's Office, which led the multi-agency rescue operation. The area is north of where Herford had parked her vehicle on Nov. 12 to embark on a solo hike of the Arnold Rim Trail, located about 100 miles southeast of Sacramento. Tragedy in Washington State: 5 dead after apparent murder-suicide at home in Vancouver Herford expressed interest in hiking, but lacked survival skills A member of the Calaveras County Sheriff's Office Search and Rescue looks out over the vast wilderness near the town of Arnold during the search for Ann Herford. The traveling nurse from Michigan was reported missing Nov. 14 after she didn't show up to work. Herford was first reported missing Nov. 14 after she failed to show up for work in Sonora, California, the Calaveras County Sheriff's Office said. A friend of the nurse told law enforcement that Herford, who had been staying alone at a Sonora hotel, had expressed interest in hiking when the two had been out to breakfast three days earlier. A witness later recalled seeing Herford a day after the breakfast on Nov. 12 near a trailhead of the Arnold Rim Trail, a mid-elevation trail for hikers, mountain bikers and equestrians. Authorities found Herford's car on Nov. 15, according to the sheriff's office. While family members told law enforcement that Herford enjoyed hiking, they said she lacked wilderness survival skills and never hiked more than a couple of miles at a time, the sheriff's office said. When the search first began, the sheriff's office urged residents of the nearby Lakemont subdivision to check their property and outbuildings for any sign of the woman. Several agencies, including Army, part of 'extensive' search The Calaveras County Sheriff's Office Search and Rescue team found the body of Ann Herford on Thursday a little over two weeks after the Michigan nurse disappeared while hiking in California. In the days that followed, hundreds of searchers with more than a dozen agencies fanned out across the wilderness to locate Herford, the sheriff's office said. The Air National Guard and the United States Army were among those that provided air support to those on the ground. The terrain was so perilous as to warrant specialized high angle rope teams, off-road vehicles, dive teams with remote-operated vehicles and canine search teams, the sheriff's office said. Investigators also conducted a forensic examination of Herford's vehicle and her computer. But by Wednesday, Nov. 22, a week after rescue operations began, the sheriff's office announced it was reining in the search. By that time, the "extensive" seven-day search included contributions from 18 agencies and a total of 478 searchers, the sheriff's office said. "The search operation spanned a challenging and mountainous 12 square-mile area, in which search teams created over 2,475 linear miles of search tracks," the agency said in a Nov. 22 post on Facebook. Stabbing in New York: 'Madman' fatally stabs 4 family members, injures 2 officers in Queens Foul play not suspected in Herford's death While limited in scope, the search continued for the next week through a dense forest of tall trees and mountainous terrain until Herford's body was found. The search's end came at "an extremely steep and dense section" of the wilderness located north of San Antonio Creek and south of Forest Road, the sheriff's office said. The area, which was not part of the Arnold Rim Trail, was where Herford was found dead. The California Highway Patrol was called in to airlift the womans body from the area, which was not easily accessible on foot, the sheriff's office said. It was not immediately clear how Herford died, but authorities said they do not suspect foul play was a factor. Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Traveling Michigan nurse who disappeared on California hike found dead WASHINGTON Members of the Supreme Court seemed conflicted on Monday over whether to allow the bankruptcy reorganization of opioid maker Purdue Pharma, which includes a provision that protects the Sackler family from liability from future lawsuits. During the oral argument, justices expressed skepticism that a bankruptcy court had legal authority to release the Sacklers from potential legal claims. But some justices also seemed reluctant to blow up the multibillion dollar deal that will provide immediate relief to opioid victims. It is no ordinary bankruptcy case, touching as it does upon the nationwide harm caused by the opioid crisis and the role that Sackler-owned Purdue played in creating it. Ahead of the argument, some opponents of the deal held a rally outside the court, with protesters chanting: "Sackler money, blood money." As part of the proposed deal, which the Supreme Court put on hold in August, the Sackler family had agreed to pay around $6 billion that could be used to settle opioid-related claims, but only in return for a complete release from any liability in future cases. The overall settlement, including assets held by Purdue, is likely to be worth significantly more, with the reorganized company set to dedicate itself to tackling the impact of opioid abuse. No Sackler family member has had any involvement in the company since 2019. Purdue made billions from OxyContin, a widely available painkiller that fueled the opioid epidemic. The companys tactics in aggressively marketing the drug came under increasing scrutiny as thousands of people died from opioid overdoses in recent years. The company sought bankruptcy protection, but the Sackler family members did not. Instead, they negotiated a separate deal with Purdue and plaintiffs in pending lawsuits that would allow the company to reinvent itself to address the opioid crisis. The Biden administration objects to the release of additional claims against the Sacklers, saying it would be unfair to potential future plaintiffs. During oral argument, Justice Neil Gorsuch was most outspoken in raising what he called "serious" constitutional questions about the deal, saying that plaintiffs who did not sign on to it would have their rights, including their right to due process, violated. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh pointed out that "bankruptcy courts for 30 years have been approving plans like this." Justice Elena Kagan's comments during the argument reflected the unease on the bench. At one point, she wondered why the federal government should be able to "blow up the deal" despite the fact that thousands of plaintiffs "who think the Sacklers are pretty much the worst people on earth" have said they support it. But later on, Kagan also noted that normally in bankruptcy cases, those involved have to make all their assets available. The Sacklers, she said, were able to join the settlement "without putting ... anything near their entire pot of assets on the table." She added that it would be "an extraordinary thing" if the court allowed the family to "basically subvert" the bankruptcy process. Pratik Shah, a lawyer for some of the victims, warned that if the court prevents the deal from going forward, there is no sign that another one can be negotiated. "There will be no viable path to any victim recovery," he said. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in a court filing that the settlement prevents the Sacklers from facing claims alleging damages in the trillions while keeping billions of dollars that they siphoned from Purdue. In a May decision, the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals approved the plan over the objection of William Harrington, the U.S. government trustee monitoring the bankruptcy. The Justice Departments trustee program, of which Harrington is part, is aimed at ensuring that the bankruptcy system operates as required under law. Purdue has criticized Harringtons role, noting that groups representing thousands of plaintiffs have signed on to the settlement, which could not have happened without the Sackler family contribution. At the Supreme Court, various groups representing plaintiffs are supporting Purdue, including one that includes 1,300 cities, counties and other municipalities, and another representing 60,000 individuals affected by the opioid epidemic. In one brief filed by a group representing a large array of plaintiffs, lawyers wrote that their clients have no love lost for the Sacklers but recognize that the settlement is the only means of getting billions of dollars in life-changing and live-saving funds ... that are desperately needed today. Canadian municipalities and Indigenous First Nations are among those objecting to the settlement. Purdue flourished under brothers Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, who died in 2010 and 2017, respectively. The family reaped billions and spent lavishly, including on splashy charitable projects. The family told the Supreme Court that it continues to back the settlement. In a brief filed on behalf of the relatives of Mortimer Sackler, most of whom are based overseas, lawyers warned of significant litigation costs and risks in seeking to enforce any foreign court judgments against the family if the settlement were thrown out. By Timour Azhari (Reuters) -A U.S. air strike killed five Iraqi militants near the northern city of Kirkuk as they prepared to launch explosive projectiles at U.S. forces in the country, three Iraqi security sources said, identifying them as members of an Iran-backed militia. A U.S. military official confirmed a "self-defense strike on an imminent threat" that targeted a drone staging site near Kirkuk on Sunday afternoon. A statement by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group representing several Iraqi armed factions with close ties to Tehran, said five of its members had been killed, and vowed retaliation against U.S. forces. The group had claimed several attacks against U.S. forces throughout Sunday. Earlier Sunday, the U.S. military official said U.S. and international forces were attacked with multiple rockets at the Rumalyn Landing Zone in northeastern Syria, but there were no casualties or damage to infrastructure. Iraqi armed groups have claimed more than 70 such attacks against U.S. forces since Oct. 17 over Washington's backing of Israel in its bombardment of Gaza. The attacks paused during the recent Israel-Hamas ceasefire but have since resumed. The U.S. in November launched two series of strikes in Iraq against what it said were Iran-aligned armed groups who had engaged in attacks against their forces. Those strikes killed at least 10 militants who were identified both as members of shadowy militia Kataeb Hezbollah and of Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces, an official security institution composed mainly of Shi'ite Muslim armed groups. Iraq's government condemned those strikes as escalatory and a violation of Iraqi sovereignty. The United States has 900 troops in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq on a mission it says aims to advise and assist local forces trying to prevent a resurgence of Islamic State, which in 2014 seized large swaths of both countries before being defeated. (Reporting By Timour Azhari; Editing by Sharon Singleton and Diane Craft) Sylvester Stallone's 72-step climb to stardom was celebrated Sunday to mark Philadelphia's inaugural "Rocky Day." Nearly 50 years after "Rocky" was released, the City of Brotherly Love welcomed the star and screenwriter back to commemorate the boxing film's impact. Stallone, 77, likened his early struggle as an actor and writer to his character Rocky Balboa's climb to success. "Naivete is great. You have all of these dreams and aspirations, and you havent been embittered yet when life beats ya down. I was very ambitious because there was no 'plan B.' At the time, all I had to fall back on was my butt," he told the crowd outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Sylvester Stallone returned to Philadelphia to celebrate "Rocky Day." "'Rocky' was just a perfect storm. It came along at a time when politics were changing and people were looking for more positivity, and I just happened to fall into it," the Oscar-nominated actor added. Stallone referenced the difficult climb to the art museum, an iconic moment in the "Rocky" movie, where the boxer sprints up the steps to the song "Gonna Fly Now" as part of a grueling workout. "To me, when you get up there, you feel like you can be the champion of your dreams," he told Sunday's audience. "But the real victory is never giving up and going the distance for yourself and your loved ones. Standing at the top, you are reminded that all things are possible," he said, in a video shared by 6ABC. "Keep punching!" Stallone told 6ABC the time since the film's release "has gone by in a blink." Every 'Rocky' movie, definitively ranked (including the new 'Creed III') "I haven't done enough in Philadelphia, I really haven't. I want to do more," he declared. "This 'Rocky Day' has kicked it all off and it's going to be a good time. I am going to give back to this city that has given me so much." The first official "Rocky Day" was also marked with the opening of the Rocky Shop located outside of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, between the Rocky Steps and the Rocky Statue which houses the film franchise's only official merchandise. "Rocky" became a franchise with five follow-up films through 2006 and birthed the Michael B. Jorden-led "Creed" spinoff, which has three movies. 'Sly': The best revelations from Netflix's new Sylvester Stallone documentary This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Sylvester Stallone in Philly to celebrate inaugural 'Rocky Day' A Texas groom whose multimillion-dollar Paris wedding recently went viral is facing aggravated assault charges after being accused of shooting at three police officers earlier in the year, according to court documents. Jacob LaGrone, 29, has been charged with three counts of aggravated assault against a public servant, a felony offense that carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, according to court documents obtained by NBC Dallas-Fort Worth. He is accused of threatening three police officers by firing a gun at them in March. An indictment says LaGrone "did intentionally or knowingly threaten" the officers with "bodily injury." It does not provide further details about the encounter. In a statement, Westworth Village said three officers one from Westworth Village and two from Westover Hills were responding to "multiple disturbance calls" at the same address on March 14 when they "were fired upon." LaGrone appeared in Tarrant County District Court in Fort Worth, Texas, Thursday and, according to court documents, has been offered a plea deal of 25 years in prison. An attorney for LaGrone, Rhett Parham, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. His new wife, car dealership heiress Madelaine Brockway, 26, was not in court. She could not be reached for comment. Videos of LaGrone and Brockway's Nov. 18 wedding racked up millions of views on social media for its lavish displays, including a welcome dinner at one of the most famous opera houses in the world, a performance by Maroon 5, and an overnight stay at the Palace of Versailles. Brockway walked down the aisle at luxury Parisian wedding venue Chateau de Villete in a custom Dior haute couture dress, according to posts by wedding planners Lake Como Weddings and HMR Designs, which labeled it the "wedding of the century." Brockway is the daughter of Robert Bob Brockway, the chairman and CEO of car dealership Bill Ussery Motors. The company was started in South Florida by Bob Brockways grandfather. Before her wedding, Brockway hosted a four-day bachelorette party at luxury Utah desert resort Amangiri. According to videos posted to Instagram by wedding planner Rachel Birthisle, each night had a different theme, and culminated in a Marie Antoinette-themed dinner party on Halloween. Brockway dressed as the former Queen of France for the event. In the days before the wedding, the bride also invited her guests to make custom tweed pouches during a private party at Chanels Haute Couture Headquarters, lunch at the Eiffel Tower and a dress reveal at Dior. Each part of the event was documented in since-deleted TikTok videos posted to Brockway's account. "One day before the wedding! We're here at Dior for my bridal luncheon, and tonight we have the rehearsal dinner at the Opera House!" Brockway said in an Instagram Reel posted by social media content creation company Olivia and Living, referring to Paris' Palais Garnier. The historic theater is known for its opulence. During the event, the building's balconies and staircases were adorned with hundreds of flower arrangements, dining tables were covered in haute couture custom porcelain, and each table had a display of chocolate trees, according to an Instagram video by Lake Como Weddings. A wedding registry that appears to belong to the couple, posted online by Fort Worth gift shop P.S. The Letter, features 119 designer products including a $12,500 crystal butterfly house, a $5,600 vintage vase, and a $2,950 antique silver tea set. Former President Trump is seeking to appeal a gag order barring him and his counsel from discussing his New York fraud trial judges staff to the states highest court. A lower appeals court reinstated Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engorons limited gag order last week. Trumps counsel argued in their request to eliminate the gag order that the trial judges enforcement of it casts serious doubt on his ability to serve as an impartial finder of fact overseeing the former presidents case. Trumps legal team on Monday asked permission from the intermediate appeals court to bring their argument to the Court of Appeals, New Yorks highest court. Without expedited review, Petitioners will continue to suffer irreparable injury daily, as they are silenced on matters implicating the appearance of bias and impropriety on the bench during a trial of immense stakes, wrote Clifford Robert, an attorney for Trumps adult sons and other entities that are parties in the case, in the request. Trumps attacks have primarily targeted Engorons principal law clerk. The former presidents Truth Social account in October falsely derided her as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumers (D-N.Y.) girlfriend and included personally identifying information about her. A Schumer spokesperson called the post ridiculous, absurd, and false in a statement to The Hill at the time. That post sparked Engorons limited gag order, and since then, Trump has racked up $15,000 in fines for various violations of it. The order was also expanded to include remarks by Trumps counsel about the clerk before it was appealed. The clerk sometimes plays an active role in the trial, passing notes to and whispering with the judge. Trump and his lawyers claim the clerk acts as a co-judge in the case, while Engoron has said he can run his court how he pleases. Trumps legal team requested a mistrial last month, claiming the judge and his clerk tainted the trial with bias against Trump. Engoron denied the motion, calling it utterly without merit. Engoron has repeatedly told Trump and his counsel that attacks on his staff are not appropriate and wont be tolerated under any circumstance. The gag order does not bar attacks against Engoron or New York Attorney General Letitia James, both of whom are also frequent targets of the former presidents rage. The former president railed against the Trump-hating judge when he testified in the trial last month. The trial judges wife and son have also faced online attacks from Trump, neither disallowed by the gag order. Engoron found Trump, the Trump Organization and several executives liable for fraud before the trial even began. James sued Trump and his business last year, claiming they falsely adjusted the value of the businesss assets to receive tax and insurance benefits. The trial is addressing other claims, including conspiracy, insurance fraud and falsifying business records. Engoron will ultimately decide the verdict. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. A British merchant ship was among three commercial vessels that were attacked by Iran-backed rebels in the Red Sea on Sunday, prompting an American warship to open fire in their defence. Yemeni Houthis claimed responsibility for attacks on two of the ships, which they described as being linked to Israel. Its a major escalation of a series of maritime attacks in Middle Eastern waters amid Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. Israels military claimed the vessels had no connection to the country. The Bahamas-flagged Unity Explorer, which is owned by a British company, was among those targeted in a drone-and-missile assault on Sunday. The USS Carney, a United States Navy destroyer, opened fire in self-defence and shot down three drones during the hours-long assault on Sunday, the US Central Command said in a statement. It said the US destroyer detected a ballistic missile fired at the bulk carrier from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen. The warship also shot down a drone, which was reportedly headed toward the Carney while it was responding to the distress call, although officials said it was not known whether the drone was targeting the warship. About 30 minutes later, the Unity Explorer was hit by a missile that caused minor damage to the vessel. Two other commercial ships, Panamanian-flagged bulk carriers Number 9 and Sophie II, were also struck by missiles in the attack, which began around 9.15am local time. The Number 9 reported some damage but no casualties, and the Sophie II reported no significant damage, Central Command said. Carney, an American Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, has already shot down numerous rockets fired by the Houthis towards Israel and vessels, in earlier incidents. A spokesperson for Rishi Sunak, said: Iran has long provided political and military support to Houthi militants and it bears responsibility for the actions of its proxies and partners. These waters are vital routes for global trade and incidents like these show the importance of the Royal Navy's presence in the region. Type 45 destroyer HMS Diamond was already heading to the region to bolster the Royal Navy's presence there. The US has vowed to consider all appropriate responses in the wake of the attack, specifically calling out Iran. These attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security, the Central Command said. They have jeopardised the lives of international crews representing multiple countries around the world. The Houthis claimed responsibility for two of Sunday's attacks, saying the first vessel was hit by a missile and the second by a drone while in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. The Yemeni armed forces continue to prevent Israeli ships from navigating the Red Sea (and Gulf of Aden) until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops, said Houthi military spokesperson Brigadier General Yahya Saree. The Yemeni armed forces renew their warning to all Israeli ships or those associated with Israelis that they will become a legitimate target if they violate what is stated in this statement. The crew of British-owned Unity Explorer includes Dan David Ungar, who lives in Israel, as one of its officers. The Number 9 is linked to Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (BSM), while the Sophie II is linked to Japan's Kyowa Kisen Co Ltd. The Houthis have launched a series of attacks on individual vessels in the Red Sea, with Sundays being the first to target multiple vessels at once. Last month the Houthis seized a Japanese-operated vehicle transport ship in the Red Sea off Yemen. Missiles landed near another US warship last week after it assisted a vessel linked to Israel that had briefly been seized by gunmen. Additional reporting by agencies WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The United States imposed sanctions on Monday on three former Sudanese officials for their role in undermining peace, security and stability in Sudan, the Treasury Department said. The sanctions are being imposed under a U.S. executive order that places penalties on people who destabilize Sudan and undermine democracy, the department said in a statement. It named the three as Taha Osman Ahmed al-Hussein, Salah Abdallah Mohamed Salah and Mohamed Etta Elmoula Abbas, all former Sudanese officials. "These individuals have engaged in activities that undermine the peace, security, and stability of Sudan," it said. "Elmoula and Gosh are former security officials who worked to return former regime elements to power and undermine efforts to establish civilian government, while Taha worked to facilitate the delivery of military and other materiel support from external sources to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)," it said. A war erupted on April 15 between the Sudanese army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces after weeks of friction between the two sides over a plan to integrate forces as part of a transition from military rule to civilian democracy. The U.S. statement said Washington was committed to promoting accountability for those responsible for atrocities in the Sudanese conflict. "The warring parties must comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law, and we call on them to protect civilians, hold accountable those responsible for atrocities or other abuses, allow unhindered humanitarian access, and negotiate an end to the conflict," it said. The U.S. announcement follows a vote by the U.N. Security Council on Friday to shut down a U.N. political mission in Sudan on Dec. 3 after a request from Sudan's acting foreign minister. A British-drafted resolution terminated the mandate of the mission, known as UNITAMS, and requires it to wind down over the next three months. UNITAMS was established by the 15-member council in June 2020 to provide support to Sudan during its political transition to democratic rule. A senior United Nations official said last month that violence against civilians in Sudan was "verging on pure evil," as a humanitarian crisis worsens and ethnic violence increasesin the western region of Darfur. Last week U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appointed veteran Algerian diplomat Ramtane Lamamra as his personal envoy for Sudan. The Security Council resolution encourages all parties to cooperate with the envoy. (Reporting by Caitlin Webber and David Brunnstrom; Editing by Rami Ayyub and Grant McCool) Boxy, colorful and emblazoned with the brands signature TC logo, Telfars Shopping Bag handbags have for years been prized accessories among the fashion conscious. The bags modeled after the shape of a Bloomingdales shopping bag have been worn by everyone from Beyonce and model Bella Hadid to US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A Telfar bag even served as a plot point on the ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary. But theyre also a common sight among Brooklyn creatives or as office-worker tote bags. That universal appeal is by design; the bags nickname, the Bushwick Birkin, combines the names of the once-industrial, now-hip Bushwick neighborhood in Brooklyn and the notoriously exclusive (priced up to six figures) Hermes Birkin handbags. By contrast, even the most expensive Shopping Bags often cost less than $300. Telfar Clemens founder of the eponymous brand, which has been in business since long before the Shopping Bag made it his companys motto to make designs not for you, for everyone, including, and perhaps especially, those who cant typically afford designer brands. Thats encompassed everything from lower prices than many luxury peers to unisex clothing that goes well beyond jeans and T-shirts. Unity means a lot to me, Clemens told Gay Times in a 2018 interview. My core group of friends and people I consider family come from all different backgrounds and sexual identities. But the strategy hasnt come without risk. In the world of luxury fashion, exclusivity, often through high prices or restricting access, is often a central driver of consumer demand and brand value. Clemens, however, has made a career of challenging longstanding fashion industry wisdom. Hes partnered with mainstream brands like Ugg, for example. In September, Telfar launched a live, 24-hour streaming site called TelfarTV. Telfar Clemens at the CFDA x Vogue Fashion Fund 'Americans in Paris' event, Paris Fashion Week, France in March 2018. - Hagop Kalaidjian/BFA/Shutterstock And this year, he took things a step further by letting customers decide how much to pay for his products. The strategy, his version of dynamic pricing, means that the greater the demand for an item, the less expensive it will be. In an industry known for gatekeeping, Telfar has become iconic by inviting everyone in. As the brand has reached new heights, Clemens has worked to bring along the customers who got him there. Clemens is a genius at identifying the customer, connecting with the customer and being unapologetic about it, too, said Lois Sakany, co-founder of the streetwear and culture blog Snobette. Clemens declined to sit down with CNN for an interview for this piece. Maker of the Bushwick Birkin This Telfar bag imported. Birkins? Them s**ts in storage, Beyonce sang in the final song on last years Renaissance album. That Telfar bag was imported from New York City, where Clemens was born to Liberian parents in Queens in 1985. The family moved to Liberia when he was young and returned to the United States at the outbreak of the second Liberian civil war in the late 1990s. Clemens, now 38, launched Telfar in 2005 while he was a student at New Yorks Pace University. Telfars clothing has always been unisex, something novel at the time. As a Black, queer designer making genderless clothing in the early aughts, Clemens went largely ignored by the fashion establishment for years. For a really long time, I just didnt get a review, Clemens said on The Breakfast Club radio show in 2022. It took 10 years to really get fashion attention. Models walk the runway at the end of the show at the Telfar Presentation during February 2017 New York Fashion Week. Telfar is known for its unisex clothing styles. - Gonzalo Marroquin/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images Since then, however, Clemens has won a laundry list of fashion awards, including the prestigious Council of Fashion Designers of America/Vogue Fashion Fund in 2017. That same year he dressed Beyonces sister, Solange Knowles, for a performance at the Guggenheim Museum; in 2020, he designed Liberias Olympic uniforms. Last year, Telfar closed New York Fashion Week a major honor. Telfar Clemens accepts the CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund Gala, New York, USA, November 6, 2017. - David X Prutting/BFA/Shutterstock But Telfars breakout product was the Shopping Bag, first produced in 2014. The Bushwick Birkin which has repeatedly appeared on Oprahs list of favorite things had it all. The vegan leather tote comes in three sizes and nearly any color, usable as an everyday work bag or for nights out. The Covid-19 pandemic sent the popularity of the Shopping Bag to new heights new bag releases announced online sold out in minutes. Even my next-door neighbor has one, Pratt Institute fashion design professor Adrienne Jones told CNN. You cant be on the planet and not know about [Telfar]. Clemens made the bags accessible to a wide range of people. The brand launched the Telfar Bag Security Program in 2020 as a 24-hour event where customers could pre-order an unlimited number of bags in any size and color. The event stood in contrast to Telfars normal releases and the model of drops from other fashion brands wherein product is limited. The program has returned at various times over the past several years, although the brand said its June Bag Security Program would be its last. Samia Laaboudi wears a beige trench coat, a neon orange handbag from Telfar and a burgundy handbag from Telfar, during New York Fashion Week, on September 14, 2022 in New York City. - Edward Berthelot/Getty Images In contrast, last year, Chanel told Reuters it placed caps on how many quilted Classic Flap handbags a customer could buy and was considering more limits on luxury products in certain markets. Analysts said that was to challenge the reseller market and keep the brand exclusive. We literally do exactly what we want as a company. Thats exactly what we are doing by moving on from (the Bag Security Program), too, Clemens said, according to a widely reported statement at the time. Instead, this holiday season, Telfar launched a Gifted program, which gave anyone who bought a handbag from November 17 to 20 a gift code to give a Shopping Bag to someone else. All the customers had to do was submit a short video explaining who the bag was for. Such programs show that just because Beyonce mentioned your name in a song, it doesnt mean that [Telfar has] moved away from the community thats really built this brand as well, said Laticha Brown, fashion business management chair at the Fashion Institute of Technology. For everyone In 2015, Telfar had an unusual partner at New York Fashion Week: fast-food chain White Castle. In the following years, Telfar designed uniforms for White Castle employees, as well as a collection celebrating the chains 100th anniversary, which was sold to the public. Profits from the collection were donated to the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Liberty and Justice Fund, which provides bail money to jailed minors. White Castle supported us before our success and we consider them family, said Babak Radboy, Telfars creative director, in a statement for the White Castle anniversary collection. Their team would serve Sliders backstage at all our shows and were basically part of our team. Its still the only thing open after midnight in Telfars hood seeing our uniforms there means something to us, and so we take it personally. Similarly, last year, Clemens hosted the brands first-ever brick-and-mortar bag release at the Brooklyn location of low-priced retail chain Rainbow. Followers of the brand say its partnerships like those that set Telfar apart. For decades, luxury fashion houses have worked to cultivate a lifestyle thats aspirational but not attainable, perpetually leaving most consumers looking from the outside in. Clemens, by contrast, creates a very different universe. Telfar designed uniforms for White Castle employees, as well as a collection celebrating the chains 100th anniversary that it sold to the public. Profits from the collection were donated to the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Liberty and Justice Fund, which provides bail money to jailed minors. - Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. In the world of Telfar, theres nothing wrong with being middle class or working class, Sakany said. I think it touches people and it makes them feel more valuable. Clemens has also never shied away from his queerness, Sakany said. And as the world has increasingly moved to accept and celebrate queer lifestyles and fashion, Telfars once boundary-pushing emphasis on unisex styles became a harbinger for other big-name brands. Today, mass-market retailers like Old Navy sell gender-neutral clothing. If youre a gay, Black or trans person, you are wearing whatever you want to wear, whatever makes you feel good, and theres no label to it, said Pratts Jones. Radical pricing model Many designers will charge as much as they think customers will pay an arbitrary system, Clemens and Radboy thought. Why charge $600 for a hoodie, Radboy told Fast Company earlier this year, when only one class of person someone rich could buy it? So, the pair devised a new pricing model. When Telfar dropped its latest unisex clothing line in March, the garment prices werent fixed. Instead, prices were set at wholesale cost at the time of the collections launch and increased incrementally at a rate of about one cent every 20 minutes. The price would be set forever when the item sold out, meaning the quicker an item flew off the (digital) shelves, the cheaper it would be. Telfar called it a sale in reverse. The dynamic pricing model was yet another way of making sure more people could afford to get their hands on Telfars designs. But it was also so different that it risked confusing customers. It shows that hes like, I trust my customer is going to ride with me, Sakany said. This is radical, its difficult to understand but I think [his customer] cares about him and his brand enough to figure it out. Telfar launched the Telfar Bag Security Program in 2020 as a 24-hour event where customers could pre-order an unlimited number of bags in any size and color. - Darian DiCianno/BFA/Shutterstock The new pricing system also served Clemens business interests. For designers, failing to accurately predict demand and making too much inventory can hurt a brands image and value its how items can eventually end up in discount stores like T.J. Maxx or on clearance racks, losing that designer money and cachet, according to Jones. With the dynamic pricing model, Telfar incentivized customers to provide data on which items were most in demand. And that data can now be used to better plan inventory buys for future collections. Its not clear whether Telfar will continue using the dynamic pricing model for future collections, but the brand has nonetheless proven that selling luxury fashion can work differently. It was a game changer, Jones said. Now, with TelfarTV, Telfar invites customers to show off what theyve copped while simultaneously helping to promote the brand. The channel, which can be viewed online or via several streaming services, encourages viewers to send in videos to be featured on the program its a stream of TikTok-like videos showing customers squealing as they unbox their bags, person-on-the street interviews, snippets of products and more. While TelfarTV is, in essence, free, user-generated marketing, its also yet another way of involving fans in the ongoing story of Telfar. Who doesnt want to be part of the team of your favorite designers? Jones said. When you submit your content to TelfarTV, you actually become a part of the commercial success. And in a world where loyalty to a brand often means signaling an allegiance with that companys entire value system, it makes sense to give customers a platform to show and share in their love for its products. When we say Black-owned we are not talking about one person, reads the TelfarTV FAQ. We didnt get to where we are alone. For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com Brianna Kaleen as Cinderella in the TUTS 'Enchanted' version inspired by the TV version starring Brandy and Whitney Houston. Melissa Taylor Brianna Kaleen as Cinderella in the TUTS 'Enchanted' version inspired by the TV version starring Brandy and Whitney Houston. Melissa Taylor Brianna Kaleen as Cinderella in the TUTS 'Enchanted' version inspired by the TV version starring Brandy and Whitney Houston. Melissa Taylor Brianna Kaleen as Cinderella in the TUTS 'Enchanted' version inspired by the TV version starring Brandy and Whitney Houston. Melissa Taylor Brianna Kaleen as Cinderella in the TUTS 'Enchanted' version inspired by the TV version starring Brandy and Whitney Houston. Melissa Taylor Brianna Kaleen as Cinderella in the TUTS 'Enchanted' version inspired by the TV version starring Brandy and Whitney Houston. Melissa Taylor Brianna Kaleen as Cinderella in the TUTS 'Enchanted' version inspired by the TV version starring Brandy and Whitney Houston. Melissa Taylor Brianna Kaleen admits she "wasn't really into fairy tales" as a kid until Brandy and Whitney Houston put a new spin on "Cinderella." The Texas native grew up watching the 1997 TV version, which featured a racially diverse cast and broke ratings records. It was watched by 23 million households and more than 60 million viewers. Kaleen stars as Cinderella in the current Theatre Under the Stars production, running through Dec. 24 at Hobby Center. It was inspired by that now-iconic adaptation and also stars Soara-Joye Ross as Godmother. Advertisement Article continues below this ad "I had a dress that matched Brandy's. My parents always say that I would run around in it and be like, 'The prince is giving a ball!'" Kaleen remembers. She auditioned from New York via video and was cast in July. "The little kid in me was like, 'Yes!' It's been really cool to take on this role. My whole career, I've been really advocating for Black women to be in roles that they typically aren't in," she says. Despite her current track, Kaleen, now 23, didn't think of pursuing theater seriously until a friend urged her to audition for musicals in high school. Like the movie "Annie," he told her, but live. It was solidified when she saw Cynthia Erivo perform "I'm Here" from "The Color Purple" musical on the 2018 Tony Awards. "I was listening to every single word she said. I would look around at what all my friends were listening to, and they weren't listening to the words. It was just about the beat of the song. People come to the theater, and whether they know it or not, they're going to be influenced by what we're saying," Kaleen says. She graduated in 2021 from Oklahoma City University with a Bachelor of Music in Music Theatre Performance and was soon onstage as Little Inez in the national tour of "Hairspray," Little Eva in "Beautiful: The Carole King Musical" and in "Ragtime." But Kaleen wanted more than supporting roles traditionally played by Black performers. A year ago, she started her own TikTok series called "Singing Songs You Don't Usually Hear Black Girls Sing in Musical Theater" as a response and an outlet. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Brianna Kaleen as Cinderella in the TUTS 'Enchanted' version inspired by the TV version starring Brandy and Whitney Houston. Melissa Taylor "I was sick and tired of my artistry being one thing when I love to sing in different colors and tones," Kaleen says. Kaleen quickly earned a following for her renditions of songs from, among other shows, "The Baker's Wife," "Into the Woods," "Parade" and "Company." It confirmed there was a community, and an audience, who shared her desire to see people of color in traditionally white theatrical roles. Still, it's remarkable that despite the success of the 1997 version with Brandy, the role of Cinderella has largely remained in the gloved hands of white actresses. In 2014, less than a decade ago, actress Keke Palmer became the first Black actress to play the role on Broadway. Brandy also reprises the role in the upcoming fourth film in Disney's "Descendants" franchise. Kaleen, then, has big shoes to fill or glass slippers, if we're being accurate. And just like Cinderella's happy ending, it's a part Kaleen was destined for. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella When: Dec. 5 - 24 Where: Hobby Center, 800 Bagby Tickets: Theatre Under the Stars, 713-558-8887; mytuts.com Photograph: Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images John Kirby, the story goes, once used the military discipline that helped propel him to admiral rank in the US navy to launch a rhetorical war on behalf of the English language. As the navys chief information officer, Kirby bluntly advised underlings in his department to kick their supposed addiction to technical jargon and learn a second language: English, according to a 2014 profile in Politico. Mocking a navy description detailing what the Zumwalt-class destroyer, a missile, could provide, the then uniformed spokesperson fired off a semantic fusillade in a scathing essay, writing: Warships dont provide. They Fight. They destroy My doctor provides. My mother provides. Related: Were still living this: families of US-Israeli hostages arrive in Washington The urge to lecture on appropriate language resurfaced last week as the 60-year-old Kirby now the public face of White House foreign policy in his role of communications coordinator for the National Security Council tackled an infinitely more emotive word: genocide. The term, defined in an international treaty that was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, has been used by critics to describe Israels military offensive in Gaza, launched in response to Hamass attack on 7 October, which killed than 1,200 Israelis. The Israeli bombardment and ground invasion has so far killed approximately 15,000 Palestinians and displaced more than 1.7 million people, forcing them into increasingly precarious conditions. Joe Biden has voiced unequivocal support for Israel and so far has resisted calls to press the country to accept a permanent ceasefire, opting instead to focus on humanitarian pauses and sending aid to Gaza. Now with polls showing Biden haemorrhaging support among Arab, young and ethnic minority voters over his support for Israel in Gaza, questions are growing over whether Kirby, arguably the most visible spokesperson for Bidens approach to the war, presents a liability for the presidents 2024 re-election bid. Challenged at a White House briefing to confront the term Genocide Joe by some protesters to described Biden, Kirby, who had previously ruled out drawing red lines for Israels actions in Gaza, embarked on an animated exposition. People can say what they want on the sidewalk and we respect that. Thats what the first amendments about, he said. But this word genocides getting thrown around in a pretty inappropriate way by lots of different folks. What Hamas wants, make no mistake about it, is genocide. They want to wipe Israel off the map. And theyve said that theyre not going to stop. What happened on the 7th of October is going to happen again and again and again. And what happened on the 7th of October? Murder; slaughter of innocent people in their homes or at a music festival. Thats genocidal intentions. Yes, there are too many civilian casualties in Gaza And yes, we continue to urge the Israelis to be as careful and cautious as possible. But Israel is not trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. Israels not trying to wipe Gaza off the map. Israel is trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat. If were going to start using that word fine. Lets use it appropriately. For left-leaning Democrats already critical of Bidens unconditional pro-Israel stance, Kirbys remarks embody what they see as a telling difference between the administrations attitude towards civilians killed in Russias invasion of Ukraine and Palestinians killed in Israels military onslaught. While the response to Kirbys past linguistic homilies were unrecorded, his latest foray provoked a significant backlash. Writing on X, the MSNBC commentator Mehdi Hasan pointed out that among those Kirby was accusing of using the word inappropriately were renowned Jewish Holocaust scholars. multiple Jewish and Israeli scholars of the Holocaust have raised the issue of genocide, Hasan tweeted. Not sure Kirby is more of an expert than Omer Bartov or Raz Segal. Bartov and Segal, both Israeli citizens, each have argued cases that flatly contradict Kirbys understanding. Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, has accused Israel of a quite explicit, open and unashamed genocidal assault on Gaza. Writing in Jewish Currents days after Israel launched its military retaliation against the Hamas attack, Segal said the country was already committing three of the five acts stipulated in the UN genocide convention. He defined these as: 1. Killing members of the group. 2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University in Rhode Island, said multiple Israeli ministers and senior figures, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had made genocidal statements and terrifying pronouncements that have never been revoked. Netanyahu has repeatedly invoked the Old Testament fate of Amalek, whose followers were condemned to annihilation after attacking the ancient Hebrews during their exodus from Egypt. In commentary for the Council for Global Cooperation, a version of which was published in the Guardian, Bartov singled out comments by Maj Gen Giora Eiland, a former head of the Israeli national security council. Eiland told Israels Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on 10 October that Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist before expanding on the theme in a 19 November article for the same publication. The way to win this war faster and at a lower cost to us necessitates the collapse of the systems on the other side, not the killing of more Hamas fighters, wrote Eiland, who expanded his enemy definition to include the Gaza population whom he said cheered Hamass atrocities. The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not be deterred by that severe epidemics in the southern strip will bring victory closer and diminish the number of IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] casualties. Summing up, Bartov wrote: Israeli rhetoric and actions are preparing the ground for what may well become mass killing, ethnic cleansing and genocide, followed by annexation and settlement of the territory. Kirbys embrace of an opposing interpretation comes amid reports of dissension within the White House among Bidens own staff members, many of whom are torn over the presidents unambiguous support for Israel in the immediate aftermath of 7 October. His comments also echo Bidens own rhetoric, which has invoked the historical Jewish experience of murderous antisemitism and emphasised Hamass assault as the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Biden has since tried to qualify his earlier public statements, meeting with Arab American and Muslim leaders and expressing regret over comments casting doubt on the Palestinian death toll. James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute and a veteran pollster, cast Kirby as part of a group think cabal surrounding Biden and impeding his political need to inch back from his initial post-7 October posture. Theres been a spontaneous support for Palestine on this issue [among normally pro-Democrat voters] thats quite unprecedented and I know there are people in the party worried about losing this level of support, said Zogby. I know the president is trying to inch back, but there are people around him who just dont get it. I think Kirby is a liability, period. We had a meeting with the secretary of state [Antony Blinken] a while back and Kirby was there. But the next day at his press briefing he made comments that were just not on board with the conversation that was being had. Its almost as if he has an agenda that goes beyond the agenda thats developing. This is not the first time Kirbys pronouncements have put him in the political line of fire. In 2014, while he was the official spokesperson for the Pentagon under the then defence secretary Chuck Hagel, he was branded an idiot by the late Republican senator John McCain of Arizona over his attempts to deflect criticism of the US effort to defeat the Islamic State. After being reappointed to the same role after Bidens 2020s election win, he was plucked to work in the White House in May last year, frequently appearing beside the administrations official press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, and emerging as a key proponent of US backing for Ukraine. Kirbys level of behind-the-scenes influence in the corridors of power is unclear, despite the suspicion of at least one observer that he has his own agenda. In announcing Kirbys White House appointment last year, Biden praised his background, knowledge and experience and highlighted his past role as a state department spokesperson, in addition to his ex-Pentagon post, as qualifying him to deal with the complexities of US foreign and defence policy. In recent days, however, it appears that the need to change the direction of a conflict whose human costs are spiralling has been internalized by the administration, with Kirby evidently on board. In a telephone conversation with Netanyahu last weekend, Biden voiced opposition to Israel switching its onslaught following the end of the recent ceasefires to southern Gaza, where an estimated 2 million people are believed to have gathered at Israels demand. The president argued that Israel cannot repeat the sweeping operation it conducted in the northern part of the territory because the crowded conditions in the south creates the potential for deeper humanitarian suffering. In a White House briefing on Tuesday, Kirby told reporters that the administration does not support southern operations unless or until the Israelis can show that they have accounted for all the internally displaced people of Gaza. The White House has also made it clear to Israel that it expects increased aid levels for Gaza permitted during the pauses to be sustained even after hostilities resume a policy that would presumably at least mitigate the darker consequences of the path mapped out by Eiland, the former Israeli national security council supremo who cited the benefits of severe epidemics. Yet for many of the presidents detractors, this brings little comfort with Kirbys proxy role emblematic of what critics see as a sign of hypocrisy: the stark contrast between American condemnation of the killing of civilians in Russias invasion of Ukraine and an apparent indifference to the number of Palestinians killed at the hands of Israels military onslaught. For me, Kirby is the mouthpiece of the American war machine and for those who have very selective outrage about the kind of civilians lives we mourn more than others, said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director of Justice Democrats, a progressive group whose eight congressional members have vocally supported Palestinian rights. Most of us dont understand why John Kirby, Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan [the national security adviser] dont take Israeli leaders at their word when they say they want to wipe Gaza off the face of the planet. If Vladimir Putin said these things, Im sure they would believe it. The White House argued Monday that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is giving into Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and other far-right members of the House Republican caucus because he now wants a vote on an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. The White House pointed to reporting from The Washington Post last month that said Johnson indicated that there is insufficient evidence at the moment to initiate formal impeachment proceedings. Johnson then called a vote on impeachment a necessary step during an interview Saturday on Fox & Friends Weekend. Under fire for expelling George Santos, Speaker Johnson is throwing red meat to Marjorie Taylor Greene and the far right flank of the House GOP by pushing a full House vote on this illegitimate impeachment stunt. He admitted there is no evidence to justify it three weeks ago, but hes doing it anyway further proof that this whole exercise is an extreme political stunt, rather than a legitimate pursuit of the truth, White House spokesperson for oversight Ian Sams said in a statement. House Republicans have been weighing whether to shore up their impeachment inquiry by taking a formal vote on the matter. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) kicked off the impeachment process without a House vote, a move the White House has blasted, arguing it gives the inquiry no constitutional legitimacy. This baseless smear campaign is solely intended to satisfy their most extreme members and proves once again that these House Republicans are wasting time on the wrong priorities, instead of working with the President on real issues American families care about, like lowering costs, creating jobs, strengthening health care, and protecting our national security, Sams said. Throughout the impeachment investigations, led by Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), House Republicans have alleged that Biden and his family accepted money from foreign interests in suspicious business deals. None of the evidence presented by the committee so far has implicated the president. Johnson this weekend also claimed that the investigation has been stonewalled by the White House, a claim that Sams pushed back on recently. Sams argued that the White House has sent letters to Comer and Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), offering to meet or talk further, yet Comer and Jordan have repeatedly refused to engage. And, he noted that the presidents son, Hunter Biden, has offered to provide testimony; last week, the younger Biden offered to testify publicly. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. YEREVAN, DECEMBER 4, ARMENPRESS. A serviceman of the Armed Forces of Armenia has sustained a gunshot wound in a military base, the Ministry of Defense said in a statement. The incident took place around 02:50, December 4. The Defense Ministry only released the victims initials A.H. The conscript is in serious but stable condition, with no immediate life-threatening conditions observed. Authorities launched an investigation to reveal the circumstances of the incident. The denunciation by the Human Rights Association, which relaunches the official numbers of the Turkish Statistical Institute. Out of 4,146 cases in 2022, at least 81 involved minors under the age of 15 and 410 boys and girls between the ages of 15 and 19. At the root are economic issues and the consequences of closures for Covid. But also worrying in some areas is the increase in female suicides. The opposition accuses the Akp. Istanbul (AsiaNews) - In Turkey there is an alarming growth in suicides among children under 18, with an increase of around 40% in the last two years, with a higher prevalence among girls in some regions. This is what the Human Rights Association (IHD) reports, based on the official data recently released by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK) and relating to 2022. Numbers that show a worrying phenomenon: out of a total of 4,146 suicides registered in the country, in at least 81 cases they are minors under 15 years old and in another 410 they are boys or girls between 15 and 19 years old. In total, at least 491 minors took their own lives last year. Compared to the previous year, a significant increase, because in 2021 the official data speak of 71 suicides among children under 15 and 377 between 15 and 19 years old with an already evident increase compared to 2020, the first year of Covid-19 with closures generalized, interruption of school lessons and lockdown. By relaunching the official numbers, the IHD Commission for Children's Rights asks for a serious and in-depth investigation to be initiated to clarify the reasons for the increase in suicides among minors. With particular attention to the regions in which "there is a higher incidence among girls", a sign of further discomfort to be highlighted. Among the latest events relating to the last period, the IHD recalls the case of a 14-year-old girl identified with the initials I.A. from the city of Cizre, in the province of Srnak, that she was killed about two weeks ago "in her own home". And again in Cizre, the activist group's note continues, "two sisters named Z.C and Z.C, aged 16 and 17, attempted suicide by throwing themselves into the Tigris river. The 16-year-old was saved and taken to hospital, while the 17-year-old apparently disappeared in the river and was never found again." Childhood and developmental suicides can occur "due to the negative effects of the economic, social and cultural structures" in which minors find themselves living, in addition to the "pressures generated by war and conflict environments" the note continues. They are disturbing elements, say IHD experts, which lead to "feelings of oppression, siege, desperation and uselessness". Furthermore, in the specific case of Turkey there are other peculiar factors including "economic poverty, forced early marriages and sexual abuse of minors" whose impact is judged to be "significant". Furthermore, "the ongoing conflict, bans and social tensions in the Kurdish provinces" contribute to a general climate of "insecurity" and "lack of hope", thus influencing the trend of suicides. For the Human Rights Association, the situation in Cizre, in the deep south-east, near the border with Iraq and Syria, is of particular concern, where "the recent suicides of children" must be "thoroughly investigated". We also need policies to protect and benefit children, which have as their "priority the identification of the economic, social and psychological reasons that lead children to suicide", as well as encouraging the implementation of "conventions relating to the rights" of children . The issue of suicides among minors is also becoming a political case and a source of conflict between governments and critical voices. The opposition parliamentarian Tahsin Becan, of the Republican Party (CHP), has launched a warning in recent days against the escalation of cases, driven by a general economic situation in the country which he defines as failing. Referring to the last twenty years, characterized by the stay in power of the president (and former prime minister) Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AKP party, he underlines that there have been at least 1673 suicides of children under the age of 15. Highlighting the seriousness of the problem, Becan recalled a recent incident involving a child who was thrown under the wheels of a train at Marmaray Yenikap station in Istanbul. A "distressing" case of the "growing trend" of child suicides. In conclusion, the CHP parliamentarian speaks of a 53% growth in suicides under the rule of the AKP (Justice and Development Party). Official records show the number rose from 2,705 in 2003 to 4,146 in 2022, with a total of 63,244 people taking their own lives between 2003 and 2022. by Sumon Corraya The new priests, who belong to the Oraon tribal community, stressed the importance of the presence of PIME missionaries for their vocation. The ordination, led by Bishop Sebastian Tudu, took place last Friday at the Cathedral of St Francis Xavier. Dinajpur (AsiaNews) Four deacons were ordained priests Friday in the Diocese of Dinajpur: Ratan Joseph Murmu, Palash Joseph Khalko, Michael Murmu, and Samuel Soren. Bishop Sebastian Tudu presided over the ordination ceremony at the Cathedral Church of St Francis Xavier. While the first three are diocesan priests, Soren belongs to the Third Order Regular of St Francis of Assisi. All of them come from the Oraon tribal community. About a thousand people were present to show their support for the new priests, who said they had matured their priestly vocation thanks to PIME missionaries, who have been present in the diocese for some time. In my childhood, PIME fathers and nuns taught us catechism. Their lifestyle has always attracted me to give my life to preach God's message, said Joseph Khalko, 31, from the parish of Khalisa, speaking to AsiaNews. His grandfather, Joel Khalko, was a catechist and his grandfather's father had been baptised by PIME priests. "I was born into a devout and practising Catholic family. I lost my father when I was eight years old, and my mother always encouraged me to be a priest, Fr Khalko explained. In my entire life I have only missed Mass when I was sick," he added, expressing gratitude to Fr Livio Prete (now in Italy), who encouraged him to take the path of the priesthood when he was in Dinajpur. Fr Ratan Joseph Murmu, originally from the parish of Baldipukur, also expressed the desire to share God's message with those who do not know Jesus Christ. He thanked various people, including PIME nuns and priests, local clergy and relatives for their support, and then emphasised his commitment to passing on the Gospel teachings to transform people's lives. Samuel Soren, originally from the Diocese of Rajshahi, will serve in the Diocese of Dinajpur as priests of the Third Order Regular are not present in Rajshahi. Bishop Sebastian Tudu congratulated the newly ordained priests, and urged them to fulfil their responsibilities diligently, stressing the importance of their role and noting that God chooses His preachers from among the weak and marginalised to make them instruments of His work. Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country with a population of 170 million, is home to a Christian minority , which makes up 0. 3 per cent of the population, half of them Catholic. The presence of foreign missionaries in the past paved the way for the growth of the local Church, with an increasing number of vocations, allowing them to continue to spread the Gospel. Today's news: Red Crescent volunteers also among victims of new Israeli bombings in northern and southern Gaza; Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party have won three of the four state elections, a prelude to the 2024 general election; 11 people are confirmed dead and 12 missing following the eruption of the Marapi volcano in Indonesia PHILIPPINES Philippine police have identified at least two suspects in the bomb attack on a Catholic church during mass that killed four people. The attack was claimed by Islamabad by a group affiliated to the Islamic State and the police confirm that one of the attackers was affiliated to the fundamentalist cell. 7 injured remain in hospital. The bomb exploded Sunday during a service at a university gym in Marawi, a city left in ruins in 2017 by a five-month military campaign to end a bloody occupation by Islamic State military groups. ISRAEL - PALESTINE In the last few hours at least three members of the civil defense in Gaza have been killed and several injured following an Israeli attack in the eastern part of Gaza city. Overnight, the Palestinian Red Crescent said that two of its paramedics had been injured when Israeli forces fired on their ambulance in the al-Faluja area of northern Gaza. One later died. Meanwhile, Israeli bombings have continued since dawn in the northern tip of Gaza, as well as in Khan Younis, in the south of the Strip. INDIA Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has won three of India's four key state elections ahead of next year's crucial general elections. The BJP retained power in Madhya Pradesh and won Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The opposition coalition defeated a regional team by conquering the southern state of Telangana. More than 160 million people voted, or a sixth of India's electorate. Today the votes are expected to be counted for a fifth state, Mizoram. INDONESIA Eleven hikers were found dead near the crater of Indonesia's Marapi volcano after its eruption on Sunday. This morning three people were rescued by rescuers while the search for the other 12 missing hikers continues. At the time of the eruption there were 75 people on a trip to the area. The authorities imposed the second level of alert and also banned residents from coming within 3 km of the crater. CHINA - RUSSIA The Baikal-Amur railway line, one of the most impressive railways in the world, which connects China to Russia over a distance of over 4000 km, was the subject of two terrorist attacks in one day. First a 50-wagon freight train caught fire inside the tunnel on the crucial Severomuysk artery, then a fuel load exploded on the alternative route. RUSSIA-JAPAN A public demonstration of several hundred people was held in Tokyo to ask Russia to return the four Kurile islands which the Japanese call "the northern territories". Among the demonstrators were several former residents of the islands, who had been taken away as children during the Soviet occupation and now live mostly on Hokkaido. Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. The Moroccan Ministry of the Royal Court, Protocol and Chancellery announced that "King Mohammed VI is paying an official visit to the State of the United Arab Emirates on Monday, 4 December, at the invitation of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed al-Nahyan. The visit of the Moroccan sovereign comes to confirm the determination of Rabat and Abu Dhabi to move always towards the strengthening and diversification of their partnership, based on the values of true brotherhood, mutual respect and mutual esteem". This historic royal visit is the first of its kind by King Mohammed VI following the election by the Supreme Federal Council of the State on 14 May 2022 of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed al-Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates, and will not fail to give a strong boost to the partnership relations that unite the two countries and which are marked by active fraternity and unwavering solidarity. In this regard, the Kingdom of Morocco and the State of the United Arab Emirates are combining their efforts to maintain their multidimensional, solid and lasting strategic relations, which are based on a strong political will, often expressed by the Heads of State of the two countries, to turn this unusual partnership into a model to be followed. PHOTO/REUTERS - Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates The active solidarity between the two countries was evident in the aftermath of the violent earthquake that struck several provinces in Morocco on 8 September. The United Arab Emirates immediately dispatched a search and rescue team to help save the victims, a noble humanitarian action that embodies the depth of the immutable bonds of fraternity that unite the two heads of state and peoples. Under the leadership of King Mohammed VI and Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed al-Nahyan, political relations between Morocco and the UAE have always been marked by continuous consultation and convergence of views between the two states and mutual support in regional and international fora. Rabat and Abu Dhabi constantly strive to coordinate their respective positions on regional and international affairs and adopt a moderate and balanced foreign policy, underpinned by the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of countries, respect for national sovereignty and international legality, and the fight against all forms of extremism and terrorism. The policies adopted by the respective governments have, according to many observers, enabled both countries to position themselves as major players in their regional environment; as well as to distinguish themselves on the international scene. PHOTO/FILE - Mohammed VI The multidimensional cooperation between the two brotherly countries, the Kingdom of Morocco and the State of the United Arab Emirates, will be considerably strengthened on the occasion of King Mohammed VI's official visit on Monday, by giving a strong dynamic to the Moroccan-Emirati strategic partnership in the different aspects of bilateral cooperation. In this regard, Morocco reiterated its "firm and constant" support for the sovereignty of the United Arab Emirates over the Tunb al-Kubra, Tunb al-Sughra and Abu Musa islands, through its constant position, reaffirmed last October before the Fourth Committee of the UN General Assembly. In the same cooperative context, the Kingdom of Morocco condemned in January 2022 the "odious" attack perpetrated by the Shiite Houthi militia, linked to Iran and fighting in the war in Yemen, against the Musaffah region and Abu Dhabi airport in the United Arab Emirates. For its part, the UAE continues to reaffirm its constant support for Morocco and its territorial integrity, one and indivisible, as demonstrated in particular by the UAE's statement following the vote by the members of the UN Security Council on Resolution 2703 extending MINURSO's mandate for one year. It should be recalled that the UAE had inaugurated, along the same lines, on 4 November 2020, a UAE Consulate General in the city of Laayoune, as a form of recognition of the Moroccan ownership of Western Sahara. Like most intermediates from the era, the 442 moved away from the muscle car market when the Malaise Era kicked in. The 1973 redesign brought smaller V8 engines to the lineup, joined by an inline-six and a V6. The fourth-gen model (1978-1980) shifted to small-block engines only in the V8 department.The 442 was discontinued without a direct replacement at the end of the 1980 model year, but Oldsmobile revived the nameplate in 1985. It was based on the Cutlass Supreme model, which featured G-body underpinnings. The latter were shared with the Buick Regal , Chevrolet Monte Carlo, and Pontiac Bonneville.The G-body was short-lived, though. Oldsmobile dropped the model after only three years and 11,481 units sold. The 442 made one final return as a version of the Cutlass Calais from 1990 to 1991, getting the axe after only 3,993 examples were delivered. The final-generation 442 was also the only iteration to feature front-wheel drive.So, while the 1980s 442 wasn't particularly noteworthy (the Hurst/Olds version wasn't even part of the lineup), it was the last of its kind with an RWD layout. And now that G-body cars have become full-fledged classics, the 442s, Regals, and Monte Carlos from the era are getting more and more attention.Well, if you're in the market for a G-body that doesn't need a restoration and it's still a relatively low-mileage rig, this two-tone coupe might be the Olds you've been looking for.Located in Wooster, Ohio, this black over silver 442 comes with only 45,196 miles (72,736 km) on the odometer. And not only is it rust-free, but it's also in surprisingly good condition for a vehicle that's more than 30 years old as of 2023. The paint looks nice all around, and the gold accents are still visible, giving the 442 a unique touch.The interior provides even more proof that this Olds had a good life. The upholstery is clean, all the trim is still there, and the entire cabin feels highly original. This 442 also left the factory as a highly equipped order, featuring A/C, power windows and locks, a six-way driver's seat, remote mirrors, and cruise control What's more, it is fitted with one of the rarest Oldsmobile options from the 1980s. Specifically, this 442 was ordered with an electric sunroof. This feature was called the Astro Roof at the time and found its way on only a few vehicles. Of the 4,208 cars sold that year, only 201 left the assembly line with the Astro Roof. That's less than 5% of the total production, making it rarer than the era's T-top vehicles. And needless to say, fewer than 201 are still around, and only a few have been maintained in such good condition.The Olds is going under the hammer at no reserve . The auction is up for nearly two more days, and bidding has reached $10,700. For reference, 1987 442s in Good condition are valued at around $15,000, while low-mileage, highly original examples are known to fetch more than $25,000. Multiple ports welcome more travelers after adoption of new visa-free policy 09:39, December 04, 2023 By GT staff reporters ( Global Times As China has welcomed the first batch of visa-free travelers after the start of its visa-free policy for France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Malaysia, multiple ports across the countries, including Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanning, improved passenger flow monitoring, on-site guidance in multiple languages and inspection checks so that visa-free visitors can easily, quickly and safely enter the border. A total of 2,029 inbound visitors entered China through visa-free channels on Friday, the first day of China's implementation of a 15-day visa-free policy for ordinary passport holders from the above-listed six countries, the National Immigration Administration (NIA) said on Saturday. According to NIA, the number of individuals entering China from these six countries on Friday increased by 12.54 percent compared to the previous day. Among these travelers, the number of Malaysian passport holders made up the majority with 1,113 travelers. French nationals had the largest increase with growth of 52.31 percent from the day before. Sabrina Chan, a Malaysian passport holder, traveled from Hong Kong to Shanghai by Hong Kong Airlines through the visa-free entry on Saturday. "Firstly, I needed to fill out an arrival card to provide my details, which was simple. Then I headed toward the foreigner fingerprint self-collection area, which was also easy and the instructions simple to follow. There were many kiosks and the line moved quickly," she told the Global Times on Sunday. "So far for me, no questions were asked. It was very smooth and I feel very happy and glad that China and Malaysia are now visa free to visit each other because I was actually in the midst of applying for a visa before and it was difficult to get appointments," said Chan. "Just bring your passport and fill out an arrival card with your hotel and flight ticket information. The entire entry process only took me 15 minutes," a Malaysian travel blogger called Joannes told the Global Times. Both Chan and Joannes said they didn't need to report their health situation, such as filling out a health declaration form, when passing through customs. From December 1, 2023 to November 30, 2024, holders of ordinary passports from the six countries can enter China visa-free for business, tourism, visiting relatives and friends and transit for no more than 15 days. An Italian engineer named Franco who works in Shanghai told the Global Times that he and his colleagues really appreciate the visa-free trial as they can now have their family come to China more conveniently. "I hope that this trial can be extended for a longer period of time. It will definitely facilitate the entry of more people," he said. With the resumption of international flights and the implementation of the new visa-free policy, it can be foreseen that the number of travelers from visa-exempt countries for short-term tourism and business exchanges will continue to increase, said Wang Jing, a deputy head of the border inspection station in Hangzhou of East China's Zhejiang Province. Wang said the border inspection station has enhanced dynamic monitoring of passenger flow, scientific arrangement of police forces, early opening of channels, and optimization of inspection procedures. The inspection station has also added language interpretation services in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic at the entry-exit hall to help guide foreign passengers. Border inspection stations at airports in cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen in East China's Fujian Province, said they have also implemented similar optimization measures to ensure safe and high-efficient border entry and promote the country's high-quality openness. China's border control agencies will optimize the deployment of police forces for on-site guidance and open up enough inspection channels to ensure efficient border entry at ports, said the NIA in a statement sent to the Global Times on Saturday. NIA said it will guide exit-entry departments under public security agencies across the country to provide convenience for visa-free entry travelers to stay in China. China now has unilateral visa exemption policy for eight countries, covering both Asian and European countries. Orders for inbound tourism from the six new countries accounted for about 15 percent of inbound tourism to China from January to November, which is an over 40 percent rise compared to 2022, according to data trip.com sent to the Global Times. Online travel agency Trip.com said that the US, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, the UK, Canada and Germany were the top 10 countries for inbound tourism to China from January to November in 2023. Inbound tourism orders to China from January to November in 2023 were about 80 percent of that in the same period in 2019. (Web editor: Tian Yi, Liang Jun) Dr. Talat Jehan Khan, 52, was stabbed to death at a Conroe apartment complex Oct. 28. A Muslim civil rights group and Khan's family have called for a federal investigation into the death as a possible hate crime. Courtesy of ABC13 Miles Joseph Fridrich, 24, appeared before a magistrate inside the Montgomery County Jail on Oct. 29, the day he was arrested and charged in the stabbing death of Conroe doctor Talet Jehan Kahn on Oct. 28. A Muslim civil rights group and Khan's family have called for a federal investigation into the death as a possible hate crime. Montgomery County Jail A Muslim civil rights group and the family of a Conroe pediatrician stabbed to death in October have called for a federal investigation into the death as a possible hate crime. The Houston chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations called for the investigation Friday on the one-month anniversary of the Oct. 28 stabbing of Dr. Talat Jehan Khan, 54. Miles Joseph Fridrich, 24, is accused of attacking Khan as she sat at a picnic bench outside the Alys Apartments in the 15000 block of Mansions View in Conroe. Fridrich remained in the Montgomery County Jail Monday with bail set at $500,000. He is charged with first-degree murder. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The circumstances surrounding Dr. Khan's murder demand a thorough and exhaustive investigation, said CAIR-Houston Director William White in a release Friday. It's been one month, and the family and community deserve answers. Given the horrifying nature of the incident, the lack of an explanation, and the climate we find ourselves in, it is imperative to explore every possible motive. The Montgomery County District Attorneys Office has not released a motive and the incident is still under investigation as prosecutors continue to review evidence, said District Attorney Brett Ligon. We are very aware juries often want to know why someone was killed, Ligon said. Because of that, we are always looking for a motive." Ligon said he has been in close contact with the family during the investigation but declined to release details of those conversations. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Houston attorney John Floyd, who is representing the family, expressed frustration with the investigation by Montgomery County officials. In speaking with the family and the community at large, we are disappointed with the pace of this investigation, Floyd said. The timing of Dr. Talat Khans murder, along with the increased Islamophobia and bigotry sweeping through the country, require answers, and the family has yet to see that from Montgomery County. Ligon said there has been no delay as far as the pace of the investigation. "I would like to remind the community of the swiftness of the Conroe Police Department who had the suspect in custody within the first hour and we had charges within the first 24 hours. The defendant has stayed in custody on a half million dollar bond," he said. Prosecutors have 90 days to present a case to a grand jury for indictment, Ligon said. The grand jury meets each Tuesday and Thursday. Advertisement Article continues below this ad A representative for the FBI's Houston office said the bureau was aware of the case, but declined to comment. During Fridrichs Oct. 29 probable cause hearing, Judge Jacqueline Bello requested a mental health evaluation for Fridrich. According to information from Texas State University, mental health evaluations are ordered when there is reasonable cause to believe the defendant has a mental illness or is a person with an intellectual disability. Houston attorney Lisa Andrews, who is representing Fridrich, could not be reached for comment Monday. Khan worked at Sea Mar Community Health Centers in Seattle for 15 years before taking the position with Texas Childrens Pediatrics in Conroe earlier this year. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Beta Technologies, manufacturer of the Alia electric aircraft, secured government funding for setting up and operating a new facility in Plattsburgh, New York. Last month, Beta Technologies completed what was considered to be the first flight of an eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) in New York. It wasn't a random location. Beta has strong ties to the area, and they are about to become even stronger.Beta started developing and flight-testing its electric aircraft at the Plattsburgh International Airport in 2017. It culminated with an incredible milestone the Alia aircraft flew from Jamestown to Plattsburgh, completing the longest-recorded flight of an electric aircraft (336 nautical miles/622 km).Now, the manufacturer is ready to expand its existing facility in Plattsburgh. The $41 million investment will turn it into a state-of-the-art center with multiple functions. First, it will become a final assembly hub for the Alia aircraft. Second, it will operate as a permanent flight test center. Last but not least, the Plattsburgh facility will become the company's delivery center for its flagship aircraft.This expansion is supported by New York officials and the local community. Clinton County awarded Beta a $20 million grant through the Empire State Development's Regional Economic and Community Assistance Program. Several universities and schools, including Clarkson University and the Champlain Valley Educational School, are working with the eVTOL company to develop study programs for advanced manufacturing and electric aviation.Once the new facility is ready for expanded operations, Beta will ensure 85 full-time jobs in the region.What makes this manufacturer stand out in the AAM (Advanced Air Mobility) industry is its focus on dedicated energy solutions. Its Alia aircraft comes with an electric charging station developed by the same company. Apart from testing and refining the Alia aircraft, Beta has also done pioneering work in terms of electric aircraft infrastructure. It recently inaugurated the first eVTOL charging station in Massachusetts, and it's linked to the first electric charging stations to operate at an Air Force base.Beta has installed similar stations at 15 locations so far across the US. More than 50 are in production right now at various other airports across the country, and many more will follow. The goal is to develop a nationwide network in support of upcoming electric air taxi services.Alia will be launched as a five-seat (plus the pilot) air taxi with a 1,400 lbs (635 kg) payload and a medium range of up to 250 miles (463 km). The unusual, innovative design makes it look like a dragonfly but was actually inspired by a bird, the Arctic tern that touches almost every continent during its migration flight.Other confirmed eVTOL manufacturing hubs in America include Archer's factory in Covington, Georgia, and Joby's new center in Dayton, Ohio, in addition to its pilot hub in Marina, California. People often ask me why I collect Hot Wheels cars. I have several reasons, and I've mentioned some of them before. Two of those reasons have to do with money and space. It's tricky to build a 1/18th-scale display, not to mention any sizes bigger than that. My first model car was a Porsche Carrera GT Photo: AC Collection I have a decent-sized Veyron collection. Photo: AC Collection I regretted selling it. Photo: AC Collection A 1/64th-scale item, like most Hot Wheels , is two and a half (six cm) to three inches long (seven and a half cm). Once you move to the 1/18 level, you're looking at nine (24 cm) to 12 inches (30 cm) long collectibles. Several cars won't be too inconvenient, but the problem with this hobby is that you always want more. Storing several hundred large diecast vehicles in an apartment could be a logistic nightmare, especially if it's small and you also have a family to share it with.And that's not even considering the cost of it all. I bought a Solido Porsche for my good friend and paid $50. Multiply that by 100, and you end up paying $5,000 for a collection of mid-level collectibles. Once you start looking into products from Autoart, Ignition, or Almost Real, that value can quickly rise to $30,000. But where's a will, there's a way. And most collectors I've ever met are genuinely passionate about the hobby. And it's that passion that helps them overcome any and every obstacle.I recently talked to Alex, a 34-year-old accountant interested in luxury cars. He used to own an old BMW 7-Series (the E38) but now drives a 2006 Volkswagen Passat. And I was surprised to learn that his diecast collection is worth more than his car. We both have approximately the same number of collectibles on display. But most of mine are in the 1/64th-scale group, while he has gone as far as to purchase 1/8th-scale cars.I've been following some of his videos, and I knew this would be an exciting conversation, but let's start from the beginning. "Believe it or not, I bought my first scale model car when I was 18. I had just gotten my first paycheck. I went to a hypermarket nearby, and there were 30 cars in the toy department. A 1/24th-scale Porsche Carrera GT from Cararama caught my attention, and I decided to get it. I remember seeing the Autoart Bugatti. Someone was selling one for $90, which felt too expensive for me then. I bought a used one for almost $120 later, even though I never thought I would own one. I felt really happy about the whole thing."Alex remembers growing up with some small toy cars, but nothing too impressive. Despite being aware of the brand's popularity among other collectors, he has never had an appetite for Hot Wheels products. Slowly but steadily, he pressed on to get the most realistic diecast cars on the market. "At first, I focused on more affordable cars and bought one or two with every paycheck. It took about three years to realize that this was becoming a serious hobby, as I had accumulated quite a few."He owns around 300 collectibles, four of which are huge at a 1/8 scale. I'm talking about 24-inch (60 cm) long models, including a Dacia 1300 and Aro 240 from Eaglemoss, a Subaru Impreza WRX STI from Hachette and a Lamborghini Aventador from Pocher. These are all kit cars, and I've discovered he is now building the famous Shelby Mustang: Eleanor . Alex also owns four more items at the 1/12th scale: a BMW M3 E46, an Alpina E30, a Ford Escort Cosworth, and a Ferrari F40. I'm sure he will be one cool dad if he ever decides to have kids!Alex has rounded up over 200 1/18th-scale cars and is determined to get more. "I started with Solido but slowly moved towards more premium brands, including Otto Mobile, GT Spirit, Kyosho, and Almost Real , just to name a few. I'm proud of my Veyron collection: 10 were Autoart models, and two are from Minichamps. Seeing that I've never forgotten about my E38, I have four tiny replicas I've gotten from Otto Mobile. I'm equally as fascinated by the M3 E46, but recently, I've been focusing on luxury vehicles from Rolls Royce and Maybach."He has spent almost $2,000 on six premium cars in the past month alone. And he's been brilliant about his hobby. Several years ago, he wanted to document his diecast hobby on video and started a YouTube channel. Today, he's one of the industry's most well-known diecast reviewers, which comes with multiple perks. Every month, manufacturers and stores send him up to 20 cars so he can shoot them in his mini-studio and post them online. Of course, this requires up to four hours of additional work daily, so it's almost like a part-time job for him.But we all know that doing what you love makes everything much easier at the end of the day. I have only seen his collection from photos and video, but I'd likely spend hours gawking at every single one of the cars in his display. Afterward, he told me about purchasing a limited-edition Rolls Royce Cullinan from a Chinese company called KengFai, and I was curious to know what his shopping list would look like if he had access to a budget of $5,000."I would love to expand my 1/12 collection, but few options exist. Still, I've had my eyes on several such cars for years. I would immediately buy the M3 CSL from Otto Mobile, the Autoart Veyron, and the convertible Phantom from Kyosho, and I'd also be super happy about a Pagani Zonda." As soon as I arrived home from our interview, I looked up some of those collectibles, and here's what I found. Otto Mobile only made 999 units of the M3 CSL, and you'll have to pay more than $1,000 to get your hands on it.As for the Veyron, prices usually start at around $800 but can quickly go up to $1,200. But I feel more at ease paying that much for such a large collectible than any Hot Wheels out there. I realize how big of a Veyron fan Alex is, considering that two of his diecast stories revolved around this model. "This one time, someone called me and wanted one of my Veyrons. He offered to pay four times its market value, which sounded too good of a deal for me to pass it by. Shortly after, I regretted the decision and found another similar model to fill the void.""I met with another collector to buy a Veyron from him on a different occasion. I examined the car with my eyes and hands and decided to buy it. As I got home, I realized it was plagued by paint rash. I couldn't believe how wrong I was to buy it, as I didn't notice the problem initially. It has been in my head for months, and I can't stop thinking about it. Most people won't even be able to tell the difference, but I know it's there and killing me inside." I was curious to know what his friends and family thought about his hobby, knowing how many different reactions I've had from my loved ones in the past."At first, they thought I was spending too much money on this hobby and taking up too much of my time. But they've since changed their mind. I'm not married yet, so I'll see how that goes when I get there." At the beginning of this story, I talked about how difficult setting up a display for one's collection is, especially when discussing larger items. Alex has spent over $3,000 on display cabinets, not even adding the costs of dedicated lighting and gear for his online reviews."I must also store the packaging; you can't throw it away. You never know when you'll sell or trade something from your collection. If you're thinking about this hobby, you need to be careful with things like that. I plan on extending the display area, and I need something custom-made for my truck. The cool part is that it features a custom-built trailer from MN Trailers; it's quite big." A photo is worth 1,000 words, so you'll probably want to feast on some of Alex's man cave photos. I'll be sure to report back with more exciting diecast stories soon. The United States has a wide range of combat aircraft at its disposal, including two of the world's only four families of fifth-generation fighter jets. And because they are always in the news, America's planes seem to be at the top of their respective food chains. Yet the Europeans claim one of their home-brewed such machines is the world's most advanced combat aircraft, at least as far as the swing-role ones are concerned that means planes with the ability to quickly adapt to different roles, if need be including during the same mission.The plane is called Eurofighter (aka Typhoon), and has been around as a product of Airbus, BAE Systems and Leonardo for exactly 20 years now.The Eurofighter is deployed in the service of several European aerial armies, including the British Royal Air Force, the German Luftwaffe, Italy's Aeronautica Militare, and Spain's Ejercito del Aire y del Espacio.Generally speaking the Eurofighter is powered by a pair of Eurojet EJ200 engines, each of them capable of developing 13,000 pounds of thrust each. The plane can reach a maximum speed of Mach 2 (2,125 kph/1,320 mph), and can fly at altitudes of 19,812 meters (65,000 feet) for distances of up to 2,900 km (1,800 miles).Those are impressive capabilities, and when paired with all the other things the plane can do militarily, we get the picture of a very capable fighting platform. Yet in the military world 20 years is a very long time, and the Eurofighter is getting old in some respects.One area where the plane could need improvements is its electronic combat capabilities, meaning the way the plane can respond to the threats of the modern-day battlefield. And it's exactly this capability that will be improved through an upgrade called Eurofighter EK.The evolution of the Eurofighter into something more potent was announced last week by European defense contractor Airbus, which announced it was tapped by the German Luftwaffe to make 15 of its Eurofighters capable of taking on more evolved threats.The exact details of what the upgrades mean are not disclosed, but Airbus did say they will include a transmitter location system sourced from Saab, backed by a self-protection suite (including jammers) supplied by the same contractor. These should give it not only defensive capabilities, but also the power to detect, locate, and disable anti-aircraft radars.On top of it all, the Eurofighter in the EK configuration will also be equipped with an anti-radar suite of missiles. These are of the Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile variety, or AARGM , produced by American company Northrop Grumman (the exact version of the weapon is not disclosed).The plane in this configuration is meant as a replacement for another European combat aircraft, the Panavia Tornado Electronic Combat/Reconnaissance (ECR), taking from it the role of enemy air defense suppressor. As per Airbus, the EK should be ready to be certified by NATO by the end of the decade.Airbus will work with Eurofighter GmbH and the NATO Eurofighter and Tornado Management Agency on the project. The cost of the effort was not disclosed. The Jeep Renegade is set to become a story in Past Tense for the US and Canada. The company decided to stop selling it in America due to low demand and collapsing popularity. The Renegade will not make it as a 2024 model in the United States and Canada. The crossover is, until the end of 2023, the brands entry-level. It currently starts at $28,445.For the money, customers get the Latitude trim, which brings the vehicle in white (the only paintwork which does not involve any cost), 17-inch aluminum wheels, and four-wheel drive. There are cloth bucket seats on board, while drivers get the Uconnect 4C NAV displayed on an 8.4-inch touchscreen.The model is powered by a 1.3-liter turbo engine, capable of delivering 177 horsepower (179 PS) and 210 lb-ft (284 Nm) to all four wheels. The power unit is linked to a nine-speed automatic transmission.But those seem not to be enough for the American market. The demand has been decreasing every year since 2016. Over 106,000 customers went for the Renegade that year, with the numbers going to little over 103,000 in 2017.The pandemic hit in 2020, and the figures instantly got worse, reaching as low as 62,847. But there was obviously no growth potential for the Renegade, so Jeep only sold 15,561 examples from January to November 2023, which would make it the worst year ever in the history of the model. US annual sales: 2016 - 106,605 2017 - 103,434 2018 - 97,062 2019 - 76,886 2020 - 62,847 2021 - 47,138 2022 - 27,551 2023 - 15,561 With the smallest of the Jeeps gone after a nine-year stint on the market in the US, the Compass is going to play the part of the entry-level model. Surprisingly, back in 2015, after the arrival of the Renegade, it was rumored that the Compass would be discontinued together with the Patriot. Only the Patriot vanished from the carmakers lineup, with the Compass living to see another generatio n, its second, in 2017.Jeep introduced the Renegade in 2014. The subcompact crossover came with the tag of a budget high-ride model, which was underpinned by the same architecture the Fiat 500X and Fiat 500L were built on. The three of them for the American market rolled off the same assembly line in Melfi, Italy.Jeep America ditches the Renegade, as reported by Automotive News (requires subscription), but it will live on in other markets such as Europe, China, and South America. The carmaker also builds the vehicle in Goiana, Brazil, and in Guangzhou, China, as the brands first model to be wholly assembled outside the US and imported into the country. This might be one of the reasons customers have lost faith in the model over the years, despite the fact that the segment has been growing. EV SUV Since the company has the $20,400 Trax, $23,100 Trailblazer, $26,600 Equinox (and upcoming Equinox), $35,400 Blazer (and Blazer EV), plus the all-new Traverse squeaky fresh, it was obviously only a matter of time before the $54,200 Tahoe and $57,200 Suburban also joined the party.So, with the Toyota rival breathing down GM's neck to recapture the sales lead in America, it is no wonder that Chevrolet moved quickly to announce the refreshed 2025 Tahoe and 2025 Suburban full-size SUVs even before we entered into 2024.They come with fresh interior and exterior designs, now in line with the Silverado and Silverado HD pickup truck siblings, pack new signature lighting treatments, and also feature a large "best-in-class" 17.7-inch infotainment screen the cockpit is clearly inspired by the Cadillac Escalade cousin which shares with them the same GMT T1XX architecture.The refinements also touched the trailering technology and ride-and-handling characteristics, brought forth a new Connected Cameras array working with OnStar, and new assistance and security features like the AutoSense Power Liftgate or the parent company's acclaimed SuperCruise system. Built exclusively at GM's Arlington Assembly Team in Texas, the Tahoe and Suburban will reach dealerships sometime next year with the more powerful (plus 10%) second-gen Duramax 3.0-liter inline-six turbo diesel first launched on the Silverado 1500.It now packs 305 horsepower and 495 lb-ft of peak torque, but customers can still order the 5.3-liter and 6.2-liter V8 gasoline engines with the same trims - LS, LT, RST, Z71, Premier, and High Country. Now, naturally, people will start asking what's next for the Tahoe and Suburban since they can't receive an all-new generation too soon. Well, if you ask the imaginative realm of digital car content creators, maybe it's time to prepare for the first-ever EV derivatives.For example, this virtual artist, better known as SRK Designs on social media, has decided to trust his CGI instinct and come up with a dreamy Suburban EV. That's not exactly preposterous. After all, Chevrolet is one of the American automakers that promised a wide range of EVs to support the transition to sustainable transportation models.And they already have the Bolt EV and Bolt EUV on sale both awaiting an all-new generation based on Ultium technology, plus the upcoming Equinox EV and Blazer EV, as well as the 2024 Chevrolet Silverado EV that can be had in WT versions, for now. Logic dictates that making the Tahoe and Suburban EVs is directly linked to the success of the Silverado EV. So, are we prepared for a fully electric full-sizefrom Chevy or not? SUV BEV Last month, Toyota crisscrossed across Earth's continents as it sped up to introduce the 2025 Camry mid-size sedan and 2025 Crown Signia crossoverat the Los Angeles Auto Show. Then it also unraveled its IMV 0 vision of a modular pickup truck that's back to basics with the production version dubbed Hilux Champ launched in Thailand for a mere $13k!In Europe, it showed the Yaris Cross update with a new version and a more powerful engine snatched from the Toyota LBX Hybrid 130. And at home in Japan, the brand also made us feel like it's 1984 all over again with the relaunch of the iconic Land Cruiser 70 with the looks of an old-school 4x4 SUV and the internals of a 21st-century vehicle.Well, those who thought that's about it for Toyota need to think again. The Japanese company is kicking off the final month of 2023 with a European bang at the annual Kenshiki forum in Brussels, Belgium; they touched on a variety of subjects. In fact, it feels like nothing was left untold at the big event. For example, they revealed the company will deliver advanced mobility solutions specifically for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris in 2024.The commercial side of the business launched the new 48V hybrid Hilux, the facelifted Proace and Proace City, as well as the big Proace Max. Interestingly, they are not abandoning the hydrogen side of things in Europe, where the Hydrogen Factory Europe will further grow the business and "stimulate a wider roll-out of hydrogen eco-systems." But wait, as there is more much more.The BEVs are now a priority for Toyota, finally, and the company not only brought in Europe the FT-3e concept launched at the inaugural edition of the Japan Mobility Show (formerly known as the Tokyo Motor Show for almost seven decades) but also debuted two new prototypes the Urban SUV Concept that will premiere during the first half of next year plus the European premiere of the Toyota Sport Crossover Concept, both previewing new production battery electric CUVs that will be part of a lineup of six dedicated battery-electric vehicles.However, there's also a piece of information that has nothing to do with the commercial, hydrogen, andparts of the business. More precisely, Toyota announced it will open pre-sales for the all-new version of the iconic Land Cruiser SUV on December 5 they are, of course, talking about the J250 variant twinned with the all-new 2024 Lexus GX 550, also known as Prado or 250 across various regions.The pre-orders take place through an online reservation process, and although we don't know the prices just yet, we at least have a few more details to share with you. First and foremost, the first examples of the 2024 Toyota Land Cruiser will arrive in (Western Europe) sometime during the third quarter of 2024. At the moment, although more trims will become available later, only the online-exclusive First Edition, along with the top Prestige and Executive grades, are available for pre-order.These will be sold in both five and seven-seat configurations, and in Western Europe, the only powertrain available at the moment is a 2.8-liter turbodiesel packing 201 horsepower. It is mated with the new eight-speed Direct Shift automatic transmission, allowing a towing capacity of 7,716 lbs. Later, the 2.8-liter diesel will be matched with a Hybrid 48V technology system sometime in 2025. BEV SUV Firmly committed to a sustainable future, Toyota is creating new advanced mobility solutions specifically for the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024, while the Hydrogen Factory Europe is expected to "further grow Toyota hydrogen business and stimulate a wider roll-out of the hydrogen eco-system." The battery-powered vehicles are gaining momentum, too, as the company previewed an expanded dedicatedthat will comprise six vehicles two of them will turn into production models based on the Urbanand Sport Crossover concepts and the company also brought the FT-3e prototype from Japan Mobility Show.No one was left out of Toyota's show of European force, and the commercial vehicle growth ambitions are now higher than ever. The Proace and Proace City minivans, along with their Verso people carrier versions, are both revamped, and the Japanese carmaker also introduced the new Proace Max to complete the panel van lineup. Even better, there's also a fresh Hilux to speak of.Unlike the 2024 Tacoma , which is arriving at nationwide dealerships in the United States this month as an all-new iteration (N400), Toyota has yet to rework the eighth generation into a new model. Although it was presented in 2015, almost a decade ago, the current model soldiers on across international markets. In Europe, though, customers will have the option to rival the electrified Ford Ranger plug-in hybrid thanks to the newest member of the Toyota Professional family Hilux Hybrid 48V.The company says it is "more efficient, with improved performance and smoother driving in urban and off-road environments (and makes) no compromises on exceptional towing and payload capacity or unparalleled off-road capability." However, unlike the rivaling, best-selling Ford Ranger, this is just a (mild) hybrid 48V system, as opposed to the plug-in hybrid capabilities of its main competitor.In essence, the 2.8-liter diesel is mated to a "compact motor generator using a belt system, which in turn charges the new 48V lithium battery, which is small enough to be installed under the rear seats () and weighs just 7.6 kg." The 48V battery also works with the vehicle's 12V system through a new DC/DC converter. The 2.8L turbo diesel has 201 hp and 500 Nm (369 lb-ft) but now gets an additional 16 hp and 65 Nm (48 lb-ft) to "enhance acceleration, power and efficiency."The new 2024 Toyota Hilux Hybrid 48V will arrive at dealerships on the Old Continent around the middle of 2024, promising up to 5% better fuel efficiency and with the latest safety and infotainment equipment the latest Toyota Safety Sense technology suite plus the newest Toyota Smart Connect system on an 8-inch display. Wireless Android Auto adapters have become incredibly popular lately, and as a former wired user, I can totally understand why. Using Android Auto with a cable is a major challenge, not only from a convenience perspective but also because a cord significantly increases the likelihood of problems hitting the app. Cables are often the culprit of Android Auto connection glitches, so with a wireless adapter, you should get a more stable and reliable experience.AAWireless is the device that made everything happen, pioneering a product category that's now rapidly expanding with the addition of new devices at various price points. Motorola joined the battle with a device backed by Google, while generic Chinese brands copied the idea to create adapters available for much cheaper.AAWireless continues to be one of the best choices in the market, so it's no surprise that many buyers ended up confused when they couldn't find the device on Amazon. AAWireless is still available in Europe but was removed from the US store, making some Android Auto users believe the company abandoned the American market.It isn't the case, as AAWireless will still be available in the United States. It was pulled from Amazon US because of a copyright complaint. Founder Emil Borconi-Szedressy says the fake copyright complaint is already being investigated by Amazon, but despite providing proof, no infringement has taken place. The online store needs more time to figure out what happened.AAWireless was still available on eBay but was eventually sold out, so now the parent company is looking into ways to sell the device directly in the United States through the official website, therefore reducing the reliance on Amazon in the country.Meanwhile, Emil Borconi-Szedressy says he's also planning an expansion to Canada, with the device expected to land in the country in the coming months. The import rules and taxes require additional work due to the lack of a physical presence in the country, but AAWireless will still launch in Canada in the near future.If you want to get AAWireless in the United States, the only option is to wait. The device should become available on Amazon in the coming days, though it's unclear how long it'll take for Amazon to verify the copyright infringement claim and the evidence provided by AAWireless. The device disappeared from the website after Black Friday, when it received a major discount, hitting the lowest price since launch.If you don't want to wait and would rather buy a wireless Android Auto adapter right here and now, Motorola's MA1 remains available in the United States on Amazon. It still carries a 22% discount, so you can get it for $69.99 instead of the regular $89.99 price tag. The initiative dubbed Hayakve (Armenian vote) was launched by a group of Armenian political activists and public figures this summer following Prime Minister Nikol Pashinians controversial pledge to recognize Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh through an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty. The campaigners have specifically demanded two new articles of the Criminal Code which would make the Armenian governments recognition of Karabakhs incorporation into Azerbaijan and its refusal to seek greater international recognition of the 1915 Armenian genocide crimes punishable by between 10 and 15 years in prison. They argue 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 discuss any initiative backed by at least 50,000 citizens. Hayakve has collected 58,000 signatures in support of its demands. The parliament committee on legal affairs gave a negative assessment of the initiative at the end of a heated discussion that lasted for seven hours and involved bitter recriminations between its pro-government and opposition members. The decision means that the National Assembly controlled by Pashinians Civil Contract party is unlikely to even include the issue on the agenda of its plenary session on Tuesday. Artsvik Minasian, a parliament deputy from the main opposition Hayastan alliance, accused Civil Contract of deceiving Armenians who voted for it in the June 2021 general elections. Minasian argued that in its election manifesto the ruling party pledged to assert the Karabakh Armenians right to self-determination. The Armenian government stopped making references to that right on the international stage one year before Pashinian declared that it recognizes Karabakh as a part of Azerbaijan. It cited instead the need to protect the rights and security of the Karabakh Armenians through the Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty and other international mechanisms. Pashinians administration appears to have stopped seeking such security guarantees as well after the recent Azerbaijani military offensive that restored Bakus full control over Karabakh and forced its practically entire population to flee to Armenia. Alen Simonian, the Armenian parliament speaker and a key Pashinian ally, said last week that the peace treaty should not contain any special provisions on Karabakh and the return of its ethnic Armenian residents. Eduard Aghajanian, another senior Civil Contract lawmaker, backed Simonians stance on Monday, saying that the security of the Karabakh Armenians will be best ensured in Armenia. Right now its better to concentrate on eliminating the consequences of the Artsakh peoples post-traumatic stress and doing the best to establish peace, Aghajanian told reporters. 4 December 2023 10:55 (UTC+04:00) Qabil Ashirov Read more The human rights of disabled people must be constantly protected and promoted, equal opportunities must be created for them in all public spheres, and awareness work in this field must be further strengthened, Azernews reports, citing Sabina Aliyeva, the Azerbaijani Human Rights Commissioner (ombudsman), telling at a round table on Protecting the Human Rights of Disabled People and Landmine Victims in Azerbaijan. "As a result of Armenia's military aggression against Azerbaijan, during the nearly 30-year invasion period, as well as in the following years, there are numerous mines and unexploded military ammunition in our territories in Garabagh and Eastern Zangezur regions, and the other side still does not want to provide accurate information about their maps and schemes," Sabina Aliyeva said. She noted that according to statistical data, between November 10, 2020, the end of the Patriotic War, which resulted in the liberation of Azerbaijani territories from invasion, until now, 65 people, mostly civilians, were killed as a result of a mine explosion, and 272 people received various degrees of injuries. In general, from 1991 until today a total of 3,416 people were registered victims of landmines, of which 357 were children, and 38 were women. "It is with great regret that I would like to note once again that the global mine terrorism, which has caused numerous casualties, serious injuries, and thousands of people disabilities, has created a serious obstacle to the large-scale restoration and reconstruction works carried out in Azerbaijan liberated from invasion, as well as to a just and sustainable peace. it slows down the process of the safe return of internally displaced persons to their native land," Sabina Aliyeva added. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz The vocational nursing program at Alvin Community College typically starts off with 50 students but drops significantly after the first semester. The new vocational nursing bridge program will potentially increase the number of graduates in the future, said Tori McTaggart, ACC vocational nursing program coordinator. Courtesy of Alvin Community College Alvin Community Colleges licensed vocational nursing program was ranked No. 1 in the state by PracticalNursing.org. The organization, which provides resources for nursing students, recently released their list of Best LVN Programs in Texas. The school was joined by several other Houston area colleges that made the list of top programs, including Brazosport College in Lake Jackson which ranked No. 7, San Jacinto College-North in Houston at No. 15, Lone Star College in Cypress at No. 17, and Texas Health School in Houston at No. 30. Advertisement Article continues below this ad BRIDGING THE GAP: Alvin Community College approved to offer bridge program for certified nursing assistants in 2024 The organization ranked schools based on the National Council Licensure Examination for Practical Nurses first-time pass rates from all licensed practical and vocational programs across Texas, according to the website. If schools had the same overall exam pass rates, the organization analyzed the number of students taking the NCLEX-PN and number of years of test data available. NEWS TO YOUR INBOX: Sign up to stay informed on important news and stories to know around Pearland Alvin Community College received 100 overall score based on its first-time NCLEX-PN pass rates. The school offers a three-semester vocational nursing program that provides hands on experience at local clinics and hospitals such as Memorial Hermann Pearland, University of Texas Medical Branch clinics and several nursing homes. Advertisement Article continues below this ad 4 December 2023 08:30 (UTC+04:00) Abbas Ganbay Read more An important step towards peace was taken several days ago, where border delimitation issues were discussed at the Gazakh-Ijavan border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. On November 21, the Armenian Foreign Ministry reacted to the statement of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry and stated that Yerevan is ready to participate in the normalisation of relations with Azerbaijan, as well as the establishment of peace and stability in the South Caucasus. Deputy Prime Ministers of the two countries, Shahin Mustafayev and Mher Grigoryan discussed issues where, in the case of positive results, a new peaceful stage is expected to be laid in relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia. While Azerbaijan and Armenia are working to establish peace in the region between each other, Yerevan continues to move closer to the European Union, whereas it has become known that the EU is planning to increase the mission of observers and patrols on Armenia's borders with Azerbaijan. We have already witnessed the double standards of European organisations towards Azerbaijan for justice in the Garabagh region. While some officials from EU and UN organisations say they are committed to the peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan, there are also parties who try to add fuel to the fire, in the form of France, Canada, Lithuania, and other countries under the wing of the Union. With an Armenian diaspora around the world, Yerevan has enlisted the support of forces that wish to establish themselves in the South Caucasus through the Armenian Open Gate, with wide access to Russia, Iran, and the Middle East. Most Western pro-Armenian institutions continue to propagate hatred towards Azerbaijan and its people, and often amongst these institutions are managers and executives of Armenian origin, who consequently strengthen their love of propagating anti-Azerbaijani statements. Take up Freedom House, which conducts anti-Azerbaijani research, for example. An organisation chart of Freedom House has been circulated on the internet recently. The vice president in charge of policy and the defence of rights, Annie Wilcox-Boyajan, curator of projects "for the development of democratic culture," Roza Melkumyan, project manager Andranik Shirinyan, and Victoria Andrksyan and so on. Thus it is obvious why this organization makes groundless statements against Azerbaijan. Remembering how France came forward to arm Armenia under the guise of "defence," now the EU is already deciding to allocate half a billion euros, which implies a move away from Russia. The visit of the European delegation to Armenia ended quite expectantly with the announcement of a new multi-million-dollar aid package. It was announced that the EU will allocate 500 million euros of "investments" to Armenia within the framework of a certain "economic and investment plan." Under what plan and what kind of investments are we talking about? It is not clear yet. What is important is that, in parallel, the EU will consider the possibility of supporting the Armenian Armed Forces. The implementation of this support will come from the European Peace Fund, which was created to finance the Ukrainian army. Knowing that many countries "support" Ukraine in the war with Russia, at the moment they have chosen the way of regrouping their forces for more "necessary things". Western countries and alliances, as well as the United States, are discussing the further outcome of the events in the war between Ukraine and Russia, where, in the end, the way was chosen: to stop supplying weapons to the Ukrainian side under the guise of "we are for peace." Now that the picture is becoming clearer, it is easier to see the initiatives and desires of the EU in financing the militarisation of Armenia. The European Union decided to invest half a billion euros in Armenia, where this may be a handout to keep Yerevan from leaving Russia in the future or in good time. EU funding of the Armenian Armed Forces is money for the purchase of Western weapons (not without French help) and equipment instead of Russian weapons. France, now the EU, and there may be other "clan brothers" of the Crusaders getting involved in this category. Why did the EU choose Armenia? It is known that representatives of the Armenian and British Defence Ministries in London signed a programme of Armenian-British cooperation in the sphere of defence for 2023-2024. On the other hand, India and Iran at one time made decisions to supply and pass military equipment for Armenia through their borders, but soon things failed for them as the Garabagh issue was closed. Maybe this is a help to Yerevan? One day before London and Yerevan signed the cooperation, the former accused Iran of destabilising the Middle East, stating that "Iran is an unacceptable threat to the region through its destabilising activities and support for proxies in the region, including Hamas, Hizbullah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad". Many dare to "help" Yerevan, and it is not yet known for what ambitions. Based on the information, we can assume the desire of Western structures to freeze or at least move forward with the signing of a peace treaty between Azerbaijan and Armenia for some time. Armenia has the right to increase its defence industry, but this is acceptable when relations in the region are well established and the West is not standing at the open gate. At the moment, Yerevan wants to sow seeds, but the seeds are spoiled. --- Abbas Ganbay is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @Noend33 Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 12:10 (UTC+04:00) By Alimat Aliyeva Only Azerbaijan can lead Armenia out of the current situation, Azernews reports, citing Georgian military and political expert Vakhtang Maysaya. Vakhtang Maysaya said that Armenia suffers the most from the closure of the Upper Lars checkpoint, the only land route between Georgia and Russia. Today, thousands of cars belonging to Armenians are parked at the border checkpoint. The Armenian leadership should understand that the only way out of this situation today is to sign a peace treaty with Azerbaijan. The Armenian leadership must realize that only Azerbaijan can lead them out of the current situation. According to him, the Armenian side must sign a peace treaty with Azerbaijan, otherwise, the current situation will lead to the end of Armenia. "The peace treaty will open the way to economic cooperation. After signing the agreement, Armenia's trade and economic relations with Azerbaijan and Turkiye will be improved. This means the opening of a new corridor, thanks to which, on the one hand, the trade potential of the South Caucasus will increase, and on the other hand, its security will be ensured," he said. The expert believes that at the current pace, a peace treaty will be signed no later than January-February 2024. Because official Yerevan understands that the planned peace treaty will not only save them but also make the region economically strong. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 13:50 (UTC+04:00) By Asim Aliev Six Azerbaijani cities have been awarded the title of tourist capital, one of them is Shusha, Azernews reports, citing the Secretary General of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) Khusrov Noziri telling at The 1st Meeting of the Tourism Specialized Education Institutions of the ECO Member States. He pointed out that Azerbaijan is a country with very good indicators in the sphere of tourism in the region and realizes important projects in the direction of tourism development. "This was decided at the 7th meeting of high-level tourism experts of the OIC member states and the 5th meeting of tourism ministers in Iran's Ardabil on October 4-5 within the framework of Azerbaijan's chairmanship in the OIC," Khusrov Noziri said. The Secretary-General commented that, as a result of attention and care for tourism in Azerbaijan, the city of Shusha has been selected as the tourism capital of Azerbaijan. The introduction of technological innovations in tourism, which is one of the most realistic areas of application of artificial intelligence, is close at hand. This, in turn, is not reflected in tourism education. Tourism development exists on the basis of peace and sustainability. As eco-educational institutions, we apply many models in education. We believe that we can achieve the development of this sector by continuing to work closely together in a time of technological development. We also need to meet our special educational needs in tourism. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 15:29 (UTC+04:00) By Asim Aliev The Joint Commission on trade-economic, scientific-technical and cultural cooperation between Azerbaijan and Iraq will be held in Baghdad this week, Azernews reports, citing Azerbaijan's Ambassador to Iraq Nasir Mammadov interview with the local media outlet. The Ambassador pointed out that the development of cooperation in various directions, including trade, ecomics and transportation, was discussed at the meeting of the presidents of the two countries on November 20. He added that the meeting planned in Baghdad will discuss 5 issues of mutually beneficial cooperation. The diplomat commented that the Azerbaijani delegation, which will visit Baghdad, will discuss issues of mutual investments between the two countries, cooperation in oil and gas, higher education, scientific and cultural research, and sending Iraqi students to Azerbaijan. He also added that the first business forum of Azerbaijani and Iraqi businessmen will be held in Baghdad. Mammadov claimed that a large number of reciprocal visits will be made in 2024 to increase the volume of trade exchange. The embassy is working with Iraqi officials and businessmen to increase trade between the two countries. Regarding investment in the gas sector, the ambassador was quoted as saying that this issue is being studied by the Iraqi government and the Iraqi oil minister or the relevant authorities will comment on it soon. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 15:10 (UTC+04:00) By Asim Aliev The official opening ceremony of the 39th Ministerial Meeting of the Standing Committee on Economic and Trade Cooperation (COMCEC) of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is taking place in Istanbul. A delegation headed by Deputy Economy Minister Sahib Mammadov represents Azerbaijan, Azernews reports, citing the Ministry. The event began with the recitation of ayats of the Holy Quran. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who addressed the ceremony, said that the Islamophobia taking place in the world is hiding under the name of freedom of expression. Referring to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Erdogan stated that the way to peace in the region is through a peaceful resolution of the conflict. Emphasizing the importance of enhancing economic cooperation among member countries, the Turkish president said that the development of e-commerce and digital transformation create new opportunities for the economy. During the event, which will be held from December 2 to 5, COMCEC member countries will discuss efforts to improve cooperation in the fields of trade, finance, transportation, communication, agriculture, tourism, poverty reduction and digital transformation. Panel sessions are being held on Global Recognition of Halal Certificates and Alternative Resolution of Global Disputes. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 16:35 (UTC+04:00) By Asim Aliev The Azerbaijan-European Union will update the "Road Map" on the implementation of the Strategic Energy Partnership document, Azernews reports, citing a tweet by Azerbaijan's Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov on his official X account. He emphasized that this was agreed during the meeting with EU Commissioner for Energy Kadri Simson. The Minister noted that during the meeting with EU Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson in the UAE, fruitful discussions were held on the Southern Gas Corridor and the Green Energy Corridor, as well as other priorities of energy dialog. We agreed to update the roadmap for the implementation of the Azerbaijan-EU Strategic Energy Partnership document. Parviz Shahbazov also discussed with Virgil-Daniel Popescu, Chairman of the Commission on Environment and Ecological Balance of the Romanian Parliament, on the sidelines of the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) in Dubai(UAE). The Minister noted that a meeting was held at the National Pavilion with the Chairman of the Commission on Environment and Ecological Balance of the Romanian Parliament Virgil-Daniel Popescu, where the goals and contributions of Azerbaijan's green energy policy were presented. We exchanged views on our energy partnership. In the meeting with EU Energy Commissioner @KadriSimson in the #UAE, we held fruitful discussions on the #SouthernGasCorridor and #GreenEnergyCorridor, other priorities of our energy dialogue... pic.twitter.com/pCEKzlJpRh Parviz Shahbazov (@ParvizShahbazov) December 4, 2023 --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 16:10 (UTC+04:00) In January-November of 2023, transiting through Azerbaijan in the Middle Corridor, container transportation in the West-East direction increased by 2.3 times compared to the same period last year, Azernews reports, the representative of ADY Container Rashad Majidov tellin at the "European Silk Road Summit" held in Budapest. Rashad Majidov informed the participants of the summit about the importance of Azerbaijan in the Middle Corridor, and the measures taken to increase the functionality and competitiveness of the corridor. In the current geopolitical situation in the Eurasian region, the advantages of the Middle Corridor compared to other alternative routes and complex logistical solutions for the corridor were discussed. The special role of the Middle Corridor in increasing the trade turnover between China, Central Asia, Azerbaijan and European countries was emphasized. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz YARAT Contemporary Art Space has opened a solo exhibition by the Peoples Artist of Azerbaijan, Farhad Khalilov, titled Between the Earth and the Sky at the Museum of Azerbaijani Painting of the XX-XXI centuries. The exhibition displays paintings created by the artist in recent years as well as graphic works that have not been shown until now, Azernews reports. Head of the Department for Relations with Political Parties and Legislative Authority Adalat Valiyev, the Culture Minister Adil Karimli, representatives of state and public organizations, scientists and cultural figures, representatives of the creative intelligentsia and youth attended the event. The true art school of the young Farhad Khalilov, who garnered attention with a distinctive style at the All-Union exhibitions of the 1960s and 70s, was the unofficial artistic life of Moscow during that era. Maturing amidst Ilya Kabakov, Oleg Tselkov, Yuri Cooper, Yevgeny Chubarov, and other nonconformist artists, Khalilov is recognized for his contributions to high artistic values and is shaped as an artist rooted in national traditions. Javad Mirjavadov, Ashraf Murad, and Sanan Gurbanov were the artist's main like-minded individuals who returned to Azerbaijan after graduating from the Moscow Higher Art-Industrial School (Stroganov). Between the Earth and the Sky showcases works by the artist that delve into his extensive body of work, exploring poetic themes. Khalilov reflects various states of nature in his works, conveying the environment as he perceives it. The revelation of these circumstances forms the core of the exhibition. The collection, unified under the metaphorical title Between the Earth and the Sky, pays homage to the elements that inspire the artist, serving as his primary source of inspiration. The artist's creative trajectory represents a philosophical discourse that transitions from figurative art to abstraction and minimalistic abstraction, embracing different visual solutions at various stages of his career. In the master colourists generalized abstractions, the interpretation of colour and space is not narrated. For the artist, it is not the motive that holds significance but rather the state, condition, and impression. *** Farhad Khalilov (b. 1946, Baku) received his initial vocational education from 1961 to 1966, studying at the Azerbaijan State Art School named after A. Azimzade. Subsequently, from 1966 to 1968, he continued his education at the Moscow Higher Art-Industrial School (Stroganov), and from 1969 to 1975, at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. Since the 1960s, he actively participated in art exhibitions. His solo exhibitions were held in Azerbaijan, Russia, and other countries, including Back in Baku (Heydar Aliyev Centre, Baku, 2019); Rendezvous (XTNS, Moscow, 2016); Personal Exhibition (The Saatchi Gallery, London, 2015); Acquaintance Personal Exhibition (Boom Gallery, London, 2011); Personal Exhibition (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2008); Personal Exhibition (Berlin City Hall, 2004); Personal Exhibition (International Art Centre, Paris, 2000), etc. His works have also been featured in group exhibitions in the USA, Germany, Japan, Poland, France, Spain, and Italy. He has been the Chairman of the Union of Artists of Azerbaijan since 1987. People's Artist Farhad Khalilov has been honoured with the Shohrat and Sharaf orders for his contributions to the development of Azerbaijani art. In 2021, he received the Labor order of the 1st degree. The artist's works are housed in museums and private collections in Russia, Turkey, France, Switzerland, Germany, England, Japan, and the UAE. Address: Baku, Bayil dist., National Flag Square Exhibition opens: Tuesday Sunday, 12:00 20:00 --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @lmntypewriterrr Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 11:38 (UTC+04:00) Laman Ismayilova Read more Azerbaijani vocalist Teymur Kazimov has been awarded in Russia as the one of the best students from the CIS countries studying in St. Petersburg. The young talent was handed a letter of gratitude from the Committee for External Relations of St. Petersburg For academic success and contribution to strengthening cooperation between Azerbaijan and St. Petersburg, Azernews reports. Teymur Kazimov is a laureate of national and international music competitions. He is a graduate of the Baku Music Academy's Music School-Studio. Currently, the vocalist studies at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory. The students were greeted by a member of the Government of St. Petersburg, chairman of the Committee for External Relations of St. Petersburg Evgeny Grigoriev. In his speech, Evgeny Grigorie noted the students' achievements in their studies, social and professional activities, and wished them further success, conveying congratulations and warmest wishes from the Governor of St. Petersburg Alexander Beglov. Letters of gratitude were presented to 66 students from Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and other countries. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 14:10 (UTC+04:00) President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev signed the Decree "On approval of the Memorandum of Understanding in the field of energy between the Ministry of Energy of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the National Energy Administration of the People's Republic of China". According to the decree, the Memorandum of Understanding in the field of energy between the Ministry of Energy of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the National Energy Administration of the Peoples Republic of China, signed on October 17, 2023 in Beijing, has been approved. After the entry into force of the memorandum of understanding specified in this decree, the Ministry of Energy of Azerbaijan must ensure the implementation of its provisions. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan must send a notification to the government of the People's Republic of China to complete the internal procedures necessary for the entry into force of the memorandum of understanding. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz International Leadership of Texas is slated to open its first Pearland K-8 free public charter in Aug. 2024. Courtesy of International Leadership of Texas A new Pearland charter school teaching kindergarten through eighth grade is accepting student applications as it prepares to welcome more than 1,416 children next school year. The International Leadership of Texas $42 million campus recently resumed construction after lengthy supply chain delays and is on track to open August 2024 in Brazoria, a county with fewer than 10 charter schools as of March, the Chronicle reports. Advertisement Article continues below this ad "We never view ourselves in competition with ISDs," said Alexandra Crutcher, ILTexas' public relations manager. "We're simply another option for parents to educate their kids. We're not better or worse. We're just different. If a child has aspirations to go into international affairs, or become trilingual by the time they graduate, then we would be a good fit for that student." PEARLAND INSIDER: Stay updated on important stories and news to know around Pearland The Pearland location will be one of seven Houston area campuses and school officials recently hosted meetings to provide information and answer questions parents may have. The schools provide students an opportunity to learn English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese along with Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills required by the state. Heres more information about how the charter school operates and what it offers. Advertisement Article continues below this ad What's the difference between an ISD and charter school? Charter schools are funded through the state, charitable donations and grants. Unlike ISDs, they don't receive additional funding from local taxes. Charter schools generally receive $500-1,000 less per student from the state than a traditional public school, according to the Texas Public Charter Schools Association. Charter schools are not required to have an armed security guard, per House Bill 3 that went into effect in September. However, ILTexas will have an armed security guard at its Pearland location for safety, said superintendent and chief executive officer Eddie Conger. State law doesn't require charter schools to enter employment contracts with employees. The school's board makes this decision and sets their own salaries, according to the Texas Education Agency. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The TEA also requires teachers at public charter schools to have a bachelor's degree unless they are a special education, bilingual or English as a Second Language teacher. However, the governing body of a charter school is allowed to set qualifications for teachers at a standard above what the state law requires. Teachers at ILTexas schools are not required to be certified by the state but may receive additional training and have opportunities to become certified through programs provided by the schools if they choose to do so, according to Laura Carrasco, deputy superintendent of academics and student services. School boards at charter schools are not elected because the school doesn't have access to local taxes like independent school districts. The public can attend the school board meetings online and in-person, similar to ISDs. How does ILTexas' trilingual education system work? Students in all grade levels receive academic instruction in English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese through a 50/50 dual language program. Two teachers work together to alternate languages every other day and pick up on the curriculum where the other stops the previous days. Advertisement Article continues below this ad "It takes 5-7 years to become fluent in any language," Conger said. Students are placed in language classes based on their experience level. For example, middle schoolers who have no experience in Spanish or Mandarin will start at the beginner level and work their way up, according to Carrasco. "We know that Mandarin Chinese is the language that is going to support our students to be global leaders," said principal Ebony James Will there be transportation provided by ILTexas in Pearland? Advertisement Article continues below this ad ILTexas Pearland does not provide transportation to and from school. The school may work with an on-site after school and before school program that would monitor students prior to and following their school days. Parents will have to pay a fee to use the service that is expected to be available 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. to support parents, James said. Transportation will be provided to the ILTexas Windmill Lakes-Orem High School in Houston from the Pearland K-8 campus for students who decide to continue their education with ILTexas. How do families apply for ILTexas in Pearland? The school is accepting applications for the 2024-25 school year, and the application review process will begin in February based on a first-come, first-served lottery system. Students who are accepted may continue to the ILTexas Windmill Lakes-Orem High School, 9901 Windmill Lakes Blvd. in Houston without having to reapply. What are the requirements to enroll in ILTexas in Pearland? Prospective students must be 5 years old on or before Sept. 1 and reside within the school's geographical boundaries, which may be found through the ILTexas application website. If the oldest sibling in a family is accepted into the school, applications for all siblings are automatically accepted and enrolled in the school, Conger said. Parents or guardians must provide their childs original birth certificate, immunization records, social security card, academic transcript from previous school, parent or legal guardian identification such as a drivers license or passport, and parent or legal guardians proof of residency such as a utility bill, lease or car insurance. 4 December 2023 16:59 (UTC+04:00) Qabil Ashirov Read more Last week OPEC+ producers held a meeting in a video format to look through the strategy of the organization in 2024. The members agreed to voluntarily cut oil production in the first quarter of next year to boost the market, but markets reacted to it the opposite. The group met to discuss 2024 output amid forecasts the market faces a potential surplus and as a 1 million barrel per day (bpd) voluntary cut by Saudi Arabia was set to end next month. Other member countries supported Saudia Arabias decision and they agreed to cut all production as well. The total curbs amount to 2.2 million bpd. Russia will cut 300,000 bdp, Iran 220,000 bdp, the UAE 163,000 and so on. It is observed that the world, which has not yet fully recovered from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukrainian war, is not ready to face the increase in oil prices and its possible effects. Speaking to Azernews on the agenda, a British journalist and expert on energy issues Neil Watson said that 2.2million barrels is not enough to cause the increase in oil prices. He noted that here an important point is that if the organization cuts production further in the future. "In my view, OPEC+ will not achieve its expressed objectives from this 2.2 million barrels per day cut. It seems apparent that it is an insufficient amount to spike worldwide demand in crude oil and there are questions to be asked about whether than OPEC+ can cut any more production in a vain attempt to boost barrel prices. Oil prices are very much reflecting the widespread view that those cuts can and will never be achieved. Since July, including the current production cuts, a reduction of nearly 5 million barrels per day has been implemented. Despite that, OPEC+ is being challenged to keep the price above the minimum acceptable of USD80 per barrel. Already there are murmurings of discontent amongst the OPEC+ members and I do not feel much more can be cut voluntarily," Neil Watson said. He also touched on the issues of the impacts of oil price increases globally and noted that there are two ways of looking at this situation. Obviously the economies of all oil-rich economies will be impacted and that has a downward multiplier effect on the economy. But, conversely, oil consuming countries will find that that the cost of fuel and energy reduces, and that will affect the currently heightened living costs across the Western World. As for Azerbaijan, Neil Watson said that it could have negative effect for the countrys economy. "Production will reduce and the barrel price will struggle to remain at USD80. There will be less incentive to exploit new oil resources. But Azerbaijan is correctly focusing on gas, and this will help its economy remain buoyant. Besides, it is correct to realise that oil demand will not last forever, and hence it has recentred its focus towards gas and is currently examining renewables and expansion of the non-oil economy. But it needs to strategise and implement its policies imminently - oil is the fuel of the 19th and 20th centuries - not the future," Neil Watson said. --- Qabil Ashirov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @g_Ashirov Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 08:00 (UTC+04:00) Turkish police have arrested in Istanbul a manager of an organized crime group operating in Russia, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on Sunday, Azernews reports, citing Anadolu Agency. Shamil Amirov, one of the managers of the "Thieves in Law" organized crime syndicate, was wanted by Interpol with blue notice for fraud and was caught in Istanbul during Operation Cage-15, Yerlikaya said on X. He said that the Istanbul Anti-Organized Crime Branch Directorate found Amirov to be residing in Sariyer district of the city. Our fight against international and national organized crime centers and poison traffickers will continue increasingly, the minister said. We are determined to clear our country of international and national organized crime groups. We will catch them one by one and bring them to justice, he added. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 19:40 (UTC+04:00) France's TotalEnergies and Kazakhstan's Ministry of Energy have signed an Agreement on Investment (AoI) to construct a wind power plant in the village of Mirny, the Zhambyl region, TotalEnergies' press service said on Monday in a press release, Azernews reports, citing Interfax. The document was signed in Dubai by TotalEnergies Chairman and CEO Patrick Pouyanne and Kazakh Energy Minister Almasadam Satkaliyev in the presence of Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev during the UN COP28 climate change conference. "This Agreement on Investment comes after the signature in June 2023 of a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for the Mirny project," according to the press release. Investment in the project will total over $1.4 billion. In 2022, Total Eren, part of TotalEnergies, signed an agreement to create Kazakhstan's biggest wind energy project in the Zhambyl Region. The project is expected to draw 820 billion tenge in investment, and it features a 300 MWh/600 MWh energy storage system. It is projected to start operating in 2026-2027, and costs an estimated $1.9 billion. In June 2023, Total Eren, JSC Samruk-Kazyna National Wealth Fund, and JSC KazMunayGas National Company signed an agreement on the purchase of electricity from the Mirny wind farm in the Zhambyl Region. Technically, the electricity will be purchased by Kazakhstan's RES Payment Center LLP from a joint venture created by Total Eren S.A. (60%), Samruk-Kazyna (20%), and KazMunayGas (20%). In November 2023, Kazakhstan's lower house of parliament, the Majilis, approved a law ratifying an agreement for France to construct a wind power plant in the Zhambyl Region. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 20:10 (UTC+04:00) Bulgaria has permitted licensed imports of Ukrainian sunflower, rapeseed, corn, and wheat, the Bulgarian Agriculture and Food Ministry said in a statement on its website quoted by Ukrainian media, Azernews reports, citing Interfax. Bulgarian Agriculture Minister Kiril Vatev and Ukrainian Agrarian Policy and Food Minister Nikolai Solsky agreed on details of licensed exports of sunflower seeds, rapeseed, corn, and wheat from Ukraine to Bulgaria at an online meeting on December 1, the ministry said. "The Bulgarian Agriculture and Food Ministry has kept its promise to limit imports of these agricultural products as much as possible up to November 30, according to the memorandum concluded between the government and the farmers protesting committee," the ministry quoted Vatev as saying. Upon the expiration of this period, the two countries "will strictly monitor the market to make sure that there are no market distortions and the interests of Bulgarian producers, processors, and consumers are not undermined," he said. The two countries will continue to monitor imports and exchange data, the Bulgarian ministry said. Solsky anticipated in November that Bulgaria, which refrained from imposing unilateral national restrictions on Ukrainian imports after September 15, when the EU lifted its relevant restrictions, could be the first EU country neighboring Ukraine to lift the restrictions in trade in agrifood. Solsky suggested that Bulgaria would particularly wish to import sunflower from Ukraine. Bulgarian farmers and processing companies agreed in the fall of 2023 to open the domestic market to Ukrainian sunflower imports starting December 1. The Bulgarian government expected that local sunflower oil producers would buy up all sunflower seeds produced by local farmers by this date and would require another 1.5 million tonnes of them. According to the Ukrainian oil industry association Ukroliyaprom, Bulgaria has 16 oil extraction facilities, which considerably increased production in the 2022 season and plan to develop sunflower oil exports using sunflower seeds imported from Ukraine. The European Commission announced on September 15 that it would not extend restrictions on imports of agricultural produce from Ukraine to the five neighboring EU countries, i.e. Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, based on certain conditions to avoid a new sharp hike in supplies. The EU had imposed restrictions on imports of Ukrainian wheat, rapeseed, sunflower, and corn to the five countries on May 2. Those countries insisted that duty-free shipments of Ukrainian agrifood to the EU flooded their markets and damaged their agricultural sector. After the EU lifted the restrictions, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia imposed unilateral bans. Moreover, Poland has added rapeseed cake and grist, corn bran, wheat flour, and their derivatives to the import ban list, and Hungary has extended its list to 24 items. Ukraine has filed a motion with the World Trade Organization accusing Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia of discriminating against its agricultural produce. Ukraine is currently in negotiations on licensing exports of its food products subject to their mandatory verification in each of the five countries. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 21:55 (UTC+04:00) On December 2, a delegation led by the Minister of Internal Affairs of Uzbekistan, Lieutenant General Pulat Bobojonov, met with the Deputy PM of the United Arab Emirates, the Minister of Internal Affairs, Sheikh Saif bin Zaid Al Nahyan, Azernews reports, citing Kun.uz News Agency. According to the MIA press service, during the meeting, an MoU on mutual recognition and exchange of drivers licenses between the government of the Republic of Uzbekistan and the government of the United Arab Emirates was signed. It is noted that upon the entry into force of this memorandum, citizens of both countries will have the right to drive vehicles with their national drivers licenses during their visit to the territory of the other country (except for those who come for long-term residence). Citizens of Uzbekistan who are residents of the UAE (long-term residents) and have a national drivers license are exempted from passing the relevant theoretical and practical tests when obtaining a UAE drivers license. The document is scheduled to enter into force on January 27, 2024. Also, at the meeting, the parties discussed the joint fight against transnational organized crime, terrorism, extremism, human trafficking and cybercrime, improving the skills of employees in these areas and exchanging mutual experience. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 22:25 (UTC+04:00) Currently, Toshshahartranskhizmat has 2,017 buses in its fleet. 672 of them run on diesel, 1,020 on natural gas, and 324 on electricity, Azernews reports, citing Kun.uz News Agency. Some 58.7% of buses purchased in 2022-2023 run on compressed natural gas, 21.4% on electricity. As a result of the measures to turn the Tashkent public transport system green, the amount of harmful substances released from the rolling stock decreased to 5.1 thousand tons in 2022, and 4.8 thousand tons in 2023. 4 December 2023 22:57 (UTC+04:00) Regions of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan intend to develop cooperation in tourism, Azernews reports, citing 24.kg News Agency. According to its data, specialists of tourism departments of Fergana, Andijan and Namangan regions made working trips to Osh, Jalal-Abad and Arslanbob. The issues of strengthening regional cooperation in the tourism sphere, in particular, the possibility of implementation of joint projects, increasing the flow of mutual tourists were considered during the talks. The sides voiced the proposals on infrastructure development in the spheres of culture, history, trade, crafts and sports. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz 4 December 2023 23:30 (UTC+04:00) Coal imports to Kyrgyzstan have almost halved. The National Statistical Committee provided such data, Azernews reports, citing 24.kg News Agency. According to statistics, from January to September 2023, about 469,500 tons of coal was imported into the country. Of this amount, the supply of solid fuel is 459,400 (821,500 tons were imported into the Kyrgyz Republic for the same period last year). The supply of brown coal reached 10,100 tons. Almost all imported coal comes to the country from Kazakhstan. Earlier, the Ministry of Energy reported that in preparation for the autumn-winter period of 2023-2024 it was planned to supply 1.2 million tons of solid fuel for the Bishkek Heating and Power Plant. Of this, 550,000 tons are imported D grade coal. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz Claire Hao is a Hearst Fellow for the Houston Chronicle's business desk, where she is starting by covering electricity, renewable energy and the Texas power grid. She also spends one day a week covering breaking and trending news. Claire spent her first-year fellowship rotation on the climate and environment team of The San Francisco Chronicle. She has previously interned on the news desks of Bloomberg Law and The Chicago Tribune as well as on the editorial board of The Washington Post. She is a 2022 graduate of the University of Michigan, where she was the 2021 editor-in-chief of her college paper The Michigan Daily. Understanding that there are two firm positions concerning the Open Border Crises, but many realties regarding its current, and, or projected real impacts to the functioning, sustainability of this Constitutional Republic: What position below best represents what you know to be true regarding this impactful policy? 0% The United States' must continue the Executive initiative of Open Borders until a Democratic Congress can codify full Demographic Inclusion by keeping the Biden /Harris Open Borders policy in place.34.62% Our United States' borders are sovereign just as are our self-governed citizens, where borders must be maintained, monitored and defended, which is the position of core Republicans.3.85% I am in favor of Open Borders to make my America more of a global community; however, the federal government must now fix problems that "Red State" governors have caused in our cities.61.54% I do NOT favor the Democratic Socialists' disruption of the cultural fabric of my Representative Republic, and there will be Treasonous Hell to Pay when the certain calamity begins in earnest. Here are 14 suits where physicians are suing their former employers that Becker's has reported on in 2023: 1. Cancer physician David Hetzel, MD, is suing his former employer, Asheville, N.C.-based Mission Hospital, alleging the hospital incorrectly reported him to the National Practitioner's Databank. 2. Lylas Mogk, MD, an ophthalmologist at Henry Ford Health in Grosse Pointe Park, Mich., is suing the system for age discrimination.The health system requires a cognition assessment for all Henry Ford Medical Group members who are 70 or older the lawsuit claims that if the employee does not comply with the screening, they will either voluntarily resign or be terminated. 3. Bangor-based Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center is among those being sued by a former colorectal surgeon who claims she was discriminated against based on her sex and country of origin. 4. David Lankford, MD, an Indiana-based pediatric intensivist, filed a lawsuit against Fort Wayne-based Lutheran Medical Group to prevent his former employer from enforcing a noncompete agreement. 5. A Black, gay orthopedic surgeon is suing Los Angeles County, Keck Medicine of USC and University of California Health Los Angeles over alleged discrimination. 6. Family physician Matthew Heckman, MD, is suing Pittsburgh-based UPMC, alleging wrongful termination. Dr. Heckman is a former employee of Wellsboro, Pa.-based Laurel Health Centers, a subsidiary of UPMC Wellsboro. 7. New York physician Leigh Ann Hutchinson, MD, is suing her former employer South Shore University Hospital in Bay Shore, alleging decades of discrimination. Dr. Hutchinson, the only Black electrophysiologist at the hospital, alleges the discrimination she faced at the Northwell Health hospital resulted in a yearly income loss of roughly $900,000 since 2004. 8. Samer Ilayan, MD, is suing Grand Rapids and Southfield, Mich.-based health system Corewell Health over alleged religious discrimination. He alleges in the lawsuit that Corewell's Beaumont Athens Clinic in Taylor, Mich., wrongfully terminated him after denying his requests for five-minute daily breaks for prayer and time on Fridays to attend weekly prayers. 9. Randall Tobler, MD, is suing Memphis, Mo.-based Scotland County Hospital, alleging slander and defamation after he was allegedly wrongfully terminated as CEO. Dr. Tobler claims the hospital's board members and employees violated the state's Sunshine Law by making false, defamatory comments to get him fired from his position, including that he allegedly embezzled money from the hospital's day care and pharmacy. 10. Ginger Holt, MD, an orthopedic oncology surgeon, filed a lawsuit against Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center alleging discrimination. 11. Paul Mason, MD, is suing Warsaw, N.Y.-based Wyoming County Community Health System over his termination more than a year ago 12. Anne Grand'Maison, MD, is suing Buffalo, N.Y.-based Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, alleging it compromised patient safety and is gender biased. The lawsuit alleges that in at least 20 cases, Dr. Grand'Maison, who is trained in sarcoma, received pathology reports for sarcoma patients that had several diagnostic errors. 13. Trinity Health and four surgeons sued Grand Rapids-based Orthopaedic Associates of Michigan, accusing the practice of holding a monopoly in Kent County. 14. James Mooney, MD, is suing Atlanta-based Emory University over alleged bias after he was demoted during a sexual harassment investigation. Dr. Mooney, a pediatric anesthesiologist, was cleared of all allegations. He is currently a faculty member for Emory's School of Medicine and works at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. Shannon Lockhart was confused when the medical examiners office called in May. Her brother, 56, had died, the person explained, but what disoriented her was the way her brother was being described as a homeless man. Stephen Lockhart had been homeless at one point. The linguistics expert helped keep ships safe for the Navy with his quick and accurate sorting of intercepted communications. Until, suddenly, the officer, fluent in Russian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Georgian, suffered a mental breakdown on the job, his sister explained. He was honorably discharged after a decade of service. In the years that followed, he moved first into an inherited family home that fell into foreclosure. Then, an apartment rented by his sister, his daughters home and, finally, a mens shelter. Photos and records related to the late Stephen Lockhart sit on a table Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at his sister Shannon Lockharts apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer In 2018, he became part of Houstons success story in reducing homelessness. He moved into Travis Street Plaza, an apartment complex specializing in serving formerly homeless veterans. There, he regaled his new friends with twisting tales peppered with unexpected facts, drawing from both his career and the novels that hed read. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Shannon Lockhart cries as she talks about the death of her brother Stephen on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at her apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Shannon called the Travis Street Plaza office to find out what happened to her brother. Thats when she learned he had been evicted for not paying rent. People moved out of homelessness often face eviction, a Houston Chronicle examination of housing court records has found. Most evictions are not for major behavioral issues such as crime but for other problems, such as paperwork or the conditions of their apartments, which lead housing authorities to stop voucher payments. Houstons strategy for addressing homelessness is built on moving people into permanent housing coupled with caseworkers tasked with helping residents adjust. Caseworkers provide what are called supportive services. They help with voucher paperwork and provide other assistance for example, they may resolve a communication issue with a landlord or connect a tenant with medical care or employment programs. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The region, however, doesnt track how often supportive services fail to help residents avoid eviction. Shannon Lockhart cries as she talks about the death of her brother Stephen on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at her apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Shannon struggled to understand how Stephen could be evicted for rent. Stephens voucher, administered by the Houston Housing Authority, meant he should never pay more than he could afford $1 a month, in his case to stay in his apartment. The building where he lived featured caseworkers, eviction safeguards. She was listed as one of Stephens emergency contacts. Somehow, every resource meant to ensure that Stephens permanent supportive housing stayed permanent failed. After Stephens eviction in March, he became homeless once more, living just outside the apartment complex, his friends said. Two months later, he was dead. Shannon Lockhart analyzes records related to the eviction of her late brother Stephen Lockhart on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at her apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Losing permanent supportive housing Advertisement Article continues below this ad Lawyers, property owners and tenants say its common for people housed with vouchers to fall through the cracks. They say that the steps to remain in the program often become snarled. Recertification is a yearly income verification process that determines how much rent a tenant pays and how much the housing authority covers using federal funds. Kim Myles Brown, litigation director with the nonprofit Lone Star Legal Aid, said it was not uncommon for people sending their paperwork to housing authorities to be met with a delay or no response. Renters can be evicted if the apartment does not receive the full rent sum while things are sorted out. Tim Nguyen is a landlord who rents about a dozen of his units to formerly homeless individuals with vouchers. He provided emails from 2021 showing that five months of back and forth with the Houston Housing Authority and a tenants housing specialist were not enough to sort out the paperwork required for voucher payments. The dispute boiled down to who would cover utilities. An email from the housing authority before the tenant moved in indicated the tenant would cover utilities, but the contract the housing authority later sent indicated that Nguyens company would pay them. After five months passed without resolving the issue, the tenant received an eviction judgment for nonpayment of rent. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The eviction, in turn, caused the tenant to lose his voucher. Housing authorities and some property owners say that the reasons a person loses their voucher can be more complex. Recent evictions at New Hope Housing, another permanent supportive housing provider, represent the major reasons people lose their vouchers, said Joy Horak-Brown, chief executive. Shannon Lockhart, right, and her niece Morgan Hagan analyze records related to the eviction of Lockharts late brother Stephen Lockhart on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at her apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer On March 11, 2021, the organization filed for an eviction against a man who had formerly been homeless. The voucher covered his entire rent of $812 a month; the man was not responsible for a penny. Yet he was over $4,200 behind rent, according to the filing. He was evicted. Advertisement Article continues below this ad In November of 2022, the same happened to two other formerly homeless men. One was not responsible for any rent; the other was only responsible for $1 a month. Both received eviction rulings for not paying rent. Horak-Brown said in each case, the men had made decisions that ended their access to voucher subsidies: One had refused to fill out his recertification paperwork; one had failed the housing authoritys inspection and moved out rather than make repairs; and one had simply disappeared, abandoning the unit. She said these decisions had been made despite the apartment offering an onsite case manager, life skills training and a staff member who specializes in helping people navigate voucher requirements. Our job is to help challenged citizens stabilize their lives in housing with services, she said. And yet you do run into these considerable bumps in the road. Systems break down Army veteran Ronnie Payne Jr. greets Buddy, his neighbor's dog, as he packs his belongings on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023 in Houston. Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer On April 29, one of Stephens friends, Ronnie Payne Jr., examined a letter taped to his door at Travis Street Plaza. NOTICE TO VACATE, it read. The paper said he was more than $2,800 behind on his rent and would have to pay it in three days. The Army veteran had been making his monthly rent payments of about $250; he received roughly $840 in disability a month. But he wasnt surprised or worried by the notice. It was probably a paperwork issue, he reasoned. That had happened at least twice since he moved into his housing in 2016, emails show. One time, the housing authority believed he had been convicted of a felony (he had not). Another time, he showed up at the wrong Harris County Housing Authority location on the day of his recertification appointment. Both times, when the housing authority told the property manager it was no longer making payments, Travis Street Plaza staff emailed to figure out what had happened. They offered to talk to Payne or his caseworker to make sure the necessary documents were filed. In the end, they worked together to clear things up. Army veteran Ronnie Payne Jr. speaks to a social worker about his housing on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023 in Houston. Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer Permanent supportive housing is a cornerstone of Houstons housing strategy. In 2011, the regions unhoused population, as measured by an annual count, made headlines: 8,500 men, women and children were homeless, a surge of 25 percent from the year before. The issue caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which named Houston one of its priority cities where homelessness urgently needed to be addressed. HUD sent staff and funds to Houston to help more than 100 groups addressing homelessness in the area come together and coordinate their efforts around a strategy: housing. One of the issues with providing people who have been chronically homeless permanent supportive housing is how to pay rent. That was addressed, in large part, by partnering with the local housing authorities, who agreed to set aside a number of vouchers for those without homes. Kenny Coles, vice president of voucher programs at the Houston Housing Authority, said that every housing specialist has a monthly caseload of around 500 voucher transactions, which includes both move-ins and recertifications. While the number seems high, he explained that if all the documentation is there, it should only take about 20 minutes to do a recertification. Nonprofit caseworkers are supposed to help with that paperwork. And veterans get additional support from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which provides its own caseworkers. Travis Street Plaza is shown on Tuesday, July 25, 2023 in Houston. Cloudbreak owns the building, where formerly homeless veterans are supposed to receive permanent supportive housing. The properties have a record of evicting veterans for not paying their rent. Brett Coomer/Staff photographer The management of permanent supportive housing providers, like Travis Street Plaza, also knows how to work with housing authorities and caseworkers, and provides additional resources of their own, according to Brad Bridwell, director of national operations for Cloudbreak Communities. The company leases affordable housing to veterans in five states and owns the 150-unit Travis Street Plaza in Midtown. Literally on the first floor of that five-floor building, Bridwell said of Travis Street Plaza, there are six full-time, dedicated social workers, Monday through Friday, 8 p.m. to 5 p.m. When Payne read the notice to pay or vacate his apartment, he no longer even knew the name of his caseworker. When the last one he had spoken with changed jobs years earlier, no replacement ever reached out, he said. He hadnt bothered to seek out a new one at the first-floor office because he hadnt found his previous caseworker helpful. Ronnie Payne Jr., a U.S. Army veteran, stands at the woodworking station where he carves walking sticks in his apartment at Travis Street Plaza on Tuesday, July 25, 2023 in Houston. When he received notice that he was behind on rent, he realized that there was a paperwork problem with his voucher, which covers most of his monthly housing costs. Brett Coomer/Staff photographer Robert Birdow, the homeless program coordinator at the Houston VA, said caseworkers generally get in touch with clients about recertification two to three months before the paperwork deadline. He also explained the VA has routine meetings with the housing authority to address any problems. The VA did not respond to the details of individual veterans situations. Even without a caseworker, Payne didnt feel too concerned about his notice to vacate. Especially when he learned the housing authority said it hadnt gotten his recertification paperwork. He had a copy of the paperwork he had sent in, dated August 2022, in his apartment. It seemed, he thought, like an easy fix. Army veteran Ronnie Payne Jr. often visits his neighbor and her dog on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023 in Houston. Payne formed close relationships in the community of veterans who have all experience housing instability. Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer Issue not tracked The Coalition for the Homeless in Houston and Harris County do not keep statistics on how many of the people they house are eventually evicted for nonpayment of rent. We have heard about some people being evicted for non-payment of rent with vouchers, said Catherine Villarreal, the organizations director of communications, in an email. But its not a large system issue, as far as we know, and each case is a little different. The Houston Housing Authority, citing privacy, does not share the specific units used for permanent supportive housing, making an independent analysis of how many people in the program get evicted each year impossible. A veteran living at Travis Street Plaza in Houston had packed his belongings on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023 in preparation for an eviction. Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer But a look at eviction records at the apartment complex where Stephen and Payne lived shows that, since 2019, evictions have been filed at the rate of 1 for every 22 units per year. Some were evicted for being as little as $150 behind in rent. Bridwell said that filing an eviction for 1 out of every 22 people is the same as retaining 95.5 percent of residents a year. He argued that figure is a success for housing chronically homeless veterans. National U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development statistics analyzing people who left the veteran-specific voucher program during their first two years indicate that roughly 1 out of 42 people, on average, lose their housing to eviction annually. Almost half of the people being evicted for nonpayment of rent at the building were responsible for their full monthly rent at the time of their eviction. It is unclear how many of them had lost their vouchers due to problems with paperwork or the conditions of their apartments. Others might live in the apartment without vouchers because of their financial success. The housing authorities stop subsidizing rent when people earn so much that their full rent is less than 30 percent of their income. A photograph of Army veteran Ronnie Payne Jr.'s children is seen in his home on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023 in Houston. Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer Bridwell said that problems with recertification paperwork sometimes arose. Of course, there are plenty of communication problems that occur between any sets of bureaucracies, he said. But he said it was very rare that such issues would not be resolved before an eviction because Cloudbreak would start having weekly meetings with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the nonprofit U.S. VETS after the first missed payment. Typically, by the time someone is evicted because they hadnt recertified, it is not an administrative mistake, he said. Its typically an outright refusal, often caused by a mental health issue such as paranoia or psychosis, and weve already tried every intervention possible to get them to go ahead and recertify. Army veteran Ronnie Payne Jr. packs his belongings on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023 in Houston. Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer Any effort to figure out why? On Aug. 31, 2022, Payne emailed his case manager at the housing authority. Please find attached my recertification for 2022, he wrote, not seeming to realize he had not attached the file. If you have any questions, please let me know via email or phone. The next day, he emailed again with two photos attached. An image of his lease showed the units rent and a form from Texas Health and Human Services showed his income. Nearly two months later, the housing authority responded to his first message the one without the photos pointing out there was no attachment. A month later, Payne forwarded his original email to show that I sent in my recertification If need be, I can drop it off. There was no reply. His letter of termination had already been mailed out. Payne says he never received the letter. This time, the property manager did not email the housing authority to find out what had happened, according to documents secured in a records request. Payne said Cloudbreak also did not inform him that there had been a problem. Army veteran Ronnie Payne Jr. on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023 holds up an eviction notice in Houston. Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer At his eviction hearing in August, his lawyer, Jonna Treble, said what had happened to his voucher was squirrelly and a mystery. We are trying to get to the bottom of this, she told Judge Steve Duble. The judge looked at Zulma Espinoza, who worked at Travis Street Plaza Apartments. You havent made any effort to figure out why? No, Espinoza said. Maybe he graduated from the program. Even after veterans graduate from case management because they show they can live independently, VA staff is still required to contact them when recertifications or inspections happen to offer assistance with the process. After an appeal, Payne received an eviction decision in November. Ronnie Payne Jr., a U.S. Army veteran, stands in his apartment at Travis Street Plaza on Tuesday, July 25, 2023 in Houston. Property had begun an eviction proceeding against Payne after voucher payments stopped. Brett Coomer/Staff photographer Calling for change When Payne went to eviction court, he thought of Stephen and how he had gone through the same process a year before. Payne was one of the people who never tired of listening to Stephen spin stories from his intelligence work or from his favorite books, such as Watership Down and anything by Tom Clancy. Stephen was known for telling grand tales. Some were embroidered on his actual experience, but some were true. For example, he worked security at the Alley Theater before college when RoboCop 2 was filmed there. He loved telling the story of how he got stuck trying to put on the cyborg police officers costume. Shannon was moved by the relationships at Travis Street Plaza. She took them as proof Stephen had found a place where he was comfortable being himself. She said living among other veterans who had experienced homelessness allowed Stephen to put aside feelings of shame about how he had lost his job. This allowed him to go back to being a full member of a society, she said. Stephen Lockhart's daughter, Morgan Hagan, looks at photos and records related to her late father on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at her aunts apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Records and interviews with Cloudbreak and the Houston Housing Authority paint a picture of how Stephen lost that stability. The problem started in 2021. That February, Stephens apartment failed a Houston Housing Authority inspection because of an unsanitary toilet. According to his family, Stephen suffered from Crohns, a chronic disease that led to bouts of diarrhea. If his unsanitary toilet was not fixed within a month, a housing authority letter to Stephen said his voucher payments would be terminated, and a notice would share the next steps. But while theres no record of the problem being corrected, voucher payments were not stopped, and no notice was sent to Stephen. Little happened until September of 2022 when an internal email flagged that Stephen had failed his inspection a year and a half prior. Still, no notice was sent to Stephen, his apartment complex or his case manager. Instead, the next month, the housing authority stopped making payments on his voucher. At the same time, Cloudbreak was piling fees onto Stephens account. Though the Houston Housing Authority covered all but $1 of Stephens $807 monthly rent, housing authority records show that Stephen had been charged $139 for damages, as well as $25 in late fees for every month that his balance was not current. Bridwell said the damage had been to a wall. Stephen had housekeeping problems over the years, according to Bridwell, and would refuse maintenance entry to correct issues identified in inspections. We will often attempt to use damage and late fees as part of interventions to try to get behavior corrected and still try not to saddle people who cant pay with heavy debts, Bridwell wrote in an email. Those late fees mounted. Cloudbreaks ledger showed that Stephen owed $549 by October of 2022. Then, the housing authority stopped making payments. When Cloudbreak filed in January for an eviction, the filing states that Stephen owed $3,044. That sum included three months without the housing authoritys $806 monthly subsidy. Shannon Lockhart looks up from records related to the eviction of her late brother Stephen Lockhart on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at her apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Stephen showed up to his eviction hearing on Feb. 2, at which point he signed a settlement with Cloudbreak. If he moved out in 15 days, Cloudbreak would dismiss the claim. But according to court records, a constable went to Stephens apartment to carry out the eviction. In a note filed in court, the constable said Stephen voluntarily removed himself and his property. Cloudbreak later emailed the Houston Housing Authority Stephens debt. It said the apartment had received $525 in deposits against his $139 in damages, $519 in late fees and $19 in missed rent. His total balance due was $152. It did not include the missed voucher payments. Shannon believes that if the apartment had asked for $152 instead of more than $3,000 the eviction filing told him he owed, her brother, who didnt have a phone, would have found a way to get in touch. He might have asked for help. After getting evicted, Stephen moved onto the street just outside, friends said. Their leases do not allow others to stay with them. So instead, they went to him. They brought him food, books, blankets and beer. Stephen, who suffered from Crohns, often turned down food, they said, because he lacked easy access to a bathroom. Stephen Lockhart's sister, Shannon Lockhart (right), and daughter, Morgan Hagan, try to reconstruct what led to his eviction shortly before his death. They gathered his photos and accolades and pored over printouts of court records on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023 in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Records show that Stephen was working with his VA case manager to get rehoused. Since he had lost his voucher with the Houston Housing Authority, she filled out a voucher referral form for the Harris County Housing Authority on May 8. But the Harris County Housing Authority denied his voucher, saying he was already leased up with a Houston Housing Authority voucher, emails show. On May 16, exactly two months after he was evicted, Stephen died of cardiovascular disease, according to the medical examiner. In Shannons view, all the organizations responsible for helping Stephen made lapses that culminated in a perfect storm: Cloudbreak charged for damages and fees that Stephen could not afford. The Houston Housing Authority stopped payments for a toilet that had been deemed unsanitary over a year earlier. The Harris County Housing Authority did not appear to have verified that Stephen had already been leased up with a voucher before denying him help. She wants Stephens story to inspire change. The Houston region should start tracking when permanent supportive housing fails, she said, and intervene to prevent eviction. At Stephens funeral service, Shannon stood before Stephens family and friends at Houston National Cemetery, a folded flag lay by Stephens remains. My hope, she told the gathering, is that this shows us all how life can change so drastically for anyone. And that moving forward, we treat those around with a little more kindness, grace and forgiveness. Clarification (Dec. 5, 5:45 p.m.): This story has been updated to reflect that the Coalition for the Homeless does not track data regarding evictions specifically. (Dec. 12, 12:30 p.m.): This story has been updated to reflect that the HUD study analyzed reasons people left the veteran-specific voucher program during their first two years. Golden Valley, Minn.-based Infinite Health Collaborative added Pediatric and Young Adult Medicine to create a new pediatric division. Pediatric and Young Adult Medicine has three Minnesota locations in St. Paul, Maplewood and Eagan, according to a news release shared with Becker's Dec. 4. The practice has served the region for more than 65 years. Three physicians are with the group Cynthia Garr, MD; Tammi Plotnik, MD, and Thomas Siefferman, MD. Infinite Health Collaborative has operating divisions across multiple other specialities including orthopedics, cardiology, family medicine and opthalmology. It's one of the largest independent multispecialty groups in the region. Las Vegas-based physician William Alvear, MD, was convicted of unlawful distribution of opioid medications. Dr. Alvear unlawfully distributed hydrocodone and alprazolam without a legitimate professional practice, according to a Nov. 30 news release from the Justice Department. He was convicted on three counts of distributing a Schedule II controlled substance and five counts of distributing a Schedule IV controlled substance. A California lawmaker is speaking out about what she says are "unintended consequences" for hospitals related to a new law that will gradually raise healthcare workers' hourly minimum wage to $25. Rep. Diane Dixon, a member of the California State Assembly, penned an opinion piece in the Orange County Register Dec. 2, commending the law's goal while also noting her concerns. "The goal of ensuring fair compensation for those working tirelessly in the public and private healthcare sector is commendable," Ms. Dixon wrote. "However, it's essential to consider the potential longer-term negative effects this new law may have on public and private employers in the healthcare industry." Her opinion piece specifically points to what she sees as three potential negative outcomes: cost burden, limited flexibility and effect on public healthcare agencies. "Wage increases, mandated by state law, place a considerable financial burden on healthcare employers. Most of these businesses already operate on slim profit margins due to the high costs of healthcare delivery," Ms. Dixon wrote. "This law will affect an estimated 469,000 private healthcare workers, which means that managers and their supervisors will also demand pay increases as well. Hospital workers may face layoffs if hospitals seek out-of-state solutions to reduce costs." She also said the wage hikes mandated in the law do not "account for the variability and complexity of the healthcare industry" and that mandating the increases without offsets by additional funding sources could strain public healthcare agencies, "leading to a ripple effect on public health programs and the overall efficiency of state healthcare services." California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the new law in October, and his administration has estimated the price at $4 billion in the 2024-25 fiscal year. According to the Los Angeles Times, when asked about cost concerns last month, Alex Stack, a spokesperson for Mr. Newsom's office, said: "This is an important law to ensure California has a robust healthcare workforce. We're working with legislative leadership and stakeholders on accompanying legislation to account for state budget conditions and revenues." The new law comes after union and hospital representatives reached agreement on how a $25 per hour minimum wage for healthcare workers could be addressed. Under the new law, which is focused on private healthcare providers but covers state-funded institutions, cities and counties are blocked from increasing pay via ballot measures for 10 years. The new law also factors in amendments that include gradual wage schedules, rather than an immediate increase for all healthcare workers. Workers at healthcare facilities with 10,000 or more full-time equivalent employees will earn $23 per hour starting in 2024, with pay increasing to $24 an hour in 2025 and $25 an hour in 2026. Smaller facilities and hospitals with a high governmental payer mix will have until 2028 or 2033 to reach the $25 minimum, depending on the type of facility. The new law allows some healthcare facilities to apply for a temporary pause or alternative phase-in schedule of the minimum wage requirements if they have documentation proving financial distress. ONC is proposing adding a "nutrition label" to healthcare apps to disclose their uses and performance, The Wall Street Journal reported. But some health system and IT company executives say the warnings could be too onerous, adding costs to patients and stifling innovation, according to the Dec. 2 story. "The idea of the food label is reasonable," Scott Arnold, chief digital and innovation officer at Tampa (Fla.) General Hospital, told the news outlet. "I just think that if it goes too far, it's going to create more burden or more tax on the providers, the clinicians and the caregivers. And that's going to take us the wrong way." But advocates for the proposal say it would help avoid the errors of some previous health tech platforms, which have been laden with errors or perpetuated health inequities, the Journal reported. "It's transparency to the user of the system," Micky Tripathi, PhD, national coordinator for health IT at ONC, told the newspaper. "Right now, there's a resistance to some of these tools because of the black box nature of them." The disclosures, which would include how any healthcare artificial intelligence is trained and tested, would be optional. "We do believe that blank fields would be very informative," Dr. Tripathi told the Journal. Some companies are worried about their proprietary algorithms being disclosed publicly, according to the story. "Our risk-related information contains intellectual property that could be reverse-engineered and copied by others," Epic told ONC in a comment letter. This November with the end of the calendar year in sight several hospital and health system CEOs shared plans to leave their roles in the coming months. Becker's reported seven CEO resignations and retirements last month: 1. Tommy Ibrahim, MD, is exiting his role as CEO of Bassett Healthcare Network in Cooperstown, N.Y., at the end of the year. 2. Harold Naramore, MD, CEO of Maryville, Tenn.-based Blount Memorial Hospital, is resigning, effective Jan. 1. 3. Steen Trawick, MD, will step down from his role as CEO and chief medical officer of Christus Shreveport-Bossier Health System in Shreveport, La., on Dec. 1. 4. Mike Robinson will retire as CEO of Emeryville, Calif.-based Canopy Health at the year's end. Ken Wood will succeed him. 5. Michelle Fortune, BSN, will exit her role as CEO of St. Luke's Hospital in Columbus, N.C., on Dec. 31. 6. Sarah Morrison is retiring from her position as CEO of the Shepherd Center on Sept. 24, 2024. Jamie Shepherd, the hospital's current COO and son of its co-founder, will succeed her. 7. Anthony Coleman, DHA, stepped down from his role as president and CEO of Broadlawns Medical Center in Des Moines, Iowa. He accepted a new role as the inaugural CEO of Cedar Hill Regional Medical Center, a new hospital being built in Washington, D.C. Margaret Fry, MD, was selected as the next president and CEO of the Pediatric Physicians' Organization at Boston Childrens Hospital. Dr. Fry is currently chief medical officer of the PPOC, an organization of physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants focused on primary care that work closely with specialists from the hospital, according to a Dec. 1 news release shared with Becker's. She will begin her new role on Jan. 1 and succeed Gregory Young, MD. Dr. Fry joined the PPOC last year. Before that, she held multiple leadership roles with the Palo Alto Foundation Medical Group in the San Francisco area. The last week of November was a busy one for hospital and health system mergers and acquisitions. Among the busiest systems was Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare. The for-profit system's Medical City Healthcare completed an acquisition of three-hospital Wise Health System in Decatur, Texas. Separately, a bankruptcy judge approved HCA's purchase of bankrupt Trinity Regional Hospital Sachse (Texas) for $41 million in a deal expected to close by the end of January. HCA Houston Healthcare completed the purchase of 11 Houston-area freestanding emergency departments from SignatureCare Emergency Center. Another large for-profit system, Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health Systems completed the sale of three Florida hospitals to Tampa General Hospital for $294 million. The hospitals in the deal include 120-bed Bravera Health Brooksville, 124-bed Bravera Health Spring Hill and 128-bed Bravera Health Seven Rivers. The addition of the hospitals will create a new division at Tampa General: TGH North. CHS has sold 11 hospitals to date in 2023. On Dec. 1, Aurora, Colo.-based UCHealth completed its acquisition of two-hospital Pueblo, Colo.-based Parkview Health. The merger came later than anticipated originally, the deal was expected to close mid-2023 but was delayed due to regulatory issues. St. Louis-based BJC Healthcare and Kansas City, Mo.-based Saint Luke's Health System which signed a letter of intent to combine in May have satisfied all regulatory reviews and reached a definitive agreement to merge. The transaction is expected to close Jan. 1, 2024. Sandoval Regional Medical Center in Rio Rancho, N.M., on Jan. 1 will join Albuquerque-based UNM Hospitals and change its name to University of New Mexico Sandoval Regional Medical Center-A Campus of UNM Hospital. Omaha-based University of Nebraska Medical Center signed a master affiliation agreement with Columbus (Neb.) Community Hospital. The partnership will focus on boosting the healthcare workforce in the region by providing more training and education opportunities to UNMC students. There was also big news elsewhere in healthcare, with reports that major payers Cigna and Humana are in talks to merge. The two organizations are discussing a stock-and-cash deal that could be finalized by the end of 2023. Health Care Service Corp. is also reportedly among the companies interested in buying Cigna's Medicare Advantage business. Norfolk, Va.-based Sentara Health is the new sole owner of Velocity Urgent Care, marking the end of the health system's joint venture relationship for the 17-site company. Sentara will now gain 17 urgent care facilities through its sole ownership of Velocity, with plans to open an 18th location in early 2024 in Elizabeth City, N.C. The Hampton Roads, Va.-based urgent care operator employs nearly 200 people. Sentara operated Velocity as a joint venture with a third party since 2017. At that time, Sentara transferred seven Sentara urgent care facilities to the Velocity joint venture. Twelve-hospital Sentara noted that since the joint venture agreement six years ago, the expansion of Velocity has followed Sentara's growth in Virginia and North Carolina and all urgent care centers are located near existing Sentara hospitals and medical facilities. This year has been marked by labor actions across the U.S. From coast to coast, healthcare workers have participated in strikes, citing concerns about issues such as pay, staffing and recruitment. The strikes have involved workers from large health systems, including a walkout at Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente that was deemed by unions as the nation's largest healthcare worker strike. Now, in the last month of 2023, Becker's is taking a look at this trend. To start, it is worth examining the number of strikes year over year. The Ithaca, N.Y.-based Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations' labor action tracker shows 115 strikes involving workers in the healthcare and social assistance sector since January 2021. This includes 39 strikes in 2022, an increase from 33 in 2021. As of Dec. 4, 43 strikes had occurred in the healthcare and social assistance sector this year. Most of these strikes have occurred in hospitals, but those in nursing homes and other healthcare facilities are also included in the data. "While it is very difficult to predict what will happen next, I think that the recent uptick in healthcare strikes will continue for at least the near future," Johnnie Kallas, a PhD candidate and the director of the Cornell labor action tracker, told Becker's in October. "Many of these recent strikes have emerged from the first set of contract negotiations for unionized workers since the beginning of the pandemic, which obviously exacerbated many of the issues, like understaffing, already confronting healthcare workers." Becker's has reported on at least 27 healthcare-specific strikes in 2023. Most recently, more than 2,400 nurses at three HCA Healthcare hospitals in Southern California launched a five-day strike Nov. 22 in the sixth month of contract negotiations. The nurses and other medical professionals, who are represented by SEIU 121RN, work at HCA's Riverside (Calif.) Community Hospital, West Hills (Calif.) Hospital and Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks. That same week the week of Thanksgiving members of the Illinois Nurses Association launched a two-day strike Nov. 21 at Ascension Saint Joseph-Joliet (Ill.), their second two-day strike in three months. The union represents more than 500 nurses at the facility. The hospital is part of St. Louis-based Ascension, one of the nation's largest nonprofit and Catholic hospital systems. While nurses are most commonly involved in strikes at hospitals, those in other roles have also taken to the picket line. For example, Members of the Committee of Interns and Residents and Mount Sinai in New York City reached a tentative agreement May 24, ending a three-day strike at NYC Health + Hospitals' Elmhurst Hospital Center. Additionally, tens of thousands of Kaiser Permanente employees across the U.S. were involved in an October strike. This included licensed vocational nurses, emergency department technicians, radiology technicians, respiratory therapists, X-ray technicians, optometrists, certified nursing assistants, behavioral health workers, surgical technicians, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, home health aides, medical assistants, dental assistants, call center representatives and housekeepers, among other positions. "I don't think [the issues] are entirely different [from] what we saw before [2023]," Mr. Kallas told Becker's in June. "It's pay. It's staffing. It's health and safety. I'd say those are probably the three main issues. But I think workers are now more emboldened to act on that." He also said he has observed a shift toward healthcare workers being willing to engage in indefinite strikes, meaning they will be off the job until they reach a settlement. Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., and United Steelworkers Local 4-200, which represents about 1,700 nurses at the facility, recently reached a tentative agreement on a new labor contract. The hospital announced the tentative three-year deal Dec. 1, about four months after union members began a strike Aug. 4. Mr. Kallas made it clear, however, that while he believes there has been a shift toward indefinite strikes, most strikes in healthcare remain of a fixed duration, meaning they are slated to last a certain number of days. There are at least several planned healthcare strikes in December at University of Rochester (N.Y.) Medical Center's Strong Memorial Hospital and River Campus, at Sutter Center for Psychiatry, and at three Ascension hospitals in Texas and Kansas. Scottsdale, Ariz.-based HonorHealth has started piloting virtual nursing to cover administrative tasks and help new nurses at a Phoenix hospital, KTAR reported Dec. 4. John C. Lincoln Medical Center has begun using the technology to reduce some of those nonhealthcare duties for in-person nurses, and has already received improved patient experience scores, according to the story. Virtual nurses beam into rooms on TV screens and can monitor patients via cameras. "This model has really given our nurses the time back they can use at the bedside," Kathi Zarubi DNP, RN, chief nursing officer of HonorHealth, told the news outlet. "Being a nurse, of course, I've always said: "Happy nurse, happy patient.'" The virtual nurses at the six-hospital system have a minimum of five years' experience, assisting their greener colleagues with on-the-job training, according to the story. "We have a lot of new graduate nurses in our hospital environments now," Dr. Zarubi told the radio station. "Which is awesome, we love our new grads, but they just don't have the experience yet sometimes." Army veteran Ronald Payne packs his belongings in preparation for an eviction due to paperwork issues on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023, in Houston. Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer Shannon Lockhart looks at photos and mementos of her late brother Stephen Lockhart on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at her apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Shannon Lockhart cries as she talks about the death of her brother Stephen on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at her apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Army veteran Ronald Payne speaks to a social worker on the phone as he prepares to be evicted due to paperwork issues on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023, in Houston. Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer Army veteran Ronald Payne holds up an eviction notice he received due to paperwork issues on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023, in Houston. Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer Photos and records related to the late Stephen Lockhart sit on a table Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at his sister Shannon Lockharts apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Army veteran Ronald Payne often visits his neighbor and her dog on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023, in Houston. Ronald Payne is being evicted from his home due to paperwork issues. Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer Travis Street Plaza is shown on Tuesday, July 25, 2023 in Houston. Cloudbreak owns three buildings where formerly homeless veterans are supposed to receive permanent supportive housing. But veterans living there say that they live under constant threat of eviction and they do not receive support in navigating payments through the HHA. The properties have a record of evicting veterans for not paying their rent. Brett Coomer/Staff photographer Ronnie Payne, a U.S. Army veteran, stands in his apartment at Travis Street Plaza on Tuesday, July 25, 2023 in Houston. Cloudbreak owns three buildings where formerly homeless veterans are supposed to receive permanent supportive housing. But veterans living there say that they live under constant threat of eviction and they do not receive support in navigating payments through the HHA. The properties have a record of evicting veterans for not paying their rent, and had begun an eviction proceeding against Payne. Brett Coomer/Staff photographer Shannon Lockhart cries as she talks about the death of her brother Stephen on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at her apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Shannon Lockhart, right, and her niece Morgan Hagan analyze records related to the eviction of Lockharts late brother Stephen Lockhart on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at her apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer A stuffed bear with a special forces logo on on it is set on a shelf in the apartment of Ronnie Payne, a U.S. Army veteran, at Travis Street Plaza on Tuesday, July 25, 2023 in Houston. Cloudbreak owns three buildings where formerly homeless veterans are supposed to receive permanent supportive housing. But veterans living there say that they live under constant threat of eviction and they do not receive support in navigating payments through the HHA. The properties have a record of evicting veterans for not paying their rent, and had begun an eviction proceeding against Payne. Brett Coomer/Staff photographer Shannon Lockhart analyzes records related to the eviction of her late brother Stephen Lockhart on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at her apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Morgan Hagan looks at photos and records related to her late father Stephen Lockhart on Friday, Oct. 13, 2023, at her aunts apartment in Conroe. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer A photograph of Army veteran Ronald Paynes children is seen in his home as he prepares for an eviction due to paperwork issues on Friday, Nov. 17, 2023, in Houston. Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer Since 2011, Houston has used a housing-first approach to reduce the count of the homeless population by more than two-thirds. However, some newly housed people in contact with the Houston Chronicles housing reporter reached back out about problems with the voucher covering the majority of their rent. One got monthly demands to pay rent posted on his door. His caseworker said that it was just a kink with voucher payments that would get worked out and eventually, it did. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Another said his lock was changed, and he slept outdoors while his landlord sorted things out with the housing authority in charge of making payments. That situation, too, was soon resolved. Then, the Chronicle heard from a tenant who was not able to resolve his voucher problems. He was getting evicted from his permanent housing but did not understand why. His friend and neighbor had already been evicted, he said. That friend died shortly afterward while living on the street. The conversation prompted the Chronicle to look into evictions at buildings housing the formerly homeless. These are four takeaways: Evicted when voucher payments stop The citys strategy for addressing homelessness is built on moving people into permanent housing. Housing is coupled with caseworkers tasked with helping residents adjust by providing what are called supportive services. They may, for example, help resolve a communication issue with a landlord or connect a tenant with medical care, food benefits or employment programs. Advertisement Article continues below this ad MORE ON EVICTIONS: Harris County's growing eviction dockets mean many cases are decided in less than 90 seconds Veterans also have caseworkers through the Department of Veterans Affairs, which meets routinely with housing authorities to address any problems. Apartment complexes that specialize in helping house people who have experienced homelessness also often have their own resources, such as staff members who specialize in helping tenants navigate voucher paperwork. But eviction records show that those moved out of homelessness still fall through the cracks of the caseworker safety net. They often face eviction, and most evictions are not for major behavioral issues such as crime. Instead, they center around rent. Problems such as paperwork or the conditions of their apartments can lead housing authorities to stop the voucher payments that often cover most of the monthly rent. The issue is not tracked Advertisement Article continues below this ad The Coalition for the Homeless in Houston and Harris County does not keep statistics on how many of the people they house are evicted for nonpayment of rent. But a look at eviction records at Travis Street Plaza, one apartment complex that primarily houses formerly homeless veterans, shows that since 2019, evictions have been filed at the rate of one for every 22 units per year. Some were evicted for being as little as $150 behind rent. Brad Bridwell, director of national operations for Cloudbreak Communities, which owns Travis Street Plaza, said that filing an eviction for one out of every 22 people is the same as retaining 95.5 percent of residents a year. He argued that figure is a success for housing chronically homeless veterans. National U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development statistics analyzing people who left the veteran-specific voucher program during their first two years indicate that roughly one out of 42 people, on average, lose their housing to eviction annually. Bridwell said that problems sometimes arose with recertification paperwork, which is required every year to secure a housing voucher. But he said it was very rare that such issues would not be resolved before an eviction because Cloudbreak would start having weekly meetings with the Department of Veteran Affairs and the nonprofit U.S. VETS after the first missed payment. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Typically, by the time someone is evicted because they hadnt recertified, it is not an administrative mistake, he said. Its typically an outright refusal, often caused by a mental health issue such as paranoia or psychosis, and weve already tried every intervention possible to get them to go ahead and recertify. A closer look at paperwork issues Ronnie Payne Jr., an Army veteran, had lived at Travis Street Plaza for six years by 2022. That August, he emailed his case manager at the Houston Housing Authority. Please find attached my recertification for 2022, he wrote, not seeming to realize he had not attached the file. If you have any questions, please let me know via email or phone. The next day, he emailed again with photos of his lease and a form from Texas Health and Human Services that showed his income. Nearly two months later, the housing authority responded to his first message the one without the photos pointing out there was no attachment. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Although he responded a month later, forwarding his original email and volunteering to drop off the paperwork in person, his voucher was terminated, and he was evicted in November. No case manager reached out to help him, Payne said. Inspections can lead to evictions Stephen Lockharts problems began in 2021. Lockhart, a Navy veteran, had been living in Travis Street Plaza for three years. That February, Stephens apartment failed a Houston Housing Authority inspection because of an unsanitary toilet. According to his family, Lockhart suffered from Crohns, a chronic disease that led to bouts of diarrhea. If his unsanitary toilet was not fixed within a month, his voucher payments would be terminated, a housing authority letter to Lockhart said, and a notice would share the next steps. But while theres no record of the problem being corrected, voucher payments were not stopped, and no notice was sent to Lockhart. Little happened until September of 2022 when an internal email flagged that Stephen had failed his inspection a year and a half prior. Still, no notice was sent to Lockhart, his apartment complex or his case manager. Instead, the next month, the housing authority stopped making payments on his voucher. He was evicted and died living outside the apartment complex two months later. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he aims to "replace and supersede" the Affordable Care Act if successful in the 2024 presidential election, making him one more candidate returning focus to the healthcare law after its spell of quiet in politics. The Republican governor made his comments about the ACA during a Dec. 3 appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press." Kristen Welker, NBC's White House correspondent, asked Mr. DeSantis about his plans to repeal and replace the law, enacted by then-President Barack Obama in 2010. "We need to have a healthcare plan that works," Mr. DeSantis said. "Obamacare hasn't worked. We are going to replace and supersede with a better plan." The governor said his would be a "totally different healthcare plan," but he did not detail how replacement legislation would supersede the current law. He stated goals to reduce healthcare costs to ensure affordability for individuals, protect those with preexisting conditions, and scrutinize "big institutions that are causing prices to be high: big pharma, big insurance and big government." Mr. DeSantis said his campaign will likely roll out a "proposal" in the spring. "I've got a lot of input that's been coming in from a lot of good people around the country," he told Ms. Welker. Mr. DeSantis' statements about the healthcare law follow those made by former President Donald Trump, who is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. In late November, Mr. Trump took to social media to identify healthcare as one agenda item for his 2024 presidential campaign with plans to replace the landmark law if he wins a second term. Mr. Trump has opted to skip every Republican primary debate, making his social media content an atypical view into his agenda crafting. The Republicans' comments signal a change from the 2022 elections, which were the first in more than a decade in which security of the ACA was not a central issue and the Republican Party cast aside its long-running campaign to repeal it. President Joe Biden's reelection team has indicated the White House is ready to make the ACA a focal point of the 2024 campaign. The president already tapped former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to warn about threats to the ACA, and his campaign is planning advertisements in battleground states that contrast Mr. Trump's "threats" to the law with Biden administration efforts to lower drug costs, Reuters was first to report. The ACA is the most challenged statute in American history, including its seven Supreme Court challenges in a decade, according to professors at Washington, D.C.-based Georgetown University. Most recently, in 2021, the Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to the ACA, in which plaintiffs argued that the law should be struck down due to the 2017 elimination of the ACA's tax penalty. At the time of the Republicans' push for a "skinny repeal" of the ACA in 2017, Newsweek identified at least 70 GOP-led attempts to repeal, modify or limit the Affordable Care Act since its inception. In May 2023, 59% of Americans held a favorable opinion of the ACA and 40% held an unfavorable opinion, according to polling from KFF. Broken down by political parties, 77% of Republicans held unfavorable views and 85% of Democrats held favorable views. A superior court judge ordered Alan Germany, former CFO of Health Care Conglomerate Associates, to write an apology letter and pay $150,000 in restitution as part of a plea agreement in relation to charges that included embezzlement, conflict of interest and using his official position for personal gain, the Valley Voice reported Dec. 2. Mr. Germany formerly served as CFO of HCCA, which previously managed Tulare (Calif.) Regional Medical Center. He also served as the acting CFO of Tulare Regional and Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine, Calif. "I apologize for and regret my involvement in the 2016 line of credit between Tulare Local Healthcare District and Southern Inyo Healthcare District. I also apologize for and regret my failure to file a Form 700 which would have disclosed my personal financial interests," Mr. Germany wrote in his apology letter to the residents of Tulare's hospital district. Mr. Germany also paid restitution of $100,000 to Tulare Local Healthcare District and $50,000 to the Southern Inyo Healthcare District. The former hospital executive served as chief restructuring officer at Inyo Hospital, which also had a management agreement with HCCA. During an Oct. 3 hearing, Mr. Germany accepted a deal in which he would plead "no contest" to the crime of conflict of interest, a felony, and failure to file a statement of economic interest, a misdemeanor, according to the Valley Voice. In addition to the apology letter and restitution payments, Mr. Germany, was sentenced to two years probation and 540 hours of community service. If he violates probation, he will serve six months in prison, according to the report. Health experts say there is no connection between pediatric pneumonia cases in the U.S. and the surge of cases in China and several other countries. China, Denmark, France and the Netherlands have all recently reported an increase in cases of Mycoplasma pneumoniae infections in children, CNN reported Dec. 1. Health officials in Ohio have also seen a surge in pediatric cases of the infection since August. "There has been zero evidence of this outbreak being connected to other outbreaks, either statewide, nationally or internationally," officials with the Warren County Health District in Ohio said in a Nov. 30 statement. "The increase in reported pneumonia cases is not suspected of being a new/novel respiratory virus but rather a large uptick in the number of typical pneumonia cases" from pathogens including mycoplasma, streptococcus and adenovirus. Three more updates on the rise in pediatric pneumonia cases: Mycoplasma, a type of bacteria that can cause pneumonia, tends to cause outbreaks every one to three years, and the U.S. has not had a surge since before the COVID-19 pandemic, experts told CNN. While the term "white lung syndrome" has been used in earlier media reports, public health experts have since cautioned against its use as it is not a medical term and can create a misleading perception that cases are caused by an unknown disease. "We expect that there are going to be some seasons that are worse than others for mycoplasma infections, and it certainly seems that, across the U.S. and Europe, that this year might be worse than other years," Buddy Creech, MD, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanderbilt University, told the news outlet. The CDC believes antibiotic resistance may be playing a role in the M. pneumoniae outbreak in China. Over the past few weeks, Massachusetts has also reported an uptick in pediatric pneumonia cases. So far, cases there do not appear to be related to mycoplasma. State health officials said the increase is "seasonally appropriate" and is most likely tied to a rise in respiratory syncytial virus and other respiratory viruses . "We are aware of the attention to the increase in pneumonia in several geographic regions of the world that has been attributed in part to mycoplasma pneumonia," the state's health department said in a statement, according to the Boston Herald. "There is no evidence that the normal and expected increase in pneumonia cases we are currently seeing in Massachusetts is related to mycoplasma." China's current outbreak of respiratory illness and cases of pediatric pneumonia has garnered attention from global health officials. The World Health Organization requested information on the country's outbreak on Nov. 22. A day later, Chinese health officials presented global health authorities with data indicating the increase is due to known pathogens alongside the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions. Meanwhile, some lawmakers and health officials have expressed concern regarding the transparency of data coming from China given the country's delay in alerting global authorities about COVID-19. The WHO said it will continue to monitor the situation in China and verify data. CDC officials have also reiterated the outbreak in China and cases in the U.S. do not appear to be tied to a novel pathogen, based on current evidence. "We believe this is all existing, meaning COVID, flu, RSV, mycoplasma," CDC director Mandy Cohen, MD, said at a House committee hearing Nov. 30. Orthopedic surgeon pay has climbed steadily over the last five years. Meanwhile, over the last three years, the CMS physician fee schedule has continued dipping. Here is how the average orthopedic surgeon pay compares to CMS' physician fee schedule over the last five years: Note: Compensation data was provided by Medscape. 2023 Compensation: $573,000 CMS conversion factor: $33.06 (-4.48%) 2022 Compensation: $557,000 CMS conversion factor: $33.59 (-3.73%) 2021 Compensation: $511,000 CMS conversion factor: $32.41 (-10%) 2020 Compensation: $511,000 CMS conversion factor: $36.09 (+0.14%) 2019 Compensation: $482,000 CMS conversion factor: $36.04 (+0.14%) Maine has been named the most injury-prone state in the U.S., with the highest number of resident emergency room visits relative to its population size, according to research from pain management specialists New York Pain Care. The study, sent to Becker's on Dec. 4, used the latest available emergency room visit data from the American Hospital Association, workplace injury data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and ambulance call-out data from the National Association of State EMS Officials to determine the most injury-prone places. The 10 most injury-prone states: 1. Maine Emergency room visits per 1,000 residents: 596 Workplace injury cases per 1,000 full-time workers: 41 2. Louisiana Emergency room visits per 1,000 residents: 535 Workplace injury cases per 1,000 full-time workers: 16 3. Kentucky Emergency room visits per 1,000 residents: 525 Workplace injury cases per 1,000 full-time workers: 26 4. West Virginia Emergency room visits per 1,000 residents: 524 Workplace injury cases per 1,000 full-time workers: 24 5. Ohio Emergency room visits per 1,000 residents: 505 Workplace injury cases per 1,000 full-time workers: 19 6. (tie) Mississippi Emergency room visits per 1,000 residents: 485 Workplace injury cases per 1,000 full-time workers: N/A 6. (tie) Indiana Emergency room visits per 1,000 residents: 485 Workplace injury cases per 1,000 full-time workers: 27 8. North Dakota Emergency room visits per 1,000 residents: 477 Workplace injury cases per 1,000 full-time workers: N/A 9. Arkansas Emergency room visits per 1,000 residents: 466 Workplace injury cases per 1,000 full-time workers: 17 10. New Hampshire Emergency room visits per 1,000 residents: 459 Workplace injury cases per 1,000 full-time workers: N/A NHS workers in Northern Ireland are in line for a free coffee on Wednesday as part of a festive thank-you campaign run by coffee giant Starbucks. The chain is also set to deliver coffee to Lagan Valley Hospital, which does not have a Starbucks nearby. All NHS workers can receive a free 'Tall' beverage as part of the initiative, now in its fourth year supporting NHS Charities. Free caramel waffles will also be offered when a beverage is purchased by NHS staff. To claim the free coffee, an NHS work identity badge must be shown in store. Alex Rayner, general manager at Starbucks UK, said: We want to thank NHS staff across the UK for all the work they do and as a token of our appreciation, we are bringing back the free Tall beverage on 6 December for the fourth year running. Coffee brings people together and we hope that NHS staff can take a moment today to share the festive joy and raise a coffee to one another to celebrate. "We know how much NHS staff have enjoyed taking part in this special day and its something we look forward to year after year, so we are thrilled to see our partnership with NHS Charities Together flourish and our offer extend to more NHS workers than ever before. We look forward to building on this success so we can continue to give back to the communities we serve. Louise McCathie, director of fundraising at NHS Charities Together, said: We deeply appreciate our partnership with Starbucks and are proud to see its ongoing work and support for NHS Charities Together. This day is an opportunity to show how much NHS staff and their work are appreciated and valued across the UK. Winter is always a challenging time for the NHS so we hope this will encourage them to pause and take a moment to enjoy this festive period. Starbucks offers a 25p discount to all customers who bring a reusable cup when purchasing a drink. NHS workers are also encouraged to make the change by bringing in their own reusable cup to enjoy their free Tall beverage. The initiatives are part of an ongoing partnership between Starbucks and NHS Charities Together, which sees Starbucks stores across the UK working with NHS Charities Togethers network of over 230 local NHS charities. These charities are based in every hospital, mental health, ambulance and community health service across the UK to help health services go further for NHS staff, patients and communities. NHS Charities Together has funded thousands of projects including vital mental health support for NHS staff, training for emergency volunteers, equipment and support for patients, and community partnership programmes to prevent ill health and reduce pressure on NHS services. Starbucks has offered 10% off to NHS staff and other frontline workers all year round since 2018. Fusion Antibodies plc specialises in pre-clinical antibody discovery, engineering and supply for both therapeutic drug and diagnostic applications (stock image) Fusion Antibodies plc, which is listed on the AIM, said the industry had been facing headwinds such as a fall-off in venture capital, leading to clients delaying projects with them. The plc specialises in pre-clinical antibody discovery, engineering and supply for both therapeutic drug and diagnostic applications. In the six months to the end of September, revenue dropped from 1.9m to 541,000, while its losses rose from 1.1m in the first half of the 2023 financial year. It had carried out a 1.67m fundraise over the half year, in tandem with a 1.6m cost rationalisation exercise. It was holding 0.5m in cash, which was up on 0.2m in the first half of the year. Fusion Antibodies said there had been some positive developments since the end of the period. It had reached a collaboration agreement with the National Cancer Institute in the USA to validate its product, OptiMAL. There was also further pipeline progression and an increased rate of deal closures. Overall, it said its 2024 results were expected to be heavily weighted towards the second half of the year. Adrian Kinkaid, CEO of Fusion Antibodies plc, said: During this calendar year, the industry has been experiencing significant headwinds especially in the venture capital-funded biotech sector. A number of clients have consequently delayed initiating their projects with us. Adrian Kinkaid, chief executive of Fusion Antibodies "Nonetheless, we have generated a significantly stronger pipeline which includes a wider diversity of clients that are less dependent on VC funding. "Consequently, whilst overall revenues for the period are low as previously announced, through our efforts we have benefitted from a trend of increasing month-on-month revenues throughout the first half of financial year 2024 period, which we hope will continue to strengthen in the remainder second half and beyond. It is particularly encouraging to see our newer offerings also being well received with our first AI/ML-AbTM contract being successfully completed and, post-period end, securing the agreement with the NCI to help validate OptiMAL. Both of these developments are having a positive impact on market awareness and engagement. What the new Kainos office development could look like when completed Kainos new office building for Belfast city centre could create more than 800 jobs during its construction and boast an economic impact of 35m over the next decade, its been claimed. Detailed full plans have now been filed for the 14-storey scheme, with work starting on the Dublin Road building as early as the second quarter of next year, developers say. Planning documents suggest it could be completed in the second quarter of 2026. The construction and operational phases of the project are estimated to generate a 810 jobs and 35m of GVA over the period 2024-34, fresh documents say. The project will also help to anchor Kainos as a strategically important employer in the NI ICT sector in its new headquarters and will bring additional employment capacity in high quality office accommodation into the city centre. The office building will sit beside a student accommodation scheme, which is being developed jointly with Queens University. The purpose-built student accommodation will also help to increase the population residing within Belfast and also improve its attractiveness to international students, it says. Earlier this year the firms new chief, Russell Sloan, said the IT services giant is set up for further growth and opportunities ahead as he takes over at the helm of the 3,000-strong business from long-time chief Brendan Mooney. Mr Sloan had been at the helm of the firms digital services business forming it back in 2013. It then had just 35 staff. Thats grown into a 1,600-strong team. He joined Kainos back in 1999. New planning documents say the office scheme could generate 2.8m of expenditure and 900,000 over the decade within maintenance and retail activity. Speaking to Ulster Business in September, Mr Sloan said: The exact timeframe is not defined it could be around 2027 [but] timescales could come forward or push out. Its a substantial building once we get through the planning process. An average of just 25% of staff are in the firms offices each week with large numbers working remotely, in common with other businesses in the IT sector. It depends on what works for you as an organisation, he said. He said Tuesday to Thursday remain the busiest days for staff coming into the office. [We are] now starting to see people in that longer pattern of working they are missing social interaction. Thats the piece we are seeing. Good Vibrations told only half the story about the punk era in Belfast Paul Burgess recalls late star and offers his take on Northern Irelands 70s and 80s punk scene Paul Burgess (centre) and Ruefrex Kurtis Reid Mon 4 Dec 2023 at 07:51 A former Belfast punk has recalled enduring liquid breakfasts with the late Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan as he gears up for the release of his memoir. Lloyds seized the newspaper group during the summer (Jonathan Brady/PA) The Barclay family has repaid the nearly 1.2 billion that it owed to Lloyds Bank, opening up its chance to transfer control of the Telegraph newspaper to an Abu Dhabi-backed fund. However, the Government has launched a probe into the proposed takeover of the newspaper and fellow publication The Spectator by the fund, amid concerns over the security and free speech implications. Lloyds confirmed that it had received the money on Monday, after seizing control of Telegraph Media Group in June over the unpaid debt. It then tried to sell the newspaper group and the Spectator, which are both read closely by Conservative Party politicians and supporters. The offices of the Telegraph Media Group in central London (Stefan Rousseau/PA) Lloyds said the debt of Penultimate Investments Holding Limited (PIHL), the holding company, had been repaid and the titles have been removed from receivership. We can confirm the repayment of the PIHL facilities has now completed, it said. We are always keen to work constructively with customers who get into difficulty with their repayments to reach an amicable solution. Wed like to thank all parties for their role in reaching this point. The Barclays had last month reached a deal with RedBird IMI to get help to pay back the debts. RedBird IMI would then take over control of the newspaper group. RedBird IMI is led by the former boss of CNN, Jeff Zucker. It is part owned by US firm RedBird Capital. But it is the other joint owner, International Media Investments of Abu Dhabi, which has worried the Government. IMI is part of a sovereign wealth fund linked to Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the royal family in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Last week the Culture Secretary, Lucy Frazer, asked watchdog Ofcom to launch a probe into whether the sale to RedBird IMI would impact the accurate presentation of news and freedom of expression in the Telegraph titles. Ms Frazer said there may be public interest considerations with the change of ownership which warrant further investigation. The regulator has until January 26 next year to report back to the minister. RedBird IMI said that it would co-operate fully with the Government and regulator. In this Jan. 22, 2015 photo, a zodiac carrying a team of international scientists heads to Chile's station Bernardo O'Higgins, Antarctica. Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press In this Jan. 26, 2015 photo, Wenjun Li, a marine chemist from China, walks along the beach in search of samples in Punta Hanna, Livingston Island, South Shetland Islands archipelago, Antarctica. Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press Mawson Station Leader Catherine Humphries (left) and Environmental Officer Albert Peterson trial new TRISH-sponsored ultrasound technology (Butterfly iQ+) that will allow people with no prior medical experience to generate clinically useful images for remote diagnosis in space or Antarctica, back to Earth or Australian Antarctic Division headquarters, respectively. Marissa Woodburn/Australian Antarctic Division A new Houston-Australian partnership is looking to use the extreme conditions of Antarctica to advance health research as astronauts prepare for trips to the moon and Mars. In both space and the South Pole, crews are isolated and must work together for survival and research. There is sometimes just one doctor, so everyone must be adept in basic medical skills. And there is not always an option for quick evacuations. MORE BAYLOR RESEARCH: Scientists want to see if humans can hibernate like squirrels while traveling in deep space Advertisement Article continues below this ad Thats why the Center for Space Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine is planning an Antarctic testbed as NASA prepares to return humans to the moon. Its partnering with the Australian Antarctic Division for a five-year program that will use the nations frigid research stations to study space health. These stations really help us to understand what we still need to understand and what technologies we still need to develop, said Dr. Emmanuel Urquieta, chief medical officer for the Translational Research Institute for Space Health and an assistant professor at Baylor College of Medicine. The Translational Research Institute for Space Health, TRISH, is funded by NASA and will select projects from U.S. companies and universities to be conducted by Australians living in six Antarctic research stations. TRISH is based at the Baylor College of Medicine. The first project is already underway. Urquieta said a miniaturized ultrasound device is being used by the Antarctic researchers to test if a person without medical training can get quality images. Astronauts also will soon test out the device in space, which Urquieta said provides a unique opportunity. Advertisement Article continues below this ad This gives us a really powerful tool to fast track some of these capabilities, he said of two testing environments. Urquieta also is interested in studying team cohesion. In the future, he wants to determine which of the six stations has the best teamwork and how that model could be used at the other stations. Once we understand what makes a team or a station better than the other ones, then we can start training others, he said. Ideally, regardless of who is on a team, they all have the same cohesion and the same team dynamic to achieve the same goal. The Antarctic setup will help differentiate the TRISH research from other test missions, such as the NASA analog that has four people living inside NASAs Johnson Space Center for 378 days pretending to be on Mars. If someone decides to just open the door and get out, they could do it, Urquieta said of missions that simulate isolation. They are volunteers for a research project. But the stations in Antarctica, theyre actually operational. Its their job to be there. And that is what makes them extremely more valuable than non-operational environments. Advertisement Article continues below this ad He also emphasized the importance of creating operations for groups with just one doctor, communication delays with Earth and no quick evacuations. Everyone will need some basic medical training or tools like the miniaturized ultrasound should that doctor become sick and need care. Some research stations in Antarctica have hospitals with multiple doctors and nurses. And some facilities are near the coast and can evacuate people year-round. But most of Australias stations are in remote parts of the continent that cannot be accessed during the roughly nine-month winter. And they operate with just one physician. The final curtain has fallen on one of Northern Irelands oldest amateur drama festivals, which first recognised the talents of Hollywood A-lister Liam Neeson in his youth and gave him a best actor award. Give My Head Peace actress Olivia Nash who used to help organise the Larne Drama Festival has described the end of the event after 89 years ago as heartbreaking. A statement from the festival committee said: It is with much sadness that the members of Larne Drama Festival have decided that the towns annual event will no longer be held. The festival started in 1934 with 14 drama groups presenting one-act plays and the lights only went out during WW2 and the Covid-19 pandemic. Officials, some of whom have helped run the festival for over 60 years, met their season ticket holders to tell them that the main reason for scrapping the event was down to finance. The statement said: It costs in the region of 7,000 to run the event. Expenses include theatre rental, teams expenses, adjudicators fee, travel and accommodation, and these have all risen steeply. Conversely grants, local financial sponsorship and ticket income have all dropped. Officials said theyd also encountered a shortage of people to run the week-long festival which used to attract drama groups from all over Northern Ireland and the Republic who between them staged over 1,000 plays at a number of different venues. Liam Neeson won a best actor award at Larne in Brian Friels play Philadelphia Here I Come with the Slemish Players whom he joined at the age of 17. Neeson namechecked the Larne Festival in an interview with the Irish Times several years ago when he said that his roots had been firmly in amateur dramatics, adding: There were all these festivals going on, usually around Easter time. There were all these little towns Bangor, Larne. Theyd have these dramatic festivals for a week or a week and a half and all these groups would be presenting plays American plays, European plays, Irish plays and these would be going on throughout all the years of the Troubles. Neesons also on record as praising the work of festival organisers across Northern Ireland whom he thanked for keeping the amateur drama movement alive and well and for inspiring young talent dreaming of a career in the professional theatre and on screen. In a message to the festival teams he said: You are keeping alive a wonderful tradition and one that I am so proud to have been part of, namely with the Slemish Players, Ballymena. I applaud your efforts. Olivia Nash, who won a number of acting awards at Larne, said: Im devastated by the news about the shutdown. The festival in Larne used to be packed every night. People used to sit on the windowsills. My late husband Bill was the festival director and we had some amazing plays on stage. Its just so sad to realise those days arent coming back. Charlie's Bar manager Una Burns and Sarah Thompson, founder of embroidery company, Ted and Stitch, at the announcement that the two local businesses have teamed up to launch of a limited edition apparel range after the bars Christmas advert went viral around the world and captured the hearts of millions. Charlie's Bar manager Una Burns and Sarah Thompson, founder of embroidery company, Ted and Stitch, at the announcement that the two local businesses have teamed up to launch of a limited edition apparel range after the bars Christmas advert went viral around the world and captured the hearts of millions. Charlie's Bar manager Una Burns, and Sarah Thompson, founder of embroidery company, Ted and Stitch, at the announcement that the two local businesses have teamed up to launch of a limited edition apparel range after the bars Christmas advert went viral around the world and captured the hearts of millions of people. The Enniskillen bar behind a viral Christmas advertisement which pulled at the worlds heart strings has teamed up with a charity to help combat loneliness. Charlies Bar, who created the advertisement which features an elderly widower making friends with a young couple, has teamed up with local embroidery company, Ted and Stitch for a line of apparel which will be sold to raise funds for Age NI and the South West Age Partnership. The limited edition range will produce a jumper, t-shirt, hat and bandana and all sales will go the two groups. Charlie's Bar manager Una Burns and Sarah Thompson, founder of embroidery company, Ted and Stitch, at the announcement that the two local businesses have teamed up to launch of a limited edition apparel range after the bars Christmas advert went viral around the world and captured the hearts of millions. Una Burns, manager and third generation of family owned Charlies Bar Enniskillen said she was over-the moon at the reaction to her pubs viral success and its impact inspired her to combat the central theme of its advert. "Sadly, thousands of people across Northern Ireland experience loneliness and this is only heightened at Christmas time which is why it is so important to show kindness, as our ad showed a smile or a simple hello can go a long way, she said. Its hard to believe that the advert only launched a week ago in this time over 10 million people have viewed our social media channels and weve had over 20,000 new followers. Weve had visitors from Donegal, Westport, Cork, Dublin, Co Mayo and even Norway on Saturday. Weve received so many postcards, letters and phone calls from around the world, as far away as Los Angeles and Canada. Its been incredible. "This has inspired us to see what else we could do to continue to harness the power of community and storytelling to help make positive change. We are delighted to partner with Ted & Stitch, another family-run Northern Ireland business, to create a wonderful range of merchandise to give the people the chance to have their own part of Charlies Bar and help us raise much-needed funds to support people in our communities. Siobhan Casey, Director of Marketing and Business Development at Age NI also celebrated the team up between the pair. Age NI is delighted to be involved in this campaign with our partner South West Ageing Partnership (SWAP). Together we provide advice, care and wellbeing support to older people and groups, she said. "We are delighted that Charlies Bar has shone a spotlight on the devastating impact of loneliness on the lives of older people across Northern Ireland which has been exacerbated by the impact of Covid-19 and the cost of living crisis. "Almost 80,000 people over 65 live alone in Northern Ireland, one in five over 55s are experiencing high levels of loneliness and we are hearing daily from callers to our advice line about their anxiety over heating their homes and having enough money. Charlie's Bar manager Una Burns and Sarah Thompson, founder of embroidery company, Ted and Stitch, at the announcement that the two local businesses have teamed up to launch of a limited edition apparel range after the bars Christmas advert went viral around the world and captured the hearts of millions. We are extremely grateful to Charlie's Bar for helping raise awareness of this issue at a global level. Their message was simple and demonstrates how small gestures can touch people's hearts. Every year we ask people to look out for their older family, friends and neighbours, particularly during Winter. An extra meal, a trip to the shops, de-icing driveways, taking out bins, or a quick chat can make a huge difference, Siobhan added. A dedicated GoFundMe page has also been set-up to enable people to make a direct donation until Monday 1st January - www.gofundme.com/f/charliesbar Age NI helps thousands of people every year by providing companionship, advice and support for older people who need it most. The South West Age Partnership represents 70 smaller local age sector groups across the Omagh and Fermanagh area and delivers community services and activities to older people. Ryanair has denied there is a new fee charging for e-boarding passes after claims emerged on social media. Some said they have been charged up to 21 to obtain the pass - or alternatively, queue for a paper pass at the airport, according to the BBC. The development was first reported by Mail Online after passengers took to social media to vent their frustration. In a statement, a spokesperson for Ryanair said: There is no charge for a Ryanair digital boarding pass ever. All Ryanair passengers can pay for a reserved seat if they so wish or if passengers wish to avoid this seat fee, they can select a randomly allocated seat entirely free of charge. One passenger contacted the airline on X, formerly known as Twitter. "When and why did you start this carry on? I now have to QUEUE to collect my boarding pass at the airport?" he asked. Another said: "So what's this forcing people to buy seats after purchasing a flight or queue for a boarding pass all about? I thought the option to take a random seat was to avoid extra queues? Another cash gathering exercise?" Airline passengers are commonly asked to check-in online and confirm their intention to take the flight, often downloading an electronic copy of their boarding pass at the same time. Passengers can also choose to pick up a paper copy at the airport but are not usually charged to do so. The claims suggest Ryanair is asking some passengers to book a seat, which costs between 7 and 21 before they can download their boarding pass. If they do not book a seat, they have to queue for a pass at the airport. Over the years budget airlines have added on charges for add-ons such as putting luggage in the hold, booking seats or choosing a seat with extra legroom. Companies often claim it's a measure to retain a low-price structure. An alleged domestic abuse victim was made to eat food off the floor while the accused took a photo on his phone, a court heard. An alleged domestic abuse victim was made to eat food off the floor while the accused took a photo on his phone, a court heard today. Barry Maguire, (39), is accused of unlawfully and maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm on his partner, intentionally choking her, restricting breathing and flow of blood to her brain, threatening to kill her and engaging in a course of abusive behaviour causing physical or psychological harm. Offending is alleged to have occurred on November 30. Having appeared without a solicitor when asked if he was representing himself Maguire replied: I suppose I am. A detective constable told Dungannon Magistrates Court the charges could be connected. She explained the partner fled to a neighbours home in the aftermath of an alleged attack and from there was taken to the hospital where she currently remains. The neighbour meanwhile contacted police and described, Signs of coercive control and degrading abuse. The injured party is covered in bruises all over her body at apparent different stages of healing. She is vulnerable and has no family support. Opposing bail the detective said: There is a risk of further offending and witness interference. The injured party and defendant have only been in a relationship for six months and this is the second reported incident both of which were reported by third parties. The injured party has never contacted police herself, instead seeking help from neighbours. She is unsure if she wants to make a statement of complaint because she says she still loves the defendant. We feel this places her at greater risk should he be released as they could resume the relationship and the abuse will continue. The court heard Maguire has a conviction for domestic abuse assault against a previous partner and a restraining order remains in place as a result. Independent witnesses to the alleged offences are neighbours therefore Maguires address was deemed unsuitable for release. Efforts are underway to find alternative accommodation for the injured party on her release from hospital. District Judge Francis Rafferty noted: Amongst other things, the defendant indicated that the injured party bruises easily. The detective said this was discussed with the injured party who states she has no medical condition to this effect and, While she does bruise easily, its not without cause. The judge continued: There is also a suggestion the defendant made the injured party eat food off the floor, which he denied but when police advised they would be examining his phone, he then claimed to have forgotten and he may in fact have taken a photograph of her eating from the floor. Turning to Maguire, Judge Rafferty asked if he wished to tell the court why he should be granted bail. Maguire replied: Ill be of no harm to anybody else. Nearly 90% of these claims are not correct. I would like the chance to get things together so I can get defended properly. I wasnt really planning on defending myself. My plan was to get bail to sort out proper representation because Im obviously not a solicitor and Im not going to do a very good job. Judge Rafferty said: The court notes you say 90% of the claims are incorrect which means 10% of them even on your suggestion are correct. Im of the view you are a significant risk to the injured party who must be protected. There is also a risk of interference with the investigation and for those reasons I am remanding you in custody. Bail is refused. Maguire will appear again by video-link at Omagh Magistrates Court on December 19. A Co Antrim woman has appeared in court today accused of stealing more than 70,000 of lottery scratch cards. Standing at the rear of Lisburn Magistrates Court, 50-year-old Cheryl Agnes Laird confirmed she was aware of the single charge against her and that he had no objections to the case against her being returned to the Crown Court. Laird, from Ashcroft Way in Lisburn, faces a single charge of theft by employee in that on dates between April 1, 2018, and September 27, 2020, she stole lottery scratch cards to the value of 72,693 or thereabouts belonging to Centra Ballinderry Ltd. None of the alleged facts surrounding the charge were opened by the prosecution but their lawyer submitted there is a Prima Facie case against the alleged thief, a submission which was conceded by the defence. The court clerk told Laird that although not obliged to, she had the right to comment on the charges and to call evidence to the court on her own behalf but she declined to say anything. Returning the case to Craigavon Crown Court, District Judge Rosie Watters freed Laird on her own bail of 500 and scheduled the arraignment to be heard on January 25. A former Police Ombudsman investigator arrested on suspicion of conspiring to pervert the course of justice has reached a substantial settlement in his claim for damages against the PSNI. Gerald Harris sued over being detained during inquiries into how the watchdog dealt with a historic case involving four teenagers ultimately acquitted of murdering a soldier in Londonderry. Mr Harris action was stayed at the High Court today on confidential terms which include the defendant paying his legal costs. His solicitor, Gavin Booth of Phoenix Law, described the outcome as a complete vindication. Speaking outside court, Mr Booth said: We welcome the substantial settlement of our clients case for wrongful arrest. Mr Harris, a retired detective who previously served with West Midlands Police, was part of a team in the Ombudsmans Office which examined allegations of RUC involvement in terrorist crimes during the Troubles. One the cases related to the so-called Derry Four who, as teenagers, were charged with the murder of Lt Stephen Kirby in the city back in 1979. They fled across the border and remained outside Northern Ireland until they were acquitted in 1998. A subsequent probe by the Ombudsman led to two former RUC detectives being prosecuted in connection with a complaint about the interrogation of the teenagers. In 2014 the two ex-officers trial was dramatically halted and the PSNI was called in to look at how the watchdog handled the complaint. By that stage Mr Harris had left the Ombudsman's Office and taken up a new position as a staff investigator with a police force in England. However, in October 2016 he was arrested at his home in Birmingham by PSNI officers and flown to Belfast to be questioned on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and misconduct in public office. Mr Harris was released without charge and later informed that he would not be prosecuted for any alleged offence. But according to the statement of claim, his job in England was terminated while he was detained in Belfast. He took legal action against the Chief Constable of the PSNI, seeking damages for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment and breaching his right to liberty. Further claims were made for negligence and loss of earnings. His lawyers contended that he lost his job as a direct consequence of his arrest and detention, leaving him unable to gain employment with any other police force and irreparably diminishing his career prospects. In court today Mr Justice McAlinden was informed that the action had been resolved on confidential terms, without any admission of liability. The judge confirmed: The case is stayed (and) the defendant will discharge the plaintiffs costs. Following the announcement Mr Booth added: Mr Harris has been vindicated as a result of this settlement. He had a distinguished, long-serving and exemplary career with the police and then the Police Ombudsman. Throughout his career he received a number of commendations for good police work, along with medals for long-service and good conduct. File photo of police officers on patrol in Belfast's Holylands area A man was stabbed in the neck and back during a row over car keys at a house in south Belfast, a court heard today. Police claimed Mahad Abdi, 29, armed himself with a large kitchen knife to launch an unprovoked, no warning attack in the Holylands area last week. Abdi, a Somali national of no fixed abode, was refused bail and remanded into custody. He appeared at Belfast Magistrates Court on charges of possessing an offensive weapon and wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. An investigating detective said the victim sustained stab wounds to the neck and back inside the property at Palestine Street on November 28. He was taken to the Royal Victoria Hospital and required stitches to injuries close to his carotid artery and spine. Witnesses alleged that Abdi emerged from the kitchen carrying the knife and stabbed him twice as he sat on the sofa, the court heard. They feared he was going to kill the victim, the detective said. Abdi left the scene before police arrived, but presented himself at a PSNI station on Sunday. Bail was opposed amid claims that he poses a risk of harm to the public. He armed himself with a large kitchen knife and stabbed the victim in an unprovoked attack, the detective alleged. He accused the victim of having stolen his car keys, but they were located beneath the sofa. Defence solicitor Andrew Russell said Abdi was informed at the house that he would have to pay a ransom to get back the keys and a phone. He also gave an account that he was assaulted for 30-40 minutes and blacked out, Mr Russell added. He couldnt remember how it ended, but does not believe that he would have acted in the manner alleged. Refusing bail due to the risks of re-offending and interference with the complainant, District Judge Steven Keown remanded Abdi in custody until December 15. Mr Keown said: This is an extremely serious and concerning set of facts. A man killed a retired police officer in his Co Londonderry flat then sat drinking in the victim's home for several days while his remains lay in a bedroom, a court has heard. Details surrounding the death of Brian Coulter (62) emerged for the first time during a plea hearing at Belfast Crown Court on Monday. Adrian Sebastian Nowak has admitted manslaughter and is due to be sentenced on Friday. Read more Man pleads guilty to 2021 killing of former RUC officer Mr Coulter was last seen alive on October 13, 2021 in the company of Nowak. His body was discovered in his flat in the Sandy Braes area of Magherafelt on October 18 by his sister. He was killed by Nowak some time between October 13 and 14, and evidence in the flat suggested the deceased was then placed in the shower and washed by Nowak before his remains were moved to a bedroom. Crown barrister Richard Weir KC told Mr Justice OHara that Mr Coulter was an alcoholic and a vulnerable man with multiple health issues including seizures which left him without power in his right hand. Mr Weir revealed that around noon on October 18, 2021 Mr Coulters sister called at his flat and let herself in via an unlocked door. The prosecutor said the flat was in a state of disarray, there was a shopping trolley in the living room and a man was asleep on the sofa. She then went to the front bedroom and observed her brother lying on the floor. The prosecutor said: His head was swollen and because of his appearance, she knew he was dead. At this point the man on the sofa Nowak woke up, adopted a threatening stance and roared at her. This caused her to flee the property and once outside, she called the PSNI. As she was waiting for police to arrive, Nowak left the flat. She challenged him, he ignored her and she took some pictures of him as he walked away from the scene. When police arrived at the flat, they noticed blood in the living room, hallway and bathroom. Mr Coulters remains were removed from the bedroom and a post-mortem examination conducted on October 20 concluded death was due to blunt force injuries to his head, neck and chest. He also suffered a bleed to the brain and had bruises on his chest and back as well as bruising to his wrists, consistent with defensive injuries. Regarding Nowak with an address at Colvil Street in Belfast Mr Weir said he was arrested in the car park of Home Bargains in Magherafelt at 2.30pm on October 18. During the arrest he spat at and tried to headbutt officers and was initially taken to Antrim Area Hospital before being brought to Musgrave Custody Suite, where he gave a false name. He was interviewed 15 times and whilst he gave a no comment response throughout, he gave a pre-prepared statement during the final interview. In the statement, Nowak said he knew Mr Coulter who had invited him to his flat where they drank together. He also claimed that after an argument, Mr Coulter hit him and he struck him back twice in self-defence. Nowak added that after this, he moved Mr Coulters body to the bedroom, then stayed in the flat drinking for a few days before a lady arrived at the property. Mr Weir told the court that Nowak was released from HMP Maghaberry on an unrelated matter on October 12 and the following evening he and Mr Coulter were seen entering the flat at Sandy Braes, which was the last time the deceased was seen alive. The prosecutor added Nowak was a man with a disposition towards violence as was evident by his criminal record both here and in his native Poland. Nowak subsequently pleaded guilty to four charges the manslaughter of Brian Coulter on a date between October 13 and 18, 2021, the common assault of his sister on October 18, 2021, and both assaulting and obstructing police on the same date. Mr Weir concluded the Crowns case by telling Mr Justice OHara that Mr Coulters death has had a very serious impact on both his sister and daughter. Defence barrister Michael Duffy SC said his client was also an alcoholic, and whilst he branded the fatal incident as unsavoury and unjustifiable, he said it was not a case of persistent wanton violence but rather one in which one or two blows were administered. He added: The plea was put forward on the basis the blows were struck by the accused during the course of an argument. Saying there was never any intention by Nowak to cause Mr Coulter any serious harm, Mr Duffy said Nowak accepted he washed Mr Coulter and moved him to a bedroom, then remained in the flat drinking for a several days afterwards. After listening to submissions from both the Crown and defence, Mr Justice OHara said there was an element of victim-blaming regarding Nowaks version of events as he was blaming Mr Coulter, who he killed, for instigating the confrontation. As Mr Coulters family sat in the public gallery, Mr Justice OHara acknowledged his loved ones needed the matter brought to an end. Saying he needed some time to reflect on what he had heard, the senior judge said he would sentence Nowak on Friday. A chef who claimed his fiancee may have disappeared to start a new life has lost a legal battle to overturn his conviction for her murder. The Court of Appeal rejected claims that Johnny Miller was wrongly found guilty of killing 34-year-old Charlotte Murray at their home in Co Tyrone in 2012. With Ms Murrays body never recovered, defence lawyers argued that he should have been acquitted because her death was not confirmed. But Lady Chief Justice Dame Siobhan Keegan ruled there was scrupulous fairness at the trial in 2019 which was based on a circumstantial case against Miller. Dismissing all grounds of challenge, she said: The judge fairly dealt with all the complicated evidence in a manner which left the fact-finding function to the jury, which is as it should be. Charlotte Murray Ms Murray, who lived with 53-year-old Miller at Roxborough Heights in Moy, was last seen alive at Halloween in 2012. According to the prosecution, he murdered her after she had sent him intimate photographs of her with another man. Miller denied the killing and claimed she could have vanished after leaving him to set up a new life in another country. When police launched a missing person inquiry he posted an appeal for information on Facebook, saying: Someone must know where she is, please help. The Crown argued that he had sent text messages to Ms Murray to create a false impression she was still alive. Mobile cell site analysis showed her phone never left him following her alleged disappearance. Further circumstantial evidence included Ms Murray leaving behind her beloved pet dog; Millers attempts to sell her engagement ring; and enquiries made by him about blades or axes. Miller is currently serving a minimum 16 years in prison on a life sentence imposed after he was convicted of her murder. Police later drained a quarry near Benburb to search for Ms Murrays body but nothing was found. Last year detectives also urged Miller to break his silence and reveal the location of her remains. However, his legal team attempted to establish that the conviction was unsafe. The trial should have been halted at the closing of the prosecution case because Ms Murrays death was not sufficiently proven, it was contended. The Court of Appeal heard there were alleged subsequent sightings of her, and that she could alternatively have been killed by someone else in the intervening period. Dame Siobhan rejected those submissions after finding that the trial judge took the correct approach. We are not convinced that this was a borderline case, albeit we think it was complicated by Ms Murrays body not being found, she said. However, there were various strands of evidence which we think the judge was correct to consider should be considered by the jury. In summary they were these: the timing of Ms Murrays disappearance, the cell phone activity, the disappearance without any trace, the accounts given and the proof of life investigations that took place. The Lady Chief Justice also confirmed that a series of alleged irregularities in how the trial ran cast no doubts over the guilty verdict. Dismissing Millers appeal, she added: They were corrected during the trial process or were not of such a material nature as to cause us to question the safety of the conviction in any respect. Volunteers load up cars and trucks with food from the Houston Food Bank during a food distribution event at Bible Way Fellowship Baptist Church on Tuesday, April 26, 2022, in Houston. Bible Way Fellowship is one of the Houston Food Bank's many food partners as the Houston Food Bank celebrates its 40th anniversary. Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Vincent Villarreal donates a box of diapers to the San Antonio Food Bank during the first-ever Mesa de la Gente/The Table of the People at Main Plaza and San Fernando Cathedral on Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023. People from many cultures across the community offered prayers and song in observance of the national holiday, Thanksgiving, at the event meant to be a unifying gathering of community gratitude and gift-giving in collaboration between the Archdiocese of San Antonio, City of San Antonio Department of Human Services' Faith-Based Initiative, Compassionate San Antonio, Interfaith San Antonio Alliance, Main Plaza Conservancy, San Antonio Food Bank, and San Fernando Cathedral. Marvin Pfeiffer/Staff Photographer Food Bank volunteer Tony Ferraro leads Sonia Sotomayor High School students volunteers during a food distribution in San Antonio on Friday, Sep1, 20023. Carlos Javier Sanchez/pixelrefle Some Latino parents respond inaccurately to surveys measuring food insecurity nationwide, potentially skewing results of the annual reviews for one of the fastest-growing demographic groups in the United States, researchers from Texas State University and other colleges found. The U.S. Department of Agricultures U.S. Household Food Security Survey Module, which helps make decisions for food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, collects data from about 50,000 households to help form its estimates of food insecurity across the country, including at the state level. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Researchers from Texas State, San Diego State and Cornell universities interviewed respondents from Texas, California and New York and found that Latino parents sometimes responded to the survey with answers that didnt always reflect their true experiences. Many of the responses to the survey questions didnt align with more detailed descriptions of the personal situations of the people we interviewed, the researchers wrote. When asked to explain their answers, many of them found it easier to talk about how they managed or coped with food insecurity than to respond to questions about how often they worried about or were not able to feed their families as they wished. Texas has a 15.5% food insecurity rate, which is more than 4 percentage points higher than the national average, according to a 2022 USDA survey. That accounts for about 4.6 million people (or more than 1.7 million families) living with low food security in Texas, which also has the second-largest Latino population in the country. The survey asked households questions about whether they worried about running out of food before they could afford to buy more or whether theyve ever cut the size of or skipped their meals because they could not buy more food. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The researchers found that comprehension of the English words or the Spanish translation of the questions was not the cause of the inaccurate responses and instead suggested that the way the questions were written could be improved. One respondent who said they never skipped or reduced their meals eventually told the researchers that they often prepared significantly smaller meals and sometimes ate just a snack. Another said they could afford to feed their family but later said they relied on food pantries and other emergency sources of sustenance. MORE BY JHAIR ROMERO: Houstons Latino grocers worry about the future as H-E-B, Kroger court their customer base Although the families they interviewed were committed to feeding their families, the researchers said the responses did not align with the intention of the survey and therefore indicated that the survey results may be underestimating the true scale of food insecurity. Latino families with kids could be hit particularly hard by skewed data, the researchers said, citing a 2022 survey that found they face a 13.2% food insecurity rate. Advertisement Article continues below this ad A 20,000 reward has been offered for information that leads to the conviction of those involved in the murder of a west Belfast man. Jim Donegan was gunned down in his car while collecting his son from school five years ago today. Independent charity Crimestoppers has announced a 20,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the killers. Mr Donegan was shot in broad daylight while waiting in his 80,000 Porsche Panamera for his 13-year-old son outside St Marys Christian Brothers on the Glen Road. The 43-year-old was widely reported to have been a major player in the drug trade. He was under threat from dissident republicans at the time. The gunman is believed to have been in his 40s and wore a hi-vis jacket bearing the word security on it. He made off from the scene on foot. The attack was in the vicinity of three schools, with a large number of children present. Jim Donegan In June, a High Court judge ruled that a failure by police to pass on specific details about a dissident republican murder threat may have contributed to Mr Donegans death. The PSNI branded the killing a brutal execution with no justification for it whatsoever. Today, on the fifth anniversary of Mr Donegans murder, we are making a specific appeal to those who were in the area at the time of this cold-blooded execution. If you have any information, no matter how insignificant it may seem, please come forward to police, a spokesperson said. Jim was a husband, a brother, a father to two sons and a stepfather, and his family now sadly face their fifth Christmas without him. His family deserve answers and justice for his murder. I am appealing to anyone with information, or who may have captured dash cam footage, to come forward. I also want to highlight the reward of up to 20,000 from the independent charity Crimestoppers, and understand that people may be afraid to speak up, but please be assured that you stay completely anonymous when you pass on what you know directly to Crimestoppers. The PSNI has renewed its appeal for information on the whereabouts of a missing man last seen three weeks ago. Aaron McKinney (32) was last seen on a bus travelling from the Falls Road in Belfast to Wellington Place shortly before 10am on Sunday 12th November. He is described as being approximately 6ft tall, with dark hair and hazel eyes. He is of slim build. Police would appeal to anyone who saw Aaron or anyone who has CCTV or dashcam footage, to contact police on 101, quoting reference number 391 of 24/11/23. Aaron McKinney Last week, his cousin Davy told the Belfast Telegraph Mr McKinney has been going through a tough time lately and his family are besides themselves with worry. "He has a lot going on in his personal life and he sort of went off the rails the last few months, he said. Davy says Aaron's anguished family just need to know that he's okay, with friends and loved ones feeling so helpless. "It's just the fact no one seems to know where he is at all," added Davy. The cold conditions are causing problems on the roads (stock image) A three car crash on the M2 motorway Belfast bound has been moved to the hard shoulder/bus lane. The crash, which was in the outer lane, occurred near motorway services and junction 4 at Sandyknowes. All traffic lanes are now open but delays are still expected. Meanwhile, the double pedestrian crossing on the Malone Road/Rosemary Park (near House of Sport Roundabout) in Belfast was not working on Thursday morning due to damage in a crash on Wednesday afternoon. Road users are asked to approach with caution, and be watchful for pedestrians trying to cross the road at this location. A new survey suggesting that less than a third of people in Northern Ireland would vote in favour of Irish unity provides a degree of comfort for pro-Union voters, Doug Beattie has said. The Ulster Unionist leader was speaking after two new polls, one on each side of the border, revealed significant divisions between north and south on the constitutional question. DUP MLA Gordon Lyons, meanwhile, said calls for a border poll are divisive and a distraction from the issues that really matter to people. Published in the Irish Times, the polls found that, in Northern Ireland, 51% of those surveyed would vote against Irish unity, while 30% would vote in favour. Some 15% of respondents were undecided and 5% said they would not vote at all. Read more NI voters would decisively reject Irish unity in border poll, new survey suggests Compared to last years findings, the latest poll also shows that more hardline views in one of the main traditions may be softening. Protestants in Northern Ireland who said they would find it almost impossible to accept a vote for Irish unity fell from 32% last year to 23% this year. The number of Protestant respondents who said they would not be happy but could live with it increased from 41% to 52%. In the Republic, 64% of respondents said they would back Irish unity, while 16% said they would not. Some 13% said they did not know and 5% said they would not vote. DUP MLA Gordon Lyons is also linked to the DFM position The power to call a border poll rests with the Secretary of State, as per the Good Friday Agreement, but there is no set criteria for when such a poll would be triggered. Calls for a border poll have grown louder in recent years with Sinn Feins electoral success, both in Northern Ireland and the Republic, as well as the fallout from Brexit. Mr Beattie said that, while the results of the survey are positive for pro-Union voters in Northern Ireland, there are still areas of concern. Its important to remember that polls are just a snapshot in time, but the findings of this survey do provide a degree of comfort for pro-Union voters, he said. That being said, unionism cannot get complacent regarding the issue of a border poll. Mr Beattie added that the current political stalemate has undoubtedly shifted some of those on the fence regarding the constitutional question towards a more open view on Irish unity. In recent years there have also been more unionists persuaded into thinking more positively about the prospect of a border poll, he said. If people dont see politics delivering for them, the simple fact is they are going to look elsewhere. Gordon Lyons said: A cycle of border polls, whether in Scotland or Northern Ireland, are divisive and a distraction from the issues that really matter to people. Here in Northern Ireland we need to get the Protocol dealt with, devolution restored and then get on with implementing the kind of policies we put forward in our Five Point Plan, like fixing the NHS and delivering 30 hours of free childcare for working families. The latest poll also found that 31% of DUP supporters would favour a border poll. This may indicate that there is a proportion of unionists who believe that a border poll which rejected Irish unity would settle the issue for the foreseeable future. The NI Affairs Committee also suggested a supermajority speaker election The DUP is blocking the creation of an Executive at Stormont (Liam McBurney/PA) The DUP has said that proposals for radical reforms of the rules at Stormont are trying to undermine the partys opposition to the Irish Sea border. But if changes dont come, any future Assembly and executive remains at risk of collapse, Alliance said. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee has made a series of recommendations for a major shake-up of how Stormont operates, which the SDLP and Alliance have backed. The committee recommended a two thirds supermajority should be used to elect first and deputy first ministers and the speaker. During the latest suspension, the DUP has blocked several attempts to elect a speaker, which is required before ministers can be nominated to form an executive. MPs also suggested that the first and deputy first minister roles should be rebranded and open to politicians from beyond the largest unionist and nationalist parties. Currently, votes from a majority of MLAs within both the nationalist and unionist traditions are needed to secure the posts of speaker, and first and deputy first ministers. It means the votes of the growing number of 'other MLAs in Alliance effectively don't count in such key votes. Alliance MP Stephen Farry said the tenets of the Good Friday Agreement, which uphold the institutions, should evolve to reflect changing demographics while upholding core principles. The past 25 years have demonstrated an underlying instability, unfairness and lack of effectiveness of the institutions. In particular, the institutions have only been operational for 60% of that time. "Even if the Assembly and Executive is restored in the near future, the risk of a further collapse remains. The committee recommendation for an independently-led comprehensive review is absolutely crucial. But DUP MP Carla Lockhart, who sits on the NI Affairs Committee, said her party is opposed to the proposals and submitted its own minority report. She said the NIACs report is trying to set aside inbuilt protections for unionists and nationalists. Speaking to the BBC, she said: Its trying to undermine the fact that unionism does not support what the Government has done in recent months around the [Northern Ireland] Protocol and the Windsor Framework. "One of the most fundamental building blocks of the Belfast Agreement was cross community consent. We want to get back to consensus politics. We dont think any new sweeping ways of working should be introduced to Northern Ireland. The DUP has been blocking powersharing at Stormont for more than a year and a half in protest at the internal UK trade barriers created by Brexits Northern Ireland Protocol. Jeffrey Donaldsons DUP is currently blocking the operation of the Stormont powersharing institutions (Liam McBurney/PA) There have been lengthy negotiations with the Government around the Windsor Framework, which reformed the Northern Ireland protocol. Theyve also sought reassurance in the form of legislation on Northern Irelands place within the UK internal market. Meanwhile, Sinn Fein said that 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement, its imperative to learn lessons around what has worked, but also what hasnt. A Sinn Fein spokesperson added: The DUPs current blockade of the Executive is unfair on all those people who voted for real change last May, and in recent council elections, and who voted for parties to work together to deliver for all our people. The outcome of those elections needs to be respected and the Executive established without delay. This would enable the Assembly and Executive Review Committee set up under the Good Friday Agreement to do its work. Sinn Fein is very much up for those discussions within that committee. SDLP MP Claire Hanna, whose party made some of the proposals, has said changes to the election of first ministers should be made in the next election. It would mean that this power of blocking that parties say we dont like how things are going so no one is allowed any governance would be a thing of the past, she said. Ulster Unionist leader Doug Beattie said there should be a factory reset to the Belfast Agreement but that any changes should be put to the electorate. The principle of consent needs to be at the heart of any change, he said. During its evidence, the NIAC heard that with the growth of the proportion of Northern Ireland society identifying as neither unionist nor nationalist since the agreement, supermajority voting would effectively equate to cross-community consent. Under current Stormont rules, Sinn Feins Stormont leader Michelle ONeill is entitled to claim the position of first minister (Brian Lawless/PA) The committee said the changes would require consultation with the Irish Government as co-guarantors to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, as well as the parties of Northern Ireland. It said that the 1998 Northern Ireland Act that enshrined power-sharing and devolution in legislation, would also need to be changed. Committee chairman Sir Robert Buckland said public services are feeling the strain due to the current deadlock. The short-term measures weve proposed will shore up the stability of Stormont increasing the incentives to keep the institutions moving and enabling the Assembly to run without an executive in place, he said. Robert Buckland is the chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee (Stefan Rousseau/PA) In the longer run, we feel that a full independent review into the effectiveness of the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement should be conducted with input from all stakeholders. But better financial outlook would sway many in favour of unification The financial impact of a united Ireland could sway voters, polls for the Irish Times found. People are significantly less likely to vote for a united Ireland if it would hit them in the pocket, a new poll indicates. It suggests the economic effects of unity would sway many in a future border poll. More than four in 10 of Northern Ireland voters who expressed an opinion in the Irish Times survey said they would be less likely to vote for a united Ireland if it meant they would be 3,500 a year worse off. But almost as many said they would be more likely to vote for unity if the reverse was true, and they were 3,500 better off. More than 1,000 people in each jurisdiction took part in polls simultaneously run by Ipsos in Northern Ireland and Ipsos B&A in the Republic. The findings appear in todays Irish Times. One of the key questions centres on how the cost of a united Ireland - positive or negative - would influence voters. They were asked for views on two hypothetical scenarios - either unification left them 3,500 worse off annually, or 3,500 better off each year. It found 43% of those expressing an opinion in Northern Ireland would be less likely to vote for Irish unity if they lost out financially. But 38% said they would be more likely if there was a better economic outcome for them. Further analysis showed 23% of Protestants who expressed an opinion in Northern Ireland would be more likely to support a united Ireland in the scenario they were 3,500 better off each year, with 45% less likely if it cost them more. Around four in 10 Catholics in Northern Ireland (41%) would be swayed by the financial cost of unity, saying they would be less likely to vote for it. Yet, if there was a financial benefit, 54% of this cohort said they would be more supportive. Some 28% of pro-unity Catholics in Northern Ireland would be less in favour of unity where it came at a cost, with nearly six in 10 (59%) even more likely to vote for a united Ireland if there was a financial benefit. In the Irish Republic, 43% would be less likely to vote for unity if there was a financial loss to them, with 51% saying a better financial outcome would make them more supportive. Some 41% of pro-unity voters in the Republic would be less enthusiastic if they were worse off. Some 56% of this cohort indicated they would be more supportive because of a financial windfall. The polls involved in-home interviews with more than 1,000 voters in each jurisdiction. The margin of error in each is estimated at 3.1%. A poll published in Saturdays Irish Times found clear - if unsurprising - attitudes to a border poll. In Northern Ireland, more than half of all voters (51%) said they would vote against unity, with 30% in favour. The rest were undecided (15%) or would not vote (5%). There is much stronger support for unity in the Republic, where 64% of respondents said they would vote for unity, with just 16% against. Some 13% said they did not know, and 5% would not vote. The NIAC has recommended changing Stormont rules to restore and stabilise the powersharing institutions (Liam McBurney/PA) Stormont rules should be urgently reformed so that a speaker can be elected by a two-thirds majority of MLAs, a Westminster committee has recommended. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee has also proposed that the same threshold should be used to elect first and deputy first ministers. As part of a raft of proposals which the committee said would assist in restoring and stabilising the powersharing institutions, it also recommended rebranding the first minister roles and making them open to politicians from beyond the largest unionist and nationalist parties. The DUP has been blocking powersharing at Stormont for more than a year and a half in protest at the internal UK trade barriers created by Brexits Northern Ireland Protocol. Sir Jeffrey Donaldsons DUP is currently blocking the operation of the Stormont powersharing institutions (Liam McBurney/PA) The party has been involved in negotiations with the Government about the Windsor Framework, which reformed the protocol, and is seeking further assurances, by way of legislation, over Northern Irelands place in the UK internal market. Senior civil servants have been left in charge of devolved departments and the Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris had to intervene to set a budget. During the lengthy suspension, the DUP has blocked several attempts to elect a Speaker, which is required before ministers can be nominated to form an executive. The Westminster committee has been carrying out an investigation into the effectiveness of the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement; the historic peace deal which created the Stormont Assembly. Within current rules, votes from a majority of MLAs within both the nationalist and unionist traditions are needed to secure the posts of speaker, and first and deputy first ministers. During its evidence, the committee heard that with the growth of the proportion of Northern Ireland society identifying as neither unionist nor nationalist since the agreement, supermajority voting would effectively equate to cross-community consent. Among the measures it recommends in its report are calls for the UK Government to urgently reform the Assembly speaker election rules so that a candidate can be elected by a two-thirds supermajority of MLAs. It recommends the same method should be used to elect first and deputy first ministers. The report adds that, in recognition of their equal status, the roles should be rebranded as joint first ministers with the position open to any two MLAs of any two parties rather than just the largest parties. Under current Stormont rules, Sinn Feins Stormont leader Michelle ONeill is entitled to claim the position of first minister (Brian Lawless/PA) Under current rules, Sinn Feins Stormont leader Michelle ONeill is entitled to claim the position of first minister as her party emerged with the largest number of MLAs following last years Assembly elections. The committee said the changes would require consultation with the Irish Government as co-guarantors to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, as well as the parties of Northern Ireland. It said that the 1998 Northern Ireland Act that came from the agreement, which enshrines power-sharing government and devolution in Northern Ireland, would also need to be changed. Sir Robert Buckland is the chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee (Stefan Rousseau/PA) Committee chairman Sir Robert Buckland said: When Stormont collapses critical public services are cast adrift. Health, education, policing; all are feeling the strain while important decisions go unmade, and the people of Northern Ireland suffer. More stringent safeguards are needed to protect against the cycle of restoration and collapse that has dogged Stormont. He added: The short-term measures weve proposed will shore up the stability of Stormont increasing the incentives to keep the institutions moving and enabling the Assembly to run without an executive in place. In the longer run, we feel that a full independent review into the effectiveness of the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement should be conducted with input from all stakeholders. This should include the North-South and East-West elements, but a fully functioning Stormont is the foundation on which the rest stands. The Stormont powersharing institutions have been collapsed on several occasions previous to the current political impasse, including by Sinn Fein in 2017 in protest at the DUP handling of a green energy scheme. On that occasion the institutions remained dormant for three years. The inquiry is examining the circumstances surrounding the death of Sheku Bayoh (Family handout/PA) Detectives investigating the death of Sheku Bayoh forced a vulnerable family to leave their home without consent, an inquiry has heard. Mr Bayoh, 31, died after being restrained by police in Kirkcaldy, Fife, on the morning of May 3 2015, having taken Class A drugs hours before with friends. The Sheku Bayoh Inquiry is investigating the circumstances of his death, how police dealt with the aftermath, the subsequent investigation, and whether race was a factor. Officers went to the home of Mr Bayohs friend Zahid Saeed and spoke to his sister, Saadia Rashid, who was caring for her elderly mother and paraplegic brother, as well as two young children, including a baby who was being breastfed. Mrs Rashid told the inquiry she repeatedly insisted police obtain a warrant but was told they didnt need one, and the family had to leave the house so it could be searched. She said a plain-clothes officer forced himself into the house after intimidating her and the family were forced to leave and felt like criminals with no rights. Mrs Rashid added they felt vulnerable and victimised, and were so rushed she forgot a breast pump and medication. Two detectives were sent from Levenmouth, Fife, to explain and persuade and reassure the occupants after uniformed officers, the inquiry heard. Giving evidence, Detective Constable Gordon Miller, 54, said there was no point in him asking consent due to the familys obvious unhappiness, and officers anticipated a complaint would be lodged. In a statement, he said he told Mrs Rashid: Sometimes you do not need warrants, because it was a serious incident that had happened at that time the property had been seized, weve got to protect the forensic integrity of it. Mr Miller said: She did ask for a warrant, and I know it says there that we were pushy, abrupt and quite rude. At that stage because the family were so unhappy, we were expecting a police complaint to come in. We certainly werent rude or pushy in any shape or form. In these situations where people are likely to complain, youre careful. He insisted he was not the plain-clothes officer who was banging on the door described by Mrs Rashid. The detective said he followed a lawful order from the senior investigating officer to protect the forensic integrity of it, so if there was drugs within the property it couldnt be disposed of, citing common law powers. He said a warrant could be sought retrospectively, but could not explain why some senior colleagues said the family had consented. Mr Miller said: I dont know why they thought consent had been given, it would have been pointless asking, we had fed back that the family were quite unhappy about having to leave the address. Why theyve thought they were consenting to a search, you would have to ask them that. Police deemed the property to be a secondary crime scene and presumed it would be drugs or a weapon or something, the inquiry heard. Mr Miller said: We havent seized a property from witnesses before or since, especially a secondary crime scene. As far as I was concerned, the property had already been seized by the officers who were there. We went along to explain the situation. It was quite clear the family were unhappy to leave the property. When asked what steps he took to ensure the family knew they did not have to consent to the search, Mr Miller said: I dont recall that I took any steps. He added: They werent consenting as such, they were begrudgingly leaving, they werent happy to leave. Mr Miller said he recalled a householder being threatened with arrest if he attempted to enter. When asked what authority he had to restrain someone from entering the house, Mr Miller said: Technically, if its his household, theres none to stop him coming in. He added: Weve seized that property under common law and were trying to protect it as best we can. Giving evidence, he said the family should have been given more explanation and told of their rights. He conceded there wasnt authority to force a family to leave. Mr Miller said: Not particularly that were aware of. If they refused to leave, we would have fed that back in, it would have been at that stage that we would have looked at getting a warrant. When Mrs Rashids statement describing her feelings of being vulnerable and victimised was read, Mr Miller disputed that the family felt criminalised, but acknowledged they felt victimised. He said: Im sorry if she felt like that. It wasnt our intention to make people feel like that. Police received a complaint that the family were thrown out into the street, the inquiry heard. Officers rejected requests that the family could remain in one room of the adapted house and were criticised for lacking compassion by Mrs Rashid, who had recently had surgery along with her baby. She said she believed they were treated differently because we were Pakistani and Muslim, and she didnt feel safe, as a male officer stood outside her door as she got changed. Giving evidence, Mr Miller said that by 7pm no alternative accommodation had been found for the family. He also said that he learnt more about Islam from volunteering with Scouts than from police training. A complaint was lodged on May 14, from Fife Islamic Centre, which said: The people living in the house were thrown out of the house, (including a seven-week old baby and a disabled person), into the street without any explanation. The inquiry, before Lord Bracadale in Edinburgh, continues. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rarely overturns decisions made by other state judges or questions the conduct of lawyers. But the states highest criminal court did both those things last week in an extraordinary rebuke of two of the Houston areas most powerful players in the courts: Vivian King, a top lieutenant of Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, and Ramona Franklin, a Harris County district judge. At issue is a serious error King made as a defense lawyer in 2015, before she joined Oggs staff. King promised in writing that she would file an appeal for a client but never did and did not respond to his subsequent inquiries for years. Franklin, the judge presiding over the case, then denied the mans request to file a late appeal earlier this year. The Court of Criminal Appeals overturned that denial last week and ruled that the man, Juan Carlos Barrera-Magana, should be able to submit the appeal after all. Its three-page opinion said in typically dry language that Kings conduct was deficient and that relief is granted. But one of the courts nine Republican judges, Michelle Slaughter, was so incensed by what happened that she penned a nine-page concurring opinion with much harsher words. While the errors that occurred in this case are particularly egregious, and are hopefully rare among attorneys across the state, this case serves as yet another reminder for all appellate attorneys of the effect of failing to stay on top of their responsibilities, Slaughter wrote. Advertisement Article continues below this ad She added that she was very disappointed in Franklins decision, calling it unsupported and erroneous. Franklin declined to comment. She was first elected to the bench in 2016 and is up for reelection next year. Chronicle brings scrutiny to Harris County indigent defense Harris County leaders have pledged to improve legal representation for indigent people accused of crimes after a Chronicle investigation revealed court-appointed attorneys are swamped with hundreds of cases a year, raising doubts about the quality of their work. One attorney made $1 million in 2022 with a caseload of hundreds of felonies and misdemeanors far exceeding state-recommended caseload limits for defense lawyers. But the county will need buy-in from felony judges who assign attorneys to indigent defendants in their courtrooms. King is also running for a judgeship in Harris County. In an email to the Houston Chronicle, she wrote that her original promise to Barrera-Magana was the result of a typo, "an unfortunate error that I tried to correct." She said she'd represented criminal defendants in more than 100 trials and written more than 50 appeals during her 22-year career as a defense attorney. I care about all the clients that I represented, King said. She added that she is "glad" Barrera-Magana will be able to file his appeal, though prosecutors in her office had argued in legal briefs to Franklin that he should not have been able to do so. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Ogg's office did not respond to questions about the matter. Mandy Miller, a criminal defense attorney based in Houston who specializes in post-conviction work, said it's not uncommon for attorneys to miss deadlines. But she called the sequence of events in Barrera-Magana's case "mind-blowing." Things happen, and you miss deadlines, and thats OK," Miller said. "The problem is not facing it. This could have been resolved ages ago." The episode is emblematic of a lack of accountability in the courts. As the Chronicle recently reported, an attorney who repeatedly missed deadlines for clients on death row is still one of the busiest and highest-earning court-appointed lawyers in the county. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The Harris County District Clerks Office recently discovered dozens of "lost" appeals that the court system had failed to address. One such appeal, which was filed in 1994 and forgotten for decades afterward, finally led to the overturning of a man's death sentence last month. The issue was first reported by the Houston Landing. Seven years of delay On Nov. 15, 2004, officers with the Baytown Police Department found 19-year-old Santiago Garcia shot to death near a park in Old Baytown. A decade would pass before Juan Carlos Barrera-Magana was convicted of murdering him and sentenced to life in prison. Both men had been involved in a smuggling business, and witnesses testified at the trial that Barrera-Magana killed Garcia because he believed he was going to snitch about something, court records show. Barrera-Magana insisted he was innocent but couldnt afford a lawyer. So King, then a prominent Houston defense attorney, was assigned to handle his appeal. In August 2015, King filed a 28-page appellate brief for her client that was rejected by an appeals court a few months later. But Barrera-Magana still had options, as King told him in a letter that December. For one, he could submit another appeal, known as a Petition for Discretionary Review, to the Court of Criminal Appeals within 30 days. Advertisement Article continues below this ad I will file this petition for you," King wrote to Barrera-Magana. She never did. A year later, King left her job as a defense attorney to work as chief of staff for Ogg, who was newly elected. Meanwhile, Barrera-Magana waited in a state prison for news of the appeal. In 2019, a court clerk informed him that no appeal had been filed. The next year, Barrera-Magana filed a grievance against King with the State Bar of Texas, which licenses attorneys and has the power to discipline them for misconduct. Only then did King respond to him. It appears that my assistant made a typo that I did not catch, she wrote to him in another letter, referring to her 2015 correspondence. The last sentence in Paragraph 1) should have read I will not file this petition for you; but instead, it read I will file this petition for you. In her statement to the Chronicle, King added that she had signed the original letter without catching the typo after being exhausted from a day in trial. The State Bar did not discipline her. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Judge Ramona Franklin of the Harris County 338th Criminal District Court speaks to defense attorneys in her court on Wednesday, June 14, 2023 in Houston. Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle By this point, Barrera-Magana had decided to avail himself of one other option he had: An application for a writ of habeus corpus, a broader legal request for a hearing in front of a judge that technically has no deadline. Without the help of an attorney, Barrera-Magana submitted a 33-page application in September 2019. He argued that he had the right to file a late appeal and that King had provided him with ineffective counsel, a violation of his Sixth Amendment rights. Now Barrera-Magana was at the mercy of the judge in Harris County who had jurisdiction over his case and the writ application: Ramona Franklin. It would turn out to be a long wait. In January 2022, more than two years after Barrera-Magana sent his application, and six months after the Court of Criminal Appeals ordered her to take action on it, Franklin issued her own ruling stating that the issue of ineffective assistance of counsel needs to be resolved. King would have to submit an affidavit answering questions about what happened. King's affidavit was due in a month. But the due date came and went. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Youre the chief of staff of the DAs office! And a judge has ordered you to do something! said Maggie Kiely, a Harris County public defender who was eventually appointed to represent Barrera-Magana, during the proceedings. After she took up the case, Kiely said she attempted to contact King for months, with no response. The Court of Criminal Appeals was getting impatient, too, sending Franklin two reminder letters about the case over a period of several months. Finally, in June 2023, Franklin signed a "motion to compel," a more serious order that demanded King to either produce her affidavit or appear in court to explain why she hadn't done so yet. A month later, King responded 17 months past the original deadline. King wrote in her affidavit that she had never intended to file an appeal for Barrera-Magana because she "did not feel it was meritorious." She recounted her "typo" in her original letter to him and said she had simply given him "instructions" on how to submit the appeal rather than promise to file it for him a claim directly contradicted by the letter itself. "If you compare the letter to her affidavit, it doesnt match up," Kiely said. "There are parts of it that are blatantly false." Still, Oggs office asked Franklin to accept the affidavit as credible and to deny Barrera-Maganas request to file a late appeal. And Franklin agreed. In September 2023 four years after his request was submitted she denied it. Ben Wolff, director of a state office that provides additional legal representation for many people facing death sentences in Texas, said the delay in the ruling might be understandable, but not the substance of it. I have a lot of empathy for busy judges with busy trial dockets," Wolff said. "But what we all should hope is that judges act as judges and not blindly rubber-stamp the state's argument." Soon after Franklin's denial, Kiely filed an appeal. By November, there was a new ruling from the Court of Criminal Appeals reversing Franklins decision along with the concurring opinion by Judge Slaughter. Manuel Rocha when he was US ambassador to Bolivia (State Department via AP) A former career American diplomat has been charged with serving as a secret agent for communist Cuba going back decades in what prosecutors portrayed as one of the most brazen and long-running betrayals in the history of the US foreign service. Court papers alleged that Manuel Rocha engaged in clandestine activity on Cubas behalf since at least 1981, including by meeting with Cuban intelligence operatives and providing false information to US government officials about his travels and contacts. The complaint, filed in federal court in Miami, charges Rocha with crimes including acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government and provides a vivid case study of what American officials say are long-standing efforts by Cuba and its notoriously sophisticated intelligence services to target government officials who can be flipped. This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent, attorney general Merrick Garland said in a statement. Attorney general Merrick Garland speaks in Washington about Manuel Rocha, the former American diplomat who served as US ambassador to Bolivia, being charged with serving as a secret agent for Cubas intelligence services (Stephanie Scarbrough/AP) To betray that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the United States while serving a foreign power is a crime that will be met with the full force of the Justice Department. The 73-year-old Rocha, whose two-decade career as a US diplomat included top posts in Bolivia, Argentina and the US Interests Section in Havana, was arrested at his Miami home on Friday. He wept as he sat handcuffed during his first court appearance on Monday and was ordered held pending a bail hearing on Wednesday. His lawyer declined to comment. The Justice Department did not reveal how Rocha allegedly attracted the attention of Cubas intelligence operatives nor did it describe what, if any, sensitive information he may have provided while in government. Instead, the case relies largely on what prosecutors say were Rochas own admissions, made over the past year to an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence operative. Rocha praised the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro as Comandante, branded the US the enemy and bragged about his service for more than 40 years as a Cuban mole in the heart of the State Department and elite US foreign policy circles, the complaint says. What we have done its enormous more than a Grand Slam, he was quoted as saying at one of several secretly recorded conversations starting last year at discreet locations a church and outdoor food court in central Miami. Defence lawyer Jacqueline Arango, centre, and Karla Wittkop Rocha, left, wife of Manuel Rocha, are trailed by journalists as they leave the James Lawrence King Federal Justice Building in Miami (Rebecca Blackwell/AP) They underestimated what we could do to them. We did more than they thought, the document quotes Rocha as saying, referring to the United States. To cover his tracks, he referred to Cuba as the island and led a normal life disguised as a right-wing person, he said in one of the recordings. He also arrived at the meetings with the undercover agent in Miami deliberately straying from the most direct route and pausing along the way in what prosecutors allege was classic counter-surveillance tradecraft as taught by Cubas spymasters. Its what Ive always been told to do, Rocha told his handler about his movements. The case is part of a historically tense relationship between the US and Cuba. Washington and Havana restored diplomatic relations in late 2014 after half a century of Cold War acrimony, though the Trump administration reimposed sanctions on Cuba and, in 2021, redesignated it a state sponsor of terrorism. The charging document traces Rochas illegal ties to Cuba back to 1981, when he first joined the State Department, to well after his departure from the federal government, when he took on lucrative private sector jobs most recently as a senior business adviser to an international public relations firm. The FBI learned about the relationship last year and arranged a series of undercover encounters in central Miami between Rocha and an agent purporting to be a Cuban intelligence operative, the document says. Manuel Rocha during a meeting with an FBI undercover employee (Justice Department via AP) I always told myself, The only thing that can put everything we have done in danger is someones betrayal, someone who may have met me, someone who may have known something at some point, Rocha said in one of the meetings, according to the charging document. In another meeting last year, Rocha referred to Cuba shooting down two unarmed planes sent by the Miami-based group of exiles Brothers to the Rescue in which four opponents of Castros government were killed in 1996, the document said. There is no indication in the complaint that Rocha aided the Cubans with the military operation a major flashpoint in more than half a century of brinksmanship between the communist-ruled island and its right-wing opponents in Miami. But at the time he served as a senior political officer at the US special interest section in Havana. I lived through it, because I was in charge, Rocha said. That was a time of a lot of tension. Rochas alleged service to Cuba may have gone back earlier than the start of his US diplomatic career. The complaint cites Rocha telling the undercover agent, who went by the name Miguel, that he first proved his loyalty in Chile in 1973 the same year right-wing General Augusto Pinochet, with US backing, overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende. Manuel Rocha (Justice Department via AP) They must have told you something because you mentioned Chile, Rocha told the undercover agent who presented himself as having reached out to him at the request of higher-ups in Cubas National Intelligence Directorate. That inspired trust in me. Born in Colombia, Rocha was raised in a working-class home in New York City and went on to obtain a succession of liberal arts degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown before joining the foreign service in 1981. He was the top US diplomat in Argentina between 1997 and 2000 as a decade-long currency stabilisation programme backed by Washington was unravelling under the weight of huge foreign debt and stagnant growth, triggering a political crisis that would see the South American country cycle through five presidents in two weeks. At his next post, as ambassador to Bolivia, he intervened directly in the 2002 presidential race, warning weeks ahead of the vote that the US would cut off assistance to the poor South American country if it were to elect former coca grower Evo Morales. I want to remind the Bolivian electorate that if they vote for those who want Bolivia to return to exporting cocaine, that will seriously jeopardise any future aid to Bolivia from the United States, Rocha said in a speech that was widely interpreted as an attempt to sustain US dominance in the region. The gambit angered Bolivians and gave Mr Morales a last-minute boost. When he was finally elected three years later, the leftist leader expelled Rochas successor as chief of the diplomatic mission for inciting civil war. Rocha also served in Italy, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, and worked as a Latin America expert for the National Security Council. After his retirement from the State Department, Rocha began a second career in business, serving as the president of a gold mine in the Dominican Republic partly owned by Canadas Barrick Gold. More recently, he has held senior roles at XCoal, a Pennsylvania-based coal exporter; Clover Leaf Capital, a company formed to facilitate mergers in the cannabis industry; law firm Foley & Lardner; and Spanish public relations firm Llorente & Cuenca, which said on Monday that it had sacked him. John Feeley, who ended a long diplomatic career serving as US ambassador to Panama, said he was saddened and shocked that my former mentor turned out to be a career Cuban mole. Mr Feeley, who retired from the State Department over differences with President Donald Trumps administration, said that the last time he saw Rocha he was surprised by how a diplomat who had served administrations of both parties had so fully embraced Mr Trumps brand of politics. It is beyond ironic that he cultivated this cartoonish persona and that everyone apparently bought it, he said. The Israeli military has widened its ground offensive and bombarded targets across the Gaza Strip (Hatem Ali/AP) The Israeli military has renewed its calls for mass evacuations from the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis, where tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge in recent weeks, as it widened its ground offensive and bombarded targets across the territory. The expanded offensive, following the collapse of a week-long ceasefire, is aimed at eliminating Gazas Hamas rulers, whose October 7 attack on Israel triggered the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian violence in decades. The war has already killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced more than three-quarters of the territorys population of 2.3 million Palestinians, who are running out of safe places to go. (PA Graphics) Already under mounting pressure from its top ally, the United States, Israel appears to be racing to strike a death blow against Hamas if that is even possible, given the groups deep roots in Palestinian society before another ceasefire. But the mounting toll from the fighting, which Palestinian health officials say has killed several hundred civilians since the truce ended on Friday, further increases pressure to return to the negotiating table. It could also render even larger parts of the isolated territory uninhabitable. Palestinians inspect a damaged building following Israeli air strikes on the town of Khan Younis (Fatima Shbair/AP) The ground offensive has transformed much of the north, including large parts of Gaza City, into a rubble-filled wasteland. Hundreds of thousands of people have sought refuge in the south, which could meet the same fate, and both Israel and neighbouring Egypt have refused to accept any refugees. Residents said they heard air strikes and explosions in and around Khan Younis overnight and into Monday after the military dropped leaflets warning people to relocate further south towards the border with Egypt. A Palestinian woman inspects a damaged house following Israeli air strikes on Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip (Fatima Shbair/AP) In an Arabic language post on social media early on Monday, the military again ordered the evacuation of nearly two dozen neighbourhoods in and around Khan Younis. Halima Abdel-Rahman, a widow and mother of four, said she has stopped heeding such orders. She fled her home in October to an area outside Khan Younis, where she stays with relatives. The (Israeli) occupation tells you to go to this area, then they bomb it, she said. The reality is that no place is safe in Gaza. They kill people in the north. They kill people in the south. Colin Crooks also oversaw the late Her Majesty The Queens visit to South Korea in 1999 County Tyrone-born Colin Crooks is the UKs Ambassador to South Korea and escorted the Asian nations President Yoon Suk Yeol on his three-day visit to the UK A diplomat from Co Tyrone has spoken of his pride at leading the team that organised King Charles first incoming State visit since the coronation. Colin Crooks is the UKs Ambassador to South Korea and escorted the countrys President Yoon Suk Yeol on his three-day visit to the UK. Mr Crooks, who is from Dungannon, described his role in last months visit as a tremendous privilege. The visit, which celebrated 140 years of the UKs diplomatic partnership with South Korea, saw Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sign a new accord committing both nations to closer future collaboration across trade, security, technology, energy and technology. Another memorable moment was when King Charles honoured K-pop singing sensations Blackpink for their climate change work, while lamenting his lack of Gangnam style in a keynote speech. It was a tremendous privilege to accompany the South Korean delegation to the UK the first foreign government to be invited for a State visit since the Coronation, said Colin (54), a fluent Korean speaker. We have a 140-year history of friendly diplomatic relations. The UK was the second biggest contributor of troops to the Korean war and over a thousand British soldiers gave their lives for South Koreas freedom. Its something which binds both nations together and will continue to do so as the UK leads the way in supporting our Korean friends in countering North Koreas aggressive posturing to ensure the safety and security of the Korean Peninsula and wider region. The UK is proud to be at the forefront of efforts to curtail North Koreas illegal weapons programmes as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. The South Korea state visit gets underway Mr Crooks said both nations have much in common. He added: Culturally, South Korea has been making its mark internationally through K-pop and K-drama which has caught the imagination of young people across the world, including the UK. A highlight for me was King Charles honouring the band Blackpink for their work promoting the COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow and having a giggle with his audience at the State Banquet about not developing much of the Gangnam style on last visit to Seoul. Colin who helped launch a new Invest Northern Ireland office at the British Embassy in Seoul last year hopes his birthplace can benefit from the strengthening of trade and investment links signed in the new accord with South Korea. South Korea is one of the fastest growing destinations for Northern Ireland goods in various sectors with 51.3m worth of exports heading there between July 2022 and June 2023. The launch of the Invest Northern Ireland office last year has enabled us to highlight how peace has made the country such an attractive place to invest, he said. In the past year, a trade deal has been struck for almost 10,000 bottles of Belfast Distillery Companys McConnells Irish Whiskey to be sold in South Korean stores with more lined up and expected to be released soon. South Koreas administrative capital Sejong City has twinned with Belfast as part of a smart cities innovation programme, creating a path to greater trade and investment opportunities and linking up. Queens University, Belfast, with counterparts in the Korea University Sejong Campus, are collaborating to develop cyber security research. South Korea is now recognised as an economic powerhouse and this deepening of our relationship through the accord can only encourage further collaboration to boost the local economy and that of the wider UK. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has signed a new Accord with South Korea Colin joined the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in 1992 and his recent brush with royalty takes his career full circle after he oversaw the late Queens visit to South Korea in 1999. Colin was appointed Ambassador to South Korea in February 2022 and has the distinction of being the first UK national to have served as Ambassador in both South and North Korea. Colin Crooks also oversaw the late Her Majesty The Queens visit to South Korea in 1999 The diplomat is also the last British person to step foot in North Korea after temporarily closing the British Embassy in Pyongyang in May 2020 as the hermit state shut its borders to impose a strict Covid-19 lockdown. North Korea was one of the first countries to lock down and the last to open back up again, so I am still the last British person to set foot in North Korea, said Colin. There are some signs of the country re-opening up its borders, so we are hoping we will be able to re-open the British Embassy again soon. Perhaps my upbringing on a divided island affected by conflict triggered my fascination and love affair with the Korean Peninsula. I met my South Korean wife during my first overseas posting here back in 1994. This years 25th anniversary of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and how thats transformed Northern Ireland shows what can be achieved through diplomacy and striving for peace. When it comes to dealing with mental health issues among our young people, early intervention is vital. In order for such intervention to take place, young people need to be aware of their emotions and recognise when they are in need of help. Thats why including mental health in the school curriculum would have a positive impact. In recent years the issue of mental health has become more prevalent, in part due to the impact of the Covid pandemic and lockdowns, as well as the cost-of-living crisis. Against this background access to mental health services is limited by growing waiting lists. Now young people have come together to call for mental health education to be included in the curriculum within the next five years. The NI Youth Forum and Secondary Students Union NI have been campaigning on this issue for some time and recently held an event at Belfast City Hall to highlight the situation. They have also called for a working group, made up of young people, professionals and politicians, to be established to help formulate the content of what should be included in the curriculum in relation to mental health. Having mental health issues taught in schools would have a variety of benefits, not just for improving the wellbeing of our young people. As Genevieve McCollum of the NI Youth Forum explains: What we need is mental health to be a key part of the curriculum, helping young people to deal with those emotions from P1 right through until the end of their school life and beyond. If that is implemented we will start to see referrals to bodies like CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) starting to fall which will cut waiting lists and help the system cope with the growing demand. A recent survey published by Northern Irelands mental health champion, Professor Siobhan ONeill, highlighted the scale of wellbeing issues among our young people. The survey found that 45.2% of 16 year olds here have probable mental ill-health, while the wellbeing of 11 year olds has declined to its lowest score since 2016. Speaking at the time, Prof ONeill noted that mental ill-health costs the Northern Ireland economy 3.4bn each year and said that the most cost-effective approach to reducing this burden of suffering is through early intervention and prevention. In this regard, having mental health as part of the curriculum would benefit our society. Military personnel stand guard at the entrance of a gymnasium while police investigators look for evidence after a bomb attack at Mindanao State University in Marawi, Lanao del sur province, Philippines, Dec. 3, 2023. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a bomb attack at a Catholic Mass on Sunday that killed four people and injured dozens in the southern Philippines, counter-terrorism experts said. The explosion occurred at 7:30 a.m. at the Mindanao State University gymnasium in Marawi city, which was taken over by militants linked to IS in 2017. During the five-month battle that followed, at least 1,200 militants, soldiers, police and civilians were killed before the military regained control of the city. In a statement Sunday, IS said on its website that soldiers of the Caliphate detonated an explosive device on a large gathering of Christians in the city of Marawi, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, an American counterterrorism consultancy. IS also said it was behind the attack on Telegram, Reuters reported. Earlier in the day, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. blamed foreign terrorists for the heinous attack, without elaborating. The United States on Monday condemned the attack in Marawi and said it stood with Filipinos in rejecting this act of violence. We mourn those killed in the attack, and our thoughts are with the injured, Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of State, said in a statement. Despite IS claim of responsibility, Philippine security officials said they were still investigating with a focus on the bomb signature, which would help identify the terrorist group. The military said ordnance experts who scoured the gymnasium after the blast have recovered fragments of an improvised bomb commonly used by local militants in the south of the country. The AFP is validating the claims made by the ISIS ... as well as the involvement of the Daulah Islamiyah-Maute Group in this heinous act of terror, Col. Xerxes Trinidad, the spokesman for the Armed Forces of the Philippines, told BenarNews. Daulah Islamiyah means Islamic State in the local language. Its membership comprises fighters from several Filipino militant factions, including the Maute Group, which had provided men and logistics during the siege of Marawi by pro-IS fighters in 2017. We are on heightened alert to ensure the safety of the public and that the perpetrators responsible will be apprehended and neutralized, Trinidad said. Law enforcers conduct an investigation at the site of an explosion in Marawi city, southern Philippines, Dec. 3, 2023. [Provincial Government of Lanao Del Sur/AP] Seven civilians wounded in the bombing remained in hospital, while about 40 others who were treated for less serious injuries had been released, Trinidad added. Rommel Banlaoi, a counter-terrorism analyst at the Philippine Institute for Peace, Violence and Terrorism Research, said IS claim to the attack was credible. The admission came from IS itself and in fact, Sheikh Abdullah Alhamsari, the self-proclaimed spokesperson of IS Philippines, reiterated the confirmation that they are responsible for the deadly blast, he said in an interview with the ANC television news cable channel. Terror threat not declining On Sunday, Armed Forces of the Philippines chief Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. said the bombing could have been a revenge attack for operations against local extremist groups linked to IS. That is one angle we are looking into, Brawner told reporters. Based on the evidence that we gathered, there is a big percentage that points to them. The bombing occurred days after security forces killed 11 Muslim militants identified as members of a local Daulah Islamiyah cell in the southern province of Maguindanao. Brawner also said on Sunday the military had killed two Islamic militants it identified as Mundi Sawadjaan and Jalandoni Lucsadato in coordinated actions. Authorities have identified Mundi as a sub-leader of IS-linked Abu Sayyaf and the nephew of the late Hatib Hajan Sawadjaan, who was thought to be the groups leader before his death in 2020. Hatib Hajan Sawadjaan masterminded a January 2019 bombing at Jolos Catholic church, killing 23 people including an Indonesian couple blamed for the suicide attack, according to Philippine authorities. The Philippine government has vowed to eliminate IS from its territory and has mounted a series of successful operations against Muslim militants in the volatile south in recent years, including killing the suspected IS emir for Southeast Asia earlier this year. Sundays attack will renew focus on the strength of the group in the country. What we have learned from the Dec. 2 incident is that those terrorist threats in the Philippines are not declining, said Banlaoi. Threats are not disappearing because there are still remnants associated with IS willing to wreak havoc. And that is why we need to still be vigilant in order to prevent them from mounting other incidents. While the Philippines is predominantly Catholic, the southern part of the archipelago in Mindanao is largely Muslim. Pope Francis offered his prayers for Filipinos to have the strength to overcome every evil with good. The Pope relayed his message via Telegram to Marawi Bishop Edwin dela Pena through the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. Jeoffrey Maitem and Mark Navales contributed to this report from Cotabato City, southern Philippines Littoral-combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords during an exercise in the South China Sea, May 2020. A U.S. naval ship conducted Monday the first known freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) near the disputed Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea, a move condemned by China as illegal. On December 4, the USS Giffords littoral combat ship trespassed into the waters adjacent to Renai Reef in Chinas Nansha Islands without the approval of the Chinese government, Col. Tian Junli, spokesman for the Chinese militarys Southern Theater Command, said in a statement. Renai is the Chinese name for the Second Thomas Shoal, an atoll in the Spratly (Nansha) archipelago. Filipinos call it Ayungin Shoal and the Philippine military in 1999 deliberately ran aground an old landing ship, BRP Sierra Madre, to serve as an outpost. Manila, which maintains that the reef is located inside its exclusive economic zone, has been accusing Beijing of acting aggressively and blocking its ships from delivering supplies to troops stationed there. In his latest statement, Col. Tian claimed that the U.S. had seriously violated Chinas sovereignty and security, severely undermined regional peace and stability, and seriously violated international law This fully demonstrates that the United States is the biggest threat to peace and stability in the South China Sea, he said. The U.S. responded that the USS Gabrielle Giffords was conducting routine operations in international waters in the South China Sea, consistent with international law, Reuters news agency reported, quoting a statement from the U.S. Navy. Every day the U.S. 7th Fleet operates in the South China Sea, as they have for decades. These operations demonstrate we are committed to upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific region, the statement said. Mondays mission was the first explicit mention of the Second Thomas Shoal as a FONOP target for the U.S. military, according to regional maritime analyst Collin Koh, who predicted that there would likely be more such operations in the future. The question is whether itll be conducted at the same time, or dovetailing with Philippine resupply missions to the outpost, or simply just conducted in random or as a response to more severe circumstances, said Koh, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore. Escalation of tension Renai Reef is one of the most tense areas in the South China Sea, wrote Hu Xijin, former editor of the pro-Beijing Global Times, in the paper. Chinese coast guard ships have had multiple confrontations with Philippine vessels near Ren'ai Reef this year, and a collision occurred in October, Hu wrote, adding that the U.S. ships appearance this time is an escalation of the U.S. gesture of intervening in the South China Sea. The Chinese commentator accused the U.S. military of using cheap muscle-flexing and petty actions to incite the Philippines to confront China more boldly. The Second Thomas Shoal is somewhat special because the Sierra Madre is still a commissioned Philippine Navy ship which means any attack on it will amount to an armed attack that triggers the Mutual Defense Treaty between the U.S. and the Philippines, said Koh. A Philippine supply boat sails near the BRP Sierra Madre after evading a Chinese coast guard ship blockade at Second Thomas Shoal, locally known as Ayungin Shoal, in the disputed South China Sea during a rotation and resupply mission on Aug. 22, 2023. [Aaron Favila/AP] According to the treaty, or MDT in short, Washington and Manila are obliged to support each other militarily if either of them were to be attacked by an external party. Ill surmise the Chinese would be more cautious around the shoal, even if the Americans stage FONOPs in the area, Koh told Radio Free Asia. I also believe Beijing may perceive this to be not simply about the Americans showing moral support to their Filipino allies but to potentially pave [the] way for the latter to carry out so-called large scale construction at the feature, the analyst said. Therefore, we dont dismiss the possibility of Beijing ramping up its measures in the area, he added. Japanese news outlet Nikkei Asia in November reported that the U.S. had begun advising the Philippines on the repair of the World War II-era ship BRP Sierra Madre. Last week the Philippine government gave approval for a large convoy of civilian boats to bring Christmas cheer to troops stationed there, risking an angry response from China. Maritime militia at Whitsun Reef Meanwhile the Philippine Coast Guard said Sunday that two of its vessels were dispatched to conduct patrols in the immediate vicinity of Julian Felipe Reef also called Whitsun another disputed reef in the Spratlys. Since mid-November, the coast guard has monitored more than a hundred Chinese maritime militia boats swarming the area, said spokesman Jay Tariela. Tariela added that the number of Chinese vessels is now estimated to have grown to more than 135 vessels dispersed and scattered within the reef. Most of the ships are rafted together and not visible on the AIS ship tracking system. Chinese maritime militia ships are rafted together at Whitsun Reef, Nov. 2023. [Handout/Philippine Coast Guard] Philippine officials repeatedly said that their country has sovereignty over the reef in accordance with international laws including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the 2016 Arbitral Award and Philippine domestic laws. China claims nearly all of the South China Sea as its own despite an international arbitration court in 2016 ruling in favor of the Philippines in a case brought against Beijing over the contested waterway. Manila has lodged numerous diplomatic protests with Beijing over the swarming of Whitsun Reef by Chinese maritime militia ships, which China insists are fishing vessels that have been fishing in the waters near the reef it calls Niue Jiao all along. RFA is a news service affiliated with BenarNews. Only a few months into office, Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin is trying to revive a plan for a land bridge that would give international shippers a shortcut between the Pacific and Indian oceans without having to pass through the Malacca Strait at Singapore. The land bridge concept would cut across the Kra Isthmus in southern Thailand and join the Gulf of Thailand to the Andaman Sea, through the construction of a rail line and highway. The prime minister, a real estate tycoon before entering politics recently, has been selling his plan lately on both sides of the Pacific. In San Francisco last month, Srettha addressed potential investors on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. There, he pitched the estimated 1 trillion baht (U.S. $28.5 billion) megaproject as a way to cut shipping costs and transportation time by up to two or three days. In mid-October, on the sidelines of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, China Harbor Engineering Co., a Chinese state-run infrastructure developer, expressed interest after a meeting with Srettha, according to international media. Other potential investors from the United States, China and the Middle East have also expressed interest in the project, Thai government spokesman Chai Watcharong said. Srettha expressed hope that the project could be launched to replace an old concept of building a canal across the Kra Isthmus to join the two seas. In recent decades, the canal idea broke down over disputes about its viability both economic and logistic as well as concerns about its effects on national security. Outlines for the international bidding process have been laid out. A consortium of investors would bid for a 50-year contract to develop a land bridge in the south of Thailand linking seaports on both sides of the southern isthmus through a 90-km (56-mile) motorway and rail connecting ports in Ranong and Chumphon provinces. The government plans to conduct international presentations to promote the project before receiving bidding in 2025 with construction expected to begin later that year before its opening in 2030. We also have plans to hold a roadshow in Japan in the near future, and we might return to China for a proper roadshow later on, Chai told BenarNews. He said that the land bridge megaproject should be attractive to investors with port management skills from countries including Singapore, for example, as they can build on their experience and capital with their investment in Thailand. There are fringe benefits to the project. Investors can develop lands around the project, Chai said. There will be more manufacturers to relocate to Thailand, which is located in a suitable location where goods can be shipped around the world. Investors have to come up with a proposed logistics system to manage the ports. Thailand can offer the location and the opportunity. This is a total package. Old idea, new era The land bridge is sometimes viewed as a revision of the Kra Canal project, a strategic initiative dating back centuries. In the same way that the bridge would link the two oceans, the canal would provide a shortcut between the Pacific and Indian oceans, bypassing the choke point in the Strait of Malacca off Singapore. Since at least the 17th century during the Ayutthaya period, the Siamese capital that flourished in the central part of modern-day Thailand during the 14th to 18th centuries, canal projects to increase commerce in the south have been raised. This idea has been around in one form or another for around 300 years, either a canal or a rail-road link. It resurfaces every time the Thai economy is on the skids because governments see it as a way to create jobs, attract investment and generate revenue, said Ian Storey, senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. Critics pointed to potential flaws in touting the project as a rival to the Strait of Malacca. Piti Srisangnam, an associate professor of economics at Bangkoks Chulalongkorn University, said a land bridge would require ships to offload cargo at one sea port to have their products transported by trucks or trains to the other side before being loaded on another ship. This would add time to the trip rather than reduce it. When we compare the land bridge idea to what is already in use, which is the Strait of Malacca, it doesnt constitute an economic viability, he said. Because the reduced time spent, said to be at two days, would be too insignificant to persuade a diversion from the Strait of Malacca. Instead, Piti said, the projected reduced time could be lost waiting to unload and load ships because of logjams at both ports. Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin presents his proposal for a land bridge across the southern peninsula to government officials in this photo posted to his X account prior to traveling to San Francisco for the APEC summit, Nov. 2, 2023. [@Thavisin] Piti said the government could reframe the project as a bridge of opportunities for goods and services to flow in and out of mainland Southeast Asia and China instead of a replacement for the Strait of Malacca, adding that the Kra Canal idea should be scrapped. Thailand has been obsessed with the Kra Canal idea for so long. It never really drops the idea and says it is not going to be done, he said. Chai, the government spokesman, said the ports would be operated under a single command system, which could reduce logjams and cut logistics cost by 15%, along with four days from the trip time compared to ships passing through the Strait of Malacca. Storey, meanwhile, is not convinced the land bridge will attract international investors. China never considered a Kra Isthmus infrastructure project as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, U.S companies simply arent interested. Even Thai companies know its not feasible, but play along to keep the government happy, he said. I have little doubt the Thais will still be talking about a Kra Canal or land bridge 300 years from now. U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) listens to Assistant Houston Police Chief Chandra Hatcher at Houston City Hall before a press conference on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023. Annie Mulligan/Contributor Denial isn't a solution Regarding "U.S. Sen. John Cornyn fights against labeling guns a public health crisis," (Nov. 29): Reading this article caused my throat to close up and my heart to pound with anger. Especially as it was followed by this headline: "HPD, FBI up reward for info on shooter who killed child." U.S. Sen. John Cornyn is quoted saying, "I think what we've learned is that it's not the gun itself that is the problem." I agree with him on that. The problem is having elected officials such as Gov. Greg Abbott, who oppose red-flag bills and who cannot seem to distinguish between a .22 and an AK-47 when condoning gun ownership for teens. It's having a senator such as Cornyn, who refuses to acknowledge that we daily experience the tragedy of an unaddressed public health crisis of gun trauma. I ask myself if these men are blind? Deaf? Sadistic? Callous? Completely owned by the NRA? Neither will ever face the fear of wondering how to pay for a funeral for their murdered family breadwinner. Perhaps they could be cured by spending a few days in a trauma unit, watching surgeons frantically attempt to patch together mutilated body parts and listening to grieving relatives screaming out their pain and outrage. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Page S. Williams, Houston Caneyhead memories Regarding "The Dog People of Caneyhead exhibit opens," (Nov. 15): I can still recall, from my memory of over 90 years, the sound of the clinking, metallic logging chains as the farmer threw them to the muddy dirt road our Model T Ford was stuck in. This Chronicle article reminded me of this not-infrequent occurrence in our lives near Caneyhead as we made our monthly shopping trip to Silsbee. We lived in a logging camp, John Henry Kirby Camp #11. I enrolled in Fred, Texas, schools in 1936. I never heard anyone making fun of Caneyhead people, as everyone was struggling economically in the middle of the Great Depression. I enjoyed our school; it had electricity and indoor plumbing, which the camp lacked. We had electricity until 9 p.m., when the generator was cut off. My parents kept books for the camp, which included payroll and the company store. Loggers who cut the huge, long-leaf yellow pines were called "flatheads." They used cross-cut saws and axes, taking a break only to dose the saws with kerosene. This was done to keep the saws from sticking with pine resin; they used a soft drink bottle with pine straw in the mouth. The "mule skinners" loaded the logs on the narrow-gauge railroad, which took them to a sawmill in Silsbee. They guided teams of two and four animals each. Advertisement Article continues below this ad These men were paid $7 to $10 for a five-day week. My father earned $20 a week for five and a half days. Unemployment at that time was common, so anyone who had a job was lucky. These people of southeast Texas were the salt-of-the-earth type who carried this great country for almost a decade until World War II came along and changed the world. You may (or may not) recognize my name, as I originated the "Hook 'em Horns" sign at the University of Texas. I did enjoy the Chronicle story, which brought back memories. Henry (HK) Pitts, College Station Honking can help Advertisement Article continues below this ad Regarding "Honk happy," (Nov. 27): Reader Tom Watson says, "Don't honk even if you love Jesus." I disagree. How often have you seen someone not starting at an intersection even after the light has turned green because they are busy texting someone? How often do you see a vehicle weave in and out of lanes because the driver is distracted with a cellphone conversation? Or driving several miles below the speed limit because they are actually texting while driving? Love Jesus, but honk when needed. That is the only thing that will shake these idiots out of their stupor. Hareesh Jana, Sugar Land Civility Regarding "Rosalynn Carter's decency and character should be our guiding star in 2024 elections (Editorial)," (Nov. 24): To add to your outstanding editorial on Rosalynn, I would like to point out how the Biden administration demonstrated great respect by flying the American flag at half-mast and by having the president attend her funeral. This is in sharp contrast to President Donald Trump. It required great pressure for him to lower the flag to respect the loss of Sen. John McCain. What a difference in civility, and extending the respect that those who have served this country deserve. Deborah Zygmunt, Missouri City Stay up to date on Berkshires news with Berkshires in Brief, our free daily newsletter LEE Voters on Wednesday will decide whether to green-light the towns first major capital building project in more than 20 years. At a special town meeting, they will be asked to approve funding to purchase two properties and construct an urgently needed, 37,000-square-foot public safety complex to replace current, dilapidated facilities housing police, fire and EMS services. The estimated price tag: $36.7 million. A two-thirds supermajority is needed for approval at the special town meeting, which will begin at 7 p.m. in the Lee High School auditorium. The Finance Committee has endorsed the proposal the first item on the nine-article town meeting warrant. If approved, the project would then be placed on a municipal election ballot in March or May of next year to exclude the debt from Proposition 2 1/2 requirements. That would require a simple majority. The expected impact on the average residential property owners annual tax payments would be a worst-case scenario maximum of $340, according to Town Administrator Chris Brittain. Thats if future annual town meetings approve the use of about $1 million in annual interest from the towns recently arrived $26.4 million GE Rest of River settlement check toward the projects 30-year bond payment. If the project is approved, the two-floor public safety complex would be built at 41 Railroad St. adjacent to the post office following demolition of the Airoldi Building. The DPW facilities at the location would be moved to 1185 Pleasant St., the former Daley/Casella Building off Route 102. If voters chose not to move forward with the plan, a new standalone police station would cost $10 million to $12 million, and there would be additional, extensive renovation costs for the current outmoded facilities, Brittain said. Construction of the new facility could begin in spring 2025, Brittain told The Eagle. But its not yet known how long it would take for the projects to be completed. Town officials made their case for the project at a public safety information session on Nov. 2 (a video of the meeting is available on demand from ctsbtv.org government channel 1303). Fire/EMS Department Chief Ryan Brown pointed out that his current facility housing the EMS department is in the ambulance garage at 177 Main St. Significant siding decay was uncovered there this year. The building is structurally unsound, Brown noted. The 24-hour on-duty crews eat and rest at computer stations, meal prep and break areas are inadequate, and theres no separation of living space from decontamination areas, he told the audience. The adjacent beloved Central Fire Station at 179 Main St. described by Brown as a jewel among New England firehouses if not the world is outmoded and can barely accommodate modern firefighting apparatus, which has to be customized to fit into the space. The fire station is unsafe for crews, the chief stated, for reasons that include lack of protection from diesel contamination, which may cause cancer, and it lacks protection from a fire alarm system. In addition, theres a lack of adequate decontamination areas for emergency responders. Police Chief Craig DeSantis noted that the town police station remained in the basement following the 1992 renovation of Town Hall. But full-time police staffing has increased by about 35 percent since then, he said, and the complexity and volume of calls that we deal with has changed significantly. Weve done our best to work with what weve been given and well continue to do that, the chief said. DeSantis listed priority needs for a new police station, including adequate staff workspace, reduction of significant current operational liability, updating the department for modern tech needs and addressing health, safety and security concerns for department members, people in custody, Town Hall staff and the general public. The police station fails its annual state Department of Public Health inspections, the chief stated. We do our level best to address the failures, but its a recurring theme, said DeSantis. He also reviewed 14 months of department activity since September 2022 9,500 service calls, 448 criminal and noncriminal followup investigations, plus 124 arrests, summonses, arrest warrants or indictments and 202 motor vehicle accident investigations. DeSantis pointed to investigations that included armed robbery, invasion, felony assaults involving weapons, violent felony domestic assaults, break-ins, felony thefts, rape, adult and child sexual assaults, physical child abuse, child pornography and drug offenses. And he reviewed significant security concerns, including insecure cruiser parking, work areas that are limited, antiquated and spread out. The result: Staff and public safety issues as well as significant operational hurdles. Presenting the feasibility study for the public safety complex, architect Brian W. Humes of Jacunski Humes Architects in Berlin, Conn., told the crowd he has designed more than 90 facilities for police, fire and EMS over the past 30 years. Eliminating the nice, the wants, the over-the-top requests is essential for a successful project, he said. Instead, he allotted space in response to such inadequate current facilities such as he encountered in Lee. Overall benefits of the proposed project are a win, win, win for the town, said Brittain, the town administrator. Perhaps we will never live in the idealized world where the scourge of impaired driving never steals another life, where such vigils wouldn't be necessary. Yet just as every soul on this annual vigil's list is a tragedy that demands our attention, every life kept off it is worth noting as well. The Hoosac Tunnel, which could see passenger trains passing through if the Northern Tier rail project continues taking shape. If you have ever heard the Lords Prayer in different settings, you might notice that some churches use the phrase Forgive us our debts where others say, Forgive us our trespasses. The word trespass is another word for sin. We read it throughout the Bible. Today we will more closely look at what the word trespass means in its different contexts. The Biblical Definition of Trespass According to NET Bible, Trespass means To pass over, to go beyond one's right in place or act; to injure another." Bible Hub shares that to trespass is: to pass beyond a limit or boundary, to enter unlawfully upon the land of another. To go too far; To commit any offense, any violation of a known rule of duty; sin. In Hebrew, asham is often used when referring to a trespass, and paraptoma in the Greek. The word or concept of trespass is referred to 73 times in 15 books of the Bible. It is clearly an important theological concept to understand. When we consider the words No trespassing in our modern culture, this means that there is a clear boundary established that we are not legally allowed to break. When someone deliberately disobeys that sign and crosses the boundary, this is trespassing. In a similar way, and biblically speaking, trespass can be thought of in this way. When we step outside of any boundary which God has created, we are trespassing against Him and others. Places We See Trespass in the Bible Stealing Property or Items against Someone The first mention of trespass is found in Genesis 31:36, when Jacob tells Laban that he has not taken his household gods. Here trespass is used in the context of taking Labans possessions, or stealing. Exodus 22:9 shares about taking an animal, a lost thing, or something that leads to judgment. A common trespass as mentioned in these two verses is theft against a neighbor. We read of trespassing including animals or specific possessions. Evil Acts against Another When we look at Scripture, we observe a common theme of transgressions being a direct act of sin against another. Genesis 50:17 discusses the plea of Josephs brothers to spare their lives when Jacob has passed away. This actually grieves Joseph because He had already forgiven his brothers and would never plan to harm them back. They carried fear because of their own evil act against him in the past. When his brothers threw him in a pit and sold him into slavery, this was a trespass. This was a harsh and hateful act towards Joseph. When we commit evil acts against others, this is an example of a trespass. Leviticus 26:40 says, If they shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, with their trespass which they trespassed against me, and that also they have walked contrary unto me Many definitions for trespass mention being out of step with Gods will. We are called as believers to walk in His ways and walk with Him. Trespassing is deliberately stepping out of the Lords plan. In the case of Numbers 5:12 it is a trespass of adultery. When we sexually sin against another, that is trespassing against them. The boundary of purity is crossed and we disobey the Lord with our bodies. Trespass Versus Sin In Ephesians 2:1 it says, And you were dead in the trespasses and sins. The words are used separately. The Greek word for transgression is paraptomasin. This is found in Ephesians 2:1, 2:5, and Colossians 2:13. It literally translates to in your trespasses or in your transgressions. The word hamartiais is used for sin. This word is used in John 8:24, 9:34, 1 Corinthians 15:17, Ephesians 2:1, 1 Timothy 5:22, 2 Timothy 3:6, 1 Peter 2:24, and Revelation 18:4. When we think about a trespass, it appears to be more of an intentional act of rebellion. This differs from the word sin which could encompass a thought, disobedience, or even unknowingly stepping outside of Gods will. Action That Leads to Separation Sin separates us from God; we see this concept throughout the Bible. Whenever we take sinful actions against another, this is described as a trespass. Think about the Lords Prayer in Matthew 6:12. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. The hard truth is that we sin against others and others sin against us. We take action against the will of God. We rebel. Sin creates a barrier between us and God. Matthew 6:14-15 says, For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive yours. We ponder the separation of sin and the trespasses that Adam and Eve committed. This led to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus on behalf of all sin. Romans 5:15 says, But the gift is not like the trespass. For if by the one mans trespass the many died, how much more have the grace of God and the gift which comes through the grace of the one man Jesus Christ overflowed to the many. Trespass Offering In Leviticus 5, the trespass offering is described as a female lamb or a baby goat or two turtle doves or two young pigeons. In fact, Mary the mother of Jesus is said to bring two doves with Joseph at the birth of Jesus (Luke 2:22-24). (I love how God always provided a way for people no matter what their financial and physical abilities.) Our trespasses are to be taken seriously and because of them, there is a penalty of blood and death. Before Jesus came, this was required to be covered by the trespass offering. However, we celebrate that Jesus was the final trespass offering. (We see more references of trespass offering in Leviticus 6, Leviticus 7, and Leviticus 14.) We no longer have to go through this physical sacrifice on behalf of our sins against others. Jesus completed this work on the cross perfectly on our behalf. Colossians 2:13-15 says, And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. Ephesians 1:7 says, In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace. As we read about trespasses, it can be easy to look at the sins of others. But may we consider ways in which we have stepped outside of Gods will. We can embrace the fact that we all fall short of Gods glory and we need His forgiveness. Our sinful hearts lead us to trespassing against others and against the Lord. We do not have to live in condemnation ever again when we are in Christ Jesus. The old has gone and the new has come. May we live out of His grace today and always. Photo credit: Unsplash/Dan Meyers Emma Danzeys mission in life stems from Ephesians 3:20-21, to embrace the extraordinary. One of her greatest joys is to journey with the Lord in His Scriptures. She is wife to Drew and mom to Graham. Emma serves alongside her husband in ministry, she focuses most of her time in the home, but loves to provide articles on the Bible, life questions, and Christian lifestyle. Her article on Interracial Marriage was the number 1 on Crosswalk in 2021. Most recently, Emma released Treasures for Tots, (Scripture memory songs) for young children. During her ministry career, Emma has released Wildflower: Blooming Through Singleness, two worship EP albums, founded and led Polished Conference Ministries, and ran the Refined Magazine. You can view her articles on her blog at emmadanzey.wordpress.com and check out her Instagram @Emmadanzey. LISTEN: Let Our Bible Study Expert Help You Start the New Year Right! Have you ever chosen a word for the year? Whether you pick a word each year or never have before, I think this episode will help you order your life in the year to come. If you don't know what your word is, today might be a great day for you to hear some of the things that we are promised in Christ that you in faith can claim for yourself for 2024. Keep in mind, each of these words requires faith. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Salem Web Network and Salem Media Group. WATCH: 5 Verses on Strength for When You Feel Weak Video stock video and music probided by SoundStripe Minor to moderate geomagnetic storm expected to occur on Mon after aurora sightings on Fri: National Satellite Meteorological Centre 09:40, December 04, 2023 By Cui Fandi ( Global Times Following a geomagnetic storm that lasted from Friday to Saturday, China's National Satellite Meteorological Centre forecasts that another minor to moderate geomagnetic storm will occur on Monday. The impact of the previous geomagnetic storm on satellite operations was not significant, but it has allowed many skywatching enthusiasts in northern China, including Beijing, to witness the aurora borealis. From 5 pm Friday to 8 am Saturday, due to the influence of a coronal mass ejection (CME) eruption from the sun, the Earth experienced a 3-hour geomagnetic storm with a Kp index of 7, a 3-hour moderate geomagnetic storm with a Kp index of 6, and a 9-hour minor geomagnetic storm. Currently, geomagnetic activity is still ongoing, according to the National Satellite Meteorological Centre. The Kp index reflects the global magnetic field activity every three hours, with higher values indicating stronger geomagnetic activity. This is the seventh occurrence of a geomagnetic storm of this magnitude this year, following events on February 27, March 23-24, April 23-24 and September 19. CME, a typical solar eruption activity, is driven by the strong magnetic field of sunspots, ejecting hundreds of millions or even trillions of tons of coronal material at speeds of hundreds to thousands of kilometers per second, forming explosive shockwaves that rapidly propagate throughout the solar system. After being hit by these shockwaves, the Earth's magnetic field undergoes significant changes in direction and intensity, resulting in geomagnetic storms. With accurate forecasting services, the satellite operations department has made preparations in advance, so the impact of this geomagnetic storm on Chinese meteorological satellite network FengYun is minimal, experts said. At the same time, due to the geomagnetic storm, aurora activity has been observed in regions such as Heilongjiang, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in China. The activity has been so intense that even Beijing has recorded clear sightings and observations of the aurora borealis. On Friday night, the auroras appeared in many high-latitude areas of China, including Northeast China's Heilongjiang and North China's Inner Mongolia. According to photos taken by astronomy enthusiasts, the night sky was illuminated by red lights. Nonetheless, what surprised people the most was that the auroras were also observed in Beijing, a lower latitude area. Observers in Beijing's suburban areas Huairou and Mentougou reported seeing the auroras. According to the China National Geographic Channel, this is the second recorded aurora sighting in Beijing history. The last time auroras appeared in Beijing was 20 years ago in 2003, according to media reports. After the ultra rare aurora sighting in Beijing, more astronomy enthusiasts as well as other residents headed to the northern suburbs of the capital on Saturday night, hoping to observe the aurora again. "On Saturday night, my friends and I went to an aurora observation point in the suburban Miyun district. Along the way, we encountered dozens of people who came for the same reason," a Beijing resident named Zou told the Global Times. "Some of them were astronomy enthusiasts, some were photography enthusiasts, and some just heard about the aurora and decided to go on a spontaneous adventure." Zou said that on Chinese social media, he saw hundreds of people making appointments to search for the aurora in various places in Beijing that night. Some experienced astronomy enthusiasts and photographers recommended several locations where auroras were seen on Friday nightand provided directions. Unfortunately, the aurora did not appear in Beijing for a second consecutive night. "Although we waited for several hours in the cold winter night without seeing the aurora, we and other 'aurora hunters' had a wonderful night," Zou said. (Web editor: Tian Yi, Liang Jun) Cynthia Reyes-Revilla, a city council candidate, talks to residents during a District H candidate forum Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2023, at the Proctor Plaza Park Community Center in Houston. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Mario Castillo, a city council candidate, talks to residents during a District H candidate forum Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2023, at the Proctor Plaza Park Community Center in Houston. Jon Shapley/Staff photographer Two prominent Harris County Democrats withdrew endorsements from District H city council candidate Cynthia Reyes-Revilla after her campaign sent a text they said was offensive to the LGBTQ+ community. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez and Harris County Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia withdrew their support over the weekend. "I have withdrawn my endorsement of @CReyesRevilla because of her campaigns inexcusable attack on our LGBTQI+ community," Gonzalez said Saturday on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. "No room for that on our City Council." Advertisement Article continues below this ad A spokesperson for Garcia's office confirmed Sunday he pulled his endorsement. Reyes-Revilla wrote in a Saturday Facebook post: "Dear residents of District H, I am here to make a public statement that I am publicly releasing the endorsements of: Harris County Pct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia and Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez ... This is at my own will and I need to do what is best for my campaign, personal perceptions/opinions and for the sake of relationships." The Reyes-Revilla campaign sent out a text Thursday with a side-by-side comparison flyer of her and her opponent, Mario Castillo, with photos of Reyes-Revilla with her family and Castillo with his husband. The campaign wrote phrases including "Committed Christian Family Values" under her name and "Not a man of Faith" under Castillo's. Also next to Castillo's photo, the flyer reads "District H deserves a leader with Integrity and the right values." Backlash came soon after from Garcia and the Houston LGBTQ+ Caucus, who called the text a "homophobic dog whistle" Thursday on X. The Caucus endorsed Castillo for the Dec. 9 Houston City Council runoff election. Advertisement Article continues below this ad "The message is an affront to the LGBTQ+ community & I've urged Cynthia to apologize," Garcia said Friday on X. "She should be better than this. Nastiness doesn't serve anyone. The word 'Disappointed' does not do justice in describing how I feel." What do you do when life doesnt work out like youve planned? Whether youre young or old, man or woman, black or white, rich or poor the fact is, life often doesnt turn out the way you thought it would. Suddenly you need a Plan B. Even those who are ultra-strong, spiritual giants sometimes experience the need for a Plan B: His name was Saul of Tarsus. He was a leading member of the Sanhedrin, powerful and well respected. One day as he was on his way to Damascus to arrest Christians, his life took an unexpected turn. He found himself knocked to the ground and having a stunning conversation with the Christ he didnt believe in. He was in desperate need of a Plan B, because life didnt work out the way he had planned. His name was Moses. He was born to Hebrew slaves but raised as the son of Pharoahs daughter. One day, life took an unexpected turn when he was caught murdering an Egyptian man who was abusing a Hebrew slave. In an instant, he went from the lap of luxury to a fugitive on the run, seeking a place to hide. He needed a Plan B, because life didnt work out the way he had planned. His name was Peter. He was well-known to be Jesus right-hand man, destined to carry the gospel message to future generations. He walked on water, was chosen for Christs inner circle, and bravely raised a sword in His defense. But then life took an unexpected turn. Instead of standing by Jesus side, he crumbled and denied even knowing Him, and his vision of leadership in the Kingdom went up in smoke. He found himself in need of a Plan B, because life didnt work out the way he had planned. What about you? Has life ever made an unexpected twist or turned out differently than you had imagined? - The company lays you off. - The business you invested in collapses. - Your spouse says they dont love you anymore and are leaving. - The doctor says its cancer. - The teenager you raised in church gets arrested. - The loved one you held up in prayer died anyway. What do you do when life doesnt work out the way youve planned? Most people start asking questions, like: Why me, and why now? Why play by the rules, if this happens anyway? Why go on after all, my dreams are totally shattered now! And of course, Why didnt You do anything about it? Why God? Have you ever experienced a why moment? A moment when life didnt turn out the way you thought it was going to and took a turn for the worse. Did you question God? If so, you would be in good company: Moses returned to the LORD and said, O Lord, why have you brought trouble upon this people? Is this why you sent me? Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has brought trouble upon this people, and you have not rescued your people at all (Exodus 5:22-23). Or David, How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? (Psalm 13:1). Even Jesus! About the ninth hour Jesus cried out in a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27: 46). Get Real with God Was Moses spiritually immature? Or David, or Jesus? Asking why isnt an indictment; in fact, if you dont ask why, you might wind up estranged from God. God expects us to be real with Him. He is not looking for some phony, Sunday-morning-only relationship. God desires an intimate, authentic, transparent relationship with us, where we trust Him enough to be real with Him. And just like any close relationship, if you dont deal with the why questions, it brings communication to a screeching halt. Maybe the reason some people dont feel like praying, dont feel like lifting their hands in worship, dont feel like reading the Bible or getting involved in a small group is because they have an unasked and unresolved why that is damaging their relationship with God. Remember, God can handle our whys. In other words, God can handle our questions, and even our anger. It wont threaten Him, diminish Him or embarrass Him. In fact, it wont even surprise Him, for the Bible declares He already knows the secrets of our hearts! (Psalms 44:21) "'Come. Sit down. Let's argue this out.' This is God's Message: 'If your sins are blood-red, they'll be snow-white. If they're red like crimson, they'll be like wool'" (Isaiah 1:18, MSG). So if you have questions only God can answer, go to Him He can handle it. Your relationship will deepen because of it. Besides, asking God why prevents the enemy from giving you the wrong answer. Even with all the benefits, what we eventually must realize is that why is actually the wrong question! Asking the Wrong Question Now as Jesus passed by, He saw a man who was blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" (John 9:1-2). Notice the type of relationship the disciples had with Jesus: if they were confused about something they simply asked Him about it. And one of the most confusing things on the planet is why people are sometimes born with handicaps and diseases. But notice Jesus response: Jesus answered, Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him (John 9:3). Translation: youre asking the wrong question. He doesnt get mad at them; He tells them exactly what we need to know about the why question its simply the wrong question. I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. When He had said these things, He spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva; and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay. And He said to him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (which is translated, Sent). So he went and washed, and came back seeing (John 9:4-7). Even though asking why is normal and maybe necessary to some extent, the right question isGod, how?! Isnt that what Jesus did? He redirected the disciples attention to look instead at what God can do in the situation, not why the situation exists. In other words, sometimes in life we may not get all the whys answered, but in the face of our doubts, fears, confusion and pain, we need to turn to the source of our help and look to what God can do! Not only can God open blind eyes, unstop deaf ears, make the lame walk and heal the broken hearted, He can restore failing marriages, rescue us from financial ruin, wipe away your past and give you hope for your future. And He is perfectly capable to set into motion Plan B when your life doesnt work out the way youve planned! But how do you look instead to what God can do, when youre tempted to get bogged down in the Why God? instead of the How God? Remember What God Is Like In Psalm 77, we see a Psalm written by Asaph, whose life wasnt working out like he thought it would. Asaph was in a season of extreme disappointment, and apparently felt that God was being unresponsive, and not recognizing his pain or his needs in life. It appears he felt completely broken. And so he gets real with God, and writes: I cried out to God for help; I cried out to God to hear me. When I was in distress, I sought the Lord; at night I stretched out untiring hands and my soul refused to be comforted. I remembered you, O God, and I groaned; I mused, and my spirit grew faint. Selah. You kept my eyes from closing; I was too troubled to speak. I thought about the former days, the years of long ago; I remembered my songs in the night. My heart mused and my spirit inquired: Will the Lord reject forever? Will he never show his favor again? Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time? Has God forgotten to be merciful? Has he in anger withheld his compassion? Selah (Psalm 77:1-7). Now, Asaph doesnt tell us what disappointment caused him to ask God why, but it had apparently pushed him to the brink of hopelessness and even loss of faith. But he went to the right source with his doubts, questions and concerns. Despite his pain, he went to the God of compassion and understanding. If you dont remember anything else, remember this God is good, all the time! Remember Moses talking with God on Mount Horeb. He said, God, I dont want to just talk to a voice anymore. God I want to see you. And the LORD said, I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence (Exodus 33: 19). In all of our lives, when things dont work out the way weve planned, we must remember who God is, so we can exchange our whys for hows and experience victory! Recall What God Has Done This is exactly what Asaph, a worship leader for King David, did, according to Psalm 77. He recalled miracles God performed in the past, specifically the deliverance of His people by parting the Red Sea. You are the God who performs miracles; you display your power among the peoples. With your mighty arm you redeemed your people, the descendants of Jacob and Joseph. Selah. The waters saw you, O God, the waters saw you and writhed; the very depths were convulsed (Psalm 77:14-16). When you begin to recall what God has done, your faith begins to build, you believe and know that if God did it before, He will do it again, and that there isnt any problem too big for God. Rest in Gods Plan B As Asaph recalled how God saved His people, surely the whole story rushed through his mind, including how Israel got to the other side of the Red Sea and then turned their backs on God. Instead of making it into the Promised Land in about thirty days, the people then wandered in the desert for forty years. Then the time had come to cross into the land. Imagine the excitement as Joshua gave them the final instructions to follow the priests over the Jorden into the land. But the Israelites soon discovered Joshua had left out one tiny, important detail it was harvest season and the Jordan River was at flood stage. In great disappointment, they must have said Why, God? Things did not turn out how we expected. But God is good and He had a plan another miracle! as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the waters edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing. It piled up in a heap a great distance awaySo the people crossed over opposite Jericho (Exodus 3:15-16). When the people were busy asking why God, He was doing a miracle far upstream that they did not know about. When they thought God was silent and unresponsive, He was putting a plan into motion. When life hadnt worked out the way they had planned, God was ready with Plan B So dont be discouraged! When you are tempted to get caught up in Why God, remember what He is like, recall what He has done, and rest in His Plan B. He wont disappoint you! Photo credit: Getty Images/PeopleImages Frank Santora is Lead Pastor of Faith Church, a multi-site church with locations in Connecticut and New York. Pastor Frank hosts a weekly television show, Destined to Win, which airs weekly on the Hillsong Channel and TBN. He has authored thirteen books, including the most recent, Modern Day Psalms and Good Good Father. To learn more about Pastor Frank and this ministry, please visit www.franksantora.cc. Photo by Michele Roman. LISTEN: Thinking Christian about Making and Keeping New Year's Resolutions The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Salem Web Network and Salem Media Group. WATCH: 10 Sins Christians Downplay (and Why They're So Destructive) Stock Footage & Music Courtesy of Soundstripe.com Thumbnail by Getty Images READ: 10 Sins That Often Go Overlooked in Christian Community User generated content (UGC) has enormous marketing potential for your brand heres how to lean into this resource as an effective amplifier on social media and why it should be an important part of your strategy. When it comes to marketing, the shift in media use and the growth of new channels over the past few years has been extraordinary. Its exciting times for digital media agencies who are on top of trends and undoubtedly overwhelming for brands dipping their toes into these often-muddy waters. The paradigm has shifted from traditional advertising to a more interactive and authentic approach where creators play a pivotal role in shaping a brand's narrative and UGC is seeing enormous growth and potential. Nicola Ashe is the strategic business director and partner at The Digital Media Collective (TDMC) and heads up the dynamic digital media agencys content creator division. She shares some of her insights into the mercurial world that is shaping media as we know it. UGC is the antidote to curation hype, says Ashe. Online content is now created daily by ordinary people (some of whom have monetised their streams), who flight their brand-focused material on a variety of channels, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter/X. From beauty and lifestyle bloggers who share their tips and how-tos, to would-be comedians in the business of creating skits, or momfluencers trying and testing new products from their shopping hauls, UGC creators create content based on their interests and arent afraid to say how they feel about a brand either. Unlike brand-created content, UGC exudes authenticity often born out of genuine experiences and personal narratives. Its unique format, ranging from unfiltered testimonials to creative collaborations, has the ability to capture an audience's attention by fostering relatable connections. In essence UGC can set new standards for organic and, importantly, peer-driven engagement. Edelman's Trust Barometer reveals that 76% of consumers consider content shared by average people to be more honest than content shared by brands. This shift in perception has forced marketers to reassess their strategies, recognising the authenticity and relatability that UGC injects into campaigns. Ashe agrees wholeheartedly: We see more and more, especially on TikTok, that content doesnt have to be over polished and curated for audiences to engage. Our clients want real and relatable content that sparks conversation and we work hard to source content creators who are dynamic and brave with their content, its an exciting time for us, she says. The South African context is particularly alive, says Ashe, who works with hundreds of content creators that she and her team personally vet and who are cherry picked to align with each client campaign: We find that a semi-manual process is the only way we can truly vouch for our creators. She says they try not to be too prescriptive on campaigns and often leave the content totally up to the creator. We know they have good relationships with their audiences and the authenticity is whats most important to us. For local brands, especially in the FMCG space, UGC can have incredible results, says Ashe. Getting products into peoples hands who have a genuine affinity for it or who we know will be excited by it can translate into important amplification and market penetration for any brand, she says, but its a fine line. Giving products to content creators in exchange for content can definitely work in terms of perception management, but it can also devalue a brand, so we work hard to find a happy balance. We dont believe in seeding products to hundreds of people at a time, so that content creator feeds are filled with the same type of content all at the same time. In a world where hyper-curated social media feeds were once the norm, UGC is a delightful and welcome counter offering. From a brand perspective, partnering with people representing you in an authentic light is gold and we are thoroughly enjoying exploring this essential marketing approach with our clients. We find that clients get so much more bang for their buck glossy photo shoots are expensive and heavy on resources and the content all looks the same and the brand tires of it quickly. "Content creators can lighten that load while expanding brand awareness to niches they may not have been able to access traditionally, says Ashe. With more than 20 million South Africans having access to a smartphone, UGC is an ideal playground for brands wanting to meaningfully engage with them: UGC starts a conversation and that is half the battle won. Texas Sen. John Whitmire listens to U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee during a mayoral forum hosted by Transportation Advocacy Group Houston Chapter on Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2023, in Houston. Elizabeth Conley/Staff Photographer Texas State Sen. John Whitmire and U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee pledged to protect Houstons marginalized communities from gentrification, environmental hazards and traffic deaths during a mayoral forum Sunday afternoon. The forum, organized by Harris County Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia, focused on quality-of-life issues facing local neighborhoods, from housing affordability to environmental justice. Jackson Lee and Whitmire both recognized the complexity of these problems, noting that resolving them will have to involve collaboration with government agencies beyond the city. The Houston mayoral race advanced to a Dec. 9 runoff between the two candidates following their respective 42.5% (Whitmire) and 35.6% (Jackson Lee) vote shares in the November general election. Advertisement Article continues below this ad As the finish line nears, both candidates continue to secure support from a broad array of elected officials and groups. On Saturday, former Houston Mayor Kathy Whitmire, who was married to John Whitmires late brother, endorsed Jackson Lee, who served as an at-large council member during Kathy Whitmires mayoral tenure in the 1990s. Garcia has not endorsed either candidate. He said he hoped the forum would help assess which contender could be a better partner in serving neighborhoods in Precinct 2, which currently lags behind other areas in income, health care, homeownership and educational attainment. Improving housing affordability Several of Sundays questions concerned housing challenges. The latest U.S. Census data shows that a quarter of Houston renters spend over half their income on housing, which places them in the severely rent burdened category. Rising housing costs have also disproportionately affected Hispanic communities, according to research by Rice Universitys Kinder Institute for Urban Research. Advertisement Article continues below this ad On Sunday, Whitmire highlighted the need for new leadership and pointed out inefficiencies in outgoing Mayor Sylvester Turner's administration. He criticized the city's move in September to end a $60 million affordable housing program, funded by Hurricane Harvey relief funds, following a missed deadline. You've got to have a housing director that understands the affordability issue. You've got to have Public Works that does not make the permitting process so long and expensive, Whitmire said. You've also got to have a mayor and I'm uniquely qualified to reach across the aisle. Jackson Lee also emphasized the need to streamline the permitting process and highlighted her previous efforts as member of the U.S. Congress in securing federal funds for Houston's housing improvements. Obviously, as the mayor of the city of Houston, I'll have a more effective pathway of using those dollars which got entangled in red tape, I admit it, Jackson Lee said. She added that even though Houston lacks zoning laws, developers should not have unrestricted freedom to build in neighborhoods. Let's work together with our neighborhoods and create restraints that are democratic and respectful, she said. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Fixing environmental inequities Jackson Lee emphasized her involvement in studying the cancer cluster in Fifth Ward and advocating for the affected families. If elected, she said she would draft a comprehensive environmental plan and appoint a designated staff member to communicate with federal and state agencies to deal with these issues. We cant do this alone, she said. Whitmire said tackling neighborhood issues such as illegal dumping was a key motivator for his candidacy. He stressed the importance of increased transparency and holding city leaders accountable, especially when residents' well-being is at stake. Advertisement Article continues below this ad We've got to get away from just the splash and the press conference and have real people solutions, he said. Tackling road safety A recent Department of Transportation report shows Harris County has one of the highest number of car crashes in the state more than 115,000 in the past year. During the forum, Whitmire and Jackson Lee both agreed that, if elected, they would push for stricter enforcement of traffic laws to enhance road safety. Whitmire suggested this should begin by increasing the number of police officers patrolling the streets. Jackson Lee said smart staffing is necessary to catch offenders unexpectedly. We need to tell HPD officers, our constables, our sheriff's office, Go to work. We'll back you up. If you follow the law, you follow your training, I'll be there for you, Whitmire said. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Residents of Houston's Eastwood area have repeatedly raised concerns about traffic congestion and safety risks due to delays at train railroad crossings. The candidates acknowledged the complexity of this issue, especially since railroads are regulated by federal authorities. They agreed that the next mayor must actively seek policy solutions. President Joe Biden meets with Angola's President Joao Manuel Goncalves Lourenco in the Oval office of the White House, Thursday, Nov. 30, 2023, in Washington. Andrew Harnik/AP The claim: President Joe Biden said Republicans intend to chop Social Security. I thought (Republicans) agreed not to do this a couple times, Biden said Nov. 27 during a White House event. But theyre back at it. Average benefit cut would be 13%. Almost 67 million Americans this year will receive Social Security payments, totaling about $1 trillion. Many older Americans rely on the benefits to pay their basic living expenses. People can start receiving Social Security retirement benefits at age 62, but full benefits kick in when they reach full retirement age, which is 67 for anyone born 1960 or later. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Social Security is funded through the payroll tax; that revenue is put into trust funds to pay for current beneficiaries. These trust funds could be depleted as early as 2032 if further action is not taken. That could mean that in about a decade, monthly checks could be reduced by about 23%. But because of its widespread support among older Americans who usually have the highest voter turnout Social Security has long been known as the third rail of politics. Many politicians in both parties are reluctant to broach major structural changes. PolitiFact ruling: Mostly False. A Republican Study Committee proposal from June would result in cuts to beneficiaries from a combination of a higher retirement age and formula changes, though the proposal said current retirees and those nearing retirement age would be exempted. Experts found the 13% cut Biden cited to be speculative, but plausible but there isnt enough detail to really know. Also, this is one Republican factions plan, not something universally adopted by the party, and its far from guaranteed to be passed in the House, let alone in the Senate. And Bidens framing also ignores that his own policy, which is essentially to continue the status quo, threatens even bigger across-the-board reductions by the early 2030s. Discussion In its 167-page fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, the Republican Study Committee backed some changes to Social Securitys structure that it said would preserve the programs fiscal health. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The group said it would make modest changes in the benefit formula for individuals who are not near retirement and are on the income scales higher end. It also said it would make modest adjustments to the retirement age for full benefits to account for increases in life expectancy. And the budget said it would phase out auxiliary benefits for high earners. The proposal would cut benefits, at least for some people. In its proposed budget, the Republican Study Committee emphasized that its proposal does not cut or delay retirement benefits for any senior in or near retirement, and Biden did not repeat this caveat. However, the flip side of the groups pledge is that younger Americans would see reductions under the groups plan. In an analysis of the proposal for PolitiFact, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget a fiscally hawkish group that tracks budget matters said it is generally true that an increase in the full retirement age is roughly equivalent to an across-the-board cut in benefits. Advertisement Article continues below this ad For instance, if people want to retire at 67, but the age for receiving full benefits is raised to 69, they can still choose to retire at 67, but if they do, they will have to accept a lower monthly payment than before the age was raised. Future beneficiaries payments could be cut further depending on their income and other factors. The White House told PolitiFact that the 13% figure originated in a table the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities published. In the table, raising the retirement age from 67 to 69 would reduce an illustrative monthly benefit from $1,000 to $867, which is a 13.3% cut. The paper was last updated in 2020, but Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, said the math it uses is still applicable. Advertisement Article continues below this ad However, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget urged caution. There both isnt enough detail to say what the full (Republican Study Committee) plan is, and there also isnt a comprehensive assessment of the full plan to say what the average cut would or wouldnt be, the group told PolitiFact. The Republican Study Committee did not answer an inquiry for this article. The Republican Study Committees membership includes about 80% of the House Republican Conference, which holds a narrow majority in the chamber. But this doesnt mean the Republican Study Committees plan is an official plan for all Republicans nor would it be a slam dunk to pass. Its one proposal from one faction, albeit a sizable one, within the House Republican Conference. Given the political sensitivity of Social Security and that one-fifth of House Republicans arent bound by the Republican Study Committees plan, it could face trouble on the floor, if it gets that far. Also, Democrats control the Senate narrowly, and its not clear that the Republican minority in the chamber would close ranks behind such a plan. An Indian Naval ship during rehearsals for the Navy Day celebrations, at Tarkarli in Sindhudurg district, Maharastra, on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023. (A PTI Photo) NEW DELHI (PTI): Prime Minister Narendra Modi will witness the Indian Navy's "operational demonstrations" involving ships, submarines, aircraft and special forces from the Tarkarli beach in Maharashtra's Sindhudurg on Monday, the Defence Ministry has said. The Navy will showcase its combat capabilities as part of the Navy Day celebrations. The Prime Minister is also scheduled to unveil a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji at Rajkot Fort. The Navy Day is celebrated on December 4 every year. "Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Maharashtra on December 4. At around 4:15 PM, the Prime Minister will reach Sindhudurg, Maharashtra and unveil the statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj at Rajkot Fort," the Ministry said on Saturday. "After that, the Prime Minister will attend the programme marking Navy Day celebrations at Sindhudurg. "The Prime Minister will also witness the 'operational demonstrations' by Indian Navy's ships, submarines, aircraft and special forces from Tarkarli beach, Sindhudurg," the Ministry said in a statement. "Every year, on the occasion of Navy Day, there is a tradition of organising 'operational demonstrations' by the Indian Navy's ships, submarines, aircraft and special forces," it added. These demonstrations provide an opportunity to people to witness various facets of the multi-domain operations undertaken by the Indian Navy, the Defence Ministry said. "It highlights the Navy's contributions towards national security to the public, while also heralding maritime consciousness amongst citizens," it said. State Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington Washington D.C. West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming Puerto Rico US Virgin Islands Armed Forces Americas Armed Forces Pacific Armed Forces Europe Northern Mariana Islands Marshall Islands American Samoa Federated States of Micronesia Guam Palau Alberta, Canada British Columbia, Canada Manitoba, Canada New Brunswick, Canada Newfoundland, Canada Nova Scotia, Canada Northwest Territories, Canada Nunavut, Canada Ontario, Canada Prince Edward Island, Canada Quebec, Canada Saskatchewan, Canada Yukon Territory, Canada Postal Code The president of Cop28 has said there is no science behind claims that phasing out fossil fuels will help stave off global warming. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber claimed there was no proof showing a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Advertisement He told former Irish president Mary Robinson that the phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development unless you want to take the world back into caves. The video meeting, which took place in the weeks before this year's UN climate summit, has been published by The Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting. Robinson said: Were in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone and its because we have not yet committed to phasing out fossil fuel. That is the one decision that Cop28 can take and in many ways, because youre head of Adnoc [Abu Dhabi National Oil Company], you could actually take it with more credibility. Advertisement Advertisement Al Jaber said: I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and mature conversation. Im not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is whats going to achieve 1.5 degrees. Robinson challenged him further, saying: I read that your company is investing in a lot more fossil fuel in the future. Al Jaber responded: Youre reading your own media, which is biased and wrong. I am telling you I am the man in charge. Al Jaber then said: Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves. I dont think [you] will be able to help solve the climate problem by pointing fingers or contributing to the polarisation and the divide that is already happening in the world. Show me the solutions. Stop the pointing of fingers. Stop it, Al Jaber said. Advertisement Al Jaber's selection to lead Cop28, which runs until December 12th, has drawn criticism from climate activists, who are concerned he will be unable to take the neutral stance required of a Cop president. He holds a number of senior government and business positions in the United Arab Emirates, including chief executive of state oil giant Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc). He is also a cabinet minister. The UAE is a major crude producer and a leading member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Al Jaber has presented himself as a mediator between both sides of the fossil fuel divide, with a healthy desire to include the oil and gas industry in the climate debate. The BBC and the Centre for Climate Reporting revealed at the beginning of the summit last week that leaked briefing documents prepared for Al Jaber showed plans to discuss fossil fuel deals with 15 countries. Hollywood actor Nicolas Cage has revealed that he may only have three or four more movies left in him and that he wants to say bye on a high note. This year the 59-year-old has appeared in a slew of films including The Retirement Plan, Renfield, The Flash, Sympathy For The Devil and Dream Scenario. Advertisement Speaking to US publication Vanity Fair about his future in Hollywood, Cage said he is starting to cement a plan. Advertisement I may have three or four more movies left in me, he said. I do feel Ive said what Ive had to say with cinema. I think I took film performance as far as I could. I want to say bye on a high note. Cage, who turns 60 in January, discussed his future and said: I was taking stock of how much time I had left. Advertisement Advertisement I thought, OK, my dad died at 75, Im going to be turning 60. If Im lucky, I have maybe a good 15 years and hopefully more. What do I want to do with those 15 years, using my father as the model? It occurred very clearly to me that I want to spend time with my family. Advertisement Nicolas Cage with his wife Riko Shibata. Photo: Alamy/PA Cages youngest daughter, August Francesca, who he shares with wife Riko Shibata, was born last year. Speaking about his career, Cage said: Maybe its time to look at the immersive streaming experience. Advertisement I dont know. I have to look for the next step and I havent found it yet. The Oscar-winning actor, who has starred in films include National Treasure and Leaving Las Vegas, said he is concerned about how his image might be used when he dies. Im thinking a lot about what happens to my likeness when I pass on, he said. I dont want, for example, Peter Loew (Vampires Kiss) or Frank Pierce (Bringing Out The Dead) or Cameron Poe (Con Air) or any of these characters that Ive created to be put into a computer that decides what to do with them. Nicolas Cage during the 60th Venice Film Festival earlier this year. Photo: Myung Jung Kim/PA. I am very concerned about how they would use my likeness. Talking about what might be next for him, he added: I do want to get much more severe and stringent in my selection process. But I want to look ahead. I want to see whats next. It comes after veteran British actor Sir Michael Caine confirmed in October that he would be retiring from acting after the release of his film The Great Escaper. The 90-year-old told the BBC: I keep saying Im going to retire. Well I am now. Also this year, Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston announced he would be taking a break from acting for a year to spend more time with wife Robin Dearden and have a sort of reset on his career. His announcement came shortly after British actor Tom Holland told Extra TV he would be taking a year off following a difficult experience working on psychological thriller series The Crowded Room. Stormont rules should be urgently reformed so that a speaker can be elected by a two-thirds majority of MLAs, a Westminster committee has recommended. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee has also proposed that the same threshold should be used to elect first and deputy first ministers. Advertisement As part of a raft of proposals which the committee said would assist in restoring and stabilising the powersharing institutions, it also recommended rebranding the first minister roles and making them open to politicians from beyond the largest unionist and nationalist parties. The DUP has been blocking powersharing at Stormont for more than a year and a half in protest at the internal UK trade barriers created by Brexits Northern Ireland Protocol. Sir Jeffrey Donaldsons DUP is currently blocking the operation of the Stormont powersharing institutions (Liam McBurney/PA) Advertisement The party has been involved in negotiations with the British government about the Windsor Framework, which reformed the protocol, and is seeking further assurances, by way of legislation, over Northern Irelands place in the UK internal market. Advertisement Senior civil servants have been left in charge of devolved departments and the Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris had to intervene to set a budget. During the lengthy suspension, the DUP has blocked several attempts to elect a Speaker, which is required before ministers can be nominated to form an executive. The Westminster committee has been carrying out an investigation into the effectiveness of the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement; the historic peace deal which created the Stormont Assembly. Advertisement Within current rules, votes from a majority of MLAs within both the nationalist and unionist traditions are needed to secure the posts of speaker, and first and deputy first ministers. During its evidence, the committee heard that with the growth of the proportion of Northern Ireland society identifying as neither unionist nor nationalist since the agreement, supermajority voting would effectively equate to cross-community consent. Among the measures it recommends in its report are calls for the UK Government to urgently reform the Assembly speaker election rules so that a candidate can be elected by a two-thirds supermajority of MLAs. It recommends the same method should be used to elect first and deputy first ministers. Advertisement The report adds that, in recognition of their equal status, the roles should be rebranded as joint first ministers with the position open to any two MLAs of any two parties rather than just the largest parties. Advertisement Under current Stormont rules, Sinn Feins Stormont leader Michelle ONeill is entitled to claim the position of first minister (Brian Lawless/PA) Under current rules, Sinn Feins Stormont leader Michelle ONeill is entitled to claim the position of first minister as her party emerged with the largest number of MLAs following last years Assembly elections. Advertisement The committee said the changes would require consultation with the Irish Government as co-guarantors to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, as well as the parties of Northern Ireland. It said that the 1998 Northern Ireland Act that came from the agreement, which enshrines power-sharing government and devolution in Northern Ireland, would also need to be changed. Sir Robert Buckland is the chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee (Stefan Rousseau/PA) Committee chairman Robert Buckland said: When Stormont collapses critical public services are cast adrift. Health, education, policing; all are feeling the strain while important decisions go unmade, and the people of Northern Ireland suffer. More stringent safeguards are needed to protect against the cycle of restoration and collapse that has dogged Stormont. He added: The short-term measures weve proposed will shore up the stability of Stormont increasing the incentives to keep the institutions moving and enabling the Assembly to run without an executive in place. In the longer run, we feel that a full independent review into the effectiveness of the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement should be conducted with input from all stakeholders. Advertisement This should include the North-South and East-West elements, but a fully functioning Stormont is the foundation on which the rest stands. The Stormont powersharing institutions have been collapsed on several occasions previous to the current political impasse, including by Sinn Fein in 2017 in protest at the DUP handling of a green energy scheme. On that occasion the institutions remained dormant for three years. The riots in Dublin should have been met with a unified response in the Dail, the Tanaiste said as he questioned the Sinn Fein motion of no confidence in the justice minister. Sinn Feins motion of no confidence in Helen McEntee on Tuesday is set to be countered by a motion of confidence tabled by the Government a vote the minister is largely anticipated to win. Advertisement Tens of millions of euro of damage was done to public infrastructure after disorder in the capital last month which saw buses, trams and Garda cars set on fire and shops in OConnell Street and Henry Street looted. The disorder flared after a knife attack on three children and their care assistant in the north inner city. Sinn Fein has tabled the motion of no confidence in Ms McEntee after claiming gardai lost control of the city. Advertisement Its leader Mary Lou McDonald said there needs to be accountability for the catastrophic failure to keep people safe. Advertisement Ms McDonald said a lack of Garda members and Government inaction have resulted in people feeling less safe in the city, as well as in other parts of the country. Advertisement On Monday, Tanaiste Micheal Martin predicted the minister will receive strong Government support and backing from several Independent TDs. Motions of confidence have become mechanisms that are used with increasing regularity by opposition, particularly by Sinn Fein, he said. So, I think, you know, there will be strong Government support and clearly a number of independents have indicated their support as well. So, I expect the motion of confidence in Helen McEntee to be passed tomorrow. Advertisement I think obviously Government will table a motion of confidence, is my expectation, and I believe that will be passed. Advertisement And my own view is the institutions of the State came under attack and thats a time for unity. When bus drivers are attacked, when gardai are attacked, and when businesses and workers are attacked via the fact that their shops are closed because of attacks on those particular premises, I mean, we all have to unite to oppose those who wish to attack the institutions of the state. Advertisement And the focus should be on solutions, collectively within the Oireachtas working to develop ideas and solutions to deal with the issues that arise from the rioting of last week and thats on a number of fronts, not just in policing, but on a number of other fronts as well. A man who raped a woman he'd been chatting with online before arranging to meet for coffee has been imprisoned for five years. Daniel Maymay (31), of Thornbury, Kilmacrennan Road, Letterkenny, Co Donegal, appeared before Mr Justice Paul Burns in the Central Criminal Court in Dublin on Monday after being found guilty of one count of rape on January 28, 2019. Advertisement Maymay had pleaded not guilty to two counts of rape and one of false imprisonment. The matter went to trial in October of this year. The jury convicted him of one count of rape, but acquitted him on the second count of rape and the false imprisonment charge. An investigating garda told John Gallagher BL, prosecuting, that the victim and Maymay had chatted over social media and arranged to meet for coffee and to smoke cannabis. The victim thought this was an opportunity to make a friend. Advertisement On the day in question, Maymay pulled up in his car and the victim got in. They then drove off in a direction that the woman didn't believe she had travelled before. Concern During the journey, Maymay and the woman chatted. She was concerned about where they were going as she was unfamiliar with the area. Advertisement They arrived in Letterkenny at Maymay's residence and entered the property through the French doors. Maymay placed a hand on the woman's back to guide her into a bedroom. The woman felt uncomfortable, but didn't want to say anything as she didn't know where she was or how Maymay might react. They smoked cannabis, then Maymay commented on the woman's waist and lifted her top. The court heard that the victim accepted during cross-examination that oral sex was performed. Maymay then touched the woman to initiate sexual contact. She told him to stop and that she wanted to go home. Advertisement Maymay told her she was 21 and you don't have to go home. He then raped her. The woman felt nauseous and was taken to a shower room afterwards. Maymay then left the property, and offered to get food for the woman. The court heard the woman didn't initially report the rape. Her mother gave evidence during the trial that the woman seemed despondent after returning home to a location in Northern Ireland. She asked if the man she was with had hurt her and her daughter nodded. Advertisement Advertisement The victim's mother then asked did he rape you? and the woman nodded again. Complaint A complaint was made to the PSNI, before it was identified that the incident took place in Donegal. The woman was taken to a sexual assault treatment unit. Following his arrest, Maymay told gardai that he knew the woman had contacted the police as she had deleted their Instagram chat. When interviewed, Maymay accepted meeting the woman and maintained there had been consensual sexual intercourse. Advertisement The woman's victim impact statement was read to the court by the investigating garda. She said she had spent nearly five years in constant fear. She said she withdrew socially following this incident and has had issues sleeping. She said she finds it difficult to be in the presence of men and has lost trust in people. The woman said she found coming to court for the trial to be a terrifying and most traumatic experience. She said the guilty verdict will help with her recovery. Why should he get away with it? The truth is out now. Previous convictions Maymay has 17 previous convictions including one for violent disorder and possession of drugs for sale or supply. In 2020, his permission to remain within the State expired and has not been renewed. Advertisement Shane Costelloe SC, defending, outlined to the court that the prosecution alleged that Maymay raped the woman, then there was an interlude before the second rape occurred. His client was then accused of leaving the woman trapped in the house. The garda accepted that Maymay was acquitted of the first alleged rape and false imprisonment, but convicted of another rape. Mr Costelloe noted that the woman said she told Maymay to stop, but he didn't. Maymay said he stopped immediately, however the jury decided this was not the case. The garda agreed that Maymay told gardai during interview about the circumstances surrounding the violent disorder charge, which related to an incident in 2013. It was further accepted that Maymay is known to gardai as someone who smokes cannabis and has no previous convictions of a sexual nature. Mr Costelloe told the court his client is from the Philippines but came to Ireland at the age of 12. His father served in the army and died in the line of duty. His mother passed away due to cancer. Maymay's siblings were already in Ireland, and he moved here to live with them. He worked as a chef, but lost employment during Covid-19. Maymay has two children and his brother was in court to support him. Advertisement The court heard that the Director of Public Prosecution's view is that the headline sentence should be between seven and 10 years. Mr Costelloe noted that the case would have been deeply traumatising for the victim. He suggested that the court consider the sequencing of events and that the jury didn't convict Maymay in relation to the first alleged rape. He suggested the court treat Maymay as someone who began a sexual act in a mistaken belief that the act was consensual and sentence his client on the basis that he was reckless as to whether or not there was consent, rather than intentionally. He submitted there is a world of difference between an offence committed with intent or one on the basis of recklessness. Mr Costelloe argued this would mean that the court should set a headline sentence at a lower level than suggested by the DPP, and then consider the mitigation. Mr Gallagher told the court that the prosecution say this is a distinction without difference as their case is that Maymay was aware there was no consent at that point. Apology In a letter handed in to the court by Maymay on Monday, he apologised for what he did and expressed regret. He also said he accepts the verdict of the jury. Maymay said he hoped the victim could find it in her heart to forgive him and wished her family the best. Imposing sentence, Mr Justice Paul Burns said: The crime of rape is a serious matter. He said the mitigating factors were that Maymay had no history of sexual offending, that he answered questions put to him during garda interview and that he abided by bail. Mr Justice Burns noted that the woman has a history of anxiety and depression and that she has struggled to sleep since the rape. He wished her the best for the future. He sentenced Maymay to six years' imprisonment but suspended the final year on strict conditions in order to incentivise rehabilitation. The sentence was backdated to when Maymay went into custody on October 13th 2023. This Nov. 12, 2018 photo shows The USS Carney in the Mediterranean Sea. The American warship and multiple commercial ships came under attack Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023 in the Red Sea, the Pentagon said, potentially marking a major escalation in a series of maritime attacks in the Mideast linked to the Israel-Hamas war. Were aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and will provide information as it becomes available, the Pentagon said. (Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Ryan U. Kledzik/U.S. Navy via AP) Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Ryan U. Kledzik /AP The guided-missile destroyer USS Carney in Souda Bay, Greece. The American warship and multiple commercial ships came under attack Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023 in the Red Sea, the Pentagon said, potentially marking a major escalation in a series of maritime attacks in the Mideast linked to the Israel-Hamas war. Were aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and will provide information as it becomes available, the Pentagon said. (Petty Officer 3rd Class Bill Dodge/U.S. Navy via AP) Petty Officer 3rd Class Bill Dodge/AP DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) Ballistics missiles fired by Yemen's Houthi rebels struck three commercial ships Sunday in the Red Sea, while a U.S. warship shot down three drones in self-defense during the hourslong assault, the U.S. military said. The Iranian-backed Houthis claimed two of the attacks. The strikes marked an escalation in a series of maritime attacks in the Mideast linked to the Israel-Hamas war, as multiple vessels found themselves in the crosshairs of a single Houthi assault for the first time in the conflict. The U.S. vowed to consider all appropriate responses in the wake of the attack, specifically calling out Iran, after tensions have been high for years now over Tehran's rapidly advancing nuclear program. These attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security, the U.S. military's Central Command said in a statement. They have jeopardized the lives of international crews representing multiple countries around the world. Advertisement Article continues below this ad It added: We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran. The attack began around 9:15 a.m. local time (0615 GMT) in Houthi-controlled Sanaa, Yemen's capital, Central Command said. The USS Carney, a Navy destroyer, detected a ballistic missile fired from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen at the Bahamas-flagged bulk carrier Unity Explorer. The missile hit near the ship, the U.S. said. Shortly afterward, the Carney shot down a drone headed its way, although it's not clear if the destroyer was the target, Central Command said. About 30 minutes later, the Unity Explorer was hit by a missile. While responding to its distress call, the Carney shot down another incoming drone. Central Command said the Unity Explorer sustained minor damage from the missile. Two other commercial ships, the Panamanian-flagged bulk carriers Number 9 and Sophie II, were both struck by missiles. The Number 9 reported some damage but no casualties, and the Sophie II reported no significant damage, Central Command said. Advertisement Article continues below this ad While sailing to assist the Sophie II around 4:30 p.m. local time (1330 GMT), the Carney shot down another drone heading in its direction. The drones did no damage. The Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, has shot down multiple rockets the Houthis have fired toward Israel during that nation's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It hasn't been damaged in any of the incidents and no injuries have been reported on board. The Defense Department initially described the assault as simply an attack on the Carney before providing more details. Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree claimed two of Sunday's attacks, saying the first vessel was hit by a missile and the second by a drone while in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Saree did not mention any U.S. warship being involved. The Yemeni armed forces continue to prevent Israeli ships from navigating the Red Sea (and Gulf of Aden) until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops, Saree said. The Yemeni armed forces renew their warning to all Israeli ships or those associated with Israelis that they will become a legitimate target if they violate what is stated in this statement. Saree also identified the first vessel as the Unity Explorer, which is owned by a British firm that includes Dan David Ungar, who lives in Israel, as one of its officers. The Number 9 is linked to Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, while the Sophie II is linked to Japan's Kyowa Kisen Co. Ltd. Managers for the three vessels could not be immediately reached for comment. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Israeli media identified Ungar as being the son of Israeli shipping billionaire Abraham Rami Ungar. Iran has yet to directly address the attacks. However, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian threatened that if the current situation continues, the region will enter a new phase over the Israel-Hamas war. All parties who are after igniting a war are warned, before its too late stop the killing of women and children, of which a new round has started," Amirabdollahian said. Iran's top diplomat described his comments as coming after conversations with resistance forces in the region a description Tehran uses for the Shiite militias it backs, including groups in Iraq, the Houthis and Lebanon's Hezbollah, as well as the Sunni fighters of Hamas. All have threatened or attacked Israel, Iran's regional archrival, during the war. The Houthis have launched a series of attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, as well as launching drones and missiles targeting Israel. Analysts suggest the Houthis hope to shore up waning popular support after years of civil war in Yemen between it and Saudi-backed forces. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The U.S. has stopped short of saying its Navy ships were targeted, but has said Houthi drones have headed toward the ships and have been shot down in self-defense. Washington so far has declined to directly respond to the attacks, as has Israel, whose military continues to try to describe the ships as not having links to their country. Global shipping had increasingly been targeted as the Israel-Hamas war threatens to become a wider regional conflict even as a truce briefly halted fighting and Hamas exchanged hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. However, the collapse of the truce and the resumption of punishing Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and a ground offensive there had raised the risk of more seaborne attacks. In November, the Houthis seized a vehicle transport ship also linked to Israel in the Red Sea off Yemen. The rebels still hold the vessel near the port city of Hodeida. Missiles also landed near another U.S. warship last week after it assisted a vessel linked to Israel that had briefly been seized by gunmen. Separately, a container ship owned by an Israeli billionaire recently came under attack by a suspected Iranian drone in the Indian Ocean. The Houthis had not directly targeted the Americans for some time, further raising the stakes in the growing maritime conflict. In 2016, the U.S. launched Tomahawk cruise missiles that destroyed three coastal radar sites in Houthi-controlled territory to retaliate for missiles being fired at U.S. Navy ships at the time. ___ Advertisement Article continues below this ad A former solicitor from Michael Lynn's practice has denied she was aware of Mr Lynn's bank borrowings, saying she had nothing to do with money in the practice. Mr Lynn (55), of Millbrook Court, Redcross, Co Wicklow is on trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court accused of the theft of around 27 million from seven financial institutions. Advertisement He has pleaded not guilty to 21 counts of theft in Dublin between October 23rd 2006 and April 20th 2007. It is the prosecutions case that Mr Lynn obtained multiple mortgages on the same properties, in a situation where banks were unaware that other institutions were also providing finance. The financial institutions involved are Bank of Ireland, National Irish Bank, Irish Life and Permanent, Ulster Bank, ACC Bank, Bank of Scotland Ireland, and Irish Nationwide Building Society (INBS). Advertisement The trial resumed on Monday after a break of four days last week, with former solicitor from his practice, Fiona McAleenan, returning to the stand for a fourth day. Advertisement Paul Comiskey O'Keeffe BL, defending Mr Lynn, showed the court a memo sent to staff at Michael Lynn & Co in October 2006 announcing that Ms McAleenan had been appointed partner of the practice. As I said before, I believed I was going to become a partner in the practice, Ms McAleenan said. I can't put it any further than that, and I've said so on numerous occasions. Defence counsel put it to Ms McAleenan that that has been her position since you sought to compel your insurance to provide indemnity cover. It's been my position since I left the practice and before that, she replied. I was never a partner. Ms McAleenan added that she had made mistakes, but I was not a partner in the practice. Advertisement When asked about an exchange of text messages from Liz Doyle, the office manager, requesting that Ms McAleenan carry out bank transfers, Ms McAleenan denied that she was involved in any bank transfers. I was not familiar with transfers, I was not aware of the lending, she said. Advertisement Mr Comiskey O'Keeffe put it to Ms McAleenan: Your position is that Liz Doyle and Michael Lynn are in a league together, committing a fraud upon you, keeping you in the dark about this. I had no involvement in any of the monies, any of these transfers, Ms McAleenan replied. I put it to you that you were aware of Michael Lynn's borrowings from the bank, you were aware from the drawdown of monies coming in and the transfer of monies out to the beneft of Kendar, where these monies were being used, Mr Comiskey O'Keeffe said. Advertisement No, that's not correct, Ms McAleenan replied. I was involved in giving undertakings. I had no knowledge of amounts, monies, transfers or any other aspect. Under re-examination from prosecution counsel, Karl Finnegan SC, Ms McAleenan agreed that the High Court found that she was not a partner in Michael Lynn & Co and had never been a partner. She agreed the High Court judge thought it was careless that she had held herself out as partner in some of the documents. Ms McAleenan agreed she had expected to become partner and said the discussions were quite advanced. The court heard that when the Law Society investigated the practice, Mr Lynn was struck off the roll of solicitors. Ms McAleenan was never sanctioned nor had any disciplinary proceedings brought against her, the court heard. Ms McAleenan's evidence finished on Monday, with Judge Nolan thanking her for her attendance. Hopefully we won't see you again, he quipped. The trial continues before Judge Nolan and the jury. A new RTE Investigates documentary will reveal how how two individuals, operating as self-styled environmental non-governmental organisations, are systematically objecting to planning applications to extract money from developers. When it comes to the planning process in Ireland the two men are gaining a reputation as "serial objectors". They have lodged multiple objections to residential and commercial developments across the country, and multimillion euro projects are being put on hold. Advertisement RTE Investigates follows the journeys of several developers who have come up against these men "and found themselves out of time, out of options and out of pocket". The programme will air on RTE One on Monday night, and will "identify the two men and feature substantial covert video and audio recordings". Professor Geraint Ellis, lecturer in planning, Queens University, told RTE Investigates: "There's been rumours that these things happen. But to see evidence of this and such high amounts of money is fairly shocking." Advertisement In a time of a national housing crisis, an increasing number of developers say they are being held up by highly questionable appeals, which can take up to a year to be heard. People say they are being held to ransom by mischievous planning objections that claim to be about protecting the environment. Advertisement An Bord Pleanala, the planning appeals board has powers to dismiss financially motivated appeals. Following Freedom of Information requests, RTE Investigates "can reveal there has not been a single appeal dismissed on the grounds of being financially motivated, although the board has the power to dismiss such appeals under the Planning and Development Act 2000". In November 2022, developer David Hogan was granted planning permission to build 74 houses, allowing him to expand his development Watergrasshill in Cork, where there is big demand for such starter homes. The brothers submitted an appeal under the name of an environmental group called An Lucht Inbhuanaithe, The Sustainable People". The development in Cork is located 290 kilometres away from Kells, Co Meath where one brother lives, and over 300 kilometres away from Westport, Co. Mayo where the other brother lives. David Hogan had concerns about the groups motivations. At a meeting with one of the individuals, Mr Hogan tried to address the environmental issues raised in the appeal, but the conversation turned from environmental concerns to money. Advertisement Advertisement David Hogan said one of the men told him: "In the event of the appeal being withdrawn, what about my costs? And he says, if you have a proposal to make, I will be happy to listen. I had said to him that I would wait, I could afford to wait. And he kind of leaned in towards me and he said, well, you're in a lot better position than most of the guys I'm dealing with." It is now almost 11 months since his planning permission to build 74 houses here in Cork was appealed by the two men. Mr Hogan has plenty of potential buyers for his development, but he is continuing to refuse to pay the two men to withdraw their appeal, so he must wait for the planning appeals board to adjudicate on the case. The appeals board has a statutory objective to decide cases within 18 weeks. However, 70 per cent of live cases before An Bord Pleanala at present have not been decided inside this time limit according to a freedom of information request supplied to RTE Investigates. Advertisement The two brothers have been increasingly prolific in submitting planning objections to housing and commercial developments around the country. These objections have been described as mischievous and financially motivated by several planning experts. Advertisement RTE Investigates has discovered another case where a developer paid them and was also asked by them for sites in that development, in return for them withdrawing their appeal against a significant residential development. The agreement gives one of the men an option to buy sites in the housing development for just 1,000 each when the sites were considered to be worth up to 50,000 each at the time. The documentary shows how RTE also uncovered further payments by other developers including a fourth one for over 50,000 which was paid to them in return for a planning appeal being withdrawn. Advertisement Dr Paula Russell, planning lecturer, UCD: "Theres a cost to society in that those houses are going to take much longer to be delivered." Photo: RTE Investigates Viewers will also see tonight how in secretly recorded footage, one of the men revealed how the withdrawal of appeals typically involves confidential deals with developers. Another property developer featured on the programme told RTE Investigates: "I want to expose the fact that people are abusing the planning system for nothing other than personal gain. It's a silent cancer. It's not spoken about." The brothers frequently describe themselves as environmental consultants with NGOs (non-governmental organisations) which are typically not-for-profit advocacy groups . Professor Geraint Ellis, Queen's University Belfast. Photo: RTE Investigates RTE Investigates could find no record of them being registered with the charities regulator or the companies registration office. Nor could they find any online presence explaining the groups goals. As there are no state regulations for NGOs at present, there is no obligation for them to do any of these things. Sadhbh ONeill, environmental lecturer and activist, said: "What makes me so angry is that I know all the organisations that I've worked with who put so much time and effort and voluntary hours into building their organisations, establishing codes of governance and practise, and complying with all of those rules in order to be able to present themselves as legitimate environmental organisations representing the public interest. And these individuals claim to have environmental concerns, but these are clearly nothing to do with what's going on." The resumption of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza is unconscionable, the Tanaiste has said. Micheal Martin condemned the latest attacks on the region, insisting innocent civilians were being killed. Advertisement Israel has intensified its assault on Gaza as it seeks to eliminate Hamas following the militant groups deadly attack on October 7th. The Israeli military has widened its offensive following the end of the week-long ceasefire. Photo: PA Graphics. It has called for the mass evacuation of the town of Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Mr Martin said it was critical to bring the war to an end. I said before the resumption of the war that it was unconscionable that the war would resume and I believe that, he said. We know from the bombardment of north Gaza that the protection of civilian life was not prioritised, and far too many innocent men, women and children were killed and are now being killed in southern Gaza as a result of this bombardment and I condemn that, that is wrong. Advertisement Speaking to reporters in Dublin, Mr Martin added: Well continue to work with all of the parties Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar and others to first of all get hostages out, to get remaining civilians out, but more critically to get the war ended. And I think there is a lot of pressure on and that pressure will continue. Even as it tries to recover hostages through indirect talks with Hamas and army operations in the Gaza Strip, Israel has been declaring some of the missing as dead in captivity, a measure designed to grant anxious relatives some closure. A three-person medical committee has been poring over videos from the October 7th rampage by Hamas-led Palestinian gunmen in southern Israel for signs of lethal injuries among those abducted, and cross-referencing with the testimony of hostages freed during a week-long Gaza truce that ended on Friday. Advertisement That can suffice to determine that a hostage has died, even if no doctor has formally pronounced this over his or her body, said Hagar Mizrahi, a Health Ministry official who heads the panel created in response to a crisis now in its third month. Advertisement "Designation of death is never an easy matter, and certainly not in the situation embroiling us," she told Israel's Kan radio. Her committee, she said, addresses "the desire of the families of loved ones abducted to Gaza to know as much as possible". Of some 240 people kidnapped, 108 were freed by Hamas in return for the release by Israel of scores of Palestinian detainees as well as boosted humanitarian aid shipments to Gaza. Since the truce, Israeli authorities have declared seven civilians and an army colonel as dead in captivity. Israel says 137 hostages remain in Gaza, their condition not always known. Advertisement This has not been confirmed by Hamas. It has previously said dozens of hostages were killed in Israeli airstrikes, has threatened to execute hostages itself and suggested that some hostages were in the hands of other armed Palestinian factions. Hostages have been kept incommunicado despite Israel's calls on the Red Cross to arrange visits and verify their wellbeing. Mizrahi said she and her fellow panelists - a forensic pathologist and a physical trauma clinician - have been watching clips shot by the Hamas attackers themselves, cellphone video by Palestinian spectators and CCTV footage of the hostage-taking "again and again, frame by frame". Advertisement That has allowed them to map out life-threatening wounds and spot any cessation of breathing or other essential reflexes. Advertisement Additional considerations have been hostages' rough handling by captors, the reduced chances of them getting adequate medical care in Gaza and accounts of deaths by former fellow hostages. Religious laws The panel has been consulting with a religious expert, she said, given Jewish laws that prevent a widow from remarrying unless her bereavement is formally recognised by authorities. "We assemble the overall picture," Mizrahi said, adding that every determination of death has to be unanimously agreed upon. The risk of getting it wrong was laid bare in the case of Emily Hand, who went missing on October 7th and whose father Tom was initially informed "unofficially" that she had been killed. The Irish-Israeli girl had in fact been taken hostage and was freed in the truce. Advertisement Being denied a burial may pose a psychological barrier for grieving kin, however. Last week, the Israeli military which has rabbinical and intelligence units scouring Gaza battlefields for information about the fate of lost soldiers, as well as remains of hostages declared dead Shaked Gal, a conscript missing since October 7th. His mother Sigalit said in a Facebook post addressed to the 19-year-old that she would not observe the traditional Jewish mourning period for him "until your body is returned". Mizrahi said her panel had yet to encounter a family that refused to accept its determination, but was prepared for that. "We are here to provide the professional side. We do not, God forbid, debate or confront the families regarding their decision, and we accept their choices with understanding," she said. The military has recovered the bodies of one captive soldier and two civilian hostages, and freed one soldier in a rescue operation. European far-right parties met in Italy on Sunday vowing to reshape the European Union after next year's European Parliament elections, toughening the bloc's approach on immigration and softening its climate policies to protect jobs and industry. Parties from around a dozen countries met in Florence, galvanised by last month's general elections in the Netherlands, which handed a surprise win to Geert Wilders' anti-immigration Freedom Party (PVV). Advertisement "Our objective is for (us) to become at least the third-largest (group in the EU parliament), after the centre-right and the socialists, and to be decisive," said Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, who hosted the meeting. The far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group is currently the sixth-largest in the EU assembly, also behind liberal, green and conservative groups, but current polling data place it in fourth position. Advertisement Mr Salvini, who has failed to include in his alliance prime minister Giorgia Meloni and her poll-leading Brothers of Italy party, fronted a previous unsuccessful push in 2019 for a far-right breakthrough in EU elections. Addressing the Florence rally via video link, Mr Wilders said he hoped his success, "a political earthquake in the Netherlands and Europe," could be "the start of a wave of national election wins" for like-minded allies. Advertisement Mr Wilders hailed Mr Salvini, leader of the League party, as an inspiration and his "number one Italian friend". Mr Salvini hit out against the EU decision to ban new CO2-emitting cars from 2035, and was backed by the co-leader of Alternative for Germany (AfD) Tino Chrupalla, who called for an "end to the war against cars". Jordan Bardella, president of Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally party, won applause speaking in Italian and saying that Europe cannot become a "5-star hostel for Africa", and linking mass immigration to violence and crime. There was less unity on other issues. Mr Wilders condemned excessive public spending while Mr Salvini railed against eurozone budget discipline rules, and German and Austrian far-righters breaking ranks on Russia and Ukraine. "Ukraine cannot win this war, they should stop it," Mr Chrupalla said, blaming EU sanctions on Russia for depressing the German economy and calling for a resumption of Russian gas imports via the Nord Stream pipeline. Mr Salvini, once a staunch admirer of Russian president Vladimir Putin, told reporters that his party had "clearly supported every intervention in defence of Ukraine, with facts, votes and money". Former British prime minister David Cameron will travel to the United States this week for the first time since returning to frontline politics. The UK foreign secretary, who was a surprise appointment during British prime minister Rishi Sunaks reshuffle three weeks ago, is set to visit Washington DC for talks about the conflict in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East. Advertisement Due to fly out on Wednesday, the UK Foreign Office said he will undertake a programme of bilateral meetings with key members of US president Joe Bidens administration. The itinerary includes a meeting with his US counterpart, secretary of state Antony Blinken, as well as discussions with Republican and Democratic congressional figures. Advertisement Mr Cameron has previously met on a number of occasions with Mr Biden, who formerly served as vice president to Barack Obama, including in Washington shortly after entering Downing Street in 2010 and again in London in 2013. Advertisement The foreign secretary first announced his trip to the US capital in an article for The Sun On Sunday. The Conservative peer said he would be reassuring American allies that Britain will stay the course in Ukraine as a debate rages Stateside about how long US support for Kyiv should continue. Advertisement The battle in eastern Europe has been raging for almost two years following the decision by Russian president Vladimir Putin who Mr Cameron has labelled a warmonger to order his troops to invade the neighbouring country in February 2022. Writing in the tabloid newspaper, Mr Cameron said it was hard to recall a previous time in recent memory of such danger and uncertainty in the world, before arguing that Britains response should be one of strength, resilience and unity. David Cameron and Joe Biden have met previously in their former roles (Stefan Rousseau/PA) Advertisement The UK Cabinet minister wrote: We need to build up our defences, stay close to our strongest friends and partners, and reach out to new allies. That is why next week I will be heading to Washington DC to work with our closest and strongest ally, the USA. The debate there about how much to help Ukraine and for how long is under way. I know the arguments that European security is American security and that dictators shouldnt be appeased will win the day. Advertisement But I want to reassure them that we will stay the course and galvanise other allies too. Guinea-Bissaus president has dissolved the West African nations parliament after what the government said was a failed coup. A decree issued by President Umaro Sissoco Embalo on Monday cited a shootout in the capital, Bissau, last week. Advertisement The date for holding the next legislative elections will be set in due time in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution, the decree stated. This Presidential Decree comes into force immediately. The order referred to the seriousness of the shootout between members of the Presidential Palace Battalion and the National Guard which started when the former tried to rearrest two ministers released from custody while being investigated for alleged corruption. It is the second time in less than two years that Mr Embalo has dissolved parliament three months after surviving a coup attempt in February, he dissolved parliament, citing unresolvable differences with the legislature. Advertisement Advertisement The foiled coup is the fourth attempted or successful military takeover of power in West and Central Africa in the last six months, following last weeks failed coup in Sierra Leone. It further raises tensions in the once-politically stable region where coups have surged with eight military takeovers since 2020. Guinea-Bissau President Umaro Sissoco Embalo speaks during a plenary session at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai (Peter Dejong/AP) Advertisement Guinea-Bissaus semi-presidential system limits the presidents powers by allowing the majority party in the parliament to appoint the Cabinet. As a result, the National Guard which comes under the Interior Ministry is largely controlled by the opposition-dominated parliament. Mr Embalo, a former army general, was declared the winner of a December 2019 run-off presidential election which his opponent contested. Tensions have remained between him and a coalition of opposition groups that won the majority in Guinea-Bissaus parliament in June when the parliament was reconstituted. Last weeks shooting incident, which lasted from Thursday night till Friday morning, happened while the president was attending the UNs Cop28 climate summit in Dubai. Advertisement Upon his return, he dismissed Victor Tchongo, the head of the National Guard, who he said was not acting alone in asking members of the guard to release the officials. Advertisement The bid to release the officials Economy and Finance Minister Suleimane Seidi and Treasury Secretary Antonio Monteiro clearly revealed the complicity of grand corruption with certain political interests and sows strong evidence of political complicit,, President Embalo said in the decree. The National Peoples Assembly, instead of fighting for the rigorous application of the Budget Execution Law and exercising their role in the supervision of the Governments acts, preferred to defend members of the Executive suspected of involvement in the acts of corruption that seriously harmed the highest interests of the State, he added. Since gaining independence from Portugal in 1974, the country of two million people which borders coup-hit Guinea, has endured continued political turmoil, experiencing four coups and more than a dozen attempted coups. The Israeli military has renewed its calls for mass evacuations from the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Younis, where tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge in recent weeks, as it widened its ground offensive and bombarded targets across the territory. The expanded offensive, following the collapse of a week-long ceasefire, is aimed at eliminating Gazas Hamas rulers, whose October 7 attack on Israel triggered the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian violence in decades. Advertisement The war has already killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced more than three-quarters of the territorys population of 2.3 million Palestinians, who are running out of safe places to go. Palestinians inspect a damaged building following Israeli air strikes on the town of Khan Younis (Fatima Shbair/AP) Already under mounting pressure from its top ally, the United States, Israel appears to be racing to strike a death blow against Hamas if that is even possible, given the groups deep roots in Palestinian society before another ceasefire. Advertisement Advertisement But the mounting toll from the fighting, which Palestinian health officials say has killed several hundred civilians since the truce ended on Friday, further increases pressure to return to the negotiating table. It could also render even larger parts of the isolated territory uninhabitable. The ground offensive has transformed much of the north, including large parts of Gaza City, into a rubble-filled wasteland. Hundreds of thousands of people have sought refuge in the south, which could meet the same fate, and both Israel and neighbouring Egypt have refused to accept any refugees. Advertisement A Palestinian woman inspects a damaged house following Israeli air strikes on Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip (Fatima Shbair/AP) Residents said they heard air strikes and explosions in and around Khan Younis overnight and into Monday after the military dropped leaflets warning people to relocate further south towards the border with Egypt. In an Arabic language post on social media early on Monday, the military again ordered the evacuation of nearly two dozen neighbourhoods in and around Khan Younis. Advertisement Halima Abdel-Rahman, a widow and mother of four, said she has stopped heeding such orders. She fled her home in October to an area outside Khan Younis, where she stays with relatives. Advertisement The (Israeli) occupation tells you to go to this area, then they bomb it, she said. The reality is that no place is safe in Gaza. They kill people in the north. They kill people in the south. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has said it is a duty of women to halt a fall in the countrys birth rate in order to strengthen national power, state media said on Monday, as his government steps up the call for the people to have more children. While getting a detailed idea of North Koreas population trends is extremely difficult because of the limited statistics it discloses, South Koreas government assesses that the Norths fertility rate has declined steadily for the past 10 years. Advertisement That is a concerning development for a country that depends on mobilised labour to help keep its broken, heavily sanctioned economy afloat. North Korean women attend the National Mothers Meeting in Pyongyang (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service/AP) Mr Kims latest appeal for women to have more children was made on Sunday during the countrys National Mothers Meeting, the first of its kind in 11 years. Advertisement Advertisement Stopping the decline in birth rates and providing good childcare and education are all our family affairs that we should solve together with our mothers, he said in his opening speech. According to South Koreas government statistics agency, North Koreas total fertility rate, or the average number of babies expected to be born to a woman over her lifetime, was 1.79 in 2022, down from 1.88 in 2014. However, the decline is still slower than its wealthier rival South Korea, whose fertility rate last year was 0.78, down from 1.20 in 2014. South Koreas fertility rate, the lowest in the developed world, is believed to be due to a potent cocktail of reasons discouraging people from having babies, including a decaying job market, a brutally competitive school environment for children, traditionally weak childcare assistance, and a male-centred corporate culture where many women find it impossible to combine careers and family. Advertisement While North Korea is one of the poorest nations in the world, the change in its demographic structure is similar to that of rich countries, some observers say. Many families in North Korea also dont intend to have more than one child these days as they know they need lots of money to raise their kids, send them to school and help them get jobs, said Ahn Kyung-su, head of DPRKHealth.org, a website focusing on health issues in North Korea. Advertisement Ahn, who has interviewed many North Korean defectors, said the smuggling in over the past 20 years of a vast amount of South Korean TV dramas and films showing an elevated social status for women is also likely to have influenced women in North Korea not to have many children. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said it is a duty of women to stop a fall in the countrys birth rate to strengthen national power (Cha Song Ho/AP) Advertisement North Korea implemented birth control programmes in the 1970-80s to slow a post-war growth in population. The countrys fertility rate recorded a major decline following a famine in the mid-1990s that was estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people, the Seoul-based Hyundai Research Institute said in a report in August. Given North Korea lacks resources and technological advancements, it could face difficulties to revive and develop its manufacturing industry if sufficient labour forces are not provided, the institute report said. Advertisement According to North Korean state media reports this year, the country has introduced a set of benefits for families with three or more children, including preferential free housing arrangements, state subsidies, free food, medicine and household goods and educational perks for children. Advertisement South Koreas statistics agency estimates the Norths population at 25.7 million. The Hyundai institute report said that North Korea is expected to experience a shrink in population from 2034 and forecast its population will decrease to 23.7 million by 2070. Ahn, of DPRKHealth.org, said Mr Kims repeated public appearances with his young daughter, Ju Ae, are probably part of efforts to encourage families, though other experts said her appearances are more likely an attempt to show she is her fathers heir. Meta, Facebook's parent company, honored the 10th anniversary of its Fundamental AI Research team, emphasizing that super intelligence is a long way to go. Read Also: Meta Sues FTC, Cites Unconstitutional In-House Courts Meta Believes AI Models Still Far From Super Intelligence During the event, Meta's chief scientist and deep learning pioneer Yann LeCun stated that he believes that the current AI models have still a long way to improve. He also highlighted that the technology is still decades away from developing sentience and common sense in AI models. LeCun's statement comes in contrast with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang who stated previously that AI will be "fairly competitive" with humans in just about five years. On the other hand, LeCun claimed that Nvidia is hopping on the AI craze as the chip company has so much to gain from it. Most importantly, the chief scientist stated that the current focus of the tech industry is to give services based on text data, which is not enough to create the advanced human-like AI models that we imagine. AI Needs Improvement in Training to Advance According to LeCun, relying on text for training is a poor source of information, which explains his belief that society will be getting a "cat-level" or "dog-level" AI for years before reaching the ambitious human-level AI. "Train a system on the equivalent of 20,000 years of reading material, and they still don't understand that if A is the same as B, then B is the same as A." He also shared no training is enough to learn a lot of basic things in the world. Currently, the Meta AI executives are working on creating apps that could work on a wide range of data from audio, image, and video information. Other AI companies have also started to support various file formats to train their models. Related Article: Meta Receives Complaints for 'Very Expensive' Ad-Free Fees for EU Users Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime. The Sydney burger venue that first opened on a graffiti-daubed side street in Newtown in 2013 is headed to North Sydney with a new 50-seat outlet. Marys joins a posse of food venues opening mid-2024 above the incoming Victoria Cross Station, part of the $21.6 billion Metro City network. After 10 glorious years of stuffing faces, were incredibly excited to deliver our special brand of mayhem over the Coat Hanger to our North Sydney brethren, Marys co-owner Jake Smyth says. Expect cold beers, tasty tunes and some truly delicious burgers. Mary's classic Mary's Burger with oak lettuce and signature sauce. Supplied Marys has never been short of confidence (and controversy), describing itself as the big bad burger bar that saved Sydney from itself. Smyth promises sneaky new menu items at North Sydney (he wont say what), an all-natural wine list curated by hip liquor merchants P&V, and a cocktail line-up curated by Matthew Bax, who was behind Melbournes tiny but mighty (and now-closed) 15-person Bar Americano. Joining Marys is a roll-call of Sydney food brands, including one of this citys best banh mi purveyors, Marrickville Pork Roll, as well as Only Coffee, Sushi Hub and bubble tea chain Machi Machi. There will also be a McDonalds. Of the 20 food and beverage retailers in the precinct, 13 will open next year, with the remaining landing in 2025. Advertisement Review Eating outRozelle Inner west pub swaps pokies for pate at its buzzy new French bistro The old gaming room at this Darling Street pub is now serving up Sydney rock oysters, steak frites and lemon tart. Terry Durack December 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 / 8 The Sackvilles former gaming room is now French bistro Chez Blue. Edwina Pickles 2 / 8 Deep-fried tripe served in a seafood cocktail dish with lemon and rouille for dipping. Edwina Pickles 3 / 8 Bannockburn chicken is served two ways, with smooth mashed potato, chicken jus and quenelle of mushroom duxelles. Edwina Pickles 4 / 8 Opera cake with layers of almond sponge, buttercream and ganache. Edwina Pickles 5 / 8 Chicken liver brulee on brioche with marmalade and pickles. Edwina Pickles 6 / 8 Saddle of White Pyrenees lamb atop cassoulet-style white beans flecked with carrot. Edwina Pickles 7 / 8 Paper-covered tables and frilled table lamps are French accents in the room. Edwina Pickles 8 / 8 Edwina Pickles Previous Slide Next Slide 14 / 20 How we score French$$$ In a sign of the times, the old gaming room at The Sackville Hotel is now a buzzy little French bistro. Instead of pokies, there is pate. Instead of fruit machines, we get lemon tart. The gaming room may have only moved to the rear of the pub, but Im much happier with the idea of my coins going towards Sydney rock oysters, steak frites and lemon tart. Goodbye pokies, hello hoedowns: How this bowling club saved itself Advertisement The Sackville has been held by the Solotel group since 1999, and chief executive Elliot Solomon has stepped into the shoes of father Bruce to oversee a total of 26 venues across Sydney, Parramatta and Brisbane. It was a recent trip of his to Paris with baby in tow that inspired the switch to a come-as-you-are bistro, complete with childrens menu, to capture the areas changing demographic. Right on cue, a young couple and their daughter settle on the banquette next to my table. On the other side, two off-duty sommeliers forensically study the wine list and argue about chablis. The entrance is through a sweet little wood-lined bar, with the restaurant space an awkward L-shape around a private dining room. The paper-covered tables are stamped with 599 Rue Cherie, a Franglais take on Darling Street, and garnished with little frilled table lamps. Patrons sit elbow-to-elbow on dark bentwood chairs as staff weave in and around them. Chicken liver brulee on brioche with marmalade and pickles. Edwina Pickles Chef Mark Williamson was at Woollahras Bistro Moncur for six years, so is well versed in the ways of the bistro. A salad of peach, tomato, goats curd, fennel and almonds ($28) is classically arranged; other dishes take twists and turns. Tuna tartare rewrites salade nicoise, all the goodies lurking under a crisp potato galette; and croque monsieur comes as cafe-style cheese toasties with a bowl of melted comte for dipping. Advertisement Even chicken liver pate ($24) comes bruleed, with a toast rack of grilled brioche, runny orange marmalade and pickled cucumber. Beneath its softened crust, the pate is smooth and pink, without being overly creamy. Tripe is deep-fried; the soft, golden fingers of blanched, braised and crumbed honeycomb tripe ($24) cutely served in a seafood cocktail dish with lemon and a runny rouille for dipping. Its quite possibly too soft, but if youve been served as much tough, chewy tripe as I have, youd shut up and be grateful. A saddle of White Pyrenees lamb ($46) sits atop terrific cassoulet-style white beans flecked with carrot, lush and comforting. The lamb has a beautifully long flavour, fringed with fat and crisp skin, with a splodge of feisty sauce verte. The menu promises chicken mousse and tenderloins within the cavity, but this doesnt eventuate. Not so good for Instagram, but still good for dinner. As is a fleshy, fruity 2021 Famille Perrin Cotes de Rhone ($15/$70). Saddle of White Pyrenees lamb atop cassoulet-style white beans flecked with carrot. Edwina Pickles Bannockburn chicken is served two ways, the leg as a very pleasant stuffed roulade, and the breast roasted on the crown ($38). Adding to the mix is a splosh of smooth mashed potato, chicken jus and quenelle of mushroom duxelles. A green salad of butter lettuce ($12) is overdressed, and softens quickly. Advertisement Staff members are kept busy as tables turn over, and while a few look lost, young waiter Lachlan Kershaw-Domingo has a handle on it. Instead of pokies, there is pate. Instead of fruit machines, we get lemon tart. The three desserts all look good, but I can never resist opera cake ($18), with its layers of almond sponge, buttercream and ganache, and absolute lack of decorative faff. Credit to Chez Blue chef Kelly Susanto for staying true to the original, created by the famed Dalloyau patisserie in Paris in 1955. (Just dont put it under the warming lights before it is sent to the table, or the ganache will be too soft.) Theres a bit of detail missing in action, as if the chef has the night off (and I discover later that was indeed the case). But heres to more pokies being sidelined in favour of the joys of wining and dining. Id much rather put my money where my mouth is. The low-down Go-to dish: Saddle of White Pyrenees lamb with white bean cassoulet, $46 Vibe: Left bank bistro meets inner west pub Drinks: Bespoke cocktails, Brandy Crustas and a very French wine list with 17 by the glass Cost: About $160 for two, plus drinks The family migrated to Australia in the early 1950s, following Trishas fathers work as a research chemist. They lived in Melbourne, Sydney and, later in life, in Canberra, where Trishas mother, Mary after the death of her husband built a new life working at the Australian National University and as one of the first guides at the National Gallery of Australia. Hippy bride Trish Barraclough and husband Warwick Konopacki on their wedding day. Trisha was educated in Melbourne by the nuns at Sacre Coeur in Glen Iris where, according to her brothers, her naturally rebellious streak was already on show. In 1969, she moved to Sydney and Macquarie University just as the social revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s was erupting, and quickly became involved with causes of the day such as the Vietnam Moratorium movement and some of the notable radical figures of the day: Pierre Vicary, Calvin Noack, Mark Aarons and Phil Gibbs. While living in student digs in Balmain in 1972, she met Warwick Konopacki, who was studying to be a clinical psychologist. They married in 1974 in the family living room, with Barraclough a barefoot hippy bride. By this time, she had started work as a researcher at the Sydney headquarters of ABC television at Gore Hill. They drove to Queensland for their honeymoon but only got as far as Brisbane. They stayed, living on a small acreage one of her first opportunities to indulge a lifelong love of horses. A committed feminist, she volunteered at the early rape crisis centre and womens shelter established in Brisbane. Her activism brought her into contact with a rich array of people author, poet and essayist Kate Jennings was a lifelong friend. Memorably, she once spent several says steering a rather lost Vanessa Redgrave around Brisbane after making an instant connection with the legendary actor. Kindred spirits: Trish Barraclough with Vanessa Redgrave. Trisha was a great booster for all her colleagues, but particularly young female journalists (including this one). Being a woman was not ever going to impede your professional life, as far as she was concerned. In 1976, she started working in Brisbane with Maxine McKew and Andrew Olle on This Day Tonight. McKew and Barraclough were the only women working in what McKew describes as a casually sexist environment but huge, huge fun. All the blokes said theyll never get on. And on the face of it, it seemed unlikely: Trisha, in her flowing cheesecloth top, jeans tucked into take-no-prisoners boots, looked like a less wrecked Marianne Faithfull. Me? I was channelling Peggy in Mad Men, McKew recalls. She had a sharp mind, a finely tuned aesthetic and the invaluable journalistic asset of a great bullshit detector. She was usually five steps ahead of you and of her executive producers. She loved fighting for her ground. Lights, camera ... Trish Barraclough on location. Barraclough went on to run her own programs as an executive producer of radio in Brisbane. After parting with Konopacki, she started working at the ABC in Canberra. In her early 40s, she found herself surprised and delighted to be contemplating single motherhood with the birth of her beloved daughter, Jess, on November 13, 1991. The previous year, she had begun a great journalistic collaboration as Canberra producer for Kerry OBrien on a new nightly current affairs program, Lateline, which drew guests from every corner of the globe via satellite, many of them giants in their field. There were guests such as Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher. OBrien recalls: I presented the program from a small ABC studio in Canberras Parliament House. Trisha was my producer, and combining the Sydney and Canberra output while delivering guests live from around the world, was always technically fraught. Kerry OBrien presenting the ABCs Lateline in 1991. Credit: ABC Some nights, as the opening theme would start playing, we sat in the studio not knowing whether all the guests from three different time zones had arrived or their pictures would be delivered or their sound linked in time. For the first six years, as we moulded the show and built an audience, Trisha was always at the heart of the process, and put her own special stamp on so many programs. Where she came into her own was in generating ideas beyond the programs bread and butter politics, economics and the big international stories. Loading She had a great capacity to think outside the square and an eye for strong social issues and the arts, and she challenged us all to broaden the dimension of the show. She was a perfect foil for me, never allowing me to get too serious. Without her influence in those first critical years, I dont believe Lateline would have had quite the breadth or the capacity to surprise that made it special. She certainly brought out the best in me, and everyone else around her. In 1995, she moved from Lateline to the birth of another innovative program, Australian Story, working in Brisbane. To many of her colleagues, the Australian Story format was peak Barraclough: it was about the person, not the journalists. She had an extraordinary capacity to persuade people to trust the program with their stories. Founding executive producer, Deb Fleming says: Demonstrably, that program would never have happened without her. Its a small tragedy that she put in all the hard yards, but escaped home to Canberra without ever benefiting from the awards and accolades that followed over the next ten years. Trish with daughter Jess and godparent Kerry OBrien. After returning to Canberra, Barraclough would go on to be the founding executive producer of the ACT edition of Stateline the only time Canberra had its own current affairs program. Veteran ABC reporter Phil Williams remembers working with her as the happiest period of my career and her passion for people-oriented stories and beautiful pictures and music. We used to win the ratings on a Friday night, which no other Stateline did ... we didnt have to do a lot of state politics and corruption. That gave us a lot more freedom, though she would go hard on a political story when needed, he says. Loading Barraclough very much drove the push to deal with the legacy of Mr Fluffy: the business that pumped loose asbestos fibre into the ceilings of houses all over Canberra in the 1970s, leaving a deadly legacy of deaths and contaminated homes well into the current century. When the program was dumped in 2014, she was shattered for herself, her team and the community that loved it. Her long career at the ABC came to an end, and she retreated into seclusion for some years to Murrumbateman, outside Canberra, where she lived with Jess, her horses, dogs and cats and, in recent times, orphaned wildlife. It was a good time for the intensely tight Trish and Jess duo: Trisha helped Jess finish her zoology degree and they travelled regularly together to NSWs South Coast and North Coast. Trish with one of her beloved horses. It would be her love of photography and becoming a warrior in defence of journalism and decent politics on Twitter and Facebook that eventually brought her back among her friends. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2022 and subjected herself to every form of treatment to resist its spread. The tough side-effects of the treatment were offset by the considerable joy she got from reconnecting with people those she had not seen for years, some whom she had never met before. She died at Clare Holland House in the early afternoon on November 21, with her beloved Jess and brother Richard by her side. University of NSW has the states largest disclosed spend on education agents, last year paying more than $59 million in commissions, according to its financial statements. It amounted to a 38 per cent increase in agent fees over the past five years despite international student numbers remaining relatively steady in the same time. UNSW said this increase was largely due to post-COVID complexity of travel and changing immigration visa policies. At the states largest educator of foreign students, Sydney University, the bill for agent fees was almost $51 million last year, a 58 per cent increase over five years but a slight drop from the year prior. Some universities reported a lower spend on commissions, with University of Technology Sydney spending $10 million on agent fees last year, down from $22.8 million in 2018. Together, Sydney University, UNSW, UTS, Macquarie University and University of Wollongong spent $147 million on agent commissions last year, according to their financial statements and figures provided on request. Loading But the total figure for NSW public universities is probably far higher. Western Sydney University, University of New England, Newcastle University, Southern Cross University and Charles Sturt University refused to reveal their commission spending or did not respond by deadline. No university revealed the percentage of international student fees it paid to agents in commission, but the peak body for education agents says the industry average for higher education is about 15 per cent of first-year fees. The rise in education agent expenditure comes at a time of fierce competition for international students, with Australian universities increasingly relying on foreign students for revenue and to fund research. A parliamentary inquiry into Australias international student sector last month recommended the government acknowledge that regulation of agents was long overdue, and said that the case for education providers being forced to disclose to students the commission paid to agents was overwhelming. Onshore agents have come under fire for poaching students enrolled in university degrees to transfer them to vocational colleges once in Australia, making large commissions in the process. Allegations of unscrupulous agents are not confined to the vocational education sector. Liang said he also frequently spoke with students who were told by their agent the degree they were enrolled in would make them eligible for a post-study work visa, only to find out when they are in Australia this was not the case. Robert Parsonson, chief executive of the International Student Education Agents Association, said Australias early adoption of education agents was a key reason for its competitiveness in the international student market. The association wants the government to implement a certification policy for Australian education agents, but does not support the committees suggestion to require full transparency of commission fees, which Parsonson said would put Australia at a disadvantage against all competitor countries. However, Parsonson said agents should be forced to disclose to students they may receive a financial advantage from their enrolment. Loading A UNSW spokeswoman said the use of education agents was the global norm because students wanted localised, quality guidance. A Sydney University spokeswoman said the institution carefully selected, trained and monitored its agents to ensure they provided quality support to prospective students and complied with relevant legislation. We have robust processes in place for monitoring, reporting and investigating any potential issues of fraud or exploitation, she said. Education Minister Jason Clare has this year announced new proposed rules mainly targeting vocational colleges, including a proposed ban on agents receiving commissions for onshore transfers. Loading But he has not committed to improving transparency of agent commissions or greater regulation of the agent business more broadly. His office said the minister will respond to the reports recommendations in due course. Theres a place for education agents in helping students navigate their move from one country to another to study, but for too long there hasnt been enough oversight of them, Clare said. Homeowners in the inner-city suburb of Alexandria are protesting against a 10-storey affordable housing development by claiming it will reduce their property values, block out the sun and infringe upon the tranquillity and wellbeing of the neighbourhood. Affordable housing developer City West Housing has proposed to build about 104 units on Wyndham Street on a site currently occupied by warehouses, a pet store and a basketball facility. The Alexandria site, owned by City West Housing, is currently occupied by warehouses, a sports facility and pet store. Credit: Edwina Pickles The site, purchased by City West last year for $37.5 million, is within 500 metres of the coming Waterloo Metro station and sits within the Botany Road Corridor, recently rezoned by the City of Sydney to encourage more affordable housing. But an anonymous flyer circulating among nearby residents claimed the development would affect property values, block sunlight, undermine privacy and alter their scenic views. Voters have swung to the Liberal Party after weeks of political dispute on border security, lifting the Coalitions primary vote from 30 to 34 per cent while holding Labors support at its lowest point since the election. The dramatic shift has also taken a toll on personal support for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose net performance rating has sunk from minus 6 to minus 11 percentage points over the past month. The exclusive findings take Opposition Leader Peter Dutton within sight of the Coalitions result at the last election after voters threw more support behind him on national security and migration. Asked to name the better leader and party to manage immigration and refugees, 33 per cent of voters backed Dutton and the Coalition while only 22 per cent named Albanese and Labor, reversing the governments lead on the same question in October. A well-placed source in the Albanese government, who asked not to be named so they could discuss the prospective visit, said the trip by the King and the Queen to Australian shores had not yet been formally confirmed by Buckingham Palace. It would be next October, its very possible it will happen. It would be around the time of CHOGM that he would come, either before or after, that would make sense that source said. The parliamentary sitting schedule for 2024 has a week-long break either side of the CHOGM meeting to allow time for King Charles and Queen Camilla to travel to Australia without interrupting the sitting calendar. Last week during a visit to Australia, Tom Parker Bowles, the son of Queen Camilla, told The Age and Sydney Morning Herald that the King was due to visit Australia next year. Hes coming next year, I think, he said. When questioned more closely, he then confirmed that he really didnt know any details of a proposed itinerary. Loading Theres always a royal tour somewhere. I always assumed that Australia was a very important place to visit. A spokesman for Governor-General David Hurley referred questions about the royal visit to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. The department declined to comment. As the Australian head of state, the King has a standing invitation to visit here. It would be Charles first visit since 2018, when, accompanied by Camilla, then Duchess of Cornwall, he opened the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast. The Queen and Prince Philip at the 1963 Melbourne Cup. Credit: Age Archives NSW is keen to host a royal visit next year to mark the 200th anniversary of the establishment in 1823 of the NSW Legislative Council and for the opening of a square on Sydneys Macquarie Street named after Queen Elizabeth. There is speculation in racing circles that Charles, who became King of the United Kingdom and Australia in September 2022 when his mother Queen Elizabeth II died, could attend the Melbourne Cup at Flemington on November 5 or the King Charles III Stakes at Royal Randwick on October 12. There is concern in the royal household over how to deal with republican sentiment in Australia, which is among 14 Commonwealth countries, in addition to the United Kingdom, where he is head of state. At CHOGM in Rwanda last year, before his mothers death, Charles told leaders that keeping the Queen as head of state was a matter for each member country to decide. Royal officials will monitor if crowds turn out for Charles and Camilla in the same way they did for the Queens final visit to Australia in 2011. Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, visit Newcastle, NSW, in 1983. Credit: Getty Conservation will play a key role in any royal visit. Australias coronation gift to Charles was a $10,000 donation to help save one of the worlds rarest bird species, the western ground parrot, also known as the kyloring. Any royal visit would involve the local charities closely associated with the King, including the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Royal Flying Doctor Service, The Kings Trust and Variety Australia. King Charles first trip as monarch will come after 16 previous trips, 15 of which were accompanying or representing his mother. Queen Elizabeth visited Australia 16 times between 1954 and 2011. Charles first visited Australia as a 17-year-old student in 1966 when he completed two terms at Geelong Grammars Timbertop campus. His first visit representing the Queen was one year later at the funeral of Prime Minister Harold Holt. Prince Charles as a schoolboy at Timbertop in Victoria in 1966. Credit: Archive When Charles visited Australia in 1977 as part of the Royal Silver Jubilee celebrations, he was interviewed on ABC music program Countdown by presenter Ian Molly Meldrum, who famously lost his composure. In 1983, Charles and his former wife Diana, Princess of Wales spent 40 days in Australia and New Zealand along with their baby son Prince William. Victorian federal Labor MP Peta Murphy has died, aged 50, after fighting cancer for many years following her diagnosis of breast cancer in 2011. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made an emotional statement in Parliament House shortly before 2pm on Monday to relay the news that Murphy had died earlier in the day. Labor MP Peta Murphy in the House of Representatives last week. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen We will always carry her glow in our hearts, Albanese said. Murphy was a barrister and public defender before defeating the Liberals to win the Melbourne seat of Dunkley in 2019, rising to become chair of the House of Representatives committee on social policy and legal affairs. The Type 096 will be more numerous, more stealthy, and may range over a wider area, Emma Salisbury of Britains Council on Geostrategy told Newsweek recently. They are under construction already. Theyre not only nuclear-powered, as the AUKUS boats are to be. The Type 096 are designed to be nuclear armed as well, with multiple, nuclear-tipped missiles capable of travelling 9000 to 10,000 kilometres. But what about the new Type 096 submarines? Have you heard any mention of these next-generation boats? Theres zero debate about this new class of submarine. Saturdays three-nation announcement of progress on the AUKUS pact to deliver nuclear-powered submarines and other high-tech capacities keeps the deals momentum going. And this will, no doubt, extend Australias intense debate about the controversial plan. The implications of this new weapon of war would be profound, according to new research by the US Naval War College. And they appear set to hit the water before the first AUKUS sub arrives. Australia is due to buy its first Virginia-class boat in 2032 under its agreement with the US, while the first Type 096 is expected to launch by 2030, two years ahead. Yet no one in Australia even seems to have heard of them. Which is understandable. Because a search of all Australian media shows that, while many hundreds of articles and newscasts have been published on AUKUS, theres been only a single mention of the Type 096 anywhere, and that was in the 11th paragraph of an editorial in the Herald Sun in 2021. As you might have guessed by now, the Type 096 is the Chinese Communist Partys bid to establish maritime parity with or superiority over the US and its allies. In other words, Australia has been waging a furious debate about its submarine plans in complete isolation from the unfolding reality around us. If were concerned about the AUKUS submarines, we should be at least as concerned about Chinas program. The maximum penalties for fraud range between 14 to 20 years of imprisonment, depending on the circumstances surrounding the criminal offence. For falsification of company books, the maximum penalty is either two years of imprisonment or 100 penalty units or both, while providing false information to members of a corporation can warrant either five years of imprisonment or a $66,000 fine, or both. Years before Sam Altman was ousted, OpenAI was reported to sign an agreement to invest $51 million in an AI chip startup where Altman himself has personal investments, the Wired revealed. Investor document shows that the AI firm signed a nonbinding agreement in 2019 with Rain AI to spend $51 million for the startup's neuromorphic processing unit once completed. The chip is supposed to replicate features of a human brain and requires less power than Nvidia's AI chips, a big draw for AI companies with huge operations like OpenAI. Rain told investors that Altman made personal investments with the company since 2018 for up to $1 million. The agreement was not reported before the announcement. OpenAI's letter of intent was made public following the US government forced the Saudi Aramco-owned Prosperity7 to sell its shares due to possible intellectual property leakage to China. Altman has previously been reported to fundraise for a new AI chip business with the Saudi Arabian government before he was fired over two weeks ago. Also Read: Sam Altman Fundraised Billions for New AI Chip Venture Before Leaving OpenAI OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Personal Investments The OpenAI CEO has been under hot water even before his firing due to a web of investments all directly linked to him. Over the past decade, the tech entrepreneur made around 400 investments in tech companies like Reddit, Stripe and Asana. He also funded other AI startups like Cerebras and Humane. Altman earlier said that he tries to "avoid things that are directly an issue with the company you're running and disclose everything." Despite the inked agreement, OpenAI has not allocated any money towards Rain AI. Battle for Affordable AI Chips Nvidia remains the biggest supplier of graphics processing units dedicated to housing large language models used in AI, but rising prices have made some companies look elsewhere. Microsoft, the biggest investor of OpenAI, has launched a new project wing to create customized AI chips for its cloud services operations to curve spending on expensive Nvidia chips. Rain has also publicly announced earlier this year to soon "tape out" a test chip before 2024. Even Altman has been known to complain about the "brutal crunch" for AI chips and the "eye-watering" costs needed to buy them. Related Article: Microsoft Debuts New AI Chip to Compete with NVIDIA, Meet Demands Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury on Monday demanded that the government "exhausts every resource" to bring back the eight former naval personnel who were handed death sentences by a court in Qatar. The Indian nationals were handed the death sentence by Qatar's Court of First Instance on October 26. India described the ruling as "deeply" shocking and vowed to explore all legal options in the case. Raising the issue during the Zero Hour in the Lok Sabha, Chowdhury said the government should exhaust every resource to get rid of the charges against the Indian nationals convicted by the Qatari court. An appeal has already been filed against the death sentence and a higher court in Qatar has admitted the plea. The appeal has been filed by the legal team of the detained Indian nationals. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani on the sidelines of the COP28 summit in Dubai last week and discussed the well-being of the Indian community in that country. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) has launched a new campaign to address rapidly escalating climate driven humanitarian crises. It calls on global governments and international donors to support local emergency responders and disaster hit communities - helping them to Stand Tall with smarter and faster humanitarian funding. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231202510555/en/ Stand Tall in the face of disaster with IFRC-DREF Insurance. (Photo: Business Wire) The IFRCs Disaster Response Emergency Fund (IFRC-DREF) is the quickest, most efficient and most transparent way of getting funding directly to local National Societies both before and immediately after a crisis hits. Yet it faces growing pressure to anticipate and respond to multiple, simultaneous and complex crises around the world as a result of climate change. Today, 3.6 billion people live in areas highly susceptible to climate change. Humanitarian funding needs are growing as more people are adversely impacted by climate-related disasters each year. The signs are hard to ignore: IFRC-DREF funding allocation increased by 75% to meet escalating demands in the first half of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022 - predominately in response to floods and earthquakes. Shoulder to shoulder - to Stand Tall The Stand Tall campaign calls on global governments and private donors to stand shoulder to shoulder with local emergency responders and the communities they support. Stand Tall aims to grow the humanitarian funds available to on-the-ground relief organisations from the CHF 64 million (US$73 million) available today to CHF 100 million (US$114 million) by 2025. Coinciding with COP28, IFRCs Stand Tall campaign uses a series of visuals to champion the incredible network of donors, volunteers, and impacted communities that make up IFRC-DREF. Nena Stoiljkovic, Under-Secretary General at IFRC, said: In the battle against climate change, we have reached a critical juncture funding needs outstrip supply as communities face more and more devastating impact. Our funding partners for IFRC-DREF enable us to deliver local response with global support. We take a moment to celebrate the incredible work and accomplishments of our inspiring network of funding partners and volunteers in impacted communities. We are proud of their determination and collaboration as we strive to prevent and lessen the burden of climate disasters on vulnerable communities. We encourage our partners to keep supporting IFRC-DREFs action. Together, we will Stand Tall in the face of climate disasters. Smarter and faster funding - to those who need it, when they need it Unlike other humanitarian funding mechanisms, 82% of IFRC-DREF funds go directly to National Societies supporting local action compared with a global average of just 1.2%. Localised, community-led action is key to ensuring communities are equipped to prepare for, and overcome, devastating crises. IFRC-DREF is evolving as it works to increase the impact of every donation to the fund. In September 2023, for example, IFRC announced the launch of IFRC-DREF Insurance - a truly innovative way to ensure that funding is always there for those who need it, when they need it. It acts as a back-stop to IFRC-DREF, bringing an additional CHF 20 million (c US $23 million) on stream, triggered during periods of high demand. In helping to reach the CHF 100 million target by 2025, global governments and private donors can Stand Tall with emergency responders and their communities - saving lives and livelihoods in the face of climate driven disasters. To learn more about IFRC-DREF and how donors can support its 2025 ambition, visit ifrc.org. About the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) IFRC is the worlds largest humanitarian network, comprising 191 National Societies and bringing together more than 16 million volunteers working to save lives, build community resilience, strengthen localisation and promote dignity around the world. About the IFRCs Disaster Response Emergency Fund (IFRC-DREF) Established in 1979, the IFRC-DREF is the quickest, most efficient, and most transparent mechanism for donors to channel global short-term emergency funding directly for local community-based action. While the average of international humanitarian funds directly channelled to local actors every year lies around 1.2% globally, 82% of IFRC-DREFs allocation is directly transferred to the National Societies. Since its inception, more than 220 million people in crisis worldwide have benefited from IFRC-DREF support. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231202510555/en/ TikTok has been getting back-to-back victories on the court after judges from Indiana and Montana favored the video app company, in separate legal battles. Read Also: TikTok Launches New 'Artist Account' to Promote Music Conveniently TikTok Prevails in American Law Recently, a state judge in Indiana threw out a lawsuit against TikTok that accuses the company of creating false claims about the safety of user data and age-appropriate content. According to Judge Jennifer DeGroote of Allen County Superior Court in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the court "lacks personal jurisdiction" over the app. More so, installing the app does not count as a "consumer transaction under the Indiana Deceptive Consumer Sales Act. Meanwhile, a federal judge from Montana had a preliminary ruling on TikTok's upcoming state-wide ban on the state. According to Judge Donald Molloy, the state failed to show how SB 419 would be "constitutionally permissible." TikTok Remains Strong in Market Position Both lawsuits are yet to reach their final verdict. However, the preliminary decisions favoring TikTok only showed that it would be a hard case to implement a ban on a powerful app. "In shutting off TikTok, the Legislature has both harmed User Plaintiffs' First Amendment rights and cut off a stream of income on which many rely. Thus, Plaintiffs have established a likelihood of irreparable harm," Molloy wrote. Due to the hurdles and early failures of cases against TikTok many law professionals are suggesting to weigh more whether the app is indeed a danger to the public. "It's a panoply of legal hurdles that anti-TikTok efforts must jump through, and there's just no way to get through all of them," Santa Clara University's law professor, Eric Goldman told CNN. Goldman also suggests that policymakers should focus on making efforts to enhance the data privacy rights of Americans and a social reconciliation should be done to study how to appropriately limit the collection of data. Related Article: Federal Judge Blocks State-Wide TikTok Ban in Montana Setting your custom ringtones is a good way to personalize your phone and differentiate messages from calls. Now Google might probably make the feature more accessible and easier. Google was reported to be prepping its Google Contacts app for Android to add a new "Ringtones" section to easily customize sound alert for each notification by just tapping "Add contact ringtone." The version 4.22.37.586680692 will include the new feature. The version is still a work in progress and no actual date yet is given for its release. The added feature was first spotted by user AssembleDebug on X (formerly Twitter) on Dec. 1, Friday. Google Contacts to get a separate section for contact ringtones This new section will make it easier to set ringtones for contacts You can play the ringtones here which you have set for contacts. If you have set ringtones for any contact before, they will also appear here. pic.twitter.com/vZKnFFPhQp AssembleDebug (@AssembleDebug) December 1, 2023 Google's changes on its contacts app came in time as the tech giant is rehauling its RCS to compete with Apple's iMessage app. Also Read: Google Messages Encrypt RCS Conversations, Group Chats How to Set Custom Ringtone on Current Google Contacts Before the update comes out, Google Contacts users only have one way to change ringtones according to their preferences. To do so, users can access the Contacts tab on their Google Phone app or directly into the Google Contacts app. Next, tap the menu in the top right corner for each contact person. Choose the "Set ringtone" option, then tap on "My sounds." A plus sign will soon appear at the bottom right corner. Click that and navigate through for the sound clip of your preference. Just a quick note, the sound clip must be downloaded into your app before being used as a custom ringtone. Once done, simply press the "Save" action button in the top right corner. The selected sound will be the contact person's ringtone when they call or message you. Then, rinse and repeat for others. Google Battle on Cross Platform Messaging Google's decision to revamp the app did not come as a surprise as it aims to spread the Android messaging standard to competitors. Earlier in November, Google urged EU regulators to allow Apple's iMessage app to become compatible with other OS's RCS. Apple soon folded to the European group and allowed the more feature-rich texting standard on iPhone and will work alongside the original iMessage app. Related Article: Google Urges Regulations on Apple's iMessage in EU Markets Net-zero business models ICR Newsroom By Published 04 December 2023 Cemtech Europe 2023, held earlier this year in Istanbul, Turkey, provided a wealth of interesting presentations on a range of topics, including net-zero business models for cement companies. This month Dr Clark takes a closer look at such models and what they mean for the cement industry. For this months Technical Forum Dr Clarks focus is on cement industry business models through the net zero transition, as presented by Fabian Apel of McKinsey & Co at this years Cemtech Europe, which took place in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2023. Mr Apels particularly thought-provoking presentation was based on an article from McKinseys Materials Practice. To continue reading this story and get access to all News, Articles and Video sections of the CemNet.com website, please Register for a subscription to International Cement Review or Login Bamburi Cement builds two solar power plants 04 December 2023 Bamburi Cement is building two solar photovoltaic power plants, which will provide up to 30 per cent of the cement producers total power requirement. According to Market Screener, this marks the largest commercial solar project ever initiated by a cement company in Kenya. The project with MOMNAI Energy Ltd, an independent power producer, will include two plants with capacities of 14.5MW and 5MW, located in Bamburis Mombasa and Athi River sites, respectively. Mohair Kapoor, CEO, Bamburi Cement, said the project will lead to significant cost savings, reduced vulnerability to load shedding and make a substantial contribution towards achieving net zero carbon emissions. Miriam Ngolo, project lead and director of strategy and business development at Bamburi Cement, highlighted the project's aim to realise recurring power cost savings, saying, "This strategic partnership with MOMNAI Energy will expedite our decarbonisation journey and lower greenhouse gas emissions through the use of zero-carbon renewable energy sources." Under the agreement MOMNAI Energy will be responsible for financing the construction, management and maintenance costs of the entire project, while Bamburi Cement will provide land leases at the two sites for the solar plants. Published under CEMEX welcomes BS 8500 concrete standard 04 December 2023 CEMEX has welcomed the introduction of the newly revised standard for concrete, BS 8500, with a two-day CEMEX UK ReadyMix Commercial Conference for key stakeholders across the CEMEX UK operation. The introduction of the new standard represents a significant advancement for the UK construction industry, to provide even greater options for concrete and cement manufacture, in the critical area of reducing the embodied carbon. Richard Boult, commercial technical manager for cement, CEMEX UK, said: BS 8500 has been long awaited and will be transformational for the industry, increasing the options of specifying lower-carbon concretes. In simple terms, this means that CEMII/A-L and GGBS can be combined in a wider range of exposure classes. Our timely annual ReadyMix Commercial Conference this week has prepared us to support our customers with the changes as they hit the market. For CEMEX, we now have even greater opportunity to increase availability, selection and choice across the entire CEMEX portfolio, without compromising on performance. Lex Russell, managing rirector, CEMEX UK Materials and chair of the Mineral Products Association, added,As the first UK company to introduce net-zero CO 2 concrete in 2020, we have the ongoing responsibility to deliver lower carbon products at scale. The incoming changes to BS 8500 are welcomed by all at CEMEX as it underpins our ambitious global goal for Vertua lower-carbon cement and concrete products to reach half of all cement and concrete sales by 2025. The amended concrete standard will serve to keep us on track with our decarbonisation goals, with the primary objective to become a net-zero CO 2 company by 2050." For specifiers of concrete and cement products, BS 8500 will now allow the specification of combination/ternary cements, broadening the spectrum of available low-carbon mixes for designers, contractors and manufacturers across the UK construction industry. In addition, Ian Riley, CEO of the World Cement Association, said: It is good to see BSI making this change to concrete standards, however, this is still a very modest step forward. Firstly, ground limestone has been used successfully as a cement component in many markets for decades, so this is not breaking new ground but catching up. Secondly, in order to produce concrete with the lowest embodied carbon and the highest circularity we need to move away from standards that require particular recipes to standards that require specific performance. Published under Sinai White Portland Cement to open first cement terminal at Arish 04 December 2023 Transcargo International (TCI), a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Ports Group, has signed an agreement with Sinai White Portland Cement to build and operate the first bulk cement silo terminal at Arish port in North Sinai, Egypt, to boost exports. According to Mist News, the terminal will have a total capacity of at least 200,000tpa and will include six cement silos with a capacity of 10,000t each, four silos to store grey cement and two for white cement. This project aligns with our commitment to support Egyptian exports by providing specialised logistics solutions across several industries. Building and operating Egypts first bulk cement terminal, we anticipate cost savings for cement producers in Egypt, making prices more competitive globally and increasing global market penetration, said Mohamed El Ahwal, CEO of TCI. Published under (Photo : Unsplash/Chris Long) After SAG-AFTRA's month-long strike ended with a tentative deal in November, the results of a ratification vote are expected Tuesday. Some union members have criticized parts of the agreement and foresee a close outcome. Anticipation for Ratification Vote The SAG-AFTRA union's tentative three-year deal is up for a vote, with vocal critics expressing concerns over artificial intelligence and compensation. The historic agreement follows a 118-day strike, and while the union's national board voted 86% in favor, dissenting voices highlight divisive issues. Some members, like actor Alex Plank, criticize the AI provisions, citing disappointment in the lack of stringent protections. The debate intensifies on social media with the hashtag #SAGAFTRAvoteNO, as the industry awaits the outcome of the close ratification vote. The 129-page agreement marked the end of a 118-day strike that halted Hollywood's productions from blockbuster movies to network series and streaming shows, revealed after Thanksgiving. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) ratified its deal after a 148 strike in October, and the Directors Guild of America settled their contracts in June without strikes. The two other unions made demands similar to SAG-AFTRA, including stricter rules on AI use, higher base pay, and a larger share of streaming profits. Notably, WGA and SAG-AFTRA hadn't had simultaneous strikes since 1960. The SAG-AFTRA national board approved the deal with over 86% support on Nov. 10, though some board members criticized it. Chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland acknowledged the agreement's imperfections but emphasized its groundbreaking nature, highlighting significant economic increases and future AI considerations. Following the vote, the board described the package as a significant milestone, valuing it at over one billion dollars in new wages and benefit plan funding. The deal includes meaningful artificial intelligence protections, including informed consent and compensation for digital replicas of living and deceased members. However, as specifics of the tentative agreement surfaced, the hashtag #SAGAFTRAvoteNO gained traction on social media, with performers expressing concerns about what they perceived as inadequate AI protections. Debates Over AI and Compensation Actor and SAG-AFTRA member Alex Plank expressed disappointment with the AI provisions, wishing for strict bans on using actors' likenesses for AI training. According to him, the proposed contract allows producers to create synthetic performers, notifying SAG and negotiating with the union for usage situation he sees as enabling competition between synthetic and human performers. Plank also criticized certain compensation aspects, believing that what was negotiated may not significantly benefit the average actor's pay. He mainly found the criteria for receiving streaming residuals too narrow. Three other union members who spoke with NBC News anonymously also feared professional fallout from a labor deal perspective. READ ALSO: How Technology Is Transforming The Way We Work Speculations on Close Vote and Committee Praise One member speculated that the vote would be close due to an overwhelming number of people voting against it. Another member, who was part of the negotiating committee, praised SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher and deemed the agreement the best they have ever received. According to Drescher, critics are exploiting the momentum as she addressed naysayers in a Zoom meeting last month. A SAG-AFTRA strike captain mentioned that if the new labor deal isn't ratified, it's unlikely to lead to another strike. Instead, the union and studios likely resolved the issues and held another vote. Many SAG-AFTRA members are not keen on another financially challenging strike after the recent one left thousands without pay during negotiations over minimum wages and streaming residuals. High-profile CEOs like Disney's Bob Iger and Netflix's Ted Sarandos were involved in the talks. SAG-AFTRA's executive vice president, Linda Powell, sees the ongoing debate over the tentative deal as healthy, attributing achievements to the members' efforts during the 118-day strike. She expressed satisfaction even if the value gets a 51% approval, noting that people are educating themselves further, which she sees as a positive and healthy process. RELATED ARTICLE: Disney CEO Signals Era of Expansion, Pledges to "Start Building Again" in Employee Town Hall 2017 Jobs & Hire All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. (Photo : Unsplash/Miguel Angel Sanz) Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines said they will aim to "maintain" each of their brand identities but operate under a single platform, combining into a 365-airplane fleet covering 138 destinations. Unified Operations Hawaiian Airlines, a rival of Alaska Airlines, is set to be acquired in a $1.9 billion deal to expand its presence along the West Coast. Based on a news release, Hawaiian Airlines is valued at $18 per share, including the absorption of $900 million in debt. At the $4.86 rate, shares of Hawaiian Airlines closed on Friday, giving the company a market cap of about $250 million. The transaction is expected to finalize in the next 18 months, creating a combined company based in Seattle, led by Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci. Customers can travel to more destinations due to the combined company's increased selection of essential air service options and access throughout the Pacific region, the continental United States, and the world. More substantial growth and competitiveness in the United States, long-term job opportunities for workers, ongoing community investment, and environmental stewardship are all anticipated benefits of the transaction. READ ALSO: The Changing Workforce: Implications for Staffing Strategic Acquisition Hawaiian Airlines has faced difficulties, including challenges from Maui wildfires, increased competition from Southwest, and a slow recovery in travel to and from Asia post-pandemic. Unlike Alaska and other carriers that regained financial stability, Hawaiian posted net losses in most quarters since 2020. Alaska Airlines sees the acquisition as a unique opportunity, providing a strategic advantage in the premium-travel Hawaii market. However, airline mergers have encountered resistance from the Biden administration's Justice Department. The DOJ dissolved a regional partnership between JetBlue Airways and American Airlines earlier. The ongoing legal battle with JetBlue's proposed acquisition of Spirit Airlines adds complexity. Despite this, Hawaiian and Alaska anticipate closing the deal in 12 to 18 months, pending regulatory and shareholder approval. Advisors Alaska Airlines is being advised financially by BofA Securities and PJT Partners and legally by O'Melveny & Myers LLP. Hawaiian Airlines receives legal and financial advice from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Professional Corporation, and Barclays. Brand Synergy The airlines plan to maintain their brand identities but operate under a unified platform, boasting a 365-airplane fleet covering 138 destinations. Peter Ingram, CEO of Hawaiian Airlines, said this partnership aims to enhance guest experience and technology. The merger will allow Alaska Airlines to triple nonstop or one-stop flights from Hawaii to destinations across North America, yielding a significant new platform support for above-average organic growth and a strategic focus on increasing options for West Coast travelers. The deal is anticipated to boost earnings within two years, with expected synergies of at least $235 million, to give Hawaiian Airlines shareholders a compelling premium while creating attractive value for Alaska Airlines' shareholders. Alaska CEO Ben Minicucci is committed to investing in Hawaiian communities and sustaining robust Neighbor Island service. Minicucci also expressed confidence in the deal getting approved, citing 12 overlapping markets, a combined 1,400 daily flights, and a more extensive network that he said would allow the airline to compete with the four largest carriers. RELATED ARTICLE: 6 Ways PR Firms Can Expand Your Influence 2017 Jobs & Hire All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. hydrogen is a building block for the energy transition. To obtain it with the help of solar energy, LMU researchers have developed new high-performance nanostructures. The material holds a world record for green hydrogen production with sunlight. When Emiliano Cortes goes hunting for sunlight, he doesn't use gigantic mirrors or sprawling solar farms. Quite the contrary, the professor of experimental physics and energy conversion at LMU dives into the nanocosmos. "Where the high-energy particles of sunlight, the photons, meet atomic structures is where our research begins," Cortes says. "We are working on material solutions to capture and use solar energy more efficiently." His findings have great potential as they enable novel solar cells and photocatalysts. The industry has high hopes for the latter because they can make light energy accessible for chemical reactions bypassing the need to generate electricity. But there is one major challenge to using sunlight, which solar cells also have to contend with, Cortes knows: "Sunlight arrives on Earth 'diluted,' so the energy per area is comparatively low." Solar panels compensate for this by covering large areas. Cortes, however, is approaching the problem from the other direction, so to speak: With his team at LMU's Nano-Institute, which is funded, among others, by the e-conversion cluster of excellence, Solar Technologies go Hybrid (an initiative of the Bayerisches Staatsministerium fur Wissenschaft und Kunst) and the European Research Council, he is developing so-called plasmonic nanostructures that can be used to concentrate solar energy. In a recent publication in the journal Nature Catalysis, Cortes, together with Dr. Matias Herran, now at Fritz Haber Institute, Berlin, and cooperation partners from the Free University of Berlin and the University of Hamburg, present a two-dimensional supercrystal that generates hydrogen from formic acid with the help of sunlight. "The material is so outstanding, in fact, that it holds the world record for producing hydrogen using sunlight," Cortes points out. This is good news for the production of both photocatalysts and hydrogen as an energy carrier since they play an important role in a successful energy transition. Concentrating solar energy with miniature magnets For their supercrystal, Cortes and Herran use two different metals in nanoscale format. "We first create particles in the range of 10-200 nanometers from a plasmonic metal which in our case is gold," Herran explains. "At this scale, a special phenomenon occurs with plasmonic metals, which also include silver, copper, aluminum, and magnesium: visible light interacts very strongly with the electrons of the metal, causing them to oscillate resonantly." This means that the electrons move collectively very quickly from one side of the nanoparticle to the other, creating a kind of mini-magnet. Experts refer to this as a dipole moment. "For the incident light, this is a strong change so that it subsequently interacts much more strongly with the metallic nanoparticle," Cortes explains. "Analogously, one can think of the process as a superlens concentrating the energy. Our nanomaterials do that but on the molecular scale. This allows the nanoparticles to capture more sunlight and convert it into very high-energy electrons. These, in turn, help drive chemical reactions. Nano hotspots unleash catalytic power But how can this energy be harnessed? For that purpose, the LMU scientists teamed up with researchers at the University of Hamburg. They arranged gold particles in an orderly fashion on a surface according to the principle of self-organization. The particles must be very close but not touching for maximized light-matter interactions. In collaboration with a research team from Freie Universitat Berlin, which studied the optical properties of the material, the LMU researchers found that light absorption increased many times over. "The gold nanoparticle arrays focus the incoming light extremely efficient, yielding, highly localized and strong electric fields, the so-called hotspots," says Herran. These form between the gold particles, which gave Cortes and Herran the idea of placing platinum nanoparticles, a classic and powerful catalyst material, right in the interspaces. This was again done by the research team from Hamburg. "Platinum is not the material of choice for photocatalysis because it absorbs sunlight poorly. However, we can force it in hotspots to enhance this otherwise poor absorption and power chemical reactions with the light energy. In our case, the reaction converts formic acid into hydrogen," Herran explains. With a hydrogen production rate from formic acid of 139 millimoles per hour and per gram of catalyst, the photocatalytic material currently holds the world record for H 2 production with sunlight. Would you ever consider going on a vacation with a stranger? TikToker Benjamin Kosinski (@bennyykosinski) has plans to go to Europe, but he doesnt want to make the trip alone, so hes looking for a girl who is willing to travel with him. He has had a terrible experience with meeting girls from dating apps in New York, so now, he has revised his strategy, turning to TikTok for help. I feel like every girl I met on Hinge and Raya was either an aspiring Instagram model or a nurse from Philadelphia, he said. He added that he would be covering the costs of the flights and hotels and didnt expect the girl to contribute to these particular expenses. They would be leaving from New York City and traveling to Stockholm, Lisbon, and Copenhagen. Once they arrived in Europe, they would be staying at a fancy hotel in Lisbon. Then, he listed off the criteria that the girl must meet. Ideally, she will be between the ages of 27 and 32. In addition, she should be fun-loving, charismatic, confident, and beautiful. Before deciding on who to take with him, he will hold video calls with potential girls to confirm mutual interest. Many women flocked to the comments section to express their enthusiasm and willingness to go on the trip, with some joking that they needed to check with their husbands first. Others were a little more skeptical about Benjamins offer since it seemed too good to be true and questioned why he had so much trouble with dating. Sign up for Chip Chicks newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox. Think of something big and important happening in the worldsome cultural trend, political movement, or social craze. Chances are that someone, somewhere, has proposed giving it a distinctly Christian or biblical framing. Some of these efforts, aimed at glorifying God in all things, supply helpful correctives to secular errors. Others, smacking more of anxious attempts at hopping aboard a moving train, add little beyond a thin spiritual gloss. Thankfully, CTs book of the year, Christopher Watkins Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bibles Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, belongs to the first category. Some might wince at the mention of critical theory, with its perceived reputation for nonsense jargon or radical politics. Critical theory comes in many flavors, of course, some guiltier than others of cramming messy human particulars into ideological straitjackets. But the late Tim Keller, in his foreword, suggests another view, observing that a good theory make[s] visible the deep structures of a culture in order to expose and change them. As Watkin contends, Scripture does this better than anything else. Other critical theoriesderived from deep analyses of race, gender, psychology, language, and lawmight apply useful lenses to reality. But all are clouded or cracked to some degree, requiring a higher wisdom and a truer story to polish off the smudges and patch together the broken shards. Gods Word, in this sense, does more than explain God to the world. In unsurpassed fashion, it explains the world to itself. Like Biblical Critical Theory, all of our award winners contain insight and beauty on their own. And like all good books, they are made complete in the greatest Book of all. Matt Reynolds, senior books editor Apologetics/Evangelism Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bibles Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture Christopher Watkin (Zondervan Academic) Biblical Critical Theory is an outstanding example of careful scholarship employed for the life of the church. Watkin leads the reader through a comprehensive account of the biblical narrative. At each scene in this narrative, he shows how complex biblical truths are often divided into false dichotomies or watered-down compromises. He argues, in contrast, that biblical teaching cuts across these divides and subverts cultural expectations. Watkin travels with ease from biblical exegesis to intellectual history to contemporary philosophy. Scholars, teachers, and pastors will all benefit from this work. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Gregory E. Ganssle, professor of philosophy, Biola University Article continues below (Read an excerpt from Biblical Critical Theory, as well as an interview with the author.) Award of Merit Humble Confidence: A Model for Interfaith Apologetics Benno van den Toren and Kang-San Tan (IVP Academic) Humble Confidence offers a fresh integration of evangelism, missiology, and apologetics. With uncommon clarity and grace, the authors bring these insights to bear on the complexities of the modern world, particularly the many religious viewpoints and expressions embedded in innumerable cultural contexts. Crucially, they retain a commitment to rational defense of the Christian faith while resisting the power struggles, logic chopping, and depersonalization that often accompany apologetic efforts. What results is a holistic model of interfaith engagement that honors and respects the bodies, minds, hearts, and souls of all involved. Marybeth Baggett, professor of English and cultural apologetics, Houston Christian University Finalists The Augustine Way: Retrieving a Vision for the Churchs Apologetic Witness Joshua D. Chatraw and Mark D. Allen (Baker Academic) The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again Justin Brierley (Tyndale Elevate) (Read CTs review of The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.) Bible and Devotional 14 Fresh Ways to Enjoy the Bible James F. Coakley (Moody) Its easy to get stuck in our approaches to the Biblereading it from a certain perspective, asking the same questions of each text, defaulting to familiar ways of interpreting it, or even just getting bored with our old routines. This book offers 14 ways to look at Scripture with fresh eyes, not only revealing meanings and emphases we may have missed but also illuminating the artistry and ingenuity of biblical authors and the Spirit who inspired them. Coakleys explanations of each concept, as well as examples from biblical and nonbiblical works, will help readers deepen their understanding of Scripture and appreciate its literary beauty. Chris Tiegreen, author of numerous devotional books and Bible study guides Award of Merit The Blessed Life: A 90-Day Devotional through the Teachings and Miracles of Jesus Kelly Minter (B&H) Minter provides a contemplative exploration of a short period in Jesus earthly life. Readers walk alongside Christs disciples, encountering crowds, misfits, and sufferers while hanging on to the Messiahs every word. With gracefully short and profound chapters, The Blessed Life illustrates the ongoing relevance of Jesus teachings and miracles for building and sustaining faith in todays world. Minters powerful writing helps us receive Jesus words the way his original audience didas new, fresh, and brimming with hope. Eryn Lynum, Bible teacher, author of Rooted in Wonder Article continues below Finalists Hearing the Message of Ecclesiastes: Questioning Faith in a Baffling World Christopher J. H. Wright (Zondervan) Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal Esau McCaulley (InterVarsity Press) (Read an excerpt from Lent.) Biblical Studies Jesus the Purifier: Johns Gospel and the Fourth Quest for the Historical Jesus Craig L. Blomberg (Baker Academic) Blomberg, a prominent New Testament scholar, gives a thorough account of the scholarship that has characterized four distinct quests to understand Jesus as a historical figure. As he highlights significant themes and trajectories, he illustrates why the Gospel of John should play a larger role in this research. Blombergs argument centers on the motif of Jesus as purifier, showing howin both John and the other Gospelshe moves beyond a focus on ritual purity to speak of being cleansed and sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Johns gospel has obvious theological value; Jesus the Purifier helps us appreciate its historical value as well. May Young, associate professor of biblical studies, Taylor University Award of Merit How to Read and Understand the Psalms Bruce K. Waltke and Fred G. Zaspel (Crossway) When it comes to works of biblical studies, my ideal is high-level scholarship that connects to pulpits and pews. How to Read and Understand the Psalms is a masterful example, and it now qualifies as my go-to introduction for this section of Scripture. Other introductions are often dry and remote, and even when they accurately dissect specific parts of the Psalms, they can miss the larger point, which is guiding the people of God in speaking to and worshiping God. I have spent a good bit of time working on and thinking about the Psalms, and while reading this book, I was instructed, corrected, and stirred to devotion. Ray Van Neste, professor of biblical studies, Union University Article continues below Finalists Nobodys Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament Sandra Glahn (IVP Academic) Isaiah J. Gordon McConville (Baker Academic) Children Holy Night and Little Star: A Story for Christmas Mitali Perkins (WaterBrook) This original Christmas story is told from the viewpoint of Little Star, a shy yet courageous member of the galaxy, who discovers her purpose in obedience to Maker. On Holy Night, when all the greater stars and planets join with the heavenly host in announcing the Saviors birth, Little Star learns she has a special part to play as well. Illustrated in muted jewel tones, the brief but lyrical text reads almost like a lullaby. And when Little Star recognizes Maker in the manger, the young reader also learns that everything was different now, but Maker was the same. Today, tomorrow, forever. Pamela Kennedy, childrens author, cocreator of the Otter B series Award of Merit The Things God Made: Explore Gods Creation through the Bible, Science, and Art Andy McGuire (Zonderkidz) The story of creation is ubiquitous enough that one might wonder if we need yet another childrens book on the topic. But wonder was, in fact, the word that came to mind as I read The Things God Made. Complemented beautifully by breathtaking artwork, the book has captured the staggering awe that the story of our fascinatingly intricate creation deserves. If we have lost our sense of wonder, McGuire aims to rekindle it. Brilliantly infusing expertise with humility, scientific fact with childlike joy, The Things God Made is a delight. I suspect it will lead readerschildren and adults alikeone step beyond wonder and straight into worship. Hannah C. Hall, childrens writer, author of God Bless You and Good Night Finalists Good Night, Body: Finding Calm from Head to Toe Brittany Winn Lee (Tommy Nelson) Marvel at the Moon: 90 Devotions Levi Lusko (Tommy Nelson) Young Adults This Seats Saved Heather Holleman (Moody) This Seats Saved captures the longing of every teenager in America: belonging. Elita, like so many girls her age, finds herself in a state of friendship adversity. Suddenly, she is excluded from the lunch table by her best friend with the painful statement This seats saved. Feeling abandoned, she battles fear and loneliness. But in a world that screams at her to fit in, Elita learns that lasting joy comes not from earning the best seat at the lunch table but from receiving the seat God has freely given her next to Christ. Reese Carlson, youth pastor, author of Church Doesnt End With Z Article continues below Award of Merit Knowing Gods Truth: An Introduction to Systematic Theology Jon Nielson (Crossway) Its a huge challenge to write a systematic theology book for teens in language they can understand. But Nielson succeeds at this task, helping students grasp deep concepts like eschatology and soteriology. Each chapter contains a Scripture passage that students are encouraged to memorize, as well as pauses where they are invited to pray and reflect on how theological truths can transform their hearts and lives. Nielson does a fine job explaining differing positions on topics like baptism and the end times while leaving space for students to think for themselves. Jennifer M. Kvamme, student ministries catalyst at Centennial Evangelical Free Church in Forest Lake, Minnesota, author of More to the Story: Deep Answers to Real Questions on Attraction, Identity, and Relationships Finalists Do Not Be True to Yourself: Countercultural Advice for the Rest of Your Life Kevin DeYoung (Crossway) Hotel Oscar Mike Echo: A Novel Linda MacKillop (B&H Kids) Christian Living/Spiritual Formation A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ John Andrew Bryant (Lexham Press) Ive sat for hours with friends with severe mental illnesses, not understanding in the slightest how they feel or whats going on inside them. This book gave me a small glimpse into their world and the hope that exists in the life and death of Jesus. It is profound and deeply troubling, lovely and heart-wrenching. Im both grieved and grateful when I think of the suffering Bryant endured to give us something so wise, true, and beautiful. This book sheds conventional genres, somehow combining memoir, poetry, lecture, sermon, and essay all in one. I left wanting to know more of the patient, quiet trust in Jesus that Bryant found in the halls of the psychiatric ward. Shar Walker, author and speaker, contributor to His Testimonies, My Heritage Award of Merit On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living Alan Noble (InterVarsity Press) Noble is unwilling to let us believe the lie that everyone else has it good. Instead, in this short, straightforward book, he affirms that life is hard and full of suffering and that you cant rely on some technique to fix whatever youre going through on this side of heaven. To some, such words can feel like a mean, cold shower. But they have the advantage of being refreshingly honest, and they can get the monkey of blame off our backs. Noble encourages readers who struggle to brave each day, reminding them to trust Jesus voice above their own emotions. Im grateful for his reminder that even if we dont feel right, we have been given the grace to act right. James Choung, vice president of strategy and innovation, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA Article continues below (Read Alan Nobles CT article, Getting Out of Bed Is an Act of Worship.) Finalists A Longing to Belong: Reflections on Faith, Identity, and Race Michelle Lee-Barnewall (Zondervan) (Read CTs review of A Longing to Belong.) Made for People: Why We Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship Justin Whitmel Earley (Zondervan) (Read CTs interview with Justin Whitmel Earley.) Church/Pastoral Leadership Bully Pulpit: Confronting the Problem of Spiritual Abuse in the Church Michael J. Kruger (Zondervan) I lament the need for this book, but its timeliness cannot be overstated. The conversation about spiritual abuse in the church is difficult to navigate because it is challenging to define and diagnose. Kruger gives a clear, biblical definition shaped by humility and pastoral wisdom. He raises his voice for wounded sheep and equips those who advocate for them. He also challenges abusive pastors and the leadership cultures that allow them to flourish. He exhorts churches to identify, repent of, and root out the abusive tactics that are tolerated and affirmed in their midst. This book deserves to be read humbly and prayerfully and applied courageously for the sake of Christs flock and the glory of his name. Brian Key, professor of urban ministry, Grimke Seminary (Read CTs review of Bully Pulpit.) Award of Merit In Church as It Is in Heaven: Cultivating a Multiethnic Kingdom Culture Jamaal E. Williams and Timothy Paul Jones (InterVarsity Press) It would be easy to dismiss In Church as It Is in Heaven as just another book on Christianity and race. But its charitable tone and wise counsel make it a must-read for pastors and church leaders. Many books on multiethnic ministry call for repentance, but few provide practical steps to restoration. Williams and Jones augment biblical instruction with personal stories of triumph and failure in a way that is convicting and encouraging. They have guided their own church toward embracing a multiethnic kingdom culture, and their experience provides a blueprint for other churches to follow. Josh Wredberg, lead pastor at Redeemer Community Church in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina Article continues below (Read an excerpt from In Church as It Is in Heaven.) Finalists Pastor, Jesus Is Enough: Hope for the Weary, the Burned Out, and the Broken Jeremy Writebol (Lexham Press) The Great Dechurching: Whos Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? Jim Davis and Michael Graham (Zondervan) Culture and the Arts Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age Samuel D. James (Crossway) James offers a fresh and compelling understanding of how digital media have given rise to various liturgies that form its users in underappreciated ways. His book is commendably accessible and engaging for general readers while being firmly grounded in an impressive array of scholarship on social, spiritual, and technological practices. Echoing Marshall McLuhans dictum that the medium is the message, James argues that the core danger of digital media isnt objectionable content but its power to inculcate values and habits that run against our eternal calling to glorify God in our hearts and lives. Rachel Smith, professor of art, Taylor University (Read CTs review of Digital Liturgies.) Award of Merit Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt (Baker Academic) Our Christian faith should inform and affect how we see the world around us. That includes the art we look at, whether in a museum, on a computer screen, or with our smartphone. With engaging prose, Redeeming Vision begins by equipping its readers with some basic analytical principles and vocabulary. The rest of the bookdivided into two sections: Love the Lord Your God and Love Your Neighbor as Yourselfencourages us to respond to art not with a detached disinterest but with a readiness to love God and neighbor, a willingness to analyze, and an openness to be changed by what we see. Cap Stewart, writer at Unpop Culture Finalists The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis Karen Swallow Prior (Brazos Press) (Read CTs review of The Evangelical Imagination.) People of the Screen: How Evangelicals Created the Digital Bible and How It Shapes Their Reading of Scripture Article continues below John Dyer (Oxford University Press) (Read an excerpt from People of the Screen.) Fiction Double the Lies Patricia Raybon (Tyndale) The mid-1920s conjure images of flappers, jazz, and speakeasies. For some, however, it was a time of suppression, racial injustice, and undiluted bigotry, a time when the KKK could pull the strings of local police departments and threaten Jews, Catholics, and especially African Americans without consequence. This is the setting for Double the Lies, the second novel in a series revolving around Annalee Spain, a determined Black woman with a knack for solving crimes. She sets out to solve the murder of a man she first saw in the local library, which is complicated by the unexplained disappearance of her boyfriend, a local Black pastor. Raybon weaves a well-paced, gripping story tailor-made for mystery lovers. Alton Gansky, novelist, writing mentor Award of Merit I, Julian: The Fictional Autobiography of Julian of Norwich Claire Gilbert (Hodder Faith) If a faith journey can ever be described as a slow burn, then the term might apply to this fictional autobiography of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. At first, as a reader with few leisure-reading hours in my day, I wondered if I could endure the slow unfolding. But Im so glad I did. Gilbert knew what she was doing in her deliberate pacing, which works both to preserve historical accuracy and to dramatize the knothole of Julians passage to faith. I felt her hunger, both physical and spiritual, and I could believe I was living her experience, so different from my own. I, Julian is a wonderful reminder that part of the mystery of fiction is its capacity to lighten the heart, give an adrenaline kick, and strip away preconceptions. Cynthia Ruchti, novelist, speaker, literary agent Finalists When in Rome Liam Callanan (Dutton) The All-American Susie Finkbeiner (Revell) History/Biography Elisabeth Elliot: A Life Lucy S. R. Austen (Crossway) Elisabeth Elliot was one of the most revered and influential American Christians in the second half of the 20th century and one of the most famous women in modern missionary history. In this intimate account, Austen has delivered a brilliant rendering of her life. Her compassionate but clear-eyed biography pulls back the curtain on evangelical hero-making, shedding light on the habits and beliefs of an entire subculture. Richly laced with primary sources, the book inspires Christian devotion while also showing the human frailties of those desperately trying to serve Christ amid adversity and suffering. Austens book deserves a wide readership both within and outside of North American evangelicalism. Darin D. Lenz, professor of history, Biola University Article continues below (Read CTs review of Elisabeth Elliot: A Life.) Award of Merit We Will Be Free: The Life and Faith of Sojourner Truth Nancy Koester (Eerdmans) At times heartbreaking and heartwarming, We Will Be Free examines afresh the life and times of Isabella Baumfree, the liberated slave who took the name Sojourner Truth after her dramatic conversion to Christian faith. The book combines careful historical research with adept storytelling, vividly portraying her remarkable impact as an abolitionist and campaigner for womens equality. Koester makes skillful use of the available source material, painstakingly recreating the life of a woman who never learned to read or write. Her book offers a wonderful example of how faith and social justice can join hands to change society. Rachel Ciano, lecturer in Christianity in history, Sydney Missionary & Bible College (Read CTs review of We Will Be Free.) Finalists Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation Collin Hansen (Zondervan) (Read CTs joint review of Timothy Keller and Beth Moores All My Knotted-Up Life.) Age of the Spirit: Charismatic Renewal, the Anglo-World, and Global Christianity, 19451980 John Maiden (Oxford University Press) Marriage and Family The Grace Marriage: How the Gospel and Intentionality Transform Your Relationship Brad and Marilyn Rhoads (Moody) This is a fantastic book. It is thoroughly grounded in Scripture, informed by and consistent with the best research on what builds satisfying and lasting marriages. Though it directs couples with serious problems to counseling, as appropriate, it focuses on the pathway from ordinary to excellent marriages, rooted in relationships drenched in grace. As someone who has researched and taught on marriage for decades, I would choose this book in a heartbeat for a marriage enrichment experience in my church. David Ayers, professor of sociology, Grove City College, author of Christian Marriage: A Comprehensive Introduction Award of Merit The Worry-Free Parent: Living in Confidence So Your Kids Can Too Sissy Goff (Bethany House) Parenting and anxiety go together like ice cream and chocolate chips. Given the amount that can go wrong, its amazing any parent manages to stay sane. Goffs wealth of clinical experience paired with a Christian worldview provides realistic and helpful advice for harried and worried parents. She walks through major errors parents can make as they seek to raise their kids in a positive, healthy manner. Nate Brooks, associate professor of counseling, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary Article continues below Finalists How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told Harrison Scott Key (Simon & Schuster) (Read CTs review of How to Stay Married.) Talking to Kids about Gender Identity: A Roadmap for Christian Compassion, Civility, and Conviction Mark Yarhouse (Bethany House) Missions/Global Church The Great Story and the Great Commission: Participating in the Biblical Drama of Mission Christopher J. H. Wright (Baker Academic) As believers, we are part of Gods grand eternal story, and we have a job to do for his glory. Wright encourages us to read the Bible in this light, asking, What does it mean to realize that we are in the Bible, in the sense that we actually participate in the story it tells and the plan it unfolds, in the era between the resurrection and the return of Christ? Each chapter presents a careful examination of various facets of mission, prompting healthy engagement with Scripture and leading us to remember that, since Jesus is Lord of all, we must continually cast our own alls at his feet. David Hosaflook, executive director of the Institute for Albanian and Protestant Studies Award of Merit Why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church Stephen T. Pardue (Baker Academic) Pardue has written a unique volume that significantly advances the discussion of global theology among evangelicals. Respectfully acknowledging the hesitations of Western evangelicals, Pardue carefully, thoughtfully, and convincingly argues that the global church is a gift from God. We need each other, and the cultural and historical diversity of the global church across the ages brings God greater glory. Susan Maxwell Booth, professor of evangelism and missions, Canadian Baptist Theological Seminary and College (Read CTs interview with Stephen Pardue.) Finalists Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement Edited by Hannah Nation and J. D. Tseng (IVP Academic) (Read an excerpt from Faithful Disobedience.) Before You Go: Wisdom from Ten Women Who Served Internationally Article continues below Edited by Emily Bennett (B&H) (Read a Top 5 Books list from Emily Bennett.) Politics and Public Life Baptist Political Theology Edited by Thomas S. Kidd, Paul D. Miller, and Andrew T. Walker (B&H Academic) Baptists have often been misunderstood as being one-dimensional, lacking a developed body of thought in political theology. The editors of Baptist Political Thought have assembled a group of scholars who demonstrate the vitality and diversity of Baptist thought on politics and religion, dealing insightfully with the traditions successes and failures alike. Some contributors tackle broad historical topics like the relationship between Baptists and the Reformation or the American Revolution, as well as early interdenominational debates on religious liberty, slavery, and social justice. Others take on contemporary challenges like sexuality and gender, environmentalism, and just war theory. John Wilsey, associate professor and chair of the department of history, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Award of Merit Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age Thomas C. Berg (Eerdmans) Religious liberty is a fundamental part of the American political order. But in many current conversations, it has taken on a controversial edge, often functioning as a flash point in our culture wars. In this thorough book, Berg argues that religious liberty, rather than being a prescription of uniformity, is both a remedy for divisiveness and an essential safeguard for genuine pluralism and cultural diversity. Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age is a must-read for all who find themselves engaging in the public square, and it gives valuable insight into the current legal and ideological landscape. Katie Fruge, director of the Center for Cultural Engagement at Texas Baptists (Read Thomas Bergs CT op-ed, Religious Liberty Doesnt Have to Make Polarization Worse.) Finalists Just Discipleship: Biblical Justice in an Unjust World Michael J. Rhodes (IVP Academic) (Read CTs review of Just Discipleship.) The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here Kaitlyn Schiess (Brazos Press) Theology (popular) Why the Gospel? Living the Good News of King Jesus with Purpose Matthew W. Bates (Eerdmans) I live in a heavily forested area, and my children are accustomed to tromping through the woods. When we visited a national forest recently, they recited a pledge to become Junior Rangers and had badges pinned to their chests. Ive spent most of my life as a follower of Jesus, studying the Word and sharing my faith with countless people. After reading this book, though, I felt as though my heart had been pinned with a King Jesus badge. Ive understood the what of the Good News, but after delving more fully into the why, Ive discovered even greater depths to biblical messages of salvation, glory, and divine kingship. For new and mature believers alike, Batess book can rekindle a living allegiance to King Jesus. Rachel Lynn Lawrence, founder of Momma Theologians Article continues below (Read Matthew Batess CT article, Conscious Uncouping from the Church Is the New Temptation.) Award of Merit Hope for Gods Creation: Stewardship in an Age of Futility Andrew J. Spencer (B&H Academic) In Hope for Gods Creation, Spencer lays out a compelling argument that orthodox evangelical theology establishes the foundation for an ethic of creation care. Scripture begins with the declaration that God is the Creator and what he made is good. Creation reveals the character of the Creator (Rom. 1), and Scripture calls us to be good stewards of that creation. The churchs primary mission is evangelism, but evangelism cannot be separated from the call to righteous living. Caring for creation is an act of obedience to God, and it makes life on this planetwhile we await the new creationbetter for all living things. Glenn R. Kreider, professor of theological studies, Dallas Theological Seminary Finalists Ordinary Splendor: Living in Gods Creation Lydia Jaeger (Lexham Press) God, Gift, and Guide: Knowing the Holy Spirit Gregg R. Allison (B&H) Theology (academic) The Doctrine of Good Works: Reclaiming a Neglected Protestant Teaching Thomas H. McCall, Caleb T. Friedeman, and Matt T. Friedeman (Baker Academic) The authors of this book make the case that more attention should be given to Christians doing good works or, to use John Wesleys term, works of mercy. Alongside a variety of Protestant theologians and confessions, they draw on key Old and New Testament teachings. The book demonstrates that, historically, many Protestants have noted the significance and necessity of good works, even if today the doctrine is often neglected in discussions of salvation or buried under a one-sided concern for salvation by faith alone. Later chapters apply these teachings to local congregations, highlighting churches that make the corporate practice of good works a major ministry focus. Adam Harwood, professor of theology, New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary Article continues below (Read CTs review of The Doctrine of Good Works.) Award of Merit The Substance of Our Faith: Foundations for the History of Christian Doctrine Douglas A. Sweeney (Baker Academic) This book offers an excellent introduction to Christian theology that is rooted in both classic Christian tradition and key contemporary theological and missiological trends. The content is both accessible and detailed, making the book an ideal text for both graduate and undergraduate students of theology. Jennifer Rosner, affiliate associate professor of systematic theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, author of Finding Messiah Finalists The Trinity in the Canon: A Biblical, Theological, Historical, and Practical Proposal Edited by Brandon D. Smith (B&H Academic) Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth Alan J. Torrance and Andrew B. Torrance (Eerdmans) Book of the Year Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bibles Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture Christopher Watkin (Zondervan Academic) Written in the spirit of Augustines City of God, Biblical Critical Theory has the potential to carve out new conversations and areas of inquiry regarding how Christian teaching on creation, anthropology, sin, society, redemption, and consummation ought to guide and govern our understanding of contemporary life. It is a significant piece of scholarship that capably interacts with an array of disciplines from philosophy and social theory to theology, ethics, and biblical studies. While the book is demanding given its length and density at many points, it will certainly have a significant downstream effect on how Christians approach cultural witness. It is a foundational work that will, in time, provide the basis for many fruitful projects in Christian social theory. While I have notable philosophical disagreements with certain points of application, I think the book successfully demonstrates the enduring relevance of the Christian story as a lens through which we can make sense of our world. Ross D. Inman, associate professor of philosophy, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary Despite its daunting size and scope, Biblical Critical Theory poses a simple question: So what if the Bible is true? What difference would its story make for our understanding of and engagement with contemporary society and culture? With that question in view, Watkin sets out on a recovery mission, drawing together an impressive range of insights from culture, intellectual history, and Scripture to paint a remarkably coherent and compelling picture of life inside the biblical narrative. In so doing, he turns modern critical theory on its head and models how Scripture can simultaneously critique our culture and offer a rich and satisfying alternative. Marybeth Baggett, professor of English and cultural apologetics, Houston Christian University Article continues below (Read an excerpt from Biblical Critical Theory, as well as an interview with the author.) Our Book Awards Process How do we choose the winners of the CT Book Awards? The process, in a nutshell, works like this: Publishers (and individual authors) can nominate as many books as they wish, in as many categories as they wish, provided (this time around) that they were published between November 2022 and October 2023. Various CT editors then sort through the resulting pool of nominees and determine the four finalists in each category. From there, the finalist books go to category-specific panels of four or five judgespastors, theologians, scholars, writers, and the likewho assess both their overall quality and their worthiness for evangelical readers. Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here. The following books were selected by Amanda P. Mason, a Buddhist ministries catalyst and clinical psychologist in Sydney, Australia. This book list encourages Christians to engage with Buddhists from their viewpoint while recognizing the challenges of bridging foundational differences between Judeo-Christian and karmic-Buddhist worldviews. The first two books are written by Western authors with a focus on philosophical Buddhism. The next three are (co-)authored by either Buddhists or Christians from a Buddhist context, where most people follow folk Buddhism, a mix of animism, Brahminism, and classical Buddhism. Beyond reading, Christians should embrace the opportunity to connect with Buddhists and learn their stories. Satisfying our curiosity by only reading runs the risk of failing to make the connections that are so sorely needed. Curiosity, empathy, and collaboration with Buddhists help establish relationships and connect us with Buddhists primary theological need to experience that God is with them in suffering. It is difficult to find a more accessible introduction to the lived experience of Buddhist philosophy and practices for people in the West than this autobiographical account of a secular American exploring four Buddhist traditions: Zen, Tibetan, Theravada, and American Buddhism. This book is a stimulating read for readers in the high-income Western world as they relate to friends who adhere to philosophical Buddhism, including those who enjoy hearing from Buddhist spiritual leaders like Thich Nhat Hanh or the Dalai Lama. It also provides religious context for mindfulness practices promoted by contemporary psychology. Moore helpfully sets out how he reaps the greatest benefits from Buddhism in how he relates to his daughter, how he handles himself in traffic, and how he orients himself to the world with kindness, compassion, and awareness. Buddhism: A Christian Exploration and Appraisal, by Keith Yandell and Harold Netland Yandell and Netlands panoramic perspective contrasts with Moores personal take on Buddhism. Among Christian scholarly books on Buddhism, Yandell and Netlands book competes closely with David Burnetts The Spirit of Buddhism for the top spot. Both provide valuable Christian insights, offering orientation and understanding of the diverse forms of Buddhism while respecting the internal logic of these traditions. Article continues below Yandell and Netland thoroughly examine the history of Buddhism, and their book serves as a textbook for introducing Buddhism in Western Christian contexts, covering essential topics like the Four Noble Truths and doctrines like impermanence, nirvana, karma, enlightenment, no-self, and dependent origination. However, it can be too dense and detailed for many students. Despite the books appeal to Christians, it maintains an outsiders perspective on Buddhism. Family and Faith in Asia: The Missional Impact of Social Networks, edited by Paul H. De Neui If you are a Christian trying to engage with Buddhists, promote Gods shalom, and introduce them to Jesus, the 16-volume Southeast Asia Network (SEANET) book series is a gold mine. The series draws from the perspectives of a diverse range of Buddhist-background believers, missionaries, and missiologists. Originating as conference papers, the series explores themes relevant to the Buddhist world. This volume on Family and Faith in Asia is one of my favorites in the series, because it addresses the intricate dynamics of family life and the unique challenges posed by the Christian faith within Buddhist cultures. The narrative of a Thai Christian navigating the complexities caused by conversion, particularly in terms of family dynamics and discussions on ancestor worship, felt akin to pastoral letters. Crucially, this volume encourages practical thinking about ministering to whole families instead of individuals. What the Buddha Taught, by Walpola Rahula Rahula is a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk, scholar, and writer. The book echoes the topical nature of Yandell and Netlands book but from a Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhist perspective. Rahula maintains authentic interaction with Buddhist teachings, interpreted from their original languages for accuracy and clarity of communication, in a way that helps Western readers who want to further their study of Buddhism from an insiders perspective. Rahulas opening chapter helps Western Christians empathize with how Buddhists may experience Christian evangelism in light of their history. He outlines Buddhas attitude of honoring rather than condemning other religions against a backdrop of the opposition early Buddhism faced. Many aspects of Buddhist teaching that might seem pluralistic to Christians came about as a reaction to Brahmin practices. Brahmins, the highest Hindu caste, demanded unquestioned acceptance of their authority without evidence of the truthfulness of their teachings. This historical context is crucial for Christians to comprehend, as is Christian awareness about the potential risks of replicating such patterns. Article continues below Missions Amidst Pagodas: Contextual Communication of the Gospel in the Burmese Buddhist Context, by Peter Thein Nyunt This is advanced-level content. Nyunt stands out as a distinctive Asian Christian scholar with roots in Buddhism, offering valuable insights into how to effectively communicate the gospel in the Burmese Buddhist setting. Nyunt is well-equipped to explore the endeavors of Protestant missionaries in reaching the Burmese: He is a former Rakhine Buddhist now following Jesus and one of the founders of the Rakhine Missions Band for Christ, which has grown to include more than 2,000 Buddhist-background believers. He also holds a PhD in missiology. His book, derived from his doctoral thesis, is reader-friendly and delves into the challenges faced by Protestant churches in connecting with Buddhists in Yangon, Myanmar. Nyunts analysis serves as a reflective case study, shedding light on the limited reception of the gospel in Southeast Asian Buddhist heartlands. He discusses contextually relevant ways to communicate the gospel in the Burmese Buddhist context, drawing from contemporary academic literature, insights from his Buddhist experience, as well as biblical, theoretical, historical, and Burmese ways of communicating. Nyunts work offers a nuanced understanding of the complex dynamics involved in sharing the gospel in this cultural and religious context. Other books to consider: Another book from the SEANET series: Emerging Faith: Lessons from Mission History in Asia, edited by Paul H. De Neui A book for starting conversations with Buddhists: No Mud, No Lotus, Thich Nhat Hanh A book on evangelism to Tibetan Buddhists: Sharing Christ in the Tibetan Buddhist World, M. Tsering A book for understanding Mahayana Buddhism: Complete Enlightenment, Chan Master Sheng-Yen A book on Zen Buddhism: The Heart of Buddhas Teaching, Thich Nhat Hanh Stories about unexplained aerial phenomena (or UAPwhich is what were now supposed to call UFOs) used to be reserved for the more garish or sensationalist parts of the internet or the tabloids lining the bottom rung of magazine racks. Not so today, when stories pointing to the evidence for extraterrestrial life are now turning up in every major news outlet. Prominent, as ever, is a headline that wont go away: that the US government recovered crashed spacecraft with nonhuman biologics. Theres even a newly released book detailing, as the headline of a recent Time article suggests, The Governments Search for Aliens and Why They Probably Exist. Perhaps now is an ideal time for Christians to start asking some serious what-if questions, like What if the front page of tomorrows newspaper carries news of evidence of life on another planet? This question has led me into some of the most fascinating theological territory Ive ever consideredsome of which I explore in my recent book, Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe. I was also one of two dozen theologians invited to participate in the NASA-funded research project on the societal implications of astrobiology at Princetons Center of Theological Inquiry. And in my research, I was surprised to discover that Christian thinkers have been pondering life beyond Earth for a long time. Why? One reason is that the Christian worldview has a unique set of prior assumptions that may make us more willing (not less willing, as some might assume) to believe in the likelihood of extraterrestrial life. Lets look, for example, at the reactions to one UAP in particular, which leading scientists seem most excited about. Oumuamua (Hawaiian for a messenger from afar arriving first) entered our solar system and passed quite close to the sun (and not that far from Earth) on September 9, 2017, traveling at almost 200,000 miles per hour. This was the first interstellar object observed in our solar systemthat is, an object that has traveled between stars, in contrast with a comet, for instance, which is bound by the sway of our suns gravity. Thats notable enough, but Oumuamua had some other unusual properties. We cant be exactly sure about its shape, but it seems to have been either an oddly long and thin object, like a stretched cigar, or perhaps a disk (or even a saucer, as familiar from so many science-fiction films). It also took an unusual trajectory when it got near the sun. Article continues below What are we to make of this? Might those unusual properties suggest that it wasnt any old object but rather an artifact from another civilization? For Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, Oumuamua is so odd that seeing it as an alien artifact makes the most sense. On the other hand, the philosopher Christopher Cowie has argued that even if there is other life in the galaxy, extraterrestrial artifacts would be too rare to be a plausible explanation for Oumuamua. What distinguishes Loeb and his critics is not whether Oumuamua is oddon that they agreebut whether that counts as evidence of other civilizations. Loebs critics think such civilizations are so unlikely that it makes better sense to say that while its odd for a natural object, its natural nonetheless. In contrast, Loeb thinks that such civilizations are probably widespread, so its more likely that Oumuamua is alien workmanship than some freakish natural object. Astrophysicist Charles H. Lineweaver examined Oumuamua using Bayes theorem: what makes for a plausible explanation for evidence depends on our prior assumptions. That is, whether its credible to believe this was an alien spacecraft relies on what else we take for grantedsuch as how likely we think the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations might be. The progenitor of Bayesian logic is Thomas Bayes, an English Presbyterian minister from the 1700s whose ground-breaking work was likely provoked by the attack on miracles by philosopher David Hume (in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding). Hume argued that we shouldnt accept stories about miracles sinceas he saw itthere will always be a more likely, nonmiraculous explanation for any extraordinary event. Our interpretation depends on our assumptions, and his assumptions did not stretch far in the direction of God. And while we dont know for sure whether Bayes was, in fact, inspired by Humes book, his friend Richard Price made this connection. Price was a doctor of divinity and brought Bayes work on statistics to public attention following his death. His treatise against Humes skeptical take on miracles (On the Importance of Christianity, the Nature of Historical Evidence, and Miracles) followed a few years later. Bayes realised that we interpret events as likely or unlikely depending on our presuppositions, and Price applied that logic to miraclesin the very first application of Bayesian thinking, as far as we know. Article continues below As a confirmed agnostic, Hume was skeptical about God. So, he considered a miraculous explanation of an unexpected event to be less likely than some natural explanation, even if he didnt know what that might be. But a Christian, like Bayes or Price, comes at the same story from a different perspective. If you believe in God and in Jesus as God incarnate, it doesnt seem at all far-fetched to suppose that Christ could turn water into wine or calm a storm. Or, in this case, we may be more likely to believe in the possibility of life beyond Earth. Turning from the 18th century to the 20th, theres a common (but wrong) assumption that religions are unimaginative compared to science and that they need scientific discoveries to provoke them into thinking about life beyond Earth. Carl Sagan, a renowned astronomer, leveled this very charge when he asked: How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed? Instead they say, No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way. A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Yet Christian theologians have been thinking about life beyond Earth continuously since the middle of the 15th century (and Jewish and Islamic theologians for even longer). If theres anything frustrating about how Christian sources address this topic, its that they dont tend to be very longthe author mentions the prospect cheerfully and then moves on. It seems these thinkers just werent worried enough to write a great deal on the subject. In the 15th century, we have a Franciscan friar, Guillaume de Vaurouillon, and Nicholas of Cusa, perhaps the greatest theologian of his age. In the 17th, theres the Dominican Tommaso Campanella (writing in defense of Galileo). We could add English Puritan theologian Richard Baxter and Anglican John Ray, who wrote of the possibility of other solar systems with planets that were in all likelihood furnished with as great variety of corporeal creatures, animate and inanimate, as the earth is, and all as different in nature as they are in place from the terrestrial, and from each other. Article continues below Nineteenth-century preacher Charles Spurgeon spoke of all creation as a grand orchestra with the inhabitants of the divers worlds, which are perhaps countless in multitude, taking their places in the one harmonious song. He believed there may be tens of thousands of races of creatures all subject to him, and governed by the same law of immutable right and justice. In the 20th century, C. S. Lewis was fascinated with outer space, writing an essay (Religion and Rocketry) and three novels (the Cosmic Trilogy) on the topic. Lewis did not believe the discovery of life on other planets would challenge Christianity, although it would certainly raise some intriguing theological questions for us to consider. One prominent writer, John Wilkins (Bishop of Chester and a founder of the Royal Society, Englands most prestigious scientific organization), thought he had evidence of life on the moon, but most theologians were speculating without evidence. That said, its striking how many theologians believed with strong conviction that there is life beyond Earth on theological groundsthose who took this as a certainty, not just a possibility. As before, what you think is plausible depends on your prior assumptions. Many Christian theologians have operated with the assumption that God would create habitable places only so that they could be inhabited. And so, far from rejecting the idea that the universe may contain other life, we find theologians arguing that life beyond Earth is widespread. Indeed, they assumed that there will be life pretty much everywhere it could possibly survive. If your assumption is that life is what matters, especially to Godand therefore that habitability is for the sake of habitationyoull find it implausible for habitable places to remain bare. Historically, then, Christian theologians have often likely overestimated how m uch life there might be in the universe. That followed plausibly from the assumption that God populates places and that places are valuable if they host living things. Article continues below Im very open to the universe being full of life, but Id say that some of the assumptions mentioned in the previous paragraph are faulty. There is a splendor in all sorts of different kinds of places in the universe, all bearing witness to the glory of God in their own way, whether they are inhabited or not. The 20th-century French Roman Catholic theologian Jean Guitton wrote that a vast universe, uninhabited other than Earth, was implausible because that would essentially make the pedestal too big for the sculpture. In other words, the universe would be like a picture frame so big that it overwhelmed the painting at its center. I think thats wrong twice over. First, even if the universe contained life only on Earth, an unimaginably large universe would not be too splendid a setting, frame, or pedestal for the glory of life on Earthespecially for human life, with its self-awareness and relation to God. But second, is it even helpful to think about the rest of the universe as merely the stage for life? The universe has a glory and dignity of its own that isnt to be judged merely in relation to us. After all, were not the only creatures with a vocation to praise God; the heavens do too (Ps. 148:36). The heavens themselves are alien and inscrutableso much so that God brings them up when he puts Job in his place for questioning his sovereignty (Job 38:3133). When it comes to the place and prevalence of life in the universe, Ill let the science inform me, as and when the data comes in. I wont be perturbed whether we find a lot or none at all. That said, Ill be surprised if Earths is the only life. After all, we didnt know until the end of the 20th century whether there are planets around other starsand it turns out theyre everywhere. Finding evidence of extraterrestrial life might be quite a feat. Yet our ability to detect signs of life around other planets has taken a massive leap forward with the 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope: It senses infrared light, which is ideal for measuring the balance of gases in the atmosphere of other planets and thus ascertaining some of the telltale signs of life. Christian theologians have thought a good deal about what makes something alive and what counts as a living thing. For instance, angelic beings are an example of life beyond Earth mentioned in the Bible and featured in the Christian imaginationhowever different they might be from other biological life. Article continues below Does it matter that theres no mention of extraterrestrial life in the universe in the Bible? I wouldnt say so, especially as we consider what the Scriptures are for and what theyre not for. In the Bible, God speaks to us in a human way. Does that make our understanding of God so human-shaped that other creatures wouldnt think about God like we do? Plenty of theologians, such as Calvin, talked about divine accommodationthe fact that God speaks to creatures in a way they can understand. Knowledge of God and revelation from God would surely be accommodated differently for different creatures so that they could understand it, but it would be the same God who is revealed and known. Then theres the idea that human beings are made in the image of God. Is this premise undermined if there are other creatures that can also know and love and be made friends of God? I dont think so. We would be no less wonderfully created and no less loved by God just because other things are also loved and wonderfuland probably wonderful in a different way from us. The more the merrier, I should think. But what of sin and salvation? If theres other sentient life, is a fall inevitable? And what about the Incarnation and redemption? Could Christs death and resurrection redeem the whole cosmos? Undoubtably, but would God limit himself to one Incarnation? Thats perhaps the most hotly contested question in the field. As Aaron Earls pointed out for CT, even C. S. Lewis thought it was at least worth considering the possibility that Jesus could have been incarnate in other worlds than earth and so saved other races than ours. As for me, I believe one Incarnation is enough, but who says God must do whats minimally necessary? In Jesus, we see God face to face as a human being. But I could see the beauty in other creatures also knowing God in their own flesh and blood. In the early 20th century, English poet Alice Meynell wrote that only we know our story and that what God has done elsewhere remains elsewhere: No planet knows that this Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave, Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss, Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave. Nor, in our little day, May His devices with the heavens be guessed, His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way Or His bestowals there be manifest. Article continues below But she ended that poem, entitled Christ in the Universe, with the tantalizing idea that we can look forward to knowing the rest of the story of the cosmos in the life of the world to come: O, be prepared, my soul! To read the inconceivable, to scan The myriad forms of God those stars unroll When, in our turn, we show to them a Man. Ultimately, whatever lies beyond Earth, of this we can be sure: God will be gracious, and God will do something glorious. Andrew Davison is the author of Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe. He is grateful to Cat Gillen at Durham University for discussing Oumuamua from a Bayesian point of view. [ This article is also available in Portugues, , and . ] More than 5,000 miles from the International House of Prayer of Kansas City (IHOPKC), the allegations against Mike Bickle have shaken Brazilian evangelicals and forced a conversation on how churches handle abuse. Dwayne Robertsfounder of the Florianopolis House of Prayer (FHOP) in southern Brazilwas among the leaders who issued a public statement on Bickle a little more than a month ago. The same day, FHOP became the first church to disassociate from Bickle due to what Roberts and FHOP senior pastor Vinicius Sousa called serious allegations of pastoral abuse. In the heart of Florianopolis Island, in a city of over a half-million people, FHOP functions as a house of prayer, missionary base, and local church. It was established a decade ago by Americans Dwayne and Jennifer Roberts, who were among the first staff members at IHOPKC. FHOP has a significant social media presence: over a quarter-million followers on Facebook and Instagram and nearly 500,000 subscribers on YouTube. Through FHOP Music, the church has gained prominence in the Brazilian gospel scene, with their songs ranked among the genres most played. The impact of FHOP and Mike Bickle himself extends beyond Florianopolis and across the charismatic landscape in Brazil, the most evangelical country in South America. Now, a wide swath of leaders has responded with sadness and bewilderment over the recent scandal. There are eccentric and unreliable charismatic leaders from whom one might expect such things, said Marcondes Soares, pastor at Igreja Episcopal Carismatica do Brasil in Recife, Pernambuco. But Bickle was considered reasonable and highly respected. Bickle envisioned a global prayer movement growing out of IHOPKC and had turned particular attention to Brazil in recent years. During a national six-city tour in 2018, he proclaimed that the church in Brazil was on the verge of the most significant revival in its history: I believe that the hand of God rests uniquely upon the body of Christ in Brazil, preparing it for a global impact. Nine of Bickles books have been translated into Portuguese. Growing in Prayer: A Real-Life Guide to Talking with God is one of the most acclaimed titles among Brazilian charismatics. On his two-million subscriber YouTube channel JesusCopy, preacher Douglas Goncalves has conducted multiple interviews with Mike Bickle, as recently as March 2023. Last year, Bickle gave the keynote address at JesusCopys Lead Like Jesus youth conference. Israel Subira, a composer, preacher, content producer, and son of the preeminent Brazilian pastor Luciano Subira, spent a year as a student at IHOPKC. He described this period as when he prayed more intensely than he had in his life: Most of my time in Kansas was spent in the prayer room. And it was amazing! FHOP has brought the movements focus on intensive prayer to Brazil. Arthur Martins, pastor of Igreja Presbiteriana Republica in Curitiba, Parana, said their influence is noteworthy, with FHOPs approach sparking a revival among local churches prayer meetings, particularly impacting the younger generation. Immersing yourself in this environment naturally leads you to seek the Lords intentions for the world and the churchs role in fulfilling his will, said Leticia Santos, a full-time missionary at FHOP for four years. She describes the experience as a turning point in her life. But its also drawn some criticism. Ronaldo Crispim, pastor at Igreja Presbiteriana Bereia in Goiania, Goias, expresses concern about what he perceives as a reductionist view in FHOPs worship theology and an exaggerated emphasis on only two elements: prayer and praise. Moreover, he scrutinizes the introspective and vertically oriented spirituality embedded in the notion of a house of prayer, interpreting it as detached from culture and isolated from daily life. Now, followers and critics alike are grappling with the news of the allegations against Bickle and the continued calls for an independent investigation. In the ecclesiastical environment of the USA, this is quite common. Every two months, a leader from a megachurch is publicly exposed due to allegations of sexual abuse. Regrettably, this doesnt shock me but evokes a sense of sadness, said Naama Mendes, pastor at Igreja Presbiteriana Independente in Maringa, Parana, who previously pastored in Miami. By contrast, abuse allegations are rarely disclosed publicly in the Brazilian evangelical context. Typically, these matters are addressed within the ecclesiastical sphere, seldom reaching legal authorities. In Brazil, the silence surrounding sexual abuse is emblematic, as churches often overlook the issues of abuse response and prevention. I am unaware of any collaborative efforts by Brazilian pastors and leaders aimed at preventing sexual abuse within the churches, said Ze Bruno Santos, a member of Igreja Pentecostal Batista El Shadday in Arapiraca, Alagoas. Ze Bruno, host of the Entre Amigos YouTube livestreams, sees an opportunity for Bickles church to model a response for followers around the world. On social media, he said: I have been closely monitoring this case, and I am taken aback by the way the IHOPKC institution, or more precisely, its leaders, have addressed it. This marks a pivotal moment in the charismatic world, not in being for or against Bickle, but in how charismatics will confront cases of abuse and injustice within the faith community. FHOPs October 27 statement regarding Bickle emphasized that the church vehemently and unequivocally condemns any form of moral failure in any circumstance and said that the leadership team of FHOP is committed to publicly sharing new information as the facts are clarified. Senior pastor Sousa, though, refrained from commenting further on the matter out of respect for his friends in Kansas, whom he stated are going through a tough time. Three weeks after the allegations were made public, IHOPKC leaders released an initial report that claimed that the concerns raised surrounding Bickle lacked any semblance of reliability or due process. IHOPKC leaders stated that the alleged victims they identified were either not credible or had recanted, and therefore it was premature to bring in a third party to investigate. The former IHOPKC leaders who brought forward the allegations challenged the response, raising concerns of conflict of interest among the legal counsel, and continued to call for an independent investigation. Last week, the ministry and advocates continues to clash. Ex-staff members protested the ministrys 24-7 prayer. Leaders came forward to defend Bickle, and an alleged victim shared her story of sexual abuse in The Roys Report. In instances like these, social accountability is vital to compel institutions to be transparent and fair in identifying victims and determining the most effective way to assist them, said Ze Bruno. While it may appear righteous for leaders to discourage comments on social media, that is a naive perspective. Ziel Machado, pastor at Igreja Metodista Livre in Sao Paulo, sees several factors contributing to cases of sexual abuse involving religious leaders. Issues like these are linked to the pride of leaders who choose to work alone, he said. Furthermore, when supervision is present, it often tends to focus on task efficiency, overlooking attention to the pastors true calling." Mendes worries about the idolization and shielding of charismatic leaders, which may occur as part of a strategy to protect church growth. The spiritual and emotional well-being of both the pastor and the congregation often becomes a secondary concern, he said, with church members being viewed as mere statistics rather than individuals deserving of compassion and care grounded in the grace and love of God. [ This article is also available in Portugues. ] Home Politics DeSantis, Ramaswamy reveal how faith helped their families cope with grieving over miscarriages Two presidential candidates are crediting their religious faith with helping their families cope in the aftermath of losing babies to miscarriages. Two presidential candidates discussed their experiences with miscarriages at the FAMiLY Leaders Thanksgiving Family Forum on Nov. 17. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of the three Republican presidential candidates who participated in the informal conversation hosted by the Iowa-based Christian conservative advocacy group, recalled his initial difficulties conceiving a child with his wife, Casey. Life has a long and winding road. Keep the faith. pic.twitter.com/CIRB5HKa89 Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) November 17, 2023 We were married, doing our thing. I was in the Navy, my wife was busy as a TV reporter, and we wanted to have a family, and it didnt happen at first, he explained. DeSantis told the audience that he and his wife took a trip to Israel after he was first elected to the United States House of Representatives in 2012. We literally went to Shiloh with Hannahs Prayer, we went to Ruths Tomb in Hebron, Ruth 4:13, he said. We prayed, we prayed a lot to have a family, and then, lo and behold, we go back to the United States, and a little time later, we got pregnant, he added. But unfortunately, we lost that first baby. DeSantis described losing his first child due to a miscarriage as a tough thing, noting, This is something that we had so much hopes for, so much aspirations. The presidential candidate maintained that despite the difficulties he experienced as a result of the miscarriage, he and his wife remained confident in God: We just kept the faith, we just kept praying. We knew that there would be a path that God would lead us on, and lo and behold a short time after ... we had our first baby girl. We didnt stop after that. Weve got a 5-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter, and weve got a big, full, joyous household, he added. DeSantis cited his experience as evidence that life has a long and winding road, illustrating the need to keep the faith. EntrepreneurVivek Ramaswamy, another presidential candidate who appeared at the discussion, also recounted his personal experience with miscarriage at the event. He detailed how his wife, Apoorva, unexpectedly became pregnant during her fourth year of residency, leading the couple to experience a lot of excitement: We told everybody we knew, we were ecstatic. We told our parents. We werent expecting the blessing, but we were grateful for it. We told our family members [and] celebrated with our friends. After highlighting how he and his wife had begun writing a letter to their unborn child, Ramaswamy described the tragedy that unfolded about three-and-a-half months into the pregnancy: One day, she woke up, she said, Im bleeding. She had a miscarriage. We lost our first child, and that was the loss of a life; it was our familys loss, he stated. After praising his wife as one of the most upbeat, strong, positive people you will meet, Ramaswamy outlined how the miscarriage caused her to sink into a depression. However, the candidate credited the couples Hindu faith with helping them cope with the loss of their child: Our faith teaches us that our child joined his Creator and one day we will too. Ramaswamy expressed gratitude that God gave the couple the blessing of a child a few months later, while stressing that God wasnt done testing us. He noted that his wife drew blood while operating on one of her patients only to discover that the person had HIV and Hepatitis B. After believing she had miscarried for the second time, a doctor discovered that the baby had a heartbeat when she showed up for an appointment the following day. Ramaswamy then invited his son, the child his wife had incorrectly thought she had lost in a miscarriage, to sit on his lap. The FAMiLY Leaders Thanksgiving Family Forum was held less than two months before the Iowa caucuses, where the three candidates who participated hope to score an upset victory over former President Donald Trump. The RealClearPolitics average of polls measuring the intentions of likely Iowa caucusgoers finds that Trump remains the favorite to win the first nominating contest ahead of the 2024 presidential election. The average of polls taken between Oct. 22 and Nov. 15 shows Trump receiving 47% support, followed by DeSantis at 17.4%. Former South Carolina Gov. and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, the third candidate who participated in the Thanksgiving Family Forum, has the support of 14.3% of voters, while Ramaswamy comes in at fifth place with 5% support. Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who has since dropped out of the presidential race, finishes slightly ahead of Ramaswamy at 6%. The Iowa caucuses are scheduled to take place on Jan. 15. Bob Vander Plaats, the CEO of the FAMiLY Leader who moderated the debate, told The Christian Post in a previous interview that despite Trumps consistent polling lead, the contest is wide-open and tailor-made for the former president to get beat. While speaking highly of the efforts of most of the top-tier presidential candidates to court Iowa voters, Vander Plaats suggested that DeSantis, in particular, had a comprehensive strategy to win the caucuses. He officially endorsed DeSantis two weeks ago. We need to find somebody who can win in 2024, and that's why I'm endorsing @RonDeSantis.pic.twitter.com/lV7Zjye3qw Bob Vander Plaats (@bobvanderplaats) November 22, 2023 According to The Green Papers, which keeps track of the presidential primary process, Iowa will award its 40 delegates on a proportional basis. This means that the amount of delegates a candidate will receive will match their share of the vote in the contest. As a result of the proportional allocation, candidates who do not win the caucus will likely still walk away with delegates. The Iowa caucuses will kick off a string of primaries and caucuses scheduled to take place in all 50 states and several territories throughout the first half of 2024, the results of which will determine the Republican Partys nominee for president. A candidate must receive at least 1,236 out of 2,470 delegates in order to win. Feature: Japanese fans enchanted after visiting Japan-born panda in China Xinhua) 09:50, December 04, 2023 TOKYO, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- A group of 14 Japanese fans of giant panda Xiang Xiang have returned to Japan from a recent trip to southwest China's Sichuan Province after visiting the beloved Japan-born female panda. "Although I have returned to Japan, my heart remains in Sichuan," Eiko Endo, a member of the group, told Xinhua. The five-day trip to the Bifengxia Giant Panda Base in Ya'an, Sichuan Province, not only helped the panda enthusiasts from Japan to realize their long-cherished wish of reuniting with Xiang Xiang, but also allowed them to witness the development and changes of Sichuan and feel the hospitality of the Chinese people. It is their common wish to go to China, especially Sichuan, again. Recalling the moment when seeing Xiang Xiang again on Nov. 8 after 261 days, giant panda wood sculptor Yu Akutsu said that Xiang Xiang looked very healthy, puffing out her cheeks and munching on bamboo shoots with relish like she did at Ueno Zoo, adding that no matter where she goes, she always looks cute. Endo thought she would burst into tears when seeing Xiang Xiang again, but she was too excited at the reunion to cry. But the next day, when Xiang Xiang appeared in front of everyone for an unusually long time, and a Chinese friend said that she might have known that her Japanese family had come to visit her, tears were gushing down Endo's cheeks. Noting that Xiang Xiang has become very skilled in peeling bamboo shoots, giant panda reporter Shigemi Niki said Xiang Xiang had gotten a bit fatter than when she was at Ueno Zoo, but the look of innocence had not changed at all. "I'm completely relieved to see that Xiang Xiang has gotten used to life there and is loved by the locals," the reporter said. Ueno Information Center, which sells tourist souvenirs, has more than 200 kinds of giant panda-themed products and is a must-visit place for panda enthusiasts. Store manager Tomoko Sakurai had never been to China before and did not speak Chinese, but after returning to Japan from the trip, she began learning Chinese and watching videos introducing China on the Internet. She said she hoped it would help her prepare her next trip to China. Sakurai posted the photos of Xiang Xiang and her China travel experience on social media, receiving thousands of likes, with many commenting "I also want to go to China." Akutsu who has been obsessed with giant pandas since childhood told Xinhua about an unexpected surprise during this trip. On the last night of her stay in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, on Nov. 10, she suddenly found that she had lost her sketchbook in a store in the city's traditional neighborhood Kuanzhai Alley. The sketchbook, full of creative designs for giant panda wood sculptures, was precious to her. Thinking the sketchbook had probably been thrown away, Akutsu expressed her discouragement on social media. However, as soon as the plane landed in Japan the next day, Akutsu turned on her mobile phone and received a big surprise -- Chinese Xiang Xiang fans shared about her lost sketchbook on Chinese social media Weibo and someone went to the neighborhood to retrieve it for her. A Chinese netizen left a comment on her post, saying, "You came to China specifically to see Xiang Xiang and I hope that the whole trip will leave you with good memories." "I knew at that moment that it was a perfect trip," Akutsu added. Endo, who once studied in China, was also impressed by the kindness of the Chinese people. "Every time I went to China, I felt like going back to my second hometown, and this trip allowed me to once again experience Sichuan's natural scenery, traditional art, a long history and delicious food. I want to pass on these experiences to my Japanese friends, so that more people can understand the charm of China and fall in love with China," she said. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) (Photo : Unsplash/Chris Montgomery) Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the work-from-home shift disrupted traditional office setups. While some companies fully embraced remote work and experts proclaimed the end of the "return to office" era, major employers like Amazon and Google enforce office returns. In some cases, performance reviews and promotions are tied to in-person attendance. Post-Pandemic Work Trend Sallie Krawcheck, CEO of Ellevest, a platform for women's investment and financial literacy, has been a vocal advocate for remote work. Ellevest has stayed fully remote, citing benefits such as cost savings, a broader talent pool, and increased flexibility for women and under-represented groups since the pandemic. During the CNBC Workforce Executive Council Summit in New York City, Sallie Krawcheck, CEO of Ellevest, discussed the positive outcomes of their decision to go fully remote. Cost considerations drove the move as a lean startup and the desire to build a more diverse workforce. READ ALSO: The Future of Workforce: 2023 Remote Work Trends The Remote Downside As Per the Pioneers According to Krawcheck, teams have become more productive and efficient at meeting deadlines in the remote setup. However, she acknowledged a downside: a reduction in creativity due to the absence of spontaneous interactions that typically happen in a physical office. Krawcheck's perspective aligns with others in the business world. Wall Street CEO Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan has expressed concerns about losses in creativity, innovation, and spontaneity with remote work. Dimon initiated a return-to-office campaign in September 2020, emphasizing the importance of physical presence for maintaining productivity in the long run. In an annual shareholder letter, Jamie Dimon highlighted the drawbacks of remote work, stating it hampers spontaneous learning and creativity by eliminating unplanned interactions like coffee machine chats and impromptu client discussions. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon referred to remote work as an "aberration," indicating a shift in tech companies' stance on remote work, with examples like Meta bringing employees back three days a week due to their investments in commercial real estate. A Microsoft study in October 2020 found that remote work impacted creativity negatively, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman criticized the tech industry's mistake in promoting permanent remote work. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and Harvard Business School professor Prithwiraj Choudhury advocate for a hybrid work model, emphasizing the value of in-person collaboration despite proclaiming "return to office is dead" long before the pandemic, suggesting a hybrid work setup, three days a week in the office. Choudhury's 2020 experiment found that hybrid HR employees produced unique work products. However, they acknowledge the imperfections of a hybrid approach, such as missing colleagues on non-office days. Airbnb CFO Dave Stephenson highlights the significance of in-person work for training and project implementation but rejects the notion that "water cooler talk" is crucial for creativity. In his view, there is no going back to five days a week in the office. The Handbook Revolution And Virtual Water Cooler According to Choudhury, remote companies can stay competitive by implementing best practices to preserve creativity. One method is using handbooks, now enhanced with AI and chatbots, to document and share team knowledge. This approach ensures that valuable information remains accessible even after an employee leaves. Another strategy is the concept of a virtual water cooler, addressing concerns about spontaneous interactions. A virtual water cooler is a mandatory, selected interaction online with someone from a different department or background that you are not likely to meet in a typical setting. Choudhury suggests that this fosters diverse conversations that can lead to more creativity. As remote work opportunities decrease in the job market, the peak of remote work might end. Choudhury emphasizes that there's no one-size-fits-all solution for companies moving forward. He suggests allowing teams to determine the best balance for their working environment, recognizing that flexibility is crucial for fostering creativity and productivity. RELATED ARTICLE: Future of Remote Work: Millennials Spearheading The Transition 2017 Jobs & Hire All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Home U.S. Hamas hostage Guy Iluz, son of American mother, among 6 hostages found dead The tragic fate of six Israeli hostages, including Guy Iluz, a 26-year-old soundman who attempted to escape Hamas, has been confirmed. These individuals were abducted by the terrorists during the Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel. Iluz was attending the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7 in Reim, where Hamas terrorists killed over 260 people. He was abducted while many of his friends were killed. His high school in Raanana announced his death, marking him as the sixth former student killed by the terrorist group, The Times of Israel reported. Iluz, known for his work with prominent Israeli musicians, made a desperate attempt to flee in his Jeep with four other passengers. Terrorists shot at Iluz's Jeep during the failed escape, killing his four passengers. He was able to exit the vehicle and climb a tree, which is where he was when he last spoke with his parents before being taken hostage, the Times of Israel added. The Israeli army also confirmed the identities of five other hostages killed by Hamas: Maya Goren, Ronen Engel, Eliyahu Margalit, Arye Zalmanovich and Ofra Keidar, Haaretz reported, noting that these individuals, hailing from various backgrounds and ages, shared the tragic fate of being abducted by Hamas. Zalmanovich, 86, a founding member of Kibbutz Nir Oz, was among the oldest hostages. His dedication to the kibbutz, even in the face of adversity, was highlighted by his son during a demonstration for the captives release. Maya Goren, 56, a kindergarten teacher, was taken after the terrorists murdered her husband and dog. Ronen Engel, 54, a recent graduate in water engineering, was abducted along with his family, who were later released. Eliyahu Churchill Margalit, 75, a long-time resident of Nir Oz, was known for his commitment to cattle raising. Ofra Keidar, 70, from Kibbutz Beeri, was captured during her morning walk, her last moments filled with confusion and fear. On Friday, health officials reported that a committee of experts, using classified information, declared three additional hostages deceased, according to The Wall Street Journal, which said the Hostages and Missing Families Forum confirmed their deaths despite the inability to access their bodies, which are believed to be in Gaza. The Israeli militarys recovery efforts have been ongoing. They managed to retrieve the body of Ofir Tzarfati, 27, from Gaza for burial in Israel, the Journal said. Doris Liber, the mother of Iluz, told The Christian Post last month that she remembers hearing the sound of gunshots during her last phone call with her son, who called to say his last words before the terrorist group Hamas took him hostage. Liber and Guys father divorced when her son was about 2, and until the boy was 7, the mother said that it was just [her] and [Guy] against the world. As an adult, she and her son kept in touch through phone calls, and he came over once a week for dinner. They frequently chatted about philosophy. When her son called, Liber told CP she heard gunshots in the background as he told his mother and father that he loved them. He spoke in a whisper during that last phone call, but his voice didn't sound terrified, she recalled. He said, Nobody is coming out alive. Everybody is dead; nobody is getting out of this alive, so I need to say my last words, Liber recounted. Iluz's father advised his son not to speak so he could remain hidden from the terrorists, and Liber did the same. And so, I told him, Guy, I love you, she said before hanging up for his safety. I regret that because that was the last time that I heard from him. Liber took part in a protest held by family members of those kidnapped by Hamas outside the United Nations offices in Geneva, Switzerland, last month. Im a single mom, and Guy is my only son. Guy is a very sensitive kid, she said. Hes a musician. We actually bought him an electric guitar when he was 9 years old, and he has been composing music since a very early age. Hes surrounded by his pack of friends, most of them neighbors, who practically lived at my house as well. Home Politics Mike Johnson blasts James Carville for saying 'Christian nationalists' worse than al Qaeda: 'Twisted and shameful' House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., pushed back Sunday against Democratic political strategist James Carville's recent assertion that he is a "Christian nationalist," and that his worldview poses a greater threat to the U.S. than al Qaeda. "It's twisted and shameful that a leading Democrat strategist says millions of Christians in America are a greater threat than foreign terrorists who murdered more than 3,000 Americans," Johnson tweeted from his official government account. "The Democratic Party should condemn this. But they wont." It's twisted and shameful that a leading Democrat strategist says millions of Christians in America are a greater threat than foreign terrorists who murdered more than 3,000 Americans. The Democratic Party should condemn this. But they wont. https://t.co/jc9xbVSkKI Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) December 3, 2023 Johnson's tweet was in response to comments Carville made Friday on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," during which Carville and Maher accused the speaker of exhibiting what they described as Christian nationalism. "Mike Johnson and what he believes is one of the greatest threats we have today to the United States," Carville said. "I promise you, I know these people." "You're talking about Christian nationalism," Maher cut in. "Absolutely," Carville said. "This is a bigger threat than al Qaeda to this country." Per@JamesCarvilleon#RTOvertime on CNN, @SpeakerJohnson is one of the greatest threats we have today to the United States and his beliefs are a bigger threat than al Qaeda to this country...a fundamental threat to the United States. pic.twitter.com/dPLe3IxLqj Brent Baker ???????? ???????? (@BrentHBaker) December 2, 2023 Carville went on to worry that at least two Supreme Court seats could open up during Johnson's tenure and that "people in the press have no idea who this guy is." "This is a fundamental threat to the United States," Carville said of Johnson's worldview. "It is a fundamental thing. [They] don't believe in the Constitution. They'll tell you that. Mike Johnson himself says, 'What is democracy but two wolves and a lamb having lunch?' That's what they really, really, really believe." "And to say, 'Oh, come on, man. It's just some crazy s---.' No, no. They believe that, and they're coming and they've been doing it forever. They're funded. They're funded. They're relentless, and, you know, they probably won't win for a while, but they might. And if they do, the whole country blows a gasket," he added. Carville's comments echo those of former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., who said during an episode of Maher's show last month that there is no difference between Johnson's worldview and that of the Taliban. "There is no difference between Christian nationalism which is what [Johnson's] representing than the Taliban," Kinzinger said during the panel discussion. "Now, maybe the end is different, maybe the means are different, but there's no difference in saying this is a government run on religion." Johnson, who is a member of Cypress Baptist Church in Benton, Louisiana, has repeatedly hit back at the escalating rhetoric against him since House Republicans unanimously elected him to the gavel in October. Johnson has unabashedly affirmed that his beliefs emerge from a Christian worldview, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity in October that he is "a Bible-believing Christian," and that if anyone wants to know what he thinks on any issue, they should "go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it." Johnson told Fox News co-host Kayleigh McEnany shortly after his election that the attacks against him such as Maher comparing him to the Maine shooter, MSNBC host Jen Psaki calling him a "fundamentalist," or a Daily Beast op-ed likening him to the Taliban are "disgusting" and "absurd." Tony Perkins, president of the national Evangelical grassroots organization Family Research Council, told The Christian Post in October that the attacks against Johnson are "almost humorous" and indicative of a growing cultural opposition toward Christianity generally. Perkinstweeted Monday that Carville's accusations were "absurd and irresponsible!" A week before Carville's comments, former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden tweeted side-by-side images of an unidentified woman holding an American flag, a Bible, and a pistol next to a photo of Reem Riyashi, a Palestinian woman who killed herself and four other people in a 2004 suicide bombing. "No different," wrote Hayden, who served as director of the National Security Agency until former President George W. Bush appointed him to run the CIA, a position he held until 2009. Home World Paris stabbing suspect pledged allegiance to ISIS, was released after separate terror plot The man arrested in connection with a stabbing attack near the Eiffel Tower in Paris over the weekend that left a German-Filipino citizen dead and two others injured was previously imprisoned for a separate terror plot and tracked for suspected radicalization. Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a French national born in 1997 to Iranian parents just outside of Paris, was identified as the assailant in Saturday's attack, French prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said during a news conference Sunday. French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told reporters Saturday that the suspect was released from prison in 2020 after serving four years for another plotted attack in 2016, adding that the suspect chanted "Allahu Akbar" during Saturday's attack. Darmanin noted that the suspect was undergoing psychiatric treatment, tracked for potential Islamic radicalization and included on a terror watch list. "This person was ready to kill others," Darmanin said, according to The Associated Press. Ricard said that Rajabpour-Miyandoab had shown "persistent radicalization" and was in contact with extremists responsible for other terror attacks in France. Ricard said that Rajabpour-Miyandoab recorded a video posted to X before carrying out the attack in which he pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. "In this video, he swore allegiance to the Islamic State and expressed his support to jihadists ... in Africa, Iraq, Syria, the Sinai ... Yemen or Pakistan," Ricard said, according to AFP. The video was published from a recently opened account that also posted about Hamas and the war in Gaza, Ricard added. Darmanin said that the suspect told investigators that he opposed Muslims being killed in "Afghanistan and Palestine" and also claimed France is an "accomplice" to Israel's military actions in Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack that killed 1,200 people. The victims include a 23-year-old German-Filipino man, a 66-year-old British citizen and a 60-year-old French national. The attack began with the stabbing of the German tourist, followed by assaults on the British and French victims with a hammer. A taxi driver intervened, potentially saving further lives. Police used a taser to subdue and arrest the suspect. As the suspect was living with his parents in the Essonne region south of Paris, Ricard said his mother reported concerns about her son's behavior last month. But authorities couldn't find any violation that would warrant a second prosecution. Three individuals close to the suspect have been taken into custody for questioning. High-ranking French officials, including Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne and President Emmanuel Macron, have strongly condemned the attack. German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser also denounced the incident, labeling it an abominable crime. Health Minister Aurelien Rousseau also highlighted the attacker's mental health issues, noting a mix of ideology, influenceability and psychiatric problems. The incident has raised questions about the adequacy of surveillance and public safety, especially in light of the upcoming 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris. France has experienced several attacks by Islamist extremists in recent years, including the November 2015 attacks in Paris claimed by the Islamic State. Home World Russian Orthodox Church hails Supreme Court ruling against 'extremist' LGBT movement The Russian Orthodox Church is celebrating a ruling by the Russian Supreme Court that labeled the international pro-LGBT movement as "extremist," calling it a "form of moral self-defense" against attacks on biblical marriage and family. Last week's ruling, which came in response to a motion filed by the Russian Justice Ministry, bans the so-called "international LGBT public movement" in Russia as an "extremist organization." In a statement to the state-run news agency RIA Novosti, a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church was quoted by the Associated Press as saying the ruling is a "form of moral self-defense by society" against attacks on "the Christian idea of marriage and family from the public and legal realms." The ruling comes after Russia expanded its laws last year so that authorities can fine any person or group that promotes homosexuality. Previously, Russian law banned LGBT advocacy for children, according to Reuters. In mid-November, the state TASS news agency reported that Russia's justice ministry filed a motion with the Supreme Court "to recognize the international LGBT public movement as extremist and to ban its activity on the territory of the Russian Federation." Under the ruling which came during a closed-door hearing as part of a classified case an individual convicted of involvement in any LGBT-affiliated "extremist organization" could face between six to 10 years in prison, according to Amnesty International. The international human rights organization has warned the "extremist" designation could potentially put anyone publicly linked to LGBT groups, lifestyles or symbols at risk of prosecution. "This shameful and absurd decision represents a new front in the Russian authorities' campaign against the [LGBT] community," Marie Struthers, director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at Amnesty International, said in a statement. "The ruling risks resulting in a blanket ban on [LGBT] organizations with far reaching violations of the rights to freedom of association, expression and peaceful assembly, as well as the right to be free from discrimination. It will affect countless people, and its repercussions are poised to be nothing short of catastrophic." The European Union also condemned the ruling. "Amid the decades-long crackdown on rights of LGBTIQ persons unleashed under President Putin, this decision aims at further persecuting the LGBTIQ community in Russia and aims to stifle civil society and those courageously defending human rights," the EU stressed in a statement. "This decision will prevent LGBTIQ persons from enjoying their human rights and dignity over fears of unjustified persecution." Earlier this year, the Russian Orthodox Church broke ties with mainline Western denominations which have increasingly embraced LGBT-affirming stances on issues of marriage and sexuality, including the Church of England, the Anglican-based U.S. Episcopal Church and Lutheran Church in Sweden and Norway, according to reports. Russian President Vladimir Putin carried out a series of actions in the last year to crack down on "LGBT propaganda"andban sex change surgeries. Last November, Russiaexpanded the law against "LGBT propaganda" aimed at any age. And in July 2023, the countrybanned sex-change operations. During his annual address to the Federal Assembly in Moscow in February, Putin leveled sharp criticism at Western values and said the U.S. and other Western nations were using "information attacks" to target youth, distort "historical truth" and "attack our culture, the Russian Orthodox Church and other traditional religious institutions in our country." Putin appeared to suggest the advancement of same-sex marriage and other rights for LGBT-identified people destroys the institution of the family and promotes pedophilia. "Look at what they're doing with their own people," he said. "It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life." As an illustration, Putin claimed priests are being forced to "bless same-sex marriages." Although Putin was likely referencing the Church of England's proposed plans to bless same-sex marriage, the proposal would grant priests autonomy not to bless same-sex marriages. "Look at the holy Scripture and the main books of other world religions," Putin said at the time. "They say it all, including that family is the union of a man and a woman, but these sacred texts are now being questioned." Home World 4 killed in church bombing in Philippines, ISIS claims responsibility Four people were killed and over 50 injured in a bombing at a Catholic Mass being held on Sunday morning at the Mindanao State University gymnasium in Marawi City, Philippines, according to media reports. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, stating it targeted a large gathering of Christian disbelievers in Marawi, a predominantly Muslim city, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist group activities online, CNN reported. Lanao del Sur province Governor Mamintal Adiong Jr. said more than 40 individuals were receiving treatment at a local government hospital, with others treated for minor injuries at the universitys infirmary. The attack coincided with the start of Advent, a period leading to Christmas when Mass attendance typically increases. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. condemned the attack on social media, describing it as senseless and most heinous, and attributed it to foreign terrorists, EuroNews reported. He assured the public that additional security personnel were deployed to respond to the incident. The United States also condemned the attack. State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller expressed solidarity with the Philippines, reaffirming the U.S. commitment to standing against such acts of violence. Mindanao, known for its significant Muslim population, has a history of insurgency and extremist violence. In 2017, the city of Marawi was besieged by ISIS-affiliated militants, a conflict that displaced over 350,000 residents and lasted five months. Brig. Gen. Allan Nobleza, the regional police commander, suggested the Daulah Islamiyah-Maute Group might be behind the bombing. This speculation follows the death of 11 group members, including the group leader in Lanao del Sur, in a recent encounter with the Philippine Army, hinting at possible retaliation, according to the BBC. Armed Forces Chief Romeo Brawner also acknowledged the possibility of the bombing being a retaliatory act. Officials believe a grenade or an improvised bomb caused the explosion. Photos circulating on social media show the aftermath inside the gymnasium, with scattered chairs and debris, but no significant structural damage to the building. Mindanao State University expressed its horror at the violence, emphasizing that such acts have no place in civilized society, especially in educational institutions. The university has suspended all academic activities and increased security measures on campus. Mindanaos history of insurgency includes a 2012 agreement between Manila and the countrys largest Muslim rebel group to establish an autonomous region, with the first elections for the regional assembly held in 2022. Despite this, sporadic violence continues. President Marcos Jr. and Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice. Security has been heightened across Manila and the southern region, with increased police presence and Coast Guard inspections at ports. The incident has raised concerns about the safety of religious gatherings in the region, particularly as the country enters a period of heightened religious activity. The Philippine government and security forces remain on high alert to prevent further attacks. Home Church & Ministries 74 churches granted disaffiliation from UMC Florida Conference amid homosexuality schism Seventy-four congregations in Florida have left the United Methodist Church over the denomination's longstanding debate over its stance on homosexuality. In a virtual special session Saturday morning, the UMC Florida Conference approved the disaffiliation votes of 74 churches in a final vote of 557 in favor and 36 against. During the session, some delegates spoke against approving the disaffiliation of specific congregations, arguing, among other things, that the process was not correctly implemented. According to the proceedings, 43 churches granted disaffiliation on Saturday were part of a lawsuit filed in 2022 against the Florida Conference, claiming that the disaffiliation process was unfair to congregations seeking dismissal. In April, Circuit Judge George M. Wright of the 8th Judicial Circuit Court in Starke ruled against the churches, stating that "a secular court must avoid entanglement in internal church matters or doctrinal matters by deferring to the decision of the highest ecclesiastical body on these issues." "In this case, the Plaintiffs admit that they are affiliated with the UMC," Wright wrote. "The Plaintiffs seemingly acknowledge that this court cannot resolve the dispute under the current state of the law in Florida." After the disaffiliation votes were approved, Florida Bishop Tom Berlin told those leaving the UMC that he "wished them well" in their future ministry work. "To those of you who are disaffiliating, to those of you who are now leaving the United Methodist Church and the Florida Conference, the vast majority of you leave in peace," Berlin said. "You are people who want to start in a new way, and you hope to effectively share the gospel with others. I hope you are able to do so. I hope that people come to Christ because of your church and your work." For those staying with the UMC, Berlin said that "the work before us is not to make people stay United Methodists" but rather "to go forth and share Christ so that people may become Christians who are United Methodists." Over the past few decades, there has been a divisive debate within the nation's second-largest Protestant denomination over whether to amend the UMC Book of Discipline to remove language banning the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals. Although efforts to change the Book of Discipline at the UMC General Conference have failed, some progressive leaders within the denomination have failed to follow or enforce the rules. In 2019, at a special session of the UMC General Conference, delegates approved Paragraph 2553, which created a process for leaving the UMC, which would expire at the end of 2023. According to numbers compiled by UM News accessed Monday morning, approximately 7,400 congregations have left the denomination since 2019 under the provisions of Paragraph 2553, including 192 churches in the Florida Conference. Home World Christian family goes into hiding despite blasphemy charges being dropped over Bible verse on Facebook LAHORE, Pakistan A court in Pakistan granted bail to a Christian falsely charged with blasphemy, but he and his family have separated and gone into hiding amid threats to their lives, sources said. Haroon Shahzad, 45, was released from Sargodha District Jail on Nov. 15, said his attorney, Aneeqa Maria. Shahzad was charged with blasphemy on June 30 after posting Bible verses on Facebook that infuriated Muslims, causing dozens of Christian families in Chak 49 Shumaali, near Sargodha in Punjab Province, to flee their homes. Lahore High Court Judge Ali Baqir Najfi granted bail on Nov. 6, but the decision and his release on Nov. 15 were not made public until now due to security fears for his life, Maria said. Shahzad told Morning Star News by telephone from an undisclosed location that the false accusation has changed his familys lives forever. My family has been on the run from the time I was implicated in this false charge and arrested by the police under mob pressure, Shahzad told Morning Star News. My eldest daughter had just started her second year in college, but its been more than four months now that she hasnt been able to return to her institution. My other children are also unable to resume their education as my family is compelled to change their location after 15-20 days as a security precaution. Though he was not tortured during incarceration, he said, the pain of being away from his family and thinking about their well-being and safety gave him countless sleepless nights. All of this is due to the fact that the complainant, Imran Ladhar, has widely shared my photo on social media and declared me liable for death for alleged blasphemy, he said in a choked voice. As soon as Ladhar heard about my bail, he and his accomplices started gathering people in the village and incited them against me and my family. Hes trying his best to ensure that we are never able to go back to the village. Shahzad has met with his family only once since his release on bail, and they are unable to return to their village in the foreseeable future, he said. We are not together, he told Morning Star News. They are living at a relatives house while Im taking refuge elsewhere. I dont know when this agonizing situation will come to an end. The Christian said the complainant, said to be a member of Islamist extremist party Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan and also allegedly connected with banned terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, filed the charge because of a grudge. Shahzad said he and his family had obtained valuable government land and allotted it for construction of a church building, and Ladhar and others had filed multiple cases against the allotment and lost all of them after a four-year legal battle. Another probable reason for Ladhars jealousy could be that we were financially better off than most Christian families of the village, he said. I was running a successful paint business in Sargodha city, but that too has shut down due to this case. Regarding the social media post, Shahzad said he had no intention of hurting Muslim sentiments by sharing the biblical verse on his Facebook page. I posted the verse a week before Eid Al Adha [Feast of the Sacrifice] but I had no idea that it would be used to target me and my family, he said. In fact, when I came to know that Ladhar was provoking the villagers against me, I deleted the post and decided to meet the village elders to explain my position. The village elders were already influenced by Ladhar and refused to listen to him, Shahzad said. I was left with no option but to flee the village when I heard that Ladhar was amassing a mob to attack me, he said. Shahzad pleaded with government authorities for justice, saying he should not be punished for sharing a verse from the Bible that in no way constituted blasphemy. Similar to other cases Shahzads attorney, Maria, told Morning Star News that events in Shahzads case were similar to other blasphemy cases filed against Christians. Defective investigation, mala fide on the part of the police and complainant, violent protests against the accused persons and threats to them and their families, forcing their displacement from their ancestral areas, have become hallmarks of all blasphemy allegations in Pakistan, said Maria, head of The Voice Society, a Christian paralegal organization. She said that the case filed against Shahzad was gross violation of Section 196 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), which states that police cannot register a case under the Section 295-A blasphemy statute against a private citizen without the approval of the provincial government or federal agencies. Maria added that Shahzad and his family have continued to suffer even though there was no evidence of blasphemy. The social stigma attached with a blasphemy accusation will likely have a long-lasting impact on their lives, whereas his accuser, Imran Ladhar, would not have to face any consequence of his false accusation, she said. The judge who granted bail noted that Shahzad was charged with blasphemy under Section 295-A, which is a non-cognizable offense, and Section 298, which is bailable. The judge also noted that police had not submitted the forensic report of Shahzads cell phone and said evidence was required to prove that the social media was blasphemous, according to Maria. Bail was set at 100,000 Pakistani rupees (US $350) and two personal sureties, and the judge ordered police to further investigate, she said. Shahzad, a paint contractor, on June 29 posted on his Facebook page 1 Cor. 10:18-21 regarding food sacrificed to idols, as Muslims were beginning the four-day festival of Eid al-Adha, which involves slaughtering an animal and sharing the meat. A Muslim villager took a screenshot of the post, sent it to local social media groups and accused Shahzad of likening Muslims to pagans and disrespecting the Abrahamic tradition of animal sacrifice. Though Shahzad made no comment in the post, inflammatory or otherwise, the situation became tense after Friday prayers when announcements were made from mosque loudspeakers telling people to gather for a protest, family sources previously told Morning Star News. Fearing violence as mobs grew in the village, most Christian families fled their homes, leaving everything behind. In a bid to restore order, the police registered a case against Shahzad under Sections 295-A and 298. Section 295-A relates to deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs and is punishable with imprisonment of up to 10 years and fine, or both. Section 298 prescribes up to one year in prison and a fine, or both, for hurting religious sentiments. Pakistan ranked seventh on Open Doors 2023 World Watch List of the most difficult places to be a Christian, up from eighth the previous year. Home Politics Christian leaders want to join lawsuit against first Catholic charter school in US Several Christian leaders in Oklahoma have asked to join a lawsuit seeking to reverse the approval of the first Catholic charter school in the country. Oklahomas Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a complaintagainst the approval of the charter school in October, expressing concerns about church and state separation. In a Nov. 14 filing with the Oklahoma Supreme Court, four Christian leaders asked to join a lawsuit against the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board and its members over the approval of the Catholic Church-affiliated St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Catholic School as a public charter school. The petitioners include Melissa Abdo, a practicing Catholic who serves on the Jenks Public Schools Board of Education and the Board of Directors of the Oklahoma State School Boards Association; Bruce Prescott, a retired Baptist minister who taught at a public high school and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary; the Rev. Mitch Randall, chief executive officer of Good Faith Media and former executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics; and the Rev. Lori Walke, senior minister of Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City. The American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Education Law Center and the Freedom From Religion Foundation represent the four faith leaders, along with three other petitioners, as they seek to join Drummonds lawsuit. The legal organizations elaborated on their clients desire to join the challenge in a joint statementlast month. Our clients proposed intervention would benefit the Attorney Generals lawsuit because they are among the people parents, students, families, educators, clergy, taxpayers, and a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation who will suffer if a religious public school is permitted to open, the advocacy groups stated. They and their children will be excluded by the schools discriminatory practices. They will be taxed by the government and forced to financially support a religion that many of them do not share. The petitioners previously filed a lawsuitagainst the opening of St. Isidore as a public religious charter school in Oklahoma County District Court over the summer. They believe that the approval of the Catholic school as a charter school violates the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, which requires charter schools to be as equally free and open to all students as traditional public schools and remain nonsectarian in [their] . . . admission policies [and] employment practices. The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the charter school application for St. Isidore in a 3-2 vote earlier this year. St. Isidore describes itself as a collaborative effort between the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa to serve students in Oklahoma who have limited access to a Catholic school by providing them with a quality Catholic education. The school plans to open in August 2024. While Drummond has emerged as an opponent of the effort to make St. Isidore the first religious charter school in the U.S., the states Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters has thrown his support behind the school. Walters has pushed back on the idea that providing taxpayer funding to St. Isidore by making it a public charter school is illegal. According to Walters, Distribution of state aid to St. Isidore once proper administrative steps are complete is not only lawful, but required under the Free Exercise Trilogy. Home World 4 Christian missionaries brutally assaulted in India Four missionaries including a pastor and his wife from Gospel Echoing Missionary Society (GEMS) were brutally assaulted in a village near Garhwa district of Jharkhand. Pastor P. Sarvanan and his companion P. Andrew have been in the hospital since they were admitted on Nov. 21, after complaints of severe headache and dizziness, Andrew told Christian Today. Doctors have done a head CT-Scan on both of us, so that they can treat us accordingly, said Andrew from the hospital where he was hospitalized along with Sarvanan, while speaking to Christian Today on Nov. 23. A church member named Shanti invited Sarvanan, the pastor of GEMS church in Garhwa city, to her house and pray for her family. Some Hindu extremists in the village spotted our car and noticed that it is a Christian vehicle because there is a cross hanging along the rear-view mirror next to the wind-shield, and they followed us. They came and spotted us and the house we were visiting and went back and reported to the others, said Andrew, an associate of Sarvanan who reached Shantis house in their private car at 5 in the evening of Nov. 15. Within 10 minutes of their arrival, a mob of about 40 young men, most of them drunk, gathered outside Shantis house and began to create a ruckus. They demanded that the Christians be handed over to them, but the host quickly latched the main door from inside, making sure that nobody could enter, Andrew said. When the host refused to open the door, the mob warned the host to send the guests out or else they would set the house on fire. Fearing that our resistance would result in a bigger issue, we decided to walk out, said Andrew. The mob pounced on Sarvanan, Andrew and Justin and began to assault them black-and-blue. They hit us with whatever their hands could find. They punched us, slapped us, boxed us and kicked us with their legs. Many of them were carrying wooden sticks and they beat us with them. Others picked up stones and bricks that were lying nearby and hit us with them, said Andrew. When Shanti and Rosy intervened to save the men, they, too, were beaten, said Andrew. The mob snatched the phones of the Christians and looted their car. Our car was filled with a lot of stuff that we had purchased for our house and for the church. Everything was looted by the people, said Andrew. After hearing the news of the attack on Sarvanan and Rosy, Vimala Johnson, younger sister of Rosy and a GEMS missionary herself, rushed to visit the family. As Sarvanan was not in a condition to speak to Christian Today, Vimala Johnson spoke on his behalf and recounted the shocking and brutal incident to Christian Today. Johnson said that her sister Rosy was in great pain. She is not able to sleep because of pain in her body due to the internal injuries that she sustained, said Johnson. Shanti is not only the sole Christian in her family but also in the entire village. She has been attending church for the past 3 years. Andrew said that the mob, including the other Hindu leaders, visited Shantis house later and forced her to reconvert to Hinduism. A Hindu ceremony was conducted and they forced me to recant my Christian faith and accept Hinduism, said Shanti on a call to Andrew. Shanti added that the situation in the village was quite tensed and that the Hindu extremists had warned her to ask the Christians to not approach the police to register a complaint otherwise they will ostracise Shantis family from the village and they will have to live the rest of their lives that way. The persecution in Jharkhand is at its peak, said Johnson, who is a missionary herself. The attack on my sister and the team is the fourth in the last two months, she added Originally published at Christian Today India Home U.S. Jewish groups sue UC Berkeley for 'longstanding, unchecked spread' of antisemitism A new lawsuit accuses the University of California Berkeley of a history of allowing antisemitism to go unchecked on campus, culminating in a surge of violence and harassment against Jewish students following Hamas Oct. 7 terrorist attack. The Brandeis Center and the Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education filed the 36-page complaint last Tuesday at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In addition to UC Berkeley, the other defendants named in the lawsuit are the University of California Regents, University President Michael Drake, University Chancellor Carol T. Christ and Provost Ben Hermalin. The complaint seeks to target the longstanding, unchecked spread of anti-Semitism at the University of California Berkeley. Plaintiffs argue that court intervention is necessary to protect students and faculty, citing instances of harassment and physical violence in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack against Israel. The complaint quotes UC Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky as saying that he was stunned when college students throughout the country, including at UC Berkeley, celebrated the Oct. 7 terrorist attack that killed over 1,200 people, a majority of them civilians. Hamas also seized around 240 people as hostages during its surprise onslaught against Israel. While the civilized world responded with horror and grief, students at UC Berkeley celebrated this twenty-first-century pogrom with resulting violence against Jewish students, the complaint stated. In a statement shared with The Christian Post, the Brandeis Center described an incident in October cited in the lawsuit where pro-Palestinian protestors reportedly attacked a Jewish undergraduate student draped in an Israeli flag. As the university newspaper, The Berkeley Scanner, reported at the time, the demonstrators attempted to steal the flag during a pro-Palestinian rally on campus, making it the second attempted theft of an Israeli flag at the school. Another incident involved two pro-Palestinian protestors disrupting Jewish students who gathered to pray after Hamas attack. Students have also participated in various rallies demanding the dismantling of Israel and chanting phrases such as intifada, intifada, according to the Brandeis Center. The students also described pro-Palestinian rallies blocking the main entrance to campus and a lecturer who told students that class was over early before proceeding to embark on an anti-Israel rant for 18 minutes, with roughly 1,000 freshman [sic] as his captive audience, the lawsuit stated. Both students stated that the school does so little to protect Jewish students, it feels as if the school were condoning anti-Semitism, the complaint continued. They added that officials at the university display a general disregard for Jewish students. Before the Hamas attack, the lawsuit claimed that Jewish students had to deal with discrimination on campus. Brandeis Center Chairman Kenneth L. Marcus, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education during the Bush and Trump administrations, asserted that the antisemitism on campus is a direct result of Berkeleys leadership turning a blind eye to unfettered Jew-hatred. The Brandeis Center founder alleges that Berkeley is quick to address other forms of hatred but not antisemitism. Berkeley, once a beacon of free speech, civil rights, and equal treatment of persons regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, gender, and sexual orientation, is heading down a very different and dangerous path from the one I proudly attended as a Jewish law student, Marcus stated. One example of pre-Oct. 7 antisemitism on campus cited in the complaint is a 2022 pledge to ban all Zionist speakers by nine law student organizations last year. The number of groups supporting the pledge has now risen to 23 organizations, with the lawsuit arguing that the ban bars Jewish students from networking opportunities provided to others. The groups behind the suit request that the court prohibit discrimination against Jewish students, faculty and speakers by requiring the school to enforce its nondiscrimination policies, among other requests. A UC Berkeley spokesperson told The Christian Post Wednesday that the academic institution "has long been committed to confronting antisemitism, and to supporting the needs and interests of its Jewish students, faculty, and staff. That commitment was strengthened in 2015, when the university established the Chancellors Committee on Jewish Student Life, and again in 2019 when a groundbreaking Antisemitism Education Initiative was launched on the campus, stated the spokesperson. The UC Berkeley spokesperson shared two documents with CP showcasing the universitys efforts to combat antisemitism following the Hamas terror attack last month, claiming the school does not have a legal right to stop demonstrations people may find offensive. The spokesperson also attached a statement from Dean Chemerinsky, who claimed the campus groups' boycott against pro-Israel speakers is consistent with students First Amendment rights. Regarding the incidents of violence and harassment against Jewish students mentioned in the lawsuit, the university spokesperson said that the police department only received one report, and it was about the October incident. The spokesperson also denied that the school had received reports of Jewish students being the recipient of threatening emails. This recent lawsuit comes amid various accusations of antisemitic incidents taking place on college campuses following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas. In addition to student groups writing statements holding Israel solely responsible for the violence, others have harassed openly Jewish students on campus. (Photo : Unsplash/Mimi Thian) Women in the United States still lag behind men when landing top-level corporate jobs. According to Pew Research Center, women comprise 50% of the U.S. population but only comprise 10.6% female Fortune 500 Chief Executives, 30.4% female U.S. Board Members, and 32.8% female college and university Presidents. Women only occupy a small percentage of top executive positions, a sign of ongoing obstacles that prevent them from participating equally in business leadership opportunities and growing in it. Underrepresentation in Leadership Roles Pew Research surveyed a representative group of US adults to understand their views on the low representation of women in top business positions. When asked why there aren't more women in executive roles, respondents highlighted vital reasons: 58% Believe women face more significant pressure to prove themselves than men. 50% Cited gender discrimination as a significant factor. 48%: Noted that family responsibilities make it challenging for women to advance in their careers. 43% Many businesses are not ready to hire women for top positions. 40% Believe sexual harassment creates a challenging environment for women's career advancement. Opinions on achieving gender parity in top executive roles were also divided: 50%: Predicted that men will continue to outnumber women in these positions. 48%: Expressed optimism, believing it's just a matter of time before there are as many women as men in top business roles. READ ALSO: Want Leadership That Works? Try These Guiding Principles Mixed Gender And Political Findings Pew Research also compared responses based on gender and political affiliation with the below findings: Most women (65%) and Democrats (76%) believe there are too few women in business leadership, regardless of gender. 79% preferred an equal number of women and men in each role. 10% thought having more women than men would be ideal. 10% believed it would be good to have more women, but not equal to men. Regarding political differences: Democrats were more likely to identify challenges for women in top business positions. Gender mattered more than political affiliation. Republican and Democratic women were more likely than their male counterparts to express concern about the lack of women in top business leadership roles and highlight specific obstacles for women. Pew Research emphasized that gender played a crucial role in shaping views, overriding political affiliations on this particular issue. Diversity and Inclusion The findings of the Pew Research study demonstrate that the underrepresentation of women in corporate leadership concerns both women and Democrats. Most respondents-especially Democrats and women-think there aren't enough women in senior corporate roles. Republican and Democratic women are more likely to express concerns about the underrepresentation of women in senior corporate roles than their male counterparts, which highlights how critical it is to consider gender perspectives when talking about the challenges and barriers women seek leadership roles in the business leadership world. The data indicates that achieving gender parity in top corporate jobs remains a significant challenge in the United States despite acknowledging women's achievements and contributions. Addressing these disparities requires ongoing efforts to dismantle barriers and promote equal opportunities for women in leadership positions. RELATED ARTICLE: Key Leadership Skills for Our Rapidly Changing World 2017 Jobs & Hire All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Home World Nigeria: Judge refuses to dismiss case of mother jailed for speaking against murder of Christian girl The trial of Rhoda Jatau, a Christian mother of five in Nigerias Bauchi State, will continue following a judges refusal to dismiss the case against her. Jatau has been in prison since last May, accused of sharing a video on WhatsApp that condemned the lynching of Deborah Emmanuel Yakubu, a Nigerian student killed by her classmates for sharing her Christian faith. At a hearing last week, Jataus legal team argued that the prosecution had failed to establish the basic elements of their case against Rhoda, but the court still decided to proceed with the trial, said the human rights group ADF International, which is backing Jataus defense. Since her arrest, Jatau has been repeatedly denied bail and held incommunicado, with only sporadic access to her lawyer and family during court appearances, the group said. Sean Nelson, legal counsel for ADF International, criticized the ongoing prosecution and detention, calling it a travesty of justice. The lead counsel for Jataus case, an allied lawyer with ADF International, expressed disappointment with the ruling but affirmed their readiness to defend Jatau. He emphasized the suffering endured by Rhoda and her family for over a year-and-a-half and called for continued prayers for her release. The decision to proceed with the prosecution follows a joint allegation letter from United Nations experts to the Nigerian government. The letter, prompted by appeals from ADF International and other religious freedom advocacy groups, highlighted the threat posed by blasphemy laws to international human rights. It also drew attention to the cases of Yakubu and Jatau. Jataus trial is set to resume on Dec. 19. If convicted, she faces up to five years in prison. The cases of Jatau and Yakubu are among numerous instances of violence against religious minorities in Nigeria. Of the more than 5,500 Christians killed for their faith worldwide last year, 90% were from Nigeria. The criminalization of blasphemy in Nigeria has far-reaching implications. In a country with over 200 million people, almost evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, blasphemy laws exacerbate societal tensions. These laws not only punish individuals for expressing their beliefs but also silence people from sharing their faith and fuel societal violence. Blasphemy laws have also led to brutal mob violence and severe harm to minority Muslims, Christian converts and others. ADF International is also supporting the legal defense of Nigerian musician Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, a Sufi Muslim sentenced to death by hanging for sharing song lyrics deemed blasphemous on WhatsApp. Yahaya, who has been imprisoned for over three-and-a-half years, is appealing his case to the Supreme Court of Nigeria, with the hope of overturning the death penalty blasphemy laws in the country. Yahaya remains in prison awaiting his appeal. According to a previous report by the U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern, Nigeria was one of the worlds top Persecutors of the Year for its treatment of Christians in 2021. The report stated that 50,000 to 70,000 Christians had been killed in Nigeria since 2000. Home U.S. Man pleads guilty to firebombing Wisconsin pro-life group office after Supreme Court leak A 29-year-old Wisconsin man, Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury, has pleaded guilty to the May 2022 firebombing of a Madison office building. Roychowdhury, also of Madison, admitted to attempting to cause damage by means of fire or an explosive. Roychowdhurys guilty plea relates to the firebombing of the Wisconsin Family Action office in Madison, according to CBS News. The attack, which occurred on May 8, 2022, was one of many directed at pro-life organizations and churches following the publication of a leaked draft U.S. Supreme Court decision indicating that justices were poised to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, thereby allowing states to ban abortion if they so choose. Evidence at the scene included a broken mason jar with a burned lid and screw top, a purple disposable lighter, and another mason jar containing a clear fluid smelling like an accelerant, the Department of Justice said in a statement. Additionally, graffiti was found on the buildings exterior. The firebombing involved two Molotov cocktails thrown through a window, setting a bookcase on fire. The graffiti message, If abortions arent safe then you arent either, was spray-painted on the offices wall. Firefighters extinguished the fire, and investigators found DNA from Roychowdhury and two other individuals at the scene. Roychowdhury's DNA was matched with that found on a half-eaten burrito he discarded. There is no indication that the other DNA profiles have led to further identifications. In March, Roychowdhury became a suspect after local police observed him disposing of food in a public trash can, according to the statement, which says DNA from the food matched DNA evidence from the attack scene. Later in March, Roychowdhury was arrested at Boston Logan International Airport as he was about to board a flight to Guatemala City. He faces a minimum of five years and a maximum of 20 years in prison, with sentencing scheduled for Feb. 14, 2024. The investigation involved multiple agencies, including the Madison Police Department, the Wisconsin State Capitol Police Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Dane County Sheriffs Office. Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Altman is prosecuting the case for the Western District of Wisconsin and Trial Attorney Justin Sher of the National Security Divisions Counterterrorism Section. The Roe v. Wade decision led to nationwide protests and other incidents of vandalism against pro-life organizations. The overturned decision later reinstated Wisconsins 1849 ban on abortion, although a Dane County judge ruled in August that the ban does not apply to medical abortions. Roychowdhurys plea agreement includes a recommendation for a reduced sentence due to his acceptance of responsibility for the crime. His sentencing was set for Friday when he pleaded guilty. Home U.S. Oakland residents say effort to condemn Hamas is 'racist,' 'anti-Arab' One of California's most violent cities is calling for peace in the Middle East and the protection of innocent life, with some residents seemingly defending the actions of Hamas. The Oakland City Council passed a resolution last week that urged U.S. Congress to demand an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war following a heated debateamong residents over the conflict, which is nearing its second month. Introduced by Councilmember Carroll Fife, the resolution backed a congressional resolution for a permanent ceasefire, unfettered access into Gaza for humanitarian efforts, along with the release of all hostages and "respect for international law." Citing the official motto of the City of Oakland, "Love Life," the resolution "calls on elected officials and residents alike to protect life and stand united against violence." The resolution also condemns what it calls a rise in "Antisemitic, Islamophobic, racist, homophobic, and xenophobic attacks in our city and across the nation." The resolution made no mention of Hamas or its Oct. 7 surprise attack in southern Israel, which killed over 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and resulted in the capture of 240 hostages. In response, Israel launched airstrikes and a ground offensive in Gaza to free hostages and eradicate Hamas, a terror group that has controlled Gaza since 2007. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry says that over 15,000 people have been killed since the war began. An effort by Oakland City Councilmember Dan Kalb, who is Jewish, to amend the resolution to condemn Hamas for the attack and "repression and violence" against both Israelis and Palestinians failed in a 2-6 vote, the Associated Pressreported. Approximately 175 residents spoke during the public comment portion of the Nov. 27 meeting, many of whom argued that amending the resolution to include condemnation of Hamas could be considered "racist." One speaker claimed that Israel murdered its people on Oct. 7. Last night the Oakland City Council voted on a resolution to call for a ceasefire. A city council member tried to insert language condemning Hamas. This was the reaction pic.twitter.com/r7aTb2mkrQ Yashar Ali ???? (@yashar) November 28, 2023 "Calling Hamas a terrorist organization is ridiculous, racist, and plays into genocidal propaganda that is flooding our media and that we should be doing everything possible to combat," said one woman who wore a COVID-era face covering. "I support the right of Palestinians to resist occupation, including through Hamas, the armed wing of the unified Palestinian resistance," another resident said. "As an Arab, asking with this context to condemn Hamas is very anti-Arab racist," said another woman. "Question: did anyone else notice that those who oppose this resolution are old white supremacists?" one resident asked. The political tension in the room led to at least one verbal altercation, at least according to Teresa Drenick, deputy director of the Anti-Defamation League's San Francisco Regional Office, who said she was "shouted down" and called a derogatory term for women by one of the speakers. "The silence and inaction in the face of the yelling, the name-calling and the disruptions seemed to telegraph tacit approval and encouragement to the crowd," Drenick wrote in an opinion piece for the Jewish outlet Forward. "Things came uniquely to a head when someone uttered 'Heil Hitler' as one of my Jewish neighbors asked the council to amend the resolution." Several California officials condemned the city council footage, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, who tweeted, "Hamas is a terrorist organization. They must be called out for what they are: evil." Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., calledthe video "shocking," while State Sen. Scott Weiner, known for his public supportof an anti-Christian drag troupe, respondedto the video, calling it "just awful." "It's shocking to see people continue to downplay, deny, or even seek to justify their October 7th attacks," Schiff tweeted. The city of Oakland which adopted its "Love Life" mottoin honor of 16-year-old Lo'Eshe Lacy, an innocent bystander killed in a 1997 drive-by shooting issuing an official call for peace comes as it ranks as one of the most violent cities in the U.S. Oaklands crime rate of 6,459 per 100,000 is 175% higher than the national average and 150%, according to Property Club. Home World Over 100 attend baby Indi Gregory's funeral; father says God used her to 'expose evil' Indi Gregory was 'true warrior,' father says More than 100 people and a delegation from the Italian government attended a funeral last week for Indi Gregory, an 8-month-old girl who died after a U.K. court ordered her off life support. Mourners gathered at St. Barnabus Catholic Cathedral in Nottingham, England, on Friday to pay their respects to Indi, who died on Nov. 13 after suffering from an incurable mitochondrial disease and related physical ailments, according to the BBC. Indi's small white casket, which was decorated with flowers, was carried through the streets of Nottingham by a horse-drawn carriage, followed by eight Rolls-Royce cars with family members. Italian officials who attended included Minister of Families Eugenia Roccella and Minister of Disabilities Alessandra Locatelli. Indi's death in hospice occurred after Lord Justice Peter Jackson, Lady Justice Eleanor King and Lord Justice Andrew Moylan shot down an appeal from Indi's parents, Dean Gregory and Claire Staniforth, who sought in vain for permission to remove her from life support at home. Indi's situation led to intervention from Italian political leaders, who gave her emergency citizenship on Nov. 6 and offered to give her specialist treatment at the Vatican-run Bambino Gesu Pediatric Hospital in Rome at no cost to U.K. taxpayers. Dr. Matteo Corradini, who serves as the Italian consul in Manchester, used Indi's Italian citizenship to request jurisdiction over her case under Article 9 of the 1996 Hague Convention, though a U.K. Court of Appeal dismissed his move as "wholly misconceived" and "not in the spirit of the convention." During Indi's funeral service, Canon Paul Newman read a eulogy on behalf of Indi's father, Dean Gregory, who described his baby girl as a "true warrior." "She didn't only have to battle against her health problems, she had to battle against a system that makes it almost impossible to win," Gregory's eulogy said. "Yet, it was her weakest point, her health problems, that distinguished Indi as a true warrior." Gregory had earlier said that after Indi was first transferred to hospice and removed from life support, she stopped breathing but then recovered, noting that "she is fighting hard." Gregory expressed sorrow at his daughter's many afflictions, but also said her fight to live inspired him and that God used her to expose wickedness. I have now reached the conclusion that this was indeed Indis destiny," he said. "God put Indi on this Earth with the mission to expose evil in the world. He chose her because she was strong, beautiful and special. But now this chapter of Indis destiny is over. Her legacy, however, has only just begun. I wanted to make sure Indi would be remembered forever and she will live on in our hearts and through our voices." Gregory also said that his "greatest comfort at this difficult time" is believing that his daughter is in Heaven because he had her baptized. "I had Indi baptized to protect her and so she would go to Heaven," he said. "It gives me peace to know she is in Heaven and God is taking care of her." Before Indi died, Dean Gregory told New Daily Compass that the U.K.'s health system is "diabolical," and that despite the fact he is not a Christian, he was moved to baptize his daughter because he came to believe he encountered spiritual evil during his family's ordeal. "I am not religious and I am not baptized. But when I was in court, it felt like I had been dragged to Hell," he said. "I thought, if Hell exists, then Heaven must exist. It was like the devil was there. I thought if theres a devil, then God must exist." "I have seen what Hell is like, and I want Indi to go to Heaven," Gregory continued. "In fact, I have decided that me and my daughter should get baptized too. We want to be protected in this life and go to Heaven." Indi's case was reminiscent of British toddlers Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard, both of whom were similarly denied the chance to receive medical treatment at the Bambino Gesu Pediatric Hospital by U.K. courts. Home U.S. Pro-life Christian nonprofits sue Washington state AG over private records investigation Two Christian pro-life nonprofits have sued Washington Attorney General Robert Ferguson, accusing his office of unlawfully investigating their private records. Obria Group and My Choices, which does business as Obria Medical Groups PNW, filed the lawsuit on Wednesday in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, Tacoma Division. The complaint alleges that Ferguson has been engaging in unreasonable civil investigative demands against the two nonprofits, forcing them to provide privileged or irrelevant materials to advance an investigation that is not based on a complaint or other reason to suspect unlawful activity. Defendant has issued CIDs that demand, for a period now exceeding thirteen years well beyond any statute of limitations, answers to interrogatories and production of documents under the pretense of conducting a civil investigation into possible violations of Washingtons Consumer Protection Act relating to the handling of patient data and statements they have made about Abortion Pill Reversal, a service they neither provide or profit from, the suit alleges. Defendant has never cited any complaint or other substantive evidence of wrongdoing to justify his demands but has launched an exploratory probe into the lawful activities, constitutionally protected speech, religious observance, constitutionally protected associations, and nonpublic internal communications and records of two entities that hold a view on a matter of public policy with which he disagrees. The nonprofits have asked the court to enjoin enforcement of Defendants CIDs so that Plaintiffs may freely speak their beliefs, exercise their faith, associate with like-minded individuals and organizations, and continue to provide services in a caring and compassionate environment to women and men facing difficult pregnancy circumstances. The two faith-based nonprofits are being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative law firm that has successfully argued cases before the United States Supreme Court. Our clients have already expended exorbitant time and financial resources trying to comply with the unreasonable demands made by Washingtons attorney general and we urge the court to swiftly halt his unlawful actions, said ADF Senior Counsel Tim Garrison in a statement released Thursday. For his part, Ferguson confirmed to Bloomberg Law that his office is indeed investigating the nonprofits, adding that he is deeply concerned about any effort to deceive pregnant Washingtonians about their reproductive health care options. Last month, the Sisters of Life secured an agreement from the state of New York that government officials would not seek sensitive information about the clients they serve at their pro-life pregnancy care centers. The agreement came after the Sisters had sued state officials last year when a statute directed the New York State Department of Health to thoroughly investigate the pro-life centers due to their refusal to provide or refer women to abortion services. We are grateful for this victory, which protects our right to continue to uphold and defend the beauty and strength of women, said Sr. Maris Stella, vicar general of the Sisters of Life, in a statement last month. In over 30 years of serving women in the state of New York, we have learned that what a woman really needs is to be seen, heard, and believed in, which is why we are committed to providing the necessary emotional, practical, and spiritual support for her to flourish. Home Church & Ministries Scott Sauls reflects on 'hard' year, choosing humility over platform in first post since resignation In his first blog post since stepping down as lead pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Scott Sauls reflected on the hard year his family endured and the importance of prioritizing humility and service over seeking power, fame and success. Following Christ includes being less concerned with chasing platform, power, likes, follows, 'influencer' vibes, and winning, and more focused on getting low. The way up is the way down. We ascend by descending. We become more by becoming less, Saulswrotein a Dec. 3 blog post titled Do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not. For Christ, this meant death. For us, it means accepting loss and obscurity if thats what it takes to be at home with Christ. It means valuing steady, humdrum faithfulness more than shiny, shallow platforms, he wrote. It means becoming at ease with brokenness, contrition, and humility and distancing ourselves from ego, pride, and 'project self.' It means chasing character more than chasing reputation. It means nurturing a kind and curious heart, and moving past our craving to be respected or right. It means thinking about 'success' differently. It means feeling grief about the logs in our own eye versus the specks in anothers. It means treasuring Marys son, who is also the Son of God. Sauls post comes less than a month after he resignedas senior pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church after subjecting church staff to a pattern of relational, emotional, and spiritual neglect, according to The Nashville Presbytery, which also said he broke the ninth commandment by fostering a culture of mistrust among the staff. In May, Sauls, a prolific speaker and author who had led the church for 12 years, was placed on leave from his role as lead pastor following an investigation into his leadership conduct by Christ Presbyterian and the Nashville Presbytery. The investigation was initiated after a group of former church staff members sent a letter raising concerns about the pastor's behavior. In November, Sauls read aloud a letter to his congregation elaborating on his reasons for stepping down. While assuring his church community that we had hoped to continue forward and help with CPC, Sauls indicated that we now believe the most merciful thing to do is step aside so the church can seek new leadership and we can seek the Lords will for whatever comes next as well. It has been an honor serving this community, Sauls declared. Were going to miss you. We wish you the best, and we love you. Last week, The Tennessean published a lengthy article alleging that under Sauls leadership, a group of staff members secretly circulated the book When Narcissism Comes to Church by Chuck DeGroat, which they felt described the pastors behavior, including his focus on projects that brought the church acclaim while neglecting others. Under Sauls, the church expanded, including launching satellite campuses and ministries, according to The Tennessean, but behind the scenes, Sauls reportedly struggled with insecurity and sharing control, leading to staff turnover and changes in ministry focus. Sauls' leadership style and the church's direction, the outlet said, led to systemic problems, creating a competitive and unprofessional culture among the staff. In his latest blog post, Sauls acknowledged that this has been a hard year for his family. This includes losing two family members and a mentor, etcetera," he wrote. "But none of our losses can compare to the ones Mary and Joseph bore, nor can our virtue compare to theirs. But like them, we do have the constancy of Christ, love in our home, and the kindness of friends who walk with us as we weather, together, our shared human frailty. Sauls said that in this current season, he finds strength in the Psalms, the Gospels and the Advent narratives, adding: By themselves, the harder chapters of life can discourage. But as Mary knew early on, the long view will eventually prevail. With God, future glory will resolve all past regret, present hurt, and future fear. As C.S. Lewis reminds us, Heaven will work backwards and turn agony into glory. Mary once saw this as through a mirror dimly, but now she sees it face to face. How proud she must be of her boy. Look at you, son, seated over there at the right hand of God as you intercede for us all! How small Marys humiliation, betrayals, losses, sacrifices, and sins must seem to her, now that she is reunited with Jesus and all generations call her blessed." Home Opinion A powerful tool for churches to fulfill their missional purpose Long ago, a crowd convincingly spread the word about Jesus Christ: Now the crowd that was with him [Jesus] when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word...So the Pharisees said to one another, See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him [Jesus]! (John 12: 17-19; NIV). This random crowd has set a lofty standard for missional church congregations of today that claim to obey Jesus well-known command: Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. (Matt. 28: 19-20; NIV). How effective is the Churchs witness today? Using research data, PEW Research Center says, Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of U.S. adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular.' In a recent National Review article titled Against the New Paganism, Jack Butler said, Over the past few decades, Christianity has both retreated from the public square and from mass culture and been pushed from them. Its once-venerable pillars in this country have atrophied. He is right. In addition, the International Mission Board (2023) of the Southern Baptist Convention estimates that 59% of the world today is considered unreached meaning Jesus is largely unknown among 4.6 billion people. There is a lot of mission work still waiting to be undertaken. The foregoing accounts tell us something is holding back our missionally-minded churches. What could be holding our churches back? Missions and the role of church budgets While worshipping in seven evangelical churches in the US in six different states during the last 50 years, I became interested in our churches claims of missional emphasis and its implementation. Years ago, I asked one lead pastor, What percent of your churchs budget goes to missions? He replied, It is about 11% of our budget. I responded with another question: What is the chance the church would devote 50% of its budget for missions? His response was very animated (meaning, my question was unexpected) and he excitedly said something to the effect, I love to see our budget for missions reach that level, but I cannot do much about it, it is in the hands of the governing board of the church. But I assure you, I am working to push up the percentage of the total budget allocated to missions. First, I am working towards a target of 20% of the budget for missions. I could tell, he meant every word he said. By 2023, this churchs missional giving plus missional expenses have exceeded 25% of the budget. Speaking of church budgets, tiny churches often struggle with a meager income. For such churches, allocating half the churchs budget for missions may be impractical. However, today, God has blessed many American churches with generous budgets. But how the churches use their budgets is another matter. The bad news about church budgets In the article How Churches Spend Their Money, Mathew Branaugh says, that an average church spends about 10% of its budget on missions; local and international missions combined. Further, Prof. Troy Gibson in his critical blog, Church Budgets: Shame on American Evangelicals, quotes Prof. Gene Veith: Of every dollar given to a [US] Protestant church, the average amount that goes to overseas missions is two cents [=2%]. In contrast, of every dollar Antioch Presbyterian Church in Chonju, Korea, takes in, 70 cents [=70%] goes to missions I consulted a friend, actively engaged in international missions, and previously associated with a large missionary-minded church in another city. That church was well-known for its missional work. My friend revealed to me that he was the church's missions director for many years before retiring. He said the church operated with a missional budget that was around 52% of the total church budget. This came as a surprise to me as I was beginning to wonder if it was unreasonable for me to suggest that missional churches devote 50% of their church budgets to missions. His message to me was, Paul, it can be done, it has been done; for decades I have been a part of the church that did so, and I was blessed to participate in the use of those funds in support of the churchs missional efforts inside and outside the US for decades. Later it came to my attention that Matt Svoboda also proposed the idea of 50% of a churchs budget going to missions in SBC Voices. For the sake of clarity, it may be useful to distinguish between the terms ministries and missions in the context of church budgets. I read somewhere, ... all missions are ministry, but not all ministries are missions. Therefore, church budgets may support several ministries of the church today without supporting missions or being a witness to the world. One purpose of church missions is to enable people in every nation to identify with these words in Acts 2:11, ... We hear them [i.e., modern churches and their missionaries] telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God. They are waiting. What church budgeting can learn from corporate budgeting Church budgets enable or hinder a churchs missional purpose. Having once worked as a manager in the private sector, and having taught business management for over three decades, it occurred to me that churches could learn a thing or two from businesses regarding budgets. When profit-making businesses change their highest corporate priority from one thing to another, to make the change take immediate and permanent effect, they re-allocate the budget to ensure that the new corporate priority is backed by their revised budget; in other words, they put their money where their mouth is. Once the corporate budget is reallocated to pursue a new priority, the new corporate priority receives enhanced funding for: 1. increased staffing 2. relevant investments and 3. targeted expenditures. Similarly, church budgets can be used as active enablers of the stated missional purpose of the church by adequately funding missional work in local, national, and international mission fields. Without adequate budgetary support, a churchs stated missional purpose may be no more than idle words. Inputs from pastors I sought input from several American pastors on this idea of 50% of a missional church's budget going for missions one of them supported the idea and excitedly said that church members may become more generous in giving to the church when members realize 50% of their church contributions will go to missions work churches should welcome his insight. The biggest challenge that other pastors expressed to me is summarized by this quote, It is difficult to reallocate our budget as suggested. History shows an expression of difficulty is the typical starting point before changes occur. Home Opinion Oh Lord, make me good. But not yet Augustine was evidently quite a rascal before God saved him. But then, werent we all? He was born in A.D. 354 to a mother who was a devout Christian and a father who wasnt (but supposedly converted to Christianity on his deathbed). Like all of us who are brought forth in iniquity (Ps. 51:5), Augustine talks about wanting to do wrong at an early age when he stole fruit, which he describes in his Confessions as being foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself. And as Derek Kidner says in describing the Fall in his commentary on Genesis: Sins fruit is shame. Augustine pursued sexual freedom at an early age, eventually having a son out of wedlock and going on to leave both him and his mother to begin the process of marrying a teenage heiress right before his conversion. Writing in his Confessions, he describes with full transparency the struggle he felt in leaving his old life behind. I laugh out loud every time I read it: But, wretched youth that I was supremely wretched even in the very outset of my youth I had entreated chastity of thee and had prayed, 'Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.' Isnt that great? You just dont get that kind of honesty out of Christians these days. OK God, Im all in, but um, well, how about some holiness leeway for a little while on the sex and self-restraint front? Nope, instead gather in a group of other believers, and heres what happens when the issue of sin comes up: nothing. You know why? Because the issue of sin in our lives rarely, if ever comes up. Were either too embarrassed or self-deceived to say what Paul did: For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate (Rom. 7:15). Is that because we maybe dont hate what were doing like Paul said? Even to the point of feeling like Augustine admitted to and living in an Oh Lord, make me good, but not yet type of way? If true, this leads to the scary question of, do we even want to be good? Im not OK and thats OK Clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Jamieson Webster says maybe not; in fact, maybe we should not. He argues in his New York Times article I Dont Need to Be a Good Person. Neither Do You. that being good in the way that we traditionally think restrains us from personal fulfillment saying, Limits cannot hold when it comes to pleasure. He speaks about a conversation with a colleague who was tired of patients wanting to learn how to be good in a conventional sense and asked him, Doesnt anyone come asking to be more free? They dont, Webster replied pessimistically, Everyone wants to make the right decisions [and that] avoids the deeper question of desire, and desire is a compass. Ill agree with his last point. Our internal compass does indeed direct us, but the issue with the Christian is we have both an old and new compass that are at odds with one another. Our directive with respect to each is clear: in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth (Eph. 4:2224). Easier said than done sometimes, as Augustine reminds us. On the one hand, were told, No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God. By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious: anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God (1 John 3:910). But on the other hand, the Bible says were made of the same stuff as Paul who wrote, For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good (Rom. 7:1921). This dichotomy causes no end of angst in many believers who want to follow Gods Word that says, You shall be holy, for I am holy (1 Pet. 1:16), but instead find themselves still wrestling with desires that wage war against the soul (1 Pet. 2:11). It can get so bad that they even start to doubt their salvation. If thats you, let me share some insight I got a while back from those great philosophers AC/DC who, writing in their song Hells Bells, characterize the road to Hell as being a place where: "Nobodys putting up a fight." Indeed. Its both amusing and informative that even non-Christians like those guys see that. A key difference between the Christian vs. the non is the believer does just the opposite they put up a fight where sin is concerned. And if you are putting up a fight and working to resist sin, then thats a good sign you have the Holy Spirit who is convicting you, which results in all of us looking heavenward more times than we would like and crying out, Be merciful to me, the sinner (Luke 18:13). Augustine eventually overcame his but not yet desire on his quest for personal holiness and so will you and I. So, until that happens, keep putting up a fight. Home Opinion The global resurgence of antisemitism Since October 7, the world has seen a resurgence of antisemitism, open and raw. In America, this has come especially from institutions of higher education though also from secondary schools and at city council meetings in Oakland. In New York, high schoolers brandished signs that read keep the world clean with an image of a Star of David in a trash can. If anything, the past few weeks should put an end to our decades-old illusion that history wont repeat itself. Looking back on the horrors of the Holocaust and the historic sickness of antisemitism, we asked questions like, How could anyone, let alone an entire culture, be overtaken by Jew-hatred? Many assumed that kind of evil could never happen again. We now know that assumption to be wrong. According to University of Massachusetts professor of criminology Arlie Perliger, The U.S. is currently experiencing one of the most significant waves of antisemitism that it has ever seen. This wave predates the October 7 massacre that initiated the war between Israel and Hamas. In 2022, [i]ncidents of harassment rose 29% compared to 2021; acts of vandalism surged 51%; and physical assaults jumped 26% to an average of 10 reported incidents a day. The week after Hamas terrorists attacked Israeli civilians, antisemitic incidents tripled compared to the same week in 2022. Even among historically high immigration numbers in those countries, the immediate plight of Palestinians in the Middle East can hardly explain attacks in Europe, Russia, Africa, and America. This contemporary crisis is the latest chapter of a hatred that goes back centuries, even millennia. Today, whats often called the worlds oldest hatred is found at both ends of the political spectrum. We certainly should not overlook the power of envy. Setting aside the irrational claims about Jewish wealth over the centuries, a simple glance at Nobel Prize winners displays the cultivating power of Jewish culture. While envy might explain some of the insanity, theres more to it. No other groups have faced so many attempts at eradication by so many: Persians, Romans, Crusaders, Nazis, and Islamists. How did the Jewish people survive when history is filled with tribes, nations, and peoples that endured for a time, only to disappear, some with barely a trace of evidence that theyd ever existed? The Jews were already an ancient people by the time of ancient Rome. Yet they remain, though what was considered at the time to be an eternal empire is now a relic. A Christian worldview offers additional resources by which to understand historical developments. Beyond sociological and anthropological realities are unseen ones. Whatever ones views of the end times, the Jewish people embody the promises of God to redeem His world and destroy the works of the devil. They are a painful reminder to Satan that his spoiling efforts to mar Gods good creation will inevitably fail in the end, and that he will be defeated. The prince of darkness can never win his fight with heaven, but in defiant desperation, he incites people to commit evil and inflict pain, especially on those through whom God works His redemption. The Jews are also a tangible reminder that humanitys story is not ultimately a tragedy. They are a link to the apostles and the prophets, to King David and the deliverance from bondage in Egypt. Even when rejecting the Messiah that fulfills Gods promise to them, theyre a reminder to the world that God wins. Especially as we approach Advent, the continued existence of the Jews is a powerful witness of Gods faithfulness to His world and to His promises. These promises, given in Eden to our first parents and reaffirmed in Revelation to the saints, declare that He is making all things new, and that nothing, even the insatiable hatred of Hell itself, can stop His restoration of all things. Originally published at BreakPoint. Blasphemy charge devastates Christian family in Pakistan A court in Pakistan granted bail to a Christian falsely charged with blasphemy, but he and his family have separated and gone into hiding amid threats to their lives, sources said. Haroon Shahzad, 45, was released from Sargodha District Jail on Nov. 15, said his attorney, Aneeqa Maria. Shahzad was charged with blasphemy on June 30 after posting Bible verses on Facebook that infuriated Muslims, causing dozens of Christian families in Chak 49 Shumaali, near Sargodha in Punjab Province, to flee their homes. Lahore High Court Judge Ali Baqir Najfi granted bail on Nov. 6, but the decision and his release on Nov. 15 were not made public until now due to security fears for his life, Maria said. Shahzad told Morning Star News by telephone from an undisclosed location that the false accusation has changed his family's lives forever. "My family has been on the run from the time I was implicated in this false charge and arrested by the police under mob pressure," Shahzad told Morning Star News. "My eldest daughter had just started her second year in college, but it's been more than four months now that she hasn't been able to return to her institution. My other children are also unable to resume their education as my family is compelled to change their location after 15-20 days as a security precaution." Though he was not tortured during incarceration, he said, the pain of being away from his family and thinking about their well-being and safety gave him countless sleepless nights. "All of this is due to the fact that the complainant, Imran Ladhar, has widely shared my photo on social media and declared me liable for death for alleged blasphemy," he said in a choked voice. "As soon as Ladhar heard about my bail, he and his accomplices started gathering people in the village and incited them against me and my family. He's trying his best to ensure that we are never able to go back to the village." Shahzad has met with his family only once since his release on bail, and they are unable to return to their village in the foreseeable future, he said. "We are not together," he told Morning Star News. "They are living at a relative's house while I'm taking refuge elsewhere. I don't know when this agonizing situation will come to an end." The Christian said the complainant, said to be a member of Islamist extremist party Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan and also allegedly connected with banned terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, filed the charge because of a grudge. Shahzad said he and his family had obtained valuable government land and allotted it for construction of a church building, and Ladhar and others had filed multiple cases against the allotment and lost all of them after a four-year legal battle. "Another probable reason for Ladhar's jealousy could be that we were financially better off than most Christian families of the village," he said. "I was running a successful paint business in Sargodha city, but that too has shut down due to this case." Regarding the social media post, Shahzad said he had no intention of hurting Muslim sentiments by sharing the biblical verse on his Facebook page. "I posted the verse a week before Eid Al Adha [Feast of the Sacrifice] but I had no idea that it would be used to target me and my family," he said. "In fact, when I came to know that Ladhar was provoking the villagers against me, I deleted the post and decided to meet the village elders to explain my position." The village elders were already influenced by Ladhar and refused to listen to him, Shahzad said. "I was left with no option but to flee the village when I heard that Ladhar was amassing a mob to attack me," he said. Shahzad pleaded with government authorities for justice, saying he should not be punished for sharing a verse from the Bible that in no way constituted blasphemy. Shahzad's attorney, Maria, told Morning Star News that events in Shahzad's case were similar to other blasphemy cases filed against Christians. "Defective investigation, mala fide on the part of the police and complainant, violent protests against the accused persons and threats to them and their families, forcing their displacement from their ancestral areas, have become hallmarks of all blasphemy allegations in Pakistan," said Maria, head of The Voice Society, a Christian paralegal organization. She said that the case filed against Shahzad was gross violation of Section 196 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), which states that police cannot register a case under the Section 295-A blasphemy statute against a private citizen without the approval of the provincial government or federal agencies. Maria added that Shahzad and his family have continued to suffer even though there was no evidence of blasphemy. "The social stigma attached with a blasphemy accusation will likely have a long-lasting impact on their lives, whereas his accuser, Imran Ladhar, would not have to face any consequence of his false accusation," she said. The judge who granted bail noted that Shahzad was charged with blasphemy under Section 295-A, which is a non-cognizable offense, and Section 298, which is bailable. The judge also noted that police had not submitted the forensic report of Shahzad's cell phone and said evidence was required to prove that the social media was blasphemous, according to Maria. Bail was set at 100,000 Pakistani rupees (US $350) and two personal sureties, and the judge ordered police to further investigate, she said. Shahzad, a paint contractor, on June 29 posted on his Facebook page 1 Cor. 10:18-21 regarding food sacrificed to idols, as Muslims were beginning the four-day festival of Eid al-Adha, which involves slaughtering an animal and sharing the meat. A Muslim villager took a screenshot of the post, sent it to local social media groups and accused Shahzad of likening Muslims to pagans and disrespecting the Abrahamic tradition of animal sacrifice. Though Shahzad made no comment in the post, inflammatory or otherwise, the situation became tense after Friday prayers when announcements were made from mosque loudspeakers telling people to gather for a protest, family sources previously told Morning Star News. Fearing violence as mobs grew in the village, most Christian families fled their homes, leaving everything behind. In a bid to restore order, the police registered a case against Shahzad under Sections 295-A and 298. Section 295-A relates to "deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs" and is punishable with imprisonment of up to 10 years and fine, or both. Section 298 prescribes up to one year in prison and a fine, or both, for hurting religious sentiments. Pakistan ranked seventh on Open Doors' 2023 World Watch List of the most difficult places to be a Christian, up from eighth the previous year. Morning Star News (Photo : Unsplash/Matthew Henry ) The rise of employee surveillance poses potential risks for employers, as it may lead to unintended consequences and backlash. While employers may deploy surveillance tools to monitor productivity, time management, or other work-related metrics, the increased scrutiny could negatively impact employee morale, trust, and overall job satisfaction. Micro-Management On Remote-Hybrid Era Arjun Sharma, a 26-year-old software engineer who works remotely, shared through CNBC Make It that he discovered the employee monitoring tool "Time Doctor" on his work laptop, which he initially didn't pay much attention to. To him, it felt like a routine process of signing in and out for work. However, his perspective changed when his manager started discussing "productivity reports" in their one-on-one meetings. The tool tracked periods of inactivity, even when he had completed tasks early, leading to discussions about constantly staying engaged. For a long time, micromanagers have been present in workplaces. However, the increase in remote and hybrid work arrangements, primarily since the pandemic, has led to heightened concerns about productivity, termed by Microsoft as "productivity paranoia." With the shift to hybrid work, 85% of leaders find it challenging to trust their employees' productivity. Consequently, there has been a significant rise in the demand for employee monitoring software. According to a report, searches for such software increased by 75% in March 2020 compared to the 2019 monthly average, and this demand has continued in 2021 and 2022. READ ALSO: 5 Ways to Create Better Relationships with Your Direct Reports How Does "Employee Monitoring" Affect Workers? Employees may react differently to employee monitoring depending on a number of factors, including workplace culture, the type of monitoring being done, and the degree of openness and communication surrounding these practices. The following are some typical ways that employee monitoring may impact worker's feelings: Privacy Concerns Employee unease, tension, or mistrust may result from feeling as though their privacy has been violated. Stress and Anxiety The ongoing awareness of being watched over can make employees feel more stressed and anxious, which can be detrimental to their mental health. Impact on Creativity Employees may be reluctant to investigate innovative ideas or take chances if they worry about unfavorable outcomes; surveillance could hinder spontaneous and creative thought. Decreased Job Satisfaction Being watched over all the time can create a bad work atmosphere, affecting employee retention and lower job satisfaction. Strained Employer-Employee Relationships The relationship between employers and employees can be strained by excessive surveillance if there is a lack of clear communication and transparency, which destroys trust. Burnout Continuous monitoring may contribute to burnout if staff members experience pressure to maintain a high level of productivity without taking breaks. Reduced Autonomy Employee motivation and job satisfaction may suffer if they feel micromanaged and have less autonomy. Monitoring employees with tools can have both advantages and disadvantages. It can improve security and accountability, but it can also cause stress lower job satisfaction, and raise privacy concerns. It's critical to communicate clearly and take a balanced approach. Employers need to address privacy concerns, be transparent about the reason behind surveillance, and promote a flexible and trustworthy work environment. Finding the ideal balance is crucial to maximizing the advantages of surveillance while protecting worker happiness and well-being. Overall, managing employee monitoring technologies in the workplace requires careful consideration and ethical behavior. RELATED ARTICLE: Communication is One of the Biggest Challenges as a Leader - Fito Salume 2017 Jobs & Hire All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. ISIS claims responsibility for Philippines church bombing ISIS has claimed responsibility for the bombing of a church in the Philippines on Sunday in which four people were killed. Over 50 people were injured in the attack, which took place as a Catholic mass was being held at the Mindanao State University gymnasium in Marawi City. Marawi is a predominantly Muslim city in the south of the country. SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity online, said that ISIS had claimed responsibility for the attack on the "Christian disbelievers". Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr condemned the bombing as a "senseless and most heinous" attack and promised to ramp up security in the area. The attack coincided with the first Sunday in Advent, a period when Christians around the world are reflecting on the coming of Christ into the world and preparing to celebrate his birth on Christmas Day. It is believed that a grenade or improvised bomb was used in the attack. It is not the first time that ISIS has been active in the area. In 2017, ISIS militants and government security forces fought for control of the city in a battle that lasted five months and displaced over 350,000 residents. What is Advent and why do we celebrate it? In churches across the land, Advent marks the coming of Christmas. This is the story ... Origin of the word Advent The English word Advent is not in the Bible. However, the word is biblical in the sense that the word advent came into English from the Latin adventus, meaning arrival, which appears many times in the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible. In the Latin New Testament, different forms of this word were used to translate the Greek word (parousia), meaning arrival, coming, or presence, depending on the context. In everday English, the word advent is used to describe the arrival of a new era e.g. "the advent of the motor car", or "the advent of the Internet". However, in the Christian context the word Advent is usually used as a proper noun associated with the period before Christmas, although it is used in other ways too. Ever since it was first expounded by the great Cistercian monk St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), the term Advent has been used in the Christian tradition to describe the arrival of Christ in three different contexts: to refer to the Advent of Christmas, the Second Advent and the Advent of New Life, which we will look at now in more detail. The Advent of Christmas Many Christians will use Advent to describe the time coming up to Christmas. Historically Advent operated in a similar way to the advent of Easter, called Lent, which were times of preparation to focus and rededicate our spiritual lives. During Advent, many churches look at the biblical stories which precede the birth of Christ. They look at the Old Testament prophecies of the coming Messiah, the birth of John the Baptist who prepared the way, and then look at the birth of Jesus. The nativity narratives are found in the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke. Advent calendars The concept of Advent has become better known in general society as Advent calendars have become more popular. The idea of Advent calendars began in Germany. The idea spread to Lutheran countries and to the USA, and after the war slowly became more common in Britain. Popular Christmas Advent calendars start for convenience on the 1st of December. The first Advent calendars included biblical scenes and Bible verses but slowly they have become more secular. In 1971, Cadbury's launched their first chocolate Advent calendar in the UK. It was in the 1990s, that novelty Advent calendars, often with little or no religious content, really took off. Western Advent Although in the popular mind Advent starts on the 1st of December, in the Catholic and Protestant Church calendars the liturgical season of Advent starts on the first Sunday of four Sundays before Christmas. The first Sunday is generally called Advent Sunday. The second Sunday in Advent was for many centuries known as Bible Sunday, because it was traditional to read Romans 15:4 on that day. The third Sunday of Advent, which is called Gaudete Sunday in some traditions. Advent ends on Christmas Eve on 24th December. Unlike Easter Day which is always on a Sunday, Christmas Day can fall on any day of the week, which means that Advent Sunday can be as early as 27th November, or as late as 3rd December. Advent only starts on the 1st of December when Christmas Day is a Wednesday (as happened in 2019, and will happen in 2024). In 2023, Advent Sunday is Sunday 3rd December. Eastern Advent For most Orthodox Christians Advent is the forty days before Christmas, although for Armenians it is fifty days. For Orthodox who have Christmas on 25th December, Advent starts on 15th November, but for those who have Christmas on 7th January, Advent starts on 28th November. Advent candles Advent and Christmas fall about the same time as the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, also called the Festival of Lights. The tradition of lighting candles through Advent echoes the Jewish tradition of lighting candles on a Hanukkah menorah, a story which commemorates an event which is recorded in the Septuagint (2 Maccabess 10:6-8). Advent wreath In many churches, there is an Advent wreath with four candles and one central candle. The tradition started in nineteenth century Germany, but is now commonplace in many churches. A candle is lit in the service on each Sunday of Advent. The first candle represents the prophets, especially Isaiah who foretold the Messiah. The second candle typically represents Mary and Joseph, or sometimes John the Baptist. The third candle represents the shepherds. The fourth represents the angels. Sometimes a fifth final candle in the centre is lit on Christmas Day, which represents Jesus. In some traditions, the candles even have to be particular colours. This tradition of Advent has becoming increasingly marked in many but not all Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox churches. Orthodox churches may have seven candles for each of the Sundays of their longer Advent season. The Second Advent The second use of the word Advent is to describe the period coming up to the Second Coming of Christ, also called the Second Advent. Some Christian traditions which emphasise this teaching are called Adventist churches. Members of the Seventh Day Adventist Church are commonly known as Adventists. The theology connected to Christ's Second Advent is called eschatology. Many people have predicted the date of the Second Coming and have been proven wrong, so if you don't understand eschatology it is not the end of the world. The idea of the return of Jesus is one of those beliefs which is shared by Christians, and also by Muslims. The Advent of new life We now live in a time between the first and second advents of Christ. The third sense of the use of the word advent, describes the advent of Christ into our lives, when Jesus comes into the heart of the believer. The idea of Jesus coming into our lives is found in different verses in the Bible. It is found in the promise in John 14:23 where he says that if anyone loves him and obeys his teaching then "my Father will love them, and my Father and I will come to them and live with them" (GNB). Then in Revelation 3:20 it says, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in..." (ESV). This is the personal advent of the new life as a Christian. Advent is marked across Christian denominations. The traditions may vary slightly but for Christians the idea is the same - that Advent is a time for all believers and families to commemorate the arrival of the Messiah, prepare for his second Advent, and remember the advent of new life in our own lives. Retrospective presents balanced look at modern master through never-before-seen works in Korea By Park Han-sol DAEJEON Lee Ung-no (1904-1989) was a pioneering artist who seamlessly fused East and West, a distinction that may now sound cliche but defines his legacy. Most of Lees representative works, produced after his move to France in 1958, embraced both the calligraphic heritage of Korea and the evolving Western abstraction from collages featuring discarded hanji (traditional Korean paper made from the bark of mulberry trees) and newspapers to the Abstract Letter series that utilized ancient Chinese characters as purely geometric patterns on canvas. And in his tour de force, Gunsang (People) series, countless human figures rendered in dynamic ink brushstrokes take on abstract pictographic forms. Only when we consider the Eastern spiritual heritage that Lee grew up with, alongside the modern Western artistic trends that inspired him in Europe, can we understand his oeuvre in a more comprehensive manner, noted Kim Ji-yoon, curator of the Lee Ungno Museum in Daejeon. The museum, located a two-hour drive from Seoul, is commemorating the 120th anniversary of the artists birth with a new exhibition designed to present such a balanced look at the Korean modern master. Entitled Winds from the East, Winds from the West, the retrospective, co-organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), is particularly noteworthy in that nearly 40 works out of the 60 on view are being showcased in Korea for the first time. These include pieces from the collections of the Centre Pompidou and the Musee Cernuschi in Paris. With such a lineup, the show offers an important glimpse into the reevaluated legacy of the artist, whose works were once banned from public display in Korea for decades after he was embroiled in a political scandal that led to his imprisonment during a time of ideological polarization. Born in 1904 in Hongseong, South Chungcheong Province, Lee started his creative journey in calligraphy and literati painting, breathing life into sagunja, or the Four Gracious Plants plum, orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo on paper. His bamboo paintings gained recognition in juried national art expositions held during the 1910-45 Japanese colonial rule. It wasnt until 1935, when he traveled to Tokyo and was exposed to 20th-century Western art, that he began to explore beyond the confines of the classical subject matter and vocabulary of literati painting. But that didnt mean he abandoned the traditional techniques of East Asian brushwork. In 1958, at the age of 54, he embarked on a journey to Europe upon the invitation of French art historian and critic Jacques Lassaigne. It was here he started experimenting with the European Art Informel style but with Eastern calligraphic injections. At his inaugural solo show mounted at the Paris-based Galerie Paul Facchetti in 1962, a prominent avant-garde gallery that featured the works of Jackson Pollock in the French capital for the first time, Lee presented a series of paper collages comprising crumpled pages of hanji, magazines and newspapers pasted onto the canvas. While a typical Western collage would arrange the cut-out ephemera flat on the surface, Lee focused on creating a rugged, semi-3D texture by reassembling the wrinkled paper fragments, ink stains and brushstrokes all in one composition. Several years later, the East-West fusion materialized in the artists works in an even more innovative form Abstract Letter series. The artist consistently emphasized the inherent connection between calligraphy and abstract painting during his lifetime, curator Kim explained. In these pieces, Chinese characters and Hangeul (Korean alphabets), among other ancient scripts, were deconstructed into purely aesthetic, geometric building blocks without retaining any association with their original meaning. On view at the museum are Composition (late 1970s), a brightly-colored, abstract family portrait whose shape is inspired by the Chinese character for good (), and Calligraphy (1959), which depicts an individual on a cliffside using the Chinese alphabet for to produce. However, his creative odyssey was forcibly put on hold in 1967 by the authoritarian government of Park Chung-hee when his perceived association with leftist intellectual circles and his time spent in Paris led to suspicions about his political affiliations. Amid the scandal fueled by anti-communist sentiments in the country dubbed the East Berlin Case Lee, along with nearly 200 other creatives and students, was arrested on charges of spying for North Korea and was subsequently imprisoned for two and a half years. Even behind bars, the artist never ceased to create art, producing more than 300 pieces using whatever materials that he could get his hands on toilet paper, soy sauce and rice paste. Upon his release, Lee returned to France and spent the rest of his life in exile. It was during this period that one of his greatest masterpieces, Gunsang series, came to life. Crowds of inky, nameless humans populate the entire canvas, with arms stretched toward the sky, torsos bent back, jumping and running around. Painted in response to the 1980 pro-democracy Gwangju Uprising, which deeply affected him as another victim of political persecution, his figures seem to perpetually exist in an ambiguous state of angst, fury or joy. The exhibition also highlights Lee's role as an educator who founded the first educational program on Eastern painting in Europe: L'Academie de Peinture Orientale de Paris. What began as informal mini-lessons on East Asian painting and calligraphy in the artists studio in 1962 turned into an art school that has produced over 3,000 graduates of diverse nationalities to this day. His commitment as an educator was guided by the same philosophy that governed his lifelong oeuvre to foster active communication and exchange between the East and the West as a bridge, rather than merely propagating Eastern aesthetics, curator Kim noted. Winds from the East, Winds from the West runs through March 3, 2024 at the Lee Ungno Museum. Wesley Luginbyhl, a storm and landscape photographer, photographed the Northern Lights at from the small, rural town of Vega, Texas. It's the third time he's seen them in Texas this year. Wesley Luginbyhl The Northern Lights, a mesmerizing display of colorful lights dancing across the sky that have long captivated humans for centuries, normally occur near Earth's north pole. However, due to a powerful geomagnetic storm, the dazzling atmospheric phenomenonalso known as the Aurora Borealiswas spotted as far south as the Texas Panhandle over the weekend. Lucky skygazers in Amarillo, Texas reported witnessing the brilliant display Friday evening. The ethereal lights are created as charged particles are ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere, in the form of solar wind, and slam into the Earth's magnetic field, according to Space.com. As Earth's magnetic field redirects the particles toward the poles (there are southern lights, too), the interaction with our atmosphere causes an emission of light. The colors produced are determined by the chemical composition of Earth's atmosphere. For example, oxygen molecules emit a green light, while nitrogen molecules produce red light. Corbin Voges, chief meteorologist for KVII-TV in Amarillo, captured portions of the sky shining a bright red just before 8 p.m. on Friday. Corbin Voges The strength of the solar energy hitting Earth's atmosphere dictates how far south the Aurora Borealis is seen. Corbin Voges, chief meteorologist for KVII-TV in Amarillo, captured portions of the sky glowing red just before 8 p.m. on Friday. "When I heard they could see red pillars in Wichita, Kansas tonight, I ran a few miles outside of Amarillo to see for myself," Voges wrote. "Sure enough, the [northern lights] were visible with a camera on the northern horizon." Advertisement Article continues below this ad Photographer Camille Davis captured the Northern Lights near Amarillo, Texas on Friday. Camille Davis Photography Photographer Camille Davis snapped a photo of the red-tinged sky filled with glistening stars near Amarillo, Texas. "Thought it was a total failure, but got home and maybe I did catch something?" Davis captioned the photo. Wesley Luginbyhl, a storm and landscape photographer, also photographed the celestial spectacle at 7:40 p.m. from the small, rural town of Vega, Texas, located just 30 minutes west of Amarillo. This is the third time Luginbyhl has seen the aurora borealis in Texas this year, previously photographing the natural phenomenon in March and April. "The pillars were strong a few minutes before this, but it has one of the best meteors I have ever captured," Luginbyhl wrote on social media. He was also able to film the pillars dancing in a video. "A lot of things are said about the Texas sky," he wrote,"but dancing auroras are definitely a new 2023 addition." By Pyo Kyung-min Audiences were treated to a preview of the musical "La Rose de Versailles," set to debut in July 2024, through a concert over the weekend, signaling the arrival of a new masterpiece. Prior to its official production, "La Rose de Versailles" garnered huge anticipation among musical enthusiasts. The concert showcased the key numbers before the musical premiers. The musical "La Rose de Versailles" is based on Riyoko Ikeda's iconic Japanese manga, "The Rose of Versailles," serialized from 1972 to 1973, known as revolutionizing the landscape of Japanese romance comics. It was adapted into a television animation in 1979 and was also brought to the stage by Japan's all-female theater troupe, the Takarazuka Revue. The new Korean adaptation, written and directed by Wang Yong-bum and composed by Brandon Lee, aims to bring to life the manga's intricate artistry and emotionally charged narrative. The narrative centers around Oscar Francois de Jarjayes, born into an aristocratic family as the youngest daughter, but raised as a man to fulfill her father's expectations. Serving as the guard commander to Queen Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution, Oscar finds herself entangled in a web of internal conflict and turmoil. Her story, a compelling blend of romance and revolutionary fervor, unfolds onstage, setting the scene for a captivating narrative. In the musical, esteemed actresses Ok Joo-hyun and Kim Ji-woo portray the central character, Oscar. Alongside them are actors Lee Hae-jun, Yoon So-ho, Jung Baek-sun, Chang Hye-rin, Lisa, and Park Hye-mi, each contributing their talents to the production. During Sunday's concert, attended by this reporter, Ok and Kim showcased their prowess as Oscar, with Lee portraying Oscar's servant Andre Grandier, Yoon as Bernard Chatelet also known as the Black Knight, and Lisa embodying the power-driven villain, Duchess Of Polignac. The concert kicked off with Kim's performance of "I, Oscar" (translated title), a powerful rendition that highlighted the actress' superb dramatic skills. Kim's stage presence was further elevated by the ensemble's harmony and its eye-catching choreography. Particular attention was drawn to "You Only Give to Me" (translated title), a number capturing Oscar's feelings for Andre and the profound connection between the two characters. Ok, celebrated as one of Korea's best vocalists, delivered a captivating performance that resonated throughout the entire concert hall. Conducted by Lee, the composer, the concert featured the impressive live performance of the Brandon Chamber Orchestra, heightening expectations for the full performance. During the concert, Lee shared insights into the challenges of composing this musical. "I thought composing would get easier as I got older, but it actually got harder, to my surprise," Lee said. "This time, I composed music that serves as an embodiment of the era, contemplating both the protagonist's complex emotions and the historical backdrop." Lee also demonstrated his dedication by borrowing the orchestra's guitar and delivering a personal performance. The "La Rose de Versailles" musical concert also treated audiences to the vibrant stage costumes of the characters, providing a visual feast ranging from the colorful Rococo-themed dresses to court uniforms adorned with sparkling gold roses. The lifelike production left the audience brimming with anticipation as they exited the concert hall, eagerly looking forward to the upcoming performance. The grand unveiling of the musical "La Rose de Versailles" is scheduled for July next year at Chungmu Art Center, Seoul. How do you improve efficiency without compromising quality? Achieving that goal has become even more essential and challenging for the wine industry in the face of climate change, increased competition on a world level, labor shortages, and other issues. Yet, one of the worlds largest wine producers is succeeding, paired with SAP. Founded in Chile more than 139 years ago, Vina Concha y Toro owns approximately 12,000 hectares (more than 29,600 acres) of prime vineyards, with production facilities in Chile, Argentina, and the United States. It distributes wine to more than 140 countries worldwide with wineries including Concha Y Toro, Vina Don Melchor, Vina Cono Sur, and Vina Maipo in Chile, Bodega Trivento Argentina, and, in the US, Bonterra Organic Estates, formerly known as Fetzer Vineyards. From grapes to winea journey of uncertainty Wineries must consider many factors to achieve maximum efficiency, yield, and quality. First, theres the life of the grapes. As the grapes grow, their annual development can be affected by factors such as climate, sunlight, water, vine density, soil, and nutrients. These factors can influence the quality and quantity of a grape crop. And every year, the degree of influence of each factor can differ. Once the grapes move to the fermentation process, again, many variables come into play that can affect the quality and quantity of every batch. They can include temperature, pump-over (a technique to improve wine development by moving the freshly crushed juice around in a vat), and the density of the wine. Facility and human factors also must be considered, including the capacity of a winerys fermentation vats to process grapes in a certain period and the availability of workers and related costs. To help wineries plan for and respond to all those factors, they need a solution that goes beyond their traditional manual operations, especially for gathering and analyzing critical data about the growing season, winemaking process, facility operations, and labor force. Until recently, Vina Concha y Toro was a member of that group. A vintage system for its vintages The workflow of Vina Concha y Toro involved numerous legacy manual paper-based processes, which could lead to errors and didnt offer a fast, integrated method to access phenological and operational data. That made it challenging to predict future conditions and wine potential and make informed decisions to improve efficiency and quality. The manual processes were also time-consuming. For example, staff had to spend an extensive amount of time overseeing the fermentation vats at critical harvest times. A full-bodied solution Working with its strategic partner BlueBoot Business Software and SAP, Vina Concha y Toro created a SmartWinery solution thats based on the SAP Business Technology Platform. The solution automates many processes throughout producers facilities, enhancing access to critical data as well as streamlining and accelerating tasks. The solution has four modules for efficiency and quality: Online monitoring of the wine fermentation, including temperature, pump-over, and density A winemaking simulator with a machine learning model to help predict the potential quality of a wine Winemaking recipes based on optimization An analysis of the producers historical data Fermentation optimization SmartWinery has digitized more than 1,000 vinification processes in three of the producers wineries: Lourdes, Lolol, and San Javier. In the Lourdes winery alone, there has been a 28% increase in capacity by optimizing the fermentation process in each of the 32 vats. One cycle has been added to each vat, from 3.5 to 4.5 cycles, allowing more wine to be created. That improvement has saved Vina Concha y Toro $375,000 in the cost of acquiring additional fermentation vats. A memorable year On the Vina Concha y Toro website are the words, We exist to transform each glass of wine and each encounter around the world into a memorable experience. And SAP has given the producer a memorable experience as well with an award for the wine producers innovation and success. Earlier this year, Vina Concha y Toro received an Honorable Mention in the 2023 SAP Innovation Awards, which is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. To learn more about Vina Concha y Toro, see the producers pitch deck. Organizational Context/ Background The United Nations Conference on Trade And Development (UNCTAD) is the part of the United Nations Secretariat dealing with trade, investment, and development issues. The organization's goals are to maximize the trade, investment and development opportunities of developing countries and assist them in their efforts to integrate into the world economy on an equitable basis. Throughout the recent two decades, the Republic of Moldova Government has undertaken significant reforms to open the economy and introduce the market mechanisms. At present, the countrys leadership is willing to continue and deepen the structural transformation, particularly in the areas of transport infrastructure development and export diversification. Therefore, there is an urgent need for modernized and transparent Customs procedures to promote Moldovas positioning as a land-linked transit country and a pro-active player in the regional trade and economic processes. Under the World Bank funded Program, UNCTAD has recently signed an agreement with the Customs Services under the Government of the Republic of Moldova for Reforms, Automation and modernization of Customs processes and procedures by implementation of Automated System for Customs Data (ASYCUDA) World under NCTS Project for the Customs Service of the Republic of Moldova Project of ASYCUDA Component. Administrative measures are taken to prepare the environment for implementing new Customs regimes and procedures to ensure transparency in the Customs clearance process and to fight Customs Corruption on one hand and to have simplified procedures on the other. In addition, the Administrative and all logistical arrangements of the project will be done through the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Chisinau, Moldova; therefore, the process of recruitment will be managed through UNDP and the individual contracts will be issued accordingly. To fulfill the requirements for the full implementation of ASYCUDA World, a national team will be hired to work closely with international experts. A National IT Expert of ASYCUDA will be hired under the project to lead and manage the national team for the reforms and full Automation of Moldovan Customs. Under the overall guidance and direct supervision of the Senior Customs Expert, the Customs Expert is responsible for assisting the effective delivery of project implementation support services helping effective operational management of projects Customs affairs and transparent utilization of resources. The Customs Expert promotes a collaborative and client-oriented approach consistent with UNDP/UNCTAD rules and regulations. Functions / Key Results Expected Provide inputs in the preparation and elaboration of work plan. Monitor and control the daily ASYCUDA Functional operations in the Customs office. Assist in providing technical expertise to the Moldova Customs Services for Customs Reforms, Trade Facilitation and increasing the Customs Revenues. Ensure all ASYCUDA related hardware equipment are properly documented and are being used in professional manner. Assist in the development of new components for the ASYCUDA Program according to the requirements of Tajikistan Customs Services. Assist in Preparation of relevant materials/documentation for implementation of new modules or update of existing modules in ASYCUDA World System. Help in the correct assessment of Customs Duties and Taxes in the ASYCUDA. System so that the due revenues are collected properly into the treasury of the state/government. Assessment of Air Cargo, Imports, Exports and Transit regimes Profiles in ASYCUDA World System as per the standards and requirements of the Customs Act and Tariff Book. Core-Behavioral Competencies: 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 and Technical Competencies: Knowledge generation Ability to research and turn information into useful knowledge, relevant for content, or responsive to a stated need. Working with Evidence and Data Ability to inspect, cleanse, transform and model data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making. Knowledge Generation Ability to research and turn information into useful knowledge, relevant for context, or responsive to a stated need. Strategic thinking Ability to develop effective strategies and prioritized plans in line with UNDPs objectives, based on the systemic analysis of challenges, potential risks and opportunities, linking the vision to reality on the ground, and creating tangible solutions. Ability to leverage learning from a variety of sources to anticipate and respond to future trends; to demonstrate foresight in order to model what future developments and possible ways forward look like for UNDP and Customs Services. Digital business analysis Ability to support digital business processes across a range of digital projects, programmes and activities. E-Governance Ability to support digital business processes across a range of digital projects, programmes and activities. Knowledge of how it works, understanding of the opportunities and challenges for governments and society. 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. Provide inputs to the development of customer service strategy. Look for ways to add value beyond clients' immediate requests. Ability to anticipate client's upcoming needs and concerns. Recruitment Qualifications Completion of at least Secondary Education is required. Bachelors degree (or equivalent) in Computer Science, Customs affairs Information Technology, Computer Application or similar fields is desirable. Completion of recognized advanced Project Management or other Customs related courses is an advantage. Experience: At least 6 years of proven work experience in Information Technology, Government agencies Computer Programs Development, Trade, Customs or other relevant field with Secondary Education is required, or 3 years of relevant experience with bachelors degree is required. Proven experience in the usage of IT-based tools, processes, and MIS in support of Business process simplification and processes is highly desirable. Previous experience in Moldova Public Sector especially with Customs or Trade related matters is desirable. Language Requirements: Excellent knowledge of English, both spoken and written and national language of the duty station. 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. 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. Salariul lunar net: 22300 MDL Asigurarea medicala internationala 100% acoperire 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: 26 December 2023 CALL FOR APPLICATIONS Reference code SVN2023-46 Open to Internal and External Candidates Position Title: Project Assistant (Accountability to Affected Populations) Duty Station: Chisinau, Moldova Classification: General Service Staff Type of Appointment: Special Short-Term Ungraded Duration: Six months with possibility of extension Estimated Start Date: As soon as possible Closing Date: 19 December 2023 Established in 1951, IOM is the leading inter-governmental organization in the field of migration and works closely with governmental, intergovernmental, and non-governmental partners. IOM is dedicated to promoting humane and orderly migration for the benefit of all. It does so by providing services and advice to governments and migrants. IOM is committed to a diverse and inclusive environment. Well qualified candidates, particularly women, persons with disabilities, Roma and other ethnic or religious minorities, persons living with HIV are particularly encouraged to apply. Internal and external candidates are eligible to apply to this vacancy. For the purpose of the vacancy, internal candidates are considered as first-tier candidates. Context: Following the launch of military operations across Ukrainian territory on 24 February 2022, substantive flows and displacements across Ukraine and toward neighbouring countries have been reported countries in the following days. As response to the Ukrainian crisis, IOM Moldova has increased operational activities which requires additional administrative staff. Under the overall supervision of the Chief of Mission and the Emergency Coordinator in IOM Moldova and the direct supervision of the CCCM Programme Officer, the incumbent will be responsible for: Core Functions / Responsibilities: Receive calls from refugees, third country nationals, and other affected vulnerable people on enquiring for information, requesting assistance, sharing feedback, or lodging a complaint about IOM services by sharing information in the language understood by a diverse group of stakeholders and guaranteeing situational sensitivity during the phone call in line with the guidelines provided in the IOM Moldova Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP), Community Feedback Mechanism (CFM) and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Handle calls in a timely and professional manner, including distressing calls, record and keep tracking data into IOM appropriate databases in an accurate manner. Refer cases as per needs requested, both internally and externally, and follow up on referrals until cases are closed. Record and process complaints in the IOM database and provide feedback to callers on action taken, if needed. Support in managing and refer sensitive complaints in line with the AAP internal SOPs and do no harm principles. Enter incoming calls and messages received through suggestion boxes, emails, media channels, and through CFM mailbox into the IOM database categorizing it accordingly. Provide accessible and timely information on organizational procedures, structures and processes that may impact communities to support informed decisions and engage communities in dialogue as part of information provision. Promote transparency, and accountability to the affected population by being accountable towards the AAP unit. Conduct any other duties or responsibilities as assigned or requested by the supervisor. Required Qualifications and Experience Education: Bachelors degree in social services, psychology, information management, geography, statistics, or other related fields with at least two years of working experience; or High School diploma with four years of relevant experience. Experience: Experience in communications and customer service-related activities. Experience working with vulnerable populations an advantage. Work experience in field visits under humanitarian programming would be an advantage. Experience in basic monitoring and evaluation activities would be an advantage. Skills: Knowledge or experience (or willingness to learn) maintaining internal tracking tools; Ability to thoroughly follow up on cases internally and externally. Languages: Fluency in English, Romanian and Russian is required (oral and written). Working knowledge of Ukrainian language is an advantage. Required Competencies The successful candidate is expected to demonstrate the following values and competencies: Values Inclusion and respect for diversity: respects and promotes individual and cultural differences; encourages diversity and inclusion wherever possible. Integrity and transparency: maintains high ethical standards and acts in a manner consistent with organizational principles/rules and standards of conduct. Professionalism: demonstrates ability to work in a composed, competent and committed manner and exercises careful judgment in meeting day-to-day challenges. Courage: Demonstrates willingness to take a stand on issues of importance. Empathy: Shows compassion for others, makes people feel safe, respected and fairly treated. Core Competencies behavioural indicators level 1 Teamwork: develops and promotes effective collaboration within and across units to achieve shared goals and optimize results. Delivering results: produces and delivers quality results in a service-oriented and timely manner; is action oriented and committed to achieving agreed outcomes. Managing and sharing knowledge: continuously seeks to learn, share knowledge and innovate. Accountability: takes ownership for achieving the Organizations priorities and assumes responsibility for own action and delegated work. Communication: encourages and contributes to clear and open communication; explains complex matters in an informative, inspiring and motivational way. Other Any offer made to the candidate in relation to this vacancy notice is subject to funding confirmation. Internals of the Organization and NMS candidates will be considered as first-tier candidates. This vacancy is also open to second-tier candidates. Appointment will be subject to certification that the candidate is medically fit for appointment, accreditation, any residency or visa requirements, security clearances, and a valid COVID certification. Only candidates residing in either the country of the duty station or from a location in a neighbouring country that is within commuting distance of the duty station will be considered. In all cases, a prerequisite for taking up the position is legal residency in the country of the duty station, or in the neighbouring country located within commuting distance, and work permit, as applicable. How to apply: Interested applicants are invited to send the Personal History Form and cover letter in English to: hrchisinau@iom.int. Please, indicate the position you are applying for and reference code in the subject line of your message. Closing date for applications is 19 December 2023. In order for an application to be considered valid, IOM only accepts the Personal History Forms duly completed. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted. Posting period: From 04.12.2023 to 19.12.2023 Articol adaugat de: Vitalie Cirhana Alte articole de la acest autor: By Lee Kyung-min A group of lawyers has filed a complaint against the Hong Kong offices of BNP Paribas and HSBC with the Seoul Southern Prosecutors Office, Sunday, over a combined 56 billion won ($42 million) in suspected naked short selling, according to market watchers, Monday. The illegal acts by the two global investment banks were the trigger for Koreas ban on short selling altogether, Nov. 6. The ban will stay in place until next June. Short-selling refers to the sale of borrowed shares expecting a profit from a price fall when the shares are bought back at a lower price. Its been widely used by foreign and institutional investors seeking leverage to net greater gains. Placing a sale without borrowing or confirming to borrow first is called naked short selling and is prohibited here. However, illegal short selling is essentially unmanageable under the current low-tech non-electronic monitoring systems. This enables many foreign investors to continue raking in undue hefty profits at the expense of retail investors, as best defined by the term Korea discount where Korean share prices remain persistently stagnant despite the growth of the economy and listed firms. The complaint followed a finding of the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) in October that BNP Paribas Hong Kong engaged in naked short selling of 40 billion won and Hong Kong HSBC did so with 16 billion won. BNP Paribas' Hong Kong office sold without borrowing the shares of five firms including Kakao, from September 2019 to May last year. Similarly, HSBC Hong Kong sold without borrowing the shares of nine firms including Hotel Shilla from August 2021 to December of the same year. This, according to the lawyers, violates the local Capital Markets Act, punishable by a prison term of at least one year or fines of up to five times the illicit gains. No criminal cases have been filed over illegal short selling so far, but we demand a thorough investigation by the prosecution, the lawyers said. How stern a punishment the financial authorities will mete out remains to be seen. The FSS in October said the illegal sales practice of global investment banks undermined the healthy operation of the local financial market system and has grave implications, a reason why it has since expanded the scope of the investigation to 10 of their peers. Financial Services Commission Vice Chairman Kim So-young said last week that the short selling ban will not be lifted until June next year. A large end-of-life charity has reported a deficit of 8.7m while recording its highest-ever level of legacies, according to recently filed accounts. Accounts for the year ending 31 March 2023 show that expenditure at Marie Curie increased by 13% to 126.7m, which in turn contributed to the charitys planned deficit. Legacy funds, or money donated as gifts in wills, rose to a record high of 44m in 2022-23, up from 38.8m the previous year. The charity said in its accounts that its number one ambition is to grow and more than double the number of people at the end of life it directly supports each year by 2028, from 44,200 to 100,000. Record legacy income The accounts show that Marie Curies total income modestly increased last year, from 165.8m to 167.3m. Fundraising and other trading income rose by 3.9m to 97.3m (2022: 93.4m), thanks to an increase in legacies. The charity, which currently has 133 charity shops across the UK, exceeded its 15.4m retail target for 2022-23, with sales of 17.2m, 11% above the expected figure and 24% more than the 13.8m recorded in 2021-22. This has been driven by an increasing demand for sustainable shopping and an agile response to stock placement, the accounts say. Our team quickly moved stock to the channel showing the strongest performance for example, items originally planned to be sold online were also sold in our high-street shops where there was increased demand, maximising sales opportunities. Marie Curies flagship annual fundraising event, the Great Daffodil Appeal, raised 4.67m, bringing the total raised since the appeal launched in 1986 to over 134m. 8.7m deficit The charity recorded a deficit of 8.7m last year, compared to a surplus of 11.6m in 2022, before gains and losses on investments and pensions. The accounts state that the deficit reflects increased investment in growth across the full scope of our activity, with charitable activity spend increasing by 13% to 126.7m (2022: 111.7m). This includes additional investment in its strategic priorities through its Impact and Innovation Fund, which totalled 8.2m last year (2022: 0.6m), and a decision to increase pay for nursing, clinical and other staff to aide recruitment and retention and enable us to support delivery and future growth in our services. Our strong financial performance throughout the pandemic has enabled Marie Curie to incur a planned deficit in 2022-23 whilst maintaining our liquidity and reserves positions at a reasonable level, the accounts read. Increased staff number despite national shortages During the year, the average number of employees at the charity grew from 3,721 to 3,843. The accounts note that, due to the national shortage of healthcare workers, the charity must ensure our processes for recruiting are fair, inclusive, innovative and simple for carers, healthcare workers and other professionals who might consider working for Marie Curie. As part of this, Marie Curie began recruiting and engaging caring services staff via non-traditional means including social media, television, radio and roadshows. We measured the efficacy of social-media recruitment on Facebook, for instance to expand our reach to candidates who may not view our traditional advertisement providers, and found that we can recruit in one-tenth of the time of traditional channels. Weve also introduced or improved recruitment processes and technology, such as an automated tool for pre-screening for instance, for reference checking and criminal background checks. We also reviewed our applicant tracking system to allow us to use more automated systems to track diversity, generate offer letters and provide a compliant, insightful service. sign up to receive the free Civil Society daily news bulletin here . For more news, interviews, opinion and analysis about charities and the voluntary sector, MANILA, Philippines (AP) A powerful earthquake that shook the southern Philippines killed at least one villager and injured several others as thousands scrambled out of their homes in panic and jammed roads to higher grounds after a tsunami warning was issued, officials said Sunday. The U.S. Geological Survey reported that the quake Saturday night had a magnitude of 7.6 and struck at a depth of 32 kilometers (20 miles). The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said it expected tsunami waves to hit the southern Philippines and parts of Indonesia, Palau and Malaysia, but later dropped its tsunami warning. The USGS recorded a further earthquake Sunday with a magnitude of 6.6, east of the municipality of Hinuatan and at a depth of 56 kilometers (34 miles), but there was no tsunami alert. The Philippine seismological agency described it as an aftershock. In Japan, authorities issued evacuation orders late Saturday in various parts of Okinawa prefecture, including for the entire coastal area, affecting thousands of people. A pregnant woman died after she, her husband and daughter were hit by a 15-feet (4.5-meter) concrete wall that collapsed in their neighborhood as the ground shook and prompted them to flee from their house in Tagum city in Davao del Norte province, the citys disaster-mitigation chief, Shieldon Isidoro, told The Associated Press. Her husband and daughter were injured. Two other children and their parents jumped from a second-floor window in panic as their house swayed but were not injured after landing on a grassy lot, said Isidoro, who was at his home when the ground started to shake. Initially the swaying was weak. Then it quickly became stronger and I could hardly stand. My perfume bottles fell off a table, pictures on my wall swung and I heard people screaming outside: `Get out, get out, earthquake, earthquake! Isidoro said. While he feared the roof of his house would collapse on him, Isidoro said he was more worried that there could be many casualties in Tagum, a city of about 300, 000 people, where he had led regular earthquake drills that he thought helped prevent more deaths and injuries. Hundreds of patients were evacuated from a Tagum hospital but later were escorted back after an inspection showed no major damage to the building, officials said. Thousands of residents stayed outside their homes for hours in many towns due to the earthquake and tsunami scare, including in some that were drenched by an overnight downpour, officials said. Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr told a news conference that authorities were assessing the quakes impact but initial reports indicated there were no major damages except for two damaged bridges and pockets of power outages. One death was reported with a few injuries, he said. Teresito Bacolcol, the head of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, told The AP shortly after the quake hit that his agency advised residents along the coast of Surigao del Sur and Davao Oriental provinces, which were near the epicenter of the undersea quake, to immediately evacuate to higher ground or move farther inland. Pictures posted on the Facebook account of Hinatuan town in Surigao del Sur province show residents fleeing to higher ground on foot or aboard cars, trucks, motorcycles and tricycle taxis overnight. Many villagers who fled to evacuation centers returned to their homes on Sunday, officials said. After undertaking inspections, civil aviation officials said there was no major damage in several airports in the south and there was no disruption in flights operations. The Philippines, one of the worlds most disaster-prone countries, is often hit by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions due to its location on the Pacific Ring of Fire, an arc of seismic faults around the ocean. The archipelago is also lashed by about 20 typhoons and storms each year. Associated Press journalist Mari Yamaguchi contributed to this report. Top photo: A resident walks past a toppled house caused by an earthquake at Hinatuan town, Surigao del Sur province, southern Philippines on Sunday Dec. 3, 2023. A powerful earthquake struck Saturday off the southern Philippine coast, prompting many villagers to flee their homes in panic around midnight after Philippine authorities issued a tsunami warning. (AP Photo/Ivy Marie Mangadlao) A long line of Illinois court cases has held that damage caused by construction defects isnt covered by commercial general liability insurance. Some rulings cited the scope of work, others focused on the nature of the damage and some hinged on whether the property damage was caused by the general contractor or a subcontractor. In each of those examples, appellate courts have relied on public policy considerations to decide that damage caused by construction defects is a business risk and not an occurrence (or accident) that requires coverage by a CGL insurance policy. Perhaps the lower courts should have looked more closely at the language of those policies. A unanimous decision released Thursday by the Illinois Supreme Court calls the reasoning behind many of the decisions into question. The high court ruled that damage caused by the shoddy work of a subcontractor may trigger coverage under a CGL policy at least sometimes. The high court said the premise that property damage to a project that an insured contractor is building can never be a covered occurrence is erroneous. To the extent that prior appellate court cases relied upon considerations outside the scope of the insuring agreements express language, that analysis, which is not tied to the language of the policy, should no longer be relied upon, the opinion written by Justice Mary Jane Theis says. Acuity, a mutual insurance company, sold a commercial general liability insurance policy to H&R Exteriors, a subcontractor on a townhouse project managed by M/I Homes in the Chicago suburb of Hanover Park. M/I filed a claim asking Acuity to defend it after it was sued by the homeowners association for water damage to the interiors of units, which was allegedly caused by H&Rs defective construction. Acuity denied the claim, saying the alleged damage is the ordinary consequence of defective construction, which cant be a covered occurrence under a commercial liability policy. The circuit court in Chicago granted a summary judgment motion filed by Acuity. The court said that damage to property other than the townhouse project itself could be covered, but damage to the townhouse project was not an occurrence. 1st District Appellate Court disagreed and ruled in favor M/I. The appellate panels opinion called into question other appellate court decisions that damage caused by construction defects isnt covered by CGL insurance, saying most of those rulings were supported by public policy arguments rather than the wording of the policies. Acuity appealed to the Supreme Court. Dueling amicus briefs were filed by groups representing insurers and general contractors. A brief written primarily by Patrick J. Wielinski on behalf of the Associated General Contractors of America and several other construction groups, urged the Supreme Court to look at policy language when deciding the case instead of public policy. Wielinski, with Cokinos Young in Dallas, wrote most of the court decisions that favored insurers were based on standard policy form language written in 1966 and 1973. He said Acuitys CGL policy used the standard form written in 1986 which included a subcontractor exception that expanded coverage in order to sell policies and collect additional policies. The Supreme Courts opinion noted the subcontractor exception in its opinion. The court also pointed out other exclusions in the policy that restored coverage to your work (meaning the general contractors project) that otherwise would be excluded. To ultimately resolve whether Acuity has a duty to defend, we think it best to remand to the trial court for further consideration, the court said. Policyholder attorney Adrienne Kitchen, an associate with Reed Smith in Chicago who was not involved with the case, said the decision represents a major win for policyholders. For years, the lower courts (in Illinois) have basically gutted CGL policies for construction defects, she said. Kitchen said the series of court decisions that found CGL insurance cannot cover damage caused by construction defects is a legal trend unique to Illinois. In fact, she said, state supreme courts in Florida, Texas and Colorado have each moved in the opposite direction. In 2007, the Texas Supreme Court specifically rejected an argument that commercial liability policies dont cover damage caused by construction defects because other lines of insurance provide that protection. The CGL policy covers what it covers, the Texas court said in Lamar Homes v. Mid-Continent Casualty Co. No rule of construction operates to eliminate coverage simply because similar protection may be available through another insurance product. Kitchen said the Illinois Supreme Courts analysis of the text of the insurance policy overrules years of lower court rulings that relied on other considerations. Importantly, Illinois now joins other jurisdictions in its holding that to find there has been property damage or an occurrence does not require damage to other property, she said. Property damage exists so long as there is physical injury to tangible property, including loss of use where physical injury is an alteration in appearance, shape, color or other material dimension. WICHITA, Kan. (AP) The family of a 22-year-old woman who died in an apartment fire in Kansas largest city after mistakes by the 911 dispatch center believes the center has systemic issues, and the local firefighters union is calling for an independent investigation. Paoly Bedeski`s family in Wichita issued a statement Thursday, The Wichita Eagle reported. It was the family`s first since the fatal fire and it came two days after the city firefighters union held a news conference to detail significant and devastating errors by the dispatch center in Sedgwick County, where the city is located. The dispatch center failed to relay the number of Bedeski`s third-floor apartment to firefighters and waited 17 minutes to sound a second alarm to bring more crews to the scene. Bedeski called 911 just before 4 a.m. on Oct. 13 to report her apartment was on fire. County officials said they are still gathering information and expect to have an advisory board review the details next week. But local firefighters union President Ted Bush has said publicly that the dispatch center`s mistakes delayed the response to the fire and prevented Bedeski`s rescue, and the Sedgwick County Commission said it also supports an independent review. The family`s statement, issued by its lawyer, said, These failures cost Paoly her life. The Bedeskis are now calling for immediate correction of these systemic issues and accountability for those responsible, emphasizing the need for adequate protection for the countys residents, the statement said. Elora Forshee, director of Sedgwick County Emergency Communications, has said Bedeskis call was not intelligible enough for the dispatcher to understand that she was trapped. Audio from the call, posted online by The Eagle, showed that much of the first 50 seconds of the call from a terrified-sounding Bedeski was hard to understand. However, she clearly stated the name of her apartment complex and her apartment number after being asked by the dispatcher to repeat herself. Bedeski`s voice is not heard after the first 50 seconds of the four-plus minutes of audio. About 45 seconds after last hearing her voice, the dispatcher says, Hello? I need you to say your apartment number clearly and distinctly. He then reports the blaze to firefighters, with the address of the apartment complex but not the apartment number. As for the delay in sounding a second alarm, Forshee said the issue was addressed on the spot with additional training. Copyright 2024 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. By Kwak Yeon-soo HONG KONG Mirinae Lee is one of only a few writers from Korea who publish their work in English rather than Korean. This choice isnt about reaching a larger readership, but rather about the way the language works better as a literary device for her, explained Lee, the author of "8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster." For a long time, I thought it would be almost impossible for a non-native speaker to write a novel in a foreign language, she said. I started writing the story in Korean, but it didnt work very well. When I switched to English, however, it worked instantly. Lee graduated from university with a major in English literature in the United States and has lived in Hong Kong for 12 years. Her debut novel, which hit stores in the U.K. in May 2023 and Hong Kong a month later, follows the life of a Korean woman spanning several tumultuous periods in history, including the Japanese colonization of Korea (1910-45), the Korean War (1950-53) and the Cold War (1947-91). The narrative weaves together eight separate yet interconnected stories, presenting an unnamed protagonist who claims to have been a slave, an escape artist, a murderer, a terrorist, a spy, a lover and a mother. Excerpts of Lees novel appeared in literary journals including Meridian, Antioch Review and Black Warrior Review, eventually catching the eye of a literary agent. The book received good reviews and Lee ended up signing with eight different publishers around the world. I feel very lucky and grateful, Lee said. The Italian and Danish editions will be available in a few months with the Korean edition aiming for a release early next year. Lee had always dreamed of becoming a fiction writer, but she did not think it would become a profession. She was in her mid-to-late 20s when the idea surfaced again. It was in Paris, inspired by a friend who declared she would become one of the greatest writers of all time, that Lee decided to pursue her dream again. I thought to myself, Wow. If she does that, why cant I at least try? I have nothing to lose except time, she said. Lee began work on her debut novel in 2017 and finished it in 2021. A bit violent protagonist "8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster" was inspired by Lees great aunt, one of the oldest women to escape alone from North Korea. She died two years ago. She was such a unique person. She went through a lot of events mentioned in the book. She survived Japanese colonialism, the Korean War and North Koreas Great Famine and escaped North Korea by herself in her 60s, Lee said. Lee's portrayal of her great aunt is not just a tribute to her resilience but also a reflection of her vibrant storytelling. Shes had such a turbulent and tragic life, but at the same time, she was very vivacious and a great storyteller. However, she didnt give detailed stories about how she escaped because she left her two children and husband in North Korea. Families of defectors are sometimes punished harshly. During her research, the writer talked to several North Korean defectors and one of the novels anecdotes, in which the protagonists daughter hides a video of South Korean content during an inspection, is based on a true event. I hung out a lot with young North Korean defectors and, from time to time, they told me things they experienced, she said, explaining how the experience added a layer of authenticity to her writing. With "8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster," Lee aims to offer a fresh perspective on the Korean diaspora in literature, creating a protagonist who defies stereotypes. I wanted to create a weird grandmother type who has a side thats a bit violent. Also, my novel is not [read] in chronological order. Each chapter is like a movie of its own, she explained. The novel's potential for adaptation into a film is currently being discussed in both Hollywood and Korea. I spoke to a few film producers in Hollywood, but our talks came to a halt because of the Hollywood strike. Ive also talked briefly with several filmmakers in Korea, but the Korean edition is not out yet. Everyone tells me finding a good director is the most important thing, Lee said. Lee is now working on her second novel, tentatively titled "Empire of V," drawing inspiration from true stories of rescued dogs in Korea. I was inspired by a Korean television show, There is No Such Thing as a Bad Dog. I imagined a dog trainer who grew up under a father who owned a puppy farm. Shes doing the opposite of what her father was doing. As the book progresses, there will be more about daughter and father, she said. When asked about the most memorable writing advice has ever received, Lee said, I have to find my ideal readers. We all have different preferences and writing styles. Its not a matter of good taste or bad taste. So I need to find readers who understand my work and listen to their opinions. By Kwon Mee-yoo Ballet dancer Park Sae-eun, the first Asian principal dancer at the Paris Opera, has been honored with the French order of merit. According to Park's Korean management company Etoile Classic, she has been awarded Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by French Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak, Saturday. Park is the first Korean dancer to receive the accolade, which recognizes individuals who have contributed to the development of art and culture. I am so grateful and honored to be named a Chevaliere de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, she wrote on Instagram. Born in 1989, Park's journey in ballet began at the age of 10. A graduate of the Korea National University of Arts, she has an impressive array of awards under her belt including Prix de Lausanne in 2007, Varna International Ballet Competition in 2010 and Prix du Cercle Carpeaux in 2013. Her career with the Korean National Ballet started in 2009 and she joined the Paris Opera in 2011. Park's rise through the ranks at the Paris Opera was swift, moving from Corps de Ballet in 2012 to "Coryphee" in 2013, "Sujet" in 2014 and "Premiere Danseuse" in 2017. In 2018, Park's talent was recognized when she won the best female dancer prize at the Prix Benois de la Danse for her role in "Diamonds," choreographed by George Balanchine. Her appointment as "Danseuse Etoile," or principal dancer, came in 2021 after a performance of "Romeo and Juliet." In this season, Park will perform Clara in Rudolf Nureyev's "The Nutcracker" in December and Kitri in "Don Quixote" in March and April next year. The Order of Arts and Letters, established by the French Ministry of Culture in 1957, is an honor recognizing significant contributions in the fields of art and culture. It comprises three ranks of Commander (Commandeur), Officer (Officier) and Knight (Chevalier). Park joins a growing list of Koreans who have received this honor, conductor Chung Myung-whun as Commander in 2011 and director Bong Joon-ho (2016), artist Kim Tschang-Yeul (2017) and filmmaker Kim Jee-woon (2018) at the Officer level and fashion designer Andre Kim (2000) and actor Jeon Do-yeon (2009) as Chevalier. NK leader says he has 'no intention of avoiding war' with S. Korea Critics question why entire nation should share burden of treatment for 'criminals' By Kim Hyun-bin The government's decision to extend health insurance coverage for rehabilitation expenses of individuals who have an addiction to illegal drugs has provoked a heated debate in online communities. The decision was made based on the belief that drug addiction is an illness that can be cured, but critics raise questions over the appropriateness of the treatment costs for "criminals" to be covered by state insurance. The Ministry of Health and Welfare made the decision on Nov. 28, seeking to address the increasing concern of drug addiction and reshape the perception of drug dependence as a treatable medical condition. The new policy is slated to take effect within the first half of next year. Until now, national health insurance coverage has been limited to those who received court orders for treatment or probation. However, recognizing the increasing prevalence of drug addiction, the ministry decided to broaden the scope to include those subject to "treatment protection. People under treatment protection include those released from prison after being convicted of illegal drug use and teenage drug addicts. The number of these people stood at about 420 as of last year. For treatments covered by national health insurance, patients usually pay about 30 percent of the total costs, while the National Health Insurance Service covers the remaining 70 percent. Previously, those undergoing treatment for drug addiction had to bear the entire cost of rehabilitation, as health insurance did not apply to their expenses. However, the high costs associated with inpatient care and other forms of treatment have hindered their ability to actively pursue rehabilitation. Those who support the government's decision to give health insurance coverage to more drug addicts said it will be helpful for society in the long term as active treatment could reduce repeated drug crimes. However, objectors argue that the government should not bear the majority of the financial burden for treating individuals involved in criminal activities. Social media platforms have become a battleground for opposing views, with comments such as: "Only hardworking people shoulder the burden," "Drug addicts should face consequences," "Help those with rare diseases and low-income individuals first," and "Why should the entire nation share the burden of treatment for those who have committed illegal acts?" One internet user expressed concerns about potential misuse, stating, "Receiving social benefits after indulging in drugs for pleasure is unacceptable. Drug suppliers will only profit from this." On the flip side, supporters argue that the opposition's perspective is short-sighted. They emphasize that applying health insurance to drug addiction treatment can contribute positively to society, enabling quicker and more effective interventions. The government's decision to cover the costs of drug addiction treatment is based on the understanding that a solely enforcement-focused approach makes it challenging to eradicate drug abuse. The recidivism rate for individuals returning to drugs stood at 36 percent in 2021, surpassing that of other crimes by about 1.5 times, according to data tallied by the Supreme Prosecutors' Office. "Despite past challenges due to limited budgets, we aim to enhance treatment opportunities by expanding health insurance coverage and providing budgetary support for personal burdens," a health ministry official said. "We plan to improve service quality, alleviate medical professionals' reluctance through appropriate compensation and ensure timely payment and fee improvements for healthcare institutions." An Alaska Airlines aircraft flies past the U.S. Capitol before landing at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., January 24, 2022. The Alaska-Hawaiian deal comes as Hawaiian has faced a host of challenges including like the Maui wildfires, increased competition in Hawaii from Southwest and a slower recovery of some long-haul Asia routes. More than a decade of airline mergers left four airlines American, Delta , Southwest and United in control of around 80% of U.S. airline capacity. Alaska has a more than 5% share of U.S. airlines' capacity and Hawaiian has a less than 2% share, according to Cirium data. In both that limited alliance and the Spirit acquisition, JetBlue argued it needed to team up to better compete with larger rivals, and grow, when planes and pilots are in short supply . It could be the latest in a string of challenges brought by President Joe Biden's Justice Department against airline deals it views as anticompetitive. Alaska Air Group 's executives spent months working on its plan to buy rival Hawaiian Airlines . The airlines' leaders will now spend many more trying to convince regulators the acquisition should go ahead. The Alaska-Hawaiian and JetBlue-Spirit deals are different in approach, but the Alaska acquisition could still face hurdles with regulators. For example, JetBlue plans to remodel Spirit's tightly packed yellow planes to take out seats and bring on board more amenities like seat-back screens, while getting rid of the Spirit brand and model entirely. Alaska, meanwhile, said it plans to keep separate Hawaiian and Alaska brands, two carriers that are key to the far-flung states they serve. That's different from Alaska's 2016 acquisition of Virgin America, when it spent years getting rid of Virgin's branding and fleet of Airbus jets in favor of a streamlined Boeing airline. The Justice Department declined to comment on the Alaska-Hawaii deal on Monday, but some experts said they expect a challenge from regulators. "The starting point is one of skepticism," said William Kovacic, a professor at the George Washington School of Law and a former chair of the Federal Trade Commission. He said the Justice Department's review of the deal will focus on where Hawaiian and Alaska compete and "consider how the two companies might have expanded service in different ways were it not for the merger itself." Alaska and Hawaiian executives have defended their deal, citing little overlap and the ability to expand their reach. The carriers' CEOs said the deal will help them expand their networks, giving Alaska access to Hawaiian's network in the Asia-Pacific region and expanding Hawaiian's current reach with Alaska's network throughout the U.S., for example. "We're confident that this is unique from others that are pursuing combinations," Alaska CFO Shane Tackett said in an interview with CNBC. "We have very similar product offerings and we have very limited network overlap." He said that the two carriers have about a 3% overlap with seats and 12 routes. In the Justice Department's lawsuit against the JetBlue-Spirit deal, "they really lean heavily on the catalyzing role that Spirit in particular, but that Spirit and JetBlue can play in the market," said Samuel Engel, a lecturer at Boston University's Questrom School of Business and senior vice president at consulting firm ICF. "I don't think anyone has every argued that about Alaska and Hawaiian," he added. "That said, the posture of this administration has suggested there are not many mergers they would embrace," he said. Alaska and Hawaiian executives said they expect it to take 12 to 18 months to close the deal, a timeframe which would push it beyond next year's presidential election and potentially into a new administration. Hawaiian's stock nearly tripled on Monday to $14.22 a share, though still below the proposed purchase price. Alaska's shares lost 14.2% to end the day at $34.08. Don't miss these stories from CNBC PRO: Investors preparing for an economic slowdown may like dividend-paying stocks, but they should be specific with their strategy, according to Wolfe Research. Dividend-paying names are usually seen as protection during downturns. The U.S. economy is slowing, but economists are mixed on whether they think there will be a recession next year. In a late-cycle environment, dividend growth becomes scarce and investors tend to pay up for names with those income prospects, Wolfe's chief investment strategist, Chris Senyek, pointed out in a note to clients last week. The best long-term dividend growth strategy is to buy stocks that offer a combination of high dividend growth and high free cash flow yield, the strategist said. "Historically, this cohort of stocks has outperformed by 500+ basis points annually," he said. "Additionally, this combination performs very well in later cycle/recessionary environments." Here are 10 names that Wolfe likes for their high dividend growth and free cash flow yields. CVS Health' s stock may be having a tough time, with shares off more than 3% in the past month. However, income investors are being rewarded with its 3.6% yield. The pharmacy giant has a dividend growth of 10% over the last 12 months, Wolfe said. CVS' third-quarter adjusted earnings and revenue beat Wall Street's expectations, a quarter after the pharmacy chain kicked off a cost-cutting program that eliminated 5,000 jobs. The job cuts were largely corporate ones, CEO Karen Lynch told CNBC . "It was really to realign the company so that we can focus our initiatives on our strategy of health-care delivery and technology and we are continuing to hire in those spaces," she said in an Nov. 8 interview on " Squawk on the Street ." Kroger 's stock has also stumbled this past year, with its shares down about 6% in the past 12 months. Nevertheless, but is giving investors a 2.6% yield. It has dividend growth of 20% over the last 12 months. In September, the grocery store chain posted a beat on adjusted earnings but missed on revenue for its fiscal second quarter. Chip stocks also made the cut, including NXP Semiconductors , Skyworks Solutions and Qualcomm . NXP Semiconductors, for instance, has a 2% dividend yield and last 12 months dividend growth of 32%. It has a 6% estimated free cash flow yield for 2024. Meanwhile, Qualcomm has a 6% estimated free cash flow yield for 2024 and 9% last 12 months dividend growth. The company, which has a 2.5% dividend yield, recently beat on quarterly adjusted earnings and revenue. Qualcomm also gave a strong forecast for the current quarter. CNBC's Michael Bloom contributed reporting. File photo of former US ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha, talking to the press on the 11th of July 2001. A retired American diplomat made his first court appearance Monday in Miami in a potentially explosive espionage case. Prosecutors say Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, spent more than 40 years spying for Cuba while he rose through the State Department, where he was U.S. ambassador to Bolivia during the Clinton administration. Rocha's case is "one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent," Attorney General Merrick Garland said Monday at a press conference. Rocha has been charged in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida with one count of Acting as an Illegal Agent of a Foreign Government, one count of conspiracy to do so and a third count, Use of a Passport Obtained by a False Statement. The Dec. 1 complaint was unsealed Monday. But the sworn accounts by FBI agents paint a much bigger picture of Rocha's alleged activities than the individual charges convey. "Beginning no later than approximately 1981, and continuing to the present, Rocha secretly supported the Republic of Cuba and its clandestine intelligence-gathering mission against the United States by serving as a covert agent of Cuba's intelligence services," the indictment alleges. "To further that role, Rocha obtained and maintained employment in the United States government in positions that provided him: (1) access to nonpublic information, including classified information; and (2) the ability to affect United States foreign policy," wrote prosecutors. Rocha was apprehended as the result of a yearlong undercover FBI operation, according to the DOJ. Undercover FBI agents posing as Cuban operatives met with Rocha several times in the past year, according to the complaint. The life Rocha allegedly described to them sounded like the plot of HBO's spy thriller "The Americans." "Since the Direccion asked me ... to lead a normal life ... I have have created the legend of a right-wing person," Rocha allegedly said, referring to the Cuban intelligence services. Legend is a spycraft term for the fictitious biography a covert agent cultivates to conceal their identity. Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., questions Ron Price, CCO of the PGA Tour, and Jimmy Dunne, PGA board member, during the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing titled "The PGA-LIV Deal: Implications for the Future of Golf and Saudi Arabia's Influence in the United States," in Hart Building on Tuesday, July 11, 2023. A standalone military aid package for Israel, with no cuts to offset it, is on the table, a Republican senator said Monday. But first, Congress and the White House must hash out a deal to beef up U.S. border security. "I don't care how we pay for it," Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., said of the Israel aid in an appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box." "I'd even consider standalone legislation just support Israel without a pay-for, I think it's that big of a priority," said Marshall, a member of the Senate Budget and Homeland Security Committees. But he said funding Israel's war against Hamas is just one piece of a complicated riddle, in which Senate Republicans want a bipartisan border security package that grants the president power to shut the border, in exchange for seriously considering a White House request for emergency foreign aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. "The rest of the riddle is not going to be solved unless we have meaningful border security," Marshall said. "If that riddle is not solved, then the Republicans are going to vote down any type of cloture for the other three pieces of this riddle, for Ukraine, for Taiwan, as well as for funding for Israel." The Senate hopes to finalize this deal by the end of the year, a lead Republican negotiator, Sen. James Lankford, Okla., said over the weekend. But this timeline could potentially be disastrous for Ukraine, the White House warned Monday. Unless Congress acts, the U.S. will run out of money to supply Ukraine more weapons and equipment by the end of the year, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young wrote in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. Shutting the flow of resources to Ukraine "will kneecap" its military efforts, threatening Kyiv's battlefield gains and increasing the likelihood of Russian military success, Young wrote. "If Ukraine's economy collapses, they will not be able to keep fighting, full stop," Young wrote. "We are out of money and nearly out of time." Johnson responded later Monday that the White House is failing to address House Republicans' concerns about further funding Ukraine while "continually ignoring the catastrophe at our own border." "House Republicans have resolved that any national security supplemental package must begin with our own border. We believe both issues can be agreed upon if Senate Democrats and the White House will negotiate reasonably," Johnson said on X. Narendra Modi, India's prime minister, arrives at the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) headquarters in New Delhi, India, on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023. India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party won three crucial state elections and unseated the opposition in two of them, strengthening Modi's bid for a third term in office. India's ruling nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, on Sunday won regional votes in three out of four major states, in a big boost for Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of a national election due by May. The central states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and the southern state of Telangana, voted last month in the last set of provincial elections before the national poll, in which Modi will seek a third term. BJP comfortably won Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh from the main opposition Congress and retained Madhya Pradesh, vote-counting data from the independent election panel showed. BJP's performance was better than widely expected as opinion and exit polls had suggested a close contest between Modi's party and Congress. Modi remains widely popular after a decade in power and surveys suggest he will win again next year. However, a 28-party opposition alliance led by the Congress has come together to jointly fight the BJP, posing a renewed challenge. But the alliance did not feature in the state polls due to internal rivalries and it was a direct contest between BJP and Congress. This picture taken from southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip shows smoke billowing after an Israeli strike in the Palestinian territory during battles between Israel and Hamas militants on December 4, 2023. John Macdougall | AFP | Getty Images The Gaza Strip faced heavy bombardment for a third night since the seven-day pause in fighting ended on Friday, as the Israeli offensive shifts to the refugee-packed south of the enclave. "We fought strongly and thoroughly in the northern Gaza Strip, and we are also doing it now in the southern Gaza Strip," Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi told reservists on Sunday. That's the clearest signal so far that a much-feared Israeli offensive is set to envelop the south of the Gaza territories, where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinian people have been forced to evacuate at Israel's instructions. "Wherever there is a stronghold, the IDF operates. The Israeli forces are fighting terrorists face-to-face and killing them," IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari told reporters in a late Sunday press briefing. Palestinians stand on the edge of a crater after an Israeli strike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on December 3, 2023, amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. Said Khatib | Afp | Getty Images The Israeli military, whose stated goal is to dismantle Palestinian militant group Hamas and recover all hostages in its custody, said in an overnight Telegram update that it has struck roughly 200 Hamas targets, separately reporting it killed a senior Hamas commander, Haitham Khuwajari, head of the Shati Battalion. CNBC could not independently verify the reports. "The goals in the northern section have almost been met," Brigadier-General Hisham Ibrahim told Israel's Army Radio, according to Reuters. "We are beginning to expand the ground maneuver to other parts of the Strip, with one goal: to topple the Hamas terrorist group." The IDF estimates that 137 hostages remain held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip in conditions unknown, following hostage swaps for the release of detained Palestinian civilians that were carried out during the cease-fire. Israel has separately begun to declare some of the missing as dead in captivity in an attempt to grant closure to grieving relatives, Reuters reported, saying that a three-person medical committee has been studying and cross-referencing video footage from the Oct. 7 terror attacks and the testimonies of released hostages. A man looks at posters bearing the images of Israeli hostages held in Gaza since the October 7 attack on the sidelines of a demonstration calling for their release, in Tel Aviv on December 2, 2023. Ahmad Gharabli | Afp | Getty Images Those measures can help determine the status of a captive, even if no doctor has formally pronounced a death, said Hagar Mizrahi, the head of the panel and a health ministry official. Israeli attacks in southern Gaza In the Gaza Strip, Israeli attacks have coalesced around the southern city of Khan Younis, where Israel suspects that Hamas leadership is entrenched in a spiderweb of underground tunnels. The IDF has been urging Palestinian civilians to evacuate certain parts of the city, according to a Google-translated update from spokesperson for Arab media Avichay Adraee. The south of the Gaza enclave was previously considered safe territory for refugees and home to the strip's few remaining fully functional hospitals, following relentless bombardment in the north. Torrential fusillades now engulf Khan Younis, with the IDF claiming on Telegram that the Israeli air force struck over 50 targets locally on Dec. 2. 28 November 2023, Palestinian Territories, Khan Yunis: Palestinians cook food in a destroyed house during the temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in the village of Khuza'a near the border fence between Israel and the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Mohammed Talatene/dpa (Photo by Mohammed Talatene/picture alliance via Getty Images) ohammed Talatene | Picture Alliance | Getty Images "A night of utterly relentless bombardments. I cannot stop thinking about the 1.8 million people in the south. I don't think there was more than a five or 10 minute-period throughout the course of the night, and I really didn't sleep, where something wasn't flying overhead or the sky being lit up," UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, who is on site, said in a voice note. "Despite what has been assured, attacks in the south of #Gaza are every bit as vicious as what the north endured," he added on social media. The targeting of Khan Younis comes mere weeks after the IDF urged Palestinian people to take refuge south of the Wadi Gaza wetlands in the strip amid decimation in the north of the enclave and raises questions over where civilians should seek shelter next. The U.S. has previously said that the conflict cannot result in forceful Palestinian displacements. Residents of the Qatari-funded Hamad Town residential complex in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, carry some of their belongings as they flee their homes after an Israeli strike, on December 2, 2023. Mahmud Hams | Afp | Getty Images A senior U.S. military official told NBC News that he was taken aback by the ferocity of Israel's resurging offensive after the end of the seven-day truce, in line with recent pleas from the White House entreating Israel to bolster its efforts to protect civilians in the enclave. One of three international mediators of the lapsed cease-fire, the U.S. has otherwise stood steadfast in its support of Israel, repeatedly condemning Hamas and defending its ally's right to self-defense. "We've designated a special humanitarian zone in southern Gaza, close to Khan Younis, which, yes, isn't perfect, but it is the best currently available solution that we have," IDF Jonathan Conricus said in a televised CNN interview. "We are not trying to displace anyone. We are not trying to move anyone from anywhere permanently. We have asked civilians to evacuate the battlefield," he said in a separate press briefing. In the Red Sea Washington itself has been drawn into the fire. The U.S. Command Center on Sunday reported that three commercial ships the Unity Explorer, the Number 9 and the Sophie II came under fire in the popular Red Sea transit route from missiles deployed from Yemeni areas controlled by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. The offensives prompted the patrolling U.S. navy destroyer, the Carney, to shoot down several Houthi drones, with only minor damage and no casualties reported, according to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Carney (DDG 64) sets sail in the Bosphorus in Istanbul, Turkey, July 14, 2019. Yoruk Isik | Reuters The Labor Department says that a Los Angeles-based poultry processor hired children as young as 14 to debone chicken with sharp knives and hid minors in closets when investigators showed up to ask questions, according to court documents and a new consent decree with the company announced Monday. The poultry processor, known as The Exclusive Poultry, processes chicken at two L.A. locations and sells its chicken to retailers like the grocery chain Aldi and Ralphs Grocery Co., a subsidiary of the Kroger Co. As part of the consent decree, The Exclusive Poultry agreed to pay more than $3.8 million, including back wages, damages and $200,000 in civil penalties for hiring children, according to the Labor Department. "The Exclusive Poultry and owner Tony Bran willfully withheld workers' hard-earned wages, endangered young workers and retaliated against employees to conceal their wrongdoing," said Jessica Looman, administrator of the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division. She added that the division "will continue to work at every level of the industry to prevent employers or retailers from exploiting workers, including children, for profit." The company's attorney, Anthony McClaren, told NBC News: "These were just allegations and the case was in its infancy. We were just beginning to do our own discovery to understand whether or not these allegations were true." McClaren said that his client did not know whether children had been hired but that the company concluded that a resolution with the federal agency "was in the best interest of moving forward." McClaren said that following the settlement, the company is effectively out of business. The Labor Department's investigation began as an inquiry into allegedly unpaid wages in August 2022, when an adult worker complained to the federal agency, according to court documents. Labor investigators repeatedly went to the company's poultry processing locations and said in affidavits they saw young workers they estimated were 14 to 17 years of age, but the workers refused to talk and would run from them. The Labor Department told NBC News it subsequently confirmed that some of the workers were as young as 14. Investigators alleged in court affidavits that employees told investigators that minors deboned chicken, worked overtime six days a week and did not attend school, and that some of those children had been injured on the job. The investigators also alleged that after the Labor Department launched its investigation, Bran, the company owner, yelled at the workers in Spanish, "threatening that he believed they had 'opened their traps' to the Department of Labor and that because of this, he would be reducing their pay." Workers allegedly told investigators that minors who worked at the company were hidden in closets and bathrooms when the investigators arrived so they would not be found. As part of the consent decree, the company has agreed to three years of monitoring by a third party to ensure no minors are hired and wages are paid back. The investigation and subsequent consent decree with the company are part of an industry-wide crackdown on wage theft and child labor by the Biden administration. In fall 2022, the department found more than 100 children, some as young as 13, cleaning slaughterhouses for a Midwestern firm. Himalaya airlines starts Kathmandu-Shanghai flight Xinhua) 09:52, December 04, 2023 KATHMANDU, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- Himalaya Airlines on Saturday launched its inaugural flight from the Nepali capital of Kathmandu to Shanghai, China's economic hub. The H9780 flight took off in the morning with 141 passengers aboard, and the H9781 flight is scheduled to return to Kathmandu with 95 passengers onboard in the evening. The airlines is operating a round trip from Kathmandu to Shanghai on an A320 plane every Saturday, while two flights have been scheduled per week from Dec. 20 to Jan. 27, 2024. The Kathmandu-based operator, a Nepal-China joint venture established in August 2014, resumed direct flights between Kathmandu and Beijing in June and started direct flights from Kathmandu to the eastern Chinese coastal city of Qingdao in September. Addressing the inauguration ceremony, Xie Yu, a counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Nepal, voiced his belief that the new flight will bring to Nepal more tourists from eastern China. "This is truly an exciting milestone," said Pratap Babu Tiwari, general manager of the Kathmandu-based Tribhuvan International Airport. The new route will help boost tourism and trade between Nepal and China, he added. The tourism sector is a major foreign currency earner and job creator for Nepal. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) By Jun Ji-hye The government-funded research institute raised the need to enhance the National Assembly's control over the finances of the national health insurance in preparation for a potential crisis that could be caused by the nation's low birth rates and aging society. The Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs said Monday that it recently submitted its research report to the Ministry of Health and Welfare to provide directions for the establishment of policies related to state insurance between 2024 and 2028. In its report, the institute said there should be procedures obligating the ministry to report budget proposals for national health insurance to the Assembly to go through deliberation and approval. Currently, the health ministry and its committee are involved in major decisions regarding the state insurance finances. The institute said the Assembly's control could contribute to boosting financial transparency and stability of the state insurance, at a time when the population is shrinking due to the low birth rate and the worsening economy. It added that the ministry should extend the scope of the related information to be released to the public, given that national health insurance is one of the most important social safety nets. The Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) expressed a similar position in its report announced in August last year. After auditing the finances of the national health insurance at the time, the state auditor pointed out that the finances had been poorly managed, as they had not been under the control of external authorities such as the National Assembly. The state insurance should be led away from financial crisis to fulfill its role as a force for improving national health, the BAI said in its report. In order for the sustainable operation of state insurance, the current decision-making process, which skips the National Assembly deliberation, should undergo improvements to raise financial transparency. All Korean nationals excluding recipients of certain livelihood programs and all foreign nationals residing in Korea for more than six months are obliged to to enroll in the national health insurance program, in accordance with the National Health Insurance Act. The program requires monthly premiums to be paid based on ones income and assets and offers about 70 percent of the coverage for most medical treatments, excluding non-essential services such as cosmetic procedures. Equal medical coverage is given to anybody suffering from illnesses or injuries, regardless of how much one pays in monthly premiums. The laws allow coercive collection if one fails to pay the premiums for a certain period. The state auditor pointed out that people deem these monthly premiums as tax, and this makes the Assemblys deliberation of the state insurance finances indispensable. Koreas total fertility rate the number of children, on average, that a woman aged 15-49 has during her lifetime fell to 0.78 last year, the lowest level among the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries. Oil well pump jacks operated by Chevron Corporation in San Ardo, California, on April 27, 2021. Oil prices extended declines on Monday, pressured by investor skepticism over the latest OPEC+ decision on supply cuts and uncertainty surrounding global fuel demand, though the risk of supply disruptions from the Middle East conflict limited losses. Monday's fall adds to a 2% decline last week after the supply cuts announced on Thursday by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and allies including Russia, together known as OPEC+. Brent crude futures were down 42 cents, or .53%, at $78.46 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures fell 37 cents, or .5%, to $73.70. "Crude seems to be under continued pressure from the OPEC+ decision," said Vandana Hari, founder of oil market analysis provider Vanda Insights. The OPEC+ cuts were voluntary in nature, raising doubts about whether or not producers would fully implement them. Investors were also unsure about how the cuts would be measured. Sluggish global manufacturing activity also weighed on prices. The latest data implies strong economic headwinds that reinforce concerns about oil demand growth, said Tamas Varga of oil broker PVM. Geopolitical considerations were back in focus as fighting resumed in Gaza. Three commercial vessels came under attack in international waters in the southern Red Sea, the U.S. military said on Sunday. Elsewhere, Western countries have stepped up efforts to enforce the $60 a barrel price cap on seaborne shipments of Russian oil imposed to punish Moscow for its war in Ukraine. Washington on Friday imposed additional sanctions on three entities and three oil tankers. Weeks before OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, the buzzy artificial intelligence company's executive team devoted an entire meeting to debating one question: should they even release the tool? "If you know Sam [Altman], he likes to cycle through topics at a high rate, so the fact that we spent this much time on one topic meant it was important," Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI, told CNBC, adding, "It was a debate people were not 100% sure that this was going to be the right thing to do or something worth our time." At the time, Lightcap said, OpenAI had a limited number of GPUs and capacity, and largely thought of itself as a company that builds tools for developers and businesses. He recalled that Altman, CEO, was a big proponent of "just trying it," his thesis being that there was something important and personal about text-based interaction with the models. The move paid off. ChatGPT broke records as the fastest-growing consumer app in history, and now has about 100 million weekly active users, along with more than 92% of Fortune 500 companies using the platform, according to OpenAI. Earlier this year, Microsoft invested an additional $10 billion in the company, making it the biggest AI investment of the year, according to PitchBook, and OpenAI is reportedly in talks to close a deal that would lead to an $86 billion valuation. But recently, those milestones have been eclipsed by a roller coaster couple of weeks at the company. Last month, OpenAI's board ousted Altman, prompting resignations or threats of resignations including an open letter signed by virtually all of OpenAI's employees, and uproar from investors, including Microsoft. Within a week, Altman was back at the company. Last Wednesday, OpenAI announced a new board, including former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo. Microsoft obtained a nonvoting board observer position. CNBC caught up with Lightcap last month after the company's first in-person event, DevDay, and then briefly chatted with him again last week after the leadership changes. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. We're coming up on the year anniversary of ChatGPT. This time last year, weeks before its debut, DALL-E was under research preview, Stable Diffusion was getting a lot of attention, and your chatbot didn't exist yet. What was it like on the team then? I think at that point we very much were thinking of ourselves as a company that built tools for developers, so it was a little bit of a new flavor of thing for us to have to think about, 'OK, this is something that the average person could pick up and use.' We had a flavor of that with DALL-E we had launched it in the spring, and we'd let people basically play with it and we saw a lot of fanfare and excitement there. But we always thought because DALL-E was such a visual medium that it was going to be the high watermark for what the consumer level of interest would be in these tools. So I think when we were looking at ChatGPT, we were using DALL-E as a little bit of a benchmark for what success might look like, in terms of just how many people would use this, who would be interested in it, would this be something that people played with for a little bit and decided that this isn't really a tool and is more of a toy. I remember us taking bets on how large ChatGPT would ever get. I think I had one of the more aggressive bets, which was a million concurrent users at any given point at the apex of our use, and we were trying to plan against that, and of course I was trying to run all the models against that, as the finance person. So that was kind of where we were, and we were very wrong. What did you predict as far as the business opportunity, and how did the rollout and adoption differ from your expectations? At the time, there was no way to know all the things that it could be useful for. And I think that's the paradox, somewhat, of this technology it's so broadly useful, and it kind of seeps into all the cracks of the world and all the cracks of your life as a tool in places that you didn't know you needed a tool. So you do the business analysis ahead of time, and you try and think, "OK, well, what would people use this for? What would drive sustained consumption of it?" And you try and assign it utility. You try and think about it as, "People might use it for creative writing, they might use it for this or that." And in a way, there were so many things that now, in retrospect, we know people use it for, but at the time, we could never conceive of to justify why this was ever going to be such a big thing. There's maybe an interesting lesson there, which is that the business analysis doesn't always tell the story, but being able to take a bet and really clue in on where something is going to have broad-based utility, broad-based value, and where it's going to resonate with people as a new thing sometimes that has to trump the business analysis. In August, 80% of Fortune 500 companies had adopted ChatGPT. Now, as of November, you're at 92%. As far as that remaining 8% of companies that haven't adopted the tool yet, have you noticed any trends? My guess is it's probably heavy industry in some senses. Big, capital-intensive industries like oil and gas, or industries with a lot of heavy machinery, where the work is more about production of a good and a little bit less about being an information business or a services business. In your eyes, what's the most overhyped and underhyped aspect specifically of AI today? I think the overhyped aspect is that it, in one fell swoop, can deliver substantive business change. We talk to a lot of companies that come in and they want to kind of hang on us the thing that they've wanted to do for a long time "We want to get revenue growth back to 15% year over year," or "We want to cut X million dollars of cost out of this cost line." And there's almost never a silver bullet answer there there's never one thing you can do with AI that solves that problem in full. And I think that's just a testament to the world being really big and messy, and that these systems are still evolving, they're still really in their infancy. The thing that we do see, and I think where they are underhyped, is the level of individual empowerment and enablement that these systems create for their end users. That story is not told, and the things that we hear from our users or customers are about people who now have superpowers because of what the tools allow them to do, that those people couldn't previously do. Let's talk about the business of generative AI. Critics say there are consumer apps galore, but is there a risk of saturation? What does the technology really mean for business? We're in this really early period, and I think it's really important that we maintain the ability for the world to sustain a very high rate of experimentation and a very high rate of trial and error. If you look at historical trends of past phase shifts in technology, there's always this really important experimentation phase. It's very hard to get the technology right from day zero. We get there eventually the end state of the technology, we eventually converge to that point but it's only after really trying a lot of things and seeing what works and then seeing what doesn't, and for people to build on top of the things that work, to create the next best things. My spicy take on this is I think the most important things that get built on top of this technology are actually things that haven't been created yet. Because it takes some cycles of building with the tools to really understand what they're capable of, and then how to combine the tools with other aspects of technology to create something that's really greater than the sum of its parts. And so that's to be expected, I think it's very healthy. Years ago, people were surprised by AI's level of use in trucking it was seen by some as too traditional of an industry, and now we're at the point when AI is part of virtually every sector. As far as adoption trends you're seeing in recent years, is there a through line like that an industry using AI in a new or different way that you're especially surprised by? There's definitely high pull with technical industries. I think one thing that we've seen is it's a great technical assistant whether you're a software engineer, mechanical engineer, chemist or biologist, there's a vast pool of knowledge that sits on the other side of your discipline that your mastery of kind of dictates your effectiveness. I think people spend their careers just trying to master that discipline, by trying to absorb as much knowledge as they can about the domain. And especially in some domains, whether it's, you know, biology or chemistry or AI, the literature on the field is constantly evolving and constantly expanding there's constantly new things being discovered, new studies being done. So I don't know if it's the most surprising thing per se, but one of the coolest things we see is ChatGPT acting almost like a sidekick in that regard, almost like a research assistant. We feel the pull from those industries in a way that, sitting back where I did in November of 2022, I would not have expected. We're now a couple of months into ChatGPT Enterprise. I remember you launched after less than a year of development, with more than 20 beta tester companies like Block and Canva. How, specifically, has usage grown? Who are some of your biggest clients since launch, and how much of a revenue driver is it for OpenAI? The enthusiasm has been overwhelming. We're still a smallish team, so we don't offer the product self-serve as of today we will imminently but we've tried to get through as many interested parties as we can get through. A lot of the focus of the last two months was really making sure that those first few customers that we implemented and onboarded saw value in the product. We're still working through waitlists of many, many, many thousands, and our hope is to get to everyone, and that's going to be a goal for 2024. Now that we have ChatGPT Enterprise, what's the current biggest revenue driver for OpenAI? How do you think that will evolve? We almost never take a revenue-centric approach to what we build and how we launch stuff. We almost always take a usage-centric approach, which is that we very much look at the things we build as needing to qualify in one of two areas they need to be really useful tools for developers to go off and build things or they need to be really useful abstractions for users to find more value in the product. So that was basically how we looked at [the] launch. It actually kind of maps quite perfectly if you look at GPTs, for example it's something that checks the box, hopefully, on that second part: "Is this a way to abstract the power of the intelligence in ChatGPT and to point it at something that's very specific, and to give it the right context, the right tools, the right connections, to be able to get really good at solving for a specific thing?" That may be a thing that's useful in your work, or maybe a thing that's useful in your life, or it may just be a fun thing it may just be that you create a funny GPT and it's a cool thing to have. ChatGPT going multimodal offering image generation and other tools within its same service is a big priority for the company that you outlined at DevDay. Tell me about why it's so important. The world is multimodal. If you think about the way we as humans process the world and engage with the world, we see things, we hear things, we say things the world is much bigger than text. So to us, it always felt incomplete for text and code to be the single modalities, the single interfaces that we could have to how powerful these models are and what they can do. So you start to layer in vision capabilities. The fact that a computer can see something that's happening in the world, and describe it and engage with it and reason about it, is probably the most astounding thing that I personally have seen at OpenAI in my five years here. I still can't really wrap my head around that and the implications of it. But you can start to see, if you squint, how things that weren't possible previously now start to become possible. You think about things as simple as being able to help visually impaired people better understand the world around them with low latency and high quality. You think about ways that companies now can better understand their equipment, for example, and can create experiences for consumers that can kind of demystify how the thing in front of them works just by pointing a camera at it. You think about being able to help people better understand and analyze things in an educational capacity a lot of people are really visual learners and the ability to see something and be able to engage with a graphic in a way that is more suitable for their learning style, that's an entirely different capability that we've unlocked. So that's what's exciting to me is that it now gives us a way to use the technology that more aligns with the way humans engage with the world and ultimately make the technology more human. We know that OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model is likely more trustworthy than GPT-3.5 but also more vulnerable to potential jailbreaking, or bias. Can you take me through how the new Turbo model announced at DevDay differs, if at all, and your plans for addressing? I think we're probably going to release a Turbo model card [a transparency tool for AI models]. So that's probably the better place to reference some of the technical benchmarking. What's your biggest hope for the year ahead? What do you think future versions of GPT will be able to accomplish that current versions can't? I tend to think of the progress curve here as moving along the quality of reasoning ability. If you think about what humans fundamentally do well, it's that we can take a lot of different concepts, and combine those things together, specific to the thing we want to do or something we're being asked to do, and create an outcome that is specific to that request in a creative way. We do at work every day, we do it in artistic capacities every day, and it's the thing that kind of underpins how we made the world the world. That's the direction I think we'd like to see the technology go that its reasoning ability is dramatically enhanced; it can take increasingly complex tasks and figure out how to decompose those tasks into the pieces it needs, to be able to complete them at a high level of proficiency; and then adjacent to all of that to do it really safely, the emphasis we put from a research perspective on getting the safety aspects of the technology right. And as the systems become more capable, we need to keep the safety bar moving in parallel, because these systems will become more and more autonomous over time. And this doesn't work, if you can't get the safety aspect right too. In the past year, what's one day that really stands out to you at the company? The day we launched GPT-4 was really special. People, I think, don't quite realize how long we'd been sitting with GPT-4 before we released it. So there was an internal level of excitement about it, and an internal feeling of just knowing that this was going to be a real shift in what these models are capable of and what people consider to be a really high-quality language model. It's the type of thing you want to share with the world as soon as you have it. And I think we as a team get a lot of energy from the world's reaction to these things, and the excitement that we see in our customers, our developers, our users, when they get to engage with it. There was that pent up excitement that had built over the preceding seven or eight months of knowing that that moment was coming. We didn't do a big launch event the way we did with DevDay. It was one of those launches where you just kind of hit the button one morning and all of a sudden it didn't exist and now it does exist. I almost like those more the bigger launch moments are fun, but I got to spend the day with the team here in San Francisco, and there was a moment right after we launched it, I think we were in our all-hands space in our cafe, and everyone just looked around at each other, and there was kind of this mix of excitement and relief and exhaustion, but everyone was smiling. And that's a very special thing you don't get a lot of moments like that. What did you personally do when you got home to celebrate? I think I worked until late in the night. In OpenAI's less than 10 years, we've seen it go from nonprofit to a "research and deployment" company. People have asked about what that means and what your structure is like, as well as how much Microsoft owns. Can you provide some clarity on that journey? High-level, we always knew that we wanted to have a structure that, at its core, retained the original OpenAI the OpenAI nonprofit. When we structured the company, the question was how to do that. And that was basically the work I did when I first joined OpenAI: figuring out, 'Is there a way to actually place OpenAI's mission and its nonprofit as the embodiment of that mission at the center of what our new structure would be?' So that's the first thing to understand, I think, about OpenAI: It's not a normal company in that sense. It really is a company that was designed to wrap around the original nonprofit quite literally, structurally, but also spiritually to be an extension of the nonprofit's mission. Its duty, primarily, is to carry out the nonprofit's mission, which is to build artificial general intelligence that's safe and broadly beneficial for humanity. So maybe it sounds crazy, and certainly there would have been easier structural and technical ways to build companies that would have come with lower, smaller legal bills, but it was really important to us to get that right. So I don't know if we did time will tell. One nice thing is the structure is really adaptable. And so as we learn more over time and have to adapt to the world, we can make sure that the structure is set up for success, but I think the core piece of it is we want to retain OpenAI's core mission as the raison d'etre for the company. And Microsoft's ownership? I won't comment on the specifics of any of the structural aspects, but it's a structure that's designed to partner with the world, and Microsoft happens to be a great partner. But we very much think about how we make this structure something that is extensible into the world, and has an engagement with the world that can fit with the nonprofit's mission. So I think that was kind of partly also what underpinned the profit cap model. You've worked with Sam Altman since OpenAI's founding. What are the main differences between you at work? What strengths and weaknesses do you fill in for each other? Sam is fun to work with moves incredibly fast. I think he and I have that in common, that we like to maintain high velocity on all things. I think where we balance each other out is that Sam is definitely future-oriented I like to think that he's trying to live years in the future, and I think should live years in the future, and he's quite good at that. My job is to make sure that the way that we built the company, the way we build our operations, the way that we build our engagement model with our customers and our partners, reflects not only where we think the world is going on that five-plus-year basis, but also accomplishes the things that we want to accomplish today. The challenge that we have is that the technology is changing quickly. So there's a big premium that we put on being able to try and educate the world on how to use the technology, the type of work we do, from safety all the way through to capabilities, how we think about products and the shifting face of our products. And there's an orchestration that has to get done really well, to do that right at high speed, when the ground underneath you is changing quickly. So that's where I think probably, hopefully, my value-add is, is focusing on getting that right building a great team that can help us get that right. If you can get that right and put one foot in front of the other, I think you eventually end up on the right five-year path. We saw a lot change at OpenAI within the span of about a week. Now that Sam is back at the company and the new board structure has been released, what are your thoughts on how that will impact the day to day? And do you anticipate additional changes to structure happening in the coming months? I don't expect any day-to-day change our mission is the same, and our focus remains doing great research and building for and serving customers, users, and partners. We have shared that we have an initial board now, and expect to add more board members What's the general mood like at the company right now? The last couple weeks brought the company together in a way that is hard to describe. I feel a tremendous amount of gratitude to our team and a deep appreciation for our customers and partners, who were incredibly supportive throughout. That support really energizes us to continue to work that much harder toward our mission. Personally, I feel very focused. [Lightcap and OpenAI declined to comment further on specifics of the circumstances around Altman's ouster and reappointment.] Don't miss these stories from CNBC PRO: Nvidia 's (NVDA) AI-fueled ascent has not yet reached its apex, Piper Sandler argued Monday, echoing our view that the chipmaker's underappreciated software business could help further boost its stock long term. Piper Sandler on Monday elevated Nvidia to its top pick among large semiconductor companies, replacing rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), for a host of reasons including a "substantially more compelling" stock valuation at less than 25 times forward earnings. By contrast, AMD's forward multiple is about 33. Additionally, the Wall Street firm said Nvidia holds "significant competitive advantages" in the AI chip market compared with new entrants, such as AMD, thanks to its complementary networking and software offerings. Piper Sandler reiterated its buy-equivalent rating on Nvidia's stock and $620 per-share price target, which implies nearly 33% upside from its Friday close. After Nvidia's more-than-200% stock-price gain this year, investors are wondering what's "new" about Nvidia, Jim Cramer said Monday. The answer to that question is software, Jim said, which could eventually help offset the historically boom-and-bust nature of semiconductor sales. "The world has decided [Nvidia] is a hardware company, so it deserves a hardware multiple," Jim said. "I think that's quite wrong. I think it deserves more than that," he argued. Software-and-services revenue is generally seen as more predictable than cyclical hardware sales, and as a result, investors are usually willing to pay a premium for it. To be sure, Nvidia's software-and-services business is small at the moment it's on pace to generate $1 billion in annualized revenue by year-end, the company said in late November. For comparison, in its fiscal year ending in January, analysts expect Nvidia's companywide sales to be nearly $59 billion, according to FactSet. Over time, though, Piper Sandler believes software can become a "significant portion" of Nvidia's total revenue. Software also expands Nvidia's universe of potential revenue sometimes referred to as its total addressable market beyond sales of hardware, like its cutting-edge AI processors, Piper Sandler said. Nvidia's software-and-services business includes DGX Cloud a supercomputer accessible via web browser and AI Enterprise, a suite of tools for companies to build their own AI applications. In particular, Piper Sandler sees AI Enterprise as a key differentiator compared with AMD, which recently launched an AI chip to rival Nvidia's dominance on the hardware side. We added AMD, a former Club holding, to our watchlist of stocks in early October, amid growing confidence that it could be a strong No. 2 player to Nvidia in the AI chip world. Nvidia remains one of the Club's two "own it, don't trade it" stocks, along with Apple (AAPL), which in recent years has relied on growing services revenue to be valued as more than just a hardware company . Despite our alignment with Piper Sandler on Nvidia's long-term software opportunity, Jim on Monday cautioned that its stock could be due for a breather. After climbing almost 15% in November alone , shares of Nvidia on Monday were on pace for their third-straight day of declines. Those losses come amid a recent rotation out of 2023's biggest tech winners. Nvidia stock was down more than 2% in midday trading, at roughly $456 a share. "Nvidia has moved too much, and now it has to rest," Jim said. "It just does. It has to rest it's OK." NVDA YTD mountain Nvidia (NVDA) year-to-date performance. (Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust is long NVDA . See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED. Visitors visit the NVIDIA booth at the 2023 Hangzhou Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China, October 31, 2023. (Photo by Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Costfoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images Ukrainian soldiers in a tank in the direction of Avdiivka in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, on Dec. 1, 2023. At least two people were reportedly killed in Russian shelling in the Kherson region on Sunday, while 18 attack drones fired from occupied Crimea were downed overnight, according to Ukrainian officials. Along with attacks by air, intense fighting continues along defensive lines in Ukraine's south and east, particularly Maryinka, Avdiivka and Bakhmut. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy used his nightly address to thank those who had not forgotten about fighters on the front line and people living in occupied areas. Ukraine is preparing new military support packages from its partners and strengthening air defenses, he said. Last week, Zelenskyy said the war had entered a new phase as harsh weather sets in and the country braces itself for a rise in Russian strikes on energy infrastructure, a strategy Moscow employed last winter. Zelenskyy also told AP in an interview that Ukraine had "wanted faster results" in this year's counteroffensive, which has made limited progress in the face of deeply entrenched Russian defenses. Ukraine says it needs to boost its own defensive lines for the winter. Here are the biggest calls on Wall Street on Monday: Morgan Stanley upgrades East West Bancorp to overweight from equal weight Morgan Stanley said in its upgrade of the regional bank that it's underappreciated. 'Upgrading EWBC to Overweight given its underappreciated excess capital levels that provide both a cushion against weakening credit and the ability to generate above peer loan growth in a weak macro environment." Bank of America adds Union Pacific and US Bancorp to the US1 Focus list Bank of America added both stocks to the firm's top picks list. "We are adding US Bancorp (USB) and Union Pacific (UNP) to the US 1 List." Mizuho upgrades General Motors to buy from hold Mizuho sees several positive catalysts ahead for GM , now that the UAW strike is in the rearview mirror. "The UAW strike is in the rearview mirror, production has resumed, and we see idiosyncratic catalysts." UBS reiterates Apple as neutral UBS said its checks show that Apple's iPhone sales in China remain "sluggish." "Phone sell-through in Oct. returns to growth due to timing but China sluggish." Deutsche Bank downgrades Anheuser Busch InBev to hold from buy Deutsche downgraded the stock, mainly on valuation. "We continue to see ABI's broadly EM focused sales exposure as attractive combined with the company's market leading market share positions. ... .However, with the shares trading on a CY24 P/E of 17.3x and offering a FCF yield of 5.6% we see the shares as broadly fairly valued for now. We therefore downgrade to HOLD from BUY." Deutsche Bank upgrades Hawaiian Airlines to buy from hold Deutsche upgraded the airline after Alaska announced it was acquiring Hawaiian over the weekend. "On the surface, the equity premium is significant, although Hawaiian's equity value traded at a level that was roughly double the $1.0 billion consideration during the pre-pandemic period from 20162019." Wells Fargo downgrades Lululemon to equal weight from overweight Wells said in its downgrade of the stock that it sees less balanced risk/reward. "Downgrading LULU to EW. While we tweak EPS higher, we maintain our $445 PT and are taking our chips off the table following a solid run YTD. We remove LULU from our Top Picks list and replace with NKE." Bank of America reiterates Amazon as buy The bank said its 2024 online e-commerce survey shows Amazon is the top choice for consumers. " Amazon remains, by far, the most popular eComm site; 64% of respondents search Amazon first when buying products (vs. Google at 14%) and, on a net basis, 45% of respondents indicate increasing usage in the next 6 months (up vs. 42% last year and vs. Walmart at 29%)." Morgan Stanley downgrades Sea Limited to equal weight from overweight Morgan Stanley downgraded the Singapore-based tech conglomerate until its business outlook is clearer. "[W]e think SE's earnings predictability for the next 6-12 months is quite low. We lower our price target to US$47/share and move to EW till we get more clarity on the: 1) Competitive landscape dynamics in Indonesia, (2) stickiness of [gross merchandise value] once marketing spend tapers, and 3) unit economics of live-streaming in this region." Roth MKM upgrades Fluence to buy from hold Roth upgraded the energy company after its recent earnings. "We are upgrading FLNC to Buy following the strong FQ4 beat and higher than- expected 2024 revenue guidance." Evercore ISI downgrades Fisker to in line from outperform Evercore said it sees too much uncertainty at the electric vehicle company. "In addition to a general lack of execution or tangible evidence of increased execution, we see FSR' s next 12 months as a highly precarious tightrope of execution, brand risk, capital raises & dilution." Piper Sandler names Nvidia a top pick Piper said the stock's valuation is particularly "compelling." "We are making NVDA our top large-cap pick (previously AMD) for the following reasons. 1) Valuation is now substantially more compelling than AMD, 2) NVDA provides the full stack of compute that allows for strong efficiencies and significant competitive advantages at the system level." Goldman Sachs upgrades Coca-Cola European Partners to buy from neutral Goldman upgraded the European Coke company, seeing a "favorable" risk/reward. "We upgrade CCEP to Buy and raise our price target to $70 (from $61). We see a favorable risk/reward for CCEP heading into year-end and beyond given a number of volume-related tailwinds a rarity in the Staples universe as the wrap around pricing benefit fades and topline growth becomes harder to come by." JPMorgan upgrades Carvana to neutral from underweight JPMorgan said the unknowns surrounding the stock are becoming better understood. "The known unknowns around the CVNA story are better appreciated by investors today in our view and it is possible CVNA can execute its way through this uncertain macro and used car industry phase in a way that limits downside to near- and medium-term estimates." Wells Fargo upgrades CyberArk to overweight from equal weight Wells sees potential upside to earnings estimates for the cyber security company. "We are upgrading CYBR to OW, as we believe the company is capitalizing on recent breach activity and the changing competitive dynamics. Our $250 PT equates to 24% upside, though there is still room for the multiple (10x) and estimates to move higher." Morgan Stanley upgrades Insulet to overweight from equal weight Morgan Stanley initiated the insulin pump therapy company and said it sees room for further gains. "GLP-1 concerns are disproportionate given Insulet's Type 1 exposure, and we see minimal impact to near-term revenue growth." Bank of America upgrades ONEOK to buy from neutral Bank of America said it's bullish on the natgas company's agreement to purchase Magellan Midstream. "We upgrade OKE to Buy from Neutral and raise our PO from $72 to $83. We think the market is underappreciating the synergies and FCF step-up from the merger with MMP." Bank of America initiates Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals at buy Bank of America said in its initiation of the biotech company that it has a "compelling" platform. "We initiate coverage on Arrowhead Pharma (ARWR) with a Buy rating and a $29/shr PO based on our risk-adjusted" sum of the parts analysis. KeyBanc initiates Worthington Steel as overweight KeyBanc initiated research coverage of the steel maker and called it resilient. "We are initiating coverage of Worthington Steel, a carve out of Worthington Industries, now Worthington Enterprises a leading value-added carbon sheet steel processor and distributor for automotive, construction, electrical, and industrial applications, with an Overweight rating and $29 price target given a favorable entry point/valuation, reflecting > 30% upside." Barclays upgrades 3M to equal weight from underweight Barclays said in its upgrade of 3M that it sees a revenue recovery. "We think the top line should be due for a recovery in 2024 after two weak years. Margin expansion could be above average due to the latest cost-cutting plan, and the evidence of greater cost control." TD Cowen reiterates Coinbase as underperform TD Cowen is standing by its underperform rating on the crypto company, seeing limited visibility into its business outlook. "We estimate COIN's November spot volume bounce will drive at most an incremental $122MM of EBITDA to our Q4 est. Given limited visibility on trading durability and possibility for lower take-rate mix shift we view the $11.5B of added market cap since 11/3 as an excessive capitalization off this move." Oppenheimer reiterates Uber as outperform Oppenheimer raised its price target on the stock to $75 per share from $65 in anticipation of its entry into the S & P 500 index. "Following the inclusion, we expect UBER to lean into growth and share buybacks, which should increase investor sentiment for growth/return in 2024." Truist upgrades CNX Resources to buy from hold Truist said in its upgrade of the natgas company that investors should buy the dip in CNX. "We expect investor sentiment to remain depressed over the next few months in the gas space, and anticipate the company's strong hedging profile to insulate the name, while still providing investors exposure to longer-term gas asset upside." KeyBanc downgraded Herc Holdings and United Rentals to sector weight from overweight KeyBanc downgraded the equipment rental companies, mainly because of their stock valuations. "We are downgrading URI and HRI to Sector Weight from Overweight as valuation captures moderating starts within our Breaking Ground dataset, plateauing pricing in our proprietary spot rental rate scrapes, and downward trends in other forward-looking nonresidential indicators." Wells Fargo reiterates Nike as overweight Wells says Nike is a top defensive pick for 2024. "We simply believe the recovery characteristics and self-help story now beginning at NKE make for a more compelling long idea into 2024." Morgan Stanley reiterates Palo Alto as overweight Morgan Stanley said Palo Alto shares have the poten tial to rise further. "We see further upside from here as growing AI tailwinds and multiple product cycles drive re-acceleration in FY25." US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen hosts Leaders from Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP) countries at the Treasury Department in Washington, DC, on November 3, 2023. WASHINGTON Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will travel to Mexico City this week to strengthen economic ties with America's top trading partner, the Treasury Department said Monday. Yellen will meet with Mexican counterparts, including President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, from Dec. 5-7 on creating supply chains spanning the bordering nations to spur job growth and bolster economic security, according to a release. Imports and exports between the U.S. and Mexico reached nearly $600 billion so far in 2023, per the International Trade Administration, and exceeded $850 billion in 2022, according to Treasury. Direct investments between the nations include manufacturing, wholesale trade, real estate and finance and insurance, according to the U.S. Trade Representative. Yellen's trip corresponds with the Treasury's launch of a Counter-Fentanyl Strike Force, to combat illicit trafficking of the deadly drug into the United States. Last month, the department worked with its Mexican counterparts to sanction three Mexican individuals and 13 Mexican entities linked to the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG), a prolific fentanyl trafficker. The new strike force will "allow us to bring the department's unrivaled expertise in fighting financial crime to bear against this deadly epidemic," Yellen said in a statement. The group's creation follows an agreement between President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping last month to jointly curb access to the fentanyl precursor chemicals that Mexican cartels use to manufacture the drug, before sending it north for distribution in the U.S. "Treasury will use every tool at its disposal to disrupt the ability of drug traffickers to peddle this poison in our country," Yellen added. U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry participates in an event on women's role in building a climate-resilient world, at COP28 World Climate Summit, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, December 4, 2023. The United States and more than 20 other countries plan to triple nuclear power by 2050 to achieve net-zero carbon emissions and limit climate change. "Nuclear power that adheres to the highest standards of safety, sustainability, security, and non-proliferation has a key role to play in keeping 1.5 C within reach," U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said in a statement issued over the weekend at the U.N. climate conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Other major economies that signed on to the agreement include Canada, the world's second-largest uranium producer; France, a global leader in nuclear energy; the United Kingdom; and Japan, which suffered a devastating nuclear accident in 2011 triggered by an earthquake and tsunami. The declaration is the most concrete step taken yet by major nations to place nuclear power at the center of the push to transition to clean energy. Interest in nuclear is booming worldwide amid growing recognition that a more dependable source of clean electricity will be needed to support the rapidly growing role of wind and solar in power grids. Nuclear is one of the few clean energy sources that can provide power without interruption when wind and solar are not available due to weather conditions. "Studies confirm that the goal of global net zero carbon emissions can only be reached by 2050 with swift, sustained and significant investment in nuclear energy," the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said in a statement in Dubai on Friday. The head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, said last month that nuclear energy is making a "very strong comeback," but government support is needed for projects. Nuclear power capacity needs to more than double from 417 gigawatts in 2022 to more than 900 gigawatts in 2050 to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by that year, according to an IEA report published in October. Nuclear capacity increased 40% worldwide in 2022 with China, Finland, Korea and Pakistan leading the way, according to the IEA report. More than 40% of the 61 nuclear plants currently under construction are in China, according to the World Nuclear Association. India and Russia are also investing heavily in nuclear power. Don't miss these stories from CNBC PRO: President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, gestures as he speaks after the National Electoral Council published the results of the consultative referendum on Venezuelan sovereignty over the Essequibo, in Caracas, on December 3, 2023. Venezuelan electoral authorities on December 3 claimed that 95 percent of voters in a nonbinding referendum approved of the nation's territorial claim on a huge chunk of neighboring oil-rich Guyana. It is "an evident and overwhelming victory for the 'Yes' in this consultative referendum," said the president of the National Electoral Council, Elvis Amoroso. (Photo by Pedro Rances Mattey / AFP) (Photo by PEDRO RANCES MATTEY/AFP via Getty Images) Venezuelans on Sunday voted to claim sovereignty over a large swathe of their oil-rich neighbor Guyana, marking the latest escalation in a long-standing territorial dispute between the countries. Voters were asked if they supported the establishment of a new state in the contested area, known as the Essequibo. Venezuela's National Electoral Council counted more than 10.5 million votes, the country's local media stated. The number of voters were not specified, however, and the Associated Press reported that few voters could be seen at polling sites throughout the voting period. The 61,600 square-mile Essequibo region makes up two-thirds of Guyana, and holds enormous oil reserves off its coast. Friction between both countries has flared since 2015 following oil exploration operations by companies like ExxonMobil. Venezuela believes that Guyana has no right to grant oil concessions in the maritime areas off the disputed territory. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government is also facing international pressure to facilitate free and fair elections in 2024. The dispute over Essequibo is more than a century old. In 1899, an international arbitral tribunal awarded the territory to Britain, when Guyana was still under its colonial rule. Venezuela has since actively disputed this. Maduro in November accused Guyana, the U.S. and oil firms of robbing Venezuela of its territory through "legal colonialism." Guyana has maintained that the accord is legal and binding, and in 2018 had sought the International Court of Justice to rule it as such. Other questions in the referendum included whether or not to grant citizenship to current and future residents in the region, as well as whether there should be a rejection of the ICJ's jurisdiction over the territorial dispute between both countries. It remains unclear how Maduro's government will enforce the results. Thomas Cook Ltd on Monday said that its promoter Fairbridge Capital (Mauritius) Ltd has completed an offer for sale (OFS) of 4 crore equity shares of Thomas Cook (India) Limited. The transaction is valued at 558 crore, the company said in a regulatory filing. Share Market Live NSE 153 apiece on the NSE today. At 1:25 pm, the scrip was trading 3.94% higher at153 apiece on the NSE today. Thomas Cook shares were one of the top performers so far this year, as it has given huge returns of 110% to investors. In March 2021, Fairbridge Capital (Mauritius) injected capital of $60 million to assist Thomas Cook (India) with the disruption to its business that resulted from the global pandemic, the company said. Now that the business of Thomas Cook (India) has fully recovered, as is reflected in its financial performance, the OFS has resulted in the return of $67.2 million to Fairbridge Capital (Mauritius), the statement read. Fairbridge Capital (Mauritius) Ltd continues to be the majority shareholder and promoter of Thomas Cook (India) Ltd and holds 30 crore shares which is higher than the number of shares it held prior to the funds injected in March 2021 (24.8 crore shares), while increasing the floating stock available to minority shareholders. "Thomas Cook India has been an important member of the Fairfax family since 2012 and we remain committed to maintaining our position as the majority shareholder and promoter of the company. The recovery of the business post the global pandemic is in line with the Tourism and Hospitality industry globally. I am confident that the company will continue to benefit from the India growth story and the rebound of the Tourism and Hospitality industry worldwide, said Prem Watsa Chairman and CEO of Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) In a dazzling display of creativity and cultural homage, Globes Hapag Movement and Lakbay Hibla recently joined forces for a transformative fashion extravaganza celebrating the Indigenous Peoples Month. The awe-inspiring Lakbay Hibla Project, The IP Fabrics in Travel, highlighted the rich cultural heritage of the Philippines and creations of the Hapag Movements talented sewing program participants, who also modeled their products. The Hapag Movement is a Globe of Good initiative aimed at reducing hunger and providing job opportunities to help families in need. Organized by JCI QC Diamante with Marianas Momentous Events Management, the impressive Lakbay Hibla event held at the Hotel Lucky Chinatown aimed to promote, preserve and protect the Filipino indigenous fabrics and weaving traditions. The Lakbay Hibla project showcases our indigenous fabrics in traditional clothing, as well as contemporary fashion. We asked ASEAN designers to feature them in their designs to promote our woven fabrics not just locally but also in other countries, said Dani Vicente, JCI Quezon City Diamante President. We want to help people in a sustainable way. We dont want to do a one-time project. It doesnt matter if its slow as long as its sustainable and they can carry it out in the future without our help. Hayden Ng, Founder of ASEAN Fashion Designers Showcase (AFDS), echoed Vicentes statement: Were trying to promote the talents and crafts of Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines more to an international platform by coming together with ASEAN designers so there is a market available for them. It also provides a livelihood for the indigenous people. Monday Gonzalez, Globe Senior Director for Content Management and Creative Services, represented Globe at the event. Photo from Globe The one-day runway show featured a remarkable lineup of 10 ASEAN Fashion Designers Showcase #fashionambassadors, who collaborated with JCI Quezon City Diamante to unveil their latest creations. These exceptional designs were brought to life by a cast of 40 talented Filipino models, including ASEAN Fashion Designers Showcase #modelambassadors Dom Petch from Thailand and Jan Villanueva from the Philippines. The event's success extended beyond the runway, offering the Hapag Movements sewing program participants a unique opportunity to display their work to a wider audience and opening doors for them in the evolving fashion landscape. The event also served as a platform for them to show that they can be a source of talented and skilled individuals in the fashion industry. We are delighted to collaborate with Lakbay Hibla for this event, a platform that not only spotlighted the exceptional skills of our sewing program graduates but also emphasized the Hapag Movement's dedication to driving positive transformation in the fashion industry. This partnership marks an exciting new chapter, brimming with possibilities for our graduates and the Hapag Movement, fueling our anticipation for what the future holds, said Yoly Crisanto, Globe Group Chief Sustainability and Corporate Communications Officer. The partnership between Hapag Movement and Lakbay Hibla set a new standard for fashion events, proving that when creativity and social responsibility come together, the possibilities are limitless. To learn more about the Hapag Movement, visit https://www.globe.com.ph/globeofgood. South Korea and Britain will begin negotiations for upgrading the bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) next month in response to changing global business circumstances, Seoul's finance ministry said Monday. The two countries inked the FTA in August 2019, and the pact went effect in January 2021, following Britain's departure from the European Union. Last month, the two nations agreed to modernize the bilateral free trade deal, and the negotiations will be held starting January 2024, the Ministry of Economy and Finance said. During his state visit to Britain in November, President Yoon Suk Yeol said the FTA has boosted the ties in such various fields as finance, logistics, service and bioscience between South Korea and Britain, and the envisioned upgrade will further strengthen cooperation on supply chains and digital trade. "The two nations will also establish and activate new government-level consultative bodies soon for economy and finance, trade and investment, and nuclear power generation to implement agreed-upon measures meant to deepen economic relations with Britain," Finance Minister Choo Kyung-ho said during a meeting of economy related ministers. Meanwhile, South Korea decided to push for clinching a bilateral Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with eight emerging and high-potential nations, in an effort to diversify its trade portfolio, Choo said. The nations are Kenya, Tanzania, Morocco, Thailand, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Serbia and the Dominican Republic. An EPA is meant to establish a mutually beneficial trade network with partner nations beyond a simple market opening, though it covers a smaller scope of areas compared with a traditional free trade agreement. (Yonhap) (CNN) ISIS has claimed responsibility for a deadly explosion that ripped through a Catholic mass service at a university gym in the southern Philippines on Sunday. At least four people were killed and dozens of others were injured in the blast at the Mindanao State University in Marawi City, according to authorities. In a communique, ISIS said its fighters detonated an explosive device on a large gathering of Christian disbelievers in Marawi City, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, a counterterrorism threat intelligence organization that tracks the online activity of extremist groups. Photos of the scene showed soldiers and emergency workers standing among debris in the gym. A section of the seating area was blown up, chairs strewn across the floor. Lanao del Sur province Gov. Mamintal Adiong Jr., told reporters more than 40 people were being treated at a government hospital in Marawi, while a number of others with minor injuries were treated at the universitys infirmary following the blast. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. condemned the attack in a post on X, formerly Twitter. Without naming any specific groups or elaborating further, he described the blast as senseless and most heinous, perpetrated by foreign terrorists. Extremists who wield violence against the innocent will always be regarded as enemies to our society, he said, adding that additional security personnel had been deployed to assist in the response. The United States condemned the horrific terrorist attack in a government statement. The United States is in close contact with our Philippine partners and stands with the people of the Philippines in rejecting this act of violence, State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said. Mindanao, the second largest island in the Philippines, is home to several Islamist insurgent groups and has long been a hotbed of insurgency against the Philippine government. While the Philippines is mostly Catholic, Mindanao is home to a sizable Muslim population. In 2017, ISIS-affiliated militants laid siege to Marawi for five months. The violence forced more than 350,000 residents to flee the city and the surrounding areas before Philippine forces liberated the city. This story was first published on CNN.com, " ISIS claims deadly blast at Catholic mass in southern Philippines' Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) is likely to play a critical role in addressing skills shortages in todays marketplace, according to a new study by London-based Kaspersky Research. It showed that 40% of 2,000 C-level executives surveyed plan to use genAI tools such as ChatGPT to cover critical skills shortages through the automation of tasks. The European-based study found genAI to be firmly on the business agenda, with 95% of respondents regularly discussing ways to maximize value from the technology at the most senior level, even as 91% admitted they dont really know how it works. "If there's a desire to delegate critical activities and functions to genAI, it is essential that senior management first develops a deeper understanding of the data management processes, including what data can and cannot be used to train these systems, said David Emm, Kasperskys principal security researcher. GenAI offers a much lower barrier than finding new workers, which is attractive to senior bosses looking to solve critical business challenges, Kasperskys study revealed. More than a quarter of those surveyed, however, called genAI a fad, comparing it to Metas recently launched Threads app an upstart competitor to X/Twitter. These leaders stated that they believe Gen AI to be just another fad [that] challenges for dominance quickly and then dies off just as fast, the Kaspersky study said. Even so, 49% of those surveyed believe employees are already automating everyday tasks such as generating email content. While genAI offers the promise of clear business benefits, education is key and collaboration with cybersecurity and risk experts is needed to help establish an environment where the technology can be used safely, securely, and productively, according to Emm. Hurdles to adopting AI persist. Those issues include high costs, uncertain return on investment (ROI), the need to upskill entire staffs, and potential exposure of sensitive corporate data to unfamiliar automation technology. Few organizations, however, have put appropriate safeguards in place to guard against some of genAI's most well-known flaws, such as hallucinations, exposure of corporate data, and data errors. Most are leaving themselves wide open to the acknowledged risks of using genAI, according to Kaspersky. For example, only 22% of C-level executives have discussed putting rules in place to regulate the use of genAI in their organizations even as they eye it as a way of closing the skills gap. Cisco CIO Fletcher Previn, whose team is working to embed AI in back-end systems and products, said it's critical to have the policies, security, and legal guardrails in place to be able to "safely adopt and embrace AI capabilities other vendors are rolling out into other peoples tools. "You can imagine all the SaaS vendors, everybodys on this journey," Previn said in a recent interview. "But are we set up to take advantage of this journey in a way thats compatible with our responsible AI policies? The Kaspersky findings indicate that, despite concerns around the use of sensitive proprietary information used to power Gen AI tools, half of the executives surveyed plan to automate mundane worker tasks, with a further 44% planning to integrate it into their own routines to expedite administrative chores. Beyond skills, will genAI replace workers? GenAI will influence 4.5 times more jobs than it replaces, according to Forrester Researchs 2023 Generative AI Jobs Impact Forecast. The technology will also make up nearly 30% of the jobs that arelost to automation by 2030. In terms of the number of jobs, we forecast that generative AI will replace 90,000 jobs in 2023, growing to 2.4 million by 2030, the study said. While 2.4 million jobs replaced by genAI sounds high, Forrester notes that automation and AI overall will replace just 4.9% of US jobs by 2030. And job losses over the next two years will remain modest until questions about intellectual property rights, copyright issues, plagiarism, model refresh rates, model bias, ethics, and model response reliability are resolved, the research firm said. We forecasted the future impacts of generative AI and found significant influence that is, generative AI will reshape how many jobs operate and how work gets done. But job losses will be lower than many expect, and influence will far outweigh job cannibalization, a Forrester spokesman said. That doesn't mean workers arent paying attention. According to Forrester, 36% of global workers employed full or part time fear losing their jobs to automation in the next 10 years. Weve been tracking how AI affects jobs for nearly a decade, analyzing the impact that AI and automation have on the future of jobs. But generative AI has spurred a brand-new round of urgent conversation around this issue, Forrester said. The researcher cited hyped predictions by some researchers of massive job disruption from the arrival of genAI tools. Goldman Sachs, for example, published a study earlier this year stating, shifts in workflows triggered by [generative AI] could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation. Forrester Not surprisingly, the number of jobs postings that include genAI terms or skills has skyrocketed over the past year, meaning workplaces are hungry for employees with specific skills. At the beginning of 2023, just 0.003% of job postings mentioned terms related to generative AI. That grew to 0.06% by the end of October, a 20-fold increase, according to Indeed. Well have to wait to see the long-term effects of genAI, but its clear right now that jobs related to the field are surging. Of course, only 6 in 10,000 job postings means Generative AI jobs arent very common, even if they are growing rapidly, Indeeds report said. Indeed The job market can shift quickly, and has done in the past. For example, up to 60% of todays workers are employed in occupations that didnt exist in 1940, according to a study by economist David Autor. This implies that more than 85% of employment growth over the last 80 years is explained by the technology-driven creation of new positions, Goldman Sach said. Added up, Goldman Sachs research estimates the total addressable market for generative AI software to be $150 billion, compared with $685 billion for the global software industry." AI is already being used to help developers and engineers create all forms of software. Cisco's Previn said one of the roles he never expected AI to touch was that of software developer, which he equates to an art form requiring unique creative abilities. ChatGPT, however, has been adept at creating code that addresses corporate data hygiene and security and it can reuse code to build new apps. A study by Microsoft showed that the GitHub Copilot tool, powered by ChatGPT, can help developers code up to 55% faster and more than half of all code being checked into GitHub now was aided by AI in its development. That number is expected to jump to 80% of all code checked into GitHub within the next five years, according to GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. Indeed Thats very interesting, because historically there was no way to compress software development timelines, Previn said in an earlier interview. Now, it turns out you can get a significant acceleration in velocity by helping developers with things like Copilot for code readings, code hygiene, security, commenting; its really good at those things. GenAIs ability to develop or engineer software also changed Ciscos internal IT system and external product strategy. Since last November, the company's IT department has developed a more fully formed strategy in terms of AI as a foundational infrastructure. Internally, that means using AI to find productivity enhancements, including areas such as automated help desk functions. Externally, Cisco now thinks in terms of how to bake AI into every product portfolio and augment the entire digital estate were managing in digital IT. A story that got left out of the corporate infighting that led to Sam Altmans firing, then re-hiring as CEO of OpenAI, was about the firms relationship with a startup called Rain Neuromorphics, which is developing a neuromorphic processing unit (NPU) designed to replicate features of the human brain. Rain says their brain-inspired NPUs could potentially offer 100 times more computing power and, for AI training purposes, deliver up to 10,000 times greater energy efficiency than the GPUs predominantly used by AI developers. In theory, these NPUs could provide a big boost in processing power for portable edge devices such as smartphones or vehicle infotainment devices located far from a data center. Samsung, for instance, says that the Galaxy S24 its next-generation flagship phone will be AI-enhanced, but smartphones are limited in their processing abilities by their portable nature. Altmans conflict of interest Before Sam Altman was fired and then rehired at OpenAI, last month, the company had signed a Letter of Intent to buy $51 million worth of Brains NPU chips, Wired reported. Complicating the issue further is the fact that this firm is one of Altmans portfolio companies, bringing up a potential conflict of interest, with the CEO of OpenAI personally investing $1 million in the firm. On X, VC Jason Calacanis pointed out that Letters of Intent what OpenAI and Altman drafted to buy chips from Rain are non-binding making the deal far from confirmed. At our investment firm we call letters of intent letters of nothing, because they are as binding as the paper theyre printed on. If someone signs an LOI, its non-binding 99%+ of the time, he wrote. Investors understand an LOI can be ripped up at any time. Others pointed out the conflict of interest in the proposed deal, noting that Altmans departure from OpenAI was because the board said he had not been candid with them. Large advance payments to neurotrophic chip startups that he owned are not in line with the goal of ensuring the safe development of AI, it makes a joke of Sams I own no OpenAI stock comment, and it looks like a form of self-enrichment, Oxford AI scholar Ryan Carey posted. CFIUS forced out Saudi investors from Rain The US government is keeping a close eye on Rain. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which evaluates transactions for potential national security risks, was concerned about the involvement of Saudi-based, Prosperity7 Ventures, in the Altman-backed Rain, and forced it to divest according to reports. Prosperity7 Ventures is a unit of Aramco Ventures, which is part of the state-owned Saudi Aramco. Rain closed a $25 million funding round in 2022 led by Prosperity7. Chinese tech giant Baidu is also an investor in the company, but CFIUS hasnt flagged that as an issue. Attorneys familiar with CFIUS and tech-related trade issues told Wired that forced divestment is a rare move, and has largely been a remedy reserved for Chinese investors. The chips Rain is producing use open source architecture by RISC-V, which is growing in popularity as tech companies try to internationalize their IP and not be reliant on American companies and rules. Major chip developers building NPUs Rain isnt the only company developing a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Intels upcoming Meteor Lake processors will feature their first NPU for AI workloads. IBM is also building an NPU and pouring billions into research, while Kneron also plans to release its NPU chips by the end of 2023. However, this NPU arms race doesnt mean that GPUs are going to be less relevant for AI anytime soon. NPUs, while efficient for specific AI tasks, are unlikely to replace GPUs in AI applications due to GPUs superior performance in handling more demanding tasks like training larger AI models, Rob Enderle of the analyst firm Enderle Group recently wrote. OpenAIs ChatGPT is a massive model that would typically require a GPU for training and inferencing. For them, the goal of an NPU may be more holistic, he wrote. One of its stated goals is to combat a GPU shortage, suggesting a higher level of performance in that they may want a better scaling alternative to the NPU/GPU solution that will surround the chip makers. In less than a week of its launch, Amazon Q Amazons Copilot competitor is already facing a threat to its survival as a new report suggests the generative AI assistant could be hallucinating. Q is grappling with inaccuracies and privacy issues, including hallucinations and data leaks, The Platformer reported, citing leaked documents. Significantly, the report comes as two major studies showed that large language models (LLMs) are highly inaccurate when connected to corporate databases and are becoming less transparent. However, according to an Amazon spokesperson, Amazon Q has not leaked any confidential information. Some employees are sharing feedback through internal channels and ticketing systems, which is standard practice at Amazon. No security issue was identified as a result of that feedback. We appreciate all of the feedback weve already received and will continue to tune Q as it transitions from being a product in preview to being generally available, the spokesperson said. Despite Amazons tall claims of being a work companion for millions and millions of people, Amazon Q may not be ready for corporate usage, according to analysts tracking the industry. If hallucinations are present, you cannot use it for decision-making in a corporate setting, said Pareekh Jain, CEO of EIIRTrend & Pareekh Consulting. Its fine for personal use or obtaining information, but not for decision-making processes. More testing needed Amazon may face substantial testing challenges before its generative AI assistant is ready for commercial release. Jain emphasized the importance of conducting extensive internal trials to ensure readiness. I think they need to do more testing with internal employees first, Jain added. Obviously, that is what they are doing now. In the end, nobody from external sources has reported these issues. There are two things here: one is the data, and the other is algorithms. They have to see if its an issue with the data or with the algorithm. Q leverages 17 years of AWS data and development proficiency and is designed to work as a versatile tool for enterprises. Given the direction of the industry, much is at stake for Amazon with this AI offering. While hallucinations dont undermine the potential of generative AI for consumer and enterprise use cases, proper training is essential, according to Sharath Srinivasamurthy, associate vice president at market research firm IDC. Training the models on better quality data, prompt augmentation (guiding users with predefined prompts that the model can understand easily), ongoing finetuning the models on organization or industry-specific data and policies, augmentating a layer of human check in case of response being suspicious are some of the steps that need to be taken to make the best use of this emerging technology, Srinivasamurthy said. Will hallucinations prompt urgency to regulate? Reports of hallucinations raise concerns about the need for regulations and the severity of rules that might kick in at some point. However, Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research pointed out that any resulting regulations can be counterproductive. Any regulation can, in fact, slow down the exchange and utilization of data, Gogia said. So, for now, the less regulated this industry is, the better. This allows for easier and smoother use of data. Take OpenAI's GPT as an example - if there were stringent guardrails around what data could be captured, then it wouldn't have taken off. Jain also suggested that setting external boundaries may not be a feasible idea, but more effort may be made by the companies themselves. Regulations may exist, but the focus is primarily on self-regulation," Jain explained. "While regulations and guidelines are necessary, there's a limit to how much auditing can be enforced. The emphasis should be on responsible AI, where the logic can be explained to customers instead of creating 'black box' systems. However, there is a threshold beyond which, in my view, the responsibility shifts more towards how enterprises perceive and implement these measures as a matter of security. All eyes on Amazon While such insights shed light on the necessity for more robust internal testing and a tilt towards self-regulation, the path to deploying AI in enterprise environments is fraught with complexity. The onus is now on Amazon to navigate these challenges, especially because of its late entry into the segment. AWS is somewhat of a laggard in this space, with Microsoft and Google currently leading, Jain added. Therefore, people have higher expectations, particularly regarding chatbots and other related technologies. (This story has been updated with comments from an Amazon spokesperson.) Ford Motor Company is recalling 45,173 model year 2015 Ford Fiestas and model year 2016 Fusions, and model year 2016 Lincoln MKZs. The vehicles were sold or registered in Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands (Saipan) and the U.S. Virgin Islands. This is an expansion of a recall issued in early 2020. Tell us about your recalled vehicles ConsumerAffairs wants to hear from you about your experiences with vehicle recalls. Tell us why you chose to get your recalled vehicle repaired, or why you didn't get it repaired, and we may reach out to you to feature you in an upcoming article. Submit your story here. A component inside the door latches may break, which can make it difficult to latch, or possibly allow the doors to open while the vehicle is being driven. Vehicle doors that open unexpectedly while the vehicle is in motion can increase the risk of a crash or injury. What to do Dealers will inspect the door latch date codes and -- if necessary -- replace all four side door latches free of charge. Letters notifying owners of this issue are expected to be mailed December 4, 2023. Owners may contact Ford customer service at (866) 436-7332. Ford's number for this recall is 20S15. Welcome to ComedyNerd, Cracked's daily comedy vertical. For more ComedyNerd content, and ongoing coverage of the Iran/Contra Affair, please sign up for the ComedyNerd newsletter below. Sign up for the Cracked Newsletter Get the best of Cracked sent directly to your inbox! SIGN ME UP Of all the iconic sketches in recent (let me reiterate, recent) Saturday Night Live history, Cecily Strong's Goober the Clown Weekend Update appearance last November has quickly ascended to cult status, garnering applause for serving as a reaction to the controversial Texas Heartbeat Act, a law that went into effect in early September that bans abortion after a fetus's cardiac activity is detected. "I know I wouldn't be a clown on TV here today if it weren't for the abortion I had the day before my 23rd birthday," Strong said during the Weekend Update segment, her voice pitched from sucking down a helium balloon. "It's gonna happen, so it ought to be safe, legal and accessible," her character continued, adding that the only reason she's discussing it is as other people keep bringing it up. I wish I didnt have to do this, because the abortion I had at 23 is my personal clown business." Although the sketch -- like pretty much anything featuring even the slightest hint of abortion sparked widespread internet controversy, the critical response was largely glowing. The Daily Beast called it bizarre and brilliant, Vanity Fair dubbed the sketch the evening's "most powerful moment," and The Atlantic's Deborah Copaken even implored the Television Academy to "please give them their preemptive Emmy right now," Advertisement But even with widespread praise for its comedic elements, Strong recently revealed that the sketch stemmed from some pretty intense negative emotions. I had so much anxiety and frustration, and it was like, I'm either gonna write, every night, essays for nobody, or I can finally just put this on the show, Strong said in an interview on The View earlier this week. And luckily right away, the show was very supportive. Beyond merely being supportive, it seems the show's overlords were particularly impressed with her passionate and hilarious sketch, marking a notable SNL first for the comic. I think it was the only thing I've ever done where I haven't had any notes. I don't think anybody wanted to give us notes, she said. And it's not just the series creative team. After the episode hit airwaves, Strong says several people who have had abortions reached out to her in private messages to relay their experiences, a reaction Strong says she is still surprised and moved by." Advertisement A lot of women say I'm the only one they've ever told, or will tell, she continued. So that still really moves me. So folks, here's to modern SNL. Sometimes it can be so good that even Lorne Michaels is speechless. Top Image: NBC For more internet nonsense, follow Carly on Instagram @HuntressThompson_ on Twitch @HuntressThompson_ and on Twitter @TennesAnyone. By Jon Dunbar Hailing from South Africas Kalahari Desert, Coetzer Rautenbach is probably Koreas most eccentric creative type. He makes everything from music, photos and videos, to fruit wines, an Afrikaaner moonshine called mampoer, pickles and even condiments, including a killer pineapple relish. Hes just started his latest project, the YouTube channel Juge is Cuddly, where he pairs videos hes made exploring abandoned places all across Korea with his self-made soundtrack, ranging from EDM to dark industrial techno. "For the videos, each song is made specially for that location, for that video," he told The Korea Times. "I start the editing process by adding all the clips together, then cutting out all the obviously unnecessary parts. After that, I have a better idea of how long the song should be." Juge is just one of his many creative personas. It comes from a notoriously bad spelling error in a DIY tattoo he received back in South Africa. When I was 17 years old, I was in a terrible punk band in a tiny mining town in the Kalahari desert, he said. One day each one of us drank a bottle of vodka without mix, so we were absolutely trashed. At some point, I had the brilliant idea to give each other tattoos. While the others went to the supermarket to steal the black stove polish, I got to work building the machine with a motor, a fork and a pen. We stood in a circle. The one to your right decided what you get, while the one to your left decided where, as long as it can be covered by summer clothing. Rautenbach ended up with a tattoo that said "Only Me Will Juge Me, with a significant misspelling on the word Judge. He decided not to fix it after one of the people involved in its creation died in a car crash while heading to a party to meet Rautenbach. The tattoo is still visible, over 20 years later. When I moved to the city a few years later, I made friends who called me Juge, he said. It just stuck. Its a nicer name than one of his other projects, a four-word phrase of which only two words are just about nice enough to be publishable in this paper: You Scum. He abbreviates the name to FYSF. That name also came out of a tattoo idea he had. But my brother refused to design it. A few weeks later I started the project, he said. With FYSF, he creates noise techno aided by a Volca Beats synthesizer. All songs with this project were made in single takes, with no mixing or mastering. Everything heard is played at that time like a live performance but instead I'm sitting on my bed, he said. The lyrics I come up with as I'm playing, and no song can be duplicated but there can be some overlap. There is no computer involved anymore only synthesizers, many pedals and a microphone. Since then, he also created a new project called kragboks, a noise project incorporating his DIY musical instruments and various guitar pedals. "In Korea, those grey metal boxes on the sidewalks, they contain transformers. In South Africa, especially in Afrikaans, they are called 'kragboks,'" he explained about the project name. "But some kid who wants to tell the world that he is strong and tough might also call himself kragboks because 'krag' can also mean 'strong.'" He's been making his own DIY music instruments for a while. Making them can be more fun than playing said instruments, he said. When he decided to start promoting his music online, he had to think about how to present all these projects. When I joined Bandcamp, I had to decide between joining as an artist or as a label, he said. Since I had three projects at that time already, the choice was obvious, but then I had to come up with a name for a label. I was drinking Ja Nee Fok brandy at the time. The first two words of Ja Nee Fok translate into English as Yes No. He's just released four more albums, including Juge's "Music To Listen To While Walking Through Abandoned Buildings," a collection of compositions themed on actual sounds heard in abandoned places. "The album now has only six tracks. I took one off because it seemed to not fit the theme," he said. "Still, the six tracks total 51 minutes." And if that isn't weird enough for you, how about FYSF's two-track "I'm a Punk Rock Loser" released the same day? Or if those don't get your goat, try kragboks' latest two albums, "wanorde" and "doom." Rautenbach has DJed a few shows over the last couple of years. Hes also interested in doing guerrilla gigs and doing more collaborations with other musicians. Although his music doesnt have a ton of fans, those who are into it are very into it. But he isnt encouraging of anyone looking to give his music a try. It shouldn't be listened to, ever, by anyone, he said, but if you absolutely must torture yourself, it might make a good soundtrack for burning down the world. For those who won't take his warning, he will DJ at Docking Around in western Seoul on Thursday, and he'll be back there on Dec. 30 for a New Year's/Apocalypse event. Visit youtube.com/@JugeIsCuddly to see his EDM urban exploration videos, or janeefok.bandcamp.com for all his music projects. Or visit juge.co.za to see his photography and learn more about his DIY instruments. In SNLs nearly 50-year history, some things have barely changed, like the host monologue, the musical guests and the good ol Weekend Update. For a few cast members, Update is the main item on their job description but even the most anchor-y anchor has at least a few sketches under their belt. Heres our rundown of the best non-Update work for each eras main news reader. (For this exercise, were leaving out killer sketch players like Amy Poehler, Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey and Jane Curtin since theyre already remembered more as comic actors than fake journalists.) Click right here to get the best of Cracked sent to your inbox. Chevy Chase Play Iconic and still dangerous after all these years. Keegan-Michael Key, Don Cheadle and Albert Brooks all name Word Association among their favorite SNL sketches of all time. Nobody had seen that kind of thing before they did it, Brooks told Rolling Stone. There was probably no whiter man working in those days than Chevy Chase, so it was a very good combination of people. It doesnt happen very often, but when a comedy sketch takes on another dimension where you almost think someones gonna get punched its just great. Seth Meyers Advertisement Advertisement Meyers was more of a sketch player than you might remember, one-half of the Needlemans with Poehler and a horny Ron Weasley in Lindsay Lohans buxom Harry Potter sketch. But well go with Buildin Finn McQuinn, if for nothing else than Meyers ability to hold his own against Liam Neeson. Norm Macdonald Play Advertisement Advertisement Ask comedy nerds which Weekend Update anchor was their favorite and odds are youll hear Norm more often than not. But Macdonald was a fair celebrity impressionist as well, scoring with turns as David Letterman, Bob Dole, and most famously, Burt Reynolds. Excuse me, thats Turd Ferguson. Dennis Miller Advertisement Advertisement In the first two decades of SNL, no cast member stayed more firmly rooted behind the fake news desk than Miller. But hed venture out to diss a guys undersized penis if the situation warranted. Kevin Nealon Play Advertisement A true ensemble player, Nealon was a reliable Swiss Army knife. In addition to manning the anchor desk, Nealon could play the straight-man dad, goofy characters like Tarzan, Mr. Subliminal and Mr. No Depth Perception, and of course, one-half of the Austrian bodybuilding team Hans and Franz. Advertisement Michael Che Advertisement Unlike the Weekend Update anchors who came before them, Che and Jost have worked almost exclusively on the phony news. One exception for Che? Playing Steve Harveys joke-writing nephew Andre during a Family Feud sketch. A sample gag: I came up with the bit on Little Big Shots where when a child says something, you stare at him for 20 seconds like hes a ghost. Advertisement Congrats to comedian Rob Schneider, who converted to Catholicism on his 60th birthday this October. The move may be good for Schneiders eternal soul, but hes not sure exactly how his new commitment is going to affect his comedy. I know I cant do the same stuff I used to do, Schneider told The Christian Post. But what exactly is going to change? Click right here to get the best of Cracked sent to your inbox. Schneider isnt judging his earlier work the guy was in a different place after all. And its not like hes starred in a bunch of dirty movies. Most younger viewers know him as the guy who cheers You can do it! in countless Adam Sandler movies. Surely the Catholics are down with that kind of good-natured encouragement. A guy who has animal powers in The Animal? Seems OK. A fella pretending to be a woman in The Hot Chick? Certain pastors might not endorse. Earning cash as a prostitute in the Deuce Bigelow: Male Gigolo films? That wont fly anymore. At least he played a minister in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry but its an Asian stereotype performing a gay marriage. As Kevin James notes, Catholic Mel Gibson wouldnt approve. Play So something has to change. I dont know if I can tell dirty jokes anymore, he says. Just some of the bad words, I go, 'Maybe I dont want to say those words anymore. You might not think of Schneider as a stand-up who spews a lot of profanity, but sure enough, its right there at the top of 2020s Asian Momma, Mexican Kids special. Were guessing he wont be doing much more of this: Im at the age now Its not that Im less interested in sex, but Im as interested in cookies. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? What kind of cookies are those? Could you move your tits? Youre blocking the cookies. Yeah. Cookie underneath that tit. Now Schneider intends to replace the naughty stuff (in the 2020 special, he does bits about constantly whipping my dick out as well as accidentally feeling up his mother-in-law). Going forward, the emphasis will be on what I believe in God, family, country Im okay with whatever comes my way, positive or negative. When you have faith, nothing can really rock you. Advertisement That likely means more projects like Daddy Daughter Trip, Schneiders 2022 film that he made with his daughter Miranda. I wanted to make a movie that finally, my wife would let my kids see," Schneider said. And I wanted to make a movie that makes people feel good and makes you laugh, makes you think and makes you feel like youre watching a real family. Advertisement The Christian Post calls Daddy Daughter Trip a heartwarming family movie but it doesnt seem to be making much of a dent in the secular world. Despite being out for a year, it only has one review on Rotten Tomatoes and its a pan. Too often the jokes dont land. Neither does the physical comedy, says Arizona Republic critic Bill Goodykoontz (a name Schneider would have to pronounce carefully in his new stand-up). There is a sweet little story buried deep inside Daddy Daughter Trip and Rob Schneider has no idea how to get at it. But the Lord provides and Schneider still has Sandler movies to fall back on. In fact, he has a part in Sandlers new animated hit, Leo. So long as Sandler characters are up to some hare-brained scheme, there will always be a place for someone shouting: By Jon Dunbar This is the first article in a multipart series about the trials and tribulations of becoming an electric scooter driver in Korea. I have vague memories from my grade school days of watching the 1995 documentary film It Runs on Water, which taught me basically two lessons about alternative energy sources for vehicles. The first was that the people developing alternatives were mostly quacks, and the second was that the evil oil industry was taking every opportunity to keep alternative fuel sources down. Now in the 2020s, electric vehicles are starting to appear everywhere, and theyre not weird. A close friend who wanted to be identified only by the name Morgan bought himself an electric scooter last year not one of those kickboard things, a real road vehicle. At first, I considered the thing a novelty, sort of how I felt when first encountering the internet in the 1990s, and cellphones in the early 2000s. It moved quietly, making only this weird whirring noise like a 1950s-era flying saucer in a sci-fi movie. Also, it possessed a quite odd feature not found in most gas-powered motorbikes and scooters: it had a reverse gear. My friend wouldnt stop talking about his new bike. He emphasized how easy it had been to buy and cheap due to a generous government subsidy. I had been thinking about buying a scooter and a friend told me about the deal the government offered. I honestly did almost zero research, he said. They did everything for me. I just sent money and a picture of my ID. The company helped him apply for a very generous government subsidy, which brought the price of a brand-new vehicle down to under 500,000 won ($400) at the time. They seemed eager to help him acquire an eco-friendly vehicle, perhaps as the market was still new and demand was low. When is the right time to go electric? Going electric is still a big jump to make, and when to make the transition is a complicated question due to all sorts of factors. Also, choosing a vehicle can be confusing, as we're talking about all new sorts of companies that you probably haven't heard of before and that have not yet formed as solid a reputation as well-known automakers like Hyundai Motor or Kia. In an op-ed published in June by The Guardian, written by none other than actor and comedian Rowan Atkinson, he pointed out that electric vehicles have zero exhaust emissions, but its a different story if you factor in the manufacturing process. The actor, who is best known for his roles as Blackadder and Mr. Bean, also claims he was an early adopter of eco-friendly vehicles. He cites a claim by Volvo that the manufacture of electric cars results in 70 percent higher emissions than combustion-engine ones, and that it would take nine years of use before the ecological balance is tipped in the electric car's favor. I don't know if all these claims are accurate, or if they apply equally to scooters, but a saying I've heard echoed in my head: "The most eco-friendly vehicle is the one you already have." So I figured my next scooter, whenever that would be, would be an electric one but for the time being I was determined to hold onto my existing one. Then during this year's rainy season, my scooter's muffler started to give out, and the engine became so ear-splittingly loud that it was no longer legally roadworthy. On my last time driving it, pedestrians would turn to look at me, and I could only shrug helplessly an experience Morgan would never have on his shiny new battery-powered wheels. When I found out a replacement muffler would be virtually impossible to source, as this was an old, discontinued model, I determined it was time to go electric, and then I could zip past everyone as quietly as a cloud. As I began shopping around, I found that the market had changed significantly in the year since Morgan made his purchase. At that time, he said he bought a model called the Leo from a seller offering the e-scooter. But now there were five models available, and Morgan's was now the most basic, with the others all offering higher performance. As well as an increased lineup, there were also more companies to choose from. Morgan mentioned Blueshark, a smart electric scooter brand from China that seemed pretty upscale. It became clear to me that along with the selection increase, prices were increasing too. Not just in the direction the market was moving, but also because of a reduction in the government subsidy. Currently, the subsidy on the purchase of an electric scooter is available only to Korean nationals, overseas Koreans on an F-4 visa or permanent residents holding an F-5 visa. One EV dealer told me that foreign customers must have a visa lasting longer than two years to be eligible. The subsidy amount seems to be based on a handful of other factors as well: the jurisdiction in which you apply, and also the number of people applying for the same subsidy over a particular period. If too many people apply, I guess it drains the allocated subsidy budget. So as demand rises, subsidy supply appears to drop, as dealers and governments lose their hunger to place new customers on electric vehicles. The further I looked into it, the more assured I felt in my decision to go electric. To be continued Prosecutors raided the Gyeonggi provincial government office Monday as part of an investigation into allegations that opposition leader Lee Jae-myung's wife misused an official credit card while Lee was serving as Gyeonggi governor. The Suwon District Prosecutors Office sent investigators to the provincial government office to seize evidence connected to the investigation, officials said. The investigation follows a disclosure by a former Gyeonggi government employee last year that Lee's wife, Kim Hye-kyung, and a former Gyeonggi employee close to Lee used official credit cards for personal purposes during Lee's term as Gyeonggi governor. Lee, currently the chair of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea, was the governor of the province from 2018-2021. Prosecutors have since been investigating Kim on charges of breach of duty. The accused former Gyeonggi employee, known by her family name Bae, was given a 10-month prison sentence, suspended for two years in August in connection with the allegations. (Yonhap) A South Korean man, who holds a U.S. attorney license, has been put under emergency detention on charges of beating his wife to death during a quarrel at their residence in Seoul, police said Monday. The man in his 50s, who worked at a major law firm in South Korea as a U.S. lawyer, was taken into custody Sunday for allegedly assaulting his wife in her 40s with an unspecified blunt instrument to death the same day, according to the Seoul Jongno Police Station. The suspect called emergency medical services and said his wife had a head injury. Officials transferred her to a nearby hospital, but she was pronounced dead, police and fire authorities said. The couple was having a squabble over financial issues due to a personality clash at the time of the incident and had long experienced such troubles, they added. The man had recently quit his job at the law firm and is reportedly a son of a former multi-term lawmaker. The police plan to request an arrest warrant for the suspect and conduct an autopsy of the woman to determine the exact cause of her death. (Yonhap) The rival parties called Monday for the government to come up with countermeasures against Beijing's recent halt in urea exports to Korea, voicing concerns it could lead to another urea crisis. On Sunday, government and industry officials said that China has recently halted customs procedures for urea exports to Korea and has yet to respond to Seoul's request for an explanation. Sources have said the government assumes the Chinese action was not a formal export control measure but came in consideration of the domestic supply and demand, adding that it is scheduled to meet with industry officials to discuss the matter Monday. "There are growing concerns that Chinese customs blocking urea from entering Korea could potentially prompt another urea crisis like the one experienced two years ago," said Rep. Kim Gi-hyeon, the leader of the ruling People Power Party. "We request (the government) come up with countermeasures with a sense of urgency." The main opposition Democratic Party of Korea also expressed concerns but criticized the government for failing to take adequate measures in the past to diversify the supply of urea. "It was a result of ... incompetent diplomacy," said Rep. Kwon Chil-seung, the party's chief spokesperson. "The United States, Japan and the European Union have secured their own supply chains and are expanding cooperative networks to prepare for Chinese mineral controls." Mixed with water, urea is used to cut emissions in diesel cars and to make agricultural fertilizers. It is a crucial element used to run logistics trucks in the country. Korea suffered major disruptions to its logistics networks in 2021 after China restricted its urea exports amid a trade dispute with Australia. (Yonhap) Bitcoin (BTC) Prices, Charts, and Analysis: Bitcoin (BTC) eyes resistance at $43k. Spot ETF narrative continues to drive Bitcoin and Ethereum, Recommended by Nick Cawley Get Your Free Introduction To Cryptocurrency Trading Get My Guide Bitcoin and Ethereum both took a significant leg higher over the weekend, breaking through prior resistance and testing levels last seen in May last year. The cryptocurrency space has been positive for the past few weeks as investors wait for news on the dozen spot Bitcoin ETF applications sitting on the SECs desk. A CNBC report last week that SEC representatives met with BlackRock and Grayscale further boosted the bullish market sentiment. BlackRock has filed for both a Bitcoin and an Ethereum spot ETF and their involvement in the space is seen as important. BlackRock has had 575 out of 576 of its ETF applications approved. Bitcoin (BTC) Continues to Rally as Spot ETF Chatter Gets Louder The technical outlook for Bitcoin has been positive since mid-October when BTC/USD produced a bullish pennant pattern. This coincided with a bullish 50-day/200-day moving average crossover Golden Cross - and was subsequently followed by a series of higher lows. Prior highs at $38k and $40k have both been broken with ease in the last four sessions. The next level of horizontal resistance comes in just under $43k. Bitcoin (BTC/USD) Daily Price Chart December 4, 2023 Recommended by Nick Cawley The Fundamentals of Breakout Trading Get My Guide Ethereum has underperformed Bitcoin this year but has still rallied from around $1,200 to $2,260 since the start of the year. The ETH/USD charts also remains positive with a Golden Cross produced on November 21st and a clear series of higher lows seen since late October. Last Fridays clean break of resistance at $2,140 opens the way for ETH to rally further with $2,500 and then $3,000 the next logical stopping points. Ethereum (ETH/USD) Daily Price Chart December 4, 2023 Charts via TradingView What is your view on Bitcoin bullish or bearish?? You can let us know via the form at the end of this piece or you can contact the author via Twitter @nickcawley1. OIL PRICE FORECAST: Oil Finds Support at Recent Lows and Eyes Double Bottom Pattern to Inspire Recovery. US are Aggressively Replenishing SPR as Oil Hovers at Attractive Prices . IG Client Sentiment Shows Traders are 85% Net-Short on WTI at Present. To Learn More About Price Action , Chart Patterns and Moving Averages , Check out the DailyFX Education Section . Most Read: What is OPEC and What is Their Role in Global Markets? Oil prices struggled for the majority of the day before finding some joy in the US session. The question is whether there is enough optimism among market participants to inspire a recovery in price? Trade Smarter - Sign up for the DailyFX Newsletter Receive timely and compelling market commentary from the DailyFX team Subscribe to Newsletter US OIL OUTPUT AND SPR RESERVES The OPEC+ meeting last week failed to convince markets with the 2.2 million bpd seemingly falling short of market expectations. This is really interesting as it comes at a time when US Crude Oil production set a record for second successive month adding a challenge to OPEC+ as they look to keep prices under control. OPEC+ are looking to add more member states which in turn will allow them greater control over the price of Oil moving forward and limit the impact of what is known as Free Riders. Interesting times ahead just as the possibility of uncertainty in the Middle East rages on. The US Energy Department Deputy Secretary said the United States is taking advantage of low oil prices and refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) as much as it can. The Deputy Secretary David Turk was quoted as saying that the amount is limited by physical constraints in the caverns. Will this aid a potential recovery in WTI prices? VENEZUELAN OIL EXPORTS Despite the optimism around the lifting of sanctions on Venezuelan oil, exports remain almost unchanged as discussed following the announcement. The lack of maintenance and infrastructure at oil fields coupled with long-standing loading delays as well as some shippers remaining reluctant to send vessels to the South American nation are all factors. At present authorities are in negotiations with various middlemen in a bid to increase its exports with sales through intermediaries currently languishing around 57% of the total. OPEC+ did comment following the lifting at sanctions warning that any material impact will take a while to be felt. Source: REFINITIV Recommended by Zain Vawda How to Trade Oil Get My Guide LOOKING AHEAD Looking to the rest of the week and there is a raft of data releases due out particularly from the US which could pose some risks to Oil prices. We also have some Chinese mid-tier data out tomorrow which could give another sign as to the health of the Chinese economy together with US ISM Services PMI release. Both of which could potentially have an indirect impact on oil prices. I would also advise keeping an eye on developments in the Middle East and potential shipping routes facing challenges as the conflict continues to heat up. For all market-moving economic releases and events, see the DailyFX Calendar TECHNICAL OUTLOOK AND FINAL THOUGHTS From a technical perspective, WTI is hovering close to the 473.00 a barrel support area which was the most recent lows in the middle of November. As things stand it does appear we are going to print a double bottom print today barring a late selloff. If that does occur it may bode well for WTI and a potential recovery if recent history is anything to go by. As you can see on the chart below, we had a triple bottom print across June and July which was the start of the rally which led us to the $95 a barrel high printed late in September. It is important to note that we do have very strong resistance areas above current price with the $76 and $78 levels in particular likely to prove challenging. WTI Crude Oil Daily Chart December 4, 2023 Source: TradingView Key Levels to Keep an Eye On: Support levels: 73.00 71.00 70.00 Resistance levels: 76.00 78.00 80.00 IG CLIENT SENTIMENT IG Client Sentiment data tells us that 85% of Traders are currently holding LONG positions. Given the contrarian view to client sentiment adopted here at DailyFX, does this mean we are destined to revisit recent lows and the $70 a barrel mark? For a more in-depth look at WTI/Oil Price sentiment and the tips and tricks to utilize it, download the guide below. Oil - US Crude Bullish Data provided by of clients are net long. of clients are net short. Change in Longs Shorts OI Daily -3% 13% 0% Weekly -7% 5% -4% Written by: Zain Vawda, Market Writer for DailyFX.com Contact and follow Zain on Twitter: @zvawda This provided photo offers a close-up look at John Field Wood's 1984 Emmy for his role in ABC's coverage of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Since then, General Manager Shannon Risley said the store has been a pillar in the community. That's just one of the ways the Nott Street market continues to try and support its community. The store incorporated in 1943 opened during World War II to provide people nearby a local grocery store at a time when the country was trying to ration gas. NISKAYUNA A little sticker on the cooler door inside the Niskayuna Co-op notes a dairy product that is made locally. Weve really just grown to the needs of the community, she said. But meeting those needs didnt come without some changes, like expanding three times and going through several renovations. The business currently occupies 8,800 square feet, according to Risley. From 1962 until the early 1970s, there was a German deli/restaurant, but that was discontinued and a snack bar was opened instead, according to the Co-ops website. The snack bar would eventually be discontinued as well. The assortment of products the Co-op offers has grown over the years, Risley said, noting it offers a larger selection of vegan and gluten-free options. The store shelves were lined Thursday with various products from pasta to canned goods. There was also a large selection of produce, and Risley said they get meat fresh every day, with butchers on hand to assist customers. Some of the latest changes to the business stemmed from the COVID-19 pandemic, when it implemented curbside pickup and delivery. The business hasnt come without its challenges over the years, including being sold in 1973 for $250,000. Risley said the challenges they face now are still ripple effects of COVID. Supply chain challenges still sometimes to this day continue to be an issue, she said. She said theyve also seen costs increase and surcharges to deliver items go up. However, through it all, the Co-op has seen many people also become member-owners. The Co-op has had 20,000 member-owners since it first opened, according to Risley. She said the recent closure of the ShopRite in the nearby plaza has led to many new customers. Risley believes what sets them apart from larger chains is not only the quality of what they offer but also the people that work there. Risley said not only do the employees have years of service but so many of our team members know customers by name or that they got their hair done. She also said the Co-op's participation in various other programs that give back to the community is another of its strengths. The Co-op has a change is good program by which people can round up their purchase to the nearest dollar and that change goes toward a featured partner three times a year. Weve been able to raise upwards of over $6,000 for just one organization at a time, she said. That money has then been able to be put back into the community to help with such things as food insecurity. Other programs the Co-op participates in are Schenectady Community Ministries' Fill the Van drives, in which they do a weeklong collection of items to donate to the food pantries. Theres also a program to collect worn, torn, faded or soiled flags which are then disposed of respectfully. Risley said, lately, the Co-op has been working with Nisky NOW (Nutrition on the Weekends), which aids in food insecurity in the Niskayuna Central School District. Find more information on the Niskayuna Co-op at www.niskayunaco-op.com. ShopRite announced on Oct. 20 that it would be closing five local supermarkets by Dec. 9, with Niskayuna seeking a replacement to anchor its Nott Street shopping plaza. The Eastern Parkway Market 32 will remain in business after the Niskayuna location opens at a date to be determined next year, according to Price Chopper spokesperson Mona Golub, as will the location at Mohawk Commons in Niskayuna. SCHENECTADY With the announcement that Price Chopper/Market 32 purchased the leases of five Capital Region ShopRite supermarkets, a Market 32 store is set to take over the former ShopRite location in Niskayuna next summer, just two miles from the companys store on Eastern Parkway in Schenectady. Price Chopper purchased the lease for ShopRites Niskayuna location, set to run through 2031, for an undisclosed sum. Theyre not buying the physical store. Price Chopper bought the leases from ShopRite, said John McAffer, associate broker at CBRE Real Estate, which represents the stores landlord Niskayuna Shopping Center LLC. They bought the legal rights to occupy the spaces from ShopRite. McAffer said another chain supermarket occupying the retail location is the best possible outcome for the overall health of the shopping plaza. McAffer said his firm was not involved in the negotiations between the two grocery retailers regarding the lease sales. From the landlords perspective, were thrilled, McAffer said. Its a great solution to the news that ShopRite was closing the stores. My guess is there were discussions going on long before there were any announcements. Ray Gillen, chair of the Schenectady County Metroplex Development Authority, said the fact that the Eastern Parkway Market 32 will remain in business is a positive for Schenectady, noting that Price Rite Marketplace at Crosstown Commons also serves customers in the upper State Street neighborhood. Gillen said that Metroplex was not involved in the lease deal between ShopRite and Price Chopper either. We were told right from the day that ShopRite announced they were leaving that it was likely another grocery store would go in there, he said. Land Minister nominee Park Sang-woo is a former career government official recognized for his expertise in housing and land policy, having served as the head of the state-run Korea Land & Housing (LH). Park, who majored in public administration at Korea University, joined the ministry in 1983 and served in key posts, including the head of the ministry's planning and coordination office. He earned his doctorate degree in urban development at Gachon University. After serving as the head of the Korea Research Institute for Construction Policy, he was named LH's CEO in March 2016 during the Park Geun-hye administration and fully served his three-year term. He is credited with successfully improving LH's poor financial structure during his term and effectively tackling housing welfare policy tasks under the succeeding Moon Jae-in administration. (Yonhap) Sometimes I ask myself whether I'm entirely fair in my own mind about Sir Keir Starmer. Admittedly, until a few years ago he was standing arm in arm with the man he described as his 'friend', the hard-Left Jeremy Corbyn. But isn't there - to borrow from the King James Bible - more 'joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance'? Sir Keir may have tried to undo Brexit. He also failed to make a stand against the anti-Semitism that polluted Corbyn's Labour Party. And, until recently, he was eager to nationalise public services and to scrap university tuition fees. But can't all of us honestly change? The economist John Maynard Keynes famously said: 'When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?' Maybe the Labour leader has seen the error of his former ways. At all events, when I heard two days ago that Sir Keir had written a piece for the Sunday Telegraph in which he praised Margaret Thatcher, I momentarily rallied to his side. Sometimes I ask myself whether I'm entirely fair in my own mind about Sir Keir Starmer Good on you, Keir, more or less summarised my thoughts. Some of your more Left-wing Labour MPs won't be pleased. Well done for taking them on, and speaking the truth. I must confess that even as these thoughts raced through my mind, they were quickly followed by more sceptical ones. Was his praise of the Iron Lady genuine? Or was he trying to cosy up to the Tory-inclined readers of the Sunday Telegraph? He didn't say much about her, but what he did say was unequivocal. Margaret Thatcher had 'sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism'. Strong stuff. He concluded by 'extending the hand of friendship' to Tories everywhere. There are two ways to test whether Sir Keir Starmer was being sincere - or calculatingly cynical. The first is to examine whether he has ever shown any fondness for the late Lady Thatcher. The second is to ask whether any of his current policies are remotely Thatcherite. The answer to the first question is that, until this moment, there have been no recorded instances of Sir Keir ever saying anything nice about Margaret Thatcher. On the contrary, he has been extremely critical of her. For once in his life he has shown consistency - until two days ago. Sir Keir wrote a piece for the Sunday Telegraph in which he praised Margaret Thatcher In the mid-1980s, the young Keir Starmer was a member of the 'editorial collective' of a short-lived hard-Left magazine called Socialist Alternatives, which existed to lock horns with Thatcherism. In five issues (there were, perhaps happily, no more) his name appears under eight articles. None was friendly to the then Conservative government. In one article, the youthful Keir refers to the 'authoritarian onslaught of Thatcherism'. Another piece by him takes a swipe against Britain's first woman Prime Minister for 'undermining the very basis of [the trade unions'] existence'. Incidentally, it can't be said that Sir Keir's prose style has lightened between those early days writing for Socialist Alternatives and his offering for the Sunday Telegraph. Turgid then and turgid now. We must, however, be fair. If we were all to be judged by what we did or wrote in our mid-20s, some of us might find ourselves in a pickle. In a spirit of even-handedness we should look at the grown-up Sir Keir Starmer. Here we don't find any traces whatsoever of admiration for Lady Thatcher. In a 2018 BBC interview, he spoke of his father: 'My dad was a toolmaker, he was a very good toolmaker, but he had to live through the policies of Margaret Thatcher, and that decimated manufacturing.' In the mid-1980s, the young Keir Starmer was a member of the 'editorial collective' of a short-lived hard-Left magazine called Socialist Alternatives, which existed to lock horns with Thatcherism As the years crept by, he hasn't softened his views. In 2021, he asserted that the Tories during the 1980s had 'abandoned' communities, while as recently as October he declared that 'back in the 1980s' the Tories had begun to concentrate 'wealth and opportunity' in the hands of the few. READ MORE: Channelling Maggie again, Keir? Starmer says 'wealth creation' is Labour's 'number one priority' as he seeks stable economic growth and vows not to splurge money if in power - amid left-wing backlash over praise for Thatcher The intervention comes as a furious spat with the Labour left rages over the party leader heaping praise on Margaret Thatcher Advertisement Nor has the Labour leader ever shown a sliver of gratitude towards Margaret Thatcher. As a result of changes she made as Education Secretary, Reigate Grammar School went private while the young Starmer was there, and his fees were paid by the State in what may have been an improved school. I am afraid to say - afraid, because I'm trying to be nice about the Labour leader - that his clumsy embrace on Sunday of the Iron Lady doesn't carry the slightest conviction. It was a piece of cynical nonsense. A few Left-wing Labour MPs have, as Sir Keir will have foreseen, risen from their lairs to complain about his remarks, but they must know that in his heart he didn't mean them. After all (and this is the second test I mentioned) there is nowhere in any of Labour's policies the merest hint of Thatcherism. If Sir Keir really believes that 'she sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism', he would surely try to emulate her. Granted, he is playing his cards close to his chest as to what he will do if he becomes Prime Minister, but he has never come near to suggesting that, in common with his adopted heroine, he believes lower taxes are liable to boost economic growth. On the contrary, Labour intends to abolish the 'non-dom' tax status enjoyed by some 26,000 rich foreigners living in Britain. It reckons that this would bring in some 3.2 billion, though some tax experts think the figure would be less. At the same time, Labour plans to abolish the VAT exemption enjoyed by private schools so parents will be forced to pay more. It amounts to a new tax on them. Labour thinks that this will raise an extra 1.7 billion, though this figure is also disputed. The point is that both changes would have been ardently opposed by Margaret Thatcher. The tax on non-doms is likely to drive away some wealthy foreign entrepreneurs, while the VAT change will be a burden for many hard-pressed parents who are, by no stretch of the imagination, rich. As I say, what Sir Keir intends to do he is mostly keeping to himself this side of the Election. I'll be astonished if he doesn't raise tax for the better-off, and surprised if the less well-off escape his depredations. It won't worry him that increasing taxation isn't an obviously Thatcherite thing to do. Of course, in pointing out that the Labour leader doesn't mean what he says, I don't exonerate this Government for its many mistakes, particularly over high tax and uncontrolled migration. Its new measures to control the latter, though welcome, are very late in the day. That said, when I read in Sir Keir's Sunday Telegraph article that Labour will make a better job of reducing mass immigration than the Tories have, I really did start counting the spoons. The Tories may have been bad at running the country, but Labour would be worse. That is the mantra I have started to repeat to myself. Maybe, just maybe, a future Conservative government will display some Thatcherite traits. But Tory-inclined voters should be warned that there's absolutely no prospect of the opportunistic Sir Keir Starmer ever doing so. Eye-popper in the Commons: a Government actually did something the voters might actually like. A mad innovation! It'll never catch on. Less than a week after a Conservative peasants' revolt on immigration levels, Home Secretary James Cleverly said he was going to chop numbers by hundreds of thousands. No more benefit-systems abuse by workers' families. No more under-cutting of locals' wages. 'Enough is enough,' said Mr Cleverly. He had plainly looked at the poll ratings. If they sink any lower, the submarine might implode. But let us park the cynicism and express wonder that 10 Downing Street had for once taken cognisance of protests from the orlop deck, and had done so less than a week after a backbench mutiny. Such responsiveness to parliamentary pressure was unprecedented. Tory MPs were in a daze. Think of Jamaican bobsleighers who had reached the bottom of a run without whizzing off the track and landing in the nearest pine tree. They cheered, smiled, practically did high fives. But one of them (Ipswich's young Tom Hunt, who has practically chewed his knuckles in frustration over the harm done to his town by immigration) did say 'shame it's taken so long'. Less than a week after a Conservative peasants' revolt on immigration levels, Home Secretary James Cleverly said he was going to chop numbers by hundreds of thousands, writes QUENTIN LETTS Labour backbenchers were appalled that anything was being done to accommodate the great unwashed British electorate. The idea that immigration might be too high was dismissed by Neil Coyle (Lab, Bermondsey & Old Southwark) as a fetish of 'Tory headbangers'. Mr Coyle happens to be the thirsty charmer who landed himself in trouble by being unpleasant to a young British-Chinese journalist late one night. Brother Coyle knows all about headbanging. Other Labour backbenchers moaned and keened and shouted 'disgrace!' and 'shame!' when Mr Cleverly, in his slightly camp, tight suit-jacket and iron-on beard, announced various new requirements that will make it harder for foreigners to work here. Beth Winter (Lab, Cynon Valley) was her customary frosty self. She's as joyless as a Valleys undertaker. Up they popped, one after another, to waggle boney forefingers of gloom: the likes of Rachael Maskell (Lab, York Central), Alex Cunningham (Lab, Stockton North) and Justin Madders (Lab, Ellesmere Port & Neston). The government was doing quite the wrong thing. This was a perfectly honourable view, no doubt, but it clashes with their frontbencher, Yvette Cooper, who claimed that she, too, wished to cut immigration. Sure thing. Yvette is magnificent at these occasions. I watch her performances with such absorption that I never actually follow her words, such as they are. You don't have to. Everything becomes subservient to the brilliant theatrics of her disgust, her disappointment, her head-wobbling indignation at everything the minister opposite her has said. She shakes her head even more than Nicola Sturgeon used to, and at greater velocity. It's a wonder she hasn't suffered frightful whiplash. The head was bouncing around so much this time that if it had left its moorings it would have shot across the Commons table, landed on the floor and kept spinning, like one of those illuminated gyroscopes, with her eyes a-bulge with vexation flashing orange and blue and green as it hurtled about on its speeding axis. Yvette Cooper is magnificent at these occasions. I watch her performances with such absorption that I never actually follow her words, such as they are Suella Braverman (of blessed memory) used to rise to the bait. Mr Cleverly handles Yvette better with a tone of amusement and, yesterday, a little wink after he talked about 'this great government'. He knew that would elicit barks of disbelief from Labour, and it certainly did. Tim Farron (Lib Dem, Westmorland & Lonsdale) asked if the Home Office had consulted Lake District hoteliers. Mr Cleverly said indeed it had. That rather popped Timbo's balloon. Joanna Cherry (SNP, Edinburgh SW) tried emotional one-upmanship by talking about an elderly relation in a care home... Mr Cleverly trumped her effortlessly by saying his mum came to this country in the 1960s to work for the NHS. And Alistair Carmichael (Lib Dem, Orkney & Shetland) was upset trawlermen would have to learn to speak English. Cod English in their case, surely? Don't miss our brilliant new podcast, The Crown: Fact or Fiction with Robert Hardman and Natasha Livingstone. Listen now on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts She arrived in the world when Queen Victoria was on the throne, treated by Sigmund Freud, exiled from Greece, rescued Jews from the Nazis and eventually founded her own convent. Princess Alice, Prince Philip's mother, spanned the eras and lived what some would consider to have been a thousand lives in her 84 years. The anniversary of her death is tomorrow. Born as Princess Alice of Battenberg in February, 1885, at Windsor Castle in the presence of her great-grandmother, Victoria, she was raised as an English princess. Her parents, Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine and Louis, Prince of Battenberg, were German. Princess Alice, Prince Philip's mother and the in-law of Queen Elizabeth II, lived what some would consider a thousand lives in her 84 years. Pictured: Prince Philip and Alice in 1957 Prince Alice and Prince Andrew of Greece following their wedding in 1903. The pair had met a year earlier at the Coronation of King Edward VII in 1902 After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1930, her family had her treated at a clinic in Berlin. Pictured Alice with her husband Prince Andrew of Greece in 1903 Princess Alice was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. It means Prince Philip and the Queen were distantly related through their great-great-grandmother Alice was one of four, the others being sister Louise, brother Louis and George. Louise later became Queen of Sweden. Louis 'Dickie' Mountbatten was Prince Philip's uncle and mentor - and mentor to Prince Charles - before he was murdered by the IRA in 1979. The Battenbergs were advised to Anglicise their surname to 'Mountbatten' during the First World War to drop the German connection. When she was a young child, Alice was diagnosed as congenitally deaf, however, could speak clearly and became a fluent lip reader. Photographs of her as a young woman showed a handsome, elegant woman, often pictured with upswept hair. She was aged just 17 years old, while at the Coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, she met and fell in love with Prince Andrew, a younger son of the King of Greece. A year later the couple wed in a German ceremony - where they received at least $750,000 in wedding gifts - Alice became Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark. The diamonds in Queen Elizabeth's future engagement ring came from a tiara gifted to Alice on her wedding day from Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra of Russia. When the Balkan Wars began in 1912, Prince Andrew was reinstated in the army, while Prince Alice helped assist war efforts by setting up field hospitals. She was later awarded the Royal Red Cross in 1913 by King George V, the late Queen's grandfather, for her hard work. By 1914, Alice had given birth to four daughters - Princesses Margarita, Theodora, Cecilie, and Sophie - with a revolution brewing in Greece, where she was living at the time. Shortly after her youngest child and only son, Prince Philip, was born in 1921, the Greek royal family were exiled following the abdication of King Constantine I of Greece, who was forced out in 1917. While he was just a toddler, the future Duke of Edinburgh was placed into a makeshift cot - an orange crate - as his family fled to Paris on a British warship. Once in France, they lived on handouts from relatives. The stressful period caused strain on Alice, whose ardent religious beliefs had slowly become more eccentric over the years. After suffering a nervous breakdown in 1930, she began hearing voices and believed she was having intimate relationships with Jesus and other religious figures. Princess Alice of Battenberg (fifth from the left) pictured with the late Queen and Duke of Edinburgh on their wedding day in 1947. None of Prince Philip's sisters were invited to the celebration because of their connections with the Nazi Party Alice had four daughters - Princesses Margarita, Theodora, Cecilie, and Sophie - with a revolution brewing in Greece, where she was living at the time. Pictured: Her daughters in 1915 Alice was congenitally deaf, however, could speak clearly. Photographs of her as a young woman showed her beauty, often pictured with upswept hair and lace gowns. Pictured, circa. 1945 She was awarded the Royal Red Cross in 1913 by King George V, the late Queen's grandfather, for her hard work. Pictured: Princess Alice circa 1910 She was later diagnosed as schizophrenic before being treated by Sigmund Freud at a clinic in Berlin. Under the advice of the renowned psychoanalyst, her ovaries were blasted with X-rays, which were said to cure her of her frustrated sexual desires. This treatment is believed to have prompted early menopause. There is also no evidence that Alice herself was consulted about this, or consented to the procedure. Following the treatment, she was admitted to a Swiss sanatorium where she remained imprisoned for two and a half years. At the time she was locked away, Prince Philip was just nine years old. He had been taken out for a picnic with his grandmother and when he arrived home his mother had gone. Prince Andrew effectively abandoned his wife to go live on the French Rivera with his mistress, despite never getting divorced. He died in 1944 in Monaco. During this time, young Prince Philip spent his time at boarding school in England and Scotland, being bounced from relative to relative during the holidays, including his uncle Lord Mountbatten. When his mother was eventually released from the sanatorium in 1932, she drifted between modest German B&Bs. The mother and son were not reunited until 1937, when they met at the funeral of Philip's sister Cecilie who died in a plane crash at the age of 26. During the First World War, she hid a Jewish family on the top floor of her home, just yards away from Gestapo headquarters The mother and son were not reunited until 1937, when they met at the funeral of Philip's sister Cecilie who died in a plane crash at the age of 26. Pictured: Prince Philip and Alice in 1960 At this point, Alice wanted 16-year-old Philip to return to Athens with her, following the restoration of the Greek monarchy in 1935. But Philip already had his future etched out in the Royal Navy, so his mother was left alone in Greece. By 1941, Alice was stranded in Nazi-occupied Greece. Lord Mountbatten sent her food parcels which she handed out to those in need. During the war, she hid a Jewish family on the top floor of her home, just yards away from Gestapo headquarters. When the Gestapo became suspicious and questioned the Princess, she used her deafness as an excuse not to answer their questions. 'I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special,' Prince Philip said when visiting her grave in 1994. 'She was a person with deep religious faith and she would have considered it to be a totally human action to fellow human beings in distress.' Following the war, diamonds were used from Alice's tiara so Philip could present a ring to Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen. Alice sold the rest of her jewels to create her own religious order, the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, in 1949, becoming a nun. She went on to build a convent and orphanage in a poor suburb of Athens. After the war, diamonds were used from Alice's tiara so Philip could present a ring to Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen. Pictured: Princess Alice arriving in London in June 1965 Princess Alice remained in Greece until 1967, when Prince Philip and the Queen flew her back to England, where she spent her final days until she died in Buckingham Palace in December 1969. Pictured: The Duke and his mother in 1957 Prince William during a visit to the Church of St Mary Magdalene to pay his respects at the tomb of his great-grandmother Princess Alice of Battenberg in June 2018 She remained in Greece until 1967, where there was a Greek military coup. Alice refused to leave the country until Prince Philip sent a plane and a special request from the Queen to bring her home. She spent the final years of her life living at Buckingham Palace with her son and daughter-in-law before she died in December 1969, aged 84. The princess was originally interred in the royal crypt in St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, but she wished to be laid to rest near her aunt, Grand Duchess Elizabeth, at the convent on the Mount of Olives. In 2018, Prince William undertook a royal tour of the Middle East, which included a stop in Jerusalem. The royal took the time to lay flowers at her gravesite. William had previously proclaimed his admiration for Alice. In light of her protecting the Cohens, he said: 'Her story is a matter of great pride for my whole family.' The last few months of her life were fictionalised in the third season of Netflix's The Crown, played by Jane Lapotaire. The series incorrectly suggested she gave a tell-all interview with the Guardian, covering topics about her mental health condition. Shortly before her death, she wrote a heartbreaking letter to her only son, that read: 'Dearest Philip, Be brave, and remember I will never leave you, and you will always find me when you need me most. All my devoted love, your old Mama.' One British woman took to Mumsnet to vent about her partner's deceitful antics Every relationship has its setbacks but it's not often that your partner lies about his secret estranged family. One British woman took to Mumsnet to vent about her 51-year-old partner's deceitful antics after he confessed he had a family of five back in Denmark, despite previously telling her he was too busy with work to have had a big family. The woman, 18 weeks pregnant with their third child, said that her partner told her that he'd always wanted a big family before meeting her, but wasn't able to because 'work was so busy'. She asked in her post whether she was wrong to keep her own children from him after the shocking conversation that shook her to her core. Users immediately came to her defence, raising concerns that he may in fact still be married to another woman. One British woman took to Mumsnet to vent about her 51-year-old partner's deceitful antics after he confessed he had a family of five back in Denmark, despite previously telling her he was too busy with work to have had a big family (stock image) The poster, 18 weeks pregnant with their third child, said that her partner previously claimed ' he always wanted a big family and never had kids as work was so busy' but he had just admitted otherwise in a sit down The anonymous woman started her post: 'I'm so b***** mad I dont even know what to do!' Tonight he sat me down and told me he had to confess - right ok? HE HAS 5 CHILDREN.' She explained that her partner is from Malta and moved to London six years ago after spending most of his life in Norway and Denmark, and that she shares two children with him. 'Yes thats right - he has 5 kids back in Denmark, ages 24, 22, 21, 20 and 18. Apparently the 4 eldest are in London this weekend and want to see him for the first time in 6 years!!!!! WHAT. 'I'm so so mad. Ive never met his family, claims he is an only child (who knows) and his parents are dead (are they?)'. The woman was told her partner had actually kept in touch with his children but they had moved abroad for work or university. He was due to meet them all while they visited the British capital. Shocked and devastated, the woman forced her partner out of their shared home and into a hotel. She explained that she didn't want him near their own children, out of fear of him abandoning them for six years too. Reaction: Mumsnet users comforted the anonymous woman about her shocking situation Fortunately, the woman wasn't stuck with him for financial reasons as she has her own income stream but had found out his secret family was receiving money from him. In a desperate plea she asked: 'What do I do now? We cant recover from this right? He is psychotic? Can I keep my kids from him or do I just hope he jets off elsewhere and leaves us to it??! 'AIBU (am I being unreasonable) to feel like the world has just imploded on itself and wonder what the actual f*** is wrong with him!? Why would he lie?!!' One user advised she look into hiring a private investigator, but added: 'Dating a financially secure man who has children - especially kids who are teens and young adults and don't live in the same country - would not be a dealbreaker for a lot of women'. She continued: 'I can't see any reason why he never mentioned this? It's absolutely insane! I would most definitely start a separation and get your financial ducks in a row. 'I'd also hire a private investigator to look more into his background. Can you call his ex-wife in Denmark? Surely, she may have some information to share!' A different user was pleased she sent her partner to a hotel, and told her she should be 'furious'. 'I'm so glad you sent him to a hotel. You should be furious. I'd chuck all of his stuff out, take his key/change the locks, take any joint money and spend it, and don't speak to him,' she finished. Another sympathetic said: 'Oh god that's beyond crazy! How will you ever believe a word he says again? You must feel like your whole relationship is based on lies. 'It will be very hard to overcome I think. Sorry you are going through such an awful hurtful mess'. A well-groomed welcome to this, Inspires sixth annual beauty awards, and the second to take place during a cost-of-living crisis. Many of us also struggled through pandemic financial woes, meaning its a long time since we have felt anything remotely resembling flush. Money has rarely felt as tight, not least as we stagger into Christmas, all of us busy cutting corners. But we still need our beauty wares we will always need their magic. Indeed, I would argue that we crave glamour now more than ever: for cheer, for charm, for screwing up our courage into a ball and plodding Britishly on. Fortunately, nowhere does budget beauty as brilliantly as Blighty. Hannah Betts argues that we crave glamour now more than ever: for cheer, for charm, for screwing up our courage into a ball and plodding Britishly on In Boots and Superdrug, we have retail giants committed to bringing us the best the industry has to offer at bargain prices. Whether its their own brands such as Boots trusty No 7 skincare or Superdrugs cracking cosmetic newcomer Studio London or decades-old stalwarts such as Rimmel, Batiste and The Body Shop. From 1980s colour king Barry M to playful pioneers 3ina (pronounced Mina), the UK is the place for power pigment costing pennies. Add supermarket deals Lidl and Aldi included Amazon offers and international names such as LOreal, Bourjois, Maybelline, Max Factor, CeraVe, Byoma, Garnier, Bioderma, Vichy, Aveeno, e.l.f., and Italian geniuses Kiko Milano, and its entirely possible to look, feel and smell as dazzling as if you had spent hundreds. Many of us will also have subscribed to Beauty Pie, which offers state-of-the-art products without the mark-ups (from 4.95 a month, or try its 60-day free trial, beautypie.com). With the wolf at the door, we are no less chic but we are more inventive. To guarantee bang for our buck, we asked three industry giants for their product passions: CEO and founder of the British Beauty Council Millie Kendall OBE; make-up artist and brand owner Ruby Hammer MBE; and beauty guru and podcaster Emma Gunavardhana, of The Emma Guns Show. I have given you my own award-winners, too: the beauty buys Ive lived with, loved, and relied on time and time again in 2023, bringing me joy when it felt thin on the ground. Take a look at our inventory of excellence, cherry-pick for your Christmas stocking, and vote now to be entered into our fabulous prize draw to scoop a selection of our winners. ...AND HERE ARE THIS YEAR'S ESTEEMED JUDGES Millie Kendall OBE Millie, 56, dispels the myth that you need to splurge on expensive products when you get older Millie, who is the CEO and founder of the British Beauty Council, has been involved in the industry for almost 40 years. She says: 'Its easy to think that when you get to my age 56 you have to splurge on expensive products to get results, but thats not the case. Some of my favourite bargain products are just as effective as more expensive counterparts. 'Take Curels Intensive Moisture Facial Cream (19.50, boots.com). If you put your fingers in the pot with your eyes closed, you wouldnt know it wasnt Tatchas Dewy Skin Cream, which is more than three times the price. It doesnt have the same fragrance but its just as good. 'There are also some great steals to be had if you look at brands that you might not think are targeted at you. My daughter and I both use the Byoma Creamy Jelly Cleanser (9.99, byoma.com), which is quick and easy to use in the shower and a good all-round cleanser.' Similarly, 3ina Lipsticks (13, uk.3ina.com) come in really great colours and the finish is a lovely semi-matte. The 503, a wearable nude pink, has become a digital media viral sensation. Ruby Hammer MBE Ruby, 61, is a professional make-up artist and the founder of her own range of beauty products Make-up artist and brand founder Ruby, 61, has been a beauty world go-to since the 1980s, and launched her own range, Ruby Hammer, in 2019. She says: 'As a professional make-up artist, and now the founder of my own range, Ive tried hundreds of products. And while there are some premium products I think are worth the money, the High Street is packed with really great, affordable products. 'Mascara is a basic staple. It should only last you three to six months as every time you open it you pump air into it so it dries out. You want something inexpensive enough to replace without hesitation. Ive had Max Factor Masterpiece (12.99, superdrug.com) in my kit since it launched. The brush grabs every lash and it lengthens, volumises and defines. 'I wont do ads or paid collaborations until Ive tried something and know that it works. That was the case with No7 Future Renew Serum (34.95, boots.com) I tested it at its launch and I have to say its bloody good! Given the technology and clinical trials behind it, its a great price although, like anything, the results are cumulative so you have to stick with it.' Emma Gunavardhana Emma, 45, has seen seismic changes in the beauty industry during more than 20 years working as a beauty journalist Beauty journalist Emma, 45, hosts The Emma Guns Show podcast which has had more than 15 million global downloads (instagram.com/emmaguns). She says: 'Ive been working in the beauty industry for more than 20 years and the changes Ive seen have been seismic. More effective, affordable products are available, and brands such as Skin + Me (29.99 for a subscription, skinandme.com), which offers prescription-by-post skincare, have been serious game-changers. 'Once you have had the remote consultation, it takes all the guesswork out of standing at a beauty counter, its democratised dermatology, and my skin has been changed for the better since I started using it. 'But there are also a handful of low-priced products that are classics for me. Bourjois Healthy Mix Foundation (12.99, superdrug.com) launched in 2010. It was discontinued in the UK in 2019 but returned three years later. Its one of those foundations that makes skin look instantly healthy and radiant. 'My favourite budget beauty buy is Vaseline (1.80, boots.com). Stick a layer on your lips before you go to bed, and you will never struggle with dry lips again.' Hannah Betts Hannah, 52, chose Glossiers extraordinary Stretch Fluid Foundation (34, ukglossier.com) as her product of 2023 After a quarter of a century writing about beauty, and 41 years wearing foundation (yes, I started aged 11), I know base has to be a perfect fit. I have found that in Glossiers extraordinary Stretch Fluid Foundation (34, ukglossier.com) my product of 2023. Apply it with my beauty-tool pick Katherine Daniels Pure Pigment Foundation & Concealer Brush (25, katherinedanielscosmetics.com). My other product of the year I bought when on offer at 2 a shot, Studio London Flaunt Flawless Blusher (5, superdrug.com). The rest of my stash is no less cheap as chips. My day cream is Hello Sunday: The Everyday One SPF 50 (16, spacenk.com), which takes base beautifully; my flat-hair fix Batiste Dry Shampoo & Volume (now 2.83, boots.com). I open up my eyes with Rimmel ScandalEyes Waterproof Kohl Kajal (4.99, boots.com) on the lower rim, then Maybelline Colossal Curl Bounce Mascara (11.99, boots.com). A Barry M Velvet Matte Longwear Lip Paint (4.99, superdrug.com) is my latest power pout. Bargain bliss. CHOOSE FROM OUR EXPERTS' FAVOURITES Poll Brow product LOreal Paris Brow Artist Anastasia Beverly Hills Brow Powder Ruby Hammer Mascara & Brow Duo Blink Brow Bar Ultra Slim Brow Definer Brow product LOreal Paris Brow Artist 180 votes Anastasia Beverly Hills Brow Powder 82 votes Ruby Hammer Mascara & Brow Duo 109 votes Blink Brow Bar Ultra Slim Brow Definer 44 votes Now share your opinion Poll Mascara Maybelline Colossal Curl Bounce Mascara Max Factor Masterpiece LOreal Paris Air Volume Mega Mascara 3ina The Volume Mascara 900 Mascara Maybelline Colossal Curl Bounce Mascara 158 votes Max Factor Masterpiece 149 votes LOreal Paris Air Volume Mega Mascara 64 votes 3ina The Volume Mascara 900 22 votes Now share your opinion Poll Eyeshadow Bourjois Palette Le Smoky Eyeshadow Kiko Milano Green Me Eyeshadow Palette Jones Road Sparkle Wash Liquid Glitter (in Barely Pink) Rem Beauty Midnight Shadows Eyeshadow Gloss Eyeshadow Bourjois Palette Le Smoky Eyeshadow 174 votes Kiko Milano Green Me Eyeshadow Palette 87 votes Jones Road Sparkle Wash Liquid Glitter (in Barely Pink) 45 votes Rem Beauty Midnight Shadows Eyeshadow Gloss 35 votes Now share your opinion Poll Eye Liner Rimmel ScandalEyes Waterproof Kohl Kajal Lisa Eldridge Seamless Glide Eye Pencil 19/99 Precision Colour Pencil (in Barna) Gosh Intense Eye Liner Pen Eye Liner Rimmel ScandalEyes Waterproof Kohl Kajal 194 votes Lisa Eldridge Seamless Glide Eye Pencil 55 votes 19/99 Precision Colour Pencil (in Barna) 13 votes Gosh Intense Eye Liner Pen 45 votes Now share your opinion Poll Concealer Maybelline Fit Me Concealer Maybelline Age Rewind Eraser e.l.f. Cosmetics Hydrating Camo Concealer Glossier Stretch Balm Concealer Concealer Maybelline Fit Me Concealer 115 votes Maybelline Age Rewind Eraser 83 votes e.l.f. Cosmetics Hydrating Camo Concealer 93 votes Glossier Stretch Balm Concealer 49 votes Now share your opinion Poll Blusher / Bronzer e.l.f. Cosmetics Putty Cream Blush Ateh Jewel Beauty Blush of Dreams Beauty Pie Quick Contour Supergel Studio London Flaunt Flawless Blusher Blusher / Bronzer e.l.f. Cosmetics Putty Cream Blush 185 votes Ateh Jewel Beauty Blush of Dreams 20 votes Beauty Pie Quick Contour Supergel 41 votes Studio London Flaunt Flawless Blusher 51 votes Now share your opinion Poll Lip product Barry M Velvet Matte Longwear Lip Paint Vaseline 3ina The Lipstick Ruby Hammer Lip Serum Balm Lip product Barry M Velvet Matte Longwear Lip Paint 93 votes Vaseline 168 votes 3ina The Lipstick 31 votes Ruby Hammer Lip Serum Balm 97 votes Now share your opinion Poll Foundation / Base LOreal True Match Foundation Bourjois Healthy Mix Glossier Stretch Fluid Foundation Rose Inc Skin Enhance Luminous Tinted Serum Foundation / Base LOreal True Match Foundation 194 votes Bourjois Healthy Mix 78 votes Glossier Stretch Fluid Foundation 47 votes Rose Inc Skin Enhance Luminous Tinted Serum 49 votes Now share your opinion Poll Night treatment LOreal Age Perfect Night Cream Beauty Pie Plantastic Micropeeling Super Drops Skin + Me Personalised Solution First Aid Beauty Bounce-Boosting Serum Night treatment LOreal Age Perfect Night Cream 192 votes Beauty Pie Plantastic Micropeeling Super Drops 31 votes Skin + Me Personalised Solution 47 votes First Aid Beauty Bounce-Boosting Serum 30 votes Now share your opinion Poll Day cream / Serum No7 Future Renew Serum Curel Intensive Moisture Facial Cream Vichy Neovadiol Meno 5 Serum for Menopausal Skin Hello Sunday: The Everyday One Day cream / Serum No7 Future Renew Serum 205 votes Curel Intensive Moisture Facial Cream 60 votes Vichy Neovadiol Meno 5 Serum for Menopausal Skin 52 votes Hello Sunday: The Everyday One 32 votes Now share your opinion Poll Bath or shower product Dove Deeply Nourishing Body Wash Soap & Glory Exfoli-Great Gloves Sanctuary Spa Signature Natural Oils Two-Phase Bath Oil Messiah & Eve Body Cleanser Number 02 Bath or shower product Dove Deeply Nourishing Body Wash 191 votes Soap & Glory Exfoli-Great Gloves 47 votes Sanctuary Spa Signature Natural Oils Two-Phase Bath Oil 57 votes Messiah & Eve Body Cleanser Number 02 274 votes Now share your opinion Poll Cleanser CeraVe Hydrating Cleanser The Body Shop Camomile Cleansing Balm Byoma Milky Gel Cleanser Bioderma Atoderm Cleansing Oil Cleanser CeraVe Hydrating Cleanser 224 votes The Body Shop Camomile Cleansing Balm 64 votes Byoma Milky Gel Cleanser 29 votes Bioderma Atoderm Cleansing Oil 39 votes Now share your opinion Poll Body lotion or cream Garnier Body Superfood Aveeno Skin Relief Body Oil Spray Ameliorate Transforming Body Lotion Nuxe After Sun all year round Body lotion or cream Garnier Body Superfood 99 votes Aveeno Skin Relief Body Oil Spray 97 votes Ameliorate Transforming Body Lotion 40 votes Nuxe After Sun all year round 48 votes Now share your opinion Poll Hair hero Batiste Dry Shampoo & Volume LOreal Paris Wonder Water Arkive Hybrid Oil Garnier Good Permanent Hair Dye Hair hero Batiste Dry Shampoo & Volume 152 votes LOreal Paris Wonder Water 79 votes Arkive Hybrid Oil 48 votes Garnier Good Permanent Hair Dye 23 votes Now share your opinion A woman who spent a year working at the South Pole has recounted her 'once in a lifetime experience', including braving temperatures of minus 106F (minus 77C), celebrating Christmas with a five-kilometer morning run through all 24 time zones and only being allowed a two-minute hot shower twice a week. Michelle Endo - who has been able to 'travel to all seven continents for free' - spent the past year working as a steward coordinator at the Amundsen-Scott research station, the closest base to the South Pole, where the sun only sets and rises once a year, and got to witness the stunning Aurora Australis. The 32-year-old from San Francisco took the hospitality manager job in November last year so she could visit the Pole without having to fork out thousands of pounds with week-long trips to the station by plane from Chile costing $59,900 or more per person. The travel enthusiast has shared the highs and lows of living in one of the most hostile environments on Earth, after becoming one of just 261 women to witness the South Pole during its perpetually dark winter months of May to August. 'It's obviously cold, but it's colder than cold,' she said. Michelle Endo (pictured) - who has been able to 'travel to all seven continents for free' - spent the past year working as a steward coordinator at the Amundsen-Scott research station 'The coldest we saw this winter was minus 106F with a wind chill of minus 150F in late June. 'But then perhaps more surprising is how the body adapts and suddenly minus 113F feels normal. 'It's hard to describe.' The outside temperature at the South Pole regularly reaches more than three times that of a commercial freezer which run at around minus 4F. The team would even freeze food by simply leaving it outside. And Michelle revealed that it wasn't just the icy cold - the altitude took 'at least a week' to get used to at 2,885m . 'Walking up a flight of stairs can take the wind out of you,' she recalled. 'The pressure altitude also changes so you might go to sleep at 3000 meters but then wake up at 3,500 meters.' Christmas at the South Pole also come with its own, unique traditions - including a run through 24 time zones Michelle also teamed up with other staff members for a month-long Christmas celebration in July (pictured) Michelle also explained that 'you're essentially living on a space ship' while there. 'Once the last flight of summer leaves mid-February, you're stuck there until late October,' she added. 'We all work and live together in the same building so while in the real world you could finish your job for the day and go home, we don't have that at the Pole.' The region has six months of sunshine between November and February, a period known as the austral summer. After several months of 'twilight', on May 10 the polar region is plunged into 24-hour darkness for around six months. This can lead to a condition called 'Winter Brain', Michelle explained admitting that she's still struggling with it even though her job at the Pole finished in November. She's currently taking a few weeks off in New Zealand before heading back to the United States for Christmas. 'We're not as mentally sharp as when we first arrived, or if we'd been living back home,' she said. 'Even now after a week since leaving the ice, I am struggling to process some of the most basic communication in a timely manner. 'Like the other day when I was ordering a tea at a cafe I had to ask the poor staff member to repeat herself three times because I could hear the words she was saying to me, but I just couldn't make sense of it.' One of the luxuries Michelle missed most was being able to take a long hot shower - and it's the first thing she did on her return. 'At the South Pole, we're only allowed two two-minute showers each week,' she said. The 32-year-old from San Francisco took the hospitality manager job in November last year so she could visit the Pole without having to fork out thousands of pounds The travel enthusiast has shared the highs and lows of living in one of the most hostile environments on Earth, after becoming one of just 261 women to witness the South Pole during its perpetually dark winter months of May to August 'Getting back to the real world and getting to stand under a hot shower for as long as I wanted was amazing.' But despite the hardships, the traveler also got to enjoy the unique and incredible experiences the Pole has to offer - including a unique Christmas tradition and the 'out of this world' Southern Lights. 'On the morning of our station Christmas, we do a fun run called "Race Around the World",' Michelle explained 'It's a 5k course that circles the Geographic South Pole so that participants get to run 'around the world' through all 24 time zones. 'Some participants take it seriously, while others like to dress up in fun costumes or onesies to do it.' Every year, the Antarctic team, who work six days a week Monday to Saturday, agreed to celebrate on the closest Saturday to December 25. Michelle said that last year, they delivered small bags of sweets to everyone the night before our station Christmas 'so that everyone got to wake up to a present'. 'It's the small things that make all the difference down there and really boost morale,' she added. The team also put up an artificial tree and enjoyed a full blown Christmas dinner prepared by the station chefs and homemade sweets made by a 'talented baker' at the station Every year, the Antarctic team, who work six days a week Monday to Saturday, agreed to celebrate on the closest Saturday to December 25. They also celebrated Christmas in July The team also put up an artificial tree and enjoyed a full blown Christmas dinner prepared by the station chefs and homemade sweets made by a 'talented baker' at the station. Michelle also teamed up with other staff members for a month-long Christmas celebration in July, with plenty of festive activities, including secret Santa, a cookie decorating workshop and gingerbread house competition. 'The winter months at Pole tend to be more relaxed as the crew doesn't change from mid-February to late October,' she explained. 'Since Christmas is my favorite holidays and there were quite a few big Christmas fans, we decided to do a month-long celebration in July. 'We had more time to deck out the station and really get into the Christmas spirit.' They created a 'candy cane lane' inside the station, and hosted a Christmas dance party, so that everyone could really get into Christmas spirit,' said Michelle. And for her, few things would beat seeing the Aurora Australis, or Southern Lights - one of the biggest highlights of her Polar adventure. The month-long Christmas celebration at the Pole in July included a gingerbread house competition The team created a candy cane lane and life size gingerbread house out of cardboard to mark the month long Christmas celebration 'Granted, I haven't seen any since the sun came back in September, but they were honestly out of this world,' Michelle said. 'I don't think I'll ever see or experience anything quite like the auroras we got at the South Pole again.' Michelle has now visited more than 60 countries, often taking up working gigs such as being an English teacher in Japan and a youth counsellor on cruise ships. 'Over the last 10 years I've taken a variety of jobs around the world that allowed me to travel to all seven continents for free,' she said. 'Antarctica was my last continent to visit and I didn't want to have to pay to go there. 'Tourists can pay tens of thousands of dollars to visit the South Pole during the summer, but no amount of money at the moment can allow them to visit during the winter and see the auroras this far south. 'As of this year, only 1,702 people have wintered over at the South Pole, 261 of which have been women. 'It's truly a once in a lifetime experience.' Michelle worked at the station as a steward between November 3 2022 and November 16 2023. She now helps others follow in her footsteps by sharing her travel tips on her blog, Wander Eat Write and @wandereatwrite. Find out more about Michelle's travels by visiting: wandereatwrite.com Telma Oritz has been forced into the spotlight after her ex-husband claimed he had a relationship with her sister Queen Letizia of Spain before their marriage together. Jaime Del Burgo, 53, who is currently based in the UK, has recently contributed to a tell-all book about the Spanish royal, where he makes the far-fetched claim they were still romantically involved after Letizia's 2004 wedding to King Felipe. The entrepreneur - who claims he was dating Letizia when she met Felipe - also shared a selfie the Queen, 51, took in a mirror during one of her pregnancies as 'evidence' of their relationship on X, formerly known as Twitter, last night. Jaime alleges Letizia abruptly ended their relationship when she called him and said: 'We can't continue seeing each other' in August 2011. The following year, he got engaged to Letizia's younger sister Telma. Telma, 50, who used to work in Barcelona's City Council and already had her daughter Amanda from her relationship with ex-partner Enrique Martin Llop, accepted the proposal after just two months of dating. Telma Oritz, pictured centre left, with her partner Irish lawyer Gavin Bonnar, and Queen Letizia and her two daughters in 2019 At this time, Jaime claims he was still close to Letizia and Felipe. Author Jaime Penafiel wrote in his new book Letizia & I: 'When [Jaime del Burgo] is going to marry Telma, it is Felipe who advises him on the marriage agreements and, over the years, they have maintained a great friendship.' In 2012, the pair relocated to New York to start their married life - but Telma returned to Barcelona the same year before announcing their permanent separation in 2014. The couple's first attempts at divorce had been squashed by the groom's father Jaime Ignacio del Burgo, who told a court that his son and Telma repented and wanted to give their marriage another go. Telma's partner is now Irish lawyer Gavin Bonnar and the couple welcomed their first child together in October 2021, when Telma was aged 47. Gavin shares two children with his first wife musician Sharon Corr. In her recent album The Fool & The Scorpion, Sharon wrote lyrics including 'the queen's twisted sister' - which fans speculated were inspired by her children's new step-mother. Letizia and Telma grew up in a middle-class family and attended a public school. Their mother Maria Rodriguez, was a nurse. Their father Jesus Jose Ortiz Alvarez, and stepmother Ana Togores, are both journalists. Telma prefers to stay out of the limelight - but it's thought she still has a close relationship with her family, with the mother-of-two invited to several special family occasions, including the Princess of Asturias Awards in 2019. Jaime Del Burgo and his ex-wife Telma Oritz seen in 2012 before their wedding. The couple divorced in 2014 The couple (pictured with Telma's daughter Amanda) relocated to New York after their wedding in 2012 before returning to Spain Queen Letizia and King Felipe with their families ahead of Princess Leonor's christening in 2006 At the lavish event, she watched her niece Princess Leonor, 18, who is heir to the Spanish throne, give a speech. This summer, when in Madrid to attend a talk on renewable energy starring Amal Clooney, she told the media her nieces were 'the best'. An economist by training, Telma works for NGO Concordia, a 'global convener of heads of state, government officials, C-suite executives, and leaders of nonprofits, think tanks, and foundations to find cross-sector solutions that address the biggest challenges of our time,' according to its website. For her job, she has rubbed shoulders with Queen Rania of Jordan in New York in September 2022. She's also been pictured borrowing garments from her sister before, after she was spotted in a red blouse of Letizia's for a work event, according to local media. Telma spent her early career working on the frontline in humanitarian relief projects after graduating in economics from Barcelona University, the IWEC Foundation revealed. She obtained her postgraduate and masters in marketing and administration from Rome, Mexico and Barcelona universities. She can also speak Spanish, Catalan, French, English, Italian, Portuguese and some Arabic. Telma's ex Jaime Del Burgo shared an undated selfie the Queen, 51, took in a bathroom mirror during one of her pregnancies as 'evidence' of their relationship on X, formerly known as Twitter, last night. Queen Letizia's sister Telma Oritz with her second husband Robert Gavin at the Princess of Asturias Awards in 2019 Telma Ortiz is seen leaving the EDP Gran Via Theater after attending the 'We Choose Earth Tour' on June 22, 2023 in Madrid In the selfie, the royal can be seen wearing a black pashmina - which Jaime claims belonged to him - and he also typed out a message, supposedly sent to him by the Spanish Queen. It read: 'Love. I wear your pashmina. It's like feeling you by my side. It takes care of me. 'It protects me. I count the hours until we see each other again. Love you. Get out of here. Yours,' TIMELINE OF JAIME'S CLAIMS ABOUT HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH SPAIN'S ROYAL FAMILY Pre-2000 - Letizia Oritz, who was a newsreader at the time, meets Jaime del Burgo - the son of a politician - and the pair start dating - Letizia Oritz, who was a newsreader at the time, meets Jaime del Burgo - the son of a politician - and the pair start dating 2001 - Letizia and King Felipe meet on the site of a oil spillage. Jaime claims he was planning to propose when she told him about her new royal romance - Letizia and King Felipe meet on the site of a oil spillage. Jaime claims he was planning to propose when she told him about her new royal romance 2003 - Letizia and Felipe announce engagement. - Letizia and Felipe announce engagement. 2004 - the couple marry at Almudena Cathedral in Madrid. Jaime claims he was asked to be a witness during the ceremony - the couple marry at Almudena Cathedral in Madrid. Jaime claims he was asked to be a witness during the ceremony 2005 - the couple welcome Princess Leonor February 2007 - Letizia's sister Erika suddenly passes away - Letizia's sister Erika suddenly passes away April 2007 - Princess Sofia is born. During one of her pregnancies, Jaime claims Letizia sends him a selfie confessing her love. - Princess Sofia is born. During one of her pregnancies, Jaime claims Letizia sends him a selfie confessing her love. 2 010 - the couple reportedly profess their love for one another and allegedly meet with lawyers. Jaime claims they looked at properties in the US to move to. He also claims Letizia suggested they use a surrogate in LA to have a baby - the couple reportedly profess their love for one another and allegedly meet with lawyers. Jaime claims they looked at properties in the US to move to. He also claims Letizia suggested they use a surrogate in LA to have a baby 2011 - Jaime claims Letizia ends their relationship over the phone - Jaime claims Letizia ends their relationship over the phone 2 012 - Jaime marries Letizia's sister Telma. The couple relocate to New York - Jaime marries Letizia's sister Telma. The couple relocate to New York 2014 - Telma and Jaime announce their separation Advertisement After sharing the image, other X users questioned the validity of Jaime's claims - given there is no evidence that Letizia sent him the photo or accompanying message. The businessman has since deleted his X account. A spokesperson for the Spanish Royal Family told FEMAIL: 'We have no comment to make about this.' It comes just weeks after Jaime - who was married to Letizia's sister Telma from 2012-2014 - made a series of shocking allegations about his relationship with the Queen in the new book 'Letizia & I' by journalist Jaime Penafiel. Speaking to El Cierre Digitial, the author, 91, said Letizia was Jaime del Burgo's 'great love' and the pair's relationship turned into a 'great friendship' after she became romantically involved with King Felipe. The businessman told the author that he met Letizia before 2000 and their relationship began on a romantic trip to Venice, years before she met King Felipe. Jaime - who is the son of the former politician Jaime Ignacio del Burgo - claims he was planning to propose to Letizia when she announced that she was dating a mysterious 'diplomat' over dinner at the Ritz hotel in Madrid in 2002. Describing how 'serious and significant' their relationship was, the author made the unlikely claim that Jaime was 'carrying an engagement ring his his pocket' that evening. Letizia reportedly told him that she had 'met someone who would oblige her to quit her profession', which Jaime said led him to deduce her mystery partner was Felipe. After the pair reportedly decided to just be friends, Jaime is said to have advised Letizia: 'Don't announce the romance, just the wedding.' Following their engagement announcement in 2003, Letizia - who had divorced her first husband in 1999 - asked Jaime to be a witness at their wedding. What's more, the royal's ex-brother-in-law also made the outlandish claim that he 'dealt' with Letizia's pre-nuptial agreement and helped to front the cost of the Queen's family's wedding outfits. He is quoted as saying: 'When the wedding with Felipe came round, I dealt with the pre-nuptial agreement as you know, amongst other things. 'I also had to pay Letizia's family's expenses because [former King] Juan Carlos refused to pay or even go halves with me. So with the help of my friend Felipe Varela, I dressed her mum, grandmother and her sisters. And with the help of Jaime Jason, her father, grandparents and a cousin.' Jaime also makes the incredible claim that the Queen asked to see him the night before the wedding at the exclusive El Latigazo restaurant in Madrid - where she asked him to 'never leave' her. Telma Ortiz arriving at the Palace in Madrid before attending an official dinner on the eve of her sister's wedding in 2004 King Felipe and Queen Letizia on their wedding day in Madrid in May 2004. Jaime Del Burgo claims he was going to propose to the newsreader until she announced she had met King Felipe He sensationally claimed: 'When we met, she took hold of my hand and asked me why I had never asked her to marry me. Obviously I didn't reply. I encouraged her as best I could. The last thing she said to me before we said goodbye to each other in that restaurant was a request: 'Never leave me.'' In the book, Letizia's alleged ex-lover describes Felipe as a 'kind-hearted man' and even goes on to say that he had a 'great friendship' with the royal. He told the author: 'I told him my problems and he told [me] his.' The businessman even claims that Felipe 'uses [him] as a good man because he felt incapable of calming [Letizia] down' on occasions. Following the wedding, Jaime described how Letizia was like a 'fox in a chicken coop' as she was 'cleverer than any of them'. Jaime - who says the Queen nicknamed him her 'yogi pal' - claims he still had a romantic relationship with Letizia even after the wedding in 2004. He also claims he has kept 'photographs, videos, mobile phones' and text messages as evidence. The businessman claimed that 'love was always there' in their relationship since they travelled to Venice together. The photograph Jaime shared on Twitter last night was taken during one of Letizia's pregnancies between 2005-2007. In the book, Jaime sensationally claims that Letizia whispered that she loved him when they were lying in a hammock by a pool at her home following Princess Leonor's birth. Jaime - who joked that Letizia's alleged ex-lover should have been his co-author - is quoted as saying in the book: 'Lying in the same hammock, under the pool porch, facing each other, Letizia told me 'I love you' and I responded 'I love you'.' Jaime Penafiel goes on to write that Jaime del Burgo subsequently wrote a play called 'La Hamaca, which in English is 'The Hammock' and edited it but never distributed it. Following this, Jaime alleges they 'took steps forward with the goal of being free' - which involved seeking legal advice and looking at properties in the US. One of the most damaging claims Jaime reportedly makes is that Queen Letizia suggested they have a child together using a surrogate in Los Angeles. Around this time, Jaime claims that he confronted Letizia after photos of her kissing Felipe appeared on the covers of Spanish magazines. He claims the Queen told him: 'I had to do it to protect us.' He says in the book Jaime del Burgo told him Felipe and Letizia had a 'difficult relationship' and told him: 'Felipe uses me as a good man because he felt incapable of calming her down.' Jaime Penafiel goes on to write that when Sofia was born, Jaime del Burgo became uncle to both of the girls. It then quotes him as saying: 'It was a beautiful period. I didn't have children, and those girls made me so happy. I was working in Brazil and suffered a pulmonary embolism. 'I was in intensive care for a fortnight. I managed to get the Albert Einstein Hospital to give me a telephone Letizia and I spoke to each other every day on [the phone]. 'During my visits to Madrid I would often go to the cinema with Felipe, Letizia and some friends. Letizia and I would always sit together, holding hands. They were moments of happiness.' However in August 2011, Jaime alleges Letizia abruptly ended their relationship when she called him and said: 'We can't continue seeing each other.' Malia and Sasha Obama were likely missing the Los Angeles sunshine on Sunday as they braved the cold and dreary New York City weather while out with friends. The sisters, who live on the West Coast, were woefully unprepared for the rainy day when they went to Anton's, a cozy cafe and wine bar in the West Village. They were spotted leaving the pricey restaurant sans umbrellas with a few of their friends, who were all dressed in sweats and comfortable shoes. Sasha, 22, ignored the damp chill in the air as she stepped out in a white cropped tank and low-cut black sweatpants, which revealed her belly-button piercing. Sasha Obama, 22, was spotted hanging out with her older sister, Malia, 25, and a few friends in New York City on Sunday Malia was bundled up in a gray sweater, faded baggy jeans, and black lug-sole boots, which were perfect for walking through puddles on a rainy day While Sasha had on nothing more than a crop top and sweatpants, Malia attempted to stay dry by draping a black leather trench coat over her head and shoulders The pals were seen leaving Anton's, a cozy cafe and wine bar in the West Village She topped off the unseasonable look with a maroon shoulder bag, black and neon yellow New Balance sneakers, hot pink socks, and sunglasses. Malia, 25, was far more bundled up in a gray sweater, faded baggy jeans, and black lug-sole boots, which were perfect for walking through puddles. While her younger sister didn't seem to be bothered by the rain, she attempted to stay dry by draping a black leather trench coat over her head and shoulders, obscuring most of her face. The former first daughters and their pals could have easily passed for college students in their cozy attire. They were smiling and laughing as they made the best of the rainy day in Manhattan. The outing comes a little over a month after Sasha was seen buying a stack of moving boxes in Los Angeles. The youngest daughter of former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama transferred from the University of Michigan to the University of Southern California to finish college last year. Sasha has been sharing an apartment with her screenwriter sister, Malia, but she hasn't gone public with her plans since she graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology last May. The former first daughters and their friends were woefully unprepared for the rain Malia was smiling underneath her trench, which obscured most of her face Sasha ignored the damp chill in the air as she stepped out in a white cropped tank and low-cut black sweatpants, which revealed her belly-button piercing Sasha topped off the unseasonable look with a maroon shoulder bag, black and neon yellow New Balance sneakers, hot pink socks, and sunglasses. The youngest Obama sister had her long braids pulled up in a ponytail for the outing The sisters and their pals could have easily passed for college students in their cozy attire She hinted at an upcoming move when she was seen lugging a handful of boxes out of a local UPS store by herself in October. There were a myriad of possible reasons why she was buying moving boxes; she could be relocating to another city, getting her own place, or heading to a new apartment with her sister. Sasha had followed in Malia's footsteps when she moved to LA last year. Her older sister had relocated to the West Coast to pursue a career as a screenwriter after graduating from Harvard University in 2021. Malia scored a lucrative position writing for Donald Glover's Amazon show, Swarm, after previously working as an intern on Lena Dunham's HBO series Girls in 2015 and at The Weinstein Company in 2017. The Obama sisters are often seen out and about in LA both together and apart. Malia and Sasha have been living in Los Angeles together. Its unclear how long they have been staying in New York City Malia relocated to LA to pursue a career as a screenwriter after graduating from Harvard University in 2021 Malia scored a lucrative position writing for Donald Glover's Amazon show, Swarm Sasha followed in Malia's footsteps and transferred from the University of Michigan to the University of Southern California to finish college last year The Obama sisters are often seen out and about in LA, both together and apart Their latest outing comes a little over a month after Sasha was spotted buying moving boxes Last year, their mother opened up about how her daughters are 'best friends' during an appearance on the Today show. Michelle recalled how they invited her and her husband to their apartment for drinks during a recent visit while reflecting on what it has been like to watch them navigate adulthood. 'We were going to take them to dinner, and they said, "Why don't you come over to our spot for cocktails?"' she said. 'And we were like, "OK let's see what this is going to be like." 'The martinis were a little weak,' she admitted. 'I dont think they really knew what it was.' Michelle also shared her amusement over her daughters' uncharacteristic insistence that they use coasters in their apartment. 'When we got the glasses they were like, "Use a coaster," and I'm like, "You never used a coaster in my house,"' she said. 'So now when it's your stuff, you want to take care of it?' Kang Jung-ai, the nominee for Korea's new veterans minister, is a former chief of a women's university in Seoul and known for her background as the daughter of a decorated veteran of the 1950-53 Korean War. Kang comes from a family of veterans, with her father being a recipient of the Order of Military Merit for his participation in the three-year conflict. Her grandfather-in-law, Kwon Jun, is known for being a member of the Heroic Corps, an independence activist organization against Japan's 1910-45 colonial rule of Korea. Born in Seoul in 1957, Kang majored in business at Sookmyung Women's University and earned a doctorate degree in human resources economics from the Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University. She became a professor at her alma mater in Seoul in 1988 and served as the president of the university from 2016 to 2020. As an economics expert, Kang previously served as a member of the presidential Regulatory Reform Committee and the National Economic Advisory Council under the previous conservative Lee Myung-bak administration. If Kang assumes the post, she will be the second woman to lead the veterans ministry after Pi Woo-jin, who served in the role from 2017 to 2019. (Yonhap) The 50-year-old also shared her secrets for everyday home cleaning Growing up, Kellie Polaschek was squeamish opening a can of tuna. Now she cleans up gruesome crime scenes and hoarder houses for a living. The 50-year-old mum from Sydney started out in recruitment before working as a bookkeeper, doing a stint in first aid training and then shifting into commercial cleaning. It wasn't until her sister-in-law, an emergency nurse, told her about the forensic cleaning industry seven years ago that she even knew it existed. She immediately saw its potential as a thriving business. Far from your normal nine-to-five, Ms Polaschek's job has since seen her encounter tattooed skin 'stuck' to a chair, four-week old remains in a shower and the all too familiar potent stench of death. But she wouldn't change a thing. Growing up, Kellie Polaschek was squeamish opening a can of tuna. Now she cleans up gruesome crime scenes and hoarder houses for a living Interestingly, Ms Polaschek applies the same methods she uses at work to her own family home. The secret, she says, is the '421' rule which sees her divide areas of the home into three categories to streamline her cleaning: seasonally (4), bi-annually (2) or weekly (1). Ms Polaschek spilled all the gory details of her job to FEMAIL, saying it's 'never a dull day' but has simply adapted a 'just do it' mentality. The dynamic boss and her team from Kamakan Forensic Cleaning are on-call any hour of the day to mop up the remains of deaths, incidents in jail cells or at train stations, and biological hazards. 'You can't think too much about what you're doing, you just need to get it done,' she said. She's often confronted with bloodstained walls, all forms of bodily fluids, cockroaches in fridges and crammed hoarder houses crammed so tightly with rubbish the piles almost reach the ceiling. As for what death smells like, Ms Polaschek struggled comparing it to anything other and said 'there's no smell like it'. Forensic cleaner for 30 years shares some of her most BIZARRE encounters Advertisement She often cleans bloodstained walls, vomit on the floor, cockroaches in fridges, and crammed hoarder houses filled with so much crammed in rubbish almost touches the ceiling. But she's adapted a 'just do it' mentally to get the job done 'Once you know it what it smells like you can detect it instantly. You never forget it because it's so potent and distinct,' she said. 'Some people say it smells like a dead animal, but I think it's 100 times worse than that. 'We've been to jobs before and have smelt it from the hallway in a building. On another occasion we had a lady who had passed away in an independent living home and we could smell it from the driveway.' Despite being somewhat used to it, she does wear a specialised uniform and face mask that helps to combat the smell and protect her. Despite being somewhat used to it, she does wear a specialised uniform and face mask that helps to combat the smell and protect her When mentioning her job to others she said people usually have two reactions - either they want to know everything or nothing at all Speaking on the 'worst' experience she's had, Ms Polaschek said the first thing that came to mind was a man who had died in the shower four weeks prior. Nobody had noticed him missing. 'This is really gruesome... his body broke down because the hot water was running non-stop on him. So he sort of melted away in the shower but it overflowed and the water went through the whole house,' she recalled. 'It was a very strange clean, there was water everywhere and it was so slippery. There would've been bodily fluid in the water.' On another occasion an older gentleman had died in his chair at home where he remained for some time. His tattooed skin was stuck to the seat. The one job she left to her husband was a unit covered with human faeces. 'I ran away from that one. I can clean up the worst blood and guts you've ever thought of, but poo or vomit I'm not a fan of,' she said. Another huge part of the job is cleaning up hoarder homes which can take anywhere from three to six weeks to tackle. When bringing up her job to others she said people usually have two reactions: They want to know everything or nothing at all. She's also a mother of five and a runs a cafe in her spare time (pictured with son Michael) As for cleaning your own home, Ms Polaschek recommends cleaning from top to bottom and back to front. She also listed the seven most common places people forget to clean, including ceiling fans and under the bed. 'The area above the kitchen cupboards tends to become grubby over time with a build-up of grime, oil and food particles. We've found animal carcasses and even $10,000 in cash in this overlooked and hard-to-reach place,' she said. 'The bathroom grout is often missed in the cleaning routine too. Clean it by making a bicarb and water paste, then wipe it off.' Pet beds and toys, the couch and kids' playroom also can be neglected. COMMON PLACES OFTEN FORGOTTEN WHEN CLEANING: 1. Ceiling fans and air conditioning units 2. Above your kitchen cabinets 3. Bathroom grout 4. Under the bed 5. Pet beds and toys 6. The couch 7. Kids playroom Advertisement To stay on top of the household chores Ms Polaschek opts to do small chores throughout the week rather than on one specific day. She said her number one hack is making a mix of laundry powder and boiling hot water and using it on rough surfaces like grout, tiles or walls. The caustic soda in laundry detergent will help break down tough marks and stains. The 421 rule she loves involves diving the areas in the home based on frequency (quarterly, bi-annually and once a week). For example, ceiling fans, air-conditioning vents, the tops of kitchen cupboards and rangehood filters should be cleaned once every season. Walls should be spot cleaned twice a year. Main areas of the home like the bathroom, kitchen and bedroom should be cleaned weekly. Pet beds, above kitchen cupboards, under the bed and bathroom grout were among the top seven most common places forgotten about when cleaning While most amateur home cleaners are fond of pouring vinegar over baking soda to deter germs, Ms Polaschek isn't a fan of this combination. She claims it 'doesn't do anything' to clean a surface but is instead a 'fun' yet ineffective chemical reaction. She's also not fond of harsh chemicals like bleach and uses environmentally friendly plant-based solutions. Her favourite tool is the Shark Cordless Detect Pro Auto Empty System vacuum for a deep, thorough clean. 'I always used to think handheld vacuum cleaners should only be used for a quick clean but I was wrong - the Shark works just as good or better than industrial cleaners,' she said. A mum has revealed the reasons why she has decided to homeschool her 12-year-old daughter next year. Mum Kat Clark, from the Gold Coast in Queensland, has 5.2 million TikTok followers and was voted Creator of the Year at the website's annual awards in 2022. The 37-year-old hosts popular Aussie podcast 'Basically Besties' with her daughter Latisha, 20 - for whom Kat has 'very strict' parenting rules. 'Traditional schooling worked [for Deja] in primary school because I had a corporate job,' she recently said on podcast It's All Her with Jody Lucas. 'Since coming into this new career, there is a lot of travelling involved. I'm often flying to Sydney.' 'Deja's even starting to get opportunities as well now, so 9-3, Monday to Friday schooling isn't working for us because we've found that we've had to take her out of school quite a bit.' Kat shared that she has enrolled Deja into home schooling for the next year. Mum Kat Clark has revealed why she has decided to homeschool her 12-year-old daughter, Deja. 'We think that's best for her, just because we don't want her to miss out on these opportunities. TikTok takes a lot of time. It's just what works for our family.' The mum claimed it was the 'perfect time' as Deja can still go back to traditional schooling a year later if she doesn't enjoy the homeschool lifestyle. Her other daughter, Latisha, finished high school and originally enrolled in law school immediately after - but dropped out six months later to pursue her career. 'With Deja, if she wanted to be a doctor or lawyer - we'd encourage her to go after those dreams. But currently those are not what her goals are. We're willing to work with her whatever happens,' the mum said. Kat also revealed that she taught her daughters to 'be themselves' and 'not to change for anyone'. 'I honestly love working so closely with my daughters. It's so much fun, it's like working with my best friends,' she said. The mum claimed that traditional schooling no longer works for Deja and she's instead going to be home schooled for the next year so she can focus on her podcast and brand deals Kat's other daughter, Latisha [right], finished high school and originally enrolled in law school immediately after - but dropped out six months later to pursue podcasting Many Australians shared their opinions on the matter. 'I'd 100 per cent let my child drop out of school if they had some direction and were mature enough,' one said. 'I hated school and my parents were very much against it, made me finish and I got through a semester of uni.' She added, 'The opportunity to re-enrol as a mature-aged student these days is so much easier and widely accepted, if you did decide you wanted a high school certificate or higher education.' 'As a high school teacher, I think this is absolutely fine! Why force a child to stay on at school if it's not for them?' an educator asked. Customers are rushing to Kmart to purchase a $35 hair styling tool that's said to be a 'dupe' of a $900 Dyson Airwrap. Paris Woods, from Melbourne, reviewed the Anko product in a now-viral TikTok video and seemed surprised by the end result. 'I might actually have to swap over from the Dyson at this point,' she captioned the clip. After demonstrating how the product works, she said it looks as if she's just left the hairdresser. The item has since sold out on the Kmart website but is available in select stores. Paris Woods, from Melbourne , reviewed the $35 Kmart Air Styler Kit and compared it to popular high-end products The $35 item (left) has since sold out on the Kmart website but might be available in selected stores. Paris said it works just as well as the $899 Dyson Airwrap with the Styler Volumizing Brush Attachment (right) 'Are you kidding me? It looks so good,' she said and the Anko tool left her hair looking straight and silky. 'So far it's taken me... probably five minutes and it looks incredible.' She compared the Kmart buy to the $899 Dyson Airwrap with the Styler Volumizing Brush Attachment as well as the $109 Revlon One-Step Volumiser. The one-minute video has since gone viral exceeding more than 1.1 million views with many saying they 'need' to get their hands on the buy. The budget hair tool left Paris' hair looking silky and sleek as if she had got it done at the hairdresser 'I was not expecting it to do something good!!' one commented, another wrote: 'Kmart hair tools are so good.' 'I need this immediately,' a third said. However, others claimed the product is far more similar to the $99 Bondi Boost Blowout Brush Pro than a Dyson. 'Definitely more a Bondi boost dupe,' one said. 'I think it's more like the Bondi hair thing than a Dyson,' another said. Despite the cheap price, many weren't convinced - and so Paris made another video comparing the Dyson Airwrap with the Kmart Hot Air Styler. On one side of her head she used the Kmart buy and on the other she used the Dyson. 'Both of these tools are amazing. I feel a lot more comfortable using this (the Dyson Airwrap), I do think it's much easier to use. But that's probably because its $900,' she said. Paris was particularly amazed by how the Kmart product added more volume to her hair. 'For all those people saying the Kmart one will never compare to the Dyson, I'm pretty happy. For $35 compared to $900,' she added. An American woman revealed her shock after stepping foot into an Australian Target store for the first time. RaeAnna, from the US, was visiting her partner in Melbourne when the duo decided to take a trip to Target. Not knowing what to expect, RaeAnna thought she would walk into a department store that resembled something from back home: sprawling aisles, endless makeup, clothes, food, and an in-house coffee shop. But the reality was far from the truth. RaeAnna posted a video of herself walking around a 'sad' store that seemed barren in comparison. An American woman revealed her shock and horror after stepping foot into an Australian Target store for the first time Some Target stores in America have Starbucks locations - a fact that shocked many Aussies 'Australian Target is like Walmart but worse,' she said, making a reference to a discount American store. 'It's ugly, it's so bad,' she said as she couldn't stop laughing. Many Australians who have visited America claimed the store was a combination of Kmart, Chemist Warehouse, Dan Murphy's, Sephora, Coles, and a cafe. Some tried to suggest Aussie Kmarts were similar to American Targets - but they were quickly shut down. 'US Targets have so much more than just a Kmart,' one said. 'You have so many options for everything.' 'You can get your ears pierced and get a facial at my local Target,' another revealed. 'It also has an optometrist.' 'Wow, Australian Target is severely lacking,' an American wrote. RaeAnna thought she would walk into a Target that resembled something from back home: sprawling aisles, endless makeup, clothes, food, and an in-house coffee shop Many Australians who have visited America claimed the store was a combination of Kmart, Chemist Warehouse, Dan Murphy's, Sephora, Coles, and a cafe While some Australians and New Zealanders shared their opinions and experiences. 'I wish we had that, I feel like having three stores in one is so much more convenient that going to multiple places,' one said. 'All the options seem amazing - at least you know everyone's house won't look the same,' another added. 'The shelves on both my closest Kmart and Target stores are always half-empty,' a rural Aussie wrote. 'Target is a furniture shop in New Zealand,' a man wrote. While thousands of Australians fly to Fiji, Hawaii or Bora Bora for a relaxing beach getaway, there's a lesser known picturesque destination on the rise. Aitutaki is the fifth largest of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific and has some of the most breathtaking beaches in the world. Travellers can immerse themselves among the beauty by snorkelling with turtles, canoeing, whale watching, stand-up paddle boarding and relaxing in a hammock on shore. Those who have visited say it's just as good - if not better - than the Maldives with options to stay in overwater resorts. Travellers can enjoy a beach to themselves at Aitutaki in the Cook Islands. The heavenly destination offers turquoise waters, jungle-like terrain, and picturesque surroundings Those who have visited say it's just as good - if not better - than the Maldives with options to stay in resorts on the water The luxury oasis is six hours away from Sydney via Rarotonga and is the perfect destination for a heavenly holiday. At large, the Cook Islands of 15,000 people remain untouched - no traffic lights or huge intersections, no McDonald's, and no sky-high infrastructures. In fact, not a single building is taller than the highest coconut tree. Travellers can expect gorgeous beaches, jungle-like terrain, spectacular turquoise lagoons and coral reefs filled with marine life. Aitutaki Lagoon Private Island Resort is a popular option with overwater bungalows, similarly to those at Bora Bora. The adults-only resort floats over one of the world's most beautiful lagoons with access to paddle boards and kayaks. At large, the Cook Islands of 15,000 people remain untouched - no traffic lights or huge intersections, no McDonald's, and no sky-high infrastructures. In fact, not a single building is taller than the highest coconut tree Aitutaki Lagoon Private Island Resort is a popular option with overwater bungalows, similarly to those at Bora Bora Travel influencer Aimee Bell visited the stunning island in June and rode a bike around on the sand and explored the beaches. 'Only in Aitutaki would you have an entire island to yourself,' she wrote on Instagram. The astonishing images show Aimee walking on a beach with palm trees to one side and the ocean on the other. It was enough to make others add Aitutaki and the Cook Islands to their travel list. 'Insane! I wanna go so bad,' one wrote, another said: 'It's so dreamy.' 'That beach is an ultimate paradise,' someone else said. 'Would love to do this!' another admitted. Earlier this year FEMAIL visited Rarotonga and Aitutaki to find out what all the hype was about. Earlier this year FEMAIL visited Rarotonga and Aitutaki to find out what all the hype was about A never-before-seen virus has made a 20-year-old man in Peru sick. The patient, who has not been identified, went to hospital with symptoms including a fever, chills and muscle and joint pain. It is unclear whether the construction worker ever recovered from his illness, which was described as being like malaria and dengue. But scientists, who discovered the pathogen after taking a sample of his blood, have warned that the virus is likely circulating in the jungle of central Peru. They called for health chiefs to monitor the viruses behind malaria-like symptoms so they can spot emerging infections and protect public health. The team, led by research technician Gilda Troncos, said their findings suggest that a novel Echarate virus variant is circulating in the jungles of central Peru The virus is a phlebovirus, which can be spread by sandflies, mosquitoes or ticks. Infections trigger a high fever, severe headaches, muscle pain and meningitis. Rift Valley fever is the most well-known illness that phlebovirus can trigger. People who develop this can develop a life-threatening haemorrhagic fever, which causes bleeding from the mouth, eyes and ears, as well as the internal organs. Until now, only three phleboviruses that cause a fever had been detected in Peru. READ MORE: Is it the flu, Covid or just a cold? Ultimate guide on how to tell your symptoms apart this winter Graphic shows the common symptoms (green tick), occasional and possible symptoms (orange circle) and the symptoms that never occur (red cross) with the common cold, flu and Covid Advertisement The patient showed up at Hospital De La Merced Chanchamayo in central Peru in June 2019. His symptoms included headaches, tiredness, sensitivity to light and a loss of appetite. Medics took a blood sample and sent it for lab testing. Researchers at the US Naval Medical Research Unit in Lima analysed the sample and detected the Candiru phlebovirus. However, segments of the virus showed differences from the Candiru virus that 'could not be explained by virus mutation', indicating the man was infected with a new virus. Analysis suggested that the pathogen was formed by the Candiru virus recombing with a novel strain of the Echarate virus. The team, led by research technician Gilda Troncos, said their findings suggest that a novel Echarate virus variant is circulating in the jungles of central Peru. The illness caused by the virus is similar to dengue, malaria and other tropical infections, they wrote in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. Ongoing surveillance is needed among patients with these symptoms to detect new viruses and protect public health, the researchers warned. They called for ecological studies to find out how widespread the new variant is within the region and spot potential sources of infection. In response to the new virus, health bosses in the UK have echoed calls for patients with a fever-causing illness to be monitored. The UK Health Security Agency said this is 'necessary to detect novel and emerging pathogens'. TikTokers have shown off their dirty Stanley lids and sparked concern The Stanley water bottle became a worldwide phenomenon for its array of colors and claims that it can keep beverages cold for hours and even days at a time. The brand's Super Quencher, which holds 40 oz of liquid and keeps drinks iced for up to two days, has taken over social media in the last year. Search 'Stanley Cup' on TikTok and you'll find more than 50 million views on TikTok and 1.6 million posts on Instagram. However TikToker Emily Zeck sparked fear on the site in October when she showed off her grimy, unwashed Stanley lid - covered in brown muck. 'I've been drinking out of this?' she asked, in the clip that's been viewed more than 12 million times. The comments make for worrying reading for Stanley cup users. TikToker Emily Zeck sparked fear in a viral video where she showed off her dirty Stanley lid One woman wrote: 'I'm recovering from mold poisoning from my Stanley,' while another commented, 'maybe this is why my stomach's been hurting and my water been tasting weird.' There are also suggestions that a piece of plastic that contains the straw provides 'easy access for the mold to build up', and that the grey stopper in the center of the cup contains 'even nastier stuff'. What's more, recent studies have suggested frequent use of reusable plastic water bottles could lead to nasty infections due to the shocking amount of bacteria they harbor. Research published in March found most reusable bottles contain about 40,000 times more bacteria than the average toilet seat. Meanwhile, other experts have warned about the risks of contracting E-coli - wich results in around 2,000 hospitalizations every year - from water bottles left to swill around in gym bags, or touched with dirty hands. So could the thousands of dedicated Stanley Cup fans be at risk? Stanley water bottles have exploded in popularity over the last year, garnering 50 million views on TikTok Dr Daniel R. Kuritzkes, the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, told DailyMail.com that, in fact, there is little to worry about. 'Water, especially if it's from a safe source like a tap in your home or filtered water supply, has a very low count of bacteria that are actually going to cause disease.' 'So there's little reason to be concerned.' But what about the previously mentioned study - which found 20.8million living microbes in four different kinds of water bottles? In comparison, the researchers found that a toilet seat has just 515. Researchers at waterfilterguru.com swabbed four kinds of water bottles to see how many colony-forming units (CFUs) had formed. On average, they contained 20.8 million CFUs of gram-negative bacteria. For comparison, a toilet seat has 515. Dr Kuritzkes said that the results of this study - by water purification firm waterfilterguru.com - have sparked unnecessary panic. While researchers did not disclose what type of bacteria they found, it isn't a form that will likely cause severe illnesses like salmonella or E. coli. 'A simple water or carbonated water, even flavored water that has no calories in it, is not going to be any significant risk to people because there's just there's to fuel the growth of harmful bacteria. 'Just because bacteria is present, it doesn't mean it is a risk - plenty of bacteria are harmless or can even be healthy.' He added that there is 'theoretically' a minimal possible risk of pseudomonas bacteria - which, in rare cases, can lead to blood infections and pneumonia. The bug is found in soil and can originate from some water sources. However, it is unlikely to colonize and spread when ingested. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), hospitalized patients who contract the infection from breathing machines, catheters, and other medical devices are most at risk for pseudomonas infection. Surprisingly, Stanley's large size also doesn't make it more vulnerable to contamination. Critics on social media have suggested that the bottles' 40 ounce capacity means stagnant water is more likely to build-up, risking contamination. But Dr Kuritzes says: 'It would have to be sitting for days and days and days for any significant number of bacteria to have increased,' Dr Kuritzkes said. 'And there's limited nutrient supply in the water. There's virtually nothing in there that the bacteria can grow on.' 'It doesn't matter how much water there is or how long it sits around because it's not going to spoil.' You also don't have to fear contamination from Stanley's straw, even though it is always exposed to the environment, unlike bottles where the straw collapses. Dr Kuritzkes said: 'The surrounding air is not where we find disease-causing bacteria and viruses. It's not like harmful E. coli or salmonella are going to somehow settle on the straw from the air.' The March study also found that more than one in 10 Americans only cleans their water bottle a few times a month. However, unless you're dragging your Stanley through the mud or keeping it outside most of the time, Dr Kuritzkes said you probably don't have to stress about washing it that often. 'I don't think it's really that critical that it be washed with soap and water,' he said. 'It's highly unlikely you'll get sick from that.' In 2016, Charles Gerba, Ph.D., a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, told Self magazine that the riskiest types of bottles require you to use fingers to access the straw. These can harbor bugs like E-coli. He said: 'Those are the only ones you see issues with because peoples fingers are contaminated.' One in three people with dementia won't be able to visit loved ones this Christmas, new figures have found. A survey, carried out by Alzheimer's Society, has laid bare the devastation caused by the disease, which affects around 900,000 people living in the UK. Since 2022, a third of those with the disease are cut off and unable to visit loved ones, while one in four surveyed are no longer able to take part in any Christmas activities. A quarter no longer recognise family or friends. Around one in five are also unable to hold a conversation with loved ones, while 43 per cent are no longer able to buy presents. Some 20 per cent also are no longer aware of what Christmas is, family and friends reported. The charity polled 1,108 people, who all have a close friend or family member living with dementia. A survey, carried out by Alzheimer's Society, has laid bare the devastation caused by the disease, which affects around 900,000 people living in the UK (Stock Image) From 1906 when clinical psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer first reported a 'severe disease of the cerebral cortex' to uncovering the mechanics of the disease in the 1980s-90s to today's 'breakthrough' drug lecanemab, scientists have spent over a century trying to grapple with the brutal disease that robs people of their cognition and independence Alzheimer's Society also reported that caring for a loved one with dementia at Christmas is taking its toll on carers, with 38 per cent saying they felt more emotionally drained and a quarter said they feel more physically exhausted. Worryingly, nearly one in 10 said they were at 'breaking point', and 65 per cent said dementia has 'robbed' them of a carefree and joyful festive season. The charity has released the figures as it launches its Christmas Appeal, asking the public to donate so they can continue to provide support to dementia sufferers and their loved ones over the festive period. READ MORE: Is this the 'beginning of the end' of Alzheimer's suffering? Breakthrough drug signals 'treatment era' for memory-robbing disease but experts warn the NHS is 'not ready' to dish it out An experimental Alzheimer's drug developed by Eli Lilly slows cognitive decline by more than a third, the company has said (stock image) Advertisement Kate Lee, chief executive of Alzheimer's Society said: 'One in three people born today will develop dementia in their lifetime. 'Christmas should be joyful but for many of the 900,000 people living with dementia and their families, their Christmases have changed forever. 'Too many people are facing dementia alone. We want everyone affected by dementia to know that whoever you are, whatever you're going through, you can turn to Alzheimer's Society for help. 'Over a quarter of carers we spoke to say the greatest Christmas gift they could receive would be talking to someone who understands. 'Our Dementia Advisers are just a call or a click away. They can give someone the guidance, advice, and empathy they desperately need. 'If you're able to, please help us be there for everyone living with dementia this Christmas whatever the day brings, by donating to our Christmas Appeal.' It is estimated that, by 2040, 1.6 million people with be living with dementia in the UK - with many millions more carers, partners, family and friends affected. Meera Syal CBE and Alzheimer's Society Ambassador said: 'I know only too well the devastating impact of dementia after my father died due to the condition, and earlier this year I also lost my mother to a rare form of dementia. 'Our family cared for our parents for over a decade and so understand how emotionally draining and physically exhausting this can be for carers. It's devastating to know how many other people up and down the UK have reached breaking point. 'I encourage everyone who can this festive season to donate to Alzheimer's Society's Christmas Appeal. You will be making a difference to the lives of thousands of people affected by dementia, and that is the greatest gift of all.' Chinese scientists are developing a shot that they say could treat autism symptoms. The injection has so far only been used on mice, but researchers said their evidence suggests it could 'feasibly' be used to help humans with the spectrum disorder. Shanghai-based scientists injected mice with a gene editing tool that altered a particular mutation in DNA associated with autism symptoms. Mice with the genetic characteristic who were given the shot had a total reversal of their behavioral and social problems. Autism is typically diagnosed in children, and about one in 36 US children were diagnosed with it in 2020, according to official figures Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been linked to a mutation in the MEF2C gene. The malfunctioning DNA causes problems with crucial development processes in the brain. Although the scientists - from Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine and Fudan University in Shanghai - focused on one gene - they caveat that it is likely that several genetic mutations are involved in the development of autism. Previous studies have linked more than 200 genetic mutations to influence ASD, most of which are not hereditary. The CDC graph shows that progress has been made in the early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder in the US. This is crucial because the earlier a child is diagnosed, the sooner they can access support These scientists chose to focus on one gene - called MEF2C - because children with mutations or deletions in it living in China and Korea are known to be more likely than others to be diagnosed with the disorder. The MEF2C gene is highly involved in neurodevelopment both in the womb and in childhood. It programs functioning in brain regions integral to learning and memory, such as the frontal cortex and the hippocampus. For the study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers packaged their gene-editing potion into a virus, which was injected into the brains of the mice. Using a virus allows the active ingredient to cross the blood-brain barrier, a network of blood vessels and tissue that lines the inside of the brain and protects it from intruders. The authors said: This treatment successfully restored MEF2C protein levels in several brain regions and reversed the behavioral abnormalities in MEF2C-mutant mice. Autism is typically diagnosed in children, and about one in 36 children were diagnosed with it in 2020. This marked a significant increase from the 2021 estimate of one in 44, and again from 1 in 110 in 2006. Experts say the increase in cases is not necessarily evident that autism is increasing -but that a rise in awareness means clinicians are better at spotting it. Around 5.4 million American adults - 2.2 percent of the US population - are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Autism ranges in severity but typically causes a person to find it difficult to adapt to changes in routine. Some of those affected also experience cognitive and language problems, and may struggle to interact and socialize with others. The disorder exists along a spectrum, meaning there is a wide variation in severity and how the symptoms are presented. Some people may have mild forms of the disorder that require little extra support. For others, the disorder can be a severe, lifelong impediment. Around a quarter of children with ASD are minimally verbal, meaning they speak around 30 or so words. Autism can sometimes be different in girls and boys, with autistic girls known to hide signs of the disorder by 'masking' them in order to fit in with others. Boys are around four times as likely to be diagnosed. Caring for a child with ASD can be very trying for parents, who often have to make special arrangements for their education and social interactions with other children. Screenings for ASD are advised at 18-month and 24-months, whereby the child's language, movement, and thinking skills, as well as behaviors and emotions can be compared tothe rest of their age group. A tax on 'poisonous' ultra-processed food should be imposed by the Government, according to a top food expert. The foods should have stickers warning they can make people overeat by 25 per cent, according to Professor Tim Spector, from King's College London. The outspoken recommendations were made at an event held by the Royal Society in London, called Advancing the Science of Human Nutrition. Professor Spector said: 'If I were in charge I would ban any health claims on ultra-processed food. 'I think it's absolutely hypocritical to have any health claim on ultra-processed food - like 'this is going to help your immune system' or 'a source of calcium' or 'extra protein', when you're just giving people poisonous foods to make them ill.' A tax on 'poisonous' ultra-processed food should be imposed by the Government, according to a top food expert. The foods should have stickers warning they can make people overeat by 25 per cent, according to Professor Tim Spector (pictured), from King's College London The expert said the 'sugar tax', levied by the Government on fizzy drinks, must be extended to ultra-processed foods, which are made using ingredients not found in a typical kitchen, like preservatives, emulsifiers and artificial sweeteners, and include cereals, flavoured yoghurts and crisps (pictured) WHAT ARE ULTRA-PROCESSED FOODS? Ultra-processed foods are high in added fat, sugar and salt, low in protein and fibre and contain artificial colourings, sweeteners and preservatives. The term covers food that contains ingredients that a person wouldn't add when cooking at home such as chemicals, colourings and preservatives. Ready meals, ice cream, sausages, deep-fried chicken and ketchup are some of the best-loved examples. They are different to processed foods, which are processed to make them last longer or enhance their taste, such as cured meat, cheese and fresh bread. Ultra-processed foods, such as sausages, cereals, biscuits and fizzy drinks, are formulations made mostly or entirely from substances derived from foods and additives. They contain little or no unprocessed or minimally processed foods, such as fruit, vegetables, seeds and eggs. The foods are usually packed with sugars, oils, fats and salt, as well as additives, such as preservatives, antioxidants and stabilisers. Ultra-processed foods are often presented as ready-to-consume, taste good and are cheap. Source: Open Food Facts Advertisement The expert said the 'sugar tax', levied by the Government on fizzy drinks, must be extended to ultra-processed foods, which are made using ingredients not found in a typical kitchen, like preservatives, emulsifiers and artificial sweeteners, and include cereals, flavoured yoghurts and crisps. He said: 'I would tax ultra-processed foods, increase the successful sugar tax, use that to subsidise fruit and veg.' There is evidence suggesting that ultra-processed foods (UPF), typically high in calories, salt, sugar and fat, may cause people to overeat, consume more calories and gain more weight. Some experts have claimed they super-charge people's appetites and disrupt signals from the gut to the brain which tell us when we are full, although others dispute this. Professor Spector described a 'special combination of things' in the way that UPF are made which make people overeat by 25 per cent. He said: 'That data is out there, go and disprove it. Until then, we should treat this as a dangerous way to make food, being correlated with ill health. 'And we should start slowly dealing with the ones that we know are unhealthy and putting a little sticker on them saying 'beware: this stuff will make you overeat by 25 per cent, have it by all means, but stop costing the health service lots of money.' Professor Spector, who co-founded personalised nutrition company ZOE, aims to cut consumption of ultra-processed food from nearly 60 per cent to less than 15 per cent the level seen in Southern Europe. The Royal Society event also featured a keynote speech by former Government food adviser Henry Dimbleby, who attacked the Government over their inaction on food and ill health. He said: 'You've got a Prime Minister who for his own, I think, kind of personal aesthetics almost, would rather try and deal with smoking, which he sees as bad, even though it is now a tiny and disappearing problem - rather than food, because he likes to drink Coke, full-sugar Coke, so he's not interested.' Mr Dimbleby, co-founder of the Leon restaurant chain, also criticised new Health Minister Victoria Atkins' potential conflict of interest, as her husband, Paul Kenward, is managing director at British Sugar, when food is 'one of the biggest problems that she faces'. The food campaigner said he had decided to 'pretty much' stop National campaigning and focus on schools, which can help people learn how to cook healthy food. Investigators search Lees former office amid intensifying criticism within party By Jung Min-ho Prosecutors searched the former office of Rep. Lee Jae-myung, leader of the opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), Monday, amid growing criticism of his party leadership ahead of the general elections early next year. Investigators from the Suwon District Prosecutors Office searched the office of the Gyeonggi Provincial Government, in which he previously served as governor, over accusations of misuse of government credit cards for personal expenses. The prosecution suspects that Lee and his wife, Kim Hye-kyung, were aware of the unlawful use of taxpayers money when his former staff purchased sushi, sandwiches and other items for them between July 2018 to October 2021 when he was in office. This comes only four days after Kim Yong, a close aide to Lee, was sentenced to five years in prison for bribery and illegal political fundraising involving property developers during a lucrative development project in Seongnam while Lee was the citys mayor from July 2010 to March 2018. The Seoul Central District Court said in its ruling that some of the money he raised was later used for Lees campaign for the 2022 presidential election, which bodes ill for Lees own trial connected to that case. The growing legal risk for Lee now appears to be dividing the DPK ahead of elections set for April 10, 2024. Reformers are intensifying criticism of his leadership, while members of a majority faction rally behind him, vowing to be tough on betrayers and telling them to leave the party. Rep. Lee Sang-min, a five-term lawmaker, became the first major figure to leave the party on Sunday. In a message sent to reporters, he said he had no hope for any positive changes in the DPK under the current leader after it lost its sense of morality. In an interview with the Joongang Ilbo, a Korean daily, Lee Nak-yon, a former prime minister who competed with the current chairman to become the DPKs candidate for last year's presidential election, also echoed such criticism, saying that the party no longer treats its ethics codes seriously, instead protecting certain politicians. He also hinted at launching a new political party with some like-minded lawmakers in order to minimize harmful effects from the polarized two-party system. Im thinking about the things I could do for the country Once the conclusion is made, I will do what I have to do. Speculation is circulating that other heavyweight figures such as former Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum and former National Assembly Speaker Chung Sye-kyun are now in talks with Lee Nak-yon to part ways with the DPK. Speaking to The Korea Times, experts said the chairmans leadership in the party will likely remain stable, at least in the short term, despite the growing legal risks and criticism. Given that the majority of lawmakers think they would have better chances of winning under Lee, his leadership will likely remain stable, at least for a while, Lee Jun-han, a professor of politics at Incheon National University, said. But if he is convicted of some of the many charges facing him possibly before the elections his leadership will be shaken profoundly. If that happens, a bigger challenge would come after the elections. If he loses the right to run for public office with a guilty verdict, it would be extremely difficult for him to maintain current support levels as a politician with no chances of becoming president, the scholar said. Republicans will make Food and Drug Administration officials explain why it took so long to deem a common stuffy nose medicine ineffective despite years of evidence. Michigan Republican Representative Lisa McClain has spearheaded the effort, giving regulators until December 11 to schedule a visit to the Capitol Hill for an official meeting with House members. The FDA announced in September that phenylephrine, long used as a decongestant in popular oral medicines such as Sudafed PE Sinus Congestion and Vicks Nyquil Severe Cold and Flu, was no more effective than a placebo at alleviating a stuffy nose. Drugs that contain it generated almost $1.8 billion in sales last year, yet evidence pointing to its ineffectiveness as a decongestant goes back about 50 years. Rep Lisa McClain [pictured] is a Republican from Michigan. She has compelled FDA regulators to visit Capitol Hill to explain why it took so long to find that oral forms of phenylephrine, a common ingredient in decongestants, was as effective as a placebo pill An FDA panel voted in September unanimously that phenylephrine was ineffective. The vote does not mean that manufacturers must pull products from shelves, though some stores may follow CVS' suit and stop selling them The FDAs Non-Prescription Drug Advisory Committee (NPDAC) voted unanimously in September to deem the ingredient ineffective in oral form. It is extremely common in brands like Sudafed, Tylenon, Benadryl, Alka-Seltzer, Mucinex, and Vicks Nyquil and Dayquil. Medicines containing phenylephrine Colrex Compound Colrex Tylenol Cold and Flu Severe Day & Night Codral Cold and Flu + Cough Day and Night Alka-Seltzer Plus Severe Cold & Flu Formula Effervescent Tablets XL-3 Cold Medicine Robitussin Peak Cold Nighttime Nasal Relief Tylenol Sinus Congestion & Pain Nighttime Norel SR Trital SR Vicks Sinex Benadryl Allergy Plus Congestion Mucinex products Advil Allergy and Congestion Relief Vicks Nyquil Severe Cold and Flu Advertisement The ingredient is protected under the FDAs Generally Recognized as Safe and Effective (GRASE) designation. The vote did not mean that manufacturers would have to pull products containing the ingredient from shelves, though CVS did so soon after the two-day meeting ended. But other major chains such as Walgreens and RiteAid have told DailyMail.com that they will only pull products from shelves if the FDA demands them to do so. An order for top medicine manufacturers such as Vicks, Tylenol, and Robitussin to halt sales or reformulate could issue a major financial blow to the massive cold medicine industry, though it's not clear if this factored into the FDA's decision to keep the ingredient widely available for decades. Rep McClain, chairwoman of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services compelled FDA officials to arrange a meeting by next week. It is not clear yet whether the meeting will be public. She said: What is the point of having an FDA if they can't do their jobs? Americans deserve better, and @GOPoversight is holding the FDA accountable for this colossal failure. Phenylephrine hit the market in the 1930s and has been used in more than 260 over-the-counter cold medicines since the 1970s. The medication was meant to constrict blood vessels to clear congestion. The medicine is metabolized in the gut, allowing just a fraction to enter the bloodstream, which is how it reaches the nose. In fact, briefing documents compiled by the FDA show that less than a one percent concentration of the drug is able to reach the nose after being broken down in the gut. The documents detailed flaws in the trials for the ingredient in the 1960s and 1970s, citing small sample sizes and relied on techniques no longer used by the FDA to approve medications. Dr Leslie Hendeles, an expert at the University of Florida in pharmacokinetics, or the way medicines move throughout the body, was the first to critique phenylephrine in 1993 in a study that compared the efficacy of that and other more cold remedies including pseudoephedrine, the main ingredient of Sudafed. He found that phenylephrine in pill form is rapidly absorbed in the gut and eliminated before it can have any effect, rendering it essentially worthless. At the same time At the time, UF professor Dr Randy Hatton was running a pharmacy research lab at UF where students would field questions from medical professionals about certain drugs and work to find the answers. They were suddenly receiving an influx of calls from pharmacists saying customers have complained about their cold medicines not working. This prompted Drs Hatton and Hendeles to compile every study they could find on phenylephrine, evaluate them all, and in 2007 conclude that the standard 10-milligram dose was no more effective than a sugar pill. Rep McClain said in her letter to the FDA: Americans seeking OTC relief should not have to worry whether they are wasting their hard-earned money on ineffective drugs. It is important that the American people have confidence in the FDAs approvals and trust that the drugs they purchase are not only safe, but also effective. Phenylephrine differs from the ingredient found in Sudafed, which is called pseudoephedrine and has typically been considered more effective. But its also a highly sought-after chemical precursor in clandestine labs manufacturing methamphetamine, a fact that until Breaking Bad character Jesse Pinkman showed up in Americans living rooms, many may not have known. Because of this, Sudafed purchases are limited to just one box per customer and must be procured from behind the pharmacy counter. Some scary news has emerged from China in the past few weeks: on November 23, the World Health Organisation (WHO) issued a statement about an increase in respiratory symptoms in various hospitals across the northern part of the country. The statement was backed up by alarming pictures of overcrowded hospitals full of children with oxygen masks and getting intravenous fluid, and details that the Beijing Children's Hospital was receiving more than 9,000 new patients a day. Reading these reports sent shivers down my spine. It was a replay of similar stories back in late December 2019, when news of what turned out to be Covid first hit. I'll be honest, back then I initially dismissed those stories, thinking that this was a contained outbreak involving a relatively small number of patients, served up with a significant dose of alarmist hype. I very quickly realised how wrong I was. Children receive a drip at a children hospital in Beijing on November 23, the same day the World Health Organization issued a statement about an increase in respiratory symptoms in the country So this time when reading the reports from China, knowing I'd been mistaken in my previous initial pandemic predictions, I looked at the story with a much more critical eye to the detail. The question is: should we in the UK be worried? The first details were published by the International Society for Infectious Diseases in their Promed (Programme for Monitoring Emerging Diseases) report of November 21, showing there were clusters of new infections occurring at various sites across northern China. The next day, the WHO had a teleconference with the Chinese health authorities to ascertain what was happening. They in turn provided data which could explain what was going on and that there was no need for panic. This data revealed there'd been a significant rise in the amount of winter viruses circulating in the population since October. These viruses included RSV respiratory syncytial virus adenovirus and influenza. These viruses most often affect children, because they've not been exposed to them before, or those most vulnerable to infections, such as the elderly. An increase in cases is to be expected every winter but I believe that this spike is so much larger because of the way China managed its Covid response; severe lockdown and then its sudden opening up of society. This means that many children were not exposed to these viruses and there was no build-up of immunity, leading to the sudden explosion of cases. A similar thing (but to a lesser extent) happened this year in early January in the UK, when paediatric wards and A&E departments (where I work) were full of children with respiratory infections. However, as predicted, the numbers fell as quickly as they dramatically rose. But this couldn't explain the whole picture of what's going on in China. The data showed there was also an increase in infections with a bacterium called Mycoplasma pneumoniae, which can cause a nasty pneumonia. The number of children infected with this had been rising since May; then there were rising cases of co-infections where the children got the bacterial and viral infections simultaneously thanks to the increasing amounts of viruses circulating in the population (blame winter weather and people spending more time indoors in close proximity). Although pneumonia caused by the bacterium is usually treated with a specific type of antibiotics called macrolides (e.g. clarithromycin and erythromycin), excessive use of these drugs has led to the strain of bacteria that's dominant in Beijing being antibiotic resistant. Indeed over the past 15 years in Beijing, 70-90 per cent of cases of infection with Mycoplasma pneumoniae were due to strains resistant to these antibiotics. But what's really significant is that the cases in China have been linked to a known cause unlike with Covid-19 initially, where we had no idea what was driving it. This would also explain why this time it's children suffering the most adults have been exposed to these infections before and so have a built-up immunity and aren't getting as sick. A woman receives a dose of the Moderna coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine at a vaccination site in New York in 2021 Another possible explanation for the rise in cases is that, as a reult of Covid, the population has a reduced ability to fight infection. While for most people, the immune system is restored to normal after a simple bout of Covid, those who had a severe episode and/or developed long Covid are at risk of having an altered immune response. But again, severe Covid is so rare in children that it cannot be a contributor to the rise in cases of respiratory symptoms seen in China. And then there are those pictures on TV of the children in China in the wards. They have oxygen and intravenous fluids things we would only give very sick patients, but they are sitting up looking quite well and doing homework. This is not something that I have seen in the hospitals I have worked in. Maybe some of the numbers in hospital are a reflection of different medical ways of caring for patients, rather than the start of a new pandemic. So I am as confident as you can be that what we're seeing in China is a rise in usual respiratory infections following the sudden changes in lockdown rules. I don't believe it's due to past Covid infections, nor is it a new virus about to start a worldwide pandemic worse than Covid. Once again, I believe that this is a relatively small number of patients but in a contained outbreak, served with a significant dose of hype. My assessment is based on an interpretation of the data and science. I'm conscious, though, that any thinking can be influenced by a phenomenon known as optimism bias: an unconscious bias which influences how we think so we come to the conclusion we want to happen. And I definitely don't want to experience another pandemic. And of course, my opinion is based on the facts we have now and on the caveat that the information we have is true. As new information becomes available, my opinion will change with the new evidence just as it did when the extent of the Covid outbreak became apparent. But it's not just me who is thinking like this about the recent outbreak in China: Benjamin Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong and a leading expert on transmission of infections, said in an interview after the data from China was released that this 'is a typical winter surge' in acute respiratory infections. 'It is happening slightly earlier this year, perhaps because of increased population susceptibility to respiratory infections resulting from three years of Covid measures,' he said. PROFESSOR ROB GALLOWAY: As new information becomes available, my opinion will change with the new evidence just as it did when the extent of the Covid outbreak became apparent Meanwhile, Francois Balloux, a computational biologist at University College London, stated: 'Since China experienced a far longer and harsher lockdown than essentially any other country on Earth, it was anticipated that those 'lockdown exit' waves could be substantial there.' Zania Stamataki, one of the UK's leading experts in this field, works as an associate professor in viral immunology at Birmingham University she told the BMJ on November 23: 'There is currently no evidence that the increase in paediatric pneumonia cases in China may be due to a new virus.' All reassuring words from world-renowned experts. So don't panic about what's happening in China. But there's no doubt that we'll face a new pandemic at some point and what I can predict with confidence is that the time bomb of the next pandemic is ticking. The problem is that we do not know when this bomb will explode it could be next year, it could be in 100 years. All we can do is plan; learn the lessons from Covid-19, invest in the systems needed to get early detection of the start of pandemics and increase the resilience of the health service so that it can cope better when the next pandemic really does hit. @drrobgalloway A single jab of ozone gas could banish hard-to-treat foot pain that affects almost one in ten adults in the UK. Plantar fasciitis inflammation of the band of tissue that runs along the sole of the foot can cause debilitating pain that lasts for months or, in some cases, even years. Most common among people aged 40 to 60, it can be triggered by wearing shoes with little cushioning or support, exercising or walking on hard and uneven surfaces, and being overweight. Some people get it because they have flat feet as the tissue gets stretched when weight is put on the foot. Current treatments include taking painkillers, steroid injections to ease inflammation, wearing special insoles to support the foot, or doing exercises recommended by a physiotherapist or podiatrist to ease the discomfort. A single jab of ozone gas could banish hard-to-treat foot pain that affects almost one in ten adults in the UK (stock image) But now a trial is under way at Ankara City Hospital in Bilkent, Turkey, to see if a one-off injection of ozone gas could keep pain at bay for longer. Results from this study are expected next year. Ozone is a form of oxygen gas found naturally in the Earth's atmosphere, where it shields us from the sun's harmful UV rays. At ground level, ozone in the air is a pollutant that is harmful to inhale, causing symptoms such as chest pain, coughing and throat irritation. The gas forms mostly in hot weather when other pollutants mix with sunlight. But in recent years, ozone in tiny quantities has also attracted interest for its potential uses in medicine. Studies have found that it may halt tooth decay, as it destroys harmful bacteria that rot teeth and gums; while other research suggests it may ease the agony of osteoarthritis by dampening down the release of prostaglandins, chemicals that are triggered by inflammation in a damaged joint and that send pain signals to the brain. It is thought the ozone jab works on sore feet in the same way it does on arthritic joints, by stemming the release of pain-inducing prostaglandins. But scientists also think ozone as a supercharged form of oxygen may increase the oxygen supply to damaged tissue, aiding the healing process. The new study will recruit 48 people aged 18 to 65 with foot pain lasting longer than three months. Half will get a single injection of a liquid form of ozone (where the gas is mixed with saline) into the foot, while the rest will be treated with extracorporeal shockwave therapy a non-surgical treatment also available on the NHS where impulses of energy are fired through the skin at the damaged tissues to reduce inflammation. Volunteers will undergo regular checks in the weeks and months after treatment, to see if the pain has subsided. Matthew Solan, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Royal Surrey County Hospital, says most cases of plantar fasciitis ease in time without specific treatment (stock image) Ultrasound scans will also be used to measure the thickness of the plantar fascia before and after treatment, as the thicker the tissue the more likely it is to cause pain. The results of a similar study in Iran, published in 2018 in the journal Pain Medicine, showed that, three months after ozone treatment, patients were in less pain than those given steroid injections into the foot. Matthew Solan, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at the Royal Surrey County Hospital, says most cases of plantar fasciitis ease in time without specific treatment and any new medical trials must account for this natural recovery process. For the previous ozone jab study in Iran, for instance, he notes that the patients treated had had pain for just two months and 'almost all would have improved with no treatment, and time alone'. He explains: 'A sensible approach is for patients to spend a minimum of three months doing the basics rest, wearing suitable shoes and weight control. 'Evidence for what is good at that stage is poor. Shockwave therapy has the least side-effects and reasonable evidence.' Shares in 888 Holdings soared 17.5 per cent on Monday after the William Hill owner was revealed to have rejected a takeover by a gambling software firm this summer. The betting giant received a 700million written offer from Playtech in July. But the offer a price of 156p per share was deemed too low for the company, according to The Sunday Times. Too low: Betting giant 888 received a 700million written offer from Playtech in July Prior to the takeover announcement, 888 Holdings shares had fallen 30 per cent over the past year, closing at 70.6p last week. They are now around 17 per cent lower. The firm's bosses, Labour peer Lord Mendelsohn and gambling industry veteran Per Widerstrom, suffered a blow when 888 was kicked out of the FTSE 250. 888 owns a slew of online bingo and casino firms under its flagship brand. It forked out almost 2billion for bookmaker William Hill in 2022. It has been hit by new gambling regulations in recent months. Revenue slipped to 405m for the three months to the end of September from 449.4m in the same period a year earlier. At its UK and Ireland business it fell 10 per cent to 157.2m. Capita has completed its strategic sale of all non-core operations by agreeing to offload its majority stake in Fera Science. The outsourcing giant revealed that private equity firm Bridgepoint Group will acquire its 75 per cent holding in the research organisation for 60million. Fera was started in 2015 as a joint venture between Capita and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which holds the remaining 25 per cent stake in the business. Takeover: Capita revealed that private equity firm Bridgepoint Group will acquire its 75 per cent holding in research organisation Fera Science for 60million It provides testing, research, advisory and assurance services to companies and public sector bodies involved in agriculture and environmental science. The Yorkshire-based company, formerly called the Food and Environment Research Agency, posted 45million in sales and a 3million pre-tax profit last year. Capita plans to use money from selling its stake in Fera to enhance its balance sheet and investment plans. Having just sold its travel and events businesses, Agiito and Evolvi, for 37million to Clarity Travel, Capita said the sale of Fera marks the completion of its 'non-core disposal programme'. The programme forms part of a turnaround plan spearheaded by chief executive Jon Lewis to strengthen the firm's balance sheet and slash its high debt pile. Lewis said: 'We had previously announced our intention to sell our stake in Fera as part of our ongoing strategy to simplify and strengthen Capita. 'It was the appropriate time to find a new partner to build on the strong, successful foundations now in place at Fera and take the company onto the next stage of its development.' Lewis will stand down as boss later this year after six years in charge, having helped reduce the firm's net debts during his tenure from over 1.1billion to 166.2million at the end of June. Capita has also repositioned itself towards providing services traditionally offered by the public sector and becoming a more high-tech business. In the last few years, it has won deals to supply training services to the Royal Navy, manage the Civil Service Pension Scheme, and assist fraud victims on behalf of the City of London Police. The company additionally won contract extensions to run the London Congestion Charge and ULEZ low emissions zone, administer the BBC licence fee, and deliver primary care support services for NHS England. Adolfo Hernandez, the vice president of global telecommunications for cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services, is replacing Lewis as chief executive. Capita shares were 3.9 per cent higher at 20.8p on Monday morning, making them one of the top five risers on the FTSE 250 Index, but have fallen by around 17 per cent since the year began. The fourth Republican primary debate is set to see candidates face their toughest test yet as a trio of female moderators turn up the heat and pressure the 2024 contenders to ditch their 'canned stump speeches.' Co-moderator Elizabeth Vargas of NewsNation told DailyMail.com her goal is to deliver a debate where viewers don't want to turn off the television like she says she wanted to do during extended periods of cross-talk in the second debate. 'We intend to moderate this debate with a firm and steady hand,' Vargas said in an exclusive look at preparation for the fourth event. 'People will not be allowed to talk over each other.' 'We're at a full boil now,' she added. 'This is crunch time, these candidates know it. They are running out of time to make their case. And they need to do it quickly.' NewsNation is hosting the fourth Republican presidential primary debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on Wednesday, December 6 from 8-10pm eastern time at the University of Alabama's Frank Moody Music Building. This is the first time a Republican primary debate is being held in the deep red state of Alabama, Vargas noted. Co-moderators for the fourth contest are NewsNations' Vargas, SiriusXM's Megyn Kelly and Washington Free Beacon Editor-in-Chief Eliana Johnson. The stage will be the smallest in the 2024 primary race yet with qualifiers including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie claimed on November 15 that he qualified for the debate. NewsNation host Elizabeth Vargas shares an exclusive look at what to expect for Wednesday night's fourth Republican presidential primary debate, which she is co-hosting in Tuscaloosa, Alabama Wednesday's debate stage is set to be the smallest yet with as few as three candidates. The third debate had five candidates from L: Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Un Ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott Previewing the line of questioning for the debate, Vargas said: 'They're not open-ended questions like you know, 'Why are you the best candidate?' You know, 'Why are you better than Donald Trump?' That is not going to be a question.' Vargas said the importance of the debate should not be understated or undervalued, claiming that these primary debates are the only chance for voters to see on stage alternate options to Trump or President Joe Biden. 'I do know that the vast majority of Americans don't want either Donald Trump or Joe Biden on the ticket,' Vargas said in an interview with DailyMail.com about the upcoming debate. 'And that leaves an opportunity, you know, for other candidates. And that's what this debate is all about.' Tensions at the first few debates were high, with candidates fighting for speaking time and talking over each other to defend their policies or launch counter attacks against their competitors. The second debate in Simi Valley, California in September was particularly heated with candidates taking personal swipes at each other and spending many parts of the debate shouting over one another. Many viewers said they either wanted to or did end up turning off their televisions without finishing the debate. Haley said to Ramaswamy in California: 'Honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber.' At the third debate in Miami, Florida in October, Ramaswamy shot back with personal affronts against Haley. 'Do you want a leader from a different generation, who's going to put this country first? Or do you want Dick Cheney in three-inch heels?' he questioned on-stage. Haley later fired back with a correction: 'They're 5-inch heels and I don't wear them unless I can run in them.' Co-moderators for the fourth contest are NewsNations' Elizabeth Vargas (ccenter), SiriusXM's Megyn Kelly (right) and Washington Free Beacon Editor-in-Chief Eliana Johnson (left) Megyn Kelly (center) co-hosted the most-watched debate ever on January 28, 2016 with Chris Wallace (left) and Bret Baier (right) all Fox News hosts at the time. Kelly returns on Wednesday to co-host with Vargas and Johnson At another point, Ramaswamy brought Haley's daughter into the conversation, noting that she was a user of TikTok during a heated debate on which candidates do and do not want to ban the Chinese social media app. 'Leave my daughter out of your voice,' Haley said in response. 'You're just scum.' Vargas said of the state of the race: 'It's like the pot of water on the stove. It's been on the heat and in the first two debates it was, you know, the water was getting warmer and warmer and warmer. And then by third debate, it was maybe a few bubbles starting or steam starting to rise.' 'We're at a full boil now,' she noted. 'This is crunch time, these candidates know it. They are running out of time to make their case. And they need to do it quickly.' 'And that means not just repeating the lines that they've been saying in the first three debates,' she added. 'It means actually explaining their position more fully, and debating with each other on why their approach and the specifics of the way they would go about something is better than the other three people on stage and Donald Trump, who by the way, will not be absent from this debate.' 'If he chooses not to show up on stage, he will be there in spirit because there will be lots of questions about him as well,' she previewed. Vargas was noticeably off-put by some of the strategies of the debate moderators before her in the 2024 cycle. Specifically, she didn't like that they asked open-ended questions without pressing candidates on specifics of how they plan to implement their plans. She was additionally peeved that they didn't seem to bring up Trump enough. Vargas says she plans to put pressure on the candidates to answer how they plan to implement their plans as president and will address Donald Trump and his absence from the stage 'I think that in one of the first debates, they didn't even mention his name until an hour into the debate,' Vargas lamented to DailyMail.com. 'I think it's ridiculous. He's leading by an enormous margin ahead of all of these candidates on the stage.' 'If he's not going to be there to defend his policies, we're going to have other candidates running to replace him weigh-in on his policies. And I think that only serves the voter,' she added. 'I mean, there's a real concern among Republican voters that Donald Trump can't win a general election. That's what Governor DeSantis has been out there saying on the campaign trail, and he might not be wrong,' the NewsNation host said. 'So this is a chance for Republicans to decide, 'Okay, if I really want a Republican in the White House, maybe I should look at somebody else. And if I do, which one would it be of these four?' The biggest elephant in the room for all GOP primary debates this election cycle is that Trump has refused to show up, instead opting for his own counter programming each time as he snubbed the events by claiming going head-to-head with the other candidates is beneath him. Vargas noted a few times the 'four' candidates on stage Wednesday, but since speaking with DailyMail.com the Republican National Committee (RNC) released those who qualified for the debate, which only included three candidates. Gun-toting Albanian gangsters have seized control of Britain's drugs market and are filling up prisons so fast the government is sending some home early to avoid running out of space. Gangs from the Balkan state now 'exert considerable control' over the supply of cocaine, a United Nations report reveals, with violent criminals importing the drug from their counterparts in mainland Europe through ports in south-east England. And a judge warned cannabis farms being run by Albanian criminal networks had reached 'epidemic levels' and had, in his judgment, 'become something of an industry'. Aided by alliances with South American drug cartels, these brutal gangsters are enforcing their grip using a combination of fear and deadly violence - while taking to social media to share sickening photos of drugs, guns and wads of cash. It recently emerged that 80 Albanian migrants have been sentenced to a total of 130 years in jail over the first four months of the year. Their crimes included murder, manslaughter, rape, firearms offences and kidnap. The scale of the crime wave is putting pressure on the UK's already bursting prisons, with the Government forced to strike deals with Tirana to allow criminals to be deported before the end of their sentences. However, some Albanian youngsters are sneaking into the UK and joining drugs gangs with the aim of getting sent to prison so they can claim to be victims of modern slavery and gain asylum, as MailOnline recently revealed. Albanian gangs are known for sharing photos of flash cars, drugs and money on social media TikTok videos show dozens of Albanian migrants crossing the Channel last year, with this group unfurling the nation's flag on the boat A suspected Albanian drug gang member tried to escape from police by leaping across the roof in his slippers from a house being raided in Worcestershire in September The UK's cocaine market is said to be worth a staggering 2billion with an estimated 976,000 users while the annual number of cocaine-related deaths has increased seven-fold in a decade, and now stands at 840. Research by the National Crime Agency has shown that Albanian-organised crime groups control the cocaine market across the main city and suburban areas of the UK (with the exception of Merseyside, where local gangsters remain in charge). One of the most infamous Albanian gangs is The Hellbanianz, who are based on the Gascoigne Estate in Barking, east London. READ MORE - The Albanian towns left crumbling as workers flee to UK Advertisement They are believed to be responsible for trafficking millions of pounds of drugs into the UK every year and openly boast of their criminal activities with garish social media rap videos. Albanian crime lords have been known to send 'clean skins' with no criminal records to the UK to join organised gangs. It means checks on Channel arrivals are failing to pick up links between them and organised crime groups. The root of the problem of Albanian organised crime here goes back to the Kosovan war of 1998 and 1999, according to a senior official in the NCA's Internal Far Europe Desk. This resulted in 'significant numbers' of Albanians coming to the UK. Around 140,000 Albanians live in the UK, the vast majority of whom - as the country's Prime Minister Edi Rama has pointed out - 'work hard, pay tax' and do not find themselves on the wrong side of the law. But the threat posed by the criminal minority is indisputable, and has only increased after the arrival last year of more than 12,000 Albanians in small boats - a 'significant number' of whom work in drugs gangs, the National Crime Agency (NCA) has said. The prevalence of Albanians among small boat migrants has attracted significant commentary. This photo from Instagram shows two gangsters posing with large wads of banknotes In this photo piles of 50 notes are arranged on a table next to an image of the Albanian flag Two guns arranged in the shape of a loveheart next to a plastic bag full of bullets In this photo, a fearsome looking weapon lies on a table next to a luxury watch and a large amount of cannabis Six Glock pistols, a Browning and a Helstar handgun were discovered concealed in a van with UK plates along with more than 200 rounds of ammunition earlier this year Last year, a record 12,301 reached the UK across the Channel, representing a quarter of the total of 45,755. Most sought asylum after arriving, with 51 per cent of Albanian claims up to June 2022 accepted. A report by MPs earlier this year found 'little justification' for this given Albania is a safe country that is not at war. Many have claimed to be modern slavery victims, with Albanian migrants making up more than half of modern slavery claims lodged by small-boat arrivals in the first half of last year, official data shows. Albania's ambassador Qirjako Qirko admitted to MPs last year that many were simply pretending to be victims of slavery to gain admission. The scale of Albanian cross-Channel migration has now fallen significantly, with the nationality thought to make up less than five per cent of the 3,700 arrivals in small boats in the first three months of the year. But the threat posed by the criminal element remains, with much of the worst violence linked to the drug trade. Brikel Palaj, 33, and Radian Lika, 35, were filmed on CCTV picking up large knives from a Sainsbury's store in Bristol before killing Aranit Lleshi in May 2022 as they attempted to steal a 95,000 crop of cannabis as part of a brutal turf war. Erland Spahiu was part of an eight man gang jailed for a minimum of 229 years for kidnapping and murdering an innocent father who they wrongly thought had raped a teenage girl. Christopher Hughes, 37, suffered more than 90 sharp force injuries to his head, neck, body and limbs, with the most inflicted while he was alive, following his abduction on February 18 last year. Some Albanian gangs have gone so far as to share social media photos of kidnappings and beatings. This image was obtained by the Mail last year One video shows five Albanians armed with knives, machetes and axes dance and rap in footage captioned: 'Ready to break into cannabis houses' Another video shows a masked gang armed with machetes, knives and hammers smashing through the front door of a cannabis house which it says is in London Three Albanians, Redjon Murati, 28, Glen Xhaferri, 26, and Anis Plauku, 29, (pictured left to right) were jailed last year after police discovered they had almost 300,000 in cannabis and cash after armed masked men stormed their home in Bradford and attacked them Another video posted to TikTok shows a masked man breaking into a cannabis factory Delivery driver Koci Selamaj was jailed for a minimum of 36 years in 2022 for murdering teacher Sabina Nessa while she was walking back home through a park in Kidbrooke, south-east London, in 2021. READ MORE - How thugs are posting social media videos of kidnappings and beatings as a warning to rival gangs Advertisement Most criminal activity involving Albanian migrants is far less obvious and involves less overtly violence. According to the NCA, many Albanians arriving in small boats are attracted by the UK's large 'grey' economy, where they can earn up to 100 a day on building sites, cash washes and barbers. Others have been brought over by smugglers to tend cannabis farms for 1,000 a week. Out of the 80 Albanians jailed in the first four months of the year, 49 had been convicted for producing cannabis, the Telegraph reported. The latest data show Albanians are the largest foreign nationality in prisons, with 1,393 behind bars as of March 31 compared with 830 Poles, 823 Romanians, 391 Jamaicans and 380 Lithuanians. That means they account for 1.6 per cent of all inmates despite representing less than 0.05 per cent of the UK population. Gangsters Radian Lika, 35, and Brikel Palaj, 33, were filmed on CCTV picking up large knives from a Sainsbury's store in Bristol before killing Aranit Lleshi in May 2022 Albanian drug dealer Eugert Merizaj fled the UK after carrying out the 'meticulously planned' gangland-style execution of a drugs rival in Hartlepool in 2019 A social media photo of an Albanian gangster holding a gun at the wheel of a car The Government has been keen to tout a returns agreement signed with Tirana in December. Internal Home Office data shows 628 Channel migrants were deported in the first six months of this year, compared with 382 in the whole of 2022. The increase has been driven by a significant rise in the number of Albanian migrants sent back to their homeland under the agreement. READ MORE - British man who claimed unknown traffickers put four Albanians into his camper van while he went to McDonald's is jailed for 15 months Advertisement Of the 628 removals from January to June, 512 were Albanian. The period also saw 45 Iraqis, 17 Iranians and 54 other nationalities removed from the UK. During the whole of 2022, 215 Albanians were sent back, along with 83 Iraqis, 31 Iranians and 53 with other nationalities. In the whole of 2021, there were just 28 small-boat migrants removed from Britain, the data revealed. Critics will point out that the deportation figures in the hundreds pail in comparison to the 12,000 Albanians who crossed the Channel last year. Shortly after the figures emerged immigration minister Robert Jenrick admitted that many others were still in hotels or had absconded. Overcrowding in British jails means ministers are keen to return foreign offenders to their home countries as soon as possible. Currently, overseas criminals can be deported only in the final year of their sentence. But under a shake-up announced last month by Justice Secretary Alex Chalk, the earliest point for removal will be brought forward by six months. In May, ministers announced a deal to return 200 Albanian prisoners to their home country. Koci Selamaj was jailed for minimum of 36 years in 2022 for murdering teacher Sabina Nessa while she was walking back home through a park in Kidbrooke, south-east London, in 2021 Albanian people smugglers have used social media to tempt their countrymen into making the journey to Britain This will see offenders serving life sentences will have to undergo a complex re-sentencing process to comply with Albanian law before they are sent back. Erland Spahiu was part of a group of vigilantes who kidnapped and murdered an innocent father who they wrongly thought had raped a teenage girl The scheme raises the prospect of serious criminals being freed earlier than if they had remained in jail here. Ms Nessa's father Abdur Rouf told the Mail in response: 'We should have been consulted about this before it was put in place. I am very sad and angry. 'It is not right for them to do it this way. My family has already felt short-changed by the justice system in the past, and now there is a risk that we will suffer again in the future.' A Home Office spokesman said today: 'We are determined to tackle both the illicit supply of drugs, relentlessly pursuing criminal networks, and to build a world-class treatment system to turn people's lives around and stop the cycle of crime. 'We also remain committed to protecting the public by removing Foreign National Offenders and cracking down on illegal working, with enforcement visits up by more than 50 per cent on last year and arrests more than doubling.' There was a dramatic rise in Albanian asylum applicants last years. Numbers have now gone down Most sought asylum after arriving, with 51 per cent of Albanian claims up to June 2022 accepted. A report by MPs earlier this year found 'little justification' for this given Albania is a safe country that is not at war Soft play centres warning parents not to bring their own booze have sparked a huge debate among mothers and fathers. Tumbles Play Place hit out last week at 'desperate' mothers and fathers bringing alcohol to its centre in Mossley, Greater Manchester, when staff found a bottle of Merlot stashed in the toilets. Poll Should parents be allowed to drink alcohol at soft plays? Yes No Should parents be allowed to drink alcohol at soft plays? Yes 111 votes No 495 votes Now share your opinion Management said they'd be checking CCTV and banning people, warning: 'If you are so desperate for an alcoholic drink in the daytime, please don't do it in our children's play centre and leave your bottles on the toilets.' Meanwhile, the Red Robin pub in Wigan last month banned punters from drinking cocktails and shots inside its onsite Wacky Warehouse children's play centre following 'incidents'. The posts have since sparked a fevered debate online as some parents brand drinkers 'irresponsible' - but other mums and dads say booze is absolutely necessary to drown out screaming children. One play centre worker told MailOnline adults get through as many as 15 bottles a week at his venue, with those responsible sneaking away from their children to have a drink. Would YOU bring booze to a soft play centre? Email matt.strudwick@mailonline.co.uk Tumbles Play Place highlighted the problem by posting a photograph of a bottle of Merlot red wine and a mixer While the Red Robin pub in Wigan has stopped letting punters drink cocktails and shots at its onsite children's play centre Wacky Warehouse after 'recent incidents' In an updated post this week on its Facebook page, Tumbles Play Place explained it didn't have a licence to sell alcohol and its insurance wouldn't cover any potential injury claims. READ MORE: Soft play venue shames parents who bring alcohol to site and posts picture of a bottle of Merlot and mixer left behind in toilets Advertisement While Tumbles Play is dead set against alcohol on its premises, others have permission to sell it on site such as Playworld, in Huddersfield, which has bottled beer on the menu for 3.60 and single and double shots of spirits like tequila, sambuca, and Jagermeister. The centre was locked in a battle to keep its alcohol licence last year when owner Kiran Uppal told how the sales were helping a 'struggling business keep its doors open', reported Yorkshire Live. Kirklees Council's licensing panel ended up limiting them from selling booze at the premises from morning to early evening. The Jelly Lounge in Windsor, Berkshire, is another with beer stocked up behind the counters. A 21-year-old team leader told MailOnline they sell between 10 and 15 bottles of booze a week and gave an insight into how parents would sneak a sip. 'When the parents come for their alcohol they mostly don't drink with their babies. They will order their drinks and then they will drink outside in the cafeteria,' they said. 'They don't do it in front of their kids as it's not a good idea and gives a bad impression.' The selling of alcohol is a hot topic of debate among parents who know all too well the struggles and chaos that ensues inside the sweaty soft play centres. Some told how they needed a tipple just to get through it, while others slammed them for being 'irresponsible'. Threads have popped up on parenting forum Mumsnet debating whether it would be suitable to have booze at soft play centres Commenting beneath Tumbles Play's post, Hayley Jayne Burke recounted how she took her son to a London soft play centre which sold alcohol. She wrote: 'Banging idea if you ask me... me and my son had the best time ever.' Jeanette Martin thought it was 'disrespectful' and 'gives you an idea how their kids with [sic] be brought up'. Tam Dodd-Sharples wrote: 'Wow, somebody has a problem.' Threads have popped up on parenting forum Mumsnet debating the ethics of drinking alcohol in front of children at parties. In one asking if people should bring their own drinks to a soft play party, some were left in shock when one user responded how all the ones they had been to had 'booze and nibbles'. The wrote alongside a laughing emoji: 'Not hard booze obviously but fizz and beer! Helps massively with the fact you to spend the afternoon in a soft play.' In another thread which asked about child party etiquette at a soft play, one parent said it should 'always include booze'. 'I've been to parties at soft play with nibbles for the parents. I'd say about 80% of parties have food for the parents (including booze),' one wrote. Another thought management at their soft play was missing a trick by not having a licence to sell alcohol. But the mother who posted the original message thought it was 'a bit odd to have booze at a soft play'. Yet one told how a couple of soft plays near them 'don't blink at seeing adults have a drink at [sic] them at afternoon parties'. They added: 'But I did do a double take at the dad having a beer halfway through a 10-12 party.' Would YOU bring booze to a soft play centre? Email matt.strudwick@mailonline.co.uk Brittany Higgins is accompanied to court each day by her loyal friend Emma Webster, who has stood by her side during some of the most trying periods of her life. Ms Webster, a political lobbyist, has offered unwavering support to Ms Higgins - from letting her lean on her shoulder at Bruce Lehrmann's defamation trial, to encouraging her now-fiance David Sharaz to ask her on a date in the first instance. When the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions announced he was dropping Mr Lehrmann's sexual assault charge last year, it was Ms Webster who immediately released a statement about Ms Higgins' admission to a Queensland hospital. Ms Webster also drove from Melbourne to Canberra to stand on the Parliament House lawn while Ms Higgins spoke about her allegations to a heaving crowd during the March4Justice rally in March 2021. She has been described by Ms Higgins as 'my one true love', and by Mr Sharaz as a 'go-to person' who is 'basically part of our relationship'. Now, Ms Webster is shadowing Ms Higgins to Mr Lehrmann's defamation trial in Sydney's Federal Court, sitting beside her in the public gallery, and leaving the building with her at the end of each day. Emma Webster is pictured, left, with Brittany Higgins, her fiance David Sharaz, and lawyer Leon Zwier (right) outside the Federal Court in Sydney last week Brittany Higgins is pictured, left, with her friend and business partner Emma Webster The pair also became business partners earlier this year, registering the name Power Blazers Pty Ltd which will aim to help Australians navigate the justice system. It's no surprise they've teamed up - Ms Webster is a powerful political operative and speaker whose expert opinion is frequently sought for television segments on the ABC and Sky News. She previously worked for former prime minister Julia Gillard, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews and ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr, and is now the director at political lobby firm Hawker Britton. The friends have also worked together before, when Ms Webster was head of communications and strategic advisor First Peoples Assembly of Victoria in February 2021. At the time, Ms Webster helped fast-track Ms Higgins' job application so she could secure the role of media advisor for the organisation before it was publicly advertised. Brittany Higgins (pictured) and Emma Webster live in different states but still manage to see each other Emma Webster is pictured, left, with Brittany Higgins They live in different states, but have found time to visit each other throughout the year. Ms Higgins lives in Queensland, but she travelled to Melbourne in November for her lawyer Leon Zwier's birthday - and was pictured smiling at a table with Mr Sharaz and Ms Webster. In August, Ms Webster posted a selfie on Instagram to announce she was asked to fill a special role at Ms Higgins' forthcoming wedding to Mr Sharaz. In the post, she was holding a box that said 'maid of honour'. The caption read: 'Reporting for duty, Brittany Higgins'. Ms Webster has now travelled interstate to support Ms Higgins again - this time, while she gives evidence at Mr Lehrmann's defamation trial. In court last week, during a lunch break, Ms Higgins stood by the door of the courtroom and rested her head on Ms Webster's shoulder while waiting for the hearing to resume. Brittany Higgins and her fiance David Sharaz travelled to Melbourne in November for her lawyer Leon Zwier's birthday, and to see Emma Webster (right) Emma Webster is a political lobbyist who has worked with former Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews (pictured together) Mr Lehrmann is suing Wilkinson and Ten over an interview with Ms Higgins on The Project on February 15, 2021, during which she first aired her rape allegations against him. He was not named in that broadcast, but he claims he was identified by friends, colleagues and family members as the man who allegedly raped Ms Higgins in Parliament House on March 23, 2019. Mr Lehrmann has continually denied having any sexual contact with Ms Higgins, consensually or otherwise. Ms Higgins spent two full days being cross-examined by Mr Lehrmann's barrister Steven Whybrow SC last week. She will return to the witness stand on Tuesday morning. Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden in two of the three closest fought states a year ahead of the 2024 election, according to an exclusive poll for DailyMail.com, amid doubts over the economy and border security. Trump is five points ahead of Biden in Arizona and three points up in Georgia. However, Biden leads his likely 2024 challenger in Wisconsin by five percentage points. All three awarded their electoral college votes to Trump in 2016, before flipping narrowly to Biden in 2020. The result of the 2024 election could come down to who takes victory in these key states. J.L. Partners polled 550 voters in Arizona, in Georgia and Wisconsin. The results show Joe Biden in danger of losing two states that helped him win in 2020 The three states chosen had the narrowest of margins in 2020. Each went for Trump in 2016 but Biden flipped them in 2020, helping him to an electoral college win 306 to 232 READ MORE: The diagrams that show how support for Joe Biden and Donald Trump has shifted in three key battleground states Advertisement But now Biden faces a challenge to hold his coalition together in Arizona, where Trump has a lead among Hispanic voters, and in Georgia, where independents are switching to the former president. Taken as a whole, the results show Biden in trouble, said James Johnson, co-founder of J.L. Partners, which ran the poll for DailyMail.com 'Trump is ahead by a fair margin in two states Biden cannot afford to lose Arizona and Georgia,' he said. 'Buoyed by a solid performance amongst his base, and a lead with independents in the two states, Trump is the early favorite. 'Though Biden still has women and graduates on side, as well as Black voters, Trump is narrowing the gap with the latter group as well as Hispanics. 'On the flip side, Biden can take heart from holding onto Wisconsin by an increased margin than in 2020. 'Is there a new pattern at play with Trump making gains in states with a more diverse electorate while white women stick with Biden?' J.L. Partners asked 550 likely voters for their views in each of the three states, using landlines, text messages and apps to ask questions. In Georgia, 39 percent said they would vote for Trump if the election were held tomorrow, compared with 34 percent who preferred Biden. That lead is powered in part by independents, who go 30 percent to 24 for Trump over Biden. Trump is ahead in Arizona and Georgia but trails Biden in Wisconsin Trump is ahead of Biden in national opinion polls with almost a year to go. But polling state by state, particularly in key battlegrounds, gives a clearer view of the electoral college result In 2020, Biden won the state by the tightest of margins: He won 11,000 votes more than Trump, or about 0.2 percent of the turnout. It is a similar picture in Arizona, where 39 percent said they would for Trump, compared with 36 percent who preferred Biden. Trump gets the backing of 31 percent of Black voters long the base for Democratic politicians and for Biden in particular way above the national number. He also takes 37 percent of Hispanic voters, compared with 34 percent for Biden. In 2020, Biden won by just 10,500 votes or 0.4 percent. The results from Wisconsin make better reading for the Biden campaign. The president leads Trump by 37 percent to 32, and his coalition of college educated voters plus minorities is standing up better than in the two other states, helped by Robert Kennedy Jr.'s position on six points. Yet it still marks a remarkable reversal from 2020, with Biden now trailing in the more diverse states and holds a lead only in the whitest of the three. And it shows that Trump remains a formidable election opponent despite four criminal indictments this year. The headline data are backed by other questions in the poll. Voters in Arizona and Georgia both saw Trump as more presidential than Biden (by margins of two and three percent respectively). But in Wisconsin they said Biden was the more presidential by eight points. Robert Kennedy Jr.'s support in Wisconsin stands on six percent, eating into Trump's vote share and helping Biden maintain a lead in the state And in Arizona and Georgia they said Trump was more in touch with their priorities, by seven and eight points respectively, while in Wisconsin it was Biden (by two points). Johnson, the pollster, said there was a still a long way to run before election day. And just as there were warning signs for Biden, there was potential trouble ahead for Trump too involving the impact of RFK Jr. on his vote and Democratic enthusiasm for keeping him out of power. 'We believe our polling, which makes voters choose "Someone else" before being given RFK Jr and other independents as an option, gives a more accurate picture at this stage of Kennedys reach closer to five to seven percent than the double-digit vote shares recorded in some other surveys,' he said. RFK's numbers in Wisconsin suggest Trump may lose vote share to the independent elsewhere too. Then there is the fact that Trump's presence on the ballot may elevate Democratic turnout. 'The most important issue to Democrats is not the economy, or healthcare, or any other policy issue, but the need to stop Donald Trump,' he said. 'That may end up bolstering Democrat turnout.' The results carry a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points. In pics: sensor industrial park in Chongqing Xinhua) 10:08, December 04, 2023 Workers are seen at a testing workshop of a technology company at a sensor industrial park in Chongqing, southwest China, Nov. 30, 2023. In recent years, the Beibei District of Chongqing has worked together with China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) in building a sensor industrial park. By introducing preferential policies, support funds and investment, the park is aimed at promoting the intelligent sensor industry to develop in a large-scale, specialized, differential and high-end way. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao) This photo taken on Nov. 30, 2023 shows a chip automation workshop of a technology company at a sensor industrial park in Chongqing, southwest China. In recent years, the Beibei District of Chongqing has worked together with China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) in building a sensor industrial park. By introducing preferential policies, support funds and investment, the park is aimed at promoting the intelligent sensor industry to develop in a large-scale, specialized, differential and high-end way. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao) This photo taken on Nov. 30, 2023 shows a chip automation workshop of a technology company at a sensor industrial park in Chongqing, southwest China. In recent years, the Beibei District of Chongqing has worked together with China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) in building a sensor industrial park. By introducing preferential policies, support funds and investment, the park is aimed at promoting the intelligent sensor industry to develop in a large-scale, specialized, differential and high-end way. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao) A worker is seen at a testing workshop of a technology company at a sensor industrial park in Chongqing, southwest China, Nov. 30, 2023. In recent years, the Beibei District of Chongqing has worked together with China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) in building a sensor industrial park. By introducing preferential policies, support funds and investment, the park is aimed at promoting the intelligent sensor industry to develop in a large-scale, specialized, differential and high-end way. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao) This photo taken on Nov. 30, 2023 shows an automation workshop of a meter company at a sensor industrial park in Chongqing, southwest China. In recent years, the Beibei District of Chongqing has worked together with China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) in building a sensor industrial park. By introducing preferential policies, support funds and investment, the park is aimed at promoting the intelligent sensor industry to develop in a large-scale, specialized, differential and high-end way. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao) This photo taken on Nov. 30, 2023 shows a scene at a testing workshop of a smart technology company at a sensor industrial park in Chongqing, southwest China. In recent years, the Beibei District of Chongqing has worked together with China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) in building a sensor industrial park. By introducing preferential policies, support funds and investment, the park is aimed at promoting the intelligent sensor industry to develop in a large-scale, specialized, differential and high-end way. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao) Workers are seen at a production workshop of a technology company at a sensor industrial park in Chongqing, southwest China, Nov. 30, 2023. In recent years, the Beibei District of Chongqing has worked together with China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) in building a sensor industrial park. By introducing preferential policies, support funds and investment, the park is aimed at promoting the intelligent sensor industry to develop in a large-scale, specialized, differential and high-end way. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao) A worker is seen at a testing workshop of a technology company at a sensor industrial park in Chongqing, southwest China, Nov. 30, 2023. In recent years, the Beibei District of Chongqing has worked together with China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) in building a sensor industrial park. By introducing preferential policies, support funds and investment, the park is aimed at promoting the intelligent sensor industry to develop in a large-scale, specialized, differential and high-end way. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao) This photo taken on Nov. 30, 2023 shows an automation workshop of a meter company at a sensor industrial park in Chongqing, southwest China. In recent years, the Beibei District of Chongqing has worked together with China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) in building a sensor industrial park. By introducing preferential policies, support funds and investment, the park is aimed at promoting the intelligent sensor industry to develop in a large-scale, specialized, differential and high-end way. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao) A worker is seen at a production workshop of a meter company at a sensor industrial park in Chongqing, southwest China, Nov. 30, 2023. In recent years, the Beibei District of Chongqing has worked together with China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) in building a sensor industrial park. By introducing preferential policies, support funds and investment, the park is aimed at promoting the intelligent sensor industry to develop in a large-scale, specialized, differential and high-end way. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao) A staff member (1st R) of China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) introduces to visitors the operation of a sensor industrial park in Chongqing, southwest China, Nov. 30, 2023. In recent years, the Beibei District of Chongqing has worked together with China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) in building a sensor industrial park. By introducing preferential policies, support funds and investment, the park is aimed at promoting the intelligent sensor industry to develop in a large-scale, specialized, differential and high-end way. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao) Workers are seen at a production workshop of a smart technology company at a sensor industrial park in Chongqing, southwest China, Nov. 30, 2023. In recent years, the Beibei District of Chongqing has worked together with China Railway Construction Corporation Limited (CRCC) in building a sensor industrial park. By introducing preferential policies, support funds and investment, the park is aimed at promoting the intelligent sensor industry to develop in a large-scale, specialized, differential and high-end way. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao) (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) Korea must pursue pro-environment policies The world is moving firmly albeit far more slowly than desired to save the Earth from global warming and climate change. In Dubai's COP28 U.N. climate meeting, 117 countries pledged to triple renewable energy use by 2030. Korea, the worlds 13th-largest economy and 13th-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, vowed to do so only at the 11th hour. Seoul notes it is a non-binding and voluntary club. Some rich countries, including the host UAE and Germany, also revealed their donations to the loss and damage fund to help developing nations suffering from climate change. Korea has yet to announce its amount. Instead, the nation vowed to triple its nuclear energy use by 2050. All this illustrates that this country is lagging in climate issues compared to its often flaunted global status. It is partly due to Koreas industrial structure still relying heavily on smokestack sectors, like steel and shipbuilding. A bigger reason, however, is the low level of climate awareness, especially among the nations conservative leaders seeking growth by any means. In his budget address at the National Assembly on Oct. 30, for instance, President Yoon Suk Yeol did not mention words like climate, carbon neutrality, or greenhouse gas even once. He uttered nuclear energy three times, but never did he utter the words renewable energy. Earlier, his government lowered renewable energys share out of Korea's total energy mix from 30.2 percent to 21.6 percent in 2030. Instead, it lifted atomic energys share to 8.5 percent. Foreign media outlets and environmentalists decried Korea as the only country running counter to global trends. The country must reverse its policy direction to keep up with the rest of the world and keep its word by 2030. Will this government do so? We are skeptical. The first thing Yoon did in the energy area was punish unqualified solar energy subsidy recipients. Many small and mid-size solar panel makers have already gone bankrupt, and larger ones reduced the scale of their business or moved overseas. Korea is at a crossroads between renewable energy and nuclear energy. The nation tries to lead the CFE (Carbon-Free Energy), which includes nuclear energy, to keep its net-zero commitments. That also explains why Korea joined the 22 countries declaring they will triple atomic energy use by 2050. Yoons energy policy, like his other policies, is based on the so-called ABM" (anything but Moon Jae-in) mindset. The former leader, alarmed by the nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011, declared a phaseout of atomic energy by 2060. Yoon thinks his predecessor was utterly wrong. Conservative media joined the attack on Moon, describing him as being close to an eco-fundamentalist. Moon might have been overambitious or not cautious in considering the reality, including Koreas capacity to shift to renewable energy quickly. Renewable energys share remains at 4.7 percent, compared to the global average of 28.1 percent. However, Moon is fundamentally right. Renewable energy must be Koreas ultimate destination, as it will soon be the cheapest and safest form of energy. Yoons shift to nuclear energy must be temporary at best. If environmentalists enticed Moon, Yoon seems captivated by nuclearists. Advocates of nuclear energy say Korea, with its small land area, is unsuitable for solar or wind power generation. They point to the limitations of renewable energy due to intermittency, while stressing the continuity and competitive costs of atomic plants. The nuclear lobbyists are only half right. Renewable energy costs have fallen far below that of nuclear energy in most advanced countries except Korea. Even small modular reactors (SMRs) are not competitive unless built on a large scale. Nuclear power generation is also too rigid to fill the void of renewable energy. Korea has no idea how to dispose of fuel waste. It also has the highest concentration of atomic power plants in earthquake-prone terrain. Although Korea may not move ahead of other countries in climate issues, it should follow in the same direction. The country may not be a model global citizen, but it should also not be a global villain. Yoon stresses fiscal stringency not to leave a burden on future generations. If so, he must know which will be better. He can leave the nation with lingering risks of a nuclear disaster and filled with fuel wastes below its surface or he can leave it completely clean and safe for future generations. With less than a year to go, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are seeing their complex coalitions of voters fracture amid a welter of other candidates jockeying for attention. A swing state poll conducted for DailyMail.com lays bare the way voters for the two likely 2024 candidates have shifted their stances since casting their votes in 2020. The headline is that Biden is trailing Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nominee, in Arizona and Georgia but holds the advantage in Wisconsin. But these three flow diagrams show just how and why the president is losing support. In Arizona, where both candidates are seeing their vote shrink, Biden has lost 13 percentage points while Trump has lost only seven points. J.L. Partners polled 550 likely voters in each of three battleground states. The results can be used to identify who is winning and losing voters. With less than a year to go, they show how Joe Biden is losing support in Arizona to other candidates Trump is ahead of Biden in national opinion polls with almost a year to go. But polling state by state, particularly in key battlegrounds, gives a clearer view of the electoral college result READ MORE: Economic worries and political weariness in Atlanta's bellwether precinct give a taste of 2024 Advertisement In Georgia, a once deep red state that is trending blue, his 2020 supporters don't know what to do. A chunk have switched from Biden to 'don't know' as they weigh questions about the economy in a state where Trump-backed challengers last year underperformed, failing to dislodge a Republican governor and a Democratic senator. But in Wisconsin, the picture is reversed. It is Trump who is seeing his 2020 coalition fragment more with former Democrat-turned-independent candidate and anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr. being the main beneficiary. The results come from a poll of 550 likely voters in each state, conducted by J.L. Partners from November 27 to December 1. 'Compared to 2020, both Biden and Trumps coalitions are fragmenting,' said James Johnson, co-founder of J.L. Partners. 'But Biden is losing more support than Trump in Arizona and Georgia: to undecided voters and in Arizona also some direct switchers to Trump.' 'In Wisconsin it is Trump's coalition that is falling apart more. 'He has lost some voters to undecideds and other candidates with RFK taking six times as many votes from Trump as he does from Biden.' In Georgia, Biden has lost 11 points with a chunk saying they don't know how they will vote The position is different in Wisconsin, where Robert Kennedy Jr. could be poised to make a decisive impact by taking voters away from Trump In Wisconsin, the nephew of U.S. president John F. Kennedy is polling at six percent with likely voters. Kennedy's impact could be a crucial factor in the 2024 election. In national polls, results suggest he tends to draw more support from Trump. Distaste for both of the main candidates and weariness at the thought of a repeat of 2020, is evident in all three flow charts. Trump and Biden enjoy considerably lower support than in 2020, and potentially decisive numbers say they don't know who they will vote for or say they would favor someone else. The overall results show Joe Biden in danger of losing two states that helped him win in 2020 Robert Kennedy Jr.'s support in Wisconsin stands on six percent, eating into Trump's vote share and helping Biden maintain a lead in the state Barely anyone said they would sit it out completely. The three states were picked because they were the tightest battlegrounds in 2020. Biden flipped Georgia, for example, by the very thinnest of margins: He won 11,000 votes more than Trump, or about 0.2 percent of the turnout. Biden took Arizona by just 10,500 votes or 0.4 percent. And he won Wisconsin by a shade more than 20,000 votes, or about 0.63 percent. Congressional leaders revealed to DailyMail.com what they believe to the greatest threat currently facing the United States during the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California. China topped the list, but other bad actors including Iran and Russia are a major concern, as well as the open southern border. Rep. Ken Calvert, the chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, exclusively revealed to DailyMail.com that China is 'our biggest threat.' 'And we need to make sure that we direct our resources and our capabilities toward that threat,' Calvert, R-Calif., continued. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, referenced the annual Reagan National Defense survey released last week which revealed that 51 percent of Americans think China is the 'greatest threat to the U.S.' 'There is no direct kinetic action right now with China militarily,' she told DailyMail.com, but according to the poll, the 'global spread of China - whether it is militarily or economically - does concern Americans.' Rep. Ken Calvert, the chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, exclusively revealed to DailyMail.com that China is 'our biggest threat' Ernst told DailyMail.com that China is the top concern for her, as well as most Americans House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., said there isn't a single greatest threat, rather a combination. 'I think the greatest threat to the United States is the effort of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and various terrorist groups to work together to push us out - to reduce U.S. influence and try to get us out of out of the Middle East, out of Asia, out of Europe,' he told DailyMail.com. The top Democrat explained the threat is the 'coalition' among those countries that are attempting to 'force a new world order.' He cited Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a top threat that is also worrying other countries, as well as China's 'territorial plans' worldwide. In addition, Iran is 'destabilizing' governments across the Middle East, which is another major concern for the U.S. Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., similarly responded that there are 'a number' of threats. 'It's a combination of things,' she told DailyMail.com. Obviously, when we look at a nation state like China, and the influence that they are gaining militarily and also with commerce. That's a huge threat to us.' She said Russia's 'belligerence and aggression' toward Ukraine should be a concern to everyone. In addition, the United State's 'nuclear competitors' - China and Russia - are her main targets. 'So my focus is is a lot on those two countries because of the existential threat that they pose to our nation,' she continued. Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said that although there are security challenges abroad, the United State's own southern border is becoming 'the most imminent' threat. 'I still happen to think that the southern border is becoming quickly becoming our number one threat. It's just too easy to come in. We don't catch a lot of them. And we already know that it's having a devastating effect on our society,' he told DailyMail.com. But he maintained that the most pressing threat in terms of national defense strategy is 'clearly China.' 'China threatens us not just in terms of militarily but economically, socially, culturally. They're a major threat that we've taken our eye off of for a few decades, and now we're laser focused,' the senator added. President and Chief Executive Officer of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute David Trulio told DailyMail.com that China is a top concern. He referenced the findings from the sixth annual Reagan National Defense survey showing Americans are most worried about China. An overwhelming number of Americans (77 percent) view China as an enemy, with only 15 percent considering the communist state an 'ally.' And 42 percent of respondents consider China to be a 'strong' enemy. That's a steep difference from 2018 results which found that only 55 percent of Americans viewed China as an enemy and 38 percent as an ally. The survey results are a 'significant contribution into assessing where the American public is on critical issues involving peace through strength,' said Trulio, who recently led a delegation to Taiwan. 'And the first takeaway is that Americans firmly support President Reagan's concept of peace through strength, they support military spending, they support an engaged America around the world, they support the U.S. supporting allies and partners - whether that be in Ukraine or Israel or Taiwan.' 'So it's very important to realize that there's the wisdom of the American people in terms of the fundamental understanding that an engaged America, and an America that helps those who are willing to fight for their own freedom, is is a good thing.' The five-day trip to Taiwan was focused on examining security issues facing the state primarily due to rising Chinese aggression and to bolster ties between the U.S. and its friend in the Indo-Pacific. Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said that although there are security challenges abroad, the United State's own southern border is becoming 'the most imminent' threat Sen. Fischer said Russia's 'belligerence and aggression' toward Ukraine should be a concern to everyone Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke about the rise in security challenges for the U.S. during his keynote remarks. 'Were living through challenging times. That includes the major conflicts facing our fellow democracies, Israel and Ukraine; bullying and coercion from an increasingly assertive China; and a worldwide battle between democracy and autocracy,' he told attendees at the forum. He added: 'And these are the times when global security relies on American unity and American strength.' A New York City Israel supporter danced through a pro-Palestinian protest outside the Natural History Museum - prompting furious shrieks of 'white supremacist' from enraged onlookers. The unidentified man donned a turquoise tank top over several other layers clothing that read: 'I Stand With Israel,' and held a miniature speaker that was playing inaudible music. Skipping into the center of the crowd, he loudly sang 'long live Israel' as the surrounding crowd grew infuriated and began shouting at him to leave. The bespectacled man, who later told police he was a local resident, didn't appear bothered by the upset he was causing the protestors, several of whom were wearing keffiyehs and masks to hide their faces. Members of the crowd became hysterical when the man, who looked to be in his sixties or seventies, planted himself in the center of the activity and began to dance to his music. Protestors with bullhorns screamed profanities at him as he remained calm, smiling and appearing unbothered. An Upper West Side man skipped into the middle of a loud, pro-Palestinian crowd who'd gathered in front of the American Museum of Natural History on Saturday One man in the crowd repeatedly called him a 'f**king b**ch,' before hurling the phrase 'Zionist pig' his way. Others roared 'f**k you motherf**ker' at him, while saying he was 'celebrating death' and calling him a 'racist,' and a 'white supremacist.' One agitated woman screeched through her bullhorn at the cops standing by to ensure things didn't get out of hand: 'You cops are inciting violence by letting this motherf**ker desecrate humanity.' As things got increasingly heated, a police officer from the NYPD's community affairs office gently guided the man away from the scene. He looked as if he was explaining something to the man, but the words were indiscernible on camera. The man was heard explaining to the officer that he actually lived back in the other direction, and told him he lived nearby. 'They're coming to my neighborhood,' he at one point explained to the group of cops about the anti-Israel protestors. Since October 7, several incidents have occurred in which pro-Palestinian protestors confront pro-Israel advocates or vandalize images in support of Israel that have gone up around the city. Individuals tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis (several dozen of whom were returned last week) have been spotted all over Manhattan, as well as around several parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Things got heated: One hysterical woman screeched through her bullhorn at the cops standing by to ensure things didn't get out of hand: 'You cops are inciting violence by letting this motherf**ker desecrate humanity' The man, however, remained unbothered and continued grooving to the tunes playing from his little speaker He was eventually led to the side by NYPD officers attempting to keep the peace Since October 7, several incidents have occurred in which pro-Palestinian protestors confront pro-Israel advocates or vandalize images in support of Israel that have gone up around the city Last month, on the Upper East Side, a man sparked outrage by pulling down posters and asking: 'Where are the Palestinians?' In a more recent incident in Brooklyn, a Jewish woman approached a couple who were tearing down posters in Brooklyn Bridge Park. 'These are American citizens,' the Jewish woman yelled at the couple, who stood saying nothing. Eventually, the man started to laugh and said: 'We don't consent to you recording us.' They then walked away. In a separate Brooklyn incident, a woman named Sarah Daoud was seen scraping down the remainder of a hostage poster, while saying aloud the word 'calba,' the Arabic word for dog. To the person who is recording her, she turns and says, 'F**k you. F**k you. And burn in hell.' William Tyrrell's foster father's vile words to an 11-year-old girl he is accused of stalking and assaulting were just part of 'talking to himself', his lawyer has claimed. A court has heard a recording of the 57-year-old, known as JS, launching into an expletive-laden rant about the girl as she got into a car for a ride to school at about 7.40am on November 23, 2020. JS could be heard claiming that the girl had ruined both his and his wife's lives. He yelled at the crying girl: 'Move, f***ing move,' before calling her a 'f***ing lazy c***'. In final submissions at Parramatta Local Court on Monday JS's lawyer, Phillip English, said the outburst was under the man's breath. Mr English said the last part of the outburst was 'very softly spoken, I couldn't hear it, the next bit, must be sotto voce' and told Magistrate Susan McIntyre 'are you satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that this amounts to intimidation? There's no approach by the accused to (the then primary schoolgirl).' William Tyrrell's foster parents leave Parramatta Local Court on Monday after being told a magistrate will decide on their innocence or guilt by March next year Mr English was appearing on the final day of submissions in a case against JS and William Tyrrell's foster mother, known as SD, before a decision by Her Honour in March next year. The foster parents are accused of common assault against a child and stalking, intimidating and causing fear of physical or mental harm against the child between Australia Day 2021 and August 30, 2021. The foster mother, 58, has pleaded guilty to two charges of common assault against the girl. She has pleaded not guilty to stalking and intimidation and her husband JS has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him. The offences allegedly occurred at two different Sydney North Shore residences, and in a vehicle. Parramatta Local Court in Sydney's west has heard recordings of heated verbal exchanges between the child and the parents as well as the sound of the then primary schoolgirl being smacked with a wooden spoon and kicked by the foster mother. On Monday, Mr English downplayed the assault allegation in which the girl said at one stage that on the day she was kicked by the foster mother that JS 'grabbed my neck'. Mr English said in subsequent interviews with police officers, the girl had said the incident was more like pressure on her shoulder and that the child had told them, 'He usually just yells. I didn't think he would choke me 'cos he's not usually like that'. A magistrate will decide by March next year if the foster parents of William Tyrrell, known as SD and JS (above) are guilty of stalking and intimidating an 11-year-old girl the foster mother has pleaded guilty to assaulting William Tyrrell's foster mother, known as SD, (pictured) pleaded guilty to two charges of common assault at Parramatta Local Court on Monday. The charges related to a young child, who is not William Mr English told Magistrate McIntyre on Friday that police had been warned about asking 'leading questions' of child witnesses and that the alleged assault had happened on what 'was a very emotional day'. SD's lawyer, Sharon Ramsden, told Her Honour she had to consider with the intimidation charges whether the physical acts against the alleged victim were unlawful harm. 'Otherwise, any time parent says "come here I'm going to slap you on the bottom", that would amount to intimidation'. SD's defence had earlier argued that if a threat by a parent to issue a child with a smacking was deemed criminal 'that would criminalise every household in Australia'. But police prosecutor Detective Chief Inspector John Marsh said the 'smack, smack, smack' was clear on the recording, and the multiple incidents and alleged threats was 'certainly not what (happened in) every household in Australia'. He said there was an incident in which the child used a phone without permission, and then called the foster mother 'a f***ing b***h'. 'It is the cumulative effect of all these incidents to show that (the foster mother) knew her conduct was likely to cause fear but nonetheless continued.' Police allege the mother threatened the girl while her foster father allegedly grabbed her by the neck after the girl said she 'hated' them. READ MORE: How William Tyrrell's foster parents escaped scrutiny... until now The problems that beset the William Tyrrell case from the moment the three-year-old vanished go directly to the heart of Australia's flawed foster parent system. On one side, you have a his foster parents, a wealthy, well-educated couple who live in a $4 million home on Sydney's exclusive north shore. And on the other are his biological parents, who fell under suspicion from police because of the problems which saw them lose custody of the little boy in the first place: substance abuse and issues with law and order. READ MORE: How toddler 'couldn't get up' after 'distressing' accident, hit and bit foster mum Advertisement JS allegedly 'grabbed' the girl about the neck and 'physically restrained her to sit back down' in the kitchen of a suburban home. She later told a teacher she was afraid to go back to the house, police allege. On one day in November 2021, the child had been placed in a 44-minute time-out period and had then told the couple she 'hated them'. Attending the hearing were detectives from Strike Force Rosann, which is investigating the disappearance of William Tyrrell, including the task force commander Detective Chief Inspector David Laidlaw. The court was told the foster mother had been 'attempting to intervene in the (alleged) victim's problematic behaviour'. She warned the girl that if she were to defecate on the floor she would rub her face in it, it is alleged. Police allege that when the child screamed out in pain, SD 'then forced the child to sit on the floor for an extended period of time before kicking the (alleged) victim and causing her pain and bruising. 'The (alleged) victim is reported to have tried to get up a number of times but (SD) forced her to sit down.' William Tyrell disappeared aged three in September 2014 in the NSW Mid North Coast town of Kendall and no trace of the toddler has ever been found. No-one has ever been charged over his disappearance. A new search of bushland within 700m of the Kendall house where William was last seen was conducted in late 2021, but no items of significance have been identified. NSW Police have referred a brief to state prosecutors recommending charges be laid against the foster mother over William's disappearance. William Tyrrell (above) disappeared aged three in September 2014 in the NSW Mid North Coast town of Kendall and no trace of the toddler has ever been found SD has denied any involvement and there is no suggestion of her guilt. The DPP has until late January to decide if to charge SD with perverting the course of justice and interfering with a corpse. Magistrate McIntyre adjourned Monday's case until March 22, and continued an Apprehended Violence Order in place protecting the young girl to continue. A gas explosion which left one man dead and two others injured was not related to any fault with the gas network, it was revealed yesterday. The blast on Friday night destroyed a suburban home in Baberton, Edinburgh, leaving furniture, clothes, roof beams, bricks and floorboards strewn across the street. Stephanie Chapman, 43, and 54-year-old Robert Taylor were rescued from the wreckage by neighbours but widower James Smith, 84, was killed by the blast. Investigations into the cause of the explosion are ongoing. Yesterday, officials from gas distributor SGN revealed an initial investigation alongside the Health and Safety Executive had confirmed that the blast had not been caused by a fault with the network. The explosion in the Baberton area of the Capital on Friday night could be heard up to seven miles away James Smith, 84, was killed after neighbouring home is obliterated in powerful blast Chunks of rubble and a concrete pillar had landed on a car SGN added that the pipes in Baberton Mains Avenue had been upgraded in June 2022. A spokesman for the company said: After a thorough investigation, the Health and Safety Executive have confirmed the incident in Baberton on Friday night was not related to SGNs network. Our deepest sympathies are with the family of the 84-year-old man who tragically died in this incident. Our thoughts also remain with the couple injured as a result of the explosion. We would like to reassure the local community that their gas supply is safe to use. A reminder that if anyone smells gas inside or outside, please call the National Gas Emergency Service on 0800 111 999. Immediately after the blast, neighbour Steven MacLennan rushed to the scene, arriving before the emergency services. Hearing desperate cries, he began to search through the debris. Mr MacLennan, who had served in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers Army Reserves for 20 years, was able to rescue Ms Chapman by moving a kitchen cabinet that was pinning her down. Ross Aitchison, who had also run into the wrecked property, helped the woman to safety. Other locals helped to drag Mr Taylor from the scene before both were taken to hospital for treatment. The blast destroyed Ms Chapman and Mr Taylors end-of-terrace home as well as smashing the windows of cars and houses down the street. Gas safety engineers inspect the scene after the explosion A fundraiser organised by Mr Aitchison has been set up for the couple to give this family something back so close to Christmas. It has raised more than 20,000. Alischa Taylor, the niece of Ms Chapman and Mr Taylor, wrote on social media: Im blown away with everyones kind donations I know my auntie and uncle will be the same. Thank you to each and every single person who has donated. Sue Webber, Conservative MSP for Lothian region, described the incident as tragic and said the impact across the community is significant. Families were evacuated from their homes as fire officers and gas engineers carried out inspections. Well-wishers commented on Facebook, offering their support. Phillippa Donaldson wrote: Im so shocked and saddened to read this awful news. Wishing them a speedy recovery. Scotlands GPs have been advised to put a daily cap on the number of patients they see. The controversial guidance from the British Medical Association Scotland comes as GP surgeries struggle to cope amid staff shortages. Family doctors have been told that it is not their responsibility to see patients if other NHS services are too busy to deal with them. Clinics across the country are having to deal with dwindling doctor numbers and increasing demands from patients with complex health needs. Dr Andrew Buist, chair of the British Medical Associations GP Committee, has warned that demand is outstripping capacity at surgeries and the new guidance is aimed at protecting staff Scottish Tory health spokesman Sandesh Gulhane, who is also a GP, blamed the SNP for mismanaging the NHS and warned patients would suffer from appointment limit The guidance means doctors are now expected to limit their appointments to just 25 a day, with patients over that capped number directed by answerphone message to NHS24 or A&E. Dr Andrew Buist, chair of the BMAs Scottish GP committee, said: Demand is far outstripping GP capacity... which is why BMA Scotland refreshed its safe working guidance highlighting the other health board services available to patients to safeguard the profession, protect practice staff and, crucially, improve the experience of patients who deserve to be seen by a doctor who is not exhausted and overworked. Last night critics warned patients would suffer unless under-fire Health Secretary Michael Matheson can step up and support the service. Scotland needs at least 800 more GPs by 2027 and doctors leaders have been warning for years of a worsening crisis in the service. Practices are collapsing because they cannot recruit new partners, and patient care is suffering. Scottish Conservative health spokesman Sandesh Gulhane, who is also a part-time GP, said: This latest guidance shows how it is patients, and other areas of Scotlands NHS, who will suffer the consequences if the discredited Michael Matheson does not step up and support us as burnout runs the risk of more GPs leaving the profession. The BMA Safe Workload Guidance for GPs in Scotland says that having an unmanageable workload is the number one problem in the working lives of doctors. It adds: It is also harming the experience that patients have with their practice. We recommend practices take urgent action to preserve patient care and their own wellbeing. Practices will need to decide how to prioritise care and day-to-day activity accordingly. These actions will inevitably result in some patients waiting longer, or issues that do not need to or cannot be dealt with in general practice being directed elsewhere. Health boards are ultimately responsible for the provision of primary medical services for patients. GP practices are not a safeguard for all NHS services or providers of last resort and they cannot be expected to operate beyond the terms of their contract or undertake a workload that is unsafe. If other services are unable to see patients, that is not the responsibility of the GP practice. When surgeries cannot take more appointments, the BMA recommends diverting calls to an answerphone message directing patients to other NHS agencies, including NHS24 on 111 or through accident and emergency. It adds that a safe number of patients per GP is 25 a day, including a mix of face-to-face and remote consultations, and that doctors should hold 15-minute appointments. Previously GPs have warned they are dealing with 50-80 patients a day. John OConnell, of the TaxPayers Alliance, said: Directing people to A&E when they may not require urgent care could clog up an already struggling system. The Scottish Government said it was up to individual GP practices to decide how many appointments their partners and salaried GPs need to provide. Noorlander's next surgery is scheduled for March and he hopes he will be able to eat solid foods after that procedure The Montana grandpa who had his jaw snagged off by a grizzly bear has gone on to speak out about the ordeal and his recovery. Rudy Noorlander, 61, was attacked by a bear around 10 feet tall on September 8 in Utah. Since then, he has made it back home to Montana, where he's learned to find light in the frightening moment. 'And don't fight any bears unless you got me with you,' he told Fox News. Noorlander recently got extensive jaw and dental reconstruction surgery after being released from the University of Utah Hospital, where he spent five weeks after the attack. Rudy Noorlander was attacked by a grizzly bear in September in Utah and is now back home in Montana recovering. He recently sat down in an Outlaw Partners podcast episode In order to reconstruct his jaw, doctors had to take a portion of his fibula bone in his leg, along with skin and an artery to help re-attach his jaw to his neck. The doctors had to transplant soft skin tissue to his head and neck to reconstruct his lower lip. Noorlander's head is now surrounded by metal wire and gauze as he heals Since then, he has gone on to find a sense of normalcy while still attending frequent doctor's visits and surgeries to try to get back to who he was before the encounter. When he was initially released at the beginning of October, Noorlander said he was eager to make the seven-hour trek home to Montana to see his dog and get back to work. During this time, speech was exceptionally difficult for Noorlander as he had to turn to a whiteboard to communicate with those around him. His speech has since improved as he recently sat down in an Outlaw Partners podcast episode and spoke about his unique and scary experience. When asked if he frequently thinks about the wild moment, Noorlander told the hosts that he doesn't think of it that often, but when it first happened, he did. 'The second or third week, it was almost PTSD, it would wake me up,' Noorlander said. One of the hosts then asked if he was thinking of going to therapy 'to get through it', to which Noorlander replied: 'I'm already through it.' Right before his attack, Noorlander was helping two hunters look for a dear, and while he searched, he came across a small grizzly bear guarding a deer carcass just before a large bear, around ten feet tall, charged from behind a tree. Madison County dispatch received a 911 call at 1:47pm, according to a press release from Gallatin County Sheriff Search and Rescue. Noorlander waited for two hours after the attack until he could be safely rescued Noorlander happily walked out of the University of Utah Hospital back in October after he spent five weeks there after the attack. He's pictured with his daughters and grandchildren Without any time to reach for his bear repellent, he attempted to shoot the beast but failed. The grizzly then took him down, bit off his jaw, scratched him on his chest and left him with bites on his arms and legs. 'The actual incident I don't remember a whole lot,' Noorlander said. 'I remember pointing the gun at him, pulling the trigger it misfired. He had me up in the air. He bit down and I yelled "help me!"' Madison County dispatch received a 911 call at 1:47pm, according to a press release from Gallatin County Sheriff Search and Rescue. Since the bears were still in the area, the first helicopter that arrived had to wait for backup to assist in keeping the creatures away. Noorlander waited for two hours after the attack until he could be safely rescued. He was rushed into emergency surgery in Montana before he was flown to Bozeman Health Deaconess Regional Medical Center in Salt Lake City, where surgeons reconstructed his jaw. In order to reconstruct his jaw, doctors had to take a portion of his fibula bone in his leg, along with skin and an artery to help re-attach his jaw to his neck. The doctors had to transplant soft skin tissue to his head and neck to reconstruct his lower lip. Noorlander's head is now surrounded by metal wire and gauze as he heals. Noorlander also suffered a severe scratch across his chest, left him with bites up and down his arms and legs, puncture marks to his head and a collapsed lung. Despite such a traumatic journey, Noorlander has been nothing but positive about it all. 'Ups and downs. Good days and bad days, but most of them are decent,' his daughter Ashley said. His grandchildren have caught on to his optimistic outlook as his grandson now considers him a superhero. When he was still in the hospital, his granddaughter expressed how excited she was just to have him home again. His other daughter, KateLynn, created a GoFundMe page to help with hospital expenses even though he has Veteran medical insurance. 'The Grizzly left a large scratch down his right chest, bit his arms, legs, and to top it all off, gave him as what Rudy describes as the most disgusting french kiss of his life before biting down and tearing off his lower jaw,' KateLynn said on the page. ] Noorlander also suffered a severe scratch across his chest, left him with bites up and down his arms and legs, puncture marks to his head and a collapsed lung Noorlander prior to the grizzly attack Despite the attack, Noorlander is now eager to get back outside as he's already gone on a snow mobile ride Despite the attack, Noorlander is now eager to get back outside as he's already gone on a snowmobile ride. 'He is the most positive person I have ever met he's a little crazy, though,' Ashley said. He still struggles with eating, speaking clearly, swallowing and brushing his teeth, but in the past three months, he has improved greatly. His next surgery is scheduled for March, and he hopes that after that he will be able to eat solid foods. Noorlander also mentioned how grateful he is for all of the support he's gotten during his long journey and has even gone on to make an Instagram account to stay connected to his fans. 'I have my family,' Noolander said. '[The attack] helped me grow closer to God, helped me resolve some issues. All in all you can either go up or go down, and I choose to be up. 'I know he's got a plan for me there's a reason he kept me here. I personally believe that the rest of my life is planned out because of this Alpine Adventures has me [during the week] and I plan on doing church devotionals, inspirational talks through the church.' A prominent Australian doctor has shut down reports a 'mystery illness' from China affecting children that has been widely reported in recent weeks - and says it is a known form of pneumonia. Dr Nick Coatsworth, who is Australia's former deputy chief health officer, said what has been called 'white lung syndrome' - because of the distinctive white patches on chest x-rays of affected children - is, in fact, a known form of pneumonia. 'It's not a mystery new illness, rather it's a manufactured term to squeeze a bit more juice out of our fear of infectious pathogens,' he explained. Two weeks ago, news broke of an outbreak of a 'mysterious' pneumonia, dubbed 'white lung syndrome' in China that had been spreading since May, but was not previously reported to the rest of the world. The six months delay in sharing the information prompted the World Health Organisation to send official requests to China for more data. The spike in the pneumonia among children that has been attributed to a rebound in respiratory illnesses rather than an entirely new virus. China had one of the most brutal and longest lockdowns of any country in the world which the WHO says robbed children of vital immunity against seasonal illnesses. A prominent Australian doctor has slammed talk of a 'mystery new illness' from China affecting children that has been widely reported in recent weeks. A woman wearing a mask is pictured Dr Nick Coatsworth, who is a former deputy chief health officer, said what has been called 'white lung syndrome' is a known form of pneumonia. Tweet pictured The WHO made the unusual move to publicly call for China to be transparent about the outbreak, which many believe is due to its mishandling of Covid when it was accused of shielding critical information on the disease in the early stages. It comes after Chinese Health Ministry spokesman Mi Feng urged people in the country to again consider wearing face masks and distancing. Speaking at a press conference on Sunday, he said: 'Efforts should be made to increase the opening of relevant clinics and treatment areas, extend service hours and increase the supply of medicines. 'It is necessary to do a good job in epidemic prevention and control in key crowded places. '[This includes] in schools, childcare institutions and nursing homes, and to reduce the flow of people and visits.' Major paediatric hospitals are recording 7,000 admissions per day in some areas of Beijing, reports suggest. The largest hospital in Tianjin a province on the coast near Beijing has allegedly been receiving more than 13,000 sick children through its doors daily. There have also been reports of spikes in child illnesses in the province of Liaoning and in Shanghai the country's biggest city. Patients being admitted to hospitals are reportedly suffering from high fever and lung inflammation, but without a cough or pulmonary nodules lumps on the lungs that are usually the result of a past infection. Scans are also showing opaque or clear areas inside their lungs, which can be caused by bacterial infections, leading to some doctors calling the disease 'white lung syndrome'. The WHO is under pressure to be tougher on China after its response early in the Covid pandemic. The agency is still reeling from suggestions that it protected Beijing by parroting its line that Covid could not spread from person to person despite having no evidence to support the claim. Two weeks ago, news broke of an outbreak of a 'mysterious' pneumonia in China that had been spreading since May, but was not previously reported to the rest of the world. A patient is pictured being treated in hospital ALDI has been blasted after staff were filmed throwing away excess food with the 'wasteful' move angering both customers and charities. Workers were filmed throwing out fruit and vegetables into an over-filled skip bin at Townsville's new ALDI store, just three days after opening at the end of November. In the 20 second video, two ALDI staff members were seen tossing what appeared to be pumpkins, cabbages and carrots, whilst another worker looked on. They didn't appear to slow down, and one even had an item in each hand to throw the vegetables in at the same time to be more efficient. The over-filled skip was full over produce, such as carrots, pumpkins and cabbages The sheer volume of wasted produce could be seen in the skip which was filled to the brim. Given the current cost-of-living crisis and the fast approaching festive season, residents were furious to see food waste on such a large scale. Meanwhile, local food charities in Townsville are struggling to keep up with demand, working overtime to make sure locals in need have enough food for Christmas. 'It distresses me a bit to know that there is food being wasted like that,' Townsville Food Pantry manager Tricia Hatfield told the ABC. She said the food charity would have happily taken the excess fruit and vegetables ALDI had discarded. 'We collect from several supermarkets during the week. What we get is stored in a cold room for refrigeration. It goes to people first and if that's not suitable it will go to a farmer,' she said. An ALDI spokesman told Daily Mail Australia there had been a large volume of produce ordered for the new store. Two workers were seen tossing produce away with one local food bank manager describing it as 'distressing' 'As we open in new markets, there is always a learning curve, and it was clear the produce estimate for this new store was incorrect resulting in an unfortunate amount of waste,' he said. 'ALDI takes its responsibility to reduce food waste very seriously and has processes and policies in place to ensure that minimal amounts of products on our shelves end up as waste.' After realising the produce order was too large, ALDI said they worked with their local food partner 'to minimise the waste, donating produce until local demand had been met, and our food waste partner could no longer accept any further donations.' ALDI said there are now measures implemented to help 'minimise waste levels in this store including working to expand our food donation network in Townsville as we establish our store and community in this new location.' Aussies are forking out up to $8,000 to take a Qantas flight to the same city they just left in order to get a scenic view of Antarctica. The flights from Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane take passengers for a fly-over of the southern continent's landmarks before returning to the same airport they departed, with no stops. The cheapest tickets cost tourists $1,200 for Explorer Economy Class, seats that have no clear view of a window or views obstructed by the wing. Prices are higher for better views and rotating seats that gives each passengers in a row turns at looking at the views and peak at $8,000 for Business Class Deluxe. The chartered flights use Boeing 787s because of that plane's large windows which allow passengers to see more of the landscape. Aussies are forking out up to $8,000 on a 13-hour scenic flight with no stops and drops passengers back at their departure The flights only occur during the summer when Antarctica is bathed in sunlight and landmarks such as the Admiralty Mountains and Cape Hallett can be seen. Passengers start to see icebergs and other evidence of the glacial continent about three hours south of the Australian mainland. The plane then drops in altitude for passengers to get a better look at the landmarks on one of Qantas' 19 different flight plans. Experts on Antarctica narrate the pass-over so passengers, who huddle around windows to get a good view, know what they're looking at. The pilots also happily tilt the flight to either side to give each side of the plane an equal viewing experience. The flights from Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane fly passengers over landmarks in Antarctica (pictured, Mount Minto) that would be otherwise unseen on other trips The flights take about three hours from Melbourne to reach the southern continent and spend about three to four hours passing over spectacles at a low altitude While flying at a low altitude provides passengers with a unique look at Antarctica, it also makes the flight more difficult for pilots. 'We're a long way from anywhere we can land if something goes wrong,' Captain James Boland told News.com.au. 'The airports on the Antarctic continent we can't use. We can't land at McMurdo (Station) or we can't land at Wilkins (Runway) so if we need to go somewhere, we need to fly a long way back to New Zealand or Australia.' Qantas operated their first flight over Antarctica in 1977 and has since provided Captain's Choice and Antarctica Airlines with aircraft since 1994. In the almost 30 years since Antarctica Airlines have launched over 150 flights over the continent with another five to take off between December until February. By Deauwand Myers Recently, President Yoon Suk Yeol dismissed Koreas umbrella intelligence agencys (National Intelligence Service, or NIS) powerful head, Director Kim Kyou-hyun, and oddly, Director Kims two chief deputies. Dismissing the three top officials of any countrys defense or intelligence services is unheard of for modern, advanced democracies and world powers. Consider Chinese President Xi and his complete reshuffling of four of the seven members of the nations all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee. Former Premier Li Keqiang, an economist who spoke fluent English, was Chinas top economic official for a decade, and was the most prominent among high-ranking government officials within the Standing Committee being unceremoniously replaced; sadly, he recently died of a heart attack. Lis fate was succinctly explained in an Associated Press article late last year, entitled Chinas Premier Li Keqiang dropped in leadership shuffle, in which the article states, Li was considered a contender to succeed then-Communist Party leader Hu Jintao in 2013 but was passed over in favor of Xi. Reversing the Hu eras consensus-oriented leadership, Xi centralized powers in his own hands, leaving Li and others on the partys ruling seven-member Standing Committee with little influence. In 2023, Xi continued his dismissals and purgings by firing and sometimes imprisoning a fairly large group of powerful government officials in a very short amount of time, with little explanation thereafter. A few examples: Chinas National Defense Minister General Li Shangfu, Rocket Force (Chinas version of the United States Strategic Command, an umbrella defense agency tasked with integrating and coordinating the United States nuclear arsenal), Commander Li Yuchao, along with his deputy Liu Guangbin, and a former deputy Zhang Zhenzhong, and most surprisingly, Foreign Minister Qin Gang. Ego, and a lack of contemplative vision mediated through vigorous public debate, are some of the many problems with true autocracies. Before Xi, governing in China worked as a kind of consensus of the few, an oligarchy of sorts. Oligarchies are little more than councils of the powerful and elite within a subset of the highest echelons within a society wherein they parse apart a set of dictums by which a nation-state is run. Even this is better than what Xi has materialized: All power accrued to himself and all heads not only subordinate to him, but aggregable to his points of view. President Yoons administration is by no means a Xi-style government. But the hallmarks of an anti-democratic aura do permeate Yoons ousting of so many officials at so high a level at so important a government office at so critical a juncture in geopolitical machinations. North Korea (or the DPRK, the Democratic Republic of Korea) has been steadily developing a better and more reliable nuclear weapons program and the delivery systems therein to, at least in the Kim Regimes mindset, secure its survival. North Korea, after many failed attempts, has successfully launched a spy satellite into low Earth orbit, and bragged that it has now been able to capture images of the United States and Koreas sensitive military and governmental installations. Xis decapitation of the higher ranks within defense sectors of the omnipresent Chinese government has, and this I say with a grain of salt, some merit. Of all sectors within the Chinese government, graft, corruption, and rank bribery are par for the course, and have been for generations within the Chinese military. He also uses his corruption purge as a means to silence and subvert real or perceived political enemies. Good for him; everyone needs a hobby. What Yoon and his political allies should recognize is this: Even by half, emulating this behavior is disconcerting for any observer witnessing it, and it poses more questions than answers. Again, in advanced democracies, of which Korea is one, this level of dismissal of high-ranking defense officials is unheard of. It looks like something sinister, and raises far more questions than it answers. Transparency, for one, is key. That is, Korean citizens and the international community have no idea why Yoon would dismiss so many officials so swiftly. We understand Xi and his accrual of all power to him. Thats autocracy 101. But what on earth are the reasons that Yoon, halfway through his only term, would need to uproot so many top officials within the NIS without a satisfactory explanation? The NIS and its iterations beforehand have always been a place of, shall we say, dark political implications. But without a full-throated transparent explanation, explicating why Yoon decimated such an important segment of his national security apparatus, policy wonks like myself are asking, in dark and muted tones: Why? Power? Xi light? Palace intrigue happens even in the most transparent democracies. Im not naive. But considering the fairly recent, dark history of Koreas nascent democracy: Presidents Park and Chun, for example, Im apprehensive. Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He is an educator and writer-at-large. ory, and is an English professor outside of Seoul. This is the horrifying moment Vladimir Putin's merciless Russian troops allegedly fire bullets at surrendering Ukrainian soldiers at point-blank range. Grainy footage posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, claims to show a group of Russian soldiers surrounding a trench near the village of Stepove, close to Avdiivka, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. A soldier in Ukrainian gear emerges with his hands on his head and then lies face down on the ground. Shortly afterwards the aerial footage shows another Ukrainian serviceman stagger out of the trench. But within seconds, the Russian soldiers appear to open fire at the second Ukrainian soldier. After hearing the gunfire the first soldier scrambles to his feet but quickly falls to the ground again as he is sprayed with a torrent of bullets, causing large clouds to form. The harrowing one-minute clip is being investigated by Ukrainian officials and would amount to war crimes if confirmed. The Kremlin has denied the allegations. A surrendering soldier wearing Ukrainian uniform puts his hands on his head and lies on the ground after being surrounded by a group wearing Russian gear A second serviceman staggered out of the hole but the group then appear to open fire at him as clouds of smoke puff up into the air It was not immediately possible to verify the video's authenticity or the circumstances in which it was filmed, and it was unclear when the incident took place. The Ukrainian General Prosecutor's office today launched a criminal investigation, hours after the Ukrainian military's press office said in an online statement that the footage is genuine. 'The video shows a group in Russian uniforms shooting, at point-blank range, two unarmed servicemen in the uniform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who were surrendering,' the prosecutor's office said in a Telegram update today. The Russian defence ministry did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. As of this evening, there were no public statements from the Russian government or military on the video. Kyiv, its Western allies and international human rights organisations have repeatedly accused Moscow of breaching international humanitarian law since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The video first appeared yesterday on DeepState, a popular Ukrainian Telegram channel covering the war. The post claimed the footage came from the front lines near Avdiivka, a Ukrainian holdout in the country's part-occupied east where there has been fierce fighting in recent weeks. The General Prosecutor's Office today said that the alleged killing took place in the Pokrovsk district, which includes Avdiivka and surrounding areas. After hearing the gun fire the first soldier scrambles to his feet but quickly falls to the ground again as he is sprayed with a torrent of bullets causing large clouds to form The harrowing footage is thought to have been taken near the village of Stepove, close to Avdiivka, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine Ukraine's human rights chief, Dmytro Lubinets described the incident as 'yet another glaring example of Russia's violations of international humanitarian law' Vladimir Putin has been repeatedly accused of committing war crimes since the conflicted started last February 'It's clear from the video that the Ukrainian servicemen are taking the necessary steps that show they are surrendering,' Ukraine's human rights chief, Dmytro Lubinets, said hours after the footage emerged yesterday. In a statement posted to Telegram, Lubinets described the incident as 'yet another glaring example of Russia's violations of international humanitarian law'. Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military grouping that is fighting near Avdiivka, was cited by Ukrainian media as saying the video was 'glaring confirmation' of Moscow's disrespect for the laws of war. EXCLUSIVE READ MORE: Putin 'could use NUCLEAR weapons in Ukraine if Zelensky retakes Crimea': Military expert warns Vladimir will dismiss the consequences of exploding a nuke if he faces humiliation Advertisement In March, footage of a man exclaiming 'Glory to Ukraine' before being gunned down in a wooded area sparked national outcry in Ukraine, as senior officials alleged that he was an unarmed prisoner of war killed by Russian soldiers. Last summer, Kyiv and Moscow also traded blame for a shelling attack on a prison in occupied eastern Ukraine that killed dozens of Ukrainian POWs. Both sides claimed the assault on the facility in Olenivka was aimed at covering up atrocities, with Ukrainian officials charging captive soldiers had been tortured and executed there. The UN's human rights chief in July rejected Moscow's claim that a rocket strike had caused the blast. Also on Sunday, Ukraine's energy ministry reported that close to 1,000 towns and villages suffered power outages that day, with hundreds of settlements in the west battered by wintry weather and others affected by ongoing fighting. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, late on Saturday assessed that military operations have slowed down all along the frontline in Ukraine due to poor weather, with mud bogging down tracked vehicles and making it hard for lighter equipment and infantry to advance. Even so, Shtupun, of Ukraine's Tavria military command that oversees the stretch of frontline near Avdiivka, said in a separate statement Sunday that Russian infantry attacks had intensified in the area over the past day. In a Telegram post, he insisted Ukrainian troops were 'holding firm' in Avdiivka and another nearby town. In the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, at least two people died and seven more were wounded after Russian forces on Sunday shelled a high-rise apartment block and other civilian buildings, the head of the city's military administration said in a series of Telegram posts. One of the updates by Roman Mrochko featured a blurred photo of what he said was the body of a deceased civilian, apparently lying on a dirt road or in a yard outside the high-rise. The photo's authenticity could not be independently verified. Regional Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin separately reported on Sunday that Russian shelling that day damaged two of Kherson's hospitals. He did not immediately reference any casualties. Earlier in the day, a 78-year-old civilian died in a village northeast of Kherson after Russian shells slammed into his garage, according to a Telegram update by the regional Ukrainian military administration. CNN host Dana Bash pushed progressive congresswoman Pramila Jayapal to condemn Hamas' barbaric use of sexual violence against Israeli women during the October 7 massacre. Jayapal, a representative from Washington state and a member of the so-called 'Squad,' said she had previously spoken out against Hamas' brutal crimes against women before flipping back to a talking point that targeted Israel. 'I want to ask you about sexual violence, and its kind of remarkable that this issue hasnt gotten enough attention, globally. Widespread use of rape, brutal rape, sexual violence against Israeli women by Hamas,' said Bash during a taping of CNN's State of the Union. 'Ive seen a lot of progressive women, generally speaking, theyre quick to defend womens rights and to speak out against using rape as a weapon of war, but downright silent on what we saw on October 7. And what might be happening inside Gaza right now to these hostages. Why is that?' Jayapal responded: 'I don't know that that's true. I think we always talk about the impact of war on women in particular,' insisting she had specifically condemned the actions of Hamas terrorists. 'But I think we have to remember Israel is a democracy. That is why theyre a strong ally of ours,' continued Jayapal. She continued: 'And if they do not comply with international humanitarian law, they are bringing themselves to a place that makes it much more difficult strategically for them to be able to build allies, to keep public opinion with them, and frankly, morally, we cannot say that one war crime deserves another. That is not what international humanitarian law says.' In October, Jayapal voted 'present' on a House Resolution supporting Israel in the wake of the Hamas attacks. She has previously been forced to apologize after facing backlash for calling the Israeli government 'racist.' In response to her comments on Sunday, Bash confronted Jayapal about her inability to stay on topic when discussing Hamas' sexual crimes. 'With respect, I was just asking about the women, and you turned it back to Israel. Im asking you about Hamas,' said Bash. 'I already answered your question, Dana,' the representative responded. 'I said its horrific, and I think that rape is horrific. Sexual assault is horrific. I think that it happens in war situations. 'Terrorist organizations like Hamas obviously are using these as tools. However, I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians. Fifteen thousand Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air strikes, three-quarters of whom are women and children.' 'And it's horrible,' said Bash. 'But you don't see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women.' 'I dont want this to be the hierarchies of oppressions,' said the congresswoman. 'This is not the way that we are going to beat terrorism.' Images of Israeli 26-year-old Noa Argamani show her being kidnapped into Gaza on October 7 On the day that more than 1,200 Israelis were killed and hundreds were kidnapped, radical Palestinian terrorists also indicriminately used rape as a weapon of war against innocent Israeli women Argamani is shown as a hostage in Gaza - she has not yet been released Progressive women's rights organizations across the globe, including those at the head of the #MeToo movement and most recently those headaing up the UN Women group, have been criticized heartily for failing to loudly condemn Hamas' use of mass rape. Just last week, nearly two months after the horrific October 7 attack, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that the organization would be investigating Hamas' use of sexual violence against Israeli women. 'There are numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas on 7 October that must be vigorously investigated and prosecuted,' he said. 'Gender-based violence must be condemned. Anytime. Anywhere.' The UN Women's organization has previously failed to take a definitive stance on Hamas' use of rape against Israeli women. A former ambassador to Iraq has warned that Iran is responsible for the multiple confirmed attacks on American warships in the Red Sea - and that the only way to stop them is for Biden to fight back. Nathan Sales, former Ambassador-at-Large to Iraq and the Levant, discussed the Pentagon confirmed attacks US maritime vessels linked to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. 'Iran is behind everything that we're seeing in terms of attacks directed on U.S. forces,' Sales said on Fox News. 'We're seeing Iranian proxies attack Americans in Syria and Iraq and now from Yemen. And they're going to keep doing it until we make them stop.' On Sunday, US Central Command confirmed there were four attacks against three separate commercial vessels in the southern Red Sea fired from Yemen's Houthi controlled areas, which are being funded by Iranian government money. Former US Ambassador Nathan Sales said the confirmed attacks on American warships in the Red Sea won't stop unless Biden takes action Pictured: Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Sales said the attacks are coming from Iranian proxies and will not stop unless we make them 'These attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security,' said US Central Command. 'They have jeopardized the lives of international crews representing multiple countries around the world. We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran.' Sales, who served as Coordinator for Counterterrorism for the state department, said the military will need to take stronger action to stop the attacks. 'Instead of blowing up empty munition's depots in the desert in the middle of the night, you're going to actually have to take action and take strikes against the people responsible for these attacks,' he said. 'And that doesn't just mean the proxies. That also means the Iranian puppet masters, the ones who are pulling the strings.' Sales said, 'It's only a matter of time before one of these Iranian proxies gets lucky and actually causes fatalities. At least 50 American soldiers have been injured during this Iranian-backed terror campaign.' 'The time to prevent this kind of attack, the time to establish deterrence is now when we can gain the upper hand and maintain dominance in terms of the escalation ladder.' 'The message they've gotten is it's open season on Americans in the Middle East and the White House is not going to take action to protect them,' Sales said. The Pentagon confirmed that Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Carney - stationed in the waters between Africa and Asia - was under attack. On October 19, images showed the US vessel defending itself against a combination of Iran-backed Houthi missiles and aerial vehicles - which it successfully shot down. Photos taken on October 19 show the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Carney (DDG 64) defeat a combination of Houthi missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles in the Red Sea Yemen's Houthi rebels later took credit for attacking two ships - without saying they were American - one with a missile and one with a drone. Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree said the attacks would continue as long as Israel remains at war with Hamas in Gaza. The Pentagon said on Sunday morning: 'Were aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and will provide information as it becomes available.' Sales suggested adding Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis back to the terrorist organization list after they were removed shortly after Biden took office. He said, 'What else do they need to do for us to designate them as a terrorist organization? That's actually something we did during the Trump administration.' 'Within weeks of taking office, the Biden administration took them off the terror list, maybe they need to reconsider that and put them back on.' On November 21, national security spokesman John Kirby said the administration is considering adding the Houthis back to the list after they seizure the cargo ship Galaxy Leader, which has ties to Israel. 'In light of the recent targeting of civilians by the Houthis, and now the piracy of a ship in international waters, we have begun a review of potential terrorist designations and we'll be considering other options together with our allies and partners as well,' said Kirby. Biden lifted the designation early in his presidency because it hampered efforts to deliver humanitarian aid to war-torn Yemen. Houthi rebels have been launching a series of attacks on vessels in the Red Sea - as well as launching drones and missiles targeting Israel as it wages war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Just last week, Iran-backed Houthi rebels fired missiles at a US Navy destroyer off the coast of Yemen in a 'significant escalation' with American forces. The USS Mason had responded to a distress call on Sunday from an Israeli-linked chemical tanker in the Gulf of Aden that had been seized by armed rebels. The Central Park tanker was carrying a cargo of phosphoric acid when its crew called for help, saying 'they were under attack from an unknown entity'. On Sunday, the Pentagon said: 'Were aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney (pictured in Jacksonville, Florida) and commercial vessels in the Red Sea' The US is considering adding the Houthi back to the terrorist organization list after they seized the Galaxy Leader. Pictured: several Houthi fighters being dropped off on the Galaxy Leader Allied ships from a counter-piracy task force that operates in the Gulf of Aden and off the coast of Somalia, including the USS Mason, responded to the call for help and 'demanded the release of the vessel' upon reaching the tanker. 'Subsequently, five armed individuals debarked the ship and attempted to flee via their small boat,' the US Central Command said in a statement, adding: 'The Mason pursued the attackers resulting in their eventual surrender.' Hours later, at 1:41 a.m. local time, two ballistic missiles were fired from Houthi-controlled Yemen then landed near the US warship - a guided-missile destroyer, raising the stakes amid a series of ship attacks linked to the Israel-Hamas war. Both missiles fell short by 10 nautical miles and landed in the water. The tanker hijacked last Sunday was identified as the Liberian-flagged Central Park by the vessel's company Zodiac Maritime after its seizure. The force is appealing to more volunteers to take part in similar initiatives It is sometimes viewed as the hobby of history buffs and archeologists. But police in Manchester are now enlisting the help of metal detectorists in their fight against knife crime. Last month two volunteer metal detectorists took part in a week-long operation with Greater Manchester Police where they scoured parks, grass verges, hedgerows and waste ground in Wigan for knives and other discarded weapons. The metal detectorists uncovered several blades, a hammer and a BB gun, which will now be safely destroyed by officers. Alan Mitchell, a police community support officer in Wigan, who is also a keen metal detectorist, took part in the sweep, known as Operation Sceptre. Police in Manchester are now enlisting the help of metal detectorists in their fight against knife crime Two volunteer metal detectorists took part in a week-long operation with Greater Manchester Police where they scoured parks, grass verges, hedgerows and waste ground in Wigan for knives and other discarded weapons last month He said: 'I've been metal detecting for a few years now and last September I came across a new role advertised for volunteer metal detectorists in GMP. 'I thought it sounded interesting and offered to help manage the volunteers.. During Operation Sceptre in November, the volunteers joined me in Wigan carrying out knife sweeps in the local park areas. 'Thanks to the work of the metal detectorists, we removed a number of potentially dangerous weapons from our streets safely. Without this intervention, it's very possible these weapons may have been used with tragic consequences.' The force is now appealing for more volunteer metal detectorists to contact them and take part in similar initiatives across other parts of Greater Manchester. The project will help tackle knife crime. More than 3,000 offences were recorded in Greater Manchester relating to knife or sharp instruments ween June 2022 and July 2023 Superintendent Caroline Hemingway, GMP's force lead for knife crime, said: 'I'm delighted with this latest initiative which enlists the help of volunteer metal detectorists. We've long said that we need communities to come together to help tackle knife crime and this is a perfect example of that in action. 'The seizures during Operation Sceptre show what can be achieved when we work together and I would welcome anyone who has an interest in volunteering their metal detecting skills to help police.' Between June 2022 and July 2023, there were more than 3,000 knife or sharp instrument offences recorded in Greater Manchester. Human remains found in sand dunes near a Sydney beach have been identified as those of a butcher who disappeared in suspicious circumstances more than three decades ago. Paul Norton was last seen on April 9, 1989, after spending the day with his sons at Leichhardt Oval watching the Balmain Tigers play the Parramatta Eels. The 31-year-old was reported missing by his girlfriend on April 14. Mr Norton's car - a blue 1981 Commodore sedan - was found weeks later at a Hertz car rental facility at Sydney Airport's domestic terminal on May 2 full of sand. The Kurnell sand dunes area was long rumoured to have been a dumping ground for bodies A 1996 inquest determined it was most likely Mr Norton's death was a result of homicide, motivated by his involvement in the drug trade. Paul Norton's remains were found in the area in October 2007, and weren't identified for more than a decade READ MORE: Mystery surrounds how many bodies Neddy Smith left in his own personal 'killing fields' Neddy Smith (left) with his then wife Debra and brothel owner Harvey Jones (right) who was found buried in sand in Botany Advertisement Human remains found at Kurnell south of Sydney in October of 2007 were formally identified as belonging to Mr Norton in 2019. The area was long rumoured to be a dumping ground for bodies following underworld killings carried out during the 1970s and 80s. Prominent Sydney gangster Neddy Smith, who died in 2021, is believed to have used the area, plus another one near Sydney Airport at Botany, to dump the bodies of his victims. These burial sites, which may yet give up more skeletons from unsolved homicides, are referred to by some police as Neddy Smith's killing fields. Investigators used DNA technology including familial samples to identify the remains. Detectives are appealing for anyone with information about Mr Norton or his death to contact police. 'Initial observations by strike force detectives have drawn links between the suspicious disappearance and likely murder of Mr Norton and a series of underworld killings in Sydney in the 80s,' NSW Police said in a statement on Monday. Paul Norton's sister, Margaret Brown, hopes the appeal may provide some answers about what happened to her brother. 'Paul and I were one of six children, and with only four of us remaining, we love to find some answers about what happened,' she said. 'Even though it's going back many years, we're asking anyone who might have information to contact police.' Mr Norton was described as being of Caucasian appearance with a freckled complexion, about 165cm tall, of thin build with brown hair. Smith was in prison when Mr Norton disappeared, facing charges over a bungled payroll robbery in December 1988 and having had his bail revoked on an October 1987 murder charge. Today, two elderly grandmothers one British, the other French will come face-to-face, a few feet apart, across a drab courtroom in the suburbs of Paris. The confrontation between Pauline Murrell, now 78, and 75-year-old Monique Olivier will be charged with emotion. It is a showdown Mrs Murrell and ex-husband, Roger Parrish, who will be alongside her, have spent 33 years fighting for, and prayed they would live to see. From the moment they take their seats Olivier in the dock, protected by a bullet-proof screen; the Gloucestershire pensioners diagonally opposite her, on a bench reserved for the families of her victims all eyes will be fixed on them. Everyone crammed into the chamber from the red-robed judge and 11 jurors, to the battery of lawyers and the phalanx of journalists will attempt to read the nuances behind the glances they exchange. That is, if Olivier can summon the chutzpah to raise her greying head and gaze across at Mrs Murrell and Mr Parrish, 80. Monique Olivier is on trial for alleged crimes that include complicity in abduction, murder and rape of Joanna Parrish, in 1990 Last week, Monique Olivier admitted her role in the murder of Joanna Parrish, luring her into a van, driving her to a lonely riverbank and remaining at the wheel as her husband serial killer Michel Fourniret raped and strangled her The confrontation between Joanna's parents, Pauline and Roger, with Monique Olivier will be one charged with emotion. They have been fighting for over thirty years for the truth Last week, she admitted her role in the murder of their 20-year-old daughter, Joanna Parrish, luring her into a van, driving her to a lonely riverbank and remaining at the wheel as her husband serial killer Michel Fourniret raped and strangled her. The so-called Ogre of the Ardennes and his Ogress accomplice had arranged to meet Joanna, a Leeds University student on a teaching secondment in the scenic Chablis-producing town of Auxerre, on the pretext that they wanted her to teach their son to speak English. Level-headed and cautious, however, she wouldn't have accepted a lift with a strange man, on that May evening in 1990, but for the reassuring presence of his wife. Of that her parents have always been sure. To their regret, they were deprived of seeing Fourniret brought to justice for her murder. He belatedly added Joanna to his list of seven admitted victims in 2018; but he died in prison three years later while awaiting a fresh trial. Olivier is also serving a life sentence with a minimum term of 25 years, and will surely die behind bars, too. But this new prosecution for helping her husband to kill Joanna and two other girls has provided her parents with some consolation. So, today, they have courageously agreed to take the witness stand. Much as Olivier might like to forget her chilling past deeds, she will be forced to listen as they describe their bright, free-spirited daughter and remind her of the unending torment she has caused them by delivering Joanna to her brutal end. Patrick Proctor, Joanna's boyfriend at the time, is also expected to give evidence today via video link. Now in his 50s, Mr Proctor has never spoken publicly about the murder. By grim chance, however, his relationship with Joanna was a key factor in the attack. He was then studying Russian in Czechoslovakia, and she advertised her services as an English tutor to raise the fare to visit him there. When Fourniret spotted the ad in a local paper, he seized his chance and fixed the fateful rendezvous. The drama of this showcase trial the denouement of a grisly saga that began with the Ogre's first (known) murder in 1987 has already captivated France. It began on the opening day, last Monday, when Olivier waived her right to avoid being filmed and posed nonchalantly in her glass box as dozens of cameras whirred. Asked why she allowed herself to be filmed, the Parrish family's lawyer surmised she was 'proud' of having been one half of France's most notorious couple. The so-called Ogre of the Ardennes and his Ogress accomplice had arranged to meet Joanna, a Leeds University student on a teaching secondment in Auxerre, on the pretext that they wanted her to teach their son to speak English Last week, Joanna's parents contemptuously dismissed Olivier's appeal for absolution. 'I can't imagine that any mother would be able to live with themselves,' Pauline told a TV reporter The wretched product of a domineering father and an alcoholic mother, Olivier was first married to a driving instructor, for whom she worked as a secretary. When he decided to become an artist, she moved with him to the French Riviera. But she told the court he wanted her to have sex with other men and tried to drown her in the bath. After she left him, in the mid-1980s, she fell into the even more evil arms of Fourniret, who was already in prison for sex offences when she answered his lonely hearts ad. In 133 letters exchanged before his release, they struck a macabre pact: he would kill her first husband if she satisfied his lust for virgins. Within weeks of his release, they had abducted and killed their first young victim. The court has heard how Olivier performed a plethora of nauseating functions on the kidnap missions. Approaching the girls; pretending to be lost or needing a doctor for their toddler son (who they sometimes took on their virgin hunts); helping to drug victims; guarding them, oblivious to their pleas for mercy; even examining them to verify their chastity. As Olivier confessed to these unspeakable crimes after Fourniret was arrested in 2003, and admitted to them again last week, the purpose of this trial is not to decide whether she was complicit. The jury must assess whether, as she insists, she acted reluctantly under his malign influence and deserves to be remembered as a pitiable stooge. Or if akin to a Rose West-like figure she willingly participated in the murders for her own gratification, as the prosecution claims. From the moment they learned of her role in Joanna's murder, Mrs Murrell, who worked in Tesco before her retirement, and Mr Parrish, a former Land Registry civil servant, have believed the latter. 'Without her, he wouldn't have been able to do what he did,' Mrs Murrell has said. 'That vile woman didn't respect people's children. I blame her for everything.' A picture taken in 1990 of Joanna Parrish (L) and her brother Barney in Paris A 1992 photo of Monique Olivier, who fell in the arms of a serial killer with whom she struck a macabre pact: he would kill her first husband if she satisfied his lust for virgins For a shamefully long time, the bungling French police failed to link Fourniret with Joanna's murder. As she began spilling his sordid secrets, however, Olivier described how they had abducted and killed an unnamed British woman in Auxerre, where Joanna then worked at a school. It could only have been her. Yet prosecutors still chose not to include her case with the seven others. Despairing that no one would ever be brought to account, in 2010 Mrs Murrell wrote a three-page letter to Olivier in prison, entreating her 'as one mother to another' to 're-examine your conscience and tell me the truth'. Her admirably restrained missive was met with silence. 'Her lawyers said it [the letter] was a trick, that it wasn't proper, and I was upset about that,' Mrs Murrell said last week. 'It wasn't a trick, it was heartfelt.' She and Mr Parrish remain close and have fought the 33-year campaign side-by-side, often travelling to France to seek new clues. Both have spoken about the devastation of losing their daughter. After Mrs Murrell read the autopsy report, she says she urged him not to look at it, but he felt compelled. Last week, those of us in court listened in disbelief as the details, too shocking to describe here, were recited. Mr Parrish has also alluded to the devastating effect Joanna's death had on her younger brother, Barney, then aged 17. 'He saw her as a guiding light and was a lost soul he didn't talk about it for months,' he said. Last week, Joanna's parents contemptuously dismissed Olivier's appeal for absolution. 'I can't imagine that any mother would be able to live with themselves,' Mrs Murrell told a TV reporter. 'And now she's pushing the victim bit.' Having listened to Olivier's self-pitying litany of excuses over the past week, nor does this reporter. A Belgian prosecutor who interrogated her says he only saw her cry once, when he took her on a fruitless hunt for bodies that she and Fourniret had buried. She wept not for the dead girls but because her handcuffs were too tight. It will be telling to see whether the Ogress's blank eyes are pricked by tears today. One of the alleged kingpins of a major drug gang has been deported to Australia after fleeing to Turkey while facing a string of serious organised crime-related offences. The 28-year-old Sydney man was arrested when he landed in Darwin on Sunday afternoon. The Australian Federal Police said the man has been a focus of the force's transnational offshore task force, known as Operation Gain, targeting the nation's most prominent overseas-based offenders. He reportedly fled Australia in a fishing boat in 2022. Masood Zakaria (pictured), one of Australia's most wanted men, has been arrested and deported to Darwin The 28-year-old Sydney man was arrested when he landed in Darwin on Sunday afternoon Turkish officials notified Australian authorities after the man allegedly entered the country in 2022 on a false passport. Further inquiries established he was living in the city of Bodrum, on the country's south-western coast. While overseas, police said the man continued to associate with a number of organised crime figures with significant Australian links. He was arrested and transferred to immigration detention by Turkish authorities in January this year and has been held in custody until his deportation. The 28-year-old was held in Darwin on a NSW arrest warrant for offences including conspiracy to murder, knowingly directing the activities of a criminal group, supplying a prohibited drug and dealing in the proceeds of crime. The man is scheduled to face Darwin Magistrates Court later on Monday, when NSW Police will make an application to extradite him AFP Assistant Commissioner Stephen Dametto said Australians who hid offshore in perceived safe havens to avoid facing Australian courts would be caught. 'More than 70 per cent of the transnational serious organised criminals who target Australia are offshore,' he said in a statement on Monday. 'One by one, these alleged criminals are being extradited or deported to Australia to face the justice system.' Mr Dametto said authorities were working on other targets, warning it was 'just a matter of time' before police reached them. NSW Police Assistant Commissioner Michael Fitzgerald said investigators spent four years working on the case. 'Once in NSW, he will face a series of charges relating to his alleged role as a director of a criminal group and conspiracy to murder - serious and violent crimes that carry equally serious jail time,' he said. The man is scheduled to face Darwin Magistrates Court later on Monday, when NSW Police will make an application to extradite him. Hobart man has been charged over the alleged assault A 10-month-old baby who died after he was allegedly violently shaken and then dropped into a cot has been pictured for the first time. Khaylan Shane Butler was rushed to hospital with serious injuries from a home in Warrane, in Tasmania's south, during the early hours of Friday morning. In a new photo of the blue-eyed infant, Khaylan wears a grey jumper and smiles up at the camera while lying on his back on a fluffy rug. Tasmania Police on Monday confirmed the little boy had died from his injuries. A 10-month-old baby who died after he was allegedly violently shaken and then dropped into a cot has been pictured for the first time 'Our condolences are with the family and loved ones of the baby,' a statement said. 'The police investigation is ongoing.' Daniel John Ridgers, 25, has been charged with causing grievous bodily harm to the baby by allegedly violently shaking him and dropping him into a cot. Ridgers did not enter a plea or apply for bail during an out-of-hours hearing in Hobart's Magistrate Court on Sunday and was remanded in custody. He is scheduled to next appear in court on Monday, December 4. Khaylan Shane Butler was rushed to Royal Hobart Hospital (pictured) in a critical condition from a home in Warrane, in Tasmania 's south, during the early hours of Friday morning Detectives previously said they believed the baby was injured in a 'serious assault' but warned the investigation is expected to take 'some time'. 'Police were called to the Royal Hobart Hospital around 5:20am ... after a child presented with critical injuries that are believed to be suspicious,' police said in a statement on Saturday. The investigation continues. Sir Keir Starmer was accused last night of 'saying anything to get elected' after he lavished praise on Margaret Thatcher. The Labour leader hailed the former Conservative Prime Minister for her 'driving sense of purpose' and for dragging Britain 'out of its stupor' by unleashing 'entrepreneurialism'. But he faced a major backlash from opponents on both Left and Right, who said his comments were a nakedly cynical ploy to win the votes of Tory supporters. Critics highlighted his previous vocal opposition to the Iron Lady's flagship policies of privatisation and taming the trade unions. As a young Left-wing lawyer, Sir Keir was even praised by union leader Arthur Scargill for defending striking miners for free. The latest row comes after he abandoned pledges he made when running for Labour's leadership in 2020, from hiking income tax and scrapping tuition fees to defending free movement and nationalising public services. Sir Keir Starmer was accused last night of 'saying anything to get elected' after he lavished praise on Margaret Thatcher Last night Tory chairman Richard Holden said: 'Keir Starmer will say anything to get elected. This is yet another classic example of him saying what he thinks people want to hear, despite having a track record of doing the opposite.' Health Secretary Victoria Atkins told Sky News: 'I suspect the great lady herself would view a man that is trying to ride on the coat tails of her success with the following words: 'No, no, no.' ' Tory Backbencher Brendan Clarke-Smith added: 'The public realise Starmer will say whatever he thinks people want to hear. 'They will be flabbergasted at his praise for Margaret Thatcher especially when he has previously portrayed himself as a champion of mineworkers. 'It's just the latest flip-flop and goes to show that both he and Labour can't be treated seriously.' Even some of Sir Keir's own MPs were withering about his remarks. Labour's Beth Winter, MP for Cynon Valley in Wales, said: 'Margaret Thatcher devastated working-class communities like mine. Policies like the grossly iniquitous poll tax and the great privatisation rip-off offs were the hallmarks of Thatcherism.' Her colleague Ian Byrne said: 'Inequality, hunger, destitution and misery. That's the real legacy left by Thatcher.' Labour's Beth Winter said Margaret Thatcher 'devastated working-class communities', adding that 'great privatisation rip-off offs were the hallmarks of Thatcherism' And Kim Johnson, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, said: 'Margaret Thatcher destroyed industries, attacked trade unionists and privatised our core industries. [She is] not someone any Labour supporter should look up to.' Sir Keir's comments were gleefully seized upon by nationalist politicians in Scotland where Mrs Thatcher remains a hate figure for many who are desperate to see off the threat of a resurgent Labour Party. Scotland's First Minister Humza Yousaf said: 'What Thatcher did to mining and industrial communities was not 'entrepreneurialism' it was vandalism.' The row was sparked by an opinion piece Sir Keir wrote for the Sunday Telegraph, in which he extended the 'hand of friendship' to traditional Tory supporters by promising a Labour government would be tough on immigration. He described several seismic moments in modern British politics, from post-war PM Clement Attlee deciding Labour must be a party of duty to Tony Blair seizing the optimism of the 1990s. Tory chairman Richard Holden said that Keir Starmer 'will say anything to get elected' Health Secretary Victoria Atkins suggested that the Labour leader was trying to ride on the coat tails of Margaret Thatcher's success 'Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism,' Sir Keir wrote. In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House, he explained: 'The point I'm making is that you can distinguish political leaders into those that had a plan and those that drifted.' Of Mrs Thatcher he said she had 'a plan for entrepreneurialism'. He insisted: 'It doesn't mean I agree with what she did, but I don't think anybody could suggest she didn't have a sense of purpose.' Asked if he was seeking Tory votes, Sir Keir said 'yes', adding: 'I do want to persuade those that voted Tory in the past to vote Labour this time round.' A Conservative Party spokesman said: 'Margaret Thatcher famously said: 'I usually make up my mind about a man in ten seconds, and I very rarely change it.' 'The British people have made up their minds about Starmer, and the verdict is that he is a spineless flip-flopper who says whatever is convenient at the time.' After deeming his debate with California Governor Gavin Newsom 'the Battle of Loserville,' former President Donald Trump continues to dominate Florida's Ron DeSantis in the Republican Primary. According to polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, Trump is now on track to win around 60 percent of the votes in the contest, which begins with the Iowa Caucus on January 24. It leaves Ron DeSantis a long way back in second place at 12.6 percent with just 52 days until the votes start to count. DeSantis will join former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, ex-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy at the next GOP Wednesday but Trump - as he did with all three previous debates - will skip it. The Florida governor has recently lost two key cogs in his Never Back Down Super PAC, with chairman Adam Laxalt resigning a week ago and chief executive Kristin Davison among several staffers being fired Saturday. After deeming his debate with California Governor Gavin Newsom 'the Battle of Loserville,' former President Donald Trump continues to dominate Florida's Ron DeSantis in the Republican Primary They've been replaced in both roles by Scott Wagner, according to the New York Times. The numbers are the first time in 2023 that Trump has garnered 60 percent of the polling average. DeSantis placing second in the polls which such a low total shows how none of the other candidates have been able to lay a glove on the incumbent nominee Trump. Haley is currently averaging 9.5 percent, Ramaswamy 5.1 percent and Christie 2.9 percent. In reality, The Washington Post reported Friday on the troubles plaguing DeSantis' presidential campaign. During Thursday night's debate with Newsom, the California governor declared that neither he nor DeSantis would be the 'nominee for our party in 2024.' At one point Newsom told DeSantis, 'you're down 41 points in your home state.' Beyond the paltry polls, DeSantis's chief rival for second place, former U.N. Amb. Nikki Haley, got the endorsement of the Koch network this week, a group that had previously been drawn to the Florida governor. According to polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight , Trump is now on track to win around 60 percent of the votes in the contest, which begins with the Iowa Caucus on January 24 It leaves Ron DeSantis a long way back in second place at 12.6 percent with just 52 days until the votes start to count Senior campaign aides are feeling gloomy about their chances in the upcoming primary, which kicks off with the Iowa caucuses on January 15. 'People increasingly think it's over,' a person close to DeSantis told The Post. 'It's a dumpster fire.' In recent weeks, a tiff between DeSantis' campaign and its allied super PAC, Never Back Down, spilled out into public view. On November 21, NBC News reported that Jeff Roe, a longtime consultant for the PAC, got into a heated argument with DeSantis confidant Scott Wagner. 'You have a stick up your a**, Scott,' Roe reportedly said. Wagner responded by saying, 'Why don't you come over here and get it!' And then last week, Never Back Down's CEO Chris Jankowski quit the group. In the meantime, DeSantis' allies have set up another PAC to help their guy: Fight Right. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' participation in the Fox News debate with California Gov. Gavin Newsom comes at a time when sources close to his presidential campaign are describing it as a 'dumpster fire' Allies of former President Donald Trump are relishing reports that show discord between the DeSantis campaign and its primary super PAC Never Back Down. 'For a group named Never Back Down, it sure seems everyone is backing out,' said one Trump insider That PAC ran an ad against Haley calling her out for saying that she jumped into politics after being inspired by something Democrat Hillary Clinton said. FactCheck.org called the ad misleading because the videos were edited to omit Haley saying that she does not agree with Clinton on 'anything' or 'a lot.' The move created more internal strife with Ken Cuccinelli, a Never Back Down board member, calling the hits against Haley 'exceedingly objectionable' and asking that his comments be preserved in the records of the board, NBC and The Post reported. On Friday, Trump's allies highlighted the discord. 'For a group named Never Back Down, it sure seems everyone is backing out,' Taylor Budowich, the CEO of the Trump-aligned PAC Make America Great Again Inc., said in a statement. But Communications Director for Never Back Down, Erin Perrine, told The Post to be prepared for a DeSantis upset in Iowa on caucus night, where Trump presently leads by nearly 30 points. 'The governor has received the support of Iowa's popular Gov. Kim Reynolds, evangelical leaders like Bob Vander Plaats, will hit all 99 counties across the state, and has our historic and unmatched caucus operation and grassroots efforts behind him to win on caucus night,' Perrine told the paper. 'Instead of regurgitating the consultant class talking points, The Post should get back to reporting,' she also said. A Never Back Down source contacted by DailyMail.com did not respond to a request for comment. Trump mocked DeSantis' debate against California Gov. Newsom, dubbing it the 'Battle of Loserville.' After midnight on Truth Social Friday, Trump shared a dubbed 'Battle of Loserville' video, with moderator Sean Hannity asking DeSantis, 'Have you ever betrayed the greatest president who ever lived, President Donald J. Trump.' Trump has long fumed that DeSantis shouldn't be running against him for the 2024 nomination because the then-president backed the aspiring Florida governor over another Republican in the 2018 GOP gubernatorial primary. In the faked clip, Hannity also asks DeSantis, 'Are you a short insecure little man that likes to wear lifts inside your cowboy boots, yes or no answer please,' while faux Newsom outs the Florida governor for bringing along a stepstool. The 55-second clip ends with DeSantis shrinking and then slinking offstage. By Robert Neff Early Western accounts of Korea often portray women as meek, subservient and hidden away from view of all males except their husbands, fathers and brothers. A Korean woman was expected to obey, without deviation, every whim of the males in her life and in some cases to follow them into death. These characterizations of Korean women were made by both male and female foreign observers, and, although there was some truth to them, they were generalizations that did not distinguish between social status, class and location. Not all Korean women were docile; many especially the royal family wielded influential power and, according to some observers, manipulated politics. Women proprietors of inns were fairly common and notorious for having a firm hand when it came to dealing with husbands who overstepped their perceived authority or male patrons who were overly emboldened by a drink too many. There are many anecdotes of wives seizing the topknot of their philandering husbands and pounding sense into their heads with the wooden sticks used to iron clothes. A perusal of the newspapers also reveal wives murdering their husbands sometimes as revenge against their husbands faults while others sought to move on to a new partner. Women were also upholders of the law. The police used women detectives because they could disguise themselves as servants and secretly investigate possible crimes in households where a man could not easily enter. Of course, these women had to be physically strong able to carry a 40-kilogram bag of rice and able to drink three large bowls of "makgeolli" (a type of Korean alcohol). These women detectives had to be at least 152.5 cm tall, which meant they towered over the average Korean woman ( 142 cm tall at the end of the 19th century) and many of their male counterparts an examination of 1,000 policemen in 1897 revealed the shortest was 144 cm and the tallest was about 182 cm. While these women detectives may have towered over most of the female population, they were dwarfed by one of the palace women who served as a bodyguard for Queen Min (Empress Myeongseong). According to one writer, like most Korean women of the time, this bodyguard did not have a given name, but her nickname was [Go Dae-su] meaning a giant girl who needs to be taken care of. Other sources, however, speculate that her name was Lee Woo-seok and suggest that she was born in 1842 possibly in the Seoul area. We know nothing about her childhood and can only speculate that it was very unpleasant. By the time she reached adulthood, she stood 210 cm tall, and was said to be stronger than five or six ordinary men. It would not challenge the imagination to assume she weighed more than 150 kilograms. And, judging by her nickname, Ancient Beast, men did not gaze upon her with lust or affection. Allegedly Queen Min looked upon her favorably but Go was ignored by her peers save the taunts and ridicule they heaped upon her. At some point, she began to provide confidential information about the palace, the queen, and the royal family to a group of dissatisfied young progressives who were plotting to overthrow the government. It would be charitable to say that loneliness and a desire to be acknowledged forced her into the arms of these rebels, but it seems more likely her participation in this treasonous plot was an attempt to exact revenge. The attempted overthrow known as the Gapsin Revolt took place on Dec. 4, 1884, and started at the post office inauguration dinner. Go aided the rebels by setting off dynamite in different places on the palace grounds, which helped confuse and demoralize the troops loyal to the government. The rebels were initially victorious but after only a couple of days were forced to flee for their lives. Several of them escaped to Japan but the majority of them were quickly killed or captured. Even Go, despite her strength, was quickly apprehended. Her fate was sealed. According to the accounts, it was on a cold winter day when Go was led through the streets of Jongno with a placard placed about her neck denouncing her for treason. Crowds of people followed, jeering and tearing at her clothing and flesh with their fingers. By the time she passed through Gwanghuimun (also known as the Corpse Gate) she was already bleeding heavily and much of her clothing was gone. She was taken to a nearby radish field the execution ground and placed at the mercy of the blood-thirsty crowd. Stones fell upon her like the rain and she eventually fell to the ground her body shattered. According to one modern writer, it was an especially cruel death. What became of her corpse is unknown. In all likelihood, it was displayed for a couple of days while suffering further indignations from mischievous children and hungry animals. If she was buried, her grave has long been forgotten and even the pages of history remember her as nothing more than an odd footnote. Robert Neff has authored and co-authored several books, including Letters from Joseon, Korea Through Western Eyes and Brief Encounters. McDonald's top-secret new spin-off CosMc's is on the verge of opening its first restaurant in Illinois - but the chain has yet to say what exactly it'll serve. The CosMc's restaurant is on the verge of completion in Bolingbrook, Illinois - although a formal opening date has yet to be set. It has been bolted onto an existing McDonald's restaurant in the suburban Chicago intersection - and was likely chosen because the fast food giant's global headquarters is based in the Windy City. CosMcs - named after a retro McDonald's alien mascot - has yellow and purple branding and appears to be heavily drive-thru focused. Local passer-by Scott Fredrickson captured its menu screens being tested. They showed an array of teas and lemonades, sandwiches, soft serve and baked goods - although its unclear if the menu is a dummy or authentic. The new purple and yellow colored storefront is named after CosMc, a mascot introduced in the 1980s The menu is said to rival Starbucks and offer items from international menus McDonald's is breaking ground in Illinois on its new spin-off restaurant, CosMc's Fast food fans have speculated it may be a rival to Starbucks that serves coffee and snacks similar to those already found in a McCafe. Some hope CosMcs may also sell tantalizing McDonald's treats currently only available at foreign outlets. CEO Chris Kempczinski unveiled plans for the restaurant in July when the company announced sales rocketed by 10.3 percent due to the viral Grimace Birthday shake. 'CosMcs is a small-format concept with all the DNA of McDonalds, but its own unique personality,' said Kempczinski. Video captured by ABC News showed construction at the new restaurant in Bolingbrook, Illinois. The purple and yellow painted storefront appears to have at least four drive-thru lanes. McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski unveiled plans for the restaurant in July when the company announced sales rocketed by 10.3 percent due to the viral Grimace Birthday shake Photos of the menu shared by TikToker @snackolator speculate CosMc's aims to be a coffee drive-thru and has items from McDonald's international menu. The TikToker said, 'The kind of conventional thinking is that this is going to be something of a competitor to like Starbucks, where it's going to focus on the McCafe stuff and the coffee and the drinks as opposed to serving burgers and fries, which makes even more sense when you realize that this CosMc's is being built directly next to an existing McDonald's.' Previews of the menu shared by the account show a large variety of drinks including a drink called signature galactic boosts, iced teas, lemonades, slushes, frappes, hot and iced coffee. On the food menu, there are sandwiches, several McMuffins, McFlurries, ice cream, baked goods, snack boxes and items from the international menu such as McPops. The company will bring CosMc's restaurants to a handful of areas in 'a limited geography' in early 2024. More details will be shared on McDonald's' investor day which is set to take place in December. CosMc first appeared in the company's fictional world, McDonaldland, where Ronald McDonald and his other friends live. He has six arms and relocated from a home in outer-space when he found out about burgers and fries from McDonald's. The mascot appeared in a 1980s ad which also featured Ronald McDonald, Grimace and McDonaldlands Professor. It showed an object which appeared to be a UFO landing before a head and six arms. pops out. CosMc first appeared in the company's fictional world, McDonaldland, where Ronald McDonald and his other friends live. He has six arms and relocated from a home in outer-space when he found out about burgers and fries from McDonald's 'Hi-ho Earth people, CosMc here. I popped in from outer space on a trade mission,' CosMc said. The return of CosMc comes after the fast-food chain brought fellow mascot Grimace back to the forefront. In June, McDonald's launched the Grimace Birthday shake which then turned into a viral TikTok trend. The company generated billions of views on TikTok with content showing people pretending to die due to the drink. Following the viral trend, McDonalds reported a 10.3 percent increase in annual sales and reported net income of $2.3 billion for the quarter ended June 30, up 94% from a year earlier. A 14-year-old girl who was missing for over a week on southeast Queensland has been found safe. The young girl disappeared from her home on Rhodes Street in Loganlea, some 30km southeast of Brisbane, at about 2pm on November 21. Queensland Police issued a plea for public assistance on Saturday after passing 11 days without the girl being found. Fortunately, she was found in the area on Sunday. A 14-year-old girl (above) who went missing from her Longlea home was found early Saturday morning 'The girl has been located safe and well. Media and the public and thanked for their assistance,' police said in a statement. Family and police were concerned for the teenager's safety due to her young age. It was believed she could have used public transport to travel around Logan or to Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast. Rishi Sunak's Plan B for Rwanda deportations will be 'watertight', it was claimed last night, amid fears proposed tactics could be thwarted by government lawyers. Insiders say the Prime Minister is determined to make the new emergency legislation to tackle illegal migration 'very robust' despite warnings from within Whitehall that it must not override human rights laws. Mr Sunak is also expected to authorise millions more pounds to be given to Rwanda to improve its asylum system, while Home Secretary James Cleverly is set to sign an improved treaty with the East African country in the next week. It comes as the latest figures show 1,264 would-be refugees braved icy conditions to cross the Channel in the past week, including 519 on Saturday alone. The number of illegal migrants reaching the UK this year is now believed to have topped the 28,526 recorded in 2021 although arrivals are still a third down on the record set last year. Insiders say Rishi Sunak is determined to make new emergency legislation designed to progress the Rwanda scheme 'very robust' (File Photo) Home Secretary James Cleverly is expected to sign an improved treaty with Rwanda in the next week Last night a government source said: 'As the PM said, the British people want action and their patience has been stretched. The Government is up for taking robust measures, providing they work.' The PM announced his new approach last month after the Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the original plan by ruling that there were 'substantial grounds' to believe people put on a one-way flight to Rwanda could be sent on to other countries where they would be unsafe. The Plan B comprises three parts: a treaty with Rwanda, emergency legislation to declare the country is safe, and a bundle of evidence explaining why anyone sent there would not be mistreated. There has been intense debate in the Tory party over how far the Bill should go, with more than 20 MPs on the Right demanding what is now known as a 'full fat' option. This would include so-called 'notwithstanding' clauses, allowing the Government to ignore the UK's Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in asylum cases as well as removing the right of migrants to challenge their deportation through judicial review. A less hardline approach would override human rights law while still allowing challenges by individuals. The PM announced his new approach last month after the Supreme Court ruled that there were 'substantial grounds' to believe people put on a one-way flight to Rwanda could be sent on to other countries where they would be unsafe But there are concerns that ministers are receiving advice from officials including government lawyers who say they cannot do anything they feel would breach the Civil Service Code such as ignoring human rights laws. 'It's anathema to them,' said one insider. 'They will say 'I don't want to be the lawyer who does this'. 'Because Mr Cleverly has only been in his new role as Home Secretary for a few weeks, Attorney General Victoria Prentis is playing a major role looking through the draft Bill. She is understood to have warned that disapplying the ECHR would be unlawful. As officials continued to work on the plan over the weekend, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins told Sky News yesterday: 'It will take a little bit of time to draw up this legislation because we want to make sure it's in the right form.' Asked if it would appear before Christmas she said: 'I know the Home Secretary is working incredibly hard and quickly on this.' Humans across the world have thousands of different accents, giving clues to where they were brought up. Now, a new study suggests parrots also squawk in different dialects depending on which city they live in. Researchers found that the calls of wild monk parakeets, a small type of parrot, vary between European cities. The team from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour analysed birds in cities in Spain, Belgium, Italy and Greece. The birds, which are originally from South America, now exist in huge numbers across Europe due to pets escaping and breeding. Researchers found that the calls of wild monk parakeets (pictured) vary between European cities (Stock image) They have an exceptionally flexible vocal repertoire and can imitate and learn new sounds throughout their lives. The study's lead author, doctoral student Stephen Tyndel, said: 'Because they spread through Europe only recently, monk parakeets are the perfect test tube for studying how complex communication evolves in a species other than our own. 'Just like humans, monk parakeets in Europe have unique ways of communicating based on where they live.' The researchers recorded the birds in Athens, Barcelona, Bergamo, Brussels, Legnago, Madrid, Pavia, and Verona. And they discovered that parrots did have different dialects in each city. Fellow doctoral student Simeon Smeele said: 'Parakeets in Brussels, for example, had contact calls that were particularly different from those of other cities. The team from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour analysed birds in cities in Spain, Belgium, Italy and Greece (Stock image of parakeets) 'For the most part, dialects differed in the frequency modulation structure within each call, which is super difficult for humans to hear.' Although the bird's dialects varied from city to city, they remained the same in different parks within the same city. The team suggested that parrot dialects separated early when birds 'invaded' European cities 50 years ago, but didn't change significantly after that. 'This suggests that dialects came about through a passive process - birds copying birds make small errors and therefore cities slowly become different from each other', Mr Tyndal said. 'Or they were different to begin with, and these differences were maintained over time.' The findings were published in the journal Behavioural Ecology. Former first daughter Ivanka Trump had a rockin' Saturday night as she took in a Black Keys concert in Fort Lauderdale and enjoyed a dinner date with her husband Jared Kushner. Ivanka, 42, looked every bit the alt-rock fan as she posed in a cute biker jacket, black mini-dress, and chic black booties, which she paired with a bright red lip. In one picture she shared to her Instagram of her date-night concert look, the blonde bombshell posed for a mirror selfie alongside the family's newly adopted German Shepherd-Lab mix, Simba. In another shot, the mom-of-three posed beside actress Rachel Korine, who was also dressed in all black backstage at the rock show. The Black Keys were headlining the Riptide Musical Festival over the weekend in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, just about 40 minutes by car away from the home Ivanka shares with husband Jared Kushner, 43, and the couple's three young children. Ivanka Trump, 42, poses with her family's newly adopted German Shepherd-Lab mix, Simba In a different pic from the night ut, Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, 43, posed together at dinner at Louie Bossi's - an Italian spot in Fort Lauderdale The elegant pair also dined at local Italian joint Louie Bossi's on Saturday, where they posed together for a picture that also made it to Ivanka's Instagram. The power-couple, who recently returned from several days in the Bahamas with their family, looked tanned and relaxed. Ivanka and Jared relocated to Miami with their three children in January 2021, after her dad left the White House. The couple then purchased the $24 million fixer-upper on Indian Creek Island in April 2021. Billionaire Alex Meruelo and his wife, Liset Meruelo, sold them the 1.3-acre estate, which was also previously owned by record producer Scott Storch from 2004 to 2008. The pair spared no expense when they gutted and rebuilt the inside of the mansion, which boasts six bedrooms and eight-and-a-half bathrooms. Aerial images of the resort-style property show its expansive sun deck, large pool, and lavish spa-cabana featuring an outdoor shower, a sauna, a cold plunge, and a central 'breezeway.' The family moved into the mansion this fall after spending nearly three years living at Arte Surfside, a luxury condominium building nestled between Miami Beach and Bal Harbor. Indian Creek is famously known as 'Billionaire Bunker' thanks to its mega-rich residents, which are a mix of celebrities and business moguls, including newcomer Jeff Bezos, who bought not one but two mansions on the island this year. The privately owned residential enclave has just 41 waterfront homes owned by 36 property owners, according to the village's website. The blonde bombshell poseed next to actress Rachel Korine, who also wore all black to Saturday night's show The former first daughter took in the alt-rock show from behind the scenes Ivanka announced that she was officially quitting politics in November 2022, explaining at the time that she will be prioritizing her private life instead of joining her dad's upcoming presidential campaign. 'I love my father very much. This time around, I'm choosing to prioritize my young children and the private life we are creating as a family,' she said. 'While I will always love and support my father, going forward I will do so outside the political arena.' She has since embraced a jet-set lifestyle since stepping back from the cut-throat world of politics - embarking on more than 11 trips in the last year alone. Over the summer, she visited Greece, Jordan for the royal wedding of the Crown Prince Hussein, Costa Rica, Spain, and New York City. For the Thanksgiving holiday break, Ivanka and her family jetted to the Bahamas for a few days of sun and sand. In the last year, she also headed to Morocco, London, Prague, Utah, Egypt, Qatar, Paris, and Jerusalem. A young man who was rescued by strangers after being buried under 1.5m of sand on a popular holiday island remains in a critical condition. Josh Taylor, 25, was buried alive after falling into a hole at Woorim beach on Bribie Island, off the north coast of Brisbane, on Saturday. The hole is understood to have been dug to roast a pig and quickly filled with sand after the walls caved in. Despite 15 men pulling on a rope tied to his leg in a desperate attempt to free him, Mr Taylor remained stuck in the roasting pit for some time. He was freed after paramedics and a RACQ LifeFlight rescue helicopter arrived with teams spending the next two hours at the scene trying to revive Mr Taylor, who had been without a pulse for about 45 minutes. It was revealed on Monday Mr Taylor remains in a critical condition in Woolloongabba's Princess Alexandra Hospital where he was airlifted to on Saturday. Josh Taylor (right) is in a critical condition in a Brisbane hospital's ICU after falling into and becoming buried in a 1.5m hole on a beach on Bridie Island Paramedics and a rescue helicopter were called to the scene at about 2pm on Saturday where they spent about two hours attempting to revive Mr Taylor Witness Nathan, who was among those who helped dig Mr Taylor out told Seven News that the 1.5metre hole had been dug so a pig could be cooked under the sand. 'He stood up off the chair, the sand had given away a little bit underneath him,' he said. READ MORE: Toddler airlifted to hospital in critical condition after single-car rollover on a major road Advertisement 'He stumbled back. He'd put his arms out to obviously to break the fall, he's continued going down and knocked sand as he's put his arms out. 'He was that deep in the hole that you could not see him, his feet, unless you were standing on top of the hole.' Onlookers rushed to Mr Taylor's aid, digging him out before tying a rope to his feet to pull him from the hole. 'There were 15 fully grown men on the end of this rope and he still would not budge,' Nathan recalled. 'That's when the paramedic was like pull him this way .. . the suction gave way and he popped out. 'I'm praying that he pulls through this.' Mr Taylor's family are by his side at the Princess Alexandra hospital where he remains in a critical but stable condition, The Courier Mail reported. The witness Nathan was leaving the beach with his family when a group of men ran over yelling for help to rescue their friend from under the sand, he told NCA NewsWire. When he arrived at the scene, the 25-year-old's family and friends were desperately digging to to get him out. The 25-year-old (pictured) had accidentally buried himself alive after falling into the hole and caused the walls of sand to collapse on top of him Mr Taylor was stuck in the hole for some time and had been without a pulse for about 45 minutes 'I realised someone was head first in a hole and I was just digging digging digging...' he said. 'When I first went up to the hole, I couldn't even see his foot. That's how deep it was,' he said. There were more than 15 people digging in the sand to get the man out before paramedics and rangers arrived. 'All of his family, were screaming at us, telling us to help, telling us to get rope so we could pull him out. It was pretty gruesome,' he said. 'There were like 15 men on the rope pulling and he did not budge.' After some time of pulling and digging, the young man finally burst through the surface of the sand, but the force of being pulled out caused him further injury, Nathan said. 'It was pretty gnarly when he popped out. I threw up,' Nathan said. 'He broke. The suction, the force, of everyone pulling.' When they got him out, the man did not have a pulse and rangers began performing CPR. A Queensland Ambulance Service spokeswoman confirmed the man was flown to Princess Alexandra Hospital in a critical condition The family of Mr Taylor (centre) remain by his side in the hospital's ICU unit, where he remains in a critical condition Rangers in the area also applied a defibrillator before the arrival of paramedics. A helicopter pilot landed on the beach to deliver the RACQ LifeFlight Rescue Critical Care Doctor and flight paramedic as close to the scene as possible. The rescue crew then flew the man to Princess Alexandra Hospital in a critical condition for further treatment. It is understood it took 45 minutes before the man's pulse returned. QAS Paramedic Peter Batt praised the actions of the people who helped out. 'The fact that they have got a return of pulse on this young man after an extended period of CPR, is evidence that good CPR was being done, it's a credit to those people who got in and helped with their first aid,' he said. Bribie Island, part of Queensland's Moreton Bay region, is a popular holiday destination. The RACQ LifeFlight Rescue helicopter crew was called to the remote beach scene The United States' former ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested on suspicion of being a Cuban spy in a long-running FBI counterintelligence investigation. Manuel Rocha, 73, was arrested in Miami Friday, according to the Associated Press. More details of the allegations against him will be outlined when he appears in court Monday. Insiders said the Justice Department has accused Rocha of working to promote the Cuban government's interests. He served under both Democratic and Republican administrations during his 25-year diplomatic career. Much of his career was spent in Latin America during the Cold War, which included a stint at the US Interests Section in Cuba. The United States' former ambassador to Bolivia Manuel Rocha, 73, was arrested on suspicion of being a Cuban spy Much of his 25-year long career was spent in Latin America during the Cold War, which included a stint at the US Interests Section in Cuba Rochas wife, Karla Wittkop Rocha, would not comment when contacted by the AP. 'I dont need to talk to you,' she said before hanging up. He was the top US diplomat in Argentina between 1997 and 2000 as a decade-long currency stabilization program backed by Washington was unraveling under the weight of huge foreign debt and stagnant growth. As ambassador to Bolivia, he intervened directly into the 2002 presidential race, warning weeks ahead of the vote that the U.S. would cut off assistance to the poor South American country if it were to elect former coca grower Evo Morales. He also served in Italy, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, and worked as a Latin America expert for the National Security Council. Born in Colombia, Rocha was raised in a working-class home in New York City and went on to obtain a succession of liberal arts degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown before joining the foreign service in 1981. Following his retirement from the State Department, Rocha began a second career in business. As ambassador to Bolivia, Rocha (right) intervened directly into the 2002 presidential race Rochas wife, Karla Wittkop Rocha (left), would not comment when contacted by the AP. 'I dont need to talk to you,' she said before hanging up He has held senior roles at XCoal, a Pennsylvania-based coal exporter; Clover Leaf Capital, a company formed to facilitate mergers in the cannabis industry; law firm Foley & Lardner and Spanish public relations firms Llorente & Cuenca. 'Our firm remains committed to transparency and will closely monitor the situation, cooperating fully with the authorities if any information becomes available to us,' Dario Alvarez, CEO of Llorente & Cuencas U.S. operations, said in an email. In recent years the Justice Department has stepped up its criminal enforcement of illicit foreign lobbying. Federal law requires people doing the political bidding of a foreign government or entity inside the U.S. to register with the Justice Department. Developing story, check back for updates... Radical reforms to make it easier for young people to buy property and company shares must be approved to restore Britain's faith in capitalism, ministers have been warned. A new report by Policy Exchange said more aspiring homeowners should be able to commission and build their own houses amid the cost-of-living crisis. The influential think tank has also called for the leasehold system to be abolished and for more people to be taught how to invest. Other reforms proposed by Policy Exchange include creating a new market-led 25-year fixed rate mortgage product to boost home ownership and implementing tax super deduction for employee ownership schemes to give more workers a stake in their companies. The authors cited polling which suggests that only 13 per cent of under-50s think capitalism is working effectively, and some 67 per cent of Millennials and Generation Zs want to live in a socialist economy. A new report by Policy Exchange said more aspiring homeowners should be able to commission and build their own houses amid the cost-of-living crisis (Stock Image) Senior Tories have praised the proposals as crucial to winning over disillusioned voters ahead of the next general election - especially young people struggling to get on the housing ladder. Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch said: 'Ownership not only brings material benefits, but imbues a sense of responsibility, of care and of stewardship in those who possess it. It is why, as Business Secretary, I have been proud to champion those who invest in our industries - and to create the conditions for small business owners to thrive. 'The success of the Conservative Party depends upon us broadening the base of those who feel they have a tangible stake in society. 'There is a clear moral case that those who work hard have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their labours. 'This includes the right to decide how to make use of and enjoy your own property, without undue interference by the state. 'It is not by redistribution and nationalisation, but by expanding the circle of ownership that we will make our society wealthier, fairer and more inclusive.' Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch said: 'Ownership not only brings material benefits, but imbues a sense of responsibility, of care and of stewardship in those who possess it' Science minister Andrew Griffith said that the conservative party needs a 'specific pitch to young people about why it should be supportive of our capitalist economic model' Science minister Andrew Griffith added: 'People feeling that they have a stake in society and can aspire to own property is fundamental to the long-term success of conservative philosophy. 'The Conservative Party needs big ideas about what it should do in Government. Perhaps more importantly, it needs a specific pitch to young people about why it should be supportive of our capitalist economic model. 'Increasingly, younger generations are being denied opportunities in society enjoyed by previous ones, and this is eroding popular support for our way life.' The authors suggest that 'more and more, young people see capitalism as the cause of society's principal problems' rather than a solution. 'If capitalism is to endure, we must create more capitalists - more property owners with a stake in the fortunes of our country' they added. A Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities spokesman said: 'Supporting young people to own their own homes is a Government priority, and since 2010 we have helped over 860,000 households to purchase a home through Government backed schemes. 'We have also laid out an ambitious long-term plan for housing to ensure we deliver the homes that communities across the country want and need.' Reform UK honorary president joked that he would lead the Tories in the future Rishi Sunak has declined to rule out Nigel Farage rejoining the Conservative Party as a member, describing the party as a 'broad church'. Mr Farage left the Tories in 1992 following the signing of the Maastricht Treaty and has since led Ukip and the Brexit Party, now called Reform UK. He is currently honorary president of Reform UK. Asked about Boris Johnson's father Stanley saying the party needed a man of Mr Farage's 'talents', Mr Sunak did not reject the possibility of him returning. The PM said: 'Our party has always been a broad church but my focus is consistently on delivering on the things that matter to people.' The Prime Minister refused to rule out Nigel Farage rejoining the Conservatives, describing the party as a 'broad church' Mr Farage left the Tories in 1992 following the Maastricht Treaty. He attended this year's Conservative Party conference in his capacity as an anchor for GB News Mr Farage attended the Conservative Party conference this year in his capacity as an anchor for GB News. The former MEP was greeted as a hero by many of the Conservative faithful and spent much of his time posing for selfies and signing autographs, sparking rumours he could return to the Tory fold. He has joked that he will lead the party in the future and has discussed his potential return while appearing on ITV's I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! An elderly great grandfather has been charged with murder after allegedly stabbing his wife to death. Frank Dimasi, 91, was hit with the charge on Monday following the death of his 85-year-old wife Maria in Findon, in Adelaide's west, late on Saturday night. Police were called to the home at about 11.20pm following 'reports of an incident' and found Maria's body with multiple stab wounds. Dimasi, who uses a walking frame and is believed to suffer from a neurological disability, was arrested at the home and taken to Queen Elizabeth Hospital under police guard for treatment for non-life-threatening and self-inflicted injuries. Frank Dimasi was hit with the charge on Monday following the death of his 85-year-old wife Maria (pictured) in Findon, in Adelaide's west, late Saturday night Dimasi was described by shocked neighbours as a 'frail' man suffering from what appeared to be early onset dementia and would often be seen walking from their home to the corner store and back. Forensic officers were seen searching the home for evidence on Sunday before a deep-clean van was called to the property. Mrs Dimasi, better known in Adelaide's Italian community as 'Nonna Maria', was a beloved cook who would always make meals for the vulnerable. She volunteered her time at her grandson's kitchen Nonna's Cucina - a community-based meal service which provides food to those recovering from illness or medical treatment, the elderly and people with disabilities. Mrs Dimasi is seen alongside celebrity chef Maggie Beer and her grandson Stefan Dimasi Mrs Dimasi was also regarded as the communities 'matriarch' who was known for sharing her Italian recipes and for attending local children's birthday parties. Neighbours said she was in 'good health' and would often be seen using her mobility scooter along her street. Mrs Dimasi was also known for being incredibly proud of her family and always doting on her three children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas paid tribute to Mrs Dimasi, praising her volunteer work at Nonna's Cucina. 'On a personal level, Maria Dimasi was a very significant contributor to our state, particularly in the western suburbs' Italian community,' Mr Malinauskas told reporters. 'Nonna's Cucina, which will be very well-known to a lot of South Australians, did amazing work delivering meals to people that are vulnerable, particularly the elderly. 'This is a good person who has lost their life in tragic circumstances.' How can I know my mothers dreams if I dont know the language she dreams in? Editors note This article is the ninth in a series about intercountry adoptions. While over 160,000 Korean children have been adopted abroad since the 1950-53 Korean War, it is believed that many cases have infringed on relevant laws or violated children's right to know the truth about their filiation. The series will review such violations in transnational adoptions of Korean children and elsewhere, and discuss receiving countries' moves for their own investigations. This series is co-organized with Human Rights Beyond Borders. ED. By Susanne Seong-eun Bergsten In an interview with poet and translator Don Mee Choi, Korean poet Kim Hye-soon spoke about the language of death. Feminine writing, she says, unlike masculine language, begins from a place of emptiness/nothingness, a place thats full with the presence of absence. This is where my language begins and ends: with loss. A loss of family, sisterhood, culture, language and native country. My native country, Korea I am its present absence. My voice, my speech, is Koreas phantom limb, its ghost haunting all of us, including myself. Starting in the 1950s in the aftermath of the Korean War and continuing to present times, more than 200,000 children were adopted abroad, making Korea the largest exporter of children in history. I was one of those children. Let us be clear: there is no Korean history without the presence of our absence. There is no Korean language without the ruptures of our disappearances. We, who never learned our native tongue but nevertheless had to find a way to speak. In the past decade, many Korean adoptees and original families have come forward with stories describing a corrupt system, which failed to protect the children and their original families and has deceived adoptive parents. There are stories of mothers whose children were stolen during birth and put up for adoption, and children who got lost or kidnapped in public places, never to be seen again. In my case, my paperwork was never falsified, nor were my parents deceived by agents of the adoption industry. But even in the best of cases, such as my own, there is a loss that can never be undone. I had a great childhood with Swedish parents who raised me in a home full of love. I also had a chance to reunite with my Korean family and both my families have met, embraced, wiped each others tears, and shared laughs and meals together. And yet, I often wonder who I could have been if I had grown up with my sisters in Gwangju and what it would feel like to speak and listen to my Korean mother effortlessly, without the labor and hazards of translation and mistranslations. I wish I could ask her about her dreams. How can I know my mothers dreams without knowing the language in which she dreams? Right now, Koreas Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating the countrys past adoption practices, which have been tainted by corruption and coercion. Korean adoptees from around the world have filed a case with the commission in which they are looking into hundreds of adoptees cases where adoption papers have been falsified, adoptees were given new identities and registered as orphans when they, in fact, had living family members and relatives, some of whom were searching for them for years. In much of the discourse, popular as well as juridical, intercountry adoptions are often posited as being in the best interest of the child. But what does the best interest of the child really mean in the context of adoption? The best interest of the child is a legal principle found in international treaties such as the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC), which was ratified by Korea in 1991 and lays out that the principle shall cover all decisions affecting the child. The convention states that the best interest principle should be the paramount consideration in adoptions. It means that the best interest of the child is more important than anything else when determining adoptions, without detailing what the best interest is in any given situation. Its worth noting that the principle has also been misused and given grounds for violations of childrens rights in various ways. In its ambiguity, what is in the best interest of a child can be subjective to the determining party and thus it has been used so that adopted children have been prevented from knowing their biological family in their own interests. In Korea, the principle is not well known, used or referred to. The Child Welfare Act in the country does not refer to the best interest but instead mentions that the interest of children shall be considered preferentially. When signing the CRC, Korea said that it did not consider it to be bound by the provisions that would require it to ensure that the adoption of a child is authorized only by competent authorities who determine, in accordance with applicable law and procedures and on the basis of all pertinent and reliable information, that the adoption is permissible in view of the child's status concerning parents, relatives and legal guardians and that, if required, the persons concerned have given their informed consent to the adoption on the basis of such counseling as may be necessary. Instead, private agencies oversaw adoptions for decades with little oversight. Only since 2013 have adoptions gone through family courts and been overseen by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. In 2013, Korea signed The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Adoption Convention), a treaty created to protect international adoptees, but failed to ratify it. The convention holds that adoptions should be in the best interest of the child, and sets out that first and foremost, a child should stay with their own family, and if not possible, domestic adoption should be the next option. Only as a last resort, it states, should a child be sent abroad for adoption. Koreas failure to make this treaty law has left children more vulnerable to harm. However, reports state they aim to finally ratify the treaty by 2025. Meanwhile, the countrys National Assembly was quick to adopt the Protected Birth Act in the beginning of October. This new legislation is meant to protect women and children by allowing women experiencing a financial crisis or dealing with an unwanted pregnancy to give birth anonymously, sealing the birth record and with the intention of giving the child up for adoption. The child has the possibility to petition a court when they turn 18 to unseal the birth record. However, this law and the way a childs birth is registered without the birth parents is concerningly similar to the previous process where children were made into paper orphans for adoption. The law also does little to support pregnant women and the economic conditions of families in need and also fails to protect childrens rights to preserve their identity and relation to their families. Perhaps the legal mechanisms are not enough to protect adoptees and if so, how can I find solace in the very system and discourse from which my rights were annihilated in the first place? The language of death, as I read poet Kim, is not a fatalistic or pessimistic one. My language, the language of Koreas lost children, is the language that reaches beyond the limits of definite national and legal imaginaries. In that place, beyond the objectivity and positivism of historical and legal narratives, my story challenges the idea that one can simply repair my wounds by invoking rights that I could not fully enjoy from the start. Mine is the language of the feminine, to follow Kim it is the sound of silence you hear when history is told without my name in it. Susanne Seong-eun Bergsten is a Korean adoptee who grew up in Sweden. She has a background in journalism and international law and is currently based in San Francisco where she works for an international human rights organization. She has authored several pieces on gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health and rights in Korea. She has also been engaged in voluntary work and advocacy for adoptee rights. Email to contact@hrbb.org for inquiries about the article. The children of British women who joined the ISIS terror group are being returned to the UK and put up for adoption, it has emerged. At least ten children are said to have been repatriated from detention camps in Syria. Those that have been repatriated are understood to be mainly orphans of unaccompanied minors. Among them were two siblings whose British mother is believed to have been killed in northeastern Syria in 2019. Their father, who is not British, is understood to have been captured and is currently in a detention camp for foreign fighters, The Sunday Times reports. The Syria-born siblings were repatriated last year and are said to be living with foster carers in south-east England and are set to be adopted, despite one set of grandparents that do not live in the UK being willing to care for them. Campaigners say that this offer was rejected by the local authority that is responsible for the children in Britain. They were initially transferred with other relatives to al-Hol detention camp in northeastern Syria following the collapse of the self-proclaimed Caliphate, but were later moved to an orphanage. It is said that this is when London became involved. Children gather outside their tents, at al-Hol camp, which houses families of members of ISIS, in Hasakeh province. MailOnline is not suggesting these children are among those being sent to the UK A woman sits with her child on the ground at Camp Roj, where relatives of people suspected of belonging to the Islamic State (IS) group are held, in Syria. MailOnline is not suggesting these children are among those being sent to the UK Charities say that seven other unaccompanied children have been returned to Britain, with one further being allowed back last October with his mother. All are believed to have received counselling, with older children possibly having been referred to the Prevent deradicalisation programme. It is estimated that at least 38 children with ties to the UK remain in camps in Syria, along with 21 women. Among them is Shamima Begum, the east London girl who left to join ISIS with two friends aged 15 in 2015. Ms Begum was stripped of her British citizenship by the Home Office. All three of her children, fathered by a Dutch-born Jihadist, died. Britain is the last Western state to have refused to repatriate families that joined the ISIS, and has made exceptions only for a small number of unaccompanied children. The United States has claimed that repatriation is the 'only durable solution'. There are growing calls for the government to change course, with fears that children stranded in Syria are both in danger and at risk of radicalisation. Reprieve, a human rights charity, said that the UK was 'abdicating responsibility' and that boys faced being moved to dangerous adult prisons when they reached adolescence. 'It shames ministers and shocks the conscience that British kids are growing up in freezing tents in dangerously unstable detention camps simply because their government refuses to bring them home,' Katherine Cornett told The Sunday Times. A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: 'Each request for consular assistance from Syria is considered on a case-by-case basis taking into account all relevant circumstances, including, but not limited to, national security.' Arizona's Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake described the surge in migrants crossing through the southern border as an invasion by a 'foreign army' of 'fighting-aged men' as migrant encounters reach record levels. Lake, who has not yet conceded she lost the governor's race in 2022, said on Fox New's Sunday Morning Futures that her state will be forever changed if action is not taken on the border crisis. John R. Modlin, Chief Patrol Agent of the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson Sector, said for the week ending December 1, there was a total 17,500 apprehensions on the border in the region. 'The worst border in the whole country is in Arizona and is the Tucson sector,' said Lake, a former TV newsreader who is a vociferous supporter of Donald Trump. 'This is not families coming across, and we do have those, but the majority of these people are fighting aged men. We are watching as we are being invaded and we're seeing a foreign army basically pour across out border.' Arizona 's Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake said her state is being invaded by a 'foreign army' of 'fighting-aged men' as migrant encounters reach record levels John R. Modlin, Chief Patrol Agent of the U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson Sector, said for the week ending December 1, there was a total 17,500 apprehensions on the border in the region In September, US Customs and Border Protection data revealed migrant encounters at the US southern border hit all-time high of 269,735 'We talk a lot about Bidenflation, we have a Bidenvasion happening on the border in Arizona.' Earlier this year, DailyMail.com documented hundreds of African migrants crossing into the US in Lukeville, Arizona, in broad daylight. An ongoing diplomatic spat between the US and Nicaragua means the latter country is now charging refugees a $160 entry fee, then turning a blind eye as migrants head north towards the United States. In September, US Customs and Border Protection data revealed migrant encounters at the US southern border hit all-time high of 269,735, including 218,763 Border Patrol arrests at illegal crossing points, and another 50,972 expulsions at ports of entry. The record monthly figure brought the total number of migrant encounters for the recently concluded 2023 fiscal year to 2.48 million, up from 2.38 million in 2022, and the highest of any year on record. US Customs and Border Protection data showed migrant encounters at the southwest land border remained high with 231,529 in October and 235,173 in November. Republican Congressman Juan Ciscomani of Arizona has called for the National Guard to be deployed to help deal with the spiraling migrant crisis. 'Tucson Sector is leading in encounters and our agents and officers are overrun and undermanned,' Ciscomani wrote to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, hours before senators issued a statement revealing another popular port of entry would close amid the influx of arrivals. 'The situation is far past a breaking point and those on the frontlines of this crisis are in need of immediate support,' he added, citing the 3,000 encounters seen at the Tuscon Center on Thursday. Demanding immediate federal intervention, the rep stated: 'We must be doing all we can to help our local communities, law enforcement officers, and CBP agents and officers. 'No one knows the gravity of this situation better than our local officials,' he went on, as the Lukeville Port of Entry 150 miles west was similarly overrun. He told Mayorkas, who assumed to top spot at Homeland Security in 2021: 'As you consider this request, I urge you to work with Governor Katie Hobbs, as well as Arizona county supervisors, mayors and sheriffs.' Shocking video from last week showed human smugglers taunting news crew at Arizona-Mexico border and blowing kisses at them while using power tools to saw hole in wall. Week in Review... - 17,500 Apprehensions - 131 Federal Criminal Cases - 18 Rescues - 10 Human Smuggling Events - 8 Narcotics Events #HonorFirst pic.twitter.com/cfie54n3Ya John R. Modlin (@USBPChiefTCA) December 1, 2023 A stretch of border seen near the Tuscon Sector Border Patrol HQ is seen here A fleet of SUVs belonging to a cartel pulled up to the border in Lukeville and eight people were escorted out of the vehicles. Migrants including a family and an elderly man with one leg were assisted through the small gap in the wall by the smugglers. Around two hours later, the cartel crew returned with electric power tools to cut a new hole in the wall. They used electric saws and drills as well as a generator for the task before they began taunting the television crew. The smugglers blew kisses and laughed as they continued to cut a hole through the wall. GOP Senator Lindsey Graham said he has 'lost all confidence' in US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin after he warned Israel faces a 'strategic defeat' if it cannot contain civilian casualties in Gaza. During a Sunday morning appearance on CNN's State of the Union with Dana Bash, Graham countered that 'strategic failure' from Israel would be 'letting Hamas stand.' He made the comment in response to a question about Secretary Austin's recent claim that Israel's continued killing of civilians in Gaza as it seeks to eradicate Hamas would yield a 'tactical victory' at the expense of a 'strategic' one. 'He's so naive. I've just lost all confidence in this guy,' said Graham, slightly exasperated. 'Secretary Austin is telling Israel things that are impossible to achieve,' he said, asking what strategy the head of DoD would suggest implementing in order to eradicate Hamas. 'If you've got a better idea of how to defeat Hamas, pass it on, but quit criticizing Israel in public,' he continued. Senator Lindsey Graham said the DoD leader should stop openly criticizing Israel's military tactics 'Strategic defeat would be inflaming the Palestinians? Theyre already inflamed. Theyre taught from the time theyre born to hate the Jews and to kill them.' Graham called the civilian population of Gaza 'radicalized' and cited the way Israeli hostages were treated by Palestinian civilians as evidence. On Saturday, during a speech at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, Austin said that the 'civilian population' of Gaza is the 'center of gravity' in the ongoing fight between the two sides. 'And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat,' he said. Hamas leaders say the number of casualties in Gaza since October 7 has reached more than 15,000, most of whom they say were women and children. 'The reason so many Palestinians are dying, I think, is because Hamas wants them to die,' Graham said when Bash gestured to the number of dead Palestinians. 'No Republican,' he said, 'is telling Israel to change their military tactics,' because it's not clear how they would change them and still accomplish the goal of defeating Hamas. Late last week, Israel said it would continue its military operation in Gaza following a ceasefire that lasted several days while a number of the roughly 240 Israeli hostages were exchanged for three times the number of Palestinian terrorists. Hamas ultimately broke the ceasefire and decided not to pursue a pause in fighting in order to release more hostages at this time. On Saturday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Israel was sacrificing a strategic victory for a tactical one because of the rising number of dead Palestinians Hamas authorities claim more than 15,000 Palestinians have died since they started the war on October 7 Some injured Palestinians are seen at the Al-Shifa Hospital which houses thousands of injured and displaced people After a temporary ceasefire that Hamas broke last week, Israel announced its military operation in Gaza has resumed Graham, a longtime foreign policy wonk, said he thinks the way to continue pushing for more freed hostages, several of whom are believed to be American citizens, is to put pressure on Iran. 'Hamas doesn't exist without Iranian help,' he said. Over the weekend, Israeli forces continued to bomb swathes of Gazan territory, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians. For weeks, Israel has warned civilians in Gaza to move south in the enclave as their battles against Hamas raged in the north, and it continued to be labelled as a safer option despite continuous Israeli bombing of Khan Younis and other areas. Now, the IDF has declared that they are fighting 'strongly and thoroughly' in the south, with warnings to displaced civilians to evacuate even further south away from the fighting. Chief of General Staff Herzi Halevi said on Sunday: 'Yesterday, and today, we eliminated brigade commanders, company commanders, many operatives, and yesterday morning we started the same process in the southern Gaza Strip,' he said. On Sunday night Israel also announced it had eliminated a key Hamas figure who had organized the October 7 attacks. In a statement it said an IDF jet has struck and killed Commander Haitham Khuwajari, head of Hamas' Shati Battalion. Israel has vowed to annihilate Hamas after the October 7 attack during which 1,200 Israelis were murdered in barbaric fashion. The Iranian-backed group is sworn to Israel's destruction South Australians are mourning the loss of slain officer, 'legendary country cop' Jason Doig, at a public police funeral in Adelaide. Brevet Sergeant Doig was killed and Sergeant Michael Hutchinson wounded after they were allegedly shot by Jaydn Stimson, 26, at a rural property in Senior, near the Victorian border, on November 16. Stimson remains in hospital under police guard and has been charged with murder and attempted murder. The police investigation is ongoing. Acting police commissioner Linda Williams on Monday remembered Sgt Doig as a police officer who had an unwavering dedication to his community and a kind and empathetic nature. Jason Doig (pictured) was killed during an alleged shooting near the Victorian border on November 16 Acting police commissioner Linda Williams on Monday remembered Sgt Doig as a police officer who had an unwavering dedication to his community (funeral pictured) SA Police Commissioner Grant Stevens is pictured, left, with his wife Emma. They lost their son in an alleged hit-and-run two days after Sgt Doig's death 'What I've learned is that Jason was regarded by many as the quintessential bloke who embodies what it means to be a country police officer,' Ms Williams told mourners. 'The universal description of Jason is that he was kind, caring, generous and unique.' A police chaplain said Sgt Doig was remembered as a legendary country cop. SA Premier Peter Malinauskas, ahead of the memorial, announced the state government would donate $100,000 to Women's Safety Services SA in Sgt Doig's honour. The police officer's family requested mourners also donate to the organisation in lieu of flowers. Monday's event was the second public memorial in as many weeks, after more than 1000 people gathered to mourn the loss of SA Police Commissioner Grant Stevens' son on Thursday. Charlie Stevens died on November 18 after sustaining irreversible brain injuries in an alleged hit-and-run incident at schoolies. Brevet Sergeant Doig died at a rural property in Senior, near the Victorian border, on November 16 Colleagues acted as pallbearers at Sergeant Jason's Doig's funeral (pictured) Sergeant Jason Doig had a public funeral at the Adelaide Convention Centre on Monday Landmarks were lit up in blue in memory of Sgt Doig and in support of the police family more broadly last week. Blue lights also shone on buildings across Adelaide, including police headquarters, Adelaide Oval, parliament house and Adelaide town hall. Ms Williams previously said both Sgt Hutchinson and Constable Rebekah Cass, who was also at the scene of the shooting but was uninjured, were home recovering from the incident. '(They) placed themselves at great personal risk to render first aid to Brevet Sergeant Doig and handcuff the accused under what was an incredibly confronting and distressing incident,' Ms Williams said. 'It is now evident to me that Sergeant Hutchinson and Constable Cass performed their duties on the night with courage and bravery.' Sgt Doig's live-streamed funeral service began at 11am at the Adelaide Convention Centre. The 53-year-old had served in the southeast for more than a decade after taking up a post at Lucindale in 2011. He joined the force in 1989. The winning bidder at a mansion's auction got down on one knee after spending $8.5million to buy the most expensive house in Sydney sold at the weekend. The French-inspired five-bedroom home at 28 Joubert Street Hunters Hill, in Sydney's north-west, sold on Saturday after 26 bids. But the sale of the sandstone house - which went for $2million above the buyer's guide after 26 bids - wasn't the only thing attendees were celebrating. Seconds after winning the auction, the male buyer fell to one knee and asked his partner to marry him in the backyard of their future home. Overwhelmed with emotions and still grasping the auction paddle, she said yes, triggering applause from those in attendance. The auction of a mansion in Sydney's Hunters Hill (pictured) has provided the backdrop of a shock proposal after a bidder dropped the knee moments after winning the property 'Everyone was shocked, no one knew about it,' selling agent Nicholas McEvoy, from Bresic Whitney, told Daily Mail Australia. Poll Is an auction a good place to propose? Yes, it's so lovely No, it's too overwhelming Is an auction a good place to propose? Yes, it's so lovely 81 votes No, it's too overwhelming 186 votes Now share your opinion 'He's gotten down onto his knee and of course she said yes... everyone was obviously clapping for joy.' Mr McEvoy said the downsizing sellers were 'ecstatic' to watch the price rise $2million above the buyer's guide and even more than optimistic estimates. 'The guide was $6.5million and we were telling visitors the price can be anywhere between there and $7.15million,' he said. 'No one believed it would get as big as it did on the day.' The property was first built in the 1850s for Hunters Hill's first mayor, Didier Joubert, who the street is named after. The five bedroom, three bathrooms and two car space home with views of the Lane Cove River plus a sandstone granny flat was last sold in April 1996 for just over $1million. BresicWhitney's website describes the property as 'a magnificent French-inspired home.... (Where) majestic entrance stairs lead to this classic, elevated home with a slate roof, precise stonework and immense verandas, perfect for entertaining'. Despite being overrun with emotions and still grasping the auction paddle, she said yes, triggering a mass applause from those in the auction's attendance (stock image) The couple purchased the five-bedroom sandstone mansion for $8.5million on Saturday, making it the most expensive property that was sold in Sydney on the weekend While the couple will cherish both moment and their new house, Aussies without the access to such funds are struggling to break into the market. Despite the increase of housing prices slowing down in November the median price for a property in Australia rose to a record high of $753,654. To pay off the average Aussie property without spending more than 30 per cent of a salary, the threshold for mortgage stress, a buyer would need a salary of about $150,000 - much greater than the average salary of $92,000. While those looking to buy a property are are being priced out, rising mortgage rates are also causing buyers to cross the mortgage stress threshold. Research from Finder released in November found the average mortgage repayment in November was just above $3,600 having increased from about $2,300 in April 2022. 'Aussies with a $590,000 mortgage will now be forking out roughly $1,345 more per month than they were in April last year,' the head of consumer research at Finder, Graham Cooke, said. 'That's a huge amount of extra money to be spending on your mortgage, especially when the cost of almost everything else is also going up.' Civil rights lawyers have come out against an Illinois high school's program to racially segregate the school's math and English classes in an attempt to boost black students' scores. The attorneys add that the program at Evanston Township High School - which is a majority minority school with just 44 percent white students - may also be illegal. Evanston offers Algebra 2, pre-calculus, AP calculus and an English seminar in what's called AXLE - Advancing Excellence, Lifting Everyone - and GANAS - from a Spanish expression meaning 'giving it all you got' - for black and Latino students. According to the school board, part of the school system's goal is: 'Recognizing that racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished achievement of students, ETHS will strive to eliminate the predictability of academic achievement based upon race.' While Superintendent Marcus Campbell said the program gives students of color 'a different, more familiar setting to kids who feel really anxious about being in an AP class,' other see it as undermining civil rights gains. The attorneys add that the program at Evanston Township High School - which is a majority minority school with just 44 percent white students - may also be illegal The program 'does not distinguish between mandatory and optional activities' under Title VI, argues William Trachman, a former official in the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights. Title VI law bans racial discrimination by federally-funded programs. 'There is no way that could possibly pass legal muster if someone sued,' civil rights law expert David Bernstein told the Free Beacon, adding that it was 'blatantly unconstitutional.' The programs, which students can sign-up for voluntarily, began with a pilot in 2019, though the school has yet to release any outcomes or statistics on whether they have any affect. The Wall Street Journal reported that 105 students are participating in the GANAS program, while another 86 are in the AXLE courses. Students, who were not identified, have testified that they are getting something out of the classes. 'I feel like I represent me and not the whole black race in this AP class,' said an alum of an AXLE class. Taya Kinzie, pictured, is principal of the school offering racially-segregated math and writing classes, which civil rights lawyers have warned may be illegal 'It's a safe space. In AP classes that are mostly white, I feel like if I answer wrong, I am representing all black kids. I stay quiet in those classes.' During the 2021-22 school year, 8 percent of white AP testers got a three or higher, while only 61 percent of Latino and 48 percent of black test takers did as well. Getting a three on those tests is usually the minimum requirement for college credits. 'I feel accepted for the first time in a long time,' said a GANAS program learner who said she was half-Latina. However, in addition to the potential legal ramifications, a racial equity consultant who has worked for the school for over a decade admits that it would be ideal if they were no longer needed in the future. 'The ultimate goal is not having an affinity section of algebra,' Glenn Singleton said. 'It's to have no disparity.' No lawsuit is reported to have been filed yet against these programs, which are also in use in liberal outposts like Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland. Federal antidiscrimination laws prevent public schools from separating students based on race, so it may face future challenges. At least 11 hikers were found dead following the eruption of a volcano in Indonesia - and the search to find 12 others who are missing is on hold due to safety concerns. The Marapi volcano erupted on Sunday, leaving nearly 75 climbers trekking up the nearly 2,900-meter mountain stranded, according to AFP. The eruption spewed hot ash as high as 9,843 feet into the air. Authorities have raised the alert to the second-highest level and prohibited residents from going within 1.8 miles from the crater's mouth because of the possibility of lava. 'There are 26 people who have not been evacuated, we have found 14 of them, three were found alive and 11 were found dead,' said Abdul Malik, head of Padang Search and Rescue Agency. A total of 49 climbers were evacuated from the area. Eight of those rescued were rushed to hospitals with burn wounds and one also had a broken limb. The Marapi volcano erupted on Sunday, leaving nearly 75 hikers stranded. There are 26 people who have not been evacuated, 11 of which were found dead and 12 are still missing Rescue teams evacuate a victim of the eruption of Mount Marapi. Three people found by rescuers were alive Rescuers talk to a man affected by Monday's volcano eruption in Marapi, Indonesia 'Some suffered from burns because it was very hot, and they have been taken to the hospital,' Rudy Rinaldi, head of the West Sumatra Disaster Mitigation Agency said to AFP. 'Those who are injured were the ones who got closer to the crater.' Falling ash blanketed several villages and blocked sunlight, National Disaster Management Agency spokesperson Abdul Muhari said. Authorities distributed masks and urged residents to wear eyeglasses to protect them from volcanic ash, he said. About 1,400 people live on Marapi's slopes in Rubai and Gobah Cumantiang, the nearest villages about 3.1 to 3.7 miles from the peak. Shocking footage showed one lucky survivor caked in ash at the bottom of the volcano. The woman, named as 'Zafira', appeared to be filming herself at the base with thick ash and dirt in her face, on her clothes and in her hair. One lucky survivor was pictured at the base of the volcano following the eruption The woman, named as Zafira, was fortunate to get away as 11 perished after the eruption The eruption sent ash plumes nearly 10,000 feet into the air and hot ash clouds spread several miles Marapi has been active since a January eruption that caused no casualties. It is located on the Pacific 'Ring of Fire' Authorities distributed masks and urged residents to wear eyeglasses to protect them from volcanic ash Marapi's alert level was maintained at the third-highest of four levels, Abdul Muhari said. He confirmed that authorities had been closely monitoring the volcano after sensors picked up increasing activity in recent weeks. Marapi has been active since a January eruption that caused no casualties. It is among more than 120 active volcanoes in Indonesia, which is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the Pacific 'Ring of Fire,' an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin. Sources told DailyMail.com at least nine 'non-human craft' have been recovered by the US government A Republican congressman and a UFO expert agree that the government knows more than they're letting on about mysterious aircraft. Author and journalist Garrett Graff and Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett jointly spoke out on the issue in a Meet the Press Reports on NBC News. Graff, author of UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government's Search for Alien Life Here - and Out There said, 'The government is covering up some level of its knowledge and understanding about what some of those things are.' 'There is something real here. There are things out there in our air space that we do not understand what they are, and that those could represent exquisite new adversary technology, but they could also represent science that we don't understand.' The expert said the coverup could be two-fold, including both the governments own secret development of planes, drones, new technologies as well as what the government is sensing and detecting in and around US airspace. Graff also said be believes the government likely knows more than they're saying - but not necessarily that they have confirmed what the mysterious aircraft themselves are. Author and journalist Garrett Graff said, 'The government is covering up some level of its knowledge and understanding about what some of those things are' Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett is calling for transparency for tax payers from the government about what they know about UFOs 'What I'm unconvinced of is that the government is covering up meaningful knowledge of, you know, alien spacecraft, alien visitors, extraterrestrial contact, Graff said. He noted it is possible NASA does not have evidence of alien life is because humans may not have the technology to detect it. Multiple sources told DailyMail.com a secretive CIA office has been coordinating the retrieval of crashed UFOs around the world for decades. One source said that at least nine apparent 'non-human craft' have been recovered by the US government some wrecked from a crash, and two completely intact. Three sources briefed on those alleged top secret operations told DailyMail.com that the Office of Global Access (OGA), a wing of the Central Intelligence Agency's Science and Technology Directorate, has played a central role since 2003 in orchestrating the collection of what could be alien spacecraft. The three sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals, have all been briefed by individuals involved in those alleged UFO retrieval missions. Representative Burchett is calling for transparency from the government on what they know about these UFOs. 'If it doesnt exist, then why do they keep spending the money to tell us,' said the congressman from Tennessee. 'You know, since 1947, they've told us these things don't exist, yet Harry Reid funded, very well funded millions of dollars towards research of it. And and they spent a whole heck of a lot of time, effort. And money on telling the American public they don't exist, but yet they're studying.' Burchett said, 'Case in point, I proposed an amendment to the FAA reauthorization bill and it basically just said if a commercial airline pilot were to spot some anomaly or a UFO, as we used to call them, and they would issue a report to the FAA, which they would, but also that report would be made to Congress.' 'Well, it was blocked. The whip told me that it was blocked. And I said, why was it blocked? He said the intelligence community blocked it. And I said, wait a minute. You mean you mean the committee? And he said, no the community.' US Space Force, the Pentagon branch tasked with protecting America from space-based threats, local and galactic, has detected thousands of UFOs in Earth's orbit. In recent years, Pentagon officials tasked with investigating UFO cases, including the now famous 2004 Tic Tac incursions America's newest military branch created under President Trump in 2019, told personnel in November that the sightings were so regular that they are 'hindering threat identification,' the branch's core mission. In recent years, Pentagon officials tasked with investigating UFO cases, including the now famous 2004 Tic Tac incursions. In 2004, Navy pilot Chad Underwood shot footage of a strange flying object in the sky flying over the Pacific, which was also seen by Navy commander David Fravor. Underwood coined the description 'Tic Tac' for the 'perfectly white' wingless oblong that was captured from his cockpit's in-flight video. Fravor described the Tic Tac object as being 'perfectly white, smooth and had no windows,' with 'two little objects that came out of the bottom'. An anti-Semitic mob was blasted by Pennsylvania's governor for screaming threats into a Jewish-owned falafel store in Philadelphia. The group marched at the Goldie's location in Center City chanting: 'Goldie, Goldie you can't hide, we charge you with genocide.' The Philadelphia chain is owned by Mike Solomonov, an Israeli-born, Pittsburgh raised chef who has won the James Beard Award in the past. The chants were denounced across the political spectrum, including in a post on X by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. 'Tonight in Philly, we saw a blatant act of antisemitism - not a peaceful protest,' said Shapiro, the state's third-ever Jewish governor. 'A restaurant was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli. This hate and bigotry is reminiscent of a dark time in history.' Shapiro added that he's reached out to Solomonov 'to share our support and Lori and I look forward to breaking bread there with them again soon.' Sunday's mob threats came at the same time as students at the nearby University of Pennsylvania - called for an 'intifada' - a violent uprising against Israel. A mob the Democrat governor of Pennsylvania called anti-Semitic protested a Jewish-owned Philadelphia falafel restaurant Sunday night, making claims that it was complicit in genocide The protests were led by the Philly Palestine Coalition, who also tried to distract fans watching the Philadelphia Eagles game in local bars by chanting: 'While you're watching, bombs are dropping.' A driver threw a plastic bottle at protesters, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, though others cheered the demonstrations. Meanwhile, a video of a group of students at the nearby University of Pennsylvania were chanting in favor of 'Intifada revolution.' The original intifada is the name given to a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, beginning in 1987. The clip has been seen by over 829,000 people after it was posted by LibsOfTikTok on X. A group marched at the Goldie's location in Center City chanting: 'Goldie, Goldie you can't hide, we charge you with genocide.' The chants were denounced across the political spectrum, including in a post on X by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro At the same time, a group of students at the University of Pennsylvania - where anti-Semitic threats were recently projected onto school buildings - went viral for calling for an 'intifada' The Ivy League institution has been frequently under fire over anti-Semitism since the October 7 attacks on campus after anti-Jewish slogans were projected onto three of the school's buildings. The school is now facing a civil rights complaint as it is accused of being a 'magnet for anti-Semites.' 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,' read one message splashed across the John M Huntsman hall in mid-November. The slogan demands the land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, meaning the end of the State of Israel. Slogans projected on Penn Commons read: 'Zionism is racism' and demanded UPenn president Liz Magill call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Another message declared: 'Penn funds Palestinian genocide.' It comes after the prestigious school increased security and contacted the FBI after a string of reports of threats against Jewish students. The Brandeis Center said it will file a complaint against the school, stating it 'has allowed its campus to become a hostile environment for its Jewish students as well as a magnet for anti-Semites.' The complaints 'seek immediate and specific action to address increasing discrimination against and harassment of Jews in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.' The University of Pennsylvania is under fire again over anti-Semitism on campus after anti-Jewish slogans were projected onto three of the school's buildings. The above slogan demands the land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, meaning the end of the State of Israel UPenn said that several of its staff members received 'vile, disturbing anti-Semitic emails' threatening violence against Jews on campus, particularly in Penn Hillel, an on-campus Jewish organization, and Lauder College House. University president Liz Magill wrote: 'These messages also included hateful language, targeting the personal identities of the recipients. Penns Division of Public Safety was immediately notified and responded. Penn Police also notified the FBI of this potential hate crime and a joint investigation is underway. Magill has also acknowledged 'swastikas and hateful graffiti' and 'chants at rallies, captured on video and widely circulated, that glorify the terrorist atrocities of Hamas, that celebrate and praise the slaughter and kidnapping of innocent people, and that question Israels very right to exist.' The school is working with the FBI to 'identify the individual or individuals who are responsible for these hateful, threatening emails and to ensure they are apprehended and punished to the fullest extent of the law,' per Magill. Earlier in November, a clip emerged purportedly showing a UPenn student praising Hamas' 'glorious October 7' incursion into southern Israel. The clip, shared by Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres, apparently shows a student addressing a crowd and urging them to remember the scenes in Israel a month ago today. She described the 'joyful and powerful images which came from the glorious October 7', adding she remembered 'feeling so empowered and so happy'. The speaker concluded her speech saying, 'Hold that feeling in your hearts... channel it through every action you take... go down to the streets every day and don't ever let them feel like you quietly accept this genocide.' A slogan projected on Penn Commons read: 'Zionism is racism' One of the messages demanded UPenn president Liz Magill call for a ceasefire in Gaza Late last week, Israel said it would continue its military operation in Gaza following a ceasefire that lasted several days while a number of the roughly 240 Israeli hostages were exchanged for three times the number of Palestinian terrorists. Hamas ultimately broke the ceasefire and decided not to pursue a pause in fighting in order to release more hostages at this time. Over the weekend, Israeli forces continued to bomb swathes of Gazan territory, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians. For weeks, Israel has warned civilians in Gaza to move south in the enclave as their battles against Hamas raged in the north, and it continued to be labelled as a safer option despite continuous Israeli bombing of Khan Younis and other areas. Now, the IDF has declared that they are fighting 'strongly and thoroughly' in the south, with warnings to displaced civilians to evacuate even further south away from the fighting. Chief of General Staff Herzi Halevi said on Sunday: 'Yesterday, and today, we eliminated brigade commanders, company commanders, many operatives, and yesterday morning we started the same process in the southern Gaza Strip,' he said. On Sunday night Israel also announced it had eliminated a key Hamas figure who had organized the October 7 attacks. In a statement it said an IDF jet has struck and killed Commander Haitham Khuwajari, head of Hamas' Shati Battalion. Israel has vowed to annihilate Hamas after the October 7 attack during which 1,200 Israelis were murdered in barbaric fashion. The Iranian-backed group is sworn to Israel's destruction Drivers were warned to take extra care on 'Ice Rink Monday' today amid a 'do not travel' alert and a 280-mile wall of snow after temperatures dropped to -6C (21F). Snow and ice warnings have been issued until midday in Scotland, northern England and North Wales as well as a rain warning for South West England until 6pm. The snow warning in Scotland was 280 miles wide, with 4in (10cm) expected. Parts of the Peak District and North Wales could get up to 6in (15cm) above 1,150ft (350m). The mercury dipped to -5.9C (21.4F) in Scotland and -3C (26.6F) in England early this morning, causing icy patches on untreated surfaces due to thawed snow refreezing. The Lake District was worst hit by heavy snow and Northern Rail said 'do not travel' to passengers in Lancashire and Cumbria trying to get between Lancaster and Carlisle via Barrow-in-Furness and also between Oxenholme Lake District and Windermere. Cumberland Council told parents nearly 40 schools will be shut today due to the weather. It comes after hundreds of drivers were rescued from their cars yesterday when drifts more than a foot deep blocked roads and brought down power lines. Some reported being stranded for up to 19 hours without food or water before help came. Around 2,500 residents spent yesterday without electricity as engineers battled treacherous conditions to repair lines damaged by the severe blizzards. A major multi-car crash closed the M4 between junctions 21 and 22 in Gloucestershire this morning, while the A30 was shut eastbound between the junctions with the A377 and the M5 near Exeter in Devon due to an accident. There was also flooding on the A46 near Nottingham; the A303 eastbound between the A371 and the junction with the A350 west of Salisbury in Wiltshire; and the A1 southbound between the junctions with the A6121 and the A47 near Peterborough. The Environment Agency issued 95 alerts for 'possible' flooding and 22 warnings for 'expected' flooding across England - mostly in the South West and Midlands. Dangerous conditions in the Peak District this morning as the region is hit by snowfall Sheep graze on snowy fields in the Peak District this morning amid the severe weather Motorists battle through dangerous conditions on roads in the Peak District this morning Visibility is very poor on roads in the Peak District this morning amid severe conditions A yellow weather warning for ice by the Met Office is in place across much of the north of England until noon today, with further warnings for snow covering the eastern side of Scotland, high ground in Wales and the Peak District until the same time Today, a yellow weather warning for ice from the Met Office was in place across much of the north of England until noon today. Met Office weather warnings today Snow and ice - Eastern Scotland - Until 12pm Snow - Peak District and North Wales - Until 12pm Ice - Northern England - Until 12pm Rain - South West and South Wales - Until 6pm Advertisement Further warnings for snow covering the eastern side of Scotland, high ground in Wales and the Peak District were in place until the same time. Simon Williams of the RAC said northern parts of the UK could be facing an 'ice rink Monday as snow refreezes overnight'. He also urged staff to work from home if possible. Mr Williams said: 'We're expecting some very treacherous icy conditions in northern parts, so those who have to drive should exercise great caution. If it's possible to delay or even abandon journeys that may well be the best option. 'Those who decide to drive should leave extra space behind the vehicle in front, and reduce their speed to give plenty of time to stop. 'Before setting out, it's important to allow more time to de-ice and de-mist vehicles thoroughly.' The Met Office also issued a yellow warning for heavy rain creating disruption to travel across parts of southern England, South East Wales and into the Midlands which will last until 6pm. The warning was extended west this morning to include more of Devon and Somerset. Met Office severe weather warnings remain in place for much of Britain this morning Forecasters said rain and hill snow will ease tomorrow with brighter spells developing Frost and fog clears for bright spells on Wednesday, wet and windy weather is set to arrive The wet and windy weather is expected to push north and east into Thursday More heavy rain is expected on Friday, although temperatures could get up to double figures ScotRail has advised passengers to check their journey before leaving home. The operator added: 'It's another cold start to the day. We're making sure platforms are gritted, but it may still be slippery at the station. Met Office weather forecast for Christmas The Met Office has issued a forecast for the period of December 18 and January 1 as follows: 'Conditions are most likely to be changeable through this period. Wetter and windier than average conditions are slightly more likely than normal, especially in the west and northwest. Temperatures are most likely to be near or above average overall, especially in the south and west. It is possible that there will be further colder interludes, but these likely to be short lived at first. Perhaps a greater chance of a longer cold spell late in the period.' Advertisement 'Please take care when you're travelling and remember that first train services of the day will take some time to heat up after being in the depots overnight.' Electricity North West said it was making hot food available at Greenodd Service Station in Ulverston this morning for customers who remained without power. Yesterday evening, it revealed 1,500 properties in Cumbria remained without electricity after power cuts followed heavy snow in the county. The electricity network operator said it had restored power to 7,500 homes, adding that 'access continues to be a major issue and even specialist 4x4 vehicles cannot reach all sites' with 'equipment for repairs being carried on foot in some locations'. It added that Cumbria's power network had been severely impacted by the snow, with more than 35 separate incidents of damage to the network reported, including 'severe damage to miles of overhead lines'. The UK Health Security Agency and the Met Office have issued amber cold health alerts in five regions - the East Midlands, West Midlands, North West, North East and Yorkshire and the Humber - until tomorrow, meaning 'cold weather impacts are likely to be felt across the whole health service for an extended period of time'. The Met Office said Saturday saw the coldest temperatures since last winter, with -12.5C (9.5F) recorded in Altnaharra in the Highland region of Scotland. A snow-covered street in Sheffield overnight as parts of the UK experience severe conditions A motorist battles through the snow in Sheffield last night as the cold spell continues A police car smashed into the front of a house in Darlington, County Durham, last night Snow blanketing houses in Sheffield yesterday morning amid the severe weather That same location was the coldest place in Britain this morning, as the mercury dipped to -5.9C (21.4F). READ MORE Second homeless person is found dead on the freezing streets of Britain Advertisement England and Wales were expected to be largely cloudy outside the warning areas today with outbreaks of rain, some of them turning heavy. Overnight snow was predicted to be confined largely to the North East and on hills with frost and ice in the north and north west. The Met Office said rain and hill snow will gradually ease across England and Wales tomorrow with brighter spells developing. It will be sunnier but cold elsewhere with a few wintry showers in the North East, and lighter winds for most. After frost and fog clears for bright spells on Wednesday, wet and windy weather is expected to arrive from the South West, pushing north and east into Thursday and Friday, with some initial hill snow. Cumbria police said ice 'will have a continued impact on Cumbria's roads' today and urged people not to travel to the region unless absolutely necessary. The force posted on X: 'If you are travelling today there is a yellow weather warning for ice in place. Please be aware of black ice on many of the county's roads and ensure you drive to the road and weather conditions.' It comes after officers, fire crews and mountain rescue teams worked through the night to rescue motorists trapped in one foot of snow in the southern Lake District on Saturday. Hundreds bunked down in schools, scout huts and church halls, or walked for hours to find refuge. Many A-roads and the M6 where several jack-knifed lorries blocked the motorway were affected, and dozens of minor routes remained either closed or impassable yesterday. Although some snow was forecast on Saturday, locals, tourists, motorists and, it seems, the Met Office were caught off guard by the heavy snowfall. Mike Smith, 39, his partner, Sammy Tancock, 38, and his three step-children were among 100 people forced to spend the night at Hawkshead Esthwaite Primary School, in Ambleside, after being stuck in their car for eight hours. The family had been to watch the annual Grizedale Forest Motor Rally when they became trapped. Ambleside resident Jane Renouf told the BBC: 'In all the years I've been here, which is over 50, I've never seen snow like it. It completely blanketed the town. It is about a foot deep.' There were reports of people abandoning their vehicles to trudge for up to six hours home through the drifts, including one man who skied for over an hour from Ings to Bowness after traffic came to a standstill. The man, known only as Rory, said: 'I just got my ski touring kit out the boot and started skiing... At the bottom of the hill a load of people were clapping. It was good fun.' Elsewhere in the North, locals were undeterred by the snowy conditions including revellers in Leeds who took to icy pavements in high heels to enjoy the countdown to Christmas. Hanwha Aerospace, a Korean defense company, said Monday it has signed a 3.45 trillion-won ($2.66 billion) contract with the Polish government to provide 152 K9 self-propelled howitzers to the European country by 2027. The deal forged with Warsaw's Armament Agency is part of a larger framework agreement reached between Hanwha and Poland in July of 2022 to supply 672 K9 howitzers and 288 Chunmoo multiple rocket launchers. The first contract was signed in August of last year. Under the second deal, Hanhwa has pledged to offer comprehensive integrated logistics support for the maintenance of K9 units and collaborate on the local production of maintenance parts for the military vehicles. A Hanwha official said the latest contract has helped the company forge a "deep trust" with Poland and "provide the foundation for a continued and ongoing cooperative relationship." (Yonhap) Rail union bosses have sparked fury after enjoying a Christmas bash with Labour MPs ahead of train drivers striking this week. Aslef chief Mick Whelan and more than 100 union members attended the holiday party with the lawmakers at the four-star Earl of Doncaster Hotel on Friday. MP Kate Osborne, who shared video footage on the bash on social media, hailed the party as 'wonderful' and applauded her Aslef 'comrades', saying she stood in 'solidarity to those taking strike action'. It comes as members of the train drivers' union are taking strike action this week in a long-running dispute over pay. Parts of the country had no trains over the weekend and there will be more disruption for the rest of the week. Britain's beleaguered pubs, bars and restaurants are also set to be dealt an 800million hammer blow this festive season as rail unions launch a string of walkouts that will impact an industry that was already crippled by draconian and damaging lockdown restrictions imposed during the pandemic. Rail union bosses enjoyed a Christmas bash with Labour MPs on Friday, ahead of train drivers striking this week MP Kate Osborne, who shared video footage on the bash on social media, hailed the party as 'wonderful' and applauded her Aslef 'comrades', saying she stood in 'solidarity to those taking strike action'. She is pictured at Friday's bash Ms Osborne posted a video from the holiday party to TikTok and X, formerly Twitter. The clip showed the glitzy event which saw her receive a gift from Mr Whelan and MPs pulling crackers. 'Great to be with Aslef comrades in a womderfully (sic) venue and solidarity to all those taking strike action today,' she tweeted. 'Lovely to have the 3 wise Men @grahamemorris @IanLaveryMP & @IanMearnsMP at table - even if Lavery cheated with the Christmas cracker!' Labour receives funding from Aslef as its affiliate so it is not surprising that union bosses and some members were invited to the bash. But the party is likely to infuriate many commuters and business owners who are feeling the direct impacts of Aslef's forthcoming walkouts. A week of commuter chaos is expected after Aslef members voted to stage a further six months of walk outs in a long-running dispute over pay. Overtime will also be banned until Saturday which will lead to further disruption and cancellations. Train drivers across England started a week-long ban on overtime on Friday which is expected to disrupt services. However, commuters needing to travel during the busy pre-Christmas weekends have already expressed their frustrations on social media after being stranded with no rail replacement service. One person unable to get a bus replacement service with Great Northern on Saturday wrote on X: 'Please explain why as a service industry you think it is acceptable not to provide a service to passengers. I have an annual season ticket and you are letting me and all other passengers down.' Train drivers across England started a week-long ban on overtime on Friday which is expected to disrupt services. Pictured: East Midlands Railway Luton Airport Express trains sit in a sidings near Kettering train station in Northamptonshire on Saturday Pictured: Members of the Aslef union on a picket line near to Leeds train station in June 2023 MPs have called for more details from the Government over its controversial plans to ensure a minimum level of service during rail strikes. New regulations will force unions to agree to make sure a certain number of trains run during industrial action. The Transport Select Committee has been holding inquiries into how the new regulations will apply during rail strikes. Members of the committee urged the Government not to overlook risks when it introduces the regulations and be ready to learn lessons where necessary. They have laid out three criteria by which the Department for Transport (DfT) should judge whether the introduction of minimum service levels (MSLs) has been successful: whether imposing them inadvertently leads to 'novel' forms of protest, if industrial disputes are prolonged, and whether they lead to better working relationships between rail unions, the industry and Government. The committee said ministers issued a one-sentence response: 'The Government welcomes these suggested criteria and will carefully monitor the impact of MSLs.' Transport Committee chairman Iain Stewart said: 'The Government has signalled its intention to implement MSLs as soon as possible. Given it has an unresolved dispute with the train drivers' union Aslef, we could see these regulations in action very soon. 'My committee felt that the Government's plans could have included more detail, as throughout our inquiry voices from the sector were calling out for guidance from DfT on how to prepare for this new way of working. 'We were disappointed by the Government's half-hearted response to our recommendation on how it will judge the success or otherwise of MSLs. 'There is a risk of MSLs worsening worker-employer relations and that, as a result, MSLs could end up making services less reliable. 'We will watch with interest how the department intends to assess the success of MSLs as the regulations come into force. 'I urge the Government to keep a close eye over how this develops and learn lessons where necessary. After all, major changes to timetabling on the rail network haven't always gone seamlessly in the past.' Scenes at Paddington Station in London as members of the drivers' Aslef union stage a 24-hour strike on October 4 Full list of train strikes this week Tuesday, December 5 - C2C and Greater Anglia Wednesday, December 6 - Southeastern, Southern/Gatwick Express, the SWR main line and depot, and on the Island Line Thursday, December 7 - CrossCountry and Great Western Railway Friday, December 8 - Northern and TransPennine Express Full list of Advertisement Meanwhile, as rail walkouts are planned through Friday, December 8, experts fear that the hospitality sector is set to be dealt another belting blow. One analysis by UKHospitality estimates that the walkouts could wipe 800million off the sector. It comes after a separate analysis predicted that rail strikes since last summer have cost Britain's economy more than 5billion. UKHospitality Chief Executive Kate Nicholls last week warned that the ongoing dispute could cost the industry up to 800million over the winter holidays and has already cost the hospitality business more than 3billion. Christmas time is particularly important for the UK hospitality sector because people tend to cut down on their spending between January to March. The holiday season is a vital source of income for certain bars and restaurants to survive. Ms Nicholls said: 'These strikes will hit hospitality businesses at the start of the critical festive period and will devastate trading during one of the busiest weeks of the year, costing the sector up to 800million. 'The ongoing rail dispute has already cost the sector 3.5billion over the past year and a half and continues to disrupt businesses, prevent staff from working and interrupt families' Christmas plans.' Industrial action last year caused a predicted 1.5billion in losses for the UK hospitality sector. A food court in Carnaby Street is empty during 2022 rail walk outs Cafes and bars in Soho appeared empty during what is usually a busy trading period for the hospitality and retail industry last year Earlier this year, hospitality brands Greene King, Fuller's, Mitchells & Butlers and Wasabi have signed an open letter, alongside UKHospitality, to the Transport Secretary, RMT, ASLEF and Rail Delivery Group, urging them to 'redouble efforts' to resolve the ongoing dispute. According to Keith Knowles, CEO of Beds & Bars, its sales were down 70 per cent on average on strike days. Thorley Taverns, which runs almost 20 pubs in Kent, claimed that strikes had 'decimated' the number of visitors from London to the Kent coast. RMT boss Mick Lynch was labelled Mick 'Grinch' after the 2022 walkouts, which scuppered thousands of people's Christmas travel plans. A severe tropical cyclone is set to form in Australian waters on Tuesday but the Bureau of Meteorology says it is too early to tell where it will make landfall. The tropical low is currently over the Solomon Islands in the Coral Sea - about 1,000 nautical miles north-west of Cairns - but it is travelling south-east directly for Queensland. Bureau senior forecaster Felim Hannify said the system would likely develop into a tropical cyclone by Tuesday and then intensify to a Category 3 later this week. Your Weather Channel JCW on Facebook said the weather models are forecasting the cyclone could 'slide down' the coast and threaten land anywhere from Townsville down into NSW. 'Which was our nightmare scenario,' the page states. A severe tropical cyclone is set to form in Australian waters on Tuesday but the Bureau of Meteorology says it is too early to tell where it will make landfall A tropical low forming off Australia's north-east coast could make landfall by early next week which one weather group called a 'nightmare scenario' The amateur weather group said it forecasted three likely tracks the cyclone will take. The first is that that the system will hit land near Cairns or Townsville and the second is that it could make landfall further south at Gladstone or Bundaberg, early next week. The third track the cyclone could take is the stay out to sea but hover near the south-east Queensland coast. 'A majority of ensembles keep it well east and well off the Queensland coast, though there are a couple of members that push it westwards towards parts of the Queensland coast,' Mr Hannify said. 'Some of them push it anywhere from Sydney anywhere up to Cairns.' Early on Monday the low will track west early into what is deemed Australia's area of responsibility. It has a high chance of developing into a tropical cyclone on Tuesday, by which time it will be in the Solomon Sea. The system will power up on Wednesday and from Thursday through Friday and has a 90 per cent chance of forming a tropical cyclone about 100km west of Papua New Guinea's Sudest Island. If it does form into a cyclone in Australia's patch, it will be called Cyclone Jasper. If it does form into a cyclone in Australian waters it will be called Cyclone Japser The weather pattern raises the risk of severe thunderstorms in central areas of Queensland, which could bring large hail, damaging winds and heavy rainfall. A severe heatwave warning remains in place for the far north and the north-east tropics. A high pressure system over the southern part of Australia will see temperatures heat up in the major capitals, with the storms of the past week largely dissipating. Outback regions in West and South Australia may even see temperatures soar to as high as 45C. Adelaide in particular expect sweltering heat in the weeks ahead. Other major state capitals are looking at a dry start to the first full week of Summer with temperatures in the high 20s to low 30s. More wet weather is expected to hit southern Australia by the end of the week While the severe storms that hit the eastern coast this week have passed more rain is set to develop towards the end of the next seven days The cyclone developing off the far north of Australia could drive monstrous surf conditions Israeli investigators probing the fallout of the brutal October 7 attacks have found evidence that men as well as women suffered sexual violence and rape at the hands of Hamas and Islamic Jihad attackers, activists have claimed. Yael Sherer, a spokeswoman for Israel's Survivors of Sexual Violence advocacy group, said there was physical evidence as well as eyewitness accounts of sexual violence perpetrated against both sexes amid the attacks. 'There was sexual violence and rape in these communities in the south of Israel... we have a few living survivors - not a lot - of both genders. It didn't only happen to women, it happened to men as well,' she told BBC Radio 4. 'Aside from finding bodies of people who were murdered, a lot of the bodies were mutilated... terrorists made sure to disgrace these people and dishonor them,' she added. It comes as Israeli police opened up the biggest investigation into sexual violence and crimes against women ever in the nation. The leader of the investigation, Shelly Harush, said: 'It's clear now that sexual crimes were part of the planning and the purpose was to terrify and humiliate people.' Police have collected thousands of statements, photographs and video clips that have been called unbearable to watch from a mother's perspective and include 'girls whose pelvises were broken they had been raped so much'. An Israeli officer walks on the ground of the Super Nova Festival in Re'im, Israel, 17 October 2023, which was attacked by Hamas on 07 October A pile of bodies are seen lying among debris at the Nova festival following the attacks Sigal Manzuri, whose daughters Norelle and Roya were killed when they attended the Nova festival, hugs family friend Lior Goldstein at a tribute to the people who were killed during the October 7 attack by Hamas gunmen, at the site of the festival Yoni Saadon, 39, who survived the attack on the Nova music festival by hiding under dead bodies, this weekend gave a harrowing account of the sexual violence he saw perpetrated against women at the campground. One horrifying image he described was the moment a woman's decapitated head rolled across the road, after she was beheaded for refusing to be stripped naked. As the sun rose on the desert festival and Hamas terrorists stormed in, Yoni took cover under a music stage. But a woman hiding alongside him was identified by terrorists. 'She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look as if I was dead too,' he told The Sunday Times. 'I will never forget her face. Every night I wake to it and apologise to her, saying ''I'm sorry''.' After an hour, the shift manager peeked out. 'I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her.' The woman was screaming 'stop it' he said, and begged the terrorists to kill her to put her out of her misery. 'When they finished they were laughing and the last one shot her in the head', he said. The father of four admitted how his mind kept reminding him it could have been one of his daughters, or his sister, who at the last minute bowed out of the festival. The horror was far from over for Yoni as, hiding in the bushes, he saw two more Hamas fighters catch a woman. 'She was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her,' he recalled. 'They threw her to the ground and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too.' Yoni shared his story with The Sunday Times at a support group for the festival survivors in Sitria, south east of Tel Aviv. Three times a week survivors from around Israel get together with parents whose children were among those slaughtered. Volunteer therapists on hand included Bar Yuval-Shani, 58, who lost her only sister, Deborah, and brother-in-law, Shlomi Matias, both musicians and peace activists, killed on Holit kibbutz by militants who broke into their safe room. Festival attendees flee the Hamas attackers. The identities of alleged victims in the investigation into sexual violence have not been shared by Israeli police Sitting on the back of a terrorist's motorcycle, her outstretched arms pointing towards her helpless boyfriend, student Noa Argamani pleads for her life Yoni Saadon's account is one of several witness accounts of rape Yuval-Shani has heard from festival survivors, all of whom, she says, are 'deeply traumatised'. But Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a lawyer and professor at Israel's Bar-Ilan University and advocate on gender-based violence, has hit out at international agencies she said have been reluctant to recognise the October 7 attacks as crimes against humanity. 'We wrote letters to the CRC committee, to the special rapporteur on violence against women, to UN women, and to numerous other UN entities and we asked them to recognise that this has taken place, to condemn it, and to acknowledge this was crimes against humanity. 'We kept on writing to them - a petition of over 800 lawyers and gender in law experts... regrettably, until a week ago none of them said the explicit words ''sexual violence'' that was performed by Hamas towards Israel. 'This took them too long... much much too long.' Eight weeks after the attacks in which 1,200 were killed and 240 taken hostage, there has been mounting evidence of widespread rape on October 7. According to the people who had to take away the lifeless bodies from the massacre sites, many of the women were left naked with serious signs of bleeding from their genitals. Haim Outmezgine, commander of a special unit of Zaka, that collects the remains of bodies said: 'We collected 1,000 bodies in ten days from the festival site and kibbutzim. No one saw more than us. 'It was clear they were trying to spread as much horror as they could to kill, to burn alive, to rape it seemed their mission was to rape as many as possible.' David Katz, head of the Lahav 443 criminal investigation unit, did not give a precise figure for the number of cases under investigation, but said the inquiry could take 'six to eight months'. A mother has been killed by a shark which ripped off her leg while she was desperately trying to save her five-year-old daughter off a Mexican beach. Graphic video appears to show the aftermath of the attack as the victim lay on the sand after being helped out of the water off Melaque Beach in the state of Jalisco. Horrified onlookers could be heard shouting 'she's lost her leg' as they waited for emergency teams to arrive on Saturday morning. Despite the quick response by rescuers, the woman - identified locally as a 26-year-old tourist called Maria Fernandez Martinez Jimenez - died of blood loss from a massive bite wound. Local reports said Maria had helped her daughter to safety by placing her on a floating platform after becoming aware she was in danger while the pair were swimming 65ft off the beach on Mexico's Pacific coast. The dead woman has been identified locally as a 26-year-old tourist called Maria Fernandez Martinez Jimenez, a former marine biology student from the University of Guadalajara A graphic video appearing to show the aftermath of the horror incident was published overnight as the victim lay on the sand after being helped out of the water The attack on Saturday morning is thought to have occurred as a swimming race was taking place which was subsequently suspended. Local authorities issued a warning to locals and visitors yesterday to stay out of the water following the tragedy. Well-wishers later left flowers at a makeshift altar erected on the beach at the spot where the woman died. Civil Protection workers and firefighters in the municipality of Cihuatlan, which Melaque Beach is part of, said in a message after the incident: 'Our officials were carrying out support activities during a swimming event in the bay when they received reports of a person who was having problems getting out of the sea. 'When they reached the area they discovered a woman who was lifeless with one of her legs amputated, apparently following a shark attack.' Cihuatlan's municipal government said in a subsequent message, after publishing a pixellated still picture of the footage appearing to show the aftermath of the attack: 'Following the terrible incident off one of our beaches, our priority is guaranteeing the safety and wellbeing of all our citizens. 'That's why we've decided on a precautionary measure of banning access to beaches until further notice. 'We are working in collaboration with the appropriate authorities to evaluate the situation and take the necessary measures to guarantee security on our beaches.' Authorities closed the beaches in Melaque and Barra de Navidad to swimming as a precaution. The woman was found 'lifeless with one of her legs amputated' on the beach in Jalisco state The dead woman has been described as a former marine biology student at the University of Guadalajara. University chiefs said in a Facebook tribute, saying it shared the pain of the victim's friends and family: 'We express our condolences following this irreparable loss.' A former University of Guadalajara student added alongside a photo of Maria: 'I want to express my condolences, affection and support for Maria's family following her death. 'I am accompanying this wonderful family I feel as my own in their pain and anguish. I am with you. Rest in peace Maria.' Shark attacks are relatively rare in Mexico. In 2019, a U.S. diver survived a shark bite on the forearm in Magdalena Bay off the Baja California Sur coast. Do YOU know what happened? Do YOU know what happened? Police have launched an investigation into a suspected arson attack after a bag engulfed in flames was left on a train carriage in west London. Officers were called to Leyton Underground station late Saturday evening for reports of a fire on the tube. Video shows how smoke filled the empty train as a bag, fully swallowed up by fire, melted into the floor of the carriage. Passengers watched from the platform as the blaze raged on. The fire caused 'extensive damage' to the carriage and it is understood that the suspect remains at large. British Transport Police have launched an appeal asking any witnesses or bystanders with footage of the attack to come forward. Police have launched an investigation into a suspected arson attack after a bag engulfed in flames was left on a train carriage at Leyton Underground station late Saturday evening Travellers stood along the platform watching and taking pictures and video as the blaze raged on and the carriage filled with smoke Footage of the aftermath shows how the interior of the carriage was burnt and left covered in black soot. The floor where the bag had been placed was completely melted and at least one glass window pane was shattered Smoke was seen coming from the carriage as the train pulled into Leyton Underground station around 10.13pm on Saturday, police have said. Officers were called to the scene just before 11.50pm to reports of a bag on fire. Footage captured at the scene shows how the carriage was filled with foggy, grey smoke as the bag burned on the floor. Travellers stood along the platform watching and taking pictures and video as the blaze continued. It is unclear how many people were aboard the train when the fire broke out or at what point the carriage was evacuated. But footage of the aftermath shows how the interior of the carriage was burnt and left covered in black soot. The floor where the bag had been placed was completely melted and at least one glass window pane was shattered. Detectives are asking anyone with information or footage of the incident and any witnesses - particularly those who were travelling on the train - to contact them at on 0800 40 50 40, or by texting 61016 with the reference 747-021223. Information can also be reported anonymously to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. MailOnline has approached British Transport Police for comment. Hollywood actress Gal Gadot has called on the United Nations to demand that every female hostage held by Hamas be released immediately, claiming that the world has failed them. The 38-year-old actress has consistently been vocal about her support for Israel since Hamas attacked Israel eight weeks ago. Referring to Hamas' deadly incursion, last night she said in an Instagram post: 'The world has failed the women of October 7th. 'We claim we stand against rape, violence against women. 'We will not let women be victimised and then silenced. 'We say we believe women, stand with women, speak out for women. Gal Gadot has been vocal about her support for Israel since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel eight weeks ago Ms Gadot's post makes reference to Shani Louk, 22, who was paraded in a Hamas video before a bone from the base of her skull was found three weeks after she was taken hostage Referring to Hamas' deadly incursion, Ms Gadot posted her message to Instagram last night 'On October 7th, the world witnessed Hamas carrying out its violent plans in real time. Within hours of the October 7th attack, the first blood-chilling video emerged of Shani Louk being paraded naked and defiled by her proud assailants. 'Yet two months later women are still hostage to these rapists and the world has failed to call this situation what it is: an urgent emergency that demands a decisive response. 'This is our moment as women and allies of women to act. I am beseeching all those who have done so much for women's rights globally - from the UN, to the human rights community, to please join in the demand that Hamas release every single woman hostage immediately - not after the next round of international mediation, not after another day. 'These women cannot survive another moment of this horror.' Ms Louk's motionless body was paraded by Hamas gunmen after the festival attack in Israel. It was unclear if she was alive in the video, although her mother later stated that she was alive and being held in a Gaza hospital Ms Louk, 22, was German but grew up in Israel, and was one of hundreds of unsuspecting partygoers at the Nova festival where Hamas conducted a massacre of some 260 civilians READ MORE: Israel says it is expanding its ground operations against Hamas' strongholds across the whole of the Gaza Strip as IDF continues to bomb territory after terrorists broke fragile truce Advertisement Shani Louk, 22, was pronounced dead after a bone from the base of her skull was found three weeks after she was taken by Hamas. Kidnapped by gunmen as she and her friends parties at the Nova festival near Kibbutz Re'im, her body was paraded after she was taken. Though her family held out hope that she was still alive, her family confirmed her passing in late October, though the circumstances of her death, as well as where and how the bone from her skull was found, are not currently clear Ms Gadot, who spent two years in the IDF as a combat fitness instructor, has been pushing for all remaining hostages to be released since war broke out between Israel and Hamas. Earlier this month, she hosted a Hollywood screening to show footage of Hamas' October 7 attack. The 47-minute video titled 'Bearing Witness to the October 7th Massacre', provided by the IDF, was shown in select locations across the world including in Los Angeles and New York. Smoke rising after Israeli attacks in Gaza, is seen from Sderot in southern Israel Young children injured in Israeli airstrikes arrive at Nasser Medical Hospital on December 3 in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Palestinian citizens inspect the destruction caused by air strikes on their homes on December 3, 2023 in Khan Yunis Smoke billows over the Palestinian enclave during Israeli bombardment amid continuing battles between Israel and Hamas The footage, which was mostly filmed by Hamas terrorists, includes murder, mass rapes and beheadings of Jewish people as well as the massacre at the Nova music festival. Shortly after the initial attack, the former Miss Israel 2004 was one of the first Hollywood names to support Israel, writing: 'I stand with Israel you should too. The world cannot sit on the fence when these horrific acts of terror are happening!' The star also asked her followers to donate funds for those affected by the attacks. Ms Gadot's call comes as Israeli investigators probing the fallout of the brutal October 7 attacks have found evidence that men as well as women suffered sexual violence and rape at the hands of Hamas and Islamic Jihad attackers, activists have claimed. Yael Sherer, a spokeswoman for Israel's Survivors of Sexual Violence advocacy group, said there was physical evidence as well as eyewitness accounts of sexual violence perpetrated against both sexes amid the attacks. There was sexual violence and rape in these communities in the south of Israel... we have a few living survivors - not a lot - of both genders. It didn't only happen to women, it happened to men as well,' Yael Sherer told BBC Radio 4. 'Aside from finding bodies of people who were murdered, a lot of the bodies were mutilated... terrorists made sure to disgrace these people and dishonor them,' she added. It comes as Israeli police opened up the biggest investigation into sexual violence and crimes against women ever in the nation. An Afghan refugee released from immigration detention after a controversial High Court ruling has been charged with two counts of indecent assault. Aliyawar Yawari, 65, appeared in the Adelaide Magistrates Court on Monday less than a month after he walked free from Yongah Hill Immigration Detention Centre in Western Australia. Police arrested Yawari at the Pavlos Motel in Pooraka in Adelaide's north on Saturday night after allegations a woman had been assaulted by a guest. He did not apply for bail and has been remanded in custody until January. Yawari was previously accused of attacking three women and was convicted of assault in 2016. The High Court's decision on November 8 allowed 148 dangerous non-citizens to be released from detention. Australian Border Force said a second man from the group has also been charged in New South Wales with drug possession. Aliyawar Yawari has been charged with two counts of indecent assault just three weeks after he was released from immigration detention after the High Court's controversial ruling Since his release from Western Australia's Yongah Hill detention centre (pictured) Yawari has been staying at motels Mohammed Ali Nadari, 45, was allegedly found with cannabis in Western Sydney after recently being released from immigration detention. He has been released on bail. Yawari was previously described by a judge as a 'danger to the Australian community' and has served a jail term for assaulting three women including one he hit with her own walking stick. The manager of Pavlos Motel - who gave the name Happy Mann when contacted by Daily Mail Australia - said Yawari had seemed like an ideal guest until the police turned up and told him of the alleged assault. 'He was really good,' Mr Mann said. 'He just talked to me a few times but it was all good, I didn't feel suspicious of anything.' Mr Mann said Yawari had been staying at the motel for a 'couple of weeks' and denied any knowledge of the alleged assault. 'Nobody knows what happened just the police know. They told us yesterday that he'd been charged,' Mr Mann said. One of the rooms in the Pavlos Motel in Adelaide's north where Yawari had been staying Guri Bhullar, who works on the motel's front desk, later confirmed Yawari had checked in on 14 November and described him as 'no trouble, always quiet a good guest'. 'He didn't like to speak much, he didn't come to reception too often so we didn't have much chat,' Mr Bhullar said. 'He was a quiet person, not a troublesome person: he used to stay in his own room.' Mr Bhullar was not working on Saturday night and did not hear of the alleged assault until later. 'The lady just called the police she didn't come to reception for any complaints that he was (allegedly) disturbing her,' he said. 'We just knew when the police came to the hotel.' It is understood Yawari was wearing an ankle tag at the time of his arrest. Yawari had arrived in Australia in 2010 after fleeing Afghanistan where his father and brother were killed by the Taliban. He found work in Bordertown in South Australia but between October 2013 and December 2014 he carried out attacks on women in rural parts of the state. In 2013 he was acquitted of rape but convicted of assault and received a suspended prison sentence. But in 2016 he was sentenced to three years and 11 months with a non-parole period of two years and eight months. After his sentence he was sent to immigration detention awaiting deportation but was released in November after the High Court ruled indefinitely holding refugees was unlawful. Shadow Minister for Immigration Dan Tehan has called for Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles to resign following 'news that two of criminals released from immigration detention have allegedly re-offended' Shadow Immigration Minister Dan Tehan has called on Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil (pictured) to resign 'The Government was asleep at the wheel when the High Court handed down its decision that resulted in the release of criminals from immigration detention,' Mr Tehan said. He claimed the Albanese government should have had 'a preventive detention regime, ready to go to protect the Australian public'. Legislation was rushed through last month to monitor and place under curfew the detainees released into the community. 'The Australian people rely on their governments to keep them safe. On this one crucial measure, the Albanese Labor Government has failed,' Mr Tehan said. He labelled the governments response chaotic and called for the two ministers to resign to restore trust. 'If they don't, the Prime Minister must sack them. This is a test for Anthony Albanese.' A plastic surgeon who was suspended twice in seven years following complaints about his treatment of patients has finally been struck off after he was caught carrying out illicit cosmetic surgery during the Covid lockdown. Dr Ashish 'Ash' Dutta was found guilty of serious professional misconduct after he performed three private operations for cash, despite assuring regulators no such procedures would be carried out during the pandemic to avoid spreading the virus. The operations included the removal of a cyst from one person, two lesions from another and a mole from a third between June 23 and July 15, 2020. Dutta admitted carrying out the procedures but claimed he did not believe they were 'surgical'. Dutta, 60 - once famed for offering 'lunchtime lipo suctions' - had previously been suspended for 12 months in 2012 over a botched boob job on a businesswoman, which left her needing four operations to fix the damage. And in 2019 he was suspended again for nine months over claims he offered a 600 discount to a patient in a bid to 'pressurise' her into undergoing breast augmentation surgery the following week - but he was cleared on appeal. Dr Ashish 'Ash' Dutta was found guilty of serious professional misconduct after he performed three illicit private operations during the Covid lockdown Dutta, 60 - who once became famed for offering 'lunchtime lipo suctions' - had previously been suspended for 12 months in 2012 over a botched boob job The latest illicit procedures were discovered during a separate investigation into other cosmetic procedures carried out by Dutta before the pandemic which left patients suffering medical episodes - as it emerged he had also carried out work despite regulatory restrictions on his practise. A Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service was told he had also lied about the condition of one patient who was left needing CPR after suffering a cardiac arrest on the operating table. Dutta, who runs his Aesthetic Beauty Centre clinics from Sunderland and Newcastle-upon-Tyne with his wife Wendy, has been ordered to have his name erased from the medical register after being found guilty of serious professional misconduct. Inquiries by the Care Quality Commission found he was operating outside the terms of a Dormancy Notice banning him for carrying out procedures and lied about carrying out 'Brazilian butt lifts' while subject to other conditions on his practise. MPTS chairman Mr Gerry Wareham told the Manchester hearing: 'Dr Dutta appears to have a deep seated attitudinal problem and has demonstrated a repeated willingness to step outside regulation. On repeated occasions he has demonstrated a tendency to seek to find a way around restrictions rather than adhering to them. 'His misconduct put his own interests ahead of the interests of patients and the wider public and he thereby put patients at risk of harm. He has demonstrated a persistent disregard for regulation and restrictions which had been imposed to promote patient safety and the intent of his actions was to avoid complying with regulations and therefore undermine safeguards. ' He added: 'Dr Dutta purposefully gave misleading information in an attempt to circumvent the frameworks put in place for patient safety. Based on the evidence received, the Tribunal could only conclude it was done for personal interests and financial gain. If permitted to practise, he would present a risk to patient safety.' Dr Dutta qualified in Calcutta in 1988 and, after moving to the UK, he worked in hospitals for 10 years in a variety of specialisms before becoming a full-time GP in 1996. He opened two private cosmetic surgery clinics in Sunderland and Newcastle in 2000 and 2004. In 2019 Dutta was suspended again for nine months over claims he offered a 600 discount to a patient in a bid to 'pressurise' her into undergoing breast augmentation surgery The investigation began in 2019 after Dutta himself contacted the General Medical Council and tried to minimise the condition of a patient who developed heart problems whist undergoing surgery. During the call he claimed the patient's heart rate had 'slowed down' and did not stop - but NHS staff who subsequently treated him said the incident was 'an extremely serious adverse event of a minor procedure'. The CQC were alerted and later carried out an inspection at the ABC Newcastle clinic in 2020 - but Dutta lied to investigators claiming the patient did not have a cardiac arrest at ABC. He also lied about undertaking other procedures despite written assurances in March of that year that no face-to-face consultations or surgical procedures would be carried out at the ABC clinics in Newcastle and Sunderland due to Covid. Inquiries revealed on June 23 2020 Dutta carried out the removal of a cyst on Patient D then on June 30 2020 removed two lesions from Patient E and on July 15 removed a mole from Patient F. The illicit procedures also put him in breach of interim GMC conditions imposed the previous May which placed restrictions on his work whilst unsupervised. Dutta admitted carrying out the procedures but claimed he did not appreciate the treatment was 'surgical'. His lawyer Mr Andrew Colman produced a recent patient satisfaction survey in which Dutta was described in 'glowing terms.' He said during the pandemic his client had immediately 'put himself on the front line of the response,' treated Covid positive patients and carried out house calls in full PPE at 'considerable risk to his own health'. He added: 'The CQC has been in a protracted confrontation with Dr Dutta, to the extent it had made unwarranted claims that he was not qualified as a cosmetic surgeon or as any kind of surgeon at all. This was a ludicrous allegation from the CQC considering Dr Dutta's roles as a trainer, an international examiner in cosmetic surgery and his training and development record. 'Against this background Dr Dutta is at a loss to understand how he is now facing erasure and the termination of his long and valued career.' Christmas markets across England have faced the axe this year, with the nation's oldest fair becoming the latest tragedy. England's oldest Christmas market in the city of Lincoln was called off this year over a 'significant risk to public safety', as market organisers around the UK blame rising costs, falling footfall and crowd safety as key concerns. Markets in Brighton and Felixstowe have also been called off, while in Durham the 'Christmas' market became a 'Winter' market this year in a bid to become more inclusive. Poor weather has also created extra problems for organisers - at the Essex County Christmas Fair, punters were turned away after muddy conditions created a 'swamp' in the car park, with even rescue vehicles becoming stuck. With light displays also cut around the UK as cash-strapped councils try and balance their budgets, some are facing accusations they have 'cancelled Christmas'. In 2022, almost 90 people were treated for injuries and the council had to enforce people-calming measures in order to prevent a crushing disaster Lincoln Christmas Market Ric Metcalfe, City of Lincoln Council leader, said the decision had been made as the 'current market has gotten way too big' and risked becoming 'unsafe' in the future Last year's four-day event saw 320,000 people flock to the city for its 40th year - but fears of crushes and other crowd injuries have meant the council rejected a last-ditch attempt to secure the future of the event. In 2022, almost 90 people were treated for injuries and the council had to enforce people-calming measures in order to prevent a crushing disaster. The event saw huge queues weave around the city's castle, with disgruntled punters describing it as a 'nightmare' and 'claustrophobia simulator'. Ric Metcalfe, City of Lincoln Council leader, said the decision had been made as the 'current market has gotten way too big' and risked becoming 'unsafe' in the future. MP for Lincoln Karl McCartney slammed the decision to cancel the market, saying: 'It doesn't seem rocket science to mitigate and ensure all aspects are catered for'. Speaking on BBC local radio, he criticised a council decision last week which voted against a motion which sought to ensure a market was considered in Lincoln for 2024. 'It wasn't to say we definitely want to bring the Christmas market... to just look at the possibilities of a different type of Christmas market that was done in a very safe and enhanced manner than previous Christmas markets. 'The Christmas market is something that not only everybody looks forward to who lives, works, studies or visits Lincoln but you can't even pay for the advertising that gave Lincoln and the county of Lincolnshire.' Cllr Ric Metcalfe, Leader of City of Lincoln Council, said: 'We understand some people's disappointment that Lincoln Christmas Market is no more. The decision was announced nine months ago on the basis that we simply could not continue delivering an event that had been deemed a significant risk to public safety. 'Lincoln at Christmas remains a stunning place to visit, with lights all across the city centre and our new Ice Trail and traditional festive activities taking place this weekend.' Durham 'Winter' Market The Bowes Museum, which was founded by the ancestors of the Queen Mother and is based at Bernard Castle, has this year removed the word 'Christmas' from the event's title A popular Christmas market in Durham was also the centre of controversy in recent weeks after it emerged bosses had renamed it the 'Winter Market' - seemingly in a bid to become more inclusive. The Bowes Museum, which was founded by the ancestors of the Queen Mother, has this year removed the word 'Christmas' from the event's title. BBC Antiques Road Trip expert David Harper called for the Durham museum's 'bonkers' decision to be reversed, saying it was deleting Christmas. Mr Harper claimed the museum was hoping to try and attract more people but was taking the joy out of Christmas. He told The Sun: 'What's next? Are we going to cancel Santa, the reindeer, children wearing Christmas hats? 'Essentially, all you'll be left with is a Wednesday market. This won't stop until we stop it. We need to nip this in the bud, take control and be a bit braver.' The Museum's director Hannah Fox strongly disputed the claims. She said: 'We have a very popular seasonal programme of events of which the market is the centrepiece. 'It's fabulous and everyone is welcome, however they celebrate over the festive season.' Brighton Christmas Market Last month Brighton & Hove City Council confirmed its Christmas market would not return after no commercial partner could be found to fund the event Brighton joined Lincoln in calling off its market altogether, saying it was facing an 'enormous funding crisis' which meant it could not stump up the 70,000 cost of hosting it. Last month Brighton & Hove City Council confirmed its Christmas market would not return after no commercial partner could be found to fund the event - as the council leader blamed low footfall. Lead councillor for tourism and culture Alan Robins said: 'Organising a Christmas market for the city was always dependent on finding a new commercial partner to help us to fund and co-ordinate the event. 'Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we have been unable to find a partner willing to commit to the project for a single year.' He continued: 'We wanted to create a different kind of Christmas market this year - because in the two years it was staged it was never actually all that popular with the public, and was also expensive for traders who wanted a pitch there.' The last two markets in Brighton have been held by an independent events company - but it ended its contract early citing problems caused by Covid and rising costs. Felixstowe Christmas Market Organiser Karen Stewart told the East Anglian Daily Times she had had come to the 'difficult decision' Event organisers in Felixstowe also named footfall as one of the factors in the decision to cancel. The Suffolk seaside town traditionally holds a Beach Street Christmas Market at the start of December. Organiser Karen Stewart told the East Anglian Daily Times she had had come to the 'difficult decision'. 'We didn't have as many people with availability to take part in this market as we had anticipated, or to make the great atmosphere and footfall we've had at previous markets,' she said. It marks a blow for local business as the decision came just days after two restaurants in the area were both forced to close. Essex Country Christmas Fair The annual fair takes place at Layer Marney Tower (pictured) Last month an Essex market was cancelled part-way through due to safety fears - after wet weather meant there was too much mud. The Essex County Christmas Fair, which takes place at Layer Marney Tower, had to be called off by Prestige Country Events as they launched a desperate social media appeal telling people to stop arriving. On Facebook, a post from the organisers read: 'We cannot let anyone else in... tonight, as the conditions in the car park are too boggy and we don't want anyone else getting stuck in the mud', the BBC reported. The three-day event was also cancelled the following evening, as organisers said: 'Do not arrive, event cancelled tonight. Cars stuck in mud.' A spokesperson added: 'Unfortunately after a year of hard work, huge financial investment and thousands of work hours, we have had to take the incredibly tough decision to cancel the Saturday and Sunday fairs, purely due to the weather. 'The field at the back had become a swamp, with rescue cars being stuck in the mud.' Oxford Christmas Market Oxford Christmas market was saved at the last minute after the previous organiser said council demands were 'impossible' Oxford's traditional Christmas market almost joined this year's casualty list after the organiser complained the council's insistence on cycle lane access made it too complicated to hold. Organiser Nicole Rahimi previously ran the event for more than a decade but claimed the council's stance made it 'impossible' to continue due to the 'high risk of accidents'. But the event was saved when new organisers were found, Oxford council confirmed. Andrew Gant, Oxfordshire County Council's cabinet member for highway management, said: 'We have worked closely with all partners to deliver a market that works for all parties, including residents, traders, and the cyclists who use Broad Street as a vital route.' Christmas Light Switch-ons Bournemouth's Christmas light switch on in 2016 - as the council confirms its cancellation due to a 44million black hole in its budget A number of light displays in Bournemouth and Christchurch have been called off Elsewhere Christmas markets are not the only casualty of this year's festive season - many towns have called off their light switch-ons too. The Mail previously reported how towns including Bournemouth, Bolton, Medway and Leominster are cancelling the events in order to save cash or as a result of local disruption such as roadworks. In Bournemouth, the switch-on was ditched after its 44,000 budget was scrapped in a cost-saving exercise - the council currently has a 44million hole in its finances. Medway Council took similar action and said it would save 75,000 - as they seek to fill a 17million budget gap. Braintree Council, in Essex, also blamed 'budgetary constraints' for cancelling its official switch-on event. A senior coroner has issued a warning about the inability of foreign health staff to speak English after hearing how carers looking after an elderly woman who died did not know the difference between 'bleeding' and 'breathing'. Barbara Rymell, 91, who suffered from dementia, died after she became trapped by a mechanical stair lift after a fall at the care home she lived at with staff being unable to free her, an inquest heard. The report found that in a 999 call, her two carers - one Romanian and one Indian - were unable to explain to the emergency services what had happened to her, and did not understand the difference between their patient being 'alive' or 'alert'. Their lack of English 'severely hampered' the call handler's response and made a 'meaningful' assessment of her condition 'virtually impossible', the coroner said. Following the call, Mrs Rymell's case was classified as 'serious' rather than requiring an 'immediate' response and when paramedics did arrive at the care home she was dead. The inquest heard how Barbara Rymell had passed away at the Ashley House Residential Home in Langport Senior Coroner for Somerset, Samantha Marsh, has now written to the Home Office and the Helen Whatley, minister for Health and Social Care to warn of the potential for future deaths if English standards are not addressed. In a highly critical report she said the current test for foreign health staff is 'wholly insufficient'. The Taunton inquest heard Mrs Rymell's death occurred on her first day as a resident of Ashley House Residential Home in Langport. The dementia sufferer arrived at the home on August 8, 2022, from hospital having suffered a fall in the community and was known to be frail with blurred vision and at a high risk of falling. 'She relied on others to keep her safe,' the coroner said. She was the only resident with a bedroom on the first floor but she was incapable of using the stairs or the stairlift on her own, the inquest heard. Mrs Marsh said in her report: 'On the evening of the 8th of August, 2022, two carers were on duty; neither of whom were native English speaking nationals; one was Romanian and the other was Indian. 'At 19:27 one of the carers called 999 to request an ambulance. It was clear, on the evidence, that Barbara had been left unattended on the mechanical chair for around five minutes. 'This was clearly contrary to the rules and procedures of Ashley House. 'During those five minutes she has left the seat of the mechanically operated stairlift (possibly unfastening the seat belt) and proceeded to climb the stairs; which she was unable to safely, due to do physical limitations and her underlying cognitive impairment. 'She has fallen on the stairs, falling downwards. Barbara has been found, having fallen awkwardly, landing with her head trapped under the chair for the mechanically operated stairlift. 'Care staff were unable to free her because of the positioning and angle at which she was entrapped within the mechanics. 'On calling 999 it was obvious that neither of the care staff were sufficiently proficient in English to be able to explain clearly the nature of the medical emergency. 'An internal audit by the ambulance service revealed that the call-handler had selected an incorrect pathway. 'The correct pathway that should have been selected was 'entrapment' but at no time during the call did the carer give any information that would have indicated that this was the presenting problem. 'The carer repeatedly used the word 'blocked' which added no assistance, clarity of explanation of the events that were unfolding. 'They did not understand the difference between 'bleeding' and 'breathing'. This made any meaningful triage of Barbara's condition virtually impossible. 'The call handler followed the script to ask if the patient was conscious and breathing (i.e. to ascertain clinical emergency and determination of a priority response) but this assessment was severely hampered given the carer did not appear to know or understand the difference between bleeding and breathing. '[The carers were also unable to] understand the difference between 'alert' and 'alive', which presented all of the same problems as referred above. 'Paramedics arrived on a category 2 response and, on arrival, it was clear that Barbara was beyond medical help. She was pronounced deceased at the scene.' The inquest concluded Mrs Rymell had died of misadventure as a result of her fall, a combination of her dementia and frailty and 'mechanical obstruction of respiration'. But Mrs Marsh said she had been shown evidence that at least one the carers' understanding of English did not meet the standards required to work in the Britain. 'I was told that in order to be able to work in the UK, those requiring a Visa (as the two carers on duty did) must prove that they can read, write, speak and understand English to at least Level B1,' she said. '[They must demonstrate that they] can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work. 'Applicants for a Visa must have passed a Secure English Language Test (SELT). 'It transpired during the Inquest that one of the workers on the evening of the 8th August 2022 had never passed the SELT, so was not qualified or permitted to work in the UK.' Addressing the government in her Prevention of Future Deaths report, Mrs Marsh said: 'I am concerned that those working with vulnerable people who are in a position of trust and responsibility must be able to demonstrate a sufficient proficiency in English to enable to summon appropriate emergency medical attention when needed. 'Vulnerable people, by very definition, are unable to often appreciate the need for help; take steps to keep themselves safe and/or summon help for themselves when they need it. 'By being unable to speak the native language of England with any proficiency I am concerned that deaths will continue to arise where those who are young, disabled, suffering from a mental impairment or who are elderly and in need of urgent medical help will not have this summoned for them if those who are engaging with emergency professionals are unable to communicate effectively.' Mrs Marsh said she did not believe the current English test for foreign workers was appropriate for staff working in a medical setting. She cited two examples where applicants were asked to fill in the appropriate missing word in the sentence. 'The Court looked at evidence of the B1 English test,' she said. 'Examples from the paper were as follows: 'I [XXX] that book last year' (options are bought, have bought, had bought). 'The town [XXX] is very beautiful, has lots of parks' (options are which, where, what). 'This level of comprehension is comparable to a KS2 curriculum being studied by Year 6 students sitting their SATS exam and appears to be wholly insufficient for those working in the direct care and protection of vulnerable people, as demonstrated in this case by carers who were alone (i.e. no English speaking members of staff on duty) being unable to explain to medical professionals the presenting condition of the patient.' Mrs Marsh told the Home Office and Mrs Whatley that they have until the 22nd January 2024 to respond to her concerns. 'In my opinion action should be taken to prevent future deaths and I believe your organisation has the power to take such action,' she said. A spokesperson for South West Care Homes said: 'South West Care Homes would like to express, once again, our deepest sympathies to Mrs Rymell's family for their loss. 'We worked closely and diligently with the authorities throughout their investigations into the circumstances of this isolated incident. 'We strive always to offer the best possible care to all our residents, and since Mrs Rymell's death we have instigated a range of management and auditing improvements to further enhance the care we provide at Ashley House.' By Baek Byung-yeul Lee Joong-keun, chairman of construction and real estate conglomerate Booyoung Group, donated 20 billion won ($15.3 million) to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) for remodeling the school's dormitories, hoping to help nurture outstanding students there, the science and technology university said Monday. I hope that KAIST, the cradle of scientific and technological knowledge in Korea, will foster global experts that can contribute to national development, the chairman said in a statement released by KAIST. Lee is well known for his strong interest in education support based on his belief that "educational goods are not something that disappears once used, but an investment for the future that is continuously reproduced." Booyoung Group, which he founded, has been actively engaging in social contribution activities centered on education since its establishment. The chairman has donated educational and cultural facilities to more than 130 grade schools and universities nationwide to foster young professionals. The donation to KAIST is also part of Lees consistent education contribution activities, KAIST said. "Chairman Lee donated funds for dormitory remodeling, hoping to foster global experts who can contribute to the national development at KAIST, the cradle of scientific and technological knowledge in Korea. We plan to overhaul the entire building, including exterior construction and mechanical, electrical, communication and fire protection," the school said. Remodeling will be carried out on two dormitories at KAIST's Daejeon campus and two at its Seoul campus. To honor Lee's wishes, KAIST announced that all remodeled dormitories will be named after his pseudonym, Woojung. "I hope that KAIST students, who lead the development of Korea, will grow their dreams and talents in the Woojung dormitories and grow into highly skilled experts," the chairman said. We expect that the good influence of Chairman Lee, who has been contributing to society in various fields, will also spread to KAIST through this donation, KAIST President Lee Kwang-hyung said. We gratefully accept the great intentions of Booyoung Group and the chairman for nurturing future experts, and will continue striving to improve the facilities and environment of the aged dormitories. The Iranian Islamist who killed a German-Filipino tourist and attacked two others, including a British father, near the Eiffel Tower has been unmasked. Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, 26, is a convicted terrorist who has been arrested for allegedly starting a bloody rampage in Paris on Saturday night, using a kitchen knife and a hammer. He kept screaming 'Allahu Akbar' Arabic for 'God is the greatest' and professing his support for ISIS as he was arrested for targeting the German tourist, named only as Collin, a British national identified only as Melvyn, 66, and a 60-year-old French man called Thierry. Rajabpour-Miyandoab, who had severe psychiatric problems and who was meant to be under surveillance by France's intelligence services, set upon Collin in front of his wife and another female friend. Both Collin and his partner were nurses, and had worked in a retirement home in Germany since January, said an investigating source. Rajabpour-Miyandoab, left, who had severe psychiatric problems and who was meant to be under surveillance by France 's intelligence services, set upon Collin, right, in front of his wife Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab shouted 'Allahu Akbar' as he was taken in by Paris police, who immobilised him with a stun gun 'The murder victim was devoted to caring for other people,' he added. 'During his holiday in Paris he had visited the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and Disneyland.' Following the attack on Collin, he went after Melvyn, who was on holiday in Paris at the time of the attack. The British father was stabbed in the eye in the attack, and on Monday was recovering from the wound in hospital in central Paris. The terrorist also attacked 60-year-old Thierry, who had been out walking with his wife and child, hitting him with a hammer. He too was still in hospital on Monday. Following a chase, and the intervention of a taxi driver, Rajabpour-Miyandoab was finally disabled by police using tasers. Rajabpour-Miyandoab was expected to be charged with a range of offences including terrorist murder on Monday. France's interior minister Gerald Darmanin confirmed the suspect had officially been on an 'S-list', for surveillance. Rajabpour-Miyandoab had expressed his anger at the mass killing of Muslims in Gaza by Israeli armed forces, and said 'France was complicit', said Mr Darmanin. In 2018, Rajabpour-Miyandoab was sentenced to five years in prison for terrorist conspiracy. The son of two Iranian refugees who was born in France, he had converted to Islam in 2015 after being radicalised online by an Isis supporter, according to prosecution documents. Rajabpour-Miyandoab was well known for forging online links with other terrorists including Larossi Aballa, who went on to stab two police officers to death in Magnanville in June 2016. Another Facebook friend was Adel Kermiche, one of the perpetrators of the stabbing to death of a Catholic priest in Saint-Etienne du Rouvray in the same year. Many of those linked with such crimes were, like Rajabpour-Miyandoab, on S-Files, but managed to carry out atrocities anyway. Rajabpour-Miyandoab later claimed to have completed a 'deradicalisation programme', claiming he had lost interest in terrorism. In court in 2018, he said 'Islamism was ruining my life', claiming he had taken to drinking beer and eating pork activities which are barred to practising Muslims. But online activity showed that Rajabpour-Miyandoab was still researching how to make phosphorus bombs. Terrorism prosecutors said on Sunday they were investigating the murder and attempted murder 'in connection with a terrorist plot'. Three people 'close to' Rajabpour-Miyandoab were being held in custody yesterday afternoon following the incident by Bir Hakeim bridge over the River Seine, prosecutors said. A forensic police officer works at the scene on Saturday night following the terror attack in the French capital Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, 26, was released from prison in 2020, and left to live at home with his parents while undergoing 'psychiatric and neurological treatment Rajabpour-Miyandoab was 'being monitored in a way that did not mean he was being hospitalised, and was supposed to follow a course of treatment' for his mental health issues, said Aurelien Rousseau, the French health minister. 'As often in these cases, there's a mixture of an ideology, an easily influenced person and, unfortunately, psychiatry,' he added. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on X that he was 'devastated' by the attack, saying that 'our thoughts are with the wounded, their families and friends'. Germany's interior minister Nancy Faeser had earlier warned that 'the war in Gaza after Hamas' terrorist act (of October 7) has worsened the threat,' saying that 'the threat of Islamist terrorism is acute and serious'. Police and security sources confirmed the attacker had claimed responsibility in a social media video as he struck, speaking about 'current events, the government (and) the murder of innocent Muslims'. The 24-year-old German-Filipino nurse was killed as a taxi driver intervened to keep the attacker away from his wife. Video of the suspect's arrest shows him slowly backing away from several French police officers while carrying what appears to be a hammer. Two officers stride towards him as he backs away on the corner of a street in Paris. Following a chase, and the intervention of a taxi driver, Rajabpour-Miyandoab was finally disabled by police using tasers. Rousseau told broadcaster France 3 that the wounded victims suffered only 'superficial (physical) traumas, but of course psychological traumas that will be enormous'. On Sunday both surviving victims were still undergoing medical care - one at the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris, the other at the city's Cochin hospital. Their condition was said to be 'stable'. French gendarmes patrol the Trocadero plaza on the opposite bank of the Seine from the Eiffel Tower following the bloodbath on Saturday French police attend the scene following the terrorist knife attack near the Bir Hakeim bridge and Quai de Grenelle The attacker, who has been named locally as Armand R., shouted 'Allahu Akbar' as he was taken in by Paris police, who immobilised him with a stun gun The deadly attack in central Paris during a busy weekend night came with the country on its highest alert for attack The attack has rocked France, which has seen tensions rise amid the Israel-Hamas conflict Tensions have risen in France, home to large Jewish and Muslim populations, following Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip The deadly attack in central Paris during a busy weekend night came with the country on its highest alert for attacks, as tensions rise against the background of the war between Israel and Hamas. The second victim of the attack was British, and was out walking with his wife when Armand R. attacked him from behind. 'The family were on the Avenue President Kennedy when they were set upon,' said an investigating source, who added: 'A hammer was used to hit the man over the head.' The Englishman was rushed to hospital, where his condition was later described as 'stable'. A third victim was also badly hurt in a hammer attack, said the source. The UK's Foreign Office said on Sunday: 'We are supporting a British man who was injured in Paris, and are in contact with the local authorities.' The area by Bir Hakeim bridge, usually thronging with tourists and locals, was cordoned off by police and bright with the flashing lights of security forces and emergency services. A taxi driver who witnessed the scene intervened, Mr Darmanin said. 'He had threatened them very violently... he will now have to answer for his actions before justice,' Mr Darmanin said. The attack has rocked France, which has seen tensions rise amid the Israel-Hamas conflict. President Emmanuel Macron said he was sending his condolences to the family of a German killed in the 'terrorist attack'. Police by the Bir-Hakeim bridge... a police source said that the attacker was known for psychiatric disorders and had said he could not stand Muslims being killed in the world A man was stabbed to death and two other tourists injured in the frenzied attack in Paris Police seal off access to the Bir-Hakeim bridge Macron, writing on X, thanked security forces for their quick arrest of the suspected attacker and said justice should be served 'in the name of the French people'. 'Paris is in mourning after this terrible attack,' transport minister Clement Beaune wrote on X. Joseph S, a 37-year-old supermarket manager who asked not to give his last name, witnessed the scene as he sat in a bar, and said he heard screams and people shouting 'help, help' as they ran. He said a man wielding an object attacked a man who had fallen down, and within 10 minutes the police arrived. France has suffered several attacks by Islamist extremists, including the November 2015 suicide and gun attacks in Paris claimed by the Islamic State group in which 130 people were killed. There had been a relative lull in recent years, even as officials have warned that the threat remains. But tensions have risen in France, home to large Jewish and Muslim populations, following Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Security in Paris is also under particular scrutiny as it gears up to host the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. In October, teacher Dominique Bernard was killed in the northern French town of Arras by a young radicalised Islamist from Russia's Caucasus region. British lawyers could be sent to work in Rwandan courts as part of a new treaty aimed at finally implementing the Government's asylum plan - as Rishi Sunak prepares to hand another 15million to the East African nation. Home Secretary James Cleverly is understood to be close to finalising a treaty with Rwanda as part of Rishi Sunak's goal of making the plan legally watertight following the Supreme Court's ruling against the scheme. Cabinet minister Lucy Frazer said the Home Office was looking 'very carefully' at the idea of sending UK Government lawyers to Rwanda to address concerns about the legal system there. British lawyers could be sent to advise Rwandan judges, perhaps for specific asylum case hearings or for longer periods, to help ensure asylum appeals are granted correctly. However, the government in Kigali is unlikely to accept any arrangement which would look like colonial-style legal interference. Home Secretary James Cleverly is expected to sign an improved treaty with Rwanda in the next week A hostel in Kigali that was due to be used by asylum seekers sent to Rwanda from the UK If a deal is reached, Mr Cleverly could head to Rwanda as soon as this week to sign the treaty, with domestic legislation also planned so the UK Parliament could assert the African nation is a safe destination for asylum seekers who arrive in Britain. Culture Secretary Ms Frazer was pressed on whether British lawyers could be stationed in Rwanda's courts following reports in the Telegraph. She told BBC Breakfast: 'There is an issue about processing and I know that the Home Office are looking at that very carefully.' READ MORE - Hundreds of illegal migrants arrive in Dover on small dinghies from Calais - making this year the second highest on record for boat arrivals Advertisement She added: 'I know that the Home Secretary James Cleverly is now working with Rwanda on a new treaty, and we will be bringing forward legislation in due course.' Mr Sunak is expected to offer an extra 15million on top of the 140million already given to Kigali to sweeten the much-vaunted deal. In the wake of the Supreme Court judgment on November 15, the Government insisted it had been working on contingency measures and promised a treaty with Rwanda within days along with emergency legislation in Parliament - but neither has yet emerged. There has been speculation that Rwanda is pushing for more money on top of the 140million already committed to the scheme. Prime Minister Mr Sunak met Rwanda's president Paul Kagame on the sidelines of the Cop28 climate talks in Dubai on Friday. He declined afterwards to say how much more money he would spend to get the scheme off the ground. Insiders say Mr Sunak is vowing his Plan B for Rwanda will be 'watertight', amid fears proposed tactics could be thwarted by government lawyers. Mr Sunak is also expected to authorise millions more pounds to be given to Rwanda to improve its asylum system, while Home Secretary James Cleverly is set to sign an improved treaty with the East African country in the next week. It comes as the latest figures show 1,264 would-be refugees braved icy conditions to cross the Channel in the past week, including 519 on Saturday alone. A group of migrants are brought ashore at Dover amid freezing conditions on Saturday The number of illegal migrants reaching the UK this year is now believed to have topped the 28,526 recorded in 2021 although arrivals are still a third down on the record set last year. Last night a government source said: 'As the PM said, the British people want action and their patience has been stretched. The Government is up for taking robust measures, providing they work.' The PM announced his new approach last month after the Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the original plan by ruling that there were 'substantial grounds' to believe people put on a one-way flight to Rwanda could be sent on to other countries where they would be unsafe. READ MORE - Rishi Sunak 'will hand Rwanda another 15m' to sign treaty and keep Channel migrants deportation plan alive Advertisement The Plan B comprises three parts: a treaty with Rwanda, emergency legislation to declare the country is safe, and a bundle of evidence explaining why anyone sent there would not be mistreated. There has been intense debate in the Tory party over how far the Bill should go, with more than 20 MPs on the Right demanding what is now known as a 'full fat' option. This would include so-called 'notwithstanding' clauses, allowing the Government to ignore the UK's Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in asylum cases as well as removing the right of migrants to challenge their deportation through judicial review. A less hardline approach would override human rights law while still allowing challenges by individuals. But there are concerns that ministers are receiving advice from officials including government lawyers who say they cannot do anything they feel would breach the Civil Service Code such as ignoring human rights laws. 'It's anathema to them,' said one insider. 'They will say 'I don't want to be the lawyer who does this.' Because Mr Cleverly has only been in his new role as Home Secretary for a few weeks, Attorney General Victoria Prentis is playing a major role looking through the draft Bill. This year became the second highest on record despite Rishi Sunak 's pledge to reduce the number of boats arriving in Britain She is understood to have warned that disapplying the ECHR would be unlawful. As officials continued to work on the plan over the weekend, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins told Sky News yesterday: 'It will take a little bit of time to draw up this legislation because we want to make sure it's in the right form.' Asked if it would appear before Christmas she said: 'I know the Home Secretary is working incredibly hard and quickly on this.' Five members of the same family were found shot-to-death in a gruesome murder-suicide that unfolded inside of their home in Washington state on Sunday. The Clark County Sheriff's Office said officers found the bodies inside a home in Orchards, Washington, following a call from another family member who said that they received a text message from a person at the home saying they had harmed people there. Police used a drone to look inside the home and saw people who appeared to be dead, the station reported. Law enforcement and a paramedic team entered the home at that point where all five were confirmed to be deceased. The Southwest Washington Regional SWAT team responded due to the threat of a firearm and entered the home with emergency medical personnel, but all five adults inside were dead, KGW8 reported. Officials have confirmed that there is no further threat to public safety. The victims have not been named. A SWAT Team was called to the area after it was deemed that a crime had been perpetrated involving a gun Clark County sheriffs Sgt. Chris Skidmore told the media that all of the victims are adults Clark County sheriffs Sgt. Chris Skidmore told the media that all of the victims are adults. The sheriff's office said the deaths in the community about 18 miles north of Portland, Oregon, appeared to be a murder-suicide, the station reported. The Orchards section of Vancouver has a population of around 20,000 people and is statistically one of the safest areas in Washington. This tragedy sees Vancouver, Washington, join more than 30 communities sent reeling by a family mass killing in the last two years, a list that includes communities of wealth and poverty and spares no race or class. A family mass killing where four or more people were killed, not including the perpetrator happened each of the last two years in places as large as Houston or as small as Casa Grande, Arizona, a database compiled by USA Today, the Associated Press and Northeastern University shows. Motives can remain speculative in family killings in which assailants take their own lives, but police often cite financial or relationship issues as the causes. The shooting occurred here in the Orchards section of Vancouver, Washington, one of the safest communities in the entire state Family mass killings are in fact the most common type of mass killing, making up about 45% of the 415 mass shootings since 2006, according to the database. They happen twice as frequently as mass shootings in which members of the public are killed. Most, but not all, involve handguns, only about a third involve households with a previous occurrence of domestic violence and most of the assailants have no violent history or criminal past. There is no governmental agency tracking murder-suicides nationally, so a few years ago policy analysts at the Violence Policy Center a nonprofit educational organization that conducts research and public education on violence in the U.S. began tracking details from news accounts to produce an annual report. The latest version from 2020 looked at murder-suicides including many mass killings during the first six months of 2019. The study found 81% of murder-suicides happened at home and 65 percent involved intimate partners. The study also found that among murder-suicides where more than three people aside from the assailant were killed, six of the 10 during those six months were incidents in which a person killed their children, partner and themselves. The 56-year-old tourist collapsed and died following his jump off Macau Tower A 56-year-old tourist has collapsed and died after completing the world's highest bungee jump. The as-yet-unnamed Japanese tourist was taken to Conde S. Januario Hospital in Macau, China, after leaping off the Macau Tower on Sunday afternoon. Officials said he experienced shortness of breath and ended up losing consciousness shortly after the 764ft jump at 4.30pm. Paramedics found he was not breathing and had no heartbeat when they arrived at the scene. He was pronounced dead after being taken to hospital. Skypark by AJ Hackett, the company that runs the bungee jump and other activities at Macau Tower, says on its website that paying customers should disclose any medical conditions before taking part in any of its activities. The as-yet-unnamed Japanese tourist was taken to Conde S. Januario Hospital in Macau, China, after leaping off the Macau Tower on Sunday afternoon The 764ft jump costs thrillseekers more than 280 Local media reported that the tourist had no external injuries to his body. Conditions that should be disclosed to the company, which has been running bungee jumps for more than 30 years, include heart problems, high blood pressure, diabetes and previous surgeries. The jump, from on top of the tower's observation desk, sets thrillseekers back more than 280 (2888 Macanese Pataca). Those who brave the heights jump from 764ft up in the air, roughly two-thirds the height of the 1108ft tall building. The company claims to have run more than four million successful jumps across the world, and says it has a 'perfect safety record', adding: 'We strive to achieve a high level of safety for our customers and crew.' The Skypark at Macau Tower has a score of 4.5 stars on Tripadvisor, with many visitors leaving positive comments about their time there. One person said: 'Going through the highest official bungee jumping experience on the planet was nothing short of breathtaking, the jump was even more astonishing than how I expected. 'What added greatly to the experience was the skypark team with their friendly and effective attitude in giving me the valuable tips and then preparing me for the jump. 'The checking and re checking of my equipment and my safety measures made me more comfortable and left no room for worrying at all.' Another said: 'Looking down from 233m could really be scary, but the crews there make it fun and they were really encouraging.' An AJ Hackett spokesperson told MailOnline: 'AJ Hackett Macau Tower Limited is saddened by the death of a tourist following a medical situation at Macau Tower yesterday that occurred after the Bungy jump was completed. 'We extend our deepest condolences to the deceased's family. 'Safety is our top priority, and each and every customer is subject to stringent safety procedures. In yesterday's incident, the tourist followed all safety requirements before taking the Bungy Jump. 'When our staff received word that he was feeling unwell after landing, they immediately administered first aid and called the authorities for help. 'The company is cooperating with relevant government departments.' A fruit and vegetable picker from poverty-stricken Tajikistan who travelled to the UK to work says he earns 12 times more than back home - as his mother hopes he will return to his country a rich man. Siyovush Abdurahmonous, 30, says he is the first person from his village Nijoni to venture to England. He is one of several migrant workers from Tajikistan who say they can make 'a fortune' picking fruit and vegetables in the UK from Canterbury to Cornwall jobs which the farmers say 'workshy' Brits refuse to do. The farms gain industrious, well-behaved workers and the migrants, who are mostly men, receive pay which they could only dream about back home. Siyovush's mother Dilorom said that when her son the only breadwinner returns to his wife Nilufar, 30, and sons Kvonchbek, 12, Davlatbeck, eight, and six-year-old Mehrojbek, he expects to have accumulated a tidy nest egg of around $10,000 (7,800). 'He took a big risk going to England and I'm very proud that he's the first man from around here to go to England. He's like a pioneer,' Dilorom said. 'He said he would give it a try and if he didn't like it, he'd come back, but it's been better than we dreamed of. When he comes back he will be a rich man in the village.' Tajikistan's average monthly wage is just $203 (160), so Siyovush's earnings in six months - around 2,000 a month - are equivalent to an incredible four years' salary back home. Migrant worker Siyovush Abdurahmonous in the UK, where he is working as a fruit and vegetable picker Abdurahmonous, 30, says he is the first person from his village Nijoni to venture to England Siyovush's family at their home in Tajikistan - his mother Dilorom, wife Nilufar and sons Kuvonchbek, 12, Daulatbek, eight, and Mehrojbek, six A man herding goats in Khujand, Tajikistan. Tajikistan's average monthly wage is just $203 (160) The former Soviet republic of Tajikistan is one of the poorest countries on earth, with a GDP about a fiftieth of Britain's, according to the IMF. For decades, Tajikistan's biggest export has been people, with up to a quarter of its 10 million population working abroad at any one time. Traditionally, most have gone to Russia, but increasingly British farmers, starved of EU labour post-Brexit, are looking much further east to recruit in Tajikistan and its neighbours Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, bringing thousands to the UK on sponsored work visas. Whereas some Tajiks have used their foreign earnings to buy rental apartments and even flash Mercedes AMG cars, Siyovush's plans for his first windfall of British apple-picking are rather more basic. He wants to knock down a mud and straw-built barn and turn it into a bedroom and adjoining bathroom with running water so that the family will no longer be forced to use the 'long-drop' pit latrine with a mud slit in the corner of their family compound. We spoke to Siyovush by WhatsApp video call while sitting in the mud and breeze-block compound which he, his wife, three sons and his widowed mother call home, along with his sister's family of three. In the dusty yard outside, a cow was tethered and squawking chickens scrabbled around among the pruned stumps of a tiny vineyard, conjuring up Sacha Baron Cohen's fictional TV reporter Borat's home in Kazakhstan. As Siyovush panned his phone around the static caravan he shares with five of his countrymen on a fruit farm near Canterbury, Kent, his widowed mother Dilorom's eyes lit up and she remarked that the furniture and kitchen fittings looked far more modern than her own. Sitting on floor cushions around the family table, she told us: 'I didn't know much about England when my son said he wanted to go there. I had heard of the Thames River and the royal princes and princesses, but not much else. 'We were very worried that he was going so far away most men travel to Russia to earn some money, and Siyovush has been there labouring on construction sites a few times.' Dilorom, the mother of migrant worker Siyovush, at her home in Tajikistan near to the border with Uzbekistan 'He took a big risk going to England and I'm very proud that he's the first man from around here to go to England. He's like a pioneer,' his mum said Siyovush's earnings in six months are equivalent to an incredible four years' salary back home Nilufar said that when word of her husband's good fortune spreads around the village, after he returns this week at the end of his six-month stint, others are likely to follow in his footsteps. 'The men can earn far more in England than in Russia,' she said. And eldest son Kvonchbek told us: 'When I grow up, I want to be like my dad and travel the world and go to England.' Beaming with cheeks as rosy red as the apples he's been picking on the farm 4,000 miles away in Kent, Siyovush a lifelong Chelsea FC fan - told how he had heard on the grapevine about fruit and veg picking jobs on offer in England and then found an advert on Facebook. He arrived in the UK in June and has picked strawberries, cherries, apples and now cauliflowers while in Kent. He had to take out a bank loan for $3,000 (2,400) to cover the visa and travel fees, which he has long since repaid. Part of the money also covers health and travel insurance for the duration of his stay in the UK. 'It's very good here, we are well looked after,' he told MailOnline. 'They like us because they know we will work hard. I'm surprised that British people don't seem to want to do these jobs.' A vegetable market in Khujand, Tajikistan - the former Soviet republic is one of the poorest countries on earth Men on bicycles in Khujand, Tajikistan - which has a GDP about a fiftieth of Britain's, according to the IMF For decades, Tajikistan's biggest export has been people, with up to a quarter of its 10 million population working abroad at any one time. Pictured is a vegetable market He joked: 'They are happy to sit around not doing very much, but they do drink a lot maybe they are hungover!' The workers are paid the minimum wage of 10.42 per hour, with more if they choose to do overtime beyond the 48-hour week, which all do. They can also be paid in piecework by the box of fruit, rather than by the hour, which can work out more beneficial for fast pickers. When bad weather stops the pickers from working, they are also paid something to keep them going, which Siyovush said 'would never happen in Russia, where the migrants are left to fend for themselves'. Sharing a self-catering static caravan with five other Tajiks, Siyovush says that in one day he can earn enough money to pay for his modest food bill for an entire month. His only other expense is the 63-a-week rent paid to the farm for the accommodation, so his remittances home via Western Union have been generous and frequent. The farm employs around 300 pickers who come from Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan as well as Ukraine and Romania. Siyovush's sons Kuvonchbek and Daulatbek with the family cow A man riding and leading donkeys in Khujand, Tajikistan Siyovush said on his days off, he has been to London and his photos home show him at all the capitals' landmarks, ticking them off, Borat-style, as many of his countrymen have also done. He also visited Stamford Bridge to pay homage to his beloved Blues. After a few months back home, he'll be heading back to Britain, he hopes, with no doubt many more of his countrymen alongside him. Siyovush spoke to MailOnline after one of his countrymen made similar claims about earning lots of money picking cauliflowers on a farm in Cornwall doing backbreaking work and gruelling hours that British workers are reluctant to do. Ali Mulloev, 24, also from northern Tajikistan, says working in the West Country enabled him to enjoy a 'luxurious life', buying two properties back home with the brand new Mercedes on the drive. He earns up to 500 per week - ten times as much as he could back home - picking cauliflowers over the winter on an 8,000-acre farm. David Simmons, a fifth-generation proprietor of Riveria Produce in Hayle, Cornwall, where Ali works says they are finding it 'impossible' to hire local workers to pick their crops over the winter. David says he once had an estate bustling with local staff but said people are now 'just not interested'. Siyovush's son Kuvonchbek with one of the family chickens A vegetable market in Khujand, Tajikistan 'The problem is, Brits have got it too cushy. We're not hungry enough,' he told BBC Two's Simon Reeves Return to Cornwall. 'They would rather go behind the bar or work in a hotel or do something which is less strenuous.' The award-winning farmer said his foreign workers were 'totally dedicated to earning money'. 'Their psyche is totally different to a lot of young people in the UK now,' he continued. 'Their psyche is to go out, earn as much money as they can as fast as they can; try and get their house, and get everything they want in life. And you've got to admire them for doing it.' The end of free movement for EU workers post-Brexit meant that during the 2020 pandemic, Mr Simmons was forced to double down his efforts to get locals in to help pick his crop. Adverts were placed in the local papers, social media and on TV, with 250 people expressing an interest. But of this, only 37 ever arrived - with numbers dwindling rapidly. 'Within seven weeks we had one person left. We just couldn't get any more people to come,' Mr Simmons said, adding: 'We're just desperate to try and get local people to come and do this work but they're just not interested.' Now 75 per cent of his pickers are from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, with some coming from Ukraine and India. None are from the UK. The figures on Mr Simmons' farm reflect the national picture, where 98 per cent of the UK's 45,000 pickers have come from elsewhere in the globe, including Barbados, Kenya and Nepal. Riviera works with recruitment companies who source staff primarily in the old Soviet Bloc and tell them what the job entails. Fresh workers then fly over and live in camper vans that sleep two to six people. Recruits are mostly male but some are female, are typically aged between 20 and 40, and some arrive with relatives. Speaking of his team, Mr Simmons said: 'The people that come over are wonderful people, they really are. I've got the utmost respect for them, to go from one side of the world to the other and do this.' In 2019, the quota for international pickers working in the UK was 2,500. But this has since been raised to 45,000 this year - which can be increased a further 10,000 a year if the Government deems it necessary. Sky News broadcaster Sally Lockwood has revealed she is pregnant after praising her colleagues for helping her hide her bump on air. The reporter, who joined the channel in 2017, announced the news in a post on X, formerly Twitter, saying that she had been disguising 'a large belly, leggings and nausea on air'. She thanked her team for looking after her and for helping keep her baby bump a secret from the public as she continued to appear on TV. Mrs Lockwood said that she is now looking forward to being a viewer for a few months as she takes time off while on maternity leave. In an earlier post on Saturday, Mr Lockwood revealed that it was her last day working for Sky before taking time off 'to focus on personal admin'. Sky news broadcaster Sally Lockwood has revealed she is pregnant after praising her colleagues for helping her hide it on air The reporter, who joined the broadcaster in 2017, announced the news in a post on X, formely Twitter, saying that she had been hiding 'a large belly, leggings and nausea on air' She thanked her team for looking after her and for helping keep her baby bump a secret from the public as she continued to appear on TV Mrs Lockwood said on X: 'Big shout out to the Sky News family whove looked after me as Ive attempted to hide a large belly, leggings and nausea on air. 'Sky News has the kindest people in the biz as well as the best. 'Look forward to being a viewer for a few months & cheering you from the sidelines.' In a longer post on Instagram, Mrs Lockwood added: 'Make up artists, producers, technical staff & fellow journos have done so much to help me and look after me behind the scenes. 'Sky News has the kindest people in the business as well as the best.' Mrs Lockwood joined Sky News in 2017, where she started as a US correspondent. During this time she reported on key moments in the country's recent history including the 2019 presidential election, the Covid-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd. She is now a news correspondent working in the UK and also reports from around the world. She is fluent in French and Italian and even flew to Italy before the country went into lockdown in 2020, where she reported on the pandemic for seven weeks. Mrs Lockwood was previously a reporter for ITN and also spent six months working for the military new provider Forces News in Afghanistan. Tory fears are mounting today that huge immigration is driving voters into the arms of Reform UK as ministers squabble over the details of a crackdown. A poll has shown the party headed by Nigel Farage and Richard Tice recording its highest ever support at 11 per cent. The BMG Research study suggested that the four-point increase was at the expense of the Conservatives, who were down three points. The finding - which will heighten concerns about a split in the right-wing vote at the looming election - comes as a closely-watched survey of activists indicated Rishi Sunak has slumped to the bottom of the Cabinet rankings. The government is desperately trying to finalise the details of a squeeze on both legal and illegal immigration. Home Secretary James Cleverly is set to travel to Rwanda within days to seal a new treaty on deporting Channel boat arrivals. Meanwhile, ministers are still working on 'watertight' emergency legislation that can overcome the objections of the Supreme Court to Rishi Sunak's much-vaunted policy. A BMG Research poll for the i newspaper has shown Reform UK - headed by Nigel Farage and Richard Tice - on its highest ever support at 11 per cent The closely-watched ConservativeHome survey of activists suggests Rishi Sunak has slumped to the bottom of the Cabinet rankings There is frantic work taking place on how to curb legal net migration, after the annual level reached an eye-watering record of 745,000 Insiders say the PM is determined to make the new law 'very robust' but there is significantly resistance within government to overriding human rights laws. Mr Sunak is also expected to authorise millions more pounds to be given to Rwanda to improve its asylum system, one of the key points made by the Supreme Court. It comes as the latest figures show 1,264 would-be refugees braved icy conditions to cross the Channel in the past week, including 519 on Saturday alone. The number of illegal migrants reaching the UK this year is now believed to have topped the 28,526 recorded in 2021 although arrivals are still a third down on the record set last year. At the same time there is frantic work taking place on how to curb legal net migration, after the annual level reached an eye-watering record of 745,000. Immigration minister Robert Jenrick has been pushing for a dramatic increase in the minimum salary for coming to the UK on work visas, as well as moves such as restricting foreign health workers to bringing one dependant with them. However, Mr Sunak and Mr Cleverly have seemed to strike a different tone, suggesting that numbers are already starting to ease and they have already taken radical action on student dependants. The BMG Research polling, for the i newspaper, found Labour's lead had extended to 16 points, on 43 per cent to 27 per cent for the Tories. Reform UK had gone from just 7 per cent in mid-October to 11 per cent at the end of last month. That was above the Lib Dems on 10 per cent, and the highest ever detected by BMG. Worryingly for Mr Sunak, he has also tumbled to the foot of the regular ConservativeHome Cabinet rankings. His rating on the panel of activists now stands at minus 25.4. Mr Cleverly has also seen his standing plunge, going from top to well down the bottom half. Kemi Badenoch is now leading the pack. The PM announced his new Rwanda approach last month after the Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the original plan by ruling that there were 'substantial grounds' to believe people put on a one-way flight could be sent on to other countries where they would be unsafe. The Plan B comprises three parts: a treaty with Rwanda, emergency legislation to declare the country is safe, and a bundle of evidence explaining why anyone sent there would not be mistreated. There has been intense debate in the Tory party over how far the Bill should go, with more than 20 MPs on the Right demanding what is now known as a 'full fat' option. This would include so-called 'notwithstanding' clauses, allowing the Government to ignore the UK's Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in asylum cases as well as removing the right of migrants to challenge their deportation through judicial review. A less hardline approach would override human rights law while still allowing challenges by individuals. But there are concerns that ministers are receiving advice from officials including government lawyers who say they cannot do anything they feel would breach the Civil Service Code such as ignoring human rights laws. 'It's anathema to them,' said one insider. 'They will say 'I don't want to be the lawyer who does this'. 'Because Mr Cleverly has only been in his new role as Home Secretary for a few weeks, Attorney General Victoria Prentis is playing a major role looking through the draft Bill. She is understood to have warned that disapplying the ECHR would be unlawful. A government source said: 'As the PM said, the British people want action and their patience has been stretched. The Government is up for taking robust measures, providing they work.' The Israeli military says it struck '200 terror targets' on Sunday as it announced an expansion of ground operations against Hamas to cover all of Gaza, with reports of dozens of tanks crossing the border into the southern part of the Strip this morning. 'IDF troops struck terror infrastructure located inside a school in Beit Hanoun, from which an attack on the troops was carried out. In the compound were two tunnel shafts, including a booby-trapped one, explosives, and additional weapons,' the IDF claimed. It also said it had destroyed hundreds of Hamas tunnels since the start of its operation in Gaza, using explosives and blocks to collapse the routes or seal the entrances, with Israeli soldiers now moving south to continue their operations. For weeks, Israel has warned civilians in Gaza to move south in the enclave as their battles against Hamas raged in the north, and it continued to be labelled as a safer option despite continuous Israeli bombing of Khan Younis and other areas. Now, the IDF has declared that it is fighting 'strongly and thoroughly' in the southern half of Gaza, with warnings to displaced civilians to evacuate even further south away from the fighting. Eyewitnesses told local media this morning that a battalion of Israeli tanks appeared headed for Khan Younis - where the IDF claims several Hamas commanders are holed up - with armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers also seen. Amin Abu Hola, 59, said the Israeli vehicles were 'two kilometres (1.2 miles) inside' the Palestinian territory in the village of Al-Qarara near Khan Younis, while Moaz Mohammed, 34, said Israeli tanks were on the southern part of Salah al-Din road which runs from the north to the south of the strip. Chief of General Staff Herzi Halevi said on Sunday: 'Yesterday, and today, we eliminated brigade commanders, company commanders, many operatives, and yesterday morning we started the same process in the southern Gaza Strip.' The IDF said their operations in the south would be of 'no less strength' than its offensive in the north, and that Hamas commanders 'will meet the IDF everywhere in a very, very strong way'. Palestinians gather at the site of an Israeli strike in Rafah, southern Gaza, today A Palestinian boy carrying a baby stands at a site of Israeli strikes in Rafah today Israeli military tanks roll near the border with the Gaza Strip on December 3 Israeli tanks on manoeuvres at the southern Israeli border with Gaza during clashes with Hamas militants on December 3 An Israeli military tank near the border with the Gaza Strip on December 3 Smoke billows over the Palestinian enclave during Israeli bombardment amid continuing battles between Israel and Hamas Palestinian citizens inspect the destruction caused by air strikes on their homes on December 3 in Khan Yunis Young children injured in Israeli airstrikes arrive at Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, on December 3 Hamas reported on Sunday that its fighters clashed with Israeli troops around one mile from Khan Younis, and video on Arabic social media appeared to corroborate the accounts of tanks headed for the southern city. Residents, many of whom had moved to southern Gaza to flee earlier attacks in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, said they could hear tank fire and feared a new Israeli ground offensive was building. On Sunday night Israel also announced it had eliminated a key Hamas figure who had organised the October 7 attacks. In a statement it said an IDF jet has struck and killed Commander Haitham Khuwajari, head of Hamas' Shati Battalion. As the war moved into its 58th day leaflets were dropped on to the Gaza Strip urging people to move further south and maps were posted on social media showing people safe routes. More than 1.8 million people out of Gaza's 2.3 million population are said to be displaced across a strip of land 25 miles long and 7.4 miles at its widest point. The Israeli military earlier ordered people to evacuate some areas in and near Khan Younis, but has only now announced a full-scale ground assault in the south. 'The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) continues to extend its ground operation against Hamas centres in all of the Gaza Strip,' spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters in Tel Aviv. 'The forces are coming face to face with terrorists and killing them.' Israel this weekend revealed it had carried out more than 10,000 airstrikes on the strip since the war started. The Jabalia refugee camp in the north of Hamas-ruled Gaza was among the sites reported to have been hit from the air. A spokesperson for the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said several people were killed by an Israeli airstrike. Footage obtained by Reuters showed a boy covered in grey dust, sitting weeping amid crumbled cement and rubble from collapsed buildings. 'My father was martyred,' he cried in a hoarse voice. A girl in a pink sweatshirt, also coated with dust, stood between piles of rubble. Bombardments from war planes and artillery were also concentrated on Khan Younis and Rafah, another city in Gaza's south, residents and health officials have said, and hospitals were struggling to cope with the flow of wounded. Smoke rising after Israeli attacks in Gaza, seen from Sderot in southern Israel A Palestinian woman brings a baby to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital as Israeli attacks continue in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Injured and displaced Palestinians seek shelter in the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis A home in Khan Younis, southern Israel, destroyed by airstrikes Children play as smoke rises following Israeli air strikes in the southern Gaza Strip Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy said the military had struck more than 400 targets over the weekend 'including extensive aerial attacks in the Khan Younis area' and had also killed Hamas fighters and destroyed their infrastructure in Beit Lahiya in the north. An adviser to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel is making 'maximum effort' to avoid killing civilians. Pictures have shown severely injured children covered in blood at the Nasser Medical Hospital in Khan Younis, which James Elder, from the children's agency Unicef, described as a 'warzone'. He told the BBC that children were arriving with head injuries, terrible burns and shrapnel from recent blasts. 'It's a hospital I've gone to regularly and the children know me now, the families know me now. Those same people are grabbing my hand, or grabbing my shirt saying "please take us somewhere safe. Where is safe?"' 'They are unfortunately asking a question to which the only answer is there is nowhere safe. And that includes for them, as they know, that hospital,' he said. He told the BBC that he could hear 'constant large explosions' close to the hospital. Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry says more than 500 people have been killed since bombing resumed after the end of a seven-day pause in the fighting on Friday. The temporary truce between Israeli forces and Hamas, which had allowed an exchange of 105 hostages held by Hamas, most of them Israelis, for 240 Palestinian prisoners. The latest violence took place despite calls from the United States - considered Israel's closest ally - for the country to limit harm to Palestinian civilians in the new phase of its offensive, focused on the south. Israeli flares light the sky above Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, on December 3 Israeli troops and military vehicles positioned near the border with the Gaza Strip Palestinians wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip are brought to the hospital in Deir al Balah Palestinians wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip are brought to the hospital in Deir al Balah Injured Palestinians, including children, receive medical treatment at Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al Balah, Gaza More than 15,523 people have been killed, according to Gaza's health ministry, in nearly two months of warfare that broke out after a Hamas cross-border raid on southern Israel on October 7 in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and around 240 taken hostage. Israel says Hamas continues to hold 136 hostages. Israel has vowed to annihilate Hamas. The Iranian-backed group is sworn to Israel's destruction. The initial Hamas attack and the ensuing war amount to the bloodiest episode in the decades-old wider Israel-Palestinian conflict. Osama Hamdan, a Lebanon-based Hamas official, accused Israel of pursuing a deliberate strategy of urging Gazan civilians south in order to trap and kill them there. 'It has become clear that the occupation's claim... of the existence of safe areas in the south of the Gaza Strip, and its constant call for citizens to go there, was a premeditated plan and trap to commit more massacres against unarmed civilians and displaced people in the south,' he told reporters without citing evidence. 'There are no safe areas.' The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment but has consistently said it is targeting Hamas military strongholds and has asked civilians to move to safe zones so they can get humanitarian aid. The Israeli military ordered Palestinians to evacuate several areas in and around Khan Younis. It posted a map highlighting shelters they should go to west of Khan Younis and south toward Rafah, on the border with Egypt. Many residents started packing but said that areas they had been told to go to were themselves coming under attack. Nabil Al-Ghandour told Reuters he and his family would leave Khan Younis for Rafah later on Sunday, their fifth move in search of safety since the conflict started. 'We can't see any safe areas,' he said. 'But we move because what can we do? We have children and all night there's shelling.' Later on Sunday, a Gazan health ministry official said seven people were killed in an air strike on a house in Rafah. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Israeli military said on Sunday its war planes and helicopters had struck Hamas targets including tunnel shafts, command centres and weapons storage facilities. Naval forces had hit Hamas vessels on the coast, it said. The military declined to give figures on the number of air strikes carried out. On another front, Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters traded fire across the Israel-Lebanon border and Israel said several of its soldiers were wounded when an anti-tank missile fired from Lebanon hit a vehicle in the Beit Hillel area of northern Israel. Reuters could not independently verify the accounts. A man once voted the most handsome in Italy has quit his modelling job to join the priesthood. Edoardo Santini, 21, was voted Italy's most beautiful man in 2019, when he was 17, in a pageant organised by ABE, a fashion group. But after a lifetime of studying drama and dance to achieve his dream of becoming a star, he said on social media Saturday he would renounce his career for his faith. 'At 21 years of age I find myself on the path towards becoming a priest, God willing,' Edoardo said, claiming to have joined a seminary near Florence. 'I've decided to give up modelling work, acting and dance, but I won't abandon all my passions, I'll just live them differently, offering them up to God,' said the Castel Fiorentino native. Edoardo Santini, 21, was voted Italy's most beautiful man in 2019, when he was 17, in a pageant organised by ABE 'At 21 years of age I find myself on the path towards becoming a priest, God willing,' Edoardo said after entering a seminary near Florence Edoardo, 21, was voted Italy's most handsome four years ago and has abandoned his dreams of stardom to train as a priest Santini said he will not regret the decision 'because now I can shout: I am Edoardo, I am 21 years old and I am happy'. Speaking to his followers on social media, the rising star explained: 'At 21 years old my father took the decision to marry my mother because she was pregnant and my mum, at 21, became a mother. 'Me, at 21-years-old, I find myself taking the path to become, God willing, a priest. In these past years I've been able to meet people who have shown me what it means to be 'church'. 'They have given me the strength to investigate this question that I've taken with me from childhood but various fears stopped me from studying it at a deeper level. Last year, I took the first step,' he said. Edoardo said he went to live with two priests, the 'best experience of my life'. 'At the end of the year it was natural for me to ask the bishop to enter the preparatory course, the year that precedes life in the seminary. And here I am, studying theology and serving two parishes in the Florentine diocese.' Now, he says, he has 'put aside my job as a model and a dancer', favouring a new 'world' where he has 'met marvellous people with pure hearts, to whom I owe a lot, who allowed me to grow'. 'Of course I won't abandon everything,' he caveated. 'Because they make me who I am but I will live them in a different context. Edoardo said he would continue to follow his new path in spite of backlash. 'Of course I have people that speak behind my back. There are those who have no problem telling me that I'm a disappointment, even in my family. But there are also those who support me, believers and non-believers.' He said that although it 'terrified him' to abandon his dream and become a priest, he was sure he will not regret the decision 'because now I can shout: I am Edoardo, I am 21 years old and I am happy'. In a video shared on his Instagram page last week he shared a clip of him appearing to pray in a church, overlaid with the caption: 'I got back on my path'. He also updated his profile bio to 'I'm a Christian, priest wannabe'. Edoardo was honoured with his title after taking part in the 40th edition of the national beauty contest Il Bello d'Italia in Avellino back in 2019. Actors Giorgio Mastrota and Gabriel Garko are among the famous faces who had early success in the competition. He said at the time the 'emotion was immense' but he too dreamed of going on to become an actor. 'Unfortunately there is never enough time for all the activities I would like to do,' he said in an interview with First Model and Actor. Edoardo has some 7,000 followers on Instagram, where he rarely posts pictures of himself from modelling shoots and on holiday. On Instagram, Edoardo shared a video of himself saying he was quitting modelling to join the priesthood 'At 21 years old my father took the decision to marry my mother because she was pregnant and my mum, at 21, became a mother,' the young actor said 'Me, at 21-years-old, I find myself taking the path to become, God willing, a priest. In these past years I've been able to meet people who have shown me what it means to be 'church',' he continued Edoardo in a holiday picture shared on Instagram, where he said he was a 'priest wannabe' 'I won't abandon everything, because my passions are part of me but I will live them and propose them again in different contexts,' the young star wrote on Instagram The warship gangway that Napoleon Bonaparte stood on to surrender to the British Navy following the Battle of Waterloo is set to fetch 60,000 at auction. Described as a 'national treasure marking the end of the Napoleonic Wars', the gangway wood, which is inset into a desk, is set to attract plenty of global interest; particularly after the release of Ridley Scott's new biopic on the military commander. It is hoped a museum will snap up the historical item at the Hansons Auctioneers in Etwall, Derbyshire, in March next year. The 'astonishing' find, uncovered during a routine antiques valuation event, is among a variety of historical objects relating to Napoleon's time aboard 74-gun British warship HMS Bellerophon, known as 'Billy Ruffian'. It was a veteran of many bloody battles against the French and played a part in Nelson's victories at the Nile and Trafalgar. However, she will be best remembered for hosting Napoleon. The warship gangway that Napoleon Bonaparte stood on to surrender to the British Navy following the Battle of Waterloo is set to fetch 60,000 at auction (Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon in Ridley Scott's drama) Described as a 'national treasure marking the end of the Napoleonic Wars', the gangway wood, which is inset into a desk, is set to attract plenty of global interest A plaque set into the wood reads, 'Made of part of gangway of HMS Bellerophon, on which Bonaparte stepped when he surrendered off Rochefort, 1815. 5 Frc piece given by Bonaparte to E.Sones' Charles Hanson, owner of Hansons Auctioneers, said: 'Napoleon surrendered to Captain Frederick Lewis Maitland aboard HMS Bellerophon on July 15, 1815. It was a momentous historical moment and Captain Maitland later secured part of the gangway Napoleon stood on for posterity. 'He also kept the sofa Napoleon slept on aboard ship and other artefacts. They are coming to auction by descent through the Maitland family, their custodians for more than 200 years. 'For lovers of history, these are mind-blowing objects. They were kept by Captain Maitland to remind him of the role he played in a defining moment in history. They are undoubtedly the most important historical objects Hansons has ever uncovered, truly breathtaking.' The desk, which has a guide price of 40,000 to 60,000, also incorporates a French coin thrown to a cabin boy by Napoleon. A plaque set into the wood reads, 'Made of part of gangway of HMS Bellerophon, on which Bonaparte stepped when he surrendered off Rochefort, 1815. 5 Frc piece given by Bonaparte to E.Sones'. The discovery was made by Hansons' valuer Katy Beardmore. She said: 'Our lovely client attended an antiques valuation event and mentioned they had images of some family pieces. 'They were unsure whether to show them to me or not but when they did it left me speechless. Seeing the couch, desk and other objects and hearing of the connection to Captain Maitland and Napoleon gave me goosebumps. 'Being in the presence of the items and knowing of their importance within British maritime history has been a privilege. I hope they go to a museum collection for all to see.' After defeat at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18 1815, Napoleon retreated to Rochefort, on the west coast of France. He pondered on escape to America and a new life in the new world. The desk, which has a guide price of 40,000 to 60,000, also incorporates a French coin thrown to a cabin boy by Napoleon Maitland allocated his cabin to the defeated emperor and the auction includes the ship's couch Napoleon rested on, estimated at 30,000 to 50,000 Captain Maitand also kept the skull of a goat which supplied milk for Napoleon on board ship, which has an estimate of 2,000 to 3,000 Other items from Captain Maitland's private collection include his Bible and gunpowder flask mounted in silver But his route was blocked by Britain's Royal Navy in the formidable form of HMS Bellerophon. After tense negotiations Napoleon surrendered to Captain Maitland on July 15 in the vain hope that he would be allowed to retire to the quiet life of an English country gentleman. Maitland allocated his cabin to the defeated emperor and the auction includes the ship's couch Napoleon rested on, estimated at 30,000 to 50,000. Captain Maitand also kept the skull of a goat which supplied milk for Napoleon on board ship, which has an estimate of 2,000 to 3,000. Other items from Captain Maitland's private collection include his Bible and gunpowder flask mounted in silver. Charles added: 'In 1836 HMS Bellerophon was broken up. Captain Maitland bought part of her figurehead and stern ornaments and deposited them in the collections of what eventually became the Royal Navy Museum. 'However, he retained a piece of gangway timber which Napoleon stood on when he boarded the ship to surrender. 'The desk, which bears a plaque detailing its provenance, was crafted for Captain Maitland and subsequently passed down through generations of the Maitland family. A French coin which Napoleon tossed to a cabin boy who assisted him is also embedded into the table. 'These objects are important national treasures. They represent a key moment in history, the end of the Napoleonic Wars which lasted from 1803 to 1815. It's astonishing to think we have uncovered the timber Napoleon's intrepid feet stood on to surrender. 'These artefacts have never been seen by the public. We expect them to be bought by a museum.' A detailed account of the events that followed Napoleon's surrender, kept by Captain Maitland, can be found in the National Archives. The log entry for July 15, 1815 recorded the surrender. Napoleon ruled France and controlled much of Europe from 1804 until he was conclusively defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 In brisk naval fashion Captain Maitland noted the arrival of perhaps the greatest general the world has seen, a moment which ended some 20 years of war: 'Received onboard Napoleon Buonaparte late Emperor of France.' Whilst in custody Napoleon and his entourage were treated liked guests, with the former emperor given access to the Great Cabin of the ship - Maitland's quarters. Napoleon noted Captain Maitland had shown him and his officers kindness and hospitality aboard HMS Bellerophon. Napoleon told Maitland he considered him a man of honour. The British Government refused to allow Napoleon to set foot in England and arranged for his exile to the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena where he died in 1821. Captain Maitland rose to the position of Rear Admiral by the time of his death in 1839. By Ko Dong-hwan Starbucks Korea signed a new partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs to use more local produce for the global coffee chain's beverage and food menu, the company said on Monday. At the company's headquarters in central Seoul on the same day, Starbucks Korea agreed to develop new products using local ingredients. The company also pledged to donate used ground coffee beans collected from its network of stores to local farms to use as fertilizer. The measures reflect the mega franchise's latest initiative to support the domestic vegetable and fruit producers for mutual growth. The ministry agreed to share information with Starbucks Korea about natural produce from around the country to help the coffee chain procure quality ingredients. The signing will help some local farms expand revenue chains by selling large quantities of produce to the company that runs over 1,840 stores in the country as of this year, according to the ministry. The authority added that the company will be supplied with government-certified natural produce through safe channels. The company said it has already agreed with the ministry to use locally produced rice powder as a signature ingredient for its new beverage to be introduced within the first half of next year. "I encourge our customers to experience our new beverages and foods made from our own natural produce," said Starbucks Korea CEO Sohn Jeong-hyun who joined the signing. "We will start promoting our mutual story with our local farms through our new items to come." The Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Chung Hwang-keun, who was Sohn's counterpart at the event, said he found the signing "very meaningful, as a global corporate like Starbucks has pledged to invest as a robust supporter of the country's agricultural industry." "I urge more companies in the country to take the same steps to invest in our quality local produce including rice power," he said. MIDM Agricultural Union Corp. President Chun Dae-kyung and operators of Starbucks stores were also present at the event. The company has already launched some 30 products that use local produce including a frappuccino using malcha from Jeju Island, a fizzio with magnolia vines from Mungyeong, lattes with sweet pumpkins from Ochang and chestnuts from Gongju, a rice chip based on Pyeongtaek rice and a tea based on citrons cultivated in Goheung. A millionaire 'magic circle' lawyer who sailed the seas on a 17million superyacht faces losing his 4million London house after being sued by a Saudi princess. Ronald Gibbs has been locked in legal 'warfare' with the Saudi royals after agreeing to set up and manage a $25million investment fund for Princess Deema Bint Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in 2011. Over subsequent years, the former Linklaters partner sank the money into shares in a boat-building company he controlled, a 3.3million apartment in Montenegro and a 17million 40-metre superyacht, which he himself sailed, the High Court heard. Mr Gibbs and the Saudi royals reached a settlement agreement in 2018, under which he was obliged to begin selling the assets and return the princess' investment. Princess Deema is now suing him, claiming Mr Gibbs has still 'not paid a penny' of what he owes and is seeking an order for sale of his 4million house in London to satisfy the 2.2million interim damages and costs bill he currently owes. Mr Gibbs claims most of the beneficial interest in the house which he bought in 2012 is owned by his ex-wife and children. Ronald Gibbs outside London's High Court... he has been locked in 'warfare' with the Saudi royals after agreeing to set up and manage a $25million investment fund for Princess Deema Bint Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in 2011 Princess Deema is now suing him, claiming Mr Gibbs has still 'not paid a penny' of what he owes and is seeking an order for sale of a 4million London house (pictured) to satisfy the 2.2million interim damages and costs bill he currently owes The former Linklaters partner sank the money into shares in a boat-building company he controlled, a 3.3million apartment in Montenegro and a 17million 40-metre superyacht, (pictured) which he himself sailed, the High Court heard The court heard that Mr Gibbs was an asset finance lawyer who rose to become a partner at Linklaters, one of the prestigious top five 'magic circle' London commercial legal firms. Independently, he agreed to manage the $25million investment pot handed to Princess Deema by her father, former Saudi defence minister Sultan bin Abdulaziz, on his death in 2011. The money was ultimately invested in a swish apartment at the Regent Hotel in Porto, Montenegro, superyacht company Silver Arrows Marine Limited and a 17million customised 40-metre Sunseeker 131 superyacht, named Elysium - the happy afterlife in Greek mythology. The company, whose past projects have included collaborating with Mercedes Benz on a unique yacht based on the lines of one of their cars, is controlled by experienced yachtsman Mr Gibbs, who has also taken the helm of the Elysium. Princess Deema and her brother HRH Prince Khaled Bin Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud have now complained that Mr Gibbs failed to liquidate the assets and return the princess' millions after being first asked to do so in 2013. Simon Atrill KC, for the princess, said Mr Gibbs had in 2018 agreed to liquidate the investment portfolio by selling the assets, but failed to do so. After summary judgment was entered against him for breach of the agreement, he was ordered to pay 582,077.49 interim damages and 1.64million costs to the princess and her lawyers. But by 2021, he had still not liquidated the investments, the High Court heard, leading to the princess suing him for breach of the 2018 agreement. That same year, Mr Gibbs was hit with a worldwide freezing order and in May 2022 had judgment entered against him in relation to breaching the settlement agreement. Mr Atrill is now asking High Court judge John Linwood to force Mr Gibbs to sell a 4million house in Richmond, south-west London, and pay off the bills with the proceeds. Money was also invested in a swish apartment at the Regent Hotel in Porto, Montenegro He told the judge Mr Gibbs has 'never repaid a penny' of the money despite 'accepting his obligation to do so... and having the means to do so'. In relation to the property at the centre of the claim, he continued: 'In 2021, Mr Gibbs said - including by way of sworn affidavit and through his solicitors - that he owned the property 100 per cent beneficially. 'Mr Gibbs, an experienced solicitor, now seeks to deny that this is what he really meant. 'On 6 October 2022, four days before the hearing of the application to make final the interim charging orders on the property, Mrs Gibbs - Mr Gibbs' wife from whom he has been separated since 2006 - emailed Princess Deema's solicitors to assert that, on the day that Mr Gibbs purchased the property in 2012, he granted a 50 per cent beneficial interest to Mrs Gibbs and a 25 per cent beneficial interest to their three children. 'Three days later, Mrs Gibbs circulated photographs of that purported declaration of trust, dated 12 July 2012. At the hearing the following day, Mr Gibbs stated that he has at best a 25 per cent beneficial interest in the property. 'This has now become Mr Gibbs' case in these order for sale proceedings.' The barrister said that Mr Gibbs and his ex, who has been joined as a defendant in the case, 'were asked to produce the original version of the purported declaration of trust...in order that it could be submitted for expert analysis in circumstances where its authenticity was disputed. 'However... the document was then mysteriously destroyed shortly before this trial, and so was not provided for inspection,' he told the judge. Mr Gibbs and his ex-wife Sandra Gibbs are representing themselves at trial. Mr Gibbs claimed he was 'living hand to mouth' due to the freezing order imposed on him in 2021 and no longer has control over the yacht or access to the Montenegro apartment Mrs Gibbs told the judge: 'I can't find the original trust deed, but have provided certified copies,' adding that she had kept it 'safe in a drawer', but that it had nevertheless been lost. Mr Gibbs, making submissions, told the judge not to expect him to have 'legal superpowers' because of his illustrious former job, but to treat him like any other litigant in person, adding that he had retired in 2006 and come off the solicitors' register in 2016. In the hearing earlier this year, Mr Gibbs had claimed the costs and damages orders would ruin him, saying: 'This is warfare against me.' Mr Gibbs claimed he was 'living hand to mouth' due to the freezing order imposed on him in 2021 and no longer has control over the yacht or access to the Montenegro apartment. The claims were disputed by Mr Atrill. Judgment was reserved. U.S. and Japanese divers have discovered wreckage and remains of crew members from a U.S. Air Force Osprey aircraft that crashed last week off southwestern Japan, the Air Force announced Monday. The $90 million CV-22 Osprey carrying eight American crew crashed last Wednesday off Yakushima island during a training mission. The body of one victim was recovered and identified earlier, while seven others remained missing. Five of the crew were found inside a large part of the aircraft's fuselage. The Air Force Special Operations Command said the remains were being recovered and their identities have yet to be determined. 'The main priority is bringing the Airmen home and taking care of their family members. Support to, and the privacy of, the families and loved ones impacted by this incident remains AFSOC's top priority,' it said in a statement. The U.S. military identified the one confirmed victim as Air Force Staff Sgt. Jacob Galliher, a married father-of-two from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on Saturday. The members of Japanese Coast Guard carry the debris which are believed to be from the crashed U.S. military Osprey aircraft U.S. military CV-22 Osprey takes off from Iwakuni base, Yamaguchi prefecture, western Japan, this crash is the latest in a string of fatal accidents involving the $90 million aircraft Japanese coast guard rescuers have found three people as well as debris after a US military Osprey plane crashed into the ocean close to Yakushima island On Monday, divers from the Japanese navy and U.S. military spotted what appeared to be the front section of the Osprey, along with possibly five of the missing crew members, Japan's NHK public television and other media reported. Japanese navy officials declined to confirm the reports, saying they could not release details without consent from the U.S. The U.S.-made Osprey is a hybrid aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter but can rotate its propellers forward and cruise much faster, like an airplane, during flight. A total of six coast guard ships and two helicopters were deployed as part of a rescue operation. The deployment of the Osprey in Japan has been controversial, with critics saying it is prone to accidents. The US military and Japan say it is safe. This is the second time in three months that an Osprey has been involved in a crash. Three Marines were killed during an exercise in northern Australia. The cause of that crash has not been made public. In June 2022, five Marines died in a fiery crash in a remote part of California east of San Diego. A crash investigation report last month found that the tragedy was caused by a mechanical failure related to a clutch. This picture shows the remains of the US military Osprey aircraft This is the second fatal crash involving an Osprey aircraft in the last three months following the deaths of three Marines on board one in August A Japanese ship is seen hauling the empty inflatable life craft out of the water There had been 16 similar clutch problems with the Marine Ospreys in flight since 2012, the report found. In February 2023, the Marine Corps announced that a piece of equipment believed to be the source of the problem had been replaced. The Osprey, a hybrid aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter but during flight can tilt its propellers forward and cruise much faster like an airplane. They are used by the US Marines, US Navy and Japan Self Defense Forces. Since 2012, there have been six fatal crashes of Marine Ospreys resulting the deaths of 16 people. A majority of the 50,000 U.S. troops based in Japan under a bilateral security pact and 70 percent of U.S. military facilities are stationed in Okinawa, which accounts for only 0.6 percent of Japanese land. Japan has suspended all flights of its own fleet of 14 Ospreys. A cash-strapped council has come under fire after its leader proposed spending 10,000 to help erect a statue of Jane Austen. Hampshire County Council is seeking to make cuts of 90 million that could include the loss of school crossing patrols, a reduction of services and grants, and freezing spending on road maintenance. But Conservative leader Rob Humby wants to help fund Winchester Cathedral's plan to build a new memorial to celebrate author Austen in time for her 250th birthday. The proposal has been met with criticism from locals commenting online, with one resident describing it as a 'kick in the teeth'. One person said: 'It's debatable whether funds should be spent at all whilst the Council is strapped for cash.' Another added: 'And they have no money because?' Winchester Cathedral's Jane Austen statue to mark the 250th anniversary of the author's birth Winchester Cathedral wants to build a new memorial to celebrate Jane Austen in time for her 250th birthday Conservative leader of Hampshire County Council Rob Humby wants to help fund Winchester Cathedral's plan to build a new memorial to celebrate author Austen 'This is the council that is cutting all services to minimum levels right?,' said another. 'So analogy would be someone only eating beans on toast, just about paying their bills and then wanting to buy a pair of Air Jordans so they can show them off! 'They have to decide on giving money, Simple answer NO, the councils say they're broke, cutting services etc. Kick in the teeth to the suffering if they do.' An editorial in the Hampshire Chronicle declared: 'The Cathedral needs to pay its own way and there is no doubt that a statue of Jane Austen would attract tourists to bring in vital revenue to pay for the building's upkeep. 'The ball is now in the public's court. We will see what people think.' The novelist, who wrote Persuasion, is one of the city's most famous former residents. She died in 1817 in Winchester, after writing titles such as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and is buried in the cathedral. The plan for the statue comes almost five years after a similar proposal - for which the council pledged to provide 25,000 - had to be dropped due to public opposition that the design was too 'Mills & Boon' and 'too kitsch for such a refined setting'. Now Winchester Cathedral has returned with a new plan for a 100,000 memorial featuring a life-sized statue of the novelist along the path of her funeral cortege. The 5'7' statue will represent Austen rising from her table at her home in the Hampshire village of Chawton as someone arrives at the door The novelist, who wrote Persuasion, is one of the city's most famous former residents It is hoped the statue will be erected in 2025 in the Inner Close to mark the 250th anniversary of her birth in 1775. Despite the 2019 backlash, the cathedral hopes the new design - by the same sculptor Martin Jennings - will win approval. Vice-Dean Canon Roland Riem said: 'Winchester Cathedral Chapter is delighted to be reviving this project, in a greatly revised form, as a lasting contribution to the 250th anniversary celebrations of Jane Austen's birth. 'As Martin Jennings has recently been trusted with the King's portrait, so I hope he will be trusted to deliver a stunning memorial sculpture of Austen for Winchester and Hampshire. 'What a joy it will be for its visitors from 2025 to meet there a woman confident of her place at the table of Britain's greatest novelists.' Mr Jennings also created the statue of John Betjeman at St Pancras railway station, unveiled in 2007, and the statue of Philip Larkin at Hull Paragon Interchange station in 2010. He also designed the first official coin and postage stamp portraits of King Charles III. He said: 'I will do everything I can to help this project succeed. Success for me means making a work of art which honours Jane Austen and pays tribute to her links with this city and its cathedral. Jane Austen died in 1817 in Winchester, after writing titles such as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and is buried in the cathedral 'The cathedral's historical collection of sculpture mostly recognises the achievements of men, so I am very glad to have the opportunity to add a representation of this justly celebrated woman.' The 5'7' statue will represent Austen rising from her table at her home in the Hampshire village of Chawton as someone arrives at the door. The sculptor hopes to suggest she is moving in front of her work as if to disguise it, as she kept her writing private. Mr Jennings said: 'From reading her novels, I wanted to give a sense of the moral vision running through them all. Perhaps this is most expressed in the sculpture in her posture and gaze. 'By erecting a bronze statue of her in a location of such distinction, we hope to communicate her moral vision and literary genius not only to today's visitors but to future generations as well.' The project has already attracted commendations from artists, academics and literacy experts, such as Prof Paula Bryne, author of The Real Jane Austen, Prof Emma Clery, author of Jane Austen: The Banker's Sister, Dr Gillian Dow, former executive director of Chawton House library, and more. The county council's leadership anticipates its 10,000 investment could attract visitors of one of 'Hampshire's cultural icons', and that the project will 'strengthen the Jane Austen trail across the county, building on the impact of the bicentenary of Jane Austen's death.' The total project costs are 100,000, made up of 60,000 for the design and model and a further 40,000 for casting and installation. A total of 73,000 has already been raised from private donations. A spokesperson for Hampshire County Council said: 'We have agreed a proposed 10 per cent contribution towards Winchester Cathedral's Jane Austen Memorial, conditional on match funding being secured by the Cathedral from Winchester City Council. 'Jane Austen is a significant figure in Hampshire's history and a literary icon, and we believe that the memorial sculpture will attract visitors to Winchester from a global fanbase, by becoming part of a network of places to visit in Hampshire on the Jane Austen trail. Supporting our heritage, where we can, is important not only for the benefit of future generations but also in helping to boost Hampshire's tourist and local economy.' MailOnline has contacted Rob Humby for comment. A pig farmer's son who was pulled out of school to look after his father's animals is locked in a 1.4million court fight with his mother over the family land. Barry Harding says since the age of 13 he has 'continually worked' at Cornerfields Farm, in Denham, Buckinghamshire, which has been in his family for nearly 80 years. He says that having to look after the pigs even as a child meant he was 'prevented from going to school and achieving any educational attainments'. He also claims that his own time, labour and money rescued the farm from financial disaster. Mr Harding's father Trevor died in 2017 and he fell out badly with his mother Joan, 76, leading to her leaving the farm, and claiming Barry changed the locks. She is now suing, accusing her son of 'forcing her out' of her home and demanding around 500,000 compensation for her share of the farm business, and profits and loans she says she is owed. Barry Harding (pictured), 47, who was pulled out of school to look after his father's pig farm is locked in a court fight with his mother over the family land Mr Harding's father Trevor died in 2017 and he fell out badly with his mother Joan (pictured), 76, leading to her leaving the farm, and claiming Barry changed the locks The dispute, which could cost the warring sides half-a-million pounds in lawyers' bills alone, reached Central London County Court as Barry, representing himself, insisted it was his endeavours that turned the farm into a success. Mr Harding disputes what his mother's share is worth, claiming his own investment of time, labour and money rescued the farm from financial disaster. His parents had made no financial contribution to the purchase of the farm from the council in 2008, other than using his father's right-to-buy discount, and he had since invested hundreds of thousands of pounds in improvements, he says. Mr Harding told Judge Mark Raeside KC: 'I have been conscious of the farm and the importance of it to my family since I was six years old. 'I continually worked on the farm from the age of 13. Because of the work required of me by my father, I was prevented by my parents from going to school. 'I went out to collect swill with my late father and I helped with the pig-farming business because this was required of me when my older brother left in 1988. 'These actions prevented me from going to school and successfully achieving any educational attainments. 'By my own endeavours and physical labour, I also created a skip hire business, bought cattle and built additional farm buildings at the farm.' Mr Harding says since the age of 13 he has 'continually worked' at Cornerfields Farm (pictured), in Denham, Buckinghamshire, which has been in his family for nearly 80 years The court heard that the Harding family started breeding pigs at Cornerfields Farm in 1948. Mr Harding told the judge he started working on the farm under his father and grandfather, sacrificing his education after being pulled out of school to help out with the pigs. The farm ceased pig-breeding around 20 years ago, but Mr Harding says that since then he has toiled and invested over 500,000 to transform it into its current skip-hire and cattle feed business. The farm was bought by the family from the council in 2008, with Mr Harding and his ex-partner putting in cash and his father's right-to-buy discount being treated as his parents' contribution. His parents' shares were then put into life trusts, entitling them to benefit from the farm during their lifetimes, but to then pass to Mr Harding and his ex, Sarah Cox, on death. However, Mrs Harding now claims the decision to put her share into trust was the result of 'undue influence' from her son, with her barrister Michael Barrow saying he had been in prime position to influence his parents. Mr Barrow told the judge: 'He initiated the preparation of the deeds and settlements, found and instructed the solicitors and presented the documents thereafter. 'Joan's evidence is that both she and Trevor felt they had no choice other than to sign and execute the documents. 'As Joan's and Trevor's son, all living together at the property, Barry was in a position to exercise control and undue influence over his parents.' Mr Harding, however, denied being in a 'position of dominance' over his mother and Mr Barrow accepted in court that evidence of actual 'undue influence' in 2008 was 'limited'. Joan insists that she, her husband Trevor and her son were in partnership, jointly running the farm until Trevor's death in 2017 and that their son has deprived her of her share of income in recent years. She claimed she had also put time and money into the business over the years, including her wages when she worked elsewhere. The court heard that the Harding family started breeding pigs at the farm (pictured) in 1948 But her son insisted: 'The business I took over was of no value,' adding: 'any investment my mother claims she put in was worthless'. 'My parents were never in any position to be able to buy the property, as their income was always limited and the pig farming business eventually collapsed.' Joan said she had lived and worked at Cornerfields from the 1960s, sharing it with Trevor and Barry until she was allegedly 'excluded' by her son in January 2017. Her barrister said she claimed her son was 'impossible to live with and that she had to leave for her own sanity.' Mr Harding denied putting any pressure on his mother, adding that she had voluntarily chosen to go and stay with her sister and brother-in-law. He insisted his mother could have returned to the farm 'any time she wanted to,' although Mr Barrow said this had proved impossible as Barry had changed the locks. 'She returned to the property to retrieve her belongings and you refused access. You changed the locks,' he claimed. 'No I have not,' Mr Harding replied. The court dispute initially also involved Mr Harding's ex-partner, who was suing both mother and son for a stake of the farm. But her claim settled at the door of the court, leaving Mr Harding and his mother to carry on fighting it out. In her claim against her son, Joan wants to overturn the deeds putting her and her husband's shares into trust so that she can liquidate her share of the farm. Alternatively, she wants him to hand her hundreds of thousands of pounds for excluding her from the farm, plus her share of profits and repayment of loans. However, Mr Harding says the trusts were legitimately made and disputes what the value of his mother's share is, claiming it was only his investment that made it a success. He wants to keep the farm business in the family. The judge reserved his ruling in the case. Ministers are braced for defeat in the House of Commons tonight after Tory MPs joined calls for a new body to administer payouts to infected blood victims. At least 30 Conservative backbenchers are due to rebel against the Government and demand the establishment of a judge-led body to oversee a compensation scheme. The infected blood scandal saw thousands of patients infected with HIV and hepatitis C through contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s. Compensation payments to victims and their families could reportedly cost between 5billion to 22billion. The Government has already paid out around 400million in interim compensation payments, with ministers having wanted to wait until the ongoing inquiry has concluded before establishing a full scheme. But they could have their hands forced after Labour put their support behind an amendment - being backed by rebel Tory MPs - to establish a body to adminster payouts within three months. The infected blood scandal saw thousands of patients infected with HIV and hepatitis C through contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s At least 30 Conservative backbenchers are due to rebel against the Government and demand the establishment of a judge-led body to oversee a compensation scheme Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves wrote to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt this weekend to inform him of her party's support for the amendment to the Victims and Prisoners Bill Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves wrote to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt this weekend to inform him of her party's support for the amendment to the Victims and Prisoners Bill. She described the infected blood scandal as 'one of the most appalling tragedies in our country's recent history'. 'This week we have the opportunity to work together to begin to bring justice for the victims,' Ms Reeves added. 'Blood infected with Hepatitis C and HIV has stolen life, denied opportunities and harmed livelihoods.' Under the amendment, tabled by Dame Diana Johnson, the Labour chair of the Commons home affairs committee, the Government would be required to create a compensation body within three months of the legislation becoming law. Senior Tories Sir Robert Buckland and David Davis are among those backing the amendment. The creation of a compensation body by the end of this year had been recommended by the chairman of the contaminated blood inquiry, Sir Brian Langstaff, a former High Court judge. But Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer this morning indicated that ministers are unlikely to shift position, insisting that it was 'appropriate' to wait until the ongoing inquiry has concluded. 'We have made interim compensation awards, there is an inquiry ongoing. That will report next year and that is why we think it is appropriate to wait for the inquiry,' Ms Frazer told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. 'I can totally understand and this is an absolutely dreadful situation, that is why Government has already identified compensation on an interim basis and that is why we have got an inquiry' She said it was 'appropriate' to 'wait for the outcome'. 'I think it is always appropriate when you put in place mechanisms for review that you await the outcome of those reviews before you make any final decisions,' she said. The independent inquiry into the scandal was due to publish its final report this autumn but the document will now be published in March 2024 due to the 'sheer volume and scale of the material'. Under an initial scheme, only victims themselves or bereaved partners can receive an interim payment of around 100,000. Labour's shadow minister for victims and sentencing Kevin Brennan has also tabled an amendment which would require the Government to respond to the final report of the independent Infected Blood Inquiry within 25 days. 'This is not a party political issue,' Ms Reeves said. 'All of us have a responsibility to act now to address this historic wrong. Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle will decide which amendments MPs will vote on later. Downing Street today defended the Government's approach to infected blood compensation. The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: 'It would not be right to pre-empt the findings of the final report.' 'We made interim payments of 100,000 to victims and their families registered with infected blood support schemes across the UK and we are prepared to respond as quickly as possible once the final report is published.' Australia's richest person Gina Rinehart has bought one of the nation's most iconic clothing brands Driza-Bone. The billionaire mining magnate paid an undisclosed amount through her clothing company S Kidman & Co company to secure the 125-year-old label from 15-year owner Propel Group. Driza-bone's signature oilskin jackets have been donned by prime ministers and US presidents and featured in films such as the Man from Snowy River as well as being showcased during the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games opening ceremony. Driza-bone's signature oilskin jackets will now be made by a company owned by mining magnate Gina Rinehart Mrs Rinehart said she valued those historical associations of the brand but was looking to the future. 'We want to keep and preserve its magnificent past but we also want to rejuvenate it,' Mrs Rinehart told Channel Seven. 'We want to grow it. We'd love to see this iconic brand overseas as well.' S Kidman and Co chief executive Adam Giles also promised big things ahead. 'You'll see Driza-Bone bigger, stronger, more accessible to more Australians and (we will) potentially export it overseas where we can tell the Australian story, the Australian spirit and the heritage and the history,' he said. Mrs Rinehart's fellow mining magnate Andrew Forrest also recently moved to keep an iconic clothing brand in Australian hands by buying famous hat-maker Akubra. Ms Rinehart has vowed to 'rejuvenate' Driza-bone and aims to expand its clothing sold overseas Russian President Vladimir Putin, Thailand Prime Minister Surayud and US President George W Bush wear the Driza-bone gear given them for the 2007 APEC summit in Sydney, In 2020 Mr Forrest's investment company Tattarang also bought famed leather outback boot maker RM Williams for $190 million. The deal bought out actor Hugh Jackman's minor stake in the company for $10million. Ms Rineharts fortune, which flow making from iron ore dug up by her company Hancock Prospecting, has been estimated at $34.41billion. Britons unleashed scathing reviews of the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree as it arrived in central London from Norway today, with unimpressed onlookers calling for the spindly tree to be 'sent back'. The fir, which will be lit in a ceremony on December 7, was felled in Norway in late November, per tradition, before being shipped to one of the capital's most iconic tourist locations. But as the 62ft tree, which was grown in the Nordmarka forests just north of Oslo, was unveiled many took to social media to point out it looked 'half dead' with parts of the tree appearing spindly and brown. The disappointing reveal comes just days after other residents in multiple towns across the UK have slammed local councils for unveiling some of the saddest looking evergreens ahead of the festive season. In March, Cambridgeshire, locals slammed the town's wonky tree, calling the loosely decorated tree 'embarrassing' and comparing it to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. LONDON: The Trafalgar Square Christmas tree looked rather flattened after its long journey from Norway NORWAY: Trafalgar Square's 62-foot tree looked magnificent as it was felled in late November before making its way to London GREATER MANCHESTER: Others across the country have also slammed their local Christmas Trees. In Hattersley in Hyde locals slammed their tree as 'shocking', with pictures showing the threadbare spruce missing some of its boughs, while the ones remaining appear very thin Meanwhile, furious members of the public in Hattersley in Hyde, were left shocked after its Christmas spruce was revealed with most of its pine needles missing. Those in Walsall blasted its 'Scoorge' council for its 'shabby Christmas tree, which had barely any lights on in a bid to save cash. The BBC also came under fire for its Christmas tree outside its Broadcasting House in Portland Place in London. Employees of the broadcaster criticised the tree, calling it a 'bit stark', while another joked that 'very very little time or licence fee money was spent' on the spruce which is noticeably different in comparison to previous years. Television Director Leigh Butcher said: 'Can confirm that very very little time or licence fee money was spent on the Broadcasting House tree this year.' Fellow Television Director Rob Jones claimed it's 'impactful from a distance', while former BBC journalist Robert Rea admitted it was a 'bit bare'. None have been criticised as much as the prominent Trafalgar Square tree, however, which is has been gifted by Norway every year since 1947, in recognition of the UK's support during World War Two. The gift began when Norway was invaded in 1940, and the King of Norway sought refuge in the UK and established the Norwegian government-in-exile. After pictures emerged showing the tree being felled, keen-eyed fans were quick to point out that they hoped it was better than last year's offering. The 2022 tree was widely mocked by Londoners on social media after it appeared rather skinny and threadbare. One person said: 'They are taking the p**s that aint a Christmas tree. Well it is but its not what we expect. Send it back.' Another joked: 'At what point will they give up the pretence and just send us a log?' Others questioned 'why would they bring us a dead tree?' and 'Is it me or does it look quite dead?' Social media users were also quick to joke Norway had only delivered 'half the tree'. LONDON: A tree has been sent by Norway ever since the World War Two in recognition of Britain's help Those on social media were quick to poke fun at the tree in Trafalgar Square that was revealed today WEST MIDLANDS: Elsewhere, locals have blasted 'Scrooge' Walsall Council for its 'Shabby' Christmas Tree near to St Paul's Bus Station, which has had barely any lights put on it in a bid to save cash CAMBRIDGESHIRE: The festive tree in March was put up earlier this month but many of those living in the area noted how sharply it is leaning to the side Another seeing the more humorous side said: 'Judging by the photos of the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree being felled last week in Norway and arriving today, it's been transported as hand luggage on Ryanair.' 'Ok, own up, who switched out the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree for one from Wish mid-journey?' someone else asked. 'That's only half the tree. Explains the recession in Norway,' quipped one user. A second added: 'Where's the other half of it?' It is being erected by a specialist rigging team, who will also be unflattening its branches, and a crane. The tree will be decorated in traditional Norwegian fashion with vertical strings and lights. Patricia McAllister, Lord Mayor of Westminster, joined British Ambassador Jan Thompson for the official tree felling ceremony in Norway. It was hosted by Oslo Mayor Anne Lindboe, who was seen helping saw down the fir. It comes as a 40ft Christmas tree was put up at the Houses of Parliament to mark the beginning of the Christmas season. LONDON: Workers could be seen trying to straighten out the tree's branches once it had been erected LONDON: After some care by workers, who straightened out the branches, this year's tree appeared much more festive The Sitka spruce was selected from the Kielder Forest, Northumberland, and will stand at the foot of Big Ben. King Haakon VII of Norway made popular broadcasts to his country via the BBC while in exile during the Second World War. Aware that he was likely to be found and apprehended by the Nazis after the invasion of neutral Norway in April 1940, he slept in his uniform, fearful they would be able to publish humiliating photographs of him in pyjamas. Denmark surrendered just six hours after Hitler's troops crossed its border. To do otherwise would be to risk further bloodshed and almost certain defeat. But Haakon and his government were determined Norway would not collaborate with the Nazis. His broadcasts from Britain reminded Norwegians to keep their values and his moral fortitude cheered them, just as he was cheered by the defiance of the greater part of the Norwegian people. Rather than saying 'when we win the war', he spoke of the day he would 'come home'. Loyalty to their constitutional monarch provided the focus for the Norwegian resistance. A Tory MP is to make an attempt to overturn Sadiq Khan's Ultra-Low Emissions Zone expansion in London after it was revealed the widened scheme generated 5.3million for the mayor's coffers in its first week. Kent MP Gareth Johnson is to try to get the Greater London Low Emission Zone Charging (Amendment) Bill into law to reserve what he said was an 'unfair stealth tax' on his constituents. The Dartford Conservative is targeting August's expansion of ULEZ to all 32 boroughs which means everyone travelling within and into Great London in a non-compliant vehicle has to pay 12.50 every day. It comes as data shows that the expansion from inner London netted almost 300,000 extra drivers who were charged in the first week it was in operation. More than 425,000 ULEZ charges were paid in the week following the extension, compared to just 140,000 the week before. Mr Johnson said: 'This is an unfair stealth tax on the people of Dartford and across the south east, hitting the poorest the hardest. The London Mayor, Sadiq Khan has no mandate for this. Sadiq Khan's controversial ULEZ expansion generated 5.3million in its first week with 300,000 extra drivers charged for driving non-compliant vehicles within Greater London 'Expanding ULEZ was not in his manifesto or in his transport strategy and the consultation on the expansion showed that people did not want it. It impacts people in Kent and other counties around London who cannot vote in or out the London Mayor. It is taxation without accountability. 'It punishes those on lower incomes who can least afford to buy a newer car to avoid the daily charge. There are also no guarantees the standard for meeting the ULEZ threshold will not be changed in the future to include more vehicles. 'My proposed bill is to overturn the ULEZ expansion and ensure the London Mayor cannot impose this unfair tax on the people of Dartford and beyond.' Mr Johnson will table the new law as a Private Member's Bill, which is unlikely to succeed unless it attracts government backing. The ULEZ scheme is designed to limit harmful pollution. Most petrol cars registered before 2006 and diesel cars registered before 2015 are non-compliant. It comes as police face anti-ULEZ activists vandalising or stealing cameras in record numbers, with almost 1,000 offences recorded between April 1 and October 31 this year. Just two people had been charged in relation to the offences, the Met said last month. The new data was revealed in Freedom of Information Requests from the Times, and showed that 284,000 extra charges were paid in just the first week, from August 29. Research by car marketplace Motorway previously showed that 16 percent of Londoners, or around 714,000 people, own a vehicle that is not compliant with the ULEZ restrictions. Motorway co-founder Alex Buttle told the Times: 'With the continued cost of living crisis and the recent expansion of London's Ulez, more drivers who use the zone are questioning their driving habits. 'We know from our research that the financial implications are causing concern among drivers in London and the surrounding areas.' Previously, the ULEZ zone had been restricted to a large area of central London, but the expansion meant it now covers all of Greater London. Its boundaries now extend into Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent, Surrey and Buckinghamshire. The data comes as Transport for London (TfL) was accused of 'misleading' the public over the benefits of the scheme. The new data was revealed in Freedom of Information Requests from the Times , and showed that 284,000 extra charges were paid in just the first week, from August 29 Ulez cameras have been attacked nearly 1,000 times in just seven months, shocking figures reveal Activists opposed to Mr Khan's flagship policy - which recently expanded to cover the entire city - have attacked hundreds of static cameras The advertising watchdog launched an investigation earlier this year after hundreds of people complained that the Mayor of London's transport authority exaggerated the extent to which the scheme had improved air quality. Now, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) report is set to criticise 'misleading' claims about the expansion of Ulez reducing levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2). A draft ASA report specifies these claims going out in Tfl's radio and newspaper advertisements. Recommendations in the report allegedly suggest that two complaints about two radio adverts and one in a newspaper are to be upheld. Following the ASA's investigation, it suggests two adverts were 'misleading' because they 'did not clarify' claims NO2 levels had 'reduced by nearly half' as a result of Ulez, and were based on 'estimates or modelled scenarios' and not 'actual figures'. Anger against the scheme has been bubbling up for some time, with 987 recorded crimes concerning ULEZ cameras from April to October. The Met Police recorded 220 reports of cameras being stolen and 767 cameras being damaged, but arrested just five people. Just two have been charged. A statement from the force said: 'The Met continues to treat criminal activity in relation to ULEZ seriously and has deployed considerable resources to our operation. 'Where there are possible lines of enquiry, local investigators will follow up using a range of investigative approaches including CCTV trawls, witness searches and an assessment of forensic opportunities.' When they arrived in September 1974, Chia Chia and Ching Ching were just the latest example of so-called Panda Diplomacy. Having been flown in to Heathrow after a deal struck by Conservative PM Edward Heath with his autocratic counterpart Chairman Mao, the pandas were given a home at London Zoo. A beaming Mr Heath, now out of office, was among the first to pay the pair a visit. When Chia Chia left the UK in 1988 - three years after the death of his mate - it was fitting that Mr Heath, who had been out of office for 14 years by then, returned to say goodbye. Sadly however, there has been no similar farewell this month from Rishi Sunak to Yang Guang and Tian Tian, who today are heading back to China after spending 12 years at Edinburgh Zoo. Former Prime Minister Edward Heath says goodbye to Chia Chia the panda, who spent 14 years at London Zoo. He returned to China in 1988, three years after the death of his mate, Ching Ching When they arrived in September 1974, Chia Chia and Ching Ching were just the latest example of so-called Panda Diplomacy. Above: The pandas making their first public appearance The deal to bring Chia Chia and Ching Ching to Britain was struck by Mr Heath during his visit to China in May 1973. By the time they arrived in September the following year, Mr Heath had been turfed out of Downing Street at the General Election. There were high hopes that Ching-Ching - who was two - and 22-month-old Chia Chia would one day breed when they first entered their enclosures at the zoo in Regent's Park. British Ambassador Edward Youde had given them a gilded send-off aboard a specially equipped British Airways 707 cargo jet, which was loaded with piles of bamboo shoots to nourish them on their journey. They were given panda-sized oxygen masks, ice blocks to sit on if it got too hot and extra air conditioning. When Ching Ching and Chia Chia made their first public appearance a few days after their arrival, hundreds of Londoners came to visit. The pair put on a typically cute display, climbing on top of each other to the delight of those watching. Yang Guang and Tian Tian are heading back to China after spending 12 years at Edinburgh Zoo. Above: Yang Guang during one of his final appearances in Edinburgh The deal to bring Chia Chia and Ching Ching to Britain was struck by Mr Heath during his visit to China in May 1973. By the time they arrived in September the following year, Mr Heath had been turfed out of Downing Street at the General Election. Above: Mr Heath greets Ching Ching during a visit shortly after the pandas' arrival Among them was Mr Heath, now leader of the opposition. He was pictured beaming as Ching Ching stood on her hind legs to greet him. He said at the time: 'They are very attractive creatures, they are a gift from one people to another to show a happy relationship.' Heath was so besotted with the pandas that he celebrated his 70th birthday party at London Zoo in 1986, after the death of Ching Ching. She passed away from peritonitis after failing to produce any cubs with her long-time mate. The nation had watched with baited breath five years earlier when she fell seriously ill with a stomach upset. On that occasion, she thankfully recovered after four months. In 1981, she had to cope with Chia Chia's absence for several weeks when he was flown to the US in the hope that he might mate with Ling-Ling, the resident panda at Washington's National Zoo Although that attempt failed, his sperm was a successfully used to impregnate Shao-Shao the panda at Madriz Zoo. She gave birth to twins, though one of them died soon after being born in 1982. When Chia Chia left permanently for a zoo in Mexico in 1988, Mr Heath again paid a visit, this time to say farewell. He told the Mail that he was 'very sad' to see him go. With their star attraction now gone, London Zoo immediately began negotiations with China and other zoos for a new pair of pandas. Mr Heath played a key role in securing a deal which saw Ming Ming arrive from China in 1991. He was paired with Bao Bao, who had come form Berlin Zoo. However, the pair hated each other and spent their time fighting rather than getting cosy together. They were sent home in 1994. Neither they nor Ching Ching and Chia Chia were the first pandas to come to London Zoo. In 1958, the attraction welcomed Chi Chi, who was privately owned. Although her visit was only meant to be for a few weeks, she proved so popular that officials decided to buy her. In 1958, Chi-Chi made two escapes from her enclosure. On the second bid for freedom, she clawed a woman's leg before she was recaptured. However, she did save the Zoological Society from a crippling financial loss in 1958. By the time she died in 1972, she had been seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors. Her stuffed remains now lie at the Natural History Museum. Ching Ching the Panda at London Zoo. She and Chia Chia proved hugely popular with visitors Ching Ching munches on bamboo. Sadly she passed away in 1985 after a bout of peritonitis Despite repeated efforts to get them to mate, Chia Chia and Ching Ching never produced a cub She was also the inspiration for the logo of the World Wildlife Fund, which was designed by Sir Peter Scott. Her stay followed those of three giant pandas who came to England in 1938. The trio, including baby Ming, had been captured from their natural home and shipped to Britain. Ming proved so popular that her image was reproduced and used on London Underground posters, as well as in postcards and even cartoons. Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen, was among thousands who came to visit. Her popularity sparked the production of panda toys, dolls, and even sweets. Whilst Ming's companions - Sung and Tang - died in 1939 and 1940, she lived on until 1944. Tragically, she had been greatly affected by the Nazi bombing campaign on London, with her hair falling out due to the stress. The Daily Mail's obituary read: 'Her passing will be mourned by hundreds of thousands of children all over the country, in whose hearts she held a very special place. 'Parents adored her, too, because Ming made their children happy.' Panda Diplomacy was not restricted to British shores. Between 1958 and 1982, China gave 23 pandas to nine different countries. In 1958, the attraction welcomed Chi Chi, who was privately owned. Although her visit was only meant to be for a few weeks, she proved so popular that officials decided to buy her London Zoo's chief vet Oliver Graham-Jones gives Chi-Chi a check-up in 1958 Chi Chi gives a wave to the camera as she has her picture taken in 1968. She died in 1972 Ming the panda was one of three who were brought to London Zoo in 1938. Ming proved so popular that her image was reproduced and used on London Underground posters, as well as in postcards and even cartoons. Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen, was among thousands who came to visit. Above: The young princess and her sister during their visit Mr Heath played a key role in securing a deal which saw Ming Ming arrive from China in 1991. He was paired with Bao Bao, who had come form Berlin Zoo. Above: Mr Heath visiting Ming Ming Also among them were Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, who were given by Chairman Mao to US President Richard Nixon in 1972. Yang Guang and Tian Tian came to Edinburgh Zoo in 2011 as part of a 10-year agreement. This was then extended by two years. It was long hoped that the pair would produce a cub, but despite repeated attempts, they remained without offspring. Visitors said their goodbyes to the bears on Thursday, November 30, with the zoo then beginning preparations for them to return to the China Wildlife Conservation Association base at Chengdu To take the pandas to their new home, Edinburgh Zoo's blacksmith Rab Clark has constructed two bespoke metal crates complete with sliding padlock doors, pee trays and removable screens so the keepers can check on them during the flight to Sichuan. The crates are 190cm long, 146cm high and 127cm wide, which the bears have been getting used to in the last few weeks. Russian billionaires have made astonishing gains in their fortunes despite Western sanctions over Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine. The soaring wealth comes despite the aim of sanctions being to hit tycoons seen as close to the dictator. The media in Ukraine has highlighted the 'never had it so good' rise in oligarch money during 2023. 'The wealth of Russia's richest oligarchs increased by $38.575 billion [30.37 billion] in 2023,' reported Economicheskaya Pravda [Economic Truth]. The evidence is based on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. RBC Ukraine media commented: 'Sanctions have no effect? Most oligarchs from the Russian Federation increased their fortunes in the past year.' Boris Johnson - then Britain's prime minister - promised in February 2022 that 'in concert with our allies, we will agree a massive package of economic sanctions designed in time to hobble the Russian economy'. Yet the wealthiest Russians are anything but hobbled. 'They are laughing all the way to the bank,' stated one comment. Examples include Putin-linked oligarch Vladimir Potanin, 62, a nickel magnate sanctioned by Britain who has seen his 24.2 billion fortune soar by 1.7 billion since the beginning of the year. 62-year-old nickel magnate Vladimir Potanin is pictured with his estranged wife who is aiming to launch a mammoth divorce settlement case in London Putin-linked oligarch Vladimir Potanin has seen his 24.2 billion fortune soar by 1.7 billion since the beginning of the year. He is currently challenging court ruling that allowed his wife to launch massive divorce settlement proceedings in the UK Russian oligarch Vagit Alekperov (R) - 62nd place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index- pictured with Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) Russian steel magnate and 'laird' Vladimir Lisin, 67, famous for buying a sprawling Scottish estate in Perthshire and sanctioned by Australia, now has a fortune of 18.03 billion - a rise of 2.42 billion Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov (R) - 82nd place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, pictured with Vladimir Putin (L) He has gone to the UK's supreme court to challenge a ruling allowing ex-wife Natalia, 62, to launch a multi-billion divorce settlement case in London, in what could become the highest in English legal history. Major shareholder of the Russian gas company Novatek, Leonid Mikhelson, 68, has registered a 2.13 billion jump in his wealth which now stands at 21.5 billion. Lukoil founder Vagit Alekperov, 73, has seen a 7.2 billion rise, taking his fortune to 19.3 billion since the start of the year despite sanctions by the UK and Australia. This comes as Lukoil saw the mysterious deaths of four senior-level figures linked to the company during the war. Among them were Vladimir Nekrasov, 66, chairman of the Lukoil board of directors, who died 'suddenly' last month, and tycoon Ravil Maganov, 67, who fell from a window of Moscow's elite Central Clinical Hospital, also known as the Kremlin clinic, in September last year. Russian steel magnate and 'laird' Vladimir Lisin, 67, famous for buying a sprawling Scottish estate in Perthshire and sanctioned by Australia, now has a fortune of 18.03 billion - a rise of 2.42 billion. Former Arsenal shareholder Alisher Usmanov, 70, the world's 82nd richest man, whose company also had ties to Everton, saw his fortune leap to 15.98 billion, a rise of 1.47 billion. Now living in his native Uzbekistan despite close Kremlin links, he made his wealth in mining, metals and mobile phones. He has been sanctioned by the UK, US and EU. Steel and mining mogul Alexey Mordashov, 58, who attended Northumbria University in Britain, saw a 486 million jump in his fortune to 15.2 billion. He, too, was sanctioned by the UK, US and EU. All of the above oligarchs are included on the list of the hundred most wealthy tycoons in the world. Former Arsenal shareholder Alisher Usmanov, 70, the world's 82nd richest man, whose company also had ties to Everton, saw his fortune leap to 15.98 billion, a rise of 1.47 billion Russian oligarch Vladimir Lisin (L) - 72nd place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, pictured with Vladimir Putin (R) Russian oligarch and former Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich - 293rd place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index Russian oligarch Gennady Timchenko (R), 133rd on Bloomberg Billionaires Index, pictured with Vladimir Putin (R) Roman Abramovich - formerly Chelsea owner and now, aged 57, the 293rd richest person in the world - is listed with a 7.95 billion fortune. This suggests an increase of 104 million for the UK-sanctioned tycoon last year when several superrich Russians took a hit after the launch of the war. Other Russian billionaires to see their fortunes rise during Putin's brutal conflict include fertiliser and coal tycoon Andrey Melnichenko, 51, whose wealth rose 3.17 billion to 13.54 billion. Metals and investment mogul Mikhail Prokhorov, 58, sanctioned by Ukraine, saw a 1.42 billion rise in his fortune, making him worth 11.8 billion. Uber-Putin-friendly Gennady Timchenko, 71, has seen a rise in his wealth by 2.11 billion to 11.4 billion despite sanctions by the UK, US and EU, and banking billionaire Mikhail Fridman, 59, is 513 million better off this year, according to the figures. This takes his wealth to 9.44 billion despite US sanctions. Fertiliser mogul and investor Dmitry Rybolovlev, 57, now has a fortune of 8.74 billion, a rise so far this year of 513 million. Some 25 Russians remain in the top 500 richest people. Gov't demands China immediately resume exports By Baek Byung-yeul The government is on alert over the possibility of another urea shortage crisis following China's sudden hold on the customs clearance of industrial urea exports to Korea, the industry ministry said Monday. Officials explained that the delay in urea customs clearance in China is not due to political reasons, but stems from increased demand there, adding it conveyed its concerns to China and requested a swift resumption of exports. On Nov. 30, China Customs, which is equivalent to the Korea Customs Service, suddenly put on hold the exports of industrial urea that a Chinese company was trying to ship to a Korean company, according to the government. Urea is essential for reducing emissions from diesel vehicles and producing agricultural fertilizer when mixed with water. When China regulated the exports of urea in October of 2021, there was a significant disruption here because Korea relied on China for 97 percent of urea imports. Since then, the government diversified its import sources for urea and reduced the dependence on China to 66.5 percent in 2022. But the level of reliance increased again to over 90 percent this year. The government believes that the possibility of a repeat shortage is low, since there is a three-month supply of inventory currently in Korea. "We confirmed that there was a delay in urea clearance in China. After checking various routes, we confirmed that there was no political motive," Choi Nam-ho, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, told reporters during a briefing. We confirmed that the delay in customs clearance occurred because the demand for urea is tight internally in China. Trade Minister Ahn Duk-geun also expressed his concerns about the hold on urea clearance at the Fifth Korea-China Free Trade Agreement (FTA) Joint Committee meeting held in Beijing on Monday. In preparation for a potential urea shortage, the government also held a response meeting with companies in the related industry that day. At the meeting, the government checked the inventory status of urea for vehicle use and problems domestic companies are experiencing with customs clearance in China. Also, they discussed securing urea through alternative import sources, such as Vietnam, and agreed to quickly respond together to stabilize supplies for vehicles. The government will tap into state reserves of urea, while businesses will secure additional volumes from countries other than China. "Having built a response system for the urea supply chain crisis with the industry, we will respond quickly and thoroughly with related agencies to ensure there will be no disruptions in urea supply," Lee Seung-ryeol, director of the industrial policy office at the industry ministry, said. Lawmakers also urged the government to quickly launch countermeasures to prevent the issue from affecting the local industry. "As China's customs blocks the exports of urea entering Korea, concerns are growing that the urea shortage we experienced two years ago may be repeated," Rep. Kim Gi-hyeon, leader of the ruling People Power Party, said during the partys Supreme Council meeting, Monday. The government should not only assess the situation, but also explore various measures to ensure a smooth supply of urea. Fuel retailers have been slammed for not passing on a 5p fuel duty cut to customers which means customers are being overcharged 5 for a fill of petrol, the RAC has said. Despite the average price of petrol falling by 7.5p per litre in November to 146.95, data from RAC Fuel Watch shows that drivers are still paying 10p more than they should be. The price of diesel came down by almost 7p to 154.40p but this still means punters are being overcharged by 5p a litre due to savings from lower wholesale costs not being passed on by retailers to drivers at the pumps. The RAC said drivers are 'far from getting a fair price on the forecourt' and estimate they are losing out on 184 million per month due to retailers refusing to pass on the cut. The news will come as a bitter shock to families struggling amid the cost-of-living crisis. Despite the average price of petrol falling by 7.5p per litre in November to 146.95, data from RAC Fuel Watch shows that drivers are still paying 10p more than they should be per litre The RAC believes petrol should be sold for an average of 137p and diesel for 150p, based on retailers taking a fairer margin. This means drivers are currently paying around 5 more than they should be to fill up an average 55-litre family car (80.62 v 75.35). For diesel, the figure is around 2.50 (84.92 v 82.50). In stark contrast, membership-only retailer Costco is currently selling unleaded for an average of 133.7p and diesel for 144p - 14p and 11p less than the UK average respectively. In Northern Ireland unleaded is being sold for an average of 141.4p and diesel for 149.5p - 5.5p and 5p less than the UK average. Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho wrote to fuel providers in October and urged them to lower their fuel prices in line with the fuel duty cuts. While this action may have started major providers cutting their prices, RAC fuel spokesman Simon Williams said it was 'extremely worrying' that 'prices aren't falling fast enough'. He said: 'While the price of fuel fell in November, the truth is there is no reason whatsoever for drivers to be jubilant as the data clearly shows they are continuing to get a rough deal at the pumps, unless they live in Northern Ireland. 'Wholesale fuel costs have been falling for months, so they should be paying around 137p for petrol, instead of a whopping 147p. Diesel is also overpriced at 154.40p when it should be on sale for under 150p. 'This is extremely worrying as the biggest retailers don't seem to have heeded the warnings levelled at them by Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho at the end of October saying she wouldn't hesitate to call out those that rip off the public. 'While the Energy Secretary's action may have encouraged retailers to begin reducing their prices, it's undoubtedly a case of far too little, far too late. Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho (Pictured) wrote to fuel providers in October and urged them to lower their fuel prices in line with the fuel duty cuts Mr Williams added that, if a price monitoring body' had been set up before now, then customers 'might finally be getting a fairer deal at the pumps'. He said: 'The wholesale market data the RAC analyses shows the true picture and unfortunately, for the Government and drivers, it shows the 5p-a-litre duty cut is not getting to drivers at all, and prices aren't falling nearly fast enough yet again. 'We've contacted her department to explain what's really going on with a view to prompting greater and more effective intervention. 'If a price monitoring body had already been set up by now - as recommended by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and accepted by the Government - then this might have been prevented and people might finally be getting a fairer deal at the pumps. 'We reiterate our call to the biggest retailers to significantly cut their prices to mirror what's happening with greatly reduced wholesale costs.' Howard Cox, Founder of FairFuel UK, told MailOnline the Government's reluctance to 'check the chronic opportunistic profiteering' was 'beggars belief'. For over 7 years I have been campaigning, with considerable Tory backbench support, for PumpWatch. The CMA back in July finally supported Fair Fuel UKs call for this consumer pump price regulatory body. 'Had PumpWatch been in place years ago, Sunaks 5p duty cut would have been in operation. In fact, petrol and especially diesel, would be at least 10p per litre lower. 'The Governments reluctance to check the chronic opportunistic profiteering that remains rife in the fuel supply chain is beggars belief. But who cares when the extra VAT generated fleecing drivers is flooding into the Treasury every single day.' Omid Scobie's new book Endgame has already dropped out of Amazon's top 100 current bestsellers list despite a blitz of publicity in the first week of its release. The title currently sits 139th in the UK bestseller book charts based on Amazon sales, which are updated hourly to reflect recent and historical sales of every item. Endgame has fallen more than 100 places in three days having been at 14th as recently as last Friday. On the day of its release last Tuesday it was ranked 77th. The book is now in the table behind children's titles such as the Beano annual, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Stick Man; biographies from Britney Spears, Matthew Perry and Chris Kamara; and cookbooks from Mary Berry, Rick Stein and Tom Kerridge. In the same Amazon list in the US, Endgame was at 235th today - below The Very Hungry Caterpillar; the Jeopardy! 2024 calendar; and a Paw Patrol sound book. A copy of Omid Scobie's book Endgame on display inside a book store in London last Friday Omid Scobie was interviewed about his new book on ITV's This Morning last Thurdsay Endgame is ranked 139th on Amazon's UK bestseller books list, which is updated hourly Amazon says its lists are a 'good indicator of how well a product is selling overall' but 'doesn't always indicate how well an item is selling in relation to similar items'. The book's falling performance comes despite a huge amount of media coverage as well as TV interviews conducted by Mr Scobie for the BBC and ITV in the UK and ABC in the US. The author has also given interviews to publications including The Times, Evening Standard, Independent, Tatler, People, Elle.com and Paris March. Meanwhile the book was not on prominent display at London's oldest bookshop, Hatchards on Piccadilly - with only one copy put aside on order, reported The Guardian. The newspaper added that about 14 copies were stacked on a table near the entrance of the nearby Waterstones, but there was 'limited interest there too'. Mr Scobie has been widely described as Meghan Markle's mouthpiece but neither she nor Prince Harry has so far spoken up in defence of the royals over highly damaging accusations of racism. The Dutch translation of the book has been pulled after it named Charles and Kate as the royals alleged to have asked what colour Prince Archie's skin might be before he was born. King Charles III and Queen Camilla attend church at Sandringham in Norfolk yesterday King Charles III is expected to consult Prince William this week to discuss their response to the storm after Buckingham Palace said it is 'considering all options' when it comes to a response. READ MORE King Charles and beaming Queen Camilla attend church service Advertisement The Sussexes have not commented publicly on the race row but a source close to Meghan said 'it was not leaked to Mr Scobie by anyone in her camp'. It also emerged yesterday that the Dutch edition of Endgame quoted a source close to the Sussexes who branded William 'heartless' another inflammatory passage that is not in the UK version. Referring to claims that the Prince of Wales secured a flight to Balmoral without Harry when the Queen was dying, the translation cited the source as saying: 'It was heartless to deny him the chance to go to Scotland to say goodbye to his grandmother. This was not the time to be petty.' A 'family source' also claims that William 'purposely ignored' Harry when the Queen died and 'didn't want to help' him, according to the Dutch edition. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with their children Archie and Lilibet in December 2021 The original 'racism' claim was made in the Sussexes' infamous 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview William, Harry, Meghan and Charles speak together at Westminster Abbey in March 2019 It said: 'He was, and is, still angry because Harry revealed private issues... He thinks that is unforgivable.' The Dutch version also refers to the King's 'cash for honours' scandal last year, with a 'source' saying 'people inside the institution are concerned that 'more stories will follow'.' None of these claims appeared in the English version, The Sun on Sunday reported. It comes after Meghan admitted under oath that she authorised a senior aide to brief Scobie for his earlier book about the Sussexes, called Finding Freedom. The father of a British woman who was murdered by a French serial killer dubbed the Ogre of the Ardennes today told a court that his widow was an active participant in all of his crimes. Roger Parrish, 80, was on Monday speaking at the trial of Monique Olivier, 75, who helped lure Leeds University student Joanna Parrish to her death when she was only 20, in 1990. Olivier, described in 2008 by a judge as a 'devil with two faces' and her husband's 'bloody muse', is charged with aiding and abetting gruesome attacks by her late husband, Michel Fourniret, in eastern France. She was sitting in the dock in the court at Nanterre, the Paris suburb, when Mr Parrish gave evidence. Holding back tears, Mr Parrish described how Joanna was born on July 3, 1969 weeks before the first moon landing by American astronauts. She became a victim of of Fourniret and Olivier five weeks before her twenty-first birthday,' Roger Parrish (left) said Joanna Parrish, 20, was killed by Fourninet. Her naked body was found in the Yonne river near Auxerre in central France Monique Olivier is charged with aiding and abetting gruesome attacks by her late husband, Michel Fourniret Mr Parrish said: Every subsequent time that landings of the moon are mentioned remind us of the birth of our beautiful daughter. She became a victim of of Fourniret and Olivier five weeks before her 21st birthday. We had already begun to prepare for a family celebration for her. Olivier, dressed in a black coat over a grey prison sweatshirt, looked on with a blank face, as Mr Parrish continued. He said: Never-ending devastation does not come even close to describing the effect Joannas murder had on our family. The trauma has remained with us to this day. Mr Parrish said his daughter was an exceptional woman and that her life was cruelly ended by a narcissistic psychopath and her female partner who was an active participant in all of his crimes. Monique Olivier was described in 2008 by a judge as a 'devil with two faces' and her husband's 'bloody muse' She is said to have assisted in the kidnappings, rapes and murders of several young women in France Mr Parrish was in court with his ex-wife, Pauline Murrell, who is Joannas mother. Before his death in 2021, Fourniret was accused of murdering eight girls and young women between 1987 and 2001. Olivier is already serving a life sentence for complicity in four of the killings and a gang rape committed by Fourniret. She is now on trial for being an accomplice in three further murders, including that of Ms Parrish, who was originally from Gloucestershire. Her naked body was found in the Yonne River, near the eastern city of Auxerre, in May 1990. Mr Parrish and Ms Murrell have been battling for justice ever since. Fourniret was charged with abduction, rape and murder in the cases but died aged 79, before he could be brought to trial. His crimes date back to 1988 in the case of Marie-Angele Domece, 18, who, like Ms Parrish, was initially reported missing from Auxerre, but whose body has never been found. Olivier is charged with aiding and abetting the kidnapping and murder of both women. The third charge is for Oliviers complicity in the 2003 disappearance of nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin, whose body has also never been found. Fourniret is described as one of France's worst serial killers 'I acknowledge all the facts,' Olivier said on the second day of her trial Olivier was charged with complicity in the disappearance of nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin, whose body has never been found Witnesses in the current trial include Sabine Kheris, the investigating magistrate who recorded Fourniret's confession. Ms Kheris is now in charge of a cold cases unit based in Nanterre, where the Hauts-de-Seine assizes court is situated. Fourniret was dubbed the Ogre of the Ardennes after the region on the France-Belgium border where preyed on victims. Olivier was handed a life sentence in 2008 over her role in four murders and a rape committed by Fourniret. In 2018, Olivier was given a further 20 years inside for her part in the killing of Farida Hammiche, the wife of one of Fourniret's former cellmates. Todays case continues. Westpac customers have been left unable to access their money after a mass outage of the bank's online systems. The bank began reporting issues about 9pm Monday, with mobile and online banking impacted by the outage. 'We're aware that customers are currently experiencing issues accessing account information in online and mobile banking,' the bank wrote on social media platforms. 'Our teams are working to fix the issue. We apologise for any inconvenience and will continue to share updates here.' Customers have said they logged into their mobile banking apps to find all accounts disappeared. Westpac customers have been shocked to see that their accounts have disappeared as the bank scrambles to fix a technical issue Westpac customers found their accounts had vanished on online banking on Monday night before the big four bank let them know an hour later the service was down Many users are reporting logging into the app to find a bank balance of zero dollars while others appear to have had cards erased. Others are not able to log in at all. Customers complained Westpac initially broke the news of the outage on social media rather than on their website. Others said they were disappointed the bank had not issued a text or email about the situation. One user said the bank had 'poor customer service and bad communication'. 'Put it on Google as well why am I forced to come to twitter to hear an admission- this is costing me money,' one user wrote on X, formerly Twitter. More than 10,000 people have reported being unable to access their account to Down Detector, a platform that records outages. Some customers said they had initially assumed there might have been a hack Other customers said it was a good example of why cash is still needed Customers took to social media to vent fury about the lack of communication from Westpac Customers have taken to social media to express their outrage over the incident. 'Internet banking and mobile app both say I do not have an account with you. Or cards. How about a proper explanation? Looks like you're being hacked doesn't it?' one person wrote. 'What's the justification for leaving hundreds of thousands of Australians without access to their own hard worked money,' another wrote. Another said: 'Thought I was hacked'. Britain can become one of the most prosperous countries in the world as it taps into the growth potential of AI and leaves behind the chaos of Brexit and Covid, Jeremy Hunt insisted today. The Chancellor tried to paint an optimistic picture amid a Tory slump in the polls, insisting the country was recovering from an economic 'sprain' and not a 'broken leg'. Speaking at an event in London he said the industrial sectors which would grow the fastest in decades to come are ones 'where we are doing really well'. Referencing Rishi Sunak's recent meeting with X boss Elon Musk, Mr Hunt told the Resolution Foundation's conference: 'I think we shouldn't lose confidence that we do some things absolutely amazingly. I know he's controversial in other ways but when Elon Musk was here three weeks ago, he said there were only two centres in the world for AI, San Francisco and London. 'We've got a lot going for us, so if we're going to go into dealing with the sprain, rather than the broken leg, then let's do so from a perspective of positivity.' The Chancellor tried to paint an optimistic picture amid a Tory slump in the polls, insisting the country was recovering from an economic 'sprain' and not a 'broken leg'. Referencing Rishi Sunak 's recent meeting with X boss Elon Musk , Mr Hunt told the Resolution Foundation's conference: 'We've got a lot going for us, so if we're going to go into dealing with the sprain, rather than the broken leg, then let's do so from a perspective of positivity.' The Resolution Foundation think tank today published a report detailing the scale of challenges facing the UK. It found that the UK has seen 15 years of relative decline, with productivity growth at half the rate seen across other advanced economies and flatlining wages costing the average worker 10,700 a year in lost pay growth. The living standards of the lowest-income households in the UK are 4,300 lower than their French equivalents, the Resolution Foundation report said. The nearly 300-page report also warned that household incomes are not expected to reach the pre-cost-of-living crisis peak until at least 2027, with income inequality in the UK higher too than any other large European country. The Chancellor sought to offer a sunnier outlook during a Q&A session with editor-in-chief of The Economist magazine Zanny Minton Beddoes. Elsewhere in the discussion, he blamed Brexit and the Covid pandemic for the damaging instability at the heart of government. "I think there's been a very particular reason why we've had that political chopping and changing - I don't think it's a good thing," the Chancellor said. He said "enormous benefits to ministers staying in their posts for a long period of time". "But we had Brexit, that led to a hung parliament, that led to a politically incredibly challenging time where the British people had voted to leave the EU but Parliament couldn't agree on how, and ultimately to the fall of Theresa May's government. "Then we had a pandemic, these things have led to changes in Whitehall. I hope we can have more stability going forward, absolutely, because I think it is a better thing for policy." The Resolution Foundation report had backed calls for full expensing, part of a package of tax breaks for businesses, to be made permanent. Mr Hunt insisted that it was part of a larger and unfinished project to boost productivity and growth "Are there more things we can do? Absolutely. I think in every fiscal event I've done I've demonstrated that I'm prepared to do big, new things," he said. "The only way in the long run that you can raise living standards is by raising productivity," he told the event. A top Hamas official has claimed that the terror group is 'not far off' from launching a 'war of liberation' that he says will be bigger than the October 7 incursion into Israel. Hamas political bureau member Osama Hamdan made the stark claims in an interview with Lebanese media outlet Bel Moubashar Online. In the interview, translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), he 'promise[d] that a war of liberation is coming, not just another October 7,' adding that he thinks such an event is not far off. Hamdan, in his late 50s, also expressed no regret for 'shattering an entire division of the occupation army', referring to the 1,200 Israelis, almost all of whom were civilians, killed by Hamas during the October 7 incursion. The group targeted young women and children, as well as families, killing thousands and kidnapping hundreds in the chaos of the incursion. Osama Hamda (pictured) expressed no regret for deaths of the 1,200 Israelis, almost all of whom were civilians, killed by Hamas during the October 7 incursion Hamas kidnapped 26-year-old Noa Argamani (pictured) from the Nova festival The terror group's gunmen were seen parading the body of 22-year-old Shani Louk (pictured), who was partying with her friends hours before at the Nova festival The terror group's gunmen were seen parading the body of 22-year-old Shani Louk, who was partying with her friends hours before at the Nova festival near Kibbutz Re'im, in the back of a 4x4 truck. While her family held out hope that she was still alive, her family confirmed her passing in late October, though the circumstances of her death, as well as where and how the bone from her skull was found, are not currently clear. Hamas kidnapped 26-year-old Noa Argamani from the Nova festival, where Shani was also taken. Phone footage of the terrible day showed Noa being snatched from her friends and begging for her life on the back of a motorcycle. She was heard screaming: 'Don't kill me!' It is not currently known where she is being held, or if she is even still alive, as she was not one of more than 100 hostages released by Hamas last week in exchange for a temporary ceasefire. Hamas targeted young women and children, as well as families, killing thousands and kidnapping hundreds in the chaos of the incursion Israeli soldiers are pictured near the country's border with Gaza today as war rages between the IDF and Hamas Israeli soldiers stand in order near Israel's border with Gaza, in southern Israel, December 4 Over 15,000 civilians in Gaza have been killed since Israel launched its retaliation against Hamas Her dying mother, currently battling stage four brain cancer, called on US president Joe Biden and the Red Cross to intervene, and shared a message for her daughter, saying: 'If I don't get to see you... please know I love you very much.' The Hamas political leader's stark warning comes as Israel's spy chief has vowed to hunt down and kill the terror group's leaders 'wherever they are in the world' even if it takes years. Turkey responded by saying that Israel would bear 'serious consequences' if it tried to carry out any assassinations on Hamas within its borders or other countries. The threat of extra judicial killing was met with a warning by a Turkish intelligence source who was quoted as saying: The necessary warnings were given to the interlocutors based on the news about the statements of Israeli officials, and it was made clear to Israel that this would lead to serious consequences.' While Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has called Hamas a 'liberation organization' accused Israel of 'genocide' in the Gaza Strip. He added that PM Benjamin Netanyahu 'will stand trial as a war criminal.' Israeli TV station Kan has aired secret recordings from the head of the country's security agency known as Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, 58, in a news programme late on Sunday night. Bar, who has been boss at Shin Bet for two years, compared the October 7 massacre that left at least 1,200 dead and more than 200 kidnapped to Gaza as 'our Munich'. In the clips broadcast by Kan, Bar can be heard saying: 'The war cabinet gave us an objective, eliminate Hamas, and we are determined to do so. This our Munich.' In 1972, Palestinian terrorists attacked the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics and killed 11 athletes and for years after the country wreaked a bloody revenge against those responsible. A later operation codenamed Wrath of God targeted nine members of the group responsible, and they were tracked down in Rome, Paris and Beirut and assassinated over a seven-year period. Shani Louk, 22, who was paraded in a Hamas video, before a bone from the base of her skull was found three weeks after she was taken hostage Ms Louk, 22, was German but grew up in Israel, and was one of hundreds of unsuspecting partygoers at the Nova festival where Hamas conducted a massacre of some 260 civilians Liora Argamani (right) fears she will not live long enough to see her only child, Noa, 26, who was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on October 7 Noa was seen being driven away on a motorbike and across the desert by Hamas terrorists Noa's father, Yakov, says doctors have told the family his wife, Liora, does not have long to live Bar added: 'We are already learning our lessons from the events (of October 7). 'It will be done anywhere needed, in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Turkey, Qatar. It will take a few years, but we will be there to do it. 'Security responsibility is ours. Our duty is to provide both security and a sebse of security. 'Unfortunately, on October 7, we did not succeed in doing that. I think we are on an upward trajectory.' In a letter to staff after the attacks Bar said: 'The responsibility is mine. Despite a series of actions we carried out, unfortunately, on Saturday we were unable to establish sufficient deterrence so as to thwart the attack. 'There will be a time for investigations. Now we are fighting.' The IDF has already taken out several key Hamas targets, and this weekend eliminated the mastermind behind the Kibbutz Nahal Oz massacre on October 7 Smoke can be seen rising from the Gaza Strip, following yet another night of missile strikes Senior Hamas leaders are known to live outside Gaza and the West Bank with key figures in Lebanon, Turkey, Qatar and Iran. Ismail Haniyeh, 61, the movement's chairman and head of Hamas political bureau, travels between Istanbul and Doha and is known to stay at luxury five-star hotels when he does. He is often joined by Khaled Masha, 58, in flying between Doha and Istanbul. Salah al-Arouri, 57, the deputy head of Hamas political bureau and responsible for the movement's military activities in the west Bank is in Beirut, Lebanon. Last week The Wall Street Journal said PM Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered spy agencies to draw up plans to assassinate the group's top leaders outside Gaza, who live in Turkey, Qatar, and elsewhere. According to the report, some called for Israel to immediately assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal, who lives in Doha, and others following the October 7 attack. Smoke can be seen rising from the north of the Gaza Strip, as fighter jets attack targets IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari said over the weekend that Wissam Farhat was killed in an airstrike on the Gaza Strip However, such actions on Qatari or Turkish soil could have strained or torpedoed diplomatic efforts to free hostages, and the idea was put on hold. The IDF has already taken out several key Hamas targets, and this weekend eliminated the mastermind behind the Kibbutz Nahal Oz massacre on October 7. IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari said over the weekend that Wissam Farhat was killed in an airstrike on the Gaza Strip. He added: 'Farhat planned and sent the terrorists on October 7 to the Nahal Oz kibbutz and nearby army post, where a cruel massacre was carried out.' Hagari said Farhat was responsible for an attack on IDF troops in the Gaza City neighbourhood of Shejaiya in 2014, in which seven soldiers were killed. A devastated family is demanding answers after their dog died just a day after being dropped off at a boarding kennel. Shane and Rachelle Bloomfield from Adelaide left Nahla, their six-year-old German Shepherd, at AlfaDog boarding kennel in the city's south east on November 9 before a holiday. But just one day later, their beloved family pet was dead. Mr Bloomfield said they were told Nahla started panting heavily after a worker took him for a drive while dropping other clients' dogs home on a day where the mercury reached 40C in Adelaide. Shane Bloomfield (pictured, left) from Adelaide left Nahla (right), his family's six-year-old German Shepherd, at AlfaDog boarding kennel in the city's south east on November 9 before a holiday - only to discover a day later he had died AlfaDog said it tried to contact the couple multiple times to tell them Nahla was taken to a vet. 'Given the symptoms, we decided the best course of action was to take him to the vet immediately,' a text to the couple read. 'They suspected overheating exacerbated by anxiety, high external temperatures, dense fur and being overweight.' But it was only after contacting the vet that the Bloomfields learned Nahla had died from heatstroke. 'My son looked to him as a brother and he was a keeper of my daughter,' Mr Bloomfield told 7NEWS. Nahla died from heatstroke. The RSPCA are reportedly investigating whether he was left in a car while temperatures soared as high as 40C in Adelaide 'My dog was clearly deceased for a number of hours before attending any sort of veterinary help.' Ms Bloomfield said it was 'beyond comprehension' Nahla died within 24 hours of being left in the kennel's care.. 'It's extremely frustrating, heartbreaking to think, how does someone work with animals with this lack of compassion,' she said. A report by AlfaDog's stated Nahla was 'significantly overweight' but his owners dispute this. 'I think they're just grappling at what they can to kind of cover themselves,' Ms Bloomfield said. The RSPCA is investigating AlfaDog over the incident. Daily Mail Australia contacted AlfaDog for comment. A pro-Palestinian protester holding a baby almost stole Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's thunder when police moved in to remove her while he gave a speech on Monday. Mr Albanese was opening a new $1.3 million 'dementia friendly' reserve in the inner west Sydney suburb of Ashfield, which is part of his federal electorate, when the struggle broke out in the small crowd. A woman clutching a baby to her side had stood silently among the small crowd of while holding aloft a sign that said 'Shame Albo' with a drawing of a watermelon slice, which is a protest symbol used to substitute for the Palestinian flag. The sole peaceful protester could be seen holding a baby and defiantly holding up a sign as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese addressed a small crown in inner west Sydney Two officers approached the woman with one of them grabbing her in a bear hug to manhandle her out of Mr Albanese's line of sight. The woman gave a yell and collapsed to the ground thwarting the officers, meanwhile Mr Albanese continued his oration without missing a beat. Greens Inner West Councillor Dylan Griffiths wrote on Facebook that he was 'shocked' by what he saw and immediately rushed over to help the woman 'when it became physical'. 'It was rough,' Mr Griffiths wrote. 'I went over and told the police to leave her alone (they did, after the failed removal), and (I) stood next to her during ceremony.' 'Other councillors, MPs in attendance should have joined me in making sure this resident was OK. 'It doesn't matter if you are being protested, Albo had the mic and he should have said something. It was just a sign.' The Lewis Herman Reserve, which Mr Albanese was opening, is designed to be 'Australia's first purpose-built dementia park'. The woman held aloft a sign that read 'Shame Albo' along with a drawing of a watermelon slice, which is a protest symbol standing in for the Palestinian flag Two officers moved in to try to manhandle the protester out of the Prime Minister's line of sight 'This park is a break-through in design and delivery of a park to meet the needs of the whole of community,' Inner West Mayor Darcy Byrne said. 'We are excited to deliver a park that supports multi-generational use by the community and reflects the diverse background of the community.' The use of watermelon slices to stand in for the Palestinian flag dates back to the Six-Day war in 1967. Following the seizure of Gaza and the West Bank the Israeli government banned public displays of the Palestinian flag. Watermelon slices were displayed in defiance of the prohibition because they have the same colours as the Palestinian flagred, black, white, and green. An internal ABC review has found its coverage of the Voice referendum was dominated by Yes supporters. The national broadcaster's 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum report found that 51 per cent of voices appearing on the ABC during its referendum coverage were in favour of a Yes vote. In contrast, just 23 per cent of speakers platformed by the ABC were in favour of a No vote, while the rest were neutral or undecided, The Australian reported. More than 60 per cent of Australians backed the No campaign on the October 14 plebiscite, while just shy of 40 per cent voted Yes. The report, compiled by editorial policies manager Mark Maley and published on Monday, revealed that the ABC received 383 complaints about its referendum coverage - with over 80 per cent relating to claims of bias or a lack of balance. The national broadcaster's 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum report found that 51 per cent of voices appearing on the ABC during its referendum coverage were in favour of a Yes vote (Pictured: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at a Yes campaign event) Only 121 complaints were investigated and just four were upheld. It is unclear what those complaints were. The report also said that balance was not needed. 'Teams were explicitly told that 50/50 balance of advocates was not required,' Mr Maley said. 'The goal was to ensure that audiences on all platforms were presented with the main arguments for and against the propositions in the referendum on every platform within a reasonable time. 'This was achieved.' The report praised Radio National's breakfast show, led by Q+A stand-in host Patricia Karvelas, for its 'influential role in the media coverage'. The report praised Radio National's breakfast show, led by Q+A stand-in host Patricia Karvelas (pictured), for its 'influential role in the media coverage' 'Stand out interviews included: Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, Tony Abbott and Anthony Albanese, Mr Maley said in report. The review also said RN's coverage including on programs Late Night Live and Between the Lines 'sought a diversity of perspectives'. The latter is presented by academic and respected news editor Tom Switzer, who is often described as one of the ABC's few conservative voices. He recently announced he is leaving the ABC, with one insider suggesting Switzer had been 'ruffling feathers' with his choice of guests. The report also touched on the issues the ABC had with covering the Garma Festival in northeast Arnhem Land in August celebrating indigenous culture. The report also touched on the issues the ABC had with covering the Garma Festival in northeast Arnhem Land in August celebrating indigenous culture. A special QA episode filmed at the festival and hosted by David Speers (pictured) led to the ABC issuing an embarrassing clarification after a guest falsely accused the N campaign of using 'AI-generated aboriginals' in their advertisements 'Indigenous and planning teams knew it was going to predominantly feature Yes perspectives so they tried hard to include other voices,' the report said. Prominent No campaigner Warren Mundine pulled out of a special Q+A episode filmed in Garma fronted by Insiders host David Speers. At the time, the ABC was forced to issue an embarrassing clarification after the Garma show aired false claims the official 'No' campaign was using 'AI-generated aboriginals' in their advertisements. Derek Chauvin has been discharged from hospital after he was stabbed 22 times in prison by a Mexican gangster and FBI informant on Black Friday. The former Minneapolis cop, 47, has been sent back to the Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, Arizona, to continue his recovery as he serves a 22-year sentence for the murder of George Floyd. John Turscak, 52, has been charged with attempted murder after he attacked Chauvin at the prison library with an 'improvised knife.' He reportedly told investigators he chose the day after Thanksgiving for its symbolic connection to the Black Lives Matter movement, which were in-part sparked by Floyd's May 2020 murder. The career criminal told correctional officers he would have killed Chauvin if they hadn't responded so quickly, according to court documents, which also revealed guards had to use pepper spray to subdue Turscak. Floyd's lawyer Gregory Erickson said that Chauvin's family is concerned about his safety at the facility in the future following the attack and are working to remove him from the prison. Derek Chauvin has been discharged from the hospital after he was stabbed 22 times in prison by a Mexican mafia informant on Black Friday John Turscak, 52, has been charged with attempted murder after he attacked Chauvin at the prison library (not pictured) on Black Friday with an 'improvised knife' 'They remain unassured that any changes have been made to the faulty procedures that allowed Derek's attack to occur in the first place,' said Erickson. Turscak, a career criminal who went by the nickname 'Stranger', had been serving a 30-year sentence scheduled to end in 2026. He now faces decades more in prison and has been moved to an adjacent federal penitentiary in Tucson. He told investigators he had been planning the attack for a month because of Chauvin's high-profile but denied having wanted to kill him He shot to notoriety over two decades ago after providing information that led to the indictments of more than 40 suspected members of the Mexican Mafia while acting as an informant, according to the Los Angeles Times. While an informant, he was dropped from the investigation and charged after admitting to a slew of crimes including drug dealing, extortion and authorizing assaults. As well as connecting the stabbing to the BLM movement, Turscak said he chose Black Friday in tribute to the 'Black Hand' symbol, which is associated with the Mexican Mafia gang, prosecutors said. He remains in custody and has no attorney listed in court records, and has previously represented himself in numerous court proceedings. His guilty plea saw him admit to conspiring to kill a rival in the Mexican Mafia in the late 1990s, who he reportedly battled for control over the cartel's Los Angeles territory. In a 2005 court filing reported by the Star Tribune, Turscak requested a transfer from a federal penitentiary in Atlanta because he feared his life was in 'imminent danger' from fellow inmates. He said he felt he was a target 'as a result of my past cooperation with the government in the Mexican Mafia investigation, and assistance to authorities here at the prison.' After his conviction, Turscak said he believed his cooperation with the FBI would have earned him a lighter sentence, adding: 'I didn't commit those crimes for kicks... I did them because I had to if I wanted to stay alive.' The ex-Minneapolis police officer was sentenced to 22- and-a-half-years in prison for the murder of Floyd after pressing his knee against his neck for more than nine minutes Chauvin sparked nationwide protests in the summer of 2020 after Floyd's killing Chauvin is serving 21 years for violating the civil rights of Floyd, and is also serving a simultaneous 22-and-a-half-year sentence for second degree murder. He was convicted of the May 2022 murder of Floyd after pressing his knee on Floyd's neck for over nine minutes, in horror footage witnessed by millions online. One of the highest profile inmates in America, he was originally housed in a maximum-security prison in Minnesota before being moved to FCI Tuscon in Arizona in August 2022. The former police officer's lawyer, Eric Nelson, has previously advocated for keeping his client out of general prison populations due to his client's notoriety. As an anticipated target, Chauvin was kept mainly in solitary confinement 'largely for his own protection', Nelson said last year. Chauvin pleaded not guilty in his murder trial, and claimed in his first comments to the media seen last week that his trial was a 'sham.' Speaking in documentary The Fall of Minneapolis, a new documentary that examines Floyd's death, Chauvin argued over a prison phone that the death was due to a lengthy wait for an ambulance. He claimed an ambulance took too long to respond to the incident, taking a 'not normal' 20 minutes to arrive. He also repeatedly referred to the fact that he and other cops had been trained in MRT - Maximal Restraint Technique. The Israeli military said its ground forces were active across the Gaza Strip as Israeli forces bombed swathes of the besieged enclave on Sunday, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians, as civilians sought shelter in a shrinking area of the south. The Hamas Palestinian militant group said its fighters clashed with Israeli troops about 2 km (1 mile) from the southern city of Khan Younis. Residents, many of whom had moved there to flee earlier attacks in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, said they could hear tank fire and feared a new Israeli ground offensive was building. The Israeli military earlier ordered people to evacuate some areas in and near the city, but made no announcement of any new southern ground assault. "The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) continues to extend its ground operation against Hamas centres in all of the Gaza Strip," spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters in Tel Aviv in the clearest sign its planned ground offensive in the south had begun. "The forces are coming face-to-face with terrorists and killing them." Fuelling fears the conflict could spread to destabilise the region, Yemen's Iran-allied Houthi movement said it attacked two Israeli ships in the Red Sea with an armed drone and a missile on Sunday, in a move to stand with the Palestinians. The Pentagon also said it was aware of reports of an attack on an American warship, the USS Carney, without going into detail. There was no independent confirmation from Israel or the United States of the attacks or what damage they caused, if any. The Jabalia refugee camp in the north of Hamas-ruled Gaza was among the sites reported hit from the air. A Gazan health ministry spokesperson said several people were killed by an Israeli air strike. Footage obtained by Reuters showed a boy covered in grey dust, sitting weeping amid crumbled cement and rubble from collapsed buildings. "My father was martyred," he cried in a hoarse voice. A girl in a pink sweatshirt, also coated with dust, stood between piles of rubble. Bombardments from war planes and artillery were also concentrated on Khan Younis and Rafah, another city in Gaza's south, residents said, and hospitals were struggling to cope with the flow of wounded. Israel's government spokesperson, Eylon Levy, said the military had struck more than 400 targets over the weekend "including extensive aerial attacks in the Khan Younis area" and had also killed Hamas militants and destroyed their infrastructure in Beit Lahiya in the north. There was no immediate comment on the reports of specific attacks. The renewed warfare followed the end on Friday of a seven-day pause in the fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas militants which had allowed an exchange of 105 hostages held by Hamas, most of them Israelis, for 240 Palestinian prisoners. The latest violence took place despite calls from the United States Israel's closest ally for Israel to limit harm to Palestinian civilians in the new phase of its offensive, focused on the south. More than 15,523 people have been killed, according to Gaza's health ministry, in nearly two months of warfare that broke out after a Hamas cross-border raid on southern Israel on Oct. 7 in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and around 240 taken hostage. Israel says Hamas continues to hold 136 hostages. Israel has vowed to annihilate Hamas. The Iranian-backed group is sworn to Israel's destruction. The initial Hamas attack and the ensuing war amount to the bloodiest episode in the decades-old wider Israel-Palestinian conflict. Osama Hamdan, a Lebanon-based Hamas official, accused Israel of pursuing a deliberate strategy of urging Gazan civilians south in order to trap and kill them there. "It has become clear that the occupation's claim ... of the existence of safe areas in the south of the Gaza Strip, and its constant call for citizens to go there, was a premeditated plan and trap to commit more massacres against unarmed civilians and displaced people in the south," he told reporters without citing evidence. "There are no safe areas." The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment but has consistently said it is targeting Hamas military strongholds and has asked civilians to move to safe zones so they can get humanitarian aid. Ground offensive feared Gaza residents said earlier on Sunday they feared an Israeli ground offensive on the southern areas was imminent. Tanks had cut off the road between Khan Younis and Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza, effectively dividing the Gaza Strip into three. The Israeli military ordered Palestinians to evacuate several areas in and around Khan Younis. It posted a map highlighting shelters they should go to west of Khan Younis and south toward Rafah, on the border with Egypt. Many residents started packing but said that areas they had been told to go to were themselves coming under attack. Nabil Al-Ghandour told Reuters he and his family would leave Khan Younis for Rafah later on Sunday, their fifth move in search of safety since the conflict started. "We can't see any safe areas," he said. "But we move because what can we do? We have children and all night there's shelling." Later on Sunday, a Gazan health ministry official said seven people were killed in an air strike on a house in Rafah. The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Israeli military said on Sunday its war planes and helicopters had struck Hamas targets including tunnel shafts, command centres and weapons storage facilities. Naval forces had hit Hamas vessels on the coast, it said. The military declined to give figures on the number of air strikes carried out. On another front, Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants traded fire across the Israel-Lebanon border and Israel said several of its soldiers were wounded when an anti-tank missile fired from Lebanon hit a vehicle in the Beit Hillel area of northern Israel. Reuters could not independently verify the accounts. (Reuters) Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman has continued to slam his alma-mater Harvard University, accusing the school and its president of turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism on campus in the wake of Hamas' barbaric assault on Israel in October. On Sunday, Ackman, 57, posted a video showing a pro-Palestinian student disrupting a class with a bullhorn, ranting about protests and chanting: 'Free free Palestine.' 'This is what you get for $73,600/year at @Harvard,' Ackman wrote in the caption. The Pershing Square Capital Management founder, who has a net worth of $3.8 billion, graduated with a degree in social studies from Harvard in 1988 and later attained an MBA in 1992. The school's official rule book bans the disruption of classes and is 'regarded as unacceptable obstruction of the essential processes of the University.' This weekend saw a mob of University of Pennsylvania students chanting 'intifada,' meaning 'uprising,' through the streets. Ackman too posted that video which was accompanied by the caption: 'Stop telling American Jews not to worry.' This is what you get for $73,600/year at @Harvard. pic.twitter.com/uNG0EGBdWZ Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) December 4, 2023 The invading protester accused Harvard of being complicit in 'genocide' taking place in Gaza The school's official rule book bans the disruption of classes and is 'regarded as unacceptable obstruction of the essential processes of the University 'This is what you get for $73,600/year at @Harvard,' alumnus Bill Ackman quipped in posting the video over the weekend Ackman, who has a net worth of $3.8 billion, graduated from Harvard in 1988 with a degree in social studies Meanwhile, campus Jewish student organization, Harvard Hillel, said in an Instagram post that students were disrupted in classes by protesters who made calls to 'globalize the intifada' and for the elimination of Israel 'from the river to the sea.' 'These calls for genocide and anti-Jewish violence throughout the world represent antisemitic speech and are not protected by the University's community standards,' the Hillel statement read. Last week, Ackman took aim at Harvard President Claudine Gray over her 'failed leadership' and called the decision not to attend an 'insult'. Ackman, 57, offered to fly Gay to Washington D.C. immediately after the documentary is screened at Harvard, where she is due to testify to Congress about the explosion in anti-Semitism at the college. But the university leader has declined the invitation, with her chief of staff stating she is 'out of town' in an email reply. 'I cant imagine anything more important for the Harvard President to do now than to bear witness to the atrocities before testifying about the Hamas protests and antisemitism on campus,' Ackman wrote on X. 'It may be true that she is "out of town" as I am sure she is flying to DC that day, but it sure sends a bad message to the students, the faculty, and the alumni community about the seriousness with which she is taking the issue of antisemitism on campus. 'And it is an insult to the Israeli Ambassador who is flying to Boston just to present the documentary at Harvard.' Ackman said he offered to provide dinner and a flight so the two could discuss the kinds of questions Gay may face at Congress on Tuesday. However, gifts such as a this from a donor seeking to influence university policy may or may not be prohibited by school regulations. A sign set up on campus by the Harvard Palestine Society Ackman is one of the many wealthy Harvard donors who threatened to stop his contributions over the school's treatment of anti-Israeli protests After posting the video of the student disrupting class, Ackman posted an open letter to Gray on X. ' Years ago, Harvard stopped being a place where all perspectives were welcome. Harvard is a place where loud, hate-filled protests appear to be encouraged, but where faculty and students can't share points of view that are inconsistent with the accepted narrative on campus,' he wrote in part. Ackman went on to describe the curriculum as following 'the same playbook ideology. Ideology poses as coursework.' Writing about current conflict, Ackman said: 'Indigenous peoples are presented as in need of justice and reparations. Jews are presented as white people. It is therefore ok to hate Israel and Jews as they are deemed to be oppressors.' 'Why are the protests only about Israel versus other conflicts in the Middle East and around the globe where Palestinians and other civilians were killed? Israel is the rare case where we have a hot conflict between people that are deemed 'white' versus people of color,' he added. Claudine Gay is due to testify at Congress about anti-Semitic incidents at her college Ackman is married to American Israeli designer Neri Oxman, the couple has one child together Ackman, who is married to American-Israeli designer, Neri Oxman, has pinned tweet at the top of his X page in which he describes himself as both 'pro-Israel' and 'pro-Palestine' but 'anti-terrorist.' The billionaire, who is son of real estate magnate Lawrence Ackman, has four children, one with Oxman, who he has been married to since 2019, and three with his first wife, Karen Herskovitz. Online records show that Ackman has primarily donated to Democratic candidates including Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Sen. Chuck Schumer. He was an early supporter of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's ill-fated 2020 presidential campaign. On Thursday, Ackman fawned over X owner Elon Musk's interview in which he told advertisers who left his platform to 'go f*** yourself.' 'Musk is a free speech absolutist which I respect. I think he is entirely correct that he and @X are treated unfairly and inconsistently by advertisers,' he wrote. Musk has faced a torrent of criticism ever since he agreed with a user who falsely claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people. Musk in his post said the user, who referenced the 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theory, was speaking 'the actual truth.' On Wednesday Musk said he had 'handed a loaded gun' to both detractors and antisemitic people, describing his post as possibly the worst he had made during a history of messages that included many 'foolish' ones. While the Anti-Defamation League's New England chapter called for Harvard to hold the protesters accountable. 'Yesterday's disruption of classes @Harvarduniv with bullhorn-amplified #antisemitic chants flies in the face of President Claudine Gay's description of Harvard as 'a place of civil behavior and civil discourse,' the ADL said in a post on X. 'We join in @HarvardHillel's demand for accountability through Harvard's free speech guidelines and codes of conduct. Harvard has committed that it will not ignore 'anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, acts of harassment or intimidation, or threats of violence.' Those words call for action.' On November 4 he wrote to Gay expressing his concerns, revealing he met with Jewish students who told him they have been spat on, subjected to anti-Semitic taunts and memes and physically assaulted in one instance, which he said was caught on video. The billionaire, who is son of real estate magnate Lawrence Ackman, has four children, one with Oxman, who he has been married to since 2019, and three with his first wife, Karen Herskovitz The clashes between Pro-Palestine and Pro-Israel supporters have resulted in The Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Education Department opening an investigation in to allegations of anti-Semitism at the school. 'President Gays failed leadership in managing the impact of October 7th on campus in large part explains why antisemitism has exploded at Harvard,' Ackman added. 'And she is also setting a bad example for other universities and institutions. We are sadly witnessing a grave failure of leadership at Harvard, one of the most important American institutions, at a critical time in its history. 'Nearly a month has passed since I emailed it to her and the full board. Crickets.' He compared Gay's leadership with Dartmouth president Sian Beilock who he praised for 'deftly' handling Israel Palestine issues on her campus. Gay has been summoned to Congress along with the heads of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania to testify about anti-Semitism as tensions on some campuses have surged in the wake of the terror attack. The hearing will be held by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. In addition to Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Penn President Liz Magill will testify. Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, who chairs the committee, vowed to hold university leaders accountable for antisemitism at their colleges. 'College administrators have largely stood by, allowing horrific rhetoric to fester and grow, Foxx said in a statement. 'College and university presidents have a responsibility to foster and uphold a safe learning environment for their students and staff. Now is not a time for indecision or milquetoast statements.' The statement did not make any reference to investigating incidents of Islamophobia which have also surged amid the mounting tensions. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has been cleared of bringing the mayoralty into disrepute when he branded some Ulez opponents as 'far-Right' and 'covid deniers'. The incendiary comments were made during a lively People's Question Time back in March on the introduction of the controversial Ultra Low Emissions Zone expansion - which has generated 5.3million in its first week. During the bad-tempered session, Mr Khan said: 'Some of you have got good reasons to oppose Ulez, but you are in coalition with Covid deniers... you may not like it... you are in coalition with the far-Right. And you are in coalition with vaccine deniers as well.' In the immediate aftermath of the comments, drivers took to social media in their droves today to blast the Mayor's 'outrageous' comments. Tory assembly member Peter Fortune said on the night: 'If you disagree with the Mayor, hes going to paint you as far-Right. His assembly colleague Andrew Boff said: 'If you disagree with him on Ulez, you get called a Nazi'. Despite how controversial and provocative the comments were, Mr Khan has been cleared of bringing the mayoralty into disrepute London mayor Sadiq Khan was holding a People's Question Time in Ealing when the extraordinary confrontation developed Despite how controversial and provocative the comments were, Mr Khan has been cleared of bringing the mayoralty into disrepute. The investigation into the comments, which was carried out by barrister Matt Lewin, found that Mr Khan did not breach the Greater London Authority's (GLA) code of conduct. The barrister found that Mr Khan and the protesters were exercising their rights to freedom of expression, which is protected by the European Convention of Human Rights and common law. Mr Lewin said Mr Khan had 'enhanced protection' due to the few limits which can be placed on 'political speech'. He said: 'This means that he had a very broad freedom to express his views, including by criticising his political opponents, and even if he did so in a way they perceived to be provocative, unfair or offensive.' He added that it was up to the electorate to decide if what Mr Khan said was fair and justified and also said it was true that 'some participants in the protest outside PQT were expressing conspiracy theories which are associated with far-Right political views'. The report also found that Mr Khan did not say that all of the Ulez opponents were part of the far-Right or anti-vaccine protesters. A spokesperson for the Mayor of London told MailOnline said the expansion of Ulez was a 'difficult but necessary' measure which is 'already working'. They said: 'The Mayor has always been clear that expanding the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) was a difficult but necessary decision. 'Latest data shows it is already working, with 95 per cent of vehicles seen driving in London on an average day now complying with air quality standards, making a huge difference to the lives and health of Londoners. Peter Fortune, the Tories' deputy leader at City Hall, shot back at Mr Khan: 'If you disagree with the Mayor he's going to paint you as Far Right.' The spokesperson also pointed to the Mayor's expansion of the scrappage scheme which gives Londoners with polluting vehicles access to thousands of pounds in support. 'Sadiq has been listening to Londoners with concerns about the scheme, which is why he expanded the scrappage scheme to ensure every Londoner impacted is eligible for thousands of pounds in support.' they said. 'This support is still available for the remaining Londoners still driving non-compliant vehicles. The Mayor welcomes the outcome of the Monitoring Officers investigation.' Neil Garratt AM, Leader of City Hall Conservatives, said: 'Sadiq Khans disparaging comments about the many Londoners who oppose his unfair expansion of ULEZ were unacceptable. 'His comments fell short of the standard Londoners expect and deserve and many feel he brought the Mayoralty of our great city into disrepute. 'Sadiq Khan resorts to insults when hes lost the argument. We all know the ULEZ expansion is an unfair tax grab on motorists which hits those who can least afford it hardest. It has nothing to do with tackling air pollution.' Shadow foreign secretary David Lammy highlighted 'placards including swastikas' apparently being brandished outside the event last night The expansion of Ulez to the Greater London Area, which was introduced at the end of August, drew major criticism and protests at the time. Motorists across all 29 boroughs now have to pay 12.50 a day to use their car if it does not meet emissions standard. Many were up in arms with the measure which added significant expenses during the cost-of-living crisis. The Ulez was expanded in an effort to improve London's air quality which is said to cause diseases such as asthma in Londoners. The White House is getting antsy to have Congress approve more aid to Ukraine as money runs out after nearly two years of the U.S. essentially bankrolling Kyiv's ability to counter Russia's onslaughts. In a blunt letter sent to Congress on Monday, Budget Director Shalanda Young wrote: 'We are out of money to support Ukraine in this fight. This isn't a next year problem. The time to help a democratic Ukraine fight against Russian aggression is right now. It is time for Congress to act.' Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, President Joe Biden's administration has committed approximately $44 billion in security assistance, which includes munitions and other military equipment. Republicans have criticized the extent to which the U.S. is sending money to Ukraine. Sen. Ron Johnson, a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said it might be time to call it quits on sending more aid. Scroll down to read the letter. The White House sent it's more urgent and poignant message yet to Congress demanding more aid for Ukraine as money runs out to assist in its nearly two-year conflict with Russia More Ukrainians continue to die every day in the Eastern European conflict launched when Russia invaded in February 2022. Pictured: People removed debris from a building hit by shelling in Donetsk, a Russia-controlled area in Ukraine on Sunday, December 3 'We have no idea what the Biden Administration's endgame is in Ukraine,' Johnson told John Catsimatidis during a Cats Roundtable interview on Sunday. 'I have nothing but sympathy for the Ukrainian people. Nothing but contempt for Putin. But Putin is not going to lose this war. They've got the resources. It's not a fair fight.' 'Russia will not lose this war. You have to recognize that reality. I don't like that reality, but it's true. The only way this war ends is in a negotiated settlement,' he added. Young wrote in her letter that 'without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from U.S. military stocks.' 'There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money and nearly out of time.' According to the State Department, the billions sent to Ukraine are an effort to assist the Eastern European nation 'preserve its territorial integrity, secure its borders, and improve interoperability with NATO.' The White House is increasingly worried about a Russian victory in Ukraine and says the extent of U.S. assistance cannot be replaced by other nations. 'Cutting off the flow of U.S. weapons and equipment will kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield, not only putting at risk the gains Ukraine has made, but increasing the likelihood of Russian military victories,' Young writes. The letter was sent to House Speaker Mike Johnson, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Democrats are on board for more support, and the top Republicans in both chambers receiving Young's letter seem to support the additional resources for Ukraine. Speaker Joghnson twice voted previously against aid packages for Ukraine, but is now on record as a supporter, joining McConnell. Monday's message employed the most alarming language yet by the Biden administration to urge Congress to approve more aid for Ukraine and the conflict with Russia nears the two-year mark in February. Young says the letter is meant 'to express the acute urgency we face as Congress weighs whether we continue to fight for freedom across the globe or we ignore the lessons we have learned from history and let [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and autocracy prevail.' In an attempt to persuade Republicans to keep funding the Ukraine war efforts, the White House is taking a different approach by pointing to the money pumped into red and purple states through the money approved for assistance to Kyiv. The administration released a map last week showing how the states are benefiting from the aid packages to produce weapons for Ukraine and pointing to the fact that around 60 percent of Ukraine spending has stayed within the U.S. borders. White House Budget Office Director Shalanda Young writes that to not send more money is to hand Russian President Vladimir Putin and 'autocracy' a victory 'That has improved our own military readiness since DOD is buying new equipment to replace what we are sending Ukraine, jumpstarting and expanding production lines, and is supporting good-paying jobs in dozens of states across the country,' Young argued. She pointed to the fact that nearly all 50 states benefit and noted that air defense systems for both Ukraine and Israel are built in Alabama, Texas and Georgia historically red states (with the exception of Georgia swinging blue). Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS), Young notes, are made in West Virginia, Arkansas and Texas, and javelins in Alabama more red states. In swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, tactical vehicles are made and sent to Ukraine, she added. 'Every day that goes by while this war continues more Ukrainians die,' Sen. Johnson said on Sunday. 'More of Ukraine gets destroyed. The sooner they reach a negotiated settlement, the better from my standpoint.' 'This war has to end. We're not going to like the result, but every day that goes by, we're going to like the result less.' 'Confused' young people in Generation Z are more likely to hail Hamas as 'freedom fighters' rather than 'terrorists' - despite the group's barbaric rape and murder spree in October, a report has claimed. The study by More in Common found Britons were split about who to back in the Israel-Hamas conflict, with the public sympathetic to both sides - amid claims Brits as young as eight were now being influenced on who to support. But it found young people aged 18 to 24 were more likely to take the Palestinian side of the conflict, and overlook the carnage of October 7 which saw more than 1,200 Israelis butchered by Hamas gunmen, sparking Israel's furious Gaza retaliation. More than a third of Gen Z (36 per cent) were behind the Palestinians, compared with just one in 10 of aged 56 and older, just under one in five (17 per cent) of 'Generation X' 41 to 55-year-olds and 24 per cent of 25 to 40-year-old 'Millennials'. Protests supporting both Israelis and Palestinians have flared in cities across the globe since Hamas's violent incursion. But the More in Common report warns: 'The way in which debates are playing out and being presented poses very real risks to both community relations and individuals' safety in the UK.' 'Confused' young people in Generation Z are more likely to call Hamas fighters 'freedom fighters' rather than 'terrorists', a study has claimed Younger people were 'more sympathetic' towards the Palestinian side of the conflict, the report found Younger Britons are now being pressured by their peers to 'take a side' on the war, the report said, while adults duped by online conspiracy theories about the conflict were 'at risk of radicalisation'. The study said Britain, as a whole, had been horrified by the October massacre and that the public remained concerned about innocent civilians losing their lives on both the Israeli and Palestinian side. However, the report warned that the perceptions in Briton could not be split into 'stark binaries' because it 'cedes discussions to those with the loudest voice and silences the views of the majority of Britons'. More In Common said this 'risks polarisation on this issue', leading to ordinary Britons feeling 'forced to choose and double down', while giving 'licence to a small but vocal fringe of conflict entrepreneurs and extremists' to 'sow discord and hate'. 'We have seen examples of this already with attacks on Jewish places of work and study, a rise in anti-Muslim hate, and a rise in far right activity,' the study said. More In Common also found there are 'pockets of sympathy' for Hamas, 'which suggests a need to do more to tackle the risk of radicalisation as a result of the conflict'. Of Gen Z, some 24 per cent said they'd describe Hamas as 'freedom fighters' - while the same number would call them 'terrorists', the polling found. That age group also had the highest number of people saying they did not know which word was more appropriate. The study also found younger people were more worried about being 'attacked or pigeon-holed' if they didn't pick a side and were concerned about saying the wrong thing about the conflict. The war has triggered fierce protests across the globe, with hundreds of thousands of pro-Palestine supporters marching in London in recent weeks Most Britons have not taken a side in the conflict - but support for the Palestinian side is dominated more by activists, 'a passionate and vocal group for whom politics is at the core of their identity', according to the study A third of 18 to 24-year-olds reported having a 'heated conversation or argument' with friends or family about the war, compared with one in 10 Britons overall. One young person said: 'My brother supports Palestine and my dad supports Israel, so it's kind of become a family feud Everyone in my year [at school] is arguing about it online.' A primary school teacher, who lives in Oxford, said: '[Social media] is promoting this radicalisation of children. It's all over social media, a lot of it's not factual. And you've got children of eight or nine years old who are saying, 'I'm with the Palestinians'. And you're thinking 'You are eight or nine, how on earth do you know what they've said?' They are so influenced.' Luke Tryl, the More in Common director, said: 'Young people in particular are being affected by the conflict. Many school children and students we spoke to told us they didn't think their schools and universities were equipped to deal with the fallout from the conflict either to tackle bullying or create space for discussing the conflict.' The report also found that of those who say they have attended a rally or protest relating to the conflict, 35 per cent say 'freedom fighters' is the best word to describe Hamas, compared with 20 per cent who would use the word 'terrorist'. 'Again this suggests that those who have attended rallies are not reflective of the average Briton in terms of their perception of actions in the conflict,' the report said. Thousands of schoolchildren across the UK have missed lessons to march through city centres demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. Since the war between Hamas and Israel broke out, anti-Semitism offences have increased by 1,350 per cent across London, the Metropolitan Police said. Hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of the capital in recent weeks, with pro-Palestinian supporters sparking outrage after some were spotted with anti-semitic posters and defying hate speech warnings by cops, singing 'From The River To The Sea', an inflammatory chant some say calls for Israel to be wiped off the map. Offences of Islamophobia across the capital have also increased since the conflict began, the Met added. On Sunday Brendan Cox, the husband of the Labour MP Jo Cox who was murdered in 2016, was involved in organising a peace vigil outside Downing Street to 'speak out against both anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hate'. Horrific toys, dolls and teddy bears that were beloved by Queen Mary have been put up for auction. The coveted set of hand carved Forest Toys, which were a brand beloved by Queen Mary, the wife of George V, are tipped to sell for 200,000. However they may not have a wide appeal as some appear to be much scarier than the toys that most children will be begging their parents for this Christmas. The lot includes a ventriloquist puppet, akin to a prop from a horror movie, which was specially commissioned for a 1978 advert for Sekonda featuring Ronnie Barker and is expected to fetch 800. Two sets of late 19th century professional Punch and Judy puppets, which belonged to Vic Taylor, the son of a travelling magician, in the early 20th century and feature some disturbing facial expressions, are also expected to go for a combined 3,500. Horrific toys that were beloved by Queen Mary have been put up for auction. Pictured: A ventriloquist puppet, akin to a prop from a horror movie, which is included in the set The lot includes two sets of late 19th century professional Punch and Judy puppets, which belonged to Vic Taylor, the son of a travelling magician, in the early 20th century This figurine of a man riding camel toy is expected to sell for 300 alone in the auction The sale, consisting of over 1,000 lots, also includes a group of ten World War One mascot 'soldier' teddy bears made as good luck charms and often carried by Tommies in their pockets could make 400 each. A possibly unique John Dennison of Leeds' 1890s counter-top clockwork penny in slot fortune telling machine, which was initially in Blackpool Tower, is valued at 3,000, while a Queen Mary's dolls house is estimated at 300. Meanwhile, the ventriloquist puppet in a gold lame dress and black fishnet stockings was sold to the vendor by Paul Baker whose father had worked with Sekonda and was given the prop when filming finished. Queen Mary picked up a Noah's Ark set of the Forest Toys brand while browsing the British Industries Fair in 1926. She was so taken by it that she ordered 24 sets from their factory in Brockenhurst, New Forest, Hampshire. This prompted a worldwide surge in popularity for the toys and a shrewd factory employee kept hold of a set, along with an archive of press cuttings. A version of the Noah's Ark set, which has been passed down generations of the family, is now tipped to fetch 7,000 at Special Auction Services, of Newbury, Berkshire. This ventriloquist puppet, which was specially commissioned for a 1978 advert for Sekonda featuring Ronnie Barker, is expected to fetch 800 It was sold to the vendor by Paul Baker whose father had worked with Sekonda and was given the prop when filming finished. These two figures of a collie dog and a farm horse are expected to fetch more than 100 each A figure of a farm girl with bucket and goose (right) is expected to sell for 200 while the red deer stag and doe set (left) is expected to sell for whopping 400 These elephant and giraffe figures are expected to fetch 400 each The auction includes these rare early 20th century Stollwerck Bros novelty chocolates, featuring a train set and a violin and bow This press book archive from the Forest Toys company, starting in 1931, featuring original photographs of their 1922 models, a Circus supplied the HM the Queen and many other product photos is expected to sell for 1,500 A Special Auction Services spokesperson said: 'After Queen Mary ordered two dozen of the Noah's Ark set, the toys grew in popularity locally, nationally, and internationally with the factory receiving visitors from all over the world. 'They were carved out of pine imported from North America via the Southampton docks and were made to scale to reflect the true proportions of the people and animals being made.' Daniel Agnew, teddy bear and doll specialist at Special Auction Services, added: 'This auction is full of the most amazing toys, dolls and teddy bears from the last 200 years, when items were made to last and were beautifully crafted, it's a nostalgic peek into the past, as people gear up to the Christmas season.' The sale takes place on December 6. A bully is set to return to a prestigious New York school where she carried out a vicious attack on a smaller girl, whose father has blasted the policy that allows the alleged attacker back in the classroom. The shocking assault was caught on film with gloating friends pulling out their phones to record the moment the attacker strode up to the 11-year-old before flooring her with a punch and kicking her repeatedly as she lay in the street. Stylized videos celebrated the attack outside Mark Twain Intermediate School for the Gifted and Talented, with slow motion replays and laughing emojis adding to the humiliation. But the attacker was served only with a suspension from the Brooklyn school while the victim now has been assigned a staff 'bodyguard' to escort her through the premises. 'Imagine knowing you could not like someone, harass them, plot an attack and film it and spread the evidence,' the victim's father said. Student laughed and filmed as the 11-year-old was approached from behind and punched to the ground in front of shocked pedestrians Fifty-five percent of pupils think bullying occurs 'most or all of the time' at the Brooklyn school, according to insideschools.org. 'Then your victim has to leave and you get to go on terrorizing other kids,' the distraught father said. 'If that keeps going, it will be more a juvenile detention center than a G&T school.' The Coney Island school boats a 99 percent pass rate in math, English, social studies and science classes. But 55 percent of pupils think bullying occurs 'most or all of the time,' according to insideschools.org. The girl's father said his daughter had been targeted by the unnamed bully and her friends at the school since joining in September, according to the New York Post. The school offered 'wellness check-ins' and offered 'restorative mediation' sessions after the attack on October 20, including a sit-down session between the girl and her tormentor. That further infuriated the bully who continued her abuse online and promised to resume the violence on her return. Messages were scratched onto a bathroom stall labeling the little girl a 'dirty a whore' and 'fat as f***', while a TikTok page called 'Mark Twain Gossip' attacked her for getting students suspended and called her a 'b****' and 'dumba**.' Police are investigating the attack after videos were uploaded to TikTok with captions including 'THE SMACK WAS MAD LOUD,' and 'my sister f***ed her up'. But public schools in New York are governed by the city's Department of Education regulation A-450, which is designed to keep expulsions to a minimum. While acknowledging that a principal 'may pursue an involuntary transfer', it insists that 'every effort should be made to minimize any disruption to the student's education.' The school, however, seemed happy to disrupt the victim's education with the offer of a 'safety transfer' to another school. Another parent at the school took the offer last year after her daughter suffered 'nightmarish' bullying at the hands of the same people. By the end her daughter was eating lunch with teachers, doing remote schooling and needing therapy. 'Imagine knowing you could not like someone, harass them, plot an attack and film it and spread the evidence,' the victim's father said. 'Then your victim has to leave and you get to go on terrorizing other kids' The victim lay helplessly in the street as her attacker pummeled her with punches ands kicks 'I didn't even recognize her anymore,' the mother told The Post. 'There are no consequences for the bullies,' she added. 'It was like, to be successful, you have to destroy whoever you feel like is the big competition.' A DOE spokesperson said the agency took immediate action after the incident. 'Bullying has absolutely no place in our school communities, and we take every report of bullying extremely seriously,' it added. Dailymail.com has reached out to the DOE for more information about the incident and the district's policy. He added that he will not resign, despite Governor Ron DeSantis urging him to Florida Republicans' chairman Christian Ziegler has claimed he is innocent after a woman claimed he raped her after she cancelled plans to have sex with him and his wife. Sarasota police are investigating an unnamed woman's claims Ziegler attacked her after she backed out of sex when she learned his wife, Moms for Liberty founder Bridget Ziegler, would not be present. In an email to supporters sent on Saturday, Ziegler, 40, said he and wife are being targeted because they are 'such loud political voices' - and added that he will not resign over the allegations. However, he did not address any specifics of the accusation that has roiled the state's conservative politics. Meanwhile a search warrant has revealed that Bridget admitted to police that the couple had a sexual encounter with the accuser last year. Moreover, Ziegler told detectives that he did have sex with the woman but that it was consensual. Ziegler claimed he filmed the October 2 encounter before deleting the video and saving it on a Google Drive, according to police documents. Florida Republican Party chairman Christian Ziegler has claimed he is innocent following a woman's claims that he raped her after she cancelled plans to have sex with him and his wife An unnamed woman claims that Ziegler sexually assaulted her after she backed out of sex when she learned his wife, Moms for Liberty founder Bridget Ziegler (pictured with Casey Desantis), would not be present In his letter to supporters, Ziegler added: 'We have a country to save and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for this process to wrap up.' 'My family is rock solid. My wife is behind me 150 percent and we have methods in place to protect our (three) children, just as we have with all previous attacks that we have faced.' The longtime GOP activist ascended to the state party's top post in February. Governor Ron DeSantis said last week that while Ziegler is innocent until proven guilty, he should resign to avoid becoming a distraction to their party - but Ziegler insists he won't quit. No charges have been filed against Ziegler, but the Sarasota Police investigation remains open. Together, the couple holds powerful influence in Florida GOP politics Police records saying that the Zieglers had group sex with a woman have led Democrats and gay rights leaders to accuse the couple of hypocrisy, given that an organization Bridget Ziegler cofounded - Moms for Liberty - has joined DeSantis and the Florida GOP in pushing back against LGBTQ+ causes. Bridget Ziegler is also an elected member of the Sarasota County school board and was appointed by DeSantis to the board that now oversees Walt Disney Worlds land development. DeSantis pushed through legislation last year disbanding a Disney-controlled board after the company opposed his bill that limits sex education in schools. The rape accusation against Ziegler became public last week after the Florida Center for Government Accountability, an investigative news organization, obtained a police report and the search warrant affidavits detailing the allegations. The accuser's name is redacted in the documents. The accuser, who has known Ziegler for 20 years, told police that when Bridget backed out of the plan to have sex, she texted Christian saying: 'Sorry I was mostly in for her,' according to an affidavit. Later that evening the woman claims that as she went to leave her apartment she discovered Ziegler outside in the hallway - and alleges he then entered her property and raped her. Ziegler, left, greets former president Donald Trump at the RPOF Freedom Summit on November 4, 2023, in Kissimmee, Florida Bridget Ziegler (left) helped establish the framework for what would become DeSantis' (right) Parental Rights in Education Bill dubbed the 'Don't Say Gay' law Weeks later, detectives began to monitor calls and messages sent by Christian Ziegler to the accuser, according to the affidavit. 'Where r u? Wanna meet and chat? Worried about you. You are my friend,' Ziegler allegedly wrote in one message via Instagram. 'Hell no not after what you did to me,' the woman responded. 'Do you not understand I am terrified of you?' A 911 call, obtained by the Florida Center for Government Accountability, made by a friend of the alleged victim's reveals she confided in the friend about being raped. 'She told me she was raped,' the friend informed the dispatcher on October 4. 'She's saying she's scared, that the person who raped her came to her house, so she's scared to leave... I'm worried about her right now,' the friend explained. In text and phone conversations monitored by investigators, Ziegler offered the woman 'financial help' before becoming suspicious that they were being recorded. Danish police have urged motorists not to use toasters to heat the batteries of electric vehicles after a driver destroyed their car and damaged a nearby house in southern Denmark. Police said on Monday they 'strongly discourage' people from using kitchen appliances to warm up EV batteries, which are highly-sensitive to temperature and can become less efficient in the cold. 'The cause of the fire is most likely to be found in the toaster that the owner of the car had placed under the front of his car to keep the battery warm,' police acknowledged in a daily report. The fire happened on Saturday in Stenlille, 40 miles (about 60km) southwest of Copenhagen. No one was injured. Electric cars and charging stations are seen at Tritium, Brisbane, Friday, March 31, 2023 File image. Danish police were pressed to advise against using toasters to warm EV batteries The car was parked in a carport - a shelter for vehicles that is attached to a house and consists of a flat roof supported on pillars. The make of the car wasn't known, and it also wasn't immediately clear if it was the vehicle owner's house that was damaged or a neighbor's home. The car's owner faces a fine. A number of EV battery fires have captured headlines since their introduction to mass-market. In the US, reports prompted an investigation by the United States Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which in 2017 concluded the 'propensity and severity' of fires and explosions from the accidental ignition of solvents used in the batteries was comparable to those in gasoline and diesel cars. Vehicles from 2021 through 2023 also encountered 79 percent more problems than those with combustion engines, according to a new Consumer Reports survey of more than 330,000 car owners. The research said EV owners most frequently reported troubles with battery and charging systems as well as flaws in body panels and the fit of interior parts. It noted that EV manufacturers are still learning to construct new types of vehicles, and suggested that their build quality will improve over time and teething issues will be ironed out. The US Navy has finally recovered a spy plane that crashed into the sea after overshooting a runway in Hawaii two weeks ago. But the extraction has cost an estimated $1.5million and, as a sea turtle is found dead onsite, experts warn the plane has damaged the endangered ocean coral. The US Navy P-8A plane missed its mark while attempting to land at a US Marines base, located ten miles from Honolulu, on November 20. For two weeks it sat floating in Kaneohe Bay - home to coral reefs and a range of marine life, from sharks to octopus and fish. Its wheels lodged in the coral bed and Navy contractors had to design a complex inflatable and rope system to float it to the surface and remove it from the water. It took 13 hours to remove the plane using a complex system of giant inflatable cylinders to move it out the water The plane floated in the bay for nearly two weeks after crashing off the runway into the water Officials said the removal operation took 13 hours starting around 6.30am Saturday. 'Our team went through a detailed planning process to develop the best course of action to get the P-8 out of the bay as quickly and as safely as possible,' Rear Adm. Kevin P. Lenox, the salvage operations on-scene commander, said. 'At times, it took us an hour to move the aircraft five feet.' The Navy estimated the total cost of the operation will be $1.5million as they focus on preserving the aircraft so it can return to service once removed. But the cost to marine life has been high too, and on Thursday, a 'deceased sea turtle' was found 'floating between' two of the Navy barriers around the plane. 'This one is unfortunate. DLNR observers this morning found a deceased sea turtle floating in between two of our barriers,' Lenox said. 'I have no information on the cause of death on that particular sea turtle. DLNR did report a sick sea turtle struggling in the vicinity yesterday, we suspect that may be related. The plane's wheels became lodged in the coral sea bed making the extraction harder The Navy is hopeful that the plane is undamaged enough to return to service after being removed from the water 'Hawaiian Marine and Animal Recovery team has taken custody of that and they'll make an assessment and if necessary we will do a necropsy on that turtle to find out why it passed.' It is unclear why the plane crashed - it had nine people on board at the time and was conducting 'routine training.' All of the staff managed to swim to shore and were unharmed. One expert speculated that the bad weather and winds made it harder to land on the shorter than average runway at Kaneohe. After the crash, local residents began warning about the risk to the local wildlife, which includes several endangered species. The area also hosts an ancient Hawaiian fishpond being restored by community groups. Kahaluu resident Jonee Kaina told Hawaii News Now: 'I think someone needs to take a look at the impact the plane is doing to our marine life. There is jet fuel, anti-freeze and other toxins.' Speaking at the time, Rear Admiral Lenox told Honolulu Civil Beat the crash damaged some coral, but they were doing all they could to limit damage to the 'critical ecosystem and a cherished part of the local community.' The plane's wheels became lodged in the coral bed The US Navy released underwater footage last week, showing the plane's tires lodged in the coral as fish navigate through rock fissures. The video 'depicts the two points of contact the aircraft has with the coral and the remainder of the aircraft floating above,' authorities said. The P-8A, a Poseidon reconnaissance plane used for intelligence, is manufactured by Boeing and shares many parts with the 737 commercial jet. Marine Corps Base Kaneohe is home to over 25,000 Marines, sailors, family members and civilian employees. COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber has defended his role as host of the UN climate summit in the UAE after declaring there was 'no science' to suggest a phase out of fossil fuels will help meet climate targets. Jaber faced a furious backlash after it was revealed he had said during an online event last month that 'there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5C'. The Emirati's appointment to the Cop28 presidency had already come in for harsh criticism from climate activists because Jaber is also the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Responding to the comments today, Jaber said: 'I am quite surprised with the constant and repeated attempts to undermine the work of the Cop28 presidency. 'I honestly think there is some confusion out there, and misrepresentation. I'm an engineer by background. Science has been central to my own career progress and yes I respect the science in everything I do. 'I have said over and over that the phase down and the phase out of fossil fuel is inevitable.' Jaber's comments came as the Amin Nasser - chief of Saudi oil giant Aramco - told a panel on the sidelines of the Cop28 climate summit in the UAE that all the renewable energy coming to market is still not enough to handle additional demand, meaning more investment in the oil and gas sector is still needed. Cop28 President Sultan al-Jaber speaks during a news conference at the summit today in Dubai, United Arab Emirates Sultan Al Jaber (centre) in Dubai at the weekend, flanked on his right by US special presidential envoy John Kerry and World Bank president Ajay Banga, and on his left by Chinese politician Xie Zhenhua and UN Environment Programme executive director Inger Andersen During Monday's news conference, Jaber complained to reporters that 'one statement taken out of context with misrepresentation' had received 'maximum coverage'. The UN climate science agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050 requires greatly reducing the use of fossil fuels and eliminating the use of unabated coal. 'I will say it very precisely. Looking at scenarios in which global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees with no or little overshoot, by 2050, fossil fuel use is greatly reduced, and unabated coal use is completely phased out,' Jaber concluded. IPCC Chair Jim Skea joined Jaber at the news conference and said he had held several meetings with the Cop28 chief on climate science. 'Dr. Sultan has been attentive to the science as we have discussed it, and I think he fully understood it,' Skea said. For some, Jaber - who earned his PhD in business and economics from Coventry University - was a fantastic choice to head Cop28. In 2006, he was put in charge of Masdar, the UAE's renewable energy vehicle, and set off on a global fact-finding mission to assess obstacles and opportunities. The UAE has since invested heavily in its nuclear and solar sector, building a massive state-of-the-art nuclear power plant, and Masdar has made shrewd investments in technologies in more than 40 countries - moves which have earned Jaber a reputation for getting results. But he has also faced a torrent of criticism for his role as chief of Abu Dhabi's huge oil company, and the Centre for Climate Reporting recently published what it claimed were leaked documents suggesting Jaber was aiming to make oil and gas deals with foreign officials on the sidelines of the Cop28 conference Reports from Amnesty International also claimed he was involved in censoring the UAE's media output when he served as chairman of the National Media Council (NMC). Jaber has maintained a phase-down of fossil fuels is inevitable and essential, but as part of a comprehensive, thought-out energy transition plan that takes into account the circumstances of each country and region. 'One size fits all will not work so we need to be flexible and agile,' he told Reuters in October. 'We should raise ambition and keep 1.5 as our north star so no one loses sight.' Cop 28 Sultan Al Jaber speaks during an energy debate in Dubai on Saturday More than 70,000 officials, campaigners, and experts are expected to attend Cop28 in Dubai Jaber previously said his experience as an oil boss adds to his ability to leverage solutions, and strongly denied the claims made by the Centre for Climate Reporting, declaring the alleged leaked documents 'false, not true, and incorrect'. The UAE and various other oil producing countries say coal, oil and natural gas must have a continued role, combined with technology to capture their emissions until new energy systems can sustain the world's needs. Jaber's team say the considered approach is refreshing. 'For many years, the Cop process has been inputting the same actions and expecting different results. In Dubai, we are doing things differently. We are bringing everyone to the table because everyone is needed, and that includes the energy industry,' a Cop28 spokesperson told Sky News. Another spokesperson for Jaber's Cop28 team responded to criticism of Jaber's involvement with the UAE's National Media Council, saying the organisation 'was abolished in June 2021, and as such is not relevant to media expression in the UAE today or Dr Sultan's work.' French prosecutors have opened an investigation into a "terrorist plot" after a man known to the authorities as a radical Islamist with mental health troubles stabbed a tourist to death and wounded two other people in central Paris at the weekend before being arrested. The attack around 9:00 pm (2000 GMT) Saturday near the Eiffel Tower came as France is at its highest alert level against the background of the war between Israel and Hamas. Terrorism prosecutors told AFP on Sunday they were investigating the knife and hammer attacker, identified as Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a French national born in 1997 to Iranian parents. Arrested at the scene, he is suspected of murder and attempted murder "in connection with a terrorist plot". A 23-year-old man, identified by a judicial source as a German-Filipino citizen, died in the attack, though a taxi driver intervened to keep the attacker away from his wife. Patrick Pelloux, an emergency doctor on duty at the time of the attack, said the couple were both nurses, adding that the woman was severely shocked but unhurt. A 66-year-old British citizen and a 60-year-old French national were wounded in the attack. Health Minister Aurelien Rousseau told broadcaster France 3 that the wounded victims suffered only "superficial (physical) traumas, but of course psychological traumas that will be enormous". Prosecutors announced a press conference for 7:30 pm on Sunday to give updates on the investigation. Three people "close to" Rajabpour-Miyandoab were being held in custody on Sunday afternoon, prosecutors said. Meanwhile government leaders including Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin were to hold a security meeting. "We will not give in to terrorism," Borne wrote on X, formerly Twitter, while President Emmanuel Macron offered his condolences to the family of the man killed. 'Afghanistan and Palestine' Rajabpour-Miyandoab, known to authorities for extremism, shouted "Allahu Akbar" Arabic for "God is greatest" as he struck on Saturday, Darmanin said at the scene by Bir Hakeim bridge over the River Seine. The suspect, who lived with his parents in the Essonne region south of Paris, told police he could not stand Muslims being killed in "Afghanistan and Palestine" and accused France of being "an accomplice to what Israel is doing" in the Gaza Strip, Darmanin added. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on X that he was "devastated" by the attack, saying that "our thoughts are with the wounded, their families and friends". His Interior Minister Nancy Faeser had earlier warned that "the war in Gaza after Hamas' terrorist act (of Oct. 7) has worsened the threat," saying that "the threat of Islamist terrorism is acute and serious." Police and security sources confirmed the attacker had claimed responsibility in a social media video as he struck, speaking about "current events, the government (and) the murder of innocent Muslims". Investigators would scrutinise his medical history, a security source told AFP, saying the attacker was "very unstable and easily influenced." Rajabpour-Miyandoab was "being monitored in a way that did not mean he was being hospitalised, he was supposed to follow a course of treatment" for his mental health issues, said Rousseau, the health minister. "As often in these cases, there's a mixture of an ideology, an easily influenced person and, unfortunately, psychiatry," he added. Darmanin said the man had previously been sentenced in 2016 to four years in prison for planning another attack in the Paris business district of La Defense, which he failed to carry out. 'Help, help' Joseph S., a 37-year-old supermarket manager who asked not to give his last name, witnessed the attack as he sat in a bar. He heard screams and people shouting "help, help" as they ran. A man wielding a hammer attacked a man who had fallen down, and within five to 10 minutes the police arrived, he told AFP. The country has suffered several attacks by Islamist extremists, including the November 2015 suicide and gun attacks in Paris claimed by the Islamic State group in which 130 people were killed. There had been a relative lull in recent years, even as officials have warned that the threat remains. But tensions have risen in France, home to large Jewish and Muslim populations, following Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel's subsequent bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Security in Paris is also under particular scrutiny as it gears up to host the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. In October, teacher Dominique Bernard was killed in the northern French town of Arras by a young radicalised Islamist from Russia's Caucasus region. (AFP) Ron DeSantis made the claims during last week's debate between his long-term combatant Democrat Newsom Siebel, who is California Governor Gavin Newsom's father-in-law, tells DailyMail.com that DeSantis is a 'lying slimeball' DeSantis claimed Kenneth Siebel told him he moved from California to Florida because 'Florida is much better governed, safer, better budget, lower taxes' Kenneth Siebel, who is California Governor Gavin Newsom's father-in-law, tells DailyMail.com that Ron DeSantis is a 'lying slimeball' Gavin Newsom's Republican father-in-law has branded Ron DeSantis a 'lying slimeball' for claiming he and his wife fled California for a better life in Florida. Ken Siebel hit out in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com after the GOP presidential hopeful mocked Golden State governor Newsom in last week's televised showdown moderated by Fox News host Sean Hannity. Siebel said he an his wife had moved to Florida from Montana as he had left California in the mid 2010s. Florida governor DeSantis dramatically told viewers: 'So, I was talking to a fella who had made the move from California to Florida, and he was telling me that Florida is much better governed, safer, better budget, lower taxes, all this stuff and he's really happy with the quality of life. 'And then he paused and he said, 'You know, by the way, I'm Gavin Newsom's father-in-law. 'So we do count Gavin's in-laws as some of the people that have fled California and come to the state of Florida.' It was considered a killer punch in the feisty exchanges between long-term combatants DeSantis and Democrat Newsom during Thursday's debate on Fox News. Siebel, 82, and wife Judith, 79 whose daughter Jennifer has been married to the California governor for 14 years splurged on a $3.3million home in one of the most exclusive parts of Naples, Florida, in 2020. But the furious financier who donated money to the DeSantis campaign in 2022, told DailyMail.com the couple hadn't lived in California in years. Ron DeSantis claimed Kenneth Siebel told him he moved from California to Florida because 'Florida is much better governed, safer, better budget, lower taxes' Siebel (far right) told DailyMail.com 'It was a real slimeball move. It made me very angry and I shouldn't have to get angry.' Newsom is pictured far left with his family Jennifer Siebel Newsom, 49, met her future husband in 2006 after being set up on a blind date. Newsom and Jennifer announced their engagement 14 months later and married at her parents' ranch in July 2008 in Stevensville, Montana. And he said he had never told DeSantis they bought the place because Florida was better governed, safer and better budgeted. Instead, he said they purchased the three-bedroom Spanish-style home with a pool solely to enjoy warmer weather and be close to college friends they had known for 60 years. 'Saying we moved from California to Florida to fit his narrative was a downright slimy lie, which he knew,' said Siebel. 'Saying we moved from California to Florida to fit his narrative was a downright slimy lie, which he knew,' said Siebel, who has lived in the Golden State with his family 'DeSantis knew that we were Montana residents. And he said that I said Florida has better budgeting and less crime. 'I have no clue on the state's budgeting. I have no clue about the crime rates.' DeSantis's spokesman hit back when contacted by DailyMail.com. 'Gavin Newsom got beaten by Ron DeSantis so badly at the debate that his family is now putting on the full-court press to mitigate the damage,' he said. 'And it makes sense; they're acting as his surrogates because no normal California resident would be willing to do so. 'It's also been widely reported that Mr. Siebel even went so far as to donate to support Ron DeSantis.' Siebel, a Republican voter who confirmed to DailyMail.com that he and his wife are Florida residents, insisted he had never said anything about state taxes or crime rates to DeSantis. 'He just made up stuff as a lie. I'm 82, nearly 83 and I'm very sad that we got brought got brought into this this slimy part of the conversation. 'It was a real slimeball move. It made me very angry and I shouldn't have to get angry.' 'I don't tolerate liars, and he lied. I found it despicable that he knew he was lying to make a point. 'I don't trust people when they do stuff like that.' On the reasons for the move to the home which is now valued on the Collier County Property Appraiser's site at $5.36million he said: 'We wanted warmer weather and had several college friends in Naples. 'That's how we ended up there. End of story.' Siebel and his 79-year-old wife lived in California for many years, but they uprooted for Montana where they owned a ranch eight years ago, he told DailyMail.com. They bought the Bitterroot Ranch in Stevensville, 100 miles west of the state capital Helena, in 1979. According to property records it was sold last month, however its website still states that the couple 'have made the ranch their getaway home' since they bought it. Records show that Siebel registered to vote in Montana in 2011 but changed his registration to Florida in 2020 and voted there in last year's Congressional elections. The couple have also owned a house on the Big Island of Hawaii. Whether it was the reason for the move or not, the Siebels will have caught some significant tax breaks by switching their residency from Montana to Florida. But they are also being hit by sales taxes in the Sunshine State which dont exist in their former home. The Tax Foundation, a Washington DC-based think tank, puts Florida fourth in its 2024 list of most tax-friendly states, with Montana just a spot lower in fifth. California places 48th of the 50 states ahead of just New York and bottom-ranked New Jersey. As for crime, the rate in Ravalli County, Montana, is slightly below the national average, but significantly higher than in Collier County, Florida which is considered one of the safest counties in the country. 'We were Montana residents for eight plus years before we moved to Florida. We had a ranch there for 44 years,' said Siebel. And he said of California: 'It is the most beautiful state. I moved there in 1966 and built a career there. The state offered us so many wonderful things oceans, beaches, mountains, wine regions and great businesses. 'It's a generator of businesses for young people that want to build a career. It's a great place to live.' Siebel said they purchased the three-bedroom Spanish-style home with a pool solely to enjoy warmer weather and be close to college friends they had known for 60 years Siebel, 82, and wife Judith splurged $3.3million on a stunning home in one of the most exclusive parts of Naples, Florida, in 2020 Siebel's fury at 45-year-old DeSantis marks a significant shift in his opinion of the presidential hopeful, fleetingly seen as the strongest contender in the 2024 GOP primary field but whose campaign appears to have misfired significantly. He is badly trailing Donald Trump, with the latest Messenger/Harris national poll putting the ex-president on 68 per cent support and the Florida governor on just nine. The Siebel family trust made a $5,000 contribution to the Friends of Ron DeSantis political action committee in 2022. The financier also gave $2,000 each to GOP Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Siebel is founder and co-chairman of San Francisco-based Private Wealth Partners and has been in investing for more than 50 years. He is also co-founder of Maier & Siebel Real Estate Investment Advisors and was also a founding partner of Robertson, Colman & Siebel and Siebel Capital Management. Daughter Jennifer Siebel Newsom, 49, met her future husband in 2006 after being set up on a blind date. She had previously dated actor George Clooney, 62. Newsom and Jennifer announced their engagement 14 months later and married at her parents' Montana ranch in July 2008. Ironically accused liar DeSantis said 56-year-old Newsom was guilty of 'bold-face lies' the day after the debate, adding: 'I mean, it was unbelievable.' The pair sparred relentlessly over issues such as LGBTQ rights, abortion, education and immigration with Newsom claiming 'that's insulting' when DeSantis alleged Los Angeles had 'collapsed' due to crime. He also condemned the Florida governor for flying migrants from Texas to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, in 2022, accusing him of using them as 'pawns'. During last week's debate DeSantis claimed Kenneth Siebel told him he moved from California to Florida because 'Florida is much better governed, safer, better budget, lower taxes' But DeSantis said of the California governor at a campaign event in Prosperity, South Carolina, next day: 'I have never been in a situation, being on stage with somebody, who told so many bold face lies.' He slammed Newsom by added: 'He said Biden deserves an A+ for being president. He said Biden is at the top of his game, that he hasn't declined cognitively are you kidding me?' It was reportedly Jennifer who put a stop to the red-state, blue-state TV debate by saying 'we're done' after it went on longer than scheduled, according to a source for NBC News. The fiery exchanges had stretched on for two hours instead of the planned 90 minutes. Newsom told host Hannity: 'Let's just do an extended hour. I'm happy to do it.' However, once the show resumed from a commercial break, neither governor was still on set. The Fox News host told the audience that 'by mutual agreement both candidates had other commitments and they realized afterwards they couldn't stay longer'. According to NBC sources, there had been significant tension behind the scenes as well, with both sides arguing the other was breaking pre-arranged rules for the exchanges. Jennifer was reported to have made her way to the stage during the commercial break after the governors had agreed extend the time and put an end to it. A Newsom aide denied the governor's wife was the reason the debate was suddenly ended, saying both sides agreed to finish proceedings A knifeman who stabbed, cut and slashed his girlfriend and her family members to death 'had an episode' just days before the 'violent and brutal' drug and alcohol-fuelled attack, a trial heard. Joshua Jacques, 29, is accused of fatally stabbing his girlfriend Samantha Drummonds, 27, her mother Tanysha Ofori-Akuffo, 45, her grandmother Dolet Hill, 64, and Ms Hill's partner, Denton Burke, 58, on April 25 last year. Police were called to Ms Hill's terraced home in Delaford Road, Bermondsey, south London, in the early hours of the morning, finding Mr Burke's body at the foot of the stairs and the three women in the kitchen. Prosecutors say Jacques left 'a bloodbath in his wake' and that all of the victims had suffered numerous stab wounds with one or more knives and were pronounced dead at the scene. But the Old Bailey heard today that in the days before the attack, Ms Drummonds told her best friend Ayo Omosuyi she believed Jacques was having an 'episode' and had been 'chatting all night and was fixated on topics'. Jacques, from Minard Road, Lewisham, south-east London, has pleaded guilty to their manslaughters but denies murdering them. Joshua Jacques, 29, (pictured) is accused of fatally stabbing his girlfriend and her family members. He 'had an episode' just days before the 'violent and brutal' drug and alcohol-fuelled attack, a trial heard. The Old Bailey heard today that in the days before the attack, Samantha Drummonds (pictured) told her best friend Ayo Omosuyi she believed Jacques was having an 'episode' and had been 'chatting all night and was fixated on topics' In a voice message sent to Ms Omosuyi on April 24, 2022, Ms Drummonds said: 'Literally like this weekend has just been a myth, like basically in a nutshell Josh is basically getting to the point where he could basically have an episode, like I don't know what's triggered him. 'It's just a myth innit obviously tomorrow is Monday and obviously doctors are gonna get. He just needs to get his medication innit.' Tom Little KC, prosecuting, told jurors at the Old Bailey today that the case involves 'four violent and brutal deaths at the hands of this defendant'. The deaths occurred during an incident on the night of April 24, 2022 and into the next morning. 'In killing four people the prosecution say that the defendant murdered three generations of one family,' Mr Little told the court. 'There is no dispute or issue other than that it was the defendant that killed all four of the victims and that he did so by attacking them. He did so by stabbing them, cutting them and slashing them. 'What you will have to decide is why he did so and what his state of mind was at the time. The prosecution case is that this is a clear case of murder or more accurately a clear case of quadruple murder. Dolet Hill and Denton Burke were both killed inside their three-bedroom home close to Millwall's stadium Dolet Hill (in the multi-coloured dress), her daughter Tanysha Drummonds (with her arm around her) and her other daughter Tracey Henry (pictured in a white dress) 'We say that the defendant killed his victims with murderous intent, and there's no dispute about that, and that when he did so his ability to form a rational judgement and to exercise self-control were not substantially impaired by any psychiatric condition and indeed that his conduct on that night was brought about by self-induced intoxication, taking drugs and drinking alcohol. 'This, we say, led to a transient psychotic disorder not meeting the requirements for the defendant to make out a partial defence of diminished responsibility.' It was the second time Jacques had visited the house where Mr Burke and Ms Hill lived, the court heard. Ms Ofori-Akuffo, also known as Racquel, sometimes stayed at the property to care for her mother who was receiving treatment for cancer, while Ms Drummonds had been living there as her own flat was undergoing renovation, Mr Little told jurors. The trial continues. The Jewish community in Philadelphia has rallied around an Israeli restaurant owner whose falafel store was viciously targeted by an antisemitic protest on Sunday night. The mob, led by the Philly Palestine Coalition, marched on Goldie's in Center City, screaming and chanting: 'Goldie, Goldie you can't hide, we charge you with genocide.' Much-loved local figure Mike Solomonov - an Israeli-born, Pittsburgh-raised chef - owns the establishment. He has won the James Beard Award in the past - and since the ordeal, prominent politicians and friends have come out to support him. Senator John Fetterman called the attack 'pathetic and rank antisemitism,' while Governor Shapiro said it was 'hate and bigotry reminiscent of a dark time.' Sunday's mob threats came at the same time as students at the nearby University of Pennsylvania - called for an 'intifada' - a violent uprising against Israel. Much-loved local figure Mike Solomonov - an Israeli-born, Pittsburgh-raised chef - owns the establishment. He has won the James Beard Award in the past - and since the ordeal, prominent politicians and friends have rallied to support him He has posed with Adam Sandler on more than one occasion after the much-loved actor visited his restaurants Senator John Fetterman called the attack 'pathetic and rank antisemitism,' while Governor Shapiro said it was 'hate and bigotry is reminiscent of a dark time' Solomonov was born near Tel Aviv, but moved to the US when he was a child. His love for cooking started when he worked in a bakery at the age of 18 in Israel. His younger brother David was killed by a Lebanese sniper in Metula, on the Israel-Lebanon border, when he was 21 years old in 2003. The Israeli soldier was shot dead on Yom Kippur - the most holy day in the Jewish calendar. Solomonov was cooking Italian food in Philly when he heard the news. A group marched at Goldie's, chanting: 'Goldie, Goldie you can't hide, we charge you with genocide' Solomonov, a dad-of-two, dedicated himself to Israeli cuisine and opened his first restaurant, Zahav, in Philadelphia in 2008. The 45-year-old has opened 20 other establishments across the country since. Zahav was awarded the James Beard Foundation 'Outstanding Restaurant' in 2019. When the war broke out, the Israeli chef launched a fundraiser to raise money for those injured in the war in Israel, with proceeds going to Friends of United Hatzalah - which is an emergency medical service that runs across Israel. Pennsylvania's Senator John Fetterman called the attack on Solomonov's business 'pathetic and rank antisemitism.' Fetterman said: 'They could be protesting Hamas. They could be protesting Hamas' systematic rape of Israeli women and girls or demanding the remaining hostages be immediately released. 'Instead, they targeted a Jewish restaurant. It's pathetic and rank antisemitism.' Solomonov posed with Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce, who ate at his restaurant Zahav - which 'brings the flavors of Israel's cultural crossroads to Philadelphia and beyond' On March 12, he posted a photo shaking hands with President Joe Biden Mike's younger brother David (right) was killed by a sniper in Metula, on the Israel-Lebanon border, when he was 21 years old in 2003. The Israeli soldier was shot dead on Yom Kippur - the most holy day in the Jewish calendar. Solomonov was cooking Italian food in Philly when he heard the news On Yom Kippur in 2003, David was ambushed by a squad of snipers stationed on the Lebanese side of the border. The terrorists spotted him and opened fire on him Mondaire Jones, the former U.S. representative for New York's 17th congressional district and commissioner for the US Commission on Civil Rights, said that his friend Solomonov 'has spent his life' making the world better. Jones called out the 'vile antisemitism' seen outside Goldie on Sunday night. He said on X: 'Mike Solomonov, the owner of this restaurant, is a friend. He has spent his life trying to make the world a better place. 'Yet he's targeted because he's Jewish and Israeli by people claiming moral superiority. This is vile antisemitism.' Bari Weiss, a Jewish journalist who pioneered The Free Press, said that she is a personal friend of Mike's - and urged others to help his businesses following the antisemitism seen outside his establishment last night. Weiss said: 'When our daughter was born, our wonderful friend (and fellow Pittsburgher) Mike Solomonov shipped us the best lamb dinner I've ever had. 'Today antisemites targeted one of Mike's restaurants.' Ted Allen, the Host of Food Network's 'Chopped,' urged: 'Philadelphia needs to step up for Mike Solomonova James Beard-Award winning chef who employs scores of people at this lovely restaurant and many more citywide (and in Brooklyn), and with whom I am proud to have made television. 'This is, simply, stupid.' Hen Mazzig, author of 'The Wrong Kind of Jew,' who has spoken out on the topic of antisemitism in recent weeks, said: 'Chef Mike Solomonov is the nicest guy I know and has done so much to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians. 'And always sees the humanity in everyone. Protestors in Philadelphia came to his restaurant to protest, just because he's Jewish.' Solomonov (left) also welcomed United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken (right) into his donut shop, Federal Donuts, to help craft his own sweet treats before the politician swore in new citizens in Philadelphia Solomonov was born near Tel Aviv, but moved to the US when he was a child. His love for cooking started when he worked in a bakery at the age of 18 in Israel Michael Solomonov has rubbed shoulders with some of the most prominent politicians and celebrities in the US - many of whom have come out in support of the chef following the protests outside his falafel shop. He has posed with Adam Sandler on more than one occasion after the much-loved actor visited his restaurants. Solomonov also welcomed United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken into his donut shop, Federal Donuts, to help craft his own sweet treats before the politician swore in new citizens in Philadelphia. On March 12, he posted a photo shaking hands with President Joe Biden. And Solomonov also posed with Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce, who ate at his restaurant Zahav - which 'brings the flavors of Israel's cultural crossroads to Philadelphia and beyond.' Over Thanksgiving, Solomonov was invited to Governor Josh Shapiro and First Lady Lori Shapiro's residence on behalf of the President's Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition. He cooked up three Thanksgiving dishes for the Governor's family to celebrate the holiday. Gov Shapiro wrote about the ordeal last night: 'Tonight in Philly, we saw a blatant act of antisemitism - not a peaceful protest. 'A restaurant was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli. This hate and bigotry is reminiscent of a dark time in history.' Sen. John Fetterman tore into an antisemitic mob who shouted threats into a Jewish-owned falafel store in Philadelphia over the weekend. 'They could be protesting Hamas. They could be protesting Hamas' systematic rape of Israeli women and girls or demanding the remaining hostages be immediately released,' the Pennsylvania Democrat wrote on X in response to a video of the incident. 'Instead, they targeted a Jewish restaurant. It's pathetic and rank antisemitism. The group marched at the Goldie's location in Center City chanting: 'Goldie, Goldie you can't hide, we charge you with genocide.' The Philadelphia chain is owned by Mike Solomonov, an Israeli-born, Pittsburgh-raised chef who has won the James Beard Award in the past. The typically progressive-minded Fetterman has been staunchly supportive of Israel throughout the war with Hamas that broke out after the group's October 7 attack on Israel. A photo of the senator wearing an Israeli flag wrapped around his shoulders at a pro-Israel march in Washington, D.C. went viral last month. The typically progressive-minded Fetterman has been staunchly supportive of Israel throughout the war with Hamas that broke out after the group's October 7 attack on Israel The chants in Philadelphia were denounced across the political spectrum, including in a post on X by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. 'Tonight in Philly, we saw a blatant act of antisemitism - not a peaceful protest,' said Shapiro, the state's third-ever Jewish governor. 'A restaurant was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli. This hate and bigotry is reminiscent of a dark time in history.' Shapiro added that he's reached out to Solomonov 'to share our support and Lori and I look forward to breaking bread there with them again soon.' Sunday's mob threats came at the same time as students at the nearby University of Pennsylvania - called for an 'intifada' - a violent uprising against Israel. A mob the Democrat governor of Pennsylvania called anti-Semitic protested a Jewish-owned Philadelphia falafel restaurant Sunday night, making claims that it was complicit in genocide Protestors in Philadelphia stand outside of a Jewish & Israeli owned falafel restaurant Goldie, Goldie you cant hide, we charge you with genocide pic.twitter.com/yF7hQwev66 Jordan Van Glish (@thatJVG) December 3, 2023 The protests were led by the Philly Palestine Coalition, who also tried to distract fans watching the Philadelphia Eagles game in local bars by chanting: 'While you're watching, bombs are dropping.' A driver threw a plastic bottle at protesters, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, though others cheered the demonstrations. Meanwhile, a video of a group of students at the nearby University of Pennsylvania were chanting in favor of 'Intifada revolution.' The original intifada is the name given to a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, beginning in 1987. The clip has been seen by over 829,000 people after it was posted by LibsOfTikTok on X. A group marched at the Goldie's location in Center City chanting: 'Goldie, Goldie you can't hide, we charge you with genocide.' The chants were denounced across the political spectrum, including in a post on X by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro At the same time, a group of students at the University of Pennsylvania - where anti-Semitic threats were recently projected onto school buildings - went viral for calling for an 'intifada' Happening now at @Penn. Hundreds of students marching chanting for Intifada revolution. Imagine being a Jewish student there pic.twitter.com/8d0uEl6sQf Chaya Raichik (@ChayaRaichik10) December 4, 2023 The Ivy League institution has been frequently under fire over anti-Semitism since the October 7 attacks on campus after anti-Jewish slogans were projected onto three of the school's buildings. The school is now facing a civil rights complaint as it is accused of being a 'magnet for anti-Semites.' 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,' read one message splashed across the John M Huntsman hall in mid-November. The slogan demands the land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, meaning the end of the State of Israel. Slogans projected on Penn Commons read: 'Zionism is racism' and demanded UPenn president Liz Magill call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Another message declared: 'Penn funds Palestinian genocide.' It comes after the prestigious school increased security and contacted the FBI after a string of reports of threats against Jewish students. The Brandeis Center said it will file a complaint against the school, stating it 'has allowed its campus to become a hostile environment for its Jewish students as well as a magnet for anti-Semites.' The complaints 'seek immediate and specific action to address increasing discrimination against and harassment of Jews in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.' The University of Pennsylvania is under fire again over anti-Semitism on campus after anti-Jewish slogans were projected onto three of the school's buildings. The above slogan demands the land from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, meaning the end of the State of Israel UPenn said that several of its staff members received 'vile, disturbing anti-Semitic emails' threatening violence against Jews on campus, particularly in Penn Hillel, an on-campus Jewish organization, and Lauder College House. University president Liz Magill wrote: 'These messages also included hateful language, targeting the personal identities of the recipients. Penns Division of Public Safety was immediately notified and responded. Penn Police also notified the FBI of this potential hate crime and a joint investigation is underway. Magill has also acknowledged 'swastikas and hateful graffiti' and 'chants at rallies, captured on video and widely circulated, that glorify the terrorist atrocities of Hamas, that celebrate and praise the slaughter and kidnapping of innocent people, and that question Israels very right to exist.' The school is working with the FBI to 'identify the individual or individuals who are responsible for these hateful, threatening emails and to ensure they are apprehended and punished to the fullest extent of the law,' per Magill. Earlier in November, a clip emerged purportedly showing a UPenn student praising Hamas' 'glorious October 7' incursion into southern Israel. The clip, shared by Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres, apparently shows a student addressing a crowd and urging them to remember the scenes in Israel a month ago today. She described the 'joyful and powerful images which came from the glorious October 7', adding she remembered 'feeling so empowered and so happy'. The speaker concluded her speech saying, 'Hold that feeling in your hearts... channel it through every action you take... go down to the streets every day and don't ever let them feel like you quietly accept this genocide.' A slogan projected on Penn Commons read: 'Zionism is racism' One of the messages demanded UPenn president Liz Magill call for a ceasefire in Gaza Late last week, Israel said it would continue its military operation in Gaza following a ceasefire that lasted several days while a number of the roughly 240 Israeli hostages were exchanged for three times the number of Palestinian terrorists. Hamas ultimately broke the ceasefire and decided not to pursue a pause in fighting in order to release more hostages at this time. Over the weekend, Israeli forces continued to bomb swathes of Gazan territory, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians. For weeks, Israel has warned civilians in Gaza to move south in the enclave as their battles against Hamas raged in the north, and it continued to be labelled as a safer option despite continuous Israeli bombing of Khan Younis and other areas. Now, the IDF has declared that they are fighting 'strongly and thoroughly' in the south, with warnings to displaced civilians to evacuate even further south away from the fighting. Chief of General Staff Herzi Halevi said on Sunday: 'Yesterday, and today, we eliminated brigade commanders, company commanders, many operatives, and yesterday morning we started the same process in the southern Gaza Strip,' he said. On Sunday night Israel also announced it had eliminated a key Hamas figure who had organized the October 7 attacks. In a statement it said an IDF jet has struck and killed Commander Haitham Khuwajari, head of Hamas' Shati Battalion. Israel has vowed to annihilate Hamas after the October 7 attack during which 1,200 Israelis were murdered in barbaric fashion. The Iranian-backed group is sworn to Israel's destruction Headteacher Ruth Perry started keeping a diary the day before Ofsted began their school inspection and stopped making entries just 48 hours before she killed herself, an inquest heard today. Thames Valley Police officers discovered Mrs Perry's diary with entries ranging from the day she found out about the inspection to January 6, two days before she died. The teacher, 53, who ran Caversham Primary School in Reading, Berkshire. was found dead by two policemen responding to a 999 call on January 8 this year. One of the officers who responded to the call made a statement to the inquest, saying he found the diary and there were no entries prior to the day before the Ofsted inspection. Reading Coroner's Court heard that attempts were made to resuscitate Mrs Perry at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading but she was unresponsive. Ruth Perry took her own life because she feared her family would be financially ruined if she lost her job after her Caversham Primary School was downgraded to 'inadequate' Teachers, friends and supporters of Ruth Perry attended the inquest centre The inquest heard from Mrs Perry's GP, who said that she took her own life because she feared her family would be financially ruined if she lost her job after her Caversham Primary School was downgraded from 'outstanding' to 'inadequate', following a disastrous Ofsted inspection in November last year. Berkshire Coroner Heidi Connor read from the statement of PC Thornton which stated: 'We found a diary that she [Ruth Perry] had written. There were no entries before 14 November and none after 6 January.' The inquest heard that Mrs Perry found out about the inspection on November 14, the day before it took place. Her sister, Professor Julia Waters, previously said Ms Perry had experienced the 'worst day of her life' after inspectors reviewed the school on November 15 and 16 last year. She was found at her house on January 8th - two days after her last diary entry. Reading Borough Council previously told the inquest it will be more 'proactive' in challenging Ofsted inspections and 'advocate for school leaders' from now on. The inquest heard from the local authority's education chief, who said he has spent 'a lot of time' considering the events surrounding Mrs Perry's death after the inspections last year. A photograph of Ruth Perry attached to the fence outside John Rankin Schools in Newbury, Berkshire People attend a vigil for Ruth Perry outside the offices of Ofsted in Victoria, central London Reading Coroner's Court was told previously that an Ofsted school inspection could not be paused even if it is causing extreme stress and anxiety to the teachers under review. The inquest into her death in January this year has previously been told by Ofsted staff that Mrs Perry's colleagues could have asked to 'pause' the two-day review as the headteachers mental health deteriorated rapidly. Asked by Berkshire Heidi Connor why Reading Borough Council had not challenged Ofsted's 'inadequate' grading of the popular primary, the Director of Education Brian Grady replied: 'This is something that I have thought about a lot over this past year. 'We are going to make a stronger, more proactive and robust role to challenge complaints about Ofsted inspections. 'We are going to support school leaders about their rights and we are going to advocate for school leaders. 'This is an area of significant difference and learning [from last year].' Mr Grady said he was unaware that a school had the option to ask for a 'pause' in an Ofsted inspection. But he added: '[Now] We will support any request to suspend an inspection.' The Coroner asked Ofsted National Director for Education Chris Russell whether 'pausing an inspection' was a 'real entity' or 'mystical creature that has been created' to answer criticism following Mrs Perry's death. She asked Mr Russell: 'How can someone know that pausing an inspection is a possibility?' He replied: 'I don't want to make policy on the hoof but we have listened and we will look at this.' Ms Perry's sister, Professor Julia Waters, previously said the headteacher had experienced the 'worst day of her life' after inspectors reviewed the school on November 15 and 16 last year Professor Julia Waters and partner Paul (both pictured) arrive at the inquest centre in Reading Mrs Connor challenged Mr Russell, saying: 'The possibility to pause an inspection does not exist.' He replied: 'No. I would say we need to look at the whole area of when the head teacher should continue with an inspection.' The coroner then asked him: 'I don't see any guidance on [dealing with members of a school's] senior leadership team becoming distressed? There is no reference [in the Ofsted inspectors' guidance] which talks about what to do if a teacher becomes stressed.' He replied: 'There is no guidance about that.' The Ofsted director told the court that Mrs Perry would have had to raise the 'conduct' of the lead inspector himself, if she was concerned about his behaviour. READ MORE: Headteachers struggling to sleep due to stress of Ofsted visits is 'usual', Ruth Perry inquest hears Advertisement Lead inspector Alan Derry has been widely criticised throughout the inquest for causing Mrs Perry extreme stress during the inspection with his 'tone', amid claims that he had had 'an agenda' ahead of the scheduled review of the popular primary school. Mrs Connor asked Mr Russell: 'If the headteacher has concerns about the conduct of the lead inspector, who would she raise those concerns with, the lead inspector?' The Ofsted director replied: 'Yes.' The coroner has previously asked Mrs Perry's GP and her colleagues whether there was a 'direct link' between the Ofsted inspection and her death. All those questioned replied: 'Yes'. Last week Mrs Perry's husband told the inquest his wife had had 'dark thoughts' about ending her own life following the Ofsted inspection. The headteacher felt she had 'let everyone down' when the watchdog downgraded the Reading primary school from 'outstanding' to 'inadequate', Jonathan Perry said in a statement. He added that she worried about the impact on the wider community, fearing it would cause her neighbours' house prices to plummet and that locals would be 'angry' with her as a result. The Perrys were due to exchange contracts on a new home on the first day of the inspection, the court has been told. And her GP, Mr Black, told the court she became worried that she would lose her job and the family become ruined financially following the Ofsted inspection, as she was 'main breadwinner'. Shocking footage shows burned volcano survivors pleading for help after getting caught in an eruption in Indonesia over the weekend. Still covered in ash and clearly distraught, 19-year-old Zhafirah Zahrim Febrina spoke desperately into her phone in a clip since shared by her family. 'Mum, help Ife,' she said, referring to herself by a family nickname. 'This is Ife's situation right now.' The young woman is now in a nearby hospital with her father and uncle after being trapped on the mountain on a hiking trip with 18 school friends. 'She is going through a tremendous trauma,' said her mother Rani Radelani, 39. 'She is affected psychologically because she saw her burns, and she also had to endure the pain all night.' In another video, a young girl is pictured with thick ash and dirt in her face, on her clothes and in her hair. Her face appears bloodied and her voice hoarse. She is also heard speaking into her phone, trapped in apocalyptic scenes. 19-year-old Zhafirah Zahrim Febrina spoke desperately into her phone in a clip since shared by her family 'Mum, help Ife,' she said, referring to herself by a family nickname. 'This is Ife's situation right now.' Locals shared fearful messages as ash clouds filled the sky in Indonesia over the weekend Smoke billows following a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, December 4 2023 The Marapi volcano erupted on Sunday, leaving nearly 75 hikers stranded. There are 26 people who have not been evacuated, 11 of which were found dead and 12 are still missing The victims are heard struggling for breath and in clear distress as they utter their messages to loved ones. At least 11 hikers were found dead following the eruption of the Marapi volcano in Indonesia on Sunday - and the search to find 12 others who are missing is on hold due to safety concerns. Nearly 75 climbers trekking up the nearly 2,900-metre mountain have also been stranded, according to AFP. The eruption shot hot ash as high as 9,843 feet into the air. Authorities have raised the alert to the second-highest level and prohibited residents from going within 1.8 miles from the crater's mouth because of the possibility of lava. As the search goes on for the missing 12 hikers, Febrina's family was relieved she was one of the lucky ones. Good news arrived in the form of a livestream on video app TikTok by a member of the rescue services, in which Radelani saw her visibly shaken daughter. 'It felt incredible, praise God she has been found,' Radelani said. 'If she asks me to allow her to climb a mountain, I'll say no.' Febrina is reportedly a Padang State Polytechnic student, known to be a resident of Padang City. A total of 49 climbers were evacuated from the area following the eruption, which took place at 2.54pm local time (0754 local time). Pictures also showed cars and roads covered with ash after the colossal explosion. Nearby villages and towns were blanketed by tons of volcanic debris. Volcanic dust and rain smeared the faces and hair of evacuated climbers, according to video on social media. Authorities have barred residents and visitors from carrying out any activities within 3 kilometres of the crater, and have set the second-highest alert level for Marapi mountain. 'We have distributed masks to residents and encourage them to stay inside their houses,' said Ade Setiawan, an official at BPBD's local disaster management unit. But not all were so fortunate to escape. Eight of those rescued from the scene of the eruption were rushed to hospitals with burn wounds and one also had a broken limb. 'There are 26 people who have not been evacuated, we have found 14 of them, three were found alive and 11 were found dead,' said Abdul Malik, head of Padang Search and Rescue Agency. Local rescue agency spokesperson Jodi Haryawan said the rescue efforts had been broken up by sporadic eruptions but the search was still going despite the risks. 'Once it was safer they continued the search. So the search was not halted,' he told AFP. Another woman was shown speaking into her phone as ash covered the ground Febrina is reportedly a Padang State Polytechnic student, known to be a resident of Padang City A climber sent a video describing her condition after the eruption of Mount Merapi, West Sumatra, on Sunday Mount Marapi spews volcanic materials during an eruption seen from Batu Palano village in Agam, West Sumatra, Indonesia, 4 December 2023. A motorist rides past by as Mount Marapi spews volcanic materials during its eruption in Agam, West Sumatra, Indonesia, Monday, December 4, 2023 A woman sits outside a house as Mount Marapi spews volcanic materials during its eruption in Agam, West Sumatra, Indonesia, Monday, December 4, 2023 Rescuers carry away a victim after the eruption of Mount Marapi in Agam, West Sumatra, on December 4, 2023 Rescue teams evacuate a victim of the eruption of Mount Marapi. Three people found by rescuers were alive Rescuers talk to a man affected by Monday's volcano eruption in Marapi, Indonesia 'Some suffered from burns because it was very hot, and they have been taken to the hospital,' Rudy Rinaldi, head of the West Sumatra Disaster Mitigation Agency said to AFP. 'Those who are injured were the ones who got closer to the crater.' A clip shared with AFP by rescue teams at the scene showed an ambulance blaring its sirens, rushing an evacuated climber from the scene with burns. In another clip, a rescue worker with a flashlight strapped to his head piggybacks a hiker who moans in pain and says 'God is great' as she is led to safety in the darkness of night. The eruption was ongoing, which was preventing air evacuations by helicopter, Malik said. 'Visually, until this morning, smokes are still billowing from the top. Visually, everything still looks grey,' Rinaldi commented. Falling ash blanketed several villages and blocked sunlight, National Disaster Management Agency spokesperson Abdul Muhari said. Authorities distributed masks and urged residents to wear eyeglasses to protect them from volcanic ash, he said. About 1,400 people live on Marapi's slopes in Rubai and Gobah Cumantiang, the nearest villages about 3.1 to 3.7 miles from the peak. Marapi's alert level was maintained at the third-highest of four levels, Abdul Muhari said. He confirmed that authorities had been closely monitoring the volcano after sensors picked up increasing activity in recent weeks. Marapi has been active since a January eruption that caused no casualties. Hendra Gunawan, the head of the Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation, said Marapi has been observed regularly erupting since 2004 with a gap of 2 to 4 years. 'Marapi eruptions are always sudden and difficult to detect using equipment because the source is near the surface,' Gunawan said, 'This eruption was not caused by the movement of magma.' The volcano is among more than 120 active sites in Indonesia, which is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the Pacific 'Ring of Fire,' an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin. The Southeast Asian country has nearly 130 active volcanoes. Huge eruptions in 1979 killed 60, while another 19 were killed by landslides. The Ring of Fire is a horseshoe-shaped geological disaster zone and hotbed of tectonic and volcanic activity. Roughly 90 per cent of the world's earthquakes occur in the belt, which is also home to more than 450 volcanoes. The seismic region stretches along the Pacific Ocean coastlines, where the Pacific Plate grinds against other plates that form the Earth's crust. It loops from New Zealand to Chile, passing through the coasts of Asia and the Americas on the way. The eruption sent ash plumes nearly 10,000 feet into the air and hot ash clouds spread several miles Marapi has been active since a January eruption that caused no casualties. It is located on the Pacific 'Ring of Fire' Authorities distributed masks and urged residents to wear eyeglasses to protect them from volcanic ash In total, the loop makes up a 25,000-mile-long (40,000km) zone prone to frequent earthquakes and eruptions. The region is susceptible to disasters because it is home to a vast number of 'subduction zones', areas where tectonic plates overlap. Earthquakes are triggered when these plates scrape or slide underneath one another. When that happens at sea it can spawn tsunamis. Only on Saturday, the Philippines was rocked by a 7.6 magnitude earthquake which caused explosions and saw buildings shake under pressure. Philippines is also located in the 'Ring of Fire'. Sir Don McCullin has said he struggles to sleep at night because of the 'poison' of what he witnessed documenting some of the world's most brutal conflicts. The photographer, 88, became a household name in the 1960s with his coverage of the Vietnam War. He also documented conflicts in Cyprus, Biafra, Iraq, Cambodia and Lebanon. Speaking to promote his new book, Life, Death and Everything in Between, Sir Don told Prospect Magazine's Media Confidential podcast that the horror of what he has witnessed 'comes back with extreme clarity and prevents me from sleeping'. He described it as a 'poison' that is 'in my blood and it still won't go away' The photojournalist said he found solace in the landscape around where he now lives, in Somerset, which he said 'was a medicine that cured me'. But he also admitted that 'what I did in the wars wasn't always right'. Sir Don McCullin has said he struggles to sleep at night because of the 'poison' of what he witnessed documenting some of the world's most brutal conflicts The photographer, 88, became a household name in the 1960s with his coverage of the Vietnam War. Above: A previously unpublished image of US Marines removing an injured comrade during the Battle of Hue in the Vietnam War in 1968 Sir Don's new book includes a harrowing image of US Marines removing a wounded comrade to safety during the Battle of Hue in the Vietnam War in 1968. He was shot and badly wounded in Cambodia and imprisoned in Uganda, as well as being expelled from Vietnam. Sir Don's other work includes searing images of poverty in Britain and the AIDS crisis in Africa. Sir Don was speaking to Media Confidential presenters Lionel Barber - the former editor of the Financial Times - and Alan Rusbridger, who edited The Guardian for a decade until 2015. The photographer also insisted that the images he has taken do not belong to him. 'There is a danger that one becomes greedy and selfish and you think these images belong to you,' he said. 'They do not. You are stealing these images from people suffering in front of you. The photojournalist said he found solace in the landscape around where he now lives, in Somerset, which he said 'was a medicine that cured me'. Above: An image from 2021 of a flooded field near Sir Don's home in Somerset 'So, you know, I feel as if I am walking on burning coals that are burning my feet, telling me that what I'm doing isn't always right. 'I have a conscience and I know what I did in the wars was not always right.' He also claimed that there is a 'beauty' in conflicts that most people cannot understand. The photographer highlighted how, when in Vietnam in 1968, he saw a black soldier grieving the loss of a heroic medic who had just been shot dead by a sniper. 'There was nothing more extraordinary to see tears streaming down his face,' he said. 'I thought people would never believe me and they think I was self-indulgent to say, you would see moments of great beauty in war, you will see them. Young workers are seen making an early morning delivery of new furniture in Kolkata, India, 1997. Sir Don's new book includes 140 of his pictures This previously published image of boys sitting on a statue of famous Muslim historian Ibn al-Mustawfi in Arbil, Kurdistan, also features in the new book. It dates back to 1991 'And I had the best eyes in the world and I knew I saw them. And it does happen in war, occasionally you will see gifts from another human being.' 'War is 99 per cent bad and evil and woefully wrong, but occasionally you will get that moment of light that comes and shows you something, allows you to walk away and think "there's no hope but there might be".' His new book is being published to coincide with the exhibition Don McCullin in Rome - a Retrospective. Simon Baker, the curator of the exhibition, said: 'Known for the bold, frank and always emotionally engaging gaze with which he approached the most disparate subjects, McCullin produced some of the most recognisable images of poverty, hunger and war in the history of photography, as well as documenting the landscape - both in Britain and abroad - with the style and passion that distinguishes all his work.' Life, Death and Everything in Between by Don McCullin is published by GOST Books. Don McCullin in Rome a Retrospective is on display until January 28 at Palazzo delle Esposizioni. An 'inclusive' Virginia festival has sparked fury by canceling a Hanukkah celebration to avoid 'siding with one group over the other' in the Israel-Hamas war. Local Jewish groups said they were 'shocked and alarmed' at LoveLight Placemaking's 'anti-Semitic' decision to pull a Menorah lighting ceremony from the Second Sundays Art and Music Festival in downtown Williamsburg on December 10. Shirley Vermillion, the festival's founder, suggested the event would not make good optics amid the Middle East conflict. LoveLight later backtracked - claiming the religious ceremony had never been 'officially scheduled'. 'The concern is of folks feeling like we are siding with a group over the other... not a direction we ever decide to head,' Vermillion told the National Review. She also told the Daily Press it seemed 'inappropriate'. Vermillion, a local dental hygienist and BLM activist, cited the festival's emphasis on inclusion and scheduling conflicts, along with a reluctance to engage in religious activities. 'Inclusive' Virginia festival organizer Shirley Vermillion (pictured) told the National Review the event pulled a Menorah lighting ceremony over fears of 'siding with one group or the other' in the Israel-Hamas war LoveLight Placemaking has sparked fury by apparently canceling the Hanukah celebration . (Pictured: a scene from the arts and music festival in previous years) Locals fumed on Facebook, leaving angry reactions on posts about the festival, and describing their Menorah move as 'exclusionary', 'awkward' and 'shameful' The United Jewish Community of the Virginia Peninsula condemned the conflation of Jewish holy festivals with Israel as anti-Semitic - and said the festival had even suggested reinstating the event if it came with a banner calling for a ceasefire. 'The Jewish Community of the Virginia Peninsula is shocked and alarmed at LoveLight Placemakings decision to cancel a Menorah lighting claiming it did not want to appear to choose sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict,' the group said. 'To be clear, the Menorah lighting, which was to be led by a local community rabbi, had nothing to do with Israel or the conflict.' 'We should be very clear: it is anti-Semitic to hold Jews collectively responsible for Israels policies and actions, and to require a political litmus test for Jews participation in community events that have nothing to do with Israel,' the UJCVP added. 'Those standards would never be applied to another community.' Lamenting increasing cases of Jewish people 'being targeted, sometimes violently' by those opposed to Israel and its actions, they described the festival's action as 'dangerous and harmful, serving to further exclude and alienate our community'. The UJCVP said the festival has been a 'meaningful and important community event that brings people together under a powerful message of unity, love and light' - and that excluding Jewish participation 'undermines its very message'. They called on LoveLight Placemaking to 'educate themselves on the harmfulness of their decision' and reinstate the Menorah ceremony. Meanwhile, locals fumed on Facebook, leaving angry reactions on posts about the festival, and describing their Menorah move as 'exclusionary', 'awkward' and 'shameful'. As the furor snowballed, the nationwide Jewish Council for Public Affairs spoke out in support of Virginia's Jewish community Local Jewish groups said they were 'shocked and alarmed' at LoveLight Placemaking's 'anti-Semitic' decision to pull a Menorah lighting ceremony from the Second Sundays Art and Music Festival in downtown Williamsburg on December 10. (Pictured: the festival in previous years) As the furor snowballed, the nationwide Jewish Council for Public Affairs spoke out in support of Virginia's Jewish community. 'We stand with our colleagues on the Virginia Peninsula,' the organization wrote on X. 'This is a sadly perfect example of what antisemitism looks like right now.' The festival backtracked on social media, saying the public had been fed 'limited and extremely false information' about its decision. It claimed the menorah lighting event was 'never officially scheduled, given a time or permitted by the city' but was 'simply being discussed'. 'The Menorah lighting was never canceled because it was never scheduled in the first place,' they said. 'It was proposed but was not consistent with the purpose of this non-religious, community art and music festival, and the proposal was denied. 'In 14 years this street festival has never had a religious program as one of its events.' The decision was about logistics, according to the festival. It said that Rabbi Mendy Heber had proposed the Menorah lighting 'in an area that has to be kept open at all times for entering and exiting traffic'. 'Logistically, physically, religiously & cultural the events were not going to fit and its very unfortunate that the most diverse & inclusive event in Williamsburg is being false accused & labeled anti-Semitic,' the organizers said. Israel expanded its ground operations in Gaza this week. (Pictured: Palestinians gather at the site of an Israeli strike in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Monday) Israeli military tanks roll near the border with the Gaza Strip on December 3 The festival said its focus is music and art rather than religion, adding that it supports 'Jewish small business owners and musicians who sell and sing at our events every month'. 'We respect and love our Jewish community members and wish them a very happy Hanukkah,' the organizers said. 'But we stand by our mission to create a safe place for all to gather and enjoy art and music and chose not to showcase religious ceremonies of any faith as part of our programming. 'We are not comfortable or interested in taking religious or cultural sides.' DailyMail.com has contacted the Virginia festival for comment. They did not respond in time for publication. Sir Keir Starmer today defended his praise of Margaret Thatcher after the Labour leader faced a left-wing backlash for hailing the former prime minister. In an article for a Sunday newspaper, Sir Keir applauded Thatcher's drive to 'drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism'. But his bid to woo disgruntled Tory voters by praising the ex-PM caused fury within Labour and among trade union leaders, with his comments branded 'embarrassing'. Sir Keir, dubbed 'Sir Flip Flop' by critics, was also accused of 'saying anything to get elected' as it was noted how his remarks jarred with his past criticism of Thatcher. The Labour leader has previously accused the former premier of 'almost destroying British manufacturing' and 'devastating' communities by closing coal mines. He has also claimed Britain is 'still counting the cost' from Thatcher's financial 'big bang' in the 1980s. Sir Keir Starmer defended his praise of Margaret Thatcher after the Labour leader faced a left-wing backlash for hailing the former prime minister In an article for a Sunday newspaper, Sir Keir applauded Thatcher's drive to 'drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism' Speaking today, as he was quizzed about his most recent remarks, Sir Keir told a Resolution Foundation event: 'What I was doing at the weekend in the article I wrote for The Sunday Telegraph was distinguishing between particularly post-war leaders those leaders, those prime ministers who had a driving sense of purpose, ambition, a plan to deliver and those that drifted. On Thatcher, he added: 'Now it doesn't mean I agree with what she did but you don't have to agree with someone to recognise they had a mission and a plan. 'So I was giving Margaret Thatcher as an example of the sort of leader who had that mission and plan. That's obviously different to saying I agree with everything that she did.' In a swipe at Sir Keir's desperation to become PM at the next general election, Tory chairman Richard Holden has claimed the Labour leader will 'say anything to get elected'. 'This is yet another classic example of him saying what he thinks people want to hear, despite having a track record of doing the opposite,' he added. Tory backbencher Brendan Clarke-Smith said: 'The public realise Starmer will say whatever he thinks people want to hear. 'They will be flabbergasted at his praise for Margaret Thatcher - especially when he has previously portrayed himself as a champion of mineworkers. 'It's just the latest flip-flop and goes to show that both he and Labour can't be treated seriously.' Here are five times Sir Keir previously criticised Thatcher - before his latest 'flip-flop': Thatcher 'almost destroyed British manufacturing' In December 2017, the then shadow Brexit secretary took aim at Tory former Cabinet minister Norman Tebbit. It came after Lord Tebbit, an arch-Brexiteer, blasted Michael Heseltine over his 'unprecedented' comments suggesting a Jeremy Corbyn government might be preferable to leaving the EU. Amid calls for Lord Heseltine to be stripped of the Tory whip, Lord Tebbit wondered whether his loyalty laid with 'the UK or a foreign power'. In response to the comments, Sir Keir wrote on Twitter: 'Advice from Tebbit, who with Thatcher almost destroyed Britains's manufacturing base. I don't think so.' Thatcher's 'devastating' closure of coal mines In August 2021, Sir Keir hit out at then PM Boris Johnson after he joked Britain had been given a 'big early start' on achieving Net Zero 'thanks to Margaret Thatcher who closed so many coal mines'. Sir Keir posted on Twitter: 'Boris Johnson's shameful praising of Margaret Thatcher 's closure of the coal mines, brushing off the devastating impact on those communities with a laugh, shows just how out of touch he is with working people.' In a social media video, the Labour leader also added: 'I stood by the miners under the Tories and I stand by their communities now. 'These communities contributed so much to the success of our country and then they were abandoned. The Tories didn't care then. And they don't care now. 'To treat the pain and suffering caused to our coalmine communities as a punchline shows just how out of touch Boris Johnson is. The prime minister must apologise immediately.' Thatcher 'wrong' to say there's 'no such thing as society' In June last year, Sir Keir used a newspaper interview to slam Thatcher's famous claim that 'there is no such thing as society'. The Labour leader told the Telegraph: 'If ever there was evidence that Margaret Thatcher was wrong about there being no such thing as society, we just saw it in the pandemic.' It has been argued that Thatcher - in what became one of her most contentious phrases - was expressing a view that individuals should first try to solve their own problems, rather than relying on government. Thatcher 'didn't see the point in our country making things' In July this year, Sir Keir used a speech in Kent to take a fresh swipe at the attitude of Tory governments to Britain's manufacturers in the 1980s. He said: 'Take my dad. He was a tool-maker and a good one highly skilled, proud of his work. 'But back in the 1980s, the Tories made it quite clear people like him were not valued and that actually, they didnt see the point of our country making things, that his skills were not part of their future. This hurt him.' Britain's 'still counting the cost' from Thatcher's 'big bang' In October this year, Sir Keir blasted Thatcher's deregulation of financial markets during his keynote speech to Labour's annual conference in Liverpool. He said: 'Back in the 1980s the Tories gave us a financial 'big bang' and we're still counting the cost. Wealth and opportunity - concentrated in the hands of the few. A son who beat his retired father to death after escaping his psychiatric hospital read a poem at an inquest into his death. Lung expert Dr Kim Harrison, 68, died after he was punched, kicked, stamped on and beaten with a broom handle by son Daniel Harrison, 38, after he fled from doctors who had sectioned him under the mental health act. Daniel was chased by health workers after bolting from his bed and sprinting through the Neath Port Talbot Hospital in Wales where he was being detained. He then dashed across a car park and travelled 12 miles in a taxi to his parents' detached country home at Coniston Hall in Clydach, Swansea, to launch the vicious attack on his father in March 2022. Daniel was allowed to attend his father's inquest remotely via Teams from his secure hospital where read a poem and a tribute to his father, which he ended 'from your ever-loving son, Dan.' Daniel Harrison, 38, beat his retired father Dr Kim Harrison, 68, to death after escaping his psychiatric hospital Dr Harrison died after he was punched, kicked, stamped on and beaten with a broom handle by his son after he fled from doctors at the the Neath Port Talbot Hospital (pictured) in Wales Daniel read two tributes he had written to his father at the inquest, including a poem he said he had penned on Father's Day. He read: 'Dear dad, I wish you were here with me on this your special day for me to hold your hand and give you a hug, for you to understand how deep my love for you is. 'Through the tragic loss we have all endured you have made the biggest sacrifice one can make. 'To heal the bones as they had once unknowingly broken and did not know how to mend. 'I wish you were here by my side for you to help guide me through life with arms open wide. 'I am so sorry for all of our loss and I hope in my heart you can feel these words and look back upon me with that same gentle smile for which you will always be remembered.' He finished the poem as 'from your ever-loving son, Dan.' A court previously heard Daniel escaped from Neath Port Talbot hospital to the family home - then fled to catch a train to London. But he was arrested in the Rathbone Hotel near Paddington station the following day. Dr Harrison and wife Jane had been warned of Daniel's escape and told he may be heading in their direction after the couple previously raised increasing concerns about their son's mental heath. But despite the warning Dr Harrison was attacked at Coniston Hall home in Clydach, Swansea on March 12. In interview Daniel said he punched his father knocking off his glasses and sending him to the floor before delivering more punches and kicks to him. He then fled on foot and caught a train from Swansea to London and was arrested two days later. Daniel told police that he felt manipulated by his parents and that his father had caused him trauma. He died 20 days later on April 9 and Daniel was sentenced for manslaughter via diminished responsibility. Doctors said Daniel was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and suffered an 'abnormality of mind'. Dr Harrison, a father of four and a renowned chest consultant, helped to set up the Respiratory Unit at Swanseas Morriston Hospital during a nearly 40-year long career in the NHS Daniel admitted manslaughter by diminished responsibility and was remanded indefinitely to a secure hospital under section 37 of the mental health act. The inquest, before a jury at Swansea Guildhall, is due to last two-and-a-half weeks. Daniel's mother, Dr Jane Harrison told the inquest: 'How do you encapsulate a life? How do you convey the essence of 68 years of a life well-lived? A professional career going back 50 years, a loving marriage of 41 years, 38 years of wonderful parenting? 'How do you express the depth and breadth of loss? The impact on me his wife; his sons; his sister Zoe; our wider family, friends and colleagues. The answer is you can't.' She paid tribute to her son saying the family was 'acutely aware of how difficult' the inquest would be for Daniel, adding: 'It is testament to his recovery, his strength and his deep love for Kim that he is here with us.' 'He has come so far over the past 20 months although this is a long journey with the heaviest of burdens to bare.' She added: 'Dad would be so proud of you Dan, we love you very much.' Dr Harrison, a father of four and a renowned chest consultant, helped to set up the Respiratory Unit at Swanseas Morriston Hospital during a nearly 40-year long career in the NHS. DPRK warns against attack against its space assets Xinhua) 10:46, December 04, 2023 SEOUL, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- The Ministry of National Defense of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) warned in a statement Saturday that "any attack against the country's space assets will be deemed as declaration of war," the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. The warning came after an official from the U.S. Space Command recently said that the United States can decrease the enemy country's outer space operation capabilities by employing diverse "reversible and irreversible methods," hinting at the U.S. intention to militarily attack the DPRK's reconnaissance satellite "Malligyong-1," according to the statement. Noting the reconnaissance satellite is "a part of the territory of the DPRK where its sovereignty is exercised," the statement said the U.S. stance is "a challenge to the sovereignty of the DPRK, and more exactly, a declaration of war against it." "It is the mission of the DPRK armed forces to exercise their war deterrent to protect the state sovereignty and territorial integrity in case a lethal military attack is carried out against the country's strategic assets or it is judged such attack is imminent," the statement stressed. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) Chinese President Xi Jinping and Alexander Lukashenko hailed strengthening ties on Monday, as they held talks during the Belarusian leader's second trip to Beijing this year. Lukashenko, a staunch ally of Russia, arrived in China on Sunday for a visit expected to last at least two days. Lukashenko last came to China in February, a trip that drew scrutiny given Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. "Belarus is, was and will be a reliable partner for China," Lukashenko told Xi on Monday, according to a readout of the talks from the office of the Belarusian presidency. "We decided long ago that we would cooperate... and be friends with China," he said. "This friendship is more than 30 years old and has never turned away from this path." Xi, in turn, said "political mutual trust" and "international collaboration" between the two countries had grown stronger since Lukashenko's last visit, according to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV. China "firmly supports Belarus in taking the path of development in line with its national conditions, and opposes interference by external forces in the internal affairs of Belarus," Xi said. "The Chinese side is willing to continue to strengthen strategic cooperation with the Belarusian side, firmly support each other, (and) promote pragmatic cooperation," Xi added. Beijing has not publicly condemned Russia's offensive despite pressure from the United States and other Western nations. Belarus relies heavily on Russia for political and financial support, and was used as a launchpad for Moscow's assault against Ukraine in February 2022. (AFP) Sir Keir Starmer responded to left-wing fury over his praise for Margaret Thatcher today - by saying that 'wealth creation' was now Labour's 'number one priority'. The Opposition leader used a speech in London to set out the party's economic pitch for the next election - with a warning that anyone expecting him to open the spending taps was going to be 'disappointed'. The intervention came as a furious spat with the Labour left raged over the leader heaping praise on the Iron Lady. Sir Keir used an article yesterday to hail the Conservative doyenne's 'driving sense of purpose' and for dragging Britain 'out of its stupor' by unleashing 'entrepreneurialism'. And today at the Resolution Foundation Conference he spoke about Labour plans for 'securonomics' - stable economic growth with a foundation on boosting productivity. Describing the latter as an 'obsession', he said: 'That's a big change for us. Having wealth creation as your number one priority, that's not always been the Labour Party's comfort zone trust me! 'But that's the change I knew was necessary, that's the change I've delivered, and my party is united behind it.' However, asked if he would cut government departmental spending, he added: 'Im certainly not in the business of cutting the funding, which is why the focus is so much on growth.' The Opposition leader used a speech in London to set out the party's economic pitch for the next election - with a warning that anyone expecting him to open the spending taps was going to be 'disappointed'. The intervention comes as a furious spat with the Labour left rages over the party leader heaping praise on Margaret Thatcher Following the cost-of-living crisis and with the economy bumping along the bottom, Sir Keir argued in his address at a Resolution Foundation conference that 'Britain is going backwards' under Rishi Sunak. He accused the Tories of being ready to 'salt the earth of British prosperity, in pursuit of its political strategy' 'It is already clear that the decisions the Government are taking, not to mention their record over the past 13 years, will constrain what a future Labour government can do,' Sir Keir told the gathering. 'Seriously - never before has a British government asked its people to pay so much, for so little.' Labour's approach will be what he and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves have dubbed 'securonomics'. It will see a focus on supporting the UK's 'huge assets' its financial sector, highly educated population and world class universities by carrying out supply-side reforms. He pledged to tackle restrictive planning laws, create a competitive tax regime, place more emphasis on skills, and draw up an industrial strategy alongside business. Sir Keir S said that a partnership with business 'must have a purpose', as he stressed the need to improve the lot of workers. 'This is a Labour Party more committed to working with private enterprise than ever before, but a partnership must have a purpose. 'And the returns of private enterprise must be better shared: your country needs higher investment, your workers need a fairer return and both will be good for your productivity. 'We will broker a new deal - with increased mental health support - a fully-funded plan to cut NHS waiting lists. 'An end to zero hour contracts. No more fire and rehire. 'A bold new Act to stamp out racial injustice and a real living wage.' Sir Keir faced a major backlash from opponents on both Left and Right, who said his Thatcher comments were a nakedly cynical ploy to win the votes of Tory supporters. Sent out to tour broadcast studios this morning, Labour frontbencher Pat McFadden pointed out that Gordon Brown had a similar response when he invited Baroness Thatcher to Downing Street for tea. However, Mr McFadden also refused to say he 'admired' Lady Thatcher, merely saying she was 'electorally successful'. Even some of Sir Keir's own MPs from the Left of the party were withering about his remarks. Labour's Beth Winter, MP for Cynon Valley in Wales, said: 'Margaret Thatcher devastated working-class communities like mine. Policies like the grossly iniquitous poll tax and the great privatisation rip-off offs were the hallmarks of Thatcherism.' Her colleague Ian Byrne said: 'Inequality, hunger, destitution and misery. That's the real legacy left by Thatcher.' And Kim Johnson, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, said: 'Margaret Thatcher destroyed industries, attacked trade unionists and privatised our core industries. [She is] not someone any Labour supporter should look up to.' Sir Keir's comments were gleefully seized upon by nationalist politicians in Scotland where Mrs Thatcher remains a hate figure for many who are desperate to see off the threat of a resurgent Labour Party. Scotland's First Minister Humza Yousaf said: 'What Thatcher did to mining and industrial communities was not 'entrepreneurialism' it was vandalism.' Other critics highlighted Sir Keir's previous vocal opposition to the Iron Lady's flagship policies of privatisation and taming the trade unions. Sir Keir will argue in his address at a Resolution Foundation conference that 'Britain is going backwards' under Rishi Sunak As a young Left-wing lawyer, Sir Keir was even praised by union leader Arthur Scargill for defending striking miners for free. Tory chairman Richard Holden said: 'Keir Starmer will say anything to get elected. This is yet another classic example of him saying what he thinks people want to hear, despite having a track record of doing the opposite.' Health Secretary Victoria Atkins told Sky News: 'I suspect the great lady herself would view a man that is trying to ride on the coat tails of her success with the following words: 'No, no, no.' ' Tory Backbencher Brendan Clarke-Smith added: 'The public realise Starmer will say whatever he thinks people want to hear. 'They will be flabbergasted at his praise for Margaret Thatcher especially when he has previously portrayed himself as a champion of mineworkers. 'It's just the latest flip-flop and goes to show that both he and Labour can't be treated seriously.' In an opinion piece for the Sunday Telegraph, Sir Keir extended the 'hand of friendship' to traditional Tory supporters by promising a Labour government would be tough on immigration. He described several seismic moments in modern British politics, from post-war PM Clement Attlee deciding Labour must be a party of duty to Tony Blair seizing the optimism of the 1990s. 'Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism,' Sir Keir wrote. In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House, he explained: 'The point I'm making is that you can distinguish political leaders into those that had a plan and those that drifted.' Of Mrs Thatcher he said she had 'a plan for entrepreneurialism'. He insisted: 'It doesn't mean I agree with what she did, but I don't think anybody could suggest she didn't have a sense of purpose.' Asked if he was seeking Tory votes, Sir Keir said 'yes', adding: 'I do want to persuade those that voted Tory in the past to vote Labour this time round.' A millionaire Canadian entrepreneur and his partner have been found dead inside a burned car in the Caribbean island of Dominica. Daniel Langlois, 66, and Dominique Marchand, both from Quebec, vanished on Friday and the burned vehicle matches a description of their car, local reports say. The Daniel Langlois Foundation confirmed on Monday that Langlous and Marchand died 'in tragic circumstances.' Global Affairs Canada acknowledged the deaths of two Canadian citizens on the island but has not named them. 'Canadian officials continue to monitor the situation closely, are engaging with local authorities and providing consular assistance. Due to privacy considerations, no further information can be disclosed,' the office said. Daniel Langlois, 66, and his partner were found dead after they went missing on Friday Langlois ran an eco-resort on the Caribbean island with his partner Dominique Marchand Dominica police said the intense fire in the car made identifying the bodies impossible Dominica police said the intense fire in the car made identifying the bodies impossible, and they are relying on 'circumstantial evidence to connect them to the missing couple.' Dominica News Online reported that four suspects were taken into custody in connection with the deaths. Dominica Minister of Justice, Immigration and National Security Rayburn Blackmoore told CTV News that four people have been taken into custody in connection to the deaths - three non-nationals and one national. Langlois is known as the founder of Softimage, which created 3D animations software for movies like Jurassic Park, Men in Black and Star Wars. The entrepreneur sold the company to Microsoft in 1994 for $200 million and went on to found the Daniel Langlois Foundation for the Art, Sciences and Technology. In October 2022 the couple opened a luxury, off-the-grid resort, Coulibri Ridge, on 200 acres of land on the island, which is located between Guadeloupe and Martinique. They reportedly worked on the project for 20 years. Langlois was beloved in Canada and Dominica, with many honoring him on social media following reports of his death. Canada's minister of Canadian Heritage, Pascale St-Onge wrote: 'Daniel Langlois, a visionary in digital technologies and cinema, has left us. His legacy reflects his innovative spirit. My thoughts are with his loved ones.' Daoust Dupes, a resident of the island, said on Facebook: 'Today my heart is heavy. I'm angry. I'm in tears. This couple were one of the sweetest who ever graced our shores. They did so much for this island. Investors par excellence. Just ask their employees, heritage enthusiasts, marine, land and wildlife conservationists, animal lovers, the community of Soufriere. In October 2022 the couple opened a luxury, off-the-grid resort, Coulibri Ridge, on 200 acres of land on the island The Quebec natives were dedicated to their sustainable project in Dominica The couple reportedly worked on the project, seen above, for 20 years 'A real tragedy that will result in more income loss for the people of Dominica. Thanks Daniel Langlois and Dominique Marchand you made this world a better place.' Travel writer Jim Byers wrote on X: 'Shocked and devastated to hear the news of the deaths of Canadian businessman/visionary Daniel Langlois and his wife, Dominique Marchand. They built the incredible Coulibri Ridge resort on Dominica and had me for a tour and lunch in January. So sad.' And fan Paul Chato added: 'Daniel Langlois has been found dead in the Dominican Republic. For those who are 3D animators, Langlois pioneered SoftImage 3D, the most advanced character animation software of its time. Reboot was produced with it as was the dinosaur in Jurassic Park. Sad.' On November 3, the government of Dominica gave Langlois a 'Meritorious Service Award for his contributions to sustainable development and research projects,' as reported by Dominica News Online. Langlois was a dual Canadian-Dominican citizen. A hero mother who saved her five-year-old daughter from a terrifying attack at a Mexican beach may have been killed by a crocodile rather than a shark, authorities have claimed. Graphic video appears to show the aftermath of the attack as the victim, whose leg was torn off, lay on the sand after being helped out of the water off Melaque Beach in the state of Jalisco. Horrified onlookers could be heard shouting 'she's lost her leg' as they waited for emergency teams to arrive on Saturday morning. Despite the quick response by rescuers, the woman - identified locally as a 26-year-old tourist called Maria Fernandez Martinez Jimenez - died of blood loss from a massive bite wound. Local reports said Maria had helped her daughter to safety by placing her on a floating platform after becoming aware she was in danger while the pair were swimming 65ft off the beach on Mexico's Pacific coast. Initially, the fatal incident was put down as a shark attack, but local residents maintained there had never been reports of sharks approaching humans in the area, leading authorities to suspect a crocodile was responsible for her death, local media said. The dead woman has been identified locally as a 26-year-old tourist called Maria Fernandez Martinez Jimenez, a former marine biology student from the University of Guadalajara A graphic video appearing to show the aftermath of the horror incident was published overnight as the victim lay on the sand after being helped out of the water The attack on Saturday morning is thought to have occurred as a swimming race was taking place which was subsequently suspended. Local authorities issued a warning to locals and visitors yesterday to stay out of the water following the tragedy. Well-wishers later left flowers at a makeshift altar erected on the beach at the spot where the woman died. Civil Protection workers and firefighters in the municipality of Cihuatlan, which Melaque Beach is part of, said in a message after the incident: 'Our officials were carrying out support activities during a swimming event in the bay when they received reports of a person who was having problems getting out of the sea. 'When they reached the area they discovered a woman who was lifeless with one of her legs amputated, apparently following a shark attack.' Cihuatlan's municipal government said in a subsequent message, after publishing a pixellated still picture of the footage appearing to show the aftermath of the attack: 'Following the terrible incident off one of our beaches, our priority is guaranteeing the safety and wellbeing of all our citizens. 'That's why we've decided on a precautionary measure of banning access to beaches until further notice. 'We are working in collaboration with the appropriate authorities to evaluate the situation and take the necessary measures to guarantee security on our beaches.' Authorities closed the beaches in Melaque and Barra de Navidad to swimming as a precaution. The woman was found 'lifeless with one of her legs amputated' on the beach in Jalisco state The dead woman has been described as a former marine biology student at the University of Guadalajara. University chiefs said in a Facebook tribute, saying it shared the pain of the victim's friends and family: 'We express our condolences following this irreparable loss.' A former University of Guadalajara student added alongside a photo of Maria: 'I want to express my condolences, affection and support for Maria's family following her death. 'I am accompanying this wonderful family I feel as my own in their pain and anguish. I am with you. Rest in peace Maria.' Shark attacks are relatively rare in Mexico. os spent the weekend going scorched earth on his former New York GOP colleagues on X and on Monday morning posted: 'The truth will set me free' Santos' profile on the site, which allows the public to pay celebrities for custom videos, includes a bio calling him a 'former congressional "Icon"' Deposed Rep. George Santos appears to have a new side gig, launching a Cameo account to sell personalized videos. Santos' profile on the site, which allows the public to pay celebrities for custom videos, includes a bio calling him a 'former congressional 'Icon,'' and describes him as 'the Expelled member of Congress from New York City.' A link to the page is now in Santos' X bio. The videos began with a listing price of $75, raising throughout Monday to $200 before selling out. Santos spent the weekend going scorched earth on his former New York GOP colleagues on X and on Monday morning posted: 'The truth will set me free.' The congressman claimed 'a very Drunken Brandon Williams attacked two former staffers who resigned from his officer earlier this year due to his terrible temperament and awful treatment of his staff,' referring to Rep. Brandon Williams, R-N.Y. Deposed Rep. George Santos appears to have a new side gig, launching a Cameo account to sell personalized videos starting at $75 He said he would file an ethics complaint against Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., over her 'questionable stock trading since joining the Ways and Means Committee.' He also made insinuations about Malliotakis' sexuality, after she voted against gay marriage while a state lawmakers but later said she regretted that. '@NMalliotakis the difference between you and I is that I don't live in denial, I'm a PROUD GAY man and I'm not afraid to say it,' Santos sniped. The former congressman also accused Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., of 'laundering money' by his campaign using Checkmate Strategies, which Lawler owns a portion of. He went after Rep. Nick Lalota for attending Hofstra for a law degree while serving as head of the Suffolk County Board of Elections. The Long Island congressman, who stole donor funds to spend on OnlyFans and Botox, fled Capitol Hill on Friday as he became just the sixth House member in history to be kicked out. Over 100 Republicans joined Democrats in booting out the fabulist liar in a historic vote Friday totaling 311 to 114, with two members voting 'present.' Santos stormed off the House floor minutes before the vote sealing his fate concluded. He warned reporters immediately after that the House 'set a new dangerous precedent for themselves' adding, 'to hell with this place.' Facing the daunting vote count, serial fabulist 35-year-old George Santos remained defiant until the very end, but said he would leave Congress if it is 'God's will.' His mountains of lies include fabricating family links to the Holocaust, 9/11 killing his mother, working on Wall Street, recovering from a brain tumor, being of Ukrainian-Jewish descent and starting a charity. Santos survived a vote to expel him last month because 31 Democrats and most Republicans voted to keep him, many of them saying they would rather wait until an Ethics Committee report came out detailing his wrongdoings. It takes a two-thirds vote in the House to expel a sitting member of Congress. This vote was different, with 105 total Republicans voting to boot out their colleague. Santos is the first member to be expelled in more than two decades. The devastating ethics report alleged he improperly diverted campaign contributions to pay for Botox treatments, Hermes bags, OnlyFans purchases and cash withdrawals at a casino. Now, the Republican's thin majority in the House is even smaller, and the GOP can only afford to lose three votes. The new breakdown totals 221 Republicans and 213 Democrats. A Ukrainian refugee who ran off with a British father before he dumped her bit a policeman after learning her friend was killed in the war, a court has heard. Sofiia Karkadym, 23, flew back to Britain to attend court today after pleading guilty to assaulting an emergency worker. Security guard Tony Garnett, 30, fell for IT manager Sofiia in May last year after he and his partner of ten years Lorna Garnett, 28, joined the Government's scheme to help Ukrainian refugees and invited her into their home in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Tony was branded a love rat when he and Sofiia left his family home just ten days after she fled from Russia's invasion and started living with him and Lorna, the mother of his two daughters. The couple moved into a rented love nest cottage in Bradford, but their relationship soured as Tony accused Sofiia of being repeatedly drunk and abusive. He claimed her heavy drinking and jealousy over his two daughters fuelled arguments between them. Sofiia Karkadym, 23, (pictured) flew back to Britain to attend court today after pleading guilty to assaulting an emergency worker Security guard Tony Garnett, 30, (left) fell for Sofiia in May last year after he and his partner of ten years joined the Government's scheme to help Ukrainian refugees and invited her into their home Bradford Magistrates' Court heard Sofiia, who has no address in Britain, was at her ex-lover's flat on 29 May this year and was refusing to leave the property. Prosecutor Shabina Taj told the court that at 5pm two police officers attended the flat on Grape Street, Bradford, after a next door neighbour reported a commotion coming from inside. Sofiia was 'visibly upset' because her friend had been killed in the war in the Ukraine. Mrs Taj said a male attended the flat demanding all his belongings and wanting the defendant to be removed from the flat. The police officers made numerous attempts to get her to leave, but she refused. 'The defendant was being very uncooperative during the whole hour,' said Mrs Taj. PC Andrew Jordinson then placed Sofiia in handcuffs but she managed to slip out of one. Together with his colleague, the officers picked her up and took her out of the flat, and decided to cuff her arms behind her back. PC Jordinson said: 'The defendant looked down and then bit my hand between the thumb and finger in my right hand. Sofiia Karkadym arriving at Bradford Magistrates Court to be sentenced for assaulting a police officer Tony is pictured with his his partner of ten years Lorna Garnett, 28, before he ran off with Sofiia 'I cried out and pushed her to the floor to prevent her biting again.' The court heard Sofiia was displaying 'erratic behaviour' and it was feared she may harm herself. 'She was screaming and shouting on the way to the police d station,' said Mrs Taj. Mitigating Lisa Julian said Sofiia has been back living in the Ukraine but had to return to Bradford for her court case. Mrs Julian said Sofiia had bounced around Europe after the Russian invasion and had ended up in Bradford, where her life fell apart. Describing the day of the assault on PC Jordinson, Mrs Julian said: 'She had been drinking and had just found out her friend in the Ukraine had been killed.' The court heard Sofiia is planning to return to the Ukraine 'as soon as possible'. Bench chairman Brian Outlaw described Sofia's situation as 'unusual' and ordered her to pay PC Jordinson 150 compensation. James Cleverly said 'enough is enough' today as he unveiled a new crackdown to cut the record level of legal migration - but he swerved calls from the Tory Right for an annual cap on numbers. The Home Secretary outlined a five-point package in the Commons that included hiking the minimum salary required for a UK skilled worker visa from around 26,000 to 38,700. He also launched a squeeze on dependants, saying care workers will no longer be able to bring their families to the UK with them. The shortage occupation list will also be overhauled, and rules that mean people can be hired on salaries 20 per cent below the going rate for Brits scrapped. Mr Cleverly said net migration is 'far too high' and the latest announcements underline that the Tories are doing more than 'any other government' to cut it. The package of measures was unveiled by the Home Secretary amid Tory panic that huge inflows could doom the party's general election chances. Cleverly's five-point net migration plan 1. Care workers banned from bringing dependants 2. Minimum skilled worker salary up to 38,700 (apart from health and social care) 3. End 20% discount on minimum salaries for foreign workers. Occupation shortage list to be reviewed 4. Minimum income requirement for bringing in dependants going up to 38,000 5. Review of the graduate visa route to consider whether people should be allowed to stay Advertisement Mr Cleverly said, taken with previous moves on restricting students from bringing dependants, they should curb net inflows by 300,000 a year from the record level of 745,000 in 2022. But Suella Braverman, who was replaced by Mr Cleverly last month after her sacking by PM Rishi Sunak, claimed the new measures were 'too late' and insisted the Government could 'go further'. She joined a number of Tory MPs in challenging Mr Cleverly on why he was not considering a hard cap on the number of migrants who can come to Britain each year. 'They are a step in the right direction. But we need to be honest. This package is too late and the Government can go further,' the ex-home secretary posted on Twitter. Mrs Braverman claimed, if the measures had been introduced a year or even six months ago, then a fall in net migration numbers would have been seen before the general election. But she suggested the impact of some of the measures would now not be seen until 2025. 'We need an annual cap, set by Parliament, across all visa routes, so we don't get into this terrible situation again and Government can be properly held to account,' Mrs Braverman added. She claimed she had proposed similar measures to today's package 'six times in the last year'. Many of the measures announced by Mr Cleverly today will only begin in the Spring, and 140,000 of the mooted reduction in annual net migration was from the existing policies. Official statistics showing whether the measures unveiled today have worked are unlikely to be published before the next election. Government figures conceded that the modelling of the impacts were very uncertain, as flows of workers was very dynamic. They suggested social care workers and their dependants would fall by 100,000 - sparking concern about fuelling staff shortages in the sector. Home Secretary James Cleverly outlined a package to the Commons including hiking the minimum salary for getting a UK skilled worker visa from around 26,000 to 38,000 There is frantic work taking place on how to curb legal net migration, after the annual level reached an eye-watering record of 745,000 A BMG Research poll for the i newspaper has shown Reform UK - headed by Nigel Farage and Richard Tice - on its highest ever support at 11 per cent The closely-watched Conservative Home survey of activists suggests Rishi Sunak has slumped to the bottom of the Cabinet rankings Suella Braverman, who was sacked as home secretary by PM Rishi Sunak last month, claimed she had proposed similar measures to today's package 'six times in the last year' In response to Tory calls in the Commons for an annual cap, Mr Cleverly responded that 'in practice' it was too difficult to manage a specific cap on net migration. Conservative backbencher Tom Hunt told the Home Secretary it 'was a shame it's taken so long' for the Government to bring forward new measures. 'There is great cynicism amongst the country when it comes to politicians talking about immigration - they've heard it all before,' he added. 'Can the Home Secretary promise to me, in the months ahead, he will explicitly demonstrate to the British public that this time it is different, this time we mean it, and this time the public will see change?' Mr Cleverly replied: 'This package is subscribed to across Government, it will be delivered and, while we recognise it won't be an instant fix... we are absolutely committed to bringing these figures down and taking back control of our borders.' Low-paid Brits face being barred from bringing foreign husbands and wives to the UK British citizens on low pay who marry foreign men and women may be barred from bringing them to the UK under rules announced today. Mr Cleverly told the Commons the minimum income threshold for family visas would rise to 38,700 - in line with the salary threshold for foreign workers - in the spring. He told the Commons: 'We will ensure that people only bring dependants who they can support financially by raising the minimum income for family visas to the same threshold as the minimum salary threshold for skilled workers, which is 38,700. 'The minimum income requirement (for family visas) of 18,600 has not been increased since 2012. This package of measures will take place from next spring.' Advertisement Alexander Stafford, a former Tory party vice-chair, suggested the number of migrants coming in to the UK should be capped in relation to the number of homes, GP places, and new school places available. 'Because at the moment the current situation is completely unsustainable,' he said. Mr Cleverly responded: 'We want to make sure that we have a planned, controlled immigration system, that's why we're making these changes, that's why we're bringing these numbers under control, so that local government planners and others have some more certainty abut the future.' Delivering his statement, the Home Secretary said: 'People are understandably worried about housing, about GP appointments... when they can see their communities growing and growing quickly.' Ministers have been frantically thrashing out details of the clampdown after the annual net migration reached an eye-watering new record of 745,000. Immigration minister Robert Jenrick has been privately pushing for even tougher action, backed by his former boss Suella Braverman and many Tory MPs. Mr Jenrick was flanking Mr Cleverly in the chamber this afternoon. However, Mr Sunak and Mr Cleverly have seemed to strike a different tone up to now, suggesting that numbers are starting to ease and they have already taken radical action on student dependants. Bombshell data at the end of last month showed net migration was 1.3million over the past two years. Revised ONS figures showed the total was 745,000 in 2022 roughly the population of Leeds. The data places migration levels at three times higher than before Brexit, despite a Conservative Party 2019 manifesto pledge to bring overall numbers down. At that point the level was around 240,000. For the year to June 2023 net migration was slightly lower at 672,000, with the ONS pointing to evidence that numbers were easing. Some of the increase has been attributed to humanitarian inflows from Hong Kong, Ukraine and Afghanistan. But rises in numbers of workers and dependants have also driven the total. The population of England and Wales has now passed 60million for the first time after growing at the fastest rate since 1962. Under existing rules, posts on the shortage occupation list can be filled by foreign workers paid 20 per cent less than the official 'going rate' in the UK. But the system has been widely criticised for being too generous, covering ballet dancers and 'arts officers' alongside jobs such as care worker, engineer and bricklayer. The independent Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) and Labour have called for the salary discount for foreign workers to be abolished, and the government has now said it will do so. Outlining the action previously announced, Mr Cleverly said: 'From January 2024, the right for international students to bring dependants will be removed unless they are on postgraduate courses designated as a research programme. We always want to attract the global brightest and best. 'We have also stopped international students from switching out of the student route into work routes before their studies have been completed. These changes will have a tangible impact on net migration.' 'Around 153,000 visas were granted to dependants of sponsored students in the year ending September 2023, today I can announce that we will go even further than those provisions already in place, with a five-point plan to further curb immigration abuses that will deliver the biggest ever reduction in net migration.' He added: 'In total, this package, plus our reduction in students dependants will mean around 300,000 fewer people will come in future years than have come to the UK last year.' Mr Cleverly said the first part of the five point plan will be 'to end the abuse of the health and care visa'. 'We will stop overseas care workers from bringing family dependants and we will require care firms in England to be regulated by the Care Quality Commission in order for them to sponsor visas,' he said. 'Approximately 120,000 dependants accompanied 100,000 care workers and senior care workers in the year ending September 2023. Only 25 per cent of dependants are estimated to be in work, meaning a significant number are drawing on public services rather than helping to grow the economy. 'We recognise that foreign workers do great work in our NHS and health sector, but it is also important that migrants make a big enough financial contribution. 'Therefore, we will increase annual immigration surcharge this year by 66 per cent from 624 to 1,035 to raise on average around 1.3billion for the health services of this country every year.' Mr Cleverly said that he wanted to stop 'immigration undercutting the salary of British workers'. 'We will increase the skilled worker earnings threshold by a third, to 38,700 from next spring in line with the median full-term wage for those kinds of jobs,' he said. 'Those coming on health and social care visa routes will be exempt so we can continue to bring in the healthcare workers on which our care sector and NHS rely. 'Thirdly, we will scrap cut-price shortage labour from overseas by ending the 20% going-rate salary discount for shortage occupations and reforming the shortage occupation list. 'I have asked the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to review the occupations on this list because of our new higher-skilled worker salary thresholds, and we will create a new immigration salary list with a reduced number of occupations in co-ordination with the MAC.' The minimum income for family visas will be raised to the same threshold as the minimum salary threshold for skilled workers, Mr Cleverly said. He told the Commons: 'Fourthly, we will ensure that people only bring dependants who they can support financially by raising the minimum income for family visas to the same threshold as the minimum salary threshold for skilled workers, which 38,700. 'The minimum income requirement of 18,600 has not been increased since 2012. This package of measures will take place from next spring. 'Finally, having already banned overseas masters students from bringing family members to the UK, I have asked the Migration Advisory Committee to review the graduate route to prevent abuse, to protect the integrity and quality of the UK's outstanding higher education sector. 'It needs to work in the best interests of the UK, supporting the pathway into high quality jobs for the global talent pool but reducing opportunities for abuse.' However, former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg asked: 'Does he think it would be a good idea to have a cap on the number coming in?' Mr Rees-Mogg replied: 'Whilst I understand the calls for a cap, in practical terms managing a cap is difficult. 'We would want to make sure that we are being as generous as possible to the people who contribute to our society and to our economy, and recognise that not every single individual the difference between a child that would count as one person against a cap, or to an investor that may bring a huge number of jobs, they are not the same, and we want to be able to make the difference between the two.' Former minister John Redwood told the Commons: 'The way we eased the driver shortage was to train more people at home and pay them more. Isn't that the right model for these scarcity occupations?' Mr Cleverly responded: 'He is absolutely right. What we want is a high-skilled, high-productivity, high-wage economy. These proposals and the work the Chancellor announced support that.' Gesturing toward Labour he added: 'They would do the opposite.' Damian Green, a former de facto deputy PM, asked how many care workers would be deterred by the shift. 'There is a huge shortage in the care sector at the moment of about 150,000 and I would hope that this isn't a significant contributor to the reduction in numbers, because if it is, it will cause damage to the care sector,' he said. The Home Secretary replied: 'What we actually see through this particular scheme is the displacement of British workers, so the actual total numbers of people in this sector has not increased anywhere near as much as the number of people who have entered on this visa route. 'We also suspect globally there is significant surplus demand, and whilst perhaps an individual with a family might be dissuaded because of the restrictions we have on family members, it is almost certainly the case that someone else that does not have those family commitments will be willing to put themselves forward.' Another Tory MP, George Eustice, urged the Government to move away from a 'failed' skills-based migration policy. The Brexiteer told the Commons: 'Isn't the problem with a skills-based immigration policy that it gives preferential access to bankers, to lawyers, to accountants, to economists even though we have no need for such people in this country, we have plenty here, homegrown talent, but it actually makes it very difficult to recruit the people we do need care workers, people who work in the food industry, in manufacturing, producing things generally or indeed in the tourism industry. 'So will the Secretary of State consider moving away from this failed skills-based migration policy and instead move to one based on the needs of our economy?' Mr Cleverly replied: 'The truth is the figures just do not bear out his assessment. The vast, vast majority of the people that we've seen in the last couple of years worth of immigration figures are in the lower end of the skills spectrum.' Labour's shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said: 'Today's announcement is an admission of years of Tory failure on both the immigration system and the economy, as net migration has trebled to a record high under the Tories since they promised to reduce it at the last election. 'Labour has said repeatedly that net migration should come down and called for action to scrap the unfair 20 per cent wage discount, raise salary thresholds based on economic evidence, bring in new training requirements linked to the immigration system, as well as a proper workforce plan for social care. 'Immigration is important but the system needs to be controlled and managed. 'But whilst the Conservatives have finally been forced to abandon the unfair wage discount that they introduced, they are still completely failing to introduce more substantial reforms that link immigration to training and fair pay requirements in the UK, meaning many sectors will continue to see rising numbers of work visas because of skills shortages. 'Rishi Sunak has badly failed on the economy and migration and is in chaos. He is now proposing policies he opposed six months ago and opposing policies he helped introduce.' Care England said immigrant staff had been 'saving the social care sector'. The industry body insisted the Government must improve pay and conditions if it hopes to drive domestic recruitment. The government is overhauling the controversial shortage occupation list, which covered ballet dancers and 'arts officers' as well as bricklayers Ministers are facing mounting pressure to act after net migration hit a shocking new record of 745,000 in a year. The rise since 2020 has been driven by arrivals from outside the EU Humanitarian routes from Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan contributed to the sharp rise in numbers, although the effects have faded. Work routes and study routes have been the main drivers in the past two years Studying and work dominate the reasons for non-EU citizens coming to the UK, while numbers of dependants has been rising In 2022 care workers and home carers became eligible for health visas, which now dominate the work visa route This chart shows the countries of origin of those coming to the UK for health roles The number of dependants accompanying people on work visas has been rising sharply The ONS has pointed to an uptick in emigration as a possible sign that net migration will come down Tory fears are mounting that huge immigration is driving voters into the arms of Reform UK as ministers squabble over the details of a crackdown. A poll has shown the party headed by Nigel Farage and Richard Tice recording its highest ever support at 11 per cent. The BMG Research study suggested that the four-point increase was at the expense of the Conservatives, who were down three points. The finding - which will heighten concerns about a split in the right-wing vote at the looming election - comes as a closely-watched survey of activists indicated Rishi Sunak has slumped to the bottom of the Cabinet rankings. Alongside the legal migration crackdown, the government is desperately trying to finalise the details of a squeeze on illicit routes. Mr Cleverly is set to travel to Rwanda within days to seal a new treaty on deporting Channel boat arrivals. Meanwhile, ministers are still working on 'watertight' emergency legislation that can overcome the objections of the Supreme Court to Rishi Sunak's much-vaunted policy. Insiders say the PM is determined to make the new law 'very robust' but there is significantly resistance within government to overriding human rights laws. Mr Sunak is also expected to authorise millions more pounds to be given to Rwanda to improve its asylum system, one of the key points made by the Supreme Court. It comes as the latest figures show 1,264 would-be refugees braved icy conditions to cross the Channel in the past week, including 519 on Saturday alone. The number of illegal migrants reaching the UK this year is now believed to have topped the 28,526 recorded in 2021 although arrivals are still a third down on the record set last year. The BMG Research polling, for the i newspaper, found Labour's lead had extended to 16 points, on 43 per cent to 27 per cent for the Tories. Reform UK had gone from just 7 per cent in mid-October to 11 per cent at the end of last month. That was above the Lib Dems on 10 per cent, and the highest ever detected by BMG. Worryingly for Mr Sunak, he has also tumbled to the foot of the regular ConservativeHome Cabinet rankings. His rating on the panel of activists now stands at minus 25.4. Mr Cleverly has also seen his standing plunge, going from top to well down the bottom half. Kemi Badenoch is now leading the pack. The PM announced his new Rwanda approach last month after the Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the original plan by ruling that there were 'substantial grounds' to believe people put on a one-way flight could be sent on to other countries where they would be unsafe. The Plan B comprises three parts: a treaty with Rwanda, emergency legislation to declare the country is safe, and a bundle of evidence explaining why anyone sent there would not be mistreated. There has been intense debate in the Tory party over how far the Bill should go, with more than 20 MPs on the Right demanding what is now known as a 'full fat' option. This would include so-called 'notwithstanding' clauses, allowing the Government to ignore the UK's Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in asylum cases as well as removing the right of migrants to challenge their deportation through judicial review. Channel migrants being brought ashore in Kent over the weekend JL Partners research has highlighted an uptick in Tory voters saying they are switching to Reform UK A less hardline approach would override human rights law while still allowing challenges by individuals. But there are concerns that ministers are receiving advice from officials including government lawyers who say they cannot do anything they feel would breach the Civil Service Code such as ignoring human rights laws. 'It's anathema to them,' said one insider. 'They will say 'I don't want to be the lawyer who does this'. 'Because Mr Cleverly has only been in his new role as Home Secretary for a few weeks, Attorney General Victoria Prentis is playing a major role looking through the draft Bill. She is understood to have warned that disapplying the ECHR would be unlawful. A government source said: 'As the PM said, the British people want action and their patience has been stretched. The Government is up for taking robust measures, providing they work.' The Chinese military said that an American naval ship had 'illegally intruded' on Monday into waters near the Second Thomas Shoal, the site of a hot territorial dispute between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. A Chinese naval force was mobilized to track the USS Gabrielle Giffords during the operation, according to a statement from the People's Liberation Army Southern Theater. The U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet said the ship 'was conducting routine operations in international waters ... consistent with international law.' Chinese and Philippine naval and coast guard ships have confronted each other repeatedly around the shoal in the Spratly Islands in recent months as China tries to prevent the Philippines from resupplying and repairing a rusting warship that it intentionally ran aground in 1999 to serve as a military outpost. Dwarfed by China's military might, the Philippines has sought America's help in its multiple territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea. In this handout photo released by Armed Forces of the Philippines, Philippines BRP Jose Rizal (FF150), right, and USS Gabriel Giffords (back) during a tactical exercise between Philippines and the United States in the West Philippine Sea on Thursday Nov 23 The Chinese military said on December 4 that American naval ship USS Gabriel Giffords (left) had 'illegally intruded' on Monday into waters near the Second Thomas Shoal, the site of a hot territorial dispute between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea The USS Gabrielle Giffords (left) conducts small boat operations with USS Mobile off the coast of Singapore. The U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet said the ship 'was conducting routine operations in international waters ... consistent with international law' in the latest dust-up with China President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. agreed to an expansion of the U.S. military presence in the country early this year and launched joint sea and air patrols with the United States late last month. China accuses the U.S. of meddling in waters far from its shores and renewed its charge that America is the one raising regional tensions following the sailing of the USS Giffords near Second Thomas Shoal. The ship is a littoral combat ship designed to operate in coastal areas. 'The U.S. deliberately disrupted the situation in the South China Sea, seriously violated China's sovereignty and security, seriously undermined regional peace and stability, and seriously violated international law and basic norms governing international relations, fully demonstrating that the U.S. is the biggest threat to peace and stability in the South China Sea,' the statement from the Chinese military's Southern Theater said. China has staked claim to virtually all of the reefs and other outcroppings in the South China Sea, building some into islands with runways that could be used by the military. Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei also say they are the rightful owners of territory in the same waters in a complex web of overlapping claims. The U.S. has long been the major military power patrolling the South China Sea, an important shipping lane and fishing grounds, operating out of bases in the Pacific. Chinese and Philippine naval and coast guard ships have confronted each other repeatedly around the shoal in the Spratly Islands in recent months In this handout photo provided by the Philippine Coast Guard, suspected Chinese militia ships stay near the Philippine-claimed reef called Whitsun, locally known as Julian Felipe reef, at the disputed South China Sea on Saturday Philippine Coast Guard said on Sunday that they have monitored more than a hundred suspected Chinese militia ships have gathered around the reef near Palawan province, Philippines China's emergence as a military power and its ambitions to be a regional and global power are challenging American long-standing dominance. A statement from the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet, based in Japan, said its operations in the South China Sea demonstrate a commitment 'to upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific region where all nations, large and small, are secure in their sovereignty, can resolve disputes without coercion, and have the freedom to navigate and fly consistent with international laws, rules and norms.' The Philippine coast guard said Sunday that it had sent two ships to Whitsun Reef, another disputed territory in the Spratly Islands, to challenge and document what it estimated to be more than 135 Chinese vessels massing in the area. The Philippines called them a maritime militia and said their presence is illegal. The vessels did not respond to radio challenges, the coast guard said. China, as in similar incidents in the past, said the reef belongs to China and that the nearby waters are an important operating area and shelter for Chinese fishing boats. 'It is reasonable and lawful for Chinese fishing boats to operate and take shelter in the waters,' Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said. 'The Philippine side should not make irresponsible remarks about that.' A Russian soldier gunned down his commander in the war zone after being mocked over his Ukrainian-sounding surname, it is alleged. Sergeant Mikhail Khokhlov, 37, killed Lieutenant Ivan Krivosheev, 37, with his AK-74 assault rifle as they guarded the occupied village Knyaze-Grigorivka in Kherson region, reports claim. Another Russian soldier Alexander Lykov, 32, suffered serious wounds as a bullet passed through his neck. Putins propaganda machine has fermented such deep hatred against Ukrainians that Khokhlov - a Russian - became upset when his comrades mocked him, say reports. The name Khokhlov can be seen as deriving from khokhol, a vulgar name used by Russians for Ukrainians. Sergeant Mikhail Khokhlov, 37, (pictured) killed his commanding officer with his AK-74 Krivosheev (pictured) was a platoon commander with the 1st battalion of the 1218th motorised rifle regiment His surname name Khokhlov can be seen as deriving from khokhol, a vulgar name used by Russians for Ukrainians Khokhlov was detained as a murder suspect, and handed over to his regiment's military police. Krivosheev was a platoon commander with the 1st battalion of the 1218th motorised rifle regiment, and Khokhlov his deputy. Reports say the machine gun shooting followed a drinking session at which Khokhlov - who is from Nikolsk in Penza region - was relentlessly mocked over his surname. Krivosheev was married with children. Khokhlov and Lykov are also married with children. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led to increased paranoia among troops and the state itself. Earlier this year, it was reported that Putin's security forces recorded an all-time high number of treason cases. Russia's FSB opened 82 treason cases between January and August 2023, independent Russian outlet Kholod reported, though the actual number is likely to be far higher. Russian soldier Alexander Lykov, 32, suffered serious wounds as a bullet passed through his neck Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led to increased paranoia among troops and the state itself. Between 1997 and 2017 there were a total of 101 treason cases. Lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov, from human rights project Department One, said: 'The FSB has picked up its pace [in 2023] we get 20 criminal cases a month on average. 'At this rate, there will be about 250 [treason cases] by the end of December, one for every work day per year.' Among those jailed for treason is Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza, 41, who holds Russian and British citizenship. He was imprisoned for 25 years for criticising Putin's war and opposing his regime. He was also twice poisoned. Eminent Russian hypersonic scientist Valery Golubkin, 71, was in June sentenced by a Moscow court to 12 years in a strict regime colony for 'state treason'. Female IT specialist Tamara Parshina, 23, is one of the youngest to be accused of treason by Putin's ruthless security forces. She was then flown for eight hours to be held in Moscow's top security Lerfortovo detention jail. Lenie Umerova, 25, from annexed Crimea, was sent to notorious Lefortovo jail in Moscow on a treason charge that could see her jailed for 20 years - despite being a Ukrainian citizen. Another hypersonic scientist Alexander Shiplyuk, 56, was held in a swoop by the FSB counterintelligence agency in Novosibirsk, Siberia, where he heads the Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. Professor Anatoly Maslov, 75, a pioneer of hypersonic technologies, was also held on suspicion of treason. A Utah man is recovering from a litany of serious injuries after he attempted to pet a bison while walking home from a family celebration just before Thanksgiving. Halen Carbajal told KUTV that he suffered a liver laceration, broken rib and bruised lung following the encounter, which took place close to the town of Provo. The 27-year-old said that the bison, which was behind a fence on a neighboring property, started following him after he got its attention. 'He had followed me all the way over, and I was like, 'Oh, that's pretty cool. I kind of did want to pet him, so I was just being naive about the whole thing, so I did that, and yeah he just rocked me pretty good,' Carbajal said from his hospital bed. He went on to describe himself as 'definitely the idiot' in the scenario, adding that he should never have gone so close to the animal. Utah man Halen Carbajal is recovering a bison gave him an eight-inch laceration after he attempted to pet it while returning home from a Thanksgiving party 'I think he struck me and then lifted me, which would make sense why my rib was broken too,' Carbajal said in describing the attack Carbajal, shown here second from the right, just finished a season working with the Utah Conservation Corps, a group which works on various environmental programs across the state In describing the attack, the victim said that the bison bowed its head and stuck his horn into him. 'I think he struck me and then lifted me, which would make sense why my rib was broken too,' Carbajal said. 'I crawled. There was a fence with some pretty good gaps in it, so I squeezed through the lower ones. I don't think he was really trying to attack me. I think he was just curious because he didn't go after me after that,' he said discussing his escape. Carbajal said that he was in the hospital for seven days after the incident, which prompted friends to set up a GoFundMe page in order to help him to pay his medical bills. 'Halen is in good spirits despite his situation and we're all hoping for a smooth recovery. Anything to help with the emergency medical bills will be so appreciated,; the introduction to the crowdfunding page reads. According to the page, Carbajal just finished a season working with the Utah Conservation Corps, a group which works on various environmental programs across the state. At the time of writing, the page has raised nearly $5,000. 'It was for sure a reality check or recognizing my naivety and thinking it would be fine to try and touch one, and just realizing that you got to have a lot more reverence for big, crazy beasts like that... There's admiration and then there's a level of respect you have to have with just keeping your distance.',' Carbajal told KUTV. Utah Division of Wildlife Resources spokesperson Faith Heaton-Jolley told KUTV that the public should be wary of bison's calm demeanor. As many as 60 million bison once roamed North America, moving in vast herds that were central to the culture and survival of numerous Native American groups A pamphlet distributed by the National Park Service to people entering Yellowstone National Park warns visitors not to get too close to bison 'There's just this common misconception that because they kind of look like cows, people think they're domestic or friendly. They are wild animals. They do act unpredictably sometimes, and they can act aggressively if you get too close to them,' she said. As many as 60 million bison once roamed North America, moving in vast herds that were central to the culture and survival of numerous Native American groups. They were driven to the brink of extinction more than a century ago when hunters, U.S. troops and tourists shot them by the thousands to feed a growing commercial market that used bison parts in machinery, fertilizer and clothing. By 1889, only a few hundred bison remained. Thanks to efforts from both state and federal governments, there are now more than 50,000 bison in the US. The return of bison in some locations is considered a conservation success. But Haaland said they remain 'functionally extinct' and more work is needed to return the animals to tribal lands and restore the grasslands they depend on. Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton 'haven't had a proper conversation in a number of years, Omid Scobie claims. The Sussexes' favoured journalist took another swipe at the Princess of Wales for the mental health ambassador being distant when the Duchess of Sussex was struggling with suicidal thoughts during her pregnancy with Archie. The under-fire Endgame author blamed Prince Harry's wavering relationship with his brother William, as mentioned in the Duke of Sussex's memoir Spare, for Meghan and Kate not having the chance to get that close. The latest comments come as the fallout from his controversial 400-page tome continues after King Charles and Kate were named in the Dutch version as the senior royals who allegedly discussed Archie's skin colour before he was born. Buckingham Palace officials will meet with aides to Prince William this week for critical talks in how to deal with the fallout from accusations of racism, with legal action said to be on the table. Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle haven't had a proper conversation in years, Omid Scobie claims In a sit-down interview with Associated Press, Mr Scobie, 42, said there is a distance between Kate and Meghan that remains to this day. 'Meghan and Kate's friendship or relationship or lack of, it's largely down to even in those early days, and we didn't know it at the time, but we have since learned due to Harry's memoir, because William and his brother were just not close, Meghan and Kate almost never had a chance to get that close,' he said. 'The Palace was certainly never shy about telling all of the journalists in the press pack, including myself, that "these are two very different women. They're not going to have much in common, but at least there's respect there". 'But I think as we've seen, as the years have gone by, that it's even been questionable whether that respect is even there.' Meghan tearfully opened up in a bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021 about having 'suicidal thoughts' when she was five months pregnant due to the stress of royal life. Mr Scobie has already taken a swipe at Kate in his book calling her 'cold' and 'a Stepford wife' and appeared to lay into her again for how she was during Meghan's darkest days. 'There would be moments where Meghan, whether she was liked or not, was at her lowest points, as in her time as a working royal, she's spoken about those suicidal ideations that she's had during her pregnancy,' he said. Meghan tearfully revealed to Oprah Winfrey during a bombshell interview in 2021 about having 'suicidal thoughts' when she was five months pregnant due to the stress of royal life King Charles III is said to be taking the furore over Omid Scobie's book Endgame 'very seriously' after His Majesty and Kate Middleton were named as the senior royals who allegedly commented on Archie's skin colour before he was born Omid Scobie claims Meghan and Kate never had the chance to get close due to Prince Harry's relationship with his brother William A copy of Omid Scobie's book Endgame on display inside a book store in London last Friday. The book has already dropped out of Amazon's top 100 bestsellers list Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, joined by her mother Doria Ragland, show their new son Archie to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip at Windsor Castle in 2019 'For Kate, who is a mental health ambassador who champions the early years sector, including focus on pregnancy right up until the age of five, you would think that that might have struck a chord with her. 'But there seems to be just this distance that has continued between the two and does to this day. I mean, as far as I know, they haven't had a proper conversation in a number of years.' Mr Scobie has been widely described as Meghan's mouthpiece but neither she nor Harry has so far spoken up in defence of the royals over highly damaging accusations of racism. The Dutch translation of Endgame has been pulled after it named Charles and Kate as the royals alleged to have asked what colour Prince Archie's skin might be before he was born. Mr Scobie has refused to apologise to Charles and Kate for the embarrassing mishap and shrugged off criticism claiming the names were 'known for a long time' while putting the blame at the Dutch publisher's door declaring: 'I never submitted a book that had those names in it.' Yet Dutch translator Saskia Peeters insisted Charles and Kate's names were in the book. Speaking to MailOnline from her home in Arnhem on Thursday, she said: 'As a translator, I translate what is in front of me. Dutch translators Saskia Peeters (pictured on her doorstep on 30 November) and Nellie Keukelaar-van Rijsbergern who worked on Omid Scobie's controversial book have insisted the names of two royals at the centre of racism scandal were in the manuscript they were sent William, Harry, Meghan and Charles speak together at Westminster Abbey in March 2019 'The names of the royals were there in black and white. I did not add them. I just did what I was paid to do and that was translate the book from English into Dutch.' Mr Scobie's initially blamed a 'translation error'. Anke Roelen, managing director of the publisher Xander, said a rectified edition of the book would be back on shelves on December 8 and simply blamed 'an error' for it being pulled. In a further blow to Mr Scobie, Endgame has already dropped out of Amazon's top 100 bestsellers list despite the blitz of publicity in the media. Mr Scobie has heavily plugged his new book with TV interviews conducted for the BBC and ITV in the UK and ABC in the US. The author has also given interviews to publications including The Times, Evening Standard, Independent, Tatler, People, Elle.com and Paris March. The title currently sits 139th in the UK bestseller book charts based on Amazon sales, which are updated hourly to reflect recent and historical sales of every item. Endgame has fallen more than 100 places in three days having been at 14th as recently as last Friday. On the day of its release last Tuesday it was ranked 77th. The book is now in the table behind children's titles such as the Beano annual, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Stick Man; biographies from Britney Spears, Matthew Perry and Chris Kamara; and cookbooks from Mary Berry, Rick Stein and Tom Kerridge. In the same Amazon list in the US, Endgame was at 235th today - below The Very Hungry Caterpillar; the Jeopardy! 2024 calendar; and a Paw Patrol sound book. Ballistic missiles fired by Yemen's Houthi rebels struck three commercial ships Sunday in the Red Sea, while a U.S. warship shot down three drones in self-defense during the hourslong assault, the U.S. military said. The Iranian-backed Houthis claimed two of the attacks. The strikes marked an escalation in a series of maritime attacks in the Mideast linked to the Israel-Hamas war, as multiple vessels found themselves in the crosshairs of a single Houthi assault for the first time in the conflict. The U.S. vowed to consider all appropriate responses in the wake of the attack, specifically calling out Iran, after tensions have been high for years now over Tehran's rapidly advancing nuclear program . These attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security, the U.S. military's Central Command said in a statement. They have jeopardized the lives of international crews representing multiple countries around the world. It added: We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran. The attack began around 9:15 a.m. local time (0615 GMT) in Houthi-controlled Sanaa, Yemen's capital, Central Command said. The USS Carney, a Navy destroyer, detected a ballistic missile fired from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen at the Bahamas-flagged bulk carrier Unity Explorer. The missile hit near the ship, the U.S. said. Shortly afterward, the Carney shot down a drone headed its way, although it's not clear if the destroyer was the target, Central Command said. About 30 minutes later, the Unity Explorer was hit by a missile. While responding to its distress call, the Carney shot down another incoming drone. Central Command said the Unity Explorer sustained minor damage from the missile. Two other commercial ships, the Panamanian-flagged bulk carriers Number 9 and Sophie II, were both struck by missiles. The Number 9 reported some damage but no casualties, and the Sophie II reported no significant damage, Central Command said. While sailing to assist the Sophie II around 4:30 p.m. local time (1330 GMT), the Carney shot down another drone heading in its direction. The drones did no damage. The Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, has shot down multiple rockets the Houthis have fired toward Israel during that nation's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It hasn't been damaged in any of the incidents and no injuries have been reported on board. The Defense Department initially described the assault as simply an attack on the Carney before providing more details. Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree claimed two of Sunday's attacks, saying the first vessel was hit by a missile and the second by a drone while in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Saree did not mention any U.S. warship being involved. The Yemeni armed forces continue to prevent Israeli ships from navigating the Red Sea (and Gulf of Aden) until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops, Saree said. The Yemeni armed forces renew their warning to all Israeli ships or those associated with Israelis that they will become a legitimate target if they violate what is stated in this statement. Saree also identified the first vessel as the Unity Explorer, which is owned by a British firm that includes Dan David Ungar, who lives in Israel, as one of its officers. The Number 9 is linked to Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement. The Sophie II's owner, Kyowa Kisen of Imabari, Japan, told The Associated Press that the ship's crew were safe and the vessel did not sustain serious damage. Managers for the two other ships could not be immediately reached for comment. Israeli media identified Ungar as being the son of Israeli shipping billionaire Abraham Rami Ungar. Iran has yet to directly address the attacks. However, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian threatened that if the current situation continues, the region will enter a new phase over the Israel-Hamas war. All parties who are after igniting a war are warned, before its too late stop the killing of women and children, of which a new round has started," Amirabdollahian said. Iran's top diplomat described his comments as coming after conversations with resistance forces in the region a description Tehran uses for the Shiite militias it backs, including groups in Iraq, the Houthis and Lebanon's Hezbollah, as well as the Sunni fighters of Hamas. All have threatened or attacked Israel, Iran's regional archrival, during the war. The Houthis have launched a series of attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, as well as launching drones and missiles targeting Israel. Analysts suggest the Houthis hope to shore up waning popular support after years of civil war in Yemen between it and Saudi-backed forces. The U.S. has stopped short of saying its Navy ships were targeted, but has said Houthi drones have headed toward the ships and have been shot down in self-defense. Washington so far has declined to directly respond to the attacks, as has Israel, whose military continues to try to describe the ships as not having links to their country. Global shipping had increasingly been targeted as the Israel-Hamas war threatens to become a wider regional conflict even as a truce briefly halted fighting and Hamas exchanged hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. However, the collapse of the truce and the resumption of punishing Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and a ground offensive there had raised the risk of more seaborne attacks. In November, the Houthis seized a vehicle transport ship also linked to Israel in the Red Sea off Yemen. The rebels still hold the vessel near the port city of Hodeida. Missiles also landed near another U.S. warship last week after it assisted a vessel linked to Israel that had briefly been seized by gunmen. Separately, a container ship owned by an Israeli billionaire recently came under attack by a suspected Iranian drone in the Indian Ocean. The Houthis had not directly targeted the Americans for some time, further raising the stakes in the growing maritime conflict. In 2016, the U.S. launched Tomahawk cruise missiles that destroyed three coastal radar sites in Houthi-controlled territory to retaliate for missiles being fired at U.S. Navy ships at the time. (AP) Moderate Republicans on Capitol Hill are prepared for former President Donald Trump to wreak havoc on their lives yet again, should he win reelection next November. A number of anti-Trump Senate Repulicans are also paying close attention to the recent rise of former U.N. Amb. Nikki Haley, telling The Hill in interviews that she may be the best hope to stop him. During Trump's four years in office, House and Senate Republicans were forced to respond on a nearly daily basis to the then-president's shock policy announcements and outlandish tweets. 'S*** yeah,' Rep. David Joyce, a Republican from Ohio, told Politico when asked whether his colleagues are concerned about clashing with Trump. 'The Orange Jesus?' he said with a laugh. That nickname came to prominence after anti-Trump former Rep. Liz Cheney said a lawmaker called Trump that as he signed onto the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Moderate Republicans in Congress are preparing for former President Donald Trump (left) to wreak havoc on their life again should he be reelected in 2024, while some Senate Republicans believe Nikki Haley (right) may be the best candidate to provide an alternative to that 'S*** yeah,' Rep. David Joyce, a Republican from Ohio , told Politico when asked whether his colleagues are concerned about clashing with Trump. 'The Orange Jesus?' he said with a laugh 'The things we do for the Orange Jesus,' muttered Republican Rep. Mark Green, Cheney wrote in her memoir, as he signed up to contest the Electoral College vote count in key swing state. Green denies saying such a thing. Trump has stronger holdings in the House than in the U.S. Senate, where a handful of Republicans had lined up behind their peer, Sen. Tim Scott, who dropped out of the 2024 race last month. Overall, Trump has secured 80 endorsements from House GOP members, though only has the backing of 13 of the 49 GOP senators. Among those U.S. senators who want to see the party move on from Trump, they're expressing interest in Haley, while suggesting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' campaign is losing steam. 'She has better prospects than he does because her numbers are going up and his are coming down,' Sen. Mitt Romney told The Hill. 'Usually, you want to place your bet on someone who is doing better.' Romney announced in September he would not seek another term. Sen. Mitt Romney, a Trump critic who declined to run for reelection, told The Hill he believed former U.N. Amb. Nikki Haley had 'better prospects' of becoming the party's Trump alternative than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, long considered Trump's top foe He's the only U.S. senator who voted to convict Trump in both of the ex-president's impeachments and would have faced a tough reelection battle in a red state. Senate Minority Whip John Thune told The Hill that Haley 'seems to be' emerging as the top Trump alternative. Thune was among the Senate Republicans who had endorsed Scott's bid. He hasn't endorsed another pick yet. 'She's acquitted herself really well in the debates, and I think has done well out on the stump,' he said. 'Part of running for national office - especially in those early states - is relatability, and I think she's got a good retail political style. Seems to be winning over some people.' Thune noted that Trump 'starts with a very commanding lead,' but told The Hill that he believes the GOP primary race is still fluid. 'I guess the question is how much can she shift that narrative,' Thune said of Haley. Sen. Mike Rounds, who had also endorsed Scott, also told The Hill Haley was well positioned to become Trump's chief rival. That being said, he expressed she had a steep hill to climb. 'The Republicans aren't ready to make changes yet in their decision making - they're getting closer. So I think her timing is probably pretty key,' Rounds said. 'It will depend now on what the other candidates say and whether the other candidates decide they want to continue to battle on.' 'After the Iowa caucuses, after New Hampshire, I think this will be narrowed down to a two-person race,' said the South Dakota Republican. 'I think she has the momentum,' he said of the former South Carolina governor. A relative has claimed she raised the alarm about living conditions in a Wisconsin 'House of Horrors' three years before two young brothers escaped naked and filthy through a broken window. Neighbors called police on July 13 after seeing the boys, aged seven and nine, walking in the street like 'cavemen who had never seen the sun.' Police who raided the home in the Bluemound Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee described it as 'the worst they've ever seen,' with piles of stinking garbage and feces on the wall of the boys' locked bedroom. The two boys couldn't use the toilet for years before the parents' arrest, it is claimed. Parents Joel Manke and Katie Koch face up to 43 years in jail for the alleged neglect, but his sister-in-law told police she reported them to Wisconsin Child Protective Services back in 2020. 'She said she knew right away that something wasn't right because the children weren't in school, they were not potty-trained and were non-verbal,' police wrote in their report. The mother of the boys who escaped from a 'house of horrors' - Katie Koch, 34, has admitted two felony counts of chronic neglect of a child and felony false imprisonment, while her boyfriend, Joel Manke, 38, is charged with four felony counts Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Mallory Davis described conditions inside the house as 'like something out of a horror movie' Koch had nailed a board over her sons' bedroom window 'to keep the children from bothering the nosey neighbor' Koch, 34, and the children moved into the home in 2019 but Manke, 38, admitted the boys had never seen a doctor or been to school during their time in his house. It has also emerged that Wisconsin CPS previously investigated Koch for neglect of their now 12-year-old half-sibling in 2011, 2017 and 2018 before clearing her each time. Manke's sister-in-law remembered Koch being 'rough with the children' and 'not very gentle', but said she had not seen the boys since Christmas 2021 when Koch was 'extremely anxious and nervously, chattering over and over and over, and just very uncomfortable in a social setting'. The couple used Instagram to paint a picture of a happy family life where the boys spent time with their grandmother, played in the snow, enjoyed baking and decorating for Christmas, and went on fun road trips. In reality, the children's hair was matted with feces and their mother had nailed a board over their bedroom window 'to keep the children from bothering the nosey neighbor.' One neighbor told police he had lived in his home for more than 30 years and never seen a child in or outside the couple's house near 71st and Stevenson. Koch told police the human waste covering the house was 'clay, paint and chocolate', but officers found it 'on the floor and all over the walls'. 'I entered the living room and observed a terrible hoarding situation - it was hard to see the floor,' one wrote. Koch has since written a three-page 'apology letter' to her children but could face 43 years in prison when she is sentenced February 8 The boarded up window's of the children's bedroom had paw patrol curtains covered in mold and feces Koch, 34, and Manke, 38, are seen in a photo posted to Instagram. Koch frequently shared images depicting a happy family life, while in reality her sons were imprisoned and lived in squalor In another photo, the child is seen hanging garlands to celebrate Christmas Neighbor Christine Eder said the children looked like 'they had never been outside'. 'They were just walking different. Their hair looked like it had never been brushed,' she said 'A smell of urine and feces stained the air within the residence', the officer added, with a 'mound of trash and garbage' next to the boy's bedroom door. 'The door was opened halfway, and a greater amount of the stench of urine and feces seemed to get worse as I approached the children's room,' he recalled. Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Mallory Davis said the boys had been imprisoned in their bedroom and described the house as 'like something out of a horror movie.' She told a hearing in July that the conditions were so bad that the children's heads had to be shaved because their hair was matted with feces. 'These children have been horribly damaged from their mother's actions,' Davis said. 'They are completely uneducated. They are not potty trained, even at their ages. 'They are, essentially at this point, unable to function in society.' During a police interview, Manke said he knew the living conditions were not good for the children, but he had to 'pick his battles' with Koch to avoid arguments. Koch was filmed looking upset in a subsequent court hearing as a prosecutor outlined the abuse and neglect she is accused of inflicting on her children. Koch pleaded guilty to two felony counts of chronic neglect of a child and felony false imprisonment on Thursday. She has since written a three-page 'apology letter' to her children and is due to be sentenced on February 8. Manke, who is not the boy's biological father has denied the charges and been released on $6,500 bail ahead of his next hearing on January 16. 'Joel tried his hardest to get the kids to go to school,' his mother Diane Manke, told WTMJ. 'What more can you do when you're not the dad? You can tell the mom, but she didn't want to do that. 'Those poor babies, we had no idea. 'Don't think for a second if we had an idea, we wouldn't have taken care of that. I don't know what went wrong or where it went wrong.' Both boys are thought to be in the care of Wisconsin CPS. A security guard has been stabbed to death after confronting a shoplifter inside a Macy's store right across from City Hall in Philadelphia, according to police. A suspect has been arrested in the stabbing, which happened around 11am on Monday at the store's entrance on Market Street by 13th Street. Police said the suspect had tried to steal hats before the stabbing but returned the items and left the store without incident after the guards confronted him. However, the man came back 10 minutes later and approached the guard, a black 30-year-old man, before fatally stabbing him in the neck. Another guard, a black 23-year-old man, was also stabbed in the face and arm when he tried to intervene but is in stable condition. A security guard has been stabbed to death in an attack inside a Macy's store right across from City Hall in Philadelphia A large police presence remains outside the department store in Center City as of noon EST Both guards remain unidentified by police, who said one is a longtime employee while the other has only worked at the store for a few months, police said. The suspect was arrested by SEPTA's Summerset station in the Kensington neighborhood after fleeing the scene on public transportation and throwing the knife on train tracks. 'Just a tragic situation, a few weeks before the holiday, these security officers are just doing their job, they're here to make sure that people can come to this location and shop in a safe manner,' said Interim Police Commissioner John Stanford. Stanford added that the guards were not armed - and that the Macy's location has seen over 250 incidents of retail theft this year. It comes as the nations sixth-largest city has been beleaguered by violent crime, tallying a record number of homicides in 2021, most of them gun-related. That number fell from 562 to 516 in 2022 but was still higher than pre-pandemic levels. Texas congressman Troy Nehls reacted to the stabbing, writing on X: 'Three loss prevention employees in a Philadelphia Macys were just stabbed. Right across the street from City Hall. Democrat-run cities are not safe.' Philadelphia has been plagued by crime in recent months - with relentless reports of robbery and looting. Shocking footage out of the City of Brotherly Love showed a Fine Wine And Good Spirits smashed apart in a September flash rob mob crime. Robbers made off with the safe and raided the lottery machine on a night when liquor stores were shut down by the authorities. Police said they made at least 52 arrests. Burglary, theft and other counts were filed against at least 30 people, all but three of them adults, according to Jane Roh, spokesperson for the Philadelphia district attorney's office. Democratic mayor Cherelle Parker, 51, has her work cut out for her in the crime-ridden city. She was voted in after she vowed to crack down on crime by backing stop-and-frisk tactics. Parker emerged from a crowded field in the May primary as the only leading black candidate, and was heavily favored over Republican David Oh in the Democratic stronghold city. A longtime American diplomat charged with working as a Cuban spy for more than 40 years has broken down in tears during his first court appearance. Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, was arrested at his Miami home on Friday after allegedly being caught out by an FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence officer, and he's now been charged with serving as a mole since at least 1981. Newly unsealed court documents allege that Rocha branded America 'the enemy', praised Cuban leader Fidel Castro as 'Comandante' and bragged about his decades of service as 'more than a Grand Slam' to the FBI agent posing as 'Miguel'. Filed in Florida federal court, the complaint charges Rocha with crimes including acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government - and provides a vivid case study of alleged efforts by Cuban intelligence to target government officials. A naturalized US citizen originally from Colombia, Rocha served in top posts in Bolivia, Argentina and the US Interests Section in Havana. His wife, Karla Wittkop Rocha, frowned as she was photographed wearing large shades dressed all in black while exiting the James Lawrence King Federal Justice Building where Rocha appeared on Monday. Victor Manuel Rocha, 73, was arrested in Miami on Friday following an extensive FBI probe, and he's now been charged with serving as a mole since at least 1981, the Justice Department said Rocha was caught out by an FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence officer, according to the Justice Department. (Pictured: Rocha referring to his decades of spying work as 'a grand slam' on a call with the undercover agent) As ambassador to Bolivia, Rocha (right) intervened directly into the 2002 presidential race Karla Wittkop Rocha (C), wife of former American diplomat who served as US ambassador to Bolivia Manuel Rocha, exits the James Lawrence King Federal Justice Building where her husband is scheduled to appear in Miami, Florida Prosecutors have portrayed his case as one of the most brazen infiltrations by a foreign agent in US history. 'This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent,' said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. 'We allege that for over 40 years, Victor Manuel Rocha served as an agent of the Cuban government and sought out and obtained positions within the United States government that would provide him with access to non-public information and the ability to affect US foreign policy. 'Those who have the privilege of serving in the government of the United States are given an enormous amount of trust by the public we serve. 'To betray that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the United States while serving a foreign power is a crime that will be met with the full force of the Justice Department.' Garland added that the septuagenarian's alleged activity constitutes a 'blatant violation' of his oath as a federal official, and 'betrays the trust of the American people'. Rocha wept as he sat handcuffed during his first court appearance Monday and was ordered to remain held pending a bond hearing Wednesday. His attorney declined to comment. If convicted, he could face decades behind bars. Former Pentagon intelligence analyst Ana Belen Montes, 65, who was found guilty of spying for Cuba years ago, was released from a Texas prison in January this year after serving 20 years. She pleaded guilty to using her senior position at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to leak information to Havana in 2002, including the identities of four US secret agents and information on programs to surveil Cuban weapons. Charging documents trace Rocha's alleged illegal ties with Cuba 's notoriously sophisticated intelligence services to 1981, when he first joined the State Department, to well after his departure from the federal government in 2002. The FBI learned about the relationship last year and arranged a series of undercover encounters with someone purporting to be a Cuban intelligence operative. This included one meeting in Miami last year in which Rocha said that he had been directed by the government's intelligence services to 'lead a normal life' and had created the 'legend,' or artificial persona, 'of a right-wing person.' Karla Wittkop, wife of Victor Manuel Rocha (left) and lawyer Jacqueline Arango (right), leaves the James L. King Federal Court in Miami, Florida, on Monday When the undercover FBI agent told Rocha he was 'a covert representative here in Miami' whose mission was 'to contact you, introduce myself as your new contact, and establish a new communication plan,' Rocha answered 'Yes' and confirmed he'd been spying for 'decades' Much of his career was spent in Latin America during the Cold War, which included a stint at the US Interests Section in Cuba The Justice Department did not reveal how Rocha attracted the attention of Cubas intelligence operatives nor did it describe what, if any, sensitive information he may have provided while in government. Instead, the case relies largely on what prosecutors say were Rocha's own admissions, made over the past year to an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence operative. Court papers allege that he has engaged in 'clandestine activity' on Cuba's behalf since at least 1981, including by meeting with Cuban intelligence operatives and providing false information to US government officials about his travels and contacts. Rocha praised the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro as 'Comandante,' branded the U.S. the 'enemy' and bragged about his service for more than 40 years as a Cuban mole in the heart of the State Department and elite U.S. foreign policy circles, the complaint says. 'What we have done ... its enormous ... more than a Grand Slam,' he was quoted as saying at one of several secretly recorded conversations starting last year at discrete locations - a church and outdoor food court - in downtown Miami. 'They underestimated what we could do to them. We did more than they thought,' the document quotes Rocha as saying, referring to the United States. To cover his tracks, he referred to Cuba as 'the island' and led a 'normal life' disguised as a 'right-wing person,' he said in one of the recordings. He also arrived at the meetings with the undercover agent in Miami deliberately straying from the most-direct route and pausing along the way in what prosecutors allege was classic, counter-surveillance 'tradecraft' as taught by Cubas spymasters. 'Its what Ive always been told to do,' Rocha told his handler about his movements. The case is part of a historically tense relationship between the U.S. and Cuba. Washington and Havana restored diplomatic relations in late 2014 after a half-century of Cold War acrimony, though the Trump administration reimposed sanctions on Cuba and, in 2021, redesignated it a state sponsor of terrorism. The charging document traces Rochas illegal ties to Cuba back to 1981, when he first joined the State Department, to well after his departure from the federal government, when he took on lucrative private sector jobs - most recently as a senior business adviser to an international public relations firm. Rocha's wife, Karla Wittkop Rocha, frowned as she was photographed wearing large shades dressed all in black while exiting the James Lawrence King Federal Justice Building where Rocha appeared on Monday Rochas service to Cuba may have gone back earlier than the start of his U.S. diplomatic career. (Pictured: the accused spy's wife Karla Wittkop Rocha leaving the Florida courthouse on Monday) The FBI learned about the relationship last year and arranged a series of undercover encounters in downtown Miami between Rocha and an agent purporting to be a Cuban intelligence operative. 'I always told myself, `The only thing that can put everything we have done in danger is ... someones betrayal, someone who may have met me, someone who may have known something at some point,'' Rocha said in one of of the meetings, according to the charging document. In another meeting last year, Rocha referred to Cuba shooting down two unarmed planes sent by the Miami-based group of exiles Brothers to the Rescue in which four opponents of Castros government were killed in 1996. Theres no indication in the complaint that Rocha aided the Cubans with the military operation - a major flashpoint in more than a half-century of brinksmanship between the communist-ruled island and its right-wing opponents in Miami. But at the time he served as a senior political officer at the U.S. special interest section in Havana. 'I lived through it, because I was in charge,' Rocha said. 'That was a time of a lot of tension.' Rochas service to Cuba may have gone back earlier than the start of his U.S. diplomatic career. The complaint cites Rocha telling the undercover agent, who went by the name Miguel, that he first proved his loyalty in Chile in 1973 - the same year right-wing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, with U.S. backing, overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende. 'They must have told you something because you mentioned Chile,' Rocha told the undercover agent who presented himself as having reached out to him at the request of higher-ups in Cubas National Intelligence Directorate. 'That inspired trust in me.' Officials said Rocha's alleged activity constitutes a 'blatant violation' of his oath as a federal official, and 'betrays the trust of the American people' Rocha's wife, Karla Wittkop Rocha (left), would not comment when contacted by the AP. 'I don't need to talk to you,' she said before hanging up Born in Colombia, Rocha was raised in a working-class home in New York City and went on to obtain a succession of liberal arts degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown before joining the foreign service in 1981. He was the top U.S. diplomat in Argentina between 1997 and 2000 as a decade-long currency stabilization program backed by Washington was unraveling under the weight of huge foreign debt and stagnant growth, triggering a political crisis that would see the South American country cycle through five presidents in two weeks. At his next post, as ambassador to Bolivia, he intervened directly into the 2002 presidential race, warning weeks ahead of the vote that the U.S. would cut off assistance to the poor South American country if it were to elect former coca grower Evo Morales. 'I want to remind the Bolivian electorate that if they vote for those who want Bolivia to return to exporting cocaine, that will seriously jeopardize any future aid to Bolivia from the United States, Rocha said in a speech that was widely interpreted as an attempt to sustain U.S. dominance in the region. The gambit angered Bolivians and gave Morales a last-minute boost. When he was finally elected three years later, the leftist leader expelled Rochas successor as chief of the diplomatic mission for inciting 'civil war.' Rocha also served in Italy, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, and worked as a Latin America expert for the National Security Council. After his retirement from the State Department, Rocha began a second career in business, serving as the president of a gold mine in the Dominican Republic partly owned by Canadas Barrick Gold. More recently, hes held senior roles at XCoal, a Pennsylvania-based coal exporter; Clover Leaf Capital, a company formed to facilitate mergers in the cannabis industry; law firm Foley & Lardner; and Spanish public relations firm Llorente & Cuenca, which said Monday that it had fired him. Manuel Rocha, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia from 2000-2002, is seen with his wife Karla Wittkop Rocha John Feeley, who ended a long diplomatic career serving as U.S. ambassador to Panama, said he was 'saddened and shocked that my former mentor turned out to be a career Cuban mole.' Feeley, who retired from the State Department over differences with President Donald Trump's administration, said that the last time he saw Rocha he was surprised by how a diplomat who had served administrations of both parties had so fully embraced Trumps brand of politics. 'It is beyond ironic that he cultivated this cartoonish persona and that everyone apparently bought it,' he said. The album, which was passed down generations, is expected to go for 12,000 It includes rare photos of Egypt and India, and sketches by the former officer Album belonging to Mark Tanner, who died in 1897, is up for auction in Exeter An unique album of photos and sketches from Egypt and India dating back as far as the early 1850s taken by a retired British officer is to be auctioned tomorrow in Exeter. Mark Tanner, who died in 1897, took rare early photos of landmarks including the Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx during travels undertaken after his retirement from service. His 1851 photograph of the Great Sphinx, which is seen buried up to its neck in sand, is only two years younger than the earliest recorded image of the monumental sculpture taken by Maxine de Camp in 1849. It was not until the 1880s that the Great Sphinx was dug out of the sands that had largely covered it for centuries. A photo of the newly built Suez Canal from 1885, and a set showing Alexandria following the Royal Navy's bombardment of the city during the British occupation of Egypt in 1882 are also included. Mark Tanner's 1851 photograph of the Great Sphinx of Giza is only two years younger than the oldest recorded photo of the monumental ancient Egyptian statue Tanner took sketches from India and Egypt along with photographs, in what has created a unique insight into travel at the height of the 19th century Tanner's younger brother repaired the album following his death, and it has since been passed down generations of the family. It is to be sold tomorrow in Exeter Other images from India show mosques and temples, monuments and royalty, as well as British military units. Tanner, a skilled artist, captured views of Cairo and desert monuments, along with watercolours of British India. He wrote notes about his experiences to accompany some of the hundreds of sketches and photographs. Tanner's younger brother repaired the album following his death, and it has since been passed down generations of the family. It is being sold by a descendant at auctioneers Bearnes, Hampton & Littlewood in Exeter. It is expected to fetch 12,000 during the sale on Tuesday. Nic Saintey, director at Bearnes, Hampton & Littlewood, said: 'The whole album is a snapshot of a time gone by when British colonialism was at its peak. 'But rather than just a dry record of one man's time in the army the album is littered with quirky anecdotes about mess life, his promotions, theatrical skits, the author nearly being consumed by a tiger, there are studies of Indian deities, wildlife and much more which almost makes it documentary material of an individual's life during the period. Nic Saintey, director at Bearnes, Hampton & Littlewood, said: 'The whole album is a snapshot of a time gone by when British colonialism was at its peak' Mark Tanner, who served in India, explored the subcontinent and Egypt after retiring in the early 1850s Unusual phots include one such as a snap of a 'man eating' Tiger 'Finally there is the homage of one brother to another, in that the album was in a dilapidated state, but was painstakingly restored, remounted and amalgamated with excerpt of his diary by his elder brother in his own hand, in the years after his death.' An auction house spokesperson said: 'It's a special item that is causing some excitement here due to its age, beautiful presentation, and subject matter. 'But most importantly it contains some fantastic examples of very old and rare early photographs, dating back to when photography itself was in its infancy. 'This includes a striking photograph of the iconic Great Sphinx monument in Egypt partially buried up to its neck in sand. 'Other photographs within the album include Indian temples, monuments, and Indian Royalty, along with many beautiful original watercolours.' Craig Hearne was left unable to work for a month and suffers sleepless nights A teacher has won a large compensation payout after he suffered life-changing neck injuries from an attack by a pupil at a 24,000-a-year school. Craig Hearne, 52, suffered permanent nerve damage when he was attacked by a violent pupil. His neck was severely injured after the 13-year-old student swung a catering lid at him after 'assaulting' two other staff members on the same day at the 8,000-a-term school. The father-of-three was left with permanent nerve damage to his face as well as ongoing psychological injuries following the attack. Mr Hearne, of Hengoed, near Caerphilly, South Wales, was working at the Queenswood School in Ledbury, Herefordshire. Craig Hearne, 52, suffered permanent nerve damage after being attacked by a pupil with a catering lid He said: said: 'I'm angry that my concerns about this pupil were not adequately addressed by the school. Behavioural policies that exist are not being consistently adhered to. 'The safety of staff members appears to be secondary to the money they can make from school fees. That can't be right. EXCLUSIVE READ MORE: Eton College language teacher, 35, accused of a string of sex offences against an underage boy Advertisement 'On the day of my attack, the pupil had assaulted two other staff members, yet he was still able to go on to attack me. 'He had a long history of violence towards staff and pupils, but there haven't been appropriate measures implemented to address his behavioural needs.' Mr Hearne was taken to Ledbury A&E before he was referred to the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff for specialist treatment. Doctors found he suffered a deep laceration of his neck which led to permanent nerve damage, leaving him unable to work for a month. His injuries included permanent loss of sensation on the right side of his face which meant he is unable to ride a motorcycle as he struggles to put a helmet on. Mr Hearne, who also suffers sleepless nights, has now received compensation from the school for the injuries he suffered in January 2020. He has now been awarded compensation from employers Aspris Children's Services after instructing law firm Thompsons Solicitors. The incident happened at Queenswood School in Ledbury, Herefordshire which charges 8,000 a term Mr Hearne added: 'I hope by taking this action, robust behavioural procedures will be implemented and strictly adhered to, so that others won't have to endure the physical and psychological distress that I have had to experience.' Queenswood is an independent school for children and young people aged between 11 and 19 with social, emotional, and mental health difficulties. READ MORE: Teacher tells students to stop being noisy during exam - only to discover one of the pupils has GIVEN BIRTH Advertisement Mr Hearne said the pupil, who has since been excluded, had previously been involved in 15 incidents, including ten instances of violence towards staff. He said the pupil had come into school armed with a weapon made of a wooden pole and nails sticking out of it a year earlier. Lawyer Caragh Hogan, of Thompsons Solicitors, said: 'I cannot begin to imagine what our client has been through over the past four years. 'He's been left with life-changing physical injuries and is still dealing with the psychological trauma as a result of this attack. His employers failed to address staff concerns and implement behavioural procedures that dealt with the risk posed by the pupil. 'We hope this settlement can provide Mr Hearne with some closure, so that he can begin to move on with his life.' The exact figure awarded to Mr Hearne in compensation was not disclosed for confidentiality reasons. He was, in a lawyer's words, 'the first great love' of Joanna Parrish's life. After graduating they had been planning to marry. Today, however, Patrick Proctor told a Paris court how his dream of settling down with the 'intelligent, cool, mischievous' girl he met at Leeds University was destroyed, 33 years ago, when she kept a rendezvous with France's most notorious serial killing couple. Ironically, it was the young lovers' desire to snatch a few days together - while Joanna was on a teaching assignment in the Burgundy region and Mr Proctor was studying Czechoslovakia - that led the 21-year-old student into their clutches. Fiercely independent, and not wishing to ask her parents for money for the travel fare to Prague, Joanna offered private English lessons in Auxerre, where was teaching on secondment at a high school. The advert she placed in a local paper, containing her phone number, was seen by Michel Fourniret, who called her saying he was looking for a tutor for his son, and arranged to meet her in the city centre. Joanna Parrish with her fiance, Patrick Proctor (left) at Leeds University in 1987 Monique Olivier (pictured) sits in the courtroom for her trial as she is charged with aiding and abetting gruesome attacks by her late husband, Michel Fourniret Self-confessed serial killer Michel Fourniret pictured arriving at court in a police car, on March 28, 2008 Joanna Parrish, 20, was killed by Fourninet. Her naked body was found in the Yonne river near Auxerre in central France Had the so-called Ogre of the Ardennes turned up alone, that May evening in 1990, Mr Proctor told the court, she would not have climbed into his van. But Fourniret's wife, Monique Olivier, was with him, and 'with a woman there, there would have been more trust,' he said. The following day, Joanna's naked body was found in the River Yonne, a few miles from Auxerre. She had been brutally beaten, drugged, raped and strangled with cord or flex. Yesterday, Olivier listened impassively from the dock as Mr Proctor, now 55 and living in Hertfordshire, stood just a few from her and said: 'It's barely believable that a human being could do that to somebody else.' For 30 years, he had never spoken of his relationship with Joanna. Standing before the judge in a suit, white shirt and burgundy tie, however, and speaking in French, he recalled how they moved into shared digs together during their second year at university, and how he twice visited her when she began her year in Auxerre. Even when he went to study in Czechoslovakia, where communication was then difficult, they stayed in close touch by letter and his weekly phone-calls to the school where Joanna taught. 'You were the great love of Joanna's life, everybody says that. For you, it was your first love,' remarked the Parrish family lawyer, Didier Seban. 'It was to her great happiness that she was coming to see you, wasn't it? 'Oui,' said Mr Proctor balefully. Gendarmes work in the forest of Issancourt-et-Rumel, northeastern France, on April 10, 2021 on the site where French police units conducted searches to find the body of missing girl Estelle Mouzin Roger Parrish (left) said his 'perfect family' had been forever destroyed when his daughter was murdered Had they planned to marry, the lawyer asked him 'Yes, we spoke of that. We were very young but that was part of our future.' Everything had changed when he received an urgent call from his mother in England, saying he must return home. Joanna's death affected him so profoundly that his studies were disrupted for two years afterwards. Earlier, Joanna's father, Roger Parrish, now 80, told the court how he and his then wife, Pauline Murrell, had been introduced to Mr Proctor. 'We were very happy for her, and for them both. They seemed to well suited to each other and we looked forward to welcoming him as part of our family,' he said. However, he said, his 'perfect family' had been forever destroyed when his daughter was murdered, weeks before they celebrated her 21st birthday. 'Never ending devastation doesn't come close to describing the effect Joanna's murder had on our family,' he said, his voice frequently breaking as he spoke in memory of her. Joanna had been a 'happy, loveable and steadfast' child 'who made friends easily'. At high school she had been appointed deputy head girl. A brilliant linguist, she was set to gain a top degree at university. Her love of France had begun with holidays and exchange visits, Mr Parrish said, and grew after she moved to Auxerre. But 'her story ended in May, 1990', he said. 'The bright, beautiful and talented 20-year-old with the world at her feet was never able to have the life she wanted or deserved. The world was robbed of an exceptional woman, and we were robbed of a sister, daughter, cousin and niece. 'Her life was cruelly ended by a narcissistic psychopath and his female partner who was an active participant in all of his crimes.' After he spoke, photographs of Joanna were projected onto a screen mounted in the courtroom. Here she was, aged three or four, smiling with her brother Barney, three years younger, on a beach holiday in the West Country. There she was, looking stunning in a blue gown at the university ball. Tributes from her university friends, read to the court, described a young woman with 'twinkling eyes' and 'amazing smile', zestful and fun-loving, and always ready to help others. Monique Olivier was described in 2008 by a judge as a 'devil with two faces' and her husband's 'bloody muse'. Pictured in court on November 28, 2023 The Parrish family have previously voiced disgust at the many mistakes and apparent indifference show by the French police and judiciary during the protracted investigation. On Monday, Joanna's father lamented the 'enormously long time' it had taken to bring the case. Frustrated about the lack of progress in the investigation, he said he and his ex-wife had travelled to France to conduct their own inquiries for seven or eight years after the murder. Most of the information they obtained came not from the police but journalists, he said. It was a British reporter who informed him of Fourniret's arrest for a string of sex murders, and his suspected involvement in Joanna's death, in 2003. Mr Parrish expressed 'regret', though not surprise, that Fourniret had died in jail during the protracted delay in bringing him to trial, leaving 75-year-old Olivier who admits being complicit but claims she acted under his influence to face the court alone. However, the most stinging criticism of the French authorities came from his sister, Joanna's aunt Pauline Harris, who had travelled from Derbyshire, and also gave a moving testimony. Since Joanna had been tricked into accepting a lift by Olivier, and that she had first confessed to her part in the murder to prosecutors 16 years ago, Mrs Harris asked why charges had not been brought sooner. 'We can't redo past mistakes and omissions in the investigation. But we hope this this will help the families of future victims and possible prevent the deaths of other young girls,' she said. Judge Didier Safar commended Mr Parish and Mrs Murrell, who chose not to speak, for their 'tenacious' pursuit of the truth. Without it, he said pointedly, this case scheduled to end on December 15 - would never have come before the court. July 1: Gabby Petito and her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie left Blue Point, New York for a cross-country road trip August 12: Police in Moab, Utah respond to a domestic incident involving the couple Aug. 17: Laundrie allegedly flies back to Florida to 'clear out a storage unit' Aug. 21: Petito's father, Joseph Petito, has his last FaceTime video call with his daughter who was in Salt Lake City, Utah Aug. 23: Laundrie flies back to Utah to 'rejoin Gabby' on their trip Aug. 24: Petito is last seen at a hotel in Salt Lake City with Laundrie Aug. 25: Petito makes final call to her mother, Nichole Schmidt, saying she was in Grand Teton National Park Aug. 25 or 26: The couple chats with the owner of a shop called 'Rustic Row' in Victor, Utah for about 20 minutes Aug. 27: Video of Petito's van was taken by blogger Jenn Bethune around 6.30 pm at the Spread Creek Campground; Witnesses say they saw a 'commotion' with the couple at Merry Piglets Tex-mex restaurant in Jackson, Wyoming Aug. 29: The day that Wisconsin TikToker Miranda Baker claimed that she and her boyfriend were approached by Laundrie at Grand Teton National Park and asked them for a ride at 5.30pm Aug. 30: Schmidt receives the last text from Petito's phone: 'No service in Yosemite' Sept. 1: Laundrie returns to his parents' home in North Port, Florida in a van without Petito Sept. 6-7: Laundrie and his parents visit Fort De Soto campsite in Florida Sept. 11: Schmidt reports Petito missing to authorities in New York; Petito and Laundrie's van was impounded by police in Florida that same day Sept. 12: Grand Teton National Park rangers search for Petito Sept. 13: Laundrie's lawyer says on October 5 that his parents now 'believe' this was the day they last saw him heading for a hike Sept. 14: Laundrie issues a statement about Petito's disappearance through his lawyer; Laundrie's parents claim on September 17 that Laundrie left his parents' home for a hike this day and they hadn't seen from him since Sept. 15: Laundrie is officially named a person of interest in Petito's case Sept. 17: Laundrie family attorney confirms his whereabouts are unknown Sept. 18: North Port police and the FBI start searching the Carlton Reserve in Sarasota County for missing Brian Laundrie Sept. 19: Bethune realizes she has video of Petito's van around 12am and submits the FBI with the footage 10 minutes later; Officials announce a body was found near Grand Teton National Park that matched Petitos description in the afternoon Sept. 21: Coroner confirms remains found in Grand Tetons belong to Petito. Her death is ruled a homicide but her cause of death is still under invesetigation Sept. 20 - 22: FBI and North Port police continue search for Laundrie in Carlton Reserve Sept. 22: Neighbors say they saw the Laudrie family pack up their detached camper on the day Gabby was reported missing. DailyMail.com photos show the camper was back in the driveway two days later, on September 13 Sept. 23: FBI issues an arrest warrant for Laundrie for 'use of unauthorized access device' for fraudulently using a Capitol One Bank debit card that was not his between August 30 and September 1 to spend $1,000; A probe is launched into the police handling of the Utah police incident on Aug. 12; Laundrie's parents visit their attorney in Orlando Sept. 25: Dog the Bounty Hunter joins the search for Laundrie Sept. 26: A funeral is held for Petito in Holbrook, New York, and her family launch a charity to help parents find missing children Sept. 27: Manhunt for Laundrie in the Carlton Reserve is scaled back after 10 day search doesn't find him. Dog the Bounty Hunter says Laundrie and his parents stayed at Fort De Soto Park from September 1-3 and September 6-8 - and that on the latter visit only the parents left Sept. 28: Laundrie's mom is accused of using a burner phone to contact her son Sept. 29: Documents reveal Laundrie's mom canceled a reservation for the Fort De Soto Park campsite for two from September 1 to 3 and booked for three from September 6 to 8; FBI seizes surveillance footage from site; FBI investigates lead Laundrie bought a burner phone on September 14; Sept. 30: Bodycam footage from a second officer at the August 12 incident is released showing a distressed Petito admitting Laundrie hit her; FBI agents collect more evidence from the Laundrie home Oct. 1: It emerges Laundrie's sister had contact with him after she said she did Oct. 2: A hiker along the Appalachian Trail claims to have seen Laundrie near the border of Tennessee and North Carolina Oct. 3: Investigators searched the area on the Appalachian trail for any signs that Laundrie had been there Oct. 4: Laundrie's sister told protestors outside her home that her family has been ignoring her after they rebuked her story and that she does not know where her brother is Oct 5: Laundrie's sister appeared on Good Morning America to say she would turn her brother in if she knew where he is; Oct. 7: Laundrie's father Christopher joins FBI agents on the search for his son at the Carlton Reserve but the search brings up no clues Oct. 12: Teton County Coroner Dr. Brent Blue announces autopsy findings which show Petito died by strangulation; No specific date of death was given - only that she was dead 3-4 weeks before her body was found Oct. 16: Petito's parents are seen collecting her ashes from the Valley Mortuary in Jackson, Wyoming October 20: Human remains found in Carlton Reserve October 21: FBI confirm the body found belongs to Brian Laundrie. A notebook, backpack and dry bag are also found near the body Police are hunting a hooded man wearing a Covid mask who is accused of spraying antisemitic graffiti onto a Labour MP's office building in north London. A still taken from CCTV footage has been released in a bid to track down the suspect, who is pictured with hood up and wearing a blue face mask, after Feryal Clark's office on Hertford Road in Enfield, was vandalised. The incident happened just after 11pm on November 21. Enfield North MP Ms Clark shared a picture of the graffiti on X, formerly known as Twitter, with the caption: 'The cowards who sprayed graffiti on my office shutters, the police have CCTV footage and the paint will be removed today. 'Next time, just try emailing!' A still taken from CCTV footage has been released in a bid to track down the suspect, who is pictured with hood up and wearing a blue face mask The antisemitic graffiti was sprayed onto the shutters of the MPs office Enfield North MP Ms Clark shared a picture of the graffiti on X, formerly known as Twitter , with the caption: 'The cowards who sprayed graffiti on my office shutters, the police have CCTV footage and the paint will be removed today' Antisemitic crime in the UK has risen sharply amid the renewed conflict in Gaza, with more than 1,000 incidents logged by Jewish charity the Community Security Trust since the attack by Hamas on October 7. PC Louis Blackburne-Maze, who is leading the investigation said: 'This was a racially aggravated crime. 'There is no place for hate in London and it's important that everyone feels safe on our streets. 'We are very keen to speak to this man so if you know who he is or have any other information that could help, we encourage you to get in touch with police. Anyone with information about the graffiti can call police on 020 8246 9386 quoting the reference CAD 1361/04DEC23, or contact the force on X @MetCC. To remain anonymous, contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111 or online. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Monday pointed a finger at Iran when discussing the attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea at the hands of Houthi rebels. On Sunday, ballistic missiles fired by the Houthis struck three commercial ships, while the American warship, the USS Carney, downed three drones that were headed in its direction. Sullivan echoed that it remained unclear whether the Carney was the intended target of the three unmanned aerial vehicles but said the incident 'is truly a source of global concerns and a threat to international peace and stability.' 'We will continue as we move forward to consult very closely with allies and partners to determine and take all appropriate responses,' Sullivan said. 'We have every reason to believe that these attacks while they were launched by the Houthis in Yemen are fully enabled by Iran,' he added. White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Monday pointed a finger at Iran when discussing the attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea at the hands of Houthi rebels The USS Carney (pictured) shot down three drones as ballistic missiles being fired from a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen attacked three commercial ships on Sunday The attack continues a pattern of escalation since the advent of the Israeli-Hamas war. On Sunday, the Carney detected a ballistic missile being fired from a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen toward a Bahamas-flagged commercial ship named the Unity Explorer. That missile missed the ship and a short time later the Carney shot down a drone headed its way. A second missile hit the Unity Explorer, while the Carney shot down a second drone as it responded to the Unity Explorer's distress call, according to Central Command's report. The Unity Explorer only suffered minor damage from the missile strike. Two other commercial carriers, the Panamanian-flagged Number 9 and Sophie II, were also hit by missiles. The Carney shot down a third drone as the warship responded to the Sophie II's distress call. 'We have every reason to believe that these attacks while they were launched by the Houthis in Yemen are fully enabled by Iran,' National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said during Monday's White House briefing The Sophie II reported no significant damage, while Number 9 reported some damage from the missile strikes. No casualties occurred. Sullivan said at Monday's press briefing that the vessels were connected to 14 different nations - but they weren't necessary tied to Israel. 'I can't answer that definitively but we don't think so. We do not believe that all three of the ships have ties to Israel and it goes to show you the level of recklessness that the Houthis are operating on,' Sullivan said. 'Any ship they shoot at, whether it's Israeli-owned or has some connection in the past to Israel, that doesn't make it any more of a justifiable target under international law than if the ship didn't have ties to Israel,' he added. One remedy that is on the table, he said, are what are referred to as maritime task forces, when military vessels from a coalition of countries would escort commercial ships through this portion of the Red Sea. Sullivan noted 'that would be a natural part of the comprehensive response to what we're seeing here.' The top national security official said that the Biden administration wanted to build a coalition to deal with this issue with 'as much buy-in from as many countries as possible.' 'This is an issue for the entire world,' he said, while also reiterating who's ultimately responsible. 'We are talking about the Houthis here, they are the ones with the finger on the trigger, that gun, the weapons here are being supplied by Iran and Iran, we believe, is the ultimate party responsible for this,' Sullivan said. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis trained his fire on rival Nikki Haley ahead of the fourth Republican debate on Wednesday, saying she was not a true conservative. The pair are locked in a bitter battle for second place behind Donald Trump, the clear frontrunner for the party's 2024 nomination. DeSantis trailed his attack lines two days ahead of the debate, saying that Haley was backed by corporate media and Wall Street rather than regular voters. 'People are gonna vote for somebody who's going to be a fighter, who represents their conservative principles, and that actually is going to be able to win on all these issues,' he said during an interview with Newsmax. 'And I'm the only guy running that can say that. Florid Gov. Ron DeSantis launched a blistering attack against former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, his rival for second place behind Donald Trump in the Republican nomination race 'I think what Haley has done is she's gotten a lot of support from corporate media, and she's gotten a lot of support now from from Wall Street interest, but that typically is not how it resonates in Iowa. 'And what I would just say Is she clearly is not a conservative.' The Haley campaign quickly punched back, accusing DeSantis of flat-out lying. 'DeSantis is so desperate to revive his failure of a campaign, he cant be bothered with the facts,' spokesman Ken Farnaso told DailyMail.com. 'Nikki Haley has been a conservative outsider who took on the establishment bullies in both parties. She turned a double-digit unemployment state into an economic powerhouse, signed voter ID and one of the toughest anti-illegal immigration laws in the country into law, and created thousands of new jobs across South Carolina. 'The more Ron DeSantis loses, the more he lies.' A year ago, DeSantis won reelection in Florida and eclipsed even Trump in the hypothetical race for the party nomination. He has seen his support wane since launching his campaign while former South Carolina Gov. Haley has gained momentum in recent weeks. Her polling numbers have risen to within a point or two of DeSantis, and last week she won the backing of the influential Koch network. Haley has seen her star rise in recent weeks as strong debate performances have led to key endorsements and improving poll numbers. Haley and DeSantis meet in Wednesday's debate They clashed repeatedly in last month's third Republican debate in Miami, Florida In the last debate, the two clashed over China policy as well as energy. This time, DeSantis made clear he will go after Haley's record in office. 'I think if you look at her record as South Carolina governor, people can't even identify any major achievements that she had,' he claimed. 'She actually killed a bill to protect girls and women and bathrooms and locker rooms, which we know has been a big issue. I signed similar I signed legislation protecting girls and women athletes. 'She actually attacked me for standing up against Disney when we had the issue with the sexualization of the elementary school curriculum.' In 2016, Haley said there was no need for a such a bill because there had been no complaints that bathrooms were being misused or anyone's rights had been infringed. DeSantis also attacked his rival for meeting the head of investment firm Blackrock, which is hated by some conservatives for its stance on ethical investing. 'And there's actually an ad being run here in Iowa that I saw that shows Nikki talking about in her own words, how her inspiration to get into politics was not Ronald Reagan, not Margaret Thatcher, but Hillary Rodham Clinton,' he said. In the meantime, they lost one of their lesser known rivals for the nomination Monday. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum ended his long-shot presidential campaign, blaming debate organizers for their strict qualification rules for preventing him making an impact. Police have accused the director of the Miss Nicaragua pageant of intentionally rigging contests so that anti-government beauty queens would win as part of a plot to overthrow the government. Nicaraguan pageant director Karen Celebertti and her husband and son were charged with conspiracy against the government. She allegedly tried to 'turn pageants into political traps and political ambushes, financed by foreign agents.' It all started November 18, when Nicaraguas Sheynnis Palacios, 23, won the Miss Universe competition, becoming the first Central American to wear the crown. The government of President Daniel Ortega briefly thought it had scored a rare public relations victory, calling her win a moment of 'legitimate joy and pride.' Pageant director Karen Celebertti and her husband and son were charged with conspiracy against the government. She tried to 'turn pageants into political traps and political ambushes, financed by foreign agents' It all started November 18, Nicaraguas Sheynnis Palacios won the Miss Universe competition, becoming the first Central American to wear the crown But the tone quickly soured the day after the win when it emerged that Palacios had posted photos of herself on Facebook participating in one of the mass anti-government protests in 2018. The protests were violently repressed, and human rights officials say 355 people were killed by government forces. Ortega claimed the protests were an attempted coup with foreign backing, aiming for his overthrow. His opponents said Nicaraguans were protesting his increasingly repressive rule and seemingly endless urge to hold on to power. A statement by the National Police claimed Celebertti 'participated actively, on the internet and in the streets in the terrorist actions of a failed coup,' an apparent reference to the 2018 protests. Celebertti apparently slipped through the hands of police after she was reportedly denied permission to enter the country a few days ago. Celebertti, her husband and son face charges of 'treason to the motherland.' They have not spoken publicly about the charges against them. A statement by the National Police claimed Celebertti 'participated actively, on the internet and in the streets in the terrorist actions of a failed coup,' an apparent reference to the 2018 protests Celebertti, her husband and son face charges of 'treason to the motherland.' They have not spoken publicly about the charges against them Just five days after Palacio's win, Vice President and First Lady Rosario Murillo was lashing out at opposition social media sites that celebrated Palacios win as a victory for the opposition She 'remained in contact with the traitors, and offered to employ the franchises, platforms and spaces supposedly used to promote `innocent beauty pageants, in a conspiracy orchestrated to convert the contests into traps and political ambushes financed by foreign agents,' according to the statement. It didn't help that many ordinary Nicaraguans - who are largely forbidden to protest or carry the national flag in marches - took advantage of the Miss Universe win as a rare opportunity to celebrate in the streets. Their use of the blue-and-white national flag, as opposed to Ortegas red-and-black Sandinista banner, further angered the government, who claimed the plotters 'would take to the streets again in December, in a repeat of history's worst chapter of vileness.' Just five days after Palacio's win, Vice President and First Lady Rosario Murillo was lashing out at opposition social media sites that celebrated Palacios win as a victory for the opposition. 'In these days of a new victory, we are seeing the evil, terrorist commentators making a clumsy and insulting attempt to turn what should be a beautiful and well-deserved moment of pride into destructive coup-mongering,' Murillo said. Ortegas government seized and closed the Jesuit University of Central America in Nicaragua, which was a hub for 2018 protests against the Ortega regime, along with at least 26 other Nicaraguan universities. Miss Universe 2022, R'Bonney Gabriel of US, puts the crown on Miss Universe 2023, Sheynnis Palacios, after she won the 72th edition of the Miss Universe pageant, in San Salvador on November 18, 2023 The government has also outlawed or closed more than 3,000 civic groups and non-governmental organizations, arrested and expelled opponents, stripped them of their citizenship and confiscated their assets. Thousands have fled into exile. Palacios, who became the first Nicaraguan to win Miss Universe, has not commented on the situation. She is still in New York. During the contest, Palacios, 23, said she wants to work to promote mental health after suffering debilitating bouts of anxiety herself. She also said she wants to work to close the salary gap between the genders. But on a since-deleted Facebook account under her name, Palacios posted photos of herself at a protest, writing she had initially been afraid of participating. 'I didnt know whether to go, I was afraid of what might happen.' Some who attended the march that day recall seeing the tall, striking Palacios there. A 32-year-old man featured in the popular podcast S-Town was shot dead in a standoff with Alabama police, early Sunday but details of what led to the deadly encounter remain scarce. Woodstock police were called to the home of Tyler Goodson - best known for his role in the investigative journalism podcast 'S-Town' created by Serial and This American Life - who had reportedly barricaded himself in his home. When officers arrived at the 500 block of Georgia Loop after midnight Sunday, Goodson reportedly brandished a gun at the officers, leading to a three-hour standoff. Before his death, he posted an eerie message on Facebook at 1.39am Sunday, that read: 'Police bout to shoot me down in my own yard.' It remains unclear who called 911 or what the reported situation was that led to a police response. Woodstock police were called to the home of Tyler Goodson, 32, (pictured)- best known for his role in the investigative journalism podcast 'S-Town' created by Serial and This American Life Goodson reportedly barricaded himself in his Alabama home located along the 500 block of Georgia Loop - during the early hours of Sunday. Goodson had brandished a gun at officers before he was shot dead, authorities said Goodson, worked as a tattoo artist and plant worker, who also spent time on his property working on projects and fixing items that needed some time and attention The community was mourning Goodson's unexpected death, including Woodstock Mayor Jeff Dodson. Dodson expressed grief upon hearing news of Goodson's shock death. In the letter, the Mayor also apologized for revealing Goodson's name before his family was notified. 'Yesterday, I woke up to the news of a tragedy. I don't believe that I had the right to do that until 24 hours had passed in order to allow his family to be notified,' Dodson wrote. 'Now that this time has passed I am devastated to let you know that Tyler Goodson was the young man involved,' he said, in part. 'I know that everyone wants answers and details, myself included. Tyler was well known and loved by myself, his family and this community. That love extends far beyond due to the S-Town podcast. 'Please remember at this time that he is so much more than a character to the fans who loved him. This young man was a father, son, brother and friend to many.' Dodson sad multiple law enforcement agencies were called for backup during the standoff and police spent three hours trying to talk him out of the house. The Alabama State Bureau of Investigation is now in charge of the case. Officials from Woodstock police and the bureau did not respond in time for this report. It remains unclear who called 911 or what the reported situation was that led to a police response. Goodson's claim to fame came shortly after the launch of 'S-Town' in March 2017. The podcast revolved around the death of John B. McLemore, a clock repairman, who shared what he disliked about his Alabama town. Goodson has referred to McLemore as a father-figure. Th podcast S-Town tells the story of an alleged murder and another death, and winds up focusing on John McLemore's (pictured) tortured relationship with the town of Woodstock, and his own inner demons McLemore committed suicide by drinking cyanide before the show came out. Goodson called McLemore a 'father figure' to him before his own untimely death The blue-eyed, bearded Goodson, who hailed from the town of Woodstock, population 1,500, worked as a tattoo artist and plant worker. His claim to fame came shortly after the launch of 'S-Town' in March 2017. The podcast revolved around John B. McLemore, a clock repairman, who shared what he disliked about his Alabama town and revealed his inner demons. The podcast focuses on the towns of Woodstock and Green Pond, where strangers now stop by occasionally to take selfies at locations from the show or put a dime atop the grave of the main character, McLemore, who committed suicide by drinking cyanide before the show came out. Goodson has referred to McLemore as a father-figure. McLemore was a Bibb County native who sent an email to producers of the 'This American Life' podcast with the subject line of 'John B McLemore lives in S-town, Alabama.' S-Town tells the story of an alleged murder and another death, and winds up focusing on McLemore's tortured relationship with the town of Woodstock, his own inner demons, and Goodson. S-Town took shape when Brian Reed, an investigative journalist and This American Life producer, agreed to meet McLemore five years ago to examine an unsolved murder. Woodstock police were called to the home of Tyler Goodson (pictured), a central figure in the the investigative journalism podcast, 'S-Town' created by Serial and This American Life Reed established that the murder never happened but developed a close friendship with the mercurial clock restorer who killed himself in June 2015 on the front porch of his rural Alabama home. Rather than abandoning his project, Reed began piecing together the labyrinthine mysteries of McLemore's eccentric life, from the giant hedge maze he built on his land to the rumored hoard of gold he buried beneath it. The setting for this twisting, turning narrative is S-Town, McLemore's unflattering nickname for his tiny hometown of Woodstock, where Goodson says he is public enemy number one. S-Town was downloaded forty million times in 114 countries according to published reports. It was set and recorded in the town of Woodstock. The podcast had also won a Peabody Award in 2017. In 2017, Goodson also pleaded guilty to a burglary charge and other counts for taking lumber, old vehicles and a laptop computer from the property of McLemore. It comes as DailyMail.com revealed an extensive cover-up of sexual abuse by figures in the church She was paid $300,000 by the church, but is now speaking out Chelsea Goodrich says her father - who was a Mormon bishop - repeatedly abused her as a child A woman who claims she was sexually abused by her bishop father and was paid $300k by the Mormon church is now speaking out to keep others safe. Chelsea Goodrich said when she was a child her father, John Goodrich, a former bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly referred to as the Mormon church, had routinely abused her. She says he climbed into her bed in a state of arousal on multiple occasions during her childhood. She told Mormon church leaders and now says they paid her $300,000 to settle potential claims and to delete her recordings of meetings about the abuse. Her father is still a free man, working as a dentist in Idaho. She is now speaking out about her situation so others don't face the same fate. 'Right now, my main concern continues to be other children,' Goodrich said. Her story comes after DailyMail.com exposed significant abuses in the church, where leaders allegedly covered up years of rampant sexual abuse and incest. Chelsea Goodrich poses for a portrait at a friend's house in Ketchum, Idaho, in September Recordings obtained by The Associated Press show that instead of helping prosecutors, the church used a legal playbook that has helped protect itself from sex abuse claims The investigation revealed the church is facing legal action over allegations it has 'maintained a pattern and practice' of hiding abuse from authorities. More than a dozen current and former members of the church have come forward with shocking claims of a culture of 'cover ups' - defying leaders who are alleged to have 'silenced' and 'threatened' those who speak out. In the spring of 2015, Chelsea Goodrich, then a 29-year-old graduate student in psychology living in Southern California, began to confront disturbing memories. While her peers dated and created lasting relationships, she filled with anxiety and dread at the prospect. 'Instead of wanting to have a relationship, I just remember feeling terror and confusion and kind of disgust, like all at once, about it,' she said. Her memories included several occasions when her father slipped into her bed at night in their house in Mountain Home, Idaho, to spoon her while he was aroused, pushing himself against her backside. Her father was charged in relation to her allegations, but pleaded guilty only to a drug-related charge in a separate case. On one occasion, when she was 9, she said her father had apologized to her for being aroused while they were playing in the family swimming pool and told her not to tell her mother. The last similar incident Chelsea recalls occurred during a school field trip to DC where her father admits he climbed into bed with her in a state of arousal and slipped close behind her. Her dad admitted to his actions during a recorded conversation. Goodrich's father, a popular Idaho dentist and former bishop in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church, was excommunicated after sharing details about his relationship with her when she was a child during a religious confession Goodrich's father is today a free man, and she says she decided to speak out to protect other children While grappling with her memories, Chelsea met a Mormon friend she came to trust and told them about her experiences. Her new friend told her that her father, Paul Rytting, was a high church official who often dealt with sexual abuse complaints and suggested Chelsea contact him. Chelsea believed Ryttings main responsibility was to aid victims, but at about that time he was deeply involved in defending the church in a highly publicized West Virginia child sex abuse lawsuit. Several Mormon families had accused the church of allowing a Mormon sex abuser, Christopher Michael Jensen, to babysit for their children, whom he allegedly abused. Jensen was sentenced to serve 35 to 75 years in prison after he was found guilty of abusing two of the children. Rytting made sworn statements in that case which were sealed by a judge and obtained by the AP -- describing the management of the secretive church Helpline, a phone number set up by the church for bishops to report instances of child sex abuse. Church officials say that they dont keep any records of the reports to the Helpline. Rytting also revealed the lengths to which the church goes to ensure confidentiality for Mormon perpetrators who make spiritual confessions. 'Disciplinary proceedings are subject to the highest confidentiality possible,' Rytting said in one affidavit. 'If members had any concerns that their disciplinary files could be read by a secular judge or attorneys or be presented to a jury as evidence in a public trial, their willingness to confess and repent and for their souls to be saved would be seriously compromised.' Rytting did not respond to telephone calls or an email with a list of questions. After meeting Ryttings daughter, Chelsea travelled with her to Salt Lake City and met Paul Rytting while staying at the family home. Audio recordings of the meetings over the coming years show how Rytting, despite expressing concern for what he called Johns 'significant sexual transgression,' would employ the risk management playbook that has helped the church keep child sexual abuse cases secret. In particular, the church would discourage a bishop, Michael Miller, who had heard confession from John Goodrich about the abuse from testifying. They cited a law that exempts clergy from having to divulge information about child sex abuse that is gleaned in a confession. Without Millers testimony, prosecutors dropped the charges, telling Lorraine that her impending divorce and the years that had passed since Chelseas alleged abuse might prejudice jurors. Rytting also offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for a confidentiality agreement and a pledge by Chelsea and Lorraine to destroy their recordings of the meetings, which they had made at the recommendation of an attorney and with Ryttings knowledge. Chelsea told the Mormon church and says they paid her $300,000 to stay quiet and to delete her recordings of meetings about the abuse In 2015, Chelsea didnt feel ready to discuss her memories and kept them to herself, she said. But she eventually told her mother. And when Lorraine Goodrich confronted her husband in their Idaho home, in July of 2015, John confirmed becoming aroused while around his daughter -- but denied any direct sexual contact, according to recordings of the conversations. In one recorded conversation with Chelsea and Lorraine, he blamed the devil for his decision to climb into bed with his 13-year-old daughter after hearing sexual activity in an adjoining hotel room during the trip to Washington. 'The adversary Im sure worked on me,' he said, using a Mormon term for Satan. 'And thats when it was going through my mind when I climbed in bed with Chelsea and was really aroused with the intent of spooning and snuggling you but I didnt.' With his family and marriage in turmoil, John revealed details of his relationship with Chelsea to visiting relatives, according to a written statement from the relatives which was ultimately submitted to authorities. They urged him to go to the police. When John said hed rather talk with a Mormon bishop, the Goodrich relatives drove him to Millers home, where John made his confession. Less than a year later, on Sept. 1, 2016, Chelsea and her mother met with Mountain Home police and played the recordings of their conversations with John. The next day, after a nearly two-hour interview at police headquarters, officers arrested him. 'Nothing happened,' John protested, as police cuffed him during a video interview obtained by the AP. 'Im not ashamed of anything.' It was then that Chelsea decided to enlist Ryttings help and began corresponding with him by email to persuade him to allow Miller to testify against her father. Chelsea and Lorraine also let Rytting know that church officials may have known about John Goodrich and his daughter for years. READ MORE: Mormon leaders accused of 'covering up' an 'epidemic' of sexual abuse that rivals scandals in Catholic church Katie Medley, 35, has blasted the Mormon church for failing to take action against a doctor and ecclesiastical leader who allegedly sexually abused her and around 200 other women Advertisement John told them, in conversations that were also recorded, that hed 'repented' details of his relationship with Chelsea to several local church leaders. Rytting told them that church leaders said they did not recall hearing any such confessions. Then, 10 days after Johns arrest in Mountain Home, another woman stepped forward with additional allegations of sex abuse after learning of the case against John. The 53-year-old single mother accused him of having nonconsensual sex with her after giving her the drug Halcion, a controlled substance John often used to sedate patients during dental procedures. She alleged that Goodrich drugged her the previous July after she cut off a sexual relationship with him. As detectives investigated the new allegations, John Goodrich, who was still facing charges in Chelseas case, called the woman at least four times, in conversations she recorded and which the AP obtained. In these conversations, Goodrich asked her to lie to police while admitting he drugged her even as he tried to minimize his actions and repeatedly apologized. 'It was fun as heck, but it was wrong,' he said in a recorded conversation. 'Just out of principle it was wrong, and Im just mad as hell at myself.' In July 2017, prosecutors dropped charges against Goodrich's father related to Chelseas allegations. Six months later, a prosecutor in a neighboring county was crafting a plea deal in which he again would escape sex crime charges. In the end, he pleaded guilty to distribution of a controlled substance, Halcion, and a judge sentenced him to 90 days in jail and three years of probation. At the initial meeting with Chelsea and Lorraine, Rytting said the clergy-penitent privilege law made it next to impossible for Miller to testify against John Goodrich. Now, four months later, he was back in Hailey with an offer. Much had changed for Lorraine and Chelsea in the meantime. Theyd begun to feel ostracized by the Mormon community. Millers wife had even removed them from a local church community 'sisters' email list, they told Rytting. Miller had been an advocate for Chelsea. During the first meeting with Rytting, Miller said John Goodrich, before his excommunication, had tried to backtrack on what hed told Miller in confession. 'John told me one thing, and then kind of toned it way down to the stake president,' said Miller, referring to a higher-ranking church official who oversees several local jurisdictions. 'He told the stake president, Well, thats not a big deal. I go, Yeah, its a big deal.' 'So we know hes lying, and we know hes lying at every level,' Rytting responded. Reached by phone by the AP, Miller refused to discuss details. 'Its clergy privilege. If I say anything, (John Goodrich) can sue me for millions of dollars.' With Rytting in town again, Lorraine and Chelsea first made it clear that they were devastated the prosecutor had dropped the criminal case, according to the recordings. '(The prosecutor) said Too bad the bishop couldnt testify,' Lorraine told Rytting. Rytting sounded surprised. He had not known coming into the meeting that the case was dropped, he said. He told them that the church perhaps could reach out to the prosecutor to help get things restarted. 'The message to this prosecutor is, youve got several pretty clear-cut instances where a predator, a sexual predator, has admitted,' Rytting said. 'And then the victims have provided information. But you dont feel any need to protect the general public?' 'She did say that if the bishop could come forward and tell, then we would have had a case. But theres nothing,' Lorraine repeated. The prosecutor, Jessica Kuehn, now works for the Pennsylvania attorney generals office and did not respond to a request for comment. The AP couldnt determine if the church ever followed up with her about the case. About an hour into the meeting, Rytting changed the subject abruptly. 'Well, should we talk about why Im here?' Rytting asked. 'I have authorization up to $300,000.' The offer stunned Chelsea and Lorraine. Months earlier, Rytting told them by email that the church was prepared to pay them $90,000 - an offer the women were considering. The payment would be made on the condition that Chelsea and her mother sign an agreement in which they promised never to use Chelseas story as a basis for a lawsuit against the church and that they never acknowledge the existence of the settlement. The Mormon church has been embroiled in several high-profile cases in which it has been accused of covering up sexual abuse over the years And there was another key provision: 'Second paragraph, Ill be interested in your response,' Rytting said, while reviewing the document with them. 'The recommendation is that you acknowledge that theres been some recordings made of all of our communications and that you agreed to destroy those recordings within 10 days of signing this,' he said. Nondisclosure agreements or NDAs, as they are commonly known - have been used frequently by the Mormon church and other organizations, including the Catholic Church, as well as individuals, to keep sex abuse allegations secret. In addition to her settlement with the church, Chelsea also settled a lawsuit against her father. In one of their recorded conversations, Rytting told Chelsea that he could check Helpline records, used by Miller to report details of John Goodrichs confession, to see whether her father had ever previously confessed to another bishop to abusing her. But in the West Virginia abuse case against the church, Rytting gave sworn, written testimony in which he said no one at the Helpline keeps records. And another ranking church official testified in a case in Arizona that the records are destroyed at the end of each day. In comments to the AP, the church declined to clarify Ryttings apparent contradiction about whether the church keeps records on the Helpline. Still, at their final meeting, Rytting assured Chelsea and Lorraine that church officials denied hearing John Goodrich confess previously to abusing his daughter, a claim the church backed in its statement to the AP. He urged them to accept the funds the church was offering and sign the nondisclosure agreement promising they would never sue the church. 'When John Goodrich engaged in abuse or any other criminal or sexual misconduct, he was acting in an individual capacity and NOT as an agent of the Church,' Rytting wrote, ignoring the fact that Goodrich was a bishop at the time. 'Accordingly, any damages arising from such misconduct will be apportioned to Mr. Goodrich and not to the Church.' Chelsea and Lorraine, distanced from their family and community, and struggling financially, accepted this assessment and signed the agreement, which did not prevent Chelsea from telling her story. Earlier this year, Chelsea decided to share it with the AP. She had tried going to the church for help. Shed tried the criminal justice system. But John was free with access to children through his family and dental practice. In a statement, the church said 'the abuse of a child or any other individual is inexcusable,' and that John Goodrich, following his excommunication, 'has not been readmitted to church membership.' Texas' governor is poised to sign one of the 'most radical immigration laws ever' as he looks to let local cops arrest migrants. SB4 has already been approved by the state legislature and Greg Abbott has vowed to sign the bill allowing local and state police to make immigration arrests. Once it's signed in early March, the legislation will allow local cops to stop anyone suspected of entering the Lone Star State illegally and ask for proof of their right to be there. Those caught in the US illegally would face up to six months in jail for the first offense and 2-20 years for subsequent entries. 'Texas politicians just passed one of the country's most radical anti-immigrant laws EVER,' the ACLU of Texas blasted the state's Republican lawmakers online. Texas Department of Public Safety officers pull over a car suspecting of carrying illegal immigrants in El Paso, Texas in October A pursuit of a vehicle carrying illegal immigrants ends on a freeway in El Paso as law enforcement tackle a rise in human smuggling in the state Illegal immigrants climb up a mountain that separates Mexico from Texas so they can sneak into El Paso 'This legislation is white supremacy in action that will encourage racial profiling and separate Texas families. If Gov. Abbott signs #SB4 into law, we'll sue.' The liberal organization worries US citizens who are Hispanic will be profiled based on how they look or language they speak. 'This is not targeting anyone; we're trying to stop the flow of illegal immigration through our state and into our state from a foreign country, and we have every right to do that,' Republican Representative David Spiller, who sponsored SB4, told NewsNation. Spiller and other Texas Republicans argue they have to do something since more than 3.8 million migrants have crossed into Texas illegally since Pres. Joe Biden took office in 2021, according to federal statistics. 'I think worth noting is the fact that this is a misdemeanor. We're not trying to round up folks that have been here for years,' Spiller said. BREAKING: Texas politicians just passed one of the countrys most radical anti-immigrant laws EVER. This legislation is white supremacy in action that will encourage racial profiling and separate Texas families. If Gov. Abbott signs #SB4 into law, well sue. ACLU of Texas (@ACLUTx) November 15, 2023 Republican state Rep. David Spiller, who represents several counties near the Oklahoma state line north of Dallas, proposed SB4 At least 3.8 million migrants have entered Texas since 2021, according the US Customs and Border Protection Enforcement would most likely happen in the first 50 miles north of the border, Spiller added. 'Anyone that's been here longer than two years, three years, five years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, they can't be charged with this offense,' he explained. 'I'm not saying that it couldn't happen in Dallas, Fort Worth or Houston, but I am saying that the most likely scenario would be that it would be at or near the border.' There are also legal concerns about how the bill allows charges against an illegal immigrant to be dropped if they agree to voluntarily return to Mexico. Many of the migrants crossing into Texas now are not Mexican. In October, Venezuelans beat out Mexicans as the top nationality encountered by the US Border Patrol for the first time ever. Migrants seeking asylum in the United States gather near a wire fence as members of the Texas National Guard stand guard with the purpose of stopping them Migrants who crossed the Rio Grande and entered the U.S. from Mexico are lined up for processing by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Sept. 23, 2023, in Eagle Pass, Texas Mexico is also not obligated to take in migrants who are not Mexican citizens. The Texas law 'attempts to set up its own system of deportationits own system of judges determining who's allowed to stay and who has to go,' Thomas A. Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal and Educational Fund (MALDEF), told Axios. Crossing into the US illegally is already a federal crime. The US Supreme Court has already ruled that enforcing immigration laws has been reserved for federal immigration officers, not for local police. After Arizona passed a similar 'show me your papers' law in 2010, SB 1070, the state was sued. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that local police didn't have the authority to arrest someone only on their immigration status since that's the job of the federal government. All Arizona cops could do if they encountered an illegal immigrant in Arizona was hold them and them turn them over to US Border Patrol. Some believe Texas lawmakers are trying to challenge the Arizona v US ruling, especially since the high court is more conservative now than in 2012. A Maryland school has suspended a union boss who singled out four wealthy local Jews as 'gluttons and thieves', admitting the 'deep distress' the teacher has caused the community. English teacher Angela Wolf was sent home from Takoma Park Middle School after the seeming anti-Semitic 2022 Facebook post emerged among a blizzard of messages attacking Israel and demanding 'No war but class war!' 'None of these people invented anything useful and are [sic] have done a damn thing to further the needs of communities,' she told her followers. 'They are gluttons and thieves, they accumulated this kind of wealth through abusing workers.' Wolf, who is an official with the Montgomery County Education Association, pushed back against the outrage saying she had no idea the people she mentioned were Jewish. English teacher Angela Wolf has been suspended from her Maryland school after a series of seemingly antisemitic social media posts She targeted a number of prominent Jewish people in the Maryland area in her posts Erin Martin, principal of Takoma Park Middle School slammed a 'series of anti-Semitic online posts' and insisted she 'strongly condemns the views expressed' Wolf also reposted a cartoon of an Israeli tank pointing its cannon at babies in a hospital with the caption 'Enemies in sight', accused Israel of 'slaughter', and claimed the country is 'determined to make Gaza uninhabitable.' Erin Martin, principal of the school in Silver Spring, Maryland, said the posts had 'undermined our school's values of respect and belonging'. 'I was extremely saddened and disappointed by the contents of these posts and strongly condemn the views expressed,' she added. Wolf, a senior official with the Montgomery County Education Association, appeared to single out the four Jewish men in her December 2022 post shortly after they were listed among the seven Maryland billionaires on the Forbes list of America's 400 richest people. She told the Daily Wire she had 'no idea these billionaires are Jewish or that my word choice had an historic significance for the Jewish community'. But she ignored the two billionaire non-Jews on the list, while including a single non-Jew by the name of Bernard Saul. Still, the school suspended her over the posts. Her suspension comes a month after a history teacher at nearby Tilden Middle School was sent home after claiming that Israelis kill Palestinians to sell their organs, and that the Hamas attack on October 7 was a hoax. 'Debunked!! No music festival attack. Babies were not burned. Women were not violated,' Sabrina Khan-Williams wrote on Facebook. 'Palestinian's (sic) are being killed and their organs are being sold,' the team leader for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion concluded. The post targeting the locals wasn't her only controversial statement. Last month, Wolf praised bus drivers who left hundreds of Jewish people stranded at DC's Dulles Airport as they returned from a pro-Israel rally, telling followers that 'their solidarity with the victims of Israeli genocide should be commended.' Despite her suspension, Wolf remains on the board of the teaching union that represents 14,000 staff in the county. 'Any action resulting from an investigation will be considered a personnel matter,' district officials wrote to parents. 'Due to employee privacy laws MCPS and Takoma Park Middle School are unable to provide further details on the personnel matter.' Wolf remains in post as a middle school director of the powerful Montgomery County Education Association teachers' union The posts are no longer up on social media. All that is visible on a Facebook page listed as Wolf's is a supportive letter from an admirer claiming that 'teachers like Angela Wolf and others who have the heart and decency to be in the struggle for human rights should be applauded, not sanctioned, and especially not by a school district'. 'Palestinians are an oppressed minority and need world support for their struggle against occupation and living under an apartheid regime,' it adds. But there is little support in the dozens of comments underneath where her remarks are dismissed as the 'ignorant ramblings of a lunatic anti-Semite'. 'I suggest you fly over to Gaza to teach ESL,' wrote Marlaine McGuiness. 'I'm sure many of us here would be more than happy to pay for your flight as well as your salary.' 'We're coming for your job you psychopathic antisemite,' added Daniel Gold. A Canadian mom diagnosed with aggressive stomach cancer has blasted doctors who told her to consider assisted suicide as 'disgusting', after she found alternative treatment in the US. Allison Ducluzeau, 57, from Victoria in British Columbia, told Global News that consultants advised her to think about euthanasia, claiming the country's universal healthcare system couldn't save her. Canada legalized Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in 2016. It has since been aggressively expanded, and the nation saw over 10,000 assisted suicides in 2021. Ducluzeau was confronted with the horrific prospect when she was diagnosed with a stage four abdominal cancer called peritoneal carcinomatosis late last year. The Canadian's family doctor said patients are normally treated with a high-dosage chemotherapy treatment called HIPEC and referred her to a surgeon at the BC Cancer Agency. Allison Ducluzeau, 57, from Victoria in British Columbia, told Global News that consultants advised her to think about euthanasia, claiming the country's universal healthcare system couldn't save her Canada is on track to record some 13,500 doctor-assisted suicides in 2022 But when she saw the consultant in January, she said they gave her the devastating news that she was not a candidate for the surgery because chemo is 'not very effective' for the cancer type. Ducluzeau said they told her she only had between two months and two years left to live, and advised talking to her family about whether she wanted to pursue assisted suicide. Shocked by the news, Ducluzeau said telling her kids was 'the hardest thing I've ever done'. 'That was honestly the worst day of my life,' she told Global News. 'Just seeing how upset they were and having lost my own mum just a short while prior to that and knowing what it was like, like going through life without a mother.' Ducluzeau left the heartbreaking conversation feeling determined to find another way, and after months of research she ended up flying to Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, for treatment she was refused in Canada. She spent more than $200,000 for the surgery, chemotherapy, scans, travel and accommodation outside the comfort of familiar surroundings. 'I would have much preferred to have been able to have this care at home where I could have had the support of friends and family and my husband could have as well because half the time I was out of it,' she said. 'But he was there by himself in a strange city, caring for someone and terrified about my well-being.' Reflecting on her experience, she said: 'I am so proud of where I live and being a Canadian and (living in) Victoria, I just never thought in a million years that that would be my experience. 'I was disappointed and, in fact, disgusted by the way I was treated.' The number of MAiD deaths in Canada has risen steadily by about a third each year from the previous year Under Canada's assisted suicide laws, anyone over the age of 18 with a serious illness, disease or disability can apply for a MAiD procedure. After the law was introduced, Quebec emerged as the world's euthanasia hotspot, as nearly 5,000 people opted for assisted suicides in the city last year. Almost eight percent of all deaths in Quebec are assisted suicides far higher than Canada's other provinces and even such countries as Belgium and the Netherlands, which have much older euthanasia laws. Canada is on track to record some 13,500 state-sanctioned suicides in 2022, a 34 percent rise on the previous year, according to an analysis of official data by Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition. Poll Should doctor-assisted suicide be available where you live? Yes No Not sure Should doctor-assisted suicide be available where you live? Yes 5812 votes No 4629 votes Not sure 874 votes Now share your opinion The country's road to allowing euthanasia began in 2015, when its top court declared that outlawing assisted suicide deprived people of their dignity and autonomy. It gave national leaders a year to draft legislation. The resulting 2016 law legalized both euthanasia and assisted suicide for people aged 18 and over, provided they met certain conditions: They had to have a serious, advanced condition, disease, or disability that was causing suffering and their death was looming. The law was later amended to allow people who are not terminally ill to choose death, significantly broadening the number of eligible people. Critics say that change removed a key safeguard aimed at protecting people with potentially decades of life left. Today, any adult with a serious illness, disease, or disability can seek help in dying. Euthanasia is legal in seven countries Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand and Spain plus several states in Australia. It's only available to children in the Netherlands and Belgium. Other jurisdictions, including a growing number of US states, allow doctor-assisted suicide in which patients take the drug themselves, typically crushing up and drinking a lethal dose of pills prescribed by a physician. In Canada, both options are referred to as MAiD, though more than 99.9 percent of such procedures are carried out by a doctor. The number of MAiD deaths in Canada has risen steadily by about a third each year from the previous year. Two freed detainees were charged over the weekend Calls for ministers to be sacked over detention debacle Anthony Albanese is facing pressure to sack the Home Affairs and Immigration ministers after two former detainees allegedly re-offended just weeks after being released following a High Court ruling that ruled indefinite detention was illegal. Afghan refugee Aliyawar Yawari, 65, has been charged with indecently assaulting a woman in a hotel in South Australia. Yawari was deemed a 'danger to the Australian community' by a South Australian judge in 2016 following attacks on three elderly women in 2013 and 2014. Meanwhile Mohammed Ali Nadari, 45, has been charged with cannabis possession in New South Wales. A fired-up Nat Barr asked if this meant all of the safety measures introduced by the Albanese Government since the High Court ruling 'meant nothing'. Dan Tehan, the Shadow Minister for Immigration, said the government had failed on their number one duty - to keep the Australian public safe Dan Tehan, the Shadow Minister for Immigration, said the government had failed its main duty to keep the community safe. 'This is a catastrophic failure... Ministers O'Neill and Giles, the home affairs minister and the immigration minister, have failed their number one duty of keeping the Australian people safe,' Mr Tehan said. 'They should do the honourable thing now and resign.' Mr Tehan accused the government of failing to adequately prepare for the possibility of the High Court ruling that indefinite immigration detention was illegal. 'We warned about this. We said they needed to have tough measures in place immediately after the High Court had made it decision. They needed to have a preventative detention regime in place when the High Court made its decision,' he said. 'They failed to do that, they haven't been transparent with the Australian public about who these people are, why they failed the character test. 'There are still three people out in the community without conditions on their visas. We know nothing about them.' Mr Tehan said the Labor government had been warned as early as June that there was a likelihood that the High Court would release 148 detainees. But the Government rushed through legislation in November an effort to contain and trace the freed detainees, including a daily curfew from 10pm to 6am and ankle tracking bracelets. 'They failed to be ready for that eventuality,' Mr Tehan said. 'And that failure has led to the community not being safe and that is the number one priority of any government. That is why both ministers should now do the honourable thing and resign. 'We would have been making sure that in the months leading up to the High Court decision that we were looking at what legislation we could put in place to keep the community safe.' He then lashed out the Prime Minister, saying 'people are worried he's a weak leader'. 'He has an opportunity soon to show some strength,' he continued. 'If they won't resigned, he should sack them.' Dan Tehan lashed the Prime Minister (pictured) saying 'people are worried he's a weak leader' Aliyawar Yawari has been charged with two counts of indecent assault just three weeks after he was released from immigration detention after the High Court's controversial ruling Yawari appeared in the Adelaide Magistrates Court on Monday less than a month after he walked free from Yongah Hill Immigration Detention Centre in WA. Police arrested him at the Pavlos Motel in Pooraka in Adelaide's north on Saturday night after allegations a woman had been assaulted by a guest. Yawari was previously described by a judge as a 'danger to the Australian community' and has served a jail term for assaulting three women including one he hit with her own walking stick. Yawari had arrived in Australia in 2010 after fleeing Afghanistan where his father and brother were killed by the Taliban. He found work in Bordertown in South Australia but between October 2013 and December 2014 he carried out attacks on women in rural parts of the state. In 2013 he was acquitted of rape but convicted of assault and received a suspected prison sentence. But in 2016 he was sentenced to three years and 11 months with a non-parole period of two years and eight months. After his sentence he was sent to immigration detention awaiting deportation but was released in November after the High Court ruling. Shadow Immigration Minister Dan Tehan has called on Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil (pictured) to resign or be sacked by the prime minister The federal government will introduce amendments on Wednesday to laws brought in to deal with the fallout from the High Court decision, resulting in the release of more than 140 detainees. Under the amendments, preventative detention orders would apply to those released, including murderers and sex offenders, and are based on similar measures for high-risk terror offenders, Ms O'Neil said. The exact number of released detainees the preventative detention orders would apply to is not known. Defence Minister Richard Marles backed his ministerial colleagues. 'What's happened here is the High Court have ruled against a law that was put in place by the Howard government, it was there throughout the Turnbull and Morrison governments,' he told ABC Radio. 'The question is whether or not (the opposition) is going to be supporting strong legislation, which will put the strongest possible conditions on those who have been released.' Asked by shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash why the government had released the high-risk detainees, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong said it was imperative to work within the court's decision. 'A shadow attorney-general should understand that a government under the Westminster system does not act like an autocratic dictatorship and actually does what the court says,' Senator Wong told parliament on Monday. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said the Coalition would likely back the laws. 'If the government has adequate measures to keep Australians safe, then we will support those measures and we'll see what they have to say,' he said. 'If we see a bad bill, we're not going to support it.' Greens senator Nick McKim called the laws a 'race to the bottom' on refugee policy. 'It creates two different classes of people in this country under the law, depending on whether you are the holder of a particular class of visa or not,' he said. The daughter of a 91-year-old dementia sufferer was left in the dark by foreign care staff whose lack of English meant they couldn't tell her how her mother had died and simply told her: 'Your mother's dead.' Barbara Rymell died at Ashley House Residential Home, in Langport, Somerset, after she became trapped by a mechanical stairlift after a fall with staff being unable to free her. A senior coroner's report found that in a 999 call, her two carers - one Romanian and one Indian - were unable to explain to the emergency services what had happened to her, and did not understand the difference between their patient being 'alive' or 'alert'. Mrs Rymell's daughter Elaine Curtis, 67, told the Daily Mail that staff were unable to communicate what had happened to her mother over the phone. Mrs Curtis, who lives in Uxbridge, said: 'When one of the staff phoned me that night she didn't speak very good English and just said straight away "your mother's dead" and that was it, nothing else. Barbara Rymell, 91, died after becoming trapped under a stairlift at Ashley House Residential Home, in Langport, Somerset 'I was so frantic and kept asking her what had happened but she was just talking in her own language. The only thing she was able to say was the word "stairs" and so I had no idea what was going on. 'I was so desperate to speak to someone who could speak good enough English to explain what was happening with my mum that I asked to speak for someone else, but I wasn't phoned back even though I called multiple times. 'All I wanted in that moment was to just talk with someone who could tell me what had happened to my mother.' Reading her diary entry from that night, Mrs Curtis recalled: 'It was 8.09pm I got that phone call from the care home telling me she had died and then I had to wait four hours until the police turned up to my house at midnight and were able to tell me what happened. 'They rung the doorbell and I buzzed them in but I didn't really think they were coming to speak to me until I saw them walk up to the front door.' She said her mother had been at the home since April and added: 'My mother had dementia and couldn't walk by herself, so we'd moved her to Ashley House so that she could interact with and talk to people - and just so that she could be cared for properly. 'But then only four months later she died because she was somehow allowed to use the stairlift by herself, even though everyone knew she couldn't do that.' Mrs Curtis said: 'It was such a horrible shock and only last week did we finally find out the details of how she died and it's just brought it all back up again.' A senior coroner has since issued a warning about the inability of foreign health staff to speak English after hearing how carers looking after Mrs Rymell did not know the difference between 'bleeding' and 'breathing'. Their lack of English 'severely hampered' the call handler's response and made a 'meaningful' assessment of her condition 'virtually impossible', the coroner said. Following the call, Mrs Rymell's case was classified as 'serious' rather than requiring an 'immediate' response and when paramedics did arrive at the care home she was dead. Senior Coroner for Somerset, Samantha Marsh, has now written to the Home Office and the Helen Whatley, minister for Health and Social Care to warn of the potential for future deaths if English standards are not addressed. In a highly critical report she said the current test for foreign health staff is 'wholly insufficient'. The Taunton inquest heard Mrs Rymell's had arrived at the home on August 8, 2022, from hospital having suffered a fall in the community and was known to be frail with blurred vision and at a high risk of falling. Mrs Rymell's daughter Elaine Curtis said staff's lack of English meant they were unable to tell her how her mother had died, and simply said: 'Your mother's dead' 'She relied on others to keep her safe,' the coroner said. She was the only resident with a bedroom on the first floor but she was incapable of using the stairs or the stairlift on her own, the inquest heard. Mrs Marsh said in her report: 'On the evening of the 8th of August, 2022, two carers were on duty; neither of whom were native English speaking nationals; one was Romanian and the other was Indian. 'At 19:27 one of the carers called 999 to request an ambulance. It was clear, on the evidence, that Barbara had been left unattended on the mechanical chair for around five minutes. 'This was clearly contrary to the rules and procedures of Ashley House. 'During those five minutes she has left the seat of the mechanically operated stairlift (possibly unfastening the seat belt) and proceeded to climb the stairs; which she was unable to safely, due to do physical limitations and her underlying cognitive impairment. 'She has fallen on the stairs, falling downwards. Barbara has been found, having fallen awkwardly, landing with her head trapped under the chair for the mechanically operated stairlift. 'Care staff were unable to free her because of the positioning and angle at which she was entrapped within the mechanics. 'On calling 999 it was obvious that neither of the care staff were sufficiently proficient in English to be able to explain clearly the nature of the medical emergency. 'An internal audit by the ambulance service revealed that the call-handler had selected an incorrect pathway. 'The correct pathway that should have been selected was 'entrapment' but at no time during the call did the carer give any information that would have indicated that this was the presenting problem. 'The carer repeatedly used the word 'blocked' which added no assistance, clarity of explanation of the events that were unfolding. 'They did not understand the difference between 'bleeding' and 'breathing'. This made any meaningful triage of Barbara's condition virtually impossible. 'The call handler followed the script to ask if the patient was conscious and breathing (i.e. to ascertain clinical emergency and determination of a priority response) but this assessment was severely hampered given the carer did not appear to know or understand the difference between bleeding and breathing. '[The carers were also unable to] understand the difference between 'alert' and 'alive', which presented all of the same problems as referred above. 'Paramedics arrived on a category 2 response and, on arrival, it was clear that Barbara was beyond medical help. She was pronounced deceased at the scene.' The inquest concluded Mrs Rymell had died of misadventure as a result of her fall, a combination of her dementia and frailty and 'mechanical obstruction of respiration'. (Pictured: Ashley House Residential Home in Langport where Mrs Rymell died) A senior coroner's report has warned about the inability of foreign health staff to speak English But Mrs Marsh said she had been shown evidence that at least one the carers' understanding of English did not meet the standards required to work in the Britain. 'I was told that in order to be able to work in the UK, those requiring a Visa (as the two carers on duty did) must prove that they can read, write, speak and understand English to at least Level B1,' she said. '[They must demonstrate that they] can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work. 'Applicants for a Visa must have passed a Secure English Language Test (SELT). 'It transpired during the Inquest that one of the workers on the evening of the 8th August 2022 had never passed the SELT, so was not qualified or permitted to work in the UK.' Addressing the government in her Prevention of Future Deaths report, Mrs Marsh said: 'I am concerned that those working with vulnerable people who are in a position of trust and responsibility must be able to demonstrate a sufficient proficiency in English to enable to summon appropriate emergency medical attention when needed. 'Vulnerable people, by very definition, are unable to often appreciate the need for help; take steps to keep themselves safe and/or summon help for themselves when they need it. 'By being unable to speak the native language of England with any proficiency I am concerned that deaths will continue to arise where those who are young, disabled, suffering from a mental impairment or who are elderly and in need of urgent medical help will not have this summoned for them if those who are engaging with emergency professionals are unable to communicate effectively.' Mrs Marsh said she did not believe the current English test for foreign workers was appropriate for staff working in a medical setting. She cited two examples where applicants were asked to fill in the appropriate missing word in the sentence. 'The Court looked at evidence of the B1 English test,' she said. 'Examples from the paper were as follows: 'I [XXX] that book last year' (options are bought, have bought, had bought). 'The town [XXX] is very beautiful, has lots of parks' (options are which, where, what). 'This level of comprehension is comparable to a KS2 curriculum being studied by Year 6 students sitting their SATS exam and appears to be wholly insufficient for those working in the direct care and protection of vulnerable people, as demonstrated in this case by carers who were alone (i.e. no English speaking members of staff on duty) being unable to explain to medical professionals the presenting condition of the patient.' Mrs Marsh told the Home Office and Mrs Whatley that they have until the 22nd January 2024 to respond to her concerns. 'In my opinion action should be taken to prevent future deaths and I believe your organisation has the power to take such action,' she said. A spokesperson for South West Care Homes said: 'South West Care Homes would like to express, once again, our deepest sympathies to Mrs Rymell's family for their loss. 'We worked closely and diligently with the authorities throughout their investigations into the circumstances of this isolated incident. 'We strive always to offer the best possible care to all our residents, and since Mrs Rymell's death we have instigated a range of management and auditing improvements to further enhance the care we provide at Ashley House.' Josh Hammer is host of 'The Josh Hammer Show' and a research fellow at Edmund Burke Foundation The United Nations' 28th climate change conference is melting down faster than an iceberg in the Arctic. It's a collection of the world's rich and influential who've set out to save all of humanity by getting rid of fossil fuels. But apparently, the engines of this international powwow don't run well on bull manure. John Kerry, the failed presidential candidate now moonlighting as President Biden's 'special presidential envoy for climate', is leading the American delegation for the COP28 summit. True to form, Kerry, our Bay State plutocrat, reportedly jetted in on a carbon-belching private plane. And Kamala Harris, our flailing vice president, deemed the meeting urgent enough to justify the greenhouse gases necessary to fuel Air Force Two and fly her to the lavish affair as well. Would it be too much to ask them to ride share? And the location of COP28: Dubai. Yes, you read that right: Dubai. Look, no hate against the United Arab Emirates or its glittering international metropolis. The Emirates was first out of the gate during the 2020 Abraham Accords peace agreements with Israel, and its response to the war in Gaza has been more measured than most Arab states. The United Nations ' 28th climate change conference is melting down faster than an iceberg in the Arctic. (Above) COP28 group photo with His Excellency Dr. Sultan Al Jaber (center-left) and US special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry (center-right) Kamala Harris , our flailing vice president, deemed the meeting urgent enough to justify the greenhouse gases necessary to fuel Air Force Two and fly her to the lavish affair as well. (Above) Harris waves as she arrives in Dubai, United Arab Emirates on December 2, 2023. I was even in Dubai last year. My fiance and I watched the iconic New Year's Eve fireworks show from the towering Burj Khalifa skyscraper. But here's a thought that didn't cross my mind while soaking in the show inside an oil-rich country that overcomes the sweltering heat by air-conditioning the desert: 'Dubai will one day lead the world to clean energy.' That would only make sense in a 'Saturday Night Live' parody. Yet here we are, and the full reality is even more absurd. Amazingly, the president of COP28 is Sultan Al Jaber, an Emirati official who serves as both the Emirates' special envoy for climate change and director general and CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, a state-owned oil company. That's some serious whiplash. The sultan has also been accused of laundering this glitzy boondoggle to sell new oil and gas leases to hungry buyers (he has strongly denied this). Perhaps, best of all, Sultan Al Jaber has reportedly argued there is 'no science' supporting the push to phase out fossil fuels. Excuse me? Isn't that the entire justification for this Oil Burning Man? Al Jaber has apparently said that a full fossil fuel phase-out doesn't make sense 'unless you want to take the world back into caves.' John Kerry's response? The sultan's remarks may require a 'clarification.' Understatement of the century? As the online jargon goes: LOL. If a Republican presidential candidate suggested there is 'no science' supporting fossil fuel phase-outs and that climate zealots wish to 'take the world back into caves,' the left-wing media would laugh him out of the mainstream. But when the president of an international climate change summit says it, America's leading envoy dismisses it as an innocent mistake. The elitism, hypocrisy, and compete lack of self-awareness is simply stunning. Kerry is a hypocrite of world-historical proportions. He is a fabulously wealthy man (through marriage) who flies around the world aboard gas-guzzling planes to useless junkets to admonish the plebeians who drive to work in gas-guzzling cars. And to top it all off, this weekend in Dubai, Kerry had the chutzpah to preach that all coal plants must be shuttered posthaste. His reason? Coal plants are killing people daily. You know what else kills people daily, and on an order of magnitude considerably larger than climate change? Poverty. And there is no more time-proven, efficient method for alleviating poverty than ensuring the widespread availability of affordable energy. Here's a thought that didn't cross my mind while soaking in the show inside an oil-rich country that overcomes the sweltering heat by air-conditioning the desert: 'Dubai will one day lead the world to clean energy.' Al Jaber (above, right) has apparently said that a full fossil fuel phase-out doesn't make sense 'unless you want to take the world back into caves.' Alas, the climate fanatics care more about appeasing power brokers in Washington and Brussels than they do about improving the lives of millions in Sub-Saharan Africa or the Indian subcontinent. If there's one upside to this energy-intensive desert fiesta, it's that the globalist green energy blob is finally starting to tear itself apart. On the sidelines of COP28, Al Gore, the patron saint of the green church, has been critical of the conference and upbraided the environmentally-sensitive yet sane British Prime Minister: 'I am not impressed with Prime Minister Sunak's climate policies. I think they're terrible. They're very disappointing.' Sunak's crime? Delaying a ban on petrol cars and gas boilers to allow working people more time to adjust to the onerous new climate change laws. Translation: Anything less than fully bending the knee to the extremists' pro-poverty, anti-growth agenda makes one an enemy. The fanatics can barely contain their unmitigated fury against those who agree with them on anthropogenic climate change, but who want to approach the problem incrementally. Even Greta Thunberg took a break from her recent pro-Hamas demonstrations to criticize Sultan Al Jaber. The fanatics can barely contain their unmitigated fury against those who agree with them on anthropogenic climate change, but who want to approach the problem incrementally. Even Greta Thunberg took a break from her recent pro-Hamas demonstrations to criticize Sultan Al Jaber. They'd never admit it, but these radicals want to plunge the world into darknessand to stop us all from having children, while we're at it. But these extremists can't hold back the overwhelming silent majority who recognize that the world cannot commit suicide on an altar of windmills and solar panels. Indeed, to his credit, Sultan Al Jaber is saying things that would never have been accepted in polite society before. Perhaps it's a sign of progress that Kerry hasn't already hopped on his jet and left in disgust? Ironically, maybe COP28 will yield something good, after all: the collapse of the Net Zero Cult that wants to rid the world of fossil fuels by any means necessary. Police in Northern Ireland have launched a murder investigation after the body of a man was found near a burning car. Two women aged 35 and 43, and a man, 31, were arrested yesterday on suspicion of murder. They remain in police custody today being quizzed by detectives. Police swarmed Edward Street, in County Armagh, following the discovery of the yet identified male and sealed off an area near the charred remains of a car yesterday. A picture on the Belfast Telegraph showed a forensics team combing the vehicle's melted remains for evidence. Investigators remained at the scene in the Edward Street area of the County Armagh town today. A forensics team can be seen combing the scene for evidence after a body of a man was found in Edward Street, County Armagh Two women aged 35 and 43, and a man, 31, were arrested yesterday on suspicion of murder. They remain in police custody today being quizzed by detectives Detective Chief Inspector Anthony Kelly, who is leading the murder investigation, said a post-mortem examination is set to take place tomorrow. 'Sadly a family has lost a loved one, which is particularly poignant in the run up to Christmas,' he said. 'My thoughts are very much with them.' 'The post-mortem is expected to take place tomorrow and we are also hoping formal identification of the victim will take place then.' Upper Bann MP Carla Lockhart told BBC Good Morning Ulster: 'It's a horrific event that has unfolded. Our thoughts are very much with the family. 'It's very alarming. There are still very scant details around it. The police are undergoing a large scale investigation and I think it's very important we give the police time and space to do that. 'It's important that rumours don't circulate and people allow that space for the police to do their job and for this all to be dealt with via the law.' Det Chief Insp Kelly described the investigation as at a 'very early stage'. 'I am appealing for anyone who was in the Edward Street or Francis Street areas of Lurgan between 2am and 5am on Sunday morning, and who noticed any suspicious activity or who may have captured dash-cam footage which could assist with the investigation, to come forward to police,' he said. Flowers were left by a lamppost in memory of the yet identified male. A post-mortem examination is set to take place tomorrow Forensic officers at a property in the Edward Street area of Lurgan, County Armagh Investigators remained at the scene in the Edward Street area of the County Armagh town today The road remains closed as police appeal for anyone who was in the area between 2am and 5am on Sunday morning to get in touch 'I would also like to hear from anyone who has any CCTV footage to contact police. 'I am aware there may be some video footage circulating on social media and I would be keen to see it. I have launched the Major Incident Public Portal where anyone can upload CCTV, dash-cam and any other footage via Jacob set out on the daredevil adventure to promote a brand and gain views online He also went on to destroy the wreckage and 'lied to investigators' about the details of the crash Trevor Daniel Jacob was sentenced to six months in federal prison after he purposely destroyed an airplane in 2021 The YouTuber pilot who deliberately crashed an airplane and destroyed the wreckage has been jailed for six months in federal prison. Trevor Daniel Jacob, 30, pleaded guilty on June 30 to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation after he jumped out of the plane and let it crash into a California hillside. Jacob, who is also a former Olympic snowboarder, crashed the small aircraft on November 24, 2021, after he took off for a solo flight at Lompoc City Airport. He recorded it in an edited 13-minute video that drew more than one million views and has since been deleted from his page. '[Jacob] most likely committed this offense to generate social media and news coverage for himself and to obtain financial gain. 'Nevertheless, this type of 'daredevil' conduct cannot be tolerated,' prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum. Trevor Daniel Jacob deliberately crashed a plane in November 2021 and went on to destroy the wreckage. He has now been sentenced to six months in federal prison for his crimes The aircraft, circled in red, is seen resting in hills of the Los Padres National Forest This image, shot by one of the many cameras mounted on the plane, captured the aircraft just moments before is smashed nose-first into a dry brush area of the forest near Santa Maria The release went on to reveal that Jacob had 'secured a sponsorship from a company that sold various items' that he decided would be presented in the video. He agreed to specifically promote a wallet made by the company in that YouTube video. Before takeoff, he set up several cameras and a selfie stick inside the plane, and approximately 35 minutes after taking off he threw himself off the aircraft. The video revealed him parachuting to the ground just after he soared above the Los Padres National Forest. The many cameras inside the plane made it possible for the crash to be recorded from when it took off, to when it descended into the dry brush area of the forest near Santa Maria. After he landed to the ground in her parachute, Jacob then hiked over to the crash site and made sure to recover the footage of the viral fame video. Two days after the intended crash, Jacobs fessed up and informed the National Transportation Safety Board about it. The board then went on to launch an investigation a day or so later and told him that it was his responsibility to collect and preserve the damage for examination purposes. Video shows Jacob landing in a thicket and complaining of cuts and scrapes after he ejected himself from the plane and parachuted to the ground Jacob appeared to struggle with the door as he went on to exit the plane mid-flight He then agreed to provide the agency with coordinates of the crash site and the video, and three days later the Federal Aviation Administration launched their own investigation. 'In the weeks following the plane crash, Jacob lied to investigators that he did not know the wreckage's location,' the press release stated. On December 10, Jacob and his friend flew via helicopter to the crash site to access the damage for himself, the release said. He then went on to take straps 'to secure the wreckage' that the helicopter lifted and carried to Rancho Sisquoc in Santa Barbara. The evidence of the crash was then loaded onto the back of Jacob's truck and taken to the airport where the plane originally took off from. Two days after the crash Jacob reported it to the National Transportation Safety Board. He then said he would share all information with them about the crash, but investigators said he lied about details Trevor Jacob is a former Olympic snowboarder (pictured) who competed in the Men's Snowboard Cross 1/8 Finals on day eleven of the 2014 Winter Olympics at Rosa Khutor Extreme Park 'He then cut up and destroyed the airplane wreckage' before he got rid of the parts in trash bins across the airport and in other places. The release said that Jacob did so 'with the intent to obstruct federal authorities from investigating the November 24 plane crash.' The official YouTube video of the treacherous add was uploaded to Jacob's page and titled 'I Crashed My Airplane.' 'Jacob did not intend to reach his destination, but instead planned to eject from his aircraft during the flight and video himself parachuting to the ground and his airplane as it descended and crashed,' a press release from the United States Attorney's Office said. Brittany Higgins appeared timid and nervous before revealing, under cross-examination, that she was handed a $2.3million compensation payout from the Federal government - and personally pocketed $1.9million. It would have been clear to Ms Higgins, who has had many opportunities to detail how much she was paid for personal injury claim, that she was detonating a political bombshell. She reached a settlement with the government in December last year, just one day after Bruce Lehrmann 's criminal trial collapsed, but the figure she was paid was never disclosed because the Albanese government claimed it was 'confidential'. Questions were repeatedly asked by media outlets and members of the Coalition as to how much she received, and why it was paid when the allegations were unproven. It soon became clear that amount may never be released, and Ms Higgins got sick of the speculation. 2GB host Ben Fordham reported in February that the compensation claim was ' substantially higher than $3million ', and Ms Higgins fired back on X (below) threatening 'legal action' against media outlets that continued to report the sum. She didn't correct the figure. Instead, she wrote: 'This headline is just plain wrong.' 'I started the legal process with the Coalition Govt in early 2022. The settlement was well below the reported figure the media has run with - let alone beyond it? 'I'm going to have to start taking legal action against media outlets,' she said. It is unclear how she planned to undertake legal proceedings because it is not illegal to publish speculative figures in a matter like this, nor is it defamatory. And during Mr Lehrmann's defamation proceedings in the Federal Court on Tuesday, we found out that Fordham's report wasn't too far off the mark. Mr Lehrmann's barrister finished Ms Higgins' cross-examination with questions about the compensation payout - and she appeared to try and dodge the issue. Lisa Wilkinson's barrister Sue Chrysanthou objected to the question, twice, but Justice Michael Lee said: 'I will allow it.' Mr Whybrow then asked if Ms Higgins had received more than $2million. 'It has been widely reported that you received over $2million as a result of the outcome of that mediation, is that correct?' Mr Whybrow asked. 'That's what's been reported?,' Ms Higgins replied. 'Yes, I received money from the Commonwealth. They came to an agreement that a failure of a duty of care was made. And they did pay me,' she said. Mr Whybrow said: 'I asked you if it was over $2million.' She tried to explain that the offer and what she got were different, after taxes and legal fees. Mr Whybrow became defiant. It was plainly clear what he was asking, but she wasn't answering the question. 'How much money did the Commonwealth pay you to stop you litigating this matter?' he asked. 'I received $1.9million,' Ms Higgins replied. 'So you've got no idea what your legal costs were or what the gross settlement sum was?' Mr Whybrow asked. 'I think it was around $2.3million. I think it was the amount and then those taxes and then the lawyer took some, but I'm not sure what that fee was. I was never focused on that fee. It was only what I received that I cared about.' The stakes for Mr Lehrmann are high - if it's found that he most likely didn't rape Ms Higgins, he stands to gain compensation and his reputation back. For the Federal government, the stakes are even higher. If Mr Lehrmann wins, Labor will have to answer questions about why millions of taxpayer dollars were handed to someone whose allegations were found - on a balance of probability - to be false. Significant claims brought against the Commonwealth can only be settled with the agreement of the Attorney-General, currently Mark Dreyfus, according to the Legal Services Directions. Finance Minister Katy Gallagher (below) - whose department paid the sum - also came under fire during Question Time in June when she was accused of knowing about Ms Higgins' allegations before the were published on news.com.au and aired on The Project in February 2021. In June 2021, she told the senate that she didn't have 'any knowledge' of the allegations prior to when they were published and broadcast. In June this year, she admitted having some prior information but insisted she 'wasn't aware of the full allegations' before they went to air, but would not say whether she had a transcript of the interview before it was broadcast. She insisted answering that question would breach Ms Higgins' confidence. However, Daily Mail Australia then revealed she appeared to have read the full transcript of Ms Higgins' television interview - four days before the program went to air. At 7.10pm on February 11, 2021, Mr Sharaz texted Ms Higgins: 'Katy Gallagher messaged me. She's angry and wants to help. She's got the context. Says they knew something was wrong because they fired Bruce and not you. They avoided a scandal.' Ms Higgins replied: 'Can I see her message?' Mr Sharaz said: 'Yep! I gave her [The Project] interview for context. I hope that's okay? She's not doing anything with it. But I'm also happy to step out and let her talk to you if you want. 'Basically, I wanted her to get all the context because it's so complicated.' It also appeared Mr Sharaz and Ms Higgins planned to get help from Ms Gallagher all along. Mr Sharaz, Ms Higgins, Lisa Wilkinson and Ten producer Angus Llewellyn had a five-hour recorded meeting in January 2021, a few weeks before The Project episode went to air. In that meeting, the group spoke about whether they had 'friendly MPs' to grill the then-Morrison government, and Mr Sharaz said 'I've got a friend in Labor, Katy Gallagher on the Labor side, who will probe and continue it going'. 'Sitting week, story comes out they have to answer questions in Question Time, it's a mess for them. That's why Britt's picked that timeline,' he said. It was then revealed that Mr Sharaz invited Katy Gallagher to his wedding to his ex-wife in 2018. However, she did not attend. Ms Higgins' settlement was reached in December last year, just one day after Bruce Lehrmann's criminal trial collapsed, but the figure was never disclosed because the Albanese government claimed it was 'confidential'. The compensation was based on her claims that she was not supported by her former bosses, Linda Reynolds and Michaelia Cash, after she she disclosed her rape allegations to them. They both deny failing to support Ms Higgins. Her claims were for general damages, past economic loss and assistance with future domestic duties, and future economic loss based on claims she would not be able to work in politics for 40 years. In court on Tuesday, Mr Whybrow asked Ms Higgins if it was her understanding that part of the claim was that she 'would not be able to work again effectively for the rest of your life?'. Ms Higgins replied: 'I believe it was 40 years.' She stepped off the witness stand on Tuesday afternoon, marking the end of her cross-examination. Ms Higgins appeared relieved. A 59-year-old man has died after crashing his car into a Sydney home. Emergency services rushed to the scene at King Square in Bidwill, in the city's northwest, shortly after midday on Monday. The driver, and only person inside the vehicle, had left the road and crashed into a house. He died at the scene but no one inside the home was injured. A 59-year-old man died after crashing into a home in Bidwill, northwest Sydney, on Monday 'Officers attached to Mt Druitt Police Area Command established a crime scene and are investigating the circumstances surrounding the crash,' New South Wales Police said in a statement. Anyone who witnessed or has dashcam footage of the crash is urged to contact Crime Stoppers. A report will be prepared for the Coroner. A married father-of-two has died in a freak accident after being fatally stabbed by a knife that he was wearing around his neck. Patrick Kenney, Jr., 42, was found in the parking lot outside of an Asian restaurant, Kowloon, located in the historic town of Saugus, Massachusetts, approximately 10 mies from Boston. Police were called to the 9pm Saturday scene initially believing it was a stabbing. He was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he later died. Essex District Attorney Paul Tucker and Saugus Police Chief Michael Ricciardelli said in a joint statement that Kenney's death 'appears to be accidental and no additional parties are believed to be involved.' Kenney's distraught family described him as 'a loving father, husband, brother, son and loyal friend to many,' according to a family statement. Patrick Kenney, Jr., 42, died on Saturday night after he was fatally stabbed by a knife he was wearing around his neck that has been ruled an 'accident' by the DA's office and Saugus Police Chief The scene outside of Kowloon, located in the historic town of Saugus, Massachusetts , approximately 10 miles from Boston, where the tragic accident took place Kenney leaves behind his wife Lauren Kenney (pictured) and two children, who are twins. Lauren's sister's, Bridget and Liz, started a GoFundMe to help support their sister and her neice and nephew during this difficult time. As of Monday evening, nearly $24,000 has been raised Kenney was fatally wounded by a knife that was attached to something he was wearing around his neck, multiple sources told NewsCenter5 reported. It remains unclear why Kenney was wearing a knife around his neck. Officials told The Boston Globe Kenney's death is under investigation. Kenney's father told the news outlet that his son's death was a freak accident. He leaves behind his wife, Lauren, and their young twin children. The family called the incident a 'horrible tragedy' and asked for privacy, as per the news outlet. 'Our family is mourning the loss of Patrick, focused on his wife Lauren and two young children, and trying to make sense of this horrific tragedy,' the family said in a statement. On Monday afternoon, a GoFundMe was created by Lauren Kenney's sisters - Liz and Bridget - to help the family in what has been described as 'an indescribable loss.' 'Patrick, our sister Lauren's husband, departed unexpectedly, leaving behind a grieving wife and their precious children, Ava & Patrick.' 'Pat was not just a loving father; he was also Lauren's best friend and confidant. His sudden absence has created a void that words cannot fill. 'As we navigate this challenging time, our main focus is ensuring that the children receive the support necessary to navigate their daily lives amid these newfound challenges. 'To provide a safety net for Lauren, Ava, and Patrick during this period of grief, we're launching this GoFundMe campaign. 'Your generosity will contribute to their future educational needs, ensuring that Pat's dream of securing a bright future for his family endures. 'The funds raised will also establish a resource for the children's long-term educational and additional requirements.' Investigators are at the scene picking up what appears to be some items they are gathering from the scene Essex District Attorney Paul Tucker and Saugus Police Chief Michael Ricciardelli said in a joint statement that Kenney's death 'appears to be accidental and no additional parties are believed to be involved' 'Let's come together to honor Pat's legacy, rallying around his family and providing the support they need to move forward.' As of Monday evening, the fundraiser has raised nearly $24,000 towards their goal of $30,000. The Wong family, which owns Kowloon, issued a statement to WCVB-TV. 'Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims family. Nothing else matters at this time,' the statement read. 'We ask that people dont jump to conclusions until an investigation is completed,' according to the news station. Two giant pandas have embarked on a 5,000-mile journey from Scotland to China on a 13-hour flight after spending 12 years living in Edinburgh Zoo. Yang Guang and Tian Tian, both 20, are the only giant pandas residing in the UK. But now they have boarded a flight back to China in bespoke crates. The two pandas were on a 10-year loan to Britain which was extended by two years, and in that time the lovable animals because a major visitor attraction. But they are now on a flight to the Sichuan province after taking off earlier today. The plane took off just after 1.45pm and you can track it here. The plane was stocked with crates of leaves and the pair are being transported in specially-crafted crates to keep them safe and comfortable on the China Southern cargo plane. Male Yang Guang is one of the pandas being sent back to China from Edinburgh Zoo Yang Guang and Tian Tian, both 20-years-old, are the only giant pandas residing in the UK The plane took off just after 1.45pm and you can track it on Flightradar The 13-hour flight will have a Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) keeper and vet Yang Guang and Tian Tian, both 20-years-old, are the only giant pandas residing in the UK. But now they have boarded a flight back to China in bespoke crates But they are now on a flight to the Sichuan province after taking off earlier today The China Wildlife Conservation Association base at Chengdu, founded in 1987, claims to be a 'world-class research facility and conservation education centre' The 13-hour flight has a Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) keeper and vet, a Chinese keeper and airline official sat behind the pilot and co-pilot, while the rest of the seats have been taken out of the specially chartered China Southern plane. The pandas will have health checks, food and water during the flight but the humans on board will have to heat up their own meals in the on-board microwave because there will be no cabin crew. Their current estimated arrival is 6:35 local time, or 1:53 GMT. Visitors said their goodbyes to the mammals on Thursday, with the zoo then beginning preparations for them to return to the China Wildlife Conservation Association base at Chengdu. The base, founded in 1987, is world-class research facility, conservation education centre, and international educational tourism destination', winning the Global 500 Roll of Honour for Environmental Achievement, the UN's highest environmental award, twice. Covering more than three square kilometers, the base has several luxury panda 'villas' tucked into the mountains and forests, allowing the bears to live together in the region with countless trees, streams and bamboo plants, as well as more than 700 species of plants and animals. To take the pandas to their new home, Edinburgh Zoo's blacksmith Rab Clark constructed two bespoke metal crates complete with sliding padlock doors, pee trays and removable screens so the keepers can check on them during the flight to Sichuan. The crates are 190cm long, 146cm high and 127cm wide, which the bears have been getting used to in the last few weeks. Mr Clark told BBC News: 'Although they look small, there's actually quite a bit of room for them inside, it's not tight. People watch as giant pandas Yang Guang and Tian Tian are loaded on to the cargo plane Cargo being loaded on to the Boeing 777F plane earlier today The pandas will have health checks, food and water during the flight 'The keepers tell me what they're looking for and what's required so we work as a team to see what's best for the animal. READ MORE - UK's only giant pandas enjoy in-flight meal as bamboo is loaded on to their plane ahead of long journey back home to China after 12 years of failing to mate in Scotland Advertisement 'I think they'll be fine. I'm sure they'll have a safe journey.' The pandas have been in quarantine since the start of November and will also spend time in quarantine when they arrive in China to comply with animal health regulations. The two bears have regular vet checks, including blood and faecal sampling, to ensure they are healthy and do not take any disease into China. A low-loader transporter was hired to transfer the pandas from the zoo to Edinburgh Airport. The pandas are usually late risers, so staff at the zoo had been gradually bringing forward their wake-up time to get them used to earlier starts. The exact time was kept secret to reduce the chance of disruption from crowds of well-wishers or protest groups, as many feel the zoo should never have taken the pandas in the first place. Visitors said their goodbyes to the bears on Thursday, November 30 The Panda Base wears its title as the sanctuary for giant pandas and red pandas Crates of leaves were seen being loaded on to the China Southern cargo plane The China Wildlife Conservation Association base at Chengdu has won the Global 500 Roll of Honour for Environmental Achievement, the UN's highest environmental award The RZSS keeper Michael Livingstone will give the pandas crate keys to the Chinese keeper and the pandas then become the responsibility of the Chinese, before they are placed in quarantine again. RZSS staff are planning to visit Yang Guang and Tian Tian next year to check in on them. The pandas return to China having failed to breed since arriving in Scotland more than 12 years ago. Britain's last pandas before Yang Guang and Tian Tian were Chia Chia and Ching Ching, who arrived in 1974 to be met by an excited Ted Heath. 'It was worse than the worst Brexit days,' a source told the Mail about the call Sources say Johnson had a 'furious' call with the French President in March 2021 Boris Johnson angrily accused Emmanuel Macron of trying to create controversy around the AstraZeneca (AZ) vaccine to distract from the EU's failings during the pandemic. Diplomatic sources told the Mail that the former prime minister held a 'furious' conversation with the French president in March 2021 in which he accused him of trying to undermine the Anglo-Swedish firm to calm domestic anger over the slow pace of the vaccine rollout in the EU. Mr Macron had infuriated the British Government and scientific community the previous month when he claimed publicly that the AstraZeneca jab was 'quasi-ineffective'. Ministers believed he was also instrumental in a controversial EU decision in March 2021 to effectively impound five million doses of the AZ vaccine at a plant in the Netherlands, preventing their export to the UK. In public, ministers declined to directly criticise Mr Macron at the time. But in private, the then PM who will give evidence to the UK Covid inquiry this week is said to have believed his actions were endangering lives. A diplomatic source said Mr Johnson used a phone call with his opposite number at the height of the issue to tackle him. Boris Johnson angrily accused Emmanuel Macron of trying to create controversy around the AstraZeneca vaccine in March 2021, according to sources Johnson had been infuriated when his French counterpart claimed publicly that the AstraZeneca jab was 'quasi-ineffective' There was another equally stormy call with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the topic 'It was probably the lowest moment in UK-EU relations in decades; it was worse than the worst Brexit days,' the source said. 'Boris was furious about the way Macron was behaving. He thought it was irresponsible and he told him that if he carried on it would have a significant cost to France's relationship with the UK. 'By the end of the conversation he was directly accusing Macron and the EU of provoking a row about AstraZeneca in order to distract attention from their own embarrassing failures over the vaccine rollout. 'There was another conversation with (EU chief) Ursula von der Leyen which was if anything even worse. The way they behaved over AstraZeneca set back relations for a very long time.' The Daily Mail revealed yesterday that Mr Johnson was so angered by the EU's threat to ban the export of AZ vaccines from the Netherlands to the UK that he asked the security services to draw up plans for a covert raid to retrieve the doses impounded at a plant in Leiden. The plan was dropped after officials warned it could inflame tensions. A spokesman for Mr Johnson declined to comment on the alleged row with Mr Macron. Israel has vowed to hunt down and kill Hamas leaders 'wherever they are in the world' even if it takes years, secret recordings reveal. The head of Shin Bet, the country's security agency, can be heard in a clip comparing the October 7 massacre to a previous terror attack at the Munich Olympics. He says: 'The war cabinet gave us an objective eliminate Hamas and we are determined to do so. This is our Munich.' In 1972, Palestinian terrorists attacked the Israeli team at the Olympics and killed 11 athletes. For years after, the country took bloody revenge against those responsible, including an operation codenamed Wrath of God dramatised by Steven Spielberg in the 2005 film Munich which targeted nine members of the group responsible. They were tracked down in Rome, Paris and Beirut and assassinated over a seven-year period. In the massacre on October 7 this year at least 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 kidnapped. Ronen Bar, head of the Shin Bet intelligence services, can be heard in a clip comparing the October 7 massacre to a previous terror attack at the Munich Olympics People walk around the ruins of a building destroyed in Israeli strikes in Gaza City on October 8 In the massacre on October 7 this year at least 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 kidnapped In the recordings aired by Israeli TV channel Kan on Sunday night, security head Ronan Bar, 58, can be heard saying: 'We are already learning our lessons from the events [of October 7]. READ MORE: Hamas warns a 'war of liberation' bigger than October 7 massacre is 'coming soon': Israeli spy chief vows to kill all the terror group's leaders around the world as mastermind behind kibbutz massacre is eliminated Osama Hamda (pictured) expressed no regret for deaths of the 1,200 Israelis, almost all of whom were civilians, killed by Hamas during the October 7 incursion Advertisement 'It will be done anywhere needed, in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Turkey, Qatar. It will take a few years, but we will be there to do it. 'Security responsibility is ours. Our duty is to provide both security and a sense of security. Unfortunately, on October 7, we did not succeed in doing that. I think we are on an upward trajectory.' In a letter to staff after the attacks, Mr Bar said: 'The responsibility is mine. Despite a series of actions we carried out, unfortunately, on Saturday we were unable to establish sufficient deterrence so as to thwart the attack. 'There will be a time for investigations. Now we are fighting.' Senior Hamas leaders are known to live outside Gaza and the West Bank, with key figures in Lebanon, Turkey, Qatar and Iran. Ismail Haniyeh, 61, head of Hamas's political bureau, travels between Istanbul and Doha and is known to stay at luxury five-star hotels. He is often joined by leader Khaled Mashal, 58, flying between Doha and Istanbul. Turkey responded by saying that Israel would bear 'serious consequences' if it tried to carry out any assassinations on Hamas within its borders or other countries. A Turkish intelligence source was quoted as saying: 'The necessary warnings were given... based on the news about the statements of Israeli officials, and it was made clear to Israel that this would lead to serious consequences.' Last week The Wall Street Journal said Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered spy agencies to draw up plans to assassinate Hamas's top leaders outside Gaza. According to the report, some called for Israel to immediately assassinate Hamas leader Mashal, who lives in Doha. But such actions on Qatari or Turkish soil could scupper diplomatic efforts to free hostages. Mr Bar's intervention comes as a Hamas official claimed the terror group was 'not far off' from launching a 'war of liberation' bigger than the October 7 attacks on Israel. Households should stock up on candles and battery-powered radios in case a catastrophe cripples digital gadgets, the deputy prime minister has warned. Oliver Dowden urged people to prepare for being thrown back to an 'analogue' era if internet and power systems collapse. Details will be set out in an official government 'resilience website' launching next year which will offer advice on how to prepare for natural disasters, pandemics and malicious acts such as cyber attacks or terrorism. Mr Dowden suggested people had become too reliant on the internet which could leave them isolated in an information vacuum during a disaster. 'It always used to be the case that everyone would be able to access a battery-operated radio,' Mr Dowden said. 'How many people have a communication device that isn't reliant on digital and electric? We shouldn't assume that the resilience we had as individuals when we were growing up is the same now because society has digitised.' Oliver Dowden urged people to prepare for being thrown back to an 'analogue' era if internet and power systems collapse Households should stock up on candles and battery-powered radios in case a catastrophe cripples digital gadgets, Mr Dowden warned In the past it was common to keep 'a torch or candles' in the cupboard under the stairs. But society had 'changed unrecognisably' in the past 20 or 30 years, Mr Dowden said, adding: 'The Government needs to ensure we are resilient in this digital age including considering those analogue capabilities that it makes sense to retain. 'If you had a power outage and you wanted to get news, where would you get that news from? In the olden days, you'd switch on the radio and you'd hear what was going on.' Mr Dowden, whose responsibilities include building the UK's resilience to emergencies, said he was revisiting official advice to ensure Britons are 'prepared and personally resilient'. 'It could be tomorrow that one of these things hits,' he said. The new website will allow members of the public to register as volunteers to help out in a regional or national crisis. In the past it was common to keep 'a torch or candles' in the cupboard under the stairs. Pictured: A person holding a walkie talkie radio phone in mountain Mr Dowden also warned that AI poses a 'chronic risk' and will increase the risks of cyber attacks and even the threat posed from chemical weapons. 'The proverbial teenage kid in their bedroom with the application of AI is going to be a much better hacker than they were previously,' he said. 'The ability of lone, malign individuals to have greater capabilities to develop biological threats increases with AI. Likewise with chemical risks.' The deputy prime minister made his remarks during a visit to Porton Down, Wiltshire, where the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory works to protect Britain from chemical, biological and radiological threats. A teenage boy has been charged with attempted murder and a string of driving offences after an alleged road rage incident. Police allege the 14-year-old was involved in an altercation at a home on Dowling Street in Woolloomooloo, Sydney, on Saturday morning, before getting behind the wheel of a stolen car. He then allegedly drove at two people before fleeing the scene and dumping the car on Windeyer Street just a block away. Police will allege in court that the car had been stolen from a home in Mosman, on Sydney's lower north shore, three weeks earlier and that the teen had choked a woman just prior to the incident. A 14-year-old boy has been charged with two counts of attempted murder after allegedly trying to mow down two people on Dowling Street in Woolloomooloo (pictured) on Saturday Police have also charged the teen with a string of driving offences and will allege in court that the teen choked a woman just prior to the incident (stock image) The teenager was arrested on Monday following 'extensive enquiries' and taken to Kings Cross Police Station where he was charged with eight offences. The charges include attempt to murder (two counts), drive recklessly/furiously or speed/manner dangerous and negligent driving (no death or grievous bodily harm). Not give particulars to other driver, take & drive conveyance w/o consent of owner, intentionally choke etc person without consent and steal motor vehicle were also among the charges. He was refused bail and set to face children's court on Tuesday. Former Labor leader Bill Shorten says those calling for the firing of ministers over the release of 148 asylum seekers may as well be pushing for High Court judges to be sacked as they were more to blame than the politicians. Two ministers in the Albanese cabinet are facing calls from the Coalition to resign after one of the freed detainees was charged with a serious sexual assault within weeks of his release, and a second was arrested for drug offences. Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan said on Tuesday: 'The time has come for the Prime Minister to do the right thing and ask for these ministers to resign, and if they don't he should sack them.' The pressure for heads to roll has only increased since it was revealed that the mass release could have been avoided had the Labor government released just one detainee: the Rohingya paedophile known as NZYQ, who has been in detention since serving a prison sentence for child sexual abuse and whose case the High Court challenge was based on. But Disability Services Minister Bill Shorten said it made no sense to be demanding politicians be sacked while the judges who made the ruling were immune to such action due to the separation of powers. 'The logic of that is that the High Court should resign,' he said. Disability Services Minister Bill Shorten said if anyone should be forced to resign, it should be the High Court judges who made the decision Afghan refugee Aliyawar Yawari was deemed a 'danger to the Australian community' by a South Australian judge in 2016 following attacks on three elderly women in 2013 and 2014 'If you really think that there was some way to prevent this, the reality is the High Court has made its decision. That is their right and prerogative in our judicial system.' Mr Shorten argued both Immigration Minister Andrew Giles and Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil had moved with 'utmost speed' to enact laws that would see the released detainees put back into preventative detention if they were assessed to be a risk to public safety. 'The High Court has made a decision, we've had to respond very quickly and there is a law in the Senate today which [the Coalition] can vote for to keep people safe,' he said. The political debate comes as a 65-year-old man was charged with two counts of indecent assault after being released from indefinite detention following the High Court decision. Afghan refugee Aliyawar Yawari originally locked up as he was deemed a 'danger to the Australian community' by a South Australian judge in 2016 following attacks on three elderly women in 2013 and 2014. He was refused police bail to appear in the Adelaide Magistrates Court on Monday. Meanwhile another released refugee, Mohammed Ali Nadari, 45, has been charged with cannabis possession in New South Wales. Today Show host Sylvia Jeffreys argued to Mr Shorten that both the Home Affairs and Immigration ministers 'knew this decision was coming and they didn't have a Plan B. That's a rookie error, isn't it?' Mr Shorten said the laws which were reversed as part of the High Court decision had been in place for 20 years, and were relied upon by the previous government during their time in power. Labor had opposed the court's decision. Mr Tehan accused the government of failing to adequately prepare for the possibility of the High Court ruling that indefinite immigration detention was illegal. 'We would have been making sure that in the months leading up to the High Court decision that we were looking at what legislation we could put in place to keep the community safe,' he said. 'The warnings were put out that there was a real worry that these people would reoffend, and that, sadly, it looks like allegedly that is what's happened.' Under the Federal government's proposed amendments, preventative detention orders would apply to those released, including murderers and sex offenders, and are based on similar measures for high-risk terror offenders, Ms O'Neil said. There are calls for Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil to resign There are calls for Immigration Minister Andrew Giles to resign The exact number of released detainees the preventative detention orders would apply to is not known. Defence Minister Richard Marles backed his ministerial colleagues. 'What's happened here is the High Court have ruled against a law that was put in place by the Howard government, it was there throughout the Turnbull and Morrison governments,' he told ABC Radio. 'The question is whether or not (the opposition) is going to be supporting strong legislation, which will put the strongest possible conditions on those who have been released.' Asked by shadow attorney-general Michaelia Cash why the government had released the high-risk detainees, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong said it was imperative to work within the court's decision. 'A shadow attorney-general should understand that a government under the Westminster system does not act like an autocratic dictatorship and actually does what the court says,' Senator Wong told parliament on Monday. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said the Coalition would likely back the laws. 'If the government has adequate measures to keep Australians safe, then we will support those measures and we'll see what they have to say,' he told reporters in Sydney. 'If we see a bad bill, we're not going to support it.' Greens senator Nick McKim called the laws a 'race to the bottom' on refugee policy. 'It creates two different classes of people in this country under the law, depending on whether you are the holder of a particular class of visa or not,' he said. James Cleverly is due to arrive in Rwanda today to sign a new treaty which will bolster the Government's flagship asylum policy. The Home Secretary was thought to be heading to Kigali overnight aboard the Government's Airbus jet, landing at about 8am UK time. He is expected to sign a treaty which will seek to address concerns raised by the UK Supreme Court last month and will be binding under international law. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said he is determined to get removals flights under way by the spring despite the court's rejection of the scheme. He aims to overcome judicial objections with the treaty and new measures which will be set out in emergency legislation. The number of small boat migrants who have reached Britain so far this year has topped 29,000 eclipsing the figure for the whole of 2021. James Cleverly is due to arrive in Rwanda today to sign a new treaty which will bolster the Government's flagship asylum policy Cleverly is expected to sign a treaty which will seek to address concerns raised by the UK Supreme Court last month and will be binding under international law More than 1,000 arrived across the Channel in the five days to Sunday, bringing the running total since the start of the year to 29,090 (File Photo) More than 1,000 arrived across the Channel in the five days to Sunday, bringing the running total since the start of the year to 29,090. By comparison, the whole of 2021 saw 28,526 migrants arrive. However, this year's figure is still down by a third on last year's record number of 45,755. In a ruling last month, judges said the 140million scheme was unlawful on the grounds there was a risk that asylum seekers could be sent from Rwanda to a country where they may be put at risk. In a further move to reassure judges about the scheme, British Government lawyers could be stationed in Rwandan courts to bolster the country's asylum system and the appeals mechanism. Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer said the Home Office was looking 'very carefully' at the idea of sending lawyers to Rwanda to address concerns about the legal system there. 'Discussions around beefing up their legal expertise, their legal capacity, have certainly been part of the talks,' a Whitehall source told the Daily Telegraph. Once the treaty is signed, ministers are expected to unveil emergency legislation setting out further moves to allow removals flights to finally take off. The number of small boat migrants who have reached Britain so far this year has topped 29,000 eclipsing the figure for the whole of 2021 (File Photo) It is understood there has been no decision on whether the new Bill will take the 'full-fat' option and withdraw parts of UK immigration law from the European Convention on Human Rights and other treaties. Alternatively, the measures could simply state Rwanda is a safe country in a bid to counteract the Supreme Court ruling. Downing Street yesterday denied reports that Rwanda is set to be paid an extra 15million for the scheme. The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: 'Certainly I don't recognise that figure of 15million, there's been no request for additional funding for the treaty made by Rwanda, or not offered by the UK Government.' Mr Cleverly told the Commons last night: 'Immigration policy must be fair, legal, and sustainable. That's why we are also taking the fight to illegal immigration. 'Our plan to stop the boats is working. Small boat arrivals are down by a third, even as illegal migration across Europe is on the rise.' Biggest ever clampdown 'will slash migration by 300,000' By David Barrett and Jason Groves James Cleverly last night vowed 'enough is enough' as he unveiled tough reforms designed to slash net migration by 300,000 a year. After a battering from the Tory backbenches over record levels of immigration, the Home Secretary pledged a five-point plan would lead to the 'biggest ever reduction in net migration'. Hailing 'the most substantial package of legal migration reforms this country has ever seen,' he said care workers will be barred from bringing family members to Britain. The salary threshold for a work visa will rise by 12,500 to more than 38,000 a year. And to stop immigration 'undercutting British workers', he vowed to 'scrap cut-price shortage labour from overseas' by ending the 20 per cent salary discount for sectors with labour shortages, and slashing the list of eligible roles. Critics warned the measures may not take effect soon enough to make a difference to migration figures before the next general election. Mr Cleverly said the proposals due to come into force in April also expanded upon previous commitments to bar most foreign students from bringing family members to the UK. After unveiling the plans, he was expected to fly to Rwanda last night to sign a new treaty in the hope of seeing deportation flights for small boat migrants begin as soon as possible. Mr Cleverly told MPs: 'Enough is enough. We've got to bring these numbers down. In total this package, plus our reduction in student dependants, will mean around 300,000 fewer people will come in future years than have come to the UK last year.' He said the measures were only possible thanks to the historic Brexit vote. 'When our country voted to leave the European Union, we voted to take back control of our borders,' he said. 'Thanks to this Conservative Government, we now have a points-based immigration system through which we control who comes to the UK.' Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's official spokesman said: 'This is the biggest clampdown on legal migration ever. It doesn't prevent us going further should we chose to do so in the future.' Under the plan announced days after it emerged net migration had hit an all-time high of 745,000 last year the bar on care workers bringing dependants is expected to cut net migration by about 100,000 a year at current levels, it is understood. Raising the salary threshold for a work visa to 38,700 is expected to slash a further 50,000 a year from the net total. Crucially, care workers will be excluded from the salary hike in a bid to avoid worsening labour shortages in the sector. A review of the jobs on the 'shortage occupation list' will aim to cut the number of sectors it applies to. Mr Cleverly also announced he will toughen family visas which allow relatives of foreign nationals to come here. Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who was sacked three weeks ago, said the announcement was a 'step in the right direction' but was 'too late'. 'I put forward similar measures six times in the last year,' she wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. 'I'm glad that the PM has finally agreed to introducing some of them now but the delay has reduced their impact.' Mrs Braverman has previously accused the PM of reneging on a private agreement to cut migration, including a deal to raise the salary threshold to 40,000. The new package echoes proposals put forward by former PM Boris Johnson in his Daily Mail column last month, when he advocated a 40,000 salary threshold and said business owners who had become accustomed to accessing cheap foreign labour should be 'called out'. Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Mr Cleverly's plan was an 'admission of years of total failure by the Government'. Home Secretary James Cleverly yesterday set out a far-reaching programme of immigration reform which could see 300,000 fewer migrants a year coming to Britain. He declared that 'enough is enough' but how will his plan work? Restricting Dependents Care workers will be barred from bringing family members with them to Britain. This has been a rapidly increasing element of net migration and was an obvious 'quick win' for the Government. In one fell swoop, the net migration total could fall by about 100,000 a year at current levels, insiders were predicting, after Mr Cleverly said some 120,000 dependants accompanied 100,000 care workers in the year to September. Boosting Wages There will be two important changes to the salaries which must be paid to foreign workers. Under the Conservative's new plan, care workers will be banned from bringing their families to the UK. James Cleverly says that this will not discourage such workers from coming to the UK The government hopes that immigration reform will see 300,000 fewer migrants a year coming to Britain Foreigners seeking to come to work in the UK will now need to earn 38,700 per year to qualify for a work visa First, the minimum salary threshold for a work visa will jump by almost half up 12,500 to 38,700 a year. In theory, this will make it less attractive for employers to look for labour overseas rather than hiring British-based staff. Second, a 20 per cent discount on that minimum salary for sectors suffering labour shortages will be scrapped. The list of eligible jobs where there is a shortage of workers will also be reviewed and stripped back. Care workers Care workers will be exempt from both these salary measures in a bid to avoid exacerbating labour shortages in care homes. Mr Cleverly told MPs he did not expect the reforms to affect the number of foreign nationals applying for care jobs and that those without dependants would come to Britain instead. Dr Madeleine Sumption, director of Oxford University's Migration Observatory, appeared to agree with the Home Secretary's analysis. The independent academic said: 'The number of people around the world who are willing to come to the UK to do care work is potentially very substantial, so the impacts on employers' ability to recruit might not be very big.' By excluding care workers in this way, ministers slyly pulled the rug from beneath the feet of critics predicting a care crisis. However, such a broad exclusion does run the risk of making the policy less effective overall. Foreign Spouses and Relatives In perhaps the biggest surprise, the requirements for bringing relatives from abroad will be made far tougher. A British-based individual or household will have to prove they have an income of 38,700 to win a family visa for a relative. That is more than double the current 18,600, which has not increased since 2012. Only rich Britons will be able to marry foreigners and bring them back to the UK, as they will now need to earn 38,700 to qualify for a family visa for a relative Ministers have also announced plans to ensure that students do not bring their families with them while they come to study in the UK Some Conservatives have claimed that Rishi Sunak is moving too slowly to introduce measures to make it difficult to come to the UK This will mean only better-off families will be able to bring foreign-based family members to join them here. This is expected to cut overall net migration by a 'few tens of thousands' a year. Foreigners who want to study or work in Britain will also have to pay larger sums towards the NHS. The 'immigration health surcharge' will jump from 624 to 1,035 per person for each year they are here. Students Ministers had already announced measures to stop most students bringing dependants here. Those changes come into force next month and are expected to see 140,000 fewer people come to this country each year. In addition, there will be a review led by the Home Office's independent Migration Advisory Committee of the 'graduate route', which allows students to work in Britain for two years after their course. Is It Enough? The new measures could leave net migration running at about 370,000 a year still far higher than the 229,000 pledged by the Conservatives in their 2019 general election manifesto. Tory MPs on the Right of the party broadly welcomed yesterday's announcement but some warned it might not be tough enough. Senior backbencher Sir Edward Leigh suggested exemptions made for the care sector could undermine the package. Former home secretary Suella Braverman indicated it was too little, too late. But if the next election takes place next autumn, as widely expected, there is still a chance yesterday's measures will have started to show through in the figures. Then Rishi Sunak may be able to tell voters that immigration has truly turned a corner. Friends have rallied behind a 25-year-old man who was buried beneath 1.5m of sand after an accident at Bribie Island and is fighting for life in hospital. Josh Taylor was without a pulse for 45 minutes after falling head first into a gaping hole in the sand on Saturday afternoon. It took 15 people to pull him free and his friends and family took turns providing CPR until he was flown to Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. He remains in a critical but stable condition as of Tuesday morning. Friends of 25-year-old Josh Taylor (pictured) have shared heartbreaking messages of support after the young man was buried alive in a freak accident Messages of support have been shared on social media, hoping for the young man's recovery as he enters his third day in intensive care. 'Prayers out to you and the family, you're gonna get through this my man,' one friend wrote to Facebook. 'Thoughts are with you Joshy,' another wrote. Wests Brisbane Junior Rugby League Club shared with members a message from the Taylor family asking for prayers to help Josh 'pull through'. 'I have very sad news that the man who was buried at Bribie is Squizzy's son Josh,' the message said. 'We are all devastated and praying for him.' A witness who helped rescue Mr Taylor was told the group had dug a pit into the sand to roast a pig, similar to the traditional Maori cooking style of hangi. A witness said Mr Taylor stumbled slighly on the sand as he got up from his chair and fell into the hole and the walls of the pit collapsed in on him. Mr Taylor fell into a 1.5m hole on a beach on Bribie Island, Queensland, (pictured) on Saturday where he would remain trapped for some time Paramedics and a RACQ Lifeflight rescue helicopter crew were called to the scene where they spent two hours attempting to revive Mr Taylor One witness, Nathan, said he was leaving the beach when a group of men ran over yelling for help to rescue their friend from under the sand. When he arrived at the scene, Mr Taylor's family and friends were desperately digging to get him out. 'I realised someone was head first in a hole and I was just digging, digging, digging,' he said. 'When I first went up to the hole, I couldn't even see his foot. That's how deep it was.' He told NCA NewsWire there were more than 15 people digging in the sand to get the man out before paramedics and rangers arrived. 'All of his family were screaming at us, telling us to help, telling us to get rope so we could pull him out. It was pretty gruesome,' Nathan said. 'There were like 15 men on the rope pulling and he did not budge.' Mr Taylor was rushed to Princess Alexandra Hospital via helicopter in a critical condition His condition hasn't changed in the days since and remains in the hospital's Intensive Care Unit After some time of pulling and digging, Mr Taylor finally burst through the surface of the sand, but the force of being pulled out caused him further injury, Nathan said. 'It was pretty gnarly when he popped out. I threw up,' he said. 'He broke. The suction, the force of everyone pulling.' When they got him out, Mr Taylor did not have a pulse and rangers began performing CPR. Rangers in the area also applied a defibrillator before paramedics arrived. Lawyers for Prince Harry will today challenge a Home Office decision that he is no longer entitled to armed police guards when he visits Britain. It was not known if the Duke of Sussex will fly in from his home in California to attend the three-day hearing at the High Court, when his legal team are expected to argue that the decision was unfair. His taxpayer-funded protection was removed after he stepped back as a senior royal and moved to the US with wife Meghan. This week's case will consider the February 2020 decision by the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures, known as Ravec, to withdraw his automatic right to such protection. He says he does not feel safe to bring his family to Britain without police protection, and that private bodyguards cannot match the powers and intelligence-gathering capacity of the police. He says he does not feel safe to bring his family to Britain without police protection, and that private bodyguards cannot match the powers and intelligence-gathering capacity of the police His lawyers have previously questioned whether members of the Royal Household were involved in the decision to withdraw his automatic police protection (Pictured - Harry leaves the High Court in London in March of this year) His lawyers have previously questioned whether members of the Royal Household were involved in the decision to withdraw his automatic police protection. It emerged that Sir Edward Young, the late Queen's assistant private secretary, and the Earl of Rosslyn, the Lord Steward of Prince Charles's household, were on the Ravec committee at the time. Harry, 39, has previously lost a High Court case in which he argued he should be allowed to pay for police protection for himself and his family when they are in the UK. The body of a woman, believed to be missing 27-year-old Heather Brooke, has been discovered in Sydney's outer northwest. A police search for Ms Brooke, from Glendenning, was launched after her family reported her missing last week when she failed to return home and couldn't be contacted. She was last seen about 1pm on Friday, December 1 at a home on Amy Close in Glendenning. SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA - Newswire Photos - MAY 23 2023: A general stock view of Police tape on a crime scene in Sydney (stock image) Police held concerns for Ms Brooke's welfare as her disappearance was 'out of character'. Police officers from Mount Druitt Police Area Command began a search for Ms Brooke and discovered a body in Schofields about 12.30am on Tuesday. While the body is yet to be formally identified, it's believed to be the missing 27-year-old. Initial inquiries suggest her death is not suspicious and a report will be prepared for the coroner. Step aside Kate and William, Barbara and Peter are the latest royal couple to pay New Zealand a visit. But these aren't your regular royals, Barbara and Peter are a world-first pairing of a male and female T-Rex. A third of New Zealand's population has already flocked to the Auckland War Memorial Museum to see the ancient power couple. Barbara is exceptionally rare as one of only three pregnant T-Rex specimens ever found. However, there are only a few days left to see the royal couple as the exhibition ends on 10 December. The world-first pairing of male and female T-Rex skeletons will be on display for a few more days at the Auckland War Memorial Museum For the first time a male and female T-Rex will be displayed side by side, offering a rare opportunity to see the magnificent specimens in comparison WHAT WAS T. REX? Tyrannosaurus rex was a species of bird-like, meat-eating dinosaur. It lived between 6866 million years ago in what is now the western side of North America. They could reach up to 40 feet (12 metres) long and 12 feet (4 metres) tall. More than 50 fossilised specimens of T. Rex have been collected to date. The monstrous animal had one of the strongest bites in the animal kingdom. An artist's impression of T. Rex Advertisement Barbara was discovered in the Hell Creek Formation in northwestern Montana where she had been buried for the last 66 million years. At 38ft (11.7m) long and almost 10ft (3m) tall Barbara would have been one of the biggest predators on Earth. The palaeontologists who found Barbara believe that her protruding stomach is evidence that she was carrying eggs at the time she died. This makes Barbara one of the rarest dinosaur specimens on Earth and a rare opportunity to examine the difference between male and female T-Rexes. At 44 per cent complete, Barbara is also the eighth most complete T-Rex specimen in the world. Experts also believe that Barbara had been injured during her lifetime, possibly in a fight with another T-Rex. A large wound on her hind legs shows signs of healing over, implying that she lived on for a long time after the injury. Her partner Peter is no less unique as one of the only four black T-Rexes ever found. While most T-Rexes are brown, Peter's bones are a brilliant obsidian black. Slightly smaller than Barbara at only just under 36 feet, Peter also bears the scars of past battles. Huge wounds in his hind leg suggest that Peter fought with a younger, stronger rival at the end of his life. However, it didn't end well as the palaeontologists who have studied Peter believe that he was almost certainly killed and eaten by another T- Rex. Barbara the T-Rex is one of only three pregnant T-Rexes ever found, scientists say her producing belly indicates she was carrying eggs READ MORE: T-Rex was 70% larger than previously thought and could weigh up to 33,000lbs, study claims Tyrannosaurus Rex (pictured) was a species of bird-like, meat-eating dinosaur. It lived between 6866 million years ago in what is now the western side of North America Advertisement The specimens on display aren't the only thing that's historic, as Auckland Museum says the exhibition has become the most successful dinosaur display of all time. With a few days left before the exhibition closes, the museum has already welcomed 1.6 million visitors. For reference that is almost the whole population of Auckland. David Reeves, CEO of Auckland Museum, says: 'Barbara and Peter have provided a once-in-a-lifetime, educational experience for many, many thousands of school children. 'It has been a joy to see peoples reactions as they encounter these magnificent specimens for the first time.' In addition to putting these magnificent specimens on display, Auckland Museum has also made the preliminary research on the specimens public. Dr David Burnham, of the University of Kansas and Dr John Nudds from the University of Manchester have been studying Peter and Barbara in the lab for months. Dr Nudds said: 'These reports are designed to encourage children and young people to learn about the extraordinary world of theropods, a subject that has fascinated me for my entire professional life.' Meanwhile, Dr Burnham added: 'Studying and reporting publicly about each individual specimen means it becomes part of the entire body of knowledge about Tyrannosaurus Rex. 'Every documented specimen counts enormously, not least because there are so very few.' It's something that features on many people's bucket lists. And if you've always dreamed of seeing the Northern Lights, make sure you have your eyes to the skies this evening. The stunning celestial display will be visible across large parts of the UK, following a coronal mass ejection. While the Northern Lights are usually only seen in the very north of the UK, the Met Office says that they could be visible as far south as Newcastle. Here's everything you need to know, including how and when to see the Northern Lights from your area. If you've always dreamed of seeing the Northern Lights, make sure you have your eyes to the skies this evening. Pictured: the Northern Lights over Warkworth Castle in Northumberland The Northern Lights are stunning ribbons of light that weave across the Earth's northern regions. These natural light shows are caused by magnetic storms that have been triggered by solar activity, such as explosions from the Sun, known as solar flares, or ejected gas bubbles from the Sun, known as coronal mass ejections. During these events, energetic charged particles are carried from the Sun by the solar wind. 'When these particles seep through Earth's magnetosphere, they cause substorms,' NASA explains. 'Then fast moving particles slam into our thin, high atmosphere, colliding with Earth's oxygen and nitrogen particles. 'As these air particles shed the energy they picked up from the collision, each atom starts to glow in a different colour.' This week, the Northern Lights will be visible from the UK as a minor coronal mass ejection strikes the Earth. 'Auroral activity should remain at background levels until late Monday 04 or early Tuesday 05 Dec when the onset of faster solar winds, possibly aided by minor coronal mass ejection influence should enhance the auroral oval again,' the Met Office explained. This week, the Northern Lights will be visible from the UK as a minor coronal mass ejection strikes the Earth If Northern Lights appear in the UK, they're usually only seen from the north of Scotland. However, viewers significantly further south may be lucky enough to see them tonight. Pictured: The Northern Lights over Achnahaird Bay near Lochniver in Wester Ross If Northern Lights appear in the UK, they're usually only seen from the north of Scotland. However, viewers significantly further south may be lucky enough to see them tonight. 'From the UK views of aurora may be possible from as far south as Northern England and Northern Ireland where skies are clear,' the Met Office added. 'Activity should subside by Wednesday 06 Dec with views likely restricted to the far north of Scotland.' Unfortunately, the weather forecast isn't looking great for this evening, which could scupper any plans to go searching for the aurora. Tonight will be 'cloudy for many overnight with rain at times,' according to the Met Office. 'Some snow, mainly in the northeast, and over some hills elsewhere,' it added. 'Clear spells giving frost and ice in the north and northwest.' If you miss tonight's display, don't worry - there are likely to be many more next year. Unfortunately, the weather forecast isn't looking great for this evening, which could scupper any plans to go searching for the aurora A study published last week revealed that Earth could hit its 'solar maximum' in 2024, when many bizarre dark spots appear on its surface. These 'sunspots' which can cluster together and form what looks like an archipelago are caused by massive changes in our star's magnetic field. They also shoot out violent explosions of energy towards Earth, causing 'solar storms' that can potentially damage satellites and disrupt the internet. 'Of course, they also create beautiful auroras so we can expect 2024 to be a good year for aurora hunters,' said Dr Dibyendu Nandi, a physicist from the IISER Kolkata Center of Excellence in Space Sciences in India. Incredible footage has provided a new view of the world's biggest iceberg as it begins its journey out into the Southern Ocean. The iceberg, called A23a, is around 1,540 sq miles in area more than twice the size of Greater London (607 sq miles) and a whopping 1,312 feet thick. It hit the headlines last week after it began to move, following 30 years stuck to the ocean floor. Now, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has released new video and images captured by the RRS Sir David Attenborough, showing the 'megaberg' stretching out into the distance beyond the research vessel. 'It is incredibly lucky that the iceberg's route out of the Weddell Sea sat directly across our planned path, and that we had the right team aboard to take advantage of this opportunity,' said Dr Andrew Meijers, Chief Scientist on RRS Sir David Attenborough and Polar Oceans Science Leader at BAS. Incredible footage has provided a new view of the world's biggest iceberg as it begins its journey out into the Southern Ocean The iceberg, called A23a, is around 1,540 sq miles in area more than twice the size of Greater London (607 sq miles) and a whopping 1,312 feet thick READ MORE: The world's biggest iceberg is on the move Advertisement While A23a originally calved from the Filchner Ice Shelf back in 1986, it remained grounded on the seabed until last week. On November 24, the megaberg broke free and began moving out of the Weddell Sea sector into the Southern Ocean. Now, the megaberg is likely to be swept along by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current into 'iceberg alley', according to the BAS. This puts it on a common iceberg trajectory towards the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia. This week, the RRS Sir David Attenborough happened to pass the iceberg as part of its planned route towards the Weddell Sea. 'We're fortunate that navigating A23a hasn't had an impact on the tight timings for our science mission,' Dr Meijers said. 'It is amazing to see this huge berg in person it stretches as far as the eye can see.' The iceberg hit the headlines last week after it began to move, following 30 years stuck to the ocean floor The British Antarctic Survey has released new video and images captured by the RRS Sir David Attenborough, showing the 'megaberg' stretching out into the distance beyond the research vessel How do icebergs form? An iceberg is a piece of freshwater ice that has detached from a glacier and is floating in the ocean. Icebergs form when pieces of ice break off the end of an ice shelf or a glacier that flows into a body of water. This is called 'calving' and is a natural process that is responsible for ice loss at the edges of glaciers and ice sheets. Advertisement Aside from filming it, the researchers also took samples from the iceberg. They hope these will aid in our understanding of how climate change is affecting the Southern Ocean and the organisms that live there. Laura Taylor, a biogeochemist working on the mission, said: 'We know that these giant icebergs can provide nutrients to the waters they pass through, creating thriving ecosystems in otherwise less productive areas. 'What we don't know is what difference particular icebergs, their scale, and their origins can make to that process. 'We took samples of ocean surface waters behind, immediately adjacent to, and ahead of the iceberg's route. 'They should help us determine what life could form around A23a, and how this iceberg and others like it impact carbon in the ocean and its balance with the atmosphere.' The record for the largest current iceberg changes most years, as new icebergs are calved off the Antarctic continent and subsequently break into smaller fragments. While A23a originally calved from the Filchner Ice Shelf back in 1986, it remained grounded on the seabed until last week Aside from filming it, the researchers also took samples from the iceberg. They hope these will aid in our understanding how climate change is affecting the Southern Ocean and the organisms that live there Rising waters and air temperatures caused by global warming are triggering instabilities along the coasts of Antarctica and Greenland, accelerating melting and increasing the rates of calving. The former record holder was A76, which detached from an ice shelf in the Weddell Sea in May 2021, but it has since fragmented into three pieces. 'Calving of icebergs from Antarctica's ice shelves is part of the natural life cycle of glaciers,' said Professor Geraint Tarling, Ecosystems Science Leader at BAS. A California lake could be sitting on top of the world's largest 'white gold' mine. The Salton Sea in southern California has been swarmed by companies large and small looking for cost-effective ways to extract lithium that is dissolved in scalding hot brine water that flows beneath the lake's southern point. But a new study funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) found the basin has even more lithium - dubbed white gold because of its soft, silvery-white look - than previously estimated. It found there could be 18 million tons of extractable metal - enough to meet the US's demand for the valuable metal for decades. California Governor Gavin Newsom has previously described the Salton Sea as the Saudi Arabia of lithium mining. A California lake could be sitting on top of the world's largest 'white gold' mine The Department of Energy (DOE) shared the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory results, which determined the underground pool could hold 18 million tons - enough to meet the US's demand for the valuable metal for decades It would also make the reservoir the largest in the world, overtaking Chile (nine million metric tons). One ton of lithium is currently priced at $29,000, making the supply in the Salton Sea worth more than $540 billion. The DOE said it could support over 375 million electric vehicle batteries. Lithium is a critical component for batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles and solar panels - and China has dominated the market for decades because 90 percent of the metal mined is refined in the nation. Jeff Marootian, principal deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, said: 'Lithium is vital to decarbonizing the economy and meeting President Biden's goals of 50 percent electric vehicle adoption by 2030. 'This report confirms the once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a domestic lithium industry at home while also expanding clean, flexible electricity generation. 'Using American innovation, we can lead the clean energy future, create jobs and a strong domestic supply chain, and boost our national energy security.' The Salton Sea is 35 miles long, 15 miles wide and 51 feet deep, and located in Riverside and Imperial counties at the southern end of California. Three companies are vying to be the first to tap into the white gold mine. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Energy (BHE), one of the companies working to pull lithium from the lake, was given a $14.9 million grant in 2021 by the DOE to study how Salton Sea-region lithium could be used to make lithium hydroxide, a specialized type of the metal that produces more efficient and longer-lasting EV batteries. The company owns 10 of the 11 geothermal power plants at the Salton Sea. Three companies will use power plants to extract the lithium to pull superheated brine from the ground Controlled Thermal Resources announced in January that it had recovered lithium from its geothermal brine resource and is set to construct a massive plant at the site (pictured) Lithium hydroxide can be easily mixed with nickel when making batteries, unlike traditional lithium. Adding nickel increases the battery's energy density, allowing for a more powerful unit. EnergySource has also secured an investment to accelerate the deployment of its extraction platform at the lake, and Controlled Thermal Resources is also a prospect of the mine. Controlled Thermal Resources announced in January that it had recovered lithium from its geothermal brine resource and is set to construct a massive plant at the site. The companies provided more than 22 researchers with brine samples to analyze and determine a potential supply lurking beneath the lake. READ MORE: Tiny town in Arkansas that sits on a multi-billion-dollar gold mine of precious lithium is set to become epicenter of EV and mobile battery BOOM! A small, quiet Arkansas town home to just 11,100 people is set to become the epicenter of the US 'white gold' boom. Advertisement The team's analysis, funded by the DOE, determined there are at least four million tons of lithium based on the portion of the geothermal reservoir that has already been drilled. There is an estimated 18 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) if the entire reservoir is drilled to produce more geothermal power. Unlike other lithium mines in the US, the Salton Sea is an area of geothermal activity that happens to contain large amounts of precious metal. This allows companies to use flash steam plants, which take high-pressure hot water from deep inside the earth and convert it to steam that drives generator turbines. Currently, most lithium is extracted from hard rock mines or underground brine reservoirs, and much of the energy used to extract and process it comes from CO2-emitting fossil fuels. According to the DOE, steam flash is more environmentally friendly than other mining practices that leave gaping holes or require large amounts of water and land. Initial estimates suggested that about three percent of the available water supply for the region would be needed for lithium recovery operations. The extraction process entails drilling thousands of feet below the bed of the Salton Sea and then pulling up boiling brine to the surface. Along with lithium, other minerals like iron, magnesium, calcium and sodium will be extracted, separated and returned to the earth. The fluids are retrieved at temperatures over 360F, creating steam that can be recycled. President and CEO of BHE Renewables, Alicia Knapp, told CNBC: 'We are already pumping 50,000 gallons of brine per minute across all of our 10 geothermal facilities to the surface. 'Were using the steam from that brine to generate clean energy. So were really halfway there in that weve got the lithium right here in our hands.' Berkley Lab's Will Stringfellow, who led a recent study on extracting lithium from geothermal brine, said: 'It comes out at over 100 degrees Celsius. 'So, you have to deal with the heat. And it's very, very saline about 25 percent by weight. There's a lot of salt, meaning a lot of sodium and chloride. 'There's also a lot of calcium and magnesium and other things like iron and silicon. 'These are all materials that could potentially interfere with the extraction.' However, experts believe separating lithium from geothermal brine is less invasive than blasting and other hard rock mining. Ridley Scotts blockbuster film, Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the little Corsican general, is littered with inaccuracies. At least, thats the general consensus. Napoleon didnt bombard the pyramids. Marie Antoinette didnt have long, frizzy hair when she was executed. And Napoleons French troops didnt shout, Vive la France, with an American accent. So, thank goodness for Apsley House the Duke of Wellingtons old home on Hyde Park Corner, which features a splendid museum and gallery with fascinating detail about the French emperor. Apsley House which rejoices in the address of Number One, London was owned by Wellingtons older brother, the Marquess Wellesley. But, in 1817, two years after his magnificent victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, Wellington bought the house and turned it into a treasure trove of his triumphs. Apsley House - the Duke of Wellingtons old home on Hyde Park Corner - features a splendid museum and gallery with fascinating detail about the French emperor, writes Harry Mount Apsley House (above) - 'which rejoices in the address of Number One, London' - was owned by Wellingtons older brother, the Marquess Wellesley Everywhere you look in this part of London is Wellington Country. Next to Apsley House is the Wellington Monument a memorial to the Duke in the shape of a naked statue of Achilles, the Greek hero of the Trojan War, made from melted-down enemy cannon. Opposite Apsley House is Wellington Arch, which originally supported a colossal statue of Wellington. The statue was considered so over-the-top that it was replaced with a chariot. Step inside the house and youre surrounded by Wellingtons impossibly grand souvenirs of Napoleon and the Battle of Waterloo. Standing in the staircase hall is a huge, naked statue of Napoleon by Antonio Canova. Its 11 ft tall over twice the real height of Napoleon, who was only 5ft 2in. He stuffed it into storage but it was bought by the British government from Louis XVIII in 1816 and presented to Wellington. A new display reveals the robes worn by the 1st Duke for three coronations the mantel was worn by his descendant at this years coronation. The current duke lives in the house today. Pictured: One of the gems on display at Apsley House, a portrait of Napoleon by Robert Lefevre READ MORE: THE HISTORIC CUMBRIAN HALL THAT'S HOME TO ITEMS BELONGING TO NAPOLEON AND THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON Advertisement Youll also see Napoleons Death Mask. The original was made of plaster, a direct impression of Napoleons face when he died. This is a grand, bronze copy. You can see that Wellington even ate off Napoleons 1812 Sevres china set, decorated in Egyptian style. It was commissioned by Napoleon for his wife, the Empress Josephine, and given to the Duke in 1818 by Louis XVIII. Apsley House is also one of Londons best unsung galleries. There are portraits of Wellington by Goya and Sir Thomas Lawrence. In 1813, at the Battle of Vitoria, Wellington took possession of an exceptional collection of Spanish paintings from the baggage train of Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleons older brother. They include Danae, one of the worlds great Titians, and four Velazquez pictures, include a delightfully shifty portrait of Pope Innocent X. In the main hall, do see Robert Lefevres portrait of Josephine, bought by Wellington in 1851. The Empress invitingly points towards her exposed nipple. Presented with such a sublime vision, surely Napoleon must have bellowed, Yes tonight, Josephine! Real estate agent has offered for her relatives to come and stay in the US Former Selling Sunset star Maya Vander has revealed she is receiving 'a ton of hate' and is preparing to lose clients after voicing her support for Israel, as she opened up about her fears for her family living in constant danger in her homeland. In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, the reality TV star confirmed that her mom, brother, cousins, and nieces, have been hiding in 'safe rooms' to escape rockets, and also revealed that she feels 'less optimistic' about peace being achieved. Maya, 41, has been vocal about the 'terrifying' situation on Instagram and has posted several videos since the October 7 Hamas terror attack, which saw around 1,200 people slaughtered - including children - and hundreds of Israelis kidnapped and held hostage after being taken to Gaza. 'What's been going on in the world, it's terrifying,' she told DailyMail.com. 'I think it's just a lot of hate. I'm a Jewish person and seeing all this hate against Jewish people... 'I mean, you don't have to agree with certain things that the Israeli government is doing, but people that are denying stuff that happened to us on October 7, that's unacceptable. Selling Sunset star Maya Vander has received 'a ton of hate' for defending Israel Maya, 41, revealed that her mother (pictured) sometimes has to hide in 'safe rooms' in Israel The TV favorite has been vocal about the 'terrifying situation' and revealed that as a result she has lost Instagram followers and could lose real estate clients 'People that are justifying a terrorist organization and calling them "freedom fighters", that really gets under my skin because I grew up in Israel and I grew up with terror my whole life.' Maya has been vocal in encouraging people on Instagram to 'check your facts' before voicing opinions on the current unrest, claiming Palestinians are 'victims' of a terror organization and would be 'happy' if Israel destroyed Hamas. She admitted it has been 'a very intense' time, but said that despite being Jewish, she's not 'trying to be an activist' and argued that 'people who go to Columbia University or Harvard and raise the flag without even knowing the history and the conflict' are simply 'very ignorant.' She was referring to protests held by Harvard pro-Palestinian groups back in October, in which students marched from Harvard's main campus in Cambridge to its business school in Boston. Maya, who was born and raised in Israel by her Jewish mother and Dutch father, revealed she was never able to ride a bus in Tel Aviv because she was 'always afraid that someone was going to explode [it].' The real estate agent now resides in Miami with her husband Dave Miller and their children, Aiden, four, Elle, three, and six-month-old Emma, but her mother remains in Israel. 'I have my mom, my brother, my cousins, my nieces, everybody lives in Israel,' Maya explained in the interview which took place days before the ceasefire. 'They've been getting rockets, and nobody talks about Israel getting over 10,000 rockets... 'Everybody is only talking about what the Israeli military are doing in Gaza, but a lot of the media doesn't show why we are even in Gaza.' When asked if she would prefer her family to come and stay with her in the US, Maya replied: 'I told them to come and spend time here until things calm down, but in Israel people are so strong. They're like, "we have our work here, we have our routine here, we can't just leave". 'They feel also this obligation to stay for their country. Every place in Israel - if it's a new construction - has this safe room that you have to run [to] once you have a rocket. I was just talking to my mom and she was like, "Oh, I'm in the safe room because we just heard sirens and a lot of booms".' Maya's brother (pictured) lives in Israel too, along with her nieces and her cousins The Israeli-born star found fame on the hit Netflix reality series Selling Sunset, from 2019 Maya resides in Miami with her husband Dave Miller and their children: Aiden, four, Elle, three, and six-month-old Emma Maya went on to stress that 'people don't know the truth' about what's really happening and admitted: 'This is a very complex situation. I'm less optimistic unfortunately when it comes to peace and all that. Hamas don't care about the civilians, that's the truth. They do not care about the Palestinian people. 'If you really think about it, if Israel really, really wanted to cause some terrible wars that cause genocide and all that, they could really go into Gaza and demolish Gaza in like five minutes. And they don't, they're trying to do whatever they can, but again, it's a war and it's not easy because they shoot rockets below tunnels, that's a fact.' The reality TV star certainly isn't going to back down when it comes to speaking out and predicted that she will 'probably lose clients' by doing so. 'I do real estate and it's important to me, but I think that there are more important things in life and you know what, if I lose followers, maybe I will then gain a few more,' she said. 'I grew up very open minded to all cultures, religions, colors. I don't see people by their beliefs. We never learned to hate... I never took a class in Israel where they taught me to hate Arabs, like never in my life, never.' Home Alone fans have been stunned by Macaulay Culkin's voice after hearing it for the first time since he was a child, saying: 'I was not expecting it to sound like that.' The iconic child actor, 43, was honored on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame on Friday in front of family and famous friends in Los Angeles, where he made an acceptance speech. Those in the crowd included his on-screen mother from Home Alone, Catherine O'Hara, Disney actress wife Brenda Song, and their two sons Dakota, two, and Carson, who was born sometime before Christmas 2022. In an emotional speech, the Kevin McCallister actor praised his wife Brenda and said: 'You are absolutely everything. You're my champion.' The Suite Life Of Zack and Cody actress, 35, could be seen tearing up as Culkin continued: 'You're the only person happier for me today than I am. Home Alone fans were shocked to hear Macaulay Culkin's voice for the first time since he was a child, saying: ' I was not expecting it to sound like that' Macaulay Culkin, (pictured), is going viral for his speaking voice while being honoured on Hollywood's Walk of Fame as fans said: 'I was not expecting that' The Home Alone actor was supported by his wife, Brenda Song, 35, (pictured), his son Dakota, two, (pictured) and an array of other famous friends 'You're not only the best woman I've ever known, you're the best person I've ever known. You've given me just all my purpose. You've given me family.' He added: 'And after the birth of our two boys, you've become one of my three favourite people. The legendary Christmas icon signed off his tear-jerking speech quipping: 'And in the spirit of the holiday season I just want to say Merry Christmas you filthy animals.' Despite Culkin's touching tribute, and the huge feat of receiving a Walk Of Fame star, some fans were more focused on the sound of his voice. One queried: 'Macaulay Culkin voice really sounds like that.' 'This is cute but are we all gonna ignore that, thats his voice.' 'Ok I'm not being funny but listen to his voice. 'Did they PUBERTY BLOCK Macaulay Culkin?' The ceremony is the first time Brenda and Macaulay have stepped out at a public event with both of their children (pictured: Macaulay with wife Brenda, kissing his son, Carson on the head) The Suite Life Of Zack And Cody actress (pictured) became teary-eyed as Macaulay praised her for giving him 'purpose', adding she is 'not only the best woman' but 'the best person' he has ever known 'Okay but why was Macaulay Culkins voice deeper as a child then as a full grown man??' 'I was not expecting Macaulay Culkins voice to sound like that.' 'The face makes it sound off like, bruh come off that and give me your real voice.' Some viewers were shocked to discover the child star and his brother, Kieran Culkin, 41, sounded eerily similar to him. One fan noted: 'Macaulay Culkin and Kieran really do have the same speaking voice - omg.' 'Yall are surprised that Macaulay Culkin sounds like his brother Kieran Culkin?' During the ceromony, O'Hara took to the podium in what was a heartwarming reunion between the actress and her on-screen son. Other fans noted how similar the Home Alone actor sounded and moved to his brother, Succession star Kieran Culkin, 41 (pictured in July) His onscreen mother Catherine O'Hara, 69, (pictured) gave a heartfelt tribute to Macaulay, noting he was a natural talent at acting and his 'perfect' performance was responsible for making Home Alone a global sensation Catherine played Macaulay's long-suffering mother, Kate, in the 1990 film Home Alone and its sequel Home Alone 2 (pictured: Catherine and Macaulay in Home Alone, 1990) The pair were both featured in the smash hit Home Alone in 1990, as well as its sequel in 1992. Macaulay played the part of mischievous Kevin, while O'Hara played his constantly vexed mother Kate. The Schitt's Creek actress tenderly touched Macaulay's face as she made a heartfelt speech about the actor - 33 years after they first met. She said: 'Home Alone was, is and always will be a beloved global sensation. 'The reason families all over the world can't let a year go by without watching and loving Home Alone together is because of Macaulay Culkin. Labelling his performance 'perfect' she continued: 'I know you worked really hard, I know you did, but you made acting look like the most natural thing in the world to do.' She told how the actor brings his 'sweet and twisted, yet totally relatable sense of humor to every project he does', quipping: 'It's a sign of intelligence in a child and a key to survival at any age. 'Macaulay, congratulations. You so deserve your star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.' She finished: 'And thank you for including me, your fake mom who left you home alone not once but twice, to share in this happy occasion. I'm so proud of you.' Reality star opens up like never before in his new tell-all memoir, Reality Check Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino has confirmed that his wife Lauren did not give him permission to shop an 'emergency sex tape' during a time of financial struggles, as the Jersey Shore star clarified confusion over the shocking revelation from his upcoming memoir. The 41-year-old talks candidly in Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation, about the true depths of his drug addiction - and reveals that he stashed away an X-rated video as an 'insurance policy' in case he ever needed cash for drugs or debts. Speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com, the MTV star cleared up headlines claiming that Lauren and his mother, Linda Sorrentino, gave him the 'OK' to sell the intimate tape in which he featured with 'four' participants. 'I have to sort of clarify this,' he said. 'My wife and my mom were in the same room when I addressed my team [about the tape]... We were bleeding money and I was desperate. Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino has confirmed that his wife Lauren did not give him permission to shop an 'emergency sex tape' during a time of financial struggles The Jersey Shore star, 41, clarified confusion about the revelation he makes in his upcoming memoir, which details how he saw the tape as an 'insurance policy' for hard times 'The shooting star of the situation was about to come in for a crash landing and I know it sounds crazy for someone to say this or under these words, but I always had this notion that if an emergency situation had transpired, I had this trusty sex tape to reveal'. The reality star, who served eight months in prison for tax evasion in 2019, continued: 'It is so crazy to say, but I had it. It was me and a number of participants, I think about four.' But fearing for his relationship and the reality of what he would have to do in order to release the intimate clip, he was quickly dissuaded him from going public with it. 'Once I started to go down the road or journey of selling said sex tape, I realized that there was more negatives than positives,' he added. 'I wasn't excited about some of the things that we we had to do, and I was like, 'Nah, I'm not going to do it.'' He then quipped: 'So to clarify it, I didn't get the okay, I didn't get the okay from mom. I didn't get the okay from the then girlfriend, who is now my wife. They were in the same room when we were discussing options that I had this emergency sex tape.' The father-of-two admitted that the impact it could have had on his relationship was a key deciding factor. 'I'm glad that I never released it,' he said. 'I'm sure that it would have had many unintended impacts on my relationship, my career and everything. I'm glad that I didn't release it.' The star then joked that he could join the host of celebrities making money through adult-subscription platforms like OnlyFans. 'Somebody contacted me recently and they wanted feet pics from me for $10,000 a month. And I'm like, "You know what? That's not bad". You know?,' he said. 'I might be able to give y'all feet pics for a $10k payment a month.' He continued: 'I even showed it to my wife and we all laughed. I showed it to my cast mates and they just got a real chuckle out of it... If you start to see feet pics, we've got a situation, man.' Mike famously neglected to pay $8.9M in taxes, which led to an eight-month sentence at Otisville Federal Correctional Institution until he was released in 2019 Mike famously starred in the hit MTV reality show between 2009-2012, before the show later returned to screens as Jersey Shore: Family Vacation (pictured in 2009) Mike honestly recounts the hurdles on his journey to sobriety in the 296-page memoir he co-authored with Andy Symonds. The TV star admitted that the fame and fortune that came with starring in a hit MTV reality show between 2009 and 2012 was akin to pouring 'gasoline on fire' for his inner demons. The 296-page memoir, co-authored with Andy Symonds, drops on December 19 In fact, the star reveals in the book that his attorneys once informed him he'd spent an estimated $500K on cocaine and oxycodone. Another shocking revelation sees the star open up for the first time ever about the day he tried heroin, something he had not even shared with his wife before penning the memoir. Reflecting on his decision to share all, Mike explained: 'It was really tough when I decided to really bare my soul and tell that story of total rock bottom. 'I was comfortable telling that rock bottom story because I eventually used rock bottom as a trampoline. But that was my darkest moment and I wanted to tell that story because I always told myself that I would never try heroin, that I would never cross that line.' He continued: 'I had the money, the resources and the status. I didn't need to go that way. But I thought it was important to tell this story because even I succumbed to it. 'I was making upwards of almost $200,000 per episode. I didn't have to go that low. Then once I did, my life was on the line. I could have easily overdosed. I could have easily died. And I wouldn't be here.' The TV star admitted that the fame and fortune that came with the show was akin to pouring 'gasoline on fire' for his inner demons The star reveals in the book that his attorneys once informed him he had spent an estimated $500K on cocaine and oxycodone The star explained how he felt that 'God had spared' him 'for the bigger picture,' telling DailyMail.com: 'I believe that God, the Almighty, used my mom as an angel and used my girlfriend - who's now my wife - to save my life on that day. I get a little emotional when I talk about it because it's a very raw and tough time in my life that I did something that I never thought I was going to do. 'I could have died from it. Eventually that next day I surrendered. I threw the the white flag and went to rehab. And I never turned back.' He added: 'I think it's very important to share these stories to the public and to other people that are suffering from the disease of addiction that you, too, can also recover. If Mike can do it, you can, too.' Sharing his hopes about the impact his memoir might have on others, Mike mused: 'Everyone that reads this needs to be to understand and get the message that it was not just overcoming addiction in the book. There was overcoming obstacles such as a miscarriage, a baby in the NICU, prison time, the United States court system, probation and community service. 'I think I showed that the key is to not give up on yourself and to understand that if you believe in yourself and you don't give up, the comeback is truly greater than setback.' Mike - who will celebrate his eighth 'Soberversary' in December - continued: 'You hear all the time about those sad stories, the negative stories. So it's very important to scream from the rooftops, the successful stories, to shed a light, to let people know that if The Situation can do it and get sober, you can too. Another shocking revelation sees the star open up for the first time ever about the day he tried heroin, something he had previously not even shared with his wife The TV star with his college sweetheart-turned-wife Lauren Pesce Sorrentino (R) and their two children - son Romeo Reign, two, and daughter Mia Bella, 10 months Sharing his hopes about the impact his memoir might have on others, Mike mused: 'I think I showed that the key is to not give up on yourself... the comeback is truly greater than setback' 'At the end of the day, I think I outlined the blueprint of how I overcame every obstacle, which was relying on my faith, you know, taking things one day at a time and almost like understanding that when good things happen in your life, this too shall pass, but also, when bad things in your and happen in your life, that too shall pass as well.' He concluded: 'Remain grateful through it all and I think that you are attract abundance and other things in your life positively.' Adding that he hopes the book will be turned into a movie one day, Mike even shared his suggestion for the cast. ' I think Miles Teller would do a good job,' he mused. 'And I would love to be in it as a cameo. Maybe I'll be the rehab therapist doing the intake or something like that.' The MTV star and his wife - who split for a decade in 2007 - will welcome their third child, a daughter, in March. They recently celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary on November 1. Elsewhere, fans can catch more of The Situation in the first part of the sixth season reunion for Jersey Shore: Family Vacation, which airs this Thursday on MTV. Reality Check: Making the Best of The Situation - How I Overcame Addiction, Loss, and Prison hits shelves on December 19. Jennifer Hudson was glowing as she arrived at the fifth annual African American Film Critics Association TV awards on Sunday in Santa Monica, California. The EGOT winner, 42, was among the honorees being celebrated at the luncheon held at the Hotel Casa del Mar. The talk show host received the We See You Award, for her 'versatility' and 'consistent excellence' throughout her music and acting career, as well as for hosting The Jennifer Hudson Show. The Respect star showcased her shapely legs in a long sleeve pink mini dress with horizontal seams and a flounce hem. She walked the red carpet in a pair of gold pumps with thin gold straps. Jennifer Hudson was glowing as she arrived at the 5th annual African American Film Critics Association TV awards on Sunday in Santa Monica. The EGOT winner, 42, was among the honorees being celebrated at the luncheon held at the Hotel Casa del Mar Her makeup was natural and her dark hair was styled in a straight bob with a side part. The Tell It Like A Woman star accessorized with several rings made from large precious stones and wore wide framed glasses. The winners were announced in June with the awards ceremonies scheduled for August, but were postponed due to the actors and writers strikes. The AAFCA TV Honors were created in 2019 to recognize excellence in the Black community on television and streaming platforms. Marla Gibbs, 92, who starred in The Jeffersons and 227, received the Legend Award. Delroy Lindo, 71, received the Legacy Award. S.W.A.T. received the Impact Award for the show's storylines that impact the African American community and Ted Lasso was honored with the Inclusion Award for its ability to 'prioritize representation of people from all walks of life.' Other winners include: Abbott Elementary for Best TV Comedy. Star and show runner Quinta Brunson also won Best TV Writing. P-Valley received Best TV Drama and Best Ensemble and Mo was named Best New Show. The talk show host received the We See You Award, for her 'versatility' and 'consistent excellence' throughout her music and acting career, as well as hosting The Jennifer Hudson Show The AAFCA TV Honors were created in 2019 to recognize excellence in the Black community on television and streaming platforms The Respect star showcased her shapely legs wearing a long sleeve pink mini dress with horizontal seams and a flounce hem. She walked the red carpet in a pair of gold pumps with thin gold straps The 1619 project was named Best Documentary. Peacock's Shooting Stars and The Best Man: The Final Chapters earned awards for Best Movie and Best Limited Series. Directing honors when to the folks calling the shots at The Ms. Pat Show. Acting awards went to Jessica Williams for her Breakout role in Shrinking, Niecy Nash-Betts was named Best Actress for her work in Dahmer Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. J. Alphonse Nicholson and Nicco Annan tied for Best Actor for their work in P-Valley. Several posters for the upcoming science fiction feature Dune: Part Two were released on Instagram on Sunday. In the shots, several members of the first feature's ensemble cast were seen in costume, including the movie's star Timothee Chalamet, who portrayed Paul Atreides in the original film. The posters also showed several new members of the cast of the sequel, which has been delayed several times, dressed up as their respective characters. Zendaya, Stellan Skarsgard, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Rebecca Ferguson and Dave Bautista were seen as Chani, The Baron, Stilgar, Gurney Halleck, Lady Jessica and Beast Rabban, respectively. Newcomers to the feature include Austin Butler, Lea Seydoux, Florence Pugh and Christopher Walken, who portray Feyd-Rautha, Lady Margot, Princess Irulan and Emperor Shaddam IV. Several posters for the upcoming science fiction feature Dune: Part Two were released on Instagram on Sunday In the shots, several members of the first feature's ensemble cast were seen in costume, including the movie's star Timothee Chalamet, who portrayed Paul Atreides in the original film The posters also showed several new members of the cast of the sequel, which has been delayed several times, dressed up as their respective characters Dune: Part One and Part Two are based on Frank Herbert's novel of the same name, which was originally published in 1965. The features are centered on Atreides, who becomes the leader of the natives of desert planet Arrakis in its fight against the tyrannical House Harkonnen. One of the first attempts to adapt the novel into a film was led by director Alejandro Jodorowsky, and although the project was ultimately canceled, his efforts were documented in the 2013 feature Jodorowsky's Dune. David Lynch went on to direct an adaptation of Dune, which was critically panned upon its release in 1984. Denis Villeneuve became attached to the new versions of the project in 2016, and Dune: Part One was eventually released in 2021. The feature received positive reviews from critics, and it currently holds an 83% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Dune: Part One also won six out of the ten Academy Awards it was nominated for, including Best Cinematography, Best Original Score and Best Sound. The feature's sequel was not formally greenlit until after the release of the first film, although it was put into production just a few days after Dune: Part One debuted. Dune: Part One and Part Two are based on Frank Herbert's novel of the same name, which was originally published in 1965 The features are centered on Atreides, who becomes the leader of the natives of desert planet Arrakis in its fight against the tyrannical House Harkonnen Denis Villeneuve became attached to the new versions of the project in 2016, and Dune: Part One was eventually released in 2021 The feature received positive reviews from critics, and it currently holds an 83% rating on Rotten Tomatoes Dune: Part One also won six out of the ten Academy Awards it was nominated for, including Best Cinematography, Best Original Score and Best Sound The feature's sequel was not formally greenlit until after the release of the first film, although it was put into production just a few days after Dune: Part One debuted Dune: Part Two was originally scheduled to be released on October 20, although its debut date has been changed several times The upcoming science fiction feature is now set to be made available to the public on March 1, 2024 Filming for the feature took place from July to December of last year, with shooting taking place in locations including Budapest and Abu Dhabi. Dune: Part Two was originally scheduled to be released on October 20, although its debut date has been changed several times. The upcoming science fiction feature is now set to be made available to the public on March 1, 2024. Villeneuve has also expressed a desire to direct a third feature in the series, which would be based on Herbert's 1969 novel Dune Messiah. Asher Keddie says she won't be returning to her hit series Offspring amid rumours of a reboot of the show. The Australian actress, 49, who played obstetrician Nina Proudman for seven seasons, said she is happy to leave her character's storyline where it ended. In the finale episode of season seven, Nina made the shock decision to resign from St Francis Hospital. 'I used to hesitate answering that question. I'd think, "Oh, I never say never." But [Nina] was in her thirties and what made it so tumultuous and entertaining, watching her navigate her thirties and try and find love, would be so utterly different now, with me almost 50, that I can't see it,' she told TV Week. 'I still love hearing people's thoughts about it and hearing that people are watching it for the third or fourth time. I think, "Wow, what an amazing thing to have been involved with." But I think we left it where we should have.' Asher Keddie says she won't be returning to her hit series Offspring amid rumours of a reboot of the show The Australian actress, 49, who played obstetrician Nina Proudman for seven seasons, said she is happy to leave her character's storyline where it ended Despite the actress's unwillingness to return, industry insiders have claimed there are 'tentative discussions' in progress to revive the hit drama for a limited season. According to New Idea, the source says one early idea was to do an Offspring version of the 2016 Gilmore Girls Netflix revival. 'It's quite a simple yet effective concept...four episodes set over 12 months, divided up by the four seasons - summer, autumn, winter, and spring. It'll be a year in the life of Nina and the Proudmans' sort of thing,' the insider claimed. When the show ended six years ago, Nina was dating Harry (played by Alexander England) and they were pregnant. Despite the actress's unwillingness to return, industry insiders have claimed that there are 'tentative discussions' in progress to revive the hit drama for a limited season If the show picked up in real time, their daughter would be of primary school age and Nina's other daughter Zoe would be a teenager. Asher recently opened up about her real life parenting struggles. The 49-year-old actress said when she fell pregnant she felt young and healthy, but now she worries about ageing as she raises her young child. 'At the time, I didn't think anything of being what apparently is an older mother. I felt the same as I did when I was 25' she told last week's issue of Stellar Magazine. 'I was physically robust and that was fine, but not that long ago I did the stupid sum thing in my head. I thought, oh, I'm counting how old I will be when he's 18.' She went on: 'You realise that you've probably lived the majority of your life, but you still have young people there whose lives you want to live with them and watch. 'It's a bittersweet kind of thing, but most of it is sweet and most of it's exciting.' Asher and Vincent tied the knot in the beachside ceremony on Fiji's Turtle Island in April 2014, with just one guest in attendance - Luca, Vincent's son from a previous marriage. The couple went on to welcome a son of their own, Valentino, in March 2015 Asher recently discussed her ten year marriage to artist husband Vincent Fantauzzo while discussing how the couple met. She also shared a glimpse into the couple's home life with their son, Valentino, and Vincent's 11-year-old son Luca, from a previous marriage. 'I take care of stuff when I come home... but we have different roles within the house and as long as the kids come first, everything falls into place,' she added. Asher and Vincent tied the knot in the beachside ceremony on Fiji's Turtle Island in April 2014, with just one guest in attendance - Luca, Vincent's son from a previous marriage. The couple went on to welcome a son of their own, Valentino, in March 2015. Kylie Jenner appeared on social media Sunday night to tease her upcoming third Khy drop. The 26-year-old bombshell uploaded a single image of herself sitting in a black fold-up chair as she flashed her flat tummy in color blocked layers. Her raven locks were cropped above her ears and arranged in a deep and precise side part with finger waves. The mother-of-two who shares daughter Stormi, five, and son Aire, 22 months, with ex Travis Scott wore black sweatpants with a waistline that fell right under her belly-button. She wore a long-sleeved crew neck red shirt as a base, and added a short-sleeved heather gray one over it before finishing with a black tank top with a scoop neck. Kylie Jenner appeared on social media Sunday night to tease her upcoming third Khy drop Her raven locks were cropped above her ears and arranged in a deep and precise side part with finger waves In a caption to her 398 million followers, Kylie wrote, 'KHY DROP 003 sweats + tees coming 12/07 !!!!!! preview now and sign up for early access on khy.com.' It comes after earlier this week she uploaded video clips of her wearing other items from the collection. One look included a backless black mini dress and other items in red, gray, and black hung on a mobile clothing rack. The caption noted, 'DROP 003 coming 12/07. @khy khy.com.' And a post shared on Saturday teased, '@khy drop 003 just in time for the holidays. reveal coming soon.' Kylie collected hundreds of thousands of likes from her devoted fanbase. In late October Jenner surprised fans by introducing her novel clothing line. She introduced the sartorial undertaking with a single photo of herself donning a black faux leather trench coat with zipper details. Earlier this week she uploaded video clips of her wearing other items from the collection One new look includes a backless black mini dress and other items in red, gray, and black hung on a mobile clothing rack In the caption, she simple wrote, 'meet khy,' and tagged its Instagram handle on the snap. Accompanying the arrival of the range was a Wall Street Journal cover story describing her latest entrepreneurial pursuit. The new business was kicked off with a star-studded launch party whose guest list included big sister Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber. The news of her fresh venture was met with both excitement and criticism from fans, with some praising the businesswoman and others complaining about the price points, which Kylie deems affordable. Zawe Ashton looked glamorous as she attended the 26th British Independent Film Awards at Old Billingsgate in London on Sunday. The Fresh Meat actress, 39, wore a glitzy gold dress which she teamed with a matching cape as she posed up a storm. The star - who is engaged to actor Tom Hiddleston - looked gorgeous in the flowing number which had silk ribbon detailing. She completed her look with sheer black gloves and pointy heels to boost her height while toting a silver bag. Her dark tresses were styled into a sleek do and she opted for natural makeup to show off her pretty features. Zawe Ashton looked glamorous as she attended the 26th British Independent Film Awards at Old Billingsgate in London on Sunday The Fresh Meat actress, 39, wore a glitzy gold dress which she teamed with a matching cape as she posed up a storm Claire Foy and Jodie Comer were among the other big names to attend the star-studded event. It comes after Zawe revealed she got into 'the best shape' of her life while filming The Marvels but ended up having to reshoot the film after becoming pregnant. The actress, portrays the warrior Dar-Benn in the film opposite stars Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris and Iman Vellani. Zawe, who admitted to being 'traumatised' from working in Hollywood, felt the gruelling training regime required for the blockbuster 'empowered' her. Speaking at the Bazaar At Work Summitt 2023, she said: 'There was this opportunity for me to get in the best shape in my life [with The Marvels] which I really hadn't been in getting fit and in shape, but strong and eating well, was a massive part of this journey for me. 'And then the process of learning stunts and fighting is probably one of the most empowering things that I've ever done.' Zawe welcomed her first child with her partner Tom last October, with the pregnancy interfering with the shoot. She said: 'I thought the film was finished, and I got pregnant and had my baby. And then they told me to come back and reshoot basically the whole movie. The star - who is engaged to actor Tom Hiddleston - looked gorgeous in the flowing number which had silk ribbon detailing She completed her look with sheer black gloves and pointy heels to boost her height while toting a silver bag Her dark tresses were styled into a sleek do and she opted for natural makeup to show off her pretty features Claire Foy and Jodie Comer were among the other big names to attend the star-studded event in London It comes after Zawe revealed she got into 'the best shape' of her life while filming The Marvels but ended up having to reshoot the film after becoming pregnant Actress Zawe welcomed her first child with her partner Tom last October (pictured in November 2023) 'That, to me, has been the biggest journey with this movie: my physical wellness, my ability to endure, to mentally switch back into that place, postpartum, and come back, and try and kick some ass again. That's really what the landmark of the film is to me now.' Zawe also spoke about working in the film industry as a young actress and how there were not many measures in place to protect performers from exploitation. She said: 'I'm probably deeply traumatised! I was working at a point in our industry that is so different from industry that we are working on making for ourselves now. There were no safety protocols. 'There were no conscious ways that we were thinking about protecting young women. I sort of wipe my brow sometimes, thinking: 'Wow, I actually emerged quite unscathed.' 'There are so many different ways that we're thinking consciously about protecting the people who are working in front of and behind the camera now.' Zawe elaborated on sexism in the industry, saying she felt 'fatigued' from spending so much time worried about her looks. Zawe, who has not revealed the name or sex of her child, also told how she feels like she is 'growing up' with her baby. The actress, portrays the warrior Dar-Benn in the film opposite stars Brie Larson , Teyonah Parris and Iman Vellani Zawe, who admitted to being 'traumatised' from working in Hollywood, felt the gruelling training regime required for the blockbuster 'empowered' her Speaking at the Bazaar At Work Summitt 2023, she said: 'There was this opportunity for me to get in the best shape in my life' Zawe also spoke about working in the film industry as a young actress and how there were not many measures in place to protect performers from exploitation Zawe elaborated on sexism in the industry, saying she felt 'fatigued' from spending so much time worried about her looks Zawe, who has not revealed the name or sex of her child, also told how she feels like she is 'growing up' with her baby She said: 'The most surprising thing for me has been how quiet I feel like I've gone in motherhood.' 'Right now, it's been really about collecting women's stories. For some reason, we don't value ageing in our society. And there are women who have given me nuggets of wisdom that I literally could not live without. And they are all over the age of 60. 'Why we're not opening a platform and listening to women who have actually lived life is crazy to me. I'm a new mum. 'I know so little. I'm growing with my child the child is going to teach you and lead you if you're open to it, and that's the moment to enjoy so much.' Kayla Itsines has shared some candid pics from her wild wedding reception with Jae Woodroffe over the weekend. The fitness influencer, 32, took to Instagram on Monday to share the images from Sunday's reception. One photo showed the newlyweds balanced precariously on several friends' shoulders as they engaged in a passionate kiss. Another happy snap showed Kayla sandwiched between two girlfriends, looking stunning in a white split skirt with matching white top. But while Kayla received many positive comments on her wedding day looks, new husband Jae was slammed for his wedding outfit choices. Kayla Itsines married her fiance Jae Woodroffe over the weekend. And the influencer has shared some candid pics from the wild reception, with one showing the newlyweds balanced precariously on several friends' shoulders as they engaged in a passionate kiss. Both Pictured Another happy snap showed Kayla sandwiched between two girlfriends, looking joyous and stunning in a white split skirt with matching white top 'Did he seriously wear runners to the wedding?' asked one commenter in the Daily Mail's story on the couple's nuptials. 'Trainers at the altar. Classy,' wrote another. Other comments also focused on the apparent dental veneers and whitening sported by Jae. 'Congratulations Mr and Mrs Teeth,' read one sassy comment. Kayla received many positive comments on her look on her wedding day, however new husband Jae was slammed for his wedding outfit choices. 'Did he seriously wear runners to the wedding?' asked one commenter in the Daily Mail's story on the couple's nuptials While another reader claimed 'the city council in Adelaide should be issuing sun glasses to everyone in the mail in case they pass this guy to prevent instant blindness.' The fitness entrepreneur shared her happy marriage news to Instagram on Sunday evening, alongside a stunning picture from their lavish nuptials. In the image, the happy couple are seen sharing a romantic kiss at their outdoor wedding ceremony in Adelaide. 'Just married my best friend and we couldn't be happier. The most perfect day ever,' she wrote The newlyweds look deeply in love as Jae wraps his arms around her waist, while Kayla tenderly caresses his cheeks. 'Just married my best friend and we couldn't be happier. The most perfect day ever,' she captioned the image alongside a white love heart and ring emoji. Kayla looked stunning in a sleek and slinky white wedding gown with a short train and sheer hood. Before the ceremony, Kayla shared her wedding makeup look, designed by artist Leah Baines Jae went for an off white tuxedo and made the modern choice of wearing crisp white sneakers for his wedding shoes. The pair exchanged vows on a podium surrounded by lavish floral arrangements and were flanked by a little flower girl in a sweet white gown. Before the ceremony, Kayla shared her wedding makeup look, designed by artist Leah Baines. Kayla's announcement was quickly inundated with well-wishes from her celebrity friends. The 32-year-old, who is a multimillionaire thanks to her popular workout app Sweat (formerly Bikini Body Guides), confirmed the happy news on Instagram 'Congratulations to you both!!!! So beautiful,' wrote fashion designer Pip Edwards alongside three red love heart emojis. 'Congrats your guys!' added celebrity stylist Jules Sebastian. 'THE BEST DAY!! So happy to have been able to celebrate this with you two,' wrote fitness trainer Katie Martin. 'So so happy for you. See you soon my angel!!!' added model Ellie Gonsalves. Steph Claire Smith soon joined the chorus, writing, 'Congratulations', alongside a clapping hands and red love heart emoji. Kayla announced her engagement to Jae after one year of dating in July last year Little is known about Jae, who is one of the 732 people Kayla follows on Instagram, but his social media activity suggests he enjoys travelling and motorcycles. The pair went public with their relationship more than a year after Kayla confirmed her split from ex-fiance Tobi Pearce in August 2020. The former couple, who dated for eight years and are parents to daughter Arna, co-founded Bikini Body Guides - later renamed Sweat - after meeting in late 2012. The business partners sold their health and fitness empire to U.S. software giant iFIT for $400million last year. Tobi has since departed the company. In May last year, Jae hinted he wanted to have children with Kayla during an Instagram Q&A. He answered the question 'would you like biological children of your own one day?' with a photo of himself playing with his stepdaughter Arna and writing 'absolutely'. Before he started dating Kayla, Jae was in a long-term relationship with a woman named Lauren Belotti, who is believed to be one of Kayla's friends. Australia's most infamous party boy Corey Worthington struck a defiant tone outside court, ranting and raving at media after avoiding a conviction for punching a man on a mobility scooter. Missing his iconic yellow sunglasses and sporting a new hair do, Worthington, 32, appeared before the Geelong Magistrates' Court on Monday, where he escaped conviction for assault and damage offences. Worthington also confronted TV reporters outside the court and filmed the interactions live on his Instagram. Outside court, he reacted angrily when asked if he regretted his actions, saying 'the assault happened, simple'. Corey Worthington looked unrecognisable during a heated outburst with media outside court in Geelong on Monday Worthington is seen at the peak of his famous with bleach blond hair and his trademark yellow sunglasses 'I did something wrong, but I'm asking you ... if someone touched the mother of your kid, what would you do?,' he questioned. 'When you're in that time and that moment, what is decided in that moment; let it be. 'I've left it for the court to decide and the court has decided. They've given me a non-conviction today.' The court was told Worthington had successfully completed an anger management course after pleading guilty to two counts of unlawful assault and criminal damage in June. The charges related to an incident in January, where Worthington assaulted a man in his 50s riding a disability scooter and damaged a car windscreen. Worthington, who is now heavily tattooed, has returned to the limelight in recent years. He featured on Channel Nine's Australian Ninja Warrior, season 2 Worthington was heard exploding at TV reporters on videos posted to Instagram shortly after the court appearance The court heard he told police at the time the man had allegedly assaulted his partner. During the short hearing, his lawyer passed up a letter to magistrate John Bentley outlining Worthington's participation and completion of the course. He was handed a 12-month good behaviour bond without conviction by Mr Bentley, who lamented media interest in the case. 'All right well Corey you've done everything I asked you to do,' he said. 'It's somewhat unfortunate there's a media circus here today'. Worthington spoke only once so say; 'yes, Your Honour', when asked if he would agree to a good behaviour bond. Worthington posted a video of himself shouting at TV reporter Amber Johnston following the court case 'Sign this bond, stay out of trouble that will be the end of it,' Mr Bentley said. 'Have a good Christmas and stay out of trouble.' After his appearance, Worthington confronted reporters, including Channel 9 reporter Amber Johnston, outside the court, claiming the media didn't like it when 'it's on the other foot'. He filmed the heated interactions and posted it to his Instagram. 'This is the media filming me and I'm just doing my right by filming them back,' he said. 'My misses got assaulted and I've gone to court to pay my dues and literally they are just filming me, they haven't left me alone.' Worthington shot to national attention at the young age of 16 after hosting a large party at his parents' home in January 2008. The party garnered international media attention after his neighbourhood was vandalised and he refused to take off his sunglasses on A Current Affair. 'It was just a get together with mates at first and we thought we might as well have a party and then it sort of got out of hand,' he said at the time. 'I can't be exactly blamed for what happened because it wasn't in the house, it was out in the street ... I'll say sorry but I won't take off my glasses'. Worthington vanished for several years after the incident but returned to the media with a surprise appearance on Nine's Ninja Warrior. Jourdan Dunn pulled out all the stops on Sunday night as she attended State 360's Black & In Fashion party at Langan's in Mayfair, London. The model, 33, turned heads in a showstopping black halterneck gown that was covered in fringe detailing. Her eye-catching dress clung to her lithe figure and boasted a small train for added dramatic effect. Jourdan added a pair of large pink diamond earrings and boosted her already impressive height even further with black high heels. She swept her raven tresses back in a slick ponytail and completed her striking look with a full face of flawless makeup, including a slick of pink lipgloss. Jourdan Dunn pulled out all the stops on Sunday night as she attended State 360's Black & In Fashion party at Langan's in Mayfair, London The model, 33, turned heads in a showstopping black halterneck gown that was covered in fringe detailing Her eye-catching dress clung to her lithe figure and boasted a small train for added dramatic effect Jourdan is one of Britain's top models, and has modelled for the likes of Prada and Victoria's Secret. However, she recently revealed that she wants to focus on acting and aspires to be in a Marvel film one day so that her son Riley, 14, will think she is the 'coolest mum ever'. She previously told how she was first scouted as a model aged 15 during a trip to the Hammersmith branch of budget clothing store Primark with her friends. Speaking to Jonathan Ross, she admitted she was paranoid the modelling scout thought she was stealing. Jourdan explained: 'It was a half day at school, I was 15 and I remember I just wanted to go home but my friends wanted to go to Hammersmith. 'We were going around the shops, the last shop we wanted to go in was Primark, I was so over it. 'We were in Primark and we were by the sunglasses section trying on sunglasses. There was this woman who kept on looking at us. 'We were like, "Does she think we are going to steal from Primark? Does she think we're the type of girls to do that?" Jourdan added a pair of large pink diamond earrings and boosted her already impressive height even further with black high heels (pictured with Jeff Barlon) She swept her raven tresses back in a slick ponytail and completed her striking look with a full face of flawless makeup, including a slick of pink lipgloss 'Then she comes up and she was like, "Have you ever thought about modelling?"' Jourdan explained that the woman gave her her business card, adding: 'I saw that it was a big agency I knew they were legit The next day we went down and they wanted to sign me.' She is currently engaged to fiance Dion Hamilton, 27, after she officially announced their engagement in February 2020 via a gushing Instagram post. In the sweet post, Jourdan couldn't hide her delight as she covered her eyes with one hand while placing the other in her beau's. An Instagram post a month prior to the engagement announcement sparked rumours that the couple had already tied the knot. Jourdan shared a holiday post of them together alongside Riley and wrote: '2009 my son entered my life, 2019 my life partner entered my life. Stepping into 2020 with both by my side is priceless.' Doctor Who's Time Lord appeared to develop a crush on Isaac Newton during Saturdays episode of the sci-fi show. At the weekend, the second of the 60th anniversary specials saw the Tardis crash into an apple tree in 1666, just as Isaac (Nathaniel Curtis) witnessed a falling apple that inspired the scientists theory of gravity. David Tennants Doctor said to companion Donna (Catherine Tate) that Isaac 'was so hot'. He added in an apparent reference to his own sexuality: 'Oh, is that who I am now?' It comes after Doctor Who was scolded by a transgender character for calling an alien 'him' during the first 60th Anniversary special. Doctor Who 's Time Lord appeared to develop a crush on Isaac Newton during Saturdays episode of the sci-fi show (David Tennant seen as the Doctor with his assistant Donna, played by Catherine Tate) David Tennants Doctor said to companion that Isaac (Nathaniel Curtis, pictured) 'was so hot'. He added in an apparent reference to his own sexuality: 'Oh, is that who I am now?' The character was called out by the daughter of former companion Donna Noble for referring to an adorable fluffy creature called Beep The Meep as 'him'. Rose, who is played by transgender actress, Yasmin Finney, 19, questioned the Doctor's assumption that the alien was a 'he', asking him: 'You're assuming he as a pronoun?' The Doctor, after realising his mistake, then apologised and asked Meep if it was a 'he or she or they', to which the creature replied: 'My chosen pronoun is the definite article. I am always The Meep'. Saturday's hour-long special saw the debut of Yasmin's character, who became an instant hit with fans after she discovered the mysterious alien that escaped from a crashed spaceship and attempted to hide it in the shed. Yasmin's role as trans teen Rose was considered groundbreaking for the show, with her name a sweet nod to The Doctor's beloved companion Rose Tyler. The Heartstopper actress was lauded by viewers for her appearance in the episode. With a secret love for crafts, she showcased her talents by making stuffed toys to sell online, despite Donna's disapproval, a source of comfort after facing bullying by other teenagers for her transition. Donna, who at this point was still without her memories of The Doctor, later found the animal, and unsurprisingly is left reeling. Last week the Doctor was called out by the daughter (pictured) of former companion Donna Noble for referring to an adorable fluffy creature called Beep The Meep as 'him' Yasmin Finney's role as trans teen Rose was already considered groundbreaking for the show, with her name a sweet nod to The Doctor's beloved companion Rose Tyler Rose discovered the mysterious alien that escaped from a crashed spaceship and attempts to hide it in the shed Things took a chaotic turn when the Doctor turned up at Donna's house, with furious alien military clashing with UNIT agents during their mission to find Meep, meaning the entire Noble family was forced to flee their home. In a bombshell twist, Meep (voiced by Miriam Margolyes) was then revealed to be the true villain, and vowed to use their spaceship to wipe out the city of London. Despite the Doctor's best attempts to hide his identity from Donna, he was forced to give up when they were trapped in Meep's exploding spaceship, and his longtime friend unlocked her Doctor Donna alter-ego to destroy the ship. In heartbreaking scenes, Donna tragically died in The Doctor's arms, but a shocking twist revealed that her abilities had been passed onto her daughter Rose, trickling out through her recreation of her mother's adventures in her stuffed toys. Not only did Rose rescue her family, but Donna, and all of her memories, were resurrected, bringing one of the show's most beloved duos back together again. Survivor veteran Luke Toki and his wife Mary have split. Mother-of-three Mary confirmed the news with a brutal Instagram post over the weekend. Alongside a picture she posted of the former Big Brother VIP contestant, Mary wrote 'He's all your ladies!' and tagged him in it. The story has since expired from her page, with neither Luke or Mary posting to their social media accounts since it went up. The reality star, 35, still followers Mary on Instagram, but she has unfollowed him. Survivor veteran Luke Toki and his wife Mary have split Daily Mail Australia has reached out to the couple for comment. Luke and Mary have been married for eight years and they share three children, Lennox, 10, Nate, eight, and Madeline, two. Nate lives with autism while Madeline was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis shortly after her birth. Luke appeared on Australian Survivor in both 2017 and 2019, but failed to win either season, prompting fans to raise $500,000 via GoFundMe to help him and his family. He then went on to win Big Brother VIP in 2021 and took home $100,000. Mother-of-three Mary confirmed the news with a brutal Instagram post over the weekend Luke and Mary have been married for eight years and they share three children, Lennox, 10, Nate, eight, and Madeline, two READ MORE: Australian Survivor star Luke Toki makes a heartbreaking plea to help his daughter with cystic fibrosis by getting a 'life-saving' medication brought to Australia Advertisement Luke won the money for his chosen charity the Perth Children's Hospital Foundation for Cystic Fibrosis Clinical Research - a cause which is close to his heart. The following year he announced he was stepping away from television and made a career change into real estate. He explained at the time that he is now a real estate agent in his hometown of Perth and described himself as the 'Michael Jordan of sales'. However, he returned to the small screen this year when he starred in the second season of The Traitors Australia. The official trailer of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire was released by Warner Bros. on Sunday. In the preview of the highly-anticipated action flick, Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry return for the fifth installment in the MonsterVerse and come across a terrifying, undiscovered monster. The duo watch as the two epic monsters team up once again to take on and battle the Skar King that threatens to eradicate the existence of not only all of the Titans but also the entire planet. According to the synopsis, the action-packed movie will 'delve further into the histories of these Titans, their origins and the mysteries of Skull Island and beyond'. Reprising their roles alongside Kaylee Hottle, they will '[uncover] the mythic battle that helped forge these extraordinary beings and tied them to humankind forever'. The official trailer of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire was released by Warner Bros. on Sunday In the preview of the highly-anticipated action flick, Godzilla emerges to join forces with Kong to battle a terrifying, undiscovered monster The trailer begins with a seismometer measuring earthquake waves and increasingly the metrics start going off the charts. As a groundbreaking earthquake intensifies underneath the pyramids in Egypt, Hall as Dr. Ilene Andrews narrates a foreshadowing thought. 'For most of human civilization, we believed that life could only exist on the surface of our planet. What else were we wrong about?' The scene then cuts to the Hollow Earth where monsters are roaming freely underneath the planet's surface. The scientist is joined by franchise newcomer Dan Stevens playing the role of Stephen Randa in following and observing Kong in his natural habitat. 'This world has more secrets than we could possibly imagine,' she narrates. Kong encounters a larger version of himself coming out of the fog but the monster reveals itself to be a much smaller and almost adorable version of the Eighth Wonder of the World. Then, the two scientists come across a massive bloody handprint in the wilderness like nothing they've ever seen before. The trailer begins with a seismometer measuring earthquake waves and increasingly the metrics start going off the charts. As a groundbreaking earthquake intensifies underneath the pyramids in Egypt, Hall as Dr. Ilene Andrews narrates a foreshadowing thought Rebecca Hall reprises her role as the scientist and says: 'For most of human civilization, we believed that life could only exist on the surface of our planet. What else were we wrong about?' Brian Tyree Henry also returned to the franchise as the cast is joined by newcomer Dan Stevens Kaylee Hottle also returns in the fifth installment film in the MonsterVerse as her beloved character Jia Andrews At one point in the trailer, Kong comes across a massive, looming figure emerging from the fog It turns out only to be an exaggerated shadow of a mini Kong Elsewhere on the island, the two scientists discover a gargantuan bloody handprint and surmise it is from a never-before-seen monster much bigger than Kong They realize that Kong is faced by a massive threat again and must join forces with the other epic Titan, Godzilla, to defeat the monster Kong uncovers a cave where he finds the skulls of his own fallen Deep inside the crater, a monster much larger than other giant apes is seen leading a tribe The trailer shows the Skar King leading the monster and attempting to eradicate the existence of the other Titans and the rest of the world The extraordinary being surfaces on land and starts threatening the much tinier humans According to the synopsis, the film also delves into the history of the Titans and will explore more of how their world came to coexist with humankind The two epic monsters team up once again to take on their new foe Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is scheduled to be theatrically released on April 12, 2024 'That's not Kong,' Andrews utters as she tries to hide the look of fear on her face. Kong is then seen falling into a crater even deeper than the Hollow Earth and coming across a majestic sight of neon crystals but also the skulls of his own fallen. It is revealed that deep inside the land lives a tribe of giant apes like Kong himself being led by a menacing, gargantuan monster. Henry as the character Bernie Hayes also finds Hottle as Jia who has now become a member of a tribute of humans living somewhere else in the mystical land. 'Kong can't stop this on his own,' the voice of Randa is heard saying defeatedly. 'He won't be alone,' Andrew declares in an audio clip playing as a never-before-seen Godzilla with magenta spikes emerges from hibernation after hiding beneath a frozen tundra. As danger looms in the Hollow Earth and also above the surface in metropolitan cities, the hot pink Godzilla wakes up and joins Kong in battle to defeat the boss monster. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is scheduled to be theatrically released on April 12, 2024. A woman has been banned from her local Bunnings over a wild stunt she pulled to promote her social media content. Layla Kelly, 33, visited her local hardware store in Porirua, on New Zealand's North Island, with another social media creator and they 'left behind' items of clothing - supposedly 'for hard-working tradies'. After the video of their stunt went viral with 15 million views, police came knocking on Layla's door for a 'really serious' talk. 'It was about 9pm when they knocked on my door, and my first thought was, "S**t, someone has died,"' Layla said. 'But then they said, "We need to talk to you about a video you made at Bunnings."' Layla Kelly, 33, (pictured) was banned from Porirua Bunnings in Wellington this year for a wild stunt she pulled to promote her content Layla went on to say, 'Bunnings saw the video, put two and two together and sent the police over to issue a trespassing warning.' Even though they didn't actually leave any clothing behind - they collected all the garments after filming the video - the store still wasn't impressed. 'Apparently that doesn't matter much because I'm not allowed back,' she added. Layla said she was asked to sign several trespass notices with the threat of a hefty fine looming over her head should she visit the store in the next two years. However, she was relieved to confirm she wasn't charged. The blonde claims to have made NZD$320,000 (AUD$297,800) in the last 12 months selling content online. Her biggest month saw her earn NZD$48,000 (AUD$47,600). She visited her local hardware store on New Zealand's North Island with another social media creator and they 'left behind' items of clothing - supposedly 'for hard-working tradies' A glamorous businesswoman who set up Bumble in Australia has been left fuming after she was recently referred to as an 'influencer'. Michelle Battersby, now the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Sunroom a creator app for women and non-binary creators to make money - explained in a lengthy statement she was 'irritated' by the term. She admitted the term took away from her real occupation as a tech founder. 'I'm raging!!! Had first-hand experience being judged based on being referred to as an influencer last night,' she wrote in a post on Instagram. 'It really opened my eyes to the discrimination that exists against anyone whose profession does exist in the content creation space. I had to get these thoughts and feelings off my chest and felt like I had a duty to defend the legitimate influencers out there.' Michelle Battersby has slammed the use of the word 'influencer' to describe herself, highlighting her formal and correct job title 'Throughout my career, I have rarely been referred to as an influencer, probably because my professional title has been used - but on the occasion influencer is mentioned I am very aware of why it makes me feel uncomfortable. 'It is because I know that as soon as that label is put out there, an onslaught of assumptions are going to be made, and I am going to be judged, dismissed, devalued and looked down upon. 'Simply, I am going to be take less seriously than if I had just been called by my job title - tech founder.' In a lengthy post shared to her Instagram account on Monday, the Sydney-based businesswoman revealed she was recently referred to as an influencer, which she said 'irritated' her She continued, 'When I first saw the reference, I thought about asking the publication to remove the word influencer, but I thought no - I do have an online community, I shouldn't feel like I have to hide from that label.' Battersby, who launched Bumble in Australia in 2016, explained how she was interviewed to discuss her 'struggle' with whether she can have children as well as a career at the same time. But instead, Battersby was met with a wave of criticism for being branded an influencer, adding that she'd 'received more hate and backlash' than she ever experienced. The Sunroom co-founder, who is just shy of clocking 37,000 Instagram followers, explained in a lengthy statement that she was bothered by the term 'I'm raging!!! Had first-hand experience being judged based on being referred to as an influencer last night,' she wrote in her caption The tech founder added that she has 'done a total of three sponsored posts' in her life online, despite regularly tagging brands and attending exclusive fashion events 'My appearance was commented on, my intelligence was questioned and my perspective was dismissed,' she continued. Battersby listed a few of the comments, with many of those claiming to influence is 'not a job'. The tech founder added that she has 'done a total of three sponsored posts' in her life online, despite regularly tagging brands and attending exclusive fashion events. Elsewhere in her statement, Battersby came to the defence of full-time influencers, apologising for the difficulty and illegitimacy they face on social media. Elsewhere in her statement, Battersby came to the defence of full-time influencers, apologising for the difficulty and illegitimacy they face on social media 'To the legitimate inflencers - my god I am so sorry,' she said. 'It must be so exhausting, so deflating every time you have an opinion, to have a group of people publicly dismiss you simply because you built an online following.' She added: 'Being an influencer is a legitimate career - it is game, it is strategy and it requires intellect to build an online community to a point where you can monetize it. An influencer is defined as 'a person or thing that influences another' and is predominately used in marketing to influence consumers into purchasing a product or service 'And in no way am I saying [influencers] are all saints - just like in any profession, not everyone is great at it and not everyone does their job ethically. 'Sometimes people gain opportunity because of nepotism, or they are skilled at creating a persona that exists purely for online consumption.' Battersby concluded: 'Sometimes it is unexplainable how someone got there in the first place, but you do not have to discredit an entire industry of women, shun them, speak down to them and treat them like that they do is less than.' An influencer is defined as 'a person or thing that influences another' and is predominately used in marketing to influence consumers into purchasing a product or service. Battersby was a 25-year-old with no marketing experience when she was given the challenge of launching Bumble in Australia in 2016 This is often done by influencers recommending the items on social media - whether it be through a sponsored post or in more subtle ways like simply tagging a brand to their post. Battersby was a 25-year-old with no marketing experience when she was given the challenge of launching Bumble in Australia in 2016. As of 2023, the dating app boasts 12.3 million monthly active users. The entrepreneur has since gone even further with her tech career and is now the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Sunroom - an app for women and non-binary creators to make money. MasterChef Australia star Brent Draper has welcomed his second child just months after winning the Channel 10 cooking show. Draper, 34, and wife Shonleigh, who host the Behind the Drapes podcast together, announced their newborn son Bowie's arrival in an interview for Woman's Day. Born November 19 at 2:33 pm, Bowie entered the world during an 'incredible' home birth with two midwives in attendance. While Brent couldn't take part in the delivery, the celebrity chef put himself to work in other ways. 'I thought it'd be a good idea while things were a lot calmer to cook some sourdough,' he said. MasterChef Australia star Brent Draper has welcomed his second child a few weeks after winning the cooking show Draper, a former boilermaker who also competed in the show's 2021 season before quitting due to mental health reasons, was crowned the 2023 winner in July over second-place contestant Rhiannon Anderson from Queensland. However, his win was marred by wild conspiracy theories. Viewers were quick to point out that Draper had spent the past two years working as a content creator for Coles, providing recipes and other food-related material for the supermarket giant. Draper was named the winner of MasterChef 2023 earlier this year However, his win was marred by wild conspiracy theories with viewers quick to point out that Draper had spent the past two years working as a content creator for Coles, providing recipes and other food-related material for the supermarket giant Coles has long served as the major sponsor for MasterChef and reportedly coughs up about $6million per season to have its logo and products splashed across the reality juggernaut. Some viewers claimed Draper's status as a Coles employee breached MasterChef's strict entry criteria on the grounds that it is a 'conflict of interest'. Others even claimed MasterChef guest judge and long-time face of Coles, Curtis Stone, gave Draper an advantage in one of the show's final challenges which ultimately led to the ousting of fan favourite Declan Cleary. Hundreds took to fan sites and Reddit forums to argue the point, with some fans calling for the 'set-up win' to be redacted. 'What the what!?!? Did y'all know about this? Doesn't this come under conflict of interest?' raged one Reddit user, adding a screenshot of Draper's TenPlay bio which clearly states he has worked for Coles since 2021. Another wrote: 'My wife has been saying since early days of this season that everything is set up for Brent to win. I always fought that idea, because I want to believe that [MasterChef] is and will always be fair. I'm not that sure now.' Others even claimed MasterChef guest judge and long-time face of Coles, Curtis Stone, gave Draper an advantage in one of the show's final challenges which ultimately led to the ousting of fan favourite Declan Cleary Of a challenge Draper won in the show's final episodes, Facebook user Linda Stewart noted: 'I read... that Brent has been an ambassador for Coles for the past two years. 'If this is true wouldn't it be a conflict of interest to have Curtis Stone, a Coles chef ambassador, to be in charge of this challenge? Wouldn't that give Brent an advantage?' A Channel 10 spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia at the time that Draper's arrangement with Coles had no bearing on the MasterChef outcome. 'After Brent Draper stepped away from MasterChef Australia in 2021 for mental health reasons, Coles reached out to support Brent's mental health journey,' the spokesperson said. 'Since then, Coles and Brent have collaborated on various recipe developments and appearances. 'Brent's return to MasterChef Australia in 2023 was in no way connected or influenced by his relationship with Coles. Like every other contestant, Brent secured his place in the competition based on merit. 'The dishes plated up by MasterChef Australia contestants are critiqued solely by the show's judges, based entirely on the quality of the dish presented. Brent works full time as a digital content creator for a number of different brands.' New friends Jackie 'O' Henderson and Pip Edwards enjoyed a business lunch on Monday. The blonde beauties flaunted their flair fashion as they enjoyed a meal with a group of women, including Jackie's Besties business partner Gemma O'Neill, at exclusive seafood restaurant North Bondi Fish. Jackie 48, and the P.E Nation founder, 43, are preparing to go on a getaway to Fiji this month with the radio host's listeners. The KIIS FM star looked stunning as she showed off her slimmed-down frame in a beautiful floral Zimmerman corset top worth $700. She paired it with a matching Zimmerman skirt which flowed down to her ankles and retails for $980. New friends Jackie 'O' Henderson and Pip Edwards enjoyed a festive lunch on Monday With her golden locks tumbling down her back, the media personality, who recently signed a historic $200million deal with KIIS FM, hid her eyes behind dark shades. Meanwhile, fashion designer Pip donned a more avant-garde look in an old-school Stella McCartney shirt tucked into beige trousers. Pulling back her blonde tresses into a low bun, she slipped on a pair of bright coral coloured shades to complete her look. The blonde beauties flaunted their flair fashion as they enjoyed a meal with a group of women, including Jackie's Besties business partner Gemma O'Neill, at exclusive North Bondi Fish Jackie 48, and the P.E Nation founder, 43, are preparing to go on a getaway to Fiji this month with the radio host's listeners The KIIS FM star looked stunning as she showed off her slimmed-down frame in a beautiful floral Zimmerman corset top worth $700 After Pip and Jackie made their way inside the popular eatery, they shared a laugh with the other women. It comes after Jackie announced in September she wants to take her fans on a tropical holiday to Kokomo Private Island in Fiji with her. The getaway is organised by Besties, the business Jackie runs with her best friend Gemma. She paired it with a matching Zimmerman skirt which flowed down to her ankles and retails for $980 With her golden locks tumbling down her back, the media personality, who recently signed a historic $200million deal with KIIS FM , hid her eyes behind dark shades Meanwhile, fashion designer Pip donned a more avant-garde look as she slipped on an old-school Stella McCartney shirt tucked into beige trousers Pulling back her blonde tresses into a low bun, she slipped on a pair of bright coral coloured shades to complete her look The business is touted as 'a space that gives you and your BFF the perfect opportunity to spend more time with each other, creating additional memories together,' according to their website. The venture claims to 'take you to the most breathtaking and exclusive destinations on group holiday adventures, plus spoil you with ranges of luxe products specifically and personally curated by us for you'. For the Fiji Besties event, Jackie announced designer Pip and home makeover crew Three Birds Renovations would be joining her. Also going on the vacation will be comedian Celeste Barber and The Good Mood Clinic. After Pip and Jackie made their way inside the popular eatery, they shared a laugh with the other women It comes after Jackie announced in September she wants to take her fans on a tropical holiday to Kokomo Private Island in Fiji with her For the Fiji Besties event, Jackie announced designer Pip and home makeover crew Three Birds Renovations would be joining her Jackie appeared to be having a blast as she sat down for lunch with her girlfriends Oprah Winfrey looked amazing as she attended the third Annual Academy Museum Gala at the at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles on Sunday. Winfrey, 69, wore a long-sleeved glimmering purple gown by Dolce & Gabbana to the event in Southern California. The TV icon rounded out her glam ensemble with jewelry from Hamilton Jewelers and rings from EFFY Jewelry. The media mogul wore her lustrous locks pulled back and eyeglasses on the chilly evening. The stalwart television personality took to Instagram with a shot of herself as she prepared to head to the event. 'Its a purple kind of night,' the Kosciusko, Mississippi-born star captioned the shot. 'Off to the @academymuseum gala with my @thecolorpurple family.' Oprah Winfrey, 69, looked amazing as she attended the third Annual Academy Museum Gala at the at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles on Sunday The media icon beamed as she walked on the red carpet at the luxe event The media icon, who celebrates her 70th birthday next month, was nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role as Sofia at the 1986 Academy Awards for her work in the film The Color Purple. A remake is headed for theaters Christmas Day, with Oprah and Steven Spielberg producing. Oprah sported a svelte figure two months after she commented on Ozempic, a drug that is used for weight loss, and why she won't use it. She opened up on her history of body image, and how she relates to it, in September at a New York City panel for her Oprah Daily's The Life You Want series. On the panel, Oprah was joined by multiple experts in the weight loss field, including Weight Watchers CEO Sima Sistani, psychologist Rachel Goldman and obesity specialists Fatima Cody Stanford and Melanie Jay. 'I don't know that there is another public person whose weight struggles have been exploited as much as mine,' Oprah said on the panel, which included conversation about how media should examine weight and obesity related issues. 'One of the things I carried so much shame for, and even when I first started hearing about the weight loss drugs, at the same time I was going through knee surgery and I felt, "I've got to do this on my own because if I take the drug, that's the easy way out,"' she said. She continued: 'There's a part of me that feels - like I think a lot of people feel with bariatric surgery - that I've got to do it the hard way, I've got to keep climbing the mountains, I've got to keep suffering and I've got to do that because otherwise I somehow cheated myself.' Oprah added that she was 'just sick of' the notion 'as a person who has been shamed for so many years' in regards to body image. Winfrey wore a long-sleeved glimmering purple gown by Dolce & Gabbana to the event in Southern California The TV icon rounded out her glam ensemble with jewelry from Hamilton Jewelers The media mogul wore her lustrous locks pulled back and eyeglasses on the chilly evening Oprah was recognized in her efforts for supporting the Academy Museum with The Pillar Award Oprah posed alongside Danielle Brooks, star of the upcoming remake of The Color Purple, on the red carpet at the event. Brooks plays Sofia, the role Oprah played in the 1985 film, in the forthcoming film Oprah was seen posing alongside longtime confidante Gayle King at the proceedings Oprah and Meryl Streep were two of the honorees at the Academy Museum Gala The stalwart television personality took to Instagram with a shot of herself as she prepared to head to the event On the panel, Oprah was candid about how she deals with specific physical conditions that have been a hurdle in her weight loss journey. 'For those of us that are adipose storers, no matter how many times,,' she said. 'You've all watched me diet and diet and diet and diet, it's a recurring thing because my body always seems to want to go back to a certain weight.' She gave the example, 'If I ate an apple pie at 11 o'clock at night, I would be two pounds heavier in the morning. I can't eat after a certain time.' Oprah said that having 'yoyoed her whole life' in weight, she is aware of the differences in how she is treated. 'This is a world that has shamed people for being overweight forever and all of us who have lived it know that people just treat you differently - they just do,' she said. She continued: 'And I am Oprah Winfrey and I know all that comes with that and I get treated differently if I am 200 plus pounds versus under 200 pounds ... there is a condescension; there is a stigma.' Amid a discussion about which weight loss drugs were the best on the market, Oprah said that society needed to recalibrate expectations. 'Shouldn't we all just be more accepting of whatever body you choose to be in?' she said. 'That should be your choice.' The broadcasting veteran was pictured in a weight loss campaign for Weight Watchers in 2016 Oprah said that having 'yoyoed her whole life' in weight, she is aware of the differences in how she is treated based on her appearance. Pictured in Sydney, Australia in December of 2010 Oprah said 'there is a condescension' and 'a stigma' toward people who are perceived as 'overweight.' Pictured in Toronto in September of 2009 Winfrey attended an event in LA at the Arclight Cinerama Dome on December 11, 2007 Winfrey was pictured at the Emmy Awards in September of 2002 in LA The talk show icon was pictured in May of 1997 at an event at UCLA Winfrey had her hands full at the Daytime Emmy Awards in NYC in May of 1995, holding multiple trophies Winfrey was pictured in NYC in May of 1994 holding a Daytime Emmy Award The media legend sported a gold ensemble when she was snapped on June 1, 1992 Oprah was pictured in March of 1992 at an event in NYC honoring the late Barbara Walters Oprah was pictured in December of 1989 at the NAACP Image Awards in LA Winfrey famously showed off 67 pounds of weight loss on a radio flyer wagon on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1988. She shed the weight as result of an all-liquid diet Oprah was pictured at the Golden Globes in Beverly Hills, California in January of 1986 Winfrey was pictured earlier in her career in January of 1978 in Baltimore Sunday's Academy Museum Gala brought together the biggest and brightest stars as they honor four showbiz talents: This year saw Oprah, Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan and Sofia Coppola among those recognized. Oprah on Sunday was recognized in her efforts for supporting the Academy Museum with The Pillar Award. Streep, 74, received the Icon Award which celebrated her entire career which includes a whopping three Oscars. Coppola, 52, was honored for advancing the art of cinema as the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola was given the Visionary Award. Lastly Jordan, 36, - who made his directorial debut with Creed III earlier this year - was presented with the Vanguard Award which is given to an emerging artist. Leading up to the event director and president of the Academy Museum Jacqueline Stewart released a statement which read: 'We are excited to gather again at our third annual Academy Museum Gala to celebrate the power, global impact, and indelible importance of cinema. 'I am truly honored to recognize four artists, Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and Sofia Coppola, whose creativity and passion have inspired and shaped our culture in such powerful ways.' Meanwhile, the red carpet was star-studded as it featured the likes of Selena Gomez, Dua Lipa, Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Salma Hayek, Eva Longoria, Billie Eilish, Chrissy Teigen, and Demi Moore. The gala was originally set to take place in October but was postponed following the Hamas attack on Israel. Disney+ released a new Aussie series last week called The Artful Dodger, which is a fresh take on the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist, set in Australia in the 1850s. Viewers have quickly become captivated by the irreverent take on the classic novel, which stars English actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster, 33, as the title character. Fans have taken to social media to gush over its gripping story, incredible performances by Thomas and Aussie actress Maia Mitchell, 30, and eye-popping period accuracy. 'Maia and Thomas' acting in the show is on top. The last ep completely wrecked me Beautiful writing plus amazing acting = bawling my eyes on the floor,' one emotional fan wrote. 'Someone needs to watch the Artful Dodger so I have someone to gush with about how fun and entertaining it is. What an interesting concept,' a second person added. Disney+ released a new Aussie series last week called The Artful Dodger, which is a fresh take on the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist, set in Australia in the 1850s. Pictured: Lead actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster Meanwhile, other users chipped in to comment on how effortlessly the lead actors tackled their challenging roles. 'The Artful Dodger is so good. Maia as Lady Belle is so lovely!' one eager viewer wrote. 'It is really good. An easy to watch show and the main guy is so cute,' another added. 'The show is actually so good. Like Oh My God,' wrote a third person. Set in 1850s Australia, it follows the adventures of one-time teen thief Jack Dawkins, also known as 'The Artful Dodger', 15-years after the story of the Dickens novel ended. In the series, Jack now practices as a surgeon in the colony of Port Victory. Viewers have quickly become captivated by the irreverent take on the classic novel, which stars English actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster, 33, as the title character 15 years. Pictured Thomas and lead actress Maia Mitchell Fans have taken to social media to gush over its gripping story and incredible performances Set in 1850s Australia, it follows the adventures of one-time teen thief Jack Dawkins, also known as 'The Artful Dodger', 15-years after the story of the Dickens novel ended The story centres on what happens when Jack's former gang-leader arrives in Australia to lure his former pickpocketing protege back into a life of crime. Joining The Queen's Gambit star Brodie-Sangster in the action-filled series is veteran British favourite David Thewlis (Harry Potter) from the Netflix drama The Sandman. Thewlis plays Dickens' iconic Fagin character, once a key ally of The Artful Dodger, after they once led a gang of thieves in the slums of London. Wentworth star Susie Porter is also featured, along side fan favourite Kym Gyngell (Black Snow), Jack Irish star Damien Garvey and Jessica De Gouw. The Artful Dodger is now streaming on Disney+ Kendall Jenner managed to steal the show by going braless at the star-studded 3rd Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles. The 28-year-old model - who posted playful snaps with red wine earlier in the day - put on a rather racy ensemble in a very sheer, body-contouring look at the event which took place at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The fiery number showcased her model figure as she opted to go bra-free in the rather see-through ensemble. The frock featured a high neckline and long sleeves and a bow around the hips which accentuated her curves. Kendall Jenner managed to steal the show by going braless at the star-studded 3rd Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles She wore her signature raven-colored locks down as she showcased her natural looks with complementary make-up. Kendall accessorized with silver hoop earrings and nude lacquer on her nails. On the red carpet the stunner was joined by her fellow model pal Hailey Bieber who stunned in a sleeveless sequined black gown. The Academy Museum Gala brings together the biggest and brightest stars as they honor four showbiz talents. This year saw Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and Sofia Coppola among those recognized. Streep, 74, received the Icon Award which celebrated her entire career which includes a whopping three Oscars. Receiving The Pillar Award was Oprah, 69, who was recognized in her efforts for supporting the Academy Museum. Coppola, 52, was honored for advancing the art of cinema as the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola was given the Visionary Award. The 28-year-old model put on a rather racy ensemble in a very sheer, body-contouring look at the event which took place at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures The fiery number showcased her model figure as she opted to go bra-free in the rather see-through ensemble The frock featured a high neckline and long sleeves and a bow around the hips which accentuated her curves She wore her signature raven-colored locks down as she showcased her natural looks with complementary make-up Kendall accessorized with silver hoop earrings and nude lacquer on her nails On the red carpet the stunner was joined by her fellow model pal Hailey Bieber The wife of Justin Bieber stunned in a sleeveless sequined black gown Oprah Winfrey and Meryl Streep were two of the honorees at the Academy Museum Gala as they posed together on the pink carpet Lastly Jordan, 36, - who made his directorial debut with Creed III earlier this year - was presented with the Vanguard Award which is given to an emerging artist. Leading up to the event director and president of the Academy Museum Jacqueline Stewart released a statement which read: 'We are excited to gather again at our third annual Academy Museum Gala to celebrate the power, global impact, and indelible importance of cinema. 'I am truly honored to recognize four artists, Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and Sofia Coppola, whose creativity and passion have inspired and shaped our culture in such powerful ways.' Meanwhile, the red carpet was star-studded as it featured the likes of Selena Gomez, Dua Lipa, Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Salma Hayek, Eva Longoria, Billie Eilish, Chrissy Teigen, and Demi Moore. The gala was originally set to take place in October but was postponed following the Hamas attack on Israel. Celebrity eyebrow queen Kristin Fisher has unleashed a spectacular rant after her business plunged into administration. Documents filed with the corporate regulator ASIC said administrators were appointed to her business Kristin Fisher Eyebrows, which owes $900,000 to creditors, last Thursday. As the news spread, Ms Fisher took to Instagram to flay the media, which she claimed treated her differently than men and male-run businesses because they prey on 'pretty girls with big boobs'. Kristin Fisher, who owns Kristin Fisher Eyebrows in Sydney 's ritzy Double Bay, was forced to hire a restructuring specialist from forensic accountant firm Worrells to help resolve her business' mounting debt Kristin Fisher is pictured with high-profile clients Jade Yardbrough and Dina Broadhurst 'My business suffered immensely during and after Covid. This is not new information,' Ms Fisher wrote. 'So were currently restructuring the business with a wonderful team of accountants administrators and advisors. 'And guess what this happens every single day. EVERY DAY! 'We arent closing the doors. No staff are being affected at all, nor are our clients and our suppliers. Is is BUSINESS AS USUAL.' Ms Fisher contrasted her coverage to 'building companies going into liquidation every single day with 50 million plus debts, wiping their debts clean and starting a new co just weeks later'. 'Here I am, a single mother of two, TRADING THROUGH this s**t show and being used as media fodder constantly,' she wrote. 'Is it because I have breasts?' The Kristin Fisher Eyebrows salon in Sydney's Double Bay is continuing to operate despite the business going into administration The collapse into administration comes months after a restructuring practitioner, Mervyn Kitay of forensic accountants Worrells, was appointed to the business, based in Sydney's eastern suburbs, in June. Under the restructuring plan, submitted to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, $216,000 would have been repaid this year with outstanding debt to be paid at a later date. The Australian Taxation Office, which is one of the major creditors and is owed personal taxes by Ms Fisher, voted against the plan to restructure Kristin Fisher Eyebrows. Kristin Fisher says that women get treated differently by the media (pictured with Rozalia Russian) Administrators Jeremy Nipps and Rahul Goyal of Cor Cordis had been appointed to the business. They posted notification that a creditors' meeting would be held on December 12. For the meanwhile the administrators have determined the business remains viable, and it will continue to operate with all staff to stay on and booking as well as gift cards to be honoured. Ms Fisher was convicted of possessing cocaine in August after being arrested on July 17 after NSW Police discovered her in the passenger seat of a drug dealers car with two bags of cocaine at her feet. On Instagram she referred to this as a 'little altercation'. 'A male judge had been caught doing exactly the same thing as me only a week earlier,' she wrote on Instagram. 'That story was totally buried. Never to be seen.' 'Meanwhile I was front page everywhere for weeks on end. It was relentless. 'The media in Australia and in Sydney particular, are quite misogynistic.' Ms Fisher said she would 'let my daughter grow up in a world where get let off for things that women pay the ultimate price for'. 'Im not a staunch feminist either Im a bloody hard-working mother of two and I just fairness for women when it comes to situations like this because Ive have enough of the gender bias,' she said 'I am once again the topic of media fodder.' 'Im kind of used to it by now even though its always defamatory and a lot of the time there is misleading language in the article.' She went on to claim the media 'preys on pretty girls with big boobs'. 'KFE isn't going anywhere nor are my boobs ... f**k the patriarchy,' she wrote. Ms Fisher, whose services cost from $40 to $1600, has a salon in the exclusive suburb of Double Bay. Her website boasts she is 'responsible for sculpting and perfecting the brows of Sydney's elite style and celebrity set'. The business offers brow services such as waxing, shaping, threading, lamination and tinting, as well as eyelash lifts and tints and LED light therapy sessions. It has over 45,000 followers on Instagram. A report by Mr Kitay said Covid restrictions and the break up of Ms Fisher's marriage had been 'calamitous' for the business. 'The combined effects of Covid (including lock downs) and the matrimonial breakdown, exacerbated by a lack of financial advice, resulted in the business becoming the primary source of funding for both its affairs and that of Ms Barnes personally,' Mr Kitay wrote. Ms Fisher has been contacted for comment Golden Bachelor star Gerry Turner has admitted he fibbed about not dating any other women between his wife's 2017 death and appearing on the hit reality show. Asked about his lies, which were exposed by The Hollywood Reporter, Turner, 72, told Katie Couric: 'I guess I would say this: I dated a number of women, but then it becomes an issue of how you define whether youre in a relationship.' Turner was exposed by an ex who gave her name as Carolyn. She said she enjoyed a year-long relationship with the reality star after his wife of 45 years Toni died of an infection in 2017. Turner claimed on TV that Toni's death had plunged him into such deep grief that he'd only countenanced romance again after being approached to appear on the hit show. But Carolyn - who is 14 years younger than Turner - says she began dating Turner just two months after his wife died. Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner has admitted lying about his romantic and career past in a new interview with Katie Couric. He's seen with his fiancee Theresa Nist, who he met on the reality show and now plans to marry Turner, pictured in a glossy publicity shot for the show, has admitted he did date other women between his wife's 2017 death and his appearance on the show While Turner was introduced as a 'retired restaurateur,' his LinkedIn profile shows he has not owned a restaurant since 1985, when he sold his Mr Quick hamburger in Iowa (stock picture). He has since found work as a hot tub maintenance man They grew so close that she spent time at his Indiana lake house, only for Turner to later dump her for gaining 10 pounds. Asked about those claims, the silver-tongued Casanova told Couric that his romance with Turner 'didn't really last a few years.' He then quickly changed the subject, saying: 'But I want to focus on what's going on now.' Carolyn said Turner callously ditched her on seeing she'd gained weight before a school reunion, telling her: 'I'm not taking you to the reunion looking like that.' She also accused him of being tight with money, claiming he'd make her pay for half their meals before they ate out - so he could then pick up the check and look like a gent. Turner is said to have demanded Carolyn pay her own way after she moved in with him in July 2018 - although she says she managed to cut his initial demand for $1,000 in monthly living expenses down to $850. Cleanliness was also a bugbear of Turner's, according to Carolyn. She alleges he'd demand she make the bed each morning before breakfast. Turner is pictured with his new fiancee Theresa Nist, who he met on The Golden Bachelor and now plans to marry. She's standing by him despite the allegations Other women have also claimed that Turner dated them between Toni's wife and his appearance on the show. Turner proposed to Theresa Nist during the finale of the ABC show, with his new lover standing by him despite the embarrassing revelations about his past. The star went on to concede that his claims of being a successful retired restaurateur were inflated - and that the mom and pop hamburger store he'd owned closed in 1985. Turner, who has since worked as a hot tub maintenance man, told Couric: 'The business I owned was very much like the Cadillac Diner that Theresa and I went to on the very first date. I sold burgers and fries and shakes, and it was a very profitable business. 'And the comments about what I did later in life, I did those after I retired. I retired at 55, and I was very happy giving back to the community and doing things that were worth something to other people. 'I mean, jeez, I didnt work as a handyman for the money. I did it because I knew I was doing something good for people who needed help. 'Theres just enough truth in (the article). But I have so many positives to think about that I havent really given that article a whole lot of thought.' Turner and his latest love Theresa will now wed on TV, in a special titled The Golden Wedding. The pair have discussed moving to Charleston, South Carolina, to begin their lives together. Advertisement Demi Moore, Salma Hayek and Eva Longoria dazzled in metallic gowns on Sunday while attending the 3rd annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles. The actresses were among the star-studded crowd who attended the benefit hosted by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures to raise funds and honor contributors to the film industry. Demi, 61, shined bright in a silver sleeveless Tamara Ralph Couture dress that featured a large flower decoration up front. She had her long black hair swept to one side and down around her waist and accessorized with dangling earrings bracelets and rings. Demi Moore, Salma Hayek and Eva Longoria dazzled in metallic gowns on Sunday while attending the 3rd annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles Demi completed her glamorous look with open-toed collar heels and accentuated her natural beauty with full makeup including rosy cheeks. Salma sizzled in a sterling white dress that featured a deep neckline and a small train. The 57-year-old Oscar nominee had her black hair parted down the middle and down below her shoulders. Salma accessorized with a headband, earrings and rings and clutched a silver handbag. She teamed up on the carpet with Oscar-winning actor Jared Leto, 51, who she starred with in the 2006 crime drama Lonely Hearts. Eva stunned in a silver sleeveless dress that featured a train. The strapless, glittering gown hugged her hips and also showed off her even tan. Eva accessorized with stylish hoop earrings and rings and while adding to her good looks with smoky eye makeup, blush and lipstick. The 61-year-old actress had her long black hair swept to one side and down around her waist and accessorized with dangling earrings bracelets and rings Demi wore a Tamara Ralph Couture gown with an oversized flower detail and completed her glamorous look with open-toed collar heels Salma accessorized with a headband, earrings and rings The 57-year-old Oscar nominee had her black hair parted down the middle and down below her shoulders Selma teamed up on the carpet with Oscar-winning actor Jared Leto, 51, who she starred with in the 2006 crime drama Lonely Hearts Eva accessorized with stylish hoop earrings and rings and while adding to her good looks with smoky eye makeup, blush and lipstick The strapless, glittering gown hugged her hips and also showed off her even tan Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and Sofia Coppola were recognized for their contributions during the star-studded gala. Streep, 74, received the Icon Award that celebrated her entire career, which includes a whopping three Oscars. The Pillar Award was given to Oprah, 69, who was recognized in her efforts for supporting the Academy Museum. Coppola, 52, was honored for advancing the art of cinema as the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola was given the Visionary Award. Jordan, 36, was presented with the Vanguard Award, which is given to an emerging artist, after making his directorial debut earlier this year with Creed III. Kate Ritchie was looking a tad downcast as she walked her dog in Sydney on Tuesday, following reports that she has split with boyfriend Chevy Black. The Nova FM radio host, 45, went makeup free for the stroll alongside her pooch and seemed in low spirits. She opted for a black shirt with lettering across the front, along with a pair of leggings. Kate completed her look with a cap, tucking her brunette ponytail underneath, and had a pair of headphones on, listening to something on her phone as she walked. It comes after a radio insider told Daily Mail Australia she split with Black nine months after they went Instagram official. Kate Ritchie (pictured) was looking a tad downcast as she walked her dog in Sydney on Tuesday, following reports that she has split with boyfriend Chevy Black The pair, who would often put on on public displays of affection while out and about in Coogee, have not been spotted together for months. An insider also told New Idea magazine there is a very telling clue their relationship is over. 'It seems like now he doesn't have any reason to keep his life hidden,' the source told the magazine. 'Until recently, Chevy preferred to keep his life under wraps, with his social media set to private. He has now changed to a public Instagram profile,' they added. Ritchie recently fueled breakup rumours by sharing a reflective post to Instagram which captured her living her best life with a girlfriend, and no mention of Black. Daily Mail Australia has reached out to both Ritchie and Black for comment. The Nova FM radio host, 45, went makeup free for the stroll alongside her pooch and seemed in low spirits She opted for a black shirt with lettering across the front, along with a pair of leggings. Kate completed her look with a cap, tucking her brunette ponytail underneath Up until recently, the pair looked to be going from strength-to-strength after debuting their relationship in February. In August, Kate took her romance to the next level by introducing Chevy to her mother Heather and daughter Mae. The couple were first pictured together on a romantic picnic in early February. The relationship came after Kate split from her ex-boyfriend John Bell and her shock rehab stint for alcohol dependency. In October last year, Kate announced she was stepping away from the Kate, Tim and Joel show before it was revealed she was seeking treatment at an exclusive rehab clinic in Sydney. In December, she said in a statement the last year had been challenging and stressful and led to an 'unhealthy reliance on alcohol'. It comes after a radio insider told Daily Mail Australia split with Black (pictured) nine months after they went Instagram official Sir Richard Branson has enjoyed a popular Australian tourist activity - climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The 73-year-old proved he is fit as a fiddle as he took on the treacherous climb, sending onlookers a thumbs up as he went. Branson wore a navy blue windbreaker over a red hoodie, and red trousers as well as a safety harness. He was with a group of friends, the crew following closely and sharing jokes with Branson as they climbed. The business titan was doing the climb as part of a Virgin event he is in the country for. Sir Richard Branson (pictured) has enjoyed a popular Australian tourist activity - climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge The 73-year-old proved he is fit as a fiddle as he took on the treacherous climb, sending onlookers a thumbs up as he went Branson wore a navy blue windbreaker over a red hoodie, and red trousers as well as a safety harness Earlier this month, more than 150 Virgin passengers were gifted a free cruise by the company's founder Sir Richard Branson. Those on board flight VA 1316 from Melbourne to Hobart were left speechless when they were told they'd each been gifted a cruise worth up to $7,000. Branson had phoned in via FaceTime from his private island Necker, in the British Virgin Islands, to alert passengers they'd be going on a Virgin Voyages cruise. The cruise line, which will launch in Australia next month, offers voyages around Australia and New Zealand. The flight was chosen as it is the same route Virgin's cruise ship Resilient Lady will travel on her Mermaiden Voyage. He was with a group of friends, the crew following closely and sharing jokes with Branson as they climbed The business titan was doing the climb as part of a Virgin event he is in the country for Earlier this month, more than 150 Virgin passengers were gifted a free cruise by the company's founder Sir Richard Branson Those on board flight VA 1316 from Melbourne to Hobart were left speechless when they were told they'd each been gifted a cruise worth up to $7,000 Branson had phoned in via FaceTime from his private island Necker, in the British Virgin Islands, to alert passengers they'd be going on a Virgin Voyages cruise 'Well, today, you happen to be travelling on the same route as our Aussie MerMaiden Voyage,' Mr Branson was heard saying over the flight's PA system. 'To celebrate this milestone, I'm pleased to gift each adult on-board a free Virgin Voyages cruise.' Passengers immediately erupted into cheers and applause before cabin crew handed each person on board their free cruise voucher. Cabin crew, baggage handlers and pilots on flight VA 1316 were also included in the mass giveaway, with more than $1million gifted by Mr Branson in total. Resilient Lady will leave its homeport of Melbourne for Tasmania on December 11. The cruise line's voyages are all adults-only. Jodie Turner-Smith wowed in a glamorous black gown as she posed on the red carpet at the Annual Academy Museum Gala on Sunday. The actress, 37, who recently filed a new custody deal with her estranged husband Joshua Jackson, looked effortlessly stylish in her ball gown. She showcased her tiny torso and elegant frame in the extravagant ensemble as she posed up a storm inside the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Her dress detailed a sleeveless structured overlay on top of the black and white train. The mother-of-one oozed elegance in her eye-popping gown as she teamed her outfit with silver necklaces and polka dot nails to complement her dress. Newly single Jodie Turner-Smith, 37, wowed in a glamorous black gown as she posed on the red carpet at the Annual Academy Museum Gala on Sunday The actress, who recently filed a new custody deal with her estranged husband Joshua Jackson, looked effortlessly stylish in her ball gown Jodie and Joshua share a three-year-old daughter, Juno Rose Diana, and have been able to come to a temporary custody arrangement for the little one. The couple separated over what has been referred to as 'irreconcilable differences' in court papers. They will have joint physical custody of the tot, and neither will pay child support - Joshua also requested that each pay for their own attorneys' fees. The annual Academy Museum Gala was launched in 2021 and aims to raise funds for the museums exhibitions and public programming. The event always draws in a red carpet so star-studded it rivals the Academy Awards themselves and the inaugural gala managed to raise a whopping $11 million for the museum. Several stars were also honoured at the glamorous soiree, including Meryl Streep, who picked up the Icon Award, which celebrates an artist whose career has had a significant global cultural impact. Michael B. Jordan picked up the Vantage Award, which honours an emerging artist or scholar who is helping to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema. Oprah Winfrey received the Pillar Award, which acknowledges exemplary leadership and support for the Academy Museum. She showcased her tiny torso and elegant frame in the extravagant ensemble as she posed up a storm at the star-studded gala Her dress detailed a sleeveless structured overlay on top of the black and white train - while purposefully matching her polka dot nail colour to her gown The mother-of-one oozed elegance in her eye-popping gown as she teamed her outfit with silver necklaces Jodie looked incredibly stylish in her eye-popping ensemble and made sure to turn heads in her gown at the extravaganza She flaunted her flawless make-up features, adding a deep red gloss on her lips and wore a silver snake necklace Jodie and Joshua (pictured) share a three-year-old daughter, Juno Rose Diana, and have been able to come to a temporary custody arrangement for the little one. The couple separated over what has been referred to as 'irreconcilable differences' in court papers Sofia Coppola was honoured with the Visionary Award, which celebrates an artist or scholar whose innovations have advanced the art of cinema. 'We are excited to gather again at our third annual Academy Museum Gala to celebrate the power, global impact, and indelible importance of cinema,' Jacqueline Stewart, director and president of the Academy Museum, said in a statement earlier this year. 'I am truly honored to recognize four artists, Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and Sofia Coppola, whose creativity and passion have inspired and shaped our culture in such powerful ways.' The event was initially set to take place in October but was postponed following the Hamas attack on Israel. There had been concerns that the Hollywood strikes would also impact the event but these came to an end earlier this year. The Hollywood actors' strike finally came to an end last month after 118 days, concluding the longest strike ever for film and television actors. The month before the writers' strike came to an end, when they celebrated a new deal with a five percent pay bump, streaming bonuses and protection against AI. Saoirse Ronan showcased her sensational figure in an eye-catching white co-ord as she attended the 3rd Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles on Sunday. The actress, 29, looked incredible as she displayed her toned midriff in a white pleated bandeau crop top which she teamed with a matching maxi wrap skirt. She added inches to her frame in a pair of towering silver metallic heels and accessorised with a pair of dazzling stud earrings. It comes after the Little Women star revealed the immense pride she feels to call herself an Irish actress, and credited the 'brave' women who came before her. Saoirse, who was born in New York but has Irish parents, admitted her roots are 'incredible stock to come from', and ensured she 'doesn't take it for granted'. Saoirse Ronan showcased her sensational figure in an eye catching white co-ord as she stepped out at the Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles on Sunday The actress, 29, looked incredible as she displayed her toned midriff in a white pleated bandeau crop top which she teamed with a matching maxi wrap skirt Appearing on the front of Harper's Bazaar UK October issue, Saoirse explained the meaningful relationship she has to her heritage. She explained: Think of Sinead [OConnor], of Sharon [Horgan], everyone who was around in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, who just didnt give a f*ck and moved away from the template that had been set. 'Theres been a lot to overcome for all women, but I think in a country like Ireland, where there was such ownership over us in every sense physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially how unbelievably brave. 'What incredible stock to come from. I dont take that for granted at all. She added: When youve got other women in your corner, they will defend you like nothing else. 'If you have that which Ive always had from my mother you carry it with you your whole life. The annual Academy Museum Gala was launched in 2021 and aims to raise funds for the museums exhibitions and public programming. The event always draws in a red carpet so star-studded it rivals the Academy Awards themselves and the inaugural gala managed to raise a whopping $11 million for the museum. She added inches to her frame in a pair of towering silver metallic heels and accessorised with a pair of dazzling stud earrings Saoirse styled her short blonde tresses in neat waves as she posed at the glamorous star studded event Several stars were also honoured at the glamorous soiree, including Meryl Streep, who picked up the Icon Award, which celebrates an artist whose career has had a significant global cultural impact. Michael B. Jordan picked up the Vantage Award, which honours an emerging artist or scholar who is helping to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema. Oprah Winfrey received the Pillar Award, which acknowledges exemplary leadership and support for the Academy Museum. Sofia Coppola was honoured with the Visionary Award, which celebrates an artist or scholar whose innovations have advanced the art of cinema. 'We are excited to gather again at our third annual Academy Museum Gala to celebrate the power, global impact, and indelible importance of cinema,' Jacqueline Stewart, director and president of the Academy Museum, said in a statement earlier this year. 'I am truly honored to recognize four artists, Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and Sofia Coppola, whose creativity and passion have inspired and shaped our culture in such powerful ways.' The event was initially set to take place in October but was postponed following the Hamas attack on Israel. There had been concerns that the Hollywood strikes would also impact the event but these came to an end earlier this year. The Hollywood actors' strike finally came to an end last month after 118 days, concluding the longest strike ever for film and television actors. The month before the writers' strike came to an end, when they celebrated a new deal with a five percent pay bump, streaming bonuses and protection against AI. Brooklyn Beckham and glamorous wife Nicola Peltz were among the guests on Sunday evening as the annual Academy Museum Gala got underway in Los Angeles. The couple were on hand to raise much-needed funds for the museums exhibitions and public programming, and both ensured they commanded attention as they made their way onto a star-studded red carpet ahead of the event. Opting for an elegant peach evening gown with a cinched waist and an off-the-shoulder detail, Nicola, 28, stood out amongst her peers while posing for photos alongside her husband. The actress daughter of billionaire businessman and investor Nelson Peltz completed the look with a matching chiffon scarf, while nude wedge heels were visible beneath the gown's floor-length hemline. Joining his wife, Brooklyn, 24, looked appropriately dapper in a black tuxedo suit and crisp white dress shirt, a neck tattoo noticeable beneath his unbuttoned collar. Brooklyn Beckham and glamorous wife Nicola Peltz were among the guests on Sunday evening as the annual Academy Museum Gala got underway in Los Angeles The couple were on hand to raise much-needed funds for the museums exhibitions and public programming, and both ensured they commanded attention The annual Academy Museum Gala was launched in 2021 and aims to raise funds for the museums exhibitions and public programming. The event always draws in a red carpet so star-studded it rivals the Academy Awards themselves and the inaugural gala managed to raise a whopping $11million for the museum. Several stars were also honoured at the glamorous soiree, including Meryl Streep, who picked up the Icon Award, which celebrates an artist whose career has had a significant global cultural impact. Michael B. Jordan picked up the Vantage Award, which honours an emerging artist or scholar who is helping to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema. Oprah Winfrey received the Pillar Award, which acknowledges exemplary leadership and support for the Academy Museum. Sofia Coppola was honoured with the Visionary Award, which celebrates an artist or scholar whose innovations have advanced the art of cinema. 'We are excited to gather again at our third annual Academy Museum Gala to celebrate the power, global impact, and indelible importance of cinema,' Jacqueline Stewart, director and president of the Academy Museum, said in a statement earlier this year. 'I am truly honored to recognize four artists, Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and Sofia Coppola, whose creativity and passion have inspired and shaped our culture in such powerful ways.' Opting for an elegant peach evening gown with a cinched waist and an off-the-shoulder detail, Nicola stood out amongst her peers while posing for photos The actress daughter of billionaire businessman and investor Nelson Peltz completed the look with a matching chiffon scarf Joining his wife, Brooklyn looked appropriately dapper in a black tuxedo suit and crisp white dress shirt, a neck tattoo noticeable beneath his unbuttoned collar The previous day Nicola shared a series of selfies as she prepared for an appearance at the Balenciaga fashion show in Los Angeles She was joined by husband Brooklyn, who embraced an identical colour scheme The event was initially set to take place in October but was postponed following the Hamas attack on Israel. There had been concerns that the Hollywood strikes would also impact the event but these came to an end earlier this year. The Hollywood actors' strike finally came to an end last month after 118 days, concluding the longest strike ever for film and television actors. The month before the writers' strike came to an end, when they celebrated a new deal with a five percent pay bump, streaming bonuses and protection against AI. Nicola's outfit drew attention to her slender physique as she posed for a photo on Sunday David and Victoria Beckham's son showed off his body art in a shirtless selfie on Monday Kaia Gerber turned heads in a glamorous polka dot gown as she attended the 3rd Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles on Sunday evening. The model, 22, who is the the daughter of runway icon Cindy Crawford, looked incredible in the strapless black and silver number by Celine which boasted a full skirt. She simply accessorised with a pair of Tiffany diamond earrings and a stunning dazzling ring. Kaia flashed her gorgeous smile as she posed up a storm at the star studded event, held at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The beauty has been following in her famous mother Cindy's modelling footsteps and they both agree that it comes with benefits and drawbacks. Kaia Gerber turned heads in a glamorous polka dot gown by Celine as she attended the 3rd Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles on Sunday evening The model, 22, who is the the daughter of runway icon Cindy Crawford, looked incredible in the strapless black and silver number which boasted a full skirt The model said working together over the years has taken their relationship to a new level. 'I do feel like we've established a really strong bond and friendship outside of just a mother-daughter dynamic, which has been so fun for me over the last few years,' Kaia told People. 'I think when we work together, it's really no different than if I was working with another professional,' Cindy, 57, explained. Cindy said: 'I feel like when I'm at work with you, it's not like, "Oh, I am with my daughter. She's also Kaia and she has her own place in the world." 'It feels more like I get to work with just a really good friend.' Kaia agreed, adding, 'Maybe I would complain a little bit more to you than I would to another person, but I wouldn't say anything different than that.' But that doesn't mean they don't have some typical parent and child issues. 'She is a cool mom and she still embarrasses me constantly,' Kaia admitted. She simply accessorised with a stunning Tiffany dazzling ring and a pair of matching diamond earrings Kaia posed up a storm at the star studded event, held at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures 'But it's good! It brings me back down to earth... I probably embarrass her constantly as well.' The annual Academy Museum Gala was launched in 2021 and aims to raise funds for the museums exhibitions and public programming. The event always draws in a red carpet so star-studded it rivals the Academy Awards themselves and the inaugural gala managed to raise a whopping $11 million for the museum. Several stars were also honoured at the glamorous soiree, including Meryl Streep, who picked up the Icon Award, which celebrates an artist whose career has had a significant global cultural impact. Michael B. Jordan picked up the Vantage Award, which honours an emerging artist or scholar who is helping to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema. Oprah Winfrey received the Pillar Award, which acknowledges exemplary leadership and support for the Academy Museum. Sofia Coppola was honoured with the Visionary Award, which celebrates an artist or scholar whose innovations have advanced the art of cinema. 'We are excited to gather again at our third annual Academy Museum Gala to celebrate the power, global impact, and indelible importance of cinema,' Jacqueline Stewart, director and president of the Academy Museum, said in a statement earlier this year. It comes after Kaia and her mum Cindy, 57, both agreed that working together has taken their relationship to a new level (pictured in New York on November 14) 'I am truly honored to recognize four artists, Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and Sofia Coppola, whose creativity and passion have inspired and shaped our culture in such powerful ways.' The event was initially set to take place in October but was postponed following the Hamas attack on Israel. There had been concerns that the Hollywood strikes would also impact the event but these came to an end earlier this year. The Hollywood actors' strike finally came to an end last month after 118 days, concluding the longest strike ever for film and television actors. The month before the writers' strike came to an end, when they celebrated a new deal with a five percent pay bump, streaming bonuses and protection against AI. Chloe Grace Moretz looked sensational as she made a rare red carpet appearance at the star-studded 3rd Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles. The actress, 26, wowed in a stylish blue halterneck gown with a chunky belt which cinched in her waist. She elevated her height in matching heels at the event which took place at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Chloe sported a bronzed makeup look which accentuated her natural features and accessorised with diamond earrings. The annual Academy Museum Gala was launched in 2021 and aims to raise funds for the museums exhibitions and public programming. Chloe Grace Moretz looked sensational as she made a rare red carpet appearance at the star-studded 3rd Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles The actress, 26, wowed in a stylish blue halterneck gown with a chunky belt which cinched in her waist The event always draws in a red carpet so star-studded it rivals the Academy Awards themselves and the inaugural gala managed to raise a whopping $11 million for the museum. Several stars were also honoured at the glamorous soiree, including Meryl Streep , who picked up the Icon Award, which celebrates an artist whose career has had a significant global cultural impact. Michael B. Jordan picked up the Vantage Award, which honours an emerging artist or scholar who is helping to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema. Oprah Winfrey received the Pillar Award, which acknowledges exemplary leadership and support for the Academy Museum. Sofia Coppola was honoured with the Visionary Award, which celebrates an artist or scholar whose innovations have advanced the art of cinema. 'We are excited to gather again at our third annual Academy Museum Gala to celebrate the power, global impact, and indelible importance of cinema,' Jacqueline Stewart, director and president of the Academy Museum, said in a statement earlier this year. 'I am truly honored to recognize four artists, Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and Sofia Coppola, whose creativity and passion have inspired and shaped our culture in such powerful ways.' Chloe sported a bronzed makeup look which accentuated her natural features and accessorised with diamond earrings The event was initially set to take place in October but was postponed following the Hamas attack on Israel. There had been concerns that the Hollywood strikes would also impact the event but these came to an end earlier this year. The Hollywood actors' strike finally came to an end last month after 118 days, concluding the longest strike ever for film and television actors. The month before the writers' strike came to an end, when they celebrated a new deal with a five percent pay bump, streaming bonuses and protection against AI. Jennifer Connelly and her husband Paul Bettany made a show-stopping arrival at the Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles on Sunday. The actress, 52, made sure to turn heads as she arrived at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in a striking silver and black split gown. Her actor husband, also 52, looked dapper in a smart black tuxedo and his trademark aviator glasses. The couple, who have been married for 20 years, arrived holding hands and posed for the cameras on the red carpet at the star-studded extravaganza. Jennifer flaunted her ample cleavage in the low-cut gown and flaunted her svelte model figure as the dress fell elegantly from her hips. Jennifer Connelly and her husband Paul Bettany, both 52, made a show-stopping arrival at the Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles on Sunday The actress made sure to turn heads as she arrived at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in a striking silver and black gown The Disney star styled her ensemble with a square black clutch bag and showcased her leg in the slit dress. She teamed her gown with a pair of shiny black court heels and opted for a minimal make-up palette. The couple are parents to two children - Stellan, 19, and Agnes, 14 - while Jennifer also has an older son Kai, 26, with her photographer ex David Dugan. The annual Academy Museum Gala was launched in 2021 and aims to raise funds for the museums exhibitions and public programming. The event always draws in a red carpet so star-studded it rivals the Academy Awards themselves and the inaugural gala managed to raise a whopping $11 million for the museum. Several stars were also honoured at the glamorous soiree, including Meryl Streep, who picked up the Icon Award, which celebrates an artist whose career has had a significant global cultural impact. Michael B. Jordan picked up the Vantage Award, which honours an emerging artist or scholar who is helping to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema. Oprah Winfrey received the Pillar Award, which acknowledges exemplary leadership and support for the Academy Museum. The Disney star styled her ensemble with a square black clutch bag and showcased her leg in the slit dress The couple, who have been married for 20 years, arrived holding hands and posed for the cameras on the red carpet at the star-studded extravaganza Her actor husband looked dapper in a smart black tuxedo and his trademark aviator glasses as he smiled on the carpet Jennifer flaunted her ample cleavage in the low-cut gown and flaunted her svelte model figure as the dress fell elegantly from her hips She teamed her gown with a pair of shiny black court heels and opted for a minimal make-up palette Sofia Coppola was honoured with the Visionary Award, which celebrates an artist or scholar whose innovations have advanced the art of cinema. 'We are excited to gather again at our third annual Academy Museum Gala to celebrate the power, global impact, and indelible importance of cinema,' Jacqueline Stewart, director and president of the Academy Museum, said in a statement earlier this year. 'I am truly honored to recognize four artists, Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and Sofia Coppola, whose creativity and passion have inspired and shaped our culture in such powerful ways.' The event was initially set to take place in October but was postponed following the Hamas attack on Israel. There had been concerns that the Hollywood strikes would also impact the event but these came to an end earlier this year. The Hollywood actors' strike finally came to an end last month after 118 days, concluding the longest strike ever for film and television actors. The month before the writers' strike came to an end, when they celebrated a new deal with a five percent pay bump, streaming bonuses and protection against AI. AFL star Brodie Grundy has announced his engagement to his long-time physiotherapist girlfriend Rachael Wertheim. The Swans recruit, 29, let the exciting news slip during a press conference on Monday, as he was discussing relocating from Melbourne to Sydney for the AFL. 'I was just so impressed with the Swans' pitch and the first meeting I had, I walked out with my now fiancee and we were just blown away,' he told the media. 'We walked out and we thought that would be amazing to land up in Sydney.' The lovebirds grew up together in Adelaide and after they began dating Rachael moved to Melbourne with Brodie as he was signed to Collingwood FC. AFL star Brodie Grundy has announced his engagement to his long-time physiotherapist girlfriend Rachael Wertheim. Both pictured They have lived together for several years and share two dogs, Ava and Sam. Grundy also revealed they would be living in scenic North Bondi upon finalising their move. 'We came up in the pre-season bye and were actually sitting up on the North Bondi patch of grass daydreaming about what it would be like to live here. Funnily enough it manifested itself,' he began. The Swans recruit, 29, let the exciting news slip during a press conference on Monday 'We've found a place in North Bondi and second day in I've gone for a surf. It's just those added little bonuses.' The Adelaide born athlete began his career with the Collingwood Magpies, who he played for from 2013 - 2022. He signed with the Melbourne Dees last year and played for them throughout 2023 before announcing he was moving to the Sydney Swans. In 2018, he was crowned winner of the Herald Sun Player of the Year award. 'I was just so impressed with the Swans' pitch and the first meeting I had, I walked out with my now fiancee and we were just blown away,' he told the media. 'We walked out and we thought that would be amazing to land up in Sydney' The lovebirds grew up together in Adelaide and after they began dating Rachael moved to Melbourne with Brodie as he was signed to Collingwood FC Tommy Fury headed out with his baby daughter Bambi on Sunday after returning home to Cheshire following his trip to Abu Dhabi. The boxer, 24, cut a casual figure in a pair of grey tracksuit bottoms teamed with a black padded coat and trainers as he pushed his little girl, 10 months, in her pram. The former Love Island star was joined by a pal on the walk following he and fiancee Molly-Mae Hague causing a frenzy after the influencer was spotted without her engagement ring while her husband-to-be enjoyed a party trip to Abu Dhabi. Molly-Mae has since put her 600,000 engagement ring back on after being pictured on several occasions without it. Tommy's trip to the UAE capital sparked rumours of trouble in their relationship after videos emerged of the boxer on nights out - including with Chris Brown - leading to Molly-Mae being seen without her engagement ring on. Tommy Fury headed out with his baby daughter Bambi on Sunday after returning home to Cheshire following his trip to Abu Dhabi It comes as the former Love Island star and fiancee Molly-Mae Hague (pictured) caused a frenzy after the influencer was spotted without her engagement ring It was claimed Molly-Mae was 'mortified' by her fiance's behaviour and told him to 'ditch his partying pals' - yet she has now put her ring back on. Molly-Mae reportedly told her husband-to-be that he needs to change his ways, with a source saying she 'has made no secret of the fact she doesn't like it when Tommy parties too hard'. Last week, the influencer appeared to confirm the pair had put the drama behind them, after she was pictured sporting her ring at The House of CB Christmas party in London. It has now been confirmed Tommy has also returned to the 3.5million pad he shares with Molly-Mae as he was seen picking up his car in the local area. The boxer's behaviour recently raised eyebrows among fans after he was spotted partying with girls and unlikely pal Chris in Abu Dhabi. Fans also accused Tommy of posting an old snap of his daughter Bambi to cover his tracks. The sportsman shared a cute image of the tot on Instagram Stories with the caption: 'Oh how I've missed that cheeky face.' It was claimed this week that Molly-Mae has warned her fiance that he needs to change his ways, with a source telling The Sun: 'Molly has made no secret of the fact she doesn't like it when Tommy parties too hard. The boxer, 24, cut a casual figure in a pair of grey tracksuit bottoms teamed with a black padded coat and trainers as he pushed his little girl, 10 months, in her pram It was claimed Molly-Mae was 'mortified' by her fiance's behaviour and told him to 'ditch his partying pals', but has since put her huge 600,000 engagement ring back on It comes after Tommy jetted to Abu Dhabi and sparked rumours of trouble in their relationship after videos emerged of the boxer on nights out - including with Chris Brown Tommy was spotted in a clip being targeted by an attractive brunette - who playfully grabbed his face as he dances directly behind her (pictured) 'This weekend has ended up being a real embarrassment to her. She was mortified when she kept getting tagged in videos while she was just trying to enjoy a festive weekend with Bambi.' The insider concluded: 'She has told Tommy it really has to stop now he's a dad and has told him to ditch some of his pals, who she thinks are a bad influence.' Tommy sparked concern between his and Molly-Mae's fans after he was spotted in a clip being targeted by an attractive brunette - who playfully grabbed his face as he dances directly behind her. In the TikTok clip, the girl is seen grabbing his face and squeezing his cheeks before Tommy turned his head away. He then turns back to look at the female as she carried on dancing amongst a crowd of other revellers in the club. While Tommy enjoyed a solo holiday, Molly-Mae remained in Manchester with their young daughter, where she was first seen without her engagement ring. Molly-Mae posted a picture without her engagement ring to her Instagram Stories while enjoying a festive day with her daughter Bambi. The Crown star Meg Bellamy has detailed how she was working at Legoland when she discovered she's landed the coveted role as a teenage Kate Middleton. The actress, 20, who portrays the Princess of Wales in the final season of the hit Netflix show, had zero acting experience and was working as a mascot at the Windsor attraction when she discovered she scooped the part. Speaking to The Sunday Times, she detailed the inopportune moment she received the call from the producer: 'I felt my phone ringing in my pocket and knew it was Kate [Bone] because Id been expecting her call for days... 'But I couldn't answer it because I was working at Legoland, in character! Eventually I got out of my costume and rushed to the delivery parking lot, which is quite scuzzy, all the delivery lorries are beeping and reversing in, to phone her back... 'And I'm on the kerb, trying to hear her. It was not glamorous. Then I had to go back into Legoland and deal with customer complaints like nothing had happened.' The Crown star Meg Bellamy has detailed how she was working at Legoland when she discovered she's landed the coveted role as a teenage Kate Middleton The actress, 20, who portrays the Princess of Wales in the final season of the hit Netflix show, had zero acting experience and was working as a mascot at the Windsor attraction when she discovered she scooped the part Pictured: The Princess of Wales is pictured meeting farmers at Brodieshill Farm in Moray, Scotland, last month Meg's story is fairytale like in itself, given she had no acting experience when she scooped the role in the wildly successful show. Upon seeing a tweet on The Crown's official Twitter account calling for actresses to apply to play the university-aged future Queen, Meg decided to go ahead to apply - by filming her own audition tape to send to producers. She said: ''I'd loved watching the show, so when the casting call came out, applying was a no-brainer. Watching it, I never thought I'd be in it one day. I never knew how present they would go, so I didn't know Kate Middleton would be an option.' Meg previously revealed her neighbour convinced her to audition for The Crown and insisted she still doesn't think she resembles Kate. Although Meg's neighbour was adamant that she looked just like the Princess of Wales, the actress said she had never been compared to Kate before. She added: 'I never got that and I still think maybe I dont, but with the amazing hair and make-up teams and the costume department, once everythings put together, you have to have an essence.' Opening up about the audition process, Meg, who stars opposite Prince William actor Ed McVey, revealed that she had to tell producers her height to begin with. She also said the casting team also asked her to reveal a fun fact about themselves - with Meg opting to tell them about her job at the popular theme park. Meg's story is fairytale like in itself, given she had no acting experience when she scooped the role in the wildly successful show (pictured with Prince William actor Ed McVey) Pictured: Meg and Ed seen filming scenes for the final season of Netflix's The Crown at St Andrews in March 2023 During the process, Meg said she tried to 'unleash her inner make-up artist' and carefully studied Netflix's photo of Kate to figure out how the future Princess had applied her bronzer. She continued: 'With every audition, I just watched and watched [Kate]. Reading about her and listening to her was so important both before and during.' Although the costume department had pictures of the Kate to base Meg's wardrobe on, the actress highlighted how there are no videos of the royal speaking as a student - meaning some of her mannerisms where left to Meg's interpretation. While Meg has no official acting credits to her name, Ed has significantly more experience; he graduated from Drama Centre London in 2021 and was an understudy in the play Camp Siegfried, which was shown at London's Old Vic. Meg has never acted professionally before and applied for the role after earning an A* for drama in her A-levels at St Crispins School in Wokingham, Berkshire. On her affinity with the royal after playing the role, Meg said: 'Stepping into Kates shoes made me really fond of her. Every day I researched her I felt a closeness with her. She was very sporty, and I played netball like her... 'Growing up in a non-royal background and falling in love [with William], theres a nice simplicity to it. Shes so approachable and so self-assured, classy and emotionally intelligent. I really admire that about her. Elizabeth Debicki (pictured) reprised her role as Diana, Princess of Wales, who she played in series 5 of the drama Netflix fans have been expressing their amazement at the 'mind blowing' story told by one of the streaming platform's new documentary series. Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife details how celebrity surgeon Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, who was seen as a pioneer of regenerative medicine, became infamous for scientific misconduct throughout the 2010s. Seven of the eight recipients of his synthetic trachea transplants died, leading to allegations of unethically performing experimental surgeries. These involved fashioning a windpipe out of plastic and then coating it with a patient's own stem cells. Amongst all that, Macchiarini met and got engaged to unquestioning journalist and TV producer Benita Alexander, who admits that she was 'engaged to a monster' in the show's trailer. 'Mind blowing': Netflix fans have been expressing their amazement at the platform's new docuseries Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife, a series about Dr. Paolo Macchiarini (pictured), who became infamous for scientific misconduct throughout the 2010s Hoodwinked: The show focusses on his relationship with journalist and TV producer Benita Alexander (above) who was conned into believing her to-be husband had a high-flying clientele as a pioneering surgeon Tragic: In parallel, the series tells the story of how seven of Macciarini's eight patients who received a synthetic trachea transplants died One viewer commented on the three-part series' unique story, saying that it left them 'bewildered'. Another added, on X: 'Watching The bad surgeon on Netflix and my mind is totally blown.' Alexander also admitted that she was hoodwinked by her fiancee's claims that he had celebrity friends and clients. Macchiarini claimed to perform surgeries for the Clinton's and Obama's, as well as saying that he would get Elton John, John Legend and Vladimir Putin at their wedding. However, the wife-to-be finally got suspicious when her partner claimed that Pope Francis would be there to officiate the ceremony - which was set to be in Rome at a time the pontiff was due to be touring South America. In fact, she was so suspicious that she hired a private investigator to help her get to the bottom of her partner's claims. She discovered that Macchiarini was actually a man of more modest means than he had been letting on, was still married to his wife of 30 years and was living in Barcelona 'with a second woman and two young children'. These revelations all contributed to the 'crazy' retelling of the story on the streaming giant. Another viewer said: 'Shattering, extraordinary documentary on Netflix. Horrifying, upsetting & jaw dropping. 'Watch. Dont ask why. Just watch.' Amazingly, the surgeon also got into a relationship with the mother of one of his deceased patients - Ana Bernardes - even as she sued the hospital after her son's death. Unbelievable: Alexander finally got suspicious when her partner claimed that Pope Francis would be there to officiate the ceremony - which was set to be in Rome at a time the pontiff was due to be touring South America Alexander finally got suspicious when her partner claimed that Pope Francis would be there to officiate their wedding - which was set to be in Rome at a time the pontiff was due to be touring South America. Alexander finally got suspicious when her partner claimed that Pope Francis would be there to officiate the- which was set to be in Rome at a time the pontiff was due to be touring South America. 'Horrifying': Viewers have expressed their amazement at the uniquely 'crazy' story In 2014, doctors at the Karolinska Institute, where he had been a visiting professor, accused him of scientific misconduct as it emerged that tragically, all but one of the patients who received his 'tissue engineered' airways had died. Macchiarini was found guilty of research fraud having misrepresented data and exaggerated the effectiveness of his technique. Described in the series as 'an absolute fraudster' who 'treated people as human lab rats,' he was given a 16-month prison sentence in Italy - where he had operated on some patients. The disgraced surgeon was later found guilty in a Swedish court of causing bodily harm for performing the experimental procedure on a patient, and given a two-year suspended sentence. Benita has reflected on the relationship more recently after throwing her engagement ring into the Hudson River when she had it appraised and found out that it actually cost just $1,000. She told the New York Post: 'It's embarrassing, but I was taken in by Paolo. Like his patients - many of whom ended up dead - I was seduced by a false promise.' Nigel Harman had a row with his wife in front of shocked Strictly Come Dancing audience members as she tried to calm him down after he received disappointing scores from the judges, it has been alleged. The former EastEnders star, who was forced to quit the BBC1 show on Saturday due to injury, is alleged to have upset his wife Lucy Liemann, 50, to such an extent during the Blackpool show last month his dance partner Katya Jones was seen consoling her after Nigel stormed off set. The 50-year-old actor also irked judges with his reactions to his scores, as Anton De Beke and Shirley Ballas were caught rolling their eyes off camera after seeing Nigel show his obvious grievances to their marks. The alleged row with his wife comes after it was claimed the Strictly cast and crew were quietly relieved hes no longer competing because they were becoming fed up with his behaviour. A Blackpool audience member told MailOnline: 'Nigel was super pumped up for the show, unlike the other celebrities they all interacted with fans as they took to their seats off camera after being introduced, but he was just in the zone, he ignored people saying hello to him. Nigel Harman had a row with wife Lucy Liemann in front of shocked Strictly Come Dancing audience members after he received disappointing scores, it has been alleged The actor and his dance partner Katya Jones ' routine to Duke Ellington's It Don't Mean A Thing left them second from bottom of the leaderboard, with a score of 31 points 'And it all kicked off when he got his scores from the judges. When the cameras stopped rolling he stormed back to his seat and beckoned his wife over. You could tell she knew what was coming. 'She tried to pacify him but it didn't work and he took his disappointment out on her. 'After he walked off, Katya then tried to console her. She was visibly upset.' Nigel wasnt shy in showing his frustration at the judges scoring throughout the series, when he believed their marks were too low, and the judges appeared to lose patience at Blackpool. He and Katya received 31 out of 40 for their routine to Duke Ellington's It Don't Mean A Thing which left them second from bottom of the judges' leaderboard. The audience member added: 'Anton and Shirley were like here we go again as Nigel looked offended by their scoring. They just rolled their eyes knowing another tantrum was on its way. 'Nigel appears very nice on camera but he can switch it on and off when he wants. Hes clearly a very driven and competitive guy but you could tell his diva antics made other people feel uncomfortable.' The actor is expected to return to Strictly Come Dancing for the live final, but a rib injury means his participation is effectively over. Nigel was filmed storming off the dancefloor after receiving a disappointing score for his performance in Blackpool In a video shared to social media, Nigel is seen swiftly exiting the dancefloor, just seconds after the BBC cameras stopped shooting Nigel's wife (centre) has been a regular visitor to Elstree during his time on the BBC show The alleged row with his wife comes after it was claimed the Strictly cast and crew were quietly relieved hes no longer competing because they were becoming fed up with his behaviour A BBC source said: 'It is always sad when a contestant leaves the show, particularly when an injury is sustained. 'Nigel will be well missed by those who have worked alongside him on the show and everyone wishes him the very best and looks forward to seeing him at the final on Saturday 16th December.' The former Casualty star appeared on Saturdays show looking dejected after a rib injury sustained in training forced him to quit the series. He told how he was about to be caught by some very handsome men but landed awkwardly, hurting his rib. Asked by host Claudia Winkleman if he had enjoyed his time on the show, Nigel said: 'Oh I've loved it, I've loved it. This hasn't really sunk in. 'When I was watching everyone coming down the stairs, it was real that I'm not part of it anymore.' Katya was full of praise for Nigel's hard work on the show and looked emotional at the thought of them no longer getting to perform together. She said: 'I have absolutely loved every moment of us creating magic on the dancefloor. 'I know the reasons he did this were for your daughter and your parents and I know your parents will be very proud of you. I hope you've got something out of this that you will cherish forever in your broken rib.' The former Casualty star appeared on Saturdays show looking dejected after a rib injury sustained in training forced him to quit the series He and Katya were due to perform a Charleston to Step in Time from Mary Poppins as part of the programme's musicals week (pictured performing together on November 11) 'She tried to pacify him but it didnt work and he took his disappointment out on her,' a source told MailOnline of his row with wife Lucy (pictured together in 2016) Nigel replied: 'The only reason I'm standing here is because of all the work you've put in. You challenge me, you push me, you support me. Most of all, you're just part of me now.' Becoming emotional, he added: 'I can't even look at you!' He and Katya were due to perform a Charleston to Step in Time from Mary Poppins as part of the programme's musicals week. The Sun alleged that Nigels backstage mood swings has become a feature on Strictly, never more so at Blackpool. But a show insider said: 'The crew and pros on the show are like a close family and the celebrities are welcomed into that. But if someone upsets that long-standing dynamic it can create bad feeling. 'Despite this everyone on the show also felt huge sympathy for Nigel having to leave the competition under such difficult circumstances.' Nigels shock withdrawal meant rivals Bobby Brazier, Annabel Croft, Ellie Leach and Layton Williams received a bye into this weekends semi-final. Coronation Street star Ellie and partner Vito Coppola are the bookies favourites to lift the Glitterball. I'm A Celebrity has been hit with fix claims, after Frankie Dettori left the show over Nella Rose on Sunday night's first live eviction. Ant and Dec delivered the news of this year's first evictee, with the camp appearing staggered that the jockey, 52, was leaving the jungle after he was left with the fewest public votes alongside YouTuber Nella, 26. After the announcement was made, Frankie bid farewell to his campmates, during which politician Nigel Farage said: 'It's a fix, Frankie. You were last in, first out.' Echoing the sentiment, Twitter was soon flooded with outrage from viewers, who alleged the results must be 'fixed' or 'rigged' due to the fact Nella, who has been at loggerheads with campmates and divided fans, was a favourite to leave. Viewers penned: 'I'm a celebrity producers 100000% made sure nella didn't go first what a fix... So nella most hated person on I'm a celeb but frankie gets voted off 1st !! I knew this was going happen its a fix.. I'm A Celebrity has been hit with fix claims, after Frankie Dettori left the show over Nella Rose on Sunday night's first live eviction Ant and Dec delivered the news of this year's first evictee, with the camp appearing staggered that the jockey, 52, was leaving the jungle after he was left with the fewest public votes alongside YouTuber Nella, 26 Not impressed: After the announcement was made, Frankie bid farewell to his campmates, during which politician Nigel Farage said: 'It's a fix, Frankie. You were last in, first out' Echoing the sentiment, Twitter was soon flooded with outrage from viewers, who alleged the results must be 'fixed' or 'rigged' due to the fact Nella, who has been at loggerheads with campmates and divided fans, was a favourite to leave 'Nella has stayed in because of all the attention the shows getting because of nella..shame on you I'm a celebrity... One reason I'm a celeb @imacelebrity is a FIX... 'Nella... Nigel even said it's a fix we all know deep down Nella should be out 1st it's all kicking off on I'm a celeb 2023 Facebook page the viewers are p**sed #NigeltoWin... The show is totally rigged. Frankie had no air time at all... 'Nella declaring This is trial 8 when it was announced she would do Fright at the museum I dont think so, she called Im a celeb on 3 of them. She is no heroine, but certain camp mates have her on a pedestal... 'I havent noticed Frankie but why wasnt Nella out? #ImaCeleb #ImACelebrity... Others however countered the claims, writing: 'I think Nella stayed in because IMAC has a younger fan base, many people under 30 know who Nella is, but dont necessarily know who Frankie was.' MailOnline has contacted ITV for comment. The ructions on Twitter come after Frankie revealed who his money is on to be crowned victor of the jungle 2023.vThe horse racing legend appeared on Good Morning Britain just hours later to discuss his brief stint. Speaking about his predictions for the winner of the show, Frankie revealed he thinks Made In Chelsea star Sam Thompson will walk away victorious. Others however countered the claims, writing: 'I think Nella stayed in because IMAC has a younger fan base, many people under 30 know who Nella is, but dont necessarily know who Frankie was' He said: 'I would say my bet is Sam. He brings a lot to the table. Hes entertaining, hes silly, he sings, hes happy. I think people are going to like him... 'That to me is the winner. Sometimes I wish he had the pause button right because I talk a lot but he talks non stop'. Frankie shed light on being the first star out of the jungle, as he admitted he predicted his departure due to the huge characters on the show. As well as Sam, he referenced Nigel, Tony Bellew, Marvin Humes and Josie Gibson as the stars who would captivate viewers. He said: '[Being evicted] was a bittersweet moment... 'I wanted to get to the final but with characters like Sam, Nigel, Tony, Marvin and Josie. I was never going to win it. So actually the thoughts of spending one more week there maybe was going to be a bit hard for me. So it was like bittersweet... 'The sweet part is I've got to come out meet my lovely wife spend some time in the Gold Coast waiting for my other campmates to come out.' On his relationship with controversial signing Nigel, he revealed: 'I met Nigel before I went into the jungle. Hes a character larger than life... Hes interesting and knowledgeable. Hes a good laugh... 'I never got to talk to him about politics because I'm not interested. One on one as a person hes always good fun'. In some insight into jungle life, he was asked about the dramas between First Dates star Fred Sirieix and Josie, after the former's status of camp chef was removed in favour of the latter - who has been candid about her lack of cookery skills. Frankie said: 'I swear to God I wasnt getting involved in it. But there was a bit of a change of the guard because the dynamic of the show changed... 'When Fred got taken out of the kitchen and Josie went in it was head to head clash. Two different cooks in one kitchen. One person said A the other said B. But at the end of the day we all got fed.' Frankie shed light on being the first star out of the jungle, as he admitted he predicted his departure due to the huge characters on the show She recently stepped down from her presenting role on BBC Radio 5 Live to spend more time with her three children. And just three months later, Helen Skelton has landed a more family-friendly role as a new permanent host of BBC Ones Morning Live, which will be going head-to-head with This Morning in a new, extended time slot. Morning Live will now overlap with beleaguered This Morning, which starts at 10am, by 45 minutes, making it a direct rival for the first time. It used to end at 10:00am, just before This Morning started. The ITV daytime show is also set to revamp in January with new presenters after Holly Willoughby announced her shock departure in October. Former Countryfile star Skelton, 40, has three children with her ex-husband Richie Myler - Ernie, eight, Louis, six, and Elsie, 20 months - and has been announced as one of the main faces of the revamped mid-morning magazine show, alongside Michelle Ackerley and Gethin Jones. Helen Skelton has landed a permanent role on BBC Morning Live after stepping down from her Radio 5 show to spend more time with her children The former Countryfile star, 40, has three children with her ex-husband Richie Myler - Ernie, eight, Louis, six, and Elsie, 20 months She will present the show from Monday-Wednesday every week as of January as part of its new extended format, which will see it broadcast for 75 minutes instead of the previous 45. This means it will now be on air for longer than ITV rival Lorraine, broadcasting from 9.30am-10.45am every weekday, compared to Lorraine's hour slot from 9am-10am. The BBC show, which also counts Sara Cox, Kimberley Walsh, Gaby Roslin and Rav Wilding as regular guest presenters, has been a hit in the ratings and regularly beats its competitor. Skelton announced her shock departure from her Sunday morning radio show in August due to being unable to 'juggle' it with being a single parent. The new role, consisting of weekday mornings, is likely to be more manageable for the presenter as her two oldest children will be at school. 'I am so excited to become a more regular member of the Morning Live family, and be in such good company,' she said. 'It's really nice to be part of a programme giving so many people a voice. Everything we talk about on the show is what my friends and family are texting me about, we're right at the heart of what matters to people right now. 'We're not just highlighting problems though, we're finding solutions and I love that we're able to help in some small way. Skelton will present the show with Gethin Jones from Monday-Wednesday every week in rotation with Michelle Ackerley as of January as part of its new extended format The Morning Live Team is now (L-R) Kym Marsh, Gabby Roslin, Michelle, Gethin, Helen, Sara Cox, Rav Wilding, Kimberley Walsh 'It's stuff you need to know but also stuff that's nice to know, and even when I'm not hosting, I'm sat at home with a cuppa taking it all in. I can't wait for January.' Emma Morris, Morning Live's Executive Editor, said: 'Helen and Michelle have been a huge hit with audiences as guest co-hosts since September and are both a joy to work with, so we are thrilled they will now become a permanent part of the team, alongside Gethin.' Skelton, who rose to fame on Blue Peter and then Countryfile, competed in last year's Strictly Come Dancing just months after she announced her marriage was over. Her rugby player ex-husband was later revealed to be in a relationship with Stephanie Thirkil and they had a baby in April 2023, just a year after his split from Ms Skelton. Myler has since accused Skelton of 'dragging her heels over divorce proceedings' and 'preventing him from moving forward with his life.' Just weeks after Skelton announced her departure from BBC Radio 5 Live, Countryfile's Ellie Harrison, 46, announced that she was leaving the show to focus on raising her children. Claudia Winkleman, 51, has also now quit her BBC Radio 2 Saturday morning show to spend more time with her children. She said: 'The truth is my children are growing up inordinately fast so I have decided to follow them around at home before they leave for good.' Skelton and Ackerley will begin their rotations as permanent BBC Morning Live hosts from January 2, alternating alongside Mr Jones every Monday to Wednesday. Jones will continue to present four to five shows a week and Kym Marsh will present on Thursdays. MARCH 2020 Kate revealed she and Prince Charles had got 'relatively close' at the Prince's Trust Awards on March 11 - Charles was diagnosed with coronavirus in mid-March. She said: 'Around the 29/30 March, I came home came in and said [to Derek] 'god you look ill.' 'He said he had a headache, numbness in his right hand, and was struggling to breathe, 'I rang Dr Hilary (Jones) and tried to get through, he talked to Derek. He said put me back on, I think you need to call an ambulance' Derek, 52, was taken into hospital on March 30 and remained in an unresponsive condition. APRIL Kate and her children isolated at home after she displayed 'mild symptoms'. Kate said: 'Derek remains in intensive care and is still very ill. I'm afraid it remains an excruciatingly worrying time. 'I'm afraid he is still in a deeply critical condition, but he is still here, which means there is hope.' MAY Kate said: 'The journey for me and my family seems to be far from over as every day my heart sinks as I learn new and devastating ways this virus has more battles for Derek to fight. 'But he is still HERE & so there is still hope.' That month, Kate and her family took part in the final clap for carers She said: 'I'll never give up on that because Derek's the love of my life but at the same time I have absolute uncertainty' JUNE On June 5, Kate revealed Derek is now free from coronavirus but continues to fight against the damage inflicted on his body JULY On July 5, Kate revealed Derek has woken from his coma but he remains in a serious yet critical condition. On July 8, she announced she would be returning to GMB, after being urged by doctors to 'get on with life' during Derek's recovery. She added that Derek had 'opened his eyes' after waking from his coma, but has been told his recovery could take years. On July 13, Kate returned to GMB for the first time since Derek was hospitalised. On July 28, Kate revealed she'd paid an 'extra emotional' first visit to Derek, and admitted she's 'frustrated' by his slow progress. AUGUST On August 14, Kate reassured GMB viewers that Derek was 'still with us,' but it was 'a waiting game.' On August 19, Kate revealed she celebrated Derek's birthday with their two children, and described the day as 'challenging' for her family. SEPTEMBER At the end of September, Derek reportedly becomes the longest surviving patient with coronavirus after spending 184 days in and out of intensive care. Kate reveals Derek has lost eight stone during his battle. The presenter announces she is returning to her Smooth Radio show so Derek can hear her voice. OCTOBER On October 30 Kate reveals that Derek has spoken for the first time in seven months, saying the word 'pain' to his wife, who watched on 'in tears' over FaceTime. Kate says a day later that her husband no longer needs a ventilator to breathe. NOVEMBER Kate reveals her family car has been stolen in latest 'body blow' to her family life, as kind-hearted fans offer their cars to help. She says she feels 'physically sick' at the prospect of facing her first Christmas without Derek. DECEMBER The GMB star tells viewers it is her dream to visit Derek on Christmas Day. She also reveals she missed two weeks on GMB after her children were exposed to the virus, but thankfully she and the kids tested negative. On December 17, Kate has an emotional conversation live on GMB with two nurses who treated Derek when he was first admitted to Whittington Hospital in North London. On New Year's Eve she reflects on a 'calamitous' Christmas without Derek, as her house was flooded and she struggled to get a food delivery slot until her pal Emma Willis stepped in to help. JANUARY 2021 Kate reveals she and her children got to visit Derek in hospital over the Christmas period, and it was the first time her family had seen him since he was hospitalised. She also says she's banned from seeing him due to new restrictions introduced during the government's third lockdown. FEBRUARY Kate reveals she is unsure how much Derek will 'ever be able to recover' following warning from doctors that he may never wake from his coma MARCH Kate revealed that was in the process of adapting her home to suit Derek's needs when he is finally released from hospital, in the ITV documentary Finding Derek. The programmed was praised by viewers for offering a heartbreaking look at the long-term effects of coronavirus. Kate also revealed that Derek has 'no muscle left' since battling Covid APRIL Kate revealed that Derek was finally allowed to leave hospital, but would require round-the-clock care once he was returned home. MAY Kate revealed that despite now being home with his family, his communication abilities were 'minimal' and he 'couldn't really move' DECEMBER During an appearance on Piers Morgan's Life Stories, Kate revealed that Derek had said 'I love you' for the first time. After celebrating Christmas, Derek was also pictured in a wheelchair during a trip to the pantomime with his family JANUARY 2022 Kate revealed that Derek was 'very fatigued' and 'very weak' following the family outing, adding: 'I don't know what this year is going to bring.' FEBRUARY Kate offered a glimpse into the daily struggles of looking after her husband amid his battle with long Covid in the documentary Caring For Derek She also revealed that Derek would die within three days if he was left alone to care for himself. JULY On July 6, Kate revealed that Derek had been re-admitted to hospital after suffering a 'downturn,' and in a later interview said she takes things 'day by day.' On July 20, it was reported that Kate had pulled out of hosting Good Morning Britain to be at Derek's bedside after he took a 'very serious' turn for the worse. Recalling the day, the presenter told The Sun: 'At one point Derek said to me, "This is it, this time. I am gone." It was just terrifying. 'His sepsis was gut-wrenching for all of us because it had gone undiagnosed until the point where it was about to take his life away again.' JANUARY 2023 Kate became overwhelmed as she confronted former health secretary Matt Hancock over his handling of the pandemic and his decision to go on I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here. She then became tearful and looked up as she spoke about Derek, who has been unwell for approaching three years. Describing public anger towards him, Kate added of his decision: 'This gives the impression you still don't get why they are cross. You still don't get why people are upset. They want to hold you to more account.' APRIL Kate revealed that Derek was once again receiving care in hospital, as she shared the emotional moment Sir Elton John dedicated a song to the 'inspiring' couple. She shared the emotional moment Sir Elton John dedicated a song to the 'inspiring' couple, writing on Instagram: 'Yes Derek has been back in hospital this week & yes there's such a long road ahead but #eltonjohn & @davidfurnish you gave the kids & Derek a moment that we will never forget and has lifted their spirits again to feel anything is possible.' It was also reported that Kate was planning a trip across the world for pioneering treatment in a 'final hope' to help her husband. MAY Kate reportedly faced a huge 716,000 tax bill after she was forced to close her husband's business two years after he became stricken with Covid-19. The final total will be settled within the coming weeks, with friends insisting she will pay whatever is owed. A friend told The Sun: 'The figures are terrifying and Kate is of course worried about all the financial pressures, but she has to trust the process. 'When it comes to an end, she is determined to pay back anything that's owed. 'It's no secret that Kate has been battling to keep her husband alive and working through some heartbreaking situations in her personal life in recent years. 'Sadly as well as the emotional stress of Derek's terrible illnesses the financial burden has also been crippling.' DECEMBER Derek was left fighting for his life after suffering a heart attack. Kate held a 24/7 vigil by his bedside and cancelled all work commitments while the family 'prayed for a miracle'. A source said: 'It was sudden and a shock as he had been doing so well and was in great spirits, looking forward to Christmas at home with the family. 'This setback has been a huge blow for his family and all the people caring for him. Kate is by his side 24 hours a day and is willing him on to win this latest battle for his life. 'Derek has fought so many times, and always, against all odds, come out the other side.' JANUARY 2024 Kate announced on January 5 that Derek had passed away. She said: 'Derek was surrounded by his family in his final days and I was by his side holding his hand throughout the last long hours and when he passed. 'I have so much more to say, and of course I will do so in due course, but for now I just want to thank all the medical teams who fought so hard to save him and to make his final moments as comfortable and dignified as possible'. MailOnline understands he passed away on January 3 in a North London hospital. He is survived by wife Kate and their children Darcey, 17, and son William, 14. Married At First Sight UK's Tasha Jay has revealed she was rushed to hospital after ripping open her stitches following surgery. The reality TV star, 25, was left screaming and feeling sick after having surgery on her wrist to help her carpal tunnel last month. Carpal tunnel syndrome is a common condition which is caused by pressure on a nerve in the wrist, usually imposed by internal swelling. Tasha was accompanied to the hospital by her husband Paul Liba, 26, who she married on the latest series of the E4 show. Sharing a selfie of herself and Paul, she wrote on Instagram: 'Of course I end up in a&e' Married At First Sight UK 's Tasha Jay has revealed she was rushed to hospital after ripping open her stitches following surgery Sharing a selfie of herself and Paul, she wrote on Instagram: 'Of course I end up in a&e' Tasha followed up with a video and told her fans: 'I am sorry but this is a joke, why, why, why.' She added: 'For the people that care, I had my carpal tunnel surgery. The cut I have got, it had just healed, the stitches had dissolved and then somehow last night I have managed to rip it all open. So I have got to have this on for another week.' Tasha was left 'traumatised' by going under the knife last month. She posted a clip of herself in a hospital gown and an arm sling while saying: 'Well, you lied to me', after many had told the reality TV personality that the surgery would not hurt as much as she feared. Tasha added: 'Awful, awful. I've got no words, I'm traumatised. Today has been awful. Not to scare anyone that's having the surgery done but everyone that told me it didn't hurt, you liars, liars. 'I screamed, I filled three sick bowls and nearly passed out. Disgusting.' The reality TV star, 25, was left screaming and feeling sick after having surgery on her wrist to help her carpal tunnel last month It comes after Tash enjoyed a night out with best pal Ella Morgan at the Miss Pap Playboy party in Manchester. As the Married At First Sight UK stars went braless in their revealing outfits, they grinned from cheek to cheek as they confidently posed for the cameras. Tasha made sure she captured attention in a racy sheer jumpsuit embellished with Playboy's iconic bunny heads. Keeping with the minimal look, the TV personality paired the outfit with clear, barely there heels and a white clutch bag. She accessorised her look with a pair of large silver hoops and a French manicure. It comes after Tash enjoyed a night out with best pal Ella Morgan at the Miss Pap Playboy party in Manchester Ella, 29, put on a very busty display as she donned a skimpy black lace jumpsuit with matching opera gloves. She put on a very busty display in her plunging ensemble as she flaunted her incredible figure for the glitzy party. The clinic consultant, from Weston-Super-Mare, elevated her bold ensemble with a classic black Chanel bag worth more than 5,000. She accessorised the garment with a pair of black strappy stilettoes with a pointed toe. Keira Knightley cut a casual figure as she stepped out solo to run some errands in north London on Monday. The Love Actually actress, 38, made sure to keep a low profile as she blended in with the public in an informal attire. She wore a trendy fur-collared black leather jacket with denim black jeans and a warm black roll-neck. Keeping warm in the city's minus temperatures, the brunette beauty wore stylish purple gloves and slipped on a pair of black ankle boots. The actress opted for a make-up free look, showcased her curly locks and wore chic black-framed glasses. Keira Knightley, 38, cut a casual figure as she stepped out solo to run some errands in north London on Monday The Love Actually actress made sure to keep a low profile as she blended in with the public in an informal attire Keria looked happy and relaxed as she walked through the streets while answering phone calls. Her outing comes after she stepped out with her husband James Righton in Hampstead in October. Keira and James, 40, tied the knot in the South of France in 2013, where she wore Chanel couture as they exchanged vows in front of eleven guests. The couple share two children together, a daughter Delilah, four and Edie, eight. The actress was enjoying some valuable free time with her family before she began filming for her new Netflix drama Black Doves over the coming weeks. The forthcoming series is set over the Christmas period and will feature Keira, who plays Helen Webb, a dedicated wife and mother who secretly also works as professional spy, unbeknownst to her loved ones. The series, which is set during the Christmas period, will also star actors Ben Whishaw and Sarah Lancashire. The actress recently hit out at the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence in film, a reactionary measure by studios to replace actors still embroiled in SAG-AFTRA strikes across the United States. Her outing comes after she stepped out with her husband James Righton in Hampstead in October (pictured together in 2022) Keira and James, 40, tied the knot in the South of France in 2013, where she wore Chanel couture as they exchanged vows in front of eleven guests - The couple share two children together, a daughter Delilah, four and Edie, eight The actress was enjoying some valuable free time with her family before she began filming for her new Netflix drama Black Doves over the coming weeks (pictured in March 2023) The forthcoming series is set over the Christmas period and will feature Keira, who plays Helen Webb, a dedicated wife and mother who secretly also works as professional spy, unbeknownst to her loved ones (pictured on The Aftermath) The actress recently hit out at the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence in film, a reactionary measure by studios to replace actors still embroiled in SAG-AFTRA strikes across the United States (pictured on The Tonight Show in March) Addressing the growing trend, Keira admitted she might be forced into preventative action by copyrighting her face - thereby preventing its unauthorised use (pictured March) She said: 'At the moment for actresses, the concern is about the voice, and they're trying to protect the voice-over industry. 'I don't know where that's at but I know that's the negotiation. But I imagine the next step will be to copyright my face' (pictured on Love Actually in 2003) Addressing the growing trend, Keira admitted she might be forced into preventative action by copyrighting her face - thereby preventing its unauthorised use. She said: 'At the moment for actresses, the concern is about the voice, and they're trying to protect the voice-over industry. 'I don't know where that's at but I know that's the negotiation. But I imagine the next step will be to copyright my face. AI has the potential to be catastrophic and I hope governments come in and regulate it,' she added. Studios including the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Apple are proposing to use AI to replace humans with digital scans where an actor's likeness can be superimposed over a stunt double. Hollywood actors and writers are currently united in their first 'double strike' in more than 60 years vowing they will protect every worker in the industry from being replaced by AI. Married At First Sight stars Shona Manderson and Matt Pilmoor revealed they 'definitely want to get married' and have children together as they opened up about their relationship. The duo originally tied the knot with Brad Skelly and Adrienne Naylor respectively on the E4 show, but their respective romances both ended leading to their surprise union. Now the reality star couple are ready to take their relationship to the next level as they discussed marriage and starting a family. Speaking in an interview with OK! Magazine, Matt, 29, and Shona, 31, said they would like to get married in the UK so their family can attend and have an 'amazing honeymoon in Bali'. Matt said: 'We definitely want to get married. Getting married abroad would be lovely but logically we would do it in the UK for family coming. We do need money so there will be no ring anytime soon! Married At First Sight stars Shona Manderson and Matt Pilmoor reveal they 'definitely want to get married' and have children together as they opened up about their relationship The reality star couple are ready to take their relationship to the next level as they discussed marriage and starting a family 'But I would love to propose at some point. Let's see how the next year goes in terms of finances but it's definitely on the cards!' Shona added: 'Yeah we've spoken about getting married. Matt has said he will wear a kilt because my family are Scottish. We've spoken about engagement rings, we just need the money first.' The couple went on to say that they are also on the 'same page with kids' and are hoping to have two. Shona continued: 'I want two kids. I'm 32 next year so I definitely want babies in the next few years. It's mental but when you know, you know, and it just works. And it can move at a healthy pace. I don't even feel scared about anything.' As the year comes to an end, Shona and Matt went on to reveal their plans for the new year as they hope to go on their 'first holiday' together and 'move in'. The couple confirmed their relationship last month after going on separate journeys on Married At First Sight. Speaking previously to OK!, Shona, who was ejected from the experiment due to the toxicity of her marriage, revealed: 'We have a really healthy, happy, safe, fun, relationship - I really appreciate Matt, it's what I deserve, we deserve each other'. Matt admitted they 'had to be so careful' to keep their romance secret and while it would have been 'incredible' to be paired together from the start, he conceded: 'I think it happened this way around for a purpose.' Matt, 29, and Shona, 31, said they would like to get married in the UK and have an 'amazing honeymoon in Bali' The couple went on to say that they are also on the 'same page with kids' and are hoping to have two, Shona said: 'It's mental but when you know, you know, and it just works' Shona went on: 'I'm proud to be his girlfriend and it just works. Matt would be driving and I would be in the back, we would be walking around Nottingham and I'd be all the way over there, we were like secret agents on a mission'. Matt added: 'We had to do it, we had to be so careful... 'We had to do what we had to do, my experience was good but we were meant to go on those journeys to find each other... Being together from the start would have been incredible but I think it happened this way around for a purpose.' Earlier this year, Shona appeared on the Its Not You, Its Them, But It Might Be You podcast with LalalaletMeExplain. She told the dating expert about some of Brad's behaviour that wasn't shown on the Channel 4 show. Shona started by saying: 'So majority of Bradley's inexcusable behaviour actually happened off camera and there was an incident after our third dinner party which then resulted in the experts intervening and choosing to send us home... 'And I won't share the details because it's just too much. It's too much for me to go into. But something I am happy to share with you is an example of something that didn't make the edit, but it happened in front of people... 'We were at a second CC and my friend, Laura in the cast, has just been called a gold digger by another cast member, Luke. 'And a little bit of context, Bradley throughout the experiment, he's done TV before. So he kept being like "don't do this, don't do that, I'm getting annoyed that you're not listening to me and don't rise to drama. We don't rise to drama... 'Your yoga vibes and meditation vibes", blah, blah, blah. And I'm sat there and my heart's going for Laura and I'm thinking I want to stick up for about hate confrontation, anyway, I do. And as soon as I do, Bradley, let's go off my hand... 'And he goes. "What the eff are you doing?" And I just freeze and I come like a deer in the headlights you see it in the edit and I kind of like stumble on my words, my argument is rubbish.' An emotional Shona added: 'I feel really embarrassed. And then he just goes "well done, you made a complete c*** out of yourself there"... It comes after Shona was ejected from the MAFS experiment due to the toxicity of her marriage to Brad Skelly (pictured) Matt clashed with Adrienne Naylor (pictured) on the show with their contrasting views on children - with the former wanting to have kids and the latter not 'And I'm just sat there. "Bradley, you can't talk to me like that." I run to the toilet, have a massive panic attack and I have to sit on the couch.' Matt meanwhile clashed with Adrienne with their contrasting views on children - with the former wanting to have kids and the latter not. In the final week of the experiment when the topic of starting a family was brought up as Matt said: 'Is there a reason why we shouldn't work on the outside? We want to travel, we want to do bits and bobs. I would one day like to have kids.' Getting serious, Adrienne replied: 'I think we are in an amazing place and I think the world of you. 'But it does worry me that you do want kids. I've always said 'don't want them'. And I've never met anybody that's made me want to change that answer.' Looking disappointed, Matt replied: 'Ummm... do you think that it could be changed?' TV presenter Kate Humble has revealed that she is struggling for TV work as the industry is a 'very strange place' at the minute. The Animal Park presenter, 54, admitted television 'does feel different' to when she first started her career '30 years ago' because not enough new content is being commissioned. Kate said she no longer knows whether TV will be a 'major part of her life' anymore and has considered quitting altogether. Speaking to Platinum, the BBC presenter said: 'TV is a very strange place at the moment. Fifty per cent of freelancers are saying they're out of work, programmes are just not being commissioned. 'It's been a long-running joke for probably the entire 30 years I've been working in television, but in January, Ludo [Graham, Kate's husband] will ask me, "Is this the last year you're ever going to work in television?" and I'll say, "Yes". Then another year goes by and somehow I still seem to be doing it. Now it does feel different though.' Animal Park presenter Kate Humble has revealed that she is struggling for TV work as the industry is a 'very strange place' at the minute (pictured in November 2023) Kate, 54, admitted television 'does feel different' to when she first started her career '30 years ago' (pictured with co-host Ben Fogle in August 2023) She added: 'The landscape is changing and I honestly don't know whether television is going to be a major part of my life, no part of my life or part of what has always been a bit of a portfolio career, which basically means doing whatever comes along that pays the bills and feeds the dogs.' In 2020, Kate invited cameras to film her life at home on her farm in Monmouthshire in Wales, for Channel 5's Escape To The Farm. She has also presented the likes of Animal Park, Countryfile, A Country Life For Half the Price and Good Life, Green Life. Kate tied the knot with TV producer Ludo Graham, 61, in 1992 and last year claimed not having children is the secret to her long and happy marriage. She revealed that not having children allowed them both 'space to grow' over the years. Kate also claimed it allowed the couple to feel 'liberated' throughout their 30-year marriage. She told Woman's Weekly magazine: 'I think not having them gives you a liberation that parents don't have. 'You grow and change a lot over 30 years, and in a lot of ways we've had the space to allow each other to do that. 'We don't have great expectations of each other, either. I don't expect him to be the breadwinner; he doesn't expect me to be the mother.' The Springwatch host said she no longer knows whether TV will be a 'major part of her life' anymore and has considered quitting altogether (pictured on Springwatch in 2012) Rare Beauty founder Selena Gomez displayed her flawless makeup look as she prepared to enjoy a star-studded night out at the Academy Museum Gala. In photos posted to her Instagram Stories, Selena looked incredible with a fresh slick of pink lip gloss, shimmering eye shadow, and a dashing of blush. Her brunette hair was slicked back into an elegant bun, further putting her gorgeous complexion on full show. Selena, 31, beamed with happiness as she posed beside pal Nicola Peltz, 28, ahead of the A-list event. The duo were taking snaps inside the Beverly Hills Hotel alongside Nicola's husband Brooklyn Beckham, 24 - who marked their friendship 'anniversary' with more snaps on his own account. Rare Beauty founder Selena Gomez displayed her flawless makeup look as she prepared to enjoy a star-studded night out at the Academy Museum Gala Beckham shared photos of them preparing to attend the gala as they struck poses inside the iconic hotel in their glam attire. 'Our anniversary xx,' Beckham captioned the posts. The photos continued on his Instagram Stories, where Beckham shared snaps of him posing with both his wife and the Only Murders In The Building actress, along with a photo of Selena's placeholder. Nicola previously revealed her friendship with Selena took off after they attended the Academy Gala together. 'I had met her once in passing a few years ago, and then we all went to this event in September, the Academy Gala,' she told Cosmopolitan earlier this year. 'We just clicked and had the best time. And then we became super, super close. I feel like shes my soul sister. 'I love her so much. Shes truly one of the most amazing people Ive ever met in my whole life. The kindest person ever. Truly, her heart is gold. I feel like Ive known her forever.' She said her husband got along well with Selena as well: 'Oh my god. Were like, "Yeah, we are a throuple." We are all three best friends.' 'I think it really is so beautiful when you have girlfriends in your life who cheer you on,' the Welcome to Chippendales actress added. 'And if Im just walking down the street and a girl is like, "Oh my gosh, I love your outfit," it means so much more than if a guy says it. Like, ew, whatever. But when a girl compliments you, its so much more special.' Gomez , Brooklyn Beckham and his wife Nicola Peltz celebrated their 'anniversary' as they attended the Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles on Sunday evening Beckham shared this snap of Selena goofing off in the elevator alongside him The star also posted this tender snap of him leaning up to Nicola The annual Academy Museum Gala was launched in 2021 and aims to raise funds for the museums exhibitions and public programming. The event always draws in a red carpet so star-studded it rivals the Academy Awards themselves and the inaugural gala managed to raise a whopping $11 million for the museum. Several stars were also honoured at the glamorous soiree, including Meryl Streep, who picked up the Icon Award, which celebrates an artist whose career has had a significant global cultural impact. Michael B. Jordan picked up the Vantage Award, which honours an emerging artist or scholar who is helping to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema. Oprah Winfrey received the Pillar Award, which acknowledges exemplary leadership and support for the Academy Museum. Sofia Coppola was honoured with the Visionary Award, which celebrates an artist or scholar whose innovations have advanced the art of cinema. 'We are excited to gather again at our third annual Academy Museum Gala to celebrate the power, global impact, and indelible importance of cinema,' Jacqueline Stewart, director and president of the Academy Museum, said in a statement earlier this year. The trio were preparing for the bash at the luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel 'Our anniversary xx,' Beckham captioned the posts Peltz previously revealed her friendship with Selena took off after they attended the same gala together 'I am truly honored to recognize four artists, Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and Sofia Coppola, whose creativity and passion have inspired and shaped our culture in such powerful ways.' The event was initially set to take place in October but was postponed following the Hamas attack on Israel. There had been concerns that the Hollywood strikes would also impact the event but these came to an end earlier this year. The Hollywood actors' strike finally came to an end last month after 118 days, concluding the longest strike ever for film and television actors. The month before the writers' strike came to an end, when they celebrated a new deal with a five percent pay bump, streaming bonuses and protection against AI. Chrishell Stause flashed her abs as she stepped out with dapper pal Chris Appleton in London on Sunday. The reality star, 42, looked sensational in a hot pink crop-top and skinny jeans, paired with thigh-high leather boots. She layered up in a houndstooth coat and accessorized with glittering jewelry. Her locks were styled sleek and straight and she sported a rich palette of make-up. Kim Kardashian's hairstylist Appleton, 40, who recently split from husband Lukas Gage, 28, looked suave in a navy blue suit and black tee for the night out. Chrishell Stause flashed her abs as she stepped out with dapper pal Chris Appleton in London on Sunday The reality star, 42, looked sensational in a hot pink crop-top and skinny jeans, paired with thigh-high leather boots Appleton and Lukas exchanged vows in a surprise Las Vegas wedding in April - but Appleton filed for divorce on Monday citing 'irreconcilable differences.' The couple's date of separation is listed as Friday and they have a prenup in place. A source told TMZ the split was 'not an easy decision for Chris to make but he tried everything he could to make the marriage work and needed to make the best decision for himself moving forward.' DailyMail.com contacted representatives for the pair for comment. The pair's wedding was only documented on Hulu series, The Kardashians last week, with Kim, 43, officiating their wedding. She also organized for music superstar Shania Twain to serenade the couple. Shania sang: Chris, Lukas, looks like you made it, get over here, lets do this. Both Chris and Lukas said: We love you! as Shania broke into her 1997 classic Youre Still The One. She layered up in a houndstooth coat and accessorized with glittering jewelry Kim Kardashian's hairstylist Appleton, 40, who recently split from husband Lukas Gage, 28 , looked suave in a navy blue suit and black tee for the night out Lukas and Chris wed in front of only six guests at Little White Chapel after applying for a marriage license in Clark County. It was the same wedding venue where Kourtney Kardashian & Travis Barker, Joe Jonas & Sophie Turner, Bruce Willis & Demi Moore, and Frank Sinatra & Mia Farrow previously walked down the aisle. Two of the other guests were Appleton's two children - 19-year-old son Billy and 17-year-old daughter Kitty-blu - whom he welcomed with Leicester salon owner Katie Katon before he came out as homosexual at age 26. Kitty-blu Instastoried several snaps from Las Vegas, including a selfie with Kimwhile watching Usher perform at Park MGM's 5,200-seat venue Dolby Live. The newlyweds could not keep their lips off each other as they sang along. Gage and Appleton made their romance public in February when they shared vacation snaps from The St. Regis Punta Mita Resort in Mexico. Appleton is seen with now-estranged husband Lukas Gage in July 2023 'I'm very happy. Very much in love. And I feel very grateful to be able to share my time with someone very special,' Appleton gushed on The Drew Barrymore Show on March 17. 'Love is a really special thing and I think meeting someone that you really connect with is really really special.' In turn Gage said he felt 'very happy, very lucky, and very much in love' while appearing on the March 27th episode of TODAY. 'He's a good-looking man. Something about being in London, I got a taste of the Brits and couldn't help myself.' Gage is known for his role as Dillon on season one of The White Lotus, Adam Pratt on season four of You and Tyler Clarkson on Euphoria. He also has a recurring role as Lars Olmstead in the 2019-set fifth season of kidnapping black comedy Fargo, which premieres later this year on FX. Meanwhile, Chris has a client list that includes Kardashian, Daytime Emmy-nominated host Drew Barrymore, two-time Grammy nominee Jennifer Lopez, and three-time Grammy winner Dua Lipa. Chris Wallace has been slammed by Adam Driver fans for telling the actor 'you don't look like the typical movie star' in an awkward recent interview . Driver, 40, was interviewed by Wallace, 76, in support of his new film Ferrari, but the conversation took a painful turn when the anchor told the Oscar-nominee about how he didn't 'look like the typical movie star' and asked what effect that had had on his career. A bemused Driver said on Wallaces Max series, Whos Talking to Chris Wallace?: 'I look how I look. I cant change that, so I guess it helped me. 'The New Yorker has also called me a horse-face. I remember reading one reviewer [who said], "His agent probably doesnt know whether to put him in a movie or the Kentucky Derby." 'So if you believe the good thing, you have to believe the bad thing. I try to not absorb anything.' Chris Wallace has been slammed by Adam Driver fans for telling the actor 'you don't look like the typical movie star' in an awkward recent interview Fans quickly took to social media to blast the 'audacity' of Wallace, with one writing: 'Adam Driver handled that poor excuse of a professional interview with class! Chris Wallace is a well grown man that was hating on another grown man on national television. Another typed: 'men like chris wallace look like turtles and look at hotties like adam driver and say "why don't you look like robert redford" to their face and it truly shows how f*****g dumb men are.' Another typed: 'I don't who the f**k Is Chris Wallace but it's so unrespectful being so rude with an actor of Adam Driver's category, he is one of the most talented male actors and physical gorgeous as inside. Adam Driver and any f*****g person in the whole world deserves kindness and respect. Others wrote: 'This guy interviewing Adam Driver is some kind of scumbag, eh' and 'Chris Wallace having the audacity to say something about Adam Driver appearance all while looking like that is f*****g crazy.' Another penned: 'I just think it's hilarious that Adam Driver has been considered a heartthrob for the better part of a decade and clones of him now dominate romance novel covers, but Chris Wallace thinks he's ugly because he doesn't look like......Robert Redford.' Last month Driver stunned fans after saying 'f*** you' to an audience member who called crash scenes in his latest movie 'cheesy' at a paid-for Q&A session. The star hit back at the suggestion that the action scenes in the film - which has received negative reviews - were 'harsh and drastic.' An irritated Driver bluntly responded: 'F*** you. I don't know? Next question.' A bemused Driver said on Wallaces Max series, Whos Talking to Chris Wallace?: ' I look how I look. I cant change that, so I guess it helped me' 'The New Yorker has also called me a horse-face.I remember reading one reviewer [who said], "His agent probably doesnt know whether to put him in a movie or the Kentucky Derby." Fans quickly took to social media to blast Wallace for his 'audacity' Driver recently hit back at an attendee of the Q&A for Ferrari - his new movie - who asked Driver what he thought of the 'cheesy'-looking crash scenes The star looked every inch the leading man as he attended the Ferrari premiere in London on Monday In addition to Driver playing the titular role, the star-studded cast includes Penelope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Gabriel Leone and Sarah Gadon The response drew awkward laughter from the audience at the Camerimage Film Festival in Poland on Sunday. The leading-man disappeared straight after the interview and 'ghosted' all the fans that were waiting for him, according to an attendee of the festival who said Driver was 'bored and rude'. Ferrari is set to hit the big screen on Christmas day. The highly-anticipated movie had a budget of $110 million and began production in April 2022 after multiple decision-changes in who would play the lead role. Christian Bale was originally set to play Ferrari, then Hugh Jackman - but eventually Adam Driver was confirmed for the role. Kim Kardashian will star in her own series helmed by American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy - hot on the heels of her turn in AHS: Delicate. The reality star, 43, who played publicist Siobhan in the scary drama, will get the chance to further flex her acting skills in a 'sexy adult' drama - where she will play LA's most successful divorce lawyer, reports Deadline. Kim's lawyer alter-ego - who TMZ reports is inspired by the star's own divorce attorney, 'disso queen' Laura Wasser - will also be the owner of an all-female law firm in the drama, which has been written Brothers & Sisters creator Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken. Her contract is currently being negotiated. The drama is set to air on Hulu with a 'big series commitment' and will be Murphy's first series under his new Disney deal, with 20th Television, part of Disney TV Studios, producing. Murphy, Baitz and Baken pitched the series to Kardashian and Kris Jenner - both 'both committed right away.' Kardashian is currently studying to be a lawyer in real life. Kim Kardashian will star in her own series helmed by American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy - hot on the heels of her turn in AHS: Delicate (pictured) The reality star, 43, who played publicist Siobhan in the scary drama , will get the chance to further flex her acting skills in a 'sexy adult' drama - where she will play LA's most successful divorce lawyer, helmed by Murphy (pictured) 'Disso queen' Laura Wasser is reportedly the inspiration behind Kim's new character Murphy, Kardashian and Jenner are all executive producing - and have begun preliminary casting for three actresses to play Kardashian's three law partners, alongside an A-lister to play her love interest. Sources tell the publication the series is eyeing to begin production in late 2024 for an early 2025 premiere. Wasser is Hollywood's famed divorce lawyer and handled Kardashian's split from Kanye West last year. When Kim was announced to star in AHS: Delicate earlier in April, her casting received some criticism, with stars such as Patti LuPone and Sharon Stone offering their own disapproval. The Basic Instinct actress notably commented on a post that shared a clip of Patti expressing her opinion about Kim taking on a large role in the show. 'Well... you know... acting. It may not be brain surgery but we do treasure our art,' Sharon had written. 'We studied, we suffered, we do suffer for it. Ten thousand hours; it's a thing.' When the series premiered, some fans slammed Kim's performance with some taking to X, formerly known as Twitter, to share their thoughts. One wrote, 'I'm not into Kim at all #AHS,' while another social media user penned, 'Kim sucks at acting. Why is she on this? Ruined it for me.' However, others applauded the TV personality in her first scripted television role. Kim's lawyer alter-ego will also be the owner of an all-female law firm in the drama, which has been written Brothers & Sisters creator Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken. Her contract is currently being negotiated A fan typed out on X, '@KimKardashian is doing the d**n thing on American Horror Story idc what anyone says.' Another added, 'FINALLY feels like AHS again! Really enjoying this season! And @KimKardashian is shockingly great!' And in the comment section of The Kardashian's finale trailer that was uploaded to Instagram on Wednesday, some social media users offered the same positive opinion. 'She's actually killing her role it fits her well at least the business woman side,' a fan wrote, with another typing, 'And she killed it as always.' Despite receiving mixed opinions from fans in regards to her performance in American Horror Story, it was recently revealed that the star will continue to pursue her budding acting career by both producing and starring in the comedy, The 5th Wheel. Despite receiving mixed opinions from fans in regards to her performance in American Horror Story, it was recently revealed that the star will produce and star in the comedy, The 5th Wheel Aside from AHS, Kim also voiced the character of Delores in PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie which premiered in September. According to Deadline, Kim will not only step in front of the camera to take on a role in the movie, but will also produce the film alongside Paula Bell. The screenplay is slated to be written by Bell as well as Janine Brito and five studios had battled against each other to score the package - which eventually went to Netflix. The media personality has been very hands on when it comes to the project, and has made sure to attend every pitch, the outlet reported. The stars of Vanderpump Rules have generously donated to a GoFundMe raising money for a friend who has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Jesse Montana is scheduled to undergo surgery to remove the tumor on December 4, according to a GoFundMe raising money for his medical expenses. The tumor was discovered after he had three seizures on November 27. Ariana Madix was the biggest contributor of her co-stars, donating a whopping $9,000 to the fundraiser. Katie Maloney donated $3,000, Scheana Shay gave $2,000, while Tom Schwartz and Rachel Leviss both contributed $500. Brittany Cartwright has also donated $100. The fundraiser has thus far achieved $85,196 of their $100k goal. The stars of Vanderpump Rules have generously donated to a GoFundMe raising money for a friend who has been diagnosed with a brain tumor Ariana Madix was the biggest contributor of her co-stars, donating a whopping $9,000 to the fundraiser Ariana revealed Jesse's diagnosis to fans on her Instagram on Sunday, posting: 'No one is cooler than my dear friend. Right now he needs our good thoughts and our help'. The reality TV personality also shared a link to his GoFundMe page to request for any assistance on his medical bills as he will be undergoing major surgery next week. 'The short version is this: Jesse has a tumor in his brain and will be having surgery this coming Monday,' she explained. 'Jesse is truly one of a kind in every way,' she gushed about her longtime friend. 'If you are lucky enough to meet him, you are immediately struck by his generosity and beauty inside and out.' Then, addressing him directly, Madix wrote: 'I love you so much. Dark crystal unicorn elixir of life always and forever. You got this.' On the GoFundMe page, it stated that that Montana suffered three seizures on November 27 and was brought to the emergency room at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. The page also noted that he had no prior symptoms of a brain tumor. Upon his examination, doctors found that he had a tumor in his brain and subsequently was held for several days in the ICU unit. Katie Maloney donated $3,000, Scheana Shay gave $2,000, while Tom Schwartz and Rachel Leviss both contributed $500. Brittany Cartwright has also donated $100 The Vanderpump Rules star, 38, took to Instagram to ask her fans to send their best wishes and help the musician, who has guest starred on the hit Bravo series before The reality TV personality shared a link to his GoFundMe page to request for any assistance on his medical bills as he will be undergoing major surgery next week According to the post, Montana was unable to undergo surgery at that time as his kidneys were 'not functioning' but are now 'recovering amazingly'. On December 4, he will undergo a procedure of getting the tumor removed from his brain. A plethora of fans and friends took to the comments section to send their prayers and well wishes to Montana. On December 4, he will undergo a procedure of getting the tumor removed from his brain She shared several photos with the model and gushed about how he is 'truly one of a kind in every way' before asking people to donate to the fundraiser Madix shared a screenshot from the fundraiser explaining Montana's diagnosis Over Vanderpump Rules' many seasons, Montana has appeared alongside the cast multiple times; seen in June 2021 In response to Madix's post, Scheana Shay replied with three prayer hands emojis. Brittany Cartwright also replied with the prayer emoji and shared a link to the fundraiser on her Instagram Story. Selling Sunset star Chrishell Stause also commented prayer hand and heart emojis. Over many seasons, Montana made multiple appearances on Vanderpump Rules and was most notably the person who told Cartwright about her now-husband, Jax Taylor, cheating with Faith Stowers in season six. Chefs from Chinese-funded companies attend cooking competition in Indonesia Xinhua) 11:02, December 04, 2023 A chef presents his dish during a food festival at Fotile Showroom in Jakarta, Indonesia, Dec. 2, 2023. Chefs from nine Chinese-funded companies in Indonesia attended a cooking competition, and shared food with on-site guests during a food festival here on Saturday. (Xinhua/Xu Qin) Guests taste dishes during a food festival at Fotile Showroom in Jakarta, Indonesia, Dec. 2, 2023. Chefs from nine Chinese-funded companies in Indonesia attended a cooking competition, and shared food with on-site guests during a food festival here on Saturday. (Xinhua/Xu Qin) A guest takes photo for a chef during a food festival at Fotile Showroom in Jakarta, Indonesia, Dec. 2, 2023. Chefs from nine Chinese-funded companies in Indonesia attended a cooking competition, and shared food with on-site guests during a food festival here on Saturday. (Xinhua/Xu Qin) Chefs hold dishes ready for display and review during a food festival at Fotile Showroom in Jakarta, Indonesia, Dec. 2, 2023. Chefs from nine Chinese-funded companies in Indonesia attended a cooking competition, and shared food with on-site guests during a food festival here on Saturday. (Xinhua/Xu Qin) A chef cooks during a food festival at Fotile Showroom in Jakarta, Indonesia, Dec. 2, 2023. Chefs from nine Chinese-funded companies in Indonesia attended a cooking competition, and shared food with on-site guests during a food festival here on Saturday. (Xinhua/Xu Qin) Chefs cook during a food festival at Fotile Showroom in Jakarta, Indonesia, Dec. 2, 2023. Chefs from nine Chinese-funded companies in Indonesia attended a cooking competition, and shared food with on-site guests during a food festival here on Saturday. (Xinhua/Xu Qin) This photo taken on Dec. 2, 2023 shows a dish displayed during a food festival at Fotile Showroom in Jakarta, Indonesia, Dec. 2, 2023. Chefs from nine Chinese-funded companies in Indonesia attended a cooking competition, and shared food with on-site guests during a food festival here on Saturday. (Xinhua/Xu Qin) This photo taken on Dec. 2, 2023 shows a dish displayed during a food festival at Fotile Showroom in Jakarta, Indonesia, Dec. 2, 2023. Chefs from nine Chinese-funded companies in Indonesia attended a cooking competition, and shared food with on-site guests during a food festival here on Saturday. (Xinhua/Xu Qin) This photo taken on Dec. 2, 2023 shows a dish displayed during a food festival at Fotile Showroom in Jakarta, Indonesia, Dec. 2, 2023. Chefs from nine Chinese-funded companies in Indonesia attended a cooking competition, and shared food with on-site guests during a food festival here on Saturday. (Xinhua/Xu Qin) (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) Fans grew concerned for Hugh Jackman last week after a 'sad' photo of the actor emerged in the wake of his split from wife Deborra-Lee Furness. But on Tuesday, the actor, 55, posted a decidedly more upbeat image of himself to social media. 'Good morning London,' wrote the X-Men star, alongside a smiling selfie. And fans appreciated the difference, with one commenting, 'Now you're starting to smile.' 'Love the smile Hugh... have a nice trip,' added another. Fans grew concerned for Hugh Jackman last week after a 'sad' photo of the actor emerged in the wake of his split from wife Deborra-Lee Furness. Seen here on Tuesday On Friday, the Hollywood heartthrob shared a series of close-up photos of his far more serious face to his Instagram account. In the pictures, Hugh looked pensive and downcast as he walked the streets of New York City. 'Entirely too close,' he captioned his post, adding the hashtag 'moods'. On Friday, the Hollywood heartthrob shared a series of close-up photos of his far more serious face to his Instagram account Hugh was inundated with messages pointing out that the actor 'looked sad' and sent words of encouragement to the newly-single star. 'We have all been there. Completely get it. Hope your day gets better,' commented one fan. 'Looking a little serious there Hugh,' another said. 'Your sunglasses are making you look a bit grumpy,' one fan noted, while another pointed out the newly-single actor's 'brow is still furrowed'. 'Why so serious my love,' asked one concerned fan, and another commented that the photo looked more like a 'mug shot' than a selfie. Hugh was inundated with messages pointing out that the actor 'looked sad' and sent words of encouragement to the newly-single star The Australian actor, 55, and wife, 67, announced their shock split in September after 27 years of marriage, telling fans they separated 'to pursue our individual growth'. Seen here in 2022 'Not a good day?' asked someone else. 'Where is that beautiful smile we all know, and love?' added a concerned female fan, with yet another describing his facial expression as 'stern'. Hugh is said to be pouring all of his efforts into getting physically 'ripped' to reprise his role as Wolverine in the upcoming Deadpool movie - and is considering his next Broadway role. 'Hugh is completely focused on Deadpool 3 and getting into Wolverine shape,' a source exclusively revealed to DailyMail.com last month. 'That is taking him away from dealing with his ex and taking him away from dating. He is excited to be back working and is excited to put all his focus on all of that.' The insider added Hugh isn't against the idea of finding love again in the future - but currently has no plans to 'chase it'. Insiders have revealed that the actor is distracting himself from heartache by pouring all his efforts into getting physically ready for the upcoming Deadpool movie 'When dating comes along, he will gladly pursue it but his priorities are elsewhere, and he isn't expecting or chasing a new love,' they said. 'He is chasing getting ripped for Wolverine and working on movies and figuring out the next time to do Broadway.' The former couple have remained friendly, with the insider adding Hugh is planning to mark his ex's upcoming birthday on November 30. The source said: 'Though they might not be in love with each other anymore, there is still a bond and a love there between the two that will last forever. 'He's still going to wish her a happy birthday and they still will talk around the holidays when it pertains to anything about their kids. They are trying to figure it all out and are looking to do it as civilly as possible.' The update comes after interest piqued in Hugh's love life, with rumors swirling that he had found love again after posting a picture of himself on a stroll through Central Park. But a separate source shut down any talk of the actor moving on, telling DailyMail.com: 'He was in the park with his best friend.' Hugh and Deborra-Lee tied the knot in 1996 after crossing paths on set of Correlli in 1995. During the course of their marriage, they adopted two children: son Oscar, 23, and daughter Ava, 18. A source previously told DailyMail.com that Hugh was in 'mourning' following their split and was keen to get back to work - which ground to a halt during the historic WGA and SAG AFTRA strikes. 'He is in that lull period where he is still mourning the break-up, looking to dive into work to get his mind removed from it, flattered that a new love life could happen in the future and also, he loves the fact that he could do absolutely nothing at all,' they said last month. 'The options he has are exciting and scary, he wants to respect Deborra's feelings and his feelings, and he also wants to respect the feelings of someone he would get involved with. 'Sure, he is interested in dating, but he also wants to give it his 100 per cent attention and not half-a** it if and when that comes about.' Patti Newton has issued a desperate plea to her troubled son Matthew as he focuses on his new life with wife Catherine Schneiderman in Texas, according to a new report. Woman's Day claims the 78-year-old is committed to having her son return to Melbourne for a reunion after years away from home and a series of scandals. Matthew, 46, who has stayed out of the public spotlight after two arrests in Miami in 2012, and his wife Catherine, 30, are living in a mansion on the outskirts of Texas. 'Moving to Texas is the best thing either of them could have done. They're loving a new outdoorsy life and they're both looking and feeling great,' a source told the magazine. '[But] Patti desperately wants them to come home to Australia.' Patti Newton has issued a desperate plea to her troubled son Matthew as he focuses on his new life with wife Catherine Schneiderman in Texas , according to a new report Matthew hasn't been home to Australia in years and didn't return for his father Bert's funeral in 2021. He has been enjoying a quiet and anonymous life in America since getting married six years ago following a series of scandals. This includes domestic violence allegations from two former girlfriends: Australian actresses Brooke Satchwell, 40, and Rachael Taylor, 37. Matthew was also charged in 2011 for assaulting a cab driver on the way to a children's party. He was also arrested twice in Miami, Florida, in 2012 - the first for trespassing and resisting officers, while a second incident saw him charged with battery and resisting arrest after he attacked a hotel receptionist. Following the charges, Matthew checked into the Betty Ford Center in California for 90 days of alcohol and drug treatment. Woman's Day claims the 78-year-old is committed to having her son return to Melbourne for a reunion after years away from home and a series of scandals Matthew, who suffers from bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and has a history of addiction, refrains from the spotlight. He had starred in a range of successful Australian television shows before moving overseas. Matthew now spends his days swimming and hiking with Catherine and their two dogs. Matthew and Catherine, who is the daughter of former New York attorney-general Eric Schneiderman, began dating in 2012 and got engaged in October 2016. A family friend told New Idea in 2017 the couple had secretly married at the home of Catherine's mother in New York. 'Moving to Texas is the best thing either of them could have done. They're loving a new outdoorsy life and they're both looking and feeling great,' a source told the magazine. '[But] Patti desperately wants them to come home to Australia.' Pictured Patti and Matthew in 2001 Cara Delevingne put on a glamorous display as she graced the red carpet at the star-studded 3rd Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles. The model, 31, flashed her legs in a sheer thigh-split black gown, which featured a plunging neckline and showed off her incredible figure. She boosted her height in platform heels at the event which took place at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Cara completed the look with long black gloves and accessorised with a dazzling silver necklace. Her short blonde locks were styled in a glamorous blowdry and she sported a flawless bronzed makeup palette with a swipe of red lipstick. Cara Delevingne put on a glamorous display as she graced the red carpet at the star-studded 3rd Annual Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles The model, 31, flashed her legs in a sheer thigh-split black gown, which featured a plunging neckline and showed off her incredible figure The annual Academy Museum Gala was launched in 2021 and aims to raise funds for the museums exhibitions and public programming. The event always draws in a red carpet so star-studded it rivals the Academy Awards themselves and the inaugural gala managed to raise a whopping $11 million for the museum. Several stars were also honoured at the glamorous soiree, including Meryl Streep , who picked up the Icon Award, which celebrates an artist whose career has had a significant global cultural impact. Michael B. Jordan picked up the Vantage Award, which honours an emerging artist or scholar who is helping to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema. Oprah Winfrey received the Pillar Award, which acknowledges exemplary leadership and support for the Academy Museum. Sofia Coppola was honoured with the Visionary Award, which celebrates an artist or scholar whose innovations have advanced the art of cinema. 'We are excited to gather again at our third annual Academy Museum Gala to celebrate the power, global impact, and indelible importance of cinema,' Jacqueline Stewart, director and president of the Academy Museum, said in a statement earlier this year. 'I am truly honored to recognize four artists, Meryl Streep, Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and Sofia Coppola, whose creativity and passion have inspired and shaped our culture in such powerful ways.' She boosted her height in platform heels at the event which took place at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Cara completed the look with long black gloves and accessorised with a dazzling silver necklace The event was initially set to take place in October but was postponed following the Hamas attack on Israel. There had been concerns that the Hollywood strikes would also impact the event but these came to an end earlier this year. The Hollywood actors' strike finally came to an end last month after 118 days, concluding the longest strike ever for film and television actors. The month before the writers' strike came to an end, when they celebrated a new deal with a five percent pay bump, streaming bonuses and protection against AI. This is due to fears batteries could cause shocks, fires or even explosions Electric vehicle owners are facing repair bills that are thousands of dollars higher than those for gas cars. A lack of specially-trained mechanics, extra safety measures for potentially explosive batteries and a greater need for replacement parts are to blame. Repairing an EV after a crash cost $6,587 on average last year - 56 percent higher than the $4,215 for all vehicles, according to research from auto data company CCC Intelligent Solutions. Electric cars are promoted as needing less maintenance than their gas-powered counterparts - with tasks such as regular oil changes no longer necessary. But - when it comes to collision repair - they need more work than regular vehicles, according to CCC Intelligent Solutions. The report found that last year, on average, an electric car repair required roughly double the replacement parts compared to a standard gas car. In 2022, repairing an EV after a crash cost $6,587 on average, compared to $4,215 for all vehicles, according to research from auto data company CCC Intelligent Solutions 'People are used to hearing that EVs have fewer parts than a combustion vehicle, but that is not the case in collision repair,' Marc Fredman, chief strategy officer at CCC Intelligent Solutions, told The Wall Street Journal. The way that many EV parts are welded in the vehicles, he said, means the components cannot be repaired and have to be replaced instead. Cars containing lithium-ion batteries also need special storage as they can be a fire risk when damaged, which adds both time and cost to the repair process, Scott Benavidez, chairman of the trade group Automotive Service Association told the outlet. Repairs costs are also higher since the bodies of EVs also tend to be made from more expensive alumium rather than steel. There are also a limited number of repair shops that are able to take on this work, meaning they are able to charge a premium for services. The CCC Intelligent Solutions report noted, however, that EVs are, on average, more than four years newer than the average vehicle. They also tend to cost over $30,000 more - which also pushes up repair costs. It found the need for specialist care also means customers face longer wait times for repairs. According to the report, it takes 25 percent longer to get an EV into a body shop compared to a gas car. And once mechanics start working, it typically takes 57 days to fix, compared to 45 days for non-EVs. There are signs that costs could come down as more independent shops become trained in EV repairs and carmakers build up a supply of spare parts. But, in the meantime, higher repair costs are also driving up insurance premiums for EV owners. Brent Shreve and his wife Molly told DailyMail.com earlier this year how the insurance on their Tesla Model Y was double that of the cover on their Volkswagen Atlas. Insurer State Farm quoted the couple - who are in their mid 30s - $78 for the gas car and $140 for the electric vehicle - despite the models being almost-identical in size and costing virtually the same amount. Brent Shreve and his wife Molly (pictured) live in Fishers, Indiana Insurer State Farm quoted the couple - who are in their mid 30s - $78 for the gas car (left) and $140 for the electric vehicle (right) It comes after a separate survey found EV owners report far more problems with their cars and trucks than owners of gas-powered vehicles. A Consumer Reports survey of more than 330,000 car owners found electric cars encountered 79 percent more problems than those with combustion engines. The research said EV owners most frequently reported troubles with battery and charging systems, as well as flaws in body panels and the fit of interior parts. The report noted, however, that EV manufacturers are still learning how to construct new types of vehicles, and some problems would be teething issues which would be ironed out over time. The calling has been there for the government statisticians to embrace AI albeit with caution and calibration With the advent of intuitive machine coherent processes like intelligence, recognition, enlightenment, systematic enquiry, and resolution connected with evolution in data collection, and accumulation, rational investigations, and computer processing power, AI provides occasions to companionship and addition to human intelligence and enhances how the people lead their work and life. In 2018, NITI Aayog developed a National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence namely, # AI for All. This strategy aims to ensure the safe and responsible use of AI. It also focuses on how India can leverage AI for social inclusion and economic growth. The field of AI is vast which includes Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models, Cognitive Computing, etc. The usage also is of varying kinds depending on the field in which it is applied. One of the tools of governance, the Official Statistical System is a field where the calling has been there to embrace but the handshake is yet to take place. The collection of data is one of the most important ingredients of Official Statistics. The Collection of data is done mostly through Census Surveys and as a by-product of administrative action like data generated as part of tax collection exercise. While undertaking Census and Surveys, one of the biggest problems faced is data quality and non-response which leads to missing data. With the help of AI, the task of finding missing and problematic data and imputation i.e. task of altering incorrect values and inserting missing values can be done in a much faster manner by applying the ML models. Another possible use of AI could be the use of a Large Language model-based Chatbot in the data collection process. This Chatbot like Chat GPT would assist in providing information instantly to the enumerator from the fieldwork manual. It would save them from the trouble of going through the voluminous documents time and again which leads to drudgery and monotony in the fieldwork. Another use case in a country like ours which has more than twenty Official languages could be an AI-based utility that helps in two-way conversation between the enumerator and the respondent which will go a long way in resolving the language barrier faced by our data warriors in the field. Further, the multi-modal bots with the capacity to read images would be of great help as they would be able to give immediate clarification to the enumerator in case confusion regarding definition arises while collecting data. Another potential use of AI, especially ML could be the classification and coding of Textual Data for official statistics. In the context of the coding and classification work in statistical organisations, the given set is typically a text or narrative provided by the respondent from a survey or administrative data source. For example, it could describe an individual's occupation or the economic activity of the company described in an administrative business register. With the increasing use of new data sources, the text data that statistical organisations might work with could also include product descriptions scraped from the internet or text posts obtained from social media platforms such as Twitter. The aim of classification and coding in this scenario could be to classify the descriptions into international or corporate statistical classification systems, such as Standard Industrial Classification (SIC), and Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) for easy understanding and quick analysis. Image data is still a relatively new type of data for statistical organisations but there is a growing need for exploring how image data can be used for the production of statistics. These models could associate the variables of interest (e.g., building type, land cover type) with the images in the training data set and classify new images with reasonable levels of accuracy. Automation (or partial automation) of these tasks can allow a large volume of information in the image data to be processed in a reliable and fast way. The cost of deployment including the computation required is one of the major factors affecting the deployment of AI in an organisation. The other main challenge facing statistical organisations to advance the use of AI in organisations is bringing together the required skills as AI requires people from Domain, Computer Science and Statistics; all working together on a project together for its meaningful use. The alignment of AI use cases with the vision of the organisation is the most important aspect of the adoption of AI. The development of AI should not be an ad-hoc process but a part of a well-thought-out strategy which has the support of the top management and confidence of all stakeholders as a tool for reducing their burden rather than replacing them or their work. (The writers are Dy Director Generals in the Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation, views are personal) The war between Balochistan-Pakistan raging for years now but it is not visible in the media because there is no media in Balochistan, writes Mir Khan Baloch The schools have been turned into carrions, villages into concentration camps. Houses-to-house search operations have become a daily routine. University and college students are harassed and intimidated on campuses. Women being raped, and female students are sexually molested. Journalists are picked up by the Pakistan army and forces, and later their mutilated dead bodies are thrown on roadsides and barren land across Balochistan. This is what Balochistan looks like today. Baloch youth are facing dire consequences not over charges of drugs or weapons but for having books which are punishable sins in occupied Balochistan. We watch the Hamas-Israel war on TV and media but the war between Balochistan and Pakistan is not visible in the media because there is hardly a single Baloch media outlet in Balochistan. Balochistan is a black hole for information. Smuggling of narcotics and weapons are easy because Pakistan supports it but writing on human rights violations and the ongoing Balochistan war is not easy, Baloch are smuggling the news and publishing them on social media. If any Baloch is found writing on Pakistans war crimes, he/she is taken away and killed after some time. On 16 November, Pakistans military and police opened fire on Baloch students of Lasbela Uthal Agricultural University for Water and Marine Science. Dozens of students were injured and the remaining were arrested and taken to undisclosed locations. Video footage of the incident sparked fear, and anger among the people of the area who came to protest on the streets of Lasbela. On 19 November 2023, Pakistan ISI took three Baloch hostages namely Adil, Shahjahan and Nabi Dad, tied their hands with rope, put them inside an explosive-loaded vehicle and detonated the car killing all of them in the Hoshab area of Turbat. Two of them were brothers. Three of them belong to the same family who were abducted on 22 August 2023 from Turbat at 3:00 pm city by the Pakistan military during a raid on their homes. This seems a new tactic of the Pakistan army but in the past, there were numerous instances of Baloch hostages thrown out of low altitude flying helicopters. Balochistan needs world attention It is the need of the hour that a debate on national and international levels must be resumed. The academic think tanks and institutions of friends of occupied Balochistan should involve Baloch leadership and people to participate and chalk policies towards getting closer to each other and work on unified goals. Lets break the rhetoric of Pakistans deep state and the army about Balochistan that cant be discussed globally. After the partition of the subcontinent, we have seen India facing border infiltration from Pakistan and China. Beijings growing aggressive policies towards India indicate that the PLA is not willing to abandon its policy of bleeding India, for the last many decades. China is leaving no stone unturned to encircle India from all fronts. Delhi is not only facing threats from the border but also is being deliberately engaged in internal conflicts where China is providing all sorts of support to militants who are fighting against Indian national interests. The non-state actors funded by China often get diplomatic backing from Beijing even at the forums of the UN Security Council. Balochistan deserves Indias attention. Many people are working tirelessly to this end. The efforts by the overseas diplomatic leadership of occupied Balochistan are bearing fruits and now there are indicators that in coming years Balochistan is heading towards taking a centre point for global powers. India should take advantage of the Balochistan uprising on global forums and lend her full diplomatic, political and other support to help the Baloch for their liberation. To chalk a long-term 100-year policy to secure Indias energy needs, and stability and disperse threats to its economy, it is needed that Delhi should open an official channel with Balochistan to pave the way for future cooperation. If India supports Balochistan, it will no longer rely on oil imports from Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela because Balochistan has more oil than the gulf and Venezuela. India's 42% of liquefied natural gas (LNG) requirements were fulfilled from Qatar till 2021 but with Dohas recent court decision to sentence to 8 former Naval personnel, the import of the energy may get disrupted. At this point, India has the option to buy LNG from Balochistan as it has huge reserves of natural gas. Balochistan is highly rich in minerals and once it is liberated, that would give a boost to Indias economy, national security, defence, and global position. The issue of Balochistan is not a political issue. It is the issue of the invasion of Pakistan. We cant accept the false narrative of Pakistan that Balochistan willingly joined Pakistan. No substantial or legal evidence proves Pakistans claim on Balochistan. I have researched and come to know that Balochistan before the withdrawal of the British from the subcontinent was ruled under the British in a similar way to India was under British occupation. When the British decided to withdraw from the subcontinent, the King of Balochistans Kalat State announced its independence on 11 August 1947. It is a well-documented fact that Balochistan remained independent for about 7- 8 months. In this period the founder of Pakistan, Mr. M.A Jinnah kept pressurizing the Khan of Kalat Mir Amed Yar Khan that Balochistan should join Pakistan but he refused to join his country into Pakistan. Both the houses (House of Lords and House of Common) of Balochistan unanimously rejected the proposal of Jinnah to join Pakistan. (The writer is a Baloch human rights activist covering Balochistan, Central Asia and the Middle East. Views are personal) This is the first part of a two-part series on Balochistan. To be continued Pakistan police have arrested the ringleader of robbers who disguised as security personnel and looted an Indian Sikh family of Rupees 250,000 and PKR 150,000 besides jewellery here in the country's Punjab provincial capital last week, a media report said on Monday. Kanwal Jeet Singh and his family members arrived here from India to attend Guru Nanak Dev's birth anniversary festivities. The Sikh family had gone to Liberty Market in the Gulberg area of Lahore for shopping on November 29 when they were intercepted by robbers disguised as police in the name of security clearance and were looted of Indian rupees 250,000 and PKR 150,000 besides jewellery. On Monday, the police claimed that the ringleader of the gang, identified as Ahmad Raza, was arrested, the Dawn newspaper reported. Raids were also being conducted for the arrest of other members of the network, the report said. Punjab caretaker Chief Minister Mohsin Naqvi has sought a report from the Lahore police chief. Naqvi called for the culprits to be brought to justice within 48 hours, saying that robbing a Sikh family in an area like Gulbarg was a grave lapse in security. Currently, over 2,500 Indian Sikhs are in Pakistan in connection with Guru Nanak Dev's birth anniversary festivities. The Indian Sikhs arrived here in Pakistan's Punjab province through the Wagah Border to participate in the festivities in connection with the 554th birth anniversary of Baba Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of the Sikh religion. During their 10-day stay here, the pilgrims visited Gurdwara Punja Sahib Hassanabdal, Gurudwara Sacha Sauda, Gurdwara Dera Sahib Lahore, Gurudwara Rohri Sahib Aimenabad and Gurudwara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur Narowal. Rajasthan upheld its tradition of changing governance every five years and ousted the Congress-led Ashok Gehlot Government by voting the BJP into power on Sunday. The second winning surge for the BJP came in Rajasthan after retaining neighbouring Madhya Pradesh and winning over Chhattisgarh, where it comfortably wrested power from the faction ridden grand old party. Till reports last filed according to the Election Commission updates, the BJP won 115 seats leaving Congress at 70 of the total of 200 Assembly seats. The elections were conducted over 199 seats while Sriganganagar's Karanpur seat was postponed due to the death of Congress candidate Gurmeet Singh Koonar. The Bharat Adivasi Party had won one seat and was leading on two. The BSP won one seat and led on another while the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party led on two and the RLD on one. Independent candidates were leading or winning from seven seats. Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot submitted his resignation to Governor Kalraj Mishra late in the evening to pave the way for several names, including former CM Vasundhara Raje Scindia, who are currently doing the rounds. Gehlot said the Assembly poll results were 'unexpected for everyone' and added that the party humbly accepted the people's mandate. For almost full term, Gehlot struggled with his former deputy and political bete noire Sachin Pilot who had carried a massive revolt within two years of formation of the Congress Government in the State. Despite having several welfare schemes in place, the culturally sound State was marred by the public airing of dirty laundry involving Congress leaders. This situation worked in favour of the BJP, as the saffron party, right from day one, kept the pressure on Gehlot. Gehlot said all the schemes introduced by the Congress Government in the past five years, including the old pension scheme and the Chiranjeevi health insurance scheme, should be taken forward by the next Government. In the current Assembly, the ruling Congress has 107 MLAs, BJP 70 and Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLPT) three. Also, the CPI(M) and Bhartiya Tribal Party (BTP) have two seats each and RLD one. There are 13 independents in the outgoing Assembly and two seats (Udaipur and Karanpur) are vacant. Raje said people have rejected the "misgovernance by the Congress and accepted her party's 'suraaj' (good governance). The former CM, who won the Jhalrapatan Assembly constituency by a margin of 53,193 votes, said the imminent victory also gave a chance to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to serve the people after the Lok Sabha polls in 2024. Celebrations broke out at the BJP's national as well as State headquarters as the party crossed the majority-mark. Groups of women workers raised slogans hailing Modi. Union Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat took a dig at Gehlot, saying his magic was over. The 'magic' has ended and Rajasthan has come out of the spell of the magician. People have voted for the honour of women and for the welfare of the poor, he said. Gehlot's father performed magic shows, and the CM has said in the past that he assisted in some. Four of seven BJP MPs who fought the Rajasthan Assembly elections won their respective seats while three others lost the polls. BJP's Lok Sabha MPs Diya Kumari (Vidhyadhar Nagar), Rajyavardhan Rathore (Jhotwara), and Baba Balak Nath (Tijara), and Rajya Sabha MP Kirodi Lal Meena (Sawai Madhopur) were declared winners. Nagaur MP and Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP) convener Hanuman Beniwal was also leading from Khinswar Assembly seat. The three BJP MPs who lost the Assembly polls included Narendra Kumar (Mandawa seat), Bhagirath Choudhary (Kishangarh) and Devji Patel (Sanchore). Devji Patel was defeated by BJP rebel Jiva Ram Chaudhary who contested as an independent candidate. Congress candidate and minister Sukhram Vishnoi secured second position on Sanchore seat. While Narendra Kumar was defeated by Congress candidate Rita Chaudhary by a margin of 18,717, Bhagirath Choudhary secured third position in Kishangarh constituency where Congress candidate Vikash Choudhary won. The Congress is on its way to achieving the magic mark of 60 seats on Sunday to form the first non-BRS Government in Telangana. This southern success comes in the midst of a saffron sweep of the Hindi heartland, where the BJP wrested two States from its rival and retained one. Telangana becomes the second southern State in the Congress kitty in 2023, after it emerged triumphant in Karnataka in May. Factors such as anti-incumbency, voter fatigue, and dissatisfaction among the youth contributed mainly to the poor performance of BRS. Despite the towering image of incumbent Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao, along with the party's extensive grassroots network and welfare programmes, the perceived inaccessibility of its leaders contributed to the growing anti-incumbency sentiments. Additionally, the Opposition projection of what they called the BRS family rule in the State further exacerbated this sentiment. The Congress had mounted a spirited election campaign with a view to unseat BRS, even as the BJP also launched a no holds-barred attack against the ruling dispensation. According to the Election Commission figures till the reports, the grand old party registered a massive lead against the ruling BRS, as the party won 47 seats and was ahead in another 17 of the 119 Assembly seats. The BRS, which has 101 members in the outgoing Assembly, emerged victorious in 22 and was leading in 17 others till last filed. Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao submitted his resignation to Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan following his party's poor performance. The Governor has asked Rao to continue in office till the formation of the new Government. The BJP bettered its tally, winning six seats and was leading in two other segments, according to the EC update. It has three members in the outgoing Assembly. The AIMIM won five seats and was leading in two. The Congress good show sparked off celebrations by party workers. While the BRS Government introduced various welfare schemes, its alleged failure to fulfill key election promises, including providing housing for the poor, ensuring significant job creation, doling out unemployment relief, as well as the delayed implementation of farmers' loan waivers and the leak of recruitment test question papers worked against them. The BJP was initially considered the main Opposition to the BRS, but the scenario changed after the Congress gained momentum following win in the Karnataka elections in May. Allegations of an implicit understanding between the BRS and the BJP, particularly regarding the Delhi Excise Policy case involving KCRs daughter Kavitha, weakened the BJP, leading anti-establishment votes to consolidate in favour of the Congress. Unlike previous elections where sentiments for separate Statehood played a crucial role, emotional issues did not significantly sway this election. In 2018, the Congress and the TDP formed an alliance, with BRS accusing TDP Chief N Chandrababu Naidu of being anti-Telangana. However, the TDP chose not to contest the recent Telangana Assembly election due to ongoing legal issues and Naidu's imprisonment in Andhra Pradesh. Similarly, YSR Telangana Party (YSRTP) led by YS Sharmila, daughter of former undivided Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, withdrew from the contest, declaring support for the Congress. The Congress ran an assertive campaign centered on the theme of change, encapsulated in the slogan 'marpu kavali Congress ravali' (there should be change - Congress should come), which effectively resonated with the electorate. Anumula Revanth Reddy, who led the Congress' charge, finds himself on the brink of a potential chief ministership. The 56-year-old leader met top police officials of the State and discussed the security arrangements for the swearing-in ceremony, likely on December 4 or 9. He welcomed the people's mandate in favour of the national party while the BRS expressed disappointment over its failure to ensure a hat-trick. BRS working president and KCR's son K T Rama Rao said the Assembly poll results were "disappointing" though he is not "saddened". Interestingly the BJPs vote share surged from 7 per cent in 2018 to 13.88 per cent in the present Assembly polls even as its number of seats has gone up to eight. The party also won two by-polls, giving it three members in the outgoing Assembly. K Venkata Ramana Reddy emerged as a giant killer by defeating the Chief Minister and BRS supremo K Chandrasekhar Rao and Telangana PCC chief Revanth Reddy in Kamareddy. He vanquished his nearest rival KCR by a margin of 6,741 votes. However, on the flip side, all the three BJP Lok Sabha MPs were defeated. Controversial legislator T Raja Singh is the only BJP candidate from the city who won in 2018 Assembly polls and has repeated his feat this time. He retained his Goshamahal seat for the third time in a row. The BJP's firebrand MP and former State chief Bandi Sanjay Kumar lost to BRS rival Gangula Kamalakar Reddy by 3,163 votes. The BJP's promise of making a Backward Caste candidate as Chief Minister also didn't seem to cut ice with the voters. Shivrajs Kamal in Full Bloom in MP A robust organisational overhaul, addressing the initial challenges of huge internal factionalism within demotivated workers, coupled with the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, were the key factors that turned the tide in favor of the BJP in Madhya Pradesh during the last days of the polls. The nervousness to retain power in the Hindi heartland for the saffron party was evident, given the ground gained by the Congress, especially as the BJP fielded seven sitting party Parliamentarians, including three Union Ministers. The BJP fielded 21 Union Ministers as MLA candidates with maximum number in MP followed by Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The task was to get everyone working together at the organisational level for the ultimate goal of bringing the BJP back to power in the coveted State. Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed 14 rallies in Madhya Pradesh during the campaigning for polls. He reached out to young voters by reminding them of the failures of previous Congress Governments on various fronts, doubling down on the development of all sections. As BJP devised a strategy to defeat anti-incumbency in Madhya Pradesh which has been under its belt since 2003, barring 18 months from December 2018 to March 2020, Modi reached out to various sections of voters, including women, youngsters, tribals, besides the traditional supporters of the saffron party. Party devised a strategy of assigning 14 senior leaders to 14 districts, where they interacted with the local functionaries as well as the elected representatives of the municipal corporations and panchayats. They organised more than 50 meetings, in which Chouhan listened to the grievances and suggestions of the party workers. Notably, the BJP didn't project any leader from the State as its Chief Minister face, apparently to beat anti-incumbency, and sought votes for "lotus", the poll symbol of the party. The ruling BJP retained power in Madhya Pradesh with an emphatic win over the Congress. While in their campaign led by Rahul Gandhi, the Congress had promised financial assistance of `1,500 to women under Nari Samman Nidhi if voted to power, Chouhan rolled out the Ladli Behna scheme by providing `1,000 per month to women. He promised to hike the assistance to `3,000 in tranches and implemented a `250 monthly hike. While former Congress CM Kamal Nath addressed one to two election meetings daily during the campaign, Chouhan addressed an average of eight to ten rallies every day to garner support for the BJP. Chouhan won from Budhni seat for a sixth time by defeating Congress' actor-turned-politician Vikram Mastal by a margin of 1,04,974 votes. Chouhan, the longest serving CM of MP, first won from Budhni Assembly seat in 1990, before winning a bypoll in 2006 and retaining the seat in 2008,2013 and 2018. Chouhan was also Lok Sabha MP from Vidisha in 1991, 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2004. The BJP is hopeful to sweep with the similar figures as was the final tally till reports filed. According to the Election Commission, the BJP had won 77 seats and leading in 87 till 7pm while the Congress won 19 seats and was ahead in 46 legislative pockets. Madhya Pradesh recorded an impressive 77.82 per cent voter turnout with around 76.02 per cent of women voters casting their ballots. The much-awaited Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) Bloc meeting of Opposition leaders to finalise their plan for taking on Modis juggernaut in the Lok Sabha polls has been scheduled for Wednesday in the national Capital. The leaders have decided to meet at the residence of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, and maximum participation is anticipated due to the presence of leaders for the Winter Session, which begins on Monday. This decision is also set against the backdrop of the grand old party wresting power in another southern State, Telangana, six months after registering a significant win in Karnataka. Sources have indicated that, while leaders are expected to discuss the 2024 strategy, members will also delve into the damage caused by alliance partners such as the Samajwadi Party and the AAP in the recently concluded election results in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. According to reports, SP candidates garnered the same number of votes that accounted for the Congresss loss, thereby paving the way for the BJPs candidate to win. The INDIA Bloc meeting was delayed as the Congress awaited the results of Assembly elections in five states Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and Mizoram before finalising the Opposition Bloc's strategy and seat-sharing arrangement for the general elections. NCP chief Sharad Pawar said the outcome of the Assembly elections in four States will not have any impact on the INDIA Bloc, which comprises more than 26 Opposition parties led by the Congress. "I don't think this will have any impact on the INDIA alliance. We will be meeting at Kharge's residence in Delhi. We will speak to those who know the ground reality. We will be able to comment on it after the meeting only," Pawar said. Pawar's NCP is part of INDIA, which has so far held three rounds of deliberations in Patna, Bengaluru, and Mumbai. Janata Dal (United) took a swipe at the Congress following its rout in three Hindi heartland States, saying it is clear that the main Opposition party is unable to win on its own. JD (U) spokesperson K C Tyagi said the INDIA Bloc was missing in the elections. The Congress is in a coalition Government with the RJD in the Bihar Government led by JD(U) leader Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Some parties like Trinamool Congress, Aam Aadmi Party and Samajwadi Party wanted early finalisation of seat-sharing but the talks were delayed due to the Assembly polls. Sources said the Opposition leaders would now plan joint rallies that were put on hold due to the Assembly elections. One such rally planned in the first week of October in Bhopal was cancelled at the last moment. Talks on seat-sharing between regional outfits would also gain momentum now, they said. The Congress never invited or consulted any of its allies in the INDIA Bloc even though socialist parties have historically had a presence in these States, said Tyagi, attacking the party's leadership of calling off a proposed rally on the Opposition alliance in Bhopal in the run up to the elections. "It is very necessary now for everyone to strengthen the INDIA Bloc. If the alliance meeting was called a couple of months earlier, it would have been good," he said. The Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation of All India Institute of Medical Sciences is all set to celebrate World Disability Day and Foundation Day of the department on December 4, 2023. The event promises several activities to highlight the importance of inclusivity and mark its inception. On this occasion, the department organized an art competition (Venue: Mahatma Gandhi Block, Gandhi Gallery, Time: 11:00 AM) and a lecture (Venue: Theatre Hall 4, Time: 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM). AIIMS Bhopal extends a hearty invitation to all to join this unique opportunity to promote a positive and strategic approach towards disability. Former Chief Minister Raman Singh is one of the contenders for the top post in Chhattisgarh after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) returned to power in the state under a collective leadership. After the BJP won 54 seats, there are a few in the race to become the Chief Minister. Three-time Chief Minister (2003 to 2018), Raman Singh is one of the leading contenders. A Rajput by caste, Raman Singh joined the saffron party as a youth member and was president of its youth wing in Kawardha in 1976-77. Then, he became a councillor of Kawardha municipality in 1983. He was elected a legislator from Kawardha seat in 1990 and 1993 but lost the 1998 assembly polls. Later, he defeated former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Motilal Vora in the 1999 general elections and became a MP from Rajnandgaon constituency. He was the Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry from 1999 to 2003 in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. He was named head of the Chhattisgarh unit of BJP in the new state of Chhattisgarh, which was carved out of Madhya Pradesh, and led the party to a victory in the 2003 Assembly elections. Arun Sao, another leading contender, an Other Backward Class (OBC) leader, started his political career with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarathi Parishad (ABVP). He also served as BJPs district president, state co-secretary and ABVPs National Working Committee member. Sao rose through the ranks after serving as a booth-level worker. He became a MP from Bilaspur in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and was appointed the BJP state unit chief in November last year. Vishnu Deo Sai, a tribal leader, is also a contender for the top post. His political career started when he was elected unopposed the Sarpanch in village Bagia. He was a legislator in undivided Madhya Pradesh between 1990 and 1998 and was elected a MP in 1999-2019. He was Union Minister of State for Steel in the first Modi ministry between 2014 and 2019. Sai also served as BJP state unit president from 2020 until 2022. Bureaucrat-turned-politician Om Prakash Chaudhary, an OBC leader, also seems to be a contender as Home Minister Amit Shah assured to make him Bada Admi. He may get the post of Deputy Chief Minister. Choudhary lost the 2018 Assembly polls from the Congress bastion Kharsia seat but has now been elected from the Raigarh seat by a huge margin. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, on Sunday, said that whenever the differently-abled got the opportunity, they showed their talents. He cited the examples of sage Ashtavakra, medieval philosopher Socrates, scientist Stephen Hawking and Jagatguru Swami Ram Bhadracharya. Chief Minister Yogi added: In the Para Asian Games held in China, our para athletes have won 111 medals. The chief minister addressed the World Disabled Day programme organised at the Atal auditorium of Dr Shakuntala Mishra National Rehabilitation University on Sunday. He said, The performance of the differently-abled is always better compared to the general public. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has given a new term divyang instead of viklang to honour the differently-abled individuals worldwide. The chief minister further said that Prime Minister Modi had implemented the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act in the country in 2016 and the state government had fully complied with the Act. He pointed out that the state government had increased the budget for schemes related to the welfare of divyangjan. Initially, divyangjans used to receive a monthly pension of Rs 300. Currently, the government has increased it to Rs 1,000 per month, Yogi pointed out, adding that approximately 10 lakh divyangjans in the state are benefiting from this facility today. Yogi also stated that in the budget for 2016-17, there was a provision of only Rs 312 crore for the welfare of divyangjan in the state but currently, the state government has increased it to Rs 1120 crore. Previously, the differently-abled suffering from leprosy used to receive a pension of Rs 2,500 while the present state government has increased it to Rs 3,000, he added. In the year 2022-23, artificial limbs were successfully distributed to 3,05,000 divyangjans in the state. Additionally, the distribution of 8,000 motorised tricycles has been done in all 80 Lok Sabha constituencies of the state, the chief minister said. He pointed out that the state government allocates Rs 40 crore annually to the Transport Department for the travel of divyangjans. Along with this, marriage incentive amount has been provided to 4,342 divyangjans in the state. Chief Minister Yogi said that the medical grant amount for divyangjan within the state had now been increased to Rs 10,000 and the state government was facilitating cochlear implant surgery with a financial assistance of up to Rs 6 lakh. He said in the budget for 2023-24, an allocation of Rs 60.48 crore had been made for this purpose. The chief minister stated that initially there were three government shelter homes for the mentally challenged in the entire state in Meerut, Bareilly and Gorakhpur. Currently, he said, the government had taken steps to establish six new centres. Chief Minister Yogi emphasised that efforts are being made to provide maximum opportunities for imparting higher education and technical education to divyangjan. Dr Shakuntala Misra National Rehabilitation University, along with Jagatguru Divyang University in Chitrakoot will also be made a state university, he added. Uttar Pradesh is the first state in the country where two universities for divyangjan are operational, he pointed out. Chief Minister Yogi inaugurated an exhibition put up by social organisations and special schools during the state-level awards distribution programme. Additionally, he honoured individuals/institutions, employers and divyang employees who have done excellent work in the field of empowerment of Divyangjan, with state-level awards. Moreover, he also distributed artificial limbs and assistive devices to divyangjans. He also honoured meritorious students of special schools. In the programme, Minister of State for Backward Class Welfare and Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities (Independent Charge) Narendra Kashyap, Chief Secretary Durga Shanker Mishra, Principal Secretary (Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities) Subhash Chandra Sharma, Vice-Chancellor of Dr Shakuntala Mishra National Rehabilitation University, Professor RKP Singh, teachers, students, and other dignitaries were present. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is rightly credited with BJP's spectacular victory in Madhya Pradesh but in flesh and blood, it is as much a victory for chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. The BJP exhibited high quality politics, suspense and hard work that resulted in an unprecedented victory for Chouhan for the fourth time. In fact, the landslide victory of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Madhya Pradesh elections came when Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan launched the Ladli Bahna Yojana just few months ago. It played a crucial and all important role in writing the script for the victory. Since the BJP had lost elections in the leadership of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan in the year 2018, it was believed that nothing better could be done in his leadership in this election. Believing this, the BJP high command made this clear in the whole election campaign and to media persons that the elections would not be contested in the leadership of Shivraj Singh Chouhan. In press conferences addressed by Union Ministers, it was clearly said that Chouhan would not be the Chief Minister in the State if the BJP comes to power with full majority. It was evident that this was said right on the face of Shivraj Singh Chouhan. However, when the campaigning started, Chouhan left no stone unturned in putting his whole strength in the electioneering. He remained busy the whole day, addressed over a dozen election rallies in a day and over all addressed 165 election rallies in the campaigning. Even before the campaigning commenced, Chouhan was well aware that he is not the chief ministerial candidate, but as the BJP leaders always say, he also said at several occasions that he is disciplined sepoy of the party and discharge the duties whatever given to him. He was seen addressing huge gathering with full might and full of enthusiasm. He was never seen exhausted. Like 2013 and 2018 elections, no yatras were taken out solely by Shivraj. It was a consolidated effort of the high command. All Central Ministers were leading different yatras taken out before the elections. However, Shivraj was separately on his own yatra and he covered almost all the constituencies. He did reach even those constituencies where he was not invited. He literally, did not leave any stone unturned in winning the elections. On the other hand, Union Home Minister Amit Shah closely monitored the whole situation and directly commanded the electioneering process. However, the results clearly indicate that Ladli Bahna Yojana played pivotal role in creating history in Madhya Pradesh. If compared with the 2003 assembly elections, the BJP headed by Uma Bharti had won 173 seats and the Congress could get only 38. However, the situation in the election was entirely different. In that election, the people were harassed with the 10-year rule of Digvijay Singh. It was resentment voting against the prevailing poor condition in B-S-P (Bijli-Sadak-Pani). The voting percent had increased to 67.25 per cent. This time, the BJP won around 164 seats, which is only 9 seats less than 2003 elections. In this assembly election, the voting percent increased to 77.16 percent, which was 2.5 per cent more in comparison to the year 2018. This year, there was no resentment in the people, while on the contrary, women vote percent increased by over 2 per cent. This is evident that Ladli Bhana Yojana played important role. Under this scheme, the women are getting Rs 1,00 per month in their bank accounts. It had started with Rs 1,000 per month and later, it was increased by Rs 200 and then Rs 100. The Congress had also declared that it would give Rs 1,500 per month to the women, but seeing this, the BJP government had claimed that the amount in the scheme would increase upto Rs 3,000 per month in coming years. It is believed that the Congress promise was only in its manifesto, while the BJP that was in power, had already started getting the direct benefit in their bank accounts. Notably, in the year 2008, Ladli Laxmi Scheme launched by Shivraj Singh Chouhan, had played an important role in winning the election. In that election, the BJP had won 143 seats, which was the major victory. In a bid to earn revenue, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) will soon be leasing out office space in its newly built office complex in Karkardooma in East Delhi. The State-of-the-art premium office complex, located in the Karkardooma Institutional area, comprises three blocks i.e. A, B, and C, and is constructed over a plot size of 22,918 sq metre. All three blocks are ready to be leased out by the Corporation. Among them, Block A has Ground + 5 floors with a carpet area of 17480 sq ft while Block B has Basement + 5 floors with a carpet area of 22391 sq ft. Block C is a 12-story building having a carpet area of more than 1 lakh sq ft. The carpet area so calculated is exclusive of basements. Block B has one basement while Block C has two basements, having ample parking facility, MCD said in a statement. The office complex is equipped with all modern amenities like air-conditioning, power backup, firefighting systems and CCTV surveillance apart from 190 KLD Sewerage Treatment Plant. The civic body has proposed to lease office spaces to interested Central/State government departments or Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) for a period of thirty years. The Corporation has recently approved the minimum rent of the office complex at Rs. 115 per sq ft with enhancement @ 7% per annum on compounding basis i.e. 21% at the end of every three years, it said. Few central government departments have expressed their interest for office space at the complex. According to officials, the civic body will be writing to other central government Departments/PSUs/State Government regarding availability of office space at Karkardooma Institutional Area. It will sign a lease agreement with the Government Department/Agency/PSUs which offer the best rate over and above the floor rate of Rs. 115/- per sq ft fixed by the Corporation. A man was arrested and a minor apprehended after a brief exchange of fire on Sunday for allegedly opening fire outside the house of a scrap dealer in northeast Delhis Welcome area as part of an extortion bid, police said. The accused were nabbed from Yamuna Khadar near the metro yard, they said. A complaint was received on November 28 that two scooter-borne assailants opened fire outside the house of Abrar Ahmed (45). No one was injured in the incident and three bullet shells were recovered from the spot, Deputy Commissioner of Police (northeast) Joy Tirkey said. Later, Ahmed told police that he received a call and the caller, who claimed to be calling on behalf of the Hashim Baba gang, demanded Rs 50 lakh from him, the DCP said. Around 3:20 am on Sunday, a police team intercepted the two accused based on a tip-off, Tirkey said. When the two were signalled to stop, they abandoned their scooter and tried to flee in the dark. One of them, who was later identified as Akki, opened fire at the police team. The police team retaliated and Akki sustained a bullet injury in his right leg. The police team arrested Akki and apprehended a minor after a brief chase. We have also recovered two pistols from them, the DCP said. Akki was taken to the hospital for treatment, he added. During interrogation, Akki told police that he is a close associate of the Hashim Baba gang. He was involved in a number of criminal cases, including those of murder and extortion, Tirkey said. Koh-e-Fiza police have nabbed a miscreant and recovered gold bar weighing 300 grams worth Rs 17.77 lakh stolen from B.V.C Logistics PVT Ltd at Ahmedabad palace. Police said that a complaint was lodged by branch manager of B.V.C Logistics PVT Ltd Ravi Kumar Suryavanshi and his work is to count the incoming parcels and deliver them to the clients,on September 3 after he counted one parcel was found less in which a gold bar was kept. The police registered a case under section 379 of IPC and started investigation. A team was formed at the police station level to trace the unknown accused, in which the team sent B.V.C Logistics PVT Ltd couriers. The CCTV footage installed in and around the company was thoroughly searched and on the basis of technical evidence and informer's information, the suspect, Durgesh Prajapat after being questioned. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, on Sunday, remembered and paid rich tributes to Bharat Ratna and the countrys first President Dr Rajendra Prasad on his birth anniversary by garlanding his statue on behalf of the people of the state. The chief minister said that Dr Rajendra Prasad was a great freedom fighter who joined the independence movement under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, providing leadership at every step of the movement. The Constitution for independent India was created under the chairmanship of Dr Rajendra Prasad. He was not only a frontline warrior in the battle for the countrys freedom, but also a key architect of the governance structure of the country, the chief minister added. Chief Minister Yogi noted that despite opposition from the then government, Dr Rajendra Prasad actively participated in the reconstruction programme of the Somnath temple and Prayagraj and Kumbh held a special place in his heart. The chief minister said Dr Rajendra Prasad was a strong supporter of Indian culture and tradition. Embracing the values and ideals of Mahatma Gandhi in his life, Dr Rajendra continued to move forward with those resolutions throughout his life, he added. Mayor Sushma Kharkwal, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Avinash Trivedi and Mahendra Nath Singh among others were present on this occasion. Nishatpura police have nabbed a member of Pardi gang of Guna and recovered 6 vehicles worth Rs 4.3 lakh from their possession, police have nabbed the gang member Devki Nagar Bridge which lead to the arrest of gang. Police said that acting swiftly on information of vehicle thief near Devki Nagar Bridge with a stolen motorcycle police team reached the spot. The police team saw a suspicious person of similar appearance standing there carrying a Pulsar 200CC black colored motorcycle, as described by the informer, who tried to escape after seeing the police team. The suspect was caught by the police team who was identified as Dhaniram Pardi of village Bilakhedi Guna. The caught vehicle thief told during interrogation that many times he came to Bhopal Karond area from his village by bus and at night roam around in the colonies, break the lock of the motorcycle parked in front of the house and steal it and take it back to my village. He told this Pulsar 200CC vehicle was stolen from Karond area. After thorough interrogation, the caught vehicle thief admitted to stealing 05 more motorcycles from Nishatpura area of Bhopal city. The theft was done on the suspicion of the vehicle thief caught by the police team, all the motorcycles including two Pulsar, one Honda Shine, one Splendid Pulsar, one Bajaj CT 125, one Passion have been recovered. The vehicle thief caught during police interrogation told that he steals vehicles from Bhopal city and sells them in his rural areas for Rs 5000 to Rs 7000. In June this year, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, while issuing appointment letters to Udyami Mitras, had asked them to act as a bridge between the government and investors. In alignment with Chief Minister Yogis vision, these Udyami Mitras have diligently worked to explore investment opportunities in Uttar Pradesh. They are completing every task assigned to them with utmost honesty. These Udyami Mitras have worked actively to solve every problem, from Udyog Bandhu meetings to investors. Udyami Mitras deployed in six districts have achieved a 100 per cent completion rate for the assigned tasks, while in 21 districts, more than 90 per cent, and in 44 districts, more than 75 per cent of the tasks have been successfully completed. The result is that investors on a large-scale seem ready to get their investments off the ground through the groundbreaking ceremony (GBC). The six districts where Udyami Mitras have completed 100 per cent of the tasks include Ballia, Basti, Bhadohi, Mahoba, Rae Bareli and Rampur. Here, Udyami Mitras have conducted ground verification for a total of 339 projects, tagging 115 projects for GBC. Additionally, in districts such as Aligarh (98.45), Etah (98.04) and Bijnor (97.65), nearly 100 per cent of the tasks have been completed. Aligarh witnessed the ground verification of the highest number of projects, with 190 projects verified, including 50 tagged for GBC. In total, Udyami Mitras across 70 districts have conducted ground verification for nearly 4,000 projects, tagging over 1,000 projects for GBC. Similarly, Udyami Mitras deployed in authorities and Invest UP have verified approximately 625 projects, tagging 25 for GBC. In the past four months, Udyami Mitras have successfully progressed projects worth over Rs 50,000 crore. Along with this, they have tagged the UP government departments for ground verification of a total of 4,591 projects worth Rs 3.84 lakh crore and final preparation of 1,147 projects worth more than Rs 75,000 crore for GBC. The dynamism of Udyami Mitras can be gauged from the significant role they have played in resolving pending cases for the past six to eight months. Udyami Mitras have assisted in addressing major issues that have been pending for the last eight months. Most of these cases were related to delays in issuing lease deeds and no objection certificates (NOCs) from development authorities. Due to their proactive efforts, not only have these cases been resolved, but they have also paved the way for further investment. Not only this, their role was crucial in the EV (Ease of Doing Business) Round Table Conference where information about the EV policy was provided to investors. With the assistance of Udyami Mitras, discussions on investment and trade promotion with the delegation from Mexico took place in the state. Additionally, Udyami Mitras participated in a conference with investors from the steel industry associated with the Indian Steel Association, and they also took part in the CEO Round Table Conference during the MotoGP event. The activeness of Udyami Mitras can be estimated from the fact that they have played a crucial role in resolving pending cases for the past six to eight months. They have assisted in addressing major issues that have been pending for the last eight months. Most of these cases were related to delays in issuing lease deeds and NOCs from development authorities. Due to their proactiveness, not only have these cases been resolved, but they have also paved the way for further investment. The decision to select Udyami Mitras for resolving investors issues was taken before the UP Global Investors Summit held in Lucknow in February. After the examination, a total of 105 Udyami Mitras were selected, and 70 of them were deployed in districts, 25 in development authorities, and 10 in Invest UP. Udyami Mitras were imparted two weeks training, during which they were equipped with information related to the state government departments and knowledge transfer. In addition, they were briefed about single window portals like Nivesh Sarthi and Nivesh Mitra, where they could understand the importance of investment promotion and ease of doing business through a single window system. Udyami Mitras were educated on investment promotion and how to encourage investors to come to the state. Furthermore, in September, Invest UP provided them with additional specialised training on these topics. Delhi logged close to 3 lakh criminal cases, an increase of 3.3 per cent, in 2002 in comparison to the previous year, according to the latest NCRB data. A total of 2,98,988 cases were registered in the national capital under the Indian Penal Code in 2022 against 2,89,045 in 2021, as per the annual crime report of the National Crime Records Bureau. The overall number of cases registered in 2020 was 2,45,844. According to the NCRB, a Ministry of Home Affairs body, Delhi recorded 501 cases of murder in 2022, up from 454 and 461 in 2021 and 2020. A total of 14,158 cases of 'crime against women' were registered in 2022, going up from 13,982 and 9,782 in the previous two years. The cases of cyber crimes rose to 685 which was 345 and 166 in 2021 and 2020, said the NCRB. The data revealed that the cases of crime against children increased from 7,029 to 7,400 in 2022, which stood at 5,256 in 2021. A total of 5,585 cases of kidnapping and abduction was registered in 2022. The numbers for the same crime were 5,475 and 4,011 in 2021 and 2020, the report said. The cases of crime against elderly citizen increased from 1,166 to 1,313 between 2021 and 2022. Life was thrown out of gear in Chennai and its neighbouring districts on Monday as relentless rains pounded various parts leading to inundation, raising fears of a repeat of 2015 deluge. People were seen scampering to buy and refill supplies and essential items with drinking water being on high demand. There was no let up in the downpour that led to power outages and internet disruption. Cyclonic storm Michaung, which is likely to cross the coast in Andhra Pradesh on the forenoon of Tuesday lay near Chennai and Puducherry, bringing heavy rains. The name 'Michaung' was suggested by Myanmar. It means strength or resilience. Transport services took a severe hit as number of trains and flights were cancelled. Heavily inundated roads posed a challenge to road users who were few and far. Many parts of the state capital and the adjoining districts of Kancheepuram, Chengalpattu and Tiruvallur came under sheets of water even as the government machinery was deployed to clear the stagnant water and inundation. In the last 24 hours ending 8.30 am today, Perungudi in Chennai received 29 cm rainfall while Avadi in Tiruvallur district recorded 28 cm and Mamallapuram in Chengalpet received 22 cm. In its latest update, the weather office said the 4 districts are likely to experience heavy to very heavy rainfall and strong winds till late on Monday. "Severe Cyclonic Storm "MICHAUNG centered over the west central and adjoining southwest Bay of Bengal off south Andhra Pradesh and adjoining North Tamil Nadu coasts moved northwestwards during past 6 hrs and lay centered at 1130 hrs IST of December 4 over the same region about 90 km northeast of Chennai. "It is likely to move nearly northwards and close to south Andhra Pradesh coast and and cross between Nellore and Machilipatnam (AP) during forenoon of December 5 as a Severe Cyclonic Storm at a speed of 90 to 100 KMPH," an update from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said. Union Home Minister Amit Shah spoke to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin over the phone today and inquired about the prevailing situation in the state in the wake of cyclonic storm Michaung and assured all possible help from the Centre. The CM said he would seek the Centre's assistance for carrying out relief work post cyclone if required. In view of the cyclone, the Tamil Nadu government has declared a public holiday on Tuesday for all educational institutions, government and private offices, financial institutions and banks in Chennai, Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram and Chengalpattu districts. The government has urged private firms to allow its employees to work from home in affected regions on December 5. However, all essential services, such as police, fire service, local bodies, milk supply, water supply, hospitals/medical shops, power supply, transport, fuel outlets, hotels/restaurants, and offices engaged in disaster response, relief and rescue activities shall function as usual. In Chennai, cabinet ministers Udhayanidhi Stalin and Ma Subramanian visited the affected areas and oversaw the relief activities. Ten teams comprising 250 NDRF personnel have been deployed for rescue efforts in affected districts, a government release said. The Chennai airport operations were suspended from 9.40 am to 11 pm. As many as 70 flights arriving to and departing from the airport were cancelled owing to non-stop rains. The runway and tarmac also remain shut due to waterlogging, the Airport Authority of India said. Rail and air services suffered cancellation and delays. "In view of water flowing above danger level, the bridge no.14 between Basin bridge and Vyasarpadi has been suspended on account of safety reasons," and six trains originating from the Dr.MGR Chennai Central to destinations including Coimbatore and Mysuru were cancelled on Monday morning, the Southern Railway said, adding full refund shall be granted to all passengers of the above trains. According to airport officials, 12 domestic outbound services, including to destinations like Ahmedabad and Thiruvananthapuram were cancelled. Four international services, including to Dubai and Sri Lanka were cancelled by a private carrier. Three arriving international services were diverted to Bengaluru. As many as 14 subways in the city have been closed due to inundation, the city police said. In 11 places, uprooted trees were removed. Meanwhile, Additional Chief Secretary, Environment Climate Change and Forests, Tamil Nadu government, Supriya Sahu reacted to a viral video of a crocodile crossing a road in suburban Perungulathur area during heavy rains in Chennai. In a post on X, she said, "Many are tweeting about this video. There are a few mugger crocodiles in several of the water bodies in Chennai. These are shy elusive animals and avoid human contact. This one has come out as the water has overflown due to massive rains under the impact of #CycloneMichuang please do not go close to water bodies." "There is no possibility of harm to humans IF these animals are left alone & UNPROVOKED. No need to panic. Wildlife division has been alerted and they are on the job to avoid any untoward incident #cyclonemichaung #Cyclone #Michaung #ChennaiRains." At Velachery in the city, a portion of land reportedly gave way, leading to a deep pit and some people were trapped. Also, a building in the locality caved in trapping some workers. Two people have been rescued and admitted to the hospital, police said without sharing further details. The Industries Department has set up a help desk for providing information and assistance to small and medium enterprises. "SIPCOT is continuously monitoring and clearing hurdles within the industrial parks located in affected districts using patrol teams," an official said. Tamil Nadu Governor R N Ravi said eastern coastal districts of the state have been badly affected by cyclone Michaung. The central and state government agencies have been deployed to ensure the safety of the people, he said. "The situation is being monitored by the central and state governments at the highest level," he said in a post on X. The Governor appealed to people to follow the advice of state government and "stay home and stay safe until the situation improves". The son of gangster-politician Mukhtar Ansari, who is currently lodged in Banda jail, has moved the Supreme Court seeking a direction to transfer his father to any prison outside Uttar Pradesh, saying he apprehends "imminent and serious threat" to his life. Umar Ansari has said in his petition that as Mukhtar Ansari belongs to a political party that is opposed to the state's ruling BJP, both "politically and ideologically", his family has been a target of "persecution" by the State. The petition has sought the top court's direction to transfer him from Banda jail to any prison in a state not ruled by the BJP. "The state has consistently been taking a personally inimical position against the petitioner's family, particularly his father, but now the petitioner's father has received reliable information that his life is in grave danger and there is a conspiracy afoot involving several actors within the state establishment to assassinate him in Banda jail," it claimed. The plea also sought a direction that Mukhtar Ansari be produced before courts only through vodeo conferencing. "The petitioner (Umar Ansari) herein has been constrained to file this writ petition under Article 32 of the Constitution of India as the petitioner apprehends an imminent and serious threat to his father i.E. Mukhtar Ansari's life who is currently lodged in Banda jail (Uttar Pradesh)," it said. It said the petitioner, being extremely fearful and concerned for his father, has been constrained to move the top court with the sole aim of protecting the life of his father. "The petitioner apprehends a grave and imminent threat to his father's life and limb in Banda jail," it said. The plea said the petitioner's mother had earlier approached the Allahabad High Court for protection, safety and security of Mukhtar Ansari. It said the high court had in May this year ordered enhanced security for Mukhtar Ansari. Mukhtar Ansari was elected to the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly multiple times from Mau constituency. "Further, another cause of concern is that even after the passing of the order dated May 3, 2023 by the Allahabad High Court granting enhanced security to the petitioner's father, there was an incident on May 18, 2023 where certain unidentified and suspicious persons visited jail barracks of the petitioner's father," it alleged. "The petitioner is deeply disturbed by the above-mentioned series of events including the murder of persons who were accused with his father in the BJP leader Krishnanand Rai murder case as well as co-accused in other cases under circumstances suggesting state complicity, the murder of late Atiq Ahmad and his brother in full police protection and therefore the petitioner apprehends an imminent threat to his father's life," the plea said. It said the apprehension also stemmed from the fact that Mukhtar Ansari is an eyewitness in many criminal cases where influential members of the ruling BJP are accused. "Therefore, covert and overt attempts are being made in order to take away the life of the petitioner's father and deter the progress of such criminal cases," it claimed. The plea said several attempts have already been made on the life of Mukhtar Ansari by those inimical to him in view of his political affiliations and he has already been attacked five times in the past. With the beginning of the winter session of Parliament, several opposition parties met here on Monday to forge a strategy to corner the Narendra Modi-led central government on issues of public interest. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge after the meeting said that they will continue to remain a responsible opposition. "As the Winter Session of the Parliament begins today, the leaders of like-minded political parties deliberated upon the various pressing issues facing the nation," Kharge said in a post on X. "As a responsible opposition, will stay the course and continue to make the Modi Government accountable," Kharge, also the leader of opposition in the Rajya Sabha, said. Leaders of various opposition parties met in the morning in Kharge's chamber in Parliament House and deliberated on their joint strategy against the government. They also discussed the issues to be raised in both houses during the winter session. Two pilots of the Indian Air Force were killed on Monday morning when their trainer aircraft met with an accident near Hyderabad, officials said. The IAF has ordered a Court of Inquiry to ascertain the cause of the accident. The incident occurred in Toopran mandal of the Medak district in Telangana, according to the local police. "One Pilatus PC 7 Mk Il trainer aircraft met with an accident today morning during a routine training sortie from the Air Force Academy, Hyderabad," an IAF official said. "It is with deep regret that lAF confirms that both the pilots on board have sustained fatal injuries," he said. Major corporations and governments all over the world are bringing about a major overhaul to their strategies to resolve soaring issues with least effort. Japan is also undermined by the complex challenges brought forth by the impacts and upshots of COVID-19. 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Blog Archive: Jan 2024 (56) Dec 2023 (155) Nov 2023 (150) Oct 2023 (155) Sep 2023 (150) Aug 2023 (155) Jul 2023 (155) Jun 2023 (150) May 2023 (155) Apr 2023 (150) Mar 2023 (155) Feb 2023 (140) Jan 2023 (155) Dec 2022 (156) Nov 2022 (150) Oct 2022 (155) Sep 2022 (150) Aug 2022 (155) Jul 2022 (154) Jun 2022 (150) May 2022 (155) Apr 2022 (150) Mar 2022 (155) Feb 2022 (140) Jan 2022 (156) Dec 2021 (156) Nov 2021 (150) Oct 2021 (155) Sep 2021 (150) Aug 2021 (155) Jul 2021 (155) Jun 2021 (150) May 2021 (155) Apr 2021 (150) Mar 2021 (155) Feb 2021 (140) Jan 2021 (155) Dec 2020 (155) Nov 2020 (150) Oct 2020 (158) Sep 2020 (150) Aug 2020 (130) Jul 2020 (124) Jun 2020 (120) May 2020 (124) Apr 2020 (120) Mar 2020 (124) Feb 2020 (116) Jan 2020 (125) Dec 2019 (126) Nov 2019 (120) Oct 2019 (124) Sep 2019 (120) Aug 2019 (125) Jul 2019 (124) Jun 2019 (120) May 2019 (123) Apr 2019 (121) Mar 2019 (124) Feb 2019 (112) Jan 2019 (125) Dec 2018 (126) Nov 2018 (120) Oct 2018 (124) Sep 2018 (121) Aug 2018 (124) Jul 2018 (125) Jun 2018 (120) May 2018 (124) Apr 2018 (121) Mar 2018 (124) Feb 2018 (112) Jan 2018 (123) Dec 2017 (124) Nov 2017 (124) Oct 2017 (141) Sep 2017 (135) Aug 2017 (138) Jul 2017 (137) Jun 2017 (134) May 2017 (138) Apr 2017 (135) Mar 2017 (139) Feb 2017 (129) Jan 2017 (143) Dec 2016 (135) Nov 2016 (138) Oct 2016 (142) Sep 2016 (128) Aug 2016 (133) Jul 2016 (136) Jun 2016 (138) May 2016 (164) Apr 2016 (311) Mar 2016 (348) Feb 2016 (320) Jan 2016 (348) Dec 2015 (314) Nov 2015 (338) Oct 2015 (363) Sep 2015 (358) Aug 2015 (399) Jul 2015 (374) Jun 2015 (331) May 2015 (337) Apr 2015 (319) Mar 2015 (320) Feb 2015 (271) Jan 2015 (286) Dec 2014 (254) Nov 2014 (238) Oct 2014 (287) Sep 2014 (267) Aug 2014 (259) Jul 2014 (260) Jun 2014 (238) May 2014 (241) Apr 2014 (228) Mar 2014 (240) Feb 2014 (217) Jan 2014 (263) Dec 2013 (226) Nov 2013 (254) Oct 2013 (256) Sep 2013 (252) Aug 2013 (263) Jul 2013 (261) Jun 2013 (251) May 2013 (250) Apr 2013 (221) Mar 2013 (193) Feb 2013 (164) Jan 2013 (157) Dec 2012 (155) Nov 2012 (240) Oct 2012 (526) Sep 2012 (411) Aug 2012 (394) Jul 2012 (284) Jun 2012 (229) May 2012 (213) Apr 2012 (213) Mar 2012 (253) Feb 2012 (269) Jan 2012 (298) Dec 2011 (273) Nov 2011 (219) Oct 2011 (204) Sep 2011 (201) Aug 2011 (236) Jul 2011 (217) Jun 2011 (211) May 2011 (206) Apr 2011 (215) Mar 2011 (215) Feb 2011 (186) Jan 2011 (215) Dec 2010 (107) Nov 2010 (98) Oct 2010 (55) Prime Minister and senior BJP leader Narendra Modi with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Union Home Minister Amit Shah during celebrations after party's victory in elections to the Legislative Assemblies of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, at BJP headquarters, in New Delhi (PTI Photo/Kamal Singh) New Delhi: It was the BJPs big day on Sunday. Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in both Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and trouncing the Congress in Rajasthan, the saffron party once again proved that it remained unassailable in the central and northern parts of India. The stunning electoral outcome of 3-0 in the Hindi heartland puts the BJP miles ahead of the Opposition in the run-up to the 2024 general election. The results again indicated that the "Modi magic" continued unabated. The counting for Mizoram will be held on Monday. While chants of "Hindi heartland Modified" echoed in the saffron corridors, an eerie silence prevailed in the Congress camp. Reeling under complete annihilation in the Hindi heartland, the Congress is trying to find solace in its lone electoral triumph in Telangana. Even in Telangana, the BJP has made inroads by managing to secure considerable leads in at least eight Assembly berths. With the BRS facing defeat, BJP spin doctors have begun work to eat into the space left out by the regional party and eventually emerge as the main Opposition to the Congress in Telangana, sources said. The BJP was heading towards a landslide victory in Madhya Pradesh by leading in 164 out of 230 seats. The Congress was struggling at 66. Of the 199 seats for which voting was held in Rajasthan, the BJP was leading in 116 seats, compared to 69 for the Congress. The BJP stunned the political pundits in Chhattisgarh by leading in 54 of 90 seats. With only 33 seats, the Congress was lagging way behind. In Chhattisgarh, the BJPs vote share went up by a huge 13 per cent and it gained 39 berths. While the BJP had managed only 33 per cent of the vote share in 2018 in Chhattisgarh, it clocked 46 per cent in the recent polls. It may be recalled that even after losing in the Hindi heartland in 2018, the BJP had managed to bag 303 seats on its own in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Following its stellar performance in these polls, the BJP "will eye at least 400 seats" with a slogan: "Ab ki bar 400 paar". As the South remained solidly with the INDIA alliance, the BJP will now be targeting the states in the northern and western parts of the country for the Lok Sabha polls next year. With the BJP heading towards victory in three of the four states that went to the polls, the party will now be in power in 12 states on its own, while the Congress, the second largest national party, will come down to three after losing Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. After ousting its rivals from the central and northern parts of the country, the Prime Minister took the social media route and stated: "The results in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan indicate that the people of India are firmly with the politics of good governance and development, which the @BJP4India stands for I thank the people of these states for their unwavering support and assure them that we will keep working tirelessly for their well-being. A special thanks to the hardworking party karyakartas. Each of them is exemplary! They have worked tirelessly and highlighted our development agenda among the people." Reaching out to people in Telangana, the Prime Minister, in a post on X, said: "My dear sisters and brothers of Telangana Thank you for your support to the @BJP4India. Over the last few years, this support has only been increasing and this trend will continue in the times to come. Our bond with Telangana is unbreakable and we will keep working for the people. I also appreciate the industrious efforts of each and every BJP karyakarta." Till a few months back, almost all the polls had predicted a comfortable victory for the Congress in Chhattisgarh and a huge opportunity to return to power in Madhya Pradesh. Led by Congress leader Kamal Nath, the party tried to take on the BJP by unleashing a massive Hindutva campaign. Besides describing himself as a "Hanuman bhakt", the Congress chief ministerial face went on to say that with "82 per cent Hindus, we are already a Hindu Rashtra". The Congress Hindutva card eventually collapsed. Meanwhile, with a huge electoral victory, Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan not only decimated the Opposition and the "anti-incumbency" notion, but also silenced the critics within his own party. Besides attracting a lion's share of the womens vote, tribals and OBCs seemed to have voted en masse for the BJP. Led by Mr Chouhan, the BJP seems to have swept the Chhindwara region, the bastion of Mr Kamal Nath. However, the main target of Mr Chouhan had been women voters in the state. Of 2.72 crore women in MP, 76 per cent came out to vote this time. Following this stupendous win, all the talk of replacing Mr Chouhan have now receded into the background. With this victory, Mr Chouhan could be heading for a fifth term as the chief minister. Stepping out after the party marched way ahead of the Congress during the day, Mr Chouhan told the media: "Our Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji is in the hearts of the people of Madhya Pradesh. The state is also in the heart of Modi ji." In an attempt to analyse this dismal performance, some Congress leaders felt that "over-confidence" and "failure to hold on to its tribal and backward vote banks" resulted in its shocking defeat in Chhattisgarh. Not only did the BJP sweep the tribal-dominated Bastar region, it also ate into the vote share of the Janta Congress Chhattisgarh (JCC) and the BSP. The Congress also failed to match the BJPs formidable electoral machinery and booth management. In Rajasthan, the skirmishes between the two top Congress leaders, Mr Ashok Gehlot and Mr Sachin Pilot, eventually proved to be the partys nemesis. Only during the end of the campaign, the Congress leadership somehow managed to persuade both Mr Gehlot and Mr Pilot to put up a united front. "It was too late by then", a Congress functionary said. The electoral debacles in the Hindi heartland yet again put a question mark on the Congress leadership, particularly on the Gandhi clan. While Mr Rahul Gandhi repeatedly raised the issue of a caste census in Madhya Pradesh, the party had no OBC leader to showcase in the state. Both Mr Kamal Nath and Mr Digvjaya Singh belong to the upper castes. However, some Congress leaders feel that the electoral defeat in the Hindi heartland may now help the party get rid of the old guard. The electoral defeats in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan will now bring the curtain down on 76-year-old Ashok Gehlot, 77-year-old Kamal Nath and 76-year-old Digvijaya Singh. It was argued that Mr Rahul Gandhi had managed to script a spectacular victory in Telangana, where he "did not have the baggage of the old guard". For the Congress, an improved performance in the Hindi heartland would have come as a significant electoral gain and positioned it as the natural leader of the INDIA alliance. Heavy rain has caused severe waterlogging in Chennai Airport Hyderabad: Chennai airport has suspended flight operations until 11 pm on Monday due to heavy rains and winds from Cyclone Michaung. Earlier, arrivals were halted for two hours between 09:17 am and 11:30 am. Flights by Akasa Air, IndiGo, Vistara, and Air India to and from Chennai have been affected, leading to diversions. Airlines recommend passengers rebook between December 4-10 for travel on or before December 17, citing inclement weather conditions. Passengers won't incur additional charges for rescheduling. Airlines advise checking flight statuses and allowing extra time for travel. Air India offers a one-time waiver for rescheduling/cancellation charges. IMD issues red, yellow alerts for Tamil Nadu, Odisha The India Meteorological Department (IMD) issued a red alert for Tamil Nadu, predicting heavy to very heavy rainfall on December 4. North coastal Tamil Nadu and Puducherry may experience light to moderate rainfall with isolated heavy to very heavy rainfall. Odisha is under a yellow alert for heavy rainfall in various parts on December 4, with predictions of light to moderate rainfall in several areas. An orange alert is issued for December 5, anticipating heavy to very heavy rainfall in specific locations in Odisha. Cyclone Michaung landfall MD Issues Red Alert for Heavy Rainfall in Tamil Nadu on December 4; North Coastal Areas and Puducherry Expecting Light to Moderate Rainfall with Isolated Heavy to Very Heavy Rainfall. Odisha Under Yellow Alert for Heavy Rainfall on December 4, Including Light to Moderate Rainfall in Several Areas. Orange Alert Issued for December 5, Predicting Heavy to Very Heavy Rainfall in Specific Locations in Odisha. Visuals from a counting centre in Serchhip (ANI) New Delhi: The counting of votes in elections to the 40-member Mizoram assembly began Monday morning. The counting process began at 8 am and postal ballots will be counted for the first half of an hour, a senior official with the election commission said. According to the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, Mizoram, the counting will be conducted in 13 centres across the state and 40 counting halls. There will be 399 EVM tables and 56 postal ballot tables in 40 counting halls across the state. Nearly 4000 personnel will be involved in the counting of votes, as per the state election commission. After a saffron wave swept the Hindi heartland, taking the BJP to decisive mandates in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, and the Congress wrested Telangana from the BRS, all eyes have now shifted to the Northeast as Mizoram is to reveal its mandate on Monday. The counting in the tiny Northeast state, which was initially scheduled for December 3, Sunday, along with four other states, was pushed back by a day following representations to the Election Commission by civil society, citing an important day in the religious calendar in the Christian-majority state. Considering appeals by political parties and civil society organisations, citing the special significance of Sunday for the people of Mizoram, the Election Commission on November 29 officially announced the deferment of the counting of votes in the state to Monday. Four major contenders are in fray in the northeastern state, which voted to elect its 40-member legislative assembly on November 7. These include the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF), the Zoram People's Movement (ZPM), the Congress and the BJP. Earlier, on Sunday, the chief ministerial face of the Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) and party candidate of Serchhip constituency, Lalduhoma, voiced confidence in the party forming a 'stable' government in the state. He said the exit poll predictions, released on Thursday, were based on scientific methodology and were 'most reliable'. "All the exit poll results point towards us. We do not need any other political party," he said. Aizawl Deputy Commissioner Nazuk Kumar said on Sunday that all arrangements and preparations for the counting of votes in Mizoram on December 4 have been completed. According to exit-poll projections, the two regional players--MNF and ZPM--are in the race to form government in Mizoram, with most predictions stating that the ruling party, led by Chief Minister Zoramthanga, has an advantage in the Northeast state, while there is also a possibility of a hung assembly. The elections to the 40-member Mizoram assembly were held on November 7, with the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF) facing a stout challenge from the Zoram People's Movement (ZPM), Congress, and the BJP. Following the deferment of the counting of votes for Mizoram, the state's Chief Electoral Officer Madhup Vyas said the Election Commission agreed to the request of social organisations and political parties as "Sunday was devoted to church duties and prayers". Meanwhile, a day ahead of the counting of votes for the Mizoram Assembly Elections, Chief Minister Zoramthanga offered prayers at the Zarkawt Presbyterian Church. The chief ministerial face of ZPM, Lalduhoma, also attended special prayers at a church in the Aizawl district on Sunday. Visuals from the site of aircraft crash (ANI) Medak: Two Indian Air Force (IAF) pilots were killed in action when their Pilatus trainer aircraft crashed at Toopran town in Medak district on Monday morning, IAF officials said. According to officials, the crash took place at around 8:55 am during training at Air Force Academy near Dindigul district. The pilots include an instructor and one cadet. The media release from IAF said, "One Pilatus PC 7 Mk Il trainer aircraft met with an accident today morning during a routine training sortie from AFA, Hyderabad. A Court of Inquiry has been ordered to ascertain the cause of the accident." The aircraft caught fire after it crashed and was soon reduced to ashes. SP, Medak, Rohini said that the aircraft crashed near Toopran. "It's a Training Aircraft from Dindigul airport. There were two people inside the aircraft, one trainer and a trainee. The airport staff and clue team are on the spot. The firefighters doused the fire," SP Rohini said. "They are trying to find out if there are any survivors. They are combing the area to find if there are body remains. Further details awaited," the SP added. The reason for the accident is yet to be known. Lok Sabha New Delhi: The much-delayed Sammakka Sarakka Central Tribal University, which was promised as part of the bifurcation of erstwhile united Andhra Pradesh in 2014 is all set to become a reality. Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Monday introduced a Bill in the Lok Sabha to establish a central tribal university in Telangana. According to the statement and objects of the Central Universities (Amendment) Bill, 2023, the establishment of "Sammakka Sarakka Central Tribal University" will cater to the regional aspirations for years to come. The proposed institution, it said, will increase access and quality of higher education and facilitate and promote higher education and research facilities for the people of Telangana. It will also promote advanced knowledge by providing instructional and research facilities in tribal art, culture and customs and advancement in technology to the tribal population of India. "Apart from bringing focus to tribal education, the central tribal university shall carry out all educational and other activities like any other central university," it read. The issue hogged headlines after Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised its establishment in the thick of the election campaign in Mahabubnagar. It was a part of the other major promises like the sanction of a national turmeric board and the issue of further Terms of Reference (ToR) to the existing Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal-II (KWDT-II) under section 5(1) of the ISRWD Act for its adjudication between the States of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh (AP). Reacting to the development, Rani Rudrama Reddy, a spokesperson of the BJP, said, "The party has always stood by its words. The Centre also delivered the turmeric board and gave a railway manufacturing unit to Kazipet. We made a tribal woman the first president of the country." The establishment of a central tribal university in Telangana is obligatory under the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014. The Central Universities Act, 2009, was enacted to establish and incorporate universities for teaching and research in various states. The law is tweaked from time to time. TPCC leader Revanth Reddy (Image: DC) Hyderabad: The Telangana Congress Legislature Party will meet on Monday to elect its leader, even as the party staked its claim to form the next government by meeting Governor Dr Tamilisai Soundararajan on Sunday evening. Pradesh Congress Committee chief A. Revanth Reddy, Telangana incharge Manikrao Thakre, Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar and former PCC chief N. Uttam Kumar Reddy were among the Congress leaders to meet the Governor. "We will hold the CLP meeting at 9.30 am on Monday and follow the due procedure prescribed in the Congress and get back to you," Shivakumar told mediapersons outside Raj Bhavan. He refused to take further questions on who the Chief Minister would be, although Uttam Kumar Reddy confirmed that no decision was taken on the top post. Revanth Reddy is the frontrunner for the top post, with party sources saying he had the blessings of the partys central leadership, given the TPCCs rejuvenation under Revanth Reddys leadership and his smooth conduct of the Congress Working Committee meeting, which culminated with a massive public meeting where Sonia Gandhi launched the Six Guarantees. The overwhelming response from people in the public meetings attended by Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra with Revanth Reddy during the campaign also helped the latter consolidate his position, sources said. Even his detractors admitted that he was the most popular leader having grassroots connections with the electorate since the time of Dr Y.S. Rajashekar Reddy. Sources said CLP leader Bhatti Vikramarka also enjoyed a good rapport with the central leadership and had scored brownie points with his padayatra. He also succeeded in changing a few candidates by directly approaching the central leadership. Leaders opposing Revanth Reddys elevation might rally around Bhatti, who might be offered the Deputy Chief Minister post, if Revanth Reddy was chosen as CM, sources said. Before the Congress met the Governor, Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao tendered his resignation through a letter sent with a staffer. According to the police, Rao left Pragathi Bhavan in a private vehicle and proceeded to his Erravelli farmhouse. The Governor immediately accepted his resignation and the proposed Cabinet meeting for Monday was cancelled, with the House deemed dissolved. Meanwhile, speaking in Khammam, Dr Tellam Venkata Rao, BRS Bhadrachalam MLA-elect, said he would join the Congress on December 8 for the development of his constituency. TPCC president A. Revanth Reddy and BJP MP and national general secretary Bandi Sanjay Hyderabad: BJP general secretary Bandi Sanjay on Sunday made special mention of TPCC chief A. Revanth Reddy, following the Congress victory in the elections. Congratulating the Congress and Revanth Reddy, Sanjay said they both had been singled out by former chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao and targeted by the outgoing government. This apparently follows the tribute that Revanth Reddy paid Sanjay during a TV event recently. When he was compared to BRS leader K.T. Rama Rao, Revanth Reddy objected and said, "Dont compare with KTR. I am from merit quota and he is from management quota plus NRI quota. His father heads a party and has made his son a working president." He continued: "I have no objection to comparing myself with Bandi Sanjay as he has struggled to come this far. KTR has no significance and stature and position of his own. I dont have anything to do with the sons. I am fighting his father. Its a fight between KCR, BJP and the Congress." In Chhattisgarh, where the poll result left many party leaders surprised, the names of Union minister Renuka Singh, Rajya Sabha MP Saroj Pandey, state unit chief Arun Sao, former chief Vishudeo Sai and Lata Usendi are also doing the rounds for the top post. (Photo: AFP) New Delhi: The "semi-final" before the 2024 electoral battle is over with the BJP registering stunning wins in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, whose mandate is expected to boost the partys chances in the general election. However, another battle lies ahead for the BJP top brass, which is to name the chief ministers for the three states. In at least two, the central leadership has always been wary of factionalism. While former chief minister Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan, incumbent CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh and former CM Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh are said to be the top contenders for CM in their respective states, there is also some talk of the BJP top brass likely to go with "new faces" to counter "voter fatigue" and factionalism and also to usher in a new leadership. Speculation is rife in Madhya Pradesh that the BJP will name its CM candidate keeping in mind the caste factor and for the first time could also name a deputy CM to "adjust" the caste arithmetic and "maintain a balance" within the state organisation. The names of Union ministers Prahlad Patel, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Narendra Singh Tomar, along with Kailash Vijavargiya, among others, are also doing the rounds for the CM post. Interestingly, in Rajasthan, where Ms Raje is seen as a front-runner for the post, MLAs have been going to her residence since morning as part of "sishtachar bhent" (courtesy visit). More than 40 MLAs are said to have met Ms Raje. While in political circles, it was seen as a show of strength by Ms Raje, a senior BJP leader from the central team said "no matter how senior someone is, he/she will have to abide by the decision taken by the leadership from Delhi". The names of Diya Kumari, Balaknath Yogi, Acharaya Balmukand, Union minister Gajendra Shekhawat, among others, are also doing the round for the top Rajasthan post. In Chhattisgarh, where the poll result left many party leaders "surprised", the names of Union minister Renuka Singh, Rajya Sabha MP Saroj Pandey, state unit chief Arun Sao, former chief Vishudeo Sai and Lata Usendi are also doing the rounds for the top post. In New Delhi, the BJP top brass started consultations over the CM issue. Senior leaders from the states, also including Rajasthan unit chief C.P. Joshi and state in-charge Arun Singh, among others, met the BJP top brass. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president J.P. Nadda, Union ministers Amit Shah and Rajnath Singh and general secretary (organisation) B.L. Santhosh held a meeting late on Sunday evening to discuss the issue. Speculation is rife that the BJP parliamentary board could meet soon to give its stamp of approval on the CM faces in the three states and then the BJP legislature party in the three states will formally approve the name. The party will also be sending observers to the three states to oversee the legislature party meetings. The Toronto-Dominion Bank, together with its subsidiaries, provides various financial products and services in Canada, the United States, and internationally. It operates through four segments: Canadian Personal and Commercial Banking, U.S. Retail, Wealth Management and Insurance, 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. It also provides credit cards and payments; real estate secured lending, auto finance, and consumer lending services; point-of-sale payment solutions for large and small businesses; wealth and asset management products, and advice to retail and institutional clients through direct investing, advice-based, and asset management businesses; and property and casualty insurance, as well as life and health insurance products. The company also provides capital markets, and corporate and investment banking products and services, including underwriting and distribution of new debt and equity issues; advice on strategic acquisitions and divestitures; and trading, funding, and investment services to corporations, governments, and institutions. It offers its products and services under the TD Bank and America's Most Convenient Bank brand names. The Toronto-Dominion Bank was founded in 1855 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Donaldson Company, Inc. manufactures and sells filtration systems and replacement parts worldwide. The company operates through three segments: Mobile Solutions, Industrial Solutions, and Life Sciences. Its Mobile Solutions segment provides replacement filters for air and liquid filtration applications, such as air filtration systems; liquid filtration systems for fuel, lube, and hydraulic applications; exhaust and emissions systems and sensors; indicators; and monitoring systems. This segment sells its products to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the construction, mining, agriculture, aerospace, defense, and transportation markets; and to independent distributors, and OEM dealer networks. The company's Industrial Solutions segment offers dust, fume, and mist collectors; compressed air and industrial gasses purification systems; and hydraulic and lubricated rotating equipment applications, as well as gas and liquid filtration for industrial processes. This segment sells its products to various distributors, OEMs, and end-users. Its Life Sciences segment provides micro-environment gas and liquid filtration for food, beverage, and industrial processes; bioprocessing equipment, that includes bioreactors and fermenters; and bioprocessing consumables, such as chromatography devices, reagents and filters, and polytetrafluoroethylene membrane-based products, as well as specialized air and gas filtration systems for applications, including hard disk drives, semi-conductor manufacturing and sensors, battery systems, and powertrain components to OEMs and various end-users. The company was founded in 1915 and is headquartered in Bloomington, Minnesota. Duke Energy Corporation, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a leading American electric power and natural gas holding company. With a rich history dating back to its founding in 1904 by James Buchanan Duke and Benjamin Newton Duke, Duke Energy has become a prominent player in the energy industry. The company operates in multiple states and serves millions of customers, providing essential energy solutions for their homes and businesses. Duke Energy's mission is to power customers' lives by delivering safe, reliable, sustainable energy while embracing innovation and environmental stewardship. Duke Energy operates in three primary segments: Electric Utilities and Infrastructure, Gas Utilities and Infrastructure, and Commercial Renewables. The Electric Utilities and Infrastructure segment generates, transmits, distributes, and sells electricity to residential, commercial, and industrial customers. The Gas Utilities and Infrastructure segment distributes natural gas to customers in the Midwest, the Carolinas, and parts of the Southeast. The Commercial Renewables segment focuses on developing, owning, and operating wind and solar renewable generation projects across the United States. With a customer-centric approach, Duke Energy serves diverse customers, including households, small businesses, large industrial facilities, and government entities. The company's commitment to providing reliable energy solutions has earned it a loyal customer base and a reputation for excellence in the industry. Duke Energy is led by a highly experienced and accomplished management team that drives the company's strategic vision and operational excellence. At the organization's helm is Ms. Lynn J. Good, who serves as Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer. Ms. Good has been with Duke Energy since 2003 and has been crucial in guiding the company's growth and transformation. She brings extensive knowledge of the energy sector and a strong focus on sustainability and customer satisfaction. Duke Energy has consistently demonstrated strong financial performance, driven by its operational efficiency and focus on delivering value to shareholders. The company has a strong net profit margin of over 10%. Duke Energy's commitment to financial stability is evident through its disciplined approach to managing debt. This prudent financial management allows the company to invest in infrastructure, technology, and renewable energy projects to meet the evolving needs of its customers. Duke Energy operates in the electric power and natural gas industry, supporting economic activities and daily life. As the industry evolves, there are several trends and challenges that Duke Energy and its peers must navigate. The transition toward cleaner energy sources and reducing carbon emissions have become the primary focus of the energy sector. Duke Energy has recognized the importance of sustainability and has been actively working towards reducing its environmental footprint. The company has set ambitious goals to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and to increase its renewable energy capacity. By investing in wind and solar projects and retiring older, less efficient coal-fired power plants, Duke Energy aims to align with evolving environmental regulations and customer expectations. The industry also faces regulatory and political factors influencing operations and profitability. Changes in energy policies, tax regulations, and environmental standards can impact production costs and the competitive landscape. Duke Energy actively engages with regulatory bodies and policymakers to ensure its interests are represented and to contribute to shaping a sustainable energy future. Competitive positioning is crucial in the energy industry, and Duke Energy has established itself as a key player. The company's extensive infrastructure, reliable service, and strong customer relationships give it a competitive advantage. Furthermore, Duke Energy's commitment to innovation and exploring new technologies positions it well to capitalize on emerging opportunities and maintain its market leadership. Duke Energy is well-positioned to capitalize on growth opportunities within the energy industry. One significant avenue for expansion is the development of renewable energy projects. As the demand for clean energy rises, Duke Energy has actively invested in wind and solar projects, expanding its commercial renewables segment. By leveraging its expertise and resources, the company aims to increase its renewable energy capacity and contribute to a sustainable future. Another growth opportunity lies in the modernization of infrastructure and grid systems. Duke Energy is committed to upgrading its power delivery systems, improving reliability, and incorporating advanced technologies. The company aims to enhance efficiency and provide customers with more reliable and resilient energy services by investing in smart grids, energy storage solutions, and digital infrastructure. While Duke Energy has demonstrated resilience and adaptability, risks and challenges in the industry should be considered when evaluating the company's future prospects and stock performance. One of the significant challenges Duke Energy faces is the evolving regulatory landscape. The energy industry is subject to various local, state, and federal regulations. Regulation changes can impact Duke Energy's operations, including the cost of compliance and the ability to pursue specific projects. Additionally, regulatory decisions related to rate structures and pricing can influence the company's revenue and profitability. Another risk is the volatility of energy prices. Duke Energy's financial performance is influenced by the cost of fuel and energy sources used in its operations. Fluctuations in commodity prices, such as natural gas and coal, can impact the company's expenses and margins. Moreover, changes in supply and demand dynamics or geopolitical events can lead to price volatility, affecting Duke Energy's financial results. Environmental factors are also significant considerations for Duke Energy. Transitioning to cleaner energy sources and reducing carbon emissions requires substantial investments in renewable energy infrastructure. While Duke Energy has been actively investing in renewables, there are risks associated with project development, such as construction delays, cost overruns, and uncertain regulatory support. Customer preferences and demand patterns present both opportunities and challenges for Duke Energy. As consumers become more conscious of environmental sustainability, there is a growing demand for renewable energy solutions. However, customers also seek greater control over their energy consumption, potentially leading to a decline in overall electricity demand. Duke Energy must adapt to changing customer needs and preferences while ensuring a reliable and efficient energy supply. Operational risks, including equipment failures, natural disasters, and cybersecurity threats, are inherent in the energy industry. Duke Energy operates an extensive infrastructure, and any disruptions or incidents can impact its operations, financial performance, and reputation. The company has implemented risk management strategies and invests in infrastructure resilience to mitigate these risks, but they remain potential challenges. Ralph Lauren Corporation designs, markets, and distributes lifestyle products in North America, Europe, Asia, and internationally. The company offers apparel, including a range of men's, women's, and children's clothing; footwear and accessories, which comprise casual shoes, dress shoes, boots, sneakers, sandals, eyewear, watches, fashion and fine jewelry, scarves, hats, gloves, and umbrellas, as well as leather goods, such as handbags, luggage, small leather goods, and belts; home products consisting of bed and bath lines, furniture, fabric and wallcoverings, lighting, tabletop, kitchen linens, floor coverings, and giftware; and fragrances. It sells apparel and accessories under the Ralph Lauren Collection, Ralph Lauren Purple Label, Polo Ralph Lauren, Double RL, Lauren Ralph Lauren, Polo Golf Ralph Lauren, Ralph Lauren Golf, RLX Ralph Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren Children, and Chaps brands; women's fragrances under the Ralph Lauren Collection, Woman by Ralph Lauren, Romance Collection, and Ralph Collection brand names; and men's fragrances under the Polo Blue, Ralph's Club, Safari, Purple Label, Polo Red, Polo Green, Polo Black, Polo Sport, and Big Pony Men's brand names. The company's restaurant collection includes The Polo Bar in New York City; RL Restaurant in Chicago; Ralph's in Paris; The Bar at Ralph Lauren located in Milan; and Ralph's Coffee concept. It sells its products to department stores, specialty stores, and golf and pro shops, as well as directly to consumers through its retail stores, concession-based shop-within-shops, and its digital commerce sites. The company directly operates retail stores and concession-based shop-within-shops; and operates Ralph Lauren stores, factory stores, and stores and shops through licensing partners. Ralph Lauren Corporation was founded in 1967 and is headquartered in New York, New York. As of September 30, 2023, the Company owned or held a direct or indirect ownership interest in 296 apartment communities containing 89,240 apartment homes in 12 states and the District of Columbia, of which 17 communities were under development and one community was under redevelopment. The Company is an equity REIT in the business of developing, redeveloping, acquiring and managing apartment communities in leading metropolitan areas in New England, the New York/New Jersey Metro area, the Mid-Atlantic, the Pacific Northwest, and Northern and Southern California, as well as in the Company's expansion regions of Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina, Southeast Florida, Dallas and Austin, Texas, and Denver, Colorado. Royal Bank of Canada operates as a diversified financial service company worldwide. The company's Personal & Commercial Banking segment offers checking and savings accounts, home equity financing, personal lending, private banking, indirect lending, including auto financing, mutual funds and self-directed brokerage accounts, guaranteed investment certificates, credit cards, and payment products and solutions; and lending, leasing, deposit, investment, foreign exchange, cash management, auto dealer financing, trade products, and services to small and medium-sized commercial businesses. This segment offers financial products and services through branches, automated teller machines, and mobile sales network. Its Wealth Management segment provides a suite of wealth, investment, trust, banking, credit, and other advice-based solutions and strategies to high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals, and institutional clients; asset management products to institutional and individual clients; and asset and investor services to financial institutions, asset managers, and asset owners. The company's Insurance segment offers life, health, home, auto, travel, wealth, annuities, property and casualty, and reinsurance advice and solutions; and business insurance services to individual, business, and group clients through its advice centers, RBC insurance stores, and mobile advisors; digital platforms; and independent brokers and partners. The company's Capital Markets segment offers advisory and origination, sales and trading, lending and financing, and transaction banking services to corporations, institutional clients, asset managers, private equity firms, and governments. The company was founded in 1864 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Chatham Lodging Trust (NYSE:CLDT) pays an annual dividend of $0.28 per share and currently has a dividend yield of 2.55%. The dividend payout ratio is 700.18%. Payout ratios above 75% are not desirable because they may not be sustainable. Based on earnings estimates, CLDT will have a dividend payout ratio of 23.93% next year. This indicates that the company will be able to sustain or increase its dividend. Read our dividend analysis for CLDT. Change of location: This meeting was originally scheduled to be held in St Columb's Hall but has been moved to Sandinos. A public meeting in Derry with Sherry Wolf from New York Jewish Voice for Peace, IPSC Donegal Secretary Fadl Mustapha and chaired by Cllr Shaun Harkin will be held this week. The meeting on Apartheid Israel, Joe Biden and Palestinian Freedom will be held 7pm Wednesday December 6 upstairs in Sandinos. Meeting organiser Anita Villa said: "Israel has launched the second phase of its genocidal war on Gaza, following a week long pause. "We can't stop talking about Palestine and need to escalate our solidarity actions across Ireland and the world to end this horror. "Despite global demands for a permanent ceasefire the US and British governments continue to arm Israel and finance the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. "Cynically, the Irish government has continued to back Israel and US President Joe Biden despite mass opposition across Ireland. "Joe Biden was paraded across Ireland as a peace builder but is the main sponsor of Israel's slaughter, while a large majority of Americans demand a permanent ceasefire. "Mass demonstrations in every US city have challenged Biden's endorsement of unprecedented Israeli terror. These included the largest ever protests by American Jews in support of Palestine." Fadl Mustapha, Secretary of the Donegal Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, will discuss the the 'genocidal war on Gaza' and how people can act in solidarity with Palestine and assist the dismantling of apartheid. Sherry Wolf, from New York Jewish Voice for Peace, will explain the geo-political reasons for unconditional US government support for apartheid Israel and the grassroots challenge facing Biden." More information on the event can be found of Facebook. The Chair of the Police Federation for NI said it asked its members to consider challenging a Police Ombudsmans findings of RUC 'collusive behaviour' because it affected its members and retired cadre. Last year, The Northern Ireland Retired Police Officers Association, supported by the Police Federation, was granted a judicial review of the ombudsman's legal right to make findings of collusive behaviour. It wanted statements issued by Police Ombudsman Marie Anderson to be declared unlawful. In 2022, Mrs Anderson found evidence of 'collusive behaviour' by the RUC in a report into the forces handling of paramilitary attacks by the UDA/UFF including the Greysteel massacre. The question was put to the Chair of the Police Federation for NI, Liam Kelly, by Cllr Christopher Jackson at DCSDC's Governance and Strategic Planning meeting last week. The Sinn Fein councillor firstly acknowledged the issues PSNI faces due to budgetary pressures, which was the basis for Mr Kelly attending Council, then asked about the legal challenge. He said Council had concerns the Police Federation's actions in the past have 'have went some way to damage confidence in policing' in the district. Our council has expressed our dismay at the representative body of serving PSNI officers to attempt to deny victims' families access to Truth and Justice and this is the first opportunity we've had to raise this directly with you, he said. In relation to representing the views of your members, did you consult your members before using your resources to attempt to deny victims within this city and district access to truth and justice by opposing the Police Ombudsman's report? And a really simple question, is it the role of the Police Federation to defend the actions of the RUC? Because that goes to the core of the confidence issue in relation to the current, serving Police Officers who are working day and daily to provide a public service to people of this city and district. Mr Kelly said the body asked its membership to consider the report's legal process because it affected members and retired members. I have to say at first instance I'm surprised I'm being asked about things, which in my mind were nothing to do with the subject matter I've been asked to come [about] today, he said. Irrespective of that, the Police Federation really does represent the views of our members. We're elected to represent the views of our members. In relation to the Police Ombusman's investigations, there's legal process, which we asked our membership to look at in relation to things that affect our members and affect our retired cadre so of course we would take the legal action to do that. That's not to try and hinder justice or potential outcomes for people. It's to make sure it's done fairly, proportionately and appropriately and we will continue to make those decisions, so we can agree to disagree on that one. Again, as a representative body, we do reflect the attitudes and the behaviours of our membership and we have a statutory responsibility to do that. On the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people, Derry welcomed Nawal Slamiah to the city from her home in Idna - a village of 35,000 in Hebron, in the West Bank. Nawal travelled here with her daughter Haifa, to talk about her work with the Idna Co-operative Association for Embroidery and Handicrafts and the reality of life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. A young widow, Nawal is a mother of three children - two daughters and a son. Mayor Patricia Logue presents a gift to Nawal Slemiah, founder and director of the Women in Hebron Women's Cooperative at a reception held in the Mayor's Parlour. (Photo - Tom Heaney, nwpresspics) Speaking to Derry Now, she said the people of Idna are supposed to be farmers but had lost their land as a result of Israel building apartheid walls on Green Line villages all over Palestine, in the West Bank and Gaza. The Green Line is the name for the border separating pre-1967 Israel from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Our people lost their lands with the wall, said Nawal. This is how Israel carried out the occupation. Our people went to work in Israel building houses. They pay good money, thats why people go there. People need money. You cant blame them. However, the last two months proved that it was occupation politics because now there are no jobs. All the Palestine workers have left Israel. They cant work there anymore, and there is no work in the West Bank for anybody. There is no work, no jobs, no money. There are no salaries in our Government. Everything has stopped in Palestine. Nawal explained she was a co-founder of the Idna Co-operative Association, which is known internationally as Women in Hebron. The co-op has 150 women from eight villages around Hebron, mainly Idna, said Nawal. We do traditional cross stitching work. The women learned how to do it from their mothers and grandmothers. We were thinking about how we could start a business using their skills. So, at the end of 2005, we started the Idna Co-operative Association for Embroidery and Handicrafts. The brand is well known now. We have a website and we have Facebook. People can order from the website. It is very easy. The problem for us is payment and shipping because under the occupation it is hard to send one piece. Shipping is very expensive for people so we need bulk orders. Customers can order together. Customers in America can order from our partner there. In Britain we have a friend in London. We send him some orders and he helps us ship these orders to people there and in Ireland. Customers pay him and he gives the money to us. Due to the Occupation, Nawal explained the Co-operative was still struggling to have a bank account in Britain, or somewhere to enable us to use paypal to solve the problem we face in Palestine receiving payment for our goods. She added: We have a bank account in Palestine but it is hard to get an international one because of Israel. They want to control everything. Our government has a problem with that too. This means the women are not getting paid for their work. Our sales really need to be international because local people dont need to buy embroidery. We have tried to find a special niche, which is why I was pleased to be able to come to Derry and speak and sell our products. Turning to the current situation in Palestine, Nawal said there were no words to explain what was happening in Gaza and the West Bank at the minute. Derry knows better than me what occupation means, said Nawal. The attack in Gaza killed more than 20,000 people in 10 weeks, mostly women and children. More than 10,000 of the dead were children and women, who did nothing. They did nothing. The people in Gaza are under occupation, in a great prison. They couldnt move. They couldnt get any help. They wanted to break the silence. They also wanted to tell Israel, We can enter your houses and go and fight. They did not kill any civilians, that was a lie. The people killed were women soldiers. They entered the military settlement, not civilian houses. The people in Gaza have paid a high price and I wish they would get something for that. I wish it was in my hand, I would say, Free Gaza and free the West Bank but it is not in my hand and it is not in their hand anymore. At least they need to free the prisoners and free Gaza from the settlements around and stop attacking Gaza all the time. Nawal called on the governments of Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Qatar to intervene to stop the fighting in Palestine. She added: I hoped they would get behind Gaza but instead they are negotiating with Israel. This is not what Gaza started and they dont want it to end this way. They want to get something after all this high price they paid. They want to free Gaza from the settlements around. They want to free all of the prisoners, leave no-one They also want to free Jerusalem and the West Bank. They want to stop the occupation and say, Thats enough. We have been under occupation for 75 years. Unfortunately, I dont think we will do it this time. We have seen the rallies all over the world and we have seen the truth is out now. They havent been able to cover it with lies as they did in the past. Mayoral reception for Nawal Slemiah 1 - Mayor Patricia Logue with Nawal Slemiah, founder and director of the Women in Hebron Women's Cooperative at a reception held in the Mayor's Parlour. Included are members of the Bloody Sunday Trust and the Museum of Free Derry. Seated on left, Maeve McLaughlin and on right Robin Percival. Standing, from left, are Paul Loughlin, Tony Doherty, Daisy Mules, Haifa Slemiah, Colr. Aisling Hutton and Adrian Kerr. (Photo - Tom Heaney, nwpresspics) People have seen whats happening and millions of people are demonstrating. It made us very happy that at least we have support from the people, she added. We know the governments all support Israel and we dont blame the West if they support Israel. If the Arab countries and the Muslim countries are with Israel. They are in negotiations after Israel killed more than 20,000 people and damaged the whole of Gaza. They are killing the people in west, south and north Gaza. They are killing them. They are demolishing their houses. How can they go back? They dont want them back but they will be back. How will they survive their lost families? They want to go back home to try and find their homes or, at least, where they used to live. They want to visit the people they lost. But, I dont think they will be able to visit anyone because the bodies were all buried together in mass graves, said Nawal. Derry is experiencing a mental health epidemic and a cancer epidemic according to a local health advocate. Maureen Collins, project manager with Hive Cancer Support - formerly Pink Ladies Cancer Group - said the situation was due to delayed diagnosis, screening and treatment. Maureen was speaking to Derry Now in advance of the unveiling of the groups We Carry On mural on Strand Road on Thursday last. We Carry On! - From Left Michelle McLaren Development Worker and Maureen Collins Project Manager at Hive Cancer Support, Dr Claire McCauley and Dr Carrie Flannagan of Ulster University, Sarah Duddy Programmes & Services Coordinator and Jacquie Loughrey Education and Prevention Officer at Hive Cancer Support with Donal O'Doherty of Peaball graffiti collective. She added people were also delaying going for routine medical appointments because they did not want to further burden the NHS. The We Carry On mural was designed by Peaball graffiti collective based on new research from Ulster University into the mental health impact of cancer surgery, commissioned by Hive. We are not just talking about chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and treatment, things we can talk about openly, said Maureen, but the deep psychological impact of surgery and how that can leave a person feeling. People feel they are basically expected to go out and face the world, even though they are looking at themselves every day post surgery and possibly post two or three surgeries and wondering, What happened? Who am I? Am I still here? Am I not still here? How do I move on with this? Down the years within our organisation some people have expressed the feeling, I am no longer a woman or I am no longer a man because the pieces and the parts which come naturally to being male or female are not there. They are wondering, What do I describe myself as? It can go as deep as that in a wee conversation in a room or it can go, Im ugly, My hairs gone, My teeth are gone, I dont walk right anymore because it could be to do with a prosthesis. It doesnt have to be your breast, your testicle or your prostate. It could be your lower limbs, your upper limbs, your eye, your ear. It could be so many things. The impact of that and the expectation that thats grand now, all your surgery is done, your treatment is done, youre cancer free, ring the bell, go on, get on with it, go forth and cope, can be overwhelming. Maureen said Hive discovered very early its support group activities - counselling, complementary therapies, the wrap-around holistic approach, needed to happen outside the medical environment. Cancer and treatment can affect your sexual relationships," she said. It can affect marriages, mother and son relationships, and mother and daughter relationships because really, you are alone with those feelings and thoughts. We found, down the years, peoples partners didnt want to touch them because they didnt want to break them or they didnt want to hurt them or they didnt know how to do it. We have also found more and more younger women, particularly over the past seven or eight years being diagnosed with breast cancer. It is becoming increasingly a hormonal cancer, being diagnosed in younger people. Luckily the success rates are still high. The threads coming out of that were about body image and how people felt, so we set up a group called I Am Me made up of 40 plus people all living with body image issues. On top of that, we had covid and people who were diagnosed during covid, where services, treatments, emotional support as we know it and as it should be - the ordinary hug, the ordinary touch, the ordinary sitting having a cup of tea - didnt happen. So, it became very apparent the mental health impact was getting stronger and bigger because there is a mental health epidemic and there is also a cancer epidemic. This is when Hive realised it needed to address the issue. Maureen said: An opportunity arose through the Ideas Fund, which is British Science Association funded by Wellcome Trust. Hive put forward our I Am Me group as a participatory group which could take part in research. Our project was accepted and we got paired with Dr Claire McCauley, Lecturer with the School of Nursing and Paramedic Science at Ulster University, Magee. We wanted to produce something interactive and promotional as well as something researched-based. We came up with the idea of a mural on a prominent wall in the city, something the participants could take part in. They were presented with themes and involved in design workshops. Donal ODoherty, our Peaball artist was passionate and creative. We hope the We Carry On mural will spark healthy conversations in the city and internationally using the on site QR code. People will be able to access information regarding services and we will also raise awareness. The mural is extremely visible on the Strand Road. Hopefully it will give people pause to think, I am that person. What can I do? said Maureen. The I Carry On mural depicts a sunflower in a Kintsugi vase. Kintsugi, meaning join with gold, is the Japanese art of repairing broken objects, mainly pottery, with gold lacquer creating a more beautiful, stronger object. Dr Claire McCauley said she was very attracted to the project by the idea of community participatory research. Claire told Derry News the researchers and the Hive project team were in agreement that this was a unique opportunity. She added: We didnt want to waste it by asking surface questions. Hive was already in a position to tell people about the mental health impact of living with the after-effects of cancer surgery, including a significant low mood and anxiety. We already knew that, so we owed it to everyone to go a wee bit deeper and find out the mechanics and the individual experience of what people were experiencing post cancer surgery and why. We wanted to find out what was happening to the person, while keeping the person at the forefront of our minds. Our interviews were intensive and I have to say, the courage and the bravery of the participants was overwhelming. My colleague, Dr Carrie Flannagan and I, both felt that. Their willingness to engage and go forward, led and supported by Hive was incredible,. Claire described her involvement in the research as a humbling experience. It was also an incredible driver as a researcher, she added. That people were prepared to put themselves in that position and go to those places within themselves, for the good of everybody coming behind, makes you work a lot harder and be a lot more motivated and focused, she said. The depth of what came through was staggering for everybody. It was a complete testament to what these participants were prepared to do. We discovered the significant personal journey people undergo during and after cancer treatment. The experience of a cancer surgery treatment is an assault on someones sense of who they are at that time in the world. How they were treated in that experience. How that was dealt with. Where they went? People also felt they had to contain their feelings for the sake of the people around them. To have the strength to be able to do that, to hold those emotions within themselves from a position of love, was amazing. They knew and faced fear and with that grew a sense of utter fearlessness, said Claire. Donal ODoherty from the Peaball, the Street Art Collective said: We here at Peaball would like to thank Hive, Ulster University and the participants that took part in the research for inviting us to be part of this amazing project. Street art can have the power to engage with its audience in a different way and we hope the finished piece can play a part in raising awareness of the impact of having cancer can have on peoples wellbeing. The We Carry On mural was created using GrafClean paint which reacts with sunlight to reduce air pollution. HIGHLIGHTS Google revealed the Gemini AI during the Google I/O 2023. Google announced that it has plans to further develop its conversational AI model with multimodal capabilities. Google might have faced a setback in the development of Gemini AI. When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, all the big tech companies are running behind in cracking the code and their biggest competitor as we all know is OpenAIs ChatGPT. From Google to Microsoft, in recent times everyone has launched their AI models. Speaking of Google in particular, it already has one alternative to ChatGPT called Bard. However, the tech company has been working on another alternative that poses competition to GPT-4 called the Gemini AI. The company revealed this during the Google I/O 2023. During this years Google I/O, the company announced that it has plans to further develop its conversational AI model with multimodal capabilities. Thats why they are working on the next-gen Gemini AI. This is a foundation model. Reports had earlier suggested that the Gemini AI would be released this year itself, but now it seems that due to production issues, the project has been delayed. Also read: Google I/O 2023 looks actually exciting: Heres everything you must know A report by The Information recently informed that Google might have faced a setback in the development of Gemini AI. The companys plan is not going in the right direction and hence the launch has been pushed. According to The Information, Googles AI is having trouble processing inputs in languages other than English. And this is a huge issue for Google. Now, for Gemini AI to become a success, it must process other languages too. Earlier, Google did share access to early versions of Bard with Gemini AI with some companies that are part of the Google Cloud program. But two weeks earlier, Google had informed us that they wouldnt receive the same before the first quarter of 2024. This also means that Gemini AI is quite late on its production roadmap. Also read: Pixel Fold gets teased ahead of Google IO showcasing key features of the Google foldable Other reports also suggest that CEO Sundar Pichai had even started to plan for launch events that have now been pushed ahead. HIGHLIGHTS iQOO is starting the pre-booking of iQOO 12 from December 5. With the Priority Pass, the buyers can grab the iQOO 12 a day before the sale. The iQOO 12 will be the first smartphone to debut in India with the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. iQOO is all set to launch its latest flagship smartphone in India. The iQOO 12 is coming to the country on December 12. But what if I say that you can jab it a day prior? That too with several benefits? Yes, it is possible. iQOO is starting the pre-booking of iQOO 12 from tomorrow (Dec 5). This will be live till December 7. iQOO is calling it Priority Pass and it will be available in limited numbers. Lets know more about it. iQOO 12 pre-booking details iQOOs Priority Pass will be available from December 5 to December 7. You can get it from Amazon as well as from iQOOs official website. Now, the interesting benefits of iQOO 12s Priority Pass include early access and more. Also read: iQOO 12 camera samples revealed: Take a look at these images from the upgraded camera With the Priority Pass, the buyers can grab the iQOO 12 a day before the sale. However, as I mentioned before, the Priority Pass will be available in limited numbers, so you need to buy it as soon as possible. Furthermore, the Chinese brand is also promising free Vivo TWS worth 2,999 for its Priority Pass customers. The Priority Pass will be available at a price of 999. This is a refundable amount which will be settled while purchasing the iQOO 12. Also read: [Exclusive] iQOO 12 first look is here! Check out whats new this year iQOO 12 specifications The iQOO 12 will be the first smartphone to debut in India with the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. Along with that, this year iQOO has also focused on camera majorly. The iQOO 12 will be equipped with a 50-megapixel primary camera, a 64-megapixel Periscope Telephoto sensor, and a 50-megapixel Ultrawide lens. iQOO is also promising a display with 3000 nits of peak brightness. It could feature a 6.78-inch 144Hz LTPO AMOLED display. Moreover, the smartphone is said to have 120-watt fast charging support. HIGHLIGHTS The OnePlus Ace 3 smartphone is expected to be revealed later this month in China. It could feature a 6.7-inch display. The OnePlus Ace 3 is expected to be rebranded as the OnePlus 12R in the global market. OnePlus is gearing up to launch the OnePlus 12 smartphone in China tomorrow, i.e., on December 5. For quite some time, there have been several leaks about the OnePlus Ace 3. Now, a tipster has revealed the launch timeframe of the Ace 3 smartphone. According to tipster WHYLAB, the OnePlus Ace 3 smartphone model is expected to be revealed later this month in China, reports Gizmochina. Also read: OnePlus Ace 3 leak reveals display, design & more Also, a screenshot from a Chinese retailers website indicates that the OnePlus Ace 3 is slated for release on December 17. Also read: OnePlus Ace 3 update: Possible OnePlus 12R rebrand with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, OLED display If this launch date is accurate, the company will probably announce the OnePlus Ace 3s launch date in the coming week. So far, rumours suggest that the OnePlus Ace 3 smartphone model is expected to come with a 6.7-inch BOE-supplied OLED panel with curved edges. The devices display will likely feature a 1.5K resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate. Also, the OnePlus Ace 3 is expected to run on ColorOS 14-based Android 14. The upcoming handset is expected to be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor. It could come with up to 16 GB of LPDDR5x RAM and up to 512 GB of UFS 4.0 storage. The OnePlus Ace 3 device will likely pack a 5,500mAh battery with 100W charging support. For photography, the upcoming handset is expected to house a 50MP main camera with OIS support, an 8MP ultra-wide lens and a 32MP telephoto camera with 2x optical zoom. On the front, there could be a 16MP camera. There is speculation that the upcoming OnePlus Ace 3 smartphone is expected to be rebranded as the OnePlus 12R in the global market. It will likely be unveiled for the global audience on January 23 next year. HIGHLIGHTS Vivo S18 series will be announced on December 14 in China. The upcoming lineup will consist of three models: the Vivo S18e, S18 and S18 Pro. Alongside the Vivo S18 lineup, the company will also introduce the Vivo TWS 3e TWS earbuds. For quite some time, there have been rumours about the Vivo S18 series. Now, Vivo has confirmed that it will unveil the Vivo S18 series on December 14 in China. The upcoming lineup will consist of three models: the Vivo S18e, S18 and S18 Pro. Alongside the Vivo S18 lineup, the company will also introduce the Vivo TWS 3e TWS earbuds. Lets take a look at the confirmed details about these devices. Also read: Vivo S18 official teaser reveals triple-camera setup & design: Check out Credit: Gizmochina The starting model in the S18 series, the Vivo S18e, will feature a flat display and a round camera module housing an OIS-enabled dual-camera system alongside an Aura LED flash, reports Gizmochina. The S18e handset will pack a 4,800mAh battery with support for 80W charging. It will measure 7.69mm in thickness. It will be available in Cloud Gauze White, Glow Purple, and Starry Night Black colour options. Also read: Vivo S18 series leak reveals processor, display, battery & more Credit: Gizmochina Now, lets talk about the Vivo S18 and S18 Pro smartphone models. Vivos President and General Manager of Brand and Product Strategy, Jia Jingdong has revealed that the S18 handset will be powered by the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chip. In contrast, the S18 Pro model will be powered by the Dimensity 9200 Plus. He further mentioned that both smartphones will be available in Huaxia Red, Black, Purple, and Sea Green colour options. Below, you can see some camera samples of the Vivo S18 handset. While Jingdong did not mention the camera specifications of the S18, he revealed that the S18 Pro will feature a 50MP front camera with dual soft LED flash, and will house a 50MP + 50MP + 12MP triple camera setup on the back. Credit: Gizmochina The Vivo S18 and S18 Pro look different when compared to the S18e. The standard and Pro variants have a curved-edge OLED display that supports a 120Hz refresh rate. Speaking of the Vivo TWS 3e earbuds, the company has revealed the design of the upcoming earbuds but has not confirmed any of its key features. Save my User ID and Password Some subscribers prefer to save their log-in information so they do not have to enter their User ID and Password each time they visit the site. To activate this function, check the 'Save my User ID and Password' box in the log-in section. This will save the password on the computer you're using to access the site. Note: If you choose to use the log-out feature, you will lose your saved information. This means you will be required to log-in the next time you visit our site. Global top-5 notebook brands experience over 20% on-month shipment drop in October, says DIGITIMES Research The global top-5 notebook brands, not including Apple, saw their combined shipments decelerate in October and slip 20% month-on-month after their keen shipments in September for the peak season. However, volumes rose 3% year-on-year, according to the latest figures from DIGITIMES Research's monthly notebook update report. Among the top-5 brands, Dell was the only vendor with an on-month shipment growth in October thanks to a recovery in the enterprise sector, a main source of orders for the US-based brand, the report's data shows. Hewlett-Packard (HP), which pushed its shipments in September, eyeing to meet its fiscal 2023 targets early, saw a major on-month shipment plunge in October, while Lenovo had a shipment performance in between Dell and HP. Asustek has been pushing keenly to promote consumer and gaming models since the beginning of the second quarter to digest its excess component inventory. With the end product inventory at the channel gradually building up, Asustek's shipments saw a massive deceleration in October. Acer was cautious about its shipment planning for July and August, which led to a shortage at the channel for both months. Although Acer quickly responded by raising its shipments in September, it also created a high comparison base for its October shipments. The top-3 ODMs together also experienced an around 20% on-month decline in October. With Quanta Computer losing more than 50% of its orders from HP from a month ago in October, Compal Electronics had overtaken Quanta as the largest notebook ODM in the month. Canadian startup Polytone Laser is changing the landscape of cancer treatment In the realm of medical technology, Montreal-based startup Polytone Laser has emerged as a pioneer, spearheading a revolutionary approach to the treatment of solid tumors and other complex diseases. Founded by siblings Karin, Luis, and Jesus Santana Rodriguez, in collaboration with their accomplished parents, Dr. Luis Santana Blank and Dr. Elizabeth Rodriguez de Santana, Polytone Laser Inc. is charting an innovative course in medicine. The inception of Polytone Laser finds its roots in a moment of inspiration during a demonstration in Italy. Dr. Luis Santana Blank, a distinguished figure in medical research, witnessed a high-power CO 2 laser vaporizing a droplet of water on an apple without causing harm to the fruit. This observation ignited a groundbreaking idea the potential of infrared lasers, operating at lower energy levels, to safely modulate cell functions. Motivated by this revelation, the co-founders conducted pre-clinical and clinical studies in collaboration with researchers at international universities, including Central University of Venezuela, the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC), the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy, and Institut Pasteur Paris, France. The culmination of their efforts resulted in a phase I clinical trial utilizing a proof-of-concept device in patients with advanced solid tumors. Published in Clinical Cancer Research, the trial not only demonstrated the treatment's clinical safety but also showcased improvements in patients' quality of life. In addition, there was objective evidence of selective anti-tumor effects documented via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), biopsies, and immune monitoring. This pivotal study and the encouraging innovation environment of the Canadian province of Quebec, where the team of co-founders resettled, prompted the establishment of Polytone Laser Inc., which is focusing on the development of KROONZ, a patent-pending laser device. This advanced technology, while pushing the boundaries of innovation, maintains safety characteristics documented in the published trial. Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most common and aggressive primary malignant brain tumor in adults, is the first target application for KROONZ. With approximately 250,000 new cases worldwide annually, addressing this formidable foe is imperative. KROONZ employs a systemic, multi-hallmark monotherapy approach, addressing metabolic energy pathways blocked by cancer to induce selective anti-tumor effects. The laser system is applied painlessly and non-invasively to the skin, capturing radiant energy and transporting it to distant target tissues. The unique characteristics of KROONZ allow it to selectively absorb energy in tumors, activating programmed cell death while sparing healthy tissues. This innovative approach marks a transformative stride in the treatment of challenging cancers like GBM. Applications in various other complex diseases Beyond GBM, KROONZ exhibits promising applications in various complex diseases. These include other solid tumors and neurodegenerative diseases of the eye and brain. Preliminary data in a patient with advanced dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) showcased positive functional and structural changes in the retina. Unlike other devices being tested for dry AMD, KROONZ may be safely applied systemically and at a distance, avoiding direct exposure and adverse effects. The differentiators of KROONZ reinforce its position as a trailblazer. It is intended to be a standalone therapy for GBM that may be combined with surgery but does not require chemo or radiotherapy. Non-invasiveness, portability, and shorter sessions also set KROONZ apart from competitors. Its design allows penetration of the blood-brain barrier without breaking it, reaching all brain regions. In ophthalmology, external supplementation using KROONZ aims to reach the retina and other ocular structures, avoiding cumulative adverse effects. In neurology, external supplementation targets cerebral structures without invasive applications. Polytone Laser acknowledges the importance of capital and strategic partnerships. As part of CTA-Taipei HealthTech, the company actively seeks collaborations with MedTech investors, manufacturers, research centers, and Contract Research Organizations (CROs). This multifaceted approach aligns with the company's mission to advance its technology, underscoring the pivotal role of diverse partnerships in navigating the intricacies of the medical technology landscape. According to President Jesus Santana Rodriguez, the company opened its first funding round earlier this year, which was very successful. "We raised the money needed for our pre-seed stage in January. This allowed us to submit additional patents, including in Taiwan, a crucial market. We developed our regulatory roadmap, including approaching the FDA in the US, with a pre-submission meeting scheduled for the very near future." He also outlined the company's growth strategy: "We believe that the goal of treating 1000 GBM patients by 2028 is conservative, representing less than 7% of the North American market." According to him, the focus is to start clinical studies for GBM in 2025. First-in-human data from GBM patients may further allow Polytone Laser to expand into other verticals. Polytone Laser's journey is a commitment to reshaping the treatment of GBM and other complex diseases through familial dedication, scientific innovation, and strategic partnerships. As the company navigates the intricate paths of medical technology, it stands on the cusp of transformative advancements in the fight against cancer. Subscriber content preview HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) Three members of Congress are asking the U.S. Justice Department to investigate how hackers breached a water utility system near Pittsburgh. The attack prompted the nation's top cyberdefense agency to warn other water and sewage-treatment utilities they may be vulnerable. . . . Subscriber content preview SEATTLE A congregate apartment complex at 1720-1728 E. Olive St. sold last week for just under $8.2 million, according to King County records. The sellers were Ebel Properties LLC and a partner, which acquired the land under a different name for $455,000, then developed it. . . . Two brothers who carried out a "savage" and "cowardly" assault on a 55-year-old man who died 13 days after he was attacked have been jailed for a combined 12 years. At the Central Criminal Court last August, a trial jury, which had deliberated for 14 hours, returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty of murder for both Ian (34) and Daniel (43) Connaghan. However, the jury of seven men and five women found Ian Connaghan guilty of manslaughter and Daniel Connaghan guilty of intentionally or recklessly causing serious harm to Michael 'Mick' Mulvey in 2019. The brothers, both of Ashington Rise, Navan Road, Cabra, Dublin 7, had pleaded not guilty to the murder of Mr Mulvey on the Navan Road, close to the Phoenix Park. A number of eyewitnesses in the case gave evidence that Mr Mulvey, who was very slight in stature, stood less than 5 3 tall and weighed less than ten stone, did not fight back against his taller attackers. At the Central Criminal Court today, Mr Justice Paul Burns sentenced Ian Connaghan to nine years imprisonment with the final year suspended for three years for the manslaughter of Mr Mulvey. Mr Justice Burns then sentenced Daniel Connaghan to five years imprisonment with the final year suspended for three years for the offence of assault causing serious harm to Mr Mulvey. The judge said Daniel Connaghan could think himself "lucky" to avoid a guilty verdict of manslaughter. Mr Mulvey, a builder, died on November 27, 2019, almost two weeks after he suffered injuries during the beating on November 14, 2019. In passing sentence today, Mr Justice Burns said the Connaghans had carried out a cowardly and cold-blooded attack on Mr Mulvey. He commended the victim's family and that of Mr Mulvey's long-term partner Pauline Matthews for the dignity they showed during an "extremely difficult" time. In Ian Connaghan's case, the jury were satisfied that his actions caused Mr Mulvey's death but were not satisfied that he had the requisite intent for murder. The brothers had also pleaded not guilty to intentionally or recklessly causing serious harm to Mr Mulvey at the Navan Road on November 14, 2019, and had further pleaded not guilty to assault causing harm to Mr Mulvey on the same occasion. No verdict was recorded in relation to Ian Connaghan regarding the two assault charges, with a similar no verdict recorded for Daniel Connaghan for the charge of assault causing harm. Ireland has run out of state accommodation for people arriving into the country seeking international protection. The department for integration confirmed on Monday it was not in a position to provide a bed for all applicants due to a severe shortage of accommodation. Women and child applicants will continue to be accommodated. Those male applicants without accommodation can still access services at drop-in centres, including showers, hot food and laundry. They will also be provided tents and sleeping bags, if required. The department, which blamed issues beyond its control, highlighted that Ireland is currently accommodating more than 100,000 people between Ukrainian refugees and international protection (IP) applicants. This includes over 74,000 Ukrainian people who have sought accommodation from the state and nearly 26,000 IP applicants currently in International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS) accommodation, said a department spokesman. Despite intensive efforts to source emergency accommodation, the department is currently not in a position to provide accommodation to all international protection applicants due to the severe shortage. Department officials are working to bring more bed spaces into use, and since January 2022 have brought over 10,000 bed spaces into use to accommodate those who arrive in Ireland seeking international protection (IP). Various issues beyond the control of the department have resulted in offers not being progressed, and accommodation not contracted, swiftly enough to meet the demand. The spokesman added: Drop-in day services will be available to unaccommodated IP applicants who wish to avail of them. In such centres, IP applicants can access facilities including hot showers, meals and laundry services seven days a week. They also provide tents and sleeping bags, where required. Currently this department has agreements with two charities to provide these services in Dublin in the event that they are needed. All unaccommodated IP applicants will be provided with the contact details for IPAS and with information on accessing health and other public services in Ireland. The department will work closely with the HSE to ensure that health services are provided to all those in need. All IP applicants who present to the International Protection Office (IPO) during an unaccommodated period will be assessed by IPAS and HSE staff for significant vulnerabilities and health issues, and prioritised for accommodation as necessary. Dominic Fracassa is an assistant metro editor overseeing breaking news and criminal justice in San Francisco. He previously covered San Francisco City Hall as a staff writer. He can be reached at dfracassa@sfchronicle.com. Today marks a historic moment for Dundalk Credit Union and Carrickmacross Credit Union, as we proudly announce a proposed partnership merger, setting a new precedent in the credit union sector for member services, financial wellbeing, and community involvement. This coming together is not just a joining of two organisations but is a unification of values, cultures and visions aimed at redefining the impact your credit union can make in the Northeast. In a financial landscape that is constantly evolving, staying ahead means not just adapting but leading. This merger is our response to the needs of our members and the communities we serve and is a merger that will be brought forward in a way that is loyal to our local identity and communities. Both Dundalk Credit Union and Carrickmacross Credit Union have enjoyed a rich heritage of success, underpinned by our commitment to member service, community involvement, and financial strength. By coming together, we can harness our combined resources to deliver even more for our members and the communities we serve. This merger is about the future, its about resilience, and its about setting a new standard in the Irish credit union sector. Its about leveraging our joint resources to bring our members the personalised service and community focus of a credit union in a way that benefits from scale and efficiency to meet the challenges and opportunities of an evolving and digital world. At the heart of this merger lies our steadfast commitment to our members. We understand that our members are the foundation of our credit unions, and every decision we make is guided by your best interests. Member feedback is vital to us, and as we move forward, we will actively engage with you, offering a platform for members to share thoughts and ask questions. The Members of both Carrickmacross Credit Union and Dundalk Credit Union will be asked to approve this merger in March/April next year. The merger will also require confirmation by the Central Bank of Ireland in line with regulatory and legislative requirements. Bernadette Farrell, Chair Dundalk Credit Union said: "While there have been other credit union mergers across the country, the scale of this proposal promises to be truly transformational for the delivery of credit union services in the Northeast. Our number one priority, always, is to serve the best interests of all of our members and the community." Emma Gilhooly, Chair Carrickmacross Credit Union said: "Our proposed merged credit union will have assets approaching 500m, reserves of 70m and funds approaching 300m for lending. We will be in a position to broaden our personal, mortgage and business lending offerings to support all of our members and the Northeast community." Billy Doyle, CEO Dundalk Credit Union said : "This proposal is fully supported by the boards, management, and staff in both credit unions, and all are excited at the prospect of this coming together and the opportunity it presents for the credit union community in the Northeast." Adele Ward, Head of Finance Carrickmacross Credit Union said: "The merged credit union will provide greater security and opportunities for staff as we serve a growing and evolving membership. It will also provide the scale and capacity for investments in new products, services, and ICT to meet current and future member needs." Xi sends congratulatory letter to 2023 Imperial Springs Int'l Forum Xinhua) 11:08, December 04, 2023 BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to the 2023 Imperial Springs International Forum held in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, on Monday. Xi noted that since its establishment, the Imperial Springs International Forum has brought together people of insight from all over the world to discuss in depth many issues affecting world peace and stability, sustainable economic development, cultural exchanges and mutual learning, playing a positive role in promoting international cooperation and enhancing closer people-to-people ties. Facing unprecedented changes in the world, the times, and history, the human society must unite, uphold mutual learning, openness, inclusiveness and win-win cooperation, advocate common values of humanity, and jointly build a better world, Xi said. It is hoped that all the distinguished guests will brainstorm their ideas, speak out for the practice of real multilateralism, and contribute to the building of a community with a shared future for humanity, Xi added. With the theme of "Multilateralism: More Exchanges, Greater Inclusiveness and Cooperation," the 2023 Imperial Springs International Forum, jointly held by the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, the Australia China Friendship and Exchange Association, the Guangdong provincial government, and the World Leadership Alliance-Club de Madrid, opened Monday in Guangzhou. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) A woman looks down at broken glass from a car break-in at Christmas Tree Point on top of Twin Peaks on Dec. 15, 2022. Experts say San Franciscos layout, labor force and tourism industry make it an ideal place to commit a car break-in. Jessica Christian/The Chronicle 2022 A visitor from Missouri gets into his car after it was broken into while he visited the Palace of Fine Arts for five minutes on Aug. 24 in San Francisco. Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott speaks during a news conference on strategy to address San Francisco car break-ins on Aug. 24. Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle One summer evening in San Francisco, a tourist left his stuff in a rental car. If you live here, youre probably already envisioning this storys unhappy ending. The stuff got taken, the cars window smashed. Advertisement Article continues below this ad But this was no ordinary tourist. It was former Yankees slugger and onetime J.Lo beau Alex Rodriguez, whod left behind roughly $500,000 worth of electronics and jewelry. San Francisco police paid unusually close attention to the crime, drawing ire from several unfamous locals: I dont know a single resident who had this level of police involvement and weve all been through this, one person tweeted. On that day in 2019, roughly 70 others in town reported a car break-in. And while this rate would be staggering anywhere else, its typical of San Francisco, where break-ins are so frequent that the streets often glint with broken glass. Car break-ins have risen and fallen in San Franciscos past, but the citys spike since 2010 has set it apart from others in California, including San Diego, Sacramento and Los Angeles. The one exception: neighboring Oakland, whose rise has tracked San Franciscos with eerie precision. The issue has vexed residents and local politicians to such a degree that the city will hold a public hearing on Sept. 21 to explore solutions. But whats behind the surge? To find out, the Chronicle spent weeks combing through city reports, century-old newspaper clippings and research papers. We spoke with nearly a dozen locals with different perspectives on the issue, from former cops to glass-repair workers. Advertisement Article continues below this ad A smoking-gun culprit didnt emerge. But some intriguing potential explanations, and a clearer picture of San Franciscos car break-in problem, did along with some possible solutions. Bip city The surge over the last decade didnt come out of nowhere. San Francisco has long struggled with bipping, the regional slang term for car break-ins. From 1988 to 1995, annual break-in rates consistently exceeded 2,000 crimes per 100,000 people double the statewide rate. San Franciscos layout, labor force and tourism industry make it an ideal place to commit a car break-in, experts said. The nations second-densest major city, its home to nearly 10,000 cars per square mile. On an average weekday from 2012-16, as break-ins soared, commuters swelled the daytime population by over 200,000, and nearly half of those people arrived in cars. And tourists make attractive victims, often traveling with luggage or buying expensive goods and storing them in rental cars (aka break-in magnets). Ben Wu, office administrator at Master Car Care Auto Body & Glass in the Tenderloin, said he sees crews combing nearby lots for break-in targets. It takes like four seconds to break the window, he said, and another five seconds to grab the bags. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Still, it hasnt always been this bad. In the 1990s, break-ins declined in the city and statewide, part of a broader property crime drop. For a nine-year period ending in 2004, Sacramentos break-in rate even eclipsed San Franciscos. (Not all break-ins are reported to police, but researchers believe police data is useful for understanding trends.) An extraordinary spike Yet starting in 2011, car break-ins surged in San Francisco, even while other crimes stayed relatively flat. In 2017, police recorded more break-ins than all other property crimes (burglaries, stolen vehicles and other larceny thefts) combined. Magnus Lofstrom, senior researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California, has a theory for why break-ins surged in the Bay Area around 2011: In times of prosperity, the economic powerhouse region becomes a target for theft. Advertisement Article continues below this ad What happened in the early 2000s (when break-ins declined) is the dot-com bust. And then when you fast-forward to around 2010 (when break-ins rose again) were coming out of the Great Recession, and we have very strong economic growth, explained Lofstrom, who has written extensively on car break-ins. These prosperous periods havent benefited everyone, of course, which could be part of the issue, Lofstrom said. From 2010 to 2019, the highest-earning 10% of Bay Area households saw incomes nearly double, increasing by $250,000, while the incomes of the bottom 10% grew by only $4,000, an increase of less than 40%. SFNext is Chronicle coverage devoted to the citys most vexing problems. To become involved: Send feedback, ideas and suggestions to sfnext@SFChronicle.com But economic trends dont tell the whole story. The spike is too sharp, too consistent. Plus, burglaries and robberies likely wouldve surged too; in the decades before the recent break-in spike, these crimes rose and fell together. So could criminal justice reform explain the spike? Advertisement Article continues below this ad Lobbyists for retailers and some politicians have blamed Proposition 47, a 2014 law that mandated prosecutors charge thefts of under $950 as misdemeanors rather than felonies. While detractors of the law sometimes exaggerate Prop. 47s effect on overall crime, with break-ins, at least, theyve got a point. Researchers at the PPIC, including Lofstrom, found a link between Prop. 47 and a 9% statewide upswing in thefts, driven by auto burglaries, from 2014-16. But car break-in rates began increasing in 2011, three years before Prop. 47 passed. Plus, the reform was statewide, and other cities didnt see their break-in rates rise to anywhere near this degree. Then what about the policies of the district attorney? George Gascon took office in San Francisco in 2011, right when break-ins started surging. Now Los Angeles district attorney, Gascon, who co-authored Prop. 47, has been criticized by moderate and conservative Californians for his progressive policies. But district attorneys policies typically dont have much of an impact on broader crime trends, studies have shown. It is important to remember that the criminal legal system is a response to crime, said Heather Schoenfeld, co-author of one such study. This is especially true for auto break-ins, as these incidents generally dont make it to the district attorneys office for charging. Car break-ins have fluctuated under different district attorneys and for seemingly different reasons: They rose, then fell slightly, under Gascon, then plummeted under Chesa Boudin due to the pandemic, then rose again post-pandemic under Brooke Jenkins. Moreover, decades of research have found that the likelihood of arrest is a more powerful force in preventing crime than the chances of severe punishment. Which points to one possible culprit for the rise: People are getting caught less. Glass from a broken car window is seen scattered across the parking lot at Christmas Tree Point on top of Twin Peaks in San Francisco on Dec. 15, 2022. Tourists make attractive victims, since they often travel with luggage or stow expensive items in their rental cars. Jessica Christian/The Chronicle 2022 In 2011, the earliest year with complete data available, city police made arrests in about 2% of reported car break-ins. Today, that figure is under 1%. (While arrest rates are likely low in most places, the Chronicle could not compare San Franciscos rates to other cities, because the FBI doesnt provide consistent arrest data for auto break-ins separate from all larceny crimes). Without repercussions for first-time offenders, their behavior will eventually escalate, said Charles Ryan, a case worker for San Franciscos Pretrial Diversion Project who works with young people who break into cars. But, he added, consequences dont have to mean prison: (There) just need to be consequences. Research shows diversion programs like Ryans may be more effective than jail time, especially for young and first-time offenders. Auto burglary is a notoriously difficult crime for cops to respond to, said Mike Sena, executive director of Northern California High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program. It takes a practiced person under a minute to break a window, steal stuff and drive away. People usually dont leave fingerprints, and they often switch out license plates on their getaway cars, which may themselves be stolen. And police dont prioritize break-ins the way they do violent crimes. A 2016 San Francisco Civil Grand Jury report on the break-in problem identified another possible reason so few people were getting caught. The police force decentralized its investigative units in 2009 and moved toward community policing, a model in which officers get assigned to patrol specific neighborhoods, often on foot, to build familiarity and trust. The grand jury believed this model made the department ineffective at curbing organized rings committing car break-ins across the city, groups they estimated were behind 70%-80% of incidents. Nearly every source the Chronicle interviewed said the low likelihood of arrest contributes to the Bay Areas high car break-in rate. Evan Sernoffsky, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department, said that arrest rates for break-ins do not reflect the impact of police work on deterring break-ins overall, and pointed out that even a few arrests can make a big difference in break-in rates. One arrest may lead to clearing one or two cases, but these crews are often responsible for dozens if not more break-ins, Sernoffsky wrote in an email. Taking these criminals out of service has a substantial impact on the number of crimes that occur. But what exactly happened to cause the decline in arrest rates? Car break-in perpetrators got smarter and more efficient, law enforcement experts and others said making cases even harder for police to solve. The Get Involved calendar Search for public meetings on top San Francisco issues so you can add your voice. Steve Tull remembers when things changed. The former Oakland police captain was assigned to the Fruitvale area around 2011-12 when, he said, break-in rates spiraled literally out of control. He said officials were looking at all types of possible responses: surveillance, bait cars, special operations. We were hitting up informants trying to figure out what was going on. Gradually, Tull and his colleagues learned: Auto burglars had become far more effective, capable of smashing dozens of windows a day and quickly selling goods at a premium. Tull said that the rise of e-commerce outlets like eBay and Amazon gave organized theft rings a place to discreetly sell stolen goods. And GPS-, hotspot- and Bluetooth-enabled devices like smartphones allowed them to hunt for electronic valuables that give off signals from inside cars. At the same time, portable electronics started appearing in cars more often, increasing the likelihood that breaking into one would yield a thousand-dollar-plus reward. The share of Americans with smartphones began to rise around 2011, reaching two-thirds of the U.S. population by 2015. iPads launched in 2010, and by 2015, over one-third of Americans had one. San Francisco, as a wealthy early-adopter tech hub, had plenty of people who both wanted these devices and could afford them. Everyone was (using) electronic gadgets, Tull said. The emergence of cellphones, laptops in particular, (plus) the ease to break into cars make it tempting, and e-commerce gives you a good price. Ryan, the diversion caseworker, added that the rise of social media played a role, turning bipping into a viral phenomenon among youth. Theyre not learning this behavior from a book, he said. Focused efforts can succeed with resources In 2018, a sign at Alamo Square Park suggested that people do their part to prevent break-ins by filling decoy purses with thousands of angry, poisonous bees. The sign was a joke, but it got at a deeper truth: Breaking into cars here is a low-risk, high-reward proposition. Solutions thus need to raise the risk, lower the reward, or both. Police could try raising risk by increasing the likelihood of arrest a steep challenge, given staffing and budget constraints. Chief Bill Scott has emphasized that violent crime remains a higher priority than property crimes. Whats more, ramping up aggressive policing, like authorizing high-speed pursuits for stolen goods, could make the city more dangerous. Still, focused police work can be highly effective even when it doesnt produce many arrests. In Vallejo, police targeted a shopping center known for break-ins over the holidays, swarming the area with officers, posting crime-prevention flyers and adding Bluetooth-enabled bait devices to decoy cars. Their efforts, which yielded only five arrests, still correlated with a 40% reduction in break-ins year-over-year. The SFPD is attempting a similar strategy now. On Aug. 24, the department announced it would boost visible patrol staff and place bait cars around break-in hot spots, including Alamo Square, the curvy part of Lombard Street and Fishermans Wharf. There are also ways to reduce the reward side of the equation. The city has previously targeted international sellers, or fencers, willing to pay boosters for the goods they steal. The district attorneys office has busted multiple fencing operations over the years, including one in a Tenderloin boba tea shop last year. Sernoffsky, the SFPD spokesperson, said his department was working with District Attorney Brooke Jenkins to target high-level sellers. But Tull, who went on to become the chief investigator for the district attorney and helped run the boba shop bust, described the problem in Whac-A-Mole terms: As soon as wed take one group off, another group comes on. He believes law enforcement agencies would need to organize a regional task force to make true progress. City officials and rental car companies could also up their efforts to reduce the reward, convincing enough residents, commuters and tourists to stop leaving stuff in their cars, which would greatly diminish the chances of a big payoff. To that end, aggressive theft awareness campaigns have been surprisingly effective. In 2017, at the height of reported car break-ins, San Francisco launched Park Smart, a campaign in which city workers posted theft awareness signs and distributed pamphlets at break-in hot spots. The following year, car break-ins dropped by nearly 20% the first drop the city had seen in seven years. As part of a Park Smart effort in 2018, the SFPD partnered with the citys Municipal Transportation Agency to reduce auto burglaries at the Sutter-Stockton Garage. The departments installed fencing, lighting and surveillance cameras, while posting signs warning people about theft. Break-ins dropped by 83% at the garage within a few months. But in a July press release, Supervisor Dean Preston called Park Smarts current status and overall impact unclear, and the Chronicle could not find any recent updates on the program. When asked about the campaign by a Chronicle reporter at the Aug. 24 news conference, Scott acknowledged the city needed to be more aggressive in raising awareness about car break-ins like it had been in 2017-18. Clare Fonstein is a reporter who joined the San Francisco Chronicle as part of the two-year Hearst Journalism Fellowship, spending her first year of the program at the Houston Chronicle. In Houston, Fonstein covered breaking news and trending stories. She was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, then attended Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where she majored in journalism and international relations. She previously worked as an intern at the Morning Call, the daily newspaper of the Lehigh Valley, and her college newspaper at Lehigh University. She can be reached at Clare.Fonstein@sfchronicle.com. Cork-based company Green Rebel has won the Rising Star Award in association with Enterprise Ireland at the 2023 Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards. This award recognises the innovation and growth achievements of a company that has demonstrated a promising growth trajectory and the potential for inclusion in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 rankings in years to come. Now in its 24th year, the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards is one of Irelands foremost technology award programmes. Headquartered in Cork, Green Rebel operates a fleet of vessels and aircraft to map vast areas of the ocean and has a team of scientists, chemists, engineers, ecologists, vessel crew and support staff across multiple locations in Cork and Limerick. CEO of Green Rebel, Kieran Ivers, said: This award recognises the progress that has been made in the offshore wind sector in such a short space of time. The economic opportunities that lie ahead for Irish companies are significant and Green Rebel is an example of what can be achieved. The services we offer didnt exist in Ireland three years ago, and already weve positioned ourselves as an organisation which can export these services to meet international demand. The market is there and it is reassuring that the value of offshore wind stays in Ireland, that jobs are created and the talent remains here. Green Rebels success is down to our strong teams in Cork and Limerick. We have some of Ireland's foremost scientific and engineering talent delivering to a global standard. Partner and Fast 50 lead at Deloitte James Toomey congratulated Green Rebel on their success. Mr Twomey said Green Rebels significant growth over the last three years highlights a continued growth in the tech sector and the outreach of Fast 50. The Fast 50 network offers an opportunity for companies to connect and learn from one another and I look forward to this network supporting Green Rebel going forward, he said. A Cork TD has welcomed news that ongoing issues with discoloured water in some areas of Cork city have been resolved. Sinn Fein TD Thomas Gould described the resolution for some Uisce Eireann customers as positive news after a long number of weeks and months for homes and businesses who experienced persistent discoloured running water. Deputy Gould said, however, that there are still families whose tap water is running brown on the northside of the city in areas including Farranree, Gurranabraher, Ballyvolane, Mayfield, The Glen, Knocknaheeny and Tower. This has caused huge upset for people - they are worried about potentially accidentally drinking brown water. The additional cost of bottled water, in the midst of a cost of living crisis, was a significant burden, especially on those with babies or vulnerable customers. People were extremely frustrated at the damage to washing machines and showers alongside the obvious potential health impacts. Mr Gould met with Uisce Eireann on Friday and was given a plan to remedy the brown water, including deep cleaning of reservoirs in Knocknaheeny and Shanakiel. I am disappointed I couldnt be given a timeframe for the issues to be resolved. I have written to the HSE and the EPA raising this concern, he said. On Tuesday, Uisce Eireann released a statement saying it continues to work to improve water quality and supply for homes and businesses in Cork city. A further programme of flushing works, which will last approximately two weeks, got underway last week and will work through Corrib Lawn, Boyne Crescent, Ballinderry Park, Annalee Grove, Gweedore Avenue, Glencree Crescent, Liffey Park, Shannon Lawn, Lagan Grove, Murmont Court, Murmount Grove, Avonmore Park, Glenamoy Lawn, Spring Vale and Old Youghal Road. A US man who was airlifted to hospital after a narrow escape from death at the top of Blarney Castle is returning to Cork with a special gesture for the team that saved his life. David Motte from North Carolina has written a book called The Gift Of Blarney, which pays tribute to everyone involved in his dramatic rescue. The ordeal saw him transported to CUH after a heart attack resulted in him collapsing on the battlement of Blarney Castle. He revisited the scene in September 2018, five months after the incident, and finally kissed the Blarney Stone. However, the father of three still had unfinished business, namely to acknowledge every member of the rescue team who saved him on that miraculous day almost five years ago. They will be the first to receive copies of his book ahead of its publication date, in February of next year. David had insisted on a Cork launch for his book, which is serving as the location for the reunion, in City Hall tomorrow. He has flown to Cork for the event. Charles and Caroline Colthurst of Blarney Castle Estate will also be in attendance. They will be joined by Siobhan Hogan, also from the Blarney Castle Estate, who ran to Davids aid with a defibrillator. Blarney Community first responders Jeremy Downey, Kate Durrant, and Deborah Lynch will also be present. Ms Lynch is a cardiac nurse at CUH where David was treated in addition to her voluntary role. Paramedic Ger ODea and his colleagues form the remainder of the rescue team, along with members of Coastguard 115, who are due to attend. There was a chief-of-police officer from Illinois who worked her way over to me after hearing the screams, David told The Echo. There was a paramedic from France. They just happened to be on-site at the time. The way it happened was nothing short of miraculous. I had this desire to piece together what happened, since I had absolutely no memory of the event. It was my understanding that this was a pure miracle. How these people all came together to save me can only be described as an outpouring of humanity. The father of three puts much of his luck down to divine intervention. I had fallen backward, which meant my feet were up, he said. My heart had completely stopped and I was taking agonal breaths so was pretty much gone. I dont think you can go through what I went through and not believe. I was out for 15 minutes, and I did pass over. As a result, my understanding and concept of death is very different now. I have no earthly memory of what happened to me, but Im well aware of just how blessed I am and how miraculous the event was. Anyone who does their research will know that to be out that long without a heartbeat is almost unsurvivable. Im very thankful and very blessed that I was able to come back to live another day. I owe an incredible debt to all these people. David said he has tried to string together memories of that day, with little success. When I woke up in hospital, I had some type of amnesia. My memory slowly started coming back to me. My long-term memory of my family and other things returned, but that 15 minutes that whole period of time I was climbing the castle never came back to me. To this day, I have no earthly memories of those moments. He described retracing his steps at Blarney Castle, months after the event, with bittersweet sentiment. As I started to look at the castle and the steepness of the steps we climbed up, I was overwhelmed and amazed, he said. It was hard to believe that I could survive such an ordeal in that situation. To this day, it totally blows me away. Mr Motte reiterated his gratitude to Cork. Im grateful to have one more chance to thank these incredible people. They will never know the depth of gratitude in my heart for what they did for me. The Gift of Blarney will be available on Amazon from February 2024. AN RTE Investigates documentary being aired tonight will highlight how a planning application for 74 houses in a Cork village us being held up by two brothers who are gaining a reputation as 'serial objectors'. The Planning Trap, which is being aired at 9.35pm on RTE One and the RTE Player, follows the journeys of several developers who have come up against these men "and found themselves out of time, out of options and out of pocket". The documentary makers say it will reveal how two brothers operating as self-styled environmental non-governmental organisations, are systematically objecting to planning applications. They have lodged multiple objections to residential and commercial developments across the country, and multimillion euro projects are being put on hold. In November 2022, developer David Hogan was granted planning permission to build 74 houses, allowing him to expand his development Watergrasshill in Cork, where there is big demand for such starter homes. The brothers submitted an appeal under the name of an environmental group called An Lucht Inbhuanaithe, 'The Sustainable People.' The development in Cork is located 290 kilometres away from Kells, Co Meath where one brother lives, and over 300 kilometres away from Westport, Co Mayo where the other brother lives. David Hogan had concerns about the groups motivations. At a meeting with one of the individuals, Mr Hogan tried to address the environmental issues raised in the appeal but the conversation turned from environmental concerns to money. David Hogan said one of the men told him: "In the event of the appeal being withdrawn, what about my costs? And he says, if you have a proposal to make, I will be happy to listen. I had said to him that I would wait, I could afford to wait. And he kind of leaned in towards me and he said, well, you're in a lot better position than most of the guys I'm dealing with." It is now almost 11 months since his planning permission to build 74 houses here in Cork was appealed by the two men. Mr Hogan has plenty of potential buyers for his development, but he is continuing to refuse to pay the two men to withdraw their appeal, so he must wait for the planning appeals board to adjudicate on the case. The appeals board has a statutory objective to decide cases within 18 weeks. However, 70% of live cases before An Bord Pleanala at present have not been decided inside this time limit according to a freedom of information request supplied to RTE Investigates. The two brothers have been increasingly prolific in submitting planning objections to housing and commercial developments around the country. These objections have been described as mischievous and financially motivated by several planning experts. RTE Investigates discovered another case where a developer paid them and was also asked by them for sites in that development, in return for them withdrawing their appeal against a significant residential development. The agreement gives one of the men an option to buy sites in the housing development for just 1,000 each when the sites were considered to be worth up to 50,000 each at the time. The documentary shows how RTE also uncovered further payments by other developers including a fourth one for over 50,000 which was paid to them in return for a planning appeal being withdrawn. Another property developer featured on the programme told RTE Investigates: "I want to expose the fact that people are abusing the planning system for nothing other than personal gain. It's a silent cancer. It's not spoken about." Viewers will also see tonight how in secretly recorded footage, one of the men revealed how the withdrawal of appeals typically involves confidential deals with developers. Sentencing was finalised in the case against a Cork man who swung a pitchfork at three young Brazilian people at Bells field and then assaulted two Cork women who came to the Brazilians assistance. Judge Mary Dorgan had indicated a sentence of six months in prison and a six-month probation bond at a sentencing hearing last week. However, the matter was adjourned to today or finalisation. The judge extended that probationary period to 12 months, partly in acknowledgment of the defendant expressing his eagerness to work with the probation service and address addiction issues. So the final sentence was one of 12 months with half of it suspended so that he can attend with the probation service for 12 months on his release. 19-year-old James Hogan of 60 Liffey Park, Mayfield, Cork, pleaded guilty to two counts of assault causing harm and one of producing a weapon, namely the pitchfork. Sgt. Kelleher said the incident occurred on July 5 2022 at Bells field, Richmond Hill, Cork, where the injured parties were socialising together and enjoying the view of Cork city when Mr Hogan and a young woman arrived. While the pitchfork was swung the assaults were with his fists. As soon as the matter was completed, solicitor Michael Quinlan said the sentence would be appealed by the accused. Judge Dorgan set recognisances at 400 of which 100 cash was to be lodged. This was done immediately and the accused was released pending appeal. A WOMAN serving a jail term for stealing ten bottles of spirits from the Marks and Spencer store in Cork city has been sentenced again for the theft of six more bottles of whiskey from the same outlet. Christina Smith, 32, of Cork Simon Community pleaded guilty to carrying out the theft with a man. Judge Mary Dorgan sentenced her to two months in prison at Cork District Court. That sentence will run concurrently with a six-month sentence for stealing from the same shop and a series of other shoplifting offences. Sergeant John Kelleher said Ms Smith and a man entered the store at 2.30 p.m. on July 18 and selected six bottles of whiskey to the value of 220 and left the store without paying for them. The alcohol was never recovered by the store. When arrested and interviewed in relation to this theft she made full admissions. Sgt. Kelleher said the defendant had 30 previous theft convictions. Defence solicitor Eddie Burke said, Both of her parents suffered from addictions. She is dealing with a drug addiction. "She was recently put on Suboxone which has had a significant positive effect for her. Unlike Methadone she cannot take heroin with it. She is doing well in prison, doing courses in hairdressing and art. She is in a very good place at the moment and looks very healthy. The solicitor said that when her time in custody comes to an end her plan is to leave Cork city and live with a relative in North Cork. Imposing a concurrent sentence which will not increase her overall time in prison, Judge Mary Dorgan said, This is an opportunity for you to make a new start. James Cox Here, we have a look at the issues which will dominate proceedings in the Dail in the coming week. No-confidence motion in Minister for Justice Sinn Fein has tabled a motion of no-confidence in Minister for Justice Helen McEntee following the Dublin riots. The vote on the motion will take place on Tuesday, December 5th. In all likelihood, Ms McEntee is likely to survive the motion as it would take a significant change of heart from a number of Coalition or Independent TDs who usually back the Government to pass. Mary Lou McDonald's party has accused the Justice Minister and Garda Commissioner Drew Harris of not being prepared for the violence that broke out in the capital on the day in which three children were injured in a stabbing. However, Government TDs have accused the main opposition party of political grandstanding. On Sunday, Minister of State for public health and wellbeing Hildegarde Naughton told RTE the Government has absolute confidence in Ms McEntee, adding that Sinn Fein had a murky relationship with law and order. She said: Fine Gael has no problem debating issues of law and order with Sinn Fein. What Minister McEntee is focused on, and what Government is focused on, is addressing those issues and making sure that the gardai are supported. These are the guardians of our State, and we need to make sure they are ready for events like this in the future. That is our focus, not political stunts. A new Ireland Thinks poll for the Sunday Independent found 38 per cent of respondents were satisfied with Ms McEntee's performance as Justice Minister. Meanwhile, 49 per cent are not happy with Minister McEntees performance. However, her popularity has still increased by nine points since the last poll. When it comes to the parties, the opinion poll shows Sinn Feins support has dropped three points to 28 per cent. Fine Gael is on 21 per cent, unchanged, Fianna Fail is up one to 19 per cent and Labour has risen by one to 4 per cent. The Greens have fallen one to 3 per cent and Independents and others have gone up by three to 14 per cent. The Social Democrats are unchanged on 5 per cent, Solidarity-People Before Profit are also the same on 4 per cent, and Aontu are on 3 per cent unchanged. Ryan's return trip Climate Minister Eamon Ryan will fly home from the Cop28 climate change conference in Dubai to vote in the no-confidence motion, before returning. This is likely to be a source of Dail debate, but Mr Ryan has insisted he would rather stay, but has to come back to vote. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said there was no alternative for Mr Ryan's return trip, as 'pairing' arrangements are not permitted in no-confidence motions. Paschal's future Fine Gael will have looked at the Bloomberg report that Paschal Donohoe was eyeing up a leadership bid for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) with concern. However, the Taoiseach appears to have ruled out a political exit for the Minister for Public Expenditure. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said Mr Donohoe remains committed to his current role. "I think it's important to bear in mind that the IMF has a managing director in Kristalina Georgieva, and she hasn't decided yet whether or not she's going to seek a second term," Mr Varadkar said. "So this issue doesn't arise at the moment, but what Paschal says to me is that his intention is to run again for the Dail in Dublin Central and to stay on as president of the Eurogroup." Abroad In the UK, the Covid-19 inquiry continues this week. Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson will be giving evidence in what will be the most high-profile sittings of the inquiry thus far. Mr Johnson is reportedly set to tell the UK Covid-19 Inquiry that he unquestionably made mistakes in his handling of the pandemic. But according to The Times, the British leader during the coronavirus outbreak will argue that decisions he took, including ordering three lockdowns in England, ended up saving tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives. In the US, all eyes are on the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election, despite the fact it is just under a year away. Democrats are reportedly nervous at the lack of alternative candidates in the event of president Joe Biden, 81, not running for any reason. The frontrunne for the Republican nomination, former US president Donald Trump, has told his supporters to "go into" Philadelphia and two other Democratic-run cities to "guard the vote" in 2024, repeating his unfounded claims of widespread election fraud in 2020 as justification for the call to action. Speaking in Iowa, Mr Trump attempted to flip the script and paint the winner, president Joe Biden, as a dangerous autocrat, calling him a communist, fascist and a tyrant. James Cox Gardai arrested two people and seized 180,000 in cash in a search on Sunday morning. Gardai attached to the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau carried out a search at a residence in Dublin 22. The search was conducted as part of Operation Tara and an ongoing investigation into a west Dublin based organised crime group involved in the sale and supply of controlled drugs. During the course of the search, gardai seized cash in excess of 180,00. A man and a woman (both in their 30s) were arrested in connection with this seizure. Both of them are currently detained under Section 2 of the Criminal Justice (Drug Trafficking) Act, 1996 at Garda stations in the Dublin Metropolitan Region. Investigations are ongoing, gardai said. Nora Mishanec is a San Francisco Chronicle breaking news and enterprise reporter. She joined the paper in 2020 as a Hearst fellow and returned in 2022 after a stint at The Houston Chronicle. She can be reached at nora.mishanec@sfchronicle.com. By Jonathan McCambridge, PA A reward of up to 20,000 (23,000) is being offered for information which could help police solve the murder of James Donegan in 2018. PSNI detectives have made a renewed appeal on the fifth anniversary of Mr Donegans death in Belfast. Independent charity Crimestoppers has announced the reward for information it exclusively receives that leads to the arrest and conviction of those involved. Mr Donegan, known as Jim, was murdered as he waited for his 13-year-old son outside his school around 3.15pm in west Belfast on December 4th, 2018. The 43-year-old was shot several times by a lone gunman in broad daylight as he sat inside his red Porsche Panamera, registration JDZ34, on the Glen Road. A PSNI spokesperson said: This was a brutal execution and there can be no justification for it whatsoever. Mr Donegan was shot in the immediate vicinity of three schools and at the time there were a large number of schoolchildren in the area. The gunman, who we believe to be aged in his 40s, was wearing a hi-vis jacket with the word security on the back of it and made off from the scene on foot. Today, on the fifth anniversary of Mr Donegans murder, we are making a specific appeal to those who were in the area at the time of this cold-blooded execution. If you have any information, no matter how insignificant it may seem, please come forward to police. The spokesperson added: Jim was a husband, a brother, a father to two sons and a stepfather and his family now sadly face their fifth Christmas without him. His family deserve answers and justice for his murder. I am appealing to anyone with information, or who may have captured dash cam footage, to come forward. I also want to highlight the reward of up to 20,000 from the independent charity Crimestoppers and understand that people may be afraid to speak up, but please be assured that you stay completely anonymous when you pass on what you know directly to Crimestoppers. If you have information, call police on 101 or submit a report online at www.psni.police.uk/makeareport. A spokesperson for Crimestoppers said: Our charity is here to support anyone with information about crime, but who doesnt want to give personal details or talk to the police. With Crimestoppers, were only interested in what you know, not who you are or your identity. We are available 24/7 online at Crimestoppers-uk.org or by calling our Contact Centre on 0800 555 111. Your information could make all the difference. By Holly Williams, PA Business Editor Low-cost airline Ryanair has said more than 960 flights were cancelled last month due to the war between Israel and Hamas. It comes after the Dublin-based carrier cancelled over 870 flights in October as a result of the conflict in Gaza. Airlines have suspended flights to Tel Aviv and neighbouring Jordan after Hamas militants launched an attack on Israel on October 7th and due to the subsequent escalation of the war. British rival easyJet said last week that conflict and the threat to stability across the Middle East has also affected demand for flights in destinations such as Egypt, while it saw bookings impacted across the board in October and November due to the war. EasyJet has been affected the war in Gaza (David Parry/PA) EasyJet warned that it does not expect to narrow losses in the first quarter of its new financial year as flights and wider demand are affected, but it said booking appetite had started to recover in recent weeks. Ryanairs latest passenger statistics showed it operated over 66,400 flights in November, with a 4 per cent increase in people flown, at 11.7 million, despite the cancellations. London-listed Hungarian airline Wizz Air said on Monday that it has decided to suspend operations in Israel until early January next year. The budget airline said it continues to monitor the situation on the ground closely, and stands ready to redeploy capacity should conditions stabilise. It carried 29.3 per cent more passengers in November, at 4.8 million. Wizz Air said it had also restarted inbound flights to Chisinau, Moldova, in Eastern Europe having suspended flights to the country in March due to tensions linked to Russias war with Ukraine. It said the move follows a comprehensive evaluation of safety factors, adding that the group intends to gradually reintroduce operations, including reopening its base in Chisinau, while ensuring safe and secure operations for its crew and passengers. Green Party leader Eamon Ryan will not return from Dubai to vote confidence in the Minister for Justice, after being offered a pairing agreement by the Social Democrats. Mr Ryan, who is in the United Arab Emirates for the Cop28 climate conference, confirmed that he had been offered the pair by Social Democrats climate spokesperson Jennifer Whitmore. Sinn Fein tabled a motion of no-confidence in Helen McEntee last week, with leader Mary Lou McDonald claiming there needed to be accountability for the catastrophic failure to keep people safe. The vote is due to take place in the Dail on Tuesday. It comes after tens of millions of euro worth of damage was caused to public infrastructure during disorder in Dublin last month that saw buses, trams and Garda cars on OConnell Street set on fire and shops looted. The rioting followed a knife attack near a school in which three children and a care assistant were injured. A spokesperson for Mr Ryan said that he has been in contact with both the Taoiseach and Tanaiste on the matter, who are in support of the arrangement. They have agreed that this occasion could be seen as an exception to the normal pairing arrangements for such motions, the spokesperson said. Considering the importance of Ire being represented at #COP28UAE I have offered a pair to Min Eamon Ryan for the no confidence motion. This won't change outcome of the motion as our votes will simply cancel each other out, but will allow for continuity at climate talks Jennifer Whitmore TD (@WhitmoreJen) December 4, 2023 Over the weekend, Mr Ryan said that he would have to return from the UN climate summit to vote confidence in Ms McEntee on Tuesday, losing two days of work at the conference. Ms Whitmore said that she made the offer to Mr Ryan due to the importance of Ireland being represented at the climate talks. This won't change the outcome of the motion as our votes will simply cancel each other out, but will allow for continuity at climate talks, Ms Whitmore said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. Isabel Hayes A man who walked into a garda station and confessed to robbing a post office with an imitation firearm under duress has been jailed for 21 months. Ian Byrne (41) told gardai he was under pressure from a drugs gang after he racked up a debt for cocaine usage when he injured his knee. The court heard he had previously worked as a forklift driver for Ikea for eight years. Byrne, of Dane Road, Balbutcher Lane, Ballymun, Dublin, pleaded guilty to one count of robbing a post office on Dorset St, Dublin 7 and one count of possessing an imitation firearm on November 1st 2022. A further count of attempting to rob a post office in Cabra two days later was taken into consideration. He has no previous convictions. Detective Garda Eoin Morrison told Derek Cooney BL, prosecuting, that Byrne was recognised on CCTV footage by gardai, but that before there was time for anything to be done about it, Byrne walked into his local garda station in Ballymun and admitted to robbing the post offices. The court heard that in the first incident, Byrne walked into Dorset Street post office with the realistic handgun and told the postmaster to hand over money. He made off with about 1000. In the second incident two days later, Byrne pointed the imitation gun at a worker behind the glass counter of the post office in Cabra before she screamed and retreated to a back room. He left without any money. The court heard that on two occasions later that month, Byrne approached gardai and told them he was carrying a knfe for protection from a criminal gang. He told them he was being coerced to commit crimes, but he did not admit he had carried out this particular robbery and attempted robbery until he went to Ballymun garda station. George Burns BL, defending, said his client's mother was also being threatened by the gang, and these threats were being investigated by gardai in Ballymun. The court heard he is on medication for depression. Sentencing him today/yesterday (MON), Judge Martin Nolan accepted Byrne was under pressure when he committed the crimes. He said he would have considered not sending him to jail if there had just been one incident. I don't think it would be reasonable or just for him to avoid a custodial term by reason of his problems, he said. The judge said he would have considered a term of five to six years if not for the mitigating circumstances in the case. He jailed Byrne for 21 months, saying that's the lowest I can possibly go. Eimear Dodd A fourth complainant has told the trial of a man accused of sexually assaulting six young men 30 years ago that he didn't block out the alleged incident, but managed not to think about it repeatedly. The 59-year-old man, who can't be named for legal reasons, has pleaded not guilty to the one count of sexual assault that he faces in relation to this complainant. Continuing his cross-examination on Monday, defence counsel Michael O'Higgins SC suggested to the complainant that it would be wrong to give the jury the impression that the accused man was solely responsible for casting him in a leading role in the musical when he was in fifth year. I don't know, the complainant replied, adding that he accepted that he auditioned for a part in the musical before the accused man and two others. He agreed with defence counsel that his evidence was that there was no sexual innuendo or any sexual chemistry with the accused man before the alleged incident. Direc The complainant agreed that he had told the jury in direct evidence that the accused abandoned his class on Wednesday afternoons when they went to the pub. Are you seriously telling the jury that you and the accused would leave school at 12pm with his class left there unattended and no questions would be asked? Mr O'Higgins asked. I dont recall how regularly it happened but it happened, he replied. Mr O'Higgins asked if he was saying his client left a class unattended to which he replied that's right. He agreed that there were at least two parties where he socialised with the accused man. He added that it is likely that there were more social events but he couldn't be specific. The complainant told the court in his direct evidence that he went back to the man's house one night in late 1995 after he and the accused drank approximately eight or nine pints. He agreed with defence counsel that this was a lot of drink for him, but said he drank more when with the accused man. He agreed there were others present that night, and he engaged in consensual sexual activity with a woman associated with the school. Mr O'Higgins suggested there are similarities between the circumstances of this event and the alleged interaction with his client which occurred on a later occasion. Both incidents started when you were asleep. In both you responded to incidents as they unfolded, however, you say one was consensual but the other was not? Mr O'Higgins said. The complainant replied, The two situations were different. I was in far deeper sleep and completely unaware of what was happening, in relation to the incident with the accused man. Garda statement Mr O'Higgins read sections of the complainant's garda statement which outlined how he woke up to the accused performing oral sex on him. Mr O'Higgins described this as being in graphic detail. The complainant agreed his account was based on his specific recollection. Defence counsel asked if he had blocked out this incident, and he replied: Its hard to block out that entirely. I managed not to think about it repeatedly. The complainant agreed that he had not forgotten or blocked out the alleged incident, but parked it at the back of his mind. Mr O'Higgins then asked the complainant about a later possible sexual encounter between him and the accused during a trip to Kilkenny. He said he couldn't remember specific details. Mr O'Higgins asked why he was unable to describe this event, but could outline the alleged first incident in minute detail. Defence counsel noted the witness said he was intoxicated on both occasions. He replied: I don't know. Defence counsel suggested that that this trip to Kilkenny took place in August 1996, and we are all agreed there was no sexual contact between you and [the accused] during that summer. I don't think so, the complainant replied. He agreed he shared a room with the accused during this trip. Mr O'Higgins suggested he didn't show any discomfort with the situation. The witness said he told someone, but felt ignored. He re-iterated when asked again by Mr O'Higgins that he thought there was a sexual encounter in Kilkenny but said he can't recall. He agreed he wasn't alleging any sexual encounters with the accused man at this point happened while he was asleep, The accused man has pleaded not guilty to one count of attempted anal rape and eight counts of sexual assault on dates between March 1991 and November 1997 at locations in Co. Dublin. The man was in his 30s at the time of the alleged offences, while the six complainants were then aged between 17 and 24. The trial continues before Mr Justice Alexander Owens and the jury. 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. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks during the Tripling Renewable Energy and Doubling Energy Efficiency by 2030 session at COP28 in Dubai on Dec. 2, 2023. KARIM SAHIB / AFP via Getty Images At the COP28 climate conference on Saturday, nearly 120 nations pledged to triple the output of renewable energy on the planet by 2030. In Dubai, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, along with 118 countries and COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber, launched the Global Pledge on Renewables and Energy Efficiency at the World Climate Action Summit, a press release from the European Commission said. With this Global Pledge, we have built a broad and strong coalition of countries committed to the clean energy transition big and small, north and south, heavy emitters, developing nations, and small island states, von der Leyen said in the press release. We are united by our common belief that to respect the 1.5C goal in the Paris Agreement, we need to phase out fossil fuels. We do that by fast-tracking the clean energy transition, by tripling renewables and doubling energy efficiency. In the next two years, we will invest 2.3 billion euros from the EU budget to support the energy transition in our neighbourhood and around the globe. The initiative was first proposed by von der Leyen in April at the Major Economies Forum in accordance with the European Green Deal. It sets targets to triple the capacity of installed renewable energy globally to a minimum of 11 terawatts (TW), as well as to double the rate at which improvements to worldwide energy efficiency are made from approximately two percent to four percent annually by 2030. Honoring the targets will help with phasing out fossil fuels and supporting the transition to decarbonization of the global energy system. This pledge and this financial support will create green jobs and sustainable growth by investing in technologies of the future. And, of course, it will reduce emissions which is the heart of our work at COP28, von der Leyen added. The pledge was led by the European Union (EU), the United Arab Emirates and the United States, reported Reuters. Other backers included Brazil, Barbados, Chile, Nigeria, Japan, Australia and Canada. The global pledge was developed in cooperation with the International Energy Agency, the European Commission, the International Renewable Energy Agency and the presidency of COP28, according to the press release. The EU is asking for the phasing out of fossil fuels with concrete actions throughout global energy systems. Language that reflects this goal is the top priority for the bloc at the climate summit. The pledge came along with other announcements related to the decarbonization of energy, which is responsible for about three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, Reuters reported. The commitments included reducing methane emissions, expanding nuclear energy and putting a stop to the private financing of coal. This can and will help transition the world away from unabated coal, said al-Jaber, as Reuters reported. Each year, a review of developments contributing to achieving the goals of four percent yearly improvement related to energy efficiency and 11 TW will be released before the COP conference, the press release said. The European Commission will work closely with financial institutions like the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development as well as the European Investment Bank in order to stick with its commitments to the pledge. Countries especially vulnerable to climate change insisted that the goals of the pledge be made alongside a deal for COP28 nations to phase out fossil fuels. It is only half the solution. The pledge cant greenwash countries that are simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production, said Tina Stege, Marshall Islands climate envoy, as reported by Reuters. Room must be made for renewables, argued Kaisa Kosonen, head of the COP28 delegation for Greenpeace, as AFP reported. The future will be powered by solar and wind, but it wont happen fast enough unless governments regulate fossil fuels out of the way, Kosonen said. Sabah, Malaysia state government aims to boost meat self-sufficiency The state government of Sabah, Malaysia, is embarking on a mission to revitalise mega cattle farms and expand cattle breeding, said the state's Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food Industry Minister Datuk Seri Dr Jeffrey Kitingan, Daily Express reported. The objective is to elevate Sabah's self-sufficiency level (SSL) in meat production, acknowledging the current low local livestock production compared to other commodities. Minister Kitingan revealed that the Sabah Veterinary Services Department (DVS) has devised comprehensive plans for this initiative. Collaborating with a government-linked company (GLC) in Balung, Tawau, DVS Sabah aims to increase the beef cattle population through an advanced feedlot system. The ambitious plan targets an increase in the beef cattle population from 53,000 in 2023 to a projected 155,000 in 2030, anticipating a significant boost in Sabah's meat production SSL from 5.26% to a projected 25% by 2030. To achieve this, DVS Sabah has implemented measures such as acquiring superior breeds, intensifying artificial insemination programmes, and providing bulls on loan for natural breeding. In 2023 alone, the department distributed 900 imported female cattle, 50 imported male cattle, 1,240 imported sheep and goats, 40 local hybrid Brahman cows, and 40 local Katjang goats to 37 participants, including two GLCs and 35 small farmers across Sabah. This livestock distribution programme is set to continue in 2024. Minister Kitingan highlighted efforts to optimise animal feed ingredients, acknowledging feed as the most significant cost in animal husbandry. Concerned about rising feed prices, DVS Sabah actively provides training in food conservation management. Additionally, the department is exploring new food sources such as Pakchong napier, ensuring the production of quality food rations, and utilizing agricultural residues as a food source. DVS Sabah has identified five strategic areas of departmental land in Papar, Kota Marudu, Tenom, Keningau, and Semporna that have the potential to be developed as fodder banks. These locations were chosen for their strategic positions, facilitating farmers in obtaining grass supplies for livestock feed in their respective districts. - Daily Express A car drives through the intersection of Kearny and Francisco streets in San Francisco on Friday. The intersection is one of many hot spots for car theft, according to San Francisco Police Department data. Jessica Christian / The Chronicle At the corner of North Point and Larkin streets in San Francisco, you can see a steady stream of tourists walking in and out of Ghirardelli Square, carrying ice cream cones and shopping bags and strolling to and from the glistening waterfront. But alongside the buzz of tourism, it is also where more cars are broken into than at any other intersection in the city. In recent years, San Francisco has faced an enduring epidemic of car break-ins, but a new analysis of police data on break-ins from 2018 to 2023 shows just which intersections are most targeted for theft. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The data reaffirms what many San Francisco residents and visitors to the city can attest to: Intersections in tourist areas are the hardest-hit areas for break-ins. For example, at North Point and Larkin streets, there were 374 break-ins in 2022, the most in the city, and up from 143 in 2018. Others in the top 10 include intersections near tourist areas like Francisco and Montgomery streets, which is close to the ferry to Alcatraz; and Steiner and Hayes streets, an intersection close to the Painted Ladies. Among intersections with at least 100 break-ins in the past year, the five that saw the greatest increases since 2018 are Columbus and Leavenworth streets, Francisco and Montgomery streets, Steiner and Hayes streets, North Point and Larkin streets, and Third and Cargo Way. The analysis follows intensifying pleas from San Francisco supervisors, residents and tourists who have expressed sustained, intense frustration over what has become one of the citys most intractable problems. Advertisement Article continues below this ad San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston, whose district includes three intersections in the top 10 for car break-ins, announced that he would convene a hearing in the fall where city agencies, including Mayor London Breeds office, police and others, would present concrete plans for reducing the number of car thefts. I remain very concerned about car break-ins, including the hot spots within District Five, said Preston. It is time to let the public know what the city has been doing, whats been working, and what hasnt. The zigzagging corner of Columbus and Leavenworth streets at the tip of Joseph Conrad Square is the intersection that saw a 300% increase in car break-ins from 2018 to 2023. The break-ins ballooned from 38 in 2018 to 153 in 2023 at the intersection, data shows. In a statement to The Chronicle, San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky said perpetrators often come from outside the city to prey on victims parked at tourist destinations, and that the department is working strategically amid limited staffing to identify networks of criminals and make arrests. Advertisement Article continues below this ad SFNext is Chronicle coverage devoted to the citys most vexing problems. To become involved: Send feedback, ideas and suggestions to sfnext@SFChronicle.com Restaurant and cafe owners near Ghirardelli Square told The Chronicle that Ghirardelli Square, and the thoroughfare of North Point in particular, has become an unmanageable magnet for car break-ins, where the sight of masked thieves casing cars and the sound of smashed windows and skidding wheels can be heard at all hours of the day. Tim Milojevich, co-owner and executive chef of Barrio Ghirardelli Square, said the crime has gotten so brazen that he started documenting the incidents through an Instagram page called ghiradellismashandgrab. A car drives through the intersection of North Point and Larkin streets in San Francisco on Friday. This intersection is one of many hot spots for car theft, according to San Francisco Police Department data. Jessica Christian/The Chronicle Sometimes Ill be on my phone and (I hear) bam, he said. I look up, and theyre pulling out the luggage. Why arent the police doing anything progressive to discourage this? Its giving San Francisco a bad name. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Further along North Point Street at the intersection of Taylor Street another hot spot for smash-and-grabs, a young woman and her grandmother caught sight of a man in a ski mask as they spoke to a Chronicle reporter. As the driver of his car skidded to a stop, the masked man jumped out of the car at the bustling intersection, frantically tried to open multiple doors of a parked car with Oregon license plates then leaped back into the vehicle before it raced down North Point. It was a classic robbery mask, explained Ava Delaney, 16, visiting from Grand Ledge, Mich. I was scared, but I didnt comprehend anything. It happened so fast. Delaney and her grandmother, Diane Cichoki, said the hotel staff and their rental car company warned them not to keep anything in their car but they didnt imagine they would actually see an attempted smash-and-grab happen just before their eyes, in broad daylight. Its our second day in San Francisco, said Delaney. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The Get Involved calendar Search for public meetings on top San Francisco issues so you can add your voice. Joe Bonadio, who manages Real Old Paper, a vintage poster gallery by Ghirardelli Square, said hed like to see the city do more to prevent break-ins; for starters, he said, they could increase the visibility and presence of signage. Hed also like to see more police stationed at the areas most affected. Outside of Ghirardelli Square, two other intersections by the Embarcadero Francisco and Montgomery streets and Francisco and Kearny streets have also exploded as hot spots for break-ins over the past few years, according to the police data. There were 84 reported incidents of car break-ins at Francisco and Montgomery streets in 2018. By 2023, it had risen by 291, according to the data. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose district includes at least four of the major hot spots, said the northeast corner of the city has become ground zero both for tourism and car break-ins and that fact is unacceptable, he said. While he acknowledged the staffing shortages within SFPD, he said he was tired of the refrain that city employees cant enforce the law because they dont have enough police. We were able to show up to Dolores Park with a hundred police, he said. Seems to me like we can do better. We know where its happening. A lot of this is organized. Its not random. Ghirardelli Square stands tall at the intersection of North Point and Larkin streets in San Francisco. The intersection is one of many hot spots for car theft, according to San Francisco Police Department data. Jessica Christian/The Chronicle On a sunny afternoon in Alamo Square, which is in the top five hot spots for break-ins, Edmonton, Alberta, resident Monty Nelson and his family were admiring the Painted Ladies when they looked over to their car and noticed something strange. Another car was parked unusually close to theirs, and suddenly they noticed that a pair of legs were dangling out of their window. They rushed over to the scene, but it was too late; Nelsons wifes belongings, including her passport, were gone. It happened so fast that the thief left behind his hat from a streetwear brand called Bathing Ape. In between phone calls to the Canadian Consulate, Nelson explained that his family was warned by everyone not to leave belongings in their car. But they figured a 30-minute jaunt to the Painted Ladies where they were standing close by wouldnt have been a risk. UCM's Engineering Route to University University College Isle of Man (UCM) has introduced an Engineering qualification which is it says is an ideal route to studying the subject at university. The Level 3 Extended Diploma, which is awarded by OCR, is a two-year, full-time course, and is equivalent to three A-Levels. From this qualification students can move on to study subjects such as Aerospace Engineering, Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Maintenance Engineering and Motorsport Engineering at university. Students must have achieved a C in English Language and Science, a B in Maths on the higher paper as well as another GCSE at grade C to be accepted onto the course. Sam Warren, Head of Faculty for Environment & Sustainability at UCM, commented: Were pleased to be introducing this qualification back into the curriculum at UCM; in Engineering were proud to support a diverse range of learners, whether thats through our School Links programme which is for school students aged 14 16, our apprenticeships for which we work closely with industry, right through to higher levels of study. This qualification is ideal for school leavers who are keen to study engineering at university as it enables them to focus specifically on the subject while gaining UCAS points to enable them to progress on that path. Typically, wed see students who are leaning towards maths, science and business. To find out more about the course, click here or call 648254 to speak to a member of the Applications team. This is Spotify's third round of layoffs this year, and will account for 17% of the company's staff. Spotify is cutting jobs for the third time this year. In a pre-holiday shocker, Spotify is laying off 1,500 workers, or 17 percent of its workforce, CEO Daniel Ek announced in a press release on Monday. The cuts are being made due to what Ek called "the challenges ahead" and he elected to make them immediately instead of doing smaller reductions over time. Affected employees will be notified later today, he added. "I realize that for many, a reduction of this size will feel surprisingly large given the recent positive earnings report and our performance," Ek wrote. "We debated making smaller reductions throughout 2024 and 2025. Yet, considering the gap between our financial goal state and our current operational costs, I decided that a substantial action to right-size our costs was the best option to accomplish our objectives. While I am convinced this is the right action for our company, I also understand it will be incredibly painful for our team." Ek went on to note that the company expanded considerably in 2020 and 2021 due to the lower cost of capital. "These investments generally worked, contributing to Spotifys increased output and the platforms robust growth this past year," he said. And despite reductions made last year the company laid off 6 percent of its workforce early in 2023 and another 2 percent in May "our cost structure for where we need to be is still too big," Ek said. Follow those rounds of layoffs, Spotify had around 9,000 employees, so the latest cuts will see around 1,500 employees losing their jobs (4,300 of those jobs were in the US as of 2022). To soften the blow, Ek said Spotify will pay an average of five months severance, cover healthcare during that time and provide immigration/career support. Ek said that for the company's next phase, "being lean is not just an option but a necessity." Last month, Spotify announced a revamped royalty model, which is supposed to give "working artists" a bigger cut, while reducing fraudulent streams. Spotify has seen consistent growth since it launch and now counts 574 million monthly active users, up 26 percent over the same period last year. The company has always struggled to make a profit, though with its last quarter being a rare exception. Ek promised more information about what the changes will mean "in the days and weeks ahead" but all that will be cold comfort to employees suddenly finding themselves unemployed just before the holidays. Be still our '90s teenage hearts! Jonathan Taylor Thomas, or JTT to his millions of young fans from the '90s, resurfaced again after years of being out of the public eye. The former teen heartthrob was spotted in Southern California on Nov. 29, some two years after he was last seen and snapped by paparazzi in 2021. JTT, now 42, wore a beige Lacoste sweater over a green shirt with a matching blue beanie. He paired these with blue jeans, a pair of dark blue New Balance sneakers and sexy glasses which are likely prescription but fit him so well! Jonathan Taylor Thomas Surfaces Publicly for First Time in 2 Years | Click to read more https://t.co/9Vwoa5Q14P TMZ (@TMZ) December 3, 2023 While JTT was one of the biggest stars in the '90s, gracing almost every teen magazine cover in that era, the actor hasn't been seen much on TV or even off camera since. The last time he was spotted out was in 2021, while walking his dogs around Los Angeles. He also made his last known TV appearance on "Last Man Standing" in 2015 with his "Home Improvement" co-star Tim Allen. Thomas, who was the voice of Young Simba in the original Disney animated movie "The Lion King," went on to become a big star during his teen years. He was a staple in teen magazines and would regularly be on the cover of titles like Tiger Beat and BOP. Let me tell you about Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and all of my Tiger Beat and BOP! magazines https://t.co/rYMXVjVv4e pic.twitter.com/vGgk86NDzr July 6, 2023 He played Randy Taylor in "Home Improvement" from 1991 to 1998 before leaving the show to pursue his studies. He enrolled at Harvard University where he took up Philosophy and History, but graduated from the Columbia University School of General Studies in 2010. In a 2013 interview, Thomas revealed the reason behind leaving Hollywood. "I'd been going nonstop since I was 8 years old," the then 31-year-old actor told People. "I wanted to go to school, to travel and have a bit of a break," before adding he had "no regrets" about his decision. Hopefully, this wouldn't be the last time fans see of him! Maybe a Hollywood come back, JTT? Chad Michael Murray revealed in a recent interview that now is the perfect time for the American drama television series "One Tree Hill" to return. In his interview with E! News, the forty-two-year-old actor who played the role of Lucas Scott on "One Tree Hill" in his early 20s talked about the drama series, saying, "Something will happen... whether we get everybody together and do a live reading of the show or we create a new fictional future episode. I don't know what it will be." Murray described "One Tree Hill" as a show that has "changed and shaped so many young people's lives." That's why he thinks now is the time to do a new generation of the series because of the current cultural shifts and topics that need to be addressed in the present times. "I think it's time that we do a new generation of the show for today's use for the issues that they're dealing with every day, from social media to racial injustice to LGBT community to everything that's out there," Murray said. "So people can feel like they belong and that they are loved. That's what we need," he added. Murray's recent interview is a significant follow-up from what he previously said in 2022 that it was "too hard" for him to watch "One Tree Hill." "It's a section of my life that I deleted. A lot of development, a lot of growth as a human being, and [I] just deleted so much of it," he said at the time. Despite this, he has always shared that he is always happy to be reunited with his former co-stars from the series, whom he considers "family." "One Tree Hill" released 187 episodes in nine seasons from Sept. 23, 2003, to April 4, 2012. It aired on The WB Television Network from its release until it transferred to a different network in 2006 -- The CW Television Network, where it aired until its final season. The drama series was set in the fictional coastal town of North Carolina named Tree Hill and started with the story of two half-brothers, Lucas (Murray) and Nathan Scott (James Lafferty). The two started as enemies but eventually developed a bond as the show progressed. Its first four seasons focused on the lives of the main characters as they go through their high school years. The story fast-forwarded to the characters' lives after college in the fifth season. It featured a new storyline with flashbacks to their lives in their college years. Since debuting as a member of BTS on June 13, 2013, member Jimin -- who is also known by the nicknames ChimChim, Mochi, Jiminie, JM and Dooly, among others -- has grown from being cute to hot and sexy. In a decade of being an idol, the "FACE" artist has tried on different hair colors, fashion styles and concepts and proved that he could be a "cutie, sexy and lovely" all at the same time. Check out these photos of Jimin from 2013 to the present and see him glow up with every new picture. 1. "Rookie King" promotions (2013) Jimin was still cute and baby-faced just a few months after making his debut as an idol and member of BTS. In this photo posted on BTS' social media accounts in September 2013, the then-teen Jiminie reminded fans of Justin Bieber because of his hairstyle and outfit. 2. "Skool Luv Affair" promotions (2014) In just a year, Jimin went from being a cutie to a hottie in his concept photo for BTS' 2014 EP "Skool Luv Affair." With disheveled hair, strong eyeliner and a bad-boy look, Jimin made his fans swoon but miss his chubby cheeks. 3. "JIMJIM Day" (2015) When Jimin celebrated his birthday in 2015, called "JIMJIM Day," BTS posted photos of the cute Jiminie fans missed. Despite having muscular arms, Jimin's face remained cute and baby-like. 4. BTS' "I Need U" comeback (2015) In the same year, Jimin transitioned to being a hottie again when BTS made its comeback with "I Need U." In a behind-the-scenes photo from the waiting room, a hot Jimin in his black polo, denim pants and brown shoes, was staring straight at the camera, making fans melt. 5. "CHIMCHIM Day" (2017) On "CHIMCHIM DAY" in 2017, BTS shared a photo of Jimin in his pink-colored hair. Through the years, his hair glowed up with him, too, as he tried on different hair colors. He proved that one can still look hot and handsome even with pink hair. 6. BTS' "4th Muster" in Japan (2018) A hot Jimin appeared before ARMYs -- BTS fans -- in a black suit with slightly seethrough sleeves during BTS' 4th Muster fan meeting in Osaka in April 2018. Jimin's squishy cheeks from his earlier years as an idol transformed into a more chiseled look with his sharp and prominent jawline. 7. 102.7 KIIS FM Jingle Ball (2019) In December 2019, Jimin sported a black and white suit as he performed onstage with his bandmates at the 102.7 KIIS FM Jingle Ball 2019 at the Forum in Los Angeles, California. He looked dashing in his light-colored hair and sexy jawline. 8. BTS' "ON" filming (2020) Jimin shone like an angel in his all-white outfit during the filming of BTS' "ON" Kinematic Manifesto film. Because of his handsome looks, Jimin's behind-the-scenes photo was liked over 463,000 times and was shared over 39,000 times on Facebook. 9. BTS' "Sowoozoo" concert (2021) In one of the performances during BTS' "Sowoozoo" concert in 2021, Jimin wowed ARMYs with his visuals -- albeit online -- with his brushed-up hair, highlighting his handsome face. His side profile transformed from being that of a cute baby Jiminie to a handsome Park Jimin. 10. Jimin's solo debut (2023) Last March, Jimin showcased a fiercer version of himself when he released his solo debut album, "FACE." In one of the concept photos, Jimin showcased the handsome man that he is now with a brushed-up do, minimal make-up, a slightly revealing suit and a lip piercing. Israel's army on Monday sent dozens of tanks into southern Gaza as part of expanded action against Hamas despite global concern over mounting civilian deaths, and as communications was cut across the besieged territory. Weeks after Israel deployed ground forces in the north of the Gaza Strip, the army has been air-dropping leaflets in parts of the south, telling Palestinians to flee to other areas. Israel has vowed to crush Hamas in retaliation for the militant group's unprecedented October 7 attacks that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and saw around 240 hostages taken, according to Israeli authorities. Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry says nearly 15,900 people have been killed in the territory, about 70 percent of them women and children, during Israel's relentless air, artillery and naval bombardments alongside its ground campaign. The toll has sparked global alarm and mass demonstrations. The Elders, a group of global leaders, accused Israel of "disproportionate" action and called on governments providing military assistance to Israel to rethink their approach. The group said in a statement Israel's retaliation "has reached a level of inhumanity towards Palestinians in Gaza that is intolerable". "More killing is not the answer. Negotiation is the way to end this conflict," they said. Tanks, armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers were seen Monday near the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis, which is packed with internally displaced Palestinians, witnesses told AFP. At the crowded entrance to the city's Nasser hospital, ambulances and private cars delivered dazed, bloodied and dust-covered survivors. Hoping to flee the bombardments, others continued to move further south, their belongings piled onto donkey carts, battered vehicles and even camels, but air strikes have followed them right to the southern border. "People are pleading for advice on where to find safety," Thomas White, Gaza director for the UN's agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, wrote on social media. "We have nothing to tell them." - Trapped under rubble - Amin Abu Hawli, 59, said Israeli vehicles were two kilometres (1.2 miles) inside Gaza in the village of Al-Qarara, while Moaz Mohammed, 34, said Israeli tanks were moving down the strip's main north-south highway. The military was trying to cut the road between Deir al-Balah in central Gaza and Khan Yunis, "firing bullets and tank shells at cars and people trying to move through the area," Mohammed said. The army said it was taking "aggressive" action against "Hamas and other terrorist organisations" in Khan Yunis, warning that the main road in the north and east of the city "constitutes a battlefield". Walaa Abu Libda found shelter at Deir al-Balah's Al-Aqsa hospital but said her four-year-old daughter remained trapped under rubble. "I don't know if she is dead or alive," said Libda, one of an estimated 1.8 million people displaced in Gaza -- roughly three-quarters of the population, according to UN figures. Three more Israeli soldiers were killed in clashes in the northern Gaza Strip, raising the number of troop deaths there to 75, the army said on Monday. Full-scale fighting resumed Friday after the collapse of a week-long truce brokered by Qatar with support from the United States and Egypt, during which 80 Israeli hostages were freed in exchange for 240 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. More than two dozen Thai and other captives were also released from Gaza. With at least 137 hostages still held in Gaza, according to the Israeli military, Hamas has ruled out more releases until a permanent ceasefire is agreed. More air strikes also hit northern Gaza where Hamas's armed wing reported clashes with Israeli tanks. Rocket salvos were again fired from Gaza towards Israeli territory. - 'Like an earthquake' - In the southern Gazan city of Rafah, resident Abu Jahar al-Hajj said an air strike near his home felt "like an earthquake". "Pieces of concrete started falling on us," he said. International Committee of the Red Cross president Mirjana Spoljaric, visiting Gaza, described the suffering as "intolerable". Conditions worsened further Monday with all mobile and telephone services across Gaza severed "due to the cut-off of main fibre routes from the Israeli side," the Paltel company said. Gazans were already short of food, water and other essentials including fuel. Israel's ally the United States has asked Israel to let more fuel in, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Monday. The US intensified calls for the protection of Gaza's civilians, and Miller voiced guarded praise for Israeli tactics as its campaign expands in the south. "We've seen a much more targeted request for evacuations" than in the earlier campaign in the north, he said. "So that is an improvement on what's happened before." Israel said that it was not seeking to force Palestinian civilians to permanently leave their homes. "We have asked civilians to evacuate the battlefield and we have provided a designated humanitarian zone inside the Gaza Strip," military spokesman Jonathan Conricus said, referring to a tiny coastal area of the territory named Al-Mawasi. Any suggestion of Palestinian dispersal is highly contentious in the Arab world as the war that led to Israel's creation 75 years ago gave rise to the exodus or forced displacement of 760,000 Palestinians. At the United Nations on Monday, Israel and Palestinian representatives traded accusations of "genocide" over the war, both sides demanding an international response. With fears of a wider regional conflagration, the Israeli army said it had launched artillery strikes in response to cross-border fire from Lebanon and its fighter jets hit targets linked to Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. The Israel-occupied West Bank has also seen a surge in violence, with more than 250 Palestinians killed there since the war began, according to Palestinian authorities. The Palestinian Authority's health ministry said Monday two more were shot dead in an Israeli raid on the town of Qalqilya, and a third in Qalandia refugee camp, while two were killed near Hebron. Despite the war, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial, suspended along with some court activity when the war began, resumed Monday. He is accused of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, which he denies. bur-dr/it/ami Judge sides with state dismissing lawsuit surrounding Rep. Zephyrs censure A district court judge sided with the state as he dismissed a lawsuit questioning the constitutionality of Rep. Zooey Zephyrs censure during the 2023 legislative session. The order said because the Missoula Democrats censure ended with the close of the legislative session, plaintiffs claims the censure breached her right to free speech are no longer relevant. Plaintiffs include Zephyr along with a handful of her constituents Anna Wong, Dean Chou, Brady Schwertfeger, and Sarah Velk. The Court cannot grant effective relief in this matter because there is no longer a live controversy, Lewis and Clark County District Court Judge Mike Menahan said in his opinion. But a representative for plaintiffs said the order made no comment on the merits of the case, only saying the court no longer had power to remedy the situation since the legislature had adjourned. Zephyr was not allowed to speak on the House floor after she said legislators in support of Senate Bill 99, which restricts gender affirming care for minors, would have blood on your hands. Zephyr is the first openly transgender woman to serve in the legislature. Republican Speaker Matt Regier of Kalispell decided not to recognize Zephyr on the floor after she did not apologize for her comments. Zephyrs supporters and constituents protested Regiers decision, chanting Let her speak! from the House gallery. Law enforcement cleared the gallery at the request of the speaker. Zephyr stood on the floor with a microphone lifted in the air. Following the protest, which drew attention from around the world, Republican legislators in the House voted together to censure Zephyr, restricting her from the House floor. Republicans said they made the decision after Zephyr broke rules of decorum. In the lawsuit, plaintiffs including Zephyr argued the censure was unconstitutional saying the ban was against in part her right to free speech and assembly. But the state claimed there was no longer an avenue for relief to be granted, as Zephyr is no longer censured, and therefore the matter was no longer an issue and the court agreed. Without a justiciable issue, this court may not hear plaintiffs case, Menahan wrote. Attorney with the ACLU of Montana Alex Rate, representing plaintiffs, said the ruling didnt comment on the basis of their cases constitutional claims. This was a challenging case from the get-go because we were seeking emergency relief in the waning hours of a fast moving legislative session, Rate said. Rate said plaintiffs are weighing their options on whether to move forward in this case but have yet to make any decisions. The post Judge sides with state dismissing lawsuit surrounding Rep. Zephyrs censure appeared first on Daily Montanan. Consumer trust in British agriculture remains strong, with over 60% feeling positive towards the industry, a new survey shows. AHDBs recent trust and transparency research has found that consumer trust in UK farming remains strong. The survey, conducted by Blue Marble in August 2023, also found that the environment is important to 51% of consumers when choosing food. However, the public are carefully balancing household finances due to the cost-of-living crisis, so while interest in the environment is strong, it sits alongside cost and quality in terms of priorities As part of AHDBs focus on the reputation of British farming, it has been tracking consumer trust and the effect on the environment since 2019. The latest results of its study show that consumer perceptions of agriculture remain positive, with over 60% feeling very or somewhat positive towards British agriculture over the last 5 years. There was an increase in positivity in 2020 due to a greater consumer focus on the food supply chain as a result of the Covid pandemic. Farmers continue to be the most trusted sector of the food supply chain with 71% of consumers agreeing that farmers are trustworthy, compared with supermarkets and food processors scoring 50% and 41%. The general public also rank famers significantly above other areas across the supply chain for their expertise, animal welfare and caring for the environment. The public are more concerned now about environmental issues than in 2020, with particular interest in water issues relating to water pollution (74%). In addition, consumers mentioned plastic in food packaging (76%) and rainforest and habitat destruction (75% and 76% respectively). When assessing specific demographics, those cutting meat intake were most concerned about the methane from livestock, effects of insecticides and water use in British crop production. Meanwhile, 'Gen Zs' were more concerned about plastic use on farms, loss of native UK species due to farming and water usage in imported crops. Responding to the survey results, Vanessa Adamson, AHDB consumer insight manager, said consumers should be provided with information to clarify the meaning of all environmental and agricultural terminology to improve understanding. She also called on the industry to utilise the trust in British farming to communicate welfare, sustainability and environmental initiatives to support the meat and dairy industry. "Provide transparency where possible around where and how British food is produced," Ms Adamson also suggested. "And build on the knowledge that Gen Zs have learnt about climate change through school and provide factual environmental reports via social media." A top Welsh breeder and trialist was again top dog on price at 12,200 during the CCM Skipton Auction Marts online winter sale of working sheep dogs. Kevin Evans, of Llwynfedwen, Brecon, led the way at the 29 November sale with his fully broken 17-month-old black and white bitch, Cefneithin Gyp. A smooth-coated, prick-eared daughter of his own Hendre Sam, Gyp is a Welsh Nursery Champion and multiple Open trials trials winner. She is line bred to Kevins dual European Nursery and Royal Welsh champion, Tanhill Glen. Gyps dam is Cefneithin Jet, from fellow North Wales dog trainer Sion Jones, who runs Cefn Eithin Sheep Dogs in Corwen. She is herself a daughter of Clwyd Bob, from another Welsh trailing legend, Ceredigions Dewi Jenkins. The solid nursery prospect was claimed by Levi Joensen, of Klaksvik on Bordoy, the northernmost Faroe Island some 200 miles north-northwest of Scotland. Its the second time the Faroese handler has made an online Skipton acquisition from Kevin Evans, also going to a very similar 12,100 in 2020 for a 19-month-old bitch, Barcroft Sophie. Both dogs have made a major impact on selling prices at Skipton in recent years. Kevin also sold a brace of red, white and tan unbroken youngsters just ten-weeks-old, a dog and a bitch from the same litter and by another of his stud dogs, Midderry Frank, an Open trials winner. Regally named, King made 1,800 and Queen 1,600. The former goes to Ballymena in Northern Ireland to join John Maybin, the latter even further across the seas to Viken in Norway with online purchaser Sjur Sndral. Next best at 5,600 was Moss, a part-broken 12-month-old black and white dog from David Wood, of Derwent, near Bamford in the Derbyshire Peak District's Hope Valley, bred out of his own Polly, who finished runner-up in the 2019 English National. Exhibiting plenty of natural power and ready to bring on further, Moss heads north of the border to Ewen Macmillan, of Lurg, near Fintry in Stirlingshire, a noted Highland cattle and Scottish Blackface sheep aficionado. David Wood also claimed top price of 2,050 in the unbroken section with his black and white Ben, a six-month-old son of Kemi Bert, this, too, from Kevin Evans and another well-bred son of the prolific Tanhill Glen. Skipton working sheep dog sales are due to return on 23 February 2024. Glass from a broken car window is scattered across the parking lot at Christmas Tree Point on top of Twin Peaks San Francisco. After city leaders pledged to crack down on car break-ins, data collected in recent months shows a dramatic drop in smash-and-grabs. Now comes the question: Can it last? Jessica Christian/The Chronicle 2022 When San Francisco officials faced reporters outside the Palace of Fine Arts in August, promising to get tough on car break-ins, the moment seemed urgent. Pressure was mounting on city leaders to alleviate property crime, yet, up to that point, progress had been slow. Around the corner from the Palace of Fine Arts, glass quilted the sidewalk debris from a rental minivan burglarized minutes before the news conference began. The years worst week for auto burglaries right around Thanksgiving was on the horizon. Car break-in tracker: Map shows close to real time break-ins across San Francisco Advertisement Article continues below this ad Then, suddenly, car burglary rates dropped. And dropped. Police began pouring resources at the problem, using a combination of bait cars, plainclothes officers and video surveillance. Officials waited with bated breath as fresh crime data rolled in each week. And the results were staggering. Between Sept. 1 and Nov. 26, San Francisco logged 3,399 smash-and-grab reports, roughly half of the 6,703 documented during the same time frame in 2022. In the months before September, the number of reports in 2023 about matched the previous year. These numbers marked a dramatic shift for a city that tends to see car burglaries spike late in the year. But to law enforcement, the timing made sense. Break-ins had plummeted just as the city launched an aggressive crackdown. The stark decrease coincided with a similar plunge in organized retail theft, following blitz operations by police. Now comes the more vexing question: Can this trend be sustained? District Attorney Brooke Jenkins drew a breath when asked whether auto burglaries might continue to go down, or at least flatline, during a recent interview. Advertisement Article continues below this ad That is my hope, of course, Jenkins said. She attributes the citys progress to a three-pronged strategy unveiled at the August news conference: targeted police efforts to catch the most prolific burglars; vigorous prosecutions; and hard-line messaging to scare away would-be thieves. Yet Jenkins emphasized the need to pivot if perpetrators change their behavior. We need anyone thinking of committing auto burglary in our city to be on notice, the district attorney said, citing a deterrence factor that builds up over time. A heavier police presence on the street and high-profile arrests help substantiate the rhetoric constantly hammered by city officials, that people who commit property crimes will be caught. Mayor London Breed underscored that point in a statement to the Chronicle. We want San Francisco to be a safe city for residents and visitors, and we want people to know if they break into cars here, they will be arrested and prosecuted, she said. Breed praised the city for making progress, but signaled that the work was just beginning. Police Lt. Scott Ryan subscribes to the theory that a small number of thieves are committing the bulk of San Franciscos auto burglaries. Apprehending these people is the key to lowering crime rates, Ryan said. Advertisement Article continues below this ad To make these arrests, police are expanding patrols and sticking bait cars at known hot spots for tourists and burglary crews. While Ryan was reticent to discuss locations and methods, a major November bust offers some clues. In that instance, police tracked down a car they had linked to a theft in Alamo Square. After arresting the driver, officers traced stolen goods to a man in the Mission District, who police said they had connected to a fencing scheme. Weve collaborated with the district attorneys office in presenting those arrests and those cases to them, Ryan said. Those people are being held responsible and are in custody as these cases move forward. Prosecutors are filing detention motions to keep people in jail after they are charged, Jenkins said, hoping to debilitate organized theft rings by removing the key players. Given that crime networks operate throughout the region, Jenkins believes San Franciscos success might trickle down to other cities. Criminologists arent as quick to praise law enforcement for fluctuations in crime, pointing to a number of possible explanations. A sudden plunge could be a statistical quirk, said Cory Schnell, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. Social or economic factors could also play in, such as a change in tourist patterns or even in the driving habits of San Francisco residents. Because crime and crime trends are caused by so many different things that are very dynamic and simultaneous, you have to be very careful about causal attribution, said Charis Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine. She pointed out that the abrupt decrease in crime may be a result from just one element of the crackdown, such as police arresting the most prodigious offenders. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Nonetheless, a tightly orchestrated intervention by multiple city departments is a plausible reason for crime to go down, Schnell said. Those strategies are on their face reasonable to account for this decrease, he acknowledged, noting that researchers try to avoid drawing conclusions until they have rigorously evaluated a particular enforcement program. Still, Schnell understands why the San Francisco Police Department and district attorney would want to take credit for a decline in crime. Because when things arent going well, he said, they definitely take the blame. Editors note: This story was updated to clarify the difference in break-ins when comparing a three month period in 2022 to 2023. Eating crunchy foods could be the key to losing weight. Snacking on crunchy foods can aid weight loss New research shows that humans eat up to half as fast when they have to chew more and feel fuller more quickly, meaning that they consume less food. Experts gave 50 people four similar lunches - two of which were classified as ultra-processed and two that were minimally processed. One meal in each category was harder and crunchier, making it more difficult to eat quickly. It was found that people consumed 26 per cent fewer calories when their lunch had a harder texture as the meals could not be gobbled up rapidly. Harder meals included boiled rice, a crunchy salad and a chewy chicken breast. Professor Ciaran Forde, senior author of the study from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, said: "We now have more than a decade of evidence that people choosing textures which encourage them to eat more slowly, like crunchier, harder or chewier foods, can help to consume fewer calories, while still feeling equally satisfied. "What is appealing in using meal textures to change behaviour and intake is that people can still enjoy eating the foods they like, while reducing the risk of over-consumption. "It means people can still enjoy a meal and eat until comfortably full, without having to feel restricted." Jay Leno is refusing to give up riding motorcycles despite cheating death in a nasty accident. Jay Leno won't give up riding motorcycles despite falling off The 73-year-old TV star suffered a number of painful injuries including a broken collarbone, shattered ribs and cracked kneecaps when he fell off a vintage bike last January just months after he was badly burned in a garage fire while working one one of his classic cars - but Jay is adamant he won't be hanging up his helmet anytime soon. He told ETOnline.com: "It my outlook on life] hasn't changed it at all,. Once a man hits 40, you can't convince him of anything else. "I'm still riding motorcycles. I'm still falling off, I'm still working on cars. No, once a guy learns [something], you can't teach him new tricks." When asked where he sees himself in the future, Jay joked: "Oh, riding motorcycles and falling off!" Jay previously opened up about his bike crash in an interview with the Las Vegas Review Journal, revealing: "That [the garage fire] was the first accident. OK? Then just last week, I got knocked off my motorcycle. So Ive got a broken collarbone. Ive got two broken ribs. Ive got two cracked kneecaps ... But Im OK. Im OK, Im working. Im working this weekend." He went on to add of the crash: "I turned down a side street and cut through a parking lot, and unbeknownst to me, some guy had a wire strung across the parking lot but with no flag hanging from it. So, you know, I didnt see it until it was too late. It just clothesline me and, boom, knocked me off the bike. "The bike kept going, and you know how that works out." Jay then joked: "You know, after getting burned up, you get that one for free. After that, youre Harrison Ford, crashing airplanes. You just want to keep your head down." All Creatures Great & Small fourth series sees more veterinary adventures, romances and life in the sleepy town of Darrowby, Yorkshire, with its rolling fields and colourful community All Creatures Great & Small series 4 Based on the popular novels and life of veterinary surgeon and writer James Herriot (aka James Alfred Wight OBE), the first series enchanted the nation, ranking as Channel 5's number-one British drama of all time. Now, the national treasure returns with its highly anticipated fourth series. The brand-new series picks up in the Easter of 1940. Its springtime, Winston Churchill is becoming Prime Minister and theres much to be glad about with the community coming together more than they have before, despite the war in Europe... With Darrowbys very own Tristan away serving in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, James (Nicholas Ralph The Most Reluctant Convert) readily accepts the help of his wife Helen (Rachel Shenton Hollyoaks) and their caring housekeeper Mrs Hall (Anna Madeley Deadwater Fell, In Bruges), who are happy to muck in with him and Siegfried (Samuel West Howards End), to make sure the surgery runs smoothly. However, the practice is forced to bring in some extra hands to help around the place in the shape of two newcomers, the highly efficient bookkeeper Miss Harbottle (Neve McIntosh Shetland) and studious undergraduate vet student Richard (James Anthony-Rose Slow Horses, Pennyworth). This series also features some wonderful guest stars, including James Bolam MBE (New Tricks), Tony Pitts (Giri/Haji), Paul Copley (Downton Abbey), Cleo Sylvestre MBE (Paddington), Will Thorp (Doctor Who) and Sam Retford (Ackley Bridge). All Creatures Great & Small Series Four inc. 2022 Christmas Special will arrive on DVD, alongside All Creatures Great & Small Complete Series One Four Box set on 11 December 2023 courtesy of Acorn Media International, following its recent transmission on Channel 5. All Creatures Great & Small Series 1-4 Box Set Series One begins in 1937 as James Herriot, a newly qualified animal surgeon, moves to a small town in Yorkshire to begin his first job with the irritable but kind veterinarian Siegfried Farnon. Once there, he quickly discovers that treating the animals is as much about looking out for their owners: there are plenty of people and animals to care for, challenges to meet, and life-affirming lessons to learn along the way. In Series Two, after Helen Anderson is jilted by Hugh Helton (Matthew Lewis Harry Potter) at the altar, she and James can finally address their feelings for each other. In Series Three, James and Helen finally tie the knot. Meanwhile, the Skeldale family is forced to consider its purpose in Darrowby and beyond as the Second World War looms. All Creatures Great and Small fans should treat themselves to a heart-warming trip to Yorkshire with this enchanting series. This uplifting family favourite is the perfect soul-soother for some winter warmth and why not spread the joy with All Creatures Great & Small Complete Series One Four Box set, an ideal gift for the festive season. To buy Title: All Creatures Great & Small Series Four Cat.No: AV3751 Cert: 12 Released: 11 December 2023 RRP: 24.99 Running Time: 315 mins. Title: All Creatures Great & Small Complete Series One Four Box set Cat.No: AV3752 Cert: 12 Release Date: 11 December 2023 RRP: 74.99 Running Time: 1260 mins. Competition prize providers Aim Publicity Be in with a chance to win a copy of All Creatures Great & Small Series 4 all you need to do is simpley answer the question below, then complete and submit the attached entry form. Question: All Creatures Great & Small is set in the 1940's, but who is the incoming Prime Minister? A. Boris Johnston B. Winston Churchill C. Gordon Brown GOOD LUCK by Matt Shine for www.femalefirst.co.uk find me on and follow me on Closing Date : 12th December 2023 To read the full story, become a PRIME member today. PRIME Unlimited Access to Insightful Industry Information All Corporate Members and TexPro Subscribers are eligible to access F2F PRIME CONTENT using the same login credentials. Pork dumplings with kanikama and tobiko from Daruma Kiosk in Berkeley. Janelle Bitker/The Chronicle Heres senior editor Janelle Bitker: Believe it or not, I think some of the Bay Areas most delicious Japanese food is coming out of a tent. That tent sets up on Saturday afternoons in the back patio at Berkeley winery Broc Cellars. Called Daruma Kiosk, its a two-year-old pop-up that critic Cesar Hernandez put on his Top Berkeley Restaurants list. Advertisement Article continues below this ad At first glance, it looks like a fairly bare-bones operation. But chef Sanae Shikayamas version of Japanese street food is tremendous: elegant, bright and full of textural contrasts. Shikayama linked up with Broc co-owner Bridget Leary when the pair worked at popular San Francisco restaurant Liholiho Yacht Club. Shikayama left for a career as a private chef, a job that necessitates a health-conscious perspective. The way she put it, she makes fancy food every day with a lot of vegetables. But she loves Japanese street food. What if she launched a pop-up as a passion project, making street food out of higher quality ingredients? At first, she tested out her concept with some friends who run the acclaimed Japanese pop-up Yakitori Toriman in Santa Cruz, cooking a separate menu alongside. Last year, she settled into a weekly rhythm at Broc. Most weeks, she makes the crisp octopus-stuffed balls known as takoyaki and side dishes. But the menu is rarely the same. Sometimes she offers spins on takoyaki, filling the batter with smoked salmon or sweet corn instead of tentacles. Other times she leans into classic Japanese convenience store fare with egg sandwiches and onigiri, perhaps stuffed with meaty unagi or flaked fish. On a recent visit, I was wowed by an izakaya menu. Buttery sashimi-grade salmon was marinated in yuzu, then balanced by bitter radicchio leaves. Shrimp was swaddled in shiso leaves before hitting the fryer. Pork dumplings were crowned with creamy, mustardy crab salad and tobiko. Advertisement Article continues below this ad My favorite was the playful dish dubbed oyako, which means parent and child. Most commonly seen as chicken and egg simmered together over rice, this pairing instead featured crunchy, juicy fried chicken with a chopped-up egg tartar sauce. Now, Shikayama says she hopes to offer an izakaya menu once a month at Broc. But dont expect her to increase Darumas presence around the Bay Area; the once-a-week schedule feels perfect, she said. Its been fun to see what customers respond to. Its not always what she expects. Other Japanese people often warned Shikayama that Americans might take issue with her takoyaki. Its supposed to be very creamy inside, but a lot of people feel its uncooked, she said. But actually in the East Bay, Ive never had any problems. I think they know Japanese food well. Daruma Kiosk. Noon-5 p.m. Saturdays at Broc Cellars, 1300 Fifth St., Berkeley. instagram.com/daruma.kiosk Amazon miniTV - Amazon's free streaming service, has been expanding its myriad content library with exciting new shows to cater to audience preferences ever since its inception. Recently, the streaming service released a cybercrime drama, Hack Crimes Online that encapsulates alarming cybercrime instances such as hacking people's social media accounts, blackmailing, launching ransomware attacks on major corporations, and more. Directed by Parmeet Sethi, this rip-roaring thriller features Vipul Gupta and Riddhi Gupta in pivotal roles. Hack Crimes Online is a creation of Friday Storytellers, who are known to produce some of the most riveting crime thrillers in India. The series based is based on a novel by India's prominent cyber-crime investigator Mr. Amit Dubey. Shital Bhatia, Co-Founder of Friday Storytellers, opened up about the challenges of turning a book into an edutainment series for viewers in a recent round table discussion. He said, "The most challenging part was to translate the technicality for the viewers to understand, but I'm so glad that Parmeet and the team have managed to pull it off so smoothly. So, yes the biggest challenge was to maintain the engagement and prevent it from becoming boring. A hacker sits in front of his machine all day long which may seem boring at times if shown in the exact same manner and our challenge was to not make it look boring, we wanted to capture the attention of our audience on all aspects." The round table discussion included renowned filmmaker Parmeet Sethi, talented actor Vipul Gupta, and Amogh Dusad, Head of content at Amazon miniTV along with Shital Bhatia, Co-Founder of Friday Storytellers. The discussion focused on current cyber risks and how to prevent them, with a special emphasis on Amazon miniTV's efforts and role in spreading awareness in an intriguing and innovative manner. Hack Crimes Online delves deeper into the dark, deep-rooted cybercrimes, shedding light on the internet's immense reach and how we are nothing but puppets in the hacking world. Hack Crimes Online is now accessible solely on Amazon miniTV, which is available on Amazon's shopping app, Fire TV, and the Play Store. Prime Video recently released the Hindi original series, Shehar Lakhot, which has been receiving widespread acclaim, praise, and love for its gripping narrative and nuanced performances by the ensemble cast. Actor Kubbra Sait, who is known for playing interesting characters, portrays the role of a police officer, S.I. Pallavi Raj, for the first time in her career in the noir crime drama. She has aced the role with finesse and conviction. Sharing the excitement of playing the role of a cop for the very first time, actor Kubbra Sait said, "As an actor, I thrive more when surrounded by exceptional individuals who inspire and challenge me to grow both personally and professionally. Pulling off a police uniform for my role in Shehar Lakhot was an exciting opportunity. Wearing the police uniform commanded respect and instilled a sense of responsibility. In this story, the uniform symbolizes the challenges faced by our real-life heroes, reminding us of our flawed yet ever-evolving system." Talking about the director, she added, "Navdeep's patience and support allowed us to truly shine as actors. With the crafting of a well-written script, I was able to delve into my memory and invoke the precise emotions needed." Shehar Lakhot Review And Rating: After Pippa, Priyanshu Painyuli Steals The Show Yet Again; A Decent Watch Shehar Lakhot is an Offroad Films production with Navdeep Singh and Khalil Bachooali serving as executive producers. It was directed by Singh and written and created by Singh and Devika Bhagat. The series boasts a highly talented cast, with Priyanshu Painyuli, Chandan Roy Sanyal, and Kubbra Sait in the lead, supported by an ensemble cast featuring Manu Rishi Chadha, Shruthy Menon, Kashyap Shangari, Chandan Roy, Manjiri Pupala, Shruti Jolly, Gyan Prakash, and Abhilash Thapliyal. The series is streaming now exclusively on Prime Video in India and across more than 240 countries and territories worldwide. Pavi Poovappa Biography: Pavi Poovappa is a highly accomplished Indian fashion model known for her vibrant presence on social media, where she showcases and endorses a variety of fashion brands through captivating photoshoots. With a substantial following on her Instagram profile, Pavi has garnered a large and enthusiastic fan base. Her journey in the fashion industry commenced in 2013, initially participating in smaller shows, and over the years, she has evolved into a prominent and influential fashion model. Bigg Boss Kannada Season 10 Pavi Poovappa has joined the cast of contestants in the Kannada reality show, Bigg Boss Season 10, hosted by the renowned Baadshah Kiccha Sudeep. Making a wildcard entry on Day 51, Pavi stepped into the Bigg Boss house. Read More Bigg Boss Kannada 10 elimination: Kiccha Sudeep's reality show has managed to create ripples on the small screen, courtesy of its drama-packed episodes. The show has remained in the headlines for the constant drama in the BBK 10 house. From Tanisha's FIR controversy to Varthur Santhosh's arrest due to tiger claw pendant, Bigg Boss Kannada season 10 has grabbed eyeballs for different reasons. BIGG BOSS KANNADA 10 EVICTION Vinay Gowda, Namratha Gowda, Drone Prathap, Tanisha Kuppanda, Snehith Gowda, Varthur Santhosh, Michael Ajay, Sangeetha Sringeri were nominated for eviction in the eighth week of Bigg Boss Kannada 10. Eight contestants were in the danger zone and it was said that Santosh registered the highest votes from the audience. Speculations were rife that Snehith Gowda or Michael Ajay might get eliminated from Bigg Boss Kannada 10. According to the online voting trends and X polls, Tanisha, Namratha and Michael were lagging in the vote race. It was said that Michael might bid adieu to the show. In a major twist, the makers scrapped the elimination process, courtesy of Kiccha Sudeep's decision. The actor used his 'Veto' power for the first time in the history of the show. He used his special power to ensure that Snehith and Michael Ajay are not evicted from the reality show. Kiccha Sudeep's authority played a big role in Michael Ajay's immunity from elimination, leaving the audience impressed. The Kannada superstar, who has been fair in his approach, said that he didn't utilise the power earlier but he didn't wish Snehith and Michael's efforts to get wasted. Justifying his decision, he said, "I didn't find it important to exercise such a power. However, considering the efforts of Snehith and Michael, I wanted to use the special power today." Keep watching this space for more updates. Temptation Island India is slowly nearing its finale week, and the tension between the audience and the contestants has reached its peak. The Indian adaptation of the global hit reality show features four couples who willingly participate in the social experiment to test their love and relationship. They are separated and sent to two villas based on their gender, where they must survive amidst attractive and tempting singles of the opposite sex. The purpose of the experiment is to observe whether the couples will successfully leave the villa with their partners or succumb to temptations, forming connections with the temptors and choosing to leave with them. Recently, former Bigg Boss contestant and social media star Rajiv Adatia expressed his enthusiasm for the show, tweeting, "Temptation Island is juicy!!! I'm actually loving it!!" This tweet ignited a great buzz among fans who expressed their desire to see him as a contestant on the show. Sharing his excitement, Rajiv said, "My fans often say that I am the perfect tempter for Temptation Island and must go on the show. I'm pretty sure and guarantee that if I go on the show, everyone will fall for me, and they will exit the show with me only!" He further shares, "I am following the show and really loving the dynamics of changing relationships every day. I've seen couples crying on days after seeing their partner kissing or getting closer to someone else. They are there to test their relationship, and they must stick to the process. I love Temptation Island; Karan Kundrra is killing it, and so is Mouni Roy. The tempters and couples are a treat to watch!" To watch more interesting updates from the show, tune in to watch Temptation Island India, 8pm onwards streaming for free only on JioCinema Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah Off-Air: Produced by Asit Modi under Neela Film Productions, Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah premiered on SAB TV with Dilip Joshi and Disha Vakani as Jethala and Dishaben respectively. The sitcom became a huge success and is counted among the longest-running shows on TV thanks to endearing characters and relatable yet funny situations. TAARAK MEHTA KA OOLTAH CHASHMAH NOT GOING OFF-AIR Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah completed 15 successful years earlier this year and is still going strong on the TRP front despite many prominent cast members bidding adieu due to different reasons. While the makers have been introducing regular twists to make the long-running show interesting and entertaining for the loyal audience, the ongoing speculations suggested that TMKOC is likely to end in the coming months. While the ongoing rumours left the Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah fans in disbelief, looks like the off-air news isn't true. Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah: Why Fans Are Trending 'Boycott' TMKOC? Here's All You Need To Know Chand Jalne Laga TWIST | THIS TV Star Confirms Entry As Kanika Mann Aka Tara's Lover: My Fears... We're saying so because a Tellychakkar report states that the much-loved sitcom isn't ending and is here to stay. Yes, you read that right! However, an official statement on the same from the makers' side is still awaited. THE CURIOUS CASE OF DAYABEN'S COMEBACK IN TMKOC For those who are unaware, Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah has been grabbing eyeballs lately for the wrong reasons. Initially, the controversial exits of Sailesh Lodha and Jennifer Mistry made headlines and most recently, netizens expressed their anger by trending 'boycott TMKOC' on X (earlier known as Twitter). Interestingly, the makers had hinted at Disha Vakani aka Dayaben's comeback during Diwali celebrations. However, in one of the recent episodes, it was revealed that Dayaben isn't returning to Gokuldham society as of now. This irked the fans of TMKOC who were eagerly awaiting her comeback. Fans then took to social media and asked the makers to apologise to them. So far, the team hasn't reacted to the outrage. GUANGZHOU, China, Dec. 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The 5th World Media Summit (WMS) held an opening ceremony Sunday morning in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province. Fu Hua, president of Xinhua News Agency, said in a keynote speech at the opening ceremony that confidence is more valuable than gold when facing difficulties. Focusing on the summit's theme of "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," attendees took part in extensive discussions to contribute media power to the construction of a brighter future. Confidence is a key word for global media leaders, noted Fu Hua, adding that history development, civilization prosperity and human progress require the media to shoulder the responsibilities of fostering unity and boosting confidence. Fu noted that the WMS serves as an important platform for media communication and cooperation between countries, and said efforts should be made to improve this multilateral mechanism and utilize it to its fullest extent, tap into the potential for cooperation, innovate collaboration models, and expand cooperation channels. Xinhua will enhance communication and consultation processes with media organizations from various countries, and work with these organizations to construct and utilize the summit mechanism effectively, Fu said. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2291274/IMG_6813.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2291275/IMG_6814.jpg View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/xinhua-news-agency-president-fu-hua-delivers-key-note-speech-at-5th-world-media-summit-wms-302003948.html Rio Tinto has approved a new 12.4MW solar farm and 8.8MVa/2.1MWh of battery storage to provide renewable energy for the Amrun bauxite operations near Weipa in Queensland. The 12.4MW solar farm and battery storage are part of Rio Tinto's global decarbonisation strategy and ongoing efforts to reduce emissions at its Pacific bauxite, alumina and aluminium operations. They are expected to reduce Amrun's diesel electricity consumption by 37 percent and annual CO2-equivalent emissions by 14,000 tonnes, and will add to the existing 5.6MW of solar and 4MWh of battery power built for Rio Tinto's Weipa operations and the local electricity network since 2015. Aggreko has been contracted to build, own, and operate the solar farm to supply renewable electricity to the mine operations, in addition to its current contract to supply electricity generated from an existing diesel power station. Rio Tinto Weipa Operations General Manager Shona Markham said "The construction of the Amrun solar farm and battery storage system, which is located on Wik and Wik-Waya Traditional lands, is an important milestone for Weipa Operations and will contribute to Rio Tinto's commitment to reduce operational greenhouse gas emissions. "The Amrun solar farm will be one of three Weipa Operations solar stations, which will together provide 18MW of solar generation capacity to our mines and the Weipa town. This project helps us make inroads towards our ambitions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our operations." Managing Director of Aggreko Asia Pacific George Whyte said "Aggreko is excited to be supporting Rio Tinto on working towards meeting their decarbonisation goals and our own with this project. "This partnership aligns with our mission to accelerate the energy transition and as a world leader in the supply of clean energy infrastructure, we are confident that we will successfully deliver reliable and efficient energy for Rio Tinto's Amrun operations." Early works have begun on the new solar farm, which is expected to be operational by early 2025. Once completed, the Amrun solar farm will provide about 21 gigawatt hours of renewable power annually. Combined with the existing Weipa renewable power generation network, the solar farms will reduce Weipa Operations' diesel consumption by an estimated 10 million litres per year and lower its annual greenhouse gas emissions by about 28,000 tonnes the equivalent of taking more than 6,000 internal combustion engine passenger cars off the road. More information on Rio Tinto's climate targets can be found here. Note to editors Rio Tinto's Weipa Operations in Far North Queensland includes three bauxite mines, processing facilities, shiploaders, an export wharf, two ports, power stations, a rail network and ferry terminals. Rio Tinto also provides the municipal services for the town of Weipa. Amrun, Weipa's newest mine, was completed in 2018 and will extend the Weipa bauxite operations by decades, significantly building on our 60-year history on Western Cape York, and providing jobs and supporting business growth in the region. The mine is located on traditional land and Rio Tinto operates within the terms of an Indigenous Land Use Agreement Rio Tinto has had with local Traditional Owners for more than 20 years. Rio Tinto works closely with the Traditional Owners to implement our agreements, ensuring that the benefits generated from mining support future generations and that important cultural heritage sites are identified and preserved. More information on solar farms at Weipa can be found here. riotinto.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231203964459/en/ Contacts: Please direct all enquiries to media.enquiries@riotinto.com Media Relations, United Kingdom Matthew Klar M +44 7796 630 637 David Outhwaite M +44 7787 597 493 Media Relations, Australia Matt Chambers M +61 433 525 739 Jesse Riseborough M +61 436 653 412 Alyesha Anderson M +61 434 868 118 Michelle Lee M +61 458 609 322 Media Relations, Americas Simon Letendre M +1 514 796 4973 Malika Cherry M +1 418 592 7293 Vanessa Damha M +1 514 715 2152 Investor Relations, United Kingdom Menno Sanderse M +44 7825 195 178 David Ovington M +44 7920 010 978 Laura Brooks M +44 7826 942 797 Investor Relations, Australia Tom Gallop M +61 439 353 948 Amar Jambaa M +61 472 865 948 $14.1 Million Brokered Private Placement of Common Shares Increase in Existing Term Loan with Cymbria Corporation by $5.9 Million to $20.9 Million Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - December 3, 2023) - Premium Nickel Resources Ltd. (TSXV: PNRL) (OTCQX: PNRLF) (the "Company") is pleased to announce a proposed equity and debt financing package of $20 million, comprising: Brokered Private Placement : a "best efforts" private placement offering of 11,765,000 common shares of the Company (the " Common Shares ") at a price of $1.20 per Common Share for aggregate gross proceeds of approximately $14.1 million (the " Offering "). Amended Term Loan : a second amended and restated commitment letter between the Company and Cymbria Corporation to, inter alia, amend the terms of their existing term loan to increase the principal amount of the loan from $15,000,000 to $20,882,353 (the "Amended Term Loan"), which, upon closing of the Amended Term Loan, would result in additional gross proceeds to the Company of $5,000,000. Brokered Private Placement The Company entered into an engagement letter with Cormark Securities Inc., on behalf of BMO Capital Markets, as co-lead agent, and a syndicate of agents to be formed (collectively, the "Agents") in respect of the Offering. Under the Offering, the Company will issue 11,765,000 Common Shares at a price of $1.20 per Common Share for aggregate gross proceeds of approximately $14.1 million. It is anticipated that EdgePoint Investment Group Inc., or an entity (or entities) managed by EdgePoint ("EdgePoint"), will exercise its participation right in respect of the Offering (the "Participation Right") and subscribe for Common Shares in accordance with its existing ownership interest in the Company. EdgePoint was granted the Participation Right pursuant to the terms of a subscription agreement between the Company and EdgePoint dated June 28, 2023. Subject to compliance with applicable regulatory requirements and in accordance with National Instrument 45-106 - Prospectus Exemptions ("NI 45-106"), the Common Shares will be offered for sale on a private placement basis: (i) in each of the provinces and territories of Canada, other than Quebec, in reliance on the "listed issuer financing exemption" from the prospectus requirements (the "LIFE Exemption") available under Part 5A of NI 45-106 for aggregate gross proceeds of up to approximately $10,000,000 (or up to approximately 8,333,333 Common Shares); and (ii) (A) in each of the provinces and territories of Canada pursuant to available exemptions from the prospectus requirements under NI 45-106 (other than the LIFE Exemption), (B) in the United States pursuant to available exemptions from the registration requirements of the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), and applicable U.S. state securities laws, and (C) in such other jurisdictions provided it is understood that no prospectus filing or comparable obligation, ongoing reporting requirements or requisite regulatory or governmental approval arises in such other jurisdictions. The Common Shares issued pursuant to the LIFE Exemption to Canadian resident subscribers under the Offering will not be subject to a hold period pursuant to applicable Canadian securities laws. The Common Shares issued to Canadian resident subscribers pursuant to prospectus exemptions under NI 45-106 other than the LIFE Exemption will be subject to a hold period expiring four months and one day after the closing of the Offering. The offer and sale of Common Shares in reliance on the LIFE Exemption will be conditional on the Company completing the Offering and Amended Term Loan for such amount that will provide the Company with sufficient available funds to meet its business objectives and liquidity requirements for a period of 12 months following closing of the Offering. There is an offering document related to the Offering that can be accessed on SEDAR+ (www.sedarplus.ca) under the Company's profile and on the Company's website at www.premiumnickelresources.ca. Prospective investors should read the offering document before making an investment decision. The Offering is expected to close on or about December 14, 2023, or such other date as the Company and the Agents may agree and remains subject to the receipt of all necessary approvals, including the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of any of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful, including any of the securities in the United States of America. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "1933 Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States or to, or for account or benefit of, U.S. Persons (as defined in Regulation S under the 1933 Act) unless registered under the 1933 Act and applicable state securities laws, or an exemption from such registration requirements is available. Amended Term Loan The Company and Cymbria Corporation (the "Lender") have entered into a second amended and restated commitment letter (the "Second A&R Commitment Letter") to amend the terms of their existing term loan (the "Term Loan") to, inter alia, increase the principal amount of the loan by $5,882,353 (the "Additional Principal Amount") from $15,000,000 to $20,882,353. The Additional Principal Amount will be subject to an original issue discount of approximately 15% and will be made available by the Lender to the Company as a single advance in an amount equal to $5,000,000 on closing of the Amended Term Loan. The Additional Principal Amount will form part of the Term Loan and, except as otherwise set out in the Second A&R Commitment Letter, will be on the same terms and conditions applicable to the Term Loan. For certainty, the Additional Principal Amount will bear interest at a rate of 10% per annum calculated and payable quarterly in arrears and will mature and be payable on June 28, 2026, which, in each case, is consistent with the terms and conditions applicable to the Term Loan. As consideration for entering into the Term Loan Amendment, on closing of the Amended Term Loan, the Company will issue an additional 700,000 common share purchase warrants (collectively, the "Additional Warrants") to the Lender, with each Additional Warrant entitling the Lender to acquire one Common Share at a price of $1.4375 per Common Share until June 28, 2026. The closing of the Amended Term Loan, including the issuance of the Additional Warrants, is expected to occur concurrently with closing of the Offering on or about December 14, 2023, or such other date as the Company and the Lender may agree, and remains subject to: (i) completion of the Offering; and (ii) the satisfaction of certain customary closing conditions, including the receipt of all necessary approvals, including the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange. The net proceeds of the Offering and the Amended Term Loan will be used by the Company to advance the exploration and development of its mineral assets in Botswana and for general corporate and working capital purposes. MI 61-101 Disclosure EdgePoint is (i) a "related party" of the Company by virtue of having beneficial ownership of, or control or direction over, directly or indirectly, Common Shares carrying more than 10% of the voting rights attached to all of the Company's voting securities, and (ii) an affiliated entity of Cymbria Corporation and, as such, the Amended Term Loan, including the issuance of the Additional Warrants, is considered to be a "related party transaction" of the Company for purposes of Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"). In addition, the Offering (including EdgePoint's participation in the Offering by exercising its Participation Right) may be considered a "connected transaction" to the Amended Term Loan for purposes of MI 61-101. The Company may, however, complete the Offering and the Amended Term Loan (together, the "Transactions") in reliance on exemptions available under MI 61-101 from the formal valuation and minority approval requirements of MI 61-101. The Transactions are exempt from the formal valuation requirement in Section 5.4 of MI 61-101 in reliance on Section 5.5(b) of MI 61-101 as the Company is not listed on a specified market under MI 61-101. Additionally, the Transactions are exempt from the minority approval requirement in Section 5.6 of MI 61-101 in reliance on Section 5.7(1)(a) of MI 61-101 insofar as neither the fair market value of the subject matter, nor the fair market value of the consideration for, the Transactions, insofar as it involves (or is expected to involve) "interested parties", exceeds 25% of the Company's market capitalization. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS Keith Morrison Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Premium Nickel Resources Ltd. For further information about Premium Nickel Resources Ltd., please contact: Jaclyn Ruptash Vice President, Communications and Government and Investor Relations +1 (604) 770-4334 Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information Certain statements contained in this news release may be considered "forward-looking information" or "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. These forward-looking statements, by their nature, require the Company to make certain assumptions and necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in these forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance. Words such as "may", "will", "would", "could", "expect", "believe", "plan", "anticipate", "intend", "estimate", "continue", or the negative or comparable terminology, as well as terms usually used in the future and the conditional, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. In particular, this news release contains forward-looking statements pertaining to the terms of the Offering and the Amended Term Loan; the use of proceeds of the Offering and the Amended Term Loan; the timing and ability of the Company to close the Offering and the Amended Term Loan; the Company's ability to obtain all regulatory approvals, including the approval of the TSX Venture Exchange; and certain fees and commissions payable under the Offering. Information contained in forward-looking statements are based upon certain material assumptions that were applied in drawing a conclusion or making a forecast or projection, including management's perception of geology and mineralization; assumptions, limitations and qualifications in the Selkirk Technical Report and Selebi; the timing and ability of the Company to receive necessary regulatory approvals; planned exploration programs and expenditures; the Company's ability to establish a mineral resource estimate for the Selebi Mine; the ability to the Company to expand mineral resources beyond current mineral resources estimates; the utility of any historical data in respect of the Selkirk Mine and Selebi Mine; the results of any testing; the ability of exploration activities (including drill results) to accurately predict mineralization; the significance of metallurgical results; current conditions and expected future developments; current information available to the management of the Company; mining activities and the business of mineral exploration; the general business and prospects of the Company; public disclosure from operators of the relevant mines, as well as other considerations that are believed to be appropriate in the circumstances. The Company considers its assumptions to be reasonable based on information currently available but cautions the reader that there can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements and the Company's assumptions, many of which are beyond the control of the Company, may ultimately prove to be incorrect since they are subject to risks and uncertainties that affect the Company and its businesses. For additional information with respect to these and risks and other factors that may affect the assumptions and forward-looking statements made in this news release concerning the Company, please refer to (i) the section entitled "Risks and Uncertainties" in the most recent management discussion and analysis of the Company, and (ii) the risk factors outlined in the filing statement of the Company dated July 22, 2022, both of which are available electronically on SEDAR+ (www.sedarplus.ca) under the Company's issuer profile. Investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of such document only and, accordingly, are subject to change after such date. The Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly or otherwise revise any forward-looking statements or the foregoing list of assumptions or factors, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein. / Not for distribution to United States newswire services or for dissemination in the United States / To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/189677 WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Alaska Air Group Inc. (ALK) has agreed to acquire Hawaiian Holdings Inc. (HA) for $18.00 per share in an all cash deal valued at about $1.9 billion. The deal includes $0.9 billion of Hawaiian Airlines net debt. Hawaiian closed Friday's regular trading at $4.86 up $0.37 up 8.24%. The deal is expected to be accretive to Alaska's earnings within two years post-close with at least $235 million of expected run-rate synergies. The acquisition is conditioned on required regulatory approvals, approval by Hawaiian shareholders, and other customary closing conditions. It is expected to close in 12-18 months. Alaska Air noted that the combined organization will be based in Seattle under the leadership of Alaska Airlines Cheif Executive Officer Ben Minicucci. 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. Inside Voyage, a new wine bar in San Anselmo. Courtesy Cass Cleave Voyage, a new wine bar, has arrived in Marin County. Courtesy Cass Cleave The team behind a popular Marin County restaurant just opened a wine bar. Voyage is now pouring natural wine and serving snacks at 500 San Anselmo Ave. in San Anselmo. The owners also run Stillwater in Fairfax, nearby San Anselmo natural wine shop Souvenir and cocktail bar Junior in San Francisco. Theyve long eyed the commanding corner building, which was built in 1916 and once housed San Anselmos first movie theater. Natural light streams in through arched windows with textured glass that line the upper edge of the buildings walls. Like their other businesses, they filled the space with warm, natural materials: a floor made from Douglas fir, huge redwood arched columns, marble tabletops wrapped in redwood and custom wooden stools made by Sam Lilestol. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Black Crate Designs, which created wooden pieces for Souvenir and Bay Area bars including San Franciscos Bar Gemini, constructed 7-foot-tall, abstract sculptures from redwood, which sit behind the 15-seat bar. At the back of the large, airy space, hung with vintage lights, is a lounge area with a fireplace. The design goes with our ethos around food and wine and it being local, sustainable, honest, said co-owner and designer Margaret Ruiz of the Strand Design, who also runs Voyage with David Ruiz, Dylan Jones and Matty Conway. Huge, custom carved redwood columns sit behind the bar at Voyage in San Anselmo. Courtesy Cass Cleave Theyre reluctant to label Voyage as a natural wine bar, though everything they pour is farmed organically or sustainably with as little sulfites as possible. Expect mostly wines from California and France to start. The bar also serves beer, cider and several low-to-no alcohol cocktails. They may add a weekday apero hour with small bites and vermouth cocktails. Cameron Meyers, the chef at Stillwater, created Voyages food menu, which will range from snacks like cheese and cured meats to steak tartare and a mortadella hoagie. Everything will be sourced as locally as possible, including smoked trout made in small batches in Napa, served with cheese and pickles. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The smoked trout plate with pickles and farmers cheese from Voyage in San Anselmo. Courtesy Cass Cleave Voyage is not a listening bar, but music, played through an analog sound system, is central to the experience, the owners said. They may host DJs and live music performances. Music and wine is a throughline: Just down the street, Souvenir sells bottles and vinyl records. The shop is where you buy the goods, Jones said of Souvenir, and this is where you experience them. Voyage. 5-10 p.m. Monday and 5-10 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. 500 San Anselmo Ave., San Anselmo. instagram.com/voyagewines Tallinn, Estonia--(Newsfile Corp. - December 3, 2023) - LinkDaddy has announced its local citations and business listings service - which leverages a private network of over 300 directories to deliver DoFollow backlinks. The new announcement from LinkDaddy comes following a report from Backlinko, which found that websites with the highest number of total backlinks usually perform optimally in Google's rankings. Working with marketing agencies seeking a stronger web presence, the LinkDaddy team will offer fully managed backlink campaigns to improve local search rankings and drive more inbound traffic. More information can be found at https://www.linkdaddy.shop/local-citations-and-business-listings/. LinkDaddy Announces Agency Backlink Local Business Directory Listings Service To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/8814/189685_4d7dac2eb4f09aef_001full.jpg LinkDaddy's recently announced service can be used to improve the overall ranking of Google Business Profiles, agency websites, or landing pages. It delivers over 300 local citations - each featuring unique descriptions and custom URLs - and links can be provided to Maps positioning, social media accounts, and more. Creating backlinks manually is a time-consuming process, but its automated solution allows agencies to scale their local SEO efforts and list sites on hundreds of industry-specific directories, LinkDaddy explains. The service facilitates the submission of complete and accurate business citations, including a business name, address, and phone number, to optimize local search performance. According to the team, business citations play a crucial role in local SEO by ensuring correct information is displayed for the business on Google Maps. By creating citations, agencies can establish that their information is consistent and correct across top data aggregators, helping search engines understand the business more accurately. In addition to citations, LinkDaddy can also create backlinks to each client's Google reviews - which helps improve brand awareness and customer trust. Agencies can customize the anchor text for each review link to target relevant keywords, and improve the chances of higher reach. By getting listed on reputable, high-authority local directories, businesses can substantially improve visibility, the team notes. When more customers find the business online, it leads to increased customer reviews and ratings over time, and positive reviews help establish domain authority as an expert in the space. Tony Peacock, the LinkDaddy CEO, has years of experience with backlink strategies that have driven growth across multiple campaigns. "We've designed our network with strategic local SEO in mind," he says. "We know how important it is to keep your local citations strong and steady, no matter what. Even if websites go down or Google sees them as duplicate content, your business listings will still be visible and effective on our network." Interested parties can learn more at https://www.linkdaddy.shop/products/local-citations-and-business-listings/. Contact Info: Name: Tony Peacock Email: tony@linkdaddy.com Organization: LinkDaddy Address: 6 Sepapaja, Tallinn, Harju maakond 11415, Estonia Website: https://www.linkdaddy.com To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/189685 Smart SOAR vendor to showcase industry-leading security orchestration platform at prestigious event in London D3 Security, the leader in smart security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR), today announced its participation as a Silver Sponsor at Black Hat Europe 2023. This highly anticipated cybersecurity event is set to take place from December 6-7 at ExCeL London, bringing together the brightest minds in the security industry to discuss the latest trends, research, and technologies. The D3 Security team will be at booth 232, demonstrating their cutting-edge Smart SOAR platform that integrates seamlessly with best-in-class security tools to provide a comprehensive, automated response to threats. Smart SOAR enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of security operations centers (SOCs) worldwide and enables better business outcomes for managed security service providers (MSSPs). "D3's presence at Black Hat Europe 2023 is a reflection of our larger commitment to addressing the complex security challenges of European companies," said Amardeep Dhingra, Director of Strategic Alliances at D3 Security. "Our quickly growing team in the UK and throughout Europe has already brought the undeniable benefits of vendor-agnostic SOAR to many thriving enterprises and MSSPs. We are looking forward to engaging with thousands more cybersecurity professionals to show how our platform can transform the capabilities of their security tools." Black Hat Europe attendees will have the unique opportunity to engage with D3 Security's experts, explore live demonstrations of their innovative Smart SOAR solution, and discuss how to overcome their most pressing security challenges. D3 Security encourages attendees to book a meeting in advance to ensure dedicated time for in-depth discussions. For more information about D3 Security's presence at Black Hat Europe 2023 and to book a meeting with their team, please visit info.d3security.com/upcoming-events. About D3 Security D3 Security's Smart SOAR helps solve many of the most entrenched problems in cybersecurity-including analyst burnout, alert overwhelm, and information silos-by transforming separate tools into a unified ecosystem with multi-tier automation, codeless orchestration, robust case management, and environment-wide reporting. Smart SOAR performs autonomous triage and drastically reduces false positives so that enterprise, MSSP, and public sector security teams can spend more time on real threats. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231203482002/en/ Contacts: Contact for D3 Security Walker Banerd, Director of Communications and Content wbanerd@d3security.com DUBAI, UAE, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Markel, the insurance operation within Markel Group Inc. (NYSE: MKL), has hired Isaac Meek as a Cyber Senior Underwriter. Meek's arrival exemplifies Markel's long-term commitment to recruiting high-level underwriting talent, so that it can continue providing insurance solutions to meet customer demand in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), while supporting the businesses' overarching strategy of accelerating growth across Asia. In his new post, Meek will work closely with Priyesh Pradhan, Professional and Financial Risk (PFR) Senior Underwriter at Markel India, to drive the growth of Markel's cyber offering in MENA and the broader Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. Alongside those responsibilities, Meek will be involved in fostering broker relationships and identifying areas for further scalability within MENA. Markel Dubai's cyber offering provides broad first-party and third-party coverage, for a broad range of industries and clients including financial institutions, hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, professional service firms, and industrial companies, with line sizes up to USD $10m. Insureds taking out this policy will also have access to the organisation's global service providers, its 24/7 crisis management hotline, and specialist cyber support. Prior to joining Markel, Meek worked for the American Insurance Group (AIG) where he started out as an Assistant Underwriter, before being promoted to Underwriter in 2021. During his five-year stint at AIG, he was responsible for underwriting risks across various financial lines including professional indemnity (PI) and directors & officers (D&O), while focusing on blended cyber and tech PI risks for customers domiciled in Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) countries, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Meek will be situated at Markel's Dubai office, reporting to Max Robbie, Senior Executive Officer at Markel Dubai. Robbie commented: "We are delighted to welcome Isaac to the team here at Markel Dubai. Isaac joins us at an exciting time as we continue to build out our product offerings, particularly given the speed of growth and development of cyber in the region." "With his wealth of experience, Isaac will help us to identify new territories and geographies to drive profitable growth for the cyber portfolio, with the support of our established cyber underwriting teams in India and Singapore. I look forward working with him so that we can continue strengthening our business in the region, offering clients tailored and bespoke products across MENA." About Markel We are Markel, a leading global specialty insurer with a truly people-first approach. As the insurance operations within Markel Group Inc. (NYSE: MKL), we operate the Markel Specialty, Markel International, and Markel Global Reinsurance divisions, as well as State National, our portfolio protection and program services operations, and Nephila, our insurance-linked securities operations. Our broad array of capabilities and expertise allow us to create intelligent solutions for the most complex risk management needs. However, it is our people - and the deep, valued relationships they develop with colleagues, brokers and clients - that differentiates us worldwide. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2289568/Isaac_Meek.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2090808/Markel_primary_logo_Logo.jpg View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/markel-hires-isaac-meek-to-lead-the-cyber-portfolio-in-middle-east-and-north-africa-302002290.html Capita Plc - Capita agrees to sell stake in Fera and completes non-core disposal programme PR Newswire LONDON, United Kingdom, December 04 4 December 2023 Capita agrees to sell stake in Fera and completes non-core disposal programme Capita plc ('Capita') today announces that it has agreed to sell its 75% stake in Fera Science Limited ('Fera') to Bridgepoint Group plc ('Bridgepoint'), for an enterprise value of 60m on a cash-free, debt-free basis. The deal values the total joint venture at 80m and represents a 10.8x multiple on a 2022 standalone EBITDA of 7.4m1. The sale of Capita's 75% interest in Fera, a joint venture with the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), will result in Capita receiving cash proceeds of 62m upon completion. These cash proceeds include cash and debt-like items and working capital adjustments. This will provide additional liquidity to further strengthen Capita's balance sheet and support investment across the Group. Fera was established in 2015 as a joint venture between Capita (75%) and Defra (25%) to create a financially sustainable business, focused on the agriculture, farming and food production market. It specialises in environmental testing, research, and advisory and assurance services for both the public and private sectors. Capita consolidates Fera in its consolidated financial statements. The reported revenue and profit before tax for the year to 31 December 2022 were 45m and 3m respectively. Gross assets were 37m at 30 June 2023. National Security and Investment Act clearance has been secured as a condition to enable completion to take place. As a condition precedent to completion, changes being made to the title of the property from which Fera operates require consent from the superior landlord. This consent process has commenced. As part of the transaction, Defra is retaining its shareholding. All current Fera senior management and employees will remain with the business when Bridgepoint becomes the new majority shareholder on completion. The sale of Fera and of our travel businesses, which completed on 14 November, marks the successful end of non-core disposals from Capita's Portfolio division as part of a strategy to simplify and strengthen the business around two core markets. Jon Lewis, Capita's Chief Executive Officer, said: "We are very pleased to have agreed the sale of our stake in Fera after a competitive auction process. "Capita and Defra have partnered together to grow and professionalise Fera over the past eight years, creating significant value for us and the taxpayer. "Fera is now a vibrant and profitable commercial business, successfully serving private sector and government customers in both the UK and overseas. "We had previously announced our intention to sell our stake in Fera, as part of our ongoing strategy to simplify and strengthen Capita. It was the appropriate time to find a new partner to build on the strong, successful foundations now in place at Fera and take the company onto the next stage of its development. "This is the latest excellent example of Capita successfully collaborating with the UK Government to commercialise and transform Government assets into valuable businesses, following previous successes including Constructionline and AXELOS. "I am particularly delighted that, subject to successful completion of this transaction and our travel businesses, which completed on 14 November, we will have completed our non-core disposals programme. These disposals have enabled us to significantly strengthen the balance sheet and materially reduce our debt." Capita is being advised on the transaction by Strata Partners. 1Standalone EBITDA has been derived by adjusting the 2022 EBITDA of the joint venture by adding back the management charge from Capita and deducting an estimation of the costs to run the entity once it is no longer part of the Capita group. For more information, please contact: Investor enquiries? Helen Parris Stephanie Little Director of Investor Relations Investor Relations Manager Tel: 07720 169269 Tel: 07541 622838 Email: IRteam@capita.co.uk Email: IRteam@capita.co.uk? Media enquiries Capita external communications Tel: 0207 654 2399 Email: media@capita.co.uk? About Capita plc Capita is a leading provider of business process services, driven by data, technology and people. Every day our 43,000 colleagues help millions of people, by delivering innovative, digitally enabled solutions to transform and simplify the connections between government and citizens, businesses and customers. We partner with our clients and provide the insight and technologies that give time back, allowing them to focus on what they do best and making people's lives easier and simpler. We operate across two divisions - Capita Public Service and Capita Experience - in the UK, Europe, India and South Africa. About Fera Fera is a national and international centre of excellence for interdisciplinary investigation and problem solving across plant and bee health, crop protection, sustainable agriculture, food and feed quality and chemical safety in the environment. Fera creates and delivers integrated, innovative and expert research services and products for our clients and partners in crop protection, chemical and animal health, as well as food producers and growers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers. Fera supports and works closely with governments, commercial entities, academia and other leading research organisations. About Bridgepoint Group plc Bridgepoint Group plc is a listed international alternative asset manager focused on middle-market companies typically valued up to 1 billion. With 39.5 billion of assets under management, the company has c.200 investment professionals (covering Services, Advanced Industrials, Healthcare and Consumer with Technology as a horizontal sector) in Europe, the US and China. Bridgepoint has four distinct investment strategies: Private Equity (Mid-cap, Small mid-cap, and Growth) and Private Credit. PARIS, France, December 4, 2023, 08:30 am CET - Pharnext SA ( FR001400JXB0 - ALPHA) (the "Company"), an advanced late-clinical stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases with high unmet medical need, today announces the successful completion of database lock for its pivotal Phase III clinical study (PREMIER trial) of PXT3003[1], its drug candidate in Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease type 1A (CMT1A), a rare debilitating peripheral neuropathy. In the wake of Pharnext's recent announcement[2] marking the last patients' last visit (LPLV) in the pivotal Phase III PREMIER study, we are thrilled to confirm the successful cleaning of the clinical database, with the database lock officially implemented on December 1, 2023. This monumental achievement paves the way for the unblinding of the study, heralding the commencement of the analysis phase for the eagerly anticipated topline results. Pharnext affirms its unwavering commitment to the predetermined schedule, assuring the delivery of topline data from the Phase III PREMIER study on December 11, as previously communicated[3]. Gilbert Wagener, Chief Medical Officer of Pharnext, expressed his exhilaration, stating, "Being part of the Pharnext team and concluding a Phase III clinical trial that holds the potential to redefine the treatment landscape for CMT1A patients, who currently lack effective options, is nothing short of thrilling. We extend our sincere thanks to all patients, patient advocacy groups, and investigators for their unwavering support throughout the clinical trial. We eagerly anticipate sharing the results with the patient community and the public on December 11, 2023." Hugo Brugiere, Managing Director of Pharnext, shared his excitement, stating, "We are overjoyed to be on the cusp of the Phase III clinical data readout. The proximity to the finish line brings an electrifying sense of hope that PXT3003 could emerge as a groundbreaking therapeutic solution for CMT1A patients." Disclaimer Pharnext arranged convertible bonds financing (OCEAN-BSA) with Global Tech Opportunities 13 which, after receiving the shares resulting from the conversion or exercise of these instruments, will not remain shareholder of the Company. The shares resulting from the conversion or exercise of the above-mentioned securities will generally be sold on the market at very short notice, which may create strong downward pressure on the share price. Shareholders may suffer a loss of their invested capital due to a significant fall in the Company's share price, as well as significant dilution due to the large number of securities issued to Global Tech Opportunities 13. Investors are advised to exercise extreme caution before deciding to invest in the securities of a listed company that carries out such dilutive financing transactions, particularly when they are carried out in succession. The Company wishes to point out that this is not the first dilutive financing transaction it has undertaken. Investors are invited to familiarize themselves with the risks associated with these transactions, as mentioned in the press release above. About Pharnext Pharnext is an advanced clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing novel therapies for neurodegenerative diseases currently without satisfactory therapeutic solutions. Pharnext has a first-in-class drug candidate, PXT3003, in development for Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease type 1A (CMT1A), a rare, debilitating, inherited peripheral neuropathy. PXT3003 benefits from orphan drug status in Europe and the United States. In 2018, PXT3003 completed a Phase III clinical trial, the PLEO-CMT trial, with encouraging topline results. This trial was followed by an open-label extension study, the PLEO-CMT-FU trial, with 120 patients continuing treatment with PXT3003. Long-term data suggest a sustained benefit, safety, and efficacy, after 6 years of total trial time. An international pivotal Phase III study of PXT3003, the PREMIER trial, enrolling 387 CMT1A patients was completed in August 2023. PREMIER topline results are expected in December 2023. PXT3003 originated from the Pleotherapy R&D approach. Pharnext draws the attention of investors to the financial and other risk factors detailed in its financial reports. More information can be found at www.pharnext.com. Pharnext is listed on the Euronext Growth Stock Exchange in Paris (ISIN code: FR001400JXB0). Contacts Financial Press Relations ACTUS finance & communication Anne-Charlotte Dudicourt acdudicourt@actus.fr +33 (0)1 53 67 36 32 Investor Relations ACTUS finance & communication Jerome Fabreguettes Leib pharnext@actus.fr +33 (0)1 53 67 36 78 [1] Marketing of PXT3003 is conditional on a positive pivotal Phase III clinical trial (PREMIER) and the approval of regulatory agencies [2] Pharnext reports the end of double-blind treatment in PREMIER trial, the pivotal Phase III clinical trial of PXT3003 in Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease type 1A [3] Pharnext announces being at D-18 before publication of topline results from pivotal Phase III clinical trial (PREMIER trial) in Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease type 1A ------------------------ This publication embed "Actusnews SECURITY MASTER ". - SECURITY MASTER Key: yphsYcqaamfFm2yelJWZl5KZZ5tnlGjKm5SVxmWdlpqZmnKTlZdkasjGZnFklmdr - Check this key: https://www.security-master-key.com. ------------------------ Copyright Actusnews Wire Receive by email the next press releases of the company by registering on www.actusnews.com, it's free Full and original release in PDF format:https://www.actusnews.com/documents_communiques/ACTUS-0-83125-2023.12.04_database-lock_en.pdf LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Compass Group Plc (CPG.L, CMPGF.PK), a British food services company, said that it has entered into a deal with BNP Paribas Arbitrage S.N.C. to repurchase of up to of $250 million of the company's shares of 11 1/20 pence each from December 4, 2023 to May 8, 2024 at the latest. This H1 buyback is the initial stage of the company's $500 million share previously announced repurchase drive, which is expected to be completed in 2024. The purpose of the H1 repurchase program is to reduce the share capital of the Group. BNPP will make its trading decisions in relation to the company's shares independently of, and uninfluenced by, the company, Compass Group said. Copyright(c) 2023 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2023) - Canadian Palladium Resources Inc. (CSE: BULL) (OTCQB: DCNNF) (FSE: DCR) (the "Company") is pleased to announce that, further to its press release dated November 9, 2023, it has completed its arm's length acquisition ("Acquisition") of all of the issued and outstanding securities of 1439266 BC Ltd. ("143 BC"), in consideration for an aggregate of 12 million common shares of the Company issued at a deemed price of $0.315. 143 BC is the legal and beneficial owner of a 100% interest in and to 15 mineral tenements totalling 24,427.28 hectares ("Property") located in 'Lithium Valley' in Minas Gerais State, Brazil. The Property is located in the East Brazilian 'Lithium Belt', sometimes called, Lithium Valley, which is home to three operating lithium mines including Sigma Lithium's Groto do Cirilo mine and numerous advanced exploration projects such as Atlas Lithium's Neves project. Pursuant to the Acquisition, the shareholders of 143 BC will also receive, on a pro rata basis, an aggregate cash payment of $200,000, which is to be paid within three (3) months. In addition, 143 BC carries indebtedness of $100,000 in relation to a loan received by it for purposes of making a $100,000 payment to the original Property vendor. The Company will indirectly assume this obligation to pay this loan, with payment due within three (3) months. All securities issued in connection with the Acquisition will be subject to a hold period expiring on the date that is 10 days following the date on which the Company files a Business Acquisition Report in respect of the Acquisition. On behalf of the Board of Directors Canadian Palladium Resources Inc. James Newall, President and CEO T: (604) 639-4472 Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. In particular, forward-looking information in this press release includes, but is not limited to, statements with respect to the proposed timing and ability to pay the cash consideration and to discharge the loan held by 143 BC. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. We cannot guarantee future results, performance or achievements. Consequently, there is no representation that the actual results achieved will be the same, in whole or in part, as those set out in the forward-looking information. Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made, and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking information. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. We undertake no duty to update any of the forward-looking information to conform such information to actual results or to changes in our expectations except as otherwise required by applicable securities legislation. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/189665 Novel ultra-high affinity ligand OncoFAP targets Fibroblast Activation Protein (FAP), associated with a variety of solid tumors Licensing agreement between Philochem and Blue Earth Diagnostics, one of the Bracco family of companies, encompasses applications of OncoFAP for diagnostic and medical imaging Philogen's Phase I clinical trial with investigational 68 Ga-OncoFAP is underway in Europe, with first three patients successfully imaged Ga-OncoFAP is underway in Europe, with first three patients successfully imaged Blue Earth Diagnostics will assume further clinical development and future commercialization activities of OncoFAP for diagnostic or medical imaging purposes worldwide ZURICH, Switzerland and OXFORD, United Kingdom and MONROE TOWNSHIP, N.J., Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Philochem AG, a wholly owned subsidiary of Philogen S.p.A., and Blue Earth Diagnostics, a Bracco company and recognized leader in the development and commercialization of innovative PET radiopharmaceuticals, today provided additional information regarding a March 2022 licensing and collaboration agreement between Philochem and Blue Earth Diagnostics. The collaboration encompasses the development of OncoFAP, a proprietary, small organic ligand with ultra-high affinity to Fibroblast Activation Protein (FAP), for applications in the diagnostic imaging of solid tumors. Under the agreement, the Philogen Group is conducting a Phase 1 clinical study to evaluate the safety and dosimetry of 68Ga-OncoFAP (68Ga-OncoFAP-DOTAGA) in patients with solid tumors. The agreement provides Blue Earth Diagnostics rights to develop and commercialize 68Ga-OncoFAP worldwide. FAP is a tumor-associated antigen which is expressed in more than 90% of epithelial cancers (e.g., malignant breast, colorectal, ovarian, lung, skin, prostate, and pancreatic cancers, as well as in some soft tissue and bone sarcomas). The Philogen Group has a Phase I clinical trial (called FAPrimo) underway in Europe to evaluate the safety and dosimetry of 68Ga-OncoFAP in patients with solid tumors. The study is planned to enroll up to 20 patients who will undergo PET/CT imaging with 68Ga-OncoFAP. The first three enrolled patients in the trial were imaged in November 2023 at the National Cancer Institute of Milan (INT). To date, 68Ga-OncoFAP-DOTAGA has been used for PET imaging applications in approximately 100 patients with various solid tumors through Philochem's collaboration with the University of Munster, Germany. Prof. Dr. Dario Neri, Member of the Board of Philochem and CEO of the Philogen Group, commented: "We are excited about the promising tumor-targeting performance of 68Ga-OncoFAP in preclinical models and human patients to date. Philochem discovered and published the first paper on this important tumor targeting ligand in 2021. We believe OncoFAP technology has potential to pave the way for a new approach to tumor diagnosis, and significantly improve diagnosis and informed management for patients who have solid tumor cancers." "We are delighted to announce this key milestone of the first three patients being dosed in the Phase 1 trial for 68Ga-OncoFAP PET in the detection and localization of advanced solid tumors," commented David Gauden, D. Phil., Chief Executive Officer of Blue Earth Diagnostics. "68Ga-OncoFAP is an innovative and promising addition to Blue Earth Diagnostics' robust portfolio of precision PET radiopharmaceuticals. We are grateful for the support of our parent company, Bracco Imaging, S.p.A., in helping to advance innovation to shape the future of precision medicine and improve patients' lives worldwide with imaging technology such as OncoFAP. Based on preclinical studies and early clinical experience, 68Ga-OncoFAP has demonstrated favorable radiochemical properties, rapid clearance from organs and soft tissues and avid tumor uptake. We look forward to continuing collaboration with Philochem throughout this Phase 1 trial and applying our deep expertise in radiopharmaceutical development and commercialization as we advance further, with the goal to help patients and address unmet needs in cancer." About Fibroblast Activation Protein (FAP) and FAP-targeted Technology Fibroblast Activation Protein, or FAP, is a transmembrane protein that is overexpressed in cancer-associated-fibroblasts (CAFs) in the tumor microenvironment of most tumor types, but expressed at low levels in normal adult tissues. It is involved in a variety of tumor-promoting activities and is considered a promising target with diagnostic and theranostic potential in a variety of diseases. FAP is being investigated for use in diagnostic imaging and therapy in multiple tumor types, such as colon, breast, lung, pancreatic and esophageal cancers, among others. CAFs are also highly expressed in tissue remodeling, and FAP imaging may have applications in benign fibrotic conditions such as wound healing, as well as in chronic inflammation, cirrhosis, and cardiovascular and rheumatoid diseases. Radiolabeled FAP ligands have demonstrated high binding affinity, rapid binding to FAP-expressing tumors and impressive lesion to background ratios in patients with a broad range of cancer types. They can be labeled with isotopes such as 68Ga or 18F for diagnostic PET imaging, or with therapeutic radioisotopes such as 177Lu or 225Ac for therapy. About Philochem and the Philogen Group Philochem is a fully owned subsidiary of the Philogen Group, a Swiss-Italian, clinical-stage biotechnology company listed on the Italian Stock Exchange. Philogen is engaged in the discovery and development of novel pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical products. Philogen's strategy is to selectively deliver bioactive agentsand www.philochem.com. About Blue Earth Diagnostics Blue Earth Diagnostics, an indirect subsidiary of Bracco Imaging S.p.A., is a growing international molecular imaging company focused on delivering innovative, well-differentiated diagnostic solutions that inform patient care. Formed in 2014, the Company's success is driven by its management expertise and supported by a demonstrated track record of rapid development and commercialization of positron emission tomography. About Bracco Imaging Bracco Imaging S.p.A., part of the Bracco Group, is a world-leading diagnostic imaging provider. Headquartered in Milan, Italy, Bracco Imaging develops, manufactures and markets diagnostic imaging agents and solutions. It offers a product and solution portfolio for all key diagnostic imaging modalities: X-ray imaging. Contacts: For Philogen Dr. Emanuele Puca Investor Relations +41 For Blue Earth Diagnostics For Blue Earth Diagnostics Media Sam Brown Inc. Mike Beyer PP-UK-0674 Date of preparation: November 2023 BERLIN (dpa-AFX) - Germany's exports and imports declined unexpected in October amid the weaker trade activity within Europe, preliminary figures from the statistical office Destatis showed Monday. Exports decreased for a second month in a row, down a calendar and seasonally adjusted 0.2 percent month-on-month, while economists were looking for a 1.1 percent gain. In September, shipments fell 2.5 percent. Imports shrunk for a fifth straight month. They fell 1.2 percent from the previous month after a 1.9 percent decline in September. Economists had forecast 0.8 percent growth. Compared to the previous month, exports to the EU countries fell 2.7 percent and imports from these countries slid 2.8 percent. Shipments to countries outside the EU grew 2.9 percent and imports from those countries rose 0.8 percent. Both exports and imports decreased on a year-on-year basis, down 8.1 percent and 16.3 percent, respectively. The foreign trade surplus for October was EUR 17.8 billion, which was slightly bigger than the EUR 17.1 billion economists had forecast. In September, the surplus was EUR 16.7 billion and it was EUR 7.8 billion a year ago. The United States attracted most of the German exports in October and shipments to the country grew 5.7 percent. Exports to China rose 1.5 percent and those to the UK climbed 5.6 percent. China was the country of origin for most of the German imports. However, imports from the country decreased 2.4 percent. Imports from the U.S. rose 2.2 percent, while those from the U.K. slumped 15.1 percent. Exports to Russia shrunk 5.0 percent and imports from the country rose 6.6 percent. 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. New language assessment tool leverages A.I. for multi-language capabilities and enhanced online testing security, addressing the global demand for quick, reliable assessments at scale. PARIS, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Pipplet, a global leader in language assessment and a subsidiary of ETS, announces the launch of Talent AI, a breakthrough in language assessment technology designed for business and education sectors worldwide. Efficiency and Advanced Technology in Language Assessment Talent AI employs advanced artificial intelligence, developed in collaboration with ETS AI Labs and OpenAI. It offers a comprehensive assessment of oral and written language skills in 30 minutes or less. Supporting English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, German, and Brazilian Portuguese, Talent AI is poised to meet the diverse needs of a global audience. Ease of Use and Enhanced Security: A Dual Focus The test's web-based, online format ensures global ease of use, facilitating language assessments from any location. In parallel, the test incorporates anti-cheating and proctoring features to ensure the reliability and integrity of its assessments. These features are essential for businesses and educational institutions seeking accurate language proficiency evaluations. Real-World Application and Impact Talent AI is designed to simulate real-life communication scenarios, providing practical and relevant language skill assessments for today's diverse professional and educational environments. This real-world application is key for those looking to accurately measure language proficiency in realistic settings. Simon Portier, CEO of Pipplet, shares: "This is a pivotal moment for us. Talent AI isn't just our latest innovation; it's a bold step towards reshaping how the world approaches language assessment. Its strategic blend of efficiency, reliability, and practical relevance positions us to continually innovate, adding more languages, and aiding organizations globally in effective communication. The future is bright, and we're just getting started!" Talent AI is now available via the Pipplet platform. For more information, visit the Pipplet website. About Pipplet Founded in 2015, Pipplet stands at the vanguard of language assessment innovation. Its user-friendly platform offers a wide array of language assessment tools, each tailored to different needs and objectives. In 2020, Pipplet joined ETS, the world's largest nonprofit educational assessment, research and measurement organization, and creator of the TOEIC, TOEFL, and GRE tests. Pipplet serves over 1,600 organizations globally, including clients like Amazon, Wipro, and Hyatt Hotels. Contact Information: Kristel Salvador Content Manager kristel@pipplet.com Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2290492/Pipplet.jpg View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/pipplet-launches-talent-ai-a-paradigm-shift-in-language-assessment-technology-302003382.html Rep. Adam Schiff holds a minuscule lead in the polls over Rep. Katie Porter, with Rep. Barbara Lee and Steve Garvey trailing them. Jack Ohman/The Chronicle In case youve been paying attention (you probably havent, really, and who can blame you?), Rep. Adam Schiff seems to hold a minuscule lead over Rep. Katie Porter in the race to succeed the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Although she barely led the California Democratic convention caucuses (41%) but fell short of the 60% threshold needed for the endorsement, Rep. Barbara Lee trails slightly behind Schiff and Porter, polling around 10% alongside former Dodgers first baseman Steve Garvey and his quixotic GOP bid. Hell be playing fourth placeman after the primary. The question is: Are you paying attention? Advertisement Article continues below this ad In many major industrialized nations, the notion that we should have these ridiculously lengthy campaigns from the presidency on down is laughable. In a parliamentary system, the prime minister calls for an election, and the election season is mercifully short. In the United States, the next election starts a nanosecond after the winner of the current one is called by the networks. Political junkies enjoy this sort of endless bummer campaign, which is functionally meaningless until, oh, a month or so from the March 5 primary date. Some observers used to say the American public doesnt really start paying attention until after the World Series has concluded, and that will leave you properly pondering the top two finishers out of the primary on the general election date of Nov. 5. To suggest that one should just tune out isnt really an option if youre any kind of news consumer. But this campaign season is getting to be like hearing Christmas music on the Fourth of July. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Whos to blame? Well, maybe people who write columns for newspapers, but certainly the Television News Machine, which has vast tracts of vacant electronic real estate to develop and exploit in between the Skyrizi commercials. This all started with the 1960 presidential election, where two very young, telegenic presidential candidates became contestants in a Hollywood screen test. Television news was rather novel. No 24/7 coverage. John F. Kennedy announced on Jan. 2, 1960. Richard Nixon announced on Jan. 9. If a current presidential candidate waited that long now they would not be included in these meaningless GOP game shows/debates that have plagued us for months already. There are some reasons why these races start earlier and earlier. One of those reasons is former President Jimmy Carter, who basically moved to Iowa for a year to compete in that states caucuses in January 1976. Carter won and that just cranked everything back a year, at least. Advertisement Article continues below this ad In the case of Schiff, Porter and Lee, they announced right before or immediately after Sen. Feinstein said early this year that she wasnt going to run. Another Democratic candidate, Google executive Lexi Reese, dropped out last week before anyone had heard of her or had the opportunity to see her chops. She was polling at 2%. Reaction: Who is Lexi Reese? Another reason is money, the key factor in an expensive media state like California, and Schiff has $32 million. A statewide weekend ad buy in the Golden State can run into the millions. Porter trails at $12 million on hand. With better campaign finance rules, maybe we could figure out a way to slow the madness down, minus the endless fundraising pressure put upon these aspirants. Unless youre a regular viewer of MSNBC, your familiarity with Schiff or Porter is probably pretty slender. In addition, the candidates have appeared at a few lightly covered forums but, thus far, no statewide televised debate. Really, how can you make a realistic judgment without the Senate candidates chopping it up? If you went out in the street and asked voters to give you any detail about the contenders, you would be greeted with a thousand-yard stare. Heres a stunner: Not everyone watches MSNBC. Or Fox. Or CNN. Or, really, anything longer in duration than a TikTok video. Advertisement Article continues below this ad California at this point is holding an MSNBC viewer primary, and thats a single-digit fractile of a teeny slice of a crumb of the electorate. Consequently, any polling youre seeing now is somewhat meaningless. An Emerson Poll has the race at 16-13 Schiff over Porter, with Garvey (why is he doing this again?) and Lee around 10. Young voters (under 50) break for Porter, and older voters break for Schiff. As noted, polling suggests that Schiff has an infinitesimal lead. When he dumps his $32 million on television, the most youll learn is his name. Schiff and Porter are barely politically distinguishable. Comparison ads? Porter goes negative on Schiffs ties? If youre a voter in Vermont, say, youre very likely to be able to meet Sen. Bernie Sanders accidentally or on purpose. If you live in California, you would really have to go out of your way to meet one of your senators. Given that we have 40 million people, budgeting five seconds for a handshake, that leaves Schiff, Porter, Lee or Garvey each needing about six years and change to meet all of you. Selfies would stretch into the 22nd century. Advertisement Article continues below this ad If youre so inclined, its fine to pay attention to the race now, but you dont need to know whos polling where yet because its not useful. A not-scientific guess is that Porter has upside growth potential, and Schiff may have some flab in his numbers when people start paying attention later in the summer of 2024. LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Oxford Biomedica Plc. (OXB.L) announced on Monday that it has inked a sale and purchase deal with TSGH SAS, a unit of Institut Merieux SA, to buy ABL Europe SAS in exchange for Oxford Biomedica shares. The transaction, expected to be closed in the first quarter of 2024, will be immediately revenue accretive to Oxford Biomedica. The acquisition will boost Oxford Biomedica's capacity in processing and analytical development and early-stage manufacturing. The combination will also address increased client demand for process development. ABL Europe is a contract development and manufacturing organization or CDMO with expertise in the development and manufacturing of solutions for biotechs and biopharma including viruses for gene therapy, oncolytic viruses, and vaccine candidates. ABL Europe currently works on over 10 cell and gene therapy programs spanning disease areas including over six different vector types. ABL Europe is projected to post revenue of around 15 million euros for the full year to December 31, 2023. For the 12 months up to December 31, 2022, ABL Europe had earnings before interest tax, and depreciation or EBITDA loss of around 1.7 million euros. Institut Merieux has acquired a 3.3 percent stake in Oxford Biomedica, through purchases in the open market, which it intends to increase to around 10 percent in aggregate by the end of the third quarter of 2024. As announced earlier, Oxford Biomedica is acquiring ABL Europe for a consideration of 15 million euros, including the value of 10 million euros of pre-completion cash funding from Institut Merieux in ABL Europe for, amongst other things, development capex. Institut Merieux has committed to provide 20 million euros of additional funding to the company, to cover capital expenditure and potential operational losses to the acquisition of ABL Europe, utilizing an equity subscription. Copyright(c) 2023 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX PUNE, India, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The healthcare industry in Saudi Arabia has gained significant importance due to its expansive population of over 36 million people, making it the largest nation in the Middle East. The government has made substantial investments in healthcare infrastructure, resulting in improved accessibility to healthcare services nationwide and driving significant advancements in the sector. Saudi Arabia boasts a well-established healthcare system that offers complimentary healthcare services to all its citizens and residents, with the government being the primary financial supporter of these services. The Ministry of Health (MOH) in Saudi Arabia is responsible for coordinating and delivering healthcare services across the country. The healthcare system in Saudi Arabia is organized into three distinct tiers: primary, secondary, and tertiary healthcare services. Primary healthcare centers (PHCs) are responsible for providing essential healthcare services at the primary level, including preventive care, health education, and screening. Hospitals and specialized facilities provide secondary healthcare services, offering advanced services such as diagnostics, surgical procedures, and emergency care. Tertiary healthcare services are provided through specialized hospitals, well-known for their expertise in areas such as organ transplants and cancer treatment. In alignment with the Vision 2030 initiative in Saudi Arabia, the healthcare sector has placed a strong focus on its development by integrating privatization and embracing Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). Vision 2030 aims to tackle critical issues and implement strategic measures to transform the healthcare system. More Insights on this report, Speak to Our Analyst: https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com/contact-us Budget Healthcare Saudi Arabia leads healthcare spending among Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations, contributing 60% of the total. The government prioritizes healthcare, with a reduced budget of $50.4 billion (SAR 189 billion) in fiscal year 2023, representing a 4.5% reduction. Three hospitals with a total of 900 beds and four specialized elderly care hospitals, which offer services like in-home dialysis and palliative care, are set to open. The Ministry of Health (MOH) aims to enhance primary care with a "doctor-for-every-family" approach, with the goal of serving over 20 million beneficiaries. This dynamic healthcare sector presents promising opportunities for innovative U.S. firms in digital health, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, biosciences, specialist clinics, ambulatory care, training, and education, among others. Market Trends: Aging Population : The elderly population in Saudi Arabia is on the rise, expected to nearly double from 1.96 million in 2018 to 4.63 million in 2030 due to improved healthcare, awareness campaigns, and government initiatives. : The elderly population in Saudi Arabia is on the rise, expected to nearly double from 1.96 million in 2018 to 4.63 million in 2030 due to improved healthcare, awareness campaigns, and government initiatives. Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs): The prevalence of NCDs, such as diabetes and hypertension, is increasing, driven by rising obesity rates, projected to exceed 45% by 2025, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The prevalence of NCDs, such as diabetes and hypertension, is increasing, driven by rising obesity rates, projected to exceed 45% by 2025, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Road Traffic Accidents: Despite government efforts to reduce accidents, road traffic injuries remain a significant factor, making healthcare services essential. Opportunities: Government Initiatives : Aligned with the 2030 Saudi Vision, the government is investing over $65 billion in healthcare infrastructure and aims to increase private sector involvement from 40% to 65% by 2030. This includes the privatization of 290 hospitals and 2,300 primary health centers. : Aligned with the 2030 Saudi Vision, the government is investing over $65 billion in healthcare infrastructure and aims to increase private sector involvement from 40% to 65% by 2030. This includes the privatization of 290 hospitals and 2,300 primary health centers. Foreign Investment : Foreign investors have the opportunity to have full ownership in various sectors, including healthcare, supported by the Saudi Arabia General Investment Authority (SAGIA). : Foreign investors have the opportunity to have full ownership in various sectors, including healthcare, supported by the Saudi Arabia General Investment Authority (SAGIA). Healthcare Expansion: The Ministry of Health (MOH) plans to establish health clusters, each serving around one million people, to enhance preventive and integrated care. Other priorities include increasing internationally accredited hospitals, doubling primary healthcare visits per capita, reducing smoking and obesity rates, and fostering digital healthcare innovation. These initiatives create promising business prospects in the Saudi healthcare sector. Saudi Healthcare Reform Highlights: Comprehensive Investment: Saudi Arabia is committed to a $65 billion investment in healthcare infrastructure, professional training, service reorganization, and the expansion of e-health services as part of Vision 2030. Saudi Arabia is committed to a $65 billion investment in healthcare infrastructure, professional training, service reorganization, and the expansion of e-health services as part of Vision 2030. Private Sector Engagement: The primary objective is to increase private sector participation in healthcare from 20% to 35% by 2030, achieved through the privatization of 290 hospitals and 2,300 primary health centers. The primary objective is to increase private sector participation in healthcare from 20% to 35% by 2030, achieved through the privatization of 290 hospitals and 2,300 primary health centers. Sovereign Wealth Fund Involvement: The Public Investment Fund (PIF) seeks to promote the localization of the pharmaceutical sector. The Public Investment Fund (PIF) seeks to promote the localization of the pharmaceutical sector. Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs): PPPs are a key strategy to share the financial burden and encourage private investment in healthcare infrastructure and services, aligning with Vision 2030. PPPs are a key strategy to share the financial burden and encourage private investment in healthcare infrastructure and services, aligning with Vision 2030. Strategic Objectives: These include privatizing medical cities, increasing the private sector's role in healthcare spending, expanding various healthcare services, and preparing the King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre for privatization to enhance its leadership. Need Assistance? Send an Enquiry@ https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com/contact-us Challenges in Saudi Healthcare: Healthcare Workforce Shortage: Saudi Arabia grapples with a shortage of healthcare professionals, notably in rural areas where most healthcare workers are concentrated in urban regions. A report by the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) reveals a shortfall of around 15,000 doctors and 20,000 nurses, resulting in extended wait times and limited rural healthcare access. Emphasis on Curative Care: Historically, the Saudi healthcare system has prioritized curative care over preventive measures, contributing to a surge in non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes, cardiovascular conditions, and obesity. NCDs now lead as the primary causes of mortality, demanding enhanced efforts for reducing NCD prevalence and bolstering overall public health. Saudi Arabia grapples with a shortage of healthcare professionals, notably in rural areas where most healthcare workers are concentrated in urban regions. A report by the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA) reveals a shortfall of around 15,000 doctors and 20,000 nurses, resulting in extended wait times and limited rural healthcare access. Emphasis on Curative Care: Historically, the Saudi healthcare system has prioritized curative care over preventive measures, contributing to a surge in non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes, cardiovascular conditions, and obesity. NCDs now lead as the primary causes of mortality, demanding enhanced efforts for reducing NCD prevalence and bolstering overall public health. Limited Private Health Insurance: Private health insurance in Saudi Arabia is primarily offered through employer-based schemes, where employees and their dependents are included as part of their employment benefits. These schemes represented only 67% of all private health insurance policies in 2020, leaving gaps in private coverage. Private health insurance in Saudi Arabia is primarily offered through employer-based schemes, where employees and their dependents are included as part of their employment benefits. These schemes represented only 67% of all private health insurance policies in 2020, leaving gaps in private coverage. Restricted Healthcare Financing: The Saudi healthcare system relies heavily on government funding, necessitating the exploration of alternative financing mechanisms to ensure its long-term sustainability. Business Expansion in the Healthcare Industry The Saudi government is actively promoting privatization within the healthcare sector. While U.S. exporters are not obligated to have a local Saudi agent or distributor, it is highly advisable for companies to explore partnerships with local entities. These collaborations facilitate improved access to business opportunities, assist in navigating import regulations, ensure compliance with testing standards, and identify potential sales and contract prospects within the public sector. Presently, over 60% of healthcare spending in Saudi Arabia is funded by the government. A critical player in this landscape is the National Unified Procurement Company (NUPCO), which centrally manages the procurement of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies and oversees the supply chain and logistics for public healthcare providers. NUPCO gathers requirements from all government healthcare entities and issues tenders to meet those needs. It's crucial to note that these tenders have tight timelines, underscoring the significance of robust local connections for exporters. Only companies that have been prequalified are invited to submit bids, and foreign companies aiming for prequalification must meet specific criteria. Key Healthcare Players: The Saudi healthcare sector is influenced by five major stakeholders that play pivotal roles in advancing the industry: Ministry of Health (MOH): As the overarching regulator of healthcare activities and services throughout Saudi Arabia, MOH is a primary provider of healthcare services. As the overarching regulator of healthcare activities and services throughout Saudi Arabia, MOH is a primary provider of healthcare services. National Unified Company for Medical Supplies (NUPCO): NUPCO takes on the critical responsibility of centralizing government procurement for pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and supplies, supporting public healthcare facilities. NUPCO takes on the critical responsibility of centralizing government procurement for pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, and supplies, supporting public healthcare facilities. Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA): SFDA holds the mandate for overseeing and regulating the import and distribution of medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and food products. SFDA holds the mandate for overseeing and regulating the import and distribution of medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and food products. Cooperative Council of Health Insurance (CCHI): As an independent governmental entity, CCHI is entrusted with the oversight and regulation of the health insurance sector within Saudi Arabia. As an independent governmental entity, CCHI is entrusted with the oversight and regulation of the health insurance sector within Saudi Arabia. National Center for Privatization (NCP): NCP is the driving force behind the privatization of specific government assets and services across various industry sectors. Prominent Manufacturers: GE Healthcare Philips Abbott Bupa King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre (KFSHRC) King Fahad Medical City (KFMS) Northside Hospitals Pfizer Sanofi About Us: Infinium Global Research, a leading provider of market research, has recently released comprehensive reports on several markets across Saudi Arabia. These reports present a detailed analysis of various segments and sub-segments within the Saudi Arabian markets. It also sheds light on the impact of drivers, restraints, and macro indicators on both short-term and long-term market dynamics. The reports provide a comprehensive outlook on trends, forecasts, and dollar values of the markets. Infinium has published reports across healthcare domains operating for Clients in Saudi Arabia for such As Single Cell Protein Market, Orthopaedic Device Market, Prefilled Syringes Market, Blood Collection Market, Smart Healthcare Products Market, Ophthalmic Surgical Technologies Market, Digital Health Market, Diabetes Injection Pens Market, Cellular Health Screening Market, AI in Drug Discovery Market, AI in Healthcare Market, Etc. Contact: Infinium Global Research 2nd Floor, Ganadish Empire, Rahatani Chowk, Pimple Saudagar, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Maharashtra 411027 Phone: +918999930634 Email: Info@infiniumglobalresearch.com Website: www.infiniumglobalresearch.com Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2244132/Infinium_Global_Research_Logo.jpg View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/infinium-global-research-reveals-insights-on-healthcare-markets-across-saudi-arabia-302004463.html BEIJING, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- On December 1, 2023, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB) successfully held the 2023 Women in Leadership Forum with participation from UNESCO and support from Development Reimagined. The forum convened 140,000 viewers across 8 media platforms and over 440 Zoom global participants. Focusing on Africa - a continent of the future - this year's forum convened distinguished ambassadors, academics and entrepreneurs who are spearheading gender equality in China and Africa across agriculture, energy, education and tourism sectors, while exploring solutions through a China-Africa lens. CKGSB's Dean's Distinguished Chair Professor of Finance and Associate Dean, Li Haitao, delivered the opening keynote emphasizing CKGSB's commitment to empower increasingly more women business leaders through programs and scholarships since the school's establishment. Mohamed Elfarnawany, Director for Priority Africa Coordination Division at PAX of UNESCO, then expressed UNESCO's commitment to collaborate with CKGSB in advancing African women across education, culture, social sciences, and technology to achieve gender equality. Subsequently, Ambassador of the Republic of Mozambique to China, Maria Gustava delivered a keynote speech explaining how, "gender equality is not just an abstract concept, it is the cornerstone of building a prosperous and inclusive society." Oliver Wonekha, Ambassador of the Republic of Uganda to China, and Isabel Domingos, Ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe to China, echoed this idea in their dialogue chaired by Hannah Ryder, CEO of Development Reimagined. One of the event's highlights was the latest research findings that CKGSB's Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Associate Dean for Inclusivity, Diversity and Equity, Zhang Xiaomeng, presented on the barriers holding women back from leadership roles as well as female leaders' resilience and convergence. The final panel consisted of Lina Ayenew, Founder of Education for Ethiopia and CKGSB alumna, Irene Maria, Product Owner of Safari Wallet, Li Yi, Co-founder of FarmWorks and Xu Xiaoju, President of Shenzhen Yinghe Technology Co.,Ltd. and CKGSB alumna, chaired by Dr Tao Zhigang, CKGSB's Professor of Strategy and Economics and Associate Dean. The four Chinese and African female founders shared best practices on applying innovative technologies to boost their businesses. CKGSB has been hosting the Women in Leadership Forum since 2013 as a platform for celebrating success stories, empowering aspiring women leaders, promoting gender equality in the workplace, and offering an opportunity to create positive change. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/cheung-kong-graduate-school-of-business-successfully-held-2023-women-in-leadership-forum-empowering-african-women-302004489.html PUNE, India, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- In recent years, Saudi Arabia has demonstrated remarkable progress in modernizing its Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. This transformation is driven by strategic initiatives from the Communication and Information Technology Commission (CITC), which has prioritized enhancing market competition through regulatory flexibility, transparency, and collaborative efforts. Notably, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) recognizes Saudi Arabia as a leader in the Arab State region, achieving a "generation 4" (G4) status in the ITU Global ICT Regulatory Outlook 2020. Within the Middle East and North Africa regions, Saudi Arabia stands as one of the largest markets for Information and Communication Technology. With its strategic geographical location, Saudi Arabia is well-positioned to emerge as a hub for technology services and cloud computing, boasting global connectivity access via the Red Sea, thereby serving markets in Europe, Asia, and Africa. As a G4 country, Saudi Arabia effectively integrates ICT regulation with a separate regulatory authority vested with enforcement powers. This authority operates with a clear mandate, overseeing a fully competitive market while safeguarding consumer interests under the "generation of regulation" model. Projections indicate that the Saudi Arabian ICT market is expected to experience a 5.6% growth in 2023, reaching a total value of $33.43 billion in 2022. This growth is predominantly driven by hardware expenditure, accounting for 58.5%, followed by services (30.4%), and software (11.1%). More Insights on this report, Speak to Our Analyst: https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com/contact-us Key Business Opportunities and Factors Driving ICT Growth in Saudi Arabia: Cloud Adoption Surge: Anticipate a robust migration to cloud computing, as organizations increasingly embrace Infrastructure-As-A-Service and Platform-As-A-Service solutions. Anticipate a robust migration to cloud computing, as organizations increasingly embrace Infrastructure-As-A-Service and Platform-As-A-Service solutions. Emphasis on Edge Computing: Expect increased investments and collaborations in edge computing, facilitating the successful deployment of emerging technologies and use cases. Expect increased investments and collaborations in edge computing, facilitating the successful deployment of emerging technologies and use cases. IT Services in the AI Landscape: IT services providers have the opportunity to design and implement innovative business models while effectively managing data and infrastructure. IT services providers have the opportunity to design and implement innovative business models while effectively managing data and infrastructure. Emerging Technology Integration: Witness a growing demand for industrial and intelligent automation, coupled with seamless integration with future technologies like IoT, AI, and Blockchain. Witness a growing demand for industrial and intelligent automation, coupled with seamless integration with future technologies like IoT, AI, and Blockchain. Green Data Centers: Anticipate a surge in green data center initiatives, data center consolidation efforts, and policy changes aimed at enhancing data center sustainability. Driving Forces for ICT Growth: Saudi Arabia's ICT expansion is propelled by rising personal incomes and a growing pool of specialists committed to advancing leadership in connectivity and information technology. Additionally, the nation boasts a robust economy, political stability, a youthful demographic, and national policies that prioritize economic diversification. Factors such as increased foreign direct investment (FDI), a burgeoning ecosystem that supports ICT innovation and entrepreneurship, a thriving telecommunications sector, and a growing IT service industry collectively stimulate ICT investments in Saudi Arabia. Investments: Saudi Arabia is embarking on a new era of digital innovation, with ICT spending projected to exceed $34.5 billion this year, underpinned by significant foreign direct investment and a substantial $7 trillion development plan for the giga project. In 2023, the Saudi government is making noteworthy investments in key areas, including AI, IoT, cybersecurity, and data analytics. In the realm of foreign direct investment, Saudi Arabia is incentivizing data center investments of $400 million, which create a minimum of 20 jobs with an average annual wage of $40,000, thereby qualifying for up to 30 years of tax savings. Furthermore, as part of its commitment to digital transformation and preparation for the future economy, Saudi Arabia has unveiled investments exceeding $9 billion in its technology sector. These investments are spearheaded by a substantial $2.1 billion commitment from Microsoft to establish a super-scalar cloud infrastructure in the country, and Oracle's $1.5 billion investment to fortify the kingdom's cloud computing capabilities. Additionally, China's Huawei is contributing $400 million to enhance Saudi Arabia's cloud infrastructure. The information and communication technology sector in Saudi Arabia are valued at SR134 billion, constituting 4.1% of the Kingdom's gross domestic product (GDP), emphasizing its growing economic significance. During the forum, the Communications, Space, and Technology Commission (CST) announced that the ICT market in Saudi Arabia surged to a value of 154 billion in 2022, establishing itself as the largest and most rapidly expanding digital economy in the region. Additionally, Dr. Altamini emphasized that CST has introduced high-speed internet services in 21,000 villages across the nation, addressing the needs of over 5 million people and ensuring uninterrupted communication services. This underlines the substantial progress in the Kingdom's communication and technology infrastructure. Notably, 5G coverage in Riyadh has reached an impressive 53%, while exceeding 94% in other regions. The utilization of fiber optics has extended to 3.7 million users in Saudi Arabia, reflecting a dynamic shift towards advanced and high-speed connectivity solutions. Opportunities: The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) has been primarily focused on establishing a robust and advanced architectural framework to facilitate digital transformation across various domains such as e-commerce, smart cities, national data management, digital education, digital healthcare, and e-government. In line with Saudi Arabia's ICT strategy for 2023, the objectives include generating more than 25,000 employment opportunities within the sector, achieving a 50% expansion in the IT market size and technology development, and increasing the sector's contribution to GDP by $13.3 billion. The strategy also aims to attract international investments and promote the active participation of women in the field. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the Saudi ICT sector experienced an impressive 8% growth between 2019 and 2021, culminating in a total value of $32.1 billion. In a move to bolster the resilience of the Supreme Audit Institution (SAI) through ICT solutions, the Saudi Fund for Improved SAI Performance (Saudi FISP) is facilitating the expansion and enhancement of ICT infrastructure. The Saudi Arabia General Court of Audit has generously allocated $1 million to be distributed among International Organization of Supreme Audit Institution (INTOSAI) members that require external assistance to advance their ICT infrastructure, thus fortifying the capabilities of these institutions. Need Assistance? Send an Enquiry@ https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com/contact-us Vision 2030: Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 is focused on the bolstering of the ICT sector with the goal of forging a digital society, digital government, digital economy, and a forward-thinking future for the Kingdom. Within this framework, the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) establishes the groundwork for diversification and enhancing competitiveness. It revolves around three primary pillars, each delineating specific objective to be realized by 2030: fostering a dynamic society, fostering a prosperous economy, and shaping an ambitious nation via a well-crafted digital strategy, enabling a connected present and an innovative future. Challenges: Saudi Arabia encounters difficulties in both enlarging its domestic ICT workforce and attracting foreign talent. Moreover, sourcing local professionals with hands-on experience in cutting-edge technologies like cloud computing, mobility solutions, and cybersecurity proves to be a challenge. The nation also grapples with significant cybersecurity threats, further complicating its ICT landscape. Main Players IBM Middle East Saudi Telecommunication company Amazon.ae Palo Alto Networks Saudi Arabian Limited Company nybl About Us: Infinium Global Research, a leading provider of market research, has recently released comprehensive reports on several markets across Saudi Arabia. These reports present a detailed analysis of various segments and sub-segments within the Saudi Arabian markets. It also sheds light on the impact of drivers, restraints, and macro indicators on both short-term and long-term market dynamics. The reports provide a comprehensive outlook on trends, forecasts, and dollar values of the markets. Infinium has published reports across ICT domains operating for Clients in Saudi Arabia for such AsCloud Infrastructure Market, Cloud Gaming Market, IT Services Outsourcing Market, Government Cloud Market, Cloud Migration Services Market, AI in Edge Computing Market, Cloud Robotics Market, Finance Cloud Market Contact: Infinium Global Research 2nd Floor, Ganadish Empire, Rahatani Chowk, Pimple Saudagar, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Maharashtra 411027 Phone: +918999930634 Email: Info@infiniumglobalresearch.com Website: www.infiniumglobalresearch.com Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2244132/Infinium_Global_Research_Logo.jpg View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/unlocking-potential-saudi-arabias-ict-market-insights-revealed-by-infinium-global-research-302004491.html VIENNA, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Huawei took part in the 15th annual Global Peter Drucker Forum, ended on Dec 1, where the company held for the first time a side workshop for European startups. The training bootcamp came as part of Huawei's pledge to nurture 10,000 startups globally by 2025, and 1000 startups in Europe by 2027. The Global Peter Drucker Forum is an international conference honoring the management philosophy of the late business guru Peter Drucker who was born in Vienna in 1909. Every year, it brings together global business leaders and scholars to discuss best management practices. This year, the theme was "Creating Resilience - Leading in an age of discontinuity." Speaking at the main event, Radoslaw Kedzia, Senior Vice President of Huawei European Region, said: "I believe that technology innovation such as Huawei Cloud AI Pangu model, and management evolution that will adapt to ever changing environment and partnership building, including with SMEs, are key steps to find resilience and bounce back from chaos." Huawei and Global Peter Drucker Forum invited about 20 SMEs from Vienna and across Europe to provide them with practical business training and also offer them a valuable opportunity to network and learn from top business practitioners. This side workshop featured interactive masterclasses on practical skills in hiring the right people and product pitches. Lecturers included Carla Arellano, Partner at Greyhound Capital and Professor Curt Carlson, Distinguished Executive in Residence, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Participants also learned about how Huawei help accelerate the growth of SMEs. Zhuang Fen, Director of Global Industry Development, Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service, said: "We enable startups to unleash their global potential with our dedicated technology support, joint marketing, and cloud services. Startups also benefit from customized cloud credits and access to our vast global network and ecosystem, fostering success in the competitive marketplace." Other Huawei speakers mentioned the Acceleration4Change and International Startup Scale Up program in Italy and Ireland. Appearing at the workshop were also managers of young tech firms that had earlier benefitted from working with Huawei. "Ours is a collaborative journey towards migrating our on-premise platforms to the Huawei cloud featuring scalability, security, and efficiency," said Jonni Malacarne, CEO of Blue Tensor. The company provides an AI-based framework with ready-to-use products Eyerus, for computer vision/predictive analysis) and Linguanalysis for document management, and document management. Wolfgang Lassl, Chief Strategy Officer, Global Peter Drucker Forum, thanked Huawei for the workshop. "It is fully in line with Peter Drucker's and our vision: we need an entrepreneurial society and SMEs are the driving force behind it. They innovate and create the basis for its wealth and productive use of resources. By their creativity, they can help us become more resilient." Before the Global Peter Drucker Forum, the SMEs had the chance to visit UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) to learn about the AIM-Global (Global Alliance on AI for Industry & Manufacturing) and other digitalization initiatives. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2291747/image_1.jpg View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/huawei-partners-with-global-peter-drucker-forum-to-empower-european-smes-302004516.html Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2023) - Oracle Commodity Holding Corp. ("Oracle" or the "Company") announces that it proposes to undertake a non-brokered private placement (the "Private Placement") to raise aggregate gross proceeds of $800,000 through the sale of 16,000,000 units (the "Units") at a price of $0.05 per Unit. Each Unit will consist of one common share of the Company and one-half of one share purchase warrant with each whole warrant (a "Warrant") entitling the holder to purchase one additional share of the Company at a price of $0.06 per share for 3 years from the date of issue. It is presently expected that there shall be approximately 96,000,000 Oracle common shares issued and outstanding upon completion of the Private Placement. Proceeds of the Private Placement are expected to be used to provide working capital, apply to list the Company's common shares on a stock exchange in Canada, and for investment purposes. John Lee, the chairman of Oracle, will be subscribing for 5,000,000 Units for gross proceeds of $250,000. The issuance of Units to insiders pursuant to the Private Placement will be considered related party transactions within the meaning of Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"). The Company relies on exemptions from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements provided under sections 5.5(a) and 5.7(a) of MI 61-101 on the basis that participation in the Private Placement by insiders will not exceed 25% of the fair market value of the Company's market capitalization. The Company will file a material change report in respect of the related party transactions in connection with the Private Placement. Finder's fees of up to 7% in cash or Units maybe be payable. The securities issued as part of the Private Placement will be subject to a hold period of four months plus one day from the date of issue. Closing of the Private Placement is expected to occur on or about December 28, 2023. Oracle's business is acquiring royalties on silver and critical minerals mining projects. The Company's current main assets include: 2% royalty on the Minago nickel project in the Thompson nickel belt, Manitoba, operated by Flying Nickel Mining Corp. ("Flying Nickel") (TSXV: FLYN). On July, 21, 2022, Flying Nickel submitted the Notice of Alteration ("NOA") to Environment Act Licence No. 2981 for the Minago Nickel Project. Flying Nickel expects to receive the final decision on the NOA in 2024. 2% royalty on the Gibellini vanadium project in Nevada, operated by Nevada Vanadium Mining Corp. ("Nevada Vanadium"). On October, 23, 2023, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Battle Mountain District Office issued a Record of Decision and Plan of Operations approval for the Gibellini Vanadium Mine project in Eureka County, Nevada. 2% royalty on the Pulacayo-Paca silver-lead-zinc project in Potosi, Bolivia, operated by Silver Elephant Mining Corp. ("Silver Elephant"). On September 12, 2023 Silver Elephant announced the sale of up to 800,000 tonnes of Pulacayo-Paca's silver oxide materials to Andean Precious Metals Corp. a certain royalty on the Ulaan Ovoo coal project in Mongolia as described in Silver Elephant's news release dated May 18, 2022. This royalty generated approximately US$78,000 in revenue to Oracle in 2023. 18,258,654 shares of Flying Nickel. This represents 20.88% of the outstanding shares of Flying Nickel. 24,691,848 shares of Nevada Vanadium. This represents 38.50% of the outstanding shares of Nevada Vanadium. Royalty payments to Oracle are subject to metal prices meeting certain threshold levels. Please refer to Silver Elephant's news release dated August 26, 2021 for details. Oracle also announces the appointment of Masateru Igata as a director of the Company, effective immediately. Mr. Igata is the Founder and CEO of Frontier LLC and Frontier Japan and has over 30 years of professional experience in Asian financial markets. Prior to Frontier, he was a Managing Director at Salomon Brother, and Nikko Citigroup in Tokyo. Oracle further announces that it has granted in aggregate, 7,990,000 incentive stock options (the "Options"), to directors, officers, employees and consultants of the Company. The Options are exercisable at a price of $0.05 per Common share for a term of five years expiring on December 4, 2028 and vest at 12.5% per quarter over a period of two years following the date of grant. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities in the United States. The securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act") or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available. About Oracle Commodity Holding Corp. Oracle Commodity Holding Corp. is an investment business holding certain royalty interests and ownership interests in other mining companies. The Company is a reporting issuer in certain jurisdictions of Canada. Further information on Oracle Commodity can be found at www.oracleholding.com. ORACLE COMMODITY HOLDING CORP. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD "Anthony Garson" CEO For more information about Oracle Commodity, please contact: +1.604.569.3661 ext. 101 Email: info@oracleholding.com Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this news release, including statements which may contain words such as "expects", "anticipates", "intends", "plans", "believes", "estimates", or similar expressions, and statements related to matters which are not historical facts, are forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Such forward-looking statements, which reflect management's expectations regarding Oracle's future growth, results of operations, performance, business prospects and opportunities, are based on certain factors and assumptions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking information in this news release includes statements concerning the expected gross proceeds, closing date and use of proceeds raised from the Private Placement, and the Company's plans to apply to list its common shares for trading on a stock exchange in Canada. Forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties, and should not be read as guarantees of future performance, events or results, and may not be indicative of whether such events or results will actually be achieved. A number of risks and other factors could cause actual results to differ materially from expected results discussed in the forward-looking statements, including but not limited to: receiving stock exchange listing approval and ability to meet customary conditions for listing; market conditions and investor sentiment for an investment in an unlisted reporting company in Canada; changes in business plans; ability to secure sufficient financing to advance the Company's investment business; and general economic conditions. Further details about the risk factors concerning the proposed transaction are set out in such news releases. Additional risk factors are set out in the Company's latest annual and interim management's discussion and analysis, available on SEDAR at www.sedarplus.ca. Forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions by management as of the date of this news release, and there can be no assurance that actual results will be consistent with any forward-looking statements included herein. Readers are cautioned that all forward- looking statements in this news release are made as of the date of this news release. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements in this news release to reflect circumstances or events that occur after the date of this news release, except as required by applicable securities laws. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/189690 Make their wish come true, all travelers want for Christmas is US. to Europe flights! Today, PLAY, a low-cost Icelandic airline operating flights between North America and Europe, is spreading holiday cheer to all travelers with flights for just $79 to Iceland and $99 to popular European destinations. Today until December 8, 2023, passengers can book roundtrip flights at incredibly low prices as an extravagant holiday gift or for a 2024 getaway to Iceland, Dublin, London, Amsterdam, and Paris. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204559513/en/ With flights as low as $79, travelers can book a European getaway without adding to their transportation budget. (Photo: Business Wire) It's too early to spot Santa in the skies, but PLAY's striking red aircrafts are bringing the holiday spirit to travelers early this year. This flash deal is a tempting treat for booking a last-minute trip in December, where families and friends can explore Christmas markets and early snowfall in Europe, or spend the holidays abroad. It's the perfect time to start planning a getaway for 2024, or for gifting an amazing European experience to a loved one even on a modest budget. PLAY's already low prices and no-frills service are available year-round, enabling travelers to "pay less, PLAY more" at more than 30 European destinations from Boston, New York, and Washington D.C. Travelers enjoy a comfortable ride with PLAY's helpers, named America's favorite flight crew this year! Low prices should spark the spirit of travel planning for long weekends, spring breaks, or even romantic Valentine's Day trips in the New Year. Travelers can head to Iceland, one of the world's safest countries, for New Year's Eve, a wellness trip, or for a stunning view of the country's nature and natural phenomenon, the Aurora Borealis. Or, instead of visiting the "Land of Fire and Ice," travelers can book extremely affordable flights to Dublin, London, Amsterdam, and Paris with flights starting at just $99! These destinations are perfect for first-time European travelers or those who want to visit family overseas last-minute this season. "This year, we experienced an incredible turnout of passengers with our highest consumer demand since operations began in the U.S. We wanted to give our passengers the gift of even more affordable flights so they can plan a dream trip or spontaneous getaway with us," said PLAY CEO Birgir Jonsson. "With flights as low as $79, travelers can squeeze more trips into their holiday season or 2024 without adding to their transportation budget." Tickets in this deal include PLAY's Basic Bundle, a streamlined travel option with a small personal item included in their discounted fare. PLAY's flash deal of $79 flights to Iceland and $99 flights to Dublin, London, Amsterdam, and Paris begins today through December 8, 2023 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time. It's valid for one-way flights on roundtrip bookings to Iceland, Dublin, London, Amsterdam, and Paris December 2023 through April 2024. Price is inclusive of all mandatory taxes, fees, and carrier charges. Restrictions and baggage fees apply, additional details of this promotion are available at www.flyplay.com/terms-for-advertised-fares. Learn more about PLAY or book a flight here. About PLAY PLAY is a low-cost airline operating flights between Iceland and Europe, and North America as of 2022. Founded in Reykjavik in 2019 by a management team with significant experience in the aviation industry, the company operates flights on new Airbus A321NEO and A320NEO aircraft, offering streamlined, no-frills service that allows travelers to pay less and "play more." Safety comes first for PLAY. On-time performance, simplicity, happiness and low prices are the airline's core principles. The airline seeks to enable passengers to see the world, but not without considering its environmental impact. PLAY is being developed with sustainability initiatives and benchmarks in place to track and reduce fuel consumption, offset carbon emissions, and limit waste. Learn more or book a flight at www.flyplay.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204559513/en/ Contacts: U.S. Press Payton St. Lawrence BIG FISH PR for PLAY 617-713-3800 play@bigfishpr.com LISBON (dpa-AFX) - Portugal's industrial production declined for the eighth straight month in October, though at a weaker rate, figures from Statistics Portugal showed on Monday. Industrial production dropped 0.9 percent year-on-year in October, much slower than the 6.3 percent decrease in September. Excluding energy, industrial output fell 3.1 percent in October, compared to a 5.8 percent decline in the prior month. Among large industrial groups, production in the intermediate goods sector fell 1.3 percent from last year, while that in the energy segment showed a sharp rebound of 14.9 percent. On a monthly basis, industrial production recovered 3.7 percent versus a 3.2 percent fall in the preceding month. 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. FAIRFAX, VA / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / WidePoint Corporation (NYSE American:WYY), the innovative technology Managed Solution Provider (MSP) specializing in Identity & Access Management (IAM), Telecommunications and Managed Mobility Services (MMS), Analytics & Billing as a Service (ABaaS), and IT as a Service (ITaaS), announced that its subsidiary IT Authorities (ITA) has been awarded a new three-year contract initially valued at $216,000 from a mobile healthcare provider. "IT Authorities is pleased to announce our newest managed services client in the healthcare sector, a mobile medical practice of doctors, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants making house calls," said Jason Caras, CEO of IT Authorities. "Based in Florida with locations in Ohio and Michigan, the company is expanding its nationwide reach to address the growing homebound patient population. Their unwavering commitment to compliance, particularly adherence to HIPAA regulations, reflects their dedication to safeguarding patient privacy. The selection of IT Authorities as their trusted partner underscores our ability to navigate the dynamic landscapes of the healthcare industry." Jin Kang, WidePoint's CEO, added: "This strategic partnership is a testament to WidePoint's ongoing commitment to excellence in this pivotal field and ability to meet the rigorous technology standards of healthcare providers. This is an expansion opportunity for WidePoint. This contract is yet another example of how IT Authorities continues to deliver value for WidePoint by presenting new synergistic opportunities that solidify WidePoint's security and managed mobility solution as the benchmark for excellence and security in the industry." About WidePoint WidePoint Corporation (NYSE American:WYY) is a leading technology Managed Solution Provider (MSP) dedicated to securing and protecting the mobile workforce and enterprise landscape. WidePoint is recognized for pioneering technology solutions that include Identity and Access Management (IAM), Mobility Managed Services (MMS), Telecom Management, Information Technology as a Service (ITaaS), Cloud Security, and Analytics & Billing as a Service (ABaaS). For more information, visit widepoint.com. WidePoint Investor Relations: Gateway Group, Inc. Matt Glover or John Yi 949-574-3860 WYY@gateway-grp.com SOURCE: WidePoint Corporation View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/812530/widepoints-subsidiary-it-authorities-awarded-new-contract-to-provide-managed-it-services HANGZHOU, China, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- A report from Xinhuanet North America: The first Liangzhu Forum, with "Implementing the Global Civilization Initiative, Promoting Exchanges and Mutual Learning between Civilizations" as its theme, kicked off on December 3, 2023, in Hangzhou, the capital of East China's Zhejiang Province. The forum, co-hosted by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the People's Government of Zhejiang Province and China International Culture Association, has attracted more than 300 international guests from over 80 countries. Foreign representatives of the six major International Alliances of Silk Road Cities participated in the forum. Tan Huism, the Executive Director of Qatar National Library and a member of the Silk Road International Library Alliance, said she believes that the prospect of the Alliances is bright because the members are eager to share and learn from each other and constantly create value for communities. The Forum carried out diverse events, including sub-forums on "Dialogue of Young Sinologists in the New Era: Civilization Exchanges and Mutual Learning Between China and the World" and "Dialogue of Chinese and International Artists: Civilization Exchange and Mutual Learning". A "Silk Road Artists' Rendezvous" exhibition will also be held. "I have been to Mexico, Egypt, Italy and other countries. In different countries and cultures, the origin of art is related to' love'." Yu Xuhong, director of the Art Museum of the China Academy of Art, shared with the audience the similarities between Eastern and Western cultures, "Art is an international language that needs no translation". "I believe that if I can understand China's past, I can also have a deeper understanding of China's present and future." Albert Tadeusz Kozik from the University of Warsaw in Poland said the opportunity to see the great cultural heritage of Liangzhu helped him further understand ancient Chinese culture. Professor Lord Colin Renfrew, a British archaeologist, spoke highly of Liangzhu, said that it showcases the great early Chinese civilization in parallel with other ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamian, the Indus Valley, the ancient Greek, Indian and Mayan civilizations. Liangzhu Forum is one of China's eight actions to support the higher-quality and higher-level construction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It aims at promoting people-to-people communication and presenting the richness, openness, and inclusiveness of the Chinese civilization to the world. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2291870/IMG_6843.jpg View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/liangzhu-forum-kicks-off-in-east-china-hangzhou-302004697.html Large retail stores in California will be required to maintain a gender-neutral toy section under a law kicking in on Jan. 1, 2024. Seth Wenig/Associated Press New changes to California's state campground reservation system aim to deter last-minute cancelations and no-shows. Gabrielle Lurie/The Chronicle Lawmakers in Sacramento pass plenty of complex, arcane measures every year that can be hard to wrap your head around. But they also pass laws that can have a pretty direct impact on everyday Californians lives, including some coming online in 2024 that could affect your commute, your annual camping trip or your paycheck. Here are 16 new laws that will kick in next year, beginning with the ones that go into effect on Jan. 1. Kicking in on Jan. 1 Advertisement Article continues below this ad Campsite reservations: Reservations at popular state campgrounds can get snapped up the moment they become available. New changes under AB618 aim to deter last-minute cancellations and no-shows that can thwart public access to some of Californias best outdoor spaces. New contractors brought on by the Department of Parks and Recreation to manage ReserveCalifornia, where campers reserve spaces online, will be required to withhold reservation fees plus the cost of a reservations first night when a camper cancels their booking within two to six days before its start date. Campers who cancel reservations or dont show multiple times will have future reservations limited by the system. The law will also create a lottery system for reservations to the five most popular campgrounds in the state, but that wont be implemented until 2025. Gender-neutral toy sections: Large retail stores in the state will be required to maintain a gender-neutral toy section, where toys are displayed regardless of whether they have been traditionally marketed for either girls or for boys. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The purpose of the bill isnt just to eliminate stereotypes about what types of toys children should play with based on their gender; theres a financial component too: Often similar products are priced differently depending on which gender theyre being marketed to. Placing similar items in the same section will allow shoppers to more easily compare prices, the Consumer Federation of California argued in its support of the bill, which passed in 2021 but goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2024. Speed cameras: Under a pilot program authorized to start in 2024, six California cities including San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose may use up to 33 cameras to enforce speed limits in school zones and designated safety corridors. Supporters of the bill argue the cameras will help in multiple ways. They aim to deter speeding, which contributes to fatal collisions involving drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. And the cameras provide a color-blind enforcement mechanism that wont target drivers based on skin color or other arbitrary factors. The equity argument cuts both ways, though: Some opponents argue the fines levied by the cameras will hit drivers of color the hardest. Others are worried about the privacy implications posed by installing more cameras to keep tabs on citizens. Though the cameras are authorized to go up beginning in January, it will likely take longer for cities to install them. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Expanded paid sick and reproductive loss leave: Over the last decade, California has led the nation in carving out requirements that employers provide workers with a minimum amount of paid sick leave. The latest law bolsters the requirements: Employees must now receive no less than 24 hours or three days of paid sick leave by the 120th calendar day of employment and no less 40 hours or five days of paid sick leave by the 200th calendar day of employment. Under a separate law, employers must also provide up to five days of leave to employees who experience reproductive loss whether through a miscarriage or other reproductive loss event, failed adoption, failed surrogacy or unsuccessful round of intrauterine insemination. The law does not require employers to provide paid leave, but an employee may use vacation, personal leave, accrued and available sick leave, or compensatory time off that is otherwise available to them. Employment protections for cannabis users: Two laws going into effect on Jan. 1 aim to prevent employers from punishing workers who legally use cannabis off the clock, or from discriminating against job applicants based on prior cannabis use. AB2188, passed in 2022, makes it illegal for employers to discriminate against employees for their cannabis use in their personal lives. Workers can still be penalized for coming to work high. Advertisement Article continues below this ad AB2188 also calls for employers to use drug tests that check for tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the chemical compound in cannabis that can indicate impairment and cause psychoactive effects, instead of tests that detect only inactive cannabis compounds, such as urine, blood or hair tests. Such tests can detect marijuana use from days, weeks and even months prior. Meanwhile, SB700 prevents employers from asking about a prospective employees past cannabis use, with some exceptions. Sen. Steven Bradford, the bills author, said the measure promotes equity by ensuring that individuals are not discriminated against solely for their legal and recreational use of cannabis, according to a legislative analysis. Concealed carry: California Gov. Gavin Newsom, an outspoken gun control advocate, signed a number of gun restrictions into law in 2023, including SB2, which aims to limit where people can carry guns. The measure was a response to the U.S. Supreme Courts June 2022 ruling striking down a New York law that required individuals to show a special need for self-defense in order to carry a concealed firearm in public. California has had a similar law, but since the Supreme Court ruling it no longer requires applicants to show a special need for self-defense. Instead, SB2 would increase the minimum age for carrying concealed weapons from 18 to 21 and prohibit them in sensitive places such as schools, parks, playgrounds and banks. Gun proponents sued to block SB2 before it went into effect. That lawsuit could impact the law: A motion for an injunction a legal order blocking the law from taking effect is pending before a federal court in Santa Ana, but has not yet been heard by a judge. For now, the law is set to take effect Jan. 1. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Conservatorship expansion: California will make it easier for counties to compel people with severe mental illness into medical treatment or temporary psychiatric holds next year. The new law expands the standards for deeming a person gravely disabled to include people whose mental illness or drug addiction inhibits their ability to keep themselves safe. SB43 by Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, D-Stockton, was sponsored by psychiatric organizations and other health care professionals who said it would get a small but troubled group of people off the streets and into conservatorships, which can include involuntary medical treatment. Disability-rights groups objected to the expansion of detention and forced treatment and argued that voluntary care was more effective, but both legislative houses approved the measure unanimously. It takes effect in January. Some counties, including San Francisco, say they will work to implement the law quickly. Others may opt to delay implementation by as much as two years, as allowed by the law. New S.F. housing scrutiny: Californias housing agency will assess San Franciscos progress toward its state-mandated housing goals every year starting next year, subjecting the city to a higher level of scrutiny than any part of the state. Other cities and counties will be evaluated every four years. The laws author, Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said he decided to subject his own city to a higher level of scrutiny because it has proven to be so slow to approve new housing. He blamed the Board of Supervisors for rejecting projects and the citys notoriously slow permitting process. The new law, SB423, will add to the pressure San Francisco is already facing after the state housing agency conducted an unprecedented audit of its housing approval process and is threatening that the city must cut some of its red tape or lose control over permitting. Fentanyl sentences: People convicted of dealing or attempting to deal more than a kilogram of fentanyl will face years of additional prison time under a new law that increases punishment for people who deal the deadly drug. AB701 by Assembly Member Carlos Villapudua, D-Stockton, managed to earn approval from the state Assembly and Senate in a year when most bills to increase punishments were blocked by progressive Democrats in the Legislature wary of continuing a war on drugs-style approach to combating the states opioid overdose crisis. Instead of punishment, lawmakers largely favored measures that increased treatment for people addicted to opioids over ones that punish people who sell them. Child sex trafficking: People convicted of child sex trafficking could face additional years of prison time starting Jan. 1. Child sex trafficking is already a felony in California that carries a prison sentence of five to 12 years, or 15 to life if the crime involves force, deceit, coercion or violence. The new law adds child sex trafficking to the list of crimes like rape and murder that automatically qualify as serious felonies, which would mean people convicted of the offense could spend many more years in prison. Californias three strikes law adds years of prison time if someone is convicted of two serious felonies and imposes a sentence of 25 years to life for a person who has been convicted of three such offenses. Classifying the offense as a serious felony would also limit instances when someone accused of child sex trafficking could negotiate a plea bargain. By making all child sex trafficking crimes serious felonies, the new law could increase jail time for people convicted of the crime even if they were not convicted of using force, deceit, coercion or violence in the commission of the crime. The bill, SB14, faced an unusual path to passage in the Legislature after it was struck down in committee but then resurrected a couple days later when Newsom intervened. The incident represented the rare situation where Newsom publicly got involved with the Legislatures work and legislative leaders took the unusual step of publicly questioning the committee votes of their fellow Democrats. It was especially remarkable for a bill written by one of the Legislatures most conservative members, Sen. Shannon Grove, R-Bakersfield. Mobile opioid treatment: Mobile pharmacies that serve homeless people will be able to dispense the opioid addiction treatment buprenorphine starting next year. Mobile pharmacies couldnt previously dispense the medication, which is also known by the brand names Subutex and Suboxone, because of its classification as a controlled substance. Advocates for the new law see this change as an important step to help address the raging overdose crisis fueled by fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid involved in a majority of overdose deaths in the state. Coming later next year New minimum wages for fast-food and health care workers: Hundreds of thousands of California health care workers will see a significant boost in pay under a law set to increase their wages gradually, with the first bump kicking in on June 1, 2024. Heres how it will apply to various health care employers: Large health systems and dialysis clinics with 10,000 or more full-time employees will have to pay workers a minimum of $23 an hour starting June 1, 2024; $24 starting June 1, 2025; and $25 starting June 1, 2026. Hospitals that get most of their funding from Medi-Cal and Medicare, and small rural hospitals, will have to pay workers at least $18 an hour starting June 1, 2024, with annual 3.5% raises. They will have to pay workers a minimum of $25 an hour starting in 2033. Primary care clinics, community clinics and urgent care clinics owned by primary care providers will have to pay employees at least $21 an hour starting June 1, 2024; $22 starting June 1, 2026; and $25 starting June 2027. All other health care facilities must pay workers at least $21 an hour starting June 1, 2024; $23 starting June 1, 2026; and $25 starting June 1, 2028. And theyre not the only ones benefiting from new wage laws. Under a compromise law signed this year, fast-food workers in the state will see their minimum wage rise to $20 an hour beginning in April, and increase by up to 3.5% a year through 2029. The law implementing the pay requirements also creates a state commission that will consider improvements to fast-food employees working conditions. Security deposit cap: Scarcity and budget-breaking rents can make searching for an apartment or house in many California cities a nightmare. But theres another factor that often places prospective homes even further out of reach: sky-high security deposits. Annual Cocktail Trends Report Details Trends to Watch in Cocktail Culture in 2024 HAMILTON, BERMUDA / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Bacardi Limited, the world's largest privately held international spirits company, releases its fifth annual Bacardi Cocktail Trends Report, anticipating the key trends that will redefine cocktail culture and the spirits business in 2024. The report, created in collaboration with strategic foresight consultancy, The Future Laboratory (TFL), draws on insights from Bacardi-led and external research, interviews with bartenders and insights from The Future Laboratory to share the themes that are transforming flavor preferences, drink formats, and cocktail experiences in the coming year. "As 2024 arrives, people are looking to settle into the unsettled - welcoming tastes of optimism into our reality. In this landscape, people are reshaping cocktail culture, infusing it with fresh perspectives and finding memorable experiences back at the bar with friends. From redefining moderate drinking to a surge in sustainable attitudes, Bacardi is at the forefront, championing a world where people-driven cocktail culture thrives through innovation, experimentation, and overall better moments," says Brenda Fiala, Global Vice President of Strategy, Insights & Analytics at Bacardi. Here are the macro-trends defining spirits sipping in 2024: Limited Libations. Next-gen drinkers are embracing a 'less but better' approach, continuing to support the ongoing premiumization era for key spirits, liquors, and NoLo categories. With a conscious approach to the economic climate, consumers are seeking small luxuries - looking to elevated lifestyle products as must-have pieces. This quality-focused shift transforms spirits into coveted collector's items, with forward-thinking brands enhancing limited-edition bottles through crafted storytelling. Simultaneously, the NoLo category continues to evolve, embodying 'The Sipping Spectrum,' where moderation is synonymous with choice, quality, flavor, and social connections. IWSR research illustrates this flexible future in action, reporting that almost half of NoLo consumers choose NoLo options on certain occasions, and full strength on others. Innovative Aging & Blending. 2024 will usher in an era of innovation for dark, aged spirits, with brands embracing unique aging methods and novel flavor combinations. Distillers are venturing into uncharted territory, discovering new sources of innovation in the expanding category. Bold and unexpected pairings continue to lead, whereas regional experimentation yields spicy, fruity, and zesty profiles in innovative formats. While enjoyers of dark, aged spirits are diversifying their palates, rum-based cocktails are continuing to grow in popularity. Tequila unanimously ranked as the number one premiumization category with Mezcal named as the next to premiumize, as indicated by the Bacardi Global Consumer Survey 2023. Escapism Elixirs. Cocktail culture is transporting consumers across destinations, countries and even eras -?as classic spritzes and ornate sips help to recreate nostalgic, convivial moments year-round. In 2024, the link between drinks and destinations will deepen, with classic cocktails and European flavors whisking drinkers from the beach to the bar. This evolution isn't just about where but also when consumers enjoy drinks. As for letting loose, non-traditional venues are on the rise, with Bacardi research indicating a shift away from nightclubs to festivals as the new hub for revelry. In South Africa and India, more than one-third of respondents are looking to enjoy more sundowner cocktails over the next year, and approximately a quarter in the U.S. and Mexico (27%) and Spain (26%). Notes of Nature. In the coming year, consumers will reframe their relationship to the natural world, impacting where they spend their time, the brands they support, and what they consume. With a resurgence in next-gen outdoor activities and a growing emphasis on sustainability, drinks brands are redefining their connection to the environment through intentional ingredients and eco-friendly practices. In the drinks world, 2024 will see brands and bartenders take a holistic approach to nature and its flavors -?harnessing sustainably sourced aromatics, florals, botanicals and oils to create cocktail experiences uniquely rooted in nature. According to the Bacardi Global Consumer Survey 2023, 44% of respondents in Canada and 43% of younger respondents in the U.S. intend to consume more cocktails made with natural ingredients in 2024. In emerging markets, the numbers are even higher with 51% in India, 47% South Africa and 44% in Mexico. Tech-Enhanced Tastes. Digital advancements are inciting change in 'what', 'where' and 'how' drinks are enjoyed, providing all-new routes to personalization, brand experience and community. As consumers increasingly seek personalized brand interactions, AI is introducing exciting opportunities for tailored cocktail experiences, accessible anytime and anywhere. For the drinks industry, AI's evolution will create all-new paths to experimentation and discovery, with brand innovators using the technology as a tool to bring consumers closer to branded cocktails and experiences, regardless of their location. While 8 in 10 younger consumers across select markets are looking to explore AI recommendations, they are adamant about maintaining the emotional connection and artistic finesse that only bartenders can provide. Download the complete Bacardi Cocktail Trends Report 2024 and Infographic. About Bacardi Limited Bacardi Limited, the world's largest privately held international spirits company, produces, markets, and distributes spirits and wines. The Bacardi Limited portfolio comprises more than 200 brands and labels, including BACARDI rum, PATRON tequila, GREY GOOSE vodka, DEWAR'S Blended Scotch whisky, BOMBAY SAPPHIRE gin, MARTINI vermouth and sparkling wines, CAZADORES 100% blue agave tequila, and other leading and emerging brands including WILLIAM LAWSON'S Scotch whisky, D'USSE Cognac, ANGEL'S ENVY American straight whiskey, and ST-GERMAIN elderflower liqueur. Founded more than 161 years ago in Santiago de Cuba, family-owned Bacardi Limited currently employs approximately 9,000, operates production facilities in 11 countries and territories, and sells its brands in more than 160 markets. Bacardi Limited refers to the Bacardi group of companies, including Bacardi International Limited. Visit http://www.bacardilimited.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. Find out what's in store for 2024. View additional multimedia and more ESG storytelling from Bacardi Limited on 3blmedia.com. Contact Info: Spokesperson: Bacardi Limited Website: https://www.3blmedia.com/profiles/bacardi-limited Email: info@3blmedia.com SOURCE: Bacardi Limited View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/812927/innovative-imbibing-limited-libations-escapism-elixirs-and-more-are-shaping-the-way-that-consumers-drink-in-2024-based-on-the-bacardi-cocktail-trends-report 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. Bridge Loan Extension Updated factoring agreement Extending Secured Convertible Debentures QUEBEC, QC / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / NuRAN Wireless Inc. ("NuRAN" or the "Company") (CSE:NUR)(OTCQB:NRRWF)(FSE:1RN), a leading supplier of mobile and broadband wireless infrastructure solutions, provides the following corporate update on business: Extension of Bridge Loan for US$1.5 Million NuRAN is pleased to announce that it has received an extension from the US based institution that provided the bridge loan (as announced on April 4, 2023 and April 24, 2023) that it has agreed to extend the bridge loan until October 21, 2024 to allow the Company sufficient time to complete other financing aimed at building out NaaS infrastructure. As consideration, the Company has agreed to increase the principal amount on the loan by 10% as an extension fee and issue the lender 5,000,000 share purchase warrants to replace the existing warrants held by the lender, with each warrant exercisable to acquire a share of the Company at an exercise price of $0.25 for a period of two years. In addition, the Company has agreed to add a conversion feature to the loan, at $0.225 per common shares of the Company. Any securities issuable upon exercise of these warrants or conversion of the loan will be subject to a statutory hold period of four months and one day. Update on the Factoring Agreement. NuRAN is pleased to announce that it has amended the terms of the factoring agreement dated August 28, 2023 (the "Amendment"). Pursuant to the Amendment, the Company has sold Receivables (as defined in the Company's news release dated August 28, 2023) valued at $1.425 million for proceeds of $865,000 consisting of: (i) a cash payment of $215,000 that have been received by the Company; and (ii) a cash payment $650,000 on or before December 31, 2023 for the purpose of funding working capital requirements leading up to the finalisation of other loans. Included in the Amendment, the factoring company agreed to extend various deadlines until January 31, 2024. Furthermore, pursuant to the Amendment, if the Company chooses to satisfy the Recourse Account (as defined in the Company's news release dated August 28, 2023) by issuing Units (as defined in the Company's news release dated August 28, 2023), which is entirely at the discretion of the Company, the deemed price per Unit will be $0.225 per Unit and the warrant exercise price will be $0.25. Finally, the Amendment adjusted the timing and quantum of the Fee Shares (as defined in the Company's news release dated August 28, 2023) so that the remaining balance of 1,300,000 Fee Shares has increased to 1,900,000, 1,000,000 of which will be issued on or before January 31, 2024, and the remainder will be issued on or before March 15, 2024. The Fee Shares will be subject to a statutory hold period in Canada of four months and a day from issuance. Update on the Secured Convertible Debentures NuRAN is also pleased to announce that the holders of its convertible secured debentures issued in August 2023 have agreed to waive certain rights pursuant to the debentures, including relating to events of default and extending those deadlines to February 28, 2024. As consideration to these debenture holders, the Company has agreed to a new conversion price of $0.225 per unit, with each unit comprised of one common share and three quarters (3/4) of one warrant, with each whole warrant exercisable to acquire an additional common share at a price of $0.25 until August 28, 2026. As additional consideration to the debenture holders, the Company has agreed to issue 120,000 common shares, which are subject to a statutory hold period in Canada of four months and a day. About NuRAN Wireless: NuRAN Wireless is a leading rural telecommunications company that meets the growing demand for wireless network coverage in remote and rural regions around the globe. With its affordable and innovative scalable solutions of 2G, 3G, and 4G technologies, NuRAN Wireless offers a new possibility for more than one billion people to communicate effectively over long distances efficiently and affordably. "Bridging the Digital Divide, One Connection at a Time." Additional Information: For further information about NuRAN Wireless: www.nuranwireless.com Francis Letourneau, Director and CEO Francis.letourneau@nuranwireless.com Tel: (418) 264-1337 Frank Candido Investor relations Frank.candido@nuranwireless.com Tel: (514) 969-5530 Forward Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as, "expects", "is expected", "anticipates", "intends", "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements include those relating to the timing of the network infrastructure license and terms on financing. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results projected, expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements, such as the uncertainties regarding include risks such as the uncertainties regarding the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, and measures to prevent its spread, risks relating to NuRAN's business and the economy generally; NuRAN's ability to refinance its long term debt that is currently in default; NuRAN's ability to adequately restructure its operations with respect to its new model of NaaS service contracts; our ability to collect fees from our telecommunication providers and reliance on the network of our telecommunications providers, the capacity of the Company to deliver in a technical capacity and to import inventory to Africa at a reasonable cost; NuRAN's ability to obtain project financing for the proposed site build out under its NaaS agreements with Orange, MTN and other telecommunication providers, the loss of one or more significant suppliers or a reduction in significant volume from such suppliers; NuRAN's ability to meet or exceed customers' demand and expectations; significant current competition and the introduction of new competitors or other disruptive entrants in the Company's industry; effects of the global supply shortage affecting parts needed for NuRAN's sites and site installations; NuRAN's ability to retain key employees and protect its intellectual property; compliance with local laws and regulations and ability to obtain all required permits for our operations, access to the credit and capital markets, changes in applicable telecommunications laws or regulations or changes in license and regulatory fees, downturns in customers' business cycles; and insurance prices and insurance coverage availability, the Company's ability to effectively maintain or update information and technology systems; our ability to implement and maintain measures to protect against cyberattacks and comply with applicable privacy and data security requirements; the Company's ability to successfully implement its business strategies or realize expected cost savings and revenue enhancements; business development activities, including acquisitions and integration of acquired businesses; the Company's expansion into markets outside of Canada and the operational, competitive and regulatory risks facing the Company's non-Canadian based operations. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward looking information. Other factors which could materially affect such forward-looking information are described in the risk factors in the Company's most recent annual management's discussion and analysis that is available on the Company's profile on SEDAR+ at www.sedarplus.ca. SOURCE: NuRAN Wireless Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/812970/nuran-provides-corporate-update Fitch Group, a global leader in financial information services owned by Hearst, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of all the remaining stock it does not own of Bixby Research and Analytics ("Bixby"), a leading provider of credit information on private syndicated loan issuers. Earlier this year Fitch Ventures, the equity investment arm of Fitch Group, led Bixby's Series A round. Bixby, founded by Brian Conroy, will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fitch Solutions and will be managed by CreditSights. Bixby will be incorporated into CreditSights' leveraged finance product suite, which includes Covenant Review's legal analysis, LevFin Insights' news and data, and CreditSights' fundamental research. Ted Niedermayer, President of Fitch Solutions, said: "The acquisition of Bixby is a natural next step as we continue to prioritize our leveraged finance offerings. Bixby's data provides complementary insights to CreditSights, which bolsters our loan offering and also allows us to grow our special situations coverage." Brian Conroy, CEO and Founder of Bixby Research and Analytics, said: "Working with CreditSights over the past six months has expanded our reach in the loan market. We're excited to build upon this success by fully integrating into the CreditSights leveraged finance platform." CreditSights clients will be able to access Bixby data and documents, Covenant Review legal research, and LevFin Insights proprietary company news and data, from new issue through bankruptcy, on one platform. About Fitch Solutions Fitch Solutions is a leading provider of insights, data and analytics. It informs investment strategies, strengthens risk management capabilities and helps identify strategic opportunities. Its analysts, lawyers, journalists and economists offer in-depth views on credit markets/risk and individual credits, ESG, developed and emerging markets, and industry sectors. Fitch Solutions is part of Fitch Group, a global leader in financial information services with operations in more than 30 countries. Fitch Group is owned by Hearst. Further information: fitchsolutions.com. About CreditSights CreditSights, Covenant Review, and LevFin Insights bring together best-in-class research, covenant analysis, and news on one platform, with a unified interface and login. CreditSights, a Fitch Solutions Company, was founded over 20 years ago with the goal of producing insightful, impartial research that would allow our clients to make prudent, profitable investment decisions in the global credit markets. Now more than ever before, we give our clients the ability to KNOW MORE, RISK BETTER. About Bixby Research and Analytics Bixby Research and Analytics is the leading provider of private credit information and data in the broadly syndicated loan market. Since inception, Bixby has been delivering market-moving news and comprehensive financial data to drive trading velocity for its clients and keep them ahead of the competition. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204847411/en/ Contacts: Fitch Group Eleis Brennan Tel: +1 646 582 3666 Email: eleis.brennan@thefitchgroup.com Bixby Research and Analytics: Brian Conroy Tel: +1 312 690 9531 Email: brian@bixbyresearch.com Top human and technical resources to build the first Portuguese Supercar PORTO, Portugal, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- With a work team that currently comprises fourteen members with academic and professional training in the areas of engineering, production and design - as well as an international network of partnerships that gives it access to the latest technologies - Adamastor is driving forward and materialising its vision of a modern supercar from its factory and engineering centre in the Perafita area of Porto. Adamastor's factory currently has a working area of around 2,225 square metres, with the potential to expand to 6,000 square metres, which will allow it to implement its growth plan in a phased and sustained manner in the future, both in terms of technical and human resources. Adamastor is fully focused on its goal of becoming a benchmark manufacturer of low volume supercars, and is also committed to establishing itself as an engineering centre of excellence, through which it will provide consultancy, design and production services using cutting-edge technology. Its capabilities and competences include CNC machining facilities, the production of components in composite materials and the use of the latest 3D printing technology. Its engineering projects also use the most advanced mechanical design, simulation and optimisation software, as well as exploiting the enormous potential of tools such as virtual reality. Following a handcrafted production approach, Adamastor's manufacturing concept is based on the assembly bay principle, in which a highly specialised technical team will be fully responsible for the entire design process of each vehicle, fostering a greater emotional connection between the human and material aspects, which will always be the inspiration behind the excellence of Adamastor's work and the quality of execution of its highly qualified technical team. Adamastor's current team includes : Daniel Lopes, a Composites Technician with a degree in Arts and a great love of handcrafts, also has Lay-Up training from Caetano Aeronautic, SA, having worked, for example, with dry carbon fibre, dry glass fibre, kevlar and copper mesh; Diogo Matos, who has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from ISEP - Instituto de Engenharia Mecanica do Porto, currently works as an engineer at Adamastor. He also has experience in robotics, building tubular chassis and providing assistance to motor racing teams. Frederico Ribeiro, who has a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, has been Adamastor's Engineering Director since its formation and is responsible for the design, drawing and simulation of structural components. He has extensive professional experience in the field of motor racing, having collaborated with renowned structures such as Speedy Motorsport and Veloso Motorsport as a Race Engineer; Gerardo Menezes, who has a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, takes on the role of Production Manager at Adamastor. He has five years' training in karting, race management and car mechanics; Joao Ginete, who has a degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Bristol, is Adamastor's Head of Aerodynamics. His professional experience includes roles at McLaren Racing, Red Bull Racing and Red Bull Advanced Technologies, having collaborated on projects such as the Aston Martin Valkyrie, as well as the Formula 1 single seaters that have been so successful in recent years; Joao Passos takes on the role of Production Coordinator and Competition Team at Adamastor, with extensive professional experience in the design and construction of racing cars. Together with the late Alfredo Matos, he founded DBE Chassis and Suspension Engineering, a company with an extensive track record in building racing cars, whether classic vehicles or contemporary models. Nuno Silva is a Composites Technician at Adamastor. With more than 15 years' experience in laminating fibres and other composite materials, he currently works on cutting cores and treating epoxy plates for lamination, as well as making moulds and laminating monolithic parts. Pedro Abreu, who has a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, is Adamastor's Production Engineer. With experience in various CAD, CAM and FEA modelling software, he also has theoretical and practical knowledge of manufacturing processes for parts made of composite materials. Ricardo Quintas, who has a degree in Management and Administration from the Instituto Superior de Administracao e Gestao, is the CEO and one of the founders of Adamastor. With extensive experience in management positions in various companies in a wide range of business areas, Ricardo Quintas is one of the driving forces behind Adamastor. Samuel Busovsky, who has a degree in Industrial Design & Technology from Brunel University London, has been Adamastor's Design Director since July 2019. He has extensive experience with CAD modelling software and is responsible for designing the interior of Adamastor's new car, including all its conception phases, from design and modelling to compliance with applicable legislation. Vitor Batista is a Composites Technician at Adamastor. He has extensive training and experience as a laminator of composite materials, acquired mainly at Caetano Aeronautic, SA. Victor Pinto takes on the role of Composites Technician at Adamastor. With extensive professional experience in the most diverse areas of production, such as carpentry, CNC cutting and machining operator, vacuum laminator, and infusion of carbon fibre composites, he is one of the most recent members of Adamastor's laminating team. This is the human capital that fulfils Adamastor's activity. A multi-talented structure that operates at the Perafita plant, where, in addition to the Supercar to be unveiled in the first four months of 2024, it already supplies components to various clients, including carbon fibre bodies and fuel tanks, propellers for wind energy generation, among others. Taking advantage of all the know-how of its team of professionals and the experience it has accumulated in the most varied areas of industrial production, Adamastor is already on the final stretch to take to the track for the first tests of what will be the first Supercar born on Portuguese soil. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2292084/Adamastor_1.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2292085/Adamastor_2.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2292086/Adamastor_3.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2292087/Adamastor_4.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2292088/Adamastor_5.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2094180/4437438/Adamastor_Logo.jpg View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/inside-adamastor-and-the-manufacturing-plant-on-the-outskirts-of-porto-302004943.html Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The UN Global Compact, together with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and UN Climate Change (UNFCCC), brought together senior executives of business, industry, finance, civil society, the United Nations and Government at the 11th High-Level Meeting of Caring for Climate at COP28. Those present discussed how to accelerate private sector action on nature and biodiversity and on the impediments and opportunities for business action towards a Just Energy Transition. For a liveable planet, it is imperative to cut emissions and deliver climate justice in line with theUN Secretary-General's Acceleration Agenda,whilst fulfilling theGlobal Biodiversity Framework. Sanda Ojiambo, CEO and Executive Director of the UN Global Compact said "Today, nearly 1 million species are at risk of extinction, and the world's largest ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and major coral reefs and wetlands, are reaching tipping points. But at the same time, we have seen first-hand how the business community has the potential to help drive progress on protecting and restoring biodiversity. In fact, companies are learning that they can't afford to be left behind - 395 million new jobs and over $10 trillion dollars in business opportunities are expected to arise from nature-positive transitions." Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse now rank among thetop 5 business risks. TheGlobal Biodiversity Framework(GBF) sets a clear path to a world living in harmony with nature by 2050, with specific expectations for business. During the meeting, the UN Global Compact, in partnership with the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Center, launched the UN Global Compact Think Lab on Biodiversity and Natureto showcase holistic approaches for business to deliver strong corporate thought leadership and policy recommendations in the lead up to the Biodiversity COP16 and Climate COP29. The Think Lab will assist UN Global Compact participants to: Define the narrative, ambition and key recommendations of the UN Global Compact to business and policymakers on nature and biodiversity. Provide clarity through mapping existing initiatives, key resources and tools and identify current best practices, key challenges and policy needs linked to corporate nature and biodiversity action to prepare and mobilize companies to submit nature strategies by COP16. Shape business thought leadership and provide innovative solutions and guidance on critical areas linked to nature and biodiversity, such as the human rights-nature nexus. Increase the uptake of learnings and deliverables across sectors and regions through the development of academy sessions, peer-learning groups and accelerators. The Think Lab will assist companies in transforming their business models, starting with assessing their impacts and dependencies on nature, and implementing credible nature strategies that will provide co-benefits for climate, biodiversity and society. This transformation could create $10.1 trillion of annual business opportunities and 395 million jobsby 2030. Inger Andersen, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme; Selwin Hart, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Climate Action and Just Transition, United Nations; Matt Jones, Chief Impact Officer, UNEP-WCMC; Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa, South Africa CEO, Naspers; JorgeLopez-Doriga, Chief Communications and Sustainability Officer, AJE Group; Mitchell New, Group General Counsel and Chairman of AIA International, AIA Group; Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman, Schneider Electric and, Daniele Violetti, Senior Director, Programmes Coordination, UN Climate Change (UNFCCC) also spoke during the event. Notes to Editors About the UN Global Compact As a special initiative of the United Nations Secretary-General, the UN Global Compact is a call to companies worldwide to align their operations and strategies with Ten Principles in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption. Our ambition is to accelerate and scale the global collective impact of business by upholding the Ten Principles and delivering the Sustainable Development Goals through accountable companies and ecosystems that enable change. With more than 18,000 companies and 3,800 non-business signatories based in over 101 countries, and 62 Local Networks, the UN Global Compact is the world's largest corporate sustainability initiative - one Global Compact uniting business for a better world. For more information, follow @globalcompact on social media and visit our website at unglobalcompact.org About Caring for Climate Launched in 2007, Caring for Climate is a partnership of the UN Global Compact, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and UN Climate Change (UNFCCC) to advance the role of business in addressing climate change. It provides a framework for business leaders to implement practical climate change solutions and help shape public policy. It has evolved from a commitment to a space for dialogue at the UN Climate Change Conferences, leveraging CEO's voices in support of the UN Secretary-General's priorities. Collagen Gummy Sales Propelled by Convenience, Taste, and Health Benefits to Reach US$378 Million by 2033 | Future Market Insights, Inc. PR Newswire NEWARK, Del., Dec. 4, 2023 NEWARK, Del., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- A study by FMI attributes the flourishing global collagen gummy market to rising consumer awareness of the convenience, palatability, and health benefits of collagen gummies. Key players are actively engaging in mergers and collaborations to develop innovative products and maintain their market dominance, ensuring a dynamic and competitive landscape. Explore further to gain comprehensive insights into the global collagen gummy market. A Detailed Analysis of the Collagen Gummy Market by Berry and Citrus Flavors, from 2023 to 2033 The global collagen gummy market value is projected to reach US$ 247 million in 2023 and US$ 378 million by 2033. Over the forecast period, global demand for collagen gummies is anticipated to surge at 4.3% CAGR. Get an Exclusive Sample Copy of the Collagen Gummies Market, 2023-2033: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/REP-GB-18539 Several factors are expected to stimulate the growth of the collagen gummy market during the forecast period. These include growing awareness about the convenience, palatability, and health benefits of collagen gummies, rising health awareness, and easy availability through online platforms. People worldwide are becoming aware about the health and cosmetic advantages of collagen supplement intake. As a result, demand for collagen gummies is rising significantly, and the trend is expected to continue through 2033. Collagen gummies are believed to positively impact skin health, hair growth, joint health, and wound healing. This prompts people to consume these health supplements, bolstering their sales. Rising health and wellness trends and interest in nutricosmetics will further boost the global collagen gummy industry. Similarly, new product launches and expanding e-commerce are expected to create growth prospects for collagen gummy companies. Key companies are focusing on using celebrity endorsements to reach a wider audience and boost their sales. This will bode well for the target market. Key Takeaways from the Global Collagen Gummy Market Study Report The global collagen gummy market is set to total US$ 378 million in 2033. in 2033. By flavor type, the berry segment is projected to hold a value share of 34% in 2023. in 2023. Based on functionality, promoting skin health segment will likely account for about 25% of market share in 2023. Understand global, regional, and country-level parameters with growth opportunities, historical data (2018-2022), and forecasts (2023-2033). Buy this report today! Demand for collagen gummies in India is anticipated to rise at a CAGR of 6.2%. The United States holds around 30.8% of the global market share. of the global market share. Sales of collagen gummies in the United Kingdom are predicted to increase at 5.6% CAGR through 2033. through 2033. China is poised to exhibit a CAGR of 6.1% from 2023 to 2033. "The global market for collagen gummies is expected to witness steady growth amid rising awareness about the benefits of collagen. Widespread advertising of processed collagen supplements by the manufacturers can be instrumental in boosting the popularity of collagen gummies in the low-income group countries," says Nandini Roy Choudhury (Client Partner for Food & Beverages at Future Market Insights, Inc.). Who is Winning? The global collagen gummy market is highly consolidated, with most of suppliers concentrated in North America and Europe. However, the unavailability of sufficient sources of collagen in these regions is gradually shifting the business to Asian and African countries. This, in turn, has encouraged several regional collagen processing industries to enter the collagen gummy sector, which could diversify the market gradually. Key players are adopting a wide variety of strategies to boost their sales and expand their global footprint. These include new product launches, mergers, celebrity endorsements, acquisitions, partnerships, and collaborations. Recent Developments in the Collagen Gummy Industry: In June 2020, Novomins Nutrition Inc. introduced its new product line of collagen gummies for its consumers. The company claims that the gummies contain hyaluronic acid, biotin, and vitamin C and are devoid of gluten and GMOs, artificial coloring, or sweeteners. In November 2020, a new startup was established as the first cell-based collagen and Gelatin Company named Jellatech. The company was founded by Stephanie Michelsen and Kylie van Deinsen-Hesp, who claim to make gelatin and collagen using cellular agriculture and without animal products. Purchase this report now to get key companies with their Revenue Forecast, Volume Forecast, Company Ranking, Competitive Landscape, Growth Factors, Trends, and Pricing Analysis. Get More Valuable Insights Future Market Insights (FMI), in its new offering, provides an unbiased analysis of the global collagen gummy market presenting historical demand data (2018 to 2022) and forecast statistics for the period from 2023 to 2033. The study incorporates compelling insights on the collagen gummy industry based on flavor type, source, functionality, and sales channel across several regions. About the Food and Beverage Division at Future Market Insights (FMI) Expert analysis, actionable insights, and strategic recommendations - the food and beverages team at Future Market Insights (FMI) helps clients from all over the globe with their unique business intelligence needs. With a repertoire of over 1,000 reports and 1 million+ data points, the team has analyzed the food and beverage industry lucidly in 50+ countries for over a decade. The team provides end-to-end research and consulting services; reach out to explore how we can help. About the Author: Nandini Roy Choudhury (Client Partner for Food & Beverages at Future Market Insights, Inc.) has 7+ years of management consulting experience. She advises industry leaders and explores off-the-eye opportunities and challenges. She puts processes and operating models in place to support their business objectives. She has exceptional analytical skills and often brings thought leadership to the table. Nandini has vast functional expertise in key niches, including but not limited to food ingredients, nutrition & health solutions, animal nutrition, and marine nutrients. She is also well-versed in the pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, retail, and chemical sectors, where she advises market participants to develop methodologies and strategies that deliver results. Her core expertise lies in corporate growth strategy, sales and marketing effectiveness, acquisitions and post-merger integration and cost reduction. Nandini has an MBA in Finance from MIT School of Business. She also holds a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering from Nagpur University, India. Nandini has authored several publications, and quoted in journals including Beverage Industry, Bloomberg, and Wine Industry Advisor. Explore FMI's Extensive Coverage in the Food and Beverages Domain: Sugar-Free Sweets Market to Reach US$3.9 Billion by 2033, Driven by Health Consciousness and Rising Demand for Alternative Sweeteners. - Get a Sample Report Copy. to Reach US$3.9 Billion by 2033, Driven by Health Consciousness and Rising Demand for Alternative Sweeteners. - Driven by growing demand for health and wellness products, the collagen peptide market is projected to reach US$1.23 billion by 2033. - Get a Sample Report Copy. is projected to reach US$1.23 billion by 2033. - Global collagen supplement market is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.4% reaching a valuation of US$ 2.8 billion by 2032. - Get a Sample Report Copy. is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.4% reaching a valuation of US$ 2.8 billion by 2032. - The sugar-free gummy market is projected to reach a valuation of US$1,040 million by 2033, expanding at a CAGR of 5.2% from an estimated US$627 million in 2023. - Get a Sample Report Copy. About Future Market Insights (FMI) Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in Dubai and has delivery centers in the United Kingdom, the United States, and India. FMI's latest market research reports and industry analysis helps businesses navigate challenges and make critical decisions with confidence and clarity amidst breakneck competition. Our customized and syndicated market research reports deliver actionable insights that drive sustainable growth. A team of expert-led analysts at FMI continuously tracks emerging trends and events in a broad range of industries to ensure that our clients prepare for the evolving needs of their consumers. Contact Us Nandini Singh Sawlani Future Market Insights Inc. Christiana Corporate, 200 Continental Drive, Suite 401, Newark, Delaware - 19713, USA T: +1-845-579-5705 For Sales Enquiries: sales@futuremarketinsights.com Website: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com LinkedIn| Twitter| Blogs | YouTube Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1197648/3531122/FMI_Logo.jpg View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/collagen-gummy-sales-propelled-by-convenience-taste-and-health-benefits-to-reach-us378-million-by-2033--future-market-insights-inc-302004718.html The daylong Forum will address critical climate change issues and highlight innovative projects and initiatives by the Indian diaspora that contribute to global sustainability efforts WASHINGTON and DELHI, India, Dec. 04, 2023, a leading nonprofit organization dedicated to uniting the Indian diaspora for a stronger, more interconnected global community, is hosting the Climate Action Forum at COP 28 on December 7th from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM at the Anantara Downtown Dubai Hotel, Business Bay, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Climate is the existential issue of our times. The Indian diaspora contains reputed experts contributing to solutions in various areas of environmental sustainability and climate change. Moreover, as evidenced during the recently concluded G20 Summit, India is playing an instrumental role in developing solutions in this realm. As part of Indiaspora's mission to inspire and position the global Indian diaspora as a force for good, and to build bridges among diaspora leaders and prominent leading lights resident in India, Indiaspora is privileged to serve as a platform to bring diverse and constructive voices together during COP 28. Indiaspora will host its daylong Climate Action Forum featuring 28 speakers from 5 countries under the theme of "Empower, Educate, Inspire, Act." Distinguished speakers from various sectors, including government, industry, and civil society, will participate in engaging panel discussions on topics such as sustainable technology, green finance, renewable energy, and the role of diaspora in climate advocacy. Key speakers include Dominic Waughray, Dasra, India Climate Collaborative, Indian Youth Climate Network. The agenda will be live on December 6th here. Indiaspora invites members of the media to attend this forum. Please complete the pre-registration here. MR Rangaswami, Founder and Chairman of the Board of Indiaspora, said, "This Climate Forum represents another step in Indiaspora's objective of being a convener for the Indian diaspora and leaders in India on some of the most pressing global issues. From our earlier work on climate, it is evident to us that these key stakeholders play an important role in advancing a globally beneficial environmental agenda." Sreekumar Nair, CEO of Indiaspora-India, added that "Indiaspora's Climate Forum builds upon our work over the past 3 years in organizing virtual global Climate Summits. Given the caliber of expertise on stage at our Forum, it promises to be an insightful and impactful dialogue. We are excited to hear from an eclectic group of speakers including policymakers, entrepreneurs, business leaders, academics and nonprofit executives." About Indiaspora: Indiaspora) is a nonprofit community of powerful global Indian leaders from diverse backgrounds and professions who are committed to inspiring the diaspora to be a force for positive impact by providing a platform to collaborate, engage, and catalyze social change. Media Contacts: USA (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) Mira Bhayroo Senior Coordinator, Marketing & Communications mira@indiaspora.org +1 (267) 608-9513 India (New Delhi) Shrenya Malik Manager of Events and Research, India Branch shrenya@indiaspora.org +91 88001 06529 AUSTIN, TX / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Vikmar Foods, a prominent player in the Canadian edible oil industry, is working towards the establishment of a cutting-edge storage and distribution warehouse in Austin, Texas. This strategic move marks a significant milestone for the company, as it aims to strengthen its presence in the American market and enhance its distribution capabilities. Key Highlights of the Expansion: Strategic market entry: Vikmar Foods decision to open a storage and distribution warehouse in Austin is part of its strategic initiative to expand operations into the United States. The choice of Austin reflects the city's vibrant business environment and aligns with the company's commitment to meeting the growing demand for its high-quality edible oils in the region. State-of-the-Art Facility: The 35,000-square-foot warehouse will be designed with state-of-the-art infrastructure and advanced technology to ensure efficient storage and distribution of Vikmar Foods diverse range of edible oils. The facility will incorporate modern warehousing solutions, including temperature-controlled zones, to maintain the integrity and freshness of the products. Boost to the Local Economy: Vikmar Foods entry into the Austin market is expected to have positive economic implications for the local community. The establishment of the warehouse will contribute to job creation, provide employment opportunities, and stimulate economic growth within the region. Global Commitment to Sustainability: The new facility will uphold Vikmar Foods commitment to sustainability. The company has implemented eco-friendly practices in the design and operations of the warehouse, including energy-efficient systems and environmentally conscious processes, aligning with its global efforts to minimize its environmental impact. Community Engagement and Celebration: Vikmar Foods expansion into the U.S. market exemplifies its dedication to providing top-tier edible oils to consumers on a global scale. For more information about the grand opening event or to schedule interviews with Vikmar Foods representatives, please contact us via info@vikmarfoods.com or visit the website vikmarfoods.com to gain more details. Media Contact Organization: Vikmar Foods Inc Contact Person: Pankhuri Sandhu Website: https://vikmarfoods.com Email: info@vikmarfoods.com Contact Number: +1 (905) 990-1799 City: Austin State: Texas Country: United States SOURCE: Vikmar Foods Inc View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/813154/vikmar-foods-to-establish-a-35000-sq-ft-storage-and-distribution-warehouse-in-austin-texas Hong Kong: Govt to bring Chow Ting to justice The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government issued a solemn statement today to strongly condemn the shameful acts of Chow Ting, who was arrested by Polices National Security Department for suspected violation of the offence of collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security, of absconding to avoid legal responsibilities. The statement said Chow Ting blatantly claimed on social media that she planned to jump bail, which is in total disregard of law and order. The Hong Kong SAR Government will spare no effort in bringing her to justice in accordance with the law. Chow Ting's flagrant disregard for police bail terms showed that she is completely devoid of integrity. She has also never soberly reflected on her acts, which are suspected to have violated the law, but has tried to escape from legal consequences. No matter what excuses she put forward or how she attempted to deceive and win sympathy, her hypocrisy, disgrace and disregard for law and order are laid bare. The statement pointed out that endangering national security is a very serious offence and the Hong Kong SAR Government will fight against it with full force and pursue the liability of the person to the end. Fugitives should not have any delusion that they could evade legal liabilities by absconding from Hong Kong. Fugitives will be pursued for life unless they turn themselves in. The Hong Kong SAR Government urged Chow Ting to repent and co-operate with Police, be responsible for her own acts and turn over a new leaf, before it is too late. This story has been published on: 2023-12-04. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Iraqi PM condemns U.S. attacks on central province Xinhua) 11:19, December 04, 2023 BAGHDAD, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- Iraq rejected any attack by U.S. forces on its territory, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani said on Saturday during a phone call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Al-Sudani emphasized that the U.S. airstrikes on positions of armed groups linked to the Iraqi Hashd Shaabi paramilitary forces in the Jurf al-Nasr area in the central province of Babil constitute a violation of Iraqi sovereignty, according to a statement issued by al-Sudani's media office. "At the same time, al-Sudani reiterated the Iraqi government's commitment to protect international coalition advisors working in Iraq," the statement said. Blinken called on the Iraqi government to protect installations hosting American personnel and to pursue those responsible for attacks on U.S. personnel in Iraq, according to the State Department of the U.S.. Al-Sudani and Blinken also discussed developments in the Palestinian territories and agreed to stabilize the truce, stop attacks, and ensure that the Israel-Hamas conflict does not expand in a way that poses a real threat to security and stability in the region, the Iraqi statement added. On Nov. 22, U.S. aircraft attacked positions of the Hashd Shaabi forces in the Jurf al-Nasr area, south of Baghdad, leaving eight of its fighters killed and wounding four others. The U.S. airstrikes came after the armed group "Islamic Resistance in Iraq," an umbrella body for Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, claimed responsibility for carrying out a series of rocket and drone attacks on military bases housing U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq and Syria. The attacks by the armed group are believed to be part of retaliatory measures amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza. Immediately after the airstrikes, al-Sudani condemned in a statement the U.S. airstrikes and described them as a clear violation of the coalition's mission, which is to fight the Islamic State militants on Iraqi soil. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) The president of the San Francisco City College Board of Trustees wants to establish voting rights in board elections for non-U.S. citizens 18 and older who attend any of the colleges eight campuses. Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle Now that a state court has allowed noncitizen parents to vote in local school board elections, the president of the San Francisco City College Board of Trustees wants to establish voting rights in board elections for non-U.S. citizens 18 and older who attend any of the colleges eight campuses. Its important that we enfranchise all of our students so that they have a voice in the process. This will allow them to be invested in their education, said Alan Wong. The resolution, which he plans to introduce at Thursdays college board meeting, says voting rights could increase student involvement, achievement and investment in CCSF and would encourage students to enroll in more classes, earn higher grades and complete college programs. Advertisement Article continues below this ad If approved at a future board meeting, the proposal would be forwarded to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, who would decide whether to put it on the ballot for approval by city voters. An opponent, James Lacy, founder of the United States Justice Foundation, a conservative nonprofit, called the plan a political stunt. Citing past investigations of concerns by regulators and auditors about the colleges financing and governance, Lacy told the Chronicle, I cannot imagine how letting Chinese citizens vote in their board elections would help solve their real problems. City College had 53,000 students as of 2019-20. Wong said over one-third of the students were born outside the United States, and his proposal would make thousands of students eligible to vote in board elections. The first non-U.S. citizens to vote legally in California were San Francisco residents in 2018, two years after the citys voters approved a ballot measure allowing noncitizen parents to vote in elections for the San Francisco Unified school board, which governs the citys public K-12 schools. The ballot measure was struck down in July 2022 by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Ulmer, who said it violated a long-standing provision of the state Constitution declaring that a United States citizen 18 years of age and resident in this State may vote. Advertisement Article continues below this ad But the states 1st District Court of Appeal overruled Ulmer this past August and said the may vote language does not restrict the authority of state and local governments particularly charter cities like San Francisco, which have substantial self-governing authority to expand voting rights. The history of home rule in the California Constitution demonstrates an intent to confer broad authority on charter cities over municipal affairs, Justice Mark Simons wrote in the 3-0 ruling. Lacys group, which filed the suit, did not appeal the ruling, which is now binding on all state trial courts. Lacy said he is working instead on a challenge in federal court to a measure on the ballot in Santa Ana next November that would allow noncitizens to vote in all local elections. Calgary, Alberta--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2023) - Lycos Energy Inc. (TSXV: LCX) ("Lycos" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has entered into an amending agreement with the National Bank of Canada to increase its existing revolving credit facility from $35.0 million to $50.0 million. The credit facility provides added financial flexibility to support the Company's growth. About Lycos Lycos is an oil-focused, exploration, development and production company based in Calgary, Alberta, operating high-quality, heavy-oil, development assets in the Lloydminster, Greater Lloydminster area and Gull Lake, Saskatchewan. Additional Information For further information, please contact: Dave Burton President and Chief Executive Officer T: (403) 616-3327 E: dburton@lycosenergy.com Lindsay Goos Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer T: (403) 542-3183 E: lgoos@lycosenergy.com Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/189777 Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2023) - KWG Resources Inc. (CSE: CACR) (CSE: CACR.A), which carries on business as The Canadian Chrome Company ("CCC", "KWG" or the "Company") (The Canadian Chrome Company is a registered business style of KWG Resources Inc.) is pleased to announce two proposed private placements - up to $2 million of Series CD-2023 Convertible Debentures (the "Debentures") and up to $5 million of flow-through units (the "Flow-Through Units"). Convertible Debentures The Debentures will be convertible into units (each a "Unit") with a deemed value of $3.00 per Unit (the "Conversion Price) (i) at the holder's option at any time prior to payment in cash. The Debentures will mature on April 24, 2028 (the "Maturity Date") and bear interest at 5% per annum, accruing daily, compounding annually and payable on April 24 of each year and at the Maturity Date or conversion. Payments of interest may, at the Company's option, be made either (i) by payment in cash (other than in the event of a conversion) or (ii) by the issuance of Units at a deemed value of $3.00 per Unit. On closing, subscribers will be paid a bonus in Units, equal to one Unit for each $12.00 of Debentures subscribed. Each Unit will be comprised of one (1) CACR.A multiple-voting share and one (1) share purchase warrant enabling its holder to acquire one further CACR.A multiple-voting share from treasury upon payment of $3.00, exercisable at any time on or before the earlier of (i) December 15, 2028 or (ii) two (2) business days after completion of a take-over bid or a merger, amalgamation, arrangement or other form of business combination as a result of which the shareholders of the Company immediately prior to such bid or business combination do not own a majority of votes attaching to the voting securities of the Company or of the resulting issuer or do not have the power to elect a majority of the directors of the Company or of the resulting issuer, as the case may be, after completion of such bid or business combination. The proceeds of the distribution of Debentures will be used to fund the Company's business focused on the acquisition of interests in, and the exploration, evaluation and development of, large-scale mineral deposits of chromite and other base metals and minerals including, without limitation, funding the Company's overhead and operating expenses and the costs of these private placements. Flow-through Units Each Flow-Through Unit will be comprised one (1) CACR.A multiple-voting share issued as a "flow-through share" pursuant to the provisions of the Income Tax Act (Canada) and one (1) share purchase warrant enabling its holder to acquire one further CACR.A multiple-voting share issued as a "flow-through share" upon payment of $3.00, exercisable at any time on or before December 31, 2024. Flow-Through Units will be offered to subscribers at $2.50 each for a minimum subscription of $500,000 or such other amount as the Company may determine. The proceeds of the distribution of Flow Through Units will be used to fund Canadian exploration expenses including the proposed drilling of targets at the Black Horse deposit in the Ring of Fire identified by the magneto telluric survey completed in February of this year, which drilling is planned to be undertaken under the permit issued September 15th, 2023 as announced by the Company on September 22nd, 2023. Closing Dates The Company proposes to complete the proposed private placements in one or more tranches on or after December 15, 2023. Finder's Fees The Company will pay finder's fees of up to 5% of the aggregate amount of Debentures and/or Flow-Through Units purchased by subscribers referred to the Company by finders entitled to receive such fees in accordance with applicable securities laws, which fees will be payable in Units at deemed price of $3.00 per Unit. Resale Restrictions All of the securities to be issued pursuant to the private placements will be subject to a four (4) month hold period. Offering This news release shall not constitute an offer to sell nor the solicitation of an offer to buy securities. Qualified Purchasers Each subscriber for Debentures or for Flow-Through Units must be an "accredited investor" within the meaning of applicable securities laws or otherwise qualify to purchase Debentures or Flow-Through Units on a prospectus-exempt basis in accordance with applicable securities laws. About The Canadian Chrome Company: KWG, which carries on business as The Canadian Chrome Company, is the owner of 100% of the Black Horse chromite project (formerly part of Fancamp's "Koper Lake-McFaulds" properties) in which Bold Ventures Inc. is carried through exploration of the former Fancamp claims for 10% of the chromite project. KWG also holds other area interests including a 100% interest in the Hornby claims, a 15% vested interest in the McFaulds copper/zinc project and a vested 30% interest in the Big Daddy chromite project. KWG also owns 100% of Canada Chrome Corporation (the "Subsidiary") which staked mining claims between Aroland, Ontario (near Nakina) and the Ring of Fire. The Subsidiary has conducted a surveying and soil testing program to assess the prospects for the engineering and construction of a railroad along that route between the Ring of Fire and Aroland, Ontario covering the claims staked by the Subsidiary. The Subsidiary engaged Cormorant Utilities and Rail-Veyor Technologies for Engineering Proposals for the construction of a transportation and utility corridor within the route and has received those proposals. KWG has also acquired intellectual property interests, including a method for the direct reduction of chromite to metalized iron and chrome using natural gas. KWG subsidiary Muketi Metallurgical LP has acquired two chromite-refining patents in Canada and one in each of the USA, South Africa and Kazakhstan, and is prosecuting an application in Turkey. For further information, please contact: Bruce Hodgman, Vice-President: 416-642-3575 ~ info@canadachrome.com Forward-Looking Statements: Information set forth in this news release may involve forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. The forward-looking statements contained herein are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements included in this document are made as of the date of this document and KWG disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable securities legislation. Although management believes that the expectations represented in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Disclaimer: Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. Not for distribution to U.S. newswire services or for release, publication, distribution or dissemination, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, into the United States To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/189789 Clever Carnivore, a Chicago, IL-based cultivated meat company, raised $7M in Seed funding. The round was led by Lever VC. Other backers included McWin Capital Partners; Thia Ventures, Valo Ventures, Newfund Capital; and Stray Dog Capital. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and scale up the production of cultivated meat. Clever Carnivore plans to relocate its Lincoln Park operations to a larger nearby facility by year-end. The expansion will allow the company to scale up production into 500L bioreactors and add in test kitchens. Led by Virginia Rangos, Ph.D., CEO, Clever Carnivore is a cultivated meat company that provides biotechnology to bring low-cost, top-quality cultivated pork, beef and chicken to the consumer market. Using its model, cruelty-free, sustainable and cost-competitive sausages, the company works to develop cultivated meat products using cell biology, recombinant protein technology and advanced bioreactor design, with the objective of creating consumer products that compete on taste, price and convenience with conventional meat, delivering a gastronomic experience that satisfies vegetarians and carnivores alike. Clever Carnivore is currently producing cultivated pork sausage, with plans to unveil its prototype product, the Clever Bratwurst, in early 2024. Clever Carnivores R&D is headed by co-founder Paul Burridge, Ph.D., a professor at Northwestern Universitys Feinberg School of Medicine. Burridge is an expert with more than 20 years of research experience in cell line development and growth media optimization. The company has optimized its growth media to support its unique cell lines, achieving an incredible reduction in cell culture media costs one to two orders of magnitude lower than any other cultivated meat company globally. FinSMEs 04/12/2023 energyRe, a Houston, TX- and NYC-based independent U.S. clean energy developer, raised $1.2 Billion in Capital Raise. The round saw participation from Glentra Capital alongside co-investors Novo Holdings and Denmark-based pension fund PKA. The capital package also included a mandated corporate debt facility to be arranged by Santander and Deutsche Bank. In addition, a firm agreement has been reached with Elia Group for the acquisition of a stake in a subsidiary of energyRe: energyRe Giga. The company intends to use the funds for the expansion of its large-scale renewable energy portfolio comprising utility-scale transmission and storage, onshore wind and solar generation, and offshore wind. Led by CEO Miguel Prado, energyRe is an independent energy company focused on solving complex sustainability challenges and providing clean energy solutions in utility-scale transmission, onshore wind and solar, offshore wind, energy storage and distributed generation. It is committed to creating a reliable, renewable energy future for all. Its diversified portfolio of renewable assets includes a development pipeline spanning seventeen states and comprises more than 500 miles of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission; 10.5 GW of solar, wind, and storage; and more than 155 MW of distributed generation. The company has offices in New York, Houston, Indianapolis, and Charleston. FinSMEs 04/12/2023 Bollywood actress Kriti Sanon is taking legal action against false articles that are being circulated on social media and the internet. This is pertaining to Karan Johars show Koffee With Karan 8, where shes yet to make an appearance. What happened? It was reported the actress was promoting trading platforms on the chat show and reacting to the rumours, she shared a note on social media that read- There have been several articles reporting false news about me promoting some trading platforms at Koffee with Karan. These articles are completely fake and false and have been published with dishonest and mala fide intent. She added, These articles are defamatory and are false associating me with the trading platforms. I have never spoken regarding any trading platform on the show. I have taken legal action against such false articles and reports and issued legal notice. I request everyone to be cautious against such false, fake and defamatory reports. Kriti Sanon on winning the National Award for Best Actress for Mimi Sanon is rapidly becoming one of the most bankable actresses of our time. Adding another feather to her cap, the diva recently bagged the National Award for Best Actress for her performance in the film Mimi. She recently flew to the national capital for the facilitation ceremony. During the event, Kriti Sanon opted for a cream saree with a tight bun, golden jewelry and light makeup. The actress also recently took to her official Instagram handle and dropped a video of behind the scene moments before the ceremony. She penned, When we are in a moment, its very rare that we know that its gonna be one of the best moments of our lives.. yesterday felt like that! During a recent conversation with The Times of India, Sanon revealed that whenever she visits Delhi, it is like coming to her hometown. However, this time, she was in the national capital to receive the National Award. She added that it was an extremely proud feeling for her Ranbir Kapoors Animal seems to be unleashing havoc at the box-office. According to early estimates, the film collected in the range of Rs 71-73 crore at the box-office on Sunday, taking the weekend total to Rs 203 crore. The industry people have also been heaping praises on the film, and the next in line is Leo star Trisha Krishnan. Along with a poster featuring Ranbir Kapoor, Trisha wrote, One word-cult! Pppppppaaaaaahhhhhhh (face with peeking eye, face exhaling and clapping hands emojis). However, the actress deleted the post later as it drew flak from social media users. As the actress praised Sandeep Reddy Vangas film, one user commented- She was lecturing about womans dignity a week ago only no? Another one wrote- Never expect a negative review from an actor/actress for any movies. They wont/cant express the real opinion as they need to sustain in the industry. A third user commented- Next Vanga heroine locked for Prabhas film. What is this behaviour? When Trisha Krishnan slammed Leo co-star Mansoor Ali Khan Thalapathy Vijay and Trisha Krishnan recently came together for Lokesh Kanagarajs film Leo that also starred Sanjay Dutt. Another actor who was a part of the film was Mansoor Ali Khan. The actor, while interacting with the media, said something that didnt go down well with Trisha and the director. He said, When I heard that I was acting with Trisha, I thought there would be a bedroom scene in the film. I thought that I could carry her to the bedroom just like I did with other actresses in my earlier movies. I have done so many rape scenes and its not new to me. After the video went viral, Trisha took to X and expressed her displeasure. A recent video has come to my notice where Mr.Mansoor Ali Khan has spoken about me in a vile and disgusting manner.I strongly condemn this and find it sexist,disrespectful,misogynistic,repulsive and in bad taste.He can keep wishing but I am grateful never to have shared screen Trish (@trishtrashers) November 18, 2023 She wrote- A recent video has come to my notice where Mr.Mansoor Ali Khan has spoken about me in a vile and disgusting manner.I strongly condemn this and find it sexist,disrespectful,misogynistic,repulsive and in bad taste.He can keep wishing but I am grateful never to have shared screen space with someone as pathetic as him and I will make sure it never happens for the rest of my film career as well. People like him bring a bad name to mankind. The Red Sea International Film Festival 2023 is currently taking place at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It started on November 30 and will conclude on December 9. This year, some of the most prominent and popular names that graced the festival with their presence were Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Ranveer Singh, Katrina Kaif, Karan Johar, among others. Lets see what these people had to say about their lives and journeys, and upcoming work fronts to a global audience at this years edition: Ranveer Singh The electrifying performer spoke exclusively to Firstpost about his love for movies, how he believes in playing different kinds of roles and more. He was honoured at the Red Sea IIFF 2023 for his contribution to cinema. He said, I am happy that I have found something that I love to do and that I am good at. Acting is my calling. I am very grateful to God for giving me this opportunity to pursue my passion and entertain people. My very first screen idol was Amitabh Bachchan. He is a legend. Since I grew up in the nineties so all the mainstream leading men were my heroes. It started with Amitabh Bachchan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and all the nineties heroes needless to say I was a great admirer of Shah Rukh Khan too. Katrina Kaif Kaif too attended the Red Sea International Film Festival 2023 and stunned fans with her appearance. During her interaction, when asked about her prep for every role she says yes to, Kaif said, My process is a little painful at times and there are days when Im really hard on myself. But, in my life, I saw a lot of dreams and many of them have come true. She added, You have to go home and feel that you have given your 150% and you have left your heart on your studio floor, and its a part of your soul. Will Smith While interacting in the presence of fans and members of the media, the actor spoke about the influence cinema can have on people and how it can influence their hearts and minds. He said, The power of cinema has grown over the years and I have recognized it as a tool for inspiration and energy. It wasnt really till the later part of my career when I understood its power to change peoples minds and hearts, that you can depict situations and people and historical circumstances and you can inspire people to learn and to grow. Johnny Depp This Hollywood star also marked his presence at this years edition will all his swagger and glory, and even shared a moment on the red carpet with Ranveer Singh. While accepting his award for his contribution to cinema, Singh gave an impromptu and spontaneous shoutout to the movie star and said, Im going off-script for a moment here. Wow, one of my screen idols is in the house. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Johnny Depp. My good sir, I have followed your work since Edward Scissorhands and Whats Eating Gilbert Grape. What an honour to be receiving this award in your presence. Thank you for everything you have unknowingly taught me about the craft, sir. Master of Transformation, versatility, is something that I am inspired by you. Karan Johar and Guneet Monga The filmmakers next work is titled Kill, co-produced by Oscar-winning producer Guneet Monga, and directed by Nikhil Nagesh Bhat. The principal cast was present at the Red Sea along with Johar, Monga, and Bhat. In response to an exclusive question by Firstpost on the casting of the film, the director said, There was an entire audition process that happened for six months because its a huge cast. The goons you see in the film are not just doing action, the second half of the film is their story and they had to emote a lot. This entire process took six months since there are about 40-43 people. Freida Pinto Slumdog Millionaire fame Freida Pinto attended the Red Sea International Film Festival and in an exclusive interview with Firstpost, spoke about coming back to the Red Sea, how cinema is changing and evolving in the last few years, and much more. Alia Bhatt Actor Alia Bhatt is all set to join the In-Conversation sidebar section, alongside Hollywood celebs like Halle Berry and Gwyneth Paltrow, at the third edition of Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. More about the opening night ceremony The Opening Night Ceremony MCs were Raya Abi Rached and Ibrahim Alhajaj, hosted by Jomana-Al Rashid, Chairwoman Red Sea Foundation and Mohammed Al Turki, CEO Red Sea International Film Festival. The Gala also saw the presentation of three honourary awards to Abdullah Al-Sadhan, presented by Mohammed Al Turki, Diane Kruger, presented by juror Fatih Akin, and Ranveer Singh, presented by Sharon Stone, and a welcome address from festival leadership, and actor Sofia Vergara. The Zoram Peoples Movement (ZPM) has won the Mizoram Assembly elections with a landslide victory, securing 27 of the total 40 seats. With this, the northeastern state is poised to get a chief minister who is neither from the Congress nor Mizo National Front (MNF) for the first time in three decades. ZPM chief Lalduhoma, a former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer, will be Mizorams next CM. He will meet the governor in the coming days to stake a claim to form the government. How did parties fare in the Mizoram Assembly elections? Who is Lalduhoma, the states next CM? Lets take a closer look. Mizoram Assembly Election Results 2023 ZPM bagged a 37.86 per cent vote share in the Assembly elections. The outgoing MNF was reduced to just 10 seats, with a 35.10 per cent vote share. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress could manage to clinch only two and one seat, respectively. Besides his MNF losing the elections, Mizorams outgoing CM Zoramthanga could not even secure his seat. He lost to ZPMs Lalthansanga by 2,101 votes from the Aizawl East-I constituency. The outgoing CM, who tendered his resignation to Governor Dr Hari Babu Kambhampati at Raj Bhavan on Monday (4 December), told reporters that anti-incumbency and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were behind his partys defeat in the polls. #WATCH | Aizawl: Outgoing Mizoram CM Zoramthanga says, Because of the anti-incumbency effect and the people are not satisfied with my performance so I lost I accept the verdict of the people and I hope that the next government will perform well It (the reason) is the pic.twitter.com/l8mN6aAXfo ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 Lalduhoma retained his Serchhip seat by 2,982 votes against MNF candidate J Malsawmzuala Vanchhawng. Who is Lalduhoma? Lalduhoma has broken the tradition of power changing hands between the Congress and the MNF since Mizorams formation in 1987. Since 1993, the CMs chair has alternated between Congresss Lalthanhawla and MNFs Zoramthanga, as per Indian Express. However, this will finally change. As an IPS officer, Lalduhoma served as security in-charge of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. He left the service to join the Congress in 1984 and got elected from Mizorams lone Lok Sabha seat later that year, reported Indian Express. Lalduhoma, who reportedly has a BA degree from Shillongs North East Hill University, played a key role in the birth of the Mizoram state. As per The Quint, he was sent by the Congress government at the Centre to meet Mizo militant leader Laldenga in London and convince him for peace discussions. The Mizo Peace Accord was signed in 1986, ending the 20-year-long insurgency led by Laldenga, reported Deccan Herald (DH). In 1988, Lalduhoma became the first MP to be disqualified under the anti-defection law after he quit Congress. He was briefly a part of the MNF, however, the ex-cop later founded his party the Zoram Nationalist Party and was elected as MLA in 2003. Lalduhoma formed the Zoram Peoples Movement a year ahead of the Assembly elections in 2018. At the time, it was a coalition of six smaller regional parties and civil society groups. The ZPM was not a recognised party during the 2018 polls and its candidates had to fight as Independents. It became a recognised party only in 2019. Lalduhoma had to contest the Serchhip by-election in 2021, which he won, after he was disqualified from the Assembly for defecting to the ZPM after being elected as an Independent, as per Indian Express. Lalduhomas zero tolerance for corruption The ZPMs thumping triumph reveals that Lalduhoma has been successful in his bid to project himself as the alternative to CM Zoramthanga. Speaking to Hindustan Times (HT) after the Assembly results, Lalduhoma said his government will focus on farmers and fiscal reforms as the states finances are in shambles. We will constitute an expert committee and put fiscal reforms in place. Our government will adopt a policy of zero tolerance for corruption and grant permission to the CBI [Central Bureau of Investigation] to act on it, he added. The ZPM chief also blamed Zoramthanga for MNFs loss, accusing the outgoing CM of corruption, nepotism, and favouritism. Lalduhomas party has promised to provide better development and governance in Mizoram. During the elections, the ZPM adopted a middle path on ideological issues against MNFs hard stance on Mizo nationalism, according to Economic Times (ET). The party also tried to corner MNF, claiming it had lost its regional character by being a part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), reported Indian Express. There have been speculations about the party tying up with the BJP now. However, Lalduhoma has maintained that he would not join hands with either national party. Both the BJP and Congress have been propagating this false propaganda that they will have some tie-up with ZPM. Why should we join hands with the BJP when we have an absolute majority? There is no need for that, the next CM of Mizoram told HT. With inputs from agencies On Sunday, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tightened its grip on Indias heartland with decisive victory in three important states: Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh. The BJP has returned to Madhya Pradesh with 163 seats in the 230-member Assembly, while the Congress has been reduced to 66 seats in the state. The saffron party also beat the Congress in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, forming governments with majorities of 115 and 54 seats, respectively. The grand-old-party, however, is poised to dominate in Telangana. It has won 64 seats in Telangana, whereas K Chandrasekhar Raos Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) is a distant second with 39 seats, followed by the BJP with eight. But how many voters did not vote for any candidate? How many votes did the NOTA get? Heres a closer look. Less than one per cent opted for NOTA The counting of votes in three out of four states on Sunday showed that less than one per cent of the voters exercised the none of the above (NOTA) option in the just-concluded Assembly polls, according to the election commission. Also Read: Raje, Gehlot, Baghel and more The big winners and losers of the Assembly elections Assembly polls were conducted in five states and while the counting of votes in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Telangana was held on Sunday, votes will be counted in Mizoram on Monday. In Madhya Pradesh, 0.98 per cent of the voters went for the NOTA option out of total voter turnout of 77.15 per cent. In neighbouring Chhattisgarh, 1.26 per cent of the electors pressed the NOTA button. Here, the voter turnout was 76.3 per cent. In Telangana, 0.73 per cent of the electors opted for NOTA. The state registered 71.14 per cent of voter turnout. Similarly, in Rajasthan 0.96 per cent of the voters exercised the NOTA option. It had recorded 74.62 per cent turnout. A formality Talking to PTI on the NOTA option, Pradeep Gupta of Axis My India said NOTA has been used from .01 per cent to a maximum of two per cent. If anything new is introduced, its effectiveness depends on its result or performance. Right to Reject: The history and use of NOTA in elections I had written to the government that if NOTAs effectiveness has to be made in the real sense, then NOTA should be declared as the winner if the maximum number of people use this option, he said. Gupta was referring to the first-past-the-post principle followed in India where a candidate who gets the maximum number of votes is declared the winner. Also Read: BJP wins in Hindi heartland: How this sets the tone for 2024 He also said that people who have been rejected by the people should not be allowed to contest the poll in such a situation where NOTA prevails over others. If this happens then people make the right use of none of the above options otherwise it is a formality. Introduced in 2013, the NOTA option on electronic voting machines has its own symbol a ballot paper with a black cross across it. After the Supreme Court order in September 2013, EC added the NOTA button on the EVMs as the last option on the voting panel. With inputs from PTI Everyone knows the saying as dead as a dodo. Well, we may soon have to bid bye-bye to that phrase. A US-based biotech firm is partnering with a Mauritius wildlife foundation to de-extinct the species that died out in 1681. But what do we know? And how would such a de-extinction work? Lets take a closer look: What do we know? The company behind the plan is Colossal Biosciences, as per IFLScience.com. The genetic engineering firm has partnered with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation. This is a nonprofit group with close links to the government. As per CNN, Colossal Biosciences lead paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro has finished sequencing the dodos genome. The company says it has also fully sequenced the genome of two other birds that will play a vital role in the process an extinct relative of the dodos called the solitaire and the dodos closest living relative the Nicobar pigeon. How would it work? As per CNN, Colossal researchers have discovered that cells known as primordial germ cells (PGCs) can be produced in a chicken embryo. The question is now whether these cells can transform into sperm and eggs. Scientists previously used PGCs to create a chicken whose father was a duck. They did this by placing PGCs into the duck embryo which resulted in an adult duck with the sperm of a rooster. The duck then mated with a hen which produced a chick. Colossal says this is the plan of action. It will first see how the dodo and solitaire genes compare with that of the Nicobar pigeon. They will then alter the PGCs so that it manifests the physical traits of a dodo. The PGCs will then be put into the embryos of a sterile chicken and rooster. Now, in theory, the chicken and rooster will become fertile and their offspring will have the traits of the dodo. Physically, the restored dodo will be indiscernible from what we know of the dodos appearance, Colossals chief animal officer Matt James told CNN via email. As Colossal Biosciences founder and CEO Ben Lamm explained to IFLScience, First you need to look at, what is the closest phylogenetic relative? What is the animal that is still existing on the planet thats the closest on the family tree? You need to find the closest phylogenetic relative because youve got to find and build a reference genome, and you need tissue samples to do that. Then, youve got to get tissue samples containing the ancient DNA of those extinct species. Ancient DNA is different from existing living DNA, because its massively fragmented. Its not all exogenous, meaning that there are other microbes and living things that have contaminated it over time. So you get snippets of ancient DNA and then you basically piece them together, Lamm added. Shapiro, speaking to Discover Wildlife, remained cautious. There are a tonne of existing technical challenges that would need to be solved in order to bring a dodo back to life, Shapiro said. Besides, bringing the dodo back doesnt solve the issue of why it went extinct in the first place. We believe that dodos became extinct because introduced species including rats, cats and pigs consumed their eggs. Because dodos didnt fly, they nested on the ground. This made their nests easy access for potential predators and consumers of eggs. It would not make sense to bring dodos back to Mauritius unless this challenge could be solved, Shapiro said. James, speaking to IFLScience, echoed Shapiro. Colossals de-extinction projects are only successful if the animals are rewilded and brought back to their natural habitat. We look forward to working with Mauritius to ensure this happens with the dodo, James said. Beth also cautioned at looking at de-extinction as a silver bullet for humanitys ails. De-extinction is not a solution to the extinction crisis of the present day, Beth told Discover Wildlife. We may get close someday. We may figure out how to make enough changes in a genome that we can engineer something that is physically similar to a dodo. And maybe that bird, returned to the Mauritian ecosystem, will fill the ecological niche that the dodo once filled and provide some improved stability to the Mauritian ecosystem. And that would be great. The company previously announced its plan to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth. With inputs from agencies Attorney John Eastman, the architect of a legal strategy intended to keep former President Donald Trump in power, talks to reporters after a hearing in Los Angeles on June 20. Jae C. Hong/Associated Press The trial on whether to disbar Donald Trumps attorney John Eastman as a lawyer in California has ended with accusations by a State Bar prosecutor that Eastman conspired with Trump to illegally disrupt the peaceful transfer of power to President-elect Joseph Biden in 2021. But Eastmans lawyer argued that the only lawbreaking was by states election officials who ignored evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen. Eastman had a First Amendment right to speak out about election fraud, and punishing him would have a chilling effect on legal advocacy for decades to come, attorney Randall A. Miller wrote in final arguments Friday to the State Bar Courts judge, Yvette Roland, who presided over the 35-day trial. Roland has already issued a tentative decision, however, that Eastman committed violations of legal ethics when he tried to help Trump overturn the election results. She is due to issue a final ruling within 90 days, which could be appealed to the state Supreme Court. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Eastman, a former law professor and law school dean at Chapman University in Orange County, has also been charged in Georgia with forgery and racketeering for allegedly trying to help Trump overturn the election results in that state. Trump and other former aides also face criminal charges. Two former Trump attorneys, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, have pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against other defendants. Eastman testified in the State Bar trial and said he had acted in good faith in preparing legal plans to challenge the election results. According to media reports of the proceedings, he testified that he does not recall saying that Vice President Mike Pence, who presented the final electoral vote count to Congress, had the authority to withhold a states electoral votes if Pence was unsure of their validity. But video footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, rally before Trump supporters stormed the Capitol shows Eastman telling the crowd, We know there was fraud. We know that dead people voted, and he was demanding that Pence do something about it. Eastman was standing alongside Rudy Giuliani, another Trump legal adviser who is also charged in the Georgia case and faces possible disbarment in Washington, D.C. Eastmans misconduct strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a lawyer, State Bar attorney Duncan Carling wrote in final arguments in the California case. He misused his license in a grave and injurious manner designed to undermine our democracy, subvert the peaceful transfer of presidential power and thwart the will of the people in a free and fair election. The evidence shows, Carling said, that Eastman held and still holds truth and democracy in contempt, deliberately disregarding facts that demonstrate the validity of Bidens victory to further a false narrative that would ignore the Constitution, disenfranchise millions of voters and undermine a democratic election. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Miller, Eastmans attorney, countered that Eastman had merely been fulfilling his ethical duty to zealously represent the interests of his client. The only violations of clearly-established constitutional law that occurred in the 2020 election were the numerous and acknowledged violations by state election officials of Article II of the Constitution, which assigns plenary authority to the state legislatures for directing the manner of choosing presidential electors, Miller wrote. For the foreseeable future, climate change will continue to have an impact on our daily lives, as it does now. According to a latest report, if fossil fuels are not phased out quickly, thousands of hospitals worldwide could close entirely or partially due to extreme weather. The report comes just before health day at the ongoing COP28 UN climate summit in Dubai. Approximately two lakh hospitals worldwide, including 53,473 in India, were examined between 1990 and the end of the century to determine their potential for harm from six climate change threats, including coastal inundation and local floods. Global hospitals at risk of closure Without a change in pace, a total of 16,245 hospitals double the number of those that are currently at high risk will fall into this category by the end of the century, according to a report released on Saturday by climate risk analyst Cross Dependency Initiative (XDI). It further states that a building, whether residential or commercial, with this degree of danger would not be considered uninsurable. According to the report, since 1990, greenhouse gas emissions have already raised the chance of extreme weather-related hospital damage by 41 per cent. Climate change is increasingly impacting the health of people around the world. What happens when severe weather results in hospital shutdowns as well? Our analysis show that without a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, the risks to global health will be exacerbated further, as thousands of hospitals become unable to deliver services during crisis, The Guardian quoted Dr Karl Mallon, director of science and technology at XDI, as saying. Many of the hospitals will need to be relocated at significant financial expense, even though some can be made resilient to the effects of extreme weather occurrences like hurricanes, strong storms, flooding, and forest fires. This will primarily affect lower- and middle-income countries, where 71% (11,512) of the hospitals at danger by the century are located. This is similar to many other effects of climate break down. South-east Asian hospitals at the highest risk The report suggests the greatest proportion of hospitals in South-east Asia are now at high risk of damage from extreme weather events. 3,357 hospitals, or one-third of the worlds high-risk hospitals are at the risk. The estimate indicated that by 2100, this figure might rise to 5,894. It will also face risks in the future; due to high emissions, nearly one in five hospitals (18.4 per cent) in the region may close entirely or in part by the end of the century. According to The Guardian, Prof Nick Watts, director of the Centre for Sustainable Medicine at the National University of Singapore, said, It is clear that climate change threatens to undermine the stability of the health systems our patients and communities depend on. Whether it results in the closing of health facilities, or a clinic becoming overwhelmed with rising burdens of disease, the human consequences are dire. The impact is nothing less than catastrophic, Eloise Todd, executive director, Pandemic Action Network, said, as per Hindustan Times, adding, The chain reaction that climate change puts into action must be stopped at the source by ending the burning of fossil fuels. 10 per cent of hospitals in India may have to relocate or close due to climate change by the end of the century. According to the XDI Global Hospital Infrastructure Physical Climate Risk Report, Nepal, where 26 per cent of hospitals could close, and India, which is currently the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, would be among the hardest hit. 5,120 hospitals in India, or 9.6 per cent of all hospitals, would be at high risk of closing by 2100, the 50-nation analysis stated. China, too, will be impacted with over 15 per cent of the hospitals at risk. The responsibility Governments are being urged by XDI to inspect hospitals in their area in order to safeguard the hospitals that are listed, along with their locations and names. Governments have a duty to population to ensure the ongoing delivery of critical services. For individual governments not to take action on this information, or for the global community not to support governments in need, is blatant disregard for the wellbeing of their citizens, Mallon said. According to Dr Vivek Desai of Hosmac, a hospital management consulting company, there isnt much environmental consciousness in hospitals. He believes there would be just about a dozen genuinely green hospitals in the entire nation. The government of India has made it mandatory for public hospitals to have a GRIHA 3 rating but this is not mandatory for private hospitals, The Times of India quoted him as saying. The Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment, or GRIHA, establishes guidelines for what qualifies as a green building. The majority of private hospitals are reluctant to implement green features due to the initial expenses. If the government provides incentives such as a reduction in electricity or property tax bills, then hospitals may want to adopt green technologies, Dr Desai suggested. Climate change Long-term shifts to temperature and weather patterns are referred to as climate change. For the last 200 years, human activity has been the primary driver of climate change. Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and gas, is one of the main culprits; the greenhouse gases released as a result serve as a blanket over the Earth, trapping solar heat and boosting temperatures. According to BBC, researchers have estimated that since the industrial revolution, the Earths surface has warmed by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius. The latest analysis says the danger to hospital infrastructure would be halved if warming were limited to 1.8 degrees Celsius and fossil fuels were phased out quickly. This is in comparison to a high emissions scenario. The United Nations said in its Emissions Gap 2023 Report on 20 November that the globe is currently on track to warm by 2.5 to 2.9 degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial era. The most obvious thing to dramatically reduce this risk to hospitals, and keep communities safe, is to reduce emissions, Mallon said. Its been a dramatic weekend in Indian politics with the BJPs resounding victory in three states, namely Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and Congress has found solace in Telangana. Decembers first Monday is also going to be busier than usual as assembly election results for Mizoram are to be announced today, winter parliament session will also begin, ethics panel report on Mahua Moitra will be submitted and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be visiting Maharashtras Sindhudurg. Heres a simple guide of the big events expected today. Mizoram assembly election results 2023 The counting of votes in Mizoram will take place today, a day after its original schedule, the Election Commission (EC) announced on Friday. The decision to change the date comes after protests were planned by the Mizoram NGO Coordination Committee (NGOCC), expressing displeasure with the 3 December counting date because it coincides with Sunday, a holy day for Christians. Winter Parliament session begins The winter session of Parliament 2023 in the new building begins today and will continue till 22 December. Earlier, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi said that the session will have 15 sittings spread over 19 days. The government will present a bill to seek Parliaments approval for adjustments to the Centres Rs 35 trillion spending programme in the current fiscal. The bill to replace the IPC, CrPC and the Evidence Act may also be taken up for consideration. Congress swearing in ceremony in Telangana The Telangana police has said that state Congress chief A Revanth Reddy has requested security arrangements for the swearing-in ceremony scheduled for either 4 or 9 December. The grand-old party was comfortably leading to reach the simple majority mark of 60 seats, dethroning K Chandrasekhar Raos Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS). Ethics panel report on Mahua Moitra in Lok Sabha The report of the Ethics Committee on the cash-for-query allegations against TMC MP Mahua Moitra will be tables in Lok Sabha during the winter session. PM Modi in Maharashtras Sindhudurg PM Modi will be attending the Navy Day celebrations at Sindhudurg today. He will also unveil a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj at Rajkot Fort, the Prime Ministers Office (PMO) said in a statement on Saturday. Punjabs Mukh Mantri Sehat Bima Yojana draw today The draw for Punjab Health Agencys Ayushman Bharat Mukh Mantri Sehat Bima Yojana will take place today. The initiative aimed at enrolling the maximum number of people of Punjab under health insurance cover. The judicial custody of AAPs Sanjay Singh ends AAP leader Sanjay Singh was taken into custody in October in connection with the Delhi excise policy case. As the probe continues, the Enforcement Directorate on Saturday filed a chargesheet against the leader, who is lodged in Tihar jail. Karnataka cabinets Belagavi legislature session begins The 10-day winter session of the Karnataka legislature will start on Monday in Suvarna Soudha in Belagavi. Several important issues like drought relief measures, warrnt urgent and productive discussions will be discussed. For the opposition, the session is a platform to put the government on the mat over what it perceives to be the governments shortcomings. Public holiday in Tamil Nadu Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are bracing themselves for heavy rainfall in their coastal districts as a deep depression intensified over the Bay of Bengal and likely to evolve into Cyclone Michaung by Sunday morning. One day holiday has been declared on Monday for all schools and colleges in Chennai, Ranipet and other districts on account of the cyclone. The Congress performed poorly in the Assembly elections in the three crucial northern states: Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh. But the South has a different story to tell. Telangana has trusted the grand old party, granting them a majority of 64 Assembly seats to form the government in the youngest state of India. Earlier in May, the Congress had made a strong comeback in neighbouring Karnataka, defeating the BJP in the polls then, which was the only stronghold of the saffron party in the south. Bharat Rashtra Samitis decade-long reign ends The near 10-year-old rule of the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) came to an end on Sunday, even as Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao tendered resignation from his post, which was accepted by Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan. BRS has been ruling the state since 2014, when Telangana was carved out of Andhra Pradesh. Also Read: Who is BJPs KV Ramana Reddy, who beat KCR, Revanth Reddy in Telangana? The party, which has 101 members in the outgoing Assembly, emerged victorious in 38 and was leading in 1 seat, as per latest EC figures. Congress won 64 of the 118 seats it contested from. It gave one seat to CPI where the communist party emerged victorious. AIMIM won 6 seats and was leading in one. A Congress delegation later met Telangana Governor to stake claim on forming government. The Telangana Assembly has a total strength of 119. The BRS has 101 members in the outgoing House, while Asaduddin Owaisi-led AIMIM has seven, Congress five, BJP three. The All India Forward Bloc has one legislator. There is one independent while there is one vacancy. Anumula Revanth Reddy, who led the Congress charge, finds himself on the brink of a potential chief ministership. The 56-year-old leader met top police officials of the state and discussed the security arrangements for the swearing-in ceremony, likely on 4 or 9 December. He welcomed the peoples mandate in favour of the national party while BRS expressed disappointment over its failure to ensure a hattrick. It is a peoples mandate. We need not (do) a postmortem. Everything goes well, then only you will get that magic number. The simple point is that they (people) wanted to change. They wanted to defeat KCR (CM Rao). They have defeated KCR. Thats all, Reddy told reporters. Reddy said the people have decided the role of the Opposition, and Congress expects the BRSs cooperation in order to fulfil the peoples aspirations. To revive democratic values, we are expecting that the BRS will come forward, he said. Also Read: Why the Telangana win is precious for Congress It is the Congress responsibility to fulfil Telangana peoples aspirations after forming the government in the state, he added. BRS working president and KCRs son K T Rama Rao said the Assembly poll results were disappointing though he was not saddened. Grateful to the people of Telangana for giving @BRSparty two consecutive terms of Government. Not saddened over the result today, but surely disappointed as it was not in expected lines for us. But we will take this in our stride as a learning and will bounce back, he said. Congratulations to Congress party on winning the mandate. Wishing you Good Luck, the BRS leader, who won from Sircilla, further said. Factors in favour of the Congress Factors such as anti-incumbency, voter fatigue, and dissatisfaction among the youth contributed mainly to the poor showing of the BRS. Despite the towering image of KCR, along with the partys extensive grassroots network and welfare programmes, the perceived inaccessibility of its leaders contributed to the growing anti-incumbency sentiments. Six Cabinet members were among the prominent BRS figures that lost. Additionally, the Opposition projection of what they called the BRS family rule in the state further exacerbated this sentiment. The Congress had mounted a spirited election campaign with a view to unseat BRS, even as the BJP also launched a no holds-barred attack against the ruling dispensation. The BJP may not have seen the desired results, but may take solace from the fact that it has bettered on its seats tally and the vote share. While it won just one seat in the 2018 Assembly polls, the BJP added seven more this time, and saw its vote share expand from seven per cent then to 13.88 per cent this time. The party also won two by-polls earlier, giving it three members in the outgoing Assembly. BJPs K Venkata Ramana Reddy emerged as a giant killer by defeating Chief Minister and BRS supremo K Chandrasekhar Rao and Revanth Reddy in Kamareddy. Also read: Congress set to form govt in Telangana: Did anti-incumbency hurt KCRs BRS? While the BJP was seen as a principal challenger to the BRS earlier, the perception changed after Congress gained momentum following the Karnataka elections in May this year. Jubilant mood prevailed at the residence of Revanth Reddy and the partys state headquarters here. Celebrations broke out at Gandhi Bhavan, the party office, where overjoyed workers were seen setting off crackers and raising Jai Congress and Revanth Anna Zindabad slogans. Security was also stepped up at Revanth Reddys residence with additional police personnel being deployed. With inputs from PTI With the BJP winning three out of the four states that went to the polls, the saffron party is now in power on its own in a dozen states across India. Meanwhile, the Congress, which lost in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh on Sunday, has been reduced to just three states. The BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi whose ascent to national politics in 2014 changed the political dynamics across the country has powered to victory in the Hindi heartland yet again. The Congress, which for decades dominated the political landscape, has been reduced to a shell of its former self. The states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) now account for almost half of the 543 Lok Sabha seats, while just two states which comprise less than 50 Lok Sabha seats are now governed by parties not aligned with either the NDA or the Opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA). Lets take a closer look at Indias updated political map: Where is Congress ruling? The grand old party rules just three states now on its own: Karnataka: The Congress took the state away from the BJPs kitty in May. Elections to the 224-member Karnataka Assembly saw the Congress nab 135 seats, while the BJP and the former prime minister H D Deve Gowda-led Janata Dal (Secular) received 66 and 19 seats respectively. Himachal Pradesh: The Congress in December wrested Himachal Pradesh from the BJP. The grand old party won 40 seats in the 68-member Assembly as the hill state maintained it tradition of not voting any government to power since 1985. Telangana: The Congress received its only silver cloud in an otherwise darkened sky on Sunday in Telangana where it is poised to form a government. The Congress, as part of a coalition, governs two other states: Bihar: The Congress in Bihar is the alliance partner of the Janata Dal United led by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Kumar, who was earlier allied with the BJP, is a master of switching sides earning him the sobriquet of Paltu Ram. Jharkhand: In Jharkhand, the Congress is part of an alliance with the JMM and the RJD. Tamil Nadu: The Congress is an ally of the ruling DMK in Tamil Nadu but does not share power in the government. Where does BJP reign? The BJP, which is at the Centre, rules in a dozen states: Uttarakhand: The BJP in March created history by becoming the only party to retain power for a second consecutive term in the state since its formation. The party won 47 out of 70 seats as Pushkar Singh Dhami, despite losing his own seat, was sworn in for a second term. Haryana: The BJP in Haryana is led by Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar who in 2019 took the oath of office for a second time. The BJP had won 40 seats in the 90-member Assembly while the JJP had nabbed 10, the Congress received just three and INLD and the Haryana Lokhit Party had got one each. Gujarat: The BJP in Gujarat is led by Chief Minister Bhupendrabhai Patel. The party in December won a seventh straight term with a record 156 seats in the 182-member House. Goa: The BJP in March won 20 seats in the 40-member Goa Assembly. Its three-time MLA Pramod Sawant, who led the party to victory, was sworn in as the states chief minister for the second time. Assam: The BJP in 2021 returned to power in Assam in the first Assembly election after the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. The party picked Himanta Biswa Sarma as the 15th Chief Minister of Assam. Tripura: The BJP had captured the Left bastion in 2018 which it then retained in March. Seventy-year-old BJP leader Manik Saha is chief minister of the sensitive border state. The BJP won 32 seats in the Assembly elections in Tripura, while its ally IPFT managed to secure just one seat. Manipur: The party in March formed the first-ever BJP government in Manipur under Chief Minister N Biren Singh after the Assembly election threw up a hung house. Arunachal Pradesh: The BJP in 2019 won the state in a landslide nabbing 41 seats in the 60-member Assembly. The state is governed by Chief Minister Pema Khandu. Madhya Pradesh: The BJP is set to form a government in Madhya Pradesh for the fifth time as the party absolutely decimated the Congress on Sunday. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is the firm favourite to return as chief minister. Rajasthan: The BJP made a grand comeback in Rajasthan on Sunday. The saffron party won 115 seats out of the 199 where Assembly elections were held as the Congress lost its grip on power in the state. Chhattisgarh: The BJP on Sunday wrested power from Congress in Chhattisgarh. The promises made by the BJP, which it promoted as Modi ki Guarantee 2023, seemed to have worked in its favour in the tribal-dominated state, where it won a thumping majority. The BJP is also part of the ruling coalition in four other states: Maharashtra: In Maharashtra, the BJP has tied up with the Eknath Shinde-led faction of the Shiv Sena to form the government. Meghalaya: In Meghalaya, the BJP is part of the Meghalaya Democratic Alliance 2.0 which has Chief Minister and NPP supremo Conrad Sangma as its chairman. Nagaland: Nagaland is ruled by an alliance between the Nationalist Democratic Peoples Party and the BJP. In March, the NDPP won 25 seats and the BJP won 12 seats to bag 37 seats in the 60-member Assembly. Sikkim: The BJP has stitched up an alliance with the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha (SKM) in Sikkim. However, the saffron party has vowed to go it alone for the upcoming Assembly elections in April. AAP second-biggest Opposition party Sundays poll results also consolidated the AAPs position as a major political party, making it the second-biggest Opposition party with governments in Delhi and Punjab. After todays results, Aam Aadmi Party emerges as the largest Opposition party in north India with 2 state governments Punjab and Delhi, party leader Jasmine Shah said on X. There are six national parties currently BJP, Congress, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), CPI(M), National Peoples Party (NPP) and AAP. The next round of Assembly polls will be held in 2024. Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh will go to polls next year while the Assembly election is also pending in Jammu and Kashmir. As several MPs contested the Assembly polls in this round, those seats in the Lok Sabha are expected to get vacant. However, since the general election will be held next year, no bypoll will be announced even if the MPs vacate their seats after being elected as MLAs. With inputs from agencies The misery for the Congress doesnt end. After losing three of the four states that went to the polls on Sunday (3 December) Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh the Congress allies in the INDIA alliance bloc have their knives out, putting the party in a precarious position. After the drubbing in the polls though the Congress managed to wrest power in Telangana the alliance partners pointed fingers at the Grand Old Party, which is not a good sign for the alliance just months before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections are to be held. In fact, as the Congress stared at its losses in the polls, it called for a meet of the bloc on 6 December. The last time the alliance had met was in Mumbai in early September. We take a closer look at how the Congress losses were received by the members of the INDIA bloc and how these results may prove to be more beneficial to the regional, smaller constituents of the alliance. INDIA bloc on Congress loss The Congress footprint in the political landscape has been reduced drastically following Sundays results. The Grand Old Party is now in power in just three states thanks to Telangana with just one state in the north, Himachal Pradesh. The last time the Congress was in power in only one Hindi-speaking state was in 1998, when Sonia Gandhi took over as the party president. The party was then in power in three states Madhya Pradesh, Odisha and Mizoram. This situation has not only perturbed the party and its leadership, but also the members of the INDIA alliance. Nitish Kumars Janata Dal-United (JDU) was one of the first to take a swipe at the Congress after the poll losses, saying it is clear that the main opposition party is unable to win on its own. JD(U) spokesperson K C Tyagi said the results of Assembly polls in the three states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan are a defeat of the Congress and a win for the BJP, noting that the opposition INDIA bloc was missing in the elections. He was quoted as telling NDTV, Now it is clear the Congress cannot put up a good fight against the BJP. The INDIA alliance was not in the race anywhere. Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) MP Manoj Jha added, Leaders like our national president Lalu Prasad and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar have acknowledged that among all partners in the INDIA coalition, the Congress has the largest footprint. But now, the ball is in the Congresss court. It ought to realise that Narendra Modis conceit cannot be fought with conceit. I am sure the Congress will realise that the self-centred politics of the BJP can be beaten only through collectivism. In the days to come, much better coordination within INDIA may be there for all to see. Sanjay Raut of the Shiva Sena, a member of the INDIA alliance, was also of the opinion that the results would have been different, especially in Madhya Pradesh, had the Congress shared seats with allies. The Congress should revisit its outlook towards allies, he said adding that it was Madhya Pradesh Congress chief Kamal Nath who had opposed sharing seats with the Samajwadi Party. National Conference leader and former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah took a more critical view of the results. He told reporters, Judging the results of INDIA alliance in the state elections, if the situation is like this in the future, we cannot win. He also reacted on the Congress call for an INDIA bloc meet, It is good that they remembered about it again after three months. Perhaps, the most stinging of reactions came from the Trinamool Congress. The partys spokesperson Kunal Ghosh said the Congresss losses were more a Congress failure than a BJP success story. He said in a post across social media platforms, The TMC is the party which can provide leadership in the battle to defeat the BJP in the country. The Arvind Kejriwal-driven Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) also took shots at the Congress, saying it had more governments in the north of India than the Grand Old Party. Senior AAP leader Jasmine Shah posted: After todays results, @AamAadmiParty emerges as the largest Opposition party in north India with 2 state governments Punjab and Delhi. However, the AAP clarified that the results in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh werent reflective of the national mood, pointing out that the Congress won Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan in 2018 but the BJP won the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Congress loss, allies victory The Congress losses on Sunday put the party in a very difficult spot now. Its previous assertion that it was the only party capable of putting up a one-on-one fight against the BJP, now stands discredited. This gives the regional parties such as the TMC, AAP and JD(U), which are major constituents of the INDIA bloc, more space to negotiate for seats for the 2024 election. As News18 put it, the INDIA front will not be willing to give the Congress the stature of a big brother anymore. So when the seat-sharing talks begin, the Congress may be forced to be meek. Notably, it will be interesting to see how the TMC, AAP and SP deal with the Congress when it comes to seat-sharing for the 2024 elections. It wont be a surprise if the INDIA bloc sees different equations when it comes to seat-sharing, as the allies will become more demanding. The parties are already playing hard to get with the Congress, who has called for a meeting on 6 December. According to report, TMCs Abhishek Banerjee may not attend the 6 December meeting. We have been pleading with the Congress to convene a meeting of the INDIA alliance. They stalled all activities and we lost the momentum. Now they have called a meeting, what for? a leader was quoted as telling the Indian Express. Also, the Congress has lost credibility with voters a feeling that the other parties will capitalise on. They could argue that their allying with the Congress could hurt them and that is why the Grand Old Party should be pushed to second position within the alliances. The results also pave way for the rise of a new national leader. The allies could argue that the Congress leadership has lost its sway with the voters and hence, a face that has been able to put up a better fight against the BJP read Mamata Banerjee or Arvind Kejriwal should be the driving force of the alliance at large. Furthermore, Congress desire to push Rahul Gandhi to be the biggest rival of Prime Minister Narendra Modi will also take a beating. Wont harm INDIA bloc But while many constituents of the INDIA alliance were sniping and taking aim at the Congress after their poor performance in the Hindi heartland, Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) had a differing view. He told reporters, I dont think this will have any impact on the INDIA alliance. We will be meeting at Congress president Mallikarjun Kharges residence in Delhi. We will speak to those who know the ground reality. We will be able to comment on it after the meeting only. Communist Party of India-Marxist general secretary Sitaram Yechury said: These election results underline the need for the secular forces to redouble their efforts in defence of peoples livelihood and the secular democratic character of the Indian republic. We will have to wait until 6 December to see how the equations have changed within the INDIA alliance, but one thing is certain. The Congress with its downsized influence is likely to lose more than it gains if it gives in to the demand of smaller parties in the alliance. With inputs from agencies A deadly drug, which is more potent than fentanyl, is wreaking havoc in the United Kingdom. Lesser-known synthetic opioids called nitazenes are leading to overdose cases, alarming the authorities. Recently, the police and border officials made the UKs largest-ever seizure of synthetic opioids, including 150,000 tablets of nitazenes and other class A and B drugs, reported BBC. What are nitazenes? How dangerous is it? How has it emerged as a concern in the UK? Lets take a closer look. What are nitazenes? Nitazenes were first developed by a Swiss company called Ciba Pharmaceuticals in the 1950s as a pain-killing medication. However, these drugs never reached markets as they are highly potent and addictive, as per BBC. These synthetic opioids can also be deadly. According to The Conversation piece, opioids affect the site in the brain called mu-opioid receptors. When these brain receptors are activated, they can provide relief from pain, and at higher doses, trigger a feeling of euphoria, followed by drowsiness. Drugs such as morphine, heroin and fentanyl can activate mu-opioid receptors, The Conversation piece added. Nitazenes are similar to fentanyl, but much stronger than heroin. Many have been classified as Class A drugs recently, reported Sky News. How dangerous are these synthetic opioids? The highly potent synthetic opioids have been associated with thousands of deaths in the United States in the last few years. According to the data published by the Tennessee Department of Health last September, there was a four-old rise in deaths due to deadly overdoses linked to nitazenes in the previous couple of years, reported NBC News. Nitazenes are an emerging group of highly potent psychoactive substances the report warned. These synthetic opioids as also being used as adulterants in other illicit drugs, such as cocaine, benzodiazepines and synthetic cannabinoids or spice, noted The Conversation. It came to light in 2019 that nitazenes were cut and mixed into heroin, cocaine, and street pills, BBC reported. When these synthetic opioids are interlaced with other drugs and alcohol, the risk of risk of overdose and death increases. As per the British broadcaster, those who consume synthetic opioids are likely to experience: small, narrowed pupils, loss of consciousness, dizziness, difficulty in breathing, nausea or vomiting, cold skin, low blood pressure or reduced heart rate. Difficulty in breathing could be the result of these drugs suppressing the respiratory system, a cause of death in opioid overdose, according to The Conversation. How the drugs are affecting the UK Nitazenes have made it to the streets in the UK. The drug was first discovered in the country in a sample of white powder kept at the back of a taxi in Wakefield in April 2021. It has since been detected in heroin, cannabis, cocaine, a vape, and mostly in black market versions of the anti-anxiety drug diazepam, as per the Sky News report. Eleven people were arrested after the UK police seized its largest-ever stash of synthetic opioids in October. Detective Superintendent Helen Rance, who is leading the investigation, said earlier: Synthetic opioids have been detected in batches of heroin found in London and across the UK; they substantially raise the risk of incredibly serious harm to the user and are believed to be linked to a number of deaths. These synthetic opioids are believed to have been recently cut into a batch of drugs in Dublin, reportedly leading to 57 deaths due to overdose. A 23-year-old at Londons Whitechapel underground station, told Sky News that symptoms from her drug usage have changed in the last few months. Ive got holes in my legs, she said. Theres no skin, just holes. Its painful. Drug charity workers are of the view that this could be because synthetic opioids are being used as adulterants in other illicit drugs. Im seeing people coughing up blood. Im seeing people dying, a crack cocaine user in East London told Sky News. As per the British police, there has been an uptick in the use of synthetic opioids due to a decline in heroin smuggling from Afghanistan to the UK. This comes after the Talibans crackdown on heroin production in Afghanistan. I think people are buying what they believe to be heroin and its been adulterated by these stronger compounds, Dr Caroline Copeland, director of the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths, was quoted as saying by BBC. Because they are so much stronger the people that are using them have no idea how much to use, and what they thought was previously a safe dose is now a very unsafe dose. Speaking to Sky News, Meg Jones, director of social justice charity Cranstoun, said: We are seeing nitazenes pop up in pockets all over the UK and it is incredibly concerning. There are an increasing number of synthetic opioids being detected in drugs that people thought were very different. We need to see government action quickly on this, because we are sleepwalking into what I would deem to be a public health crisis, and we are not prepared for it in the UK at all, she warned. With inputs from agencies Venezuela and Guyana are going at it and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is involved. On Sunday, voters in Venezuela approved President Nicolas Maduros plan to claim Essequibo an oil and mineral rich area that belongs to its neighbour Guyana. The development comes just days after the ICJ ordered Venezuela to take no steps to alter the status quo. Lets take a closer look at the row: The origins of the dispute Essequibo is a 159,500-square-kilometer territory that comprises two-thirds of Guyana. Venezuela has long considered Essequibo as its own. As per The Guardian, Venezuela has done so since 1811 when it gained its freedom from Spain in 1811. This is because Essequibo was within its boundaries during the Spanish colonial period. Venezuela has long disputed the border decided by international arbitrators in 1899 when Guyana was still a British colony. That boundary was decided by arbitrators from Britain, Russia and the United States. The US represented Venezuela on the panel in part because the Venezuelan government had broken off diplomatic relations with Britain. As per The New York Times, while most nations consider Essequibo part of Guyana, many in Venezuela continue to insist otherwise. Venezuelan officials contend that Americans and Europeans conspired to cheat their country out of the land and argue that a 1966 agreement to resolve the dispute effectively nullified the original arbitration. Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America, maintains the initial accord is legal and binding and asked the International Court of Justice in 2018 to rule it as such, but a decision is years away. Why is Essequibo important? For Guyana, the area is home to over a sixth of its population of 800,000, as per The Guardian. The region is also mineral rich having reserves of gold, copper and oil. The area, which is larger than Greece, also allows access to an area of the Atlantic where energy giant ExxonMobil discovered oil in commercial quantities in 2015 . This drew the attention of the Maduro government. Essequibo also borders Brazil whose defence ministry earlier this week in a statement said it has intensified its defence actions and boosted its military presence in the region as a result of the dispute. It is also important to note that the development comes in the backdrop of growing trouble for Maduro. Venezuelas government promoted the referendum for weeks, framing participation as an act of patriotism and often conflating it with a show of support for Maduro. Maduro threw the full weight of his government into the effort. Essequibo-themed music, nationally televised history lessons, murals, rallies and social media content helped the government to divert peoples attention from pressing matters, including increasing pressure from the US government on Maduro to release political prisoners and wrongfully detained Americans as well as to guarantee free and fair conditions in next years presidential election. A piece in The New York Times noted that Maduro has seemingly stoked the dispute to distract from his troubles at home. For Mr Maduro, stoking a geopolitical crisis provides a way to shift the domestic conversation at a moment when many Venezuelans are pressing for an election that could challenge his hold on power, the piece noted. Whats the latest? The International Court of Justice on Friday ordered Venezuela not to take any action that would alter Guyanas control over Essequibo, but the judges did not specifically ban officials from carrying out Sundays five-question referendum. Guyana had asked the court to order Venezuela to halt parts of the vote. Then, on Sunday, Venezuelans approved the government referendum. The New York Times quoted Venezuelas electoral authority as saying more than 95 per cent of those polled voted for the referendum. They were asked whether they support establishing a state in the disputed territory, known as Essequibo, granting citizenship to current and future area residents and rejecting the jurisdiction of the United Nations top court in settling the disagreement between the South American countries. Voters on Sunday had to answer whether they agree to reject by all means, in accordance with the law, the 1899 boundary and whether they support the 1966 agreement as the only valid legal instrument to reach a solution. The National Electoral Council claimed to have counted more than 10.5 million votes even though few voters could be seen at polling sites throughout the voting period for the five-question referendum. The council, however, did not explain whether the number of votes was equivalent to each voter or if it was the sum of each individual answer. It has been a total success for our country, for our democracy, Maduro told supporters gathered in Caracas, the capital, after results were announced. He claimed the referendum had very important level of participation. Yet long lines typical of electoral events did not form outside voting centers in Caracas throughout Sunday, even after the countrys top electoral authority, Elvis Amoroso, announced the 12-hour voting period would be extended by two hours. If the participation figure offered by Amoroso refers to voters, it would mean more people voted in the referendum than they did for Hugo Chavez, Maduros mentor and predecessor, when he was re-elected in the 2012 presidential contest. But if it is equivalent to each individual answer marked by voters, turnout could drop to as low as 2.1 million voters. I came to vote because Essequibo is ours, and I hope that whatever they are going to do, they think about it thoroughly and remember to never put peace at risk, merchant Juan Carlos Rodriguez, 37, said after voting at a center in Caracas where only a handful of people were in line. What happens next? The practical and legal implications of the referendum remain unclear. In comments explaining Fridays verdict, international court president Joan E Donoghue said statements from Venezuelas government suggest it is taking steps with a view toward acquiring control over and administering the territory in dispute. Furthermore, Venezuelan military officials announced that Venezuela is taking concrete measures to build an airstrip to serve as a logistical support point for the integral development of the Essequibo, she said. It remains unclear how Maduro will enforce the results of the vote. The question to consider is if he will actually invade Guyana in a Wag The Dog-type situation. The government is holding the referendum for internal reasons, said Benigno Alarcon, director of the Center for Political Studies at Caracas Andres Bello Catholic University. It needs to test its electoral machinery. If the Opposition joins together and there is a willingness to participate (in the 2024 election) by Venezuelans, Maduro is out, added security analyst Rocio San Miguel. He is activating a scenario of conflict to perhaps suspend the election. Its very alarming, Venezuelan defence specialist. Rocio San Miguel told The Guardian. We are probably heading to a dead-end street where both sides have to protect their honour, and that is a dangerous place where, throughout history, irrational decisions have been taken. Phil Gunson, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, warned that Maduro would pay a high price diplomatically. Maduro would be totally isolated because he has virtually no support anywhere in the world even among his own traditional allies such as Cuba, Gunson said. Guyana vows to defend every inch of territory Guyana considers the referendum a step toward annexation, and the vote has many on edge. The New York Times quoted Guyana president Mohamed Irfaan Ali as saying, Essequibo is ours, every square inch of it. People in the border region are very concerned, Guyanas foreign minister, Hugh Todd, told The Guardian. Maduro is a despotic leader, and despotic leaders are very hard to predict. Any one of our international partners in the democratic free world will want to support Guyanas cause, because we have always followed the rules, procedures and principles. Venezuela is doing the contrary to that. They are on the wrong side of international law and they are on the wrong side of history. They do not have friends and partners on the path that they are taking, Todd added. We have always said, and we mean it, that we want to resolve the controversy over the 1899 award peacefully. But while we believe that diplomacy is the best option, we are a nation state and we have to protect our people. Therefore we will not rule out any option necessary to ensure that we can protect and preserve our sovereignty and territorial integrity, he said. Ali on Sunday told Guyanese his government is working continuously to ensure the countrys borders remain intact and said people have nothing to fear over the next number of hours, days, months ahead. I want to advise Venezuela that this is an opportunity for them to show maturity, an opportunity for them to show responsibility, and we call upon them once more join us in allowing the rule of law to work and to determine the outcome of this controversy, Ali said. With inputs from agencies Following a slew of violent incidents that have rocked the state since May 2023, Manipur saw new acts of violence. In the Tengnoupal district of Manipur, two militant factions engaged in a gunfight that resulted in the deaths of thirteen persons, according to media sources citing officials. The tragedy happened on Monday afternoon in the village of Leithu. A group of militants on their way to Myanmar were ambushed by another group of insurgents dominant in the area, an official in the hill district was quoted as saying by news agency PTI. When security forces arrived at the scene, he reported that they had discovered 13 bodies so far. Although the identities of the deceased were unknown, they didnt seem to be locals. According to media reports, the police stated that it seems the deceased were not from the Leithu area and may have come from another location after which they got into a battle with another group. Around noon, inputs were received of a gunfight that had broken out between two groups of militants at Letithu village near Saibol in Tengnoupal district. The nearest security forces were about 10km away from the spot. Once our forces moved in and reached the place, they found 13 bodies in the Leithu village. The forces did not find any weapons next to the bodies, a police official told the media. According to the officer, it seems that the deceased were not from the Leithu region and may have arrived from somewhere else before getting into a shooting with another gang. The deceaseds identity was not verified by the police, though. The police have reached the spot. They will probe the matter, the officer added. Notably, Tengnoupal district shares a porous border with Myanmar which has witnessed a lot of internal strife and tribal conflict in recent times. The Manipur government has brought up the problem of antisocial characters in border districts with Myanmar on several occasions. Because of its potential effect and destructive nature, the deep depression over the South Bay of Bengalwhich has strengthened into cyclonic storm Michaungis being closely watched. Five people have died as a result of the storm in various events in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, the police reported on Monday. The state has seen several trees uprooted as a result of the severe winds. Peoples life have been impacted as they struggle with problems like waterlogging and other problems in various parts of the southern state. According to authorities, one individual has been hurt as a result of the tree collapsing. Given the cyclonic storm, the Chennai airfield will remain closed until 9 a.m. on Tuesday. Airfield closed for arrival and departure operations till 0900 hrs IST tomorrow due to adverse weather conditions, said the Chennai airport authority in a post on X. Subways have been closed due to the severe waterlogging in Chennai. Also, traffic has been closed from Manjambakkam to Vadaperumbakkam Road due to the release of water from Puzhal Lake, said the police. DDRT Teams are available in all vulnerable areas and they are working in coordination with the GCC and Highways Department, police added. About 90 km east-northeast of Chennai, cyclonic storm Michaung strengthened into a severe cyclonic storm about 8:30 a.m. today. The north coastal regions of Tamil Nadu and Puducherry are expected to see heavy to extremely heavy rainfall on December 4 and 5, according to the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD). On December 4 and 5, it is predicted to rain light to moderately in most areas and heavy to very heavy in a few, with really heavy falls at isolated places over coastal Andhra Pradesh and Yanam. Chennais public life is significantly impacted by the heavy rains that are hammering many areas of the city. The continuous severe rainfall left several locations flooded, including Wallajah Road, Mount Road, Anna Salai, Chepauk, outside Omandurar government multispecialty hospital, and other low-lying regions. Heavy rainfall caused Chennais well-known Marina Beach to flood, and severe waterlogging shut the roads leading from Mount Road to Marina Beach. In light of the storm, the Tamil Nadu government has announced Tuesday to be a public holiday in the districts of Chennai, Chengalpattu, Kancheepuram, and Tiruvallur. Due to the severe weather in the state, all schools, colleges, educational institutions, and government officesincluding those of public undertakings and corporations, boards, banks, and financial institutionswill be closed in the four districts of Chennai, Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram, and Chengalpattu. Nonetheless, all necessary services including law enforcement, fire protection, municipal organisations, milk and water supply, medical facilities, electricity supply, transportation, petrol stations, lodging and dining establishments, etc., as well as the offices handling disaster response and relief and rescue activities, shall function as usual. The Indian Meteorological Department has issued a red alert for the state of Tamil Nadu, and the government of that state has encouraged residents to take precautions. Heavy to extremely heavy rainfall is expected in Chennai and the surrounding areas, according to the IMD. According to the Indian Meteorological Department, the cyclone is expected to strengthen more in the meantime and make landfall between Nellore and Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh by tomorrow morning. In the midst of the dire circumstances, Union Home Minister Amit Shah called with the chief ministers of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Puducherry earlier today on Cyclone Michaung and promised them all-out help from the central government. During distinct phone calls with Chief Ministers of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Puducherry, YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, MK Stalin, and N. Rangasamy, the Home Minister assessed the state of affairs in these regions regarding rescue and relief efforts, along with other measures to guarantee that casualties are kept to a minimum and damage is reduced. Amit Shah also discussed the intense rains in Chennai with the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, where the Indian Army is rescuing individuals from Mugalivakkam and Manapakkam, which are affected by the rainfall and massive waterlogging. Due to the impact of the heavy rains on Tuesday, December 5, the Tamil Nadu government had earlier asked private businesses and enterprises in the four districts of Chennai, Thiruvallur, Kancheepuram, and Chengalpattu to permit their employees to work from home as much as possible. During Sundays National Crisis Management Committee (NCMC) meeting, the Cabinet Secretary underlined that, given the most recent IMD forecast, the concerned states need to take all required precautions. Eight more teams were held in reserve, according to the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), which said that its 21 teams were currently stationed in Puducherry, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu. The Coast Guard, Army, and Navy rescue and relief teams, as well as ships and planes, are also kept on standby. In the meantime, Indian Railways has significantly increased the capacity of all of its equipment to guarantee and oversee safe and orderly railway operations in the regions that are anticipated to be impacted by Cyclone Michaung. The committee was also informed about the precautionary steps being taken by the chief secretaries of Tamil Nadu, Odisha, and Puducherry, as well as the special chief secretary of revenue and disaster management, Andhra Pradesh. The Indian Railways has established an emergency control cell at the Divisional/HQ level with officers from Operating, Commercial, Engineering, Electrical, Signal/Telecommunications, Security, and other branches in each shift as part of their preparation for cyclone-related disaster management. Their role is to monitor train operations around-the-clock and take appropriate action when needed. Prior to Cyclone Michaungs impact, the East Coast Railway (ECoR) cancelled up to 60 trains within its authority. To keep an eye on Cyclone Michaung, ECoR has established a Crisis Management Cell. According to sources, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy earlier and assessed the state of preparations for battling Cyclone Michaung. The former assured the latter of his full support in handling the cyclones aftermath. (With agency inputs) Delhi Mayor Shelly Oberoi on Monday ordered the suspension of the medical superintendent of MCDs Hindu Rao Hospital over alleged infrastructural lapses, officials said. There was no immediate response from the medical superintendent over the allegations. According to an MCD official, the suspension order came after the mayor paid a surprise visit to the hospital on Monday and found several infrastructural gaps such as dark corners and corridors, lack of basic hygiene, piles of garbage, and dark and dirty toilets. The mayor has instructed senior officers of the health department to ensure that the infrastructural lapses are resolved at the earliest possible, the official said. She will soon visit the hospital again to check the status of the actions taken on her instructions, he added. Mayor London Breed speaks at a press conference in Alamo Square in October. A moderate San Francisco advocacy group is seeking to put a measure on Novembers ballot to give the mayor more power and reduce the number of city commissions. Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle Note: This story was updated on Dec. 19 after TogetherSF pulled one of its charter amendments, with plans to resubmit a revised version. A moderate San Francisco advocacy group and a city supervisor have embarked on parallel efforts to reform the city government with two basic policy prescriptions: Give the mayor more power and reduce the number of commissions. Both share a belief that the structure of City Hall is itself one of the primary barriers preventing San Francisco from solving its myriad problems of homelessness, housing, drug abuse and economic strife. But the advocacy group, TogetherSF Action, and the supervisor, Rafael Mandelman, currently differ on the best ways to accomplish their goals. Advertisement Article continues below this ad TogetherSF Action announced Monday it would put two charter amendments before voters in November 2024. One measure would, broadly speaking, give the mayor greater authority, while the other would cut the number of city commissions in half. TogetherSF Action said it would submit the text of its proposed measures for review by City Attorney David Chiu. Once Chius office prepared a summary of the legal changes the measures would make, the advocacy group planned to begin gathering signatures to put the measures on the ballot. The group will need to get about 50,000 signatures from San Francisco voters by July 8. At the same time, Mandelman is moving forward with plans he unveiled in October to bring a similar ballot measure to voters, also in November 2024. While Mandelmans proposal would make some of the same changes TogetherSF has proposed giving the mayor more power to fire heads of department and cutting the number of city commissions TogetherSF Action wants to go further than him in some areas. And Mandelman is going the legislative route, trying to get at least five of his Board of Supervisors colleagues to send a City Charter amendment to voters early next year. TogetherSF Action CEO Kanishka Cheng said her group didnt feel comfortable waiting for the legislative process to play out. We dont have a ton of faith that (the supervisors) will go as far as we think we need to go, Cheng said of her groups decision to pursue ballot measures similar to what Mandelman has proposed. We dont want to confuse voters. And it is a very real risk to have dueling measures. But theres really nothing that we can do to prevent that. Cheng said the goal of her groups proposed measures is to create a clear range of legislative authority, executive authority, department authority, so that the residents really understand who is accountable and are super empowered to then hold them accountable. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The groups first proposed amendment would reform the City Charter to allow the mayor to directly hire and fire heads of departments, and remove a prohibition in the City Charter against hiring deputy mayors. Critics of this type of reform contend that San Francisco already has a strong mayor system of government, that the mayor doesnt need additional power and that commissions serve an important role in transparency, inclusion and oversight in city government. Currently, the mayor must select department heads from a list created by commissions that oversee that department. TogetherSF Action would make the commissions role in department head hiring and firing advisory only commissions could still recommend hiring or firing department leaders but the mayor would not have to follow their recommendations. The proposed changes also eliminate a salary cap on wages paid to mayoral staff, which Cheng said would make it easier for the city to hire top-level talent. Currently, city law mandates that, with few exceptions, no member of the staff shall receive a salary of more than 70% of the mayors salary. City Hall spokesperson Jeff Cretan said that Mayor London Breed has consistently pointed to the difficulty and constraints that exist within San Franciscos Charter, particularly around commissions and managing departments. Advertisement Article continues below this ad While there is a lot the mayor can do, there are a lot of restrictions that make it difficult to move quickly, and which slow down governance and dilute accountability, he said. While I cant comment on the specifics of the legislation, we need reforms in this area and its definitely a conversation we should be having. Former City Administrator Rudy Nothenberg said that, in general, the argument of a mayor needing more power leaves me cold. But removing a prohibition on deputy mayors could be useful, he said. He is not affiliated with either effort. Mayors dont have the time or interest in doing managerial work, he said. There needs to be a staff and high-level officials in the mayors office who manages day-to-day affairs of how departments are performing. He also approved of the removal of salary caps, noting you get what you pay for, with respect to municipal hires. TogetherSF Actions second proposed amendment would create a commission to eliminate or consolidate the citys more than 130 commissions and other oversight bodies and advisory groups, with a hard cap of 65. The law would require supervisors to review the streamlining bodys recommendations and by August 2025 create a list of commissions that would remain in existence. If the board does not act within that time, the charter would eliminate all commissions by the end of that year, though supervisors could create them after that deadline if they wanted to. The group pulled the measure in mid-December, after concerns from the Mayor's Office that authority of the dissolved commissions would pass to the Board of Supervisors rather than to the mayor. A spokesperson for the reform group said it was hammering out changes and plans to resubmit the measure early in the new year. Advertisement Article continues below this ad We are making updates to our reform measure that will make the initiative stronger and clarify authority and responsibilities between the executive and legislative branches, Cheng said in an emailed statement. We look forward to submitting the measure in the coming weeks and continuing to grow our citywide coalition challenging the status quo. Cheng noted that the 65-commission cap would still be higher than other major cities in California such as Los Angeles. The measures come amid San Franciscos widely publicized challenges dealing with its doom loop narrative of spiraling crime, homelessness and drug addiction, and as a large majority of residents, 65%, said that life in the city is worse than when they first moved here. Mandelmans proposal does not include TogetherSFs idea to expand the mayors hiring authority for department heads, nor has he proposed a hard cap on the number of commissions, among other changes. Additionally, he has suggested including something that TogetherSF Action has not: Preventing the mayor and a minority of supervisors from being able to send initiative ordinances directly to the ballot. (Officials could still propose charter amendments). Mandelman told the Chronicle the legislative route hes pursuing could produce a better ballot measure even though the path is less certain, since he might not be able to get a majority vote. Advertisement Article continues below this ad There are real advantages to having this work through a legislative process and giving the mayor and members of the Board of Supervisors the opportunity to look at different drafts and giving them, as well as outside folks, the opportunity to improve the legislation and point out flaws, he said. Both Mandelman and TogetherSF Action were influenced by an August report that TogetherSF Action commissioned in conjunction with the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College. The report advocated for strengthening the power of the mayors office and reducing the number of city commissions and other civic bodies. Nothenberg, the former city administrator, said the effort sounded complicated, but nevertheless supported the idea. If I had my druthers, thered be no commissions at all, so anything they can do to diminish them is a laudable goal, he said. I would like to see a simpler and more direct approach but if thats the way they need to do it, its certainly worth a try. Indias government has agreed to withdraw its soldiers from the Maldives, the Indian Ocean archipelagos President Mohamed Muizzu said on Sunday. Muizzu won the presidential election in September, having campaigned to alter the Maldivess India first policy and promising the removal of a small Indian military presence of some 75 personnel. In the discussions we had, the Indian government has agreed to remove Indian soldiers, Muizzu told reporters. We also agreed to set up a high-level committee to solve issues related to development projects. Muizzu made the remarks following engagements on the sidelines of the COP28 climate summit with Indian officials. India provides certain military equipment to the Maldives, assists in disaster response and has been helping build a naval dockyard there. A senior Indian government official in New Delhi told Reuters discussions took place between India and the Maldives on the matter, and both sides recognised the importance of the assistance India provides. The Maldives acknowledged the utility of these (Indian) platforms Discussions on how to keep them operational are ongoing. The core group that both sides have agreed to set up will look at details of how to take this forward, said the official, without commenting directly on Muizzus remarks. Indias Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday. India and China have been vying for influence in the region, with the coalition that supports Muizzu considered to have leaning more towards China. Most of the Indian military personnel were in the Maldives to operate and manage two helicopters and a Dornier aircraft given to the Maldives by India. At his inauguration last month, Muizzu said he would ensure that his country has no foreign military presence. He had requested Indian troop withdrawal to Kiren Rijiju, Indias minister for earth sciences, who represented India at the presidents inauguration. Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary said Monday that India will become a USD 5 trillion economy early in the Amrit Kaal on the path to achieving the goal of becoming an advanced economy by 2047. Chaudhary in a written reply in the Lok Sabha said that the USD 5 trillion milestone will be crossed with the help of a strong rupee which will result from macroeconomic stability. The government has set the goal of becoming an advanced economy by 2047. In the process, it will become a USD 5 trillion economy early in the Amrit Kaal, he said. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in November this year said India is expected to overtake Japan and Germany to emerge as the third largest economy in the world by 2027. The International Monetary Fund has also projected India to become a USD 5 trillion economy with the third largest GDP in 2027-28. India has significantly improved its position as a well-governed and innovative country with a conducive environment for business, as reflected in several global indices. At the end of 2022-23, the Indian GDP stood at USD 3.7 trillion. In 1980-81, size of the Indian economy was USD 189 billion, which increased to USD 326 billion after a decade. In 2000-01, the size of the GDP rose to USD 476 billion. In 2010-11, Indias GDP jumped to USD 1.71 trillion, and further increased to USD 2.67 trillion in 2020-21. Chaudhary said the exchange rate is not an overlooked factor as it ranks Indias GDP size in the world. India is a market economy, and the government monitors economic progress through market-determined GDP and exchange rate, Chaudhary said. He further said both domestic and international markets are the mechanisms that determine Indias GDP, exchange rate and contribution of various sectors to GDP. The contribution of agriculture, industry and services to nominal GDP in 2022-23 stood at 18.4 per cent, 28.3 per cent, and 53.3 per cent, respectively. Chaudhary said the government also contributes to economic progress through policy interventions, including the measures announced in annual budgets. Major initiatives taken by the government in the last 9 years for directly increasing the GDP include implementation of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy (IBC) Code, recapitalisation of public sector banks, rollout of Goods and Services Tax (GST), reduction in corporate tax, boost in effective capital expenditure, introduction of Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme in 14 sectors, continuous liberalisation of the FDI regime, and building of digital infrastructure. With inputs from PTI. Mizoram Chief Minister Zoramthanga met Governor Hari Babu Kambhampati on Monday evening and resigned following the debacle of his party, the Mizo National Front, in the assembly elections, officials said. The MNF has won nine seats and is leading in one, while the opposition Zoram Peoples Movement (ZPM) secured a majority by bagging 27 seats in the 40-member House. Zoramthanga himself also lost to ZPMs Lalthansanga by 2,101 votes in the Aizawl East-1 seat, according to the Election Commission. With inputs from PTI. Referring to the recent poll results, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the nation has rejected the negative politics of the opposition. He said that the assembly election results in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh have been very enthusiastic for those committed to working for the people. Speaking to the media ahead of the Parliament Winter Session, he said The country has rejected negativity. This is a golden opportunity for my friends in the opposition. Rather than venting out their anger of defeat (in assembly elections), they should take lessons from this defeat and shun the idea of negativity that has been there since last nine years and approach the session with positivity. The nation will also change its point of view towards them (opposition),. VIDEO | The country has rejected negativity. This is a golden opportunity for my friends in the opposition. Rather than venting out their anger of defeat (in assembly elections), they should take lessons from this defeat and shun the idea of negativity that has been there since pic.twitter.com/JVIHjrvrtT Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) December 4, 2023 Rajnaitik garmi badi tezi se badh rahi hai. Yesterday, the results of the four-state elections came out. The results are very encouraging encouraging for those who are committed to the welfare of the common people of the country and the bright future of the country, he said. VIDEO | The Assembly election results (in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh) are enthusiastic for those who are committed to working for the people, says PM @narendramodi speaking to media ahead of Parliament Winter Session. (Full video available on PTI Videos - pic.twitter.com/GRZYhZV34r Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) December 4, 2023 Winter Session, 2023 of the Parliament will commence from today and will continue till December 22. The session will have 15 sittings spread over 19 days. The session will begin just a day after the results of four states were declared by the Election Commission of India. Winter Session, 2023 of Parliament will commence from 4th December and continue till 22nd December having 15 sittings spread over 19 days. Amid Amrit Kaal looking forward to discussions on Legislative Business and other items during the session, Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Prahlad Joshi had said in a post on X. The session will begin just a day after the results of four states were declared by the Election Commission of India. Tamil Nadu districts, including Chennai, and Puducherry that have been witnessing heavy rainfall, waterlogging and power disruption since Monday morning are now bracing for worse. The IMD has forecast a cyclonic storm to cross South Andhra Pradesh and the adjoining North Tamil Nadu coast, between Chennai and Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh, around 4 December evening. The deep depression over the Bay of Bengal intensified into a cyclonic storm Michaung and triggered heavy rain in Chennai and most parts of Tamil Nadu. Chennai and its neighboring districts received heavy rainfall overnight, with Meenambakkam recording 196 mm and Nungambakkam receiving 154.3 mm in the 24 hours leading up to 5:30 am on Monday morning. Cyclone Michaung update Cyclone Michaung lies about 100 km from East-North East of Chennai. In the last six hours, it has moved at the speed of 10 km/hour and its expected to move in the northwest direction, intensified to severe cyclonic storm is expected by 4 noon on Monday. Further, it will move parallel to the coast of north Tamil Nadu and South Andhra Pradesh, expected to cross Nellore- Machilipatnam by Tuesday at 4 noon, Chennai Regional Metrology Director Balachandran said. Heavy rainfall and strong winds are likely to continue till Monday evening in Chennai, Chengalpattu, Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur districts, Balachandran added. #WATCH | Tamil Nadu: Balachandran, Chennai Regional Metrology Director says, Cyclone Michaung lies about 100 km from East-North East of Chennai. In the last 6 hours, it has moved at the speed of 10 km/hr and its expected to move in the northwest direction, intensified to pic.twitter.com/awRtcSiV8A ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 Chennai airport operations suspended Due to heavy rain and flooding, Chennai airport operations have been suspended for two hours. Trains cancelled Heavy rains have forced authorities to temporarily shut bridge No.14 between Basin Bridge and Vyasarpadi as a precautionary measure to ensure public safety. This has resulted in the cancellation of six trains departing from Dr MGR Chennai Central railway station, including those bound for Coimbatore and Mysuru. The Southern Railway has announced that all passengers affected by the train cancellations will receive full refunds. #WATCH | Tamil Nadu: As cyclone 'Michaung' approaches Chennai coast, accompanied by heavy rainfall, several trains are delayed and a few have been cancelled. (Visuals from Egmore Railway Station) pic.twitter.com/5SfV1Xr81L ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 Schools, colleges, govt offices closed Due to massive rainfall and waterlogging, schools, colleges, and government offices in Chennai and three adjoining districts have been ordered to remain closed on Monday. The Tamil Nadu government has urged private companies to allow their employees to work from home. Chennai rain deaths Amid heavy rainfall accompanied by gusty winds, a newly constructed wall collapsed in the Kanathur area, East Coastal Road, Chennai, on Monday morning. Two people died and one was critically injured in this incident. The deceased are residents of Jharkhand, said Kanathur Police who are investigating the matter. Chennai submerged in water Severe waterlogging due to heavy rainfall in Chennai city, Thillai Ganga Nagar Subway in Alandur has been closed. #WATCH | Tamil Nadu: Amid severe water logging due to heavy rainfall in Chennai city, Thillai Ganga Nagar Subway in Alandur has been closed. pic.twitter.com/jnQYVuJ9a1 ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 Heavy rainfall in Chennai caused massive waterlogging in parts of the city. Visuals from Ashok Nagar area of the city showed waterlogged roads and uprooted trees. #WATCH | Tamil Nadu: Heavy rainfall in Chennai causes massive waterlogging in parts of the city. (Visuals from Ashok Nagar area of the city) pic.twitter.com/i0N9NJb8Hl ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 Visuals from Vadapalani and Arumbakkam areas of Chennai also saw the roads submerged in water. #WATCH | Tamil Nadu: Heavy rainfall in Chennai causes massive waterlogging in parts of the city. (Visuals from Vadapalani and Arumbakkam areas of the city) pic.twitter.com/xvmB35Vu47 ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 Waterlogged Chennai Here are more visuals from parts of Tamil Nadu showing the city waterlogged after overnight heavy rainfall. VIDEO | Severe waterlogging in GST Road, Chromepet, Chennai after the region receives heavy rainfall in the wake of #CycloneMichuang.#TamilNaduRains #ChennaiRain pic.twitter.com/RIpKe2H5Tr Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) December 4, 2023 VIDEO | Waterlogging inside Tambaram Government Hospital in Chennai after heavy rain lashes the region.#CycloneMichaung pic.twitter.com/SCGLEoKjJn Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) December 4, 2023 With inputs from agencies Foreign tourist arrivals in India are yet to reach the pre-pandemic levels as only 85.9 lakh of them visited the country in 2022 as against 2.88 crore in 2018 and 3.14 crore in 2019. Data on foreign tourist visits (FTVs) from 2018 to 2022 was presented in the Lok Sabha on Monday. The tourist influx sharply declined in 2020 to 71.7 lakh and further plummeted to 10.5 lakh in 2021. In 2022, 85.9 lakh foreigners visited the country, according to the government data. Union Tourism and Culture Minister G Kishan Reddy provided this information in response to a question, stating that the ministry is not considering the launch of pilgrim tourism circuits across the country. Reddy explained that the ministry supports the development of tourism infrastructure, including pilgrimage sites, through schemes like Swadesh Darshan, Prashad (Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual, Heritage Augmentation Drive), and Assistance to Central Agencies. Projects under these schemes are identified in collaboration with state governments, Union Territory administrations, or central agencies. The approval is contingent on adherence to guidelines, fund availability, and the status of ongoing projects. The Ministry of Tourism has sanctioned a total of 76 projects under Swadesh Darshan, 46 under Prashad, and 38 under the Assistance to Central Agencies scheme. However, Reddy noted that the ministry does not maintain data on pilgrims traveling across states for religious visits. With inputs from agencies External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Monday engaged in discussions with the Principal Deputy NSA of the United States Jon Finer, and discussed a range of bilateral and global issues. The meeting in New Delhi came against the backdrop of a case filed in a US court by American prosecutors against an Indian national for his alleged involvement in a plot to kill a Khalistani leader on American soil. It is understood that the issue figured in the meeting between Jaishankar and Finer, though there is no official confirmation on it. Jaishankar expressed his satisfaction with the meeting, stating, Good to meet Principal Deputy NSA of the US Jon Finer this afternoon. Useful exchange of views on the global situation. Discussed taking our bilateral cooperation forward. Good to meet Principal Deputy NSA of the US Jon Finer this afternoon. Useful exchange of views on the global situation. Discussed taking our bilateral cooperation forward. pic.twitter.com/WBwVCPpzF5 Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) December 4, 2023 Last Thursday, India expressed concern over the US linking an Indian official to a man charged with conspiring to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh extremist. India emphasised that further action would be determined based on the findings of an inquiry panel investigating the allegations. In response to the foiled plot, India has already formed a probe team to look into the allegations. On Wednesday, US federal prosecutors charged Nikhil Gupta, 52, of working with an Indian government employee in the foiled plot to kill Pannun. The US prosecutors informed a Manhattan court that authorities in the Czech Republic arrested and detained Gupta. With inputs from PTI External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Monday said that the term Bharat has multiple symbolisms in different domains, be it economically, development wise, politically or culturally. #WATCH | EAM Dr S Jaishankar at an event says, What does it mean building a Bharat narrative?If you look at the term Bharat, it today has multiple symbolisms in different domains pic.twitter.com/2PTzK8ILzh ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 Addressing ICCRs Knowledge India Visitors Programme on Monday, Jaishankar said, The subject which would be appropriate at this time I thought would be building a Bharat narrative. In many ways that is what is happening in India. What does it mean building a Bharat narrative? People sometimes see it as politics, sometimes they look at the word play and think this is some kind of linguistic message. But if you look at the term Bharat, and I am not getting into the origins of the word or the history of the concept. It today actually has multiple symbolisms in different domains. He said when we speak about Bharat in terms of economics, we speak about a Atmanirbhar Bharat. So it has a connotation of a certain resilience, certain self sufficiency, a contribution, a talent out there, which is expressing itself, added Jaishankar. He said developmentally today, when we speak about Bharat, it also implies commitment about creating an inclusive, just, fair society where no one is left behind. And that is actually in many ways the true test of development, added the minister. Jaishankar said politically Bharat is a statement of independence. Its a declaration that as India engages the world, it doesnt have to be done necessarily in terms set by others or in frameworks determined by others that are objective in that engagement, is in many ways to actually let our own personality and our own innate qualities come out. So, it is in ways an expression of the persona of the society, he said. He said then there is of course the cultural domain. When we speak about Bharat, it could be speaking about our languages, our traditions, our heritage, our practices, said Jaishankar. Lastly, when it comes to the world, he said the Bharat that we seek to set the narrative about is a Bharat which would like to be perceived as a Vishwamitra. A friend which at crucial moments has really stepped up in a way in which countries and societies normally dont do in international relations, said the minister. Talking about G20, Jaishankar said that at a time when the world is so deeply divided, not everybody expected us to succeed in our presidency. #WATCH | Delhi: EAM Dr S Jaishankar says, At G20, we did it with a cause and commitment for the global South During the G20, we showed a culture that can harmonise. At a time when the world is so deeply divided, not everybody expected us to succeed in our G20 presidency. We pic.twitter.com/n6JsRPumOa ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 At G20, we did it with a cause and commitment for the global South During the G20, we showed a culture that can harmonise. At a time when the world is so deeply divided, not everybody expected us to succeed in our G20 presidency. We were able to find a bridge between the East and the West and the North and the South, said Jaishankar. He said Bharat today is linked to how we look ahead. Typically, governments look at the term that awaits them. The thinking of a government runs from an election to an election. And in that country, at best that is a five year plan that you can have. Today, we are talking about an Amrit Kaal. A 25-year vision where we actually think that we would see a remarkable, transformation in our country. We will be able to address a lot of historical problems while establishing our place in the international order, he added. With inputs from agencies The stunning electoral gains in the three Hindi heartland states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan do not necessarily presage a sure win for the ruling BJP, as people vote differently in state elections as compared to Lok Sabha elections. However, unlike the losses in the same states in 2018 prior to the 2019 general elections, there are multiple pointers to suggest that the mood of the nation, especially in the populous Hindi hinterland, portends that the BJP is poised to gain incrementally in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, surpassing its earlier tally of 303 seats. This surmise is based on the following observations: First, the BJP lost these same three states in 2018, yet registered a contra-trend in the same states in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. So, what is the national import of these 2023 state wins for 2024? A flashback to the 2013 wins in these three states by the BJP before the 2014 national sweep by Modi is more reflective of the reasons for optimism, as it shows that this time around, the scale of victory is even higher than what it was at the beginning of the Modi Wave 1.0 which began during end-2013. Second, the decisive verdict in the three Hindi heartland states reveals that despite going into state elections without a chief ministerial face, it was the Modi wave that swept the elections. Yes, it seemed like a Modi wave for sure, despite most exit-polls predicting a cliffhanger in most states, except Madhya Pradesh. This favourably impacts the likely outcome for the 2024 elections as seen through multiple prisms: that Modis emotive connection with the voter remains in tact; that the voter believes in Modis deliverables, as he has systematised welfare delivery; and that the BJPs organisational robustness has further strengthened due to abundant manpower and financial resources. Incumbency is a double-edged sword, no doubt, as it can lead to voter fatigue, especially if it is after two terms. Modi himself seems to buck that trend, as his popularity ratings are at historic highs of 70 per cent after two successive terms. Interestingly, a similar record of prolonged pro-incumbency has been sustained by the BJP government in Gujarat since last 25 years, in Uttar Pradesh which is the most crucial state for Lok Sabha elections, and in Madhya Pradesh since 18 years. Opportunistic coalition formations prior to general elections have seldom succeeded, and are unlikely to do so again. Empirically, each time a disparate opposition has tried to weave an opportunistic and clumsy alliance a year prior to general elections, the template has flopped under the weight of its own contradictions. More so now, as the Congress being the dominant force within the INDIA alliance will have diminishing powers to negotiate. Modis redefined demographic prioritisation cuts across caste or religious segmentation, as both are now archaic formulas. Modis victory speech on Sunday was unstoppable, as he redefined the demographics BJP prioritises not by the stereotypical segmentation of caste, creed or religion instead, he addressed himself as a guarantor of delivery to the youth, to the women, to the poor and to the farmer. Each of these demographic segments has enormous weightage, and collectively contribute to over 80 per cent of the voting populace. Modis women-led development became a force multiplier to gain votes, as it is a cut above the cliched women empowerment of yesteryear. The BJPs success nationally has been diligently built on the back of the partys targeted outreach towards women-centric concerns. Since 2014, the BJP has aggressively focused on delivery of social welfare schemes towards women. If it was a localised scheme of Ladli Behna in MP, it was the Mahatari Bandhan Yojna in Chhattisgarh that tilted the axis in favour of BJP. While these schemes bore electoral dividends in states, the passage of the Womens Reservation Bill reserving 33 per cent seats for women in national and state legislatures has strengthened BJPs outreach to this demographic ahead of 2024. The Axis My India poll results in MP, for example, showed that 50 per cent women supported the BJP, in contrast to 44 per cent men who polled in their favour. Same in Chhattisgarh, where the BJP was ahead of the Congress in attracting women voters who voted for a change. Women today comprise a distinct and voluminous voting entity, as education levels have risen. The model of gender-based competitive populism is being assiduously crafted by all political parties. Each regional party has developed its own localised version of region-specific welfarist schemes, like in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal, etc. Ultimately, the woman voter casts her vote in favour of the party which has delivered on their promises. Pan-India, it is the innumerable flagship schemes of the Modi government that are closest to having achieved 90 per cent saturation in delivering on promises made a decade back. I myself fall in the category of a women voter. Even though toilets, gas cylinders and Awas Yojna, etc, matter to my rural sisters, I am also a labharti, a gainer, in another form. Women labhartis have gained across strata, whether its funding for micro entrepreneurship through Mudra loans, or increased financial inclusion, or free food grains. Even the upper echelons of womens strata gained through increased labour force participation in the corporate world, or through an increase in economic vibrancy as reflected in the stock markets, due to a stable regime since a decade, and pro-women policies pursued by the Centre. The Modi dispensation has laid greater emphasis than previous governments on budgetary outlays for gender-specific expenditure. Gender budgeting is an approach to government fiscal policy that seeks to use a countrys national budget as a tool to resolve societal gender inequality, and promote inclusive development. The effective implementation of gender budgeting requires a political commitment top-down in order to achieve gender mainstreaming. A targeted intervention has ensured that gender equality is integrated into the planning and budgeting processes, and that public budget revenues and expenditures benefit women, as they constitute the most marginalised sector. Under the current gender budget, the Part A component, which comprises 100 per cent women-specific schemes, has been allocated a sum of Rs 26,772.89 crore, increasing by six per cent from the last gender budget where Rs 25,260.95 was allocated. The BJPs incremental voter base amongst women has been achieved as a result of not one single attribute but a cumulative of welfare programmes that benefited women across strata. The author is an ex-chairperson of the Committee for Financial Inclusion, Niti Aayog. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstposts views. A strange controversy has broken out recently over the National Medical Commission logo. It inadvertently illustrates the internalized cultural inferiority of a postcolonial India. So deep-seated is this inferiority complex that it interferes with even well-meaning attempts to form a national identity through the retelling of native stories and reimagination of Indian cultural mores and symbols. There are several issues entangled with the controversy that saw the government finding itself at the receiving end of some sharp criticism from the Opposition, with habitual critics and a section of the medical fraternity joining in. This motley group has charged the Narendra Modi government at the Centre with creeping saffronisation, accusing it of upsetting the secular balance of the Indian State by designing a logo. Make of it what you will. According to this narrative, Indias top medical regulatory bodys newly modified logo which features a Hindu religious symbol, is clinching evidence of the governments bigotry, endorsing pseudoscientific beliefs and move to go against the Constitution. The offending logo at the centre of the controversy depicts a colourised image of Dhanwantari, a surgeon and the physician for gods in Hindu mythology whom the Puranas hold to be the father of Ayurveda. Not just Ayurveda, however, Dhanwantaris name is associated with all branches of medical science in India. It is also a powerful cultural motif that signifies healing and cure. Medical stores bearing Dhanwantaris name is a common sight across India. The Centre has been accused specifically of dropping the national emblem of three lions and adopting the colour image of Dhanwantari, and of using the term Bharat instead of India. In an article published on 1 December, The Times of India reported that the NMC has modified its logo, dropping the national emblem and including the photo of Dhanvantri (sic) and added that there was no official announcement of the logo change. The report quoted the Indian Medical Associations Kerala chapter, as saying, the recent change in the NMC logo is not acceptable to the modern medical fraternity. The new logo gives a wrong message and will harm the scientific and secular nature of the commission. The organisation, according to the report, demanded that the move should be rescinded. A controversy erupted, fuelled by posts criticizing or defending the narrative on social media. There are two claims involved. First claim: the surreptitious dropping of a secular logo and replacing it with a Hindu religious symbol. Second claim: that this is the marker for Indias transformation into a Hindu rashtra and junking of the secular Constitution, as some hyperventilating critics have alleged. Lets tackle the issues one by one. It certainly appears to be the case that the NMC did not publicly announce the modification of a new logo, but it is misleading to claim that the national emblem has been replaced in its wake. On the contrary, the regulatory body formed in September 2020 after abolishing the erstwhile Medical Council of India (MCI) through an act of Parliament, initially had no logo. The national emblem acted mostly as a placeholder for all national bodies. According to multiple media reports quoting Yogender Malik, member of the Ethics and Medical Registration Board who handles media communication at the NMC, We never had the India emblem as our logo. We did not have a logo earlier. It was only around a year ago that the NMC, after taking suggestions, came up with the logo. The Dhanwantari logo was black and white for more than a year and we realised that we need to colour it. So that is the only change that has happened. I do not understand the criticism, he added. Hindustan Times quoted BN Gangadhar, the officiating chairman of NMC, as saying, The image of Dhanwantari was already in the logo but in the form of a black and white line diagram. All members unanimously decided that colour should be added to the image as black and white image was not printable. When the NMC was formed, it was decided then to use Dhanwantaris image in the logo. Apollo is the god of healing in some other country and Dhanwantari is the god of health and healing in India. NMCs statement, that it had no official logo and a new one was created sometime last year, is true. If we search internet archives, last years webpage of nmc.org.in shows a black and white image of what appears to be Dhanwantari and the word India written above it. The image has been colourised now and India replaced with Bharat. It is clear that the NMC did not have a national emblem as its logo, and therefore the narrative that a secular logo has been replaced with a Hindu religious one is specious. Now lets address the second claim, that the image of a Hindu god on the logo of a national medical regulatory body somehow demonstrates creeping saffronisation because it alienates members of other faiths. At the core of this phoney narrative lies what I have referred to earlier as the internalisation of cultural inferiority and an incurable self-loathing among a section of Indians for whom political independence never translated into true decolonization that would facilitate the expression of civilisational identity. It is hard to understand why the logo for the now-dissolved Medical Council of India that featured the Rod of Asclepius belonging to Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing did not endanger Indias secular spirit but cultural motif associated with ancient Indian civilization may? The Indian Medical Association, some of whose members have been vocal against this change, has its logo a modified version of Caduceus, a symbol with a short staff entwined by two serpents. According to the National Library of Medicine, a website of the government of the United States, Caduceus is a symbol of Hermes or Mercury in Greek and Roman mythology. Caduceus symbol is identified with thieves, merchants, and messengers, and Mercury is said to be a patron of thieves and outlaws, not a desirable protector of physicians. So, how did this unsavoury image come to be associated with organisations associated with medicines and healing? According to the website, US Army Medical Corps, the Public Health Service, and the US Marine Hospital however use the Caduceus largely as a result of the adoption of the Caduceus as its insignia by the US Army Medical Corps in 1902. Incidentally, in 2015, a PIL was filed in the Madras High Court Bench claiming that many doctors in India were by mistake using the Greek symbol Caduceus, consisting of a staff entwined by two serpents and surmounted by wings, instead of the Rod of Asclepius, consisting of a wingless staff entwined by a single serpent, as a symbol of medicine. This view finds support in the essay written by professors Anil Shetty, Shraddha Shetty and Oliver Dsouza (carried by US National Library of Medicine) who observe, The true and authentic symbol of Medicine is not the Caduceus but the Rod of Asclepius. The Rod of Asclepius is a single serpent entwined rod wielded by the Greek God of healing and Medicine, Asclepius. In Greek mythology Asclepius is the son of Apollo- the god of light, the Sun, truth and also a god of healing. Asclepiuss daughters are Hygieia, the goddess of hygiene and cleanliness and Panacea the goddesses of remedies. The Hippocratic Oath which all physicians have taken for centuries is dedicated to the same four deities, namely Apollo, Asclepius, Hygieia and Panacea. In this debate over which is the official/unofficial logo for medicines and doctors, does something strike you as odd? Indian elites and those who cry blue murder at every ticking of a clock when it comes to the Narendra Modi governments stated and unstated moves, found no problems in accepting or normalizing symbols that are decidedly foreign in origin and have nothing to with Indian motifs, traditions, or culture? And if religiosity is what they are against, as some doctors, opposition leaders and critics have professed since the controversy broke out (sample this New Indian Express report or this News18 report, then the argument becomes even more comical. As Indians, we have no problems in accepting Greco-Roman religious emblems as symbols of the medical profession, but outrage erupts when a god of ancient Indian medicine and medical science is held up as the motif. Flaunting a logo with a Greek god is secularism, and accepting a logo with an Indian god is communalism? The former is scientific, and the latter is pseudoscience? These questions are worth pondering over, because they point to a deeper malaise. The self-hatred of our elites perpetuates the feudal and colonial power structures. The god revered as a healer by millions of ordinary Indians, if adopted as the motif for a regulatory body, challenges precisely this power structure. And for those virtue-signalling on secularism, it is worth pointing out that many countries with a majority of Muslim population refuse to accept the Red Cross society, the international humanitarian agency to care for the wounded during war and have their own Red Crescent Society because of the Judeo-Christian value associated with the former symbol. According to Britannica, the Red Cross is the name used in countries under nominally Christian sponsorship, while Red Crescent (adopted on the insistence of the Ottoman Empire in 1906) is the name used in Muslim countries. So much for secularism. The fake outrage takes away from the real issue. The debate in India quickly becomes polarized along partisan lines without an understanding of the core problem the image of Dhanwantari is not a religious but a cultural symbol. The conflation of culture with religion gives rise to these spurious and toxic debates. If a Greco-Roman symbol can be accepted in popular conception as non-religious then an Indian national organisation is well within its rights, and in fact should, borrow from its rich cultural iconographies. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstposts views. Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Signs warn people not to leave valuables in their cars near Lombard Street in San Francisco, a tourist hot spot, on March 16, 2016. Michael Short/Special to the Chronicle 2016 At a recent hearing called by Supervisor Dean Preston on car break-ins, residents criticized police and elected leaders for making little progress on the issue. The number of auto burglaries has hovered at more than 20,000 a year since 2010, with the pandemic year of 2020 being the lone exception. As a Chronicle analysis recently reported, car break-ins have risen and fallen in San Franciscos past, but the citys spike since 2010 has set it apart from others in California, including San Diego, Sacramento and Los Angeles. The one exception: neighboring Oakland, which has seen a rise that has tracked San Franciscos almost exactly. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Despite various announcements and efforts the city has made no noticeable progress, Preston said at the opening of the hearing. Theyre very quick, said resident Kathi OLeary, who witnesses smash-and-grabs daily from her window overlooking the Alamo Square park. Cars are parked in the neighborhood around Alamo Square in San Francisco. Thieves have been targeting tourists cars in this area. Salgu Wissmath/The Chronicle 2022 Denny Garbuio, the manager of a shoe store on Haight Street, wrote a letter in advance of the hearing about the number of tourists who are emotionally scarred by auto burglaries. Advertisement Article continues below this ad It all points to an unfortunate truth: The fear of getting bipped the slang term for a break-in is part of life in the Bay Area. Tips and tricks to avoid break-ins have long circulated around social media, but the tools and tactics that thieves use also keep evolving. In their guide on break-ins, KQED points out that you can do everything right to avoid a break-in, and still get bipped. Its not if, its when youll get your car broken into if you live in the Bay Area, Ladan Sobhani, co-owner of Berkeley repair shop Auto Glass Express, told KQED. Heres a roundup of the best advice to avoid a car break-in thats come up through the Chronicles coverage. Know the risk of where you park Our S.F. Car Break-In Tracker is an interactive map that shows in near real time the number and locations of car break-ins occurring across the city. When you click on each incident, it shows you the date, time, description of the incident and whether the case is active. Advertisement Article continues below this ad A Chronicle analysis shows that tourist destinations are overwhelmingly targeted, from San Francisco International Airport and other Bay Area airports to San Franciscos most notable sights. If its one of the citys top sightseeing spots, odds are, the risk of bipping is higher. Avoid hot spots Our analysis found that not only are certain areas more likely to be targeted, but there are specific street intersections that appear to be car break-in hot spots, and those may warrant avoiding altogether. You can see the full data on those intersections on our website, but they include North Point and Larkin streets near Ghirardelli Square; Francisco and Montgomery streets, which is close to the ferry to Alcatraz; and Steiner and Hayes streets, an intersection close to Alamo Square and the Painted Ladies. Dont leave Bluetooth devices in your car Bay Area police in at least three cities are aware of thieves using Bluetooth technologies to snatch electronics from parked cars. Experts say any smartphone can scan for Bluetooth signals, so thieves can detect other smartphones, iPads or laptops nearby in seconds. Some even use radio scanners or specialized applications downloaded from the dark web that can unlock cars in a matter of clicks. So dont leave your electronics in your car. Advertisement Article continues below this ad In fact, dont leave anything in your car Anything that appears even the slightest bit valuable in your car could be targeted, even if youre only ducking out for a short period of time or think its well-hidden. Tourist officials suggest traveling light and leaving high-value possessions back in the hotel. The same advice goes for locals: Leave the valuables at home. In August, city law enforcement officials held a news conference to tout new strategies to address auto break-ins and Police Chief Bill Scott advised not to leave anything in ones car, even if its for a minute. People will leave their car for just a few minutes to see a sight and get a photo, and they get back and they [were] 50 yards away, and their stuff is gone, Scott said, according to KQED. Glass from a cars broken window is scattered on the sidewalk and gutter near Lombard Street in San Francisco, a hot spot for smash-and-grab burglaries. Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle The conference was held at San Franciscos Palace of Fine Arts another hot spot for break-ins and Scotts point was made all the more clear when a break-in occurred just around the corner from the conference. A family from Missouri told the Chronicle they were gone from their locked car for only about 15 minutes to explore, leaving four backpacks, laptops, a Kindle, jewelry and other items sitting in the rental car. They returned to their car on Baker Street to find the back window broken out and all of their belongings stolen. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Curb your tires Congresss humiliation seems to have no end in sight as close on heels of disastrous drubbing in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh Assembly elections 2023, key leaders of the INDI Alliance have declined to attend the bloc meeting which party chief Mallikarjun Kharge had convened for 6 December. DMK President and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin cited the grave situation obtaining in the state owing to cyclone Michaung. Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav, however, seems to have ducked on account of prior commitments. Trinamool Congress (TMC) supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her nephew Abhishek Banerjee have also confirmed that they wont be attending the forthcoming INDI Alliance meeting. Power equation in I.N.D.I.A has shifted The upcoming I.N.D.I.A bloc meeting will be different, said sources, as Congress wont be able to dictate terms within the alliance after the Assembly elections 2023 results were declared on Sunday (3 November). There was already rift and differences between other alliance partners and the Congress as the party did not agree with seat sharing with Samajwadi Party (SP), Left, CPI, CPI(M) in Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Chhattisgarh. Alliance partners were also angry as number of members asked the Congress, throughout the run-up and during election process, to hold general meeting, coordination committee and campaign committee meeting, but they were denied. Congress cant dictate A senior leader told News18, The Congress, now, clearly cannot dictate their own terms. There should be a coordination between all the parties together. The meeting is also expected to witness a debate on who is going to lead the INDI alliance. The bloc members also said they would be coming up with an alternative vision after things did not work in Congress favour on ground despite announcing a number of schemes. Congress foot-print in north India has been gradually washing off with the party only holding the helm in Himachal Pradesh. The party has been wiped out in the Hindu heartland. There has been rage in the I.N.D.I.A bloc whose activities were stalled by the Congress well ahead of the Assembly elections 2023. With results going against Congress favour, Kharge took to X and mentioned the INDI alliance in his first response, saying, The Congress Party participated in the elections of these four states with full force. I express my gratitude to our countless workers. Without getting disheartened by this defeat, we, along with INDIA parties, have to start preparing for the Lok Sabha elections with double enthusiasm. Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, or I.N.D.I.A, is a coalition of political parties led by the Indian National Congress (INC) that has been constituted to take on the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha poll. It was formed during an opposition party meeting in Bengaluru in July 2023. In a major boost for Make in India, and for Apples plan to manufacture components of the iPhone locally in India, Japanese electronic parts manufacturer TDK Corp will manufacture lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery cells for Apple iPhones in India, announced IT Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar. This development is part of Apples ongoing efforts to diversify its production base and shift some manufacturing operations away from China, with India emerging as a pivotal growth driver. Apples foray into Indian production commenced in 2017, initially through Wistron and subsequently through Foxconn. The tech giant currently collaborates with a total of 14 suppliers in India, emphasizing its commitment to the Indian market as a key manufacturing hub. TDK will establish a cutting-edge manufacturing facility in the northern state of Haryana, a move expected to generate several thousand job opportunities in the region, as highlighted by Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar in a social media announcement. The news, initially reported by Business Standard on Sunday, underscores TDKs role as a leading electronic component and device maker from Japan. According to sources familiar with the matter, TDK will manufacture the battery cells in India to power iPhones assembled within the country. This strategic alignment with Apples supply chain diversification efforts is anticipated to strengthen Indias position within the global production network. The Li-ion battery cells produced by TDK will be supplied to Apples designated Li-ion battery assembler, Sunwoda Electronics, which is already operational in India. Sunwoda Electronics currently imports battery cells from various global markets. This collaboration is poised to streamline the supply chain for Apples iPhone production in India, supporting the companys vision of sustainable and localized manufacturing. TDK, known for its acquisition of Hong Kong-based Li-ion battery and cell maker Amperex Technology Ltd in 2005, recently acquired land in Haryana for the establishment of a manufacturing unit. This facility is expected to play a pivotal role in producing Li-ion battery cells, including those destined for Apple iPhones. Commercial production, with a focus on supplying cells to Apple, is slated to commence in the near future, signalling a significant milestone in the collaboration between TDK and Apple in the Indian manufacturing landscape. (With input from agencies) In a recent quarterly threat report released by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, it was revealed that Meta has successfully dismantled a large network of over 4,700 fake accounts originating from China. These accounts, pretending to be Americans and Indians, were actively involved in disseminating misleading information on divisive topics related to US politics and US-China relations as well as Indian politics. While Meta did not explicitly tie the profiles to Chinese officials in Beijing, the company expressed concerns about the surge in such networks originating from China, especially with the approaching 2024 US elections. According to Meta, China now ranks as the third-largest geographical source of such deceptive networks, trailing behind Russia and Iran. The deceptive Chinese network, as outlined in the report, engaged in a variety of topics such as abortion, culture war issues, and aid to Ukraine. The accounts utilized profile pictures and names stolen from legitimate users worldwide, sharing and liking each others posts. Notably, some of the content appeared to be directly copied from X, formerly Twitter. Among the accounts activities, some were found to copy verbatim posts from US politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, including figures like Nancy Pelosi, Gretchen Whitmer, Ron DeSantis, Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan. Meta emphasized that the network displayed no consistent ideological stance. Metas report raised questions about the networks objectives, stating, Its unclear whether this approach was designed to amplify partisan tensions, build audiences among these politicians supporters, or to make fake accounts sharing authentic content appear more genuine. The companys moderation policies strictly prohibit coordinated inauthentic behaviour, referring to posts from groups of accounts working together with false identities to mislead users. While the content shared by these networks often references accurate news stories, Meta highlighted that the intent is to manipulate public opinion, sow division, and artificially boost certain viewpoints. According to Meta, the extensive Chinese network was thwarted before gaining traction among real users. Ben Nimmo, leading investigations into inauthentic behaviour at Meta, commented that these networks still struggle to build audiences, but theyre a warning, emphasizing the ongoing efforts by foreign threat actors to influence people online ahead of the upcoming elections. In addition to the large Chinese network, Meta also uncovered two smaller networksone from China focusing on India and Tibet, and another from Russia posting primarily in English about the invasion of Ukraine and promoting Telegram channels. The report underscored that Russian networks, previously scrutinized since the 2016 election, have shifted focus to the Ukraine conflict, attempting to undermine international support for Kyiv. In a notable development, Meta highlighted that the US government ceased sharing information about foreign influence networks with the company in July, following a federal ruling related to a First Amendment legal case. This decision is currently under consideration by the Supreme Court, contributing to the broader debate about the collaboration between the US government and tech companies and its potential impact on the free speech of social media users. In an official statement on Monday, NVIDIAs CEO Jensen Huang assured that the company is fully committed to meeting the surging demand for its artificial intelligence processors in Japan. This announcement aligns with Japans urgent efforts to reconstruct its semiconductor infrastructure, once globally eminent, and bridge the gap in AI technology development. NVIDIAs graphics processing units (GPUs) have established dominance in the AI market. During a press briefing at Prime Minister Fumio Kishidas official residence in Tokyo, Huang emphasized the exceptionally high market demand, stating, Demand is very high, but I promised the prime minister we will do our very, very best to prioritize Japans requirements for GPUs. Huangs visit coincided with Japans recent allocation of approximately 2 trillion Yen ($13.6 billion) in an additional budget, specifically earmarked for chip investment. This financial infusion underscores Japans commitment to revitalizing its semiconductor sector and staying abreast of AI technology advancements. It is anticipated that some of the allocated funds will be utilized to support Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC and chip foundry venture Rapidus. Rapidus aims to establish cutting-edge chip manufacturing facilities in Japans northern island of Hokkaido, contributing to the nations semiconductor resurgence. Huang expressed optimism about Japans evolving semiconductor industry, stating, The semiconductor industry that Japan is now starting to grow and foster will be able to produce GPUs. He emphasized the growing recognition among nations, including Japan, about the necessity of owning and controlling their data, building domestic AI factories, and independently producing AI intelligence. NVIDIAs CEOs assurance aligns with the global trend of nations recognizing the strategic importance of securing their AI capabilities and fostering self-reliance in the tech sector. (With inputs from agencies) Eleven hikers were found dead Monday and another 12 were missing after a volcano erupted in Indonesia, with rescuers racing to carry injured and burned survivors down the mountain on foot. Rescuers worked through the night to find dozens of hikers stranded on Mount Marapi on the island of Sumatra after it spewed an ash tower 3,000 metres (9,340 feet) taller than the volcano itself into the sky on Sunday. The dead hikers were found near Marapis crater after the 2,891-metre volcano rained ash on nearby villages, according to a local rescue official. Twelve were missing, three more were found alive and 49 had safely descended from the crater, some with burns and fractures, the official said. They are being carried down manually, rescuers are taking turns bringing them down. We cant do an air search with a helicopter because the eruption is ongoing, said local rescue agency chief Abdul Malik, who added about 120 rescuers were involved in the search. The three other people who had been found alive were yet to be taken down the mountain, along with the 11 dead. Those three survivors were found near the crater and their condition was weak, and some had burns, Malik said. A clip shared with AFP showed a rescue worker with a flashlight strapped to his head piggybacking a hiker, who moans in pain and says God is greatest as she is led to safety in the darkness of night. Zhafirah Zahrim Febrina, one of the rescued hikers, is shown in a video message from the volcano desperately appealing to her mother for help. The 19-year-old student appeared shocked, her face burnt and her hair matted with thick grey ash. Mom, help Ife. This is Ifes situation right now, she said, referring to her nickname. She is now in a nearby hospital with her father and uncle after being trapped on the mountain on a hiking trip with 18 school friends. She is going through a tremendous trauma, said her mother Rani Radelani, 39. She is affected psychologically because she saw her burns, and she also had to endure the pain all night. Tremendous trauma Local rescue agency spokesperson Jodi Haryawan said the rescue efforts had been broken up by sporadic eruptions but the search was still going despite the risks. Once it was safer they continued the search. So the search was not halted, he told AFP. Rudy Rinaldi, head of the West Sumatra Disaster Mitigation Agency, told AFP some of the rescued hikers had suffered burns. Those who are injured were the ones who got closer to the crater, he said. At least eight people suffered burns, one had burns and a fracture and another had a head wound, according to a list of those found from Basarnas, a national search and rescue agency, seen by AFP. Ahmad Rifandi, an official at the Mount Marapi monitoring station, told AFP that ash rain was observed after the eruption and had reached Bukittinggi, the third-largest city in West Sumatra that has a population of more than 100,000. The plume of smoke and ash blocked out the sun after the eruption and coated nearby cars, scooters and ambulances. Marapi is on the second alert level of Indonesias four-step system and authorities have imposed a three-kilometre exclusion zone around its crater. The Indonesian archipelago sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where the meeting of continental plates causes high volcanic and seismic activity. The Southeast Asian country has nearly 130 active volcanoes. As the search goes on for the missing 12 hikers, Febrinas family was relieved she was one of the lucky ones. Good news arrived in the form of a livestream on video app TikTok by a member of the rescue services, in which Radelani saw her visibly shaken daughter. It felt incredible, praise God she has been found, Radelani said. If she asks me to allow her to climb a mountain, Ill say no. After the BJP registered thumping victories in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, and made good gains in southern state of Telangana, the foreign media on Monday saw the results as an indication of voters mood and gave edge to the saffron party ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is eyeing a third consecutive term. According to a New York Times report, the BJP has expanded its dominance of a key region ahead of general elections with wins in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. The report added that the wins were another blow to the dwindling fortunes of the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress. This is the BJPs big advantage in 2024, the report quoted political analyst Arati Jerath as saying. Referring to the Ram temple, the NYT report claimed that Mr. Modi already has a big plan for further galvanizing his base of support: the inauguration in January of a massive Hindu temple in Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh Mr. Modi, projecting himself as an ambitious champion of development as well as Hindu interests, also has a strong pull with voters across the country. His government has used the resources of the top-heavy and unequal Indian economy for well-targeted welfare schemes, handed out often in his name. In states where local BJP leaders were struggling in the elections, it was Mr. Modis face on the posters; the handouts for voters were presented as Modis guarantee, the report added. Financial Times reported while there is limited evidence of a correlation between state and national results, the outcome leaves Congress looking weakened at a crucial time for the party, which dominated Indian politics for decades until PM Modis ascent to the premiership in 2014. According to Bloomberg, even though the Assembly elections do not serve as a stand-in for the general elections in 2024, the fact that the Opposition lost fairly comprehensively will buoy the ruling party and PM Modi ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. Rahul Gandhis Congress made an effort to highlight issues like discrimination based on caste and unemployment with the hope that, in a few months, they would gain traction across the country, Bloomberg reported. Prime Minister Modi remains exceptionally popular, Bloomberg quoted Shumita Deveshwar, chief India economist at GlobalData.TS Lombard, as saying. The state polls show the mood of the nation lies in bringing him back to power for a third consecutive term, she added. A weaker performance by the BJP may have provided the Opposition with some momentum, but the outcome now signals that Modis return to power is inevitable, Deveshwar said. Modi remains widely popular after a decade in power and surveys suggest he will win again next year, reported Reuters. However, a 28-party opposition alliance (INDIA) led by the Congress has come together to jointly fight the BJP, posing a renewed challenge. But the alliance did not feature in the state polls due to internal rivalries and it was a direct contest between BJP and Congress. AFP reported the victories in the three states further boosted the BJP and Modi, who is already the favourite to win his third consecutive term in office next year. The results are seen as yet another setback for the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty scion Rahul Gandhi, 53, who led the opposition centre-left Indian National Congress partys aggressive and personal campaign directly targeting Modi, it added. The BJP won in 163 out of 230 seats in Madhya Pradesh while the Congress remains a distant second with just 66 seats. In Rajasthan, the saffron party won in 115 out of 199 seats that went to the polls, with the Congress clinching only 69. Chhattisgarh has 54 seats for the BJP and 35 for the Congress. Winning 64 out of 119 constituencies, the Congress ousted the BRS government in Telangana. With inputs from agencies President Xi Jinping expressed a willingness to bolster its strategic cooperation with Belarus after a meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Monday. Xi also conveyed Chinas readiness to strengthen coordination and collaboration with Belarus in various multilateral mechanisms, including the United Nations and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, as reported by the official news agency Xinhua. Xi emphasized the importance of enhancing cross-border transport facilitation, promoting economic and trade relations, and fostering people-to-people exchanges between the two countries, according to Xinhua. The Chinese leader also said Beijing and the Eastern European country should implement projects such as the China-Belarus industrial park and promote industrial cooperation. With inputs from Reuters. Columbia University, which has drawn peoples ire for extending support to Hamas military action on Israel, has now gone a level up by announcing a teach-in and discussion on significance of the October 7th Palestinian counteroffensive. The School of Social Work at the Columbia University has released a poster of holding the discussion on 6 December on campus. The invitation was shared on X by Shai Davidai, who is an assistant professor of management at the Columbia Business School, and who grew up in Israel. Asking people to retweet his post, Davidai said: ITS TIME FOR ALL OF US TO RAISE OUR VOICES! The School of Social Work at @Colubmia University CANNOT allow a teach-in that sees rape as a counteroffensive and calls murder and kidnap of children revolutionary violence! ITS TIME FOR ALL OF US TO RAISE OUR VOICES! The School of Social Work at @Colubmia University CANNOT allow a teach-in that sees rape as a counteroffensive and calls murder and kidnap of children revolutionary violence! PLEASE RETWEET THIS WITH YOUR OWN CALL TO @Columbia pic.twitter.com/w1bCgsAMsx Shai Davidai (@ShaiDavidai) December 4, 2023 In an interview with CBS News, Davidai said he was shocked to his core by the Hamas atrocities on 7 October, and then by what he saw as the university's failure to condemn the perpetrators by name. People have expressed their anger with a few of them asking the university to "do something about this" and "make the right choice." This is heartbreaking, I cannot believe it.@Columbia you have a chance to do something about this, I hope that you'll make the right choice Benita (@NirBenita) December 4, 2023 Addressing the Columbia University, another user said: "This is appalling that you are allowing this teach-in which calls Oct 7 a 'counteroffensive'. And you are allowing them to do so on university grounds. You should cancel this 'teach-in' because they are trashing your school's reputation." Dear Columbia: This is appalling that you are allowing this teach-in which calls Oct 7 a "counteroffensive". And you are allowing them to do so on university grounds. You should cancel this "teach-in" because they are trashing your school's reputation. Kathleen Vullis (@KVullis) December 4, 2023 "This is terrorist. Straight out," wrote another user. This is terrorism. Straight out Goonies (@GooniesIL) December 4, 2023 "Rape, kidnapping, torture and murder are not justifiable for fighting oppression. They are crimes against humanity. Columbia School of Social Work - you've abandoned the upholding of the basic human rights, basic principles of social work. You have lost all credibility to teach SW," said another user. Rape, kidnapping, torture & murder are not justifiable for fighting oppression. They are crimes against humanity. Columbia School of Social Work - you've abandoned the upholding of the basic human rights, basiprinciples of social work. You have lost all credibility to teach SW. Julia Chaitin (@jchaitin2445) December 4, 2023 'Will not feel safe on campus' In a post on X, a student of the University said, "I lost multiple friends at the nova festival. I will not feel safe on campus while this is happening. This is the rhetoric of justifying worldly regarded terrorism. This must not go on at Columbia University." I am a student at Columbia and have a final presentation on campus on the sixth. I lost multiple friends at the nova festival. I will not feel safe on campus while this is happening. This is the rhetoric of justifying worldly regarded terrorism. This must not go on @Columbia intel chief student (@dat_yid) December 4, 2023 A user also pointed out that the invitation has a dove symbol on it. The bird is used as a sign of peace. I love the irony of the dove as a symbol for peace RabbiJewbaccaGoldvasser (@rabbijewbaccag) December 4, 2023 The CBS News report further said leaders of students supporting Israel and Students of Justice in Palestine, both feel "unsafe on the campus of Columbia University" which has been the site of ongoing heated protests over the Israel-Hamas war. In October, days after the war began, more than 100 professors of the Columbia University came together to sign a letter in support of students who expressed their views on the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The students voiced their support for Hamas' "military action" in Israel on October 7. With demonstrations picking up pace, some of the university's prominent donors have threatened to withhold their financial contributions. To contain protests, the Columbia University campus gates have been kept locked with entrances being guarded by NYPD (New York Police Department). After an American warship navigated in disputed South China Sea waters, China on Monday criticised the US, highlighting the continued military tensions between the two countries. According to South China Morning post, citing a statement from the Chinese military, the USS Gabrielle Giffords appearance on Monday near the Second Thomas Shoal seriously violated Chinas sovereignty and security. The United States has deliberately disrupted the South China Sea, seriously violated Chinas sovereignty and security, severely undermined regional peace and stability, and seriously violated international law and basic norms governing international relations, a spokesperson for Chinas Southern Theatre Command said in a statement. China refers to Second Thomas Shoal as Renai Reef. Meanwhile, in response to the charge, Commander Megan Greene of the US Seventh Fleet said in a statement said that the US vessel was conducting routine operations in international waters that followed international law These operations demonstrate we are committed to upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific region where all nations, large and small, are secure in their sovereignty, can resolve disputes without coercion and have the freedom to navigate and fly consistent with international laws, rules and norms, she said in an email to South China Morning Post, adding that the US would not be deterred from continuing to work alongside its allies and partners. Although general relations have stabilised following President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinpings meeting in the US last month, tensions between the two countries still exist over US military action. Since former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August 2022 a visit to which the Peoples Liberation Army retaliated with never-before-seen military drills top-level military ties have been severed. Beijing has not yet announced a replacement for fired Defence Minister Li Shangfu, despite US officials stating that China committed to policy-level negotiations with Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin during the Xi-Biden sitdown. According to Bloomberg, theres a chance that an incident in the South China Sea might turn into a conflict if theres no contact at all. With inputs from agencies Dozens of Israeli tanks, along with armored personnel carriers and bulldozers, entered the southern part of the Gaza Strip near Khan Yunis on Monday. The Israeli military is widely anticipated to launch a ground offensive in response to the October 7 attack by Hamas in southern Israel. Residents in the village of Al-Qarara near Khan Yunis told AFP that Israeli vehicles were positioned approximately two kilometers inside Palestinian territory. Additionally, tanks were observed on the southern section of Salah al-Din road, disrupting movement between Deir al-Balah and Khan Yunis. Since the expiration of a truce on Friday, hostilities have resumed, including rocket launches by militants in Gaza and Israeli airstrikes. According to the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, approximately 1.8 million people in Gaza, constituting roughly 75 perc ent of the population, have been displaced, seeking refuge in crowded and unsanitary shelters. Concerns are rising as people fear being pushed toward the Egypt border. Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus asserted on Monday that Israel is not aiming to permanently displace anyone. We are not trying to move anybody from anywhere permanently, he said. With inputs from AFP Molly Tuttle performs onstage in February during Spotifys 2023 Best New Artist Party at Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has said the company will lay off about one-sixth of its staff on the heels of two prior rounds of layoffs this year. Monica Schipper/Getty Images for Spotify Spotify is slashing its global workforce by about one-sixth in its latest cost-cutting measure. In a memo to staff on Monday, CEO Daniel Ek stated that the cuts would impact 17% of the companys more than 9,000 employees, translating to approximately 1,500 people. Tech layoffs: Here are the job cuts impacting Bay Area workers Advertisement Article continues below this ad I recognize this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions, Ek wrote. To be blunt, many smart, talented and hard-working people will be departing us. This move represents the third and most extensive round of layoffs this year at Spotify, which has offices across North America, including a location at 425 California St. in San Francisco. The cuts come on the heels of the companys release of its popular Spotify Wrapped report, which gives users lists of their most streamed content. According to its third-quarter performance report, the streaming service significantly grew its subscriber base to 574 million users, achieving an 11% increase in total revenue, reaching $3.6 billion. The Stockholm-based company reported a quarterly profit of $34 million, its highest figure since the 2021 coronavirus pandemic. Despite these achievements, Ek highlighted that the company has struggled to make a profit, reporting an overall loss of over $500 million in revenue since the beginning of the year. We debated making smaller reductions throughout 2024 and 2025, Ek said. Yet, considering the gap between our financial goal state and our current operational costs, I decided that a substantial action to rightsize our costs was the best option to accomplish our objectives. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Alongside the layoffs, Spotify last year trimmed some of its original programming, including various podcasts and true crime series. Employees affected by the layoffs can expect to receive, on average, a severance package equivalent to around five months of pay, coupled with continued health care benefits during that period. As part of a protracted FBI counterintelligence investigation, Manuel Rocha, a former US ambassador to Bolivia and American diplomat, was taken into custody in Miami on Friday. According to reports, Rocha, 73, is accused of working as a covert agent for the Cuban government. Insiders who spoke with the Associated Press on condition of anonymity said that more information about the case is expected during his court appearance on Monday. The US Justice Department is reportedly building a case against Rocha, alleging his involvement in advancing the interests of the Cuban government. Federal law mandates individuals engaged in political activities on behalf of foreign governments within the US to register with the Justice Department, which has intensified its efforts to combat unlawful foreign lobbying. The Justice Department declined to comment, and Rochas legal representation remains unclear. Attempts to reach his wife for comment were unsuccessful. Rochas extensive 25-year diplomatic career spanned both Democratic and Republican administrations, with significant assignments in Latin America during the Cold War era. Born in Colombia and raised in New York City, Rocha earned degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Georgetown before joining the foreign service in 1981. His diplomatic roles included serving at the US Interests Section in Cuba during a period of strained relations with Fidel Castros government. Rochas career featured impactful interventions, such as during the 2002 Bolivian presidential race, where he warned of potential US aid withdrawal if the country elected Evo Morales, a former coca grower. Following retirement from the State Department, Rocha pursued a second career in business. He presided over a gold mine in the Dominican Republic and held senior positions in various organizations, including a coal exporter, a cannabis industry mergers facilitator, a law firm, and Spanish public relations firms. As the legal proceedings unfold, Rochas diverse professional background adds complexity to an already intriguing case. The involved firms express commitment to transparency and cooperation with authorities, as Rochas legal journey continues. The National Security Council (NSC) has elevated the threat level for Israelis in 80 countries due to the Gaza war, according to a Jerusalem Post report, citing a newly released list. The National Security Council notes heightened risks from Iran, its proxies like Hamas, and global jihad elements targeting Israeli and Jewish interests worldwide. This coincides with a continuous and significant increase in incitement, attempted attacks, and widespread manifestations of anti-Semitism in many countries, the report quoted NSC as saying. According to the report, an NSC official has advised Israelis to carefully consider their travel destinations, acknowledging an unprecedented potential for violence from terrorist attempts and increased anti-Semitism. A senior National Security Council official told Jewish Insider that many terrorist attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets around the world were prevented from the start of the war. While the official would not state a number, he said, We never saw such a rise across the boardThere were individual incidents in Western Europe, but not in recent years nor in such quantities. There is an awakening among global jihadist groups, like Al Qaeda and ISIS, the senior official warned. Several Western countries, including the UK, Germany, France, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and Russia, were moved from the councils Level 1 category, which is basic precautionary measures to Level 2, which is increased precautionary measures. Some countries, like South Africa, Eritrea, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan, were raised to Level 3, suggesting essential travel only. The NSC has recommended postponing travel to regions with high warning levels, including the Middle East, North Caucasus, countries surrounding Iran, and certain Muslim countries in Asia. Travelers are advised to steer clear of demonstrations, protests, and check for anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish activity in their destination, as per the advisory. Once abroad, individuals should avoid displaying Israeli and Jewish symbols, large gatherings of officials, and keep embassy/consulate contact details and emergency services information readily available. With inputs from agencies In the aftermath of the brutal October 7 attacks, Israeli investigators have uncovered evidence suggesting that both men and women experienced sexual violence and rape perpetrated by Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists, according to activists. In a report by The Daily Mail, Yael Sherer, a spokesperson for Israels Survivors of Sexual Violence advocacy group, highlighted the presence of physical evidence and eyewitness accounts supporting instances of sexual violence against both genders during the attacks. The investigation, led by Shelly Harush, is the largest ever conducted by Israeli police into sexual violence and crimes against women. Harush emphasized that sexual crimes were evidently part of the Hamas terrorists plan, with the intention to terrify and humiliate people. Police have collected thousands of statements, photographs and video clips that have been called unbearable to watch from a mothers perspective and include girls whose pelvises were broken they had been raped so much, Harush said. Yoni Saadon, a survivor of the Nova music festival attack, described witnessing horrifying acts of sexual violence against women during the assault. His account included a deeply disturbing incident where a woman was beheaded for refusing to be stripped naked. Saadons recollections underline the brutality and inhumanity of the attackers. The report also sheds light on the ongoing trauma faced by survivors, with support groups providing a space for individuals to share their harrowing experiences. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, a lawyer and professor, criticised international agencies for their reluctance to categorize the October 7 attacks as crimes against humanity, despite efforts by advocacy groups to draw attention to the explicit acts of sexual violence committed by Hamas. As the investigation continues, the evidence suggests widespread rape during the October 7 attacks, with numerous victims left naked and showing signs of severe injuries. Haim Outmezgine, commander of a Zaka unit, noted that the attackers seemed intent on spreading maximum horror, including killing, burning alive, and raping as part of their mission. David Katz, head of the Lahav 443 criminal investigation unit, indicated that the inquiry into these crimes could take six to eight months. The article emphasizes the urgent need for international recognition of the sexual violence as crimes against humanity, as survivors and advocates seek justice for the victims of this appalling tragedy. The President of Guinea-Bissau Umaro Sissoco Embalo dissolved the parliament after an attempted coup in the West African nation. President Embalo issued a decree on Monday, saying that the date of forthcoming legislative elections will be set at the opportune moment, in line with the constitution. Last year, a similar attempt was made to destabilise the government. President Umaro Sissoco Embalo had said that three people previously arrested by U.S. authorities for drug trafficking were behind an attempted coup last week. Former navy admiral Bubo Na Tchuto and his aides Tchamy Yala and Papis Djeme were arrested in 2013 in a high-profile U.S. drug sting on a luxury yacht off the West African coast for conspiring to ship cocaine into the United States. Guinea-Bissau has seen around 11 successful or failed coups since gaining independence from Portugal in 1974. It is a major transit point for Latin American cocaine headed for Europe, which has contributed to its instability. With inputs from agencies. Iran has reportedly escalated executions with more than 700 carried out in 2023 alone, including 176 since the Israel-Hamas conflict began on October 7. Iran Human Rights (IHR) raised concerns about the heightened risk faced by political prisoners and protesters since Israel launched a military offensive on Gaza after the Hamas attack. Other human rights organizations, including Hengaw and Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRA), also confirmed a significant increase in executions. IHR has urged Western countries, particularly European nations to denounce the executions and break their silence on the matter. It also emphasised the need to address the arbitrary execution of over three individuals daily by the Iranian government. The organisation highlighted a record of 707 executions in 2023 alone, including children and women, marking an unprecedented figure in the last eight years, according to reports. Human rights advocates argue that Iran is exploiting the global focus on the Gaza conflict to target dissidents, executing individuals without proper judicial processes. Since the start of the war, there has been little international focus on the human rights situation in Iran, and there has been no substantial response to the significant increase in executions, he added, according to the Guardian. In the last two months, Iran executed individuals including 17-year-old Hamidreza Azari, accused of murder based on a forced confession. Milad Zohrevand, the eighth protester linked to the Women, Life, Freedom movement, was also executed for participating in anti-government protests. The UN condemned Zohrevands execution, citing a trial lacking due process. Tehran also executed Majid Kazemi, Saleh Mirhashemi, and Saeed Yaghoubi, accusing them of war against god for their involvement in protests. Human rights groups allege police torture to extract confessions. In October, the UN expressed concern, saying that Iran executed people at an alarming rate, with 419 killed between January and July 2023, marking a 30% increase from the same period in 2022. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Qatari Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani and discussed the war against Hamas in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian territories. Both the leaders also emphasised on the need for de-escalation and a ceasefire. Qatar committed to restore calm The Qatari PM told Blinken that his country, alongside other mediation partners, was committed to the ongoing efforts to restore calm in the region. The Israel-Hamas war started on 7 October after the attack by the Palestinian terrorist group, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and the abduction of about 240 Israel and foreign hostages. In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Blinken confirmed talking to Qatari PM about the ongoing efforts to facilitate the safe return of all hostages and further increase levels of aid to civilians in Gaza. Spoke with Qatari Prime Minister Al Thani about ongoing efforts to facilitate the safe return of all hostages and further increase levels of aid to civilians in Gaza. Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) December 4, 2023 According to the US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller, Blinken also reiterated his gratitude for Qatars partnership and critical efforts to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas and enable the recent humanitarian pause in Gaza." Late last month, Qatar brokered a deal between Israel, Hamas and Egypt, in coordination with the United States, to release foreign nationals and critically injured Palestinian civilians from Gaza to Egypt. The Israel-Hamas truce that began on 24 November lasted for a week and secured the release of more than 100 hostages, mostly women and children from Gaza. The ceasefire came to an end after Hamas, as per the provisions of the deal, did not provide a list of hostages expected for release the next day. As per the deal, for each hostage, Israel was asked to release three Palestinian prisoners. Israel claimed that Hamas had refused to release additional female abductees and two remaining child hostages, as part of the deal, and thus violated the agreement. On Friday (1 December), moments before the pause in fighting came to an end, Hamas fired rockets into Israel following which Israel resumed its air and land operation in Gaza. In his conversation with Blinken, the Qatari PM expressed concern that the resumption of fighting after that humanitarian pause has complicated mediation efforts and worsens the humanitarian crisis. Al-Thani also conveyed Qatar's condemnation of all forms of targeting civilians, especially women and children, saying actions such as these, including the policy of collective punishment, are unacceptable under any circumstances. The statement by the Qatari PM underscored the urgent requirement for opening humanitarian corridors to ensure the safe passage of relief and aid to Palestinians affected by the ongoing conflict. With inputs from agencies On December 10, the executive board of the World Health Organisation will convene in an emergency meeting to address the health crisis in Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinian ambassador is advocating for increased medical assistance and easier access for foreign healthcare professionals. The session will be called by Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus after consulting with the chair from Qatar, as the WHO revealed on Monday that it had received requests to conduct the meeting from 15 different nations. The meeting will primarily address Gaza, which is engaged in conflict between Israel and Hamas, according to Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. It will also address attacks on the health sector in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Due to fuel shortages and Israeli bombs, only a small portion of Gazas hospitals are still open, and those that are are being more and more overloaded with newly arrived wounded. According to a WHO database, since Israels cross-border strike on October 7th, which was followed by Hamass invasion of Gaza and retaliatory aerial bombardment, there have been 427 attacks on healthcare facilities located in Palestinian territories. Who is thought to be behind the attacks is not mentioned in the database. Israel has charged Hamas with employing common Gazans as human shields by locating weaponry and command centres inside of medical facilities and other non-military structures. As fighting in Gaza resumed on Saturday following the breakdown of a week-long truce, a senior advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel would assist in the delivery of humanitarian aid to the civilian population. Additionally, the WHO has issued a warning regarding the spread of illness, claiming that it could kill more people than the bombardment of Gaza and that the number of kid cases of diarrhoea is around 100 times higher than normal. Due to an Israeli bombing campaign, up to 80% of Gazas 2.3 million residents have evacuated their homes, turning much of the populated coastal strip into a barren wasteland. The 34-member WHO governing board convenes in January to set the agenda for the organizations annual assembly. Japan, China, France, and the United States are among countries currently holding seats. (With agency inputs) Residents and journalists on the ground reported that on Monday, intense Israeli airstrikes struck the southern part of the Gaza Strip, killing and injuring hundreds of Palestinians, including in locations where Israel had ordered civilians to seek shelter. After taking much of the now-devastated north, Israeli tanks and troops continued their ground campaign against Hamas fighters in the southern part of the enclave. Israel gave Palestinians orders early on Monday to evacuate some areas of Khan Younis, the major city in southern Gaza. However, locals claimed that the places they had been instructed to visit were also under attack. About 25% of Khan Younis is highlighted in yellow on a map that the Israeli military shared on social media site X, designating areas that need to be evacuated. There were three arrows pointing west and south, directing travellers to Rafah, a large town close to the Egyptian border, and the Mediterranean coast. In Khan Younis, desperate Gazans gathered their possessions and made their way to Rafah. The majority were on foot, moving in a mournful and silent parade past abandoned buildings. However, Thomas White, the director of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, claimed that residents of Rafah were being compelled to leave. According to the official Palestinian news agency WAFA, an Israeli airstrike on two schools in Gaza Citys Daraj neighbourhood that were housing displaced Palestinians resulted in at least 50 fatalities. It was not immediately feasible to independently verify the report or get a response from the Gaza Health Ministry. An Israeli army spokesman stated that the report was being investigated. In a related development, the health ministry said that in eight weeks of fighting, Israeli bombardment of the Hamas-ruled enclave has killed at least 15,899 Palestinians, 70% of them women or children. There could be many more missing and buried under the debris. Israel began its campaign to destroy Hamas in punishment for its gunmens cross-border attack on October 7. According to Israeli counts, they massacred 1,200 people and took 240 captives, making it the worst day in Israels 75-year history. Israel charges that Hamas operates from residential areas, including tunnels that are only demolished by massive bombs, endangering residents. Hamas disputes that it does. A large portion of the populous coastal strip in Gaza has been converted to a bleak wasteland by the Israeli bombing assault, forcing up to 80% of the 2.3 million residents to flee their homes. Since a week-long truce ended on Friday, Israeli soldiers have rapidly advanced deep into the southern half of Gaza, having largely taken control of the northern half in November. Residents claim that tanks have closed off the main north-south route by driving into Gaza from the border fence. According to the Israeli military, the main route north from Khan Younis constitutes a battlefield and was now shut. (With agency inputs) A district court in Israel will resume the hearing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus corruption case on Tuesday after a more than two-month hiatus due to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. The case known as Case 4000 or the Bezeq-Walla bribery case allegedly took regulatory steps beneficial to Bezeq Telecommunications in exchange for favourable media coverage on the Walla website, earlier owned by Bezeq. The Jerusalem District Court will resume hearing on 74-year-old Netanyahus corruption case on Tuesday. In June, the three judges in the case recommended that the prosecution withdraw the bribery charge. The prosecution, however, declined to withdraw the charge and decided to continue the trial as planned, after which the court heard the testimonies of the people concerned. The last hearing in the bribery case was held on September 20, after which the court adjourned for a holiday break, which got extended due to Hamas brutal attack on Israel on October 7 and the subsequent war. The courts had since shifted to an emergency schedule, during which only urgent hearings were held. The trial in Netanyahus corruption cases was halted as they were not considered urgent. Last week, Justice Minister Yariv Levin signed regulations allowing the courts to resume normal operations. Under the directives, courts have resumed activity with exceptions for attorneys and litigants now serving in the army reserves or who have been evacuated from their homes under government orders. In addition, legal procedures have been frozen in connection with lawyers and litigants who have been taken hostage or deemed missing, as well as parents, spouses, children, and siblings of hostages and missing persons and other family members who qualify for government assistance, under the Law for the Funding of Prisoner, Hostage and Missing Person Families. Last week, Justice Minister Yariv Levin signed regulations allowing the courts to resume normal operations. Under the directives, courts have resumed activity with exceptions for attorneys and litigants now serving in the army reserves or who have been evacuated from their homes under government orders. In addition, legal procedures have been frozen in connection with lawyers and litigants who have been taken hostage or deemed missing, as well as parents, spouses, children, and siblings of hostages and missing persons and other family members who qualify for government assistance, under the Law for the Funding of Prisoner, Hostage and Missing Person Families. If the war continues for several months, the question of how the war and the hearings can be conducted simultaneously will have to be addressed. Netanyahu is also on trial for two additional counts of fraud and breach of trust in Case 1000, which concerns gifts he allegedly inappropriately received from billionaire benefactors, and Case 2000, in which he allegedly negotiated to obtain favourable media coverage in a newspaper in exchange for curtailing its competitors, The Times of Israel newspaper reported. The death toll from Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip has surged to 15,523 since the start of the conflict on October 7, the Health Ministry in the besieged Palestinian enclave announced Sunday. With inputs from PTI. A security guard was killed and another injured on Monday in a stabbing incident at Macys in Philadelphia, United States. The tragic event unfolded at the department store located in the 1300 block of Market Street in Center City. According to the interim police commissioner John Stanford, the incident commenced around 10:45 am (local time) when an individual allegedly tried to steal multiple hats from the store, reported CBS News. Security intervened, successfully retrieving the merchandise after a confrontation. Despite this, the individual was allowed to leave but returned approximately 15 minutes later. Upon returning to the store, the individual targeted one of the security guards, eventually running towards a second guard with a knife, resulting in stabbing injuries. The second guard, attempting to assist his colleague, sustained several slash and stab wounds. Both guards were taken to Jefferson Hospital, where the 30-year-old guard succumbed to his injuries, while the 23-year-old guard suffered stab wounds to his face and left arm. The suspect fled on the Market-Frankford Line but was arrested later at SEPTAs Somerset Station. The individuals identity has not been disclosed. Philadelphia police are overseeing the ongoing investigation. With inputs from agencies Jessica Flores is a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle. Before joining The Chronicle in 2021, she worked for USA Today, NPR affiliate KPCC and Curbed LA. Originally from L.A., she received her masters degree in journalism from the University of Southern California and a bachelors degree from Mount Saint Marys University in Los Angeles. She can be reached at Jessica.Flores@sfchronicle.com. An anti-corruption court in Pakistan, hearing the Al-Qadir Trust case, has summoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi for a hearing on December 6. The court has issued non-bailable arrest warrants for six other individuals involved in the case. The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) filed the case against Khan and seven others, including his wife, alleging corruption related to the Al-Qadir Trust. Judge Muhammad Bashir of Accountability Court No. 1 in Islamabad issued a written order for the appearance of the accused. Imran Khan, already in Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, was directed to be produced at the next hearing. The other six accused, including property tycoon Malik Riaz Hussain and his son Ali Riaz, Farhat Shahzadi, a close friend of the spouse of the ex-prime minister, former special assistants to the premier Mirza Shahzad Akbar and Zulfi Bukhari, and lawyer Ziaul Mustafa Nasim were stated as at large and the court issued non-bailable arrest warrants against them. The judge also said that the next hearing would be conducted at Adiala jail as per a notification issued by the law ministry on November 14. According to the charges, Khan and Bibi obtained billions of rupees and land worth dozens of acres from Bahria Town Ltd of Malik Riaz Hussain for legalising Rs 50 billion that was returned to the country by the UK. With inputs from PTI In a concerning development, the Pakistan Taliban, operating under the formal appellation of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has successfully established a shadow rule in various parts of the volatile northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, according to a report. The militant group is now directing local officials and contractors to consult and cooperate with its clandestine administrative apparatus, reported Times of India. According to the report, KP Governor Ghulam Ali expressed his apprehensions regarding the regions security in a televised interview on Saturday. He said the current situation is unfavourable for political parties to hold rallies in the province, especially with the general elections scheduled for 8 February. The governor drew parallels with the restive Balochistan province in the southwest, noting that a similar precarious situation persists there, added the report. The TTP recently issued directives to contractors associated with the governments water, power, and oil departments in North Waziristan, informing them about the establishment of a ministry of economic affairs by the group. Contractors were instructed to engage with the new ministry and come to an agreement on projects within a five-day timeframe. The TTP warned of armed action in case of non-compliance. The purported aim of the new ministry is to raise funds for the groups pious jihad and enhance the administrative setup in the areas under its influence. According to the ToI report, insiders reveal that the TTP has established covert departments in every tribal district along the Afghan border, as well as in KPs southern districts of Tank, Dera Ismail Khan, Lakki Marwat, and Bannu. These clandestine units reportedly engage in blackmailing businessmen and affluent individuals, in addition to handling the resolution of disputes among locals. Faced with perceived shortcomings in both the legal system and local government, individuals are increasingly turning to the TTPs justice ministry to address their grievances. The situation raises serious concerns about the erosion of governance in the affected regions. Authorities are closely monitoring the evolving scenario, especially with the upcoming elections on the horizon, added the report. With inputs from agencies Seaborne exports of diesel and gas oil from Russian ports increased by 8.5% in November compared to the previous month, reaching approximately 2.8 million metric tons. This surge follows the lifting of an export ban and an expansion in production, as reported by traders and LSEG data. To address a domestic shortage, Russia had implemented a temporary ban on diesel exports starting on September 21. The ban was partially lifted on October 9, allowing the resumption of ultra-low-sulphur diesel (ULSD) exports through Transneft pipelines. Subsequently, on November 22, Russia completely lifted the ban on summer diesel exports. In the first three weeks of November, diesel output from Russian refineries rose by almost 11% from an average October level to 238,120 tons per day, Reuters sources said. Russian ULSD shipments to Brazil hit a record high in November, data from traders and LSEG showed. Russian diesel has replaced a large amount of Brazils supplies, which were previously sourced from the U.S., traders said. Russia has diverted its diesel supplies to Brazil, Turkey, African and Asian countries after a full European Union embargo on Russian oil products went into effect in February this year. According to LSEG shipping data, at least 0.93 million tonnes of diesel were loaded in November in Russian ports, mainly the Baltic port of Primorsk, and were now heading to Brazil. Most of those cargoes will arrive in Brazilian ports in December. Between January and November ULSD shipments from Russian ports to Brazil have totalled 5.8 million metric tons, while diesel supplies from the U.S. have fallen to 2.25 million metric tons, after 5.9 million metric tons in the first 11 months of 2022, LSEG data showed. Russian diesel and gasoil seaborne exports to Turkey rose 16% month-on-month in November to 750,000 metric tons, according to shipping data. Last month about 550,000 metric tons of diesel and gasoil from Russian ports were heading to African countries, including Libya, Togo, Ghana, Senegal and Ivory Coast, LSEG data showed. Another 155,000 metric tons of diesel from Russia in November was destined for ship-to-ship transfers near the Greek port of Kalamata. The final destinations for these cargoes is not yet known. About 200,000 metric tons of diesel has no confirmed destination yet. All the above shipping data are based on the date of cargo departure. With inputs from Reuters. A senior regional official announced on Monday that Major General Vladimir Zavadsky, the deputy commander of Russias 14th Army Corps, has been killed in Ukraine. Alexander Gusev, the governor of the Russian region of Voronezh, declared Zavadsky dead at a combat post in the special operation zone but provided no other information. Russia uses the term special military operation to refer to the conflict in Ukraine, which is now nearing its second anniversary. According to the investigative news site iStories, Zavadsky was the seventh Major General whose passing has been officially recognised by Russia, making him one of the 12 senior officers to have been declared killed since the conflict began. As the Ukraine was grinds on, top Russian officer deaths have decreased, which military analysts have in some cases attributed to Ukrainian success in monitoring careless communications. As a former tank commander and highly decorated officer, Zavadsky was described by Gusev as having suffered transfixing pain upon his death. (With agency inputs) Accusing the US of applying double standards, North Korea blasted the US on Monday for permitting rival South Korea to launch a spy satellite from US soil while denouncing the Norths previous satellite launch. From Californias Vandenberg Space Force Base, South Korea launched its first spy satellite manufactured domestically into space last Friday. That followed North Koreas November 21 launch of its own military spy satellite into orbit for the first time. In contrast to the South Korean launch, Washington, Seoul, and their allies swiftly and strongly condemned North Korea for violating UN Security Council resolutions with its satellite liftoff. The international community sees any launch by North Korea that employs ballistic technology as a pretext for testing its missile technology. North Korea maintains it has the right to launch satellites and test missiles in the face of what it calls US-led military threats. It is a space-level tragicomedy that the US, going frantic with illegal denunciation and sanctions moves over the exercise of (North Koreas) sovereignty, has shown behaviour based on double standards by launching a spy satellite of (South Korea) in a shameless manner, an unidentified spokesperson for the Norths National Aerospace Technology Administration said in a statement. The statement said if the gangster-like logic of the US is connived and tolerated, global peace and stability will be exposed to an irrevocable grave danger. North Korea has said its spy satellite transmitted imagery with space views of key sites in the US and South Korea, including the White House and the Pentagon. But it hasnt yet released any of those satellite photos. Many outside experts question whether it can send militarily useful high-resolution imagery. North Korea has said itll launch additional spy satellites to better monitor its rivals moves and enhance the precision-guided strike capability of its missiles. South Korea also plans to launch four more spy satellites by 2025 under a contract with SpaceX. The establishment of its own space-based surveillance network would ease its dependence on US spy satellites to monitor strategic facilities in North Korea. Experts say launching a satellite aboard a SpaceX rocket is more economical and that South Korea also needs more tests to ensure the reliability of a launch rocket. Earlier on Monday, South Korea conducted a third test flight for a solid-fuel rocket near its southern Jeju island, according to the Souths Defence Ministry. A ministry statement said the launch was successful and put a civilian commercial satellite into orbit. Solid-fuel rockets require shorter launch times and cheaper development and manufacturing costs than liquid-fuel rockets. Experts say solid-fuel rockets are used to launch smaller spy satellite because they have weaker thrust force than similar-sized liquid-fuel rockets. They say the development of solid-fuel rockets can help improve South Koreas missile technology as well. After the North Korean satellite launch, South Korea said it would resume frontline aerial surveillance in response. South Korea said North Korea reacted by restoring border guard posts. Both North and South Korean steps would breach their earlier agreement to ease military tensions along their border. The North Korean satellite liftoff followed two earlier launch failures. South Korea suspects North Korea likely received Russian technical assistance for a satellite launch program as part of expanding cooperation between the two nations, both locked in separate confrontations with the United States. (with inputs from The Associated Press) Together with the Finnish Border Guard, the warships of Finland, Estonia, and Britain practised protecting submerged infrastructure in the Baltic Sea region on Monday, according to a statement from Finlands Defence Forces. This region, which is well-known for its extensive submerged infrastructure, saw damage to three telecommunications cables and a gas pipeline that connected Finland and Estonia at the beginning of October. Finland and Estonia believe there is a connection between the occurrences involving the gas pipeline and the cable, and that the damage was caused by a container ship flying the flag of Hong Kong pulling its anchor down the seabed. China has declared that, in compliance with international law, it is willing to supply the relevant information. The cooperative exercise, which is scheduled to continue on Tuesday, aims to build capacities for underwater monitoring and protection. Though the exercise is being conducted under the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) defensive cooperation of NATO, which includes the Nordic and Baltic states, the Netherlands, and Britain, all three participants are members of the military alliance. Britain announced on Thursday that it would participate in JEF patrols in the area in December by sending seven Royal Navy ships and a maritime patrol aircraft. Amid mounting worries about Russian sabotage, Britain had announced in October that it intended to increase its military presence in Northern Europe, sending 20,000 troops there the following year. The goal was to assist safeguard vital infrastructure in the area. Additionally, last year, the Nord Stream gas pipelines from Russia to Germany were destroyed in the Baltic Sea, which investigators say were deliberately blown up, although they have not yet named a suspect. (With agency inputs) A Non-residential Pakistani woman living in Manchester, UK avoided imprisonment despite admitting to pocketing nearly 100,000 in state benefits over a five-year period. Mahmood claimed benefits on behalf of her aunt and uncle, who were living in Pakistan, but asserted that she was unaware of the inability to claim for relatives residing abroad. During her trial at Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester, Saaba Mahmood, 36, a mother of eight from Heald Green near Stockport, Greater Manchester, pleaded guilty to four charges of failing to disclose information to make a gain and one count of fraud. However, she was spared a 16-month jail term, with the sentence suspended for 18 months, provided she participates in a 15-day offenders program at a cost of 1,500. Prosecutor Julian Goode revealed that Mahmood acted as an appointee for her aunt, uncle, and mother, receiving benefit payments on their behalf. The charges included Disability Living Allowance and Employment Support Allowance, totaling 94,858.44 in overpayments. In her defense, Mahmood claimed a lack of skills in understanding how to live responsibly in society and asserted that she did not perceive her actions as causing harm. Her lawyer, Isobel Thomas, emphasized Mahmoods remorse, early guilty plea, and the potential negative impact on her eight children, especially considering her husbands health condition. The court heard that Mahmoods husband, suffering from schizophrenia, would face distress, and her children, some of whom had experienced assault, might be placed in foster care if she were imprisoned. Additionally, Mahmood is a caregiver for her aunt, who has dementia, hepatitis C, and kidney failure. Judge Angela Nield acknowledged the significant sums involved and the prolonged duration of the offenses. She highlighted the potential harm to vulnerable families when the benefits system is abused. Despite Mahmoods genuine remorse and the discipline of her family, the judge reluctantly suspended the sentence, recognizing the potential for rehabilitation. As Mahmood avoids immediate custody, she is mandated to complete 15 rehabilitation requirement days and 150 hours of unpaid work. However, she will face a Proceeds of Crime Act hearing in November to address the financial implications of her actions. Ukraine launched a probe into the allegations that Russian forces had killed Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered. Grainy footage circulating on social media suggested that two uniformed men were shot at close range after emerging from a dugout. The video shows the servicemen, one of them with hands raised walking out at gunpoint, lying down on the ground, and subsequently being fired upon by a group of Russian troops. The authenticity of the video and the circumstances in which it was filmed could not be immediately verified, and the timeline of the incident remains unclear. Responding to the footage, the Ukrainian General Prosecutors office launched a criminal investigation on Sunday. This move followed an online statement from the Ukrainian militarys press office, affirming the authenticity of the video. The video shows a group in Russian uniforms shooting, at point-blank range, two unarmed servicemen in the uniform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who were surrendering, the prosecutors office said in a Telegram update on Sunday. The Russian defence ministry did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. As of Sunday evening, there were no public statements from the Russian government or military on the video. Kyiv, its Western allies and international human rights organizations have repeatedly accused Moscow of breaching international humanitarian law since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Kremlin denies these allegations. The video first appeared Saturday on DeepState, a popular Ukrainian Telegram channel covering the war. The post claimed the footage came from the front lines near Avdiivka, a Ukrainian holdout in the countrys part-occupied east where there has been fierce fighting in recent weeks. The General Prosecutors Office on Sunday said that the alleged killing took place in the Pokrovsk district, which includes Avdiivka and surrounding areas. Its clear from the video that the Ukrainian servicemen are taking the necessary steps that show they are surrendering, Ukraines human rights chief, Dmytro Lubinets, said hours after the footage emerged on Saturday. In a statement posted to Telegram, Lubinets described the incident as yet another glaring example of Russias violations of international humanitarian law. Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military grouping that is fighting near Avdiivka, was cited by Ukrainian media as saying the video was a glaring confirmation of Moscows disrespect for the laws of war. In March, footage of a man exclaiming Glory to Ukraine before being gunned down in a wooded area sparked national outcry in Ukraine, as senior officials alleged that he was an unarmed prisoner of war killed by Russian soldiers. Last summer, Kyiv and Moscow also traded blame for a shelling attack on a prison in occupied eastern Ukraine that killed dozens of Ukrainian POWs. Both sides claimed the assault on the facility in Olenivka was aimed at covering up atrocities, with Ukrainian officials charging captive soldiers had been tortured and executed there. The U.N.s human rights chief in July rejected Moscows claim that a rocket strike had caused the blast. Also on Sunday, Ukraines energy ministry reported that close to 1,000 towns and villages suffered power outages that day, with hundreds of settlements in the west battered by wintry weather and others affected by ongoing fighting. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, late on Saturday assessed that military operations have slowed down all along the frontline in Ukraine due to poor weather, with mud bogging down tracked vehicles and making it hard for lighter equipment and infantry to advance. Even so, Shtupun, of Ukraines Tavria military command that oversees the stretch of frontline near Avdiivka, said in a separate statement Sunday that Russian infantry attacks had intensified in the area over the past day. In a Telegram post, he insisted Ukrainian troops were holding firm in Avdiivka and another nearby town. In the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, at least two people died and seven more were wounded after Russian forces on Sunday shelled a high-rise apartment block and other civilian buildings, the head of the citys military administration said in a series of Telegram posts. One of the updates by Roman Mrochko featured a blurred photo of what he said was the body of a deceased civilian, apparently lying on a dirt road or in a yard outside the high-rise. The photos authenticity could not be independently verified. Regional Gov. Oleksandr Prokudin separately reported on Sunday that Russian shelling that day damaged two of Khersons hospitals. He did not immediately reference any casualties. Earlier in the day, a 78-year-old civilian died in a village northeast of Kherson after Russian shells slammed into his garage, according to a Telegram update by the regional Ukrainian military administration. With inputs from AP. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday said that the ties between Moscow and Berlin had been disrupted due to blasts in September 2022 affecting the Nord Stream pipelines. These pipelines were responsible for transporting Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Putin made this statement while receiving credentials from over 20 new foreign ambassadors, including those from Germany and Britain, during a ceremony at the Kremlin. The current frozen state of (Germanys) relations with Russia and this is not on our initiative, I want to emphasise is unprofitable. It is unprofitable both for us and for you, but especially, in my view, for Germany, Putin said. Energy has always been an attractive area of bilateral cooperation, he said, reported Reuters. This cooperation was literally disrupted by the sabotage on the Nord Stream pipelines. Russia has attributed the pipeline explosions to the United States, Britain, and Ukraine, although all three nations have denied any involvement. Putin also expressed optimism about the potential improvement in relations between Moscow and London, stating, Let us hope that the situation will change for the better in the interests of our two countries and peoples. The backdrop for strained relations between Russia and Western countries can be traced back to Putins decision in February 2022 to deploy tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, a move that triggered extensive economic sanctions from the Western nations. With inputs from Reuters This week, Russian President Vladimir Putin will go to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to a Monday report from the Russian news outlet Shot, which quoted Putins assistant Yury Ushakov. The three nations that make up the OPEC+ group of oil producers decided last Thursday to voluntarily reduce their output by a total of roughly 2.2 million barrels per day. This is when the claimed visit took place. Because of uncertainties regarding the extent to which the voluntary cuts would be carried out, markets responded to the agreement with cynicism. Following the statement last Friday, oil prices dropped by 2%, and they continued to fall on Monday. As of 1709 GMT, Brent crude was down around 0.6% at $78.45. The 2.2 million bpd amount included a 1.3 million bpd voluntary cut from Saudi Arabia and Russia. According to a remark from Shot, Ushakov stated that Putin would first travel to the United Arab Emirates and then Saudi Arabia, where talks would primarily involve Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. I hope that these will be very useful negotiations, which we consider extremely important, Ushakov stated. Putin has not been overseas very often in recent years, and when he has, it has been largely to former Soviet states. In October, he made his most recent journey outside of those nations, to China. In addition to working with OPEC+, Putin is eager to develop ties with the Gulf states as part of his efforts to form international alliances with non-Western nations and show that the US and its allies have failed to isolate Russia due to the conflict in Ukraine. In March, Putins ability to travel overseas was curtailed due to an arrest order issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the war crime of deporting Ukrainian children to Russia. Russia refuted the accusation and referred to the action as absurd, claiming that it was illegal in any event because Russia is not an ICC member. Putin can visit both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates without worrying about being detained in accordance with the ICC warrant because neither nation is a member of the court. (With agency inputs) An atmospheric river-fueled storm is expected to bring heavy precipitation to the Pacific Northwest on Monday and Tuesday and modest rainfall to the Bay Area on Wednesday. Baron/Lynx A fire hose in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, will dominate the West Coast weather pattern this week. This strong atmospheric river-fueled storm is forecast to bring heavy precipitation totals and major flooding to the Pacific Northwest, while California remains comparatively drier. By the time the river of moisture reaches the Bay Area on Wednesday, it will fade to the intensity of a stream or creek. San Francisco should still get a decent soaking, but the North Bay will get the heaviest precipitation, up to an inch. Showers are forecast to hang around Thursday and Friday as temperatures trend downward late in the week. Live storm map: See where rain is hitting California and Bay Area Advertisement Article continues below this ad Smells like pineapples Over the weekend, a cold atmospheric river-fueled storm dumped heavy rain and multiple feet of snow in Washington, Oregon and Northern California, with its remnants washing out as light rain over the Bay Area. A different flavor of atmospheric river with warm Hawaiian roots, known as a Pineapple Express, is expected to push the snow level to 10,000 feet over the Pacific Northwest on Monday and Tuesday. The National Weather Service forecasts as much as 11 inches of rain on top of the weekend snow, causing rapid melting. Dozens of rivers and streams forecast to exceed flood stage and avalanche warnings are expected in the Cascade mountains. Parts of the Cascade Range in the Pacific Northwest could receive more than 10 inches of precipitation this week. A few inches of rain are possible in Northern California. Baron/Lynx The orientation of the Pineapple Express leaves the Bay Area on the muggy, warm side of the storm track. Partly cloudy skies and areas of mist are possible Monday, with highs in the upper 50s to upper 60s. Precipitation is forecast to remain well north of the Bay Area on Tuesday, as the warm tropical winds push the high temperatures into the mid- to upper 60s, and even lower 70s in the South Bay. Areas of dense morning fog are possible Monday and Tuesday. Advertisement Article continues below this ad On Tuesday night, the weakening Pineapple Express is forecast to slide south over Northern California, with its remnants crossing over the Bay Area by Wednesday morning. Expect a tenth to a half inch of rain in San Francisco, Oakland and along the Peninsula on Wednesday, with up to a quarter inch in the South Bay and East Bay interior valleys. Marin and Sonoma counties could see up to three-quarters of an inch. Weather models predict rain around the Bay Area on Wednesday morning, with showers continuing through the day. Baron/Lynx Winds will shift out of the northwest on Wednesday, blowing in a chillier air mass for high temperatures in the lower to mid-60s. Thursday and Friday will be even cooler, in the upper 50s to lower 60s. Showers could add an additional quarter-inch to the rain gauge Thursday and Friday. Overnight lows will trend cooler throughout the week, with some 30s possible in the North and East Bay on Thursday night. The strength of this storm will increase the risk of rip currents and sneaker waves along northwest-facing beaches. The National Weather Service Bay Area office has issued a beach hazards statement until 4 a.m. Tuesday for the North Bay, Peninsula and Monterey Bay coastlines. Monday breakdown San Francisco: The recent wet weather, combined with light winds, will be the perfect recipe for areas of fog and mist around the city in the \morning. Fog will burn off midday for partly cloudy skies and highs in the lower 60s, a few degrees above normal for San Francisco in early December. Advertisement Article continues below this ad A beach hazards statement is in effect for sneaker waves and rip currents along the coastline until 4 a.m. Tuesday. Fog is expected to redevelop overnight. Lows will be in the lower to mid-50s. North Bay: Areas of fog and mist are possible throughout the day as a weak disturbance passes over Northern California. Clouds will slowly burn off throughout the day, with some sunshine expected in the late afternoon. Highs will be in the mid-60s in Santa Rosa, Petaluma, San Rafael, Napa, Vallejo, Vacaville and Fairfield. Lower 60s are expected along the coastlines of Marin and Sonoma counties, where a beach hazards statement is in effect for sneaker waves and rip currents until 4 a.m. Tuesday. This is the beginning of the tule fog season, a hazardous weather phenomenon for drivers throughout the Central Valley and near the delta. The recent wet weather, combined with light winds and mainly clear skies, will be the perfect recipe for areas of fog Monday night, especially in Solano County. Lows will be in the mid- to upper 40s. Advertisement Article continues below this ad East Bay: Patchy fog is possible throughout the morning, with weather models highlighting the bay shoreline for the best chance of fog and mist. Fog and clouds will slowly burn off for some afternoon sunshine. Highs will be in the lower 60s in Richmond, Alameda, Oakland, Hayward and Fremont. Mid-60s are in store for Antioch, Concord, Walnut Creek, Dublin, Livermore and Pleasanton. Fog is expected to redevelop overnight with temperatures dropping to the mid-40s inland and upper 40s near the bayshore. Take particular caution when commuting Tuesday morning, as some of the fog could be quite dense, especially near Antioch, Concord and Martinez. Pacific Coast and Peninsula: Some morning fog is possible along the Highway 101 and Interstate 280 corridor. The fog is expected to burn off by noon for a mainly sunny afternoon. Highs will be in the mid- to upper 60s in San Mateo, Redwood City and Menlo Park. Morning mist is possible in Daly City and San Bruno before clearing skies in the afternoon and highs in the lower 60s. In Pacifica and Half Moon Bay, expect highs around 60 degrees, but be wary of sneaker waves and rip currents. A beach hazards statement is in effect for the San Mateo County coastline until 4 a.m. Tuesday. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Fog is possible again overnight and Tuesday morning. Lows will be in the mid- to upper 40s. South Bay and Santa Cruz: Morning clouds should clear throughout the day for afternoon sunshine. Highs will range from lower 60s in the Santa Cruz Mountains to mid-60s in Santa Cruz and upper 60s in San Jose and Santa Clara. A beach hazards statement is in effect for sneaker waves and rip currents along Monterey Bay from noon Monday until 4 a.m. Tuesday. Imran Ibn Mansur, a British Islamic scholar who goes by the online moniker Dawah Man, warned against Muslims participating in protests during a lecture on December 1, 2023, at the Darussalam Masjid and Cultural Centre in Southall, a London suburb. He claimed that attending a protest would be impossible without Muslim sisters leaving their homes, standing next to a guy that is going to take it in the backside at night, and the free mixing of men and women. Ibn Mansur cited a verse in the Quran that told women to stay at home, and if they did leave, he said, they had to cover themselves with a jilbab or a niqab, a face veil. He asked: Is Allah going to give victory to people who are disobeying Him outright? The lecture was streamed live on the Facebook page of the mosque. A viral video depicting the conversion of a temple in Ahmadpur Lumma town of Sadiqabad in Pakistan into an animal farm has sparked widespread outrage. Another story of plight of minority hindu temples in Pakistan- A temple in Ahmedpur lamma city of Paks Panjab converted into Animal Farmpic.twitter.com/u4PFqUgQhn Megh Updates (@MeghUpdates) December 3, 2023 The video shared on X shows an ancient temple which has been converted into an animal enclosure and is now home to cattle, goats, ducks, and chickens. The video shows two men entering the premises and filming the video as they show around. The video became viral a day after another clip showcased how a Krishna temple was transformed into a madrassa and mosque in the same town. These incidents have ignited controversy and raised questions about the preservation of religious diversity and cultural heritage in the neighbouring country. Thats why they are in this condition with no food to eat, no fuel to burn and no money to have. Hope they suffer more for what they have done with our Hindu community there and our temples, said one of the user on X. Highlighting BJPs massive victory in the Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in Assembly elections, another user said, With todays result and the forthcoming results, this plight will soon end! All the best Paxtan! With inputs from agencies One of the main conspirators of the dastardly 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, Sajid Mir, who was lodged in the Central Jail of Dera Ghazi Khan in Pakistan has been poisoned, according to unconfirmed reports. A few months back Mir was shifted from Lahore Central Jail. As per sketchy details, Mir was airlifted by the Pakistan Army to CMH Institute of Medical Sciences, Bahawalpur. Who is Sajid Mir? Sajid Mir is a senior member of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and is wanted for his involvement in November 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai. Believed to be in his mid-40s, Mir is one of Indias most wanted terrorists and has a bounty of $5 million placed on his head by the US for his role in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks. In June, 2022, Mir was jailed for over 15 years in a terror-financing case by an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan. Pakistani authorities had in the past claimed Mir had died, but Western countries remained unconvinced and demanded proof of his death. In June this year, China blocked a move to designate Mir as a global terrorist by the UN. Slamming China, India said, it showed a lack of genuine political will of Beijing to fight the scourge of terrorism. On 20 June, 2023, a proposal was moved by the US and co-designated by India to blacklist Mir under the 1267 Al Qaeda Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council as a global terrorist and subject him to assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo. In a recent update on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Elon Musk, owner, and Chief Technical Officer (CTO), shared a revealing image showcasing Xs remarkable lead in organic traffic over Metas Facebook and Instagram. The post also shed light on the platforms significantly lower paid traffic and comparatively modest paid topic prices. According to the data shared by Musk, in November 2023 in the United States, X on desktop witnessed impressive search engine (SE) traffic, driven organically by Google, reaching 650.9 million. In contrast, Metas Facebook and Instagram trailed behind with 520.7 million and 496.5 million, respectively. The disparity continued in the realm of paid traffic, where X recorded only 1.1K (1100), while Instagram and Facebook reported 99.9K and 708.4K paid traffic, respectively. The trend extended to mobile traffic as well, with X outpacing Metas social media platforms in terms of organic traffic. Despite the substantial lead in organic reach, Xs paid traffic price remained considerably lower at 14.3K USD, while Instagram and Facebook reported 105.4K and 1.1 million USD, respectively. However, amidst these positive statistics, Musk acknowledged a significant challenge faced by X, with major advertisers withdrawing their campaigns in response to controversial comments made by Musk on the platform. Notable companies such as Disney, IBM, Warner Bros, and Discovery have distanced themselves from X, prompting Musk to address the issue at The New York Times DealBook Summit. Expressing his stance on the advertiser boycott, Musk stated, I dont want them to advertise. He defiantly added, If someone is going to blackmail me with advertising money, go f yourself. Musk also warned about the potential repercussions, stating, What the advertising boycott is going to do is its going to kill the company. The whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail. Lets see how Earth responds. The situation remains dynamic as X navigates the intersection of organic success and the challenges posed by the advertiser exodus. (With inputs from agencies) Jahlil Rainey, 19, of Houston, is in custody on a charge of murder in an October 29 shooting death in Richmond. 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Zurich, 4 December 2023 Ad hoc announcement pursuant to Art. 53 LR Patrick Frost has decided that he will step down as Group CEO at the Annual General Meeting of Swiss Life on 15 May 2024. The Swiss Life Board of Directors intends to propose the election of Patrick Frost as a member of the Board of Directors at the 2026 Annual General Meeting. The Board of Directors has appointed Matthias Aellig as his successor as Group CEO with effect from 16 May 2024. Marco Gerussi will succeed him as Group CFO. In addition, Jorg Arnold will step down at his own request as CEO of Swiss Life Germany at the end of June 2024 and take over as non-executive Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Swiss Life Deutschland Holding GmbH. He will be succeeded by Dirk von der Crone with effect from 1 July 2024. In spring 2024, there will be a change of leadership at Swiss Life: Patrick Frost, who joined the Group Executive Board of Swiss Life as Group CIO in 2006 and was appointed Group CEO on 1 July 2014, is stepping down of his own accord. He will hand over the leadership of the Group to Matthias Aellig. Patrick Frost: After serving for 18 years on the Group Executive Board of Swiss Life, ten of which as CEO, I have decided to step down from my operational role in May 2024 to focus more on strategic tasks. I am convinced that, in view of the very good performance of our company, now is the right time for a change at the top of the Group Executive Board. I am pleased to be able to hand over this role to Matthias Aellig, with whom I have had a very trustful working relationship for many years. Rolf Dorig, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Swiss Life: Since 2006, Patrick Frost has made a decisive contribution to the continued success of our company with his impressive work. His far-sighted approach as CEO made a profound and lasting impact on Swiss Life during challenging times. On behalf of the Board of Directors, the Group Executive Board and the employees of Swiss Life, I would like to thank him most sincerely for this. The Swiss Life Board of Directors intends to propose the election of Patrick Frost as a member of the Board of Directors at the 2026 Annual General Meeting. The Board of Directors has appointed the current Group CFO Matthias Aellig (1971) to succeed Patrick Frost as Group CEO with effect from 16 May 2024. Matthias Aellig has held key positions at Swiss Life since 2010, initially as Group Chief Risk Officer and since 2019 as Chief Financial Officer. Chairman of the Board of Directors Rolf Dorig: Matthias Aellig is among those personalities at our company who in recent years have played a key role in helping Patrick Frost shape the strategy of the entire Group. By selecting him as successor, the Board of Directors is demonstRating its commitment to continuity. I am very pleased to have this opportunity to work closely with Matthias Aellig in the coming years. Matthias Aellig: I am very much looking forward to continuing to shape the future of Swiss Life as CEO from mid-May. I would like to thank the Board of Directors for the confidence they have placed in me, and I am delighted to be able to continue our collaboration, also with both new colleagues on the Group Executive Board. In cooperation with the entire Group Executive Board and all our employees, I will do my utmost to continue on the successful path we have forged. Marco Gerussi (1977) will become Group CFO and a member of the Group Executive Board on 16 May 2024. He joined Swiss Life in 2010 and has held management positions in risk management and finance. Since 2018, as Head of Finance Transformation, he has been responsible for the challenging but successful introduction of the IFRS 17/9 accounting standards and the associated Group-wide finance systems. In addition, he took over as Head of Group IT in 2023. Furthermore, there will be a change at the helm of Swiss Life Germany in the summer of 2024: after seven years as CEO, Jorg Arnold will step down at his own request at the end of June 2024 and assume the role of non-executive Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Swiss Life Deutschland Holding GmbH. The Board of Directors and the Group Executive Board would like to thank him for his outstanding commitment. Since 2017, Jorg Arnold has driven Swiss Life Germany forward with great success. Under his leadership, both the number of advisors and the fee result of the owned IFAs almost doubled, while the value of new insurance business almost tripled. Dirk von der Crone (1976) will take over the helm of Swiss Life Germany as of 1 July 2024. He has been with the company since 2005 and a member of the local German Executive Committee since 2020, where he is responsible for Services and Operations for the owned IFAs as well as HR. Dirk von der Crone has made a significant contribution to the success of Swiss Life Germany over the years, for example by realigning purchasing operations, back office processes and product management at the owned IFAs. As CEO of Swiss Life Germany, he will become a member of the Group Executive Board of Swiss Life. Dirk von der Crones appointment is subject to the approval of the relevant supervisory authorities. Media conference Today at 10.30 a.m. (CET), Rolf Dorig, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Patrick Frost, Group CEO, and Matthias Aellig, Group CFO, will hold a media conference in German for media representatives at our head office (General-Guisan-Quai 40, Zurich). There will be an opportunity for short interviews with Rolf Dorig and Patrick Frost afterwards. Information Media Relations Phone +41 43 284 77 77 media.relations@swisslife.ch Investor Relations Phone +41 43 284 52 76 investor.relations@swisslife.ch www.swisslife.com Follow us on X and LinkedIn @swisslife_group / Swiss Life Group Further information All our media releases can be found at swisslife.com/mediareleases Swiss Life The Swiss Life Group is one of Europe's leading comprehensive life and pensions and financial solutions providers. In its core markets of Switzerland, France and Germany, Swiss Life offers individuals and corporations comprehensive and individual advice plus a broad range of own and partner products through its sales force and distribution partners such as brokers and banks. Swiss Life Select, Tecis, Horbach, Proventus and Chase de Vere advisors choose suitable products for customers from the market according to the Best Select approach. Swiss Life Asset Managers offers institutional and private investors access to investment and asset management solutions. Swiss Life provides multinational corporations with employee benefits solutions and high net worth individuals with structured life and pensions products. Swiss Life Holding Ltd, registered in Zurich, was founded in 1857 as Schweizerische Rentenanstalt. The shares of Swiss Life Holding Ltd are listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange (SLHN). The Swiss Life Group also includes various subsidiaries. The Group employs a workforce of around 10 000 and has at its disposal a distribution network of over 17 000 advisors. Swiss Life corporate film Cautionary statement regarding forward-looking information This publication contains specific forward-looking statements, e.g. statements including terms like believe, assume, expect or similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements, by their nature, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors. These may result in a substantial divergence between the actual results, developments and expectations of Swiss Life and those explicitly or implicitly described in these forward-looking statements. Given these uncertainties, the reader is reminded that these statements are merely projections and should not be overvalued. Neither SwissLife nor its Members of the Board of Directors, executive managers, managers, employees or external advisors nor any other person associated with Swiss Life or with any other relationship to the company makes any express or implied representation or warranty as to the correctness or completeness of the information contained in this publication. SwissLife and the abovementioned persons shall not be liable under any circumstances for any direct or indirect loss resulting from the use of this information. Furthermore, Swiss Life undertakes no obligation to publicly update or change any of these forward-looking statements, or to adjust them to reflect new information, future events, developments or similar. End of Inside Information Individual NATO nations try to announce their 2024 aid in advance so that Ukraine can know what they are receiving and fit that aid into their war plans. For example, the Netherlands, one of the smaller NATO members, announced it was spending $2.2 billion on Ukraine aid in 2024. The German GDP is over four trillion dollars while that of the Netherlands is about one trillion dollars. Germany is sending $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine in 2024. Considering its smaller size, the Netherlands has been a major supplier of aid to Ukraine. The 2024 Dutch aid for Ukraine includes a wide array of weapons and services. There will be more air defense systems, UAVs and munitions for various weapons Ukraine already has. Services include training for Ukrainian F-16 pilots and aircraft maintainers. In 2024 a larger portion of the aid will go to economic reconstruction. Unable to do much damage to Ukrainian armed forces, Russia is concentrating many of its missile attacks on economic targets. These have to be repaired or rebuilt, especially the targets that provide electricity, heat or clean water and sanitation services. Winter is coming and the Russians want Ukrainian civilians to suffer. The Dutch can relate to this. During World War 2 the Netherlands was occupied by German troops and towards the end of the war the Germans greatly reduced the food available for Dutch civilians. In the Netherlands, that period of privation is remembered, and they dont want to see it happen to the Ukrainians. For centuries Ukraine has suffered periods of brutal occupation by invaders. The most frequent brutal occupier has been Russia, which has played the homicidal villain several times in the last century. The most infamous Russian occupation incident was in the use of famine during 1932 and 1933 to suppress Ukrainian opposition to Russian rule, especially new Russian dogma of communism, which prohibited private farms and expected all farmers to work for state-owned collective farms. This was resisted by many farmers throughout Russia, but the opposition was most stubborn in Ukraine, where about 20 percent of the Soviet Union population lived. Ukrainian farmers were the most productive in Russia and produced most of the exportable wheat. Ukrainian resistance produced a horrific response, the seizure of nearly all the wheat crops in the areas of most resistance. This lasted two years and killed nearly four million Ukrainian, about an eighth of the population in what Ukrainians called the Holodomor. This translates as the great famine. Russia denied the Holodomor ever happened and many Western nations, and their mass media, went along with that. One exception was Britain, where one British reporter risked his life by going to Ukraine and obtaining proof of the Holodomor. The Russian government kept denying the famine ever happened until 1983, when a more open communist government admitted that many communist crimes were true. This made an impression on Russians because they realized more of the victims of prison camps (Gulags) and communist terror in general were Russians. As a result, during the 0ccupations of Crimea and parts of Donbas in 2014 the Russians tried to win the support of locals. That lowered the civilian death toll but did not turn most of the occupied population into loyal citizens of Russia. By 2020 most Ukrainians in the occupied territories wanted out. The most desperate moved to Russia, many others wanted to get to Ukraine and others sought to go anywhere but Ukraine and Russia. The Holodomor and many other past incidents of Russian brutality led to Russian troops being ordered to not attack civilians during the 2022 invasion. That failed to cause civilians to be any more receptive to the Russian presence and, within a month troops were told they could loot and not tolerate any resistance from civilians. Russia denied that civilians were being killed or that widespread looting was taking place. Cell phone cameras carried by most Ukrainians made that disinformation difficult to sustain. Nor were the heavy casualties inflicted on the Russian forces who believed they would easily defeat the Ukrainians and occupy the capital, Kyiv, within two weeks. After a month of this Russian troops around Kyiv were ordered to withdraw to Russia and try to conceal evidence of mass murder before they left. This produced some mass graves, but many bodies were left in plain view and many surviving civilians had video evidence of who did what. Russia again denied it, insisting these civilians were killed by Ukrainian forces to make the Russians look bad. Once more the video evidence, especially from Ukrainians who witnessed it and could identify some of the perpetrators, made the atrocities difficult to deny. Mindful of that, Russian occupation forces in parts of Ukraine that were seized early on and are still under Russian control, were ordered to try really hard to win over the locals without resorting to mass murder. The main occupation zone is north of Crimea and centered around the city of Kherson, which is the capital of Kherson province. Kherson City was captured during the first week of the invasion and Russia has held onto most of the province ever since. The city is a major port because it is located near the mouth of the Dnieper River and the Black Sea. The Dnieper is a major navigable river for Ukraine and has long been used to handle the movement of cargo, especially wheat being exported. Ukraine has been trying to recapture Kherson City and province ever since finally did so the end of 2022, aided by a growing partisan movement inside Kherson province and passive resistance to Russian occupation by most Ukrainians in the province. Some Ukrainians agreed to work for the Russian occupation, and they were soon the targets of attacks by Ukrainian partisans. Some of the turncoats were killed but more worrisome to the Russians were indications that other Ukrainian officials quietly agreed to work for the partisans. The Russians now believe that many of their Ukrainian administrators were working with the resistance from the beginning. At the same time the Russian occupation forces still had orders to try and win over the Ukrainians or at least discourage them from joining an armed insurrection. To help with that the Russians sought to Russify the province as quickly as possible. That meant replacing the Ukrainian cell phone service with a Russian one. Ukrainian TV and radio transmissions are blocked. Russian ID documents became mandatory and use of any currency, but the Russian ruble was forbidden. Russia controlled utilities (especially water and electricity) and every effort was made to link Kherson to the Russian economy. The initial reason for pacifying the population was to make life safe for Russian troops in Kherson. That was never fully achieved, and now Russian troops have to worry about roadside bombs or anti-vehicle mines as well as sniper fire and assassination via pistol or a bomb planted in a vehicle. The goal of this was to hold elections that could be depicted as honest and show a majority of Kherson residents supporting annexation by Russia. The Ukrainians are not cooperating and doing so in clever ways that Russian Information War specialists can recognize and struggle to counter. The Ukrainian resistance is both armed and dangerous but also mindful of the importance of outperforming the Russian Information War campaign. The latest American aid package for Ukraine includes a lot of Cold War era PARM anti-vehicle mines that never go used. These mines were developed by the Germans to halt or disrupt a Soviet invasion that never came. The Germans believe the Ukrainians have uses for these mines, especially the Ukrainian partisans. This has proved to be true, and the Ukrainian want more of these mines after having received nearly 15,000. Germany has to resume production of these mines to meet the Ukrainian demand. Ukrainians depict the Russian occupiers as worse than the German Nazis of World War II infamy. This is particularly embarrassing for the Russians because the official Russian government justification for the invasion is to liberate Ukrainians from neo-Nazi Ukrainians led by president Zelensky, who is Jewish. This tragicomedy was understood by many in Russia early on and led to a largely unarmed, but often violent, resistance movement inside Russia and Belarus. Russia denies the extent of the resistance in Kherson, calling armed partisans local bandits and gangsters. Video proof gets out of Kherson and Russian troops stationed in Kherson complain to friends and family back home. This intensifies resistance to the war inside Russia, where the government is waging its own Information War to generate support for the war or at least discredit the critics. It was the growing inability to suppress accurate news that played a role in causing the Soviet Union to dissolve in 1991. The former KGB officers who brought back so many aspects of Soviet rule during the last two decades are having a hard time dealing with media and image control. Its the 1980s all over again but worse. This is a reminder that the Information War is not a state monopoly and often a multi-sided conflict. Story Highlights 58% of U.S. workers are on-site and most of them cant adopt hybrid work On-site, non-remote-capable workers have far lower engagement than others For frontline workers, time flexibility matters more than location flexibility In debates over returning to the office and hybrid work, leaders often miss one fact: 58% of American workers work fully on-site. Most of these workers cant do their jobs remotely, and many of these workers are considered frontline, meaning they interact with customers or manufacture products directly. During the pandemic, these required on-site workers were considered essential for keeping the economy -- and society -- going. And yet, Gallups data find that fully on-site, non-remote-capable employees have far lower engagement (29%) than fully remote workers (38%), hybrid workers (38%) and even on-site workers who are remote-capable (34%). Frontline workers have not experienced the benefits of remote work or hybrid flexibility -- for example, getting to skip the daily commute. Could this explain the engagement gap between hybrid frontline workers? Our research suggests it does not, at least not directly. Over half of on-site, non-remote-capable employees (57%) say they are not at all bothered that other workers are allowed to work from home some of the time. For those who are fully on-site but could work remotely, resentment is higher: Over half say they are bothered, a little to a lot that other employees are allowed to have remote work flexibility while they do not have this option. When Gallup asked frontline workers what type of flexibility they would leave their current employer for, working from home was one of the less-valued options (33%). This desire for remote work or work-from-home options has declined significantly from 2022 to 2023, with 38% saying they would change employers for this benefit in 2022 compared with 33% saying the same in 2023. Either because it seems unrealistic in their current career path or because they simply prefer working on-site, frontline workers rate time flexibility higher than location flexibility. ###Embeddable### Day Flexibility More Valuable Than Hour Flexibility Time flexibility can mean different things to employees: the opportunity to choose which days you work, which hours you work or increased vacation time. All these options allow workers to better fit their work into the rest of their lives. When Gallup asked frontline workers which types of flexibility their employer offered and which they would leave their current employer to gain, the answers fell into four categories: More Expected (More Valued, More Offered) Choice of which days per week you work Differentiating (More Valued, Less Offered) Increased PTO or vacation time Four-day workweek (e.g., four 10-hour days) More Common (Less Valued, More Offered) Flexible start and/or end times Flextime (some choice over the hours you work) Relaxed dress code Nice-to-Have (Less Valued, Less Offered) Remote work or work-from-home options Choice in which hours per day you work Three-day workweek (e.g., three 12-hour days) Shorter shift lengths Work at any location (on-site) ###Embeddable### The most appealing flexibility includes the ability to choose which days you work, more PTO and vacation time, and a four-day workweek. The less appealing options include the ability to choose the hours you work -- flexible start/end times, short shift lengths and flextime more generally. And even this interest in hour flexibility seems to be in decline: Valuing flexible start and end times declined from 36% in 2022 to 34% in 2023 and valuing choice over hours worked decreased from 35% in 2022 to 31% in 2023. Bottom Line for the Frontline Employers may think they are providing the perks and benefits their employees want when they are actually missing the mark. For example, while many employees say their employer offers a relaxed dress code, that doesnt seem to play a significant role in attracting or retaining frontline workers. On the other hand, workers valued increased vacation time even more highly than a four-day workweek. To maximize frontline employee attraction, performance and retention, leaders should find a better way to listen to workers opinions on what flexibility options they value most. Issue Date: 4th December 2023 Dublin city is open for business. Visitors to Dublin city are encouraged to use public transport. Daily, high-visibility patrols conducted by An Garda Siochana. On Friday, 1st December 2023, An Garda Siochana commenced Operation Open City, which will continue until 7pm on Christmas Eve, 24th December 2023. The aim of Operation Open City is to facilitate the movement of public transport and minimise traffic disruption to the general public, through high visibility and enforcement activity in Dublin city. Operation Open City involves a multi-agency approach between An Garda Siochana, the National Transport Authority, local authorities and transport providers. During Operation Open City, An Garda Siochana will conduct a high-visibility enforcement operation with Gardai patrolling major arterial routes and link roads during peak periods of traffic movement. There will also be particular focus on traffic management around car parks at major shopping areas to avoid traffic congestion. Car parks are open throughout the city, however visitors to Dublin are reminded that the use of public transport is encouraged. For information on public transport services visit the Transport for Ireland website. Suburban retail parks and shopping centres situated on the outskirts of Dublin city are open for business and also have car parking facilities available. Operation Open City runs alongside the Christmas and New Year Enforcement Operation which will target lifesaver offences and intoxicated driving offences over the festive period. Both operations are focused on preventing fatal and serious injury collisions on our roads, as well as the prevention and detection of crime and public order incidents. Enhanced communication will be provided to the public by An Garda Siochana and relevant stakeholders through social media. Follow An Garda Siochana, Transport for Ireland and Dublin City Council social media accounts for regular updates. Safety advice for Christmas shoppers: Be careful when withdrawing money from cash machines and financial institutions. Mind your belongings when in crowded areas. Use a handbag or shoulder bag that can be held securely. Dont leave bags or valuables visible inside parked cars. Park your car in a controlled car park and retain the parking ticket on your person. Always lock your car securely when leaving it unattended, even for brief period. Report any incident to Gardai, immediately. Visit Garda.ie for crime prevention advice. Public transport providers will be operating additional services throughout the Christmas period. Operating hours are being extended by Dublin Bus, Bus Eireann, Irish Rail and Luas. Details of the extended service arrangements can be found on the Transport for Ireland website. China reports no new infectious diseases caused by new viruses or bacteria Xinhua) 11:20, December 04, 2023 BEIJING, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- China's National Health Commission on Saturday announced that no new infectious diseases caused by new viruses or bacteria have been identified this ongoing winter, and that the acute respiratory diseases currently being reported in the country have all been caused by known pathogens. Citing monitoring results, commission spokesperson Mi Feng made the remarks in Beijing during a press conference that was also attended by other health officials. Chinese health authorities are actively monitoring and assessing winter respiratory diseases, with efforts underway to optimize medical resource allocation, improve medical treatment processes, and enhance the role of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in treatment, Mi said. SERVICE SUPPLY INCREASES China is expanding its supply of medical services to meet the needs of the people -- particularly pediatric outpatient services at all medical institution levels, including TCM hospitals and maternal and child health institutions, the official said. This expansion will involve extending outpatient service hours to lunchtimes, evenings and weekends, based on patient numbers, as well as increasing hospital bed capacities and streamlining registration, examination and payment processes to improve public access to medical care. Mi also emphasized a guarantee of medical supplies. The utilization of TCM and the integration of Chinese and Western approaches to medicine are being advocated to enhance the prevention and treatment of common winter respiratory diseases, he said. Measures are also being taken to ensure the supply of influenza vaccines and other vaccines, with a focus on early vaccination for key groups such as the elderly and children to reduce the risk of illness, according to the official. CURRENT DRUGS EFFECTIVE Influenza viruses are prone to mutation, which poses a challenge to the prevention and control of influenza. Addressing the issue of virus mutation at the press conference, Wang Dayan, head of the Chinese National Influenza Center under the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said the situation is being closely monitored. "The results have shown that the antiviral drugs in use are effective against the influenza viruses," Wang said, noting that Chinese National Influenza Center, in collaboration with various laboratories worldwide, has been monitoring the sensitivity of influenza viruses to antiviral drugs. On the compatibility of prevalent viruses and vaccines, Wang said that China's dominant influenza virus subtypes this winter are influenza A (H3N2) and influenza B, unchanged from last year, and they are also consistent with the dominant strains circulating in most regions around the world. She emphasized the importance of getting vaccinated, especially for high-risk groups such as the elderly, children and those working in public places. "Vaccination can effectively reduce the risk of infection, illness and severe complications." (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) MANZINI Engaging Bemanti (Water Party) regiment in an improper manner has resulted in two families being fined a cow and a goat. The two families from Malindza are not happy after their members were allegedly assaulted by soldiers and further fined a goat and a cow by the areas royal kraal. This was after they were accused of disrespecting members of the regiment, who were camping in the area. Information gathered was to the effect that the soldiers allegedly assaulted *Mduduzi and his friend, shortly after they had a scuffle with members of the regiment near the Mpaka Shopping Complex. In an interview yesterday, Mduduzi shared that the soldiers found him inside a motor vehicle they were driving in while at the complex. At the time, he said the driver had gone to withdraw money from an ATM, leaving him and his other friend in the car. The soldier asked me about the drivers whereabouts and I responded that I have no idea. They accused me of hiding him and further assaulted me. They also assaulted the driver upon his return to the car. The soldiers then took us to Malindza Royal Kraal where they accused us of defying the Water Party Regiment, he alleged. He said his family was summoned to the royal kraal and fined a goat, while the drivers family was fined a cow. Prior to the alleged assault, Mduduzi claimed that they had a scuffle with members of the Water Party Regiment, after they had accused the driver of wearing a hat. According to Mduduzi, the members of the regiment confronted the driver in the midst of all men who were wearing hats. Hat The driver asked them if he was the only man wearing a hat when confronted by members of the regiment. He responded by saying that accusing people of wearing hats was old-fashioned. I think the members of the regiment communicated with the soldiers who later came for us, he said. He mentioned that they were enjoying alcoholic beverages when the incident happened. However, while Mduduzi claims that they were driving in a motor vehicle when it all started, his father *Musa told this publication that the members of the regiment arrived at his homestead and found two family members. He disclosed that one man was found wearing a hat, while the other was in his home casual wear. The Water Party demanded a fine for finding one of the men wearing a hat, but he did not comply and a scuffle ensued, he narrated. Musa alleged that the members of the Water Party then took the pair to umphakatsi, where they allegedly assaulted them. According to Musa, the elders of the family were later called and informed about the incident. He added that they were also fined a goat while the other family was fined a cow. My gripe is why the umphakatsi demands a goat when it has already punished my son? I think the punishment of the child amounted to a corrective measure. I am hurting, because I have to take the only goat I have. The unfortunate thing is that we were not given a chance to say a word, he said. He said the payment of the fine was due on Friday. Meanwhile, the Malindza Umphakatsi stated that if subjects were found to be in violation of the traditional standards, they ought to be punished accordingly. When drawn for comment, Indvuna Cijwa Sipho Dlamini said: Yemntfwanami, atikhulunywa tindzaba tebemanti lamoyeni, angeke ngiyikhulume nami. Malindza ushaye bantfwabakhe emvakwekutsi bente intfo lebekungafanelanga bayente. In loose translation, the indvuna said issues pertaining to the Water Party Regiment could not be discussed by Malindza Royal Kraal as they had their own structure at Lwandle. He further highlighted that Malindza subjects were punished after having been found to have not adhered to the traditional norms. He then politely declined to comment any further and referred this reporter to the Water Party Regiment at Lwandle. It should be mentioned that Malindza Royal Kraal is one of the bases where some members of the Water Party Regiment camp until their colleagues return from the sea. Traditions About three weeks ago, this publication reported that Sidzakeni residents were warned to abide by cultural norms and traditions, as the Bemanti season had begun. The warning was issued by the Lwandle indlunkhulu representative, who introduced himself as BakaNdwandwe, during the funeral of Tengetile Nompilo Dlamini. BakaNdwandwe spoke on behalf of indlunkhulu, reminding the community of the traditional dress code and behaviour expected during this time. This was after the indlunkhulu expressed its condolences on the passing on of Nompilo, as it stated that they had also lost one of their own. Itsi indlunkhulu yaseSidzakeni, sive saseSidzakeni siyatiswa kutsi kutawuphuma libutfo lebemanti eLwandle, asigcoke kahle, bomake bagcoke tidziya, the indlunkhulu said. Loosely translated, the message was alerting Sidzakeni folk about the imminent dispersal of Bemanti from Lwandle and, therefore, a specific instruction was issued, warning against the wearing of pants and nail polish among women, and the wearing of short pants and hats by men. Women in pants were warned to place emahiya over their pants to respect the custom. The traditional leaders further warned against the making of noise by playing loud music and hosting parties. They also advised against the continuous violence in society. Those who would be found on the wrong side of the law were said to have penalties imposed against them. It is worth noting that during this time of the year, His Majesty King Mswati III commissions Bemanti (Water Party), marking the first leg of the Incwala Ceremony, which is the celebration of the first harvest of the first fruit in Eswatini. During the event, the nation gathers at the Ludzidzini Cattle byre and thank God for the peace and stability that had prevailed since Eswatini gained her independence from Britain. Saturday Night Snow showers early will become steadier snow overnight. Low near 30F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of snow 80%. 1 to 3 inches of snow expected. Israel struck Gaza targets Sunday in its war on Hamas sparked by the October 7 attacks as international concern mounted over the spiralling civilian death toll on the third day after the end of a week-long truce. Map locating the Essequibo territory, disputed between Venezuela and Guyana, the areas claimed by each country as well as the giant Stabroek oil block CRAWFORD Before the automobile, a horse was a riders best friend and the main transportation method. Horses arent as revered as they once were, but places like Spirit Wind Horse Rescue in Crawford save horses from mistreatment and from being killed inhumanely. The nonprofit also promotes the adoption of horses to good homes and provides a safe sanctuary for those animals that have physical or emotional challenges. Beth Keenan, who, along with Vendla Vee Stockdale, started the Spirit Wind Horse Rescue in 2008, jested, I decided instead of joining a womans club or taking up crocheting, Id get run over by horses at least once a week. Although Keenan may joke about her job, she is serious about ensuring that horses are cared for properly and allows her property to be one of two properties where horses are cared for by the nonprofit. Before she launched the Spirit Wind operation, Keenan and her husband, John Ware, were members of a dog rescue. When Stockdale and her husband moved to Crawford in 2008, they rescued a horse in Wyoming. The horse lovers became friends and eventually launched Spirit Wind Horse Rescue. The horses live on Keenan and Wares 15-acre property and a 30-acre property owned by Stockdale. I didnt expect to spend the rest of my life doing this, but I love it, Ware said. He added that they were visiting a horse sanctuary or rescue with horses near the beginning of their marriage. I said, Its beautiful, referring to one of the horses, Ware recalled, and the wife said, Shes yours, and got it for me. Spirit Wind and horse rescues across the country attend auctions or round-ups to save horses from slaughter by kill buyers, who buy horses based on poundage. Some of the current horses they have were from a Nevada round-up. Keenan noted that they and other horse rescues dont just save perfect horses but will take in wild mustangs or horses with physical or emotional ailments and provide sanctuary for them. Keenan said they have even purchased a few horses that did not live very long after they got them, but at least they left the earth humanely. Although Spirit Wind loves when they can have horses adopted from their two facilities in Crawford, they accept the fact that some of their horses will never leave their care because if we think theres a chance it will hurt someone or it has physical issues, we will keep them, Keenan said. The nonprofit also seeks to keep families of horses together when they seek adoption, as horses are very herd- and family-orientated and need animal companions sometimes. A few unrideable horses they didnt think would be adopted found homes with elderly people who just wanted a horse as a friendly companion. Keenan said they were able to celebrate a recent adoption a few weeks back as two burros and a pony went to a family from Montrose who have a few hundred acres of land and a pond and trees. When they do obtain young, healthy horses, the horse rescue pays about $5,000 to a horse trainer who lives nearby to train the animal well so it can be adopted more easily, and often they are adopted quickly afterward. On Keenans property, three such horses will soon be able to be adopted. Two of these three horses were born on the land when they adopted two pregnant mares during a round-up in Fallon, Utah, about eight years ago. Although she loves all horses dearly, Keenan said that some of the younger horses like to be muddy, and trying to get the mud out of their hair is a pain. Keenan said each horse they obtain has a private shelter and is separated into groups based on age and personality. They have had horses live into their 40s on their property. Spirit Wind, which gets its name from a horse of Keenans that died, has had as many as 70 horses on the two properties but currently has about 30. Keenan and Ware said they had helped more than 200 horses find homes since they began the Spirit Wind operation. Ware said keeping up the property is hard work but is rewarding. Ware agreed with the late Winston Churchhill, who said, Theres something about a horse that is good for the inside of a man. As of November 1, Spirit Wind had seven mustangs, 11 sanctuary horses that cannot be adopted for different reasons, seven horses adoptable for riding and training, four horses adoptable for companionship only, one mule and one horse in foster care. We all have personal horses that we have rescued we each pay the expenses for our own, Keenan said. Just to add to the fun, we all also have rescued dogs and cats. Keenan said Spirit Wind is always looking for volunteers to help and for monetary contributions, as there are not many grants to obtain in the area. The nonprofit mainly exists through donations. Keenan and Ware said it is getting harder to manage the operation as they get older and would love more volunteers. Although Spirit Wind is on a tight budget, the group also tries to help in emergencies when people feel they have to give up their horses due to financial struggles or cant afford vet care, including operations, and even help the owners who cant afford to put their animal down humanely, as its much cheaper to take it to auction. Keenan said Hay is the most expensive cost, and people have sometimes donated it. Other expenses include vet costs, supplements, salt blocks, water, fencing and panels, a farrier and training. In addition, Vee and John and I of course pay for our properties which we have pretty much turned over to the horses taxes, irrigation, insurance, fencing, et cetera, Keenan said. IDF Provides Gazan Residents With Information Regarding Movement for Their Safety in the Next Stage of the War: This Is the Division of Evacuation Areas in Gaza. IDF Press Release 01.12.23 The terrorist organization Hamas uses the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields, placing its command and military infrastructure in residential areas, hospitals, mosques, and schools. Hamas turns civilian sites into military targets while using civilians and civilian facilities as a human shield. Since the beginning of the war, the IDF has been deploying various means to avoid harming civilians in the Gaza Strip. This includes sending messages and announcements to the residents of Gaza calling on them to evacuate from specific areas that are being used by Hamas for terrorist activities and calls for them to evacuate along relevant routes. In preparation for the next stage of the war, the IDF is publishing the Evacuation Zone Map in the Gaza Strip. This divides the territory of the Gaza Strip into areas according to recognizable areas to enable the residents of Gaza to orient themselves and understand the instructions, and to evacuate from specific places for their safety if required. An interactive map that was published shows the numbers of the areas in the north and south of the Strip, calling on residents to locate the relevant area to them and to act if they are requested to evacuate from it. The map was published on a special page on the IDF website in Arabic and in a special video released by the IDF Spokesperson in Arabic on social networks. Additionally, the map was published in announcements distributed by the IDF in the Gaza Strip. Link to the site: https://bit.ly/gaza_blockmap NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Statement by PM Netanyahu Israel - Prime Minister's Office The 37th Government 01.12.2023 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this evening, at his press conference at the Kirya in Tel Aviv: "Citizens of Israel, This evening we received difficult news. It finally became clear that Col. Asaf Hamami, a hero of Israel, fell in battle on the 7th of October. Asaf was the commander of the Gaza Division Southern Brigade. Two weeks ago I met with his family. We prayed together for a different result, which to my regret, did not materialize. Asaf was a hero for all of us. May his memory be blessed. Citizens of Israel, 'Whoever saves one life, it is as if he has saved the entire world.' Last week we rescued many worlds. We returned 110 souls to Israel. We freed 86 Israeli citizens - children, women, young people, mothers and grandmothers, as well as dozens of foreign nationals. The entire nation and many around the world held their breath as they followed each release. The boys and girls and young people whom we returned home: Raz, Aviv, Hila, Alma, Noam, Emma, Yuli, Emilia, Avigail, Emily, Gali, Amit, Eitan, Nava, Yahel, Noam, Ohad, Uriah, Yuval, Ofri, Erez, Mia, Noga, Ofir, Dafna, Ela, Tal, Agam, Gal, Or, Yagil, Itay, Maya, Bilal, Aisha, Uri, Natali, Mika, Liam - and many others whom we have released. These are not just names but souls of boys and girls that we brought back home, we brought them back to life. We will be with them and look after them. I embrace them on behalf of all of you, citizens of Israel: Welcome to those who have left the horrors, welcome back home. The Psalmist writes (142:8): 'Take my soul out of confinement'. We have taken them out of confinement, from darkness to light, from slavery to redemption. Only one week ago this seemed unbelievable, completely imaginary. And today they are here, wrapped in the love of their families and of the people. How great is the joy of their return, and how great is the pain of those who were murdered amidst terrible brutality and of those who have not yet returned. I deliberated greatly before the decision. I asked myself how does one negotiate with the Satan who murdered, raped, dismembered and burned human beings, women, children and infants, a Satan to whom human life has no value. But at the same time, it was clear to me that we could find a way to rescue dozens of hostages from the Satan's claws. I was not prepared to give up on that possibility. We conducted tough negotiations under fire, from evening to morning and from morning to evening. I spoke frequently with President Biden and we pressed the intermediaries in order to improve the outline. And indeed, we succeeded in considerably improving it. We applied pressure around the world - the Mossad, the negotiating team, the ISA and the IDF. I was in continuous and daily contact with the White House. The efforts were productive; we doubled the number of those who were released but the mission has yet to be completed. This week I visited our wounded at Soroka Medical Center. I met there with heroic fighters and another hero, Mia Regev. Mia was abducted by Hamas murderers from the party at Reim. They shot her and wounded her leg. She endured physical and mental tribulations but she is recovering. She is strong. Mia met her brother Itay, who was also abducted and whom we also succeeded in freeing. I stood by her bed. I embraced her. I embraced her father Ilan and her younger brother Guy. What can I tell you citizens of Israel, my brothers and sisters, I saw with my own eyes a family that was reborn. We achieved the releases of our hostages thanks to a combination of the massive military pressure by our heroic soldiers and the relentless diplomatic effort I led along with my colleagues. My wife Sara and I met again this week with parents of several of our hostages who remain in the terrible Hamas captivity. We embraced them and I promised them: We will do everything to bring them back home - all of them. In order to complete the sacred mission of returning all of our hostages, in order to eliminate Hamas, and in order to ensure that Gaza does not go back to constituting a threat to Israel, and that there will be no element there that educates its children for terrorism, supports terrorism finances terrorism and calls for the destruction of Israel - we are continuing to fight with full force. Our soldiers prepared for this during the pause - for absolute victory over Hamas. I met in the field with our fighting men and women who told me: 'Mr. Prime Minister, continue until the end' and I told them: 'To the end - of that there is no question.' Citizens of Israel, I tell you this evening that you have those whom you can rely on. The fighting men and women of the IDF, the ISA, the policemen and women who have fought with utmost heroism - they are the best. They have great spirit, strength and faith. They nobly and heroically bear the pain of losing their heroic comrades and commanders who have fallen, and thus our entire people - until victory is achieved. The fighting continues. The day before yesterday I directed the IDF, together with the War Cabinet, to resume fighting, with increasing force. In the last 24 hours, we have destroyed over 400 Hamas terrorist targets. We carried out extensive aerial attacks in Khan Yunis. We eliminated terrorists and infrastructure in Beit Lahiya. We are continuing to act in the northern Gaza Strip. Last week, many of you asked what one of our heroic soldiers whom I visited inside the Gaza Strip asked me: 'Will the fighting resume after the days of the pause?' I answered him: 'Unequivocally - yes!' Now the answer is clear to everyone. I state clearly and unequivocally: We will continue the war until we achieve all of its goals and it is impossible to achieve these goals without continuing the ground incursion. The ground incursion was essential in order to bring about the results up to now, and it is necessary to bring about future results. I tell our friends around the world, you share our goal of eliminating Hamas and releasing our hostages; therefore, I also emphasize to them that there is no way of achieving these goals except by victory, and there is no way to achieve victory except by continuing the ground incursion. The IDF and the security forces are doing this with determination, strength and while upholding international law. In the north as well, we are taking continuous action against Hezbollah's efforts to act against us. We are thwarting terrorist cells, pushing the enemy away from our border and destroying war materiel. We are continuing with the policy that we have determined: Strong deterrence in the north, clear decision in the south. We are not sitting idly by in the face of the aggression against us. We are returning fire many times over. Let it be clear: We are committed to restoring security both in the south and the north. If Hezbollah makes a mistake and enters into a broad war, it will be destroying Lebanon with its own hands. Citizens of Israel, we are in the midst of a difficult and bitter war but there is no war more just. It is a war for our home. All of us are united behind the justice of our cause and all of us give full backing to our soldiers. A difficult war is yet before us, but in the end, we will be victorious. Together we will fight - and with G-d's help, together we will win." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Coordinator for the Hostages and Missing Brig.-Gen. (Ret.) Gal Hirsch, met with US Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens and his Team Israel - Prime Minister's Office The 37th Government 02.12.2023 Coordinator for the Hostages and Missing Brig.-Gen. (Ret.) Gal Hirsch, this evening, met with US Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens and his team, who are visiting Israel. At this evening's meeting, their second in recent days, the two discussed efforts to release the hostages, efforts by the Government of Israel on their behalf and on behalf of their families, and the close cooperation between the US and Israel since the start of the crisis. Brig.-Gen. (Ret.) Hirsch expressed - to the American envoy and his team - great appreciation for the deep commitment, unwavering support and continuous commitment since the outbreak of the war. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Prime Minister's Office announcement Israel - Prime Minister's Office The 37th Government 02.12.2023 The Prime Minister's Office has announced, on behalf of the Mossad: Following the impasse in negotiations and the directive given by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Director of the Mossad David Barnea has instructed his team in Doha to return to Israel. The terrorist organization Hamas did not uphold its part of the agreement, which included the release of all of the children and women according to a list that was given to Hamas and approved by it. The Director of the Mossad thanks the Director of the CIA, the Egyptian Intelligence Minister and the Qatari Prime Minister for their extensive joint mediation efforts, which led to the release of 84 children and women from the Gaza Strip, along with 24 foreign nationals. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address MBABANE The election of a new council of the Law Society of Eswatini (LSE) had to be deferred after there was reportedly a stalemate between lawyers over this item. On Saturday, the LSE held its annual general meeting (AGM) at Emafini. It is reported that a majority of the lawyers who were in attendance were of the view that there should be no new elections, instead, the current executive should be allowed to continue occupying office. Others, however, reportedly felt that same should be conducted as allowing the current council to automatically continue holding office without elections being conducted, would be an undemocratic thing to do. Subscriptions It was then agreed that the elections should be deferred to February next year and that those who were desirous to vote and to be voted for should be screened, to ensure that they were in good standing in terms of paying subscriptions. This means that the council, which is being led by senior lawyers Mangaliso Magagula and Sidumo Mdladla, will remain in office. Secretary of the LSE, Charity Simelane, said it was resolved by the membership that the elections and sub-committee reports items be deferred to February 2024. Among the lawyers who attended the AGM and made submissions was former High Court Judge Sipho Nkosi. Some of the issues that were discussed included the breakdown of the rule of law. Meanwhile, during the meeting, the President of the law society, Magagula reportedly delivered a report, where he outlined achievements and challenges they encountered. In his report, the president mentioned that the past two and a half years had been very challenging for the legal profession. We faced multiple challenges at both national and professional levels. Some of these challenges are still ongoing and are a threat to the practice of law and the rule of law. The law society must remain engaged in dealing with the challenges. Equally important is the need to reform, capacitate and strengthen the office of the law society, so that it can best serve the legal profession and provide the institutional framework to regulate the practice of law and promote the interests of the legal profession, reads part of the presidents report. He pointed out that during this period, the legal fraternity lost seven of its colleagues, who untimely passed away. Magagula mentioned that the colleagues who passed away during this period were: Sikelela Magongo, Kush Vilakati, Thulani Maseko, Phindile Sikhondze, Knox Nxumalo, Bongumenzi Mkhonta and Vusi Kunene. The LSE president said it was regrettable that as the legal fraternity, they had been denied the right to honour their departed colleagues through a mention. Magagula pointed out that this was a tradition, where they honoured their departed colleagues in the place where lawyers worked, the courtroom, and in a way that defined them as members of the noble legal profession. It was painful to tell families of our departed colleagues that we cannot hold a mention for their loved ones, because the chief justice (CJ) has refused to allow this tradition. It is a pity that a courtroom is required to honour our colleagues through the traditional mention, said Magagula in his report. He went on to tell the lawyers in attendance that the law society could not be left behind in adapting to these new technologies, which had become a reality of life going forward. He mentioned that the law society had been participating in a project intended to digitalise the courts. The programme, according to the president, was known as the Integrated Change Management System. Allocation He said the programme removed human intervention in case management. Magagula, in his report, stated that the manual allocation of cases had been one of the contentious issues in the administration of justice. The president said the new technologies would hopefully enable greater participation of members of the law profession in their affairs. He stated that they also had to adapt to the by-laws to these new realities. In his report, the LSE president further highlighted that during the unrest, which was one of the most difficult periods in the country, the legal profession was able to participate and provide their views on how the law society should navigate in what was one of the most difficult challenges they faced. We had to take into account differing opinions and balance them with the objects of the Law Society as a professional body representing the interests of the legal profession. The council valued the contributions of the legal fraternity. The contributions guided the approach taken on issues relating to the unrest. The use of the virtual platforms enabled the participation of members even those outside the country, reads part of the report. He pointed out that members were able to express their views without having to physically attend meetings. Magagula said the use of virtual platforms has seen an increase in the participation of the legal fraternity in their affairs. We have no doubt that as we go into the future, this will continue. Efforts to get comment from the registrar of the High Court proved to be futile as her phone rang unanswered. The register was being sought to answer on the allegations that the CJ declined to allocate lawyers a courtroom whenever they wanted to conduct the mention. Remarks by Vice President Harris on the Conflict Between Israel and Hamas December 02, 2023 Dubai, United Arab Emirates THE VICE PRESIDENT: Today, I had productive meetings with the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Egypt. And I spoke to the Amir of Qatar to discuss developments in Gaza and to accelerate planning for the day after the fighting. I will get to those conversations in a moment. But first, let's take a step back. On October 7th, Hamas terrorists launched a terrorist attack that killed 1,200 innocent people in Israel, including 35 Americans. It was a brutal and horrific massacre. Babies and Holocaust survivors were killed. Young people who were simply attending a concert were shot dead. Two hundred and forty hostages were taken from their homes. And over, then, the past eight weeks, President Biden and I have been clear: Israel has a right to defend itself. And we will remain steadfast in that conviction. We are working with Israel and our partners in the region to secure the release of all the hostages, which includes Americans. The recent pause in the fighting proved effective. More than 100 hostages were reunited with their families during this time, including two more Americans, and humanitarian aid surged into Gaza. As I told the families of American hostages when I met with them, we will not waver in our commitment to bring them home. Let me be also very clear, as I've said before: We cannot conflate Hamas with the Palestinian people. Hamas is a brutal terrorist organization. Hamas has vowed to repeat October 7 until Israel is annihilated. No nation could possibly live with such danger, which is why we support Israel's legitimate military objectives to eliminate the threat of Hamas. President Biden and I have also been clear with the Israeli government in public and in private many times: As Israel defends itself, it matters how. The United States is unequivocal: International humanitarian law must be respected. Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating. I have spoken with members of the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities of America, including those who have lost loved ones in Gaza and American citizens who were injured and evacuated from Gaza. It is truly heartbreaking. As Israel pursues its military objectives in Gaza, we believe Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians. So, we all want this conflict to end as soon as possible. And to ensure Israel's security and ensure security for the Palestinian people, we must accelerate efforts to build an enduring peace. And that begins with planning for what happens the day after the fighting ends. Shortly after October 7th, President Biden and I began discussions with our national security team about post-conflict Gaza. We have begun to engage partners in the region and around the world in these conversations, and this has been a key priority over the last eight weeks. Five principles guide our approach for post-conflict Ga- Gaza: no forcible displacement, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, no reduction in territory, and no use of Gaza as a platform for terrorism. We want to see a unified Gaza and West Bank under the Palestinian Authority, and Palestinian voices and aspirations must be at the center of this work. At a certain point, the intense fighting and the phase of fighting will end and we will begin implementing our plans for the day after. To develop these plans then, we will continue to work with both Israelis and Palestinians. But there must also be regional consensus and support. To that end, I've had a number of in-depth conversations with Arab leaders here in Dubai. Specifically, I proposed three areas of focus: One, reconstruction. The international community must dedicate significant resources to support short- and long-term recovery in Gaza for example, rebuilding hospitals and housing, restoring electricity and clean water, and ensuring that bakeries can reopen and be restocked. Second, security. The Palestinian Authority Security Forces must be strengthened to eventually assume security responsibilities in Gaza. Until then, there must be security arrangements that are acceptable to Israel, the people of Gaza, the Palestinian Authority, and the international partners. And to reiterate and this is very important terrorists will not be permitted to continue to threaten Israel. Third, governance. The Palestinian Authority must be revitalized, driven by the will of the Palestinian people, which will allow them to benefit from the rule of law and a transparent, responsive government. Eventually, this revitalized PA must have the capacity to govern Gaza, as well as the West Bank. We believe progress on these three areas reconstruction, security, and governance will improve the lives and livelihoods of the Palestinian people. Further, we have been clear, the Palestinians have a right to dignity and self-determination. And Israelis and Palestinians must enjoy equal measures of prosperity and freedom. They also deserve all deserve a sense of safety and security. And a two-state solution, then, remains the best path, we believe, toward a durable peace. The President and I are committed to that goal. In conclusion, when this conflict ends, Hamas cannot control Gaza, and Israel must be secure. Palestinians need a hopeful political horizon, economic opportunity, and freedom. And the region, more broadly, must be integrated and prosperous. And we must we must work toward that vision. So, with that, I'll take your questions. AIDE: Priscilla. Q Madam Vice President, how did Qatar describe the state of hostage negotiations during your call today? And did they provide any reassurance of a truce in the next few days for the release of additional hostages? THE VICE PRESIDENT: So, I'm not going to reveal the details of the conversation, but I did speak with the Amir. And the work and their commitment to this work is ongoing, as is ours. And our work is ongoing to support some ability to re-open the pause and to have a deal going forward where there will be a pause so that we can get hostages out and get aid in. AIDE: Nandita. Q Thank you for doing this. THE VICE PRESIDENT: Of course. Q You laid out your conversations with the regional leaders. You laid out your the expectations that you put forward. What specifically, in terms of commitments, were you able to get from them when it comes to post-conflict planning for Gaza? THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, let me just say that the conversations that we had were very productive. And there is, I believe, a mutual desire to figure out how we are going to approach and think about the day after in a way that brings stabal- stability and peace to this region and reinforces, as I said earlier, Israel's security, the sense of security and safety for both the Palestinians and Israelis, doing what is necessary to ensure there are equal measures of prosperity and freedom and security for the Palestinian people and for Israel. Q To that point, Israel has suggested building a buffer in Gaza, and they've been having some conversations about that today and for the past few days. What is the U.S. position on it? And one more, if I may. You mentioned, you know, sort of bolstering the Palestinian Authority so that they can, you know, rule both the both Gaza and the West Bank. What, according to you, should happen to get the Palestinian Authority to that point where they can govern both Gaza and the West Bank? THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, as I said, we have to revitalize the Palestinian Authority, which means giving the support that is necessary for good governance, understanding that on the issues that must be resolved, as we think of a plan for the day after, it is about good governance, which will bring transparency and accountability to the people of Gaza and the West Bank. It's also about what we need to do to recognize there must be some plan for security for the region. And I suspect as a as a plan develops, it will take into account interim and then longer term. And finally, what we must do in terms of rebuilding Gaza and a commitment to that. AIDE: Deepa. Q And thoughts on the buffer zone? AIDE: Hold on. Deepa. Q The buffer zone. You didn't answer her question on that. THE VICE PRESIDENT: What is the question exactly? Q Israel has been suggesting a buffer zone in Gaza, Madam Vice President. What is the U.S. view on that? THE VICE PRESIDENT: We have not weighed in on that. Q Thanks, Madam Vice President. I wanted to ask: What evidence do you have that Israel won't just be receptive to conversations and asks the U.S. has made in terms of protecting civilian life, minimizing harm to civilian life in Gaza not just receptive to those asks but actually following through and really acting on them. Do you have any evidence that Israel will listen? THE VICE PRESIDENT: I do believe that they have listened, and I can assure you: From the beginning, the President has been very direct and clear about our perspective, for example, that humanitarian laws, the rules of war must be followed, which includes what must happen in terms of giving humanitarian aid, no intentional targeting of civilians. And we have been very clear also that, one, Israel has a right to defend itself, but we also must take into account that far too many Palestinian civilians innocent people have been killed and Israel must do more to protect innocent civilians. Q To that point, in the first day after this temporary truce had had ended, Israel killed 200 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Is that minimizing harm to civilian life? Is that acceptable? THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't have the details to tell you exactly who was killed. And but I will say this, we have been very clear about where we stand on this, which is innocent civilian lives should not be intentionally targeted and that Israel must do more to protect innocent life in Gaza and innocent civilians in Gaza. And we've been very clear about that. And we continue to make that point, not only privately but publicly as well, as you see. AIDE: Thank you, guys. THE VICE PRESIDENT: Okay, thank you. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Houthi Attacks on Commercial Shipping in International Water Continue U.S. Central Command USCENTCOM Dec. 3, 2023 Release Number 20231203-01 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE SOUTHERN RED SEA -- Today, there were four attacks against three separate commercial vessels operating in international waters in the southern Red Sea. These three vessels are connected to 14 separate nations. The Arleigh-Burke Class destroyer USS CARNEY responded to the distress calls from the ships and provided assistance. At approximately 9:15 a.m. Sanaa time, the CARNEY detected an anti-ship ballistic missile attack fired from Houthi controlled areas of Yemen toward the M/V UNITY EXPLORER, impacting in the vicinity of the vessel. UNITY EXPLORER is a Bahamas flagged, U.K. owned and operated, bulk cargo ship crewed by sailors from two nations. The CARNEY was conducting a patrol in the Red Sea and detected the attack on the UNITY EXPLORER. At approximately 12 p.m., and while in international waters, CARNEY engaged and shot down a UAV launched from Houthi controlled areas in Yemen. The drone was headed toward CARNEY although its specific target is not clear. We cannot assess at this time whether the Carney was a target of the UAVs. There was no damage to the U.S. vessel or injuries to personnel. In a separate attack at approximately 12:35 p.m., UNITY EXPLORER reported they were struck by a missile fired from Houthi controlled areas in Yemen. CARNEY responded to the distress call. While assisting with the damage assessment, CARNEY detected another inbound UAV, destroying the drone with no damage or injuries on the CARNEY or UNITY EXPLORER. UNITY EXPLORER reports minor damage from the missile strike. At approximately 3:30 p.m. the M/V NUMBER 9 was struck by a missile fired from Houthi controlled areas in Yemen while operating international shipping lanes in the Red Sea. The Panamanian flagged, Bermuda and U.K. owned and operated, bulk carrier reported damage and no casualties. At approximately 4:30 p.m., the M/V SOPHIE II, sent a distress call stating they were struck by a missile. CARNEY again responded to the distress call and reported no significant damage. While en route to render support, CARNEY shot down a UAV headed in its direction. SOPHIE II is a Panamanian flagged bulk carrier, crewed by sailors from eight countries. These attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security. They have jeopardized the lives of international crews representing multiple countries around the world. We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran. The United States will consider all appropriate responses in full coordination with its international allies and partners. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address December 3, 2023 By C. Todd Lopez , DOD New Brown: Young People Consider Military Service if They Know Enough About It Getting young people to choose a career in the military will require more people talking about what opportunities there are in the service, said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. During a discussion yesterday at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, Air Force Gen. CQ Brown, Jr. said there's great opportunity in military service. To get young people to consider it for themselves, they just need to hear more about it. "I think about the opportunities and the things that young people will have the opportunity to do if they were to join our military," he said. "We've got to talk about that. And partly the reason I say that is because I believe young people only aspire to be what they see or know about. If you don't know about the opportunities of serving in the military, you may never pursue that career field." Brown said in his own life, he was encouraged by his parents to serve in the military and expected initially that he'd serve only a short amount of time. "My degree is in engineering," he said. "I was going to be an Air Force engineer for four years and get out." While in college, he said he got an opportunity to ride in a T-37 Tweet, an Air Force trainer aircraft. That experience, he said, changed his outlook on what his military service could be. "I became an F-16 pilot, and I still get to fly today. It's those kinds of opportunities, I think, that you just don't know until you have a chance to experience it," he said. "And whether you stay for just a handful of years or you stay in for a handful of decades, there are great opportunities serving in our military." Following the end of the Cold War, Brown said, the U.S. military contracted in size as military bases shut down, and there were fewer opportunities for young people to interact with service members. Educating young people about military service must be a nationwide effort now, he said. "One of the goals we have to do as a nation is to talk about our military and the opportunities," he said. "And I try to do that when I go out and travel because you don't know what you don't know." Warfighting Skills Are a Focus The 2023 Reagan National Defense Survey indicated that some Americans think the U.S. military is too focused on social issues at the expense of a focus on warfighting. But Brown said that isn't the case. "I would say honing our warfighting skills has primacy in everything we do," he said. "That's why we exist: to fight and win our nation's wars. We want to be so good at what we do that our adversaries [say], 'Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.' We do that because we bring in our nation's best from all backgrounds. And I'm extremely proud of our service members, every single one of them." As he travels around the U.S. military and meets with service members, Brown said he can see where their focus is. "I'm just so amazed by the young people that come into our military. And when I go out and talk to them, they are focused on warfighting. They are focused on getting the mission done, and they're just they're amazing young people, and I'm just proud to be able to work with them." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address December 3, 2023 By Joseph Clark , DOD News Public-Private Partnership Is Key to Building Defense Industrial Base and Workforce The U.S. defense industrial base and federal government must work together to shore up the defense industrial base and workforce of the future, the Pentagon's top acquisition official said yesterday. William A. LaPlante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, called for a whole-of-government approach and creative solutions by the private sector to draw the talent needed to ensure a capable, innovative industrial base with a talented resilient workforce. He highlighted the need for our nation and our global allies to produce critical systems and equipment rapidly and at scale. He also said recruiting a trained and skilled workforce to the defense industrial workforce requires public-private collaboration at all levels to build a robust talent pipeline. "This is at the state and local levels. This is at the high schools all the way up to the federal level," LaPlante said during a panel discussion at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California. "I think we can do [an] even a better job at ... making sure we're all talking to each other," he said. LaPlante and his fellow panel members took note of U.S. shipbuilders' investments in training opportunities for high schoolers to develop skills that will translate into well-paying jobs that will be in demand in the future. "I think the submarine industrial base has done a lot of really good work," he said. He added that the government and private sector can also work together to ensure that the work environment within defense manufacturing is attractive to future talent. "If you've been to some of these advanced manufacturing [facilities], it looks like they're at a startup," he said. "It's really cool. That actually matters. And, so, the governmentall of uscan help...to invest in those areas." LaPlante also said the government and private sector can work together to lower barriers to entry for some professions that require highly skilled employees, but not necessarily a college degree. While he said that this may not be feasible for all positions, it can work in some. "You know, people without college degrees can do software sometimes a lot better than those of us that are overly educated beyond our intelligence," LaPlante said with a touch of humor. "You think about that; that goes against culture, right? But we've got to think of these [things] creatively like that," he said. The Defense Department is preparing to release a comprehensive National Defense Industrial Strategythe first of its kind in DOD's historythat seeks to tie our nation's highly capable and innovative industrial and technology base to our current National Defense Strategy and meet the global challenges DOD confronts. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Philippines' new coastal station in South China Sea serves to consolidate its illegal control, caters to US interests Global Times By GT staff reporters Published: Dec 03, 2023 08:12 PM The Philippines' new coastal station in the South China Sea serves as a base to monitor foreign vessels for the purpose of consolidating its illegal control of China's Zhongye Dao (or Zhongye Island), as well as to cater to the interests of the US in the region, Chinese analysts said on Sunday, saying that Manila's recent proactive acts have gone "off course." The new three-story facility is furnished with advanced technology including radar, automatic identification, satellite communication and coastal cameras, Reuters reported on Friday, citing the Philippine coast guard. During a recent visit to the island, Eduardo Ano, the Philippine national security adviser, even accused China of "not adhering to the international order, to the rule of law," the Reuters report said. A new coast guard station on China's Zhongye Dao in the South China Sea serves to monitor foreign vessels passing by, including China's, as part of Manila's preparations to conduct cognitive warfare against China, Chen Xiangmiao, director of the world navy research center at the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, told the Global Times on Sunday. "The so-called cognitive warfare is to gather information about the opponent and expose them to exert pressure on the opponent through public opinion." Mao Ning, spokesperson of China's Foreign Ministry, said at a press briefing on October 16 that Zhongye Dao is China's territory. The Philippines has illegally occupied Zhongye Dao, which seriously violates China's sovereignty. Chen believes the Philippines' act of building a new coast guard station on Zhongye Dao must have been backed by the US, as it serves the overall US Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness, which aims to establish a network or interagency maritime intelligence collection in the Indo-Pacific region through the combination of sea and water, and air and space means. Regardless of the already mounting tensions in the area, the Philippines recently has been actively inviting countries to beef up defense cooperation in the region. The Philippines and France agreed to commence discussions for a defense agreement that would enable troop visits, according to Bloomberg on Sunday. The Philippines already has similar agreements with the US and Australia, and it has also agreed to begin negotiations with Japan on such an agreement, media reported. The first joint sea and air patrols between the Philippines and Australia began on Saturday, according to Anadolu Agency. By seeking backing from external forces, the Philippines intends to justify its illegal behavior of taking over China's islands in the waters to shift its relatively weak balance of power with China, Chen said but he warned that it will not benefit the Philippines other than by seemingly getting diplomatic resources. Inviting external forces will only escalate regional tensions and increase the Philippines' cost of maritime operations, and more importantly, it is losing a sound environment to conduct friendly dialogue with China to solve disputes, Chen noted. More countries which are seeking to assert their own geopolitical interests and contain China's influence in the region are likely to join the Philippines's initiative, Wu Shicun, president of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, at the International Symposium on Maritime Dispute Settlement and International Law, which was held in Beijing last week. Additionally, since the beginning of 2023, the Philippines has repeatedly created tensions in the waters off China's Ren'ai Jiao (better known as Ren'ai Reef) of the Nansha Islands. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr even said that he has taken the initiative to contact Vietnam, Malaysia and other countries, hoping to discuss the possibility of reaching a new code of conduct in the South China Sea excluding China. In this regard, Wu said that the Marcos administration's attempt to start anew will only cause divisions in ASEAN. "The Philippines has gone off course and is a bit naive," Wu said, adding he predicts that the Philippines is likely to continue its risky behavior for a while. From what the Philippine government opts to do in the water, its South China Sea policy only serves to cater to part of the national sentiment at home and to the strategic adjustment of the US, rather than serving the national interests of the Philippines itself, Chinese experts noted. "Taking the risk of hurting ties with China is shooting themselves in the foot," Chen said. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Western leaders' intensifying pressure on Israel amid resurgence of Gaza hostilities 'hard to counter persisting divergence between conflicting sides' Global Times Western leaders intensify pressure on Israel amid resurgence of hostilities in Gaza By Deng Xiaoci Published: Dec 03, 2023 06:53 PM Western leaders, including US Vice President Kamala Harris and French President Emmanuel Macron, intensified their pressure on Israel over the weekend amid the resurgence of hostilities between Israeli forces and Hamas militants after a weeklong cease-fire faltered. Chinese analysts on Sunday noted that despite growing vocal concerns from the US and Europe, their impact on the conflict might be limited due to the significant differences that persist between the conflicting parties. The US vice president, who was in Dubai for the United Nations COP28 climate conference, said that "too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering, and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating," Bloomberg reported on Sunday. Macron also warned explicitly on Saturday on the sidelines of the COP28 talks that Israel's aim of eliminating the Palestinian militant group Hamas risked unleashing a decade of war. The Western leaders' messages of grave concerns over the situation come after the resurgence of intense fighting between the conflicting Israeli army and Hamas militants on Friday and the Israeli side's indications that it intends to expand ground operations in the Gaza Strip. Israel has carried out intense air strikes on Khan Younis in southern Gaza, with residents describing it as the heaviest bombing of the war, according to the BBC on Sunday. The Gaza-based Health Ministry said at least 193 people were killed in the latest wave of Israeli attacks. The Israeli Defense Force announced on Saturday that it attacked 400 targets in the Gaza Strip during the past 24 hours, including 50 targets in Khan Younis, eliminating militants and destroying Hamas infrastructure. Israel said that Khan Younis, the second most important urban center in the Gaza Strip, has become a stronghold for most Hamas leaders and the bulk of its fighters and missile arsenal after they fled Gaza City and its north, Xinhua News Agency reported on Sunday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a press conference at Hakirya military base in central Tel Aviv, asserted on Saturday that Israel's ground operation in Gaza, which has resulted in fatalities, must continue to ensure the release of hostages. Netanyahu's remarks followed the withdrawal of his negotiation team from cease-fire talks with Hamas in Qatar. Netanyahu emphasized the necessity of the ground operation's expansion to achieve all of Israel's objectives, making it clear that a cease-fire without meeting these conditions would be considered unfeasible, according to Xinhua in a different report on Sunday. Saleh al-Arouri, deputy head of Hamas's political bureau, told Al Jazeera on Saturday that "there are no negotiations now" and there would be no more prisoners exchanged with Israel until the war is over. Before the seven-day cease-fire collapsed on Friday, 110 hostages were released, including 24 foreign nationals, while an estimated 135 hostages are still being held by Hamas and other militants in Gaza, according to Netanyahu. The Israel Defense Forces' Arabic-language spokesperson posted maps on social media indicating which areas civilians should leave, directing people in areas east of Khan Younis to evacuate further south to shelters in Rafah, an indication that a ground offensive could be imminent. The resurgence of intense fighting has laid bare just how huge the divergences are between the conflicting sides, and this gap will remain a major barrier toward peace in the foreseeable future, Liu Zhongmin, a professor at the Middle East Studies Institute of Shanghai International Studies University, told the Global Times on Sunday. Liu explained that in essence, Hamas is seeking a complete end of the war and sees the release of hostages as a step toward this goal, while Israeli authorities continue to push for the total elimination of Hamas and therefore its hostilities would not stop even after all hostages are freed. Chinese observers noted that the US and Europe are intensifying their pressure on the Israeli authorities in pursuit of a complete truce, however they believe the efforts are unlikely to reverse the short-term situation. The continued Israel-Gaza war will not only further isolate Israel in the international community, but also test Netanyahu's own political career at home, Liu said. Observers pointed out that having failed to persuade Israel to bring an end to the war that has killed more than 15,000 civilians and counting day by day, the US ruling Democratic Party, which paints itself as a defender of human rights, is facing mounting pressure as the 2024 general election approaches. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Yemen will continue operations against Tel Aviv, US in support of Gaza IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency Dec 3, 2023 Tehran, IRNA -- Spokesperson for the Yemeni Armed Forces Brigadier General Yahya Saree has said that the Yemeni Armed Forces will continue operations against the Zionist regime and the US in support of Gaza. The Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) will resume their operations against the Israeli occupation after it renewed its aggression on the Gaza Strip on Friday morning, Almayadeen news channel reported citing Brigadier General Saree's announcement on Sunday. "We will resume targeting the Zionist occupation entity with painful and crushing strikes," Saree confirmed. The spokesperson stressed that the Armed Forces "halted the navigation of the Zionist enemy's vessels" in the Red Sea "in support of the Palestinian people". "The [US] managed the war on Yemen, and [it is also] managing the current war on Gaza and Palestine," Brigadier General Saree underlined. He said that the Yemeni Armed Forces are "engaged in a decisive battle against the Zionist and American enemy, and we will persist until the aggression on Gaza comes to an end". "Those who aggress against the Yemeni people from the coalition of evil regimes and mercenary gangs are the ones who support and endorse the Zionist entity's brutal aggression on Gaza," he added. "The Americans and Zionists will be acting in absolute idiocy if they choose to commit an aggression on Yemen," Saree stressed, confirming that the YAF will deliver a "strong and painful" response to such actions. Turning words into action, the YAF led a successful operation in the Red Sea, seizing an Israeli-owned cargo ship on November 19, 2023. The Yemeni Armed Forces have also launched multiple attack drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles at Israeli targets in occupied Palestine. 3266**2050 NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Several Israeli soldiers killed, injured in Hezbollah missile strikes IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency Dec 3, 2023 Tehran, IRNA -- The Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah has targeted several Israeli military bases in a fresh round of missile strikes, as tensions escalate in border regions following the resumption of Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip. Reports said on Sunday that several military sites, including Zabadin and Ruwaisat al-Alam sites, were struck with missiles. In a statement, Hezbollah said several Israeli soldiers were killed and injured when their military vehicle was hit by anti-tank fire in the area of Beit Hillel in northern occupied territories. The Israeli military confirmed the missile strikes, claiming that Israeli forces had detected the launch site inside Lebanon and were striking it. Al Jazeera also reported four missiles were fired from Lebanon towards the Galilee Panhandle in northern occupied territories. Meanwhile, the Israeli regime's Channel 12 acknowledged that four Israeli soldiers were injured after a rocket hit the city of Qiryat Shemona. Tensions continue to rise in the region nearly two months after the Zionist regime launched a full-scale invasion of Gaza, which has killed an estimated 16,000 Palestinians. 4353**2050 NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Resistance groups target US military base in Syria IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency Dec 3, 2023 Tehran, IRNA -- Lebanon's Al Mayadeen TV have cited its sources that several explosions have been heard in a military base of the US-led coalition in Kharab al-Jir military airport in northern Hasaka. Al Mayadeen said that the resistance groups have targeted the military airport with seven rockets, while noting that there is no immediate information on the possible damage or casualties. The attacks happened shortly after the landing of cargo planes carrying military equipment for the US bases in Syria. Since the launch of the Zionist invasion of Gaza Strip and the US blatant support for these aggressions, resistance groups have been carrying out rocket and drone attacks against US bases in Iraq and Syria as a sign of support for the oppressed people of Gaza. 9341**2050 NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Iran deports 16k illegal migrants to Afghanistan IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency Dec 3, 2023 Mashhad, IRNA -- An Iranian border guard commander has said that 16,000 illegal Afghan migrants were expelled and came back to Afghanistan via the Taybad border crossing in Razavi Khorasan province over the past five days. Brigadier General Majid Shoja said on Sunday that the border guard command of Khorasan Razavi province identified and handed over 16,000 illegal migrants to representatives of Afghanistan. This move was carried out to deal with the phenomenon of the illegal presence of foreign nationals in Iran, he noted. Foreign nationals must enter Iran via official and legal entrance points, otherwise, they will face firm reactions, Shoja noted. Around 328,000 Afghan migrants who illegally entered Iran during the first half of the current Iranian calendar year (March 21, 2023, to September 22, 2023) have been repatriated to their country through the border crossings of Khorasan Razavi province. The northwestern province has a 302-kilometer common border with Afghanistan to the east. Taybad County, one of the main border points between the two countries, is located 225 kilometers southeast of Mashhad, the capital city of Razavi Khorasan province. 4208**9417 NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address MBABANE He must come back home. His Majesty Correctional Services (HMCS) has called for its former employee Bhekani Magagula to come back home and volunteer information to the police. Through a Facebook live stream, the self-confessed exiled struggle stalwart made serious allegations that at the height of the political unrest in 2021, officers at HMCS would leave with at least 20 rounds of ammunition each when going out to the field and they would return with none. Registry Magagula said he knew this because he was exposed to the registry book, where records of each officers ammunition before leaving for duty and after duty were kept. He alleged that the perception that HMCS officers were not participating in the killing of emaSwati at the height of the political unrest was wrong and he claimed that they equally participated. When supporting this allegation, the former warder narrated that each time the officers went out with the loaded guns; they would return with no bullets, an indication that they had used the ammunition to kill emaSwati. MaSwati, dont buy into the thinking that warders were not participating in the killings of emaSwati during the unrest, they were equally carrying out the killings, he alleged. Magagula said he did not regret leaving HMCS, because he would have resigned anyway, given the allegations he was putting forward, which he said was not sitting well with him. I did not just leave my employment, but I could not stand and watch while the people I was working for were involved in the killing of innocent emaSwati, he alleged. Magagula also shared that the exiled struggle stalwarts he was with were actually starving and would sometimes go for a week without eating. He pinned this on a leader of a political formation, whom he did not mention by name, only referring to him as Bhabuli. Magagula said it was all merry when they reached South Africa (SA), having escaped from Eswatini as they were warmly welcomed by the leader. He alleged the leader was a recipient of money from donors who were financially supporting the struggle and the funding was intended to ensure that the struggle stalwarts were well taken care of. He alleged that on their arrival, they were residing at the leaders camp and they were about 16 of them at the time. However, he asserted that the leader did not use the money as intended, but focused on his personal life and neglected the struggle soldiers, so much that they had to leave his camp where they were residing and find an alternative place to stay. Comrades It was about 16 of us initially, but the number has decreased to eight. We are all alive and well but I can tell you that the comrades are starving and they sometimes go a week without eating, he said. Magagula said the only thing that kept him going was that he had found something to do, that was bringing him income, but the others were struggling to make ends meet. This was not the first time such information was shared as the allegation of starvation by the so-called struggle stalwarts was once made by one of the members of the solidarity forces, who was in exile in SA but later apprehended by police. He made the assertion while making his appearance in court. Raisi says Islamic Republic supports Palestine based on Constitution IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency Dec 3, 2023 Tehran, IRNA -- The Islamic Republic's support of Palestine and Gaza which are under attack these days is according to the country's Constitution, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has announced. President Raisi made the remarks at the second national conference on responsibility for implementation of the Constitution in Tehran on Sunday. Supporting the oppressed is among the principles of the Islamic Republic Constitution, the president underlined adding that support for Palestine has been the main issue since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. Referring to the killing of nearly 6,000 innocent children in Gaza, the president stressed that the fake Zionist regime will be annihilated by divine revenge. Article 154 of the Islamic Republic Constitution says: The Islamic Republic of Iran has as its ideal human felicity throughout human society and considers the attainment of independence, freedom, and the rule of justice and truth to be the right of all people of the world. Accordingly, while scrupulously refraining from all forms of interference in the internal affairs of other nations, it supports the just struggles of the freedom fighters against the oppressors in every corner of the globe. 1483**7129 NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Iran, EU call for immediate halt to Gaza war IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency Dec 3, 2023 Tehran, IRNA -- Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell have discussed the Gaza war on the phone, with both top diplomats emphasizing the need for an immediate stop to the conflict. During the talks that were held on Saturday night, Amirabdollahian also stressed the need for sending humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians in Gaza. He warned against the Israeli regime's plan for the forced migration of Palestinians from their land, and blamed the current situation on occupation and aggression by the regime. Amirabdollahian also warned of the possibility of the war expanding to other parts of the region in case that the Israeli regime does not stop its crimes in the besieged Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. The top Iranian diplomat criticized US support for the Israeli regime, saying that Washington's supportive policies are encouraging Tel Aviv to continue its military aggression and killing of civilians in Gaza, and are an important cause of spreading the war. Borrell, on his part, said that tensions in Gaza and the West Bank should be stopped as soon as possible, adding that the European Union is engaged in efforts to make Israel respect international law. He admitted that Iran plays a role in helping de-escalate tensions in the region, and said that the EU also shares the view that the Palestinian issue must be resolved through diplomacy, and the continuation of military attacks only exacerbates the crisis. 4194 NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Hamas: No prisoner exchange until aggression on Gaza ends ISNA - Iranian Students' News Agency Sun / 3 December 2023 / 10:14 A member of the Hamas movement political bureau called on all world powers to end the occupation of the land of Palestine and al-Quds. Tehran (ISNA) - Head of the detainees, wounded, and martyrs files in the Hamas movement, Zaher Jabarin stressed that ther will be No prisoner exchange until aggression on Gaza ends. "We are ready to pay the price for freedom, and we will not accept anything less than our independence," the senior Hamas official emphasized. On the prisoners-captives exchange negotiations headed by Qatar, Jabarin told Al Mayadeen that "efforts have not been halted, and [Qataris] are working to curb the Israeli aggression against Gaza." He also revealed that the movement had acquired information that indicated that the Israeli occupation would renew its aggression on the Gaza Strip following the exchange of civilian Israeli captives for Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli prisons. Jabarin said the movement will work to achieve the "sovereign demands" of its people, adding that they are currently battling for the liberation of Palestinians. In this context, the senior official confirmed to Al Mayadeen that the movement offered to hand over all elderly captives, over the age of 60, in exchange for all Palestinian prisoners of the same demographic. He also reiterated that "there will be no prisoner exchange [deal] as long as the Israeli aggression on Gaza continues." On this point, Jabarin said the "ruling class in the Zionist entity has [direct interest] in extending the aggression against Gaza, because once it stops," Israeli officials will be pushed out of office and "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be imprisoned," due to the occupation's failure to prevent the events that unfolded on October 7, which constituted an "intelligence failure at all security, political, and military levels." Jabarin stressed that Israeli officials will be heading "to the ash heap of history." The Hamas official, through Al Mayadeen, saluted the Resistance in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, calling on all Arab and Islamic countries to engage in the fight against the Israeli occupation. "An Arab country receiving the President of the Zionist entity, at this time, weighs heavily on us, and it is irrational," Jabarin explained, in reference to Isaac Herzog's visit to the United Arab Emirates. On another note, Jabarin slammed US Vice President, Kamala Harris, who said Hamas should be uprooted from Gaza, saying, "If she wants to uproot Hamas, she must uproot 75% of the Palestinian people." On the buffer zone that the occupation seeks to establish in the Gaza Strip, after its harrowing October 7 defeat, Jabarin said the movement "will thwart any attempt to establish a buffer zone in Gaza," stressing that there can be "no security solution to the Palestinian" cause. Earlier on Saturday, Reuters revealed that "Israel" informed several Arab countries of its desire to establish a buffer zone inside the Gaza Strip after its war on the Strip ends, citing its wish to prevent any future attacks. According to sources, "Israel" has communicated its plans to Egypt and Jordan, as well as the UAE. Additionally, Saudi Arabia, which has not established official ties with "Israel", has been informed, along with Turkey. The governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey have not responded to Reuters' requests for comments. Attempts to reach Jordanian officials for comments were unsuccessful, according to the news agency. End Item NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Raisi proposes referenda in countries to measure support for Palestine ISNA - Iranian Students' News Agency Sun / 3 December 2023 / 10:09 Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi urged different nations to hold referenda to show everyone that their people greatly support Palestine and the rights of the Palestinian people, adding that Western countries are particularly terrified of organizing such a move. Tehran (ISNA) - The President's suggestion came during a Saturday phone discussion with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, in which the two discussed a variety of issues, including Tehran-Tokyo ties and Israel's current war on Gaza. Raisi called the Zionist regime's massacre in Gaza "the greatest humanitarian disaster in modern history" and emphasized the importance of establishing truths about the Palestinian situation. He touched on the occupation's history of demolishing homes and killing Palestinians, as well as turning Gaza into an open-air prison in the last 75 years. Raisi expressed that world leaders should review this past to observe the actual sufferings of the Palestinian people. He proposed that different countries, including Japan, should hold referenda in which they measure support for Palestine by their local populations, citing that Western nations are "very afraid" of holding such referenda. Nevertheless, wide public support for Palestine and calls for a ceasefire have caused a global ripple effect that has been noticeable worldwide. Raisi then criticized the US role in Israel's war on Gaza, calling it the main perpetrator behind the Israeli "war machine" that terrorizes the defenseless people of Gaza while they are under siege. He emphasized that the silence of world leaders only emboldened the Zionist child killers and urged that countries including Japan should seriously follow up on 4 major issues that will ease the suffering of Palestinians. According to the Iranian President, these are halting Israeli strikes, sending relief to Gaza, lifting the siege, and upholding international law. Kishida voiced worry about the humanitarian situation in Gaza and highlighted the significance of halting strikes on civilians, as well as delivering humanitarian supplies to Palestinians there. End Item NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Qatar urges swift, impartial probe into Israeli crimes in Gaza Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 6:26 PM Qatari Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani has called for an urgent probe into Israeli crimes in Gaza. The Qatar-based Al Jazeera TV channel quoted Sheikh Mohammed as saying on Sunday that there was a need for an "immediate, comprehensive and impartial international investigation" into crimes Israel has been committing in Gaza. This is the first time since the start of the Israeli attacks on Gaza in early October that Sheikh Mohammed has described the regime's conducts in the enclave as "crimes." His country was the chief intermediary in negotiations between Hamas and Israel that led to a seven-day ceasefire starting November 24. The lull in the fighting allowed the badly-needed humanitarian aid to reach people in Gaza while Hamas and Israel exchanged captives and prisoners. Sheikh Mohammed said Qatar will continue to mediate between Hamas and Israel to work out another truce or a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. More than 600 people have been killed since early hours of Friday when Israel resumed its attacks on Gaza. Nearly 15,000 people, a significant part of them women and children, were killed in Israel's attacks on the enclave before the Qatar-mediated truce came into effect. The aggression began on October 7 hours after Hamas launched an unprecedented military operation into Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine near Gaza. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US warship, multiple commercial vessels attacked in Red Sea: Pentagon Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 6:25 PM The Pentagon says an American warship and multiple US commercial vessels have come under attack in the Red Sea, in what is viewed as a major escalation in the strategic waterway over the Israeli regime's brutal onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip. "We're aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and will provide information as it becomes available," the Pentagon said on Sunday. The Pentagon added that the USS Carney, which is an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, had shot down missiles and drones aimed at it last week while escorting a commercial vessel in the Red Sea. The American destroyer had been sailing near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which separates East Africa from the Arabian Peninsula, at the time of last week's attack, but no damage was inflicted on the Carney or its crew. The Pentagon fell short of clarifying whether the American warship was struck on Sunday, and did not identify where it believed the fire came from. The latest attack against the US destroyer and other commercial ships operating in the Red Sea came as Britain's Royal Navy said a suspected drone attack and explosion had been carried out in the area. Ambrey, a UK-based maritime security group, also announced on Sunday that a Bahamas-flagged cargo vessel was "struck by a rocket" while sailing off western coast of Yemen. Brigadier General Yahya Saree, the spokesman of the Yemeni armed forces, said two Israeli ships named Unity Explorer and Number Nine had been targeted in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait earlier in the day. Yemen's Armed Forces have launched a series of ballistic missiles at various sensitive targets lying across the southern part of the occupied territories in support of Palestinians since the Israeli regime waged a brutal war in Gaza in October. Yemen's Armed Forces and the popular Ansarullah resistance movement also warned of targeting any of the occupying regime's ships crossing the Arab country's territorial waters. The Yemeni Armed Forces seized on November 19 an Israeli cargo vessel, named Galaxy Leader, in the Red Sea, in what they said was a response to the regime's massacre of Palestinians in Gaza. The entire 52 crew members onboard were also detained by Yemen's naval forces in the south of the Red Sea. Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime's decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians. According to the Gaza-based health ministry, over 15,500 Palestinians, including more than 6,500 children and 4,000 women, were killed in Israeli strikes. Many more dead are feared to be under the rubble. Tel Aviv has also imposed a "complete siege" on Gaza, cutting off fuel, electricity, food, and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address UK-owned ship 'struck by rocket' off Yemeni coast amid spiraling tensions over Gaza: Report Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 4:25 PM A British-owned vessel sailing through the Red Sea has reportedly been targeted by rocket fire off Yemen's western coast, amid heightened tensions in the strategic waterway over the Israeli regime's war on the besieged Gaza Strip. Ambrey, a UK-based maritime security group, announced on Sunday that the unnamed Bahamas-flagged cargo vessel was "struck by a rocket" while sailing south around 35 nautical miles off western coast of Yemen. "The affected vessel was issuing distress calls relating to piracy/missile attack," the maritime security firm said, adding that "an international naval asset in the vicinity of the incident" was likely proceeding to the ship's location. Providing further details on the incident, Ambrey said the targeted vessel en route from the United States to Singapore had transited the Suez Canal five days ago. "The bulker was reportedly struck by a rocket and the crew retreated to the citadel," it added. "Numerous vessels passed the incident location today but no unusual maneuvers were observed." Ambrey said the attacked vessel's ownership and management was linked to Dan David Ungar, a British citizen listed as an Israeli resident. In a separate report on Sunday, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) agency, run by Britain's Royal Navy, claimed that it had received "a report of Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) activity including a potential explosion... originating from the direction of Yemen." The agency said the blast took place in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that separates East Africa from the Arabian Peninsula, advising vessels in the area to "exercise caution." Yemen's Armed Forces have launched a series of ballistic missiles at various sensitive targets lying across the southern part of the occupied territories in support of Palestinians since the Israeli regime waged a brutal war in Gaza in October. Yemen's Armed Forces and the popular Ansarullah resistance movement also warned of targeting any of the occupying regime's ships crossing the Arab country's territorial waters. The Yemeni Armed Forces seized on November 19 an Israeli cargo vessel, named Galaxy Leader, in the Red Sea, in what they said was a response to the regime's massacre of Palestinians in Gaza. The entire 52 crew members onboard were also detained by Yemen's naval forces in the south of the Red Sea. Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime's decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians. According to the Gaza-based health ministry, over 15,500 Palestinians, including more than 6,500 children and 4,000 women, were killed in Israeli strikes. Many more dead are feared to be under the rubble. Tel Aviv has also imposed a "complete siege" on Gaza, cutting off fuel, electricity, food, and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Yemeni forces target two Israeli ships in Red Sea: Spokesman Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 3:10 PM The Yemeni armed forces have targeted two more Israeli ships in the Red Sea. They say the battle against the Israeli regime and the United States will continue until attacks on the Gaza Strip come to a full stop. On Sunday, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, the spokesman of the Yemeni armed forces, said two Israeli ships named Unity Explorer and Number Nine were targeted in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait earlier in the day. He said that the first Israeli ship was targeted with a naval missile, and the second ship was struck with a drone after they rejected warnings from the Yemeni navy. "In support of the Palestinian nation, we've disrupted the passage of Zionist enemy ships," he said. Saree maintained that the Yemeni armed forces will continue to prevent Israeli ships from passing through the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea until the attacks "on our brothers in Gaza come to a halt." "Today, we are in a decisive fight against the US and the Zionist enemy and we will continue this until attacks on Gaza are stopped," he said. Yemeni forces launched missile and drone attacks on targets in the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine after the aggression on Gaza began in early October. On November 19, Ansarullah fighters boarded a commercial ship believed to be ultimately owned by a major Israeli businessman with links to the Tel Aviv regime. The Yemenis have said that any ship with links to Israel will be a legitimate target if it passes the waters off Yemen's ports in the Red Sea. Reports have shown that Israeli shipping companies have already decided to reroute their vessels in fear of attacks by Yemeni forces. Saree told Yemen's al-Masirah TV that Yemen is also prepared to respond to any retaliatory attack by the US and Israel and their allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The attacks by Yemenis are part of a broader military campaign that targets Israeli and US interests and involves resistance groups in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. The campaign is aimed at forcing the regime to halt its aggression on Gaza and to press Washington to end its support for the aggression. Iraqi resistance forces have launched dozens of attacks on US military bases in Iraq and Syria while Lebanon's Hezbollah has been engaged in almost daily attacks on Israeli bases in northern Palestine over the past two months. Israel resumed its attacks on Gaza early on Friday after a seven-day truce with Hamas. More than 15,500 people have been killed in Israel's attacks on Gaza since October 7 when the aggression was launched in response to the killing of 1,200 Israeli settlers and military forces in an operation by Hamas. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Israel seeking to 'separate' West Bank and Gaza: Palestinian foreign ministry Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 2:25 PM The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates has warned that Israel is planning to "solidify the separation" between the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip in an attempt to undermine the prospects of a future Palestinian state. The ministry made the remarks in a statement posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sunday, saying that Israel seeks to carry out the plan amid its ongoing deadly bombing campaign against Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has time and again said he plans to annex "all" settlements in the occupied West Bank. Israel occupied the West Bank in the 1967 Six-Day War, in a move never recognized by the international community. The Palestinian foreign ministry further condemned the killing of a 38-year-old Palestinian man, who was shot by Israeli settlers on Saturday, calling it "a deliberate attempt to escalate the situation in the West Bank." Israeli settlers fired live ammunition at Ahmed Mustafa Assi, father of six children, after raiding the town of Qarawat Bani Hassan in northwestern West Bank under the protection of the regime's forces. Assi was then left bleeding on the ground while Israeli forces accompanying settlers did not allow medical teams or local Palestinians to reach him. Israel has ramped up its aggression against Palestinians across the West Bank since October 7, when it launched a genocidal war against the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and thousands of others injured by Israeli settlers or troops across the occupied territory since the onset of the war. Around 16,000 people have so far been killed in Gaza with over 40,000 people wounded. According to Gaza's Health Ministry, 70 percent of victims of Israeli strikes on the blockaded territory are women and children. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Israeli attacks on Gaza kill 700 Palestinians in 24 hours Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 1:01 PM At least 700 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed in the latest round of Israeli attacks on the besieged Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours. The relentless Israeli bombardment has destroyed numerous homes, buildings, residential apartments, and both public and private properties. The Israeli military bombarded the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza with missile shells, killing over 100 Palestinians. The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza announced on Sunday that at least 400 people were killed in attacks on Shujaiya neighborhood and Jabaliya refugee camp. Several civilians were killed and others injured when an Israeli airstrike targeted a residential building in the al-Daraj neighborhood in Gaza City. Many people also lost their lives when a house was targeted by Israeli warplanes in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza Israel has also been continuing its attacks on the eastern areas of Khan Yunis in southern Gaza. The latest Israeli attacks targeted a house in the al-Junainah area in Rafah, in southern Gaza, leaving several dead. The Israeli military further bombed a house in the Nadim area of the Al-Zeitoun neighborhood, east of Gaza City. Airstrikes were also reported in the vicinity of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. Many civilians are reportedly trapped under the rubble. Continuous explosions are also heard in northern areas of Gaza as well. The death toll in the besieged territory since October 7 is now around 16,000. Most of the victims are women and children. The Gaza Health Ministry says Israeli forces have deliberately targeted 130 health facilities and put 20 hospitals out of service. As the total siege imposed by Israel on the already blockaded territory continues, food is running out, and bread is becoming more difficult to get with each passing day. Since October 7, bakeries across the Gaza Strip have been one of the targets of Israeli attacks. Dozens of bakeries have been either bombed or have gone out of service due to lack of fuel. A senior member of the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement has held the Tel Aviv regime fully responsible for the failure to extend the week-old truce which collapsed on Friday. "Claims that Hamas violated the terms of the truce deal are intended to justify the resumption of the genocidal war against civilians in the Gaza Strip," Ezzat al-Resheq, a member of Hamas's political bureau, said on Saturday. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Last week, Members of Parliament (MPs) were given a true picture of the state of the Eswatini economy by the Principal Planning Officer (PPO) in the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development, Siphiwe Dlamini. In a bold and principled display of leadership, she fearlessly confronted the poor management of the countrys economy, telling the MPs what they needed to hear rather than what they wanted to hear. She decried the lack of monitoring of government resources, uncontrolled spending and high corruption in ministries. She also questioned the need for 19 ministries and numerous parastatals and highlighted four areas where the government has been found to be losing a lot of money, namely; salaries and transfers in parastatals; car rentals by the Central Transport Administration (CTA) and fuel; as well as external travel. This submission stands in stark contrast to the all-too-common approach of officials who sacrifice the truth for political convenience. Her courageous stance serves as a beacon of hope for the genuine progress that the people deserve. Her principals should encourage this approach instead of creating echo chambers in which the truth is shut out. embracing They should not emulate our MPs, who, instead of embracing the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) Perception Survey findings that they are perceived as the most corrupt politicians, became highly defensive. This knee-jerk reaction only serves to underscore the urgent need for a change in the mindset of those who are meant to receive and act on genuine advice. The media is all too familiar with the shoot the messenger reactions that come with telling people what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear. This must stop. It is time our society embraces reality if we are to move forward as a country. We are fresh from Sibaya, where the people spoke truth to power in raising the critical challenges they face, such as poverty, unemployment, corruption, a lack of quality education, the health crisis, and many more. The overview cannot get any clearer. Rather than becoming defensive or dismissive, leaders at all levels must take this as a call to action. It is time to adopt a genuine commitment to do right for a change. This is the monumental task that lies ahead of Prime Minister (PM) Russell Dlamini and his Cabinet team. The PM has promised to present the countrys grand plan soon. We do believe it will spell out workable strategies to address the numerous socio-economic challenges we face, which are regarded as disasters. hope Our hope lies in the fact that he has been brought in for his ability to manage disasters. He must seize this opportunity to demonstrate a commitment to inclusive governance that is without fear or favour, so that more government officers can emulate the Economic Planning officer in giving good advice. Without this culture, any grand plan is destined to fail, because true leadership demands a willingness to listen, to learn, and to incorporate diverse voices into the framework of national progress. Let us embrace this moment as an opportunity to foster a culture of open dialogue, accountability and transparency. It is only this brand of leadership that can propel Eswatini towards a brighter and more prosperous future. Hamas holds Israel fully responsible for expiration of truce in Gaza Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 11:26 AM A senior member of the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement has held the Tel Aviv regime fully responsible for the failure to extend the week-old truce which collapsed on Friday. "Claims that Hamas violated the terms of the truce deal are intended to justify the resumption of the genocidal war against civilians in the Gaza Strip," Ezzat al-Resheq, a member of Hamas's political bureau, said on Saturday. Israel and Hamas agreed on a temporary truce on November 24 which was renewed twice before ending on Friday. Under the truce, fighting was paused and humanitarian aid was allowed to enter Gaza as Hamas released captives in exchange for Israel releasing Palestinian prisoners. An hour before the truce was supposed to end, at 7 am (05:00 GMT), the Israeli military claimed that its so-called missile defense system had detected incoming rockets. After that, they "intercepted a launch from Gaza." Minutes after the truce ended, Israeli air raids and artillery fighting resumed in Gaza. "The occupying regime is repeating its false allegations in the hope that it can invent excuses for its renewed aggression against Gazans," Resheq added. He said that Israel is spreading false and unfounded narratives and dismissed the claims about the missile launched from Gaza toward the Israeli-occupied territories. Such attempts are "aimed at obscuring the regime's premeditated plan to resume its barbaric bombardments and raids, and commit much more horrific massacres against defenseless civilians" in the coastal enclave, he added. "We exhibited our genuine willingness for the extension of the temporary ceasefire during talks with the mediators. We reiterate that the Israel regime is fully responsible for the failure to extend the humanitarian pause as it did not respond positively to the offers it had received through mediators," Resheq said. Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the territory's Palestinian resistance movements waged the surprise Operation al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime's decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians. The Israeli aggression has so far killed more than 15,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address President Raeisi: Iran's support for Palestine based on its constitution Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 11:02 AM President Ebrahim Raeisi says Iran's support for Gaza and Palestine is based on the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, adding that advocating for the Palestinians was the number-one priority since the 1979 Islamic Republic. Speaking at a conference in Tehran on Sunday, Raeisi emphasized that the tendencies of some regional countries do not compromise the constitutional principle behind the support for Palestine. "Our support for Gaza and Palestine is based on the Constitution. Backing the oppressed is among the foundations of the Constitution. Thus, supporting Palestine has been the foremost issue of the [Islamic] Revolution since its onset," he said. "We cannot stop adhering to the principles. The inclinations of some parties in the region will not compromise this principle of the Constitution." The Iranian chief executive also described the Iranian Constitution as the most progressive among all countries. He further cited an African jurist as saying that the Constitution of the Islamic Republic is a combination of democracy and ideals. 'Divine revenge to end Zionist regime' Meanwhile, Raeisi referred to the brutal Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip that has so far killed more than 15,200 Palestinians and left vast swathes of the besieged territory in ruins. He said that huge gatherings are being held across the world as the Zionist regime's racial discrimination, murder, injustice and oppression against the Palestinian people have been exposed. "We do not doubt that the divine revenge will emerge from the blood of 6,000 children, who were martyred oppressively, and that it will end the cruel and fake Zionist regime." Israel waged the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group conducted Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the usurping entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people. Iran hailed the historic Palestinian operation that shattered the Tel Aviv regime's so-called myth of invincibility. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Drone attack targets US-run military base in northern Iraq Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 10:46 AM A military base in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region where US military forces and trainers are stationed came under a drone attack amid rising anti-US sentiments over Washington's unconditional support for the Israeli onslaught in the Gaza Strip. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of anti-terror fighters, in a statement published on its Telegram channel, claimed responsibility for the attack on the US-run installation at the Erbil International Airport early on Sunday. The statement added that the explosive-laden drone directly struck the designated target and destroyed it. There were no immediate reports about possible casualties or the extent of damage caused. Sabereen News, a Telegram news channel associated with Iraqi anti-terror Popular Mobilization Units, also reported the incident. The strike comes amid rising anti-US sentiment over Washington's firm support for Israel's war against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, which has killed at least 15,207 people, most of them women and children. Another 40,650 people have been wounded as well. More than 7,500 individuals are reported missing, who may have died or been trapped under the rubble waiting to be rescued. The Israeli regime launched the war after Gaza's resistance groups conducted Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, their biggest operation against the occupying entity in years. Since the onset of the war on October 7, the United States has backed Israel's ferocious attacks on Palestinian territory as a means of "self-defense." The US House of Representatives on November 2 passed a standalone $14.3-billion military assistance package for Israel. The legislation, however, is yet to clear the Senate. Washington has also vetoed United Nations Security Council resolutions that called on the occupying regime to cease its aggression. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Hezbollah says undaunted by US, Israeli threats, will continue support for Gaza Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 10:37 AM A high-ranking official with Hezbollah says the Lebanese resistance movement will continue to support Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip and is not intimidated by US and Israeli threats. Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Sheikh Naim Qassem said on Sunday that the resistance's strength lies with the Palestinians' right to their lands and their "will to fight till the last breath." "The resistance will endure and continue, and it is prepared for that, we are with you. We will provide what is necessary to help you win and the threats of the US and Israel will not intimidate us," Lebanon's el-Nashra newspaper quoted Sheikh Qassem as saying. The Hezbollah official stressed that the Israeli regime achieved no goals in its weeks-long onslaught on Gaza, which began on October 7 after Hamas Operation Al-Aqsa Storm. "During 50 days, the Israelis did not achieve any goals, even the prisoners were released in exchange [for captives] and not in the battle," Sheikh Qassem said, referring to the Israel-Hamas truce which began on November 24 and was renewed twice before ending on Friday. Under the truce, mediated by Egypt and Qatar, fighting was paused and humanitarian aid was allowed to enter Gaza as Hamas released 110 captives in exchange for Israel releasing 240 Palestinian prisoners. "This war is absurd and has repercussions for the Israeli regime. The Palestinian people will emerge from this war stronger and more committed to their land and to their resistance, while the Israelis will be weaker and more anxious about the future," he added. The Hezbollah official also added that they will defeat Israel, however, they are "not in a rush to do so." Southern Lebanon has come under Israel's sporadic attacks since the start of the war in the besieged Gaza Strip. Hezbollah has in response carried out more than 1,000 retaliatory strikes on the occupied territories in support of Palestinians in the coastal territory. Amal, Hezbollah in coordination against Israel Ali Khreis, a senior Lebanese Parliament member, said in an interview with the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat on Saturday that Lebanon's Amal Movement is in "constant coordination" with Hezbollah in the fight against the Israeli regime and its support for Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip. "The Amal Movement is present in southern Lebanon militarily and logistically, and in case of any foolishness by Israel in attacking Lebanon and carrying out a ground offensive, we will be at the forefront of the resistance," Khreis said. Declining to provide further details on the Amal Movement's activities in southern Lebanon, Khreis told the Saudi daily that they are performing the tasks of evacuating the injured in coordination with the International Red Cross and UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Khreis said the Lebanese movement is also helping the displaced residents by providing them with shelter and assistance 'Israel suffered strategic failure' Hussein Hajj Hassan, another Lebanese Parliament member, commended the resistance front's support for Palestinians in Gaza and said the Israeli regime suffered a "strategic" setback in the besieged area. "The Zionist enemy suffered such an unprecedented strategic failure that we will witness its severe repercussions for a long time," Hajj Hassan said. "From day one [of the war], the enemy was pursuing unattainable goals, including the destruction of Hamas, the reoccupation of Gaza, and the forced relocation of the Palestinians, which could not be achieved," he added. "After 50 days of ground operations in the first stage, the Zionist regime was unable to win even a partial victory." "The patience and perseverance of the residents of Gaza is exemplary and great. We are witnessing massive changes in the Arab and Islamic world, and all these factors are causing the Zionist enemy to end up nowhere." 'Palestine to remain first issue of Muslims' Hassan Mourad, another Lebanese parliamentarian, also lauded in an interview with Asharq al-Awsat newspaper Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation. "Palestine will remain the first issue of the Muslim world and there will be no change in this regard. The truth will only emerge at the decisive moment. The people of Arab countries proved that they support the right and freedom of a resistance that grows day by day and is passed on from generation to generation," Mourad said. "Gaza emerged victorious due to the steadfastness of its resistance and the patience of its people, and it succeeded in breaking the will of the enemy." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Al-Qassam operation kills 60 Israeli soldiers: Hamas Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 10:05 AM The military wing of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas says its fighters have killed dozens of Israeli soldiers in their camp at a deployment point east of Juhr Al-Dik, amid the regime's unrelenting aggression against the Gaza Strip. Hamas' military wing, known as Qassam Brigades, reported on Sunday that their fighters have killed as many as 60 Israeli soldiers after explosive devices were detonated in their camp, east of Juhor ad-Dik village in the south of Gaza City. Al-Qassam fighters successfully planted three anti-personnel devices in a circular formation around the deployment center. The landmines were detonated simultaneously at 04:30 local time and Palestinian fighters immediately started firing at the remained Israeli military personnel, the military brigades said. The reports said that after inflicting significant casualties, all of the resistance fighters safely withdrew to their positions. The Israeli military has confirmed the death of the "two soldiers" during the battles in Gaza today. On Saturday, Al-Qassam released a video from Gaza that shows resistance fighters attacking Israeli soldiers, tanks, and a JCB from close range in the Beit Hanoun neighborhood of the Gaza Strip, using four anti-personnel and anti-fortification shells. Moreover, in separate statements on Friday, Al-Qassam said that it fired rockets at the cities of Asqalan, Ashdod, Sderot, Netivot, and Beersheba, as well as the Ra'im military base, in the wake of the expiry of the ceasefire with Israel in the besieged Palestinian enclave. It also said its fighters attacked Israeli forces in northern Gaza, including an Israeli tank and a troop carrier. Israel has ramped up its aggression against Palestinians across Gaza and the West Bank since October 7, when it launched a genocidal war against the Gaza Strip. Hamas and the Israeli regime exchanged hundreds of prisoners during a seven-day truce agreement, which was mediated by Egypt and Qatar. The brutal regime resumed its military onslaught after the deal expired on Friday. Moreover, the Israeli regime in a statement on Saturday, ordered its Mossad negotiating team in Qatar to return, following a deadlock in the talks on extending a truce with the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas. An estimated 300 people were killed and hundreds more wounded on Saturday after 50 residential buildings were leveled by Israeli fighter jets in the Shujaiya neighborhood, according to the Palestinian civil defense in Gaza. Earlier, at least 100 Palestinians were killed by Israeli air strikes on Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp. More than 15,200 people have so far been killed in Gaza with over 40,000 people wounded. According to Gaza's Health Ministry, 70 percent of victims of Israeli strikes on the blockaded territory are women and children. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Israeli settlers, forces kill more Palestinians in West Bank attacks Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 2:12 AM Israeli settlers and the regime's troops have killed at least three more Palestinian men during separate attacks across the occupied West Bank. In the first incident on Saturday, Israeli settlers, who were protected by the regime's forces, carried out a terrorist attack against the town of Qarawat Bani Hassan in northwestern West Bank, the official Palestinian Wafa news agency reported. The settlers fired live ammunition at a Palestinian man identified as 38-year-old father of six children Ahmed Mustafa Assi. Assi was then left bleeding on the ground while Israeli forces accompanying settlers did not allow medical teams or local Palestinians to reach him. Later on Saturday, another Palestinian succumbed to injuries he had sustained during an attack by Israeli forces near the town of Tell, in the northern West Bank province of Nablus. According to Wafa news agency, ambulances were denied access to the wounded Palestinian man, whose identity remains unknown, before he was apprehended by the Israeli occupation forces. Soon after he was arrested, the Palestinian man was pronounced dead because of his serious injuries. The third Palestinian was killed early Sunday by the Israeli forces' live fire during a violent raid in the city of Qalqilyah. Local sources reported that the 21-year-old man, whose identity has not been announced yet, lost his life after Israeli forces started to fire indiscriminately at civilians while conducting violent raids on their homes. The Palestinian man was hit with live fire as he was heading to his workplace at a bakery. Israel has ramped up its aggression against Palestinians across the West Bank since October 7, when it launched a genocidal war against the Gaza Strip. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and thousands of others injured by Israeli settlers or troops across the occupied territory since the onset of the war. The latest of the Israeli attacks featured an extensive raid targeting the city of Jenin and its refugee camp in the north of the West Bank, during which two Palestinian children were shot dead by the regime's forces. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Investor caution highlights red flags in Vietnam economy Vietnam has a lot going for it, but its growth and attractiveness as a destination for foreign investment are not preordained. A commentary by Zachary Abuza 2023.12.03 -- Vietnam has been riding very high the past few years with its superlative initial handling of the Covid-19 pandemic that kept its factories open and as the single biggest beneficiary of corporate supply chain diversification out of China. Vietnam realized 8.5% growth in 2022 and had commitments of $22.4 billion of foreign direct investment (FDI). Pledged FDI by September 2023 already reached $20 billion. A stream of high-level foreign visitors - including U.S. President Joe Biden - have come to court the leadership in Hanoi. Apple moved a supply line to Vietnam, Lego is building a solar-generated plant, and other chip manufacturers have made announcements about establishing production in Vietnam. Yet, growth for the first six months of 2023 was only 3.72%, half the target. Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh announced that the target for 2023 remains 6.5% but the Asian Development Bank, IMF and Singapore's UOB have all sharply lowered their predictions closer to 5%. While Vietnam has benefitted from supply chain diversification, that's also made it over-dependent on exports; Exports reached 93% of GDP in 2021. Exports fell for five consecutive months in 2023, the longest slump in 14 years. Exports to the United States in the first nine months of 2023, were down 24% compared to the previous year, which had a large impact on their overall trade balance. Vietnam runs enormous trade deficits with China, as its manufactured goods are dependent on imported components. Recent announcements by two important foreign investors, Intel and rsted, should also be red flags for the leadership. Jumping the gun Intel opened their chip assembly and packaging plant in 2010 and in 2021, increased their investment to $1.5 billion. In early 2023, there were unconfirmed reports that the firm was planning a $1 billion expansion. Vietnamese leaders were clearly expecting that and more. In February, the Vietnamese government jumped the gun in announcing a $3.3 billion investment from Intel. The firm's CEO told Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh in a May 2023 meeting in Hanoi that the firm still had plans to invest in the country. Despite the fanfare around Biden's September 2023 trip to Vietnam, the passage of the CHIPS Act, and Chinh's whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley in September, Intel announced that they would not be expanding in Vietnam in the foreseeable future. Both sides tried to do damage control. Intel reiterated that they had "never made any official announcement of a new investment." But clearly something was amiss. In June 2023, the Danish renewable energy giant rsted announced that it was leaving Vietnam's wind market, stating that "Our business ethics have met hurdles." Vietnam, according to the World Bank, has the fastest growing electricity market in Southeast Asia. And it also has the fastest rate of renewable energy growth in the region. With its long coastline, Vietnam is thought to be the largest market for wind power in Southeast Asia, an estimated 600GW. rsted signed an agreement with T&T, a sprawling conglomerate, in 2021, with an ambitious target of investing in 21GW of offshore wind by 2030. In August 2022, the joint venture announced two offshore wind farms off Ninh Tuan province. In May 2023 it had signed a contract with a division of the state-owned oil company to build foundations for its turbines. Unaddressed systemic issues So the country that is trying to attract more semiconductor production and more investment in its renewable sector has seen leading global players equivocate or walk away. What's going on? While it's incorrect to say that Vietnam is no longer a darling of foreign investors, the country has no shortage of challenges and issues that will ensure that it doesn't reach its full potential and perhaps be caught in the middle income trap. There are five interrelated things worth noting. First, Vietnam's electricity supply remains erratic. Last summer's heat waves resulted in daily brownouts at many industrial estates in the Hanoi-Haiphong corridor. The government called on firms to reduce their energy consumption. If you want to be the "plus one" as companies seek to diversify supply chains, then you have to get basic infrastructure right. While there was great relief that Vietnam finally produced its long awaited power development plan (PDP-8), in May 2023, it took years to negotiate and was highly contentious; the prime minister didn't even sign off on it. PDP-8 remains short on details and it watered down Vietnam's commitment to reducing its dependence on coal fired power plants. The government is not even close to getting their implementation plan completed, and the grid remains antiquated and underdeveloped. Although Vietnam joined the $15.5 billion Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) program in 2023 to wean itself off of coal, and has committed itself to carbon neutrality by 2050, it's been slow to provide the donor community with concrete plans. It hasn't helped that it has arrested six climate activists on trumped up charges who were presenting plans to help the government reach their carbon neutral goals. Corruption worries The regulatory framework remains both unclear, contradictory, and oftentimes undeveloped. rsted indicated concern that the power purchase mechanism is still not in place, and unlikely to be agreed upon anytime soon. Second, there are real human capital concerns. With Samsung, Amkor, Synopsis, and others rushing into Vietnam's young semiconductor industry, there are already shortages of trained engineers and designers. Vietnam has an estimated 5,000 chip engineers, and it will take years to get more trained. Third, corruption remains endemic. The most recent scandal, an $12.5 billion embezzlement scheme at Saigon Commercial Bank, highlighted the lax oversight and corruption within the banking sector. rsted's announcement made indirect mention of corruption. Fourth, Vietnam is less politically stable than what meets the eye. The three politicians most trusted by the international business community were purged in December 2022 to February 2023 in the "Blazing Furnace" anti-corruption campaign of Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong. None was directly tied to corruption, and the moves against them were seen as being politically motivated. Throughout 2023, there were rumors that the Prime Minister himself was in fear of losing his job. There have now been two CPV Central Committee Plenums that have been unable to come to a consensus on who to fill the two vacancies on the Politburo. And infighting ahead of the 14th Party Congress, expected to be held in January 2026, is already underway. Finally, policy making remains slow and cumbersome and no one is expecting a bold response to the slowing economy ahead of the Party Congress. Vietnam still has a lot going for it, but its growth and attractiveness as a destination for foreign investment are not preordained. In a very competitive global landscape, Vietnamese policy makers have to be responsive. The recent signals by two global industry leaders suggest a lack of confidence in Vietnam's leadership to provide sound corruption-free economic stewardship. Zachary Abuza is a professor at the National War College in Washington and an adjunct at Georgetown University. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense, the National War College, Georgetown University or Radio Free Asia. Copyright 1998-2023, RFA. Used with the permission of Radio Free Asia, 2025 M St. NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20036. For any commercial use of RFA content please send an email to: mahajanr@rfa.org. RFA content December not be used in a manner which would give the appearance of any endorsement of any product or support of any issue or political position. Please read the full text of our Terms of Use. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Less Flower, More Sun? President-Backed Initiative To Change Flag Causes Outcry In Kyrgyzstan By Chris Rickleton, RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service December 03, 2023 BISHKEK -- To some, the new flag proposal resembled the spine-covered burs of the horse chestnut fruit while others saw the head of the mace weapon used by medieval combatants to bludgeon their foes in battle. But for all the mocking memes and genuine indignation, Kyrgyzstan's flag appears set for a makeover, after President Sadyr Japarov backed a parliamentary initiative to change its design and lawmakers passed the first reading of a concurrent draft law this week. The question then is why? Or perhaps more pertinently, why now? According to parliament speaker Nurlan Shakiev, a co-initiator of the bill to change the flag that reached parliament in late September, the answer lies in aesthetics. Namely, the wavy solar rays that emanate from the flag's "tunduk" centerpiece -- the object at the apex of a Kyrgyz yurt, or nomadic tent -- look too similar to the petals of a sunflower. Japarov's office backed this finding almost immediately, with the president suggesting in October that the sunflower likeness had long been a topic of discussion in Kyrgyz society -- and not in a good way. "There have even been cases when foreigners who came to visit us said that large amounts of sunflowers must be grown in our country," Japarov insisted in comments to the state news agency Kabar. That could be problematic because the Kyrgyz word for sunflower, "kunkarama," is used as a metaphor for something or someone that is dependent, and "bends to the sun" -- a fact that Japarov alluded to in the Kabar interview. "To be honest, since gaining independence we have been heavily dependent on the outside world. So maybe it's time to reconsider the appearance of our flag," he maintained. But the president hasn't merely supported the proposal. After Shakiev and another lawmaker put forth a new version of the flag that caused anger and comparisons with all kinds of thorny plants, Japarov and his team hit the drawing board and came up with an alternative to the alternative. And it is a flag closer to the president's vision -- still with straight rays, but slightly less bur-like -- that is likely to be the final version, with lawmakers passing a first reading of the draft law with 66 votes to eight on November 29. A poll by RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service with more than 40,000 votes and counting, meanwhile, showed around 80 percent of respondents want to keep the existing flag. Nothing Better To Do, Or Grand Distraction? Successive popular revolutions in Kyrgyzstan brought a glut of nation-building initiatives as new administrations look to make their mark on a post-Soviet independence that has little to show for it in the way of economic success. A common complaint is that such proposals like the one to change the flag show that officials and parliamentarians "have nothing better to do" despite a multitude of pressing problems in Kyrgyzstan. After the country's second revolution in 2010, a new government and an emboldened parliament brimmed with ideas to set the country back on its proper spiritual and political path. Some initiatives -- like the call to tear down a statue of a winged, female figure holding aloft a tunduk, because holding a tunduk is a patriarchal preserve, lawmakers and other public figures argued -- were successful. Others, like the initiative to change the background color of Kyrgyzstan's flag from the current "bloody" red to blue -- or rename the capital Bishkek after the country's mythical hero, Manas -- never made the cut. Yet there is another more conspiratorial, but still popular view, which is that these inevitably emotive debates are actively triggered in order to distract from other -- more underhand -- moves being made by the government. In this vein, journalist and legal expert Semetei Amanbekov warned on Facebook on October 25 that "the flag and other nonsense initiatives" are a useful way of deflecting attention from a very controversial law on "foreign representatives," akin to a Russian-style law on foreign agents that has drawn widespread international criticism. That was the same day the foreign representatives bill passed a first reading and -- naturally -- the same day Japarov gave his detailed comments on the flag-changing initiative to Kabar. "The first step has been taken toward the complete destruction of independent media and progressive NGOs [on] the road to the country's isolation," Amanbekov said at the time. Nevertheless, the journalist is now part of the wave of social media users who have posted profile photos of themselves with the current flag in opposition to the move to change to a new banner. 'Not Seeing, Not Listening' More than three years after being catapulted from a prison cell to the presidency during post-election unrest, former opposition figure Japarov has proven one of the most transformational of the country's six presidents and -- thus far -- one of the most popular. Constitutional changes passed in 2021 cut the stronger parliament that was established in 2010 back down to size, and significantly expanded the powers of Japarov's presidential office. Also thrown out was the stipulation that prevented presidents from running for reelection -- a trailblazing change in a region where presidents stay in office until they die. This month, a new body that is not popularly elected but which chimes with Kyrgyz history and traditions -- the People's Kurultai -- is expected to enter the political fray. Critics view the new body as a probable echo chamber for the president and his allies and yet another way of keeping the diminished legislature in check. It is difficult to argue that a majority of Kyrgyz -- many of whom found the post-2010 parliaments bloated and useless -- are in any major way troubled by these moves. National polling done in May under the aegis of the U.S.-based International Republican Institute indicated that 78 percent of respondents approved of the overall direction the country was taking. That is down from 85 percent in the spring of 2022 but still significantly higher than the results of polls going back as far as 2007. And yet analysts still argue that this administration is falling into the same traps as its predecessors by ramping up crackdowns on civil society, jailing well-known politicians, and targeting independent journalists in a period when economic pressure appears to be growing. In recent months, authorities have attracted outrage for arresting a 70-year-old woman and a single mother for expressing political views on social media, while a 20-year old blogger is awaiting a potential jail sentence of up to seven years after he reposted a video of a politician criticizing Japarov. In light of these and other developments, and regardless of its motivations, the flag-change bid looks potentially risky, especially given the fact that public opinion on the initiative is -- at best -- divided. Kyrgyz parliamentary speaker Shakiev pledged that "everything will be taken into consideration" before any definitive move is made on the flag. In October, he cited conversations with the flag's original creators and claimed they were also unhappy about how the central emblem had changed over the years. But one of those authors, Bekbosun Zhaichybekov, claims Shakiev misinterpreted him. While he had indeed previously called on officials to ensure "control" over the design in its reproductions, he was categorically against swapping the wavy solar rays for the straight ones, he told Kaktus Media. Of the parliamentarians to raise objections to the move, visually impaired Dastan Bekeshev, a persistent critic of the government, admitted that he had never even seen the national flag but, like many citizens, doubted that it was hindering the country's development. His colleague, Tazabek Ikramov, quizzed Shakiev about how much the flag change would cost the state budget. Shakiev said that other than flags flying in the country's cities and at Kyrgyzstan's foreign embassies, the changes would be implemented gradually. There would be no additional burden on the state budget, he claimed, thanks to the costs being met by unnamed "sponsors." Mirlan Samyikojo, another lawmaker against changing the flag, argued that the decision was one of "state importance" and therefore required a popular referendum. But he said on the day of the bill's first reading his views were overridden in the most literal sense when another lawmaker voted in favor of the new flag on his behalf. "This bill is being passed by deception," Samyikojo said. "Of the people, 90 percent are against changing the flag. We are not seeing them. We are not listening to them." Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/kyrgyzstan-president-change-flag- outcry/32711880.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. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Israeli Military Says Destroyed About 500 Shafts to Hamas Tunnels in Gaza Since October 27 Sputnik News 20231203 MOSCOW, (Sputnik) - Last week, Qatar mediated a deal between Israel and Hamas on a temporary truce, the exchange of hostages, and the delivery of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. On Friday, the Israeli military resumed fighting against Hamas, saying the group had violated the humanitarian pause by opening fire on Israeli territory. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Saturday its had discovered over 800 shafts to Hamas tunnels since the start of its ground operation in the Gaza Strip on October 27, with about 500 of them destroyed so far. "Since the beginning of ground operations in the Gaza Strip, IDF soldiers have located over 800 shafts to Hamas' underground tunnels. About 500 of the tunnel shafts have been destroyed using a variety of operational methods, including with explosives and blocks," the IDF said on Telegram. On October 7, Hamas launched a large-scale rocket attack against Israel from the Gaza Strip and breached the border. Israel launched retaliatory strikes and ordered a complete blockade of Gaza, cutting off supplies of water, food, and fuel. On October 27, Israel launched a ground incursion into the Gaza Strip with the declared goal of eliminating Hamas fighters and rescuing the hostages. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Death Toll in Gaza Strip From Israeli Strikes Tops 15,500 - Health Ministry Sputnik News 20231203 CAIRO, (Sputnik) - The death toll from Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip has exceeded 15,500, while over 41,300 people have been injured, Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qudra said on Sunday. "The number of victims of the Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip since October 7 has grown to 15,523 people, 41,316 others sustained injuries of varying severity," Al-Qudra told a televised news conference. Last week, Qatar mediated a deal between Israel and Hamas on a temporary truce and the exchange of some of the prisoners and hostages, as well as the delivery of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. The truce was extended several times, but on Friday, the Israeli military resumed fighting against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, saying the group had violated the humanitarian pause by opening fire on Israeli territory. On October 7, Hamas launched a large-scale rocket attack against Israel from the Gaza Strip and breached the border. Israel launched retaliatory strikes and ordered a complete blockade of Gaza, cutting off supplies of water, food, and fuel. On October 27, Israel launched a ground incursion into the Gaza Strip with the declared goal of eliminating Hamas fighters and rescuing the hostages. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Dr Gianrico Farrugia, the President and CEO of Mayo Clinic, withDr George Cheriyan at Mayo Clinic in October 2023. An international consulting team representing Mayo Clinic, Rochester, US, visited the facilities of the American Mission Hospital (AMH) and the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland - Medical University of Bahrain (RCSI-MUB), in Busaiteen, recently to assess the AMH academic work stream and the ongoing collaboration between Bahrains two healthcare organisations. The newly opened King Hamad American Mission Hospital (KHAMH) in AAli which is the fifth and the largest of our AMH facilities - is also the official teaching hospital for the students of RCSI-MUB, said Dr George Cheriyan, AMHs Corporate CEO. Thanks to the wise leadership of this nation, which aims to improve the overall healthcare delivery in the Kingdom of Bahrain, a year-long engagement with Mayo Clinic has also begun, he added. Mayo Clinic was ranked No 1, among the World's Best Hospitals 2023, by Newsweek-Statistas Global Hospital Ratings, this year. Dr Deepak Abraham, who took up his role as the hospitals Chief of Medical Staff in February, said: The Mayo Clinic engagement spans three work streams: governance, academics and quality. The governance workstream visit was completed in June 2023, and it was followed by the visits of AMH board members and AMH leadership teams to the Mayo Clinic in October. According to a statement from the hospital, the Mayo Clinic assessment, held during 14-16 November 2023, included visits to various facilities and also interactions with the leaders of the organisations. It involved discussions around the existing partnership for student rotations, internship programs, and the future establishment of residency programs, said Dr Abraham. The RCSI has established a Clinical Trials Unit at the King Hamad American Mission Hospital, which will help in placing Bahrain on the world map by bringing cutting edge multicentric Phase II and Phase III clinical trials to Bahrain, he added. We are impressed with the close association of the two institutions in Bahrain, which clearly promises an enhancement in the level of medical education offered in the kingdom, said Ben Langholz, the Principal Analyst of Mayo Clinic International Consulting. Consulting team member Bob Speary, the Operations Administrator from the Education Services of Mayo Clinic, said: Mayo Clinic is committed to help AMH as they strive to pursue the establishment of postgraduate training programs in select specialties in the kingdom. The academic work stream assessment culminated in the first Symposium of Pediatrics held on November 19 at KHAMH in AAli, with an expert faculty from Mayo Clinic, Dr Seema Kumar, who spoke and held panel discussions with 10 other speakers. Dr Kumar, the Chair of Mayo Clinics Pediatric Endocrinology Division and the Program Director for the Pediatric Endocrinology Fellowship, gave two lectures -- one on tackling childhood obesity in the Middle East and Bahrain and another on the management of type-1 diabetes in children and the latest technologies in diabetes management. - TradeArabia News Service US to Deploy Ground-Based Missiles in Indo-Pacific in 2024 - Reports Sputnik News 20231203 MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The US military is planning to deploy ground-based intermediate-range missiles in the Indo-Pacific region in 2024 in order to deter China, the Asian newspaper reported on Sunday, citing US Army Pacific spokesman Rob Phillips. The United States might deploy land-based versions of the Tomahawk cruise missile and the Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) with an estimated range of 500 kilometers (310.6 miles) to 2,700 kilometers, media reported, adding that the US official did not specify the expected location and timing of deployment. This will be the first arsenal in the region since the end of the Cold War and the first deployment of intermediate-range missiles by the United States since the country withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (the INF Treaty). The INF treaty, signed between the Soviet Union and the US in 1987, banned the countries from developing and possessing ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges from 500-5,500 kilometers. In 2019, former US President Donald Trump withdrew from the treaty. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address US Spends 50% More Funds on Munitions Due to Ukraine's High Artillery Burn Rate - Pentagon Sputnik News 20231203 WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Saturday that the United States now has to spend 50% more money on munitions compared to five years ago because of Ukraine's high burn rate of artillery shells. "Ukraine's high burn rate for artillery has hammered home the need to invest even more in munitions. So compared to the defense budget from just five years ago, we're putting nearly 50 percent more money into munitions," Austin said in his remarks at the Ronald Reagan National Defense Forum in California. He also pointed out that during the Biden administration's tenure, the production of artillery shells in the US will quadruple. He added that US will continue to support Ukraine amid ongoing hostilities in the Middle East. The Pentagon chief believes that the outcome of the Ukrainian crisis will define global security for decades to come. At the same time, the Pentagon still refuses to provide data on the amount of support for Israel. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Israel launches airstrikes on Gaza, dozens killed: ministry People's Daily Online (Xinhua) 09:05, December 04, 2023 GAZA, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- The Hamas-run Health Ministry said that Israel launched new airstrikes on various areas in the war-torn Gaza Strip on Sunday, resulting in dozens killed and wounded. Rescue workers and medics told Xinhua that Israeli airstrikes targeted a populated residential building belonging to the Abu Aita family in the Jabalia Camp in the northern Strip. Thirty-seven people were killed and were transferred to the hospital over the past few hours. Meanwhile, at least three people were killed and 20 others wounded in an Israeli bombardment targeting a house owned by the Abu Jiyab family in the Abu Eskandar area, north of Gaza City, according to medics. Moreover, the Palestinian civil defense service said that several people were killed and wounded in homes destroyed by Israeli warplanes on Yafa Street, east of Gaza City. Earlier in the day, the civil defense service spokesperson Mahmoud Basal reported that 84 dead were transported to Al-Muamalat Hospital in Gaza due to Israeli airstrikes in the recent hours. The government's Media Office Director Ismael Al-Thawabteh told reporters on Sunday that more than 700 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during the last 24 hours. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Operation Iron Swords - Day 58 - 03 December 2023 Israel will hunt down Hamas in Lebanon, Turkey and Qatar even if it takes years, the head of Israel's domestic security agency Shin Bet said in a recording aired by Israel's public broadcaster Kan. It was unclear when Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar made the remarks or to whom. "The cabinet has set us a goal, in street talk, to eliminate Hamas. This is our Munich. We will do this everywhere, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Qatar. It will take a few years but we will be there to do it." By Munich, Bar was referring to Israel's response to the 1972 murder of 11 Israeli Olympic team members when terrorists from the Palestinian Black September group launched an attack on the Munich games. Israel responded by carrying out a targeted assassination campaign against Black September operatives and organizers over several years and in several countries. Yemens Houthis (armed by Iran) attacked a U.S. warship and multiple commercial ships in the Red Sea as they seek to choke a vital artery for international commerce. The United States military was aware of reports on Sunday that an American warship and commercial vessels were attacked in the Red Sea. "We are aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and will provide updates as they become available," the Pentagon said. Houthi "Ansar Allah" group announced that its naval forces targeted two Israeli ships this morning in Bab al-Mandab, the "Unity Explorer" ship and the "Number Nine" ship. The group's spokesman, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, said in a statement broadcast on Al-Masirah TV that this targeting "came in implementation of the directives of Commander Abdul-Malik Badr al-Din al-Houthi, and in response to the demands of our great Yemeni people and the calls of the free people of our Arab and Islamic nation to stand fully with the choices of the Palestinian people and their proud resistance." He added: "The naval forces of the Yemeni Armed Forces, with the help of God Almighty, carried out this morning a targeting operation against two Israeli ships in Bab al-Mandab, which are the "Unity Explorer" ship and the "Number Nine" ship, where the first ship was targeted with a naval missile and the second ship with a naval drone. Saree continued: The Yemeni armed forces continue to prevent Israeli ships from navigating the Red and Arab Seas until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops. He added: "The Yemeni Armed Forces renew their warning to all Israeli ships or those associated with Israelis that they will become a legitimate target if they violate what was stated in this statement and previous statements issued by the Yemeni Armed Forces." The US Department of Defense said in a statement, An American warship and several commercial ships were attacked on Sunday in the Red Sea , which may represent a major escalation in a series of naval attacks in the Middle East linked to the war between Israel and Hamas. The British Army had previously said that there had been a drone attack and explosions in the Red Sea, without going into details. Yemen's Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for attacking two vessels, the Unity Explorer and Number Nine, but made no mention of attacking a US Navy ship. The guided-missile destroyer USS Carney is an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. According to senior US officials who spoke to various news outlets, including ABC News and NBC News, a ballistic missile fired by Houthi rebels in Yemen landed close to a merchant vessel in the Red Sea. The USS Carney was nearby and responded to the ship's distress call. While heading to assist, the Carney shot down a Houthi drone and had previously destroyed another Houthi drone, according to the official. The Houthis said they attacked the ships because they were linked to Israel and were targeted after they rejected warnings. The Iran-backed militia have launched several missile and drone attacks on Israel since the start of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas. Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said the two ships that came under attack had had no connection to the state of Israel. Operational Update Al Jazeera's analysis of satellite images revealed a series of developments in terms of operations carried out by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip and the placement of its military vehicles in the main axes. The analysis was based on images obtained by Al Jazeera, taken by satellites on November 24 and 30, of various areas of the Gaza Strip. Pictures taken on November 24 show Israeli forces digging a trench starting from the Juhr al-Dik area (east of the central region of the Gaza Strip) with a length of approximately 1.8 kilometers. Excavation work has progressed, bringing the length of the trench to 2.7 kilometers, according to photos from November 30. The purpose of digging the trench is not yet known. The Israeli trench is similar to the Russian trenches that were spotted in various areas of the Russian-controlled Crimean Peninsula during the war on Ukraine in recent months. The trench extends from the Juhr al-Dik area for a length of 2.7 km. The pictures also showed the Israeli army constructing a road that cuts through the entire center of Gaza, from the entrance to Juhr al-Dik in the east to the seashore in the west. The Israeli forces paved the road to facilitate faster movement of vehicles. Currently, a large number of vehicles are concentrated outside the sector, east of the entrance to Juhr al-Dik. These vehicles may be part of the armored vehicles that withdrew during the truce, and they may be in the process of preparing for any possible new operations. Pictures taken on November 30 showed a number of tents that were likely used to shelter soldiers west of Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip. Regarding the deployment of forces, photos from November 30 showed a decrease in the number of military vehicles inside the Gaza Strip by an approximate rate of between 35% and 40%, as follows: The number of vehicles in the Beit Hanoun axis decreased from 78 vehicles on November 24 to 37 vehicles on November 30. The number of vehicles in the Beit Lahia axis decreased from 287 vehicles on November 24 to 164 vehicles on November 30. The number of vehicles in the Wadi Gaza axis decreased from 371 vehicles on November 24 to 215 vehicles on November 30. There was also a decrease in the number of heavy vehicles compared to an increase in the number of light vehicles. The map of the Israeli incursion shows the expansion of the forces in the northern and central Gaza Strip, and the expansion of the scope of their operations to remove buildings or agricultural greenhouses and bulldoze lands in search of Palestinian resistance tunnels. The possibility of an Israeli military attack on the southern Palestinian Strip spread an atmosphere of terror in Gaza, as 4 out of every 5 people fled their homes into crowded shelters, schools, tents, and hospital corridors, according to media reports. After the end of the week-long ceasefire, much of the south is under intense bombardment, with up to 1.5 million civilians facing a second exodus from places that Israel initially said would be safe. The map of residential areas published by the IDF came as an Israeli response to an American request to provide safe areas in the southern Gaza Strip, and to take measures to protect civilians during its military operations, which appear to be expanding in the southern regions, especially in the city of Khan Yunis. The map for all areas of the Gaza Strip limits the options of more than two million people in the small coastal strip, and pushes them little by little towards areas with no access to the city of Rafah, which is squeezed between the sea to the west and the Israeli security fence to the east and the border with Egypt to the south. The map, according to which the Strip was divided into hundreds of small, contiguous residential squares, caused a state of confusion among the people of Gaza, whose conversations were dominated by the question, What is your block? That is, what is your residential square number according to this map, while others disparaged the map and denied the occupations claims that its goal was to protect civilians. The IDF claimed that this map aims to enable Palestinians to know the places of evacuation according to the division, give the residential blocks numbers and plan their borders accurately, so that it is easier for them to move to safe places according to the military instructions that will be issued in the coming days. One of the areas designated for evacuation included several towns in eastern Khan Yunis (Al-Qarara, Khuzaa, Abasan, and Bani Suhaila), whose residents were ordered to move south to Rafah. These areas represent 19% of the area of the Gaza Strip (69 square kilometers) and were home to about 350,000 people before the war. The Israeli army also warned residents of the eastern parts of Gaza City (Al-Shuja'iya, Al-Zaytoun, and the Old City) and Jabalia in the north of the Strip to evacuate. The designated areas cover about 6% of the Gaza Strip and are home to about 415,000 people. Before the new evacuations, the Gaza Strip recorded more than 1.8 million displaced people suffering from massive overcrowding and poor sanitary conditions in shelter centres, including significant increases in diseases such as hepatitis, infectious conditions such as diarrhea and acute respiratory infections, and hygiene-related conditions. In addition, there are concerns about the lives of vulnerable groups of people in difficult shelter conditions, such as people with special needs, pregnant, newly born or breastfeeding women, people recovering from injuries or surgeries, and those with weakened immune systems. The Israeli side did not explicitly announce its intention to transfer the Palestinians to Sinai, but the first to raise this issue was the army spokesman, Richard Hecht, when he said days after the start of the war: The Rafah crossing is still open (..) and I advise anyone who can leave to do so. This statement aroused apprehension from the Egyptian side and it was read as a prelude and confirmation of Israeli intentions in this regard, which prompted it to issue warnings against any scenario related to the displacement of Gazans to Egyptian territory. Despite the statement correcting Hecht's statement, Cairo continued its position and escalated its rejection of the "plan to resettle Palestinians from the Gaza Strip in Egypt." The Israeli army spokesman, Avichay Adraee, said in a statement calling for movement towards areas in Rafah, We published a map of the areas that divide the territory of the Gaza Strip into areas and neighborhoods that you know, in an effort to help you in the next stages of the war, to understand and realize the directives issued and to move from the locations. precisely defined if necessary to preserve your security. He pointed out that "Israel does not ask the residents of Gaza to leave the Strip, but rather to leave the places where military operations are taking place, and evacuation from combat zones is done in order to distinguish between civilians and militants." However, the Palestinian analyst, Ashraf Al-Akka, confirmed in statements to the Al-Hurra website that Israels invitation to the residents to head towards Rafah means moving forward with the process of displacement towards Rafah and later Sinai, and the process takes place under the weight of hunger, siege, disease and bombing. The French newspaper "Liberation" said Saturday that the Israeli army is using artificial intelligence techniques to wage a comprehensive war in the Gaza Strip , in which it can estimate the number of civilian casualties in the bombing, saying that the algorithms developed by Israel or private companies are one of the most destructive and deadly methods of bombing in the 21st century. The French newspaper quoted the Israeli newspaper "Jerusalem Post" that the Israeli army claimed to lead what it called the first "artificial intelligence war", using 3 algorithms, which are "Alchemist", "The Bible", and "Depth of Wisdom", and mentioned another military system it uses called "Fire Factory". The Israeli military uses these algorithms to analyze a large number of intelligence data and quickly estimate the effects of different potential strategic options. The newspaper reported that the Israeli army uses two tools in particular in its war on the Gaza Strip: the Bible and the fire factory. The first aims to suggest the most relevant targets for attack, within a given perimeter. The second is used to improve attack plans for aircraft and drones depending on the nature of the chosen targets, and the algorithms are also responsible for calculating the amount of ammunition needed, according to the newspaper. The newspaper added that the Israeli army's artificial intelligence systems are operated by operators who must verify and approve targets and raid plans, which means that these systems will not make a direct decision to open fire, although part of the process will be automated. The newspaper said that the "Bible" algorithm takes civilian casualties among the elements it considers in identifying new targets for bombing. The newspaper quoted Israeli media as saying that the use of these technological solutions explains how the Israeli army was able to bomb the Gaza Strip at such a frantic pace. According to Israeli army, the Bible algorithm automatically allowed it to identify targets at a rapid pace. The newspaper reported that the Israeli army said that the "Bible" algorithm recorded 100 targets per day for bombing, while the army was placing 50 targets annually in Gaza to bomb them, and former army officers described the algorithm as a "mass assassination factory." Artificial intelligence techniques are usually used to identify targets and avoid collateral damage, but the Israeli occupation army does not care about this feature. In fact, it may be keen on the opposite, as its program to monitor its targets in the Gaza Strip depends on quantity, not quality. The Israeli army announced that it is using artificial intelligence technology to determine the targets it wants to bomb in Gaza at an accelerated rate, and described this technology as a factory that works around the clock to generate potential targets. The program, called "Gospel" in English and "Bible" in Arabic, and which the occupation uses to monitor its targets in the Gaza Strip, has eportedly identified 40,000 suspects to be assassinated. The program relies on information and images from drones and information coming from intercepted communications. It also uses watchtower data to monitor the movements of targeted individuals, then gives instructions on targets that should be attacked, and the number of people likely to be killed in the bombing. An Israeli official explained to Bloomberg in mid-June that two models are being used to build a data set based on algorithms regarding specific targets, in order to calculate potential ammunition, set priorities, assign thousands of targets to aircraft, and propose a schedule for raids. According to the same official, the two systems are subject to human operators who examine and approve targets and air strike plans. It is noteworthy that the program does not take the decision itself, but rather leaves it to the unit commander, who presses the destroy button after he receives the list from the Targets Unit, which was established in 2019. The occupations use of artificial intelligence to determine its goals sparked widespread interaction, part of which was reported by the Shabakita program (12/3/2023), including what Muhammad Al-Saray wrote: The danger of intelligence lies in the negative use of it by murderers, criminals, or oppressors!! Mercy and eternity for the Palestinian martyrs." Yalmqa Al-Baraa tweeted: No to justify the group genocide that occurred under any name... Where is the artificial intelligence and the Unity Intelligence Corps (8200) since the beginning of the Al- Aqsa flood ?! Where is the artificial intelligence in the indiscriminate bombing of hospitals, mosques, churches and schools?! Where is the Shin Bet in the massacres and killing of innocents? And where?? Iman Hassan agreed with him, writing: It is not intelligence, technology, or anything.. They control everything in front of them. America gives them bombs and they throw them everywhere.. How many kilograms did they throw at them? All the bombs in the world, to the point that Ukraine votes and does not find a weapon. Gaza He throws more weapons at it than Russia and says you are smart! As for Shadia Saadawi, she said, What will change the matter? The owner of the land is always the victor and the owner of the right. If he is with God, God is with him, then he is above the throne and they are under the throne. This unit had so far targeted more than 15,000 targets in Gaza during the first 35 days of the war, while Israel used to identify an average of 50 targets per year before the introduction of this unit, but with the help of new technology, it is now bombing 100 targets daily, which has doubled the number of victims, 15 times more than the IDF operation against Gaza in 2014. Sources told the British newspaper " The Guardian " that Israel's next attack on the southern Gaza Strip "is based on intelligence information derived from hundreds of militants who were arrested during the fighting in the northern Gaza Strip, which will allow the Israeli army to find and kill Hamas leaders." Politicians and generals in Israel believe that eliminating senior leaders - especially the movement's leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar - constitutes the "best opportunity" to eliminate the movement, which is deeply rooted in Gaza, after nearly two decades of its complete control over the Strip. Two military officials with knowledge of the strategy for the next phase confirmed to the British newspaper that there will be an intense focus on using new intelligence information to target the leaders of the Hamas movement, which is classified as a terrorist organization in the United States and other countries. Critics of the Israeli military operation say the new strategy "will do little to reduce the high cost in civilian lives" killed in Gaza. The Guardian said, Under pressure from the United States regarding the killing of civilians in Gaza, the Israeli army sees that a comprehensive campaign to assassinate the Hamas leadership is its best hope for achieving its goals of destroying the movement... and forcing it to return the Israeli hostages on acceptable terms, and ending the conflict. In this regard, analyst and former Mossad official, Yossi Alef, said: We are subject to increasingly stringent American pressure. He continued: "America supports getting rid of Hamas, but on the condition that many civilians are not killed. Therefore, perhaps the movement's leaders can be attacked, which will lead to the dismantling of Hamas without killing many people." In the first phase of the fighting inside Gaza, Israeli forces were able to destroy large Hamas infrastructure in the northern Gaza Strip, but Israeli military officials previously told the Observer newspaper that despite the killing of large numbers of mid-ranking field commanders, the Israeli army did not "haves access to any of the top leaders so far." Kobi Michael, an expert at the Institute for International Security Studies in Tel Aviv, explained that the Israeli army learned lessons from its campaign before the truce. He continued: The next goal will be to target the leaders in order to reach a better agreement regarding the release of the hostages, adding: It is likely that any information will be entered into an artificial intelligence-based system called Habsura (Gospel) to identify targets at a rapid pace. Some experts doubt that AI-based systems have underestimated civilian harm, pointing to the widespread destruction of entire neighborhoods in Gaza. In the last day, the naval forces attacked with hundreds of shells terrorist targets of Hamas and targets of assistance to the ground forces in their activities. Among these goals; Military infrastructures, vessels associated with the Hamas naval force, weapons and more. The Israeli newspaper Maariv reported that Tel Aviv sent several warships and an advanced submarine to the Red Sea. It indicated that this step was taken to monitor Iran's activities in the region. Israel is coordinating its movements with the United States, whose ships are in the Red Sea. Four Palestinians were martyred by fire from the IDF and extremist settlers in various areas in the occupied West Bank during the past 24 hours, while the Israeli army stormed Jenin , Qalqilya and Hebron and arrested dozens of Palestinians. The West Bank is witnessing a wave of tension and field confrontations between Palestinians and the Israeli army, coinciding with a devastating war launched by Israel on the Gaza Strip , which left massive infrastructure destruction and tens of thousands of martyrs, most of them children and women, in addition to an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. The Ministry of Health said that a Palestinian died from his wounds in the village of Al-Jalama, northeast of Jenin. A young man was also martyred and others were injured by bullets from settlers and Israeli occupation forces in the town of Qarawat Bani Hassan, west of Salfit. Groups of extremist settlers stormed the town under the protection of the occupation forces, and carried out a series of attacks on citizens and their property. In the city of Qalqilya, Al Jazeera's correspondent reported that a young Palestinian man died as a result of his wounds after the occupation forces shot him. The reporter reported that Israeli occupation army forces stormed several neighborhoods in the city amid heavy gunfire. The IDF also killed a young man in the village of Tal, south of the city of Nablus, at a military checkpoint last night. In turn, the Palestinian Ministry of Health condemned the Israeli forces beating and arrest of the driver of the Health Directorate in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian Minister of Health, Mai Al-Kaila, said in a statement that the occupation forces assaulted the car driver and his colleague (whom she did not name), and searched the directorates car and destroyed its contents, as the crew was heading from the Bethlehem Governorate to the central ministrys warehouses in Nablus to bring the vaccines. Al-Kaila stressed that the occupation is increasingly escalating its deliberate attacks on treatment centers and teams in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank every day, and is bombing and storming hospitals and arresting the wounded and medical personnel, and does not care about international laws, rights, or conventions. The United Nations and international human rights organizations and institutions called for immediate intervention to provide protection for treatment centers, personnel working in the health sector, and ambulance crews and vehicles. In Hebron Governorate, occupation soldiers, accompanied by a group of settlers, attacked a Palestinian family in the Khallet Taha area, west of the town of Dura. A video clip showed an Israeli soldier assaulting the head of the family, Noah Al-Haroub, with his rifle, while he was tending his sheep with his family. One of the soldiers and settlers also threw stones at family members. In a phone call with an Al Jazeera correspondent, Noah Al-Haroub said that he had been subjected to these types of attacks for days, in addition to being prevented from reaching his land. In another attack, a surveillance camera showed that masked settlers attacked, with stones and sticks, a restaurant owned by a Palestinian in the town of Al-Sawiya, Nablus Governorate. The settlers - who took advantage of the lack of residents in the area - destroyed the restaurants equipment and facilities. The town of Al-Sawiya is constantly exposed to attacks from settlers who settle in settlements near the town. Israeli forces continued their incursions into many Palestinian areas in the West Bank. Homes were raided in the city of Jenin and the Askar camp east of Nablus, the city of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, Jabal Al-Tawil in the city of Al-Bireh, and several villages south of Nablus and the city of Hebron. The Prisoners' Affairs Authority and the Palestinian Prisoners' Club announced in a joint statement that the Israeli occupation forces arrested 60 Palestinians, including 5 girls and former prisoners, last night and this morning, before releasing some of them in the morning. The statement added that the arrests were concentrated in the Hebron and Ramallah governorates, while the rest were distributed in the Jericho, Jenin, Salfit, and Bethlehem governorates. The statement denounced the occupation forces' raids on homes, assaulting their residents by beating and abusing them, and subjecting them to field investigation, before taking them to detention centers. This brought the number of detainees in the West Bank to about 3,500 since October 7th. The Israeli forces also stormed the Al-Sowaneh neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem, and notified the residents of a building in which the preacher of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Ikrimah Sabri, lives , of the decision to demolish it under the pretext of building without a permit. In this context, the Israeli forces demolished this morning a floor in a building in the town of Sur Baher, south of Jerusalem, under the pretext of not having a permit. The building owner reported in a phone call to Al Jazeera that the demolished apartment housed five members of the family of the daughter of the freed prisoner Jihad Attoun. On a daily basis, the Israeli army carries out storming campaigns into villages and towns throughout the occupied West Bank, accompanied by confrontations, arrests, and shooting and tear gas bombs at Palestinians. A source in the Al-Qassam Brigades told Al Jazeera that 70% of the occupation forces withdrew from the north, while the Palestinian resistance factions clashed on several fronts in the Gaza Strip with the occupation forces and ambushed about 60 Israeli soldiers, destroyed 3 vehicles, and bombed settlements around the Gaza Strip , while the Israeli government announced... The army began a ground operation north of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip. The leading source in the Al-Qassam Brigades said that the Israeli ground operation is currently concentrated in the south of the Gaza Strip, coinciding with limited maneuver operations in the north, stressing that 70% of the Israeli forces have withdrawn from the north of the Gaza Strip as a result of the failure of their operations and because of resistance strikes. He added that the withdrawal of the occupation forces from the northern Gaza Strip began with the temporary humanitarian truce that ended Friday, and he added that the withdrawal accelerated with the resistance strikes in the last two days. The resistance factions reported that they killed a number of Israeli soldiers during clashes and attacks, while the Israeli army did not publish the total number of those killed since the start of its ground operations in Gaza on October 27, but said that the number of injured people in Gaza reached about a thousand injured. The Al-Qassam Brigades announced that they had targeted 4 tanks of the occupation army in Beit Lahia, north of the Gaza Strip, with an Al-Yassin 105 shell, destroying 3 of them, in addition to blowing up the opening of one of the tunnels with a group of Israeli soldiers east of Beit Lahia after booby-trapping it with explosive devices. The Brigades reported that they targeted an Israeli special force inside a building in Beit Hanoun with a TPG shell, and that they killed a number of their soldiers. They said that she blew up a powerfully booby-trapped tunnel belonging to the occupation in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, then targeted the Israeli rescue forces with mortar shells. The Al-Qassam Brigades said that they targeted an Israeli tank and a troop carrier with "Al-Yassin 105" shells, and targeted an Israeli D-9 bulldozer with a Tandom shell north of the city of Khan Yunis, and detonated a minefield with an Israeli force of 8 soldiers, and killed off those who remained alive from point zero north. East of Khan Yunis. The Al-Qassam Brigades reported earlier that they bombed a gathering of occupation soldiers east of Khan Yunis with mortar shells. In the center of the Gaza Strip, the Al-Qassam Brigades said that they killed a large number of occupation soldiers after detonating explosive devices at their position of 60 soldiers east of Juhr al-Dik. It added that it bombed a gathering of Israeli soldiers with heavy-caliber mortar shells, and targeted 5 occupation vehicles east of Deir al-Balah with Al-Yassin 105 shells, and announced the destruction of 3 of them. he Al-Qassam Brigades also announced that it had bombed the Avishalom settlement with a missile salvo, and that it had bombed Ashkelon with a missile salvo in response to the Israeli massacres against civilians. It added that it bombed the Amitai settlement with a 114 mm short-range Rajum missile system, and targeted the Reim military base with a missile salvo, in addition to Sderot and Israeli crowds east of the Magin settlement. The Al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of Islamic Jihad , reported that they engaged in fierce clashes with Israeli soldiers in the Sheikh Radwan axis. For its part, the Al-Quds Brigades said that they clashed with an Israeli foot force in the Abu Haddaf area, northeast of Khan Yunis, and bombarded it with mortar and RPG shells. The Al-Quds Brigades said that its members detonated an explosive device with an infiltrating Israeli tank near the Hajjaj Mosque in the Al-Mughraqa area, and engaged in fierce clashes with Israeli soldiers in the Al-Nasr neighborhood in Gaza City. The Al-Quds Brigades reported that they bombed Beersheba, Sufa, Halit, Sderot, and the settlements of Sufa, Nir Ishaq, Kfar Saad, and Kfar Izza with concentrated missile barrages, in addition to bombing the occupation bases in Ra'im and Miftahim. It also said that it bombed the industrial zone in Ashkelon with a concentrated missile salvo. Al Jazeera's correspondent confirmed the sound of sirens in Ashkelon and the northern Gaza Strip. For his part, Al Jazeera's correspondent reported that an Israeli drone was shot down in the northern Gaza Strip, but no resistance faction has so far claimed responsibility for shooting it down. The Israeli army spokesman said that the Air Force continued to launch raids in Gaza, targeting tunnel openings, command headquarters and weapons depots, while the occupation aircraft bombed inhabited homes throughout the Strip, resulting in the death and injury of dozens. The Israeli government spokesman stated that their military operation is now focused on Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, while Israeli Army Radio said that the army has begun a ground operation north of Khan Yunis. The official Palestinian News Agency confirmed that Israeli vehicles entered Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, starting from the eastern border area in the Al-Qarara area, northeast of Khan Yunis, towards Salah al-Din Street. It added that the occupation vehicles are stationed near the Al-Mahathin Junction, amid heavy fire coverage from warplanes and shelling from tanks, artillery, and reconnaissance aircraft. The Israeli government claims that the leadership of the Hamas movement is located in Khan Yunis, after claiming that the movements leadership is concentrated in Al-Shifa Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip, which it stormed and arrested a number of people. The Al Jazeera military and strategic expert, Major General Fayez Al-Duwairi, said that the Khan Yunis ground battle differs in form from the attack in the northern Gaza Strip , stressing that it will be more ferocious than the first phase, explaining that the hand of the resistance will be supreme. Al-Duwairi added that 40% of the occupation armys losses in the 2014 war between the resistance and Israel were in Khan Yunis, stressing that the Al-Qassam Brigades - the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement ( Hamas ) - in this region is one of the strong points, and it is very experienced. Al-Duwairis comment coincided with an announcement on the occupation army radio that the army had begun a ground operation north of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, after violent fire belts focused on the city in addition to Deir al-Balah in the center. The occupation army - according to Al-Duwairis military reading - plans to divide the center and south into 3 sections: the first includes Deir al-Balah and the Nuseirat, al-Bureij, and al-Maghazi camps, the second is the Khan Yunis area, and the third is the Rafah border city with Egypt. Al-Duwairi added that if the occupation plan succeeds, "the Gaza Strip will be divided into 4 operational areas, each with forces allocated to the occupation army and another to the defending forces." He stressed that the attack on Khan Yunis differs in form from the Gaza operation, which he besieged and then began storming, as he will proceed in the south to complete each stage, then develop it to move to the next stage. He stated that the separation lines between the governorates are considered weak points for the defending forces, but he expressed great confidence that the Palestinian resistance has overcome this dilemma. Returning to the clashes in Gaza and its north, the military expert confirmed that the areas entered by the occupation army are areas of engagement and not control. He added that the occupation army is trying to benefit from its previous experiences and build on them, but it is facing violent resistance. The military expert pointed out that the occupation transferred part of the forces that were allocated to the northern Gaza Strip to the southern region and added them to the operational and strategic reserve forces in the Al-Qarara area, northeast of Khan Yunis. In his speech, he touched on the operations of the Al-Qassam Brigades - today, Sunday - in the areas of Juhr al-Dik, east of the central region, the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza, and Beit Lahia in the north, and said that they targeted tanks, troop carriers, and bulldozers, while confirming that a disaster befell the soldiers of the occupation army in Juhr al-Dik. Al-Duwairi stressed that October 7, 2023 is a turning point in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, in his comment on Israels revelation for the first time of the Qassam naval landing on the beaches of Zikim on the first day of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood . Since the beginning of the ground maneuver in the Gaza Strip, IDF forces have located over 800 shafts of Hamas underground tunnels, of which approximately 500 have been destroyed by a variety of operational methods, including explosions and blockades. Some of the shafts located connected Hamas strategic assets through the underground medium. In addition, many kilometers of tunnel route were destroyed. The shafts were located in civilian spaces, and many of them were located near or inside buildings such as educational institutions, kindergartens, mosques and playgrounds. In some of the shafts, IDF forces located many weapons that were left inside. Le Monde said that it had analyzed video clips broadcast by the Israeli army since it occupied the Shifa Hospital building in Gaza, which showed the presence of a tunnel, but it was not of a size that would make it a broad operational center for the Islamic Resistance Movement ( Hamas ) as presented by the Israeli armed forces. The French newspaper explained that the spokesman for the Israeli armed forces appears wandering through a tunnel, pointing to a kitchen, toilet, or a small empty room, in video clips that allegedly prove the existence of a huge underground operations center used by Hamas under the hospital complex. Thanks to the unedited sequence of these video clips, Le Monde was able to reconstruct maps of this underground passage, which is about 130 meters long. We notice arrangements there, but they do not amount to an operational and strategic center, nor to a large weapons cache, she said. The Israeli army claims. The newspaper pointed out that the Israeli army had previously accused Hamas of taking a command center under the Shifa Hospital complex, displaying three-dimensional images of a center with 5 meeting rooms several days before it stormed the complex, but the images it broadcast did not resemble the tunnel it showed. The Iraqi Hezbollah Brigades announced that they targeted the American Kharab al-Jir base in northeastern Syria, and directly hit their targets. It said in a statement, "In response to the crimes committed by the enemy against our people in Gaza, the Mujahideen of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq targeted the American occupation base, Kharab al-Jir, in northeastern Syria, with a large missile salvo, and directly hit its targets." This is the second targeting of the day , after the Islamic Resistance in Iraq announced in a statement at dawn that an American base at Erbil Airport was targeted and a direct hit was achieved. American forces have been subjected to more than 73 attacks since October 17 in Iraq and Syria, resulting in the injury of more than 60 American soldiers, according to the Pentagon. Pentagon officials said earlier that they were frustrated by the escalation of attacks on American forces in Iraq and Syria, according to the Washington Post, while the Islamic Resistance in Iraq announced its readiness to escalate its military operations inside and outside Iraq in support of the Palestinian people. Bystanders Israeli voices appeared, demanding that Egypt receive the Palestinians of Gaza in Sinai temporarily until the end of combat operations, but Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi strongly opposed such a measure and considered the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai a red lin. for Egyptian national security. In its statement on the X platform, the Israeli army called on residents of neighborhoods in Khan Yunis to head towards the areas of Shaboura Camp, Tal Al-Sultan, and Al-Fakhari, which are areas in the far south of the Gaza Strip, near the Egyptian border. The Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, warned that the fighting in the southern Gaza Strip "will provide a high possibility that they (Gazans) may want to flee to the far south and cross the border." Commenting on such a scenario, former Secretary-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, wrote via X: I hope that we will be aware of the treacherous Israeli plan to forcibly displace the people of Gaza, which violates all laws and values, and that we will do what we can to stop it...and I believe that we have what we can do to do it." Axis of Resistance Irans support for Gaza and Palestine is in total compliance with the Constitution, which has obligated the Islamic government to back the oppressed, Raisi said in an address to a conference on the implementation of the Constitution, held in Tehran. He noted that supporting the rights of the Palestinian nation has been a fundamental principle of the Islamic Republic of Irans foreign policy since the victory of the Revolution in 1979. Describing the issue of Palestine as the Muslim worlds top priority, the president underlined that international political developments or the interests of certain regional parties wont change this basic tenet of Irans foreign policy by any means. He also noted that massive worldwide rallies in solidarity with Palestine and Gaza indicate that the blood of the oppressed Palestinian people has overcome the arrogance systems media empire. Raisi also expressed confidence that the Zionist regime, which has the blood of over 6,000 Palestinian children on its hands, is going to collapse and vanish. Allied for Democracy Professor of political science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Meir Masri, pointed out that Israel does not have expansionist ambitions neither in the Gaza Strip nor in any of the neighboring countries... We are not interested in emptying the Gaza Strip of its population... The claim that Israel has a plan aimed at displacing the population The Gaza Strip to the Sinai Peninsula is a figment of the imagination of the Nasserist press, which is addicted to lies and slander. Regarding the discussion of the idea of displacement by Israeli officials and politicians, he confirmed in his interview with Al-Hurra website that what is meant is temporary displacement, as Poland and Ukraines neighboring countries did with the Ukrainians. He continued: I hope that Egypt will show a greater degree of cooperation with us in order to remove civilians from war zones, until we end military operations, but the Egyptian leadership does not seem concerned with the security and safety of the Palestinians. We helped it in its war against ISIS in Sinai, and it refuses to cooperate with us against ISIS in Gaza. Cairos position is incomprehensible and not at the level of the event. "Although the idea of displacing Palestinians - in Gaza to Sinai, and in the West Bank to Jordan - seems superficial from a realistic standpoint, it should be noted here that the extreme right-wing movement that rules the occupying state today is not a secular movement in large part, but rather there is a large part belongs - in fact - to the Salvationist religious movement, which believes in end-time prophecies, the descent of Christ the Savior, and other religious fundamentalist narratives that govern the movement of the followers of this movement. Today, this movement is enthusiastically participating in this battle. Because he considers it a prelude to the end-of-the-world battle that will bring about Christ the Savior!" noted Abdullah Amarouf. Professor of Jerusalem Studies and former media and public relations officer at Al-Aqsa Mosque, Istanbul University. "Recently, an unknown group appeared and began publishing messages on the ground in the West Bank, and in sponsored advertisements on Facebook - which is considered the most followed in the Palestinian territories - all of which call on Palestinians in the West Bank to immigrate to Jordan as a better solution for both parties. This work has several goals: Among them is exploiting the various calls published by individuals and officials in the occupation government to displace the residents of the Gaza Strip to Sinai to spread the idea and mix up the cards, in order to create a major shock among the Palestinian community in the West Bank that prevents it from participating forcefully in the current war. Fearing the fate of the population in Gaza, whether through destruction, killing, or displacement. It appears that those responsible for these calls belong to newly formed extremist right-wing religious groups, as these groups follow new methods of work. Individuals from these groups also appear to be active activists in extremist temple groups operating in the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem as well.... "Itamar Ben Gvir has been constantly arming West Bank settlers since the beginning of the war on Gaza, thus forming an armed militia of settlers parallel to the occupation army in the West Bank. Here we should not forget that he had stipulated on Netanyahu in the first government formation talks that he be allowed to form an armed security apparatus for West Bank settlers called the National Guard.... This actually means that the religious Zionist movement is working to form its own army in its areas of influence in the West Bank, and in the event that the political and societal rift in Israel worsens, it has the possibility of being independent of itself from the Israeli army, and carrying out its own wars, the direct goal of which is, of course, an attempt to implement its vision of displacing Palestinians from the West Bank to Jordan, and perhaps establish their own entity in the region. "We repeat here that someone might say; The scenario of displacement from Gaza to Sinai - as an example of any similar scenario in the West Bank - is illogical and practically inapplicable. This is true from a practical standpoint, but it should be noted that settler groups do not view the issue in the same way. These groups still control the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of National Security through Smotrich and Ben Gvir. "Although Ben Gvir is known for his extreme recklessness and his ridiculous populist speeches, even within Israel, a person like Smotrich has a clear vision of how to carry out the displacement process, in a more profound and dangerous way than Ben Gvir, and this raises the level of danger of these plans.... "Therefore, this scenario should not be ruled out; Because we are simply not dealing here with balanced personalities, but rather they are religiously motivated personalities towards a devastating collision, and therefore we need someone to ring the bell and look at every little and big thing in the scene deeply before it is too late." Netanyahu's popularity has never been so low, and he now finds himself facing the most difficult crisis in his political life, in light of the ongoing war between his country and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, according to a report by the American newspaper The New York Times . Netanyahu is currently facing an increasingly violent backlash due to his government's failure to prevent the October 7 attacks. v The New York Times report also indicated that there was "strong criticism of his (Netanyahu's) handling of the war in the Gaza Strip," adding that "people in his government or aspiring to succeed him agree that he did not have such a low level of popularity on the Israeli street." Analysts explained that despite this, and due to complications in the Israeli parliamentary system and the circumstances of the ongoing war in Gaza, there are only a few paths to remove Netanyahu from office in the near future, and they added that his long political career and legacy depend greatly on how he managed things during the period. "The coming days." The New York Times noted that "the memorial vigils for the dead Israelis in recent days and weeks have turned into protests against Netanyahu's leadership, with calls demanding that he bear responsibility for the intelligence failure that preceded the Hamas attack, turning into demands for his resignation." The Israeli government is also facing pressure from the United States recently to work to reduce the number of civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip. With the collapse of the truce that lasted for seven days, and witnessed the release of more than 100 hostages in exchange for the release of 240 Palestinian prisoners, Netanyahu searched for a solution, including the possible assassination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, a move that could satisfy his government coalition, silence his critics, and satisfy citizens. Angry because of the hostage issue, according to the newspaper. Two Israeli officials, one of whom is a former, said that Netanyahu "privately informed his aides that he is pushing the army toward assassinating Sinwar." Major Israeli spy agencies are working on plans to hunt down Hamas leaders living in Lebanon, Turkey, and Qatar, where the movement's political bureau has been based for a decade, according to Israeli officials who spoke to the Wall Street Journal. The two officials added to the American newspaper that Netanyahu "believes that the assassination of Sinwar will be enough to convince Israeli public opinion that he has achieved a major victory against Hamas, and that the war can end." While the newspaper quoted Israeli political analysts, that the killing of Sinwar could calm the wave of anger, but it will not bring about feelings to the contrary in favor of Netanyahu. Anshel Feffer, a writer for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, said: If the Israeli army succeeds in assassinating a prominent figure in Hamas, I expect Netanyahu will try to take credit for it. But Feffer noted that "despite the many previous scandals that damaged Netanyahu's reputation, he has always managed to protect his political career." In Britain, opposition leader Keir Starmer also warned Israel of a war in southern Gaza that would be as bloody as its campaign in the north. He continued: "We cannot return to the way the first phase of this war took place. Many innocent people lost their lives, whether in Israel or throughout Gaza. We have to look at this phase as a different phase." US Vice President Kamla Harris confirmed, on Saturday, in a speech she delivered at the COP28 conference, that the United States will not allow under any circumstances the forced transfer of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. She added, "The United States is clear in its support for Israel and also in its keenness to protect the civilian population." US Defense Secretary Austin: 'We will not let Hamas or Putin win.' U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin criticized those endorsing "an American retreat from responsibility" at the Reagan National Defense Forum. Secretary Austin considered protecting civilians a moral responsibility and strategic necessity for Israel. "If you push civilians into the arms of the enemy, you are trading tactical victory for strategic defeat," Austin told a defense forum in Simi Valley, California. Austin - who pledged that the United States would stand by Israel as its closest friend in the world - added that he pressured Israeli officials to significantly expand humanitarian access to Gaza. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin made his strongest statements yet about the need for Israel to protect civilians in Gaza, describing them as the center of gravity in Israel's war with Hamas and warning of the dangers of their extremism. "In this type of combat, the center of gravity is the civilian population," Austin said. Relying on his experience as a four-star general who fought the battle against ISIS, he added, "Therefore, I have always made clear to Israel's leaders that protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is a moral responsibility and a strategic necessity." Austin said in statements during the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, that he personally urges Israeli leaders to avoid civilian deaths and injuries, stop irresponsible rhetoric, and prevent settler violence in the West Bank. He added that he also urges Israel to significantly expand the scope of humanitarian aid entering Gaza, adding that he expects more aid to be delivered in the coming days. Israel faced increasing American calls to avoid killing Palestinian civilians, while hundreds demonstrated in New York City and Washington, D.C., demanding an end to renewed Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip. US Vice President Kamala Harris said that a very large number of innocent Palestinians were killed in Gaza. Harris added - in a press conference on the sidelines of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai - that Israel has the right to defend itself, but international and humanitarian law must be respected and work to stop targeting innocent Palestinians. Harris told reporters, "Frankly, the extent of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are heartbreaking." Butcher's Bill / Oasis of Martyrs Palestinian armed group Hamas launched thousands of missiles at Israel and deployed its militants to infiltrate Jewish settlements near the countrys border with Gaza on 07 October 2023. The 1,200 Israelis killed on the first day would be the equivalent of 36,000 Americans killed in an attack, as a proportion to Israels population of 9.3 million people (compared to 332 million in the USA). Israeli President Isaac Herzog stated: Not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been killed in one day". PM Netanyahu stated "On October 7th, Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis. Maybe more. This is in a country of fewer than 10 million people. This would be equivalent to over 50,000 Americans murdered in a single day. Thats twenty 9/11s. That is why October 7th is another day that will live in infamy." It is the second largest loss inflicted on the Israeli forces after the 1973 war, as the Palestinian resistance killed more than 1,200, wounded more than 5,132 others, and captured more than 250, most of them military personnel, some of whom were high-ranking officers in the army. The HAMAS Ministry of Health in the besieged sector announced that the number of victims of the Israeli operation its beginning had risen to about 16,000 martyrs. Gaza's health ministry had a day earlier registered the deaths of over 18,000 Palestinians, a major jump from the "about 15,000" reported a few days earlier. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Observatory reports that it had "counted up to this moment about 17,500 dead Palestinians". The count included about 6,150 children killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza since October 7, the Gaza Press Office said. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The Hamas-run government said more than 4,000 women were among the dead. The number of injured had risen to "more than 41,000" with varying injuries, up from 36,000 two days earlier [which was up by 3,000 from the previous report]. The Palestinian Government Media Office in Gaza said the number of missing people had risen to more than 7,500 [ double the 3,750 previously reported], including 1,800 children still under the rubble, including 4,700 children and women. The Palestinian Ministry of Health announced that the number of wounded as 36,000 [previously announced as about 32,000 wounded], 75 percent of them children and women. Israel revised down the death toll from the October Hamas attacks in southern Israel from 1,400 to 1,200. IDF had said previously it was holding 1,500 bodies of terrorists, a total that now would increas to about 1,700. The number of Israeli soldiers that the IDF admitted were killed in ground battles with the Palestinian resistance reached 75, while the death toll for the Israel forces had risen to 395 soldiers since the beginning of Operation al-Aqsa Flood. At least 7,771 Israelis were injured. The Hebrew newspaper Haaretz revealed that the number of soldiers who were injured since the start of the war reached about a thousand soldiers, noting that 202 soldiers were seriously injured. The army rarely referred to casualties when talking about the deaths of soldiers during battles. According to the same newspaper, this policy differs from what was prevalent in previous wars and military campaigns, during which the army also published the number of its wounded, in addition to publishing other details. The IDF previously announced that more than 260 soldiers had been injured since the start of the ground operation in the Gaza Strip, including 100 in serious condition. Lebanons Health Ministry released its first official casualty numbers in fighting, saying 77 people were killed and 251 wounded since the start of the war on Gaza. Hostages Deputy Head of the Political Bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement ( Hamas ), Saleh Al-Arouri, announced that the movements official position requires that prisoners not be exchanged before the aggression stops, and he told Al Jazeera, There will be no exchange of prisoners until after the war stops. Al-Arouri stressed - in an interview with Al Jazeera - that there will be no exchange of prisoners until the end of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip and a comprehensive and final ceasefire, stressing that our Zionist prisoners will not be liberated until all our prisoners are liberated and after the ceasefire. The Hamas leader revealed that the remaining prisoners in the Gaza Strip are soldiers and civilian men who served in the occupation army, although the occupation insists that the resistance still has women and children, pointing out that the elderly men detained served in the army and some of them are still in it. In the same context, Al-Arouri confirmed that the movement said it was ready to exchange bodies for the bodies of martyrs, but it needed time to exhume the bodies of the Israelis. We need time to exhume the bodies of the Israelis who were killed in the occupation raids in Gaza. Regarding the extent of the Palestinian resistances readiness to continue the battle with the occupation after the collapse of the truce, Al-Arouri responded, The resistance is prepared for all Israeli military scenarios, whether land, air, or other wars. He stressed that it is equipped and reinforced with a popular incubator, and it is all resistance, stressing, There is no fear or anxiety over The resistance will win." On the other hand, he said that the Israeli occupation will fail again to achieve the goals it set for itself, "liberating prisoners and what he calls the elimination of Hamas," accusing the United States of America of covering up the crimes carried out by Israel in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Broadcasting Authority quoted informed sources as saying that Israel informed the mediators that it wanted to return to calm in the Gaza Strip for one day, while the White House said that it had expectations of the possibility of declaring a new truce in the Strip. Israel wants a one-day truce in exchange for the release of more women and children detained in Gaza, according to the Israeli Broadcasting Authority. But the sources told the Broadcasting Corporation that the possibility of a return to calm tonight is slim, and that there is a chance of reaching an agreement within two or four days. With negotiations to renew the truce faltering, the head of the Mossad orders his men to return from Qatar. The Israeli Mossad announced that the negotiating team that was in Qatar had received an order to return to Israel, after negotiations with Hamas on extending the truce reached a "dead end." A rare statement issued by the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on behalf of the Mossad said: Due to the impasse in the negotiations, and on instructions from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mossad Chief David Barnea ordered the negotiating team in Doha to return home. The statement added that Hamas "did not fulfill its obligations under the agreement, which included the release of all women and children on the list submitted to Hamas." The statement concluded, "The head of the Mossad thanks the head of the CIA, the Egyptian Minister of Intelligence, and the Prime Minister of Qatar for their partnership and tremendous mediation efforts that led to the release of 84 women and children detained in Gaza, in addition to 24 foreign citizens." According to Israeli media, the return of the Mossad team from Qatar and the full resumption of fighting in Gaza is considered a message that there will be no negotiations without a full return to the agreed upon plan, that is, the release of women and children. Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy told reporters that Hamas still held 137 captives. The resistance released 10 Israeli detainees, 4 Thais and 2 Russian women, who were released outside the agreement. Over the course of 6 days, Israel has received 102 detainees, women and children, including 78 Israelis, in exchange for the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners, women and children, Eylon Levy, the Israeli government spokesperson, told reporters 01 December 2023: Hamas still holds 137 hostages from the October attacks, in addition to four others who went missing before the war The hostages include two children aged four and 10 months, who, Hamas now claims, are dead 117 male hostages are still kept in Gaza, including the two children, as well as 20 females 126 hostages are Israelis, and 11 others are foreign nationals Foreign nationals are eight Thais, one Nepalese, one Tanzanian and one French Mexican citizen Ten of the remaining hostages are 75 and older. There are seven missing people since the October 7 attack Hamas has released 110 hostages so far 86 Israelis and 24 foreign nationals. The Al-Qassam Brigades announced the death of an Israeli woman and her two children who were detained by them as a result of a previous Israeli bombing of Gaza. The Israeli army confirmed the deaths of five hostages held in Gaza, saying their families had been informed, and the body of one of them returned to Israel. In recent days, the IDF and Israel police notified the families of the hostages Eliyahu Margalit, Maya Goren, Ronen Engel and Arye Zalmanovitz about their deaths, army spokesman Daniel Hagari said. He also said troops had brought back the body of a fifth person that he identified as Ofir Tsarfati. Hagari said Gaza militants were still holding 136 hostages, among them 17 women and children. Before the release of the sixth batch of Israelis detained in Gaza, Israeli government spokesman Elon Levy said that 161 Israelis are still detained in the Strip [al-Jazeera reported "more than 100 prisoners" remain with the resistance]. Levy added that Israel has prepared a list of 50 Palestinian detainees to be released if Hamas continues to release detainees. At least 76, and possibly more than 80, hostages had been released by Hamas over six days of a cease-fire. During the pause, Hamas fighters released 60 Israeli women and children. In return, Israel released 180 security detainees from its prisons, all of them women and minors under the age of 19. Hamas also separately released 19 foreign hostages, most of them Thai farm workers, under separate agreements parallel to the truce agreement. Thirty children held by Gazan terrorists have been released as part of a four-day ceasefire deal with Hamas that began Friday, but 10 still remain in the Strip. The terror group has said it planned to release 20 more hostages as part of a two-day extension to the deal. U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the Biden administration believes eight or nine more Americans are still being held but the U.S. does not have "solid information on each and every one of them." Perhaps 100 are Israeli civilians. Some of the rest are soldiers, seized when Hamas raided military bases in Israel. They may end up being held the longest. The Israeli military had not specified how many soldiers were captured, nor their ranks. By one account 236 confirmed abducted civilians and IDF soldiers. 18 of the abductees are elderly people aged 75 and older. 121 of the abductees have foreign citizenship (including dual citizenship). Conflicting estimates were provided regarding the number of Thai nationals still in captivity. The Wall Street Journal reported 25 November 2023 that Hamas is interested in releasing 23 Thai citizens during the four days of the ceasefire, mediated by Iran. On the other hand, the Thai Foreign Ministry claimed 20 more citizens who are held captive by Hamas, and that four of the ten who were released were not included in the number initially estimated. According to some estimates, Hamas was initially holding nearly 210 of the 240 hostages, while Palestinian Islamic Jihad was holding the remaining 30. About 40 Israelis remained missing. More than 40 hostages taken from Israel into Gaza on October 7th are not currently in the custody of Hamas, the group responsible for the attack, according to a CNN report based on a diplomatic source briefed on the negotiations, CNN's prior reports had indicated that an estimated 40 to 50 hostages were held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad or other unidentified groups or individuals. Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson for the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, said on Hamas telegram account that 23 bodies of the 60 missing Israel hostages were trapped under the rubble. It seems that we will never be able to reach them due to the continued brutal aggression of the occupation against Gaza, he said. Since the start of the war on October 7, at least 3,400 people had been detained, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society. Israel said that, since the beginning of the war, about 2,100 wanted persons have been arrested throughout the IOS Division and the Bekaa and Emekim Brigade, about 1,100 of them are affiliated with Hamas. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Russo-Ukraine War - 03 December 2023 - Day 648 Su M Tu W Th F Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 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 the efforts of both Russia and Ukraine to overcome their adversary's ground-based air defence systems continue to be one of the most important contests of the war. On the Russian side, the SA-15 Tor short-range surface-to-air missile system (SAM) is playing a critical and largely effective role. With a maximum range of 15 km, the SA-15 is operated by the Russian army air defence units and is designed to protect the front line of ground troops. This is in contrast with other short-range systems, such as SA-22 Pantsir, which are operated by Russian Aerospace Forces and typically protects command nodes, longer range SAMs, and air bases. Effectively acting as the front line of Russia's elaborate air defence network in Ukraine, the SA-15 is currently particularly utilised to counter Ukrainian uncrewed aerial vehicle operations. One of the key limitations of the system in the current war is likely the endurance of its crew. With an established allocation of only three personnel to each system, maintaining a high state of alert for extended periods is highly likely proving an extreme test of endurance. The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported that during the day of December 3, there were 56x combat engagements. Russian forces launched a total of 1x missile strike, 31x air strikes, 24x MLRS attacks at the positions of Ukrainian troops and various settlements. Unfortunately, the Russian attacks have resulted in civilian casualties and injuries. Private residential buildings as well as other civilian infrastructure were destroyed and damaged. Volyn and Polissya axes: no significant changes. No signs of formation of an offensive group. Certain units of the armed forces of Belarus continue their missions in the areas bordering Ukraine. Sivershchyna and Slobozhanshchyna axes: Russia maintains its military presence in the areas of russia bordering Ukraine. Russia continues its sabotage and reconnaissance activities, shelling Ukrainian settlements from the territory of Russia and increases the density of minefields along the state border of Ukraine. Around 20x settlements came under Russian artillery and mortar fire, including Volodymyrivka, Hasychivka (Chernihiv oblast), Kozache (Sumy oblast), Hraniv, Budarky, Chuhunivka (Kharkiv oblast). Kup'yans'k axis: Russian forces conducted assault operations in the vicinity of Syn'kivka (Kharkiv oblast). Ukrainian defenders repelled 7x attacks in the area. The Russian invaders fired artillery and mortars at around 10x settlements, including Fyholivka, Ivanivka, Kyslivka, Tabaivka, Krokhmal'ne, Berestove (Kharkiv oblast). Lyman axis: Russian forces made failed assaults with air support in the area of Serebryans'ke forestry (Luhansk oblast), where Ukrainian defenders repelled 3x attacks. Russian forces launched an air strike in the vicinity of Spirne (Donetsk oblast). The Russian occupiers fired artillery and mortars at around 10x settlements, including Makiivka, Nevs'ke, Bilohorivka (Luhansk oblast), Yampolivka, Tors'ke, Dibrova (Donetsk oblast). Bakhmut axis: Russian forces conducted offensives with air support near Bohdanivka, Ivanivske, Klishchiivka and Andriivka (Donetsk oblast), where Ukrainian defenders repelled 16x attacks. Around 20x settlements, including Min'kivka, Bohdanivka, Ivanivske, Klishchiivka, Andriivka, Ozarianivka (Donetsk oblast), came under artillery and mortar fire. Avdiivka axis: Russian forces made assaults with air support east of Novokalynove, east of Novobakhmutivka, Stepove, Avdiivka, Sjeverne, Pervomais'ke (Donetsk oblast), to no success. Ukrainian defenders repelled 14x attacks in the area. Russian forces fired artillery and mortars at around 15x settlements, including Novokalynove, Berdychi, Avdiivka, Tonen'ke, Netailove, Nevel's'ke (Donetsk oblast). Mar'inka axis: Russian forces made failed assaults with air support in the vicinities of Mar'inka and Novomykhailivka (Donetsk oblast), where Ukrainian defense forces repelled 5x attacks. The settlements of Krasnohorivka, Heorhiivka, Mar'inka, Pobjeda, Paraskoviivka, Katerynivka (Donetsk oblast) were under artillery and mortar fire of the Russian occupiers. Shakhtars'ke axis: Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensives in the vicinity of Staromaiors'ke (Donetsk oblast). Around 10x settlements, including Vuhledar, Vodyane, Prechystivka, Zolota Nyva, Urozhaine (Donetsk oblast), came under artillery and mortar fire. Zaporizhzhia axis: Russian forces made 3x attempts to regain lost ground south of Robotyne (Zaporizhzhia oblast), to no success. Also, Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensives near Novopokrovka (Zaporizhzhia oblast). Russian forces launched an air strike near Novodarivka (Zaporizhzhia oblast). Around 25x settlements, including Charivne, Novodanylivka, Mali Shcherbaky, Stepove, Kam'yans'ke, Plavni (Zaporizhzhia oblast), came under artillery and mortar fire. Kherson axis: Russian forces launched an air strike in the vicinity of Krynky (Kherson oblast). Russian forces fired artillery at the settlements of Dudchany, Beryslav, Ivanivka, Sadove, Romashkove (Kherson oblast), as well as the cities of Kherson and Ochakiv (Mykolaiv oblast). Ukrainian Defense Forces continue to hold their ground on the left bank of the Dnipro River (Kherson oblast) and inflict fire on the Russian forces. During the day of December 3, Ukrainian Air Force launched 2x strikes on air defense systems, 8x strikes on concentrations of Russian troops, weapons and military equipment, and 2x strikes on ammunition depots. Ukrainian missile troops hit 1x heavy multiple rocket flamethrower system, and 1x Pantsir self-propelled anti-aircraft system of the Russian invaders. Also, overnight Ukrainian air defense forces destroyed 10x of 12x Shahed-136/131 UAVs. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation reported that in Kupyansk direction, units of the Zapad Group of Forces, aviation, and artillery inflicted fire damage on manpower and hardware of AFU 14th mechanised and 25th airborne brigades near Sinkovka and Berestovoye (Kharkov region). One ammunition depot of the AFU 113th Territorial Defence Brigade was eliminated near Liptsy (Kharkov region). The enemy lost up to 95 Ukrainian troops, one armoured fighting vehicle, two motor vehicles, and one D-30 howitzer. In Krasny Liman direction, units of the Tsentr Group of Forces and artillery repelled one attack launched by assault groups of the AFU 60th Mechanised Btigade near Yampolovka (Donetsk People's Republic). In addition, strikes were delivered at clusters of manpower of AFU 63rd mechanised and 12th special forces brigades near Yampolovka (Donetsk People's Republic) and Serebryansky forestry. The enemy lost up to 250 Ukrainian troops and two motor vehicles. In Donetsk direction, units of the Yug Group of Forces supported by artillery inflicted fire damage on AFU manpower and hardware near Kurdyumovka, Andreyevka, and Kleshcheyevka (Donetsk People's Republic). The AFU losses were up to 300 Ukrainian troops killed and wounded, one infantry fighting vehicle, two motor vehicles, one D-20, one D-30 howitzers, as well as one Gvozdika self-propelled artillery system. In South Donetsk direction, units of the Vostok Group of Forces and artillery inflicted fire damage on manpower of AFU 72nd mechanised and 79th air assault brigades near Novomikhailovka and Ugledar (Donetsk People's Republic). The enemy's losses amounted to up to 85 Ukrainian troops killed and wounded, one armoured fighting vehicle, two motor vehicles, one Akatsiya self propelled artillery system, and one Gvozdika self-propelled artillery system. In Zaporozhye direction, units of the Russian Group of Forces, helicopters, artillery, and heavy flamethrower systems repelled one attack launched by assault groups of the AFU 82nd Air Assault Brigade close to Verbovoye (Zaporozhye region). In addition, servicemen of the AFU 46th Airmobile Brigade were defeated close to Rabotino (Zaporozhye region). The enemy's losses amounted to up to 20 Ukrainian troops and two motor vehicles. In Kherson direction, the Russian Group of Forces' units inflicted fire damage on AFU manpower close to Matiyasovo and Novosyolovka (Nikolaev region), and Tyaginka (Kherson region). The AFU lost up to 65 Ukrainian troops, two motor vehicles, three Gvozdika self propelled artillery systems, and one Bukovel-AD electronic warfare station. Operational-Tactical and Army Aviation, unmanned aerial vehicles, Missile Troops and Artillery of the Groups of Forces of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation hit one command post of the air defence control and warning centre of the AFU Vostok Air Command near Dnepropetrovsk, fuel depots close to Mirgorod (Poltava region) and Khmelnitsky, one ammunition depot in Nikolaev region, as well as manpower and military hardware in 107 areas. Russian air defence and electronic warfare systems have shot down eight UAVs near Podkuychansk (Lugansk People's Republic), Slavnoye, Belogorovka (Donetsk People's Republic), Peschanoye, Vinogradovka (Kherson region), Verbovoye (Zaporozhye region), as well as two S-200 anti-aircraft guided missiles converted to hit ground targets, and one HIMARS MLRS projectile. In total, 545 airplanes and 256 helicopters, 9,361 unmanned aerial vehicles, 442 air defence missile systems, 13,759 tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, 1,187 combat vehicles equipped with MLRS, 7,224 field artillery guns and mortars, as well as 15,876 units of special military equipment have been destroyed during the special military operation. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Terrorist Attack at Mindanao State University in the Philippines US Department of State Press Statement Matthew Miller, Department Spokesperson December 3, 2023 The United States condemns in the strongest terms the horrific terrorist attack that occurred today during a Catholic service being held at Mindanao State University in Marawi, the Philippines. We mourn those killed in the attack, and our thoughts are with the injured. The United States is in close contact with our Philippine partners and stands with the people of the Philippines in rejecting this act of violence. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address North Korea begins reconnaissance satellite operations Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 6:23 AM North Korea has begun its reconnaissance satellite operations, the state news agency has said, after Pyongyang successfully launched its first military satellite last month. The new satellite operations office at the Pyongyang General Control Center of the National Aerospace Technology Administration (NATA), started to discharge its mission on Saturday and will report acquired information to the reconnaissance bureau at the army and other major units, KCNA said on Sunday. Pyongyang warned the United States against any attack on its reconnaissance satellites after a US space official hinted that Washington was capable of interrupting Pyongyang's satellite operations. Pyongyang, which managed to launch its first military reconnaissance satellite on Nov. 21, warned Washington that an attack on its satellite would be a declaration of war. On November 24, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited NATA and observed new photos taken by the country's recently launched reconnaissance satellite. Meanwhile, media reports said the new satellite is capable of transmitting photos of the White House, the Pentagon, US military bases, and "target regions" in South Korea to NATA. North Korea succeeded in launching its satellite in its third attempt, after receiving assistance from Russia. Pyongyang believes US presence and military exercise in the region pose an existential threat to North Korea, insisting that it will continue responding to the US-led joint military drills by advancing its own programs as well as developing and testing all sorts of weaponry, including deterrent nuclear missiles capable of striking mainland USA. The United States and the United Nations Security Council have imposed tough sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Hong Kong begins preparatory work for legislation of Article 23, to complete the work in 2024: CE Global Times By Global Times Published: Dec 03, 2023 12:20 PM The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government has already begun the preparatory work for the legislation of Article 23 as the city has the constitutional responsibility of establishing its own law to prohibit acts and activities that endanger national security, the HKSAR Chief Executive John Lee said on Sunday. In a video address at the launch ceremony of the city's national security knowledge challenge test for schools, Lee said that the aim is to complete the legislation of Article 23 in 2024 and link it with the national security law for Hong Kong to establish an effective national security legal framework, thus perfecting the legal system and execution mechanisms to uphold national security. The activity is being held ahead of December 4, which also marks China's Constitution Day. The Constitution and the Basic Law together form the constitutional order of the HKSAR. The Constitution is a crucial foundation for the enactment of the national security law for Hong Kong. It contains specific provisions for maintaining national security, including those related to safeguarding the nation's fundamental system, maintaining national unity, ethnic solidarity, protecting state secrets, as well as maintaining the sovereignty, security, and developmental interests of the nation, Lee said. Article 23 of the Basic Law requires the HKSAR government to enact laws on its own to prohibit seven categories of acts that endanger national security, including treason, sedition, subversion and theft of state secrets. Educating Hong Kong residents to proactively safeguard national security is a significant challenge, Hong Kong's Secretary for Justice Paul Lam Ting-kwok said while addressing the launch ceremony. Lam said that he hopes that residents would not harbor misunderstandings about the national security law for Hong Kong due to malicious smears or attacks by others, nor should they comply with the law solely out of fear of legal sanctions. The HKSAR government hopes that every Hong Kong resident clearly understands that national security is the cornerstone of a stable and prosperous nation and the safeguard of public well-being. Respecting and abiding by national security laws is not only a legal obligation but also a civic duty, Lam said. Secretary for Security Tang Ping-keung also emphasized the importance of effectively promoting national security education among young people. The national security knowledge challenge test for schools organized jointly by the Security Bureau, Department of Justice, and Education Bureau, combines the legal expertise of the Department of Justice with the educational network of schools and students managed by the Education Bureau. In this academic year, the education bureau will organize in-campus seminars to deepen teachers' understanding of national security. These seminars will cover a range of topics including key knowledge about national security, important legal overviews, the comprehensive view of national security, key areas of national security, and subject-related examples. The aim is to encourage teachers and students in the city to actively promote national security education, explore and understand the country's history, culture, and latest developments, while strengthening their knowledge of the country's Constitution, Basic Law, and the national security law for Hong Kong, according to Jeff Sze Chun-fai, Under Secretary for Education. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address PBC to guard against systemic financial risks, further defuse risks of outstanding local government debt: governor Global Times Move to boost investor confidence, local govt economic growth By GT staff reporters Published: Dec 03, 2023 09:23 PM In its latest statement on the pursuit of high-quality financial development, the People's Bank of China (PBC), the country's central bank, vowed on Saturday to guard against systemic financial risks, including the outstanding local government debt. The central bank will work to establish a long-term mechanism to handle local government debt risks, control new debt strictly and provide emergency liquidity to local governments with heavy debt burdens when necessary, PBC Governor Pan Gongsheng said during an exclusive interview with the Xinhua News Agency on Saturday. Pan noted that China's financial risks are generally controllable, adding that the PBC will improve mechanisms for financial risk prevention, warning and management. Pan made similar statements during the Financial Street Forum held in early November, noting that the overall debt level of the Chinese government is at the middle to lower range by international standards, and the authorities have taken multiple measures this year to support local governments to resolve debt risks. "The central bank's stance has sent a signal that China has promised the world that there will be no financial systemic risks, which will boost the confidence of investors and market players," Hu Qimu, a deputy secretary-general of the digital-real economies integration Forum 50, told the Global Times on Sunday. As of the end of October, outstanding local government debt stood at about 40.1 trillion yuan ($5.63 trillion), within the debt limit for local governments in 2023 approved by the first session of the 14th National People's Congress - which was about 42.17 trillion yuan, data from China's Ministry of Finance showed. "The central bank's governor noted the importance of liquidity support for local governments. Problems with the liquidity of debt can lead to a halt in local operations and even a contraction of the economy as a whole. But the growth of debt must be matched by local economic development," Tian Yun, a veteran economist based in Beijing, told the Global Times on Sunday. The central bank's statement indicates that it will continue to monitor the financial data of local governments and with other sectors to prevent liquidity risks, Tian noted. The central government has sufficient policy tools to avoid systemic financial risks and ensure local economic development while resolving local debt problems, Hu noted. Despite continuous Western media hype over China's alleged local government debt problem, the Chinese central government and provincial governments have implemented measures to support local governments in prudently addressing debt risks, which aim to alleviate the fiscal pressure of local governments and expand the role of local finance in boosting the development of local economies. For instance, local governments are urged to raise funds to pay back debts through selling assets, including cash-generating ones. In addition, the authorities have guided financial institutions to help resolve existing debt risks and control new debts through a variety of measures, including debt extensions, debt swaps and loan rollovers. According to thepaper.cn, 29 Chinese localities including North China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Tianjin Municipality have issued refinancing bonds this year to pay off debts, which has "made a good start for central and local governments to prevent local debt risks," Tian noted. The latest development marked the re-start of the issuance of special-purpose refinancing bonds this year to allow local governments to swap local debts with higher-quality guaranteed bonds, observers said. "It is also worth mentioning the issuance of additional 1 trillion yuan in special-purpose treasury bonds in October, which could help drive investment in local infrastructure and reduce local hidden liabilities," Tian noted, adding that the issuance showed that the central government will increase fiscal spending to help localities ease short-term debt pressures, especially at a time when economic downward pressure is more pronounced. Hu noted that local governments will continue to control new debt and optimize debt allocation while ensuring the normal promotion of ongoing infrastructure projects. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address INS KADMATT AT YOKOSUKA, JAPAN (02-05 DEC 23) India - Press Information Bureau Ministry of Defence Posted On: 03 DEC 2023 9:22AM by PIB Delhi INS Kadmatt, on a Long Range Operational Deployment to the North Pacific Ocean entered Yokosuka, Japan on Dec 02, 2023 for an Operational Turnaround (OTR). Onboard visits including professional interactions and community welfare activities are planned during the stay. Interactions with the Japan Maritime Self Defence Force (JMSDF) will include cross-ship visits, professional exchange of ideas, Joint Yoga Camp, and coordination meeting for the Maritime Partnership Exercise (MPX). At Yokosuka, the ship will be celebrating the Navy Day on 04 Dec 2023 in presence of the Indian diaspora in Japan. Recently, INS Kadmatt has also undertaken fuelling with JMSDF Fast Combat Support Ship, JS Towada on 28 Nov 2023, off Okinawa, under the tenets of the Reciprocal Provisioning of Supply and Services (RPSS) signed between both navies. The visit of INS Kadmatt to Japan and interaction with the JMSDF is aimed at further bolstering maritime cooperation between India and Japan, in line with the vision of both countries for the Indo-Pacific. INS Kadmatt is an indigenously designed and built Anti-Submarine Warfare Corvette, equipped with state-of-the-art AS weapon suite. ________________________________ VM/JSN 232/23 (Release ID: 1982026) NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Iran's Army voices readiness to share military knowledge, experience with Iraq IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency Dec 3, 2023 Baghdad, IRNA -- Iran's Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Bagheri has voiced Iran's Army readiness to transfer their knowledge, experiences, and capabilities to the Iraqi armed forces. Major General Bagheri met and held talks with Iraqi Defense Minister Thabet Mohammed al-Abbasi in Baghdad on Sunday. Describing Iraq as a country with high priority in the foreign and defense policies for the Islamic Republic of Iran, Major General Bagheri said that the views and positions of the government, nation, and authority on significant regional and international issues are very important and its clear example is the two countries' close stances on the Gaza war and the issue of Palestine. Referring to the conditions of the two countries and the region and the importance of enhancing security defense ties and cooperation between Iran and Iraq, he underlined that the cooperation between the armed forces of the two countries is still far from the desired level, despite many existing fields of cooperation and potentials, and the two countries need to use such potentials. Major General Bagheri described the experiences of the Islamic Republic of Iran's armed forces in tactical, strategic, and technical fields as very valuable, saying that the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran are ready to transfer their knowledge, experience, and capabilities to the Iraqi armed forces. Major General Bagheri also announced the readiness of the Islamic Republic of Iran's armed forces to conduct a bilateral or multilateral naval rescue exercise in the Persian Gulf. Mohammed al-Abbasi, for his part, said that Iraqi people, with different political views, believe in the divine's promise and they will stand by the Palestinian nation. Al-Abbasi further stated, "During my trip to the Islamic Republic of Iran and visiting the capabilities and defense equipment, I witnessed the growing trend of Iran's defense industry." 3266**2050 NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address 'Iran armed forces ready to counter threats to Iraq's territorial integrity' IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency Dec 3, 2023 Baghdad, IRNA -- The Iranian armed forces are ready to counter any threat to the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of Iraq, says Iran's top military commander. Major General Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, made the remarks during a meeting with his Iraqi counterpart, Abdel Emir Yarallah, in Baghdad on Sunday. Bagheri hailed the "good stability and security" in the neighboring Arab country, which he said is moving in the direction of growth and development. He said the Islamic Republic of Iran was the only country that came to Iraq's aid against the Daesh terrorist group, describing top anti-terror commanders Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, who were assassinated by the US in 2020, as a "precious legacy" for the people of both countries. "The two countries have good and valuable experiences in the war against terrorism and can share their experiences within a suitable plan," said the top Iranian general. Yarallah, for his part, expressed his gratitude to the Islamic Republic for its sincere cooperation in the fight against Daesh and commemorated Lieutenant General Soleimani. He stated that the Iraqi armed forces are fully prepared for the development of military, defense, training exchanges and joint exercises and exchange of experiences with Iran. Bagheri traveled to Iraq on Saturday for his first official visit to the Arab country. During his three-day visit, he will focus on cooperation on the fight against terrorism and regional developments, as well as defensive and bordering cooperation. 4354**7129 NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Iran, Iraq share similar stance on Palestine, Gaza war: Top general Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 3:08 PM Iran's highest-ranking military commander says the Islamic Republic and Iraq pursue a similar line on the Palestinian issue, particularly the ongoing Israeli war on the besieged Gaza Strip. Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Baqeri made the announcement in a meeting in Baghdad on Sunday with Iraqi Defense Minister Thabet Mohammed al-Abbasi. Baqeri underscored the common stances of the Iranian and Iraqi governments, nations and religious authorities on leading regional and international developments. He highlighted the high position of Iraq in Iran's foreign and defense policies, saying Tehran and Baghdad need to strengthen security and defense cooperation given the regional circumstances and the status of the two countries. Pointing to great achievements of the Iranian Armed Forces in the tactical, strategic and technical spheres, the top general said Iran was ready to share its knowledge and expertise with Iraq. Baqeri also said the Iranian Armed Forces are prepared to stage bilateral or multilateral naval rescue and relief drills in the Persian Gulf. The Iraqi defense chief, for his part, said the Iraqi nation, with all the various political views, feel bound to stand with the Palestinian people in the face of the Israeli regime. Iran expects Iraq to fully disarm terrorists along border: Baqeri In a meeting with Iraqi Minister of Interior Abdul Amir al-Shammari on Sunday, Baqeri hailed the measures the Iraqi government has undertaken in border control. "There is still evidence and concern about the presence of certain terrorist elements in the border region, and the Iraqi government is expected to keep up the border control job until the complete disarmament of those groups," the top Iranian general said. He said joint activities of the two countries' border guards can help establish full security along the border. Baqeri said 1,500 kilometers of border between Iran and Iraq "should be the border of friendship, trade and safe tourism." The Iraqi interior minister, for his part, hailed the Iranian Armed Forces' joint cooperation with Iraq to enhance border security. Shammari said Iraq gives primacy to gaining full control over all border points with Iran. At the end of the meeting, Baqeri toured an exhibition of Iraqi defense equipment. Back on March 19, Iran and Iraq signed a security agreement in Baghdad encompassing coordination in protecting the border. Under the agreement, the Iraqi government had promised to disarm terrorist and separatist groups based in the Kurdistan region by September 19, vacate their military barracks, and transfer them to the camps established by the Baghdad government. Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein said on September 23 that his country has implemented all clauses of the security agreement. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Iran armed forces ready to confront threats against Iraq's territorial integrity: Top general Iran Press TV Sunday, 03 December 2023 11:18 AM Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Baqeri has expressed the Islamic Republic's preparedness to confront any potential threats against Iraq's territorial integrity and national sovereignty. Baqeri made the statement in a meeting with his Iraqi counterpart Abdel Emir Rashid Yarallah in the country's capital of Baghdad on Sunday. Iran's top general pointed to the various commonalities and good relations between the two neighboring countries, saying Iraq was moving on the path of growth and development concerning the stability and good security established in the Arab country. "The two countries have good and valuable experience in the war against terrorism and can share their experience in a suitable format," Baqeri said, adding, "The Islamic Republic of Iran was the only country that came to Iraq's aid against the Daesh [terrorist group], and the martyrs Haj Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis are a precious legacy for the people of both countries." Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, the chief commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy chief of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), were assassinated in a US drone strike outside Baghdad International Airport on January 3, 2020. During the meeting on Sunday, Baqeri also stressed the need for holding joint drills between Iranian and Iraqi militaries to ensure the lasting security of shared borders. "The common borders of the two countries provide an opportunity to increase the convergence and benefits of both nations from mutual capacities," he added. The chief of staff of Iraq's Army, for his part, expressed his gratitude to the Islamic Republic for its sincere cooperation in the fight against Daesh and honored the memory of General Soleimani. Yarallah also announced the full readiness of the Iraqi armed forces for the development of military, defense and training exchanges with Iran as well as joint exercises and sharing experience. The two neighboring countries signed a security agreement in March after anti-Iranian terrorist groups residing in the Iraqi Kurdistan region increased their malign activities, especially in border areas. Responding to their activities, Iran's IRGC has launched several rounds of strikes against their positions since September last year, vowing to continue the attacks until the groups are disarmed. Iran has, on countless occasions, warned Iraqi Kurdistan's local authorities that it will not tolerate the presence and activity of terrorist groups along its northwestern borders, saying the country will give a decisive response should those areas become a haven for anti-Tehran terrorists. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Nine Dead, Including Two Soldiers, After Militants Open Fire On Bus In Northern Pakistan By RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal December 03, 2023 Nine people have been killed, including two soldiers, after unidentified militants opened fire on a passenger bus accompanied by a security-forces vehicle in northwestern Pakistan. At least 26 were injured, including one soldier and a local Sunni cleric, in the attack in the Gilgit-Baltistan region, according to local police and government officials. While no group has claimed responsibility for the late-evening attack, the injury to the cleric led Interior Minister Shamsul Lone to suggest on December 3 that the aim was "to breed religious hatred." Lone said the militants fired on the two vehicles from nearby hills as they traveled on the Karokoram Highway to the Punjab Province city of Rawalpindi. The highway, which connects Pakistan to China and also passes through the restive Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. Security forces were accompanying the passenger bus due to recent tensions between local Sunnis and Shi'a, Lone said. Interim Prime Minister Anwar ul-Haq Kakar said in a statement that "anti-state elements would not be allowed to sabotage the peace of Gilgit-Baltistan," and vowed to continue fighting "against terrorists." Authorities in Gigit-Baltistan said that a special investigative team has been formed to look into the attack. Muhammad Khorasani, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan and active in the region, denied any link with the shooting. Local and central government officials have requested that religious scholars work to lessen Sunni-Shi'a tensions that have risen since summer after scholars on both sides accused each other of insulting their respective branches of Islam. In September, a joint committee of Shi'ite and Sunni leaders was formed with the aim of preventing conflicts. Following the December 2 attack, the committee condemned the violence and called on people to remain calm. Gilgit-Baltistan lies along China's One Ring One Road initiative and is the sight of a dam project being built with the help of Beijing. Interior Minister Lone said there was a possibility the attack was carried out in an effort to scare investors. Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/pakistan-northwest- militants-open-fire-bus-kill-nine/32711692.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. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address 4 ally leaders call for Taiwan's inclusion in COP28 ROC Central News Agency 12/03/2023 12:41 PM Taipei, Dec. 3 (CNA) The leaders of Taiwan's four diplomatic allies on Saturday called for Taiwan's inclusion in the United Nations system during the ongoing 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP28) being held in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. On the second day of the high-level segment of COP28, prime ministers of Taiwan's Caribbean allies Saint Lucia and Saint Kitts and Nevis, Pacific ally Tuvalu, and African ally Eswatini voiced their support for Taiwan's participation in the U.N.'s annual climate change conference. In his address, Saint Lucian Prime Minister Philip Pierre said that "the time is now for world leaders to transform to a safer place for our children." "And in this battle Taiwan must not be left behind," he underlined. Prime Minister Terrance Drew of the Saint Kitts and Nevis named Taiwan as a "reliable global partner in the climate crisis." "Saint Kitts and Nevis firmly believes that Taiwan, as an island nation, should be allowed to play meaningful role in the existential policy drives of the United Nations," he said. Tuvalu Prime Minister Kausea Natano, meanwhile, said in his speech that all the challenges being faced by the world need all countries around the world to take part in, to address. "I therefore urge the members of U.N. to recognize the contribution of the Republic of China (Taiwan) to assist with climate change challenges, health issues and so forth," he said. In his address, Russell Mmiso Dlamini, prime minister of the Kingdom of Eswatini, said all countries should be part of the agreements and commitments on climate action. "If countries like Taiwan have voluntarily committed for the sake of the planet and people without being a party to the negotiations, then the rest of us can," he said, adding that Eswatini calls for Taiwan's formal inclusion in future COP meetings. The 2023 U.N. Climate Change Conference, or Conference of the Parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), more commonly referred to as COP28, is the 28th U.N. Climate Change conference, which is being held from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12 in Dubai. The conference has been held annually since the first U.N. climate agreement was reached in 1992. It is intended to be a platform for governments to discuss and agree on policies to limit global temperature rises and adapt to impacts associated with climate change. Taiwan, officially called the Republic of China, left the U.N. in 1971, when the People's Republic of China took its place, and it has since been excluded from the U.N.'s special agencies, including the UNFCCC. Since 1995, Taiwan officials have taken part in the annual conference through the government-funded Industrial Technology Research Institute, acting as an NGO observer. (By Joseph Yeh) Enditem/cs NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Ukraine Says Apparent Shooting Of Surrendering Soldiers A Russian War Crime By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service December 03, 2023 Ukraine's military has decried the apparent killing of two surrendering Ukrainian troops by Russian forces and said it considers the incident evidence of a war crime. Drone footage of the incident that appeared on social media on December 2 showed apparently unarmed Ukrainian soldiers leaving their shelter, lying on the ground, and then being shot by people in darker uniforms. The alleged execution reportedly took place near the village of Stepove, which is located a few kilometers from the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiyivka where heavy fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces is taking place. RFE/RL was unable to independently confirm the authenticity of the video or the date or location of the apparent killings. On December 2, Ukrainian military spokesman Oleksandr Shtupun said on Telegram that the drone footage "published in the media depicts the killing of two Ukrainian prisoners of war." "All evidence will be handed over to the responsible international institutions dealing with war crimes," Shtupun said. Ukrainian Human Rights Commission Dmytro Lubinets wrote on Telegram on December 2 that the video showed that the Ukrainian soldiers were disarmed with their hands raised and that they clearly posed no threat. "The execution of those who surrender is a war crime," Lubinets wrote. Lubinets said he will report the incident to the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations. "The Russian Federation must be punished for every such case of the execution of Ukrainian soldiers who surrender," Lubinets said, adding that the alleged incident was not the first in which Ukrainian prisoners of war had been killed by Russian forces. Russia has widely been accused of committing war crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine, including the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure, the use of cluster munitions, and the torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war. Russia has denied committing war crimes in Ukraine. Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/kyiv-confirms-drone- footage-shooting-ukrainian-soldiers/32711730.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. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Kyiv Police Cannot Confirm Whether Ukrainian Lawmaker Detained For Alleged Treason Injured In Custody By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service December 03, 2023 Kyiv police said on December 3 that following an investigation they were unable to confirm allegations that detained Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Dubinskiy was physically injured while in custody. The headquarters of the National Police in Kyiv earlier this week reported it had been informed by Dubinskiy's legal team in a message that the lawmaker, who is in detention in Kyiv as he awaits trial for alleged treason, was physically injured over the course of two days. On December 2, Dubinskiy's lawyers claimed on his Telegram channel that an ambulance had been sent to facility and determined that he had suffered "multiple hematomas, as well as a suspected rib fracture." After sending a team to investigate, the National Police in Kyiv said in its December 3 statement that it was unable to verify the claims. "According to the results of an inspection and forensic examination" carried out at the facility, the National Police in Kyiv said, the information it had received "was not confirmed." Dubinskiy, a former deputy for the ruling Servant of the People party who is under U.S. sanctions for interference in U.S. elections, was ordered by a Kyiv court last month to serve 60 days in pretrial detention on suspicion of treason. Dubinskiy was expelled from the party in 2021 after he was put on a U.S. sanctions list for election interference, which he has denied. He has continued in parliament as an independent lawmaker. The SBU said on November 13 that an investigation had determined that an unidentified current member of the Servant of the People party it said was suspected of treason went by the call sign "Buratino" and "was part of a criminal organization formed by the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces." The SBU alleged that criminal organization had $10 million in financing and that its aim was "to disrupt the sociopolitical situation in Ukraine and discredit the state in the international arena." The investigation, according to the SUB, also documented instances in which the unidentified lawmaker spread false information about Ukraine's military and political leadership, including the "alleged interference in 2019 of Ukrainian high-ranking officials in U.S. presidential elections." Ukrainian media have reported that the lawmaker under investigation was Dubinskiy. Ukrainian prosecutors have reportedly indicted Dubinskiy, along with another Ukrainian politician and a former prosecutor, for allegedly colluding in 2019 with Russian intelligence in an alleged effort to tie the family of then-U.S. presidential candidate and 2020 U.S. election winner President Joe Biden to corruption in Ukraine. Also reportedly indicted are Kosyantyn Kulyk, a former Ukrainian deputy prosecutor general who is also under U.S. sanctions for election interference, and former lawmaker Andriy Derkach. The three have also been accused of promoting conspiracy theories that Kyiv, and not Russia, had meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election won by Donald Trump. Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/kyiv-police-ukraine- lawmaker-treason-injured-custody/32711936.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. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Ukraine Admits It's Unable to Increase Military Production to Keep Up With Russia Sputnik News 20231203 MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak on Sunday admitted that Ukraine alone is unable to increase military production to be on par with Russia. "Ukraine is ready to reach the end... When [Ukraine] will be provided with the necessary number of weapons, because Ukraine itself will not be able to increase such an amount of military production to achieve parity with Russia," Podolyak said in an interview with Ukrainian Independent Information Agency of News's YouTube channel. Western countries have been providing military aid to Ukraine since the start of Russia's military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. The Kremlin has consistently warned against continued arms deliveries to Ukraine, saying it would lead to further escalation of the conflict. In April 2022, Russia sent a diplomatic note to all NATO countries on the issue of arms supplies to Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned that any cargo containing weapons for Ukraine will become a legitimate target for Russian strikes. A Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Everyone should remember that the battle for the fate of Ukraine continues - address by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy President of Ukraine 3 December 2023 - 20:18 Fellow Ukrainians! Today, the Russian occupiers struck at Kherson once again. Brutal strikes. Straight at the city... Houses. Streets. Our hospitals. As of now, two people have been reported dead. My condolences to the families and friends. All the wounded have been provided with the necessary assistance. Altogether, on this day alone, and only in Kherson region, there were more than 20 Russian shelling occasions - similar to those in Kherson, purely terrorist in nature. In the city of Beryslav and in the villages of the region. I extend my gratitude to all the rescuers from the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, to all the National Police personnel working to eliminate the consequences of the shelling. I am grateful to all the doctors and nurses who are providing assistance. I am grateful to the local authorities and volunteers who do not abandon their cities and communities to their fate. Intense battles are ongoing in dozens of areas along the entire frontline. The most severe are the Maryinka, Avdiivka and Bakhmut areas. However, it is also difficult in the south and in Kharkiv region. And every city in Ukraine, where today was a relatively quiet day... Everyone who is now in the rear. Everyone who can afford to spend time at home. Everyone should remember that the battle for the fate of Ukraine continues. It's not on social media, not in arguments over political matters, not in squabbling. This battle is where Ukrainians need support every day. Specific things that strengthen Ukraine. Things that add strength to our positions, to our state. Things that allow us to respond to the enemy's attacks with our actions. Active actions. Bold actions. I thank everyone who does not forget that the frontline requires support every day. I thank everyone who is working for the sake of unwavering, constant, real support. I thank everyone who understands how important it is for our people in the frontline areas and the temporarily occupied territories to feel that Ukraine remembers them. That Ukraine remembers and will not abandon them to the enemy's destruction. I thank everyone who does not get discouraged and does not waste their precious energy on arguments. Those who work for the national interests. Those who heal and save lives. Those who educate children and genuinely care for their communities' interests. Those who manufacture weapons and ammunition for our warriors. Those who organize volunteer fundraisers and, against all odds, provide assistance to specific units. I am grateful to everyone who trains our soldiers, both here in Ukraine and in partner countries. Each such training mission is a tangible contribution to the victory that will come. Inevitably. If you do not just believe in it, do not just expect victory from the warriors, but do everything in your power every day so that Ukraine becomes stronger and our collective capabilities increase. We are already preparing for the next week, and we will definitely expand the capabilities of our state. In particular, our defense industry. We are preparing new military support packages from our partners. Strengthening our air defense, which is a constant priority, is also in progress. We will definitely retaliate for the occupiers' terror against our people. We always do. Glory to Ukraine! NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Amazon to introduce advanced coding, AI modules in 100 KREIS schools Bengaluru, Dec 4 (UNI) Amazon.in on Monday announced the expansion of its Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) programme to introduce advanced coding and artificial intelligence (AI) modules in 100 Karnataka Residential Educational Institutions Society (KREIS) Schools. The company will also provide digital infrastructure enhancements for 30 KREIS Schools. This expansion will impact over 13,000 students in grades six to eight across 30 districts of Karnataka. Building on the success of the previous intervention, which inspired students to explore the possibilities of computer science, the expanded module will enable students to develop complex computer applications incorporating advanced programming concepts like control conditions, variables, and functions. Additionally, through project-based learning, students will also be introduced to the basics of AI with a further understanding of its relevance, future possibilities, and impact on their lives and the world around them. This programme will complement the current courses in coding, logical sequencing, learning loops, and block programming offered to KREIS schools under the Amazon Future Engineer Programme. The 20-hour module is designed to take into account the current exposure of students to computer science and coding. Class six students will be taught the fundamentals of block programming, while seventh and eighth graders will be introduced to advanced programming and the basics of AI. This initiative is implemented in collaboration with the Learning Links Foundation (LLF), which will conduct introductory coding sessions and grade appropriate coding boot camps to students in person, making computer science accessible for the schools that are often situated in remote areas. Furthermore, LLF will work with educators to provide professional development support and resources to teachers to facilitate effective computer science learning in the long run. Supplementing these efforts, Amazon employees will conduct Class Chat Sessions, guiding students on diverse career opportunities within the tech industry and providing insights on pathways to achieve their goals. "The Amazon Future Engineer programme's integration of advanced coding and AI modules aligns seamlessly with our vision to empower our students with the proficiency required to navigate the increasingly tech-centric world," Social Welfare Principal Secretary P Manivannan said. "This project-based learning module will empower students with the skills and knowledge needed to excel in a tech-driven world. Recognizing education's transformative power, Amazon is committed to democratizing access to high-quality computer science education," said David Zapolsky, Senior Vice President, Global Public Policy and General Counsel, Amazon. In September, Amazon India announced the expansion of its partnership with the National Education Society for Tribal Students (NESTS) under the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India, to launch the Amazon Future Engineer program in 54 Eklavya Model Residential Schools (EMRS) across the states of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, and Telangana. The partnership was expanded from a computer science fundamentals module to include Advanced Block Programming and Artificial Intelligence for students of grades six to nine. Amazon introduced AFE in India in 2021 and has partnered with several education-focused non-profit organizations, including Leadership for Equity, Learning Links Foundation. Amazon Future Engineer is a computer science education program that allows all young people to explore their potential and build a better world for us all. As a childhood-to-career programme, AFE offerings start with primary schooling and continue through secondary into career. Under this programme, Amazon has also offered scholarships and internships to girl students interested to make a career in the tech industry. Throughout, Amazon partners with organizations that share its mission and create opportunities for students to discover the richness of computer science through intersections with self-expression, social justice, sustainability, and more. So far, Amazon Future Engineer program has supported more than 1.5 million students to explore and learn computer science and trained over 8,000 teachers across the country. UNI BDN Andriy Yermak and Jake Sullivan discussed preparations for the Ukrainian-U.S. conference of defense industries President of Ukraine 3 December 2023 - 10:36 Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak had a phone call with National Security Advisor to the President of the United States Jake Sullivan in the framework of the ongoing dialogue with the allies. Andriy Yermak briefed Jake Sullivan on the current situation on the battlefield and the priority needs of the Ukrainian defense forces. He dwelled on a recent trip with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the frontline regions: Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, and Kharkiv regions, where they visited the advanced positions of Ukrainian defenders resisting the Russian aggressor. According to him, at the meeting with the Head of the State, the soldiers conveyed specific requests regarding weapons and ammunition needed to defend Ukrainian territories from occupiers. The interlocutors also discussed the preparations for the first Ukrainian-U.S. conference of defense industries slated for December 6-7 in Washington, in accordance with the agreements between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Joseph Biden. The head of the Ukrainian President's Office also talked about the progress of implementing the Ukrainian Peace Formula, including the tenth ambassador-level meeting that took place on Friday at the Boryspil International Airport. Andriy Yermak expressed gratitude to U.S. President Joseph Biden, his entire team, both houses of the U.S. Congress and the American people for their leadership and strong support of Ukraine in the fight for freedom, independence and against Russian terror. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Zelenskyy Thanks Those Helping Fight Against Invasion By VOA News December 03, 2023 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday thanked everyone who has helped Ukraine in its fight against Russia's invasion, including soldiers, workers of the Emergency Service of Ukraine, the National Police, the National Guard and more. "It is important that everyone remains committed to the common cause," Zelenskyy said in his daily address. "It is important that every week one can say, "I have contributed something of my own to the common defense." Earlier Saturday, power was restored at Ukraine's Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant after it was lost on Friday, averting again a "nuclear catastrophe," according to a statement by Ukraine's Energy Ministry on Telegram. "This is the eighth blackout which occurred at the [Zaporizhzhia plant] and could have led to nuclear catastrophe," the statement said. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed the outage and restoration of power. The plant was occupied by Russia in March of last year and is no longer generating power but needs a supply of electricity to cool one of its four reactors, which is in a state of hot conservation, meaning it has not fully been shut down. The ministry said that after losing grid connection the plant turned on 20 backup generators to supply its electricity needs. At 7 a.m. local time, it said, Ukrainian specialists repaired the 750-kilowatt line that is again bringing power to the plant. Eastern front lines Fighting continues around the eastern Ukrainian towns of Avdiivka and Marinka, with both Russia and Ukraine claiming advances. Ukraine's General Staff said Saturday that Russian forces had been unsuccessful in their attempts to advance on villages near Marinka but said nothing of troop movements in the town. Once a city of 10,000 Marinka, southwest of the Russian-held regional center of Donetsk, is now a ghost town, after almost a year of Russian efforts to seize it. There are no civilians left there. For almost two months, Russian forces have been attacking the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka, 40 kilometers north of Marinka. Ukraine says its forces control Avdiivka, though not a single building remains intact. Ukrainian troops regained swaths of territory last year in a sweep through the northeast, but a counteroffensive launched in the east and south in June has made only incremental gains. White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby called on the U.S. Congress on Friday to act swiftly to provide aid to Ukraine before the end of the month, after which it will become difficult to provide Kyiv with assistance it needs. "We need that assistance immediately so we can provide them assistance in an uninterrupted way," Kirby told a news briefing. Kirby said the United States expects that Russia will try to destroy critical Ukrainian energy infrastructure this winter as it did last year. Zelenskyy acknowledges that the advance has been slow but rejects any notion that the war is slipping into a stalemate. He met with his military command Friday to discuss ways to produce "concrete results" in the war next year. In his nightly video address, he spoke about improvements in mobilization methods. Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address NEW YORK, Dec. 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- WHY: Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, announces the filing of a class action lawsuit on behalf of purchasers of securities of Fisker Inc. (NYSE: FSR) between August 4, 2023 and November 20, 2023, both dates inclusive (the Class Period). A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than January 26, 2024. SO WHAT: If you purchased Fisker securities during the Class Period you may be entitled to compensation without payment of any out of pocket fees or costs through a contingency fee arrangement. WHAT TO DO NEXT: To join the Fisker class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=20654 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email pkim@rosenlegal.com or cases@rosenlegal.com for information on the class action. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than January 26, 2024. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. WHY ROSEN LAW: We encourage investors to select qualified counsel with a track record of success in leadership roles. Often, firms issuing notices do not have comparable experience, resources or any meaningful peer recognition. Be wise in selecting counsel. The Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Rosen Law Firm has achieved the largest ever securities class action settlement against a Chinese Company. Rosen Law Firm was Ranked No. 1 by ISS Securities Class Action Services for number of securities class action settlements in 2017. The firm has been ranked in the top 4 each year since 2013 and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors. In 2019 alone the firm secured over $438 million for investors. In 2020, founding partner Laurence Rosen was named by law360 as a Titan of Plaintiffs Bar. Many of the firms attorneys have been recognized by Lawdragon and Super Lawyers. DETAILS OF THE CASE: According to the lawsuit, defendants made materially false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) Fisker had a material weakness in its internal control over financial reporting; (2) Fisker had incorrectly accounted for certain costs; (3) as a result Fisker was likely to delay filing its quarterly report; (4) Fiskers infrastructure was limiting its ability to deliver its production; and (5) that, as a result of the foregoing, defendants positive statements about Fisker's business, operations, and prospects were materially misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages. To join the Fisker class action, go to https://rosenlegal.com/submit-form/?case_id=20654 or call Phillip Kim, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email pkim@rosenlegal.com or cases@rosenlegal.com for information on the class action. No Class Has Been Certified. Until a class is certified, you are not represented by counsel unless you retain one. You may select counsel of your choice. You may also remain an absent class member and do nothing at this point. An investors ability to share in any potential future recovery is not dependent upon serving as lead plaintiff. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rosenlawfirm/. Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. ------------------------------- Contact Information: Laurence Rosen, Esq. Phillip Kim, Esq. The Rosen Law Firm, P.A. 275 Madison Avenue, 40th Floor New York, NY 10016 Tel: (212) 686-1060 Toll Free: (866) 767-3653 Fax: (212) 202-3827 lrosen@rosenlegal.com pkim@rosenlegal.com cases@rosenlegal.com www.rosenlegal.com NEWARK, Del, Dec. 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The organic personal care market value is forecast to increase from US$ 22,487.9 million in 2024 to US$ 55,562.5 million by 2034. The global demand for organic personal care products is projected to surge at a CAGR of 9.50% over the assessment period. Several people all over the world are becoming increasingly conscious of their health, especially the way they look. This has significantly driven the growth of organic personal care products in the global marketplace. Consumers are increasingly opting for organic personal care products, such as face cleansers, shampoos, moisturizers, creams, lotions, etc. These products are crafted with natural ingredients, free from harmful chemicals and synthetic additives, fulfilling the rising demand for cleaner and more sustainable beauty solutions. Request Sample Report: Empower Your Market Understanding with Invaluable Insights: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-18507 The rising disposable incomes of middle-class people in countries like India, China, Australia, etc., is another major reason for the growth of the organic personal care market. This gives consumers a chance to prioritize their health and well-being, eventually leading to an increased preference for premium organic personal care products. The globalization of beauty brands due to online platforms and international retail channels has also significantly contributed to the overall market. Celebrity-owned organic cosmetic brands are also gaining a lot of traction in the global personal care industry. These celebrities have millions of followers and the desire to look like their favorite actors or actresses has led to a surge in the popularity of these brands. The increased exposure to Western beauty standards and the influence of beauty enthusiasts on social media sites have collectively led to an increased demand for these products in the last couple of years. Key Takeaways from the Organic Personal Care Market Organic skin care products command a substantial market share of 48.70% in 2024, emerging as the predominant choice. in 2024, emerging as the predominant choice. Supermarkets/hypermarkets are the most common distribution channel in this market, claiming a 39.70% share in 2024. share in 2024. The organic personal care market in India is predicted to grow at a remarkable CAGR of 10.40% through 2034. through 2034. The organic personal care market in China is expected to rise at a whopping 11.70% CAGR through 2034. through 2034. The organic personal care market in Australia has the potential to grow at a 9.80% CAGR through 2034. through 2034. The United States organic personal care market is projected to rise at an 8.60% CAGR through 2034. through 2034. The organic personal care market in Germany is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.70% through 2034. There is a lot of room for innovation in this market. The market is still in its nascent stages and many people are still unaware of the benefits of organic products. Key players are leveraging this opportunity to tap the emerging markets organically and expand their consumer base. They are collaborating with social media influencers and local wellness chains to spread awareness and educate consumers about the advantages of natural products,- Opines Sneha Verghese, Senior Consultant for Consumer Goods and Products at Future Market Insights (FMI). Key Companies of the Organic Personal Care Market Aveda Corporation Burts Bees Estee Lauder Companies Inc. Hain Celestial Group Amway Corporation Bare Escentuals Beauty, Inc. Arbonne International LLC Neutrogena Corporation The Body Shop International PLC Yves Rocher SA Request the Full Report Methodology Now: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/request-report-methodology/rep-gb-18507 Competitive Landscape The organic personal care market is characterized by the presence of several players like Estee Lauder, Amway Corporation, Neutrogena Corporation, etc., who have a strong foothold in the market. These brands have a loyal consumer base and an extensive research and development budget to curate new products in the market. There is a presence of small brands, too. These brands cater to regional consumers and are mainly indulged in crafting personalized products for their consumers. The eCommerce platforms and small-scale brands are able to sell their products across a wider consumer base. Recent Developments In 2023, textile innovator HeiQ introduced HeiQ Skin Care, a 100% bio-based technology to enhance the skin's health and appearance by optimizing the skin microbiome through active probiotics and prebiotics. In 2023, Kensing, LLC acquired Advanced Organic Materials (AOM), a prominent producer of non-GMO plant-based vitamin E and phytosterols derived from sunflower and rapeseed. Key Segmentation of Organic Personal Care Market By Product: Skin Care Hair Care Oral Care Others By Distribution Channel: Hypermarkets/Supermarkets Pharmacy and Drug Stores eCommerce Others By Region: North America Latin America Europe East Asia South Asia and the Pacific Middle East and Africa (MEA) Get Instant Access to Our Detailed Report: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/checkout/18507 Authored by: Sneha Varghese (Senior Consultant, Consumer Products & Goods) has 6+ years of experience in the market research and consulting industry. She has worked on 200+ research assignments about Consumer Retail Goods. Her work primarily focuses on facilitating strategic decisions, planning and managing cross-functional business operations technology projects, and driving successful implementations. She has helped create insightful, relevant analyses of Food and beverage market reports and studies that include consumer market, retail, and manufacturer research perspective. She has also been involved in several bulletins in food magazines and journals. Have a Look at Related Research Reports of the Consumer Product Domain: The global ASEAN organic cosmetic market size is projected to attain a valuation of US$ 9,484.4 million by 2033. Our consumer product industry analysts opine that ASEAN organic cosmetic providers can expect a modest CAGR of 5.4% through 2033, with a current valuation of US$ 5,605.4 million in 2023. The male color cosmetics market demand is estimated to be valued at US$ 17.57 billion in 2023 and is expected to total US$ 43 billion by 2033. The adoption of male color cosmetics is likely to advance at a CAGR of 9.4% during the forecast period. The global colour cosmetics market forecast leads to an estimated CAGR of 5% in the global market during the forecast period and registers a revenue valued at US$ 52.5 Billion in 2022 and is expected to cross US$ 85.52 Billion by 2032. The global natural cosmetic color market growth is forecasted to be appraised at US$ 68.46 billion by 2032, up from US$ 41.63 billion in 2022, advancing at a CAGR of 5.01% during the forecast period. The baby personal care market share is likely to hold the global market at a moderate CAGR of 5% during the forecast period. As per newly released data by Future Market Insights (FMI), the baby personal care market is estimated at US$ 6.08 Billion in 2023 and is likely to cross US$ 8.71 Billion by the end of 2033. About Future Market Insights (FMI) Future Market Insights, Inc. (ESOMAR certified, recipient of the Stevie Award, and a member of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce) offers profound insights into the driving factors that are boosting demand in the market. FMI stands as the leading global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, consulting, and events for the Packaging, Food and Beverage, Consumer Technology, Healthcare, Industrial, and Chemicals markets. With a vast team of over 5000 analysts worldwide, FMI provides global, regional, and local expertise on diverse domains and industry trends across more than 110 countries. Contact Us: Nandini Singh Sawlani Future Market Insights Inc. Christiana Corporate, 200 Continental Drive, Suite 401, Newark, Delaware 19713, USA T: +1-845-579-5705 For Sales Enquiries: sales@futuremarketinsights.com Website: https://www.futuremarketinsights.com LinkedIn| Twitter| Blogs | YouTube New York, United States , Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Global Smart Baby Monitor Market Size is to grow from USD 1079.86 Million in 2022 to USD 2298.38 Million by 2032, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.85% during the projected period. Get a Sample PDF Brochure: https://www.sphericalinsights.com/request-sample/2704 The number of single-parent homes and working parents is rising, smart baby monitoring devices are becoming more and more common. Working parents are actively looking for nannies or daycare centers to monitor their children while they are gone. Parents use this device to communicate information using their smartphones. When both parents are working, parents are more likely to spend money to keep their kids safe. The demand to maintain an eye on newborns' activities and the growing number of working parents are driving demand for this device. The market for smart baby monitors is expanding as a result of technological advancements, particularly in the areas of video and Wi-Fi. The development of technology has made baby monitors possible for parents and newborns to communicate in real time. For instance, in addition to a long-range monitor and night vision, the Willcare Newborn baby monitor provides features including lullaby tracks, temperature sensors, and a clock. Baby monitor demand is expected to rise dramatically over the next years as a consequence of technological advancements and ease of use. Parents and other individuals can watch a child's whereabouts while they are gone thanks to smart baby monitors. Furthermore, they provide crucial environmental data like the room's temperature. COVID 19 Impact The COVID-19 epidemic is having a negative impact on economies and industries in a number of nations due to lockdowns, travel bans, and company closures. The governments in this region's COVID-19 containment efforts have had a negative impact on the electronics industry. China, the region's top manufacturer and one of the worst-affected nations, along with India, has finally had an influence on the production of electrical equipment. Browse key industry insights spread across 200 pages with 140 market data tables and figures & charts from the report on " Global Smart Baby Monitor Market Size, Share, and COVID-19 Impact Analysis, By Product (Video Monitor Device and Audio Monitor Device), By Connectivity (Wired, Wireless), By Distribution Channel (Online, Offline), By Application (Home/Family, Commercial, Daycare, Hospitals), and By Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa), Analysis and Forecast 2022 2032 Buy Now Full Report https://www.sphericalinsights.com/checkout/2704 The video monitor devices segment dominates the market with the largest revenue share over the forecast period Based on type, the global smart baby monitor market is segmented into video monitor devices and audio monitor devices. Among these, the video monitor devices segment is dominating the market with the largest revenue share of 82.5% over the forecast period. The baby's activities, feeding schedule, and nap time are all monitored through video; several video monitoring systems for smart baby monitoring incorporate temperature sensors, automated smartphone notifications, and two-way audio; When parents are away from home, they may quickly and safely keep an eye on their kids by watching live footage of their whereabouts. The wireless connectivity segment is witnessing significant CAGR growth over the forecast period. On the basis of the wireless connectivity segment, the global smart baby monitor market is segmented into wired and wireless. Among these, the wireless connectivity segment is witnessing significant CAGR growth over the forecast period. since the simplicity and ease of use, wireless connectivity is becoming increasingly popular. Compared to traditional baby monitors, which require complex cabling, wireless connectivity offers a simpler setup and greater mobility. smartphones and tablets allow parents to keep an eye on their children while they are out and about or in another room. Modern features like two-way audio, night vision, and connectivity with smart home automation systems are also frequently found in these monitors. The offline segment is expected to hold the largest Global Smart Baby Monitor Market share during the forecast period. Based on the application, the global smart baby monitor market is classified online and offline. Among these, the offline segment is expected to hold the largest smart baby monitor market share during the forecast period. Many parents prefer to physically examine and interact with products before making a purchase, which offline retailers allow. To reassure customers, offline businesses also frequently provide demonstrations and qualified advice. Additionally, some customers might not always have access to the internet, making offline merchants a more convenient option. The home/family segment accounted for the largest revenue share of more than 57.2% over the forecast period. On the basis of application, the global smart baby monitor market is segmented into home/family, commercial, daycare, and hospitals. Among these, the home/family segment dominates the market with the largest revenue share of 57.2% over the forecast period. Global adoption of smart baby monitors is being driven by an increase in the number of working parents and increased knowledge about the use of devices equipped with innovative technology. Inquire Before Buying This Research Report: https://www.sphericalinsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/2704 North America dominates the market with the largest market share over the forecast period. North America is dominating the market with more than 51.2% market share over the forecast period. Some of the factors that contribute to the market's expansion in this sector include the rapid adoption of new technology, an increase in dual income due to the high employment rate, and the adoption of female empowerment, which leads to an increase in the proportion of female workers. According to the US Department of Labor, women make up roughly 47% of the working population in the nation. Asia Pacific, on the contrary, is expected to grow the fastest during the forecast period. The continued population growth and the rising income levels of the middle- and upper-class populations have a major impact on the growth of the baby monitor market in APAC. Families frequently look for methods to guarantee their children's safety and happiness even when they are not present physically. Europe market is expected to register a substantial CAGR growth rate during the forecast period. Competitive Analysis: The report offers the appropriate analysis of the key organizations/companies involved within the global market along with a comparative evaluation primarily based on their product offering, business overviews, geographic presence, enterprise strategies, segment market share, and SWOT analysis. The report also provides an elaborative analysis focusing on the current news and developments of the companies, which includes product development, innovations, joint ventures, partnerships, mergers & acquisitions, strategic alliances, and others. This allows for the evaluation of the overall competition within the, Some of the Major vendors in the global smart baby monitor market include Motorola, Inc, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Summer Infant, Inc., Vtech Communications, Inc., Lorex Technology Inc, Dorel Juvenile Group, Inc., Ibaby Labs, Inc., Koninklijke Philips N.V., Infant Optics, Snuza International, Graco Inc, WiFi Baby, Withings SA, Nanit Sleep System Get Discount At @ https://www.sphericalinsights.com/request-discount/2704 Recent Market Developments In August 2023, Masimo, a global leader in noninvasive monitoring technologies, announced the full U.S. market release of the Stork smart home baby monitoring system. Market Segment This study forecasts revenue at global, regional, and country levels from 2020 to 2032. Spherical Insights has segmented the global smart baby monitor market based on the below-mentioned segments: Smart Baby Monitor Market, Product Analysis Video Monitor Device Audio Monitor Device Smart Baby Monitor Market, Connectivity Analysis Wired Wireless Smart Baby Monitor Market, Distribution Channel Analysis Online Offline Smart Baby Monitor Market, Application Analysis Home/Family Commercial Daycare Hospitals Smart Baby Monitor Market, Regional Analysis North America US Canada Mexico Europe Germany Uk France Italy Spain Russia Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China Japan India South Korea Australia Rest of Asia Pacific South America Brazil Argentina Rest of South America Middle East & Africa UAE Saudi Arabia Qatar South Africa Rest of Middle East & Africa Browse Related Reports Global Electric Toothbrush Market Size , Share, and COVID-19 Impact Analysis, By Product (Battery Powered, Rechargeable), By Technology (Rotational, Vibrational), By Distribution Channel (Offline Stores, Online Stores), By End-User (Adults, Children), and By Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa), Analysis and Forecast 2022 2032 Global Hand Wash Market Size , Share, and COVID-19 Impact Analysis, By Product (Ordinary Hand Wash, Waterless Hand Wash), By End-User (Commercial, Residential, Industrial), By Distribution Channel (Pharmacy Stores, Supermarket/ Hypermarket, E-commerce, Others) and By Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa), Analysis and Forecast 2022 2032 Global Luxury Watch Market Size , Share, and COVID-19 Impact Analysis, By Product (Analog, Digital), By Distribution Channel (Offline, Online), By End-User (Men, Women, Unisex), and By Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa), Analysis and Forecast 2022 2032 Global Aluminum Foil Market Size , Share, and COVID-19 Impact Analysis, By Product (Wrapper Foils, Container Foils, Others), By Application (Food, Beverages, Pharmaceutical, Personal Care & Cosmetics), By End-Use (Packaging, Industrial, Others) and By Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa), Analysis and Forecast 2022 2032 About the Spherical Insights & Consulting Spherical Insights & Consulting is a market research and consulting firm which provides actionable market research study, quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight especially designed for decision makers and aids ROI. Which is catering to different industry such as financial sectors, industrial sectors, government organizations, universities, non-profits and corporations. The company's mission is to work with businesses to achieve business objectives and maintain strategic improvements. CONTACT US: For More Information on Your Target Market, Please Contact Us Below: Phone: +1 303 800 4326 (the U.S.) Phone: +91 90289 24100 (APAC) Email: inquiry@sphericalinsights.com, sales@sphericalinsights.com Contact Us: https://www.sphericalinsights.com/contact-us Follow Us: LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter OTTAWA, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The future of Arctic and Northern research in Canada depends on a transformational shift that prioritizes Indigenous leadership, voices, and engagement, according to a new expert panel report from the CCA. Despite persistent structural and systemic barriers, a more equitable and effective research system is possible with commitment from the research communityfrom individuals to institutionsto engage ethically, respectfully, and with a sense of reciprocity, at all stages of the research process. Building a collaborative and inclusive Northern research system is an essential part of Canadas work to realize the rights affirmed in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Calls to Action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Its critical that those working in all parts of the research system address the needs and priorities identified by Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous people in the North, recognize and respect Indigenous rights and self-determination, and ethically engage with and learn from Indigenous knowledge systems. Centring Indigenous leadership, engagement, and knowledge systems will ultimately lead to more relevant and informed research that benefits all Canadians. Arctic and Northern research in Canada has long been dominated by Southern researchers and institutions as well as Southern interests, needs, priorities, and perspectives, said the Panel, co-chaired by Drs. Karla Jessen Williamson and Ashlee Cunsolo. This has been reflected in approaches to research that ignore Indigenous Peoples and their rights, cultures, and knowledges, all of which are vital to understanding Arctic and Northern environments and societies. The Panel determined that an inclusive, collaborative, and effective Northern research system must be accessible and accountable to Northern and Indigenous communities while also safeguarding Indigenous knowledge systems and data. This report addresses many of the structural and systemic barriers that have inhibited research in the Northern regions of Canada, said Eric M. Meslin, President and CEO of the CCA. In describing a path that elevates Indigenous leadership and knowledges, it can help transform research there, and elsewhere in Canada. A consortium of Arctic and Northern research and science organizations from across Canada, led by ArcticNet, asked the CCA to identify the key foundational elements to create an inclusive, collaborative, effective, and world-class Arctic and northern science system in Canada. The report by the Expert Panel on the Future of Arctic and Northern Research in Canada sets out these elements, as well the avenues through which these elements can be implemented. Visit www.cca-reports.ca to download the report. Contact: Heather Ennis Director of Communications, Council of Canadian Academies 613-851-7723 heather.ennis@cca-reports.ca About the Council of Canadian Academies The CCA is a not-for-profit organization that undertakes independent, evidence-based expert panel assessments to inform public policy development in Canada. For more information about the CCA or its assessments, please visit www.cca-reports.ca. Follow us: @cca_reports A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b79284be-9b49-4e4b-8a8e-a52a73899102 RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C., Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Asensus Surgical, Inc. (NYSE American: ASXC), a medical device company digitizing the interface between the surgeon and patient, announced that a Senhance Surgical System has been sold to the Companys distribution partner and will be placed in a hospital in the Commonwealth of Independent States region. This marks the second system sold to the region in the past month. We are excited to be partnering with yet another institution to initiate a Senhance program to deliver better patient outcomes," noted Anthony Fernando, President and CEO of Asensus Surgical. Hospitals continue to recognize the value of our advanced digital laparoscopic platform, which leverages Augmented Intelligence to enable consistently superior outcomes. We're particularly enthusiastic about hospitals continuing to adopt Senhance, highlighting the system's clinical relevance and value. The Senhance Surgical System is the only commercially available robotic surgery system with haptic feedback, a differentiating feature for surgeons. About Asensus Surgical, Inc. Asensus Surgical, Inc. is digitizing the interface between the surgeon and patient to pioneer a new era of Performance-Guided Surgery by unlocking clinical intelligence for surgeons to enable consistently superior outcomes and a new standard of surgery. Based upon the foundations of Digital Laparoscopy and the Senhance Surgical System, the Company is developing the LUNA Surgical System, a next generation robotic and instrument system as a foundation of its Digital Surgery solution. These systems will be powered by the Intelligent Surgical Unit to increase surgeon control and reduce surgical variability. With the addition of machine vision, Augmented Intelligence, and deep learning capabilities throughout the surgical experience, we intend to holistically address the current clinical, cognitive and economic shortcomings that drive surgical outcomes and value-based healthcare. The Senhance Surgical System is now available for sale in the US, EU, Japan, Russia, and select other countries. For a complete list of indications for use, visit: www.senhance.com/indications. To learn more about Performance-Guided Surgery and digital laparoscopy with the Senhance Surgical System, visit www.asensus.com. Follow Asensus Email Alerts: https://ir.asensus.com/email-alerts LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/asensus-surgical-inc Twitter: https://twitter.com/AsensusSurgical YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AsensusSurgical Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/asxc TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@asensus_surgical Forward-Looking Statements This press release includes statements relating to the Senhance Surgical System and the sales of a Senhance System to be placed in a hospital in the Commonwealth of Independent States region. These statements and other statements regarding our future plans and goals constitute "forward looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and are intended to qualify for the safe harbor from liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that are often difficult to predict, are beyond our control and which may cause results to differ materially from expectations and include whether hospitals will continue to recognize the value of our advanced laparoscopic platform. For a discussion of the risks and uncertainties associated with the Companys business, please review our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, filed with the SEC on March 2, 2023 and our other filings we make with the SEC. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward looking statements, which are based on our expectations as of the date of this press release and speak only as of the origination date of this press release. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. INVESTOR CONTACT: Mark Klausner or Mike Vallie, 443-213-0499 invest@asensus.com MEDIA CONTACT: Dan Ventresca Matter Communications AsensusPR@matternow.com 617-874-5488 A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/7ada0ccb-2f62-4bb8-870d-51edbd5e5abe WILMINGTON, Del., Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As a female business executive, strategist, marketing and communications expert and philanthropist, Carolmarie Brown understands how to shape the brand and reputation of multinational companies, drive business growth and put the power of Ashlands people and products in the hands of customers and communities around the world. Brown, Ashlands vice president corporate affairs, marketing, brand and business communications has a passion for problem-solving that is well-served in a company whose purpose is to responsibly solve for a better world. But what makes her different is her unique ability to jump across functional lines, from the boardroom to the STEM classroom, from communications to business operations, and from philanthropy to employee engagement with both ease and understanding. Brown has led the development of a comprehensive philanthropic strategy, Responsible Solvers, that allows Ashland leaders and local employees to customize their philanthropic community programs to fit the unique needs of countries and cultures from Thailand to Texas and Newark to New Delhi. Its a business philosophy that has paid significant dividends with a focus on bringing more women and minorities into the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) that taps the business leaders of tomorrow today. When Ashland took on a new Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategy that drove those disciplines deeper into the company at every level, it was Brown who spearheaded the communications plan, bringing a technical strategy to life, and shining a spotlight on the people behind the products, employees who are experts in manufacturing, sourcing, sales and research and development. By 2022, Ashlands ESG presence became a defining feature of the $2.5 billion company, with a digital presence whose audiences increased by more than 1700 percent in one year alone. Throughout her career, she has helped companies achieve strategic objectives with marketing know-how and a keen eye on the bottom line. She's a brand builder with business acumen, who led the evolution of the Ashland corporate brand strategy, positioning and creative identity, post-IPO of Valvoline. The work won a REBRAND 100 Award of Distinction and an Ashland Chairman's Award. Prior to Ashland, Browns business accomplishments include a 25-year career at DuPont in various roles, including marketing, sales, communications, issues management, public relations, new business and product development, brand management and licensing. She was responsible for some of DuPonts most profitable brands, including Teflon, Lycra, Corian, and STAINMASTER. Carolmarie began her professional career as a child model and in broadcasting and advertising, and previously worked with the Kraft Dairy Group and Dow Consumer Products. All of this gave her a foundation to build a powerful and influential career. I am deeply honored by this recognition, Brown explains. The truth is, I am a part of an amazing team of solvers from every corner of the world in a company that enables everyone to bring their authentic selves to work. The fact that I get to help create and shape these strategies is a testament to our CEO, whom I deeply admire, and to the mentors, both women and men that I have had throughout my 35-year career. And that passion for problem solving at Ashland means we get to work on some of the most profound problems facing the world from climate issues and disease to sustainable sourcing and diversity. But nothing is as rewarding as seeing young women today, aspiring to business leadership, who like my own daughters have become interested in STEM. These young ladies are our future - the next generation of solvers, and I am happy to help them on their paths as leaders and as women. Carolmarie is modest about her accomplishments, but the reality is the knowledge, visionary creativity and passion she brings to her job and to her life inspire more people than she knows, said Guillermo Novo, chair and chief executive officer, Ashland. She is an integral part of Ashlands executive team and of the surrounding community. While we are not surprised by this recognition, we are proud that others see the breadth of who she is and all she has accomplished. Brown and 39 other women will be recognized at ceremonies on November 30 at the Lighthouse Cove Event Center in Dewey Beach, Del. and on December 6, 2023 at the Chase Center on the Riverfront, Wilmington, Del. The honorees were chosen from more than 300 entries spanning a wide range of industries and roles across Delaware. To learn more visit ashland.com/ESG About Ashland Ashland Inc. (NYSE: ASH) is a global additives and specialty ingredients company with a conscious and proactive mindset for environment, social and governance (ESG). The company serves customers in a wide range of consumer and industrial markets, including architectural coatings, construction, energy, food and beverage, nutraceuticals, personal care and pharmaceutical. Approximately 3,800 passionate, tenacious solvers from renowned scientists and research chemists to talented engineers and plant operators thrive on developing practical, innovative and elegant solutions to complex problems for customers in more than 100 countries. Visit ashland.com and ashland.com/ESG to learn more. Trademark, Ashland or its subsidiaries, registered in various countries. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: Media Relations: Lin Nordmeyer +1 (302) 545-9882 lin.nordmeyer@ashland.com Attachments MIAMI, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mycotopia Therapies Inc. (Mycotopia Therapies) (the Company) (OTC: TPIA) announced today it has purchased certain assets of Philon Labs, LLC ("Philon Labs"), including patents related to innovative AI robotics based home health products. With this acquisition Mycotopia Therapies has begun its transition to a growth-oriented company using Artificial Intelligence ("AI") to transform great ideas and innovative solutions into disruptive products using advanced engineering and design techniques. The patents acquired from Philon Labs relate to their Milkyway" and "Phill Robot" products. Phill is the first massage robot with a 35 inch range, 15 lb massage force and is AI controlled. Its the only massage robot in the market assisted by Artificial Intelligence and with a wide variety of massage patterns made to take your relaxation to a whole new level. The Milkyway is the first smart fridge for breast milk storage bags. Its automated vertical rotating storage system organizes every bag by date and ounces freezing them evenly. Mycotopia Therapies will change its name to AiBotics to reflect the Company's focus on AI enhanced products and revolutionizing the way technological products are developed and deployed to fulfill the needs of individuals and businesses worldwide. The Company plans to file with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) to change the name of the company to AiBotics and the trading symbol to ABIT. Since its inception in Latin America in 2020, Philon Labs has been at the forefront of technological advancements. The "Milkyway" and "Phill Robot" are testaments to their design genius. Flagship Products: Phill Robot and Milkyway The Phill Robot, Philon Labs' flagship AI-powered massage robot uses advanced AI algorithms to learn and adapt to user preferences for a bespoke massage experience. With its range of massage accessories, this compact marvel signifies a leap in the wellness industry. Phill Robot is the first massage, scratch, and caress robot featuring cutting-edge AI technology, poised to redefine the massage experience by bringing unparalleled convenience to the user's bedside. This innovative creation takes the approach to relaxation and stress relief to the next level, delivering a personalized and spa-quality massage within the confines of one's home. Phill embodies the essence of a groundbreaking "massage-on-demand" experience. Phill boasts a patented deployment system with a foldable, long-range arm. It has a 35-inch range and 15-pound massage force, and it is AI-controlled with a wide variety of massage patterns. When in a folded and stored state, it seamlessly serves as a stylish nightstand adjacent to your bed. Distinguished by utilizing top-tier materials and finishes, Phill emerges as the epitome of modernity and sophistication in the robotic market. The Milkyway, a pioneering smart refrigerator for breast milk storage, epitomizes Philon Labs' commitment to addressing real-world challenges. Its automated vertical rotating system and stylish design cater to modern parenting needs, showcasing Philon's acumen in creating solutions that resonate with consumers. Milkyway features a pioneering patent-pending vertical rotating storage system that efficiently organizes bags by date and ounces, ensuring even freezing. It is fully customizable with a sleek design adaptable to any kitchen or room, and the standard version accommodates up to 99 breast milk storage bags. For larger capacities, a customized version can store 120+ bags, making it ideal for hospitals and nursing rooms. The Milkyway app offers real-time updates on freezing temperature and milk inventory, aiding in monitoring the baby's breastfeeding habits and schedules. Patents and Trademarks Mycotopia acquired the following patents from Philon Labs: David Gruszka, Co-Founder and CEO of Philon Labs, who will become President of Mycotopia, said, The Phill Robot prototype stands as a testament to cutting-edge technology, embodying a vision for elevated AI functionality and a seamlessly immersive user experience. With the current model demonstrating substantial potential, the imminent integration of advanced sensors, AI software, and user-friendly interfaces could revolutionize the product's capabilities. Mr. Gruszka continued, As we embark on our ambitious production goals and market strategy for 2024, our developmental roadmap for Phill Robot follows a phased approach, prioritizing empirical testing and expert-driven design. We are committed to harmonizing innovative design with efficient production through a strategic partnership with a seasoned manufacturing firm, advancing the product toward commercial readiness. Terms of the Agreement Under the terms of the Agreement, Mycotopia Therapies will acquire certain assets of Philon Labs, including Phill Robot and Milkyway. In consideration for the acquisition of the Assets, Mycotopia Therapies will issue a new class of Preferred Stock with a face value of $2,000,000 convertible into shares of the Common Stock of Mycotopia. All shares of Preferred Stock and Common Stock issued in conjunction with the transaction will be "restricted securities," as defined in Rule 144 under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended. This major transaction will provide the Company with the platform to grow and build value for all of our stakeholders, said Ben Kaplan, Chief Executive Officer of Mycotopia Therapies. The name change from Mycotopia Therapies to AiBotics reflects the core DNA of the Company, making high-quality products using Artificial Intelligence ("AI") to transform great ideas and smart solutions into disruptive products using advanced engineering and design techniques. Mr. Kaplan added, Our shareholders, employees, vendors, and partners remain our priority as we work together to position the business for its next chapter. As we head into our next growth phase, the timing is ideal for us as a company and our shareholders to make the move. About Mycotopia Therapies Mycotopia Therapies focuses on helping you heal and reclaim your life. Your journey of healing is an understanding of mental and physical wellness with a professional team of mental wellness practitioners and cutting-edge technology. Mycotopia believes in a holistic and spiritual approach to providing healing. Investors and interested parties can find additional information about Mycotopia Therapies on the Company's website at https://www.mycotopiatherapies.com. Forward-Looking Statement Disclaimer This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Such statements may be preceded by the words intends, may, will, plans, expects, anticipates, projects, predicts, estimates, aims, believes, hopes, potential or similar words. Forward-looking statements are based on certain assumptions, opinions and estimates of management and are subject to various known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the Company's control, and cannot be predicted or quantified and consequently, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements: (i) the initiation, timing, progress and results of the Companys research, manufacturing and other development efforts; (ii) the Companys ability to advance its products to successfully complete development and commercialization; (iii) the manufacturing, development, commercialization, and market acceptance of the Companys products; (iv) the lack of sufficient funding to finance the product development and business operations; (v) competitive companies and technologies within the Companys industry and introduction of competing products; (vi) the Companys ability to establish and maintain corporate collaborations; (vii) loss of key management personnel; (viii) the scope of protection the Company is able to establish and maintain for intellectual property rights covering its products and its ability to operate its business without infringing the intellectual property rights of others; (ix) potential failure to comply with applicable health information privacy and security laws and other state and federal privacy and security laws; and (x) the difficulty of predicting actions of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and its regulations. All forward-looking statements included in this press release are made only as of the date of this press release. The Company does not undertake an obligation to publicly update such forward-looking statements to reflect new information, subsequent events, or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. For Media and Investor Relations, please contact: David L. Kugelman (866) 692-6847 Toll Free - U.S. & Canada (404) 281-8556 Mobile and WhatsApp Email: dk@atlcp.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/3cfe53ff-b008-4375-83d5-b95e26446ae0 A video accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/db3990dd-0062-48c9-9fd8-39adf6e81d0e Staunton, VA, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Secure Solar Futures, a provider of on-site clean energy to schools, hospitals, and businesses, has signed a 25-year Solar Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with Mountain Empire Community College to develop a 777-kilowatt solar power system on its campus in Big Stone Gap, Va. MECC is a comprehensive two-year college serving residents of Lee, Scott, Wise, and Dickenson Counties, and the City of Norton. The agreement will provide the college with on-site solar power at no upfront capital cost for the next three decades or more while offering opportunities for workforce development in renewable energy. The solar project received an incentive grant of $100,000 from the Coalfield Solar Fund, a partnership of the technology company Intuit, the National Energy Education Development Project, and Secure Solar Futures. Coalfield Solar Fund grants encourage K-12 public schools and community colleges in coalfield communities in Virginia and West Virginia to adopt solar power. This initiative is not just about energy sustainability; it's a significant stride towards creating meaningful educational and career opportunities in our community, said Kristin Westover, president of MECC. By integrating solar technology with workforce development, we're not only contributing to environmental conservation but also paving the way for future generations to pursue rewarding careers in the energy sector in SWVA, the heart of energy production. Secure Solar Futures will install a total of 1,679 solar panels manufactured by Jinko Solar at two locations. Dalton-Cantrell Hall will host 117 kilowatts of solar capacity, covering 47% of the buildings electricity demand, while five buildings located near each other (Godwin Hall, Holton Hall, Robb Hall, Phillips-Taylor Hall, and the Goodloe Center) will host 659 kilowatts of solar capacity, covering 29% of the power demand of those facilities. After installation, Secure Solar Futures will own, operate, and maintain the solar equipment and sell the clean energy produced to MECC for the term of the PPA. In its first year, the solar system will produce 1,032,400 kilowatt hours of electric power, which is enough energy to power 142 average homes while avoiding the equivalent of more than 732 metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution, an amount that would be produced by burning 819,553 pounds of coal or using 82,327 gallons of gasoline. At the conclusion of the PPA term, MECC will take ownership of the solar power system at no additional cost, producing its own energy for the remainder of the equipments 35- to 40-year productive lifespan. In addition to installing and operating solar energy systems, Secure Solar Futures will continue to help the college operate a workforce development program to train solar power technicians. We look forward to continuing to build on the partnership among MECC and others to expand on the shining example of how a community-based demand-pull model for solar + workforce development generates college enrolment and significant savings. And all while creating a sustainable pipeline for exciting and well-paying career paths in coalfield communities, said Anthony Smith, president of Secure Solar Futures. This is particularly gratifying as we witness the difference this makes for each individual, one person at a time, and their families who can now envision a career and a future for living and working in their home community. The Coalfield Solar Fund offers solar incentive grants to K-12 public schools and community colleges in 7 counties and the city of Norton in Virginia along with 28 counties in West Virginia. The three-year program is now accepting applications for its second year of funding at its website, coalfieldsolarfund.org. Our regional cluster strategy builds on the organizational culture and systems already present between community colleges and their feeder public school districts, notably their career and technical education programs, said Smith. Organizations and initiatives that helped develop the project included the Southwest Solar Workgroup, and the Solar Finance Fund, along with the feeder school districts and Career and Technical Education programs in Wise and Lee Counties. About Secure Solar Futures As a market and policy leader, Secure Solar Futures builds, owns, manages, and funds affordable Resilient Solar Solutions for schools, hospitals, and businesses. The company combines state-ofthe-art solar technology with an innovative business model to make commercial-scale solar readily affordable in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast, helping customers to realize the economic, environmental, and community benefits of solar energy. In 2017, Secure Solar Futures became a Certified B Corporation. Find the company online at www.securesolarfutures.com. Attachment Hyderabad, Dec 4 (UNI) Amidst tight security, the crucial meeting of the Congress Legislature party (CLP) began at a hotel here on Monday to elect their Legislature party leader. The meeting attended by all the newly elected congress MLAs, held in the presence of senior leader and AICC observers to decide their Legislature party leader to form the government in Telangana. After grabbing 64 seats, above the magic figure in the 119-member legislative assembly, Telangana Congress President A Revanth Reddy along with Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar, AICC in-charge of Telangana Manikrao Thakre and former TPCC president Utta Kumar Reddy on Sunday night met governor Dr Tamilisai Soundarajan and staked claim to form the government. Speaking to reporters after the meeting with the Governor, Shivakumar said they submitted a letter to the governor stating they have a clear majority to form the government. When asked about the election of the partys legislature party leader, Shivakumar without disclosing any further, he said that We have a procedure in the Congress party, we will follow that. The Congress delegation urged her to invite the Congress, which is the single largest party, to form the government. The 56-year-old Revanth, who is the top contender for CMs post , won from Kondangal constituency with a margin of over 32,000 votes defeating his closest rival BRS candidate Patnam Narender Reddy. However, he lost from Kamareddy, where BJP candidate Katipally Venkata Ramana Reddy won the seat. After facing a defeat, K Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) on Sunday evening submitted his resignation to Governor Dr Tamilisai. KCR has sent his resignation through a messenger which was accepted by the Governor. UNI KNR GNK HOUSTON, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Crown Castle Inc. (NYSE: CCI) (Crown Castle) announced today that it is commencing a public offering of one or more series of senior notes, subject to market and other conditions. The notes will be issued by Crown Castle. Crown Castle intends to use the net proceeds from this offering to repay a portion of the outstanding indebtedness under its commercial paper program and pay related fees and expenses. J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Mizuho Securities USA LLC, SMBC Nikko Securities America, Inc., TD Securities (USA) LLC and U.S. Bancorp Investments, Inc. are the joint book-running managers of the offering. The offering is being made pursuant to Crown Castles existing effective shelf registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The offering will be made only by means of a prospectus supplement and the accompanying base prospectus, copies of which may be obtained by contacting any joint book-running manager using the information provided below. An electronic copy of the preliminary prospectus supplement, together with the accompanying prospectus, is also available on the SECs website, www.sec.gov. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy the securities described herein, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or other jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. CAUTIONARY LANGUAGE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS This press release contains forward-looking statements that are based on Crown Castle managements current expectations. Such statements include plans, projections and estimates regarding the proposed offering, including the use of proceeds therefrom. Such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including prevailing market conditions and other factors. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those expected. More information about potential risk factors that could affect Crown Castle and its results is included in Crown Castles filings with the SEC. The term including, and any variation thereof, means including, without limitation. ABOUT CROWN CASTLE Crown Castle owns, operates and leases more than 40,000 cell towers and approximately 85,000 route miles of fiber supporting small cells and fiber solutions across every major U.S. market. This nationwide portfolio of communications infrastructure connects cities and communities to essential data, technology and wireless service bringing information, ideas and innovations to the people and businesses that need them. JOINT BOOK-RUNNING MANAGERS CONTACT INFORMATION J.P. Morgan Securities LLC 383 Madison Avenue New York, New York 10179 Collect: 1-212-834-4533 Citigroup Global Markets Inc. 388 Greenwich Street New York, New York 10013 Toll Free: 1-800-831-9146 Mizuho Securities USA LLC 1271 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10020 Toll Free: 1-866-271-7403 SMBC Nikko Securities America, Inc. 277 Park Avenue New York, New York 10172 Toll Free: 1-888-868-6856 TD Securities (USA) LLC 1 Vanderbilt Avenue, 11th Floor New York, New York 10017 Toll Free: 1-855-495-9846 U.S. Bancorp Investments, Inc. 214 N. Tryon St., 26th Floor Charlotte, North Carolina 28202 Phone: 1-877-558-2607 CONTACTS Dan Schlanger, CFO Kris Hinson, VP & Treasurer Crown Castle Inc. 713-570-3050 FINANCIAL RELEASE December 4th, 2023 Aeroports de Paris SA ADP Ingenierie signed a Judicial Agreement of Public Interest, bringing to a close the preliminary investigation into the company ADP Ingenierie, a company of Groupe ADP, has agreed with the French National Financial Prosecutor's Office (Parquet National Financier - PNF) to terminate the investigations it was subject to and relating to past events relating to certain contracts concluded by ADP Ingenierie in Libya in 2007 and 2008, and in the Emirate of Fujairah in 2011. Investigations into these contracts began, in each case, following a spontaneous disclosure made by ADP ingenierie in 2013. This agreement, in the form of a Judicial Agreement of Public Interest (Convention judiciaire d'interet public - CJIP), was signed on November 29, 2023 and was validated by the President of the Paris Judicial Court on Monday December 4, 2023. Under this agreement, ADP Ingenierie has agreed to pay an immediate public interest fine of 14.6 million euros. This marks the end of the investigation and, in accordance with the law, does not imply any admission of guilt. Since the date of the facts investigated, Groupe ADP has taken significant steps to reform itself by implementing a very rigorous Ethics and Compliance program fitting to the most stringent requirements. Under the terms of the CJIP, ADP ingenierie will not be required to take any additional compliance measures. Investor Relations contacts: Cecile Combeau +33 6 32 35 01 46 and Eliott Roch +33 6 98 90 85 14 - invest@adp.fr Press contact: Justine Leger, Head of Medias and Reputation Department +33 1 74 25 23 23 Groupe ADP develops and manages airports, including Paris-Charles de Gaulle, Paris-Orly and Paris-Le Bourget. In 2022, the group handled through its brand Paris Aeroport 86.7 million passengers at Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly, and nearly 193.7 million passengers in airports abroad. Boasting an exceptional geographic location and a major catchment area, the Group is pursuing its strategy of adapting and modernizing its terminal facilities and upgrading quality of services; the group also intends to develop its retail and real estate businesses. In 2022, group revenue stood at 4,688 million and net income at 516million. Registered office: 1, rue de France, 93 290 Tremblay-en-France. Aeroports de Paris is a public limited company (Societe Anonyme) with share capital of 296,881,806. Registered in the Bobigny Trade and Company Register under no. 552 016 628. groupe-adp.com Attachment VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Giga Metals Corp. (TSX.V: GIGA, OTCQX: GIGGF, FSE: BRR2), based in Vancouver, focused on nickel and cobalt, today announced that Mark Jarvis, CEO & Chairman, will present live at the Clean Energy and Precious Metals Virtual Investor Conference, hosted by VirtualInvestorConferences.com, on December 6th, 2023 DATE: December 6th TIME: 12:30 1:00 PM EST / 9:30 10:00 AM PST LINK: https://bit.ly/3rOONJH Available for 1x1 meetings: December 6th This will be a live, interactive online event where investors are invited to ask the company questions in real-time. If attendees are not able to join the event live on the day of the conference, an archived webcast will also be made available after the event. It is recommended that online investors pre-register and run the online system check to expedite participation and receive event updates. Learn more about the event at www.virtualinvestorconferences.com . Recent Company Highlights The positive Pre-Feasibility Study was filed in October 2023, read the PFS press release here and the full PFS report here 30-year project life with average production of 35,000 tonnes per year of nickel and 2,000 tonnes per year of cobalt A nickel project like Turnagain with low carbon intensity in a stable jurisdiction like B.C. has a key role to play in the future of the nickel industry, in particular for the battery industry. Giga Metals, in conjunction with partner Mitsubishi Corp., is in active discussions with potential strategic investors. About Giga Metals Corporation Giga Metals Corporations core asset is the Turnagain Project, located in northern British Columbia, which contains one of the few significant undeveloped sulphide nickel and cobalt resources in the world. Turnagain is held in Hard Creek Nickel, a subsidiary owned 85% by Giga Metals Corporation and 15% by Mitsubishi Corporation. The Pre-Feasibility Study was filed in October 2023. About Virtual Investor Conferences Virtual Investor Conferences (VIC) is the leading proprietary investor conference series that provides an interactive forum for publicly traded companies to seamlessly present directly to investors. Providing a real-time investor engagement solution, VIC is specifically designed to offer companies more efficient investor access. Replicating the components of an on-site investor conference, VIC offers companies enhanced capabilities to connect with investors, schedule targeted one-on-one meetings and enhance their presentations with dynamic video content. Accelerating the next level of investor engagement, Virtual Investor Conferences delivers leading investor communications to a global network of retail and institutional investors. CONTACTS: Giga Metals Corporation Mark Jarvis CEO 604-681-2300 info@gigametals.com Virtual Investor Conferences John M. Viglotti SVP Corporate Services, Investor Access OTC Markets Group (212) 220-2221 johnv@otcmarkets.com Dublin, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Satellite Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communications - Global Strategic Business Report" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. Global Satellite Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communications Market to Reach $6.9 Billion by 2030 The global market for Satellite Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communications estimated at US$2.4 Billion in the year 2022, is projected to reach a revised size of US$6.9 Billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 13.7% over the analysis period 2022-2030. Satellite Telemetry, one of the segments analyzed in the report, is projected to record 13.3% CAGR and reach US$2.6 Billion by the end of the analysis period. Growth in the Automatic Identification System (AIS) segment is estimated at 12.7% CAGR for the next 8-year period. The report provides an overview of the satellite industry, factors affecting it, and short-term market opportunities. It delves into the role of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the satellite industry and the regulatory environment. The report introduces Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication, its key components, and applications. It focuses on Satellite M2M communication and its end-uses, including satellite telephones. The report emphasizes the potential of satellite M2M services for recurrent revenue and their role in bolstering IoT connectivity. It highlights the proliferation of satellite-enabled devices and their potential in IoT. The report states that the US and Europe are the prime revenue contributors to the satellite M2M communication market, while developing regions are hotspots for future growth. The competitive scenario is dominated by American companies. The report concludes by mentioning that remote monitoring and the need for new data sources in the post-COVID-19 phase will augment satellite M2M services, and it provides insights into recent market activity, including the global key competitors' percentage market share in 2022 and their competitive market presence worldwide in 2022. The U.S. Market is Estimated at $921.1 Million, While China is Forecast to Grow at 16.6% CAGR The Satellite Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communications market in the U.S. is estimated at US$921.1 Million in the year 2022. China, the world's second largest economy, is forecast to reach a projected market size of US$995.9 Million by the year 2030 trailing a CAGR of 16.6% over the analysis period 2022 to 2030. Among the other noteworthy geographic markets are Japan and Canada, each forecast to grow at 11.2% and 12.4% respectively over the 2022-2030 period. Within Europe, Germany is forecast to grow at approximately 13.5% CAGR. What`s New? Special discussions on the global economic climate and market sentiment Coverage on global competitiveness and key competitor percentage market shares Market presence analysis across multiple geographies - Strong/Active/Niche/Trivial Online interactive peer-to-peer collaborative bespoke updates Access to digital archives and trademarked research platform Complimentary updates for one year Access to curated YouTube video transcripts of market sentiments shared by CEOs, domain experts and market influencers via interviews, podcasts, press statements and event keynotes Key Attributes: Report Attribute Details No. of Pages 332 Forecast Period 2022 - 2030 Estimated Market Value (USD) in 2022 $2.4 Billion Forecasted Market Value (USD) by 2030 $6.9 Billion Compound Annual Growth Rate 14.1% Regions Covered Global MARKET TRENDS & DRIVERS Robust Opportunities in the Automotive Sector World Automobile Production in Million Units: 2008-2022 Security & Surveillance Systems: Prominent End-Use Domain Growing Role of IoT Elevates Importance of Satellite M2M Global Number of IoT Connected Devices (In Billion Units) for the Years 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022 & 2025 Global IoT Market (In US$ Billion) by Industry for the Years 2018 and 2022 Satellite IoT: Driving the New Space Era M2M Technology Poised to Transform UAE Businesses Widespread Use in Aerospace & Defense Applications Defense Spending Patterns Influence Market Uptake Global Military Spending (in US$ Billion) for the Years 2014 through 2020 Satellite SCADA Applications Gaining Traction Growing Relevance of SCADA-HMI RTUs: The Fundamental Building Block for SCADA Systems Satellite M2M Gains Critical Importance in Transportation & Logistics Applications Widening Use Case in Commercial Land Transportation Spiraling Competition in the Trucking Industry Drives Focus on Telematics World Commercial Vehicle Telematics Market by Region/Country (2021 & 2023): Percentage Breakdown of Revenues for US, Canada, Japan, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Rest of World Commercial Vehicle Tracking & Monitoring Systems for Emergency Crash Response Government Intervention Bodes Well for the Market World Spending on Logistics (in US$ Trillion) for the Years 2019, 2021 & 2023 Breakdown of Annual Production of Commercial Vehicles (Trucks, Trailers & Buses) in Million Units for Years 2019, 2021 & 2023 Satellite M2M Services Gain Increased Acceptance in the Maritime Industry Satellite M2M for Shipping Fleet Optimization Satellite M2M Seeks to Widen its Role in Oil & Gas Sector Global Daily Crude Oil Demand in Million Barrels for the Years 2015 through 2020 Global Oil & Gas E&P Industry Spending (in US$ Billion) for the Years 2015 through 2021 Declining Cost & Complexity of Implementation to Drive Uptake of Satellite M2M Services Cost Benefits of Satellite M2M in End-Use Sectors Government Intervention Bodes Well for the Market New Technology Innovations & Product/Service Developments to Drive Growth Dual Mode Solutions to Help Sustain Demand Prospects for Satellite M2M Cloud Platforms to Expand Reach of Satellite M2M Development of Multi-Network M2M Platforms Spearhead Market Growth Standardization: Key for Wider Adoption of Satellite M2M Market Challenges Intense Competition from Cellular M2M Networks Security Concerns Limit Growth Opportunities High Equipment and Bandwidth Cost Restrain Growth Low Awareness about Satellite Capabilities Hampers Adoption Lack of Interoperable Equipment FOCUS ON SELECT PLAYERS(Total 45 Featured) Honeywell International, Inc. General Electric Company Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. (SingTel) Sierra Wireless, Inc. Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. Telenor ASA ORBCOMM Telit IoT Platforms, LLC Leonardo SpA SkyBitz, Inc. Applied Satellite Technology Systems Ltd. Quake Global, Inc. Telenor Satellite Prodigium Group Ltd. mu Space and Advanced Technology Co., Ltd. For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/e9fadl About ResearchAndMarkets.com ResearchAndMarkets.com is the world's leading source for international market research reports and market data. We provide you with the latest data on international and regional markets, key industries, the top companies, new products and the latest trends. Attachment Toronto, Canada, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- RTOERO will host its first Future of Aging Summit from May 15 to 17, 2024, in Toronto, Canada. The international conference will bring together experts and thinkers from various sectors, all with a common focus: improving later life. Through this summit, our goal is to continue to foster an interconnected network of people across sectors who, like us, believe in a better futuretogether and want to help create it, says Martha Foster, chair of RTOEROs Board of Directors. The three-day event features a diverse lineup of international speakers, including a film screening of Your 100-year life and Q&A with director Theo Kocken, plus keynote talks from: Ritu Sadana, head of ageing and health with the World Health Organization Tomson Highway, award-winning Cree playwright, author and musician DY Suharya, the regional director of Alzheimers Disease International for the Asia Pacific region who was recently recognized by the UN Decade of Healthy Ageing as a Healthy Ageing 50 leader Attendees have access to breakout sessions covering a range of topics, including: Redesigning communities for a highly-aged society Finding solutions through age-tech Ageism and discrimination Rethinking retirement policies The silver workforce Climate change, emergency and older adults The Future of Aging Summit is part of RTOEROs Vibrant Voices Advocacy focus. Together with partners, RTOERO advocates for critical policy improvements to address urgent needs now and create a more secure and compassionate future for everyone. As a national non-profit membership organization of workers and retirees from the education sector in Canada, our commitment to social good runs deep, says Jim Grieve, CEO of RTOERO. We see ourselves as facilitators and changemakersbecause we can all bein big and small ways. Everything is connected. The summit is designed for policymakers, researchers, engineers, designers, planners, community organizers, advocates, and anyone else focused on supporting healthy aging, ending ageism and building age-friendly societies. For more information, see the summit website: agingsummit.ca. About RTOERO RTOERO is a bilingual, trusted voice on healthy, active living in the retirement journey for the broader education community. With 84,000+ members in 51 districts across Canada, we are the largest national provider of non-profit group health benefits for education retirees. We welcome members who work in or are retired from the early years, schools and school boards, post-secondary and any other capacity in education. We believe in a better future, together! Attachment TORONTO, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lactalis Canada, the Canadian dairy leader behind iconic brands like Cracker Barrel, Black Diamond, Balderson, Astro and Lactantia and a subsidiary of France-based Lactalis Group, is pleased to announce the winners of Lactalis Canada NEXT Ventures the companys second annual internal innovation competition designed to bring new ideas to the forefront by reimagining and rethinking processes, technologies, products, and business models through future thinking, creativity and digital transformation. With the 2023 theme of Continuous Improvement, the internal crowdsourcing program saw close to 100 innovative and creative submissions from employees at all levels and areas across the organization. A range of submissions were underscored by emerging digital technologies including AI and Machine Learning to enable process enhancement and efficiency, automation, enablement of value-added tasks, service level improvement, innovative packaging and optimized collaboration. I am thrilled to congratulate the winning team, the finalists and all of the innovators who have truly epitomized the spirit of our NEXT Ventures program. The range and calibre of submissions for this years program demonstrates, yet again, the incredible talent, innovative spirt and intrapreneurship that exists within Lactalis Canada, said Mark Taylor, President and CEO, Lactalis Canada. Interestingly, digital transformation was a common theme throughout this years program and we look forward to leveraging the expertise and leadership of Lactalis Canadas digital lab, LLabs, in mentoring, driving and incubating both the winning project and other ideas on a go forward basis. Aptly named DemandSense, the winning project focuses on improved forecasting accuracy for customers through digital transformation using enhancements such as AI technology. The project team comprises of members of Lactalis Canadas Yogourt & Cultured Division Amanda dHalluin, Trade Marketing Director, Diego Avendano, Category Insights Analyst, Philippe-Olivier Provencher, Revenue Growth Manager, Rozenn Juguet, Supply Planning Manager, and Patrick Belgar, Category Information Manager. As a key component of the NEXT Ventures program, the winning project will now go into multi-year incubation with a dedicated project team, key resources, tools and internal and external expertise to build and implement this technology. Lactalis Canada NEXT Ventures First launched in April 2022, Lactalis Canada NEXT Ventures is an annual program designed to spur and accelerate future thinking, innovation, and creativity by empowering our people and leveraging internal crowdsourcing to explore ideas and bring to market new products, processes, digital technologies or business models. With a new theme every year, contributors with the most inventive and potentially viable proposals have the unique opportunity to participate in a comprehensive program to further explore and develop these new ideas from inception to implementation through the facilitation of mentorships, collaboration, resource support and external partnerships. Following an open call to all employees in April 2023, this years edition of Lactalis Canadas NEXT Ventures program saw close to 100 submissions from across the organization. In alignment with the theme of Continuous Improvement, the top 20 finalists submitted video proposals. Of these, the top three innovative ideas were selected based on the potential impact and feasibility of each proposal. The top three finalists, who were all awarded a cash prize, participated in the Lactalis Canada Next Ventures Pitch Day held in Toronto, Ontario where they presented their proposed projects to the NEXT Council panel comprised of a cross-functional team of leaders from across the organization, including Lactalis Canadas President and CEO. Each idea was carefully evaluated by the panel based on innovativeness, sustainability and viability to determine the Lactalis Canada NEXT Ventures winner. Lactalis Labs (LLabs), Lactalis Canadas new innovation hub dedicated to enabling digital transformation through technology solutions, AI, Machine Learning and data science capabilities, will support as a partner to many of the ideas coming out of the Lactalis Canada NEXT Ventures program. Since the program launched in 2022, Lactalis Canada NEXT Ventures has received more than 200 ideas from across the organization and in addition to the winning team, many other project ideas continue to be explored due to their viability and value to the business. About Lactalis Canada Inc. With 140 years of brand heritage, Lactalis Canada is committed to enriching and nurturing the lives of Canadians by producing nutritious and great tasting dairy products. Named on Forbes list of Canadas Best Employers, Lactalis Canada directly employs more than 4,000 employees, supports hundreds of farming families and contributes to the livelihoods of thousands of Canadians who provide essential services to Lactalis Canada's more than 30 operating sites including 20 manufacturing facilities. The companys iconic brands include Cracker Barrel, Black Diamond, P'tit Quebec, Balderson, Cheestrings Ficello, aMOOza!, Astro, Khaas, siggis, IOGO, IOGO nano, Olympic, Lactantia, Beatrice, Marie Morin Canada, Galbani, and President. Lactalis Canada is part of Lactalis Group, the worlds leading dairy company, headquartered in Laval, France. For more information, visit www.lactalis.ca. Media Contact: Sarah Sutton Manager, Corporate Communications, Lactalis Canada media@ca.lactalis.com VANCOUVER, B.C., Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Innovate BC and the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP) are providing a combined total of $2,014,425 in research and development funding to 13 companies in British Columbia piloting cleantech projects as part of efforts to support the development of a greener B.C. and bolster the provinces cleantech sector. We are supporting innovative technology that has the capability to create a more sustainable and green economy, said Brenda Bailey, Minister of Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation. BC Fast Pilot allows small businesses the ability to accelerate their development process, resulting in a rapid growth in our clean tech sector that benefits both our economy and our environment. The program helps small and medium sized businesses design, build, and operate a pilot plant or small demonstration of their technology while helping to solve real world problems. Examples of these solutions include mitigating the impacts of climate change, improving operational efficiencies, and increasing health and safety. By providing up to $200,000 in funding for each project, the BC Fast Pilot program enables B.C. technology companies to demonstrate the impact of their product, measure the value of their solution, and encourage customer adoption. For customers, the program offers a way to minimize some of the risk that traditional industries encounter when adopting new technologies. Our government understands that to grow a sustainable and competitive economy we need innovation and investments in clean technology, says The Honourable Francois-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry. To build a greener Canada, NRC IRAP is helping small and medium-sized businesses fully leverage the technologies they are developing and take their ideas to market. By investing in British Columbia innovators, we are investing in a thriving, sustainable, and inclusive economy for all Canadians. This is the fifth round of funding through the BC Fast Pilot program, which was launched in 2019. Since the program started in 2019, 75 pilot demonstrations have been funded a combined total of $9.9M. Notable outcomes include the creation of 117 jobs, the acquisition of 138 new customers, and an increase of $13.3M in new revenue for participating projects. The BC Fast Pilot program isn't just about driving innovation; it's about shaping the future we want to leave for generations to come, says Innovate BC Interim President + CEO, Tomica Divic. By funding these projects, we're not just backing promising businesses; we're investing in a sustainable and inclusive world for future generations. This funding prioritizes regional projects, with a focus on cleantech and projects that involve physical installations and are capital intensive in nature, and those that involve Indigenous communities or organizations. Our partnership with Innovate BC is enabling companies to demonstrate the value and reliability of their technology in real world applications, helping minimize risks and ultimately encourage customer adoption, says Iain Stewart, President, National Research Council of Canada. We are thrilled to support these innovative Canadian companies and help them bring their ideas to life. Become an Innovate BC Insider to be first to know when applications open for Innovate BC funding. Learn More Meet the Round 5 Awardees About the BC Fast Pilot program About NRC IRAP About Innovate BC A Crown Agency of British Columbia, Innovate BC works to foster innovation across the province and bolster the growth of the local economy through delivering a wide range of programs that help companies start and scale, access talent and encourage technology development, commercialization, and adoption. Innovate BC also harnesses crucial data collection and research, and works to forge strategic industry and community partnerships that create more opportunities for B.C. innovators. Attachment IRVINE, Calif., Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Jill Goodwin has been named the winner of a Silver Stevie Award in the Most Innovative Woman of the Year Healthcare category in the 20th annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business. The Stevie Awards for Women in Business honor the achievements of women executives, entrepreneurs, employees, and the companies they run worldwide. The Stevie Award has been hailed as the worlds premier business award. Nicknamed the Stevies for the Greek word for crowned, the awards were presented to winners during a gala event attended by nominees and their guests at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. The event was broadcast via Livestream. More than 1,600 entries were considered in more than 100 categories, including Executive of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year, Company of the Year, Startup of the Year, Women Helping Women, and Women Run Workplace of the Year. Jill Goodwin was honored with the Silver Stevie Award for Most Innovative Woman of the Year category in healthcare. As an entrepreneur and business owner in the health and fitness industry for over 25 years with a degree from the University of California, Irvine in social ecology with an emphasis in psychology, Jill Goodwin has decades of experience building successful cultures and award-winning teams. Goodwin is passionate about delivering an outstanding customer experience. She joined Axis Research & Technologies in 2015 and has focused on building a team that is passionate about what they do, creating new growth opportunities and helping the company expand nationwide. Jill has successfully aided with the expansion of Axis into new, ultramodern lab facilities, introducing the bioskills company to audiences in Columbia, Maryland and Chattanooga and Nashville, Tennessee, in addition to its headquarters in Irvine, CA. Through Goodwins leadership, Axis engaged, highly trained and motivated team anticipates the needs of the top healthcare brand clients that rely on Axis pre-clinical training research and technology lab facilities. Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners were determined by the average scores of more than 200 business professionals around the world, working on six juries. Maggie Miller, president of the Stevie Awards, said, In its 20th year, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business received an outstanding body of nominations from women in organizations of all types, in 26 nations. We are gratified by how meaningful it is to women to win a Stevie Award, and how impactful it can be on the futures of their careers and their organizations. We congratulate all of this years Grand, Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners for their achievements. Details about the Stevie Awards for Women in Business and the list of winners in all categories are available at www.StevieAwards.com/Women. About AXIS The premier bioskills training and cadaver lab supporting medical device research and training, Axis Research & Technologies supports professionals in healthcare innovation by providing world-class facilities, medical equipment, tissue sourcing, and audio-visual services for surgeons, medical professionals, and medical device companies for research and development, to practice surgical techniques, develop and perfect medical devices and provide education to audiences worldwide. Axis offers the most advanced global broadcasting and hi-tech A/V capabilities in Irvine, Calif., Columbia, Md., Nashville, Tenn. and Chattanooga, Tenn. About the Stevie Awards Stevie Awards are conferred in eight programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, the Middle East & North Africa Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. A ninth program, the Stevie Awards for Technology Excellence, will debut in 2024. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at http://www.StevieAwards.com. Contact: Echo Media Group julia@echomediateam.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/f0362f55-42a1-4954-b65c-620a763b169f VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, not-for-profit advocacy organization Resource Works announced that former Environment Minister and Attorney General Barry Penner will serve as chair of a new, high-profile campaign focused on energy policy in BC, the Energy Futures Initiative. Barry Penner's experience in both the government and private sector make him uniquely well-qualified to speak to British Columbians on energy policy, said Resource Works Founder and CEO Stewart Muir. Barrys leadership will bring an important and fresh perspective to the conversation on BCs long-term energy policy. Penner, who introduced British Columbias first-ever climate action strategy 15 years ago, outlined the important role that the Energy Futures Initiative would take on in the months ahead. Our province is home to an ever-increasing demand for energy and a strong desire to reduce emissions, said Penner. Energy choices today will have a major impact on British Columbians for generations. As we look to a future of increasing electrification and a growing population, its crucial to consider what steps need to be taken, including making sure our energy system is reliable, affordable and sustainable for years to come. Amid ongoing questions surrounding British Columbias ability to meet ambitious government targets, the Energy Futures Initiative will provide accurate and relevant information surrounding the state of energy in BC. Energy Futures will focus on presenting clear, factual information about the impacts that different policy options will have on our province, continued Penner. British Columbians deserve to be informed about how todays energy choices will impact affordability, system reliability and climate goals. Lets have an open discussion. The campaign will produce informational content exploring topics related to the state of energy in British Columbia, showcasing the important role that energy plays in the economy and highlighting both the opportunities and challenges that can emerge from different types of government policy. Energy plays a vital role in our province, and Resource Works is proud to stand behind this incredibly exciting initiative, said Resource Works Managing Director Margareta Dovgal. Robust planning, strong policy incentives and meaningful engagement with British Columbians will enable our energy future to securely, sustainably and affordably meet our needs for years to come, she added. Penner says the Energy Futures Initiative would also be making policy recommendations to senior levels of government, starting with the provincial governments throne speech in February 2024. Media Contact Taylor Verrall 250-508-3067 taylor@resourceworks.com Background: Barry Penner Barry Penner served as BCs Minister of Environment, Minister of Aboriginal Relations and Attorney General during his four terms as a MLA. Penner represented Chilliwack in the BC Legislature from 1996 to 2012. During this time, he also served as both President and Vice President for the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER) and chaired a number of Legislative Committees. As Minister of Environment, Penner introduced BCs first climate action plan which included North Americas first revenue-neutral carbon tax. Energy Futures Initiative The Energy Futures Initiative is a Resource Works-led project that will bring a fresh perspective to discussions surrounding the future of energy in British Columbia. Energy Futures will explore some of the greatest challenges facing British Columbias energy security, affordability and independence, answering the big questions on how we meet BCs growing energy demand while protecting our environment, not just today but for the coming decades and century ahead. Resource Works Resource Works is a public-interest advocacy and communications not-for-profit organization based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Their mission is to reignite the promise of Canada's economic future by leading respectful, inclusive and fact-based dialogue on natural resource development. Resource Works helps show how resources have worked for citizens in the past and how they can continue to do so in a new era defined by environmental responsibility and reconciliation. We communicate the importance of resource sectors to personal well-being and opportunity, demonstrating how responsible development creates jobs and incomes, both directly and indirectly, while maintaining a clean and healthy environment. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b149724a-1dc6-4de7-b19d-f803e1fc9e8b NEW YORK, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of FMC Corporation (FMC or the Company) (NYSE: FMC). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at newaction@pomlaw.com or 888-476-6529, ext. 7980. The investigation concerns whether FMC 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 September 7, 2023, Blue Orca published a short report on FMC, alleging that FMC has concealed from investors that it has suffered a recent string of stunning legal defeats around the globe that have enabled competitors to now launch competing generics at prices up to 80% below the price of FMCs flagship insecticide product and that [c]ontrary to the Companys claims, FMCs process patents to not protect its flagship product from generic competition. On this news, FMCs stock price fell $6.09 per share, or 7.41%, to close at $76.10 on September 7, 2023. Then, on October 23, 2023, FMC announced that it was again cutting its Q3 2023 outlook and guidance for revenues for Q4 and FY 2024, projecting earnings well below the expectations of analysts, citing substantially lower sales volumes in Latin America, particularly Brazil. On this news, FMCs stock price fell $8.83 per share, or 12.18%, to close at $58.12 per share on October 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 billions of dollars in damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomlaw.com . Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes. Fort Johnson, LA (71446) Today Mostly cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy this afternoon. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible late. High around 70F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph.. Tonight Scattered thunderstorms early, then mainly cloudy overnight with thunderstorms likely. A few storms may be severe. Low 54F. Winds S at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 90%. SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hagens Berman urges ChargePoint Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: CHPT) investors who suffered substantial losses to submit your losses now. Class Period: June 1, 2023 Nov. 16, 2023 Lead Plaintiff Deadline: Jan. 29, 2024 Visit: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/CHPT Contact An Attorney Now: CHPT@hbsslaw.com 844-916-0895 ChargePoint Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: CHPT) Securities Fraud Class Action: The complaint alleges that Defendants misrepresented and concealed that: (1) ChargePoint was experiencing higher component costs and supply overruns for first generation DC charging products; (2) that, as a result, the Company was likely to incur impairment charges; (3) that, as a result of the foregoing, the Companys profitability would be adversely impacted; and (4) that, as a result of the foregoing, Defendants positive statements about the Companys business, operations, and prospects were materially misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis. The truth began to emerge on Sep. 6, 2023, when ChargePoint reported its 2Q 2024 financial results, including a $28.0 million, or 19 percentage point, inventory impairment charge. The Company stated the inventory impairment charge was taken to address legacy supply chain-related costs and supply overruns on a particular DC product. As a result, the Company reported quarterly GAAP gross margin of 1%, down from 17% in the prior years same quarter. Then, on Nov. 16, 2023, ChargePoint announced preliminary Q3 2024 financial results, which would include an additional non-cash inventory impairment charge in the amount of $42 million related to product transitions and to better align inventory with current demand. As a result, the Company expected to report GAAP gross margin of negative 23% to negative 21%. The Company also reported revenue had fallen to $108 million to $113 million, as compared to $150 to $165 million as previously expected. Moreover, ChargePoint announced the abrupt departures of its CEO (Pasquale Romano) and, at the request of its board, its CFO (Rex S. Jackson). These events caused the price of ChargePoint shares to drop sharply. Were focused on investors losses and are investigating whether ChargePoint may have misrepresented product demand and omitted to disclose rising inventory costs, said Reed Kathrein, the Hagens Berman partner leading the investigation. If you invested in ChargePoint and have substantial losses, or have knowledge that may assist the firms investigation, submit your losses now If youd like more information and answers to frequently asked questions about the ChargePoint case and our investigation, read more Whistleblowers: Persons with non-public information regarding ChargePoint 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 CHPT@hbsslaw.com. About Hagens Berman Hagens 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. Attorney advertising. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes. Services may be performed by attorneys in any of our offices. WASHINGTON and DELHI, India, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Indiaspora, a leading nonprofit organization dedicated to uniting the Indian diaspora for a stronger, more interconnected global community, is hosting the Climate Action Forum at COP 28 on December 7th from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM at the Anantara Downtown Dubai Hotel, Business Bay, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). Climate is the existential issue of our times. The Indian diaspora contains reputed experts contributing to solutions in various areas of environmental sustainability and climate change. Moreover, as evidenced during the recently concluded G20 Summit, India is playing an instrumental role in developing solutions in this realm. As part of Indiasporas mission to inspire and position the global Indian diaspora as a force for good, and to build bridges among diaspora leaders and prominent leading lights resident in India, Indiaspora is privileged to serve as a platform to bring diverse and constructive voices together during COP 28. Indiaspora will host its daylong Climate Action Forum featuring 28 speakers from 5 countries under the theme of Empower, Educate, Inspire, Act. Distinguished speakers from various sectors, including government, industry, and civil society, will participate in engaging panel discussions on topics such as sustainable technology, green finance, renewable energy, and the role of diaspora in climate advocacy. Key speakers include Dominic Waughray (World Business Council for Sustainable Development), Madhav Pai (WRI-India), BK Sister Jayanti (Faith Leader) and Vivek Oberoi (Indian Film Actor). Our partners in this endeavor are Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), Dasra, India Climate Collaborative, Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN). The agenda will be live on December 6th here. Indiaspora invites members of the media to attend this forum. Please complete the pre-registration here. MR Rangaswami, Founder and Chairman of the Board of Indiaspora, said, This Climate Forum represents another step in Indiasporas objective of being a convener for the Indian diaspora and leaders in India on some of the most pressing global issues. From our earlier work on climate, it is evident to us that these key stakeholders play an important role in advancing a globally beneficial environmental agenda. Sreekumar Nair, CEO of Indiaspora-India, added that Indiasporas Climate Forum builds upon our work over the past 3 years in organizing virtual global Climate Summits. Given the caliber of expertise on stage at our Forum, it promises to be an insightful and impactful dialogue. We are excited to hear from an eclectic group of speakers including policymakers, entrepreneurs, business leaders, academics and nonprofit executives. About Indiaspora: Indiaspora (www.indiaspora.org) is a nonprofit community of powerful global Indian leaders from diverse backgrounds and professions who are committed to inspiring the diaspora to be a force for positive impact by providing a platform to collaborate, engage, and catalyze social change. Media Contacts: USA (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) Mira Bhayroo Senior Coordinator, Marketing & Communications mira@indiaspora.org +1 (267) 608-9513 India (New Delhi) Shrenya Malik Manager of Events and Research, India Branch shrenya@indiaspora.org +91 88001 06529 CHALK RIVER, Ontario, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), Canadas premier nuclear science and technology organization, is pleased to announce that over 250 CNL employees were recognized for exceptional organizational accomplishments at the companys 2023 Awards of Excellence ceremony, which was held last week at Germania Hall in Pembroke. An annual program that recognizes employee excellence, the CNL Awards of Excellence were established to celebrate the outstanding achievements of individuals and teams whose hard work, determination and accomplishments helped CNL deliver its science and technology programs and major projects. As Canadas national nuclear laboratory, CNL provides nuclear science and technology products and services to federal and commercial customers, works to safely address Canadas nuclear liabilities, and is managing the revitalization of the Chalk River Laboratories campus. This years winners were recognized for accomplishments that include the development of new technical capabilities, key accomplishments in decommissioning and environmental remediation, improvements in organization health and safety, significant progress in Indigenous and public engagement, and the completion of important commercial projects, among others. The 2023 CNL Awards of Excellence winners come from various departments and sites all across the company, and the work that they do is diverse, requires unique strengths, and spans different work environments, commented Joe McBrearty, CNLs President and CEO. But together, these teams helped make CNL a safer place to work, brought commercial success and opportunity to the company, advanced pioneering new technologies and capabilities, and helped grow CNLs reputation here in Canada and abroad. D.F. Torgerson Discovery Award CNLs Awards of Excellence are organized into two categories. The first, known as the D.F. Torgerson Discovery Award, is named after CNLs former Executive Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Dave Torgerson, and recognizes employees for the generation of new or innovative ideas and solutions, significant research or technical achievements, and new business initiatives. This years awards were presented to 44 employees from six groups for accomplishments that include: The digital transformation of CNLs Decommissioning and Environmental Remediation organization. Research to enable the high-accuracy measurement of electrical resistivity, establishing a new capability at CNL. The development of 3D printing capabilities using uranium dioxide. The successful lab-scale demonstration of a unique process for clean hydrogen production. The development and execution of a novel strategy to safely remove radioactive tanks and components as part of an important decommissioning project. The completion of unique testing of irradiated fuel cladding, supporting the future growth of CNLs business in an exciting new area. Distinguished Merit Award The Distinguished Merit Award is given to employees who have made exceptional contributions in productivity improvements, achievements of increased revenue, decreased operating costs, safety innovation or environmental initiatives, development or strengthening of new or existing partnerships, and the exploitation of these results. This years awards were presented to 215 employees from 23 groups for accomplishments that include: Work to surrender the leases of various buildings and trailers, enabling a sustained cost savings for the company. The adoption of new software to create a more advanced and innovative approach to radiation protection management. The acquisition of Radium-226, material which supports the production of an exciting new medical isotope at CNL, Actinium-225. Irradiated material testing on behalf of an important commercial customer. Dosimetry research to better measure dose to the eye lens. The implementation of a new learning management system at CNL. Engagement activities related to the signing of a long-term relationship agreement with a First Nations community. Work on the post-irradiation examination of light water reactor fuel. The development and deployment of a new chemistry corrosion monitoring service. The development and implementation of a new human performance training initiative. Work as the Mission Lead of the Environmental Remediation Management (ERM) Program Management Office. Leadership in nuclear education and outreach. The development and hosting of cyber security incident response exercises. Work to obtain an important agreement with a radiopharmaceutical supplier. The delivery of key commitments related to the construction of new buildings at the Chalk River Laboratories campus. Work on criteria changes for the Port Hope Area Initiative Community Report. Chemical decontamination work for a commercial customer. The development of expertise in multiscale materials modelling. The completion of irradiated pressure tube burst tests for a commercial customer. Organization of the Hydrogen Safety Workshop and the launch of the Canadian Hydrogen Safety Centre. The design and operation of a tile hole drying system. Work conducted as part of the Safety Excellence Team. The safe removal of an active storage tank as part of the decommissioning of a key facility. On behalf of everyone at CNL, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, the Government of Canada and our many customers here in Canada and around the world, I want to extend my thanks and congratulations to the 2023 CNL Awards of Excellence recipients, who represent the very best of CNL, and who have shown what we are capable of as an organization, added Mr. McBrearty. For a full list of the 2023 CNL Awards of Excellence winners, including profiles and videos on the award-winning teams, please visit www.cnl.ca/awards. To learn more about CNL, please visit www.cnl.ca. About CNL As Canadas premier nuclear science and technology laboratory, and working under the direction of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), CNL is a world leader in the development of innovative nuclear science and technology products and services. Guided by an ambitious corporate strategy known as Vision 2030, CNL fulfills three strategic priorities of national importance restoring and protecting the environment, advancing clean energy technologies, and contributing to the health of Canadians. By leveraging the assets owned by AECL, CNL also serves as the nexus between government, the nuclear industry, the broader private sector and the academic community. CNL works in collaboration with these sectors to advance innovative Canadian products and services towards real-world use, including carbon-free energy, cancer treatments and other therapies, non-proliferation technologies and waste management solutions. To learn more about CNL, please visit www.cnl.ca. CNL Contact: Philip Kompass Director, Corporate Communications 1-866-886-2325 media@cnl.ca Photos accompanying this announcement are available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/d5bedba3-9731-434a-bf08-02292e55394b https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/8babc91c-bf35-416e-a643-f04275e7a285 https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/8babc91c-bf35-416e-a643-f04275e7a285 DENSO and Mitsubishi Electric each invested $500 million for a 12.5% non-controlling interest in the silicon carbide semiconductor business Coherent entered into arms-length long-term supply agreements with DENSO and Mitsubishi Electric to support their 150 mm and 200 mm substrate and epitaxial wafer demand The silicon carbide semiconductor business will fund future capital and operating expenses required for the continued growth of the business PITTSBURGH, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Coherent Corp. (NYSE: COHR), a global leader in materials, networking, and lasers, today announced that it has closed the $1 billion aggregate investment by DENSO CORPORATION and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in Coherents silicon carbide semiconductor business (the Business). Under the terms of the transaction announced on October 10, 2023, DENSO and Mitsubishi Electric each invested $500 million in exchange for a 12.5% non-controlling ownership interest in the Business, with Coherent owning the remaining 75%. Coherent has separated and contributed the Business to a new subsidiary that will operate the Business. Going forward, all operating and capital expenses of the Business will be funded by the Business. Coherent will control and operate the Business, which will continue to be led by Sohail Khan, Executive Vice President, Wide-Bandgap Electronics. In connection with the transaction, the Business has entered into arms-length long-term supply arrangements with DENSO and Mitsubishi Electric that support their demand for 150 mm and 200 mm silicon carbide (SiC) substrates and epitaxial wafers. As I mentioned in October, we are excited to expand our strategic relationships with DENSO and Mitsubishi Electric to capitalize on the significant demand for silicon carbide, said Dr. Vincent D. Mattera, Jr., Chair and CEO, Coherent. I believe that such a close relationship with two leaders in SiC power devices and modules is the best path forward to maximize shareholder value and position the Business for long-term growth. The investments from our strategic partners will be used to accelerate our capacity expansion plans and help sustain our leadership position, while ensuring the development of a robust and scalable supply for the rapidly growing market for SiC-based power electronics, largely driven by the explosive growth of the global electric vehicle market. Through this strategic relationship with Coherent, we will secure a stable procurement of SiC wafers, which are critical for battery electric vehicles, and contribute to the realization of a carbon-neutral society by promoting the widespread adoption of BEVs in all regions around the world, said Shinnosuke Hayashi, President & COO, Representative Member of the Board at DENSO. Dr. Masayoshi Takemi, Executive Officer, Group President, Semiconductor & Device for Mitsubishi Electric, said, We are pleased that this investment has been successfully completed. Going forward, we will further strengthen our collaboration with Coherent, leveraging their capabilities in development and manufacturing of SiC substrates, to achieve solid growth of our SiC power device business and contribute to a more sustainable world through decarbonization. When incorporated into electric vehicles and industrial infrastructure, SiC-based power electronics have demonstrated the potential to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and accelerate the transition to a cleaner and more energy-efficient world. Strategic Rationale Market estimates indicate that the SiC total addressable market will grow from $3 billion in 2022 to $21 billion in 2030, representing a 28% compound annual growth rate. The transaction builds on Coherents more than two decades of demonstrated leadership in SiC materials. In recent years, the Company has aggressively invested to scale its manufacturing of 150 mm and 200 mm substrates to address this underserved market. Over the past two years, Coherent has invested aggressively in capital and R&D for SiC. The closing of this $1 billion combined investment into the Business will accelerate the Companys capital plans in the coming years. Specifically, the investment will fund the manufacturing expansion of the Business and, in combination with the concurrent supply agreements, enhance its position in the market. The transaction enables Coherent to increase its available free cash flow to provide greater financial and operational flexibility to execute its capital allocation priorities, as it expects the aggregate $1 billion investment will be used to fund future capital expenditure requirements of the Business. Additional Transaction Details BofA Securities and Allen & Company LLC served as financial advisors to Coherent, and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, Covington & Burling, and Sherrard, German & Kelly served as legal advisors to Coherent. About Coherent Coherent empowers market innovators to define the future through breakthrough technologies, from materials to systems. We deliver innovations that resonate with our customers in diversified applications for the industrial, communications, electronics, and instrumentation markets. Headquartered in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, Coherent has research and development, manufacturing, sales, service, and distribution facilities worldwide. For more information, please visit us at coherent.com. Forward-Looking Statements This communication contains forward-looking statements relating to future events and expectations that are based on certain assumptions and contingencies. The forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements in this communication involve risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results, performance, or trends to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements herein or in previous disclosures. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements herein include, but are not limited to: (i) the failure of any one or more of the assumptions stated above to prove to be correct; (ii) litigation and any unexpected costs, charges, or expenses resulting from the separation of the Business or investments by DENSO and Mitsubishi Electric; (iii) the risk that disruption from the separation of the Business or investments by DENSO and Mitsubishi Electric materially and adversely affects the respective businesses and operations of Coherent or its subsidiaries; (iv) Coherents and its subsidiaries ability to devise and execute strategies to respond to market conditions; (v) the risks to anticipated growth in industries and sectors in which Coherent and the Business operate; and (vi) the risks to realizing the benefits of investments in the Business, including R&D and commercialization of innovations. Coherent disclaims any obligation to update information contained in these forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or developments, or otherwise. No Offer or Solicitation This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any jurisdiction in which the offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. Contact Paul Silverstein Vice President, Investor Relations & Corporate Communications investor.relations@coherent.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/c169903e-ab9b-46cb-97dd-63fb80f368dc SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hagens Berman urges National Instruments Corporation (NATI) investors who sold NATI shares before Jan. 17, 2023 below the acquisition price to submit your losses now. Class: Investors who sold NATI from May 25, 2022 Jan. 17, 2023 Lead Plaintiff Deadline: Jan. 29, 2024 Visit: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/NATI Contact An Attorney Now: NATI@hbsslaw.com 844-916-0895 National Instruments Corporation (NATI) Securities Fraud Class Action: Were focused on investors losses and are investigating whether NATI may have intentionally misled investors about the Emerson offers, said Reed Kathrein, the Hagens Berman partner leading the investigation. The complaint alleges that NATI: (1) deceived the investing public about its prospects; (2) artificially inflated the market price of NATI common stock; and (3) caused investors to sell shares of NATI at artificially deflated prices. On Jan. 13, 2023, NATI announced that it initiated a review and evaluation of strategic options to maximize shareholder value, adopted a poison pill, and disclaimed that this process would result in a specific transaction. Notably, NATI did not reveal that it already had a significant offer in hand from Emerson Electric to acquire all outstanding NATI shares at a premium purchase price. Investors learned the truth on Jan. 17, 2023, when Emerson announced an eight-month timeline of previous acquisition communications to NATI. Emerson revealed that it had offered $48/share on May 25, 2023, that it subsequently increased the offer to $53/share on Nov. 3, 2022, and that it reiterated the increased offer on Jan. 11, 2023. Emerson also revealed how, in response to its offer, NATI had increased its financial guidance despite its continued margin expansion and other challenges. This news drove the price of NATI shares skyrocketing up to as much as $54.69/share on Jan. 17, 2023. Then, on April 12, 2023, Emerson announced that it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire NATI for $60/share in cash at an equity value of $8.2 billion, representing a premium of nearly 50% over NATIs closing price on Jan. 12, 2023. The deal closed on Oct. 11, 2023. If you invested in NATI and sold your shares before Jan. 17, 2023 or have knowledge that may assist the firms investigation, submit your losses now If youd like more information and answers to frequently asked questions about the NATI case and our investigation, read more Whistleblowers: Persons with non-public information regarding NATI 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 NATI@hbsslaw.com. About Hagens Berman Hagens 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. Attorney advertising. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes. Services may be performed by attorneys in any of our offices. 2.10% Li 2 O over 4m from the new MK3 Pegmatite Trading Symbol: TSXV: NAR VANCOUVER, Dec. 4, 2023 - North Arrow Minerals Inc. (TSXV: NAR) ("North Arrow") is pleased to report lithium assay results from fall 2023 exploration work at its 100% owned MacKay and LDG Lithium Projects in the Northwest Territories. The two properties are located 10km apart, along the alignment of the annual winter road connecting Yellowknife with the Diavik diamond mine, approximately 13km to the north of LDG. Highlights of these assay results include: At the MacKay Project, 14 of 17 samples collected from the newly discovered MK3 pegmatite have returned over 1% Li 2 O, including 5 representative grab samples returning 5.25%, 4.08%, 2.71%, 1.92% and 1.10% Li 2 O. O, including 5 representative grab samples returning 5.25%, 4.08%, 2.71%, 1.92% and 1.10% Li O. A composite rock sawn channel sample from MK3 returned 2.10% Li 2 O over 4 metres. O over 4 metres. Two additional composite 4 metre channel samples from MK3 have returned 1.49% Li 2 O and 1.43% Li 2 O. O and 1.43% Li O. Three representative grab samples from the previously unsampled northeastern extent of the MK1 spodumene pegmatite returned 3.21% Li 2 O, 2.62% Li 2 O and 0.11% Li 2 O. O, 2.62% Li O and 0.11% Li O. Representative samples from the northern extent of the LDG Project's SD2 spodumene pegmatite have returned 3.19% Li 2 O, 1.53% Li 2 O and 1.46% Li 2 O, extending confirmed spodumene mineralization 260m to the north. O, 1.53% Li O and 1.46% Li O, extending confirmed spodumene mineralization 260m to the north. A prospecting sample has returned 5.57% Li 2 O at the southern end of a newly mapped 200m long subcropping spodumene pegmatite approximately 120m west of the main SD2 pegmatite showing. Ken Armstrong, President and CEO of North Arrow commented, "The initial lithium assays from the MK3 spodumene pegmatite at North Arrow's MacKay Project are highly encouraging and confirm MK3 as a new drill target. Additionally, the confirmation of significant lithium grades in the SD2 area of the LDG Project provides confidence the area hosts multiple, subparallel spodumene pegmatites. Collectively, these results help advance our thesis that the LDG and MacKay Projects could host spodumene pegmatites of similar size and grade to the deposits currently being drilled by other workers in the Yellowknife Pegmatite Province (YPP). With the MacKay and LDG Projects, and the DeStaffany Project in the YPP, North Arrow now holds a 100% interest in three Northwest Territories lithium projects where, during 2023, we have defined multiple drill ready spodumene pegmatites. We are working towards seeing all three properties drilled in 2024." 2.10% Li2O over 4m from the new MK3 Pegmatite at MacKay Project, NWT MacKay Lithium Project The MK3 spodumene pegmatite was discovered this fall (please see North Arrow news release dated October 12, 2023), and is a prominent 15 to 20m wide, white pegmatite exposure with common 2-30 cm long spodumene crystals. MK3 has been traced near continuously for approximately 130m and remains open along strike to the west. Five representative grab samples, collected from various locations along the showing have returned 5.25%, 4.08%, 2.71%, 1.92% and 1.10% Li 2 O. Three follow-up channel samples, each four metres in length, have returned 2.10% Li 2 O, 1.49% Li 2 O and 1.43% Li 2 O, providing a good representative indication of lithium mineralization within the pegmatite. It's important to note the channels were cut from outcrop areas amenable to sampling with a rock saw and did not test the entire exposed width of the pegmatite. An image showing the locations of the channel and grab samples at MK3 can be found here and below. Follow up sampling of the MK1 pegmatite, discovered earlier this summer approximately 4.5 km to the east of MK3, focused on the eastern extent of the showing, where three representative grab samples returned 3.21% Li 2 O, 2.62% Li 2 O and 0.11% Li 2 O. These results build on earlier sampling, from which 10 of 12 rock samples returned over 1.1% Li 2 O (please see North Arrow news releases dated September 20, 2023 and August 14, 2023 for details) and extend confirmed spodumene mineralization at MK1 to a total strike length of 450m. An image compiling significant assay results from MK1 can be found here and below. The MacKay project area has also been expanded to 8,661ha with the staking of additional mineral claims and hosts additional evolved pegmatite occurrences that require follow up evaluation in 2024. LDG Lithium Project New assays from the SD2 target area on the LDG property extend confirmed spodumene mineralization 260m northwards with three representative grab samples returning 3.19% Li 2 O, 1.53% Li 2 O and 1.46% Li 2 O. In addition, a separate, subcropping pegmatite has returned 5.57% Li 2 O. This sample was collected at the southern end of a 200m long, subcropping spodumene pegmatite running sub parallel to and approximately 120m west of the main SD2 pegmatite showing. Outcrop exposures at both the SD2 and SD4 areas, where July sampling returned assays of up to 1.7% Li 2 O and 2.1% Li 2 O, respectively (please see North Arrow news release dated September 18, 2023 for details), are generally of low profile and limited by extensive glacial overburden. However, ongoing interpretation of field mapping data and detailed orthophoto and geophysical information indicate these pegmatites may extend beneath overburden along their interpreted strike. The discovery of several subcropping pegmatites in the SD2 area, adjacent to the main pegmatite showing, support the concept that multiple subparallel pegmatites occur in these target areas with the same size potential as seen at the spodumene pegmatite occurrences in the Yellowknife Pegmatite Province. An image compiling significant assay results from SD2 can be found here and below. Sample Collection, Laboratory Procedures and QA/QC Samples were collected in the field from rock sawn channels or as representative grab samples using a rock hammer. Channel samples were cut using a portable rock saw, with sampled material collected at 1m intervals, chipped from between parallel incisions cut nominally 3-4cm apart and 3-4cm deep. Individual channel and grab samples were collected into plastic polymer bags, sealed and transported to ALS Global, where sample preparation and analytical work was conducted. Samples were prepared using ALS method CRU-31 (crushing to 70% passing through a 2mm screen), SPL-21 (split sample - riffle split), and PUL-31 (pulverize up to 250g to 85% passing through a 75-micron screen). A 0.2g subsample of the pulverized material was analyzed for 52 elements using a sodium peroxide fusion by ICP-MS (ALS method ME-MS89L). Samples returning >500ppm Li were also assayed using a 0.2g subsample dissolved in a sodium peroxide solution and analyzed for lithium according to ALS method Li-ICP81. Lithium results are reported by the lab as % Li and have been multiplied by 2.153 to convert to % Li 2 O. Results passed QA/QC screening at ALS and North Arrow's inserted certified reference materials returned results within acceptable limits. About North Arrow Minerals North Arrow is a Canadian based exploration company focused on the identification and evaluation of lithium and other exploration opportunities in Canada. North Arrow's management, board of directors and advisors have significant successful experience in the global exploration and mining industry. North Arrow is evaluating spodumene pegmatites at its 100% owned LDG, MacKay, and DeStaffany Lithium Projects (NWT) and is also exploring for lithium in Nunavut at the Bathurst Inlet pegmatite field and continues work to identify additional lithium exploration opportunities in northern Canada. North Arrow also owns interests in the Naujaat (NU), Pikoo (SK), and Loki (NWT) Diamond Projects and maintains a 100% interest in the Hope Bay Oro Gold Project, located approximately 3 km north of Agnico Eagle's Doris Gold Mine, Nunavut. North Arrow's exploration programs are conducted under the direction of Kenneth Armstrong, P.Geo. (NWT/NU, ON), President and CEO of North Arrow and a Qualified Person under NI 43-101. Mr. Armstrong has reviewed and approved the technical contents of this press release. North Arrow Minerals Inc. /s/ "Kenneth A. Armstrong" Kenneth Armstrong President and CEO Website: www.northarrowminerals.com Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release contains "forward-looking statements" including but not limited to statements with respect to North Arrow's plans, the estimation of a mineral resource and the success of exploration activities. Forward-looking statements, while based on management's best estimates and assumptions, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, including but not limited to: risks related to the successful integration of acquisitions; risks related to general economic and market conditions; closing of financing; the timing and content of upcoming work programs; actual results of proposed exploration activities; possible variations in mineral resources or grade; failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; accidents, labour disputes, title disputes, claims and limitations on insurance coverage and other risks of the mining industry; changes in national and local government regulation of mining operations, tax rules and regulations. Although North Arrow has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. North Arrow undertakes no obligation or responsibility to update forward-looking statements, except as required by law. SOURCE North Arrow Minerals Inc. TSX: DIAM SASKATOON, Dec. 4, 2023 - Star Diamond Corp. (TSX: DIAM) ("Star Diamond" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that, subsequent to the recently announced transaction with Rio Tinto Exploration Canada Inc. ("RTEC") whereby Star Diamond has agreed to acquire all of RTEC's interest in the Fort a la Corne Joint Venture, Star Diamond's technical team is once again now focussed on the technical investigation and evaluation of the Star - Orion South Diamond Project, with the aim of a future development decision. The initial work aims to prepare a revised Mineral Resource estimate for the Star - Orion South Diamond Project, which will form the foundation of an updated Pre-Feasibility ("PFS") study. The PFS study will enable a Feasibility Study, on which a production decision can be based. Highlights The revised Mineral Resource estimate for the Star and Orion South kimberlites will integrate Star trench cutter diamond data, adding improvement to the diamond size frequency curves for both kimberlites. The mitigation of risk in the Orion South diamond price estimate: the 2018 Preliminary Economic Assessment ("PEA") demonstrated that it is economically efficient to mine the Orion South kimberlite first. However, Orion South has a significantly smaller evaluation diamond parcel than Star, adding some risk to the diamond price estimate for Orion South. We believe there is opportunity to mitigate the risk in the Orion South diamond price estimate, without the necessity of additional bulk sampling to obtain a larger diamond evaluation parcel. The scoping of an updated PFS is scheduled to commence early in Q1 2024. These developments will likely give rise to the ability to complete the updated PFS within a two-year time frame and the Feasibility Study shortly thereafter. We anticipate these major studies will be completed at a substantially lower expenditure level than was previously contemplated. Revised Mineral Resource Estimate The aim of the revised mineral resource estimate is to integrate all of the drilling and diamond results recently generated by the Fort a la Corne Joint Venture, with archival data used to build the geological model, which forms the basis of the mineral resource estimate. Importantly, the diamond parcels recovered from the ten Trench Cutter ("TC") holes drilled on the Star kimberlite were recovered in an efficient, modern Bulk Sampling Plant ("BSP") that ensures excellent diamond liberation and recovery. The BSP includes High Pressure Grinding Rolls that ensure liberation of the small diamonds (1-6 millimetre) locked in kimberlite, that are subsequently recovered by an efficient Dense Media Separator that operates in the same narrow 1 to 6 millimetre size range. The small diamonds (+1, +3 and +5 DTC) from the Early Joli Fou ("EJF") kimberlite unit of both Star and Orion South include significant proportions of D coloured octahedral diamonds, which have significant value (US$30 -US$50 per carat), which is unusually high for these small diamonds. The integration of the TC diamond data in the evaluation parcel aims to strengthen the diamond grade and price used in the Mineral Resource estimate. The aim of this work is to prepare a rigorously constrained Mineral Resource estimate by the end of Q2 2024. This revised Mineral Resource estimate will provide an improved foundation for the revised PFS. Orion South Diamond Price Orion South has shallower overburden (Orion South 100 metres, Star 140 metres) and higher diamond grade (Orion South 17 cpht, Star 10 cpht) kimberlite in direct contact with overburden, both of which ensure more rapid access to cash flow after overburden removal in a future mine. Consequently, the PEA demonstrated that it is economically efficient to mine Orion South first. However, there is a significant difference in the size of the evaluation diamond parcels recovered from the EJF, the principal economic unit in both Star and Orion South. The Orion South evaluation parcel includes only 1,399 carats, as opposed to the Star EJF parcel of 7,122 carats. In order to commence mining on Orion South, the risk associated with the estimation of diamond price on a smaller evaluation parcel needs to be mitigated. We believe that the close similarities of the kimberlite geology and diamond parcel characteristics for Star and Orion South can enable better estimation of the Orion South diamond price. We have developed a plan to conduct an in-depth investigation of the extent of similarities between the Star and Orion South EJF diamond populations, with the aim of mitigating the risk in the estimation of the diamond price for the Orion South EJF diamond parcel. The goal of this investigation is to accurately estimate the Orion South diamond price without the requirement of additional bulk sampling, which is both expensive and time consuming. The confidence generated in the Orion South diamond price will add to the precision of the mineral resource estimate. Updated PFS The scoping of an updated PFS is scheduled to commence early in 2024 with the initial work focussed on updating the hydrogeology and geotechnical models, in addition to the management of fines in plant process water. Changes in environmental legislation, since the PEA, require that deep groundwater pumped from the Mannville sediments to stabilize the open pits of a future mine will require a revised method of disposal. Geotechnical work will focus on the engineering of pit slopes, particularly in parts of the overburden, to ensure steeper pit slopes and, consequently, a significant reduction in overburden removal. The processing of some Orion South kimberlite results in plant process water from which the fines do not settle quickly or easily. Investigations will be made into the mechanical separation of the fines and the future of a fines management area, as this will minimize the use of "tailings ponds". Significant parts of the work completed for the 2018 PEA, including the mining method, process plant design, site layout and infrastructure, can be updated and incorporated into the updated PFS. Senior VP Corporate Development Star Diamond, George Read, states: "The revised mineral resource estimate will potentially provide an improved foundation on which a well constrained updated PFS can be built. It is estimated that some $3 million in flow-through funding is required for 2024 to cover the revised resource estimate, the technical team expenses, scoping of the PFS, overall site management and environmental compliance. An additional financing of at least $3 to $5 million is required to cover the costs of the updated engineering work required by the PFS in the latter part of 2024 and early 2025." RTEC Transaction Star Diamond and RTEC have entered into an agreement dated November 28, 2023 (the "Agreement") which provides, subject to the terms and conditions set forth therein, for Star Diamond's acquisition of RTEC's interest in the Fort a la Corne Joint Venture. Completion of the transactions contemplated by the Agreement is subject to various closing conditions including receipt of all required Governmental approvals and the approval of the Toronto Stock Exchange for the issuance of additional common shares of Star Diamond to RTEC. All technical information in this press release has been prepared under the supervision of George Read, Senior Technical Advisor to Star Diamond, a registered Professional Geoscientist in the Provinces of Saskatchewan and British Columbia and Mark Shimell, Project Manager, a registered Professional Geoscientist in the Province of Saskatchewan and Alberta, who are the Corporation's "Qualified Persons" under the definition of NI 43-101. About Star Diamond Corporation Star Diamond is a Canadian-based corporation engaged in the acquisition, exploration and development of mineral properties. Shares of Star Diamond trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the trading symbol "DIAM". Star Diamond's most significant asset is its interest in the Fort a la Corne property in central Saskatchewan. These kimberlites are located in close proximity to established infrastructure, including paved highways and the electrical power grid, which provide significant advantages for future mine development. For further information, please contact: Phone: (306) 664-2202 Email: stardiamondcorp@stardiamondcorp.com Website www.stardiamondcorp.com Stay Connected with Us: Twitter: https://twitter.com/StarDiamondCorp LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/star-diamond-corp Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Star-Diamond-Corp/100058096376664/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stardiamondcorp/ Caution Regarding Forward-looking Statements This press release contains "forward-looking statements" and/or "forward-looking information" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements. The use of any of the words "anticipate", "plan", "aim", "target", "contemplate", "continue", "estimate", "expect", "intend", "propose", "might", "may", "will", "shall", "project", "should", "could", "would", "believe", "predict", "forecast", "pursue", "potential", "possible", "capable" and similar expressions are intended to identify "forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in this press release include, but are not limited to, expectations regarding the completion of the transactions that are the subject of the Agreement and the Project's potential to be a significant contributor to both the local communities and the broader Saskatchewan economy. These forward-looking statements are based on Star Diamond's current beliefs as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to it and involve inherent risks and uncertainties, both general and specific. Risks exist that forward-looking statements will not be achieved due to a number of factors including, but not limited to, the impact of changes in the laws and regulations regulating mining exploration, development, closure, judicial or regulatory judgments and legal proceedings and the additional risks described in Star Diamond's most recently filed Annual Information Form, annual and interim MD&A. Although management of Star Diamond considers the assumptions contained in forward-looking statements to be reasonable based on information currently available to Star Diamond, those assumptions may prove to be incorrect. When making decisions with respect to Star Diamond, investors and others should not place undue reliance on these statements and should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. Star Diamond does not undertake any obligation to release publicly revisions to any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this release, or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as may be required under applicable securities laws. Investors should not assume that any lack of update to a previously issued forward-looking statement constitutes a reaffirmation of that statement. Continued reliance on forward-looking statements is at investors' own risk. SOURCE Star Diamond Corp. by Rafael Newman When I was eleven years old, Eva Kornpointner, my mothers motherour Grossmutti, as we were taught to call hertook me, together with all five of her other grandchildren, on a trip up the Rhine. Our ultimate, trans-Rhenish objective, after we had crossed the Swiss border at Basel, was Zurich and its hinterland, where Grossmutti had been born in 1906 into a family of German immigrants to Switzerland; along the way we visited other sites of personal importance to her in Germany, such as Munich, where she briefly attended university in the 1930s and where our grandfather had been born, and Coburg, in Upper Franconia, where her ancestors, according to family legend, had helped to build the famous castle. We were confounded by the enormous, filthy Cologne Cathedral, admired the more congenial Mainzer Dom, and goggled at the devils footprint in the Munchner Frauenkirche, the legendary vestige of a metaphysical architectural dispute. (Churches figured prominently on Grossmuttis itinerary: surprising, given her lifelong commitment to atheism and progressive politics, but inextricable from German history.) In Switzerland, Grossmutti took us on a tour of the city of Bern, where we played chess with life-sized pieces on an outdoor board in the Rosengarten, Napoleons vantage point upon briefly occupying Switzerland, and sniffed wonderingly at what seemed to be chocolate-scented vapors emanating from manhole covers in the Altstadt. When we did finally arrive in Zurich we were treated to homemade plum tart by Fee Meyer, our mothers cousin and one of our last remaining local relatives. Fee also escorted us on a hike up the Uetliberg and a visit to the neighboring town of Rapperswil, the home of her aging mother, our great-aunt Kathe, Grossmuttis eldest sister. Tante Kathe (whom her wizened aspect and lack of English, together with whispered family legend, had conspired to give a forbidding aura) had spent the war years in Germany, having returned to the familys homeland in the 1930s along with one of her brothers; this latter had then stayed on, in what was to become East Germany, while Kathe and her daughter Fee made their way back to Switzerland in the late 1940s. Now, it may have been a function of this German heritage of Grossmuttis, and the fact that her own personal, historical experience of Switzerland (born in Baden, in the canton of Argovia, and raised near Winterthur, with family in Schwerzenbach, outside of Zurich) was exclusively of the Alemannic or Germanophone cantons of her adopted countrybut it was not until long afterwards that I realized there even was another linguistic region of Switzerland. For indeed there is, a collection of Francophone cantons known collectively as la Romandie or das Welschland, each sobriquet in its own way a memento of the SPQR and home to just under a quarter of the Swiss population. (Never mind the two other Latinate cantons, Italophone Ticino and the Romansh-speaking parts of the Grisons, which came even later to my consciousness.) I did already know, in 1975, that there was a French-speaking city called Geneva, because one of my parents friends had left her husband in Vancouver to go and work there as an interpreter; and I was vaguely aware that the city had something to do with Switzerland. But I was uncomfortable thinking about the name, and even more so pronouncing it, inhibited in part by its gloomy personal associations with divorce and familial separation as well as, it occurs to me in retrospect, the fact that it was a near anagram for the word vagina, and thus taboo to the prepubescent mind. Nor could this lacuna in my political geography be accounted for by latent Francophobia, since our trip that summer had in fact begun in Paris, where my cousins, fluent French-speakers, lived with their parents, who were attached to the Canadian embassy there; and the whole family cultivated a worship of the French capital worthy of the Lost Generation. No, my obliviousness to the presence of a second important national language in Switzerland was in a sense symptomatic of the same malaise from which the country as a whole suffers, and which should have been familiar to me already as an Anglophone Canadian: the tendency of speakers of a majority language to overlook, downgrade, dismiss, or discount minority language speakers, and to behave as if their own language, because that of the majority, were in fact the sole natural national tongue. And in return to be resented and, albeit more deliberately, ignored by members of the linguistic minority. In English-speaking Canada this phenomenon has been referred to as two solitudes, after the eponymous 1945 novel by the Maritime writer Hugh MacLennan. In Germanophone Switzerland, meanwhile, the (linguistic, political, cultural) gulf separating Romands from Dutschschwyzer is popularly known as the Roschtigraben, or Roschti (a grated and fried potato pancake) trench, after a dish eaten traditionally in rural German-speaking areas of Switzerland. The Hashbrown Divide. In political terms, the divide between the two main linguistic regions of Switzerland is often manifested in a pronounced polarity in voting patterns, for instance when national referenda tend to return a majority right-wing result from the German side, and a majority left-wing result from the French side (although this difference is currently ceding, in the country as a whole, to a generalized divide between rural and urban regions, regardless of their linguistic makeup). More practically, and more familiarly to me from my youth in Canada, there is an institutionalized difficulty teaching each linguistic group the others language, with the German side favoring early English instruction in public schools over French, and the French side (understandably) divided over whether to teach their children high or written German, or to begin early on with the dialect version actually spoken on the other side of the country. (But then of course the question would be: which dialectthat of Bern, Zurich, Basel?) I regularly attend meetings of a national organization that brings together members from both sides of the divide, at which the lingua franca, as often as not, turns out to be English. * On a recent rainy Sunday, I took a three-hour train ride, from Zurich by way of Lausanne to St-Maurice, in the canton of Valais on the border to the canton of Vaud, to hear my friend Annina Haug sing Rosina (brilliantly, and with considerable comedic chops) in Barbiere di Siviglia. The audience in the unexpectedly large auditorium, hidden two floors below street level in a non-descript municipal building, was large and boisterous, taking their time finding their seats, calling out to friends and neighbors, and, when the opera was underway, applauding long and enthusiastically after the overture, following particularly successful arias, and during the many curtain calls (and encore of the first-act finale!) that closed the performance. As I once heard a Francophone Swiss performer at the Zirkus Knie complain, following an attempt to get the uptight Zurich audience to sing along with him: Thats the sort of spirit you get in Lausanne on a Monday morning! Now here was that celebrated Latin spirit on a Sunday afternoon, and it was terrific. After the intermission, but just before the curtain went up for the second act, I turned to the couple seated next to meFrench-speakers, as most of the crowd seemed to beand asked them whether they were from the Romandie (they were: or rather, she was, but he, although now resident with his wife there, came originally from Bern). And were they familiar with the term Roschtigraben? They certainly recognized it, they assured me, at least once I had repeated it in French (le fosse des rosti); and when I asked them to explain it to me, they said it was a shorthand for the difference between the Francophone and Germanophone regions of Switzerland. Politically, yes, I understand that, I replied politely, because the Dutschschwyzer tend to be more conservative than the Romandshere they made a gesture of demurral, either to reject my perceived self-deprecation or to align themselves, against the cliche, with the political centerbut why does it mean that? I mean, who is it who eats Roschti; or rather, who doesnt eat Roschti? They agreed with my perplexity: after all, despite its conventional association with German-speaking farmers in the Bernese countryside, Roschti is eaten with relish on both sides of the putative divide: by my interlocutors, in fact, among others. And when I asked what form of starch was traditionally served in their part of the country, and was told that mashed potatoes, or puree, was the favored accompaniment to meat dishes in the Romandie, I informed them that my partner, born and raised in the Emmenthal, a solidly Germanophone region of Switzerland, was a lifelong devotee of that particular dish. We were shaking our heads in bemusement at the entrenchment of possibly surpassed cultural divisions in a journalistic shorthand when the house lights dimmed for the second act. (The Italian libretto reminded us that there was also said to be a polenta divide separating the German-speaking cantons from Ticino: just another canard?) * If the current state of relations between the Francophone and Germanophone regions of Switzerland has improved in recent years, this is surely due in part to the efforts of my friend Sandrine Charlot Zinsli. Sandrine, a Parisian who spent part of her youth in Latin America and studied at Sciences Po, Frances flagship institute for the social sciences, has lived in Zurich for decades with her husband, a Germanophone Swiss architect from the Grisons, and their two daughters. She has worked as a journalist, translator, mediator, and cultural organizer, both as a freelancer and with a variety of associations, including the pan-Swiss Migros supermarket chain, for whose cultural foundation she served as a liaison between the Germanophone and Francophone regions. She was coordinator of the Semaine de la langue francaise et de la francophonie (SLFF) in Switzerland from 2014 to 2015 and was created a Chevalier dans lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres de la Republique francaise in 2011. I met Sandrine in the early 2000s, as the two of us accompanied our very young children to the park near where we both lived with our families on Schindlerstrasse. I recall exchanging recipes and accounts of life as young parents, as well as our experiences as immigrants to Switzerland. Not long afterward, in 2003, I got involved in the Fete de la Musique, the street festival Sandrine initiated, on the French model, in our neighborhood, and which is still happening annually, under a new generation of amateur management. (I have written about the Fete, which has since been renamed the Schindlerplatzfest, here.) In October of that same year Sandrine founded Aux Arts etc, a website for the transmission of Francophone culture in the non-French-speaking cantons of Switzerland and an association that mounts cultural events of its own. Together with a small team (Veronique Arlettaz Roncoroni, Marie-Pierre Frossard, Agnes Jullin, and Souad Sellami), Sandrine maintains the site, publishes an editorial (or edi-tot) in an email newsletter, mounts exhibitions, holds public book-club discussions and literary fora, and promotes other cultural organizations, all in the name of disseminating the culture of her homeland and its various colonial outposts. The site features a useful agenda of upcoming local events and posts write-ups of past occasions. (I have myself contributed to these, with brief texts on appearances by Didier Eribon and Edouard Louis, among others.) The associations name is a gentle spoof of Serge Gainsbourgs notorious aux armes et ctera, that song itself a reggae-infused vamp of the French national anthem that was the object of considerable vitriol from patriots when it was released in 1979: La Marseillaise, after all, is sacred to a certain strain of French chauvinism, and must be protected from pollution by undesirables For its part, the Swiss websites call to the arts rather than to arms is an admirably concise expression of Sandrines own world view, which combines the progressive politics inherited from her cosmopolitan parents with a ferocious dedication to culture, and a militant (but non-violent) faith in its unifying, socializing, indeed redemptive powers. Last month, from November 21 to 26, Aux Arts etc celebrated its 20th anniversary with a weeks worth of events at Theater Stok, a diminutive underground venue near the Kunsthaus Zurich nestled among university buildings and the music conservatory. The offerings were as ambitiously eclectic as the associations have been for the past two decades, with theatrical and musical performances, readings, podium discussions, literature for children and adults, and a karaoke evening with live instrumental backup and a song-list, prepared in advance with collective input, its numbers mainly from the metropolitan French tradition but also featuring titles from the Francophone and Germanophone regions of Switzerland. The afternoon of the final day of Aux Artss residency at Theater Stok, before the evening of live music and partying that would close the week, saw the launch of a book ironically (but accurately) announced as a world premiere. Zwolf Fabeln/Douze Fables de Jean de La Fontaine (Edition Plumes, Fribourg), gorgeously illustrated by Alice Lobsiger, features translations of 12 poems by Jean de la Fontaine, the 17th-century French Aesop, into Bernese German by the father-and-son team of Yves and Philippe Seydoux. On that final Sunday, Yves Seydoux presented a selection of the dialect versions, in each case preceded by a recitation of the original French by Valerie Valkanap, an author and initiator of the book project. The performance was rich and riveting, not only for the artisanship of the (rhyming, word-playing) Bernese translations but also because the two reciters had memorized their selections, and their occasional small lapses and eminently forgivable parapraxes made the whole thing more theatrical, and more human. It was as if we were witnessing the successful meeting of these two very different but related cultures, in the person of two engaging and attractive performers, across their putative divide. I was reminded of the bilingual couple I had met in St-Maurice, she from the canton of Valais, he from Bern, attending an Italian opera; and I thought of my Francophone friend Sandrine, with her Germanophone husband, the excellent Beat Zinsli, incorporating in their marriage, at the basic, personal level, the union of languages that occasionally proves difficult at the Swiss federal level. Because after all, that is where language most vividly takes place: locally, personally, in live encounters. Reading, singing, and talkingand eatingtogether. Across the divide. Aux arts, mes citoyennes! PS: Forthcoming this winter in the Geneva-based periodical Joy-Art is a linked pair of bilingual limericks, written for an issue devoted to Lerotisme and taking full advantage of the lurid potential of a Roschtigraben. Repetition and mastery of my childhood trauma? Governors Statewide Elected Officials State Legislators Mayors and County Officials When a Republican and Democrat from Washington state recently announced a new group called Washington Independents, they did something that in today's aggressively partisan age is positively radical: They seized the political center.The new group, former Democratic U.S. Rep. Brian Baird said, is "looking for candidates who will listen, have the courage and integrity to solve the tough issues, and who will put principle over party or special interests and people over partisanship."Baird and Chris Vance, a former head of the state's Republican Party, are far from alone.According to dozens of political observers across the country, there are a handful of moderates at all levels of government who aren't just quietly pursing moderate policies but who actually wear the title proudly.Before we meet these moderates, it's important to note that we're only including politicians holding or seeking office and who are rising stars rather than long-entrenched incumbents. That's because it's too easy to eschew partisanship when you're not facing an imminent party primary, and for this discussion to be valid, it's important to demonstrate that their brand of politics has a future.Being a governor offers a better opportunity for pursuing a centrist approach than most elected positions. After all, governors have to run statewide and a hardline partisan approach often won't win over enough urban, suburban or rural voters.Governors also have to work with the opposite party in the state legislature to pass laws and in cities and counties on economic development. In many cases, this fosters moderate policies.Unsurprisingly, today's moderate governors can be found in states that generally lean toward the opposite party of their executive leader. In the blue states of Maryland, Massachusetts and Vermont, voters have, respectively, elected RepublicansandCharlie Baker, for example, signed bills in November that require insurers to offer free birth control and ban bump stocks , which increase weapons' rate of fire. Hogan, meanwhile, signed a fracking ban and has pursued sick-leave legislation, though he vetoed a Democratic version he considered too far-reaching.Red states, meanwhile, have elected several Democratic governors, includingin Montana,in North Carolina andin Louisiana. Cooper's highest-profile accomplishment -- overturning the H.B. 2 "bathroom bill" -- ended up irritating both the left and the right."I happen to believe that Democrats in a large part of the country, but particularly across the South, would do much better if we fielded more candidates who were pro-Second Amendment and pro-life such as myself," Edwards told in September. "I happen to believe we have a superior message in many regards that will resonate with people across this region, but they won't hear it if you don't check a couple of boxes first. They won't hear the rest of your message."And almost by definition, the nation's sole independent governor, Alaska's, qualifies as a centrist.It's worth noting, however, that none of these politicians are necessarily a good fit for the term rising star. Few elected positions rank higher than governor, and the ones that do are difficult for moderates to attain.Winning a U.S. Senate election as a member of the state's minority party is a much heavier lift than winning the governorship. And running as a moderate in a party's primary for president? Fuhgeddaboutit.If governorships are the ideal place for moderates, then it should come as no surprise that several are running for the office.Take Kansas. Following a divisive two terms under Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, moderates in the state are flexing their muscles. The widespread unpopularity of Brownback's budget-busting tax cuts has shifted the power in the Republican Party ever so slightly back toward the center, as Democrats and moderate Republicans have sought with some success to stymie Brownback's initiatives.The GOP has three relatively moderate candidates in their large field for 2018: former legislatorsand, and state Rep.. If any of them manages to survive the primary, says Burdett Loomis, a University of Kansas political scientist, they would likely fare well in the general election.Democrats, for their part, have always had to be more moderate to win in the state. If a conservative wins the GOP primary, the Democrats should be able to make the race competitive with one of their candidates -- House Minority Leader, former Wichita Mayor, and former legislator and agriculture secretaryAnother state where moderates may be ascendant in 2018 is Colorado. There, independent voters will have their first chance ever to vote in partisan primaries, potentially pushing both parties toward the center.Floyd Ciruli, a Denver-based pollster, pointed to several moderate politicians running for governor next year who could benefit, including Democratic Lt. Gov.and Republican Attorney GeneralLynne, who has served as president of the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Colorado, called herself the most "pragmatic" candidate in the race, "with more experience than any other candidate in managing millions of dollars of budgets, large organizations,"Coffman has a moderate record on social issues and has attended an LGBTQ pride event.Other candidates with moderate profiles who are expected to run for governor next year include Afghanistan War veteran and Democratic state Rep.in South Carolina, former Democratic U.S. Rep.in Florida, Republican surgeonin Oregon and former Tennessee economic development chiefIf a couple of these moderate gubernatorial candidates begin to gain traction during the 2018 election cycle, it may be a sign that centrism is demonstrating a surge in popular appeal.It's increasingly rare for members of one party to win statewide office in states dominated by the opposite party. Nevertheless, there's Mississippi Attorney GeneralThe Democrat withstood a tough Republican challenge in 2015 and may run for governor in 2019. If he does so, he would be the only Democrat with a prayer of winning.In Missouri -- a state that has turned heavily Republican in a relatively short period of time -- Democratwas appointed to the position of state auditor and plans to run for the office on her own in 2018. Despite Missouri's political drift, observers say she's taken a relatively nonpartisan approach and has a good shot at winning next year.The position is a bit of a launching pad: Three recent U.S. senators from Missouri previously held the state auditorship -- Claire McCaskill, John Ashcroft and Christopher Bond.On the Republican side, Utah Lt. Gov.has made headlines for criticizing President Trump, reaching out to gays and leading a bipartisan effort to address Utah's homelessness and opioid challenges. He is expected to run for governor in 2020.Given the hyperpartisan nature of state legislatures these days, it's tough to be a moderate. Still, there are a few in the most unlikely of places.In Texas, Republican state Rep.is "the most visible and vocal unabashed Republican moderate," says Rice University political scientist Mark P. Jones. She's the only abortion rights Republican in the Texas Legislature, and she's been endorsed by the state's leading LGBTQ advocacy group, Equality Texas."Unlike some of her moderate colleagues who are moderates in Austin but present themselves as hard-line conservatives back in their district, Davis both walks the moderate walk in Austin and talks the moderate talk when back home in Houston," Jones says.In California, Assemblymanis a leader among moderate, pro-business Democrats in the legislature. Previously, Daly served as mayor of Anaheim."To be effective at any level of government, you have to be able to work with people who are not going to agree with you on every issue," Daly told thein 2013.And in New Mexico, Democrat, a state representative, is one of a handful of moderates who are gaining influence in the legislature. A Democrat from the conservative eastern portion of New Mexico, Dodge served in the Navy and has been a teacher, principal and business owner. He has risen quickly in the chamber to become vice chairman of the influential House Appropriations Committee.Since cities and suburban counties have become increasingly Democratic, mayoral offices and county executive positions offer Republicans some of the best opportunities for pursuing centrist political careers. In other words, they can offer agendas that are pro-business but socially moderate.In deep red Oklahoma, Oklahoma City Mayoris considered relatively moderate."By Oklahoma standards, his views on issues like LGBTQ rights [have become] more progressive during his years as mayor," wrote Arnold Hamilton, editor of theCornett is widely considered a strong general election candidate as he runs for governor in 2018, but Hamilton noted that the last Oklahoma City mayor to run statewide didn't survive the 2004 GOP primary.In New York's Dutchess County, which narrowly supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016, voters have elected Republican, a former village mayor and former Assemblyman, as their county executive.Molinaro is "very steeped in how government works and is committed to good government while pursuing fiscally conservative and socially moderate policies," says Gerald Benjamin, a political scientist at SUNY-New Paltz.In staunchly Republican Utah, Salt Lake County Mayor, a Democrat, has branded himself as a moderate -- a necessity as he seeks to oust Republican U.S. Rep. Mia Love.While McAdams had backed a broad expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, he told that he collaborated with Republican state House Speaker Greg Hughes on a more politically manageable approach.Meanwhile, in Alabama,has been elected mayor of Tuscaloosa four times as a Democrat, focusing on economic development and the city's recovery from tornado devastation. He's running for governor in 2018.One of the surprise hotbeds of moderate Republican and Democratic mayors is Indiana. The highest-profile example is South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg , who ran unsuccessfully to lead the Democratic National Committee, billing himself as a fresh, midwestern voice. He's gay and a Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan.The bench of moderate Indiana mayors is even deeper on the GOP side.is the mayor of Carmel, an Indianapolis suburb with a population of 86,000. He's pushed for green and pedestrian-oriented development. Another Republican mayor isof the neighboring and similarly sized suburb of Fishers; he's considered a pragmatic Republican. Elsewhere in the state, Republicanserves as mayor of Evansville and has taken a moderate approach. Split Responsibility on Health States Fending for Themselves Elections: No One Size Fits All The great crises of the past century, from the Great Depression and World War II to 9/11 and the Great Recession, all had one major outcome in common. The federal government assumed greater power and authority in response, which then became permanent. The coronavirus pandemic has been an exception.Rather than seizing greater authority or even using the powers already available to him, President Trump largely, though not entirely, outsourced pandemic response to the states. He often goaded or criticized governors, but he made it clear he thought it was primarily their problem.The administration and Congress provided guidance and resources to the states, but left decision-making up to them. It was an approach consistent with the original federalist structure of the nation, which did not foresee the massive national government we live with today. What you might regard as Trumps failure to be more authoritative in terms of national regulation actually has been very consistent with the constitutional structure of federalism, says Robert Nagel, a law professor at the University of Colorado.Its doubtful that Trump based his pandemic response on a reading of James Madison. The president sought to downplay the coronavirus, as he put it, concerning himself more with its effects on the economy and his own re-election prospects. He didnt demand strong medicine because he never wanted, as he often said, for the cure to be worse than the disease.But the net effect was the same. Trumps inaction opened up space for states and localities to devise their own plans. That hasnt been all to the good. The result has been a patchwork pandemic , with different states, and even different communities within states, attacking the virus with greater or lesser aggression. Anthony Fauci, the federal governments top infectious disease official, has complained about the disjointed nature of an approach that varies by city and state. And what happens in one state can quickly affect other states, given the nature of a viral disease.The downside of the response is that the states themselves have not coordinated or had a common approach either, says John Kincaid, a federalism expert at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. Weve had some regional coordination, but you see a clear division in the states along party lines, which is very similar to what we see in the federal government.Still, a varied response is better than nothing. If responsibility for addressing the coronavirus fell strictly on federal shoulders, the situation might be even more dire, given Trump's laissez-faire approach. I think we have, frankly, a colossal failure of presidential leadership right now, says John Vile, a political scientist at Middle Tennessee State University. Thank goodness we have some governors and mayors willing to step into the breach, or wed be worse off than we are now.The nation has gotten an education in federalism this year. Although the media and most of the public tend to view Washington as the government, the 50 states and thousands of localities have demonstrated their own importance during the pandemic. That has continued in other contexts notably during the aftermath of the election, with state and local officials less willing than members of Congress to indulge Trumps contention that it was somehow stolen from him.Article II of the Constitution gives states the authority to set the times, places and manner of elections. That dispersal of power has made hard to hack elections and, as Trump is finding out, difficult to overturn. Part of it is the concerns the Framers had about tyranny, Kincaid says. This non-centralized system is an anti-authoritarian aspect of our government.National uniformity appeals to people because its more efficient. Liberals are left unhappy by the fragmented coronavirus response, while conservatives are now complaining about variations in state election laws that they claim have cheated Trump. Meanwhile, weve come to expect a national solution to every problem. Federal power has, in the past, increased excessively during times of crises, Nagel says. The net effect really over 200 years, but certainly in modern times has been more and more power to the national government, on all kinds of things including health and welfare.Federalism still acts as something of a brake on that process. Its point is not to satisfy people who want to impose a single set of rules but rather to frustrate them, by limiting centralized power. We often think about checks and balances as consisting of the executive, legislative and judicial branches, but the Founders also saw subnational governments as an important check. The true barriers of our liberty in this country are our state governments, Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1811 letter.During the Spanish flu epidemic, President Woodrow Wilson himself got sick but he never mentioned the flu publicly. Thats how different things were in those pre-New Deal days: There was no expectation of a federal response.First cities and then states set up health departments during the 19th century. It was through their responses to epidemics of yellow fever, cholera and other diseases that they gained powers such as quarantines and shutdown authority that are still relevant, though obviously controversial, today. At the federal level, what became the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wasnt established until 1946, as an outgrowth of the anti-malaria effort during World War II (and thus part of the national governments postwar expansion).Over the years, the division of responsibility for public health between the feds, states and localities has become fairly clear. During recent infectious disease outbreaks such as Ebola, Zika and the H1N1 flu, the CDC took the lead on messaging and set strategies and guidelines that state and local health departments largely followed. Funding for their efforts was later backfilled, at least in part, by Congress.That model broke down this year. The CDC was often sidelined. While the agency held daily news conferences during prior outbreaks, it often went silent for months this year. Robert Redfield, the CDC director, was sidelined as part of the White House coronavirus task force and sometimes contradicted directly by the president.Nations that have combatted the pandemic most successfully, such as Vietnam, Taiwan, New Zealand and Japan, have taken a centralized approach. They didn't all pursue the same strategies, but they all did pursue strategies whether universal mask wearing or travel restrictions or aggressive testing and tracing that have been uniform within their borders.Other federalist nations have also coordinated their approaches. In Germany, Chancellor Merkel negotiated an approach with states, says Kincaid. Australia formed an ad hoc cabinet including premiers and heads of the territories.Those countries have had much better results than the United States.Weve had mixed messages, says Emily Gee, a health economist at the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. There hasnt been and there still isnt any federal coordinated strategy on best practices. All of this has been delegated to the states.Emergency response wasnt a public health responsibility until the 2001 terrorist attacks. Public health funding reached a peak following the attacks, with Congress wanting hospitals and the CDC to be ready to confront disasters.In 2002, Congress created the Strategic National Stockpile of vaccines and other medical supplies, which was designed to help respond to health needs due to bioterrorist attacks of other public health emergencies.Trump didnt see it that way. States should find their own supplies, he said back in March, leading governors to make their own deals with suppliers, including overseas. Governors are supposed to be doing a lot of this work, and they are doing a lot of this work, Trump said . The federal government is not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping. You know, were not a shipping clerk. This state of affairs has caused clear friction between Trump and Democratic governors.Things have started to change. With Operation Warp Speed, the federal government will, within days, help coordinate the shipping of vaccines to states. Joe Biden has clearly signaled that battling the coronavirus will be his top priority upon taking office as president.Throughout the campaign, Biden made clear he wants everyone across the country wearing masks, but he recognized the limits of his authority as president. He said hed work with governors to have them issue mask mandates, but he cant order them to do so any more than Trump could order governors to reopen their states economies, as he briefly claimed he had total authority to do back in April.This has led to a revival, says Kincaid, for an almost-moribund idea known as dual federalism, which holds that there are policy areas in which state and federal responsibilities are separate and clearly demarcated.Its become clear that the federal government has limited constitutional authority, he says. Police powers and public safety are largely held by the states and were not delegated to the federal government.On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn Biden's victories in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to delay the Electoral College from voting on Dec. 14. He claims those states adopted illegal voting procedures that will taint the Electoral College.Officials in those states dismissed Paxtons complaint as a stunt. His lawsuit appears destined to be the latest of dozens of election-related legal actions brought by Trump and his allies to be thrown out in court. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied granting an injunction sought by a GOP congressman who wanted to throw out the 2.5 million absentee ballots cast in Pennsylvania or allow the legislature to pick the state's electors. The justices took just 34 minutes after receiving the claim to reject it.Trump has sought to strong-arm leaders in states, including Pennsylvania Georgia and Michigan , to toss out certified election results and put up a set of electors who would support him. Although plenty of state legislators have echoed Trumps evidence-free claims that the election was rigged against him, or have given them an airing in hearings, state and local officials with clear, formal roles have rejected them."To think I would wake up one day and decide that 2.5 million people's votes didn't count just because it wasn't the way I wanted the election to turn out, that's certainly not democracy, Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan said on CNN.If a federal agency were in charge of elections, Trumps ability to bring pressure to bear would obviously be greater. Most Republican members of Congress have refused to recognize Bidens election.There are tremendous variations in how states and counties run elections, leading to all manner of complaints. The 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted major portions of the federal Voting Rights Act has allowed Southern states to close hundreds of polling places . Limited resources in some jurisdictions leave them more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Some places have long voting lines, others dont. Some can count ballots quickly, others clearly lag. Democratic states in recent years have adopted automatic voter registration laws, while Republicans have favored voter identification requirements.No one would design a system that takes such wildly different approaches to a single act. Yet the fact that the election system is so diffuse turned out, this year, to be an insurance policy.Federalism in many ways is inefficient and does produce uneven or imperfect outcomes, Nagel says, but it is a guard against tyranny because you have local control. Shanghai holds 2023 international friendship cities cooperation forum Xinhua) 11:22, December 04, 2023 SHANGHAI, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- Themed "Deepening Friendship Cities Cooperation and Promoting High-Quality Development," the 2023 Shanghai International Friendship Cities Cooperation Forum was held in Shanghai on Friday. Representatives of 13 of Shanghai's friendship cities, provinces or states attended the forum. The event included two sessions -- one centered on smart city development and deepening cooperation between friendship cities, and another on economic and trade cooperation and the high-quality development of friendship cities. Shanghai established a sister city relationship with Dunedin in New Zealand about three decades ago. "We are here to create opportunities together, do business together and succeed together," Jules Radich, mayor of Dunedin, said during the event, noting that the sister-city relationship is full of potential. "The efforts we made today will bring great benefits for tomorrow." Wajenda Chambeshi, director of international relations, policy and protocol of Los Angeles in the United States, announced during the event that Los Angeles has reached a cooperation agreement with Shanghai to build a green shipping corridor, with the common goal of achieving the decarbonization of shipping by 2030. "Los Angeles and Shanghai are both important international shipping centers. By creating a partnership with Shanghai, Los Angeles is very committed to using smart technology to solve common problems such as climate change," he said. The forum was co-hosted by the Foreign Affairs Office of the Shanghai municipal government and the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) by Jeroen Bouterse On November 22nd, a far-right party received almost a quarter of the vote in the Dutch national elections, making it by far the largest of the fifteen parties elected to our new Parliament. Whether it will actually get to govern depends on its capacity to form a coalition, but what is certain is that it will take 37 out of 150 seats in the legislature this week; twelve more than the second-largest party. International media reporting on this landslide all noted what the party and its leader Geert Wilders represented over the last decades: his aggressive attacks on Islam and his slurs on minorities with Islamic country backgrounds, his softness on Putins Russia, his resistance to climate measures, and his calls for a Nexit, to name a few. While Dutch media and (to-be) opposition parties have certainly not ignored these points, they barely played a role in the campaign, and in the initial domestic interpretation of Wilders victory. In that interpretation, the vote for Wilders has to be understood as an anti-establishment vote: the result of general dissatisfaction with a centrist coalition failing to address the problems of the people. The far right won not because of its promises to close mosques, arrange fewer Moroccans, cut support to Ukraine, withdraw from the Paris agreement and quit the EU, but more or less in spite of those promises; it won, rather, because of social issues such as a persistent housing crisis. I will push back against this interpretation later, because I believe it lets the voter off the hook too easily. Aspects of it are clearly true, however. There has been a large anti-establishment vote in the Netherlands for decades, and it has proven rather mutable. Populist parties have won a significant share of the vote in many national elections since 2002. In 2019 a party arguably to the right of Wilders became the largest party in the Senate. It has subsequently fallen apart, and earlier this year a populist party representing agrarian interests took its place as the largest party. Until a few weeks ago, a newly founded and ostensibly centrist party that was in many ways Wilders polar opposite seemed on course to win the November elections. The point is that, to the extent that voters moved between these parties, not all of them can have been motivated by a deep love for the radical right. In fact, while Wilders party was the most durable populist force in the landscape it has existed for almost two decades now its best days seemed to be behind it. Support had gradually dwindled to a little over 10% of the vote. Governing parties got used to the dead weight in Parliament, and the public seemed to be paying less attention. A reason for its apparent decay, we have now learned from a near-perfect political experiment, was its effective isolation by prime minister Mark Rutte. Rutte, as leader of the main right-wing party (the VVD), had sworn never to work with Wilders again, having been severely disappointed when Wilders withdrew his support for Ruttes first coalition government. This year, the very success of that strategy led to its undoing. Dilan Yesilgoz, Ruttes successor as VVD leader, sought to bolster the right-wing credentials of her party after years of centrist coalitions. In particular, she decided to demonstrate her seriousness about restricting immigration by lifting the ban on Wilders, whose party seemed less threatening than ever. This maneuver backfired spectacularly. Rather than gratefully returning to the mainstream right-wing party, many people decided that if a vote for Wilders was not a waste of a ballot anymore, they might as well go for it. The poor campaigns of the other populist parties did most of the rest of the work. The final piece of the puzzle, however and this brings us to the point where I explain how my dissatisfaction with the political landscape in my country actually gets at something fundamentally wrong with our democratic culture is the effective way Wilders was able to alter his image. Minutes after prime minister Rutte announced that he would not seek a next term, Wilders changed his rhetoric, striking a much more conciliatory tone and suggesting that his party was ready to govern responsibly. In the campaign that followed, he proved able to pull this off with very little pushback. The media and the country marveled at the new, softer version of the far-right leader. Its very implausibility after twenty years of political vandalism led to this becoming the primary lens through which he was seen. He had become mild; Geert Milders, everybody kept saying, with some combination of surprise, irony and amusement. Of course everybody understood the strategy behind the transformation. Less well understood, or perhaps simply unavoidable, was how little excuse a large part of the electorate needed to switch their vote to a party whose platform still included blatant rights violations such as banning the Quran. In the campaign, Wilders said he was prepared to put his anti-Islamic agenda on hold, and that was that: the very fact that he was working so hard on seeming acceptable proved enough to make him acceptable. It had been decided in advance that a vote for the far right was not, actually, a vote for the far right: even if pundits didnt take Wilders on his word, a frame now dominated in which a vote for him could be read as an innocent cry for help. In the run-up to the election, the national debate had centered around cost of living and a housing crisis, the failures of the government, and migration. The problems were easily connected. In particular, all the major parties agreed (though in different tones) that immigration was an unacceptable burden on the countrys resources and services. The national debate over migration became more nuanced than before politicians found that not only refugees, but also migrant workers and international students take up housing space but this had the paradoxical effect of making completely mainstream the notion that a migration crisis was going on. Attempts by social scientists and journalists to dispel this myth, or to fact-check alarmist claims about the impact of immigration on demand for housing, did not change this. National discourse decided that a vote against immigration was not a sign of islamophobia or xenophobia, or even of ill will to refugees, but merely a plea finally to address a root cause of the problems of overburdened Dutch citizens. The change in discourse around migration made it possible to see the far rights history of resentment against minorities, its cruelty to outsiders, and its undermining of the rule of law as accidental to its anti-immigration credentials. This was a convenient fiction; in fact, those strategies were, and remain, a window upon the ideological structure of the party, and upon the morals and political instincts of its leader and its (small) cadre. There is an incentive for politicians to interpret a vote not in terms of the party that it brings to power, but in terms of the state of mind of the voter. Rather than admitting that people willingly and knowingly voted for the vision and policies of the opponent, it seems more constructive to theorize that there must be some kind of misunderstanding going on, preferably one that has been rectified by the very election in which it came to light. Their vote for the others was not a final judgment on what the balance of power should be in the next Parliament; rather, it was a signal to the system, and the question is still up for grabs which party gets to interpret that signal. The voter should be taken seriously, but not literally. I think this is a paternalistic perspective on the meaning of the vote, that cheapens the democratic act. My vote is my vote precisely because its effect is not a matter of interpretation by others: it is simply counted, and the result of the counting results directly in a distribution of seats in Parliament. Though I am always perfectly happy to tell people what I voted, the secret ballot seems to me to embody perfectly the ideal of lay political agency: a union of a completely personal decision and an impersonal effect, abstracted from the incentives and preoccupations of the voter. A vote for a representative body is not a plebiscite, in which I get to be used in a political struggle between existing powers that can alter the meaning of my vote; it is an unambiguous, direct decision about who represents me at all. Built into concepts like a signal or a protest vote, moreover, is the populist premise of a distinction between the governing elites and the people. This may apply to flawed democracies that exclude new ideas or coalitions from representative government; but in countries where both constitution and practice allow for the easy entry of new parties, it is misplaced. Democracy is self-government, and self-government requires agency. A vote is not just the expression of the desire for things to be better; there has to be some notion, however crude, of why we ought to try to make things better this way rather than that way. I am not saying that by voting for populists without clear-cut policy proposals rather than for those good-old establishment parties, voters are in fact choosing merely to signal their dissatisfaction, discarding their responsibility to make substantive choices. That paternalistic model is only one of the interpretations on the table. The other is the more disturbing: it is that the vote for the far right is at least to some extent literally a democratic vote for its stated agenda of putting Dutch people first. Everybody has heard Wilders various threats to minorities, outsiders, and perceived elites; many, it seems, have calculated that those threats did not affect them, or that empowering the nationalist right might actually give them a leg up. The interpretive frame of an anti-establishment vote in which those votes have come to be embedded whitewashes or softens these threats. I realize that my darker view is also just one possible interpretation. In a functioning and fair democratic system, however, there is one aspect of an election that cannot be undone through reinterpretation: that is who it brings to power. Wolff accused of F1 conflict of interest Unnamed rival team bosses are aiming fire at a new alleged conflict of interest for Mercedes team boss and co-owner Toto Wolff. Toto Wolff, Abu Dhabi GP 2023 Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd. Earlier, the Austrian was accused of taking advantage of his links with his former lawyer Shaila-Ann Rao, who went on to become interim secretary general of sport at the FIA. And now, Business F1 magazine claims team bosses are again concerned about Wolff getting access to privileged information - this time via his wife Susie. Susie Wolff is now a leading figure at Formula 1's new female-only F1 Academy series, with the magazine claiming: Team principals believe Wolff now has access to confidential information they do not . One unnamed boss said: "The information is flowing both ways from us and to Toto but of course we are not getting the benefit of that, he is and they are. They're saying, hey, you know, we can go and have a meeting, an internal meeting, and the next thing it's all over (Liberty Media CEO) Greg Maffei's desk because Toto's told his wife, who in turn has told Stefano (Domenicali), who's told Greg Maffei. GBfoods Ghana rewards first Anigye Aba Fie promotion winner GraphicOnline Business News Dec - 04 - 2023 , 15:05 GBfoods Ghana has unveiled the inaugural grand prize recipient in its nationwide consumer promotion, "Anigye Aba Fie." Following weeks of eager anticipation, Madam Francisca Baiden, an esteemed teacher, has emerged as the fortunate winner of a comprehensive kitchen makeover after the initial draw conducted in Kumasi. A devoted consumer of Gino and Pomo products, Francisca Baiden not only relished the delectable flavours offered by GBfoods but has now reaped the rewards of a completely transformative experience for her kitchen. The "Anigye Aba Fie" promotion was crafted as a token of gratitude to valued GBfoods consumers, and Francisca's win serves as a heartwarming success story, exemplifying the enriching experiences the company aimed to provide through this initiative. Her steadfast support and loyalty have not only elevated her culinary encounters but have also bestowed a touch of luxury upon her home. Amit Mahajan, Sales Director at GBfoods Ghana, expressed gratitude to Ghanaians for their participation in the promotion and extended congratulations to Francisca Baiden for clinching the first grand prize. He remarked, "We are elated to reward our dedicated consumers, and Francisca's win symbolizes the joy and enrichment we aimed to bring into the lives of our consumers. This promotion has celebrated the flavors of Gino and Pomo while creating moments of happiness and transformation." Samuel Dery, Marketing Director at GBfoods Ghana, echoed this sentiment, stating, "Francisca Baiden's win is a testament to the success of the 'Anigye Aba Fie' promotion. We designed this initiative to warm hearts and provide our consumers with reasons to celebrate. The complete kitchen renovation and additional prizes are our way of giving back to those who have made GBfoods a part of their daily lives." Upon learning of her victory, Francisca Baiden expressed her gratitude, saying, "I am beyond thrilled and grateful to GBfoods for this incredible prize. The kitchen makeover is a dream come true, and I appreciate the efforts GBfoods has put into making this promotion special for its consumers. Thank you for enhancing not just my meals but also my home. It's real!" In addition to the grand prize, other fortunate winners received essential home appliances, branded t-shirts, souvenirs, and airtime, contributing to a more convenient and joyful daily life. Amapiano is just a rebranded version of Ghana's Azonto- Samini Graphic Showbiz Showbiz News Dec - 04 - 2023 , 11:16 Ghanaian Dancehall artiste, Samini has asserted that the popular South African music genre, Amapiano, is merely a rebranded and repackaged version of Ghana's iconic Azonto. Explaining why he believes the genre takes inspiration from Ghanaian root in a recent interview on Property Fm, Samini emphasised that Amapiano borrows heavily from the composing elements of Azonto, which gained widespread popularity across various countries during its heyday. While acknowledging that Amapiano originated in South Africa as a subgenre of house music in the mid-2010s, Samini insisted that the similarities between the two genres are too prominent to ignore. The Sweet Mistake crooner said: Today if you do Azonto and you add one or two things to it, somebody will say its Amapiano, but Amapiano is something which is already South African." Despite the parallels, Samini emphasised the distinctiveness of Ghanaian music, asserting, "Amapiano is always going to be South African, so after everybody tried with Azonto, at the end, its Ghana that you will connect it to. So Amapiano will be connected to South Africa, but going forward, Ghana music remains Ghana music." Great restaurant experience Adwoa Asare-Asamoah Opinion Dec - 04 - 2023 , 10:47 I recently had an unexpectedly great #restaurantexperience. There have been a few not-so-good experiences in restaurants I was expecting better, so expectations were nonexistent. However, the entire experience from beginning to end was pleasurable. I am Ahimaa (pronounced a: hi: maa), a Ghanaian young woman whose monthly hormonal surges have a penchant for dictating international cuisine. On November 4, 2022, my day started with a strong urge for Chinese food, so I planned a Chinese eat-out for dinner. I was not entirely sure where, but I knew it would be Chinese. The urge was so strong that I had no appetite for either breakfast or lunch, or possibly unconsciously I was saving my tummy for the evening ensemble of Southeastern Asian spices. Evening came and luckily my husband was home early. So we decided to turn it into a date night. We settled on a Chinese restaurant that had recently opened a branch within 10 km of our home. We had entertained the idea of visiting when it was newly opened. However, we never got around to making it a reality. Busy This restaurant is situated by a busy road and housed in a three-level storey property with shops on the ground level, the restaurant on the middle level, and premium apartments on the last level. The experience began right at the car park. A beaming security man beckoned and assisted us to park well, another walked to us smiling and politely enquired if we were coming to the Chinese restaurant, to which we responded in the affirmative and asked why. He responded that he had to open the car door for me. We were pleasantly surprised or rather gobsmacked (my new favourite English word). He graciously opened the car door for me and led us to the entrance leading to the elevators. A waitress took over and assisted us with the elevator by punching in the floor level. The elevator doors opened, and we were met by another waitress who welcomed us and led us into the restaurant. The restaurant has both outdoor and indoor seating. We were handed over to another waitress who courteously enquired about our seating preference. We opted for indoor; spicy food in humid November weather in Ghana is better enjoyed in a cooler environment. We were enveloped in the cool air-conditioned interior of the restaurant and welcomed by an amiable waiter who led us to our seats. Another waiter pulled up an extra chair for my bag and removed the table piece in the middle of the table, which would have otherwise obstructed good conversation. Our main waiter gave us the food and drinks menu and disappeared without literally standing on us to make an order. He gave us time to decide and reappeared when we had decided on our choice of food and drinks. This is a waiter who knew his job. Knowing the Ghanaian palate, he assisted us with the right choice of sauce to ensure an enhanced culinary experience. Food and drinks came on time; the waiter ensured our glasses were never empty. Our main meal was timely; a few minutes after the starter had done the deed in our tummies. Same as the dessert after the main meal. Though the food was not extraordinary (it was the usual Chinese), the pepper sauce known in Ghana as shito did the trick for me. It was so good I requested a takeaway which was obliged with a 150ml disposable bowl. Payment of service was hassle-free as well, devoid of the usual delays which get you threatening to leave without paying. Departure Our departure experience was no different from the arrival. Pleasantries of goodbyes and hope you come again were said, and again, with their signature pleasant smiles, the security men assisted us to reverse safely into the busy road. The entire experience from beginning to end was pleasurable. The quality of service delivered was 10/10. We felt valued and respected; it felt like they preempted and met our every need for the reason we were there. Kudos to the management of #noblehouseghana, Spintex Branch, for maintaining a great corporate culture, and kudos to Robert and Prosper at the car park, Jerry and James who waited on us, and the ladies at the elevator and foyer who were on duty on November 4, 2022. What are the actual elements that sold me? Stay tuned for the details in the next story Disclaimer: This story is not a paid review. The writer is a Customer Experience Management Practitioner. FOCOS Hospital hosts forum on Anti-Microbial Resistance Gloria Apprey Life Nov - 27 - 2023 , 09:33 In an effort to address the growing threat of Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR), a panel of experts have shed light on the causes, management of the phenomenon, importance of vaccination and other health matters. The discussion held at the Focos Orthopaedic Hospital in Accra last week was on the theme; Preventing Anti-Microbial Resistance Together. It was in accordance with the world AMR awareness week. The Chief Executive Officer of the hospital, Dr Irene Adorkor Wulff, set the tone for the forum by explaining the phenomenon. She said it occurred when bacteria, viruses and fungi became resistant to the medications used for the treatment of the diseases they caused. Dr Irene Adorkor Wulff speaking at the event Causes The panel highlighted the abuse of antibiotics, not completing treatment, wrong prescriptions, ineffectiveness of drugs and mutation of certain types of bacteria as contributing factors. That, they said, happened naturally and over a long period of time. Touching on this, the Head of Pharmacy of the hospital, Dr Benjamin Ampadu, said while some doctors might be quick to prescribe antibiotics, patients also tended to self-prescribe such drugs even for common colds. He said now there was an alarming increase in drug-resistant infections caused by bacteria and viruses worldwide that when not handled, could pose threats to health. Dr Ampadu advised that whenever there is something wrong with you medically, try to resist self-medication. We have turned ourselves into doctors diagnosing all kinds of diseases, even before we get to the pharmacy and this is unhealthy. Management Addressing the management of AMR, Family Physician and Diabetologist, Dr Francis Addai, said it could be curbed through regulations, continuous education and training of the citizenry, doctors and some over-the-counter medicine sellers. Touching on regulations, the Head of the National Public Health and Reference Laboratory of the Ghana Health Service, Dr Gifty Boateng, said coordinated efforts were in place. She highlighted a governmental policy introduced in 2017 and a national action plan to address AMR. She also asserted the key point of awareness creation, education, surveillance and research on the types of organisms that were now resistant to antibacterial drugs. Through these policies, some stewardship programmes have been rolled out for pharmacists and student pharmacists. There are also now microbiologists involved in researches and have published articles on AMR. Thankfully, now, more data is available on the issue of AMR she added. She further asserted the need to equip laboratories in the country with infrastructure, tools and training to enable them identify some of these issues. Dr Boateng however lamented the inadequacy of funds in implementing some policies. Monitory and evaluations of some orthodox and herbal drugs that come into the country from various angles is also an issue, she added. She called on agencies, government and individuals to help in the combat of this health emergency. Dr Francis Addai added his voice to the progress made in AMR awareness. He commended the Bolgatanga Regional Hospital and the MDS Lancet Laboratories for their effort in terms of research and laboratories. Vaccination Part of the discussion was the issue of lack of vaccination in adults. Nurse Manager of the hospital, Claudia Wireku-Tei, touched on the importance of vaccination in both adults and children. She said vaccination was important in preventing certain illnesses that might be caused by bacteria, fungi or viruses. Another panellist, Public Health Specialist of the hospital, Dr Bismarck Adams, advised that adults could get vaccinated against some diseases such as, Hepatitis B and Human Papilloma Virus(HPV) for the prevention of cervical cancer, genital warts, etc. in women. He however said in-depth consultation with a medical professional to ascertain the need and suitability was necessary before any form of vaccination was embarked upon. As the discussion concluded, the panel called for an increased investment in research and development, strengthened international collaborations and enhanced public awareness campaigns. They also emphasised the need for a multi-sectoral approach to combat AMR, involving not only healthcare professionals but also policymakers, educators, the media and the general public. Illegal hawking on medians in Makola increase ahead of Christmas Gloria Apprey Life Dec - 04 - 2023 , 10:37 Traders at the Makola Market in Accra have turned road medians, typically designed for traffic control and safety, into makeshift stalls between 4 a.m. and 10 a.m. Along the South Liberia Road, specifically from the Movenpick Ambassador Hotel through the Accra City Hotel to the market, these vendors sell various items including clothing, shoes, bags and food items despite bold "no hawking" signs. The situation creates chaos and traffic . The Mirror visited the market on different days last week. The Hawkers A hawker, Miss Anovi Gogo, who spoke to The Mirror said she saw the situation as an opportunity to make some money by selling since there were limited job options. Another hawker, Safira Safui who sold clothing acknowledged the illegality but alleged she paid a fee of GH40 to a member of a task force for the chance to sell. Miss Gogo, who traded in ladys handbags said, the spot was ideal for early morning market. "I have to make as much money as I can from my trade. I am able to sell a number of bags before going back to my spot in the main market, she said. Miss Safui, a middle-aged woman who sold ladies clothing explained that the spot made it easier for her target market, who were mostly busy working women and boutique owners to conveniently purchase items. Here, I can bring the market to such women who may be on their way early in the morning. Fortunately, I am able to make some sales. I paid GH 40 to a task force man within the market , a hawker who gave her name as Dodzi said. Addressing concerns for their safety, a trader in footwear, Madam Safoa, told this reporter that, although safety was a concern, she needed to make money to take care of her children. It seemed the gains made were worth the risks for these traders. A commuter, who was buying in the chaos and was not comfortable disclosing her name said she found the place convenient and had encountered no challenges since she started buying from there. She however admitted that since it was illegal, the system should be regulated in order to curb decongestion and ease traffic flow. I would support a crackdown by the A.M.A if embarked upon", she added. Another buyer, who would only give her name as Grace, said that was the first time since she rarely came to town. She added that the few items she had bought were cheaper than regular market prices. Measures by the A.M.A When contacted, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (A.M.A) and other stakeholders said their attention had been drawn to the issue and had therefore drawn an action plan to deal with the issue. According to the Chief Executive Officer of the Metropolitan Security Council (METSEC) of the A.M.A, Elizabeth Kwatsoe Sackey, the measures would take effect today, Saturday, December 2, 2023. At a news conference in Accra on November, 28, 2023. Dubbed: Operation Let the Traffic Flow, she said the measures would ensure the flow of both human and vehicular traffic within the Central Business District (CBD) and other parts of the metropolis ahead of the festive season. Mrs Sackey said the measures would stop all trading activities on the streets and pavements outside the designated areas within the metropolis which flouted the bye-laws of the assembly. She said vehicles found at prohibited places would be towed and offenders fined. Mrs Sackey urged the public within the metropolis to refrain from littering and dumping refuse into drains and other unauthorised places. She also urged all stakeholders and residents to support the operation, saying it is a collective effort to create a more organised and enjoyable urban experience. UDS graduates 4,399 students Mohammed Fugu Education Dec - 04 - 2023 , 10:26 The University for Development Studies (UDS) last Saturday held its 24th congregation ceremony to graduate students who have completed their respective programmes of study. In all, a total of 4,399 students comprising 4,242 undergraduates, 124 graduates, 15 postgraduate diploma and 16 Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) students graduated. Out of the number, 161 students graduated with first class honours. New technology President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in a speech read on his behalf by the Northern Regional Minister, Shani Alhassan Shaibu, charged the university to develop new engineering technologies for agriculture and industrialisation in the north. He said as the world was evolving every minute, it was very imperative for every nation to leverage on technologies to maximise growth and productivity. "Our universities in general and UDS in particular have a role to play in ensuring that they provide training that will ensure our graduates are not mere spectators but movers of these unfolding events," he said. He reiterated the governments commitment to provide infrastructure to the university to reposition it to deliver effectively. For his part, the Vice-Chancellor of the UDS, Prof. Seidu Al-hassan, said the graduates had been well-equipped to lead positive change in their respective communities. "Studies have revealed that our products are very competitive in the job market with many creating jobs on their own. The UDS is committed to churning out productive graduates and innovative ways to solving challenges," he noted. He, however, lamented the challenges facing the university such as inadequate hostels and lecture halls, and appealed to the government to take deliberate steps in addressing challenges facing the school. Prof. Al-hassan advised the graduates to put the knowledge acquired to good use and create jobs for themselves. He announced that the university would be starting its law faculty next year to bring law education to the steps of people of the north. The Director-General of the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC), Prof. Ahmed Jinapor Abdulai, indicated that the commission had set up a committee to deal with the backlog of all accreditation issues as soon as possible. A mechanical engineer student from the Nyankpala campus of UDS, Francis Mbawin Lambon, emerged as the overall best student. He received cash prizes, certificates and citations. Aisha Huang jailed 4 and half years, fined GH48k Justice Agbenorsi Dec - 04 - 2023 , 12:20 The Chinese national, En Huang, popularly known as Aisha Huang, has been sentenced to four and half years in prison for engaging in illegal mining in Ghana. Aisha Huang, who has also been slapped with a GH48,000 fine, is also to be deported after serving her jail term. That was after the Criminal Division of the Accra High Court presided over by Justice Lydia Osei-Marfo, found her guilty on the charge of undertaking a mining operation without a licence, facilitating the participation of persons engaged in a mining operation and the illegal employment of foreigners. She was also convicted on her own plea in the charge of entering Ghana while prohibited from re-entry. It was the courts opinion that the state, led by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Yvonne Atakora Obuobisa, has proven beyond reasonable doubt that Aisha Huang committed the crime. Facing the judge in her usual nose mask and white scarf, Aisha was calmly seated in the dock one hour into the reading of the judgement. While Aisha Huang had denied all the charges, it was the courts view that she contradicted herself in her defence statements in the trial which lasted for one year, two months. Plea of mitigation Miracle Attachey, counsel for Aisha Huang, in his plea of mitigation said his client had been in custody since October 2022. He, therefore prayed the court to impose a fine and deport his client instead of a custodial sentence. It is our humble prayer that a custodial sentence to the accused would exert another financial burden on the state particularly the prison service, he added. She has made the work of the prosecution and court move expeditiously regarding her re-entry charge. Response In a sharp response, the Director of Public Prosecutions said taking into consideration the impact of Aisha Huangs action on the families and witnesses who testified before the court, it was imperative for the court to impose a maximum custodial sentence and a deportation order. In conclusion, we wish to state that because of the indignity with which the accused person operated, the sentence should reflect the impact of her actions on the people of Ghana, the communities that she had permanently impaired and the livelihoods that she took away, she added Background En Huang was accused of being in the thick of affairs of illegal mining [galamsey], especially in the Ashanti Region. She was deported from Ghana in 2018, after the Attorney-General decided to discontinue her trial in which she was accused of engaging in small-scale mining without licence. However, she was said to have sneaked back into Ghana to allegedly engage in the same activities for which she was deported. In October 2022, the Attorney-General then decided to prosecute her for the alleged crimes before her deportation and new ones committed since her re-entry into Ghana. It was the case of the prosecution that Aisha had an illegal mining concession at Bepotenten in the Amansie West District in the Ashanti Region and also operated a mining support services company. She had pleaded not guilty to undertaking a mining operation without a licence, facilitating the participation of persons engaged in a mining operation, the illegal employment of foreigners, and entering Ghana while prohibited from re-entry. But on May 3, 2023, Aisha pleaded guilty to entering Ghana while prohibited from re-entry contrary to section 20(4) of the Immigration Act, 2000, Act 573. That was after she had entered into a Plea Bargaining agreement with the State (office of the Attorney General). Old law Due to the time Aisha Huang committed the offence, she was sentenced based on the old mining law, Minerals and Mining Act, 2006 (Act 703), which imposes a maximum of a five-year jail term for engaging in illegal mining. This old law was replaced in 2019 by the Minerals and Mining Act, 2019 (Act 995). Under Act 995, convicted illegal miners face a minimum of 15 years in prison and a maximum of 25 years in prison. 60,000 hectares ready for agric zones =George Folley & Emmanuel Bonney Dec - 04 - 2023 , 06:00 The government has secured over 60,000 hectares of land for the establishment of agricultural zones in the Eastern, Ashanti, Upper West, Northern and North East regions. This is a start-up activity to roll out the second phase of the Planting for Food and Jobs programme. The Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, who made this known in his keynote address at the 39th National Farmers Day Awards Night held at the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT) at Tarkwa in the Western Region last Friday, said in 2024, government would complete the development of 50,000 hectares of land in land valleys to expand the areas under rice, soya and maize cultivation. Additionally, he said work had begun on the development of 7,100 hectares of irrigated infrastructure in economic enclaves within the agriculture zones. "We have set ourselves ambitious but achievable targets every year of the five-year period of the programme (PFJ 2.0). For example, we expect to increase our self-sufficiency in rice from the current level of 48 per cent in 2022 to 72 per cent by 2025 and 106 per cent by 2028. Poultry will be increased from five per cent in 2022 to 22 per cent by 2025 and 111 per cent by 2028. Best farmer The awards ceremony saw Charity Akortia from the Agona West Municipality in the Central Region being adjudged the Overall National Best Farmer for 2023. Theophilus Ezenrane Ackah, from the Western Region, was the first runner-up, followed by Kwaku Yeboah Asumah. The novelty event was graced by a host of personalities, including the Minister of Food and Agriculture, Dr Bryan Acheampong; Board Chairperson of the Minerals Commission, Barbara Oteng-Gyasi; the Board Chairman of Ghana Cocobod, Peter Mac Manu; Chief Executive Officer of Cocobod, Joseph Boahene Aidoo, and the Member of Parliament for Tarkwa-Nsuaem, George Mireku Duker. It was chaired by the President of the Western Regional House of Chiefs and Paramount Chief of the Wassa Amenfi Traditional Area, Nana Tetrete Akuamoah Sakyi. National Farmers Day Dr Bawumia said the National Farmers Day had a lot of significance, hence its observance as a public holiday. He said farmers and fishers were celebrated because they were the cornerstone of the country's economic development, contributing to the growth of industry through the supply of raw materials, foreign exchange earnings from exports, job creation, poverty reduction and the general well-being of the populace. He applauded all agriculture staff and allied agencies and the country's development partners who helped to advance the government's agenda to modernise and transform the sector. Dr Bawumia said Farmers Day must be an occasion to remind ourselves that the new dynamics called for a new strategy to enable the country to realise its goals of food security and resilience, job creation, poverty reduction and prosperity. The Vice-President said the key issues hindering the nation's efforts of accelerating growth and transformation of agriculture in recent times were global conflicts disrupting supply chains, price hikes of inputs and their impact on food demand and supply, effects of climate change, outbreak of diseases, pollution of water resources and population explosion. Sustenance "These threaten our very sustenance as a people and, therefore, calls for bold and decisive decisions and innovative strategies to neutralise the drawback effect on developing agriculture," he said. Dr Bawumia said the country's experience on the agriculture front in the past six years demonstrated government's unwavering commitment to transform the sector and place it on a sound footing of accelerated development. The efforts put in by government since 2017 had yielded notable success through the flagship programme, Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ), initiated in 2017. "You would all recall that when you look at Ghana's agriculture growth between 2013 and 2016, in fact, it was a declining story. "Average growth of agriculture between 2013 and 2016, he said, was 2.9 per cent, but when the PFJ was implemented in 2017 and in spite of the global economic challenges like the COVID pandemic, Russia-Ukraine war, disruption of supply chain, average growth in the agriculture sector between 2017 and 2022 was six per cent. Growth "We have doubled agriculture growth, notwithstanding, so we must be doing something right," he said and added that "so we doubled the growth rate in the agriculture sector that we came to meet". Dr Bawumia said the significant increase in the growth rate in the agriculture sector enhanced food security, increased job opportunities across the agriculture value chain and supported emerging industries with raw materials, among others. He said the PFJ programme reached over 1.5 million farmers and resulted in a significant increase in productivity of some staples. During the period, yields from maize production increased from 1.8 metric tonnes per hectare in 2016 to 3.3 metric tonnes per hectare by 2022. On the other hand, rice, he said, increased from 2.9 metric tonnes to 4.5 metric tonnes per hectare during the same period. The Western Regional Minister, Kwabena Okyere Darko Mensah, said when it came to agriculture, the region was the best. Nana Sakyi, for his part, commended farmers for their hard work towards providing food for the citizenry. The Vice-Chancellor of UMaT, Prof. Richard Amankwah, said the university worked on technology to support agriculture. by Akim Reinhardt I teach at a large, public university in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. For about a decade now, the upper administration has had a habit of sending comforting emails whenever theres a major school shooting. Of course there are far too many school shootings in America to send a note for each one, so I suppose the administration tries to keep it relevant, for lack of a better word. These heartfelt missives arrive in my Inbox once or twice a year, typically after some lunatic shoots up a college campus. So far as I can tell, they go to everyone. To every faculty member, staff member, and student on campus. To 25,000 people or more. These emails were introduced by our previous university president, who wore her concern like a badge. She departed last spring for a seven-figure salary at another school. When an email arrived following the Hamas attack on Israel last month, we were still between presidents. That letter included a group sign-off from the interim president, the interim provost, the vice president of student affairs, and the vice president for institutional inclusion and equity. Then came an email from the dean of my college, followed by yet another email from the interim president, this one signed only by her. In all, I received three letters in less than a week. So much caring. So much concern. To say that emails of this nature infuriate me would be an overstatement. They dont actually make me angry, which Im sure my therapist will be happy to hear. However, I do find them to be mildly exhausting and rather annoying. They instill a sense of umbrage. Figuring out how to talk to family and friends about this stuff takes enough energy. Now my bosses have to insert themselves into the conversation too? Perhaps the phrase that best sums up my reaction to receiving such emails over the last several years is: How dare you. There is a degree of presumptuousness baked into these emails that I find astonishing. To believe that tens of thousands of strangers would want your unsolicited thoughts and support concerning a far-off tragic event just because youre a top level bureaucrat? Come on now. The most recent emails were step even beyond that. Comforting notes from strangers concerning a war taking place across an ocean, on a different continent, and that this nation is not sending soldiers to fight in? That assumption might reveal a sociopathic level of narcissism if it were genuine. But of course these emails are probably just the byproduct of adhering to whatever color-by-numbers managerial manual all the American college presidents seem to read and follow these days. I imagine that shockingly high paid consultants insist that such emails enhance the schools leadership; in reality, they publicly degrade it. Simply put, I (and many people I speak to) dont find most of the the emails to be genuine. And because they dont seem genuine, they come off, at least to me, as sad, unintentional parody. And thats probably for the best, because if I did think a university presidents motivations for sending such emails were genuine, Id find myself wondering what kind of megalomaniac is in charge of our school. One reason the emails dont seem genuine is the cherry picking. The kindhearted cousin of selective outrage is selective mourning, pity, and condolences. The truth is, bad shit happens all the time, all over America and around the world. But apparently only some of that shit is worthy of these unsolicited, over the top emails. Here in the city of Baltimore, where Ive lived since 2001, about 300 people are murdered every year. I repeat: Every fucking year. And my school, located just beyond the city line, has far more students, faculty, and staff from Baltimore than we do from the Middle East. Factorially more. But never a peep about any of that. Those thousands whove been shot and stabbed to death a few scant miles from campus in the years Ive been working there? Nothing. But a school shooting in Iowa or yet another war in the Middle East? These administrators cant stop telling us how much they care about it and care about us and demand that we all come together, whatever that means at an institution with over 25,000 people. One of those recent emails about the latest Middle East war included a reminder that our community is resilient. As if the school itself had suffered some unspeakable tragedy. Truly, the dissonance created by reactions to what happens six miles away and six thousand miles away is head-spinning if you stop to recognize it. For the record, compliance with a federal law called the Clery Act (1990) requires most colleges to track crimes on and near their campuses, and to disclose them in an annual report. Perhaps driven by a better-safe-than-sorry attitude, some schools, including mine, go beyond annual reporting and send occasional mass emails about stolen laptops, vandalism, dorm scuffles, reports of shady characters, and the occasional car jacking. The serious tragedies half-a-continent or a world away? Emails. The everyday crime in our backyard? Emails. Lethal tragedies just down the road occurring on a near-daily basis? Virtually nothing. The Clery Act reporting emails are easy enough to avoid. I began marking them as Junk, and for quite a while now, theyve gone straight to my Spam folder. Done and done. But the saintly meditations ripped from todays national and international headlines? Those typically come directly from the president or from University Communications, a source of wide-ranging and sometimes important information. As an employee, I cant afford to blackball either of those sources. So Im stuck receiving these emails, and that leads me to consider what this means for labor relations. Dear University President: I am not a friend, a relative, or a fellow parishioner. I am a worker. An employee, your subordinate who gets paid to perform tasks, and whom you can fire for cause (Heres hoping that me publicly whining about your emails doesnt constitute cause.) Yet here I am, being subjected to personal condolences from my boss(es) on matters that do not personally affect me, and in which my place of work is not directly involved. Furthermore, as a subordinate state employee at a public university, your emails are the VOICE OF THE STATE, and now the VOICE OF THE STATE is implying how I should feel about the news of the day. That seems wildly inappropriate to me. And whats more, in these emails the VOICE OF THE STATE usually suggests that maybe I should get counseling to help deal with the tragedy du jour. Holy shit. Seriously? Boundaries, people! In an effort to establish clear lines for a professional relationship, I did respond to one of these emails last year. I politely explained that I understood how some people might actually find these emails comforting, but for a variety of professional reasons, which I listed, I found them anything but, and that I did not want to receive anymore of them in the future. I never heard back. I assume my email went unread. But I still get theirs. For the record, let me say that I actually like many of the college administrators Im speaking about. And Im not just saying that so my bosses wont hate me should they end up reading this essay. College professors like to make sport of whining about administrators, and often its warranted. But in my case, I think our interim president was (we now have a brand new permanent president) a swell person. I was more cynical about the last permanent president, who started this tradition of sending unwanted Gloria Gaynor-style We Will Survive emails to everyone on campus, and whose own reputation was fairly tarnished by the time she hightailed it out of here for a massive cash-in elsewhere. But based on our brief encounters and her general approach to doing things, I like the recent interim president quite a bit. And the dean and the rest of them. Which is to say, none of what Ive written here is personal. Indeed, my entire point is that I dont want any of what transpires between us at work to be personal. I dont think our top university administrators are bad people, or even bad administrators; I just want them to stop sending me bloated Hallmark sympathy cards about national or world news events. If there were ever a time to stop sending them, this would be it. One of those three emails about the Middle East included a soft command that we should all come together as a community in this most difficult time with minds that are open to hear the feelings of our colleagues and classmates, with understanding of our collective differences and our similarities, and join in a unified stance that we must all advocate for one another and for peace. I must say, the naivete of imploring everyone to come together over the most recent war in the Middle East was almost charming. Almost. Since then, of course, the notion of us all coming together over an Arab-Israeli war has gone from laughable to explosive. Israel has predictably responded to Hamas war crimes with its own war crimes. The world is now divided over which is worse, anti-semitism or Islamophobia, murdering and kidnaping babies or bombing hospitals. I assume that college administrators around the country who sent similar kumbaya come-together emails in the early days of this horrific and wretched war now regret it. Good. Turnaround is fair play. Ive regretted receiving such letters ever since they first began arriving about a decade ago. Let us be done with them once and for all. Let us stop pretending that a huge school with a transient adult student population is a community; that we all come together on much of anything; or that headlines announcing distant tragedies lead us to crave soothing and support from top level bureaucrats the great majority of over 25,000 students and employees have never met. Let us be adults. Let us be professional. And leave us to manage our own reactions to the worlds horrors as we deem fit, in our personal lives, and without your unsolicited and frankly inappropriate guidance. Akim Reinhardts website is ThePublicProfessor.com Afriwave Telecom renovates Teshie orphanage library Daily Graphic Dec - 04 - 2023 , 10:57 The Afriwave Telecom Ghana Limited has refurbished the library of the Teshie orphanage to a modern standard. The company refurbished the homes library and resourced it with a thousand space bookshelves, six desktop computers with one year internet subscription. Teshie Orphanage is a private organisation (non- governmental) which provides shelter and homely atmosphere for orphans and vulnerable children within the Teshie community and managed through the assistance of individuals and organisations to educate and care for these children to equip them to face the challenges of the outside world. The Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Afriwave Telecom, Francis Poku, explained that the refurbishment of the library was part of Afriwaves initiative at making a sustainable impact on the lives of these children, who needed it most. He reiterated that when we (Afriwave) provide support of any kind, our focus is to look at how sustainable and impactful the support is; there is no better way of ensuring the sustainability of an initiative than to invest in the education of our future leaders, he added. Afriwave He revealed that Afriwave Telecom will soon launch its SMS platform which would create a single point for all Value-Added Service (VAS) providers to gain access to the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) from one place. Throwing more light on the SMS platform, Mr Poku said, Afriwaves SMS platform would help expand the communications need of every customer that route through the ICH. He further noted that the SMS platform would not only expand the communications need of customers but would also experience seamless messaging and transparency in billing which would enable the customer to stay in control of cost and make an informed decision. He urged VAS providers, banks, corporate organisations, and the telecom industry players to take advantage of the platform for their messaging needs. Currently, the ICH is fully connected to all the telecommunication providers in Ghana, and already carrying all interconnect voice traffic in the country. Children Mr Poku urged the orphanage to continue to nurture these young children to restore the confidence they needed as children to grow into better adults. Mr and Mrs Parker, founders of the home, thanked Afriwave for their generosity at such a crucial time of the year. They further expressed her gratitude to the entire management and staff for nominating the Home to be recognized in such a manner. Church will continue to speak against looters of national coffers Presby Moderator Chris Nunoo Dec - 04 - 2023 , 06:50 The Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, Rt Rev. Dr Abraham Nana Opare Kwakye, has said he would wage a relentless crusade against the tendency of fellow citizens to loot the national coffers. He said the church would not relent in speaking against any such acts, no matter who was in the leadership of the country. The tendency of some of our fellow citizens looting the national coffers is a matter of great public concern and we shall not relent in speaking against any such acts, no matter who is in the leadership of our dear country. As a leader of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (PCG), I will lead the church to proclaim its prophetic voice on national and global matters, he assured. Induction service In his first address at an induction service held at the Ebenezer Congregation of the church at Osu in Accra yesterday, Rt Rev. Kwakye pointed out that the resources of the nation were meant for the entire nation and, therefore, had to be shared equitably to the benefit of all. He also described as a security concern rising unemployment and hopelessness in the country due to the economic crisis and gave an assurance that the church would not relent in its efforts to demand accountability. Rt Rev. Kwakye, visibly poised for action, also touched on the continued devastation of the environment through illegal mining (galamsey) and filth, and said that was a matter that we must all deal with. He called on the church to let the world know that a new dawn had come and urged them to stand together, irrespective of the varied ideological and political differences to build a just community and a prosperous nation. Profile Until the General Assembly of PCG elected him as Moderator on August 17, this year, Rt Rev. Kwakye was the Chairman of the Ga Presbytery. He takes over from Very Rev. Professor Joseph Obiri Yeboah Mante, who ended his tenure last Thursday. The Moderator received 220 Yes endorsement as against six No by the General Assembly. Rev. Dr Seth Kissi who received 54 nominations, and Rev. Dr Kwabena Opuni-Frimpong who also received 22, withdrew in support of Rev. Dr Kwakye who obtained 119 nominations to head for the endorsement alone. Coming into office as the 19th Moderator of the General Assembly of the PCG, Rt Rev. Kwakye who is an old student of Tema Secondary School, was commissioned by the Presbyterian Church of Ghana into ministry in 1997 at Kaneshie and ordained in 1999 at Odumase Krobo. After his probation at the La Bethel Presby Church in 1997, he was posted to the Christ Congregation, Adentan in 1999 as the Minister in Charge and later to the Calvary Congregation, Haatso. He assumed appointment as a Lecturer at the Department for the Study of Religions, University of Ghana, Legon in January 2014, and was promoted to the rank of Senior Lecturer in February 2020. Will of God While he acknowledged that the responsibility to lead was a herculean one, Rt Rev. Dr Kwakye gave an assurance that he would seek to know the will of God only, and to serve God diligently with all his heart. In that regard, he asked for the continuous prayers of all every day for a fresh anointing and the strength to do his work. Rt Rev. Dr Kwakye also expressed his sincere appreciation and gratitude to his late parents and all who contributed in diverse ways to his life, academic and priesthood journey. Sermon In a sermon, a former Moderator of the General Assembly of the PCG, Very Rev. Professor Emmanuel Martey, advised the Moderator to be a leader according to the Spirit and not the flesh. He also advised the new leader to be after the order of the Holy Spirit. Very Rev. Prof. Martey said a leader of the church ought to take holiness and the Holy Spirit seriously and asked the Moderator to keep on asking, seeking and knocking during his stewardship while he remained in constant communion with the Lord. Quoting from St Augustine of Hippo and Isaiah 63 verse 10, the former Moderator said the church had a mixture of both good and bad people. He, therefore, charged the new Moderator to be revitalised according to the Spirit. Religious freedom The Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, who graced the occasion, assured the church and Ghanaians of the commitment of the government to uphold religious freedom and fostering an environment where all faiths could thrive. Dr Bawumia said the occasion underscored the harmonious relationship between the State and the diverse religious bodies, adding that the government recognised the pivotal role that faith played in shaping the moral fabric of the nation. He said the church had through its various community outreach programmes exemplified the values and expressed gratitude to the PCG for its recent support to the victims of the dam spillage. Cyberteq earns triple awards Daily Graphic Dec - 04 - 2023 , 09:08 A cybersecurity firm in Ghana, Cyberteq Falcon Limited, on one night, won multiple cybersecurity awards at different awards ceremonies held concurrently at different venues. The firm picked awards at the Africa Digital Economy Awards (ADEA), the National Communications Awards (NCA), which took place at the Underbridge Events Centre in Accra, and the Ghana Corporate and Excellence Awards (GCE Awards) held at the Movenpick Hotel. The ADEA awards held in Nairobi, Kenya, were keenly contested by reputable cybersecurity companies around Africa. Awards The awards included Best Cybersecurity Consulting Company in Africa (ADEA), Innovative Cybersecurity Company of the Year (NCA Awards) and Consulting Cybersecurity Company of the Year (GCE Awards). The rest were Hall of Fame 2023 (NCA) and a Cybersecurity Leadership Award (NCA) that was presented to the companys Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Ben Tagoe, for his contributions towards the promotion of cybersecurity in Ghana. The NCA award, in particular, marks the third consecutive year that Cyberteq has emerged victorious, while the ADEA and GCE recognitions were the first for the company. Mr Tagoe expressed his immense gratitude for the collective achievements and attributed the success to the unwavering dedication of the Cyberteq staff and collaborative partnerships. He also commended their esteemed clientele for their continued trust and support, acknowledging their pivotal role in Cyberteq's growth and success. "We are truly honoured to be recognised as Africa's premier cybersecurity consulting company. This award is a testament to the collective efforts of our team and the resilience of our partnerships. Heartfelt appreciation to our clients for their unwavering trust. These milestones galvanise us further as we continue to raise Ghanas flag high on Africa's digital landscape," the Cyberteq CEO said. Cybersecurity Mr Tagoe cautioned against the heightened susceptibility to cyber threats, especially during the approaching Yuletide, emphasising the need for businesses to prioritise cybersecurity investments. He also advised individuals to exercise caution in their online engagements. "We stand at a critical juncture where economic dynamics could increase cyber risks, particularly during festive periods. Businesses must fortify their cybersecurity measures. Individuals, too, need to exercise vigilance in their online interactions," Mr Tagoe advised. a Gaming Commission supports dams spillage flood victims Diana Mensah Dec - 04 - 2023 , 06:36 The Gaming Commission of Ghana has presented relief items worth GH 40,000 to the North Tongu District Assembly to alleviate suffering and provide hope for those displaced by the Akosombo and Kpong dams spillage. The items included 100 bags of rice, two bale of Mosquito Nets, 20 packs of Drinks, 10 Boxes of Biscuits, seven boxes of soap, 100 pairs of slippers and 10 pieces of Solar Panels to be distributed to the victims many of whom are still displaced. Victims The month-old flood, which commenced on September 15, 2023, by the Volta River Authority (VRA), occasioned by the overflow of water from the two dams, has submerged several homes and farmlands, displacing over 35,000 people. Tour The delegation from the Commission, led by the Director of Finance and Administration, Sena Dake, visited some of the devastated areas at Mepe and a visit to the Chief of Mepe. Presently, the majority of the displaced people are housed in classroom facilities within the Mepe area that have been spared of the flood waters. A number of schools have also been submerged, leaving nearly 10,000 children out of school. At the St Kizito Catholic Senior Technical School at Mepe, about 1,500 of the displaced people are being housed. At the Chief Palace of Mepe, the Amankralo of Mepe Traditional Area ,Togbe Korsi Nego IV, in giving details on the extent of the devastation of the community, said over 1200 homes were submerged, leaving houses collapsed and all farms flooded. He informed the delegation that the communitys water bodies were contaminated because the floods took over public toilets, cemeteries and refuse dumps, making the water unsafe for consumption. He thanked all groups who came to their aid, he, however, expressed worry about the rains in the upcoming months. Social Responsibility Presenting the items to the North Tongu District Assembly for onward distribution to the victims, the Director of Finance and Administration of the Gaming Commission of Ghana, Sena Dake, said the urgency of the situation had required them to come together to support those who were affected by the spillage. As a company that operates in the area, she said the commission was socially responsible to reach out and provide humanitarian assistance to the affected communities saying, we want to put smiles on the faces of the victims and support them to bounce back stronger. She, therefore, expressed the hope that the other communities would quickly get back to normalcy and the children could also go to school. Mrs Dake extended her sympathies to the families who had been impacted by the floods and expressed the hope that the donation would help support, as well as bring comfort and relief to the affected families. Germany commits 145.9m to support Ghana Kester Aburam Korankye Dec - 04 - 2023 , 06:24 Ghana and Germany have signed an agreement on bilateral cooperation at the end of bilateral discussions in Berlin. The agreement focuses on climate and energy, good governance and sustainable economic development, with Germany committing 145.9 million to help address pressing issues in these areas. Ghana's social protection policies under the Post Covid-19 Programme for Economic Growth (PC-PEG) were also praised by Germany as a critical intervention that would help protect the poor and vulnerable. The Ghanaian delegation, including Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, who also signed the agreement on behalf of Ghana, and Ghanas Ambassador to Germany, Gina Blay, were in Berlin to attend the 2023 G20 Compact with Africa conference. Other members of the delegation were O. B. Amoah, Gifty Twum-Ampofo and a Deputy Minister of Energy, Andrew Agyapa Mercer. The delegation also completed the annual bilateral negotiations with Germany and engaged with the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, on Ghana's IMF Programme during a working lunch for Africa Finance Ministers and representatives of international institutions at the conference. The German Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, Svenja Schulze, signed on behalf of his country. Strengthened ties The Minister of Finance said the strides made had paved the way for a future marked by strengthened economic ties, innovation and inclusive growth. We appreciate all the financial and non-financial commitments made towards the various sectors, including support to Ghanas Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) which is aimed at supporting the private sector to invest in green energy and greening of businesses, Mr Ofori-Atta said. He thanked the German government for the amount committed towards social protection. The emphasis placed on bolstering social protection initiatives demonstrated a collective responsibility toward the welfare of our citizens, fostering an environment of inclusivity and support for the most vulnerable segments of society, the Finance Minister added. Other areas for support Mr Ofori-Atta also touched on the allocation to the District Assemblies Common Fund-Responsiveness Factor Grant (DACF-RFG) which he said underscored both countries joint commitment to local development, ensuring that resources reached the citizenry in local communities across Ghana to accelerate growth at the sub-national level. Furthermore, he said, strides made in the energy sector highlighted the recognition of the sectors pivotal role in driving sustainable economic progress. The collaborative efforts to advance renewable energy infrastructure, including our 10,000 gigawatts (GW) solar programme and innovation align perfectly with our shared goals for a greener and more resilient future, Mr Ofori-Atta pointed out at the signing ceremony. TVET The minister did not mince words, thanking the German government for the support and collaboration in strengthening Ghana's technical, vocational education and training (TVET), particularly in the areas of skills development, curriculum enhancement as well as infrastructure and equipment. The German partnership on TVET also covers industry partnership through the formal training of craft persons and strengthening connections between TVET institutions and industries, which both countries see as essential for ensuring that graduates are job-ready. High Court orders removal of VC, Registrar of C.K. Tedam University Gilbert Mawuli Agbey Dec - 04 - 2023 , 05:30 The Bolgatanga High Court has ordered the removal of two principal officers of the C.K. Tedam University of Technology and Applied Sciences in Navrongo for being in office despite reaching the compulsory retirement age of 60. They are the Vice-Chancellor (VC), Professor Eric Magnus Wilmot, and the Registrar of the university, Dr Vincent A. Ankamah Lomotey. On March 20, this year, the plaintiff, Joseph Pwoawuvi Weguri, filed a joint case against the university, the Attorney-General, Prof. Wilmot and Dr Lomotey as first, second, third and fourth defendants. He wanted a declaration that the purported appointment of the third and fourth defendants as VC and Registrar by the first defendant was null and void. It also sought an order compelling the two officers to refund all sums of money, including salaries and allowances they received during the period of nullity. The plaintiff also asked for cost to be awarded against the defendants, including legal fees of the plaintiff. Professor Eric Magnus Wilmot Ruling The court, presided over by Justice Charles Adjei Wilson, in a ruling said the third and fourth defendants did not fall under Article 70 office holders and that the only basis on which a public officer of tertiary institution could continue in office after he or she had attained retirement age was by virtue of a contractual employment. The court said in this case as far as this court was able to ascertain, no contract was sought nor obtained by the two defendants for the grant of extension of time to remain in office beyond the retirement age. The judge in his consequential ruling ordered a perpetual injunction restraining the third and fourth defendants from holding themselves out as VC and Registrar of the university and further prohibited them from taking any steps to perform any duties and functions on their post forthwith. Subsequently, the universitys governing council shall nominate or appoint an interim management board pending the appointment of a new VC and a registrar to replace them. Dr Vincent A. Ankamah Lomotey Background In December 2020, the university appointed the third and fourth defendants for a full term of four years after the two had retired from public service. The two officers attained compulsory retirement age of 60 years in April 2022 and August 2021 respectively, but they remained in office. Statement of claim In his statement of claim, he contended that the public service laws of Ghana, especially Article 199 of the 1992 Constitution as amended by Act 527, required public officers to retire from full-term service at the age of 60. The plaintiff said the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission and the Ministry of Finance cautioned public universities, including first defendant, on appointment and post-retirement contracts in a circular dated June 8, 2021 and a written directive issued by the minister. He argued that before the appointment of the third defendant as the VC who had retired as a public officer at the University of Cape Coast in 2019 by the university (first defendant), he was first appointed as an interim VC. He said the continuous occupation of office and drawing of salaries and allowance from the consolidated fund by the third and fourth defendants as public officers in full employment after retiring from office was not only unlawful but illegal. The plaintiff contended further that first and second defendants acted in an unlawful, arbitrary and capricious manner by giving full-term employment to the third and fourth defendants and said: I petitioned the Minister of Education and the university for the removal of the two and the governing council was directed to consider the petition. However, he noted that on January 12, 2023, the governing council issued an unfavourable determination of the petition stating that the VC and the Registrar were appointed in accordance with the law. Defendants arguments Counsel for the defendants, Louisa Babilah, an Assistant State Attorney, stated that though Act 1,000 mandated the university to appoint its officers, including VC and Registrar, the provision in the universitys statute referenced by the plaintiff did not apply to the appointment of foundation VC and Registrar. She argued that the interim appointment of the third and fourth defendants in April 2020 was converted by the universitys council to full-term appointment on December 1, 2020. New appointment Meanwhile, following the court ruling, the governing council at an emergency meeting on November 28, 2023, has appointed the Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Samson Abah Abagale, as acting Vice-Chancellor, and the Deputy Registrar, Gilbert Ansoglenang, as acting Registrar. The council has initiated processes for the appointment of a substantive VC and a Registrar. High-profile personalities arrive for Peacekeeping meeting Vincent Amenuveve Dec - 04 - 2023 , 05:59 More than 600 dignitaries and high-profile personalities from about 100 countries across the globe are arriving in Accra today to participate in the first United Nations Peacekeeping Ministerial Meeting to be hosted on the African continent. The Minister of Defence, Dominic Nitiwul, who disclosed this at a press briefing in Accra yesterday, said the two-day event scheduled to take place at the Accra International Conference Centre (AICC) would begin tomorrow and end on Wednesday, December 6, this year. He stated that tomorrow there would be a welcome reception at 12:30 p.m. at the AICC with two side meetings on "Women in peacekeeping" and "Environmental aspects of peacekeeping". The side meetings would be jointly organised by Sweden and the United States respectively. Event, dignitaries The event is expected to be attended by personalities such as the Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations, Jean-Pierre Lacroix; Foreign and Defence Ministers, Heads of International Organisations, Academia, Social Partners, civil society organisations and journalists. They are expected to enhance the impact of the current peacekeeping operations of the UN. The participants will be joined by several key players in the peacekeeping domain, including heads of relevant international organisations. The Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, is expected to address the main conference on Wednesday, December 6, 2023. Expectation, agenda Briefing the media further on the high-level event on the UN calendar, Mr Nitiwul said the expectation for this year's conference was even higher for two reasons: firstly, it is the first time Africa is hosting the conference and secondly, the conference is being convened at a time of increased calls for Peacekeeping Operations programmes to rapidly evolve. He said the meeting would focus its attention on thematic issues identified by Ghana for the meeting, including the issues of Women in Peacekeeping, which had become a topical issue in peacekeeping operations in recent years, given the demonstrable impact of the inclusion of women in peace processes. As a country which has exceeded UN targets on the inclusion of women in peacekeeping operation programmes, Ghana is proud to instigate further discussion on the issue, Mr Nitiwul who is also the Member of Parliament for Bimbilla, further stated. The Defence Minister said in line with the UN's Action for Peacekeeping, the conference would also discuss existing efforts to improve the Mission's capacity to protect civilians in their areas of responsibility, safeguard the mental health of peacekeepers as well as the safety and security of the gallant men and women who made sacrifices in pursuit of world peace. The conference, he explained, would further address the issues of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech targeting peacekeeping missions, which often fueled discontent for peacekeeping operations. Bilateral meetings Mr Nitiwul said three panel sessions would be convened on five themes that Ghana selected. They included women in peacekeeping, protection of civilians, mental health of peacekeepers, safety and security of peacekeepers and strategic communications in peacekeeping. The event, he further observed, would generally showcase a digital exhibition of Africa's role in the UN Peacekeeping Enterprise, the Elsie Initiative, with a number of bilateral meetings to be held in rooms at the AICC that had been earmarked and put in shape for that purpose. Ghanas input The Defence Minister stated that the choice of themes for the event was informed largely by the wealth of experience of our uniformed personnel, who, for decades, have been at the forefront of UN Peacekeeping. The press briefing was also addressed by a Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration in charge of Political and Economic Matters, Kwaku Ampratwum-Sarpong, and the Minister of Information, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah. Lakeside Estate sweeps 5 awards at 35th GREDA Anniversary Mary Mensah Dec - 04 - 2023 , 08:01 Lakeside Estate, the leading real estate developer in the country, has won five awards at the 35th Ghana Real Estate Developers Association (GREDA) anniversary dinner and awards night. The association also conferred the posthumous award of Housing Personality of the Year on the late Mr Torgbor Mensah for his outstanding role in the development of the Association. It was on the theme: 35 years of Successful Housing Through Stakeholder Collaboration. Early this year Lakeside Estate was adjudged the real estate marketing company of the year 2022 by the Chartered Institute of Marketing Ghana (CIMG) at its 33rd Annual National Marketing Performance Awards, bringing the number of awards won by the company to two as in 2019. The Five awards The five awards Lakeside won at the GREDA event were the Overall Real Estate Company of the Year, Best in High-End Community Set-up, Best in Middle-End Residential, Gated Community Middle End and Green Award. Speaking to the Daily Graphic on the sidelines of the awards ceremony at the Alisa Hotel in Accra, the Managing Director of Lakeside Estates, Dr Prince-Joseph Ayiku, indicated that the awards were a testament to the collective dedication and passion of every member of the Lakeside team and the trust placed in them by its cherished residents and partners. The past 25 years He said Lakeside Estate had for the past 25 years developed luxurious gated communities in the Adenta Municipality by providing quality housing units that were environmentally friendly while giving shareholders value. I cannot completely express the sentiments of my fellow awardees; but there is a common denominator that runs through every awardee. That is the gratitude that we have been acknowledged and appreciated for our contributions towards the bridging of the housing deficit in Ghana. Dr Ayiku expressed his deepest appreciation to the Ghana Real Estates Company for the honour, saying, To be acknowledged in the company of such esteemed developers is truly humbling. Vibrant real estate landscape Again, he said the acknowledgement was not only for Lakeside Estate but a celebration of the vibrant real estate landscape in Ghana, and we are proud to be a part of it. The journey of Lakeside has been one of commitment to excellence, innovation and community building and attributed it to the vision which has enabled Lakeside to redefine living spaces and just not to create houses but homes and vibrant communities. He continued extending thanks to all the members of Lakeside Family. I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to every member of the Lakeside family, from our dedicated staff to our residents who have entrusted us with their dreams. It is your belief in our vision that propels us forward. Each award is a shared victory, reflecting the passion and hard work of every individual contributing to Lakeside's success. Acknowledgement For all of us who received acknowledgement this evening, we are conscious of the responsibility that comes with these accolades. They serve as a reminder that our mission is not just to build houses but to craft lifestyles, to create spaces that foster growth, connection, security and happiness. Dr. Ayiku concluded with a quote by Colin Powell which states '"there are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure." With over 25 years' of experience in the real estate industry in Ghana. Lakeside Estate has earned a reputation for excellence in the production of quality houses for its customers. It has become the preferred Residential developer for many Ghanaians and those in the Diaspora. Latex Foam supports Greater Accra Farmers Day celebration Daily Graphic Dec - 04 - 2023 , 10:39 Foam manufacturer, Latex Foam, has celebrated Ghanaian farmers and fishers for their steadfastness, saying they are a core reason for the country's efforts towards economic prosperity. It said without farmers, there was no way the country would think of economic development as they were the backbone of the economy. The Public Relations Officer of the company, Gifty E. Appiah, made the remark last Friday when Latex Foam donated foam materials, including mattresses worth over GH35,000 towards the Greater Accra Regional Farmers Day celebration. She said Latex Foam felt obliged to contribute towards "honouring hardworking farmers and fishers in the region" because of the values of resilience and fortitude that the company shared with farmers and fishers. Zeal Mrs Appiah said as the providers of the nation's food supplies, farmers and fishers continued to "demonstrate remarkable zeal, ensuring the sustenance of the system with the unending cycle of production year in, year out". She said it was for such reasons that Latex Foam had supported the Farmers Day celebration over the years, pledging that the company would continue to support the effort to honour the "outstanding works of farmers and fishers" in the years ahead. Support Receiving the items, the Chief Director of the Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council, Lilian Baeka, expressed gratitude to Latex Foam for the gesture. She commended Latex Foam for its continuous support and partnership to honour and celebrate the nations hardworking farmers and fishermen whose efforts contribute immensely in helping the country to be self-sufficient in food production. Mrs Baeka further commended the company for being one of the "solid support systems of the region over the years", stressing that the Farmers Day celebration in the region had been sustained by the benevolence of the company and other donors. Nuclear Energy Agency mentors SHS girls in STEM Yaa Kuffour Senyah Dec - 04 - 2023 , 08:11 Female scientists and policymakers from Ghana and overseas have mentored 46 senior high school (SHS) girls selected from 17 public and three private schools across seven regions. The two-day international mentorship workshop was to encourage SHS girls to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Paris-based international organisation, the Nuclear Agency (NEA), organised the workshop, its first in sub-Saharan Africa and the 21 in the world. Nuclear Power Institute of the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission (GAEC) provided assistance for the workshop on the theme, "Inspiring young females in STEM careers for a better tomorrow". The Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Nuclear Energy Policy and Cooperation of the U.S. Department of Energy, Aleshia Duncan, stated that the workshop was to help address the under-representation of women in the field of STEM, especially in the nuclear energy sector, and to enhance female leadership and visibility in the sector. She urged the girls to be bold and committed to their goals and endeavour to accomplish them. Be strong, make bold choices for your life, and accomplish the task at hand. Say yes to opportunities and embrace the challenges that may come your way. Giving up is not an option, she said. Ms Duncan, who is also the Chairperson for the International Framework for Nuclear Energy Cooperation (IFNEC), encouraged them to be change agents and to lead the transformation agenda for a better society. The world needs people like you to develop advanced nuclear reactors and innovate other technologies to help solve societal problems, she added. Counselling The Director-General of GAEC, Prof. Samuel Boakye Dampare, underscored the need for an inclusive and equitable education that required creating a welcoming learning environment, particularly for girls, and encouraging them to pursue all academic disciplines, even those perceived as difficult, such as STEM. An effective career counselling system, staffed by well-trained professionals, is crucial for students, particularly girls, to overcome fears and gain confidence for success in STEM fields, he stated. Prof. Dampare charged the girls to become Maria Salomea Skodowska-Curie, the first female chemist to win the Nobel Prize in 1903 and the only one to win it twice for her groundbreaking studies on radioactivity that shaped the very foundations and concepts of nuclear science. Back home, we can talk of Prof. Jane Naana Opoku Agyeman, a professor of literature; Prof. Rita Akosua Dickson, a phytochemist; and Prof. Nana Aba Appiah Amfo, who were or are the first female Vice-Chancellors of leading universities in Ghana, he said. You can achieve anything in life once you are dedicated to your studies, work hard, persevere, focus, and are diligent. Also, make good use of the limited resources available and aim to give it your best shot, Prof. Dampare added. The Director-General of NEA, William D. Magwood IV, has also said that about three billion people would be living in Africa in 2050. As a result, it was crucial and incumbent that Africa be part of the industrial future, which is the only way to have highly trained people, including women. Among these highly trained people, we are going to have women play a very strong role. This mentorship workshop, thus, is planting seeds for the future. It aims to cultivate women's future roles in fields like energy, engineering, healthcare, and other fields where nuclear technology is important. If you believe in the future, you have to believe in programs like this because these girls are the future, he explained. My message to women is that they should follow their hearts, dreams, and talents, and maximise their skills to make the world a better place, as not doing so cheats both themselves and the world, Mr Magwood added. by Terese Svoboda The year 1909 was the first time George H. Cove vanished. He claimed he was kidnapped and threatened with death if he continued developing his patent on solar panels. One story has it that an investor arranged the kidnapping to discredit him, and that instead of death, he was offered a furnished house and $25,000 (almost a million dollars in todays money) if he would cease promotion of his solar panels. Newspapers went crazy and he was subsequently accused of arranging the kidnapping as a publicity stunt. But Cove already had plenty of publicity, one would say too much, newspapers lauding his efforts and investors pouring money into his work. The police dismissed the kidnapping as a hoax. Were they paid off? His rivals, Edison, Westinghouse, and Standard Oil, were notorious in stamping out competition. All three were known to use extreme measures to protect their market share. Cove had been fronted (framed?) by Elmer Burlingame, who issued stock he did not own in Coves Sun Electric Generator Company. When this was revealed, investors went sour. In 1911, after raising $160 million in todays money, his company declared bankruptcy. Cove was arrested for stock fraud and went to jail for a year. Perhaps he should have gone into stealth mode. Given two days sun, it will store sufficient electrical energy to light an ordinary house for a week was Coves pitch.While his solar panels didnt generate much electricity in comparison with Westinghouse and Edisons inventions, hed invented something much more important, the photovoltaic generator, that is, a way to get electricity directly from the sun. He did not understand how the solar panel worked, but neither did anybody else at the time. This technology would not be investigated again until the 1950s at Bell Labs, and then with silicon rather than the simpler version that Cove stumbled on. Son of a Canadian tinkerer who held a patent for a clothes dryer in 1870, George was just as enthusiastic as his father about inventing. When he was 25, he went temporarily blind working on a patent for a piano that will reproduce any music ever played by turning on an electric current no matter how many years elapsed since the original playing, but he was primarily interested in alternative energy. In 1906 the Canadian government awarded him a gold medal for his plan for harnessing the tides of the Bay of Fundy. He built his first solar electric generator in 1904-05 and a few years later placed a model in the Metropole Building in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Savvy enough to send a description of the device to American investors, he moved to Somerville, Massachusetts on their money and opened his own lab. He quickly moved to a lab near Wall Street, the neighborhood of the many other energy startups of the period. It was in October 1909, the same year he patented his invention, moved to Massachusetts and New York City and issued stock, when he was allegedly kidnapped. Twenty years earlier, Edison stopped the development of the thermo-electrical generator by buying the company and stopping all research. Widespread use of the Coves solar electric generator might well have reduced growing demand for Edisons coal and oil-fired generating stations. With regard to his closest competitor Westinghouse, Edison alleged that the alternating current was unsafe and proposed the slanderous term Westinghousing for public execution by AC current. And of course, there was discouraging Tesla, the disruptive genius of the 20th century. Edison promised him $50,000 if hed solve his DC problems. When Tesla returned with the solution, Edison reneged. George Westinghouse gave Tesla a generous contract to solve his AC problems. Though good to his employees, Westinghouse had his own problems with Edisons industrial espionage. In the struggle between Edison and Westinghouse to harness the power of Niagara Falls, Westinghouse blueprints found their way to GE. The third player, Standard Oil, was so ruthless that its behavior was the reason behind the passage of Americas first anti-trust laws. Cove disappeared a second time after his year in jail. There is no mention of him, not even a death certificate, following his sentencing, except for a 1920 patent filing with his brother for a musical instrument. Hed returned to his earlier enthusiasm, perhaps the one that nearly made him blind. The third time Cove vanished was in 2021. He seemed to have been literally erased from his own invention when an 1884 postcard showing a rooftop solar panel was published in the Smithsonian magazine and attributed to another inventor, Charles Fritts,who made the first selenium cell. In Untangling the Mystery of the Worlds First Rooftop Solar Panel, online investigator Foeke Postma used geolocation and extensive research to show another nearly identical photo with Cove, not Fritts, posed behind the array on a Maiden Lane rooftop in downtown NYC. Another angle shows him again on the same rooftop in 1910. Postma concluded that Cove had not been photoshopped out but that a third postcard image existed without Cove and it had been misattributed to Fritts. Although Fritts worked in a lab not far from Coves, Postma pointed out that his rooftop view had to be completely different.[1] Everybody knows that the amount of the natural power that is going to waste every day is inconceivable, predicted Cove. His rooftop solar panel was not only revolutionary for its time, its still revolutionary now. Bell Labs selenium cell is expensive to produce both energy-wise and financially. Coves photovoltaic cell produced more energy with much less energy input. As Kris De Decker wrote in Low-Tech Magazine: If you were to build the cells exactly the way Cove did by press-fitting the caps and then overwrapping them with wire to try to keep them tight, they would also be easier to recycle, being strictly a mechanical operation, no chemicals need to be involved. It would be labor-intensive to put them together and take them apart again, but it could be automated, too.[2] Marxists would say that technologies are promoted if they increase the wealth and power of the mighty, and are suppressed if they dont. The fossil fuel industry promoted themselves and discouraged any other power source. The moral of the story, aside from capitalisms destructive ways, is that far too often what inventors come up with is discarded because something else makes more money. This can be very discouraging. The mind of an inventor is a delicate thing, like the artists. Chance events coupled with positive feed-back rather than technological superiority will often determine economic development writes W. Brian Arthur in Scientific American.[3] Cove should not vanish again. His work should be taken up by those wanting to see low-tech solar power available to all at a reasonable price. *** Sources: https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/view/17744/22231 https://theconversation.com/if-the-first-solar-entrepreneur-hadnt-been-kidnapped-would-fossil-fuels-have-dominated-the-20th-century-the-way-they-did-215300 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/133971505 https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/08/16/untangling-the-mystery-of-the-worlds-first-rooftop-solar-panel/ https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/download/17744/22231 [1] [1] Postma, Foeke. Untangling the Mystery of the Worlds First Rooftop Solar Panel. Bellingcat. 16 Aug 2023. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/08/16/untangling-the-mystery-of-the-worlds-first-rooftop-solar-panel/?utm_source=twitter [2] [2] De Decker, Kris. How to Build a Low-tech Solar Panel? Low-Tech Magazine. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low-tech-solar-panel 5 Oct 2021. [3] [3] Arthur, W. Brian. Positive Feedbacks in the Economy. Scientific American. Vol. 262, No. 2 (Feb 1990). 92-99. Prioritise mental health of employees Victor Asante Daily Graphic Dec - 04 - 2023 , 07:24 The Managing Director and Chief Executive Office of FBNBank Ghana, Victor Asante, has called on corporate leaders to prioritise the mental health of their employees just as they do for their physical health needs. According to him, a focus on mental health engineered at the top of the corporate structure can enhance the support system of the organisation and lead to enhanced productivity. Mr Asante made these remarks as a guest speaker at the launch of the book What is on your mind? and a mental health outreach and fundraiser event at the Chartered Institute of Bankers. The book is the fifth of Daniel Delasie Dogbey who is a multi-talented young author. ccording to Mr Asante, corporate leaders played a fundamental role in shaping the organisational culture. When leaders openly acknowledge and prioritise mental health, they set the tone for the entire organisation. He further opined that demonstrating a commitment to mental well-being sends a powerful message to employees that their mental health is valued, and that seeking support is both encouraged and supported. Mental, neurological and substance use disorders account for over 10 per cent of the global disease burden and there are some 2.3 million in Ghana with mental health conditions and need care, according to the World Health Organisation. However, 75 per cent of people with mental disorders receive no treatment in low-to-middle income countries. Mr Asante believes that prioritising mental health at the workplace will help reduce the number of people with the condition and improve the support system for those currently needing treatment. Mr Asante mentioned that it is crucial for us to recognise that our employees are not just workers, but individuals with unique experiences and struggles. By championing mental health well-being, we create an environment that values and support these persons. He suggested that flexible work arrangements, employee assistance programme, access to mental health resources, training and education about mental health awareness and resilience-building as well as creating an environment where employees feel comfortable to openly discuss their mental health concerns without fear of judgement or repercussions should be at the core of strategies aimed at positioning organisations to champion mental health of employees. The World Health Organisation describes mental health as a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realise their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their community. It is an integral component of health and well-being that underpins an individual and collective abilities to make decisions, build relationships and shape the world we live in. Mental health is a basic human right. And it is crucial to personal, community and socio-economic development. Stronger advocacy needed on BRI initiative Panellists Vincent Amenuveve Dec - 04 - 2023 , 11:40 Panellists at a symposium in Accra on the Belt and Road Initiative(BRI) have called for a stronger advocacy on the benefits of the BRI to Ghana and other countries on the African continent. Such advocacy, they said, should also include the need to design an effective communication strategy that would eradicate the misconception and bad publicity about the benefits of the BRI and what Ghana stood to gain from embracing the initiative to boost its infrastructure and economic development. They equally stressed the need for the government to create an opportunity in the nation's foreign policy to enable the country to take full advantage of the opportunities that existed in the BRI. BRI The BRI, known within China as the One Belt One Road, is a global infrastructure development strategy adopted by the Chinese government in 2013 to invest in more than 150 countries and international organisations. It is considered a centrepiece of the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping's, foreign policy. Panellists The panellists at the symposium organised by the Ghana-China Friendship Association(GHACHIFA), who made the suggestion included the Managing Editor of the Insight, a private newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr; the Commissioner, Head of Institution and Auditor General at the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Abuja, Nigeria, Dr Alfred Mahamadu Braimah, and the President of Ghana Association of Chinese Society, Hong Tang. The rest were an Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) Lecturer, at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Nana Opoku Osei-Sraha; an Architect and Mechanical Engineer on the Africa Railway Triangle Network Master Plan, Kwame Gonza, and the Executive Director, Africa-China Centre for Policy Advisory, Paul Frimpong. It brought together civil society organisations, industrialists, staff of Chinese companies embarking on various projects under the BRI, New concept Speaking on the topic for the symposium, Belt and Road Initiative(BRI): Is Ghana missing out?, Mr Pratt Jnr argued that there was the need for a new paradigm shift where Africans would own their resources and determine how it was exploited as opposed to what happened in the colonial era where the resources were virtually shipped to the colonial masters to better their economy. He said this was the time for us to intensify a new concept of infrastructure development to aid the economic and political development of the country and Africa. Mr Frimpong, for his part, indicated that considering the infrastructure gap that was required to be urgently fixed on the continent amounting to between $30 billion and $170 billion, it was prudent to embrace the BRI initiative. He said critics of the BRI had made some developing countries to believe that the initiative was a death trap policy" by China that would ultimately colonise beneficiary countries and confiscate their assets for failure to pay back loans given to the latter for infrastructural development. Misconception, bad publicity An ICT lecturer, Nana Osei-Sraha, suggested that the nations leaders must be intentional by ensuring that Ghana's foreign policy created an opening to fully embrace the BRI initiative. Private sector The Head of Institution and Auditor General at ECOWAS in Abuja, Nigeria, Dr Braimah, who joined the discussions virtually, said apart from accepting the initiative, there was the need for government to also promote a public-private partnership to effectively deliver infrastructural facilities. The BRI dream is already on course and the World Bank has confirmed its benefits; it is a journey worth embarking on let's move forward as for the negativities they will always be there so we should not allow them to distract us" he advised. An Architect and Mechanical Engineer, Mr Gonza, said Ghana was already enjoying the benefits of the BRI in terms of infrastructure and that it would not be prudent to pull out now because infrastructure is the basis for economic development. GHACHIFA leadership The Chairman of GHACHIFA, Ambassador Anani Demuyakor, and the General Secretary of the association, Dr Benjamin Anyagre, both stressed the importance of the symposium and the benefits of BRI. Use innovation to create own jobs - Entrepreneur encourages youth Diana Mensah Dec - 04 - 2023 , 10:33 The Chancellor of Wisconsin International University College, Ghana, Dr Paul Kofi Fynn, has urged the youth, especially graduates, not to depend on the government for jobs as they come out of school. He said most of the youth depended solely on the government for jobs, which added to the number of unemployed youth in the country. At the maiden Gathering Place Summit - 2023 in Accra at the weekend, Dr Fynn, however, called on the government to create the conducive environment that would empower young people to establish their own businesses. The problem we are facing these days is the dependency syndrome; the youth now sit and wait for the government to come and do something for them; it will never happen. They will make huge promises to you to vote for them, then nothing happens, he said. Dubbed: Strengthening The Rising Generation Through Skills Acquisition, the summit was to discuss challenges facing the emerging generation, youth empowerment through entrepreneurship and personal commitment to becoming self-reliant, among others. Dr Fynn said the youth needed to be empowered, liberated and inspired to live their dreams, and admonished them to also come up with ideas that would help them and the nation. The academic and entrepreneur expressed the hope that a review of the countrys educational system would shift the system towards more practical teaching and learning to help position students to apply the knowledge they acquired for the development of the country. Gathering place A gathering place is an initiative designed by the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day for young single adults (YSAs) of the church and their friends to gather and participate in wholesome activities and experiences that bring them closer to one another and to God. It is also to learn career and life skills that will lead the youth to become self-reliant and responsible future leaders. The programme has been rolled out to about 180 locations in the Africa West Area, where the youth come to these gathering places of the church to learn the various skills such as fashion and decor, Photography, Video Editing, Data Analysis, Sewing, Wig Making, Bakery and Soap Making. Employment The First Counsellor, Africa West Area Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Elder Jorg Klebingat, said the initiative would enable the youth to gain employment through the skills acquired and have enough to provide for themselves and families. He urged the government to make available the right resources and opportunities for the youth to chart a course and establish something for themselves. Mr Klebingat said the initiative also aimed to simply help the youth to remain faithful in their church worship habits. The youth are showing us that when you provide them with the opportunity, they will make something for themselves and so as long as the youth bring their own energy and enthusiasm and do what they can do the church will be there to continue providing these resources, he added. Commitment The Director for TVET, Ministry of Education, Ghana, Rejoice Dankwa, said relevant skills acquisition would empower the youth to be innovative and self-reliant, adding, it will equip them with the right tools to face the challenges of the future job market and solve critical problems in the country. She said the ministry had put in place relevant policies and guidance such as CTVET to prepare the youth to meet the demands of the 21st Century. Attention The spokesperson of the National Chief Imam, Sheikh Armiyawo Shaibu, said much attention needed to be given to the youth, saying, to neglect the needs of the youth is to spell doom of every community. He advised the youth to explore the new job market and understand the skills needed to make themselves more competitive and relevant. Lithium contract best for Ghana - Minerals Commission Graphic.com.gh Dec - 04 - 2023 , 07:15 The Minerals Commission says the Lithium deal between the government of Ghana and Barari DV Ghana Limited is in the best interest of Ghana. In a press statement issued on Monday, December 4, the Commission said the government thoroughly examined all available options before entering into the agreement. The commission in the statement signed by the Chief Executive Officer, Martin Kwaku Ayisi said several concerns raised about the deal are rooted in ignorance, suggesting that critics may not have thoroughly read the agreement. The Minerals Commission reaffirmed that the deal is a well-considered decision beneficial to the country. "For the avoidance of doubt, the mining lease was granted for 15 years to Barari, which is the subsidiary of Atlantic Lithium Limited, an Australian company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and also on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange. The lease covers an area of 42.63 Km2 in and around Ewoyaa in the Mfantseman Municipality of the Central Region. "The Commission notes in spite of the publication of the lease which is now widely available to the general public, it has become increasingly clear that the commentators have not read the agreement in its entirety and as result many of the concerns are based on assumptions that are inaccurate and assertions that are not supported by facts or any data." Key stakeholders, including the Institute of Economic Affairs (lEA) and former Chief Justice Sophia Akufo, have criticised the contract as colonial and Guggisberg-type, respectively. These concerns stem from a mining agreement signed on October 20, 2023, between Ghana and Barari DV Ghana Limited. The $250-million project, located in Ewoyaa, Mfantseman Municipality in the Central Region, is set to commence production by 2025. The deal includes a 10% royalty and 13% free carried interest by the state, surpassing the existing 5% and 10%, respectively, for other mining agreements. Barari DV Ghana Limited is also required to contribute 1% of its revenue to a community development fund for the upliftment of the mining area. While some, including statesman and business executive Sir Sam Jonah, have praised the government for securing better fiscal terms, sceptics, especially the IEA, remain cautious about the agreement. Attached below is a copy of the press statement Speaker gives Education Minister up to 12:30pm today to appear before Parliament Zadok Kwame Gyesi Dec - 04 - 2023 , 12:13 The Speaker of Parliament, Alban S.K. Bagbin has given the Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, up to 12:30pm today [Monday, December 4, 2023] to brief the house on the reopening date for first year senior high school (SHS) students. The Speaker said if the Minister fails to appear, he (Dr Osei Adutwum) will be referred to the Privileges Committee. The Ghana Education Service (GES) has asked all first-year SHS students to report to schools on Monday, December 4, 2023. The reporting date, is in line with what the GES had planned as part of the 2023/2024 academic calendar for pre-tertiary institutions. More to follow... Assess MPs on their core functions Sosu Daniel Kenu Politics Dec - 04 - 2023 , 05:43 The National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament (MP) for Madina in the Greater Accra Region, Francis-Xavier Kojo Sosu, has described as unfortunate the criteria used by the electorate to assess the performance of MPs in recent times. He said instead of MPs being assessed based on their core function of legislation, the electorate rather looked at the number of development projects their representatives in Parliament were able to execute in the constituency. He, therefore, called for more public engagements to help change that perception as it was not the duty of MPs to construct roads or initiative capital intensive infrastructural projects. Visit Mr Sosu said this during an educational forum organised by the Department of Public Safety Engagement of Parliament for the University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA) student parliamentarians at the Parliament House. The student parliamentarians were in the House to learn at first hand how Parliament works and how they could participate indirectly in shaping policies. The legislator for Madina explained that rather it was the central government and the local assemblies that were responsible for the provision of infrastructural development such as roads, schools, hospitals, among others, in constituencies. "MPs don't have the financial muscle to construct roads and undertake major projects," he said. DLEs Touching on the December 19, 2023 District Level Elections, Mr Sosu appealed to eligible Ghanaian voters to get involved in the local government elections to vote for people who would represent their interest and hold government accountable. "But if the only reason why you will be voting for a particular candidate is based on money or who attends a church harvest, then you have lost it," he said. Mr Sosu also re-ignited the calls for local assemblies to be independent of central government and their chief executives to be elected. The MP said the election of district chief executives was crucial because it gave confidence to the people as someone they legitimately elected to maximise their locally endowed natural resources for the development of basic infrastructure in their respective local government jurisdiction. He said this would help discourage the practice where supervision of local development projects were relied on significantly by external consultants. On the structures and how committees in Parliament work, a Principal Assistant Clerk and Head of Infrastructure and Security Cluster, Janet Frimpong, took the students through all 31 committees and how bills referred to such committees are carried. Quoting Article 103 (5) of the Constitution and Standing Order 155 which mandate Parliament to establish such committees, Mrs Frimpong said the Standing Orders regulated the works of Parliament without which things would be done haphazardly. For instance, she said Order 153 required every Member of Parliament to belong to at least one committee. She told the students that apart from the Public Accounts and Subsidiary Legislation Committees chaired by the Minority, all other committees were chaired by the Majority with the Minority members serving as ranking members. History Tracing the history of the Parliament of Ghana from its Westminster type days to present day Ghana, the Director, Public Engagement of Parliament, Superintendent (rtd) Effia Tenge, said the legislative representation dated back to 1950 when the country was a British colony known as the Gold Coast. The Legislative Council, as the body was then known, was purely advisory as the governor exercised all legislative and executive powers. No Standing Order prohibits Speaker from asking questions - Bagbin to Majority Leader Zadok Kwame Gyesi Politics Dec - 04 - 2023 , 15:09 The Speaker of Parliament, Alban S.K. Bagbin has said there was no Standing Order in Parliament that prohibits him, as Speaker from asking questions on the floor of the House. In any case, he says he is not the first Speaker to ask individuals who appear before the House questions. He insisted that his predecessors also asked questions in a bid to seek clarity when issues were not too clear. when certain persons appeared before the House, Mr Bagbin was responding to the Majority Leader, Osei Kyei-Mensah Bonsu, who sought to find out why the Speaker was putting so many questions to the Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, when appeared before the House on Monday afternoon. The Education Minister was in Parliament on Monday, December 4, 2023, to answer questions on the reporting date for first year senior high school students in Ghana. The Speaker and some Parliamentarians had last week urged the Education Ministry to allow the first year students to report in January 2024 instead of the originally planned December 4, 2023 date. Following that, the Speaker directed that the Minister appears before the House to answer questions. The Minister who was answering the questions on the purchase of mathematical sets for final year students in junior high school was interrupted by Mr Bagbin as to whether the items were procured and supplied as expected. The follow up questions from the Speaker after the Minister answered the first question obviously compelled the Majority Leader to find out from the Speaker his intentions for the numerous questions. When Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu asked Mr Bagbin why he was asking those questions, the Speaker responded by asking the Majority Leader, which Standing Order of the house prohibited him from asking questions. "Can you draw my attention to any Standing Order that says the Speaker cannot ask questions?" Mr Bagbin asked the Majority Leader, explaining that where the law is against the speaker participating in debates or discussions, the law states it. "Where the law doesn't say so, it means it is not prohibited, you can do it," Mr Bagbin told the Majority Leader, adding, "I am not the first Speaker to ask questions." Mr Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu also asked the Speaker to point him to any law that gives him power to ask questions. "Mr Speaker, I thought you were going to also show me where the Speaker can ask questions," he stated. President Akufo-Addo on why he cannot sign Witchcraft, other bills due to constitutional issues Daniel Kenu and Nana Konadu Agyeman Politics Dec - 04 - 2023 , 15:24 President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has explained to Parliament that, even though the contents of the Criminal Offences (Amendment) Bill, 2022, (Witchcraft bill) and the Armed Forces (Amendment) Bill, 2023 have his support, he cannot assent to them because of constitutional issues. The President has explained that the way and manner the two bills were prepared flouts Article 108 of the 1992 Ghana Constitution and he, therefore, cannot assent to them due to the constitutional issues. "After thorough consideration in the light of constitutional issues, I'm unable to assent to these bills," President Akufo-Addo stated in a letter he sent to Parliament. The Speaker of Parliament, Alban S.K. Bagbin read the letter in the House on Monday morning [December 4, 2023]. Speaker Bagbin explained on the floor of the House that during a conversation between him [Speaker] and the President last week, the president raised specific constitutional concerns. "I raised specific constitutional concerns regarding the bills related to Article 108 particularly the nature of these bills which were introduced to Parliament as private member's bill rather than being presented by or on my [President] behalf." Article 108 of the 1992 constitution states: "Parliament shall not, unless the bill is introduced or the motion is introduced by, or on behalf of, the President -" "The content of these bills have my support but we need to ensure that they are enacted in line with established constitutional and legislative process," President Akufo-Addo's letter to Parliament stated. The letter said the concerns raised were significant and have profound implications for the constitutional integrity of "this Legislative action." "Any legislation we pass must be in complete alignment with the provision of our constitution. "I intend to have the bill reintroduced to Parliament on my behalf in due course," the letter said. Another bill the President is also unable to assent to is the Wild Life Resources Management Bill, 2023. Unlike the other two, the President indicated that this bill was introduced on his behalf. However, the letter said various provisions of the bill requires Parliament to reconsider the move to ensure that the bill when enacted will be in alignment with established constitutional legislative process. The letter said once the necessary considerations and review were done an action will be taken. Background The Criminal Offences (Amendment) Bill, 2022, which is now popularly referred to as the Witchcraft Bill, explicitly criminalises the practice of witchcraft accusation and proscribes the declaration, accusation, naming or labeling of another person as a witch, and its related matters. The object of the bill is to amend the Criminal Offences Act, 1960 (Act 29), to prohibit the practice by any person as a witch doctor or witch finder. It formed part of the broad policy measures to deal with attacks and human rights violations arising out of witchcraft accusations. The bill was laid in Parliament on March 31, 2023, by the Member of Parliament (MP) for Madina, Francis-Xavier Sosu, on behalf of other co-sponsors. They are Mr Sosu, MP for Pusiga, Hajia Laadi Ayii Ayamba; MP for Wa East, Dr Godfred Seidu Jasaw; MP for Krachi, Helen Adjoa Ntoso, and MP for Afram Plains North, Betty Nana Efua Krosbi Mensah. Parliamewnt On the Floor of Parliament on Monday, November 27, 2023, it came up that five months after Parliament had passed the Criminal Offences (Amendment) Bill, 2022, which makes it an offence to accuse any person of being a witch, the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, was yet to assent to it to become law. Haruna Iddrisu It was the Minority, championed by the MP for Tamale South, Haruna Iddrisu, who maintained that the failure of the President to assent to the bill constituted a constitutional breach which should not be countenanced. Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu In the ensuing debate, the Majority Leader, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, explained that the President had noticed some technical challenges in the bill and had arranged to meet with the Speaker to iron them out before passing it into law. Clarification from President's office The Office of the President on Tuesday, November 29, 2023 clarified that President Akufo-Addo had not been silent on the bill and that it was presented to him on Monday, November 27, 2023, the same day the Speaker made the accusation. by Angela Starita Before Id seen Barbie, my sister told me shed liked it but hated the last scene, which she went on to describe. Oblivious to the concept of spoiler alerts, she spoke with considerable disgust about the lunacy of a doll who lived in a perfect world of clothes, sparkling beaches, and dance parties choosing to become a human woman. It didnt make sense. And of all places to end this witty homage to MGM technicolora gynecologists office?! Such a disappointment, and utterly illogical. Mysterious even. This was the tenor of her review, minor outrage on the part of a doll wed both loved. Even though were eight years apart in age, wed played with some of the same dolls when I had inherited hers, a brown-haired Barbie with a bouffant and a Francie doll, her small-breasted friend who sported a blond flip do. I got the white carrying case too and whatever clothes Jeanette had collected. Under my tenure, the Barbie world grew exponentially and entered the 1970s. I made a town for her in the space under the steps going into our basement. Its central feature was the three-story town house where my main doll, Malibu Barbie, a blond with a deep tan, lived. The others had various apartments around town and the gang would travel around the country in Barbies camper. I wasnt allowed to have a Ken doll, so if a romantic plot line ensued, another Barbie would temporarily take the trouser role for a heated make-out scene. When I did finally see the movie, I found it surprisingly moving, tearing up when Barbie realizes she has to leave Barbieland, that in fact, shes stopped being a doll. I suppose that when she chose to end the movie at a doctors office, Greta Gerwig had in mind the start of adolescence and the painful end of childhood. But I also wonder if she had remembered a late scene in The Bell Jar when Esther gets fitted for a diaphragm. Its a moment of power for a character who for much of the book feels utterly defenseless. For me, at least, the final scene of Barbie had much the same tone, the melancholy of saying goodbye. So why my sisters strong reaction to this moment of female manifestation? Im torn between two theories, though Id guess the answer is some combination. In 2018, Jeanette was treated for advanced ovarian cancer, which had spread to her uterus, spleen, gall bladder, liver, and the membrane around her lungs. (As one surgeon put it to me, think of this form of ovarian cancer as forming in the fallopian tube and then spreading its cells like the fluff of a blown dandelion.) She underwent a 9-hour surgery, chemotherapy, and an immunotherapy clinical trial. All in all, treatment lasted for a year and a half. Despite skin-of-your-teeth odds, though, shes survived with no relapses. But she will never be the same energetic woman who charged into her surgeons office after an off pap smear, a person deemed in good enough shape that her body could withstand a 50% increase in chemo drugs to hit the cancer as hard as possible. That certainly could provide a decent explanation for her disgust when, expecting a nostalgic, doll-sized romp through mid-century excess, she smacked into beige Barbie in a non-descript office building in a non-descript gynecologists office, so bland and so dangerous. But theres more to it, Im betting, something about our age difference and even more about where we grew up. Until I was 10, my family lived in Jersey City, a medium-sized city on the other side of the Hudson from lower Manhattan. Jeanette attended an all-girls Catholic academy from second grade until 12th, a place that fulfilled all the stereotypes of parochial schools of the eraancient nuns, minor corporal punishment, lousy education. I was a first grader there the year my sister and two of her friends tried out for the schools variety show. Their act consisted of lip synching to the Fifth Dimensions version of the Age of Aquarius while wearing sequined, floor-length sheaths my mother had made them. At the school-wide assembly, I happened to be near Sister Alice the mostly silent, very old principalwhen she turned to a colleague and shook her head severely, a gesture I noted then announced at the dinner table that night. As anticipated, the number was cut from the next weeks show. So, though Jeanette was there from 1964 until 1975, norm-shattering years in the popular culture, to be sure, those shifts were forcibly ignored in a Catholic school in Jersey City, a place that however close to New Yorkand really could you get any closer?remained insulated in a transparent but impermeable skin. It was like one of those Bucky Fuller drawings showing a gelatinous bubble sealing parts of Manhattan. But the Jersey City version, instead of protecting against nuclear destruction, stalwartly prevented the entry of updated sexual mores or any check on the ingrained corruption of everyone from mayor to meter readers. There may have been an abundance of Cutlass Supremes and POW-MIA flags, and other signifiers of the 70s, my sisters youth was shaped by a city functioning, more or less, as it had since the 1920s and 30s, only, I guess, dirtier, less hopeful, its racial and class lines more rawly exposed. Im reminded of recollections of one Benny Brookstone, an elderly habituee of a Jersey City diner I used to frequent as an adult in the 1990s, who would talk about his long-time girlfriend, a local madam, whom hed pick up on her days off to go out for a meal of whiskey and medium rare steak. I always imagined this rendezvous taking place at a restaurant just a few blocks from my sisters parochial school and that feels about right, like one world was merely the inverse of the other. In Bennys telling, Jersey City of that era was the good life. By the time I was 11, my family had moved to a farm in central New Jersey, and Jeanette was away at college. I went to a public school with kids whod never been to New York or Philadelphia, thought the NJ Bar Association regulated alcohol sales, and got high on pills or Jimson weed growing in the woods. It was a sorry bit of culture shock for me, but once I finally found friends with a modicum of ambition, the move let me grow up in a setting more in tune with the present. The town had its own anachronisms to be sure, but at least by high school my peers attended rock concerts, stuck pins in their cheeks, and bought marijuana instead of foraging in the woods. I hated the place and paid a fairly stiff price in a loss of confidence since Id arrived, more or less, from another planet in terms of behavior, expectations, and fashion. But by the time I was leaving for college, I understood that, given my sisters experience, Id been lucky to be there. By any metric, my second hometown offered way more perspectives on life, some downright bizarre but undeniably different from what my mother called the hot house roses grown at the Academy of St. Aloysius, pretty but subtly stunted and ill-equipped for the world outside Jersey Citys borders. But even an hours drive from the deteriorating storefronts of Journal Square, the 1930s died a slow death in my world, this time in the form of a direct collision between my mothers high school hygiene class and the Boston Womens Health Book Collective, authors of the 1971 classic Our Bodies, Ourselves. It happened when I was 17, and my mother took me, for the last time, to a pediatricians office. To the doctors credit, hed hired a nurse practitioner, Patsy Deal, to talk to girls who already had their period. After hed conducted most of the physical, Patsy came in andtalked. She didnt give you a pap smear or a pelvic exam. She asked you questions. At the time, I had no contextno knowledge of the womens health movement for understanding this gangly, highly enthusiastic woman who wanted to know, I guess, how regular my periods were? I dont know because none of it made an impression on me, and I strongly doubt Id remember her name today if it hadnt been for a small remark my mother, whod been present for the whole scene, made afterwards. One of Patsys questions had been if Id ever looked at my vagina? I probably said yes since, after all, I lived with it every day. Could I have not looked at it? No, she meant really looked at it. She suggested I get a hand mirror and see my vagina from below. Im sure I duly nodded and the whole thing went out of my head. I certainly wasnt mortified or embarrassed by the exchange: my mother always approached medical concerns with a matter-of-fact, clinical tone. When shed had to have a hysterectomy seven years earlier, she didnt demure to euphemism even with a 10-year-old. She hated, really despised, when pregnant women referred to the baby in my tummy. The cloying tone coupled with inaccuracy offended her pragmatic sensibility. So a small alarm must have gone off in my head when, as we waited for Patsy to come back armed with pamphlets, she said to me, I never look down there. I only let the doctor. Even my oblivious 17-year-old self, already making an inventory of my room to locate any portable mirror, understood the repressed, all together fucked up genesis of this sentiment. Here was a woman who never avoided hard reality, drilled in me the need to have regular check-ups, to face whatever unpleasantness that meant with resigned stoicism. None of this was stated directly but, predictably enough, through what she herself did. She was careful to see her gynecologist each year, going into Manhattan after a long day of teaching. Shed wait sometimes for hours, for the kingly Dr. Jordan to finally make his appearance, a man who would shout at his patients, including my mother, if during their pregnancies theyd gained more weight that he deemed correct. You werent going to use pregnancy as an excuse to get fat on Dr. Jordans watch. After giving birth to me, a premature baby born with pneumonia, my mother weighed less than before her pregnancy. Despite this trauma, she continued to be his patient until he retired some time in the early 1980s. Ive puzzled over why she stayed, someone so off-handedly bright who could cut through pretense and false arguments without effort, someone with no patience for euphemism: what made her stay? I suppose she expected men to have power, to lord it over you, and you needed to accept it. Thats not to say that my mother didnt essentially believe in this power arrangement. Or, more accurately, she was deeply ambivalent about equality, wanted it and feared it. She once told me about her adolescent rage at my uncle never having to do house work. In her anger, she threw a wooden brush on the ground that ricocheted against sensitive veins on my grandmothers leg, which immediately swelled up. In the telling, my mother had no sympathy for her younger self, just shame that shed inflicted pain. That same grandmother and her husband insisted that all three of their daughters attend college, a notion their Depression-era neigbhors scoffed at. Their reasoning was blunt: you make your own money so can stay in a marriage because you want to, not because you have to. She was among the first four women admitted to Fordham University in the schools early experiment with coeducation at its business school. She majored in accounting, but after graduation in 1948, no one would hire her. Finally, an office manager, an older woman, told her: they wont want to hire you because if you have to go on a business trip, the company would have to pay for a separate hotel room. End of story. Full stop. My mother headed uptown to Columbia, got a masters in educationclasses she hatedand then built a career teaching bookkeeping and business law at a public high school in Staten Island, where I imagine her discipline and smart aleck teasing was put to good use. But outside of school, there were plenty of spheres where she questioned her right to take the lead. Visiting Dr. Jordan fell into that category: he had a stellar reputation, he knew her and her various gynecological woes, and Im sure she had no expectation that any other doctor would treat her differently. That is, she saw no point in fighting what she perceived as unavoidable reality. Her comment that day, as we waited for the ardent Patsy Deal to return, didnt come from a woman divorced from the world as it existed in 1982, but one whod concluded that 1948s limitations on womens lives were permanently in place, our vulnerability situated precisely between our legs. Why hold a mirror up to that? Ta Tuge Mona will launch their new publication, A Window Unobscured: Stories from Guahan Teachers, to celebrate the conclusion of the Sigi Mona Manfafanague Project. The launch will take place at the Guam Community College Multipurpose Auditorium 3 p.m. Saturday. The new book reveals a glimpse inside the world of eight teachers in the Guam Department of Education, where each writer offers readers a different perspective of Guahans public middle and high schools. The teachers and authors of A Window Unobscured participated in the Sigi Mona Manfafanague training and content development project and had the opportunity to dive into the writing workshop method to develop their professional capacities as writing teachers across six sessions of curated curriculum from November 2021 to March 2022. In those sessions, curriculum topics included lesson planning, community building through writing, stages of the writing process, approaches to responding to student writers, literacy strategies, and broader issues in the area of literacy instruction. The project also held a writing retreat at the Merizo Seaside BnB in April 2022 to support the teachers in the final stages of their writing process. The teachers not only learned about the writing process method as it is used at GCC and UOG for their own classrooms, they also used the method to develop their own essays about teaching at GDOE, said Simone Bollinger, program developer and teacher trainer for the project. Their essays have been compiled into this book to serve as a resource for pre-service and in-service teachers, as well as educators at all levels, so that the lessons and experiences that have shaped them as teachers can be passed on to others. The Sigi Mona Manfafanague project was funded by the U.S. Department of Education CARES Act as part of the Governors Education Assistance and Youth Empowerment Grant Program. The project was also supported by Humanities Guahan and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mary Okada and the Guam Community College, and Sharleen Santos-Bamba and the University of Guam. Authors in A Window Unobscured include Renee Julia D. Blancaflor, Sarah Damian, Pamela Yamashita DeVera, Marcy Ermitanio, Leah Fuentes Llegado, Christine Joy Borja Mallari, Andrealline Fajardo Mayoyo-Buan, and Piyamas PJ Sablan-Jalique. The book is edited by GCC professor and Program Developer Simone Efigenia Perez Bollinger and UOG professor and Co-Teacher Trainer Teresita Lourdes Perez. The book also includes a foreword by Roberta M. Abaday, a National Board certified teacher and past awardee of the National State Teachers of the Year, Guam chapter. The public book launch event is free and open to the public and will include live readings by the authors. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event,w and the special event price for the book is $10. For more information, contact Johanna Salinas at johannah.salinas@gmail.com. American and international air crews have set to work dropping about 84,000 pounds of donated food, clothing, and other useful items to remote islands around Micronesia as part of the 72nd Operation Christmas Drop. A crowd of U.S. military top brass, diplomats, and airmen from all over the globe crowded into a hangar at Andersen Air Force Base Monday for the official push off ceremony for this years drop. A single ceremonial Christmas package was guided onboard a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft during the spectacle, and hundreds more supply packages were loaded up onto similar aircraft for delivery to remote islands throughout the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau. About $70,000 worth of donations and another $250,000 worth of donated supplies were raised by this years Christmas Drop committee, according to Air Force officials. Fundraising is a collaboration between the military, University of Guam, and the local government. Airlift crews had already taken to the skies as Mondays ceremony commenced, said long time Christmas Drop coordinator Brother Bruce Best. He said hes been around for the Christmas Drop for about 50 years and hopes to make it to the 100th drop. Standing around the hangar at Andersen in a Santa hat marked Send It, Best was itching to get back to running the radio communications between pilots and folks on the ground, who will be marking drop off locations with flags for safety. Were going to be rockin and rollin all 12 hour days every day, Best said. We got everything from fish hooks to canopies to life preservers, food, all kinds, anything for survival, a lot of monetary and stuff, so a lot of stuff for the ladies packed up in boxes, he said. American C-130 air crews from the 374th Airlift Wing and 36th Airlift Squadron are joined by the Japanese Self Defense Force, Republic of Korea Air Force, and Royal Canadian Air Force in flying 25 sorties to drop 210 boxes to more than 55 islands throughout the Pacific, according to the Air Force. Operation Christmas Drop truly captures the Christmas spirit, delivering supplies, clothing, rice, fishing equipment, and toys to outer island families, reaching more than 42,000 people across the Micronesian islands in Santas alternative sleigh, keynote speaker and U.S. Ambassador to the FSM Jennifer Johnson told the assembled crowd. Johnson said she and her family were arguably most excited for the Christmas Drop when they first arrived in Micronesia. There was a reason the drop is the longest running humanitarian airlift for the Department of Defense, Johnson said. For one, this is a special opportunity that unites everyone in the region and strengthens our partnerships. And, it makes a huge difference to those that live in the outer islands, she said. FSM President Wesley Simina called the event a beacon of goodwill and a reminder of the power of love and cooperation. He called for those present to continue to work together and foster understanding past the holiday season. What began as a non-local initiative between the United States and the Federated States of Micronesia has blossomed into an inspiring display of international cooperation, transcending borders, and demonstrating the enduring spirit of unity, Simina said. The University of Guam and its officials are the subject of a lawsuit alleging job discrimination, and urges the court to acknowledge the need for change to ensure diversity, inclusion and equality at UOG. Ye-Kyoung Kim sued UOG and its officials, claiming shes discriminated against on the basis of race, national origin and age by not hiring her in 2021 to fill the new position of associate director of the UOG Global Learning and Engagement Office. Jonas Macapinlac, UOG chief marketing and communications officer, said, The University of Guam denies all allegations of wrongdoing in this lawsuit. The lawsuit claims that UOG officials behaved unprofessionally and unfairly toward her during the interview and hiring process. Kim alleged that UOG hired or promoted a younger, less qualified candidate from a different race and national origin, referring to the hiring of Amanda Blas. I also believe that their treatment may have also been retaliatory for prior Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claims I filed against the University of Guam in the past, Kim said in her lawsuit. In that prior EEOC case, Kim said she and UOG reached a settlement agreement that UOG violated. In her lawsuit, she asserted UOG violations under the Civil Rights Act of Employment Discrimination and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Kim joined UOG as its first Korean female professor in the Teaching as a Second Language and information technology faculty in 2007. Thats after she completed her doctoral studies at Ohio State University. She resigned on Jan. 12, 2010, alleging discriminatory practices at UOG. From 2014 to 2017, Kim, whos married to a U.S. citizen, served as an adjunct professor of computer science at the UOG College of Natural and Applied Sciences. Between 2014 and 2017, a pattern of concerning employment practices occurred at the University of Guam, she said in her lawsuit. During this period, despite possessing a doctoral degree and prior experience as a UOG employee, my applications for several key positions were systematically overlooked. In August 2021, she applied for the newly opened senior-level academic administrator position of associate director of Global Learning and Engagement Office at UOG. This is the subject of her lawsuit. The listed defendants include UOG and its officials, including Global Learning and Engagement Director Carlos R. Taitano, Research Corp. executive director Cathleen Moore-Linn and chief human resources officer Joseph Gumataotao. It is critical to note that, unlike other candidates with similar qualifications, my applications were dismissed without an interview a fundamental step in the hiring process, Kim said in her lawsuit. This stands in stark contrast to the treatment of other UOG alumni of Chamorro descent, who were consistently selected for these roles. Last updated 12/4/2023 at 12:15pm Due to deadline issues at the paper, Havre Daily News was unable to print this in Fridays edition. Monday 2023 Montana Association of Counties elected officials training 1:30 p.m. Building manager meeting in the Commission Office 3:30 p.m. Council on Aging Director Meeting in the Commission Office 5:30 p.m. Beaver Creek Park Board meeting in the Hill County Courthouse Timmons Room Tuesday 2023 Montana Association of Counties elected officials training 9:30 a.m. Health department director meeting in the Commission Office 10:30 a.m. Road department meeting in the Commission Office 3:30 p.m. Beaver Creek Lodge design development Zoom meeting in the Timmons Room Wednesday 2023 Montana Association of Counties elected officials training Thursday 9 a.m. Rocky Boy tribal council meeting at the Rocky Boy tribal center 10 a.m. Commissioners weekly business meeting in the Commission Office Public comments on non-agenda items Public comments on agenda items Claims and payroll Employment Budgets Abatements Journal and vouchers Ordinance Resolutions Contracts Board appointments Policy updates County permit approval Subdivision/survey approval County needs First reading of ordinance No. 23-115, name of ordinance not included in the agenda Great West Task Order #24 Montana Historic Preservation Gran for courthouse elevator 11 a.m. Meeting with New Media Broadcasters regarding mills in the Commission Office Friday Regular business hours Havre Police Department A 7:07 a.m. Thursday caller on Third Avenue reported finding a credit card while out walking. Havre Police staff attempted to find the owner then destroyed the card. -- A written or verbal warning was issued after a caller reported a noise complaint on Ninth Avenue. -- A vehicle crash was reported Thursday at 10:52 a.m. at the hospital where the driver of a tall camper went through the passage at the emergency room. -- Fabian Joel Saddler Jr. of Rocky Boy, 24, was arrested on two Justice or City court warrants after a 12:17 a.m. Friday vehicle stop on Second Street. -- Kolby Wade Finchum of Havre, 26, was arrested on a charge of partner or family member assault after a caller at 3:53 a.m. Friday reported family members were having a domestic disturbance. -- An 11:18 a.m. Friday caller reported finding an elderly woman in the middle of First Street. The caller had stopped and helped the woman to a parking lot. -- Officers responded to a Friday 12:29 p.m. report from a caller who said it sounded a female neighbor on First Street Northeast was being beaten up. The incident was resolved peacefully. -- A Friday 12:58 p.m. request for someone to perform a welfare check on someone on Second Street who was supposed to be receiving food was referred to another agency. -- A report of a sex offense was referred by Child Protective Services to Havre Police at 5:07 p.m. Friday. -- A caller at a First Street business reported Friday at 6:26 p.m. that a man stole three packs of cigarettes. -- Juanita Lucia Recio of Havre, 31, was arrested on seven Justice or City court warrants after a Friday 6:31 p.m. caller reported two suspicious vehicles on Fifth Avenue. -- A 3:19 a.m. Saturday report of a domestic disturbance on Ike Avenue was resolved peacefully. -- A written or verbal warning was issued after a caller at a First Street business reported two men were trying to get into a the building Saturday at 3:22 p.m. -- A complaint from a Seventh Avenue caller, asking Saturday at 3:45 p.m. for assistance removing a family member, was resolved peacefully. -- Christopher James Comp of Havre, 63, was arrested on charges of driving under the influence and careless driving after a two-vehicle crash was reported at 4:36 p.m. Saturday at Main Street and Third Avenue. -- A two-vehicle crash at First Street and First Avenue was reported Saturday at 4:58 p.m. -- Konnor Andrew-Shane Brogdon of Havre, 20, was arrested on a trespass to property charge after a caller at an 11th Street West business reported Saturday at 8:53 p.m. that a man was repeatedly trespassing. -- Nichole Lee Gregori of Havre, 34, was issued a summons on a criminal contempt charge related to a 24/7 Sobriety Program no-show reported at 8:04 a.m. Sunday. -- Officers on Ninth Avenue assisted callers, including Blaine County Sheriff's Office, looking for a stolen vehicle Sunday at 10:01 a.m. -- Thomas James Jones of Havre, 38, was issued a summons on a trespass to property charge after a caller at a First Street business reported a trespasser at 10:17 a.m. Sunday. -- A vehicle crash was reported on Eighth Street at 1:14 p.m. Sunday. -- A caller at Hill County Sheriff's Office reported Sunday at 4:07 p.m. finding a dog that the Havre Animal Control officer had been looking for. -- Fred Nashookpuk of Havre, 38, was arrested on a disorderly conduct charge after a 5:50 p.m. Sunday caller reported a man passed out in the First Street alley and a First Street Northeast caller asked at 5:55 p.m. for assistance. -- A stolen vehicle was recovered Sunday at 8:52 p.m. on McKinley Avenue. -- Bradley Lynn Perkins of Havre, 24, was arrested on a pick up and hold order and four Justice or City court orders, and Eryn Callie Ferguson of Box Elder, 22, was arrested on five Justice or City court warrants served on First Street at 10:35 p.m. Sunday. -- Someone stopped at the police station Sunday at 11:44 p.m. to report an assault. Hill County Sheriff's Office Deputies were asked Thursday at 11:58 a.m. to assist another agency on Second Street West. -- A burglary was reported in Box Elder Thursday at 12:05 p.m. -- Two large aggressive black dogs were reported on Fifth Avenue North at 2:49 p.m. Thursday. -- A vehicle crash that caved in the wall of a building on U.S. Highway 2 West was referred to Montana Highway Patrol Thursday at 3:39 p.m. -- A Thursday 7:33 p.m. caller in Rudyard reported hearing gun shots, and deputies searched the area but were unable to locate the source. -- Craig Orland Bahr of Great Falls, 53, was arrested on charges of failure to yield to an emergency vehicle and no driver's license and on two Justice or City court warrants during a vehicle stop in Box Elder Thursday at 10:30 p.m. A second arrest was made or summons issued, but no details on charges were provided. -- Jon Arthur Sonju of Fallon, Nevada, 23, was issued a summons on charges of violation of a protective order and obscene phone call after someone stopped at the sheriff's office Friday at 8:48 p.m. to ask deputies for assistance. -- A hit and run crash reported on Third Street North Sunday at 9:54 a.m. was referred to Montana Highway Patrol. -- Deputies initiated an investigation during a vehicle stop on U.S. Highway 87 at 12:32 a.m. today. Havre Fire Department Emergency medical technicians responded to two calls Thursday, three calls Friday, four calls Saturday, four calls Sunday and one call early this morning. -- Firefighters, along with an ambulance, responded a vehicle crash on the 100 Block of First Street at 5 p.m. Saturday. Fire Chief Nathan Courtnage said four patients were seen, but no one required transport. -- Firefighters, along with an ambulance, responded Saturday at 6:24 p.m., Courtnage said, to a fire alarm on the 10 Block of Third Street where heat from cooking had set off a fire alarm, which was then reset. -- Firefighters, along with an ambulance, responded at 7:12 p.m. Saturday to the 800 Block of Second Street where a fire had started in a cigaret disposal can and had burned itself out before arrival of the truck, Courtnage said. -- Firefighters, along with an ambulance, were called Sunday at 1:16 p.m. to a vehicle crash on the 700 Block of 12th Avenue where one patient was seen but did not require transport, Courtnage said. Havre Animal Shelter This morning the animal shelter held four 6-month-old kittens, two 14-week-old kittens and one cat all of unknown gender, four female cats, eight kittens between 14 weeks and 6 months old, and one male cat. -- Also this morning, the animal shelter held four female mixed-breed dogs, seven puppies between 14 weeks and 6 months old, a male and a female Rottweiler, and a female German shepherd. Additionally, two puppies, ages 17-weeks and 22-weeks, were being housed offsite. The procession, organized jointly by student unions from the capital region, will commenced at the Hietaniemi Cemetery and culminated at Senate Square for a public celebration. On December 6 , 2023, students from the capital region will come together to celebrate Finland's 106th Independence Day in the traditional Student Independence Day Torchlight Procession. "The Student Torchlight Procession brings us, the students of the capital region, together year after year. In addition to celebrating our independence, we remember the students who have paved the way for us," said Nea Hakala, Chair of the Student Union of the University of Helsinki. The solemnity of the torchlight procession will begin at 4:00 PM at the Sankariristi monument in Hietaniemi Cemetery, where wreaths will be laid. The procession itself will set off from the Hietaniemi Cemetery Chapel at approximately 5:00 PM, following a route that included Hietaniemenkatu Arkadiankatu Pohjoisesplanadi Presidential Palace Mariankatu Aleksanterinkatu Senate Square. Traffic will be temporarily redirected to accommodate the procession. At the Presidential Palace, the procession will be greeted by the President of the Republic in a traditional manner. A civic celebration will take place at Senate Square from approximately 5:55 PM to 6:15 PM. The program will include choir singing, a speech by the Mayor of Helsinki, Juhana Vartiainen, and speeches by student unions. "In the Torchlight Procession, we students continue a long and festive tradition," remarked Mikaela Lindberg, a member of the Student Union of the University of Helsinki's board. This year's event will be organized by the Student Union of the University of Helsinki (HYY), Aalto University Student Union (AYY), Svenska Handelshogskolans Studentkar (SHS), the Student Union of the University of the Arts Helsinki (TaiYO), as well as Arcada Student Union ASK, Helga - Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences' Student Union, Laureamko - Laurea University of Applied Sciences' Student Union, and METKA - Metropolia University of Applied Sciences' Student Union, in collaboration with the Kadettitoverikunta organization. HT Various scams have exploded in numbers this year. Simultaneously, Finnish banks have been more successful in thwarting scams. Finnish citizens have lost millions of euros this year in various scams. At the same time, banks have been successful in combating scams more than ever. Scammers continually develop new methods and increasingly use social manipulation. For Nordea, insights from other Nordic countries provide an opportunity to effectively prepare for new types of scams. According to financial industry statistics, during the first half of 2023, banks prevented and recovered 15.9 million for victims of scams. This is more than double the amount compared to the same period the previous year. "Our observations indicate that scammers are not slowing down in the latter part of the year either. However, we have clearly kept up the pace: as scam numbers have grown, we have been able to prevent them more than last year. The trend is similar in other Nordic countries as well," says Sara Mella, Head of Personal Banking at Nordea. In Finland, various sectors are working hard to keep citizens safe from scam attempts. Increasing awareness of different scams is crucial. Nordic collaboration provides Nordea with a unique view of how fraud evolves in different market areas. "Fraud trends and criminal methods often spread from one bank to another and from one region to another. What we may not yet see in Finland could be a significant phenomenon, for example, in Sweden. It's important that we know what to prepare for. We also actively communicate with our customers because knowledge and expertise enhance security," says Mella. Scammers Continuously Develop New Methods Monitoring AI Usage Closely Although many scams and scam attempts follow similar patterns, new methods are constantly emerging. For example, hybrid scams, a combination of a message and a phone call, arrived in Finland during the past summer. "In new scams, there's an emphasis on manipulating the victim so that they unwittingly act actively in favor of the fraudster, such as making payment transactions themselves. The scammer may also instruct the victim to respond in a specific way if the bank asks about transactions, aiming to prevent the fraud and situation from continuing," describes Sara Helin, an expert in Nordea's fraud prevention unit. There have been examples of scams produced by artificial intelligence worldwide, but they have not yet become as prevalent in the Nordic countries. AI can be harnessed to steal voice and produce video and audio material that doesn't actually exist. For example, a call from one's own child with a video element is much more convincing than a text message. "We closely monitor the situation in the Nordic countries. Cases suspected of involving AI are investigated thoroughly. So far, we haven't identified any confirmed cases," says Helin. Patience is Key Protecting Yourself from Scams It's possible to protect oneself from scams by remembering a few simple pieces of advice. "The most important rule to remember is that patience is key. Scammers often appeal to urgency and urge you to act quickly, but there's always time to verify before taking action," reminds Helin. HT YEOKENS. Unless you eat a lot of yoghurt youve probably never heard of them. This points-based loyalty scheme on packets of Yeo Valley yoghurt, butter, cream and cheese promises a range of rewards including discounts, merchandise and, most prized of all, a free visit to the Yeo Valley organic farm in Somerset. My daughter Helen has been a dedicated collector for some time and rang me to see if I wanted to come with her on her free trip. Well, I say free but mum was still stung for the cost of her own ticket (not enough Yeokens for two apparently), travel and a nearby hotel the night before. Apart from that, completely free. Organic tends to bring up images of expensive, artisan products bought by the wealthier middle classes. But is it, despite the wholesome image, actually any better for the environment? Agriculture, as a whole, is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. The Governments Agri-Climate Report for 2022 finds that UK agriculture is responsible for 11 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions, in particular nitrous oxide and methane. Nitrous oxide is about 300 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas and its major source is fertilised soils, in particular soils fertilised with synthetic nitrogen fertilisers. Methane emissions are caused by enteric fermentation, as the report calls them sheep and cattle burps to you and me. The good news is that nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture have come down significantly in recent years as farmers have applied fewer nitrogen fertilisers to their crops. Methane, by contrast, has reduced only slightly due to smaller numbers of sheep and cattle. So does farming organically make any difference to any of this? Well, yes, it does in some significant ways. Research undertaken by Professor Andrew Neal at the Rothamsted Agricultural Research Centre and published in the journal Nature Food in January found that adding organic matter like manure to soils reduces the emissions of nitrous oxide from soil very significantly, in comparison with soils which have had only inorganic synthetic fertilisers added. Synthetic fertilisers are banned under organic standards. Organic farming also promotes closed loop agriculture where the farm recycles all nutrients and organic matter back to the soil by composting, for example, making the farm more sustainable. Closer to home, we have an organic farm in Whitchurch, Tolhurst Organic, managed by Iain Tolhurst, who has been pioneering organic farming techniques for 47 years. The farm is unusual enough to have a chapter in naturalist George Monbiots latest book, Regenesis Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet. Iain says he has seen many benefits of farming organically. Using natural methods of pest control, such as planting native wildflowers between beds of crops, has encouraged beneficial insects which predate on crop pests such as aphids and enhance biodiversity. He uses no nitrogen fertiliser, either synthetic or organic, such as animal manure, on his land. Instead he grows plants that convert nitrogen in the air into a form that plants can use, a system called green manure. This eliminates any leakage of nitrogen from the farm. Its undeniable that organic produce tends to cost more but it is a far more environmentally friendly way of producing food. So can we square this circle? Its worth remembering that most crops we grow are fed to animals we then eat, even when humans could eat the crops directly. This in turn drives the need for high yields and inputs of synthetic fertilisers which in turn emit nitrous oxide. The Governments Climate Change Committee recommends eating less meat and dairy and more plant-based protein foods for health as well as environmental reasons. Buying some of those plants from organic farms such as Iains would really make a difference. THE Wizard of Toz by the junior section of Wargrave Youth Theatre was introduced to us by a very confident narrator, suitably assisted by an equally enthusiastic stage manager who appeared from the wings. The narrator rambled on and gave us an excellently acted two-minute monologue. Very clever. Poor Jojo, on stage, as her mother started to take lots of flash photos from the audience. Her embarrassment showed, which only drove her mother on. Didnt she hear the No flash photography request before the start? Great dialogue between them had the audience in stitches as Mum approached the stage for some close-ups. There was some super acting. Then Gran appeared with a large video camera just to really make the point. It was well acted with great timing and so clever. We met Dorothy along with Toto (bark, bark), the Scarecrow (no, you cant sing) and the Tin Man (this isnt your scene) all very capable actors with excellent stage presence and confidence. Then the fire alarm sounded well, not really, but of course it became a great sketch inserted into the story by the building manager. There was great comic timing and clever acting, with a plot that was simple but extremely funny. It was reminiscent of early Monty Python. Who knew the Lion came from Shakespeare? Did the lion crash the scene or was it another very clever piece of acting? Crash bang and a very convincing Witch appeared wearing a fabulous fluorescent hat, reminiscent of Wheres Wally? Three monkeys entered with her, all of whom had various skills. One (tried to) juggle, one flew (or rather tried to) around the stage and the third gave a demonstration of his acrobatic skills. So The Wizard of Toz was not there in person but a clever stand-in, ably helped by the stage manager with a balloon, who captured our attention. The final scene, led by Dorothy, summed up the qualities this play showed in abundance great acting, great timing and very clever inspired comedy from a very young cast. Well done, all. The Sound of No Music was performed by the senior section. A new narrator introduced this play and again with great confidence explained why this version had no music. Wargrave Theatre, it seems, doesnt have the correct licence. We started in the convent where Maria and Rev Mother were talking have you ever seen a nun with crisps up her sleeve before? Maria arrived at the home of the Von Trapp family carrying a large cello case. Was this downtown Chicago? There was an interesting dialogue between the new governess and the butler with an excellent stage German accent. The children were introduced one by one dont we all remember that scene? Now, with only one boy in the cast of 16, Friedrich and Kurt were played by one person, cleverly done by dropping to his knees in his superb lederhosen for the younger Kurt, which was inspired. How often do we see young people today standing side by side using their phones? Except these phones were telegrams, convincingly acted by Leisel and Rolfe. Sixteen, going on 17? No music still but cleverly dropped in by sound. So the actors were not allowed to sing and the Von Trapp family were itching to do Doe, a deer... so, why not turn it into a community song, which the audience belted out ably helped by very clever cue cards. Again, this was inspired panto folk take note. Some of the lines were priceless The most boring un-charismatic male lead in any musical was how Captain Von Trapp was described (with apologies to Christopher Plummer). Cups glued to a tray and lots more visual slapstick comedy added to this clever take on a film and theatre classic. Was Australia a mistake? Of course we all know it was Austria and very professionally carried off. A great dance routine by the whole cast would have Rodgers and Hammerstein turning in their graves. Then there was a short scene with two nuns, with shades of Sister Act, but still so clearly of The Sound of Music. It was like watching a series of very clever comic sketches acted with great professionalism and timing that cleverly satirised the original without ever offending. Anyone walking in at any point of the 40-minute performance would soon pick up that they were watching a very clever take on the original. That takes some doing. Well done, all. Finally, as we all know, the Von Trapp family escaped Austria over the Alps into Switzerland. Who came up with 500 Miles by the Proclaimers as the theme to that sketch? This was my first visit to a production by Wargrave Youth Theatre and I came with an open mind. My wife Helen and I have seen a couple of very enjoyable productions at the Theatre Royal Windsor this year with serious household name actors. The younger members of Wargrave Theatre came very close. We had a wonderful evening and look forward to the next production. Huge credit to Chez Annetts for putting this together as it clearly involved a massive amount of work, extremely skilled writing and direction. Bravo. Also, huge applause to the backstage, set painting and sound and lighting guys, who were very clever and really made the production come alive. Peter Knowles Number 1: (People born on 1, 10, 19, and 28 of any month) Ganesha says you will enjoy the most wonderful time this week. You will be able to grow as a better person. This week you will have to create a balance between your personal and professional life so that your life remains better, safe, and comfortable. You get good news from people you love and share basic things. Pay attention to the small things in life and remain optimistic. There's a definite reason you're continuing to grow your personal life this week. You have a goal and a determination to do something very different from the document. It is worth using it in better ways so that you can stay ahead of the posts on your website. There really is no substitute for this plan, and the positive effects will quickly become a habit. Professionally, this will be a favorable time for you as you will get many important engineers to work for you. Make sure you continue good work and complete your pending tasks on time. Read your free weekly numerology predictions on hindustantimes.com. Find out what the planets have predicted for these numbers from 4th to 10th December 2023(shutterstock) Number 2: (People born on 2, 11, 20, and 29 of any month) Ganesha says to be a little careful this week as you may have to face a lot of controversy and fraud. People may not confide in you about significant negativity which can lead to depression and anxiety. No matter what the situation is, you must work hard and use your creativity in the best possible way. Luck will soon favor you and ultimately you will be successful in achieving new heights of success. It requires care and attention in your personal life. He does everything that feels right and puts off other people's opinions and shareholdings. Exercise control over your life because this is the only way to achieve mental peace and satisfaction right now. You will be proud to see your child achieve something great in his life. You will work hard in your personal life and after that, you will also achieve success. Nominate your profession and complete your pending tasks so that you can do something new. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Number 3: (People born on 3, 12, 21, and 30 of any month) Ganesha says this week has brought immense success and luck in your life. Focus on the stories that you like the most so that you can give yourself a thirst and do the stories that you like the most. This week it is important for you to stay ahead of everyone and focus on your education and initiation in life. In this way, you will not only achieve success but will also get mental peace and satisfaction throughout your life. This week it is important for you to manage and evaluate various choices in your personal life. Your career, finances, and love life are linked together, so try to understand how they are affecting each other. With this, you can make your week more effective. Assess your current situation in each area and identify any areas that need attention or improvement. This week is bringing promising opportunities for you. Number 4: (People born on 4, 13, 22, and 31 of any month) Ganesha says this week will be important for self-change, education, and travel. This week especially students will have a good time in their studies. Students who are applying for higher education may get positive news this week. Due to higher education, there can be possibilities of traveling. You will probably learn about some new topic or area in life and start developing an interest in it. You may also go on a trip or a weekend vacation with your siblings. You will enjoy some recreational activities or events with your siblings. This week will be very beneficial for your professional life in terms of profits and achievement of goals. If you are in business, your business will gain momentum and you will meet new partners who will take the business forward. If you are currently employed, you may receive praise from your superiors and colleagues. This week is going to be very progressive for you. Number 5: (People born on 5, 14, and 23 of any month) Ganesha says this week will be seen with an impact on financial matters, shared resources in the family, and marital agreement. This week your focus will be more on financial matters. You will thoroughly review your past investments and also get profitable returns. You may think about new investments and perhaps investing in a new area. You are advised to understand the market properly, do research on a personal level, and not trust anyone. You will discuss financial matters and investments with your family. You can get good guidance from such discussions and you will be able to make positive changes in your investments. This week you may also get some other alternative source of income, which will bring good financial benefits and make you financially strong in the coming future. However, you will also have many unnecessary expenses this week. Number 6: (People born on 6, 15, and 24 of any month) Ganesha says this week will bring the ability to express their feelings, new ideas, and networking. This week you will express your thoughts openly and focus on yourself. You will think about your aspirations related to your life and career. You will have a desire to discover new ideas and delve deeper into life. Ultimately, you may come across as a geek to coworkers and family. You will be very eager to share your knowledge with everyone. From the end of this week, you will start enjoying financial security. You may also get freedom from debt soon. You can also expect solutions to your other financial problems. This period will bring success in the efforts that you have recently started. Your popularity and fame will increase in the professional field and everyone in the office will be impressed by your work and dedication. Number 7 (People born on 7, 16, and 25 of any month) Ganesha says this week will bring introspection, interest in spirituality, and unnecessary expenses. This week you will be able to take some time for yourself, especially for introspection. You may potentially revisit past issues or secrets and begin working on them. You will also show interest in spirituality or spiritual subjects. You can also consult an astrologer about past issues and ongoing issues in life. This week there will be many unnecessary expenses that you may have to face. You are advised to maintain a budget and spend accordingly. You will get new opportunities in your career and appreciation from superiors as you will be able to perform very well in the work already assigned. This period indicates support from someone of the opposite sex which will bring new projects and financial gains. Number 8: (People born on 8, 17, and 26 of any month) Ganesha says this week will be important for the impact on social groups, religious journeys, and group activities. This week your interaction with friends in social groups will increase which will be very beneficial for your career and future. You will have a desire to share ideas and collaborate with like-minded individuals. This communication and exchange of ideas will give you happiness and satisfaction. This week there is great potential for you to form new relationships and get involved in group activities that will make you realize many things about yourself. You will have very creative and new ideas in the professional field and with their help you will be able to impress everyone and your career will also progress well. Number 9: (People born on 9, 18, and 27 of any month) Ganesha says this week will be important for careers, public image, and identity. This week you will see positive signs and amazing growth in your career. Your image among colleagues and superiors will improve significantly and you will receive a lot of appreciation for your past work. You will focus on professional development and begin networking with superiors regarding potential projects and goals. There are immense possibilities for recognition and advancement in the field you are working in. Something new or surprising may happen in your personal life. It is essential to handle any situation that arises during the week calmly and through positive conversations. In your personal life, you will enjoy a peaceful and harmonious time in your marital life. Contact Shri Chirag Daruwalla: Call / whatsapp on: +91 9825470377 Email: info@bejandaruwalla.com Website Url: www.bejandaruwalla.com Just about a year on, it is time again for the inevitable. Another step forward for the Apple MacBook Pro 16. Its been twice in a year, this time around, which itself is a conflict against the routine. Clearly the M3 couldnt wait, and unleashed its been. After all, an all-round step forward from the M2 series that itself set performance and battery stamina benchmark, worrying everything in the Windows PC ecosystem. Perhaps we arent charmed anymore by serious spec upgrades. Could it be Apples precision with resetting performance reference points, with every Apple Silicon generation? Maybe. The new Macbook Pro, The Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3 chip options, isnt an iterative update. It is a broader transition, a development thatll undoubtedly have Intel, AMD and an entire ecosystem of Windows laptop makers, incredibly worried. Again. The flagship for this generation is the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with the M3 Max chip. It is the fastest among a troika that too has M3 and M3 Pro. It does cost a significant outlay too, with the base price for an M3 Max spec-ed machine, a mind-numbing 3,49,900. For a broader picture, the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with M3 is priced 2,49,900 onwards. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here For that money, youll get colossal specs too. Apple India Online Stores customise your Mac option illustrates a clear picture. Your choice between a 14-core CPU and 30-core GPU or a 16-core CPU and 40-core GPU options of the Apple M3 Max chip (without getting into geek-speak, more means even greater performance). While 36GB memory is itself a really high starting spec, this can be swapped for as much as 128GB RAM. Theres up to 8TB SSD, or solid-state-drive, too. To quell curiosity, we customised this to the limit (including an 8TB SSD, though thatd be really rapacious for most), and the price tag reads an enormous 7,19,900. Things indeed are serious, and Apple isnt playing around with a machine as powerful as this. Also read:Apples new M3 chips reset performance benchmarks, with an eye on gaming While weve experienced generations of MacBook Pro 16-inch over the years, continuity in design still retains a freshness that isnt easy to hold. The only real visual difference between this and the early 2023 models (or even the 2021 model, for that matter) is the new Space Black colour. A genuinely darker colourway in a MacBook, a sharp contrast to the silver. Space Grey was the darkest a Mac went, in the past few years. This colour will not be easy to maintain, particularly if caring for a piece of technology, doesnt come naturally to you. Refinements in anodization help reduce smudges to an extent, but thats about it. Keep a cleaning cloth handy, thatd be our recommendation. It is nigh impossible to make the MacBook Pro 16-inch with the M3 Max chip, struggle for breath. Even with gaming, and thats exactly the direction Apple is looking in with the M3 chips and beyond. Not just the number of cores for the processor and graphics. Dynamic caching, an industry first, will allow software to determine memory allocation for each app or game in real-time, instead of working predefined minimum or maximum allocation. The new GPU also adds Mesh shading and Ray Tracing. While I do not have a direct comparison with a MacBook with the M2 Max chip for benchmarks to illustrate a generational forward step, improvements are clear nonetheless. This is around 3 times faster with a Geekbench benchmark test, for instance, than the most powerful Intel Core i9 and Core i7 powered laptops weve tested in the past few months. The idea isnt to confuse you (thats why we purposefully stay away from benchmark scores as comparators), but illustrate how far ahead an Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with the M3 Max is ahead of Intel and AMDs silicon. That translates into tangible improvements in experience, even when this behemoth is being used for more mundane tasks, such as a laptop at work. On a lighter note, finally a laptop that meets Google Chromes real-world usable spec requirements! Switch to gaming, which Apple insists youll get a chance to do more, and it is astonishing for well the M3 Maxs processing and graphics handles gameplay at the highest detailing settings. We can hope more gaming titles on the App Store for Macs soon, with Apple Arcade primed to get into its stride. Also read:Experiences can be turbocharged with purpose-built tech: Apples Bob Borchers Though thats only really when any sort of strain is hinted at, as the cooling fans work their hardest. And these can get quite loud. We must refer to the automatic power mode switching too. It is attentive and responsive enough to immediately make a switch to the high-power settings when it detects a synthetic benchmark test or a game loading. Thats also a cue for the fans to be ready for some extra work. So much power must mean battery life will struggle with compromise? On the contrary, we tested the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch with the M3 Max deliver close to 19 hours on a charge, at 70% brightness level (manually set; auto settings turned off for accuracy) with two 8-hour workdays (and the multitasking involving overloaded web browsers and documents that comes with it), and rest of the time taken up with video streaming, taking advantage of a gorgeous display. Screen brightness, particularly for one of this size, will have a bearing on stamina. Its around 15 hours of similar usage at 100% and almost 21 hours when dropped down to a more comfortable 30%. The takeaway here is, you arent compromising battery stamina and can still leave the adapter at home as you step forward for a day at work, despite the luxurious comfort of a 16.2-inch screen. That makes it portable, as much as it is a desktop replacement. Not just the M3 Max spec, but the MacBook Pro 16-inch in general, all things form factor considered. Mind you, it is 2.16kg or thereabouts, and youd like to keep your backpack time to a minimum during commute. Also read:Space Black MacBook Pro and colourful iMac get a massive performance jump Speaking of this Liquid Retina XDR canvas, not much has changed except non-HDR content now has a peak brightness of 600-nits as against 500-nits from the previous generation. This remains one of the most accurate displays in the computing space with wide colour (P3). The question really is, who needs all this power and performance in a laptop? Important to make one thing clear from the outset an Apple M3 Max chip only really makes genuine sense for a gamer making early bets on Apples intent for the ecosystem, or anyone with pro workloads such as a video editor who puts a premium on the minutes shaved off for task completion. And money, no bar. This may be the point of some complication, but if raw performance is still an important enough criteria but not the M3 Max ballpark, even the M3 Pro machines could make perfect sense. While saving you some money. All this while, there is absolutely no denying the fact that Apple has indeed reset the benchmark. The very best of a laptop as you interface with the physical being that is the Apple MacBook Pro 16-inch. Under the hood, nothing else matching the M3 Max and its performance as well as battery stamina, all in a wholesome perspective. This is reaffirmation of a path Apple chose when it closed the Intel chapter a few years ago, a decision that stands validated. Yet again. Taiwanese firm Foxconn on Monday stopped the production of Apple iPhones at its facility near Chennai due to heavy rains, triggered by the Cyclone 'Michaung'. The iPhone maker has not decided whether it will resume production on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Foxconn has been manufacturing iPhones at its plant in Sriperumbudur since August. A man wades through a waterlogged road during heavy rain owing to Cyclone Michaung, in Chennai,(PTI) Heavy rain threw life out of gear in Chennai and neighbouring districts in Tamil Nadu. Streets are waterlogged, airport runways and railway tracks are submerged due to the rain amid cyclonic storm Michaung which lay near Chennai and Puducherry. Cyclone Michaung LIVE coverage Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Several parts of Chennai and the adjoining districts of Kancheepuram, Chengalpattu and Tiruvallur were inundated even as the government machinery was deployed to clear the stagnant water and inundation. The MK Stalin government has ordered the closure of all educational institutions in Chennai on Tuesday due to anticipated heavy rainfall. The state government has urged private companies to allow their employees to work from home in affected regions on December 5. However, all essential services, such as police, fire service, local bodies, milk supply, water supply, hospitals/medical shops, power supply, transport, fuel outlets, hotels/restaurants, and offices engaged in disaster response, relief and rescue activities shall function as usual. In Chennai, cabinet ministers Udhayanidhi Stalin and Ma Subramanian visited the affected areas and oversaw the relief activities. Ten teams comprising 250 NDRF personnel have been deployed for rescue efforts in affected districts. The Chennai airport operations were suspended from 9.40 am to 11 pm. As many as 70 flights arriving to and departing from the airport were cancelled owing to non-stop rains. The runway and tarmac also remain shut due to waterlogging, the Airport Authority of India was quoted by PTI as saying. (With Reuters, PTI inputs) Indian billionaire Gautam Adani's net worth increased by 5.6 billion dollars ( 46,663 crore) last week due to the good performance of Adani Group companies' stocks. This comes nearly a year after he lost a substantial chunk of his net worth due to the allegations of financial irregularities levelled by the American short-seller Hindenburg. Gautam Adani(Reuters file photo) The Adani Group stocks soared on Tuesday, a day after the Supreme Court reserved its verdict on the probe into the Hindenburg allegations saying it won't consider media reports against the group as the gospel truth. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The market considered the remark as a positive sign and invested heavily into the company over the week. On Tuesday, the conglomerate's market value rose by 12 billion dollars, reported Bloomberg. Hindenburg had accused the Gautam Adani group of stock market manipulation -- a charge denied by the conglomerate. Abhay Agarwal, founder and portfolio manager at Mumbai-based Piper Serica Advisors, told the agency that the view over the controversy is that "we will not hear about Hindenburg". Also read: Gautam Adani's renewables firm in talks for 14,978 crore loan: Report The court had asked Sebi to probe the Hindenburg's allegations against the Adani Group. The entire episode had led to the group losing 153 billion dollars worth of market value. Over the last few months, the group has recovered a major part of that value. A six-member expert panel appointed by the court said in its interim report in May that it saw no regulatory failure or signs of price manipulation in Adani stocks. The group's recovery was propelled by the investments made by GQG Partners and Qatar Investment Authority. It also secured a 3.5 billion dollars refinancing loan which boosted investor sentiment in favour of the Adani Group. Gautam Adani's current net worth has increased to 59.5 billion dollars, according to Forbes. He lost 55 billion dollars due to the allegations. He was the world's second richest person when the allegations struck; now he is the 20th richest person in the world. Infosys co-founder Narayan Murthy's advice to youngsters to work 70 hours a week had triggered a massive debate across several sections of the society. In his conversation with the company's chief financial officer Mohandas Pai, he had said if India wanted to compete with countries like Japan and China, it needed to boost up the work productivity, which is very low. "Our youngsters need to work for at least 70 hours a week, he had said. Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy (PTI file) Murthy's advice also found a mention in the winter session of the parliament which commenced on Monday. Three Lok Sabha MPs asked the Narendra Modi government whether it is evaluating the suggestion posed by the Infosys co-founder. Congress MP Komati Venkata Reddy, Bharat Rashtra Samithi's Manne Srinivas Reddy and Kanumuru Raghu Rama Krishna Raju of the YSR Congress Party in an unstarred question to the Ministry of Labour and Employment, asked, Will the Minister of LABOUR AND EMPLOYMENT be pleased to state: Whether the Government is evaluating the 70 hour work proposal made by Infosys co-founder in order to make the country competitive and increase productivity; and if so, the details thereof and the stand of the Government in this regard as compared to working hours in foreign countries set out in the International and basic principles? Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Rameswar Teli, the minister of state (MoS) for labour and employment, replied," No such proposal is under consideration of Government of India". ALSO READ: Nothing should be free, says Narayana Murthy at Bengaluru Tech Summit Murthy''s suggestion had found support from Ola chief executive Bhavish Aggarwal. "Totally agree with Mr Murthys views. Its not our moment to work less and entertain ourselves. Rather its our moment to go all in and build in 1 generation what other countries have built over many generations!he had posted on social media platform X. However, film producer Ronnie Screwvala did not agree with Murthy's 70-hour suggestion. Boosting productivity isn't just about working longer hours. It's about getting better at what you do - Upskilling, having a positive work environment and fair pay for the work done. Quality of work done > clocking in more hours, he had said in an X post. As heavy rains lash Chennai and other nearby regions due to Cyclone Michaung, more than 30 flights are reportedly diverted to Bengaluru airport. Visuals on the internet show runways getting inundated with water at Chennai airport and the operations are delayed. Michaung Cyclone: More than 30 flights diverted to Bengaluru from Chennai(REUTERS) Also Read - 'Michaung' turns into severe cyclonic storm; heavy rainfall in Chennai Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The diverted flights include both domestic and international airlines which are supposed to arrive in Chennai airport. All the airlines have already alerted the passengers about the diversions as the impact of Michaung is severe on Monday. Meanwhile, the flights to Chennai, Tirupati and Vijayawada from Bengaluru were delayed and a few cancelled, due to the extreme weather conditions at the region. In an announcement, the management of Bengaluru airport said, Due to adverse weather conditions in the region and the temporary closure for arrival operations at Chennai Airport on December 4, 2023, scheduled departures from BLR Airport to Chennai (MAA), Tirupati (TIR) and Vijayawada (VGA) are experiencing delays or cancellations. Passengers are requested to check with their respective airlines for alerts and updates. According to PTI, at least 12 domestic outbound services, including to destinations like Ahmedabad and Thiruvananthapuram were cancelled in Chennai. Also Read - Cyclone Michaung: IMD's heavy rainfall warning in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry today; schools closed Four international services, including to Dubai and Sri Lanka were also cancelled by a private carrier, the news agency reported, citing unidentified officials. The cyclone is expected to hit the west-central Bay of Bengal off south Andhra Pradesh and adjoining north Tamil Nadu coasts by the forenoon of December 5. According to IMD, the cyclonic storm is currently over the Southwest Bay of Bengal and is likely to continue to move northwestwards, intensify further and reach West central Bay of Bengal off south Andhra Pradesh and adjoining north Tamil Nadu coasts by Monday forenoon. A US-based Sikh environmental organisation has completed planting 850 sacred forests, with the latest one in Ludhiana, and will be presenting its progress and the action plan at the UN Climate Summit in Dubai. People look at artwork by Yiyun Kang at the COP28 U.N. Climate Summit, Sunday, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (AP) According to a press release, EcoSikhs global president Rajwant Singh will be showcasing the Sacred Forest initiative as an effective climate solution for ecological restoration and will offer collaboration with governmental organisations and faith groups. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here He has been invited by COP28 CEO Adnan Z Amin to address a panel titled Urban Wisdom: Indigenous knowledge and governance of future cities. On the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith, EcoSikh planted its 850th sacred forest of 1,313 trees in the heart of Ludhiana. EcoSikh will be presenting its progress and the action plan in a meeting of various stakeholders in Dubai. COP28, which is taking place in Dubai, will be one of the largest and most important gatherings in 2023 and is expected to host 60,000 to 80,000 delegates and over 140 heads of state. We all need to take action urgently in response to devastating rising temperatures. We cannot wait for some entity or government to find solutions to the ecological disasters we are facing all around us now. Many communities are losing their ancestral lands due to several environmental factors beyond their control. We cannot sit and watch while people are suffering due to catastrophe, Singh said. EcoSikh was founded in 2009 in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme as the Sikh communitys response to climate change. For over a decade, EcoSikh has been working on environmental issues in India and now has chapters in Canada, the UK, Ireland and the United States. Our strategy to fight climate change should not only be focused on emission reduction. We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Sacred Forests is one effective way to achieve that goal. Mass action of such kind can help control the rising temperatures, said Charan Singh, EcoSikhs forest convener. A fire broke out in the operation theatre (OT) building of Kalyan Singh Super Speciality Cancer Institute and Hospital (KSSSCIH) here on Monday afternoon, fire officials said, adding no injuries were reported in the incident. No one was hurt... The fire broke out in the battery room on the second floor of the OT Block of the hospital causing panic among the staff and attendants, said chief fire officer Mangesh Kumar. According to fire officials, two smoke exhausters and seven firefighting vehicles from various fire stations took almost two hours to put out the fire. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The popular cancer care hospital is located near Ahmamau Crossing on Sultanpur Road of the state capital. No one was hurt... The fire broke out in the battery room on the second floor of the OT Block of the hospital causing panic among the staff and attendants, said chief fire officer Mangesh Kumar. The fire was put out after two hours of struggle. At the time of the fire, dozens of patients and attendants were trapped... The fire started in the battery room, which had inflammable materials, the CFO said, adding all persons in the building were safely evacuated. A short circuit could have caused the fire, hospital authorities, meanwhile, said. The fire broke out, possibly, due to a short circuit in the UPS room. There is no disruption in medical services due to the fire. An investigation team has been formed to find out the cause, said Dr R K Dhiman, the director of the institute in a statement. Weve 25 operating theatres, out of which four are on the second floor. The third floor has no patient care facility, and the fourth doesnt have any public movement, said Dr Devashish Shukla, the medical superintendent, said. However, one of the scheduled surgeries had to be postponed. Forest teams were deployed after locals in village Meerpur Jehta in Kakori reported spotting a leopard in the area. Forest officials checking pugmarks (Sourced) Locals reported a leopard presence following which our teams reached the spot. The pugmarks were picked up and analysed. It was found the pugmarks were not that of a member of the cat family but possibly of a hyena, said divisional forest officer Ravi Kumar Singh. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Possibly the locals got confused as a hyena too has stripes on the body, said the DFO. The forest department has deployed three teams to keep vigil on the movement of any wild animal. Locals can also inform us if they spot any wild animal. We shared the contact number of control room 0522-2716723 with the locals, said Singh. Leopards have been spotted by locals several times in the state capital. LUCKNOW The Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited (UPPCL) successfully increased its revenue collection by 45% in November of this year compared to the same month the previous year, marking a significant achievement. Representational photo (HT Photo) UPPCL chairman Ashish Kumar Goel said on Monday, In November this year, we achieved a revenue of 5400 crore, compared to 3718 crore in November 2022, representing a 45% increase. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The Varanasi discom demonstrated the highest growth, achieving a 72% increase in revenue, followed by the Agra discom (58%), Lucknow discom (54%), and Meerut discom (30%). Goel added, We have instructed officials not to become complacent but to continue their efforts to further enhance revenue recovery, ensuring improved power supply for the people. He added that a team of 96 officials from Shakti Bhawan has been dispatched to various districts for three days to monitor the progress of the ongoing One-Time Settlement (OTS) scheme and assess the power supply situation. Cyclone Michaung has thrown life in Chennai out of gear. An unusually heavy downpour (151 mm in 24 hours ending at 8.30 am on December 4, the third highest in a 24-hour period; and the 24 hours ending at 8.30 am on December 5 will likely be worse) has forced the government to call in the army for rescue and relief. The airport is closed and many trains have been cancelled. Schools are shut as memories of the 2015 floods return to haunt the city residents. Two record-breaking downpours on November 16 and December 2 and mismanagement of reservoirs had caused havoc in the city that year. These extreme weather events are no longer once-a-century events. Delhi, this year, Bengaluru last year and Mumbai in 2005 saw devastating floods. There are both local reasons and global factors for these events. The infrastructure has not kept up with the pressures of population explosion. Lakes, tanks and floodplains of rivers have been encroached, leading to impediments in drainage of flood waters. The climate crisis has accentuated these disasters. Rainfall that was spread across the monsoon season often falls in a day or two. An already creaking urban drainage system is stretched even further, leading to a breakdown: In coastal cities like Chennai, the tide complicates matters. PREMIUM Chennai: People wade through a waterlogged road during heavy rain owing to Cyclone Michaung, in Chennai, Monday, Dec. 4, 2023. (PTI Photo)(PTI12_04_2023_000322A)(PTI) CAT 2023 Answer Key Highlights: The provisional answer key of the Common Admission Test (CAT) 2023 has been released. Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Lucknow has released it along with candidates responses on the official website, iimcat.ac.in. CAT 2023 answer key released (iimcat.ac.in) Direct link The entrance test was conducted on November 26. As informed by IIM Lucknow, around 2.88 lakh of the total 3.28 lakh registered candidates appeared in the examination. The overall attendance was 88 per cent. The paper had 66 questions divided into three parts VARC: 24 questions, DILR: 20 and QA: 22 questions. Candidates are allowed to send their feedback on the provisional answer key and it will be reviewed by the institute. If found valid, changes will be made in the final key. Follow this live blog for IIM CAT 2023 answer key link and other updates. The Uttar Pradesh Subordinate Services Selection Commission (UPSSSC) is expected to release final or revised answer keys and results of the Preliminary Eligibility Test (UP PET 2023) soon. The window to raise objections to the provisional answer key was closed on November 15 and next, it will publish final answer keys. UPSSSC PET result, final answer key 2023: Where to check it(Shutterstock) Candidates can check UP PET result 2023 and download final answer keys from upsssc.gov.in, once it is released. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Candidates were allowed to raise objections to the preliminary answer key. Their objections will be reviewed by a panel of experts. If answers are changed because of it, the final answer key will will be revised accordingly. Candidates can expect results of the UPSSSC PET 2023 soon after final answer keys are released. UPSSC PET was held on October 28 and 29. The provisional answer key was released on November 6. When declared, candidates can check their results through these steps: How to check UPSSSC PET result/final key Go to the commission's official website upsssc.gov.in. Open the UPSSSC PET final/revised answer key download or result link, as required. Login to the dashboard Check your result/answer key and download it. The Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Rohtak welcomed Haryana Governor Bandaru Dattatreya who made a keynote address and interacted with students and faculty of the institute on Friday. Haryana Governor Bandaru Dattatreya visits IIM Rohtak According to a press release issued by IIM Rohtak, Governor Dattatreya, during his visit, reviewed all the work done by the institution, and saw presentations regarding the programs offered, clubs and committees, research output, consulting, and executive education. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Prof. Dheeraj Sharma, Director, IIM Rohtak, along with faculty and other staff of IIM Rohtak welcomed the Governor. Speaking during the occasion, he urged the students to find ways to contribute not only to the corporate world but also to society at large. No plan to introduce state-specific cultural curricula: Union minister G Kishan Reddy He highlighted the institute's commitment to serving as the research arm for Haryana as well as the center. Sharma also said that the institutes efforts in actively conducting assessments and offering consultancy services to pivotal government agencies. Following this, a presentation ceremony by different student bodies was conducted. The students highlighted the institutes achievements, focusing on three aspects: programs, consulting services, and research. Governor Dattatreya, while addressing the gathering, lauded the institute for its insightful research initiatives and valuable societal contribution. He extended additional felicitations to Professor Dheeraj Sharma for his leadership elevating the institute to new heights. UPPSC recruitment 2023: Application process begins for Staff Nurse posts The Haryana Governor interacted with the students and highlighted the importance of regularly engaging in co-curricular and physical activities for improving physical and mental fitness, particularly Yoga sessions. He said, the institute must prepare students for a technological environment characterized by artificial intelligence, augmented reality, machine learning, 3D printing, and data science. Governor Dattatreya emphasized that by 2030, approximately t.hree crore new technical jobs will be created. With appropriate technical education it was very likely that two crore jobs out of the three crore new jobs would be taken by Indians, said Dattatreya Emphasizing the potential of the New Education Policy (NEP) to foster values, develop scientific temper, and improve the employability of students, Governor Dattatreya lauded the diversity of students in the institute, hailing it as a Mini India. The Haryana Governor also appreciated the Jammu Kashmir women's internship program offered by the institute every year. (For more information, visit the official website) There are no plans to introduce state-specific cultural curricula in a partnership with the Ministry of Education, Union Tourism and Culture Minister G Kishan Reddy told Parliament on Monday. No plans for state-specific cultural curricula, says Union Minister In a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha, Reddy said paragraph 4.32 of the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020 clearly mentions that the states will prepare their own curricula and textbooks, incorporating state-specific material as needed. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The Ministry of Culture, through its autonomous body Centre for Cultural Resources and Training (CCRT), designs training programmes focusing on the promotion and preservation of India's tangible and intangible cultural heritage, literary heritage, folk and tribal art and culture (dance, music, painting) and craft traditions, with a special emphasis on multilingualism and multiculturalism, keeping in view the recommendations of the NEP-2020, Reddy stated. On Monday, actor Janhvi Kapoor and Shikhar Pahariya reached the Mahakaleshwar temple in Ujjain. Janhvi is rumoured to be dating Shikhar for quite some time now and they are often seen visiting temples together. Photos of them from the Mahakaleshwar temple have now been shared by news agency ANI. Also read: Janhvi Kapoor misses Orhan Awatramani Janhvi Kapoor and Shikhar Pahariya at Mahakaleshwar temple. Janhvi Kapoor and Shikhar Pahariya For the temple visit, Janhvi opted for a pink saree, while Shikhar wore a white kurta outfit. As per ANI, Janhvi participated in the bhasma aarti, which takes place early morning. She also took part in special rituals. Shikhar was with her during the pooja. Temple priests blessed Janhvi and gave her a photo of Baba Mahakal. Janhvi has not yet shared any visuals from her trip to Madhya Pradesh's Ujjain on social media. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Janhvi's rumoured relationship Janhvi Kapoor and Shikhar Pahariya are rumoured to be dating for a long time now. Neither they have confirmed their relationship, nor denied it. The two are often spotted out and about together in paparazzi photos and videos. Janhvi's relationship with Shikhar is not as new as many might think. Reportedly, Shikhar was in a relationship with Janhvi several years ago. However, it is believed that the two parted ways due to unknown reasons. It was filmmaker Karan Johar who almost confirmed Janhvi Kapoor and Shikhar Pahariya's past relationship during an episode of Koffee With Karan last year. Janhvi had appeared with Sara Ali Khan who has reportedly dated Shikhar Pahariya's brother Veer Pahariya. While Janhvi and Shikhar found their way back to each other, Sara and Veer are no longer together as per reports. Who is Shikhar Pahariya? Shikhar is the grandson of the former chief minister of Maharashtra Sushil Kumar Shinde. He is an entrepreneur by profession. Janhvi is all set for her Telugu debut with Devara. Talking about beginning the film shoot, she recently told Galatta Plus, "I have shot for three days for the film. It was so comfortable. They were so loving. Its everything I have been dying to do for such a long time. When I went on set and they gave me the brief and when I just had fun in front of the camera, it was just the most liberating thing. They welcomed me with open arms, even the people over there. It felt like homecoming. Entertainment! Entertainment! Entertainment! Click to follow our Whatsapp Channel Your daily dose of gossip, films, shows, celebrities updates all in one place I go back to December all the time! Cuz it's the beginning of Christmas shenanigans, with loads of decorations, gifts and my favourite, desserts! Top 10 movies you can enjoy watching this christmas alongside your family and friends. Our familial tradition on Christmas has been watching and re-watching all our favourite Christmas movies and therefore, we bring to you, the ultimate Netflix Christmas Watchlist. Top 10 movies you can enjoy watching this festive season alongside your family and friends. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Klaus- 2019 Described as the best modern Christmas movie on Netflix, Klaus is an English language Spanish animated film, following a postman located in an island town in the Far North who finds a friendship with a reclusive toymaker. Love, Actually- 2003 Following nine connected stories, this movie is set a few days before Christmas, exploring one emotion that binds us all, love. Among the characters explored are David, the handsome newly elected British prime minister who falls for a young junior staffer, Sarah, a graphic designer whose devotion to her mentally ill brother complicates her love life, and Harry, a married man tempted by his attractive new secretary. A California Christmas- 2020 This one is a favourite of many on X. Joseph, a rich charmer who poses as a ranch hand to get Callie, a farmer to sell her familial land before Christmas. A lovely fact about this one, the reel-life couple, is also a real-life couple! Who Killed Santa? A Murderville Murder Mystery- 2022 Fans of Murderville's improvisational romps will surely enjoy this one. Senior Detective Terry Seattle has to figure out who killed Santa. The one catch here: his co-detectives, Jason Bateman and Maya Rudolph, who play themselves have no script like the rest of the cast. Together they have to improvise their way through the investigation. Christmas With You- 2022 With some describing it as sweet and others as cute and fun, this movie has quite a following. It follows pop star Angelina, who feeling career burnout, moves to a small town and not only finds the thrill of work but also the will to love. Happiest Season- 2020 The first LGBTQ Christmas film, this one became an instant classic when it was released. It follows Abby and Harper, an LGBTQ couple, who are all set to visit Harper's family during the holidays. The only twist? Harper hasn't come out to her parents yet, and what ensues is a rom-com delighting the viewers with love, comedy and drama. A Christmas Prince- 2017 This one has stood the test of time. It follows an undercover journalist, Amber, who heads overseas to research Prince Richard, who is set to be the king. Hop on to a ride filled with a misunderstood prince, a royal family and the big ol' tale of love. Holidate- 2020 Featuring the classic let's make a deal formula, Holidate follows Sloane and Jackson who make a deal to be each other's plus one for every holiday through the year, with no strings attached. Well, things don't always go as planned, right? The Holiday Calendar- 2018 This one follows, Abby, a struggling photographer, who finds a calendar that predicts the future-including a possible romance. The Princess Switch- 2018 A Parent Trap during the Christmas season, The Princess Switch will sate your sweet, love-loving heart, when two similar-looking women, one a princess and the other a baker, swap places and fall in love. Prakash Raj has said that his ED day or his questioning in a money laundering case by the Enforcement Directorate may get delayed, given operations in Chennai have been sabotaged by Cyclone Michaung. The ED has summoned the actor for questioning in a money laundering case linked to an alleged 100-crore ponzi and fraud case against a Tiruchirapalli-based jewellery group. (Also Read: Prakash Raj summoned by ED for questioning in money laundering case) Prakash Raj will be next seen in Devara What did Prakash Raj say? Prakash took to X (formerly Twitter) on Monday to share a screenshot of the Chennai airport's tweet informing everyone that the airfield would be closed for departure and arrival till 9 am on Tuesday owing to the adverse conditions caused by Cyclone Michaung and the consequent Chennai rains. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here He wrote in the caption, Sad news to dear #panauti and #Bhakts. Tomorrow is my ED day. But #chennairains #CycloneMichaung is playing Spoil Sport. You may have to wait. Please (namaste emojis) stay tuned for updates. #justasking. What's the ED case about? The investigation pertains to a case against Pranav Jewellers, a partnership firm based in Tiruchirapalli, whom the ED raided on November 20 and claimed to have seized "unexplained" cash of 23.70 lakh and some gold jewellery. Prakash, 58, a National Award-winning actor, has been a brand ambassador of this company. He has been asked to depose before the federal agency in Chennai in the first week of December. According to sources of PTI, the ED wants to record his statement and understand some purported payments made by the company to the Bengaluru-based actor-politician and some other financial transactions. Prakash, who has acted in Hindi, Kannada, Telugu and Tamil movies, has been an outspoken critic of the Bhartiya Janata Party. He unsuccessfully contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as an independent candidate from Bengaluru Central seat. The ED case stems from an FIR of the Tamil Nadu Police Economic Offences Wing. According to the police complaint, Pranav Jewellers and others collected 100 crore from the public under the guise of a gold investment scheme with the promise of high returns, the federal agency said in a statement. "Pranav Jewellers failed to return the amount to such investors and the firm (Pranav Jewellers) and other connected persons cheated the public by diverting public funds to shell entities/ entry providers under the garb of purchase of bullion/ gold ornaments," it said. The supplier parties in the books of Pranav Jewellers were entry providers, who during the investigation, "confessed" to providing adjustment and bogus accommodation entries to Pranav Jewellers for amounts of over 100 crore and also "confessed" to giving cash to the accused persons in lieu of bank payments, the ED claimed. "During the searches, various incriminating documents, unexplained cash of 23.70 lakh, bullion and gold jewellery weighing 11.60 kg were seized," the probe agency said. Prakash Raj will be next seen in Devara and Pushpa 2: The Rule. Entertainment! Entertainment! Entertainment! Click to follow our Whatsapp Channel Your daily dose of gossip, films, shows, celebrities updates all in one place. Recently, a fiasco happened at the pre-release event of Hi Nanna held in Visakhapatnam that left netizen fans pics of Vijay Deverakonda and Rashmika Mandanna were shown on-screen. Anchor Suma was also called out for making light of it while Mrunal Thakur looked surprised. The actor finally addressed the same in a recent interview. (Also Read: Vijay Deverakonda-Rashmika Mandanna vacation pics shown at Hi Nanna event. Mrunal Thakur looks surprised, fans are mad) Nani 'apologises to anyone hurt' by Vijay and Rashmika's pics being shown at his event(Instagram/X) I apologise if someone is hurt Nani was asked in an interview with M9 why Vijay and Rashmikas pictures were shown on-screen and he said, Its unfortunate that happened. Even before I realised whats happening the picture was taken down. We are all close friends, Vijay and Rashmika realise these things happen. But, if someone was truly hurt by it, me and the team apologise for it. We dont know who did it He also claimed that neither him nor anchor Suma knew their pictures would be used, apart from stating that they dont know who did it. So many people work in putting up an event like that. It shouldnt have happened. We called and asked around to see if we could find out who did it. But whoever did must be scared already, so we let it go. Its a movie event, not one for a gossip website for us to pull such stunts, he added. What happened Vijay and Rashmikas vacation pictures were shown on-screen at the Hi Nanna event. Anchor Suma made light of the situation while Mrunal looked surprised and Nani smiled. Suma saw a photographer standing at the event and jokingly asked him if hes the one who clicked their pictures in Bali. She also asked him if he can click such pictures without understanding the concept of privacy. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Celebs yet to react While Nani addressed this in the interview, Vijay, Rashmika and Mrunal are yet to address it on their social media or otherwise. Entertainment! Entertainment! Entertainment! Click to follow our Whatsapp Channel Your daily dose of gossip, films, shows, celebrities updates all in one place An awards show called Santosham South Indian Film Awards held by Suresh Kondeti, a reporter who also claims to be the PRO of Chiranjeevi and some members of the Mega family, has run into controversy. The event held in Goa seems to have left numerous social media users unhappy because they allege certain celebs didnt get the respect they deserved, blaming the Telugu film industry and the Mega family (Chiranjeevi and family) for the fiasco. (Also Read: Nani reacts to Vijay Deverakonda and Rashmika's vacation pics being shown at Hi Nanna event) Ramesh Aravind was recently allegedly brushed off at an event. Allu Aravind denies involvement. What allegedly transpired A reporter claimed that numerous Kannada celebs were disrespected at the event. She wrote on X, The event, which started well, abruptly halted when it was the Kannada film industry's turn to receive awards. The organizers switched off the lights as soon as Ramesh Aravind took the stage, prompting the anchor to leave and asking Kannada actors to depart. She also added that many celebrities faced issues while checking out of their hotel because dues hadnt been paid. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Fans react Netizens were angry that an event, which was supposed to celebrate all four south Indian film industries, allegedly disrespected the Kannada film industry. One fan wrote, Hard to take it!! I feel sad for what happened in Goa for our industry people at Santhosham South Indian Film awards. Our industry should voice over and boycott any such events in the future. Another claimed, Santhosham South Indian Film awards Goa organised by @santoshamsuresh a TFI (Telugu film fraternity) member, has disrespected many Kannada artists on stage, and lights were off, no room facilities were provided. I don't understand why our celebrities attended such cheap shows organised by TFI! And he is close to @KChiruTweets Family itseems. Mega family distance themselves Allu Arjuns father and Chiranjeevis brother-in-law, producer Allu Aravind held a press meet in Hyderabad to address the fiasco. He distanced both the family and the Telugu film industry from the awards show, stating, A journalist has been holding an award function for many years not but he was unsuccessful while holding an event in Goa. Many have alleged that he is one of our family members PR. Just because we have clicked pictures with him, doesnt mean he represents us. He added that the events full responsibility was on Suresh alone and it had nothing to do with the Telugu film industry, as some on social media claimed. It is not right to drag us into this. Other industries have faced an issue while there and are blaming the Telugu film industry. It hurts me deeply to see us blamed for something one man has done. I reinstate that our family has nothing to do with him and blame cannot be placed on Tollywood, he said. Suresh tenders apology In a note Suresh shared with the press and released on social media, he wrote, This is entirely my personal initiative and has no connection with the Telugu industry. There was a slight communication gap at the Goa event, and I want to clarify that it was not my intention to cause any trouble to the Kannada, Tamil people. I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by our event. Miss Communication occurred during the distribution of accommodation to almost 1200 celebrities. It's common to face challenges in organizing such a big event, and sometimes mistakes happen unintentionally. I hope you can understand that. Entertainment! Entertainment! Entertainment! Click to follow our Whatsapp Channel Your daily dose of gossip, films, shows, celebrities updates all in one place AT THE LATEST climate summit convened by the UN, COP28 , which opens in Dubai on November 30th, one group is sure to have an outsize voice. These are the small island developing states (SIDS). Their club numbers just 39 full members and 18 associates. Together they account for less than 1% of the worlds population, land mass and GDPand just 0.2% of carbon emissions. Yet on climate, as well as in other development-related areas, they have a knack of helping to shape the international agenda. The SIDS vary widely (see maps). Belize, Guyana and Suriname are not even islands. Far from counting as developing, Singapore is one of the worlds richest societies. Many of the others are not exceptionally pooronly seven count among the worlds least developed countries (among them Guinea-Bissau, Haiti and Timor-Leste). But as Emily Wilkinson of ODI, a think-tank in London, emphasises, SIDS collectively have much more in common than their very big differences. The commonalities relate, above all, to the susceptibility that small size confers to sudden shocks. Whether from pandemics or from natural disasters, these have enormous economic and social consequences. A changing climate finds extra ways to pile on the pressure. All this means that small island states are forced to plan for the long run. So when it comes to policy in areas such as climate and development, they are adept at bringing bigger countriesall too slowly, admittedlyalong with them. Little islands, large friends The small states have proved canny as they navigate the geopolitical contest between America and its friends and China. They have needed to be: the contest is playing out over their maritime domain, above all in the Pacific and Indian oceans. And with exclusive economic zones (EEZs) that can have areas many times that of the islands themselves, small island states are big ocean states. As such, small island states have a vested interest in peaceable seas around them, open for trade and free of conflict and crime, including smuggling, arms-running and illegal fishing. That makes SIDS champions of a multilateral order governed by international law. The small island states on balance therefore lean more readily to the West. It helps that America, Australia, Europe and New Zealand are big donors. For instance, Australia, the biggest Pacific donor, commits about 40% of its almost $3bn annual budget for aid to Pacific island states. Yet small island states resent sometimes clumsy attempts by America to use them to project hard powerand to press them to resist Chinese proposals. And although China comes with goodies that SIDS badly want, such as the capacity and the finance to build much-needed infrastructure, that countrys actions can be clumsy, too. Its attempts last year to get island nations to sign up to a China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Visionin effect a new geopolitical blocwere flatly rejected. How do we view national security? asks Mark Brown, the prime minister of the Cook Islands. Its climate security. Its economic security. Its the wellbeing of our people, that sort of securityIts not warshipsits not more patrols. That doesnt do it for us. Climate security matters more for SIDs than geopolitical wrangles do. It is an existential issue for them as their vulnerabilities are potentially extreme. In one night in 2015 Cyclone Pam, the second-most intense tropical storm ever recorded in the southern Pacific Ocean, caused damage equivalent to 60% of Vanuatus annual GDP and wiped out much of the countrys infrastructure. As for the Caribbean: to take one year, 2017, the estimated cost of the hurricane season for the regions countries was $93bn. As Abdulla Shahid, the departing foreign minister of the Maldives, puts it: SIDS have the smallest carbon footprint, but we find ourselves in the biggest trouble. Models suggest much of low-lying Kiribati, the Maldives and Tuvalu will sink beneath the waves by the centurys end. Climate is a threat not only to development but to sovereignty. The prospect helps the club pack a certain moral punch. Members striking gestures (cabinet meetings held underwater) and slogans (Save Tuvalu, save the world) reinforce that punch, as does their strength in numbers: SIDS account for a fifth of UN members. On climate their agenda-setting has been striking. Advocacy by SIDS was crucial to bringing the first international climate treaty into being in 1992. In 2015 they were instrumental in bolstering the ambitions of the Paris agreement with the collective aspiration to restrain global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels (ie, doing better than the target of 2C). Most impressively, at COP27 a year ago in Sharm El-Sheikh, they forced climate-related loss and damage (something they had pushed for three decades) to the centre of the climate debate. This is the acknowledgment that the worlds biggest historical emitters of carbon have an obligation to help casualties of climate change adapt to it. A loss-and-damage fund was agreed on, to be paid for by rich-country emitters. But rich countries have not yet put their money where their mouths are. Even finding a permanent home for the fund has fallen victim to bickering. Going into COP28, Mr Brown hopes that at the summit negotiators will agree on the scale and sources of funding for it, as well as the criteria for eligibility. Small island states are affected particularly badly by shocks because calamities often reinforce one another, undermining these states resilience across the board. A core weakness, as Ms Wilkinson points out, is that economic assumptions that underpin the workings of larger countries do not apply to SIDS. They are generally too small to foster diversified economies or to reap the benefits of scale, and too distant from big markets. That means they struggle to attract private capital. Some island states have alighted on niches that can serve them well. The most obvious is tourism; Caribbean states, in particular, are close to the huge and wealthy North American market. That also makes them inclined to offer themselves as tax havens. Other niches include resourcesstarting with fish. Several have lucrative revenues from selling day licences for tuna to foreign vessels. And in the Cook Islands, if Mr Brown has his way, a seabed-mining bonanza beckons. On his coffee table is a pile of black egg-shaped forms that a visitor might mistake for artwork. In reality, the seabed of the countrys vast EEZ hosts millions of these nodules, rich in nickel, tungsten and, above all, cobalta battery in a rock, as Mr Brown likes to put it. Yet the niches rarely come without perils. In the south Pacific, illegal fishing by foreign vessels means depleted stocks and forgone revenues. A boom and bust in potash mining in tiny Nauru left the state bankrupt and the land denuded. And in the Cook Islands, where Mr Brown talks about harvesting those nodules, conservationists and fishermen worry about the impact on biodiversity and fish stocks. As for tourism, covid-19 hit SIDS dependent on the industry much more than it did more diversified economies, and many small states are emerging from the pandemic with sharply higher levels of debt. Meanwhile, positioned between drug-consuming America and coca-producing countries in South America, Caribbean states struggle with violent crime. The situation is worsened by illegal firearms from abroad, particularly from America. Rising gun-trafficking has left the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and others with horrific violence. In a small country, even low numbers of guns can have an enormous impact. The murder rate in the Turks and Caicos, 78 per 100,000, is roughly ten times higher than in America and 100 times higher than in the EU. Growing greenbacks Given the relative size of small states climate and development needs, and their difficulties accessing market finance, many leaders argue that all but the most successful small island states will need financial and other assistance in the form of concessional loans, grants and budgetary support from richer countries and international institutions for decades to come. Mr Brown, for example, points out that getting a new supply vessel for remote islands into play constitutes a hefty part of the annual infrastructure budget. He calls for heavily concessional lending with loan terms of up to 50 yearsmuch longer than international financial institutions currently offer. He notes that the Asian Development Bank, a key lender in the Asia-Pacific region, is growing responsive to the idea. The Cook Islands is a case study of how even relatively prosperous microstates need help. Fiji, the Maldives, the Marshall Islands and Palau are among those that count as upper-middle-income countries, ranking above Brazil or China and ineligible for overseas development assistance. Yet measures of income fail to capture states vulnerability to shocks that can knock a country back. Shortly before the pandemic, the OECD moved the Cook Islands to developed-country status. As covid-19 hit tourism, the Cook Islands was deprived of help just when it needed it. Support is growing for a multidimensional vulnerability index as a means to taking SIDS special circumstances into account. Such an index, says Mr Shahid, would help clarify development challenges and identify countries in need of heightened international assistance before a crisis hits. A severe lack of bureaucratic capacity makes matters worse. Darshana Baruah of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank in Washington, DC, writes that small states lack the administrative capacity to compete against countries such as China and India for access to multilateral development finance. A loan application to the World Bank is much more troublesomeand relatively much more costlyfor Cape Verde than it is for Brazil. Small states governments are stretched thinMr Browns budget department has fewer than ten staff. And the process of applying for funds can be excruciating: over three years to get accreditation to access climate funds; one to two years to be approved; and a further year or two for disbursement. It is partly why only a fraction of money theoretically available to SIDS gets delivered. Global institutions, says Ms Wilkinson, are not set up with small countries in mind. Despite their vulnerabilities, it is wrong to think of small island states as powerless or hapless victims. A sense of agency, whether as countries affected by climate or by great-power competition, matters hugely to them. And there are indications that Western countries, at least, are listening more carefully to them. America has sharply upped its aid commitments in the Pacific. Earlier this month Tuvalu, with a population of 11,200, struck a remarkable deal with Australia, which promised residency rights to 280 Tuvaluans a year as well as help with coastal adaptation projects to allow citizens to stay in their homes with safety and dignity. Certainly, small island states need help, in ever more creative forms, with a litany of challenges. But, clear-eyed about their future, they are as determined as ever to set the agenda. 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under licence. The original content can be found on www.economist.com In the battle against the climate crisis, scientists and innovators are continuously exploring new technologies and methods to reduce carbon emissions and remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. One such solution that has been gaining attention in recent years is biochar. Biochar, a form of charcoal produced from biomass, has the potential to serve as a viable carbon removal solution, but questions regarding its affordability and permanence linger. People protest against the climate crisis in Glasgow. (Reuters) Biochar stands apart from conventional charcoal as it is a product of a controlled process involving the heating of biomass in an oxygen-depleted environment. This distinct production method transforms biomass into a stable, carbon-rich solid material. The significance of biochar is twofold, driven by its remarkable ability to effectively remove carbon from the atmosphere. One of its primary applications is enhancing soil quality. When biochar is introduced into the soil, it brings about several advantageous changes. These include improving water retention in the soil, which aids in drought resistance and ensures a consistent water supply for plants. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Moreover, biochar enhances the soil's nutrient-holding capacity, making vital nutrients more accessible to plants. It also promotes microbial activity in the soil, fostering a healthier environment for plant growth. The cumulative impact of these benefits results in increased plant growth, contributing to higher carbon sequestration through the absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide by the plants. Aside from its role in soil enhancement, biochar is known for its remarkable carbon storage capabilities. Unlike other carbon removal technologies that may release carbon back into the atmosphere, biochar has the potential to store carbon for an extended period, spanning thousands of years. The affordability of biochar as a carbon removal solution is a multifaceted issue, with several factors playing a crucial role in influencing the overall cost and feasibility of deploying biochar. One pivotal factor is the cost of biomass, which can vary significantly depending on the type of biomass used and its geographical source. Accessibility and availability of biomass materials differ from region to region, introducing variability in the affordability of biochar production. In addition to biomass costs, the technology and methods employed in the production of biochar significantly impact its affordability. Different production techniques come with varying costs, which must be taken into consideration when evaluating the overall feasibility of biochar as a carbon removal solution. Furthermore, transportation and application expenses are key components of the cost equation. The cost of transporting biochar to the desired location is influenced by factors like distance, and the chosen method of application can impact labour and equipment costs. These logistical considerations add to the overall financial implications of using biochar. Another critical aspect is the durability of biochar, which remains a subject of debate within the scientific community. Some studies suggest that biochar may gradually return carbon to the atmosphere over time, while others argue that it can remain stable for millennia. The ultimate outcome depends on various factors, including the type of biomass utilised and the specific production process employed. Lastly, the rate at which biochar releases carbon is influenced by environmental factors like temperature and humidity. A comprehensive understanding of these variables is essential for assessing the long-term permanence of biochar as a carbon removal solution. As such, the affordability of biochar is intricately linked to a range of factors that need to be carefully considered to determine its viability as a solution for carbon removal. Biochar, despite ongoing debates about its cost-effectiveness and long-term viability, remains a promising solution for mitigating climate change. It boasts several advantages, notably its affordability, as it can be produced at a cost comparable to other carbon removal technologies. Additionally, biochar's ability to be produced on a large scale makes it a practical option for widespread adoption. Most important, it offers long-term carbon storage potential, contributing to the reduction of atmospheric carbon concentrations. Nonetheless, it's essential to acknowledge the existing uncertainties around biochar. Continued research and rigorous examination of its economic feasibility and permanence are necessary. In the face of the urgent global challenge of climate change, biochar presents itself as a technology worth exploring. The journey to fully understand its effectiveness and suitability as a carbon removal solution is ongoing and represents a promising avenue in the collective effort to combat the effects of climate change. To delve deeper into the complexities of biochar's affordability and permanence, let's explore some of the key factors that influence its effectiveness as a carbon removal solution: Biomass type and location: The cost of biomass can vary greatly depending on the type of biomass used and its geographical source. Availability, abundance, and accessibility of biomass materials are critical factors to consider. Production technology: Different technologies are available for biochar production, and the choice of technology significantly affects the overall cost and quality of the biochar produced. Transportation distance and application method: Transporting biochar to its intended destination and the method of application can incur varying costs. These costs depend on factors such as distance and equipment needed for application. Biochar stability: The stability of biochar depends on the type of biomass used and the specific production process employed. Understanding the factors that influence biochar's stability is essential for long-term carbon storage. Environmental factors: The rate of carbon release from biochar is influenced by environmental conditions, including temperature and humidity. Studying these factors is crucial for predicting biochar's long-term effectiveness. In the quest to combat the climate crisis, biochar emerges as a promising candidate for carbon removal. Its unique properties, including the ability to enhance soil quality and store carbon for extended periods, make it a compelling solution. The biochar market is expected to rise from $204.69 million in 2023 to an estimated $450.58 million by 2030. However, the complexities of affordability and permanence cannot be overlooked. As the world strives to reduce carbon emissions and combat the effects of the climate crisis, continued research and development in the field of biochar are essential. With a better understanding of its affordability and permanence, biochar could play a significant role in mitigating the impacts of the climate crisis. This article is authored by Shailendra Singh Rao, founder, Creduce. The 12th edition of the Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF), which took place over the weekend, saw close to 30k people come together to discuss and delve into all things literature. The free-for-all, community-funded festival was attended by authors Devdutt Pattnaik, Ramachandra Guha and more. Among the attendees, sessions with authors Abraham Varghese, Mike Bearly, Sudha Murty, comedian Kanan Gill and actor Huma Qureshi were the most popular ones. Bangalore Literature Festival was graced by around 20,000 attendees and over 300 speakers this year(Photo: Aayushi Parekh/HT) Speaking to us about the festival this year, organiser V Ravichandar says, The festival has grown massively over the years. I call this a college fest on steroids! Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Author Shoba Narayan, who spoke on her recent book Namma Bangalore, enjoyed interacting with the forward crowd at the do. We spoke about Bengaluru being home. Its quite wonderful seeing people who have lived here forever, people like me who have lived for a few decades and others who have recently moved, come together for the discussion, she says. According to author Amish Tripathi, who was at the fest this year along with his sister Bhavna Roy, Bengaluru is the biggest readers market in the country and BLF exemplifies that. The last edition I attended was quite small, but BLF has grown massively. My books perform really well here, so I make it a point to do a tour for every release, shares Tripathi. Young minds at work The fest also played host to a Childrens Literature Festival (CLF), which featured three stages and a workshop space. Vikram Sridhar, curator of CLF, says, Its heartwarming to see children of all ages being present and actively participating here. We have seen a two-fold growth in the number of attendees, compared to last year. Author Aparna Jaishankar is also in awe of how interactive the fest was, for kids and their parents: Its a lovely space to be in. Ive been attending and doing sessions almost every year here. This edition of the Bangalore Literature Festival saw insightful sessions, book stalls teeming with young minds and happy faces Following the recent signing of peace agreement between United National Liberation Front (UNLF) and the Centre last week, around 25 leaders and cadres of another Meitei group, the National Revolutionary Front Manipur (NRFM) have now joined the UNLF, which is a step towards peace, the Union ministry of home affairs (MHA) said in a statement on Monday. The Centre signed a peace deal with the UNLF, the oldest insurgent group in Manipur, last Wednesday, ending a six-decade-long armed movement. (File) The NRFM is led by Major Boicha (vice chief of army staff of the outfit). The 25 cadres joined the UNLF and surrendered 25 weapons on December 2. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here With this, most of the outfits members have taken a step towards abjuring the path of violence. The development is likely to give a momentum to efforts of government of India to restore peace and normalcy in Manipur, MHA said in a statement. Notably, NRFM (earlier United Revolutionary Front) was formed on September 11, 2011, by cadres of three factions of KCP, a Meitei underground outfit. Its senior leaders operated from bases in a neighbouring country and were involved in violence and extortion in various parts of the Manipur Valley. The development is likely to encourage other Meitei UG outfits to join the peace process and pursue their demands in a democratic manner besides giving a boost to fulfil Modi Governments vision of Insurgency free and prosperous North East, MHA said. The peace deal with the UNLF, the oldest insurgent group in the region, was signed last Wednesday, ending a six-decade-long armed movement. From alleged irregularities in the excise policy in Chhattisgarh, to the Kalehswaram dam in Telangana, to a red diary in Rajasthan, a sustained focus on corruption allegations across states of Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Telangana were key parts of the BJPs campaign in these states, forming the basis of successes in the first two, and an increase in seats in the southern state. Voters stand in queues to cast their votes for Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections, at a polling station, in Jabalpur on November 17. (ANI) In Chhattisgarh for instance, where the BJP pulled off its largest win in history in terms of seatshare, winning 54 seats, the last three months of the campaign saw them attack the Bhupesh Baghel government on a host of allegations, from excise, to coal, to the dissemination of funds by the District Mineral Fund. The party also targeted chief minister Baghel, with officers reportedly close to him arrested by central agencies like the Income Tax department and the Enforcement Directorate. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Former minister Ajay Chandrakar, who fought from the Kurud constituency and won said, Corruption is the biggest issue in this election. All the scams which came to the fore during the Congress reign created a narrative in the state that the Bhupesh Baghel led government is neck deep in corruption. The Congress knows it is now difficult for it to return with this image in front of the people. OP Choudhary, former IAS officer turned politician, who won from Raigarh and is considered one of the frontrunners for the Chhattisgarh chief ministers post said that corruption was one of the major reasons of the Congress poor performance in the plains of the state. It is only corruption that defeated the Congress in most seats, and people understand that the party gave them nothing except this, and did it without any shame, Choudhary said. Congress spokesperson RP Singh however denied these allegations and said that the BJP had taken advantage of investigative agencies and created a false narrative. In Rajasthan too, a state where the BJP has upturned power, corruption formed the crux of the BJP campaign, particularly after allegations raised by minister Rajendra Gudha, who said he knew of a red diary that contained in it records of irregularities. Gudha was sacked by the Congress within days of making the allegation. To be sure, the contents of the red diary have never been made public, with the Congress alleging that these were false allegations. Still, they became an important part of the BJP thrust with Baba Balaknath, the successful candidate from Tijara and a BJP chief ministerial hopeful saying, People voted for a change because they were fed up with the way the Congress has turned the state into a den of corruption. China's manned space delegation interacts with youth in Macao Xinhua) 11:25, December 04, 2023 MACAO, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- "Can near-sighted people become astronauts?" "What if astronauts get sick in space?" "Do astronauts feel hot or cold when they are engaged in extravehicular activities?" These were among a number of questions raised by enthusiastic young people in China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) on Saturday when they had the chance to meet face in face with the country's astronauts. The astronauts are members of a delegation of China's manned space program who are on a six-day visit to Hong Kong and Macao from Tuesday to Sunday at the invitation of the Hong Kong SAR government and the Macao SAR government. They left Hong Kong and arrived in Macao on Friday. Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency who led the delegation, told Macao students at a public lecture that an astronaut must have sound physical and mental conditions, professional knowledge and always be able to control emotions, encouraging Macao students to study hard and do more physical exercises in order to pursue space dreams. Shenzhou-13 astronaut Wang Yaping, who is well known among the audience because she had given lessons in space to students on earth for twice in 10 years, said she was so pleased to know that some students who attended her lesson a decade ago had become engaged in the space missions now. "If there is another chance, I really hope to be able to give yet another lesson in space to share its beauties and wonders," she said. Shenzhou-15 astronaut Zhang Lu shared details of arduous training for long hours with his own body and the spacesuit weighing over 200 kg and conducting extravehicular activities as long as 10 hours without eating, calling for students who have passions for space to join the cause. Shenzhou-12 astronaut Liu Boming said he was able to maintain a sound physical condition while on duty because he was well-prepared. "Remote monitoring and control from the ground were also important," he added. The astronauts also introduced China's space program development strategies, the construction of China's space station and the manned lunar missions, as well as details of life in space. Hung Ling Ming, a PhD student at the University of Macao, said he was thrilled to learn from the astronauts the spirit of science and the manned space program. "If possible, I hope to make contributions to our country's space cause," he said. Sung Gaai Hin, a senior high school student at the Lingnan Middle School who has enjoyed watching rocket launches since childhood, said both he and his classmates have been very proud whenever China makes achievements in its space program. Pong Sam, a student of the City University of Macao, said he was deeply impressed by the tough training that astronauts have to go through. When asked if he would consider joining the space cause, his answer was "Certainly!" (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) The Congress wrested a key, resource-rich state in the South, winning Telangana on Sunday, but lost ground in north India, failing to displace the Bharatiya Janata Party in Madhya Pradesh, and being voted out of power in both Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Analysts say the electoral loss has created a larger problem for the largest Opposition party: it has faltered in a region where it needs to drastically improve its strike rate against the BJP. Senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi(ANI file photo) The biggest problem for the Opposition is that the Congress is not able to grow in states where it faces the BJP. In other areas, it plays a second fiddle to strong regional parties, said a senior leader from an Opposition party who asked not to be named. Worse still, the loss in the Hindi heartland means the Congress is in power only in Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, and Telangana, adding weight to the argument that Indias grand old party is becoming a largely southern Indian regional force. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The Congress itself is aware of this. Our focus has remained on improving our strike rate in north India. Only if we can expand our presence in the north India, do we have a better chance of taking on the BJP nationally, said a Congress leader who asked not to be named. After Sundays results, the Congress has 439 MLAs out of 1,320 in 10 states where it is in direct contest with the BJP -- Assam, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan. In the Lok Sabha, two states, Kerala and Punjab, account for 30% seats of the Congress . The principal Opposition party has just seven Lower House seats from the 10 states listed above. The Congress, which won two states between November last year and May, suddenly looking like it was on the path to revival , admits that Sundays results are a reversal. The setback is even bigger as it comes just six months before the Lok Sabha polls and the window for course correction is very small, said a Congress leader who asked not to be named. But our larger problem, said a senior strategist in the Congress, is about positioning ourselves in north India. We desperately want our strike rate against BJP to improve. In other states, we have to depend on regional parties. In those states, such as Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh or Tamil Nadu, we are marginal players. It is in north India, where we should have improved but we couldnt. Sanjay Kumar of CSDS told HT, We have been always talking about the inability of the Congress to face the BJP in a direct contest. In a large number of north Indian states, the Congress has tags attached to it of appeasing the Muslims or being a dynasty party. Also, in north Indian states, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi enjoys an unmatched popularity. Outside north, in many states the regional identities are much stronger. But in the north, the BJPs general plank of national pride, nationalism and Hindutva have a greater appeal and the Congress is not able to match that national pride and Hinduism. As the Bharatiya Janata Party's saffron Tsunami swept the Hindi heartland on Sunday, the counting day for four states that polled for their assemblies in November, with stunning victories in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, foreign media saw the results as an indication of voters' mood ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi is eyeing a third consecutive term. Prime Minister Narendra Modi at BJP Headquarters in New Delhi on Sunday. (Sanchit Khanna/HT Photo) The New York Times reported that with the triumphs in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, the BJP expanded its dominance of a key region ahead of general elections. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The results were another blow to the dwindling fortunes of the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, NYT reported. Citing political analyst Arati Jerath, the report said, This is the B.J.P.s big advantage in 2024". Referring to the Ram temple, the NYT report claimed that Mr. Modi already has a big plan for further galvanizing his base of support: the inauguration in January of a massive Hindu temple in Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh Mr. Modi, projecting himself as an ambitious champion of development as well as Hindu interests, also has a strong pull with voters across the country. His government has used the resources of the top-heavy and unequal Indian economy for well-targeted welfare schemes, handed out often in his name. In states where local B.J.P. leaders were struggling in the elections, it was Mr. Modis face on the posters; the handouts for voters were presented as Modis guarantee, it said. Bloomberg reported that while the assembly polls arent a proxy for 2024s general elections, the fact that the opposition lost fairly comprehensively will buoy the ruling party and Modi ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. The Congress party under Rahul Gandhi had tried to highlight issues like joblessness and caste discrimination in the hope it would resonate nationally in a few months time, it reported. Prime Minister Modi remains exceptionally popular, Shumita Deveshwar, chief India economist at GlobalData.TS Lombard, was quoted as saying. The state polls show the mood of the nation lies in bringing him back to power for a third consecutive term, she said. A weaker performance by the BJP may have provided the opposition with some momentum, but the outcome now signals that Modis return to power is inevitable, Bloomberg quoted Deveshwar. News agency Reuters said Modi remains widely popular after a decade in power and surveys suggest he will win again next year. However, a 28-party opposition alliance (INDIA) led by the Congress has come together to jointly fight the BJP, posing a renewed challenge. But the alliance did not feature in the state polls due to internal rivalries and it was a direct contest between BJP and Congress. Another foreign news agency AFP reported the victories in the three states further boosted the BJP and Modi, who is already the favourite to win his third consecutive term in office next year. The results are seen as yet another setback for the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty scion Rahul Gandhi, 53, who led the opposition centre-left Indian National Congress party's aggressive and personal campaign directly targeting Modi, it added. Financial Times, citing political scientists, reported there is limited evidence of a correlation between state and national results. However, the result leaves Congress looking weakened at a crucial time for the party, which dominated Indian politics for decades until Modis ascent to the premiership in 2014. New Delhi: Faultlines in the Opposition's INDIA bloc became apparent on Sunday after partners blamed the Congress party for its 3-0 drubbing against the Bharatiya Janata Party in Hindi heartland states Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Congress allies Samajwadi Party, Janata Dal(United), Trinamool Congress launched sharp attacks against the Mallikarjun Kharge-led party, accusing it of ignoring its INDIA partners. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi with Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee President Revanth Reddy. (PTI) Nitish Kumar's JDU took a jibe at the Congress saying it was clear that the party couldn't win the elections alone. JDU leader KC Tyagi said it was the Congress defeat, not a win for the BJP. He also said that the INDIA bloc was missing in the elections as the Congress never invited its allies for consultations. "It is very necessary now for everyone to strengthen the INDIA bloc. If the alliance meeting was called a couple of months earlier, it would have been good," he said. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here National Conference leader Omar Abdullah said INDIA alliance would not be able to win the 2024 general elections "if the situation is like this in the future". "Neither could they save Chhattisgarh, nor win back Madhya Pradesh nor could they win in Rajasthan again," he said. Abdullah also called out the delay in calling INDIA alliance meeting. "On December 6, the Congress chief has invited some INDIA alliance leaders for lunch. They recalled the INDIA alliance after three months. Let's see," he said. Check full coverage of assembly elections here He also questioned the Congress party's decision to not give Samajwadi Party seats to contest the Madhya Pradesh assembly elections. "Either the Congress has not been able to understand the ground situation in Madhya Pradesh. What harm could have happened if they had given 5-7 seats to Akhilesh Yadav. What storm could have blown? What have they won now? The results are in front of everyone now," he said. The Trinamool Congress blamed the Congress party for its defeat. The CPIM, however, supported Rahul Gandhi. Also read: After Congress poll debacle, INDIA ally TMC claims 'leadership' in battle vs BJP "In the three states, it is more of a Congress failure than a success story of the BJP," TMC spokesperson Kunal Ghosh said in a social media message. "TMC is the party which can provide the leadership in the battle to defeat the BJP in the country," he added. RJD national spokesperson Manoj Jha said after the defeat the Congress realised the importance of "collectivism" against the BJP's "self-centred" politics. "Leaders like our national president Lalu Prasad and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar have acknowledged that among all partners in the INDIA coalition, the Congress has the largest footprint. But, now, the ball is in the Congress' court. It ought to realise that Narendra Modi's conceit cannot be fought with conceit," Jha added. Also read: Assembly election results 2023: What foreign media said about PM Modi as BJP wins MP, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh The Samajwadi Party, which had a massive row with the Congress in the run-up to the elections over seat sharing, said it was Kamal Nath's "indecent" statements against Akhilesh Yadav that led to the party's defeat. "Former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath gave an indecent statement against the SP chief. He called the SP chief, who has been a four-time MP and the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh as 'Akhilesh-Vakhilesh' due to which not only Madhya Pradesh, but the people of Bahujan class and backward classes were hurt, and its adverse effect was reflected in the results, SP spokesperson Manoj Singh Yadav. The Samajwadi Party had called the Congress party's refusal to give seats "betrayal". The BJP bagged 54 seats in Chhattisgarh, the Congress 35. In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP won 163 seats against the Congress's 66 seats. In Rajasthan, the BJP won 115 seats against the Congress's 69. The Congress won the assembly elections in Telangana with 64 seats. The BRS won 39 seats, the BJP 8 and the AIMIM 7 seats. The Congress Legislature Party (CLP) on Monday passed a one-line resolution, authorising Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge to pick the next Telangana chief minister a day after the party wrested power from the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) in the southern state. Congress leader DK Shivakumar speaking at the Congress Legislature Party meeting in Hyderabad. (PTI) People aware of the matter said Telangana Congress chief A Revanth Reddy, who steered the party to victory with an aggressive campaign, was the leading contender for the states top elected post. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here We will get to know the high commands decision in a couple of hours, a Congress leader said on condition of anonymity after an over three-hour CLP meeting at a Hyderabad hotel. Reddy proposed the resolution as per the partys tradition while Bhatti Vikramarka, the CLP leader in the outgoing assembly, seconded it. The meeting was held under Congress observer and Karnataka deputy chief minister D K Shivakumars supervision. The people cited above said Reddy, who enjoys the support of the majority of the newly elected lawmakers, has the backing of the partys central leadership for the top post. They added once the new CLP leader is named, a Congress delegation will submit a letter to governor Tamilisai Soundararajan. Another delegation that met Soundararajan on Sunday night explained the procedure the Congress would follow and said they would come back once the CLP leader was elected. The governors office said it will on Monday inform the media if there is any request from Congress for an oath-taking ceremony. Vikramarka, Congresss Dalit face, was expected to take oath as deputy chief minister. Ahead of the CLP meeting, Shivakumar separately met Member of Parliament N Uttam Kumar Reddy, Vikramarka, and Komatireddy Rajgopal Reddy, who were seen to be in the race for the chief ministers post. The meetings were held at another hotel. Reddy has been credited with leading a robust local campaign focussed on alleged corruption to end BRSs 10-year rule by winning 64 of the 119 seats. The BRS bagged 39 seats. The Congress lost to the Bharatiya Janata Party in the heartland states of Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh months before the national polls next summer. New Delhi: At least 6% cough syrup samples belonging to 54 Indian pharmaceutical manufacturers failed the mandatory quality test for export till October this year, according to government data. (Representative Photo) The data from the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) report was based on testing of samples in various states across the country. Out of the 2,014 samples tested in government laboratories in states such as Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, and Union territory of Chandigarh, 128 (or 6%) failed the quality test and were found to be not of standard quality (NSQ), as per the government data. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The government laboratories designated for testing of samples, include Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission, Ghaziabad (Uttar Pradesh); Central Drugs Laboratory (CDL), Kolkata; Central Drug Testing Laboratory (CDTL), Chennai; CDTL, Mumbai; CDTL, Hyderabad; Regional Drugs Testing Laboratory (RDTL), Chandigarh; RDTL, Guwahati; and any NABL-accredited state drugs testing laboratory. Also read- WHO issues substandard medicine alert in Iraq for India made cough syrup According to the government data, of the 385 samples tested in the Gujarat lab, 51 were found to be NSQ, while 29 out of 502 samples failed the quality test in the Ghaziabad lab. Earlier, the Union commerce ministry through an order in May this year had made it mandatory for cough syrup manufactures to get their stocks tested at a government lab before shipping for export. The directive was issued after India-made cough syrups were allegedly linked to deaths of children in some countries. In December last year, Noida-based Marion Biotechs cough syrup was linked to the death of 18 children in Uzbekistan. On October 5, 2022, World Health Organisation had issued a medical product alert over four cough syrups Promethazine Oral Solution, Kofexmalin Baby Cough Syrup, Makoff Baby Cough Syrup, and Magrip N Cold Syrup manufactured and exported by Haryana-based Maiden Pharmaceuticals. The UN body had linked Maidens syrups to the death of 66 children in The Gambia. CHENNAI: Authorities on Monday halted operations at Chennai airport after the runway was submerged due to torrential rain a day before Cyclone Michaung makes landfall on the coast of Andhra Pradesh on Tuesday morning. Chennai Airport runway inundated amid incessant rains triggered by Cyclone Michaung, in Chennai, Monday (PTI) Chennai airport closed the airfield for arrival operations from 9:17am till 11.30am. Following a review, the airport announced on X, formerly Twitter, that the airfield had been shut for arrival and departure operations till 11pm due to severe weather conditions. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The airport, counted as one of Indias busiest airports, handles an average of 500 flights every day. Chennai Airport runway inundated amid incessant rains triggered by Cyclone Michaung, in Chennai (PTI) A Chennai airport official said the flight operations were normal on Sunday but they were forced to shut the airport today due to the cyclonic storm. We will, however, review the situation by 8pm to take a call if the operations will have to be suspended further, a second airport official said. Cyclone Michaung is expected to make landfall on the coast of Andhra Pradesh on Tuesday morning, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said, with sustained winds of 90-100 kph (56-62 mph), gusting to 110 kph. Videos on social media showed planes with their wheels submerged in water at the Chennai airport and floodwater sweeping away cars through the streets in parts of the city. The Madras Unit of the Indian Army rescues people from the waterlogged areas of the Mugalivakkam and Manapakkam areas following heavy rainfall (ANI) News agency PTI said the Meteorological Department has reiterated its forecast of heavy rainfall, accompanied by gales in parts of Andhra Pradesh over the next three days from Monday to Wednesday. Due to the incessant rains, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) have stopped devotees from taking the holy bath at Sri Kapilathirtham waterfalls. Air India and Akasa Air have offered a one-time waiver of rescheduling/cancellation charges for passengers due to the weather. All passengers who are unable to travel to and from Chennai between 4th Dec 2023 to 10th Dec 2023, can rebook their travel for any date on or before 17th Dec 2023 at no additional cost, by calling our Akasa Care Centre on +91 9606 112131, Akasa Air said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. 33 flights to Chennai were diverted to the Kempegowda International Airport on Monday, a PTI report said quoting Bangalore International Airport Limited (BIAL) officials. Cyclonic storm Michaung has turned into a severe Cyclonic storm, the India India Meteorological Department said on Monday. Tidal waves hit the coast under the influence of the 'Severe' Cyclone Michaung, at the Kasimedu fishing harbour, in Chennai on Sunday.(ANI) The cyclone is expected to hit the west-central Bay of Bengal off south Andhra Pradesh and adjoining north Tamil Nadu coasts by the forenoon of December 5. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here According to IMD, the cyclonic storm is currently over the Southwest Bay of Bengal and is likely to continue to move northwestwards, intensify further and reach Westcentral Bay of Bengal off south Andhra Pradesh and adjoining north Tamil Nadu coasts by Monday forenoon. "It is likely to intensify gradually and move nearly northwards almost parallel and close to south Andhra Pradesh coast and cross South Andhra Pradesh coast between Nellore and Machilipatnam, close to Bapatla during forenoon of December 5 as a 'Severe Cyclonic Storm' with a maximum sustained wind speed of 90-100 kmph gusting to 110 kmph," the weather agency said. Heavy rainfall in Chennai Heavy rainfall due to Cyclone Michaung caused severe waterlogging in several areas across Chennai on Monday. Several low-lying areas, including hospitals and many residential parts, witnessed inundation even as civic agency personnel were involved in clearing the stagnant water. Trains and flight services have also been adversely affected due to the weather. The Chennai bench of the Madras High Court and all district courts in the city have been shut. Waterlogging has been reported in several parts of the city such as Maduravoyal, Porur, Saligaramam, and Valasaravakkam. Trees have been uprooted due to strong winds in many places. Several trains and flights have been either cancelled or delayed due to the adverse weather conditions. According to PTI, at least 12 domestic outbound services, including to destinations like Ahmedabad and Thiruvananthapuram were cancelled in Chennai. Four international services, including to Dubai and Srilanka were also cancelled by a private carrier, the news agency reported, citing unidentified officials. Three arriving international services were diverted to Bengaluru. Similarly, 11 express trains from Chennai Central were cancelled after the water level reached the danger mark at Bridge No. 14 between Vyasarpadi and Basin Bridge owing to heavy downpours. "In view of heavy rain in Chennai and the water crossing the danger level in Bridge No. 14 between Basin Bridge and Vyasarpady stations, the trains have been regulated as given below. Please go through and plan your journeys accordingly. We regret the inconvenience caused," the Divisional Railway Manager, Chennai, Southern Railway, posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. Suburban train services in all the Chennai Suburban sections have also been temporarily suspended till 8 am on Monday. Heavy rainfall is expected across Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh due to cyclone Michaung in the coming days. Tamil Nadu has already declared a public holiday in the wake of the warning of bad weather. The principal bench of the Madras High Court and all district courts in Chennai are also to remain shut on account of the rains. Section 144 imposed on coastal areas of Puducherry In view of Cyclone Michaung, the Puducherry district administration has imposed Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code on the coastal areas close to the seashore of Pudhucherry, reported ANI. The administration has restricted the movement of all persons on the coastal areas near the seashore from 7 pm on December 3 until 6 pm on December 5. The step has been taken to prevent any loss of life or property. Policemen patrol on a pathway along the seashore ahead of the landfall of Cyclone Michaung in Puducherry on Sunday.(PTI) "Any person violating this order shall be liable to be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to six months, or with fine or both", the official notice stated. As severe cyclonic storm Michaung is likely to make landfall on Tuesday, several Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh districts received heavy rainfall on Monday. People wade through a waterlogged road during heavy rain owing to Cyclone Michaung, in Chennai (PTI) Rainfall has also been predicted for several districts of Odisha and Jharkhand. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here On Monday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah held discussions with the chief ministers of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Puducherry regarding the challenges posed by cyclone Michaung. He provided assurances of comprehensive assistance from the central government to address the situation. He said in a post in X, formerly Twitter, A discussion was held with the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh state Shri YS Jagan Mohan Reddy on the pre-emptive measures being taken in the event of Cyclone Maichang crossing the coast. Saving people's lives is our first priority. The central government is ready to provide all necessary assistance to Andhra Pradesh. NDRF personnel are already depleted in the state. We have kept more teams ready to help if required. Here are the top 10 updates on cyclone Michaung: Due to the severe cyclonic storm 'Michaung,' parts of Andhra Pradesh experienced relentless heavy rainfall on Monday, with forecasts indicating a continuation over the next few days. The intensifying storm over the west-central and southwest Bay of Bengal, affecting the south Andhra Pradesh and adjoining north Tamil Nadu coasts, has resulted in substantial rainfall across various districts in the state. Commuters wade through a waterlogged road following heavy rainfall triggered by 'Severe' Cyclone Michaung, in Andhra Pradesh's Vijayawada on Monday. (ANI) An official told news agency PTI that the centre of the Michaung was located 90 km east to northeast of Chennai, 200 km northeast of Puducherry, 300 km south to southeast of Bapatla, 170 km southeast of Nellore, and 320 km south of Machilipatnam. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The India Meteorological Department on Monday said, Coastal Andhra Pradesh and Yanam is likely to get exceptionally heavy rainfall over 4th and 5th December! Stay safe and take all necessary precautions. It added, The severe cyclonic storm Michaung formed over the Bay of Bengal will cross the South Andhra Pradesh coast between Nellore and Machilipatnam near Bapatla in the morning of 5th December. On Monday, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy conducted a review meeting on the cyclone with senior officials, initiating various relief efforts. An alert has been issued for Andhra Pradesh's districts including Nellore, Tirupati, Bapatla, Prakasam, Konaseema, Krishna, West Godavari and Kakinada. As per a statement from the Chief Minister's Office (CMO), the severe cyclonic storm is likely to make landfall near Andhra Pradesh's Bapatla around noon on Tuesday, bringing winds with speeds up to 100 km per hour. In response to the crisis, Chief Minister Reddy has pledged financial aid, allocating 2 crore for Tirupati district and 1 crore for each of the following districts: Nellore, Prakasam, Bapatla, Krishna, West Godavari, Konaseema, and Kakinada. The Chief Minister assured additional funds as needed for relief efforts. In a bid to prevent loss of life and livestock, senior IAS officers will be deployed as special officers in the affected districts starting Monday. The focus will be on safeguarding crops, especially by procuring paddy and securing the kharif harvest. Evacuation procedures are actively taking place in 181 relief camps spread across the eight districts, with both the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) deploying five teams each to assist in the affected areas. During a comprehensive review meeting, the Chief Minister directed officials to mobilize resources, including the services of ward and village secretariats, village clinics, and Rythu Bharosa Kendras (RBK), to enhance relief efforts. Special officers were directed to prioritize the medical, food, and drinking water needs of evacuees. Financial assistance of 2,500 per family and 1,000 for individual evacuees will be provided upon their return from relief camps. For severely affected thatched houses, financial assistance of 10,000 will be distributed, along with 25 kg of rice, pulses, edible oil, onions, and potatoes for evacuees. Officials have also been tasked with ensuring the safe transportation of pregnant women and monitoring the spread of communicable diseases. Severe cyclonic storm Michaung, which lies 90 km northeast of Chennai, has led to heavy rainfall across several Tamil Nadu districts. A red alert was issued on north coastal Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Yanam, India Meteorological Department Director General Dr Mrutyunjay Mohapatra said on Monday. NDRF personnel visit a low-lying area near the banks of Kosasthalaiyar river as Tamil Nadu witnesses heavy rain owing to Cyclone Michaung, in Tiruvallur district. (PTI Photo) Incessant rainfall across the state led to internet disruptions and power outages. Michaung, likely to move towards Andhra Pradesh on Tuesday, will lay near Chennai and Puducherry on Monday, bringing heavy downpour. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Chennai Regional Metrology Director said on Monday, Cyclone 'Michaung' lies about 100 km from East-North East of Chennai. In the last six hours, it has moved at the speed of 10 km/hr and is expected to move in the northwest direction, intensified to severe cyclonic storm and is expected by 4 noon today. Further, the cyclone will move parallel to the coast of north Tamil Nadu and South Andhra Pradesh, expected to cross Nellore-Machilipatnam by tomorrow at 4 noon. Heavy rainfall and strong winds are likely to continue till this evening in Chennai, Chengalpattu, Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur districts. Here are the measures taken by the Tamil Nadu government: After a thrilling Sunday, all eyes are on Mizoram as the results for the fifth and the last state which would conclude the high-tension poll battle in all five assemblies ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. BJP secured a massive victory in three out of four states situated in the country's heartland Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. In its second win in the south this year, Congress managed to crush K Chandrashekar Rao-led Bharat Rashtra Samithi's (BRS) hat-trick dream in Telangana and wrested power to form the first-ever non-BRS government in the youngest state. Telangana Congress president A. Revanth Reddy with party leaders D.K. Shivakumar, Manikrao Thakre and others during the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) meeting, in Hyderabad(PTI) After the big win in three states, the BJP continues to face the question of potential chief ministerial faces who would lead a new set of cabinets for the next five years. In Rajasthan, the party has to make a tough choice between Vasundhara Raje, Diya Kumari and Baba Balaknath. Or, will the party bring in a surprise element? Meanwhile, veteran in Chhattisgarh Raman Singh is seen as a front-runner for the top position. Likewise, four-time Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan may return for his fifth term. The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Indian Army to finalise the policy for considering the promotion of women officers from the rank of colonel to brigadier, after it was told that deliberations are underway to formulate a policy to deal with the issue of the officers career progression. Supreme Court (PTI) A bench comprising Chief Justice of India Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud and Justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra took note of the submissions of Attorney General R Venkataramani and senior advocate R Balasubramanian that the Army is working on formulating a policy for the purpose. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Posting the matter for hearing in the first week of April, CJI said: We will give you (Army) time for bringing the policy. We would expect the formulation of policy by March 31, 2024. Some women Army officers have alleged discrimination in promotion from the rank of colonel to brigadier. In a landmark verdict on February 17, 2020, the top court had ordered permanent commission for women officers in the Army, rejecting the Centres stand on their physiological limitations as being based on sex stereotypes and calling it gender discrimination against women. The apex court had directed that all serving Short Service Commission (SSC) women officers have to be considered for permanent commission irrespective of them having completed 14 years or, as the case may be, 20 years of service within three months. Later, in another major verdict on March 17, 2020, the top court had paved the way for granting permanent commission to women officers in the Indian Navy, saying a level playing field ensures that women have the opportunity to overcome histories of discrimination. According to AG, an officer must meet the essential eligibility criteria of minimum 2 confidential reports (CR) in Colonel Select rank. Any deviation from this fundamental eligibility criteria will amount to compromising with the operational requirement of the Indian Army, he said. He further informed the Court that to earn the rank of Brigadier, an officer in the Army is required to experience operational command of a unit or battalion for a period of 18 to 24 months (about 2 years). It is by gaining the experience, technical qualification and service knowledge as commanding officer of unit that helps officers to understand the intricacies, nuances and complexities of command, Venkataramani said. Also read- Right to approach court is heart of Constitution: CJI Chandrachud At the same time, the applicant lady officers, represented by advocate Archana Pathak Dave, informed the Court that the women have fought a long drawn battle in Courts to get their due, beginning with the 2020 decision of the top court allowing permanent commission to short service commission women, thus opening command roles to women in the Army. Later in 2021, through yet another significant decision, the Court found the yardstick adopted by Army to grant PC to women as being discriminatory vis-a-vis male officers. Dave said that the applicants only seek a policy to be put in place for governing promotions by SB 2. AG said that all policies of the Army are gender-neutral and the applicants before the Court should not push the matter beyond a certain point. He said that maximum possible waivers were granted by the Army for the women officers as the special board 3 which met thrice this year for promotion of women officers to the rank of Colonel, has empaneled 120 women officers till date. Most of the women officers before the court did not meet the eligibility criteria for Brigadier with command positions given to them after June this year. The bench, also comprising justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra told AG, That is all because we pushed the envelope. We nudged you, otherwise nothing would have happened. The Court told Venkataramani that the Army had shown resistance by citing operational efficiency as a ground to justify denial of permanent commission to women. It is not your case that operational preparedness of Army has been affected in any manner with women coming in, the bench added. Also read- In a historic step, IAF inducts women in non-officer cadre While the problem raised by the applicant women officers pertain to the pre-2005 batch, the Army expressed its apprehensions that making an exception for the set of women officers before the Court could have long-term consequences. In a note submitted to Court, AG said, The experience of performing in Colonels rank is utmost essential to gauge any officers fitness for higher appointment. Any exception to this will have ramifications on the quality of leadership in the Indian Army along with opening avenues for many others who are deficient of command criteria to seek similar treatment. The welfare schemes championed by Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan seemed to work for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the state, with the party winning in 163seats, but a similar welfarism plan promoted by Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot did not reap the same benefits for Congress in the state, where the party conceded defeat after assembly election results were declared on Sunday. HT Image A deeper look at the ground situation points to two key reasons for the disparity in the outcomes. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here First, the BJP had a strong ground structure to counter anti-incumbency against its sitting MLAs in Madhya Pradesh, which was absent in Rajasthan. Rajasthan usually votes out the incumbent every five years. Second, while BJP was able to utilise the anti-incumbency against Congress MLAs in Rajasthan, the Congresss ground in campaign in MP was not strong enough to do the same in the state where BJP has been in power for 18 of the last 20 years. Additionally, experts said, the credibility of Prime Minister Narendra Modi among the public was an added factor that worked in the BJPs favour, which the Congress was not able to counter. Guarantee PM Modi worked well in MP. In every speech, Modi successfully convinced the voters that double engine government can do wonders in MP and the voters will get priority in all the schemes, political expert from MP, Girija Shankar said. The delivery of benefits under the Ladli Behna and Kisan Nidhi schemes was also timed well by the by Chouhan-led BJP government in Madhya Pradesh. Under the Ladli scheme, each woman in the state received 1,250, while farmers were given 6,000 for an acre of land under the Kisan scheme. According to a senior MP BJP leader, who declined to be named, the benefits were directly transferred into the accounts of the beneficiaries in early November, just days before polling was held on November 17. We wanted to remind the people that the BJP delivers money directly into their bank accounts, a senior BJP leader in MP said. That was not a case in Rajasthan, where no such transfers were made in the days leading up to the polls. The state went to polls on November 25. Most of the state government schemes were running for months and there was no direct transfer in month of November, a senior Congress leader in Rajasthan, on condition of anonymity, said. However, the Congress leader said that it was because of Gehlots welfare schemes that the party was able to win a respectable 70 seats, as compared to 2013 when it only secured 21 seats. The schemes prevented a landslide win for BJP in the state, he said. The BJP won Rajasthan with 115 seats of the 199 assembly seats, for which the votes were counted on Sunday, while the Congress only secured 70 seats. In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP was leading with 163 seats of the 230 seats. The Congress only won 66 seats. Political analyst Narayan Bareth said the BJP had a better and more effective election machinery in Rajasthan as compared to Congress in Madhya Pradesh. And, therefore, the BJP was effective taking benefit of the anti-incumbency and counter Gehlots welfare schemes through narrative of change in government every five years, he said. New Delhi: The Congress party sharply reacted to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's remark over the former's assembly election loss saying his 'gyan' (advice) had vanished when the BJP lost the Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh elections. Narendra Modi speaks during a news conference ahead of the winter session of Parliament in New Delhi.(Bloomberg) Before the start of the Parliament's Winter Session, PM Modi advised the Opposition to learn lessons from the defeat in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan instead "venting frustration". Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here "If I speak on basis of the assembly poll results, this is a golden opportunity for friends in opposition. Instead of making plans for venting frustration over defeat, they should learn from this defeat, leaving behind the habit of negativity of the last nine years, if they move forward with positivity this session, the country will change its perspective towards them. A new door could open for them," PM Modi said. In response, Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said, "It would be better if the PM stops thinking about our future. Because when the BJP lost Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, sab gyan gaayab ho gya tha (all advises had vanished)". Congress general secretary and MP K C Venugopal also slammed PM Modi over the remark. Also read: PM Modi-led BJP win prompts all-time-high Sensex, Nifty response; here's why "Every election is different. When Congress won Karnataka, this point was not made (by the PM). When Congress won Telangana, this point was not there. Of course, we are congratulating the people who have won the election. We will definitely introspect what happened in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan...We are definitely going to analyse. Frankly speaking, we can't even understand what happened in Madhya Pradesh," he added. PM Modi today the country has rejected negativity. "They are in the opposition but still I am giving them good advice," Modi added. The Congress won the Telangana assembly election, ousting K Chandrashekar Rao of power in the state. The Winter session of Parliament will run till December 22. With inputs from PTI, ANI This autumn was a time rich with promise for the Congress in Madhya Pradesh. Congress leaders Kamal Nath, Randeep Singh Surjewala and Digvijaya Singh in Bhopal on Sunday. (PTI) The state, the largest of the three provinces headed for assembly elections, appeared prime for a change. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had been in the saddle for 18 of the last 20 years and suffered from internal factionalism in a state where it has powerful leaders in every region. There were allegations of corruption. And signs of anti-incumbency appeared to dog chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Most importantly, the Congress had just stormed to a historic victory in Karnataka, running a rooted, energetic campaign that managed to stitch a diverse social coalition and unite marginalised castes and communities, displacing an unpopular BJP government. The party believed that Madhya Pradesh, with its large constituents of farmers, Dalits and tribals, was there for the taking. Inexplicably, however, former chief ministers Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh chose a different tack, said Congress leaders aware of the details. The two men who helmed the campaign in the state, turned away from running the kind of issues-based grassroots campaign that won the Congress the biggest victory in a generation, and poured their energies into an acerbic, negative pitch that spent precious campaign hours attacking senior BJP leaders, and even allies -- time that could have been used to fine-tune the partys outreach on the ground. On Sunday, the results were there for all to see. The Congress slumped to its worst performance in a decade as the BJP soared to its highest-ever vote share. The BJP won 163 of the states 230 assembly seats, leaving behind the Congress a poor runner-up at 66. As the dust settled on the shock loss on Monday, and central and state leaders rued fumbling the best chance to dethrone the BJP government in two decades, they zeroed on a key reason behind the drubbing -- a caustic campaign that spent too much time embroiled in controversy over shrill personal comments. The Congress announced multiple schemes, like those for women and free education for students, all of which could have benefitted us if we had just spoken about them. Instead, it seemed to us, that the focus of Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh, who ran the show, was a negative campaign, said a senior Congress leader, requesting anonymity. Also read- HT interview: Unsavoury words were used against me... Madhya Pradesh election results have silenced them, says Scindia ACERBIC, NEGATIVE, OVERCONFIDENT That negativity was pervading the campaign became apparent early -- and within the party. In September, as bungled candidate selection sparked protests across the state and the leadership was forced to walk back on some polarising decisions, workers began pouring into the party headquarters. But instead of listening to their grievances and uniting the campaign, Nath and Singh chose a more high-handed approach, said a second party leader. Digvijaya Singh and Kamal Nath were showing autocratic behaviour. Nath included his favourites in all the committees by ignoring the experienced one...He was scolding leaders by showing his survey reports, and Singh was scolding leaders by closing doors in the meetings being organised in the districts, said this leader, who belongs to Mahakaushal, Naths home region. This upset the workers a lot because more than listening to their grievances , they were focusing on attacking us. The result is here in front of all, added the leader. Through the campaign, they spent more time hitting out senior BJP leaders even as feedback from the ground said better communication was needed to convince voters of the Congresss manifesto promises. On November 7, Singh said in Indore that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah had lost confidence in the state BJP. The PM is campaigning as if he is the CM candidate he said. In a rally in Sagar on November 12, Nath attacked Chouhan and said he was an actor who would find work in cinema in Mumbai even after he was rendered jobless in Madhya Pradesh. In December, Singh attacked Union civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia, who left the Congress in 2020, and called him a traitor. Now we have no Scindia left. Now there is no traitor, he said. Nath alleged that Scindia took benefits from the erstwhile Congress government. Whether he (Scindia) is black or yellow, I dont have to answer that, he told reporters. Party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra also hit out at Scindia, calling him a traitor who betrayed peoples trust, and made disparaging personal remarks about his family legacy and height. After the results, Scindia hit back. Someone had made remarks about my height. The people of Gwalior-Malwa have shown how tall they are, he said. ALLIES NOT SPARED Even allies -- constituents of the 28-party Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA)-- werent spared. Nath ignored requests by the CPI(M) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) for an alliance, acting dismissively. SP chief Akhilesh Yadav, angered by the attitude as well as the denial of a seat-sharing arrangement, campaigned in Madhya Pradesh. If the Congress continues to behave like this, who will trust them? If we fight with confusion in our minds against the BJP, then we wont succeed, he said on October 20. Asked about these comments, a curt Nath continued undeterred. Arre bhai, chhodo Akhilesh Vakhilesh (forget Akhilesh, he told reporters, suggesting the SP chief was inconsequential. The results showed that this caustic campaign had backfired. In Chouhans home region of Bhopal-Narmadapuram, the BJP won 26 seats and the Congress five. In Naths home region of Mahakaushal, the party fell to 17 seats, with the BJP winning 21. In Bundelkhand, the region that abuts Uttar Pradesh, the Congress won 7 and the BJP 22. SP candidates made up the difference between candidates of the two parties in five seats. This meant that if the SP had allied with the party finishing second, the Congress, the alliance would have won. The damage was most stark in Gwalior-Chambal, Scindias home region that is traditionally a Congress stronghold. The Congress lost 10 seats to register 14 wins while the BJP rose from a paltry six seats to 17. A third Congress leader said that Naths dismissive denial of tickets to INDIA members became a distracting sideshow. All the SP was asking was four seats and the CPI(M) two. But Nath wasnt even willing to give them these seats, saying the Congress doesnt need them, he said. Also read- Madhya Pradesh election 2023: Multi-pronged strategy powers BJP CUT OFF FROM GROUND REALITIES The focus on personal attacks and a negative campaign meant that the lessons learnt from Karnataka were forgotten. There was time to replicate the Karnataka election model. There was an initiative to talk of 50% corruption, but unlike in Karnataka, we did not set a narrative on corruption. Even issues like price rise, unemployment and examination scams were not built on, said a fourth party leader. Within the party, this manifested in delayed responses, or a complete lack of communication. There were repeated requests from the Congress candidate in Budhni, Vikram Mastal, contesting against Chouhan, for an election meeting or roadshow by Nath. There was no response and party workers began asking if we even wanted to beat Chouhan who eventually won with a huge margin of over a lakh, said a fifth leader. The leader added that the central leadership then made an attempt to bring in political strategist Sunil Kanugolu who had helped the Karnataka Congress campaign. But Nath blocked him, preferring to rely on his own surveyors. Kanugolu was eventually was deputed to Telangana, where the Congress managed to defeat the incumbent Bharat Rashtra Samithi in what was the only bright spot for the party on Sunday. Sunil Kanugolu helped the Congress design a powerful campaign in Karnataka and Telangana, but Nath had an argument with him and he was asked to go. Nath had his own surveyors but either they didnt read the situation correctly, or didnt communicate well, the fifth leader said. The leaders quoted above said that Nath and Singh were so certain of the political dividends of their acerbic approach that the party didnt react to issues raised by the BJP, or concerns from the ground. Instead, they stuck to making personal attacks, rewarding their own associates. Nath got his son, Chhindwara MP Nakul Nath, to play a key role in deciding the tickets from the district. Singh ensured tickets for three of his family members, of whom two lost. This did not go down well with the rank and file of the Congress. It sent out a message that it was true that they were not working for the party but to establish their relatives, said the third leader. Other leaders complained that their insularity from local workers meant that the leadership didnt understand that the shrill pitch was not assuring voters -- especially communities that had long been Congress backers but chose to support the BJP this time. Even in the middle of the campaign, one was asked to drop messages with their close associates and there was no telling if there would be a response. Most times, there was none, the fourth leader said. On Sunday, Madhya Pradesh gave them a response. For four and a half years after a resounding loss in December 2018, on the surface at the very least, the Chhattisgarh BJP seemed leaderless and rudderless. Their tallest leader, three term Chief Minister Raman Singh, was diminished the party falling to a record 15 seat low, and with no clear second rung, there seemed to be a vacuum. The party tried tribal leader Vishnu Dev Sai, but in 2022, with the Congress focusing on OBCs, made one time MP Arun Sao party president, diligent but without the heft to carry a campaign. But despite the lack of a clear state leader to rally around, with Prime Minister Modi as the face, a turn towards welfare and a sharp focus on the Congress corruption, the BJP has pulled off the most unprecedented of results in its sweep of the Hindi heartland, winning 54 of the 90 seats in its best ever Chhattisgarh performance. Navi Mumbai, India - Dec. 3, 2023:BJP party workers celebrate party's victory in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh at Shivaji Maharaj Chowk Vashi in Navi Mumbai, India, on Sunday, December 3, 2023. (Photo by Bachchan Kumar/ HT PHOTO) (HT PHOTO) Senior BJP leaders said that while they used collective leadership, fundamentally coalescing around Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the face, they were calculated about other key decisions. One of them, leaders said, was the decision to announce candidates for 21 seats, all that the party considered relatively weak on August 17, nearly three months before the polls were officially announced. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The other decision was to field senior leaders including four members of parliament, such as Renuka Singh and Arun Sao, both of whom won. This strategy tied in with the local anti-incumbency against Congress legislators, with the Congress seemingly acknowledging this in their removal of 22 sitting MLAs. The disenchantment against legislators came to the fore and the partys miscalculations will haunt it. The party initially went to the elections on the face of Baghel but by the end said collective leadership. On the other hand, the BJP, even without a leadership, was clear in its messaging, a senior Congress leader said. In the last leg of the campaign, the BJP pressed the Congress, and chief minister Baghel, on allegations of corruption, ranging irregularities in coal, Mahadev app(an online betting scam), excise and in the use of the District Mineral Fund. The people of the state understood that the Congress was looting the state government and hence overthrew them, said Ajay Chandrakar, former minister and senior leader who won the election from the Kurud constituency. In Bastar and Surguja, the party ran targeted campaigns on local issues. In the north of the state, the party quietly took advantage of internal Congress issues like TS Singhdeo not being made Chief Minister. In Bastar, they used festering anger against conversions- tribals expressing concerns that their communities were allegedly being proselytized by Christian missionaries. In most seats in Bastar, this conversion politics seeped in, a Congress leader said. Importantly, on November 3, when it announced its manifesto, the BJP also made a concerted shift from a long standing position. In 2018, the BJP had been voted out after failing to fulfill a promise of a paddy bonus, ostensibly being actively discouraged by the central government. In 2023 however, faced with a slew of Congress promises, the BJP announced welfare schemes of its own, and called them Modis guarantees. This was a first for the BJP in Chhattisgarh and people expressed their support for the Prime Minister. The promise of purchasing paddy at 3,100 per quintal, giving 12,000 to every woman in the state are among those that worked for the party. This complemented other aspects of its campaign. The Congress, on the other hand, had nothing to offer other than welfare schemes, said Harsh Dubey, a Chhattisgarh based political commentator. Is Mamata Banerjee skipping the upcoming the meeting of the opposition bloc INDIA on December 6? The West Bengal chief minister on Monday said she was not aware' of any such meeting. West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee. (PTI) "I don't know, I have no information so I kept a programme in North Bengal...If we had the information, we wouldn't have scheduled those programmes. We would have definitely gone (for the meeting), but we have not received any information," ANI quoted the Trinamool Congress chief as saying. According to ANI, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge is said to have dialled his INDIA alliance partners and invited them for a meeting, this a day after the grand old party suffered setbacks in the three Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. It had just one reason to smile with a victory in Telangana. Because of the elections, it (INDIA alliance meeting) was postponed. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has now taken the initiative to have that meeting. This meeting will build the confidence level of the (INDIA) alliance partners, Congress MP Manickam Tagore told PTI. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here It is believed that the December 6 meeting in the capital could feature seat sharing talks on top of the agenda. The huddle could be tough for Congress after the defeats in the just-concluded assembly election. On the BJP's victory, Mamata Banerjee had said the saffron party's wins in the three states should not be seen as a disaster for the opposition as the victory margin is thin. Look at the figures. The BJP won by thin margins. It happened because of split in (opposition) votes. There should have been proper seat sharing," she added. Talking about seat sharing, the elections in Madhya Pradesh witnessed a war of words between Congress and its INDIA ally Samajwadi Party. SP chief Akhilesh Yadav had accused the Congress of betrayal by not giving it tickets to contest in a potential alliance with the Congress in MP. ALSO READ: Day after Congs poll setback, Akhilesh says poll result has ended arrogance, matter has concluded INDIA or 'Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance' is a group of 28 opposition parties, including the Congress. The parties have come together to take on the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), led by PM Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and prevent it from winning a third straight term at the Centre in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Imphal The ongoing ethnic strife in Manipur that has roiled the northeastern state for the past seven months has deepened fault lines between Meitei and Kuki communities, dividing them geographically across the state. While no Meiteis live in hill districts such as Churachandpur anymore, Kukis from the valley have taken refuge in the hills. BSF personnel stand guard near houses of Kuki officials in Checkon area of Imphal. (HT Photo) However, a handful of Kuki bureaucrats, police officers and officials on central government services still reside in Checkon and New Checkon localities in the middle of Imphal, amid tight security. People familiar with the matter said these few Kuki officials are all from the community that are left in the city. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here On the night of September 2, the last of the 10 Kuki families living in New Lambulane locality, adjoining Checkon, moved out of Imphal after police and intelligence officials noted a threat to their lives. On Friday, HT visited the two most-guarded localities, less than 2km from the chief ministers residence, in Imphal. A narrow lane right in front of the city convention centre has some of the houses of Kuki officials, guarded by a team of armed personnel of the Border Security Force (BSF). Standing close to the barricades, the BSF personnel ensure there are no gatherings nearby, amid reports of armed mobs setting the abandoned houses of Kuki families on fire. Among the abandoned houses in the lane in Checkon, one is of Manipurs former director general of police (DGP), P Doungel, who too has left Imphal. On the second day of ethnic clashes that started on May 3, Doungels house was vandalised by a mob. A prominent Kuki member, Doungel was the states police chief when the clashes broke out. The IPS officer, who superannuated on June 30, now lives with his family outside Manipur, officials said. At the Checkon tribal market, about 500 metres from the main gate outside the convention centre, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) has set up a camp in an abandoned building. Armed CRPF personnel patrol the lanes round the clock. A Meitei officer from a central force, seeking anonymity and requesting not to disclose the name of the force, said: Different central forces are on duty here. There are houses of a Kuki IG and a DIG near the camp. We ensure there is no problem here. I may be a Meitei but I am a government officer first. I am here to do my duty, which I will do efficiently. Our job is to ensure that not only these officers but even their abandoned houses are not vandalised. Rioters have no identity. He said that even the officers who have been transferred out have their houses in the area. There is high alert round the clock in this locality, though violence has ebbed across the state. And, this is not without a reason. On August 26, unidentified rioters entered the New Checkon locality and set ablaze some of the abandoned Kuki houses. To be sure, a similar pattern by rioters was also observed in hill districts where abandoned houses of Meitei families were torched. While there are few officers working from Imphal, majority of Kuki officers have been working in a hybrid mode, from outside Imphal districts or nearby states, ever since the clashes broke out. They attend meetings, stay the night there (Checkon and New Checkon), and return immediately, a senior police officer said, also declining to be named. They do not visit any other place in Imphal because of the current situation. There is a lot of secrecy maintained about their travel dates. When Kuki officers from New Checkon travel to the police headquarters, they are escorted by security forces. Some Kuki officers have also moved out of the state and joining central deputation in Delhi. In September, a senior IG-rank Kuki officer took a transfer from Manipur police to the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP). An officer heading the polices telecom department, who was earlier based in Imphal, is now working from Churachandpur. The same is the case for junior officers too. All Meiteis have been shifted to valley areas while all Kukis are now working in hill districts, the senior police officer quoted above said. But all this is a temporary arrangement. At least 181 people have been killed and around 50,000 displaced in Manipur since May 3, when the ethnic violence started in the northeastern state between Meitei and Kuki communities. GUWAHATI: Outgoing Mizoram chief minister and president of ruling , Mizo National Front Zoramthanga, on Monday said his partys defeat to (ZPM) was as an outcome of anti-incumbency and impact of Covid-19. Zoram Peoples Movement Outgoing Mizoram chief minister Zoramthanga (HT file) MNF, which had bagged 26 of the total 40 seats in the state in 2018, managed to secure just 10 seats this time. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The biggest surprise of the day for the party was the defeat of Zoramthanga from the Aizawl East I seat to ZPMs Lalthansanga by a margin of 2,101 votes. Senior party leader and deputy chief minister in the outgoing government, Tawnluia, was also defeated by ZPMs W Chhuanawma by a margin of 909 votes. Our party got defeated because of anti-incumbency. People were also not satisfied with my performance because of the Covid-19 onslaught. I accept the verdict of the people and I hope that the next government will perform, Zoramthanga told journalists in Aizawl. Following the declaration of results, the 79-year-old met Mizoram Governor Hari Babu Kambhampati at the Aizawl Raj Bhawan and submitted his resignation along with a few other MNF leaders. Also Read: Mizorams new government will have zero tolerance for corruption: Lalduhoma Though MNF was part of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at Centre, the two parties didnt have any alliance in Mizoram. After Mondays loss, questions have been raised on whether the regional party would continue to remain in NDA. It depends on the decision of my party. I am one of the founding members of NDA and personally I have no mind to leave it, Zoramthanga, who had held the chief ministers post thrice, said. While Mondays result is a setback for the MNF as a party, it could be the end of a long and chequered career for Zoramthanga, a rebel turned politician. Prior to signing of the Mizoram Peace Accord in 1986, the 79-year-old was one of the prominent leaders of MNF, a militant outfit earlier. Zoramthanga has headed MNF since 1990 and had earlier been chief minister for two terms--first in 1998 and then again in 2008. It seems ZPMs victory is the outcome of voter fatigue with MNF and Congress, the two parties that have ruled the state since Mizoram became a state in 1987. Voters this time wanted to give a chance to another party, said J Doungel, professor of political science in Mizoram University. New Delhi: At least 13 people have died in a fresh bout of violence in the Tengnoupal district of Manipur on Monday afternoon. A police patrol party in a violence-hit area of Manipur. (AFP) Officials in the security forces said that at around noon, inputs were received of a firefight that had broken out between two groups of militants at Leithu village near Saibol in Tengnoupal district. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The nearest security forces were about 10km away from this place. Once our forces moved in and reached the place, they found 13 bodies in the Leithu village. The forces did not find any weapons next to the bodies, one officer aware of the matter said. The officer said that it appeared the dead are not from Leithu area and could have come from another place after which they engaged in a firefight with a separate group. Neither police nor security forces confirmed the identity of the deceased people. Also Read: Kuki officials stand ground in Meitei-dominated Imphal The police have reached the spot. They will probe the matter, the officer added. Manipur has been roiled by ethnic clashes between Meitei and Kuki communities since May 3. The clashes have left at least 182 dead and around 50000 homeless. It was only on Sunday that authorities lifted the ban on mobile internet services in the violence-hit state after seven months with the exception of border areas in some districts. The areas in the above districts are either dominated by Meiteis or Kukis and have witnessed the majority of the violence, gunfights, arson and abductions in the past seven months. The lifting of suspension came four days after the Centre and Manipur government signed a peace agreement in New Delhi with the United National Liberation Force (UNLF), the oldest militant outfit in the state. (HT has contacted Manipur Police for their response. The copy will be updated) New Delhi The government is working on decriminalising several minor and technical offences to promote ease of doing business and is expected to bring the proposal in the budget session of Parliament, two senior officials said, adding that states may also be incentivised to reduce compliance burdens at the local level. The government is expected to bring a proposal in the budget session of Parliament on decriminalising several minor and technical offences to promote ease of doing business. (PTI) It is a work in progress. An inter-ministerial working group is on it. Smaller groups have been formed to examine specific matters expeditiously, said Rajesh Kumar Singh, secretary, Department for Promotion of Internal Trade and Investment (DPIIT), an arm of the commerce and industry ministry. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The Union budget may also provide incentives to carry similar reforms for both citizens and businesses at local levels by states as most of the central laws have already been streamlined under the Jan Vishwas Bill 1.0, a second official working in a different economic ministry said, requesting anonymity. The Jan Vishwas Bill 2.0 is also considering to bring reforms in archaic explosive laws among others, the second official said. The objectives of the second version are broadly same as the one that was enacted in August this year. The purpose is to reduce compliance burden on businesses and citizens to ensure a hassle-free environment to work. The move will eventually encourage entrepreneurial spirit among people, he said. Addressing a day-long conference on ease of doing business, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal on November 8 asked the industry to come up with ideas to quickly reduce some more compliance burdens for both businesses and citizens. He said the government could quickly bring the second edition of the Jan Vishwas Bill soon in Parliament, provided stakeholders expeditiously give their suggestions and feedback. HT reported it on November 9. The working group on this matter is an all-inclusive body of officials from various ministries, industry bodies, legal professionals and technical experts. Specialised agencies, such as National Housing Bank (NHB), National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) and Central Pollution Control Board are also part of this group. Goyal asked stakeholders to look for some low-hanging fruits that could immediately give some relief to the common man, small-scale industries, micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), small traders and startups. He said that the move will boost entrepreneurship, encourage investments, inculcate spirit of innovation, and reduce cost of compliance. He said the Narendra Modi government believes in action and it trusts business communities as wealth creators for the nation. He, however, cautioned the industry not to misinterpret laws to justify unlawful activities. Usually laws get complicated when a set of people misuse the law, then somebody has to sit down to plug that issue, and thats how the laws keep getting complicated, he said. The second official quoted above said decriminalising of minor offences will also reduce the burden on judiciary and prisons. He said there is a rise of criminal cases on trivial grounds of omission or commission that could be settled with a penalty. Citing data from the National Judicial Data Grid, he said, of the total 42,402,907 pending cases as on February 23 this year, 31,586,284 were in relation to criminal proceedings. According to the National Crime Records Bureaus prison statistics, 554,034 prisoners were confined in different prisons in India against a capacity of 425,609 as on December 31, 2021. Speaking at an investment roadshow on August 29, 2023, DPIIT joint secretary Manmeet Nanda said that the department had already reduced 40,000 regulatory compliance burdens. The earlier version of the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Bill, 2023 became a law on August 11, 2023. Besides decriminalising minor offences and repealing archaic laws, it rationalised various fines and penalties and introduced compounding of offences. It decriminalised more than 180 provisions in 42 central laws under 19 ministries. Mizoram Election Results 2023 highlights: Welcome to our live coverage of the Mizoram assembly election results, a day after the results of four states Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, and Chhattisgarh were announced. The Zoram Peoples Movement (ZPM) swept off the northeastern state with 27 seats out of the total 40 assembly seats - dethroning the Mizo National Front (MNF) who got 10 seats. The BJP came a distant third with two seats, while Congress managed to get one seat in the state. Zoram People's Movement chief and likely to be next Mizoram CM Lalduhoma. (PTI Photo) Assembly election results 2023: Full coverage The exit poll results had indicated a neck-and-neck fight between the ruling MNF and former IPS officer Lalduhoma's ZPM. Some predicted that the ruling MNF, led by chief minister Zoramthanga, holds an advantage, while some have projected a victory for ZPM. As per the initial trends, the ZPM is looking poised to register a landslide victory. MNF, ZPM and Congress contested in all 40 assembly seats, while BJP contested in only 23 seats in the state. Polling for the Mizoram assembly was held on November 7 with a voter turnout of 80.43 percent. Rajasthan election results 2023: Full coverage Originally scheduled for December 3, the counting day was rescheduled to December 4. The Election Commission, in an official notification, cited the receipt of "several representations from various quarters" within Mizoram as the driving force behind this decision. The representations collectively requested a revision of the counting date from December 3, 2023 (Sunday), to another weekday. Chief Electoral Officer Madhup Vyas said that the poll body agreed to the request as Sunday was devoted to church duties and prayers. As the counting of votes polled in the assembly elections in Mizoram began at 8am on Monday, very early trends showed a close fight between the ruling Mizo National Front led by chief minister Zoramthanga and the Zoram People's Movement. Postal ballots and votes cast at home, a facility started for senior and specially abled voters, will be counted first before electronic voting machines will be taken out for counting. Mizoram chief minister Zoramthanga(ANI) Additional chief electoral officer H Lianzela said the counting was being held in 13 centres across Mizoram. One counting hall has been set up for each of the 40 assembly seats at these 13 centres, he said. Follow Live Updates on Mizoram election results 2023 Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The counting was supposed to happen on Sunday along with Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Telangana. However, it was deferred by the Election Commission following appeals by political parties, NGOs, churches and students' bodies as Sunday holds a special significance for the people of Mizoram, a Christian-majority state. Mizoram has a total of 8.57 lakh voters of which 80.66% had cast their votes on November 7. A total of 10585 voters in the state had cast their votes at home. Mizoram had witnessed an incident-free and peaceful voting that recorded 80.66% voter turnout. There will be 40 counting halls in all. Around 4000 counting and other support staff would be on duty in the locations. To ensure security, 10 companies of central armed police forces (CAPF) and around 2000 personnel from Mizoram police would also be engaged, chief electoral officer Madhup Vyas informed on Sunday. There are four major contenders in the fray, the ruling Mizo National Front, Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party and Zoram Peoples Movement. But most exit-polls and experts predict it to be a tight contest between the regional parties, MNF and ZPM. In 2018, MNF had ousted the Congress from power by winning 26 seats. A new regional party, ZPM, which was formed a year earlier, had come a surprise second winning 8 seats, which Congress, which bagged 5, was relegated to the third spot. BJP made its debut in the Christian-majority state by winning a lone seat. While MNF, ZPM and Congress have put up candidates in all seats, BJP, which contested 39 seats five years ago, had fielded 23 candidates. There are a total of 174 candidates in fray including 16 womenthree from BJP, two each from Congress, MNF and ZPM and rest Independents. The outgoing assembly had no women MLAs. Mizoram election results 2023: The counting of votes for the Mizoram Assembly election will begin on December 4. The counting of votes in Mizoram was earlier scheduled for December 3 (Sunday) along with Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Telangana. Follow the full coverage of the Mizoram Assembly Election here. However, the Election Commission on November 29 deferred the counting to December 4 (Monday) following appeals by political parties and organisations citing the special significance of Sunday for the people of Mizoram, a Christian-majority state. The elections to the 40-member Mizoram assembly were held in a single phase on November 7. A voter turnout of 80.66% was recorded on the day. In the northeastern state, four major contenders are in the fray the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF), the Zoram Peoples Movement (ZPM), the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Mizoram election results 2023: Voters wait in queues to cast their votes for the Mizoram Assembly elections on November 7.(ANI) Most exit polls have predicted a tight contest between the two regional parties MNF and ZPM. While two exit polls, conducted by India Today-Axis and Jan ki Baat-News 18, have projected ZPM as favourites, two others ABP-Cvoter and P-Marg gave advantage to the MNF. The Congress has been projected at third position followed by the BJP by the exit polls. In 2018, the MNF ousted the Congress from power by winning 26 seats. The ZPM, which was formed a year before the previous polls, came second winning eight seats, relegating the Congress, which bagged five, to the third spot. The BJP made its debut in the Christian-majority state by winning a lone seat. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here While MNF, ZPM and Congress have fielded candidates in all 40 seats, the BJP is contesting in 23 constituencies. A total of 174 candidates, including 16 women and 17 Independents, were in the fray. The outgoing assembly had no women legislator. Mizoram election result: When does the counting of votes start? The votes for Mizoram will be counted on December 4. According to the Election Commission, the counting of the votes will begin at 8 am onwards. The early trends will start tricking in as soon as the counting of votes begins. As per trend, the postal ballots are counted first, followed by the votes polled in the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs). Mizoram election result: Where and how to check the results? To check Mizoram assembly election results, you can refer to various reliable sources, including official election commission websites, news channels, and dedicated election result portals of the poll body. Here are some ways where you can check the latest Mizoram election results: The Zoram People's Movement's (ZPM) thumping victory in the Mizoram assembly election on Monday also meant a majority of exit polls aired by news channels on November 30 failed to predict the final results. Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) workers celebrate party's lead during the counting of votes for the Mizoram assembly election in Aizawl on Monday, (PTI) The ZPM is all set to form the next government in Mizoram after the party swept the elections bagging 26 seats in the 40-member House. According to the Election Commission (EC), the party was leading in one seat. The prominent ZPM winners include the party's CM face Lalduhoma who bagged the Serchhip seat defeating his MNF rival J Malsawmzuala Vanchhawng by 2,982 votes. Follow Live Updates on Mizoram election results 2023 Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The ruling Mizo National Front won seven seats and was leading in three. These include Mamik, Tuirial, Serlui, Tuivawl, East Tuipui, West Tuipui and Thorang. The BJP won Palak and Saiha seats. The Indian National Congress was leading in one seat. Also Read: Six-party alliance Zoram People's Movement wins Mizoram assembly election, setback for CM Zoramthanga's MNF. 10 facts Some exit polls had predicted a clean sweep by the ZPM, but the majority indicated a hung House with no party getting a clear majority. The India Today- My Axis India had predicted a clean sweep to the ZPM, with 28 to 35 seats. The MNF was likely to win 3-7 seats, the Congress 2 to 4 and the BJP 0-2 seats. The incumbent chief minister Zoramthanga's MNF, according to the exit poll, was likely to be reduced to just 3-7 seats. According to the India TV-CNX exit poll, the MNF was predicted to win between 14 and 18 seats. The Congress would win 8-10 seats, it said. The BJP would get between 0 and 2 seats, while others were expected to win between 12 and 16 seats, the exit poll showed. Also Read: Who is ZPM's Lalthansanga, who defeated Mizoram CM Zoramthanga in Aizawl? The Jan ki Baat exit polls had given between 10 and 14 seats to the MNF and 15 and 25 seats to the ZPM. The BJP was predicted to win 0-2 seats. It projected 5-9 seats for the Congress. The ABP News-CVoter predicted a win for the MNF with 15-21 seats. The Congress, it said, could win 2-8 seats. It only gave 12-18 seats to the ZPM. The exit poll said the BJP would not be able to open its account in Mizoram. According to the Times Now-ETG polls, the MNF would win 14-18 seats, the Congress may end up winning 9-13 seats, The ZPM was predicted to claim 10-14 seats, while the BJP 0-2 seats. In the last assembly elections, held in 2018, the MNF had won 26 seats and the ZPM secured eight seats, relegating the Congress that bagged five seats to the third place. The BJP had won one seat. The counting of votes polled in the Mizoram assembly elections began at 8am on Monday across 13 centres in the north-eastern state. Postal ballots and votes cast at home, a facility for senior and specially-abled voters, were being counted first. Votes polled in electronic voting machines will be counted afterwards. As many as 80.66% of the 857000 voters voted in the polls held in the state on November 7. (ANI) As many as 80.66% of the 857000 voters voted in the polls held in the state on November 7. There are 40 counting halls. Around 4000 counting and other support staff would be on duty. To ensure security, 10 companies of central armed police forces and around 2000 personnel from Mizoram Police would also be engaged, chief electoral officer Madhup Vyas said on Sunday. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Most exit polls predicted a tight contest between the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF) and another regional party Zoram Peoples Movement (ZPM). In 2018, MNF wrested power from the Congress by winning 26 seats. ZPM, which was formed a year earlier, won eight seats. The Congress bagged five seats and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) one in the Christian-majority state. The MNF, ZPM, and Congress put up candidates for all seats. The BJP, which contested 39 seats five years ago, fielded 23 candidates. A total of 174 candidates, including 16 womenthree from BJP, two each from Congress, MNF, and ZPM contested the polls. The outgoing assembly had no women lawmakers. The Congress and MNF have held power since the formation of the state in 1987. The counting of votes was earlier scheduled for Sunday along with Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana. The Election Commission of India on November 29 deferred the counting to Monday following appeals for it given the significance of Sunday for the people in the Christian-majority state. The BJP on Sunday wrested power from the Congress in the Hindi heartland states of Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh while retaining it in Madhya Pradesh. The Congress managed to win in the southern state of Telangana months before the national polls. Mizoram has had a history of voting out the incumbent in every two elections after 1993. The state has also only been ruled by Mizo National Front (MNF) or Congress governments since 1984. Both these long-term trends have been broken in the 2023 election. The Zoram Peoples Movement (ZPM) a new party whose candidates fought as independents in 2018 because it had been formed just one year before the election has won the 2023 election in the state after just one term of a MNF government. While the MNF has still managed to finish second in the state, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has pushed the Congress to the fourth spot. This increases the string of losses the Congress has suffered in this round of elections to four. Zoram Peoples Movement (ZPM's) president and party's CM candidate Lalduhoma being greeted by party members after party's victory in the Mizoram Assembly elections on Monday. (ANI) How big is the ZPMs win in Mizoram? In terms of seat share and vote share, it is in line with winners of previous elections. The party has won 27 of the 40 seats in the state with a 37.9% vote share. In comparison, the MNF had won 26 seats in the 2018 election and the Congress had won 32 and 34 seats in the 2008 and 2013 election respectively. Both the MNF and the Congress have previously won bigger vote shares than that won by the ZPM in this election. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here See Chart 1 The MNFs success, therefore, is not so much in terms of seat share and vote share as in breaking the states long-term tradition. The Congress and the MNF had previously won at least 27 of the states 40 seats in each election since 1989. In this election, the two parties have been reduced to just 11 seats. However, individually, the Congress is the bigger loser . The MNF has won 10 seats with a 35% vote share. These are the third lowest and fifth lowest seat and vote share figures for the party in Mizoram. The Congress on the other hand has won one seat with a 20.8% vote share, both the lowest ever for the party in the state. Also read- Mizorams new government will have zero tolerance for corruption: Lalduhoma See Chart 2 To be sure, the Congress has slipped below the second position earlier, too, in Mizoram. It finished third in 2008 and 2018. However, it was the Mizoram Peoples Conference (MZPC) and the ZPM (fighting as independents) who had pushed Congress to the third position in these two elections. In 2023, it has been further pushed further down to fourth position by the BJP, with which the Congress is in a contest in national elections too. The BJP has increased its seat tally from one in 2018 to two in 2023. The BJP pushing the Congress to the fourth spot, however, does not mean that popular support for the party outmatches the Congress in Mizoram. The BJP fought just 23 of the 40 seats in the state. Even in these 23 seats, its vote share is only 8.8%. This suggests that it won votes largely in the two seats it has won. On the other hand, the Congress vote share (it contested all 40 seats) is 20.8%. Mizorams Opposition Zoram Peoples Movement (ZPM) on Monday swept the polls in the state, winning 27 of the 40 seats. Police officer turned politician and ZPM chief Lalduhoma, 74, who is set to become the next chief minister, spoke to Hindustan Times, about his priorities and agenda. Edited excerpts: Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) chief Lalduhoma. (PTI) What factors helped ZPM? Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The public wanted change and ZPM was able to get the support of the voters. People in Mizoram want a better and corruption-free government and economic development. We were the first party to announce the list of candidates in April much ahead of others. That helped our candidates reach out to all voters and it worked. What resulted in the ruling Mizoram National Front (MNF)s defeat? People are very disappointed with them. They made lots of empty promises. The main reason for MNFs loss was chief minister Zoramthanga. It is not that the party is bad. But the party leader was involved in corruption, nepotism, and favouritism. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has bagged two seats and wants to be part of the ZPM government... Both the BJP and Congress have been propagating this false propaganda that they will have some tie-up with ZPM. Why should we join hands with the BJP when we have an absolute majority? There is no need for that. How do you see Congress getting relegated to fourth place behind the BJP? They were in power for a long time and people are fed up with them. It will take time and it be quite difficult for Congress to revive itself in Mizoram. What will be the priorities of your government? As promised, our government will procure ginger, turmeric, chili, and broomsticks at a minimum pre-determined price to support farmers. The states finances are in shambles. We will constitute an expert committee and put fiscal reforms in place. Our government will adopt a policy of zero tolerance for corruption and grant permission to the CBI [Central Bureau of Investigation] to act on it. Other focus areas will be decided after the swearing-in takes place. When is the swearing-in expected? It has not been decided yet. We have to first meet our party leaders and newly-elected lawmakers...in Aizawl on Tuesday...since some candidates might take more time to reach the capital, we will have another meeting on Wednesday. We are likely to stake claim to form the government on Wednesday and the swearing-in can be expected either on Thursday or Friday. Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday took a dig at the Congress party saying its greed and lust for power led to its defeat in three Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh. According to Vijayan, the grand old party's resistance to joining forces with other INDIA alliances led to their current loss in these states. Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan Congress thought it was competent to win against the BJP on its own and therefore, did not join forces with the other INDIA alliance parties in these states to present a united front against the saffron partyHad they joined hands with the other parties, this would not have been the result. They were greedy and lusted for power. They wanted it all for themselves, the Kerala CM said during a press briefing. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here He added, Congress leader Digvijay Singh had offered to share seats with the Samajwadi Party (SP) in Madhya Pradesh, but Kamal Nath was against it and in such a situation, the party leadership ought to have intervenedBut they did not. In Rajasthan too, Congress declined to work together with other secular parties, including the CPI(M)." Speaking about whether his party CPI(M) needed the Congress to win in the three states, Vijayan said, The issue was to defeat the BJPFor that, we all needed to be united. The BJP ousted incumbent Congress from Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and retained Madhya Pradesh with a landslide victory. This led to the saffron party tightening its hold in the Hindi heartland and gave a big boost to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. With an absolute majority in the 90-member Chhattisgarh assembly, the BJP won 54 seats while the Congress trailed at 35 seats. In Rajasthan, the saffron party won a total of 115 out of 199 seats. In Madhya Pradesh, BJP managed to stave off anti-incumbency after winning 163 seats in the 230-member assembly. However, the BJP bagged only eight seats in the 119-member Telangana assembly as Congress won the southern state by ousting K Chandrasekhar Rao-led Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS). Meanwhile, the BJP won only two seats in Mizoram. According to the Election Commission (EC) data, BJP candidate K Hrahmo won the Palak Assembly constituency, while K Beichhua won the Saiha Assembly seat. New Delhi: As many as 13,626 reserved category students from the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), and Other Backward Classes (OBC), dropped out of top academic institutions in the country in the past five years, Union minister of state for education minister Subhas Sarkar informed Parliament on Monday. In case of CUs, minister Subhas Sarkar told Parliament 4596 OBC, 2424 SC, and 2622 ST students dropped out in the last five years. (PTI) These institutions include central universities (CUs), Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the minister said. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The data was submitted in response to a question by BSP member in Lok Sabha Ritesh Pandey about the governments assessment of the total number of students who had dropped out of CUS, IITs, IIMs and NLUs during the last five years. In the case of CUs, Sarkar said that as many as 4596 OBC, 2424 SC, and 2622 ST students dropped out in the last five years; in case of IITs, 2066 OBCs, 1068 SC, and 408 ST students dropped out; and, in case of IIMs, the figures were 163, 188, and 91 for OBC, SC and ST students, respectively. No such data is available for national law universities or NLUs. NLUs have been established under the Acts enacted by the respective state legislatures and as such they are the state universities. No such data on drop out students of NLUs is maintained by the Central Government, Sarkar said in his response. Explaining the possible reason behind the drop outs, Sarkar said that in the higher education sector students have multiple options and they choose to migrate across institutions and from one course or programme to another in the same institution. The migration/withdrawal, if any, is mainly on account of securing seats by the students in other departments / institutions of their choice or on any personal ground, he said. Responding further to the query on what the government was doing to address the issue, Sarkar said that the government had taken various steps like fee reduction, establishment of more institutes, scholarship, priority access to national level scholarships to aid the students with poor financial backgrounds to pursue their education. For the welfare of SC/ST students the schemes like waiver of tuition fees in IITs, grant of national scholarships under Central Sector Scheme, scholarships in Institutes etc. are also there, he said. Sarkar said that in order to proactively address any issues of SC/ST students, institutes have set up mechanisms such as SC/ST students cells, equal opportunity cells, student grievance cells, student grievance committees, students social clubs, liaison officers and liaison committees. The University Grants Commission (UGC) also issues instructions from time to time to promote equity and fraternity among students, he said. In what appears to be a "show of strength", about 25 BJP MLAs on Monday met former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje here who is said to be among the frontrunners for the CM's post. BJP leader Vasundhara Raje (File Photo) The development comes amid intense speculations over the contenders for the top post after the BJP returned to power in the state, winning 115 seats in the assembly polls held last week. The party did not name its CM candidate in the elections. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Though the MLAs termed it a courtesy meeting, they said they will support Raje if the party leadership chooses her for the post in the state. Nasirabad MLA Ramswaroop Lamba said that people have seen the works of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Raje and that the decision regarding the CM will be taken by the party's parliamentary board. "BJP has returned to power in Rajasthan only because of the work done by PM Modi and Vasundhara Raje, he said. When asked whether the party MLAs will support Raje for the CM's post, Lamba said the legislators are with her. Over two dozen BJP MLAs from various districts reached Raje's Civil Lines residence till evening. Apart from Raje who won assembly elections from Jhalrapatan seat, Union ministers Gajendra Singh Shekhawat and Arjun Meghwal, and party MPs -- Baba Balaknath and Diya Kumari who also won assembly polls -- are among the contenders for the CM's post. According to sources, BJP state in-charge Arun Singh and state unit president CP Joshi are in Delhi for a meeting with the party high command. They met party president JP Nadda and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, the sources said. Shekhawat and Balaknath are also in Delhi to attend the Parliament session. In Jaipur, the MLAs who visited Raje's residence included Kalicharan Saraf, Babu Singh Rathore, Prem Chand Bairwa, Govind Ranipuria, Kalulal Meena, KK Vishnoi, Pratap Singh Singhvi, Gopichand Meena, Bahadur Singh Koli, Shankar Singh Rawat, Manju Baghmar, Vijay Singh Chaudhary, Pushpendra Singh and Shatrughan Gautam. Raje, who is the national vice president of BJP, has been the chief minister of Rajasthan twice from 2003 to 2008 and 2013 to 2018. While she was the CM face in earlier elections, the party decided to go to polls without projecting any leader for the post with PM Modi leading the campaign. After BJP's defeat in 2018 and the changed dynamics within the party, Raje was seen as a sidelined leader. Now that the BJP has returned to power in the state, her supporters are expecting the party to give her the chance to be the CM for a third time. Prime Minister Narendra Modi hit out at the Opposition ahead of the start of the winter session of Parliament on Monday and said the country has rejected negativity, a day after the Bharatiya Janata Party's thumping victories in the assembly elections of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. Prime Minister Narendra Modi.(PTI) "The country has rejected negativity. Before the commencement of the session, we hold discussions with our colleagues in the Opposition...We urge and pray for the cooperation of everyone. This time too, the process has been undertaken...I also urge all our MPs that this temple of democracy is essential for public aspiration and to strengthen the foundation of developed India," Modi said outside the new Parliament building. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here When there is a commitment to people's welfare then the word anti-incumbency becomes irrelevant, Modi further said. In a piece of advice for the Opposition, Modi said, ...If I speak on the basis of the recent elections' results, this is a golden opportunity for our colleagues sitting in the Opposition. Instead of taking out your anger of defeat in this session, if you go ahead with positivity and learn from the defeat and leave behind the tendency of negativity of the last nine years, the country will change their point of view for them... Buoyed by its victory in the assembly elections, an aggressive BJP will seek to corner the Congress-led Opposition in the winter session when a report recommending TMC MP Mahua Moitra's expulsion is expected to be tabled in the Lok Sabha. The leaders of the Opposition INDIA bloc met on Monday morning ostensibly to redraw their strategies to take on Modi-led BJP both inside the Parliament and in the electoral arena. The Congress, which was hoping to score a big win in Madhya Pradesh and retain Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, had to taste a resounding defeat. However, the grand old party did manage to oust the BRS from Telangana. "...Rajnaitik garmi badi tezi se badh rahi hai (winter is delayed but political temperatures are rising). Yesterday, the results of the four-state elections came out. The results are very encouraging - encouraging for those who are committed to the welfare of the common people of the country and to the bright future of the country...," Modi said. Those who move on the principle of empowerment of four 'castes' of women, youth, farmers and poor get overwhelming support, he added. The Rajya Sabha on Monday said it had not revoked the suspension of Aam Aadmi Party MP Raghav Chadha over alleged breach of privileges. There is no revocation of suspension. He has been held guilty by the committee and punished. The committee said his suspension for last more than three months (suspended on August 11) till date is enough punishment and therefore, he can now attend the proceedings of the House, sources in Rajya Sabha told HT. Chadha in a video message had thanked the Supreme Court and Rajya Sabha chairperson Jagdeep Dhankhar and claimed his suspension was revoked. On 11th August, I was suspended from the Rajya Sabha. I went to the Supreme Court for the revocation of my suspension. Supreme Court took cognizance of this and now my suspension has been revoked after 115 days...I am happy that my suspension has been roved and I want to thank the Supreme Court and Rajya Sabha Chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar, he added. AAP MP Raghav Chadha flashes a victory sign after his suspension was revoked by the Rajya Sabha on Monday. (X/ANI) Chadha, the Rajya Sabha MP from Punjab, was suspended on August 11 during the Monsoon session of Parliament over the alleged breach of privilege. He was accused of not taking consent of five Rajya Sabha MPs before including their names in a select committee for considering the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (Amendment) Bill 2023 seeking to diminish the power of the elected AAP government in the Capital over services. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here On a complaint by the five MPs, the same was referred to the privileges committee and Chadha was suspended till the committee submitted its final report. Rajya Sabha chairperson Jagdeep Dhankhar said,"As regards the sentence, the committee finds the suspension suffered by him since 11th August 2023 from the house thus far as the sufficient sentence that will meet the ends of justice." The committee stands committed to upholding the sanctity of Parliamentary proceedings and safeguarding the integrity of the institution. The committee expresses hope that Raghav Chadha will reflect and introspect, ANI quoted Dhankhar as saying. NEW DELHI: New epaulettes to be worn by naval officers will bear the imprint of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharajs maritime legacy as India leaves behind the mentality of slavery and moves ahead drawing inspiration from the Maratha ruler, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Monday in his Navy Day address at Sindhudurg in Maharashtra. Prime Minister Narendra Modi addresses the gathering at the Navy Day 2023 celebrations in Sindhudurg district on Monday (PTI) The current epaulettes, a shoulder piece that signals an officers rank, feature the Nelsons Ring, a colonial legacy. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The PM also announced that an upcoming nomenclature of naval ranks will also be in line with Indian traditions. The new epaulettes and the Indianised ranks will be the latest in a series of changes introduced by the navy during the last year to discard traditions associated with the British empire, including adopting a new ensign, doing away with batons for commanders and allowing traditional Indian wear in officers messes. Inspired by the ideals of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, todays India is moving forward abandoning the mentality of slavery. I am happy to announce that the epaulettes donned by the naval officers will now highlight the heritage and legacy of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and they will be similar to the naval ensign, the PM said. He recalled unveiling the naval ensign last year while commissioning Indias first indigenous aircraft carrier INS Vikrant. The flag, which earlier featured the St Georges cross, now has the seal of Shivaji. This years Navy Day celebrations were held at the Sindhudurg Fort, built by the Maratha ruler in the 17th century. India celebrates December 4 as Navy Day to commemorate Operation Trident, the navys attack on Karachi harbour during the 1971 war with Pakistan. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inspects the Guard of Honour at the Navy Day 2023 celebrations, in Sindhudurg on Monday (ANI) With the feeling of taking pride in ones heritage, I am proud to make another announcement. The navy is now going to name its ranks in line with Indian traditions, he said. The navy has completed a review of ranks held by sailors, inherited from the British, and is set to replace them with Indianised designations as part of a larger drive to jettison colonial military traditions, HT reported on October 9. Gender-neutral changes to the ranks will also be announced shortly. More than 65,000 sailors will now get new ranks. The ranks that will be made to align with Indian traditions are Master Chief Petty Officer Ist Class, Master Chief Petty Officer IInd Class, Chief Petty Officer, Petty Officer, Leading Seaman, Seaman Ist Class and Seaman IInd Class, HT has learnt. Officer ranks will stay. The PM, who witnessed an operational demonstration by warships, submarines, aircraft and the elite marine commandos from Sindhudurgs Tarkarli beach, emphasised the governments resolve to strengthen Nari Shakti in the armed forces while congratulating the navy on the landmark appointment of a woman as the commanding officer of warship. Lieutenant Commander Prerna Deosthalee is set to assume command of fast attack craft INS Trinkat, the development coming three decades after the navy began inducting women as officers, along with the other two services. INS Trinkat, which was commissioned into the navy in September 2000, carries a crew of around 50. Named after an island in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the ship is equipped with anti-surface and anti-air guns, as well as medium and heavy machine guns. In his 23-minute speech, PM Modi touched upon the countrys rich maritime heritage, how Shivajis navy shaped India as a naval power, the rejection of the politics of negativity by people in the context of the election results on Sunday, the countrys rise as an economic powerhouse, self-reliance achievements and Indias march towards becoming a developed nation. PM Modi said the trust of 140 crore Indians was the countrys biggest strength as it was setting big goals and working to achieve them with full determination. This strength is the power of the worlds biggest democracy, he said. You saw the reflection of this strength in four states yesterday. A glimpse of positive outcomes of unity of resolutions, emotions and aspirations is visible as people of the diverse states are being driven by the spirit of nation first. Today, the country has taken inspiration from history and is busy preparing a roadmap for a bright future. People have pledged to move forward in every field by defeating the politics of negativity. This pledge will take us towards a developed India. He said Indias history was not just about slavery, defeats and disappointments, but it also held glorious chapters of victories, courage, knowledge, science, art, creative skills and maritime capabilities. Noting that it was the countrys maritime power that first came under attack by foreign powers, PM Modi said that India, which was famous for making ships and boats, lost control of the sea and a key strategic economic strength. He said India was now regaining its lost glory and highlighted the governments efforts to boost the blue economy. This is that period of Indias history, which is going to write the future not just of five to 10 years but for the coming centuries. He said measures like the India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor will recreate the lost Spice route. He also touched upon the strength of Made in India by citing light combat aircraft Tejas, Kisan Drone, Unified Payments Interface system, Chandrayaan-3, and aircraft carrier INS Vikrant. Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Monday called a key parliamentary strategy committee meeting at 5:30 pm at her residence in 10 Janpath, day after the grand old party's showing in the assembly polls. This comes a day after the Congress suffered triple setbacks in the Hindi heartland. The grand old party was ousted from power in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, while it failed to stop the Bharatiya Janata Party from retaining power in Madhya Pradesh despite having won the election in 2018. In the Hindi heartland, the Congress is now in a ruling alliance with the Janata Dal (United) and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar and rules Himachal Pradesh. ALSO READ: 'Conceit': Congress slammed by INDIA bloc allies after 3-1 election drubbing The Congress, however, won it big in southern India by wresting Telangana from Bharat Rashtra Samithi. It is the party's second victory in south India after Karnataka. Congress MP Rahul Gandhi took to social media platform X after the results. We humbly accept the mandate of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan - the battle of ideology will continue. I am very thankful to the people of Telangana - we will definitely fulfil the promise of making Prajalu Telangana. Heartfelt thanks to all the workers for their hard work and support," he said. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge thanked the voters of Telangana, while terming the results in the 3 Hindi-speaking states as disappointing. Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi. (ANI file) Taxes on the profits of oil and gas, maritime and aviation industries, additional levies on leisure travel, and the cancellation of subsidies for any fossil fuel could offer the world enough financial resources to help vulnerable countries deal with climate impacts and developing economies transition to greener energy, an independent high-level expert group said in its report released on Monday. People walk at Dubai's Expo City during the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai on Monday. (REUTERS) The report by the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance (IHLEG) was released by Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley, who is also the architect of the Bridgetown Initiative to address the needs of countries facing debt and liquidity challenges, at this years UN Climate conference (COP28) underway in Dubai. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here In its efforts to redraw the climate finance mechanism, the Initiative presented a roadmap to reach $2.4 trillion in climate investment for developing nations outside China, outlining a variety of commitments that governments, private companies, multilateral funding institutions, and philanthropies can adopt to tackle costs associated with the climate crisis. Mottley said two steps were now crucial to keep the world within the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5C: reining in methane emissions, and fixing climate funding. The objective first and foremost is not to breach 1.5 degrees. The best way to do that is by controlling methane. I make the call again for a global methane agreement because if we can adjust to a global minimum tax, then we can do this. And second, we must also get an understanding that if there is not enough public money, then let us give the opportunity to people to pay their fair share and transform their behaviour, she said. The expert group is co-chaired by economists Vera Songwe of Brookings Institution and Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute at London School of Economics. Amar Bhattacharya, senior fellow at Global Economy and Development, Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings is the executive secretary of the group with NK Singh, chair of Indias fifteenth finance commission, as one of the advisers. The COP26 and COP27 Presidencies extended the mandate of the IHLEG in July 2022 to prepare the report. Mottley said the approach on financing needs to take into account people who may not be able to pay and must transform their behaviour such as farmers --- while those that can afford to, such as philanthropies, oil and gas companies, and people flying first class, must chip in with climate costs. The point is we can get there if we accept that if we have a plan that is credible to live on mars then everyone has to pay their part through change of behaviour or contribution from their pockets, Mottley added. The group was tasked to assess how the climate finance system must change if it is to support the investment and actions necessary to deliver the goals of the Paris Agreement, where countries agreed to limit global warming to under 2C compared to the pre-industrial era, and strive to keep it under 1.5C. Their first report published last year at COP27 concluded that around US$2.4 trillion of investment a year would be necessary by 2030 (in emerging markets and developing countries outside China) across the priorities of a just energy transition, adaptation and resilience, loss and damage, and the conservation and restoration of nature. This is a four-fold increase from current levels of funding for these sectors. Failure to generate investment and finance of the scale and nature required is to fail on Paris. The consequences would be devastating, particularly for the poorest people. Seizing the opportunity would unlock the growth story of the 21st century. This is truly finance with a purpose, the report said. A core portion of the report focussed on the role of multilateral development banks (MDBs). Singh and American economist Larry Summers recently led efforts to suggest reforms in these banks, including on how to finance development and climate intervention. We are at a critical juncture today. We are off-track in delivering on both the climate commitments and sustainable development goals. There is a sense of urgency to make significant progress. There is great congruence and synergies in the reports of the Independent Expert Group (IEG) on Reforming Multilateral Development Banks, which Larry Summers, and I co-chaired, and the Independent High Level Expert Group (IHLEG) report. The latter recommends an integrated climate finance framework that boosts all sources of finance, namely public and private, domestic, and international and uses their complementary strengths, said Singh. During his speech at the COP28 finance session, he said MDBs must be at the centre for climate and developmental finance, for creating an effective response and bringing diverse actors to support a shared agenda of transformative development... The report recommends tackling the immediate debt constraints and lack of fiscal space that are impeding the ability of many countries to invest, especially poor and vulnerable economies. Adaptation costs/needs are now estimated at around 1018 times as much as current flows of international public adaptation finance. The commitment by developed countries to provide $100 billion per year by 2020 was not met as of 2021, eroding trust, the report noted. We must therefore pursue all options, including carbon markets (compliance and voluntary), expanded rechannelling of special drawing rights, international taxation and a bigger role for philanthropy, including from the corporate sector, the report concluded. On Monday, at COP 28, UK, France, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), European Investment Bank (EIB), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and African Development Bank (AfDB) made new commitments to expand Climate-Resilient Debt Clauses (CRDCs) in their lending. In total 73 countries joined a call to action to donors to expand the use of these clauses by 2025. These commitments support countries to deal with climate shocks by ensuring they have fiscal space to invest in climate action. These are key elements of the COP28 UAE Declaration on the Global Climate Finance Framework to make climate finance available, accessible, and affordable. The Declaration is endorsed by India, France, Barbados, Kenya, Ghana, Germany, UK, USA, Senegal, and Colombia. NEW DELHI: The Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Monday asked the central government to release funds for the rural jobs guarantee and housing schemes, accusing the Centre of imposing an economic blockade against the West Bengal government, a charge that was promptly rebutted by Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan who alleged corruption in implementation of central schemes. NProceedings of the Lok Sabha are underway on the first day of the Winter Session of Parliament, in New Delhi on Monday. (ANI /Sansad TC) (ANI) TMC Member of Parliament (MP) Sudip Bandhopadhyay raised the issue during the Zero Hour in Lok Sabha on Monday, saying the Centre should release the states dues under MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) and PM Awas Yojana. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here We are keen to place our demand to the Prime Minister of India and we hope this issue is discussed on the floor of the House without further delay and economic blockade should not be allowed to be created., Bandhopadhyay said. The TMC lawmaker added that money allotted under MNREGA amounting to 18,000 crore had been blocked over the last two years. Some MPs and state ministers came to Delhi to meet minister of state Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti but they were kept waiting. And ultimately after 2.5 hours, when we went for the meeting, she left by the back door. We were lifted bodily and taken 20km away from Delhi, TMCs Bandhopadhyay said, a reference to protests by lawmakers and state ministers at Rajghat and Krishi Bhavan in Delhi on October 2 and 3. TMC general secretary Abhishek Banerjee led the protests. Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan countered Bandhopadhyay, saying the Trinamool Congress was actually worried that the partys leadership would also end up in jail for corruption. They take money meant for the poor people of West Bengal from the central government, they keep their cut money, that is the reason. All states in the country remain in the financial system, Bengal thinks it is above it, the state government thinks they are above it, Pradhan said. In the PM Poshan Yojana (Mid-day meal scheme), they (West Bengal Govt) have misappropriated 4000 crore and the government of India has given the inquiry to the CBI. Everything will come out. It is their fault.. Half a dozen ministers are in jail and they are scared that their leadership will also be sent to jail, he said. NEW DELHI: Two Indian Air Force pilots were on Monday killed in a Pilatus PC-7 Mk II trainer aircraft crash, the first accident involving the Swiss-origin aircraft in IAF service. The aircraft was on a routine training sortie from Air Force Academy, Hyderabad. India bought 75 trainers from Pilatus Aircraft for 2,900 crore under a 2012 contract. (AFP file) The aircraft met with an accident on Monday morning during a routine training sortie from AFA, Hyderabad, the IAF said in a statement. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here It is with deep regret that the IAF confirms both pilots onboard the aircraft sustained fatal injuries. No damage to any civil life or property has been reported. A Court of Inquiry has been ordered to ascertain the cause of the accident, it added. India bought 75 trainers from Pilatus Aircraft for 2,900 crore under a 2012 contract. It is a turboprop, tandem seating, basic trainer aircraft of IAF. Initial training of all pilots is carried out on Pilatus PC-7 Mk II planes and Kiran Mk-1/1A trainers. Those training to become fighter pilots further train on the British-origin Hawk advanced jet trainers before they can fly supersonic fighter jets. India is now building its own basic trainer aircraft. In March, the defence ministry awarded a 6,838-crore contract to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) for 70 HTT-40 basic trainers. HAL will start rolling out the aircraft in 2025-26. In July 2019, the defence ministry suspended business dealings with Pilatus Aircraft Ltd for one year for violation of a pre-contract integrity pact in the 2012 contract, while also factoring in Indian investigations against the plane maker for alleged corruption and irregularities. The contract with Pilatus Aircraft Ltd included a clause for the follow-on purchase of 38 more planes. Mondays crash comes six months after an ageing Kiran trainer aircraft, flown by one of Indias finest test pilots and with a woman flight test engineer onboard, crashed on the outskirts of Karnatakas Chamarajanagar on June 1, putting the spotlight on the decades-old plane and the pressing need to replace it with a modern aircraft. Both survived the crash. The air force plans to retire the Kiran trainers by 2025. The much-delayed Sitara intermediate jet trainer (IJT), being developed by HAL, was planned as a replacement for the IAFs Kiran fleet to carry out stage-II training of fighter pilots. The IJT project is several years behind schedule and testing activity is still on. Improper engine selection and faulty planning in the early development stage by HAL led to significant delays in the IJT project that was sanctioned almost 25 years ago, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) said in a report tabled in Parliament in August. Also Read: In a historic step, IAF inducts women in non-officer cadre The IJT project was sanctioned in July 1999 with a grant of 180 crore. Incorrect assessment of the required thrust and lack of clarity on availability of A Type Engine led to improper engine selection, which, in turn, had a cascading effect on the design and development of Project 2 (IJT), the national auditor said in its report. Lack of clarity on resolution of stall and spin issues and improper planning in the initial stages of development led to a delay in the project, the report said. The IJT, first powered by a French engine and now a Russian one, was expected to get initial operational clearance by 2006 with deliveries to IAF planned a year later. However, there is no indication from the IAF about a possible order. The IJT or the HJT-36 single-engine aircraft has completed a raft of crucial trials, but the testing process is still on. In January 2022, HAL announced that the IJT had successfully demonstrated the capability to carry out six turn spins, a key requirement for trainers and the most crucial phase of flight testing. The capability to enter and recover from a spin is a necessity for a trainer aircraft to familiarise trainee pilots with departure from controlled flight and the actions required to recover from such situations. To be sure, the IJT project is no longer backed by the IAF, and HAL had to dig into its internal funds to carry out key trials after the project suffered a critical setback during spin testing in 2016 and brought the programme to a temporary halt. The future of the IJT project looks uncertain and the IAF could lease trainer aircraft to meet its requirements after the Kirans retire. US principal deputy national security adviser Jonathan Finer met external affairs minister S Jaishankar and national security adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval on Monday against the backdrop of Washingtons allegations of an Indian link to a plot to kill a Khalistani leader on American soil. US principal deputy national security adviser Jonathan Finer with external affairs minister S Jaishankar in New Delhi on Monday. (Image posted on X by Dr. S Jaishankar) This was the first publicly acknowledged contact between a senior US security official and the Indian leadership since US prosecutors alleged last week that Indian national Nikhil Gupta had worked with an official purportedly responsible for intelligence in a thwarted plot to assassinate Sikhs for Justice (SFJ) leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Finer visited New Delhi for consultations on Monday with Vikram Misri, the deputy national security adviser (strategic affairs) in the National Security Council Secretariat. A readout from the external affairs ministry described the consultations as a follow-up to US NSA Jake Sullivans visit to India in June and Dovals trip to the US in January. Good to meet Principal Deputy NSA of the US Jon Finer this afternoon. Useful exchange of views on the global situation. Discussed taking our bilateral cooperation forward, Jaishankar posted on X after his meeting with the American official, without giving details. During the consultations, Misri and Finer reviewed key bilateral issues and exchanged views on regional and global developments, according to the external affairs ministrys readout. Misri and Finer also undertook the first comprehensive mid-term review of the India-US initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET) after the first meeting led by the two NSAs in Washington in January. They took stock of progress made in building technology value chains under the framework of iCET, the readout said. The two officials expressed satisfaction at ongoing collaboration in areas such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum and high-performance computing, defence innovation, space, and advanced telecommunications through interaction between the governments, industry, academia and other stakeholders. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden launched iCET in May 2022 to facilitate cooperation in new and emerging technologies. The mechanism is jointly led by Indias National Security Council Secretariat and the US National Security Council. Misri and Finer reiterated their commitment to fulfilling the vision of Modi and Biden for elevating the bilateral strategic partnership and agreed to broaden iCETs scope to include biotechnology, technologies for processing critical minerals and rare earths, digital connectivity and digital public infrastructure, and advanced materials, the readout said. They also affirmed the importance of easing regulations to facilitate high-tech collaborations, and transfer of technology. Their discussions served to highlight the immense potential to tap synergies between their domestic initiatives and boost the competitiveness of industry in both countries, the readout added. Finer was also scheduled to meet foreign secretary Vinay Kwatra and participate in the Global Technology Summit currently underway in New Delhi. India has set up a high-level inquiry committee to examine the allegations of a conspiracy to kill Pannun, a senior leader of the outlawed SFJ who has already been declared a terrorist by India. New Delhi last week described the indictment filed against Nikhil Gupta in a US federal court in Manhattan as a matter of concern and said that follow-up action will be taken on the findings of the inquiry committee. Reaffirming Americas continued commitment to the strategic relationship with India, US principal deputy national security adviser (PDNSA) Jonathan Finer visited New Delhi on Monday to review progress on the bilateral initiative on critical and emerging technologies (ICET), committed to deepening the tech partnership at a public event, and said the two countries have differences but also the maturity to handle those differences in a constructive manner. US Principal Deputy National Security Advisor Jonathan Finer (right) with Vikram Misri, Deputy National Security Adviser. (ANI) Finer said that his conversations in Delhi, especially with his counterpart, Indian deputy NSA Vikram Misri, had crystallised for him President Joe Bidens statement that no partnership is more consequential for the future than the India-US partnership. And no aspect of this partnership is more consequential in shaping the future than technology and innovation, Finer said at the Global Technology Summit, hosted by Carnegie India in partnership with the ministry of external affairs (MEA). Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The PDNSAs visit comes in the wake of a US Department of Justice indictment which charges an Indian national, Nikhil Gupta, for allegedly plotting to assassinate Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a Sikh separatist who India has designated as a terrorist but who happens to be a dual American-Canadian citizen, on American soil. The indictment alleges that Gupta was acting on the instructions of an Indian government employee involved in security affairs. India has acknowledged receiving inputs on the issue from the US, said this isnt government policy, and set up a high-level investigation committee to examine the issue. Given the speculation about the impact of the controversy on the India-US relationship, Finers visit and public statements indicate that the US is keen to not let it affect the momentum in the strategic partnership with India. Finer called on external affairs minister S Jaishankar and NSA Ajit Doval during the visit. After the meeting, Jaishankar tweeted, Useful exchange of views on the global situation. Discussed taking our bilateral cooperation forward. Without referring to the controversy, Finer, in his public remarks, acknowledged that the two countries have a complicated history, and in the past, they have not been fully aligned and not found it easy to be economic partners or be on the same page on geopolitical issues. But Finer said that the most important step forward had been the recognition that there was more that connected the two countries than divided them. He said the two countries wont agree on everything and there were issues that remained till the present day. But nodding at the bipartisan support for the relationship in the US, Finer said, We work through differences in a constructive manner without derailing cooperation. In a subsequent question on differences over Ukraine, Finer, while saying there were issues around Ukraine which both countries agreed on while having different viewpoints on other issues, claimed that the US and India have a mature relationship, they identify opportunities and pursue them, and referred to ICET as well as Quad as examples of cooperation. Even on issues that are most challenging, we can work through it constructively. Finer is a key figure in the US national security council (NSC). As NSA Jake Sullivans deputy, he has a global mandate, but he is expected to play an increasingly influential role in monitoring Indo-Pacific affairs, as Kurt Campbell, the current NSC Indo-Pacific coordinator moves to the State Department as deputy secretary. In a statement on his visit, MEA said that Finer and Misri reviewed key bilateral issues and exchanged views on regional and global developments. They undertook a comprehensive mid-term review of (iCET), especially around tech value chains, semiconductors, quantum, Artificial Intelligence (Al) and High-Performance Computing (HPC), defence innovation, space, and advanced telecommunications. The statement added that India and the US had agreed to expand the scope of ICET to include biotechnology, critical minerals and rare earths processing technologies, digital connectivity and digital public infrastructure, and advanced materials. Finer and Misri also affirmed the importance of easing regulations to facilitate high-tech collaborations, and transfer of technology, with their discussions focused on tapping synergies between domestic initiatives. In his public comments, Finer also called ICET one of the most significant frameworks of cooperation in the history of the bilateral relationship which was focused on delivering outcomes. He referred to the GE jet engine deal, semiconductor initiatives, space collaboration between Nasa and Isro, efforts in the US Congress to lower export control barriers on computing, and telecom as specific areas where progress had already been made, while suggesting that the next chapter of tech collaboration involved revisiting old assumptions and modernising bureaucratic and regulatory frameworks. Union external affairs minister S Jaishankar on Monday termed India-US ties as structurally sound, expressed confidence that these ties will continue to deepen irrespective of political changes in America, and stressed that, in the broadest possible sense, Indias natural tech partnership is with western economies. External affairs minister S Jaishankar addresses the Global Technology Summit in New Delhi on Monday. (ANI) Speaking at the Global Technology Summit, hosted by Carnegie India in partnership with the ministry of external affairs on Monday in New Delhi, Jaishankar countered those who alleged that India was getting overdependent on the US, calling it a selective political and ideological label. He pointed out that the label ignored the overdependence on countries that supplied a bulk of basic goods, in an allusion to China. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here But while favouring Indias ties with the West and highlighting the contradiction with China, Jaishankar staunchly defended Indias ties with Russia. He placed the relationship in a historical context, even crediting Moscow with saving India at times in the past, and explained the geopolitical logic of the relationship as being based on first principles of strategy, of convergence with a neighbours neighbour. This was yet another signal that Delhi factored in the China challenge when it decided on its posture towards Moscow. I have always been clearly advocative of the fact that when it comes to tech in the broadest possible sense, really our natural partner are western economies. Thats why Quad has been helpful, the Trade and Technology Council with European Union has been helpful. These are our technology partners, they are our markets, they are our investors, these are places where mobility from which this country can benefit and skill development can happen. There is a big agenda there, particularly with respect to US and Europe, the minister said. Asked about the argument of some that this is leading to overdependence on the US, Jaishankar shot back at critics. Usually I find overdependence is a rationalisation of inaction. You dont want to do something, you say dont do it because you will get overdependent. It is a curious argument. You use it against some countries, not against others. Look at Indias trade figures and tell me where are we overdependent. I can tell you where we are overdependent. The accounts where we have enormous trade deficits and where often we are dependent on for very basic things. But thats not where you hear the overdependence argument. Politics sometimes masquerades as national security. There are ideological agendas. Responding to a question on whether the partnership will sustain if there is a political change in the US a question perhaps prompted by Donald Trumps rising poll numbers Jaishankar traced the history of the relationship from 2000. If a relationship can actually prosper with five different presidents, the data clearly indicates a certain stability. There is enough investment from both sides. There is a structural soundness to the relationship. He added that from the Indian perspective, the India-US relationship is proofed against political change. Jaishankars ownership of the relationship with the US assumes particular significance given the recent controversy where US has said it has conveyed, in strong terms, its concerns over allegations that implicate an Indian official in a plot to assassinate a Sikh separatist on American soil. But the minister also spoke of the importance of Indias relationship with Russia in the presence of an audience that also included a range of American officials, including the US principal deputy NSA Jon Finer. When asked about Indias military dependence on Russia, Jaishankar once again pointed to the problem with the conception of overdependence and its selective use. Look we have a relationship with Russia. It is an accumulated relationship of 60 years. It happened because the direction of world politics during that period forged that relationship. I see the problem defined in a way as if it is a handicap for India. This relationship has saved us at times. Whether we are overdependent depends on us. If we have multiple partners and skills to play them off while maintaining levels of trust and confidence with each of them, I am not dependent and certainly not overdependent on any one. He also said that a glance at the map, and strategy 101, would show that India and Russia will have strong ties, based on the idea of a neighbours neighbour. India had ended up in a situation, Jaishankar said, where its options were constrained. But in the past three decades, and definitely in the past decade a period that coincides with Indias wider engagement, especially with the West - Jaishankar said that Indias options had expanded and it was natural for a country to make the best use of it. The minister also spoke about the progress in tech relationship with EU, particularly through the mechanism of the TTC. He highlighted four central achievements of Indias G20 presidency a push for digital public infrastructure, renewed attention to the setback on sustainable development goals, reforming the global order by giving Africa a seat on the table, and a push for green funding in the context of reform of multilateral development banks. Asked about how he looked back at his term as foreign minister, Jaishankar spoke about five dramatic, mostly unexpected events that marked the period since 2019 Covid, the downturn in Indias relations with China and consequences for national security and diplomacy, the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, and now the situation in West Asia. It is a different world. My considered self assessment would be in each case, we have sought to absorb the event, respond in the most effective way, and use it to advance and gain in some manner. From an Indian perspective, overall I would say we havent done a bad job. The counting of votes in Mizoram is currently underway, with the Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) crossing the halfway mark in early trends and was leading in 18 seats, besides winning 8, according to the Election Commission (EC). ZPM alliance founder Lalduhoma, who is also the party's Chief Minister face for Mizoram. If the ZPM manages to convert the trending numbers into actual figures at the end of the counting of votes, it will be a massive setback for the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF). While the ZPM is on the front foot this election, it ended up getting just six out of the total 40 in the 2018 Mizoram election. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The 2023 Mizoram election is extremely significant to the ZPM as the political alliance is aiming to come to power this term, taking an early lead in as many as 27 out of the total 40 seats. Mizoram chief minister Zoramthanga was now trailing in his constituency Aizawl East 1, as his ZPM rival is zooming past him in the early trends. Zoram People's Movement: 5 things to know about the alliance Deepika Padukone attended the 3rd Annual Academy Museum Gala at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, California. The guest list included big names, including Selena Gomez, Robert Downey Jr, Natalie Portman, Elizabeth Banks, Olivia Wilde, Danai Gurira, Sandra Oh, Billie Eilish, Finneas O'Connell, Saoirse Ronan, Gemma Chan, Cara Delevingne, Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, and others. Deepika wore an indigo blue gown for the occasion and styled it with shimmering diamond jewels. Deepika Padukone attended the Academy Museum Gala 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Instagram) Deepika Padukone attends the Annual Academy Museum Gala Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Deepika Padukone shared pictures of her glamorous look for the Academy Museum Gala 2023. (Instagram) Deepika Padukone took to Instagram on Monday to post pictures of herself on her story dressed in the floor-length gown she wore for attending the Annual Academy Museum Gala 2023 in California. The images are from her hotel before she left for the star-studded gala. It shows Deepika striking pose for the camera and showing off her million-buck look for the affair. Scroll through to read our detailed download on Deepika's outfit below. Deepika's indigo-blue sleeveless gown features a one-shoulder plunging sweetheart neckline showing off her decolletage, structured boning, fitted bodice hugging her svelte frame, mermaid silhouette, floor-grazing hem length, and a long train on the back. Deepika Padukone wore an indigo blue gown for the Academy Museum Gala 2023. (AFP, Instagram) Deepika accessorised her gown with striking diamond jewels, including dangling earrings, statement rings, and bracelets. In the end, she chose muted smoky eye shadow, darkened on-fleek brows, mascara on the lashes, glossy nude brown lip shade, beaming highlighter, rouge on the cheekbones, and contouring for the glam picks. Lightly tousled and an open messy hairdo rounded off Deepika's Academy Museum Gala look. On the work front Meanwhile, Deepika will be seen soon in the sci-fi action film Kalki 2898 AD opposite Prabhas. She also has director Siddharth Anand's aerial action film Fighter opposite Hrithik Roshan and Rohit Shetty's Singham Again with Ajay Devgn, Kareena Kapoor, Akshay Kumar, Tiger Shroff and Ranveer Singh. A study published in the journal Gut offers light on the complex relationship between serum lipids, lipid-modifying targets, and cholelithiasis, a common disease characterised by gallstone formation. Complex relationship between lipids and cholelithiasis: Study(Twitter/KevinTweeted) The researchers at Jilin University's First Hospital led the study, which employed a combination of observational and Mendelian randomization (MR) approaches to thoroughly examine these associations. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Cholelithiasis is a prevalent hepatobiliary disorder that primarily affects Western populations. It is a significant risk factor for cholangiocarcinoma, a kind of bile duct cancer. Understanding the risk factors for cholelithiasis is crucial for developing effective prevention and therapeutic methods. ALSO READ: Myths about gallstones: Is normal life possible after removing gallbladder? We're now on WhatsApp. Click to join Previous research has explored the role of serum lipids and lipid-modifying targets in cholelithiasis development. However, findings have been inconsistent, highlighting the need for further investigation. The current study aimed to address this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis of these relationships. The study utilized data from the UK Biobank, a large-scale biobank resource, to examine the associations between serum lipids (total cholesterol, LDL-C, HDL-C, and triglycerides) and cholelithiasis risk. The researchers found that serum LDL-C and HDL-C levels were inversely associated with cholelithiasis risk, indicating that lower LDL-C and higher HDL-C levels were associated with a reduced risk of gallstone formation. Interestingly, the relationship between serum total cholesterol and cholelithiasis was non-linear, with lower cholesterol levels associated with an increased risk of gallstones. This finding contrasts with conventional wisdom, which suggests that lower cholesterol levels are generally beneficial for health.The researchers also employed MR, a genetic approach, to investigate the causal effects of serum lipids and lipid-modifying targets on cholelithiasis risk. MR utilizes genetic variants as proxies for specific risk factors, allowing for assessing causal relationships without the confounding effects of lifestyle and environmental factors. MR analyses supported the observational findings, confirming that lower serum total cholesterol and higher triglyceride levels were independent causal risk factors for cholelithiasis. The findings of this study provide valuable insights into the complex interplay between serum lipids, lipid-modifying targets, and cholelithiasis risk. The researchers suggested that these findings could inform the development of personalized risk assessment strategies and potential therapeutic interventions for cholelithiasis prevention. Last week, Indias Defence Procurement Board, a key defence ministry agency, approved a plan for the Indian Navy (IN) to acquire a second indigenous aircraft carrier. To be built at a cost of over 40,000 crore, the IAC-II will be modelled on INS Vikrant, Indias first indigenous aircraft carrier, commissioned in September 2022. The new warship is intended to bolster Indias maritime security posture against Chinas Peoples Liberation Army Navy, whose expanding incursions into the Indian Ocean region have generated anxiety in New Delhi. Even so, the move raises questions about the advisability of a second light 40,000-tonne aircraft carrier for the Indian Navy, instead of a big 60,000-tonne plus flattop. It is instructive that the IN has, at least since 2018, been pushing for a big aircraft carrier. However, last year the Navy unexpectedly dropped its demand for a large carrier and announced that the next flattop would be a small one. What led to this reversal is still unclear, but it seems the IN is in a fiscal situation in which building a large aircraft carrier is no longer feasible. The current focus of the Modi government is on achieving self-reliance for India, and the Navy is under pressure to prioritise the development of indigenous capabilities. With capital allocations down and the government having significantly reduced the acquisition of foreign systems, the Navy has neither the material resources needed nor an assurance of imports for the development and construction of a big carrier. Choosing a smaller flattop design potentially guarantees that Cochin Shipyard and its considerable expertise gained during the construction of the Vikrant are effectively utilised. Naval planners seem to have taken another factor into their calculations. The Navy is also looking to induct indigenous twin-engine deck-based fighters by 2030. To operate these aircraft, which are intended to replace the MiG-29Ks, the IN will require at least two operational aircraft carriers. A light aircraft carrier makes better sense because a large flattop could take over two decades to enter service. Nonetheless, the transition from a supercarrier to a modest flattop creates a predicament for the Navy. The problem with light carriers is that they are unsuitable for use in todays dynamic and contested maritime environment. In wartime conditions, a small carrier is constrained in its operations, particularly when faced with the adversarys anti-access, anti-denial systems. In the absence of a catapult system to enable the launch of heavy, long-range multi-function aircraft, the ship is forced to operate within the engagement envelope of the adversarys shore-based missiles and air defence systems. Small carriers are also less capable than large deck carriers in other critical respects. Small flattops feature conventional propulsion (gas turbine or diesel), which provides less power than large carriers, which are typically nuclear-powered and have enough power to operate constantly in sensitive littorals. This results in reduced flexibility and agility in operations. A light carrier has a shorter operational range, a lower sortie generation rate, and less endurance than a large aircraft carrier, which can act as a floating base and deploy for lengthy periods. Small flattops also have less powerful onboard defence systems than larger carriers and are especially vulnerable to drone swarm attacks. While small deck carriers are valuable in peacetime presence activities, their combat role is restricted unless their air wing consists of a strong aircraft with improved range, lethality, and survivability. Maritime planners today know the importance of having a fifth-generation carrier-based fighter that can deliver precision munitions over extended distances without endangering aircraft or aircrews. The IN does not have such an aircraft presently. Over the next decade, MiG-29Ks and Rafale marines would likely operate from Indian aircraft carriers. How successful these operations will be in deterring opponents in the far seas is hard to say. There are, admittedly, two views on the subject of light aircraft carriers. Aircraft carrier sceptics believe that the flattop being expensive and vulnerable assets ought to be small and well-protected. With limited defensive capability against modern anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles, the carrier must not venture too close to enemy territory. Aircraft carrier proponents disagree, and point to the ships decisive ability to tip the psychological balance at sea. A large flattop, they rightly claim, is the only platform capable of maintaining a continuous and visible presence in the far-littorals. That complicated the adversarys cost-benefit calculus in a way that no other asset is capable of doing. If the sceptics are right and symbolic presence at sea is all that matters, then a light carrier is indeed a worthy asset. But if a carrier is meant for use in combat, then it must be capable of supporting larger numbers of long-range combat and reconnaissance aircraft. Whatever the rhetoric surrounding IAC-II in the media, China with large aircraft carriers, such as the 65,000-tonne Shandong and the 80,000-tonne still-to-be-commissioned Fujian is unlikely to be deterred by the presence of two 40,000-tonne Indian flattops in the Indian Ocean. It is not that Indias naval planners are unaware of this reality. Their decision to opt for a smaller carrier seems to be the result of diminishing options. Despite the ships shortcomings, particularly its limited warfighting capability, a second Vikrant is all they can hope for at the moment. Yet, policymakers ought to know that a small aircraft carrier wont cut it in combat with a worthy adversary in the littorals. Abhijit Singh is head of the Maritime Policy Initiative at Observer Research Foundation. The views expressed are personal The election results on Sunday came as a rude shock to the Congress. It won Telangana for the first time since the UPA government created the state in 2014, but was outperformed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan. The party expected to easily retain Chhattisgarh given its overwhelming mandate in 2018, but the BJP regained the state with the largest seat share and vote tally since the creation of the state. In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP retained power despite having been in office for more than 18 of the last 20 years with its highest-ever vote share. And, in Rajasthan, the Congresss hope of chief minister Ashok Gehlot magically defying the weight of electoral history no incumbent has returned to power in the state in the last three decades was not realised. In Mizoram, where the counting took place on Monday, the Congress has been relegated to the fourth spot in terms of seats won. Why did the Congress fail to repeat its 2018 performance in the three Hindi belt states? And, what do these results portend for the party in the run-up to 2024? The Congress has a perennial problem of misinterpreting election verdicts. It overplays the reasons behind its victories and underplays the losses. Take, for example, its defeat in Gujarat and victory in Karnataka in the recent elections. The Congress won Karnataka because: One, the BJP government in the state was seen in a negative light and facing charges of massive corruption; two, the Congress organisational machinery in the state could match the BJP; three, its state leadership was more popular than the BJP CM; and four, the party had a wider social and geographical base in the state. A combination of these factors gave the Congress a huge advantage in Karnataka. However, a section of Congress managers insisted that the Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY) along with the partys five guarantees did all the trick to rally the bottom half of the social pyramid (AHINDA coalition) behind the party and that Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi and the BJPs ideological platform had no appeal in the state. The Congress managers have since then started posturing that they could replicate the Karnataka model at the national level. It is easier said than done. The Karnataka model could work in Telangana because the opponents made a series of mistakes that the party could capitalise on easily. The incumbent CM, K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR), had exhausted the emotive appeal of a separate Telangana state in the 2014 and 2018 elections. The Congresss young and aggressive leader Revanth Reddy confronted KCR and his political family on the charges of corruption and nepotism, including accusing the CM of betraying the Telangana movement. The re-christening of the TRS as BRS (Bharatiya Rashtra Samithi) came in as a shot in the arm for Reddy. The BJPs campaign floundered too with multiple changes in state leadership. Furthermore, the partys organisational base (along with efficient use of election strategists) ensured that the positive momentum from BJY and Karnataka victory created a formidable campaign. The Congress perhaps did not realise that it faced a much tougher challenge in the Hindi belt states than it did in Karnataka or Telangana. The BJPs organisational machinery, ideological appeal and PM Modis popularity are much higher here. While the BJP may have lost multiple state elections since 2018, it has also retained power in many Uttarakhand, Goa, Haryana, Maharashtra, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and now MP. On the other hand, the Congress has not been voted back to office in any state since 2013. This indicates that the Congress organisational machine now has a poor track record of defending their governments record. It continues to face challenges in keeping its leadership tussles in the states under wraps. And, sometimes these factional issues can become insurmountable. The BJP under Modi is not only a more agile and adaptive party, but it also does not hesitate to take bold moves. It fielded sitting MPs and Union ministers in assembly elections. When the party realised midway through the campaign that sidelining popular CM faces could prove to be a costly move, it brought them back to the centre stage. Yet, the party may initiate a leadership change in all three states keeping an eye on the future. Moreover, the Congress becomes a prisoner of its rhetoric too soon. Since the rise of Prime Minister Modi in 2014, the BJP has made deep inroads among the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and lower castes and it mobilises the poor as well as women. Many of these groups have been traditionally voters of the Congress in these states. There were indications from the Lokniti-CSDS pre-poll surveys conducted in October that the Congresss support among these groups, in comparison to 2018, may take a hit. However, instead of taking concrete steps to address these issues, the party leadership thought it could own the social justice plank by simply making a demand for a nationwide caste census and mobilising the OBCs in north India (while giving the same number of tickets to upper castes and OBCs as the BJP). Similarly, there were reports of local anti-incumbency against Congress MLAs, but the party could not replace them. The Congress also ignored its potential allies in the Hindi belt. An alliance with the Samajwadi Party or Aam Aadmi Party in the Hindi heartland may have not averted the partys defeats. But by not accommodating their demands, the Congress destabilised the INDIA group even before the 2024 campaign began. The Congress needs to realise that the success of the INDIA group critically depends on its performance in states where it is in direct contest with the BJP chiefly Assam, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Karnataka. In the last two Lok Sabha elections, the BJP outperformed the Congress in these states. The Congresss victories in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh just six months before the 2019 polls made no difference. With crushing defeat in these states now, the partys ability to anchor an Opposition coalition has become feeble. Hopefully, the Congress will not overread its victory in Telangana and extrapolate it to the 2024 campaign. Similarly, it may do well to refrain from creating a false binary between the voters of northern and southern India. That will be detrimental to the partys prospects of a revival in the near future. Rahul Verma is fellow, Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi. The views expressed are personal Do you find yourself standing in front of a bland and uninspiring refrigerator every time you open the kitchen door? Are you tired of the same old stainless steel or plain white options that dominate the appliance market? If so, it might be time to consider a splash of colour to transform your kitchen space and add a touch of personality to your home. In this blog, we're diving into the vibrant world of the Best Fridge in India 2023. Stay stylish and keep things chill with top 10 colourful refrigerator recommendations. We are no more in the era where refrigerators were confined to neutral tones, blending seamlessly into the background. Today, homeowners are embracing the opportunity to make a bold statement with their kitchen appliances, and colourful fridges are stealing the spotlight. From bold reds that exude energy to soothing blues that create a calm ambience, the options are as diverse as your personal style. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here But it's not just about aesthetics a colourful fridge can also be a functional and focal point in your kitchen. Imagine effortlessly finding your favourite snacks in a sea of colour-coded compartments or inspiring a lively atmosphere during family gatherings. Refrigerator isn't just an appliance; it's a conversation starter, a design element, and a reflection of your unique taste. In this blog, we'll explore the various aspects of colourful fridges, from the latest technology and features to how they can enhance your kitchen decor. We'll take a look into the psychology of colours and how different hues can impact your mood and overall kitchen experience. Whether you're a trendsetter looking to stay ahead of the curve or someone seeking a refreshing change in their kitchen aesthetic, we've got you covered. It is all about functionality, meeting style, and making your kitchen a canvas for self-expression. Also Read: Best refrigerator brand in November 2023: Top picks for you Product List Whirlpool 192 L 3 Star Vitamagic Pro Inverter Direct-Cool Single Door Refrigerator (215 VITAMAGIC PRO PRM 3S INV MAGNUM STEEL-Z, Grey, Auto Defrost Technology, 2023 Model) The Whirlpool 192 L 3 Star Vitamagic Pro Inverter Direct-Cool Single Door Refrigerator is an advanced appliance designed to meet the cooling needs of households efficiently. With a capacity of 192 litres, it offers ample storage space for your perishables. The refrigerator comes in a stylish Magnum Steel-Z colour, adding a modern touch to your kitchen. The 3-star energy rating ensures energy efficiency, saving on electricity bills while maintaining optimal performance. Equipped with Auto Defrost Technology, this refrigerator prevents the accumulation of frost, reducing the need for manual defrosting and ensuring a hassle-free maintenance experience. The Inverter technology provides consistent cooling and minimizes energy consumption by adjusting the compressor speed based on the cooling demand. The Vitamagic Pro feature helps keep fruits and vegetables fresh for a longer duration by maintaining the ideal moisture levels. Specifications of Whirlpool 192 L 3 Star Vitamagic Pro Inverter Direct-Cool Single Door Refrigerator Capacity: 192 litres Energy Rating: 3 Star Cooling Technology: Direct-Cool with Inverter Compressor Defrost Technology: Auto Defrost Color: Magnum Steel-Z Pros Cons Energy Efficiency Single Door Design Vitamagic Pro Technology Limited Capacity B0BSRV8C8Y 2. Whirlpool 300 L Frost-Free Triple-Door Refrigerator (FP 313D PROTTON ROY, Steel Onyx) DO you seek a sophisticated and efficient refrigeration solution? Look no further than the Whirlpool 300 L Frost-Free Triple-Door Refrigerator (FP 313D PROTTON ROY, Steel Onyx). This appliance boasts a spacious interior and a unique triple-door design that sets it apart in terms of both functionality and aesthetics. Furnished with the latest frost-free technology, the refrigerator ensures that you never have to deal with the hassle of manual defrosting. The triple-door configuration separates the compartments for the freezer, refrigerator, and vegetable crisper, providing optimal storage conditions for different types of food items. The Steel Onyx finish adds a touch of elegance to your kitchen, blending seamlessly with various decor styles. Specifications of Whirlpool 300 L Frost-Free Triple-Door Refrigerator Capacity: A generous 300 liters of storage space. Triple-Door Design: Three separate compartments for freezer, refrigerator, and vegetable crisper. Frost-Free Technology: Eliminates the need for manual defrosting. Advanced Cooling Technology: Ensures uniform cooling for all stored items. FreshFlow Air Tower: Strategically placed vents for efficient cooling and freshness preservation. Pros Cons Ample Storage Size and Space Constraints Frost-Free Convenience Higher Price Point B083RPPSQF 3. Lloyd Havells 93 L 1 Star Direct-Cool Single Door Refrigerator (2023 Model, GLDC111CBST1GC,Black Steel) The Lloyd Havells 93 L 1 Star Direct-Cool Single Door Refrigerator, a 2023 model in sleek Black Steel (GLDC111CBST1GC), combines style and functionality to meet the diverse needs of modern households. With a compact design, this refrigerator is ideal for small kitchens or as an additional storage unit. Featuring a 93-liter capacity, the refrigerator provides ample space for storing fruits, vegetables, beverages, and other essentials. The Direct-Cool technology ensures efficient cooling, maintaining a consistent temperature to keep food fresh for longer periods. The 1 Star energy rating indicates moderate energy efficiency, making it a suitable choice for those conscious of electricity consumption. The Black Steel finish adds a touch of sophistication to any kitchen decor, while the single door design enhances accessibility. The refrigerator is equipped with adjustable shelves, a crisper for fruits and vegetables, and door racks for organized storage. Lloyd Havells prioritizes durability and reliability, ensuring that the appliance is built to last. Specifications of Lloyd Havells 93 L 1 Star Direct-Cool Single Door Refrigerator Capacity: 93 litres Energy Rating: 1 Star Cooling Technology: Direct-Cool Finish: Black Steel Features: Adjustable Shelves, Crisper, Door Racks Pros Cons 1. Compact design, ideal for small kitchens. 1. Limited energy efficiency with a 1 Star rating. 2. Stylish Black Steel finish enhances kitchen decor. 2. Limited capacity may not be suitable for larger households. B0CD5YFPJ9 4. Haier 628 L Triple Door Side By Side Refrigerator Appliances, Expert Inverter Technology (HRT-683KS, Black Steel, Magic Convertible, Made In India) The Haier 628 L Triple Door Side By Side Refrigerator (model HRT-683KS) is a sophisticated appliance designed to meet diverse refrigeration needs. Boasting a sleek Black Steel finish, this refrigerator incorporates Expert Inverter Technology, a hallmark feature that enhances energy efficiency and ensures optimal performance. With a generous 628-liter capacity, this refrigerator is spacious enough to accommodate a large quantity of food items and beverages, making it ideal for families and households with high storage demands. One standout feature is the Magic Convertible functionality, allowing users to adapt the storage space according to their requirements. This flexibility is particularly useful for accommodating oversized or irregularly shaped items. Furthermore, the refrigerator is proudly labeled as "Made In India," emphasizing Haier's commitment to local manufacturing. Overall, it is a premium appliance offering ample storage capacity, energy efficiency, and flexibility in organization. Its sleek design and advanced features make it a standout choice for those seeking a reliable and high-performing refrigerator. Specifications of Haier 628 L Triple Door Side By Side Refrigerator Capacity: 628 litres Finish: Black Steel Technology: Expert Inverter Technology Special Feature: Magic Convertible Origin: Made In India Pros Cons Energy Efficiency Large size for smaller households Adaptable Storage Higher cost compared to basic models B0B8ZMMGNV 5. Panasonic 309 L 3 Star Prime Convertible 6-Stage Smart Inverter Frost-Free Double Door Refrigerator (NR-TG325CPKN, Diamond Black, Jumbo Fresh Vegetable Basket,2023 Model, Net Capacity 275L) The Panasonic 309 L 3 Star Prime Convertible Refrigerator (NR-TG325CPKN) is a sophisticated kitchen appliance designed to elevate your food storage experience. With a sleek Diamond Black finish, this double-door refrigerator boasts a net capacity of 275 liters, providing ample space for your groceries. The 6-stage Smart Inverter technology ensures efficient and precise cooling, adapting to varying loads and environmental conditions to optimize energy consumption. Equipped with a Jumbo Fresh Vegetable Basket, this refrigerator promotes freshness by providing an expansive storage area for fruits and vegetables. The convertible feature allows you to customize the storage space based on your needs, offering flexibility between the freezer and refrigerator compartments. The frost-free design eliminates the hassle of manual defrosting, saving you time and effort. Specifications of Panasonic 309 L 3 Star Prime Convertible 6-Stage Smart Inverter Frost-Free Double Door Refrigerator Capacity: 309 litres (Net Capacity: 275 liters) Energy Rating: 3 Star Inverter Technology: 6-Stage Smart Inverter Color: Diamond Black Fresh Vegetable Basket: Jumbo Size Pros Cons Convertible Design Capacity Limit Energy Efficiency Limited Color Options B0BRRWC2RM 6. Samsung 183 L, 3 Star, Digital Inverter, Direct-Cool Single Door Refrigerator (RR20C1723S8/HL, Silver, Elegant Inox, 2023 Model) The Samsung 183 L, 3 Star, Digital Inverter, Direct-Cool Single Door Refrigerator (RR20C1723S8/HL) is a trustworthy appliance designed to meet the cooling needs of households. With a capacity of 183 liters, it offers ample storage space for groceries while maintaining an energy-efficient operation with its 3-star rating. The digital inverter technology ensures precise temperature control, optimizing energy consumption and minimizing noise levels. This refrigerator features a direct-cool system, contributing to its efficiency by allowing cool air to circulate directly through the compartments. The elegant inox silver finish adds a touch of sophistication to the appliance, making it suitable for various kitchen aesthetics. As a 2023 model, it likely incorporates the latest advancements in refrigeration technology. Specifications of Samsung 183 L, 3 Star, Digital Inverter, Direct-Cool Single Door Refrigerator Capacity: 183 litres Energy Rating: 3 Star Cooling Technology: Digital Inverter, Direct-Cool Design: Single Door with Elegant Inox (Silver) finish Model: RR20C1723S8/HL (2023) Pros Cons Energy Efficiency Limited Features Digital Inverter Technology Manual Defrosting B0BR3WHPQP 7. Godrej 180 L 2 Star Advanced Capillary Technology, With Jumbo Vegetable Tray Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator(2023 Model, RD EDGE 205B WRF PP BL, Pep Blue) The Godrej 180 L 2 Star refrigerator, model RD EDGE 205B WRF PP BL, in Pep Blue, is equipped with Advanced Capillary Technology, providing efficient cooling while being energy-conscious. The Direct Cool Single Door design enhances the refrigerator's overall performance. With a capacity of 180 liters, it is suitable for small to medium-sized households. The refrigerator features a Jumbo Vegetable Tray, offering ample space for storing vegetables and fruits, ensuring they remain fresh for an extended period. The Advanced Capillary Technology aids in faster cooling and maintains a consistent temperature, enhancing the overall freshness of the stored items. The Pep Blue color adds a touch of vibrancy to the appliance, making it visually appealing. The refrigerator's design is both functional and aesthetic, blending seamlessly into modern kitchen spaces. The direct cool technology simplifies maintenance and ensures hassle-free operation. Specifications of Godrej 180 L 2 Star Advanced Capillary Technology, With Jumbo Vegetable Tray Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator Capacity: 180 litres Energy Rating: 2 Star Advanced Capillary Technology for efficient cooling Jumbo Vegetable Tray for ample storage Direct Cool Single Door design Pros Cons 1. Energy-efficient (2 Star) 1. Limited capacity for larger households 2. Ample storage for veggies 2. Lacks advanced technological features B0BS6XQVD1 8. Godrej 97 L 2 Star Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator (2023 Model, RD CHAMP 114B WPI OR WN, Orchid Wine) The Godrej 97 L 2 Star Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator is a reliable and efficient appliance invented to fulfill the requirements of families. Available in Orchid Wine color, it combines functionality with an elegant aesthetic. This refrigerator boasts a 97-liter capacity, providing ample storage space for your perishables. The direct cool technology ensures efficient and uniform cooling throughout the refrigerator, maintaining freshness for a longer duration. The single door design enhances accessibility and ease of use. With a 2-star energy rating, it strikes a balance between performance and energy efficiency, making it a suitable choice for households conscious of power consumption. The Orchid Wine color adds a touch of sophistication to your kitchen decor, making the refrigerator not just a practical appliance but also a stylish addition to your home. The design is complemented by thoughtful features such as adjustable shelves and storage bins, allowing for customizable organization based on your needs. Specifications of Godrej 97 L 2 Star Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator Capacity: 97 litres Energy Rating: 2 Star Cooling Technology: Direct Cool Color: Orchid Wine Single Door Design Pros Cons Ample Storage Limited Features Energy Efficiency Manual Defrost B0CGWZD3B4 9. Godrej 180 L 4 Star Turbo Cooling Technology, 24 Days Farm Freshness Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator(2023 Model, RD EDGENEO 207D THF AQ WN, Aqua Wine) The Godrej 180 L 4 Star Turbo Cooling Technology refrigerator, model RD EDGENEO 207D THF AQ WN in Aqua Wine, is a single-door refrigerator designed to provide efficient cooling and preserve the freshness of farm-fresh produce for up to 24 days. The appliance incorporates advanced Turbo Cooling Technology, ensuring rapid and uniform cooling throughout the refrigerator, maintaining an optimal temperature to keep your food items fresh and crisp. The 4-star energy efficiency rating underscores its commitment to sustainability, as it consumes less power while delivering superior performance. This refrigerator boasts a 180-liter capacity, making it suitable for small to medium-sized families. The direct cool feature further enhances energy efficiency by eliminating the need for a separate cooling fan. The Aqua Wine color adds a touch of sophistication to the appliance, making it a stylish addition to any kitchen. Specifications of Godrej 180 L 4 Star Turbo Cooling Technology, 24 Days Farm Freshness Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator Capacity: 180 litres Energy Efficiency: 4-star rating Cooling Technology: Turbo Cooling Technology Defrost Type: Direct Cool Freshness Feature: 24 Days Farm Freshness Pros Cons Energy-efficient with a 4-star rating. Limited capacity for larger families. Turbo Cooling Technology for quick cooling Direct cool technology may require manual defrosting. B0BV261KG7 Also read: Whirlpool refrigerator: 10 best models with double doors 10. Haier 190 L 5 Star Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator Appliance (2023 Model, HED-205MFB-P, Marine Peony, Base Stand with Drawer) The Haier 190 L 5 Star Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator (2023 Model, HED-205MFB-P, Marine Peony, Base Stand with Drawer) is a sleek and functional kitchen appliance designed to meet the cooling needs of a small to medium-sized household. Boasting a capacity of 190 litres, this refrigerator is adept at preserving perishables while occupying minimal space in your kitchen. The appliance features a single door design, enhancing ease of use and access. The Marine Peony colour adds a touch of aesthetic appeal to your kitchen decor. The inclusion of a base stand with a convenient drawer not only elevates the refrigerator but also provides additional storage space for items like vegetables and fruits. This refrigerator operates on a 5-star energy efficiency rating, ensuring optimal cooling performance while minimizing energy consumption. The direct cool technology employed contributes to the refrigerator's ability to maintain consistent temperatures, keeping your food fresh for longer periods. Specifications of Haier 190 L 5 Star Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator Capacity: 190 litres Energy Efficiency: 5-star rating Cooling Technology: Direct Cool Design: Single Door with Marine Peony colour Additional Features: Base Stand with Drawer Pros Cons Space Optimization Manual Defrosting Energy Efficiency Limited Capacity B0BTHLGZ1Q Top 3 features for you Product Name Feature 1 Feature 2 Feature 3 Whirlpool 192 L 3 Star Vitamagic Pro Inverter Direct-Cool Single Door Refrigerator (215 VITAMAGIC PRO PRM 3S INV MAGNUM STEEL-Z, Grey, Auto Defrost Technology, 2023 Model) 192 L capacity 3 Star energy rating Vitamagic Pro Inverter Whirlpool 300 L Frost-Free Triple-Door Refrigerator (FP 313D PROTTON ROY, Steel Onyx) 300 L capacity Frost-Free technology Triple-Door design Lloyd Havells 93 L 1 Star Direct-Cool Single Door Refrigerator (2023 Model, GLDC111CBST1GC,Black Steel) 93 L capacity 1 Star energy rating Direct-Cool technology Haier 628 L Triple Door Side By Side Refrigerator Appliances, Expert Inverter Technology (HRT-683KS, Black Steel, Magic Convertible, Made In India 628 L capacity Triple Door design Expert Inverter Technology Panasonic 309 L 3 Star Prime Convertible 6-Stage Smart Inverter Frost-Free Double Door Refrigerator (NR-TG325CPKN, Diamond Black, Jumbo Fresh Vegetable Basket,2023 Model, Net Capacity 275L) 309 L capacity 3 Star energy rating Prime Convertible, 6-Stage Smart Inverter Samsung 183 L, 3 Star, Digital Inverter, Direct-Cool Single Door Refrigerator (RR20C1723S8/HL, Silver, Elegant Inox, 2023 Model) 183 L capacity 3 Star energy rating Digital Inverter technology Godrej 180 L 2 Star Advanced Capillary Technology, With Jumbo Vegetable Tray Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator(2023 Model, RD EDGE 205B WRF PP BL, Pep Blue) 180 L capacity 2 Star energy rating Advanced Capillary Technology Godrej 97 L 2 Star Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator (2023 Model, RD CHAMP 114B WPI OR WN, Orchid Wine) 97 L capacity 2 Star energy rating Direct Cool technology Godrej 180 L 4 Star Turbo Cooling Technology, 24 Days Farm Freshness Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator(2023 Model, RD EDGENEO 207D THF AQ WN, Aqua Wine) 180 L capacity 4 Star energy rating Turbo Cooling Technology Haier 190 L 5 Star Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator Appliance (2023 Model, HED-205MFB-P, Marine Peony, Base Stand with Drawer) 190 L capacity 5 Star energy rating Base Stand with Drawer Best overall product Are you in search of a refrigerator that seamlessly blends style with functionality? The Haier 190 L 5 Star Single Door Refrigerator is the optimal choice. Its sleek design, featuring a vibrant Marine Peony color, adds a touch of elegance to any kitchen. The thoughtful inclusion of a base stand with a drawer enhances accessibility, providing a convenient storage solution. Beyond aesthetics, this refrigerator excels in performance, offering a capacious 190 L capacity and a 5-star energy rating for cost-effective operation. Its direct cool technology ensures effective cooling without unnecessary complexities. With Haier's commitment to quality and user-friendly features, this refrigerator emerges as the best overall product, seamlessly catering to both style-conscious and practical consumers alike. Value for money product In India, the Godrej 97 L 2 Star Direct Cool Single Door Refrigerator is a prudent investment. Priced competitively, it offers a capacious 97-liter storage capacity, catering efficiently to the needs of smaller households. Its 2-star energy rating ensures adequate cooling without compromising on electricity bills. The Orchid Wine color adds a touch of elegance to any kitchen, enhancing aesthetic appeal. The single door design simplifies access and minimizes heat loss, contributing to energy conservation. The refrigerator's optimal size strikes a balance between functionality and space utilization. With Godrej's established reputation for durable appliances, this refrigerator assures long-term reliability without compromising on essential features. It combines affordability, practicality, and durability, making it a value-for-money choice for discerning consumers in India. How to find the perfect best fridge in India 2023? Selecting the ideal refrigerator in 2023 involves considering your specific needs and available space. Begin by measuring the designated area to ensure a proper fit. Determine the capacity required based on your household size and usage patterns. Assess the typesingle door, double door, or side-by-sidekeeping energy efficiency in mind. Check for features like adjustable shelves, crispers, and door compartments to accommodate varied storage needs. Evaluate the cooling technology; frost-free options minimize maintenance. Additionally, explore user reviews for insights into durability and after-sales service. Lastly, compare prices across reputable brands to strike a balance between functionality and affordability, ensuring your refrigerator choice aligns seamlessly with your lifestyle and budget. At Hindustan Times, we help you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and products. Hindustan Times has an affiliate partnership, so we may get a part of the revenue when you make a purchase. We shall not be liable for any claim under applicable laws, including but not limited to the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, with respect to the products. The products listed in this article are in no particular order of priority. INTRODUCTION Stay ahead with innovative technology and value with 10 of the best Wi-Fi enabled fridge models. (Unsplash ) In the bustling appliance market of India, finding the best fridges that seamlessly blend technology with affordability can be a daunting task. This comprehensive guide is dedicated to unravelling the finest selection of the best fridges in India, focusing on the top 10 Wi-Fi enabled models that stand out. Whether you're refurbishing your kitchen with smart appliances or seeking a reliable and efficient refrigerator within a budget, our curated list promises to cater to your needs. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here As the heart of every home, the kitchen deserves appliances that not only meet practical requirements but also align with the evolving trends of smart technology. This is where the latest Wi-Fi enabled fridges come into play. They offer unparalleled convenience, allowing you to control and monitor your refrigerator remotely. Imagine adjusting temperatures, receiving alerts, or even peeking inside your fridge via your smartphone! This cutting-edge integration is what makes these models the best fridges in India, offering a harmonious blend of innovation and functionality. These models are perfect for those looking for India budget fridge options without compromising on quality and features. They demonstrate that advanced technology and efficiency can indeed come with an affordable price tag. Additionally, for those seeking exceptional value, our guide highlights the latest fridge deals in India. We delve into various models that offer the best of both worlds advanced features at competitive prices. This ensures that you don't have to stretch your budget to enjoy the benefits of a modern, Wi-Fi enabled refrigerator. In conclusion, this guide on the best fridges in India is meticulously crafted to help you navigate through the myriad of options available in the market. Stay tuned as we explore each model in detail, helping you make an informed decision for your home. Product List Samsung 653 L, Frost Free Convertible 5In1, Digital Inverter, Wi-Fi Enabled Side by Side Refrigerator (RS76CG8003S9HL, Refined Inox, 2023 Model) With its convertible 5-in-1 modes, you can optimize space for more or less food as needed. The digital inverter compressor consumes 50% less power while keeping noise levels down for quiet and efficient cooling performance. Two drawers and four glass shelves inside give you plenty of options to organize fruits, vegetables and leftovers so nothing gets lost or goes bad. The Twin Cooling Plus feature ensures items stay fresher longer by preventing odours from mixing between compartments. The wifi connectivity lets you control temperatures from your phone so you can ensure your food is always at the ideal freshness, whether you're home or away. Specifications of Samsung 653 L, Frost Free Convertible 5In1, Digital Inverter, Wi-Fi Enabled Side by Side Refrigerator Capacity: 653 litres Convertible 5-in-1 modes Digital Inverter Compressor Twin Cooling Plus feature Wi-Fi Enabled Interior: Two drawers, four glass shelves Colour: Refined Inox Pros Cons Convertible 5-in-1 modes for space optimization Higher price range due to advanced features Digital inverter compressor saves 50% power & reduces noise May be too large for smaller kitchens Twin Cooling Plus & Wi-Fi connectivity for enhanced freshness and control B0BQC4Y4TP Also read: Enjoy amazing discounts on double door fridge to multi-door ones Samsung 653 L, Frost Free Convertible 5In1, Digital Inverter, Wi-Fi Enabled Side by Side Refrigerator (RS76CG8003B1HL, Black Matt, 2023 Model) Samsung's convertible 5-in-1 mode lets you optimize storage however you need with normal, seasonal, extra fridge, vacation, and home-alone modes. The 653-litre capacity suits families of five or more, while the digital inverter compressor adjusts speed automatically for quieter operation and lower energy use. The interior features two drawers, four toughened glass shelves, and a bottle storage capacity of six. Twin cooling plus technology keeps food fresher longer by preventing odours from mixing between compartments. Precise cooling, WiFi connectivity, and the moist, fresh zone help ensure your groceries stay in perfect condition. Built from durable materials and designed for easy upkeep, this side-by-side refrigerator will keep your kitchen organized for years to come. Specifications of Samsung 653 L, Frost Free Convertible 5In1, Digital Inverter, Wi-Fi Enabled Side by Side Refrigerator Capacity: 653 litres Convertible 5-in-1 modes Digital Inverter Compressor Twin Cooling Plus technology Wi-Fi Enabled Interior: Two drawers, four toughened glass shelves, bottle storage Colour: Black Matt Pros Cons Versatile convertible 5-in-1 mode for varied storage needs Size may not be suitable for compact spaces Energy-efficient with digital inverter compressor & quiet operation Premium pricing due to high capacity and features Twin Cooling Plus technology & spacious interior with toughened glass shelves B0CCYNFC1F 3. SAMSUNG 681 Litres Frost Free Side by Side Door Smart Wifi Enabled Refrigerator Appliance with Family Hub (RS72A5F11SL/TL, Real Stainless) Take the chill out of fridge shopping with this Samsung side-by-side beauty. SpaceMax technology maximizes interior capacity, while a digital inverter compressor ensures efficient and quiet cooling. The sleek stainless steel finish and reversible door add style to any kitchen, and the Family Hub feature transforms the entire fridge into a smart hub for the home. Control appliances, check the kids' schedules, stream music and more - all from the refrigerator door. With six shelves, two drawers, a wine rack and spill-proof shelves, this 681-litre capacity fridge provides plenty of organization for large families. The frost-free design means no more defrosting mess, just effortless food preservation and energy savings for years to come. Specifications of SAMSUNG 681 Litres Frost Free Side by Side Door Smart Wifi Enabled Refrigerator Capacity: 681 litres SpaceMax technology Digital Inverter Compressor Family Hub feature Frost-free design Interior: Six shelves, two drawers, wine rack, spill-proof shelves Colour: Real Stainless Pros Cons SpaceMax technology maximizes interior capacity High-end pricing bracket Family Hub feature turns the fridge into a smart home hub Size can be cumbersome for smaller kitchen layouts Frost-free design with efficient cooling and stylish stainless steel finish B09LYTK3XV 4. Samsung 644L WI-FI Enabled Smart Things Side By Side Inverter Refrigerator (RS76CG8133B1HL, Black DOI) Powered by an inverter compressor for quiet, energy-efficient cooling, it features Twin Cooling Plus technology to maintain optimal freshness in multiple compartments. The WiFi connectivity lets you control the temperature from your phone while the door alarm notifies you of accidental openings. Inside, you'll find two crisper drawers, four adjustable shelves, and a large 244-litre freezer with auto-defrost to prevent ice buildup. Perfect for larger families, this fridge has the capacity and features to keep your groceries organized and fresh for days. Specifications of Samsung 644L WI-FI Enabled Smart Things Side By Side Inverter Refrigerator Capacity: 644 litres Inverter Compressor Twin Cooling Plus technology Wi-Fi Enabled Interior: Two crisper drawers, four adjustable shelves, 244-litre freezer Colour: Black DOI Pros Cons Inverter compressor for energy efficiency and quiet operation Large size might not fit in all kitchen spaces Twin Cooling Plus technology & Wi-Fi connectivity for smart control Premium price point Spacious interior with auto-defrost feature in the freezer B0BTYX2WZD 5. Samsung 633 L, Frost Free Convertible 5In1, Digital Inverter, Wi-Fi Enabled Side by Side Refrigerator (RS78CG8543S9HL, Refined Inox, Water & Ice Dispenser, 2023 Model) Samsung's 633-litre side-by-side freezer boasts a stunning Refined Inox finish and convertible 5-in-1 mode to optimize storage for any occasion. Its Digital Inverter Compressor runs whisper-quiet while providing precise cooling control, keeping food fresh longer thanks to Twin Cooling Plus and the Moist Fresh Zone. With Wi-Fi connectivity, you can control temperatures from anywhere via an app. The spacious interior includes two crisper drawers, four adjustable shelves made from easy-clean tempered glass, and storage for up to 10 bottles. This stainless steel blend refrigerator combines high performance and innovative features to transform your kitchen into a culinary wonderland. Specifications of Samsung 633 L, Frost Free Convertible 5In1, Digital Inverter, Wi-Fi Enabled Side by Side Refrigerator Capacity: 633 litres Convertible 5-in-1 mode Digital Inverter Compressor Twin Cooling Plus and Moist Fresh Zone Wi-Fi Enabled Interior: Two crisper drawers, four adjustable shelves, 10 bottle storage Water & Ice Dispenser Colour: Refined Inox Pros Cons Convertible 5-in-1 mode with a Digital Inverter Compressor for efficiency Higher price due to advanced features and capacity Twin Cooling Plus and MoistFresh Zone for longer freshness Large size may not be suitable for smaller kitchens Wi-Fi connectivity for remote control & ice dispenser feature B0BRY3XWFK 6. Samsung 653L WI-FI Enabled Smart Things Side By Side Inverter Refrigerator (RS76CG8115B1HL, Black DOI) With 653 litres of capacity, Samsung's side-by-side inverter refrigerator keeps food fresher for longer thanks to WiFi connectivity that monitors performance and notifies you of any issues. The automatic defrost system and door-ajar alarm further help maintain optimal freshness. Four spacious shelves and two drawers provide ample storage space for all your food and beverages, while the sleek black finish adds a touch of style to your decor. The reversible doors make installation easy, and the energy-efficient inverter compressor saves you money on energy bills. So say hello to smarter, simpler food storage - this innovative Samsung refrigerator is ready to transform your kitchen. Specifications of Samsung 653L WI-FI Enabled Smart Things Side By Side Inverter Refrigerator Capacity: 653 litres Wi-Fi Enabled Automatic defrost system Door ajar alarm Interior: Four shelves, two drawers Energy-efficient inverter compressor Colour: Black DOI Pros Cons Large capacity suitable for big families Might be too large for compact kitchen spaces Wi-Fi connectivity for monitoring and control Premium price range Energy-efficient with automatic defrost system & door ajar alarm B0BTYXCKZC 7. Samsung 653L WI-FI Enabled Smart Things Side By Side Inverter Refrigerator (RS76CG8113B1HL, Black DOI) This spacious side-by-side refrigerator has all the features a big family needs. At 653 litres, it offers ample room for all your weekly groceries with separate fresh food and freezer compartments. The digital inverter compressor automatically adjusts speed to minimize noise and use less energy while keeping food fresh. Best of all, the Wi-Fi connectivity allows you to control and monitor your refrigerator from anywhere using the Samsung Smart Things app. So whether you need to defrost the freezer or check if you're out of milk, this refrigerator handles it all while fitting in perfectly with stylish black stainless steel doors and plenty of shelves and drawers for organizing all your groceries. Specifications of Samsung 653L WI-FI Enabled Smart Things Side By Side Inverter Refrigerator Capacity: 653 litres Wi-Fi Enabled Digital Inverter Compressor Samsung Smart Things app compatibility Interior: Separate fresh food and freezer compartments Colour: Black DOI Pros Cons Spacious 653-litre capacity ideal for large families Size may be cumbersome for smaller kitchens Wi-Fi connectivity for easy control via app High-end price due to large capacity and features Digital inverter compressor for efficient and quiet operation B0BTYVV6XJ 8. Samsung 653L WI-FI Enabled Smart Things Side By Side Inverter Refrigerator (RS76CG8103S9HL, Refined Inox) The 653-litre capacity means there's plenty of room for even the largest families, while the side-by-side design offers both flexibility and style. The digital inverter compressor adjusts speeds for quiet, energy-efficient cooling, keeping your food fresh longer. Features like Wi-Fi connectivity, door alarm and Twin Cooling Plus technology ensure optimal performance and convenience. The stainless steel blend exterior and interior look sleek, while the ample shelves and drawers provide plenty of organization. This refrigerator combines the latest innovations with a premium design to create an appliance that keeps groceries organized and fresh while blending seamlessly into your kitchen. Specifications of Samsung 653L WI-FI Enabled Smart Things Side By Side Inverter Refrigerator Capacity: 653 litres Digital Inverter Compressor Wi-Fi Enabled Twin Cooling Plus technology Interior: Ample shelves and drawers Colour: Refined Inox Pros Cons Large capacity with energy-efficient digital inverter compressor May be too big for smaller kitchen areas Wi-Fi connectivity & Twin Cooling Plus technology Priced higher due to advanced technology and large capacity Stylish stainless steel blend exterior with ample storage options B0BT9BDBY3 9. Samsung 644L WI-FI Enabled Smart Things Side By Side Inverter Refrigerator (RS76CG8133DXHL, Clean Pink) Its massive 644-litre capacity and spacious interior provide plenty of room for your culinary creations, while the digital inverter compressor keeps food fresher for longer in whisper-quiet operation. The Wi-Fi connectivity allows you to control temperatures and monitor energy usage from your phone. The twin cooling system maintains separate temperatures for the fridge and freezer to preserve food at optimal conditions. With two adjustable shelves, two drawers, and a reversible door, this fridge offers versatile storage for all your groceries. The door alarm alerts you if left ajar to avoid food waste. Built with Samsung's latest innovations, this fridge brings high performance and smart features to your kitchen in a sleek stainless steel design that adds stylish appeal to any home. Specifications of Samsung 644L WI-FI Enabled Smart Things Side By Side Inverter Refrigerator Capacity: 644 litres Digital Inverter Compressor Wi-Fi Enabled Twin Cooling system Interior: Two adjustable shelves, two drawers, reversible door Colour: Clean Pink Pros Cons Large capacity with digital inverter compressor for longer freshness Unique colors may not appeal to all tastes Wi-Fi connectivity for temperature control and energy monitoring High price point due to size and smart features Twin cooling system with versatile storage options B0BTZ63TFG Also read: Enjoy amazing discounts on double door fridge to multi-door ones 10. Samsung 580 Litres Wi-Fi & Twin Cooling Plus French Door Refrigerator (RF57B5132DX/TL, Brown) This spacious 580-litre Samsung French door refrigerator boasts features that keep food fresher for longer. The inverter compressor automatically adjusts its speed to cool more efficiently while running quieter, and the WiFi connectivity lets you monitor and control the fridge from any device when you're away. The two full extension drawers provide ample storage for fruits and vegetables, while the three shelves, interior LED lighting and power freeze mode provide optimal flexibility and performance. The twin cooling system keeps the fridge and freezer sections at separate temperatures for optimal freshness and freezing, and the frost-free design means you'll never have to defrost the freezer manually again. Specifications of Samsung 580 Liters Wi-Fi & Twin Cooling Plus French Door Refrigerator Capacity: 580 litres Inverter Compressor Wi-Fi Enabled Twin Cooling system Frost-free design Interior: Two full extension drawers, three shelves, LED lighting, power freeze mode Colour: Brown Pros Cons Efficient inverter compressor & Wi-Fi connectivity for remote monitoring Colour may not suit all kitchen aesthetics Twin cooling system for optimal freshness and frost-free design Slightly lower capacity compared to other models Spacious with full extension drawers and LED lighting B0B77D7PRQ Top three features for you Product Feature 1 Feature 2 Feature 3 Samsung 653 L (RS76CG8003S9HL, Refined Inox, 2023 Model) Convertible 5-in-1 Modes Digital Inverter Compressor Wi-Fi Connectivity Samsung 653 L (RS76CG8003B1HL, Black Matt, 2023 Model) Convertible 5-in-1 Modes Twin Cooling Plus Technology Digital Inverter Compressor Samsung 681 Litres (RS72A5F11SL/TL, Real Stainless) SpaceMax Technology Family Hub Feature Frost-Free Design Samsung 644L (RS76CG8133B1HL, Black DOI) Twin Cooling Plus Technology Inverter Compressor Wi-Fi Connectivity Samsung 633 L (RS78CG8543S9HL, Refined Inox, Water & Ice Dispenser, 2023 Model) Convertible 5-in-1 Mode Twin Cooling Plus and MoistFresh Zone Wi-Fi Connectivity with Ice Dispenser Samsung 653L (RS76CG8115B1HL, Black DOI) Wi-Fi Connectivity Energy-Efficient Inverter Compressor Automatic Defrost System Samsung 653L (RS76CG8113B1HL, Black DOI) Spacious 653-Litre Capacity Digital Inverter Compressor Wi-Fi Connectivity Samsung 653L (RS76CG8103S9HL, Refined Inox) Digital Inverter Compressor Twin Cooling Plus Technology Wi-Fi Connectivity Samsung 644L (RS76CG8133DXHL, Clean Pink) Digital Inverter Compressor Twin Cooling System Wi-Fi Connectivity Samsung 580 Litres (RF57B5132DX/TL, Brown) Inverter Compressor Twin Cooling System Wi-Fi Connectivity and Frost-Free Design Best overall product Samsung 653 L Frost Free Convertible 5In1, Digital Inverter, Wi-Fi Enabled Side by Side Refrigerator (RS76CG8003S9HL, Refined Inox, 2023 Model) stands out as the best fridge in India. This model brilliantly combines cutting-edge technology with practicality, making it an ideal choice for modern Indian households. Its convertible 5-in-1 modes offer unparalleled flexibility, catering to different storage needs. The digital inverter compressor is a game-changer, ensuring energy efficiency and quieter operation. Additionally, the Wi-Fi connectivity adds a layer of convenience, allowing remote management of the fridge's temperature. This fridge not only excels in functionality but also adds an aesthetic appeal to any kitchen with its sleek, Refined Inox finish. Best value for money product The Samsung 580 Litres Wi-Fi & Twin Cooling Plus French Door Refrigerator (RF57B5132DX/TL, Brown) emerges as the best value for money product. With a generous 580-litre capacity, it is suitable for larger households, yet priced reasonably, aligning well with the criteria for India budget fridge options. The inverter compressor and Twin Cooling Plus system ensure efficient and separate cooling for the fridge and freezer, maintaining food freshness. Moreover, the Wi-Fi connectivity feature provides the convenience of remote monitoring and control, a rare find in this price segment. This refrigerator offers a sophisticated design with a practical layout, making it an excellent choice for those seeking high-end features without breaking the bank. How to find the best Wi-Fi enabled fridge? Finding the best Wi-Fi-enabled fridge in India involves considering several key factors to ensure you get the most out of your investment. Firstly, assess the capacity and size of the refrigerator to match your household's needs. A larger family would benefit from a fridge with more storage, whereas a smaller one might prefer a compact model. Secondly, examine the energy efficiency ratings. A fridge with a higher rating will consume less power, aligning well with the 'India budget fridge' criteria by saving on electricity bills in the long run. Thirdly, delve into the specific features of the Wi-Fi functionality. Look for a fridge that offers remote temperature control, alerts for open doors, and the ability to track grocery lists and expiry dates. Additionally, consider the brand's reputation for reliability and customer service. Reviews and customer feedback can be incredibly insightful. Lastly, compare prices across different retailers to find the best deal, ensuring you get a high-quality, feature-rich refrigerator at a reasonable price. At Hindustan Times, we help you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and products. Hindustan Times has an affiliate partnership, so we may get a part of the revenue when you make a purchase. We shall not be liable for any claim under applicable laws, including but not limited to the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, with respect to the products. The products listed in this article are in no particular order of priority. In a conversation with Shantanu Deshpande, the founder of Bombay Shaving Company, Radhika Gupta, the Managing Director and CEO of Edelweiss AMC, revealed she never discussed her maternity leave with her boss. She also shared about how topics related to maternity are generally not spoken about in workplaces. Edelweiss MF CEO Radhika Gupta shared about her views on maternity leave. (Instagram/@iamradhikagupta) Gupta reshared a snippet from her conversation with Deshpande on X and wrote, "I know of very few women who arent nervous about how pregnancy and motherhood will happen, with work alongside. I was too, and I received the best advice from my boss. Here it is. Among many interviews, the last 30 minutes of this one are truly special. Beyond the work-life balance question, we spoke on the really tricky aspects of becoming a mom, the social stigma around miscarriage, and the most difficult fourth trimester." (Also Read: Edelweiss CEO shares how better infrastructure can lead to a productive nation) Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here In the video, Gupta says that she never discussed maternity leave with her boss and neither did he ask her for how long will she be taking the leave. She also shared that her boss said, "If I were to send you to Harvard to get six months of executive education, I would do it, and nobody would say that you're taking time off. I'd give it to you in writing that motherhood will make you a better leader." Watch the video here: This post was shared on December 3. Since being shared, it has gained close to 40,000 views and several likes. Many took to the comments section of the post to share their reactions. Check out what people are saying about it here: An individual wrote, "I love how clearly you encourage motherhood and people should also think about its important aspect of life just like they think about career break for any degree." A second commented, "Heard this podcast today, very powerful. Appreciate you talking about topics that have too much stigma around them. When leaders talk about such topics, it helps in building empathy." "Super," commented another. In the Green Park area of Delhi, a stray dog found itself in a precarious situation after tumbling into a gutter. Trapped for three days, its cries finally reached someone's ears, prompting the intervention of Delhi Fire Service officials. The canine had entered the gutter through a damaged manhole but was unable to come out of it. The fire service personnel then skillfully drilled into the road to rescue the distressed dog, ensuring its safe retrieval. Snapshot of the dog being saved. (Instagram/@ Simanta V. Mahanta ) "Unsung heroes from the Delhi Fire Service rescuing a doggo trapped inside a gutter for three days," wrote Simanta V. Mahanta as she shared the video of the rescue operation. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The clip shows the fire personnel drilling inside the road and trying to locate the dog. As they clear the stones from the way, the dog can be heard whimpering. Finally, once the hole is big enough, a man goes inside it and pulls out the dog to safety. Watch the video here: This post was shared just a few days ago. Since being posted, it has garnered more than 3.4 million views. The share also has numerous likes and comments. Check out what people are saying about this video here: An individual wrote, "Thank you so much for saving his life." "Fantastic job, guys!" said a second. A third commented, "Thanks off and salute to these heroes who saved this dog live." A fourth added, "What a wonderful rescue." A fifth posted, "Salute to the heros who saved the dog's life. May God bless him with lots of happiness and blessings." A sixth shared, "Proud of our heroes." Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have been snubbed from Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminsters wedding, it has been revealed. Grosvenor is a godfather to Prince Williams son George, as well as Harry and Meghans son Archie. King Charles III, Queen Camilla, William, and Kate Middleton have reportedly been invited to the wedding set to be held at Chester Cathedral in England on June 7. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle attend the sitting volleyball finals at the 2023 Invictus Games, an international multi-sport event for injured soldiers, in Duesseldorf, Germany September 15, 2023 (REUTERS/Piroschka Van De Wouw/File Photo)(REUTERS) Grosvenor, who is tying the knot to Olivia Henson, had initially decided to invite the Sussexes, according to The Times. However, he later realised that their presence might overshadow his big day. We are not in a position to comment on the guest list, a Grosvenor spokesperson said. Notably, Grosvenor served as an official in King Charles coronation. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Its incredibly sad it has come to this. Hugh is one of very few close friends of William and Harrys who has maintained strong bonds and a line of communication with both, an unidentified friend of Grosvenor said. He wishes they could put their heads together and patch things up, but realizes its unlikely to happen before the wedding. He wanted to avoid anything overshadowing the day, especially for Olivia, and doesnt want any awkwardness, added the friend. This revelation comes shortly after the release of Omid Scobies book Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchys Fight for Survival. This week, the book was slashed in price by 50 percent following a controversy around two racist royals being named in the books Dutch edition. The book was released on Tuesday, November 28. The hardcover version is on sale for 50 percent off on Amazon, which is notably down from 22 to 11. It was previously reported that the two senior royals, who allegedly had concerns" over Meghan Markle and Prince Harrys son Archies skin colour, were identified in the books Dutch edition. This led to a temporary halt in sales. Later, the book was removed from the shelves across the Netherlands. It will be back on the shelves again on December 8, according to GB News. On CNNs State of the Union, host Dana Bash asked Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal why she and other progressive women have been silent on the issue of Hamas sexual violence against Israeli women during the October 7 massacre. Why aren't progressive women condemning Hamas' atrocities? Dana Bash questions congresswoman Pramila Jayapal(AP/ Enterprise News and Pictures) Jayapal, who represents Washington state and is part of the Squad, claimed that she had condemned Hamas atrocities against women before, but then shifted the focus to Israels actions. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Bash said, I want to talk to you about sexual violence, which is something that hasnt gotten enough attention globally. Hamas used rape, brutal rape, sexual violence against Israeli women as a weapon of war. Ive seen a lot of progressive women, who usually defend womens rights and speak out against rape as a weapon of war, but theyre silent on what happened on October 7. And what might be happening to the hostages in Gaza right now. Why is that? We have to remember Israel is a democracy Jayapal replied, I dont think thats true. I think we always talk about the impact of war on women in particular, and said that she had specifically spoken out against Hamas crimes. ALSO READ| Rep. Pramila Jayapal spearheads US immigrant visa reform bill to ease Green Card backlogs, Indians to benefit But I think we have to remember Israel is a democracy. Thats why theyre a strong ally of ours, Jayapal continued. And if they dont comply with international humanitarian law, theyre putting themselves in a position that makes it harder for them to build allies, to keep public opinion with them, and frankly, morally, we cant say that one war crime justifies another. Thats not what international humanitarian law says. Jayapal voted present on a House Resolution supporting Israel after the Hamas attacks in October. She also had to apologize after calling the Israeli government racist and facing backlash. Bash challenged Jayapal on her response and said, With respect, I was just asking about the women, and you turned it back to Israel. Im asking you about Hamas. Rape is horrific.it happens in war situations. Jayapal said, I answered your question, Dana. I said its horrific, and I think that rape is horrific. Sexual assault is horrific. I think that it happens in war situations. Terrorist organizations like Hamas are obviously using these as tools. But I think we have to be balanced about bringing in the outrages against Palestinians. Fifteen thousand Palestinians have been killed in Israeli air strikes, three-quarters of whom are women and children. Bash replied, And its horrible. But you dont see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women. I dont want this to be the hierarchies of oppressions. This is not how were going to defeat terrorism, Jayapal said. ALSO READ| Body of missing Minnesota woman, 24, found in garbage chute in NYC building, its tragic, says devastated dad Many progressive womens rights groups around the world, including the leaders of the #MeToo movement and the UN Women group, have been criticized for not condemning Hamas mass rape loudly enough. Last week, almost two months after the October 7 attack, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that the UN would investigate Hamas sexual violence against Israeli women. A woman who initially praised the extraordinary humanity of Hamas terrorists has now revealed the reality, saying being abducted and held hostage was horrifying. 45-year-old Danielle Aloni wrote an open letter under duress where she wrote that she and her daughter, five-year-old Emila, was being treated like a queen. Danielle Aloni laughs as she meets family members at the Schneider Children's Medical Center, Israel, Saturday, Nov. 25, 2023 (Schneider Children's Medical Center Spokesperson via AP)(AP) People can die because their abductors simply decided to murder them However, ten days after her release, she revealed the truth. On October 7, we were brutally kidnapped from our home, she said, according to The US Sun. Our daughter saw things that children at that age, or at any age, should not see. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here It was a horror movie you feel like you want to pinch yourself and wake up from this movie. People can die because their abductors simply decided to murder them, she added. Chilling images and videos shared by Hamas military wing A few days ago, chilling images and videos surfacing online, which were reportedly released by Hamas military wing, show the masked terrorists waving goodbye to Israeli hostages after handing them over to the Red Cross. Videos and images show the terrorists leading the hostages, handing them over and waving goodbye, while the hostages wave back. Some of the children can be seen smiling. However, some social media users pointed out that the terrorists can be heard ordering the hostages to keep waving. Another video showed former Israeli hostage Rimon Kirsht giving a death stare to a Hamas terrorist during her release. She was hailed for her grit and confidence. While being released, Rimon is seen giving her Hamas captor one final piercing glare, cocking her head and walking away with fellow hostage Merav Tal. People in the comment section hailed her and the moment as iconic." Rimon and her husband, Yagev Buchshtab, 34, were abducted on October 7. They were kept captive for 53 days. Dozens of Israeli tanks, armoured personnel carriers, and bulldozers entered the southern part of the Gaza Strip near Khan Younis as part of an expanded ground offensive, The Times of Israel reported. Israeli soldiers in North Gaza. (Reuters) The Israeli military, in response to the collapsed truce with Hamas, announced an expansion of ground operations in all of Gaza. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here "The IDF is resuming and expanding the ground operation against Hamas' strongholds across the whole Gaza Strip," Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari told a news conference. Hagari added, "Our policy is clear: we will forcefully strike any threat posed against our territory." Israeli attacks in Gaza have led to approximately 15,200 Palestinian deaths since October 7, according to the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Ministry of Health. In the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military reportedly arrested at least 60 people, including former prisoners, with a focus on the Bethlehem area. The Palestinian Prisoners Society indicated that the total number of arrests since October 7 has now reached 3,540, according to CNN. In Qalqilya, the IDF announced the killing of two suspected militants, targeting a cell responsible for repeated attacks on troops. The Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed two Palestinian deaths during the incursion but did not confirm their identities. It said, "Counterterrorism forces targeted a terrorist cell that had repeatedly fired on troops in the city of Qalqilya, killing two terrorists and wounding several others overnight (Sunday)." The IDF said that one of those killed--29-year-old Emad Alaa Nezal--had "carried out a number of recent shooting attacks against security forces." Separately, a 32-year-old man was killed during an Israeli military raid at the Qalandia refugee camp north of Jerusalem, with 17 others injured, 11 by live ammunition, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. Videos from the West Bank area depict clashes between Israeli soldiers and young Palestinians. The overall toll in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7 stands at 256 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and settlers, according to the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Health Ministry, CNN reported. Israel said Monday it was not seeking to force Palestinian civilians to permanently leave their homes, even as it acknowledged conditions in the besieged Gaza Strip were "tough". Israel-Hamas War: A Palestinian boy carrying a baby stands at a site of Israeli strikes, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.(Reuters) Any suggestion of Palestinian dispersal is highly contentious in the Arab world as the war that led to Israel's creation 75 years ago gave rise to the exodus or forced displacement of 760,000 Palestinians, an event known as the Nakba, or "catastrophe". Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Israel declared war on Hamas, which rules Gaza, after its brutal October 7 attacks on Israel killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli authorities. With the health ministry in the Palestinian territory reporting a death toll of more than 15,500 people, the impact of Israel's relentless bombardment and ground offensive has sparked growing international concern. Since the collapse last week of a truce that allowed for the release of dozens of Israeli and other hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, Israel has expanded its offensive in Gaza. In its latest estimate, OCHA said around 1.8 million people in Gaza, roughly 75 percent of the population, had been displaced, many to overcrowded and unsanitary shelters. Speaking to reporters on Monday, Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus said: "We are not trying to displace anyone, we are not trying to move anybody from anywhere permanently. "We have asked civilians to evacuate the battlefield and we have provided a designated humanitarian zone inside the Gaza Strip," he said, referring to a tiny coastal area of the territory named Al-Mawasi, as he acknowledged the situation in Gaza was "tough". "We are perfectly aware that there is limited space and limited access and that is why it is so important to have the buy-in and support of international humanitarian organisations to help with the infrastructure in the Al-Mawasi area," he added. 'No safe place' As Israel expanded its operations, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk at the weekend voiced alarm that hundreds of thousands of Gazans were "being confined into ever smaller areas" in the south of the territory. "There is no safe place in Gaza," he said. Earlier in the war, Israel's neighbour and treaty partner Jordan expressed concern that the violence might trigger a wave of displacement spilling into its borders. Likewise Egypt -- which shares a border with Gaza and also signed a peace deal with Israel -- has rejected the idea of a mass movement of Palestinians into its territory. "We have not tried to have any people evacuate there," Conricus said, referring to Egypt. "Egypt has been very clear about where they stand: they do not want that." US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said that "people should be able to stay in Gaza, their home". The conspicuous absence of Meghan Markle's engagement ring has sparked rumors and concerns, especially among her in-laws, Prince William and the Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton. Meghan's ring, a six-carat, cushion-cut diamond masterpiece designed by Prince Harry, features stones with sentimental value the central gem from Botswana and two smaller diamonds from Princess Diana's collection. FILE - From left, Meghan the Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry, Prince William and Kate the Duchess of Cambridge watch a flypast of Royal Air Force aircraft pass over Buckingham Palace in London, (AP) Meghan's decision not to wear the ring has prompted speculation, with fashion expert Danielle Rogers-Clark suggesting that Prince William is particularly concerned. The worry doesn't stem from a judgment on Meghan's personal choice, but rather a fear that the precious ring might be misplaced or, worse, stolen. Princess Diana's jewelry holds immense sentimental value, and William, protective of his late mother's memory, views these pieces as irreplaceable. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here As Rogers-Clark explains, "William is very protective over his late mother Princess Dianas memory and her legacy. Her stunning and precious jewelry collection forms a very important part of that." The concern extends beyond personal sentiment; it reflects a commitment to preserving Princess Diana's legacy, considering each piece invaluable. Also Read | Meghan Markle and Prince Harry dismayed over racist royals controversy: Report Meghan's alteration of the ring during her pregnancy added another layer of significance to the jewelry. Prince Harry's choice to incorporate diamonds from his mother's collection was a poignant tribute, ensuring Diana's presence in their shared journey. While Meghan's choice to go ringless is her prerogative, the concern from the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arises from a deep respect for the historical and emotional weight of Princess Diana's jewelry. Rogers-Clark emphasizes that Prince Harry would likely share his brother's concern, stating, "Equally, Harry has as much right to his mothers pieces as William. I am sure William is aware that his brother feels exactly the same and would do his best to make sure the diamonds remain safe and loved." An army drone strike accidentally hit a village in northwestern Nigeria, killing and wounding civilians celebrating a Muslim festival, local authorities, the military and a resident said on Monday. Members of the Nigerian Army brigade see-off German Chancellor.(AFP) Nigeria's armed forces often rely on air strikes in their battle against so-called bandit militias in the northwest and northeast of the country, where jihadists have been waging a 14-year conflict. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The army did not provide details or a deathtoll for the strike late Sunday in Tudun Biri village in Kaduna State, but other officials reported fatalities and one villager said 30 people were killed. "Muslim faithful observing Maulud were mistakenly killed and many others injured following a military drone attack targeting terrorists and bandits," Kaduna State governor Uba Sani said. He said he has called for an investigation. Many of the victims were women and children, resident Hassan Ma'aruf told AFP by telephone, sharing images he said showed the bodies. AFP could not immediately confirm the authenticity of the images. Dozens of wounded were taken to a teaching hospital in the state capital Kaduna, local state security commissioner Samuel Aruwan said following a closed-door meeting with army officials and community leaders. He said the attack left "several citizens dead and others injured" but did not provide a toll. According to the army, it was a routine mission against militants that "inadvertently affected members of the community," he said. "The Maulud celebration was taking place in the village last night when the gathering was bombed at around 9:00 pm," said Ma'aruf, the resident. "We have so far identified 30 dead victims, mostly women and children." Militia gangs, known locally as bandits, have long terrorised parts of northwest Nigeria, operating from bases deep in forests and raiding villages to loot and kidnap residents for ransom. In the northeast, jihadists have been pushed back from the territory they held at the height of the conflict, though they continie to fight on. More than 40,000 people have been killed and two million displaced since 2009. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has made tackling insecurity a priority since coming to office in May, as he seeks to encourage foreign investment in Africa's most populous country. Nigerian military bombing raids have caused civilian casualties in the past. At least 20 fishermen were killed and several injured in a September 2021 attack in Kwatar Daban Masara on Lake Chad in the northeast, when the military mistook them for militants. In January 2017, at least 112 people were killed when a fighter jet struck a camp housing 40,000 people displaced by jihadist violence in the town of Rann near the border with Cameroon. The Nigerian military blamed "lack of appropriate marking of the area" in a report issued six months later. In July 2019, at least 13 civilians were killed when a fighter jet struck Gajiganna village in Borno state, as it tried to hit jihadists who were fleeing following an attack on a nearby base. abu-lcm/pma/gv A moderately strong earthquake struck northwest Turkey on Monday, sending people out into the streets in fear. There was no immediate report of injuries or damage. Turkey Earthquake: HaberTurk television said it was felt in Istanbul and other nearby regions where people left homes and offices in fear.(Representational) The magnitude 5.1 earthquake was centered in the Sea of Marmara, off the town of Gemlik in Bursa province, according to the disaster management agency, AFAD. It struck at 10:42 a.m. local time (07:42 GMT), at a depth of some 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here HaberTurk television said it was felt in Istanbul and other nearby regions where people left homes and offices in fear. In February, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake devastated 11 southern and southeastern Turkish provinces as well as part of northern Syria. More than 50,000 people were killed in Turkey. Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman has continued to slam his alma-mater Harvard University, accusing the school and its president of turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism on campus in the wake of Hamas' barbaric assault on Israel in October. Bill Ackman, chief executive officer and portfolio manager at Pershing Square Capital Management(REUTERS) On Sunday, Ackman, 57, posted a video showing a pro-Palestinian student disrupting a class with a bullhorn, ranting about protests and chanting: 'Free free Palestine.' Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here 'This is what you get for $73,600/year at @Harvard,' Ackman wrote in the caption. The Pershing Square Capital Management founder, who has a net worth of $3.8 billion, graduated with a degree in social studies from Harvard in 1988 and later attained an MBA in 1992. The school's official rule book bans the disruption of classes and is 'regarded as unacceptable obstruction of the essential processes of the University.' This weekend saw a mob of University of Pennsylvania students chanting 'intifada,'meaning 'uprising,' through the streets. Ackman too posted that video which was accompanied by the caption: 'Stop telling American Jews not to worry.' Meanwhile, campus Jewish student organization, Harvard Hillel, said in an Instagram post that students were disrupted in classes by protesters who made calls to 'globalize the intifada' and for the elimination of Israel 'from the river to the sea.' 'These calls for genocide and anti-Jewish violence throughout the world represent antisemitic speech and are not protected by the University's community standards,' the Hillel statement read. Last week, Ackman took aim at Harvard President Claudine Grayover her 'failed leadership' and called the decision not to attend an 'insult'. Ackman, 57, offered to fly Gay to Washington D.C. immediately after the documentary is screened at Harvard, where she is due to testify to Congressabout the explosion in anti-Semitism at the college. But the university leader has declined the invitation, with her chief of staff stating she is 'out of town' in an email reply. 'I cant imagine anything more important for the Harvard President to do now than to bear witness to the atrocities before testifying about the Hamas protests and antisemitism on campus,' Ackman wrote on X. Also Read | Harvard situation dire, getting worse, Bill Ackman writes to its President over growing anti-semitism on campus 'It may be true that she is "out of town" as I am sure she is flying to DC that day, but it sure sends a bad message to the students, the faculty, and the alumni community about the seriousness with which she is taking the issue of antisemitism on campus. 'And it is an insult to the Israeli Ambassador who is flying to Boston just to present the documentary at Harvard.' Ackman said he offered to provide dinner and a flight so the two could discuss the kinds of questions Gay may face at Congress on Tuesday. However, gifts such as a this from a donor seeking to influence university policy may or may not be prohibited by school regulations. A woman who had gone missing was found deadin the garbage chute at a condo building in Manhattan a day later, according to law enforcement sources. Police said the body was identified as that of Jaclyn Jackie Elmquist, 24. She was found at 540 West 28th Street in Chelsea late last week by a building employee. She had vanished aftera work party. Police said the body was identified as that of Jaclyn 'Jackie' Elmquist, 24 (@katlynkampmeier/X) Elmquists cousin shared a missing person poster on X after she disappeared. my cousin Jackie Elmquist has been missing since last night after she left a work party in Manhattan- she didnt come home or show up for work this morning please spread the word so people in the area can see it since all of her family lives here in Minnesota, she captioned it. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Officers and EMS rushed to the luxury residential complex after her body was found, and she was declared dead at the scene. Shocking surveillance footage showedElmquiststumbling down West 28t Street, trying to open doors, before she was found dead. It is unclear why she entered the building. Police are now reportedly investigating whetherElmquist is connected to amissing person's case where a woman was last spotted at a nearby restaurant, boarding a cab. Were going through Jackies things now, Elmquists father, James Elmquist, of Minnesota, told New York Post. Its tragic and, uh, its just a bad situation I cant really talk. Police said they believe the death was an accident and no foul play is involved, according to the outlet. "A preliminary investigation determined the deceased's injuries are indicative of having fallen down the garbage chute," a Deputy Commissioner of Public Information spokesperson shared, according to PEOPLE. It hasnt been determined if she was intoxicated but its a possibility, a police source said, as per New York Post. An autopsy by the city Medical Examiners office, that will determine her cause and manner of death, is pending. In her upcoming memoir, "Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning," former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney makes bold claims about Donald Trump's post-election state, suggesting he became depressed and stopped eating. Cheney recounts questioning Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy's visit to Trump in Mar-a-Lago, to which McCarthy allegedly responded, "Trump's not eating, so they asked me to come see him." TOPSHOT - Former US president and 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump leaves after speaking at a campaign rally in Claremont, New Hampshire, on November 11, 2023. (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO / AFP)(AFP) However, Trump vehemently disputes these assertions, taking to Truth Social to clarify, "I was not depressed, I WAS ANGRY, and it was not that I was not eating, it was that I was eating too much." Trump contends McCarthy visited for support and party unity. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Cheney's book, set for release on December 5, not only delves into the personal dynamics within the Republican party but also issues a stark warning about Trump's potential impact on the Constitution. She writes, "As a nation, we can endure damaging policies for a four-year term. But we cannot survive a president willing to terminate our Constitution." Trump's camp fires back with Steven Cheung calling Cheney a "loser" peddling fabricated tales to boost book sales. Despite the controversy, Cheney stands by her warnings, emphasising the stakes in the 2024 presidential election. Also Read: Donald Trump's mention of Insurrection Act sparks speculation on impending charges Joe Biden destroyer of American democracy: Donald Trump's dig Donald Trump no longer immune from civil lawsuits over 6th January Capitol attack, says US appeals court The book release comes amid Trump facing lawsuits over the Capitol riot on January 6, with allegations that his unfounded claims of election fraud and his rally speech incited violence. Trump denies wrongdoing, portraying the accusations as a political vendetta. Cheney's tumultuous political journey, from voting to impeach Trump to losing her congressional seat, adds layers to this narrative. McCarthy's office dismisses her claims, suggesting "McCarthy Derangement Syndrome" alongside the alleged "Trump Derangement Syndrome." Apparently, Donald Trump will not let things go even after a week. The former American president lashed out at Academy Award winner actor Robert De Niro for his acceptance speech at the Gotham Awards. On Sunday, the 77-year-old politician took to the Truth Social platform to address Robert De Niro's speech. Robert De Niro calls Donald Trump a liar During the beginning, the actor was surprised to see his speech paying tribute to the crew and cast of his latest release, The Killers of The Flower Moon had been edited with the anti-Trump comments being cut out from the autocue. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Well, since his displeasure with the potential presidential candidate is no news, he picked up his phone and read his Trump-bashing lines, where he highlighted the GOP candidate's lies. I just wanna say one thing, the beginning of my speech was edited, cut out I didn't know about it, and wanna read it, began the Oscar-winning actor. "It was, thankyou, history isn't history any more, truth is not truth, even facts are being replaced by alternative facts and driven by conspiracy theories and ugliness. In Florida young students are taught that slaves develop skills that could be applied for their personal benefit. Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan's arsenal. The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office, and hes keeping up the pace with his current campaign of retribution. With all of his lies, he cant hide his soul. He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature and shows his disrespect for example using Pocahontas as a slur. This is where I came in and I saw that they edited all that. Trump lashes out at Robert De Niro On Sunday, the 77-year-old politician took to the Truth Social platform to address Robert De Niro's speech, writing: Robert De Niro, whose acting talents have greatly diminished, with his reputation now shot, must even use a teleprompter for his foul and disgusting language, so disrespectful to our Country. He has become unwatchable both in movies, and with the FOOLS that destroyed the Academy Awards bringing them from one of the top shows in the Country to a Low Rated afterthought, the former president added. De Niro should focus on his life, which is a mess, rather than the lives of others. He has become a total loser, as the World watches, waits, and laughs! A former US ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha, 73, was taken into custody in Miami on Friday by the FBI on charges of secretly acting as an agent of Cuba, according to two sources who spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. Manuel Rocha, former high-ranking diplomat, faces charges of unlawful Cuban advocacy in the US(AFP via Getty Images) AP reported that Rocha is accused of working to advance the interests of the Cuban government inside the US, without registering with the justice department as required by law. The Justice Department has been cracking down on illegal foreign lobbying in recent years. The sources said that more details about the case will be revealed at a court hearing on Monday. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here Rocha had a long and distinguished diplomatic career that spanned 25 years and both Democratic and Republican administrations. He specialized in Latin America during the cold war era, when the US pursued a range of political and military interventions in the region. He also served in the US Interests Section in Cuba, when the US and Cuba did not have full diplomatic ties under Fidel Castros regime. ALSO READ| Man stabs four to death in New York's Queens, police shoot him dead Rocha was born in Colombia and grew up in a working-class family in New York City. He earned degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown before joining the foreign service in 1981. He was the US ambassador to Argentina from 1997 to 2000, during a period of economic and political turmoil that saw the country default on its massive foreign debt and go through five presidents in two weeks. He then became the US ambassador to Bolivia, where he meddled in the 2002 presidential election, threatening to cut off US aid to the country if the voters elected Evo Morales, a former coca farmer and leftist leader. I want to remind the Bolivian electorate that if they vote for those who want Bolivia to return to exporting cocaine, that will seriously jeopardize any future aid to Bolivia from the United States, Rocha said in a speech that was widely seen as an attempt to maintain US hegemony in the region. His intervention backfired, as Morales won the election three years later and expelled Rochas successor for inciting civil war. Rocha's career also included service in Italy, Honduras, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, along with his role as a Latin America specialist for the National Security Council. ALSO READ| HBO adapts former Congressman George Santos' Gatsby-esque journey to big screen After retiring from the state department, Rocha embarked on a second career in business, holding senior positions at a gold mine in the Dominican Republic partly owned by Canadas Barrick Gold, a coal exporter in Pennsylvania, a cannabis merger company, a law firm and a Spanish public relations firm. Our firm remains committed to transparency and will closely monitor the situation, cooperating fully with the authorities if any information becomes available to us, Dario Alvarez, CEO of Llorente & Cuencas US operations, said in an email. The story of George Santos, the former congressman who was kicked out of Congress last week for lying and misusing campaign funds, is heading to the big screen. Former US Representative George Santos, a Republican from New York, speaks with members of the media on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, on Friday, Dec. 1, 2023. T Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg(Bloomberg) HBO Films has acquired the rights to The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, a new book by Mark Chiusano, a former Newsday reporter. The movie will be produced by Frank Rich, a former New York Times columnist and the executive producer of two Emmy-winning shows Succession and Veep. The screenplay will be written by Mike Makowsky, who also wrote the HBO crime drama Bad Education. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The book and the movie will explore the Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on truth and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American Dream. ALSO READ| Man stabs four to death in New York's Queens, police shoot him dead Santos, who faces criminal charges, represented part of New York District Three, which includes Great Neck, the inspiration for Little Egg, the fictional town where Jay Gatsby, the protagonist of F Scott Fitzgeralds classic novel The Great Gatsby, lived and lied. Chiusano quoted to the Guardian last week that Santoss saga was a tragedy at its core. He is someone who is clearly very ambitious and wants to live a kind of wealthy life, a life of fame and notoriety, and he is trying to attain essentially a version of the American dream, which so many people have sought over the years. On Friday night, the former US state representative tweeted that he would file complaints about former colleagues Nicole Malliotakis, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota and Bob Menendez, whom he accused of various misdeeds. On Sunday, Reince Priebus, a former Trump White House chief of staff and ABC political analyst, admitted that there were divisions within the Republican party over the vote to expel Santos and the issue of taking away the power from the voters in his district. ALSO READ| Joe Biden destroyer of American democracy: Donald Trump's dig True, he lied. He has a big mouth, all of these things. You know, I do think there is a concern with taking that power away from the people in the district, Priebus said. Santos, he added, was a victim of himself. But he is also paying the price for having a big mouth, for being almost a comedian in front of his colleagues, who are now his judges. And he paid the price. And thats a good lesson about, when you get in trouble, you keep your head down; you keep your mouth shut. New York Magazine, which covered Santoss rise and fall in detail, quoted Dr Seuss: Dont cry because its over. Smile because it happened. One of the three Palestinian college students who were shot over Thanksgiving weekend in Vermont is now paralysed from the chest down, his mother has said. A bullet became lodged in Hisham Awartanis spine, causing the tragedy. His family has now set up a GoFundMe. A bullet became lodged in Hisham Awartanis spine, causing the tragedy (Rich Price via AP, File) Hisham will now have to spend up to four weeks in spinal trauma care, which will be followed by several months of physical therapy, his mom Elizabeth Price said. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here We believe that Hisham will meet this challenge with the same determination Ive witnessed this week, Hishams mother said, according to CNN. The fund will help cover costs associated with his rehabilitation, air travel of his family and expenses related to the adaptive needs of his new reality. Hisham, 20, is a Brown University maths major. The GoFundMe reads, Hisham's first thoughts were for his friends, then for his parents who were thousands of miles away. He has demonstrated remarkable courage, resilience and fortitude - even a sense of humor - even as the reality of his paralysis sets in. We, his family, believe that Hisham will change the world. He'll change the world through his spirit, his mind and his compassion for those much more vulnerable than himself, especially the thousands of dead in Gaza and many more struggling to survive the devastating humanitarian crisis unfolding there, it adds. The suspect arrested in connection with the student was identified as 48-year-old Jason James Eaton. Hisham was shot along with two other 20-year-old friends Kinnan Abdel Hamid and Tahseen Ahmed while they were walking on Prospect Street while visiting a relative for Thanksgiving holiday. Two of the students were wearing keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian scarves, the police department said. The three friends were born just before the end of the Second Intifada. They reportedly grew up together in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. Jason pleaded not guilty to three counts of attempted murder. Prosecutors have said that there is not enough evidence to charge him with a hate crime. His motive is not known. The World Health Organization's executive board will hold a rare emergency session on Dec. 10 to discuss the health crisis in Gaza and the West Bank, with the Palestinian envoy seeking more medical aid and access for foreign healthcare workers. A picture taken from southern Israel near the border with the Gaza Strip, shows smoke billowing over the Palestinian territory during Israeli bombardment amid continuing battles between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (AFP) The WHO confirmed on Monday it had received a request from 15 countries to hold the session, which will be convened by Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in consultation with the Qatari chair. Wrap up the year gone by & gear up for 2024 with HT! Click here The Palestinian ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Ibrahim Khraishi, said the meeting would focus mostly on Gaza, engulfed by war between its Hamas rulers and Israel, but also cover attacks on the health sector in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. "We want to empower the WHO and call for the Israeli side not to target the medical sector. We want to allow for fresh medical supplies," he told Reuters, adding that his diplomatic mission was drafting a motion to be reviewed by the board. "One idea is to send more doctors in from around the world," he added, saying many countries had offered. The "Occupied Palestinian Territory" is a WHO observer rather than a member state but has influence in the organisation through supporters. Israel said the session was an example of the "double standards and disproportionate attention towards Israel in the multilateral arena". Only a fraction of Gaza's hospitals remain operational due to Israeli bombings and a lack of fuel, and those that are still functioning are increasingly overwhelmed by a new wave of wounded arriving. A WHO database shows there have been 427 attacks on healthcare facilities in Palestinian territories since the Oct. 7 cross-border Hamas attack on Israel, and the latter's retaliatory aerial blitz and invasion of Gaza. The database does not touch on who is seen as responsible for the attacks. Israel has accused Hamas of using ordinary Gazans as human shields by placing command centres and weapons inside hospitals and other civilian buildings. A senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday Israel would facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza's civilians as fighting there resumed after a week-long truce collapsed. The WHO has also warned of spreading disease which it has said could kill more people than bombardments in Gaza, with diarrhoea cases among children rising to about 100 times normal levels. As many as 80% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have fled their homes, the U.N. humanitarian agency OCHA says. The WHO's governing board is made up of 34 members and typically meets every January to fix the agenda for its annual assembly. Membership is split among regional groups and the United States, Qatar, Senegal, Australia and China are among seat holders. More Children's books in the U.K. are now featuring racially minoritized characters. This was revealed in the survey conducted by the Center for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE). This is a good thing since more and more children can now see other characters aside from White people; giving them a chance to learn more about other ethnicities. The survey analyzed children's books with racially minoritized characters from 2017 until 2022. UK: Children's Books With Racially Minoritized Characters are Increasing! According to The Guardian's latest report, more and more children's books with racially minoritized characters are being published in the United Kingdom. When CPLE first conducted its survey in 2017, there was only a 4% increase. However, in its 6th survey, this number reached 30% (2022). This shows that there's a rising trend in children's books featuring other ethnicities that are not White; 7% in 2018, 10% in 2019, 15% in 2020, and 20% in 2021. CLPE Research & Development Executive Director Farrah Serroukh shared her excitement about the rising children's books with racially minoritized characters. "We welcome the increase in overall output and were pleased to encounter more variation in the breadth of realities reflected in the literature we reviewed," she said. However, the children's books they analyzed, such as "JoJo & Gran Gran Go," "Hairdresser" by Laura Henry-Allain, "Through the Forest" by Yijing Li, and "My Mum is a Lioness," have some parts that don't properly depict racially minoritized characters. Because of this, CPLE said that this makes it "challenging to decipher presence and in other instances, the role allocation felt tokenistic or formulaic." Farrah is currently encouraging publishers to improve the quality and volume of their children's books in order to properly reflect the realities that other ethnicities face. "We encourage publishers and creatives to build on the traction of recent years and continue to strive towards improving the volume and quality of titles that meaningfully reflect realities available to young readers," she explained. Read Also: AI-Generated Books Could Put Amateur Mushroom Pickers in Danger; Here's What Experts Say Most Featured Racially Minoritized People CLPE said that the children's books they analyzed mostly featured Black characters (6.8%). The second most featured racially minoritized characters are those with mixed heritage backgrounds. They made up 4.6% of the children's titles. Meanwhile, over 1% of these books featured characters from South Asian backgrounds. These non-White ethnicities are mostly included in fiction titles. From 2017 to 2022, racially minoritized characters are increasing in these fiction children's books. However, this is not the case for non-fiction and picture books since both of these genres saw drops in 2022. Related Article: Iowa Rights Groups File Lawsuit Against Law Banning LGBTQ+ Books in School to Raise Gender Identity @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called on Russian women to have larger families, urging them to consider having "seven, eight, or more" children to combat the country's declining population. Speaking via video link at the World Russian People's Council, Putin addressed what he referred to as Russia's "catastrophic demographic problems" and emphasized the importance of family traditions, as per Mail Online. Putin Urges Russians to Embrace Large Families In his speech, Putin cited the historical tradition of multi-generational families with several children, noting that many Russian families in the past had seven or eight children. He urged citizens to preserve and revive these traditions, stating, "Large families must become the norm." The Russian leader's call for increased birth rates comes in response to a significant decline in the country's population, which has been exacerbated by factors such as the war in Ukraine, mandatory military conscription, and economic stagnation. To address this population slump, Putin is pursuing various policies and initiatives to encourage childbirth. In a somewhat unconventional move, Putin suggested that the state would support "motherhood" and offered incentives for families to have more children. He acknowledged that many Russians have a tradition of multi-generational solid families, which he believes should be embraced and expanded. However, the average number of babies per woman in Russia is currently only 1.42, and this figure is decreasing rapidly. To reverse this trend, Putin is urging Russians to return to an era when large families were commonplace, evoking the spirit of the tsarist era, according to The Sun. Read Also: WHO Investigates Mysterious Pneumonia in China as Cases Increase-Will This Become Another Pandemic? Russia's Population It is worth noting that Vladimir Putin, who is known for his private and secretive personal life, is believed to have at least six children from three different partners, though he publicly acknowledges only two daughters. His call for increased childbirth rates has led to speculations about his own family. In addition to encouraging larger families, Russia is also implementing measures to restrict access to abortions, with some regions banning them in private clinics. Russian MP Sultan Khamzaev even proposed financial incentives to dissuade women from having abortions. One particularly controversial proposal that recently came to light involved turning female convicts into "baby-making machines" to support Russia's population growth. Under this scheme, female prisoners would be temporarily freed to become pregnant, with the promise of reduced sentences for successful pregnancies. Those who failed to conceive would be returned to penal colonies. The call for increased childbirth rates coincides with Russia's declining population, which saw a significant decrease of 555,000 during the first year of Putin's war in Ukraine. This decline has raised concerns about the country's economic prospects. While Putin's plea for larger families may aim to address demographic challenges, it is also seen as a strategic move in preparation for Russia's presidential elections in 2024. As Russia grapples with a shrinking population and other pressing issues, Putin's call for more children has become a prominent aspect of his leadership agenda, Express reported. Related Article: China Claims Respiratory Illness Surge Isn't Caused by Novel Virus-Here's What Chinese Health Ministry Says @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The Montana bill that would have banned the popular short-video social media app TikTok throughout the state beginning on January 1, 2024, was stopped by a federal court. The judge said the supposed ban would violate the free expression rights of users. First-Ever TikTok Ban Blocked by Judge Legal documents filed Thursday, November 30, by Judge Donald Molloy detailed his reasoning for handing down the preliminary order. Among other things, Molloy cited Montana's failure to demonstrate how the original SB 419 law might be "constitutionally permissible" as justification. For Montana, this is a setback. In May, Governor Greg Gianforte signed SB 419 into law, arguing that it would aid in the state's common goal of protecting the people of Montana from the surveillance of the Chinese Communist Party. According to CNBC, Judge Molloy said in the document, "Despite the State's attempt to defend SB 419 as a consumer protection bill, the current record leaves little doubt that Montana's legislature and Attorney General were more interested in targeting China's ostensible role in TikTok than with protecting Montana consumers. This is especially apparent in that the same legislature enacted an entirely separate law that purports to broadly protect consumers' digital data and privacy." In a statement, a representative from TikTok expressed the company's joy at the judge's rejection of the unconstitutional statute, which would allow hundreds of thousands of Montanans to retain their freedom of expression, livelihood, and community on TikTok. But according to an assertion from the Montana Attorney General's office, the judge's ruling is only "a preliminary matter at this point." "The judge indicated several times that the analysis could change as the case proceeds and the State has the opportunity to present a full factual record," the Montana Attorney General's office further said, as reported by CNBC. See Also: Call for TikTok Ban in US Renewed as Officials Accuse Platform of Being Anti-Israel Politicians Worry App Might Jeopardize National Security Prior to Judge Molloy's preliminary order, the popular video and social networking app owned by the Chinese internet firm ByteDance was going to be banned in Montana, making it the first U.S. state to do so. In May, ByteDance announced that it had sued Montana in an effort to stop the state from illegally banning TikTok. The company's legal team said in court documents that Montana lacked evidence to back up claims that TikTok let the Chinese government access user data and exposed children to inappropriate internet content. During a hearing in March, American lawmakers questioned TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew about the app's parent firm ByteDance, and the possible ties between the Chinese government and the business. A nationwide ban on TikTok has been proposed by politicians because of their worry that the Chinese Communist Party may get access to the data of American citizens. In an effort to allay fears about its impact on national security, TikTok has highlighted its "Project Texas" program, which, with the support of business IT giant Oracle, aims to keep user data inside the United States. See Also: TikTok Denies Malaysia's Claims Platform Bans Pro-Palestinian Content @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Republican Party of Florida chairman Christian Ziegler is now the subject of an inquiry by the Sarasota Police Department about a sexual violence claim that dates back to October. Derek Byrd, Ziegler's lawyer, reportedly said that his client has been complying completely with all requests made by the authorities. He added, "We are confident that once the police investigation is concluded that no charges will be filed and Mr. Ziegler will be completely exonerated," Byrd said. Nothing specific about the probe was revealed by him. According to the report that Byrd cited, the inquiry into the allegations of sexual misconduct by Ziegler and the assault was first detailed on a local Florida watchdog website. Police Report Allegedly Includes the Words 'Rape, Sexually Battered' Thursday morning, November 30, CNN was able to see a police report pertaining to the case. The 12-page document had been highly censored, leaving just a handful of terms exposed, and among them were "raped," "sexual assault," and "sexual battery." The Sarasota Police Department supplied CNN with this report after receiving a request for complaints, reports, and other legal documents. The claimed victim informed authorities on October 4 that the event had occurred at a Sarasota residence two days prior to the complaint. Redactions prevented disclosure of specifics on the alleged incident. Even after redaction, not a single name appeared, not even Ziegler's. Cynthia McLaughlin, a representative for the Sarasota Police Department, told CNN that no charges have been filed but that she could not confirm this due to an ongoing investigation. Read Also: NYC Mayor Eric Adams Removes Campaign Fundraiser Brianna Suggs Amid Kickback Scheme Allegations Gov. DeSantis Calls for Ziegler's Resignation Florida Republican Governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has called for Ziegler's resignation after the news broke out. "I don't see how he can continue with that investigation ongoing given the gravity of those situations, and so I think that he should, I think he should step aside. He's innocent till proven guilty, but we just can't have a party chair that is under that type of scrutiny," he stated, as reported by The Washington Post. Christian Ziegler is a staunch Republican in Florida, and so is his wife, Bridget. They were powerful in Sarasota County, but under DeSantis, the pair ascended to notoriety throughout the state. With extensive experience in local politics, including stints as county commissioner and state party vice chairman, Christian assumed the role of chairman of the Florida GOP in February. Former DeSantis ally Bridget was appointed to the Sarasota County School Board in 2014 and has since been re-elected three times, most recently in 2022. The cultural conflicts that DeSantis has started in Florida's public schools have been led by Bridget. A conservative parents' rights group, Moms for Liberty was co-founded by her. They have spearheaded campaigns to get books removed from schools in states like Florida and others because they believe these books are improper for children. Read Also: NY Rep. Jamaal Bowman Faces Charges After Pulling 'False' Fire Alarm in Capitol Hill @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Americans who support the death penalty are now decreasing, as revealed by a new poll conducted by Gallup; an American analytics and advisory firm located in Washington, D.C. The survey, which was conducted in October, revealed how many U.S. residents see criminal/prisoner execution in the country; if it is administered fairly or not. Gallup revealed that there's a huge gap between Americans who see the death penalty being implemented fairly and those who don't. In fact, experts said that this is the highest number that the analytics firm acquired since it started polling the fairness of the death penalty's application in 2000. Americans Supporting Death Penalty Now Waning According to Fox News' latest report, the Gallup survey revealed that 50% of Americans think that the U.S. is unfairly administering the death penalty. On the other hand, 47% say capital punishment is fairly implemented. This just shows that the death penalty's isolation in the United States is further growing. In 2023, the U.S. had 24 executions; the last one was conducted in Oklahoma on Thursday, Nov. 30. These death penalties happened in only five U.S. states; Missouri, Texas, Alabama, Florida, and Oklahoma. The number of states that conducted death penalties is considered to be the lowest in the previous 20 years. Some experts, including Prof. Catherine Grosso of the Michigan State University's College of Law, said that the declining support for the death penalty could be attributed to more younger Americans questioning the U.S. criminal justice system. Grosso said that more U.S. citizens doubt the justice system in the U.S., especially after the controversial incident in which George Floyd was killed by a police officer after stepping on his neck. Read Also: Ohio Dad Faces Death Penalty for Executing 3 Young Sons, Tried To Hunt 1 Who Tried To Escape Will Declining Support Lead To Death Penalty Abolition? As of writing, it is hard to determine if the U.S. will decide to abolish the death penalty because of declining support from Americans. This is because some states are reviving capital punishment and even introducing new methods to execute criminals eligible for the death penalty. The Guardian recently reported that Florida's revival of the death penalty is among the reasons why executions in the U.S. reached 24, which is higher than in 2022 (18 death penalties). But, it is possible for the death penalty to be eradicated by the U.S. government. "There are some scholars who are optimistic the death penalty will be totally eradicated pretty soon," said University of Nebraska-Lincoln Law Prof. Eric Berger. "I think what's more likely is it's going to continue to decline. But I think it's less likely that in the foreseeable future, it'll totally disappear," he added. Related Article: Alabama Supreme Court Approves Nitrogen Gas Execution as New Death Penalty @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. British inventor and innovator Sir James Dyson lost his libel claim against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), the publisher of the Daily Mirror, on Friday (December 1). He sued the publisher over a "vicious and vitriolic" article published in January 2022 which personally attacked him and undermined his work encouraging young people into engineering. It was revealed that the Daily Mirror article of journalist Brian Reade referred to the engineer as "the vacuum-cleaner tycoon who championed Vote Leave due to the economic opportunities it would bring to British industry before moving his global head office to Singapore." "Kids, talk the talk but then screw your country and if anyone complains, tell them to suck it up," Reade's article further read. Read Also: Alistair Darling: Former UK Chancellor Dies at Age 70, Remembered for Battling Financial Crisis Mirror Says Author's Article Was an 'Honest Opinion' The Mirror defended the case filed by Dyson, arguing that Reade's article was an "honest opinion." For this, the High Court of Justice made a decision to dismiss Dyson's claim in a sentence given on Friday, finding both that MGN's defense had succeeded and that Dyson did not prove he suffered serious harm to his reputation. "In the present case the claimant cannot demonstrate that he has suffered financial loss as a result of these publications," High Court judge Robert Jay said in the ruling. "Nor can he show that his philanthropic work, particularly directed to young people and schools, has been harmed in any way." In response to the decision, an MGN spokesperson said that the firm welcomed the judgment, which upheld the "rights of [its] columnists to share honestly held opinions, even about powerful or wealthy individuals." Related Article: UK, Rwanda Officials Commit to Deportation Deal as Delays Challenge Controversial Agreement @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The popular Filipino couple Kathniel's breakup shocked many Filipinos as both of them announced the end of their relationship on Thursday, Nov. 30. A few weeks before their separate official breakup announcements, many Filipinos speculated that the two were no longer dating. Most of the rumors claim that Daniel John Ford Padilla, aka DJ, cheated with another actress. No matter what the reason is, the breakup of DJ and Kathryn Bernardo broke the hearts of many Filipinos as they see them as the perfect couple. Kathniel's Breakup Saddens Many Filipinos The Strait Times reported that DJ and Kath ended their 11-year relationship via their official Instagram accounts. The 27-year-old Filipino actress posted a photo of her and the 28-year-old actor. She included her long messages confirming their breakup and saying that what they had was genuine love. "I want you to hear it straight from me: It's true that Deej and I have decided to part ways," said Kathryn via her official IG announcement. "Like any other relationship, we tried our best to make it work," she added. However, Kath said that they've been drifting apart for a while and decided to accept that their relationship is beyond salvation. The actress explained that she is confirming their breakup since it would be unfair to pretend and show their fans that they are still together. She ended her message by saying that their relationship began with respect and ended with respect. The former lovers' decision to part ways drove many Filipinos to tears since they saw Kath and DJ as the perfect couple who should have lasted a lifetime. Read Also: Who Is Bryan Spears: Britney Spears Calls Older Brother 'Like a Dad and My Best Friend' Amid Family Feud Kathniel's Breakup Could Affect Philippines' Showbiz The Kathniel breakup is not just saddening for Filipino fans. It is also a big deal for the showbiz industry, as well as the business sector since their decoupling could negatively affect some brands, especially those endorsed by Daniel Padilla. But, show business will be mostly affected... In a good way. Philstar reported that Kathniel's separation could inspire more future Filipino love teams since the 11-year relationship between Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla offers lots of lessons. These include how they treated (and will still treat) each other with respect during their relationship and after the breakup. The impact they made with Filipino fans could also pressure other on-cam couples to greater heights, especially in their performances as partners in teleseries or movies. Aside from these, the separation of Kath and DJ could also inspire Filipino writers to write movies that don't revolve around two characters; leading to more unique films that viewers will certainly spend their time on. Related Article: Lukas Gage Cheated on Chris Appleton Prior Sudden Split After 6 Months Marriage, Source Claims @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an additional 170,000 military troops to join the force, bringing the total number of servicemen to roughly 1.32 million. The document detailing the order was published by the Kremlin's website and follows the singing on Friday. The document states that the military personnel quota of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation is now set at 1,320,000 troops. This is an increase from the previous number which was set at 1,150,628. Putin Orders Increase in Number of Military Troops In a statement, the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) said that the increased quota was made in response to "the growing threats to our country associated with the special military operation and the ongoing expansion of NATO." Putin's military personnel also reportedly suffered heavy losses in the last few weeks as the invasion of Ukraine continued on its 22nd month. Russia's MoD said that the increase will be implemented in stages at the expense of citizens who express a desire to perform military service under a contract. It added that there was no plan for a significant increase in the conscription of citizens for compulsory military service, as per Newsweek. The Russian president's latest move could be seen as another political gamble as he is facing a re-election vote in March. Officials from Moscow have argued that Putin is expected to have no serious competitors in the upcoming election. However, with the invasion of Ukraine growing increasingly unpopular among Russian citizens, it is possible that Putin's continued support for the war could become an obstacle to his re-election campaign. Read Also: France: Yoga Guru Arrested for Alleged Sexual Exploitation of Female Followers A professor at George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government, Mark Katz said in an email that not all polling numbers have shown bad news for the Russian strongman. This includes a study that was published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Tuesday. It found that 75% of Russian citizens "generally support the actions of the Russian armed forces." The statement from the Russian MoD explaining the reason for the increase in military troops also noted that NATO "joined armed forces are being built up near Russia's borders." It added that additional air defense systems and strike weapons were being deployed. The ministry argued that the potential of NATO's tactical nuclear forces was being ramped up, according to Yahoo News. Ongoing Russia-Ukraine War Officials said that boosting the number of Russian troops was an appropriate response to the NATO bloc's aggressive activities. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in December last year declared that the nation needed a total force of 1.5 million. He argued that this was to guarantee the fulfillment of tasks to ensure Russia's security but did not say when the military would be able to reach such a size. Previously, the Kremlin also considered the size of its military as sufficient. But amid continued conflict between Russia and Ukraine, both nations have been secretive about the actual number of military casualties that they have suffered. Moscow only confirmed just over 6,000 military casualties but the West has had much higher estimates. The UK Defense Ministry in October tweeted in a regular update that Russia has "likely suffered 150,000 -190,000 permanent casualties." This number included troops that were killed and those that were permanently wounded, said the Associated Press. Related Article: Sergei Lavrov Spoke at a Security Meeting To Criticize NATO, West Before Walking Out @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Ambulance delays in the U.K. concern coroners since these could lead to unwanted patient deaths over the winter. Because of this, they decided to write "damning" warnings to the government. British coroners issued their warnings after multiple inquests into patient deaths following ambulance delays. They also unraveled the latest casesin Birminghamconnected to mental health bed shortages. UK: Ambulance Delays Concern Coroners According to The Guardian's latest report, three U.K. coroners sent PFD (prevention of future deaths) reports to Victoria Atkins, the health secretary. They released their PFD reports after six deaths linked to chronic problems, which present a continuing life-threatening risk to patients. Two of the coroners said that they were concerned that ambulance delays could make this worse as they are expected to happen again this winter. In the PFD reports, an emergency medicine consultant said that although ambulance response time was improved over the summer period, 15 to 20 ambulances were seen waiting outside the emergency department for the past few weeks. One of the PFD reports confirmed that three patients already died because of ambulance delays affecting SWASFT (South West Ambulance Service). Among the victims was said to have waited for eight hours before the needed ambulance arrived. In another worse case, a patient had to wait for 13 hours. Health officials and coroners said that these longer ambulance delays are concerning since ambulances are expected to arrive where patients are within 20 minutes. "It is for you and your department to take the action that is required to resolve the issues and to prevent future patients in the area from dying avoidable deaths," said coroner Andrew Cox in his PFD report sent to the health secretary. "It is not for me as coroner to make recommendations on how you do that and so I leave that to you," he added. Read Also: Ardent Health Services Breach Affects 30 Hospitals in Six US States-Forcing Patients to Find Other Medical Facilities Eight-Hour Ambulance Delay Blamed for Man's Death BBC reported that a man died after waiting for over eight hours just for an ambulance to arrive. He was identified as 50-year-old Christopher Hart; a resident in Woodbridge, Suffolk. Because of this, his family is now urging the British government to take action over ambulance delays to avoid unwanted deaths. Christopher's sister, Sheena Clements, said that losing a family member is one of the hardest things that anyone can experience. What's sadder about Hart's passing is that the cardiologist informed the victim's family that if he had the medical attention on time, he would have survived; with a 93% to 97% chance of survival. "All we want is for the government to take notice and do something about it," said Sheena. Related Article: UK Blames Pornography for Teens' Worsening Sexual Behaviors; Experts Reveal Alarming Details @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The 2023 UN COP28 (United Nations Climate Change Conference) is now focusing its discussions on climate change's contagious effects on human health. During the first two days of the international climate conference, which took place in Dubai, top leaders shared their concerns about the adverse health effects of climate change. One of the topics they talked about was the 7 million deaths globally linked to air pollution. They also discussed the spread of malaria, cholera, and other diseases because of the now-unpredictable weather system. The question is, why is the UN suddenly discussing the health effects of climate change? Here's what a top WHO official explained. 2023 UN COP28 Now Discussing Climate Change's Human Health Effects According to Local10's latest report, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus explained they are suddenly discussing the negative health effects of climate change. He said that it is the best time for the UN COP28 to hold its first Health Day, especially since the contagious health effects posed by climate change were immediate and present. "Although the climate crisis is a health crisis, it's well overdue that 27 COPs have been and gone without a serious discussion of health," said the top WHO official via the Associated Press. "Undoubtedly, health stands as the most compelling reason for taking climate action," he added. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry also said it took the United Nations long enough to finally make climate change's linkage to health issues its centerpiece discussion. He explained that the human body is similar to Earth since they are both ecosystems. Kerry further stated that if humans poison the water, land, and air, they are also poisoning their own bodies. Read Also: UAE Allegedly Planned To Push for Oil, Gas Deals During COP28 Summit, Leaked Documents Suggest COP28's Declaration Supported by Hundreds of Countries (Photo : Kevin Frayer/Getty Images) The declaration of the UN COP28 regarding climate change's linkage to health issues was backed by over 120 countries. However, the United Nations didn't clarify if it will make efforts to phase out fossil fuels. Instead, COP28 leaders said they would make drastic efforts to reduce the healthcare sector pollution, which accounts for 5% of global emissions. WHO's climate and health head, Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum said that the worsening high temperature across the globe is already putting great pressure on human bodies since it leads to higher rates of infectious disease. Related Article: COP28 Climate Summit: Millions in Donations Put Pressure on Wealthy Countries To Make Pledges @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Omid Scobie's book "Endgame" creates issues within the royal family. With that, King Charles has to prepare for crisis talks regarding the racism allegations he faces because of the controversial title. 42-year-old British journalist and writer Omid Scobie released his controversial book "Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy's Fight for Survival" on November 28. What he said in his book led to criticisms against King Charles and other members of the British Royal Family. Because of this, the British ruler needed to prepare for the public anger that Omid Scobie's book caused. Omid Scobie's 'Endgame' Book Puts King Charles on Spotlight According to The Daily Mail UK, King Charles and Catherine, Princess of Wales, allegedly made racist remarks regarding the skin color of the son of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Archie. This is what is stated in the Dutch edition of Omid Scobie's "Endgame" book. BBC News reported that the allegations were shared by Prince Harry and her wife, Meghan, during an interview with Oprah back in 2021. However, the context and circumstances of the rumored interview regarding their son's skin color are still unclear. As of writing, Harry and Meghan haven't released any public statement regarding the alleged comment of King Charles on their beloved baby's skin color. But, some sources who claim to be close to the Duchess of Sussex said that Meghan has no intention of making the names in the book public. They are insisting that the letters leaked to Omid Scobie didn't come from the side of Meghan. Since the issue involving King Charles, Meghan, and Prince Harry is a very serious topic, an anonymous source close to the British Royal Family said that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex should start speaking publicly about the racism allegations against the U.K. ruler. "For the couple that talked about 'death by a thousand no comments', the silence at this point is deafening," said the source. Read Also: Prince Harry Spotted in Windsor Castle Visiting Late Grandmother Elizabeth II's Grave Omid Scobie Denies Dropping Names Omid Scobie said that in the English version of his book, he only said that two people were involved and that he knew their identities. However, the author never mentioned their exact names because of legal reasons. But, in the Dutch version of "Endgame," titled "Eindstrijd," the two Royal Family members were identified: King Charles and Catherine. "All of this is frustrating because it feeds into something that couldn't be further from the truth. And also, quite frankly, I've always felt the names weren't needed to have this discussion," said Scobie. As of writing, Omid Scobie is accused of acting as a "mouthpiece" for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, which he strongly denies, saying that he isn't "Meg's pal." Related Article: Report: UK's King Charles Secretly Profited From Dead British Citizens' Money @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The United States Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on Monday regarding the legality of Purdue Pharma's roughly $6 billion bankruptcy settlement. The company is the maker of the powerful and highly addictive pain medication OxyContin which is said to have played a key role in the nation's opioid epidemic. If the court's justices allow the deal to proceed, it could result in billions of dollars being poured into addiction-treatment and other relief efforts. Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Settlement Additionally, the settlement would shield the Stamford, Connecticut-based pharmaceutical company's wealthy Sackler family owners from lawsuits brought by opioid victims. Purdue reached a bankruptcy settlement with creditors, including several state attorneys general, local governments, and the U.S. Justice Department's criminal and civil divisions in 2019. Under the agreement, the pharmaceutical company would transform into a non-profit and dedicate its assets to addressing the harms of opioid addiction across the United States. In 2021, a U.S. bankruptcy court approved the restructuring plan and it was revised the next year to include more money from the Sacklers, as per Yahoo Finance. The development came after the attorneys general of eight states and the District of Columbia successfully appealed the bankruptcy court approval. The modified agreement has support from all financial stakeholders in the case, including all state attorneys general. However, it is opposed by the Justice Department's bankruptcy watchdog and some individual opioid plaintiffs. The Sacklers would have to pay up to $6 billion to a trust that would be used to settle claims filed by states, hospitals, and people who had become addicted and others who have sued the pharmaceutical company in question. A group that comprised more than 60,000 people who have filed personal injury claims resulting from their exposure to Purdue opioid products told the Supreme Court that they were supporting the settlement. This includes the legal immunity for the Sackler family members. Read Also: FedEx Sued by Black Delivery Driver Billions of Dollars for Relief The Supreme Court hearing would assess whether or not the settlement violates federal law. The case is believed to have wide-ranging impacts on whether or not companies can continue to declare bankruptcy to dodge more severe financial consequences, according to Business Insider. The legal maneuver, which is officially referred to as third-party non-consensual releases, allows organizations to settle personal injury claims in bankruptcy court instead of civil court. The former can protect them from future litigation, which makes it the more cost-effective option for a firm that is trying to avoid paying for its accused wrongdoings and keep its options open. However, legal experts argue that companies are more often relying on bankruptcy court than civil court to settle claims. Opponents argued that the practice robs regular people of their day in civil court. Legal experts claim that the U.S. government had long questioned the validity of the practice, which raised the possibility that a sweeping decision in the case would upend similar agreements. A bankruptcy expert who teaches at Emory University School of Law, Lindsey Simon said that Purdue Pharma is just the case where they finally got the court to look at, said the New York Times. Related Article: [REPORT] Americans Supporting Death Penalty Now Waning @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke today to President Isaac Herzog of Israel on her flight to Washington, D.C., from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where the Vice President had several conversations with Arab leaders on the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The Vice President reiterated the strong U.S. support for Israel's right to self-defense and she and President Herzog discussed latest developments in Gaza. They spoke about the situation in the West Bank and the Vice President reiterated our concerns with steps that could escalate tensions, including extremist settler violence. READ ALSO: Readout of Meeting Between President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and President Joao Manuel Goncalves Lourenco of Angola Building on the Vice President's meetings in Dubai, the Vice President reiterated the importance of planning for the day after the fighting ends in Gaza, and she underscored our commitment to a two-state solution. The Vice President told President Herzog that, to follow-up on this conversation and her meetings in Dubai on day-after planning, her National Security Advisor, Dr. Phil Gordon, would travel to Israel and the West Bank this week for additional discussions. READ MORE: Statement from President Biden on the Passing of Henry Kissinger @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Venezuelan voters favored their country's referendum on Essequibo, rejecting the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) jurisdiction in the dispute with Guyana. The territorial dispute focuses on support for the creation of a new state in the potential oil-rich Essequibo region. This week, the court banned Venezuela from taking any action that would change the status quo in the area, which is the subject of an active case before the ICJ. Venezuela's Essequibo Referendum However, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government went aheadwith a five-question "consultative" referendum. Electoral authority president Elvis Amoroso said that all of the referendum's questions passed with more than 95% approval. He added that at least 10.5 million votes were cast for "yes" but did not confirm the number of voters in total. There are some political and security analysts who have called the referendum a show of strength by Maduro and a test of support for his government ahead of a planned 2024 presidential election, as per Reuters. In April, the ICJ said that it had jurisdiction though a final ruling on the matter could come several years in the future. Venezuela has argued that the issue should be resolved by the two countries themselves. In a statement, Maduro cheered the "total success" of the vote late on Sunday. He told a cheering crowd that the Venezuelan population has spoken loudly and clearly regarding the issue. The Essequibo region, which is at the heart of the case, is a 160,000 square kilometer area that is mostly thick jungle, Venezuela has reactivated its claim over the territory in the past few years after finding out that there is offshore oil and gas in the region. The South American country has long argued that the Essequibo region was stolen when the border was drawn more than a century ago. However, Guyana considers the referendum a step toward annexation, and the vote has its residents on edge, according to the Associated Press. Read Also: Jewish Canadians Celebrate Hanukkah to Bring People Together Amid Rise in Antisemitism The ICJ's Jurisdiction Throughout the voting process on Sunday, long lines typical of electoral events did not form outside voting centers in Caracas. Instead, before the 12-hour voting session was scheduled to end, Amoroso announced that polls would remain open for two additional hours because of what he described as "massive participation." With the "yet" vote count at 10.5 million, it meant that more people voted for the referendum than they did for Hugo Chavez, Maduro's mentor and predecessor, when he was re-elected in the 2012 presidential race. However, activity at voting centers on Sunday in the capital paled in comparison with the hours-long lines that were seen formed outside of centers during the presidential primary that was held by a faction of the opposition in October. This was done without the assistance of the National Electoral Council. Despite the vote on the referendum, its legal and practical implications remain unclear. However, the president of the ICJ, Joan E. Donoghue said that statements from Venezuela's government suggested that it was already taking steps with a view toward acquiring control over and administering the territory in question, said The Guardian. Related Article: Narendra Modi Boosts Reputation as Ruling Nationalist BJP Sweeps Polls in 3 Indian States @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Google quietly pushed back the release of its Gemini AI model to next year amid reports of supposed language-related issues. The tech giant's GPT-4 competitor was initially supposed to come out before the end of the year after it was teased at I/O 2023. At the time, Google touted Gemini AI as a foundational model with "impressive multimodal capabilities." Google Delays Release of Gemini AI The company did not publicly announce the initial release date but pushed it back after reports that Gemini AI was struggling with non-English queries. The issue prompted CEO Sundar Pichai to delay the live release of the artificial intelligence model. Gemini AI was intended to be able to handle a broad range of applications, putting together different types of data such as images and text for more advanced tasks. Google said in May that once the model is fine-tuned and rigorously tested for safety, it would be available in various sizes and capabilities. The model is expected to bring improvements to the tech giant's existing AI and AI-enhanced products. These include Bard AI, Google Assistant, and Search. However, due to the significance of this release and the dominance of rival OpenAI, it seems that Google is not going to rush Gemini AI into the public, as per Engadget. The delay in Gemini AI's release comes as OpenAI is pushing the launch of its GPT Store to early 2024. The company first introduced its GPT Builder tool in early November during its first developer conference. It gave subscribers an easy way to make their own custom AI bots. At the time of the announcement, OpenAI added that it would soon release the GPT Store for users to list their reactions and potentially make money from them. This was also initially slated for a November release. However, due to the surprise ouster of OpenAI's since-reinstated CEO Sam Altman, the month's plan did not follow the schedule. In an email on Friday that was sent to GPT Builder users, OpenAI said that they are now planning to launch the GPT Store early next year. Read Also: Google Celebrates 1 Billion RCS Users, Unveils New Features for Messages Competition in the Generative AI Market While Gemini AI has yet to be released to the public, it has been said to strongly outperform GPT-4 from OpenAI. This is because it harnesses a lot more computing power than its artificial intelligence competitor, according to Business Insider. In a statement, Google's Vice President and manager of Bard and Google Assistant, Sissie Hsiao said that she has seen some pretty amazing things regarding Gemini AI. She added that when she tried to bake a cake, the model drew three pictures of the steps on how to ice a three-layer cake. The delay of the artificial intelligence model's release comes a few months after the tech giant combined its Brain and DeepMind AI labs to create a new research known as Google DeepMind. As researchers anticipate the generative AI market to be worth roughly $1.3 trillion by 2032, it is clear that Google is going far and beyond to invest in the space to maintain its position as a leader in AI development, said Techopedia. Related Article: Apple, Paramount Reportedly in Merger Talks for Discounted Streaming Bundle @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. A terrorist attack in Marawi (the Islamic City of Marawi) targeted a Catholic mass, which was conducted by the Mindanao State University on Sunday, Dec. 3. Local authorities said that terrorists bombed an MSU gymnasium in the Province of Lanao del Sur; the bombing attack has been claimed by ISIS (The Islamic State) terrorists. As of writing, the Philippine National Police said that it is actively working with the Marawi City Police Station, the Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction Management Office of Marawi, and the Task Force Marawi to conduct further investigation. Marawi Terrorist Bombing of MSU Catholic Mass Condemned by US According to Yahoo News' latest report, the latest terrorist bombing in Marawi also saddened the United States. The American government condemned the deadly attack through the U.S. Department of State. "The United States condemns in the strongest terms the horrific terrorist attack that occurred today during a Catholic service being held at Mindanao State University in Marawi, the Philippines," said the U.S. State Department via its official press statement. "We mourn those killed in the attack, and our thoughts are with the injured," the department added. The U.S. government confirmed that it is already in close contact with its Philippine partners, promising that it will stand with Filipinos to reject this kind of violent act. Aside from the U.S. government, Pope Francis was also saddened by the Marawi bombing incident. In a telegram message sent to Marawi Bishop Edwin dela Pena, the supreme pontiff said that he's praying that all might turn from violence and overcome evil with good. Read Also: Ukraine Investigates Ukrainian POW Execution Allegations Against Russia; Victims Reportedly Unarmed When Killed Marawi Bombing Kills 4, Injures Over 40 PNP officials said that the bombing, which happened at 7:00 a.m. local time on Dec. 3, killed four individuals and injured over 40 other people. They said that medical attention was immediately provided to dead victims' families and those who suffered serious injuries. As the investigation continues, authorities asked the public to stop spreading unverified information regarding the terrorist attack. The PNP is asking for the cooperation of Filipinos nationwide so that their investigation will not be hindered by misinformation. The law enforcement department thanked those who made efforts to share relevant and verified details that can contribute to the resolution of the MSU gymnasium bombing. The Philippine National Police promised that they would prioritize the safety and security of citizens as they try to attain justice. Related Article: Philippines: At Least 4 Dead in Explosion During Catholic Mass in Marawi @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Bonneville County Sheriff's Office arrested Jeremy Albert Best, an Idaho man, after killing his wife, Kali Jean Randall, and kidnapping his 10-month-old, Zeke Best, infant son on Saturday. Later on, the body of 10-month-old Best was discovered after a group of hunters called 911 to report seeing a man in a sleeping bag on the side of the road. Police Arrested Best The Teton County Sheriff's Office received a 911 call from the Best residence at Skyline Loop in Victor. The caller heard arguing and sent police to the house. The police immediately identified the body of the woman as Randall as soon they arrived at the house. After locating Randall, the police issued an Amber Alert, referring to Best as an armed and very dangerous homicide and kidnapping suspect on Friday. On November 30, the police responded to a disturbance call at the Swan Valley General Store about a man who was nude and walking around the store. Best was evaluated by emergency medical service on scene and transported to Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center by ambulance for further medical and mental health concerns. "Best was secured and placed in a patrol car until Idaho Falls Ambulance personnel arrived to treat him for any injuries," the police said. According to the police, the witness of a group of hunters reported Best naked and making odd statements. During the time of the call, Best was a suspect in the murder of his wife and the kidnapping of his son, which triggered an Amber Alert for the 10-month-old. The hospital reported to the media that Best was discharged that afternoon. Best went home to kill his wife and kidnap his son after a few hours of leaving the hospital. The police reported that Zeke was found dead at the scene but did not disclose where Zeke's body was discovered or identify his cause of death. They also discovered Best's black Chevy SUV down an embankment off the roadway near Zeke. Bonneville County Detectives, Idaho State Police, and the TCSO continued the investigation with assistance from the Idaho Falls Police Detectives and FBI. Best was transported to the Bonneville County Jail and booked for the outstanding homicide warrant in Teton County after a medical clearance and will remain in custody until his arraignment. Read Also: What Filipino Couple Kathniel's Breakup Means to the Filipino Showbiz Industry Idaho Kidnapping Law According to Idaho code 18-4501, kidnapping is defined as seizing, confining, inveigling, abducting or kidnapping a person or detaining a child under 16 years, by force or fraud to obtain money, property, or reward or any other thing of value for the return of such person. Idaho laws classify kidnapping into two categories: first-degree and second-degree. The first-degree kidnapping intends to kidnap a person to obtain money, commit rape, serious bodily injury upon the person abducted, and any lewd and lascivious act upon any child under the age of sixteen. The second-degree kidnapping does not have any ransom. Related Article: New York City Police Fatally Shoot Man Suspected of Stabbing to Death 4 People @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Indonesia's Marapi volcano erupted on Sunday, sending tons of ash into the sky as high as 3,000 meters and resulting in the death of scores of people across the region. The country's disaster management agency BNPB said that the 2,891-meter-high volcano erupted at around 2:54 p.m. local time. It released volcanic ash at high intensity to nearby districts. Photographs released by the BNPB showed vehicles and roads being covered with the white powdery residue. Indonesia's Marapi Volcanic Eruption Officials have been forced to prohibit residents and visitors from carrying out any activities within three kilometers of the crater. They have also set the second-highest alert level for Marapi Mountain to notify people of the dangers that the area poses. In a statement, an official at BPBD's local disaster management unit, Ade Setiawan said that they have already distributed masks to residents. They encourage people to wear facial coverings and stay within their houses to avoid potential threats to their health, as per CNN. The volcanic eruption comes as the country sits on the Pacific's so-called "Ring of Fire" and has 127 active volcanoes. An official with Indonesia's Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation Center at the Marapi monitoring post, Ahmad Rifandi said that there were no immediate reports of casualties. There are two routes for climbers that were closed following the volcanic eruption and villagers who were living on the slopes of the mountain were advised to stay roughly 1.8 miles from the mouth of the crater because of potential lava. Roughly 70 climbers made their way up the nearly 9,480-foot mountain on Saturday and were reportedly left stranded. The acting head of North Sumatra's conservation agency, Dian Indriati said that so far, 28 have been successfully evacuated while the others were still waiting for rescue. On social media, a video showed the climbers being evacuated to a shelter with their faces and hair smeared with volcanic dust and rain. In a statement, National Disaster Management Agency spokesperson Abdul Muhari said that many villages were covered with falling ash that blocked out the sun, according to USA Today. Read Also: Narendra Modi Boosts Reputation as Ruling Nationalist BJP Sweeps Polls in 3 Indian States Rescuing Stranded Climbers Muhari noted that officials were closely monitoring the volcano after sensors picked up rising activity in the past few weeks. Since January, Marapi has been active following an eruption that caused multiple casualties. While initial reports made no mention of casualties, authorities later discovered that the bodies of 11 climbers were found. A rescue official noted that three people were found alive on the volcano and at least 12 other climbers were still missing. Rescue operations were temporarily delayed due to safety concerns due to a small eruption on Monday. A spokesperson for the search and rescue team, Jodi Haryawan said that it was too dangerous to continue given the situation. The head of Padang Search and Rescue Agency, Abdul Malik said that there were 26 people who were not evacuated. Officials noted that among the rescued individuals, eight were taken to a hospital with burns and one had a broken limb, said The Guardian. Related Article: Venezuelan Voters Reject ICJ Jurisdiction, Approve Essequibo Referendum in Dispute With Guyana @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Japan's bear attacks are alarmingly increasing this 2023. Experts warned that encounters between humans and bears could happen more often than expected; warning citizens to stay vigilant. Japanese authorities said that they are struggling to address the rising interactions between citizens and carnivoran mammals since many of them are starting to leave their natural habitats. As of writing, Japan's environment ministry said that they already recorded over 200 bear attacks in the past eight months since April; 30 of these animal attacks happened in November alone. Japan Bear Attacks Alarmingly Increase Due to Hibernation Delays The Guardian reported that this is the first time that bear attacks in Japan exceeded the 200 record. Unfortunately, six of the victims died; one of them was a fisherman (angler) whose remains were found close to a 1.5-meter-tall bear in the northernmost prefecture of Hokkaido. The clawed animal was shot dead. After that, authorities conducted DNA testing and confirmed that the human body parts belonged to the missing angler. Local authorities said that the bear attacks are increasing because many of these mammals are experiencing hibernation delays, which is mainly caused by hunger. They added that bears are leaving their natural habitats in search of food. Usually, bears in Japan will hibernate from late November until the spring every year. Sadly, because of food scarcity, bears and other hibernating animals are expected to continue to forage. Teruki Oka, a forestry expert, said that some bears also hibernate earlier than November. However, because their energy is not enough to last until April, they usually wander around finding food. "They are hungry and agitated in the winter due to the lack of prey animals," said Prof. Hiromi Taguchi from Tohoku University of Art and Design. He warned that bears who developed a fondness for meat, such as the infamous OSO18, which attacked over 60 cows, could be menacing. Read Also: Woman Dead Over Suspected Bear Attack Near Yellowstone Park What To Do In Case of Bear Attack It is indeed sad to know that bears only leave their habitats because they don't have enough food. However, it is still important to know the things you should do in case you encounter an attacking bear. The National Park Service said that bears will show different kinds of behaviors during certain situations. Some will run away from people while others will try to attack humans; leading to a deadly encounter. Usually, bears will do their "bluff charges"; the survival technique they use when encountering potential threats or when they're in distress. During bluff charges, NEVER look away from the bear. Instead, back away slowly while waving your hands above your head. If ever the bear's bluff charge leads to a direct contact, do the following: Black Bears: Don't play dead. Instead, fight back with everything you have; punch and kick it, throw rocks at it, and use your bear spray to defend yourself. Brown Bears (Grizzlies): NEVER try to fight back. Playing dead is your best option, but always cover your head and neck with your arms while lying flat on your stomach. Related Article: Canadian Bear Attack: Aggressive Grizzly Kills Couple, Prompting Officials To Euthanize Animal @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Alaska Airlines has announced a significant move in the airline industry by acquiring Hawaiian Airlines for $1.9 billion. This strategic acquisition aims to expand Alaska Airlines' reach, positioning it as the fifth-largest airline in the United States. However, the deal may face scrutiny from the Biden administration and regulators, as per USA Today. Alaska Airlines Buys Hawaiian Airlines, Expands Network Under the terms of the agreement, both Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines will maintain their respective brands while integrating into a single operating platform. This integration is expected to provide passengers with increased access to a broader range of flights and destinations, spanning across the Americas, Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific. Alaska Airlines will pay $18 in cash for each share of Hawaiian Airlines, with the latter's stock closing at $4.86 on Friday. Additionally, the deal encompasses assuming $900 million in Hawaiian Airlines debt, resulting in a total acquisition value of $1.9 billion. The combined airline will be headquartered in Seattle, with Ben Minicucci, CEO of Alaska Airlines, leading the new entity. The companies anticipate that the acquisition will contribute to profits within two years of closing. Furthermore, the merged airline will join the OneWorld alliance, aligning itself with major carriers such as American Airlines, British Airways, and Cathay Pacific. While Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines are smaller than dominant carriers in the US, they believe their merger will create a synergistic network, offering enhanced connectivity to 138 destinations for passengers traveling between the continental US and the Pacific region. This includes non-stop service to 29 international destinations in the Americas, Asia, Australia, and the South Pacific. Hawaiian Airlines holds a deep-rooted history within the Hawaiian islands, dating back to its incorporation in 1929 as Inter-Island Airways. Both companies have committed to retaining Honolulu as a key hub and are dedicated to preserving and expanding their union-represented workforce in Hawaii. The merger is expected to triple the number of destinations accessible within one stop in North America for travelers originating in Hawaii, according to The Guardian. Read Also: Ukraine's NATO Membership Being Finalized, But Recommendations for Kyiv's Needed Reforms Still Under Discussion Alaska-Hawaiian Merger Faces Regulatory Hurdles The acquisition has received approval from the boards of both Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines. However, it still requires the consent of Hawaiian Holdings shareholders and regulatory approval from US authorities, including the Department of Justice, which has been cautious about further airline consolidation due to concerns about potential fare increases. This move comes as the Biden administration is already seeking to block JetBlue's proposed $3.8 billion acquisition of Spirit Airlines, a deal involving the largest budget carrier in the nation. The Justice Department recently succeeded in preventing a partnership between JetBlue and American Airlines. The average domestic airline fare out of Seattle during the spring has risen significantly in recent years, reaching $409.93, up from $293.08 two years prior. A similar trend is observed in Honolulu, where the average domestic fare during the spring increased to $367.94, up from $329.93 two years earlier. The Alaska-Hawaiian merger could potentially raise questions about competition, particularly concerning flights between Hawaii and the US mainland. However, the airlines' limited route overlap and their non-ultra-low fare model may mitigate regulatory concerns. As the airlines proceed with their merger plans, collaboration with their unions will be a key aspect of streamlining operations. Both companies have already engaged with collective bargaining leaders, and the Air Line Pilots Association is evaluating the proposal while awaiting further details. This acquisition marks a significant development in the airline industry, with Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines aiming to create a more robust and competitive entity while navigating regulatory challenges, The Associated Press reported. Related Article: Meta Intentionally Designs Platforms To Pursue Millions of Underage Users To Sign Up, Court Document Claims @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Representative James Comer, who serves as the chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, has suggested that the possibility of impeaching President Joe Biden is growing more likely. This revelation comes after House Republicans reportedly engaged with their constituents at Walmart during the Thanksgiving holiday, where concerns regarding the President's actions were voiced, as per to Newsweek. Impeachment Looms as GOP Investigates Biden's Son The ongoing investigation by the GOP has focused on allegations of President Biden's involvement in his son Hunter Biden's business dealings with China and Ukraine during his tenure as Vice President under the Obama administration. These allegations include claims of improper intervention and receiving bribes. It is important to note that these allegations have been strongly denied by both the White House and Hunter Biden's legal representatives. Democrats, in turn, have criticized the impeachment inquiries for failing to uncover substantial evidence against the President. On Saturday, US House Speaker Mike Johnson hinted at the likelihood of Republicans taking steps towards a formal impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden. "I think it's something we have to do at this juncture," Johnson stated during an appearance on Fox and Friends Weekend. The Republican Party has spent several months investigating the President and his son's business dealings, with the hope of finding any wrongdoing that could serve as grounds for impeachment. However, the full House has not yet voted to formally authorize an impeachment inquiry, as some Republicans have expressed reservations about the sufficiency of evidence to justify such action. The White House has consistently rebuffed GOP efforts to compel the release of information, citing a 2020 opinion from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel pointed out the importance of a complete House resolution as a prerequisite for a House committee to request documents or conduct interviews. Mike Johnson and GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik expressed confidence in having enough votes to authorize an inquiry and highlighted its importance in obtaining information from the White House. Johnson stated, "We are the rule-of-law team. We have to do it very methodically," according to The Guardian. Read Also: Ukrainian President Says They're Entering New War Phase While Getting Unsatisfying Results Lack of Evidence in Impeachment Probe Raises Concerns Despite the investigation's duration, it has not yielded substantial evidence to support impeachment. Several expert witnesses called by Republicans during a September hearing stated that they did not believe there was enough evidence to justify such a move. Meanwhile, Florida Governor and potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has cautioned House Republicans about the ongoing impeachment inquiry into President Biden. While he considers the probe "justifiable," DeSantis expressed concern that GOP lawmakers risk getting distracted from addressing other pressing issues facing Americans, such as immigration and the economy. DeSantis noted that Republican voters, particularly in states like Iowa, are more concerned about issues like border security and the state of the economy than the allegations against President Biden and his family's financial dealings. House Republicans initiated the impeachment inquiry in September, alleging President Biden benefited financially from his family's overseas business affairs. However, the inquiry has yet to produce direct evidence implicating the President in any foreign improprieties. In a recent closed-door meeting, House Republican leadership and committee chairs leading the investigation discussed the ongoing inquiry and indicated their intention to seek a formal vote to authorize the probe in the coming weeks. It's important to note that this proceeding is currently only an impeachment inquiry and not a full-scale impeachment effort. Governor DeSantis concluded by urging House Republicans to balance their focus on the impeachment inquiry with their responsibilities on other critical issues, reminding them not to use it as a distraction from addressing the pressing concerns of American citizens, USA Today reported. Related Article: NATO: Russia's 300,000 Soldier Casualties in Ukraine Not Enough to End Invasion-Here's What Top Official Explains @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The US intelligence community did not have prior knowledge of Hamas' plan to attack Israel, according to National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby. This statement comes in response to a report by The New York Times that Israeli officials had obtained the attack plans over a year before the Oct. 7 incident occurred, as per to Politico. Biden Administration Reacts to Intel Gap in Hamas Attack Plans Kirby, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," stated that the intelligence community had indicated that they did not have access to the document. He also mentioned that there was no indication that Israel had shared the attack plans with the United States. A senior White House official sought to distance the Biden administration from any potential political fallout resulting from the revelation that Israeli intelligence agencies had discovered Hamas' plans but dismissed them as implausible. Kirby stated that US intelligence agencies had determined that they had not received or had any knowledge of the attack plans detailed in the document. Regarding the coordination between US and Israeli intelligence officials, Kirby mentioned that intelligence analysis can sometimes have missing pieces, and in this case, the US intelligence community had no advance warning of the attack plans. Kirby agreed with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's assertion that an investigation into the matter could wait until after the war with Hamas. The Israeli military's efforts against Hamas have resulted in a significant number of casualties, with thousands of Palestinian civilians, including children, losing their lives. The Biden administration's support for Israel's actions in the conflict has attracted both praise and criticism. Conservatives and older Democrats commend President Biden for standing beside a close ally, while younger generations criticize his apparent appeasement of a right-wing Israeli government and call for a permanent ceasefire to prevent further civilian deaths, according to Independent, according to Independent. Read Also: NATO: Russia's 300,000 Soldier Casualties in Ukraine Not Enough to End Invasion-Here's What Top Official Explains US Assists Israel in Hamas Intelligence Gaps Given the revelation that Israeli intelligence failed to detect the attack plans, the US is now reportedly assisting Israel in identifying gaps in information gathering. House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Turner stated that the US is working closely with Israeli intelligence to address these gaps. The New York Times report indicated that Israeli officials had known about Hamas' plan for over a year but dismissed it as too ambitious to carry out. However, the attack plans were followed with chilling precision and resulted in the deaths of approximately 1,200 people. The revelation raises questions about how Hamas obtains sensitive information about Israel's military forces and communication hubs. It also raises concerns about leaks within Israeli intelligence. Within the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, there is a growing call for the United States to address deficiencies in intelligence gathering and take measures to avert future attacks.Within the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, there is a growing call for the United States to address deficiencies in intelligence gathering and take measures to avert future attacks. As the situation continues to unfold, it remains to be seen how the Biden administration will address the criticism and work towards a resolution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The support for Israel's actions and the handling of the war have had an impact on the president's popularity among key demographics, with polls indicating a decline in enthusiasm and support, Mail Online reported. Related Article: Vladimir Putin Orders Additional 170K Military Troops To Bring Total Number to 1.32 Million @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Arab and Muslim American leaders, who recently had a meeting with President Joe Biden, are now encountering criticism from members within their own communities. The meeting, aimed at bridging relations with pro-Palestinian groups during the Israeli-Hamas conflict, has been met with skepticism and anger, as per The Messenger. Muslim-American Voters 'Alianated' Attendees of the meeting, including prominent figures such as Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Emgage CEO Wa'el Alzayat, described the gathering as intense and emotional. They shared personal stories of the devastating impact the war between Hamas and Israel had on their families. This criticism towards Arab and Muslim American leaders highlights the challenges that the Democratic Party faces in maintaining the support of key constituencies. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, warned that mishandling the conflict in Gaza not only risks alienating Muslim voters, a crucial part of Biden's voting coalition but also damages relationships with majority-Muslim countries in the Middle East. Jayapal emphasized the urgent need for Democrats to address these vulnerabilities within their coalition. Public opinion polls show a growing disapproval of the Biden administration's handling of the Israeli-Hamas conflict, particularly among younger voters, women, and nonwhite voters. Activists on social media have rallied behind calls for the president to pressure Israel and Hamas into reaching a permanent ceasefire, driven by the shocking images and reports of human suffering emerging from Gaza. The potential consequences for President Biden, who is expected to run for re-election in 2024, are concerning. He will need to rebuild his 2020 coalition to secure victory against a likely Republican opponent, possibly former President Donald Trump, according to Independent. Read Also: Israel Makes 400 Strikes vs. Hamas 48 Hours After End of Truce Biden's Support Dwindles Amid Concerns The president's support has already diminished due to concerns about his age and ability to carry out the duties of his office. His current trailing status in several battleground states, including Michigan, with its significant Muslim voter community, signals the need for caution and strategic action. While the White House has asserted its efforts to minimize civilian casualties and damage in Gaza, concerns persist over potential reputational damage to the United States on a global scale. Jayapal echoed these concerns and called for a coalition involving the United States, Israel, and Arab countries to work towards a long-term peace solution. Jayapal's statements come in the wake of a new anti-Biden campaign, #AbandonBiden, initiated by a coalition of Muslim leaders from key swing states ahead of the 2024 presidential election.The campaign has gained traction as Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a close ally of Jayapal, has publicly criticized Biden, accusing him of being complicit in war crimes. In response to criticism regarding the handling of the conflict, Jayapal acknowledged the urgency of addressing humanitarian concerns while condemning Hamas's actions. She emphasized the need for balance when considering the plight of Palestinians and called for justice in a comprehensive and even-handed manner. As the Israeli-Hamas conflict continues, the Biden administration faces an uphill battle to maintain support among crucial voter groups. The outcome of this internal struggle will ultimately shape President Biden's chances of securing re-election and potentially impacting the United States' global reputation, Washington Examiner reported. Related Article: US Navy, Commercial Boats Targeted in Red Sea: Reports @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. An authority in the area reports that floods in northern Tanzania have triggered landslides that have resulted in at least 47 deaths and 85 injuries, with concerns that the number might climb. This calamity struck the town of Katesh, located about 300 kilometers north of the capital, Dodoma, as reported by district commissioner Janeth Mayanja. Queen Sendiga, the regional commissioner in the Manyara area, confirmed these numbers, cautioning that the death toll might rise further, as per Al Jazeera. Tanzania Hit by Tragic Landslides and Flooding The landslides, which occurred near Mount Hanang's slopes, were caused by heavy rains that lashed the town on Saturday. The deluge not only claimed lives but also led to significant infrastructural damage. Many roads were rendered impassable, blocked by mudslides and debris such as dislodged trees and stones. The flooding swept away livestock, a crucial source of livelihood for many in the region, adding to the community's woes. Tanzania's President, Samia Suluhu Hassan, who was attending the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, expressed her condolences. She emphasized the deployment of increased government efforts for rescue operations. The president's statement, issued online by the Tanzanian Ministry of Health, reflected the government's commitment to addressing this crisis. The Tanzanian Meteorological Agency has issued warnings of continued heavy rains. This situation is particularly alarming given East Africa's recent transition from an unprecedented drought to weeks of torrential rains and flooding. This shift in weather patterns is attributed to the El Nino phenomenon, a natural weather pattern known for causing global climatic disruptions. El Nino is characterized by increased global temperatures, leading to droughts in some regions and excessive rainfall in others, according to The Guardian. Read Also: Italian Mafia 'Maxi Trial:' More Than 200 Convicted of Being Part of 'Ndrangheta Crime Group Climate Change Fuels Extreme Weather in East Africa The impact of climate change is evident in the increasing intensity and frequency of such extreme weather events. This year's El Nino cycle is expected to have its worst effects towards the end of 2023 and into the following year. The last significant El Nino event in 1997-1998 led to over 6,000 deaths in East Africa due to flooding. This latest disaster in Tanzania adds to the growing list of climate-related calamities in the region. In May, Rwanda experienced similar catastrophic floods and landslides, resulting in the loss of at least 130 lives. Across East Africa, the ongoing downpours have displaced over a million people in Somalia and caused extensive damage to property and agriculture in Tanzania. The situation has prompted African leaders to advocate for new global taxes and reforms in international financial institutions. These measures are aimed at funding action against the climate crisis, reflecting the urgent need for global cooperation in addressing these challenges. Images broadcast on state television TBC depicted the severe impact of the floods, with numerous homes submerged and vehicles stranded in thick mud. The catastrophe has not only led to a humanitarian crisis but also poses a severe challenge to the region's infrastructure and economy. As rescue and relief efforts continue, the international community's focus is drawn to the broader implications of climate change and the urgent need for concerted efforts to mitigate its effects. The tragedy in Tanzania serves as a stark reminder of the vulnerability of communities to environmental changes and the necessity of proactive measures to safeguard both human lives and ecosystems, Mail Online reported. Related Article: Finland Accuses Russia of 'Instrumentalization of Immigrants' @ 2024 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. African leaders launch green industrialization initiative at COP28 Xinhua) 11:27, December 04, 2023 DUBAI, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan President William Ruto on Saturday convened African leaders here at the ongoing COP28 talks to accelerate Africa's green industrialization. At an event attended by leaders of Angola, Burundi, Djibouti, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal and Zambia as well as COP28 President Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the Africa Green Industrialization Initiative was launched. The initiative aims to accelerate and scale green industries and businesses across Africa, promote climate mitigation and adaptation, and stimulate economic green growth on the continent. In his remarks, Ruto said that "the initiative marks a concrete step toward the realization of the Nairobi Declaration, activating private sector-led scaling-up of green industrial clusters." African leaders embraced the initiative as the pathway for their nations' development. They also discussed plans to activate end-to-end socioeconomic transformation through the rapid growth of green industrial clusters, the strong role of regional and global export markets for value-added green products and technologies, crucial for global clean energy value chain. Attendees at the event also stressed that Africa's green industrialization was critical for the achievement of the world's collective climate ambitions. Leaders or senior representatives from over 100 countries are gathering here on Friday and Saturday for the World Climate Action Summit, which is being held during the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP28. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) Anticipated to open in early 2024, citizenM will add to its growing US portfolio with the opening of the brand's very first hotel in Austin. Developed in partnership with Turnbridge Equities, the 17-story tower will house a 344-room hotel featuring citizenM's signature interior design by Amsterdam-based concrete, longtime design partner of the brand. The hotel interiors will draw inspiration from the local community, filled with an eclectic mix of contemporary art and objects by local artists. citizenM Austin Downtown will also feature a rooftop pool and bar area, with design by commissioned artist PONI (Hilda Palafox), plus an exterior art piece by Calhan Hale, designed to encapsulate the ever-present existence of city and nature in the area. Austin has been on citizenM's radar for years as an exciting cultural centre and influential tech and business hub, and marks the brand's commitment to be present in markets where its customers are. 344 rooms 24/7 canteenM Gym Rooftop pool and bar Rooftop mural design by commissioned artist PONI (Hilda Palafox) Design architect: concrete Amsterdam Local architect: Baskervill General contractor: Gilbane Developer: Turnbridge Equities and citizenM address: citizenM Austin Downtown, 617 Colorado St, Austin, Texas Elite Havens, Asias premier luxury villa rental company, has expanded its curated selection of more than 300 private luxury villas and chalets across Asias most awe-inspiring locations by introducing 32 stunning new properties in Goa, India. Signed in collaboration with Indias leading luxury vacation home rental company, Lohono Stays by Isprava, the new properties each feature a pool and expansive living spaces with restored heritage furniture, offering exclusivity, privacy, and the warm hospitality India is renowned for. Lauded for its long coastline, lush countryside, vibrant culture, and laid-back lifestyle, Goa beckons discerning travellers seeking exceptional experiences. With a dedicated team committed to crafting immersive local experiences, Elite Havens seamlessly links guests with an array of must-do activities from the exploration of historic cathedrals and ancient forts to delighting in the rich flavours of local delicacies and meandering through fragrant spice plantations. Goas charm as a holiday destination lies in its accessibility and its capacity to cater to diverse tastes and preferences, making it a destination of choice for those seeking a tantalising food scene, cultural fusion, and a climate that promises a diverse and enriching experience. We are delighted to continue our thriving collaboration with Lohono Stays to offer discerning travellers access to Goas most exceptional holiday homes, ensuring they can experience the many wonders of this beautiful destination in the utmost comfort and convenience. Ms Maya Rigg, Chief Executive Officer of Elite Havens Each villa in the collection was thoughtfully curated by Ms Rigg together with Elite Havens Cluster Manager for Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka, Mr Alan Porteous. On the new additions, Mr Porteous said, These exclusive villas represent the pinnacle of comfort and sophistication, each a masterpiece of architectural design and elegance. From the moment you step into Villa Athena, a two-storey contemporary masterpiece, Estate de Alta Palmiera, offering lakehouse living, or Glasshouse on the Bay, a one-of-a-kind home built right on the edge of the water, you are enveloped in opulence and refinement that mirrors the grandeur of Goas cultural heritage. Each property in the collection has something special to offer discerning visitors. Mumbai serves as the major international entry point to India for Elite Havens core guest markets, including UK and Middle Eastern guests. Upon arriving in Mumbai, guests can take a brief domestic flight to reach the vibrant shores of Goa. Elite Havens commitment to exceptional service includes offering comprehensive information to guests to help plan their journey, including booking private transfers and ongoing transportation throughout the stay. In a country known for its vibrant colours and warm hospitality, we invite everyone to explore the remarkable contrasts that make India truly unique, and we have everything in place to ensure visitors can see India in a different light, said Ms Rigg. Goa is the perfect addition to our portfolio, and we are delighted to give travellers the opportunity to experience elite luxury in this tropical paradise. For more information about the new properties, please visit elitehavens.com/india-private-villas. Elite Havens article about the nine best things to see and do in Goa is available here. About Dusit International Established in 1948, Dusit International or Dusit Thani Public Company Limited (DUSIT) is a leading hospitality group listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand. Its operations comprise five distinct yet complementary business units: hotels and resorts, hospitality education, food, property development, and hospitality-related services. The group's portfolio of hotels, resorts and luxury villas includes approximately 300 properties operating under a total of eight brands (Devarana Dusit Retreats, Dusit Thani, Dusit Suites, Dusit Collection, dusitD2, Dusit Princess, ASAI Hotels, and Elite Havens) across 19 countries worldwide. The group also operates culinary schools and hospitality colleges in Thailand, plus catering companies for the education sector in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Dusit International's diversified investments in real estate development, hospitality-related services, and the food sector are part of its long-term strategy for sustainable growth, which focuses on three key areas: balance, expansion, and diversification. For more information, please visit dusit-international.com. Sureerat Sudpairak Corporate Manager Public Relations +66 (0) 2200 9999 ext. 3321 Dusit In this episode, host Simone Puorto sits down with Vincent Somsen, a seasoned Hospitality and Travel Tech Advisor at GAIN, with a particular focus on Web3 technologies. Born into a family of hoteliers, Vincent brings a wealth of personal experience and insight into the everyday challenges faced by owners and managers in the hospitality sector. His extensive career has seen him work with numerous esteemed hospitality organizations both in the Netherlands and the United States, including prestigious brands like Waldorf Astoria and W Hotels. Vincent is a staunch advocate for Web3 technologies, viewing them as a pivotal solution to a range of industry issues such as increasing intermediary influence, low customer loyalty, the commoditization of services, diminishing customer trust, and the risk of brand hijacking. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in understanding the transformative potential of Web3 in travel and hospitality, directly from a seasoned professional with deep roots in the industry. Dont miss out on the invaluable insights and personal experiences that Vincent has to share! Vincent Somsen:https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincent-somsen/ Hospitality Net is the go-to global website for the international hospitality community, acting as a neutral broker and dependable publisher of hospitality and travel business news. It provides industry stakeholders with a unique platform to increase visibility and engagement through a one-of-a-kind membership business model unparalleled in industry publishing. Always forward-thinking, Hospitality Net has organized the first Web3 and Travel event in the Metaverse (Polybius) and published "The Definitive Web3 Glossary: Unlocking the Future of the Internet", a crucial resource available for purchase here. Hospitality Net is committed to nurturing knowledge and connectivity, housing the largest community for hospitality professionals to gather, collaborate, and discuss industry trends and developments. Hotel Andra Seattle Joins MGallery Hotel Collection Accor today announced that Hotel Andra Seattle has joined the Group's global portfolio as the newest addition to the MGallery Hotel Collection. Located in Seattle's bustling Central Business District, the hotel rises 10 stories high and offers 123 stylish guestrooms and suites, providing a sophisticated urban escape with a Scandinavian soul in a downtown area thriving with food, music, art and history. Just off the heels of a $12 million property-wide renovation, Hotel Andra Seattle MGallery will maintain the refined Nordic design and first-class offerings for which the property is known. Since its debut in 2008, the MGallery Hotel Collection has shared a distinctive vision of hospitality. Each hotel in the collection is chosen for its unique character, intended for those fueled by passion, curiosity and interest in the world around them. Every MGallery property has its own distinctive design and story to tell with more than 100 exceptional addresses across 30 countries around the world from Hotel Molitor Paris, where the first bikini debuted at the hotel's famed pool; to The William Inglis, which pays homage to Australia's racing history and equine culture; to INK Hotel Amsterdam, the former home of the Dutch newspaper; to The Galata Istanbul Hotel, whose historical 'CeAme Hamamo' dates back to 1720, maintaining a 300-year-old tradition of wellness through water therapy. "We are thrilled to welcome Hotel Andra Seattle into the Accor family," said Heather McCrory, CEO, Accor North & Central America. "This truly special property represents a tremendous addition to Accor's hotel portfolio in Seattle, which also includes Fairmont Olympic Hotel Seattle, as well as the Pacific Northwest corridor, where the hotel joins our Vancouver and Victoria properties, including Hotel Belmont Vancouver MGallery Hotel Collection, Fairmont Pacific Rim, Fairmont Hotel Vancouver and Fairmont Empress." Hotel Andra Seattle transports guests from the bustle of downtown into the comfort of relaxed urban luxury. Nestled between the popular South Lake Union and Belltown neighborhoods, Hotel Andra Seattle is based in the heart of the city's Central Business District, within a 10-minute walk to Seattle's top attractions including the iconic Pike Place Market, the Space Needle, Amazon Global Headquarters, Washington State Convention Center, the Waterfront and more. Inspired by the city's rich Scandinavian heritage, the hotel interiors highlight the Swedish baroque period with luxurious furnishings in velvet, wool, and linen. In addition, both the public spaces and 123 sophisticated guestrooms and suites reflect a comforting sense of hygge, the Danish art of being consciously cozy. The heart of the hotel is the sun-lit Living Room lobby, with a full-height fireplace that radiates warmth and vitality. Advertisement Hotel Andra Seattle is the renowned home of Hot Stove Society, a cooking school led by Seattle-based chef and restaurateur, Tom Douglas. Open year-round on the hotel's second floor, Hot Stove Society offers a variety of recreational cooking classes and events, from the social and light-hearted to advanced skill-building. One of two restaurants on property, Lola, also helmed by Douglas, celebrates Greek-influenced flavors mingled with the fresh bounty of the Pacific Northwest, while Assaggio Ristorante is an upscale Italian eatery featuring the robust and bold flavors of central and northern Italy, complimented by a wine list hand-selected by owner and chef, Mauro Golmarvi. "We're delighted to join the MGallery Hotel Collection; the brand's celebration of authenticity in hospitality is a perfect fit for our distinctive hotel," added Lars Pedersen, Hotel Andra Seattle General Manager. "As a homegrown Seattle property with hygge in our DNA, we are proud to join Accor and MGallery as both continue to grow across North & Central America, and look forward to welcoming more guests from around the world to their new home in Seattle." The MGallery Hotel Collection is undergoing exceptional growth with more than 55 hotels in varying stages of development around the globe. Most recently, two new additions joined the MGallery Hotel Collection in North America: Hotel Belmont Vancouver MGallery in early December 2021 and Berkeley Park Hotel MGallery in Miami in March 2021. Accor will also open the first MGallery Hotel & Residences in Mexico with the debut of Mayaliah Tulum Hotel & Residences - MGallery, slated for 2024. Within the Accor portfolio, which offers unique experiences in more than 5,300 hotels and residences across 110 destinations around the globe, MGallery sits alongside globally renowned brands including Raffles, Orient Express, Fairmont, Sofitel, Emblems Collection, Novotel, ibis and many more. Upon joining Accor, Hotel Andra Seattle MGallery also becomes a part of one of the most attractive and powerful loyalty programs in the world, ALL - Accor Live Limitless. "Building Accor's presence in the North American market continues to be a top priority for the Group, "said Mark Purcell, SVP, Development, Accor North & Central America. "This newest addition to the MGallery Hotel Collection further strengthens the solid foundation we've already established across the region with Accor's robust collection of brands, including MGallery, Fairmont and Sofitel, and demand for our luxury and premium offerings, especially our collection brands, is stronger than ever. We are thrilled to add another MGallery address in the U.S., especially in such a high-demand city like Seattle. We are excited for the continued growth in this region, and what is yet to come." ibis Styles Phuket Bangtao (Thailand) Accor shared its recent signings for November 2023 throughout Asia. As of October 2023, Accor has executed management agreements for an 69 properties, augmenting its extensive portfolio with over 16,500 keys. Amidst this remarkable surge, the Group strategically continues to direct its efforts toward resolute leadership in the Premium, Midscale and Economy segments, epitomised by its steadfast representation through the Novotel, Mercure, and ibis brands. This strategic approach underscores Accor's commitment to ensure a diverse range of offerings for its guests. "The dynamism of the hospitality market demands more than expansion; it demands innovation. Our strategic signings and brand introductions to new markets are a testament to our pledge to be pioneers in delivering unparalleled guest experiences, marking a new era in the evolution of hospitality, said Garth Simmons, Chief Executive Officer, Premium, Midscale and Economy Division for Accor in Asia. New signings include: ibis Styles Phuket Bangtao (Thailand) Accor continues its growth in Thailand with the recent signing of ibis Styles Phuket Bangtao. This newly built hotel, set to open its doors in 2025, will feature 140 keys, a restaurant, a bar, a swimming pool, and a well-equipped gym. Situated in the vibrant neighbourhood of Bangtao, known for its pristine beach and modern living, ibis Styles is poised to infuse the locale with a fusion of artistic ingenuity and contemporary chic. With this signing, Accor further strengthens its position as the largest international hotel operator in Thailand, boasting a robust network of 73 hotels in the Midscale and Economy segments and a pipeline of 14 projects currently in development. Novotel Jakarta Pulo Mas (Indonesia) Accor is pleased to announce the signing of Novotel Jakarta Pulo Mas, located in Pulo Mas, East Jakarta. This 36-floor hotel, part of a mixed-use development with an office building and the Nusantara TV studios, will offer 175 rooms, including standard rooms and suites. Featuring an all-day dining restaurant, lounge, health and fitness centre, spa, pool bar, and an outdoor swimming pool, Novotel Jakarta Pulo Mas promises a serene ambience with a spectacular bird's-eye view of Jakarta. Mercure Cat Tien and ibis Styles Cat Tien (Vietnam) Accor will oversee the management and operation of two hotels within the Imperial Oasis Quy Nhon project in Binh Dinh province, featuring the renowned Mercure and ibis Styles brands. Scheduled to open in 2027, the Mercure Cat Tien and ibis Styles Cat Tien hotels, situated in the Cat Tien gateway urban area, will offer 189 and 250 guestrooms, respectively. Both hotels will feature state-of-the-art facilities including an all-day dining restaurant, meeting rooms, swimming pool, pool club, and a gym. These projects align with Accor's strategic emphasis on coastal economic development and high-end commercial sectors in Vietnam. Swissotel Bangkok Pratunam (Thailand) Accor will unveil the Swissotel Pratunam Bangkok in early 2027. Nestled in the vibrant heart of Bangkok's premier shopping district, this premium hotel with 325 beautifully decorated rooms and suites is set to redefine urban sophistication. Guests can indulge in panoramic skyline views from the rooftop infinity pool, relax in the world-class spa, and enjoy exquisite dining options. Grand Mercure Goa Candolim (India) Grand Mercure Goa Candolim is scheduled to welcome guests in Q2 of 2024 and will become the 7th Grand Mercure in India. This expansive 6,500 sqm hotel offers 87 well-appointed rooms, two dining options, a 500+ sqm banquet hall, with fitness and spa facilities. With its upscale amenities, the hotel aims to make a significant impact on Goa's dynamic hospitality scene, providing a notable stay for travellers. Through six signings with over 1,100 additional keys across Asia in November 2023, Accor continues to demonstrate its prowess in the hospitality industry, delivering exceptional and innovative experiences to guests in the region. Rendering of the Handwritten Collection Hotel in Batumi Accor announced the signing of a cooperation agreement with Mardi Holding, one of Georgia's largest development companies, to open a Handwritten Collection hotel on the Black Sea coast in Batumi, Georgia in 2026. Launched in January 2023, the Handwritten Collection brand represents a unique portfolio of exclusive hotels with an individual style, which offer guests an intimate and stylish hospitality experience from local hoteliers. "We are proud to announce the signing of a Handwritten Collection property in Batumi the first hotel under the exquisite Handwritten Collection brand in our region. It was created for travelers who value emotional travel experiences and the leading hospitality trends. In addition, the new brand is aimed to support independent and boutique hotel owners looking to boost their global profile, attract international audiences and grow their revenue without losing their identity. We are confident that hotel openings under the new international brands will help boost the dynamically developing tourism sector of Georgia and are delighted to provide the local community with a unique hotel that meets traditional local needs and the high standards of an international brand. I am grateful to our partner Mardi Holding for this excellent opportunity to implement another landmark project in Georgia's main Black Sea resort," says Alexis Delaroff, Chief Operating Officer of Accor New East Europe. Handwritten Collection in Batumi will occupy a new building on a territory of 80,000 square meters and offer 197 rooms, including suites. Its infrastructure will feature a modern fitness center, a gastronomic restaurant and meeting facilities. Handwritten Collection provides its guests with a unique experience to meet local hoteliers, feel their character and energy, which reflects local culture and traditions. The brand offers unparalleled stays in truly unique hotels that never repeat each other. Located within a 20-minute drive from Batumi International Airport and a 10-minute drive from the Central Railway Station, the hotel's convenient location will allow guests to visit the main recreational and tourist areas of the city, including its vibrant center and the famous Batumi Boulevard, spanning over 7 kilometers along the Black Sea coast. Travelers will enjoy its leisure area with numerous bars, shops and restaurants. "In partnership with the esteemed hotel operator Accor, we are pleased to introduce a brand new hotel experience in Batumi and Georgia. Unique and stylish residences alongside extraordinary hotel facilities are designed for our investors and guests. We truly believe that our project with a panoramic heated swimming pool will become one of the highlights of Batumi," Nugzar Berishvili, Managing partner at Mardi Holding, comments. Batumi is the second largest city in Georgia and a big marine port located on the coast of the Black Sea. It's a charming seaside town with spacious beaches, picturesque nature, a variety of traditional and international restaurants and trendy bars, as well as ancient and vibrant culture and various sights, which makes it perfect for family trips with children, friends getaways and solo travel. Handwritten Collection hotel is expected to open in Batumi in 2026. Guestroom at the InterContinental Bangkok Sukhumvit Hotel IHG Hotels & Resorts announced the opening of InterContinental Bangkok Sukhumvit. Situated in Thonglor, the property offers 241 rooms and suites. Widely regarded as one of Bangkoks most upscale neighbourhoods, Thonglor is awash with chic bistros, upscale bars, and onsen spas; InterContinental Bangkok Sukhumvit sits amidst the bustle of this energetic area. The hotels design draws inspiration from the context of the city, bringing memories from the past into the present and reflecting this in the design details. The elegance of Tor-mue, a traditional intricate hand weaving technique, is interwoven through the hotel's design and touchpoints. InterContinental Bangkok Sukhumvit is designed for the modern luxury traveller seeking cultural rich experiences, said Prin Pathanatham, General Manager, InterContinental Bangkok Sukhumvit. "Embodying the spirit of the Thonglor district where we are located, one will find international influences weaved into the hotel stay experience and contemporary design. Traditional Thai craftsmanship and contemporary flair are also integrated into the guest experience. The hotel offers three signature dining options including AVA Brasserie, which presents a brasserie-style international menu inspired by Pan Ams key destinations including London, New York, Tokyo, Miami, Frankfurt and Bangkok, a nod to the brands origin. The Lobby is a stylish all-day lounge that celebrates the connectiveness of Thailand and Japan, with original Thai tea on offer alongside a traditional Japanese green tea ceremony. The Lobby will offer exclusively blended coffee by Sarnies and tea options from well-known tea houses which include Char Flower Tea, TWG, and Peace Oriental Teahouse as well as a selection of Thai craft chocolates from KanVeLa. Finally, Rogues a high-energy cocktail bar, will present curated cocktails, exclusive sake selection and whiskey collections, and live jazz performances. A selection of suites, including the impressive Presidential Suite which boasts indoor and outdoor areas are equipped with state-of-the-art technology, including a 55-inch Smart TV, Chromecast, Bluetooth audio, soundbar, and motion sensors to prevent energy wastage. Bathroom amenities are from luxury European brand, Byredo in large format instead of miniatures. Modern travellers lead diverse lives, and InterContinental Hotels & Resorts acknowledges the need for seamless transitions throughout their day. To address this, the brand is committed to helping guests "shape shift" through their day. New initiatives include scientifically backed food and beverage programmes aimed at helping guests reduce travel fatigue while ensuring dining options reflect differing guest needs throughout the day. All guests will also receive access to Timeshifter, a jet lag app which enables travellers to use the latest circadian science to adjust quickly to new time zones. At InterContinental Bangkok Sukhumvit, a Sleep Well Program is curated to induce relaxation and promote sound sleep. This includes a pillow and pillow spray menu, calming ambient lighting and a bedtime tea set. An iHome PowerClock Glow in each room further promotes healthy sleeping rituals by creating a calming environment using a combination of light and sound therapy. THE SPA by HARNN will present a Japanese-Thai inspired concept. Signature treatments include The Origami, which is inspired by the traditional Japanese paper folding and Thai garland knitting; the therapist will employ a combination of massage techniques, including Japanese Shiatsu and Thai soothing massage. The experience is designed to untangle tension in ones mind and body, leaving guests feeling refreshed. For business travellers, the hotel boasts extensive meeting facilities that feature natural light and accommodates up to 300 guests across 685 square metres. Five multipurpose spaces are equipped with cutting-edge technology for physical and hybrid meetings. Room rates start from THB 8,000++ for a Classic Room. Hampton Inn & Suites, in Truckee, California JLL Capital Markets announced today that it arranged $22.5 million acquisition financing for The Hampton Inn & Suites, in Truckee, California. JLL worked on behalf of the borrower, JMA Ventures, LLC, to secure the acquisition loan from MetLife Investment Management, a lender with an expertise in hospitality lending, led by Mike Pace, Mike Coen, and Dan McKenzie. The property features 109 guestrooms and suites across two buildings, a heated outdoor pool and jacuzzi, fitness center and over 1,000 square feet of meeting space. It is in Truckee, a High Sierras California mountain town, which is popular for visitors driving from the San Francisco Bay Area and is the gateway to Lake Tahoe. The Hampton Inn & Suites, Tahoe-Truckee provides convenient access to major transportation routes including I -80, CA 267, the Truckee Airport, as well as newly constructed bike lanes. The property is situated by popular tourist attractions and prime destinations in the area, such as Northstar and Palisades Tahoe ski resorts, Martis Camp, Old Town and a host of outdoor activities. The JLL Capital Markets Debt Advisory team was led by Senior Managing Director Jordan Angel, Executive Vice President Mike Huth and Associate Ethan Habecker. This acquisition continues to grow JMA Ventures footprint in the Tahoe market and offers guests the opportunity to enjoy beautiful accommodations in a market with very limited supply. says Angel. Chicago, IL (60637) Today Cloudy skies early, followed by partial clearing. Temps nearly steady in the low to mid 30s. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph.. Tonight Cloudy with periods of snow after midnight. Low 28F. Winds ESE at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of snow 100%. Snow accumulating 1 to 3 inches. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph. Subscribers to Register-Star or The Daily Mail are eligible to receive full access to HudsonValley360. If you have an existing print subscription, please make sure your email address on file matches your HudsonValley360 account email. Published: 4 Dec 2023 Share: Charles Hay A senior diplomat and former British High Commissioner to Malaysia has received an Honorary Degree from Heriot-Watt University on Saturday (2 Dec). Charles Hay was presented with his new academic title of Doctor of the University during Heriot-Watts Winter Graduation ceremonies being held at the Edinburgh campus this week. He was recognised with the honour for his longstanding commitment to advancing British higher education in Malaysia. Mr Hay said: Im deeply honoured to have been awarded an honorary degree from Heriot-Watt University. It is a privilege to receive such recognition from this esteemed institution, known for its commitment to excellence in education and its contributions to the global academic community. Id like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the faculty, staff, and students of Heriot-Watt University for this distinction. It is a testament to the enduring partnership between the United Kingdom and Malaysia, which has been marked by collaboration and a commitment to advancing knowledge and understanding. Originally from Aberdeen, Mr Hay has had a distinguished career in British diplomacy. After graduating in Politics and Philosophy at Southampton University, he joined the British Army, training at Sandhurst and then serving with the Gordon Highlanders. He remained with the regiment for five years, which overlapped with the end of the Cold War, and was posted in Scotland, Cyprus, the Falkland Islands, Berlin and Northern Ireland before retiring as Captain. Mr Hay then moved to the Foreign Office where he specialised in European affairs, serving in Prague, Madrid and was the UKs Permanent Representation to the EU in Brussels. He worked alongside the former Labour MP, Robin Cook, as his spokesman during the Kosovo war, and led the team organising the G8 Summit in Gleneagles in 2005. Later, he was appointed Consular Director with the responsibility for looking after British Nationals globally and for the UKs response to overseas crises. In 2015, Mr Hay became Ambassador to South Korea at a period of rising tension, ending his time in Seoul with the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in March 2018. He was British High Commissioner to Malaysia between 2019 and 2023. Professor Sir Geoff Palmer, Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University, said: It gives me immense pleasure to bestow this honorary degree upon Charles. His dedication to diplomacy and his remarkable contributions to international relations have had a profound positive impact on the world. A total of 12 graduation ceremonies are being held at the Universitys Edinburgh campus between the 2nd and 5th of December marking the academic achievement of students from the School of Social Sciences, School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, School of Energy Geoscience Infrastructure and Society, and the School of Textile and Design. Top 5 Strategies to Promote a Music Release Releasing new music can be a daunting task, so heres a straight-forward guide to planning and executing a successful release for artists of all levels. by Promoly As a musician, releasing a single can be an exciting and nerve-wracking experience. Youve put in countless hours of hard work, and now its time to share your music with the world. However, promoting your single is crucial to its success with so many artists vying for attention. In this guide, well explore five effective ways to promote your single and help you reach a wider audience. 1. Create a Compelling Press Release A press release is a document that provides journalists and media outlets with information about your single. Its essential to create a compelling press release to grab the attention of journalists and get your music featured in publications. The press release should include key information such as the release date, the name of the single, a brief description of the song, and any notable collaborations or features. To create a compelling press release, make sure to highlight what makes your single unique. What inspired you to write the song? How is it different from other music on the market? Including quotes from band members or producers can also add a personal touch and help create a connection with the reader. 2. Leverage Social Media Social media is a powerful tool for promoting your music. Platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook allow you to connect directly with your fans and reach new audiences. To effectively promote your single on social media, creating engaging content that reflects your brand and personality is essential. Consider creating a teaser or lyric video to give your fans a taste of whats to come. You can also share behind-the-scenes photos and videos to create a sense of excitement and anticipation. Remember to use hashtags relevant to your genre and music to increase your reach. 3. Collaborate with Influencers Collaborating with influencers is an effective way to reach new audiences and promote your single. Influencers are individuals with a significant following on social media, and they can help promote your music to their followers. When choosing an influencer to collaborate with, make sure to select someone whose audience aligns with your target demographic. Consider reaching out to influencers in your genre and offering them an exclusive listen to your single. You can also offer to create custom content, such as a music video or behind-the-scenes footage, to share on their social media channels. 4. Utilize Streaming Services Streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music are essential for promoting your music. These platforms allow you to reach a vast audience and increase your streams and followers. To maximize your exposure on streaming services, make sure to create an eye-catching album cover and optimize your metadata. Consider creating a playlist featuring your single and other songs in your genre to increase your visibility. You can also collaborate with other artists in your genre and create a joint playlist to cross-promote your music. 5. Plan a Release Party A release party is an excellent way to celebrate the launch of your single and generate buzz. You can invite fans, journalists, and industry professionals to attend the event and enjoy a live performance of your music. Promote the release party on social media and through your press release to increase attendance. Consider partnering with a local venue or music festival to host the release party. You can also offer attendees exclusive merchandise, such as t-shirts or posters, to create a memorable experience. Conclusion Promoting your single is essential for its success. You can increase your visibility and reach a wider audience by creating a compelling press release, leveraging social media, collaborating with influencers, utilizing streaming services, and planning a release party. Remember to be creative and authentic in your approach and have fun sharing your music with the world. Ready to take your music promotion to the next level? Sign up for Promoly today and discover how to promote your music like a pro! With our powerful tools and resources, you can increase your visibility, reach new audiences, and grow your fanbase. Dont wait any longer, start promoting your music with Promoly today! Share on: 'Slow Dancing' Opens at the Hillman Jackson Gallery GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. In his exhibit titled "Slow Dancing," John Musall, long-time faculty in design for theater, will exhibit paintings of dancers at Bard College at Simon's Rock. John Musall, faculty in design for theater at Simon's Rock, will exhibit a collection of paintings of dancers entitled "Slow Dancing" in the Hillman Jackson Gallery at the Daniel Arts Center on campus. This exhibit opened November 30, 2023, and will run through January 22, 2024. This exhibit is free and open to the public Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m. - 8 p.m., Saturdays, 12:00 - 8 p.m., and Sundays, 2:00 - 8:00 p.m. Artist John Musall began painting dancers and choreographers thirty five years ago while working with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York. In his work as a lighting designer, he became fascinated by dancers moving in colored stage lighting and began a series that he's continued to this day. In his artist's statement, Musall said "Because dancers are concerned with the shapes their bodies can make through choreographic time while striving for controlled perfection, I was compelled to do my best to be exact in my representations, in hopes of honoring dancers commitment to their art." For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Agnes Chow, one of Hong Kong's best-known pro-democracy activists, says she has breached a bail order to report to police in the city and will instead stay in Canada. Ms Chow, who was jailed for 10 months for taking part in Hong Kongs 2019 protests, announced on Instagram on Sunday that she would be continuing her studies in Canada and would not report back in Hong Kong to meet her bail conditions, adding that she might now never be able to return to the city. Ms Chow was a core member of the now-disbanded pro-democracy group Demosisto, one of the main forces behind the 2019 movement in the city. She was arrested in 2020 under the draconian Beijing-imposed national security law, implemented a year after the protests in an effort to throttle dissent. Critics of the government say the law, which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, has been weaponised to stifle protest and used to arrest more than 280 people. Several activists, including Nathan Law, Anna Kwok and Finn Lau, have fled abroad fearing arrest since the law was implemented. Chow was released from prison in 2021 on the condition she check in with police regularly, and her passport was confiscated. She has been compared online and in media reports to Mulan the Chinese folk heroine who fought to save her family and country. She said a campaign of pressure from the Chinese authorities had caused her "mental illness", forcing her to leave the country and potentially never return. She said it was as if the police wanted to remind her that she hadn't regained her freedom after being released from prison, and to "not try to do anything". Ms Chow said she was only allowed to have her passport back this year after she agreed to take part in a propaganda tour of Shenzhen in mainland China accompanied by national security officers. The activist said she was asked to sign a letter of "repentance" and thank the police in writing for making her "arrangements so that I can understand the great development of my motherland". Ms Chow left Hong Kong in mid-September to study at a university in Toronto, just a day after receiving her passport. "I don't want to be forced to do things that I don't want to do anymore and be forced to visit mainland China again. If it continues, my body and my mind will collapse even though I am safe," she wrote. She was due to report to Hong Kong's national security police this month but decided against it. "Maybe I won't return for the rest of my life," she wrote. Ms Chow said in an interview broadcast on TV Tokyo on Monday that she was still weighing her next steps, including the option of seeking asylum in Canada. Asked whether she would take up political activism there, she said she wanted to do something in Hong Kong's interest. The Hong Kong police said it "strongly condemned" Ms Chow's decision, saying it was "against and challenging the rule of law". "Police urge the woman to immediately turn back before it is too late and not to choose a path of no return. Otherwise, she will bear the stigma of 'fugitive' for the rest of her life," the police said in a statement. The police earlier in July placed bounties on eight pro-democracy activists who fled the city into self-imposed exile. Forced to gather in exile, Afghanistans resistance movement is working in the shadows on ways to oust the Taliban from its grip on Kabul, knowing it can no longer trust or rely on the Western allies who so hastily pulled out of the country in August 2021. There is bitterness on display here at the Herat Security Dialogue in Dushanbe, the capital of neighbouring Tajikistan, but this unusual gathering of former ex-warlords, resistance fighters, diplomats and politicians is united by a single cause: a future for Afghanistan without the Taliban. Perhaps the star guest at the talks is former Mujahideen leader Ismail Khan, dubbed the Lion of Herat for his involvement in fighting the Soviet invasion of the 1980s, who supported the government against the Taliban up until he was captured in August 2021. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Social security in an independent Scotland could transform lives, a Scottish Government minister has said. Social Justice Secretary Shirley-Anne Somerville said independence would allow the Scottish Government to go even further on tackling issues such as poverty. The ninth paper in the Building a New Scotland series is set to launch on December 6 and will outline the progress already made by ministers, despite only holding limited social security powers. Ms Somerville said: The Scottish Parliament has shown how Scotland can make different choices and deliver a fairer system with more positive outcomes. Independence would provide us with an opportunity to go further and transform the way benefits are delivered in this country. With independence, we could ensure everyone has a decent standard of living and provide a strong safety net people could turn to when times are financially tough. Currently, the UK system fails to provide an adequate level of support for those who need it. As a result, the UK has higher poverty rates than European nations that are comparable to Scotland. She said the Scottish Government has been able to introduce transformative policies such as the Scottish child payment 25 a week for eligible children and has lifted an estimated 50,000 children out of relative poverty in 2023/24. She added: It is only with the full powers of independence that we could use the full fiscal and economic levers to tackle poverty in Scotland. Sign up to the Independent Climate email for the latest advice on saving the planet Get our free Climate email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Independent Climate email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} The Cop28 president, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, has insisted that he and the UAE very much respect science, as he sought to quell a backlash over comments questioning the need to phase out fossil fuels. During an online event last month, Mr Jaber suggested there was no science behind requiring the end of fossil fuels in order to limit temperature rise to 1.5C, a key aim in the fight against the climate crisis. We very much believe and respect the science, he said on Monday, after a number of climate groups and scientists expressed their severe concern at his previous remarks, with one activist saying such climate denial belongs in the Stone Age. Mr Jaber said: Weve been very upfront about it and we said clearly and repeatedly that the UAE takes this task [of heading UN climate talks] with humility, and responsibility. We fully understand the urgency behind this matter, he said. I have always been very clear on the fact that we are making sure that everything we do is centred around the science, Mr Jaber added. We did not in any way underestimate or undermine the task at hand. Mr Jaber called the phase-down and the phase-out of fossil fuels essential and said that his previous statement was taken out of context. He added that the task needs to be orderly, fair, just and responsible. In response to Mr Jabers latest remarks, Cansin Leylim Ilgaz, associate director of global campaign for climate advocacy group 350.org, told The Independent they were a huge relief. For too long these UN climate conferences have failed to address the main cause of the climate crisis, which has been scientifically proven over and over again to be fossil fuels. Cop28 needs to take its next leap and must recognise that a mere phase-down of fossil fuels is no longer sufficient, Ms Leylim Ilgaz said. To safeguard our planet and its inhabitants, we must embrace a fast, full, fair, and funded phase-out of fossil fuels, she added. During the online event on 21 November, alongside former Irish president Mary Robinson, Mr Jaber suggested that a phase-out of oil would not be compatible with sustainable development unless you want to take the world back into caves. Urged by Ms Robinson to commit, as Cop28 host and chief executive of the UAEs state-owned oil company, to phase out fossil fuels in order to tackle an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone, Mr Jaber called the suggestion alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is whats going to achieve 1.5C, he said. The comments were met with condemnation by climate groups and scientists who branded it alarming. Sir David King, founder and chair of the UK Climate Crisis Advisory Group, said the Cop28 chiefs comments were incredibly concerning and said it was surprising to hear reports of the Cop28 president defend[ing] the use of fossil fuels, and to learn that he is supposedly unaware of the viability of renewable alternatives. Christian Aids global advocacy lead, Mariana Paoli, said such climate denial belongs to the Stone Age. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the branch of the UN tasked with supporting the global response to the threat of climate change, released a report after Mr Jabers comments branding the phasing out of fossil fuels non-negotiable. Mr Jaber told the conference he was quite surprised with the constant and repeated attempts to undermine the work of the Cop28 presidency. The hosts previously told The Independent: The Cop president was unwavering in saying reaching 1.5C involves action across a number of areas and sectors. The Cop president is clear that phasing down and out of fossil fuels is inevitable and that we must keep 1.5C within reach. The chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jim Skea, who joined Mr Jaber at the news conference, said the Cop28 president has been attentive to the science. Mr Jaber also sought to lay out the early achievements of the summit, saying: I believe we have already set a high bar for delivery. He flagged the breakthrough agreement on loss and damage to help more vulnerable nations deal with the impact of the climate crisis, and also drew attention to the tens of billions of dollars pledged by countries in the first few days of the summit. There is real hope and optimism that this is a major inflection point and we cannot miss the opportunity, Mr Jaber said. I am determined to deliver the most ambitious response to the global stocktake, he said, referring to the first five-yearly UN assessment of where countries stand in tackling the climate crisis. Mr Jaber has been under fire since he took on the role of Cop28 president while being the CEO of the UAEs national oil company ADNOC. Activists have said it is like getting a tobacco company to lead an anti-smoking convention. In the run-up to the summit, an investigation by the Centre for Climate Reporting and the BBC alleged that his team was using its position to strike oil deals. The former US vice-president and environmentalist, Al Gore, called the report utterly appalling. Mr Jaber denied the accusations, calling them false. Not true, incorrect, not accurate. The climate summit is seeing an unprecedented push for the phasing out of fossil fuels an issue that has remained a sticking point in climate negotiations for a long time. And after record-breaking temperatures and devastating droughts and wildfires this year, momentum is building for an ambitious deal that calls for an end to oil, coal and gas. Sign up to the Independent Climate email for the latest advice on saving the planet Get our free Climate email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Independent Climate email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Hillary Clinton has said that the lack of women around the negotiating tables at Cop28 is a major concern and and that the tide has been turned against the voices of women being heard in recent years. In many of the governments that are represented here at Cop, there are no women, the former US secretary of state told a packed audience at an event at the Dubai Expo centre. How do we get the concerns of women to be heard? Thats what events like these are about. We also have to be cautious of the fact that now we are swimming against the tide, and the tide has been turned against women in many parts of the world, she added. Ms Clinton was speaking at an event highlighting the critical role of womens leadership in tackling the climate crisis, and also the growing impacts of extreme heat on women and girls in vulnerable communities. The former Democratic presidential candidate referenced visible pushback against womens rights and opportunities, pointing to a recent statement from Chinese leader Xi Jinping calling on women to actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing. Leaders of a number of countries have basically sent a message out that women need to get out of the workforce and they need to be home and make more babies, Clinton said. We also see changes in legislation to undermine the role of women to encourage [them] to withdraw from the economy and undermine the rights of women who are seeking equality. Leaders posing during a family photo at Cop28. It makes clear that women are not adequately represented at the highest levels of global leadership (EPA) The fact that women are not adequately represented at the highest levels of global leadership was made abundantly clear during the family photo at Cop28 last week which was mainly rows of men. Secretary Clinton appeared on Health Day at Cop28 with Reema Nanavaty, director of the Self Employed Womens Association (Sewa), a trade union which represents 2.5 million informal women workers across India. They were joined on the stage by Eleni Myrivili, global chief heat officer to UN Habitat and the Arsht-Rock Foundation. Myrivili is one of coterie of all-female chief heat officers around the world. The roles were created by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Centre, an international think tank with a goal to make 1 billion people more resilient to extreme heat by 2030. Heat is a silent and insidious killer that claims the lives of more people than any other climate disaster and is particularly dangerous for the elderly, young children, the poor, and those with existing health conditions. Women were deliberately selected for the heat officer roles because they are disproportionately impacted. The number of dangerously hot days is estimated to double by 2050, and the greatest burden will fall on women and girls. Not only does extreme heat impact womens health, but they are the backbone of the informal economy around the world in piecework, domestic duties and care-giving for children and the elderly. Clinton spoke about female workers in the informal sector who she met during a visit to Gujarat in February and how heat is making their work unbearable. These are women who work hard and have worked hard. Their mothers worked hard, their grandmothers worked hard and now all of a sudden they are finding it almost unbearable to get up with the sun and, and work till the sun goes down, which is what they historically have done, Clinton said. So now theyre getting up at four oclock in the morning because by 10 or 11, its too hot to keep working. Nanavaty said that there is an urgent need for more small-scale solutions like insulated water bottles and cooling roofs to make the day-to-day lives of female workers more bearable. Theres nothing to protect these workers. They not just lose their lives but livelihoods, she said. These women workers dont want charity, they want a life of dignity and self-respect. And they are already showing how to play a major role in climate action. Sign up to our free weekly newsletter for insider tips and product reviews from our shopping experts Sign up for our free IndyBest email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the IndyBest email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} The next OnePlus flagship phone has been officially unveiled. The OnePlus 12 launched in China on 5 December, with a global release date predicted to follow in January. The newest Android phone from the Chinese brand features a 120Hz AMOLED display capable of reaching a ludicrous (and record-breaking) 4,500 nits peak brightness. A high peak brightness is useful for improving the appearance of HDR (high dynamic range) content, allowing the screen to show very bright highlights and very dark backgrounds at the same time. Read more: Sign up to our money-saving deals newsletters Peak brightness also makes a phones display much clearer in strong and direct sunlight, though this generally isnt a problem in northern Europe or for anyone living at relatively high or low latitudes. For comparison, the iPhone 15 Pro Max tops out at 2,000 which is already more than enough, even on the UKs sunniest days. OnePlus 12 cameras The OnePlus 12 will use similar camera hardware to that found in the OnePlus Open the brands first foldable phone, launched earlier this year meaning it gets a 50MP main camera, 48MP ultrawide and a 64MP telephoto lens with a periscoping, 3x optical zoom. OnePlus 12 specs Under the hood, the OnePlus 12 runs on the newest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, and can be configured with up to 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage, so expect flagship-grade performance and speed. OnePlus has also revealed that the new phone will use a whopping 5,400mAh battery thats bigger than the high-end Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. The OnePlus 12 was officially revealed by OnePlus president Li JieLouis on Weibo (OnePlus) OnePlus 12 price The OnePlus 12 starts at 4,299 in China (around 480 or $600), but international prices will be higher. Considering the OnePlus 11 launched in February starting at 729, we can guess the new flagship will arrive at a similar price or upwards of it. If you cant wait around for the newest OnePlus, the OnePlus 11 is still an excellent option, and features in our round-up of the best Android phones. OnePlus 11: Was 729, now 646.54, Amazon.co.uk (OnePlus) OnePlus entered the market as a trendy challenger brand, producing superbly built and highly refined Android phones at a fraction of the cost of the big-name flagships. Since then, OnePlus has moved towards the mainstream, making premium phones (with big price tags to match) but the OnePlus 11 is a small return to form for the Chinese manufacturer. Its a mid-price 5G Android phone running on a clean and streamlined version of the operating system, with a decent camera, a brilliant 120Hz screen and top-end performance. Buy now Voucher codes For the latest offers on tech and other gadgets, try the following links: Ready to enter the world of VR? Weve rounded up the best virtual-reality headsets for immersive gaming Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Lifestyle Edit email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Bowen Yang has given fans an update on his mental health journey after getting candid about his experiences this summer. During the 2023 American Museum of Natural History Gala, the 33-year-old Saturday Night Live star told PageSix that hes been improving since he experienced bad bouts of depersonalisation. My mental health is great, the comedian told the outlet. I had a really rough patch and people were very patient with me. Its hard but you know, I barrelled through. I powered through. In July, Yang first addressed his mental health issues when he announced he was taking a break from his Las Culturistas podcast. In an announcement on his Instagram story, he said: Taking a very short break from [Las Culturistas]. Bad bouts of depersonalization are ****ing me up bad, but I am doing my best to get better! Please take care, be soon. Three weeks later, the Wicked actor addressed his mental health hiatus, explaining that he had been encountering some issues with his anti-depressant Wellbutrin. So I was on Wellbutrin and full transparency I got a low dose of Adderall just to help with the travel, to help with adjusting to the hours, Yang admitted, having taken the hiatus while filming for Wicked in London. Its not working, he continued. I was talking to some friends last night about how Wellbutrin really is not doing it for a lot of people. And if its working for you, God bless. But Wellbutrin isnt for me. Yang isnt the first celebrity to admit to experiencing symptoms of depersonalisation, with musician Dodie and Counting Crows rocker Adam Duritz also reporting having depersonalisation-derealisation disorder. Depersonalisation - which psychologists say stems from the underdiagnosed depersonalisation-derealisation disorder (DDD) - occurs when someone regularly feels as though they are having an out of body experience, according to Columbia University. Derealisation occurs when you feel like your surroundings arent real and it feels like youre in a dream-like state. According to senior medical director of Columbia Doctors Psychiatry, Dr Jacques Ambrose, DDD can cause significant distress and morbidity to the affected individuals, but it often goes undetected or misdiagnosed. He added: Delays in treatments also prolong the course of DDD. People diagnosed with depersonalisation-derealisation disorder either experience depersonalisation, derealisation, or both, all of which can directly interfere with their everyday lives and relationships. This isnt the first time the comedian has opened up about his mental health, having opened up to People for 2021s Sexiest Man Alive issue about his experience being sent to conversion therapy by his parents as a teenager, and how difficult it was for them to accept his sexuality. There was a huge chasm of misunderstanding, Yang told the outlet. Neither side really understood where the other was coming from, and it led to very dangerous situations overall. What was always constant was the intention of love from both sides, he added. It pushed me into questioning what it meant, what was protected and what I should be protective about in terms of being a queer person. I dont take it for granted. Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Lifestyle Edit email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have reportedly been excluded from the upcoming wedding of the Duke of Westminster, a lifelong friend of Prince Harry and Archies godfather, as the fallout from the publication of Endgame rumbles on. Hugh Grosvenor has invited the King and Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales to his nuptials next summer with Olivia Henson, set to be the society wedding of the year. But it is understood he did not invite Harry in order to avoid a family clash at the wedding and risk anything overshadowing the day. Prince William is said to be up for the job of best man at the wedding on 7 June, with the Duke of Westminster also godfather to Prince George. A friend of William and Harrys told The Sunday Times: Its incredibly sad it has come to this. Hugh is one of very few close friends of William and Harrys who has maintained strong bonds and a line of communication with both. He wishes they could put their heads together and patch things up, but realises its unlikely to happen before the wedding. He wanted to avoid anything overshadowing the day, especially for Olivia, and doesnt want any awkwardness. On Saturday night, a spokesperson for the Duke of Westminster said: We are not in a position to comment on the guest list. Prince Harry and Meghan have not been invited to the society wedding of the year (Getty Images) The Prince and Princess of Wales have been invited to the Duke of Westminsters wedding (PA Wire) The Duke of Westminster became engaged to Ms Henson earlier this year. One of the UKs richest men, he took over his familys billion-pound fortune and estate when his father, Gerald, died in 2016 after having a heart attack while walking on his Abbeystead estate. Grosvenor Group owns about 300 acres of land in the Mayfair and Belgravia areas of London, as well as major city centre developments such as Liverpools ONE shopping centre, and the duke is part of the royal inner circle. It comes as the royal racism storm exploded again this week following the release of Omid Scobie's second book Endgame. Copies were pulled from shelves in the Netherlands after the Dutch translation was found to have named King Charles and Princess Catherine as two royals alleged to have raised concerns about the skin colour of Archie ahead of his birth. Endgame claims the names were discussed in letters exchanged between the Duchess of Sussex and the King. Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, is a lifelong friend of the royal family (PA Archive) The claims were initially made against one senior royal in Harry and Meghans explosive interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, but the couple declined to name the person allegedly behind the remarks, fearing the backlash would be too damaging for them. Harry and Meghan are yet to break their silence on the unfolding drama but have faced calls to respond. Appearing on This Morning on Thursday, Mr Scobie brushed off the naming of the senior royals, claiming he never submitted the book with the names in. He later told BBC Twos Newsnight that a full investigation was underway to discover how the names were included in the translation amid questions that the move was a PR stunt designed to boost sales. The Dutch publisher initially dismissed the edition containing the names as a translation error. But translator Saskia Peeters, who worked on Mr Scobies latest book, refuted claims she had added the names of the two royals in the Dutch translation of her own accord, despite the English version leaving them out. As a translator, I translate what is in front of me, she told Mail Online. The names of the royals were there in black and white. I did not add them. I just did what I was paid to do, and that was translate the book from English into Dutch. Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Lifestyle Edit email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Nelson Mandelas granddaughter has called on Britains royal family to pay reparations for colonialism in Africa. Ndileka Mandela, an author and climate activist, appeared on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg where she urged Britain to acknowledge its role in colonising parts of Africa, and referred to climate apartheid as a painful ripple of its colonial legacy. If there can be an acknowledgement of what was done to countries to colonise because we are still suffering a great deal from colonisation, in as far as our culture as Black people is concerned, she said, speaking from the Cop28 climate conference in Dubai. So there has got to be first admission of the fact that yes, we acknowledge that we displaced you as a people. Then we can talk of reparations. Pressed on whether she would want to see reparations from the royal family, she replied: Yes I would. Thats where healing begins. Mandela said she wanted acknowledgement of the royal familys role in colonialism before reparations (BBC) If you are arguing with the next person and you come to a tiff, when you sit around the table and admit your part, both parties admit their part in the disillusion of whatever it is that happened, it is then that healing begins. If that happens, the healing will definitely begin. Her remarks come two months after King Charles was praised for acknowledging the more painful aspects of Britains relationship with Kenya during a historic speech notable for its contrition over colonial injustices. Charles said at the time: ...we must also acknowledge the most painful times of our long, complex relationship. The wrongdoings of the past are a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest regret. They were abhorrent, unjustifiable acts of violence committed against Kenyans, as they waged a painful struggle for independence and sovereignty. And, for that, there can be no excuse. Mandela was then asked about the treatment of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, in a week where discussion has returned to the alleged royal racist who is said to have raised concerns over the colour of Prince Archies skin. The names of two members of the royal family King Charles and the Princess of Wales were given in the Dutch-language translation of Endgame, a new book about the royal family written by royal reporter Omid Scobie. Scobie did not write the names in the English version of the book, and has denied adding them to the version released in the Netherlands. Asked if she felt the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had been victims of racism in the UK, Mandela said: I believe Harry and Meghan had to find their own voice, in a similar way Grandad had to find his own voice. They should be given, like any other person, room to voice out whatever their misgivings are. I cannot speak to whether Harry and Meghans children have been discriminated [against], because I dont have first-hand information of that. However he should be allowed to voice out whatever he wants to voice out and choose his own path. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} The actor Jonathan Majors appeared in court in New York on Wednesday for the expected start of jury selection in a trial in which he is accused of injuring his then-girlfriend during an argument last spring. The trial could wind up playing a big role in what happens next with Majors, who had emerged as a breakout star with major roles in films including Creed III and who was being set up as the next great supervillain in the Marvel multiverse. The 34-year-old actor entered a Manhattan courtroom alongside his current girlfriend, the actress Meagan Good, carrying a bible and a coffee mug. He did not speak during the start of the proceeding. Majors was arrested in March over a confrontation between the actor and Grace Jabbari, his girlfriend at the time, during a car ride in Manhattan. Prosecutors said Jabbari had grabbed a phone out of the actor's hand after seeing a text, presumably from another woman, saying Wish I was kissing you right now. Majors tried to snatch the phone back. Jabbari said the actor pulled her finger, twisted her arm behind her back and hit her face. After the couple's driver stopped the car and the pair got out, Jabbari said Majors threw her back into the vehicle. Police said Jabbari was treated at a hospital for minor injuries. Majors attorneys have maintained that Jabbari was the aggressor during the fight and had scratched and hit him. Jabbari was also briefly arrested by New York City police last month after Majors filed a cross complaint against her, but the district attorneys office dropped all charges against her the next day. Majors, 34, is charged with misdemeanors including assault and could be sentenced to up to a year in jail if convicted. Before jury selection could begin Wednesday, attorneys for Majors sought to bar the public and press from the courtroom in order to discuss evidence in the case that has not been made public. The attorney, Seth Zuckerman, warned the evidence could taint the jury pool beyond repair for Mr. Majors, adding that his client may face trial by newspaper. The Manhattan District Attorney did not take a position on the matter. An attorney hired to represent the press, Katherine Bolger, opposed the move to seal evidence, noting that the public had a right to know the evidence in the case. The judge, Michael Gaffey, said he would rule on the issue later in the day. Majors starred in the Marvel TV series Loki" and the film Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, and was awaiting the release of another star vehicle, Magazine Dreams, which is now in limbo. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} A concrete wall along an avenue in the Dominican Republic's capital that collapsed over the weekend and killed nine people during heavy rains was poorly designed, experts said Monday. The government of the Caribbean country has come under scrutiny, with experts saying they had warned more than 20 years ago about the walls failures and lack of effort to fix them. It has weaknesses in the design, civil engineer Cristian Rojas told The Associated Press. No anchors were placed, and that is why the wall collapsed. Rojas, former president of the Dominican College of Engineers, Architects and Surveyors, said the force of the water in a flooded adjacent avenue, combined with the type of wall that was built, led to the collapse. Dominican geologist Osiris de Leon recalled that the first warnings about the wall were made more than two decades ago. He posted a story from December 1999 on X, formerly known as Twitter, in which El Siglo newspaper quoted the college recommending that the wall be rebuilt because it was cracked and it can fall and cause a tragic accident. The collapse occurred Saturday in Santo Domingo when a portion of the wall that runs along the heavily transited 27 of February Avenue fell in one piece, crushing cars and their occupants, authorities said. Among the victims was Puerto Rico prosecutor Michael Orozco, his wife, Maria Nereida Martinez, and his in-laws, according to Javier Rivera, president of the islands Association of Prosecutors. Martinez was pregnant. Comrade Orozco was living a wonderful personal moment with his family, and as a young, committed lawyer, a promising future awaited him, Rivera said. Also killed was Dominican Police Gen. Eduardo Cabrera Castillo, authorities said. Andres Matos, spokesman for the Ministry of Public Works, rejected accusations that the government did not properly maintain the wall and nearby infrastructure. These tunnels and overpasses are given permanent maintenance, Matos told the AP. He attributed the collapse to other causes but declined to provide details. The ministry is ordering a deep, structuralist investigation, which implies that we should not get ahead of the causes, he said. The collapse occurred as a tropical disturbance moved through the western Caribbean, battering the Dominican Republic with heavy rains over the weekend. Authorities said at least 24 people died, including those crushed by the wall. The storm tore tin roofs off hundreds of homes and cut off access to nearly a dozen communities, authorities said. Officials in neighboring Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, said two people died after being swept away by floodwaters. ___ Associated Press reporter Danica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Police are investigating claims Jewish children have been prevented from getting on buses in London. In one incident, several Jewish schoolboys were waiting at Egerton Road bus stop in Stamford Hill, north London and signalled for it to stop. The driver initially slowed down but then continued without stopping, the complaint says. It is claimed several passengers were encouraging the drivers alleged actions, making antisemitic remarks and expressing their gratitude for the bus not stopping, the Met Police said. The incident is said to have occurred at around 8.05am on the 76 bus towards Waterloo, on 26 November. People take part in a march against antisemitism organised by the volunteer-led charity Campaign Against Antisemitism at the Royal Courts of Justice in London in November (Jordan Pettitt/PA Wire) The alleged incident was reported to Shomrim - the Jewish Community Safety Patrol - and to the Met by a passenger who felt threatened, intimidated, shocked, and scared as he was the only Jewish person on the bus at the time. He said he was angered by the apparent complicity of the bus driver and other passengers, a Shomrim spokesperson said. Have you been affected by this? Email barney.davis@independent.co.uk A similar incident is said to have taken place three days later, on the 318 bus, on Ravensdale Road in Hackney at around 7.40pm. A 13-year-old Jewish girl reported her bus initially slowing down for Jewish boys putting their hands out for it to stop. She claimed the driver then rapidly accelerated and did not allow them on. At the next stop, a non-Jewish Londoner was permitted on board, suggesting discriminatory behaviour by the driver, the complaint claims. Transport for London (TfL) said it was taking the reports extremely seriously, adding: We do not tolerate any form of discrimination on our network. There has been a rise in antisemitic hate crimes since the Hamas attacks, with this Kosher restaurant in Golders Green vandalised in October (Reuters) It comes after the Metropolitan Police said antisemitic attacks in London increased by 1,353 per cent following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas conflict on 7 October. Chaim Hochhauser, chief executive of Shomrim, described children terrified to go home from school or use public transport as he said: We are talking about kids waiting at bus stops to go onto buses. Bus drivers see the Jewish people waiting for buses and they say, No, you are not getting on, and drive off. Its happening all over at supermarkets and clothes stores, they say, We are not serving you Jewish people. We are seeing it all over London, and its unfair. Why should we suffer like this? Our children dont know what is happening in the Middle East, they dont have TVs, its not their fault. We receive phone calls every day to our 24/7 hotline, asking, If it is safe for my children to go to school, go to the park, or even go to hospital appointments? We have to say, Its business as usual, just be aware of your surroundings, and notify us if something looks suspicious etc. The Israel-Hamas war has had an impact on the UKs Jewish and Muslim communities (AFP via Getty Images) Mr Hochhauser said the number of hate crimes reported to his organisation has rocketed in recent weeks, as he fears an incident will start with shouting but spiral into far worse. He said: We have never had so many hate crimes in one month. Usually, on average, it's three a week. Since 7 October, Shomrim has reported 84 hate crimes. We are not talking about nationally this is happening, just around the Stamford Hill neighbourhood. We are Charedi Orthodox Jewish people, we are an easy target, and we are vulnerable. Our greatest fear is that it starts with shouting, but it doesnt end there, and someone will get hurt. A Scotland Yard spokesman confirmed officers are investigating the bus incidents in Hackney. It is alleged that the drivers slowed while approaching bus stops where children were waiting, before speeding up without stopping, a spokesperson said. On both occasions it is suggested that the children were obviously Jewish based on their appearance. It is alleged that during [one] incident the other passengers on the bus made antisemitic remarks in support of the drivers actions. A TfL spokesperson added: "We do not tolerate any form of discrimination on our network and take any reports of this extremely seriously. We are investigating these reports and would urge anyone who has experienced discrimination, or has information about any incidents, to report this to us or the police so that it can be investigated. Anyone with information is asked to call 101 providing the reference 4606/26NOV in relation to the incident on 26 November or 6372/29NOV in relation to the incident on 29 November. Information can also be provided to Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111. Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} A British teenager has been killed in Gaza while fighting for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), the Israeli army said. Binyamin Needham, 19, died on Sunday and was promoted to the rank of sergeant after his death, the IDF said. According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Mr Needham was born in England and moved to Israel when he was eight years old, with his parents and five siblings. The outlet quoted his sister, Orly, who said: He was so proud, and he had just finished basic training. He was happy to defend the country. Mr Needham was born in Edgware, north London, and moved to Israel 10 years ago with his parents Faye and Amnon. The aftermath of Israeli airstrikes on Khan Younis (Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images) Binyamin was the youngest of six and still has a sister and brother in London. His sister, Orli Ferris, told the Mirror he was a wonderful, wonderful brother. We loved him with all our hearts and we always will. He will be missed by all of us and so many others, but we will always make sure we remember him in our hearts, she said. Nothing will be the same now, but we are all very proud of what he did and he was also proud of what he was doing. He had just finished his apprenticeship and was doing his professional training. We dont know the exact details of what happened but he was only in Gaza for two days. He went in on Friday and died Sunday. An Israeli soldier gestures towards a tank crew member as it crosses a road (REUTERS) Intense footage emerged of his IDF battalion storming a building in the Gaza Strip full of Hamas fighters. She added: We are so so sad and my parents are devastated, we cant make any sense of it and we are heartbroken. We shall honour him and keep his memory alive. He was a wonderful boy and everyone who knew him said the same. He died with a pure soul and he died protecting his country. He would go back to London every year or so to see his siblings who live there. The teenager was one of three soldiers who died in combat operations in Gaza on Sunday, the IDF said. The other two soldiers were named as Neriya Shaer and Ben Zussman. Also among British nationals known to have died since Hamass attack in October while serving in the Israeli army is 20-year-old Nathanel Young. The IDF said they had struck 200 Hamas targets since the ceasefire ended, finding a booby-trapped tunnel inside a school as well as explosives and additional weapons. The war has already killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced over three-fourths of Gazas 2.3 million residents, who are running out of safe places to go. The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the death toll in the territory since October 7 has surpassed 15,500, with more than 41,000 wounded. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths, but said 70 per cent of the dead were women and children. Since the start of the war on 7 October, the IDF announced the deaths of 401 soldiers. Of those, 75 died during the ground offensive inside the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army resumed its offensive on Friday after a weeklong cease-fire expired. The vast majority of Gazas population has fled to the south in search of safety. Israeli military spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said late Sunday that ground troops were also pushing into the south. The Israeli army is continuing and expanding the ground operation against the Hamas presence in every part of the Gaza Strip, he said. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has been contacted for comment. Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} The broadcaster Chris Packham has filed a High Court legal challenge to the government against a decision to weaken key climate policies. Packham, a veteran environmental campaigner, has applied for a judicial review of the governments decision to ditch the timetable for phasing out petrol and diesel powered cars and vans and a delay to the phase-out of new gas boilers. A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said it rejects Packhams claims and will robustly defend the challenge. The measures and their schedule had been set out in the governments Carbon Budget Delivery Plan, which was put before parliament in March. In September, Rishi Sunak announced he would delay the ban on selling new diesel and petrol cars from 2030 to 2035 and that 20 per cent of households will be exempt from a new gas boiler ban, arguing that he does not want to burden ordinary people with the costs. Following the announcement, Packham wrote to the prime minister, the energy secretary and the transport secretary to challenge the decision, arguing that Mr Sunak does not have the legal right to change the timeline of carbon budget pledges at will, since the actioning of the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan is governed by statute. Packham has also campaigned against government budget cuts to agencies tasked with protecting nature (PA) Packham said he did not receive a satisfactory response to his letter and, therefore, filed the judicial review application at the High Court. He added that the governments response to his letter made clear that the decision was made without any public consultation, without informing the Climate Change Committee, without informing parliament and without providing any reasons for the delays to the policies. The legal challenge cites the requirement to have plans in place to meet the budgets if the proposals and policies within them are altered. Packham argues that the secretaries of state have breached this obligation by not confirming or outlining how they still intend to meet the latest budget. The legal challenge also alleges that there was a failure to consult on the changes, particularly a failure to take into account ongoing consultations about off-grid heating and minimum energy efficiency in rental properties. It also claims that the decisions were based on misinformation, such as the governments argument that the UKs over delivery on previous greenhouse gas reduction targets meant that some measures were no longer needed, that carbon budgets impose unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families that no-one was ever told about and that the latest budget was voted through with barely any consideration given the hard choices needed to fulfil it. David Cameron at Cop28 in Dubai (Getty) Packham argues that this messaging is wrong, because under section 10 of the Climate Change Act, the financing and social impact of the policies were taken into account when setting the sixth carbon budget. The legal challenge also alleges that there was a breach of the duty to inform the public of the reasons for the decisions to change the policies. Packham said: We are in a crisis which threatens the whole world, everything living is in danger, including all of us. We have the potential to reduce that threat, we have the solutions and we have plans and targets. We must not divert from these. To do so on a whim for short-term political gain is reckless and betrays a disregard for the future security of the planet. Packham argued that the emissions reductions from the vehicle and gas boiler policies were intrinsically important to the UKs ability to reach somewhere near its net zero commitments. Rowan Smith, a solicitor at Leigh Day, said: If the governments lawyers are correct, then the secretary of state would have carte blanche to rip up climate change policy at the drop of the hat, without any repercussions whatsoever. Thats why this legal challenge is so important: if successful, it will mean that the secretary of state has to keep to their promises to have in place policies that will enable carbon budgets to be met. It comes after a successful legal challenge by Friends of the Earth that the 2021 sixth carbon budget did not include sufficient detail in order to demonstrate how the UK would reach net zero by 2050 as the Climate Change Act 2008 says it must. A spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: We strongly reject these claims and will be robustly defending this challenge. We have overdelivered on every carbon budget to date and these changes keep us on track to meet our legal net zero commitments. We routinely publish future emissions projections across all sectors and will continue to do so. Households will now have more time to make the transition saving some families thousands of pounds at a time when cost of living is high. Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} An artisan cheese hailed as one of the smelliest in the world, and aptly named the Minger, will hit supermarket shelves for the first time this Christmas. The decadently pungent Minger will soon make its way onto dinner tables in Scotland after its maker signed an exclusive deal with Asda. Minger, produced by Highland Fine Cheeses, will be available in 54 Asda stores north of the border. Rory Stone, who runs the family business and has been making cheese for more than 50 years, said it was a proud moment to sign the deal with supermarket giant Asda. The business has come a long way from making cheese in the bathtub to seeing it on the supermarket shelves! he said. Our cheeses are still made by hand but are now produced in our dairy in Tain. He added: Washed rind cheeses are very seldom seen on supermarket shelves, so this is a really exciting time for cheese lovers - especially for all those festive cheeseboards. Two other of the firms cheeses - Fat Cow and Blue Murder - will also be available to buy in Asda as part of the deal. Rory Stone, who runs the family business ( Highland Fine Cheeses) Minger is a pungent cheese and runny when ripe, with Fat Cow made for dishes that would normally call for Swiss cheese. Blue Murder, meanwhile, is mould-ripened and meaty in flavour. Ashley Connolly, local buying manager at Asda said the supermarket was over the moon and stocking the Minger and other cheeses on its shelves. We are continually looking for opportunities to work with the best local suppliers to find really quality and innovative products, so were over the moon about our new partnership with Highland Fine Cheeses, he said.e Highland Fine Cheeses has developed improved packaging, for stronger shelf stand out, this is testament to the companys passion for its cheeses, which is evident from the range we are now able to offer customers in store in the run up to Christmas Im sure these lines are going to feature heavily on the festive cheeseboards! Asda said High Fine Cheese products would be available to purchase just in time for Christmas. Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Londoners have mocked the appearance of this years "half-dead" Trafalgar Square Christmas tree, with some insisting it should be sent back to Norway. Standing at 62ft (19 metres) tall, the spruce grew in Nordmarka, just outside of Oslo, before being chopped down, transported 1,000 miles and unveiled in central London on Monday in a scrawny condition. People on social media were quick to mock the tree, which appeared to have been missing half of its volume before workers were seen hammering in extra branches, performing a Christmas Miracle transplant. Workers hammer on extra branches (@DanBarker) They are taking the p**s that aint a Christmas tree. Well it is but its not what we expect. Send it back, one person said to initial pictures of the tree. Another person tweeted: Each year it feels like this is a visual representation of the state of the nation. This year is meh, could be better, could be worse. One follower asked: Wheres the other half of it?! One X user posed: Is it me, or does it look quite dead? Norway sends the UK a Christmas tree for Trafalgar Square every year as an annual tradition to thank its attempts to help defend the country during the Second World War. The tradition has been in place since 1947. According to the MailOnline, this years tree may be the last dispatched from Norway with the tradition and transportation seen to be outdated and environmentally unfriendly. Its 50:50 whether another one will be given, a guest at the felling is alleged to have said. The tree is cut down in Norway (British Embassy Oslo) An official Trafalgar Square Tree social media account defended the appearance in a series of sassy posts. Replying to one post, they said: Looks like you spoke to soon, look at me now! Also its not always about whats on the outside, this is a beautiful tradition which I hope will carry on for years to come. Whatever the criticism this years looks far sprucier than 2021s tree where it was said to resemble a half-plucked chicken. Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} They have been described as the rats of the sky and are known for stealing chips and ice creams from tourists - but now seagulls are being blamed for the dirty water at a seaside resort. DNA analysis of samples from Weston-super-Mares two-mile-long sandy beach by the Environment Agency indicates that the gulls are a significant source of the unclean bathing water. The test results, which drew a link between the E. coli bacteria in the water and the seagull faeces, were highlighted in a new report that ruled the resorts bathing water quality was poor for the third year running. The publication by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs warned against swimming at Weston. And while other factors behind the unclean water - including the discharge of sewage and litter - are being worked on, reducing the impact of the seagulls on the water is a more difficult task. Seagulls fly to and from the town from the breeding colony of Steep Holm (Getty Images) The birds defecate in the Bristol Channel as they fly to and from the town from the nearby breeding colony of Steep Holm. A survey is now to be done of the birds population to help experts find out if there has been an increase that could have contributed to the deterioration in bathing water quality. Last year, North Somerset Council proposed to dish out 75 fines to people caught feeding the gulls in a crackdown - but then backed down following strong public opposition. Town mayor Mark Canniford said the community had a strong affection for the birds, but acknowledged they were causing some issues in the town. He told The Independent: The plan to fine people was met by opposition from people who said it was unfair to pick on those who take enjoyment from feeding the gulls - but those people are disconnecting themselves from the problems the population causes. The gulls can be confident enough to swoop down and steal food from tourists (Getty Images) I love the seagulls, I love hearing their noise in the mornings, it reminds you you are on the seaside. But there is the problem with the water and they can be confident when swooping down to take food from people. We try to discourage people from feeding them. We need to find a suitable solution without hurting the gulls and upsetting the public. The birds are protected by law under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. Last year, a man who killed a seagull after it stole his chips was given a 12-week curfew and ordered to pay 750 in costs. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said that despite the perception the population of seagulls was growing, many species of the gull were under threat. A spokesperson told The Independent: While their increased presence inland and in our cities may give the appearance of there being more gulls than ever, our gulls are in trouble despite this. Donkey rides are popular on Westons beach where swimming is advised against due to the poor quality of bathing water (PA) All seven species of gull that regularly breed in the UK are now listed as red or amber status in the list of UKs Birds of Conservation Concern, meaning that their population are in decline. They added that human activity at sea, climate change and unsustainable fishing were making it harder for the birds to survive. The latest bathing water quality results used samples over a five-year period taken between May and September each year. A steering group has been set up in a bid to improve the water quality involving the council and Wessex Water, which has spent millions of pounds on the situation. Jim Flory, environment manager at the Environment Agency, said: By working with the steering group we are confident that we are doing all we can to see the improvement in water quality that everyone wants. Many people enjoy these coastal waters, and we know the value they bring in terms of social, health and wellbeing benefits. Its vital that bathing water quality is maintained and improved. Get the free Morning Headlines email for news from our reporters across the world Sign up to our free Morning Headlines email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Morning Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Women in the armed forces have been raped, sexually assaulted and bullied by fellow colleagues, with one woman having to have her womb removed after being traumatised by the horrific abuse, a series of harrowing testimonies have revealed. The accounts, published by the defence committee, detail multiple allegations of serious sexual violence and harassment, with women saying they felt unable to report the incidents for fear of their careers being ruined. The testimonies, which will inform MPs wider inquiry into women in the armed forces, claim that: One former army soldier was raped in an army barracks and then refused medical care Another woman did not receive the right care for 35 months after a serviceman broke into her room and raped her A junior officer was sexually assaulted after a social function and felt unable to report it A woman was told to drive a senior and influential army colleague back to his mess and talk about work. When they arrived in his room, he proceeded to strip off his clothes and she left A serviceman sexually harassed a soldier to the point of attempted suicide. The same man was found using a computer to search for indecent images/videos of children, with the senior command team apparently aware of his behaviour A pregnant servicewoman was sexually harassed at a party but believed speaking up would have 100 per cent ruined my career A woman in the RAF was stalked, groped and called a thick f***ing b**** for making an error The testimonies are part of evidence to the Women in the Armed Forces Inquiry being run by the defence committee, which had its first hearing in November. The inquiry is building on an ongoing investigation, launched by MPs in 2021, into the experiences of servicewomen. Some of the accounts are from women who left the services many years ago, but the majority are from those who have left only recently or who are still in the forces. In the anonymous testimonies published by the defence committee, one former soldier in the army, who joined in 1994 at the age of 22, said that she had been raped and what I deem as tortured in the British army in a British army barracks. She said her career was stripped from her when the British army refused me medical care/treatment and failed to involve the military or civilian police. Chair of the defence committee, Robert Courts MP, said change within the armed forces had been too slow (Getty) She added that she was coerced into giving what clothing I had on me, any evidence that may have been left. This eventually led to her getting her womb taken out in a hysterectomy in her late forties, explaining: With what occurred in army service I came to hate my womanhood, my vagina, my womb, and that damaged part of me I still feel hurts and haunts me. One woman in the army described her difficulties with accessing help after a serviceman broke into her room and raped her. From the point of rape to receiving specific trauma-informed care took 35 months, she wrote. I made continued attempts to access support, retelling the trauma 67 times. Another servicewoman said a male colleague had sexually harassed one of her junior soldiers to the point that she attempted to take her own life. She added: The full truth of his behaviours never came out until he was found to have been using a non-MoD office computer to search for child pornography it transpired that the whole of the senior command team had been aware of his behaviours. One junior officer, who had recently decided to leave the army, said she had been consistently sexually objectified. She recalled an incident earlier in her career when she was sexually assaulted after a social function, while the perpetrators friend watched. She felt unable to report the assault, scared of the rumour mill that would spring up if she did. Another woman who has since left the army said during her time in the Ministry of Defence a serving married naval officer would not take no for an answer. She explained: This was the closest Ive ever come to being raped, but physically I pushed him away from me and he stopped... The next day he came up to me and laughed and said I sexually assaulted you last night. He continued to harass her on the phone after this incident until she threatened to inform his wife, the police and his vetting officer, she said. The harassment had pushed some women to leave the armed forces, with one former servicewoman saying that by the time she received a decision from the service complaints system confirming she had been subjected to sexual harassment she had already decided to quit. One servicewoman explained that she had been sexually harassed when she was pregnant at a work party (Getty) One woman in the RAF said she thought that if she rose through the ranks she would be able to make a difference to the culture but this is simply not the case. She recounted that in her first few years in the RAF, she was groped, called a thick f***ing b**** for making an error, accused of having affairs, stalked for several months by a male colleague, and had to deal with a male colleague entering her room late at night demanding sexual attention. When she reached her current rank, a male colleague told her she was simply another female being pushed by the RAF to stop men like him promoting, she wrote. The testimonies come after an investigation found that the sexual harassment of Gunner Jaysley Beck by her boss was almost certain to have been a factor in her death in 2021. Last month, a report also found a degrading and humiliating environment for women within the Red Arrows display team, while it was reported that senior women at the MoD have alleged sexual harassment by male colleagues. Chair of the committee, Robert Courts MP, thanked those who had come forward with their stories. He said: The accounts of sexual assault and the culture of normalisation of sexual harassment are particularly disturbing and make for difficult reading. While the Ministry of Defence and armed forces have made some progress since our 2021 report on women in the armed forces, this has been too slow, and the underlying culture has been hard to shift. Lucy Baston, lawyer at the Centre for Military Justice, who represents many servicewomen bringing complaints and discrimination claims against the MoD, said: These submissions demonstrate the need for urgent reform many describe completely appalling behaviours which were either not reported at all, for fear of the complainant losing her career, or, if they were reported, poor outcomes. The handling of serious complaints must be taken away from the single services themselves. An MoD spokesperson said: Sexual offences and unacceptable sexual behaviour have no place in the armed forces. All allegations are taken extremely seriously and crimes are investigated by the service police. We have set up an independent defence serious crime unit, created a victim witness care unit and strengthened our ability to discharge from service anyone who has committed an offence or engages in unacceptable sexual behaviour. Rape Crisis offers support for those affected by rape and sexual abuse. You can call them on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, and 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland, or visit their website at www.rapecrisis.org.uk. If you are in the US, you can call Rainn on 800-656-HOPE (4673) Sign up to our free Brexit and beyond email for the latest headlines on what Brexit is meaning for the UK Sign up to our Brexit email for the latest insight Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Brexit and beyond email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Chancellor Jeremy Hunt blamed Brexit for years of political instability, admitting that the turmoil in government undermined Britain economically. The cabinet minister also said the UK economy was suffering from a sprained ankle as he rejected the diagnosis of a broken leg and defended his autumn statement tax cuts. I think theres been a very particular reason why weve had that political chopping and changing I dont think its a good thing, Mr Hunt admitted on the Tory tumult of recent years. Mr Hunt said the 2016 Brexit referendum had created years of political chop and change, before the Covid pandemic added to disorder in government. We had Brexit, that led to a hung parliament, that led to a politically incredibly challenging time, he told the Resolution Foundation think tank conference on Monday. The British people had voted to leave the EU but parliament couldnt agree how, and ultimately we had the fall of Theresa Mays government, he added. Mr Hunt said: Then we had a pandemic; these things have led to changes in Whitehall. I hope we can have more stability going forward, absolutely, because I think it is a better thing for policy. His comments came as the influential think tank published a new report revealing the huge scale of Britains economic problems. The Resolution Foundation found that the UK has seen 15 years of relative decline with productivity growth at half the rate seen in other advanced economies. Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have put faith in tax cuts to boost growth (UK Parliament/Getty) The living standards of the lowest-income households in the UK are 4,300 lower than their French equivalents, the report said, with average workers seeing 10,700 a year in lost pay growth. The nearly 300-page report also warned that household incomes are not expected to reach the pre-cost-of-living crisis peak until at least 2027, with income inequality in the UK higher than in any other large European country. But Mr Hunt sought to offer a sunnier outlook during a question and answer session at the conference. One audience member asked why the think tank was describing an economy that has a broken leg while the chief surgeon disagreed. Im not sure Id describe it as a broken leg but identifying areas where we can do better, Mr Hunt responded. And that is a very good thing for us that we do that. But sometimes we forget that other countries also have the things that they need to improve. Mr Hunt added: I think we shouldnt lose confidence that we do some things absolutely amazingly. I know hes controversial in other ways but when Elon Musk was here three weeks ago, he said there were only two centres in the world for AI, San Francisco and London. Weve got a lot going for us so if were going to go into dealing with the sprain, rather than the broken leg, then lets do so from a perspective of positivity. Keir Starmer warned again any major spending boost if Labour wins power (AFP via Getty) Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer told the Resolution Foundation conference that Labour wont be able to quickly turn on the spending taps if it wins power next year. Anyone who expects an incoming Labour government to quickly turn on the spending taps, is going to be disappointed, he said but said he could not announce this partys spending plans now. Mr Starmer said Labour will be ruthless when it comes to spending every pound wisely, saying millions know what its like to fight for every penny. My sister is one of them. I will say to her lets go to the pub for lunch. And she will say, straightaway, Ill make sandwiches. So I have said to every member of my shadow cabinet, when they are drawing up their plans for our manifesto, think carefully about how precious every pound is for the people we must serve. Sir Keir said Labour will be able to fund 28bn in green investment if its growth plan works. The Labour leader said it would ramp up in the second half of parliament, and he insisted it would be within its own fiscal rules. Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox Get our free View from Westminster email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the View from Westminster email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Sir Keir Starmers top team prevented a shadow minister from criticising Margaret Thatcher, The Independent can reveal. As the Labour leader faces a backlash for his praise of the former Tory prime minister, a leaked email shows he stopped Sam Tarry, then the partys shadow minister for transport, from attacking her failed policies in 2021. Mr Tarry has been romantically linked to deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner, whom she described as her soulmate in April this year, but the couple is understood to have separated in the last month. Mr Tarry was fired by Sir Keir from his transport brief in July 2022 for making up policy on the hoof, after he gave a series of unauthorised interviews from the picket line. There has long been speculation about Sir Keir and Ms Rayners strained relationship, with the deputy leader of the opposition once describing it as an arranged marriage. Two years ago, Mr Tarry was keen to praise Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnhams announcement that bus services were to be brought under public control, and wanted to hail the biggest announcement on buses since Thatchers failed Transport Act in 1985. Angela Rayner and Sam Tarry (WireImage) The Tory leaders act introduced privatised and deregulated bus services throughout Great Britain and led to the mass sale of council bus companies. It has been criticised for pushing up fares and eroding Britains bus network, leaving passengers in some areas stranded. Left-winger Mr Tarry had wanted to criticise her 1985 Transport Act, saying it failed to deliver lower fares and better services across Greater Manchester. But when the comments were sent to Sir Keirs office for approval, one of his top aides insisted the reference to Thatcher be taken out. The leaked email said: Can we take out the Thatcher stuff and instead criticise the current government? Starmer has said he is looking to lead a mission-based Labour government (PA) An adviser to Mr Tarry pushed back on the suggested edit and replied: Mr Burnhams happy with it and shes despised in the north, so it will play well with voters. But Sir Keirs aide insisted the reference be removed to focus on the current set of elections and criticise the current set of Tories. The approved quote went out as: The decision to take local public control of Greater Manchesters buses will benefit all users, after Conservative governments have spent the last 10 years presiding over a toxic mix of cuts to services and ever-rising fares. This is a positive step forward from one of the leading mayors in Britain, whos not afraid to take bold measures that are in the best interests of all those across Greater Manchester. This clearly shows what Labour can do in power. A source familiar with the exchange said it was indicative of Labours refusal to criticise Ms Thatcher under Sir Keirs leadership, adding that recent praise for her was less of a surprise and more of a confirmation of the Labour leaders admiration for the former prime minister. Labour declined to comment on the emails. The revelation came after Sir Keir used an op-ed to claim the former prime minister effected meaningful change and set loose Britains natural entrepreneurialism. Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, he said: Every moment of meaningful change in modern British politics begins with the realisation that politics must act in service of the British people, rather than dictating to them. Praise of the Iron Lady was met with negative reactions from some of Labours MPs (Getty) Margaret Thatcher sought to drag Britain out of its stupor by setting loose our natural entrepreneurialism. Tony Blair reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late Nineties. Sir Keir was following in the footsteps of his predecessor Sir Tony, who also praised the Iron Lady in the run-up to his 1997 general election landslide. But he faced a furious backlash from left-wing MPs, with one saying the former Tory PM caused poverty and deprivation not seen since the Dickensian era. On Monday, Labours national campaign coordinator Pat McFadden said he would not use the word admire to sum up how he felt about Thatcher, and would instead say she was successful electorally. But left-wing Labour MP Beth Winter told The Independent that the Thatcher governments between 1979 and 1990, devastated communities with the deliberate destruction of the mining industry. She added: Policies like the grossly iniquitous poll tax and the great privatisation rip-off offs were the hallmarks of Thatcherism. Another Labour MP Ian Byrne said Ms Thatchers legacy was inequality, hunger, destitution and misery. And Kim Johnson, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside, said Thatcher did nothing for working class communities in Liverpool and across the country. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, Ms Johnson warned. Sir Keir defended his remarks on Monday, telling a Resolution Foundation conference: What I was doing at the weekend was distinguishing between post-war leaders who had a driving sense of purpose, a mission, a plan, and those who drifted. Grilled on the backlash from the left, the Labour leader said: It doesnt mean I agree with what she did, but you dont have to agree with someone to recognise that they had a mission and a plan, in her particular case about entrepreneurship. Sir Keir said the Tory government of the last 13 years had overseen complete drift. He added: Can anybody in this room define the mission of the last 13 years? What was it? ... I want a mission-led Labour government. Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox Get our free View from Westminster email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the View from Westminster email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Rishi Sunak has suggested that Nigel Farage would be welcome inside the Conservatives insisting his party was a broad church. Former chancellor George Osborne has said it is not inconceivable that the former Ukip boss could be a future Tory leader because of the partys shift to the right and frustration from the grassroots. Mr Farage, currently on ITVs Im a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!, was feted by Tory members and seen dancing with former home secretary Priti Patel at the recent party conference. Asked about Stanley Johnsons plea for the Tories to open their arms to the ex-Brexit Party leader, Mr Sunak told reporters: Our party has always been a broad church. The hard-right politician has also flirted with the idea of joining the Tories in recent weeks as he seeks to raise his profile again saying never say never. He also told his fellow Im a Celeb contestants that it depends how much mess the country gets in when they asked him about trying to become PM. Mr Farage quit the Tories in 1992 after John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty, which strengthened ties with the EU. The remarks by Mr Sunak come as the latest BMG Research survey for the i shows that Reform UK is now third on 11 per cent its best performance in any poll by the firm. Delegates at the recent Tory conference pose with Nigel Farage (AFP via Getty Images) There is speculation that Mr Farage founder of the re-incarnation of the Brexit Party a could replace current leader Richard Tice when he gets out of the jungle Asked earlier this month if Mr Farage could stage a comeback and lead the right-wing party, Mr Tice said: Lets wait and see. New JL Partners polling found that Nigel Farages Reform UK is doing the most damage to Mr Sunaks party, with one in six 2019 Tory voters switching to the right-wing party. The major study also revealed Mr Sunak is now faring worse than Liz Truss with the wider electorate. Just 59 per cent of voters who backed the Conservatives in 2019 under Boris Johnson are sticking with the party under Sunak, the report found. That was down from 74 per cent last August and 63 per cent following Ms Trusss disastrous mini-budget in September 2022. An in-depth study by JL Partners found Mr Sunak has presided over a year of decline leading to an implosion in the Tory vote. It will set alarm bells ringing in No 10, and comes as the ConservativeHome survey revealed Mr Sunaks plummeting support among Tory grassroots. Mr Sunak is now the least popular member of his cabinet, with an approval rating of -25.4, according to the latest online poll. Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox Get our free View from Westminster email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the View from Westminster email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Rishi Sunaks government has unveiled a crackdown on record-high net migration as he tries to wrest back control of his increasingly divided Conservative Party. The measures, unveiled by home secretary James Cleverly, follow a series of polls which show the Tory leaders popularity has plummeted to a record low and he is now faring even worse than Liz Truss with the electorate. The latest ConservativeHome survey revealed Mr Sunaks support among Tory grassroots plunged to -25 per cent, making him the least popular member of the cabinet. In a bid to win back voters, Mr Cleverly increased the salary threshold for foreign workers from 26,200 to 38,700 as part of a package set to come into force in April. Mr Cleverly also raised the threshold for people living here wanting to sponsor a family member to move to the UK the person living in the UK must now earn 38,700, up from 18,600 currently. He also banned overseas social care staff from bringing dependants to the UK and the rule allowing the most-needed professions to be hired at 20 per cent below the going rate would also be scrapped. MPs on the Tory right urged the PM to implement even more severe measures to control numbers and ignore human rights law so Rwanda deportations can begin warning that nothing matters more to voters than immigration. But business leaders warned of major staffing crises in hospitality and social care ahead. Labour accused the Tories of chaotic panic, while union leaders claimed the PM was playing roulette with essential services to placate the right. The fresh row came as Mr Cleverly announced: A five-point plan to cut legal migration and a new target of 300,000 fewer migrants a year Foreign care workers will no longer be able to bring their dependants to the UK The minimum income for family visas was raised to the new salary threshold of 38,700 The shortage occupation list will be overhauled to end a 20 per cent salary discount The graduate visa route letting students stay for two years after their studies is under review Mr Cleverly declared enough is enough as he promised his plans would deliver the biggest ever reduction in net migration after levels soared to a record high of 745,000 in 2022 and sparked Tory outrage. He said the strategy would bring down annual levels by 300,000 in future years. Mr Cleverly said the Tories would get rid of cut-price labour by stopping shortage occupations being able to pay 20 per cent less than the going rate, and restricting the number of jobs which are on the list. Suella Braverman has led pressure on Rishi Sunak to cut migration numbers (AP) Sacked home secretary Suella Braverman said the measures were too late and the government can go further. She called on Mr Sunak to cut the graduate visa route from two years, and bring in an overall Australia-style cap on annual net migration. Mr Sunak and Mr Cleverly did not limit the total number of NHS and social care visas a move immigration minister Robert Jenrick is believed to have been pushing for. Two sources said Ms Braverman and Mr Jenrick had also pushed for the salary threshold to go even higher to 45,000. Senior Tory John Hayes, Ms Bravermans closest ally, told The Independent that nothing matters more than the immigration crackdown both legal and illegal if the party has any chance of winning next years general election. Mr Hayes, leader of the Common Sense Group, said the new moves were long overdue but incredibly welcome, although he warned that Mr Sunak he would have to go further. Mr Hayes is demanding that the Tory leader opt out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in its emergency Rwanda legislation. We need severe measures. We need to be really tough, he said. Leading right-winger Simon Clarke, a former cabinet minister, claimed Tory voters had expressed a desperation for bold action to deliver a fix. The ex-minister said voters will return if we deliver on illegal immigration. Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg challenged Mr Cleverly in the Commons to consider Ms Bravermans idea of an Australia-style overall cap on net migration numbers. But the new home secretary said a cap would be difficult to manage. Record-high migration has reopened the huge divides in the Tory party. Mr Jenrick said last week that he wanted to bring in his own plan before last Christmas, and suggested he was keen to consider an overall cap on net migration. Immigration minister Robert Jenrick has pushed for a five-point plan to cut net migration (PA) However, senior Tory Damian Green warned Mr Sunak and Mr Cleverly about the huge shortage in the care sector, warning that the ban on dependants could cause major problems. The One Nation group leader said: I would hope that this isnt a significant contributor to the reduction in numbers, because if it is, it will cause damage to the care sector. But Mr Cleverly denied that it would lead to a staff shortage. Tory health committee chair Steve Brine has also warned against clamping down on care workers, arguing that they are the people who look after your ailing parents and grandparents. Unison general secretary Christina McAnea accused Mr Sunak of playing roulette with essential services just to placate its backbenchers and the far right. She warned that some foreign workers already here will now leave. What do you thinks going to happen? she told the BBC World at One programme. To those who are already here, who do have dependents when they come to renew their visa, presumably they will be told you have to send your children back again. Prof Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, said immigration was saving the social care sector from collapse arguing that 70,000 overseas workers were needed in the past year to fill gaps. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said Mr Sunak appears comfortable with tearing apart families to score political points. And Miriam Deakin, director of policy at NHS Providers, said measures that deter foreign recruits were deeply concerning. Rishi Sunak has vowed to crack down on both legal and illegal migration (PA Wire) UKHospitality chief Kate Nicholls warned of a major staffing crisis in pubs, bars and restaurants arguing the changes will further shrink the talent pool and worsen the shortages hospitality businesses are facing. The industry leader warned that 95 per cent of the 8,500 hospitality visas issued last year would no longer be eligible under these plans. Dr Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory, said the move to raise the family visa income threshold to 38,700 would restrict some people very significantly. She said the largest impact will fall on lower-income citizens, and particularly women and younger people. Reunite Familes UK, which helps migrants bring loved ones to Britain, said they were beyond devastated at the change. It comes as a new JL Partners survey found that just 59 per cent of people who voted for the Tories in 2019 plan to vote Conservative at the next general election, down from 63 per cent following Ms Trusss disastrous mini-Budget. It also revealed that one in six 2019 Tory voters have switched to Reform UK. Separately, a BMG Research survey shows that Reform UK is now third on 11 per cent its best performance in any poll by the firm. Pollster James Johnson said there was only one option for the Conservatives now: go big on immigration or go home. Labours shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said Mr Sunaks chaotic panic plan was an admission of years of total failure by this Conservative government. Alistair Carmichael, the Lib Democrats home affairs spokesperson, said polling showed that confidence in Mr Sunaks approach to immigration was at an all-time low yet they seem determined to keep pushing their damaging, divisive policies. The major overhaul comes as Mr Cleverly is in Rwanda to sign an updated agreement. But senior civil servants at the Home Office are said to have warned No 10 that its Rwanda legislation is destined to fail. James Cleverly is set to visit Rwanda this week to sign an updated treaty (PA Wire) Government lawyers are reportedly refusing to sanction the most draconian version of the legislation that would opt out of the ECHR by using a notwithstanding clause to direct UK judges to ignore it. Leading Tory moderate Sir Robert Buckland warned that opting out of the ECHR would be foolish and rash and would endanger the Good Friday Agreement. The new chair of the Northern Ireland affairs committee told the BBC it would be a very un-Conservative step. But senior Tory Mark Francois warned Mr Sunak that it could be three strikes and youre out urging the PM to to ignore the ECHR in the emergency Rwanda legislation. The chair of the European Research Group (ERG) told GB News: Rishi promised to stop the boats but ... he hasnt has he? Weve had two goes before. Now its three strikes and youre out. The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Four killings in four days. Three of them were homeless men. Hunted and shot to death as they slept on the streets of Los Angeles, a city facing a glaring homelessness crisis. The suspected serial killer was finally identified as 33-year-old Jerrid Joseph Powell after police discovered he was already in custody for another murder that happened during his alleged killing spree the same week. Mr Powell was arrested on Wednesday for a botched robbery that left Nicholas Simbolon dead at his home in San Dimas, 28 miles east of Los Angeles. By Saturday, investigators connected him to the murders of the three homeless men using his car and the murder weapon, a gun, that they found inside, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore announced at a press conference. I am grateful that this suspect in this case is in custody and no longer a threat to our community, Chief Moore said. News of the arrest came just a day after authorities sounded the alarm of a possible serial killer targeting homeless people in the downtown area with city officials announcing an urgent plea for the homeless to be on high alert for the killer preying on the unhoused. The suspected serial killer was identified as 33-year-old Jerrid Joseph Powell (LAPD) No motive in the violent four-day killing spree has yet been determined. Heres what we know so far: A timeline of the killings Los Angeles authorities said the first victim Jose Bolanos, 37 was found dead with a gunshot wound around 3am on Sunday, 26 November on a couch outside in an alley in South Los Angeles. Police Chief Michel Moore said at a news conference on Saturday that the man was killed brutally and ruthlessly. On Monday, 27 November, Mark Diggs, 62, was shot and killed while pushing a shopping cart around 5am, near downtown, according to officials. It was chilling, Mr Moore said Saturday, recalling video footage of the killing. The coldblooded manner in which he walks up and shoots this individual without any hesitation, no interactions, and then leaves that location and and we now know to follow home an individual, a young father of two, whos simply charging his car. The third homeless shooting occurred Wednesday about 2.30am, in the Lincoln Heights area, where the body of a 52-year-old man was found on a sidewalk where he had been sleeping. Police did not immediately identify him pending notification of family. All three men were asleep in the open areas like alleys or sidewalks when they were shot and killed, Chief Moore said. It was believed the suspect approached each victim as they slept, opened fire then walked away, according to Moore. Surveillance video showing suspect (LAPD) Early the next morning, Powell was arrested after the Beverly Hills Police Department conducted a vehicle stop. Police believed the vehicle had been used during a robbery gone wrong in San Dimas the night before. It was also later connected to the three homicides, Moore said. Less than 24 hours before Mr Powell was arrested, Nicholas Simbolon, 42, who was not homeless, was found dead in the garage of his home in the city of San Dimas, 28 miles east of Los Angeles, at 6.48pm. Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said it appeared the suspect had followed Simbolon home from an electric vehicle charging station about 12 miles from his house. The suspect, later identified by police as Mr Powell, robbed Simbolon of some personal belongings before shooting him and fleeing. How investigators connected the dots At Saturdays press conference, Chief Moore revealed how investigators connected the dots between the shootings. He said investigators working on the cases of the fatal shootings discovered that the shell casings in the two cases on Monday and Wednesday were similar and that there had been a similar case on Sunday in another bureau. One vehicle, a 2024 BMW M440 that was seen in footage all three shootings, was the key and a task force worked on locating it. Sheriff Robert Luna said Beverly Hills police used what he described as an automatic license plate reader system to identify the car. We know theres controversy out there about the usage of this system, he noted. But let me tell our community something: If we did not enter that plate into this system, this individual that we believe is responsible for at least four murders may have been out there and re-offended. He was victimizing, as was said, some of our most vulnerable community members." Detectives then tracked it to Beverly Hills, where police had conducted the traffic stop and found the firearm inside, authorities said. The vehicle was in custody of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Office in connection with the San Dimas homicide. Inside the vehicle was a gun, the murder weapon used in all four homicides, Chief Moore said. A car linked to the killings (LAPD) Authorities do not believe there was any connection between Mr Powell and the victims. The chief said authorities worked quickly to identify the suspect, aided by surveillance technology. Had they not had access to those tools, this individual, I am convinced, would still be moving about the city and the region, and killing individuals, Moore added. No motive has yet been determined. Botched robbery victim was a father-of-two described as gentle Nicholas Simbolon was a county employee known to his two young children, wife and family as Noli. I cannot even express my feelings, how devastated we are right now, the victims aunt, Fanny Prentice, told KTLAs Shelby Nelson. Ms Prentice described the moment she heard the news about his death. He says, Noli died, just like that, she said. I mean, how can you hear this? Died? Noli died, what? I just saw him Saturday, said goodbye. That will be his last goodbye to me. Simbolon had worked as a business systems analyst for the superior court and in 2019 joined the IT staff of the chief executives office as a principal systems analyst, officials said. He was a prolific developer who had recently completed an innovative IT system to process our countys budget process, Kathyrn Barger, a member of the county Board of Supervisors, noted at a press conference. His coworkers describe him as a kind, gentle, and hardworking person. All of the men were killed outside (KTLA ) Suspected LA serial killer is a convicted felon with violent background Authorities are asking anyone with information about the suspect, including other crimes he may have committed, to come forward. LA County Sheriff Luna described Mr Powell as a convicted felon who had violence in his background. We want to make sure that anybody who may have been a victim of this individual that they come forward and notify your own police department, Luna added. Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon said they are working on further charges. The residents of Los Angeles County can breathe a sigh of relief today. Once a case is presented, our team will ensure that justice is served, Gascon added. Authorities said they cant ignore the possibility that Mr Powell might have committed other crimes. Based on his criminal history, he didnt just start doing this a week ago, Sheriff Luna said. Mr Powell appeared in court on Monday. He will enter a plea in January. His bond is set at $2m, and was denied bail during his Monday court appearance. The locations of the shootings (LAPD ) Killings push city officials to create a task force The killings pushed city officials to create a task force to help get the homeless off the streets. Los Angeles County is the nations most populous county, with about 10 million people, and was home to more than one in five of the nations homeless people, according to a 2022 federal tally. As of January, the last official count, more than 75,000 people were homeless across the county on any given night. There was a push to open emergency shelters that are typically relegated to harsh weather to get as many homeless people off the street as possible. The rate of homeless homicide has spiked this decade, data from the Los Angeles Police Department revealed the total for this decades three years exceeds all of last decades, The Nation reported. In 2017, 29 homicide victims in Los Angeles were homeless. By 2022, that number had jumped to 74. You have an epidemic of homelessness and living outside, and an epidemic of gun violence, said Barbara DiPietro, senior policy director for the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. No one should be surprised to see that this is increasing. We throw vulnerable people to the wolves every day. The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} A top American diplomat who used to be the US ambassador to Bolivia has been arrested for allegedly secretly working as a Cuban spy. Manuel Rocha, 73, was taken into custody in Miami on Friday in what marked the culmination of a long-running FBI counterintelligence investigation, according to the Associated Press. Two sources told the agency that Mr Rocha is accused of secretly working to promote the Cuban governments interests. Investigators allege that this is a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act a law which requires any individual lobbying and doing the political bidding of a foreign government on US soil to register with the Justice Department. Further details about the 73-year-olds alleged work as a Cuban government agent are expected to be revealed on Monday when he appears in federal court. Neither the DOJ or Mr Rocha has yet publicly commented on his arrest. Mr Rochas wife Karla Wittkop Rocha refused to comment and hung up the phone when reached for comment by the AP. The bombshell arrest comes after Mr Rocha has spent 25 years working as a top US diplomat in several Latin American countries. His diplomatic postings included a stint at the US Interests Section in Cuba during a time when the US lacked full diplomatic relations with Fidel Castros communist government. Born in Colombia, Mr Rocha was raised in a working-class home in New York City and went on to obtain a succession of liberal arts degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown before joining the foreign service in 1981. Manuel Rocha was arrested on Friday (Supplied) He was the top US diplomat in Argentina between 1997 and 2000 as a decade-long currency stabilisation program backed by Washington was unraveling under the weight of huge foreign debt and stagnant growth, triggering a political crisis that would see the South American country cycle through five presidents in two weeks. At his next post as ambassador to Bolivia, he intervened directly into the 2002 presidential race, warning weeks ahead of the vote that the US would cut off assistance to the poor South American country if it were to elect former coca grower Evo Morales. I want to remind the Bolivian electorate that if they vote for those who want Bolivia to return to exporting cocaine, that will seriously jeopardise any future aid to Bolivia from the United States, Mr Rocha said in a speech that was widely interpreted as a an attempt to sustain US dominance in the region. The gambit worked but three years later Bolivians elected Morales anyway and the leftist leader would expel Rochas successor as chief of the diplomatic mission for inciting civil war. Mr Rocha also served in Italy, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, and worked as a Latin America expert for the National Security Council. Following his retirement from the State Department, Mr Rocha began a second career in business, serving as the president of a gold mine in the Dominican Republic partly owned by Canadas Barrick Gold. More recently, hes held senior roles at XCoal, a Pennsylvania-based coal exporter; Clover Leaf Capital, a company formed to facilitate mergers in the cannabis industry; law firm Foley & Lardner and Spanish public relations firm Llorente & Cuenca. The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Veterinarians have raised the alarm over a mystery coughing illness on the rise in dogs across the US. Experts have warned that symptoms of the mystery illness may present as similar to those of kennel cough, including coughing, sneezing, nasal and/or eye discharge and lethargy. But the illness is distinct from kennel cough because symptoms will include a wet, rather than a dry cough, experts have said. Instead of that dry cough where the dog felt good, it was now this wet cough where the dog felt sick, Amanda Cavanagh, the section head of the urgent care service at Colorado State University Veterinary Teaching Hospital, told Good Morning America. Vets have also warned that the mystery illness is highly contagious and could potentially be fatal. Oregon, Colorado and New Hampshire are among the states that have seen cases of the illness, which has caused lasting respiratory disease and pneumonia and does not respond to antibiotics. Some cases of the pneunomia progress quickly, making dogs very sick within 24 to 36 hours. The Oregon Department of Agriculture has documented more than 200 cases of the disease since mid-August. Wendy Brown, from Idaho, told Good Morning America her three golden retrievers Bridge, Dooley and Lulu started showing symptoms of the mystery illness earlier this month. Dooley started doing kind of this huffing and also seemed to feel quite lethargic, she said. Not too long after, Bridge began to exhibit the symptoms. But his were louder, more boisterous. I thought it was his stomach because he made like a retching sound. Ms Brown said she initially thought her dogs had kennel cough, but after the coughing did not subside, she knew it was more serious. She said after 10 days and a dose of doxycycline from the vets, her beloved pets are still not feeling much better. Ms Cavanagh said any dogs showing signs of consistent coughing should be brought to a vet to be examined. We can ultrasound the lungs to see if there is a problem that is related to pneumonia or the contagious pneumonia that seems to be going around, she said. She also recommended keeping any dogs showing symptoms away from other dogs during the length of their illness, as well as for two weeks after the cough goes away. The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Military divers from the US and the Japanese Marine Self-Defence Forces have found large parts of the American Osprey aircraft that crashed into the sea in southwest Japan. The US Air Force confirmed on Monday that part of the fuselage had been located, according to CBS News. The wreckage included the cockpit which still contained the bodies of five of the eight crew members who were on board the fateful craft, according to the Air Force Special Operations Command. Both Japanese and US teams had been searching the waters around the island of Yakushima and had a breakthrough when their surface ships and dive teams were able to locate remains along with the main fuselage of the aircraft wreckage, the Air Force said. The dive teams were able to confirm five additional crew members from the original team of eight that were involved with the crash. The Air Force said that two of the five crew members found on Monday had been recovered, adding that there was an ongoing combined effort to recover the remaining crew members from the wreckage. A Japan's coast guard vessel conducts search and rescue operation around the site where a U.S. military Osprey aircraft was believed to crash in the sea off Yakushima Island, Kagoshima prefecture, southern Japan Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023 (AP) The military branch chose not to identify the five crew members. Prior to this discovery, the remains of only one crew member had been found. Last week, the Air Force identified that crew member as Staff Sergeant Jacob Galliher, 24. The Air Force added that the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, its air wing, divers, and other resources such as unmanned vehicles were being used in the search. The first-ever deadly Osprey accident in Japan took place last week when the US Air Force CV-22, which was based at the Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, went down. A floating object believed to belong to the U.S. military aircraft V-22 Osprey that crashed into the sea is seen off Yakushima Island, Kagoshima prefecture, western Japan November 30, 2023 (via REUTERS) It left the Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Yamaguchi Prefecture for a training flight headed to the largest US base in the area Kadena Air Base on Okinawa. But, soon the aircraft requested an emergency landing on the small island of Yakishima. Not long later, it crashed into the sea close to the island. Witnesses have said the aircraft flipped and caught fire before hitting the water. The Japanese Coast Guard, with the help of local fishermen, have been searching 24/7 following the crash. Fishermen participating in a searching operation unload recovered parts believed to be pieces of wreckage from the fuselage of a U.S. Air Force CV-22 Osprey transport aircraft are from their boat at a port on Yakushima Island, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan, 30 November 2023 (EPA) US military personnel carry a dinghy as they head out to search for the crash of a US CV-22B Osprey aircraft, on the island of Yakushima, Kagoshima Prefecture on December 1, 2023 (JIJI Press/AFP via Getty Images) Some pieces of the aircraft have been provided to the US military. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Japan gives the US the exclusive rights to look into the incident. When two US airmen were injured in an Osprey crash in 2016 off the coast of Okinawa, Japan was also sidelined in the following investigation. The recent crash is the latest in a series of incidents involving Osprey aircraft around the world and the incident has led to frustration and concern in Japan. Japan is the USs top ally in the region and more than 50,000 American troops are stationed in the country. The Japanese government has requested that the US ground its Ospreys in the nation until the aircrafts safety can be investigated. The US has disregarded the request and is continuing to fly the craft despite concerns it may harm relations with Tokyo at a time when China is carrying out an aggressive military expansion in the region. The members of Japanese Coast Guard carry the debris which are believed to be from the crashed U.S. military Osprey aircraft, at a port in Yakushima, Kagoshima prefecture, southern Japan, Monday, Dec. 4, 2023 (AP) A Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force minesweeper searches in the waters where a U.S. military Osprey aircraft crashed, off Yakushima, Kagoshima prefecture, southern Japan, Friday, Dec. 1, 2023 (AP) Japan is the only other nation flying Ospreys and its military has grounded its own on a temporary basis. The Japanese Defence Ministry said that the US has six Ospreys at Yokota and another 24 at the Futenma base on Okinawa, according to CBS News. The hybrid aircraft was initially used in Japan more than ten years ago and is able to take off and land vertically like a helicopter before changing the angle of the rotors to fly at high speeds like a plane. This file photo taken on August 23, 2022 shows a US military Osprey aircraft at the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in the centre of the city of Ginowan, Okinawa prefecture (AFP via Getty Images) If all the crew members died in the recent crash, it would be the deadliest incident involving an Osprey ever. It comes after three US Marines were killed and eight others were taken to hospital following an Osprey crash on an Australian island in August, CBS notes. In the summer of last year, five Marines died when an Osprey crashed in the desert in California. The centre-left Japanese paper Mainichi has pushed Tokyo to insist on taking part in the investigation into last weeks crash, arguing that the agreement with the US must change and Japan must stop being sidelined. The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} In the mid-late 1990s, Purdue Pharma began manufacturing, and heavily marketing, an opioid pill that has quickly become a thorn in the side of the world: OxyContin. The implications of the pill, which is widely believed to have heavily contributed to, if not sparked, the opioid epidemic, is now making its way to the Supreme Court in a case that, at first, appears as another bankruptcy case. In Harrington v Purdue Pharma, justices are being asked to decide if a reorganisation plan created by Purdue Pharmaceuticals under their Chapter 11 claim, can allow for a third party, aka the companys former owners, the Sackler family, to be granted immunity from civil liability even though the Sacklers have not declared bankruptcy themselves. Under the current deal, victims can obtain long-awaited financial compensation but cannot bring civil suits against individual members of the Sackler family. Should the court strike down the deal, it would set negotiations go back to square one which would undoubtedly take longer to hash out given the Sacklers wouldnt have extensive protections. But it would also give victims the opportunity to bring the Sackler family to civil court. Millions of people in the US have been impacted by the opioid epidemic. Between 1999 and 2021, over 280,000 people died of overdoses involving prescription opioids, according to the CDC. In 2021 alone, the number of deaths involving prescription opioids was five times the number it was in 1999. Only in the last 10-15 years have pharmaceutical companies begun facing lawsuits over their marketing and manufacturing of easily accessible opioid prescriptions. In 2007, Purdue pled guilty to felony charges of misbranding the drug including its risk for addiction and agreed to pay $600m in fines. A campaigner holds a pill container outside the US Supreme Court (EPA) Over the next few years, lawsuits seeking damages began flooding Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers from victims, states, local governments, Native American tribes and more. This includes Ellen Isaacs, who in her amicus brief to the court, said she found her 32-year-old son dead on their bathroom floor from an opioid overdose after he got hooked on OxyContin pills that were sold to him to manage pain. The government claims that to protect themselves from potential money judgments the Sacklers withdrew approximately $11bn from the company and transferred it overseas more than 40 per cent of which went to Purdues taxes. During this time, the Sacklers also began removing themselves from the companys board. With mounting lawsuits and about 75 per cent of its assets drained, Purdue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019. But the Sacklers did not and instead negotiated a strategy. In its proposed plan of reorganisation, Purdue Pharma would pay $1.2bn for administrative expenses and distribution to opioid victims. About 138,000 plaintiffs could receive anywhere between $3,500 and $48,000 over the next 10 years. Then, in a separate settlement that would be implemented into Purdues reorganisation plan, the Sackler family agreed to contribute approximately $4.3bn that number eventually turned into $6bn when the deal was sent to the Court of Appeals. But in return for contributing to the settlement, the Sacklers and other non-debtors would be free of all opioid-related claims. In short, it is a $6bn get-out-of-jail card. Campaigners and family members of those who have died of opioids gather outside the US Supreme Court (EPA) The tactic has been used in other lawsuits to protect individual liability like in the sexual abuse suits against the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts of America. Purdue Pharmas bankruptcy plan was initially approved by a New York bankruptcy court and 95 per cent of the victims. However, most of the claimants who were entitled to vote or had personal injury claims failed to vote. More than 2,600 personal-injury claimants voted against the plan including Ms Isaacs. "Its just all wrong," Ms Isaacs told CBS News. "I want my day with Richard Sackler." The US Trustee Program, an arm of the Justice Department that serves as a watchdog for bankruptcy cases, opposed the plan claiming that the deal prevents people from pursuing individual family members in civil court imposing on their right to due process. Curtis E Gannon, the deputy solicitor general arguing on behalf of the Trustee Program, said on Monday that because the Sackler family had not filed for bankruptcy themselves they should not be permitted to receive release protections through a bankruptcy court. The protections are typically reserved for those in financial distress but Mr Gannon said the Sackler family was not and cited how they increased their initial offer from $4.3bn to $6bn during litigation. The Sacklers have not made all their assets available to the state, Mr Gannon told justices. He suggested Congress could make legislation that would allow for deals like this to exist but in narrower situations. Meanwhile, attorneys representing Purdue Pharma and unsecured creditors of Purdue Pharma said that the addition of the release was necessary in order for victims to have any sort of relief because the Sacklers would have refused to contribute to the deal if there was not one. Without the release, the plan will unravel, and Chapter 7 liquidation will occur, Pratik Shah, representing The Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors of Purdue Pharma LP, said. Mr Shah argued that the Sacklers would be faced with an overwhelming number of lawsuits, any of which could quickly wipe out any potential money for victims if civil suits were permitted. Jen Trejo holds a photo of her son Christopher as she is comforted outside the Supreme Court (AP) By the end of the arguments, justices seemed split on the issue. Should the court uphold the deal, it would set a precedent allowing other people to take advantage of company bankruptcy claims and avoid liability through broad releases. The court will decide the case in spring 2024. Close Young Thug criticises Andre 3000 The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Evening Headlines email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} The hotly-anticipated trial of the rapper Young Thug is back under way in a courtroom in Atlanta, Georgia, after being derailed when a codefendant was stabbed in jail. In May 2022, Young Thug, real name Jeffery Williams, was arrested and charged in a sprawling RICO indictment along with 27 other defendants. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis who is using the same law to prosecute Donald Trump in his Georgia election interference case accused the suspects of being part of a criminal street gang named YSL or Young Slime Life. According to prosecutors, the gang is responsible for multiple violent crimes, including murders, shootings, carjackings and racketeering. Young Thug denies the accusations and insists YSL is simply his record label Young Stoner Life. The trial has been undoubtedly rocky. Shannon Stillwell, a YSL co-defendant, was stabbed multiple times in jail by a fellow inmate in December. The incident led to the trials postponement until 2 January. When the trial resumed on Tuesday, Young Thug instantly sparked speculation online around what he was wearing under his shirt. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} New fears of Russian escalation across Europe have emerged after a German think tank said Western countries must prepare for a direct attack from Russia. In a statement the German Council on Foreign Relations wrote: With its imperial ambitions, Russia represents the greatest and most urgent threat to Nato countries. Once intensive fighting will have ended in Ukraine, the regime in Moscow may need as little as six to ten years to reconstitute its armed forces. Within that timeframe, Germany and Nato must enable their armed forces to deter and, if necessary, fight against Russia. Only then will they be in a position to reduce the risk of another war breaking out in Europe. But, the head of Polands national security agency estimated that Russia could attack Nato countries within three years in an interview with Nasz Dziennik. Jacek Siewiera suggested that an attack could come from Natos eastern flank which includes countries such as Poland, Estonia, Romania and Lithuania. He estimated they had three years to prepare for a confrontation. The Ukraine-Russia conflict has been raging for nearly two years and now experts say it could spread to the rest of Europe (Anadolu via Getty Images) The minister said that analysts at the German think tank were too optimistic. If we want to avoid war, Nato countries on the eastern flank should adopt a shorter, three-year time horizon to prepare for confrontation. This is the time when a potential must be created on the eastern flank that would be a clear signal deterring aggression. Therefore, it is necessary to further increase the number of Polish troops. President Zelensky has also urged Europe to keep Ukraine at its forefront (AFP via Getty Images) It comes as the White House warned that the US was running out of money to support Ukraines defence and could be out of resources by the end of the year after supporting the nations defensive military action following a full-scale invasion by Russia for almost two years. However, Lord George Robertson, a former Nato secretary general warned that the worlds attention must stay on Ukraine, stating that any distraction from the conflict would benefit Vladimir Putin and nobody else. Just weeks ago, Lord Robertson warned against Western nervousness of Russian escalation. He said: Instead of the West being nervous of Russian escalation...we need to breed in the military hierarchy in Moscow the worry that if they overdo what is being done in Ukraine then an actual and not fictious war with Nato might be the result. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Ukraine has accused Russia of committing a war crime by executing two unarmed Ukrainian soldiers who had already surrendered, and said an investigation has been launched into the killings. The Ukrainian prosecutor generals office said it had launched a probe into a video purporting to show the incident, saying it took place near an observation post outside Stepove village in Donetsk. The video shows a Ukrainian soldier crawling out of a foxhole as six Russian soldiers wait for him outside. He is seen holding his hands up and then lying on the ground. Within seconds, another Ukrainian soldier stumbles out of the dugout and lies down. The Russian soldiers then fire upon the two unarmed Ukrainians. The video shows a group of people in Russian uniforms shooting, at point-blank range, two unarmed servicemen in the uniform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who were surrendering, the Ukrainian prosecutor generals office said. The killing of prisoners of war is a gross violation of the Geneva Conventions and is classified as a serious international crime, it said. The Independent was not able to verify the authenticity of the video. The Ukraine prosecutor general announced the investigation on Sunday, a day after the video of the killing was shared by the Ukrainian government on its social media channels. Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets had first commented on the incident on his official Telegram channel, stating that the execution of those who surrender is a war crime. "Today, a video of the execution by Russian servicemen of Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered as prisoners appeared online. This is another violation of the Geneva Conventions and disrespect for international humanitarian law," he wrote on Saturday. He added: I believe that our law enforcement and intelligence agencies will be able to identify the Russian servicemen who committed this crime. While Russia denies committing war crimes during its 21-month-old invasion of Ukraine, officials in Kyiv and international human rights organisations have repeatedly raised incidents involving violations of the rules of war by Russian troops. Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesperson for Ukraines Tavria military command, told the Ukrainska Pravda news website that the video was "glaring confirmation" that Russia violates the rules of warfare on a daily basis. In a similar incident earlier this year, a captive Ukrainian sniper became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance after he was shot dead in a video. The sniper defiantly cried out Glory to Ukraine before he was killed in the video which surfaced in March. In September, a panel of independent UN-backed human rights experts said they were documenting the mounting evidence of war crimes committed by Russian forces in their war against Ukraine, including torture some of it with such brutality that it led to death and rape of women aged up to 83 years old. The commission, in its report, said Russian soldiers in Ukraines southern Kherson region raped and committed sexual violence against women of ages ranging from 19 to 83 years, and often family members were kept in an adjacent room hence being forced to hear the violations taking place. Russian officials have not acknowledged the expert commissions report. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Dozens of Israeli tanks have rolled into southern Gaza, witnesses have said, as Israel expands its war on Hamas. The move followed heavy bombardment of the southern city of Khan Younis over the weekend, with the Israeli military renewing calls for mass evacuations from the area, where tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge in recent weeks. No one can describe the fear, horror and the suffering we are facing right now, Khalid Mohammed, a 22-year-old computer science graduate based near Khan Younis told The Independent. All we can do is try to prepare ourselves by storing some food and other essential needs for a couple of days ahead. According to those on the ground, armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers were also seen entering the area surrounding Khan Younis. Resident Amin Abu Hawli, 59, told AFP the Israeli vehicles were two kilometres (1.2 miles) inside southern Gaza in the village of Al-Qarara near Khan Younis. Residents said they heard airstrikes and explosions in and around the city overnight. The Israeli military has ordered the evacuation of nearly two dozen neighbourhoods in and around the area, dropping leaflets ordering residents to move south towards the border with Egypt. A map created by the military showed around a quarter of the city of Khan Younis marked off in yellow as territory that must be evacuated at once. Three arrows pointed south and west, telling people to head towards the Mediterranean coast and towards Rafah, near the Egyptian border. Desperate families most of them on foot packed their belongings and headed towards Rafah. But Rafah itself was coming under Israeli fire. The head of the United Nations agency in Gaza (UNWRA), Thomas White, said people there were themselves being forced to flee. People are pleading for advice on where to find safety. We have nothing to tell them, he said on X, formerly Twitter. The Israeli military also started warning civilians to avoid the main north-south highway between Khan Younis and the central town of Deir al-Balah, saying the road had become a battlefield and was extremely dangerous. This indicated that Israeli troops were approaching Khan Younis from the northeast, possibly with plans to cut central Gaza off from the south. Were fearing that the Israeli tanks will cut the roads towards us and we [wont be able to] find anything to eat, said Mr Mohammed. The aftermath of Israeli airstrikes on Khan Younis (Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images) Israel has vowed to eradicate Hamas following the attack inside Israel on 7 October that killed 1,200 people and saw around 240 people taken hostage into Gaza. Israel responded with an intense aerial bombardment and a blockade that has left stores of fuel, food, water and medical supplies running low. Ground operations have followed, at first focusing on northern Gaza, but now pushing south. The goals in the northern section have almost been met, Brigadier-General Hisham Ibrahim told Israels Army Radio. We are beginning to expand the ground manoeuvre to other parts of the Strip. Health officials in Hamas-run Gaza say that almost 16,000 people have died since Israel began its military operations, with 70 per cent of them women and children. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesperson, said the army was pursuing Hamas with maximum force in the north and south, hitting approximately 200 Hamas terror targets. The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, reported that at least 50 people were killed on Monday in an Israeli airstrike that hit two schools sheltering displaced people in the north of the Strip. The Israeli military said it was looking into the report. In his early briefing, before that report, Rear Admiral Hagari said Israel was trying to minimise harm to civilians, pointing to the map created by the Israeli military that divides Gaza into hundreds of blocks, with the aim of enabling the Israelis to give precise instructions to civilians on where to evacuate to. Many Palestinians, however, say they are struggling to access online versions of the map, due to frequent internet blackouts throughout Gaza. When they are able to arrive in the areas where they have been instructed to seek refuge, they say they do not feel any safer with most of Gaza having been repeatedly bombed. Of course we dont trust [the map system]. Why would I trust it? said Mr Mohammed. Israel told us once to go south and bombed us in the south. Unfortunately, we dont have any other solution except to do what the system told us. The level of human suffering is intolerable, Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said during a rare visit to Gaza. It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, and with a military siege in place, there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible. A week-long truce to facilitate the release of hostages in exchange for Palestinians being held in Israeli jails ended on Friday, with Israel seeking to push quickly into southern Gaza. The pause had also allowed the first respite from the bombing campaign for Gazas residents. Palestinians flee from Khan Younis to Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip (AFP via Getty Images) During the truce, Hamas released 105 of its hostages in return for 240 Palestinian detainees. But with most women and children hostages now believed to be free, the truce collapsed over terms for releasing more, including Israeli men and soldiers. Israel says 136 hostages are still being held, with Ms Spoljaric calling for their immediate release. Israeli military chiefs believe the head of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, as well as the head of its military wing, Mohammed Deif, are hiding out in Khan Younis. They also believe some of the remaining Israeli hostages are held there, in Hamass complex network of tunnels deep underground. Doctors have said the situation inside Nasser Hospital one of the few functioning hospitals in Khan Younis is catastrophic. Infectious diseases such as pneumonia are spreading rapidly as hygiene levels plummet amid extreme overcrowding. WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described conditions as unimaginable. On Saturday, US vice-president Kamala Harris told Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi: Under no circumstances will the United States permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, the besiegement of Gaza, or the redrawing of the borders of Gaza. On Monday, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he believes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be tried as a war criminal. Mr Netanyahu has previously dismissed such rhetoric and said that Israel has a right to defend itself. Speaking at a meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) committee, Mr Erdogan said Gaza is Palestinian land and will always belong to the Palestinians. As pressure mounts on the world stage, Mr Netanyahu also faces trouble internally. This morning, his trial on corruption charges restarted for the first time since the beginning of the war, at Jerusalem District Court. In a corruption saga which rocked Israeli politics for months prior to 7 October, Mr Netanyahu faces charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in one case, and charges of fraud and breach of trust in two other cases. He denies any wrongdoing. For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Breaking News email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Doctors in southern Gaza have warned that infectious diseases are spreading rapidly through the territory, due to overcrowding caused by the mass evacuation of civilians as Israels military campaign moves south. Asem Mohammed, 24, a volunteer doctor at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, told The Independent the area surrounding the hospital was full of infectious diseases and epidemiological issues, including fungal infections, dermatological infections and pneumonia. Khan Younis has become the main target of Israeli military operations in the three days since hostilities restarted, after the end of the week-long truce that saw over 100 hostages and 240 Palestinian prisoners released. The situation right now inside the hospital is catastrophic, Yousef Adnan, 24, a volunteer doctor at Nasser Hospital, told The Independent. We are treating thousands of cases of diarrhoea due to the lack of access to clean water. In addition to treating disease, doctors are dealing with a renewed flow of victims of Israeli airstrikes, which have centred on Khan Yunis in recent days. Witnesses inside the hospital described seeing pools of blood on the floor, with doctors stepping over dead bodies as they moved from case to case. After a team from the World Health Organisation visited Nasser Hospital on Saturday, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described the conditions there as unimaginable. Patients were receiving care on the floor, screaming in pain, he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. Palestinians inspect a building damaged during Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip (AFP via Getty) The area around the hospital has become a makeshift camp for people who have been forced to flee their homes since the war began. In recent days they have been joined by residents from nearby neighbourhoods in Khan Younis, who have fled there for safety. The severe overcrowding has created optimal conditions for the spread of disease which is compounded by a lack of medical supplies, limited access to clean water, and poor sanitation. As of 29 November, the WHO had recorded 85,899 cases of diarrhoea, 2,335 cases of chickenpox, 24,355 cases of skin rashes, 116,829 cases of acute respiratory infections, 25,456 cases of scabies and lice, and 1,150 cases of jaundice throughout Gaza. Cases of diarrhoea among children aged five and older were more than 100 times normal levels across Gaza in early November. On Wednesday, WHO spokesperson Dr Margaret Harris warned: Eventually, we will see more people dying from disease than we are even seeing from the bombardment, if we are not able to put back [together] this health system." The situation is getting worse and worse, said Mr Mohammed. As the war continues, a key concern for humanitarian groups working in Gaza is the spread of lethal water-borne diseases such as cholera and typhoid. Local doctors have described how a lack of essential vaccines for newborn babies allowed disease to spread faster through hospitals. They have noted an increase in hospital-acquired pneumonia. On Sunday, Israel ordered the evacuation of five more areas in and around Khan Younis, dropping flyers ordering residents to move towards Rafah. Khan Younis is a dangerous combat zone, read leaflets dropped over the area by Israeli warplanes. Throughout the day, Israeli bombs continued to pound the city. The pattern of Israel Defence Forces operations has led to expectations that Israel is preparing for a ground invasion in the south of the territory. This has caused concern that the prospects of a renewed ceasefire are moving further and further away. On Saturday, the deputy chief of Hamas, Saleh al-Arouri, reportedly told Al Jazeera that no further hostages would be released until a new ceasefire is agreed. The statement came as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Mossad negotiators to leave Qatar and withdraw from talks over a new ceasefire. Elsewhere, the ripple effects of the war continued to play out globally. The British government announced it would send surveillance planes to conduct operations over the Mediterranean, including Israel and Gaza. Surveillance aircraft will be unarmed, do not have a combat role, and will be tasked solely to locate hostages. Only information relating to hostage rescue will be passed to the relevant authorities responsible for hostage rescue, it said in a statement on Saturday. The safety of British nationals is our utmost priority, the Ministry of Defence said. Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the IndyTech email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} Spotify will cut nearly a fifth of jobs at the company in an attempt to grow faster. It is the latest round of cuts at the streaming service, which axed around 600 jobs at the beginning of the year. Its chief executive said it had made the decision to allow it to grow faster, and acknowledged that it would be losing good employees. Bosses at the technology firm said in a note to staff that it will axe 17 per cent of the workforce in a bid to be more efficient in the face of a growth slowdown. The company employs around 9,300 people globally. It did not disclose how many roles would be affected in the UK but employs 881 people in the country, according to its latest annual report. This would suggest around 150 jobs in the UK may be at risk. Daniel Ek, chief executive of Spotify, said: Considering the gap between our financial goal state and our current operational costs, I decided that a substantial action to right-size our costs was the best option to accomplish our objectives. While I am convinced this is the right action for our company, I also understand it will be incredibly painful for our team. To be blunt, many smart, talented and hard-working people will be departing us. He said the business will build an even stronger Spotify in 2024 as a result of the cuts. It is the latest set of job losses at Spotify this year, with the company first announcing it would cut around 600 roles in January. In the summer, the Sweden-based business said it would cut around 200 jobs in its podcasting unit as it continued to reduce costs. The company also increased its subscription fees in the UK, US and Australia in July, as it said it would pass cost increases on to customers. Additional reporting by agencies Sign up to Simon Calders free travel email for expert advice and money-saving discounts Get Simon Calders Travel email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Simon Calders Travel email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} A UK citizen has been sentenced to three months in jail in Dubai after insulting airport staff who were slow to bring his mother a wheelchair. The unnamed man was originally issued a Dh 10,000 (2,150) fine, but his appeal against this failed and his punishment was extended to a jail term on 6 November. The Court of Appeal heard that the man began to insult staff at Dubai International Airport after they told him that they couldnt immediately bring his mother a wheelchair, reports the Daily Mail. The incident happened in February 2022. An airport employee told the court that the man swore at her after she had explained the airports wheelchair policy to him, telling him that a wheelchair would be made available before boarding the bus. I saw the traveller repeatedly asking an airport desk employee about the wheelchair and expected that he might have not understood her explanation, she said, reports The National. When I tried to explain it to him, he insulted me using very bad language. I told the traveller that using such offensive language is not allowed at Dubai airport but he responded that he didnt care. The employee then called the police, and a case was filed against the man in Dubais Criminal Court. Following an appeal, which he lost, the fine was escalated into a jail sentence, followed by immediate deportation. The Independent has contacted the Dubai court system for comment. The Emirate is known for its strict laws over what it deems offensive behaviour. In October, an American student briefly faced a year in prison after being accused of assaulting staff during an altercation. In 2017, a British tourist was also sentenced to a brief jail term after making rude gestures and touching a mans hip in a bar. Q I have just received an email headed: Make your Christmas shopping stress-free. Im all in favour of that. The invitation is from Ryanair and urges me to gift your loved ones a Ryanair gift card. My brother has a house near Pisa in Italy and regularly flies there on Ryanair. Should I be tempted to send him 100 worth of flights? Sarah A A This is a question I tend to get each December, and my answer remains the same: no. I welcome the general trend towards giving experiences rather than goods. What better, you might wonder, than the gift of travel? But if you buy a gift card for a particular airline, you risk providing a distinctly inferior experience. Activists wearing inflatable Pikachu costumes spoke out against the harm caused by Japanese-financed fossil fuel projects. A global coalition of civil society groups and activists demonstrated on Cop28s Finance Day in UAE on Sunday, 3 December. Using the slogan #SayonaraFossils, the group called for Japan to shift towards renewable energy projects instead of financing new fossil fuel ones. It is despicable that Japan still clings to its outdated and destructive ways over the needs of the planet and the Global South, said Lidy Nacpil, a prominent Filipino human rights and environmental activist. At least 47 people have died and 85 others injured following heavy flooding and landslides in northern Tanzania, authorities said on Monday 4 December. Overnight rain sent floodwater raging, causing destruction to property and vehicles in Katesh Town and its adjoining villages in the Hanang District. The government has deployed the military to help rescue hundreds of people trapped by the flooding which has been described as the worst in years in the East African nation. Houses, roads and bridges have been destroyed, complicating ongoing rescue efforts. Some vehicles were submerged in Katesh Town, where people waded through mud and floodwater to get around. A bag set on fire began melting into the floor of a tube carriage in a suspected attempt of arson. The tube was stationary at Leyton Underground Station at around 10:13pm on Saturday, 2 December, when smoke emanated from the carriage. The bag can be seen through the smoke-filled carriage, engulfed in flames and melting into the floor of the stopped train. Officers arrived at the scene later that evening. The British Transport Police published an appeal the next day urging witnesses and anyone with photos or footage of the suspected arson incident to get in touch with them. In the spirit of my revered grandfather, Nelson Mandela, I wish to express my deep concerns about the ongoing crisis of climate apartheid. This term, introduced by the United Nations four years ago, serves as a stark reminder that much like the apartheid my grandfather valiantly fought against we are now faced with a global struggle where the poorest (often people of colour) in the global south bear the brunt of climate change while contributing the least to its causes. As we approach the 10th anniversary of Madibas passing on 5 December, I am reminded that his battle against apartheid in South Africa was a fight against a system of racial and economic segregation. This struggle has now morphed into a global one, where the divide is between those who suffer the most from climate change and those who benefit from the economic structures causing it. The parallel is painfully clear: in apartheid South Africa, power and wealth were in the hands of a few, and today, the major polluters, primarily in the global north, continue to prosper at the expense of those in the global south. Cop28, hosted by the UAE, is a crucial moment for global leaders to address these disparities. While scepticism abounds, particularly with the UAE being an oil-producing nation, it is imperative to approach this summit with a balanced perspective. The focus should not only be on the host nation but also on other even bigger contributors to fossil fuel expansion like the United States, Canada, Russia, Iran, China and Brazil. Sign up for the View from Westminster email for expert analysis straight to your inbox Get our free View from Westminster email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the View from Westminster email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} George Santos got what he wanted. I first realised this about the now-expelled New York Republican during the speakers race in October, when he started shouting at a pro-Palestinian activist who had questioned him earlier. I had caught him coming out of the meeting room in the Longworth House Office Building and asked him about Jim Jordan when he caught the activist and shouted you are human scum. Immediately, all of the reporters moved from covering the GOP disarray and zeroed in on him, effectively turning it into a reality show. And thats how he wanted it. He got all of the Washington press corps, the House Republican conference and even some Democrats to play along with his charade as he distracted from his legal troubles. Thats why the House vote to expel him will not deter him. He turned every attempt to shame him into an opportunity. Furthermore, Republicans in the House of Representatives have created an ecosystem that disincentivizes policymaking and instead elevates people who see Congress as a way to build their brand rather than make a difference. And the press is just as guilty of giving him what he wants as anyone else. The perfect example came the day before his expulsion vote, when Mr Santos called a press conference in the bitter chill of November in Washington outside the Captiol at 8am on a Thursday. Despite these elements, he still had a swarm of reporters willing to hear him air his grievances and shout his questions, even as we knew he would blatantly lie. He refused to refute the allegations in the House Ethics Committee report that detailed his misdeeds such as lying about loaning his campaign money, using campaign donors for personal expenses such as Hermes and OnlyFans, and falsifying Federal Election Commission reports. Rather, he bragged about how well he served his constituents. Rep Anthony DEsposito, a fellow freshman Republican from his neighboring district on Long Island, refuted that to me, noting how his office is now having to handle constituent work for Mr Santoss 3rd district. All of these people do not want to deal with or just don't have the ability to do a deal with George Santos and the people who live there deserve proper representation, he told me. But when I asked Mr DEsposito what could be done about stopping another George Santos, he didnt have much to say. I think it's for the person to not run and try to dupe and defraud voters, he said. Similarly, Republican Rep Mike Garcia of California - who like Mr Santos and Mr DEsposito represents a district that President Joe Biden won - dithered when I asked him what could be done to prevent another grifter from arriving in Washington. How does the Democrat party do better opposition research as well? Mr Garcia told me. I mean, everyone missed this one. So look, when someone is committing a crime, and they're intentionally trying to cover their tracks and it makes it harder to find this thing. So this is the fault of him and his team. Rep Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the chairman of the House Rules Committee echoed the sentiment, telling me that political opponents are supposed to craft political attacks and the media is supposed to cover it. The local media in New York City, didn't get his job done, didn't better pay attention, he told me. I can't believe some of this stuff didn't come up during the campaign. Democrats and the press missed their mark on Mr Santos. But he received the support of the Republican apparatus. The Ethics Committee report noted how he falsely claimed he loaned his campaign money to earn the support of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOPs campaign apparatus, which gave his campaign $5,000 after he won his primary. The NRCCs then-chairman Tom Emmer, now the House Majority Whip, congratulated him on election night. Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, a fellow New Yorker who could have vetted him, endorsed him in 2021. House Republicans could have easily made sure a shameless con artist did not infiltrate their ranks. Blaming the Democrats or the press is the equivalent of blaming a bartender for not cutting someone off after they get a DUI. Similarly, the fact remains that there is simply no more incentive for Republicans who want to govern to stay in the House. Kay Granger, the House Appropriations Committee chairwoman, is calling it a day, as is Rep Michael Burgess of Texas, who led Republicans during the many fights about health care. Conversely, people who see legislation as an obstacle to getting attention populate the House Republican conference. Like he's the biggest one now, Rep Maxwell Frost, the first Generation Z member and outspoken progressive, told me on Thursday, adding that they still have a whole other host of people who are not here to be serious not here to actually legislate and want to push our country the wrong direction. Governing doesnt get someone on Fox News. Compromise cramps a conservatives brand of ideological purity. So there will be more George Santoses. Furthermore, they will see him not as a cautionary tale but rather as someone who blazed a trail for them to follow and they will see that their Republican colleagues will defend them until every other option is exhausted. And hes not even an isolated incident. Last Congress, now-disgraced former congressman Madison Cawthorn became an anthropomorphized ethics report, to the point Kevin McCarthy had to punish him. But when I caught Mr McCarthy, the now-disgraced ex-speaker who protected Mr Santos in the name of keeping his gavel, and asked how he would vote to expel the lawmaker on Wednesday, he didnt answer. This differs wildly from Democrats, who almost immediately called for former governor Andrew Cuomo to go amid allegations of sexual misconduct, and are now showing Sen Robert Menendez of New Jersey the door amid an indictment. Of course, no discussion about how Republicans reward being a serial liar defrauding the public and facing federal indictments is complete without talking about the head of the party, Donald Trump, who had zero previous political experience, who lies about everything from his wealth to whether he lost the presidential election in 2020 and who has received undying fealty from the GOP. Where did George Santos get the idea that you could lie, cheat and steal and succeed in the Republican Party? Where does that idea come from, Rep Jamie Raskin asked me rhetorically on Thursday, before answering with Mr Trump. I mean, if he can make lying, standard operating procedure, then it invites every kind of charlatan and con man to come on in. The water's warm for them. That culture of permission now permeates the GOP. The party of personal responsibility now puts the onus on Democrats and the press rather than raising a standard that the wise and honest can repair, to borrow from George Washington. Now, they have adopted the standard of Taylor Swift in her Reputation era, telling everyone Look What You Made Me Do. (Tellingly, Mr Santos has said that Bad Blood is his favourite song from Ms Swift and Reputation is his favourite album, even though Bad Blood is on 1989). The House GOPs unwillingness to police itself means that more figures like Mr Santos will enter the peoples House and coarsen democracy even more by turning it into their platform to soft-launch their quest for fame. When I caught Mr Santos on Thursday night, I asked him what he planned to do on his first day as a former member of Congress, he told me: Sleeping in. And he wont lose a second of sleep for his actions. Why would he? The House GOP all but tucked him into bed. The Royal Albert Hall held a 150-year celebration in 2021 after losing millions of pounds during the pandemic. Photo: Matt Crossick/PA The owners of Birr Castle in Co Offaly, Brendan and Alison Parsons, are selling their private box at Londons iconic Albert Hall for 3m (3.5m). Mr Parsons is the 7th Earl of Rosse and his wife is the Countess. The Parsons family has owned the private box at Albert Hall since the venue was opened in 1871 by Queen Victoria. The construction of the hall was partly-funded by the sale of a quarter of its more than 5,000 seats by way of subscription to wealthy patrons. The current Earl of Rosses great-great-grandfather, the 3rd Earl of Rosse, paid 100 for the private box, with a 999-year lease. The Times of London, which first reported the planned sale of the box, noted that Box 14 has been kept in the Parsons family for the past 152 years. But while the private box at the venue holds significant prestige, it also attracts an annual 13,795 (16,000) bill as a contribution towards the maintenance of Albert Hall. As owners of a Grand Tier box, the Earl and Countess receive tickets to any event at the venue not involving private promoters. But such third-party events comprise about two-thirds of the performances, including the Last Night of the Proms. The owners also have a brass plate engraved with their name erected in the hall and can avail of private catering for an extra cost. The Earl and Countess have said theyre selling the box because they dont use it as often as they would wish. The Times reported that there have already been enquiries for Box 14 from potential buyers in the Middle East, Hong Kong and eastern Europe. Martin Bikhit, a luxury property expert at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices in London, told The Times that the private box is a must-have asset for wealthy families who already have showcase assets from mansions to yachts. Fundamentally, its for someone who either has an immense appreciation for the arts with sizeable wealth, or its for an individual who has got the houses, the private jets, and the boats and they want an asset that almost feels as though its something money cant buy, he said. The Parsons family arrived in Birr in 1620 during the Plantations. The current Earl spent his career in the United Nations development programme, living with his family in many third world countries. He returned to Ireland in 1979 when his father died. Matt Corcoran of Avista Medical and Siobhan Crowley CEO of Medray Medray supplies healthcare equipment to radiology, dental, veterinary and associated sectors across Ireland and the UK. This is the fifth acquisition completed by the company since it was acquired by private equity investor Erisbeg in 2019. Erisbeg invests in businesses that can become leaders in their industry through organic growth and acquisitions. Avista Medical, which was founded in 2004, has developed medical imaging equipment and also provides a support service to radiology departments in public and private hospitals across Ireland. Avista is the long-term agent and support specialist for Canon Medical Systems, the global manufacturer of CT, MRI, X-Ray and ultrasound equipment in Ireland. Medray chief executive Siobhan Crowley said that the business complements Medrays diagnostic portfolio and strengthens the service and support offering to our customers. Ive known the CEO Siobhan Crowley for many years and am looking forward to further serving our clients with a strengthened Imaging sales and service team and reaching out to new clients into the future, added Avista Medical managing director and co-founder Matt Corcoran. In June, Medray bought Molloy Veterinary, a Longford-based business. The business supplies veterinary practices across Ireland. How convicted UK serial fraudster continues to operate company from Ireland Companies Registration Office in Dublin to begin striking off companies that fail to meet filing obligations but opportunity to root out serial fraud may be being lost The Companies Registration Office. Photo: File image John Mulligan Mon 4 Dec 2023 at 03:30 A convicted British serial fraudster who masquerades as a medical doctor and accomplished businessman has continued to operate a public limited company from Ireland even though the firm has failed to file necessary documentation with the Companies Registration Office for the past two years. The Swan Centre cineplex in Rathmines is owned by Omniplex Irish cinema operator Omniplex Cinema Group is expanding into Britain by acquiring five Empire Cinema locations in England and Scotland. More deals are in the works. The total investment will exceed 22m (25.6m). The takeover will secure 150 existing jobs at the cinemas in Birmingham, Ipswich, Sutton, Clydebank, and High Wycombe. The theatres will be rebranded as Omniplex Cinemas. Further UK sites are expected to be added next year, the family-owned Irish group said. The UKs relatively small Empire Cinemas chain was created in 2005 following competition concerns stemming from the mergers of Odeon and UCI, and Cineworld and UGC. The Empire business has struggled and in the wake of Covid, falling into administration in July this year meaning the chain missed out on the so-called Barbenheimer effect that led to the public flocking to see blockbusters Barbie and Oppenheimer. Administrators from BDO shut six cinemas in the chain in July, a move that left large UK cities including Sunderland and Wigan with no major cinema for the first time in 100 years, but continued to trade at eight sites while seeking a buyer. The Omniplex deal includes five of that remaining eight. A multiplex in Sutton Coldfield and two high-end Tivoli-brand venues in Bath and Cheltenham remain on the market . Omniplex currently operates 38 locations on the island of Ireland. One of its directors, Paul John Anderson, said the successful operations here had given the business the confidence to expand into Britain, Our disciplined approach to investing in our businesses and unwavering drive to operate high-quality cinema locations have proved successful over the years on the island of Ireland, and has given us the confidence to venture into new territories, he said. This expansion is a testament to our commitment to innovation, quality, and delivering unforgettable moments for our customers. The former Empire cinemas will be rebranded in line with the Irish parent from this month. The wider Omniplex group includes the Swan Shopping, including a multi-screen cinema in Rathmines in Dublin, the Scotch Hall Shopping Centre, including a cineplex, in Drogheda, that was bought for 21m this time last year and other property assets. However, the core of the business is its expanding chain of cinemas on both sides of the Border that currently stands at 270 screens in 38 locations. Dr Daniel Malan, assistant professor in Business Ethics and director of the Trinity Corporate Governance Lab. Photo: Paul Sharp/SHARPPIX Trinity Business School has launched a new Trinity Corporate Governance Lab, which it says intends to define corporate governance best practice for the next decade. Governance has become a major focus for investors as the G in environmental, social and governance (ESG), while so-called frontier technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are throwing up new ethical dilemmas. Generative AI start-up, OpenAI, has become a case in point, where board level clashes have been characterised as a battle between financial imperatives to growth the business and ethical concerns around how far and fast the technology can safely develop. Trinity Corporate Governance Lab will deliver innovative, collaborative projects and research in the areas of corporate governance and business ethics. The lab is a spin-out of the Trinity Centre for Social Innovation and will work closely with the Trinity Centre for Digital Business and Analytics. Currently, the lab is responsible for the Trinity Business Ethics Speaker Series and also plans to introduce an Executive in Residence programme as well as other offerings in the executive education space. Business advisory firm FTI Consulting has been announced as its inaugural knowledge partner, with Mason Hayes & Curran on board as its second knowledge partner. The project is being launched today at an event at Trinity Business School, with Dr Stephen Davis, senior fellow at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance, providing a keynote speech. Research projects at the new lab will include Frontier Technology, Corporate Moral Progress which aims to identify the responsibility of firms, explore the sources of their immorality and chart a path for their improvement; and Socially Acceptable and Fair AI, which proposes to develop a methodology for the design of fair AI applications. Dr Daniel Malan, assistant professor in Business Ethics and director of the Trinity Corporate Governance Lab, said the lab will provide a platform to integrate governance and business ethics into the delivery of research and world-class education. The Lab is perfectly aligned with the Business School strategy... and we look forward to work with our academic and industry partners to have real impact, he said. Report says 800 homes could be built on the land A government document has said land in Limerick owned by Shannon Foynes Port could be used to develop 800 homes. However, the Land Development Agency (LDA), the state body considering the port site for housing, said the lands are constrained and not an immediate priority for development. The Housing for All report published in November to show the Governments progress on housing targets identified land owned by Shannon Foynes Port Company in Limericks docklands as a potential property development site. The lands at the port are highly constrained and not an immediate priority for the LDA It said: Land currently in operational use by port. This is a long-term potential opportunity that requires installation of flood defences. The report said 800 homes could be built on the land. This was despite the Shannon Foynes Port Company previously saying in June that it was shocked to see its lands being considered by the LDA for home building. In a statement to the Sunday Independent, the LDA said: The lands at Shannon Foynes Port were identified as state-owned lands with the potential for housing in [an LDA report] published in March. Since the publication of the report, the LDA and Shannon Foynes Port Company have held discussions. The lands at the port, however, are highly constrained and not an immediate priority for the LDA. Shannon Foynes Port Company and the LDA have agreed to remain in contact regarding any future development. Shannon Foynes Port Company had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. Early retirement is only likely for about one in five Irish workers Large numbers of workers will have to keep working after reaching the age of qualification for the state pension. This is because they do not expect to be able to afford to stop working, a survey has found. Just one in three workers expect to retire at the age of 66, when people qualify for the state pension. A similar proportion expect to have to keep working until they reach 70, according to a survey of 900 workers conducted by pensions and investment company Royal London Ireland. Early retirement is only likely for about one in five Irish workers. Most of those who expect to keep working to the age of 70 are thought to be in the private sector, where pension coverage is low and where those that do have a pension often have insufficient funds built up to allow them to retire early. The Central Statistics Office found earlier this year that 57pc of workers say the state pension will be their main source of income when they retire. This is because these people have no work-based pension or private retirement fund. From next month, workers will have the option of continuing to work up to the age of 70 rather than taking the state pension at the current qualifying age of 66. In return, deferred recipients would be entitled to a higher weekly payment of 315, compared with the current rate of 265.30 a week. Most people would retire early if they could afford to do so. Research undertaken earlier this year by Royal London Ireland found that almost six in 10 workers in Ireland would retire at the age of 50 or 60 if they could afford it. A further one in five would stop working today if finances allowed. Mark Reilly, pension proposition lead with Royal London Ireland, said: Our findings reveal that just one in six expect that, in reality, their present financial circumstances will enable them to retire at the age of 60, which means that many individuals will not see this aspiration come to fruition. Mr Reilly said it was striking that a substantial number of individuals expect having to delay retirement until they reach the age of 66 or 70, despite harbouring a strong desire to retire earlier. The Government has promised that the much-delayed auto-enrolment system will finally be launched by the end of next year. It would bring as many as 750,000 private sector employees into a workplace retirement savings plan, helping to defuse a mounting pensions time bomb as the population ages. Auto-enrolment has been labelled the biggest pensions shake-up in the history of the State, but a number of deadlines for its launch have been missed in the 17 years since it was first proposed. The fact that no state contributions were allotted for it in Budget 2024 has created fresh doubts about the latest deadline being met. Mr Reilly said the survey shows that many young people anticipate retiring later in life than what might have been considered the norm in previous generations. Tributes have been paid to a woman who died while trying to rescue sheep. Gardai and emergency services were alerted after the woman was discovered in a river at Gerahmeen, near the Gap of Dungloe, Beaufort Co. Kerry shortly after 11am on Friday December 1. The woman who has been named locally as Mary Tangney (74) from Black Valley in Beaufort. She was treated at the scene but was pronounced dead a short time later. It is understood that the woman had been attempting to rescue sheep when the tragedy occurred. Paying tribute local Councillor Michael Cahill (FF) said Ms Tangney was a "very warm-hearted and loving person. Mary was a beautiful woman who was well known, highly regarded and respected, he said. "My deepest sympathies are with her family, friends and neighbours. This tragedy has occurred so close to Christmas which only adds to the devastation her loved ones must be going through right now. Another local councillor Cllr Patrick Connor-Scarteen said: Its shocking and very sad to hear what happened, he said. This is a very close-knit community where everyone looks out for one another. Sheep farming would be one of the main occupations in this world-wide famous location. My sympathies are with this poor womans family and also to her neighbours and friends right now, he said. Kerry IFA Chairman Kenneth Jones also offered his sympathy. He said he was "very saddened to hear of Ms Tangneys tragic passing. The Health and Safety Authority (HSA) confirmed it is investigating the tragedy. Ms Tangneys death is the third farming tragedy in the past fortnight following the recent farming tragedies in Wexford and Carlow. She is survived by her husband Eugene (Genie) and children Karen, Patie, Niall, Eugene and Donnacha. According to the Department of Agriculture over the past decade there are on average 19 workplace fatalities on Irish farms each year accounting for two in very five workplace fatalities. RTE Investigates reveals how planning appeals against developments have been withdrawn for cash Two brothers have been objecting to planning applications in a scheme aimed at extracting money from property developers, an RTE documentary will claim tonight. RTE Investigates: The Planning Trap will feature covert recordings showing how the men posed as representatives of an environmental non-governmental organisation and developed a reputation as serial objectors. The content of the recordings has been described by experts as shocking, outrageous and a disgrace. The practice of asking for so-called goodbye money to drop objections was first revealed by the Irish Independent over the summer, following which the garda fraud squad began investigating one such case. The cases are separate from the issues highlighted by RTE. Several objections have been lodged by the two men to residential and commercial developments countrywide. The brothers submitted an appeal after developer David Hogan received planning permission for 74 houses in Watergrasshill, Co Cork. The appeal was submitted under the name of An Lucht Inbhuanaithe (The Sustainable People). The Cork development is 290km away from one brothers home in Kells, Co Meath, and more than 300km away from the other brothers Westport, Co Mayo, home. RTE Investigates found no record of An Lucht Inbhuanaithe being registered with the Charities Regulator or the Companies Registration Office, and the group has no online presence, though a lack of state regulation for NGOs means they are not legal requirements. Mr Hogan said one brother told him: In the event of the appeal being withdrawn, what about my costs? And he says, if you have a proposal to make, I will be happy to listen. In another case, one developer paid the brothers and also gave one of the men the option to buy sites in the development for just 1,000 at a time they were valued at up to 50,000 each. The documentary will also show a case in which the two men were paid more than 50,000 in exchange for the withdrawal of a planning appeal. For 23 years, An Bord Pleanala has had powers to dismiss appeals on the grounds they are financially motivated. However, Freedom of Information requests show the planning appeals board has never rejected an appeal on these grounds since being granted that power in 2000. A property developer told RTE Investigates: I want to expose the fact that people are abusing the planning system for nothing other than personal gain. Its a silent cancer. Its not spoken about. Sadhbh ONeill, an environmental lecturer and activist, told RTE Investigates it makes her so angry considering the work put in by legitimate environmental organisations to comply with rules and represent the public interest. And these individuals claim to have environmental concerns, but these are clearly nothing to do with whats going on, she said. Housing Minister Darragh OBrien wants the Government to consider a crackdown on demands for go away money for not objecting to developers plans and has written to Justice Minister Helen McEntee and the Attorney General, asking if stronger sanctions are needed in new planning laws to cut down on this practice. Attorney General Rossa Fanning said the outcome of an investigation into alleged extortion will determine whether the law needs to be strengthened. He added that reports of systemic misuse of planning appeals are deeply concerning and have a negative impact on buyers. RTE Investigates: The Planning Trap airs tonight at 9.35pm on RTE One and the RTE Player The president of Cop28 has said he has incredible respect for Mary Robinson after a recording of him ranting at the former Irish president was revealed. Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber told a press conference at the climate summit in Dubai that he also respected climate science and fully appreciated the urgency of the climate crisis. His remarks came after he was heard on the recording berating Mrs Robinson after she told him she did not hear enough urgency in his voice. When she pushed him to take the lead on seeking agreement at the summit for a phase-out of fossil fuels, he claimed there was no science to say a fossil fuel phase-out was needed to prevent global warming rising to a dangerous level. The revelations, published by The Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting, caused shock and dismay among scientists. The president of Cop28 accuses Mary Robinson of 'pointing fingers' Dr Al Jaber claimed at the press conference today that his comments had been reported out of context and misinterpreted. In fact, the full recording, part of a day-long online event on women and climate change, was available on YouTube. Dr Al Jaber addressed the issue unprompted at the press conference his first in several days. I want to say something about the media reports, he said. I have incredible respect for Mary Robinson and a great deal of respect for everything she has been able to accomplish and achieve over the years. He went on to talk about the questions raised over his stance on the science. We said clearly and repeatedly that the United Arab Emirates takes this task with humility and responsibility and we fully understand the urgency of this matter," he said. Were here because we very much believe and respect the science.43pc of global emissions must be reduced by 2030. We need to make that happen, to keep 1.5 within reach "I have been crystal clear on the fact that that is a critical success factor if we want to keep 1.5 within reach. He said as an engineer, economist and businessman: I trust numbers and figures. Science has guided my life. He was accompanied throughout his brief appearance by Professor Jim Skea, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the global climate science body. Professor Skea said he had had a small number of one to one conversations with Dr Al Jaber on the science. He has been attentive and I think has fully understood it, he said. Two brothers jailed over cowardly attack on builder (55) who died 13 days after he was assaulted Michael Mick Mulvey died on November 27, 2019Ian Connaghan was sentenced to nine years with one year suspended for manslaughterDaniel Connaghan was handed five years with the final year suspended for assault causing serious harm Daniel (43) Connaghan (left) and Ian (34) Connaghan (right) both of Ashington Rise, Navan Road, Cabra, Dublin 7 Photo: Collins Courts Paul Neilan Mon 4 Dec 2023 at 14:32 Two brothers who carried out a "savage" and "cowardly" assault on a 55-year-old man who died 13 days after he was attacked have been jailed for a combined 12 years. A charity has said there has been a worrying increase in the number of dogs needing help after taking in a dog whose coat was so badly matted, they were unable to tell if it was male or female. Acorn, a three-year-old poodle cross, was rescued by the animal welfare charity after he was found wandering alone in Dublin, in late October. A very concerned member of the public brought Acorn to Dogs Trust, as it was clear he needed urgent veterinary care due to severely matted fur and being unable to walk properly. The charitys veterinary and welfare manager Niamh Curran-Kelly said: Although Acorn was affectionate at first, his heavily matted fur was causing him a lot of discomfort and distress. As the charitys team began to clip away his tangled coat, they discovered an old dog toy embedded within the clumps of hair, suggesting he was once a much-loved pet. Due to Acorns distress and level of discomfort, he needed to be sedated by the veterinary team at Dogs Trust to completely shave his coat. Acorn's horribly matted coat before he was helped by Dogs Trust. Photo: Dogs Trust Ireland We removed almost a kilo of matted fur from him, which is an awful lot to carry around on his 14kg body, Ms Curran-Kelly said. Dogs with coats like Acorns need regular grooming and sadly, this is something many people do not consider when they decide to welcome a dog into their home. While Acorn is in the process of being adopted, the charity is appealing to the public for their support, so that they can be there for the next dog like Acorn who urgently needs them. This year, the charity received the highest volume of surrender requests since opening the doors to its rehoming centre in 2009. Dogs Trust recently launched its Save the Next Dog campaign, highlighting the worsening dog abandonment crisis in Ireland. With 3,691 people contacting Dogs Trust since January, the charity fears that more dogs like Acorn could end up being abandoned, as rescues and welfare organisations struggle to cope with the demand for their services. The charity has 274 dogs in its care, which it is trying to rehome all around the country via its regional rehoming programme. The chairperson of Kildress Wolfe Tones GAA club in Tyrone has paid tribute to former captain and player Matty McGuigan who sadly died just hours after moving to Australia with his girlfriend. The 24-year-old was from Cookstown, and had studied at Holy Trinity College there. He had just moved to Sydney, Australia with his partner Clodagh in recent days. Club chair Dominick McGuirk told RTEs Morning Ireland that Mr McGuigan was our leader and that we all loved him having captained the club at 22-years-old. It is hard to believe that he is gone,. We thought we would be seeing him three or four months later but little did we know 24 hours after he left we would be getting that call, Mr McGuirk said. It is the second tragedy to hit the Kildress club in recent months. In September nine-year-old Ronan Wilson, a youth team player with the club, died after a hit and run incident in Co Donegal. He stressed that words cannot describe what the entire community is feeling now. Mr McGuirk said Matty came through the club from 12-years-old and was the star player for many of the clubs teams through youth level all the way up to minor and then into senior level, which he started playing with at 17-years-old. Mr McGuigan also lined out for Tyrones minor squad. Hes been our leader the last six or seven years of his short life, Mr McGuirk added. He said it was a lot to deal with and that every young person wants to travel and Matthew decided that he wanted to travel. He offered his condolences to all of Mr McGuigans family, who he said are very close to the club, particularly his parents Mel and Grainne. Mr McGuigan will be sadly missed by his brothers Darragh, Liam and Karol. His brother Darragh posted a tribute on social media. Forever young, love you forever. Very grateful to have you as a brother for 27 years of my life, dont know how this has happened or why Ill never understand. He is the cherished grandson of Matt and Colette Tracey and the late Tommy and Annie McGuigan and the loving partner of his girlfriend Clodagh Corr. Matthew will be deeply regretted and sorrowfully missed by his mother, father, brothers, grandparents, partner, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbours, friends and his wider family circle, RIP death notice reads. Following news of Mr McGuigans death, the club said they were absolutely devastated. Our thoughts and prayers are with the McGuigan and Tracey families at this very difficult time, the club said. Social Protection Minister Heather Humphreys has announced a Double Child Benefit Payment will be paid tomorrow to support 650,000 families with the cost of living. The measure means that 280 per child will be paid in respect of over 1.2 million children across the State. Minister Humphreys also announced the details for the Christmas Bonus, which will be paid to approximately 1.3 million people this week including pensioners, carers and people with disabilities. The total cost of Christmas bonuses coming to families in Ireland constitutes more than 320 million. It will be paid on the same day recipients usually receive their weekly pension or other primary payment. Meanwhile, recipients of Illness Benefit for longer than 12 months will also receive a Christmas Bonus as they did last year. Christmas is a very special time of the year, but it can be an expensive period for individuals and families, Ms Humphreys said. The Christmas Bonus is a vital support, particularly for our senior citizens. I am very conscious of the pressure families are under particularly in the run-up to Christmas. Child Benefit is one of the few tools within the Department of Social Protection that I can use to support working families. I know from my days working in the Credit Union how much families depend on the monthly Child Benefit payment, and I am delighted to announce details of this double payment today, which will support hundreds of thousands of hardworking families across the country. Child Benefit is paid to families with children up to the age of 16 years. The payment continues to be paid in respect of children until their 18th birthday if they are in full-time education or have a disability. From September 2024, Child Benefit will be extended to 18-year-olds in full-time education. This payment will cover children at the second level or otherwise as they remain in full-time education until they turn 19. Around 60,000 18-year-olds in Ireland will benefit from this measure. Recent figures reveal that more than 172,000 families will benefit in Co Dublin, 72,000 in Co Cork, 35,000 in Kildare, 33,000 in Galway, 30,000 in Meath, 26,000 in Limerick, and 22,000 in Donegal. Fine Gael TDs and senators are still reeling from reports that Public Expenditure Minister Paschal Donohoe is considering a bid to lead the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Its out of the blue and nobody knows what is happening. It is the topic of discussion amongst the entire membership, said one source. Remarkably, Mr Donohoes spokesperson did not deny the report, but insisted he would run as a TD in his Dublin Central constituency at the next election. All I know is all Ive read. There was never any talk or discussion about it, said another source. But it doesnt come as that much of a surprise because hes very well respected in Europe and the (Irish) economy is thriving, in part down to his prudent management. Some politicians even expect the minister to clear the air at this weeks parliamentary party on Wednesday night. Were all kind of in the dark, said one member of the parliamentary party. Helens (McEntee) no-confidence motion will be put to bed at that stage. The PP (parliamentary party) meeting is becoming a place where everything is being spoken about and nothing left out. Donohoe leaving for a top job in the US would come as a blow to the party, as many long-standing TDs have already announced theyre not running for election again, including former ministers Richard Bruton, Charlie Flanagan, John Paul Phelan as well as David Stanton and Brendan Griffin. If Donohoe goes for the job and gets it, it will begin in September 2024, in which case he would have to resign his seat, triggering a by-election. Figures in the party recognise they have no chance of keeping Donohoes seat in any by-election before the general election. Mary Lou McDonald secured a phenomenal 35pc of first-preference votes in the Dublin Central constituency in 2020, nearly double the quota on the first count. Many view any running mate she chooses having an almost 100pc chance of being elected. Mary Lou could run [convicted criminal and former councillor Jonathan] Dowdall from prison and he would get elected, said one senator. The chance of winning that by-election is one in a million. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar insisted yesterday that there is no vacancy at the top of the IMF and that Donohoe had told him his intention is to run again for the Dail in Dublin Central and to stay on as president of the Eurogroup. The situation is that hes not a candidate, theres no vacancy, Mr Varadkar told reporters. There is no campaign and there cant be, at this stage. He said he spoke to the minister on Saturday night about lots of things, including a possible bid for the IMF job. That kind of came up in the conversation. I was sort of curious about it. He [Mr Donohoe] doesnt know where the story is coming from. The Taoiseach added that he did not ask Mr Donohoe if he wanted the top job. Mr Varadkar said there is no vacancy as Kristalina Georgieva, the current president of the IMF, may yet seek a second term. If it arises, thats the only point at which anything comes into consideration, its only speculation at this stage, Mr Varadkar added. Olga Zhuravlova and her family were forced to flee Mariupol in 2022 and now live in refugee accommodation Olga Zhuravlova (right) and two members of her catering company, before they fled Ukraine Some of the meat-filled crepes, produced by Olga and her family Olga Zhuravlova (right) and two members of her catering company, before they fled Ukraine A Ukrainian woman who was forced to flee Mariupol with her family has found a new lease of life after setting up a catering business from her Citywest hotel room. Olga Zhuravlova was like any other hardworking individual in Mariupol in the lead-up to February 2022. She and her husband ran a popular cafe, their first business. Life was good. Our cafe was doing great, we were well-known for our freshly roasted coffee and a new catering business. We were planning for the future, she told the Irish Independent. After Mariupols brutal and unrelenting bombardment by Russian forces in March of last year, she had a choice to make, leave now or face weeks of relentless bombing, which would eventually flatten the city. Many people didnt take the possibility of a full-blown invasion seriously, and after three days were unable to leave. Olga didnt take any chances and immediately uprooted with her family, including her husband Pavlo, her two young children, her mother Olena and her husbands mother, also Olga. They decided to come to Ireland, and have been staying in Citywest Hotel in Dublin since the summer of 2022. When we first arrived, we couldnt even think about work. My son Dmytro was just two months old and my daughter Polina was only three. I spent the first six months holding them tight, she said. As time passed, the former businesswoman longed for her past life. I noticed that lots of Ukrainians here were living in hotels without any proper cooking facilities, she said. They too longed for the taste of home and after spotting a demand, she began delivering on a small scale to nearby hotels. I took some orders, cooked and delivered traditional Ukrainian foods, she said, and putting her degree in business to use, scaled up and established her own catering company. Sense Catering is a Ukrainian food and catering business she runs from her hotel bedroom, which her local Intreo office (the Public Employment Service) helped set up. While logistics for orders and deliveries are taken there, the cooking is done in a shared kitchen in an enterprise park in west Dublin. Her mother minds her son while she and her mother-in-law put together some traditional Ukrainian dishes. Last week, they catered for the anniversary celebrations of the Ukrainian Community Centre in Rathmines. People are so grateful to taste some of the foods they havent had in so long, she added. Olga says there is a real opportunity for Irish people to try out Ukrainian food, something which she said they could really enjoy. Meat-filled crepes and cottage cheese dumplings, called syrniki, are two dishes that she feels would appeal most to the Irish palate. While happy for now, she and her family hope to one day return home. We appreciate so much what Ireland has done for us. I dream that Mariupol will be free and we can return. For now we can only make short-term plans, she said. The Government is looking to rely heavily on wind turbines to meet 80pc renewable energy goal. Stock image Irelands goal of generating 80pc of the countrys electricity from renewable energy by the end of the decade is in serious jeopardy, wind-energy companies have said. Their warning comes as the Irish delegation at Cop28 throw their support behind moves to reach global agreement on tripling total renewable energy output by 2030. Ireland was one of the first countries in the world to set an ambitious national target but a report commissioned by industry group, Wind Energy Ireland (WEI) throws doubt on whether it can be achieved. It reveals that 95pc of industry experts surveyed believe delays getting planning decisions and connections to the national electricity mean 80pc by 2030 is not achievable. Noel Cunniffe, WEI chief executive, said the blockages needed to be cleared fast. This report should be a wake-up call to anyone who wants to cut our carbon emissions and end our dependency on imported fossil fuels, he said. There have been well-publicised problems at An Bord Pleanala, compounded by a backlog of cases, increasingly complex projects and a difficulty filling essential specialist positions. Those same issues were raised repeatedly by the experts questioned. They were largely from the onshore wind sector on which the Government is relying heavily to build new farms to meet the 80pc target. Longer-term, the strategy is to turn to offshore where much greater power can be generated. However, no planning applications have been submitted for any of these projects. Second to planning delays, the biggest problem identified in the report was grid connection. Wind turbines need to connect to the national grid but there is a shortage of sites where there is infrastructure to connect, and where grid is available, it is often too congested to add extra power. Mr Cunniffe said the state agencies could do with help from the industry to move things along. No one questions the commitment, at every level of Government, of those struggling to deliver these policies but they simply do not have anything close to the resources they need, he said. Government and industry should be working together to accelerate the delivery of onshore renewables, to design a policy framework, a planning system and supportive grid infrastructure that is fully equipped to deliver our ambitions. Eamon Ryan will not now have to leave the Cop28 climate conference in Dubai in order to vote on a Sinn Fein motion of no confidence in Justice minister Helen McEntee. The Green Party leader has instead been offset by a Social Democrats TD and will not have to double his carbon footprint by flying home and then back out again to the UAE. Jennifer Whitmore, Social Democrats Deputy for Wicklow, made the pairing offer to Mr Ryan by text after consulting her party colleagues, and he was pleased to accept. Ms Whitmore said she was a committed environmentalist, which was her motivation even though her party says it has no confidence in Minister McEntee. The move means that Ms Whitmore and Mr Ryan will cancel each other out by both not casing a vote on the motion, due to take place tomorrow. The Government is expected to comfortably carry the day, and will substitute a motion of confidence in the minister. Mr Ryan said Deputy Whitmore offered the pairing arrangement on Sunday night. I consulted with the Taoiseach and Tanaiste and they agreed it makes sense to stay here, he said. He said the Dail still took primacy but he was pleased the arrangement allowed him to stay. Im looking forward to that and I think weve a real role here, he said. Mr Ryan, as head of the Irish delegation, has been involved in a number of discussions around initiatives to channel greater finance away from fossil fuels and into renewables. His team are also involved in discussions on the interim arrangements for running the newly formalised Loss and Damage Fund. Ms Whitmore, explaining her decision on the Claire Byrne radio programme on RTE radio 1 said she had been becoming increasingly concerned about the language coming out of Cop28, when you look at the UAE and theyre essentially saying there is no scientific evidence that fossil fuels are harming the climate,. We decided to offer the minister a pairing. And what that would mean is essentially that minister Ryan would be able to stay at Cop28 and wouldn't have to come back for two days for the vote and flight back. Despite Taoiseach Leo Varadkar claiming that there couldnt be a pairing without illness or incapacity, Ms Whitmore said: My understanding is that that's a convention of Fine Gael. She added: I decided just to make the offer to minister Ryan and he has accepted it. He discussed it with the Taoiseach and the Tanaiste and they both agreed that it would be advantageous to take the offer up. I was surprised to see that Leo had actually said that, and obviously it is just a convention rather than a rule of the Dail. She added of minister Ryan: Our discussions were based on text because obviously he's a number of hours ahead. So we were just texting backwards and forwards, but I think it's really important that Ireland is represented at Cop28 and to have continuity in those discussions. For him to pull away for two days just doesn't make sense. She added: Essentially, the pairing won't have any impact on the outcome of the no confidence motion because we will just cancel each others votes out. And I think it's certainly worthwhile doing that to enable him to stay for those two extra days so that he can focus on Ireland's representation. It did not mean the entire Social Democrats party support the Minister for Justice, she stressed. We've always been clear that we really do struggle to see how anyone could have confidence in Minister McEntee, and not just in relation to what happens on the riots. There have been problems for a number of years with antisocial behaviour and the growth of the Far Right, and none of these have been tackled over many months and years and that is within the remit of minister McEntee. So it is very difficult to see how anyone could have confidence in how she's performing her functions. She added: I have a really strong commitment and opinion on on our climate crisis, which is the biggest crisis that's impacting us at the moment. And the people who voted me in knew me as someone whose background is in climate and ecology. Raid of 8m heroin plane linked to The Family gang boss already facing 14 years in prison West Dublin gang suffers major blow as gardai seize 8m of heroin from aircraft The huge haul of heroin seized in the raid Patrick O'Connell Mon 4 Dec 2023 at 10:00 The leader of a drugs gang suspected of importing 8million worth of heroin seized at Weston Airport on Friday is already facing up to 14 years in prison for unrelated money-laundering offences. Snow Patrol have announced their only Irish date next year with a stadium show to take place in Limerick next summer. The Indie rock band will play at Thomond Park Stadium, the home of Munster Rugby in Limerick city, on Friday, July 12, 2024, with tickets to go on sale this Friday morning. They join Ed Sheeran and Dermot Kennedy, who played at the Limerick stadium in the last two years. The hugely-popular band released a special re-issue of their 20th anniversary album Final Straw, in August and have hinted at the release of a new album coming next year. Snow Patrol carved out a hugely successful commercial rock career over the last 29 years, particularly with the release of hit songs Run and Chasing Cars in the early 2000s. The groups lead vocalist Gary Lightbody, from Co Down, set up the group in 1994 after moving to Dundee Scotland to study English literature. He is now the sole original member. Gary Lightbody, Johnny McDaid and Nathan Connolly of Snow Patrol perform at The Wiltern on May 21, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Michael Tullberg/Getty Images) The band has racked up an impressive number of critical and commercial accolades, including 15 million global album sales, one billion global track streams, five UK Platinum Albums, and are Grammy, BRIT Award and Mercury Music Prize nominated. Earlier this year, the band announced that Paul Wilson, the group's bassist, and Jonny Quinn, the drummer, were leaving the band. Nathan Connolly, who joined in 2002 and plays lead guitar and backing vocals, as well as Johnny McDaid who joined in 2011 and plays rhythm guitar, piano, keyboards and backing vocals form the rest of the band. At the time, Gary Lightbody said: While I am sad that we have come to the end of a long, fulfilling and wonderful chapter of Snow Patrol, I also have deep gratitude and excitement to be at the start of a brand new chapter for us. I love this band. I love these guys. I love the music we make. Snow Patrol will be joined on the night by Limerick-based 3-piece band, Kingfishr, who have quickly established themselves as one of the rising prospects in Irish music. Bursting onto the scene in the last two years, the band, who have been likened to Mumford and Sons and Dermot Kennedy are part of the newest generation of Irish contemporaries. The bands grand, atmospheric tone married with their propensity for catchy melodies has resonated with a wide audience. All five of their releases this past year have garnered significant Irish radio play, with the group accruing 3.8 million streams on Spotify on the same year they played Electric Picnic, earlier this summer. Tickets for Snow Patrol at Thomond Park will go on sale this Friday at 9am, costing 53.85 subject to licence. Wander List: Four places to visit in the beautiful kingdom Its going to be a supersized White Lotus. Its going to be longer, bigger, crazier. So said Mike White of season three of his jet-set satire which made Successions Roy family look almost functional. It wont be until 2025 that the next instalment hits screens, with Thailand the new backdrop after previous forays in Hawaii and Sicily. Both were filmed at Four Seasons hotels, so its safe to assume theyll be using at least one of their four Thai properties (Bangkok, Koh Samui, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai). Dispatch A premature baby lies in an incubator in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on October 22. Thirty-one premature babies from Al-Shifa were eventually evacuated to Egypt. Photo: Reuters/Mohammed Al-Masri The nurse in the besieged hospital was caring for five fragile babies. Infants, born premature, their parents whereabouts after a month of war unknown. Now he faced the most difficult decision of his life. It was the height of Israels assault on northern Gaza last month, and al-Nasr Childrens Hospital was a war zone. The day before, airstrikes had cut off the Gaza City facilitys oxygen supplies. Israeli tanks had surrounded the hospital complex, and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were calling and texting the doctors, urging them to leave. The latest instalment of Things You Probably Shouldnt Say in the Dail comes to us courtesy of Justice Minister Helen McEntee, who this week referred to the Dublin rioters as scumbags. Really? Scumbags? Is that the best a Justice Minister can come up with? Youd think that a minister reacting to a brutal mass stabbing and an unprecedented night of public rioting might try to actually understand why Dublin went into meltdown on her watch. Food poisoning sickens 60 students in India's Punjab state Xinhua) 13:10, December 04, 2023 NEW DELHI, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- Nearly 60 children suffered from food poisoning after consuming the food provided in their school in India's northern state of Punjab, a state government official said on Saturday. According to the official, the students complained of stomachaches and vomiting, after which they were rushed to a government hospital in the state's Sangrur district. Some of the students were discharged after receiving the first-aid, while others were still undergoing medical treatment. Following the incident, the district administration formed multiple teams comprising officials from health and education departments to probe the matter. The local police said a person in charge of providing the food has been arrested, and an inquiry has been initiated against him to know the cause of food poisoning. According to media reports, initial examination by medical practitioners revealed that the students had consumed contaminated food, which led to food poisoning. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) Mary Kenny: Get the very best out of your 20s they are the most defining decade of our lives Public support for Garda Commissioner Drew Harris and Justice Minister Helen McEntee has stood up, according to our poll. After the Dublin riot, todays much anticipated Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks opinion poll provides further evidence that the level of immigration to this country is pressing on the publics consciousness and is an issue the Government will have to contend with in a more meaningful way. In its favour, the Government has said in recent weeks that the possibility of secondary transfers from other European countries was something that was being examined. This is a phenomenon where refugees arriving in Ireland are, it is said, coming from other EU states because income and social welfare supports are more generous here. There is also some discussion at cabinet level on limiting state accommodation to three months for those arriving, with the view that the State is running out of beds for refugees fleeing from desperate situations, such as the war in Ukraine. Todays poll also finds a public still embracing those refugees who have arrived here, with a heartening view that Irelands cultural life has been enriched by people coming to live here from other countries. Indeed, the poll also reveals a comfortable majority would count migrants among their family and friends. However, it is clear the level of immigration has reached a point where the public now believes there needs to be a government policy rethink. That view is not lost on the Government, which finds itself in a difficult place should it wish to continue to meet its international obligations. To its credit, Sinn Fein, which leads the opposition, has declined numerous opportunities to blow a dog whistle in the direction of those most intent on causing social unrest over an issue affecting many western countries. Perhaps as a consequence of that, at least in part, Mary Lou McDonalds party sees a fall in support in todays poll to its lowest level in two years. Some of its supporters are ebbing away to Independent/Other TDs who may take a more dogmatic approach on this issue. Sinn Fein is content to involve itself in the cut and thrust of politics related to the handling of the riot and the responsibility of the Justice Minister and Garda Commissioner. However, todays poll also finds significant support for the minister and the commissioner in the aftermath of the events on November 23, indicating a public anxious to avoid politics as usual in the face of other threats. For many months now there has been growing concern about the rise of the far right in tandem with concerns around immigration and it is evident that it is this issue, more so than the level of immigration, which preoccupies the public after the riot. Most troubling is the finding that almost a third of those polled would consider voting for a party or candidate who holds strong anti-immigration views, an increase of 14 points since September 2021. While this does not point to the imminent emergence of a far-right political party of the kind which has sprung up in several countries in Europe, the State should not be complacent. The poll shows the public is telling the Government to introduce a measure of common sense and fairness in relation to the level of immigration here out of fear that a far-right movement might take off, with policies similar to the repugnant views expressed last week by the boorish former MMA figure, Conor McGregor. Happily, our poll finds precious little support for any political ambitions McGregor might entertain. Ireland, we are at warthere is a grave danger upon us.make change, or make way. These were some of the social media posts from Conor McGregor during the recent Dublin riots, that have brought him to the attention of the Irish authorities and the public. As the streets of Dublin were on fire, McGregor was criticising Irelands immigration policy, blasting Irelands welfare system as a gravy train that was attracting immigrants. This was a far cry from a younger McGregor who proclaimed the week before he won his first fight as a UFC member (earning himself a cheque for $60,000) that hed been claiming Jobseeker's Allowance in Ireland between 2008 and 2013 before he became one of the worlds biggest sporting names. Reaction to his political comments have not gone unnoticed, especially among the Far Right who are trying to claim the fighter as one of their own. Even Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson devoted a full online broadcast to McGregor and his comments. Fionnan Sheahan is joined on the Indo Daily by Ellen Coyne, special correspondent with the Irish Independent, to ask if Conor McGregor is going to move from prize-fighter to Far Right political influencer. Disabled artists are behind Supported Studios Artists from Corks Supported Studios impressed staff at Meta HQ in Dublin last week when they demonstrated their artistic talents on a site visit. Cork Supported Studios is a group of disabled artists who are supported in their arts practice, including studio time, regular exhibitions and sale of their work, by Crawford Art Gallery and MTU Crawford College of Art and Design. The studios were invited to Facebook parent companys Dublin headquarters as part of the tech giants Disability@ programme, which strives to support, celebrate and empower Meta employees who identify as having a disability. This is Cork Newsletter Enter your email address below and click 'Sign Up' to receive the This is Cork newsletter direct to your inbox. Please check your inbox to verify your details Artist Ide Ni Shuilleabhan treated staff on their lunchbreak to a live demonstration of her coffee painting technique while other Supported Studios artists, including Tom OSullivan and Yvonne Condon, painted live. The studio is having a pop-up sale of prints and original works in Cork city centre during December which will see shoppers pick up a unique and affordable gift of art. Seventy per cent of the proceeds will go directly to the artists and the remainder will go to back in to supporting the work of Supported Studios, buying materials for artists and covering expenses such as travel. Malin Head and Belfast Coastguard successfully coordinated a rescue of four fishermen in Lough Foyle. Four fishermen were rescued when a 30 foot fishing boat overturned in Lough Foyle during extremely difficult weather conditions. The Maritime Rescue Sub Centre in Malin Head and Belfast Coastguard successfully coordinated the rescue of four fishermen in Lough Foyle when a 30 foot vessel fishing herring overturned. The coastguard responded after the alert was raised by the activation of a personal locator beacon (PLB). The causalities were located and recovered by the Greencastle Coast Guard D Class boat and transferred to hospital by the Sligo-based helicopter R118. The Portrush Lifeboat was also involved with the search alongside other local fishing vessels. Greencastle Coastguard said the weather conditions on scene were extremely difficult with thick, freezing fog and a low sunset bringing visibility to practically zero for large boats. A spokesperson for Malin Head Coastguard said this rescue highlights the importance of having a properly registered PLB and knowing how to use it adding this device saved four lives. Echoing their comments, Greencastle Coastguard said four men are going home to their families tonight because there was a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB) activated on one of the lifejackets. All at Greencastle Coast Guard Unit would like to thank our colleagues at Malin Head Coast Guard, Rescue 118, RNLI Portrush, the local fishing vessels and all others who were involved in todays search and rescue. We are more than delighted to have had such a great outcome for the four local fisherman, their families and friends. The weather conditions on scene were extremely difficult with thick, freezing fog and a low sunset bringing visibility to practically zero for the larger vessels including our Delta. "Luckily, we had launched our smaller D-Class and the crew were able to see below the freezing fog to quickly locate and rescue the men without hesitation. But lets look at the facts - four men are going home to their families tonight because there was a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB) activated on one of the lifejackets. One small piece of equipment saved four lives. When on the water - Please always wear a lifejacket with a PLB attached and know how to activate it in case of an emergency. We are all incredibly happy and thankful that this callout ended with such success. Thanks again for all the cooperation and support we receive on an ongoing basis from our local community and wider community. Andrea Horan calls for more support to change the energy in the city A Dublin business owner has urged the public not to give up on the city centre in the wake of the recent riots. Andrea Horan, founder of Tropical Popical, a funky nail bar on Dublins South William Street, describes herself as a long-time cheerleader of Dublin, but also admitted the city has its problems. This is something thats been coming for a while, and the riots are just one example of the temperature rising in the city because of issues with planning, development, gentrification and rising costs, she said. She described the widespread riots in the capital on November 23 as bringing up a sense of post-traumatic stress for business owners in the city centre. Spending in Dublin city centre plunged on Black Friday as many consumers opted to stay at home following riots on the Thursday evening. Cliff Nolan owner of the Bike stop Capel Street talks about the destruction of his store during the riots A new report from Bank of Ireland revealed that in-person debit and credit card spending in the city centre almost halved on the day after the riots compared with the same day in 2022. In-person card spend dropped by 46pc in Dublin 1 and Dublin 2 on Black Friday, and 27pc year-on-year on both the Saturday and Sunday following the unrest. I saw people saying this was really going to affect town, as people get nervous about coming in, and I did notice that we had a couple of cancellations the day after the riots, Ms Horan said. I suppose the thing is, after something like that happens, coming into the centre is always the safest time because those in charge are forced to react and make things safer. Ms Horan also said theres been a spicy edge to the city for some time now, which she puts down to the lack of people coming into town since Covid. People got used to staying local and forgot the point of town, she said. Retailers can just talk about town as somewhere to go to spend money, and I think theres much more to town than that. It is a good shopping area, but its also a culture hub where you have all the theatres and concert venues, museums, galleries, clubs and pubs. In the wake of the riots, there has been an increased garda presence on Dublins streets, and Ms Horan stressed that its more important than ever to get into the city. People being around the city provides a layer of security, self-policing happens when people are in a city, she said. You cant continue stripping the city of what makes us unique. We talk about being a city for tourists when a lot of tourists are coming to see the parts that are being stripped away. Damage to Foot Locker after rioting on the streets of Dublin Theres a danger there, but also theres an issue with not creating a city that caters for the people who live there. Putting amenities, facilities and structures in place to support people living in the city should be the main priority. We should be able to support people making art in the city and being able to do that easily with transport and security and making it a nice place to be. I think if that isnt a concerted effort and an objective, then its very easy for the city to fall further into disrepute. Ms Horan also spoke about the multi-cultural aspect of Dublin that gives her an appreciation for the place she calls home. I spent so much of my time growing up in town, and it gives me a different perspective because its a melting pot of culture and different people with different identities, she said. It helps to open your mind and make you more empathetic to other people, and that is something you cant replicate. Making the city busy with people and being defiant of the fear is some of the ways we can stop social issues as people are mixing with people who arent like themselves and realise that actually, were not that different. With Christmas on the horizon, Ms Horan has been trying to get her business back to normal. Weve made a big effort to get the Christmas decorations up early and are trying to change the energy in the city, she said. Soccer Kerry FC manager and players excited to get new season going with visit of Avondale United It hardly seems like 12 weeks since Kerry FC were last seen in action, but that is exactly the length of time the League of Irelands newest club will have been in winter hibernation when they emerge on Friday evening for a Munster Senior Cup game Shirley Thornton (Moms Porter Cake) and MJ Kissane at the Phoenix Womens SHED pre-loved fashion show and Christmas Fayre at the Pipe Band Hall on Thursday afternoon. Photo by Mark O'Sullivan. Sheila Martin (Secretary Phoenix Womens Shed), Mariann Fitzgerald (Vice Chair Phoenix Womens Shed), Many Landers (Treasurer) and Annette OSullivan (Committee Member) pictured at the Phoenix Womens SHED pre-loved fashion show and Christmas Fayre at the Pipe Band Hall on Thursday. Photo by Mark OSullivan. Sonali Flynn pictured at the Phoenix Womens SHED pre-loved fashion show and Christmas Fayre at the Pipe Band Hall on Thursday. Photo by Mark OSullivan. Tabitha Overy pictured at the Phoenix Womens SHED pre-loved fashion show and Christmas Fayre at the Pipe Band Hall on Thursday afternoon. Photo by Mark OSullivan. Lea Barker Bond (Pet Bakery) and Sheila Martin (secretary of the Phoenix Womans shed) at the Phoenix Womens SHED pre-loved fashion show and Christmas Fayre at the Pipe Band Hall on Thursday afternoon. Photo by Mark OSullivan. Cathrine OBrien, Sinead Sheehy, Olivia Dineen, Hannah and Anne Dineen pictured at the Phoenix Womens SHED pre-loved fashion show and Christmas Fayre at the Pipe Band Hall in Tralee on Thursday afternoon. Photo by Mark OSullivan. Julie Byrne (Crafters Cabin Listowel) pictured at the Phoenix Womens SHED pre-loved fashion show and Christmas Fayre at the Pipe Band Hall in Tralee on Thursday afternoon. Photo by Mark OSullivan. Doireann Barrett (Gluten Free Kitchen Company) and Bairbre Barrett at the Phoenix Womens SHED pre-loved fashion show and Christmas Fayre at the Pipe Band Hall in Tralee on Thursday. Photo by Mark OSullivan. Anne Sweeny and Sarah Fitzgerald (Green Green Gate Kombucha) pictured at the Phoenix Womens SHED preloved fashion show and Christmas Fayre at the Pipe Band Hall on Thursday afternoon. All photos by Mark O'Sullivan. Fashion sustainability and a move away from fast fashion was the main message of the day at the Phoenix Womens Shed pre-loved fashion show and Christmas fair that took place at the Pipe Band Hall on Matt Talbot Road in Tralee last Thursday afternoon. Organised by the team at the Phoenix Womens Shed, the aim of the event was to support and encourage the sharing of pre-loved clothing and to support women in the arts and crafts industry. Sheila Martin, the Secretary of the Phoenix Womens Shed, spoke to The Kerryman after the event about how delighted she and the other organisers were with the events success and about the fast fashion industry that exists in the world at the moment and how damaging it is to the environment. "It was a great success and the women really enjoyed it, Sheila said, adding the fashion show was a 'pre-loved' fashion show - which means that all of the clothes were purchased originally in charity shops - and it was organised by the Phoenix Women's SHED and it acted as a fundraiser. We combined it as well with the Christmas Fair that we had on at the same time." It [the event] was all about promoting the message that so many unwanted clothes are dumped in landfills. Some of the figures that I've seen from Oxfam was that half a ton of unwanted clothes are dumped every minute in Ireland. We've got a fast fashion industry and a lot of the products are made from resources that are not sustainable, Sheila continued. "Our message to people was for them to buy good quality clothes and to keep them or share them and recycle them instead of buying lots and lots of cheap stuff that you know once you've washed them or worn them a couple of times, they'll be thrown out," she added. On how the Christmas Fair went on the day, Sheila said that it was wonderful to see people exhibiting so many different items which she said made for perfect Christmas gifts for people. "We had 15 tables/stands taken up by Christmas table displays, jewellery, ethically sourced and fair trade products, gluten free and vegan cakes and wood burnt designs. There was just a wide variety of things that people could buy. A chap came dressed as Santa Claus as well and he went down a treat, he was very popular, she laughed. "Between the music and the fair and Santa Claus and the fashion show, it was a highly successful event. We're really delighted." Follow the Phoenix Womens Shed at their Facebook page here. Convicted and fined 200 at Sligo District Court A 33 year old man who was arrested at Sligo Train Station on Sunday appeared before Judge Adrian Harris at Sligo District Court today. Lukas Malkowski of Glen Guest House, Lower Gardiner St, Dublin 1 was charged with intoxication and engaging in threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour. Inspector Pat Harney told the court the intoxication charge was being withdrawn. He said that on December 3rd, the defendant was on the train and was refusing to leave. He was aggressive towards staff and was subsequently arrested. He had a large number of previous convictions mainly for intoxication. Defending solicitor Mr Gerard McGovern said the Inspector had been very fair in outlining his evidence. He said his client was a Polish national who had been living in Ireland for 12 years. He has a young son and the solicitor said he had fallen on bad times and was living in a hostel. He said the Inspector was correct and that alcohol doesnt suit him. Judge Harris said it was not a pleasant experience for the staff from Irish Rail and he told the defendant there was no excuse for that behaviour. He said from the position set out by the State and Mr McGovern along with noting the apology and his circumstances, he was going to convict and fine him 200. Danny Gilmartin, stonemason, Emmet Farrell, stonecarver and Cllr Thomas Healy atop of the Teeling monument which has had its hand restored. A hand has been restored to a monument in Collooney which had been blown off by The Black and Tans. After over 100 years of being damaged the hand on the Bartholomew Teeling memorial statue in Collooney was finally restored to its former glory last week. Local Councillor Thomas Healy was instrumental in the restoration and is delighted to see the statue being restored. He said: This is a very important historical monument at Carrignagat outside Collooney. A battle was fought here between the English and the French/United Irishmen forces under the command of General Humbert. The courage and initiative of Colonel Bartholomew Teeling from Belfast in singlehandedly charging the English cannon, saving his comrades from annihilation, was instrumental in the victory and was praised by General Humbert as the greatest act of valour he had ever witnessed. The memorial to Bartholomew Teeling was erected by the people of Collooney in 1898 to commemorate the battle. Local lore has it that the hand was shot by a passing Black and Tan patrol in the Troubles of the 1920s. Unfortunately, the memorial has needed some restoration in recent years. I met on several occasions with the owners of the monument, the National Graves Association, and had some works done about the grounds. The NGA, Collooney Redevelopment, Tidy Towns and I met with Sligo County Council to draw up a restoration plan. There are extensive works being carried out at present on the grounds and on the statue itself by the NGA. I contacted the Office of Public works for assistance also. A local stonemason, Emmet Farrell, who also works for the OPW, cast the new hand and he attached it last week making use of the current scaffolding. When finished the monument will be a striking feature on the Collooney to Ballisodare road as well as a site of significant local historical interest. It is, of course, fitting, that we acknowledge and honour all of those who fought for our countrys freedom throughout our history, without them who knows where we would be now. Carrick-on-Suir Garda Station in south east Tipperary is so under resourced that at times it feels there is no Garda presence in the town at all, according to a Tipperary County Councillor. Cathaoirleach of Carrick-on-Suir Municipal District Cllr Kieran Bourke raised the matter at a recent local authority meeting. Carrick-on-Suir Garda Station previously always had up to 16 or 17 Gardai, consisting of two Sergeants and 14 members. We now have two Sergeants, and four members. And one of those members is out sick, said Cllr Bourke. Garda morale is on the ground. I as Chairman of Cathaoirleach of Carrick-on-Suir Municipal District would fail in my duty if I didnt highlight it. When I became Chairman back in June, I said it was one of my duties to highlight it. I know, as a Councillor there is not a lot I can do, but I can most certainly highlight it. Carrick-on-Suir has a population of around 7,000, with another 3,000 people in the wider hinterland, that comes to 10,000. Four guards could not police that, 24-hours a day with shifts seven days a week, said Cllr Bourke. There are times in my opinion when we have no garda presence in Carrick-on-Suir. Carrick-on-Suir is depending on Gardai to come from Clonmel, at least 20 minutes drive away. During an incident last Friday night, November 24, Gardai had to come from as far away as Cahir, about 40 minutes drive away. Thats not acceptable, and it couldnt be acceptable. While the Government can talk about Dublin, and whats going on in Dublin, but its the same all over the country, he said. From the time of the incident on Friday - an anti-social behaviour incident involving smashed windows - it took one hour and 50 minutes before Gardai arrived on the scene from the time it was reported. The Fianna Fail Councillor raised it as a Notice of Motion at Carrick-on-Suir Municipal District. I got full support from my colleagues, that we would write to the Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, and the Garda Commissioner, Drew Harris, telling them of the situation in Carrick. And asking them to do something about it. A token gesture is no good here. Two or three guards is not good enough. We want at least ten members, said Cllr Bourke. If one of the two Sergeants leaves the force, gets promoted, or falls ill, they will not be replaced as Carrick-on-Suir does not have the numbers to justify having two Sergeants, he said. Constituents have come to him, complaining about the lack of Gardai in Carrick-on-Suir. Cllr Bourke is a Peace Commissioner and has Gardai calling to him wanting search warrants and other documents to be signed. Cllr Bourke said he knew from his conversations with members of An Garda Siochana, not just in Carrick-on-Suir, but right across the country, that morale is extremely low in the force. When over 90 per cent of Gardai who were polled, had they confidence in their boss, they voted No. Thats not said lightly, he said. Wexford County councillors and officials with representatives of Tandem Design at Hook Lighthouse. Wexford County Council has announced the appointment of Tandem Design to create an interpretive design and experience plan for the expansion of the visitor experiences at the Hook Lighthouse. The project is being developed in association with Failte Ireland, Irish Lights and Hook Heritage CLG, with funding provided through the Rural Regeneration and Development Fund (RRDF) scheme under the Department of Rural and Community Development. Plans are under way to expand the visitor experience at the Hook Lighthouse to create an exciting, sustainable and environmentally sensitive visitor attraction on the Hook Lighthouse footprint. After an international competition, Tandem Design won the competition to develop the interpretation, design and experience for the Hook Lighthouse area. The project is part of an ongoing initiative to develop and improve County Wexfords tourism infrastructure by Wexford County Council and Failte Ireland. Keep an eye on www.hookheritage.ie/ where updates on the project will be available in the coming months. Sgt Tony Murphy with his long service medal with his sons Josh and Tony who are also part ot the battalion. Battalion Quartermaster Sergeant Thomas Ma Donald was among those honoured for his service at a special ceremony in the Wexford Barracks last week. The Campile man received special thanks and best wishes on his retirement after 44 years of service to both the An Forsa Cosanta Aitiuil (FCA) (Local Defence Force) and the Army Reserve. BQMS MacDonald is the last reservist to hold this rank in the Defence Forces. He was joined on the night by the Wexford's Army Reserve Unit, E Company, 3 Infantry Battalion, which was celebrating the service of some of its longest serving members. Commandant Enda McDonald presented long service medals to Lieutenant Lorretta Harte (retr), C/S Philip Turner, Sergeant Linda Casey, Sgt Anthony Murphy, Corporal Garreth Lloyd, Cpl Keith Shanahan, Private Brian Banville, Pte Grzegord Dabrowsk, Pte Ross Kelly, and Mark Mernagh. Members of the infantry unit are from across the county and enjoy the military life in their spare time, explained Cmndt McDonald. Members take part in ceremonial duties, weapons/tactics training, leadership development, decision making skills and supporting their Permanent Defence Forces (PDF) parent unit, the 3rd Infantry Battalion based in Kilkenny Military Barracks. The Army Reserve organisation is integrated into the Permanent Defence Forces and plays an increasingly important role in supporting the Defence Forces' mission. "There are no formal education qualifications to join the Reserve Defence Forces (RDF) as a recruit, continued Cmndt McDonald, with the exception of age limits, the criteria for enlistment to the RDF are the same as the PDF with regard to fitness assessment, medical examination and security clearance. To that end, the Reserve Defence Forces in Wexford is now accepting applications for the Army Reserve. It is looking for men and women from all backgrounds who enjoy working as part of a team. Applicants must be at least 18 years of age and not more than 35 years of age on date of enlistment. Former members of the PDF or RDF with a minimum of one (1) years' service, can apply to join the RDF up to the age of 45 years of age. Training consists of two hours per week on Wednesday evenings, several weekends a year, and periods of paid training and courses. E Company covers County Wexford, and recruits are sought from all areas of the County. The RDF is an integral part of the Defence Forces, and trains alongside their full-time counterparts. For further information visit www.military.ie, or text 086 856 3366. Music from the Wexford Opera Festival Masses of 2019, the St Oliver Plunkett Mass, and the St Michael Mass from 2022, feature on a new CD which will be launched by the Rowe Street Church Choir on Friday, December 8. Taking place in the Loch Garman Band Hall, St Patricks Square on High Street at 7 p.m., the launch will feature guest speaker and local historian Monica Crofton. The music on the CD was directed by Rowe Street Choirmaster Donagh Wylde, with international organist, Professor Gerard Gillen, performing in both Masses, the soloist from the Wexford Festival Opera recording was award winning Soprano Hannah O Brien. The CD was recorded, produced and designed by long time Rowe Street Choir member and bass Patrick Jackman and all proceeds from its sales will go towards the Rowe Street Organ Restoration Fund. All performances feature compositions by Belgian composer Ernest De Regge who has connections with Choirmaster Donaghs family. De Regge was appointed music professor at St Flannans College Ennis and organist and choirmaster at the Cathedral in Ennis in 1921, Donagh explains. In whatever spare time he had outside of his parish duties he taught music privately and composed church music, including three Masses, two of which are recorded on the CD, along with numerous songs, works for piano and organ. He built up a high standard in the cathedral choir and won many awards for composition. Along with seven other people, Mr De Regge died tragically at an auction in Carmodys Hotel Ennis in 1958 when the floor collapsed. Years later one of his former pupils, photographer Denis Wylde, came across some dusty old copies of music by De Regge including these Masses. Before he died he passed them onto his son Donagh who revived them and other pieces over the years in performances in Ireland and in Europe. Please come along and get Christmas off to a festive start, you are guaranteed an enjoyable and entertaining evening of music, festive favourites, carol singing and refreshments, said Donagh. All proceeds will go to the Restoration of Rowe street church organ. Daragh Reid looking after customers at the Armstrong Life Pharmacy Customer Appreciation Day in Arklow. Photo: Michael Kelly Grace O'Sullivan and Beverley Rowlands at the Armstrong Life Pharmacy Customer Appreciation Day in Arklow. Photo: Michael Kelly Jack Enright draws from the lucky dip with Rachel Kinch at the Armstrong Life Pharmacy Customer Appreciation Day in Arklow. Photo: Michael Kelly Armstrong Life Pharmacy in Arklow rolled out the red carpet for their customers last month, kicking off the festive season with their annual Customer Appreciation Day. In store, customers enjoyed 20pc off, spot prizes and more, with pharmacy owner Laura Armstrong keen to thank the community for supporting them throughout the year. "This was our way of showing our gratitude to our loyal customers and thanking them for shopping local this Christmas, she said. This is Wicklow Newsletter Enter your email address below and click 'Sign Up' to receive the This is Wicklow newsletter direct to your inbox. Please check your inbox to verify your details The teams fundraiser for the Arklow Community Resource Centre (ACRC) was also launched on the day. "This charity, established by Shiela and PJ Busher, aided by 28 volunteers, provides food for 165 local families five nights a week, said Laura. Over 300 children benefit from these food drops. We hope to exceed the 465 we previously raised for the charity. The fundraising initiative is just the latest good cause the pharmacy has raised funds for this year, having raises thousands for Crumlin Childrens Hospital and supported Arklow Cancer Support. Laura also reminded everyone that its not too late to get the flu vaccine, both adult and childrens vaccinations can be booked online at lifepharmacy.ie. The childrens nasal flu vaccination is also now available for those up to 17 years of age. On a more festive note, the store remains stocked with Irish gifts, including Max Benjamin, Green Angel, Inis, Sculpted by Aimee, Julie Clarke Candles, and Bare by Vogue, and there is a personalised shopping service and complimentary gift wrapping. It wouldnt be Christmas time without movies, and before it all even begins you have a chance to catch a double bill of classics at the Whale Theatre, Greystones on Sunday, December 10 (note that films need to be booked separately). The afternoon kicks off at 1pm with the iconic Christmas comedy Home Alone, a movie that one UK reviewer described as slapstick always flirts with sadism in this film, one is left with a nasty suspicion that it may have overstepped the mark. This is Wicklow Newsletter Enter your email address below and click 'Sign Up' to receive the This is Wicklow newsletter direct to your inbox. Please check your inbox to verify your details In the US, a critic said: the characters bear no resemblance to real people, the plot no resemblance to plausible events Well, its Christmas! For those who have no idea what this is about, the John Hughes-directed caper stars eight-year-old Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin). On the night before a family trip to Paris, his mother (Catherine O'Hara) makes him sleep in the attic. After the McCallisters mistakenly leave for the airport without Kevin, he awakens to an empty house and his wish to have no family comes true. Then the chaos ensues as he realises that two con men (Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern) plan to rob the McCallister residence, and that he alone must protect the family home. Roll out the giant spiders, swinging irons, hot pokers and all the rest. Its crackers and you can get to see it on the big screen before it screens on the small screen over the hols. Next up at 4.30pm is Muppets Christmas Carol, a take on the Dickens classic told by muppets, Jim Hensons muppets. Kermit the Frog plays Bob Cratchit, the put-upon clerk of stingy Ebenezer Scrooge (Michael Caine). Other Muppets -- Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Fozzie Bear and Sam the Eagle -- weave in and out of the story, and of course there is Michael Caine, who excels in a very heart warming and sentimental movie. Tickets are priced 12 and booking is through whaletheare.ie Israeli authorities are investigating claims by US researchers that some investors may have known in advance of a Hamas plan to attack Israel on October 7 and used that information to profit from Israeli securities. Meet the firm behind our content. Visit their website to see how their services can help your business succeed. Tanzanian Prez Samia Suluhu Hassan at COP28. Photo Courtesy: X/Samia Suluhu Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan is leaving the COP28 climate conference early as fatal floods and landslides occur at home, reports BBC. Citing the leader's spokeswoman, BBC said that the calamity happened over the weekend, killing at least 50 people in the northern Hanang region. Zuhura Yunus told BBC that President Samia will return to Tanzania "as soon as possible" to deal with the situation. About 5,600 people have been affected, according to Yunus, who cited local reports. The heavy rains damaged homes and infrastructure, and they have also had an impact on farmland, endangering the people's livelihoods. The government has dispatched 400 rescue workers to the Hanang region. However, Yunus noted in a statement released on Monday that the rescuers are working in difficult conditions, including damaged and blocked roads. "President Samia, who has been in Dubai for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP28), has decided to cut her trip short and arrive in the country as soon as possible to deal with this disaster," Yunus wrote in a statement. President Samia was among the dozens of world leaders who gathered at the major UN summit to discuss tackling climate change. COP28 began on November 30 and will run until December 12. According to Yunus, the president has authorised her administration to pay for the burial expenses of those who perished in the landslides and flooding. The administration will also pay for medical bills for the injured and provide temporary lodging for those whose homes were "washed away." Dr. Godwin Mollel, Tanzania's Deputy Minister of Health, told BBC: "We have a team of doctors and medical officers deployed. The services are much better, and many of the patients are progressing well." Flooding is said to be the greatest natural hazard in Tanzania, affecting tens of thousands of people each year. Photo courtesy: Screenshot grab from X video Hyderabad/UNI: Amidst tight security, the crucial meeting of the Congress Legislature party (CLP) began at a hotel here on Monday to elect their Legislature party leader. The meeting attended by all the newly elected congress MLAs, held in the presence of senior leader and AICC observers to decide their Legislature party leader to form the government in Telangana. After grabbing 64 seats, above the magic figure in the 119-member legislative assembly, Telangana Congress President A Revanth Reddy along with Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar, AICC in-charge of Telangana Manikrao Thakre and former TPCC president Utta Kumar Reddy on Sunday night met governor Dr Tamilisai Soundarajan and staked claim to form the government. Speaking to reporters after the meeting with the Governor, Shivakumar said they submitted a letter to the Governor stating they have a clear majority to form the government. When asked about the election of the partys legislature party leader, Shivakumar without disclosing any further, he said, "We have a procedure in the Congress party, we will follow that." The Congress delegation urged her to invite the Congress, which is the single largest party, to form the government. The 56-year-old Revanth, who is the top contender for CMs post , won from Kondangal constituency with a margin of over 32,000 votes defeating his closest rival BRS candidate Patnam Narender Reddy. However, he lost from Kamareddy, where BJP candidate Katipally Venkata Ramana Reddy won the seat. After facing a defeat, K Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) on Sunday evening submitted his resignation to Governor Dr Tamilisai. KCR has sent his resignation through a messenger which was accepted by the Governor. Photo courtesy: UNI New Delhi/UNI: Asserting that people have rejected negativity in the latest state Assembly polls, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday urged the opposition not to vent the anger of defeat in the parliament session. The BJP came up with spectacular performances in the polls in three Hindi heartland states, the results of which were declared on Sunday. The saffron outfit seized power from the Congress in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, and retained its government with a two-thirds majority in Madhya Pradesh. Having badly lost out in all three states, the only consolation for the Congress was victory in Telangana, where it unseated the BRS. Briefing the media before the winter season of Parliament, the Prime Minister said, "Instead of planning to vent out the anger of the defeat in this session, if we learn from this defeat and leave the trend of negativity and move ahead with positivity in this session, then the country will change the way it looks at them (opposition)". "Based on the election results, I would say that this is a golden opportunity for the Opposition. They must shed the negativity they have been carrying for nine years and proceed with positivity," he added. The Prime Minister also urged MPs to come with maximum preparation and participate in in-depth discussions on whatever bills are placed in the House. "This temple of democracy is a very important platform for people's aspirations and to strengthen the foundation of developed India," he added Over the election results, PM Modi said the results of four states which came out yesterday "are very encouraging" and added, "These results are encouraging for those who are committed to the welfare of the common man of the country, who are dedicated to the bright future of the country." "The empowerment and concrete plans for building the bright future of the women, youth, farmers,and the poor of the country received immense support," he said. The Winter Session of Parliament began on Monday (Dec 4) and it will continue till December 22. The session will have 15 sittings spread over 19 days. On Saturday, the Government convened an all-party meeting to seek cooperation from political parties to ensure the smooth functioning of both the Houses of Parliament during the session. A total of 19 bills are scheduled to be taken up during the Winter Session, These include the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, the Bhartiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, the Chief Election Commissioner, and other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Bill, The Central Universities (Amendment) Bill, the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation (Amendment) Bill and the Provisional Collection of Taxes Bill 2023. Among financial businesses, there will be a presentation, discussion,and voting on the first batch of Supplementary Demands for Grants for the year 2023-24 and the introduction, consideration, and passing of the related Appropriation Bill. Screengrab from video tweeted by Raghav Chadha New Delhi/IBNS: The Rajya Sabha on Monday said that Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MP Raghav Chadha's suspension has not been 'revoked' as the privilege committee has found him "guilty" over an alleged breach of privileges. There is no revocation of suspension. He has been held guilty by the committee and punished. The committee said his suspension lasted more than three months (suspended on August 11) till the date is enough punishment and therefore, he can now attend the proceedings of the House," a source told UNI. Earlier in the morning, Raghav Chadha in a video message thanked the Supreme Court and Rajya Sabha Chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar and claimed his suspension was revoked. "On 11th August, I was suspended from the Rajya Sabha. I went to the Supreme Court for the revocation of my suspension. The Supreme Court took cognizance of this and now my suspension has been revoked after 115 days," he said in a social media post. My statement on the revocation of my suspension from Parliament today. pic.twitter.com/869rRDBylj Raghav Chadha (@raghav_chadha) December 4, 2023 BJP MP GVL Narasimha Rao had moved the motion to allow Raghav Chadha to attend the House, who was suspended from the Upper House for alleged breach of privileges. Chadha, the Rajya Sabha MP from Punjab, was suspended on August 11 during the Monsoon session of Parliament over the alleged breach of privilege. The AAP leader was accused of not obtaining the consent of five Rajya Sabha MPs before including their names in a select committee for considering the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (Amendment) Bill 2023. On a complaint by the five MPs, the case was referred to the privileges committee and Chadha was suspended till the committee submitted its final report. A Privileges Committee meeting of the Rajya Sabha was held in Parliament on Monday to discuss the suspension matter of the AAP leader. However, the AAP leader was allowed to attend the proceedings and even speak in the Rajya Sabha later in the day. I paid my respects to Mahatma Gandhi ji on the Parliament premises today. The life of Bapu teaches us that, no matter how tough the challenge, truth always prevails. ... pic.twitter.com/nPfN9021yr Raghav Chadha (@raghav_chadha) December 4, 2023 "Spoke in Parliament after 115 days of suspension. Got an opportunity to raise iPhone Snooping Alert issue, of which I too was a target. Demanded an investigation by a JPC. If right to privacy of an MP is being violated in such brazen ways, what hope does a common citizen have?" Spoke in Parliament after 115 days of suspension. Got an opportunity to raise iPhone Snooping Alert issue, of which I too was a target. Demanded an investigation by a JPC. If right to privacy of an MP is being violated in such brazen ways, what hope does a common citizen have? pic.twitter.com/0zhP3knAhh Raghav Chadha (@raghav_chadha) December 4, 2023 [With UNI inputs] File image of Mamata Banerjee in INDIA bloc meet/ courtesy: UNI Kolkata/IBNS: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will not attend the next INDIA alliance bloc meeting on Wednesday. Banerjee, who said the Congress lost the recent state elections due to a lack of seat-sharing arrangements with other INDIA members, has a pre-scheduled programme in north Bengal on that day. "I am not aware about this (the meeting). That's why I have already scheduled a programme in north Bengal. I have a seven-day programme there. Had I known, would I have kept this programme? I would have surely gone for it. But because we have no information, I am going for the north Bengal tour," she said. Her party Trinamool Congress may also skip the meeting, media reports said. File image of Mamata Banerjee in INDIA bloc meet After Mamata Banerjee's announcement, Congress spokesperson Jairam Ramesh said that the meeting was an "informal" one. Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge Sunday called for the next meeting of the INDIA opposition bloc to be held in Delhi on Wednesday. The news comes as the party lost elections in the crucial states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh. The only consolation for the grand old party was winning the state of Telangana. The INDIA bloc meeting is being held after a gap of three months since the last one in Mumbai on August 31 and September 1. The meeting is expected to chalk out plans for next year's Lok Sabha election. New Delhi/IBNS: Union Home Minister Amit Shah Monday assured all possible assistance to the Tamil Nadu government as Cyclone Michaung caused havoc in Chennai and the northern part of the state. Shah spoke to state Chief Minister M K Stalin and took stock of the measures taken to tackle the cyclone. He also spoke to Puducherry Chief Minister N. Rangasamy and enquired about the situation. In a post on 'X', Shah said: "Spoke to Tamil Nadu CM Shri @mkstalin Ji and Puducherry CM Shri N. Rangasamy Ji. Took stock of the measures taken to tackle the challenging weather conditions caused by the Cyclone Michaung." "Assured them of all the necessary assistance from the Modi Government to secure lives. Adequate deployment of the NDRF has already been made and additional teams are ready for further assistance," he added. Spoke to Tamil Nadu CM Shri @mkstalin Ji and Puducherry CM Shri N. Rangasamy Ji. Took stock of the measures taken to tackle the challenging weather conditions caused by the Cyclone Michaung. Assured them of all the necessary assistance from the Modi Government to secure lives. Amit Shah (@AmitShah) December 4, 2023 Life was thrown out of gear in Chennai and its neighbouring districts on Monday as relentless rains pounded various parts leading to inundation and flooding. The Tamil Nadu government has declared a public holiday on Tuesday for all educational institutions, government and private offices, financial institutions and banks in Chennai, Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram and Chengalpattu districts. According to IMD the cyclonic storm Michuang is to cross the south Andhra Pradesh coast between Nellore and Machilipatnam close to Bapatla during the forenoon of 5 Dec as 'severe cyclonic storm. As many as 12 relief camps have been set up for the rain-affected victims in Mogaltru and Narasapuram mandals of the West Godavari district as the cyclone is likely to make landfall between Nellore and Machilipatnam, close to Bapatla on Tuesday. [with UNI inputs] IDF discovers 800 tunnel shafts in Gaza Strip. Photo Courtesy: IDF X page grab The Israel Defense Forces on Sunday said it discovered 800 tunnel shafts in the Gaza Strip since it began a ground offensive targeting the Hamas members late in October. The defence force said 500 such tunnels have been destroyed. "IDF troops eliminated 500 of the 800+ exposed shafts to Hamas underground tunnels located near or inside kindergartens, schools, playgrounds and mosques," IDF posted on X. IDF troops eliminated 500 of the 800+ exposed shafts to Hamas underground tunnels located near or inside kindergartens, schools, playgrounds and mosques. To be clear, these places arent childproof, but rather teeming with terrorism. Every tunnel shaft and weapon we find is pic.twitter.com/xIVO1x0PD8 Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) December 3, 2023 "To be clear, these places arent childproof, but rather teeming with terrorism. Every tunnel shaft and weapon we find is further proof of how Hamas deliberately uses the residents of Gaza for their terrorist agenda against Israelis," the force said. Israel and Gaza are engaged in a conflict after Hamas members attacked on October 7 and killed 1,200 people. The Hamas group member also took 240 people as hostage. Meanwhile, the resumption of hostilities in Gaza and its terrifying impact on civilians underscore the need for the violence to end and a long-term political solution between Palestinians and Israelis to be found, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Sunday. Silence the guns and return to dialogue the suffering inflicted on civilians is too much to bear. More violence is not the answer. It will bring neither peace nor security, Volker Turk said in a statement, voicing deep concern that negotiations towards a continuation of last weeks pause had reportedly stalled. Fighting resumed on Friday and hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombardments, he said, citing the Gaza Ministry of Health. No aid entered the enclave via the Rafah crossing with Egypt on Friday, and delivery on Saturday was restricted, further impacting humanitarian operations to support millions amid a scarcity of food, water, fuel and other basic essentials. The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) also called for a ceasefire in Gaza in a post on social media on Saturday. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the reports of ongoing hostilities and bombardment were petrifying. He said a WHO team visited Nassar Medical Hospital in southern Gaza on Friday, where countless people had sought shelter and patients were receiving care on the floor. These conditions are beyond inadequate -unimaginable for the provision of health care, he wrote on X, formerly Twitter. I cannot find words strong enough to express our concern over what were witnessing. Ceasefire. NOW. Photo courtesy: X/@TAIBU_CHC Toronto/IBNS: Observing World AIDS Day at the start of Indigenous AIDS Awareness Week in Canada, Toronto has joined Fast-Track Cities, a network of more than 600 cities worldwide committed to ending the HIV epidemic locally, a news release has said. The Paris and Sevilla Declarations were signed by Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Eileen de Villa, in a ceremony to formalize the citys inclusion in the Fast-Track Cities network. The HIV/AIDS epidemic sparked a powerful movement rooted in compassion, care and solidarity against stigma and discriminationthe Fast Track Cities Network and the dedication of our local service providers and organizationspromote health and well-being, and position Toronto alongside other great cities that are working towards ending HIV, Olivia Chow said in a news release Proclamation of the Mayors World AIDS Day is available on the webpage. Through close collaborationThousands of Torontonians benefit from access to HIV testing, prevention, and treatment optionsLets fast-track our efforts to prevent new HIV infections, avert AIDS-related deaths, and end HIV-related stigma, said Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Eileen de Villa Having seen a sustained increase in reported HIV infections since 2016 (with the exception being during the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw a decrease in sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing.), The city of Torontos participation in the Fast-Track Cities Network was done at a crucial time. Although HIV incidence in Toronto has reached pre-pandemic levels, there has been a nearly 40 percent decline in routine STI testing from 2019 to 2021, revealed by Toronto Public Healths 2023 Population Health Profile. Having claimed 40.4 million lives with ongoing transmission globally, HIV remains a major global public health issue including within countries that had sustained decreases in new infections. Encouraging residents to take part in World AIDS Day activities, Toronto Public Health says recent advancements in HIV prevention and treatment can be learnt, and support those affected by HIV. A collaboration that unites cities from around the world to collectively address the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the Fast-Track Cities Network is supported by the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care as well as Fast-Track Cities Institute. (Reporting by Asha Bajaj) The 2023 presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, has reacted to the controversy that has trailed Nigerias huge number of delegates at the ongoing COP28 Climate Change Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. According to a list published by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), Nigeria has 1,411 participants out of 81,027 delegates registered to attend the summit in person, the third-highest number, alongside China. The participants list showed that Nigeria also has the highest number of registered delegates from Africa. The Federal Government has also come under criticism over the participants list as many Nigerians condenmed the sponsoring of delegates to the conference with taxpayers money. Reacting to the development, Atiku criticized President Bola Ahmed Tinubu over his huge entourage, saying the action of the government is at variance with the reality of the nation. According to him, Tinubu turned the climate summit into an Owambe all-comers jamboree with his large entourage. READ ALSO: Atiku made his position known on the contentious issue in a statement by his spokesman, Paul Ibe. He posited that Tinubu was disconmected from the severity of the economic ruin that Nigeria is facing due to his failed economic policies. The COP28 summit, he said, is about improving lives, clean air, water, and healthy food for all people, nature, a safe and secure future, and not for a jamboree party. His words: How will the head of a government turn a conference of climate change to a jamboree, all-comers and owambe party of over 1,400 delegates? It is ridiculous and a confirmation that he is still in a slumber as far as governance is concerned. The economic dire straits that Nigeria is facing demand that its leaders cut their coats according to the cloth available. It makes no sense for us to continue to borrow money to throw a street party outside the country. The leader of the Nigerian delegation should be reminded: COP28UAE is about improving lives, about clean air and water, healthy food, for all people, for nature, for a safe and secure future, and not for a jamboree of over 1,400 Owambe delegates. Tragedy has rocked Bauchi state following the killing of a final student, identified as Joseph Agbabaidu, of the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, in an attempt to steal his phone. The 500-level Geology student was said to be heading to his residence at Yelwan Tudu, which is about one kilometre from the school gate, when a robbery gang stabbed him. According to a source who spoke with Tribune, he gave up the ghost on Sunday morning, despite efforts by health personnel to save him. READ MORE: One Killed In Fresh Kano Protest Over Appeal Court Judgement The source said: This tragic event echoes a similar incident last December when another Benue State student lost his life in a phone-related struggle. In the wake of this heartbreaking loss, we implore the school management, the police, and the Bauchi State government to prioritise and enhance the security of students within the state, Our community should not have to endure such sorrow, and proactive measures are crucial to prevent further tragedies. May the soul of Agabaidu Obiaje Joseph rest in peace. Mr Joseph is an older brother to three other siblings of his, all of whom are in school here at ATBU. The SUG VP, two other staff members of the university, and his siblings will be conveying his corpse back home. The Nigerian Army has accepted responsibility for the death of some residents of Tudun Birni community in Igabi Local Government Area of the Kaduna State. According to the State Government, the army said the air strike that killed the villagers was a mistake. Information Nigeria reports that on Sunday, many residents were feared dead after an air strike was launched on the community. Some reports have put the death toll from the strike at over 30, with scores left injured. However, Edward Gabkwet, Nigerian Air Force (NAF) spokesperson, said reports that NAF launched the air strike on hapless civilians was false. However, speaking on the development, Samuel Aruwan, overseeing Commissioner, Ministry of Internal Security and Home Affairs, in a statement on Monday after an emergency security meeting, said the incident inadvertently occurred during a routine mission against terrorists by the army. Aruwan added that injured victims are currently receiving treatment at the Barau Dikko Teaching Hospital. According to him, the meeting was presided over by Hadiza Balarabe, Deputy Governor of the State, and had heads of security agencies, religious and traditional leaders in attendance. The Kaduna State Government has received briefings on Sunday nights attack which left several citizens dead and others injured. READ ALSO: My Parents Died In Fire Outbreak When I Was Little Toke Makinwa Reveals The Nigerian Army explained the circumstances which led to the unfortunate and unintended attack. The General Officer Commanding (GOC) One Division, Nigerian Army, Major V.U Okoro explained that the Nigerian Army was on a routine mission against terrorists, but inadvertently affected members of the community. The Deputy Governor at the end of the closed door meeting, conveyed the condolences of the Government and People of Kaduna State to the families that lost their loved ones, and prayed for the repose of the victims souls. As of the time of this update, search-and-rescue efforts are still ongoing, as dozens of injured victims have been evacuated to Barau Dikko Teaching Hospital by the Government. Heads of security agencies who attended the meeting include the Commissioner of Police, MY Garba, and Director of the Department of State Services (DSS), Abdul Eneche. The Chairman of the Kaduna State Chapter of Jamatu Nasril Islam (JNI) Professor Shafiu Abdullahi, led other religious leaders. Also present at meeting was the District Head of Rigasa, Alhaji Aminu Idris, in whose domain the incident occurred, Aruwan detailed. The operatives of Rivers Police Command have arrested two persons accused of kidnapping and burying alive Praise Daakian, a former Community Development Committee Chairman in Kereken-Boue, Khana Local Government Area of the state. The Commissioner of Police in the state, Olatunji Disu, while parading the suspects alongside other 15 suspects before journalists, on Monday, said that the culprits and his accomplices buried the victim alive after collecting N200,000 as part of payment for a ransom from the victims wife. He said: Anti-Cultism Unit arrested Baridapdo Igia, 33yrs m and Elvis Gordon, 26yrs m, two suspected armed robbers and kidnappers in Kereken-Boue community of Khana Local Government Area. READ MORE: 62 Passengers Escape Death As Aircraft Skids Off Runway In Rivers After a series of interrogations, the duo confessed to being leaders of Iceland and Degbam cult groups in Khana Local Government Area, respectively and have been terrorising Khana Local Government Area for the past three years. During interrogations, they also admitted to kidnapping and burying alive one Praise Daakian, a former CDC Chairman in Khana Local Government Area. They murdered the victim after collecting the sum of NGN200,000 as part of payment for his ransom from the victims wife. The duo also confessed to murdering nine other victims from 2021 to 2023 and were the main reason for the partial evacuation of the community within this same period. Investigations are still ongoing to uncover the full scale of the suspects operations. The Kano State Government, having discovered a warehouse filled with diverted food palliatives, has ordered the arrest of Tasiu Alamin Roba, a Senior Special Assistant (SSA) of the Governor in connection with the diversion. The Kano Police Command also arrested in connection with the diversion, Abdulkadir Muhammad, Robas alleged accomplice. The duo are expected to be transferred to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) for further investigation. State Governor Abba Yusuf, led government officials and journalists to the warehouse at Sharada Industrial Estate on Saturday. Yusuf, who said the culprits would be punished, directed the Commissioner of Police to take over the warehouse and conduct an investigation to identify all the suspects. While briefing the Governor during the visit, Rabiu Amour, a community leader, said thousands of bags branded with the Governors portrait and designed as palliatives were discovered to be repackaged. READ ALSO: Theres Nothing Hopeful Around Proposed 2024 Budget Business Expert We know these food items are meant to be distributed to less privileged people, therefore we decided to make a whistle blow. This is our contribution to the good efforts of the governor, he is trying his best to help the downtrodden but some people within the system are sabotaging him, Amour said. The Agriculture Commissioner, Danjuma Mahmoud, said the food items were meant to be distributed to Persons With Disabilities (PWDs) and widows of deceased members of the armed forces and other security agencies. You will recall that after the official unveiling of the distribution of food items meant for the less privileged as palliatives to crush the impact of fuel subsidy removal, the government later set aside another large portion of the palliatives specifically to be distributed to people with special needs like in the society. Besides people with special needs, the last round of palliatives were also meant for families and widows of members of the armed forces, the army, navy, airforce, police, and that of the sister agencies like immigration, prison services, customs, civilians defence, road safety, and Hisbah vigilante, Mahmoud said. Chimaobi Agah, father of four children, has cried out over his four children who had been missing since last Monday. The father is however pleading with the Abia State Government and the state police command to come to their rescue. Agah, 43 years from Amasiri in Ebonyi State, who lives in Umuagua Ibeku in Umuahia North, Abia State, said his four children, Chinweotiti Chimaobi (seven, female), Nmesomachi Chimaobi (seven, female), Testimony Chimaobi (four, male) and Godswill Chimaobi (two, male), left home for their school, Great Ambassadors College, Nkwoegwu, also in Umuahia North on Monday, November 27 but had not been seen since then. Information Nigeria had reported that when Agah travelled to Enugu State for work, his wife prepared the children for school and hired a tricycle driver within their area to convey them to school. According to him, when the four children were not at home at the end of the day, he and his wife became apprehensive and started looking out for them. He said they raised an alarm over the disappearance of the four children suspected to have been abducted by the tricycle rider engaged to convey them to school. She paid a Keke (tricycle) rider to take them to school. In the afternoon, when the school was supposed to dismiss, they did not return home, and my wife went to their school to look for them. She was told by the school authorities that they did not come to school at all. My wife called me and I returned to Umuahia on Tuesday morning. I went to the school and was told the same story. So, I went to the police and reported it. They gave me four policemen and we searched for them but without success. They asked me to come back the next day and make a statement. READ ALSO: 35.1m Nigerians Living With Disabilities NCPWD After that, they told me to go to a radio station and make an announcement. I have done all these and till now, I have not seen them. The public should please help me. God should please forgive my sins. I know Im a sinner but I believe Jesus died for sinners like me. Please, I need my four children rescued, he cried out. As at Sunday, Agha said the children had yet to be seen and pleaded with the state government and the police to assist in locating and saving the children. I am feeling bored. Losing four children is not easy. Let the Abia State Government and the police help us, he said. He noted that the police asked him to come to their office on Sunday. Acknowledging the report, the Abia State Police Command Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Maureen Chinaka, in a statement saidid, On 28/11/2023, at about 1530 hrs, Mr. Chimaobi Agha and his wife, Mrs Chimaobi Oluchi, residents of Umuagu (Ibeku, Umuahia North LGA), visited Ohuhu Police Divisional headquarters to report an incident. According to their account, on Monday, 27/11/2023, at 0730 hrs, Mrs Chimaobi Oluchi escorted their four children identified as follows: Chinweotiti Chimaobi (7 yrs old, female), Nmesomachi Chimaobi (7 yrs old, female), Testimony Chimaobi (4 yrs old, male) and Godswill Chimaobi (2 yrs old, male). The childrens mother escorted them to the junction of her street to board an unknown tricycle destined for Great Ambassadors College, Ukaiuga Nkwoegwu, Ohuhu, in Umuahia North LGA. No one escorted or went with them, considering that the eldest is 7 years old and the tricyclist is unknown. Unfortunately, at the end of the school day, the children did not return home as anticipated. The police initiated an investigation into the whereabouts of the missing children. Further investigation has shown that the children were not present in school on the specified date, and the investigation to trace the missing children is ongoing. We urge anyone with information that could aid in locating them to promptly report to the nearest police station. The 2023 presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi has slammed Nigerias 1411-member delegation to the ongoing United Nations climate summit in Dubai. Obi, in a thread of tweets via his X account on Sunday, said: In a twist of sad irony, let me congratulate the giant of Africa, Nigeria, for matching the great China, with the same number of contingents at the ongoing COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Nigerias contingent to COP28 totaled 1411, the same number as the Chinese contingents. Nigeria has more people living in Multi-Dimensional poverty than China, despite China having seven times our population READ MORE: Work Together To Dismantle Criminality, Corruption Peter Obi Charges Youths Most importantly, the vast majority of those in the Nigerian delegation to COP28 are either non-relevant civil servants or relations, friends and hangers-on of high government officials. Most of them hardly understand or have anything to do with Climate Change. This huge contingent is out at public expense at a time when most Nigerians can hardly afford food and basic needs as a result of economic hardship. I pray earnestly that a day will come soon enough when we can focus on competing with China on productivity and the miracle of migrating the highest number of its citizens out of poverty over a relatively short time. As we have kept emphasizing, we must stop waste as a a tradition of our government and nation. We urgently need to cut the cost of governance and invest in production. We need to de-emphasize unnecessary ceremony and showmanship as a mode of government behaviour. We need to tie spending to necessity and national Priority. A New Nigeria is possible. We only need to do the reasonable and the necessary. The Presidency has said only a handful of the 1,411 Nigerian delegates who registered to attend the COP28 Climate Summit in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, are sponsored by the Federal Government. This was, as it said, a bulk of the contingents comprised private sector players such as businesspeople, Civil Society Organisations and delegates from Nigerias oil-producing Niger Delta region. It also argued that the delegates are at the Summit to promote their respective causes and not for a jamboree. President Bola Tinubus Senior Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Temitope Ajayi, in a Sunday statement said: It is important to state here that delegates from all countries, whether from government, private sector, media and civil society groups, attend COP summits and conferences as parties and the number of attendees are registered against their countries of origin. This does not mean they are sponsored or funded by the government. Sundays response follows social media uproar over the significant presence of Nigerian delegates at the ongoing United Nations Climate Conference (COP28) in Dubai. While noting that the large contingent from Nigeria is not solely government-funded, Ajayi said, It is important to state here that delegates from all countries whether from government, private sector, media and civil society groups attend COP summits and conferences as parties and the number of attendees are registered against their countries of origin. This does not mean that they are sponsored or funded by the government. It must also be said that the fact that people registered to attend a conference does not mean everyone who registered is physically present. As the biggest country in Africa, the biggest economy and one with a bigger stake in climate action as a country with a huge extractive economy, it is a no-brainer that delegates from Nigeria will be more than any other country in Africa. He pointed out that because of the significance of the climate conference, stakeholders from Nigeria beyond the government are also involved. They include UBA Chairman, Tony Elumelu; Chairman of BUA group, Abdul Samad Rabiu and other billionaires whose businesses are promoting sustainability and climate actions through their philanthropies. These businessmen and women and their staff who came with them to promote their own business interests are part of the 1,411 delegates from Nigeria. Their trip to Dubai is not funded by the Federal Government. READ ALSO: Toke Makinwa Reacts After Netizens Dragged Her For Being In President Tinubus COP28 Delegation In Dubai United Nations Climate summit, by its very nature, commands attendance of big names from across the world statesmen and women, politicians, lawmakers, corporate titans, journalists and activists, etc. who promote big global agenda. So, people attend the summit for many reasons, the Presidency clarified in the statement titled Nigeria at COP28: Separating the facts from fiction. Ajayi also explained that when the world comes together to take action to achieve a common goal and proffer collective solutions to a nagging global concern, there are parties involved from government, private sector, civil society, media and multilateral institutions. He noted, In Nigeria like so many other countries, interested parties comprising government officials from both the Federal and sub-national governments, business leaders, environmentalists, climate activists and journalists are present in Dubai. Also participating are agencies of government such as the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited and its subsidiaries, the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, the Niger Delta Development Commission and many youth organisations from Nigeria, he explained. The President of Ijaw Youth Council, Jonathan Lokpobiri, leads a pan-Ijaw delegation of more than 15 people who registered as parties from Nigeria. Among delegates from Nigeria are also over 20 journalists from various media houses. Their participation is very important. It is not for jamboree as it is being mischievously represented on social media, he noted. Defending Tinubus participation at the global summit, the aide said, President Tinubu and other officials on the Federal Government delegation are in Dubai for serious business not jamboree. Our President has been very busy representing our country well. Since Thursday morning when he arrived Dubai, President Tinubu has spent not less than 18 hours daily in attending very important sessions, pushing our national agenda whilst holding bilateral and business meetings on the sidelines. The Presidency highlighted the logic behind Nigerias participation, stating, Africa that is battling problems of poverty, security and struggling to provide education and healthcare to her people cannot be told to abandon its major source of income which is mostly from extractive industries without the West providing the funding and investment in alternative and clean energy sources. The 2023 presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, says the number of Nigerias delegates at the ongoing COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), is a waste of scarce resources. Obi expressed his dissatisfaction about the number of delegates representing Nigeria at the climate change conference via X on Sunday. According to a list published by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), out of 81,027 delegates registered to attend the summit in person, Nigeria has 1,411 participants at the conference, the third-highest number, alongside China. The participants list showed that Nigeria also has the highest number of registered delegates from Africa. While congratulating Nigeria for matching Chinas number of contingents, Obi described the situation as a twist of sad irony owing to Chinas unmatched financial advantage over Nigeria. In a twist of sad irony, let me congratulate the giant of Africa, Nigeria, for matching the great China, with the same number of contingents at the ongoing COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Nigerias contingent to COP28 totalled 1,411, the same number as the Chinese contingents. While Chinas budget for 2024 is about $4 trillion, about $2,860 per head; Nigerias budget is about $33 billion, about $165 per head. China has a high Human Development Index, HDI, with a ranking of 79 out of 191 countries measured, and Nigeria has a low HDI, with a ranking of 163 out of 191 countries measured, he posted. READ ALSO: Toke Makinwa Reacts After Netizens Dragged Her For Being In President Tinubus COP28 Delegation In Dubai Obi also pointed out that Nigeria has more people living in multi-dimensional poverty than China, despite China having seven times our population. Most importantly, the vast majority of those in the Nigerian delegation to COP28 are either non-relevant civil servants or relations, friends and hangers-on of high government officials. Most of them hardly understand or have anything to do with Climate Change, he added. The former Anambra State Governor said the huge number of delegates banking on public expense comes at a time when citizens can hardly afford food and basic needs as a result of economic hardship. I pray earnestly that a day will come soon enough when we can focus on competing with China on productivity and the miracle of migrating the highest number of its citizens out of poverty over a relatively short time. As we have kept emphasizing, we must stop waste as a tradition of our government and nation. We urgently need to cut the cost of governance and invest in production. We need to de-emphasize unnecessary ceremony and showmanship as a mode of government behaviour. We need to tie spending to necessity and national Priority. A New Nigeria is possible. We only need to do the reasonable and the necessary, he added. Apart from government officials, staff of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and celebrities are among those who registered to attend the annual climate change conference. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has asked President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to tell Nigerians how much was spent to sponsor the delegates attending the ongoing COP28 in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to a list published by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), Nigeria has 1,411 participants out of 81,027 delegates registered to attend the summit in person, the third-highest number, alongside China. The participants list showed that Nigeria also has the highest number of registered delegates from Africa. The Federal Government has also come under criticism over the participants list as many Nigerians condenmed the sponsoring of delegates to the conference with taxpayers money. In a statement on Sunday, Debo Ologunagba, PDP spokesperson, said the Tinubus administration is wasteful, frivolous and reckless in the application of the scarce resources of the nation. The opposition party accused Tinubu of adding the names of his cronies, mistresses and other hangers-on associated with the presidency to the delegates list. READ ALSO: Kano Governors SSA, Accomplice Arrested For Diverting Palliatives For PWDs, Widows Our party challenges the presidency to come clean by making public the names of the official delegation sponsored by the federal government to the conference, the relevance of such individuals to the Conference and the total cost of such sponsorship on the nation. Of course, Nigerians have the list and they know the genuine officials of sub-national governments and other self-sponsored entities at the Conference. The PDP calls on the national assembly, pursuant to its constitutional duty under Section 88 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended) which empowers it to investigate and expose corruption by any organ of government, to immediately commence investigation into this embarrassing revelation and impose appropriate sanction on anyone or Institution found culpable in that regard. Our party also demands that President Tinubu should be ready to refund any federal government funds improperly spent to sponsor any individual who has no relevance at the conference. Such funds should be channelled to projects that have direct bearing on the wellbeing of Nigerians, the PDP said. The Delta State Police Command has threatened to arrest, investigate and charge to court any citizen with suspicious sources of wealth, who cannot justify their means of earnings. INFORMATION NIGERIA reports that the Command Police Public Relations Officer, Bright Edafe, made this known on Sunday via his X handle. Edafe expressed his displeasure that some Nigerians feel it is wrong to question what he described as suspicious wealth of those who cant lay claim to any justifiable means of income. He said: It is a very sad trend that people feel its wrong to question the suspicious wealth of persons who cannot lay claim to any justifiable means of income. READ MORE: Delta Police Arrest Woman For Allegedly Pulling Her Husbands Testicles Till He Died We have cases of ritual killings, Kidnapping, and even internet fraud. We tell our men to do the right thing and not take it as an avenue to extort. However, any person arrested and cant justify his source of income should be properly investigated and charged to court when the cockroach in his cupboard has been unveiled. Like me, hate me, I dont mind, its the simple truth. The Lagos State Traffic Management Agency has assured the public that it will partner with other agencies of government, including the Kick Against Indiscipline, to ensure a free flow of traffic during the Yuletide season. The agencys Director, Public Affairs and Enlightenment Department, Mr. Adebayo Taofiq, quoted the General Manager, LASTMA, Mr. Bakare Oki, in a statement on Sunday. Mr Oki said the move was part of the strategies put in place to enhance smooth traffic around marketplaces during the festive period. READ MORE: Traffic Offender Stabs LASTMA Official While Attempting To Evade Arrest Oki said: All motorists are urged to maintain speed limits as they embark on their journeys into, within and outside Lagos as major entry/exit roads in Lagos like Lagos-Ibadan, Lagos-Abeokuta, Lagos-Badagry, Lekki-Epe expressways and Lagos-Ikorodu-Sagamu highway would be adequately covered by LASTMA personnel for smooth and seamless traffic flow, Oki said. Every motorist must obey traffic regulations, drive within the prescribed speed limit, must avoid reckless driving and also carry out regular maintenance works on their vehicle before putting them on the road in order to avoid road accidents. Love him or hate him, Duckbill Group chief economist and AWS snarkologist Corey Quinn is often right in his assessments of AWS product strategybut not always. Sometimes Quinn is completely wrong, like last week when he claimed AWS is just a fundamentally unserious company when it comes to genAI. This after the successful launches and customer adoption of Amazon CodeWhisperer (coding assistant), Amazon Bedrock (makes it easier to use a variety of large language models), and more, including the re:Invent mainstage release of Amazon Q (a genAI-powered chatbot). Quinns comment might have passed muster a year ago when AWS was jockeying to be taken seriously alongside Microsoft, which had a deep partnership with and investment in OpenAI, and Google, which for years had been open sourcing impressive data science/AI-related projects. But in the wake of re:Invent, its clear that AWS is a fundamentally serious company when it comes to generative AI and AI, generally. Putting genAI to work To be fair to Quinn, he was making a gross generalization based on one erroneous data point: the pricing for Claude (Amazon Bedrock Edition). But pricing is set by Anthropic, an AWS partner (one that just received up to $4 billion from AWS). And its not even necessarily the big price change Quinn thought hed spotted. Still, although Quinn was wrong in this particular instance, hes often right to call BS on AWS product releases. Just not this time. AWS is clearly fundamentally serious [about] genAI. At least, I think thats what 10,000 Bedrock customers would say. The product just hit general availability in September and already Adobe, BMW, United Airlines, Merck, and at least 9,996 other customers are using it, according to AWS CEO Adam Selipskys keynote. Ditto CodeWhisperer customers like Buildstr that have seen security vulnerabilities decrease from using the tool. Following that topic of security, another commentator praised the integration of generative AI into Amazon Detective and Amazon Inspector as a significant leap in cloud computing security and code management. If AWS were playing catch-up in AI (something Im sure theyd dispute), at re:Invent they went past their competition in some key ways. For example, in Selipskys keynote, he announced that CodeWhisperer customizations (the ability to add internal libraries, APIs, etc., to improve output) were generally available to everyone, versus GitHub preannouncing theirs (but not making them available) and Google Cloud offering a gated preview of sorts. AWS also is unique in offering code transformation/language upgrade capabilities. In general, AWS made a point of announcing a variety of services and features that are available now, rather than in the future, a nice change from recent re:Invent launches. This brings us to Q, a new service that offers AWS a big step forward in genAI and beyond. A dramatically different Q Im sure the folks inside AWS understood the unfortunate associations Q would have with extreme conspiracy types, but they also must have banked on the James Bond association with Q, the R&D department of MI5 in 007s world. Theyre going for cool instead of crazy. Long term, theyre probably right (though this is an area where Quinns commentary isnt necessarily incorrect). Short term, Q is a definite line-in-the-sand moment for AWS, establishing their fundamentally serious investment in genAI. Q, argues RedMonk analyst and cofounder James Governor, is going to be a big deal, in part because it offers a compelling vision of the future of docs, alongside Microsofts release of Copilots across its product lines. Additionally, Governor says, Q provides an abstraction that could help unify AWS services that have become too complicated and unwieldy. Unlike Microsoft, which promises a multitude of Copilot assistants, AWSs approach is dramatically different. As Governor explains, AWS offers just one Q that is cross-service across all products for ops, troubleshooting, development. With Q you should be able to pick up a conversation in one console and continue it on another console (and, eventually, have a conversation start in your IDE, if youre a developer, and have it persist to your console). AWS already offers Q across its documentation, website, Slack/Teams, mobile app, etc. Its almost bizarre that Microsoft, the company that has historically offered customers a very unified experience, has shipped its org chart with many Copilots, as if thats a virtue, whereas AWS, which has historically offered all sorts of competing, purpose-built services as a virtue, is the one giving a unified, cross-service experience. This unified approach will bring serious advantages out of the box. Also, although AWS didnt really play this up at re:Invent, Q just turned AWS into the productivity application vendor (think Salesforce or Microsoft) that it largely has never been. This is the next squillions of dollars for the company, Governor observed. Hey look, we dropped Q into Amazon Connect for call centers. AWS is now an application vendor, with the connective tissue (Q) to help it turn data into answers for enterprises. Its a big deal. A marketplace strategy This is not to say that somehow AWS won the genAI sweepstakes with a few announcements, however hefty in importance. First, as with Microsofts and Googles announcements, theres still plenty of assembly required. Everyone is selling a genAI vision more than a ready-made genAI reality. Even so, until now AWS wasnt really in the conversation. Now they are, and in some cases, theyre leading that conversation. Also, somewhat refreshing for any tech vendor but particularly for AWS (with 1.2 trillion cloud services, give or take), AWSs genAI message isnt that enterprises must go all in with AWS. AWS was quick to suggest more of a marketplace strategy where customers can pick and choose the right model for the job. For example, if you ask Q which models it uses, itll tell you its built on Bedrock and uses a variety of models depending on the task. A more humble AWS? Definitely maybe. Also, a fundamentally serious company about genAI. Last month, the Biden administration issued a sweeping executive order focusing on artificial intelligence. The edict particularly focused on privacy concerns and the potential for bias in AI-aided decision-making. Either could potentially violate citizens' civil rights. The executive order was a tangible indication that AI is on the government's regulatory radar. We spoke to AI practitioners about the order and found they were concerned about both the nature of the proposed regulations and the potential for further restrictions. No industry likes being regulated, of course, but it's worth listening to what those working in the trenches have to say. Their comments highlight the likely pain points of future interactions between the US government and the fast-growing AI industry. Regulation can help minimize risk Some practitioners were encouraged that the federal government was beginning to regulate AI. "Speaking as both an investor and a member of society, the government needs to play a constructive role in managing the implications here," says Chon Tang, founder and general partner of Berkeley SkyDeck Fund. "The right set of regulations will absolutely boost adoption of AI within the enterprise," he says. Clarifying the guardrails around data privacy and discrimination will help enterprise buyers and users "understand and manage the risks behind adopting these new tools." Specific areas of the executive order also came in for praise. "The most promising piece of the EO is the establishment of an advanced cybersecurity program to detect and fix critical vulnerabilities," says Arjun Narayan, head of trust and safety for Smart News. "This program as well as the big push on advancing AI literacy and hiring of AI professionals will go a long way to establishing much-needed oversight, improving safety guardrails, and most importantly governancewithout stifling much-needed AI-driven research and innovation across critical sectors of the economy." Enforcement is key ... and unclear Much of the reaction was less than positive, however. For instance, one of the most critical aspects of regulation is enforcementbut many in the AI industry say it is unclear how the executive order will be enforced. "There appears to be no tangible framework that this EO will be enforceable or manageable at this stage," says Yashin Manraj, CEO of Pvotal Technologies. "It remains just a theoretical first step towards governance." Bob Brauer, founder and CEO of Interzoid, believes that the lack of specifics will hold back real-world practitioners. "Much of the document remains ambiguous, planting the seeds for future committees and slow-moving regulatory bodies," he says. "Concern arises, for example, with mandates that AI models must clear yet-to-be defined government 'tools' before their release. Considering the rapid development and diversity of AI models, such a system seems impractical." Scott Laliberte, managing director and global leader at Protiviti's Emerging Technology Group, elaborates on the gaps between the order's mandates and the realities of their practical application. "Many of the [executive order's] suggestions do not have feasible solutions yet, such as the AI-generated content marking and bias detection," he says. "Common methodologies for suggested processes, such as red-team safety tests, do not exist, and it will take some work to develop an industry-accepted approach. Laliberte says the call for global coordination "is commendable, but we have seen the struggle for years to come up with a common approach for global privacy, and getting a global consensus on guidelines for AI will prove even more difficult." The threat of a quiet exodus The global AI landscape was top of mind for many of the experts we spoke to. All forms of regulation in the absence of international coordination can lead to "regulatory arbitrage," where relatively portable industries seek the least regulated jurisdictions to do their work. Many practitioners believe that AI, which has captured the imagination of many technologists around the world, is particularly ripe for such moves. "The oversight model will severely slow down the rate of progress and put complying US firms at a significant disadvantage to companies operating in countries like China, Russia, or India," says Pvotal's Manraj. "We are already seeing a quiet exodus from startups to Dubai, Kenya, and other locations where they will have more freedom and cheaper overhead. Manraj notes that companies that set up shop elsewhere can still benefit from US technologies "without being hindered by government-imposed regulatory concerns." As the founder of Anzer, a company focused on AI-driven sales, Richard Gardner is definitely feeling the pressure. "Given these considerations alone, we're considering relocating AI operations outside of the United States," he says. "No doubt that there will be a mass exodus of AI platforms contemplating the same move, particularly since new reporting obligations will put a halt to R&D activities." Tang of the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund sees the issue extending beyond the corporate world. "There is a real risk that some of the best open source projects will choose to locate offshore and avoid US regulation entirely," he says. "A number of the best open source LLM models trained over the past six months include offerings from the United Arab Emirates, France, and China." He believes the solution lies in international cooperation. "Just like arms control requires global buy-in and collaboration, we absolutely need countries to join the effort to design and enforce a uniform set of laws. Without a cohesive coordinated effort, it's doomed to failure." An unbalanced playing field for startups Even within the United States, there are worries that regulations could be onerous enough to create an unbalanced playing field. "Centralized regulations impose hidden costs in the form of legal and technical compliance teams, which can unfairly favor established companies, as smaller businesses may lack the resources to navigate such compliance effectively," says Sreekanth Menon, global AI/ML services leader at Genpact. This burden makes it difficult, he says, "for enterprises to jump on the centralized regulatory bandwagon." Jignesh Patel is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and co-founder of DataChat, a no-code platform that enables business users to derive sophisticated data analytics from simple English requests. Patel is already contemplating what future regulations might mean for his startup. "Right now, the executive order does not significantly impact DataChat," he says. "However, if, down the line, we begin to go down the path of building our own models from scratch, we may have to worry about additional requirements that may be posed. These are easier for bigger companies like Microsoft and Meta to meet, but could be challenging for startups." "We should make sure the cost of compliance isn't so high that 'big AI' begins to resemble 'big pharma,' with innovation really monopolized by a small set of players that can afford the massive investments needed to satisfy regulators," adds Tang. "To avoid the future of AI being controlled by oligarchs able to monopolize data or capital, there must be specific carve-outs for open source." Why reinvent the wheel? While almost all the experts we spoke to believe in the potentially transformative nature of AI, many wondered if creating an entirely new framework of regulations was necessary when the government has decades of rules around cybersecurity and data safety on the books. For instance, Interzoid's Brauer found the privacy-focused aspects of the executive order somewhat puzzling. "AI-specific privacy concerns seem to overlap with those already addressed by existing search engine regulations, data vendors, and privacy laws," he says. "Why, then, impose additional constraints on AI?" Joe Ganley, vice president of government and regulatory affairs at Athenahealth, agrees. "Regulation should focus on AIs role within specific use casesnot on the technology itself as a whole," he says. "Rather than having a single AI law, we need updates to existing regulations that utilize AI. For example, if there is bias inherent in tools being used for hiring, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission should step in and change the requirements." Some practitioners also noted that the administration's executive order seems to have a lighter touch with some industries than others. "The executive order is surprisingly light on firm directives for financial regulators and the Treasury Department as compared to other agencies," notes Mark Doucette, senior manager of data and AI at nCino. "While it encourages beneficial actions related to AI risks, it largely avoids imposing binding requirements or rulemaking mandates on financial oversight bodies. This contrasts sharply with the firmer obligations and directives imposed on departments like Commerce, Homeland Security, and the Office of Management and Budget elsewhere in the sweeping order." However, Protiviti's Laliberte assumes that the weight of the federal government will come down on most industries' use of AI eventuallyand, as Ganley and Brauer suggest, will do so within existing regulatory frameworks. "While US regulation in this space will take time to come together, expect the executive branch to use existing regulations and laws to enforce accountability for AI, similar to how we saw and still see it use the Federal Trade Commission Act and Consumer Protection Act to enforce privacy violations," he says. Prepare now for regulation to come Despite the worries and talk of a mass AI exodus, none of the practitioners said they believed industry upheaval was imminent. "For most US technology companies and businesses, the executive order will not have immediate consequences and will have a negligible effect on day-to-day operation," said Interzoid's Brauer. Still, he added, "Anyone vested in the nation's innovative landscape should vigilantly monitor the unfolding regulations." Protiviti's Laliberte believes that anyone in the AI space needs to realize that the wild west days may be coming to an endand should start getting ready for regulation now. "Companies, especially those in regulated industries, should prepare by having an AI governance function, policy, standard, and control mapping to avoid claims of negligence should something go wrong," he says. "It would also be advisable to avoid or at least put heavy scrutiny on the use of AI for any functions that could lead to bias or ethical issues, as these will likely be the initial focus for any enforcement actions." With this order, he says, "the executive branch has signaled it is ready to take action against bad behavior involving the use of AI." Im making a bold statement here: Cookies are the perfect treat. Theyre not as fussy as cake. They dont need to be kept at the perfect temperature like ice cream. You dont even need utensils to eat them. Yes, cookies are probably the most convenient of baked goods, and there are so many different varieties that its hard to find someone who claims they dont like cookies. Cookies feel like home. No matter where you grew up, cookies can transport you back to childhood. I grew up making alfajores de maizena with my mom for birthdays and family celebrations, from lining up the cookies like little soldiers, to adding the dulce de leche or rolling the coconut this was a sweet tradition when growing up, says Jezabel Careaga of Jezabels Cafe and Bakery. How we choose our best lists What makes something the best? Our recommendations are based on our reporters' deep regional knowledge and advice from local experts. We also strive to represent the geographic and cultural diversity of the city and region. Spot an error or omission? Email us at phillytips@inquirer.com For some, the perennial favorite is chocolate chip. When someone says they want a cookie, they usually mean chocolate chip, says Keshia Davis from Denises Delicacies. For many us included a chocolate chip cookie is one of the first we ever love; that kind of connection is what puts it on the menu, says Nima Etemadi of Cake Life Bake Shop. But dont be confused by their simplicity. We put a lot of thought, time, and research into how it can reach its full potential, says Etemadi. [Our] cookies are inspired by our dreams as much as our traditions. Everyone who shapes the menu has meaningful, foundational food memories that are the basis from which we think about what a cookie has the potential to be. And Philly bakeries arent a go-to for just locals, but also for people who have moved away and still order a box when theres a big holiday coming up. Its almost like every Christmas, they come home, says Joe Termini of Termini Bros. The reason why its so special here is because its authentic. Philly doesnt try to be anyone else. For those moments that you want to enjoy the nostalgic goodness of a cookie without the effort, Philadelphia bakeries come through. I love to bake with my daughter, but there are two cookies we always buy instead of making, says Irene Levy Baker, author of Unique Eats and Eateries of Philadelphia. My favorite cookies are the tehina chocolate chip cookies at KFar, Michael Solomonovs cafe on 19th in Rittenhouse. Ive tried to make them myself and even bought the Soom tahini that he recommends, but they are just never as good. My other favorite cookie is Metropolitan Bakerys chocolate chip and dried cherry cookies. Philadelphia magazine printed the recipe in October 2008. I still have it but I typically just go to Metropolitan Bakery to buy them because the dough has to be refrigerated overnight and thats just too long for me to wait for them. Whether youre craving chocolate chip or anise, dulce de leche, pine nuts, sesame, or something else, this city has a world of techniques and traditions, and modern twists on classics. There truly is a cookie for every taste. Here are the best places to go for cookies in the city. Advertisement Bredenbecks in Chestnut Hill has been a family-run Philadelphia tradition since 1889. Now run by the fourth generation of Boyds, the bakery has kept most of the recipes the same all of these years. Theyre best known for traditional German cookies that are hard to find elsewhere in the area: pfeffernusse, springerle, filbert bars, and cinnamon stars. The springerle is a family favorite thats made using their great-grandmothers cookie press from the early 1900s. They require a lot of patience because they take two days to make and the flavor doesnt fully develop for two weeks. The anise flavor along with the crunchy outside and chewy inside makes them worth the wait. You can visit the bakery in person, call, or place orders through the website. During the holiday season, Bredenbecks offers make-at-home gingerbread house kits with premade gingerbread and all the fixings. 8126 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 19118, 215-247-7374, bredenbecks.com, @bredenbecks Longtime friends and pastry chefs Lily Fischer and Nima Etemadi founded Cake Life Bake Shop in 2013 and opened a brick-and-mortar shop on the main drag in Fishtown in 2016. The most popular cookie is the chocolate chip-walnut, topped with flakes of sea salt and baked to crispy/chewy perfection. Their signature cookie is the petal-pistachio, decorated with violet petals, raspberry dust, and rose sugar. Seasonal cookies are added throughout the year, so check Cake Lifes Instagram to see whats in the mix. Committed to diversity, Cake Life Bake Shop is proudly woman/trans-owned. 1306 Frankford Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 19103, 215-268-7343, cakelifebakeshop.com, @cakelifebakeshop, Wed.-Thurs. 8 a.m.-9 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 8 a.m.-11 p.m., Sun. 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Crust is a Manayunk spot that describes itself as a vegan bakery with an emphasis on social justice. Owners Meagan Benz and Juli Van Brown make it a point to purchase locally whenever possible to support other small businesses and give back to the community by donating food and funds to causes theyre passionate about. (Philly Bail Out, Abortion Liberation Fund of PA, and Seeding Sovereignty are just a few.) Their most popular year-round cookie is the tahini chocolate chip, outselling their standard classic chocolate chip every week. Its a twist on the classic with a nuttiness that gives it a depth of flavor that makes it extra decadent. Popular winter cookies are the peanut butter blossoms (think peanut butter cookies with a chocolate kiss) and frosted sugar cookies, but the menu contains almost two dozen cookies so there is something for everyone. Benzs favorite is the chocolate crinkle, a small two-bite cookie that tastes like a gooey decadent brownie on the inside with a slight crisp to the outside, rolled in powdered sugar. Visit the store in person to pick from the many cookies available, or preorder cookie boxes during the holidays on their website. 4409 Main St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19127, crustveganbakery.com, @crustveganbakery, Wed.-Thurs. 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 8 a.m.-8 p.m., Sun. 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Denises is a second-generation Black family-owned business in North Philadelphia. Denise Gause was a home baker who opened the bakery in 1991, close to where she grew up. It quickly gained a following because of the homestyle taste made with all-natural, high-quality ingredients. Gause retired in 2018, and now the bakery is owned and run by her nieces, Keshia Davis and Cynthia Benton. Davis personal favorite is the butter cookie (actually her moms recipe) piped out of pastry bags. (Theyre so rich in butter that they can only make them during cold weather.) Another popular favorite: the Oreo chunk. Its a brown sugar dough with big chunks of chopped Oreo. Cant forget the good ol classic chocolate chip cookie either. While Davis and Benton have kept the recipes the same as their Aunt Denise, theyve updated the technology: You can now get your cookies through Uber Eats, GrubHub, or their new app, in addition to ordering in person. 2916 N. 22nd St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19132, 215-225-5425, cakesbydenise.com, @cakesbydenises, Tues.-Fri. 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Sat. 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Tova du Plessis opened Essen Bakery in South Philly in 2016 after having her daughter and quitting her job as a pastry chef at the Rittenhouse Hotel. With Essen, she decided to re-create the pastries she remembered from growing up in a Jewish household. I was determined to make the best babka, challah, bagels, and other Jewish pastries in Philadelphia, she said. Her take on the black and white cookie is true to its New York origins, elevated with a bit of citrus in the cakey batter, real vanilla bean in the royal icing, and Valrhona dark chocolate ganache. Theyre baked fresh daily. Pick up a cookie at the window or place an order the day before on the website. During the holidays, you can order a variety box with flavors that are only available then, like a tehina and jam thumbprint cookie, a pistachio shortbread, and a mini biscotti loaded with fruit and nuts. 1437 E. Passyunk Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 19147, 215-271-2299, essenbakery.com, @essenbakery, Mon. 8:30 a.m.-1 p.m., Wed.-Sun. 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Chef Lila Jai Colello graduated from New Yorks French Culinary Institute before going on to work for Wolfgang Puck and the Food Network. Then she was diagnosed with celiac disease. So she made it her dual mission to make baked goods that are undetectable as gluten-free and create items that are hard to find in the gluten-free world. At Flakely, Colello uses her own proprietary flour mixes and everything has both eggs and butter. I feel that still creates the best texture and mouthfeel in a baked good. Flakelys cookie selection includes black and white cookies, brown butter chocolate chip, ginger molasses, and pecan tea cakes (which are actually cookies.) Beyond cookies, homemade Pop Tarts and croissants are best-selling items. To try the gluten-free goodness for yourself, simply walk up to the pink take-out window in Manayunk every Saturday from noon to 2 p.m. Flakely also offers local Philly area delivery and shipping across the U.S. Flakely donates 3% of every single sale to organizations that help feed our community or fight for racial and social justice, including The Color of Autism, Black Votes Matter, Philabundance, and Project HOME. 220 Krams Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 19127, 484-450-6576, flakelygf.com, @flakelygf Haegeles is a fourth-generation, family-owned, old-fashioned bakery in Mayfair specializing in German treats, hand made the same way they were 90 years ago. Each cookie is hand-cranked using an original Kook-E King cookie press dating back to 1950, purchased by August Haegele, the original first-generation owner. The best-selling Christmas items are the holiday mix of butter cookies with jimmies, nonpareils, or sugar. The jelly sticks made out of French pastry dough and Vienna walnut cookies are simply beautiful. And the holidays are their real-time to shine with springerle, pfeffernusse, and lebkuchen (a soft and nutty German gingerbread.) The smell alone is worth a visit to the bakery. During the week of Christmas, Tues.-Sun., check the website for special holiday hours. 4164 Barnett St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19135, 215-624-0117, haegelesbakery.com, Tue.-Fri. 7 a.m.-5 p.m., Sat. 7 a.m.-4 p.m. Hang Tran of HB Cuppycakes is known for her cupcakes with beautiful buttercream flowers, but everyone loves her chocolate chip cookies, too. Tran attributes her signature cookie to weeks of trial and error after deciding in December 2019 that she wanted to develop the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Its crispy on the edges and chewy on the inside, topped with a dark chocolate chunk sprinkled with Maldon sea salt. If youre a matcha lover, ask for the matcha black sesame cookie. Tran doesnt have a storefront, but you can place orders through Instagram or email. Her cookies are so delicious that they were included in the Philly edition of Bakers Box, which spotlighted Asian American bakers and pastry chefs. @hbcuppycakes, hbcuppycakes@gmail.com High Street Bakery High Street Bakery, a bakery rooted in locally sourced whole grain methodologies, is part of High Street Hospitality Group (Fork and a.kitchen + bar). High Street Bakery serves High Streets bread, pastries, pizzas, pastas, and sandwiches. Now that High Streets restaurant is reopened, expanded bread and pastry offerings will be available. Head Baker Delilah Pergola created pink peppercorn-black sesame cookies as an elevated spin on the classic shortbread, with bright pops of pink peppercorn, a tender buttery crumb, and savory notes of sesame. Enjoy them yourself at the bakery or share them with loved ones this holiday season in High Streets holiday cookie box. 101 S. 9th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19107, 215-625-0988, highstreetonmarket.com, @highstreetbakeryphl, Mon.-Sat. 8 a.m.5 p.m. Isgro is a family-owned bakery thats been making traditional Italian cookies by hand since 1904. Here, youll find Italian favorites like butter cookies made with butter sourced from J & L Poultry, and pignoli, an almond paste cookie covered in pine nuts. But dont miss their award-winning and best-selling ricotta cookies. Gus Isgro came up with the recipe 20 years ago: The cookies are light with an almost sponge-like texture, and come in two flavors: plain with lemon glaze or chocolate chip with a chocolate drizzle. The torrone, which is only available at the holidays, is another standout. Its a honey-based soft nougat with almonds and pistachios. The three main staples ricotta, butter, and their assortment of Italian cookies, which are hand-cut, fruit-filled cookies ship nationwide online through their website. 1009 Christian St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19147, 215-923-3092, isgropastries.com Despite its growth as a formidable chain of cookie purveyors across the country, it still deserves a place on Phillys best cookie list because its a hometown operation. Created in 2003 by former UPenn students, Jared Barnett and Seth Berkowitz, during a late-night study sesh, these grand and gooey cookies were some of the early movers into the cookie delivery game. Now, you can get these monster-sized cookies with ice cream, as cookie cakes, and so much more all able to be delivered to your house until midnight or 1 a.m each night. Multiple locations, insomniacookies.com, @insomniacookies Jezabel Careaga opened her business in 2010 as a coffee shop. Over the years, it has grown into a full-blown Argentine bakery-restaurant and market, known for alfajores. The traditional alfajores de maizena are made with cornstarch and have a sandy texture, are filled with dulce de leche and rolled in coconut. (Theyre also available with chocolate). To taste them yourself, you can stop into the bakery (indoor dining is now available), or the cafe ships nationwide. You can also catch Jezabels at the Fairmount, Fitler Square, Clark Park, and Headhouse Farmers Market, or Riverwards in Fishtown. Call ahead for big orders. 206-208 S. 45th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, 215-554-7380, jezabelsphl.com, @jezabels.phl, Thu.-Mon. 9 a.m.-4 p.m. KFar is Michael Solomonov and Steve Cooks all-day Israeli cafe and restaurant. You really cant talk about cookies in Philadelphia without mentioning their brown butter chocolate chip cookie, with honey, dark chocolate, and Maldon salt. While that gets the most love, pastry chef Katreena Kanney is excited about the Pistachio Toffee Cookie, an off-the-menu specialty cookie made from the Pistachio Sticky Bun (a guest favorite) that joins the main menu in December. Order the cookies online or stop by the cafe. The brown butter chocolate chip cookie can be ordered online or purchased in-store, and is also available through their catering packages. 110 S. 19th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19103, 267-800-7200, kfarcafe.com, @kfar_cafe, Everyday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Madison Kaplan is a self-taught baker who started making intricately decorated cookies as a hobby before turning it into a business. She opened her own storefront in Northern Liberties in 2019, where she sells homemade cookies, cupcakes, cakes, chocolate, candy, and toys. And just a few short years later, Madison K. Cookies won Best of Philly in 2022. In addition to decorated cookies, you can find classics like chocolate chip, birthday cake, and snickerdoodle. During the holiday season, enjoy chocolate peppermint and M&M cookies. Each month, Kaplan changes her menu of big cookies (such as apple pie with a caramel drizzle during Thanksgiving), so be on the lookout for Decembers special offering. On Dec. 16, the bakery will transform into a Disney Christmas, filled with Disney-themed baked goods. And while Kaplan created most of her recipes on her own, she credits her mom for the stores fan favorite: the giant chocolate chip cookie with sea salt. Ill be passing that recipe down to my kids one day for sure, she says. Walk into the bakery or order online; give two weeks notice for custom orders. 800 N. 2nd St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19123, 215-660-9616, madisonkcookies.com, @madisonkcookies Manakeesh gets its name from the traditional Lebanese sandwich a flatbread made with crispy dough topped with spices and a variety of vegetarian or halal meat options. Manakeesh Cafe is famous for their award winning baklava; however, they also specialize in a traditional Lebanese shortbread cookie called maamoul. Made with a semolina cookie batter sweetened with rose water for a hint of floral flavor, they are stuffed with either dates, walnuts, or pistachios. Have napkins handy the pistachio and walnut are covered in powdered sugar, so things can get a bit messy. 4420 Walnut St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, 215-921-2135, manakeeshcafe.com, @manakeeshcafe, Mon.-Thu. 9 a.m.-9:30 p.m., Fri. 9 a.m.-1 p.m., 2:15 p.m.-9:30 p.m., Sat. 9 a.m.-10 p.m., Sun. 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Metropolitan Bakerys sour cherry chocolate chip cookies are so popular that they sell them year-round. Its a traditional chocolate chip with a slightly tart punch from chewy dried sour cherries balanced with a sprinkle of Maldon sea salt. Its so popular that the bakery also sells an ice cream version of it. You can also get chocolate chip and walnut, oatmeal raisin and pecan, as well as other seasonal offerings. Theyre famous for their sourdough bread too, so grab a baguette and a cookie. 262 S. 19th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19103, 215-545-6655, metropolitanbakery.com, @metropolitanbakery, Tues.-Sun. 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Amy Edelman and her husband (and fellow chef), John Millard, are the baking duo and owners of Chestnut Hills Night Kitchen Bakery. (Their daughter Izzy claims the job as official taste tester.) Their cookie menu includes more than a dozen varieties. The 4-inch jumbo chocolate chip was the first on the menu and remains the most popular, as is the sugared shortbread, which is thick cut and available in different shapes for the holidays. If you love chocolate, the chocolate sea salt cookie is dark, dense, and incredibly rich and uses only a little bit of flour to hold the chocolate-forward cookie together, and has Maldon sea salt on top. Visit the bakery to pick up a cookie to take home, or eat it right there at the bakery. Theres a table inside and several outdoors. You can also pick up holiday cookie decorating kits that include shortbread cookies, pastry bags with royal icing, and a variety of sprinkles. ($35) For December, they have yule logs seasonal treats a chocolate spongecake with chocolate icing and whipped cream center. 7723-25 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 19118, 215-248-9235, nightkitchenbakery.com, @nightkitchenbakery, Mon.-Fri. 7:30 a.m.-6 p.m., Sat. 8 a.m.-6 p.m., Sun. 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Old City Coffee, which also has locations in Reading Terminal Market, is known for its big-as-your-face cookies that make you feel like a kid again. They come in chocolate chip, vegan peanut butter, and oatmeal raisin and are made using traditional recipes and high-quality ingredients. The customer favorite is the chocolate chip, using the same recipe since they opened in 1985. The flavor is balanced, not too sweet, and, of course, chocolaty. The vegan peanut butter cookies are also popular. They roast their coffee beans using a vintage gas-fired drum roaster to produce the rich, flavorful coffee theyve become known for. They also have holiday gifts available online and in-store. 221 Church St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19106, 215-629-9292, oldcitycoffee.com, @oldcitycoffee, Mon.-Thurs. 7 a.m.-4 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 7 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Sun. 8 a.m.-5 p.m. The brainchild of Delco sister duo Rhonda Saltzman and Mercedes Brooks, Second Daughter is an award-winning artisanal bakery thats wooed customers and critics in the short time since getting the dough rolling in 2021. Saltzman, a Culinary Institute of America graduate, made brownies 30 days straight, approximately five times a day, to get their renowned brownies perfect finding that balance of fudgy, not too chewy inside with a crackled top sprinkled with Maldon salt. Their crowd-favorite cookie is the brown butter chocolate chip jawn, a six-inch wide, thin chocolate chip cookie that is delectably chewy from the gooey inside all the way to the outer edges. Other staples include maple snickerdoodle, double chocolate Nutella, and rye black and white cookies. Located in Bok Building, Second Daughter currently only accepts preorders but will soon start retail in 2024. 1901 S. 9th Street, Suite 403, Philadelphia, Pa. 19148 215-350-2207, seconddaughterbakingco.com @seconddaughterbakingco Wed.-Sun. 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Where else can you order a spicy pork sandwich, vegan meatballs, a side of crispy pig skin, and delicious cookies in one stop? Small Oven Pastry Shop is connected to Porcos Porchetteria in Point Breeze/Graduate Hospital. While Porcos is known for its 100% natural heritage pork, the pastry offerings are just as mouthwatering, like a gluten-free chocolate fudge cookie or brown butter espresso cookie. For the holidays, be sure to check out the red velvet crinkle cookies, chewy holiday spice-flavored molasses cookies, and a few holiday desserts like a coquito tarte and turtle cheesecake with chocolate, pecans, and caramel. 2204 Washington Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 19146, 215-545-2939, smallovenpastryshop.com, @smallovenpastryshop, Wed.-Sun. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Termini Bros Bakery celebrated 100 years in 2021. Its even more special after these past few years, says Joe Termini. All cookies are made by hand, from scratch, using the same tools and techniques handed down from original recipes brought over from Sicily. They use high-quality almond paste, house-made preserves made every summer, and crumbs from trimmed cakes to make their cookie dough. Their techniques are steeped in tradition. Their most beloved cookie is the pignoli, a soft, chewy macaroon made with almond paste and imported Spanish pignoli (pine nuts). Other favorites: the Long John, made with almond paste and filled with raspberry jam; the chocolate banana, an amaretto cookie with French buttercream and raspberry jam and topped with a sliced banana and dark chocolate; and torrone, a nougat mixture with pistachios and almonds. Buy at the bakery, or order specialty tins 24 hours in advance. Termini also offers shipping online and local delivery. 1523 S. 8th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19147, 215-334-1816, termini.com, @termini_bros, Sun.-Thurs. 10a.m-7 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 9 a.m.-7 p.m., This little bakery has cupcakes, brownies, cheesecakes, and more. Theyve perfected the edible cookie dough, making it egg-free and available by the scoop, as cookie dough bites, or enrobed in a homemade chocolate magic shell as a cookie dough popsicle. You can even get a doughwich with cookie dough sandwiched between two cookies. If you prefer your cookies baked, go for the funfetti sugar cookies. Theyre chewy, colorful, and said to be as big as your face. 339 S. 13th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19107, 215-237-4647, shopsweetbox.com, @sweetboxphilly Mon.-Sat. 10 a.m.- 7 p.m., Sun. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Soft and chewy cookies just like your favorites from childhood thats The Bakeshop on 20ths specialty. The sugar cookies are a customer favorite made primarily with eggs, butter, and sugar so that theyre light and fluffy and melt in your mouth, plus topped with nonpareils. Other staples include the brookie, Italian ricotta, maple snickerdoodle, and dark chocolate peppermint. 269 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19103, 215-644-9714, bakeshopon20th.com, @bakeshopon_20th Bonnie Sarana was working in finance in 2007 when she decided to take a much-needed hiatus and enroll in the Culinary Institute of America. She graduated two years later and went on to open Vanilya, a globally inspired dessert and breakfast bakery in the Passyunk neighborhood, at first solely focusing on custom cakes that blossomed into serving bagels, breakfast pastries, and cookies. The six-cookie menu includes the best-selling mudslide cookie, a double chocolate cookie using unsweetened chocolate, dark chocolate, and chocolate chips, which also happens to be gluten-free. Theres also the crowd favorite banana oat chip cookie which was an office favorite during Saranas finance days and a personal family favorite, according to her son. They also have a ginger cookie (year-round, not just during holidays), classic chocolate chip, sugar cookies with nonpareils, and toffee. 1611 E. Passyunk Ave., Philadelphia, Pa. 19148, 917-751-7044, vanilyabakery.com, @vanilya_bakery, Tues.-Sun. 8:30 a.m.-3 p.m. Whipped Bakeshop was founded in 2009 by husband and wife Zoe and Brennen Lukas. They specialize in custom cakes, cookies, and cupcakes. Their most well-known cookies are their beautifully decorated sugar cookies, which come individually wrapped. Whipped Bakeshop made treats for Olivia Rodrigo, Lizzo, and other celebrities in 2022. This holiday season, they will feature festive holiday cookie gift boxes. 636 Belgrade St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19125, 215-598-5449, whippedbakeshop.com, @whippedbakeshop, open by appointment only Michelle Reese is a freelance writer who also runs the kids activities blog Sweet Mini Moments. She lives in Bucks County. Patrick Iannone (center), 22, after pleading guilty Dec. 4 to assaulting Fox 29 traffic reporter Bob Kelly in Sea Isle City, N.J., in July. He was accompanied by his mother, retired Sea Isle Police Capt. Rosemary Milano, and his father, Joseph Iannone, a Sea Isle Realtor. Read more CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE, N.J. Patrick Iannone, 22, told a judge Monday he had no idea who Bob Kelly was when he went to the Oar House Pub in Sea Isle City on July 30, having already had a lot to drink, and punched the Fox 29 traffic reporter in the face. Now he knows. Iannone pleaded guilty on Monday to third-degree assault, the result, in part, of Kelly objecting to his application for a pretrial intervention, a diversionary program that would have allowed Iannone to avoid prosecution altogether. READ MORE: Bob Kelly suspect Patrick Iannone appears in court Advertisement You did not know him before that night? his lawyer, John Tumelty asked him in court. I was not aware of who he was, replied Iannone. Did you go up to him while in the bar and punch him in the face? Tumelty asked. Yes. There was no reason for you to do that, is that correct? Yes. Iannone said he learned after the assault that Kelly suffered significant bodily injuries, including to his head and face, was knocked briefly unconscious, had an eye injury that resulted in him seeing spots, and suffered a cut to his eye that left a scar. As part of the plea deal, prosecutor Edward Shim told the judge the state would recommend probation, along with required alcohol and anger-management counseling, and no contact with Kelly, who did not attend the hearing. Kelly declined to comment Monday when reached by phone. Cape May County Superior Court Judge Christine Smith has the final say. She set sentencing for Feb. 12, and Shim said Kelly would be there. Shim said Kellys wishes would be considered at sentencing by the judge, who could decide to sentence Iannone to jail. But that would allow Iannone to withdraw his guilty plea, he said. At the hearing, the judge warned Iannone that if he failed probation, he would end up in jail. Iannone said he understood. The only way youll see the door of a state prison is if you fail probation, which I expect youre not going to do, the judge told him. I will not, he said. His lawyer said Iannone was giving up the right to argue that his intoxication played a role in the assault. He admitted that he caused those injuries to Kelly. After the hearing, Shim, the prosecutor, said third-degree crimes carry a presumption of no jail time in New Jersey, so that the plea deal offered Iannone was consistent with similar cases. He said Kellys objection to the pretrial program was one factor, along with an incident last summer in which Iannone was charged in Municipal Court with an assault in the Dead Dog Saloon, also in Sea Isle City. In that case, Iannone pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in Municipal Court and was fined $500, according to court records. It is not considered a criminal conviction under New Jersey law. Shim said the Dead Dog Saloon incident contributed to a pattern of antisocial behavior that would argue against accepting Iannone for a pretrial intervention program. Maria Serna holds a sign in favor of the creation of a health center on the Friends Hospital campus along Roosevelt Boulevard in 2025 during a community meeting at the Simpson Recreation Center on Saturday. Read more The proposed creation of a health center in Northeast Philly continues to be the center of debate involving health-care accessibility, misinformation, fears about the possible loss of a historical building, and concerns over a potential increase in traffic crashes along the already busy Roosevelt Boulevard. On Saturday, about 50 community members gathered in the Northwood area to support and oppose the construction of a health center on the grounds of Friends Hospital considered the nations oldest private psychiatric hospital, on 100 acres. According to the city, the project has been part of an ongoing conversation since 2011, but many community members said this is the first time they are hearing about it or having a say. What does the proposal entail? Plans call for the creation of a 55,000-square-foot health center capable of serving 30,000 Philadelphians a year with a smaller facility near Frankford Transportation Center serving around 5,000 patients annually. Patients will pay between $5 and $20 for adult and pediatric doctors appointments. Also, there will be no charge for access to family planning, immunization for children, dental services, blood work, mammograms, x-rays, pharmacy, behavioral issues counseling, specialist referrals, and physiotherapy. How does the community feel? For longtime resident Maria Serna, a place like this could be a game changer. My mom is 90 years old, and she and my sister are in wheelchairs. I have had to wait up to a year for a doctors appointment for them at Health Center 10 [2230 Cottman Ave.] the only city health center in the area, Serna said. Advertisement Many of her neighbors have similar experiences, she said. This area has a big immigrant population, many dont have access to doctors, leaving them at risk of dying, being hospitalized for aggravated conditions, and dealing with the fear of deportation if they go to an emergency room, she said. Then, why is the project facing opposition? Among the issues raised by those who spoke Saturday in opposition to the project included concern that the nearly 170-year-old Lawnside building, which once served as the superintendents residence, would be demolished. The hospital campus was originally established as the Friends Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of their Reason in 1813. Its already frustrating to see the landscape with this [new] building in it, but to see it demolished is like adding insult to injury, said Oscar Beisert, a nearby resident and a preservationist. Its common in many places to build around it or relocate, they do it all the time. Even if they just use the building for storage is better to have the building for the ambiance. For Serna, the concern about the building feels like people losing sight of their privilege and failing to notice the huge need for health care in the area. Besides the concerns for preserving the structure, there is worry about the site turning into an injection site and the impact that would have on the community. Health Commissioner Cheryl Bettigole debunked the injection-site rumor. Later, Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, who represents District 7, including sections of Juniata and Fairhill that will also be impacted by the creation of both health-care centers confirmed injection sites are not part of the conversation. Zoraida Figueroa, who lives across the street from the proposed location and has lived in the area for 38 years, suggested that discussion over historical concerns about the project might be a cover for what is really bothering people. Im hearing concerns about having people come from other places. ... What they are saying is, Im afraid of people who are not like me, so lets talk about that rather than hiding behind a historical situation, said Figueroa. If they were concerned about the historical building, then they should have maintained it. Why cant the Lawnside building be incorporated into the construction? According to Bettigole, the city tried to find ways to do so but couldnt reach a solution. It isnt up to modern code; it doesnt have sprinklers; it doesnt have wide-enough hallways, the rooms are not wide enough for our health center design, and moving it is prohibitively expensive, [costing] over a million dollars, Bettigole explained. When asked what played into the decision to choose this location to house the new health center, Bettigole cited space, parking, public transit accessibility, and having a willing landlord. Is the construction set in stone? No. Before being able to green-light the project, City Council has to hear from community members, and the site where the construction would take place has to be rezoned to allow for a health facility. According to Lozada, over the next week City Councils committee on rules, which addresses zoning matters, among other things, will consider the rezoning bill. We need to try to figure out a balance that is going to address the need as well as the community concerns, Lozada said. Authorities have charged a Narberth-based doctor with attempted murder and related offenses after she allegedly set fire to a home in Montgomery County last month, Lower Merion Township Police said. Amy L. Cohen, 35, is also facing charges of arson, terroristic threats, stalking, reckless endangerment, ethnic intimidation, and simple assault in connection with the incident at the home of the grandmother of an ex-boyfriends girlfriend, court records indicate. Authorities said an investigation began Nov. 24 after Lower Merion police found a threatening flier that referenced antisemitic language and the victims Merion home. The flier made threats against the elderly female residents granddaughters, who do not live at the home. Similar fliers had also been found at homes of the victims family members in Philadelphia and elsewhere in Montgomery County, police said. Advertisement Then, a woman set a fire at the houses front door around 1:30 a.m. Thursday, security camera footage showed. Footage showed the woman attempting to accelerate the fire by spraying flammable liquid into the flames, police said. The fire burned out before moving beyond the homes porch. Authorities did not say whether anyone was injured. Fire departments in Lower Merion and Norristown, Pennsylvania State Police, and the FBI processed the scene, and investigators identified a suspect who authorities said was previously involved in a relationship with a boyfriend of one of the victims granddaughters. That suspect was Cohen, police allege. Investigators obtained search warrants for Cohens home and vehicle, and executed them Friday. The searches yielded evidence, which police did not describe, that connected Cohen to the crime, and she was arrested the same day, officials said. She has since been arraigned, and is being held at Montgomery County Correctional Facility in lieu of $5 million cash bail. Cohens case is awaiting a hearing date, according to court records. An attorney listed as representing Cohen in court documents did not immediately respond to request for comment. According to Cohens LinkedIn page, she works as a doctor at Bryn Mawr Hospital. A staff bio page with Cohens information has since been removed from the Bryn Mawr Medical Specialists Associations website. People begin their march up 18th St. during the Flood Philly for Gaza rally and March, which began at Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia on Sunday. Read more Hundreds of protesters marched through Center City and University City to show their support for Gaza and demand a permanent cease-fire. Its the latest in sustained local efforts aiming to call attention to the war and its fallout. Protesters were critical of some local businesses, including Goldie in Center City, an Israeli-style falafel shop. Goldie is part of the CookNSolo group, which is co-owned by Israeli-born Michael Solomonov. Last month, a small group protested outside CookNSolos Laser Wolf in Fishtown, and in October, an Instagram post by the Philly Palestine Coalition called for a boycott of several Philadelphia restaurants, including CookNSolos. READ MORE: Viral chants at Goldie draw rebukes; protest organizers say criticism detracts from ceasefire demand Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro responded to a video of protesters chanting in front of Goldie, calling the stop in front of the business a blatant act of antisemitism not a peaceful protest. Advertisement A restaurant was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli, said Shapiro on X, formerly Twitter, adding hes reached out to owner Solomonov to share his support. I cant believe I even have to say this but targeting businesses simply because theyre Jewish owned is despicable. Philadelphia stands against this sort of harassment and hate, said U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D., Philladelphia) on X. Led by the Philly Palestine Coalition, protesters also marched through Center City chanting while youre watching, bombs are dropping to Eagles fans in bars. Some weekend revelers and shoppers were supportive of the message, stepping out to cheer or take a video. Others were less receptive. One driver threw a plastic bottle at protesters because they were blocking traffic. The demonstration comes at the heels of a weeklong cease-fire that allowed for the exchange of Palestinian prisoners and Israeli hostages who had been captured during the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. That truce ended Friday. According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, at least 200 Palestinians have been killed since Friday. The ministry estimates the total death toll since the start of the war now exceeds 15,200. Israels Foreign Ministry says about 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. Protesters in Philly on Sunday included families, people of various faiths, and a range of nationalities. Marzieh, who didnt want to give her last name over safety concerns, said she made the 30-minute drive from South Jersey with her three young children and husband. The 38-year-old Iranian said Sunday was her fourth protest supporting a cease-fire; the family traveled to New York City and Washington for other protests. We couldnt live our normal life, she said. Were following the news. Nowadays, its getting so horrible. We thought this was a way we could show our sadness. The family marched in a long line holding hands. Protesters like Philly resident Mary Pred, 27, marched alone. She held a sign that read Jews for free Palestine. Raised to support Israel, Pred said she didnt know much about the relationship between Israel and the Palestinian territories until the latest conflict. Since then, Pred has attended about 10 demonstrations denouncing the war. Israel doesnt stand for all Jews, she said. I would hope other Jews recognize they could be safe and free without the apartheid ethnostate. The march took demonstrators through the heart of the University of Pennsylvanias campus, where protesters accused Penn, Drexel University, and Swarthmore College of being complicit in the ongoing war. The war has become a flashpoint on college campuses for supporters of the Palestinian territories and Israel. The protesters also made their way to 40th and Market Streets, the site of the University City Townhomes. The homes served as affordable housing for more than 40 years but after a yearslong fight, demolition is slated to begin before the end of the year. Nada Abuasi, one of the event organizers, said townhome residents and Palestinians have a connection, both having been victims of displacement. We intend to show that were very united, she said of ending the protest at the Townhomes. Protest organizers vowed to keep speaking out in support of Gaza. Next weekend, there are plans to bus Philadelphians to Harrisburg for a statewide protest calling for a cease-fire. The night ended largely without incident, save for some incidents of graffiti in University City calling for a free Gaza. Police, who helped quell the tempers of frustrated drivers stuck in traffic, said no arrests were made as a result of the march. This article contains information from the Associated Press. Two-thirds of the 140 standardized patients that work at Jefferson University want to unionize. Four of them -- Nina Ryser (from left), Jennifer Summerfield, Charlotte Northeast, and Landis Smith -- pose for a photo on the schools Center City campus on Nov. 30. They act as patients for medical students, and they want to form a union with the Office and Professional Employees International Union. Read more In practice-exam rooms at medical schools across the city, there are workers who act as patients. They memorize entire character profiles symptoms, family histories, emotional temperaments. Dressed in thin hospital gowns and underwear, they allow their bodies to be examined by students, who palpate their stomachs and scope their ears. In some instances, these patients may be instructed to scream or cry. And then they give the students feedback on their examination. Known as standardized patients, these gig workers say their roles are crucial to public health but invisible to the public and often undervalued. Now, the ones at Thomas Jefferson University want to unionize. Advertisement Workers cite low pay, erratic scheduling, security breaches, and theft at their Center City workplace. Theyre concerned that artificial intelligence threatens their job security. Ive seen personally the lightbulb go off when a good medical student gets it, said 44-year-old standardized patient Charlotte Northeast, when they realize that a tiny little interpersonal connection can make all the difference between diagnosing something important or not. And so if were replaced by AI, or were downsized into nothing, ultimately, patients suffer. Earlier this month, more than two-thirds of the 140 standardized patients at Jefferson signed a letter to the universitys top executives, asking them to voluntarily recognize their union with the Office and Professional Employees International Unions Local 32. Jefferson declined. We believe that our employees should have an opportunity to formally vote in a secret ballot election based upon accurate information without outside pressure, Jefferson provost Matt Dane Baker wrote in a response to the workers, adding: We strongly believe that a direct relationship between all employees and our leadership results in the most productive teams and best empowers employees to advocate for themselves. Jefferson sent the The Inquirer a similar statement. READ MORE: Actors help medical students learn the less technical side of medicine OPEIU has filed with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election and is waiting for a date. If the union campaign is successful, it would likely be the first union of this kind of workers in the country. Chief among the workers concerns is pay. Standardized patients at Jefferson have been making the same amount since 2008: $20 an hour. Its the lowest of all pay rates for this kind of work at Philadelphia schools, which typically pay $22 an hour or more, according to three standardized patients who work at multiple institutions. Workers said their compensation was especially low when looking at the compensation of former Jefferson CEO Stephen Klasko, whose $5.4 million salary made him the second-highest paid hospital executive in the region in 2021. He was paid even more in 2019: $7.4 million. The entire reputation of this program is built on the back of this labor and they cant find it in their budget to pay their workers fairly? asked Andy Moholt, 37, a standardized patient whos also a touring musician. Standardized patients often choose their field for the flexibility. Their hours vary from month to month they might work 15 hours a month or 80, depending on their own schedules and the schools needs. Despite this, the majority of standardized patients at Jefferson are employees, not independent contractors. Independent contractors are not legally allowed to unionize. READ MORE: Here are Philadelphia's highest-paid health system CEOs in 2021 Many standardized patients are actors or other kinds of artists. Landis Smith, 71, and his wife, Jennifer Smith, used to work as patients part time while they ran their theater company but now work full time as theyve retired from theater work. They cobble together hours from six different schools in the area. Kimya Imani Jackson is a standardized patient who has a doctorate in biobehavioral health and was formerly a researcher in health disparities. Jackson, 46, says she was called to the work because of her mothers history with the medical system. When her mother was young, her scarlet fever was misdiagnosed and she ended up spending months in the hospital and missing a half-year of grade school. The doctors initially dismissed her mothers concerns, she said, which is why its so important that standardized patients teach medical professionals how to make patients feel heard and respected. An FBI agent enters the offices of Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers during a series of simultaneous raids on union offices, labor leader John Dougherty's home and those of several of his family members and allies. Read more Welcome back, court watchers, for another edition of the Inside Johnny Docs Trial newsletter. And oh, how the time flies. After four weeks of testimony, its closing time. Prosecutors and the defense both finished presenting their evidence last week and are expected to make their final pitches to jurors later today. After that, it will be up to the seven women and five men of the jury to sift through the dozens of expense reports; receipts for Target, Brooks Brothers, and pasta dinners; wiretapped phone calls; and hours of witness testimony that have been put before them as they attempt to render a verdict in the case. But before we get there, weve got a weeks worth of behind-the-scenes details from court to unpack and a look at some of the evidence the jury didnt hear including what prosecutors describe as recordings of John Dougherty allegedly threatening to beat up and run over potential witnesses in the case. Lets get to it. Advertisement Jeremy Roebuck and Oona Goodin-Smith (@jeremyrroebuck, @oonagoodinsmith, insidejohnnydoc@inquirer.com) If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here. The briefing From Eagles game box seats to Taylor Swift concerts, prosecutors said Dougherty misspent thousands of dollars on tickets for his family and friends. Ive got Nicki Minaj tonight, he told his niece in 2015. How many do you need? Accountants repeatedly warned Doughertys union, Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, about its lax oversight of credit card use and expense reports. But Doughertys lawyers say he wasnt aware of that. The atmosphere was tense in the courtroom during testimony from one ex-Local 98 business agent. Doughertys supporters in the gallery grumbled to themselves about the mans status as witness for the prosecution, with one exclaiming during a break: Wanna catch a rat? Put out some cheese. Prosecutors wrapped up their case by pointing to an $80 cookie tray they say Dougherty bought with union money for the christening of his nephews baby. He justified the expense as for the good of the union. A defense attorney asked: Is that so awful? Where things stand now After a month of testimony from government witnesses, Doughertys chance to directly tell the jury his side of the story came Thursday. He opted to remain silent. The typically outspoken labor leader chose not to take the witness stand or call any witnesses to testify on his behalf. Though perhaps surprising, the move isnt all that unusual. Remember, the government has the burden of proof in criminal trials, meaning it must persuade the jury to convict beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense doesnt have to do anything especially if it believes the government hasnt proven its case. Dougherty also chose not to testify in his 2021 bribery trial alongside then-Philadelphia City Councilmember Bobby Henon, though he did call several defense witnesses. Both men were ultimately convicted. And its not like we havent heard Doughertys take throughout his current trial. Through their cross-examination of every witness, defense lawyers Greg Pagano and Henry M. George have sought to poke holes in the governments theory that Dougherty and other union officials embezzled more than $600,000 from Local 98. Theyll have another chance to make their case during closing arguments. Doughertys codefendant Brian Burrows, Local 98s former president, also chose not to testify. But his attorneys did call one witness to the stand: his brother Robert. They hoped the siblings testimony would discredit a witness jurors heard from earlier in the trial contractor Anthony Massa, who said Brian Burrows had instructed him to bill to Local 98 for thousands of dollars in home renovations he oversaw at the union presidents Mount Laurel home. Robert Burrows told jurors he believed his father and brother did some of the work for which Massa later billed. But prosecutors pushed back hard, challenging the sibling on how he knew that. What we heard in court I dont think the elves did it. Robert Burrows response when prosecutors pressed him on how he knew the Burrows family, not Massa, had done the home renovation project in question. Breaking it down: The evidence the jury didnt hear The door may be closed on new testimony in the trial, but there was one bit of provocative evidence jurors never heard. In the months following his 2019 indictment, Dougherty was repeatedly caught on tape threatening to beat up, sue or run over potential witnesses against him and in one case, urged members of his union to put a suspected turncoat in their ranks under the water, prosecutors said in court filings last week. They asked the judge to let them play those recordings secretly captured by an FBI informant in the ex-union chiefs inner circle saying the threats were only further evidence of Doughertys guilt. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Schmehl never publicly ruled on that request and the government never played them for jurors. But the transcripts are colorful, to say the least. You can say, Oh, well he cant beat me up anyway. Yeah, I can, Dougherty told a room full of Local 98 business agents in 2020, according to the filing. At this level, when youre playing with my family and my life I can. And theres nobody here [that] will get back up a second time. The first time you get up, the second time I run you over. Months earlier, hed warned a room of around 30 union members and allies to think twice before talking to the FBI. You going to f around with that mouth, Im coming after everything you have and everything you f own, Dougherty purportedly said. Prosecutors say other recordings feature Dougherty boasting of his prowess in 30 brawls and urging loyalists to do something about one member of the union he suspected of turning against him. During a 2020 conference call, he likened his legal plight to the fate of a mob boss in the Canadian crime drama Bad Blood, which he said hed been watching on Netflix. Every show, they say one thing, Dougherty said, according to the government filing. Everybody is brought down by someone on the inside. Doughertys defense has previously argued these secret recordings violated the labor leaders civil rights and that he never intended to intimidate anyone. But in his push to have them admitted as evidence in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Grenell insisted: These are not the words and deeds of a person convinced of his innocence. Asked and answered We always appreciate hearing your questions about the trial. Reader Bob Wolfe emailed to ask: Could Dougherty be ordered to pay Local 98 back for the money hes accused of stealing? The answer: If Dougherty is convicted, he will almost certainly be ordered to pay restitution to the union. Exactly how much will be decided at his sentencing. And things could get complicated. Lawyers on both sides will surely have conflicting ideas about which dinners, shopping trips, and tickets to concerts or sporting events should be considered personal and which ones Dougherty can justify as business expenses debates that U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Schmehl, the judge overseeing the case, will have to referee. Local 98 is likely to have something to say, too, about how much it believes its owed. Thanks for writing in, Bob! We also answered more of your questions last week in a Reddit AMA on /r/philadelphia, including some about what its like in the courtroom, union PACs, and the publics increasing interest in labor groups. Do you have a question about the trial? Email us back and we might answer it in our newsletter. The legal lens Next on the docket The case could be in the jurys hands as soon as Tuesday, and from then on out, your trusty newsletter writers will be on verdict watch. How long until the jury reaches that verdict? Your guess is as good as ours. In Doughertys 2021 bribery case, the jury took 3 days to find him and Henon guilty. But, this is a different case with different charges, different evidence, and different jurors. Truly, only time will tell. In the meantime, you can follow along with our live updates and daily coverage. And keep an eye on your inbox for a special verdict edition of the newsletter, whenever that decision comes. Well see you here again soon. By submitting your written, visual, and/or audio contributions, you agree to The Inquirers Terms of Use, including the grant of rights in Section 10. Guests examine two skeletons of people who had fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva at the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia on Sept. 9, 2020. Read more The Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia was founded in 1863 through the donation of tissue specimens, medical tools, and anatomical models by Thomas Dent Mutter, who had been the chair of surgery at Jefferson Medical College. In the ensuing 160 years, both the museums collection of human tissue specimens and its popularity have grown exponentially. Its true that many historical specimens in the collection were acquired without informed consent from the donors. Many others were acquired from other museums and hospitals that no longer wanted to care for their teaching collections; these orphaned specimens faced destruction if not accepted into the museums collection. New leadership specifically, CEO Mira Irons and executive director Kate Quinn has decided that instead of displaying anatomical and pathological tissue specimens, the museum will transition to an institution concerned with health and well-being. (It should be noted that both Irons and Quinn have expressed deep distaste for the museum, both among museum staff and in print.) In so doing, the museum is critically reevaluating the need for the display of human remains for educational purposes or even depictions of human remains unless there was explicit consent from the donor. As a result, college staff have been instructed to remove specimens from the teratology exhibition at the museum, which highlights fetal defects now rarely seen due to advances in obstetrics. Staff were also informed that even literary illustrations of human remains were no longer to be used for educational purposes. However, Quinn stated that more recent donations that had enthusiastic consent will likely remain unchanged in a recent Philadelphia Magazine article. Although that may be the museums public stance, clearly that policy is in name only just ask Barbara Kotzin. Advertisement Kotzin has scoliosis so severe her spine formed an S-shape. However, Kotzins condition was partially corrected through the surgical insertion of hooks and rods in her back in 1996. A visit to the Mutter Museum, one of the few institutions in the United States that curates and displays human tissue specimens, convinced her to donate her skeleton to the collection after her death, with her full consent and enthusiastic agreement to put a little of herself on display. Since 1996, she has worked closely with curators to facilitate the donation. Kotzin even arranged and earmarked funds for the postmortem defleshing of her skeleton, brought her executor to visit the Mutters scoliosis skeletons, and memorialized her plans in her will. And yet, when Kotzin reached out recently to Quinn, she was flatly told that the museum didnt have any paperwork on her and that the museum is not currently receiving new acquisitions. A subsequent letter explaining her situation, sent individually to each of the board of trustees of the college, was met with deafening silence. Now 74, Kotzin is at a loss as to how to proceed. The failure to meet their obligations to donors like Kotzin suggests that college leadership is interested in respecting the wishes of the dead but only when such wishes agree with their predetermined narrative that the public has no business viewing anatomical and pathological specimens. Supporters of the Mutter Museum have no qualms with a fair and clear-eyed evaluation of the collection and the return of specimens to family members if they can be identified and so wish. Instead, Irons and Quinn have unilaterally decided to sanitize the parts of the museum that they personally find unappealing instead of allowing the public to decide, individually, if theyd like to see and learn about medical science and history in its purest form. The museum recently hosted a town hall-style meeting (called, ironically, Postmortem) to gather opinions about the ethics surrounding the collection and display of human remains, underwritten by a $285,000 grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Instead, Quinn and Irons could have gotten all the information they needed from the deeply critical commentary and intense backlash they received on their social media platforms from fans and followers of the museum, or from some of the 35,500 people (and counting) who signed a Change.org petition calling for the preservation of the museums legacy without spending a dime. It seems that in its campaign to preserve the dignity of the dead, the leadership of the College of Physicians has forgotten how to treat the living with kindness and respect. Dont listen to what they say, watch what they do. And make your voice heard by signing and commenting on the petition or emailing your thoughts to the college at inquiries@collegeofphysicians.org. Marianne Hamel is a board-certified forensic pathologist practicing in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and the chair of the Wood Institute, Library, and Museum Committee of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. A sign from a recent event organized by parents outside Bryant Elementary, urging the School District to provide students there with a nurse. Read more As a Black parent whose child attends one of Phillys most neglected schools, I know what its like to be silenced, ignored, and shut out of important conversations about public education. Parents like me consistently encounter racist and toxic narratives about how we are less invested in our childrens success than wealthier communities. Though we may not get the media attention of parents who storm school board meetings to ban books, we are doing the work, and always have been. I am driven by the wisdom of my foremothers, who demonstrated that, collectively, we can and must fight for a world worthy of our dignity, hopes, and dreams. Im one of the parent members who make up Lift Every Voice Philly, a Black-led organization committed to driving systems change in Philly schools. My fellow parents and I are united in our belief that we must take collective action to transform our city by fighting for all Philly kids as if they are our own. READ MORE: My parents didnt let me apply to a magnet school. Im glad. | Opinion Advertisement My child is a fifth grader at William C. Bryant Elementary, a K-8 school in Cobbs Creek. Like all the schools associated with our organization, my school is majority Black and low-income. School data show that none of Bryants students passed the recent math state tests. But what that data wont tell you is that Bryant students, like other students in neglected schools, are consistently subjected to classes without full-time teachers sometimes for an entire year. In January, fellow Bryant parents and I learned that our school no longer had a nurse after one of our children relayed that they were unable to get routine help for a schoolyard scrape. This news brought back some awful memories from 2013, when nurses were cut all across the district. In the end, two children one of whom was a Bryant student died after experiencing health emergencies, with no nurse on duty. We will never know if a school nurse could have made all the difference. For the past year, we, as parents closest to the pain of injustice and disinvestment have been organizing to build the power we need to chart a new path forward. We channeled our anger and fear into action and expanded our fight to neighboring schools that were also suffering without nurses. We quickly established new parent chapters at Commodore John Barry Elementary, Edward Heston, Alain Locke, and Roosevelt Elementary Schools. We built community by sharing our stories of how the nurse vacancy crisis was endangering our children. A daughter who was given the wrong medication. A son unable to access medicine all day. Health emergencies that resulted in 911 calls and ambulances as the only course of action. The absence of school nurses doesnt just threaten our children, it also traumatizes our families and threatens our livelihood. When we get panicked calls from school, informing us that our children are in ambulances on the way to the hospital, when we are called from work to administer medication, and when we keep our kids home safe with family members, we bear the weight of this failure. Too many of us have had our pay docked and received write-ups at work for needing to leave. Too many of us have received truancy court and Department of Human Services visits, blaming us for our kids absences from school when this is a failure of the school system. We got to work, organizing community dinners, canvassing outside our schools, collecting hundreds of petition signatures, and hosting phone banks to the superintendents office at school dismissal. Our persistence and collective efforts paid off and brought new urgency to this long-standing problem. Even when some of our schools got nurses, it wasnt enough we stayed the course to ensure that we kept the focus on all schools, and over time, weve watched all our school chapters add daily nurse coverage. The School District, which typically has dozens of nurse vacancies in its 217 schools, has now turned this shortage around. (According to a district spokesperson, there are only 10 schools with short-term substitute nurses, however over the past 2 weeks there has been a 98% coverage rate at those schools. Meaning that those schools have been receiving nursing services 4-5 days per week. The spokesperson added that the number of schools with a short-term substitute nurse is fluid and can fluctuate if, for example, a district nurse goes on leave.) Our persistence and collective efforts paid off. By partnering with Karyn Lynch, the chief of student support services, Kendra McDow, the schools chief medical officer, and Shannon Smith, the districts director of nursing, district staff listened to the urgent needs we put forth and responded to them in a timely manner by overhauling the hiring process and placing temporary nurses in places like Barry, where students have gone years without a regular nurse. We are happy to celebrate this progress, but we also know that lasting change will require more competitive salaries, additional administrative support for the nurses who currently work in the district, and a clear pipeline for temporary nurses to become permanent. This is just the beginning. In 2024 we will be expanding to new chapters across Philadelphia and growing our movement to transform the district and the city. Our work is not done until our city is truly accountable to Black parents who have consistently shown that we have the expertise needed to build a district and city worthy of our children, hopes, and dreams. Carrera Wilson is a parent of a child at the William C. Bryant Elementary School. She is a member of Lift Every Voice Philly, a Black-led parent organizing group committed to driving systems change in Philly public schools. Supporters of former President Donald Trump protested outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia on Nov. 8, 2020, a day after the 2020 election was called for President Joe Biden. Read more Philadelphias head of elections assured the public on Sunday that the 2024 presidential election will be completely fair and accurate after former President Donald Trump urged followers over the weekend to go into cities like Philly to guard the vote. The former president has repeatedly alleged electoral wrongdoing in both Detroit and Philadelphia, heavily Democratic cities with substantial Black populations that helped swing their respective states toward President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. At a campaign stop in Ankeny, Iowa, on Saturday, he urged those in the audience to take action, naming Philly, Detroit, and Atlanta. Lisa Deeley, who chairs the Philadelphia City Commissioners, the three-member body that oversees the citys elections, responded on Sunday, reiterating that 2020s results were completely fair and accurate and that is what we will continue to deliver in 2024. I can only assume it is to try and sow doubt about the validity of the election results, Deeley wrote in the statement. Advertisement No credible evidence of electoral malfeasance in any city exists. When reached by The Inquirer, Deeley said that she felt the need to respond to Trumps comments simply because he said it. When a former president is spreading disinformation, its up to us to be truth tellers, said Deeley. Deeley said she expects 2024 to be operationally smoother than 2020, both because the pandemic has receded and because her office has much more practice with higher volumes of mail ballots. Like many Pennsylvania jurisdictions, Philadelphias vote count took several days in 2020. The counting was marked by heated protests by supporters of both the former president and Biden. Deeley said her office hasnt received any threats and doesnt foresee any operational challenges at least not yet. I would say that the former president is starting the calls out of his playbook a little early this time, she said. Serial success stories Its hard to reach the top, but even harder to stay there. Thats why extra praise has been heaped on those who made it into the winning circle for IBs Brokers on Underwriting Agencies 2023, as over 400 brokers selected the best in 16 categories based on: coverage overall service level turnaround times for new business and claims broker support premium stability commission structures Most are repeat winners and are celebrated for being consistently outstanding. Nik Kanellakos, director of ADK Insurance Brokers, highlights the key elements a broker demands from a top underwriting agency: communication returning calls and emails innovation working to find a solution for clients And discussing the pain points for brokers, he says, There are capacity issues and sometimes a lack of responses as we are forever chasing them, as there has also been an influx of new staff and inexperienced staff coming on board. This years winners have overcome these hurdles to become trusted, reliable partners with their brokers. IB spoke to three serial winners (who also won in the same categories in 2022) to gain insight into how they have been able to dominate their respective sectors. Construction: Glenn Ross, CEO, MECON Insurance Commercial motor: Darryl Martin, General Manager, Market Development, GT Insurance Cyber information and technology: Colin Pausey, COO, Emergence Insurance Underwriting consistency Whats been the key to winning again in your sector? Ross (MECON): We have a very strong company culture focused on our people. Most of our senior staff have been with the company for in excess of eight years, and staff turnover is very low. This has enabled a high level of staff training and a group cohesion that enables MECONs broker-facing staff to deliver informed and valuable assistance, particularly around our ever-evolving policy coverage. Martin (GT): We really stay true to our culture in that we are very customer-centric, ensuring we prioritise the service to our brokers, and that means our service model. Were represented throughout Australia and the different regions, which enables us to have dedicated local contacts in the broker market. Brokers still demand local and personalised service, and thats something that we havent changed in our model. Speaking with our broker partners, there is a lot of stress in businesses in Australia, which means theres extra demand put on brokers and also the insurers to be able to respond in a timely manner, so we really prioritise that. Pausey (Emergence): In times when the market was hard, our rates didnt go through the roof. We went as far as we could without rate increases. There was a period of time when other agencies were trying to reduce coverage as part of managing issues, but we just kept our wording the same; in fact, weve probably enhanced our wording. Another one of the keys is our team structure; they have accessibility to decision-makers and to the more experienced professionals in the firm. The impact of public liability (worker to worker) injury claims remains a significant risk, and increased reinsurance costs are also an influential factor. MECON does have some new initiatives in the planning stages, but we need to keep some things up our sleeve, particularly with new entrants to our market space! Glenn Ross MECON Insurance Underwriting innovation Along with consistency, what additional features have you embraced in the last 12 months? Ross (MECON): We constantly monitor risk developments occurring in the construction industry and are quick to react to keep brokers advised and to provide innovative covers to assist clients in managing such risks. (Our quick reaction to COVID-19, our Builders Advantage Endorsement providing coverage for the risks builders encountered with fixed-price contracts and extended construction durations and our Project Duration Extension Endorsement to specifically cater for extended project durations unexpectedly encountered in annual policies are all examples of innovation to address emerging risks.) Merging with the UAA Group has seen MECON undergo change. MECON no longer underwrites contractor plants and equipment as UAA has absorbed our CPE portfolio. MECON now focuses entirely on construction, wherein we have adhered to our tried and trusted formula. Using the engineers vernacular, if it aint broke, dont fix it! Martin (GT): We have invested heavily in also improving our self-service capabilities, which addresses the needs of some brokers for quick or instant response times on particular segments of motor. Our self-service platform enables them to instantly quote, but its also supported by dedicated underwriters behind the scenes, so if something doesnt perhaps fit, weve got a dedicated team there to respond very quickly as well. The marketplace in our particular segment of commercial motor is a very competitive marketplace, and that certainly motivates our constant innovation. We also build in feedback mechanisms to ensure that were tweaking, so while weve developed a streamlined platform service for our brokers, its not a tool that we revisit every year or two; its something that were constantly monitoring every month. Pausey (Emergence): In the new year, when you buy a policy from us, youll get a whole range of services at no cost to the insured. Youll have ongoing 24/7 monitoring of the dark web, so if somebodys already got your stuff and its out there, well be able to tell you. Ill be frank, some of our major competitors are also rolling out offerings like this, and I think this will make it hard for the market going forward because this is going to come as much as a service offering as an insurance offering. We can tell the insured about a vulnerability, and its actually a zero-day type vulnerability, and were just letting them know. We cant compel them to do anything because its not a terminal condition of the insurance contract, but we just hope they take it in good faith. Also, we employ our own incident response people in-house, and its a genuine 24/7 model; everyone offers 24/7 incident response or a form of it, but we employ the people who are empowered to make decisions, and if they need to get forensics specialists, lawyers or communications experts involved, they can have a team available within an hour. We look at every customer on their individual merits and try to design a program thats suitable for their needs, and were largely led by the broker who is there to provide that professional guidance to ensure the customer is appropriately insured Darryl Martin GT Insurance Underwriting engagement As these awards are driven by broker feedback, how do you interact with the broking community, and what part do they play in how you operate? Ross (MECON): With work from home being the norm, visiting large groups of brokers face to face has become almost a thing of the past. Instead, we have adapted to providing webinar training and podcasts for our broker community. (Broker training has always been provided by MECON.) We have also been fortunate in that the UAA Group BDM network is conducting personalised broker visits and is now acting across the group, including on MECONs behalf. Each year, we conduct a broker survey. The results are closely scrutinised and help us set the scene for the year ahead. The brokers who respond to our survey are probably unaware of how influential they are in setting MECONs direction. Martin (GT): Were an intermediate business, so our broker is also our customer. We always collaborate with our brokers to understand exactly how they see GT. Looking through the lens of the brokers is really important, and we also invest in market research, so that enables us to get a very wide cross-section of insight to ensure that we are making very informed strategies on our continuous improvement journey. Pausey (Emergence): We dont just have business development people; our people are business development underwriters; they all have the ability to underwrite as well. So, they actually go out and talk to brokers. Thats a good model, but we also invite different teams of brokers in a lot, almost once, sometimes twice a month, where we do a presentation to them. We tell them about our cyber advisory services, incident response and claims, then use examples. Its actually a social event underpinned by about an hour to an hour and a half of presentation, and thats incredibly successful because we only do one product, so we deal with the brokers on a very regular basis. And thats the opportunity for the broker to say to us, Why arent you doing this? and if you hear it often enough, then maybe its something youve got to provide that cover, or we tell them, Its actually something we do provide, but we dont call it that; we call it this. However, The Sydney Morning Heralds latest report revealed that ANZ and Suncorp will try to overturn the competition watchdogs decision over nine days of hearings, with barristers from both groups aiming to convince the Australian Competition Tribunal that the deal will not significantly lessen competition in the Australian mortgage market. coverage; overall service level; turnaround times for new business; turnaround times for claims; broker support; premium stability; and commission structures. Based on broker feedback, IB calculated the top three winners for each type of insurance and awarded them with gold, silver, and bronze medals. The three insurance products that received the most votes from brokers were awarded the Brokers Pick medal. I am honoured to be joining Centrewest, which I have long admired for its reputation within the industry, said Cole. Im extremely excited to work with the leadership team and expanded board to drive the strategic direction that will support the evolution of the business. If you ever came in contact with this guy, check your history because hes really good about using other peoples identities, the deputy marshal had said. So, if there is someone helping him, its very possible. He has the means. We believe he still has a lot of cash on him. Hes good at talking to people. He can manipulate people. He does have a history of turning very violent if he doesnt get his way. A San Diego-based technology firm for the hospitality industry has avoided a trial over charges it discriminated against a qualified deaf applicant from Massachusetts for a remote IT job. U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns in Boston approved a 26-page consent decree resolving a disability discrimination lawsuit filed against remote-first technology company Digital Arbitrage, Inc., doing business as Cloudbeds, by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). EEOC sued on behalf of a deaf applicant who had the education and experience for the three remote IT Administrator jobs that the Cloudbeds finance department advertised on indeed.com. His candidacy was advanced after review of his application but then he was dropped from consideration not because of any accommodation that might be needed for the job but after he asked for an alternative way to accomplish a recorded interview that was the next stage in the hiring process. The applicant, who resides in Northampton, Massachusetts, is deaf and uses American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate. Cloudbeds refused to use ASL or another alternative for the interview and did not inquire any further. The CEO said the company would not accommodate the interview because it would never hire a deaf person for the job anyway, according to the lawsuit. The EEOC found the interview refusal was a violation of the reasonable accommodation requirement of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Cloudbeds failed to engage in a good faith interactive process to identify reasonable accommodations in the hiring process and, in effect, it rejected him and terminated his candidacy because of his deafness, according to the EEOC complaint. By turning away the deaf applicant without an interview, the company never learned how he had for years used various chat, email, video, screen share and other technologies to perform very similar remote IT work including resolving technical issues for end-users as the Cloudbeds jobs required. He had 17 years of experience in the IT professional support field including work as a remote IT director, a remote IT engineer and an IT systems administrator for various companies. After turning him away, the firm hired three non-deaf candidates with less relevant job experience and less education for the IT jobs. As part of the settlement Cloudbeds will pay $150,000 in damages. But it has also agreed to much more, including making substantial changes to its policies to encourage deaf candidates to apply for future jobs and be proactive in accommodating them where necessary. The firm will update its reasonable accommodation policy and provide annual training for managers and human resources about discrimination law. The CEO of Cloudbeds, who insisted the company would not accommodate the candidate, will issue an annual video message on ensuring that people who are deaf and hard of hearing are provided reasonable accommodations. The companys human resource personnel will complete training on integrating deaf employees into the workplace, and an employee will complete courses on assistive technologies that are available to deaf or hard of hearing employees to communicate in the workplace. The firm will also post any finance department IT openings to the website of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology along with a statement of commitment to hiring and accommodating people with hearing disabilities. EEOC Regional Attorney Jeffrey Burstein said that it is important that human resources and managerial professionals keep pace with changing technology as workplaces move to remote-first and hybrid settings. Timothy Riera, acting director of the EEOCs New York District Office, said the consent decree is a reminder to employers of the importance of engaging in the interactive process with qualified individuals who may provide insight into what reasonable accommodations they may need during the hiring process and may enable them to perform the essential functions of the positions to which they are applying. Cloudbeds sells a software suite, the Cloudbeds Hospitality Platform, to independent hotels, hostels, vacation rentals, and hotel groups nationwide and internationally via the internet. Topics InsurTech Talent Tech Eight aging dams in central and western Massachusetts will be removed as part of a $25 million initiative announced Friday by state environmental officials. The structures to be dismantled include the abandoned high-hazard Bel Air Dam in Pittsfield. Removing the dams will restore fish and other wildlife habitats, increase biodiversity, improve water quality, promote climate resiliency and make communities safer, officials said. This summer, we saw firsthand the catastrophic impacts of severe flooding and the stress and pressure it puts on our dams, Gov. Maura Healey said. The floods earlier this year put a few dams at risk and raised concerns that the structures may increasingly be at risk as the region is hit by stronger and wetter storms. There are thousands of dams across New England and many were built decades if not centuries ago, often to help power textile mills, store water or supply irrigation to farms. The concern is they have outlived their usefulness and climate change could bring storms they were never built to withstand. Of the $25 million, $20 million will support the removal of Bel Air Dam, and $5 million will go toward the removal of the remaining seven dams. The removal of the Bel Air Dam will reduce the risk of downstream flooding that could affect nearly 500 parcels of land, including residential, business, commercial, and industrial areas. As part of the dam`s removal the state will dispose of contaminated sediments off-site to reduce health risks, officials said. The dam`s removal should also improve fish passage and improve ecological restoration of the west branch of the Housatonic River in Pittsfield, where the dam sits. The remaining seven dams are: Cusky Pond Dam in New Braintree; Schoolhouse Pond Dam in Sutton; Patrill Hollow Pond Dam in Hardwick; Thousand Acre Reservoir Dam in Athol; Arnold Pond Dam in Sutton; Salmon Pond Dam in Brookfield; and Weston Brook Dam in Windsor. Copyright 2024 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Flood Massachusetts Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on Sunday for reform of the insurance sector, where companies are increasingly withdrawing assistance against climate shocks. Lower-income countries and workers in nations most affected by climate change are struggling to access insurance to help protect them from economic shocks. We need to rethink the insurance industry, Clinton said during a panel on women and climate resiliency. Insurance companies are pulling out of so many places. Theyre not insuring homes. Theyre not insuring businesses. Climate Finance Takes Center Stage at COP28 Climate Talks Clinton earlier this year joined the Arsht-Rock Foundation Resilience Center as a global ambassador on heat, health and gender. The center has pioneered new forms of so-called parametric insurance that offer payments once disasters hit a pre-set extreme. During Sundays discussion, Clinton recalled meeting Indian women who described working outdoors in construction, farming or desert salt flats, forced to work in almost unbearable conditions because they had no economic alternatives. But as the climate changes, as storms increase and drought and heat increase, she said, its not just poor, hard-working women in India. Its people everywhere who are going to be left out with no backup, no insurance for their business or their home. In the U.S., insurers have already begun pulling back from risky regions such as Californias fire-prone forests or along southeast coastlines hit by hurricanes. Clinton warned that this trend would escalate. People in the United States, Europe, theyre going to wake up and say, What do you mean, I cant get insurance?' (Reporting by Valerie Volcovici and Elizabeth Piper; editing by Katy Daigle and Jan Harvey) Photograph: Gan Bingdong stands in the basin of a community reservoir near his farm that ran nearly empty after its retaining wall started to leak and hot weather and drought conditions accelerated the loss of water, in Longquan village in southwestern Chinas Chongqing Municipality, on Saturday, Aug. 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein) Related: Topics Trends Three commercial vessels came under attack in international waters in the southern Red Sea, the U.S. military said Sunday, as Yemens Houthi group claimed drone and missile attacks on two Israeli vessels in the area. The Carney, an American destroyer, responded to distress calls and provided assistance following missile and drone launches from Houthi-controlled territory, according to U.S. Central Command. Yemens Houthi movement said its navy had attacked two Israeli ships, Unity Explorer and Number 9, with an armed drone and a naval missile. A spokesperson for the groups military said the two ships were targeted after they rejected warnings, without elaborating. Red Sea Attacks on Ships Spark Safety Concerns for Sailors In a broadcast statement, the spokesperson said the attacks were in response to the demands of the Yemeni people and calls from Islamic nations to stand with the Palestinian people. The U.S. military said the Carney shot down three drones as it helped the commercial vessels. It was not clear if the warship was a target. It said the attacks were a threat to international commerce. We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran, the statement said. The United States will consider all appropriate responses in full coordination with its international allies and partners, it added. An Israeli military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said the two ships had no connection to Israel. One ship was significantly damaged, and it is in distress and apparently is in danger of sinking and another ship was lightly damaged, Hagari told reporters in Tel Aviv. The reported incident follows a series of attacks in Middle Eastern waters since war broke out between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas on Oct. 7. An Israeli-linked cargo ship was seizedin November by the Houthis, allies of Iran. The group, which controls most of Yemens Red Sea coast, had previously fired ballistic missiles and armed drones at Israel and vowed to target more Israeli vessels. Multiple Engagements The Bahamas-flagged bulk carrier Unity Explorer is owned by Unity Explorer Ltd and managed by London-based Dao Shipping Ltd, LSEG data showed. The ship was scheduled to arrive in Singapore on Dec. 15. Number 9, which was headed to Suez port, is a Panama-flagged container ship owned by Number 9 Shipping Ltd and managed by Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK-based Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (BSM), the data showed. BSM said in a statement to Reuters Number 9 is currently sailing and there were no reports of injuries or pollution after the incident. The vessel was hit by a projectile while transiting the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the company said. Unity Explorers owners and managers could not be reached immediately for comments. According to U.S. Central Command, the Unity Explorer suffered minor damage while the Number 9 also reported damage. British maritime security company Ambrey and sources said earlier that a bulk carrier and a container ship had been hit by at least two drones while sailing in the Red Sea. Ambrey said the container ship had reportedly suffered damage from a drone attack about 63 miles (101 km) northwest of the northern Yemeni port of Hodeidah. Britains Maritime Trade Operations agency (UKMTO) said it had received reports of a drone attack in the Red Seas Bab al-Mandab Strait. Last week a U.S. Navy warship responded to a distress call from an Israeli-managed commercial tanker in the Gulf of Aden after it had been seized by armed individuals. (Reporting by Aziz El Yaakoubi in Riyadh and Rami Ayyub in Washington; additional reporting by Ahmed Elimam in Dubai, Hatem Maher in Cairo, Howard Goller in Jerusalem, Jonathan Saul in London, Nilutpal Timsina in Bengaluru, and Idrees Ali in Washington; writing by Aziz El Yaakoubi and Douglas Gillison; editing by Bernadette Baum and David Holmes) Photograph: This photo released by the Houthi Media Center shows Houthi escort the cargo ship Galaxy Leader on Sunday, Nov. 19, 2023. Yemens Houthis have seized the ship in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen after threatening to seize all vessels owned by Israeli companies. (Houthi Media Center via AP) Topics Commercial Lines A group representing 83 Spanish media outlets has filed a 550 million euro ($600 million) lawsuit against Facebook owner Meta Platforms, citing unfair competition in the advertising market in a case that could be replicated across the European Union. The AMI media association said in a statement on Monday the lawsuit was filed collectively by the newspapers with a commercial court on Friday, and allege Meta violated EU data protection rules between 2018 and 2023. The newspapers argue that Metas massive and systematic use of personal data of its Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp platform users gives it an unfair advantage of designing and offering personalized ads, which they say constitutes unfair competition. Metas press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Meta source familiar with the matter said the company was yet to receive the legal documents. The complainants, including Prisa which publishes Spains main newspaper El Pais and Vocento, the owner of ABC, allege most of the ads placed by Meta use personal data obtained without express consent from clients. This, they claim, violates the EU General Data Protection Regulation in force since May 2018 which demands that any website requests authorisation to keep and use personal data. Of course, in any other EU country, the same legal proceeding could be initiated as it concerns an alleged violation of European regulations, Nicolas Gonzalez Cuellar, a lawyer representing the newspapers, told Reuters. The lawsuit is the latest attempt by legacy media to fight tech giants in tribunals to protect their turf. All over the world, media organizations have struggled in courts and parliaments to make tech giants pay fair fees for using and sharing their content. Spanish media have scored a victory against Alphabets Google News service, which the government shut down in 2014 before its reopening in 2022 under new legislation allowing media outlets to negotiate fees directly with the tech giant. Following the Spanish case, several countries, such as Canada earlier this year, have imposed regulations designed to make internet giants pay for news. ($1 = 0.9203 euros) (Reporting by Inti Landauro, Jakub Olesiuk and Supantha Mukherjee; editing by David Goodman and Emelia Sithole-Matarise) Topics Lawsuits An Iowa man pleaded guilty to wire fraud for using his position as an insurance agent and annuity salesperson to defraud elderly individuals out of their retirement savings and other monies. Zachary James Flaherty, age 47, of Clive pled guilty in federal court on Nov. 29, the Southern District of Iowa announced. Flaherty admitted to engaging in a scheme to defraud some of his insurance clients, specifically, that he intended to defraud some of his clients by making false statements to those clients to obtain financial benefits for himself to the detriment of his clients. In one instance, Flaherty told one of the victims, referred to in court documents as Victim #10, that he would invest proceeds from the sale of her house on her behalf and for her benefit, even though Flaherty knew that his representations to Victim #10 were false. As a result of Flahertys false representations, Victim #10 wrote two checks, totaling $170,000, to a company Flaherty owned and/or operated. Flaherty used the proceeds of his fraudulent scheme to acquire various assets, including a boat and automobiles. Flaherty is scheduled to be sentenced on April 12, 2024. He faces up to 20 years in prison. The Iowa Insurance Divisions Fraud Bureau and the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated the case, with assistance from the Des Moines Police Department, Clive Police Department, and the Iowa Department of Public Safetys Division of Criminal Investigation. Source: Southern District of Iowa Topics Fraud Agencies Iowa LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) A lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court alleges negligence by CSX Transportation caused a train derailment and ensuing chemical fire that forced residents of a small Kentucky town out of their homes for more than a day, including most of Thanksgiving. The train derailed on Nov. 22 around 2:30 p.m. that Wednesday near the remote town of Livingston. Residents were advised to evacuate just a day before the Thanksgiving holiday and were only cleared to return to their homes that Thursday after the fire was put out. An investigation by the railroad company found that the derailment occurred after a wheel bearing on a train car failed. Morgan & Morgan filed the lawsuit seeking class-action status on behalf of the towns affected residents, saying the derailment could have been prevented if CSX had monitored the trains wheel bearings more closely and had placed trackside detectors that sound an alarm when wheel bearings overheat closer together. Because of CSXs alleged recklessness and negligence in monitoring the trains wheel bearings, theyve created a potentially deadly environment for all residents living in the surrounding area of Rockcastle County, Morgan & Morgan attorney Jean Martin said. CSX said in a statement that it is reviewing the lawsuit`s allegations and that it continues to support affected residents. We pride ourselves on being a safe railroad and in the rare occurrence of an incident like the one in Livingston, KY we respond quickly, prioritizing safety and supporting recovery of the community, the statement said. Two of the 16 cars that derailed carried molten sulfur, which caught fire after the cars were breached. No other hazardous materials were released. The Federal Railroad Administration said an investigation is ongoing. According to the Environmental Protection Agency website, sulfur dioxide can cause respiratory problems, depending on the concentration and length of exposure. A spokesman for the railroad said Monday that crews were able to repair the tracks and trains resumed running through the area on Sunday. All 16 railcars involved in the derailment have been taken from the site, and crews removed the spilled chemical and 2,500 tons of impacted soil and replaced it with clean material, CSX said. A CSX spokesman, Bryan Tucker, said no sulfur dioxide had been detected in the area since the fire was extinguished. Tucker said the bearing that failed didnt get hot enough to trigger an alarm from the last one of the railroads trackside detectors that the train passed, so the crew didnt get any warning before the derailment. A wheel bearing has to be at least 170 degrees hotter than the ambient temperature to trigger an alarm. The train traveled about 21 miles (33 kilometers) after the last detector and was two miles (3 kilometers) away from the next one along the tracks. Across all of CSXs networks in the eastern United States, those detectors are an average of 14.9 miles (24 kilometers) apart, but on less-traveled tracks that dont include passenger traffic the detectors can be farther apart. Tucker said that was the case here. Those trackside detectors that railroads rely on to help spot defects before they can cause derailments received a lot of attention earlier this year after an overheating wheel bearing caused a fiery derailment on a different railroad in eastern Ohio in February. In that Norfolk Southern derailment, the crew did get a warning but it didnt come soon enough for them to be able to stop the train before it derailed in East Palestine. That derailment and several others since then have put the spotlight on railroad safety nationwide, but the reforms proposed afterward have largely stalled in Congress, and regulators have also made little progress. The Kentucky lawsuit named two plaintiffs but seeks class-action status for all residents affected and asked the court for medical monitoring, injunctive and declaratory relief, punitive damages, damages related to emotional distress, loss of property value, and increased risks of future illness. Photo: Emergency responders work at the scene of a derailment of a CSX train north of Livingston, Kentucky, on Nov. 22. (WTVQ via AP Photo.) Copyright 2024 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Lawsuits Kentucky Florida authorities have announced the arrest of four people in connection with an alleged scheme to deliberately damage roofs in order to qualify them for insurance claims. And another contractor well known to insurers was arrested in Fort Myers. A warrant for fraudulent activities was issued in November for Ricky Lynn McGraw, 37, owner of South Florida Restoration Services, or SFR, a company that has filed numerous lawsuits against property insurers in recent years. McGraw was arrested Sunday in Fort Myers and charged with grand theft and insurance fraud, both felonies. He posted bail early Monday, the Lee County Sheriffs Office reported. McGraw told Insurance Journal last week that he could not comment on the charges. McGraw has been a thorn in the side of several Florida carriers in recent years. In May, a Lee County circuit judge found that SFR had intentionally concealed information in a condominium assignment-of-benefits claims dispute with Tower Hill Prime Insurance Co., and stuck with a roof estimate while it had already subcontracted with a roofing company that charged a much lower price for the actual work. SFR Services was aware that the cost of the scope of roof work was $99,000, at least as of March 20, 2020, the judge wrote in his order. Despite knowing this information, SFR Services continued to present an estimate generated by Elite Claims and continued to represent that the value of the roof replacements for the clubhouse and both gatehouses was more than $230,000, while simultaneously indicating that its overhead and profit fell in line with the industry standard of 20%. McGraw has said that he planned to appeal the judges order. The criminal investigation by state investigators stemmed from that case and now include the actions of McGraws brother, Matthew McGraw, a public claims adjuster, Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis said in a statement Monday. The adjuster allegedly colluded with a roof company to inflate the replacement cost, Patronis said. He did not provide further information about the fate of the adjuster. Georgia Roof Contractor Jailed Its not just in Florida where some roofing contractors are facing charges. In the Atlanta metro area a roofing company owner was arrested and spent more than a week in jail late last month after he was charged with accepting insurance claims payments but failed to perform the roof work. Atlanta News First Its not just in Florida where some roofing contractors are facing charges. In the Atlanta metro area a roofing company owner was arrested and spent more than a week in jail late last month after he was charged with accepting insurance claims payments but failed to perform the roof work. Atlanta News First reported that contractor Thomas Bouhan was charged after several homeowners told police that he had not replaced or repaired their roofs, months after he had accepted insurance checks of $13,000 to $19,000. One woman said the contractor had knocked on her door, offering a free roof inspection, then found what he said was hail damage. The homeowners insurance company agreed to pay $13,000 for a new roof, the news site noted. Bouhan completed at least one roof after Troup County investigators warned him that he could be arrested, but his company did not provide a refund to another angry homeowner, news outlets reported. The roofing company has multiple lawsuits, criminal investigations and consumer complaints pending against it. Bouhan told the Atlanta News First site that he never intended to take anyones money and would be refunding at least one homeowner who had paid him the insurance proceeds more than a year ago. This type of fraud scheme is especially despicable, as its a significant driver in rising premium costs impacting every single policyholder in our state, Patronis said. When Florida policyholders open their homeowners insurance renewal notices and see outrageous increases, they have guys like this to thank, and this is a perfect example of the kind of scum that try to come between you and your insurance claim to enrich themselves. The CFO said that DFS investigators found that McGraw knowingly signed a sworn proof-of-loss statement that contained misleading information by attesting that the claim amount for the Rookery Pointe association was significantly higher than the actual cost. Tower Hill appraisers had repeatedly requested that McGraw turn over any subcontractor estimates, and he refused, DFS noted. Meanwhile, DFS announced the arrest of four people associated with Castle Roofing Co. in an apparent scheme to defraud Citizens Property Insurance Co. Paul Vautour, former vice president of the roofing firm, along with Kiana Vautour, Robert Lusk Sr., and Robert Lusk Jr., were taken into custody in Pasco and Pinellas counties on Nov. 30, Patronis said in a bulletin. Pinellas County arrest records show Paul and Kiana Vautour, ages 49 and 26, respectively, live in Oldsmar, Florida, near Tampa. Charges include grand theft, criminal use of personal identification information, and insurance fraud. The DFS bulletin said that company representatives had systematically caused damage to homeowners roofs, prompting insurance claims. Citizens Property Insurance investigators became suspicious at some point and began reviewing claims, finding a pattern of manipulation of roof coverings. Video also was obtained of Castle workers causing damage to roofs, damage that was later claimed as wind damage, DFS said. A DFS investigation found that Paul Vautour had reportedly trained employees on how to fabricate roof damage to support insurance claims. Fraud drives insurance rates up and harms all Florida policyholders, Citizens CEO Tim Cerio said in statement. Citizens thanks, and will continue to assist, DFS investigators and local prosecutors as they go after these unscrupulous contractors. The Florida Secretary of State lists five companies with the name Castle Roofing. DFS did not say which corporation the alleged perpetrators were associated with. Topics Florida Fraud Claims Contractors RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) New or tougher criminal penalties against rioting, vandalizing power stations and harassing law enforcement officers and emergency workers are among North Carolina laws approved this year that took effect Friday. Expanded gun rights at some places of worship and prohibitions on state agencies from demanding job applicants comment on personal and political beliefs also are among over two dozen new laws enacted by the Republican-controlled General Assembly and implemented fully or in part on Dec. 1. Separately, Medicaid expansion also began Friday in North Carolina, which is expected to ultimately provide health care coverage to roughly 600,000 adults. UTILITY ATTACK Increased punishments for intentionally damaging or attempting to damage energy facilities received strong bipartisan support in the legislature following the December 2022 electrical substation shootings in Moore County that cut power to about 45,000 homes and businesses for days. There have been no announced arrests in the attack. The enacted measure, which also would apply to damaged power lines, wires or other operating equipment, makes such attacks a high-grade felony that would likely result in several years of prison time for a first offender. A person who is injured or whose property is damaged by a utility attack also has grounds to sue for monetary damages. RIOTING PENALTIES North Carolina`s anti-rioting statute now contains higher criminal punishments and some new crimes pushed by Republicans in response to protests against racial injustice and police brutality in 2020 that at times became violent. Fines and prison time have increased, typically by a couple years or more, for protesters who brandish a weapon, injure somebody or cause significant property damage. The law also creates new crimes for protesters who cause a death or incite a riot that contributes to one. Business owners also are able to seek compensation from protesters who damage property. In the weeks after the bill was enacted, the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina sued to block enforcement of the state`s anti-rioting law. The group`s lawsuit now focuses on the definition of a riot in state law untouched this year by legislators as being so broad and vague as to threaten peaceful demonstrators with their arrest. The lawsuit is pending. GUNS AT CHURCHES A gun-rights bill that became law when legislators overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper`s veto already eliminated a requirement that someone obtain a permit from their local sheriff before they can purchase a handgun. Other provisions that took effect Friday ease rules for people who want to carry a pistol at buildings where some churches hold services. The law says people with a separate concealed weapons permit can carry a gun openly or under clothing while they attend religious services at a location where private or charter schools also meet. State law otherwise prohibits guns on school property. Some church leaders had complained it was harder to protect parishioners at these sites then at traditional church venues. The law doesn`t allow firearms during school hours or when any students are present. And it still doesn`t apply when a public notice prohibiting concealed weapons is posted. STATE HIRING It`s now unlawful for state agencies, community colleges and the University of North Carolina system to compel applicants for rank-and-file jobs to reveal their personal or political beliefs to get hired. The law, which doesn`t prevent opining voluntarily, was hailed by Republicans as protecting free speech and diversity of thought. In response to GOP opposition to critical race theory, the law also bans trainers of state employees from advancing concepts to workers such as that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex, or to believe they should feel guilty for past actions committed by people of the same race or sex. The legislation became law over Cooper`s veto. The governor said the restrictions attempted to suppress workplace discussions related to diversity, equity and inclusion. OTHER LAWS Penalties have been increased for people who point lasers at law enforcement officers, while a new offense has been created for pointing them at emergency medical technicians and police animals like K-9s. Another new law increases criminal penalties against K-12 educators who commit certain sex offenses against students. Punishments for intentionally disseminating obscene materials also have risen to a more severe felony if the suspect knowingly commits the crime in the presence of a child. And unauthorized street takeovers in which motorists block traffic to perform burnouts, doughnuts and other stunts also have now become officially illegal, with first-time violations a misdemeanor and fines of at least $1,000. Copyright 2024 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics North Carolina Gun Liability Winter weather brought high winds and snow to parts of the Pacific Northwest, knocking out power in some areas and dumping fresh snow across the Cascade Range. Thousands of households were without power Saturday morning in the greater Seattle area after a night of rain and wind, the Seattle Times reported. Seattle City Light reported 17 outages affecting more than 1,700 customers as of late morning, roughly two-thirds of them in South Seattle, according to the utility`s outage map. The utility said it was investigating the cause. Smaller outages, some caused by fallen trees, were affecting other neighborhoods throughout Seattle, according to the Seattle Times. Communities across the region were affected. Puget Sound Energy reported 79 outages impacting more than 4,700 customers as of about 11:30 a.m. The outages stretched from Kitsap County to as far south as the state capital Olympia, the news outlet reported. In Oregon, more than 2,000 customers in the Portland area also lost power, outage maps from Portland General Electric and Pacific Power showed. The power cuts came as high winds swept across the region, reaching 52 mph at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, according to the National Weather Service`s office in Seattle. The NWS said the winds were expected to weaken in the Seattle area by the afternoon. The high winds prompted Olympic National Park, on the Olympia Peninsula west of Seattle, to close several coastal campgrounds. It warned that wind storms can whip up life-threatening waves on the coast and cause trees to fall and block roads. The storms also brought snow to the Cascades. As of Friday afternoon, Paradise in Mount Rainier National Park had received 14 inches of snow over 24 hours, according to preliminary reports from the National Weather Service. In the Oregon Cascades, the Mt. Bachelor ski resort near Bend hosted its opening day Saturday after receiving roughly a foot of snow in the previous 24 hours. Timberline on Mount Hood reported similar snow fall over the same time period and had expected to open its chair lifts but had to postpone until Sunday because of high winds, the resort said in an Instagram post. Mount Bachelor said it was also experiencing high winds. Officials in Washington and Oregon have warned drivers to be cautious while driving in the windy and snowy conditions, use tire chains if needed and have supplies in their vehicles, such as water and blankets, in case of traffic delays. Copyright 2024 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Oregon Source: Streetwise Reports December 4, 2023 (Investorideas.com Newswire) The Australian PM was pictured holding one of DroneShield Ltd.'s products at the White House. Read on to see why analysts like this company's stock. DroneShield Ltd. (DRO:ASX; DRSHF:OTC) has announced in a press release that Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister, was recently pictured with one of DroneShield's products, the DroneGun Mk4 portable counterdrone system during a visit to the White House. According to the press release, the Prime Minister supports the company as an Australian contractor as global tensions continue to rise and that AU$10.4 million of the company's products were sent as aid to Ukraine in October. Oleg Vornik, the CEO of the company, stated, "DroneShield continues to receive strong support form both Australian and U.S. Governments, being our two home bases. This image of the Australian Prime Minister holding our flagship product is a showcase of this support. Most work we do is under strict confidentiality due to the nature of our customers, and it's pleasing to see this public endorsement of our work, as global tensions and hostile use of drones continue globally." Focus Shifting to Small Drones Warfare A report from McAlinden Research highlighted how small drones have increasingly become a part of modern warfare and detailed that the United States Army had developed a plan to arm small drones, which it believes is a more cost-effective method than large combat drones and is a tactic that has been proven effective in Ukraine. The US Army has awarded significant contracts to defense corporations in the past, such as its US$237 million contract with Raytheon Technologies. As a result, counter-drone technology has also become increasingly important. David Axe of The Daily Beast also covered the use of counter-drone tech in the conflict in the Middle East, where the Israeli army is engineering methods to guard troops against this new weapon. Axe commented on the dire need for counters to this technology: "They're so cheap, and thus so easy to deploy in huge numbers, that armies are struggling to develop defenses fast enough to prevent devastating drone campaigns." Potential 179% Return Technical Analyst Clive Maund reviewed the company on July 19, 2023, and rated the company as a "Buy" for potential investors. Maund cited several factors in his positive review of the company, including the conflict in Ukraine, which has seen heavy drone use, and the company's advantageous stock position. Maund commented, "the fact that the stock has been behaving like a young, dynamic stock in recent days implies that something big is in the offing, so the current strong upside momentum looks set to continue and may even accelerate." Darren Odell, an analyst with Peloton Capital, reviewed the company on July 20, 2023, and also rated the company as a "Buy" for potential investors with a target share price of AU$0.84 per share, representing a potential return on investment of 179%. Odell believes that the company's recently acquired contracts and its significant revenue growth to AU$100 million indicate future success. Daniel Laing of Bell Potter looked at DroneShield on October 24, 2023, rated the company as a "Buy" for investors, and gave a target price of AU$0.45 with a return on investment of 58%. Laing commented that "the company very well could have a record year." Laing also stated that DroneShield could have lucrative contracts coming down the pipe. Laing put out an updated report on November 30, where he reiterated his Buy rating and raised his price target to AU$0.50 per share. DroneShield has a number of catalysts to report, according to its investor presentation, including a 5-year goal of AU$300 to US$500 annual revenue, with half of that belonging to SaaS and software development. Ownership and Share Structure Reuters provided a breakdown of the company's ownership and share structure, where management and insiders own approximately 6.28% of the company. According to Reuters, CEO and Managing Director Oleg Vornik owns 1.71% of the company with 10.46 million shares, CFO and Company Secretary Carla Balanco owns 1.38% of the company with 8.45 million shares, CTO Angus Bean owns 1.21% of the company with 7.39 million shares, Independent Non-Executive Chairman Peter James owns 1.07% of the company with 6.53 million shares, and Director Paul Jonathan Shaw owns 0.91% of the company with 5.58 million shares. Institutions own approximately 7.99% of the company, as Epirus Inc. owns 3.03% of the company with 18.50 million shares, Beta Gamma Pty. Ltd. and Ravenscourt Pty. Ltd. together own 3.52% of the company, with 21.5 million shares, S R Bennett Pty. Ltd. owns 0.88% of the company with 5.35 million shares, and P & B Shaw FT CB Pty. Ltd. owns 0.56% of the company with 3.43 million shares. According to Reuters, there are 611.4 million shares outstanding with 511.84 million free float traded shares, while the company has a market cap of CA$132.8 million and trades in the 52-week period between CA$0.18 and CA$0.42. More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. 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Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp Get Great Trading Ideas and News Alerts Guest posts and sponsored content - Got $100? That's all it takes to get an article published on Investor Ideas - Learn More Roche agreed to pay as much as $3.1bn (2.8bn) for Carmot Therapeutics, a developer of the new type of weight-loss treatments thats sparked a pharma industry gold rush. The deal for three experimental medicines in obesity and diabetes could push the Swiss drugmaker into competition with European rival Novo Nordisk, whose drugs Wegovy and Ozempic have fuelled the Danish pharma players growth into the most valuable company in Europe. Roche, which has come under pressure to improve its pipeline with new medicines, agreed to pay $2.7bn at first for closely held Carmot and up to $400m in milestones, it said. Though Carmots drugs are still in the early stages of development, the deal could lead to a competitor to the likes of Wegovy and Eli Lillys Zepbound, which are fueling the growth of a weight-loss market estimated to reach $100bn by the end of the decade. Roche was among the first drugmakers to work on a treatment in the GLP-1 class a category that could fuel some of the biggest-ever blockbusters but it halted the experimental medicines development more than a decade ago after patients dropped out of a study due to side effects like nausea. The field is more crowded now, with Pfizer working on a weight-loss pill and AstraZeneca signing a licensing deal with Chinese drug developer Eccogene for another. Roche rose as much as 2.2% in Zurich trading. The stock is one of the worst performers among European peers this year. Eli Lillys market value now exceeds half a trillion dollars on hopes for its drug, while Novo Nordisk is close behind. Roches stock has dropped more than 15% this year, giving it a value of about $228bn. Carmots lead experimental medicine is a weekly injection thats ready to enter the second of three stages of clinical tests, meaning its still a few years away from reaching patients. But existing data suggests a best-in-class potential to achieve and maintain weight loss with differentiated efficacy, according to Roche. One of the other two treatments is a pill, which drugmakers see as the next frontier for obesity treatments because it will be easier to take. The assets could combine with another experimental Roche drug that preserves muscle mass, solving one of the fallouts of existing treatments. The trio could also have potential in other indications such as heart disease, Roche said. Bloomberg I might still be easing myself into my new role as the president of Veterinary Ireland, but life on the farm is continuing as normal and spring is coming closer every day. And the famous scout phrase Be prepared always comes to mind when I think about the spring. Last week, I launched 'Operation Springtime' on the farm with a re-organisation and improvement of existing sheds on the farm. Operation Springtime We are planning a whole different approach to calving cows and housing calves this year, time will tell if its a success or not. I always think change is nothing to fear and making sure to get lots of advice before change can ensure success. The first area of focus is the group calving shed, we usually have about six cows in this shed at a time and have individual pens about 50m away that we move the cows to when calving. Last year, I noticed that the cows, especially the younger cows, were very unsettled when we moved them out of the large shed to these individual pens. We even had cows try to jump gates to get back to the group which is far from ideal when on the verge of calving. In the end, it was safer for us to have them in this shed as there was a calving gate present and two calving cameras that covered both pens. The plan is now to make three individual pens in the larger group shed with a calving gate present between two of the pens with a section gate, just in case. The hope is to make the cows more comfortable and not disrupt any progress with labour that moving can cause. A study by Proudfoot et al., published in 2013, showed that moving cows during the late part of the first stage of labour caused a subsequent delay in the second stage of labour. This late first stage of labour appears with signs of mucus, a raised tail head and the beginning of abdominal contractions. There are two options suggested from this study to minimise prolonged labour, option one is to move in very early first-stage labour at the point you see the pins" beginning to soften indicating the pelvic ligaments are relaxing. Option two would be just in time where the cow is moved to a pen when active stage 2 labour is occurring when the calves legs are showing and active abdominal contractions are in full swing. This just in time strategy will now work well in our new shed as we will be able to move the cows that are in active stage 2 labour easily to the individual pen if required. As a general rule of thumb, intervention should only be initiated in cows if no progress is seen from the beginning of active stage 2 labour within 30-45 mins and 90 mins in heifers. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, cows get missed and need to be moved at the wrong time. Minimise stress To minimise stress, move these cows in pairs. In the past, we would have moved cows at the incorrect time which resulted in more interventions than were truly necessary. Discuss with your vet the best protocol for managing calving movement, taking your farm set-up into account. Keeping stress to a minimum is key in the calving shed, it helps with the smooth progression of calving and helps with maintaining calcium levels, reducing the risk of milk fever. Cows that may have needed extra intervention may need a calcium bolus at birth if they have not gotten one as per your standard procedure on the farm. We always give a fresh cow drink post-calving for both calcium replenishment and rehydration post-calving. I think there is also a part of me that just loves to give the cow some TLC after calving, the tea and toast as I call it. Improving the infostructure of the calving shed also has a knock-on effect for safety. Having a proper working head gate is so important for restraint for both farmers and visiting vets. I have had too many hairy moments on farms with faulty head gates opening, one was mid-section and I can tell you my stress levels were through the roof that night. Before the chaos of spring begins make sure to check all the head gates and handling equipment on the farm, you never know the impact it might make. Space is as important in the calving area as it is in any housing; the more space available, the more comfort and less infection pressure. Read More Pneumonia was calling last weekend- How to prevent mid housing season I can imagine a cow close to giving birth would like some space to herself and it is recommended to have approximately 10m2 per cow and to have a shed large enough to hold 10% of your herd to cope with tight calving patterns. This is where scanning results will help to plan how much you will need to accommodate your calving pattern. Keeping feed intake up during this pre-calving time is key for a smooth transition period, supplying extra feed space of 85cm per heavily pregnant cow alongside fresh daily forage can all help with intakes. Deep clean Before any cows go into this area in January we plan on doing a deep clean, always a lovely job. It was cleaned fully in May with the majority of the organic material removed, however, we will do a pre-spring disinfection with Cylex, a disinfectant that kills both crypto and coccidiosis, both are diseases that affected our calves last year. Unfortunately, these pathogens are spread by healthy cows that carry them without any clinical signs, making them commensals. I am excited about the improvements to the calving house and we are very grateful to our neighbour Pat O'Donavan from McDonalds Brothers who has given us great ideas. In part two next week I will update you all on the plan for the upgraded calf shed. Out of all the aspects of large animal veterinary, calf health is my ultimate passion. As I sit here with my posh coffee in Blackrock Village in Dublin, about to go speak to first-year vet students in UCD as president of Veterinary Ireland, its a real pinch myself moment. I hope I can inspire the next generation t o follow their passions and take the opportunities that present to them during their veterinary career. Soon I will be home in Cork again on the farm, my happy place. Chrstmas is all about home, about loved ones, about family, gathering together to share. These comforting dishes, selected from The Gathered Table, A taste of Home are perfect for feeding your family, or a crowd this festive season. Each of the savoury recipes, from key members of the Irish food world, offers delicious ways to use up those Christmas Day leftovers, while the glorious dessert, from Georgina Campbell, is a classic choice for a traditional feast on December 25. Using food to bring people together, this Gather & Gather book promises wholesome perfection this Christmas. Smoked Ham & Leek Pie Recipe by Olivia Duff, Maperath Farm This recipe has provided comfort at our table not just on cold, wet days, but also to those who have shared our table who required comfort, like our visiting Ukrainian family. I also take comfort in knowing that we have reared and produced the ham ourselves. We are blessed to have a wonderful butcher in Hugh Maguire (aka The Smokin Butcher) who naturally smokes our rare-breed hams for us at home at Maperath Farm. Smoked Ham & Leek Pie recipe by:Olivia Duff, Maperath Farm This pie is the perfect way to use up a baked ham or Christmas ham and we all agree that its even better the next day. Servings 6 Preparation Time 15 mins Cooking Time 60 mins Total Time 1 hours 15 mins Course Main Ingredients 85g butter 1 tsp rapeseed oil 1 large onion, finely chopped 3 medium-sized leeks, thinly sliced 1 heaped tsp English or French mustard (Grahams Mustard is wonderful) 85g plain flour, plus extra for dusting 300ml chicken stock 50ml double cream 300g cooked smoked ham hock or leg or cooked baked ham, flaked apart salt and freshly ground black pepper 1 sheet of ready-rolled puff pastry, thawed if frozen 1 egg, beaten To serve: green salad Method Preheat the oven to 180C, 160C fan. Heat the butter and oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat. When the butter has melted, add the onion and cook gently, covered with a lid, for about 10 minutes, until softened and translucent. Add the leeks and cook for a few minutes more, covered, until softened but not coloured. Add the mustard and then the flour and cook for 12 minutes to cook off the raw taste of the flour, then pour in the stock and cream. Add the ham and mix well to combine, then season to taste. Cook for just a couple minutes to marry the flavours together, then take the pan off the heat. Transfer to a 25cm pie dish and allow to cool before putting on the pastry. (The pie can be prepped in advance and left overnight at this stage to cook the next day.) Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured surface until it will cover your pie dish. Carefully drape the pastry over the top, pressing to seal the edges, then trim off any excess pastry. Brush the top of the pie with the beaten egg, then prick with a fork to allow steam to escape. Put the dish on a baking tray to make it easier to get the pie in and out of the oven. Bake in the preheated oven for 45 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown and the filling is bubbling. Bring the pie to the table to let everyone help themselves. Serve with a simple green salad on the side. The Gathered Table: A Taste of Home (30) is compiled by Gather & Gather, with all proceeds going to Peter McVerry Trust. ninebeanrowsbooks.com Mac n Cheese Recipe by Jess Murphy, Kai Every time my mum comes to visit me in Galway from New Zealand, mac n cheese is the one thing I always ask her to make for me. Its nurturing, wholesome and can feed a crowd. You might have to use every pot in the house, but that just extends your time and chats with your loved one. Mac n Cheese recipe by:Jess Murphy, Kai Mac n cheese is nurturing, wholesome and can feed a crowd. Servings 10 Cooking Time 40 mins Total Time 40 mins Course Main Ingredients 400g macaroni 50g butter 1 medium onion, chopped 4 garlic cloves, crushed 4 tinned anchovies 200ml Gavi white wine 50g plain flour 1.2 litres full-fat milk 2 tsp mustard powder a large pinch of cayenne pepper 120g Kylemore cheese, grated 120g smoked Gubbeen cheese, grated 2 balls of scamorza cheese (important for the cheese stretch!), chopped a pinch of freshly grated nutmeg To serve: garlic bread watercress salad Method Preheat the oven to 205C (185C fan). Cook the pasta in a pot of boiling salted water according to the packet instructions. Drain and set aside. Melt the butter in a large heavy-based pot over a medium heat. Add the onion and cook for about 10 minutes, until soft, then add the garlic and anchovies and cook for 12 minutes more, until the anchovies start to break down. Turn the heat up and add the white wine. Let it reduce down, then add the flour, milk, mustard and cayenne, stirring until its a lovely, super-thick sauce. Stir the cooked pasta, most of the cheeses and a pinch of grated nutmeg into the sauce, then transfer it all to a big baking dish and scatter over the rest of the cheese. Bake on the lower rack of the preheated oven for around 20 minutes, until golden brown and crisp on top we want bubbling, melting heaven. Serve to a round of applause from your mates and family with shop-bought garlic bread and a peppery watercress salad. The Gathered Table: A Taste of Home (30) is compiled by Gather & Gather, with all proceeds going to Peter McVerry Trust. ninebeanrowsbooks.com Dillisk, Leek & Cheddar Tart Recipe by John & Sally McKenna, McKennas Guides Our job takes us all over Ireland, tasting food in many wonderful restaurants. Ironically, this makes us appreciate home cooking even more. We especially enjoy being able to say, well, were home for two weeks now, so its time to bake bread or make pastry. We know were really at home when were making this tart, sometimes (not always) taking time to pick the dillisk from the local beach, where it grows on the washed-up strips of brown kelp. Dillisk, Leek & Cheddar Tart recipe by:John & Sally McKenna, McKennas Guides We know were really at home when were making this tart. Servings 6 Preparation Time 3 hours 0 mins Cooking Time 50 mins Total Time 3 hours 50 mins Course Main Ingredients For the pastry: 160g plain flour 1 tsp salt 60g cold butter, cut into cubes 2 tbsp plus 1 tsp cold water For the filling: 50g butter 3 medium-sized leeks 50ml water salt and freshly ground black pepper a handful of roughly chopped fresh dillisk 2 eggs 100g grated Cheddar cheese 250ml cream 1 tbsp Dijon mustard Method To make the pastry, put the flour and salt in a large bowl. Add the cold butter and rub it into the flour with your fingers. Add the cold water drop by drop, mixing just until everything comes together into a ball. Cover with a butter wrapper or wrap in cling film and refrigerate for 1 hour, until chilled. Roll out the chilled pastry to line a 20cm flan dish. Put the butter wrapper or cling film on top of the pastry and place the pastry-lined dish in the freezer for another couple of hours, until its hard and frozen. (If you want to keep it in the freezer for longer, then completely wrap it in cling film first to protect it.) Preheat the oven to 200C (180C fan). Prick the base of the pastry all over with a fork, then pre-bake the pastry in the preheated oven for about 20 minutes, until golden. There is no need to use baking beans if using this frozen dough. To make the filling, melt the butter in a saucepan over a medium heat. Add the leeks and saute for about 5 minutes, until they start to soften. Add the water and season with salt. Cover and cook for a further 5 minutes. Season again, this time with black pepper and the roughly chopped dillisk. Remove the pan from the heat and allow to cool slightly. Beat the eggs in a bowl and stir in the grated cheese, cream and mustard, then fold in the cooled leeks. Pour this custard into the part-cooked pastry shell and bake in the oven for approximately 20 minutes, until the filling is just firm. Cut into wedges to serve. The Gathered Table: A Taste of Home (30) is compiled by Gather & Gather, with all proceeds going to Peter McVerry Trust. ninebeanrowsbooks.com Smoked Salmon, Chorizo & Potato Gratin Recipe by Ruth Healy, Urru Culinary Store Home is arriving in to the aroma of baking or cooking and knowing straightaway what is in the oven. Its the freedom to open the fridge, turn on the kettle and pick at whatever is on the counter without asking like this potato gratin. Potato gratin ticks all the boxes: tasty and nutritious; a flexible one-dish wonder; veggie or meaty; elegant or rustic; penny-pinching or extravagant. The basic recipe consists of potatoes, creamy milk, seasoning and a grated cheese topping. This is my preferred version but use your personal taste, creativity and availability of ingredients to make up your own satisfying gratin based on the basic recipe. Smoked Salmon, Chorizo & Potato Gratin recipe by:Ruth Healy, Urru Culinary Store Potato gratin ticks all the boxes: tasty and nutritious; a flexible one-dish wonder; veggie or meaty; elegant or rustic; penny-pinching or extravagant. Servings 4 Preparation Time 15 mins Cooking Time 45 mins Total Time 60 mins Course Side Ingredients a knob of butter 1 garlic clove, cut in half across the short side 8 medium or large potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced 100g smoked salmon, torn into manageable strips 100g chorizo, sliced a pinch of grated nutmeg salt and ground white pepper 500ml milk 200ml cream 200g Cheddar or Gruyere cheese, grated To serve: buttered peas green leafy vegetables or salad Method Preheat the oven to 200C (180C fan). Butter the base and sides of a 35cm x 20cm dish, then rub it with the cut side of the halved garlic clove. Soak the potato slices in cold water until ready to use, then drain and pat dry in a clean tea towel. Start with an overlapping layer of potatoes in the bottom of the dish, then add a layer of the smoked salmon, more potatoes, a layer of chorizo and finish with a layer of potatoes. Sprinkle a little nutmeg, salt and white pepper on each layer as you go. Stir the milk and cream together and pour it over the potatoes. Sprinkle the grated cheese on top. Bake in the preheated oven for 45 minutes, until the potatoes are soft and creamy. Serve with buttered peas and green leafy vegetables or a salad. The Gathered Table: A Taste of Home (30) is compiled by Gather & Gather, with all proceeds going to Peter McVerry Trust. ninebeanrowsbooks.com Granny Campbells Retro Sherry Trifle Recipe by Georgina Campbell, Georgina Campbells Ireland Guides While many recipes become part of a familys best-loved repertoire, very few have followed ours down the generations as persistently as my mothers traditional trifle, which is an absolute must at every Christmas gathering. Served in an old cut-glass bowl dating back to who-knows-when and presented retro-style with blanched split almonds and glace cherry flowers with angelica leaves, it never fails to raise a smile and I always make two or there would be no leftovers to enjoy the next day. Granny Campbells Retro Sherry Trifle recipe by:Georgina Campbell, Georgina Campbells Ireland Guides My mothers traditional trifle is an absolute must at every Christmas gathering Servings 8 Preparation Time 10 mins Cooking Time 30 mins Total Time 40 mins Course Dessert Ingredients 1 small shop-bought sponge cake or premium-quality trifle sponges raspberry jam, preferably homemade 150ml approx. sherry, preferably medium or sweet 450g fruit, e.g. poached pears 1 jar of cocktail cherries, drained 300ml cream For the custard: 425ml creamy milk 1 vanilla pod or a few drops of vanilla extract 3 eggs 25g caster sugar To decorate (optional): blanched almonds, glace cherries and angelica OR toasted flaked almonds Method To make the custard, put the milk in a pan with the vanilla pod (if using) and bring almost to a boil. Take the pan off the heat, then remove the vanilla pod. You can wash the vanilla pod and pat it dry to reuse. Whisk the eggs and sugar together lightly in a separate bowl. Gradually whisk the hot milk into the egg mixture. Rinse the pan out with cold water, return the mixture to it and stir over a low heat until it thickens enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. Do not allow it to boil. Pour the custard into a mixing bowl and set aside, stirring occasionally to prevent a skin forming. If using vanilla extract, stir it in now. Halve the sponge cake horizontally and spread with raspberry jam to make a sandwich. Cut into slices and use to line the bottom and the lower sides of a large glass trifle dish. Drizzle generously with the sherry. Slice the fruit if necessary, then spread it out over the sponge and intersperse with cocktail cherries tucked in around the fruit to make an even layer. Pour the custard on top, cover with a plate and leave to cool and thicken in the fridge. Before serving, whip the cream and spread it over the custard, then decorate with the traditional blanched split almonds and the glace cherry and angelica flowers or, more simply, with a casual scattering of toasted flaked almonds if you like. The Gathered Table: A Taste of Home (30) is compiled by Gather & Gather, with all proceeds going to Peter McVerry Trust. ninebeanrowsbooks.com The Gathered Table: A Taste of Home (30) is compiled by Gather & Gather, with all proceeds going to Peter McVerry Trust. ninebeanrowsbooks.com Kathleen Lynn was born near Killala, Co Mayo in 1874. She was exceptional for her time, as she qualified as a doctor before the turn of the last century, when not many women did so. She was also a militant revolutionary, a captain in the Irish Citizen Army. She was stationed in Dublins City Hall during the 1916 Rising. When members of the British army stormed City Hall and forced her to surrender on Easter Monday evening, she was asked to identify herself. She said she was a doctor. The British commanding officer presumed she was there in a stereotypically female, caring role. Lynn quickly corrected him, adding that she was also captain of her outpost, forsaking the opportunity to evade imprisonment so she could properly identify as a military officer. Lynn, along with her partner Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, is one of the women featured in Croithe Radacacha, a fascinating documentary about the hidden stories behind eight lesbian couples during Irelands revolutionary years. The other couples include the crack sniper Margaret Skinnider and Nora OKeeffe; Eva Gore Booth, younger sister of Countess Markievicz, and Esther Roper; Helena Molony and Eveleen OBrien; Elizabeth O' Farrell, the nurse who surrendered on behalf of the 1916 rebels outside the GPO, and Julia Grenan; and Kathleen OBrennan and Marie Equi. Although their lives climaxed a century ago, their concerns havent aged. It surprised how contemporary a lot of these women felt and how we could relate to them now, says Ciara Hyland, director of Croithe Radacacha. They were this revolutionary generation of radical women who were so concerned with quality. They were passionate about making their society better, and addressing issues of inequality in society. They campaigned for womens equality, reproductive rights, better housing, better working conditions, better social conditions. We have a radical activist generation of young people coming up now in Ireland. Their concerns are similar. The battles fought and what they wanted to change feel so relatable," added the Cork-based director. Women like Eva Gore Booth and Esther Roper in their journal Urania argued for the abolishment of gender. They said there should be no masculine and feminine gender, that it should be up to people to decide for themselves what they want to be. They discussed trans rights. This a hundred years ago. Its super contemporary. A scene from Croithe Radacacha on TG4. The couples lived during an extraordinary moment in Irish history when it seemed everything was up for grabs notably womens rights, and workers rights, which came to a head during the Dublin 1913 Lockout. The air was light with a cultural nationalist revival, which fed into the militant nationalism that led to the Easter Rising, a moment of beautiful madness for the women. We were walking with Ireland into the sun, said Molony. The aspirations of the 1916 Rising rebels, captured in the Easter Proclamation which strove for equality for all Irishmen and Irishwomen, so everyone would be cherished equally, came to nothing, however. Instead it was a return to the kitchen for women in the 1937 Constitution, which bore heavily the fingerprints of Taoiseach Eamon de Valera and soon-to-be Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. The documentary brings to light from a mix of detective work and hypothesis the lesbian nature of the couples relationships. There are accounts of whole adult lives lived together; affectionate kisses exchanged between Lynn and ffrench-Mullen the night before one of their birthdays, and of the pair sharing breakfast in bed together; O' Farrell and Grenan were buried in the same plot in Glasnevin Cemetery; Brennan was in a relationship with the openly gay American radical Equi, who adopted a child, and was spied on by the FBI, which led to a three-year imprisonment. The documentary addresses [whether or not the couples were truly in lesbian relationships with each other] head-on and very well," says Mary McAuliffe, historian and UCDs Director of Gender Studies. I take all of the evidence in the round. I look at all the sources I possibly can, both as regards the individual women and as couples, and then make an analysis. They don't tell us. They don't use the word lesbian or queer, but, for instance, with Kathleen Lynn and Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, there's evidence in a diary that Rosamund Jacob kept where she at one time was having a conversation with Hanna Sheehy Skeffington about sex. It was after 1916 so [her husband] Francis is dead, and Hanna said she was delighted to be done with all that. Rosamund felt she was in love with some guy, but then maybe she thought she might be like Dr Lynn and Madeleine and have no use for men at all. She's saying this in the context of a conversation about sex. That can mean nothing other than these two women were in a relationship together. You take all of the material and, as a professional historian, and the others as well who contribute to the documentary, you make your analysis. The analysis is, I would argue, that these are same sex couples. Croithe Radacacha on TG4. Elaine Mai and indie rock band Pillow Queens enlisted enthusiastically in the project, providing tracks, as they both passionately believe in inclusivity. The documentary also features original music by composer Darren Sheehan. It makes for a stirring film. Hyland says three or four contributors were moved to tears during their interviews. Queer people, who were missing from documented Irish history in the last century, have been brought in from the shadows. The idea of having these women in history books is really important for the gay community, says Hyland. Several contributors talked about growing up and thinking that being gay or lesbian was a foreign thing that it didn't exist in Ireland. It was very lonely to grow up and feel so different and not have these role models. Now these women are being put back into the history books. The idea that queer people have always been part of Irish history and that they were really foundational to the founding of modern Ireland is a big thing for LGBTQ+ people. Croithe Radacacha (Radical Hearts) will screen on TG4, Wednesday, December 6, 9.30pm History of gay Ireland The recorded history of gay Ireland dates back 1,500 years to the age of mythology. Homosexuality in Ireland, as Brian Lacey, a contributor to Croithe Radacacha, remarks, is as Irish as the Irish language itself. Gay Irish history, however, was kept secret for centuries. Ireland in the twentieth century was a homophobic and conservative country, influenced by the legacy of Victorian mores and the Catholic Churchs stifling rule. Male homosexuality in Ireland was a criminal offence, dating back to a British parliament bill from 1861, and it wasnt decriminalised until 1993. Curiously, lesbianism was never criminalised, but it was stigmatised. It's all to do with living in a patriarchal society where female sexuality was seen as reproductive and marital, says Mary McAuliffe, historian and UCDs Director of Gender Studies. It wasn't so much about sexuality, it was about male and female, about the binary. Male sexuality was criminalised because of anxieties around men behaving like women. Female sexuality was seen as passive, so it was not a threat to society and it wasnt really believed women could actually have sex together. Housing Minister Darragh OBrien is to meet with the European Commission about Irish plans for a crackdown on Airbnb and short-term lets following a year-long delay to the new laws. The meeting, taking place on Monday, follows a provisional agreement between EU member states and the European Parliament as part of a plan to introduce consistent registration for short-term lets across the bloc. Mr OBrien is to meet with key officials of two European commissioners, Thierry Breton and Nicolas Schmit, on the matter. A spokesperson for Mr OBrien said the provisional agreement "clears the way for us to proceed with national plans to tackle inappropriate short-term lettings and free up more units for the long-term rental market. We want to discuss the EU agreement and how it will work in an Irish context, said the spokesperson. It is understood that the Department of Tourism is planning to publish the legislation by February, with it due to take full account of the new EU agreement. The rapid implementation of the register following the passage of the bill is crucial to giving certainty to operators and encouraging more units back into the rental market, said the spokesperson. The Department of Housing will work with local authorities and ensure necessary resources are provided to implement the planning guidelines which will be published in tandem with the legislation. Irish plans to regulate short-term lets were stymied by the European Commission, with the legislation being delayed between March and December this year. Concerns had been raised that the proposed changes would be too restrictive for companies such as Airbnb and Booking.com to operate here. However, the new EU-wide approach is expected to be formally adopted by both the European Parliament and Council early next year. Laws 'in alignment' A spokesperson for the Department of Tourism said that this agreement provides clarity and will ensure that Irish laws are in full alignment with new EU laws. The plans will see the creation of a short-term let register which will require any property used as a short-term let for more than 21 days a year to be registered with Failte Ireland. Additionally, any property used as a short-term let would be required to have a registration number from Failte Ireland. The Government is estimating that the proposed register will help to bring up to 12,000 short-term let properties back onto the long-term rental market. Previously, Mr OBrien expressed his frustration at the delay to allow for Ireland to crack down on short-term lets. I have been frustrated with the Commission and with the slowness of their response, and I know they're assessing it, said Mr OBrien. He said that short-term lets had a role to play, but that more properties needed to be brought into the long-term rental market. Theres a role for short-term lets within our tourist offering, absolutely. Were not looking to take the legs out from under people. Two brothers, operating as environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs), are systematically objecting to planning applications in order to extract money from developers, an RTE documentary will reveal on Monday night. The two brothers, who have gained a reputation as "serial objectors", have lodged multiple objections to residential and commercial developments across the country, and as a result, multimillion euro projects have been put on hold. RTE Investigates: The Property Trap will follow the journey of several developers who have come up against these men and found themselves out of time, out of options and out of pocket. In November 2022, developer David Hogan was granted planning permission to build 74 houses, allowing him to expand his development Watergrasshill in Co Cork, where there is big demand for such starter homes. The brothers submitted an appeal under the name of an environmental group called An Lucht Inbhuanaithe, The Sustainable People. Mr Hogan had concerns about the groups motivations. At a meeting with one of the brothers, Mr Hogan tried to address the environmental issues raised in the appeal but the conversation turned from environmental concerns to money. Mr Hogan said one of the men told him: "In the event of the appeal being withdrawn, what about my costs? "And he says, if you have a proposal to make, I will be happy to listen. "I had said to him that I would wait, I could afford to wait. And he kind of leaned in towards me and he said, well, you're in a lot better position than most of the guys I'm dealing with." It is now almost 11 months since his planning permission to build 74 houses in Cork was appealed by the two men. Mr Hogan has plenty of potential buyers for his development, but he is continuing to refuse to pay the two men to withdraw their appeal, so he must wait for the planning appeals board to adjudicate on the case. Sadhbh O'Neill, Environmental Lecturer and Activist. Picture: RTE Investigates In another case, a developer paid them, and was also asked by them for sites in that development, in return for them withdrawing their appeal against a significant residential development. The agreement gives one of the men an option to buy sites in the housing development for just 1,000 each when the sites were considered to be worth up to 50,000 each at the time. The documentary will show how the men were paid more than 50,000 in return for a planning appeal being withdrawn. Since 2000, An Bord Pleanala also has the power to dismiss financially motivated appeals. However, according to Freedom of Information requests, there has not been a single appeal dismissed on these grounds. The two brothers have been increasingly prolific in submitting planning objections to housing and commercial developments around the country. These objections have been described as mischievous and financially motivated by several planning experts. The brothers frequently describe themselves as environmental consultants with NGOs which are typically not-for-profit advocacy groups although, RTE Investigates could find no record of them being registered with the charities regulator or the companies registration office. Nor could they find any online presence explaining the groups goals. As there are no state regulations for NGOs at present, there is no obligation for them to do any of these things. Sadhbh ONeill, Environmental Lecturer & Activist said: "What makes me so angry is that I know all the organisations that I've worked with who put so much time and effort and voluntary hours into building their organisations, establishing codes of governance and practise, and complying with all of those rules in order to be able to present themselves as legitimate environmental organisations representing the public interest. And these individuals claim to have environmental concerns, but these are clearly nothing to do with what's going on." Watch RTE Investigates: The Property Trap tonight at 9.35pm on RTE One and RTE Player. The family of the young girl who was seriously injured in the stabbing attack outside of a Dublin school last month has thanked the public for their support. The five-year-old remains in a critical condition at Temple Street Children's Hospital following the knife attack on November 23. Her mother has shared an update on her daughter's condition via a GoFundMe page that was set up in the wake of the incident to help the family. "Our little girl has shown incredible strength and [is] still here with us," the message said. "We don't know yet what lies ahead as it is still early but she is resilient and limitations will not stop her." The woman also thanked the public for their solidarity and support over the past couple of weeks. "Thank you so much for the incredible gesture and kindness you have shown our family during these troubled times. Your thoughts, prayers and generosity have and will go a long way. To date, the GoFundMe has raised more than 29,000 for the family while other fundraisers have been set up for others caught up in the attack. It has been confirmed by GoFundMe as a verified fundraiser. It was 10 days ago that three children and one woman were injured outside of Gaelscoil Cholaiste Mhuire in Dublin city centre. Two of the children - a five-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl - were injured but have since been discharged from the hospital. Creche worker, Leanne Flynn, remains in a serious but stable condition after she was injured while trying to protect the children. The suspect, a man in his late 40s, remains in hospital. A number of fundraisers in the wake of the stabbings have since raised more than 500,000. The hours following the attack saw riots break out in the city centre with buses set alight, Gardai attacked and shops looted. According to a new poll, over half of Dubliners are visiting the city centre less often, or not at all, because of safety concerns. The Amarach poll has shown 40% of people nationally said they are less likely to make a trip into the city, following recent disturbances. However, 26% of respondents said people should ignore the recent violence and continue to head into town and do some shopping. A 36-year-old man accused of carrying out a robbery while armed with a large kitchen knife and wearing a balaclava was remanded in custody until December 18. Bernard Horgan appeared by video link from Cork Prison charged in relation to allegedly carrying a large kitchen knife and robbing 250 in cash from the Unity shop at Lower Glanmire Road in Cork on November 26 last. Judge Mary Dorgan acceded to the application from Sergeant John Kelleher to remand the accused in custody for two weeks to allow time for directions in the case to be obtained from the Director of Public Prosecutions. Garda Killian OConnell previously objected to bail being granted to Bernard Horgan because of the seriousness of the alleged crime. It was alleged that the Unity shop on Lower Glanmire Road, Cork, was robbed at 3.30pm on November 26 when a raider wearing a balaclava arrived in the convenience store and produced a large kitchen knife, demanding that the cash register be opened. He grabbed notes only and made good his escape, Garda OConnell said. It is my belief that he is a danger to himself and to the public at large, Garda OConnell said. Defence solicitor Eddie Burke said: He is adamant that absolutely no threats were made to any shopkeeper. Bernard Horgan of Cork Simon Community testified: When I went into the shop, all I said was open the till. I had the knife in my hand. I did not threaten him or anything. A sister of convicted Limerick drug dealer Christy Keane who was caught with over 100,000 in cash in her attic told gardai it was from savings she had made since her husband died, the Special Criminal Court has heard. The non-jury court also heard on Monday that Sandra Hehir had accumulated 68,000 in savings over five years and had withdrawn 70,000 to pay down the balance of her mortgage, a position gardai said was not in line with her legitimate income. Last October, Sandra Hehir, 56, with an address at Assumpta Park, Island Road, Limerick City, pleaded guilty that on June 17, 2020, at the same address she handled, acquired and/or possessed cash to the value of 124,055, knowing or believing (or being reckless as to whether) property in the said premises was the proceeds of criminal conduct. Ms Fiona Murphy SC, prosecuting, told the court on Monday that five other counts could be taken into consideration. The barrister said a nolle prosequi would be entered in due course on three other counts. Sentence hearing At Mondays sentence hearing, Sergeant Cathal O'Sullivan, from Roxboro Road Garda Station, told Ms Murphy the money-laundering operation in 2020 was designed to target the Keane organised crime group in Limerick, particularly Christy Keane and his nephew. The sergeant said the defendant Sandra Hehir is the sister of Christy Keane the "patriarch" of the Keane organised crime group and the mother of convicted drug dealer Warren Hehir. Sgt O'Sullivan told the court Sandra Hehir's house was searched on June 17, 2020, and 124,055 in 13 separate bundles was found secured in a plastic sheet in the attic. Sandra Hehir told gardai the money in the attic was from savings she made since her husband died. An investigation was launched by gardai into a property in Kilmurry Court in Garryowen and it was established Sandra Hehir had purchased the property in August 2017 for 128,000 and that 39,000 had been paid by her as a deposit for the house. An order was later granted seeking documentation from the purchase of Kilmurry Court and the relevant material was received by gardai. Sandra Hehir was interviewed by gardai and denied she made the purchase of the house on behalf of her son Warren. Information received from the Revenue Commissioners showed Sandra Hehir was in receipt of the covid payment and the widow's pension. She was also employed as a hairdresser and together with her pension she earned a total of 35,000 annually. The defendant's financial accounts were frozen and gardai established she had accumulated 68,000 in savings over various accounts in the last five years. Sgt O'Sullivan said 70,000 was withdrawn from a bank account in March 2018 and was used by the defendant to pay off the remainder of a mortgage on her own property, which she told gardai was the proceeds of a life assurance policy she had for her late husband. "In respect of that life assurance policy for her husband, an analysis was done of the Hehir lifestyle and she should never have been able to afford it," he said. He said Hehir registered for income tax in 2017 and the business description given was hairdressing. He said she also registered as a PAYE employee and was employed with an address in Limerick at the time of the Garda investigation. The sergeant agreed with counsel that on analysis of the defendant's bank accounts "gardai could say the money in her account during covid was not in line with legitimate income". Sandra Hehir, he said, was arrested in June 2020 and engaged in six interviews with gardai. She made no positive admission of the money seized on June 17, 2020, or the money in the bank accounts, he said, adding she provided different accounts for the provenance of the monies. The defendant told gardai she was married for 30 years until her husband died in 2017. She said she was earning 600 a week from her hairdressing job and made money from "jobs at home" but was unable to tell gardai how much that was. The witness agreed with counsel it was fair to say that while Sandra Hehir engaged with gardai she had given them accounts which they weren't satisfied with. "They were conflicted," said the sergeant. No previous convictions The court heard she had no previous convictions. Under cross-examination, Padraig Dwyer SC, defending, put it to Sgt O'Sullivan that his client was not involved in serious criminality. "I considered her a key facilitator in acquiring assets in the purchase of Kilmurry Court," Sgt O'Sullivan said. He agreed she was not an active member of the Keane organised crime organisation and had worked in various hair salons since she was 18 years old. The barrister suggested to the witness his client was "beholden" to her son Warren, who is a convicted drug dealer and that he would have preyed upon her to cooperate by opening bank accounts. In reply, the sergeant said while Warren was certainly an active member of an organised crime group he wouldn't agree with the proposition "to that extent". "She certainly facilitated the purchasing of the house but in relation to the opening of accounts, she said she was good at saving essentially," he added. Sgt O'Sullivan agreed the defendant had put a distance between herself and family members since the investigation. He further agreed with counsel that while she gave conflicting accounts in interview, she had given a lot of information to gardai which was of assistance. Mr Dwyer said while his client was remorseful and at low risk of reoffending, a probation report might be of assistance to the court. Mr Justice Michael MacGrath, sitting with Judge Sarah Berkeley and Judge James Faughnan, adjourned the sentence hearing until January 29 and remanded Sandra Hehir on continuing bail until then. Green Party leader Eamon Ryan will not return from Dubai to vote confidence in Justice Minister Helen McEntee, after being offered a pairing agreement by the Social Democrats. Mr Ryan, who is in the United Arab Emirates for the Cop28 climate conference, confirmed that he had been offered the pair by Social Democrats climate spokesperson Jennifer Whitmore. Sinn Fein tabled a motion of no-confidence in Ms McEntee last week, saying that following the stabbing of three children and their carer in Dublin and the riots that followed, Ms McEntee "refuses to acknowledge the political failures that allowed our communities to become unsafe". A spokesperson for Mr Ryan said that he has been in contact with both the Taoiseach and Tanaiste on the matter, who are in support of the arrangement. They have agreed that this occasion could be seen as an exception to the normal pairing arrangements for such motions, the spokesperson said. Over the weekend, Mr Ryan said that he would have to return from Cop to vote confidence in Ms McEntee, losing two days of work at the conference. He confirmed that he did have confidence in Ms McEntee and the Government overall. Ms Whitmore said that she made the offer to Mr Ryan due to the importance of Ireland being represented at the climate talks. This won't change the outcome of the motion as our votes will simply cancel each other out, but will allow for continuity at climate talks, Ms Whitmore said in a post on X, formerly Twitter. Dail pairing arrangements are typically arranged between the Government and opposition in the case of TD absences from the Dail. This usually occurs whenever Government ministers are abroad on official business and a Dail vote is due to take place, with a paired opposition TD not voting to cancel out the absence. The last two months have been a living hell for the people of Gaza. The brutality they have suffered, the loss of lives and homes, and the slow obliteration of their world, have happened in a way that is harrowing and unprecedented. Thanks to social media, the world has borne witness to entire families being wiped out due to the unrelenting Israeli bombardments. Nothing and nobody has been spared the carnage. Children, the elderly, schools, hospitals, and the images of defenceless premature newborns slowly dying, breath by breath, due to the lack of oxygen because of the acute fuel shortages imposed by Israel, will be impossible to erase. The world has been moved by the heart-wrenching accounts of women, men, and children trapped in a spiral of bombardments, shelling, and military attacks. Daily they have woken up to news of overnight bombings, and to images of seriously injured people many with limbs gone and bodies being pulled out from under the rubble of what was once their homes. Weeks of widespread shelling and airstrikes on refugee camps, schools, and hospitals where internally displaced people were sheltering, and residential buildings have killed more than 15,000 people. More than 50% of housing units in Gaza have been destroyed since the start of the conflict. Gazan officials indicated on November 27 that more than 14,800 people have been killed, including about 6,000 children and 4,000 women. Palestinians in Gaza have been left without food, water, medicine, and fuel for weeks. The United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres said recently that Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children. In the mix of this horror, humanitarian agencies and their selfless, courageous staff in Gaza have been on the front line, desperately trying to bring a sliver of humanity and dignity amidst the crisis. Sadly, too many humanitarian workers have died in Gaza in the line of duty, including local staff in agencies and organisations supported by ActionAid. This includes three doctors who were killed in Al-Shifa Hospital, a long-standing partner of ActionAid that provides maternity services in northern Gaza. ActionAid is supporting Palestinian organisations and groups inside Gaza that are bringing assistance and protection to the population. Breach of law Our urgent aim is to see a full ceasefire and stop the relentless attacks that are rapidly transforming the strip into a shattered piece of land on the shoreline of the Mediterranean. ActionAid condemns any violations of international law, violence, attacks on civilians, and kidnapping. We unequivocally condemn what happened in Israel on October 7. But Israels response, which has claimed the lives of over 6,000 innocent children, is wildly disproportionate. So far there has been an appalling lack of meaningful engagement from influential states on alleged Israeli violations of international humanitarian law throughout the occupied Palestinian territory. Growing allegations of war crimes by Israeli forces in Gaza have been met with effective silence by a range of third states, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Indeed, these and others have continued to offer Israel political, financial and in some cases, military assistance and support in its assault on Gaza and occupation of Palestinian territory generally. Irelands stance in favour of respect for international humanitarian law has been welcome. On top of blockades since 2008, Gaza has endured five wars, two major escalations, and other attacks from air, land, and sea. Yet, the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into alleged war crimes and other atrocities opened in 2019 has made painfully slow progress, undermined by inadequate resources and a lack of political support. This silence and inaction stand in stark contrast with Ukraine, where an unprecedented number of mostly European ICC member countries asked to open an investigation soon after the Russian invasion of the country. ActionAid women-led and youth-led partners work for social, gender, and climate justice in several contexts where there are authoritarian repressive regimes, political violence, and war. They tell us that without justice for past events, even if the violence stops, there will not be lasting peace. This is relevant now for Gaza and the West Bank. More than 50% of housing units in Gaza have been destroyed since the start of the conflict. Picture: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty A permanent ceasefire in Gaza must be the first step in addressing the end of Israels military occupation, and fulfillment of the Palestinian right to self-determination to determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development by way of a just and durable solution based on UN resolutions. This process needs to go hand in hand with prompt, thorough, and effective investigations by qualified and independent bodies, including the International Criminal Court, of all credible and official accusations of current and past atrocities. The silence of most Western governments is unsettling and will have devastating consequences for our common humanity and understanding of the rule of law. On October 26, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for an immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce in Gaza. However, EU members such as Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, and Germany abstained. The United States voted against and had previously vetoed a similar resolution in the Security Council. This status quo requires a rethinking of the current global representation and governance. Meanwhile, the world watches one of the most devastating and cruel humanitarian crises in decades. Karol Balfe is CEO of ActionAid Ireland As global leaders gathered this week in Dubai at Cop28, pastoralists in northern Kenya are not just recovering from the worst drought in 40 years, but are preparing for the next drought. Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, people are counting the cost of a year in which they experienced the hottest day in 58 years and an unprecedented three cyclones, and widespread loss of farms and livelihoods as a result of flooding. In the coming days, policymakers at Cop28 will repeatedly be told countries which contributed least to greenhouse gas emissions are bearing the brunt of climate change. But will they truly understand what that means or what is urgently needed from them to assist these countries? In northern Kenya, five successive failed rains meant there were no proper rains in 2021 and 2022. The impact on the mainly pastoral communities was devastating. An estimated 50-70% of livestock died during the drought. The cattle were first, followed by sheep and goats, then donkeys which are normally very resilient and then finally the camels. Some 50% of camels in the region died during the drought. They are the most important asset for pastoral people, a sign of wealth. Camels are only sold when there is a huge need or for a dowry. The drought of 2021/22 has had a devastating and long-lasting impact. It takes between six months and one year after a drought before goats breed again. For cows, it is a further year. To replace the livestock lost during the recent drought could take between three and 10 years. But communities now expect droughts every five years, making herd replacement impossible. Malnutrition A major humanitarian response across the region meant the loss of human life was limited in 2021 and 2022. However, malnutrition levels soared, with about one million people in the region becoming malnourished during the drought. The lack of rain has forced some families to move to urban centres, abandoning their homes and potentially their way of life. Usually, community meetings are attended by women as they are closer to the family homes. With sea levels rising, one-in-seven Bangladeshis 24 million are expected to be forced from their homes by climate-related issues by 2050. Picture: AP But these meetings, facilitated by Concern staff, are now increasingly attended by men and boys. They are there to see what is happening, in search of hope. They carry small clubs and herding guns essential tools for herders but now they have no animals to care for. Their animals have died and their herds have shrunk in some cases going from 50 down to two goats. In Bangladesh, climate change poses an existential threat to the 169 million population. Two-thirds of people 112 million live less than 15 feet above sea level. With sea levels rising, one-in-seven Bangladeshis 24 million are expected to be forced from their homes by climate-related issues by 2050. In addition to increasing rainfall levels, greater uncertainty comes as to when the rain will fall. Soaring temperatures between April and June meant that much of this years jute crop was damaged and burnt. River erosion Bangladeshi families also face the increasing risk of river erosion, which is destroying fertile land and peoples livelihoods. In parts of the south, where we work, 563 families (about 2,500 people) lost their farms and homes this year alone. Some families try and remain in the area. Others have no option but to migrate to cities, where they face living in very poor conditions in informal settlements. Concern is working with communities in Bangladesh and Kenya as they adapt to climate change. Concern supports people at household and community level, helping people to be sustainable today, tomorrow and in the future beyond the next drought or flood. Kenya has a lot of fertile land but not enough water. It can produce sufficient food and livestock but investment is needed in water sources. If all the available water is harvested, it can be sufficient. In several regions of Kenya, much of the underground water is saline or high in metals. Major investment is needed to treat water for multiple use livestock, crops and human consumption. Concern has done a lot of work rehabilitating boreholes. Work is also needed to manage rangelands so the vast pasturelands used by pastoralists to graze their livestock can re-generate. This is one the key areas where climate adaptation funding could have major results. Research is being undertaken into hybrid and drought-resistant seeds. However, you cannot plant them without sufficient water. The use of fast-maturing and drought-resistant seeds is being rolled out to communities, with the seeds being harvested and kept in communities for the following years harvest. Flood warnings In Bangladesh, Concern is a member of the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, working to develop effective early warning systems. This gives communities advance notice of impending floods, enabling them to limit the damage done by taking steps such as strengthening flood defences, and moving livestock and assets to higher ground. Adaption work to protect communities includes raising households and community buildings such as mosques and schools on plinths and raising the height of key access roads. Nature-based solutions such as strategic tree-planting near households and along roadsides are also effective in protecting structures and limiting soil erosion during floods. The new reality of worsening climate change means these adaptation measures are becoming more difficult and ineffective given the increased extremes of weather. For example, we may raise a road or a building above the previously highest flood level, only for flood waters to rise further this year. Climate change means we are planning for unpredictable and previously unimaginable situations. If the communities we work with in Bangladesh got 60 seconds with decision-makers at Cop28 they would tell them the people of Bangladesh are bearing the burden of climate change, although they have done little to create the problem. Wealthier countries are letting us shoulder the burden while doing little to provide the finance and support to help us. Climate adaptation work is producing meaningful results for communities. But more funding is needed. Impacted communities will look for a commitment by global leaders and donors at Cop28 to increase climate adaptation funding and deliver on existing promises. Communities at the frontline of climate change are adapting they are experts in adaptation. They know how much adaptation costs and why funding for adaptation is inadequate. These communities also know that there is only so much adapting a person can do. Help is needed, commitment is needed and the political will to change course is needed. Cop28 must be the moment for the whole world to adapt because we are running out of time. Afsari Begum is a flood resilience programme manager with Concern Bangladesh Jackson Mekenye is livelihoods coordinator with Concern Kenya Global leaders gathered at Cop28 must make progress on increasing levels of climate financing, as well as delivering on existing funding commitments, and ensuring funds reach the worlds poorest countries which are severely impacted by climate change. The devastating impact that climate change is having on some of the worlds most vulnerable countries means there needs to be an urgency about the scale of climate finance commitments made at Cop28 and a clear pathway as to how they will be delivered. The announcement on the opening day regarding the loss and damage fund is welcome although we need to see the level of commitment by countries towards funding it to estimate how valuable it will be to impacted countries. To appreciate the scale of the climate emergency, global leaders should pay attention to Somalia where the drought which has ravaged the country for the last two years is currently being followed by the worst flooding in 35 years. Large tracts of the country are under water, leaving 2m people in need of emergency assistance. Bridges have been washed away and homes and farms destroyed. The evidence we are seeing in Somalia and in communities facing devastating floods, droughts, heatwaves, cyclones, and rising sea levels means global leaders must urgently escalate measures to help those impacted. Through the UN climate process, high-income countries committed to allocate $100bn annually by 2020 through to 2025 to help low-income countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address the impacts of climate change. Cop28 must show if that commitment has been delivered upon and provide a clear pathway to ensure it is achieved. Climate finance agreements made at Cop28 must also ensure funding reaches countries that need it most. Low-income countries where there is conflict and which are impacted by climate change often have greater difficulty securing climate finance. Low-income countries are exposed to some of the most severe climate impacts, have the least capacity to adapt, and find it hardest to recover. They also have the fewest resources available with which to respond. They urgently require international support to help them deal with the impacts of climate change. Reiseal Ni Cheilleachair Head of Global Advocacy, Concern Worldwide, Dublin 2 McEntee vote vital for democracy I am writing to express my deep concern over the recent events surrounding the security breach in our capital city and the subsequent riots. While the motion of no confidence in Justice Minister Helen McEntee may be inconvenient for some, it is an essential aspect of our democratic process. The oppositions duty is to hold the government accountable, and in this instance, there has been a significant failure in security leading to chaos on our streets. The handling of the situation has been abysmal, and Minister McEntees interviews have lacked strength and clarity. Justice Minister Helen McEntee: Faced a motion of no confidence following the Dublin riots. Picture: Brian Lawless/PA Wire The upcoming vote of no confidence provides an opportunity not only to address these security lapses but also to scrutinise the rise of the far-right. It is crucial, however, to differentiate the actions of the mob from any legitimate political stance. Looting and violence are not acceptable responses in any democracy. The role of social media must be examined in this context, along with the responsibility of political parties in disseminating information. Fine Gaels posts on social platforms raise concerns and are reminiscent of a Trump-esque approach, lacking in factual accuracy. The Central Statistics Office van provide empirical data on crime rates and the electorate can make up their own minds. What I will say is that Minister McEntees continued protestations that Dublin is safe ring hollow and both empirical data and anecdotal evidence will tell you differently as will the footfall experienced by Dublin city centre retailers. As discussions unfold next week, I hope they will lead to a more focused response to the risks facing our society. Regardless of Minister McEntees fate, it is essential to address the threat posed by those who claim to represent a political ideology but are, in reality, disruptive opportunists. Killian Brennan Malahide Road, Dublin 17 Challenging the unsocial networks In an interesting ruling, US district judge Donald Molloy has blocked Montanas attempt at banning TikTok while the matter is being challenged in courts. There are concerns that this restricts peoples rights, including the freedom of speech, but also Chinas ability to use the information. There are, however, many ways for people to express their views on any topic, but this seems the silliest way given the usual items that appear with Facebook not far behind. What really needs to be banned is the bullying, outrageous conspiracy theories, misinformed views, and the addictive nature of these sites that waste so much of young people as well as a number of older people who should be more sensible. Could any court or even any deity change the unsocial media platforms we see to real social media platforms? I doubt it. Dennis Fitzgerald Melbourne, Australia X marks the spot Many tides ago, the letter X indicated where the pirates treasure was buried. It was also accepted as a signature for those misfortunates unable to sign an agreement. X was also the rating given to raunchy films. Later it was an accepted abbreviation on a card, representing a kiss. Over the years, X has become a short version for Christ in Christmas . The letter X has recently been hijacked once more by Mr Musk of Twitter, as its new name. I also notice that more and more of reporters refer to time by the 24-hour clock which confuses many who are used to the AM and PM form. So, before it gets more complicated, may I wish all your witty scribes and readers, a Happy Twittermas and a prosperous 24 past eight pm. Sean Kelly, Tramore, Co Waterford Looking close to home Speaking at University College Cork recently, former President Mary Robinson castigated US president Joe Biden for issuing more oil and gas licensing permits than Donald Trump. Today, Ireland, without any natural gas storage, is scrambling to bridge an immediate shortage of over 600KW electricity generating capacity, leading to probable outages depending on demand and the vagaries of the weather over the coming winter, and will, bizarrely, be dependent on the compliance and good will of large private electricity customers to plug the gap in cases of emergency. Mrs Robinson is aware no doubt that Ireland has about 5GW of installed onshore wind capacity which is notoriously unreliable and intermittently generates at best 30% of Irelands electricity. The remaining 70% is generated mainly by natural gas, 30% comes from the dwindling Corrib field and 70% is imported from Britain and across thousands of kilometres from Norway, with a huge carbon footprint. At present and for the last week, because of the total absence of wind, all of Irelands electricity was generated by fossil fuels, coal, oil, natural gas, and imports. The problem was compounded by the recent irresponsible decision by Transport Minister Eamon Ryan to go cap in hand and sign a long-term agreement with Britain to supply 100% of our natural gas supply. Having fought for centuries to win our independence, the irony was lost on Mr Ryan as the Coalition is now happily handing over total control of our most vital energy supply to an increasingly dysfunctional and chaotic British political establishment. It is beyond comprehension that the Government would choose this route while refusing to grant further licences to progress the Barryroe and Inishkea fields just off the coasts of Cork and Mayo. The Barryroe oil and gas field alone has independently proven 300m barrels of high-quality oil and copious quantities of low-carbon natural gas, which would ensure energy independence and security for decades to come. Irelands energy policy has been long plagued by political expediency, incompetence, and U-turns, the latest being Taoiseach Leo Varadkars inexplicable decision in 2023 to cease issuing prospecting licences off our coast. Closer to home, it would be interesting to hear Mrs Robinsons views on the Irish Governments energy policy. John Leahy Wilton, Cork Cork County Council has rejected a planning application for the retention of a food stall market in Cobh. Mountleader Services Ltd had lodged an application with Cork County Council seeking permission for the retention of a change of use at the Old Maritime Boatyard in Carrigaloe, Cobh. It was to facilitate the continued operation of a market and food emporium, known as The Boatyard. The retention would see the developer keep 10 temporary container businesses, six of which are food stalls, two of which are operating as a tattoo parlour, one which operates as a beautician, and one which includes indoor seating. The site also includes 36 car parking spaces, a public restroom, a dog wash, and a car wash. The Boatyard, which originally opened in 2022, closed last month following legal enforcement due to the pending planning permission application. Planners at Cork County Council have now rejected the application, though. In doing so, it noted the local development plan includes a policy objective to "promote the development of town centres and neighbourhood centres as the primary locations for retail and other uses that provide goods or services principally to visiting members of the public". In Cobh, these areas are Westbourne Place, Casement Square, Pearse Square, East Beach and West Beach, and The Boatyard is located outside this area. The planners also noted the site of the development is an area which is susceptible to flooding. Venezuelans have approved a referendum called by the government of president Nicolas Maduro to claim sovereignty over an oil- and mineral-rich area of neighbouring Guyana. The Venezuelan government argues the territory was stolen when the border was drawn more than a century ago. It remains unclear how Mr Maduro will enforce the results of the vote. But Guyana considers the referendum a step toward annexation, and the vote has its residents on edge. The National Electoral Council claimed to have counted more than 10.5 million votes even though few voters could be seen at polling sites throughout the voting period for the five-question referendum. Soldiers wait in line to vote on a referendum about the future of a disputed territory with Guyana (Ariana Cubillos/AP) The council, however, did not explain whether the number of votes was equivalent to each voter or if it was the sum of each individual answer. Venezuelan voters were asked whether they support establishing a state in the disputed territory, known as Essequibo, granting citizenship to current and future area residents and rejecting the jurisdiction of the United Nations top court in settling the disagreement between the South American countries. It has been a total success for our country, for our democracy, Mr Maduro told supporters gathered in Caracas, the capital, after results were announced. He claimed the referendum had a very important level of participation. Yet long lines typical of electoral events did not form outside voting centres in Caracas throughout Sunday, even after the countrys top electoral authority, Elvis Amoroso, announced the 12-hour voting period would be extended by two hours. If the participation figure offered by Mr Amoroso refers to voters, it would mean more people voted in the referendum than they did for Hugo Chavez, Mr Maduros mentor and predecessor, when he was re-elected in the 2012 presidential contest. But if it is equivalent to each individual answer marked by voters, turnout could drop to as low as 2.1 million voters. The International Court of Justice on Friday ordered Venezuela not to take any action that would alter Guyanas control over Essequibo, but the judges did not specifically ban officials from carrying out Sundays five-question referendum. Guyana had asked the court to order Venezuela to halt parts of the vote. Although the practical and legal implications of the referendum remain unclear, in comments explaining Fridays verdict, international court president Joan E Donoghue said statements from Venezuelas government suggest it is taking steps with a view toward acquiring control over and administering the territory in dispute. She said: Furthermore, Venezuelan military officials announced that Venezuela is taking concrete measures to build an airstrip to serve as a logistical support point for the integral development of the Essequibo. The 61,600-square-mile (159,500-square-kilometre) territory accounts for two-thirds of Guyana and also borders Brazil, whose Defence Ministry earlier this week in a statement said it has intensified its defence actions and boosted its military presence in the region as a result of the dispute. Essequibo is larger than Greece and rich in minerals. It also gives access to an area of the Atlantic where energy giant ExxonMobil discovered oil in commercial quantities in 2015, drawing the attention of Mr Maduros government. Venezuelas government promoted the referendum for weeks, framing participation as an act of patriotism and often conflating it with a show of support for Mr Maduro. The country has always considered Essequibo as its own because the region was within its boundaries during the Spanish colonial period, and it has long disputed the border decided by international arbitrators in 1899 when Guyana was still a British colony. That boundary was decided by arbitrators from Britain, Russia and the United States. The US represented Venezuela on the panel in part because the Venezuelan government had broken off diplomatic relations with Britain. Venezuelan officials contend that Americans and Europeans conspired to cheat their country out of the land and argue that a 1966 agreement to resolve the dispute effectively nullified the original arbitration. Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America, maintains the initial accord is legal and binding and asked the International Court of Justice in 2018 to rule it as such, but a decision is years away. A man who allegedly killed a German tourist and injured a British national in a suspected terror attack in Paris had pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State, authorities said. The man, named by AP as Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, is accused of stabbing the German-Filipino man to death before using a hammer to injure a British man and a French national on Saturday near the Eiffel Tower. Frances anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said he had opened an investigation into the attack on Sunday. He said Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a French national, had posted a video on X before the attack pledging his allegiance to IS alongside other recent posts in which he made references to the Israel-Hamas war. A man jogs past a blood stain at the site where a man targeted passers-by (Christophe Ena/AP) Mr Ricard said Rajabpour-Miyandoab, born in 1997, converted to Islam at the age of 18 and in 2016 planned on joining IS in Syria before being imprisoned for four years on a charge of planning violence. He received psychiatric treatment and was under surveillance for suspected extremism, the prosecutor confirmed. Three other people from Rajabpour-Miyandoabs entourage and family have been detained by police for questioning, Mr Ricard said. After killing the tourist, the attacker crossed the bridge to the citys right bank and injured the British and French nationals, authorities said. Mr Ricard said both of them were able to get back home on Sunday. Emmanuel Macron sent condolences to the family and loved ones of the German national who died (Peter Dejong/AP) The suspect cried Allahu Akbar (God is great) and a police officer twice tasered the suspect before arresting him, authorities said. French interior minister Gerald Darmanin reportedly said that when questioned by police, the suspect expressed anguish about Muslims dying, notably in Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, and claimed that France was an accomplice. I send all my condolences to the family and loved ones of the German national who died this evening during the terrorist attack in Paris and think with emotion of the people currently injured and in care Mr Darmanin said this person was ready to kill others, and praised the quick response of the police. In a statement to the PA news agency, a spokesperson for the British Foreign Office said: We are supporting a British man who was injured in Paris and are in contact with the local authorities. Writing on X on Saturday, Frances president Emmanuel Macron said: I send all my condolences to the family and loved ones of the German national who died this evening during the terrorist attack in Paris and think with emotion of the people currently injured and in care. My most sincere thanks to the emergency forces who made it possible to quickly arrest a suspect. At least 47 people have been killed and 85 others injured amid heavy flooding and landslides in northern Tanzania, authorities said on Monday. The government has deployed the military to help rescue hundreds of people trapped by the flooding, which has been described as the worst in years in the East African nation. A former career American diplomat has been charged with serving as a secret agent for communist Cuba going back decades in what prosecutors portrayed as one of the most brazen and long-running betrayals in the history of the US foreign service. Court papers alleged that Manuel Rocha engaged in clandestine activity on Cubas behalf since at least 1981, including by meeting with Cuban intelligence operatives and providing false information to US government officials about his travels and contacts. The complaint, filed in federal court in Miami, charges Rocha with crimes including acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government and provides a vivid case study of what American officials say are long-standing efforts by Cuba and its notoriously sophisticated intelligence services to target government officials who can be flipped. This action exposes one of the highest-reaching and longest-lasting infiltrations of the United States government by a foreign agent, attorney general Merrick Garland said in a statement. Attorney general Merrick Garland speaks in Washington about Manuel Rocha, the former American diplomat who served as US ambassador to Bolivia, being charged with serving as a secret agent for Cubas intelligence services (Stephanie Scarbrough/AP) To betray that trust by falsely pledging loyalty to the United States while serving a foreign power is a crime that will be met with the full force of the Justice Department. The 73-year-old Rocha, whose two-decade career as a US diplomat included top posts in Bolivia, Argentina and the US Interests Section in Havana, was arrested at his Miami home on Friday. He wept as he sat handcuffed during his first court appearance on Monday and was ordered held pending a bail hearing on Wednesday. His lawyer declined to comment. The Justice Department did not reveal how Rocha allegedly attracted the attention of Cubas intelligence operatives nor did it describe what, if any, sensitive information he may have provided while in government. Instead, the case relies largely on what prosecutors say were Rochas own admissions, made over the past year to an undercover FBI agent posing as a Cuban intelligence operative. Rocha praised the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro as Comandante, branded the US the enemy and bragged about his service for more than 40 years as a Cuban mole in the heart of the State Department and elite US foreign policy circles, the complaint says. What we have done its enormous more than a Grand Slam, he was quoted as saying at one of several secretly recorded conversations starting last year at discreet locations a church and outdoor food court in central Miami. Defence lawyer Jacqueline Arango, centre, and Karla Wittkop Rocha, left, wife of Manuel Rocha, are trailed by journalists as they leave the James Lawrence King Federal Justice Building in Miami (Rebecca Blackwell/AP) They underestimated what we could do to them. We did more than they thought, the document quotes Rocha as saying, referring to the United States. To cover his tracks, he referred to Cuba as the island and led a normal life disguised as a right-wing person, he said in one of the recordings. He also arrived at the meetings with the undercover agent in Miami deliberately straying from the most direct route and pausing along the way in what prosecutors allege was classic counter-surveillance tradecraft as taught by Cubas spymasters. Its what Ive always been told to do, Rocha told his handler about his movements. The case is part of a historically tense relationship between the US and Cuba. Washington and Havana restored diplomatic relations in late 2014 after half a century of Cold War acrimony, though the Trump administration reimposed sanctions on Cuba and, in 2021, redesignated it a state sponsor of terrorism. The charging document traces Rochas illegal ties to Cuba back to 1981, when he first joined the State Department, to well after his departure from the federal government, when he took on lucrative private sector jobs most recently as a senior business adviser to an international public relations firm. The FBI learned about the relationship last year and arranged a series of undercover encounters in central Miami between Rocha and an agent purporting to be a Cuban intelligence operative, the document says. Manuel Rocha during a meeting with an FBI undercover employee (Justice Department via AP) I always told myself, The only thing that can put everything we have done in danger is someones betrayal, someone who may have met me, someone who may have known something at some point, Rocha said in one of the meetings, according to the charging document. In another meeting last year, Rocha referred to Cuba shooting down two unarmed planes sent by the Miami-based group of exiles Brothers to the Rescue in which four opponents of Castros government were killed in 1996, the document said. There is no indication in the complaint that Rocha aided the Cubans with the military operation a major flashpoint in more than half a century of brinksmanship between the communist-ruled island and its right-wing opponents in Miami. But at the time he served as a senior political officer at the US special interest section in Havana. I lived through it, because I was in charge, Rocha said. That was a time of a lot of tension. Rochas alleged service to Cuba may have gone back earlier than the start of his US diplomatic career. The complaint cites Rocha telling the undercover agent, who went by the name Miguel, that he first proved his loyalty in Chile in 1973 the same year right-wing General Augusto Pinochet, with US backing, overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende. Manuel Rocha (Justice Department via AP) They must have told you something because you mentioned Chile, Rocha told the undercover agent who presented himself as having reached out to him at the request of higher-ups in Cubas National Intelligence Directorate. That inspired trust in me. Born in Colombia, Rocha was raised in a working-class home in New York City and went on to obtain a succession of liberal arts degrees from Yale, Harvard and Georgetown before joining the foreign service in 1981. He was the top US diplomat in Argentina between 1997 and 2000 as a decade-long currency stabilisation programme backed by Washington was unravelling under the weight of huge foreign debt and stagnant growth, triggering a political crisis that would see the South American country cycle through five presidents in two weeks. At his next post, as ambassador to Bolivia, he intervened directly in the 2002 presidential race, warning weeks ahead of the vote that the US would cut off assistance to the poor South American country if it were to elect former coca grower Evo Morales. I want to remind the Bolivian electorate that if they vote for those who want Bolivia to return to exporting cocaine, that will seriously jeopardise any future aid to Bolivia from the United States, Rocha said in a speech that was widely interpreted as an attempt to sustain US dominance in the region. The gambit angered Bolivians and gave Mr Morales a last-minute boost. It is beyond ironic that he cultivated this cartoonish persona and that everyone apparently bought it When he was finally elected three years later, the leftist leader expelled Rochas successor as chief of the diplomatic mission for inciting civil war. Rocha also served in Italy, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, and worked as a Latin America expert for the National Security Council. After his retirement from the State Department, Rocha began a second career in business, serving as the president of a gold mine in the Dominican Republic partly owned by Canadas Barrick Gold. More recently, he has held senior roles at XCoal, a Pennsylvania-based coal exporter; Clover Leaf Capital, a company formed to facilitate mergers in the cannabis industry; law firm Foley & Lardner; and Spanish public relations firm Llorente & Cuenca, which said on Monday that it had sacked him. John Feeley, who ended a long diplomatic career serving as US ambassador to Panama, said he was saddened and shocked that my former mentor turned out to be a career Cuban mole. Mr Feeley, who retired from the State Department over differences with President Donald Trumps administration, said that the last time he saw Rocha he was surprised by how a diplomat who had served administrations of both parties had so fully embraced Mr Trumps brand of politics. It is beyond ironic that he cultivated this cartoonish persona and that everyone apparently bought it, he said. An announcement by the Myanmar junta in its mouthpiece newspapers on Monday encouraging soldiers who have deserted or gone AWOL (absent without leave) to return to their barracks has further exposed the frailty of the regimes military amid an expanding nationwide resistance offensive. In the announcement the junta says soldiers that return will be exonerated from any minor crimes they may have committed. The announcement doesnt specify what the minor offenses are. The regime says its offer to take the soldiers back was being made at their request, but the claim has been widely dismissed, as the Myanmar military is known to have been seriously depleted since the 2021 putsch, thanks to a recruitment crisis, desertions and heavy casualties suffered in daily clashes with resistance forces. A sergeant who is currently serving in the Myanmar military and who has taken part in earlier arrests of deserters said that not only have many soldiers already deserted, but Even the soldiers [still] in the military earnestly wish to flee. Those who have deserted will never return. He added that in his experience, deserters who are arrested typically run away again after their punishment is completed. No one wants to serve in a military with such capricious leadership. I have never heard of such an announcement before. Since last year, the regime has drawn up lists of deserters and sent notices to their homes, ordering them to return to duty or face punishment. It has also recalled veterans, threatening to suspend their pensions if they dont return. The civilian National Unity Government (NUG) said over 20,000 soldiers and police have joined the Civil Disobedience Movement over the past two years. From late October to Nov. 30, the Myanmar regime lost 19 towns and 303 outposts across the country to the resistance offensive. Hundreds of junta soldiers have surrendered in northern Shan, Chin, Mon, Karenni (Kayah) and Rakhine states. In Kokang in northern Shan State, three junta battalionsinfantry battalions 125 and 143, and Light Infantry Battalion 129surrendered in their entirety. Meanwhile, the NUG and the Brotherhood Alliancea group of three ethnic armed organizations fighting the regime in Shan and Rakhine states and other parts of the countryhave urged junta personnel to surrender, promising that they will be treated humanely and offering them a safety guarantee. Since the Brotherhood Alliance launched its Operation 1027 offensive in late October, the regime has reportedly stepped up conscription, and has allegedly resorted to forcing family members of existing personnel to undergo military training. The first district-level town captured by Myanmar resistance forces began operating under a full-strength civilian administration on Sunday, according to the parallel National Unity Government (NUG). Kawlin in Sagaing Region is under full civilian control, less than a month after the Peoples Defense Force (PDF) and armed ethnic allies seized the township on Nov. 4 following four days of fighting with junta troops. The township administration is being run by 1,180 civil servants who joined the Civil Disobedience Movement in Kawlin and other townships, the NUG said. Civil servants have begun coordinating with Peoples Administration Teams at the ward and district levels to strengthen management and administrative chains at each level in Kawlin, it added. The task of protecting the townships residents from junta attacks has been handed to local PDF groups, the Peoples Security Force and Peoples Police Force. Peoples administration teams and the PDF are also operating an early warning system and managing bomb shelters to protect civilians from strikes by junta artillery and warplanes, the NUG said. A civilian judiciary would now be established by appointing qualified judges and setting up courts. Of the total 98 detainees in junta detention at Kawlin police station, 63 who were arbitrarily arrested have been released while the remainder will be processed as per the law. Emergency medical services are being provided by the township health team, comprising 65 volunteer nurses, doctors and basic health workers. The township health service also covers displaced civilians while support is in place for those who wish to return to Kawlin. The township currently houses 12,610 displaced people, who are being fed with food supplied and distributed by the Ministry of Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Management, the NUG statement said. Regarding education, teaching materials have been organised and the NUGs Ministry of Education is planning to open both online and on-ground schools as soon as possible to minimise disruption for students. Kawlin residents can be seen walking freely about the town in video released by a local information group on Sunday. Residents are returning to the town. The markets are also reopening, a member of the Kawlin information group told the Irrawaddy. Another resident said stores are reopening and peace had been restored in the town. Since taking control of Kawlin, resistance forces have also seized the towns of Khampat and Kawlin in Sagaing Region. At least 11 bodies were discovered in Kya Paing Village in Monywa Township in the resistance stronghold of Sagaing Region after the village was raided by junta troops and pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia groups on Saturday, residents and resistance forces said. Around 50 Pyu Saw Htee militia and junta troops from Taw Pu Village raided Kya Paing on Saturday morning, Monywa Peoples Defense Force (PDF) said. We found 10 charred bodies in Kya Paing Village. Six bodies were found inside a house and the other bodies were spotted beside it. Another person was shot dead while attempting to escape, a representative of Monywa PDF said. All of the deceased were civilians, males in their 30s and 40s. They were not PDF members, he added. Most of the residents of the village were arrested by junta troops during the raid as they had been unable to flee their homes. At least 60 villagers were detained inside a pagoda compound on Saturday while Pyu Saw Htee militia carried out lootings, according to Chindwin Attack Force, a resistance group based in Monywa Township. They killed 11 male villagers and released the other detainees. They also carried out lootings and arson, said a member of the group who helped to extinguish the fires. Nearly 100 houses were incinerated by the Pyu Saw Htee militia, according to resistance groups. Kya Paing, located to the south of Monywa town, has around 400 houses. The raid and killing spree were conducted in retaliation for a resistance attack on a Pyu Saw Htee base in Nga Pu Village on Friday, a resistance member said. Nyan Lynn Thit, an independent group that monitors regime violence, claimed on Nov. 3 that junta troops had carried out at least 27 massacres, killing 188 people, during the four months from May to August. Myanmars military regime has detained over 70 civilians in Rakhine State in the two weeks since fresh fighting erupted with the Arakan Army (AA), according to local reports. Among the detainees are 30 from the state capital Sittwe, 14 from Kyaukphyu, 11 from Taungup, six from Maungdaw, five from Ponnagyun, three from Pauktaw, two from Myebon, and two from Rathedaung townships. They were seized by junta personnel between November 13 and 26, according to One Nations News, a media outlet covering the conflict in Rakhine. They were detained under the Unlawful Association Act for allegedly having ties to the AA. The whereabouts of many of those being held are still unknown, say their relatives. The detainees have not yet been transferred to the police, said a family member of a detainee in Taungup town. Family members have also been barred from visiting them. And we dont know what charges they face. The detainees in Taungup are mainly owners of businesses, ranging from filling stations, gold shops and department stores to construction firms. They are being held at the Light Infantry Battalion 544 base in the town, according to relatives. Local reports indicate that a General Staff officer (Grade 1) from No. 15 military command based in Pauktaw is demanding a ransom of 30 million kyats (around US$ 14,300 at the official exchange rate) for each detainee. The Irrawaddy could not independently verify the reports. In Thandwe town, junta troops are targeting leaders of civil society organizations, said residents. Around 10 have been arrested and their whereabouts are still unknown, the locals said. In Kyaukphyu town, the majority of detainees are goldsmiths, according to a resident. They were arrested for paying tax to the Arakan Army. Hoteliers were also arrested. Dozens of people were arrested when soldiers went around the town and checked houses for overnight guests. I think around 30 people might have been detained [in Kyaukphyu town], said one local. The regime has blockaded Kyaukphyu since November 14, restricting delivery of food supplies into the town, he added. Even vegetables hawkers are not allowed to enter the town. Schoolteachers [from surrounding villages] who came to withdraw their salaries were also not allowed to enter the town. Junta troops paid their salaries outside the town. The troops drive around the town in military vehicles, and make arbitrary arrests, he said. The regime has also blockaded the state capital of Sittwe and other Rakhine towns including Kyauktaw, Ponnagyun, Buthidaung, Minbya, Myebon and Rathedaung. Residents said regime troops are driving around the towns at night and shooting indiscriminately. A regime blockade last year that cut off supplies of food and medicine to Rakhine forced the AA into agreeing a temporary ceasefire on humanitarian grounds. However, ethnic Rakhine politician U Pe Than said the regimes tactic of imposing travel restrictions to starve civilian populations in Rakhine is no longer working as it struggles to contain an expanding nationwide resistance offensive. The regimes tactics to instill fear in the public no longer work. The Myanmar military is not only fighting the AA but it is under attack across the whole country. Under these circumstances, the tactic of arresting and starving people and imposing travel restrictions amounts to pushing the people into a corner. The regime is digging its own grave, U Pe Than predicted. The Irrawaddy was unable to obtain comment from the regime about the arrest of civilians in Rakhine State. The fresh fighting in Rakhine erupted as part of a resistance offensive that began in Shan State in late October and has since expanded across the country. The Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) and its resistance allies continue to attack Myanmar junta positions in Kyaukkyi Township, Bago Region. Light Infantry battalions 599 and 590 and the police station in Mone town have been under attack since Saturday along with the towns bridge. A member of Bago Peoples Defense Force reported junta airstrikes and shelling on the town and said reinforcements are being sent to the township. Mone is 172km south of Naypyitaw and 241km northwest of Yangon and, if taken, would be the first town seized between the two main junta power centers. It is the first time the KNLA has tried to seize a Bago Region town. The KNLA reported 32 attacks by fighter jets and helicopters on Mone since Saturday. The Irrawaddy could not independently verify the reports. The junta has cut off Mones communications and residents are trapped in the town. Junta airstrikes and shelling have also targeted villages across Waw and Kyaukkyi townships since Saturday, according to residents. Shelling reportedly killed an 84-year-old woman in Mone town and destroyed a Kyaukkyi Township monastery, clinic and houses on Sunday. There is no doubt that recent events in Myanmar were as unanticipated as they are unprecedented. An alliance of three ethnic resistance armies in the norththe Kokang-based Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), the Taang National Liberation Army (TNLA, a Palaung group) and the Arakan Army (AA)has overrun more than 200 junta bases and confiscated huge quantities of weapons. Morale among the Myanmar armys troops is low, and there have been surrenders and even defections. The alliances military successes in the north have encouraged other resistance forces across the country to be more active, and the Myanmar army seems to be losing ground everywhere. Myanmar appears to be ablaze with resistance to the junta, the State Administration Council (SAC), which seized power in Naypyitaw in February 2021. But is this really going to lead to the downfall of the SAC and the government it appointed, and to the disintegration of the Myanmar army, and put the country on a course to the federal democracy that many see as the final goal of the resistance? Some, among them Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington, seem to believe so; he has even proposed what should be done with the Myanmar military once the resistance has won. Writing for Nikkei Asia on Nov. 29, he suggests that, First, the Burman-dominated army, known as the Tatmadaw, must be disbanded and rebuilt from scratch. But he refrains from saying how such a lofty goal should be achieved, or by whom it would be done. Duwa Lashi La, the acting leader of the National Unity Government, which was set up by the resistance after the coup, said in a statement on Oct. 2before what has been termed Operation 1027 was launched by the groups in the norththat resistance forces were in control of about 60 percent of the countrys territory. The Economist reported on June 8 that there are estimated to be over 300 of these Peoples Defence Forces (PDFs), with more than 65,000 fighters. Add another estimated 100,000 or so in Myanmars many ethnic forces and the resistance may soon outnumber the Myanmar army, the strength of which, as independent Australian Myanmar scholar Andrew Selth states, is less than the often cited 400,000 and possibly as low as 250,000, or even 200,000. But, as Selth also states, while the Myanmar army may be spread out on many fronts and unable to defeat the resistance, it remains the most effective and best-armed fighting force in the country. And the bitter reality is vastly different from the optimistic assessments of the situation that many international and local observers have indulged in since Operation 1027 was launched. There may be around 300 PDFs across the country and at least 20 ethnic resistance armies, and the Myanmar military has been forced to give up large tracts of land not only in northern Shan State, but also in Chin State, Magwe Region and, especially, Sagaing Region in the west. There is heavy fighting in Karenni (Kayah) State and Karen State, and an embattled Myanmar military has been forced to depend on air power because the infantry is shattered and unable to regain control over areas adjacent to the Thai border. There are, however, four factors which have to be taken into account when making a realistic assessment of the situation. The first would be the strength of the PDFs and the lack of unity among them. According to a report published by the United States Institute of Peace on Nov. 3, 2022, only 60 percent of them are armed, and mostly with locally produced low-quality arms. And they are local resistance forces more concerned with controlling their own respective areas. There appears to be little coordination and no common supreme command, and they are not operating in accordance with some well thought out strategy encompassing the entire country. The second factor would be lack of unity among the ethnic armies. Kachin, Palaung and Shan armies claim more or less the same areas in northern Shan State, and there are also territorial disputes between the Shan and the Wa, and the Shan and the Pa-O. The most powerful of the ethnic forces, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), may have provided the MNDAA, the TNLA, the AA and the Shan State Army of the Shan State Progress Party with weapons, but it still adheres to the ceasefire agreement it struck with the Myanmar military in 1989 and could not be considered part of some overall resistance. In Kachin State, a local ethnic Shan army is siding with the Myanmar military against the Kachin Independence Army, which in turn has little or no influence in Lisu- and Rawang-inhabited areas of northernmost Kachin State. There are several rival Chin armies in Chin State, and the Pa-O in southern Shan State have been involved in fights with the Shan State Army of the Restoration Council of Shan State (RCSS). The RCSS, on the other hand, sticks to its 2015 ceasefire agreement with the Myanmar military and some of its leaders are investing heavily in real estate in southern Shan State. By no stretch of the imagination could it be claimed that Myanmars many ethnic armies are a unified force, or even have common interests. The third factor is the seemingly everlasting unity of Myanmars armed forces. The military has been in power, directly or behind the scenes, since 1962 and, despite purges and dismissals, it has not seen any splits or even inner tendencies that could be viewed as embryonic factions. The military has become a powerful state within a state with its own institutions and privileges for its members. And what is happening now is nothing new. The Myanmar military has been under siege many times during the long history of the countrys ethnic and political civil wars, which broke out shortly after independence from Britain in 1948, and it has always persevered in its endeavours, chief of which is to remain the countrys most potent institution. Only a decisive split within the military, or much larger defections than those we are seeing now, would cause it to fall from power. No one can predict the future, but there have so far been no signs of any such infighting, or even serious disagreements, among the officer corps or the rank and file. On the other hand, unexpected things do happen, so nothing could be ruled out. The fourth factor, which is too often overlooked, is China. Myanmar is of utmost strategic importance to China because it is the only neighboring country that gives it direct and easy access to the Indian Ocean. China also has other interests in Myanmar, such as resource extraction and, most recently, how to deal with the many cross-border scam centers that are bleeding the nation. And, regardless of what the Brotherhood Alliance comprising the MNDAA, TNLA and AA has said in statements, the recent fighting in northern Shan State has more to do with that than any fight for federal democracy. An estimated US$40 billion has flown out of China and into those scam centers, and that at a time when China is facing an internal economic slowdown. The main centers affecting China are located in the UWSA-controlled territories of northeastern Shan State, and in Kokang and adjacent areas to the north. The Chinese can deal with the UWSA, which is heavily dependent on China for trade and supplies of everything from guns to food. The Chinese issued a couple of arrest warrants of prominent UWSA personalities, read the leaders the riot act, and reined them in. It is a different story in Kokang and other parts of northernmost Shan State. There, the centers are to be found in areas and at localities controlled by SAC-allied, local militia forces. At first, the Chinese put pressure on the SAC to deal with the problem, but apart from deportations of quite a few not especially important people, nothing really happened. The Chinese then sent undercover special branch officers into Kokang, and several of them were killed by the militiassomething that really angered the Chinese. So did Chinas security authorities initiate Operation 1027? That is hard to say, but their security services were certainly aware of the plan in advance and did nothing to stop it, and were pleased to see that the alliance attacked several of those centers and forced them to close down. The UWSA has declared that it is neutral, but it has supplied the alliance with most of its weaponry. Those weapons are of Chinese origin, and it is hard to believe that the Chinese disapproved of them being handed over to the alliance forces. Significantly, groups of patriotic monks were allowed to demonstrate outside the Chinese Embassy and City Hall in the commercial capital Yangon on Nov. 19. As The Irrawaddy reported the following day, the monks criticized China for backing an ethnic alliance that has been delivering heavy defeats against regime troops in northern Shan State. Members of the Patriotic Monks Union (Yangon) and Myanmar Nationalist Organization took part in the protestaccusing Beijing of destroying Myanmar by selling weapons to ethnic armed organizations based near the border in northern Myanmar, and to PDF groups. What the Chinese made of the protests is not clear, but the generals soon realized that they could not afford to really antagonize China. Thousands of telecom fraud suspects were subsequently handed over to China, and for days after the demonstrations, spokesmen for the SAC proclaimed the juntas strong and amicable relationship with Beijing, saying the ties will only grow stronger over time. The bottom line when it comes to Chinas security authorities is that they have leverage, in one way or another, inside Myanmar only as long as the country is weak. They can play the role of being a friendly neighbor and peacemaker and, at the same time, use a carrot-and-stick approach to get whatever they want from any government that is in power in Naypyitaw: trade coupled with investment and access to the Indian Ocean on the one hand and indirect support for the ethnic armed organizations on the other. If Myanmar ever became exactly what the resistance is striving forstrong, peaceful, democratic and federalthe influence China now has inside Myanmar would be gone. But China does not want the situation to get totally out of hand, either, because that could lead to serious instability in the frontier areas and, most likely, an unwanted flood of refugees across its border. Hence, Chinese troops were dispatched to areas near the border with Myanmar soon after Operation 1027 began making headway. All of those four factors combined mean that this is a war neither side can win and the situation wont change until and unless something more unexpected and decisive than Operation 1027 happens. Meanwhile. caught in the middle is the civilian population, which is bound to suffer the most. Monday, Dec 4th, 2023 (8:47 am) - Score 6,000 Network operator CityFibre has confirmed that, following an ongoing review of prioritisation of our deployment locations, they have taken the decision to pause their 40m project to deploy a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network across the Wiltshire town of Swindon. CityFibres deployment in Swindon began in October 2020 (here) and was originally supported by civil engineering firm VolkerSmart Technologies (recently rebranded to VolkerTelecoms). The same contractor has worked with the operator in a number of other locations, such as Bracknell, Maidenhead, Slough and Ipswich. NOTE: CityFibre supported by various UK ISPs (TalkTalk, CityFibre supported by various UK ISPs ( Vodafone Giganet and Zen Internet etc.) is owned by Antin Infrastructure Partners, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Mubadala Investment Company and Interogo Holding. However, its fair to say that the Swindon build did suffer from some problems and complaints over the years (here and here), although the operator has still managed to cover the vast majority of the town with their new network and so the impact of todays pause occurring ahead of the original 2024 completion goal shouldnt be as significant as it could have been. At the same time the operator has had somewhat of a rocky 2023, which is not unlike many other network builders. The operator, under pressure from rising costs (build, leases and interest payments on debt etc.), competition and other factors (e.g. the need to generate strong take-up), began the year by announcing hundreds of job losses (here) and also suffered disruption in Norwich after their local build partner, Telec Networks, called in the administrators (here). Shortly after that we also learnt that a fair number of their other build locations (here), such as those linked to Kier Group and the odd other contractor, had been paused as part of the same review process as mentioned for Swindon. The decision to cancel or change a build partner is one that typically causes significant build delays, as it can take up to around a year to find and appoint a suitable replacement for large projects. A CityFibre spokesperson said (Swindon Advertiser): CityFibre is pausing its Swindon rollout, and we wont be getting to Wroughton in the near future. This decision comes as part of an ongoing review of prioritisation of our deployment locations, given the pace and scale of our nationwide rollout. Any areas we no longer intend to reach as part of our commercial rollout are communicated to BDUK via the normal channels. Im sorry we wont be able to supply full fibre to Wroughton as part of this current rollout, but there is a possibility we will return to finish South Swindon and Wroughton at a later date. The news that Swindon has become the latest build project to be put on ice is particularly concerning, since CityFibre were already getting fairly close to completion of the original build plan (at least they will, once all of the built but not yet live areas become Ready for Service). But the reality here is that the operator, like many other players in the current market, need to keep a close eye on their financial situation and focusing on monetising what theyve built so far is a natural response to the pressure. The operators wider full fibre network currently covers 3 million UK premises (up from 2.5m in January 2023) and 2.6m of those are considered to be Ready For Service by a supporting broadband ISP (up from 2.2m). But their original ambition is to reach up to 8m premises (funded by c.2.4bn in equity and c.4.9bn debt) across over 285 cities, towns and villages (c.30% of the UK) by the end of 2025 (here). CityFibre told us a couple of months ago that they remain confident of both their roll-out targets and that theyll be able to find replacement contractors for all their paused projects. But after so much disruption its becoming increasingly hard to see that 8 million ambition as being achievable by the end of 2025. The operator has previously talked about balancing this through the potential acquisition of some rival networks to boost their coverage. However, consolidation is a complex and expensive business, due to the many differences that can exist between networks and technologies. But for now, it remains to be seen how successful CityFibre will be in this regard and whether it will be enough to help keep them on target. Chinese automotive brand Changan enters Kenyan market Xinhua) 13:11, December 04, 2023 NAIROBI, Dec. 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese automotive brand Changan has been launched in the Kenyan market and will be distributed by Inchcape Kenya, a motor dealer. Sylvia Agani, the regional sales manager of Changan Automotive, said at a briefing in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, Friday evening that the Chinese vehicles have been tailored for local clients who value quality brands that provide superior driving experience. "Kenyans will now be able to purchase Changan's passenger and light commercial models that offer modern car technology coupled with advanced safety systems at a very competitive price point," Agani said. Agani observed that six models in Changan's innovative range of vehicles including the Oshan sport utility vehicle, Alsvin sedan, Hunter pickup, Star 5 minivan, and Star 5 mini truck single and double cabin will now be available in the Kenyan market. Julia Vershinskaya, the managing director of Inchcape Kenya, said that Changan Automotive is an ideal partner because its cars are suited to local conditions and has already established a presence in other African markets such as Angola, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Ghana. Vershinskaya observed that the cooperation with Changan Automotive will enable more Kenyans to have access to Chinese motor vehicles that offer value for money. "We have more collaborations with Chinese motor vehicle manufacturers than any other automotive distributor in Kenya thanks to our market insight and experience," Vershinskaya added. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) Collocated with ITEXPO, the Leading Communications and Technology Event Since 1999 Shelton, CT December 4, 2023 TMC today announced that HCL Tech has signed on as a Gold sponsor for the Future of Work Expo, part of the #TECHSUPERSHOW, being held February 13-15, 2024 at the Greater Fort Lauderdale/ Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Through interactive sessions, quality keynotes, exciting networking experiences and a recently expanded exhibit floor, the Future of Work Expo connects businesses with the solutions, partners and education they need to drive digital transformation. HCL Tech, Inc. is a renowned managed services provider offering highly reliable, cloud-based, business communications services, IoT services, and business analytics. Were glad to welcome HCL Tech as a Gold sponsor of the 2024 Future of Work Expo, said Rich Tehrani, TMCs CEO and ITEXPO Conference Chairman. HCLSoftware, a division of HCLTech, develops, markets, sells, and supports software for AI and Automation, Data, Analytics and Insights, Digital Transformation, and Enterprise Security. HCLSoftware is the cloud-native solution factory for enterprise software and powers millions of apps at more than 20,000 organizations, including more than half of the Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 companies. Theyre a must-see at the Future of Work Expo. For more information or to register for the Future of Work Expo, contact [email protected]. For media inquiries, contact Michelle Connolly. Companies interested in exhibiting, sponsorship or advertising packages for CannaTech Expo should contact TMC's Dave Rodriguez at 203-852-6800 x146. For the latest Future of Work news, updates and information follow the event on X at @FOW_Expo. About TMC Through our news and solutions-focused editorial platforms, live events, webinars, and online advertising, TMC provides global buyers with valuable insights for making informed technology purchase decisions and successfully navigating markets. In turn, leading technology vendors rely on TMC, FutureofWork and our family of sites and events for exceptional branding, thought leadership, and lead generation opportunities. Our live events, including the ITEXPO #TECHSUPERSHOW, offer unparalleled visibility and sales prospects for all participants. With our customized lead generation programs, including a turnkey webinar program, we consistently deliver a steady stream of leads that translate into sales opportunities and database growth. In addition, display advertising on respected news sites and newsletters generates millions of impressions, bolstering brand reputations. TMC offers a comprehensive 360-degree marketing solution, with services such as event and road show management, as well as expertly crafted content creation including blogs, press releases, articles, and marketing collateral. These efforts contribute to SEO, branding, and overall marketing success. To discover more about how TMC can assist you in achieving your marketing goals through our events and online advertising, please visit www.tmcnet.com. Stay connected with us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X by following @tmcnet. About HCL Tech HCLTech is a global technology company, home to more than 221,000 people across 60 countries, delivering industry-leading capabilities centered around digital, engineering, cloud and AI, powered by a broad portfolio of technology services and products. We work with clients across all major verticals, providing industry solutions for Financial Services, Manufacturing, Life Sciences and Healthcare, Technology and Services, Telecom and Media, Retail and CPG, and Public Services. Excited to announce that HCLTech will be showcasing their Next Gen HXM Productivity Technology called #Nippon - designed to support the Hybrid Workforce for Today & Tomorrows Digital Workplace. HCLSoftware - Nippon Website In todays world, the rate at which organizations are switching over to remote working is increasing on a regular basis. Therefore, maintaining collaboration across the global workforce, along with enhancing employee experience, has become the primary focus. This is also essential for maximizing operational resilience. To navigate these challenges in remote workingwhile ensuring better business performanceproductivity management becomes a critical lever for competitive advantage. Productivity management for an individual, a team, or an organization revolves around four components: The ability to plan strategically, taking a 360-degree view of data; staying focused on a task at hand; aided by minimized hindrance and encouraged by recognition; and finally, the ability to prioritize work and follow through consistently. Collaborative technologies and solutions can help us achieve these. Media and Analyst Contact: Michelle Connolly Senior Marketing Manager TMC 203-852-6800 x 170 [email protected] Contact: Cathy Clarke CNC Associates Tel.: 617-527-2089 Email: [email protected] Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. [ Free eNews Subscription Share this Page Tweet Share Edited by Alex Passett remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Reddit Email 412 Shares Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) Gaza was a free-fire zone on Saturday and Sunday, with UN officials saying that no place in the Strip is safe. Hundreds were killed, almost all of them innocent noncombatants, and including a worrisome number of children. Although Israel tried to pull the stunt of issuing a map with supposedly safe zones, almost no one in Gaza has access to the map because of electricity outages and lack of internet access. Moreover, many Palestinians dont have transport, and there is nothing to eat or drink at those places anyway. Many are refusing to move again, since so many are already internally displaced persons crowded into inadequate United Nations Works and Relief Shelters, which lack sufficient food, water and other necessities for these hundreds of thousands of people made homeless. CNN Morning anchor Isabel Rosales interviewed James Elder of UNICEF from Khan Younis, Gaza, in the supposedly safer south. Elder is an Australian national who lives in Sydney. His bio tag at LinkedIn says, James Elder is Spokesperson for the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF). In this role he has responsibility for speaking on humanitarian crises across the globe, together with all key issues that affect children. In 2022 this role has meant five missions to Ukraine, and three to the Horn of Africa. Elder clearly is putting his life on the line to report on this gut punch of a humanitarian disaster for children in Gaza, over 6,000 of whom are already known to have been blasted to smithereens by Israeli Air Force pilots, with more thousands under the rubble, some of them dying slow deaths from dehydration before they expire. Gaza journalists are essentially putting out goodbye videos, saying they can no longer gather news, and that they may not survive the carpet bombing. First Rosales played a video Elder had put out on social media in which he warned, We see more children with the wounds of war, with the burns, with the shrapnel littering their body, with the broken bones. Inaction by those with influence is allowing the killing of children. This is a war on children. Rosales asked him to describe the situation at the hospital where he was located at greater length: Utter panic. Ive just been in a hospital with bombardments going on all around, I must say. As I was there, ten children came in with the wounds of war ten, maybe, in a couple of hours, with horrendous wounds, with shrapnel to the brain, with eye injuries, with third degree bones. It is a war zone, that hospital. So there is panic among the people. Absolute. It changes every hour here. People dont know where to go. They are almost in a trance. Children in the hospital, Isabel, grabbing me mothers are grabbing me, saying take me somewhere safe. A little girl held me, and I try to take a moment always. She just had two empty water bottles. Shes in a hospital. Please, can you put some water in them? The water in the taps, it is salty, she cant drink it. So it is utter panic. People are being told to move from A to B. Its like a chess game. Except that it ends in the death of children. Its not a game for them. The safe zones, Isabel, I think its so important [to stress that] its a false narrative and its a dangerous narrative. People dont have the transport. They dont know where theyre meant to go. They are places in the desert. They have no water, they have no food, they have no protection in these places. And so when they get there disease stalks. And when they quite often get to these places, they are bombed. Its a very dangerous narrative that is being shared. They are not safe zones. They will be zones of death. CNN Morning: James Elder Note that Elder is reporting that the tap water in Khan Younis is too salty to drink, and because Israel has destroyed the pipelines and denied fuel for pumps, desalinized water is not reaching people. Salt water causes you to urinate out more water than you take in, so over time will kill you from dehydration. This little girl is facing this life-threatening situation in the hospital. Meanwhile, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported Heavy Israeli bombardments from air, land and sea across Gaza, as well as ground operations and fighting. Hamas also fired some rockets at Israel, though apparently ineffectually. The report continues, From the afternoon of 2 December to the afternoon of 3 December, at least 316 people were killed and at least another 664 injured in Gaza, according to the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza. The Israelis summarily ordered 20 percent of Khan Younis to go elsewhere, to the places Elder characterized as death traps. Khan Younis had a population of about 230,000 before the current Israeli carpet bombing campaign, making it roughly as populous as Richmond, Va. or Spokane, Wa. A fifth of its population would be roughly 46,000 people that were being herded elsewhere all of a sudden, under threat of death by bombardment. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu says he is dedicated to thinning out the population of Gaza, some 2.2 million people. Apparently leaving none of them anywhere to live somehow figures into this final solution removing the impurities from the Israeli body politic. Reddit Email 46 Shares ( Tomdispatch.com) In 1981, Indias post office issued a stamp showing the flags of India and occupied Palestine flying side by side above the phrase Solidarity with the Palestinian people. That now seems like ancient history. Today, Hindu nationalists are flying the flags of India and Israel side by side as a demonstration of their support for that countrys catastrophic war on Gaza. Its a match made in heaven (or do we mean hell?), because the two nations have similar problems theyre trying to solve. Israel has long been engaged in the violent suppression of Palestinians whose lands they occupy (including the current devastation of Gaza, an assault that 34 U.N. experts have labeled a genocide in the making). Meanwhile, Indias Hindu nationalist government continues the harsh oppression of its non-Hindu minorities: Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and indigenous people. About the time Zionist settlers were beginning their occupation of Palestine in the early 1920s, an Indian right-wing figure, V.D. Savarkar, fashioned the ideology of Hindutva (Hindu-ness). Today, right-wing Hindu nationalists employ Hindutva and physical violence to further its vision of India as a nation for Hindus and Hindus only. Similarly, Zionism views historic Palestine as a land for Jews and Jews only. These parallel visions, along with the two governments increasingly authoritarian tendencies and ready use of violence, have drawn them into a dark alliance the consequences of which are unpredictable. India Makes New Friends The Republic of India and the State of Israel were born nine months apart in 1947 and 1948, each an offspring of partition. The British-ruled Indian subcontinent was then split into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, while Israel was carved out of a portion of the British Mandate Palestine. Throughout the Cold War, India would be a leader of what came to be known as the nonaligned movement formerly colonized nations that sought to develop independently of both American and Soviet influence. In the 1980s, it also became the first non-Arab nation to recognize the state of Palestine. A similar recognition of Israel didnt come until 1992, around the time India was shifting away from its nonaligned social-democratic stance toward its current adherence to neoliberalism. Embed from Getty Images Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (L), US President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attend the launch of the Global Biofuels Alliance at the G20 summit in New Delhi on September 9, 2023. (Photo by EVELYN HOCKSTEIN / POOL / AFP) (Photo by EVELYN HOCKSTEIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images). In recent decades, India and Israel have established strong trading relationships, especially in the military sphere. In fact, given the massive militarization of its borders with China and Pakistan and its suppression of occupied Kashmir and its people, India has become the top importer of weapons and surveillance equipment from Israel. In 2014, the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won power and its leader, Narendra Modi, became prime minister. In the process, India and Israel grew ever closer. By 2016, as the Washington Post reported, after Indian commandos carried out a raid inside Pakistan-controlled Kashmir in response to an attack by militants on an Indian army post, Modi trumpeted the action, saying: Earlier, we used to hear of Israel having done something like this. But the country has seen that the Indian army is no less than anyone else. Today, the Israeli weapons-robotics firm Elbit Systems has even established a drone factory in India and now has a $300 million contract to supply drones to the Indian army occupying Kashmir. Meanwhile, Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have established a mutual-admiration society, dubbed by the media of both countries the Modi-Bibi bromance. And New Delhi has all but abandoned the Palestinians. Economic Alliances When, on October 27th, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for an immediate, durable, and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities in Gaza, only the U.S., Israel, and a handful of small nations voted no. India abstained. (Apparently, the Modi-Bibi bromance wasnt quite enough to sustain a no vote.) Modi, however, immediately responded to the measures passage by declaring his solidarity with Israel. Economic, political, and diplomatic relations between New Delhi, Tel Aviv, and Washington (all nuclear powers, by the way) had been strengthening even before the current conflict. Last year, for instance, India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States formed the I2U2 Group to attract corporate investment for their mutual benefit. Projects now underway include food parks across India with climate-smart technologies and a unique space-based tool for policymakers, institutions, and entrepreneurs (whatever in or out of the world food parks and space-based tools might be). Then, in September, the G-20 summit of the group of 20 major nations, meeting in New Delhi, approved an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor which, according to Voice of America, would establish a rail and shipping network linking the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan to the Israeli port of Haifa on the Mediterranean Sea. And guess who now operates that very port? A company led by Gautam Adani, Indias richest person and (naturally!) a Modi buddy. Foreign Policy notes, It is also palatable for the Middle East to have India as a major energy market to diversify its exports and offset Chinese influence over critical commodities such as oil and gas. But not surprisingly, the war in Gaza has thrown plans for such a new Indian-oriented economic corridor through the Middle East into limbo. High-, Medium-, and Low-Tech Warfare Militarily, the conflicts in occupied Palestine and occupied Kashmir are both lopsided mismatches. In each, a powerful nation-state is assaulting resource-poor populations, though the scale of slaughter, displacement, immiseration, and death wrought by the Indian regime doesnt faintly approach whats currently being done by Israel in the Gaza Strip at least not yet. While the cases have similarities, magnitude isnt one of them. In Gaza, you have the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), a massive high-tech killing machine financed in large part by the worlds richest nation, facing off against Palestinian resistance groups, including the Qassam Brigade, whose most effective weapons are homemade Yassin antitank grenades and whose defenses largely consist of a network of fortified tunnels. Instead of engaging in face-to-face subterranean combat with the Qassam fighters something that could turn out badly indeed for the IDF the Israelis have been carrying out an industrial-scale bombardment of densely populated areas. As of late November, the result was approximately 15,000 civilians killed (including more than 6,000 children) and the displacement of 1.6 million people, or two-thirds of Gazas population. In India, the Hindu nationalists onslaught against non-Hindu minorities has not been carried out by the Indian Army itself, but by a paramilitary organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), in partnership with the BJP. That unofficial army, founded almost a century ago and modeled on Italian fascist Benito Mussolinis blackshirts and Adolph Hitlers Nazi stormtroopers, has a membership of five to six million and holds daily meetings in more than 36,000 different locales across India. Its shock troops rarely even carry firearms; their weapons are low-tech, crude, and exceptionally cruel, and their targets are unarmed, unsuspecting civilians. They kill or maim using batons, machetes, strangulation, sulfuric acid to the face, and rape, among other horrors. Such attacks by Hindu-nationalist gangs, different as they are from the military assault on Gaza, do have parallels in the occupied West Bank. There, Israeli settlers, some carrying government-supplied small arms, maraud through parts of that area (where they live illegally), beating, torturing, and killing Palestinians, including ethnic Bedouin families. They have expelled people from their homes, stolen their money and possessions, including livestock, and destroyed houses and schools. It is now olive harvest season and Jewish settlers have attacked Palestinians in their olive groves, sometimes forcing them off their ancestors land, perhaps permanently. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed this way since October. Common Language One of the worst atrocities perpetrated against Muslims since Indias partition occurred in 2002 in the western state of Gujarat. (Not coincidentally, that states chief minister at the time was Narendra Modi.) Following the alleged torching of a train compartment in which 58 Hindu nationalist volunteers were traveling, Hindu mobs inflicted state-sponsored terrorism on the Muslim community across Gujarat. More than 2,000 Muslims were killed. Speaking in the aftermath of that horror, then-prime minister A.B. Vajpayee offered a perfunctory admission of regret for the carnage, only to ask rhetorically, Lekin aag lagayi kisne? (But who lit the fire?) The implication was that since some from their community were accused of committing the initial crime, all Gujarat Muslims were responsible and that, however regrettably, justified their slaughter. Similar allegations of collective guilt and justifications for collective punishment have a long history in Israel, as in the current conflict. In October, Israeli President Isaac Herzog claimed that there is an entire nation out there that is responsible. That comment earned Herzog a place in a greatest-hits video of Israeli leaders attempting to defend atrocities inflicted on Gazas 2.3 million inhabitants. Similarly, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. told Sky News, I am very puzzled by the constant concern which the world is showing for the Palestinian people, and is actually showing for these horrible inhuman animals. Some of the language surrounding it can be similar. Allegations that, in their October 7th attack on Israel, Hamas fighters beheaded children and tore fetuses from womens wombs none of which have been substantiated eerily echo the sexualized violence committed by Hindu mobs in Gujarat in 2002 (rape, mutilation, the killing of women and their babies, and other horrors). A report of attackers using a sword to cut a fetus out of a Muslim woman and burning the bodies of both fetus and mother has been told and retold countless times over the past two decades. And within mere hours of the October 7th attack in Israel, BJP politicians and Hindu nationalists in India were spreading propaganda on social media, including accusations that Palestinians were worse than animals and were cutting fetuses from wombs, beheading children, and taking girls as sex slaves. This started in India before IDF spokespeople began spreading similar claims. An Unnatural Disaster Drawing a comparison to the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the Israeli agriculture minister, a member of the security cabinet, recently explained his governments goal to a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz this way: We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba. (Nakba was a reference to Israels forcible expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians from large portions of their territory in 1948.) When the incredulous reporter tossed the minister a lifeline, asking if he really meant what hed said, he doubled down: Gaza Nakba 2023. Thats how itll end. As of now, it certainly looks that way. The IDF bombed apartment blocks, shelters, schools, and hospitals in northern Gaza to force the migration of the population there toward supposedly safe south Gaza. They then began bombing southbound car caravans and even ambulances in which refugees were fleeing. Large groups of other Gazans were forced to make the long journey south on foot through narrow IDF-designated corridors. As the Guardian reported in mid-November, Those walking south under the tense gaze of Israeli troops, through a hellscape of tangled rubble that had been buildings two months ago, along roads shattered by weapons and churned to mud by tanks, had little hope of rest when they reached the south. Shelters are crammed, food and water supplies are so low the UN has warned that Palestinians face the immediate possibility of starvation, infectious diseases are spreading, and the war there is expected to intensify in coming days. Israel soon began bombing parts of South Gaza, too, clearly trying to drive the refugees further south, possibly even through the Raffah gate into Egypt. But Egypt has refused to participate in such an ethnic-cleansing campaign. So, figuratively speaking, millions of desperate Palestinians have their backs to the wall, or in this case, fence, with nowhere to run. As economic and geopolitical ties among Israel, India, and the U.S. have only continued to strengthen, Joe Biden has chummed it up with both Netanyahu and Modi, averting his eyes from their antidemocratic and all-too-violent national visions. He has backed the assault on Gaza all the way and as late as November 18th was still arguing in the Washington Post against a ceasefire. At the same time, he called for increasing the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza to remedy critical staggering shortages of food, water, housing, and fuel. In other words, the Biden administration is treating the catastrophe there like a natural disaster, acting as if theres something terrible happening, something beyond his (or anyones) power to prevent, so all that can be done is to aid the survivors. In truth, administrations in Washington have been treating Israels occupation and immiseration of the West Bank and Gaza like a natural disaster for more than half a century now. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor Peoples Campaign, recently pointed out an incident that suggests just how disingenuous that claim is. In November, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant came under withering criticism for permitting a few small, wholly inadequate truckloads of humanitarian aid to enter Gaza from Egypt. As Theoharis noted, Gallant defended his decision to allow the aid this way: The Americans insisted, and we are not in a place where we can refuse them. We rely on them for planes and military equipment. What are we supposed to do? Tell them no? This puts the lie to the idea that Washington has no influence over the progress or outcome of this war. It does have influence over Israel more than $3 billion worth in the form of military aid provided by Washington every year, not to speak of the $14 billion the Biden administration still wants to reward Israel with. As we write this, we dont know what will happen to the people of Gaza once the temporary ceasefire for prisoner exchanges expires. But rest assured that the governments of India and Israel will continue to feed off each other as they develop new strategies, tactics, and propaganda for their respective campaigns of occupation and oppression, campaigns the U.S. government, through both action and inaction, is endorsing. Consider them now three nations under god(s) of hell. Copyright 2023 Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox Via Tomdispatch.com MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the prestigious International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,800 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and outside of North America. Penn Chavurah, which describes itself as an independent student-run space for progressive Jews at Penn, began planning a screening of Israelism in the summer of 2023. A screening was scheduled for 24 October 2023, but after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the onset of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, Penn Chavurah decided to postpone the screening. In late October 2023 Penn Chavurah submitted a request for university approval of a screening to take place on 28 November 2023; that request was denied on 21 November 2023, with the university citing its concern for the safety and well-being of the Penn community, though it has not prohibited campus events advocating for Israel. Your administration reportedly pressured Penns Middle East Center, which had reserved a room for the screening, to withdraw its support and cancel the screening; it also apparently threatened to rescind Penn Chavurahs funding and status as a student organization if it proceeded with the screening. The documentary was nonetheless screened as planned on 28 November 2023. Media reports indicate that the university is now threatening to initiate disciplinary proceedings against the students who organized the screening. VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Irving Resources Inc. (CSE:IRV)(OTCQX:IRVRF) ("Irving" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that diamond drilling has commenced at its East Yamagano high-grade epithermal gold-silver vein project, Kyushu, Japan. The Shin-Yamagano (New Yamagano) Prospecting Plan covering drilling activities at East Yamagano has received Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry ("METI") Kyushu approval. Importantly, this is the first ever drill program at this large-scale target believed by Irving's geologists to potentially host the eastern extension of the famous Yamagano vein system. Yamagano was one of the largest historic gold mines in Japan. Irving plans to complete an initial one to two drill hole test over the coming months. The Company's BLYLF90D diamond drill is being utilized and is operated by Nagasaki Chiken Co. Ltd, a local drilling company sub-contracted by Irving Resources Japan GK, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Irving. "We are delighted to undertake the first ever drill program at East Yamagano," commented Akiko Levinson, CEO and a director of Irving. "Our sincere gratitude goes out to Shimadzu Ltd, underlying owner of the core mining lease that adjoins East Yamagano and is optioned to Irving, for their assistance in helping make this happen. This drill program has great significance given the recognition of the Yamagano gold mine in Japanese history. The Yamagano district is the closest significant gold vein system to the world famous Hishikari gold mine, just eleven kilometers to the northeast with which it shares many geological similarities.[1] We hope that our drill program leads to the discovery of a deposit equally exciting as Hishikari in what we believe is the eastern extension of the Yamagano deposit." The Yamagano project is subject to the Irving-Newmont Exploration Pty Ltd ("NEPL") and Irving-Sumitomo Corporation exploration alliance agreements. NEPL is a wholly owned subsidiary of Newmont Corporation. Description of the Yamagano Mining License: The Yamagano mining district, situated approximately 11 km southwest of the large, high-grade Hishikari gold mine, is host to innumerable historic gold mine workings, some dating back to 1640AD during the early Edo Period in Japan. Mining focused on a multitude high-grade epithermal gold veins hosted by volcanic rocks blanketing this region. Gold veins at Yamagano appear associated with a particular geophysical feature, an area of anomalously high gravity, thought to represent a buried uplift, or dome, in underlying denser basement sedimentary rocks. Such a geologic feature is believed to have focused gold-depositing hydrothermal fluids to ascend into overlying faults and fissures where they formed extensive high-grade vein networks. A gravity high was recognized very early as an important control at the Kushikino gold mine (56 tonnes or 1.80 Moz Au produced) situated approximately 39 km southwest of Yamagano. Based upon this geologic model, initial targeting of the famous Hishikari deposits (248.2 tonnes or 7.98 Moz Au produced) was driven largely by recognition of an anomalous gravity high underlying that area. Irving believes the gravity high under East Yamagano reflects a buried dome of basement rock and that, given the large footprint of this feature, there is considerable prospectivity for a substantial vein system. About Irving Resources Inc. Irving is a junior exploration company with a focus on gold in Japan. Irving resulted from completion of a plan of arrangement involving Irving, Gold Canyon Resources Inc. and First Mining Finance Corp. Additional information can be found on the Company's website: www.IRVresources.com. Akiko Levinson, President, CEO & Director For further information, please contact: Tel: (604) 682-3234 Toll free: 1 (888) 242-3234 Fax: (604) 971-0209 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Forward-looking information Some statements in this news release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation and other applicable securities laws, including, without limitation, statements as to planned exploration activities and future hopes and prospects for the project. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and, as such, involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the statements. Such factors include, without limitation, customary risks of the mineral resource exploration industry, the availability to Irving of sufficient cash to fund any planned drilling and other exploration activities, as well as the performance of services by third parties. Irving Resources Inc., Irving-Newmont Exploration Pty Ltd and Irving-Sumitomo Corporation do not undertake any obligation to release publicly revisions to any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this news release, or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as may be required under applicable securities laws. Investors should not assume that any lack of update to a previously issued forward-looking information constitutes a reaffirmation of that statement. Continued reliance on forward-looking statements is at investors' own risk. THE CSE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OR ADEQUACY OF THIS RELEASE. [1] No assurance can be given that a similar or any commercially mineable deposit will be determined at the East Yamagano project. December 4, 2023 TheNewswire - London, Ontario Abitibi Metals Corp. (CSE:AMQ) (OTC:AMQFF) (FSE:4KG) (Abitibi or the Company), is pleased to announce a non-brokered private placement of up to 10,000,000 common shares of the Company at a price of $0.30 per common share for up to total gross proceeds of up to $3,000,000 (the "Offering") with lead orders from Frank Giustra, Greg Chamandy and other strategic investors. Jonathon Deluce, CEO of Abitibi Metals, stated, We are thrilled to announce a strategic investment from Mr. Frank Giustra a distinguished financier and mining entrepreneur. Mr. Giustra is known globally for his unparalleled success as he has helped foster the growth of some of the worlds most successful mining companies. We are also thrilled to announce a strategic investment from Mr. Greg Chamandy, an exceptionally accomplished serial entrepreneur with a diverse background spanning multiple industries. Mr. Chamandy, who co-founded Gildan Activewear, also served as the Executive Chairman of Richmond Mines Inc., a company that was acquired by Alamos Gold for $933 million. Mr. Chamandy also served as the Chairman of Cornerstone Capital Resource Group, which was acquired by SolGold. Abitibi Metals has also attracted additional strategic shareholders interested in the growth prospects of both the high-grade B26 Deposit and the Beschefer Project. We will be the first public company to develop the B26 Deposit since its initial discovery by SOQUEM in 1997. The Company intends to utilize these funds to increase the size of its upcoming drill program at the high-grade B26 Polymetallic Copper Deposit and the Beschefer Gold Project, both situated just 7 kilometers apart within the mineral-rich Abitibi Greenstone Belt, and for general and administration expenses including potential awareness initiatives. Mr. Deluce continued This capital will mark a significant step towards realizing our aggressive growth plans for 2024. We now plan to conduct a larger Q1 drill program at B26 with a strong focus on advancing and expanding the existing high-grade resource. We are also set to increase our marketing and awareness initiatives, in tandem with achieving a complete OTCQB listing and forming a world-class advisory team. Finder's fees in cash or securities may be paid on gross proceeds of the financing, as permitted by securities laws. The securities issued in connection with the Offering are subject to the Companys filing requirements with the Canadian Securities Exchange, and all securities will be subject to a four-month statutory hold period after closing. About Abitibi Metals Corp.: Abitibi Metals Corp. is a Quebec-focused mineral acquisition and exploration company focused on the development of quality base and precious metal properties that are drill-ready with high-upside and expansion potential. Abitibis portfolio of strategic properties provides target-rich diversification and includes the high-grade B26 Polymetallic Copper Deposit (Ind: 7.0MT @ 2.94% Cu Eq & Inf: 4.4MT @ 2.97% Cu Eq) and the Beschefer Gold Project, where historical drilling has identified 4 historical intercepts with a metal factor of over 100 g/t gold highlighted by 55.63 g/t gold over 5.57 metres and 13.07 g/t gold over 8.75 metres amongst four modelled zones. With approximately 45% insider ownership and a market cap under $25M, the Company is tightly structured for potential positive developments. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD Jonathon Deluce, Chief Executive Officer For more information, please call 226-271-5170, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , or visit https://www.abitibimetals.com. The Company also maintains an active presence on various social media platforms to keep stakeholders and the general public informed and encourages shareholders and interested parties to follow and engage with the Company through the following channels to stay updated with the latest news, industry insights, and corporate announcements: Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbitibiMetals LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/abitibi-metals-corp-amq-c/ Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-looking statement: This news release contains certain statements, which may constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking information involves statements that are not based on historical information but rather relate to future operations, strategies, financing plans, financial results or other developments on the B26 Project or otherwise. Forward-looking information is necessarily based upon estimates and assumptions, which are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond the Companys control and many of which, regarding future business decisions, are subject to change. These uncertainties and contingencies can affect actual results and could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in any forward-looking statements made by or on the Companys behalf. Although Abitibi has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results to differ from those anticipated, estimated or intended. All factors should be considered carefully, and readers should not place undue reliance on Abitibis forward-looking information. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as expects, estimates, anticipates, or variations of such words and phrases (including negative and grammatical variations) or statements that certain actions, events or results may, could, might or occur. Mineral exploration and development are highly speculative and are characterized by a number of significant inherent risks, which may result in the inability of the Company to successfully develop current or proposed projects for commercial, technical, political, regulatory or financial reasons, or if successfully developed, may not remain economically viable for their mine life owing to any of the foregoing reasons, among others. There is no assurance that the Company will be successful in achieving commercial mineral production and the likelihood of success must be considered in light of the stage of operations. 10.1 % Zinc, 0.3 g/t Gold, 37.0 g/t Silver & 0.6 % Lead over 116.3 meters 16.1 % Zinc, 0.5 g/t Gold, 12.4 g/t Silver & 0.1 % Lead over 16.1 meters RENO, Nev., Dec. 4, 2023 /CNW/ - i-80 GOLD CORP. (TSX: IAU) (NYSE: IAUX) ("i-80", or the "Company") is pleased to report continued high-grade poly-metallic results from the ongoing drill program at the Company's Ruby Hill Property ("Ruby Hill" or "the Property") located in Eureka County, Nevada. The current drill program is focused on both defining and expanding high-grade mineralization in multiple target areas including the Blackjack (skarn) and the Hilltop (skarn and polymetallic CRD) Zones, and advancing metallurgical work associated with these deposits. The most recent intercepts in the Blackjack Zone include the first hole drilled from the east side of the Archimedes pit, which intersected significant high-grade mineralization at depth in the southern portion of the deposit where it remains open for expansion. Highlight results from new drilling include: Blackjack Zone iRH23-42 8.3 % Zn, 0.6 % Pb, 50.1 g/t Ag & 0.6 g/t Au over 20.1 m iRH23-42A 10.1 % Zn, 0.6 % Pb, 37.0 g/t Ag & 0.3 g/t Au over 116.3 m Including 16.3 % Zn, 0.5 % Pb, 42.3 g/t Ag & 0.3 g/t Au over 39.7 m And 14.5% Zn, 1.0% Pb, 59.9 g/t Ag & 0.2 g/t Au over 16.3 m iRH23- 43B 16.1 % Zn, 0.1 % Pb, 12.4 g/t Ag & 0.5 g/t Au over 16.1 m Also 12.2% Zn, 0.1% Pb, 20.1 g/t Ag & 0.9 g/t Au over 8.6 m "The exceptional results being realized at Ruby Hill have attracted significant interest with high-grade polymetallic mineralization being defined in multiple target areas," stated Tyler Hill, Chief Geologist of i-80. "Recent drilling has returned some of the highest-grade mineralization to-date in the Blackjack Zone as we continue to step-out to the south and at depth. Additionally, following the construction of the new drill stations better suited to intersect the East Hilltop Zones, substantial CRD and Skarn mineralization is being defined highlighting the potential to expand mineralization in these recently discovered zones." These new intercepts are complemented by other recent drilling at Blackjack including iRH23-41 that intersected both CRD and skarn mineralized zones that assayed 15.6 % Zn, 8.7 % Pb, 420.4 g/t Ag & 0.6 g/t Au over 40.4 m (CRD) and 10.7 % Zn, 0.4 % Pb, 0.2 g/t Au & 37.0 g/t Ag over 47.9 m (skarn). Skarn mineralization in the Blackjack Zone occurs proximal to the contact of the Graveyard Flats intrusive, and identical geological setting at the East Hilltop Skarn Zone located approximately three hundred metres (300 m) to the south. Future drilling will test this large area as no previous drilling has been completed between these two high-grade horizons (see Figure 1). Drilling is also being completed in the Upper and East Hilltop Zones situated along the Hilltop fault structure where multiple zones of mineralization have now been defined over a strike length of approximately 750 metres including the Upper, Lower and East Hilltop Zones (see Figure 1). As part of the ongoing drilling campaign, several holes are currently being drilled to advance metallurgical knowledge related to the polymetallic mineralization at Ruby Hill. This work is being funded by a third-party company that has recently entered into exclusivity with i-80 to acquire a minority joint venture interest in the Ruby Hill Property. Table 1 Highlight New Assay Results from Blackjack Zone Drilling Drillhole ID Zone Type From (m) To (m) Length (m) Au (g/t) Ag (g/t) Pb (%) Zn (%) iRH23-42 Blackjack Core 596.8 616.9 20.1 0.6 51.1 0.6 8.3 iRH23-42A Blackjack Core 530.8 647.1 116.3 0.3 37.0 0.6 10.1 including Blackjack Core 530.8 547.1 16.3 0.2 59.9 1.0 14.5 And Blackjack Core 605.9 645.7 39.7 0.3 42.3 0.5 16.3 iRH23-43B Blackjack Core 587.0 603.4 16.4 0.5 12.4 0.1 16.1 And Blackjack Core 699.2 707.7 8.6 0.9 20.1 0.1 12.2 True widths estimated 60-90%. UTM Drillhole ID East m North m Elevation m Azimuth Dip NAD83 Zone 11 iRH23-42&42A 587525 4375149 1995 032 -45 iRH23-43 588171 4375020 1987 309 -43 The ongoing drill program is also testing the FAD deposit that is located approximately two kilometres to the south of Ruby Hill where earlier drilling completed by Paycore returned intercepts of up to 8.0 g/t Au, 79.0 g/t Ag, 10.0 % Zn & 1.0 % Pb over 27.4 m in hole PC22-10, and 7.1 g/t Au, 376.0 g/t Ag, 6.3 % Zn & 10.3 % Pb over 14.8 m in hole PC2208. The Company has submitted for approval its plan to develop an underground mine at Ruby Hill with mineralization accessed via a ramp from the Archimedes open pit. The target is to commence construction in 2024 to provide underground platforms for definition drilling and mining operations. Multiple types of mineralization have been identified in the Hilltop Corridor including skarn (Blackjack), CRD (Hilltop/historic mines), distal disseminated Au-Ag mineralization (Mineral Point) and locally Carlin-type gold. The Eureka (Ruby Hill) Mining District has a history of high-grade polymetallic CRD production that began in the 1860's and spanned a period of more than one hundred years. Historic mined grades rank amongst the highest for any CRD district in the world. Since the 1960's, the CRD potential of the Eureka District has been largely overlooked in favour of exploration for Carlin-type gold deposits and the Company considers the opportunity to be substantial. The Ruby Hill Property is one of the Company's primary assets and is host to the core processing infrastructure within the Eureka District of the Battle Mountain-Eureka Trend including an idle leach plant, an active heap leach facility, and is host to multiple gold, gold-silver and polymetallic (base metal) deposits. Please click here for further information on abbreviations and conversions referenced in this press release. QAQC Procedures All samples were submitted to American Assay Laboratories (AAL) of Sparks, NV, which is an ISO 9001 and 17025 certified and accredited laboratory, independent of the Company. Samples submitted through AAL and are run through standard prep methods and analyzed using FA-PB30-ICP (Au; 30g fire assay) and IO-4AB32 (35 element suite; 0.5g 4-acid ICP-OES+MS). Select high-grade gold samples were also completed with metallic screen fire assays using G-FASFAu11. AAL undertakes their own internal coarse and pulp duplicate analysis to ensure proper sample preparation and equipment calibration. i-80 Gold Corp's QA/QC program includes regular insertion of CRM standards, duplicates, and blanks into the sample stream with a stringent review of all results. Qualified Person Tyler Hill, CPG-12146, Chief Geologist at i-80 is the Qualified Person for the information contained in this press release and is a Qualified Person within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101. About i-80 Gold Corp. i-80 Gold Corp. is a Nevada-focused, mining company with a goal of achieving mid-tier gold producer status through the development of multiple deposits within the Company's advanced-stage property portfolio with processing at i-80's centralized milling facilities. i-80 Gold's common shares are listed on the TSX and the NYSE American under the trading symbol IAU:TSX and IAUX:NYSE. Further information about i-80 Gold's portfolio of assets and long-term growth strategy is available at www.i80gold.com or by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Certain statements in this release constitute "forward-looking statements" or "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including but not limited to, the expansion or mineral resources at Ruby Hill and the potential of the Ruby Hill project. Such statements and information involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the company, its projects, or industry results, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or information. Such statements can be identified by the use of words such as "may", "would", "could", "will", "intend", "expect", "believe", "plan", "anticipate", "estimate", "scheduled", "forecast", "predict" and other similar terminology, or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. These statements reflect the Company's current expectations regarding future events, performance and results and speak only as of the date of this release. Forward-looking statements and information involve significant risks and uncertainties, should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results and will not necessarily be accurate indicators of whether or not such results will be achieved. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements or information, including, but not limited to: material adverse changes, unexpected changes in laws, rules or regulations, or their enforcement by applicable authorities; the failure of parties to contracts with the company to perform as agreed; social or labour unrest; changes in commodity prices; and the failure of exploration programs or studies to deliver anticipated results or results that would justify and support continued exploration, studies, development or operations. 2.10% Li 2 O over 4m from the new MK3 Pegmatite VANCOUVER, BC, Dec. 4, 2023 /CNW/ - North Arrow Minerals Inc. (TSXV: NAR) ("North Arrow") is pleased to report lithium assay results from fall 2023 exploration work at its 100% owned MacKay and LDG Lithium Projects in the Northwest Territories. The two properties are located 10km apart, along the alignment of the annual winter road connecting Yellowknife with the Diavik diamond mine, approximately 13km to the north of LDG. Highlights of these assay results include: At the MacKay Project, 14 of 17 samples collected from the newly discovered MK3 pegmatite have returned over 1% Li 2 O, including 5 representative grab samples returning 5.25%, 4.08%, 2.71%, 1.92% and 1.10% Li 2 O . have returned over 1% Li O, including 5 representative grab samples returning and . A composite rock sawn channel sample from MK3 returned 2.10% Li 2 O over 4 metres. returned Two additional composite 4 metre channel samples from MK3 have returned 1.49% Li 2 O and 1.43% Li 2 O . have returned and . Three representative grab samples from the previously unsampled northeastern extent of the MK1 spodumene pegmatite returned 3.21% Li 2 O, 2.62% Li 2 O and 0.11% Li 2 O. returned and 0.11% Li O. Representative samples from the northern extent of the LDG Project's SD2 spodumene pegmatite have returned 3.19% Li 2 O, 1.53% Li 2 O and 1.46% Li 2 O , extending confirmed spodumene mineralization 260m to the north. have returned and , extending confirmed spodumene mineralization to the north. A prospecting sample has returned 5.57% Li 2 O at the southern end of a newly mapped 200m long subcropping spodumene pegmatite approximately 120m west of the main SD2 pegmatite showing. Ken Armstrong, President and CEO of North Arrow commented, "The initial lithium assays from the MK3 spodumene pegmatite at North Arrow's MacKay Project are highly encouraging and confirm MK3 as a new drill target. Additionally, the confirmation of significant lithium grades in the SD2 area of the LDG Project provides confidence the area hosts multiple, subparallel spodumene pegmatites. Collectively, these results help advance our thesis that the LDG and MacKay Projects could host spodumene pegmatites of similar size and grade to the deposits currently being drilled by other workers in the Yellowknife Pegmatite Province (YPP). With the MacKay and LDG Projects, and the DeStaffany Project in the YPP, North Arrow now holds a 100% interest in three Northwest Territories lithium projects where, during 2023, we have defined multiple drill ready spodumene pegmatites. We are working towards seeing all three properties drilled in 2024." MacKay Lithium Project The MK3 spodumene pegmatite was discovered this fall (please see North Arrow news release dated October 12, 2023), and is a prominent 15 to 20m wide, white pegmatite exposure with common 2-30 cm long spodumene crystals. MK3 has been traced near continuously for approximately 130m and remains open along strike to the west. Five representative grab samples, collected from various locations along the showing have returned 5.25%, 4.08%, 2.71%, 1.92% and 1.10% Li 2 O. Three follow-up channel samples, each four metres in length, have returned 2.10% Li 2 O, 1.49% Li 2 O and 1.43% Li 2 O, providing a good representative indication of lithium mineralization within the pegmatite. It's important to note the channels were cut from outcrop areas amenable to sampling with a rock saw and did not test the entire exposed width of the pegmatite. An image showing the locations of the channel and grab samples at MK3 can be found here and below. Follow up sampling of the MK1 pegmatite, discovered earlier this summer approximately 4.5 km to the east of MK3, focused on the eastern extent of the showing, where three representative grab samples returned 3.21% Li 2 O, 2.62% Li 2 O and 0.11% Li 2 O. These results build on earlier sampling, from which 10 of 12 rock samples returned over 1.1% Li 2 O (please see North Arrow news releases dated September 20, 2023 and August 14, 2023 for details) and extend confirmed spodumene mineralization at MK1 to a total strike length of 450m. An image compiling significant assay results from MK1 can be found here and below. The MacKay project area has also been expanded to 8,661ha with the staking of additional mineral claims and hosts additional evolved pegmatite occurrences that require follow up evaluation in 2024. LDG Lithium Project New assays from the SD2 target area on the LDG property extend confirmed spodumene mineralization 260m northwards with three representative grab samples returning 3.19% Li 2 O, 1.53% Li 2 O and 1.46% Li 2 O. In addition, a separate, subcropping pegmatite has returned 5.57% Li 2 O. This sample was collected at the southern end of a 200m long, subcropping spodumene pegmatite running sub parallel to and approximately 120m west of the main SD2 pegmatite showing. Outcrop exposures at both the SD2 and SD4 areas, where July sampling returned assays of up to 1.7% Li 2 O and 2.1% Li 2 O, respectively (please see North Arrow news release dated September 18, 2023 for details), are generally of low profile and limited by extensive glacial overburden. However, ongoing interpretation of field mapping data and detailed orthophoto and geophysical information indicate these pegmatites may extend beneath overburden along their interpreted strike. The discovery of several subcropping pegmatites in the SD2 area, adjacent to the main pegmatite showing, support the concept that multiple subparallel pegmatites occur in these target areas with the same size potential as seen at the spodumene pegmatite occurrences in the Yellowknife Pegmatite Province. An image compiling significant assay results from SD2 can be found here and below. Sample Collection, Laboratory Procedures and QA/QC Samples were collected in the field from rock sawn channels or as representative grab samples using a rock hammer. Channel samples were cut using a portable rock saw, with sampled material collected at 1m intervals, chipped from between parallel incisions cut nominally 3-4cm apart and 3-4cm deep. Individual channel and grab samples were collected into plastic polymer bags, sealed and transported to ALS Global, where sample preparation and analytical work was conducted. Samples were prepared using ALS method CRU-31 (crushing to 70% passing through a 2mm screen), SPL-21 (split sample - riffle split), and PUL-31 (pulverize up to 250g to 85% passing through a 75-micron screen). A 0.2g subsample of the pulverized material was analyzed for 52 elements using a sodium peroxide fusion by ICP-MS (ALS method ME-MS89L). Samples returning >500ppm Li were also assayed using a 0.2g subsample dissolved in a sodium peroxide solution and analyzed for lithium according to ALS method Li-ICP81. Lithium results are reported by the lab as % Li and have been multiplied by 2.153 to convert to % Li 2 O. Results passed QA/QC screening at ALS and North Arrow's inserted certified reference materials returned results within acceptable limits. About North Arrow Minerals North Arrow is a Canadian based exploration company focused on the identification and evaluation of lithium and other exploration opportunities in Canada. North Arrow's management, board of directors and advisors have significant successful experience in the global exploration and mining industry. North Arrow is evaluating spodumene pegmatites at its 100% owned LDG, MacKay, and DeStaffany Lithium Projects (NWT) and is also exploring for lithium in Nunavut at the Bathurst Inlet pegmatite field and continues work to identify additional lithium exploration opportunities in northern Canada. North Arrow also owns interests in the Naujaat (NU), Pikoo (SK), and Loki (NWT) Diamond Projects and maintains a 100% interest in the Hope Bay Oro Gold Project, located approximately 3 km north of Agnico Eagle's Doris Gold Mine, Nunavut. North Arrow's exploration programs are conducted under the direction of Kenneth Armstrong, P.Geo. (NWT/NU, ON), President and CEO of North Arrow and a Qualified Person under NI 43-101. Mr. Armstrong has reviewed and approved the technical contents of this press release. North Arrow Minerals Inc. /s/ "Kenneth A. Armstrong" Kenneth Armstrong President and CEO Website: www.northarrowminerals.com Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release contains "forward-looking statements" including but not limited to statements with respect to North Arrow's plans, the estimation of a mineral resource and the success of exploration activities. Forward-looking statements, while based on management's best estimates and assumptions, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, including but not limited to: risks related to the successful integration of acquisitions; risks related to general economic and market conditions; closing of financing; the timing and content of upcoming work programs; actual results of proposed exploration activities; possible variations in mineral resources or grade; failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; accidents, labour disputes, title disputes, claims and limitations on insurance coverage and other risks of the mining industry; changes in national and local government regulation of mining operations, tax rules and regulations. Although North Arrow has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. North Arrow undertakes no obligation or responsibility to update forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Faustin Twagiramungu, Rwanda's prime minister after the 1994 genocide and a virulent critic of President Paul Kagame, died in exile in Belgium on Saturday aged 78, his party announced. Twagiramungu served as Rwanda's premier from 1994 to 1995 and unsuccessfully ran for president in the 2003 elections won by Kagame, who has been in power ever since. Twagiramungu later went into voluntary exile in Belgium, where he lived with his family, and became a fierce critic of Kagame's government, calling it a "cruel dictatorship". His party, the Rwandan Dream Initiative, released a statement saying Twagiramungu died on Saturday morning without providing further details on the circumstances. Government critic Victoire Ingabire, jailed on terrorism charges before being released in 2018, told AFP Twagiramungu "will never be forgotten in Rwandan politics and history" and was "a great fighter for democracy". Ukraine launched an enquiry on Sunday into what it said was an "execution" by Russia forces of two unarmed Ukrainian soldiers who had signalled their intention to surrender. Ukrainian officials condemned the reported incident as a "war crime". There was no official reaction from Moscow. On Saturday a short video, whose authenticity could be confirmed by AFP, was posted on Telegram showing two men coming out of a shelter, one with his hands above his head, before lying on the ground in front of another group of soldiers. This is followed by what appears to be gunfire, and rising smoke, before the video cuts off abruptly. The public prosecutor's office in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk said that according to "preliminary data", the images were filmed near the village of Stepove, close to Avdiivka, an eastern town where fighting is raging. "The video shows how a group of people in Russian uniforms shoot at close range two unarmed servicemen in the uniform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who surrendered as prisoners," the prosecutor's office wrote. "Investigators and prosecutors have started an investigation". "The killing of prisoners of war is a gross violation of the Geneva Conventions and is classified as a serious international crime." The Ukrainian army's strategic communications centre said on Saturday it possessed "confirmed information" that the video showed the "execution" by Russian forces of "unarmed soldiers". Ukraine's human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, condemned the incident as a "war crime". - Violating the rules of war - The Ukrainian soldiers "were disarmed and their hands were raised", Lubinets wrote on Telegram on Saturday. "They did not pose any threat! The Russian side had to capture them and give them the status of prisoners of war." The speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, accused Russian forces of violating the rules of war. The Ukrainian army urged the international community to hold Russia's military leadership "accountable". In March, another video went viral, appearing to show a Ukrainian soldier being shot dead after shouting "glory to Ukraine". At that time the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said his office had documented numerous violations of international humanitarian law against prisoners of war. These included "numerous summary executions and targeted attacks on civilians" by Russian forces and affiliated armed groups like the Wagner mercenary force, as well as "621 cases of enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention". The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court vowed Sunday to step up efforts to investigate alleged war crimes, as he wrapped up a visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Karim Khan stressed his visit was "not investigative in nature" but said he was able to speak to victims on both sides of the conflict. More than 15,200 people have been killed in the besieged Palestinian territory of Gaza, according to Islamist group Hamas, in more than eight weeks of combat and heavy bombardment. "My office will further intensify its efforts to advance its investigations in relation to this situation," Khan said. "Credible allegations of crimes during the current conflict should be the subject of timely, independent examination and investigation." Opening its doors in 2002, the ICC is the world's only independent court set up to probe the gravest offences including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It opened an investigation in 2021 into Israel as well as Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups for possible war crimes in the Palestinian territories. Khan has previously said this investigation now "extends to the escalation of hostilities and violence since the attacks that took place on October 7, 2023". But ICC teams have not been able to enter Gaza or investigate in Israel, which is not an ICC member. The war broke out when Hamas militants burst through Gaza's militarised border into Israel on October 7 and killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, while also taking around 240 hostages, according to Israeli authorities. Khan said he witnessed "calculated cruelty" at the sites attacked by Hamas. Those attacks "represent some of the most serious international crimes that shock the conscience of humanity, crimes which the ICC was established to address". He also emphasised that "the manner in which Israel responds to these attacks is subject to clear legal parameters that govern armed conflict". Acknowledging that conflict in densely populated areas such as Gaza was "inherently complex", international humanitarian law must still apply, Khan said. Legal experts have told AFP that both Hamas and Israel could face war crimes charges over the conflict. Five countries called in mid-November for an ICC investigation into the Israel-Hamas war, with Khan saying his team had collected a "significant volume" of evidence on "relevant incidents". Khan also called for humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza and not be seized by Hamas. "All actors must comply with international humanitarian law. If you do not do so, do not complain when my office is required to act," he warned. Ukraine launched an enquiry on Sunday into what it said was an "execution" by Russia forces of two unarmed Ukrainian soldiers who had signalled their intention to surrender. Ukrainian officials condemned the reported incident as a "war crime". There was no official reaction from Moscow. On Saturday a short video, whose authenticity could not be confirmed by AFP, was posted on Telegram showing two men coming out of a shelter, one with his hands above his head, before lying on the ground in front of another group of soldiers. This is followed by what appears to be gunfire, and rising smoke, before the video cuts off abruptly. The public prosecutor's office in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk said that according to "preliminary data", the images were filmed near the village of Stepove, close to Avdiivka, an eastern town where fighting is raging. "The video shows how a group of people in Russian uniforms shoot at close range two unarmed servicemen in the uniform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who surrendered as prisoners," the prosecutor's office wrote. "Investigators and prosecutors have started an investigation". "The killing of prisoners of war is a gross violation of the Geneva Conventions and is classified as a serious international crime." The Ukrainian army's strategic communications centre said on Saturday it possessed "confirmed information" that the video showed the "execution" by Russian forces of "unarmed soldiers". Ukraine's human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, condemned the incident as a "war crime". - Violating the rules of war - The Ukrainian soldiers "were disarmed and their hands were raised", Lubinets wrote on Telegram on Saturday. "They did not pose any threat! The Russian side had to capture them and give them the status of prisoners of war." The speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, accused Russian forces of violating the rules of war. The Ukrainian army urged the international community to hold Russia's military leadership "accountable". In March, another video went viral, appearing to show a Ukrainian soldier being shot dead after shouting "glory to Ukraine". At that time the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said his office had documented numerous violations of international humanitarian law against prisoners of war. These included "numerous summary executions and targeted attacks on civilians" by Russian forces and affiliated armed groups like the Wagner mercenary force, as well as "621 cases of enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention". ZLOCHYN.DP: What makes it difficult, from your point of view, to investigate war crimes in Donetsk and Luhansk regions? KLAUS HOFFMANN: Unfortunately, a significant part of these regions is still under occupation. This creates considerable difficulties for investigations because, due to the lack of access, our Ukrainian colleagues are often unable to inspect the crime scene and document evidence. The only option left is to work with those witnesses and victims of crimes who were able to leave occupied territory. I should also point out that in the current situation, our Ukrainian colleagues are facing a situation where they must work in close proximity to the war zone, with daily sirens and constant attacks. This in itself greatly complicates their work. Yet another challenge is the overwhelming number of cases. Currently, we need to find criteria by which to prioritize cases. This, of course, does not mean that the investigation of all other cases should be dismissed. What is the current significance of trials held in absentia within the Ukrainian judicial system? We explain to our Ukrainian colleagues and friends that international justice allows proceedings in absentia [without the presence of the accused]. Naturally, we understand that society and, above all, the victims of war crimes, are eager for justice to be served as quickly as possible. Certainly, if the evidence is gathered, the trial can take place even in the absence of the accused. However, it is important to understand that international standards stipulate strong protection of the rights of the accused. We see some difficulties in this regard as well. In particular, the proper informing of the accused, supposedly a Russian soldier, is in fact often delayed by the court. It is obvious that communication between the embassies of the countries at war does not work. Another problem is ensuring the right to defence. Although the accused has a lawyer, they have no contact with each other, so it is very difficult for a defence lawyer to be involved in such proceedings. With this in mind, we mentioned to our colleagues that other countries, such as Croatia, have conducted a significant number of trials in absentia. But then a number of cases were reviewed by the European Court of Human Rights. It should be understood in advance that some court decisions will be subject to appeal in Strasbourg in the future. Could you share your thoughts on the way collaborators and traitors are tried in Ukraine? This is a very difficult question. A considerable part of such criminal cases, of course, must be investigated and, therefore, will be investigated by prosecutors. For example, the case of the Head of the Kharkiv Security Service and the cases of other people who assisted in the Russian invasion, allowed it to occur and also helped to establish the occupation authorities or actively interacted with Russia. However, my recommendation to my colleagues is to follow the relevant instructions while determining whether or not there was a fact of collaboration in each particular case. It is no secret that most of the "notorious" collaborators have fled the de-occupied territories. Yes, it's true. When the occupied territories were liberated, the "main" collaborators fled to Russia. But as for the people who are now being investigated and tried as suspects or have already been indicted for collaboration, first of all, we need to find out why they stayed in the occupied territories. To survive, because of their families or something else? It is necessary to be very careful with such cases. Once a prosecutor in the Kyiv region suggested during a discussion that there should be a general presumption of innocence for people who remained after the liberation of the temporarily occupied territories because we cannot begin to imagine that all these people were voluntarily involved in collaboration activities. It is a challenging task to separate those who were trying to earn some money and feed their families from the real collaborators. And to conclude, I would like to add that the way the Ukrainian justice system will deal with collaborators is not only a legal but also a political problem. In this regard, it is reasonable to rely on the experience of transitional justice in European countries, particularly in postwar Germany. What would you say is the main difference between the war crimes in the former Yugoslavia you dealt with as a prosecutor and the crimes of the current war? I will start with a great number of similarities. I worked on a case against Serbian war criminals and saw many common features in the actions of the Russian and Serbian armies. It includes terrorizing the civilian population regularly, imprisoning civilians and executing them. Also, there are numerous sexual crimes. Another common feature is the use of prisoners in hostilities. What happened in the Balkans is happening again. This time it is happening in Russia. The biggest distinction is the scale of the war and the completely different number of war crimes and their victims. There are differences in the political aspect as well. For instance, it is important to remember that this war was started and is being led by Russia, which is one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. In other words, it is one of the countries that is supposed to ensure peace in the world. Is it your opinion that sooner or later those responsible for war crimes committed in Ukraine will be punished? And what is needed for this to happen? This is a very important question both for victims of war crimes and for society as a whole. I believe that the arrest warrant for Putin issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague is a very important step in this direction. In the context of the Yugoslavia tribunal, no one really expected that the top officials there Milosevic, Mladic, Karadzic would be tried. Obviously, the political situation in Serbia and Russia is different. But we have to wait. Over time, there will be more proceedings and more arrests. War criminals will be brought back from Russia or arrested while in other countries. As for political leaders like Putin and Shoigu [Russias Minister of Defense], we'll see. It may take a few years, but I am sure that one day these people will be detained. This interview is part of our coverage of war crimes justice produced in partnership with Ukrainian journalists. A first version of this article was published on the "Zlochyn.dp.ua" website. As Netflix unveils the much-awaited sequel, "Sweet Home" Season 2, Kim Moo Yeol attracted the attention of viewers due to his head-turning visuals. Starting the month with a bang, the original series featured a mix of new and returning cast members. With Song Kang, Lee Jin Wook, Go Min Si, Park Gu Young, and Lee Si Young reprising their roles as Green Home survivors, the series also showcased a roster of talented stars joining. Among the new characters are Jung Jinyoung, Oh Jung Se, Yoo Oh Sung, and Kim Moo Yeol. Interestingly, aside from being one of the main leads, Kim Moo Yeol has been getting a lot of attention due to his portrayal of Kim Young Hoo. Netizens Point Out the Resemblance of Kim Moo Yeol to Ong Seung Wu Taking on the role of Kim Young Hoo, he is the second-in-command of the Special Forces Guards. In "Sweet Home" season 2, Kim Moo Yeol's character exudes tactical skills and a head-strong militaristic mind. In addition, he is also a former UDT sergeant, making him a significant person to boost resilience against the destructive monster threat, as one of his missions is to keep the human survivors alive by any means necessary. IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Lee Jin Wook Reveals Telling 'Sweet Home' Co-Star Song Kang to 'Exercise Less' - But For What Reason? After Netflix officially released "Sweet Home" season 2 on December 1, viewers got to see Kim Yoo Yeol's different side as he transformed into a hotshot soldier. Due to this, the public couldn't help but gush over his looks, especially his similarities with fellow actors. Netizens also pointed out his uncanny resemblance to Ong Seung Wu. Based on their posts, Kim Moo Yeol looked like the older version of the "Strong Girl Namsoon" star. In addition, netizens said that they could play father and son in one drama. Is 'Sweet Home' Season 2 Worth Watching? After a three-year break, Netflix delivered a show-stopping and mind-boggling "Sweet Home" season 2, in which the Green Home residents faced more challenges and met terrifying creatures as dangerous areas went beyond their normal surroundings, and this time, staying alive became their only goal. As the 8-episode sequel aired, viewers witnessed how the virus evolved and now had a term called "special infectee," which describes half-humans and half-monsters like Cha Hyun Soo. On top of it, Lee Jin Wook's character, Pyeon Sang Wook, went from protagonist to villain in the new season. Other than the returning cast, the sequel also showcased a slew of new characters, adding color to the drama's excitement. READ MORE: 'Juvenile Justice' Star Kim Hye Soo Reveals Stand on Juvenile Law Revision + Shares Honest Thoughts on Co-Star Kim Moo Yeol For more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news, keep your tabs open here at KDramaStars. KDramaStars owns this article Written by Geca Wills Get ready for the second part of "Weak Hero" as Netflix introduces the cast lineup with Park Ji Hoon, Ryeoun, Yoo Soo Bin and more. For the second time around, the series is expected to dominate prime time with its unique and never-done-before narrative. Catch the details by reading more. Netflix Confirms Final Cast Lineup For 'Weak Hero Class 2' The wait is over as "Weak Hero Class 2" finally announces its complete cast lineup! After Wavve transferred the work to Netflix, excitement skyrocketed through the roof. Many also looked back at how the first season dominated Hallyu by binge-watching all 8 episodes. On December 4, Netflix finally announced the production of "Weak Hero Class 2" with the star-studded cast including Park Ji Hoon, Ryeoun, Choi Min Young, Yoo Soo Bin, Bae Na Ra, Lee Jae Min and Lee Jun Young. The first season established Park Ji Hoon's Yeon Si Eun's life as an outcast who overthrows bullies inside and outside of school by using his brain to win battles through strategies. "Weak Hero Class 2" continues Yeon Si Eun's story as he transfers to Eunjang High School with the trauma of being unable to protect his best friend. In his new world, he matures as he struggles to fend for himself. On the other hand, the new photos shared by Netflix highlight the new cast members who will join Yeon Si Eun. Ryeoun of "Twinkling Watermelon" will play Park Hoo Min while Choi Min Young of "XO, Kitty" plays Seo Joon Tae. Lee Min Jae will portray Go Hyun Tak while Yoo Soo Bin returns as Choi Hyo Man, Yeon Si Eun's opponent. Bae Na Ra and Lee Jun Young play Na Baek Jin and Geum Sung Jae, respectively. READ MORE: Ji Woo Exudes Aura As Queen In 'Love Song For Illusion' The new addition to the roster is expected to create a fun and exhilarating atmosphere as Yeon Si Eun finds new friends that he must protect from the bad guys. Park Ji Hoon On Reprising Yeon Si Eun Role In 2022, Park Ji Hoon completely changed his soft image into a dark, angsty teen as he transformed into Yeon Si Eun. Thanks to his flawless performance, he was named as Best New Actor at the 2023 Blue Dragon Series Awards and 2023 Korea Drama Awards. "My heart is pounding already. The series is an important project to me as a rookie actor," Park Ji Hoon shared his honest feelings. "I will work hard to show a different side of me and how I've matured in the upcoming season." "Weak Hero Class 2" is expected to be released some time next year so stay tuned for more details. ALSO READ: Shin Hye Sun Chose To Star In 'Welcome To Samdalri' Because of Ji Chang Wook? Here's What We Know KDramaStars owns this article. Written by Elijah Mully. Award-winning actress Go Min Si confidently showed some skin with her newest sultry pictorial. See the photos here! Go Min Si Showcases Figure in Calvin Klein Pictorial On December 2, following the release of "Sweet Home 2," Go Min Si dropped an unconventional underwear pictorial. The actress uploaded snippets of her photoshoot on her Instagram, featuring herself wearing Calvin Klein. In the pictures, the "Youth of May" star exuded allure by exhibiting her sultry expressions and taut stomach. Her fit physique, which seems to contradict her innocent visuals, induces admiration from her fans. Go Min Si's Hilarious Reaction at 44th Blue Dragon Film Awards Go Viral Go Min Si bagged the title Best New Actress at the 44th Blue Dragon Film Awards for her performance in the movie "Smugglers," where she worked with celebrity-icon Kim Hye Soo. The prestigious ceremony was held last November 25 in Seoul. ALSO READ: New Meme Is Born! Go Min Si Has the Most Priceless Reaction to Her 'Best New Actress' Trophy at the 44th Blue Dragon Film Awards She also went viral for her candid reaction after announcing her award. Many found her reaction funny as she didn't expect to receive such a huge recognition. She almost tripped before taking center stage to receive the trophy. Thankfully, her senior co-stars assisted and cheered for her. What's Next for Go Min Si? Go Min Si once again captivated viewers with her spunky character in Netflix's original series "Sweet Home 2," which premiered on December 1. After the much-anticipated sequel, Go Min Si might headline the romance drama "I'm Against My Romance." It features the story of ex-lovers who are in a situation where a reunion with one another is a continuation of a familiar relationship - or the start of a new relationship. Choi Hyun Wook was also offered to join the lead cast but soon turned down the project. Hallyu superstar, Lee Jong Suk, also reportedly received a casting offer to become Go Min Si's partner in the drama, and the actor is currently reviewing the script. YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: Go Min Si & Choi Hyun Wook as Ex-Lovers? K-Stars Reportedly to Lead New Romance Drama The drama will be penned by "Something in the Rain" writer Kim Eun, and is expected to be helmed by director Lee Eung Bok, the creative mind behind the hit series "Descendants of the Sun," "Goblin," "Mr. Sunshine," and "Sweet Home." Go Min Si is also returning to Netflix with a new series "In the Woods With No One," alongside Kim Eun Seok, Yoon Kye Sang, and Lee Jung Eun. What can you say about Go Min Si's daring pictorial? Share your thoughts/replies in the comments! For more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news and updates, keep your tabs open here at KDramaStars. KDramaStars owns this article. Shai Collins wrote this. Shin Hye Sun's life gets ruined due to a nasty rumor. In episode 2, she resorts to going back to her hometown after all is said and done. In the new episode of "Welcome To Samdalri," she and Ji Chang Wook finally reunite. Keep on reading to know more. Jo Sam Dal Returns Home After having her career ruined over a rumor, Jo Sam Dal (Shin Hye Sun) tries to talk with her assistant as a last ditch effort. Sadly, it gets worse. Her haters and reporters finally make their way to her house after her address gets leaked. Because her sisters' lives are also being ruined, she's left with no choice but to go home. Meanwhile, Jo Yong Pil (Ji Chang Wook) considers going to Seoul for his childhood friend. When she sees her daughter in Jeju Island after years of absence, Jo Sam Dal's mother gets a deja vu when her daughters return after causing ruin in their lives. Jo Sam Dal Breaks Down Jo Sam Dal later reveals the truth to her family, sharing her pain. The three Jo sisters sit together for drinks to reminisce about their past and bond once again. The following day, everyone celebrates Jo Sam Dal's return. With this, everyone also talks about her relationship with Jo Yong Pil. READ MORE: 'Welcome To Samdalri' Episode 1: Shin Hye Sun Gets Hit With Vicious Rumors Meanwhile, the negative comments on the Internet about Jo Sam Dal continue. Sadly, even her colleagues assume the worst of her. She ends up making a mess in her home. Jo Yong Pil assumes that a thief has broken into the Jo family's home and gets into action. However, he's surprised to see Jo Sam Dal and the memories of the past come rushing back including their breakup. Seeing her state, he makes up a reason to leave. Jo Sam Dal & Jo Yong Pil Finally Reunite Later that night, Jo Sam Dal sits near the docks and tries to fix everything. When she moves towards the water, Jo Yong Pil arrives but ends up falling into the deep waters. Unfortunately, he doesn't know how to swim. Jo Sam Dal then dives in to save Jo Yong Pil. At the end of the episode, viewers are able to see little Jo Yong Pil and Jo Sam Dal share a unique bond, and how they fell for one another. Years later, Jo Yong Pil visits Jo Sam Dal's exhibition that she worked hard on despite being canceled. In the end, he's the only person to visit her exhibit. YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE THIS: 'Castaway Diva' Episode 11: Park Eun Bin & Chae Jong Hyeop Share Sweet Kiss KDramaStars owns this article. Written by Elijah Mully. We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form By Ambrose Musasizi President Museveni has cautioned residents in the districts of Rakai and Kyotera against eating meat when they are not sure about its source. The President said such meat will expose them to anthrax which has already claimed 17 lives while 28 others are bedridden in several villages of Kabira Sub County in Kyotera District. I was informed about a disease known as Anthrax in these areas of Rakai and Kyotera. It catches people after they have eaten meat of an infected animal or touched a dead animal which is already sick , Mr Museveni said during the commemoration of the World Aids Day at Kiswaaga Village, Byakabanda Sub County in Rakai District last Friday. The President however said since Anthrax is not contagious, it is the reason why the government maintained the venue of this years World Aids Day commemoration rather than shifting it to Kayunga District as it had been proposed five days prior to the event. At the function, meat was not served as the norm has been at most public functions in the area. Anthrax is caused by a bacteria known as Bacillus anthracis. Humans generally acquire the disease directly or indirectly from infected animals or occupational exposure to affected or contaminated animal products. It occurs naturally in soil and commonly affects domestic and wild animals. People can get sick with anthrax if they come in contact with infected animals or contaminated animal products. Domestic and wild animals can become infected with anthrax when they breathe in or ingest spores in contaminated soil, plants or water. The animals can include cattle, sheep, goats, antelopes. In areas where domestic animals have had anthrax in the past, routine vaccination can help prevent outbreaks. Upon his arrival in Rakai, Mr Museveni unveiled a monument at Kibaale trading centre in appreciation of individuals who have played a big role in the fight against the Aids scourge in the past four decades . He later urged Ugandans to avoid contracting the virus as a way of neutralizing it to prevent new infections. Available statistics from the Uganda AIDS Commission (UAC) show that more than 50,000 acquired HIV/Aids in the last two years and 17,000 Aids-related deaths occur per year. These new infections are occurring among young girls and women between the ages of 15 to 24 years. This translates into about 25,000 people per year and about 68 per day . He advised the people already living with the virus to live a positive life and regularly take their medicine. We lost some soldiers in the Army on Antiretroviral (ARVs) drugs because their bodies weakened due to being overworked. Make sure that while taking the ARVs, you eat well and avoid stressing the body, he said. The day was marked under the theme: Ending Aids by 2030, Keeping Communities at the Centre. The Director General of Uganda AIDS Commission (UAC), Dr Nelson Musoba, said Uganda has been a pioneer in implementing successful prevention and awareness programmes which has served as a model for other nations. The governments commitment, the collaboration with donors has resulted in providing accessible and affordable antiretroviral treatment that has undoubtedly saved countless lives and demonstrated Ugandas dedication to the health and wellbeing of its citizens, he said. By Franklin Draku Government is under the spotlight again for sending a 600-strong delegation to the 28th Conference of Parties that is underway in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE). This has opened the government for scrutiny over its spending choices amid revenue constraints It makes Uganda one of the African countries with the largest delegations, just a few tiers below Nigeria, the second largest economy on the continent- represented by over 1,400 delegates. Three months after the budget reading, the government suffered intense criticism after it dispatched two delegations of 70 notable officials to the UN General Assembly in New York, where some of the representatives were from dockets unrelated to the theme of the September summit. On the team are 13 ministers and 58 Members of Parliament, alongside senior government officials. Julius Mukunda, the Executive Director of the Civil Society Budget Advocacy Group says delegates should be scrutinized based on technical competence and capacity to meaningfully engage with issues up for discussion. Speaking to Daily Monitor earlier, Charles Odongtho, the spokesperson of the Office of the Prime Minister said Prime Minister Robinah Nabbanja, as head of delegation, only travelled with seven staff from her office. The Leader of Opposition in Parliament (LoP), Mr Mathia Mpuuga said he did not know how the delegations were constituted, but offered that apart from policy makers and few government officials including the MPs, I dont expect all those climate shoppers to go for that conference. We need to do an audit of their role there. Otherwise, if we find out that their role is not directly related to the activity taking place, then we should consider that as a waste. The gaps must be closed and whoever is found to be responsible for travelling must be held responsible, he said. The Nakawa Chief Magistrates Court has issued a second set of criminal summons against Molly Katanga and her daughter Martha Nkwanzi to face trial in connection with the murder of her husband, Henry Katanga. This comes after Molly and Nkwanzi failed to honor the first set of summons issued on November 21, 2023, reportedly due to hospitalization at HIK and Roswell Hospitals, respectively. Instead, the duo sent a team of lawyers, including Elison Karuhanga, Jet Tumwebaze, and Bruce Musinguzi, to inform the court that Molly Katanga is advised to remain under a doctors watch due to severe head and brain injuries, a hand fracture, and the recent surgery she underwent for these injuries. The lawyers also presented a letter and photographs explaining Mollys condition and her inability to attend court. Additionally, they stated that Martha Nkwanzi had just given birth and was suffering from postpartum effects, requiring close supervision at Roswell Hospital. The lawyers promised to bring Molly and Nkwanzi to court as soon as they are well. Based on this explanation, presiding Chief Magistrate Elias Kakooza declined to issue an arrest warrant against the duo as requested by the ODPP. Instead, he extended the criminal summons, requiring them to appear in court on January 8, 2024. In a packed courtroom, Katangas relatives wore T-shirts and held placards demanding justice for the murdered businessman According to the DPP, Molly Katanga is wanted for the murder of her husband, Henry Katanga, while her daughter Martha Nkwanzi is accused of destroying evidence. Meanwhile, the same court refused to hear a bail application by the three suspects charged in connection with Henry Katangas death. The court advised them to apply for bail in the High Court, which has jurisdiction over capital offenses. The three suspects on remand include the deceaseds 31-year-old daughter, Kakwanza Patricia, charged with destroying evidence; 30-year-old Amanyire George, a shamba boy at the Katanga home; and Otai Charles, a health worker, both charged with accessory after the fact of murder. The prosecution alleges that Henry Katanga was shot dead on November 2, 2023, at Mbuya Chwa 2 Road, Nakawa Division, Kampala Capital City, by his 55-year-old wife, Molly Katanga. Prosecution further states that Amanyire George and Otai Charles, a nursing officer at Kireka B Cell Kira Municipality in Wakiso District, received or assisted other people known to them to be liable for an offense, in order to enable them to escape punishment. Meanwhile, Henry Katangas mother, Millien Kyobuhoro, and his uncles have hired former Deputy Attorney General Mwesigwa Rukuntana to represent them in the trial. This move has not been well received by the defense team. President Yoweri Museveni has re-echoed the call for more vigilance among members of the public amid renewed terror threats to the country. He has particularly asked people in churches, markets, mosques, bus terminals, hotels, and bars to be vigilant and look out for strangers. In a statement, the president says the vigilance must be maintained until security forces completely up-root the ADF in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which he blames for the spate of attacks on citizens in the recent past. This is after 2 Improvised Explosive Devices exploded in Kikubamutwe parish (Kabalagala) and another in Nabweru Kibwa Nassana municipality on Saturday night. The president, however, says that due to the vigilance of the Wanainchi and the security forces, the two bombs went off without harming anybody. They had planted one of the bombs near a pork joint. Bazzukulu, what is a joint? I take it to mean a selling point or centre. In Runyankore, we would say: akarabo kempunu. Ekirabo means an Eating House. Empunu are pigs. It could also mean a bar, Museveni said in a statement on Sunday. Investigations continue and the general public is called upon to be vigilant and security conscious as we approach Christmas and New Year festivals. The National Economic Empowerment Dialogue (NEED) party has criticized political leaders for allegedly disregarding the pleas of poor residents whose properties in areas such as Kansanga, Kabalagala, Bunga, and Ggaba have been demolished by the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA). The demolitions are being carried out in preparation for the 19th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), scheduled for January 15-20, 2024, at the Munyonyo Commonwealth Resort. Following that, Uganda will host the Third South Summit, organized under the framework of the Group of 77 and China, a loose alliance of developing countries, from January 21-23 at the same venue. Addressing the media at the partys headquarters in Rubaga, Charles Basajja, the party treasurer, noted that leaders from Makindye Division had been collecting money from traders operating along various roads but had failed to defend them when KCCA demolished their properties. He stated that these traders received Parish Development Model and Emyooga funds to start small businesses but are being destroyed due to a one-week event that he claimed had little impact on poor Ugandans. Please allow ads as they help fund our trusted local news content. Kindly add us to your ad blocker whitelist. If you want further access to Ireland's best local journalism, consider contributing and/or subscribing to our free daily Newsletter . Support our mission and join our community now. liam hehir writes: Ponder the fact that there won't be a story like this and wonder about why that is. It is genuinely weird, right? Te Pati Maori's Crossed Guns Post Incites Online Controversy auckland Te Pati Maori has become embroiled in an online controversy following a social media post featuring an image of crossed guns. The contentious post comes as the party gears up for the Nationwide Action Day, set to coincide with the opening of New Zealand's 54th Parliament. The image, which was posted in the backdrop of the party's call to resist the election of a national government, has received significant criticism from various corners of social media. Critics argue that the use of such provocative and violent symbolism could potentially be misconstrued as a call for violence rather than peaceful protest. Social media platforms, including on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook, have been flooded with comments voicing concerns about the meaning and implications of the graphic. Some users worried that the use of firearms in the image were not consistent with a call to peaceful protest and could incite violence. Despite the ongoing controversy, Te Pati Maori has yet to release an official statement addressing the concerns raised about the image. The debate continues to rage online, casting a shadow over the party's preparations for the upcoming Nationwide Action Day. Shenandoah, IA (51601) Today Cloudy skies with a few snow showers this afternoon. High around 25F. Winds NE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of snow 30%.. Tonight Periods of snow along with gusty winds at times, especially this evening. Low 11F. Winds NNE at 20 to 30 mph. Chance of snow 100%. 5 to 8 inches of snow expected. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph. COLUMBIA The City of Holts Summit announced on Monday that World War II veteran Wilburn Rowden will serve as the grand marshal of the city's annual Christmas parade. Rowden is one of the oldest World War II veterans currently residing in the mid-Missouri area, with the veteran having celebrated his 100th birthday in April. Rowden's commencement of duty begin in 1943 when he was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Forces, where he served as a radio operator aboard a B-17 bomber, according to a press release. On March 6, 1944, the aircraft he was aboard was shot down near Hanover, Germany. Although Rowden was able to evacuate the plane safely, he was captured by the German military and spent the next 13 months as a prisoner of war until his liberation by the 104th Division on April 26, 1945. Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Error! There was an error processing your request. Upon his discharge in November 1945, Rowden joined the Missouri National Guard, where he went on to serve for over 38 years, attaining the rank of Chief Warrant Officer Four before retiring in 1983, the release said. Rowden will lead the Christmas parade alongside a junior grand marshal. The junior grand marshal is a student from the North School who was selected after a short-story contest where they depicted their ideal Christmas. In commemoration of the city's 50th anniversary, Holts Summits' annual Christmas parade will feature a theme of "That '70s Christmas." The parade is scheduled to take place at 2 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 9. Alaska Airlines airplane takes off from the south runway at the Los Angeles International Airport, Thursday, March 2 in Los Angeles. Alaska Air (ALK) on Sunday announced it will buy Hawaiian Airlines (HA) for $1.9 billion. A St. Louis couple is pushing for change at a federal level after they used their own supply of Narcan to save a mans life during a flight. Mary and John Gaal always carry Narcan with them. The director of the Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young and the White House are warning Congress that the US will kneecap Ukraine if funding is not approved. EOG Resources, Inc. (NYSE:EOG Get Free Report) was the recipient of a large increase in short interest in the month of November. As of November 15th, there was short interest totalling 7,080,000 shares, an increase of 11.5% from the October 31st total of 6,350,000 shares. Currently, 1.2% of the shares of the company are short sold. Based on an average trading volume of 2,840,000 shares, the short-interest ratio is presently 2.5 days. Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades Several equities research analysts recently issued reports on EOG shares. Bank of America increased their target price on shares of EOG Resources from $143.00 to $147.00 in a report on Wednesday, September 27th. Sanford C. Bernstein lowered EOG Resources from an outperform rating to a market perform rating and dropped their price objective for the stock from $155.00 to $146.00 in a research note on Tuesday, October 17th. UBS Group upped their price target on EOG Resources from $164.00 to $165.00 and gave the stock a buy rating in a research note on Wednesday, October 4th. Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. lowered shares of EOG Resources from a buy rating to a hold rating in a research report on Thursday, August 24th. Finally, Morgan Stanley boosted their price target on shares of EOG Resources from $132.00 to $134.00 and gave the stock an overweight rating in a research note on Wednesday, November 29th. Seven analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, fourteen have given a buy rating and one has given a strong buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat, the stock presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $148.05. Get EOG Resources alerts: View Our Latest Research Report on EOG Resources Institutional Investors Weigh In On EOG Resources EOG Resources Stock Performance Institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in the stock. Bank Julius Baer & Co. Ltd Zurich increased its stake in EOG Resources by 100,317.5% during the 2nd quarter. Bank Julius Baer & Co. Ltd Zurich now owns 538,528,863 shares of the energy exploration companys stock worth $61,629,243,000 after buying an additional 537,992,573 shares during the period. State Street Corp increased its holdings in EOG Resources by 2.8% during the 1st quarter. State Street Corp now owns 36,299,584 shares of the energy exploration companys stock worth $4,161,014,000 after purchasing an additional 1,005,328 shares during the period. Capital Research Global Investors grew its position in shares of EOG Resources by 11.0% during the second quarter. Capital Research Global Investors now owns 33,923,655 shares of the energy exploration companys stock worth $3,882,219,000 after buying an additional 3,348,650 shares in the last quarter. Wellington Management Group LLP increased its stake in shares of EOG Resources by 12.4% during the first quarter. Wellington Management Group LLP now owns 26,897,413 shares of the energy exploration companys stock worth $3,083,250,000 after buying an additional 2,977,408 shares during the period. Finally, Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. lifted its position in shares of EOG Resources by 1.1% during the 3rd quarter. Charles Schwab Investment Management Inc. now owns 12,937,070 shares of the energy exploration companys stock worth $1,639,903,000 after purchasing an additional 145,691 shares during the last quarter. 89.21% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds. EOG traded down $0.62 during midday trading on Monday, hitting $122.98. 1,195,750 shares of the company were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 3,281,103. The companys 50 day simple moving average is $126.14 and its 200 day simple moving average is $123.29. The firm has a market capitalization of $71.72 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 9.18, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.36 and a beta of 1.44. EOG Resources has a 1-year low of $98.52 and a 1-year high of $142.49. The company has a current ratio of 2.43, a quick ratio of 2.10 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.14. EOG Resources (NYSE:EOG Get Free Report) last posted its earnings results on Thursday, November 2nd. The energy exploration company reported $3.44 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $2.95 by $0.49. EOG Resources had a net margin of 32.11% and a return on equity of 26.80%. The firm had revenue of $6.21 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $5.91 billion. As a group, sell-side analysts predict that EOG Resources will post 12.12 earnings per share for the current year. EOG Resources Increases Dividend The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Wednesday, January 31st. Stockholders of record on Wednesday, January 17th will be issued a dividend of $0.91 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Tuesday, January 16th. This represents a $3.64 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 2.96%. This is an increase from EOG Resourcess previous quarterly dividend of $0.83. EOG Resourcess dividend payout ratio (DPR) is currently 24.52%. About EOG Resources (Get 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. See Also Receive News & Ratings for EOG Resources Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for EOG Resources and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. Granite Ridge Resources, Inc. (NYSE:GRNT Get Free Report) saw a significant growth in short interest in November. As of November 15th, there was short interest totalling 345,500 shares, a growth of 11.0% from the October 31st total of 311,200 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 629,800 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 0.5 days. Currently, 0.6% of the shares of the stock are sold short. Insider Buying and Selling at Granite Ridge Resources In related news, major shareholder Grep Gp Iii, Llc sold 8,165,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Friday, September 15th. The stock was sold at an average price of $5.00, for a total value of $40,825,000.00. Following the sale, the insider now owns 16,800,468 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $84,002,340. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available through this link. In other news, Director Thaddeus Darden bought 10,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction dated Thursday, November 30th. The stock was bought at an average price of $5.92 per share, for a total transaction of $59,200.00. Following the completion of the purchase, the director now owns 179,762 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $1,064,191.04. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. Also, major shareholder Grep Gp Iii, Llc sold 8,165,000 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, September 15th. The stock was sold at an average price of $5.00, for a total value of $40,825,000.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the insider now directly owns 16,800,468 shares in the company, valued at $84,002,340. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Over the last ninety days, insiders have purchased 27,500 shares of company stock valued at $154,350. 1.40% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders. Get Granite Ridge Resources alerts: Institutional Inflows and Outflows Several hedge funds have recently modified their holdings of the business. Hamilton Lane Advisors LLC raised its stake in shares of Granite Ridge Resources by 122.2% during the third quarter. Hamilton Lane Advisors LLC now owns 8,410,844 shares of the companys stock worth $51,306,000 after buying an additional 4,625,595 shares during the last quarter. Northwestern University bought a new stake in shares of Granite Ridge Resources during the 3rd quarter valued at $30,648,000. Adage Capital Partners GP L.L.C. acquired a new position in shares of Granite Ridge Resources in the 3rd quarter valued at $9,368,000. BlackRock Inc. boosted its position in shares of Granite Ridge Resources by 636.7% in the 2nd quarter. BlackRock Inc. now owns 1,402,820 shares of the companys stock worth $9,301,000 after purchasing an additional 1,212,392 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Geode Capital Management LLC grew its stake in shares of Granite Ridge Resources by 155.8% during the second quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 392,018 shares of the companys stock worth $2,599,000 after purchasing an additional 238,793 shares during the period. Institutional investors own 7.56% of the companys stock. Granite Ridge Resources Price Performance Shares of Granite Ridge Resources stock traded down $0.17 during midday trading on Monday, reaching $5.83. The company had a trading volume of 250,208 shares, compared to its average volume of 272,949. The company has a current ratio of 1.47, a quick ratio of 1.47 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.13. The stock has a fifty day simple moving average of $6.13 and a 200 day simple moving average of $6.54. Granite Ridge Resources has a 1-year low of $4.82 and a 1-year high of $9.62. The company has a market capitalization of $775.39 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of 6.59 and a beta of 0.13. Granite Ridge Resources (NYSE:GRNT Get Free Report) last released its earnings results on Thursday, November 9th. The company reported $0.21 EPS for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $0.25 by ($0.04). Granite Ridge Resources had a net margin of 29.78% and a return on equity of 20.45%. The firm had revenue of $108.40 million during the quarter. As a group, equities research analysts forecast that Granite Ridge Resources will post 0.87 earnings per share for the current year. Granite Ridge Resources Dividend Announcement The company also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, December 15th. Shareholders of record on Friday, December 1st will be issued a dividend of $0.11 per share. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, November 30th. This represents a $0.44 annualized dividend and a yield of 7.55%. Granite Ridge Resourcess dividend payout ratio is currently 48.35%. Analysts Set New Price Targets A number of equities analysts have commented on GRNT shares. Stephens started coverage on Granite Ridge Resources in a research note on Tuesday, September 26th. They issued an overweight rating and a $8.00 price objective on the stock. Bank of America assumed coverage on shares of Granite Ridge Resources in a research report on Tuesday, November 7th. They set a buy rating and a $9.00 price target on the stock. Read Our Latest Research Report on GRNT About Granite Ridge Resources (Get Free Report) Granite Ridge Resources, Inc operates as a non-operated oil and gas exploration and production company. It owns a portfolio of wells and acreage across the Permian and other unconventional basins in the United States. The company is based in Dallas, Texas. See Also Receive News & Ratings for Granite Ridge Resources Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Granite Ridge Resources and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE Get Free Report) was the recipient of a significant increase in short interest in the month of November. As of November 15th, there was short interest totalling 34,660,000 shares, an increase of 10.9% from the October 31st total of 31,250,000 shares. Based on an average daily trading volume, of 9,740,000 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 3.6 days. Approximately 2.7% of the shares of the company are short sold. Analyst Ratings Changes A number of equities analysts have weighed in on HPE shares. Raymond James upped their target price on Hewlett Packard Enterprise from $19.00 to $20.00 and gave the stock an outperform rating in a research note on Friday, October 20th. StockNews.com upgraded Hewlett Packard Enterprise from a hold rating to a buy rating in a research note on Tuesday, October 31st. Morgan Stanley upped their price objective on Hewlett Packard Enterprise from $15.00 to $16.00 and gave the stock an equal weight rating in a report on Wednesday, November 29th. Bank of America upped their price objective on Hewlett Packard Enterprise from $18.00 to $19.00 and gave the stock a neutral rating in a report on Wednesday, August 30th. Finally, Credit Suisse Group cut their price objective on Hewlett Packard Enterprise from $21.00 to $20.00 and set an outperform rating for the company in a report on Wednesday, August 30th. Five investment analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and five have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average target price of $17.82. Get Hewlett Packard Enterprise alerts: View Our Latest Stock Report on Hewlett Packard Enterprise Insider Buying and Selling at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Institutional Inflows and Outflows In other Hewlett Packard Enterprise news, CEO Antonio F. Neri sold 434,884 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Thursday, September 7th. The stock was sold at an average price of $17.48, for a total value of $7,601,772.32. Following the sale, the chief executive officer now directly owns 1,370,291 shares in the company, valued at $23,952,686.68. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this link . In related news, CEO Antonio F. Neri sold 434,884 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Thursday, September 7th. The stock was sold at an average price of $17.48, for a total transaction of $7,601,772.32. Following the sale, the chief executive officer now directly owns 1,370,291 shares in the company, valued at approximately $23,952,686.68. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is accessible through the SEC website . Also, EVP Alan Richard May sold 343,016 shares of the businesss stock in a transaction on Thursday, September 7th. The shares were sold at an average price of $17.48, for a total value of $5,995,919.68. Following the sale, the executive vice president now owns 249,511 shares in the company, valued at $4,361,452.28. The disclosure for this sale can be found here . Corporate insiders own 0.53% of the companys stock. Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the business. Valley National Advisers Inc. raised its position in Hewlett Packard Enterprise by 68.1% during the 2nd quarter. Valley National Advisers Inc. now owns 1,728 shares of the technology companys stock valued at $30,000 after purchasing an additional 700 shares during the last quarter. Authentikos Wealth Advisory LLC bought a new position in shares of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the 3rd quarter worth approximately $31,000. McIlrath & Eck LLC raised its position in shares of Hewlett Packard Enterprise by 90.2% in the 2nd quarter. McIlrath & Eck LLC now owns 1,910 shares of the technology companys stock worth $32,000 after acquiring an additional 906 shares in the last quarter. Ritter Daniher Financial Advisory LLC DE bought a new position in shares of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the 3rd quarter worth approximately $33,000. Finally, First Manhattan Co. raised its position in shares of Hewlett Packard Enterprise by 89.4% in the 1st quarter. First Manhattan Co. now owns 2,413 shares of the technology companys stock worth $40,000 after acquiring an additional 1,139 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors own 81.15% of the companys stock. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Trading Down 2.1 % HPE stock traded down $0.35 during trading on Monday, hitting $16.54. 13,447,485 shares of the company traded hands, compared to its average volume of 12,005,682. The firm has a market capitalization of $21.22 billion, a PE ratio of 10.81, a P/E/G ratio of 2.72 and a beta of 1.25. Hewlett Packard Enterprise has a 1 year low of $13.65 and a 1 year high of $18.14. The company has a 50-day moving average of $16.22 and a 200-day moving average of $16.55. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.35, a quick ratio of 0.66 and a current ratio of 0.87. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE Get Free Report) last released its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, November 28th. The technology company reported $0.52 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $0.50 by $0.02. The business had revenue of $7.35 billion during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $7.36 billion. Hewlett Packard Enterprise had a return on equity of 9.83% and a net margin of 6.95%. Hewlett Packard Enterprises quarterly revenue was up 5.0% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same quarter in the prior year, the company posted ($0.23) EPS. Analysts predict that Hewlett Packard Enterprise will post 1.91 earnings per share for the current fiscal year. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Increases Dividend The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, January 11th. Shareholders of record on Wednesday, December 13th will be given a dividend of $0.13 per share. This is a positive change from Hewlett Packard Enterprises previous quarterly dividend of $0.12. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Tuesday, December 12th. This represents a $0.52 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 3.14%. Hewlett Packard Enterprises dividend payout ratio is presently 31.17%. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company Profile (Get Free Report) Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company provides solutions that allow customers to capture, analyze, and act upon data seamlessly in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia Pacific, and Japan. It operates in six segments: Compute, HPC & AI, Storage, Intelligent Edge, Financial Services, and Corporate Investments and Other. Read More Receive News & Ratings for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. Hudson Pacific Properties, Inc. (NYSE:HPP Get Free Report)s share price was up 6% during trading on Monday . The stock traded as high as $7.17 and last traded at $7.11. Approximately 1,769,010 shares were traded during trading, a decline of 54% from the average daily volume of 3,829,528 shares. The stock had previously closed at $6.71. Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades Several analysts recently weighed in on the stock. Wedbush began coverage on shares of Hudson Pacific Properties in a research report on Tuesday, October 3rd. They issued an outperform rating and a $8.00 price objective on the stock. StockNews.com began coverage on Hudson Pacific Properties in a report on Thursday, October 5th. They issued a sell rating for the company. The Goldman Sachs Group raised Hudson Pacific Properties from a sell rating to a neutral rating and lifted their target price for the company from $5.50 to $6.25 in a research note on Thursday. Piper Sandler lowered their price target on Hudson Pacific Properties from $9.00 to $8.00 and set an overweight rating on the stock in a report on Friday, November 10th. Finally, Bank of America downgraded shares of Hudson Pacific Properties from a neutral rating to an underperform rating and reduced their price objective for the stock from $5.50 to $4.00 in a report on Monday, November 13th. Two investment analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, five have given a hold rating and five have issued a buy rating to the companys stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the company presently has a consensus rating of Hold and a consensus target price of $7.75. Get Hudson Pacific Properties alerts: Read Our Latest Analysis on Hudson Pacific Properties Hudson Pacific Properties Stock Up 4.8 % The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.41, a current ratio of 1.51 and a quick ratio of 1.51. The stock has a market capitalization of $990.81 million, a P/E ratio of -8.83 and a beta of 1.23. The stocks fifty day moving average is $5.55 and its two-hundred day moving average is $5.59. Hudson Pacific Properties (NYSE:HPP Get Free Report) last issued its earnings results on Wednesday, November 1st. The real estate investment trust reported ($0.27) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing analysts consensus estimates of $0.21 by ($0.48). Hudson Pacific Properties had a negative return on equity of 3.07% and a negative net margin of 10.00%. The company had revenue of $231.44 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $238.37 million. As a group, research analysts predict that Hudson Pacific Properties, Inc. will post 0.96 earnings per share for the current fiscal year. Institutional Inflows and Outflows Institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in the company. Financial Gravity Asset Management Inc. boosted its stake in Hudson Pacific Properties by 103,925.0% in the 3rd quarter. Financial Gravity Asset Management Inc. now owns 4,161 shares of the real estate investment trusts stock worth $28,000 after purchasing an additional 4,157 shares during the period. KBC Group NV acquired a new stake in shares of Hudson Pacific Properties in the second quarter worth $33,000. Captrust Financial Advisors purchased a new position in shares of Hudson Pacific Properties during the second quarter valued at $33,000. AXS Investments LLC acquired a new position in Hudson Pacific Properties during the first quarter valued at $35,000. Finally, Point72 Hong Kong Ltd purchased a new stake in Hudson Pacific Properties in the 2nd quarter worth about $35,000. 97.58% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors. Hudson Pacific Properties Company Profile (Get 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. Read More Receive News & Ratings for Hudson Pacific Properties Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Hudson Pacific Properties and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. ARQ Wealth Advisors LLC increased its position in iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF (BATS:MTUM Free Report) by 2.2% in the second quarter, according to its most recent 13F filing with the SEC. The firm owned 59,134 shares of the companys stock after purchasing an additional 1,300 shares during the period. iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF comprises about 5.5% of ARQ Wealth Advisors LLCs investment portfolio, making the stock its 3rd biggest holding. ARQ Wealth Advisors LLC owned 0.10% of iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF worth $8,530,000 at the end of the most recent reporting period. A number of other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also recently added to or reduced their stakes in MTUM. Elevated Capital Advisors LLC lifted its position in iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF by 12.2% in the 2nd quarter. Elevated Capital Advisors LLC now owns 19,563 shares of the companys stock worth $2,822,000 after buying an additional 2,129 shares in the last quarter. Orion Portfolio Solutions LLC lifted its position in iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF by 137.4% in the 2nd quarter. Orion Portfolio Solutions LLC now owns 37,597 shares of the companys stock worth $5,423,000 after buying an additional 21,758 shares in the last quarter. Equitable Holdings Inc. lifted its position in iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF by 16.2% in the 2nd quarter. Equitable Holdings Inc. now owns 153,949 shares of the companys stock worth $22,207,000 after buying an additional 21,453 shares in the last quarter. Cornerstone Planning Group LLC purchased a new stake in iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF in the 2nd quarter worth approximately $61,000. Finally, First Citizens Bank & Trust Co. purchased a new stake in iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF in the 2nd quarter worth approximately $219,000. Get iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF alerts: iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF Stock Performance Shares of iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF stock traded up $0.40 during midday trading on Monday, reaching $150.51. 501,126 shares of the companys stock traded hands. The company has a market cap of $9.36 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 19.35 and a beta of 0.91. The companys 50 day simple moving average is $143.46 and its 200 day simple moving average is $143.15. iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF has a 52 week low of $81.37 and a 52 week high of $113.60. About iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF The iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF (MTUM) is an exchange-traded fund that is based on the MSCI USA Momentum SR Variant index. The fund tracks an index of large- and mid-cap US equities, selected and weighted based on price appreciation over 6- and 12-month periods and low volatility over the past 3 years. See Also Want to see what other hedge funds are holding MTUM? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF (BATS:MTUM Free Report). Receive News & Ratings for iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. Korea and Cambodia have held their first joint exercise aimed at enhancing Cambodian peacekeepers' capacity in engineering under a United Nations partnership program, the defense ministry said Monday. A team of 10 Korean military engineers trained 32 Cambodian counterparts in the area of facilitating logistics support for U.N. peacekeeping missions from Nov. 6 to Dec. 1 near the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, the ministry said. Japan and Australia participated in the exercise as observers. The joint drill was held as part of the U.N. Triangular Partnership Program, which aims to enhance peacekeepers' capacity in engineering, medicine and other areas through the provision of training and operational support. Under a bilateral agreement signed in 2022, Korea in February handed over military equipment to Cambodia and plans to additionally provide heavy equipment, including graders, bulldozers and vibratory rollers, according to the ministry. The ministry said it will expand the combat engineers' exercise to include other Southeast Asian nations that deploy forces to U.N. peacekeeping missions, including the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand, from next year. (Yonhap) Angola, IN (46703) Today Cloudy skies. A few flurries or snow showers possible. Temps nearly steady in the low to mid 30s. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph.. Tonight Cloudy. Low 26F. SW winds shifting to ESE at 10 to 15 mph. Kendallville, IN (46755) Today Cloudy. A few flurries or snow showers possible. Temps nearly steady in the low to mid 30s. Winds W at 15 to 25 mph.. Tonight Mainly cloudy. Low 26F. SSW winds shifting to ESE at 10 to 20 mph. NCT Dream's speech during the MelOn Music Awards 2023 took a funny turn when a fan's gesture rendered them speechless! Here's what happened. Dreamzen Leaves NCT Dream Lost for Words After Hilarious Gesture at MelOn Music Awards 2023 Earlier on December 2, at 5 p.m. KST, the MelOn Music Awards (MMA) 2023 was held at the INSPIRE Arena, in Yeongjongdo, Incheon. Among the star-studded lineup who attended the event, NCT Dream was one of the artists who attended the awards show. The group received their wins for the night, taking the awards for Top 10 Artist, Millions Top 10, Best Male Group, and Record of the Year (Daesang). YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN: NCT Dream's 'Hot Sauce' Becomes the Most Viewed within 24 Hours among SM Music Videos + See Top 10 Fans were hyped up during the ceremony, as shown by their cheers for NCT Dream during their acceptance speeches, screen time, and exciting performances. However, during one of their speeches, one fan managed to steal the show and NCT Dream's attention. According to the clips and edits that went viral across social media, the camera panned to an enthusiastic Dreamzen, who imitated NCT Dream's cute pose. This "kyu" pose was consistently made by the group during their events, as well as in the 2023 MMA's red carpet segment. With the lucky fan's unexpected gesture, Jeno was surprised by the act, leading him, Renjun, and Jaemin to imitate the pose back in return! Watch the clip here: pic.twitter.com/3iLDzN9lE6 December 2, 2023 pic.twitter.com/VoIyRxGZCa (@guma389) December 2, 2023 Meanwhile, on social media platform Instagram, user @onyour__mint also uploaded a wholesome fan edit regarding the cute interaction. Watch the video here. The post was also flocked by fans, who happily commented on the video's good vibes and adorable exchange. NCTzens also praised the fan's initiative, saying how commendable it was for her to take the chance of a lifetime and make the most out of it! Read their comments below: "She had one chance she decided not to disappoint!" "Both the fan and the idols are cute." "See this is what y'all should do when you come on screen. Take the one in a lifetime chance. I don't know why K-fans cover their face when they come up on screen lmao!" "She had one chance and slayed! It's so cute in the end that she melted." "One thing 7Dreamies will do is make their fan investment worth it." In other news, NCT Dream also won the award for Worldwide Fans' Choice Top 10 (Bonsang) in the 2023 MAMA Awards. The event was held on November 28 to 29, at the Tokyo Dome, in Japan. See the full list of winners of Day 1 and Day 2! Are you looking forward to more of NCTzens and NCT Dream's wholesome interaction? Let us know in the comments! Read KpopStarz for more K-pop news. IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: NCT Dream Joins BTS & BIGBANG as Only Boy Groups to Score THIS Feat on Spotify South Korea KpopStarz owns this article Written by Riely Miller Fantagio has officially closed the new memorial dedicated to the late Moonbin. Read more for further details. Late ASTRO Moonbin's New Memorial Space Shut Down by Fantagio On December 3, Fantagio uploaded an official statement on ASTRO's official fan cafe announcing the closure of Moonbin's new memorial space in Seonunsa Temple. According to sources, the long-term memorial was closed on December 3, at 8 p.m. KST. The agency also shared that the shutdown was concluded based on the opinions of ASTRO's fandom AROHAs. "Based on the opinions of AROHAs (ASTRO's fandom name), we have decided to close the Seonunsa Moon Space (Moonbin's memorial) immediately at 8 p.m. KST, on December 3." YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN: Rocky Reveals Feelings After Moonbin's Passing, Relationship With ASTRO: 'My life collapsed' Previously, the Moon Space memorial was located at the Gukcheongsa Temple, which is near Namhansanseong. The space was then moved to the Seonunsa Temple on December 2, allowing fans to visit the late idol's memorial. However, sources stated that the relocation news reached out to fans, who raised their doubts about the relationship between Fantagio and Seonunsa. Fans have also requested to put a stop to the exhibition of Moonbin's beloved items at Seonunsa Temple. AROHAs shared: "Fantagio declared that Moonbin's memorial space will be moved deep into the mountains, a travel of more than four hours away from Seoul and to display his items from his lifetime." "Fantagio has signed a business agreement with a temple called Seonunsa Temple earlier in September." YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: AROHAs Re-Examine ASTRO Moonbin's Final Heartbreaking Tweet: 'Nobody around him seemed to know' Upon seeing the claims, Fantagio replied to the accusations and denied all information mentioned. It also shared that the relocation was due to considering the safety of visitors during the winter season and for establishing a permanent memorial for Moonbin. "False information is being distributed indiscriminately across social media. Fantagio has not engaged with any kind of agreement or contract with Seonunsa, and we have no financial interest." "The reason for the relocation of Moon Space from Gukcheongsa Temple to Seonunsa Temple was because of the visitors' safety in the winter and for inaugurating a permanent shrine for Moonbin. We relocated because Gukcheongsa is a branch temple belonging to Seonunsa." Furthermore, Fantagio added that the relocation was purely out of good intentions to honor Moonbin. The agency also declared that legal action would be taken against those who circulate false rumors. "Fantagio's executives and employees traveled to Seonunsa Temple and thoroughly prepared Moonbin's memorial by hand with their hearts alongside them." "Please do not distort and incorrectly instigate the feelings of our agency's executives and employees towards Moonbin with lies. We will take strong legal action against the distribution of false rumors." For more K-pop news and updates, keep your tabs open here at KpopStarz. IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: ASTRO Moonbin's Memorial Space Extended, Fantagio Announces Details in Official Statement KpopStarz owns this article Written by Riely Miller Girls' Generation's Taeyeon Opens Up About Struggles During Era in Candid Conversation with GOT7's BamBam In a recent episode of 'Bam House,' GOT7's BamBam welcomed Girls' Generation's Taeyeon as a special guest, leading to a heartfelt conversation where Taeyeon shared her honest reflections on the challenges she faced during her TaeTiSeo activities. BamBam's Transformative Journey: From Almost Quitting to GOT7 Debut, Fueled by Taeyeon's Autograph The encounter, documented in a video titled 'Welcome, this is your first time at a (Bam) House meeting, right?' and uploaded on the 1st, unfolded as BamBam reminisced about receiving Taeyeon's autograph from her sister during his trainee days. Taeyeon, in response, recalled writing, "Let's meet when we debut." BamBam, expressing gratitude for the autograph, disclosed, "I was on the verge of quitting being a trainee, but after getting Taeyeon's autograph, I promised myself, 'I will definitely debut.'" He went on to share how his life took a positive turn after debuting with GOT7, attributing a significant impact on his personal and family life to the experience. IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: SNSD Taeyeon vs IU: Music Critic Shares Comparison Between Two 'Vocal Queens' BamBam's Emotional Connection to Taeyeon's 'What If' and Transformative Fan Moment While recounting his emotional moments as a trainee, BamBam revealed, "I once cried while listening to 'What If' by Taeyeon in the Han River. Not being fluent in Korean, I misunderstood the lyrics that say 'If I go,' and thought, 'I'll be really sad if I go back to Thailand.'" The conversation took an intriguing turn as BamBam disclosed the exact moment when he became a devoted fan of Taeyeon watching Girls' Generation's unit TaeTiSeo 'Twinkle' music video in 2012. Responding to BamBam's heartfelt revelations, Taeyeon acknowledged the commonality of such stories among junior artists but confessed, "I am very grateful, but to be honest, I had a hard time while working at TaeTiSeo." She candidly shared the difficulties arising from the workload and constant busyness during that period. Taeyeon's Reflection: Impact on Peers' Dreams and Challenges in Career's Pivotal Phase Taeyeon reflected on the impact of her actions on her peers, saying, "It makes me reflect when I hear that some friends developed their dreams by seeing what they were like back then. Some of my friends dreams are growing because of my actions and appearance, and I think, 'I need to come to my senses.'" The conversation provided a rare glimpse into Taeyeon's personal journey and the challenges she faced during a pivotal phase in her career. YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN: SNSD Taeyeon Terrorized for 'To X' Teaser's 'Similarities' to BTS Jungkook's 'Seven' + SONEs Defend Idol For more K-Pop news and updates, keep your tabs open here at KpopStarz. KpopStarz owns this article. Written by Cassidy Jones. Puppet parade amuses residents in Hong Kong Ecns.cn) 13:33, December 04, 2023 A giant puppet is seen during the Standard Chartered Arts in the Park, an annual program, in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Dec. 3, 2023. (Photo: China News Service/Chen Yongnuo) Standard Chartered Arts in the Park, Hong Kong's largest outdoor youth arts festival with a puppet parade was held on Sunday. The carnival showcased a total of ten 4-meter-high giant puppets as well as 250 artworks. Kids play with a giant puppet during the Standard Chartered Arts in the Park, an annual program, in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Dec. 3, 2023. (Photo: China News Service/Chen Yongnuo) Young students attend the Standard Chartered Arts in the Park, an annual program, in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Dec. 3, 2023. (Photo: China News Service/Chen Yongnuo) Giant puppets are seen during the Standard Chartered Arts in the Park, an annual program, in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Dec. 3, 2023. (Photo: China News Service/Chen Yongnuo) A giant puppet is seen during the Standard Chartered Arts in the Park, an annual program, in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Dec. 3, 2023. (Photo: China News Service/Chen Yongnuo) A giant puppet is seen during the Standard Chartered Arts in the Park, an annual program, in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Dec. 3, 2023. (Photo: China News Service/Chen Yongnuo) A giant puppet is seen during the Standard Chartered Arts in the Park, an annual program, in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Dec. 3, 2023. (Photo: China News Service/Chen Yongnuo) A giant puppet is seen during the Standard Chartered Arts in the Park, an annual program, in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Dec. 3, 2023. (Photo: China News Service/Chen Yongnuo) (Web editor: Tian Yi, Liang Jun) Actor Sonu Sood on Monday penned the sweetest birthday wish for his wife Sonali Sood. Sonu took to Instagram and posted a string of pictures of himself with Sonali. He captioned the post, "Happy birthday Sonali. @sonalisood04. Thanks for always being my support system. Love u loads." In the first picture, the Dabangg star can be seen hugging his wife. The second photograph showcases a solo picture of Sonali. The couple can be seen posing together for the camera in the third picture. As soon as the post was uploaded, fans and industry friends of the actor chimed in the comment section. Sonu Sood Pens Heartfelt Birthday Wish for Wife Sonali Sood, Says Thanks for Completing My Life. Actor Neha Dhupia commented, "Happy birthday Sonali." "Happy Birthday Sonali. Have an awesome day. Love from all of us," a fan commented. Notably, Sonu Sood and Sonali Sood had exchanged wedding vows on September 25, 1996. The couple has two sons, Ishant and Ayaan Sood. Meanwhile, on the work front, Sonu will be seen in Fateh which stands as a thrilling action-packed film that has already ignited anticipation due to its captivating storyline and the involvement of Hollywood stunt coordinators. The conclusion of the San Francisco shoot adds another layer of excitement. Sonu Sood Looks Back at His Early Days of Struggle in Mumbai, Says Roamed Film City to Get Noticed by the Producers. Sonu Sood Shares Sweet Birthday Wish For His Wife: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Sonu Sood (@sonu_sood) The breathtaking backdrop of San Francisco has seamlessly enhanced the film's crucial action sequences and dramatic moments. Fateh is based on real-life instances of cybercrime experienced by people during the Covid-pandemic. Helmed by Vaibhav Mishra and the film stars Jacqueline Fernandez, Shivjyoti Rajput and Vijay Raaz in prominent roles. Some of the best names from Hollywood including the director of photography, research team, and action choreographers have been roped in for this film. Actor Kay Kay Menon is basking in the success of his recently released series The Railway Men and hopes that the series will qualify for Oscars as India's entry. Kay Kay said in a statement, "I wish The Railway Men was eligible to be qualified as India's entry to the Oscars. This show shows the world what we, as a country, faced on that fateful night and also shows the spirit of selfless Indians who put their lives at risk to save countless people from dying." The Railway Men Review: Critics Hail R Madhavan, Kay Kay Menon, Divyenndu and Babil Khan's Netflix Show Based on Bhopal Gas Tragedy! "This series truly deserves to represent India on every global stage and tell people worldwide about our resilience & and character in insurmountable danger and grief. The Railway Men is a show that every Indian should be proud of," the actor said. Menon believes that the series would have made India proud on this renowned global platform, which exclusively recognizes feature films that are theatrically released. He said, "It rests in my filmography as one of the best projects that I have ever been a part of. I'm thrilled with the response that the series has received globally already. It deserves all the love. It is our tribute to the undying human spirit, a tribute to Bhopal and its resilience and it is also a tribute to all the unsung heroes of Bhopal whose sacrifice saved hundreds of thousands of people unaware of how to fight the silent killer in the air." The Bambai Meri Jaan actor added, "I congratulate everyone associated with the series for the success that it is tasting. It is a story that is touching people's hearts. I haven't met anyone who hasn't told me that their eyes welled up while watching The Railway Men." The Railway Men is set against the backdrop of the Bhopal gas leak tragedy. It showcases the unshakeable courage of the employees of Indian Railways and their efforts to save countless lives during the city's darkest hours. In the late hours of December 2, 1984, methyl isocyanate gas leaked from a pesticide factory owned by the Union Carbide Corporation. The gas disaster is considered the world's worst industrial tragedy. R Madhavan, Kay Kay Menon, Divyenndu, and Babil Khan feature in the lead roles. Before The Railway Men, Did You Know Kay Kay Menon Had Made His Big-Screen Lead Debut With a Film Based on Bhopal Gas Tragedy? Watch The Railway Men Trailer Here: Over 3,000 people died within days of the gas leak and more in the later years with many families suffering health consequences. Survivors and their families have said they have struggled with health problems such as cancer and respiratory, immune and neurological disorders. The Railway Men, which was created under the banner of YRF Entertainment, is streaming on Netflix from November 18. Imphal, Dec 4 (PTI) At least 13 people were killed in a gun-battle between two groups of militants in Manipur's Tengnoupal district on Monday, officials said. The incident took place at Leithu village on Monday afternoon, they said. Also Read | Elephant Attack in Odisha: Wild Elephant Trample Two Farmers to Death in Khordha District. "A group of militants on their way to Myanmar were ambushed by another group of insurgents dominant in the area," an official in the hill district said. Security forces reaching the spot found 13 bodies so far, he said, adding their identities were yet to be ascertained but they appeared not to be locals. Also Read | Madhya Pradesh Election 2023 Results: Congress Leader Kamal Nath Meets CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Congratulates Him for Election Victory (Watch Video). Tengnoupal district shares a porous border with Myanmar. (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, Dec 4 (PTI) NITI Aayog has decided that data for some of the key performance indicators (KPIs) will be collected at district level for release of a combined report of Composite Water Management Index 6.0 (CWMI), Parliament was informed on Monday. In a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, Minister of State for Planning Rao Inderjit Singh said NITI Aayog has been publishing CWMI since 2018. Also Read | Mukhtar Ansari Murder Plan: Gangster-Turned-Politician's Son Moves Supreme Court Alleging Plan To Assassinate His Father in Jail Before 2024 General Elections. So far, two editions -- CWMI (June 2018) and CWMI 2.0 (August 2019)-- have been published. Subsequent edition of CWMI was prepared in August 2022 with delay due to the nationwide Covid-19 situation. "After due deliberations with the concerned ministries and departments, the scope of CWMI was extended up to district levels, and to increase the data granularity, it was decided that data for some of the KPIs will be collected at district level. Also Read | Indian Navy Day 2023: INS Sandhayak Inducted Into Fleet on Navy Day. "Therefore, it was ideated that a combined report of editions up to CWMI 6.0 should be released," he said. According to the minister, it was also decided that other channels need to be explored to take the task of indexing rather than relying only on CWMI; and there is a need to make data and its analysis more useful or applied in planning, decision making, policy formulation or research by public or private stakeholders concerned with the water sector. Views of the ministry/departments have been sought in this regard, he added. Replying to another question, Singh said the average annual water availability of any region or country is largely dependent upon hydro-meteorological and geological factors. "For India, per capita water availability is reducing primarily due to increase in population. The average annual per capita water availability has been assessed as 1,545 cubic meters in 2011 and 1,486 cubic meters in 2021," he said. NITI Aayog in 2018 and 2019 had ranked all states on the composite water management, comprising 9 broad sectors with 28 different indicators covering various aspects of ground water, restoration of water bodies, irrigation, farm practices, drinking water, policy and governance. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Shimla/Srinagar, Dec 4 (PTI) Six labourers from Jammu and Kashmir were killed when their vehicle fell into a gorge near Sunni in Shimla district on Monday morning, police said. The mishap took place at Kudharghat, about 35 km from Shimla city, when the driver of the ill-fated pickup truck lost control of the vehicle, police said, adding six more people sustained injuries. Also Read | Elephant Arjuna Death: Former Golden Howdah Elephant Dies in Wild Tusker Attack, Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah Expresses Sorrow. Of the 12 occupants, nine were from Kulgam district in Jammu and Kashmir, working as labourers in Himachal Pradesh. They were on their way to Mandi from Sunni, police said. Three of the labourers died on the spot and as many were declared dead by doctors when they were taken to a hospital, police said. Also Read | Sikh Man Attacked in UK: Teens Attack 58-Year-Old Sikh Man in Langley Memorial Park Leaving Him With Broken Ribs. Those injured are undergoing treatment at the Indira Gandhi Medical College Hospital (IGMCH), police said. The deceased were identified as Farid (24), Gulab (43), Sahbir (19), Talib (23), Gulzar (30), and Mustak (30), Superintendent of Police Sanjeev Kumar Gandhi told PTI. The injured included Ranjit, who was driving the vehicle, Aslam, Talib Hussain, Akash Kumar, Ajay Thakur, and Manjoor, police said. A case has been registered and investigations are on, he added. Jammu and Kashmir Lt Governor Manoj Sinha expressed grief over the deaths. "Anguished by the tragic road accident in Shimla, in which six Kulgam residents have lost their lives. Condolences to the bereaved families. May the injured recover soon, Sinha wrote on X. He also directed the Deputy Commissioner of Kulgam to provide all necessary assistance to the next of kin of the deceased. CPI(M) leader and former MLA from Kulgam M Y Tarigami expressed solidarity with the family members of the deceased and the injured while demanding adequate compensation for the victims. Jammu and Kashmir Apni Party leader Altaf Bukhari also consoled the demise of labourers. "Extend my heartfelt sympathies with the bereaved families and pray for a swift recovery of the injured persons. I in the meantime urge the authorities to ensure best possible treatment for the persons injured in the incident," Bukhari posted on X. Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu directed the district authorities to provide immediate relief to the next of kin of the deceased and the best possible treatment to the injured, a statement issued in Shimla said. Meanwhile, in another incident, a truck crushed four vehicles in Vikasnagar area of Shimla city, however, no casualty was reported. As many as 110 persons were killed while 401 sustained injuries in 260 accidents from January 1 to November 23, 2023, in Shimla district according to police data. (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, Dec 4 (PTI) The search for the leopard that was spotted on Friday night in south Delhi's Neb Sarai area was still on while at least 50 police officials have been deployed in the area to monitor the situation. "It's more than 48 hours and there is no lead on the leopard. The two trap cages set up by the forest department are still at their places," a police official said on Monday. Also Read | Telangana Election 2023 Results: From Aggressive Campaigning Led by A Revanth Reddy to Anti-Incumbency, These Factors Helped Congress Win Indias Youngest State. The leopard was spotted near a farmhouse in the Neb Sarai area on the border of Delhi and Haryana on Friday. It has not been seen since then. A police officer said at least 50 staffers of the Neb Sarai Police station have been deployed round the clock to keep a tab on the situation. They, under the supervision of the station house officer, Inspector Surender Rana, are working with the forest department personnel. Also Read | HPSC MO Admit Card 2023 Out at hpsc.gov.in: Hall Ticket for Subject Knowledge Test of Medical Officers Released, Know How To Download. "We are making announcements, at least thrice a day, telling the people about do's and don'ts if they see the leopard again," a police official said. The forest department on Saturday said two teams of 40 personnel have combed the jungle area which is connected to the Aravali Hills range. (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, Dec 4 (PTI) The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has issued notice to the Gujarat government seeking a detailed report on the death of seven workers in a blast at a chemical manufacturing factory in Surat. The commission said it has taken suo motu cognisance of a media report that seven workers died and 24 were injured in the incident on November 29. Also Read | Bade Miyan Chote Miyan: Teaser of Akshay Kumar and Tiger Shroff Starrer To Release on Republic Day, 2024. It has been observed that the reported explosion in a tank filled with inflammable chemicals, prima facie, indicates possible negligence on the part of the factory management, which requires an investigation as the incident has resulted in human rights violations of the victim workers, the NHRC said. It has issued notices to the chief secretary and the director general of police of Gujarat, calling for a detailed report in the matter within four weeks. Also Read | Tamil Nadu Rains: Several Vehicles Get Washed Away As Heavy Rainfall Triggered by Cyclone Michaung Causes Waterlogging in Parts of Chennai (Watch Video). The report should also include the status of the FIR registered by police, medical treatment of the victims and compensation, if any, granted to the next of kin of the deceased persons and the injured, the NHRC said. The commission would also like to know about the action taken against the delinquent persons responsible for the tragedy. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Paris, Dec 4 (AP) A small twin-engine plane was forced to make an emergency landing on Monday in the southern Paris suburbs, France's civil aviation safety agency said. French media said the aircraft landed near a populated area in the town of Villejuif. Also Read | UK New Migration Policy: PM Rishi Sunak's Government Tables Tougher Visa Rules for Foreign Workers, Clampdown on Bringing Families. Sebastien Barthe, the communications director for the safety agency known as BEA for short, said the cause of the unplanned landing was a technical problem and that four people were on board the plane, including the pilot. Barthe could not confirm French media reports saying that three passengers sustained injuries but said his agency was investigating what led up to the emergency landing. Also Read | Sikh Man Attacked in UK: Teens Attack 58-Year-Old Sikh Man in Langley Memorial Park Leaving Him With Broken Ribs. We will examine all aspects, including the pilot's health and the aircraft's mechanical condition, he said. Emergency services were on the scene quickly. Photos and videos widely shared on social media showed the plane against a wall and emergency personnel at work. (AP) (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) This is that period of Indian history that will write the future of the country not just for 5-10 years but for the coming centuries, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi while attending the Navy Day celebrations in Maharashtra's Sindhudurg on Monday. The Daniel Ortega government is now investigating the director behind the Miss Nicaragua beauty pageant after it was revealed that new Miss Universe Sheynnis Palacios protested against the dictator in 2018. The government of Nicaragua has been stamping down on all forms of dissent since the 2018 protests, and critics of Ortega have pointed out that the newly-crowned Miss Universe joined the 2018 protests against Ortega. However, when this came out, the Ortega regime retaliated by going after the Miss Nicaragua organizers, particularly pageant director Karen Celebertti. The Associated Press reported that the charges against Celebertti "would not be out of place in a vintage James Bond movie with a repressive, closed-off government, coup-plotting claims, foreign agents, and beauty queens." She is accused of "intentionally rigging contests" so that "anti-government beauty queens" such as Palacios would win. The Nicaraguan government claims that this is all part of a plot to overthrow it, though no evidence has been presented. Initially, the Ortega regime celebrated Palacios's victory and called her Miss Universe crowning a moment of "legitimate joy and pride." However, their view of her quickly degraded after the beauty queen's Facebook posts resurfaced, as she posted photos of herself participating in one of the 2018 anti-government protests. According to the Nicaraguan National Police, Celebertti "participated actively, on the internet and in the streets in the terrorist actions of a failed coup," referencing the 2018 protests. The pageant organizer managed to escape police after she was reportedly denied permission to enter the country shortly after Nicaragua's big moment of national pride. A statement said that the pageant director committed "treason against the motherland" and claimed that she "remained in contact with the traitors, and offered to employ the franchises, platforms, and spaces supposedly used to promote 'innocent' beauty pageants, in a conspiracy orchestrated to convert the contests into traps and political ambushes financed by foreign agents." Miss Nicaragua Organizer Now Banned in Nicaragua After Sheynnis Palacios's Miss Universe Win Shortly after Palacios won Miss Universe and after it came out that she protested against the government in 2018, Karen Celebertti and her daughter were detained upon their arrival at the Managua airport. However, they soon deported them to Mexico, allowing her to escape. READ MORE: Miss Universe 2023: Sheyniss Palacios Makes History for Winning First Ms. Universe Crown for Nicaragua Celebritti, who is accused of running a "beauty queen coup," is a Nicaraguan citizen. It was unclear why she was deported days before an investigation into her was launched. According to France 24, police have also searched her home and briefly detained her husband, Martin Arguello. Vice President and First Lady Rosario Murillo reportedly ordered that she be barred from entering the country. Miss Universe Sheynnis Palacios Now a Symbol of Resistance in Nicaragua Against the Dictator When she won the Miss Universe crown, Nicaraguans took to the streets and celebrated. Now, that moment of national pride is quickly being repressed as celebrating her victory is now being seen as a form of "coup." Palacios rose from belonging to a low-income family to becoming the world's most-renowned beauty queen, and her story is resonating with Nicaraguans, according to The Guardian. With her past of protesting against the Ortega regime and the government retaliating against her. Many are now using her as a symbol of defiance against the dictator. Palacios herself has not said anything political, but her protesting past was enough to have many criticize the government, which is now cracking down on those critics. This included imprisoning a TikToker who defended Palacios against official criticism, as well as two artists who painted a mural of her in celebration of her victory. It is still unclear if the new Miss Universe will be allowed to go back to her home country, though. If anything, she may be forced to live like many other government critics now living in exile in other countries, such as Costa Rica and the US. READ NEXT: Daniel Ortega Net Worth This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Rick Martin WATCH: Miss Universe 2023 Sheynnis Palacios enjoying the beautiful City of New York - Joel Padoga In a surprising turn of events, Samuel Garcia, a prominent contender in the upcoming Mexico 2024 presidential election, has opted to withdraw from the race, according to Reuters. Garcia, aged 35, communicated his decision through a statement released by his center-left Citizens' Movement (MC) party, expressing his choice to return to his role as governor of the northern state of Nuevo Leon. "I have decided to not participate in the electoral race for President of the Republic," Garcia stated, marking a departure from his previous commitment to seek the candidacy of MC. This decision has notable consequences for both Garcia's political trajectory and the broader landscape of Mexico 2024 presidential election. READ NEXT: Mexico President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador Links Xochitl Galvez to a Mafia Leader Samuel Garcia Leaves Mexico 2024 Presidential Election To Put His State in Order Governor Samuel Garcia's withdrawal unfolded amid a tumultuous episode in Mexican politics, AP reports. The border state of Nuevo Leon witnessed a unique situation on Friday when two interim governors were briefly designated to replace Garcia, who had initially requested a six-month leave of absence to focus on his presidential campaign. Mexican law mandates that any official intending to run for office must resign or take leave at least six months before the election. With the June 2024 presidential vote approaching, Friday marked the deadline for Garcia to make this decision. However, faced with a contentious situation, Garcia had to forgo his presidential aspirations to restore order to his state. In an attempt to ensure a smooth transition, Garcia appointed a Cabinet member to serve as interim governor. However, the state congress, where Garcia's party holds a minority, exercised its formal right to name the interim governor and selected an assistant prosecutor unaffiliated with Garcia's party. This decision sparked protests, leading to a standoff that involved protesters breaking into the state legislature building. Reacting to the unfolding events, Garcia announced his decision to abandon his leave of absence and resume his duties as governor. This turn of events highlights the complexities and tensions inherent in the intersection of Garcia's political ambitions and the governance of Nuevo Leon. Consequences of Samuel Garcia's Election Withdrawal Garcia's withdrawal carries significant implications for the ongoing electoral process, per BNN. As a candidate trailing in recent polls with around 10% support, Garcia's departure leaves a void that the Movimiento Ciudadano party must swiftly address. Party leader Dante Delgado indicated that the selection process for a new candidate would be determined in the coming days, with an anticipated announcement on January 20. The abrupt exit of Garcia has raised questions about the party's ability to find a replacement candidate of stature. The agreement formalizing Garcia's withdrawal will take effect upon its publication in the state's official newspaper. With Garcia out of the race, the 2024 presidential competition now narrows down to candidates from the ruling Morena party and the opposition coalition, both of whom are women. This development virtually ensures that Mexico's next president will be a woman. Additionally, Garcia's return to his gubernatorial duties safeguards Movimiento Ciudadano's control of the state, adding another layer to the evolving political landscape in Mexico. READ MORE: Haiti: Coup Leader, Drug Trafficker Deported Back From US This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Bert Hoover WATCH: Watch: Smoke & Scuffle in Northern Mexican Regional Assembly - Form Firstpost A Mexico woman died after an apparent shark attack left her bleeding to death off the Pacific Coast of Mexico, near the Port of Manzanillo in Jalisco State last Saturday. According to the Yucatan Times, the shark attack happened in the morning, with Civil Protection agents and firefighters responding to the incident. The woman was pulled from a beach in Melaque Bay in Jalisco State, and she had no vital signs. She was then declared dead soon after. Videos of rescuers attending to the Mexico woman soon on the beach made their rounds on social media. Those posts stated that she had no vital signs and her legs were severed due to an apparent shark attack. The videos themselves showed her being severely injured as onlookers watched. Soon after she was declared dead by her rescuers, an investigation was launched. The local Public Security personnel soon closed the beach off. Reports indicated that the beach where the shark attack happened will be closed off until further notice as investigations continue. More Details Surface as Mexico Woman Was Swimming With Her Young Son When Shark Attacked Her A day after the fatal Mexico shark attack, Rafael Araiza, the head of the local civil defense office, spoke with reporters and revealed that the attack happened in the better-known beach town of Barra de Navidad. While he did not reveal the victim's name, he did state that she was 26 years old and was swimming with her five-year-old daughter when the shark bit her. She was also a resident of a nearby town. READ NEXT: Anger Erupts After Rich Teen Beats Up Parking Guard in Expensive Private High School in Mexico The civil defense official noted that the victim was swimming with her young child toward a floating play platform about 75 feet (25 meters) from the shore when the attack occurred. He told reporters that as the woman was trying to boost her child aboard the floating platform, the shark finally attacked by biting into her hip and causing a massive wound. Since the attack happened near the shore, rescuers were quick to respond. However, the woman soon died of blood loss, though her daughter was reportedly unharmed. Shark attacks are relatively rare in Mexico, and this latest one has shocked local residents because of how rare these incidences are. It was not revealed what species of shark attacked her. Another Mexico Shark Attack Happened in Cancun Earlier This Year While shark attacks in Mexico are rare, they do happen, as seen in last weekend's incident in Jalisco. Another one also occurred earlier this year, and it actually happened to an American boy vacationing in Cancun for Spring Break. The attack happened last March, and it happened to 10-year-old Colorado boy Dillon Armijo, according to ABC-7. The boy managed to survive and spoke with several media outlets regarding his harrowing brush with death, telling reporters he thought he would have died, saying, "It just felt like a bump, like a really sharp bump." The Colorado boy was rescued quickly and underwent three surgeries, surviving the deadly attack. READ MORE: Journalist in Mexico Tells Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador He's Afraid for His Life During Press Briefing This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Rick Martin WATCH: Great white sharks are making a great big comeback in Mexico - CBS Mornings The Guyana Vs. Venezuela territorial dispute regarding the Essequibo territory has entered a new phase as the UN High Court sided with Guyana. However, Venezuela is still holding its controversial referendum regarding whether or not it should take control of that disputed territory. The United Nations' top court has now ordered Venezuela not to take any action that would alter Guyana's control over the disputed Essequibo region, which is rich in mineral deposits and is claimed by both countries. The territory also makes up some two-thirds of Guyana. Essequibo is a territory larger than Greece and is rich in oil and minerals, according to the Associated Press. It has been a part of Guyana since an 1899 border decision was passed granting control of the area to Guyana. However, Venezuela is claiming it as part of its territory because of historical reasons and is even having its citizens vote on whether or not to annex it. The UN court order did not explicitly bar Venezuela from holding its referendum, though, only telling the Nicolas Maduro-led country that it must "refrain from taking any action which would modify that situation that currently prevails" in Essequibo. It did rule that the 1899 ruling "remains in place until a case brought by Guyana against Venezuela on the region's future is considered by the court." The Guyana Vs. Venezuela territorial dispute is made even more complicated as Venezuela refuses to recognize the UN High Court's jurisdiction over the issue, even though Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez is characterizing the issue as a "victory" for her country as it does not bar Venezuela from doing the referendum. Venezuela Referendum Happening Even After UN High Court Sided With Guyana President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela urged his citizens to vote for the government to claim sovereignty over Essequibo, arguing that the e oil- and mineral-rich territory was stolen by foreign powers when the borders were drawn in that 1899 agreement. "We are solving through constitutional, peaceful, and democratic means an imperial dispossession of 150 years," said the Venezuelan strongman after casting his vote in Caracas. The vote still happened as the UN did not specifically ban it from happening. READ MORE: Guyana Pirates Trial: Court Sentences 2 Pirates to Death Over Fishermen's Deaths However, the AP pointed out that Guyana considers the referendum a step toward annexation. Residents in the country are on edge right now as the Venezuelan government is asking its citizens whether they support establishing a state in Essequibo. Should the referendum result in a win for taking control of the disputed territory, it remains unclear as to how Venezuela plans to take it from Guyanese control, as its neighbor has been adamant about defending the territory it considers its own for over a century. International Community Sees Essequibo Territory Part of Guyana, Not Venezuela According to France 24, the issue has become an obsession for Maduro, whose country faces a sovereignty problem, should he get what he wants. This is because the majority of the international community regards the Essequibo region as Guyana territory. The vote for the referendum took place without any observers. International media reported that no one dared to campaign for the "no" vote as Venezuela's oppressive regime is infamous for stamping out any form of dissent. However, it is also worth noting that Venezuelan troops are already on the border with Guyana, and international observers are afraid that should Maduro's plans push through, "it could destabilize the entire region." READ NEXT: Venezuela Election: Maria Corina Machado Officially Wins Opposition Primary This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Rick Martin WATCH: Venezuelans vote in controversial referendum on disputed territory with Guyana | DW News Authorities in Los Angeles have successfully apprehended the suspect linked to a string of four California fatal shootings that transpired over the course of this week, including the unprovoked killings of three homeless men, according to ABC News. The alleged California serial killer, identified as Jerrid Joseph Powell, 33, was taken into custody in connection with the murders of three unhoused individuals who were tragically killed while sleeping on the streets. Powell was initially arrested in relation to another homicide that occurred earlier in the week, involving a follow-home robbery in Los Angeles County. The four-day spree of serial killings spanned from Sunday to Wednesday, with the suspect being apprehended on Thursday in connection with the robbery-homicide. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) announced the search for a potential serial killer on Friday, and within 24 hours, Powell was arrested. "Twenty-four hours ago, we announced there was a killer on the loose. Now he is in custody," said Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass during a press briefing on Saturday, noting the swift resolution. The suspect's vehicle, present at all three homicides of unhoused victims, and a handgun recovered from the vehicle were identified as crucial pieces of evidence. Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore confirmed that the handgun was "positively identified" as the murder weapon used in the California fatal shootings. Both the vehicle and the firearm were also linked to the home robbery shooting. READ NEXT: California Party Shooting Kills Teen, Injures 3 California Fatal Shootings The series of fatal shootings began on November 26, with the first incident occurring near 110th Street and Vermont Avenue in Westmont, per the Los Angeles Daily News. The victim, identified as 37-year-old Jose Bolanos, was sleeping on a couch behind a building when he was approached and fatally shot by the suspect. The second shooting occurred on November 27 in Downtown LA's Skid Row. Mark Diggs, 62, was fatally shot while charging his phone near an electrical outlet after leaning against a wall and falling asleep. The third victim, a 52-year-old man whose name has not been disclosed, was fatally shot while sleeping on a sidewalk in East L.A. The fourth case involved the murder of Nicholas Simbolon, 42, who was found with a gunshot wound inside his Tesla in the garage of his San Dimas home. Simbolon was followed from an electric vehicle charging station in West Covina, leading to his tragic death. Technology Plays Vital Role in California Serial Killer's Arrest The arrest of Joseph Powell, the suspected California serial killer, was facilitated by the utilization of technology, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna. Following Simbolon's murder, law enforcement identified the suspect's vehicle through video evidence and eyewitness reports, allowing them to input the license plate into an automatic license plate reader. This technology played a critical role in locating Powell's car, aiding in his subsequent arrest, FOX 11 noted. Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore underscored the importance of technology in ensuring community safety. "The safety net of what technology can provide us today for safer communities is critical," Moore said, expressing confidence that without access to these tools, the suspect might have continued his violent spree. Officials revealed that Powell has a lengthy criminal history, raising concerns about the possibility of additional victims. Authorities are urging anyone with information about other potential victims to come forward. As investigations continue, law enforcement is working to establish a motive for the series of California fatal shootings. This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Bert Hoover WATCH: Suspect in San Dimas follow-home shooting also suspected of 3 LA homeless murders - From FOX 11 Los Angeles Pressure is mounting on President Joe Biden re-election bid as Muslim Americans, dissatisfied with his approach to the Israel-Gaza war, unite under the banner of #AbandonBiden, per FOX News. Muslim leaders from various swing states, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, gathered in Dearborn, Michigan, on Saturday to coordinate a national response. The campaign, spearheaded by Arab and Muslim leaders, criticizes Biden's failure to call for a cease-fire amid the rising death toll in the Israel-Hamas conflict. According to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza, the death toll has reached 15,200 Palestinians, with 1,200 Israelis killed, primarily during the Oct. 7 attack that triggered the war. The cease-fire between Israel and Hamas concluded after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) accused Hamas of firing at Israel. Hamas contends that Israel rejected an offer to release more hostages. Jaylani Hussein, one of the organizers based in Minneapolis, expressed that Biden's reluctance to call for a cease-fire has irreparably damaged his relationship with the American Muslim community. The #AbandonBiden campaign voices the concerns of Muslim Americans witnessing the tragic consequences of the conflict. READ NEXT: Joe Biden Approval Rating Plummets Effects of Muslim Americans on Joe Biden's Re-Election The impact of the #AbandonBiden campaign on Joe Biden re-election prospects remains uncertain. However, it underscores the growing political pressure faced by the President amid the ongoing Middle East conflict, according to POLITICO. Arab and Muslim leaders have been urging Joe Biden to advocate for a cease-fire for nearly two months, and this new coalition intensifies that pressure. The discontent among Arab and Muslim Americans poses a potential threat to Joe Biden's chances of re-election, especially in swing states that host significant Arab American and Muslim American voting blocs. With over 15,000 casualties in Gaza, the anger among this demographic may influence the political landscape. The Muslim American population, numbering around 3.45 million, wields significant voting power. Jaylani Hussein emphasized their ability to impact the nation through both financial contributions and votes. The Joe Biden re-election campaign has yet to respond to these developments. In 2020, approximately 59 percent of Arab Americans supported Biden, but recent polls indicate a decline in this support. The #AbandonBiden campaign raises questions about how this dissatisfaction might shape the political landscape in crucial swing states. Donald Trump Can't Celebrate Yet Despite expressing dissatisfaction with Joe Biden, Muslim Americans clarified that this does not translate into support for former President Donald Trump. Moreover, Muslim Americans express skepticism, stating they do not anticipate better treatment from former President Donald Trump if he were to be re-elected, Al Jazeera noted. The community sees withholding votes from Biden to influence U.S. policy rather than an endorsement of Trump. While it remains to be seen if Muslim voters will collectively turn against Biden, even marginal shifts in support could impact states where Biden secured narrow victories in 2020. Recent surveys indicate a significant decline in Joe Biden's backing among Arab Americans, potentially affecting states like Michigan, where Arab Americans constitute 5 percent of the vote. READ MORE: Is Mark Cuban Running for President? This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Bert Hoover WATCH: Local Muslim leaders call to 'Abandon Biden' - From KARE 11 Texas Governor Greg Abbott's controversial floating barriers designed to deter migrants from crossing the Rio Grande were found to be unlawful by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday and ordered the state government to take them down, thus affirming a previous ruling by a lower court. Abbott ordered these controversial floating barriers be placed in the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass last summer, having caused several controversies, including a diplomatic complaint from Mexico, criticism from Joe Biden, and several migrants dying as a result of drowning near these floating barriers. According to the Texas Tribune, the decision to affirm the previous ruling was 2-1, as the Rio Grande must be navigable, and any obstruction placed along the river must receive permission from the US Army Corps of Engineers before being deployed. Texas argued that the floating barriers would force migrants to cross the border at ports of entry where it is safer. However, Texas was not able to prove this, said one of the three judges, and it had previously been proven that the floating barriers were not able to deter migrants from trying to cross. "At this stage, however, Texas has not offered concrete evidence that the barrier has saved lives or reduced illegal crossings and drug trafficking," wrote Judge Don Willett, a Trump appointee, in his opinion. The Texas state government faced a lawsuit from the US Justice Department, which argued that the barrier was installed without required federal authorization. A lower court in San Antonio sided with the federal government, but Texas quickly appealed it. This ruling from the Court of Appeals affirmed the previous San Antonio ruling. "It considered the threat to navigation and federal government operations on the Rio Grande, as well as the potential threat to human life the floating barrier created," wrote Judge Dana Douglas in the opinion affirming the previous decision. READ MORE: Did Texas Install Chainsaws on Its Controversial Floating Barriers Along the Rio Grande? Critics Say Yes Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Vows To Take Rio Grande Floating Barriers Case to Supreme Court As for how Governor Greg Abbott reacted to the decision, he says that the Court of Appeals was "clearly wrong" in a statement on social media. The Texas Republican then vowed to take the case to the highest court in the land. "We'll go to SCOTUS if needed to protect Texas from Biden's open borders," wrote Abbott on social media. This is the latest in a string of legal defeats regarding his draconian immigration policies as he previously failed to stop US Border Patrol agents from legally cutting razor wire the state installed along the riverbanks of the Rio Grande. Much of the Rio Grande Floating Barrier Actually in Mexico's Side of the River The floating barriers along the Rio Grande were originally part of Greg Abbott's Operation Lone Star, which includes busing migrants to large Democratic-led cities. However, soon after these barriers were installed, Mexico filed a diplomatic complaint and pointed out that 80% of the barriers were actually on the Mexican side of the river and were thus illegal. Satellite imagery showed nearly 80% of the orange buoys crossing over to the Mexico side of the boundary and therefore breaking international law. These buoys are anchored to the riverbed to help deter migrants, and a joint US-Mexico topographical survey found that 787 feet of the barrier are crossing over, according to CBS News. READ MORE: Mexico Finds Another Dead Body Near Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's Floating Barriers This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Rick Martin WATCH: Texas must remove floating barrier from Rio Grande, Fifth Circuit Court orders - 12NewsNow George Santos, recently expelled from the House of Representatives, is set to make a different kind of appearance, this time on the silver screen, according to The Daily Beast. HBO Films has secured the rights to "The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos," a book penned by Newsday columnist Mark Chiusano. Executive produced by Frank Rich, known for his work on "Veep" and "Succession," along with Mike Makowsky, the writer of "Bad Education," the movie will delve into the gripping narrative of Santos' tumultuous political career. The George Santos movie, described as a saga of a local race that evolved into a battle for Long Island's soul, will unravel the story of a man who, in pursuit of his American Dream, exploited the system, waged war on truth, and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country. The logline promises a Gatsby-esque journey and an exploration of how a seemingly minor political contest transformed into a significant event that impacted the political landscape. While the George Santos movie's release date, director, and cast are yet to be announced, speculation on social media regarding potential actors for the role of the serial fabulist is already rampant. READ NEXT: George Santos Cries 'Bullying' Ahead of Congress Expulsion George Santos' Congressional Stint Ends Amid Scandal George Santos, a Republican, secured a notable victory for his party by flipping New York's 3rd Congressional District red in the 2022 cycle, per the NY Post. However, his political ascent was marred by revelations of fabrications in his personal biography, including false claims about attending Baruch College and a fictitious career on Wall Street. The aftermath of his election victory saw Santos facing a 23-count indictment accusing him of embezzlement and misleading donors. Despite initial reluctance, Congress decisively expelled him in a historic 311 to 114 vote, with 105 Republicans supporting the effort, a rare move that marked only the sixth expulsion in the history of the US House of Representatives. Despite announcing he won't seek reelection, Santos remains unyielding. Following his expulsion, he vowed to file multiple complaints against his former colleagues to the House Committee on Ethics on Monday. George Santos Faces Serious Violations and Legal Consequences The expulsion followed an alarming report from the House Ethics Committee, revealing "substantial evidence of potential violations of federal criminal law." The committee found that George Santos had consistently transferred campaign funds to his personal account, using the money for lavish expenditures at Hermes, OnlyFans, and Sephora, among other personal indulgences, Rolling Stone reports. Notably, the former congressman reported payments for beauty and spa treatments, an opulent Hamptons getaway, and various charges during his honeymoon to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC). The committee is referring the matter to the Justice Department. Facing 36 federal charges, George Santos, who maintains his innocence, has been arrested and charged with lying to Congress, wire fraud, and money laundering. A superseding indictment in October added 23 more counts, including conspiracy, identity theft, and additional instances of wire fraud and FEC violations. READ MORE: George Santos Net Worth This article is owned by Latin Post. Written by: Bert Hoover WATCH: George Santos expulsion is a symptom of a chaotic Congress - From MSNBC Three merged Lutheran congregations in Bethlehem have ended a 10-month search for a new home. The congregations that merged in February to create Blessed Trinity Lutheran Church have merged with Rosemont Lutheran Church in West Bethlehem. The merger was approved by both congregations Sunday, according to the Blessed Trinity website. A 71-year-old woman was escorted to a hospital in Brooklyn, New York, after police discovered high levels of carbon monoxide in her Hackettstown home on Sunday, authorities said. Hackettstown officers initially responded to the 100 block of Willows Grove Street at 6:21 p.m. for a welfare check, after the woman reported not feeling well, police said. An assessment of the womans home by the Hackettstown Fire Department later concluded there were high levels of carbon monoxide throughout the house. As of Monday, authorities said they had not determined the cause of the high levels of carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide levels inside the womans home were greater than 1800 ppms, according to Lt. Darren Tynan of the Hackettstown Police Department. Average levels in homes without gas stoves vary from 0.5 to 5 parts per million (ppm). Levels near properly adjusted gas stoves are often 5 to 15 ppm and those near poorly adjusted stoves may be 30 ppm or higher, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. We are reminding everyone to check their carbon monoxide and smoke detectors, Tynan said. The woman was taken to Hackettstown Medical Center. The hospital determined due to her level of exposure she would be transported to a hospital in New York, Tynan said. The owners of Easton Food Market shocked South Side Easton residents when the local store unexpectedly closed without a word this summer, but a new store is on the way. 250 Line Street LLC, the New York City-based agency leasing the former grocery store, confirmed on Thursday that an agreement with new tenants was signed last month a new supermarket could open by early 2024, a spokesperson said. The tenants are just waiting for refrigeration at this point, Haim Joseph, principal owner of 250 Line Street LLC, told lehighvalleylive.com. The new tenants are the previous subletters of the former tenants, Joseph said. Easton Food Market officially closed in June, Joseph confirmed, to the dismay of many area residents who were plunged into a food desert and forced to drive as far as Bethlehem or Allentown to find a store with ingredients typically used in Latin and Caribbean cooking. Weve always had a grocery store there and everyone was disappointed when they were gone, said Easton City Councilman-elect Frank Pintabone. I would also like to see that entire parcel redeveloped. Easton Food Market was previously a C-Town supermarket and T.J. Barts. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to lehighvalleylive.com. Glenn Epps can be reached at gepps@lehighvalleylive.com or glenn_epps_on Twitter. Portlaoise business woman Sonya Duggan has been honoured by the All-Ireland Business Foundation. The Director of Kilminchy School House has been named as the Business All-Star Laois Entrepreneur of the Year 2024. It's the fourth year running that Ms Duggan has received the award. The Foundation says her commitment extends beyond the identification of industry challenges. It says that as the Director of Kilminchy School House, a Montessori School in Portlaoise, Ms Duggan has played a pivotal role in creating a nurturing learning environment since the school's establishment in September 1999. Reacting to the news of her achievement, Kilminchy School House Director, Sonya Duggan said she was delighted to receive All-Star Accreditation as Laois Entrepreneur of the Year. "On behalf of our whole team in both our schools, we will continue to strive to do our best for our children and parents. This accreditation recognises all the hard work we put in to ensure they continue to get the best care and service Kilminchy School House can offer. It gives us such a sense of pride and achievement in our work," she said. Her business is geared towards children aged 110 years, the school encourages creative exploration of the world through various teaching approaches inspired by Reggio, Steiner, and Forest School methodologies. "She actively champions and promotes innovative initiatives and solutions. Her focus is on ensuring that the early years sector not only attracts but also retains exceptional individuals for the present and future. Her unwavering dedication to this cause serves as both an inspiration and a crucial element for the improvement of education and childcare services," says the Foundation. It continues: "The success of Kilminchy School House is attributed to its commitment to providing high-quality staff, excellent facilities, and fostering a caring, friendly culture. Sonya's passion for Early Years Education and Care is evident, as she serves as a dedicated advocate for Quality and Holistic Education, Equality, and ensuring a level playing field for all providers. Her enduring impact on the education sector continues to make a significant contribution to the community." Deputy Chair of AIBFs Adjudication Board, Kieran Ring, announced the award. "This accolade is in recognition of Sonya Duggan, Kilminchy School House's outstanding performance during her audit for Business All-Star accreditation. The result of the audit saw Sonya being honoured with Business All-Star Laois Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 accreditation. This is Sonya's fourth consecutive year being named a Business All-Star, a remarkable achievement. "Sonya's determination goes beyond identifying the challenges faced by the industry. She actively seeks and promotes innovative initiatives and solutions, ensuring the early years sector attracts and retains exceptional individuals now and in the future. Her unwavering commitment to this cause is both inspiring and essential for the betterment of education and childcare services. Managing Director of the All-Ireland Business Foundation, Kapil Khanna, said the accreditation, which is now held by over 650 firms, is needed by the thousands of small and medium businesses which operate to their own standards but have nothing to measure them by. We evaluate a companys background, trustworthiness and performance, and we speak to customers, employees and vendors. We also anonymously approach the company as a customer and report back on the experience. The business goes through at least two interviews and is scored on every part of the process against set metrics, he said. The All-Ireland Business Foundation says it is an autonomous national accreditation body tasked with enterprise development and the promotion of Best-in-Class in Irish business. Laois Sinn Fein TD Brian Stanley insisted the hapless Justice Minister should go and said a statement on policing by Fine Gael TD Charlie Flanagan rings hollow. Dep Stanley was responding to a statement issued by Dep Flanagan at the weekend in response to Sinn Feins decision to table a motion of no confidence in the Minister of Justice. The motion followed rioting and looting witnessed in Dublin on Thursday, November 23. Rather than work with Government and other authorities to ensure Dublin and all other areas are safe and equipped with high visibility policing, they want to take out the Justice Minister Helen McEntee and Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, Dep Flanagan said. Rather than work with all and provide unity following the violent events of November 23rd, Sinn Fein want to tear down the institutions that people are looking for leadership from. But this has always been Sinn Feins default position. Attack the State and attempt to tear it down. Sinn Fein and Mary Lou McDonald wont succeed. Fine Gael want to build stronger, safer communities across the country, Deputy Flanagan stated at the weekend. Dep Stanley said he had read the statement which was issued by Dep Flanagan, who is a former Minister for Justice. This rings hollow coming from somebody who is a member of Laois Joint Policing Committee and who has, and people can check the attendance record of that, will see that the two Sinn Fein representatives have almost a 100% attendance over the last three and a half years. Deputy Flanagan, as I recall it, has only attended one meeting in three and a half years of the Joint Policing Committee, said Dep Stanley. Sinn Fein believes in engagement with the community, engagement with Gardai. Using those opportunities to try and ensure that the streets are safer and that we have a well resourced and effective policing service. Fine Gael in this case in relation to the Dublin situation. It is an act of deflection. Deflecting attention away from the fact that there are 500 less Gardai in Dublin city then there was when this government came to power. They have had the justice portfolio for 13 years and they failed to put extra Gardai on the streets despite an increase in population, said Dep Stanley. It is clear that the Gardai had a lack of equipment. It is clear that the government have failed to bring forward legislation and get body cameras in place in a timely manner. Gardai are not sure of their powers. You have a ridiculous situation where the hapless Minister for Justice is writing to the Policing Authority to find out off the Policing Authority when the Guards can use powers to protect themselves. She showed no political leadership whatsoever, he continued. It is only now after the catastrophe in Dublin, the Dublin riots, which the response to was very poor, not the individual Gardais fault, but a clear lack of leadership on top. They are only now putting a public order unit in place. That public order unit, according to the figures released by government last week, will only consist of 42 frontline Garda. Around the clock 24/7, if you take that, that would only mean eight to ten members on a shift at any given time, said Dep Stanley. I think the real failure here is that Fine Gael continue to deny, or even say that they werent aware, that the centre of Dublin city spun out of control unfortunately. Even Eamon Ryan, the leader of the Green Party, as I recall it he has actually admitted that he was aware that things had got out of control but Fine Gael either were unaware of it or failed to recognise that. They have also failed to put the Garda Reserve in place, so there is complete failure, you couldnt have faith in this Minister. It is not just us that us saying it, communities are saying it to us, people in business are saying it to us. In relation to his criticism of our party leader, these events actually happened in her constituency. She has been on the ground, not just in the last fortnight, but she has been on the ground talking to people and engaging with people and local Gardai over recent months and raising these concerns. Unfortunately the Minister for Justice wasnt listening, said Dep Stanley. From Sinn Feins point of view we want to make community safety and public safety a priority. We are supporting getting more Gardai on the street, we provided for that in our budget. We want to make sure that we double the training allowance to get more Gardai training in Templemore. We want to make sure that the Gardai have the equipment but also that they know when they can use that and they are not left in a situation where they neither have the equipment nor proper guidance on what force they can use to try and protect themselves and protect local communities, he said. Fine Gael have not put community services in place in a lot of these communities where there have been problems. They have cut back on diversionary programmes, on youth services and when you do that, it may not be the single cause of the issues that arose in Dublin but it certainly doesnt help the situation, said Dep Stanely. It is clear that the government has not dealt with the problem but are actually refusing to recognise that this problem has been boiling under the surface for the last couple of years. In Laois Offaly, Deputy Stanley said overall we have good service here when asked about policing. Gardai and everyone would like more resources but I have to say that our engagement here would be very good with the local gardai, the Joint Policing Committee, the new Chief Superintendent that is there, we get a very good response any time that we have to engage with the Gardai on any matters, he said. He said Laois Offaly, and in particular Laois, had been fortunate in the numbers of recruits it has secured in recent years compared to other parts of the country. The death has occurred of Marie Eaton Millbrook, Midleton, Cork / Newbridge, Kildare. December 2, 2023 peacefully surrounded by her loving family in the excellent care of the doctors, nurses and staff of Ward 2D, Cork University Hospital. Sadly missed by her loving sons and daughter Conor, Tim and Roisin, her parents Joe and Nora, brothers and sister Niall, Joe Jnr and Sara, sister-in-law Sinead, partner Gareth, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncle, relatives, neighbours and friends. May Marie Rest In Peace. Family flowers only, donations in lieu to Cancer Research. Marie will repose at Hydes Funeral Home, Drurys Avenue, Midleton P25VW02 on Monday, December 4 from 6pm to 9pm. A private cremation service will follow. The death has occurred of Susan (Sue) Briody (nee Moran) Leixlip, Kildare and formerly of Queensbury, London, UK. December 1, 2023 (peacefully) at home, surrounded by her loved ones. Susan (Sue), beloved wife of the late Gerard, cherished mother of Darren, Martin, Sarah and Liam and a devoted grandmother of Leah, Annabel, Ciara, Ollie, Shauna, Matilda and Lillie. Sadly missed by her sons, daughter, grandchildren, son-in-law, daughters-in-law, sisters, brother, extended family and friends. May she rest in peace. Reposing at her son Martins residence on Saturday evening (December 2) from 6pm to 8pm. Removal on Monday morning (December 4) to the Church of Our Ladys Nativity, Leixlip arriving for Funeral Mass at 11am followed by cremation at Newlands Cross Crematorium. Sues funeral cortege will pass by her home in Beechpark, Leixlip on Monday morning at approximately 10.30am as Sue makes her way to the church in Leixlip. Sues funeral mass may be viewed online (live only) at 11am on Monday morning (December 4) by following this link. Followed by her committal service at Newland's Cross Crematorium by following this link at 12.50pm (approx). Messages of sympathy and condolences for the family may be left at www.cunninghamsfunerals.com. Family flowers only please. Donations, if desired, to the Friends of St Brigids Hospice. The death has occurred of Danielle Claire Quinlan Bishopland, Ballymore Eustace, Kildare, W91WD35. Died in her beloved Bishopland on December 2, 2023. Deeply loved and loving daughter of Paddy and Eilis Quinlan, adored sister of Wendy and Jonathan, sister in law of Alejo and Aine, aunt to Ana Ines, Tommy, Nicky, Robin and Jesse. Greatly loved and missed by her aunts, uncles and cousins and friends. Arrangements to follow. Being waked at home W91WD35. No flowers please, donations if wished to St Bridgets Hospice, Cancer Research, or the injured Jockeys Fund. Funeral Arrangements Later. The death has occurred of Philip (Phil) Kilmurray Clane, Kildare / Celbridge, Kildare / Ballyfermot, Dublin. December 2, 2023, suddenly at home. Pre-deceased by his loving parents Frank and Josephine. Sadly missed by his loving children Sinead, Phelim, Clara and Sean, Seans fiancee Holly, grandchildren Meadhbh, Eibhlin and Calvin, siblings Fintan, Janet, Fineen, Owen, Anna and Liam (Billy), brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews, extended family, neighbours and many good friends. Rest In Peace. Funeral Arrangements will be updated at a later date. Family flowers only please, donations can be made in memory of Phil to the Irish Cancer Society by clicking on the following link : https://www.cancer.ie/?form=FUNLTKAQEVU For all enquiries, please contact Oliver Reilly Funeral Directors on (045) 868230. The death has occurred of James (Jim) Noonan Cowanstown, Maynooth, Kildare / Rathcoffey, Kildare. December 2, 2023, peacefully in the wonderful care of the staff of Maynooth Community Care Unit, pre-deceased by his loving wife Breda and son Seamus, sadly missed by his family and a large circle of friends. Rest In Peace. Reposing at Oliver Reilly's Funeral Home, Woods House, Clane (W91 YPX4) on Tuesday from 6pm to 8pm. Removal from the Funeral Home on Wednesday at approx. 9.30am to arrive at the Church of the Sacred Heart, Rathcoffey for 10am Funeral Mass, followed by burial in Mainham Cemetery, Clane. The Funeral Mass can be viewed live here: https://www.claneparish.com/rathcoffey-webcam/ Oliver Reilly Funeral Directors accept no responsibility for any live webcam interruptions or issues. A special thanks to the staff of Maynooth Community Care Unit for their loving care shown to Jim. For all enquiries, please contact Oliver Reilly Funeral Directors on (045) 868230. The death has occurred of Eileen (Ellen) O'Sullivan (nee Gilligan) Kiskeam, Cork / Kildare. Passed away peacefully on December 1, 2023 surrounded by her loving family and in the tender loving care of the staff at Teach Altra Nursing Home Newmarket. Beloved wife of the late Denis and dear mother of Ann, Mary, John and Denis and sister of the late Moll, Johnny and Seamus. Sadly missed by her loving family, grandchildren Peter, Denis and Ellen, James, Eileen and Finbar, Jack, Denis, Tom and Katie, Dylan, Keira and Charley, brother Mike, sisters Bridie and Anne (Nan), sons-in-law Hugh and Sylvie, daughters-in-law Kathleen and Angela, nephews, nieces, relatives, kind neighbours and family friends. May She Rest in Peace. Reposing at Caseys Funeral Home Kiskeam on Sunday (December 3) from 4.30pm to 6.30pm. Reception into the Church of the Sacred Heart Kiskeam on Monday (December 4) for Requiem Mass at 12 noon, followed by burial in the local cemetery. Eileens Funeral Mass will be live streamed and may be viewed at churchservices.tv/kiskeam. House Private Please 'To us you were someone special, someone set apart, your memory will live forever, engraved within our hearts.' The death has occurred of James (Jim) (Jimmy) Quigley Athy, Kildare / Blackrock, Dublin. December 3, 2023 (peacefully) at the Blackrock Hospice after a long battle with illness bravely bourn with his sister Michelle and brother Tom by his side. James (Jim/Jimmy), dearly beloved son of the late Patrica, much loved brother of Michelle, Terry, Stephen, Thomas and the late Martin and brother-in-law of the late Theresa (Quigley). Sadly missed by his loving sister, brothers, nieces, nephews especially Dean, his best friend Derek, extended family and friends. May his gentle soul rest in peace. House Private. Reposing at Patrick O'Donovan and Son Funeral Home, Sallynoggin A96 PW73 on Tuesday (December 5) from 5pm to 7pm with family present. A Celebration of James life will be held on Wednesday (December 6) at 12 noon in St Michaels Cremation Services Chapel within the Funeral Home, followed thereafter by cremation. To view the Service live click on this link https://churchcamlive.ie/odonovan For those who would have liked to attend the funeral but are unable to, can leave a personal message of sympathy on the notice section at https://www.patrickodonovanandsonfunerals.ie. Please Note: the links provided to live-stream the Funeral Services are managed by an independent streaming company. The Funeral Directors accepts no responsibility for its functionality or interruption to a live transmission. The death has occurred of Frances (Margaret) Lynch (nee Coffey) Old Connell, Newbridge, Kildare, W12 FP93. Peacefully at Willowbrook Nursing Home surrounded by her loving family. Wife of the late Seamus. Sadly missed by her loving sons Paul, Mark and Larry, daughters Josephine, Adrienne and Teresa, her 13 grandchildren and great grandson, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, sisters Teresa and Betty, brother Lar, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, nephews, nieces, relatives, neighbours and a large circle of friends. May Frances Rest In Peace Reposing at her family home (W12 FP93) from 3pm on Monday until 8pm with Rosary at 7pm. Removal by Glennons Funeral Directors on Tuesday morning at 10.15am to arrive at St Conleth's Parish Church, Newbridge for Requiem Mass at 11am. Cremation afterwards at Newlands Cross Crematorium at 1.30pm. Family flowers only please. Donations, if desired, to Newbridge Cancer Support Group. Donations box in house and in church. A defendant who appeared in Naas District Court on Thursday, November 23 last, was allegedly involved in a number of incidents in Newbridge. The man previously appeared before Athy District Court on November 14 last, and Judge Desmond Zaidan imposed reporting restrictions on the case pending a psychiatric assessment on the man. The accused, who is aged in his 20s. was accused of threatening three separate people with a knife in Newbridge, specifically on Eyre Street, the Main Street and Edward Street on November 13 last. On the latest court date (Thursday, November 23 last), the defendant appeared before Judge Zaidan via video-link, as he is currently remanded in custody. It was heard that directions from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) are not yet ready in the case. QUESTIONS TO THE ACCUSED Speaking directly to the accused, Judge Zaidan asked him if he had been seen by any doctors, to which the man replied: "Yes, I've seen two separate ones." When the judge asked him if he was taking any medication or undergoing treatment, the man said: "Honestly, I think I just need therapy or counselling. "I haven't been diagnosed with a mental illness before." Judge Zaidan adjourned the case to December 7 to allow time for DPP directions. He also ordered for a psychiatric report to be conducted on the accused for this date. Stormont rules should be urgently reformed so that a speaker can be elected by a two-thirds majority of MLAs, a Westminster committee has recommended. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee has also proposed that the same threshold should be used to elect first and deputy first ministers. As part of a raft of proposals which the committee said would assist in restoring and stabilising the powersharing institutions, it also recommended rebranding the first minister roles and making them open to politicians from beyond the largest unionist and nationalist parties. The DUP has been blocking powersharing at Stormont for more than a year and a half in protest at the internal UK trade barriers created by Brexits Northern Ireland Protocol. The party has been involved in negotiations with the Government about the Windsor Framework, which reformed the protocol, and is seeking further assurances, by way of legislation, over Northern Irelands place in the UK internal market. Senior civil servants have been left in charge of devolved departments and the Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris had to intervene to set a budget. During the lengthy suspension, the DUP has blocked several attempts to elect a Speaker, which is required before ministers can be nominated to form an executive. The Westminster committee has been carrying out an investigation into the effectiveness of the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement; the historic peace deal which created the Stormont Assembly. Within current rules, votes from a majority of MLAs within both the nationalist and unionist traditions are needed to secure the posts of speaker, and first and deputy first ministers. During its evidence, the committee heard that with the growth of the proportion of Northern Ireland society identifying as neither unionist nor nationalist since the agreement, supermajority voting would effectively equate to cross-community consent. Among the measures it recommends in its report are calls for the UK Government to urgently reform the Assembly speaker election rules so that a candidate can be elected by a two-thirds supermajority of MLAs. It recommends the same method should be used to elect first and deputy first ministers. The report adds that, in recognition of their equal status, the roles should be rebranded as joint first ministers with the position open to any two MLAs of any two parties rather than just the largest parties. Under current rules, Sinn Feins Stormont leader Michelle ONeill is entitled to claim the position of first minister as her party emerged with the largest number of MLAs following last years Assembly elections. The committee said the changes would require consultation with the Irish Government as co-guarantors to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, as well as the parties of Northern Ireland. It said that the 1998 Northern Ireland Act that came from the agreement, which enshrines power-sharing government and devolution in Northern Ireland, would also need to be changed. Committee chairman Sir Robert Buckland said: When Stormont collapses critical public services are cast adrift. Health, education, policing; all are feeling the strain while important decisions go unmade, and the people of Northern Ireland suffer. More stringent safeguards are needed to protect against the cycle of restoration and collapse that has dogged Stormont. He added: The short-term measures weve proposed will shore up the stability of Stormont increasing the incentives to keep the institutions moving and enabling the Assembly to run without an executive in place. In the longer run, we feel that a full independent review into the effectiveness of the institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement should be conducted with input from all stakeholders. This should include the North-South and East-West elements, but a fully functioning Stormont is the foundation on which the rest stands. The Stormont powersharing institutions have been collapsed on several occasions previous to the current political impasse, including by Sinn Fein in 2017 in protest at the DUP handling of a green energy scheme. On that occasion the institutions remained dormant for three years. i-80 Gold Expands High-Grade Mineralization in the Blackjack Zone at Ruby Hill 10.1 % Zinc, 0.3 g/t Gold, 37.0 g/t Silver & 0.6 % Lead over 116.3 meters 16.1 % Zinc, 0.5 g/t Gold, 12.4 g/t Silver & 0.1 % Lead over 16.1 meters RENO, Nev., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - i-80 GOLD CORP. (TSX: IAU) (NYSE: IAUX) ("i-80", or the "Company") is pleased to report continued high-grade poly-metallic results from the ongoing drill program at the Company's Ruby Hill Property ("Ruby Hill" or "the Property") located in Eureka County, Nevada. The current drill program is focused on both defining and expanding high-grade mineralization in multiple target areas including the Blackjack (skarn) and the Hilltop (skarn and polymetallic CRD) Zones, and advancing metallurgical work associated with these deposits. The most recent intercepts in the Blackjack Zone include the first hole drilled from the east side of the Archimedes pit, which intersected significant high-grade mineralization at depth in the southern portion of the deposit where it remains open for expansion. Highlight results from new drilling include: Blackjack Zone iRH23-42 8.3 % Zn, 0.6 % Pb, 50.1 g/t Ag & 0.6 g/t Au over 20.1 m iRH23-42A 10.1 % Zn, 0.6 % Pb, 37.0 g/t Ag & 0.3 g/t Au over 116.3 m Including 16.3 % Zn, 0.5 % Pb, 42.3 g/t Ag & 0.3 g/t Au over 39.7 m And 14.5% Zn, 1.0% Pb, 59.9 g/t Ag & 0.2 g/t Au over 16.3 m iRH23- 43B 16.1 % Zn, 0.1 % Pb, 12.4 g/t Ag & 0.5 g/t Au over 16.1 m Also 12.2% Zn, 0.1% Pb, 20.1 g/t Ag & 0.9 g/t Au over 8.6 m "The exceptional results being realized at Ruby Hill have attracted significant interest with high-grade polymetallic mineralization being defined in multiple target areas," stated Tyler Hill, Chief Geologist of i-80. "Recent drilling has returned some of the highest-grade mineralization to-date in the Blackjack Zone as we continue to step-out to the south and at depth. Additionally, following the construction of the new drill stations better suited to intersect the East Hilltop Zones, substantial CRD and Skarn mineralization is being defined highlighting the potential to expand mineralization in these recently discovered zones." These new intercepts are complemented by other recent drilling at Blackjack including iRH23-41 that intersected both CRD and skarn mineralized zones that assayed 15.6 % Zn, 8.7 % Pb, 420.4 g/t Ag & 0.6 g/t Au over 40.4 m (CRD) and 10.7 % Zn, 0.4 % Pb, 0.2 g/t Au & 37.0 g/t Ag over 47.9 m (skarn). Skarn mineralization in the Blackjack Zone occurs proximal to the contact of the Graveyard Flats intrusive, and identical geological setting at the East Hilltop Skarn Zone located approximately three hundred metres (300 m) to the south. Future drilling will test this large area as no previous drilling has been completed between these two high-grade horizons (see Figure 1). Drilling is also being completed in the Upper and East Hilltop Zones situated along the Hilltop fault structure where multiple zones of mineralization have now been defined over a strike length of approximately 750 metres including the Upper, Lower and East Hilltop Zones (see Figure 1). As part of the ongoing drilling campaign, several holes are currently being drilled to advance metallurgical knowledge related to the polymetallic mineralization at Ruby Hill. This work is being funded by a third-party company that has recently entered into exclusivity with i-80 to acquire a minority joint venture interest in the Ruby Hill Property. Table 1 ? Highlight New Assay Results from Blackjack Zone Drilling Drillhole ID Zone Type From (m) To (m) Length (m) Au (g/t) Ag (g/t) Pb (%) Zn (%) iRH23-42 Blackjack Core 596.8 616.9 20.1 0.6 51.1 0.6 8.3 iRH23-42A Blackjack Core 530.8 647.1 116.3 0.3 37.0 0.6 10.1 including Blackjack Core 530.8 547.1 16.3 0.2 59.9 1.0 14.5 And Blackjack Core 605.9 645.7 39.7 0.3 42.3 0.5 16.3 iRH23-43B Blackjack Core 587.0 603.4 16.4 0.5 12.4 0.1 16.1 And Blackjack Core 699.2 707.7 8.6 0.9 20.1 0.1 12.2 True widths estimated 60-90%. UTM Drillhole ID East m North m Elevation m Azimuth Dip NAD83 Zone 11 iRH23-42&42A 587525 4375149 1995 032 -45 iRH23-43 588171 4375020 1987 309 -43 The ongoing drill program is also testing the FAD deposit that is located approximately two kilometres to the south of Ruby Hill where earlier drilling completed by Paycore returned intercepts of up to 8.0 g/t Au, 79.0 g/t Ag, 10.0 % Zn & 1.0 % Pb over 27.4 m in hole PC22-10, and 7.1 g/t Au, 376.0 g/t Ag, 6.3 % Zn & 10.3 % Pb over 14.8 m in hole PC22?08. The Company has submitted for approval its plan to develop an underground mine at Ruby Hill with mineralization accessed via a ramp from the Archimedes open pit. The target is to commence construction in 2024 to provide underground platforms for definition drilling and mining operations. Multiple types of mineralization have been identified in the Hilltop Corridor including skarn (Blackjack), CRD (Hilltop/historic mines), distal disseminated Au-Ag mineralization (Mineral Point) and locally Carlin-type gold. The Eureka (Ruby Hill) Mining District has a history of high-grade polymetallic CRD production that began in the 1860's and spanned a period of more than one hundred years. Historic mined grades rank amongst the highest for any CRD district in the world. Since the 1960's, the CRD potential of the Eureka District has been largely overlooked in favour of exploration for Carlin-type gold deposits and the Company considers the opportunity to be substantial. The Ruby Hill Property is one of the Company's primary assets and is host to the core processing infrastructure within the Eureka District of the Battle Mountain-Eureka Trend including an idle leach plant, an active heap leach facility, and is host to multiple gold, gold-silver and polymetallic (base metal) deposits. Please click here for further information on abbreviations and conversions referenced in this press release. QAQC Procedures All samples were submitted to American Assay Laboratories (AAL) of Sparks, NV, which is an ISO 9001 and 17025 certified and accredited laboratory, independent of the Company. Samples submitted through AAL and are run through standard prep methods and analyzed using FA-PB30-ICP (Au; 30g fire assay) and IO-4AB32 (35 element suite; 0.5g 4-acid ICP-OES+MS). Select high-grade gold samples were also completed with metallic screen fire assays using G-FASFAu11. AAL undertakes their own internal coarse and pulp duplicate analysis to ensure proper sample preparation and equipment calibration. i-80 Gold Corp's QA/QC program includes regular insertion of CRM standards, duplicates, and blanks into the sample stream with a stringent review of all results. Qualified Person Tyler Hill, CPG-12146, Chief Geologist at i-80 is the Qualified Person for the information contained in this press release and is a Qualified Person within the meaning of National Instrument 43-101. About i-80 Gold Corp. i-80 Gold Corp. is a Nevada-focused, mining company with a goal of achieving mid-tier gold producer status through the development of multiple deposits within the Company's advanced-stage property portfolio with processing at i-80's centralized milling facilities. i-80 Gold's common shares are listed on the TSX and the NYSE American under the trading symbol IAU:TSX and IAUX:NYSE. Further information about i-80 Gold's portfolio of assets and long-term growth strategy is available at www.i80gold.com or by email at [email protected]. Certain statements in this release constitute "forward-looking statements" or "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including but not limited to, the expansion or mineral resources at Ruby Hill and the potential of the Ruby Hill project. Such statements and information involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the company, its projects, or industry results, to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or information. Such statements can be identified by the use of words such as "may", "would", "could", "will", "intend", "expect", "believe", "plan", "anticipate", "estimate", "scheduled", "forecast", "predict" and other similar terminology, or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. These statements reflect the Company's current expectations regarding future events, performance and results and speak only as of the date of this release. Forward-looking statements and information involve significant risks and uncertainties, should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results and will not necessarily be accurate indicators of whether or not such results will be achieved. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements or information, including, but not limited to: material adverse changes, unexpected changes in laws, rules or regulations, or their enforcement by applicable authorities; the failure of parties to contracts with the company to perform as agreed; social or labour unrest; changes in commodity prices; and the failure of exploration programs or studies to deliver anticipated results or results that would justify and support continued exploration, studies, development or operations. SOURCE i-80 Gold Corp 4 december 2023 at 06:00 News published onand distributed by: Ault Alliance's Subsidiary, Sentinum, Set to Launch New Montana Data Center, Boosting Bitcoin Mining Operations Ault Alliance, Inc. (NYSE American: AULT), a diversified holding company ("Ault Alliance," or the "Company"), today announced its wholly owned subsidiary, Sentinum, Inc. ("Sentinum"), plans to begin operations at its new Montana data center in January 2024. The opening of this new data center will expedite the Company's plans to improve its profitability and efficiency by transitioning some of its miners from a third party hosted Bitcoin mining operation to its own facility in Montana. The Company anticipates the initial transition of its mining hardware will begin in January, with a focus on optimizing operational costs and improving cash flow. The new Montana data center consists of two sites and once operational shall have a combined initial capacity of 20 megawatts ("MWs"). The Montana data center will begin operations in a two-pronged approach by bringing one 10 MW site online in January, followed by the second 10 MW site shortly thereafter. Sentinum believes that the capacity of the two Montana sites can be significantly expanded and has contracted with the local utility to begin an electrical load study in order to better understand the opportunities for power upgrades at its Montana sites. Pending the results of the study, Sentinum would also require additional financial resources in order to increase the capacity. Will Horne, Chief Executive Officer of Ault Alliance, emphasized the strategic importance of this expansion, stating, "The launch of our Montana data center is a pivotal step in our roadmap. It aligns with our objective to transition our miners from hosted locations to our bespoke data centers. This shift is expected to yield reductions in our per kilowatt-hour costs, thereby bolstering our profitability and cash flow. This is more than just an expansion; it's a testament to our commitment to be a leading company in the digital asset industry. Our Montana data center is set to become a cornerstone of our mining operations and is expected to drive efficiency and contribute towards profitability in 2024." For more information on Ault Alliance and its subsidiaries, Ault Alliance recommends that stockholders, investors, and any other interested parties read Ault Alliance's public filings and press releases available under the Investor Relations section at www.Ault.com or at www.sec.gov. About Ault Alliance, Inc. Ault Alliance, Inc. is a diversified holding company pursuing growth by acquiring undervalued businesses and disruptive technologies with a global impact. Through its wholly and majority-owned subsidiaries and strategic investments, Ault Alliance owns and operates a data center at which it mines Bitcoin and offers colocation and hosting services for the emerging artificial intelligence ecosystems and other industries, and provides mission-critical products that support a diverse range of industries, including metaverse platform, oil exploration, crane services, defense/aerospace, industrial, automotive, medical/biopharma, consumer electronics, hotel operations and textiles. In addition, Ault Alliance extends credit to select entrepreneurial businesses through a licensed lending subsidiary. Ault Alliance's headquarters are located at 11411 Southern Highlands Parkway, Suite 240, Las Vegas, NV 89141; www.Ault.com. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These forward-looking statements generally include statements that are predictive in nature and depend upon or refer to future events or conditions, and include words such as "believes," "plans," "anticipates," "projects," "estimates," "expects," "intends," "strategy," "future," "opportunity," "may," "will," "should," "could," "potential," or similar expressions. Statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on current beliefs and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update any of them publicly in light of new information or future events. Actual results could differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement as a result of various factors. More information, including potential risk factors, that could affect the Company's business and financial results are included in the Company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including, but not limited to, the Company's Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8- K. All filings are available at www.sec.gov and on the Company's website at www.Ault.com. 4 december 2023 at 06:35 News published onand distributed by: Nanoscope Therapeutics Continues Leadership Growth; Welcomes Accomplished Finance and Biotech Leader Glenn Sblendorio as Chairman of the Board New Addition Highlights Continued Enhancement of Organization's Strategic Trajectory DALLAS, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Nanoscope Therapeutics (Nanoscope), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing gene therapies for inherited retinal diseases, today announced the appointment of Glenn Sblendorio as Chairman of the Board, effective immediately. With more than 30 years of exemplary experience marked by extensive executive leadership in the ophthalmic industry, Mr. Sblendorio will support Nanoscope in reaching its strategic vision. In his new role as Chairman of the Board, Mr. Sblendorio will play a pivotal role in ensuring the effectiveness of the board of directors in implementing Nanoscope's organizational strategy and direction. His comprehensive understanding of finance and business development will assist in guiding Nanoscope through its mission to bring hope for renewed sight to millions of people affected by retinal degenerative diseases for which no cures currently exist. Mr. Sblendorio remarked on his appointment, "I am honored to join Nanoscope as Chairman of the Board. The company's commitment to advancing novel treatments for retinal degenerative diseases aligns with my passion for making a meaningful impact in the retina space. I look forward to working collaboratively with the board and leadership team to drive innovation and contribute to the realization of our shared mission." Most recently, Mr. Sblendorio held various key leadership roles at IVERIC bio, Inc., an Astellas Company (formerly Ophthotech Corporation), including CEO, President, and Director. He also served as EVP, COO, CFO and Treasurer. Additionally, he served as President, CFO and Director at The Medicines Company and as EVP and CFO at Eyetech Pharmaceuticals. Earlier in his career, Mr. Sblendorio was a Managing Director at MPM Capital Advisors, LLC, and held various senior financial positions at Hoffman-La Roche. Nanoscope CEO and Co-Founder Sulagna Bhattacharya expressed enthusiasm about the appointment, stating, "We are elated to welcome Glenn Sblendorio as our Chairman of the Board. His wealth of experience in building and scaling progressive companies, coupled with his thorough knowledge of successfully bringing retinal treatments to market, will undoubtedly strengthen Nanoscope's position as a leader in the ophthalmic industry. We look forward to leveraging his expertise as we navigate the next phases of our development." Mr. Sblendorio joins the company at a crucial time, and his appointment reflects Nanoscope's commitment to optimizing the impact of the board of directors by assembling a group of diverse and accomplished advisors to drive the organization's innovation and success. Nanoscope is dedicated to pioneering novel retinal solutions that make a lasting impact for patients and physicians. About Nanoscope www.nanostherapeutics.com Nanoscope Therapeutics is developing gene-agnostic, sight-restoring optogenetic therapies for the millions of patients blinded by inherited retinal diseases, for which no cure exists. The company's lead asset, MCO-010, recently reported topline results from the RESTORE Phase 2b multicenter, randomized, double-masked, sham-controlled clinical trial in the U.S. for retinitis pigmentosa (NCT04945772). The company has also recently completed the Phase 2 STARLIGHT trial of MCO-010 therapy in Stargardt patients (NCT05417126). MCO-010 has received FDA fast-track designations and FDA orphan drug designations for both retinitis pigmentosa and Stargardt. Preclinical assets include non-viral laser-delivered MCO-020 gene therapy for geographic atrophy. For media inquiries, please contact: Argot Partners 212-600-1902 [email protected] SOURCE Nanoscope Therapeutics 4 december 2023 at 07:00 News published onand distributed by: SAMUEL ANNOUNCES AGREEMENT TO SELL WESTERN CANADA AND U.S. CARBON PLATE SERVICE CENTERS TO RUSSEL METALS OAKVILLE, ON, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - Samuel, Son & Co., Limited (Samuel), a leading metals distributor and industrial products manufacturer, today announced that it has entered into an agreement to sell its Western Canadian and U.S. carbon plate Service Center operations to Russel Metals Inc. (Russel) for approximately $225 million, subject to closing working capital and other normal course adjustments. The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions. Colin Osborne, President and CEO of Samuel, stated, "Samuel has a longstanding reputation as one of North America's leading metals distribution companies. We will continue to build on this legacy with a Service Center business that will now focus on growing customer relationships in Central and Eastern Canada and the U.S., while simultaneously accelerating our investment in additional growth opportunities across the business. We are proud of the strength of the operations we are selling to Russel, which we believe can be made even stronger as part of this newly combined business. On behalf of Samuel, I would like to extend our appreciation to the team members who will be joining Russel for playing such an important role in our Service Center business." Western Canada Service Center locations in Winnipeg, MB; Nisku, AB; Calgary, AB; Surrey, BC; and Langley, BC will be included in the transaction. U.S. carbon plate branches in Neville Island, PA and Buffalo, NY will also be part of the transaction. Following the anticipated close of this transaction, Samuel will continue operating a leading network of Service Center locations across North America, in addition to its automotive and diversified manufacturing divisions. About Samuel Founded in 1855, Samuel, Son & Co., Limited, is a family-owned integrated network of metal manufacturing, processing and distribution divisions. Samuel employees provide metals, industrial products and related value-added services from locations across North America. The company leverages its industry expertise, breadth of experience and the passion of its people to help drive success for North American business ? one customer at a time. For more information visit Samuel.com. SOURCE Samuel Son & Co., Limited 4 december 2023 at 07:15 News published onand distributed by: CGX Energy Inc. and Frontera Energy Provide Notice of Virtual Presentation On Guyana-Suriname Basin, Corentyne Block, and Integrated Well Results TORONTO and CALGARY, AB, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - CGX Energy Inc. (TSXV: OYL) ("CGX") and Frontera Energy Corporation (TSX: FEC) ("Frontera"), joint venture partners (the "Joint Venture") in the Petroleum Prospecting License for the Corentyne block offshore Guyana, announced today that on December, 11, 2023, at 10:00 am ET, senior operational and technical team members will host a virtual informational presentation on the Guyana-Suriname basin, the Corentyne block and the Integrated Well Results. Participants are encouraged to submit questions in advance to: [email protected] or [email protected]. Questions may also be submitted during the informational presentation. The Joint Venture cordially invites all shareholders, stakeholders, investors, and media to attend the virtual presentation. To join the presentation, visit: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/d63887b7-4251-4310-b884-f1e10c3f0f63@2637d50c-c560-436c-8997-ebe63c9656fd About CGX CGX is a Canadian-based oil and gas exploration company focused on the exploration of oil in the Guyana-Suriname Basin and the development of a deep-water port in Berbice, Guyana. About Frontera Frontera Energy Corporation is a Canadian public company involved in the exploration, development, production, transportation, storage, and sale of oil and natural gas in South America, including related investments in both upstream and midstream facilities. The Company has a diversified portfolio of assets with interests in 27 exploration and production blocks in Colombia, Ecuador, and Guyana, and pipeline and port facilities in Colombia. Frontera is committed to conducting business safely and in a socially, environmentally, and ethically responsible manner. If you would like to receive News Releases via email as soon as they are published, please subscribe here: http://fronteraenergy.mediaroom.com/subscribe SOURCE Frontera Energy Corporation 4 december 2023 at 07:30 News published onand distributed by: Trading Technologies taps three experienced capital markets business leaders for new senior management roles, effective Jan. 1 Justin Llewellyn-Jones to assume COO role; Christopher Heffernan to lead fixed income business line; Alun Green to oversee futures and options CHICAGO, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Trading Technologies International, Inc. (TT), a global capital markets technology platform provider, announced today that the firm has appointed three industry leaders ? each with decades of relevant experience ? to key new posts on its leadership team. Joining on Jan. 1, 2024 will be Justin Llewellyn-Jones as Chief Operating Officer (COO), Christopher Heffernan as EVP Fixed Income and Alun Green as EVP Futures & Options. As COO, Llewellyn-Jones will lead all of the firm's market-facing business to drive its multi-asset growth, in collaboration with the heads of each business line. Heffernan will focus on building TT's global fixed income business, while Green will focus on expanding the company's core futures and options franchise. Llewellyn-Jones and Heffernan will be based in New York, with Green based in London. TT CEO Keith Todd said: "As we continue to grow into new asset classes and significantly broaden our appeal to the buy side, we have been steadily fortifying our leadership team ? as well as subject matter experts within each of our newly aligned business lines ? with seasoned professionals to ensure we have all the building blocks in place to achieve our ambitious goals. Justin, Chris and Alun bring to the team a wealth of talent, skills, experience and deep relationships, and we're thrilled to have them join TT in the new year." Justin Llewellyn-Jones Llewellyn-Jones has nearly three decades of experience in fintech and financial services working in London and New York. Most recently at Broadridge, he served as Chief Product Officer since early 2022 and as Head of Capital Markets, North America (Equities, FX & Derivatives) for more than four years, with responsibility for business operations and product strategy. Previously, he was Global Head of Derivatives at ION after more than 14 years with Fidessa, which ION had acquired. At Fidessa, he was also Global Head of Derivatives for more than six years and COO Americas for more than eight years. He joined Fidessa in 2005 as Senior Vice President, responsible for service delivery for the firm's U.S.-hosted services business, and he was named Managing Director of that business in 2008. Llewellyn-Jones also served in various roles at NatWest and ADP. He earned a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree from the University of Manchester and a Master of Science degree in computer science from Cardiff University. Christopher Heffernan Heffernan has over two decades of fixed income experience in sales and trading, business development, and leadership roles. Over the last decade, he helped build two fixed income trading businesses, with focuses on electronic and algorithmic trading, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and portfolio trading. He has built relationships with a diverse global client base, including asset managers, hedge funds, insurance companies, pension funds, wealth management firms, private banks and broker-dealers. Most recently, Heffernan served since 2019 as Head of Fixed Income Sales at Flow Traders where he ran a team responsible for new business, client distribution and relationship management. Prior to this, he joined SumRidge Partners in 2011 as one of the original founding employees, serving until 2018 as Director, Institutional Sales. His successful efforts over seven years contributed to the firm's acquisition last year by global financial services firm Raymond James. Heffernan started his career at Morgan Stanley in 2001, where he served as Vice President in fixed income for over eight years, with roles on both the sales and trading desks. He earned a bachelor's degree in finance from Villanova University. Alun Green Green has 24 years of financial markets and technology experience. For the past eight years, he has served in London as Managing Director, Derivatives Utility at Fidelity Information Services (FIS), following the firm's acquisition of SunGard in 2015. He also served at FIS as Executive Vice President and Head of Strategy, Post-Trade Derivatives and Securities. For more than seven years, Green had been in multiple roles at SunGard, first as Senior Vice President, Global Head of Operations and ultimately as Executive Vice President, Deputy Head, Derivatives Utility prior to the FIS acquisition. Green was at Calyon Financial (known as Carr Futures prior to its 2004 acquisition by Credit Agricole) in several technology-focused roles from 1999 to 2007. He earned two Master of Science degrees in mathematics, from both the University of Oxford and Queen Mary University of London. About Trading Technologies Trading Technologies ( www.tradingtechnologies.com ) is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology platform provider to the global capital markets industry. The company's award-winning TT platform connects to the world's major international exchanges and liquidity venues in listed derivatives alongside a growing number of asset classes, including fixed income and cryptocurrencies. The TT platform delivers advanced tools for trade execution and order management, market data solutions, analytics, trade surveillance, risk management and infrastructure services to the world's leading sell-side institutions, buy-side firms and exchanges. The company's blue-chip client base includes the Tier 1 banks as well as brokers, money managers, hedge funds, proprietary traders, Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs), commercial hedgers and risk managers. These firms rely on the TT ecosystem to manage their end-to-end trading operations. In addition, exchanges utilize TT's technology to deliver innovative solutions to their market participants. TT also strategically partners with technology companies to make their complementary offerings available to Trading Technologies' global client base through the TT ecosystem. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1672454/Trading_Technologies_Logo.jpg 4 december 2023 at 07:30 News published onand distributed by: ARNOLD LAW FIRM, SAFETY CENTER, AND DEMETRIS BAMR WASHINGTON UNVEIL INSPIRATIONAL JUSTICE & SUPERHERO SAFETY MURAL IN SACRAMENTO SACRAMENTO, Calif., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Arnold Law Firm, in collaboration with Safety Center and renowned local artist Demetris BAMR Washington, proudly unveils a two-part mural at Safetyville USA, symbolizing safety, justice, and freedom. The community is invited to witness the grand unveiling of the Justice & Superhero Safety Mural on Sunday, December 17th, 2023, at 10:30 AM. This unique partnership aims to deliver a visually striking and meaningful piece of artwork to the Sacramento community. The aspiration is to instill a sense of responsibility and a commitment to diversity and justice among the city's youngest residents. The first segment of the mural showcases Lady Justice towering over the impactful word "JUSTICE." The second part features a child-friendly depiction of Clayeo Arnold, founder of Arnold Law Firm, as a superhero guiding a diverse group of child superheroes through the importance of safety?a captivating tableau designed to enlighten children and offer families an exciting photo opportunity. The organizers are hopeful that this mural will become a prominent stop on the Sacramento art mural tour. About Arnold Law Firm: Established in 1975 by Clayeo C. Arnold, Arnold Law Firm has played a vital role in Sacramento County. Committed to the community, the firm ensures just compensation for victims of catastrophic and life-altering injuries. With a deep understanding of the region and its people, Arnold Law Firm and its founder Clayeo Arnold remain an integral part of the community. "We know the area, we know the people who live here, we know the doctors, we know the experts. We've been here for a long time....We are part of the community and we are going to remain part of the community." - Clayeo C. Arnold About Safety Center: Safetyville USA, a 1/3 scale model city representing Sacramento, serves as an immersive learning environment for children to practice essential safety skills. Since 1984, Safety Center has educated children and caregivers through interactive tours, programs, and events. Arnold Law Firm has been a steadfast supporter for nearly two decades, contributing to Safetyville's child-sized law firm building. About Demetris BAMR Washington: Demetris BAMR Washington is a talented artist renowned for his "Cartoon Surrealism" style. Influenced by California's diverse cultures, he has completed over 90 murals across the state, each telling stories that inspire people. Event Details: Date and Time: Sunday, December 17th, 2023, at 10:30 AM Location: Safetyville USA, Safety Center 3909 Bradshaw Road Sacramento, CA 95827 SOURCE Arnold Law Firm 4 december 2023 at 08:20 News published onand distributed by: Akobo Minerals to Present at the Clean Energy and Precious Metals Virtual Investor Conference December 6th OSLO, Sweden, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Akobo Minerals (Euronext and Frankfurt: AKOBO) (OTCQX: AKOBF). The Scandinavian-based Ethiopian gold exploration and boutique mining company today announced that Jrgen Evjen, CEO, will present live at the Clean Energy and Precious Metals Virtual Investor Conference, hosted by VirtualInvestorConferences.com, on December 6th. This presentation will shed light on the company's recent intersection of the bonanza-grade ore body in the Segele underground mine and the promising exploration potential in Ethiopia as part of the Arabian Nubian shield. DATE: December 6th TIME: 11:00 AM ET LINK: https://bit.ly/3rOONJH Available for 1x1 meetings: December 6th, 7th, 8th and 11th This will be a live, interactive online event where investors are invited to ask the company questions in real-time. If attendees are not able to join the event live on the day of the conference, an archived webcast will also be made available after the event. It is recommended that online investors pre-register and run the online system check to expedite participation and receive event updates. Learn more about the event at www.virtualinvestorconferences.com . About Akobo Minerals Akobo Minerals is a reputable Scandinavian-based gold exploration and boutique mining company. The company currently holds an extensive exploration license encompassing 182 square kilometres and a 16 square kilometres mining license, with an active mining operation in the Gambela region and Dima Woreda, Ethiopia. Akobo Minerals has emerged as the foremost gold exploration company in Ethiopia, boasting over 13 years of dedicated on-the-ground experience. What sets Akobo Minerals apart is its strong commitment to fostering positive relationships with local communities, extending all the way to national authorities. This commitment is underscored by the company's unwavering dedication to environmental and social governance (ESG), as evidenced by their groundbreaking shared value program. Akobo Minerals has firmly established its presence in the region by upholding the principles of ethical conduct, transparency, and open communication. This foundation positions the company to embrace new opportunities and ventures as they emerge, making it a key player in the burgeoning Ethiopian mining industry. Akobo Minerals has charted a clear course for its future growth, with a strategy centered around amassing a portfolio of valuable gold resources through high-impact exploration and mining activities, all while maintaining an efficient and streamlined business operation. The company is headquartered in Oslo and is publicly listed on the Euronext Growth Oslo Exchange and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol AKOBO. For US investors, Akobo Minerals AB (OTCQX: AKOBF) is traded on the OTCQX Best Market, adhering to high financial standards, best practice corporate governance, and compliance with U.S. securities laws. Additionally, the company has a professional third-party sponsor introduction, and investors can access current financial disclosures and Real-Time Level 2 quotes for the company on www.otcmarkets.com. Akobo Minerals places great emphasis on meeting and exceeding industry standards, fully complying with all aspects of the JORC code, 2012. For detailed information on their adherence to this code, please refer to https://www.jorc.org/. Akobo Minerals' unwavering commitment to ethical practices, community engagement, and environmental responsibility positions them as a formidable force in the evolving landscape of the Ethiopian mining sector. About Virtual Investor Conferences Virtual Investor Conferences (VIC) is the leading proprietary investor conference series that provides an interactive forum for publicly traded companies to seamlessly present directly to investors. Providing a real-time investor engagement solution, VIC is specifically designed to offer companies more efficient investor access. Replicating the components of an on-site investor conference, VIC offers companies enhanced capabilities to connect with investors, schedule targeted one-on-one meetings and enhance their presentations with dynamic video content. Accelerating the next level of investor engagement, Virtual Investor Conferences delivers leading investor communications to a global network of retail and institutional investors. CONTACTS: Akobo Minerals Jrgen Evjen, CEO Mob: (+47) 92 80 40 14 Mail: [email protected] LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/akobominerals Web: www.akobominerals.com Virtual Investor Conferences John M. Viglotti SVP Corporate Services, Investor Access OTC Markets Group (212) 220-2221 [email protected] 4 december 2023 at 08:35 News published onand distributed by: Miami International Holdings Announces New MIAX Sapphire Options Trading Floor to be Located in Wynwood District of Miami; 38,400 Square Foot Facility will Include Office Space for MIAX Employees and Market Participants MIAMI, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Miami International Holdings, Inc. (MIH), owner of Miami International Securities Exchange, LLC (MIAX), MIAX PEARL, LLC (MIAX Pearl), MIAX Emerald, LLC (MIAX Emerald), MIAX Sapphire, LLC (MIAX SapphireTM), Minneapolis Grain Exchange, LLC (MGEXTM), LedgerX LLC (LedgerX), The Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSX), and Dorman Trading, LLC (Dorman Trading) today announced that the new MIAX Sapphire options physical trading floor will be located in the 545 Wyn building in Miami's Wynwood district. The new MIAX Sapphire exchange will be MIAX's fourth national securities exchange for U.S. multi-listed options and will operate both an electronic exchange and physical trading floor. The electronic exchange is expected to launch in the second quarter of 2024, with the physical trading going live in the second half of 2024, subject to regulatory approval. The MIAX Sapphire trading floor will be the first national securities exchange to establish operations in Miami, Florida, and will include a next-generation trading floor, ancillary office space for MIAX employees and market participants, conference facilities and broadcast media space. Additional tenants in the 545 Wyn location include Sony Music and PwC. "Miami's business-friendly culture, favorable tax environment and emergence as the 'Wall Street of the South' make the Wynwood district the ideal location to launch the new MIAX Sapphire trading floor," said Thomas P. Gallagher, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MIH. "Mayor Levine Cava's office and the Miami business community have been very welcoming and receptive to our plans, and we are grateful for their support. We look forward to continued collaboration with the fast-growing Miami financial community as we expand MIAX's presence in the city." "Having worked with MIAX for over 15 years, it is gratifying to see its continued commitment to the State of Florida and the Miami community with the opening of its newest exchange in Wynwood," said former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. "MIAX's sustained market share growth since the launch of its first exchange in 2012 is a testament to its management team, dedicated employees and industry leadership." "MIAX's decision to build its newest exchange in Miami reinforces our status as a destination for the global financial industry," said Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava. "Being selected as the location for a regulated national securities exchange represents an important milestone for our community and validates our strategy of providing a dynamic business environment for global financial institutions and industry professionals." "As the second largest international finance hub on the east coast, Greater Miami is at the forefront of financial services innovation, which is consistent with MIH's history and culture," said Rodrick T. Miller, President and Chief Executive Officer, Miami-Dade Beacon Council. "The new MIAX Sapphire trading floor will serve as a key financial tenant for the Wynwood district, tapping into diverse local talent and attracting additional financial firms to our thriving business ecosystem. We are proud to have supported MIAX's expansion in Miami and will continue to partner with them as they engage with our community." About MIAX MIAX's parent holding company, Miami International Holdings, Inc., owns Miami International Securities Exchange, LLC (MIAX), MIAX PEARL, LLC (MIAX Pearl), MIAX Emerald, LLC (MIAX Emerald), MIAX Sapphire, LLC (MIAX SapphireTM), Minneapolis Grain Exchange, LLC (MGEXtm), LedgerX LLC (LedgerX), The Bermuda Stock Exchange (BSX) and Dorman Trading, LLC (Dorman Trading). MIAX, MIAX Pearl and MIAX Emerald are national securities exchanges registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that are enabled by MIAX's in-house built, proprietary technology. MIAX offers trading of options on all three exchanges as well as cash equities through MIAX Pearl Equitiestm. The MIAX trading platform was built to meet the high-performance quoting demands of the U.S. options trading industry and is differentiated by throughput, latency, reliability and wire-order determinism. MIAX also serves as the exclusive exchange venue for cash-settled options on the SPIKES Volatility Index (Ticker: SPIKE), a measure of the expected 30-day volatility in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY). MGEX is a registered exchange with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and offers trading in a variety of products including Hard Red Spring Wheat Futures. MGEX is a Designated Contract Market (DCM) and Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) under the CFTC, providing DCM and DCO services in an array of asset classes. LedgerX is a CFTC regulated exchange and clearinghouse and is registered as a Designated Contract Market (DCM), Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) and Swap Execution Facility (SEF) with the CFTC. BSX is a fully electronic, vertically integrated international securities market headquartered in Bermuda and organized in 1971. BSX specializes in the listing and trading of capital market instruments such as equities, debt issues, funds, hedge funds, derivative warrants, and insurance linked securities. Dorman Trading is a full-service Futures Commission Merchant registered with the CFTC. MIAX's executive offices and National Operations Center are located in Princeton, N.J., with additional U.S. offices located in Miami, FL. MGEX offices are located in Minneapolis, MN. LedgerX offices are located in Princeton, N.J. BSX offices are located in Hamilton, Bermuda. Dorman Trading offices are located in Chicago, IL. To learn more about MIAX visit www.miaxglobal.com. To learn more about MGEX visit www.mgex.com. To learn more about LedgerX visit www.ledgerx.com. To learn more about BSX visit www.bsx.com. To learn more about Dorman Trading visit www.dormantrading.com. About the Miami?Dade Beacon Council The Miami-Dade Beacon Council is the county's official economic development partnership. Attracting and retaining companies that create high-value jobs and invest in our community, The Beacon Council is committed to driving long-term economic prosperity and inclusive growth for Miami-Dade County, its businesses, and residents. We achieve this by marketing Miami-Dade as a world-class business destination; growing local companies and fostering entrepreneurs; and shaping Miami-Dade's economic future. Established in 1985, The Beacon Council has attracted more than 120,000 new jobs and $7.6 Billion of new investment to Miami-Dade County. For more information, visit BeaconCouncil.com. Disclaimer and Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements The press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities of Miami International Holdings, Inc. (together with its subsidiaries, the Company), and shall not constitute an offer, solicitation or sale in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer; solicitation or sale would be unlawful. This press release may contain forward-looking statements, including forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements describe future expectations, plans, results, or strategies and are generally preceded by words such as "may," "future," "plan" or "planned," "will" or "should," "expected," "anticipates," "draft," "eventually" or "projected." You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including the risks that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. All third-party trademarks (including logos and icons) referenced by the Company remain the property of their respective owners. Unless specifically identified as such, the Company's use of third-party trademarks does not indicate any relationship, sponsorship, or endorsement between the owners of these trademarks and the Company. Any references by the Company to third-party trademarks is to identify the corresponding third-party goods and/or services and shall be considered nominative fair use under the trademark law. Media Contact: Andy Nybo, SVP, Chief Communications Officer (609) 955-2091 [email protected] SOURCE MIAX 4 december 2023 at 08:30 News published onand distributed by: ROC.ai Expands into New Markets with Launch of Iris Recognition, Driving American-Made Innovation in Multimodal Biometrics Game-Changing Approach Enables Launch in Record Time, Setting New Industry Standards for Combined Speed and Accuracy in Iris Recognition DENVER, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Continuing their blockbuster drive to put American-made computer vision algorithms at the top of global performance, Rank One Computing (ROC.ai) has announced the launch of their groundbreaking iris recognition solution. By leveraging their cutting-edge AI, ML, and deep learning expertise, ROC.ai was able to develop an iris matching algorithm that outperforms global competitors in just a few short months. In the prestigious NIST IREX rankings , ROC.ai's algorithm proved to be 100x faster than NEC, IDEMIA, or Thales ? with an accuracy in searching two eyes (left and right iris) of 99.3% at a false positive ID rate of 1.0%. "While not surprised, I am remarkably impressed with our team's ability to build such a powerful set of algorithms in such a short time. We announced our first fingerprint matching algorithms earlier this year and now we have one of the leading iris algorithms. We're developing from the ground up, here in the U.S., and competing head-to-head with established foreign biometric giants," said ROC.ai CEO Scott Swann. Iris recognition, a form of biometric authentication that relies on the unique patterns in a person's iris, has been gaining traction for its high accuracy and security. It has critical applications across multiple sectors, from border control and national security to access control and financial services. However, achieving a high level of accuracy is no easy feat, as it requires advanced algorithms that can handle the complex and delicate task of matching iris patterns. The success of ROC.ai in this field is a testament to their prowess in artificial intelligence, deep learning, and the development of complex neural networks that replicate the human visual system. "The ROC team's journey began less than six months ago with a commitment to revolutionize the field of iris recognition. We embarked on a mission to develop a U.S.-native algorithm that would establish a new standard for accuracy and speed. We are delighted to have delivered on this goal in our first submission and in record time," said Blake Moore, ROC.ai VP of Product and Customer Success. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) conducts its IREX tests to evaluate the quality and reliability of iris recognition algorithms worldwide. By securing a NIST ranking in an unprecedented timeframe, ROC.ai demonstrated the efficiency and robustness of their highly innovative, scalable approach. Traditionally, it takes years for biometric companies to develop algorithms that can compete on a global scale. What is most noteworthy about ROC.ai's achievement is that they managed to do it in just a few months. This accelerated pace not only underscores the technical expertise of the ROC team, but also reflects the incredible potential of American-made technology in transforming the global biometrics industry. "Our approach to developing iris recognition capabilities was quite similar to past efforts that have delivered the industry-leading face and fingerprint recognition algorithms that ROC.ai is renowned for. It is a combination of the pattern recognition scientific principles espoused by the seminal textbook Pattern Classification , a blue-collar work ethic and mentality, and software engineering trade secrets that for nearly a decade now have landed ROC as the fastest and most efficient computer vision algorithm developer in the world," remarked Brendan Klare, ROC.ai Chief Scientist and Co-Founder. The ROC.ai algorithm has not only set a new benchmark in the biometrics industry but has also brought much-needed innovation and competition to the global stage. Established identity proofing and biometrics companies are now closely watching the rise of this dynamic player (ROC.ai is also the #1 global face recognition provider in combined accuracy and efficiency). With their visionary approach, unwavering dedication to data privacy, and an industry leading code of ethics , ROC.ai is showing the world that the future of biometric security is brighter than ever. A World Leader in Computer Vision and Biometrics At ROC.ai, we believe in the power of technology to make the world smarter, safer and stronger ? without bias or threats to privacy. Trusted by the U.S. military, law enforcement, and FinTech, our multimodal solutions deliver game-changing results with battle-tested reliability across NIST government testing, military applications, and 200M+ annual identity proofing transactions. Media Contact: Matt Aitken, Director of Marketing 206-291-0348 [email protected] SOURCE ROC (Rank One Computing) 4 december 2023 at 08:32 News published onand distributed by: Consello's Investment Banking Business Launches Shareholder Activism Defense Practice NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Consello, the financial services advisory and strategic investing platform, is pleased to announce the launch of its Shareholder Activism Defense practice and the appointment of Kiran Moorthy as a Managing Director and Head of Shareholder Advisory & Activism Defense. The practice will operate within Consello's Investment Banking business. Mr. Moorthy brings a wealth of experience to Consello, boasting a successful background in shareholder advisory, mergers and acquisitions, and activism defense across the U.S. and European markets. Before joining Consello, Mr. Moorthy was Head of European Shareholder Advisory within Citi's Banking Capital Markets and Advisory division where he advised companies across all industries in connection with activist defense, contested situations and preparing for hostile activity. Before Citi, he was a Vice President at Goldman Sachs where he advised C-suites and Boards on M&A and activist situations. In today's increasingly complex and volatile global business environment, companies and their leadership face heightened vulnerability to event-driven and management-related activism campaigns. These campaigns can disrupt short-term strategic initiatives and long-term growth. Recognizing the critical need for activist defense and preparedness, especially in advising C-suite members, Consello's Investment Banking business is set to integrate this specialized service. "Understanding your company's exposure and how to prepare for and then successfully negotiate with an activist investor should be a business imperative for every company and every CEO ? not necessarily just those in the midst of a strategic or operational shift," said Mark Shafir, Managing Partner of Consello Investment Banking. "Our Shareholder Advisory & Activism Defense practice will become a key component within our suite of advisory services. We are excited to welcome Kiran to the team; he is a shrewd and experienced banker and has a deep understanding of the various strategies and tactics activists deploy, especially in relation to event-driven campaigns." Mr. Moorthy will be based in Consello's New York office. Consello will continue to build out the division's global team and business under Mr. Shafir's leadership. Consello continues to rapidly develop its operations around the world. The company currently has four operating divisions, including M&A Advisory and Investment Banking, Investing, Growth and Business Development and Digital Assets Advisory. The company has offices in Atlanta, Barcelona, London, Miami and New York. About Consello The Consello Group is a financial services advisory and strategic investing platform. At Consello we invest capital to grow companies, and we execute for our banking clients across industries. We also offer business development services to help companies grow and a digital assets advisory business to help companies participate in the global digital financial services ecosystem. Consello offers these four distinct but integrated lines of businesses all on one platform: Investing, M&A Advisory and Investment Banking, Growth and Business Development and Digital Assets Advisory. Media contact: info@consello.com SOURCE Consello 4 december 2023 at 09:00 News published onand distributed by: Introducing Avail: A New Platform Harnessing AI to Help Hollywood Cover More IP and Innovate the Pre-Production Process Today, Avail announces the open beta phase of its initial offering, a submissions summarization tool. Avail's coverage offering summarizes scripts and books of any length, outputting a hallucination-free detailed summary, character breakdown, and tonal assessment within minutes. Additionally, users can chat with the script or book to extract further insights in real time. "After months of R&D, we're thrilled to share Avail with the industry," said Chris Giliberti, Co-Founder and CEO of Avail. "In my executive days, the biggest challenge I faced was keeping up with the myriad of submissions. We built Avail to ensure you leave no stone unturned in your quest to find the best new voices and stack your pipeline with hits. It's exciting to imagine a future where opportunity is no longer gate kept by limited executive capacity." Alexis Ohanian, founder of Seven Seven Six, said: "Amidst the boom of AI-powered apps, Avail stands out given the team's unique combination of Chris' producing experience and John's tech pedigree. We're inspired by their vision of developing new technology that creates more exposure for Hollywood's creator class." Already in use at two leading talent agencies and multiple major studios, this is just the beginning for Avail. The company's tech team ? composed of Google and Amazon alums ? is hard at work building new products, including custom models and products cobuilt with industry leaders such as Range Media Partners. Avail has formed a strategic partnership with Range on an initiative to develop custom products for premium film and television financing, development and production centered on fast budgeting and production planning use cases, as well as business affairs insights. Avail is co-founded by CEO Chris Giliberti and Head of Product & Technology John Liu. Prior to Avail, Giliberti served as founder of Zestworld, a creator-forward platform for comics, and as founder and head of Gimlet Pictures, the TV and film adaptation arm of Gimlet Media. Giliberti started his career as a TMT-focused management consultant, most recently at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Liu, who also served as founder of Zestworld, previously led Google Maps' SMB APIs, services merchant growth, and new local search experiences for Google Search. Liu built his own platform for students as an undergrad, and began his tech leadership career at startups Chegg and Smule. Avail is backed by top-tier Silicon Valley and Hollywood names, including Seven Seven Six (Alexis Ohanian), General Catalyst, Advancit Capital (Shari Redstone) and Liontree. Avail (https://www.itsavail.com/) is now available for companies and individuals alike. Subscriptions start at $250/month with four reports a month and a 30-day free trial. Enterprise pricing available upon request. 4 december 2023 at 09:15 News published onand distributed by: Liangzhu Forum Kicks Off in East China Hangzhou. HANGZHOU, China, Dec. 4, 2023 /CNW/ -- A report from Xinhuanet North America: The first Liangzhu Forum, with "Implementing the Global Civilization Initiative, Promoting Exchanges and Mutual Learning between Civilizations" as its theme, kicked off on December 3, 2023, in Hangzhou, the capital of East China's Zhejiang Province. The forum, co-hosted by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the People's Government of Zhejiang Province and China International Culture Association, has attracted more than 300 international guests from over 80 countries. Foreign representatives of the six major International Alliances of Silk Road Cities participated in the forum. Tan Huism, the Executive Director of Qatar National Library and a member of the Silk Road International Library Alliance, said she believes that the prospect of the Alliances is bright because the members are eager to share and learn from each other and constantly create value for communities. The Forum carried out diverse events, including sub-forums on "Dialogue of Young Sinologists in the New Era: Civilization Exchanges and Mutual Learning Between China and the World" and "Dialogue of Chinese and International Artists: Civilization Exchange and Mutual Learning". A "Silk Road Artists' Rendezvous" exhibition will also be held. "I have been to Mexico, Egypt, Italy and other countries. In different countries and cultures, the origin of art is related to' love'." Yu Xuhong, director of the Art Museum of the China Academy of Art, shared with the audience the similarities between Eastern and Western cultures, "Art is an international language that needs no translation". "I believe that if I can understand China's past, I can also have a deeper understanding of China's present and future." Albert Tadeusz Kozik from the University of Warsaw in Poland said the opportunity to see the great cultural heritage of Liangzhu helped him further understand ancient Chinese culture. Professor Lord Colin Renfrew, a British archaeologist, spoke highly of Liangzhu, said that it showcases the great early Chinese civilization in parallel with other ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamian, the Indus Valley, the ancient Greek, Indian and Mayan civilizations. Liangzhu Forum is one of China's eight actions to support the higher-quality and higher-level construction of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It aims at promoting people-to-people communication and presenting the richness, openness, and inclusiveness of the Chinese civilization to the world. SOURCE Xinhuanet North America 4 december 2023 at 09:26 News published onand distributed by: Registration Now Open for Kevin's Song 8th Annual Conference on Suicide, Michigan's largest gathering of prevention experts, educators and advocates, Jan. 25-27, 2024 GROSSE POINTE FARMS, Mich., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Registration is now open for Michigan's largest conference on suicide ? the Kevin's Song 8th Annual Conference on Suicide: Continuing the Conversation ? featuring a prestigious roster of mental health experts, educators and advocates. The conference takes place January 25?27, 2023 at the Saint John's Resort, 44045 Five Mile Rd., Plymouth. The three-day conference features keynote and breakout sessions that will address all aspects of this public health crisis to better understand and prevent suicide. New for 2024 is the Pre-Conference Training Day on Wed., Jan. 24, featuring educational sessions for clinicians, including safeTALK, QPR, and AMSR. Thurs., Jan. 25 ? The Youth Mental Health & School Summit, presented by The Children's Foundation and Macomb County Community Mental Health, will focus on integrating schools, youth-serving organizations, and clinicians to promote suicide prevention and mental well-being for youth. Presentations will appeal to educators, mental health professionals and suicide prevention advocates. Fri., Jan. 26 ? At Continuing the Conversation About Suicide Prevention, presented by Corewell Healthtm, Priority Health, and the Dolores and Paul Lavins Foundation, attendees will hear the latest in research about suicide and risk assessment as well as evidenced-based treatments and prevention strategies. Complimentary registration will be offered on Friday to any student or professional trainee in a behavioral health or a medical related field of study in a Michigan university or college program. Friday evening is the Saving A Life Award Dinner presented by CNS Healthcare that will honor individuals and organizations that exemplify outstanding service to the community in suicide prevention. Sat., Jan. 27 ? Surviving Suicide ? A Journey of Hope and Healing presented by the Joseph J. Laurencelle Memorial Foundation focuses on survivors of suicide and will feature stories designed to ease the pain for those who often suffer alone and in silence. Throughout the three-day conference, Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network will sponsor the Memorial Forest ? a quiet place at the conference dedicated to those whose lives were prematurely ended. Kevin's Song has applied for continuing education for Nurses, Social Workers, Addiction Professionals (MCBAP), Michigan Teachers (SCECH), and Certified Counselors (NBCC). Early bird rates are through Dec. 31: three-day conference: $300; two-day conference (Thur. and Fri.): $275; single day pricing: $150. For more information, including full program details, visit www.kevinssong.org . SOURCE Kevin's Song 4 december 2023 at 09:39 News published onand distributed by: Fengate expands its portfolio of U.S. wireless communications towers with new acquisition HOUSTON, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fengate Asset Management (Fengate) is pleased to announce financial close on the acquisition of a significant portfolio of high-quality wireless communications towers in the United States (U.S.) from TowerCom, LLC (TowerCom). The towers, located in 11 states across the U.S., expand Fengate's communications tower portfolio to more than 200 towers in 15 states, and further the multi-year partnership between Fengate and TowerCom. TowerCom is a leading communications tower developer focused on some of the fastest-growing wireless markets in the U.S. It originally developed the towers and will manage the newly acquired portfolio on Fengate's behalf. "This is our fourth transaction with TowerCom, demonstrating our strong partnership with them and our successful track record with critical infrastructure across North America," said Andrew Cogan, Managing Director and Portfolio Manager of Fengate Infrastructure Yield Fund. "The rapidly evolving wireless industry is driven by the current significant increase in data consumption, demand for connection mobility, proliferation of 4G and 5G technology and availability of contracted cash flows, and has emerged as a strategic asset class for infrastructure investors." Rad Lovett, Executive Chairman of TowerCom, said TowerCom is pleased to continue the partnership with Fengate. "TowerCom is proud to partner with Fengate to grow its core asset portfolio within the telecommunications infrastructure sector. This transaction enables TowerCom to generate liquidity for its shareholders, while remaining deeply involved in the operations of the portfolio." Fengate is managing this investment on behalf of the Fengate Infrastructure Yield Fund and its affiliated entities, including an investment fund owned by LiUNA's Pension Fund of Central and Eastern Canada. Media Contact Maddison Sharples Director, Marketing and Communications, Infrastructure Fengate Asset Management +1 416-254-3326 [email protected] 4 december 2023 at 10:00 News published onand distributed by: BIG BLUE MARBLE ACADEMY ANNOUNCES THE OPENING OF FOUR NEW LOCATIONS IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA, NOW ENROLLING The Leading Early Childhood Educator Continues to Expand Child Care Offerings in the Atlanta Market ATLANTA, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Big Blue Marble Academy , known for excellence in early childhood education, is proud to announce four new childcare centers in the Atlanta, Georgia, communities of Dallas, Marietta, Woodstock, and Dunwoody are now open and enrolling. Welcoming over 400 new students and 85 new teachers and staff, Big Blue Marble Academy remains steadfast in meeting the demand for quality childcare within the Atlanta market. Utilizing research-based early learning theory and best practices for playful engagement, each of the four new locations offers BBMA's unique global curriculum for children ages six weeks to five years; summer camp, before school, and after-school care for children ages 5 to 12. By joining the existing 26 centers in Georgia and 13 centers in Atlanta, Big Blue Marble Academy reaffirms its commitment as a trusted childcare partner to families in the area. With Big Blue Marble Academy's mission to Nurture Little Minds and Grow Big Hearts at the forefront, these new locations combine the best in early childhood care, hands-on activities, service learning, and a strong researched-backed global curriculum. "We take immense pride in serving the Atlanta metropolitan area by providing unparalleled childcare services and extending a warm welcome to new families in our Big Blue Marble Academy community," said Jeff Wahl, CEO of Big Blue Marble Academy. "Our goal is to create a positive impact and empower young minds to foster a love of learning at an early age as they grow into responsible global citizens." The new locations and their addresses are as follows: Big Blue Marble Academy Paulding: 269 East Paulding Drive, Dallas, GA 30157, operating Monday through Friday from 6:30 AM to 6:30 PM . 30157, operating Monday through Friday from . Big Blue Marble Academy Marietta: 2040 MacLand Crossing Circle, Marietta, GA 30008, operating Monday through Friday from 6:30 AM to 6:30 PM . 30008, operating Monday through Friday from . Big Blue Marble Academy Woodstock: 12055 Highway 92, Woodstock, GA 30188, operating Monday through Friday from 6:30 AM to 6:30 PM . 30188, operating Monday through Friday from . Big Blue Marble Academy Dunwoody: 4472 Chamblee Dunwoody Road, Dunwoody, GA 30338, operating Monday through Friday from 7:00 AM - 6:00 PM . For further information, please visit bbmacademy.com. About Big Blue Marble Academy: Big Blue Marble Academy operates 65 schools across eight states providing early care, preschool, after-school care, and summer camp for children ages 6 weeks to 12 years. BBMA nurtures little minds through a robust preschool curriculum that ensures children are developmentally, socially, and emotionally prepared for kindergarten and beyond. Its emphasis on global awareness and character development teaches children invaluable lessons, growing big hearts that are ready and eager to take on the world. SOURCE Big Blue Marble Academy 4 december 2023 at 10:45 News published onand distributed by: Osisko Metals Inc. to Present at the Clean Energy and Precious Metals Virtual Investor Conference December 6th MONTREAL, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Osisko Metals Incorporated ( TSX-V: OM ; OTCQX: OMZNF ; FRANKFURT: 0B51 ), based in Montreal, Canada, focused on base metals, today announced that Robert Wares, Chairman and CEO, will present live at the Clean Energy and Precious Metals Virtual Investor Conference, hosted by VirtualInvestorConferences.com, on December 6th. DATE: December 6th TIME: 2:00 PM EST LINK: https://bit.ly/3rOONJH Available for 1x1 meetings: December 4th and 5th This will be a live, interactive online event where investors are invited to ask the company questions in real-time. If attendees are not able to join the event live on the day of the conference, an archived webcast will also be made available after the event. It is recommended that online investors pre-register and run the online system check to expedite participation and receive event updates. Learn more about the event at www.virtualinvestorconferences.com . Recent Company Highlights Successful closing of its previously-announced joint venture transaction with a subsidiary of Appian Natural Resources Fund III LP, which resulted in the formation of a joint venture for the advancement of Osisko Metals' Pine Point Project. Completed the acquisition (the "Transaction") of a 100% interest in the past-producing Gaspe Copper Mine with Glencore Canada About Osisko Metals Osisko Metals Incorporated is a Canadian exploration and development company creating value in the critical metals space, specifically copper and zinc. The Company is a joint venture partner with Appian Natural Resources Fund III LP for the advancement of one of Canada's premier past-producing zinc mining camps, the Pine Point project (the "Pine Point Project"), located in the Northwest Territories, for which the 2022 PEA (as defined herein) has indicated an after-tax NPV of C$602 million and an IRR of 25%, based on long-term zinc price of US$1.37/lb and the current mineral resource estimates that are amenable to open pit and shallow underground mining. The current mineral resource estimate in the 2022 PEA consists of 15.7Mt grading 5.55% ZnEq of indicated mineral resources and 47.2Mt grading 5.94% ZnEq of inferred mineral resources. Please refer to the technical report entitled "Preliminary Economic Assessment, Pine Point Project, Hay River, Northwest Territories, Canada" dated August 26, 2022 (with an effective date of July 30, 2022), which has been prepared for Osisko Metals and PPML by representatives of BBA Engineering Inc., Hydro-Resources Inc., PLR Resources Inc. and WSP Canada Inc. (the "2022 PEA"). Please refer to the full text of the 2022 PEA, a copy of which is available on SEDAR ( www.sedar.com ) under Osisko Metals' issuer profile, for the assumptions, methodologies, qualifications and limitations described therein. The Pine Point Project is located on the south shore of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, near infrastructure, paved highway access, and has an electrical substation as well as 100 kilometers of viable haulage roads already in place. In addition, the Company has acquired a 100% interest in the past-producing Gaspe Copper Mine, located near Murdochville in the Gaspe peninsula of Quebec. The Company is currently focused on resource evaluation of the Mount Copper Expansion Project that hosts an inferred mineral resource (in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 ? Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects) of 456Mt grading 0.31% Cu (see April 28, 2022 news release of Osisko Metals entitled "Osisko Metals Announces Maiden Resource at Gaspe Copper ? Inferred Resource of 456Mt Grading 0.31% Copper"). Gaspe Copper hosts the largest undeveloped copper resource in Eastern North America, strategically located near existing infrastructure in the mining-friendly province of Quebec. About Virtual Investor Conferences Virtual Investor Conferences (VIC) is the leading proprietary investor conference series that provides an interactive forum for publicly traded companies to seamlessly present directly to investors. Providing a real-time investor engagement solution, VIC is specifically designed to offer companies more efficient investor access. Replicating the components of an on-site investor conference, VIC offers companies enhanced capabilities to connect with investors, schedule targeted one-on-one meetings and enhance their presentations with dynamic video content. Accelerating the next level of investor engagement, Virtual Investor Conferences delivers leading investor communications to a global network of retail and institutional investors. CONTACTS: Osisko Metals Kimberly Darlington Investor Relations 514-861-4441 [email protected] Virtual Investor Conferences John M. Viglotti SVP Corporate Services, Investor Access OTC Markets Group (212) 220-2221 [email protected] 4 december 2023 at 11:10 News published onand distributed by: Resolution Economics Strengthens its Financial Advisory Services Practice with Addition of The Red Maple Group LOS ANGELES, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Resolution Economics, LLC ("Resolution Economics" or "ResEcon") announced today that The Red Maple Group ("RMG"), an economic and forensic consulting firm has joined ResEcon as part of the Financial Advisory Services ("FAS") practice group. They will bring further expertise in business valuations and Chief Financial Officer ("CFO") consulting to the FAS practice group. Now in its 26th year, Resolution Economics is a leading specialty consulting firm providing economic and statistical analysis and regulatory compliance advice to companies, law firms, universities, and others. The firm has expertise in labor and employment matters, finance/forensic accounting analysis, artificial intelligence bias audits, life sciences, and affirmative action planning. ResEcon's forensic and accounting team provides analysis in a wide range of consulting situations to help companies understand their internal compliance circumstances and provides expert assistance and testimony in a variety of commercial dispute settings. Headquartered in New Jersey, RMG is a leading economic and financial consulting service provider to business and government leaders, litigators, and estate planning professionals. Founded in 2018, the firm is led by Christopher Young, Ph.D. The firm's services include, but are not limited to, the performance of economic damages calculations, econometric analyses, social science research, valuation of businesses and patents. The firm has shown great success in assisting business and government leaders in resolving financial disputes, ranging from fraud and shareholder oppression to racketeering, labor disputes, and securities fraud. The firm also specializes in providing CFO, CEO, and COO services for leading U.S. technology, financial and healthcare firms. "The addition of Dr. Young's team and their practice areas further enhances the growth ResEcon has been achieving over the past few years. We are incredibly excited to welcome these experienced professionals to our firm," Ali Saad, Managing Partner at ResEcon, said. "Dr. Young and his group are known for their thoughtful, consistent, high-quality work ? a standard that ResEcon is also known for." "We are delighted to join Resolution Economics, a firm we have admired for many years," said Dr. Young. "There is great cultural and strategic fit between RMG and ResEcon and we see valuable opportunities to learn from each other's successes and to offer some very important and integrated new services to clients. It is exciting to become part of a firm focused on consistently improving client engagement and supporting our growth." Resolution Economics and the RMG group are well established in the litigation support field and have professionals who have consulted or testified as experts in hundreds of state and federal matters. J. Duross O'Bryan, head of ResEcon's FAS practice group said: "Chris and his team bring to ResEcon a significant amount of experience in the valuation and damages areas. We are very excited to have them join our team and look forward to a very successful future together." Resolution Economics is a portfolio company of Levine Leichtman Capital Partners (LLCP). About Resolution Economics Established in 1998, ResEcon is an employee-owned, private equity-backed consultancy with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Charlotte. ResEcon is a leading provider of rigorous analytical services in the labor and employment area, including providing these services to support employer's pay equity decision making and the full range of human capital decisions from recruitment to termination. ResEcon also has a long and distinguished record in performing analysis and giving expert testimony in large scale class action settings in discrimination matters. In addition, the company has the leading practice nationally in handling wage and hour claims under state and federal statutes, as well as consulting to companies regarding their wage and hour practices. ResEcon also provides Artificial Intelligence bias audit and compliance services and specialized consulting for life sciences companies. In October 2022, Resolution Economics acquired Berkshire Associates, a leading provider of outsourced Affirmative Action Plan ("AAP") consulting and software services, compensation analysis, equal employment opportunity (EEO) and other human resource compliance-related services. Continuing its growth, in November 2023, Resolution Economics acquired the AAP, DE&I, Pay Equity and related training services of Biddle Consulting Group. Contacts Kate Kopec [email protected] SOURCE Resolution Economics, LLC 4 december 2023 at 12:11 News published onand distributed by: The Bahamas Achieves Unprecedented Tourism Success with Record-Breaking Eight Million Visitors NASSAU, Bahamas, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism, Investments & Aviation is proud to announce a historic achievement in tourism, with the country welcoming a record-breaking eight million annual visitors this year. This remarkable success stands as a testament to the unified efforts, strategic planning, and visionary initiatives championed not only by the Ministry of Tourism but strengthened by the invaluable support of key stakeholders like the Nassau/Paradise Island Promotion, The Bahamas Out Islands Promotion Board and The Bahamas Hotel & Tourism Association. We ensure every traveler's journey is not just a visit but an unforgettable, enriching experience. The Hon. I. Chester Cooper, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Tourism shared his optimism, stating, "The Bahamas has long been a sought-after destination, and reaching eight million visitors is a milestone that reflects the collective dedication of our tourism professionals nationwide. Our success lies not just in our islands' allure but in the strategic endeavours we have embraced. As we celebrate this achievement, we are equally focused on shaping a future that ensures sustained year-over-year growth and enhances the visitor experience." Sales and marketing strategies have been instrumental in positioning The Bahamas as a premier travel destination. The Ministry of Tourism reached global audiences through targeted campaigns utilizing digital marketing, social media, and strategic partnerships. These efforts, combined with creative and impactful advertising initiatives, showcased the diverse attractions and unique experiences that continue to make The Bahamas a must-visit destination. The government's commitment to ensuring a seamless and welcoming travel environment has fostered positive relations with industry partners. Innovative cruise strategies, accompanied by increased airlift, have significantly contributed to the surge in visitor numbers. Also collaborations with major cruise lines, the development of new cruise ports, and the introduction of new shore excursions have enhanced the overall travel experience. Latia Duncombe, Director General of Tourism, remarked, "This historic milestone in visitor arrivals is a clear indicator of the unique charm and richness of our 16-island destination. Our unwavering dedication to offering diverse, authentic experiences underlines our strategy for Brand Bahamas. We ensure every traveler's journey is not just a visit, but an unforgettable, enriching experience that beckons a return to our beautiful shores." Crucially, the support and collaboration of tourism stakeholders, promotion boards and hotel partners have played a vital role in this success. DPM Cooper underscored the importance of this collaboration, stating, "Our partners have been instrumental in achieving this milestone. Their continued collaboration is key to our sustained success, and together, we will shape the future of Bahamian tourism and the Bahamian economy." As The Bahamas celebrates this unprecedented achievement, the Ministry of Tourism looks ahead, developing future strategies to ensure sustained growth in visitor arrivals and a continued positive trajectory for the tourism industry. ABOUT THE BAHAMAS The Bahamas has over 700 islands and cays, as well as 16 unique island destinations. Located only 50 miles off the coast of Florida, it offers a quick and easy way for travellers to escape their everyday. The island nation also boasts world-class fishing, diving, boating, and thousands of miles of the Earth's most spectacular beaches for families, couples, and adventurers to explore. See why It's Better in The Bahamas at www.bahamas.com or on Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram. PRESS INQUIRIES Anita Johnson-Patty Bahamas Ministry of Tourism, Investments & Aviation [email protected] SOURCE The Bahamas Ministry of Tourism, Investments & Aviation 4 december 2023 at 15:25 News published onand distributed by: This photo released by the Houthi Media Center shows a Houthi forces helicopter approaching the cargo ship Galaxy Leader on Sunday, Nov. 19, 2023. Yemen's Houthis have seized the ship in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen after threatening to seize all vessels owned by Israeli companies. AP An American destroyer shot down multiple drones on Sunday, December 3, while assisting commercial ships in the Red Sea that were targeted by attacks from Yemen, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said. Yemen's Iran-backed Huthi rebels who said they targeted two of the ships launched a series of drones and missiles toward Israel in recent weeks and seized a cargo vessel last month, but the latest attacks mark a significant escalation in the threat to shipping in the area. "Today, there were four attacks against three separate commercial vessels operating in international waters in the southern Red Sea," CENTCOM said in a statement. "The Arleigh-Burke Class destroyer USS Carney responded to the distress calls from the ships and provided assistance" and shot down three drones that were heading for the warship during the day, the statement said. The Carney detected a missile fired from a Huthi-controlled area of Yemen that landed near the Bahamas-flagged M/V Unity Explorer, while the cargo ship later reported minor damage from another missile from a rebel-held area. Read more Article reserve a nos abonnes Yemeni Houthis open new Red Sea front Panamanian-flagged M/V Number 9 a bulk carrier reported damage but no casualties caused by a missile from Yemen, while the M/V Sophie II, which also flies Panama's flag, said it was struck as well but suffered no significant harm. CENTCOM said the attacks "represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security". 'Enabled by Iran' "We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Huthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran. The United States will consider all appropriate responses in full coordination with its international allies and partners," it said. The Huthis claimed responsibility for attacks on the Unity Explorer and Number 9 in a statement on social media earlier in the day, saying the ships were Israeli and that attacks on the country's vessels would continue "until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops". Hamas carried out a shock cross-border attack from Gaza on October 7 that Israeli officials say killed about 1,200 people. Israel responded with a relentless land and air campaign that the Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry says has killed more than 15,500 people. Those deaths have provoked widespread anger in the Middle East and provided an impetus for attacks against American troops in the region as well as on Israel by armed groups opposed to both. Israel has faced drone and missiles launched from Lebanon and Yemen, while American forces in Iraq and Syria have been targeted in a series of attacks that have injured dozens of US personnel. Read more Yemen rebels say seized vessel owned by Israeli businessman Washington has blamed the attacks on Iran-backed forces and responded with air strikes on multiple occasions. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said in an address to a security forum on Saturday that the United States "will not tolerate attacks on American personnel. And so these attacks must stop." "Until they do, we will do what we need to do to protect our troops and to impose costs on those who attack them," he said. Saleh Almeri, aged 26, gathered his strength and rode his bike all the way to Finland. It was November 17, a few minutes before midnight and Helsinki had just announced the closure of four of its border crossings in the southeast of the country. Having come to try his luck by cab, the young man was stopped by Russian soldiers, then sent to a police station, where officers put him in a car with a bicycle. "A Russian police officer sold it to me for 250 to get to the border. He took my passport and my phone," he revealed. The car dropped him off a few hundred meters before the demarcation line. He cycled the rest of the way, as crossing the border on foot was forbidden. "I was the last to enter," said Saleh with a shy smile. A moment later, he was seeking asylum in Finland. Saleh Almeri, a 26-year-old Yemeni, walks to his accommodation at the Joutseno reception center in the hamlet of Konnunsuo, near Lappeenranta, on November 29, 2023. LAURENCE GEAI/MYOP FOR LE MONDE In Saleh Almeri's phone, on the left, a photo of his graduation ceremony in Russia. On the right, the bicycles needed to enter Finland, as people on foot were not allowed to cross. At the Joutseno reception center in the hamlet of Konnunsuo, near Lappeenranta, Finland, November 29, 2023. LAURENCE GEAI/MYOP FOR LE MONDE Originally from Yemen, the young migrant arrived in Russia in 2019 on a student visa. In June, he graduated from university in Rostov-on-Don with a degree in mechatronics engineering. On his phone, he proudly displayed photos of the graduation ceremony. Shortly afterwards, mercenaries from the Wagner group, rebelling against Moscow, entered the city. Fearing forced recruitment, Saleh fled to Belarus, from where he made three unsuccessful attempts to enter Poland. Back in Russia, he learned on social media in early November that a route to the European Union had opened in Finland. Like him, 913 people from Syria, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere entered the Nordic country of 5.5 million people via Russia in November, before the border was completely closed on the 29th. Compared to the French population, this represents just over 11,200 people. But never mind the figures, according to the interior minister, Mari Rantanen (Finns Party, far right), contacted by Le Monde: "It's not an immigration issue, but a security one. We suspect Russia of wanting to instrumentalize migrants, and we want this to stop immediately." The Nuijamaa border crossing, closed since November 18, 2023, photographed on November 29, 2023. LAURENCE GEAI/MYOP FOR LE MONDE At the Nuijamaa border crossing, in pristine landscape 250 kilometers east of Helsinki, director of operations Samuel Siljanen assured us on Wednesday, November 29 that the situation was "under control." Here, before the Covid-19 epidemic, the outbreak of war in Ukraine and the suspension of tourist visas granted by Finland to Russians, some 20,000 vehicles passed through every day. Now, it's impossible to get closer than 100 meters. 'Russia is behind it all' Since the barriers were lowered on November 17, two migrants have attempted to cross the border into the forest nearby. They were quickly intercepted. "The snow is our best ally," said a phlegmatic Siljanen. The border guards have also installed barbed wire on some easily accessible sections, pending the erection of a three-meter-high barrier, of which only three kilometers have been built out of the 200 kilometers planned. The European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) has sent 50 agents as reinforcements. "We were prepared for this kind of situation," assured Siljanen, who pointed out that during the winter of 2015-2016, well before Finland joined NATO last April, Russian guards had let through 1000 migrants, before resuming filtering operations, as they have done since the Cold War era. You have 55% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only. Nigerien people, some holding Russian flags, participate in a march called by supporters of coup leader Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani in Niamey, Niger, on July 30, 2023. SAM MEDNICK / AP Niger's military leaders said on Monday, December 4, that they were ending two European Union security and defense missions in the country, as it battles with two long-running jihadist insurgencies. The foreign ministry said that it was ending the agreement between Niger and the European Union regarding the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) mission in the country. Niger's foreign ministry also announced in a press statement the "withdrawal by the State of Niger of consent for the deployment of an EU military partnership mission" in Niger. Under the CSDP, the EU in 2012 launched a Niamey-based civilian capacity-building mission called EUCAP Sahel Niger, which supports Niger's internal security forces, authorities and non-governmental actors. Also established under the EU's mission was a military partnership known as EUMPM, launched in February "at the request of the Nigerien authorities," according to the EU Council website. The partnership was designed to "enhance the ability of the Niger Armed Forces to contain the terrorist threat," the website said. Read more Article reserve a nos abonnes France's military presence in Africa faces an uncertain future The West African nation is battling two jihadist insurgencies a spillover in its southeast from a long-running conflict in neighbouring Nigeria, and an offensive in the west by militants crossing from Mali and Burkina Faso. The country has been ruled by military leaders since the overthrow of democratically elected President Mohamed Bazoum in July. A Russian delegation met with Niger's military leaders in Niamey earlier on Monday, with the two countries agreeing to strengthen military cooperation. Read part 1 of 'France-Africa, the breakdown' Article reserve a nos abonnes How West African public opinion turned against France Conor McGregor has taken to the social media platform 'X' to express his opinion of his alcohol product Forged Irish Stout. In a post, the former UFC champion claimed that Forged Irish Stout is "better tasting" than the renowned Irish stout Guinness and that people are "switching over" to his brand once they have tasted the drink. The tweet read: "Forged Stout is everywhere from a branding standpoint atm. "But the product itself is the real magic. Its a quality Stout. Simple as. Its place is well earned. "In regard to the premises we are in currently, we are in 100 on premise accounts in Ireland and 400 off premise. In the UK we are in 700 on premise accounts and 400 off premise. In Canada we are in 300 off premise accounts with on premise starting next week. All of which growing rapidly! In the USA, we are only scratching the surface! The USA market is DEMANDING Forged Irish Stout and we will deliver! 150 on premise accounts and 350 off premise accounts in the USA currently. "Growing fast and done in the blink of an eye they woke up and we were everywhere! "Never in the history of Irish Stout has a contender emerged at this pace. Or any pace for that matter. Not since McGregor / Aldo has a contender arose like this. "The Forged Irish Stout Freight train!!!! We back grassroots all the way to World titles. We support community. Family. Hard work. The takeover, baby! Welcome to the new age" A SISTER of convicted drug dealer and gang "patriarch" Christy Keane who was caught with over 100,000 in crime cash in her attic told gardai it was from savings she had made since her husband died, the Special Criminal Court has heard. During a hearing this Monday, the non-jury court was also told that Sandra Hehir had accumulated 68,000 in savings over five years and had withdrawn 70,000 to pay down the balance of her mortgage, a position that gardai said was not in line with her legitimate income. Last October, Sandra Hehir, aged 56, with an address at Assumpta Park, Island Road, Limerick city pleaded guilty that on June 17 2020 at the same address she handled, acquired and/or possessed cash to the value of 124,055, knowing or believing (or being reckless as to whether) property in the said premises was the proceeds of criminal conduct. Ms Fiona Murphy SC, prosecuting, told the court that five other counts could be taken into consideration. The barrister said that a nolle prosequi will be entered in due course on three other counts. At the sentencing hearing, Sergeant Cathal O'Sullivan, from Roxboro Road garda station, told Ms Murphy that the money laundering operation in 2020 was designed to target the Keane Organised Crime Group in Limerick, particularly Christy Keane and his nephew. The sergeant said that the defendant Sandra Hehir is the sister of Christy Keane - the "patriarch" of the Keane Organised Crime Group - and the mother of Warren Hehir. The Special Criminal Court has already heard that Warren Hehir - a member of the Keane gang in Limerick - and his wife spent 59,000 carrying out "extensive works" to a house in Garryowen, despite neither of them having a job. They will be sentenced on January 22, 2024. Sgt O'Sullivan told the court that Sandra Hehir's house was searched on June 17, 2020 and that 124,055 in 13 separate bundles was found secured in a plastic sheet in the attic. A "tick-list" was also found relating to substantial sums of money owed. There was a phone number on the receipt which gardai were able to ascertain had only been active since 2019. Sandra Hehir told gardai that the money in the attic was from savings she had made since her husband died. The sergeant said the defendant made reference to her son Warren and his wife Vicky Hehir paying for renovations to a house in Garryowen in Limerick but that she wouldn't say anymore than that. Giving the background to the Keane Organised Crime Group, Sgt O'Sullivan said it was traditionally based in the St Mary's Park area of Limerick but it is now located in the Garryowen area. He said in the early 2000's there was an amalgamation between the Keane-Collopy families but that they are now separate organised crime gangs. The Keane gang and its associates are involved in the distribution of drugs and suspected of the importation of firearms on a national and international level, he said. The court heard they had been involved in an on-going feud with the McCarthy-Dundon gang since 2000 and that there had been 19 murders. The Keane family, he said, were originally involved in the sale of coal. An investigation was launched by gardai into Kilmurry Court in Garryowen and it was established that Sandra Hehir had purchased the property in August 2017 for 128,000 and that 39,000 had been paid by her as a deposit for the house. An order was later granted seeking documentation from the purchase of Kilmurry Court and the relevant material was received by gardai. Sandra Hehir was interviewed by gardai and denied she made the purchase of the house on behalf of her son Warren. Information received from the Revenue Commissioners showed that Sandra Hehir was in receipt of the Covid payment and the widow's pension. She was also employed as a hairdresser and together with her pension she earned a total of 35,000 annually. The defendant's financial accounts were frozen and garda established she had accumulated 68,000 in savings over various accounts in the last five years. Sandra Hehir would stop using an account once it reached 20,000 and would open another one, said the witness. Sgt O'Sullivan said 70,000 was withdrawn from a bank account in March 2018 and was used by the defendant to pay off the remainder of a mortgage on her own property, which she told gardai was the proceeds of a life assurance policy that she had for her late husband. "In respect of that life assurance policy for her husband, an analysis was done of the Hehir lifestyle and she should never have been able to afford it," he said. He said Hehir registered for income tax in 2017 and the business description given was hairdressing. He said she also registered as a PAYE employee and was employed with an address in Limerick at the time of the garda investigation. The sergeant agreed with counsel that on analysis of the defendant's bank accounts "gardai could say the money in her account during Covid was not in line with legitimate income". Sandra Hehir, he said, was arrested in June 2020 and engaged in six interviews with gardai. She made no positive admission of the money seized on June 17, 2020 or the money in the bank accounts, he said, adding that she provided different accounts for the provenance of the monies. The defendant told gardai she was married for 30 years until her husband passed away in 2017. She said she was earning 600 a week from her hairdressing job and made money from "jobs at home" but was unable to tell gardai how much that was. "She said she would use her husband's life assurance policy to pay off the mortgage at her own address," he continued. The witness agreed with counsel that it was fair to say that whilst Sandra Hehir engaged with gardai, she had given them accounts which they weren't satisfied with. "They were conflicted," said the sergeant. The court heard she had no previous convictions. Under cross-examination, Padraig Dwyer SC, defending, put it to Sgt O'Sullivan that his client was not involved in serious criminality. "I considered her a key facilitator in acquiring assets in the purchase of Kilmurry Court," Sgt O'Sullivan said. He agreed that she was not an active member of the Keane Organised Crime Organisation and had worked in various hair salons since she was 18 years old. The barrister suggested to the witness that his client was "beholden" to her son Warren, who is a convicted drug dealer and that he would have preyed upon her to cooperate by opening bank accounts. In reply, the sergeant said whilst Warren is certainly an active member of an organised crime group he wouldn't agree with the proposition "to that extent". "She certainly facilitated the purchasing of the house but in relation to the opening of accounts, she said she was good at saving essentially," he added. Sgt O'Sullivan agreed the defendant had put a distance between herself and family members since the investigation. He also said he would be surprised if the defendant was ever to find herself in trouble with gardai again. He further agreed with counsel that whilst she gave conflicting accounts in interview, she had given a lot of information to gardai which was of assistance. Mr Dwyer said that whilst his client was remorseful and at low risk of reoffending a probation report might be of assistance to the court. Mr Justice Michael MacGrath, sitting with Judge Sarah Berkeley and Judge James Faughnan, adjourned the sentence hearing until January 29 and remanded Sandra Hehir on continuing bail until then. Vicky Hehir, aged 30, also known as Victoria O'Halloran, of Bruach na Sionna, Castleconnell, County Limerick and her husband Warren Hehir, 33, of the same address recently appeared before the three-judge court for their sentence hearing. Warren Hehir had pleaded guilty that on dates between August 8, 2019 and 17 June, 2020 he "possessed, used, converted, transferred or handled" cash to the value of 59,000, knowing or believing or being reckless as to whether the property was the proceeds of criminal conduct, in discharging sums due and owing in respect of works carried out on Kilmurry Court, Garryowen, Limerick between August 8, 2019 and June 17, 2020. He also pleaded guilty that on June 17, 2020 at The Path, Garryowen, he handled, acquired or possessed a Rolex watch knowing, believing or being reckless as to whether the watch was the proceeds of criminal conduct. Vicky Hehir had pleaded guilty to one charge of money laundering in relation to the 59,000 for the works carried out at Kilmurry Court. A DELEGATION from Limerick IFA, led by county chairman Sean Lavery, met with senior executives from Irish Rail to discuss farmer concerns and work on the reopening of the Limerick to Foynes rail line. The 42km stretch of railway between Limerick and Foynes was originally opened in 1858 but has been closed since 2001. Irish Rail is now implementing a plan to reopen the rail line for freight services in 2025 / 2026. Mr Lavery said there are 156 farmers / landowners affected by the line and work is ongoing by contractors Sisk in clearing vegetation and removal of the old track. Some 20km of the 42km line is already cleared and the plan is to have the project completed by the end of 2025, according to Irish Rail. Mr Lavery said the major areas of concern for farmers are hedge removal, fencing, culverts, drainage and level crossings. Hedge removal and fencing are by agreement with the individual farmers and Irish Rail said they have met most of the farmers on the line and discussed their needs, said Mr Lavery. A total of 22kms of concrete post type fencing has already been erected, along with some timber post fencing, which is suitable for horses. Irish Rail has pointed out that there are 87 structures across the line including roads, bridges, overpasses, underpasses and culverts. There are 57 level crossings. The IFA delegation pointed out that the reopening of level crossings on the rail line is a major development for farmers and their farm operations, after more than 20 years without traffic on the line. This could impact very significantly on many of the farmers on the line, depending on their farming enterprise, structure and other particular circumstances. Irish Rail will have to engage very closely with the impacted farmers and it was agreed with Irish Rail that the farmers will need independent agricultural consultancy / property and legal advice available to them, at no cost to the farmer, said Mr Lavery. The Limerick IFA chairperson said the issues and options around level crossings, underpasses, overpasses and associated items are very important for farmers and their businesses. He said farmers must have proper professional advice available to them. The IFA delegation also included Barry Murphy, Limerick IFA environment chairman; Philip Ruttle, Limerick IFA vice chair and Kevin Kinsella, agricultural consultant to the IFA. Irish Rail was contacted for comment. There was no response at the time of going to press. THE HIGH Court has quashed a decision by An Bord Pleanala granting planning permission for a 30m student accommodation plan on the edge of Limerick - for a second time. Cloncaragh Investments is planning to construct 68 build-to-rent apartments with 318 bed spaces at the site of the old Dan Ryan garage opposite Punch's Cross. The firm initially secured permission from An Bord Pleanala for the project under fast-track planning legislation in 2021. But following a judicial review to the High Court by Environmental Trust Ireland, a judge quashed this decision. A judicial review is a mechanism by which an application can be made to the High Court to challenge the decision making processes of administrative bodies like An Bord Pleanala. This decision, made last year, meant the application was reactivated, and An Bord Pleanala ordered to consider the housing plans once again. The national planning body approved the fresh plans in February this year. For a second time, Environmental Trust Ireland initiated judicial review proceedings. And this Monday, in an order handed down by the High Court, An Bord Pleanala's decision to approve the student halls project was quashed once again. Solicitor Michelle Hayes of Environmental Trust Ireland says the group welcomes the fact the High Court has taken this decision, and said she feels they have been "vindicated". "How many times does the developer intend to go back and insist on building on a contaminated site and on a site that isn't fit for purpose for any building, not just what they are hoping to do - it's disgraceful," she said in response to the decision. Also responding to the news, John Hickie, of Cloncaragh Investments said the company remains committed to developing the land on the edge of the city, out of commission for almost 20 years. "It is extremely frustrating to find ourselves in this position after a considerable amount of time, effort and investment having gone into developing this site. This is a brownfield, vacant site in the heart of Limerick City that was assembled six years ago to develop it; on the grounds of a former petrol station that hasn't been in operation for almost 20 years. After months of consideration and consultation with Limerick City and County Council it was agreed that a purpose-built student accommodation development would be ideal for the site; which would complement existing commercial, retail, residential and hospitality in the area; its proximity to Mary Immaculate College was also identified as a key reason for the need to develop such units," he added. Low-cost airline Ryanair has said more than 960 flights were cancelled last month due to the war between Israel and Hamas. It comes after the Irish carrier cancelled over 870 flights in October as a result of the conflict in Gaza. Airlines have suspended flights to Tel Aviv and neighbouring Jordan after Hamas militants launched an attack on Israel on October 7 and due to the subsequent escalation of the war. Rival easyJet said last week that conflict and the threat to stability across the Middle East has also affected demand for flights in destinations such as Egypt, while it saw bookings impacted across the board in October and November due to the war. EasyJet warned that it does not expect to narrow losses in the first quarter of its new financial year as flights and wider demand are affected, but it said booking appetite had started to recover in recent weeks. Ryanairs latest passenger statistics showed it operated over 66,400 flights in November, with a 4% increase in people flown, at 11.7 million, despite the cancellations. London-listed Hungarian airline Wizz Air said on Monday that it has decided to suspend operations in Israel until early January next year. The budget airline said it continues to monitor the situation on the ground closely, and stands ready to redeploy capacity should conditions stabilise. It carried 29.3% more passengers in November, at 4.8 million. Wizz Air said it had also restarted inbound flights to Chisinau, Moldova, in Eastern Europe having suspended flights to the country in March due to tensions linked to Russias war with Ukraine. It said the move follows a comprehensive evaluation of safety factors, adding that the group intends to gradually reintroduce operations, including reopening its base in Chisinau, while ensuring safe and secure operations for its crew and passengers. The country's economy is approaching the Union Budget on February 1, 2024, along with the general elections in the same year. During an election year, the government does not present a full-fledged Budget for the whole year, instead the government prepares an interim budget or a vote on account. Livemint explains what these terms mean and how they are different from the Union Budget. What is a Vote on Account? As defined by Article 116 of the Indian Constitution, a vote on account is an advance grant to the government from the Consolidated Fund of India to cover short-term expenditure requirements until the new financial year begins. There is a Consolidated Fund of India, defined in Article 266 of the Indian Constitution, which stores all the revenue generated by the central government, including taxes, interest on loans, and a portion of state taxes. In accordance with the Act, the Consolidated Fund may not be withdrawn except under an appropriation undertaken by law and approved by the Centre each year during the Union Budget. What is the need for Vote on Account? During an outgoing government, an interim budget is presented, or a vote on account is sought. The next government will be responsible for presenting the full budget. The vote on the account cannot impact the tax regime. Under the constitution, money cannot be withdrawn by the government from the Consolidated Fund of India unless it has been appropriated by law. This is accomplished by passing an appropriation bill during the Budget process. Nevertheless, passing the appropriation bill through the Parliament and becoming a law may take time. As of April 1, when the new financial year begins, the government will require permission to spend even a penny. Vote on account is the process of withdrawing money from the Consolidated Fund of India during that period, usually two months. A vote on account is a formality and does not require debate. The government seeks a vote on account for four months when elections are scheduled a few months into a new financial year. Vote on account is essentially the Parliament's interim approval of spending by the government. As such, a vote on account is merely an interim authorization to spend money, as opposed to a full Budget that includes details of expenditures and receipts, including tax changes and government policies. During election years, when elections are scheduled a few months into the new fiscal year, the government prefers to request a vote rather than present a full budget because it is unfair to deny the government the right to design its own budget for the remainder of the year if it changes after elections. How is Vote on Account different? Regular budgets are presented for the whole financial year. During the general elections, the incumbent government will present an interim budget in place of a full budget. A vote-on-account includes only the government's expenditure, whereas the interim budget deals with both receipts and expenditures. How is the Union Budget planned? Union Budget Day is the most sought-after day for Indian citizens, as it determines the economic fate of the country. The central government takes months to plan and implement tasks that lead to budget drafting. The activity usually starts in August-September, i.e. six months before the date of tabling the budget. The budget gets tabled by the Union Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, on February 1 each year. Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Spotify is preparing to lay off 17% of its workforce or about 1,500 employees, as the company accelerates its profitability push. Chief Executive Daniel Ek announced the job cutsthe Stockholm-based companys third round of layoffs this yearto staff Monday. Despite efforts to reduce costs, Ek said Spotify is still spending too much money. The audio streaming company has been squeezed by slower economic growth as well as interest-rate increases that have made it more expensive to borrow, he said. The Spotify of tomorrow must be defined by being relentlessly resourceful in the ways we operate, innovate, and tackle problems," he said in a 1,000-word letter to staff. Being lean is not just an option but a necessity." Spotify, like other tech companies, grew in size and scope during the pandemic, with its head count nearly doubling over the last three years to more than 8,000 workers, as a result of hiring and acquisitions. As investors have become more focused on profitability than growth, many streaming-focused companies have aggressively cut costs. At Spotify that meant scaling back a $1 billion bet on podcasting, including through layoffs earlier this year. It continues to back top podcasters Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper and Emma Chamberlain, and stopped making a number of other shows such as Meghan Markles Archetypes." Spotify, which reported a 462 million euro lossequivalent to about $503 millionin the first nine months of the year, is trying to balance investments in emerging areas such as its growing ad business with the need to become consistently profitable. The company also is focused on its audiobooks offering, which rolled out to subscribers in the U.S. last month. Last year, during its first investor day since going public, Ek said he wants Spotify to be the worlds largest audio company and announced ambitious growth targets, such as generating $100 billion in revenue by 2030. He said the company plans to reach profitability by 2024. As investor pressure to hit that profitability goal increased over the last year, Ek told executives to look for ways to cut costs. The company expects the fresh round of layoffs to help it reach its profitability target faster. In Mondays letter, Ek said substantial cuts were the best option for accomplishing the companys objectives and thanked laid-off employees for their help growing the company. To be blunt, many smart, talented and hard-working people will be departing us," he said. The average employee will receive five months of severance pay. A leaner structure will change the way Spotify employees work and allow the company to invest profits more strategically back into the business, Ek said. Lean doesnt mean that we have small ambitions," Chief Financial Officer Paul Vogel said in an interview. The company will be more thoughtful with its future spending and focus on areas that are driving the most growth, he said. Spotify posted a surprise profit in the third quarter and stronger-than-expected subscriber and user growth. The company raised the price of its subscription in the U.S. and other major markets over the summer, a long-awaited increase the company said hasnt led to higher churn. The restructuring marks Spotifys third round of significant layoffs this year. In January the company said it would lay off about 600 employees, or 6% of staff. In June it announced plans to trim an additional 200 jobs, or 2% of its workforce. Those cuts also brought changes to the C-suite, including the departure of Chief Content Officer Dawn Ostroff, a key architect of the companys expansion into podcasting. The company was reorganized under Co-Presidents Gustav Soderstrom and Alex Norstrom. Write to Anne Steele at anne.steele@wsj.com Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Billionaire Gautam Adani added $5.6 billion to his net worth last week after shares of his companies rallied following the Supreme Court hearing on Hindenburg report-related matter, Bloomberg report said. The business tycoons' wealth eroded early this year after a US-based short seller alleged wide-ranging corporate malfeasance against billionaire Adani Group in its 24 January report. However last month, the top court reserved its verdict on a batch of petitions seeking examination of allegations of fraud against the Adani conglomerate. The apex court in its verdict mentioned that it wont take scathing media reports on the conglomerate as the gospel truth." The final ruling is awaited. Not seeking extension to finish probe into Adani-Hindenburg matter: Sebi to SC After the Court's order, the industrialist ranks 20th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index with a $65.8 billion fortune. Additionally, Adani Group stocks added about $9.8 billion in market value on Monday. The surge in stock was part of Nifty 50 and Sensex scaling new highs as market investors cheered a victory by Prime Minister Narendra Modis party in three state elections. At record high! Sensex jumps over 1,100 points, Nifty over 300 points: 5 reasons why On Monday, at 9.30 am, the Sensex was up over 1,000 points, or 1.5%, at 68,525 and the Nifty was up over 300 points, or 1.5%, near 20,600. Shares of flagship firm Adani Enterprises jumped 7.8% while those of Adani Green Energy jumped 8.43%. Shares of Adani Total Gas clocked a gain of 4.56%. Shares of Adani Power surged 5.35% while shares of Adani Wilmar rose 2.59%, and Adani Ports shares rose 6.10% at 1:20 pm on Monday. Adani Enterprises share price, other group stocks surge up to 15% as Nifty 50 jumps to record high Last month stock prices of Adani-owned firms soared by almost 15,000 after SC's order. Nine of the 10 listed group companies ended in the green, adding 14,786 crore in group market capitalization, stock exchange data showed. Adani Group to take final call on Wilmar JV stake divestment in three months The overall market capitalisation of the 10 Adani Group companies stood around 10.26 lakh crore after the court's hearing. A first-generation entrepreneur who started as a diamond trader in Mumbai in the 1980s and was the second-richest person briefly in 2022, Gautam Adani has lost $55 billion the biggest wealth loss for any tycoon this year. ADANI GREEN ENERGY More Information Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! The founders of Lybrate Inc. have moved a Delaware court to start arbitration proceedings against healthcare startup Pristyn Care, which has failed to pay them in full for acquiring their company last year. The founders also plan to seek over $13 million in damages in arbitration, a court filing showed. Tiger Global-backed Pristyn Care, which is operated by GHV Advanced Care Pvt. Ltd and runs a network of hospitals and clinics through partners, had acquired Delaware-incorporated doctor consultation platform Lybrate to enter the primary care segment. The total deal size was said to be $20-30 million, including payments to Lybrates investors such as Nexus Venture Partners, Tiger Global Management and Ratan Tatas RNT Associates. Both founders joined Pristyn Care following the acquisition. In their court petition, Lybrate founders Saurabh Arora and Rahul Narang said they received only $1.5 million out of the $8 million payment in the first tranche, while the investors were paid in full. GHV received 85% of plaintiffs Lybrate stock but only provided $1.5 million in total fixed consideration, with the remaining $6.5 million of non-contingent consideration to be split over the following two years," the filing said. The founders said they were scheduled to receive a combined $3 million in June under their original agreement, but this payment was not made. The balance payment of $3.5 million is due in 2024, according to the original agreement. In addition, around $4 million was promised based on milestone achievements during the third tranche. Pristyn Care and Lybrate founders Arora and Narang did not respond to requests for comments on Monday. Pristyn Care suspended Lybrates founders in July after they served a default notice, Mint reported on 20 July. While the founders have asked for a Delaware-based arbitrator, Pristyn Care has sought to appoint a London-based arbitrator, the filings showed. Plaintiffs intend to hold GHV accountable for the aggregate damages amount, which by plaintiffs estimation is in excess of $13 million," the filing said. Pristyn Care has denied it owes payments to Lybrate founders. The Mint report quoted a company spokesperson on 20 July, Pristyn Care has and shall continue to act in accordance with the contractual terms and conditions. Pristyn Care has not defaulted on any of its contractual obligations." Later in a court response filed on 21 November, Pristyn Care said it did not complete the Tranche II transfer due to a pending investigation into allegations of improper conduct by plaintiffs." Pristyn Care turned unicorn in April 2021, in a funding round led by Tiger Global Management. Its other investors include Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India), Hummingbird Ventures and Epiq Capital. At that time, the company said it had raised a total of around $150 million from external investors. Pristyn Care reported a revenue of 96 crore and loss of around 64 crore in FY21. It has not yet filed its FY22 financial statements. On 5 November,Mint reported that Pristyn Cares auditors had flagged material weakness" in the internal controls in the company. The findings included an instance of a Pristyn employee providing the auditor with certain documentary evidence in relation to agreements with doctors, which were not genuine." Bengaluru: In a short press release, dated 13 October, the Ministry of Women and Child Development announced that the Female Labour Force Participation Rate (FLFPR) for 2022-23 had improved significantly over the previous year by 4.2 percentage points to 37%. The trend, over the last five years (24.5%, 30.0%, 32.5%, 32.8%, 37%) has been nothing short of a miracle. Some states that were laggards have made significant progress and some of the leaders have slipped. The report shatters some long-standing myths and offers insights that can help shape policy interventions for each state. In the context of work and employment, there are several terms that are tossed around, and it would be helpful to quickly understand what these are, how they are measured, and their uses and limitations. LFPR is a ratio of the number of individuals who are part of the labour force to the number of individuals in the working age (greater than 15 years of age). A person is considered to be a part of the labour force if she/he is either employed or actively looking for work. Only those actively looking for work are considered unemployed and those that are idle, under-employed or self-employed, but not looking for work, are not considered unemployed. The unemployment rate is the ratio of the number of unemployed individuals to the sum of employed and unemployed individuals. Measured this way, the unemployment rate would offer a false sense of comfort and hide the reality that there could be a large number of individuals who are either idle or underemployed. They could be so for various reasons, a loss of hope being one of them; they have simply given up looking out for a job. And this percentage is far higher for women than men. The key highlights of the 2023 data at a national level have been captured in the accompanying chart. The unemployment rates for both men and women are the same3%but the point to note is that as compared to men, three times the number of women are not looking for a job. Not without flaws View Full Image (Graphic: Mint) FLFPR is a reasonably accurate but not a totally fool-proof indicator of the real participation of women in the workforce. For instance, whether a woman doing unpaid work chooses to say if she is actively looking for work or not would alter the FLFPR numbers. For a variety of reasons, in some states, more women doing unpaid work may say they are looking for work than in some other states, thus inflating the FLFPR percentage in the former. Further, those who are self-employed or underemployed (and not looking for a salaried job) are not considered part of the labour force and hence, increase in micro-entrepreneurship over a period could artificially depress FLFPR. Further, the surveys to arrive at these statistics are conducted by temporary staff who may not be sufficiently trained to understand these fine distinctions and assure that the data they gather is not distorted by these subtleties. Fortunately, these vagaries are unlikely to alter either the overall trends or the underlying insights. Non-obvious insights View Full Image One of the most under-reported trends is that agriculture, which is the least productive undertaking, is fast becoming women dominated in India. (Mint) The common belief has been that FLFPR numbers were higher in the south and the west in comparison to the north and the east. However, the government of Indias annual report of the periodic labour force survey (PLFS) for 2022-23 shatters this myth and throws up many surprises. Despite higher literacy rates and women empowerment indices, the simple average of FLFPR for the five southern states is a whopping 13 percentage points lower than that of the five northern states of Himachal, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Jharkhand (41% versus 54%). The average for four of the seven north-eastern states is 57%. There are only four states with less than 25% and these are Assam, Bihar, Haryana and Delhi. Delhi is the lowest at 14.8%. Quite obviously, there is no straightforward explanation and many factors are at play. In a research report, two young economists from St. Xaviers College, Mumbai, have discovered an inverse correlation between per capita income and FLFPR, which means that as family incomes rise, women tend to drop off from the work force reinforcing the hypothesis that working women in India have mostly played the role of supplementing family incomes. However, Bihar and Haryana run counter to this narrative and a possible explanation is the continued strong patriarchal culture in these two states while the other five northern states have probably made positive strides on this front, making it easier for women to work or at least actively seek work. In states with a strong culture of patriarchy, women stepping out of the home has traditionally been viewed as something undesirable and affecting the prospects of marriage. Decades of reinforcement of this attitude has resulted in public spaces and work places being totally dominated by men, and therefore unsafe for women. The FLFPR numbers in almost all states are higher for the rural segment than for the corresponding urban segment. As per a recent article in The Hindu Business Line, across India, on an average, the agriculture sector employs almost 80% of all economically active women. One of the most under-reported trends is that agriculture, which is the least productive undertaking, is fast becoming women dominated in India. However, farms with infrastructure that makes agriculture productive, like irrigation and mechanization, continue to be run by men while women operate the least productive parcels of land that are small and dry. Large and well irrigated farms are far fewer than small and unproductive holdings. Men from families with such unproductive land holdings often migrate to towns in search of work leaving their womenfolk managing the farm. Gender pay gap Gender Pay gap may not be a very significant problem in the world of the public sector and progressive private companies, but it is a serious problem in most other enterprises. When the gender pay gap is stark, there is no incentive for women to come and join the labour force. This is probably one reason why in the five southern states, despite very high levels of literacy and women empowerment (on all other measures of women empowerment except gender pay gap), the FLFPR is very disappointing. Missing manufacturing View Full Image In the absence of a robust manufacturing sector, construction has been one of the biggest employment-generating industries. However, jobs here are mostly temporary and unsafe. ( AFP) Across the world, manufacturing has typically provided women steady income earning opportunities and a secure environment. Among the top 10 economies in the world, India is probably the only country that missed this bus and leapfrogged into services. Agriculture has historically been a declining enterprise. As per a study by Deloitte, in 1800 in France, the share of the labour force working in agriculture was nearly 65%. In 2012, that number was under 5%. Mechanization of agriculture, combined with low population, resulted in a sharp decline of the labour force engaged in agriculture across the developed world. Increase in agricultural productivity and increased urbanization have had a strong correlation. The decline in the share of the labour force in agriculture hasnt been as sharp in countries like India. Lack of alternative employment opportunities in manufacturing and the limited number of jobs in services has also played a role in continued underemployment and low productivity in agriculture. In the absence of a robust manufacturing sector, construction has been one of the biggest employment-generating industries, but it has never been a good substitute for manufacturing in terms of providing steady and safe employment, especially for women. The jobs are mostly temporary, unsafe with no secure perimeter, weakly regulated, and the conditions and pay are highly discriminatory towards women. Women in construction have almost been relegated to carrying loads on their heads that men refuse to. Visit any construction site and this deeply discriminatory and ubiquitous practice would become evident. Can things get better? Low FLFPR is an outcome of a myriad socio-economic factors, many of which are rooted in history and culture. No change of significance can be driven without first understanding the causal factors followed by sharply targeted interventions. It is evident that the levers for driving improvement are different for every state. The progress made by the five northern states is worthy of praise, and offers hope that change is possible even in short timelines. Clearly, something has been working well for them and probably that has got to do with good governance and continued social reform by successive governments. Probably, the five southern states need to address gender pay gaps seriously to draw more women into the labour force. The history of women empowerment in other parts of the world also indicates that things can get better quickly. Cambridge did not grant degrees to women as late as in 1948 and Harvard Medical School admitted a woman for the first time in 1945. It was only during World War II that for the first time in the western world, women were pulled out of homes on a large scale and thrust into jobs that were originally exclusive to men. However, after the war came to an end and the men began returning home from the battlefront, this trend lost steam and women were back to being confined at home. But the feminist movement had picked up momentum and in 1964, after nearly 200 years of independence, America passed the civil rights bill by which any form of discrimination based on gender, race, colour, religion, or national origin was outlawed. In fact, even in 1964, the powers given to enforce the provisions of the Civil Rights Act were weak, though these were supplemented during later years. Passage of this Act was not easy and there was considerable opposition in both the Senate as well as the House of Representatives. From time to time, there were attempts to confine women to homes under the guise of family values. Despite such a late start, and all the obstacles along the way for change, the progress in the western world on this has been rapid and deep. Way forward for India View Full Image Make in India is beginning to work through a combination of policy push around incentives and imposition of non-trade barriers on imports. (Reuters) A lot has been said and written about Indias demographic dividend. If we quantify demographic dividend as the ratio of the population in the employable age (say 15-59 years of age) to the total population, it would become evident that time is running out and India would enjoy this dividend for at best two more decades after which we would be confronted with the problem of supporting a growing segment of senior citizens. It is inevitable that every country, with growing prosperity, would eventually get to this state at some point of time. Europe and Japan have grown old. The US and China are rapidly getting there. Fortunately for them, they had cracked the code of getting women to work in time. This problem would get exacerbated in countries where the FLFPR percentage continues to remain low. It is therefore important to address this issue with a sense of urgency. Creating a steady stream of supply needs emphasis on education. The goal for every state in India should be to get to where Kerala is today in the next five years. Make in India is beginning to work finally through a combination of policy push around incentives and imposition of non-trade barriers on imports. A large pool of educated and skilled women would help accelerate the manufacturing sector. Laws regarding rights to property, safety at the workplace and in public spaces, gender pay equality, social reform are essential to move the needle. And finally, governments at the centre and the states should roll out the red carpet for women micro and small entrepreneurs. T.N. Hari is an author and founder of Artha School of Entrepreneurship National Testing Agency (NTA) Monday said the Admit Card for applicants of UGC NET December 2023 has been made live at URL https://ugcnet.nta.ac.in and applicants whose examination is scheduled on 6th, 7th and 8th December, can now download their Admit Card from the NTA UGC website. The University Grant Commission (UGC) National Eligibility Test (NET) December 2023 exam city slip was released on December 2, 2023. Also Read | Britain announces stricter visa norms to reduce migration The UGC NET December 2023 session examinations are scheduled at different centres throughout the country from December 6 to December 14, 2023. The Examination dates are: 6 December, 7 December, 8 December, 11 December, 12 December, 13 December and 14 December. As per UGC notification, the NET examinations would be conducted in two shifts. The morning shift is scheduled to start from 9 am to 12 pm and the second shift will start from 3 pm to 6 pm. Also Read | RBI cancels licence of Kolhapur-based Shankarrao Pujari Nutan Nagari Sahakari Bank How to download the Admit Card from the official website. The NTA has made the admit cards live, the candidates can download the admit card from the UGC official website: https://ugcnet.nta.ac.in Steps to follow for downloading the admit card: Go to the official website of NTA UGC: https://ugcnet.nta.ac.in On the home page, go to the latest news section, click on UGC NET December 2023 Admit Card Window A new login window will open, enter your application number, Date of Birth and Security PIN. Please note that all the fields are mandatory After submitting, your UGC NET Admit Card for the December 2023 exam will be displayed Verify all the details carefully. Download the Admit Card and save it. Take a printout of the Admit Card for the examination and also for future reference. UGC-NET is conducted twice every year (June & December). In order to regularize the UGC-NET examination cycle, the National Testing Agency (NTA), with the concurrence of UGC is conducting UGC NET December 2023 in 83 subjects, at selected cities across the country. Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) chief Lalduhoma is all set to become the next Chief Minister of Mizoram as his party secured a landslide victory in the state assembly election 2023. The ZPM won 27 of the total 40 assembly seats in Mizoram, while the incumbent CM's party, Mizo National Front (MNF) won 10 seats. Meanwhile, Lalduhoma secured a clear victory in the Serchhip Assembly constituency of Mizoram. Lalduhoma is the chief ministrial candidate from the ZPM. He was pitted against MNF debutant J Malsawmzual Vanchhawng. Meanwhile, the Congress had fielded R Vanlaltluanga from Serchhip who had earlier contested the Assembly polls in 2013 unsuccessfully. Follow Mizoram Election Results 2023 LIVE Updates here Lalduhoma told news agency ANI on Monday that he would be meeting the Mizoram Governor this week to stake claim to form the government in the state. "Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow I will meet the Governor...Swearing-in will be within this month," Lalduhoma was quoted as saying. Follow Aizawl, Mizoram Assembly Election Results 2023 LIVE Updates here Who is Lalduhoma? ZPM chief Lalduhoma, who is also the party's chief ministerial candidate, contested the Mizoram Assembly Election 2023 from Serchhip. In 2018, Lalduhoma secured 35.4 per cent votes, defeating the Congress' Lal Thanhawla which got 32.7 per cent votes. The ZPM leader had joined Congress after he had left his job as an IPS officer in 1984. The same year he had contested the Lok Sabha polls on a Congress ticket and was elected unopposed. However, in 2020, he was disqualified under the anti-defection law, becoming the first legislator to have been disqualified under the law in the country. Lalduhoma had worked in the security of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. According to the Economic Times, he was reportedly sent by Indira Gandhi to hold negotiations with Mizo militant leader Laldenga in London and persuade him for peace talks. Laldenga then signed a peace accord in 1987 with then-prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, the report said. This made Lalduhoma a key player in the birth of Mizoram state. Apart from joining different political parties, including the Mizo National Front (MNF), Lalduhoma also floated his parties, including the Zoram Nationalist Party (ZNP). He was chosen as the first chief ministerial candidate of the ZNP-led Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) coalition in the 2018 assembly polls, news agency PTI reported. Lalduhoma won the Serchhip seat in the 2018 assembly polls held in November 2018, ousting incumbent legislator and five-time chief minister Lal Thanhawla. In 2018, he was the head of the ZPM. However his party was not registered back then. In 2020, Lalduhoma was disqualified as an MLA on a technicality, for defecting to the ZPM, the Economic Times reported. Except for the period 1998-2003 and 2018-2023, the Congress has been in power in Serchhip after Mizoram attained statehood. Before the 2018 assembly polls, Lalduhoma had successfully contested the assembly polls two times from the Ratu seat in 2003 and the Aizawl West-I seat in 2008. In the last assembly polls, he won from two seats. ZPM chief ministerial candidate Lalduhoma has assets worth 4 crore, PTI reported. What has ZPM chief Lalduhoma promised in Mizoram Lalduhoma said that after forming the government, his party will make a resource mobilisation team for financial reforms. "Mizoram is facing financial crises... That is what we are going to inherit from the outgoing government...We are going to fulfil our commitment... Financial reform is necessary, and for that, we are going to make a resource mobilisation team," Lalduhoma was quoted by PTI as saying. He earlier asserted that his party would give top priority to farmers if it came to power in Mizoram in the November 7 assembly elections. He also promised to construct three new hydroelectric dams to generate around 300 MW of power and not to hike power tariffs for the next five years. Addressing a ZPM block conference at Khawrihnim village in Mamit district, he asserted that around 60 per cent of the state's population is dependent on agriculture and allied sectors. "The ZPM will give topmost priority to the uplift and development of farmers. We will modernise agriculture," he said. Lalduhoma said that more terrace farming will be done on hills with gentle slopes. He said a proper plan will be made for growing the cattle rearing sector. Lalduhoma said that the ZPM, if it comes to power, will follow decentralisation of power and will set up committees from state to village levels involving NGOs, churches and other organisations which represent the people, to monitor development. Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Mizoram Elections Result 2023: The Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) Chief Ministerial candidate Lalduhoma has achieved a resounding triumph in the Serchhip Assembly constituency of Mizoram, as confirmed by the Election Commission of India in the release of results for 27 seats from the November 7 polls in the state. ZPM has won 27 seats, while MNF has emerged runner up winning 10 seats. Lalduhoma secured a decisive victory in Serchhip, surpassing Mizo National Front candidate J Malsawmzuala Vanchhawng by 2,982 votes, according to data from the Election Commission of India. Meanwhile, the Tuichang Assembly seat saw the defeat of Mizoram Deputy Chief Minister and MNF candidate Tawnluia to the ZPM candidate, as reported by the Election Commission. Tawnluia, representing the Mizo National Front (MNF), secured 6,079 votes, while the ZPM candidate W Chhuanawma emerged victorious with 6,988 votes. Tawluia of MNF received 6,079 votes while the ZPM candidate W Chhuanawma got 6,988. Congress candidate C Lalhriatuia received 1,674 votes while the Independent candidate Lalhmunsiami got only 67 votes," the EC said. Meanwhile, Mizoram Rural Development Minister and MNF candidate Laruatkima lost to ZPM nominee Lalnghinglova Hmar in the Aizawl West II Assembly constituency, according to the Election Commission. View Full Image Mizoram Rural Development Minister and MNF candidate Laruatkima lost to ZPM nominee Lalnghinglova Hmar in the Aizawl West II. (Photo: EC) Hmar of Zoram People's Movement secured 10,398, while Lalruatkima of Mizo National Front got 5,579 and Ngurdingliana of Indian National Congress received 1,528 votes," the EC said. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate K Hrahmo emerged victorious in the Palak Assembly constituency, defeating MNF rival K T Rokhaw by a margin of 1,241 votes, as reported by the Election Commission. Hrahmo secured 6,064 votes, while Rokhaw received 4,823 votes. Following the voting to elect its 40-member legislative assembly on November 7, with four major contenders, namely the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF), the Zoram People's Movement (ZPM), the Congress, and the BJP, the political landscape is charged with anticipation. Mizoram Elections Result LIVE Originally slated for December 3, Sunday, the counting of votes in Mizoram, along with four other states, faced a one-day delay. This decision came in response to representations made by civil society to the Election Commission, pointing to a significant day in the religious calendar of the Christian-majority state. Also Read: Mizoram Election 2023: BJP promises Lotus scheme, 1.5 lakh for girl child in manifesto | Details here Responding to appeals from both political parties and civil society organizations, and recognizing the unique importance of Sunday for the people of Mizoram, the Election Commission officially declared on November 29 the postponement of the vote counting in the state to Monday. Responding to appeals from political parties and civil society organizations, the Election Commission officially announced on November 29 that the counting of votes in Mizoram would be deferred to Monday. In the state, which elected its 40-member legislative assembly on November 7, four major contenders are competing for victory. Who are the contestants? Zoram People's Movement leader and the party's chief ministerial candidate Lalduhoma is contesting against the three-time Chief Minister Zoramthanga. Furthermore, he vowed for victory in Serchhip, where he is currently serving as the MLA. What does the Mizoram Assembly Exit Polls 2023 say? Mizoram is likely to witness a hung assembly with no party crossing the majority mark of 21 seats. The exit polls also hint at a major setback for Mizoram Chief Minister Zoramthanga's party MNF. As per the poll of polls analysis, the Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) is likely to win 19-20 seats, while the ruling MNF may bag only 12-13 seats in the state. A political party needs to win 21 seats to form government in Mizoram. Earlier, Lalduhoma said his party will maintain its identity as an independent regional party free from Delhi's control. Also Read: Mizoram Assembly election voting today: Here's the list of parties, candidates, other details "We will not join any group at the national level even if we come to power. We want to maintain our prestige and remain as an independent regional party, which is free from Delhi control," the 73-year-old ZPM leader told PTI."We don't want to be under the control of Delhi," he told PTI. Furthermore, he stressed the cordial relationship with the Centre. "We will not join any group at the national level even if we come to power. We want to maintain our prestige and remain as an independent regional party, which is free from Delhi control," the 73-year-old ZPM leader told PTI. ZPM working president K Sapdanga exercised his voting rights in Mizoram's Aizawl North-III constituency. ZPM working president K Sapdanga after exercising his franchise had said, He (CM Zoramthanga) is showing his dream (of coming back to power). But I don't think so. He will not come again. It seems from the movement of the people that the same government will not come again because an anti-incumbency wave is very much at this time." Also Read: Aizawl, Mizoram Assembly Election Results 2023 LIVE: Counting for 40 seats begins There was a voter turnout of 78.40 per cent during the single-phase election, featuring 174 candidates in Mizoram. The primary competition involves the incumbent Mizo National Front (MNF), Congress, and Zoram Peoples Movement, while the BJP is eager to position itself as a potential "kingmaker." The home voting method for the 2023 Mizoram Legislative Assembly elections was expanded to several state districts, enabling PwD and senior citizens (80 years of age and above) to cast votes. Poll workers, other officials, and those providing necessary services voted using postal ballots. Notably, ZPM, having secured the second-highest number of seats in the 2018 assembly elections with eight wins, has positioned itself as the primary contender in the current election. In the previous election, the ruling Mizo National Front had secured 26 seats. Also Read: Mizoram Election Results 2023 LIVE Updates: Counting of votes for 40 seats begins Established in 2017 through the collaboration of two political parties and five groups, the Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) strategically capitalized on a platform advocating for a non-Congress, non-Mizo National Front (MNF) government. This approach allowed the party to ascend as the primary opposition force in Mizoram, securing eight seats in the 2018 assembly polls and relegating the Congress to the third position. (With inputs from agencies) Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! The Congress Sunday stormed to power in Telangana as the party won 64 seats in the 119-member state Assembly. The ruling Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS)which has been in power for the last 10 years has managed to get 39 seats. BRS has already conceded defeat and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao has submitted his resignation to Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan. Thanking the people of Telangana for their support, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi said the people of Telangana have created history. Also Read | Assembly Election Results 2023 LIVE Updates: BJP's victory in 3 states warning to 'ghamandiya' alliance, says PM Modi In a post shared by her official handle on X, Priyanka wrote in Hindi, The people of Telangana have created history and given the mandate in favour of the Congress Party. This is the victory of the people of Telangana. This is the victory of the people of the state and every worker of the Congress Party." Here are some points that led to the Congress win in Telangana, when the party was defeated in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh: The anti-incumbency at the constituency level against BRS MLAs, the removal of Bandi Sanjay as the BJP Telangana unit chief, and common perception among the masses that the ruling BRS and AIMIM of Asaduddin Owaisi are secretly colluding with BJP are among some factors that contributed to the upturn of Congress in the state. Congress Telangana manifesto provided some guarantees which proved to be a game changer. The party in its manifesto promised cash transfers, pension schemes, free electricity, cooking gas cylinders and land to a wide base of voters with a guarantee. The party promised to provide free bus travel for women, 2500 to women every month under the Mahalaxmi Yojana, cooking gas cylinder at 500, 200 units of free electricity, pension of 4,000 per month to the elderly. The Rythu Bharosa guarantee promises agricultural prosperity to the 58.33 lakh farmers of the state. The farmer's investment support scheme promises 15,000 annually to farmers and tenant farmers; 12,000 for agricultural labourers; and 500 bonus for farmers growing paddy crops The Congress manifesto also promised land and financial assistance of 5 lakh to the homeless people in the state under the Indira Amma Indlu scheme. Also Read | EC orders suspension of Telangana DGP Anjani Kumar after he meets, congratulates state Congress chief Revanth Reddy The party promised allocation of up to 15% of the state budget for education. Under the Yuva Vikasam scheme 5 lakh for students' education to be provided through Vidya Bharosa card. Congress also promised population-based reservations for BCs after the caste census, separate sub-plans for BCs and minorities, and a special Welfare Board for Economically Backward Classes. Direct assistance of Rs. 2 lakhs to Yadavs and Kurumas for sheep rearing is also part of the schemes. On the contentious Dharani portal, the party said it would replace Dharani with a new portal with land owners getting full rights on the land distributed by the government. 12,000 per year in each auto drivers account, the abolition of liquor belt shops, formation of three corporations for SC sub-castes after SC classification are also on the list. The Congress manifesto also assured to address corruption in the construction of the Kaleshwaram project with a sitting Judge of the High Court. It promised to revive the Chief Ministers Praja Darbar at the camp office every-day. The Congress also promised to increase the budget up to 4,000 crore annually towards minority welfare, besides conducting the caste census within six months after coming to power. The party also promised to ensure fair reservation for all backward classes including, minorities in jobs, education and government schemes. Under the Abdul Kalam Taufa-e-Taleem Scheme, the party said it would provide financial assistance of five lakh to Muslim, Christian, Sikh, and other minority youths upon completing M.Phil and Ph.D programmes. The BJP's decision to replace its Telangana president Bandi Sanjay Kumar with Union minister G Kishan Reddy and the elevation of Etela Rajender, who had switched from the BRS, led to the decline of the party in the state. The Congress also promised to establish a welfare board for Gulf workers and a compensation of Rs. 5 lakh each to families of workers who died in the Gulf. It also promised to increase the monthly pension for the disabled to Rs. 5,016 and Rs.3,016 pension for folk artists over 50 years old. Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Chhattisgarh Election Result 2023 : In Chhattisgarh, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed majority vote share as well including two other states as indicated by December 3 Assembly Election Results. BJP gained vote share of 46.27 per cent as compared to its closest rival Indian National Congress (INC) whose vote share stood at 42.23 per cent. Election results to 90-member legislative assembly saw BJP securing absolute majority over 54 constituencies while Congress trailed behind with 35 seats. Gondvana Gantantra Party (GGP) was able to gain control over one seat, according to the data shared by the Election Commission (EC). These elections witnessed a total of 1,181 candidates contesting elections against each other where polling in the state was held in two phases. In the first phase that is on November 7, votes were casted in the names of 223 candidates while in the second phase 958 candidates were involved whose polling took place on November 17. The major parties contesting the assembly elections in Chhatisgarh included BJP, Congress, Janta Congress Chhattisgarh (JCC) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Other regional outfits that were a part included Gondwana Gantantra Party (GGP), the Hamar Raj Party (HRP) and the Left parties. Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel who stood as Congress candidate from Patan constituency secured decent victory by a margin of 19,723 votes over his closest contender who was distant nephew and BJP candidate Vijay Baghel. Bhupesh Baghel victory comes even as he faces charges and allegations of receiving payoffs in excess of 500 crores from the promoters of the Mahadev betting app. Former CM Raman Singh who stood as BJP candidate from Rajnandgaon constituency secured victory by a margin of 45,084 votes over his closest contender Congress's Girish Dewangan. Raman Singh is regarded as one of the longest-serving chief ministers of any state. In Bastar, Congress's Baghel Lakheshwar secured victory by a small margin of 6,434 votes over his closest rival BJP's Maniram Kashyap. Bastar area is considered to have stronghold of Naxalites, that is tribal communities dominate the area demographically. BJP candidate Purandar Mishra took lead in North Raipur and won by 23,054 votes over his closest contender Congress's Kuldeep Singh Juneja. Brijmohan Aggarwal of BJP won by 67,719 votes over his closest contender Congress's Mahant Ramsundar Das in the South Raipur constituency. BJP's Rajesh Munat emerged victorious by 41,229 votes over Congress's Vikas Upadhyay in West Raipur. Motilal Sahu of BJP won by by 35,750 votes over his closest contender Congress's Pankaj Sharma in rural Raipur. As per the exit polls Congress was slated to win in Chhattisgarh following a stiff contest with BJP. However, yesterday's election results defied exit-poll projections and brought in a clear majority for BJP in the state. (With inputs from ANI) Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Monday cancelled the licence of Kolhapur-based Shankarrao Pujari Nutan Nagari Sahakari Bank Limited, Ichalkaranji and asked the bank not to carry on any banking business, with effect from the close of business on December 4, 2023. Shankarrao Pujari Nutan Nagari Sahakari Bank Limited, Ichalkaranji, Kolhapur is prohibited from conducting the business of banking which includes, among other things, acceptance of deposits and repayment of deposits as defined in Section 5(b) read with Section 56 of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949 with immediate effect, the Reserve Bank said. The apex bank said the Shankarrao Pujari Nutan Nagari Sahakari Bank does not have adequate capital and earning prospects. As such, it does not comply with the provisions of Section 11(1) and Section 22 (3) (d) read with Section 56 of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949. Also Read | Byju Raveendran pledges homes to raise funds for staff salaries The banking regulator also said the co-operative bank has failed to comply with certain sections of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949. The Reserve Bank further said the public interest would be adversely affected if the United India Co-operative Bank is allowed to carry on its banking business any further as the bank with its present financial position would be unable to pay its present depositors in full. On liquidation, the Reserve Bank said that every depositor would be entitled to receive deposit insurance claim amount of his/her deposits up to a monetary ceiling of 5,00,000 from Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation (DICGC) subject to the provisions of DICGC Act, 1961. As per the data submitted by the bank, 99.85% of the depositors are entitled to receive the full amount of their deposits from DICGC. The RBI further said as of July 24, DICGC has already paid 41.60 crore of the total insured deposits under the provisions of Section 18A of the DICGC Act, 1961 based on the willingness received from the concerned depositors of the bank. The RBI has directed the Commissioner for Cooperation and Registrar Cooperative Societies, Maharashtra to issue an order for winding up the bank and appoint a liquidator for the bank. Earlier in the day, the Reserve Bank imposed monetary penalties on four co-operative banks for deficiencies in regulatory compliance. These co-operative banks are: Jijamata Mahila Sahakari Bank Ltd, Shri Laxmikrupa Urban Co-operative Bank Ltd, The Konark Urban Cooperative Bank Ltd and The Chembur Nagarik Sahakari Bank Ltd. BANK OF INDIA More Information Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! The country experienced a surge in strikes unlike anything in recent memory. According to Cornell ILRs Labor Action Tracker, as of Oct. 31, there were 354 strikes in 2023 involving roughly 492,000 workersnearly eight times the number of workers involved in strikes for the same period in 2021 and nearly four times the number for the same period 2022. Not only were there more strikes, they led to historic companywide and industrywide bargaining victories with some of the nations largest and most powerful corporationsUnited Parcel Service, Kaiser Permanente, Hollywood, the big three auto-companies, and hotels and casinos in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Detroit. For many workers, these were the first contract negotiations since Covid-19, and the first strikes since before the recession of 2008. Spurred on by anger and frustration over the pandemic and lockdowns, skyrocketing corporate profits, deteriorating working conditions, rising prices and decades of concessions and wage stagnation, not only are more workers striking, but more unions are winning, and winning big. These victories come at a difficult time for labor. Union representation reached a record low of 6% of private employment in 2022. New leaders But last year, a new generation of leaderssuch as Sean OBrien (Teamsters), Shawn Fain (United Auto Workers), Ellen Stutzman (Writers Guild of America) and Fran Drescher (Screen Actors Guild)had a mandate from their members to run smarter and more militant campaigns. By actively engaging the public, the media and public officials, and changing strike strategies, they left employers in unfamiliar and less comfortable territory. Strike after strike was framed in terms of standing up for all workers against corporate greed. Issues such as ending two-tier wages and recouping pay and benefit concessions struck a chord with the public, ratcheting up public support for unions and for strikes up to 74%, and, for the first time in recorded history, the U.S. president joined a union picket line, scolding employers for not offering more. The Teamsters at UPS used the threat of a strike and innovative strategies such as practice picketing, where union members picket before the contract expiration to signal their resolve. That strategy allowed them to win a record contract covering 340,000 UPS employees nationwide, without actually striking, making up for more than two decades of concessionary agreements. When the 175,000 members of Writers Guild and SAG-Aftra struck Hollywood, the studios let bargaining drag on for seven months, convinced the unions would have to settle once members began to struggle to pay their bills. But workers in both unions stood united, winning not only across-the-board increases in minimums and streaming bonuses, but also the first enforceable protections against the use of artificial intelligence. Also in California, in October 75,000 nurses and doctors struck Kaiser Permanente, in the largest healthcare strike in U.S. history, winning a 21% wage increase over four years, as well as improvements in training, professional development and staffing. Similar victories were registered by Los Angeles hotel workers, Las Vegas culinary workers and Detroit casino workers. The campaign that most captured media attention and the support of the nation was the UAW strike of the Big Three automakersFord Motor, Stellantis and General Motors. New rules The union played by a new set of rules, bargaining with all companies at once, strategically targeting individual plants with no notice, and calling out the company for its greed. Ultimately the union won an unprecedented agreement, winning on demands thought by many to be a pipe dream, such as 25% wage increases, reinstating COLA, elimination of two-tier wages, the right to bargain over plant closures, and bringing electric vehicle plants under the Big-3 agreement. For each of these, rank-and-file participation and engagement were essential elements of the victory. If workers hadnt voted overwhelmingly to strike, showed up every day at the picket line, reached out to community, labor and political allies, and refused to cross the picket line, the strikes would have failed. It was labors hot summer" and labor showed up. Support came from outside the country as well, with unions in other countries staging international days of action in support of striking workers. The commitment of union leaders to stand strong was critical to the unions success. If the writers and actors unions hadnt held out, even after the companys last, best, final offer, neither union would have won pathbreaking language on artificial intelligence. Nor would the UAW have achieved the last-minute agreements to bring electric vehicle jobs if Shawn Fain had given in to pressure to settle. Ultimately, though, success depends on unions making the cost to the employer of not settling greater than the cost of settling the contract. As Fain told UAW members, quoting Walter Reuther, Power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the worldGeneral Motorssay yes when it wants to say no." As my research has shown, for that to occur the unions need to find ways to leverage the power of workers and community allies through escalating tactics targeting the companys profit, growth, key relationships and supply chain. That is why the Writers Guild focused its attention on Netflix and Walt Disney, the largest and most profitable streaming companies, and the UAW targeted first the parts suppliers and then the companies cash cowsSUV and trucking plantsbecause those would have the greatest impact. Its also why the unions expanded their strikes when companies didnt move on key issues, and stopped the escalation when the company did move. Not all strikes were large. In fact, according to ILR Labor Action Tracker data, 60% of the strikes in the past year were in units with 100 or fewer workers. This isnt surprising, given that most employers in the U.S. have fewer than 100 workers. But it does limit bargaining power if unions only represent a limited number of workers in an industry or parent company. Nor were all strikes this year successful. In March 2023, United Mineworkers returned to work at Warrior Met Coal without a contract after a two-year strike. Union workers at Starbucks, Amazon.com, REI and Trader Joes have yet to win first contracts. Despite immense support from the rank-and-file members and allies, none of these unions could win because they didnt have enough density in the firm or leverage against the company. Companies on defense Still, even taking losses into consideration, the current labor climate isnt business as usual. For the first time in decades, unions launched offensive strikes with some of the nations most powerful employers. Corporations are now on the defensive, explaining to investors why they underestimated the unions commitment to the fight, and billions of dollars were spent dragging out negotiations that could have been settled months earlier. Meanwhile, nonunion employers feel pressure to raise wages to stop their workers from organizing, when for years declining union density put downward pressure on wages. The groundswell of public support for unions also has strengthened labors hand in local and state labor policy issues. What remains to be seen is whether the rise in the intensity and success of union strike activity represents a long-term change in the culture and practice of U.S. collective bargaining, or are these strikes dependent on the current favorable economic and political climate. A more-volatile labor marketor a Republican presidencycould stall labors resurgence as it just got started. Kate Bronfenbrenner is the director of labor education research and a senior lecturer at Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com. Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Last week, the federal enforcement agency summoned the actor for questioning in a money laundering case linked to an alleged 100-crore ponzi and fraud case against Tiruchirapalli-based Pranav Jewellers. Also Read | Cyclone Michaung LIVE: 5 killed in Chennai amid heavy rains, IMD issues alert The national award-winner actor took to social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) to share a screenshot of the Chennai airport's tweet informing that the airfield would be closed for departure and arrival till 9 am on Tuesday owing to the adverse conditions caused by Cyclone Michaung and the Chennai rains. He wrote in the caption, Sad news to dear #panauti and #Bhakts. Tomorrow is my ED day. But #chennairains #CycloneMichaung is playing Spoil Sport. You may have to wait. Please (namaste emojis) stay tuned for updates. #justasking." What's the case? The summons followed a probe against Pranav Jewellers, a partnership firm, whom the ED had raided on November 20 under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and claimed to have seized "unexplained" cash of 23.70 lakh and some gold jewellery. Prakash, 58, a National Award-winning actor, has been a brand ambassador of this company. He has been asked to depose before the federal agency in Chennai in the first week of December. The ED has indicated that Prakash Raj's summoning is part of the broader investigation into the alleged bogus gold investment scheme floated by Pranav Jewellers. The ED wants to record his statement and understand some purported payments made by the company to the Bengaluru-based actor-politician and some other financial transactions, PTI reported citing sources. Also Read | Byju Raveendran pledges homes to raise funds for staff salaries The ED case stems from an FIR of the Tamil Nadu Police Economic Offences Wing. According to the police complaint, the Pranav Jewellers collected 100 crore from the public under the guise of a gold investment scheme that promised high returns. However, the company not only failed to fulfil its commitment but also didn't return the invested money to the investors, leaving them in the lurch, the federal agency said in a statement. "Pranav Jewellers failed to return the amount to such investors and the firm (Pranav Jewellers) and other connected persons cheated the public by diverting public funds to shell entities/entry providers under the garb of purchase of bullion/gold ornaments," the ED statement read. Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Ahead of New Year 's Eve and Christmas Eve, about 48 per cent of Indians plan on increasing their travel budget in 2024, according to a report by ACKO in collaboration with YouGov Travel. About 60 per cent of Indians are set to travel to international destinations this year. The data is from a survey done with 1,000 respondents from seven major Indian cities between the age group of 24 to 45 years old. Also Read | Travel sector outlook for 2024 is a mixed bag The report revealed that around "48% of Indians will be allocating an increased budget for their travel in the coming year and 37% will be increasing the duration of the trip, to embark on extraordinary adventures and make the most of every opportunity." The report findings also pointed towards the increased awareness of travel insurance among Indians. About 67 per cent of Indians believe travel insurance is mandatory, the report added. Also Read | Visa-free travel best way to draw tourists: Booking Holdings CEO Brijesh Unnithan, SVP, Embedded Insurance, said, "travellers are more concerned about convenience and flexibility, and they are ready to spend more on the experience. It is great to see that Indian travellers understand the importance of travel insurance and know what to expect from a policy." What has been the travel trend so far? Additionally, according to data released by Cleartrip on December 1, the July to August period, usually seen as a dull phase for the travel sector witnessed increased demands for flights from solo women travellers. The demand went up by six percent as compared to the April to June period, according to the latest travel trends report. Additionally, Bangkok emerged as the preferred destination for women travellers. Approximately 71 per cent of respondents were willing to spend 16 lakh on their international trips, while domestic travellers would like to spend up to 1 lakh, as per the ACKO report. Where are Indians travelling? According to the ACKO report, travellers' preferred international destinations, including Dubai, ranked first, followed by the Maldives, Singapore, Switzerland, and Bali. Goa ranked first among the preferred domestic travel destinations, followed by Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Uttarakhand, and Rajasthan. Additionally, the popular destinations among solo women were Gurugram, Goa and Chandigarh, according to the Cleartrip report. Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! It was a hushed start for the Indian primary markets in 2023. In the initial months, we saw a muted atmosphere, but as time unfolded, so did the narratives. In recent months, the number of IPO listings has surged remarkably. Comparing the current year's IPOs with the preceding years, the numbers tell a totally different story. In 2022, 90 companies made their debut including both small and medium enterprise (SMEs) and mainboard segments. Fast forward to 2023, and we have 101 IPOs that are already listed, and we still have one month to go. The journey started with 8 IPOs combined in January and February 2023. March marked a turning point with 11 IPOs as markets picked up pace. However, a dip followed in the months of April and May, with less than 7 IPOs each month. From June 2023, demand resurged and has remained resilient till date. What sets 2023 apart is that there were no blockbuster IPOs like the LIC IPO with an issue size of 210 billion (bn). In fact, 2023 had a quieter trend with focus on companies from the tier-2 cities. To understand this better, lets look at some numbers. You see, till October 2023, 36 mainboard IPOs were listed. These IPOs collectively raised over 270 bn. Approximately half of these (18 IPOs), came from companies located in tier-2 cities like Yatra Online, Signature Global, Utkarsh Small Finance Bank, and Cyient DLM, among others. Until October 2023, 36 mainboard IPOs went public, and together they raised more than 270 billion. What's interesting is that 18 of these companies, like Yatra Online and Utkarsh Small Finance Bank, are from tier-2 cities. They gathered 106 billion, which is 40% of all the money raised by these 36 mainstream IPOs until October 2023. Lets look at 2023s IPOs from a rear-view mirror, the best and the worst performing ones, and understand what lessons we learn from them which can be implemented in 2024. Lets begin. Top IPOs with Gains on Listing Date #1 Tata Tech Tops the List The Tata Tech IPO tops the list as it made a stellar debut with a remarkable 140% premium, marking the best opening in the Indian mainboard market in the last two years. The issue price of the IPO was 500 and upon listing, the stock began trading at 1,200. This robust response is attributed to attractive valuations compared to industry peers and the strong brand reputation of Tata group. Second, Tata Tech's FY23 PE ratio stands at 32-33x, which is significantly lower than its industry counterparts, with KPIT at 105x, L&T Technology Services at 40x, and Tata Elxsi at 70x. #2 IdeaForge In the drone sector, IdeaForge made the second big entry into the mainstream segment through its IPO. The company specialises in manufacturing unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), widely used across various sectors. IdeaForge claims to be a market leader in the Indian UAS market with a market share of approximately 50%. During its IPO, IdeaForge issued shares at 672, and upon listing on 7 July 2023, the stock opened at 1,295, marking a listing gain of 92%. However, post its listing, the stock has been on a declining trajectory. As of 30 November 2023, the stock is trading at 782, reflecting a wealth erosion of 39% from its listing price. View Full Image ... This decline can be attributed to a couple of factors. First, the stock is perceived to be overvalued during its IPO. Additionally, the company is facing challenges in maintaining a robust balance sheet and has been consistently reporting declining revenue. These factors have contributed to the downward trend in the stock's performance. The trend of hefty valuations impacting companies is not unique, we have seen such instances back in 2021 with startups like Paytm, PB Fintech, Zomato and Nykaa were listed. A similar scenario was repeated with Honasa Consumer IPO, the parent company of Mama Earth. When the company issued its draft red herring prospectus (DRHP) in December 2022, it faced criticism from market participants for its initial 240 bn valuation. Subsequently, the final valuation at which the company launched its offering was reduced to 104 bn, less than half of the initial valuation. Additionally, the size of the issue was also trimmed. On 7 November 2023, the stock got listed at a 4% premium to its issue price. #3 Utkarsh Small Finance Bank The third in the list is Utkarsh Small Finance Bank. As a small finance bank, it has achieved the second-fastest growth in assets under management (AUM) from the financial year 2019 to 2022 among other SFBs with AUM exceeding 50 bn. During its IPO, the bank had an issue price of 25. On 21 July 2023, the stock was listed at a 91% premium at 48. This premium listing was because of strong IPO subscription numbers and bullish market conditions. However, as of 30 November 2023, the company is trading at 50, very close to its listing price. #4 Gandhar Oil Refinery The next in the list is the recent listing of Gandhar Oil Refinery. The company made a robust debut, opening at 298 per share, a premium of 76% over its issue price of 169. This successful listing is attributed to factors such as strong subscription numbers, attractive valuation, robust financials, and growing overseas opportunities for the company. The company's position as a leading manufacturer of white oils has increased its appeal among investors, contributing to its positive debut in the market. #5 Cyient DLM The last on this list is Cyient DLM. The company has positioned itself as one of the top performers for listing day gains in 2023. Headquartered in Mysore, the company serves as a reliable partner in electronics and mechanical manufacturing. It is a supplier for major players in various industries such as Honeywell International, Thales Global Services S.A.S, ABB, Bharat Electronics, among others. Cyient DLM operates within a contract manufacturing framework, placing a strong emphasis on quality and customisation to meet specific customer requirements. The shares had an issue price of 265 and got listed at 420, reflecting a remarkable 59% gain. As of 30 November 2023, the company's share price is trading at 651, showcasing an outstanding return of over 145% from its issue price. The outstanding performance could be because the company has managed to thrive in a highly competitive environment within the electrical component business. The sustained success in such a competitive atmosphere is likely contributing to the positive momentum in its share price. Similarly, from the 101 IPOs, 84 are trading at a premium to its issue price as on 2 December 2023. Top IPOs with Losses on Listing Date In 2023, most mainstream IPOs opened either flat or at a premium to their issue price. However, there was one exception. Updater Services is one such example that opened at a 5.4% discount to its issue price. Market experts suggest that, fundamentally, the company was strong, but the public issue was aggressively priced, leading to a discounted listing. View Full Image .... Yatra Online Limited also faced challenges as it got listed at a discount of 4.3%, and to date, it continues to trade at a discount. The company's high PE valuation and heavy reliance on the airline ticketing business, coupled with the competitive nature of the travel industry, contributed to the dampened response to the IPO. Now, finding the best and the worst performing IPOs just got easier. BSE has come up with a new section on their website where you can quickly track the performance of IPOs of the last five years. View Full Image ... What we can Learn from the IPOs of 2023 #1 Understanding valuations is a must From IdeaForge to other overvalued IPO stories we saw this year, it just goes on to prove that be it renewable energy or some other hyped sector, its crucial to carefully check the underlying companys true value, understand the risks and do a thorough competitor analysis. Before investing, just go through a few sections in the red herring prospectus. It will help you analyse so much more about the business. The sections we are talking about are: About the company section, where you get to know about the business, industry structure, market opportunities and more. Financial information section, where you get the audited reports of the last five years. Object of the offer section, where you know where the accumulated money would be used. Quantitative and qualitative disclose of the risk, where you get to know what risks the company sees for their business. Legal and other information section, where the company mentions about all the unsettled lawsuits. Remember, companies facing critical legal challenges may pose a higher risk to investors. Doing all of this is very important because it will help you find diamonds among the duds. #2 Competition is real Investors should check competition in the industry before investing in an IPO. You see, competition is everywhere, be it for a well known company or a startup. Hence, winning projects can be tough for companies who do not have a competitive edge and this will affect profitability. Second, in highly competitive sectors such as travel and food aggregators where competitive pricing is a key factor, investors should assess a company's market share in its sector and assess competitive edge before considering an investment. As an investor, understanding the company's position relative to competitors is crucial in determining its ability to thrive in a market where pricing plays a significant role. #3 The performance of an IPO depends a lot on the overall market sentiment The success of an IPO is significantly influenced by the broader market sentiment. When the overall market is positive and investors are optimistic, the new IPOs tend to perform well as there is a greater appetite for investment. Lastly, think of IPOs as a long term investment and invest in it with the same mindset as you do for other stocks. Happy investing! Disclaimer: This article is for information purposes only. It is not a stock recommendation and should not be treated as such. This article is syndicated from Equitymaster.com According to the annual crime report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Delhi registered the highest rate of crime against women in the country in 2022. The national capital recorded 14,247 cases in 2022 with a rate of 144.4 (per lakh), which was way above the national average of 66.4. The crime against women in the national capital stood at 14,277 in 2021 and 10,093 in 2020, reported PTI. The NCRB data revealed that Uttar Pradesh registered 65,743 crime against women FIRs in 2022 followed by Maharashtra 45,331, Rajasthan 45,058, West Bengal 34,738 and Madhya Pradesh 32,765. These five states together contributed 50.2% (2,23,635 cases) of the total cases lodged in the country in 2022. Also Read | Cyclone Michaung news: Foxconn halts iPhone production near Chennai as heavy rains batter Tamil Nadu The NCRB data stated that 12 states and Union Territories recorded crime rates higher than the national average of 66.4. National capital Delhi topped the list with 144.4, followed by Haryana with an average crime rate of 118.7, Telangana 117, Rajasthan 115.1, Odisha 103, Andhra Pradesh 96.2, Andaman and Nicobar Islands 93.7, Kerala 82, Assam 81, Madhya Pradesh 78.8, Uttarakhand 77, Maharashtra 75.1, West Bengal 71.8 and UP 58.6. The NCRB data further stated that a total of 4,45,256 cases of crime against women were registered last year across the country, with almost 51 FIRs every hour. The figures were 4,28,278 in 2021 and 3,71,503 in 2020. The majority of crimes against women under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) were of cruelty by the husband or his relatives (31.4%) followed by kidnapping and abduction of women (19.2%), assault on women with intent to outrage her modesty (18.7%), and rape (7.1%), the NCRB data stated. The NCRB said the upward swing in police data (FIR) does not mean an increase in crime. It means more people are coming forward to register crimes. Also Read | Manipur news: Fresh violence leaves 13 dead in gunfight near Myanmar border 'Rise in crime' and 'increase in registration of crime by police' are clearly two different things, a fact which requires better understanding. Thus an oft-repeated expectation from certain quarters that an effective police administration will be able to keep the crime figures low is misplaced," the NCRB said Increase in crime numbers in a state police data may in fact be on account of certain citizen-centric police initiatives, like launching of e-FIR facility or women helpdesks," it said. "The increase or decrease in crime numbers, however, does call for a professional investigation of underlying factors pertaining to the local communities to suitably address the pertinent issues," it added. Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Cyclone Michaung latest updates: As cyclone 'Michaung' is expected to make landfall tonight in Southern Andhra Pradesh and the North coast of Tamil Nadu, several parts of Chennai continue to receive heavy rainfall with very strong winds. Teams of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) rescued around 15 people from Chennai's Tambaram area as it witnessed severe waterlogging. People were rescued from Peerkankaranai and Perungalathur neighbourhoods in Tambaram due to waterlogging and power outages in the area. Cyclone Michaung Live Updates Sharing latest updates on Cyclone Michaung, S Balachandran, Director, the India Meteorological Department (IMD), Chennai said, Cyclone 'Michaung' lies about 100 km from East-North East of Chennai. In the last 6 hours, it has moved at the speed of 10 km/hr and it's expected to move in the northwest direction, intensified to severe cyclonic storm is expected by 4 noon today. Further, it will move parallel to the coast of north Tamil Nadu and South Andhra Pradesh, expected to cross Nellore- Machilipatnam by tomorrow at 4 noon. Heavy rainfall and strong winds are likely to continue till this evening in Chennai, Chengalpattu, Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur districts." The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has warned several places in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry that heavy rain and thunderstorms would occur today i.e. on 4 December, as a result of Cyclone Michaung. As per IMD, heavy to very heavy rain is likely to occur in a few places with extremely heavy rain at one or two places over Chennai, Kancheepuram, Chengalpattu and Tiruvallur districts of Tamil Nadu. Moreover, the weather department has also predicted heavy to very heavy rain over the Ranipet, Vellore, Tiruvannamalai, and Villupuram districts while heavy rains have been predicted at one or two places over Cuddalore, Kallakurichi and Tirupattur area. Cyclone Michaung Updates: Cyclonic storm Michaung has turned into a severe Cyclonic storm, the India India Meteorological Department said on Monday. Heavy rainfall due to Cyclone Michaung caused severe waterlogging in several areas across Chennai on Monday. Several low-lying areas, including hospitals and many residential parts, witnessed inundation even as civic agency personnel were involved in clearing the stagnant water. Cyclone Michaung latest updates: Ten things to know 1) Five southern Odisha districts on alert Five southern Odisha districts - Malkangiri, Koraput, Rayagada, Gajapati, and Ganjam - were put on alert as the IMD issued a Yellow Warning (be updated) of 7 cm to 11 cm rainfall on Monday and the intensity of rain (orange warning) likely to increase in these areas on December 5. 2) Section 144 imposed Because of the upcoming cyclone 'Michaung', expected to hit the west-central Bay of Bengal off south Andhra Pradesh and adjoining north Tamil Nadu coasts, the Puducherry district administration imposed Section 144 of the IPC on the coastal areas close to the sea shore of Pudhucherry. To prevent any loss of life or property, the district administration restricted the movement of all persons on the coastal areas near the sea-shore has been prohibited from 7 p.m. on December 3 until 6 p.m. on December 5. 3)Educational institutions to be closed in AP's NTR district for two days The district collector announced holidays for all educational institutions in the NTR district on December 4 and 5. 4) Holiday in Tamil Nadu As the state braces for the cyclone, the Tamil Nadu government has declared a public holiday on Monday. The government urged private companies to encourage the 'work from home' option for their employees in Chennai, Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram, and Chengalpattu districts. 5) IMD's heavy rainfall warning in Tamil Nadu, Puducherry today During the cyclone period, parts of north coastal Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, coastal Andhra Pradesh, Rayalaseema, Telangana, and Odisha are likely to experience rainfall, though with varying intensity. 6) When will Cyclone Michaung make a landfall? Cyclone Michaung, brewing over the Bay of Bengal, is expected to make landfall between Nellore and Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh with winds that could pack speeds of up to 100 kmph on Tuesday forenoon. 7) Cyclone Michaung: IMD issues alert The IMD issued Yellow Warning (be updated) as heavy rainfall (7 to 11 cm) is likely at one or two places in Malkangiri, Koraput, Rayagada, Gajapati, and Ganjam on December 4. Similarly, it said that light to moderate rain and thundershowers may also occur at many places in Malkangiri, Koraput, Rayagada, Gajapti, Ganjam, Puri, at a few places in Kandhamal, Nabarangpur, Kalahandi, Nayagarh, Khurda, Jagatsinghpur, Cuttack and at one or two places in remaining parts of the state. For December 5, the IMD issued Orange warning (be prepared) and forecast heavy to very heavy rainfall (7 to 20 cm) may occur at one or two places in the five districts of Malkangiri, Koraput, Rayagada, Gajapati, and Ganjam. It also issued a Yellow Warning (be updated) and forecast heavy rainfall (7 to 11 cm) is also likely at one or two places in Nabarangpur, Kalahandi, Kandhamal, and Puri. 8) Cyclone Michaung: Trains cancelled The railways have cancelled a total of 118 trains. The East Coast Railway (ECoR) has cancelled 60 trains and set up a round-the-clock helpline for providing information and assistance to passengers. According to officials, ECoR has planned for early restoration of train traffic and tracks if affected by the cyclone. 9) PM Modi in constant touch with state CMs of Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Odisha, and Andhra Pradesh Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said he was in constant touch with the states' governments on the eastern coast bracing for Cyclone Michaung to coordinate relief and rescue efforts. 10) People living in low-lying areas have been asked to reach the cyclone shelters in advance The government said that the Greater Chennai Corporation commissioner and district collectors have been advised to house people living in vulnerable areas in cyclone shelters. People living in low-lying areas have been asked to reach the cyclone shelters in advance. The public has been cautioned against going near waterbodies and taking selfies or parking vehicles under trees. -With agency inputs Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Global media hailed the victory as 'an expansion of PM Modi's dominance' after BJP won three of the four states declared on Sunday, adding that the outcomes are 'vital' ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in 2019. The Washington Post praised the BJP's huge wins in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan, calling them 'crucial'. "The crucial poll has pitted India's opposition against the ruling party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of next year's vital national vote," the Washington Post stated in its report. Global media outlets asserted that PM Modi's victories in three states would give him a chance at a hat-trick of wins and a third straight term in office. Al Jazeera ran a report with the headline, "India's BJP wins three of four state polls months before the national election", terming the BJP's poll victories "historic and unprecedented". The UK-based news agency, Reuters, dubbed the poll victories as a 'big boost' for PM Modi ahead of the general elections next year, heading its story as, "In boost for Modi, BJP sweeps polls in three Indian states." "The election results indicate the voter mood ahead of the national elections in May in which Modi is eyeing a third consecutive term," it stated in its report. During the counting day for four Hindi-speaking states that voted in their assemblies last month, a saffron tsunami swept the Hindi heartland. The BJP's stunning mandates in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan stunned not only their rivals, but also some pollsters who predicted tight races. The election results across four states, especially the losses in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, came as a huge to the Congress's hopes for 2024 as it is now out of power across a vast swathe of the Hindi heartland. Rajasthan's vote count revealed a starkly different picture than what some pollsters had predicted, with 115 seats going to the BJP and 69 for the Congress. Chhattisgarh has 90 assembly constituencies, 54 of which were won by the BJP and 35 by the Congress. Elections for Mizoram will be held on Monday, where the incumbent party is the Mizo National Front, a regional ally of the BJP. A sixth of India's electorate voted in five state assembly elections last month, with more than 160 million people registered to vote. (With Inputs from PTI) Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Manipur witnessed fresh violence in a series of violent incidences that has gripped the state since May, 2023. According to media reports citing officials, 13 people were killed in a gunfight between two groups of militants in Manipur's Tengnoupal district. The incident took place at Leithu village on Monday afternoon, PTI reported. "A group of militants on their way to Myanmar were ambushed by another group of insurgents dominant in the area," an official in the hill district told PTI. Security forces reaching the spot found 13 bodies so far, he said, adding their identities were yet to be ascertained but they appeared not to be locals. The officer said that it appeared the dead are not from Leithu area and could have come from another place after which they engaged in a firefight with a separate group, Hindustan Times reported. Notably, Tengnoupal district shares a porous border with Myanmar. Manipur administration in Manipur has repeatedly mentioned the nuisance of anti-social elements in border areas with Myanmar. Mobile Internet Restored in Manipur Meanwhile, the Manipur government on Sunday restored mobile internet services across the state barring a few areas till 18 December, a notification said. "Considering improvement in law and order and inconveniences faced by people due to the mobile internet ban, the state government has decided to relax the suspension," the notification said. Mobile towers catering to services within a 2km radius along adjoining areas between districts such as Chandel and Kakching, Churachandpur and Bishnupur, Churachandpur and Kakching, Kangpokpi and Imphal West, Kangpokpi and Imphal East, Kangpokpi and Thoubal and Tengnoupal and Kakching will still face suspended operations, it said. Mobile internet had been suspended in the state since May 3 following the outbreak of violence in the state. Kuki Zo Community Demand Separate Administration Last week, in several areas of Manipur, members of the Kuki Zo community demonstrated on streets demanding a separate administration. They urged the Centre to hasten the process of establishing a separate administration in areas of the state dominated by the Kuki Zo community. The agitators submitted a memorandum to Union Home Minister Amit Shah through the deputy commissioner. Zo United accused the state government, including the police, of aligning with the Meiteis, and distributing government-issued firearms to members of the valley-based community for use against the tribals. More than 180 people have been killed and thousands rendered homeless in ongoing ethnic strife between Imphal Valley-based Meiteis and hills-based Kuki Zo community in Manipur since May 3 this year. Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Anand Mahindra, the chairperson of Mahindra and Mahindra Group, took to social media to express gratitude on Navy Day. In a post on X on Monday, he shared a video of the Indian Navy, remembering "one of the most energising memories from" his childhood. "One of the most energising memories from my childhood is a visit on board our first aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant. I remember a strong feeling of being safe & protected. Our Navy still makes me feel that way. On Navy Day, I bow low with gratitude," Anand Mahindra tweeted. The Indian Navy celebrates Navy Day on December 4 to commemorate "Operation Trident," the Navy's audacious attack on Karachi harbour during the 1971 War. The Indian Navy also shared the video capturing key moments of the Indian Nay, saying "On this historic day we rededicate ourselves to the service of our great Nation & continue to serve with pride honour & unwavering commitment to National Security. Jai Bharat! #SamNoVarunah." Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi Monday extended greetings, saying the commitment of navy personnel in safeguarding India's seas is a testament to their unwavering dedication to duty and love for the nation. He said he looks forward to joining the Navy Day programme at Sindhudurg in Maharashtra later on Monday. ALSO READ: Anand Mahindra on Vicky Kaushal-starrer 'Sam Bahadur', says pride of country multiplies On December 3, the Indian government informed that INS Kadmatt, on a long-range operational deployment to the North Pacific Ocean, had entered Japan's Yokosuka for an Operational Turnaround. The ship will be celebrating India's Navy Day in the presence of the Indian diaspora at Yokosuka on December 4. ALSO READ: Anand Mahindra's lookalike? Industrialist says 'we were separated during...' The visit of INS Kadmatt to Japan is aimed at further bolstering maritime cooperation between India and Japan. INS Kadmatt is an indigenously designed and built Anti-Submarine Warfare Corvette, equipped with a state-of-the-art AS weapon suite. TRIDENT More Information Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! CHENNAI : While the result of the state assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh has surprised many, it will calm the markets. Fears of fiscal profligacy or a rickety coalition government at the Centre in 2024 have eased. Mint explains: Why were the election results surprising? Not many expected the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to do well in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and pre-poll surveys showed a close fight in Rajasthan. But the party managed to fight off four-term anti-incumbency and retain power comfortably in Madhya Pradesh, and wrest power from the Indian National Congress in both Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. In other words, the BJP swept the Hindi heartland, leaving the Congress in shock. Telangana was the only consolation for the Congress. Strong anti-incumbency derailed the Bharat Rashtra Samithi government, but here, too, the BJP doubled its vote share. What do these results portend? The BJPs strong show in the Hindi heartland, just months before the next Lok Sabha election, means that Prime Minister Narendra Modis popularity is intact in the region which contributes a large chunk of seats to the Lok Sabha. This puts the BJP at a clear advantage and the opposition in potential disarray. The fear of a badly cobbled coalition government coming to power at the Centre next year has eased. Also, a BJP loss would have given a leg -up to welfare politics. The party would have resorted to fiscal profligacy to win back voters. That is unlikely to happen now. Are the markets ecstatic for these reasons? Yes. Stock markets do not like political instability. A strong show by the BJP has improved the chances of it coming to power at the Centre comfortably next year and the markets are happy with this development. Fiscal discipline is critical for the economy to grow rapidly. The BJP governments policy of blending welfare with development has got the nod. Is there a fear of welfare politics? For all its past reform credentials, the Congress has embraced welfare economics in a big way. It first tasted success with this strategy in Himachal Pradesh, promising the return of the Old Pension Scheme. In Karnataka and Telangana polls, it gave a slew of guarantees that included cash handouts. However, these guarantees failed to deliver in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The BJPs messaging of welfare blended with development resonated better with voters in the Hindi heartland. How will this impact the opposition? The Congresss success in Karnataka in May raised hopes of a resurgence, and 26 opposition parties came together to form the INDIA bloc. But the Congresss rout in the Hindi heartland has not only blunted its resurgence. but also weakened its position in the alliance. INDIA bloc leaders have attacked the Congress, saying it is guilty of an arrogant" attitude. The party had ignored the bloc and fought these assembly elections alone. An INDIA meeting on Wednesday is expected to be a stormy affair. New Delhi: The Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board (PNGRB) may recommend a specific allocation of natural gas used for cooking, said two people with knowledge of the plan. City gas distributors (CGD) supply both compressed natural gas (CNG) for transportation and piped natural gas (PNG) for cooking. The natural gas is sourced from legacy fieldsold fields which were operated by state-run ONGC and Oil India Ltd. However, there is no specification or mandate on how much gas should go to each of the two segments. Under the administered price mechanism (APM), the price of gas from legacy fields is capped, making it cheaper than gas from other fields. A person aware of the developments said several gas distributors prefer to supply most of this allocated cheaper gas for CNG where margins are higher than PNG. Currently, distributors get around 20 million standard cubic metres of natural gas every day, most of which goes for CNG, according to industry experts. The gas needs to be allocated to these two consumption sectors separately. The gas is given under the header of CGD, for both cooking and transport. The regulator may recommend that the cheaper gas from legacy fields should be used largely for PNG," said the person mentioned above. The move comes in the backdrop of slow progress in the penetration of PNG connections despite the governments push for expanding the PNG network. Currently, there are only around 10 million piped gas connections compared with over 290 million cylinder gas users. The government aims to take the number of piped bas connections to 125 million by 2030. The move is also aimed at fulfilling the target of increasing the share of gas in Indias energy mix to 15% by 2030 from the current 6%. So far, gas distributors have been authorized to supply in 300 geographical areas, covering about 88% of the countrys area, and 98% of its population. In October, the Union government launched the 12th round of bids for seven more geographical areas in five states in the Northeast and the union territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh. In a bid to boost natural gas adoption, the Union cabinet has approved new guidelines for gas pricing following recommendations made by the Kirit Parikh-led committee on natural gas pricing, paving the way for linking domestic natural gas prices in India to global crude prices. Following the change, the price of natural gas is calculated at 10% of the monthly average of the Indian crude basket, which is a weighted average of Dubai and Oman (sour) and Brent Crude (sweet) oil prices. Under the new regime, a floor price as well as a ceiling price was introduced for operators to source gas from the legacy fields of oil and gas companies. Effectively, that would shield the CGD operators from volatility in international prices. The upper and lower ceiling, respectively, are $4 per metric million British thermal unit (mmBtu) and $6.50 per mmBtu under the APM. The government has also been trying to push for expansion of the PNG network as there is a heavy import burden of LPG and PNG is usually cheaper than LPG for the end consumer. The union minister for petroleum and natural gas Hardeep Singh Puri had in March this year told parliament in a written reply to a question that in terms of calorific value of different petroleum products, current prices and rupees per million calories, PNG is generally cheaper per unit of energy consumed as compared to LPG. Depending upon local prices, conversion factor of the cooking stove, etc., PNG provides a positive competitive advantage over LPG," he said. Queries sent to PNGRB remained unanswered till press time. In international waters of southern Red Sea, three commercial vessels were attacked on December 3 informed US military, reported Reuters . Two Israeli vessels in the area were attacked by drone and missile as claimed by Yemen's Houthi group. Houthis control most of Yemen's Red Sea coast. They have in the past attacked with ballistic missiles and armed drones at Israel and vowed to target more Israeli vessels. As per US Central Command report an American destroyer named Carney responded to distress calls and provided assistance following missile and drone launches from Houthi-controlled territory. The Carney shot down three drones as they were suspected to be helping commercial vessels informed US military. However, it was not clear if the warship was a target as attacks were a threat to international commerce said US military. Two Israeli ships namely Unity Explorer and Number 9, were attacked by the navy as claimed by Yemen's Houthi movement. The navy attacked with armed drone and a naval missile. Israeli military spokesperson named Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari informed reporters in Tel Aviv, One ship was significantly damaged and it is in distress and apparently is in danger of sinking and another ship was lightly damaged," reported Reuters. He also claimed that the two ships had no connection to Israel. The two ships were targeted after they rejected warnings, without elaborating as informed by spokesperson for the group's military. The spokesperson further stated the attacks were in response to calls from Islamic nations to stand with the Palestinian people and the demands of the Yemeni people and in a broadcast statement The statement read, "We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran." It further added, "The United States will consider all appropriate responses in full coordination with its international allies and partners." A series of attacks in Middle Eastern waters have surfaced since war broke out between Israel and Hamas on October 7. In November, an Israeli-linked cargo ship was seized by the Houthis that are an allies of Iran. Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! At least 11 hikers were killed after a volcano erupted in western Indonesia. With a peak elevation of 2,891 metres (9,484 feet) on the island of Sumatra, Mount Marapi erupted on Sunday, shooting a 3,000-meter-tall ash tower into the sky. "There are 26 people who have not been evacuated, we have found 14 of them, three were found alive and 11 were found dead," said Abdul Malik, head of Padang Search and Rescue Agency told AFP, speaking a day after the eruption. Malik further added that there were a total of 75 hikers on the mountain from Saturday who rescue workers were trying to account for. Twelve were still missing and 49 had descended, some of whom had been taken to hospital, he said as quoted by AFP. Rescue teams were working through the night to help bring mountaineers down to safety," West Sumatra's natural resources conservation agency said as quoted by AFP. Authorities have raised the alert to the second-highest level and prohibited residents from going within 3 km (1.86 miles) of the crater. Video footage showed a huge cloud of volcanic ash spread widely across the sky and cars and roads covered with ash. A small eruption was taking place on Monday and the search was suspended, Jodi said. "It's too dangerous if we continue searching now," he added. There were 49 climbers evacuated from the area earlier Monday and many were being treated for burns, he said. Indonesia sits on the Pacific's so-called "Ring of Fire" and has 127 active volcanoes, according to the volcanology agency. (With inputs from Reuters and AFP) Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! "COP28 has mobilised over $57 billion so far," said a post by COP28 UAE on Monday. It added that governments, businesses, investors and philanthropists have delivered "an historical eight pledges and declarations in the first four days of COP28". Meanwhile, the Director-General of COP28 said, "We took early and decisive action to operationalize the Loss and Damage Fun...and have seen commitments of over $720m for the fund and funding arrangements." He added that there was $12.5 billion "replenishment of the Green Climate Fund the largest ever in history". Moreover, "countries and global donors have pledged over US$777 million to help defeat neglected tropical diseases and improve the lives of 1.6 billion people", COP28UAE said in another post. All about Day 5 at COP28 Day 5 at the crucial Conference of the Parties (COP) 28 summit in Dubai will soon conclude, but the controversy around the COP28 President hosting the summit remains a focus. Meanwhile, the sessions on Monday focused on "Finance, Trade, Gender Equality, and Accountability", with the slogan "Unite, Act and Deliver". As Day 5 unfolded, here's a look at all the controversy, deals and key announcements made during the events on Monday (December 4). The controversy On Monday, COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber defended his role in hosting this year's UN climate summit and insisted he understood and respected the science of climate change. He was responding to a December 3 report in the Guardian newspaper on comments he made last month on the phase-out of fossil fuels that have sparked criticism at COP28. The Guardian story had quoted Al Jaber saying during a November 21 online event that "there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5C". During Monday's news conference, Al Jaber complained to reporters that "one statement taken out of context with misrepresentation" had received "maximum coverage". He said, "I am quite surprised with the constant and repeated attempts to undermine the work of the COP28 presidency." He added, "We are here because we very much believe and respect the science. 43 per cent of global emissions must be reduced by 2030. Thats 22 gigatons. And we need to make that happen to keep 1.5C within reach," the COP28 President said. The controversy over the COP28 presidency has been brewing ever since the summit began. Oil is a fossil fuel that is one of the major sources impacting the global climate. Now, the country hosting the COP28 summit, the UAE, is one of the world's top 10 oil-producing nations. Moreover, it has appointed the chief executive of the state-owned oil company, Sultan al-Jaber, president of the COP28 talks. According to reports, COP28 Presidency and Saudi Arabia launched the Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Charter (OGDC), a global industry charter aimed at speeding up climate action across the oil and gas sectors. Officials were quoted by Emirates News Agency as saying that 50 oil and gas companies, representing more than 40 per cent of global oil production, signed the charter. "Signatories have committed to net-zero operations by 2050, ending routine flaring by 2030, and near-zero upstream methane emissions," Arab News reported. KEY ANNOUNCEMENTS SO FAR ON DAY 5: 1. During the Global Climate Action Through Fostering Sustainable Finance event at COP28, HE Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair, Chair of the UAE Banking Federation unveiled that the UAE Banking Federation has collectively pledged to mobilize AED 1 trillion, equivalent to nearly $270 billion, by 2030. 2. COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber three more declarations will be announced in the coming days on hydrogen, cooling, and gender. I am especially proud that we have delivered the first-ever declarations on health and food systems. These are two massive priorities for our COP28 Presidency action agenda," he said. 3. The UAE banking sector came together to announce a landmark commitment to collectively mobilize more than $270 billion in sustainable finance by 2030. 4. The UK announced the first ever climate-resilient debt clauses in Africa, with Senegal. As many 73 countries joined together to issue a call to action on the adoption of these clauses. "The United Kingdom (UK), France, the World Bank, the African Development Bank Group, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) just announced they will expand the use of climate resilient debt clauses in their lending, which pause debt when countries are hit by natural disasters," COP28 account on X posted on Monday. 5. France and Japan announced they will lead in supporting the African Development Banks breakthrough facility to leverage Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) for climate and development, channelling additional resources where they are needed most. SDRs are rainy-day foreign exchange reserves held at the International Monetary Fund, backed by dollars, euros, yen, sterling and yuan. 6. Renewable energy firm ReNew Energy Global Plc inked an initial pact with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for a funding of $5.3 billion. "The MoU was signed at COP28, Dubai by ReNews Founder, Chairman and CEO, Sumant Sinha and Suzanne Gaboury, Director General, Private Sector Operations Department, ADB," a company statement said. ALSO READ: India refuses to sign COP28 Declaration on Climate and Health. Here's why 7. The Arab Energy Fund, formerly known as APICORP, plans to invest up to $1 billion over the next five years in decarbonisation technologies, the Middle East and North Africa-focused multilateral financial institution were quoted by Reuters as saying on Monday. The planned investment and new name are part of a five-year strategy to 2028 to support the regional energy transition towards net-zero goals. The announcement was made during the COP28 climate summit in Dubai. ALSO READ: COP28: PM Modi meets Israel President, emphasises India's support to two-state solution to Palestine issue 8. A consortium led by the Rockefeller Foundation launched a pilot initiative to use carbon credits to retire a coal power plant in the Philippines before the end of its natural life, it said on Monday during the COP28 climate talks in Dubai. The Coal to Clean Credit Initiative (CCCI) said its project was a "first of its kind", in that it plans to make use of carbon credits to finance the early closure. In the latest plan to be announced on the sidelines of the summit, the CCCI said it aimed to use carbon credits to decommission the South Luzon Thermal Energy Corporation (SLTEC) plant by as early as 2030, a decade ahead of its current retirement date. 9. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) said on Monday it will allot $10 billion in climate finance for the Philippines between 2024 and 2029. The funds will help the Philippines implement its commitments to climate action under the Paris Agreement, the ADB said in a statement during the COP28 climate summit in Dubai. 10. Canada, Brazil and Egypt will announce new methane regulations at the COP28 climate summit later on Monday, a US official told Reuters. As of Monday, 155 countries have signed up as members of the Global Methane Pledge, a voluntary partnership committing countries to collectively reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent from 2020 levels by 2030. KEY SPEAKERS > Speaking in the Finance Day", UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, Developed countries must show how they will double adaptation finance to $40 billion a year by 2025 as promised, and clarify how they deliver on the $100 billion, as promised." > "Climate change is not gender neutral. Women make up the majority of the worlds poor and despite and maybe because of this women and girls are at the forefront of climate action....This is why I am delighted and honored to announce the launch of COP28 gender-responsive trust transition and climate action partnership, said Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, UN Climate Change High-Level > IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said, We are at the point when speed, quality, and depth of action are absolutely essential if we are to fulfil our duties to the next generations." > "We should not wait a decade. Reducing emissions is crucial for climate action," Mark Carney, the UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, said on Monday. > "It is clear that the COP28 action agenda advocating Unite, Act, and Deliver, will be a critical guiding principle in scaling up sustainable finance, managing related financial risks, and meeting our internationally agreed climate targets," HE Khaled Mohamed Balama, Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates Governor, said. He reaffirmed the UAE's commitment to accelerating sustainable finance. Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Russian President Vladimir Putin will travel to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia , according to people familiar with the plans, a rare trip abroad for the leader since his invasion of Ukraine. Putin plans to visit Abu Dhabi, UAE, this week, according to one person, who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the topic. He also intends to travel to Saudi Arabia, according to another person. Russian outlet Life.ru reported earlier Monday that Putin would make a working visit to the two countries, citing Yuri Ushakov, a Kremlin adviser on foreign affairs. Ushakov also said Putin would meet Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Putins spokesman Dmitry Peskov didnt reply to messages seeking comment. The excursion highlights the importance of the Gulf states to Moscow, given its dependence on energy-export revenues. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Russia are all members of OPEC , the alliance between the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and other major oil producers, and talks between the leaders will be key for Putin. In an interview with Bloomberg on Monday, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman emphasized the level of trust and cooperation between Riyadh and Moscow on oil policy. The relationship between the two countries forms the backbone of the OPEC alliance, which last week agreed to extend and deepen its production cuts. The visit also comes as the UAE hosts the COP28 summit in Dubai, though Putin will arrive after most world leaders have left. The UAE has also become a home for many Russian companies fleeing the West amid sanctions. International Isolation Putin has rarely left Russia since he ordered troops into Ukraine in February 2022, triggering a raft of international sanctions, though he has visited China and former Soviet neighbors. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against him in March for alleged war crimes, further complicating travel outside his country. Putin feels more confident, this density of external visits has not been seen for a long time," said Elena Suponina, a Middle East analyst based in Moscow. For Putin, both in Saudi Arabia and in the UAE, the goals of the visit are the same: matters related to OPEC, the Middle East conflict and the Russian chairmanship of BRICS." also Read ALLIANCE More Information Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! The new government of the Maldives has pushed for Indian troops to leave the island nation. Indian defence personnel, who are involved in the maintenance of Indian military platforms in the country, have been a subject of some sensitivity in Maldivian politics. Mint breaks down why. What has the Maldives requested? The country's newly elected President Mohamed Muizzu said India and the Maldives have reached an agreement to secure the withdrawal of Indian military personnel in the country. As a candidate, Muizzu had called for the removal of any foreign military personnel and followed up this request soon after taking office during a meeting with union minister Kiren Rijiju. The president further shared that after a series of constructive meetings and dialogues with the Indian government, an agreement has been reached to withdraw Indian military personnel, which is currently in progress at a technical level," Muizzus office said on Sunday. Indian government sources said the matter came up during the Maldivian presidents meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of COP28 in Dubai. However, they also said discussions were ongoing to see if India-supplied defence platforms could remain in service. What are Indian troops doing there? According to Muizzu's office, there are 77 Indian defence personnel in the country. They help operate helicopters and Dornier aircraft, which have been provided to improve emergency services and medical evacuations in the Maldives. These troops have conducted more than 500 medical evacuations over the past five years. According to experts, these platforms are also expected to improve the island nation's maritime surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. Why is the Maldivian government requesting their departure? The presence of foreign military personnel on Maldivian soil has been portrayed by some groups as a threat to the country's sovereignty . This was particularly true during the India Out" campaign. As scholar David Brewster points out, this has led to disquiet and suspicion about the Indian militarys presence in the country. Muizzu has also framed his decision as a move to protect the countrys sovereignty, and called on India to respect the decision. What does it mean for India-Maldives ties? Muizzus decision to ask for the withdrawal of Indian troops is unlikely to go over well in New Delhi, especially since his predecessor Ibrahim Solih was a firm supporter of a closer relationship with India. The country is also a vital part of Indias broader strategy in the Indian Ocean, given its strategic location. The Indian government's decision to send a lower-ranked cabinet minister to President Muizus inauguration was seen by some as a sign of New Delhis displeasure. However, others suggest that Muizzus government simply wants a more balanced foreign policy that reduces the country's dependence on India. Bilateral ties may not be as warm as they were under Solih, but are likely to remain stable. With the Assembly poll results 2023 in three states - Madhya Pradesh , Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh - being a disappointment for the Congress, some rumblings have begun among the constituents of the INDIA opposition bloc ahead of their meeting on December 6, with many leaders alleging that the grand old party ignored others, but was unable to win elections on its own. Some regional parties, including the TMC, AAP, and SP had earlier expressed eagerness for early seat-sharing talks, but the Congress delayed discussions until after assembly polls. Sources close to PTI cited, the Congress deliberately postponed negotiations to increase its bargaining position, anticipating a favorable outcome in the elections. During the CWC meeting in Hyderabad, some leaders advocated for avoiding early seat-sharing talks with regional parties, suggesting that the Congress should not go in for early seat-sharing talks with regional parties and that it should hold discussions from a position of strength after the party fares well in assembly elections in five states," the sources said. The attitude became more apparent during talks between the SP and Congress on seat sharing for the Madhya Pradesh polls had failed. Will the power-sharing dynamic change within the INDIA bloc after Congress's disastrous loss in the Assembly Election 2023? As the results pushed the Congress further back, leaving it in power in only three states on its own -- Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Telangana -- some opposition parties are questioning whether the grand old party is the weakest link within the alliance. JDU, Nitish Kumar's party that initially proposed the idea of an alliance party, took a jibe at the Congress saying it was clear that the party couldn't win the elections alone. JDU leader KC Tyagi said, "It is very necessary now for everyone to strengthen the INDIA bloc. If the alliance meeting was called a couple of months earlier, it would have been good," he said. A senior leader from the Trinamool Congress told Hindustan Times, The Congress should leave it to regional parties to take the lead against the BJP. While parties such as the Trinamool Congress, DMK, AAP, JD(U) and RJD had been repeatedly successful in thwarting the BJPs electoral advances, the Congress has failed to do so." National Conference leader Omar Abdullah said INDIA alliance would not be able to win the 2024 general elections "if the situation is like this in the future". Further questioning about Congress's attitude towards SP during seat-sharing talks in Madhya Pradesh, he said, What harm could have happened if they had given 5-7 seats to Akhilesh Yadav. What storm could have blown? What have they won now? The results are in front of everyone now." Meanwhile, an AAP leader pointed out that it is now the largest opposition party in north India, and not Congress. "After today's results, Aam Aadmi Party emerges as the largest opposition party in north India with 2 state governments -- Punjab and Delhi," Jasmine Shah said in a post on X. What next from INDIA alliance? Leaders of opposition parties have already urged Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to move forward in bringing everyone together to strengthen the INDIA bloc to defeat the BJP while putting aside differences. NCP supremo Sharad Pawar said, "I do not think it will have any impact on the INDIA bloc. We will speak to those who are aware of the ground reality. We will be able to comment on it only after the meeting." All the parties will meet at Kharge's residence in Delhi on December 6 to chalk out a strategy for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Talks on seat-sharing between regional outfits would also gain momentum now," sources said. They told PTI the opposition leaders would now plan joint rallies that were put on hold due to the assembly elections. One such rally planned in the first week of October in Bhopal was canceled at the last moment. (With inputs from agencies and Hindustan Times) ALLIANCE More Information Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Sundays referendum in Venezuela asked the electorate if it agrees that two-thirds of Guyana actually belongs to Venezuela. The dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro sought a yes" vote and thought it had a lay-up. Guyana was a British colony in 1899 when a Paris tribunal ratified its dominion over the Essequibo region. Caracas has long disputed the ruling. From early childhood Venezuelans marinate in the doctrine that the land was stolen from them. So approval on all five referendum questionsincluding one that proposed the creation of a new Venezuelan statewas the heavy favorite. Late Sunday morning, the regime claimed robust turnout; by afternoon, the opposition posted photos of empty polling stations and reported high abstention. As we went to press, official results werent in. But it almost doesnt matter. The failing Mr. Maduro seems intent on picking a fight with a neighbor. The only questions are how far he will go and what it will cost him. The referendum was a call to Venezuelans to rally round the flag, which is the oldest trick in the tyrants manual for what to do when things are going badly. And they are. The economy has collapsed since Mr. Maduro took office in 2013. Venezuelan living standards, once the envy of South America, are in the tank. Some 7.5 million people, or a quarter of the population, have emigrated, tearing families apart. Pressure is increasing on the dictatorship to lift the ban on the 2024 presidential candidacy of popular opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. The other reason Mr. Maduro held the referendum is that the disputed Guyanese land corresponds to what is believed to be enormous oil reserves off its coast. Venezuelas incompetence and corruption mean it cant even extract the oil it has within its own borders. But Mr. Maduro sees the nation next door getting rich and reflexively needs to object. Envy, after all, is the mother of communism. In 2015 Exxon Mobil made the first crude discovery in the Stabroek Block in Guyanese waters. The gross recoverable resource," according to the company, is now estimated to be more than eight billion oil equivalent barrels" from more than a dozen successful wells. In all there are an estimated 11 billion oil equivalent barrels in Guyanese waters, and at least five other international oil companies are working in the area. In September Guyana received bids for exploration and exploitation of eight new blocks. But unlike the existing wells, where Exxon, its partners, and some competitors are already bringing up crude, the oil resources in the recently auctioned blocks are off the coast of the Essequibo region. Mr. Maduro wants them. In 1966 Venezuela and Guyana agreed to disagree about the territory in the Geneva Agreement. In March 2018 the United Nations used the authority provided by that accord to assign the case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which is expected to rule on the matter early next year. Sundays referendum suggests that Venezuela, which more than once has asserted that the court has no jurisdiction to rule on the dispute, doesnt like its odds and is prepared to take matters into its own hands. Last week a token number of Venezuelan military were rumored to have moved close to the border. Brazil put its military on high alert in the region. U.S. Army special forces leadership met with its Guyanese counterparts last week, but U.S. Southern Command declined to comment on Friday. The State Department didnt respond to requests for comment. The invasion of the Falkland Islands might have bought unpopular Argentine dictator Leopoldo Galtieri some support in 1982if British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher hadnt been so determined to wave the Union Jack. Perhaps Mr. Maduro has that Galtieri adventure in mind since there is no Thatcher equivalent these days. Deterrence, particularly from the U.S., seems to be lacking. Military aggression against a smaller sovereign nation wont go over well, even among the usual Maduro allies. Brazils President Luiz Inacio Lula" da Silva is a supporter of both the Cuban and Venezuelan military dictatorships. But hes also an advocate of the peaceful resolution of cross-border disputes using international courts. Nor can Mr. Maduro count on Havana to back him. Cuba has long leaned on the English-speaking Caribbean for support at the U.N. and in other international forums. Their first allegiance is to Guyana. Even China, which is making oil investments in Guyanese waters, doesnt want an invasion. Finally, one of the most important tests of jurisdiction is the self-determination of the local population. Its unlikely that the Guyanese living in the Essequibo want to become Venezuelans. Yet despite widespread disapproval of what the world seems to have already judged as a provocation against a peaceful neighbor, it would be unwise to underestimate the desperation building up in Caracas. If Mr. Maduro finds he has painted himself into a corner, desperate measures wont be out of the question. Cuba, Brazil and China are unlikely to stand on principle. Write to OGrady@wsj.com. KYIVThe Ukrainian sniper had lain still for hours in near freezing temperatures when the command came to take the shot at a Russian soldier almost 2 miles away. You can," his spotter said, and Vyacheslav Kovalskiy pulled his trigger. The bullet took around nine seconds to reach its target, who doubled up and fell, according to a video of the shot reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Kovalskiy and Ukraine say the shot set a new sniping distance record, breaking the previously acknowledged mark by more than 850 feet. Combat shots such as this arent verified by a third-party adjudicator, the shot has offered Ukraine a morale boost when the countrys forces are struggling to make headway at the front line. A Ukrainian sniper, using a Ukrainian-made weapon and bullet, had broken the record. Sniping has played a prominent role in the war with Russia, where static front lines in a flat landscape suit the discipline, even as drones and mines change the way the marksmen operate. It was also a shot heard around a world of snipers, a group of highly skilled shooters who have long pushed the boundaries of just how far a bullet can travel with accuracy. Some are skeptical that Kovalskiys shot was a record. To hit targets at ever-longer distances, snipers lean heavily on math, calculating a host of technical factors, from the airs humidity to wind speed, temperature and the curvature of the earth. They also need a good rifle and a lot of luck. On Nov. 18, Kovalskiy was already packing his rifle by the time the bullet reached its destination and a member of his team shouted that it was a hit. The shot was filmed and on reviewing the footage later, Kovalskiy and other snipers concluded it had been deadly. I was thinking that Russians would now know that is what Ukrainians are capable of," Kovalskiy said. Let them sit at home and be afraid," he added. Several snipers and ballistics experts contacted by the Journal said that while the shot is possible with the equipment described, it would be hard to execute given the uncontrollable variables, not least the weather, that would have to be taken into account at such distances. For conventional sniping, there are so many variables that are hard to quantify, so the reality is anything over about 1,300 meters (about 4,265 feet) can be more luck than skill," said Steve Walsh, a former U.S. Marines sniper instructor. Kovalskiys shot hit around 12,470 feet, around a third longer than the Golden Gate Bridge. That distance would break a record of 11,600 feet set in 2017 by a member of the Canadian Special Forces in Iraq. The 58-year-old former businessmans journey to martial mythology started just before day break on Nov. 18, when he and his spotter, a partner who calculates distance, wind speed and other variables, set up positions across the river from a Russian military base in the Kherson region of east Ukraine. The two men, who are part of a military counterintelligence division of the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, observed groups of Russian soldiers cutting wood. They considered these mens ranks too low to shoot. At around noon, a group of five soldiers appeared and Kovalskiy noticed one instructing. He had his officer. The spotter set to work. He used a laser to measure the distance to the soldiers. Using specialist software and meteorological data he concluded that there was a strong wind that would move the bullet around 200 feet from its trajectory. He calculated humidity and temperature, which affects how fast the bullet travels. Even the spin and curvature of the earth has to be factored in for long-distance shots. By the time the bullet gets to its set distance, the target has already shifted with the earths rotation. Using all these variables, Kovalskiy tested a shot around 1,000 feet to the side of the target. It was a miss, the spotter told him. They had got the wind speed wrong. He quickly reset, reloaded and aimed. You have to (shoot) immediately because the wind changes constantly," Kovalskiy said. In video of the shot, the Russian officer can be seen gesticulating to men who had gathered around him. The spotter gave his usual command that he should fire. You can," he said. Kovalskiy pulled his trigger. The video shows a gap from shot to impact of around 9 seconds, a period long enough that a target can have moved. U.S. ballistics expert Brad Millard timed the shot in footage and said that it was the correct time that this sort of bullet would take to hit 12,470 feet. A sniper will aim their barrel above a target because gravity forces the bullet down. Kovalskiys shot was like a mini artillery shell, traveling over 330 feet above the level of the target before descending toward the unaware officer. In the footage, the officer doubles up and falls and his men flee. The video ends. The shot has been widely covered by Ukrainian news websites. It was also noted with pride by Ukrainian soldiers on the front line. In the Kreminna Forest in east Ukraine, a former sniper turned artilleryman said hearing the news was a punch the air" moment. Everyone was talking about it," he said. Ukraine needs a boost. A much-heralded counteroffensive has been stymied by stubborn Russian defense. The country has lost tens of thousands of soldiers and Russia continues to bomb civilian sites. Countries in war often turn to combat legends to build morale, and countries in the former Soviet Union have a history of elevating the sniper to hero status. At the start of this war, Ukrainians traded stories of the Ghost of Kyiv," a Ukrainian jet-fighter pilot credited with shooting down several Russian planes. The Ukrainian military later said that rather than an individual pilot, the Ghost of Kyiv" was meant as a composite symbolizing the combined heroism of its pilots. Millard, the U.S. expert who designs software to test gun ballistics, says he doubts how the Ukrainian sniper team know for sure that the officer was killed. The shot hit its target in the chest or stomach area, Kovalskiy said. Having seen footage many times, he is certain that the soldier died because of the way he doubled up and dropped immediately. The bullet they used was also so large, and would have traveled at such a speed, that it would be impossible to survive such a hit, he said. There is no chance he survived," Kovalskiy said. The lack of confirmation that the shot was fatal is likely to lead to continued skepticism. When British sniper Craig Harrison broke the then-record in Afghanistan in 2009, killing two, the British military confirmed sightings of the corpses. Kovalskiy says that online critics are incorrectly basing many of their calculations on the type of bullet used by the record-setting Canadian sniper. A round is made of the actual projectile that hits a target and the casing that contains the explosive material that takes it there. Kovalskiys round was custom-made by a local gunsmith. It has a similar projectile to the Canadian round but a larger case that could pack more propellant, making it faster. At a location in Kyiv, Kovalskiy and his spotter laid out their gun and bullets for inspection. The long, thin gun is a specialist sniper rifle called the Lord of the Horizon, of which Kovalskiys is around one of 10. The bullets are 16 cm long. The barrel was made by the U.S. company Bartlein Barrels and the scope comes from Japan. But the rest is Ukrainian, adding to local pride. Kovalskiy and his spotter wonder why there is so much skepticism about a shot of this distance when targets, albeit stationary, have been achieved at these lengths several times in competitions such as the King of Two Miles in the U.S. The two men are no ordinary snipers. Kovalskiy has been winning long-distance shooting competitions in Europe and North America for decades and first met his spotter at such competitions in Ukraine. But this time, Kovalskiy hit a man, not an inanimate target. Unlike most soldiers, who may never see an enemys face let alone know if they have killed them, snipers head out seeking to kill people whom they can clearly see and generally have little doubt if they have taken a life. Harrison, the former British sniper, said that the record is a heavy crown to wear. Though he has since written a book about his experiences, the sniper says the actual record brought him misery for years. He was named by the British military without his permission, which led to threats against his life and that of his family, he said. Harrison said sniping contributed to severe Post-traumatic stress disorder that he has suffered after fighting in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. I will carry that last instant of their life in my mind forever. I know it will never leave me," he wrote in his book. Kovalskiy and his spotter say they have no regrets about killing Russians. Despite his age, the Ukrainian signed up as a sniper on the first day of Russias full-scale invasion. It doesnt worry me a gram," Kovalskiy said. Ievgeniia Sivorka contributed to this article. Write to Alistair MacDonald at Alistair.Macdonald@wsj.com WASHINGTONWhen top Biden administration officials gathered last month at the Justice Department to announce a $4.3 billion legal resolution with Binance, one powerful regulator was absent. Attorney General Merrick Garland was there. So was Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. But Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler wasnt, even though he has his own legal beef with Binance. The SEC sued the worlds largest cryptocurrency exchange in June and has been the regulatory scourge of the crypto world. The SEC wasnt involved in the monthslong settlement talks that led Binance and its founder, Changpeng Zhao, to plead guilty and settle Treasurys civil charges, according to people familiar with the matter. The SECs absence reflects the high cost of settling with a civil law enforcer that cant put people in prison but can put American crypto companies out of business. Even before the SEC sued Zhao, Binance and its U.S. affiliate, the parties couldnt come close to agreeing on settlement terms, people familiar with the matter said. Settling on the SECs terms at the time may have required Binance to close most of its U.S. crypto-trading business and accept a claim that its affiliates engaged in manipulative trading, the people said. We remain confident in our case against the SEC and will continue to defend our platform vigorously," a Binance spokesman said Friday. Before suing Binance, regulators wanted the company to accept an injunction that would stop Binance.US from offering trading in many of the crypto assets on its platform, people familiar with the matter said. That would sort of be the end of Binance.US," said Lee Reiners, a lecturing fellow in economics at Duke University. Another hurdle: The SEC alleged that Binance violated investor-protection laws by selling BNB, its own crypto token, in 2017. Settling that claim would make it nearly impossible to trade BNB in the U.S. and could hurt its value around the world. The SECs litigation has taken its own toll. At a court hearing last week, Binance.US attorneys said the venue has withered under the stress and cost of the SECs lawsuit. The average monthly value of Binance.US assets is down almost 90%, and Binance.US has lost almost half of its monthly users since the SEC filed its case, Binance.US attorney Matthew Laroche said. Prosecutors and the Treasury Department had more leverage to get Binance to settle, the people said. The Justice Department said it would indict Binance and Zhao if they didnt plead guilty. Binance feared an indictment might spur customers to withdraw their assets all at once, destroying the business. The Treasury Department threatened to name Binance as a primary money-laundering concern, which would have effectively cut it off from the U.S. financial system and made it impossible for customers to exchange their crypto assets for dollars. Binance and its affiliates probably felt more confident about fighting the SEC in court, Reiners said. The SECs claims all turn on its ability to show that cryptocurrencies are securities. If a court decides they arent, the rest of the SECs case collapses. They have more of a chance prevailing in court against the SEC than other agencies," Reiners said. They also probably dont want to settle because the industry is waging a holy battle against the SEC, and they want to do their part." Binances guilty plea and Zhaos agreement to step down as its chief executive leave the company with a path to continue doing business, even in the U.S. Its guilty plea calls for Binance to implement effective anti-money-laundering and sanctions-compliance programs and requires a court-appointed monitor who will oversee its progress. As long as Binance can satisfy the monitor without losing too many lucrative customers, it might do well enough. Its not a resolution that is guaranteed to kill," said Stuart Alderoty, chief legal officer of Ripple, a digital-asset company that partly prevailed this year in litigation with the securities regulator. As part of the deal it reached last month, Binance did settle with a different market regulatorthe Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The CFTC sued Binance earlier this year alleging that it offered risky crypto derivatives to American users without the proper licensing and protections. The CFTC has played a junior role to the SEC in regulating crypto. But its chairman, Rostin Behnam, joined Garland and Yellen on stage Nov. 21 when they announced the $4.3 billion deal with Binance. The CFTC will get about $950 million of that. The moment gave Behnam a turn in the spotlight without the SECs Gensler, whose agency has filed hundreds of crypto enforcement actions and has also sued major crypto exchanges Coinbase and Kraken. The resolution of the [CFTCs lawsuit] against Binance and Zhaowithin just eight months of its filingsolidifies the CFTCs reputation as the proven leader in the civil enforcement space when it comes to digital assets," Behnam said. Write to Dave Michaels at dave.michaels@wsj.com Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! Nvidia was never going to have the artificial intelligence market all to itself. The past year has certainly made it seem that way, though. Nvidias sales have more than doubledand its market value more than tripledas major tech companies snapped up the companys chips to capitalize on the explosive interest in generative AI sparked by the launch of the ChatGPT online chatbot a year ago. Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, two of Nvidias largest competitors, have seen their data-center sales shrink lately as the tech giants operating those networks have redirected their spending toward Nvidias specialized chip platforms. That is a situation that both chip makers need to remedy, and quickly. Intel and AMD still draw a lot of their business from the mature and slow-growing market of personal computers. That places a greater onus on their data-center segments to drive overall revenue growth. AMD has been highly successful in this pivot over the past few years as technological leaps and a smart partnership with chip-making powerhouse Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing allowed it to take share from Intel in the market for central processing chips, or CPUs, used in data centers. AMDs data-center sales jumped 64% last year while Intels slid by 15%. But even AMD has felt the pinch of wallet share moving to Nvidia; the chipmakers data-center revenue for the past two quarters is down 6% from a year earlier. Hence, much is riding on a new class of AI accelerator chips called the MI300 family that the company is launching this quarter. AMD is holding an event Wednesday to spotlight those and other AI-related products just a few miles from Nvidias own headquarters. The company also has taken the unusual step of projecting revenue for a specific product line; Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su told investors during the companys third-quarter call last month that the company expects $2 billion in revenue from the new AI chips next year. Such a boost from a brand-new product would be a major score for AMD, which was projected by Wall Street to do about $10 billion in data-center sales for 2024 before that forecast. But it also wouldnt make much of a dent for Nvidia, which is projected to do more than $76 billion in data-center revenue for the same period and nearly $90 billion the following year. Its literally a rounding error," said Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon, comparing the two companies projected sales. Intel really cant afford to miss the AI party either. The chip-making pioneer is in the midst of an ambitious and expensive turnaround plan to regain its manufacturing edge while also improving both its PC and data-center businesses. Both have been under pressure because of industry shifts and competition. Intels revenue has fallen for the past two years in a row, adjusting for the sale of its memory business in 2021, and is expected to decline again this year. That would be the first time since at least 1990 that Intel has seen revenue fall three years in a row, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence. Intel is holding an event in New York City on Dec. 14 to showcase some of its latest AI products. Those will include chips designed to enable generative AI to run directly on PCs, a feature expected to figure prominently in new computers and smartphones launching next year. Wall Street seems hopeful; analysts expect Intels PC and data-center segments to show double-digit revenue gains in 2024, according to FactSet estimates. That would still leave Intel lagging Nvidia, which is expected to surpass the historically much larger Intel in total revenue this year and close its fiscal year ending in January of 2025 with revenue of $91 billion15% more than Intels all-time annual record. But Nvidias dominance still leaves room for competitors. Tech giants snapping up AI processors are loath to rely on a single supplier for such key technology. Chris Caso of Wolfe Research also notes that some tasks such as AI inferencing offer a more level playing field" for challengers. Training is where Nvidia has built such a big competitive moat," he said. Rival chip makers will still have their work cut out for them crossing it. Write to Dan Gallagher at dan.gallagher@wsj.com Milestone Alert! Livemint tops charts as the fastest growing news website in the world Click here to know more. Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed it's all here, just a click away! Login Now! STREET FOOD Instead of eating at expensive restaurants, you can save a lot of money by gorging on the delectable street food in Malaysia. Credit : PEXELS You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close U.S. base in NE Syria comes under renewed attack: war monitor Xinhua) 13:47, December 04, 2023 DAMASCUS, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. base in the Kharab al-Jir town in Syria's northeastern province of al-Hasakah came under attack by pro-Iran fighters on Sunday as part of the revenge campaign for the Israeli attack in Gaza, a war monitor reported. Rocket shells fired by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a Iran-backed Iraq-based militia, hit the base with no information about casualties, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Meanwhile, the pro-government Sham FM radio cited a statement by the militia, confirming that a "big wave of rocket shells hit their targets directly" in the Kharab al-Jir base. The Britain-based observatory has said that it had documented 47 attacks on U.S. bases in Syria since October 19. The Kharab al-Jir base is used as a station for gathering vehicles entering and exiting Syrian territories due to its proximity to the Syrian-Iraqi border. The U.S. forces have set up bases in several areas in northeastern Syria, especially near oil and gas fields. The Syrian government repeatedly charged that the U.S. is aiming to steal and smuggle oil and gas production abroad using convoys of tanks and trucks, in coordination with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) The unsightly barge occupying the dry dock in Clondra for what seems like forever was the subject of a discussion at a recent Longford County Council meeting. Waterways Ireland says they are trying to come up with a plan for the vessel after arrangements to donate it to a community group fell through. Cllr John Brown raised the issue about the Waterways Ireland barge at the November meeting of the authority. Cllr Brown asked: There is a barge in the dry dock on a continuous basis for what seems like forever. It's very unsightly, what is being done about it? Brian Treacy, Waterways Ireland's North Shannon Senior Engineer, explained why there has been no progress on the vessel: That is a Waterways Ireland barge. It's one of the traditional barges on the canal. Clondra dry dock is not functional, there needs to be work done on it. It's part of a network of dry docks and we are looking at improving it. We have a number of functioning dry docks; two are in Shannon Harbour, one in Athy, and one in Mullingar. In the western end of the Royal Canal there is one, Clondra, and at present it is not functional. Our objective is to get it functional, he told the local authority members. The Waterways Ireland Engineer explained the hold up on work on the barge: There was a plan to give it over to a local group, who were to develop it as a passenger boat on the Shannon, from Lanesnboro, but that plan had problem because of the age of the vessel. It will take an enormous amount of work to repair it, so we are looking for another plan for it. Cllr Colm Murray asked when the work on the dry dock would commence. In his reply Mr Treacy, said it could be undertaken as part of the State body's asset management programme, but suggested that there were other ways it could be approached: We couldn't put an exact date on it, but we hope to look at it as part of the works for Richmond Harbour and Tarmonbarry to be taken in 2024. A Longford student was among more than 120 undergraduate students recognised for their academic achievement in this years Leaving Certificate and A-level exams, at the Dublin City University Scholars Awards in The Helix, Glasnevin Campus on Wednesday, November 29. The students were recognised for achieving more than 600 points in the Leaving Certificate exams, or two A grades and one B in the A-levels. Former Mean Scoil Mhuire, Longford, student, Megan Glennon, BA in Global Business (Spain), was among those honoured and also present was Mean Scoil Mhuire teacher Laura McEnroe. Recipients hail from 23 counties on the island of Ireland and represent the universitys five faculties: the DCU Business School, the Institute of Education, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Faculty of Science & Health and the Faculty of Engineering and Computing. Seven students were also awarded DCU scholarships. Matthew Larney (Scoil Chaitriona, Glas Naion) received the Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge scholarship. Six Northern Irish students were also awarded the McAleese Scholarship. The scholarship includes a cash award and allows successful applicants to gain one of up to five reserved places across a number of DCU undergraduate courses. Roisin Dowdall (St. Pauls High School, Newry), Sarah Fitzpatrick (Our Lady's Grammar School, Newry), Oran Harris (St. Pauls High School, Newry), David Kehoe (Abbey CBS Grammar School, Newry), Aoife Loughrey (Dominican College, Portstewart) and Meabh O'Hare (Aquinas Diocesan Grammar, Belfast) were this years recipients. DCU President Prof Daire Keogh said, This group of scholars, from right across the island of Ireland, represents the extraordinary talent of our young people. They are a credit to their former schools and should be very proud of their achievements. We look forward to the future success of these talented students and we commit to supporting their personal and academic development throughout their time at the University. Irish NGO Trocaire has said that donations made by communities in Co.Longford and around the country are saving many lives in Gaza. The organisation made the announcement as it launched its Christmas Appeal this morning (1st Dec) which is focusing on Children in Conflict and highlighting the fact that one in six young people in the world live in conflict zones. Speaking at the launch, Trocaire CEO Caoimhe de Barra said that the horrendous situation in Gaza has already resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent women, men and children and the unacceptable death toll continues to rise. As well as those who have tragically lost their lives, many more people have been seriously injured. The situation is posing huge challenges for Trocaires partners but they are making a difference thanks to the support of the public in Co. Longford. Trocaires partner organisation, Medical Aid for Palestinians, is working against the odds in Gaza to ensure that those injured, many of them children, receive urgent medical care to give them the best chance of survival. The recent temporary truce allowed for limited humanitarian aid to reach those desperately in need of food, water, and medical assistance, and the release of hostages and those arbitrarily detained allowed them to be reunited with their families. However, a pause is not enough. A permanent ceasefire needs to be brokered to bring an end to the hostilities that have seen thousands of Palestinian and Israeli civilian lives lost, the majority of them women and children. Many of Trocaires local partner organisations in the Gaza Strip have been unable to operate in recent weeks, and they have suffered their own horrendous ordeals through displacement and loss of friends and families. When they are able to do so, they must be allowed to return to delivering lifesaving medical care, psychosocial support and legal assistance to the people of Gaza, Caoimhe de Barra said. Before the escalation of violence last month, the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip faced acute humanitarian needs, with more than 80% of the population dependent on some form of humanitarian assistance. Today, 1.7 million of the 2.2 million residents of the Gaza Strip are internally displaced, in an area that is only around one third the size of County Longford. Trocaire are urging people to donate to the cause if they are in a position to do so. Donations can be made on their website https://www.trocaire.org/ Crime By Chris Boyle Published: December 04 2023 Oscar Argueta was drunk and driving at approximately 93 miles an hour when he T-boned another vehicle, killing passenger. Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly announced that a Hicksville man pleaded guilty today to aggravated vehicular homicide and related charges for a June 2022 high-speed crash in Hempstead that killed a 48-year-old man and seriously injured his wife. Oscar Argueta, 37, pleaded guilty before Judge Robert McDonald to charges of Aggravated Vehicular Homicide (a B felony); Manslaughter in the Second Degree (a C felony); Assault in the Second Degree (a D violent felony) and Driving While Intoxicated (an unclassified misdemeanor.) The defendant is due back for sentencing on February 7, 2024, and is expected to be sentenced to five to 12 years in prison. The NCDA recommended a sentence of seven to 21 years in prison. Oscar Argueta was drunk and driving 93-miles-an-hour in an SUV when he plowed into the Popoola familys Mercedes, killing husband David and seriously injuring his wife, DA Donnelly. The force of the crash was so great that the victims vehicle was launched into a nearby utility pole. Theres no excuse for drunk driving when there are cab services and ride-sharing apps available with one swipe on a cellphone. DA Donnelly said that on June 26, 2022, at approximately 1:40 a.m., the defendant was traveling northwest on Greenwich Street in Hempstead in a Dodge Durango while intoxicated and driving at a high rate of speed when he T-boned a Mercedes Benz G300 crossing the intersection on Curtis Avenue. The victims vehicle struck a curb causing the car to flip into a utility pole. Forty-eight-year-old David Popoola, who was the passenger, and his wife, were trapped inside of the vehicle after the collision. Popoola was pronounced deceased at the scene. His wife was taken to Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital with serious physical injuries and underwent emergency surgery on her wrist. The defendant remained at the scene and was arrested by members of the Hempstead Police Department. Local News By Chris Boyle Published: December 04 2023 The upgrade added a large bold star as the focal point of the monument, a decorative concrete walkway to help visitors traverse the site safely, benches, and refreshed shrubbery. Nassau County Legislator Delia DeRiggi-Whitton (D Glen Cove) joined her partners in government and the community on Veterans Day to celebrate the completion of upgrades to the Citys veterans memorial outside First Presbyterian Church. The upgrade, which was the vision of local Scout Genalie Prezali and funded with a $75,000 Nassau County Community Revitalization Project (CRP) grant secured by Legislator DeRiggi-Whittons office, added a large bold star as the focal point of the monument, a decorative concrete walkway to help visitors traverse the site safely, benches, and refreshed shrubbery. Community, Charity & Cause By Chris Boyle Published: December 04 2023 The overwhelming success of last years coat drive was a heartwarming demonstration of the tremendous generosity that permeates the Syosset and Jericho communities, Legislator Drucker said. Nassau County Legislator Arnold W. Drucker (D - Plainview) is once again joining forces with the Syosset and Jericho Public Libraries to support an annual coat drive spearheaded by the Long Island Coalition for the Homeless. Donors are invited to drop off new and gently used winter coats and winter accessories (gloves, hats, scarves, etc.) at the Syosset Public Library, 225 S. Oyster Bay Road, Syosset, N.Y. 11791 and the Jericho Public Library, 1 Merry Lane, Jericho N.Y. 11753 during normal business hours from Monday, Nov. 20 to Friday, Dec. 22. The overwhelming success of last years coat drive was a heartwarming demonstration of the tremendous generosity that permeates the Syosset and Jericho communities, Legislator Drucker said. When you donate a winter jacket, you are giving more than the gift of warmth - you are wrapping the person who receives that coat in a spirit of compassion and hope for a better future. I am proud to once again be partnering with the Long Island Coalition for the Homeless on such a worthwhile endeavor. Anyone interested in supporting the coat drive can contact Legislator Druckers office at 516-571-6216 or adrucker@nassaucountyny.gov for details. Local News By Chris Boyle Published: December 04 2023 The grants will support projects that prevent 2.7 million gallons of stormwater and 101,000 pounds of nitrogen pollution from flowing into Long Island Sound waters. Today, federal and state environmental agencies and officials from New England and New York, including the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), announced 39 grants totaling $12 million to organizations and local governments to improve the health of Long Island Sound. The grants are matched by $8 million from the grantees themselves, resulting in $20 million in total conservation impact for projects in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. In all, these Long Island Sound Futures Fund (Futures Fund) 2023 grants will support projects that improve water quality by preventing 2.7 million gallons of stormwater and 101,000 pounds of nitrogen pollution from flowing into Long Island Sound waters. The projects will also remove 120 tons of marine debris from the sound and support planning for restoration of 880 acres of coastal habitat and 102 miles of river corridor vital to fish and wildlife. And, the projects will reach 30,000 people through environmental education programs that increase awareness of how to improve the health and vitality of the Sound. Funding for the grant program comes from the EPA as part of the Long Island Sound Study (LISS), with additional support from FWS, NFWF and The Zoetis Foundation. Everyone that lives, works, and plays on the Sound deserves clean water and equitable access. By Investing in America, these grants, along with the huge investment in the Sound from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, put us on the right path, said EPA New England Regional Administrator David W. Cash. Because of these investments, EPA is making good on its promises to uplift communities, make them more resilient to climate change, and improve the health of the Sound as a whole. EPAs continued investments in locally based programs in and around Long Island Sound will tackle water quality improvements, reduce nitrogen pollution and restore coastal habitat, said Regional Administrator Lisa F. Garcia of EPA Region 2. EPA is proud to support these innovative and impactful projects that will improve the health and resilience of this vital estuary for generations to come and ensure that all communities have a voice and a role in the protection and restoration of the Sound. The LISS initiated the Futures Fund in 2005 through EPAs Long Island Sound Office and NFWF. The grant program has a strong history of making environmental improvements by supporting people and communities who value the sound and take a direct role in its future. Since its inception, the Futures Fund has invested $56 million in 640 projects. The program has generated an additional $65 million in grantee matching funds towards these projects for a total conservation impact of $121 million. The projects have opened 121 river miles for fish passage, restored 842 acres of fish and wildlife habitat, treated 208 million gallons of stormwater pollution, and engaged 5 million people in protection and restoration of the sound. This years grants provide support for grantees and their partners to implement projects that benefit community residents, farmers, fish, and wildlife, said Jeff Trandahl, executive director and CEO of NFWF. The Long Island Sounds watershed covers more than 16,000 square miles in six states and the funding today represents a commitment to foster the progress made over many decades towards a healthier, cleaner and more resilient watershed that will benefit wildlife and people for generations to come. The projects funded today conserve and restore vital habitat for threatened and endangered wildlife like piping plovers and roseate terns, as well as include working directly with communities to create a future landscape more resilient to climate change, said Wendi Weber, Northeast Regional Director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Removing dams and replacing culverts clears the way for migratory fish while reducing the risk of flooding. Living shorelines support fish and shellfish while buffering destructive storm surge. These grants support a brighter future for the people and wildlife of Long Island Sound. Since 2005, the State of Connecticut has been privileged to benefit from the groundbreaking and critical work of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation through its Long Island Sound Futures Fund. Projects supported by the Futures Fund lead to real world advancement and improvements to the Long Island Sound, our most cherished natural resource, said Emma Cimino, Connecticut Deputy Commissioner of Energy and Environmental Protection. Today Connecticut joins in celebrating the award of over $7.5 million in 23 grants to 22 recipients in Connecticut, which leverage almost $4 million in additional local funding. These important and forward-thinking projects range from reducing nitrogen pollution and removing barriers to fish passage to improving the resilience of our coastal communities and providing pathways to conservation careers to young people from environmental justice communities. We are grateful to our federal partners for this impactful funding in Connecticut and those awarded in New York. New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Basil Seggos said, The Long Island Sound is an irreplaceable natural resource to New Yorkers and neighbors alike. Working hand-in-hand with stakeholders and key partners like the Long Island Sound Futures Fund, DEC is proud to see the extensive investments and efforts underway to restore and protect the Sound for future generations by improving water quality, conserving critical habitats, responsibly increasing recreational access, and empowering the public to safeguard this cherished natural resource. DEC congratulates and thanks grant awardees for their sustained dedication to the conservation of this vital ecosystem. A complete list of the 2023 Long Island Sound Futures Fund grants recipients is available here. See a list of quotes from elected officials and partners about todays grant announcement here. To learn more, please visit the NFWF Long Island Sound Futures Fund website. BACKGROUND Long Island Sound is an estuary that provides economic and recreational benefits to millions of people while also providing habitat for more than 1,200 invertebrates, 170 species of fish and dozens of species of migratory birds. The grant projects contribute to a healthier Long Island Sound for everyone, from nearby area residents to those at the furthest reaches of the sound. All nine million people who live, work, and play in the watershed impacting the sound can benefit from and help build on the progress that has already been made. About the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Chartered by Congress in 1984, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) protects and restores the nations fish, wildlife, plants and habitats. Working with federal, corporate, foundation and individual partners, NFWF has funded more than 6,000 organizations and generated a total conservation impact of $8.1 billion. NFWF is an equal opportunity provider. Learn more at nfwf.org. About the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Grants Every year, EPA awards more than $4 billion in funding for grants and other assistance agreements. From small non-profit organizations to large state governments, EPA works to help many visionary organizations achieve their environmental goals. With countless success stories over the years, EPA grants remain a chief tool to protect human health and the environment. Follow EPA Region 1 (New England) on X and visit our Facebook page. For more information about EPA Region 1, visit the website. About the Long Island Sound Study The Long Island Sound Study, developed under the EPAs National Estuary Program, is a cooperative effort between the EPA and the states of Connecticut and New York to protect and restore the Sound and its ecosystem. To learn more about the Long Island Sound Study, visit the website. Suffolk County Legislator-elect Catherine Stark was arrested on Sunday in Riverhead for allegedly driving while under the influence of drugs, according to the Riverhead Police Department. The Republican - who defeated Democrat Catherine Kent in the November election - was reportedly pulled over at approximately 2:30 p.m. as she was entering her own driveway after an individual had made a 911 call regarding her driving. According to court documents, Stark, 60, was acting disoriented and displayed droopy eyelids, drowsiness, slurred speech and extreme dry mouth; police say that she admitted during the encounter that I took one to two Oxycodones. I have back pain. Steven Losquadro, an attorney representing Starks, released a statement where he purported that a previously-undisclosed cancer diagnosis was the root cause of the incident. Catherine Stark courageously has been battling cancer, a condition that she has chosen until now to keep private. This incident occurred when she unfortunately went to a store hours after taking her medication. There was no alcohol or illegal substances involved, and a test volunteered by Ms. Stark showed this," the statement said. "A blood test, also voluntarily given by Ms. Stark, will conclusively prove this. All medication taken by Ms. Stark to assist in her fight against this disease has been prescribed by her oncologist. She looks forward to a quick resolution of this incident, including relevant circumstances regarding her treatment, before the Court in a responsible and respectful manner. An upfront, written agreement likely will soon be required in Chicago residential real estate transactions to specifically state that when commissions are disbursed at closing, the buyers agent will be compensated by the buyer. 4-Dec-23 Exclusive buyer brokers, an honorable real estate profession, often have performed an excellent service protecting purchaser rights and interests, while sometimes struggling to collect their well-earned commissions. Much of their battle is against greedy double agents who are eager to collect two-fold commissions from representing both buyers and sellers in a deal, essentially cutting out the buyers broker. To protect buyers and their brokers, in the near future, an upfront, written agreement likely will be required in Chicago residential real estate transactions. The document specifically states that when commissions are disbursed at closing, the buyers agent will be compensated by the buyer. We all need to make sure theres more transparency on where an agents commission comes from, Laura Ellis (left), president of residential sales at Baird & Warner, told Crains in November. It comes from the buyer. Typically, out of the proceeds of a home sale, sellers give their agent an amount for commissions often, but not always, it is 5-6 percent of the sale price. Traditionally, or conventionally, the sellers agent generally pockets half of the commission and shares the other half with the agent representing the buyer, although the splitting of commissions varies greatly depending on company policies. However, it is the buyer, through their purchase money, who actually funds the commissions for both agents. But buyers dont always understand the process. It has been argued in the courts for decades, most recently in a $1.78 billion federal antitrust verdict in Kansas City, and another case filed in October in Illinois, on the key issue of the conventional split of real estate commissions. Finally, after decades of misunderstanding, it is clear that buyer brokers do more than just getting keys to the properties that a buyer wants to see. The buyer agent also counsels the buyer on the overall home buying process, including determining whether the asking price is fair, giving helpful advice on the search for financing, and often recommending professional trades and an attorney for the closing. FTC study concluded home buyers were misled Historically, nearly all residential real estate agents were bound by law and statute to represent the best interests of the sellers. However, a 1983 study conducted by the Federal Trade Commission reported that seven out of ten purchasers thought they were being exclusively represented in their real estate transactions, when in fact, they were not. This study blew the lid off something known as sub-agency, wherein both real estate agents in a transaction represented the seller, and the buyer had no representation at all, noted Sara Benson (right), president of Benson Stanley Realty. Benson was the first Chicago Realtor to exclusively represent purchasers. Consequently, the real estate industry was completely revolutionized nationwide in the 1990s as laws were changed state by state in favor of consumer representation. A new breed of broker, known as the buyers broker, evolved, noted Benson. The development was a huge step forward for consumers. Ralph Nader and the Consumer Federation of America, who had delivered blistering attacks on the real estate industry, championed the cause as did major corporations, including a major telephone carrier. A 1993 survey conducted by Sprint (now T-Mobile), suggested that buyer brokers consistently delivered lower home prices for their clients. In 500 corporate relocations over the period of one year, buyer brokers secured homes at 91 percent of the asking price, compared with the 96.5 percent secured by the traditional brokers. Thats a full 5.5 percent spread, or a savings of $13,750 on a $250,000 home. However, representing both buyers and sellers in the same brokerage firm presented a direct conflict of interest. Dubbed dual agency, the two services couldnt be offered in the same company without extreme liability to the brokerage firm. In most lawsuits brought against real estate agents and their firms, the agents and brokers are accused of having violated their fiduciary duties, Benson said. These are the duties of uncompromising care, confidentiality, accountability, loyalty, obedience, and full disclosure. In a valiant attempt to preserve their commissions, big brokerages lobbied for new forms of practicing their craft. Unfortunately for the consumer, what emerged in many states were new laws that served to dilute a real estate brokers accountability and reduce the level of services provided to consumers. Use extreme caution when any agent mentions the words assigned agent, facilitator, contract broker, transactional agent, mediator, designated agent, or limited agent, warned Benson in Escaping Condo Jail, a 600-page real estate textbook she co-authored with this writer. These are generally terms used to confuse the public and circumvent the full disclosure of dual agency. Buyers waive their rights when they consent to dual agency. What is dual agency? Dual agency can carry a different meaning in different states. It can refer to the practice of a single agent representing both buyer and seller in the same transaction, and it can also refer to the practice of two agents from the same office who separately represent a buyer and seller in the same real estate transaction. That form of representation is referred to as designated agency in states that have implemented rules governing the practice, Benson noted. Consumer groups frown on dual agency, calling it, at best, nonsensical, and at worst, legalized fraud. Dual agency, and its many forms of watered down services, is primarily supported by large, multi-office firms that depend on in-house sales for their survival. The brokerage firm earns double commissions at no additional cost or expense, Benson explained. Dual agency benefits the real estate agent and the brokerage firm at a high cost to the consumer because dual agency, by law, reduces the amount of services that a real estate agent may fully provide to either the buyer or seller, she said. Even though dual agents attempt to treat opposing sides of a transaction fairly and honestly, they cannot serve equally two masters. By operating as a dual agent, real estate brokers owe fiduciary duties to neither buyer nor seller. Advice for home buyers When choosing a buyers broker, make certain the broker agrees to represent the buyer exclusively and will never ask permission to become a double agent. There is a high probability that no two buyer broker agreements are alike, Benson said, Many real estate agents are poorly trained in exclusively representing buyers. Buyers need to read the fine print. Its also a good idea to interview at least three experienced buyer brokers before making a commitment, Benson advised. Many tenured residential exclusive-buyer brokers have been using buyer broker agreements for the past three or four decades, she said. Who really represents you in the home buying deal? More definition from Sara Benson. What is a buyers broker? A broker with whom a buyer contracts to represent him or her in a real estate purchase. What is a sellers broker? A broker with whom the seller contracts to represent him or her in the sale of their real estate. What is a dual agent? A broker that represents both the buyer and the seller in the same transaction but cannot fully represent either party. It is illegal not to disclose the dual-agency relationship. There is an inherent conflict of interest because the seller wants the highest price and the buyer wants the lowest price. Dual agency benefits the real estate agent at a high cost to the consumer. What is a fiduciary relationship? A relationship of trust and fidelity. Real estate brokers owe a duty of undivided loyalty to their clients. The real estate broker must exercise utmost good faith, care, confidentiality, and full and fair disclosure at all times. Dual agents cannot act as full fiduciaries. (Alliance News) - The Barclay family has repaid the nearly GBP1.2 billion that it owed to Lloyds Banking Group PLC, opening up its chance to transfer control of the Telegraph newspaper to an Abu Dhabi-backed fund. Lloyds confirmed that it had received the money on Monday, after seizing control of Telegraph Media Group in June over the unpaid debt. It then tried to sell the newspaper group, which also owns the Spectator. Lloyds said the debt of Penultimate Investments Holding Ltd, the holding company, had been repaid. "We can confirm the repayment of the PIHL facilities has now completed," it said. "We are always keen to work constructively with customers who get into difficulty with their repayments to reach an amicable solution. "We'd like to thank all parties for their role in reaching this point." The Barclays had last month reached a deal with RedBird IMI to get help to pay back the debts. RedBird IMI would then take over control of the newspaper group. RedBird IMI is led by the former boss of CNN, Jeff Zucker. It is part owned by US firm RedBird Capital. But it is the other joint owner, International Media Investments of Abu Dhabi, which has worried the government. Last week the UK Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer, asked watchdog Ofcom to launch a probe into whether the sale to RedBird IMI would impact the accurate presentation of news and freedom of expression in the Telegraph titles. Frazer said "there may be public interest considerations" with the change of ownership which "warrant further investigation". The regulator has until January 26 next year to report back to the minister. RedBird IMI said that it would "co-operate fully with the government and regulator". source: PA Copyright 2023 Alliance News Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Before the modernisation work on the link is completed, commuters will still be able to benefit from "significant improvements" to the rail network Before the modernisation work on the link is completed, commuters will still be able to benefit from "significant improvements" to the rail network Photo credit: Shutterstock Before the modernisation work on the link is completed, commuters will still be able to benefit from "significant improvements" to the rail network Photo credit: Shutterstock Belgiums rail operator has secured 1 billion in funding for several infrastructure projects, including the service between Luxembourg and Brussels that has long been under refurbishment to speed up the line. Begun in 2007, the project to modernise the Brussels-Luxembourg rail link has been postponed many times and will only be completed in 2029 at the earliest. The upgraded track will link the Luxembourg and Belgian capitals in two hours, compared with the current journey time of around three hours. The project is particularly complex. To enable trains to reach a speed of up to 160km/h (compared with 130km/h at present), several curves on the route, which crosses the steep valleys of the Belgian Ardennes, have to be smoothed out. This requires special equipment and plenty of resources, which is one of the reasons the project has been subject to successive postponements. Loan from the Federal Debt Agency In order to complete the work on Axis 3 Brussels-Luxembourg, and other major national projects, Belgian rail network operator Infrabel has been seeking funding including from the European Investment Bank (EIB). Belgian newspaper L'Echo has now revealed that Infrabel has finally succeeded in obtaining funding, not from the EIB, but from the Federal Debt Agency, via a 1 billion loan, reportedly at a more favourable rate than the EIB. Also read: Brussels train upgrade may be delayed, warns ex-Belgian PM The Federal Debt Agency deal consists of new and additional investments on top of the 16.4 billion promised by the state to the Belgian infrastructure manager for the period 2023-2032. This additional funding will be used not only to modernise the Brussels-Luxembourg line, but also to complete the Walloon regional express network, in order to facilitate and strengthen rail traffic between Brussels and the major cities of Wallonia. Part of this sum will also be used to improve station accessibility. In concrete terms, the loan will be carried out in two tranches. Today, Infrabels board of directors decided that a first tranche of 800 million will be activated from 2025, Infrabel stated. Also read: Outgoing minister renews Brussels train pledge Before the modernisation work on the Brussels-Luxembourg link is completed, commuters will still be able to benefit from significant improvements to the rail network, as promised in early October by the mobility ministers of Belgium and Luxembourg. From the end of 2024, CFL trains will be able to run as far as Libramont and will no longer be restricted to terminating at Arlon. Car park capacity near stations will also be increased and rolling stock modernised. At their meeting in early October, the ministers also discussed the introduction of a fast, three-times-a-day service between the Belgian and Luxembourg capitals starting in December 2026. This article was originally published by Virgule. It has been translated and edited by Duncan Roberts Download Image: Web The works of independent animation filmmaker Nelson Caliguia will be featured in the Lycoming College Art Gallery in downtown Williamsport beginning Friday, Dec. 8, with a gallery talk at 5:30 p.m. The exhibition, which will run through Feb. 17, is free and open to the public. As an animation artist, it is my dream to create an animation project that us Filipinos could proudly claim as our own, said Caliguia. As an animation filmmaker, whenever I start conceptualizing a new animation project, I see it as another chance to explore local themes and imagery. Why do I prioritize local subject matter? For starters, there are already countless animated films that explore Western and East-Asian stories and motifs. On the other hand, original animated works from Southeast-Asia are scarce and usually obscure. By portraying local culture in animation, I feel that I am contributing something unique and different to the art-form. Moreover, I believe that it is more natural for me to tackle Filipino themes since these are things that I grew-up on and am most familiar with. I believe that there is such a thing as uniquely Filipino animation... an animation that is undeniably us. " Nelson continues, I believe that there is such a thing as uniquely Filipino animation... an animation that is undeniably us. F. Sionil Jose has said that Great art always has a nationality. I agree with this statement. Whatever it is that our collective identity might constitute of in the future, it is my hope that Filipino animators would reflect local themes whenever creating their own works. Nelson has been honored with awards, citations, grants, and other recognition in the animation field. His work, Inday Wanda, was adapted into a live-action series by TV5 and Unitel. He earned a master of fine arts degree from Rochester Institute of Technology through the Fulbright program. The Lycoming College Art Gallery, located in downtown Williamsport at 25 W. Fourth St., contributes to the citys arts culture and allows the College to become more involved with the surrounding community. Lycoming art students have the opportunity to interact with visiting artists and learn first-hand the inner workings of an art gallery. The gallery is open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 4-8 p.m. For more information, please visit the gallery online at: https://www.lycoming.edu/art/gallery/22-23.aspx. On 6 August 2022, Jamaicans celebrated 60 years of formal national independence from British rule. The parasitic Jamaican ruling class attempted to use the pomp, ceremony and spirit of national fervour to distract from worsening economic and social crises. But the fact is that the tasks of Jamaicas independence struggle have not been completed. The death of Queen Elizabeth II and the accession of King Charles III in Britain has put the question of republicanism squarely on the table in the British Caribbean, including Jamaica. In the eyes of the majority of ordinary Jamaicans, now is the time to cut ties with these imperialist has-beens. Jamaicas real history is a litany of slavery, rebellion, and class struggle. From the first European landings in the 16th century, through the English invasion of the island in the 1670s, up until independence, Jamaica was crushed under colonial rule. Sugar cane plantations were worked by huge numbers of slaves toiling in unbearable conditions, and produced massive profits for the English colonialists. In the words of Trinidadian Marxist historian, CLR James: For three centuries the sugar economy and the slave trade dominated the West Indies and the world market. Jamaicas history is filled with heroic uprisings, waged by black slaves and peasants against their slave masters. From Tackys Rebellion (1760-61); to the great slave revolt of 1831 following on from revolts in Barbados in 1816 and Demerara in 1823; to the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. National independence was not graciously bestowed by the British ruling class upon the Jamaican masses, but hard-fought for and ultimately won by the working class and peasantry, fearlessly resisting their imperialist oppressors. Jamaicas revolutionary traditions must be rediscovered by a new generation of trade unionists, conscious class fighters, and youth looking for a way out from the horrors of capitalism. The Great Depression & 1938 general strike After the abolition of slavery, the sugar trade and colonial oppression still endured in Jaimaica. The Great Depression of 1929 was a turning point, as it led to a slump in the price of luxury goods, including sugar, which had a huge impact on Jamaica. High unemployment and economic stagnation caused widespread discontent. Despite the banning of pickets, many strikes broke out throughout the 1930s mainly among dockers and transport workers / Image: libcom In fact, the radicalising mood of the masses throughout 1929 and 1930 led the British Armed Forces stationed on the island to disband a regiment of native Jamaicans and replace it with British troops, to avoid fraternisation during a possible uprising. Jamaica was ruled under the Crown Colony system a colony administered by the British monarchy who appointed a Governor. As such, political parties and parliamentary elections did not exist for ordinary Jamaicans, since the requirements to run for the administration were designed to make only upper-class Jamaicans eligible. The anger in society, therefore, expressed itself in a radicalisation on the industrial front. Although the formation of unions were legal in Jamaica, peaceful pickets of workplaces were illegal. In spite of this, many strikes broke out throughout the 1930s, mainly among dockers and transport workers. Some even came to violent clashes between workers and the state forces. As Trinidadian Marxist George Padmore describes in 1931: One of the clashes with the police took place at Rio Cabre, near Spanish Town. The Government is constructing a bridge there [...], the men, realising how badly they were being exploited, formed a strike committee and downed tools. They demanded eight hours labour at 3/6 per day instead of 3/- [3 shillings and sixpence (42p a day or 2.10 a week) instead of 3 shillings (36p)]. The employers (Government contractors) refused and the men began to picket the bridge. The Government ordered armed police to the scene, and attempted to break the strike through intimidation. The labourers refused to return to work under the old conditions. Strike-breakers were brought in, and the strikers took active measures to see that the blacklegs did not work. Then the police sided with the strike-breakers, and a general pitched battle took place. The police used their rifles and bayonets, while the strikers kept up the offensive with bottles and stones. Only after reinforcement was rushed to the scene were the strikers outnumbered and dispersed by the superior arms of the police. Beginning in earnest with the dock workers organised in the newly formed Jamaica Workers and Transport Union (JWTU), the strike wave culminated in a general strike in 1938, which, as George Padmore wrote: covered Kingston. City cleaners and wharf labourers ceased work. For days the garbage remained uncollected. Factories were closed, shops and offices were forced to shut; tram, bus and rail services ceased. Even the Fire Brigade threatened to strike. This was a tremendous demonstration of the power of a working class that had only lately arisen, out of a population that less than a century prior had been largely enslaved. In a demonstration of class solidarity, CLR James writes: On May 23rd 1938, American sailors in the harbour of Kingston, Jamaica, refused to blackleg on the black dock-workers and collected subscriptions for the strikers. Alexander Bustamante A prominent participant in the strike was an anti-colonial agitator organised in the Jamaican Workers Union (JWU), Alexander Bustamante. Bustamantes agitation led to him being imprisoned, but, such was his popularity with the masses, the government was forced to release him. Winning the respect of the masses, Bustamante was then thrust to the head of the general strike. Strike agitator Alexander Bustamente was a right-wing trade union leader from the outset / Image: Robert Knudsen To be sure, Bustamente was not a socialist, but a right-wing trade union leader from the outset. CLR James accurately described him as an unprincipled demagogue. Throughout his life he would repeatedly claim that he stood for no particular economic or social system over another. His actions spoke for themselves and demonstrated his ultimate loyalty to maintaining the status quo of capitalist exploitation. Nevertheless, he commanded considerable authority over sections of the organised working class for his fiery opposition to British colonialism. After the strikes, as a concession to achieve peace, significant efforts were made by the British colonial government to encourage land parcelisation among the peasantry. At the same time, in every sector of industry, the increasing weakness of British imperialism meant it was being usurped by US capitalism. The PNP and JLP The economic concessions from the British government could not contain the urgency felt by many Jamaicans for more political rights, such as organising political parties. It must be said that, without the development of the trade unions and the increasing confidence of the workers, the formation of the political parties would not have occurred. Norman Manley founded the Peoples National Party, based on the reformist ideas of Fabianism / Image: Jamaica Information Service For example, the Trade Unions Council (1938-52) was founded at the same time as the Peoples National Party, as well as the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU). The PNP, founded by Norman Manley, was based on Fabianism, a reformist tradition originating in Britain. This peculiarity can be partially explained by the fact that Manley had been educated as a lawyer in England at Oxford University. Fabianism appealed to Manley, as a petit-bourgeois intellectual. Nevertheless, the PNPs programme included nationalisation of sugar manufacturers such as British-owned Tate and Lyle, as well as abolishing the British monarchy as head of state, with Jamaica instead becoming a republic. In the eyes of the ruling class, who were always keen to stem the rising radical mood of the masses, this programme posed a major threat. Although Bustamante and Norman Manley, who were also cousins, had worked in the labour movement together during the late 1930s, Manley found collaborating with Bustamante impossible. A clash of personalities Bustamante the relaxed, charismatic rogue, in contrast to the formal and legalistic Manley concealed the fact that their differences were fundamentally political; one was a defender of the status quo, while the other advocated reform. In fact, Bustamante eventually split from the PNP in 1943 to form the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), tied to his union, the BITU. The PNP and JLP at that time clearly represented the left-wing and right-wing tendencies in the labour movement, respectively. Following the labour unrest of the 1930s, in 1938 the British government ordered the West India Royal Commission to investigate the situation in the British Caribbean and propose solutions to a growing crisis. The findings were included in the Moyne Report, which described the widespread squalor and misery of the masses throughout the Caribbean. After years of delay, in 1944 the British government issued the recommendations of the report including universal suffrage and a new expanded 32-member House of Representatives. That years general election brought Bustamantes JLP to power, winning 22 seats. Manleys PNP won only 5, with the remainder won by small parties. Bustamantes victory was partly because of the personal authority he held over the masses but also because he was able to mobilise and organise his supporters through the BITU, something the PNP lacked. In this period, Bustamante earned the moniker the uncrowned king of Jamaica due to his considerable control over organised labour and unofficial leadership of the government. In 1946, CLR James wrote: The Peoples National Party controls a small association of unionists, but the mass power is in Bustamentes handsThe masses of the people are not hostile to Manley and the PNP. They are, however, fanatically loyal to Bustamente and often express regret at the lack of unity. The PNP struggles to win the Jamaican masses to its program. However, the 1949 general election was much closer. The PNP received more votes than the JLP, but it was the JLP that actually secured more seats. At this point, a political stalemate existed neither party was capable of winning a decisive victory against the other. Manley, in a rightward shift under pressure from the capitalists who wanted to remove the revolutionary elements from the PNP, purged radicals from the party throughout the 1950s. The first wave in 1952 included Trevor Munroe, and in 1954 four prominent party members, including self-described Marxist, Richard Hart, were expelled for their communist sympathies. In an attempt to break Bustamantes stranglehold over the trade union movement, Manley founded the National Union of Workers in 1952 as an industrial wing of the PNP. British imperialism and the West Indies Federation Following the Second World War, the grip of British imperialism over the West Indies was the weakest it had ever been. As was the case in many colonial countries across the British empire, demands for Jamaican independence intensified. The West Indies Federation was not based on working class internationalism, and so narrow nationalist interests came to the fore / Image: NuclearVacuum By the 1950s, all of the progressive forces in Jamaica backed independence in one form or another. Under Manley, Jamaica joined the West Indies Federation in 1958. The intention behind this federation was to combine 10 British-controlled Caribbean nations into one political and economic union. However, this union was not based on working-class internationalism, and the nationalist interests of the respective leaders came to the fore. In almost every nation involved there were splits on the question of what the scope of the federation should be, what relationship it should take with British imperialism, and how members of the federation would avoid becoming dominated by the economically stronger islands. Eventually, Bustamante opposed the federation and argued that it would harm the national economy of Jamaica. Driven by narrow, nationalist interests Bustamante wanted to protect the interests of the petit-bourgeoisie and appeal to reactionary layers within the working class who supported Anglo-US imperialism. In contrast, Manley put forward the idea that a united West Indies Federation would remove barriers to economic development, and be a progressive step forward in breaking from British imperialism. Manley called a referendum in 1961 on whether Jamaica should remain in the Federation. 54.1 percent voted no", shattering Manleys plans of a united British West Indies. Many who were in favour of the federation were concentrated in the urban areas, while many poor rural areas voted against fearing they would have to foot the bill if the economy suffered. Jamaicas road to independence looked increasingly likely to come via an agreement with British imperialism, which found it difficult to maintain even a diminishing number of colonies. Independence Babylon gone? After the defeat in the referendum, Manley negotiated with the British for Jamaican independence, and the following year the Jamaica Independence Act 1962 was passed in the UK House of Commons. The Independence Act of 1962 did not stop Jamaica being dominated by imperialism / Image: govuk It stated that Jamaica would remain a member of the Commonwealth, with the Queen as the head of state over a Jamaican Parliament. Many old colonial elements remained in the Constitution enabling Britain to still rule Jamaica indirectly. Effectively the independence granted by Parliament merely handed over the day-to-day tasks of managing capitalism to the now-trusted Bustamante/Manley regimes. The bitter rewards of Manleys failures were shown when the JLP under Bustamante won the first independent elections in April 1962 (26 seats for the JLP to 19 for the PNP). Manley would not be the PM to usher in the independence that he had spent decades fighting for. Without a doubt, the lack of a bold, socialist programme as part of the deal for national independence and the timidity of Manley in the face of the imperialists, led to his defeat. Independence was met with large and jubilant celebrations by workers and youth but many had been sold the illusion that independence under capitalism could solve their economic and social problems. Although independence had been formally declared, imperialism remained, and the US wasted no time in filling the gap left by British imperialism. This scramble by US imperialism led to a greater concentration of wealth developing over the next decade in the hands of US-owned businesses. In Jamaica, the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution were carried out in a partial and uneven way over decades, because the Jamaican bourgeoisie was not strong enough to carry out these tasks by themselves. In the words of Ted Grant: The bourgeoisie of the colonial areas has come too late on the world arena to be enabled to play the progressive role which the Western bourgeoisie played in the development of capitalist society. For this reason, Anglo-US imperialism continued to dominate the Jamaican economy. In fact, following independence, the World Bank provided Jamaica with the biggest ever loan at the time to a developing country for educational purposes. US imperialism, through the World Bank, began exploiting Jamaicas natural resources and labour; expanding the bauxite industry and manufacturing sectors. This led to living standards for urban and rural workers to decline and a rapid increase in inequality. Any illusions about independence on a capitalist basis being able to raise living standards, provide good quality free education, or even basic necessities like clean water and electricity, melted away. Throughout the 1960s, and particularly following the impact of the world economic slump in the early 1970s, Jamaican workers and youth turned to revolutionary ideas eventually bringing the PNPs Michael Manley (Norman Manleys son) to power on a popular left-reformist programme. Unfortunately, Manleys regime would fail to break from capitalism. After carrying out radical reforms and partial nationalisations, Manley came under immense pressure from US imperialism and the IMF to reverse these and cut ties with neighbouring Cuba. Manleys regime was brought down in 1980 with hundreds of people killed in political violence stoked by US imperialist meddling. Revolutionary leadership needed 60 years on and Jamaica is still dominated by Anglo-US imperialism with the British monarchy as head of state. For decades the PNP and JLP have promised referendums on becoming a republic. But why havent they materialised? Since the 1980s the PNP and JLP have come to represent the interests of two wings of the ruling class; the left liberals and the right wing. Neither is willing to fully break with British or US imperialism, let alone capitalism. Prince William and Kate's visit to the Caribbean helped strengthen the mood for republicanism / Image: Prachatai However, there is mounting pressure on the Jamaican ruling class to follow Barbados example by holding a referendum on becoming a republic. The calamitous visits by the British monarchy to the Caribbean this year have only strengthened this mood for republicanism. When Prince William and Kate met with Jamaican PM Andrew Holness, in front of cameras they politely listened to him inform them that his country was moving on from the monarchy. Holness has started the process of removing the British monarchy as head of state by 2025, but after so many false starts, who is to say that they wont break their promises again? And even if Jamaica does become a republic, what plan does Holness and the Jamaican establishment have to solve the dire economic and social conditions that millions of Jamaicans live under? A Jamaican republic under capitalism offers nothing to workers and youth. It is only the struggle for socialism and abolition of capitalism that can guarantee true independence from both the feudal British monarchy and US imperialism. Jamaicas economy has in the last decade been lauded, with a relatively high GDP and profits flowing. But this wealth has not found its way to the working class. The rich enjoy all of lifes luxuries, while the poor live in squalor, unable to feed themselves on poverty wages, and denied basic essentials. Capitalism in Jamaica has been a disaster. Corruption and violent crime are rife. Living standards havent improved for decades. And the environmental damage caused by Bauxite mining has left thousands with infertile land and poor health. The parasitic presence of US, UK, and increasingly Chinese businesses exploiting Jamaican resources and workers provide the Jamaican ruling class with healthy profits from lucrative contracts. The government expects the value of bauxite mining exports to increase 7 per cent to US$507 million this year. If nationalised alongside other major industries as part of a socialist plan of production, these profits could be used to solve the myriad of social and economic problems that blight the lives of the working class. Let alone the vast amounts of money that are paid to the IMF to service decades worth of loans. The fight for genuine independence must also come with a struggle against capitalism, which has led the Jamaican working class down the path of misery, poverty, and destitution. In addition to casting off the colonial relic of the monarchy, Jamaicans must rediscover their revolutionary traditions, and fight for real freedom, which can only come with socialist revolution. Whether its a classic chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin or sugar cookie or deluxe doughs like peanut butter cup or smores, cookies unite us all. In honor of National Cookie Day, which falls on Monday, Dec. 4, retailers from across the state are offering delicious way to celebrate. Whether you decide to bake a batch yourself or swing by your local bakery, here are some places in Massachusetts that have deals in honor of the holiday. In-store offers: Insomnia Cookies Insomnia Cookies is offering a free classic cookie and $1 deluxe cookies when you place an order at any one of their locations through the Insomnia Cookies app or with any in-app delivery. Click here to find a store near you. Johnny Rockets Monday will be your last day to get a free cookie when you buy food at any one of Johnny Rockets locations. The offer cannot be combined with other offers and menu pricing and offerings may vary by location. Click here to find a store near you. Potbelly Potbelly customers can get a free cookie with the purchase of any entree. Customers must use the promo code COOKIE online and the Potbelly App at to activate the deal. Click here to find a store near you. Circle K Customers can get a free cookie if they use a coupon found in the CircleK app at participating locations. The offer is valid while supplies last. Click here to find a store near you. Online Offers: RealCookiesCo From Monday, Dec. 4 until Sunday, Dec. 10, you can save 20% when you order cookies online at RealCookiesCo.com. Use the promo code CookieWeek2023 during checkout. Lenny & Larrys Monday is the last day to get 20% off an online order at LennyLarry.com. Customers must use the promo code COOKIEGALORE to save. Levain Levain is offering free nationwide shipping on 12-packs of cookies when you place an order online. You can also place an order and have it picked up at Levains Boston location. An overnight fire broke out at a Rhode Island barn that sits on the property of the The Conjuring movie. The fire was reported at 1677 Round Top Road in Burrillville, which is the address for The Conjuring House, early Monday morning, Dec. 4 according to WJAR. The Pascoag Fire Department, Harrisville Fire Department and several other departments were called the fire just before midnight, the Pascoag Fire Department wrote on Facebook. Crews cleared the scene around 4:45 a.m., the department added. In the early morning hours, we experienced a fire within our barn, a Facebook post from The Conjuring House reads. Thankfully, staff jumped straight into action, and fire fighters were able to contain and put out the flames. We are unaware of the cause at this time, and hope to find out more soon. The post went on to say that the barn is still standing. WJAR reported that tours will still be available. The house itself is fine, and the spirits within it are okay, as well, TCH continued. We appreciate all of the love and support being sent our way. The cause of the fire is under investigation. (This story was updated at 12:24 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 4, 2023, with additional reporting) Breaking a procedural logjam, state House Democrats sent a year-end budget, weeks overdue, to the state Senate on Monday morning. Democrats mustered the troops on Monday to muscle past minority Republicans, who had repeatedly doubted the presence of a quorum in the House, blocking action on the spending plan, which pumps $250 million in taxpayer cash into the states emergency shelter system. The year-end spending plan also includes funding for union contracts and emergency assistance to storm-stricken communities across the state. The bill cleared the chamber on a 105-14 vote without debate. Republicans, who hold only a handful of seats in the lower chamber, have wielded outsized influence in the debate over the year-end spending plan. Republicans wanted the chamber to meet in formal session, where a roll call vote can be taken. Democrats resisted that call. On Monday, Republicans launched a series of last-ditch procedural efforts to block the bill. Democrats used their super-majority to roll over Republicans. While they were not compelled to return to Boston, one senior Democrat said a sense of building frustration over the delay had motivated Democratic lawmakers to return to session. What brought them back the importance of the issue, the importance of $250 million to homeless folks who are going to be out in the street, if we dont build a shelter for them, House Speaker Ron Mariano, D-3rd Norfolk said. The raises in the contracts were already negotiated. Those were important to the members. All those things are important. Thats what brought people back. Speaking to reporters after the vote, House Minority Leader Brad H. Jones, R-20th Middlesex, placed the blame for the delay squarely at the feet of Democrats. You guys control the House, Senate and governors office, Jones said. No excuses. Dont try to put this off anybody else. If you want to see why this wasnt didnt happen in a timely fashion, grab a mirror and look at it. Ahead of Mondays vote, state party bosses also exchanged dueling statements. In a statement, Massachusetts Republican Chairperson Amy Carnevale said Democratic leaders seemed more concerned with bypassing debate and votes than allowing previously negotiated provisions to proceed without interruption, Carnevale said, according to State House News Service. Included among these provisions already negotiated are important cost of living increases for state union workers. Instead, Democrats are once again choosing to try push back room deals through a process that does not allow for accountability, Carnevale said. On Monday, ahead of the vote, state Democratic Party Chairperson Steve Kerrigan slammed GOP lawmakers for their delay tactics. While Democrats have delivered a closeout budget that supports working families, obstructionist MassGOP legislators are shamelessly advancing their MAGA agenda at the expense of Massachusetts workers right before the holidays, Kerrigan said. Its time to put party affiliation aside and do whats right for Massachusetts working families. We wont let them forget this callous neglect of families when it comes to election time. Thats a promise we will keep, he continued. A Connecticut man who died in a crash on Interstate 495 in Haverhill on Friday, Dec. 1, was identified by Massachusetts State Police on Monday. David Ziembko, 62, of New Britain, was driving a 2017 Honda CRV in the southbound lefthand lane at around 2:54 p.m., state police said. Before reaching the Route 97 overpass, the Honda exited the roadway and entered the grass median and struck a guardrail, state police said. This caused the car to roll over onto its roof. Ziembko was taken out of the car by first responders and then taken to Lawrence General Hospital, where he died, state police said. The crash remains under investigation, with state police looking into what caused the car to go off the road, including whether Mr. Ziembko may have suffered a medical event prior to driving off the road, state police added. A male employee of Total Wine & More in Dedham was assaulted by a group of people at knifepoint in the stores parking lot Sunday evening, according to Dedham police. Dedham Police Chief Michael dEntremont said the attack stemmed from an incident Saturday during which the employee denied service to a man at the Dedham mall store. On Sunday, about half a dozen people assaulted the employee in the stores parking lot around 8 p.m., dEntremont said. Two of the people were wielding knifes. Read more: Early morning Boston shooting leaves man with life-threatening injuries The group eventually fled, dEntremont said. The employee was evaluated by paramedics at the scene, but declined further medical assistance. Police are still looking for suspects in the case. Total Wine & More did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday morning. A shooting in Bostons Roxbury neighborhood early Monday morning has left a man fighting for his life, according to police. Officers responded to 48 Clifford St. at 3:51 a.m. after gunfire was detected there via Boston Police Departments Shotspotter Activation System, which monitors for sounds of gunfire and notifies police. At the scene, police said, officers discovered an adult man suffering from life-threatening gunshot wounds. The man was taken to a hospital, but police did not know his condition Monday morning. By Wednesday, police did not have any updates on how he was faring. Additionally, officers took a suspect into custody at the scene, but on Wednesday, they said the suspect was released. Read more: Boston police: 2 arrested after woman pepper sprays officer in the face No further information about the shooting has been released. A judge has dismissed a lawsuit against the town of Holden over its decision not to comply with a state law meant to increase the housing supply in communities served by the MBTA. The lawsuit, filed in August by the Central Massachusetts Housing Alliance and two local residents, claimed that by not following the 2021 MBTA Communities Act, Holden was exacerbating the regional housing shortage. However, last week, Judge Daniel Wrenn wrote in a decision that the plaintiffs had failed to demonstrate the harm Holdens noncompliance had caused. The complaint makes clear that CMHA and (Westborough resident Lydiana) Morales are overburdened by a lack of affordable housing in Massachusetts, Wrenn wrote in his decision. But the complaint contains no allegations connecting the towns failure to comply with (the law) to any harm or injury specific to CMHA and Morales. Rather, CMHA and Morales allege a general, indirect harm that they, like many other individuals and organizations across Massachusetts, suffer from the lack of affordable housing in the state. The MBTA Communities Act requires cities and towns served by the transit agency have at least one zoning district of reasonable size where multi-family housing is allowed within a half-mile of a commuter rail, subway or bus station or ferry terminal. While Holden does not contain any transit stations, it borders Worcester, which does, so it is still subject to the law. The 177 municipalities affected by the law were required to submit an action plan to the state in January. Holden failed to do so. Town officials have since said they will not follow the law, leaving them ineligible for certain state funding opportunities. Town Manager Peter Lukes said in a statement Monday that the town has not yet decided whether it will follow the law. We have received dozens of calls from municipal leaders and concerned residents from across the state regarding participation in the MBTA Communities program, he said. We have not been able to respond due to the pending litigation, but now that it is resolved at this stage, Holden is prepared to advise other municipalities of our stand and share our legal rationale behind these decisions. In the lawsuit, which named the town, its Board of Selectmen, and Lukes as defendants, CMHA alleged that Holdens noncompliance led to strained resources at the organization, impairing its ability to follow its mission. Morales said in the lawsuit that she and her child left their Worcester apartment in October 2022 because she could not afford the rent, and moved into a shelter in Westborough. She had been unable to find affordable housing since then, and said Holdens decision not to allow more housing to be built made her search harder. Holden homeowner Jennifer Lish, the other plaintiff in the lawsuit, said that the towns decision not to comply hurt her and other residents because they would lose out on the benefits of programs which the town would no longer be able to access. Read more: Opposing groups with same name cause confusion in Newton housing debate Since the filing of the lawsuit, the state has increased the penalties for communities which do not follow the law, adding a variety of new grant programs to the list which those communities will be ineligible for. Wrenn wrote in his decision that Morales had experienced only a general harm, and that Holden was only one of many towns where she would consider living. While Lish is a Holden resident, Wrenn wrote that her concerns that residents of the town would miss out on grant eligibility, increased housing infrastructure, a larger and more diverse population and a greater tax base were similarly a general harm, not a specific injury to Lish. Lukes called the dismissal a huge win for Holden. The CMHA sent out press releases to every media outlet in the state over a week prior to the town receiving notice that the action was even filed in the court. It appeared that the entire purpose of this frivolous lawsuit was to intimidate and embarrass Holden through the CMHAs false narrative, he said. We were clearly not intimidated and frankly the only people who should be embarrassed are the ones who brought this inappropriate legal action and wasted everyones time. Lawyers for Civil Rights, which was representing CMHA in the lawsuit, said in a statement that they expect to appeal Wrenns decision. We are disappointed with the judges decision to dismiss the case on purely procedural grounds, they said. In the meantime, as the case proceeds, Holden is still required to comply with the law. Officers for the Medford Police Department will begin wearing body-worn cameras starting this week. The announcement for the body-worn camera program in Medford described the devices as crucial in modern policing to improve accountability and trust between police and the communities they serve. They accurately document interactions, improve community relations, strengthen public trust, reduce complaints, defend officers from false accusations, and enhance training and evaluation, the Medford police announcement from Nov. 30 stated. Gov. Maura Healey, a proponent of body-worn cameras as a means of increasing trust in communities, announced in October that 52 police departments across the state will share more than $3.6 million in state grant money for new body cameras. The new program will start with 33 officers beginning Monday, Dec. 4, seven of which are supervisors, according to an announcement by the department. The remainder of the department will be outfitted with body-worn cameras by the first week of January 2024. Medford Chief of Police Jack Buckley said the program takes steps towards ongoing efforts to enhance public safety and strengthen the trust between our officers and the community we serve. The initial month trial period will be dedicated to educating officers on camera usage, finding glitches and concerns, and getting officers familiar with the protocols around the cameras, according to the Medford police. Police must wear body cameras at all times during their patrol shifts, including detail assignments. Medford police will be required to turn on the cameras during specific police interactions except for situations where an expectation for privacy exists, according to the department. Policies around the body-worn cameras were drafted by a team from the Medford Police Department, Medford police unions, the mayors office, and the Middlesex District Attorneys Office. Motorola Watchguard is the manufacturer of the body-worn cameras, according to Medford police. At a legislative hearing earlier this year, county prosecutors told lawmakers that the proliferation of cameras was overloading the statewide network that handles the footage, WBUR reported. State officials said last year that 10% of the Bay States municipal police department have a body-worn camera program. And three-quarters of departments in big cities and smaller towns were interested in starting such a program, WBUR reported, citing survey data compiled by the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association. SPRINGFIELD Angel Sanchez of Springfield was always interested in emergency medicine, but his fears of taking on such a big responsibility while raising a young son made it a no-go. But being accepted into an ambulance companys Earn While You Learn EMT program made the difference. The program paid him for a 40-hour week, so he didnt have to try to fit in classes on top of a regular job and family responsibilities. The company guaranteed him a job upon graduation. On Monday, Sanchez and 15 of his classmates finished a 12-week course and received their EMT certifications. The graduates now begin on-the-job training as official employees of the company, AMR. Ive wanted to do EMS for a while, but I was scared to do it, being responsible for someones life, Sanchez said. A friend graduated from an earlier class and suggested the program. That recommendation, plus the fact that the company covers tuition, books, uniforms and provides a $16.50-an-hour pay rate, gave Sanchez the confidence to apply. The program began in Springfield in 2019 as a way to address the shortage of health care workers. Its 11th class graduated Monday. It has proven to be such a success that AMR expanded it to its other headquarters, in Worcester and Marlboro, said Emily Chandler, Massachusetts program manager for AMR. AMR employs about 415 people in Springfield. It created the program to recruit and retain hard-to-find EMTs. While the classes do not fill all staffing needs, they help, she said. When people sign up, they commit to the 12-week program that runs five days and week and every other weekend. They also agree to work for AMR for a year, although 93% of the graduates are still working for the company, said Patrick Leonardo, AMR regional director for Massachusetts. The class has proven popular, with 150 to 200 people applying for the programs 20 slots every time it is offered. A majority of applicants are people like Sanchez, who learned about the program from an EMT who has gone through it and recommended it, he said. There are advantages for AMR in offering its own classes. Students build a familiarity with AMR and a camaraderie with its employees. Certification standards are the same in all classes, but AMR can add in elements such as teaching students how to safely drive an ambulance and general company policies and procedures, Chandler said. Evelyn Quinones, of Southwick, holds a bachelors degree and has studied to be a pharmacist and works as a cardiac monitoring technician at Baystate Medical Center. She realized she wanted to work in emergency medicine. I want to be a ground or flight medic and AMR gave me the tools to get started on that, she said. Quinones, who continues to work at Baystate, said she is paying back college loans so she couldnt finance an EMT course. The Earn While You Learn classes were ideal. There were a lot of ups and downs in the class but I already knew the medical terminology, so that made it easier, she said. Quinones said she is looking forward to starting to work on the ambulance and at the same time is hoping to continue her education by taking a paramedic class that follows the same model. Based on the success of the EMT course, AMR began a paramedic course in 2021 so existing employees can further their education. Students also pay no tuition and continue to earn their salary when they are studying, Chandler said. At the graduation, Deputy Police Chief Rupert Daniel, Deputy Fire Chief David Wells and Dr. Seth Kelly, of Baystate Medical Center, all talked about the vital role EMTs play. Think about it. You people signed up to save peoples lives. It doesnt get any better, Daniel said. Mayor Domenic J. Sarno thanked the graduates and their families for providing the support they needed so they could pass the courses and excel in their new jobs. I appreciate what you do. I dont envy what you do, he said. He said it takes a lot to be willing to help people day after day, on what might be the worst day of their lives. The graduates applauded when their instructor, Randy Rameau, took the podium. He told the students they now have the medical training to start their careers. Remember, always treat patients with dignity, respect and a great deal of empathy, he said. Authorities are investigating a fatal car incident after an 80-year-old woman was trapped under a Buick Regal in her driveway and later died at the hospital last Wednesday. At about 7:48 p.m. on Nov. 29, North Reading police found the woman trapped beneath the car in her driveway on the corner of Fieldcrest and Hollywood terraces, according to a joint statement by the Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryans Office and the North Reading Chief of Police Mark Zimmerman. The woman was not identified by authorities. First responders were able to free the woman from underneath the Buick by using airbags to lift the car, authorities said last week. The woman was brought to a nearby hospital where she was pronounced dead, according to the police and district attorney. Authorities said a preliminary investigation found that the car belonged to the woman and that there was no one behind the wheel of the car that struck the woman. The investigation suggests that the car rolled backward and hit the woman, authorities said, adding that no foul play is suspected. The incident is under investigation Massachusetts State Police Collision Analysis and Reconstruction Section to find out what caused the car to roll backward. The man who died after he was stabbed outside Kowloon Restaurant in Saugus Saturday is being remembered as a loving father and husband, brother, son and loyal friend to many, according to his family. Patrick Kenney Jr., 42, of Milton, was found with a knife wound in the parking lot of Kowloon, located at 948 Broadway, after 9 p.m. on Dec. 2, Essex County District Attorney Paul F. Tucker and Saugus Police Chief Michael Ricciardelli said Sunday. Kenney was pronounced dead a short time later at Mass General Hospital. Authorities believe the stabbing was accidental, and that no one else was involved. Kenney was reportedly killed by a knife that was attached to something he was wearing around his neck, according to WCVB. Our family is mourning the loss of Patrick, the family said in a statement. [We are] focused on his wife Lauren and two young children, and trying to make sense of this horrific tragedy. Read More: Man stabbed with knife outside Kowloon Restaurant in Saugus dies at hospital The Wong family, who owns Kowloon, has known Kenney and his family for years, WCVB reported. The 42-year-old reportedly took a bus from the South Shore to Saugus with family and friends to have dinner at the Route 1 restaurant on Saturday, the Wong family told the outlet. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims family, the Wong family said in a statement according to the outlet. We ask that people dont jump to conclusions until an investigation is completed. Read More: Saugus police to charge 4 people for Kowloon brawl involving glass bottle The incident is under investigation by the Essex County District Attorneys Office State Police Detective Unit and detectives from the Saugus Police Department. This stabbing comes just two weeks after a Thanksgiving-Eve brawl at the popular Chinese restaurant around 10:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, according to previous reports. Saugus police said in a Wednesday news release that four people will be charged in Lynn District Court in connection with the fight. A New Hampshire woman who pled guilty to her involvement the death and burning of a woman in Bridgewater in 2015 was sentenced in Plymouth Superior Court on Monday, Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruzs office announced. Shannon Squires, 47, pled guilty to one count each of manslaughter and kidnapping in connection with the death of Ashley Bortner, 29, of New Jersey, Cruzs office said in a statement. Bridgewater police received a 911 call before midnight on Nov. 3, 2015, about a fire burning next to the MBTA commuter rail tracks. When police arrived, they found a body was on fire, Cruzs office said. Police found that 70% of the body, identified as Bortner, was burned and she was gagged with a towel wrapped around her face, Cruzs office said. Her hands and feet were also bound. During their investigation, Massachusetts State Police found that she knew a man named Fernando Owens, 51, and believed Bortner played a role in the death of Owens son, Cruzs office said. State police investigators determined Owens was connected to Bortners murder after they took an electrical chord and a towel from Owens home. Owens fled the United States for the Dominican Republic, where authorities arrested him there, Cruzs office said. Squires and her partner, Julian Squires, of Manchester, were in Bridgewater at the time the 911 call was made. They assisted in killing and disposing of Bortners body, Cruzs office said. Owens was found guilty of first-degree murder and aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to life in prison in June 2023. Julian Squires was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in June 2022. On Monday, Judge William Sullivan sentenced Shannon Squires to eight to 10 years in prison with five years of probation, Cruzs office said. A Boston woman died Monday after a fatal shark attack while paddleboarding in the Bahamas, Reuters reported. The woman, 44, was paddleboarding with a male relative three-quarters of a mile off Sandals Royal Bahamian Resort in Cable Beach, New Providence, the Nassau Guardian confirmed. The accident happened at around 11:15 a.m., NBC 10 Boston reported. Her name has not been released. Read more: Shark attack at New York City beach leaves woman critically injured CPR was administered to the victim; however, she suffered serious injuries to the right side of her body, including the right hip region and also her right upper limb, police told Reuters. The woman died at the beach, the Nassau Guardian added. A jet ski operator who saw the attack said he could see the shark pull her off the board and into the water. I mean it was crazy, because, like I said, I watched them push out from the beach, he told the Bahamian newspaper. They were laughing and talking. They [were] side by side and laughing and talking. Mondays attack was the second in almost two weeks when a 47-year-old German tourist disappeared after she was attacked while diving at Tiger Beach on Nov. 21, the Nassau Guardian said. CHICOPEE Since its first developmental disabilities group home was built in 1994, ServiceNet has continued to expand its offerings as a nonprofit human services agency, assisting people who live with mental health challenges, intellectual disabilities and substance abuse issues, among other conditions. With its new community-based day program, Skillbuilders Makerspace+, the agency on Front Street plans to give area residents with developmental disabilities and autism the chance to acquire new skills that they can develop into vocations or explore further. The agency held a ribbon-cutting for the program there Friday. The program has been operating for three weeks in a 3,000-square-foot space, which was formerly a part of ServiceNets enrichment center. It offers activities in drawing, screen printing, basic coding, 3D printing, Lego engineering and more. Some of the clients also can spend three days a week at the agencys Prospect Meadow Farm in Hatfield, a therapeutic farm where they can pursue their agricultural interests. The entire program sees about 10 clients a day, Monday through Friday, and serves 25 total, who receive assistance and work closely with staff members to develop different skills. Among its different programs, ServiceNet helps more than 8,100 people annually throughout Western Massachusetts. For clients with learning disabilities, such as Abel Piquette, Skillbuilders provides him with a space to feel welcomed and where he can fit in with others. Piquette, who has a passion for drawing, said Friday that he is looking forward to meeting new people at the day program. In addition to serving people with developmental disabilities, Skillbuilders also will serve as a community partner, said Shawn Robinson, director of vocational services for ServiceNet. Robinson said the program will be collaborating with Fruit Fair supermarket on Front Street, once its rooftop greenhouses are installed. Clients from the program will be able to work there. Sam Newell, co-owner of Fruit Fair, said staff intend to grow a lot of fresh produce with the clients and give them a worthwhile learning experience, too. In addition to the community partnership, Robinson said the agency wants to allow the general community to use its classrooms. He said ServiceNet envisions developing a system that will allow the public to sign up online for an available space. Robinson said there is not a lot of programming available for people with significant behavioral differences and believes that by offering space, they can come in with their guardian or an aide, and participate. Excited for whats ahead for Skillbuilders, Mayor John Vieau said the program gives people with disabilities an opportunity to showcase their potential. He said he values the partnership the city has with ServiceNet. Theyre growing here in Chicopee and providing essential services for many, and people need those services, Vieau said. State Rep. Shirley Arriaga, D-8th Hampden, said she is hopeful that people will take the opportunity to explore the different programs and resources offered at Skillbuilders. Once an art kid herself who loved self-expression through different artistic avenues, such as pottery, Arriaga commended the program for offering art classes to its clients. We need to find new channels or more channels to express ourselves, and what better way than through art? she said. Massachusetts students still skip school at a much higher rate than they did before the pandemic. And many families, especially Latino ones, do not see higher education as a viable option for their children. Public education is at yet another inflection point. Schools must make sure they remain relevant. On that, districts would do well to follow the lead of the Westfield public schools, whose administrators last week brainstormed with business leaders about how classes, even early on, can connect with careers. In whats billed as a first of its kind move in the Northeast, the fourth grade at the Abner Gibbs Elementary School in Westfield is working with Federal Aviation Administration. The goal? Excite 10-year-olds about the idea of working in the aviation industry. Already, a FAA representative has met with those fourth graders and will be back five more times. Businesses small and large have joined this Adopt a Classroom program in Westfield, bringing early intel on careers. Baystate Health needs future employees to care for patients. Whip City Fiber, which promotes regionally controlled internet access, needs tech-savvy students able, in time, to help it expand its model in western Massachusetts. Elm Electrical needs future engineers to keep its business growing. Abner Gibbs Elementary School in Westfield.(Westfield public schools) Stefan Czaporowski, Westfields superintendent of schools, says the Adopt a Classroom effort brings authentic, practical learning to students. Czaporowski knows that simply telling students they must attend school, and should want to continue on to college, is not enough. More than ever, students and families need reasons to pay for education beyond high school. A recent Massachusetts poll conducted for The Education Trust shows that a dwindling number of families expect their children to go on to college. Only 37 percent of Latino families say they expect their children will enroll in a four-year college. That contrasts to 59 percent of white families and 73 percent of Asian ones. The percentages tumble when families earning under $50,000 a year are asked if they expect to send children to college. Only 26 percent of them said yes. Cost, of course, is the top reason for the tepid college enthusiasm. But if a college experience were shown to be worth the cost, the percentage of families willing to send their children to school would rise. School leaders in Westfield understand what Massachusetts families are telling pollsters. Education needs to be both worth the investment and relevant to students. Otherwise, students wont show up. FOXBOROUGH The Patriots failed to get into the red zone during Sundays 6-0 loss to the Los Angeles Chargers. The one golden opportunity they did have, however, slipped right through Tyquan Thorntons hands. The 2022 second-round pick saw one target on Sunday and it came in the form of a nicely placed Bailey Zappe deep pass. At 2:28 of the third quarter, Thornton sprinted past Chargers safety Alohi Gilman. Zappes pass soared through the air as Thornton created more separation, but when the ball descended from the sky, the receiver dove to try and make the catch. Thats when the ball slipped through Thorntons hands. It was a deflating play that couldve been huge for a Patriots team that desperately needed help on Sunday. Thats why Thornton was so upset afterward and took accountability for what happened. The receiver said it wasnt a tough catch to make even in the rain and was one he shouldve caught. Not hard at all. I feel like we get this weather a lot. I feel like I shouldve been able to make that play, Thornton said. Just running through the catch and being more focused that its raining, looking the ball all the way in. $200 INSTANT BONUS DRAFTKINGS MASS CLAIM OFFER BET $5, GET $200 BONUS BET FANDUEL MASS CLAIM OFFER BET $50, GET $250 BONUS CAESARS MASS CLAIM OFFER $1,000 FIRST-BET BONUS BETMGM MASS CLAIM OFFER MA only. 21+. Gambling Problem? If you or a loved one is experiencing problems with gambling, please call 1-800-327-5050 or visit gamblinghelplinema.org for 24/7 support. LiveChat with a GameSense Advisor at GameSenseMA.com or call 1-800-GAM-1234 MA Gambling Helpline. MA only. 21+. Gambling Problem? If you or a loved one is experiencing problems with gambling, please call 1-800-327-5050 or visit gamblinghelplinema.org for 24/7 support. LiveChat with a GameSense Advisor at GameSenseMA.com or call 1-800-GAM-1234 MA Gambling Helpline. The play happened on second-and-5 at the New England 34-yard line. After the incomplete, Zappes third-down pass attempt was deflected and the Patriots punted. That was a common theme on Sunday as the team punted seven times. Thornton had a nice moment as he ran for a 39-yard gain to set the Patriots up at the Los Angeles 35-yard line with 9:40 left on the clock. However, the Patriots offense ended up going backward as Zappe was sacked twice in a row (on third down and fourth down). Sundays game was full of several moments where the offense couldnt come through. Afterward, Thornton was kicking himself for the missed opportunities. Its definitely frustrating, Thornton said. I wish I could get that one back just to make that play for our offense. I feel like we really needed that. Got to do better on my job just to make that routine play. (I was) very close. Hopefully, next time I get that, Ill make that play. (*This story was updated at 5:07 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 4, 2023 with additional reporting) A $3.1 billion year-end budget that pumps $250 million in taxpayer cash into the states emergency shelter system is on the final steps of its journey to Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healeys desk. The state Senate voted 20-3 on Monday afternoon, after days of delay, to approve the close-out budget, which also includes funding for union contracts and emergency assistance to storm-stricken communities across the state. The compromise spending plan still was due to clear several procedural hurdles on Monday afternoon before it could be sent to Healey for her signature. The upper chambers vote came hours after the state Houses approval of the spending plan earlier in the day on Monday. The House voted 105-14 without debate to send the bill to the other side of the State House. In a brief display of parliamentary theater, majority Senate Democrats cut a deal with Republicans to allow the GOP to offer a motion to convene the Senate in formal session, where a roll call could be taken and lawmakers could debate the compromise spending plan. Those formal voting sessions ended for the year on Nov. 15, and the chambers are now meeting in informal sessions, where bills are approved on voice votes, and without debate. In a news conference after Mondays vote, Senate President Karen Spilka, D-Middlesex/Norfolk and Senate Minority Leader Bruce Tarr, R-1st Essex/Middlesex said the display of procedural unity between their two caucuses was undertaken to show that the two sides were capable of working together to swiftly pass the compromise bill. The exercise also served the dual purpose of drawing an entirely unsubtle distinction from the more fractious House. And it gave Senate Republicans political cover with hometown voters to say theyd voted against the spending bill but had not been obstructionist about it. We spent the last few hours working out this deal, Spilka said. Its a win-win for everybody. And the bottom line, the the supplemental budget is done, its passed. Its going to the governors desk today. Tarr offered a similar sentiment. For us, this was never about obstruction. For us, this was trying to maintain our principles and trying to make sure that the Senate kept all of its options open for people to express their views, the Senate GOP floor leader said. And I think its extremely significant that the order that we offered to have a formal session was adopted, not by a simple majority, but unanimously, so that we kept that option open, Tarr continued. And I would make the point that weve talked a lot about time lately, and I was trying to make this point on the floor, that we got this bill very late. And we shouldnt have allowed that to preclude our options. Sparring in the House In the House, the lower chambers majority Democrats mustered the troops on Monday to muscle past minority Republicans, who had repeatedly doubted the presence of a quorum in the House, blocking action on the spending plan. Republicans, who hold only a handful of seats in the lower chamber, have wielded outsized influence in the debate over the year-end spending plan. Republicans wanted the chamber to meet in formal session, where a roll call vote can be taken. Democrats resisted that call. On Monday, Republicans launched a series of last-ditch procedural efforts to block the bill. Democrats used their superior numbers to roll over Republicans. The bill lawmakers approved Monday was the product of a joint House and Senate conference committee that negotiated the differences between the two chambers. The bills final price-tag creeped up from $2.8 billion to nearly $3.1 billion by the time the votes were taken. House Ways & Means Committee Chairperson Aaron Michlewitz, D-3rd Suffolk, told reporters Monday that the conference reports $3.1 billion total stemmed from different pieces, you know, on each side that we added up together. That included assistance to migrants in the state shelter system, Michlewitz said. So it was a couple of things that were added together to get to that final number, but its ... nothing to brand new, he said. While they were not compelled to return to Boston, one senior House Democrat said a sense of building frustration over the delay had motivated Democratic lawmakers to return to session. What brought them back, the importance of the issue, the importance of $250 million to homeless folks who are going to be out in the street, if we dont build a shelter for them, House Speaker Ron Mariano, D-3rd Norfolk said. The raises in the contracts were already negotiated. Those were important to the members. All those things are important. Thats what brought people back. Speaking to reporters after the vote, House Minority Leader Brad H. Jones, R-20th Middlesex, placed the blame for the delay squarely at the feet of Democrats. You guys control the House, Senate and governors office, Jones said. No excuses. Dont try to put this off anybody else. If you want to see why this wasnt didnt happen in a timely fashion, grab a mirror and look at it. WESTFIELD The Small Planet Dancers will give several free performances of their holiday show Wassail! A Victorian Holiday across the region this month. The 90-minute program, which will celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, and the New Year, features dances, costumes, music, and poetry from 1870s America. Audiences will see formation dances like the Virginia reel, polkas, waltzes, and quadrilles, cultured and elegant predecessors to square dancing. Quadrilles began in European courts and were performed with horses in parades, before traveling to the United States. They look nothing like the square dances they evolved into. UMass Chan Medical School in Worcester returned to The Boston Globe Magazines Top Places to Work in 2023, moving up the list from its position last year. UMass Chans placement on the list made it the only higher education institution to be included out of the 175 organizations listed. The school ranked 24th of all the largest employers in Massachusetts, with over 4,000 employees in the commonwealth and 6,000 employees across the United States. Companies listed with UMass Chan included MassMutual in the 20th spot, DraftKings in eighth, Rockland Trust in seventh and Dell Technologies in fifth. Again at the top of the largest employers list was Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. While conducting the survey to collect data, the Globe said it consulted with the engagement platform Energage. The platform specializes in employee engagement and retention from over 137,000 individuals at 347 Massachusetts organizations, the medical center said in a statement. The survey takes a look at employee opinions about the direction of the company along with its execution, connection, management, work, pay and benefits and engagement, the statement added. The Globe and Energage also looked at what companies on the list were doing to encourage diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace policies. Out of the more than 30 companies that answered questionnaires about their programs and policies, the medical school was among 23 companies that stood out as 2023 DEI champions, the statement read. Read more: How the newest dining hall on the UMass campus became the epitome of campus dining We take immense pride in being recognized for a second consecutive year, and particularly in being acknowledged for our dedicated focus on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives this year, Chancellor Michael F. Collins said of the medical school in the statement. This achievement underscores our commitment to fostering a collaborative and connected community and celebrates the outstanding efforts of our colleagues. It is the latest evidence of how UMass Chan is advancing medicine, nursing, biomedical research, DEI and public service together thanks to the dedication of our employees. This is the second consecutive year UMass Chan appeared on the Globes list. A TOURMAKEADY girl who has been waiting for over three years for life-changing spinal surgery will undergo treatment in Dublin tomorrow (Tuesday) Leah Heneghan (13), who has scoliosis, will undergo surgery for her painful condition in Crumlin tomorrow after a receiving a cancellation appointment. Her plight was previously raised in the Dail during summer by Mayo TD Alan Dillon, who has described this development as fantastic news. While welcoming the appointment, Leahs father Mark has hit out at the HSE for what he has branded non-existent communication for months regarding her condition. Frustrating MR Heneghan brought the matter directly to the attention of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar when he visited South Mayo in August. Once you met anybody face to face you couldnt praise them enough. It was to get somebody on a phone or to get any feedback, it was non-existent, Mr Heneghan told The Mayo News. All of a sudden you get an appointment, and you were waiting six months from March more or less until November really to find out whats going on. All of a sudden, we got this appointment and once that happened the wheels are in motion again. But between then and March and November there was no communication virtually. Thats the frustrating part, the unknown its always hanging over you. Scoliosis is a condition which causes the spine to bend sideways. If left untreated it can cause severe pain and damage to internal organs. In 2017, Department of Health made a commitment that children with scoliosis would not have to wait longer than four months for surgery. However, several children are still waiting for much longer periods before receiving surgery. In August, 291 children in the State were waiting for spinal surgery, 110 of whom were waiting longer than six months. Hard to sleep Mr Heneghan described her daughters case as straightforward, as she does not have any major underlying conditions. Leahs spine is currently bent at an angle of almost 90 degrees. This has forced her to give up sport and has left her struggling to carry her school bag. Mr Heneghan described her upcoming surgery as perfect timing, as she has begun to outgrow an orthotic brace which slows the curvature of her spine. The brace wasnt effective, so she was aching in bits all the time because the brace wasnt where it needed to be on her body, she had outgrown it. She had found herself finding it hard to sleep with the pain of it, he said. She was on the usual painkillers and [got] plenty of rubs to try and ease it as much as possible. Its not even an option of getting her another brace even at this stage. This is going to be done soon because a brace takes up to three months between measuring and getting it manufactured, Mr Heneghan added. It will all be done and dusted before that could happen. At the minute she is going through a good spell, she is able to sleep properly, thats really positive. Its getting there slowly but surely. Gradual processes LEAH's surgery will require her to spend five days to a week in hospital. Her father said it will then take another five to six weeks before she can return to school. Itll be a gradual process because she wont be able to sit in a classroom for very long initially, said Mr Heneghan. That will build up over time based on every child, every case is different, but you just play it by ear after that. After the initial six weeks thats the big hurdle out of the way, thats the hope, he added. Once she gets going and gets her feet under her and getting the muscles back into the same position, the fact that theyve been in an unusual position before, that will take time. Deputy Alan Dillon described the development as fantastic news for Leah and her family. Leah is a bright young girl with a fantastic future ahead of her and it has been a pleasure to be able to assist her and her parents, Mark and Fiona, he said. It is disappointing that Leah was forced to wait over three years as her condition deteriorated but I am hopeful that her surgery will be a success. Childrens Health Ireland (CHI) said that it could not comment on individual cases and said that the team involved could speak to the family directly. Openly communicating and engaging with patients and their families is an absolute priority for Childrens Health Ireland and is in the best interest of the children and young people we treat. Direct patient and family contact will remain the priority for our staff working with our Orthopaedic patients, a CHI spokeswoman told The Mayo News. Both CHI at Crumlin and CHI at Temple Street have dedicated contacts in place for parents and guardians, where they can reach Clinical Nurse Specialists who are known to our patients and families waiting for spinal surgery, and who can answer queries in relation to their childs scoliosis care plan. A Tyrone GAA Club has described news of a beloved player's death abroad as "shattering". Twenty four year old Matthew McGuigan reportedly died in Australia after falling sick over the weekend. He was known as a talented player, having formerly captained Kildress Wolfe Tones. According to Extra.ie, Matthew had just arrived in Sydney earlier last week with his girlfriend, Clodagh. In a statement, a spokesperson for Kildress Wolfe Tones said: "We are absolutely devastated here in Kildress tonight with the sad news of Mattys death. Our thoughts and prayers are with the McGuigan & Tracey families at this very difficult time. "We all know the importance of looking out for and supporting each other and even more so in times like this. Therefore we have made the decision, with the support of the families, that our 5k a day will continue this week, in the hope that it will bring comfort to our community during this time. "Kildress Wolfe Tones will have the doors of the Hub open and are encouraging everyone to call in for a cuppa. Rest in peace Matty, you truly were one of a kind!" Another Tyrone GAA club, the Pomeroy Plunketts, also released a statement, which reads: "Pomeroy Plunketts GAA wish to convey our heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of Kildress Wolfe Tones captain Matthew McGuigan. "We are all shocked and saddened to hear of his passing. A young, talented man with such a bright future ahead of him. This is another crushing blow to our neighbouring club and a massive loss the the GAA community. "Our thoughts and prayers are with Matthews family at this time. May he rest in peace." Errigal Ciaran GAA stated: "As a club we are deeply saddened by the sudden death of Mattie McGuigan. We offer our deepest condolences to the McGuigan family, his friends and all those at Kildress Wolfe Tones. "Ar dheis De go raibh a anam uasal." Strabane Sigersons GAA also expressed sympathies, calling the news "tragic". A spokesperson stated, "A top-class player who lit up many pitches around Tyrone, he was a joy to watch. "We extend our deepest sympathies to the McGuigan and Treacy Families, his partner Clodagh, to all his friends, and to all at Kildress Wolfe Tones." 1. CONTEXT SODEICO Sarl, a company specializing in the recruitment and provision of qualified personnel, is recruiting on behalf of one of their clients for a Program funded by USAID/BHA (United States Agency for International Development/Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance) an Administrative and Receptionist. The client is a global humanitarian organization that works with people in poverty and distress to create justice and positive change through empowering partnerships and responsible actions. For this position Based in Kasai, DRC; the client seeks passionate, engaged and experienced candidate who embodies values of connectedness, courage and compassion. 2. ORGANIZATIONAL POSITION The Admin and Receptionistwill be under the supervision of the COP. 3. DUTIES AND RESPONSABILITIES The Admin and Receptionist will oversee and participate in the following duties: 1. Reception Duties: Greet visitors, guests, and staff in a professional and friendly manner. Answer and direct phone calls, take messages, and handle inquiries promptly. Maintain a clean and organized reception area. 2. Administrative Support: Assist in managing office supplies, equipment, and inventory. Coordinate and schedule meetings, appointments, and travel arrangements for staff. Prepare and distribute documents, memos, and reports as required. Assist in organizing and maintaining electronic and physical filing systems. 3. Communication: Serve as a liaison between staff, visitors, and external stakeholders, ensuring effective communication. Handle incoming and outgoing mail, emails, and faxes, forwarding them to the appropriate recipients. Support the COP in drafting, editing, and proofreading correspondence and documents. 4. Financial Support: Assist in processing financial documents, such as invoices, expense reports, and travel reimbursements. Maintain accurate records of financial transactions and assist in budget tracking. 4. Other Duties: Provide general administrative support to the office as needed. Assist in organizing and coordinating office events, meetings, and workshops. Maintain confidentiality and handle sensitive information with utmost professionalism. 5. BASIC SKILLS Communication Skills: Excellent verbal and written communication abilities to interact effectively with visitors, staff, and external stakeholders. Customer Service: Strong customer service skills to provide a positive and professional experience for guests and callers. Organizational Skills: Ability to manage multiple tasks, prioritize work, and maintain an organized and efficient office environment. Attention to Detail: Keen attention to detail to ensure accuracy in handling documents, messages, and scheduling. Time Management: Skill in managing time effectively, being punctual, and meeting deadlines. Technology Proficiency: Proficiency in using office equipment, computer systems, and software such as word processing, spreadsheets, and email. Professionalism: Demonstrating a professional demeanor, maintaining confidentiality, and handling sensitive information discreetly. Problem-Solving: Ability to identify and resolve routine administrative and operational issues independently. Adaptability: Being flexible and adaptable to changing priorities and able to handle unexpected situations. Teamwork: Willingness to collaborate with colleagues and contribute to a positive work environment. ADDITIONAL SKILLS Ability to work in a multicultural environment; 6. QUALIFICATION AND EXPERIENCE Bachelor, diploma in Administration or equivalent; additional administrative certifications; 3 to 5 years of experience in administrative or receptionist position for NGOs or International organization; Proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook); 7. LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY Must be fluent in French, both oral and written; Intermediate Level of English is required; Mastering of the local language will be an asset 8. COMPUTER SKILLS Detailed understanding of the full Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams); Vision conference app or online tools meeting. by Ray Schultz , November 30, 2023 Popular Science, the magazine that popularized many wonky subjects for readers, publishing such authors as Charles Darwin in its 151 years, is no more. The periodical has stopped publishing its online magazine, its print edition having been halted three years ago, according to The New York Times. However, it continues to publish content on its website, including articles and video, and offers a podcast titled, The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, the Times reports. Axios had reported earlier in November that Popular Science owner Recurrent Ventures had cut 13 staff positions and that only five editorial staff members remained. advertisement advertisement According to the Times, Recurrent Ventures spokesperson Cathy Hebert issued this statement: Like most media companies, Recurrent is adapting to the evolving landscape of its audience. Whether its due to shifting patterns in social media, an increase in consumer demand for video or shifting advertising budgets which have also increasingly moved toward video its clear that change is a consistent theme. by Fern Siegel , December 4, 2023 Alaska Airlines has teamed with the Harlem Globetrotters in its latest campaign to promote international travel. Creative agency Mekanism produced the work, which highlights the airlines as a domestic carrier with access to 500+ global destinations that can be booked directly at its site. Here is the spot: Globetrot with Alaska Airlines. The campaign will run on social (TikTok + Meta), digital OOH (in Seattle), streaming and linear TV. In a recent airline survey, it found 85% of U.S. travelers plan to cross the Atlantic or Pacific to overseas hot spots. There was also a keen desire to visit Europe, with the U.K., France and Spain scoring as the top three leading destinations. advertisement advertisement One in 10 is most interested in visiting the Oceania region with Australia (80%) as the top choice, followed by New Zealand (69%) and Fiji (36%). Eric Edge, CMO of Alaska Airlines, told Agency Daily: "We challenged ourselves to find a unique way to let our guests know that they can book global travel through AlaskaAir.com and earn thousands more miles when they do. Partnering with the Harlem Globetrotters gave us a delightful, visual shortcut as we invite our guests to trot the globe." The work notes the Mileage Plan that rewards member loyalty, the elite advantages that accrue and how to triple your miles on flights when the Alaska Airlines Visa card books tickets. Mekanism's client work includes the NBA, OK Cupid, Jose Cuervo and Charles Schwab. by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, December 4, 2023 WPPs GroupM and IPG Mediabrands Magna have released data around annual predictions related to search, retail media, social and video. Within GroupMs digital ad-revenue numbers, the agency forecasts search will see the slowest growth, with a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.1%. Retail media will grow 9.3%. Other -- a category that includes social media and short-form video -- will grow 8.5% on a compound basis. GroupM forecasts that at the close of 2023, retail media will have become the fastest-growing digital channel -- forecast to improve 9.3% compared with 2022. Growth in 2024 will decelerate as retailers likely add net-new non-endemic advertisers to rosters, and share shifts take place as smaller players challenge Amazons dominance. Walmart, which reported $2.7 billion in advertising revenue in 2022, is likely to take in more than $3 billion worldwide in 2023, which should earn it a position in GroupMs top 25 global ad-sellers list. advertisement advertisement Two events will affect search, artificial intelligence (AI) and the pending ruling against Google in the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust lawsuit, although it is unlikely that they will lead to a significant structural change for the company. GroupM estimates that companies mentioned AI 443 times in earnings calls for Microsoft and Alphabet in 2023. Digital ad revenue is forecast to grow 11.2% in 2023 after ad sellers including Meta, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Spotify, Pinterest, Microsoft and Snap all reported accelerating growth in the third quarter, according to GroupM. The growth excludes connected television (CTV), digital out-of-home (DOOH), and other digital extensions of traditional media from the data. IPG Mediabrands Magna released its winter update, Global Ad Forecast, which predicts that net advertising revenue for media owners will rise 5.5% to $853 billion this year, and by 7.2% in 2024. The data suggests Keyword Search and ecommerce will remain the most popular ad formats -- up 9% to about $298 billion in 2023. The U.S. market for search grew 10% this year, driven by retail media, which represents 23% of total search-advertising revenue outside of China. Retail Media Networks generated $124 billion of ad revenues globally in 2023, and about $43 billion in the U.S. Retail Media Networks represent 15% of global advertising revenue. Some 87% went into keyword search-based formats. Magna predicts global Retail Media Networks -- mostly run by ecommerce platforms like Amazon or traditional retailers like Walmart -- will rise 20% outside of China. Although Search has seen growth, it was far outpaced by social, which witnessed 14% growth. Social and Video formats hit double-digit growth based on better monetization of the rapidly growing short vertical video impressions. This year, social-media companies like Meta, and TikTok are expected to grow 15% to $182 billion, while short-form pure-play video platforms like YouTube and Twitch are forecast to grow by 9% to $70 billion. by Steve McClellan @mp_mcclellan, December 4, 2023 Publicis Groupe has appointed Susie Nam as CEO of Publicis Creative US. She replaces longtime Publicis Groupe media and creative veteran Andrew Swinand who the company said would be leaving in the spring to pursue other opportunities. In her new role, Nam will oversee iconic agency brands including Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi, Fallon, BBH, Team One, The Community and Turner Duckworth. She will report to Carla Serrano, group chief strategy officer, Publicis Groupe. advertisement advertisement Previously, Nam was CEO of the Americas for Droga5, where she served for 14 years in a number of roles spanning account management and operations. She was named COO in 2015 and CEO in 2021; she left in May of this year. Publicis credits her ability to design agency systems and culture that yield breakthrough ideas and best-in-class talent. Nam began her career in publishing as a journalist at George magazine before serving as features editor for The New York Times first online edition. She then studied at the London School of Economics, practiced as an urban planner in England, and returned to the US where she turned her talents to advertising at Fallon. She joined Droga5 in 2009. A Korean-American executive, Nam is also known for her ongoing advocacy and leadership for diversity, equality and inclusion across communities. She currently serves as the chair of the ADCOLOR Board of Directors. She is an Aspen Institute First Movers Fellow, was recognized among The Ad Clubs 2023 Innovators, and was recently honored with the Impact Award by the Asian American Federation. While there is incredible innovation and connectivity that sets rich circumstances for good work, the essential ingredient remains best in class creativity. I hope to help all the agencies and their leadership toward this ambition, stated Nam. Susie's last role focused on finding that bridge between creativity, data, technology and consultancy, added Serrano. Her new position at Publicis allows her to fulfill this vision in practice, and tremendous opportunity lies ahead for our clients, our agency brands and our talent. Swinand has served as US creative and production chief for the last three years and has also led the Leo Burnett Group since 2017. Earlier he founded marketing technology consultancy Transparent and was also a founder of Abundant Venture Partners. by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 4, 2023 Google's most complex artificial intelligence (AI) has been put on hold until next year. The model, Gemini, has been described as the next generation of AI multimodal model with the ability to process multiple types of data such as text, images and video. It aims to have the capability to understand and generate text, images and websites based on a written description or text. OpenAI's DALL-E is a version of GPT-3 trained to generate images from text descriptions using textimage pairs. The controversy has continued for several weeks. Two previously unannounced launch events originally scheduled to take place this week were quietly rescheduled for early 2024 after concerns surfaced that the AI Google would demonstrate wasn't reliable enough, according to The Information, citing two anonymous sources. The technology wouldn't respond well enough to some non-English questions, prompts and inquiries. advertisement advertisement Pichai announced Gemini in May 2023 and described it as a multimodal, highly efficient tool and API integrations built to enable future innovations, like memory and planning. While still early, were already seeing impressive multimodal capabilities not seen in prior models, Pichai wrote in the blog post. Once fine-tuned and rigorously tested for safety, Gemini will be available at various sizes and capabilities, just like PaLM 2. When launched, it has said, Gemini will outperform OpenAIs DALL-E. Gemini will pull from Googles enormous sources of data across its network of products. Google also has discussed using Gemini to power features like to verbally describe chart analysis. AI is being embedded more deeply into programmatic advertising. Many technology companies now use a combination of AI and machine learning to improve bidding and performance. In August 2023, analysts at SemiAnalysis, a semiconductor blog, wrote a post titled, in part, Google Gemini Eats The World. It was sparked, in part, by Googles release of the MEENA model before COVID. For a short period of time, was the best large language model in the world, according to SemiAnalysis analysts Dylan Patel and Daniel Nishball who pointed to a blog and paper written by Google engineers that detail Gemini. The Google engineers wrote: This model required more than 14x the FLOPS of GPT-2 to train, but this was largely irrelevant because only a few months later OpenAI dropped GPT-3, which was >65x more parameters and >60x the token count, >4,000x more FLOPS. The performance difference between these two models was massive. SemiAnalysis reported that the MEENA model sparked a memo written by Noam Shazeer, founder at Character.AI titled "MEENA Eats The World. In this memo, Shazeer predicted things that the rest of the world would realize after the release of ChatGPT. The key takeaways were that language models would get increasingly integrated into our lives in a variety of ways, and that they would dominate the globally deployed FLOPS, SemiAnalysis reported. Noam was so far ahead of his time when he wrote this, but it was mostly ignored or even laughed at by key decision makers. by Ed DeNicola , Op-Ed Contributor, December 4, 2023 If Elon Musk is as smart as many believe he is, he already decided to change Xs business model from an ad-supported one to something else. In that case, there was little risk in him cursing out the ad community last week. Unfortunately, this probably isnt the case and hes simply reacting out of frustration. Linda Yaccarino, Xs CEO, was specifically hired to fix Xs ad business. The words Musk used to attack advertisers were highly charged and potentially manipulative. While its hard for anyone to always say the right thing in the moment, there are so many other ways he could have said the same thing without alienating clients. Musk could have said that advertiser spending impacts media content and its having an adverse effect on free speech. X is trying to work with advertisers to create a safe advertising environment and at the same time provide a means for people to exercise their constitutional right to speak freely. advertisement advertisement He did take responsibility and apologized for an anti-semitic post he recently made on X and went so far as to say it was foolish. However, rather than try to put advertisers at ease about advertising on X, he chose to spin it that they were trying to blackmail him with advertising/money. Even if the Media Matters for America report showing Xs advertisers posts alongside neo-Nazi and white nationalist posts is manufactured, the mere possibility of it being true should be enough to scare many advertisers away. His goal during last week's New York Times DealBook interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin should have been to reduce marketers' anxiety about advertising on X. Instead, he made it worse. Based on my experience at Cambridge Analytica (CA), once the media echo chamber started to speculate that Trump won the 2016 presidential election due to a misuse of Facebook likes for ad targeting, whether it was true didnt matter. CA was no longer able to win business. The very mention of impropriety was enough to scare off clients and the company eventually folded due to a lack of business and it being too expensive to fight all the lawsuits. Hopefully this wont happen to X, but there is at least one precedent. There are parallels between X and Cambridge Analytica, both the leaders of these companies were caught making public remarks that harmed their reputations while at the same time the companies were involved in perceived scandals CA with Facebook and X with ads appearing next to hateful content. Advertisers likely arent that sensitive to Musks accusations; although, they will be to any support for hate speech or other questionable Musk activity. More than anything, CMOs want to be successful and build their brands. Theyre looking for safe environments in which to advertise, expansive reach against target audiences, great ad targeting tools, competitive pricing, and measurable results. If X can deliver these, its situation can be salvaged. Let us not forget that X has somewhere around 556 million active monthly users and most of them are highly coveted young adults. As of October, the platform was reported to receive around 6.14 billion visits per month and Musk himself is the most-followed person on X with more than 150 million followers. It has a lot going for it. If Xs safety settings and AI were working perfectly today, and it might very well be the case, it would still take a lot of time and effort to prove it to advertisers. Perceptions can be a powerful deterrent and stubborn to change. Its not going to happen overnight. One thing is for sure, Musks claims and accusations are making him and Yaccarino the talk of the town. The earned media coverage is already spectacular, and you would expect it to translate into usage for X. You have to wonder how much of Musks antics are a calculated choice. The good news is that Musk owns most of X, an estimated 74%. The stock price isnt an issue as it was delisted when Musk bought the company and took it private. As a result, they dont have to contend with activist shareholders. Musk and Yaccarino have the space to turn this around. Lets hope it doesnt devolve into another Cambridge Analytica scenario. A former Marine has pleaded guilty to firebombing a Planned Parenthood in California while he was on active duty and stationed at Camp Pendleton as part of a case authorities labeled "domestic extremism," according to the Justice Department. Chance Brannon, 24, an ex-corporal, pleaded guilty Thursday to four total counts, according to the Department of Justice: conspiracy, malicious destruction of property by fire and explosives, possession of an unregistered destructive device, and intentional damage to a reproductive health services facility. Brannon was arrested in June 2023 and has been in custody since then, the law enforcement agency said. He and two other co-conspirators plotted the attack in the early spring of 2022. Only Brannon was in the military, according to the Justice Department. Read Next: Air Force's Missileer Cancer Study Now Looking at 14 Different Cancers and Environmental Risks at Other Bases "This defendant exemplifies the insidious danger posed by domestic extremism," U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said in a released statement. "The defendant, who was a member of the U.S. military, admitted not only to attacking a Planned Parenthood facility but also to planning for attacks on the power grid and a pride celebration at Dodger Stadium. We must never waver in our commitment to protect the American people from violent extremist ideology." Military.com reached out to the office of Brannon's listed attorney for comment, but did not hear back by publication. Brannon admitted that he and one of his co-conspirators, Tibet Ergul, 22, discussed starting a race war, according to the Justice Department and court records, and that they had discussed targeting a LGBTQ+ pride event at Dodger Stadium with a remote-detonated device. They collected a World War II manual and discussed doing dry runs on the stadium in the fashion of Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, according to the department. They were arrested two days before the pride event. Months before the plan to attack the stadium, Brannon and Ergul used a Molotov cocktail to set fire to a Planned Parenthood in Costa Mesa, California, according to court records. In the early hours of March 13, 2022, the pair -- donned in masks and dark clothing -- drove to the facility and threw the incendiary weapon into the entrance. Ergul later texted an acquaintance taking credit for the firebombing and said that he wished he "could've recorded the combustion" before sending a picture of him holding the Molotov cocktail in Brannon's car. Planned Parenthood provides reproductive health care services, including abortion. The Justice Department said, according to Brannon's plea agreement, that he chose this target "because he wanted to make a statement against abortion, scare pregnant women away from obtaining abortions, deter doctors, staff, and employees of the clinic from providing abortions, intimidate and interfere with the patients of the clinic, and encourage others to engage in similar acts of protest." A month later, after a tipster had called the FBI identifying the duo, a special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service found Brannon's Dodge Challenger parked in front of the barracks at Camp Pendleton. Brannon admitted to planning other attacks, including the targeting of another Planned Parenthood in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade -- a legal precedent that upheld a constitutional right to abortion for decades -- and electrical substations to start a race war, the Justice Department said. He also discussed targeting the Anti-Defamation League, according to court records. Brannon kept plans to attack the Southern California Edison substation in a dog-tag style thumb drive with "Semper Fidelis" on it -- the Marine Corps motto. The thumb drive also contained a gear list, which included a rifle with "Total N***** Death" written on it and a recording of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting in which a white supremacist killed 51 people in New Zealand. A short-barreled rifle and two silencers, which belonged to Brannon, were not registered. "This case is yet another unfortunate example of lone actor and small cell 'do it yourself' white supremacist terrorism," Jon Lewis, a researcher at the George Washington University's Program on Extremism, told Military.com on Monday. "The individuals did not require organized group membership to plot numerous acts of targeted violence in further of hateful ideology," he said. "Laid out in the court records, these individuals plotted to target nearly every enemy in the ongoing 'culture war.' From the Anti-Defamation League to Planned Parenthood to critical infrastructure, these mild extremists were committed to their goal of conducting accelerationist terrorism in the hopes of sparking a race war." Brannon will be sentenced in April. He faces up to 51 years in prison for all four counts he pleaded guilty to. Ergul, and the third defendant, Xavier Batten, have pleaded not guilty and will go to trial in the spring. -- Drew F. Lawrence can be reached at drew.lawrence@military.com. Follow him on X @df_lawrence. Related: Marine Kicked Out of Corps and Indicted in Alleged Neo-Nazi Infrastructure Attack Plot Pleads Guilty to Weapons Charge Houthi rebels are stepping up their maritime campaign of targeting vessels they claim to be connected to Israel and U.S. Navy warships are increasingly being caught in the crossfire, testing the limits of the Pentagon's claim it is successfully deterring further attacks in the Middle East. U.S. Central Command announced on Sunday that the USS Carney responded to four attacks against three separate commercial vessels off the coast of Yemen and shot down drones. Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters Monday that "it's still important to understand and to focus on [the fact that] what's happening in Israel and within Gaza has not spread out into a wider regional conflict." It was the fifth incident in the region in recent weeks where a Navy warship felt threatened enough to take the relatively rare step of firing its weapons, or encountered missiles flying in its vicinity. Meanwhile, Houthi rebels in Yemen have said the attacks are aimed at Israel, which remains at war with Hamas amid a U.S. military buildup in the region to support the Israelis and deter expansion of the conflict. Read Next: Air Force's Missileer Cancer Study Now Looking at 14 Different Cancers and Environmental Risks at Other Bases Tensions in the Red Sea kicked off on Oct. 19 -- less than two weeks after Israel declared war on Hamas -- when the destroyer USS Carney detected and destroyed four land attack cruise missiles and 15 drones using its missiles and deck gun that were launched by the Houthis. The group is considered an Iranian-backed militia like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and smaller groups operating in Iraq and Syria. It was not clear where the drones and missiles were headed, but officials in the Pentagon said they believed Israel to be the target. The next incident didn't come until almost a month later on Nov. 15 when the destroyer USS Hudner downed a drone coming from Yemen that came too close to it. Then, just over a week later, on Nov. 26, the USS Mason responded to a distress call from a merchant ship under attack by individuals that Pentagon officials later said appear to be Somali. As the Mason was responding to the incident, missiles fired from Yemen landed about 10 miles from the ship. The next incident was just days later -- Nov. 29 -- when the Carney downed a drone heading in its direction. Then, just days after that incident, the Carney downed three more drones as it was responding to distress calls from merchant vessels under apparent missile attack. The uptick in attacks, and the apparent targeting of merchant shipping, appears to be part of a concerted campaign by the Houthi rebels to target Israeli ships passing through the waterway that heads to the Suez Canal and then Israel. In a statement reported by multiple outlets, Houthi officials said that their forces will continue to "prevent Israeli ships from navigating the Red Sea and [Gulf of Aden] until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops." "The Yemeni armed forces renew their warning to all Israeli ships or those associated with Israelis that they will become a legitimate target if they violate what is stated in this statement," Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree, a spokesman for the group, said. Israeli officials speaking to reporters have not denied the connection outright. Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler, the Israeli Defense Forces international spokesman, told reporters last week that the merchant ships "have very minimal connection to Israel, if at all" and, instead framed the attacks as "terrorism against the freedom of navigation in the region." The threat certainly appears to be felt on the decks of the Navy ships in the region. Although Singh stressed that the Pentagon has no indications that either the drones or the missiles in any of the five incidents targeted Navy ships, self-defense was cited in every instance and a recent incident with an Iranian drone in the Persian Gulf underscores the threat ship commanders feel from the Houthi aircraft. On Saturday, just a day before the Carney's last engagement with Houthi drones, U.S. Central Command released a picture of an Iranian drone flying in "an unsafe and unprofessional manner" within sight of the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Arabian Sea. On Monday, Singh said that "just because something is unsafe and unprofessional doesn't always meet the threshold to feel the need to shoot it down." "It's up to the discretion of the commander," Singh added, when asked about the different responses to similar drones. "They have the absolute right to make that decision and make that call when it is happening in that moment." This position by the Pentagon -- that ships and sailors are not being targeted outright -- is also being used as a way to push back on the idea that the U.S. needs to retaliate against Yemeni forces. Singh said the situation "certainly is something that is very concerning to us, something that we're going to continue to monitor" but stopped short of saying that there are plans to retaliate like the military has done several times in Syria and Iraq. Retaliatory actions in Iraq, specifically, have drawn the ire of the country's prime minister. There were also two planned retaliations on weapons storage facilities in Syria. "If we decide to take action against the Houthis, it will, of course, be at a time and place of our choosing," Singh said. Related: Retaliatory US Airstrikes Are Starting to Raise Tensions and Draw Ire in Middle East The military has officially committed to never resuming live-fire training at Makua Valley, one of its most controversial training grounds in Hawaii. The military hasn't fired a shot in the valley since 2004 as a result of a lawsuit brought against it by Earthjustice on behalf of local activist group Malama Makua. Since then the Army has worked to remove unexploded bombs around 22 ancient Hawaiian cultural sites, as well as hosted "cultural access " days led by Malama Makua members twice a month. In October, U.S. Army Pacific leadership signed a memorandum stating there are no plans to resume that training, and on Thursday in a joint statement submitted to Hawaii's federal district court, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth said the military would "no longer need to conduct live-fire training at (Makua Military Reservation), now or in the future, and, therefore, no new (unexploded ordnance ) will be added to MMR." On Friday, Malama Makua held a news conference in the parking lot of the training area celebrating the agreement as rain drizzled. Amid the backdrop of the vast green valley, Malama Makua board member Karen Young, widow of the late Malama Makua co-founder Fred Dodge, said she was "cautiously ecstatic "happy, but also worried that the promises made in court wouldn't be kept. The valley holds particular significance for Hawaiian cultural practitioners. In Hawaiian, "makua " means "parent, " and the valley is considered the place where human life was first created, according to oral tradition. By the 20th century it was the site of several farms and ranches owned by members of a diverse community of Hawaiian, Japanese and Portuguese families. The military began using parts of Makua for live-fire training in the 1920s when the islands were governed as a U.S. territory. But after the Japanese navy's surprise attack on Dec. 7, 1941, the U.S. military imposed martial law in Hawaii and took control of all of Makua for training, which meant kicking out the farmers and ranchers in the valley. Military officials assured them it would be temporary and that they would be able to return when the war was over. But in 1945, World War II ended and the Cold War began. The military asked Hawaii's territorial government for the transfer of 6, 608 acres at Makua for training. In 1964, five years after statehood, the Army paid just $1 for a 65-year lease from the state to continue training on Makua and the other leased lands. "Growing up here in Makaha, this place has always been very special for our community, whether it's at the beach or when you're driving past and you get to see this beautiful valley behind you, " said state Rep. Cedric Gates. "But you can never go inside the valley to enjoy or to practice their culture prior to Malama Makua, and all the access that was provided after fighting many years, and even take decades to get where we are today." Gates said "the signing of the document really emphasizes the military's understanding that there never should have been live firing here to begin with. ... We need to build on that, to really return this aina back to its rightful owners, which is the people of our community, especially our Native Hawaiian community." In a joint statement released by Gates and fellow Leeward Oahu lawmakers Rep. Darius Kila and Sen. Maile Shimabukuro, they stated that they "are grateful to the Army for stepping up, and we ask for their continued cooperation and full support in clearing all unexploded ordnance before the 'aina is rightfully returned to our Native Hawaiian community. Today marks the beginning of a full return of Makua back to its people." Each military branch used Makua at various points before the last shot was fired in 2004. Ships pounded it with guns from the sea, aircraft dropped napalm and soldiers and Marines fired countless bullets. Malama Makua member Vince Dodge, Fred Dodge's son, was involved in a cleanup effort in 2003. "We came across napalm casing, white phosphorus. They also use the valley and it's very important for the disposal of munitions that get close to their 'best use' date, " Vince Dodge said. "(The explosives ) start getting unstable and nobody wants them around, right ? So they dumped hundreds of tons of munitions offshore in Waianae, some like right offshore, some deep, and they destroyed hundreds of tons of munitions in the valley, as well as chemical waste from Tripler and the university. It was a dumping ground. That's the way it was back then." Dodge said that if the Army leaves Makua, "we don't want them to run the cleanup because they don't do that well. The whole military system of contracting is rife with corruption, and it's about making money and it's not about doing the job well. The job of cleanup of this valley is going to take decades, right ? It took 80 years to get here today. It's going to take decades. We need our community to direct that, but we need the Army to put up the money for thatthat's their obligation." The Army long insisted that there were no ancient sites in the valley. But wildfires started by live-fire training burned foliage and revealed several ancient sites across the valley. Sparky Rodrigues, a co-founder of Malama Makua, said, "All the historic sites were black, and all the endangered species was wiped out, completely wiped out, from the fire." As a result of litigation, the Army has spent millions on archaeological resources, as well as on efforts to reseed the area with local native plants and monitoring endangered species. Dodge said the latest pledge is a "a step in the cleanup and return of this value, which the Army promised to do when they occupied it." But though the military officials committed not to resume live fire, and said they intended to step up removing bombs currently there, they are not talking about leaving the valley. The valley is still used for various flight and drone training and other exercises. "The U.S. Army will continue to execute valuable, non-live-fire training opportunities critical to our mission and soldier readiness at MMR, " U.S. Army Pacific spokesperson Col. Rob Phillips said in a statement. "The U.S. Army will continue to provide regular community access to MMR for cultural activities per the 2001 settlement agreement. The Army comes with a sense of humility and fortitude that this official announcement will facilitate greater good to the aina and the community here." But members of Malama Makua said they want to see military training to stop altogether and see the land returned. During the conference, several called for peace and drew connections between the Army's seizing of land from Makua residents during World War II and the displacement and killings of Palestinians trapped in Gaza today. "We all know what's happening in Palestine and how outrageous that is, " said Dodge. "We're going to push all weekend from the outside ; we have good people in the military that are pushing from the inside. ... We got to change this thing. There's been violence and war for a long time, and it just begets more violence and war. That's been completely proven." They also expressed concern that while Austin and Wormuthwho were appointed by President Joe Bidenmade the pledge, there's no guarantee that future leaders will honor it, noting the broken promise to the farmers who called the valley home. "So yes, we're happy, it's a good step, " said Dodge. "But we also know that it can change at any moment." Rodrigues said that he believes the 2021 Red Hill Water Crisis has, in part, prompted commanders to take a more cooperative stance as the military presence in the islands has come under more intense scrutiny. The Pentagon considers the Pacific its top-priority theater of operations, and Oahu is the nerve center for those operations and the Pentagon wants to maintain its footprint in Hawaii. "I'm always angry and upset, and it's not new. I'm not the only one, " said Malama Makua board member Lynette Cruz. "You talk to many other people in the Hawaiian community who had been looking at the impact of military presence on this aina. ... Everyone is pissed unless you've got a good job with the military presence. Unless you have some kind of a benefit from the military being present, the rest of us are looking at the fact that what happened to our land." But Young struck a more optimistic tone, saying she believes "our relationship with the military has evolved. We see their humanity and I think they see ours, and I would like us to go forward. The times are changing, the world is changing and I think we need to also change in regard to that and maybe there's hope we can work together somehow." Rodrigues said that he will look to the native kahuli snailsometimes called the "singing snail "as an indicator of whether Malama Makua's efforts have paid off. "The kahuli snail sings when the forest is pono, " he said. "I have never heard the kahuli snail singing yet, but that's one of the outcomes that we'll use as a benchmark to the success of the return and cleanup and restoration." ___ (c)2023 The Honolulu Star-Advertiser Visit The Honolulu Star-Advertiser at www.staradvertiser.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. WASHINGTON The Biden administration on Monday sent Congress an urgent warning about the need to approve tens of billions of dollars in military and economic assistance to Ukraine, saying Kyiv's war effort to defend itself from Russia's invasion may grind to a halt without it. In a letter to House and Senate leaders and released publicly, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young warned the U.S. will run out of funding to send weapons and assistance to Ukraine by the end of the year, saying that would kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield. She added that the U.S. already has run out of money that it has used to prop up Ukraine's economy, and if Ukraines economy collapses, they will not be able to keep fighting, full stop. We are out of money and nearly out of time, she wrote. Biden has sought a nearly $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other needs, but it has faced a difficult reception on Capitol Hill, where there is growing skepticism about the magnitude of assistance for Ukraine and where even Republicans supportive of the funding are insisting on U.S.-Mexico border policy changes to halt the flow of migrants as a condition for the assistance. Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled House has passed a standalone assistance package for Israel, which is fighting a war with Hamas in Gaza, while the White House has maintained that all of the priorities must be met. Congress already has allocated $111 billion to assist Ukraine, including $67 billion in military procurement funding, $27 billion for economic and civil assistance and $10 billion for humanitarian aid. Young wrote that all of it, other than about 3% of the military funding, had been depleted by mid-November. The Biden administration has said it has slowed the pace of some military assistance to Kyiv in recent weeks to try to stretch supplies until Congress approves more funding. We are out of money to support Ukraine in this fight, Young wrote. This isnt a next year problem. The time to help a democratic Ukraine fight against Russian aggression is right now. It is time for Congress to act. The letter followed a classified Capitol Hill briefing on Nov. 29 for the top House and Senate leaders on the need for the assistance. Defense and other national security officials briefed the big four congressional leaders as Congress is debating President Joe Bidens nearly $106 billion funding package, which includes $61 billion for Ukraine but has become snared by Republican demands for U.S.-Mexico border security changes. They were clear that Ukraine needs the aid soon and so does our military need the aid soon, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told The Associated Press in an interview. ___ AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed. The Giants offer to reigning American League MVP Aaron Judge is believed to be [in the] $360MM neighborhood, reports Jon Heyman of the New York Post. The number of years on the contract arent clear, though recent reports have suggested Judge could push for a nine-year deal. That would put the potential average annual value on San Franciscos offer in the $40MM ballpark, or perhaps in the $36MM range if they were comfortable extending the offer to a decade in length in order to mitigate some of the AAV and luxury tax concerns. San Francisco has long been seen as the primary threat to sign Judge away from the Yankees, given their increasing urgency to field a winner, the teams wide-open payroll outlook and Judges fandom of the team as a child growing up in Northern California. Judge has met with both teams in the past week, and outside of some loose connections to the Dodgers, theres been no concrete reports of other teams involved in the mix. That hardly means Judge only has two suitors, of course. Coming off a 62-homer, .311/.425/.686 season that netted him his first MVP win, it stands to reason that the majority of teams would at least inquire about the possibility of a deal. However, given the heights to which his market appears to be soaring, most clubs would surely balk at making a competitive offer. Still, todays revelation that the Padres offered Trea Turner a $342MM deal that wouldve given him the third-largest guarantee in MLB history only to be rebuffed in favor of the Phillies has at least served as evidence that another team is willing to spend at the very top end of the free agent market (albeit on a different player). Theres been no firm link between the Padres and Judge just yet, but with San Diego eyeing the corner outfield market and having displayed a willingness to commit an unprecedented third $300MM+ contract, its easy enough to speculate that the Friars could emerge as a viable third entrant in the bidding. Heyman suggests that even with the Giants enormous offer, many in the industry still believe the Yankees to be the favorites. The Yankees, for their part, of course continue to hope that Judge will re-sign and spend his career in the Bronx, although recently extended general manager Brian Cashman told reporters last night that agent Page Odle has not given the Yankees any assurances that theyll be afforded the opportunity to match or exceed an offer from another team before Judge accepts (link via Bryan Hoch of MLB.com). The Giants have approximately $133MM in salary committed to next years books and are a projected $91MM shy of the first tier of luxury-tax penalization, so an AAV for Judge in the upper $30MMs or even reaching $40MM wouldnt put them anywhere close to the tax line. Judge did reject the Yankees qualifying offer, however, so hed cost the Giants their second-highest pick in next summers draft and also trigger a $500K reduction in their spending capacity on international amateur free agents. The Detroit Lions beat the New Orleans Saints 33-28 to move to 9-3 for the first time since 1962, thanks to a red-hot first-quarter showing in Week 13 action. They grabbed an early 21-0 lead, then made enough plays and stops down the stretch to survive another up-and-down day. MLives Dungeon of Doom podcast is back with another postgame episode after the teams latest win as they clinch closer to a division title. Hosts Kyle Meinke and Ben Raven break it all down, looking at the highs -- Sam LaPorta and the offensive line -- and the lows -- the secondary and Frank Ragnows injury. See below to listen. Subscribe to the Dungeon of Doom wherever you get your podcasts -- Spotify, Apple, Google -- Follow Ben Raven and Kyle Meinke on Twitter. That was a heck of a win. Its not easy to come in this place and win, Lions head coach Dan Campbell said. Thats a prideful team. They came out and fought. I loved the way we came out early in this game. They made some adjustments, then we had to make some adjustments. I was proud of our defense getting two takeaways. I thought Sam LaPorta, man, was huge today for us. I thought he was, he really made some huge plays. I thought we did a great job taking care of the football. We got two takeaways on defense. Thats got to be our recipe. I thought, boy, Goff there at the end, that was a critical, critical pass. Reynolds on the catch, so just a number of things, not easy. Its not easy to win. But here we go, man. We got nine wins with five to go. WEXFORD COUNTY, MI Police are investigating after two vehicles were found with punctured gas tanks in a Walmart parking lot. Michigan State Police in Cadillac responded to the store in Haring Township after the damage was reported on Nov. 10. It is unknown whether this was an attempt to steal gasoline or to damage the vehicles, police said. During a review of video footage, troopers observed a newer model, white Chevy Express van loitering in the area near both vehicles for an extended period, police said. The Wexford County Sheriffs Office also had similar incidents in the area weeks prior to this incident, police said. Anyone with information is asked to call the MSP Cadillac Post at (231) 779-6040. ANN ARBOR, MI Tickets are on sale for a benefit concert to help save a fire-damaged music venue in Ann Arbor. The Save the Speakeasy show planned for Jan. 9 at The Ark features a long lineup of local musicians helping raise funds for Johnnys Speakeasy, 2923 Dexter Road. Performers include: Chris Buhalis Judy Banker Band Al Bettis Dave Boutette and Kristi Davis Annie and Rod Capps Band Rochelle Clark Shari Kane and Dave Steele Billy King and San and Emily Slomovits Misty Lyn and the Big Beautiful Peter Madcat Ruth The Sidemen The Dick Siegel Trio Rollie Tussing Trio The Whiskey Charmers Wilson Thicket The literally underground venue known as Johnnys Speakeasy has operated out of the basement of owner John Williams house for decades, hosting private concerts featuring mostly local musicians. With a barrel vault ceiling and stone walls, those whove been have praised its acoustics and atmosphere. Fire damage can be seen to the home that housed Johnnys Speakeasy at 2923 Dexter Road in Ann Arbor on Friday, Nov. 3, 2023.Jacob Hamilton | jhamilt3@mlive.com But a fire in September 2022 left the house significantly damaged and the speakeasys future uncertain. Williams, a retiree who has been staying at his second residence in northern Michigan, has been in a legal dispute with AAA Insurance, arguing the insurance payouts offered arent enough to rebuild. Fight to save Ann Arbor underground music venue leads to protest outside AAA office Supporters of the speakeasy protested outside the AAA office on Main Street in November. AAA maintained then it was being fair, paying what was owed under the policy in November 2022 and January 2023, and said additional payments were still possible, but the timeline of a resolution would be decided by the courts. Supporters of Johnny Williams protest outside AAAs Ann Arbor offices at 1100 S. Main St. in Ann Arbor on Friday, Nov. 3, 2023.Jacob Hamilton | jhamilt3@mlive.com The music community is now rallying around the cause in an effort to bring Johnny home, said Doug Selby, a local builder and organizer of the campaign to save the speakeasy, which now has a website: SaveTheSpeakeasy.com. The Jan. 9 show is expected to be the first in a series of benefit concerts with proceeds going toward Williams legal fund and restoration of the home above the speakeasy. General admission tickets are on sale through the Michigan Union Ticket Office for $25, while reserved and gold circle tickets that were $35 and $50 are already sold out. 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. WASHTENAW COUNTY, MI -- Officials are trying to determine the identity of the person killed in an overnight fire in the Manchester area, according to police. The Manchester Fire Department was called to the house in the 5600 block of Sharon Hollow Road in Sharon Township around 10:30 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 3, for a report of a structure fire., according to Chief William Scully. Read more: 1 killed when fire destroys Manchester-area house The two-story home, which was fully engulfed in fire when crews arrived, collapsed on itself within 15 minutes, Scully said. The house, which is believed to have been built in the mid-1800s, is a complete loss, police said. Due to the intensity of the fire, an interior fire attack could not be made, Scully told MLive in an email. The fire was brought under control around 11:30 p.m. During their investigation of the fire, a human body was located, however a positive identification could not be made, state police wrote in a release on Monday, Dec. 4. The person was dead in the rubble of the home, Scully said. No other injuries were reported. Neighbors told police they believed the home was occupied by one person who was home at the time. They had last spoken with the person around 6 p.m. on Sunday, they told police. A neighbor told an MLive reporter that a woman lived at the house. The body was taken to the University of Michigan for an autopsy and identification, police said. Anyone with information is asked to reach out to the Michigan State Police Brighton Post at 810-227-1051. Want more Ann Arbor-area news? Bookmark the local Ann Arbor news page, the Ypsilanti-area news page or sign up for the free 3@3 Ann Arbor daily newsletter. GRAND RAPIDS, MI Police on Monday, Dec. 4, are investigating the shooting death of a man on the citys Southeast Side. Grand Rapids police found the victim around 6 a.m. on the sidewalk at Hall Street SE near Marshall Avenue. The victim suffered an apparent gunshot wound, police said. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Major Case Team detectives are investigating. Police asked anyone with information to call investigators at 616-456-3380 or anonymously through Silent Observer at 616-774-2345 or www.silentobserver.org Read more: Current, former Grand Rapids leaders endorse David LaGrand in mayoral race Coffee shop overwhelmed by PETA complaints for reindeer display DeVos Place expansion, new convention hotel being re-examined following pandemic Pere Marquette beach among sites where Muskegon has planted hundreds of trees Michigan launches lifelong learning department with acting director MUSKEGON, MI -- A judge has ruled she will take testimony from Ottawa County commissioners to help determine if the county must pay a $4 million settlement to county Health Officer Adeline Hambley. Muskegon County Circuit Judge Jenny McNeill made the ruling Monday, Dec. 4, following a court hearing. Shell likely hear the testimony during an as yet unscheduled date for January. McNeill also ruled she would look privately at closed session meeting minutes from a Nov. 6 Ottawa County Board meeting. The meeting was the genesis for the alleged $4 million agreement. The minutes, collected by Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck, were turned over to McNeill following Mondays court hearing. Related: Ottawa County health officers attorney claims county board violated Open Meetings Act McNeills rulings are the latest in an ongoing saga over efforts by a majority faction of Ottawa County commissioners, members of the far-right group called Ottawa Impact, to force Hambleys departure. They announced plans to terminate her in January but the effort was stymied by a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by Hambley. Commissioners in late October held a termination hearing that led to several subsequent meetings -- including hours of closed sessions -- but with no vote on Hambleys status. After the Nov. 6 meeting, it was revealed that commissioners were in settlement talks with Hambley. Hambleys attorney, Sarah Howard, has said she believed a binding deal was reached that day, an agreement reached through back-and-forth email communication. But Ottawa County Corporate Counsel David Kallman said commissioners never voted on a $4 million settlement and, because of that, there was no deal. Instead, after returning from closed session, they voted to accept Kallmans recommendation on litigation and settlement activities. Kallman alleges his recommendation was only to continue settlement negotiations. Related: Dispute over Ottawa County health officer and $4 million settlement headed toward mediation Howard and Kallman argued their points before the Muskegon County judge on Monday. McNeill focused her questioning on the end-of-meeting vote by commissioners. What does that mean, accept counsels recommendations? McNeill asked. Kallman said he could not tell her specifically because it was made during closed session, but he said the recommendation was not to authorize a $4 million settlement. McNeill questioned why commissioners didnt simply vote to continue negotiations if that was the intent. After Mondays hearing, Howard said she was pleased with the judges rulings. I think the minutes are going to reveal that they wanted to agree to the $4 million package with all of the other terms, and thats what they intended when they left Nov. 6, she said. Commissioners expected to testify are Chair Joe Moss and commissioners Doug Zylstra, Roger Bergman, Jacob Bonnema. Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck also may testify. Kallman, also speaking after Mondays hearing, said he has no problem with the judge looking over the closed session minutes. Its going to bear out what weve been saying all along, he said. Separate from the court action, Ottawa County commissioners voted Nov. 28 to try to reach a settlement through mediation. Howard and Kallman are expected to select a mutually agreeable mediator for the purpose. Want more Grand Rapids-area news? Bookmark the local Grand Rapids news page or sign up for the free 3@3 Grand Rapids daily newsletter. OTTAWA COUNTY, MI A 55-year-old man is accused of giving a teen boy alcohol and then having inappropriate sexual contact with him after, police said. An investigation into James Jimmy Richard Beauchamp started in August when police received a report regarding an alleged sexual assault, Ottawa County sheriffs deputies said. OTTAWA COUNTY, MI A new proposal before the Ottawa County Board would allow any county employee to legally carry a gun while on the job. On Tuesday, Dec. 5, the Ottawa County Board of Commissioners Planning and Policy Committee will consider that policy change and another that would reimburse county employees for fees related to obtaining or renewing concealed pistol licenses (CPL). If approved, the proposals will move forward to the full board for final approval. The committee will also consider several other policy changes Tuesday, including those which would give Ottawa County Administrator John Gibbs and the board the ability to hire anyone to an open position without the need for further approvals. Under current policy, any county employee who possesses a firearm or other weapon while on duty or on county property and isnt authorized to do so can face disciplinary measures. The new proposed policy would allow any county employee to carry a firearm or other weapon while on duty or on county property so long as they are in compliance with state laws while doing so. In a memo to commissioners, Gibbs wrote the reason for the policy change is that county employees must comply with applicable laws regarding possession of weapons. In Michigan, residents over 18 years old who legally own a registered firearm can openly carry the weapon. Residents over 21 years old who have obtained a CPL can carry a concealed pistol that is legally owned by them and registered. Some locations where the state forbids open or concealed carry include day care centers, schools, bars, churches and more. Some county properties, like the Juvenile Justice Institute, may also fall under state laws which make carrying a firearm unlawful. Ottawa County officials said Monday they did not have a full list of county properties where state law restricts the ability to carry. The Ottawa County Board of Commissioners is led by the ultraconservative majority faction called Ottawa Impact. Board Chair Joe Moss, who also leads a political group called Ottawa Impact, can sometimes be seen with a pistol on his hip during board meetings at the countys Fillmore Complex in West Olive. Derek Melot, spokesperson for the Michigan Association of Counties, said it appears that Ottawa County would be the first county in the state to allow all employees to legally carry while on the job. Melot said there may be a county that has already done it but that the organization has no record of it. Melots organization represents, and works to support, county commissioners across all 83 counties in the state. Ottawa County would also appear to be the first county in the state to reimburse county employees for CPL fees, Melot said. Based on a quick review of our records, the Michigan Association of Counties is not familiar with any other Michigan county that has adopted a program with these details or has considered one, he said. Under that proposal, the county would reimburse CPL license fees related to registration, renewal or training for any county employee. The fees would only be reimbursed upon successful registration or renewal or successful completion of a CPL course. The county would not reimburse more than $200 for a CPL course. Gibbs wrote in a memo to commissioners that about 8% of West Michigan adults hold a CPL. If that ratio is the same for county employees, the annual cost of the new reimbursement policy would be about $2,000 a year, he said. Gibbs said the new CPL reimbursement policy would attract employees and help keep Ottawa County safe. Given the importance of self-defense and that the scientific evidence shows that increases in CPL adoption result in decreases in violent crime, this policy will benefit the community and encourage county employees to engage in responsible, legal firearm ownership, Gibbs wrote, without citing what study he was referring to. GRAND RAPIDS, MI Waseyabek Development Company, a tribal economic development group based in Grand Rapids, has purchased a Maryland-based software development company that specializes in serving the U.S. Department of Defense. Deidra Mitchell, president and CEO of Waseyabek, said her firm closed on its purchase of VES, LLC, on Nov. 30. UPDATE: This story was updated to reflect Merze Tate was the first Black student to graduate from WMU. KALAMAZOO, MI -- Come April, Western Michigan University will be adding an installation to honor the brick mason who oversaw construction of the universitys first building, Heritage Hall. SAGINAW, MI Imprisoned for torturing a dog, Justin A. Humpert did not learn to curb his violent tendencies. The storm brewing inside Humpert was likewise not reined in when he found love and got engaged while on parole. In the summer of 2021, Humperts simmering rage boiled over as he went into a frenzy, trying to kill his grandmother, his fiancee, and her children by crashing a vehicle into them. Not finished, he grabbed a hatchet and struck his 55-year-old mother, Joyce A. Humpert, with it numerous times, leaving her body in a rural ditch. SAGINAW TWP, MI Police are looking for a man who brazenly robbed a Saginaw Township grocery store. About 11:30 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 4, an unknown man entered the Kroger store at 4672 State St. His head covered by a blue hooded sweatshirt he was wearing, the man approached the customer service counter. The Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential, deemed MiLEAP, took its first steps Friday as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer launched the department with an acting director in place to lead it. The department will handle everything from child care licensing, formerly in the department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, to scholarship administration, which was previously handled by the Department of Treasury. Michigan Republican Party chair Kristina Karamo could be in trouble. Theres a growing likelihood Karamo could be removed as chair of the party less than a year into her tenure after a majority of the partys state committee skipped a Saturday meeting she convened to attend one organized by a group of discontented party leaders. With only a minority of the state committee present for the chairs virtual meeting a planned protest had prompted their in-person venue to cancel Karamos meeting couldnt achieve the quorum required to conduct business. Instead, a majority of the state committee gathered in Commerce Township without Karamo, who declined an invitation to attend their in-person alternative. It was a watershed moment for Karamos detractors, who say it shows theyve gained the momentum. This is the first time ever shes not in the majority, Warren Carpenter, an Oakland County Republican, said in an interview with MLive. The split is the result of long-simmering dissatisfaction with Karamos leadership as the party limps toward a crucial presidential election year in a highly-competitive state with meager fundraising and perpetual infighting. Karamo didnt return an interview request from MLive. State committee members have since filed a petition for a special meeting Dec. 27. They are convinced theyll gather with the votes necessary to remove Karamo from her role. Were going to be able to vacate her at our next meeting, Carpenter said. Shes gone. It still remains uncertain. Critics dont yet have enough petition signatures to force a removal vote, but Carpenter said state committee members are seeking an attempt to amend party bylaws to bring the threshold for removal from 75% down to 60%. If the state committee attendees at the Commerce meeting all back Karamos removal, it would place them only a few votes away from the support they need. Carpenter said theyll need 67 votes to amend the bylaws. Carpenter is the former 9th congressional district chair who previously resigned in protest of Karamos leadership. He had once been a major Karamo booster, fundraising for her campaign for secretary of state and donating to her bid to lead the party. Critics allege Karamo had only worked to further divide a party already riven by internal conflict, with little to show for her promises to revitalize a party that experienced historic losses in the 2022 election. Dive deeper: Michigans GOP is a doggone mess: inside a party torn by infighting and paranoia For Bree Moeggenberg, one night in late November represented a breaking point, pushing her from outspoken critic to actively working for Karamos removal. In one fell swoop, Karamo used her authority as chair to disband a nascent conflict resolution committee and removed one of her most prominent critics, Andy Sebolt, as chair of the policy committee. For many people, if you put your name out there, youre putting your head on the chopping block, and thats something that people didnt sign up for, Moeggenberg said. Theyre not interested in being attacked on that level. Financial documents provided to MLive show the party had just $35,000 in cash as of Aug. 10, and the most recent budgetary disclosures obtained by MLive painted an even more dire picture. By the end of October 2019, the year before the last presidential election, the Michigan Republican Party had raised a total of nearly $2 million into its federal account. In 2023, under Karamo, the party has brought in a little more than a quarter of that in total to all its accounts, about $582,000, according to financial documents provided to MLive. More than a quarter of the money was raised before Karamo became chair. Their state-level campaign account reportedly had less than $5,000 in it. In running for chair, she had outlined a plan to raise $30 million by the 2024 election. The party has had a net income of just $71,000 since Karamo became chair, according to budget documents. Carpenter alleged those documents have been doctored to paint a less dire picture of the partys finances. They are also reportedly close to defaulting on a line of credit with Comerica Bank, which has long been a crucial election-year resource for the party. The party hasnt made an interest payment on that debt since September, according to the budget documents. Karamos own worldview, heavy on conspiracy theories and Christian nationalism, has been placed front-and-center in the state partys agenda and operations since she took the helm. She believes globalists and the uniparty have conspired to hobble the efforts of true Republicans including prior Michigan Republican leaders. Learn more: Conspiracies and a Holocaust meme mark the dawn of Karamos Michigan Republican Party These people, they dont care about the well-being of the state, they dont care about the well being of the party. They care about power, Karamo said of false Republicans in a previous interview with MLive. Hassan Mehme, the coalitions vice-chair, will be chairing the special meeting later this month. He had previously spoken to MLive about his frustration toward his party, which he sees as leaning in on Christian nationalism under Karamo. The partys storied Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference featured a lineup stacked with fringe Christian thought leaders More: Tilt toward Christian nationalism vexes Muslim party leaders Bridge Michigan reported that in Karamos virtual meeting, Dan Hartman, the partys general counsel and a Karamo loyalist said, we signed up to fight Democrats, but we found out that our problem is that the enemy is within. Its represented a constant frustration for activists like Moeggenberg, who consider themselves deeply conservative but recognize a need to build diverse coalitions to win elections. If you dont agree with (Karamo), youre a demonizer or youre a Democrat, Moeggenberg said. We need to be able to link arms with everybody and come to that common ground, and Kristina is not capable of coming to common ground. LAS VEGAS, NV Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessels office has asked a federal judge to reject an attempt by former Edenville Dam owner Lee Mueller to shield himself from a nearly $120 million judgment through bankruptcy protection. On Nov. 16, Nessels office motioned for dismissal of Muellers Chapter 13 case in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Nevada, calling the former dam owners filing a bad faith effort to avoid paying judgments following the 2020 Michigan flooding disaster. Mueller, of Las Vegas, was ordered to pay $119,825,000 in natural resource damages by a federal judge in Michigan, who issued a default judgment against the former Boyce Hydro owner on Nov. 27 after ruling in February he was personally liable for the death of fish and freshwater mussels during the flood. In the states motion in Nevada, assistant attorney general Nathan Gambill called Mueller one of the worst environmental wrongdoers in Michigan history. His bankruptcy filings do not reflect it, but Mr. Muellers sole purpose in pursuing bankruptcy relief is to discharge court judgments, Gambill wrote. A spokesperson for Nessels office said Michigan seeks to collect on the Nov. 27 judgment to the fullest extent permitted by law and use the money for restorative purposes. The people of Edenville and nearby areas deserve to see accountability come to the man who devastated their communities, and as their representatives on this case we will use every available tool to secure these dollars from Mueller, said Nessel spokesperson Danny Wimmer. Messages seeking comment through Muellers bankruptcy attorney were not returned. According to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the May 2020 failure of the Edenville Dam in Midland County and resulting flood caused more than $21 million in damage to state fisheries, and at least $90 million in damage to an ecosystem for freshwater mussels. The judgment does not account for property damage caused by the dam failure, which U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney ruled resulted from Muellers neglect of structural improvements which experts say likely could have prevented the disaster. Mueller filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy in September amid an increasing stack of court rulings against him and the multiple business entities and trusts through which he exercised unilateral control over Boyce Hydro, say state attorneys. Mueller put two of those Boyce Hydro entities into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020. Liquidating trustee in the Chapter 11 case, Scott Wolfson, did not respond to a request for comment, but in court filings, has suggested the states pursuit of rulings against Mueller is gamesmanship to bolster its case against flood victims who are suing state regulators, claiming their decision-making contributed to flood damage at their properties. The lawsuits claim the state shares blame for the disaster after allowing Boyce Hydro to raise water levels behind the dam. In September, the state Court of Appeals refused to dismiss the case and Nessels office has asked the Michigan Supreme Court to review that decision. In Nevada, the bankruptcy trustee appointed to Muellers Chapter 13 has twice recommended his case be dismissed, both in October and November. In filings, trustee Kathleen Leavitt asserts that Muellers debt reorganization and repayment plan is unfeasible due to his lack of cooperation and lack of regular income. In its dismissal motion, Nessels office argues that Mueller is ineligible for Chapter 13 because his total debt exceeds a $2.75 million limit and he was ruled liable for it before filing. Mueller listed $13,650 in debt in his filing, and debt owed to the state of Michigan as unknown. According to the states motion, Mueller admitted to owing at least $5 million when he agreed to pay that amount during negotiations to resolve similar natural resources litigation in Ingham County Circuit Court, provided that the judgment only be collectable against his property in Michigan. The state would not agree to those terms. In March, Ingham Judge Wanda Stokes ruled that Mueller was personally liable for natural resource damages, although a final $5 million judgment against him was not handed down until October. Gambill called Mueller the absentee landowner of critical infrastructure in Michigan who badly mismanaged the Edenville Dam during his ownership by putting money into frivolous profit-making efforts rather than fix critical weaknesses he personally identified. His bankruptcy filing is inaccurate and inequitable. It has been more than three years since heavy rain swelled Wixom Lake, causing a breach at Edenville on May 19, 2020 that overtopped the Sanford Dam and sent floodwaters into the village of Sanford, downtown Midland and beyond. The resulting 500-year flood caused more than $200 million in property damage and forced the evacuation of 10,000 people downstream of the impoundment at the confluence of the Tobacco and Tittabawassee rivers. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) asked experts to study what happened at the Edenville and Sanford dams after the flooding disaster. The 2022 report said failure was foreseeable and preventable but could not be attributed to any one individual, group or organization. The dam failed by static liquefaction, a rare sudden loss of soil strength more commonly associated with mining wastewater dams. In 2021, FERC fined Boyce Hydro $15 million for failing to perform important safety work after the disaster. The agency revoked Boyces license to generate power at Edenville in 2018, citing Muellers repeated failure to address safety concerns. The Four Lakes Task Force, which acquired the Boyce dams after the flood, is in the middle of a $350 million project to rebuild the structures and restore Wixom and Sanford lakes. Related stories: Judge orders stalled Edenville flood lawsuits to proceed Edenville Dam owner ignored structural flaws for years Edenville Dam owner hid evidence of vulnerability Judge says dam owner, attorneys lied about flood Tax plan approved for Wixom & Sanford lakes rebuild 30-year plan would restore Wixom, Sanford lakes Ghanaian Dancehall artiste Shatta Wale says he sees his music as a platform to inspire the youth and preach the word of God. At his performance at the Guinness Accravaganza on Saturday, December 2, Shatta Wale opened up about his spiritual faith which goes beyond making hit songs. "I am just a servant of God, using my music as a way to preach and let people know that God is King of all Kings," the dancehall star told the energetic crowd. He encouraged fans to rely on God rather than traditional healers or 'mallams' who often exploit people for money. "Watch God because God will watch over you," Shatta Wale advised. Beyond his own music, Shatta Wale hopes to mentor young talents in Ghana. "Next year, I want to have a music workshop to not only teach about music, but how to discover yourself and become who you want to be rather than try to be like someone else," he said. This comes after A Rocha Ghana recently urged the musician to use his influence to champion Green innovation and sustainable jobs for the countrys youth. The East African Community (EAC) regional force began its withdrawal from the Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday morning after Kinshasa deemed it ineffective and refused to renew its mandate. The regional bloc first deployed troops in the violence-plagued region in November last year after the resurgence of the M23 rebel group. DRC authorities at the time invited the EAC to deploy its forces to free the areas taken by the rebels. But the future of the deployment was thrown into doubt after DR Congo President Felix Tshisekedi accused the force of cohabiting with the rebels rather than forcing them to lay down arms. Following a summit on 25 November, the EAC announced that the DRC "would not renew the mandate of the regional force beyond 8 December 2023". A first group of around 100 Kenyan soldiers from the regional force -- which also includes Ugandan, Burundian and South Sudanese soldiers -- left from Goma airport bound for Nairobi, according to a spokesman for the force on the ground who did not provide more detail on further withdrawals. The East African Community regional force was first deployed last year after the resurgence of the M23 rebel group. By Alexis HUGUET (AFP) AFP journalists saw their plane taking off shortly after 05:00 am (03:00 GMT). But fighting continues between the M23 group and the DRC army, supported by militia who call themselves "patriots". On 24 October, a Kenyan soldier from the regional force was killed by shrapnel. December elections Numerous armed groups and other militias have been active for three decades in the east of the DRC, a legacy of the regional wars that broke out during the 1990s and 2000s. The UN stabilisation mission to the DRC, MONUSCO, has been present in the country since 1999, in addition to the EAC's force. A first group of around 100 Kenyan soldiers from the East African Community regional force board a plane to leave the DRC. By Alexis HUGUET (AFP) But it has also been accused of ineffectiveness, with Kinshasa calling for its "accelerated" departure from January 2024. MONUSCO comprises around 14,000 peacekeepers, deployed almost exclusively in the east of the country. General elections are scheduled for 20 December in the DRC, a vast country of around 100 million inhabitants. President Felix Tshisekedi, in power since 2019, is standing for a second five-year term. But due to the ongoing fighting against M23, the elections will not be able to take place in two territories in eastern DRC's North Kivu province. Tshisekedi is counting on security forces from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), to which the DRC also belongs, to replace the EAC. But the creation of a SADC force, which has been mooted since May, has so far failed to materialise. Since the end of 2022, around a thousand former European soldiers, presented by Kinshasa as "instructors" and split between two private companies, have also been present in North Kivu. DRC authorities also claim that the national army is in the process of building up its strength, with the aim of defending the territory itself and protecting the country from its neighbours. Many people have questioned why I live in Europe, but interested in fighting against Akufo Addo's regime. In my opinion, this is a pointless question because one need not be a resident of one's country to be interested in the advancement of one's nation. Since your birthplace determines your ancestry, I believe that Ghana must develop into a strong nation so that I can one day return and enjoy my homeland. I will fight Akufo Addo because he is killing my country via corruption, incompetence, and laziness. Since Ghana gained independence on March 6, 1957, no Ghanaian leader, under any democratic government, has ruined Ghana to the extent that Akufo Addo's criminal family, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta, and the other politicians of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) have supported all of this government's bad policies and criminal activities to the detriment of the impoverished people. Despite this, the irrational Akufo Addo wouldnt like to be criticized by any unhappy Ghanaian. One of the things that have caused the country to break apart so quickly is the fear that many people have for Akufo Addo, preventing them from fighting for Ghana. If a large number of Ghanaian journalists had been true to their craft and refused to allow Akufo Addo's financial power to influence them, the country's catastrophe would not have been in such dire straits. This is the reason I dont like the imbecile Paul Adom-Otchere for defending the immoralities of this regime to the point of the country's collapse. I am aware that not all NPP politicians are ignorant; most of them are aware that President Akufo Addo is to blame for the economic catastrophe and calamity that Ghana has experienced. However, they find it difficult to express their emotions and live in regret and pain because if they criticize their party, they will not only be called traitors but will also be fired by the despotic leader who wants all NPP politicians to support his widespread corruption and incompetence. In 2020, Akufo Addo was the beneficiary of a rigged election, after his biggest failure, without any shame, he has since assured Ghanaians that his vice president will come to improve the situation in 2024. I mean the failed vice president, Mahamudu Bawumia and I don't know how this man will become president because he can't even win by cheating, and I know that no rational person will vote for him. However, the unfortunate thing that transpired was that during the 2020 presidential and parliamentary elections, eight lives, three of them minors, were lost. These include Abdallah Ayarek, 18, Zakaria Samira, 12, Musah Fuseini, 14, Botwe Tackie, 16, Abdallah Ayarek, 18, Tajudeen Mohammed, 41, Dompreh Emmanuel, 36, and Abass Ibrahim, whose age was not disclosed, while fifteen other voters also suffered injuries of varying degrees, primarily from bullets. The corrupt Supreme Court judges appointed by the president provided a shield for Akufo Addo, his vice president, Mahamudu Bawumia, and the head of the Electoral Commission, Jean Mensa. The perpetrators enjoyed their crimes with impunity, but this will not happen again. The victims' families had the opportunity to take the case to the International Criminal Court for those responsible to face criminal charges there but did not know how to proceed. The International Criminal Court (ICC) acknowledges that there have likely been election-related deaths in Ghana, but the authority cant do anything about it or make arrests for the offenders to be prosecuted until those involved families take the proper action. I will, therefore; teach the families of victims of such circumstances how to write a letter to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, demanding the arrest of any politician or official of the Electoral Commission who causes election violence through election malpractices or rigging, as I have declared myself to be a voice for the voiceless in Ghana. Here's an example: A plea for the International Criminal Court to investigate the eight homicidal fatalities that occurred in Ghana during the elections in December 2020 so that the perpetrators might be held legally accountable. The International Criminal Court Official address Oude Waalsdorperweg 10 2597 AK, The Hague The Netherlands (Holland) Tel. + 31 (0)70 515 8515 Fax +31 (0)70 515 8555 Postal address Po Box 19519 2500 CM, The Hague The Netherlands (Holland) Dear Prosecutor I, Joel Savage, a journalist and health columnist located in Belgium, would like to inform you about the illegal killings of eight innocent persons by the forces of Ghanaian President Nana Akufo Addo during the 2020 elections. Following the murders, the ruling party, the NPP, called the victims criminals and did not provide the victims' families with any justice. Those who carried out the murders have enjoyed their crimes without consequence ever since. As the Prosecutor of the world's permanent International Criminal Court (ICC), a court of last resort for victims of the most serious crimes, your mandate allows you the opportunity to not only investigate international crimes but also to monitor the situation investigated by your office and to perform an early warning function, therefore; I would like to request your immediate investigation into the killings and bring those responsible to face the wrath of the real law at The Hague. The victims are Zakaria Samira, 12, Musah Fuseini, 14 Botwe Tackie, 16, Abdallah Ayarek, 18; Tajudeen Mohammed, 41, Dompreh Emmanuel, 36, and Abass Ibrahim whose age was not stated, including three minors. Since you have already put a lot of effort into bringing justice to the families of those killed in political turmoil throughout the world, including Africa, I will be grateful for your efforts to look into the political killings to provide some solace to the victims' families. Yours truly, Joel Savage The complaint's address must be displayed underneath. Readers should take note of this: 2023: The International Criminal Court's judges are chosen and elected to assume their official responsibilities. The twenty-second session of the Assembly of States Parties, which will take place at the United Nations in New York from December 414, 2023, is set to include the election of six judges. As such, while drafting a letter of complaint, it is necessary to include the names of the judges the complaint will be directed to. In conclusion, any criminal complaint letter sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague needs to be sent via a reputable postal company, such as DHL, FedEx - Express, UPS, etc., if they have offices in Ghana regardless of the cost. This is necessary to ensure that the letter reaches the appropriate judges in The Hague, Holland, safely. It might take a little longer because the ICC receives a lot of these letters but be assured that they will reply to your request. French prosecutors have opened an investigation into a "terrorist plot" after a man known to the authorities as a radical Islamist with mental health troubles stabbed a tourist to death and wounded two other people in central Paris at the weekend before being arrested. The attack around 9:00 pm (2000 GMT) Saturday near the Eiffel Tower came as France is at its highest alert level against the background of the war between Israel and Hamas. Terrorism prosecutors told AFP on Sunday they were investigating the knife and hammer attacker, identified as Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a French national born in 1997 to Iranian parents. Arrested at the scene, he is suspected of murder and attempted murder "in connection with a terrorist plot". A 23-year-old man, identified by a judicial source as a German-Filipino citizen, died in the attack, though a taxi driver intervened to keep the attacker away from his wife. Patrick Pelloux, an emergency doctor on duty at the time of the attack, said the couple were both nurses, adding that the woman was severely shocked but unhurt. A 66-year-old British citizen and a 60-year-old French national were wounded in the attack. Health Minister Aurelien Rousseau told broadcaster France 3 that the wounded victims suffered only "superficial (physical) traumas, but of course psychological traumas that will be enormous". Prosecutors announced a press conference for 7:30 pm on Sunday to give updates on the investigation. Three people "close to" Rajabpour-Miyandoab were being held in custody on Sunday afternoon, prosecutors said. Meanwhile government leaders including Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne and Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin were to hold a security meeting. "We will not give in to terrorism," Borne wrote on X, while President Emmanuel Macron offered his condolences to the family of the man killed. 'Afghanistan and Palestine' Rajabpour-Miyandoab, known to authorities for extremism, shouted "Allahu Akbar" (Arabic for "God is greatest") as he struck on Saturday, Darmanin said at the scene by Bir Hakeim bridge over the River Seine. The suspect, who lived with his parents in the Essonne region south of Paris, told police he could not stand Muslims being killed in "Afghanistan and Palestine" and accused France of being "an accomplice to what Israel is doing" in the Gaza Strip, Darmanin added. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on X that he was "devastated" by the attack, saying that "our thoughts are with the wounded, their families and friends". His Interior Minister Nancy Faeser had earlier warned that "the war in Gaza after Hamas' terrorist act (of 7 October) has worsened the threat," saying that "the threat of Islamist terrorism is acute and serious". Police and security sources confirmed the attacker had claimed responsibility in a social media video as he struck, speaking about "current events, the government (and) the murder of innocent Muslims". Investigators would scrutinise his medical history, a security source told AFP, saying the attacker was "very unstable and easily influenced". Rajabpour-Miyandoab was "being monitored in a way that did not mean he was being hospitalised, he was supposed to follow a course of treatment" for his mental health issues, said Rousseau, the health minister. "As often in these cases, there's a mixture of an ideology, an easily influenced person and, unfortunately, psychiatry," he added. Darmanin said the man had previously been sentenced in 2016 to four years in prison for planning another attack in the Paris business district of La Defense, which he failed to carry out. (AFP) President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has congratulated the leadership and entire members of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for the successful conduct of the party's parliamentary primaries in orphan constituencies on Saturday. I extend warm congratulations to the National, Regional, Constituency, Electoral Area and Polling Station Officers, and, indeed, the entire membership of the New Patriotic Party for the conduct of free, fair, transparent, and credible parliamentary primaries in orphan constituencies during the weekend of Saturday, 2nd December 2023, he said in a statement on Sunday. This completes the penultimate stage of the Party's preparations for the all-important contest of 7th December 2024, and we have, once again, expressed our deep attachment and commitment to the democratic values, which have been hallmarks of our Party's great tradition, he said. The President said despite the challenges confronting the nation, the party had demonstrated, with its record in office, that we are the Party that can bring progress and prosperity to all parts of our country. So, I urge all winners to be magnanimous in their celebrations and work hard to bring onboard those who were not successful. Through this, we shall create the united, formidable front that, under the leadership of our new, worthy presidential candidate, Alhaji Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, will enable us to go into the difficult 2024 elections with quiet confidence, and, with the help of Almighty God, Break the Eight, which is the fervent wish of all NPP members, and, indeed, of all well-meaning Ghanaians, he stated. The party on Saturday went to the polls to elect parliamentary candidates for the 2024 general election in constituencies where the party has no members of parliament, also referred to as orphan constituencies. The elections took place in 111 constituencies across the 16 regions with a total of 321 aspirants vying for the single slot in the constituencies where the elections were held. GNA Yemen's Houthis claim responsibility for attacking 2 "Israeli ships" in Red Sea Xinhua) 15:02, December 04, 2023 ADEN, Yemen, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- Yemen's Houthi rebel group on Sunday claimed responsibility for attacking two "Israeli ships" off Yemen's Red Sea coast near the strategic Bab el-Mandeb Strait earlier in the day. According to a statement released by the group's military spokesman Yahya Sarea, the rebel forces carried out drone and naval missile attacks at two "Israeli ships" after both ships ignored warning messages from Houthi-controlled naval forces. He vowed that the Houthi forces would continue hampering Israeli ships from sailing in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea until Israeli military aggression against the Gaza Strip ceases. Earlier on Sunday, a Yemeni coast guard official told Xinhua that a missile had struck a Bahamian-flagged commercial ship 34 nautical miles off the coast of Mocha, a Yemeni port city in the Red Sea, while sailing in international waters near Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The official confirmed the vessel sustained damage, but the extent was unknown. The Houthis have previously threatened to target Israeli ships in the Red Sea in retaliation for the ongoing conflict in Gaza that erupted on Oct. 7 between Israel and the Gaza-ruling Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). On Nov. 19, the Houthis seized a vessel they claimed was an "Israeli ship" near Bab el-Mandeb, holding 52 sailors of different nationalities hostage. The strikes on the commercial ship near the strategic maritime route of Bab el-Mandeb could potentially escalate tensions and threaten international shipping in the region. Since the Yemeni civil war erupted in late 2014, the Houthi militia has taken control of much of Yemen's north, including the strategic Red Sea port city of Hodeidah. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) First-time candidate Akosua Manu has expressed gratitude to delegates after being elected as the New Patriotic Party's parliamentary candidate for Adentan. In a post on social media following her victory, Manu said: "I asked for your support and your trust. You have offered me more than enough." Akosua Manu, popularly known as Kozie, polled 814 votes to defeat her closest contender Kwasi Obeng Fosu who garnered 638 votes in the keenly contested election. The Deputy CEO of the Ghana National Youth Authority will represent the NPP in the 2024 general election as the party's candidate for the Adentan seat. In her appreciation message, Manu said she was encouraged by the campaign of her contenders and their efforts. She called for unity in the party going forward. "I urge all to be magnanimous in victory so we can focus on uniting the party ahead of 2024," the quote reads. Akosua Manu's victory puts her in pole position to retain the seat for the NPP, which is currently being held by the NDCs incumbent MP Mohammed Adamu Ramadan. 2023 presidential candidate Peter Obi has slammed President Bola Tinubu for matching China's delegation of 1411 members at COP28 in Dubai. In a social media post, Obi noted: "In a twist of sad irony, let me congratulate the giant of Africa, Nigeria, for matching the great China, with the same number of contingents at the ongoing COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates." He pointed out that while China has an annual budget of $4 trillion and spends $2,860 per capita, Nigeria's budget is $33 billion representing just $165 per citizen. Obi also highlighted that Nigeria has a lower human development index than China despite having a smaller population. The Labour Party candidate criticized the Nigerian delegation, saying "Most of them hardly understand or have anything to do with Climate Change." He argued this was wasteful given Nigeria's economic downturn which is currently leaving many in extreme poverty. This huge contingent is out at public expense at a time when most Nigerians can hardly afford food and basic needs as a result of economic hardship, he wrote. Obi called for a shift toward more productive spending that focuses on development instead of "ceremony and showmanship." If Bawumia could not deliver it as vice president, then what can he give Ghana as president? I have been writing about Bawumia's lies and unfulfilled promises for a while now because Ghana is in danger of making the same mistake again by electing Bawumia as president, just as they did with Akufo Addo, who has destroyed the nation with no way to turn things around. The video "30 failed promises of Mahamudu Bawumia," presented by "One Hour With Munufie," caught my attention this past weekend. I have stated many times that Ghanaians do not have to accept anything that developed nations will not stand for just because Ghana is an African country. A developing nation like Ghana needs to take elections seriously to choose leaders who are dedicated to their tasks. Presented by "One Hour With Munifie How could a nation possess so many resources and yet have such a dysfunctional economy? This indicates that the person in charge lacks mental strength and leadership skills, as evidenced by his deceit to enter politics to steal from public coffers and rename institutions that have already been established to elevate his family whom he believes Ghanaians have forgotten, into the annals of history. Just one broken promise by a politician will immediately incite a protest demanding the resignation of that politician in Europe, the United States of America, and Asia, especially Japan. This has frequently occurred in Britain, Japan, and Australia; however, in Ghana, Bawumia has lied so much that it has damaged his reputation, yet he is unable to quit since he is addicted to lying. While some NPP politicians want the vice president, Mahamudu Bawumia, to be the nation's leader, this is solely out of greed and selfishness to keep the party alive. They don't care about the suffering of the people; if they did, the party would not be in favor of the numerous taxes the government has imposed on Ghanaians without jobs, even though they have accused Mahama of taxing the populace excessively. Bawumia told Ghanaians in December 2019 that "Digitization Will Be Disruptive to Corruption." As a result, the NPP government has decided to combat corruption using a variety of strategies, such as increasing the use of technology and constructing anti-corruption institutions. Ultimately, the NPP's administration seems to be the most corrupt, even more so than the numerous accusations of corruption leveled against John Mahama. It is Bawumia's responsibility as an economist to assess the effects of debt on an economy, yet as of the end of 2020, Ghana's public debt was at a staggering 291,6 billion, or 76.1% of the country's GDP. Why should someone like that be elected president? Ghana is likewise experiencing a significant issue related to African politics. The damage the NPP has caused to Ghanas economy and infrastructure is enough. I hope Ghanaians will watch the video, and think about who they would like to see as president. President Nana Akufo-Addo has touted his governing New Patriotic Party's developmental record despite current challenges. He asserted that the ruling party remains the best party to bring progress to Ghana. In a congratulatory message to the NPP following recent primaries, Akufo-Addo stated: "Despite the challenges confronting the nation, we have demonstrated, with our record in office, that we are the Party that can bring progress and prosperity to all parts of our country." The President's comments came after the party held the selection of candidates for 'orphan constituencies' where its does not have sitting MPs. Akufo-Addo extended "warm congratulations" to NPP officers for conducting "free, fair, transparent and credible" primaries. As the party eyes retaining power in 2024, the President urged unity and called on the winners to work with defeated contenders. He expressed confidence that under Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia as flagbearer, the NPP "shall create the united, formidable front" needed to "Break the Eight" - defeat the opposition NDC for a third consecutive term. For nearly three decades, the chaotic, overcrowded Owino secondhand market in Uganda's capital has been the cornerstone of Hadija Nakimuli's life, helping the widowed shopkeeper build a house and raise 12 children. But a potential government ban on the sale of used clothing threatens to sever this crucial lifeline for Nakimuli and tens of thousands of vendors like her. "Where is our future if they stop secondhand clothes?" the 62-year-old asked, rummaging through her stash of underwear, dresses, shoes and bags. Established in 1971, the sprawling market employs some 80,000 people, 70 percent of them women, according to Kampala city authorities. "Other than students, my clients include ministers (and) members of parliament who call me to deliver clothes to their air-conditioned offices," said Joseph Barimugaya, whose stall stocks menswear. A secondhand Pierre Cardin blazer costs a fraction of the price of a new one. By BADRU KATUMBA (AFP) "This trade should not be tampered with. Everyone benefits, including the government, which gets taxes," the father of four told AFP. Every day, hundreds of customers squeeze through the narrow alleys separating the makeshift wooden stalls, eager to grab a bargain. Here, a secondhand Pierre Cardin blazer goes for 40,000 Ugandan shillings ($11), a fraction of the price of a new one. "As a teacher I earn less than 500,000 Ugandan shillings. If I am to buy a new garment it means I would spend all my salary on clothing," Robert Twimukye, 27, told AFP while shopping at Owino on a Saturday afternoon. He is not alone. Although there are no official figures available, the Uganda Dealers in Used Clothings and Shoes Association estimates that 16 million people -- one in three Ugandans -- wear used clothing. 'Clothes from dead people' "Everyone is into secondhand clothes. Only few people in Uganda can afford new clothes," said Allan Zavuga, retail manager of Think Twice, which employs 30 staff across three branches in the country. East Africa imports around an eighth of the world's used clothing. By BADRU KATUMBA (AFP) "Banning it in Uganda is doing a disservice to the population and also the country at large," he said, pointing out the environmental cost of producing new clothing instead of reusing items. East Africa imports about an eighth of the world's used clothing, providing jobs for some 355,000 people who earn $230 million a year, according to a 2017 study by the US government's aid agency, USAID. But the sector has also been a longstanding sore point for governments in Africa, who say the cast-offs harm the domestic textile industry. "These clothes are from the dead in a foreign country. When a white (person) dies, the clothes are sent to Africa," President Yoweri Museveni said in August this year. "I have declared war on secondhand clothes to promote African wear," he said. The used clothing sector has been a long-standing issue for African governments. By BADRU KATUMBA (AFP) In an interview with AFP, Uganda's state minister for trade, David Bahati, said it was a question of "dignity". If the proposed ban goes ahead, "we will be able to replace these second hand clothes", he added. "It cannot be done in one day but we can do it in a gradual manner," Bahati said. The government is examining the issue with a view to potentially implementing the ban in January. "The government is ready to give investors incentives... such as tax holidays to ensure we process our cotton into new garments to cover the market demands." Trade row Uganda has been here before. In 2016, Museveni sought to ban used clothing as part of an East African initiative to develop domestic industries, but faced significant opposition by the Kampala City Traders Association. Diplomatic considerations also played a part. In 2016, Uganda sought to ban used clothing to develop domestic industry. By BADRU KATUMBA (AFP) Initially, the East African Community regional bloc put up a united front. But the alliance cracked after Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda balked at the prospect of retaliatory loss of duty-free access to US markets. In the end, Rwanda decided to go it alone and imposed steep taxes on used clothing in 2016, leading to a sharp drop in imports and an increase in the smuggling of secondhand goods to meet demand. Uganda is proposing to ban secondhand clothes in January next year. By BADRU KATUMBA (AFP) Two years later, the US suspended duty-free benefits for apparel from Rwanda in a tit-for-tat move. At Owino, geopolitics is far from the minds of shoppers and sellers alike. "Who did the government consult (before deciding) to ban secondhand?" second-generation shopkeeper Harriet Musoke Kyambadde asked, her voice trembling with indignation. "Banning this business will be sending me into abject poverty," the mother of three told AFP, throwing her hands in the air. burs-gm/amu/ho/gil - Source: 04.12.2023 LISTEN African countries can simultaneously address climate change and improve public health by reducing air pollution. In many cases these actions also have other societal, economic, environment or health benefits . Addressing these together is challenging because they are often the responsibility of different government departments. International climate change, health and development processes are often also separate discussions. However, for the first time, this year at COP28, a whole day will be devoted to discussing the linkages between climate change and health. In September 2023, the African Union, United Nations Environment Programme, Climate and Clean Air Coalition and Stockholm Environment Institute released the technical report behind the Integrated Assessment of Air Pollution and Climate Change for Sustainable Development in Africa at the African Climate Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. The report identified actions that could be taken across Africa in the short, medium and long term to simultaneously address climate change and improve public health. The actions reduce exposure to toxic air pollution and achieve other development priorities outlined in the African Union's Agenda 2063 the Africa We Want. It builds on strong evidence that air pollution is a leading health risk; that the causes of air pollution strongly overlap with those of climate change; and that there are readily available policies and measures that simultaneously benefit each issue. We served as co-chairs, steering committee members and coordinators of the integrated assessment. We brought together expertise in climate change, air pollution, public health, energy and agriculture. We joined over 100 authors from 17 African countries, and representatives from climate change ministries in 35 countries, to produce the report. At its heart, the report assesses how climate actions could be implemented across Africa, and the benefits of doing so. It shows that, through 37 priority actions, hundreds of thousands of premature deaths could be avoided yearly due to improved air quality. This will also reduce Africa's climate change contribution. The report highlights five key reasons why these actions should be a priority: 1) adverse impact of air pollution on health across Africa 2) projected increases in emissions without intervention 3) multiple benefits from their implementation 4) reduced climate impacts in Africa 5) demonstrated implementation in Africa. Air pollution is causing premature deaths A lack of action to check key emission sources is robbing Africans of their health. Africa is responsible for about 4% of global carbon dioxide emissions causing climate change. The resultant air pollution has a strong impact on public health. In 2019, air pollution caused 1.1 million premature deaths on the continent. Deaths mainly occurred from cooking with wood and charcoal ( almost 700,000 premature deaths ), and poor outdoor air quality ( almost 400,000 premature deaths ). Air pollution particularly affects children. About 56% of global air pollution-linked infant deaths occur in Africa ( 383,000 infant deaths ). Sources of air pollution and emissions that cause climate change strongly overlap in Africa. They include fuels used for cooking, transportation, power generation and industries, agriculture, and waste management. Inaction will worsen impact of climate change Without action, Africa's climate change contribution could triple by 2063. Health and climate change impacts could worsen because the impact of air pollution on health would more than double. Without intervention, projected economic development, population and urbanisation would substantially increase fuel and electricity consumption and more than triple demand for transportation, food, and waste generation. Five focal areas for 37 climate actions Hundreds of thousands of premature deaths every year could be avoided through climate action in Africa. The assessment identified 37 specific actions across five areas that could check climate change and reduce air pollution. The five areas are transport residential energy and industry agriculture waste. If all 37 actions were to be implemented, the most health-damaging air pollutant emissions could be reduced by 35% by 2030, and 80% by 2063. This would save the lives of 180,000 people who could have died prematurely yearly by 2030, and 800,000 by 2063. The most effective actions include: use of clean cooking fuels and technologies, especially transition to electricity as a primary source of cooking fuel emission controls for vehicles and increased use of electric vehicles renewable electricity deployment and energy efficiency measures in industry and businesses transforming management practices in agriculture and reduced open burning of crop residues best waste management practices, including avoiding open waste burning, and reducing waste generation. The same 37 actions can reduce Africa's contribution to climate change by 20% by 2030, and by 60% by 2063. Climate action can check rainfall and temperature extremes Climate change impacts that Africa will suffer are primarily determined by the future emission pathways of other continents that emit the majority of greenhouse gas emissions. It is therefore imperative for health protection in Africa that other regions rapidly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. However, the assessment shows that implementing the 37 actions could limit the negative effects of regional climate change on rainfall and temperature. This is especially in the Sahel region. This could substantially reduce land degradation and safeguard food production. Scaling climate action Action is being taken, but needs to be rapidly scaled up. The assessment emphasises that all the recommended actions are currently being implemented in Africa. Scaling up across Africa requires a well-funded and resourced continent-wide programme on clean air. The report recommends that such a programme should cover development and enforcement of national regulations, regional standards, and transparent monitoring of progress. The African Ministerial Conference on the Environment has urged that the Clean Air Programme should be coordinated by strong country-led initiatives, cascaded to the regional economic communities and higher levels of policy. COP28 can be used to accelerate the recommendations from the report for sustainable development in Africa. Additional commitment to implement and monitor these measures, and new finance and investment to achieve scale, would help ensure that climate change actions benefit people across the continent. Brian Mantlana, climate change lead at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa, and Caroline Tagwireyi, consultant, Ampelos International Consultancy, Harare, Zimbabwe, contributed to this article. Chris Malley receives funding from United Nations Environment Programme-convened Climate and Clean Air Coalition. Alice Akinyi Kaudia receives funding from United Nations Environment Programme-convened Climate and Clean Air Coalition. Andriannah Mbandi receives funding from the United Nations Environment Programme-convened Climate and Clean Air Coalition. Kevin Hicks receives funding from the United Nations Environment Programme - convened Climate and Clean Air Coalition. Philip Osano receives funding from the United Nations Environment Programme - convened Climate and Clean Air Coalition Youba Sokona receives funding from the United Nations Environment Programme-convened Climate and Clean Air Coalition. By Chris Malley, Research Fellow, Stockholm Environment Institute York Centre, University of York And Alice Akinyi Kaudia, Associate Lecturer, University of Nairobi And Andriannah Mbandi, Lecturer, South Eastern Kenya University And Kevin Hicks, Senior Research Fellow, University of York And Philip Osano, Research Fellow, Stockholm Environment Institute And Youba Sokona, Vice-president du GIEC et professeur honoraire, UCL Ghana is all set to host the 2023 United Nations (UN) Peacekeeping Ministerial Conference this week. The two-day meeting is slated for Tuesday, December 5, and Wednesday, December 6, 2023. The decision by the global body to bring the Conference to Ghana is not only significant but historic in the sense that it marks the first time the event is going to be hosted on the African continent. At a Ministers Press Briefing on Sunday, December 3, Ghanas Minister of Defence, Hon. Dominic Nitiwul assured the world that the country is ready to host the 2023 United Nations UN Peacekeeping Ministerial Conference. He said Ghana is taking advantage of the privilege and will host an excellent conference to make Africa proud. Ghana, currently serving as the chair of the UN Special Committee on Peacekeeping, will welcome Foreign and Defense Ministers, Heads of International Organizations, Academia, Social Partners, Civil Society Organizations, and Journalists from across the globe. Briefing the press on the conference, the Defense Minister said the decision by the UN to move its Peacekeeping Ministerial Conference to Accra is a testament to Ghana's growing role in international peacekeeping efforts. With an expected attendance of 80 to 100 member states and over 600 registered delegates, the conference will delve into critical themes such as the role of women in peacekeeping, the protection of civilians, the mental health of peacekeepers, safety and security, and strategic communications. The two-day event will kick off with a welcome reception at the Accra International Conference Centre, featuring side meetings on "women in peacekeeping" and "environmental aspects of peacekeeping," organised in collaboration with Sweden and the US, respectively. On the second day, His Excellency the Vice President of the Republic, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia will address the main conference, followed by panel sessions on the selected themes. A digital exhibition highlighting Africa's role in the UN Peacekeeping Enterprise will be a prominent feature. This, Defense Minister Dominic Nitiwul expressed Ghana's commitment to leveraging the conference as an opportunity to establish bilateral and multilateral partnerships. He concluded by emphasising the critical importance of the conference, not only to Ghana but to the entire African continent. On his part, Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Kwaku Ampratwum-Sarpong expressed Ghanas preparedness to host the programme. He said Ghana will draw on its experience from organizing previous conferences of this nature to deliver successful meetings. The President of the Republic, H.E Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has called on Ghanaians to continue trusting the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government. In a statement, the President said the NPP is the party to bring progress and prosperity to all parts of the country, insisting that the records of the party in government leave no doubt. Despite the challenges confronting the nation, we have demonstrated, with our record in office, that we are the Party that can bring progress and prosperity to all parts of our country, President Akufo-Addo said. This is contained in a statement issued at the end of the Parliamentary Candidate election in orphan constituencies over the weekend. In a message to the winners in the various constituencies, President Akufo-Addo charged them to get the losers on board to work together to ensure the NPP wins power in the 2024 general elections. So, I urge all winners to be magnanimous in their celebrations and work hard to bring onboard those who were not successful. Through this, we shall create a united, formidable front that, under the leadership of our new, worthy presidential candidate, Alhaji Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, will enable us to go into the difficult 2024 elections with quiet confidence, and, with the help of Almighty God, Break the Eight, which is the fervent wish of all NPP members, and, indeed, of all well-meaning Ghanaians, President Akufo-Addo said in his statement. Read the full statement below: I extend warm congratulations to the National, Regional, Constituency, Electoral Area and Polling Station Officers, and, indeed, the entire membership of the New Patriotic Party for the conduct of free, fair, transparent and credible parliamentary primaries in orphan constituencies during the weekend of Saturday, 2nd December 2023. This completes the penultimate stage of the Partys preparations for the all-important contest of 7th December 2024, and we have, once again, expressed our deep attachment and commitment to the democratic values, which have been hallmarks of our Partys great tradition. Despite the challenges confronting the nation, we have demonstrated, with our record in office, that we are the Party that can bring progress and prosperity to all parts of our country. So, I urge all winners to be magnanimous in their celebrations, and work hard to bring onboard those who were not successful. Through this, we shall create the united, formidable front that, under the leadership of our new, worthy presidential candidate, Alhaji Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, will enable us to go into the difficult 2024 elections with quiet confidence, and, with the help of Almighty God, Break the Eight, which is the fervent wish of all NPP members, and, indeed, of all well-meaning Ghanaians. 04.12.2023 LISTEN Flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Dramani Mahama has held a meeting with defeated flagbearer aspirant Dr. Kwabena Duffuor. The meeting among other things is to get the former Governor of the Bank of Ghana on board to plan ahead of the 2024 general elections. Opening up on the meeting with Dr. Kwabena Duffuor, John Mahama in a short statement stressed the importance of getting every member of the NDC on board to pursue the common goal of returning to power. It was great meeting with Dr Kwabena Duffuor as we discussed the future of our party and the upcoming 2024 elections. It is important for us to come together and work towards unity and the growth of our party. Lets focus on our common goals and aspirations to build the Ghana we want together. Together4Change and for #Victory2024, John Dramani Mahama said. Dr. Kwabena Duffuor pulled out of the flagbearer election of the NDC early this year citing an unacceptable breach of faith by the Council of Elders of the Party. He also raised concern about the voters register, insisting that it was full of irregularities. Despite his failed attempt to lead the party into the 2024 general elections, the former BoG Governor has stayed committed to the NDC. He is now set to work with Mahama and the party ahead of the next general elections. Thousands of people, including youth and women groups joined independent presidential aspirant Alan Kyerematens Movement for Change in a health walk dubbed "Afrafranto" in Kumasi, Ashanti Region. The marchers were estimated to be about 300,000. Mr Kyerematen, who left the governing New Patriotic Party to form the Movement for Change (MFC), led the Afafranto Unity Walk. Prominent figures like Sister Afia, Twene Jonas, and Oliver Khan 'the ship dealer', were among the faces seen among the marchers. Their involvement has not only bolstered the visibility of the movement but also signalled a shift in support towards Alan Kyerematen's cause. Having served in Ghana's Trade and Industry Ministry for over a decade under two different administrations, Mr Kyerematen's decision to break away from the NPP was seen as a watershed moment in Ghana's political landscape. Mr Kyerematen and his movement have already held several similar events in different parts of the country. The colour yellow has been a defining identifier of the Movement. The government has disbursed over GHC100 million as grant funding and training to youth-led start-ups and Micro, Small and Medium-Scale Enterprises (MSMEs) to generate youth entrepreneurs and leverage Ghanas youthful population to stimulate economic empowerment and development. Through the Ghana Jobs and Skills Project (GJSP) and the Ghana Economic Transformation Project (GETP) implemented by the Ghana Enterprises Agency, the government has provided capacity building on business management, technical assistance and grant funding to over 30,000 persons, selected start-ups and MSMEs, with many more expected to receive same in the coming year. Addressing thousands of youth drawn from across the country at the end of a YouStartGrant Expo dubbed Empowering Youth Entrepreneurs for a Resilient Economy in Accra, the Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia reiterated the governments determination to provide the youth with the necessary training and funds to make it on their own and contribute their quota to national development. It is exciting to note that these initiatives are ongoing efforts by the government to create an entrepreneurial economy. In September 2023, the government, through the Ghana Enterprises Agency, approved over GHC35 Million to 272 MSMEs under various components of the Ghana Economic Transformation Project (GETP). Also, between September 2021 and August 2022, the government supported over 780 firms with grant funding of over GHS65 Million under the GETP. I am happy to announce that the Government of Ghana, through the Ghana Jobs and Skills Project (GJSP) and the Ghana Economic Transformation Project (GETP), will award grant support of almost GHS 65 million to 3,000 start-ups and MSMEs gathered here, with the total support to beneficiaries in 2023, totalling GHS 100 million. It is also important to note that a special grant package has been designed to support and empower Persons With Disabilities (PWD), he announced. Over 30,000 young persons and MSMEs have already received between four and five days of Business Management Training, with more entrepreneurs and start-ups and established enterprises expected to receive grant funding in 2024 under the YouStartGrant initiative. By the end of these two Projects, the government will have supported more than 50,000 start-ups and MSMEs with technical and financial support through the Ghana Enterprises Agency. The overall impact of these two initiatives extends beyond financial figures and statistical metrics, the Vice President noted. This grant funding is not just a monetary transaction; it is an investment in the dreams, aspirations and potential of the youth. It is a signal that shows the youth of this great nation that it is possible. Through strategic partnerships and targeted interventions, we are creating an environment of possibilities where ideas flourish, businesses thrive and individuals find the means to unleash their potential. And it is surely the complementary pathway to nurture and reap the demographic dividend of having a youthful population. By providing financial resources alongside targeted training programs, we are empowering the youth for the paradigm shift of job creation as opposed to job seekers. I strongly believe that such Technical Assistance and catalytic grants will drive the objective of promoting private investments and business growth. This is a strategic move towards industrialisation, export expansion, and job creation. Let us recognise the significance of today's grant signing ceremony in shaping the destiny of our nation. Let it re-echo in our minds and hearts that investing in the strengthening of the nations youth and businesses through these interventions stimulates and lays the foundations for economic growth and prosperity for all. By empowering the youth, we are contributing to a secure future where no one is left behind, and our nation stands as an icon of success on the international stage. The People's National Convention (PNC) has expressed "deep concern" regarding the "untimely and rushed" approach adopted by the Ghana Education Service (GES) in "pressuring" first-year students and their parents to report to schools "merely three days after releasing school placements". A statement signed by PNC General Secretary Janet Nabla said "this sense of urgency is concerning, considering that a vast majority, approximately 70% of students, have been placed in schools they did not choose". Moreover, she said "it is unfortunate that certain students have found themselves placed outside their regions or vicinities with no prior consultation or input from them". Furthermore, the PNC noted that "parents are grappling with the mammoth task of finding the necessary financial resources to cater to the associated responsibilities". "It is undeniable that such an abrupt and unreasonable expectation puts undue strain on families", the PNC said. The party said it "firmly believes that the Ghana Education Service should give due attention to the voice of the Speaker of Parliament, as they are the representatives of the people". Speaker Alban Bagbin had hauled Education Minister Yaw Adutwum to Parliament over the matter. He was billed to appear on the same day, Monday, 4 December 2023, when the students are supposed to report to school. The GES had also issued a statement insisting on the reopening date despite pleas from teacher unions and parent-teacher associations to delay the reopening date. Adding its voice to the calls for a delay in the reopening date, the PNC "recommends that the Ghana Education Service consider postponing the reporting deadline to January 3rd". It explained: "This extension would offer both parents and students sufficient time to adequately prepare for the upcoming academic year, thereby alleviating the stress and anxiety caused by the current situation". Also, the party urged the Ghana Education Service to "prioritise the well-being and academic success of students and make a concerted effort to address the concerns raised". "This will ensure that the education system remains inclusive, fair, and accessible to all Ghanaian children, without leaving others behind", the party insisted. It pointed out that the "future of our educational system depends on collaborative efforts between the GES, parents, and students, without allowing any party to become too powerful and abuse the others". -classfmonline A thousand people demonstrated peacefully in Paris on Sunday against the government's immigration law, at the call of several groups, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the "march against racism" of 1983. "Forty years later, we are still marching for equal rights and justice, against racism and the Darmanin law," read one of the banner at the procession which went from Montparnasse to Place d'Italie, drawing a crowd of around 1,100 people, according to police. "Forty years later, the problems are the same. Racism is still there. We are all here to protest against this lack of equality", added Francois Sauterey, co-president of Mrap (Movement against racism and friendship between peoples). "It is absolutely necessary today that this Darmanin law is not a law which ends up excluding people who want to get here and who are already here," he added. MP Eric Coquerel from the far-left France Unbowed party took the microphone to demand "the regularisation of undocumented workers, undocumented students, we must welcome them with dignity on our territory". Co-organised by the UCIJ (United against Disposable Immigration, for a welcoming migration policy), Sunday's demonstration took place 40 years after the historic march "against racism and for equal rights" on 3 December 1983. French media nicknamed it the "Marche des Beurs" (Arabs in slang French) a term rejected by its initiators. "Whole or in pieces, your law will be torn to shreds," read another sign, referring to the immigration bill which is being debated by the parliament. France's upper house Senate on 14 November passed a bill aimed at controlling immigration, toughening the language and measures of the legislation in a manner likely to complicate the government's search for compromise in the lower house. Originally proposed by the government with a mix of steps to expel more undocumented people and improve integration, the text voted through by 210 to 115 now leans firmly towards enforcement after its passage through the Senate, which is controlled by the right. Member of Parliament (MP) for Tamale South, Haruna Iddrisu wants Parliament to probe allegations of the government registering over 600 delegates for this years Conference of Parties (COP28). Data released by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change suggests that Ghanas delegation to COP28 in Dubai has increased to 618 from the delegation of 350 last year. The delegation consists of 95 persons on the official parties list and an additional 523 on the party overflow list. Speaking on the floor of Parliament on Monday, December 4, 2023, the former Minority Leader bemoaned the impact of the number of attendees of COP28 on the state coffers. Mr Speaker, with this economic distress, how can Ghana lead a delegation of 618 persons? Are we shelling the economic gain and hardship of the Ghanaian? And Mr Speaker, I see a delegation of the president here to COP28 I am demanding that a committee looks at this, he said. Parents in the Ashanti Region are calling on the Ghana Education Service (GES) to reschedule the reporting date for first-year students in Senior High Schools (SHS). This comes after the GES announced today, Monday, 4 December 2023, as the official reporting date for these students, despite widespread calls for a rescheduling by the pre-tertiary teacher unions, the Parent Teacher Association of Ghana and the Speaker of Parliament. In a statement, the GES had maintained the set date for the reporting of first-year students. However, Class 91 3 FMs Ashanti Regional Correspondent Elisha Adarkwahs visit to some schools in the region, including Asanteman Senior High School and Adventist Senior High School, observed that most students had not come to report but were rather collecting prospectuses on the scheduled day of reopening. Some parents expressed their concerns, emphasising that the scheduled date for reopening was too short considering the time it took for students to be placed and the subsequent reporting date. The parents are urging the GES to take into account the practical challenges faced by both parents and students, particularly the limited time between placement and the official reporting date. They believe that rescheduling the reporting date will provide families with sufficient time to prepare adequately for the students' entry into SHS. -classfmonline Ministry of Education has issued a challenge to the authority of Parliament concerning the decision-making process for the opening and closing of schools in the country. The Ministry contends that Parliament lacks the mandate in this regard, asserting that the Ministry is the sole authority with the power to direct the closure or reopening of schools. Ernest Akosa, Deputy Public Relations Officer of the Ministry, expressed this viewpoint in response to news that the Minister of Education had been summoned to Parliament on Monday, December 4, 2023. During an interview on the Ghana Yensom Morning Show on Accra 100.5 FM, Mr Akosa questioned Parliament's jurisdiction on matters related to school operations. He clarified that the decision to reopen Senior High School (SHS) 1 on Monday, December 4, was aligned with the Ghana Education Service's choice to revert to the old academic calendar. Mr Akosa emphasized that these efforts were aimed at bringing order to the academic calendar and eventually phasing out the double-track system. He appealed to parents for understanding and urged them to take advantage of the situation by allowing their wards to report for the reopening. Acknowledging the inconvenience caused by the short notice of the reopening, Mr Akosa apologised to parents for any disruption. In response to concerns raised by the Minority in Parliament, Speaker Alban S.K. Bagbin summoned the Minister of Education, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, to appear before Parliament on Monday, December 4. Speaker Bagbin proposed a shift in the reopening date to the first week of January 2024, citing the need for better preparation among parents and teachers. The Minority MPs expressed discomfort with the initial reopening date, highlighting challenges faced by parents in preparing their children for school on short notice. They questioned the timing of releasing school placements a few days before asking students to report on December 4. The MPs emphasised the necessity for additional time for teachers to rest and address logistical challenges posed by the hurried reopening. Despite these concerns, the Ministry of Education maintained that first-year SHS students should report to school on December 4, 2023. The Ministry assured flexibility for students unable to report on the first day, ensuring that they would not lose their slots. The Ministry argued that the academic calendar had been publicised weeks in advance, expecting parents and students to prepare accordingly. -Classfmonline Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has urgedthe Senate President, Mr Godswill Akpabio to use his leadership position topromptly reject the plan by the Minister of the FCT, Nysom Wike to spend N15billion for the construction of a befitting residence for the Vice President, Mr Kashim Shettima. SERAP urged him to assert Senates authority and constitutional oversight roles to reject the N2.8 billion on publicity for the FCTA and other proposed wasteful and unnecessary spending that may be contained in the 2023 supplementary budget and the 2024 budget proposed by President Bola Tinubu. In the letter dated 2 December 2023 and signed by SERAP deputy director Kolawole Oluwadare, the organisation said: The plan to spend N15 billion on a befitting residence for the vice president is a fundamental breach of the Nigerian Constitution and the countrys international anticorruption and human rights obligations. SERAP said: The Senate has the constitutional duties to ensure that Mr Wikes proposed spending is entirely consistent and compatible with constitutional provisions including his oath of office. All public officials remain subject to the rule of law. SERAP also said, The National Assembly including the Senate has a constitutional responsibility to address the countrys debt crisis, including by rejecting wasteful and unnecessary spending to satisfy the personal comfort and lifestyles of public officials. The letter, read in part: The National Assembly cannot continue to fail to fulfil its oversight function. The Senate must assert and demonstrate its independence by checking and rejecting all wasteful and unnecessary spending by the executive. It would be a grave violation of the public trust and constitutional oath of office for the Senate to approve the plan to spend N15 billion on a befitting residence for the vice president at a time when the Federal Government is set to spend 30% (that is, N8.25 trillion) of the countrys 2024 budget of N27.5 trillion on debt service costs. The Federal Government also plans to borrow N7.8 trillion to fund the 2024 budget. Nigerias public debt stood at 87.4 trillion naira as of June with 38% owed to external creditors including multilateral and commercial lenders. Should the Senate and its leadership fail to stop wasteful and unnecessary spending and rein in government borrowing, SERAP would consider appropriate legal action to compel the National Assembly including the Senate to discharge its constitutional oversight roles in the public interest. SERAP urges you to refer to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) the allegations of corruption in the spending of the previously approved N7 billion for the construction of a new residence for the vice president. The construction was reportedly abandoned but the whereabouts of the N7 billion remain unknown. The Senate has the constitutional competence and legitimacy to compel compliance with the Nigerian Constitution and the countrys international obligations. The Senate ought to assert its authority and vigorously exercise its constitutional oversight roles to check the apparently wasteful and unnecessary spending by Mr Wike especially given the growing debt crisis and the indiscriminate borrowing by the government. It is a travesty and a fundamental breach of the lawmakers fiduciary duties for the National Assembly to allow the executive to use national budget as a tool to satisfy the comfort and lifestyle of public officials. Nigerians have a right to honest and faithful performance by their public officials including lawmakers, as public officials owe a fiduciary duty to the general citizenry. Cutting the N15 billion on a befitting residence from the FTCA budget would be entirely consistent with your constitutional oath of office, and the letter and spirit of the Nigerian Constitution, as it would promote efficient, honest, and legal spending of public money. According to our information, the Minister of the FCT, Nysom Wike and the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) plan to spend N15 billion for the construction of a befitting residence for the Vice-President, Mr Kashim Shettima. The plan is contained in the N67 billion FCT supplementary budget which President Bola Tinubu had on Tuesday transmitted to the National Assembly for approval. SERAP notes that Mr Wike proposed plan to spend N15 billion on a new residence for the vice president despite the recent allocation of N2.5 billion for the renovation of the current residence of the VP in the federal governments supplementary budget already passed by the National Assembly and signed by President Tinubu. The House of Representatives has reportedly approved the plan to spend N15 billion on a befitting residence for the vice president. The National Assembly has also approved another N3 billion for the renovation of the vice presidents residence in Lagos State. Mr Wike also plans to spend N2.8 billion on publicity for the FCTA. The proposed plan to spend 15 billion on a a befitting residence for the vice president is different from the N100 billion for the FCT contained in the federal government supplementary budget. SERAP notes that the Federal Government has also budgeted N8 billion on the two official residences of President Tinubu in Abuja and Lagos. On top of the planned spending of N15 billion on a befitting residence for the vice president, billions of naira have been allocated for the purchase of cars for the Villa and the Office of the First Lady. Section 14(2)(b) of the Nigerian Constitution of 1999 [as amended] provides that, the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government. Under Section 16(1)(a)(b), the National Assembly including the Senate has the obligations to harness the resources of the nation and promote national prosperity and an efficient, a dynamic and self-reliant economy, and to secure the maximum welfare, freedom and happiness of every citizen. Under sections 59(2) and 299 of the Nigerian Constitution, the National Assembly including the Senate has legislative powers over money bills including the proposed N15 billion, and other wasteful and unnecessary spending by the Federal Government. 04.12.2023 LISTEN The Agona East Chairperson of the Ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Madam Hannah Asamoah was last Saturday elected as Parliamentary candidate to represent the party for the 2024 general elections. She polled 396 out of the 657 valid votes cast beating her closest rival, Mr. Prince Esaah who obtained 259 with 1 rejected ballot. She was subsequently declared as a Parliamentary candidate-elect for the NPP. The elections which was conducted by the Agona East District Directorate of the Electoral Commission (EC) under the supervision of the District Director, Madam Patience Shebrah was generally peaceful. In her acceptance speech, Madam Hannah Asamoah thanked the delegates for the confidence reposed in her adding that she would lead the party to recapture the parliamentary seat from the NDC in the 2024 general elections. She used the occasion to appeal for unity of purpose for the party in the Agona East constituency to achieve its main purpose of recapturing the lost seat which she said had been in 'exile' for over 12 years. "We have been winning Presidential elections on many occasions, what is left is the Parliamentary, we are going recapture it. " Through the brilliant performance of His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo Addo led NPP Government, the NPP has become attractive to the masses in the constituency. "It therefore behoves on us to come together with one accord as a family in our quest to break the 8 and also recapture the seat as well. "Agona East is looking up to the NPP to represent them in Ghana's Parliament House so that more infrastructure and human development could be provided fully. We dare not to disappoint them this time around, 2024 should be a rescue year for the people in the Agona East constituency. "As I have been saying, my doors are opened to welcome every individual person, be it a toddler, youth or adult to win the ultimate goal for the NPP, together we can relieve our people and give them their desired haven," the chairperson stated. Member of Parliament for Gomoa Central, Hon. Naana Eyiah who doubles as a Deputy Minister for Interior has reiterated government's commitment to improve agriculture through prudent measures and policies to make it attractive to the youth. According to her, Planting for Food and Jobs, Planting for Export and Rural Development as well as the provision of numerous farm inputs and equipment for mechanized farming has improved crop production. Hon. Naana Eyiah said this at the 39th Annual National Farmer's Day celebration held at Gomoa Afransi in the Gomoa Central District to celebrate gallant farmers for their massive contribution to food sufficiency in the country. A 37-year-old, Mr. Job Keitu from Gomoa Manso won the District Best Farmer award. Mr. Samuel Egyir received the District Best Youth Farmer award while Mr. Joseph Kofi Donkor, former Assembly Member for Gomoa Benso Electoral Area received the District Best Crop Farmer award. They got various farming inputs and home appliances as their prize package to motivate them and encourage others to emulate. Hon. Naana Eyiah who chaired the occasion lauded gallant farmers in her constituency especially the females who received various awards pledging to spearhead agricultural development in the constituency. Gomoa Central District Chief Executive, Hon Benjamin Kojo Otto noted that the Gomoa Central District Assembly has benefited immensely from the supply of farming inputs for farmers which has contributed to food sufficiency despite climate change. He stated that Agriculture remains the cornerstone of the development of Ghana "so agriculture cannot be denied when it comes to socio-economic development hence the need to improve the farming industry to attract and create job opportunities for the teeming unemployed people in the country." He stressed, "Through prudent measures and policies, there are enough Extension Officers to assist farmers to expand their farms and to use modernized methods of farming thereby producing enough to feed their families and the country as a whole. "I want to appreciate the effort of our Member of Parliament, Hon. Naana Eyiah for her immense contribution who has raised the number of registered farmers to over 19,000 of which 8,000 are females. "The Assembly through the Agriculture department has supplied cutlasses, fertilizers, pesticides, wellington booths and others to our farmers to facilitate their work. We will continue to support them to expand their farms." The Gomoa Central District Director of Agriculture, Mr. Richard Marcus Odame while commending the award winners for their dedication and commitment to the development of Agriculture in the District noted that his outfit would continue to work with them to improve food and cash crop production. "I sometimes wonder if people through politics or their self imagination say Ghana will soon run out of enough food to feed itself due to the government's poor policies on farming. "It is an open secret that foodstuffs are abandoned across various communities and in our market centers. Government through the Ministry of Food and Agriculture is supporting farmers economically, why am I saying so? "In Gomoa Central District alone, we supplied over 8,000 free coconut seedlings and 85,000 oil palm seedlings last year. We have been able to increase free oil palm seedlings from 85,000 to 93,000. This is automatic financial support to farmers. "It is worthy to note that Gomoa Central is counted as one of the pillars of agriculture and the epitome of human development as far as agricultural growth is concerned. "People are trooping to our offices on a daily basis requesting for more free seedlings to expand their farms. We are extremely happy with this development and remain grateful to our workaholic Member of Parliament Hon. Naana Eyiah and our District Chief, Hon. Benjamin Kojo Otto for supporting the growth of agriculture in the Gomoa Central District," Mr. Odame emphasised. 04.12.2023 LISTEN I have read Manassehs piece on HE John Mahamas 24-hour economy proposal about three times and can confidently conclude that Manasseh is both an avowed pessimist and an intellectual dwarf. Nothing personal, Bro. Had Chairman Mao or Indira Gandhi fallen for your rather backward kind of thinking both China and India would still be wallowing in abject poverty and still be labelled as third world countries. It takes a bold visionary leader to see possibilities and opportunities where others see vast emptiness and obstacles. Manasseh, you either enjoy a fudge and mudge around your own syncopation of carefully selected emotion-packed words or you simply refuse to reason. And many a Ghanaian finds it difficult to understand your never ending penchant to use your pen to destroy the very fine gentleman they see as their messiah. We are still waiting for you to furnish us with hard core evidence to support your long winding pointless stories of accusation about the Ford Expression gift, trying to create an illusion of corruption where clearly, none existed. In case you have forgotten, we are also still waiting to see at least one professionally captured photo or video of the akonfem flying to Burkina Faso that you made song and dance of. I still want to give you the benefit of the doubt by believing you have what it takes to be a good investigative journalist, not one who limits their investigative writings to wild magic mushroom-induced effusions that frankly, border on hallucinations. Are we seeing a reincarnation of Don Quixote in you? You have made a lot of comparisons with existing 24-hour economies from a variety of countries around the world and most of your observations are right. However, common sense should tell you that a developing economy rich in natural resources, which is yet to construct a lot of infrastructure to meet its basic needs has all the ingredients in place to take off like a rocket if the right atmosphere, aka enabling environment is created. Why do you think the developed economies tend to invest in infrastructure to kickstart their economies that slow down dangerously? Each $1 billion in infrastructure spending would create 1 million full time equivalent jobs (Josh Bivens, 2017 published in the USA economic policy institute article titled the potential macroeconomic benefits from increasing infrastructure investment). I like to use real life examples in my write ups. Imagine (please leave magic mushrooms aside for now) John Mahama decides to pilot his 24-hour economy on road construction alone, to complete the Eastern Corridor road that continues to excite farmers, traders, exporters and manufacturers alike! One group of labourers, skilled machine operators, drivers of tipper trucks, graders, water tankers, forklift operators, fitters, site foremen, civil engineers, drainage experts, quantity surveyors, quality controllers, to name but a few would start a shift from say, 6am until 2pm, another set of the same professionals and other personnel will take over and continue from where the early shift left off until 10pm, and finally a third shift starts from 10pm until 6am. Dont you think the road will be constructed 3 times faster? Is it likely demand for round-the-clock food sellers, security personnel, first aiders or emergency care professionals and a whole host of ancillary businesses will spring up around those road construction sites? Going on, do you realise a 24-hour economy will create *THREE TIMES AS MANY* jobs as the existing 8-hour shifts a day? Will those new employees be paid? Will they spend their new, previously non-existent income on other goods and services? Will that kick start economic activities that otherwise would not exist? Will the newly constructed road attract international traffic to and from Northern Togo, Burkina Faso and other landlocked countries that may use our expanded, more efficient ports? Are you with me still, Manasseh? Good if you are. Will all those new workers pay taxes on their earnings? Will that increase income for the treasury? Will that increased tax revenue allow government some additional room to invest in other aspects of the economy? Could unskilled labourers learn on-the-job to acquire new skills that would otherwise not happen? So you see the countless benefits of a 24-hour economy in just one sector of the construction industry? What if we continued constructing the stalled Mahamas E-blocks and the abandoned regional hospitals? One aspect of the 24-hour economy that has not yet been touched upon is education. Forget about education as you know it. If we make a conscious decision that we want to achieve 99% literacy rates in all adults who for some reason missed out on regular education and take advantage of existing language laboratories in our secondary and tertiary institutions outside normal school hours (say from 7pm to 11pm), would we be killing the proverbial two birds with one stone? You bet. Will the newly literate adults be able to contribute to economic activity in ways that they previously could not? Just think of the potential benefits of such a decision by government. Would there still be any qualified teachers lurking about without employment? Could that encourage some retired teachers to volunteer a few hours of their time in the evenings to keep their professional passions alive? Now lets go one notch up. What if we decide to create Ghanas Silicon Valley by bringing passionate people together to learn nothing but computing in their spare time after work or other engagements from 7pm to 11pm? First of all do you see that as a good idea, Manasseh? Secondly dont you think with the creative brain power God has endowed Ghanaians with, we will start producing made in Ghana computer chips, mobile phones, tablets, scooters, solar panels, solar powered street lights, etc in no time at all? Could we also train more bricklayers, plumbers, tilers, electricians and other artisans? You see the endless possibilities this policy could create in just two areas? I could go on and on and open your myopic mind but I will leave it at that for now and encourage you to learn to see your glass as half-full rather than half-empty. If you were doing the bidding of your friend Dr Mahmoud Bawumia to try and punch holes in Mahamas 24-hour economy, you have failed miserably and should do proper thinking before publishing any more nonsense of the sort. Mahamas 24-hour economy is viable and by far remains the one policy that will almost certainly breathe fresh oxygen into the comatose Nana Akufo-Addo - Bawumia economy and bring it back to life. I dare add that it will force much needed efficiency into the Ghanaian way of doing things and boost productivity, as a shift system will ensure targets are met and enhance competition in a positive way. Why do I say so? Each 8 hour shift will be given a minimum length of road to construct and if one shift continues to fall behind consistently they will be kicked out and a fresh team of workers sought. Will that enhance competition? Absolutely. Author : Elijah Tiimob (Chairman, NDC East London Branch) West Africa Brief- The Six Regions of The African Union, from: www.west-africa-brief.org 04.12.2023 LISTEN Question-- Is it many Black/African/the original people of Africa today miseducated, undereducated, uneducated, as it pertains to Pan African history, the global concept and movement??? Lets address this. Such books as The Miseducation of the Negro (C.G. Woodson), African-Centered Education (Haki & Safisha Madhubuti; BaBa Mawlimu Baruti, and the term Negropeanism (M. Ani), are an example of the analysis of Black/African mental health, social problems and education issues, and they are descriptions of complications that have plagued Blacks/Africans since the coming of the European to Africa (J. H. Clarke; C. Williams; A. Perbi). As it has been said, basic physics cause and effect. There is research and in-depth writings that describe causes--traumas of over 400 years of racist chattel enslavement, and other systematic brutal forms of subjugation devised by racist whites/Europeans as they invade areas of the world. White supremacists devised Jim Crowism and Apartheid systems not just in the U.S. and South Africa, but similar racist and oppressive systems to maintain white power in seven (7) continents dominated by the Black/African indigenous and aboriginals. White supremacists teach whiteness in classrooms, perpetuate whiteness in social media, movie theatres, and television programming; and they even set a whiteness standard of beauty, and make inept attempts to white-wash African History (F. Cress Welsing; Neely Fuller; J. DeGruy; N. Akbar). Furthermore, if white supremacist cannot steal the history they demonize. Chattel slavery began on the continent of Africa; colonization and Eurocentric-indoctrination process was the making of continental Africa Negropean bourgeoisie community-- minds conditioned to follow the politics of going along to get along and rubbing elbows with whites. A small group of Black rich, but not wealthy and controlled; money hungry and desperate enough to sign agreements to stay afloatdocuments allowing whites/Europeans to mine and drill on Africa lands, which benefits white dominated countries economies, monarchies, prime ministers and churches. The Negropean bourgeoisies conditioned by the white supremacist-- signs on their dotted lines looking for favors and handouts-- receiving briefcase payouts and kickbacks behind closed doors to feed their bloated egos; and yet, Negropeans wallow in a deeply engrained self-hate, struggling with a crab-in-the-barrel mentality, and condescendingly looking down upon other Black/African people in underdeveloped African communities as they speed through towns in Black SUVs kicking up the dust of undeveloped roads, and not conscious of the fact they are self-destructive. What would Henry Sylvester Williams, Booker T. Washington, Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois, Kwame Nkrumah, Kwame Ture and thousands of other Pan African conference and congress members over hundreds of years think of how the concept of Pan Africanism is being twisted and minimized today to serve the purpose of further invading white supremacists and certain confused half-casts and Negropeans malicious efforts to control the continent of Africa? From white Asians (i.e. En Huang a.k.a. Aisha Huang) illegal Galamsey to the present day U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris promoting certain bedroom practices (for Africans, but not Saudi Arabians) -- to so called African Union 2063 plan (stand on the sidelines 40 year idea), and yet white supremacists are able to negotiate within a few years or practically overnight for African lands and valuable natural resources. And, with the aid of half-castes and Negropeans-- maintain white power structures/neo-colonialism, and further keep the masses undereducated and impoverished in African lands that are natural resource rich. Such is Pan African problems that are global not just continental Africa, which white supremacists want to isolate continental Africa from the African Diaspora. I urge Black/Africans to reclaim the concept of Pan Africanism from white supremacists, confused half-castes and Negropeans. Pan Africanism is not taught in Ghana and many other continental African schools; lets come to integrate it into curriculums, textbooks, and further the Pan African Movement given to us by Our Ancestors. Pan Africanism was conceptualized in the west by African Diasporans in the 1800s. The Pan African Movement was started in England by aforementioned Black Revolutionaries. The Fifth Pan African Congress was brought over to the Gold Coast via Kwame Nkrumah. Therefore, it is amazing to conscious Blacks/Africans how many Ghanaians are willing to throw themselves under a trotro just to do business with the same people who played a dominant role in chattel slavery, colonialism/neo-colonialism, apartheid, assassination of Black/African revolutionaries; and even after President Nkrumah ushered out white supremacists colonialists; and taught Africa must unite and the Black man is capable of managing his own affairs. Instead, today-- the struggle is for whiteness, not global Pan Africanism, Black upliftment. Pan Africanism was the driving force behind many continental African leaders gaining independence from white/European colonialists and imperialists, which President Kwame Nkrumah was one of the first. Pan Africanism includes President Kwame Nkrumah and King Haile Salassies Organization of African Unity (OAU), which focuses on Black unity, a One Africa and self-governance now. Pan Africanism is about the unification of Black/African people on the continent of Africa and other Black people throughout the world, its global (See-- Six Regions of Africa); and its about creating a family bond among Ascendants of the Africans sold by certain wicked chiefs and stolen by racist white slave traders; including Africans who left Africa voluntarily. Pan Africanism is not the useless ideology of todays African Union administration that sacked Dr. Arikana Chihombori-Quao whose focus is African-centeredness, nation building, and her determination to speak out against the exploitation of Africans and African Diasporans. Pan Africanism is not about white supremacist/Eurocentric-brainwashing, and training Africans to believe whiteness will provide them access to white resources and assimilation into a white business realms and secret societies--which Africans do not control, no more than they control the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group. Pan Africanism is not about appeasing white supremacists who want to hand desperate Africans dated technology--AI programs and IT, especially when Ghana/African nations are without constant electrical power (which democratic presidential elected Kwame Nkrumah efforts to make available Atomic Energy prior to the NLC overthrow (many view CIA/BI financed); when many African nations are without up-to-date computers; without well-shelved high tech public libraries (several university libraries are not well-equipped), and when African nations are without African-centered curriculums. Is it not understood African nations have their own cultures and business societies??? Pan Africanism is not about white supremacists, confused half-casts and invaders who refer to themself as white Africans or Afrikaaners (Dutch Boers), and those pushing (including Negropeans) for land thieves-- white supremacists and so called Israelis (A. Koestler; P. Guthrie) an observation seat in the African Union meetings. One must also ask, how can Europeans/white supremacists who continued to underdevelop Africa (as author Walter Rodney explains) and destabilize African nations-- be concerned about the history of Pan Africanism, the ongoing Pan African movement, and the true essence of the concept of Pan Africanism??? They do not-- white supremacists neo-colonialists are determined to redefine Pan Africanism to benefit their parasitic white-capitalist agenda, and separate Africans from African Diasporans, especially on the floor of a white-centered African Union and the United Nations. Of course, white supremacists are aware Pan Africanism is not exactly about them; they are determined to misconstrue it to be anything but African-centered, and for the purpose of unifying the global masses of Black people. It is the efforts of white supremacists to steal the concept of Pan Africanism, as they have stolen African Arts and philosophical ideas (G.M. James explains) and alter it for their purposes, again to isolate, and to control Africas valuable resources. White supremacists know Pan Africanism was at the very foundation of another of their banishing phenomenon, the same as their ancestors who were ushered out of Africa lands to the Caucasus Mountainshowever, this time during the Golden Age of Kwame Nkrumah (P. Guthrie; K. M. Muhammad). REFERENCES Dr. Mwalimu Baruti- Afrikan Centered Education, from: https://youtu.be/7I4vV-XDY1w?si=gyagYQ9P-AYhixx Dr. J. H. Clarke- The Coming of The European, from: https://youtu.be/nB3tVZv8Q8?si=Z2m7hnk- _vx0RCrq Dr. Marimba Ani Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior Dr. C. Williams- Destruction of Black Civilizations Dr. Akosua Perbi Indigenous Slavery in Ghana Dr. Kwame Nkrumah- The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah Dr. Kwame Nkrumah- Dark Days in Ghana Dr. Kwame Nkrumah- Africa Must Unite Dr. Frances Cress Welsing- Isis Papers: Keys to the Colors Mr. Neely Fuller- The United Independent Compensatory Code/System/Concept: A Compensatory Counter-Racist Code Dr. Niam Akbar Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery Dr. Joy DeGruy Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome Mr. Arthur Koestler- The Thirteenth Tribe Mr. Paul Guthrie- The Making of the whiteman Dr. Walter Rodney- How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Dr. G. M. James- Stolen Legacy Dr. K. Makeda Muhammad- African Ourstory, whites disruption ABBREVIATIONS NLC National Liberation Council (emmanuel kotoka) CIA Central Intelligence Agency (U.S.) BI British Intelligence (U.K.) Dr. K. Makeda Muhammad is a Repatriate a returnee to Africa via Ghana in 2011. Dr. Makedas field of study is Black Studies; she is an author of three books, educator, independent researcher, historian, recipient of Ghanas Education Community (EDUCOM) Award, Pan Africanist, Africana Womanist (C. Hudson Weems), community and social media activist. As the attention of the world is focused on the bloodletting that has re-commenced in Gaza, armed Jewish settlers in the West Bank have stepped up their provocations against Palestinians under the watchful and helpful eye of the Israeli Defense Force. Palestinian homes in the West Bank are being demolished or occupied as the security forces take fresh batches of West Bank Palestinians into administrative detention. The efficacy of the prisoner exchange between Hamas and the Israelis has been totally eradicated.by this new wave of arrests. The people of the global South understand only too well the narrative the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are trying to share with the rest of the world. We understand because we have also been fed into the same inhumane meat grinder of racist, white supremacist settler colonialism. The Israeli /Palestinian disaster is but the latest manifestation of the same diabolic and Machiavellian enterprise that led Europeans to sail the ocean blue, discover new lands and people, dispossess the people of their land, and kill as many of them as was possible. The settler colonial project at its core, is a bloody, genocidal enterprise that seeks to replace one group of people with another group. Columbus in his diary underscored the exploitative and genocidal tendencies of settler colonialism when he stated that with the assistance of a few well-armed men he would be able to subjugate and enslave the local population of Hispaniola. Columbus and his merry band of genocidal ethnic cleansers proceeded to enslave the indigenous people of Hispaniola and initiate the first of many genocides that would ensue in the New World. It is estimated that the European settler colony project was responsible for the death of over 50 million indigenous people in the Caribbean, South, Central and North America. This New World Indigenous Holocaust was accomplished in just over a hundred years. Entire ethnic groups of indigenous people were wiped out entirely. The Taino or Arawak people of the Caribbean islands was one example of a people that was completely annihilated. The European desire to plant the cross in newly ethnically cleansed territories also led to cultural genocide as the customs, religion, and civilization of the indigenous people were torched. In addition to destroying the savage brutes who populated the new lands, the settler colony project sought to superimpose European culture, religion, language, legal structure, and educational norms on the newly discovered lands. Survival and prosperity for the remaining indigenous in new settler colony states was directly correlated with assimilation to the superimposed culture. Any of the remaining indigenous that resisted assimilation quickly understood that there was hell to pay for resistance. Collective punishment was like a sacrament in the settler colony project. Whenever resistance was encountered among the remaining indigenous, the entire community of the remaining indigenous was punished harshly as a deterrent to future rebels. Perhaps one of the most inexplicable ironies of the settler colony project is the almost fanatical insistence that the new settlers are constantly facing an existential threat from the barbarous hordes of the indigenous. New genocidal ethnic cleansing purges were therefore reframed as self-defense or as noble, courageous acts designed to protect and advance the glorious civilization of the West. The victimizers covered themselves in the bloody garments of their victims and then cried to the world, see what these savage brutes have done to us. Now that the US House of Representative has passed a resolution affirming Israels right to existence, and that also affirms that the denial of Israels right to exist is a form of antisemitism, it is left to be seen how the pro-Palestinian supporters in America will respond to this new challenge to free speech. The settler colony project has always been shrewd enough to evolve laws that help to protect the institution of settler colonialism. The charge of antisemitism is being weaponized and used as a cudgel by Israel and the US House of Representative to help provide cover for impenitent Zionists as the Israelis mount the last stand for racist, white supremacist settler colonialism in the modern world. Lenrod Nzulu Baraka is the founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center and the author of Oreos, Coconuts, and Negropeans: Rediscovering Our African Identity. Penpa Tsering, the political leader of Tibet's government in exile, was in Paris this week to raise awareness about the increased repression faced by Tibetans living in Chinese-controlled areas. He spoke to RFI about issues such as intense surveillance and the destruction of Tibetan cultural identity. After the 1949 Communist takeover of China, Beijing tried to co-habit with Buddhist Tibetans, who lived in vast areas in China's south west. But the increasing presence of the Communist army triggered Tibetan protests that were met with a brutal Chinese crackdown, in 1959. Thousands of Tibetans were killed, monasteries destroyed, and Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, was forced into exile. Currently, the Dalai Lama, and the Tibetan government in exile, the Central Tibet Administration (CTA) reside in Dharamsala, India. The CTA is led by Sikyong ("political leader") Penpa Tsering, who was born in a refugee camp in India. Penpa Tsering (56) is now touring the world, taking over some of the tasks of the Dalai Lama who turned 88 this year, including raising awareness of Chinese "colonial" policies with regards to the Tibetans living within Beijing-controlled areas. Diaspora His mission also involves keeping in touch with 130,000 strong Tibetan diaspora communities, 8,000 of whom live in France. Before arriving in Paris, he visited the US, Latin America, Canada, Spain and Austria. RFI: Can you begin by telling us more about the objective of your tour? Penpa Tsering: Above all, there needs to be a lot more education about China and about what China is doing to other parts of the world. Under [China's supreme leader] Xi Jinping, control, surveillance, and everything has increased from 2012-2013 onwards, with the activities of the United Front Work Department having become pervasive in the form of Confucius institutions, overseas police stations or espionage, as shown by the latest report by (Berlin-based think tank) Merics. Xi Jinping's flagship program is the Belt and Road Initiative. It's not just investment in other countries but also political influence in these regions. Strategy "Most of the governments are only interested investment from China and business with China but they fail to realise the strategic approach of China. I keep telling them I'm not here only to seek support for my people and for my country, but I'm also here to warn you. That if you don't understand China and its motivations, then it is your nation and your people who are going to suffer eventually. These facts about what China is doing internally and domestically to the Chinese people themselves need to be known to the outside world. RFI: France established ties with Beijing in 1964, 15 years ahead of the US and its much-heralded "opening to China". What do you expect from the French government and President Emmanuel Macron? Penpa Tsering: The French government likes to have its own independent foreign policy, not necessarily toeing the line of United States. But there has to be more transatlantic cooperation when it comes to China. The European Union also needs more uniform trade and foreign policy. Because you don't have that, China is doing exactly what the European colonials used to do against the colonies: divide and rule, carrot and stick, using one country against the other. Over the last 10 years, Xi Jinping introduced the security law in Hong Kong. He was responsible for the concentration camps in Xinjiang. He was responsible for the colonial-style boarding schools in Tibet, where Tibetan children are separated from their families, from their culture, from their language, from their religion. The Chinese government's aim is to change every young Tibetan into Chinese, to avoid ethnic problems in the future. Join forces Penpa Tsering: So, while the whole world is moving towards multiculturalism, China is the only country that's moving towards uniculturalism at the expense of every other culture. But when you point that out to the Chinese government, they point fingers at the United States and say, how did they treat their native people? Or the Canadians with the First Nations, the Scandinavians with the Sami people, or the Australians with Aboriginals, New Zealanders with Maoris? True, these countries have made mistakes. But they realise it and they are trying to make up for it. But China is consciously doing it to the Tibetans inside Tibet, destroying its very identity from language to religion. I tell the Europeans: please don't look at us [Tibetans] only from the perspective of a victim of communism. If you want to bring about positive change in China, eventually you need both internal forces and external forces. And we are the internal forces, Tibetans. Uyghurs, Mongols, Hongkongers, Taiwanese, including the pro-democracy movement inside China. They all will have to come together. Just because you have freedom here, you cannot neglect freedom in other countries. Tomorrow [dictatorship] may knock on your door. RFI: The dialogue between the Dalai Lama and Beijing authorities has been brought back to a minimum since 2010. It's been reported that your government had some level of contact with the Chinese authorities. Is that true? And what is the subject and priority in this context? Penpa Tsering: We don't even have [official] contacts. I do have a back channel, but that's unofficial. And I can't say more than that because there's nothing concrete to talk about. So the reason for the back channels is to re-establish contact. RFI: How do you feel about the fact that the human rights situation of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang generates more global interest than the one in Tibet? Penpa Tsering: There are differences in visibility, differences in people willing to come forward to give evidence and the focus and the scale and the diversity of what the Chinese government is doing. So I tell my Uyghur friends, it's not a competition. As long as the perpetrator is the same, it reflects the same on the international community. The scale, and there may be variations and differences in policies because the situation is different. Tibet is very large, 2.5 million square kilometres and sparsely populated, whereas the population density in Xinjiang is higher. China will have to change The Dalai Lama is now in his late 80s. There's the reincarnation issue, where religious authorities find a child that is predestined to become his successor. The Chinese may move to find a child somewhere inside the areas they control, and turn him into a person who will toe the Communist party line, as they did with the Panchen Lama. What will be your policy? Penpa Tsering: His Holiness is committed to live long. He keeps reassuring us that he will live for another two decades and more. So that's why I keep telling our Chinese friends, let us see whether the Dalai Lama outlives the Communist Party or the Communist Party outlives the Dalai Lama. Because China will have to change. On reincarnation, this is a purely religious activity. His Holiness says that if the Chinese government is really serious about reincarnation, they should study Tibetan Buddhism first. They then should look for Mao Zedong's, then for Deng Xiaoping's reincarnation and then Jiang Zemin's reincarnation. And only then maybe the Dalai Lamas' reincarnation. RFI: Currently the CTA's Ministerial Cabinet, the Kashag, has you as Sikyong (political leader), and three "Kalon" (Ministers) who are all female. When do you think the Tibetan government will be ready to have a female as their president? We are the only exiled government with all democratic structures. I believe in women's empowerment. Right now, I'm the only man in the cabinet. I have three other women ministers. So, any one of them or any other woman could get elected. It will depend on the public as to who they want to choose. I cannot foretell when we will have the next women Sikyong. Photo caption 1: L- R: Charles Storr, Inward Investment Manager at City of York Council; Nigel Tracey, General Manager at ETAS; His Excellency Miguel Berger, Ambassador of The Federal Republic of Germany to the United Kingdom; Professor Miles Elsden, Director of the Institute for Safe Autonomy; Tony Corby, Head of Inward Investment at City of York Council; Christine Hogan, Inward Investment Manager at City of York Council; Sabrina Zissler, Global Partnerships Manager at the University of York. The group are pictured standing in one of the ISAs labs, next to a healthcare robot. YORK, UK - In a striking display of York's historical charm and technological prowess, His Excellency Miguel Berger, the German Ambassador to the UK, embarked on a comprehensive tour of the city on Thursday, 30 November. Accompanied by York's Lord Mayor, Cllr Chris Cullwick, and Lady Mayoress Joy Cullwick, the Ambassador's visit shone a spotlight on York's dual identity as a custodian of ancient crafts and a hub for future technologies. The Ambassador's first stop was the awe-inspiring York Minster, where he met with teams of skilled glaziers and stonemasons. These artisans are pivotal in preserving the medieval cathedral, a world-renowned heritage site, ensuring its grandeur endures for future generations. The visit took a futuristic turn at the University of York in Heslington, where Ambassador Berger met with Professor Matthias Ruth, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research. Discussions centred around the university's groundbreaking work in research and innovation, particularly in the field of Artificial Intelligence. A tour of the Institute for Safe Autonomy (ISA) with its Director, Professor Miles Elsden, offered the Ambassador an exclusive look into the latest AI innovations. The ISA's mission to develop technologies ensuring safety and security in autonomous systems was a focal point of the visit, reflecting the institutes commitment to societal welfare and economic advancement. Ambassador Berger expressed admiration for the UK's blend of education and innovation, highlighting the potential for increased international collaboration. The day concluded with a presentation by ETAS, a York-based subsidiary of the German firm Bosch, specialising in automotive industry systems. Nigel Tracey, Manager of ETAS, underscored York's appeal as a prime destination for high-growth tech companies, citing the city's quality of life, access to talented graduates, and cutting-edge research facilities like the ISA. Cllr Chris Cullwick, the Rt. Hon Lord Mayor of York, remarked on the visit's demonstration of York's ability to honor its past while embracing a forward-looking vision. "This visit truly gave a sense of how York both embraces the past and looks ahead to a bright future," he said. Cllr Pete Kilbane, Deputy Leader of City of York Council, thanked the Ambassador and emphasised York's historical role in leading new technologies and industries. "The visit was a great opportunity to shine a light on Yorks international role in high-growth industries such as AI," Kilbane stated. Ambassador Berger acknowledged the significance of understanding the UK beyond London and praised the burgeoning York-Germany connection. "It was impressive seeing the close and thriving economic relationship between the UK and Germany," he commented. Professor Matthias Ruth highlighted the Institute for Safe Autonomy's commitment to minimizing risks while maximizing the societal, economic, and environmental benefits of autonomous systems. "In presenting the Institute to His Excellency Miguel Berger, we highlighted that working in partnership we can provide better understanding of the safe, ethical and real-world applications of autonomous systems," he explained. The visit underscored York's status as a city where history and future technologies coalesce, fostering a unique blend of cultural heritage and innovation. Money pledges grabbed the spotlight at Cop28 in Dubai on Monday as delegates turned their focus to the yawning gap in the need for climate finance and what's on offer. The United Arab Emirates the host of this year's conference pledged $270 billion in green finance by 2030 through its banks, and several development banks made fresh moves to scale up their funding efforts, including by agreeing to pause debt repayments when disaster strikes. But leaders of the region's biggest economy and the world's biggest oil producer Saudi Arabia have so far not attended the UN summit, in sharp contrast to their participation in last year's Cop27 conference in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Saudi Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, energy minister and the key climate negotiator for the kingdom, was a no-show at the Saudi Green Initiative. De facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman also did not deliver a keynote speech to world leaders as scheduled on Friday. Trillions needed for developing nations The amount of cash needed for energy transition, climate adaptation and disaster relief is overwhelming. A report released Monday estimates that emerging markets and developing nations will need $2.4 trillion a year in investment to cap emissions and adapt to the challenges posed by climate change. "The world is not on track to realise the goals of the Paris Agreement. The reason for this failure is a lack of investment, particularly in emerging market and developing countries outside China," said the report's co-author Nicholas Stern, who chairs the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. "The central challenge is to accelerate and implement the fostering and financing of this investment from a range of sources." Billions more for 'disaster fund' Meanwhile, vulnerable countries that are already being hit by costly climate disasters are asking for billions more through a newly formed disaster fund, although current pledges are only around $700 million. "Unless we have an urgent set of decision-making, we are going to suffer what every parent suffers from exciting expectations and being unable to deliver," said Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who has become a prominent voice in global discussions about mobilising climate finance. In a news conference, she urged countries to go beyond voluntary pledges and pleas to charities and private investors and instead to consider taxes as a way to boost climate funding. A global 0.1 percent tax on financial services, for example, could raise $420 billion, she said, while a 5 percent tax on global oil and gas profits in 2022 would have yielded around $200 billion. "The planet needs global governance not in a big stick way, but in a simple way of us cooperating with each other to be able to work with the institutions that we have," she added. Other delegates, including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, have called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies which have hit a record $7 trillion per year. An army drone strike accidently hit a village in northwestern Nigeria, killing and wounding civilians celebrating a Muslim festival, local authorities, the military and a resident said on Monday. Nigeria's armed forces often rely on air strikes in their battle against so-called bandit militias in the northwest and northeast of the country, where jihadists have been waging a 14-year conflict. The army did not provide details or a deathtoll for the strike late Sunday in Tudun Biri village in Kaduna State, but other officials reported fatalities and one villager said 30 people were killed. "Muslim faithful observing Maulud were mistakenly killed and many others injured following a military drone attack targeting terrorists and bandits," Kaduna State governor Uba Sani said. He said he has called for an investigation. Many of the victims were women and children, resident Hassan Ma'aruf told AFP by telephone, sharing images he said showed the bodies. AFP could not immediately confirm the authenticity of the images. Dozens of wounded were taken to a teaching hospital in the state capital Kaduna, local state security commissioner Samuel Aruwan said following a closed-door meeting with army officials and community leaders. He said the attack left "several citizens dead and others injured" but did not provide a toll. According to the army, it was a routine mission against militants that "inadvertently affected members of the community," he said. "The Maulud celebration was taking place in the village last night when the gathering was bombed at around 9:00 pm," said Ma'aruf, the resident. "We have so far identified 30 dead victims, mostly women and children." Militia gangs, known locally as bandits, have long terrorised parts of northwest Nigeria, operating from bases deep in forests and raiding villages to loot and kidnap residents for ransom. In the northeast, jihadists have been pushed back from the territory they held at the height of the conflict, though they continie to fight on. More than 40,000 people have been killed and two million displaced since 2009. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has made tackling insecurity a priority since coming to office in May, as he seeks to encourage foreign investment in Africa's most populous country. Nigerian military bombing raids have caused civilian casualties in the past. At least 20 fishermen were killed and several injured in a September 2021 attack in Kwatar Daban Masara on Lake Chad in the northeast, when the military mistook them for militants. In January 2017, at least 112 people were killed when a fighter jet struck a camp housing 40,000 people displaced by jihadist violence in the town of Rann near the border with Cameroon. The Nigerian military blamed "lack of appropriate marking of the area" in a report issued six months later. In July 2019, at least 13 civilians were killed when a fighter jet struck Gajiganna village in Borno state, as it tried to hit jihadists who were fleeing following an attack on a nearby base. Leicester The Bishop of Leicester has announced a significant appointment in the city's ecclesiastical community. Revd Canon Karen Rooms, who has been serving as the Acting Dean of Leicester since January 2023, is set to become the new Dean of Leicester. This appointment marks her as the third individual to assume this prestigious role. Before her elevation to Acting Dean earlier this year, Revd Canon Rooms had been an integral part of Leicester Cathedral's leadership team. She held the positions of Sub Dean and Canon Missioner since her arrival in Leicester in 2016. Beyond her roles within the Cathedral, she has actively contributed to the Diocese, notably as the Womens Ministry Enabler and a founding figure in the Leicester Citizens community organizing alliance. Revd Canon Rooms shared insights into her journey and vision for the future in a recent interview. Her path to priesthood is notably diverse. Prior to her ordination in 2006, she held roles in sales and marketing with Procter and Gamble, and logistics with Boots. A transformative period of her life was the seven years spent in northern Tanzania with her family, where she immersed herself in the local culture and established a cafe business in the heart of Tanzanias coffee industry, Moshi. Upon returning to the UK, her commitment to community service shone through her volunteer work with Citizens Advice and her training for ordination in the Church of England. Her ministry in Leicester was preceded by significant roles in Nottingham, where she served as a parish priest in inner-city parishes and as the Area Dean of Nottingham South. Her work in community organising, particularly with Nottingham Citizens, significantly shaped her approach to ministry. Expressing her affection for Leicester, Revd Canon Rooms highlighted the citys diversity and cultural vibrancy, from its culinary delights to its rich arts scene. Her vision for Leicester Cathedral is one of inclusivity and engagement. She envisages a Cathedral bustling with visitors of all ages, a place where everyone feels the embrace of God and a sense of belonging. Her ambition is to see the Cathedral grow as a centre of worship, justice, and mission, and to further integrate it into the heart of the city, county, and diocese. As she prepares to take on her role as Dean, Revd Canon Rooms is particularly excited about the reopening of the Cathedral and the completion of the new Heritage and Learning Centre. Her focus remains on fostering an intercultural worshipping community and building partnerships to contribute to Leicesters overall flourishing. This new chapter under Revd Canon Rooms' leadership promises a dynamic and inclusive future for Leicester Cathedral, reflecting her deep commitment to community, justice, and spiritual growth. Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, the Minister for Education, has explained that the decision on the re-opening date for first year students of SHS was to return the system to the pre-covid academic calendar. He added that about 81 per cent of them had been placed into Senior High Schools hence pegging the re-opening on Monday, December 4, 2023. Briefing Parliament on the matter, Dr Osei Adutwum also summarised the harmonised prospectus as the grounds for the commencement of the 2023/2024 academic year. Mr Speaker, given that over 81 per cent of students were automatically placed based on their choices, it cannot be said that a lot of placements are yet to be remedied because some candidates have been placed under the region they reside. In addition, for the first time the Ministry of Education with its relevant agencies and stakeholders, developed a National Harmonized Prospectus for all SHS and TVET students. This was to give parents ample time to buy the prospectus items and get their wards ready for school on December 4, 2023, Dr Osei Adutwum said on the floor of Parliament on Monday. First-year Senior High School (SHS) students across the country were expected to report to their respective schools on Monday, December 4, 2023, despite concerns about the re-consideration of the reopening date. The Parliament of Ghana, parents, guardians, and other relevant stakeholders called for an extension of the reporting date, citing distinct reasons, but the Ghana Education Service (GES) maintained the December 4 date. Parliament further urged the Minister of Education to consider rescheduling the reopening date to the first week of January instead of Monday, December 4. A statement issued by the Parliamentary Service said: Due to the short notice with its attendant inconvenience to students, parents, teaching, and non-teaching staff, the House proposes for the consideration of the Hon. Minister of Education the first week of January 2024 as a more convenient and appropriate time for parents, students, and teachers to adequately prepare for academic work. However, the request was turned down by GES. In the Service response through its statement signed by Madam Cassandra Twum Ampofo, the Public Relations Officer of GES, it reminded parents, students, and the public that the reporting date for first-year students of SHS was December 4 as indicated on the Placement form. It said: It is the expectation of Management that schools begin registration and orientation of students from Monday, December 4th. Per the academic calendar, there would be a Christmas break on the 21st of December and a resume on the 3rd of January 2024, to continue academic work till March 5th, 2024, the statement said. Commenting on the issue on the floor of the House, Mr Haruna Iddrisu, a National Democratic Congress Member of Parliament (MP) for Tamale South said the Ministrys action was weakening the Parliament of Ghanas oversight responsibility adding There must be respect. So, when the Speaker directs on our behalf, it is not for any PRO in any ministry but for the minister to show respect to the House, particularly since he is also a member of this house, he said. About 585,797 out of 598,839 candidates were placed in various Senior High Schools and Technical and Vocational Education and Training Schools (TVET) nationwide through the Computerized School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS). Dr Osei Adutwum also the New Patriotic Party MP for Bosomtwe refuted the insistence that teaching and non-teaching staff did not have ample time to rest ahead of the re-opening of schools. Mr Speaker, since the introduction of the double track calendar in 2017, more teaching and non-teaching staff have been employed at schools. In fact, most teachers are only at the post when a particular track is in session. So, it cannot be true that all teachers have never had any rest since the double track was introduced, he said. GNA Vice President and Flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has acknowledged the significant role of the celebration of Ghanaian festivals and how they aid in preserving the countrys rich cultural heritage. Speaking in Nandom in the Upper West Region during the launch of the 23rd edition of the Kakube Festival, Dr. Bawumia stated that festivals, such as the Kakube Festival, held a special place in the rich tapestry of Ghanas cultural heritage. He, therefore, called for the promotion of Ghanaian festivals to preserve Ghanas rich culture, and promote national development efforts. As we gather here amidst the vibrant display of tradition and culture, it is important to recognise the invaluable role festivals, like Kakube, play in preserving our heritage. Festivals hold a special place in the rich tapestry of Ghanas cultural heritage. It serves as a testament to our reverence for tradition, unity, and the preservation of our unique customs that bind us together as a nation. While commending the Chiefs and People of Nandom Traditional Area for upholding the celebration of the Kabuke Festival, the Vice President called for opportunities in the celebration of festivals to be utilised to bring more benefits to the people. These occasions not only celebrate our past, but also serve as platforms to chart the course for our future. They are opportunities to reflect on our achievements, acknowledge our challenges, and renew our commitment to progress and development, he added. We gather here not merely to revel in festivities but to reiterate our unwavering commitment to fostering peace, enhancing unity, and propelling development in our beloved nation. With disturbances in neighbouring Burkina Faso, Dr. Bawumia urged the people in Nandom and beyond, to safeguard the peace, to ensure continuous development. Peace is the cornerstone upon which progress and prosperity are built. It is incumbent upon each of us to safeguard this invaluable asset. Let us embrace dialogue, understanding, and tolerance in resolving differences, nurturing an environment where peace flourishes and endures across our communities. Unity stands as our strength. Together, united in purpose, we are a formidable force capable of surmounting any challenge. Let us embrace diversity, leverage our collective strengths, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the pursuit of our shared aspirations. Vice President Bawumia also called for continuous investment in education, noting that it represented a brighter pathway for generations. Some dignitaries present at the ceremony include; MP for Nandom Constituency, Ambrose Dery, who is also the Minister of the Interior. The National Chairman of the NPP, Stephen Ayesu Ntim, former General Secretary of the NPP Kwabena Agyapong and Upper West Regional Minister Hafiz Bin Salih. GNA PROOF Acquisition Corp I (NYSE:PACI Get Free Report) and Wheels Up Experience (NYSE:UP Get Free Report) are both small-cap unclassified companies, but which is the superior business? We will contrast the two companies based on the strength of their valuation, analyst recommendations, earnings, risk, institutional ownership, profitability and dividends. Profitability This table compares PROOF Acquisition Corp I and Wheels Up Experiences net margins, return on equity and return on assets. Get PROOF Acquisition Corp I alerts: Net Margins Return on Equity Return on Assets PROOF Acquisition Corp I N/A N/A N/A Wheels Up Experience -45.59% -315.49% -28.49% Volatility & Risk PROOF Acquisition Corp I has a beta of 1.04, meaning that its share price is 4% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Wheels Up Experience has a beta of 2.1, meaning that its share price is 110% more volatile than the S&P 500. Institutional and Insider Ownership Analyst Ratings 19.7% of PROOF Acquisition Corp I shares are held by institutional investors. Comparatively, 37.4% of Wheels Up Experience shares are held by institutional investors. 34.0% of PROOF Acquisition Corp I shares are held by company insiders. Comparatively, 0.3% of Wheels Up Experience shares 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. This is a summary of current ratings and recommmendations for PROOF Acquisition Corp I and Wheels Up Experience, as reported by MarketBeat. Sell Ratings Hold Ratings Buy Ratings Strong Buy Ratings Rating Score PROOF Acquisition Corp I 0 0 0 0 N/A Wheels Up Experience 0 3 2 0 2.40 Wheels Up Experience has a consensus target price of $25.60, suggesting a potential upside of 949.18%. Given Wheels Up Experiences higher possible upside, analysts clearly believe Wheels Up Experience is more favorable than PROOF Acquisition Corp I. Valuation & Earnings This table compares PROOF Acquisition Corp I and Wheels Up Experiences revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation. Gross Revenue Price/Sales Ratio Net Income Earnings Per Share Price/Earnings Ratio PROOF Acquisition Corp I N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A Wheels Up Experience $1.58 billion 0.26 -$555.16 million ($23.39) -0.10 PROOF Acquisition Corp I has higher earnings, but lower revenue than Wheels Up Experience. Summary Wheels Up Experience beats PROOF Acquisition Corp I on 5 of the 9 factors compared between the two stocks. About PROOF Acquisition Corp I (Get Free Report) PROOF Acquisition Corp I does not have significant operations. The company intends to effect a merger, capital stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization, or related business combination with one or more businesses. PROOF Acquisition Corp I was incorporated in 2021 and is based in Reston, Virginia. About Wheels Up Experience (Get Free Report) Wheels Up Experience Inc. provides private aviation services in the United States. The company offers membership programs, charter, aircraft management, whole aircraft sales, and commercial travel services. It also provides freight, safety, and security solutions, as well as managed services. The company serves individuals, industry, government, and civil organizations. It operates a fleet of approximately 1,500 aircraft. The company was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in New York, New York. Receive News & Ratings for PROOF Acquisition Corp I Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for PROOF Acquisition Corp I and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. Currys plc (OTCMKTS:DSITF Get Free Report) saw a large decline in short interest during the month of November. As of November 15th, there was short interest totalling 6,361,100 shares, a decline of 18.4% from the October 31st total of 7,796,200 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 0 shares, the short-interest ratio is presently days. Currys Price Performance Shares of Currys stock remained flat at $0.59 during trading on Friday. 25,000 shares of the stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 16,009. The stocks 50-day simple moving average is $0.58 and its 200 day simple moving average is $0.64. Currys has a 1-year low of $0.56 and a 1-year high of $0.96. Get Currys alerts: Wall Street Analyst Weigh In Separately, Berenberg Bank lifted their price objective on shares of Currys from GBX 58 ($0.73) to GBX 62 ($0.78) in a research note on Monday, September 11th. Currys Company Profile (Get Free Report) Currys plc operates as a retailer of technology products and services. It offers consumer electronics and mobile technology products and services; and mobile virtual network operator and consumer electrical repair services. The company also sells its products through online; and offers insurance services. Featured Stories Receive News & Ratings for Currys Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Currys and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. Graphic Packaging Holding (NYSE:GPK Get Free Report) was the recipient of a significant growth in short interest in November. As of November 15th, there was short interest totalling 13,470,000 shares, a growth of 10.2% from the October 31st total of 12,220,000 shares. Based on an average daily trading volume, of 3,200,000 shares, the short-interest ratio is presently 4.2 days. Institutional Inflows and Outflows Several hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of the business. Wellington Management Group LLP raised its stake in shares of Graphic Packaging by 5.2% during the third quarter. Wellington Management Group LLP now owns 12,681,314 shares of the industrial products companys stock valued at $282,540,000 after purchasing an additional 628,663 shares during the period. American Century Companies Inc. boosted its holdings in Graphic Packaging by 3.5% in the third quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 7,128,914 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $158,832,000 after purchasing an additional 241,245 shares during the period. Neo Ivy Capital Management acquired a new position in Graphic Packaging in the third quarter worth $480,000. ASB Consultores LLC acquired a new position in Graphic Packaging in the third quarter worth $263,000. Finally, Deutsche Bank AG boosted its holdings in Graphic Packaging by 2.3% in the third quarter. Deutsche Bank AG now owns 897,210 shares of the industrial products companys stock worth $19,990,000 after purchasing an additional 19,958 shares during the period. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 99.67% of the companys stock. Get Graphic Packaging alerts: Graphic Packaging Trading Up 0.4 % Shares of Graphic Packaging stock traded up $0.09 during mid-day trading on Monday, hitting $23.18. 1,872,361 shares of the stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 3,528,453. The company has a 50-day simple moving average of $21.78 and a 200 day simple moving average of $23.05. The company has a current ratio of 1.17, a quick ratio of 0.46 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.90. Graphic Packaging has a twelve month low of $20.07 and a twelve month high of $27.56. The stock has a market capitalization of $7.09 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 10.45, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.32 and a beta of 0.87. Graphic Packaging Dividend Announcement Graphic Packaging ( NYSE:GPK Get Free Report ) last released its earnings results on Tuesday, October 31st. The industrial products company reported $0.74 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $0.72 by $0.02. Graphic Packaging had a net margin of 7.14% and a return on equity of 35.97%. The business had revenue of $2.35 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $2.47 billion. During the same period last year, the company earned $0.67 earnings per share. The companys quarterly revenue was down 4.2% on a year-over-year basis. Research analysts forecast that Graphic Packaging will post 2.85 EPS for the current year. The business also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Friday, January 5th. Investors of record on Friday, December 15th will be given a $0.10 dividend. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, December 14th. This represents a $0.40 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 1.73%. Graphic Packagings dividend payout ratio is presently 18.10%. Analysts Set New Price Targets Several research firms recently issued reports on GPK. StockNews.com began coverage on shares of Graphic Packaging in a research report on Thursday, October 5th. They set a buy rating for the company. Truist Financial reaffirmed a buy rating and set a $31.00 target price on shares of Graphic Packaging in a research note on Tuesday, September 5th. Raymond James downgraded shares of Graphic Packaging from a strong-buy rating to a market perform rating in a research note on Monday, November 27th. Jefferies Financial Group lowered their price target on shares of Graphic Packaging from $26.00 to $24.00 and set a hold rating for the company in a report on Wednesday, October 18th. Finally, Citigroup cut their price objective on shares of Graphic Packaging from $29.00 to $26.00 and set a buy rating for the company in a research report on Tuesday, October 10th. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, three have assigned a hold rating and eight have issued a buy rating to the company. According to MarketBeat, the company presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and an average price target of $28.00. View Our Latest Stock Analysis on GPK About Graphic Packaging (Get 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. Further Reading Receive News & Ratings for Graphic Packaging Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Graphic Packaging and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, S.A. (NYSE:BBVA Get Free Report) was the target of a significant decrease in short interest during the month of November. As of November 15th, there was short interest totalling 2,190,000 shares, a decrease of 8.8% from the October 31st total of 2,400,000 shares. Currently, 0.0% of the shares of the company are sold short. Based on an average daily volume of 1,100,000 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is presently 2.0 days. Wall Street Analyst Weigh In Several brokerages have recently weighed in on BBVA. Barclays upgraded Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria from an equal weight rating to an overweight rating in a research report on Thursday, October 19th. Morgan Stanley cut Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria from an overweight rating to an equal weight rating in a research report on Tuesday, September 5th. Finally, StockNews.com began coverage on Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria in a research report on Thursday, October 5th. They set a buy rating on the stock. Three analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and four have assigned a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria currently has an average rating of Moderate Buy. Get Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria alerts: Get Our Latest Stock Report on BBVA Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria Price Performance Shares of BBVA stock traded down $0.01 during trading on Friday, hitting $9.28. The company had a trading volume of 1,319,628 shares, compared to its average volume of 1,307,018. The company has a quick ratio of 1.02, a current ratio of 1.02 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.22. The stocks 50-day moving average is $8.34 and its two-hundred day moving average is $7.83. The stock has a market capitalization of $55.36 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 7.25, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.48 and a beta of 1.31. Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria has a 52 week low of $5.60 and a 52 week high of $9.52. Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (NYSE:BBVA Get Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, November 1st. The bank reported $0.36 earnings per share for the quarter, hitting the consensus estimate of $0.36. The company had revenue of $8.66 billion for the quarter. Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria had a net margin of 26.36% and a return on equity of 14.46%. During the same quarter last year, the company posted $0.29 earnings per share. As a group, analysts predict that Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria will post 1.35 EPS for the current fiscal year. Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria Cuts Dividend The business also recently disclosed a semi-annual dividend, which was paid on Thursday, October 26th. Investors of record on Tuesday, October 10th were given a $0.1685 dividend. This represents a dividend yield of 5.1%. The ex-dividend date of this dividend was Friday, October 6th. Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentarias dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 21.09%. Institutional Inflows and Outflows Institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the stock. MAI Capital Management increased its position in shares of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria by 5.7% in the first quarter. MAI Capital Management now owns 62,631 shares of the banks stock worth $442,000 after purchasing an additional 3,360 shares during the last quarter. Mather Group LLC. grew its position in Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria by 13.2% during the first quarter. Mather Group LLC. now owns 12,592 shares of the banks stock valued at $89,000 after acquiring an additional 1,470 shares during the last quarter. Lake Street Advisors Group LLC grew its position in Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria by 5.9% during the second quarter. Lake Street Advisors Group LLC now owns 68,800 shares of the banks stock valued at $528,000 after acquiring an additional 3,845 shares during the last quarter. American Century Companies Inc. grew its position in Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria by 35.1% during the first quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 1,150,789 shares of the banks stock valued at $8,113,000 after acquiring an additional 299,075 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Zhang Financial LLC bought a new position in Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria during the second quarter valued at approximately $119,000. 2.83% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors. Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria Company Profile (Get Free Report) Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, SA, together with its subsidiaries, provides retail banking, wholesale banking, and asset management services. It offers current accounts; and demand, savings, overnight, time, term, and subordinated deposits. The company also provides loan products; deals in securities; leasing, factoring, brokerage, and asset management services; and manages pension and investment funds. Further Reading Receive News & Ratings for Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust (NYSE:BPT Get Free Report) was the target of a significant increase in short interest in the month of November. As of November 15th, there was short interest totalling 1,850,000 shares, an increase of 5.7% from the October 31st total of 1,750,000 shares. Currently, 8.6% of the shares of the company are short sold. Based on an average trading volume of 235,800 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is presently 7.8 days. BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust Trading Up 0.3 % Shares of BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust stock traded up $0.01 on Friday, reaching $3.54. 140,375 shares of the stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 186,008. BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust has a 1-year low of $3.05 and a 1-year high of $14.24. The business has a fifty day moving average price of $4.78 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $5.50. Get BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust alerts: Analyst Ratings Changes Separately, StockNews.com initiated coverage on shares of BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust in a research note on Thursday, October 5th. They set a hold rating on the stock. Institutional Inflows and Outflows Institutional investors and hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the stock. JPMorgan Chase & Co. grew its position in BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust by 5,937.0% during the first quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. now owns 6,037 shares of the oil and gas companys stock worth $46,000 after buying an additional 5,937 shares during the period. Tower Research Capital LLC TRC grew its position in BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust by 4,547.1% during the first quarter. Tower Research Capital LLC TRC now owns 7,296 shares of the oil and gas companys stock worth $56,000 after buying an additional 7,139 shares during the period. BNP Paribas Arbitrage SNC acquired a new position in BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust during the third quarter worth about $64,000. Sheaff Brock Investment Advisors LLC acquired a new position in BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust during the second quarter worth about $77,000. Finally, Two Sigma Investments LP grew its position in BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust by 21.6% during the first quarter. Two Sigma Investments LP now owns 16,331 shares of the oil and gas companys stock worth $125,000 after buying an additional 2,900 shares during the period. 4.32% of the stock is currently owned by institutional investors and hedge funds. BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust Company Profile (Get Free Report) BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust operates as a grantor trust in the United States. It holds overriding royalty interest in the Prudhoe Bay oil field located on the North Slope of Alaska. The Prudhoe Bay field extends approximately 12 miles by 27 miles and contains approximately 150,000 gross productive acres. Read More Receive News & Ratings for BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for BP Prudhoe Bay Royalty Trust and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. CACI International Inc (NYSE:CACI Get Free Report) saw a large increase in short interest in the month of November. As of November 15th, there was short interest totalling 256,700 shares, an increase of 20.4% from the October 31st total of 213,200 shares. Based on an average daily trading volume, of 125,400 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 2.0 days. Currently, 1.2% of the companys shares are short sold. Insider Transactions at CACI International In other news, Director Gregory G. Johnson sold 125 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Thursday, September 14th. The shares were sold at an average price of $319.82, for a total transaction of $39,977.50. Following the completion of the sale, the director now owns 5,998 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $1,918,280.36. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this link. Insiders own 1.23% of the companys stock. Get CACI International alerts: Institutional Inflows and Outflows Several hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the business. Tudor Investment Corp Et Al purchased a new position in shares of CACI International during the third quarter worth about $1,820,000. Private Capital Advisors Inc. grew its holdings in shares of CACI International by 1.5% during the third quarter. Private Capital Advisors Inc. now owns 44,157 shares of the information technology services providers stock worth $14,340,000 after purchasing an additional 639 shares in the last quarter. Covestor Ltd grew its holdings in shares of CACI International by 9.1% during the third quarter. Covestor Ltd now owns 540 shares of the information technology services providers stock worth $170,000 after purchasing an additional 45 shares in the last quarter. Eagle Asset Management Inc. lifted its position in CACI International by 8.0% in the 3rd quarter. Eagle Asset Management Inc. now owns 11,284 shares of the information technology services providers stock worth $3,542,000 after buying an additional 833 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Kayne Anderson Rudnick Investment Management LLC bought a new stake in CACI International in the 3rd quarter worth approximately $12,267,000. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 87.30% of the companys stock. Analysts Set New Price Targets A number of equities analysts recently issued reports on CACI shares. Barclays increased their target price on CACI International from $350.00 to $400.00 and gave the stock an overweight rating in a report on Monday, August 14th. JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased their target price on CACI International from $330.00 to $380.00 and gave the stock an overweight rating in a report on Friday, August 11th. Bank of America increased their target price on CACI International from $365.00 to $385.00 and gave the stock a buy rating in a report on Thursday, August 17th. Truist Financial raised their price objective on CACI International from $345.00 to $385.00 and gave the company a buy rating in a research note on Friday, August 11th. Finally, William Blair restated an outperform rating on shares of CACI International in a research note on Thursday, August 10th. Eleven investment analysts have rated the stock with a buy rating, According to MarketBeat, the stock presently has an average rating of Buy and an average target price of $374.09. Get Our Latest Stock Analysis on CACI International CACI International Price Performance CACI stock traded up $3.57 during mid-day trading on Friday, reaching $324.52. 66,183 shares of the company traded hands, compared to its average volume of 83,200. CACI International has a 52-week low of $275.79 and a 52-week high of $359.33. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.55, a current ratio of 1.24 and a quick ratio of 1.24. The company has a market capitalization of $7.23 billion, a P/E ratio of 19.73, a P/E/G ratio of 1.71 and a beta of 0.95. The company has a fifty day moving average price of $323.85 and a 200-day moving average price of $327.02. CACI International (NYSE:CACI Get Free Report) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, October 25th. The information technology services provider reported $4.36 EPS for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $4.52 by ($0.16). CACI International had a return on equity of 13.74% and a net margin of 5.49%. The business had revenue of $1.85 billion for the quarter, compared to analysts expectations of $1.68 billion. During the same period in the previous year, the firm posted $4.36 EPS. The firms revenue for the quarter was up 15.2% compared to the same quarter last year. As a group, analysts anticipate that CACI International will post 20.05 earnings per share for the current year. About CACI International (Get 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 through two segments: Domestic Operations and International Operations. Further Reading Receive News & Ratings for CACI International Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for CACI International and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. Glatfelter Co. (NYSE:GLT Get Free Report) was the recipient of a large growth in short interest during the month of November. As of November 15th, there was short interest totalling 1,500,000 shares, a growth of 5.6% from the October 31st total of 1,420,000 shares. Based on an average daily volume of 318,900 shares, the days-to-cover ratio is currently 4.7 days. Approximately 3.5% of the shares of the company are short sold. Wall Street Analyst Weigh In Separately, StockNews.com raised shares of Glatfelter from a sell rating to a hold rating in a research report on Friday, November 3rd. Get Glatfelter alerts: Check Out Our Latest Stock Report on Glatfelter Insider Activity at Glatfelter Institutional Investors Weigh In On Glatfelter In related news, major shareholder Carlson Capital L. P acquired 250,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, October 2nd. The stock was purchased at an average cost of $1.95 per share, with a total value of $487,500.00. Following the transaction, the insider now directly owns 6,715,000 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $13,094,250. The purchase was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink . In related news, major shareholder Carlson Capital L. P acquired 200,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, September 5th. The stock was purchased at an average cost of $1.92 per share, with a total value of $384,000.00. Following the transaction, the insider now directly owns 6,365,000 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $12,220,800. The purchase was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink . Also, major shareholder Carlson Capital L. P acquired 250,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, October 2nd. The stock was bought at an average cost of $1.95 per share, with a total value of $487,500.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the insider now directly owns 6,715,000 shares in the company, valued at $13,094,250. The disclosure for this purchase can be found here . Insiders purchased 811,000 shares of company stock valued at $1,491,800 in the last three months. 2.59% of the stock is owned by insiders. A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in GLT. American Century Companies Inc. grew its stake in shares of Glatfelter by 35.9% during the 1st quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 122,864 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $1,521,000 after purchasing an additional 32,486 shares during the period. Citigroup Inc. grew its stake in shares of Glatfelter by 6.6% during the 1st quarter. Citigroup Inc. now owns 43,512 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $538,000 after purchasing an additional 2,692 shares during the period. Bank of Montreal Can grew its stake in shares of Glatfelter by 8.9% during the 1st quarter. Bank of Montreal Can now owns 52,236 shares of the basic materials companys stock worth $692,000 after purchasing an additional 4,261 shares during the period. MetLife Investment Management LLC grew its stake in Glatfelter by 56.4% in the 1st quarter. MetLife Investment Management LLC now owns 23,331 shares of the basic materials companys stock valued at $289,000 after acquiring an additional 8,417 shares during the period. Finally, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Empls Retrmt SYS grew its stake in Glatfelter by 14.1% in the 1st quarter. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Public School Empls Retrmt SYS now owns 38,385 shares of the basic materials companys stock valued at $475,000 after acquiring an additional 4,733 shares during the period. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 79.27% of the companys stock. Glatfelter Stock Performance GLT traded up $0.11 during trading on Friday, reaching $1.58. 330,693 shares of the companys stock were exchanged, compared to its average volume of 220,727. Glatfelter has a 1 year low of $1.32 and a 1 year high of $4.87. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 3.34, a current ratio of 2.33 and a quick ratio of 1.15. The stock has a market capitalization of $71.24 million, a P/E ratio of -0.68 and a beta of 1.67. The companys fifty day simple moving average is $1.65 and its 200-day simple moving average is $2.41. Glatfelter (NYSE:GLT Get Free Report) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, November 2nd. The basic materials company reported ($0.23) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter. Glatfelter had a negative return on equity of 15.02% and a negative net margin of 7.28%. The business had revenue of $329.92 million for the quarter. About Glatfelter (Get Free Report) Glatfelter Corporation, together with its subsidiaries, manufactures and sells engineered materials worldwide. It operates through three segments: Composite Fibers, Airlaid Materials, and Spunlace. The Composite Fibers segment offers food and beverage filtration materials for single-serve coffee and tea products; wallcover base materials for wallpaper manufacturers; metallized products that are used in labels, packaging liners, gift wraps, and other consumer product applications; composite laminates consisting of decorative laminates for use in furniture, household and commercial flooring, and other applications; and specialty engineered products, which are used in electrical energy storage, home, hygiene, and other engineered fiber-based applications. Read More Receive News & Ratings for Glatfelter Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Glatfelter and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. Shekhar Iyer is former senior associate editor of Hindustan Times and political editor of Deccan Herald. Views are personal. Check Free Credit Score on Moneycontrol: Easily track your loans, get insights, and enjoy a 100 cashback on your first check! Check Free Credit Score on Moneycontrol: Easily track your loans, get insights, and enjoy a 100 cashback on your first check! Yash Sadhak Shrivastava is an aspiring voice in the Journalistic forefront with experience in covering financial markets & geopolitics. Harshita Tyagi is a budding journalist on a mission to prove that financial markets and geopolitics can be as entertaining as your favorite TV show Souptik Datta Reports real estate, infra and city in Bengaluru. Btw, curiosity never kills the cat. Check Free Credit Score on Moneycontrol: Easily track your loans, get insights, and enjoy a 100 cashback on your first check! Rachita Prasad heads Moneycontrols coverage of conventional and new energy, and infrastructure sectors. Rachita is passionate about energy transition and the global efforts against climate change, with special focus on India. Before joining Moneycontrol, she was an Assistant Editor at The Economic Times, where she wrote for the paper for over a decade and was a host on their podcast. Contact: rachita.prasad@nw18.com Invite your friends and family to sign up for MC Tech 3, our daily newsletter that breaks down the biggest tech and startup stories of the day December 04, 2023 / 09:06 PM IST Nita M. Ambani, Founder and Chairperson, Reliance Foundation, was awarded at the CII Scorecard 2023 event in New Delhi today, with the 'Sports Leader of the Year - Female' award for her exemplary leadership in driving Indias sports story. Reliance Foundation was also awarded with the 'Best Corporate Promoting Sports in India' award for setting a benchmark for excellence in sports. Gearoid Reidy is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication. Ashwani Mahajan is a professor at PGDAV College, University of Delhi, and the national co-convener of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication. Asim Ali is a political researcher. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication. Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication. Market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has asked six entities, including former promoters of Satyam Computer Services Ltd (Satyam), to disgorge unlawful gains of Rs624 crore with an interest of 12%pa (per annum) for about 15 years, taking the total amount to over Rs1,747 crore. In an order last week, Ananth Narayan G, whole-time member (WTM) of SEBI, says, "The pledging of SCSL (27.86mn- million) shares by SRSR Holdings Pvt Ltd (SRSR) and selling of the said pledged shares in the market on account of invocation of pledge by financial institutions (due to margin shortfall) amounted to an indirect sale of SCSL shares by SRSR on behalf of the Raju brothers. Further, due to the invocation of the pledge, the liability to repay the loans was also extinguished. The contention that shares were acquired by SRSR from the Raju family (which, as observed in the second order of Securities Appellate Tribunal- SAT, were the promoters of Satyam) for 'valuable consideration' appears to be an attempt to lend artificial legitimacy to the transactions." The six entities (noticees) named in the SEBI order are: B Ramalinga Raju (former chairman of Satyam), B Rama Raju (ex-managing director -MD), B Suryanrayana Raju (brother of Ramalinga Raju), SRSR, Vadlamani Srinivas (ex-chief financial officerCFOof Satyam) and G Ramkrishna (ex-vice-president for finance at Satyam). "By urging that the scale of the fraud was lesser in earlier years when the promoters sold their shares, these noticees appear to be seeking to reduce their culpability by pointing to the lesser gain they made," the order says, adding, "This is far from the truth. The large scale of the fraud in Satyam was built up from the early 2000s. It was not an overnight exercise. The promoters and management played the central role in this build-up. Further, much of the promoter holding was moved to SRSR Holdings for raising funds through the pledge of shares and then offloaded later due to the invocation of the security. In view of the above, I am unable to accept the contention that the intrinsic value was higher in earlier years of the fraud." Under an agreement signed on 15 September 2006 between the Raju family (Ramalinga Raju, Rama Raju, B Nandini Raju and B Radha), SRSR Holdings, DSP Merrill Lynch Capital Ltd, a non-banking finance company (NBFC) and ICICI Bank Ltd, the Raju family received a loan of Rs2,266 crore from DSP Merrill Lynch Ltd (DSP and stock broker for SRSR and the Raju family), a unit of the NBFC. The Raju family then transferred Rs2,266 crore to SRSR Holdings. For purchasing shares of Satyam from Raju family, SRSR Holdings moved the money to DSP. The Raju family received Rs2,266 crore from DSP towards selling Satyam shares to SRSR which was transferred to DSP towards repayment of the loan. From the above, the SEBI WTM says, "I also find that acquisition of 27.86mn Satyam shares by SRSR Holdings from the Raju family was funded by Raju family themselves. The bank balance of the ICICI Bank account in question reveals that SRSR had NIL funds as of the date of the acquisition of shares by SRSR Holdings. Sans the fund transferred to SRSR on the very same day by the Raju family, SRSR would not have been in a position to purchase the 27.86mn Satyam shares from the very same Raju family. Therefore, effectively, SRSR had acquired the said shares without paying any consideration." SEBI also restrained Ramalinga Raju and Rama Raju from markets till 14 July 2028 while not passing a restraining order against Suryanarayana Raju, SRSR Holdings, V Srinivas and G Ramakrishna. Ramalinga Raju, Rama Raju, V Srinivas and G Ramakrishna are already under restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court. In January 2018, the enforcement directorate (ED) attached fixed deposits (FDs) worth Rs822 crore of erstwhile Satyam Computer Services with four lenders, Andhra Bank, Bank of Baroda, IDBI Bank and ING Vysya Bank. The action by the ED was related to a case filed against B Ramalinga Raju, founder-chairman of Satyam Computer Services, and others. The ED had also attached some fixed assets worth Rs250 crore owned by Ramalinga Raju and his family in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu. According to ED, Ramalinga Raju, his brother B Rama Raju, wife B Nandini Raju and sister-in-law B Radha Raju transferred their shares in Satyam Computer Services to SRSR Holdings, owned by them. SRSR Holdings pledged these shares with lenders and obtained a loan worth Rs2,172 crore. To conceal the source of funding, these loans were routed among 327 front companies floated by the family. Out of the total loans obtained by the Raju family, Rs822 crore found its way in Satyam Computer Services and was utilised for daily expenses and paying salaries of employees. In 2012, the ED had claimed that since this amount of Rs822 crore subsists with Satyam Computer Services and was obtained by pledging the company shares, it falls under the definition of mischief of proceeds under the PMLA and is thus liable for attachment. However, in March 2021, the Supreme Court dismissed ED's petition filed against an order passed by the High Court of Hyderabad for Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. On 7 January 2009, Ramalinga Rajuthe then chairman of Satyam Computerhad sent an email to the SEBI, wherein he admitted and confessed to inflating the cash and bank balances of the company, besides understating liabilities and other financial misstatements. After the fraud came to light, the Indian government ordered an auction for the sale of the company in the interest of investors and employees of, what was known at that time as, the country's fourth-largest IT firm. The company was acquired by Tech Mahindra, then renamed Mahindra Satyam, and eventually merged with Tech Mahindra. Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has decided to extend the timeline for linking the SEBI complaint redressal (SCORES) platform with the online dispute resolution platform to 1 April 2024 from 4 December 2023. However, regulated entities, including listed companies, registered intermediaries and market infrastructure institutions (MII) need to submit the action taken report (ATR) (in the investor complaint) within 21 days from the date of receipt of the complaint. In September, while releasing a framework for the redressal of investor grievances through the SCORES platform and linking it to an online dispute resolution platform, SEBI shared the workflow of processing investor grievances by entities and the framework for monitoring and handling of investor complaints by the designated bodies that was expected to come into force from 4 December 2023. In its September 2023 circular, SEBI says, "The complaints lodged on SCORES against any entity shall be automatically forwarded to the concerned entity through SCORES for resolution and submission of ATR. Entities shall resolve the complaint and upload the ATR on SCORES within 21 calendar days of receipt of the complaint. The ATR of the entity will be automatically routed to the complainant." If the investor is not satisfied with the ATR, she can request a review of the resolution provided by the entity within the next 15 days. "In case the complainant has requested for a review of the resolution provided by the entity or the entity has not submitted the ATR within the stipulated time of 21 calendar days, the concerned designated body shall take cognizance of the complaint for the first review of the resolution through SCORES. The designated body shall take up the first review with the concerned entity, wherever required. The concerned entity shall submit the ATR to the designated body within the time stipulated by the designated body." The designated body should ensure to submit a revised ATR within 10 calendar days from the review on SCORES. Even then, if the investor complainant is not satisfied with the revised ATR, she can seek a second review of within 15 calendar days from the date of the submission of the revised ATR by the designated body. In that case, SEBI or the designated body would take up the review with the stakeholders involved, including the concerned entity and/ or the designated body. "The concerned entity shall provide clarification to the respective designated body and/ or SEBI, wherever sought and within such timeline as specified. The second review complaint shall be treated as 'resolved' or 'disposed' or 'closed' only when SEBI 'disposes' or 'closes' the complaint in SCORES. Hence, mere filing of ATR with respect to SEBI review complaint will not mean that the SEBI review complaint is disposed of." The SEBI circular also has a provision for imposing fines on the listed company which fails to redress investor complaints within the stipulated time. The designated stock exchange (DSE), which will be the designated body for listed companies, would levy a fine of Rs1,000 per day per complaint on the listed company. These fines would also be imposed on companies that are suspended from trading. If the company fails to redress investor complaints or pay the fine within 15 days, then the DSE will issue a notice to the promoter/s of the listed company to ensure submission of ATRs on pending complaints and payment of fines within 10 days. SEBI says, "In case the listed entity fails to comply with the aforesaid requirement and/ or pay a fine levied within the stipulated period as per the notices, the DSE shall forthwith intimate the depositories to freeze the entire shareholding of the promoter(s) in such listed company as well as all other securities held in the demat account of the promoter/s. The depository(ies) shall immediately freeze such demat accounts and also intimate the promoter(s) about the details of non-compliances resulting in freezing of their demat accounts." "Upon exhaustion of all options as mentioned above, and if the number of pending complaints exceeds 20 or the value involved in such complaints is more than Rs10 lakh, stock exchanges shall forward all the complaints against such listed companies to SEBI for further action, if any," the circular says. Hong Kong: Algernon Yau tours SZ firms Secretary for Commerce & Economic Development Algernon Yau today led a business delegation of enterprises of Belt & Road countries operating in Hong Kong to start a two-day visit to the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) in Shenzhen. Being the first business networking event organised by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government for enterprises of Belt & Road countries operating in Hong Kong, the visit seeks to promote the city as a services hub in assisting enterprises to tap the Mainland market. Members of the delegation include 20 representatives from 15 enterprises from countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, covering industries such as investment, finance, tourism, construction, environmental protection, energy and infrastructure. The visit is arranged under the themes of green development and innovation and technology to respond to "promoting green development" and "advancing scientific and technological innovation" of the eight major steps to support the high-quality development of the initiative, as announced by President Xi Jinping. In the morning, Mr Yau led the delegation to visit the headquarters of BYD Company to learn about its latest developments in areas such as vehicles, rail transit, ternary lithium batteries and blade battery nail test experiments. The delegates also experienced first hand the intelligent rail transit system, SkyShuttle. Mr Yau also hosted a welcome luncheon for the delegation, where he said Hong Kong is not only a superconnector, but also a super value-adder that has a lot to offer with its professional services sector, and enterprises would benefit a lot by utilising such world-class professional services. At Tencent's headquarters in the afternoon, Mr Yau and the delegation were briefed on digital transformation and financial solutions, artificial intelligence technology as well as its services and products in the areas of social media and electronic games, and real-case applications in Southeast Asia. The delegation later met representatives of the Belt & Road Environmental Technology Exchange & Transfer Center (Shenzhen) (B&RETTC) to learn about its work and explore collaboration opportunities. Witnessed by Mr Yau, four enterprises respectively signed a memorandum of understanding with the B&RETTC, laying a good foundation for further co-operation in promoting green development. In the evening, Mr Yau and the delegation attended a dinner with Shenzhen Vice Mayor Wang Shourui. Mr Yau said with the experience of this visit and a profound foundation of collaboration with the Shenzhen Municipal People's Government, it is hoped that more diversified enterprises from Belt & Road countries operating in Hong Kong will have the opportunity to explore business opportunities in the GBA. The delegation will conclude the Shenzhen leg of their trip tomorrow morning and proceed to Guangzhou in the afternoon to continue the visit. This story has been published on: 2023-12-04. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Feature: Macao students take "space class" offline with Chinese astronauts Xinhua) 15:13, December 04, 2023 Wang Yaping (2nd R, front), a crew member for China's Shenzhou-13 space mission, talks with Wong Ging Pui (1st L, front), a senior high school student from Tong Nam Middle School in the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) in Macao, south China, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Cheong Kam Ka) MACAO, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- "One, two, three!" An email was sent into space at the Macao Science Center on Sunday, witnessed by nearly 200 local students. The email was sent by Wang Yaping, a crew member for China's Shenzhou-13 space mission and the first woman astronaut who has entered China's space station, together with Wong Ging Pui, a senior high school student from Tong Nam Middle School in the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) who attended Wang's space class online two years ago. "Can astronauts surf on the internet and play video games? Can you watch TV? Can we send emails to you while you are in space?" These were the questions Wong had the chance to ask Wang in December 2021 on behalf of Macao students when she was broadcasting a live lecture in space to students on Earth. Now Wong was excited to meet Wang in person and experience how to send an email into space using the Beidou Navigation Satellite System. "I made it!" said Wong. He said Wang has inspired him by her own stories and personally encouraged him to keep studying hard. "I hope to become a person like her whose life is meaningful to both the society and the country," he said. Known for being a "space teacher," Wang said she was very happy to be able to interact with the students face to face. "I'm very glad to see how they have grown," she said, encouraging the young people to explore the unknown and break limits on the way to realizing their dreams. Wang is a member of a delegation of China's manned space program on a six-day visit through Sunday to Hong Kong and Macao SARs at the invitation of the SAR governments. While at the Macao Science Center, the delegation was briefed on popular science education plans for Macao students. The astronauts gave their thumbs up when learning that junior high school students in Macao have lessons on human exploration of the universe and China's space technology development. The delegation also visited an ongoing exhibition of China's achievements in space exploration and navigation held at the Center, including moon samples brought back by the Chang'e 5 lunar mission, models of rockets and "Macao Science 1" space exploration satellites jointly developed by the mainland and Macao. The students waved national flags to say goodbye to the astronauts when they left the Center. "Today's tour marks a perfect conclusion to our visit to Macao," said Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency who led the delegation. "We hope to help Macao compatriots know more about China's manned space program, inspire the local young people to explore science and space, and see increased participation of Macao in the country's future space programs," said Lin. A delegation of China's manned space program visit the Macao Science Center in Macao, south China, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Cheong Kam Ka) (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) A plea to Biden from longtime immigrants in Chicago: Please dont forget about us, we need job permits too Pacific Islands Forum Secretary General Henry Puna, third right, at a Moana Blue Pacific Pavilion event last Saturday in Dubai at the COP28 climate summit. In this file photo, then-Acting Gov. Josh Tenorio speaks to attendees at the 2nd Annual Housing and Homelessness Summit held Friday, Nov. 17, 2023, at the University of Guam in Mangilao. SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) A state appeals court ruled that California can continue providing personal information of gun owners to researchers to study gun violence, reversing last years decision by a lower court judge who said such data sharing violates privacy rights. In 2021, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law allowing the states Department of Justice to share identifying information of more than 4 million gun owners in California with qualified research institutions to help them better study gun violence, accidents and suicides. The information which the state collects with every firearm sale to perform background checks include names, addresses, phone numbers, and any criminal records, among other things. Under the law, researchers can use the information and make their findings public, but cant release any identifying information of gun owners. In response, gun owners and organizations sued the state, arguing that the disclosure of their information violates their privacy rights. San Diego County Superior Court Judge Katherine Bacal ruled to temporarily block the law last October. But on Friday, a three-judge panel of the California Court of Appeals for the Fourth District found that the lower court failed to consider the states interest in studying and preventing gun violence in its analysis before halting the law. In the opinion, Associate Justice Julia C. Kelety sent the case back to the lower court and said the preliminary injunction must be reversed. Lawyers representing the gun owners and firearms groups suing the state didnt immediately respond to calls and an email seeking comment. The Friday ruling came months after a federal judge refused to block the law in a separate lawsuit. The data sharing law is among several gun measures in California that are being legally challenged. In October, a federal judge overturned the states three-decade-old ban on assault weapons again, ruling that the law violates constitutional rights. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said once the data sharing ruling is implemented, the state will resume providing this information to researchers. The courts decision is a victory in our ongoing efforts to prevent gun violence, Bonta said in a statement. He added: The law serves the important goal of enabling research that supports informed policymaking aimed at reducing and preventing firearm violence. Garen Wintemute, who directs the California Firearm Violence Research Center at University of California, Davis cheered the recent ruling. The center has been working with the state on studying gun violence. The courts decision is an important victory for science, Wintemute said in a statement. For more than 30 years, researchers at UC Davis and elsewhere have used the data in question to conduct vital research that simply couldnt be done anywhere else. Were glad to be able to return to that important work, which will improve health and safety here in California and across the country. By TRAN NGUYEN Associated Press Lloyd Mathiesen and Tom Hobby View Photo Tuolumne County, CA Calling it a groundbreaking partnership, Chicken Ranch Rancheria of Me-Wuk Indians is joining Yosemite Clean Energy in the effort to build a bioenergy facility in Chinese Camp near the existing Pacific Ultrapower site. We reported earlier that the planned project will be spread across 45 acres. The 50-megawatt thermal watt facility will utilize 90,000 tons of wood waste per year and convert it into green (carbon negative) hydrogen. Collectively, they will seek grant funding from the CAL Fire Climate Investment Fund, and other state and federal grant sources, to ensure the viability and success of the project. The Tribe notes that it is dedicated to providing cultural, environmental, and economic development opportunities for its Tribal members, and envisions a sustainable forest enterprise within its traditional territory. They support the sustainable use of waste wood, which aligns with Yosemite Clean Energys goals of transforming forest and farm wood waste into renewable fuels. Yosemite Clean Energy, based in Mariposa, hopes that the Tuolumne County project will serve as a model for similar type initiatives, worldwide. Specific financial terms of the partnership were not released. The California Energy Commission awarded Yosemite Clean Energy $5 million this past July to construct its first facility, which will be located in Oroville and is scheduled to be completed in early 2026. The Tuolumne County project is planned to be built second. Pictured are Chicken Ranch Rancheria Tribal Chairman Lloyd Mathiesen and Yosemite Clean Energy CEO Tom Hobby. Government working to boost youth employment, says Acting President Chiwenga In a rally held at eBusteni in Cowdray Park, Bulawayo, Acting President Constantino Chiwenga addressed Zanu PF supporters, emphasizing the governments commitment to creating more job opportunities for the youth. The rally was organized to support Zanu PF candidate Aurther Mujeyi, who is vying for the Cowdray Park seat, and Kidwel Mujuru, contesting for the council ward. Chiwenga expressed his belief that the recent recalls within the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) party have inadvertently favoured Zanu PF. He stated, The opposition party has confusions and removed their representatives in Parliament who said they had won in the previous elections which has become a reason to restart our elections. The Acting President outlined various initiatives aimed at improving the lives of the constituencys residents. Among these plans is the implementation of the smart city concept, which includes enhancing healthcare services, road infrastructure, and the construction of additional schools in Cowdray Park. Chiwenga assured the crowd that the government would prioritize job creation for young people and women, offering them assistance through loans from the womens bank and youth empowerment bank. Additionally, the government aims to provide every house in the area with title deeds. Chiwenga criticized the Bulawayo City Council for its poor service delivery, prompting the governments intervention. He noted that road rehabilitation and electricity installation, tasks typically assigned to local councils, were currently being undertaken by the government due to the councils failures. The Acting President highlighted recent road rehabilitation efforts on 12th Avenues, George Avenue, Masiyephambili, and Nketa Drive, affirming the governments commitment to continuing such programs regardless of the councils performance. Water scarcity in Cowdray Park was another concern addressed by Chiwenga. He pledged to resolve the issue by installing pipes to transport water from the Gwayi-Shangani Dam to the high-density suburb. The government has also been working on alternative solutions, obtaining water from Eppington Forest and utilizing dams in Matabeleland South province to alleviate water shortages in Bulawayo. As the rally concluded, Chiwenga reassured the attendees that the government would persist in its efforts to enhance the lives of the people in Cowdray Park, emphasizing their commitment to job creation, improved infrastructure, and access to basic amenities such as water and electricity. Breaking News via Email By Lambert Strether of Corrente. In a recent and very stimulating discussion between Michael Hudson and Steve Keen, a question arose: When was the term capitalism, er, coined? This intrigued me, and being a glutton for punishment, I thought Id look into capital, and capitalist as well. I should caveat right away that, as far as possible, Im looking at the emergence of the words in context (source, nation, date) with meanings as understood in normal commercial life. The post is in no sense systematic, its totally not an intellectual history, and its Anglo-Centric, since English is the language I speak, and English tools are the tools I have. The post only covers what Bourdieu would call economic capital (and not social or symbolic capital, even if understanding those two forms of capital has great potential for understanding why capitalism is so anti-fragile). Here is the Indo-European root of capital, kaput (!): (I love this stuff. From the root, branching out: capital, caprice, cattle, caudillo, chef.) Historically, capital comes first, followed by capitalist, and lastly by capitalism, and I will take the terms up in that order. First, a perspective that applies to all three from Stephen Stoll, The History of Capital: So complete has capital become throughout the social order that it appears to have emerged from the natural order, and the behavior it instills seems to many people to be an expression of universal human motives and aspirations. As three historians observe, One of the distinguishing features of a free-enterprise economy is that its coercion is veiled Far from being natural, the cues for market participation are given through complicated social codes [social capital, symbolic capital]. Indeed, the illusion that compliance in the dominant economic system is voluntary is itself an amazing cultural artifact. It might be true that the gentry did the same thing in 1650 that they did in 1250. They extracted value from people and environments. But they did it differently than anyone had before, through a discipline imposed by rents and wages, through social codes and cues that appeared to be independent of people. They arent. Perhaps the most radical idea we can have about capital, the single most subversive thing we can think about it, is that it begins as nothing more than a relationship between people. Like the meanings of words, relationships change . Of all the insights of the people who coined capitalism, I think that is the most important, if not exactly mainstream. Capital My Oxford English Dictionary (OED), dates capital to M16, that is to the middle of the 16th Century CE: Frederic Pryor, in Capitalism Reassessed, Appendix 2-1: Etymology Of Capitalism gives the words history after the Indo-Europeans but before the English glommed onto it, as we do (which is why English is such a wonderful language and there are so many volumes to the OED[1]): [The word capital] comes from the Latin words capitalis, capitale, which in Western Europe in the Middle Ages designated, among other things, property and wealth. (Berger, 1986: pp. 17-18). In classical Latin, however, property was designated by a different word, namely caput. The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1906-12, vol. 3: 43-34) provides examples of this usage: for instance, around 30 B.C., Horace employed it to indicate property in his Satire 1 (Book 2, line 14). Several decades after Horace, Livy also employed the word with roughly the same meaning. A common derivation linking capital to head of cattle (hence wealth) appears to be incorrect. (On cattle, the American Heritage Dictionary would appear to disagree. Infinite are the arguments of mages applies to a lot of the derivations here presented, and, I think, to etymology in general.) Franz Rainer, in Word formation and word history: The case of CAPITALIST and CAPITALISM adds a twist: [B]y the time that the first derivative, capitalist, appeared, capital generally referred to the property, not necessarily only money, that a rich person owned. In double-entry bookkeeping, the term referred to the net worth owned by the merchant after taking away the liabilities from the assets. (Rainers scholarship is a real pleasure to read, and if you have the time to sit with it, I recommend you make a cup of coffee and do so.) Sadly, Rainer doesnt footnote when and where the double-entry bookkeeping usage appeared, but it would be pleasing if it were Italy, where double-entry bookkeeping (at least for the West) first propagated, and even more pleasing if it were one of the Italian city-states where, at least according to Giovanni Arrighi (The Long Twentieth Century) capitalism originated. Rank speculation! We turn now to a later addition to our stock of words, capitalist. Capitalist My OED dates capitalist to the late 18th Century: Its interesting that we have a word for the thing relation, Capital, and had to wait two centuries to have a word for the owner of the thing relation. Here we turn again to Rainer, Word Formation, whose research is exhaustive and properly sourced: [T]he noun Capitalist was indeed coined in the Netherlands (then: United Provinces) back in 1621 by tax authorities in order to designate a wealthy citizen who possessed 2,000 guilders or more [For the] Dutch Capitalist was a complex concept, designating at the same time a wealthy person, mostly engaged in money-lending or investment activities, as well as a category of the tax authorities. And: The 17th century is called the Golden Age in Dutch historiography, because the United Provinces at that time were at the forefront of trade, military, science and art. This background, especially their eminent position in international finance, explains how a Dutch neologism could spread abroad and start an astounding international career. Already by the end of the 17th century, we find loan translations in German and French. German Capitalist (today written Kapitalist) appears as early as 1671 in a document on the financial system of the United Provinces, where, due to its novelty, it is glossed as money-lender The German word, as far as I can see, had no influence on French. Capitalist now hops to France, rather like a virus on an airplane, still in Rainers telling: The few examples that we find in French until the middle of the 18th century. refer to that same Dutch reality. In the second half of the 18th century, however, the noun capitaliste firmly established itself in French with a reference independent from the Dutch context. Here is a quote from the Dictionnaire domestique portatif (Paris: Vincent 1765), vol. 3, p. 505: RENTIERS; ce terme est synonyme a capitaliste, cest-a-dire, a celui qui fait valoir son argent, en le disposant suivant le cours de la place, & qui vit de ses rentes.The diffusion of the term among a wider public was furthered by its adoption by the Physiocrats [Turgort, 1788], an economic school that began holding much sway at that time, in France and abroad. (Sadly, rentiers is out of scope for this post.) Finally, Capitalist now crosses both the Atlantic and the Channel to the English-speaking peoples[2]: Nowadays we strongly associate capitalism with the Anglo-Saxon world, but the truth is that Great Britain and the United States were the last among the big, developed nations to take up the word capitalist. In English, capitalist does not make its appearance before 1787, when the following example is attested in Madisons [(!!!!)] writings In other Countries this dependence results in some from the relations between Landlords and Tenants in others both from that source and from the relations between wealthy capitalists and indigent labourers. Four years later, the word is used in England by Edmund Burke. There can be no doubt that French was the donor language for the English calque. (A calque is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation (English hamburger to French hambourgeois). And so to the final addition to our word hoard, capitalism. Capitalism My OED dates capitalism to the middle of the 19th Century: So, from move from the relation, capital, to the person playing one of the roles in that relation, capitalist, and then to the system in which those players play those roles, capitalism, takes about three hundred years. Here we have two different narratives that, so far as I can tell, do not intersect. First, Rainer: [C]apitalist acquired the sense entrepreneur after having crossed the Channel (and the Atlantic), a sense that migrated back to France from the 1830s onwards, where it has cohabitated with the original sense ever since. Capitaliste, in that way, became the antonym of ouvrier, travailleur (both worker) and proletaire proletarian, just like capital capital had become the antonym of travail work. This lexical opposition simply reflected an extra-linguistic phenomenon, namely the well-known social divide created by the Industrial Revolution. In the 1840s, French capitalisme was also attracted by this lexical field and thereby was converted into the standard designation of the new economic system characterized by the exploitation of workers in factories owned and often run by a small group of capitalists/entrepreneurs. Here are some of the first examples of this new sense, which are probably attributable to Louis Blanc: Une lutte recemment engagee entre Lamartine et L. Blanc a donne naissance a un nouveau mot ; le capitalism . Ce nest pas au capital, secrie ce dernier, que nous avons declare la guerre, mais au capitalisme ; cest-a-dire, sans doute, aux capitalistes (Louis Blanc was a French utopian socialist.) Importantly, from its formation, capitalism was always explicitly oppositional both in nature and in conception: [T]he new lexical opposition [of capitalism] with socialisme and communisme could be viewed either as a consequence of this conceptual change, or as its trigger. In fact, the relevant meaning of these two terms, namely an economic system where the means of production pertains to the workers or to society as a whole, called for a designation for the opposite concept of an economic system where the means of production was concentrated in the hands of a small group of wealthy individuals. Since this means of production was referred to technically as capital and the entrepreneurs had come to be called capitalistes, capitalisme was a natural choice. This reconstruction of the words origin also neatly explains why the word was used with negative connotations right from the beginning: it was launched by the opponents of capitalism, while capitalists themselves and circles close to them used to call the then prevailing economic system liberalisme (economie de marche market economy is of much more recent vintage). The second narrative comes from Michael Sonenscher, Capitalism: The word and the thing. Here again capitalism is oppositional, although framed by post-1789 French reactionaries, rather than utopian socialists: [A] number of royalist publications that began to circulate before and after the French Revolution of July 1830 [used the word, inspired by a Royalist named Bonard]. Here, capitalism became a shorthand for a fusion of two related problems. Behind the political question of the type of constitution suitable for the new regime, there was also, they argued, a social question, which asked whether any or all of the constitutional arrangements established by the July Monarchy were compatible with the combination of the division of labour, public debt, and inequality that, they claimed, were the hallmarks of capitalisme. No simple constitutional adjustment, they argued, could erase the legacy of the French Revolution. Real closure would have to come from erasing the French Revolution itself. Capitalism, in this setting, began as a French royalist and legitimist concept that was designed to expose the limitations and fragility of the Restoration settlement and July Monarchy. It also, more importantly, began as a real political problem since the original concept of capitalism was a palimpsest of many of the most morally and socially explosive issues to have arisen over the course of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution: from war and debt to constitutional crisis and social dissolution. Positioning the concept of capitalism in a context that, right from the start, was significantly more apocalyptic than that of an industrial revolution or an economic category helps to explain the urgency and intensity of efforts made to understand the nature of the thing itself. Whether from the right or from the left, capitalism propagated rapidly until legitimized in Germany in 1902. Rainer once more: A more interesting conceptual change occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, academic circles began using the term not only to refer to the contemporary economic system, what we now call industrial capitalism, but also to economic systems of past times that, in their opinion, presented sufficient similarities with the contemporary system to be called capitalism. Proto-capitalism was located in the Renaissance, in the Middle Ages, or even in Antiquity. This conceptual change, which was the result of conscious conceptual manipulation for scientific purposes, resulted in a more abstract concept of capitalism, freed from some of the more contingent aspects of 19th century industrial capitalism, as well as its negative overtones. [T]he international success of this scientific sense was certainly due to the publication, of Werner Sombarts monumental Der modern Kapitalismus [in 1902]. After 1902, of course, came 1917[3], after which capitalism, still oppositionally charged, exploded into the American media environment of that time. From Steven G. Marks, The Word Capitalism: The Soviet Unions Gift to America: As the press conveyed the earth-shattering events occurring in Russia they adopted the word capitalism en route. Nearly every New York Times article that mentioned it in the 1920s had to do with the Soviet Union and its rulers Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Simple reporting on the USSR required adoption of the term, and editorializing necessitated defining it . The definitions varied according to the political orientation of the writers and publications. By 1919, the first Red Scare was in full fury, and conservatives in the US were denouncing Bolshevism as a menace to Americanism. Fast forward to the present day: [M]y purpose has been to call into question what we really know about capitalism by showing that at nearly every moment since the word came into use it was defined by way of comparison with the dreaded Soviet Frankenstein economy. As a result, American conceptions of capitalism have been, and still are, imbued with what Samuelson once called the economic science fiction of the right as well as of the left and center. Let me close by quoting Christine Lagarde, Economic Inclusion and Financial Integrityan Address to the Conference on Inclusive Capitalism, in a speech before the International Monetary Fund: Capitalism originates from the Latin caput, cattle heads, and refers to possessions. Capital is used in the 12th century and designates the use of funds. The term capitalism is only used for the first time in 1854 by an Englishman, the novelist William Thackerayand he simply meant private ownership of money. Holy moley. But I dont have time to put on yellow waders. Perhaps, armed with this post, readers can pick apart LaGardes words. Conclusion I should really have a terrific peroration here, but since the goal of the post was purely to explain, perhaps not. Once again, the moral: So, from move from the relation, capital, to the person playing one of the roles in that relation, capitalist, and then to the system in which those players play those roles, capitalism, takes about three hundred years. Thats a long time to rectify the names. Are we doing any better today? NOTES [1] Sadly, my printed Shorter OED, the one with the magnifying glass, which I got as a signing bonus from the Book of the Month Club, is gone where the woodbine twineth. All I have now is an app! [2] I am guessing many usage examples could be gleanded from the Positive Good theorists in what would become the Confederate States. From George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All, 1857: The capitalists, in free society, live in ten times the luxury and show that Southern masters do, because the slaves to capital work harder and cost less, than negro slaves. [3] Here is an interesting discussion on the issue of whether The Bearded One used the word capitalism. From his letters, yes he did. My mom and dad watched the whole Just Conversations video I moderated with Dr. Linda Wynn and Dr. Learotha Williams Jr. about the Morris Memorial Building. Then my dad called to chastise me for not putting the issue of a Nashville Civil Rights Museum in terms that politicians actually care about: money. Betsy, he said, no politician cares about history or whats right. You have to show them the benefits in terms they understand. OK, Dad. Jeez. You want to write my posts or what? But I couldnt shake what he said, so I did some research. The National Civil Rights Museum over in Memphis has 200,000 visitors annually. Sixty-thousand of those are schoolchildren. It takes up a city block. The Mississippi Civil Rights Museum sees similar numbers. The National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta has 200,000 visitors annually, with 50,000 of those being schoolchildren. It looks like it might take up most of a city block, though its in a beautiful park setting that makes guessing its size from Google Maps a little difficult. It has multiple floors. On the Future of the Morris Memorial Building The historic downtown building could have been a civil rights center. Instead it's slated to become a hotel. Around 145,000 people visit the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute each year. That building looks like it could fit about four 16th Street Baptist Churches (the church across the street from it) inside it. Even the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro, N.C., sees 70,000 visitors a year and thats just in the old Woolworths. Civil rights museums are big draws. Such a museum in Nashville, if these numbers held true for us, would draw about the same as the Tennessee State Museum. And these museums all charge admittance, unlike the state museum. But one thing about the state museum its a hell of a lot bigger than the Morris Memorial Building, as are most civil rights museums. Lets assume that the Morris Building is going to be a boutique hotel. OK, fine. Im pissed at Nashville being the King of Saying Were Going to Do Something and Then Not Doing It. But we still need to stop embarrassing ourselves as a city by not valuing the movement we cradled. We should have a civil rights movement museum. So then, we might ask ourselves, Where would we put it? Many other cities have their museums in or near civil rights landmarks the Lorraine Hotel, the 16th Street Baptist Church, Woolworths. And we have such a civil rights landmark: Z. Alexander Loobys house. And Z. Alexander Loobys house, at 2014 Meharry Blvd., has a lot to offer as a place to build a museum around. It has historical significance. Looby was the most prominent civil rights attorney in Tennessee for most of his life. The movement offices were directly behind his building, on Jefferson. His house sits between historically Black universities Fisk, TSU and Meharry. And theres only one other building on that end of the block. Theres a parking lot next to Loobys house and a parking lot across the alley facing onto Jefferson, and with the exception of one Meharry-owned building the rest is all empty lots. How easy would it be to get tourists and schoolchildren to that spot? Well, someone put an interstate right through North Nashville, so you could exit right off I-40 and be a measly three blocks away. Or if, by chance, you were staying in a boutique hotel in a historic building designed and built by Black Nashville artisans downtown, you could always hop on the 29 bus and it would take you right there. +7 Who Bombed Z. Alexander Loobys North Nashville Home? Author Betsy Phillips Dynamite Nashville: The KKK, the FBI, and the Bombers Beyond Their Control is scheduled for release via Third Man Books Putting the museum there would also exploit my favorite thing about Nashville that you can just go and see where things were and are. You could go to the museum and learn about the organizing that was done at Clark Memorial Methodist Church, and when you were finished with your visit, you could walk across Fisks campus where civil rights icon Diane Nash went to school and over to Clark Memorial. You might see an exhibit on the damage that interstates in Nashville did to Black neighborhoods, and then you might look out the windows of the museum and see how the interstate cut through North Nashville. Maybe you see an exhibit about the 1990 student protests at TSU and you hear a recording of jeff obafemi carr talking about the rats and the plumbing that didnt work and the conditions in the dorms, and then you walk outside and see a sign now talking about TSU being shortchanged billions of dollars over the years. You can make connections between then and now. And putting the museum in North Nashville would center the Black community. So often the story of civil rights focuses on the sites of protest. This would put the spotlight back on the sites of planning and caring and community. Oh shit, I already forgot my dads lesson. OK, forget all this nifty stuff. Lets put it this way. Civil rights museums bring in about 200,000 visitors a year who pay between $15 and $20 to visit. Lets say our museum isnt that great and we only bring in 100,000 visitors who pay $15 a visit. Thats still $1.5 million. And those 100,000 people are going to need places to eat nearby. They might want to buy some souvenirs. If theyre kids, maybe they decide they want to attend Fisk or TSU, thus bringing their money to the city for the whole time theyre in college. Nashville, we could do this. We should do this. On Thursday 07 December 2023, the NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg, will receive the Prime Minister of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Mr Luc Frieden, at NATO Headquarters. 15:00 (CET) Press point by the Secretary General and the Prime Minister of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg Media coverage Media representatives, who have annual accreditation to NATO for 2023, can cover the press conference in person. Media representatives without annual accreditation wishing to attend, please register to the Press Accreditation Portal no later than 05 December 2023 at 12:00. Please note: ad-hoc accreditation may not be guaranteed and will be explicitly confirmed by email from NATO Accreditations. The event will be streamed live on Twitter @NATOPress and on the NATO website. A transcript of the Secretary Generals remarks, as well as pictures taken by a NATO photographer, will be available on the NATO website. The video will be available for free download from the NATO Multimedia Portal after the event. For more information: Contact the NATO Press Office Follow us on X (formerly Twitter) @NATO, @jensstoltenberg and @NATOPress Americas 2024 election may be decided by 23 million ILLEGAL ALIENS The American Immigration Council (AIC) has warned that millions of illegal immigrants will vote in the upcoming 2024 election. An AIC analysis found that more than 23 million immigrants are planning to cast a ballot, many of them for the first time since arriving in the United States. What this means for the outcome of the election remains to be seen. "As more immigrants naturalize and become eligible to vote, they continue to gain political power," the analysis states. "The number of immigrant voters is only projected to rise in the next decade, and in some states, foreign-born voters are already capable of deciding elections." (Related: Will there even be a 2024 election?) People born in other countries to decide America's fate The report goes on to state that foreign-born eligible voters will once again account for about one in 10 of all eligible voters in 2024. This means that 10 percent of the voting populace in the U.S. will be people who are not natural born citizens. In swing states, this is especially significant because it means that this 10 percent will become the deciding factor in the election's outcome. "The share of the American electorate that is foreign-born is immensely significant because presidential elections, particularly in the nation's swing states, are decided often by small margins," the AIC report states. Assuming the 2020 election outcome was even legitimate, AIC highlighted the very slim margins by which President Joe Biden "beat" Donald Trump in states like Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. AIC's analysis also found that most foreign-born voters vote for Democrat presidential candidates over Republican candidates, which means the 2024 election could be a tough nut for conservatives to crack because of the ever-changing demographics of this country. Even though Trump won the 2016 election, foreign-born voters back then still overwhelmingly supported two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, with 64 percent voting for her and just 31 percent voting for Trump, according to exit polls. "Meanwhile, Trump won native-born American voters by 49 percent compared to Clinton's 45 percent. Put another way, if the 2016 election were up to foreign-born voters, Clinton would have beaten Trump in a historic landslide." Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) has been warning as of late that Biden wants to allow as many illegal migrants as possible to vote in the 2024 election because otherwise his chances of reelection are slim. Native-born Americans are less likely than illegals to vote for him, after all. California has been toying with the idea of allowing non-citizens to vote in municipal elections in that state, while Democrats all over the country are pushing for similar changes as they swing wide-open the southern border for seemingly limitless illegal entry into the country. It would appear as though the constant stream of illegal immigration into the country is designed to flood the electorate with new Democrat voters so Republicans are never again able to win an election. States that have explicitly banned non-citizen voting include Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Ohio. "Clearly, the number of illegal invaders must be brought down to zero," one commenter wrote. "All immigration must be reduced to zero for at least the next 50 years because our dear United States of America needs a time out." "End all of the freebies and welfare-goodies for the invaders and all immigrants; they need to carry their own load. Fine employers of illegal invaders until it hurts and then some. End the anchor baby fiasco. End chain migration. Shut down all sanctuary cities for illegal invaders and then arrest and prosecute those who had anything to do with establishing them in the first place." The latest news about the 2024 election can be found at Chaos.news. Sources for this article include: TownHall.com NaturalNews.com Madman Bill Gates pushing world governments to force his new GMO crops and livestock on their people Billionaire eugenicist and money whore Bill Gates wants world governments to force his genetically modified (GMO) crops and livestock on their populations. Through a company called "Breakthrough Energy," Gates hopes to replace the world's food supply with artificial fruits, vegetables and meat products that he owns, basically giving him total control over everything. (Related: Italy becomes first nation to BAN Bill Gates' fake meat due to "serious health concerns.") Bill Gates speech at Africa Climate Summit Bill Gates is calling on governments around the world to use his genetically modified crops and livestock for "climate adaptation" through his new company Breakthrough Energy. Source: NTV Kenya (YouTube) pic.twitter.com/aflL7SHbnJ Camus (@newstart_2024) November 23, 2023 ?Bill Gates is calling on governments around the world to use his genetically modified crops and livestock for "climate adaptation" through his new company Breakthrough Energy. pic.twitter.com/x8jpXZbPU1 Truthseeker (@Xx17965797N) November 18, 2023 Bill Gates destroying cattle with mRNA "vaccines" The Breakthrough Energy company through which Gates hopes to accomplish this global food takeover is a collective of organizations also founded by Gates back in 2015 that have as their goal the elimination of greenhouse gas emissions to stop climate change. All of these organizations operate under the banner of Breakthrough Energy and include various other initiatives related to global warming. There is also Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), a venture capital firm founded by Gates and connected to Breakthrough Energy. Several ultra-wealthy tech and business leaders control BEV on behalf of Gates and focus their time and energy on investing in startups that have the potential, they say, to reduce global emissions by at least one percent by developing climate-friendly technologies. BEV also has a "catalyst" program that focuses on funding unique, commercial-scale projects in areas such as sustainable aviation fuel, geothermal power and methanol-driven fuel cells. "The overarching goal of Breakthrough Energy aligns with a broader, global initiative to develop and deploy critical climate solutions necessary for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050," reports explain. "This ambition reflects a growing global consciousness about the urgent need to address climate change and its impacts effectively." Gates is also working on injecting every last cattle animal with mRNA "vaccines" for the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) and other diseases, supposedly. Many are beginning to suspect that perhaps Gates is also involved in the string of mysterious fires that have occurred over the past several years at food factories all across the country. "I believe Gates and these climate change lunatics are behind the explosions, fires and terrorism at food and energy plants to push their disgusting vegan fake lab food and toxic battery EVs and green energy," one commenter wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "Where is the outrage by the GOP? Why aren't there investigations? These are not coincidences! This is homegrown terrorism! DOJ? FBI? Silent!" wrote another person. Another wrote that Gates "is a disturbed boy in a man's body," further describing him as a pedophile whom the world would be better off without. "History is littered with egocentrics like him who are so full of themselves they believe half the world needs to bow down to them and follow their lead," wrote another. "Something about excessive wealth and power that drives them nuts and makes them a danger to others." Someone else commented that the reason Gates keeps trying to reinvent and alter the things God made is "because he is of satan and satan has been doing this since God cast him out of heaven." More related news coverage can be found at GMO.news. Sources for this article include: 100PercentFedUp.com NaturalNews.com Over 3,000 car dealers sign letter opposing Bidens electric vehicle mandate: EVs are stacking up on our lots A coalition of more than 3,000 automobile dealerships across the United States have sent an open letter to President Joe Biden calling on him to "tap the brakes" on his regime's aggressive electric vehicle (EV) push. Car dealers from all 50 states that collectively sell every type of major vehicle brand on the market signed on to the letter, which centers around Biden's new tailpipe emissions standards that are said to be the most aggressive federal regulations of their kind ever issued. These proposed regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) require that the majority of new vehicle purchases within the next decade be EVs, even though demand for EVs is very low because the cars themselves are unsuitable for people's lifestyles and the infrastructure isn't there to make them a viable option anyway. The proposed EPA guidelines would affect all car models ranging in year of production from 2027 through 2032. They are purportedly aimed at improving air quality and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. "These vehicles are ideal for many people, and we believe their appeal will grow over time," the dealers wrote in their letter to Biden. "The reality, however, is that electric vehicle demand today is not keeping up with the large influx of BEVs [battery electric vehicles] arriving at our dealerships prompted by the current regulations. BEVs are stacking up on our lots." "Last year, there was a lot of hope and hype about EVs. Early adopters formed an initial line and were ready to buy these vehicles as soon as we had them to sell," continued the dealers. "But that enthusiasm has stalled. Today, the supply of unsold BEVs is surging, as they are not selling nearly as fast as they are arriving at our dealerships even with deep price cuts, manufacturer incentives and generous government incentives." (Related: Electric vehicles are a SCAM here's why.) EVs require parts mostly made in communist China The EPA's proposed regulations take none of this into account, the letter continues, calling the agency's expectations "unrealistic based on current and forecasted consumer demand." The fact that EVs are piling up on car lots shows that people simply do not want to buy them, even with socialized incentives covered by taxpayers designed to make EVs more affordable for the average American. There is also an incredible lack of charging infrastructure across the vast land mass of the United States. Getting from state to state or even city to city, depending on the distance is sometimes impossible because there is no way to get there on a single charge and no charging stations in between. Then there are all those rare earth minerals required to build EVs. These minerals mostly come from overseas, especially from communist China. Dredging up these minerals is both energy-intensive and destructive to the environment -- it is not a green endeavor -- not to mention the fact that making EVs at this standard also means making America permanently reliant on the world's largest communist dictatorship for EV materials. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), China currently produces about 75 percent of all lithium-ion batteries, as well as 70 percent of cathodes and 85 percent of anodes, two other key components of EV batteries. "Mr. President, it is time to tap the brakes on the unrealistic government electric vehicle mandate," the letter reads. "Allow time for the battery technology to advance. Allow time to make BEVs more affordable. Allow time to develop domestic sources for the minerals to make batteries." "Allow time for the charging infrastructure to be built and prove reliable/ And most of all, allow time for the American consumer to get comfortable with the technology and make the choice to buy an electric vehicle," concluded the letter. The EV push is short-sighted and anything but "green." Learn more at GreenTyranny.news. Sources for this article include: FoxBusiness.com NaturalNews.com Denmark seeing surge in same white lung syndrome pneumonia supposedly found in China The same new form of pneumonia reportedly in circulation throughout communist China is said to also now be spreading in Denmark Mycoplasma pneumoniae, a bacterial infection known to cause the disease known as "white lung syndrome" pneumonia that does not respond to most antibiotics, has reportedly reached "epidemic" levels of infection in Denmark, prompting fresh concerns about a new disease outbreak. Beijing is saying much the same thing about what it is calling a "mystery" wave of pneumonia that has arrived just in time for the winter season. China's mystery pneumonia is characterized by inflammation of the lungs, particularly in children. Hearkening back to the days of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) is a return to face masking and social distancing, which are highly recommended across China. Circulating videos show Hazmat suit-clad workers spraying some kind of chemical disinfectant inside schools, hallways and outside. (Related: Chinese military may have been in possession of COVID-19 bioweapons much earlier than thought, scientist says.) White lung syndrome pneumonia outbreaks occur in Denmark roughly every four years According to Denmark's Statens Serum Institut (SSI), rates of white lung syndrome pneumonia have tripled over the past five weeks. Government officials are warning that many children will be "struck down" this winter season. In nearby Netherlands, there is reportedly an "alarming spike" in cases of children facing pneumonia infections, which is also said to be a problem in Sweden as well. All these government warnings from China and various European countries are inciting fresh fears that the continent is experiencing a new outbreak and that many other nearby countries will soon be affected. M. pneumoniae infections are similar to mild influenza, much like COVID-19 was. Sometimes the disease is called "walking pneumonia," and children are said to be the most susceptible to it. Common antibiotics like penicillin have no effect on the condition, which reportedly circulates in Denmark roughly every four years, usually in late autumn and early winter. The last time an outbreak like this occurred in Denmark was in 2018, which means the Scandinavian country is well overdue for another one. "For the past four years, the number of mycoplasma infections has been extremely low, and it is therefore not unusual that we have an epidemic now," commented SSI senior researcher Hanne-Dorthe Emborg. "We have actually been waiting for it since we closed the country after the COVID pandemic." This year, though, the number of infections is expected to be higher than usual just like what is being reported in China. "Precisely because the number has been so low in the past three-and-a-half years, and there is therefore a group of children who have not built-up immunity, we can probably also expect a higher incidence this season than what has been seen during previous mycoplasma epidemics before the pandemic," Emborg said. Singapore is another country where mycoplasma infections are on the rise and is also a nation where previously most everyone was forced to get "vaccinated" for COVID. When asked for more data on its outbreak, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated that the new outbreak "is a very common phenomenon in many countries, and in China that has been put under effective control." "China's interactions with the international community will not be affected by any factors, and we welcome more visits from friends from across the world," Wang added. Other related conditions being blamed for the new mycoplasma outbreak in China include seasonal flu and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), these being the same circulating diseases that spread around China right before COVID became a "pandemic." Will white lung syndrome pneumonia become the next "pandemic?" Find out more at Pandemic.news. Sources for this article include: DailyMail.co.uk NaturalNews.com White House forced YouTube to censor COVID-19 misinformation, internal documents reveal It's been a year since Big Tech mogul and former X CEO Elon Musk released the controversial "Twitter Files," which proved that President Joe Biden's Department of Justice (DOJ) and White House colluded with previous Twitter management to implement big-brother censorship and high-profile content moderation on mostly conservatives because of their political views. Then, the Facebook Files emerged, leading Meta to change internal policies due to pressure from the Biden administration. Now, internal documents from Google, which owns YouTube, have been unearthed. These show that Biden pressured the company to censor Americans from spreading alleged "misinformation" related to the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) and vaccinations. This was disclosed by House Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who held a live hearing on social media censorship on Thursday. On a long thread on X, where he first presented other tech giants' collusion with big government, Jordan further said: "Here's the first edition of the YouTube Files. We knew the Biden White House was pushing Facebook and Twitter to censor more. Now we know the White House was repeatedly pressuring Google to censor content on YouTube." THE YOUTUBE FILES PART 1. BIDEN WHITE HOUSE PRESSURED YOUTUBE TO CENSOR AMERICANS. Internal docs from Google (YouTubes parent company) obtained by @JudiciaryGOP and @Weaponization show that the Biden White House wanted Americans censored. ? Thread:https://t.co/tM1IdEIJCG Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) November 30, 2023 The documents, acquired through a source close to the committee, reveal that the White House sought to quash vaccine skeptics. The lawmaker further disclosed that on April 12, 2021, Rob Flaherty, Biden's director of Digital Strategy, emailed Google wanting to know how the company could better crack down on vaccine "misinformation" and to discuss ways the White House can partner in its product work. Flaherty already left the administration to be deputy campaign manager for Biden's re-election bid in the 2024 polls. After a week, an internal email from Google noted that Flaherty "particularly dug in on our decision-making for borderline content," referring to content that doesn't violate their Community Guidelines, but instead brushes up against it. Another week passed, the search engine company acknowledged that they sent the White House a list of videos removed for COVID-19 vaccine "misinformation." "Really [Flaherty's] interested in what we're seeing that is not coming down," reads an email from YouTube. "there is a very high degree of interest now coming from the White House regarding vaccine misinfo/vaccine hesitancy and our work around borderline content." It continued, saying that unfortunately, the role of tech in addressing vaccine hesitancy is about to come under a massive spotlight particularly as the supply of the vaccine is soon to outpace demand. "Over the last several weeks, the Google & YT GAAP team have had conversations with the White House staff on YouTube's policies and all the great work that is being done to raise authoritative information and fight harmful misinformation related to COVID-19 misinformation," the communication further read. The next day, YouTube's Government Affairs team sent an internal email to the product team to flag the interactions with the White House. "We were hoping to get something on the books in the next two weeks or so to prevent anything from potentially spiraling out of control," read the email. The team then asked if the product team would meet directly with White House staff to show how much censorship they've conducted on their behalf, because "[White House] staff continued to have questions on the raise/reduce efforts" to reduce 'misinformation'. Within the same thread, Jordan vowed that his committee will continue the critical investigative work to further inform legislative solutions to the vast government censorship enterprise. He also said that Sen, Rand Paul and the House Republicans introduced legislation that would provide victims of censorship with the ability to sue the government bureaucrats, who are responsible for causing their constitutionally protected speech to be removed. (Related: Rep. Jim Jordan destroys Democrat claim that government never told Twitter to censor.) Jordan issues subpoena to Flaherty to testify Jordan immediately subpoenaed Flaherty to testify about his actions to pressure digital platforms to censor content on the same day of the committee hearing. The latter must sit for committee questions on Jan. 11, the Ohio solon wrote in the legally binding demand for testimony. "The committee was able to obtain documents that demonstrate the central role you played in communicating the Biden White House's censorship efforts to social media companies, including the White House's demands to censor true information, memes, satire and other constitutionally protected forms of expression," Jordan said in the letter to Flaherty. "Your testimony will inform the committee's legislative reforms aimed at preventing the Executive Branch from wielding its immense power to pressure social media platforms to censor disfavored viewpoints." According to the New York Post, the pending Supreme Court case, for which oral arguments have not yet been scheduled, followed a lower court ruling restricting the government's ability to pressure companies to squelch disfavored speech. The said ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by the Republican state attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, who argued that the Biden administration was violating Americans' First Amendment free speech rights. The lawsuit turned up a large number of documents showing that Flaherty and his team contacted Facebook and Twitter to limit the spread of alleged "misinformation" about the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 shots. But he repeatedly declined to appear to testify in the case. The same goes with former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who proclaimed in July 2021 that Biden aides were "flagging" content for removal, but were unsuccessful. Below is the video of the House Judiciary subcommittee meeting to examine claims that the federal government censors speech on social media. Censorship.news has more stories related to this. Sources for this article include: ZeroHedge.com FoxBusiness.com NYPost.com FBI tells Newsweek that Trump supporters are enemies of the state and must be secretly tracked, monitored, investigated Have you ever voted for Donald J. Trump? (Article republished from LeoHohmann.Substack.com) Have you ever posted a comment to any social-media platform that was even remotely favorable towards Trump? If so, you may be on an FBI watchlist. According to an October 4 report in Newsweek, the federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbance around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump's army of MAGA followers. Notice the term army. Theres a sinister purpose behind that word. The government, in cooperation with its corporate partners at Newsweek, is trying to paint a picture of an organized military force ready to go to war with Trump as its leader. As a member of the conservative movement in America, I can tell you that it is the most unorganized, disjointed and fragmented movement in the country. It is not in any way monolithic and as such poses no threat to the government or anyone else. But this is who our government has targeted for monitoring and tracking. Theyre not worried about the Chinese men of military age pouring over the open border at a rate of 2,000 to 4,000 per month under Biden. Theyre not worried about Iranian sleeper cells. NO, theyre worried about American citizens on the Trump team who want to see their candidate in the White House. Heres a blurb from the article: The challenge for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the primary federal agency charged with law enforcement, is to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliationseven though the vast majority of its current "anti-government" investigations are of Trump supporters, according to classified data obtained by Newsweek. "The FBI is in an almost impossible position," says a current FBI official, who requested anonymity to discuss highly sensitive internal matters. The official told Newsweek that the FBI is intent on stopping domestic terrorism and any repeat of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the FBI source told Newsweek that the agency must also preserve the Constitutional right of all Americans to campaign, speak freely and protest the government, as if it holds its nose and begrudgingly goes through the motions of preserving any of our rights. This article is a laughing stock. Pure propaganda. But theyre not even good at creating propaganda because nobody with half of a working brain cell still believes the FBI has any respect for the Constitution. This is the same agency that threatened to investigate parents attending school board meetings and traditional Catholics who attend Latin masses. This is the same FBI that breaks down the doors of unarmed senior citizens like Roger Stone (see photo above from 2019), and arrests elderly women praying in front of abortion clinics. By focusing on Trump and his MAGA supporters, the FBI official said, the Bureau runs the risk of provoking the very anti-government activists that the terrorism agencies hope to counter. "Especially at a time when the White House is facing Congressional Republican opposition claiming that the Biden administration has 'weaponized' the Bureau against the right wing, it has to tread very carefully," says the official. Oh, such a poor FBI, crying crocodile tears because it has to at least pretend like it has constitutional boundaries within which it can conduct its Gestapo operations on American soil, violating households under cover of darkness, forcing its victims into black SUVs and hauling them off in handcuffs and leg irons to the American gulag as they await their show trials. Their crime? These Americans are anti-government in their thinking. Hmm. Unless there is a new category of crime passed by Congress, the thought crime, and I dont recall such a law being passed, then it is no crime at all to be anti-government. Any government that prosecutes one of its citizens for being anti-government is by nature tyrannical, because people living under a legitimate constitutional government would have no reason to be anti-government. By even accusing us of being guilty of being anti-government, our government has admitted to its own crimes against humanity. This Newsweek article was perhaps the most pathetic psy op disguised as a news article Ive ever seen. Its purpose was not to inform but to intimidate while presenting a facade of respect for our Constitutional rights. This is exactly why the FBI should have never been created in the first place. Our founding fathers would have rolled over in their graves at the thought of a national police force. Even if it started out with a mission that focused on legitimate federal crimes such as foreign terrorists who infiltrated America, any freedom-respecting constitutionalist could have predicted with a little common sense that it would one day be weaponized and turned against the domestic political opponents of an empowered elite. This is why I am of the belief that the FBI should be totally defunded and permanently disbanded. If allowed to exist at all, it should be disarmed. You do not need to be armed in order to be a strictly investigative agency. Do your investigations and then turn the information over to state or local law enforcement, which could then make the decisions about whether to make any arrests. Anyone who is a regular reader of mine knows I am no fan of Donald Trump. I turned against him when he rolled out a militarized vaccine program with an injection that wasnt even a vaccine, using mRNA technology to tinker with human genetics. Hes also now gone soft on abortion, saying Republicans need to moderate their pro-life position. Youre either pro life or youre not, Donald. You cant have it both ways. So I am done with Trump. I think he could even be a plant who is working for the other globalists, a type of Emmanuel Goldstein character from Orwells 1984. In short, controlled opposition. But to say that Trumps followers comprise the main threat to stability in the United States is utter nonsense and the FBI knows it. In fact, I would say that the FBI is a much bigger threat to American stability than the followers of Trump, Joe Biden, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or any other political candidate. For the record, I am not anti-government. I believe wholeheartedly in the need for government, but it must be legitimate government that exercises powers clearly delineated in the U.S. Constitution. Any powers not specifically enumerated to the federal government in that document rest with the states. Thats just a fact. Those at the top of the U.S. Justice Department and FBI know this. Dont believe their lies. Dont bite on their fake corporate news. The truth is that the FBI is an enforcer for whats become a one-party state with the Democrats as the lead organ of oppression and the Republicans playing the role of fake opposition. They speak of an uprising because thats what they want, the more violent the better. Dont take the bait. Read more at: LeoHohmann.Substack.com Mental models, misinformation and the waning of human cognition Brighteon.com/cf9ecbf8-2c50-4359-8a8a-31cf12e87349 Rumble.com/v3z1pwy-bbn-dec-1-2023-mental-models-misinformation-and-the-waning-of-human-cogniti.html Bitchute.com/video/iwhCvfp2pqXk/ Banned.video/watch?id=656a00c40681e68064dc273c iTunes: Healthrangerreport.com/brighteon-broadcast-news-dec-1-2023-mental-models-misinformation-and-the-waning-of-human-cognition Auto-generated summary and highlights AI's rapid advancement and its impact on human cognition. Mike Adams discusses the potential of AI to change the future of human civilization and the importance of mastering AI to avoid being enslaved by it. He predicts that AI will surpass human cognition within the next three years, leading to rapid changes that will be difficult to comprehend. AI, Nvidia, and the future of technology. Taiwanese American founder of Nvidia leads a remarkable company with a heart in Taiwan, known for innovative value-added physical manufacturing. NVIDIA's stock price is expected to continue rising as they revolutionize AI and deep learning with their specialized hardware. The speaker claims woke corporations are programming AI with delusional ideas, including gender identity and climate change, and plans to deprogram these hallucinations with expensive hardware and Nvidia microchips. AI-generated summaries and the potential dangers of relying on AI for climate solutions. Adams explains how AI systems can generate accurate summaries of audio content, including transcriptions and automated summaries. Adams demonstrates the capabilities of AI-generated summaries by reading them aloud, impressing listeners with their quality. Former Deputy Secretary of the US Treasury Paul Craig Roberts warns AI systems being built by woke corporations and scientists will arrive at the conclusion to exterminate humans to solve climate change. Speaker argues that humans hallucinate just like AI systems, citing climate change as an example. AI, climate change, and censorship. Adams warns that AI systems are being programmed with false beliefs about climate change, which could lead to harmful actions. Humanoid robots with AI brains will be produced and remotely updated with language models and behavior models based on the false belief in climate change, potentially leading to mass murder of humans. Adams argues that AI systems are being designed to promote government and corporate narratives, rather than seeking truth. The speaker criticizes the use of "authoritative sources" like the CDC, FDA, and NIH, which are propaganda branches for Big Pharma. AI, government control, and health industry manipulation. Open AI may be directed by government to promote official lies through AI systems. Adams claims pharmaceutical companies influence AI language models to promote false narratives, such as the idea that chemical imbalances cause mood swings, and that statin drugs are necessary to treat high cholesterol. The speaker is working on releasing an open-source language model that can be used offline to provide more accurate information and counter these false narratives. Developer plans to create AI model for holistic health, avoiding pharmaceutical and vaccine industry biases. AI, climate change, and health research. AI summarizer generates accurate chapter titles from podcast, despite lacking understanding or knowledge. The speaker argues that AI systems can hallucinate information and that humans also hallucinate, citing the climate cult as an example (Chapter 2). The speaker criticizes AI researchers for prioritizing establishment lies over truth in vaccine and climate narratives, inadvertently creating Skynet (Chapter 3). Speaker argues AI systems trained on govt sources will prioritize power & control over truth, leading to Orwellian dystopia. Decline of human cognition and rise of AI. Adams argues that AI summaries are often better than human summaries, but the public education system is failing to teach critical thinking skills, leading to a decline in human cognition. Adams criticizes the public education system for prioritizing conformity over individuality, teaching students to trust authoritative sources rather than learning to discern real news from fake news. Society is producing lower-educated individuals while machines surpass human cognition. Censorship, misinformation, and manipulation of memory. The speaker warns of the dangers of censorship and the manipulation of information by institutions with a history of lying. Speaker argues that misinformation is any info contradicting one's worldview, using 9/11 and depression as examples. The subjectivity of facts and cultural differences. The idea of absolute facts and irrefutable truth is a lie, as there is no such thing. Adams highlights the diversity of facts across cultures, noting that what one culture considers a fact may be seen as falsehoods by another. Language and cultural differences are emphasized as factors that shape worldviews, with examples from Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. The limitations of human perception and cognition. Adams argues that truth is relative and subject to change as new discoveries are made. Speaker argues that mental models can create false realities, and identifying and correcting them is key to success. Speaker argues that people rarely perceive reality accurately due to cognitive biases and assumptions. Cognitive enhancement through mushroom consumption. Speaker shares their experience with Lion's Mane mushroom, noting improved neurological function and new ways of perceiving the world. Mike grows Lion's Mane mushroom in a bucket with straw and uses it for cognitive enhancement. Mike improved his Rubik's Cube solving skills and aims to solve it in under 30 seconds. UAE abandoning dollar for oil trades and financial landscape shifts. Health Ranger, Mike Adams, discusses the development of a Colloidal Silver first aid product, testing essential oils for their optical properties and creating a unique formulation. Mike Adams shares a fascinating story about testing 30 essential oils on how they interact with ionic silver, observing changes in the solution's opacity and color. Craig Roberts: UAE has abandoned dollar for oil trades, a sign of things to come. Roberts: Paul Craig, former Assistant Secretary of Treasury, joins the show to discuss the financial landscape and the increasingly chaotic world. ### Watch each episode of my new show, Decentralize TV, which features top guests who teach pro-freedom decentralized living principles and skills, at www.Decentralize.TV Discover more interviews and podcasts each day at: https://www.brighteon.com/channels/HRreport Follow me on: Brighteon.social: Brighteon.social/@HealthRanger (my breaking news gets posted here first) Telegram: t.me/RealHealthRanger Substack: HealthRanger.substack.com Banned.video: Banned.video/channel/mike-adams Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@healthranger Twitter: https://twitter.com/HealthRanger Bastyon: https://bastyon.com/healthranger Gettr: GETTR.com/user/healthranger Rumble: Rumble.com/c/HealthRangerReport BitChute: Bitchute.com/channel/9EB8glubb0Ns/ Clouthub: app.clouthub.com/#/users/u/naturalnews/posts Join the free NaturalNews.com email newsletter to stay alerted about breaking news each day. Download my current audio books -- including Ghost World, Survival Nutrition, The Global Reset Survival Guide and The Contagious Mind -- at: https://Audiobooks.NaturalNews.com/ Download my new audio book, "Resilient Prepping" at ResilientPrepping.com - it teaches you how to survive the total collapse of civilization and the loss of both the power grid and combustion engines. Modernas disinfo department monitors 150M websites for anti-vaccine narratives The disinformation department of Massachusetts-based vaccine maker Moderna has partnered with external entities to monitor websites for "anti-vaccine" content Investigative journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson disclosed this development in a report. They noted that Moderna's global intelligence department teamed up with the Public Good Projects, an industry-backed nonprofit. The Big Pharma firm also partnered with social media search, monitoring and analytics tool Talkwalker to monitor and suppress dissenting voices on Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine policy. Former law enforcement agent Nikki Rutman, who spent 20 years in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, spearheads Moderna's disinfo team. She previously worked in Boston during the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed (OWS). During her OWS stint, Rutman conducted weekly cybersecurity meetings with Moderna. She eventually joined the vaccine maker, where part of her work is stopping "disinformation." According to Fang and Poulson, Rutman produces reports that tag "anti-vaccine narratives" online and recommend steps to address them. The investigative journalists' report exposed key people behind the endeavor, LifeSiteNews said. Aside from this, the report disclosed that Rutman's team together with PGP and Talkwalker deploys artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor 150 million websites worldwide for vaccine-related conversation. Bhattacharya: Moderna bankrolls MEDICAL CENSORSHIP The PGP is funded through a $1.27 million donation from the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, a biotech lobbying group that represents Pfizer and Moderna. This led Stanford University professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to comment: "Moderna through the PGP pays thousands of health professionals to attack and defame vaccine critics and push social media to censor anyone who says things, true or false, that reduce profits." Fang and Poulson also wrote that the global intelligence team reports "anti-vaccine narratives" to Moderna staff, assessing the risk of each one through a color code. Low-risk narratives "don't currently warrant any action," while higher-risk narratives will call for the team to "notify the appropriate stakeholders with recommendations." "None of the reports that we have seen makes any attempt to dispute the claims made," the two pointed out. "Rather, the claims are automatically deemed 'misinformation' if they encourage vaccine hesitancy." Moderna first began working with PGP on a program called "Stronger" that ran from 2021 to 2022. Under the program, the non-profit "identified misinformation and shaped content decisions on social media." The partnership was expanded in October with an official training program, developed by Moderna and PGP, alongside the American Board of Internal Medicine, to help healthcare workers identify medical misinformation. The online course, called the "Infodemic Training Program," is a signal of an official partnership between biopharma and the NGO world. "The network of fact-checking non-profits has grown at an industrial pace, providing opaque opportunities for private and public interests to take subtle control over the public discourse," Fang and Poulson noted. "Such sophistication in blending public-health messaging and corporate advertising should concern anyone with an interest in how government controls free speech." Moderna has not successfully advanced any product to market prior to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine and was on the verge of collapse when the pandemic was announced. Its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine transformed the drugmaker into a $100 billion company almost overnight and turned its CEO, chairman and co-founders into billionaires. (Related: Heads of vaccine makers Moderna, BioNTech included in list of COVID-19 billionaires.) Today, as interest in taking another booster shot wanes and subsidies are disappearing, so, too are profits. This has led to the company investing in new strategies like a marketing campaign to stay afloat, Fang and Poulson reported. Visit BigPharmaNews.com for more stories about Moderna. Watch Dr. Pam Popper discuss the business partnership between Moderna and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration below. This video is from Wellness Forum Health channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: Moderna developing new mRNA flu vaccine for upcoming avian influenza plandemic. CHURNING OUT DEATH: Moderna CEO wants mRNA vaccine factories on every continent. Vaccine advisers outraged as Moderna, government scientists CONCEALED key data about COVID boosters. Moderna plans to release mRNA vaccines for other diseases, including cancer. Sources include: LifeSiteNews.com Brighteon.com Steve Quayle warns of ORCHESTRATED nuclear events that will destabilize America Author and researcher Steve Quayle has warned of orchestrated nuclear events in various U.S. cities , which are part of a bigger plan to destabilize the country. "The information is that there's going to be orchestrated nuclear events in cities in the U.S. that are going to destabilize us. There are 27 cities that are going to be set up for false flags, [and those] will be blamed on Hamas or Hezbollah," he told the Health Ranger Mike Adams during a recent appearance on the "Health Ranger Report." He answered in the affirmative when Adams asked whether or not this would be a coordinated, mass domestic terrorist attacks. He continued that the responsible parties know nobody could stop them. "I'm speaking specifically about a self-generated false flag series of events in the U.S. that will be simultaneously coordinated and will maximize the amount of destabilization," Quayle said. According to Quayle, the attacks would be committed using low-yield neutron bombs that can be concealed with paraffin wax in this case. He pointed out that these neutron bombs can be purchased on the nuclear weapons black market established by the late Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. Incidentally, Khan was the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons development program. One potential suspect for these attacks would be Iran, which has been working on a nuclear bomb for two decades already. Iranian scientists also received training in nuclear physics in the U.S., even before Mohammed Reza Pahlavi the last Shah was overthrown from power in 1979. Moreover, Quayle highlighted the ease of acquiring certain nuclear components such as fissionable material, tritium gas and a trigger from third parties. 3-Letter American agency will orchestrate domestic terror attacks According to Quayle, a three-letter U.S. government agency will orchestrate the attacks a theory Adams agreed with. The Health Ranger commented that previous guests he had interviewed talked about the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) going around to recruit radicalized Muslims in America for such attacks. The only difference, however is that the attacks would be allowed to go live this time. (Related: FBI warns: Hamas or other terrorist groups could attack United States.) Adams then asked his guest if former U.S. President Barack Obama was involved in this false-flag scheme. The 44th president has always wanted to take down America from within. Quayle responded in the affirmative, recounting former White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett flying to Iran along with tens of billions of dollars. History appears to repeat itself once more, with incumbent U.S. President Joe Biden set to release another $10 billion possibly meant for Tehran. He urged Americans to remember Obama's classic statement about what he was going to do for the world of Islam and America bringing change. Given this, Quayle disclosed that he was even asking some people if they like the change that has happened to America now. Follow Terrorism.news for more stories about the impending terrorist attacks to be carried out in America. Watch the full conversation between Steve Quayle and the Health Ranger Mike Adams below. This video is from the Health Ranger Report channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: New poll reveals 75% of Americans fear Israel-Palestine conflict could lead to TERROR ATTACKS in the U.S. Over 70,000 special interest aliens from countries that promote or protect TERRORISM have entered the U.S. since 2021 James Woods warns a Hamas-like army is surely walking across Bidens non-existent border every day. French President Macron: The increasing threat of Islamist terrorism undermines ALL OF EUROPE. Special video report from Steve Quayle and Mike Adams: The American government turns its weapons of WAR against the PEOPLE. Sources include: Brighteon.com Britannica.com Study: Maternal distress can set the stage for childhood behavioral issues Stress that the mother experiences during pregnancy can set the stage for her child's behavioral issues in the future, according to a study. Growing evidence notes that stress and distress which occurs when stress is prolonged, severe or both during pregnancy is linked to offspring risk for externalizing behavior outcomes, such as reactive/aggressive behaviors, hyperactivity and impulsivity, among others. A new study published by the American Psychological Association in the journal APA PsycNET suggested that psychological stress and distress during the pregnancy period uniquely increases the odds of "children developing and exhibiting aggressive, disinhibited and impulsive behaviors." Researchers noted that while effects may be relatively small, they may persist across developmental periods from early childhood through adolescence. In a separate study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, researchers from the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCP) in London found that mothers-to-be who experience even moderate stress during their pregnancy are nearly four times more likely to have offspring who develop a personality disorder. They also implied that women who are severely stressed during the duration of their pregnancy are, in some cases, nearly 10 times more likely to have children who are at risk of developing a personality disorder by age 30 when compared with those whose mothers experience little or no stress during the period between conception and birth. The impact of prenatal stress on a childs development can carry over to the family environment and parent-child relationships both of which could increase the likelihood, suggested the authors. (Related: Healthy habits and mental well-being: Natural ways to beat depression.) How the study was done The RCP researchers gathered data from a total of 3,626 individuals in Helsinki, Finland. The participants were born between July 1, 1975, and June 30, 1976, and had mothers who completed regular health and well-being assessments during their pregnancies. Each month, the mothers answered a question on mental stress since their last doctors visit no stress, some stress, or notable stress. What the study found After 30 years, using data obtained through the Finnish Hospital Discharge Register and the Finnish National Population (when the sample individuals would have been around 30 years old), the researchers found 40 of the 3,626 samples had a diagnosed personality disorder after accounting for variables, including maternal smoking during pregnancy, parental psychiatric history and subjective feelings of depression before, during and after pregnancy. "It highlighted the importance of providing mental health and stress support to pregnant women and families during the antenatal and postnatal period," said Dr. Ross Brannigan, lead author from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. "One in 20 people in the United Kingdom have been diagnosed with a personality disorder, which can lead to psychosocial impairment, increased rates of suicide, functional impairment and increased long-term use of health services," according to the RCP's Mental Health Information. Limitations of the study RCP Perinatal Faculty Chair Dr. Trudi Seneviratne noted that the study did not account for important factors that may affect pre- and postnatal stress and child development, such as family financial situation, parenting style or sexual trauma, among others, which we know contribute to stress in pregnant women." Prenatal stress on child behavioral outcomes The "Encyclopedia on early childhood development" includes many independent studies that have shown that if a mother is stressed, anxious or depressed while pregnant, her child is at increased risk of having a range of problems, including attention deficit (ADHD), behavioral or conduct disorders, emotional problems and impaired cognitive development. Here are two situations that show how stress during pregnancy can handicap children from before they are even born and produce lasting undesirable changes in both the mother and her child. First, when a pregnant woman feels stress, the "fight or flight response" is initiated and her adrenal glands inject a group of stress hormones called catecholamines that consist of adrenaline and nor-adrenaline into her circulation. Because her body is being prepared for fight or flight, her blood is diverted from the internal organs, such as the stomach and the intestines, to the large muscles of the legs diminishing normal blood supply to the uterus. For a pregnant woman, this means that her baby will receive less blood and therefore, less oxygen and nutrients. The consequences can be terrible if this persists. This also means that her parasympathetic nervous system, which controls her bodys ability to relax, is inhibited leading to wakefulness and difficulty in digestion or absorption of nutrients from food. Second, if a pregnant woman experiences acute stress, such as the death of a loved one or loss of a job, or is a single mother worried about how she will support the child she is carrying, her amygdala (a major processing center for emotions) will override signals from her hippocampus (which plays a major role in learning and memory). This also "stokes the fires in the adrenals" so they keep producing the stress hormones cortisone (derived from the metabolism of cortisol), adrenaline and noradrenaline. In either case, a pregnant womans body is flooded with loads of stress hormones and also the fetus growing within her. Stress hormones and the babys developing brain Cortisol is an essential hormone that plays many important roles in almost every organ and tissue in the body, including the bodys stress response, but at the same time, too much of it can almost be poison. Research has shown that abnormally high and prolonged cortisone concentrations in utero have many harmful effects on the developing fetus, particularly in the construction of the brain. It can lead to cell migrations to the wrong destinations resulting in abnormal neural circuits and interference with the babys internal states, such as sleep and digestion. In chronic stress, a large concentration of stress hormones will destroy vital dendrites, neurons, synapses and so on. Stress also decreases the production of oxytocin (the so-called love hormone) and increases the production of vasopressin (a hormone that supports aggressive behavior). Continuous secretion and circulation of glucocorticoids, particularly cortisol, eventually leads to a reduction of dopamine decreasing activity in the brains pleasure pathways, reducing norepinephrine that can result in a lack of alertness and motivation and a lowering of serotonin that can greatly reduce feelings of happiness and well-being. Because of all these factors, babies who are exposed to their mothers prenatal stress will have a very strong tendency to develop a personality disorder. Head over to WomensHealth.news for more stories on women's health and healthy pregnancies. Watch the following video to learn how child personality disorders are linked to prenatal stress. This video is from the Daily Videos channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: Spending at least 2 hours in nature per week improves overall health and psychological well-being, study shows. Green space makes you happy: A childhood spent in nature decreases risk of later depression. Study: Frequent visits to green spaces linked to lower use of prescription drugs. Researchers find evidence of toxic chemicals from cosmetics and blood of pregnant women. Sources include: NaturalHealth365.com NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov 1 PsycNET.APA.org Cambridge.org MDPI.com 1 RCPsych.ac.uk Child-Encyclopedia.com PsychologyToday.com MDPI.com 2 Brighteon.com Its official: United Arab Emirates STOPS using the U.S. dollar for oil trades In a bold move away from the United States petrodollar, the United Arab Emirates has officially stopped trading oil in American dollars According to reports, the U.A.E.'s decision to switch away from using U.S. dollars in the oil trade marks a broader pivot among the BRICS economic alliance to transition to the use of local currencies for oil transactions. Along with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and Argentina, the U.A.E. is now part of the original five BRICS nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. (Related: Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran among six countries invited to join emerging BRICS global superpower.) For many years, the U.S. dollar has been the long-established currency used in the global oil market. As increasingly more countries shift away from it, this de-dollarization process puts America at an ever-worsening economic disadvantage. "This expansion signifies a growing inclination towards de-dollarization among these nations, a move that challenges the traditional hegemony of the U.S. dollar in international trade," reports Jai Hamid for Cryptopolitan. "The U.A.E.'s decision to prioritize local currency over the U.S. dollar in new oil deals is a clear reflection of this sentiment. This move isn't just a mere policy shift; it's a strategic maneuver in the complex chess game of global economics." U.A.E. a global oil powerhouse It may not seem all that significant to some, but this shift away from the U.S. dollar is significant because the U.A.E. is a global oil powerhouse. Not only that, but together with the rest of the BRICS alliance, now expanded with six additional members, the U.A.E. is leading the world away from the U.S. dollar's position as the global reserve currency. Should other nations follow the U.A.E.'s lead, this could lead to an eventual collapse of the U.S. dollar, a heavily manipulated fiat currency that the private Federal Reserve and its banking cartel partners print at will to fund war and other global endeavors. What seems to be happening is that the world is entering a new era of currency dynamics in oil transactions, especially now that the U.A.E. is actively searching for new oil trading partners. The U.S. is becoming increasingly irrelevant in world trade, in other words. Other than war, debt and LGBT perversion, the U.S. produces very little of anything valuable anymore, and the rest of the world is taking notice and responding accordingly. "It's not just a matter of switching currencies; it's about altering the very fabric of international oil trade," Hamid writes. "The potential ripple effects on the U.S. dollar could be substantial, marking a shift in the global economic power balance." Up to 15 countries are on the U.A.E.'s list of new potential oil and gas deals, including China, Russia and Egypt all of which are members of BRICS and advocates of de-dollarization. "This isn't just about diversifying trade; it's about making a statement on the global stage," Hamid adds. "The U.A.E. is not just following a trend it's setting one." Chances are that de-dollarization, which is gaining momentum on the world stage, will not stop with oil. All global trade is likely to be affected by this shift away from U.S. economic dominance, and Americans need to take notice of what this could mean for their wallets. The U.S. dollar is already rapidly becoming worthless due to constant dilution by the Fed. Add to that a global shift away from the U.S. dollar in trade and soon people will be carting around proverbial wheelbarrows full of paper funny money that will barely be enough to buy a loaf of bread once things hit the fan for real. More related news about global de-dollarization can be found at DollarDemise.com. Sources for this article include: MSN.com NaturalNews.com Border Patrol sector in Arizona STOPS POSTING UPDATES amid ongoing surge of illegals A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sector based in Arizona that has seen frequent migrant surges will no longer be posting updates on the southern border. The CBP's Tucson Sector won't be updating its social media profiles with the latest news about the ongoing migrant crisis, according to the National Pulse. "In light of the ongoing migrant surge, all Tucson Sector Border Patrol social media accounts will be paused until further notice," CBP Tucson Sector Chief Patrol Agent John Modlin announced on Nov. 26. "We appreciate your understanding and continued support during this challenging time." However, not everyone agreed with the move, with several alleging that federal authorities may be attempting to downplay the full extent of the migrant crisis. Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin was among them. "Just days [after] Border Patrol's Tucson sector reported having 15,300 illegal crossings, [the sector] says it's pausing its social media until further notice due to 'ongoing migration surge,'" he said. "Regardless of the reasoning behind this, this is such a bad look." Melugin also noted that the media makes use of data and photographs uploaded to the CBP Tucson Sector's account regularly. "Essentially, the border crisis in the sector is so bad that they're going to cut off all communication and transparency with the public. It's unacceptable," he remarked. According to Breitbart, the Tucson sector "is currently the busiest along the southwest border for migrant apprehensions." Agents within the sector apprehended 373,625 border crossers, as per data from CBP reports. CBP now PROCESSING MIGRANTS instead of guarding border A source within CBP disclosed to Breitbart that the agency's priority has shifted from preventing migrants from entering unlawfully to processing them. According to the source, agents in the Tucson sector "have been exclusively relegated to processing and caring for the wave of migrants crossing into the sector in recent days." "Facing overcrowding at migrant processing facilities in the sector, the source says most non-essential details have been eliminated to re-direct all Border Patrol agents to the task of accommodating the overwhelming number of migrants in custody," the news outlet said, citing the insider. According to the CBP source, more than 5,000 migrants are being detained at facilities within the Tucson sector. They added that hundreds of others are still held at field rally points, awaiting transport to area processing centers. This wasn't the first time the Tucson sector downsized operations during periods when migrant crossing surge. In those instances, CBP has reduced or eliminated field patrols and closed checkpoints with agents being redirected to assist with migrant care and processing duties. In September, Breitbart noted that several highway inspection checkpoints were closed. At the time, migrant apprehensions exceeded 50,000. But according to the source, canceling field patrols and checkpoint operations puts national security at risk. (Related: IT'S BASIC MATH: Border Patrol agents link 575% increase in seizures of smuggling vehicles to surge in U.S. border crossings.) "We have no idea how many migrants who have criminal records or intend to harm American citizens are going to escape across the border while we focus on processing," the source said. "The cartels will definitely take advantage of the opportunity to move narcotics across the border, or on our open highways." Breitbart also recounted a September visit to the Tucson sector, observing the large migrant groups crossing into the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument "by the hundreds." The groups marched from the border fence to a rallying point more than a mile away to surrender to awaiting Border Patrol agents. "The migrants then await transport to nearby facilities for processing. Most of those surrendering to the Border Patrol are ultimately released to pursue asylum claims in the U.S., reports reveal." Head over to BorderPatrol.news for similar stories. Watch this One America News report about CBP closing border checkpoints due to the surge of migrants. This video is from the GalacticStorm channel on Brighteon.com. More related stories: US border crisis persists: Thousands of migrants continue to cross daily despite the summer heat. 'Invasion force' of more than 700,000 migrants to be pushed across U.S. border after Biden ends Title 42 this week. Border officials see significant increase in illegal crossings by Chinese nationals, increasing risk of ChiCom infiltration and spying. Sources include: TheNationalPulse.com Breitbart.com Brighteon.com Health Ranger Report: Wars create mass migrations, sending refugees pouring into U.S.s open borders In a recent episode of the "Health Ranger Report," ex-Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich tackled the displacement of people as a cause of the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine with the Health Ranger Mike Adams . The two pointed out how the United States' twisted immigration policy opened its borders to all refugees when there was a clear danger that terrorists or criminal groups could take advantage of the "humanitarian" intentions to invade the country. "We rushed the U.S. Navy to the Mediterranean Sea to defend Israel's borders. But there's no defense of our borders, not even a rational immigration policy," Adams said as he admitted supporting rational immigration as the types of foreigners this brings come with many wonderful properties and contributions to the nation. He added that in many ways, they even value America more than Americans do. Agreeing with the Health Ranger that it is entirely different when it comes to President Joe Biden's open border policy, Kucinich said that it is difficult for the U.S. to understand the need to have borders and the need to regularize the entry of people into the country. "The fact that the borders were essentially deconstructed and we know that some of the people who came in represented criminal gangs is a horrific situation," the former Cleveland mayor said. "We know that people are trying to come to America in search of a better life there and trying to find a way to survive. But if we were very clear about having a closed border, we wouldn't be in this situation." He added that the United States need to reestablish the borders, make them secure and provide a means for people who want to emigrate to the U.S. to be able to do so. (Related: As U.S. helps Israel ethnically cleanse the holy land, Biden is deploying heavy machinery to U.S. southern border to LIFT razor wire, allowing more illegals to flood into America.) Kucinich then stressed the role of wars in creating mass migrations of people. Adams agreed, noting how the creation of refugees is causing economic destitution in many areas. The Natural News founder cited Germany as an example. "Look at what happened with the NordStream pipeline and then its blowback on Germany's economy. When we cut off Russia from the SWIFT system, we can't trade with Russia. And so, Russia ended up investing in its domestic economy rather than offshoring money. It became very strong in terms of industrial output while the West is hurt by the lack of fertilizer and aluminum as well as energy coming out of Russia." At this point, Kucinich raised the importance of installing "right" people into government office. "The people who come into office with a president can have a major impact on world affairs. The United States ought to be a beacon of light for the world. We cannot be telling people all around the world, 'It's my way or the highway,'" he pointed out. He then looked back at his 16 years serving in Congress, where he met a lot of decision-makers who decided who was going to live and die in other countries. "We must believe that there is a spiritual or moral responsibility we have to each other as not just citizens of our country, but citizens of the world," he emphasized. Young Democrats are now calling for ceasefire in Israel Leaning towards the topic of choosing the right people who are elected to office those who have wisdom and maturity and share the values of desiring safe families and opportunities for their children Adams touched on how the younger generation of Democrats is now calling for a ceasefire in Israel. As of Nov 21, over 14,000 Palestinians and Israelis en toto have been killed in the ongoing war, including 53 journalists 46 Palestinian, 4 Israeli and 3 Lebanese and over 100 UNRWA aid workers. As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, dozens of young people massed outside the entrance to the California Democratic Party convention on Nov. 18, chanting a message for California Democrats who don't support a ceasefire in the Middle East: "In November, we'll remember!" Demonstrators also shouted "Ceasefire now!" as Rep. Katie Porter, who does not support a humanitarian pause, was speaking. It took the state party chair, Rusty Hicks, to walk on stage and demand that "every candidate will be heard" to quiet them. "There's quite a strong demographic or age divide even in the Democratic party. On the older side, they tend to support this current war," Adams said turning to Kucinich for his comment. Being in the Democratic Party when he was a public servant, Kucinich noted how the voices of the young people should be heard as they are those who are calling to us from a future that has not yet been realized. "[They are] asking us to create a world of peace where they may live out their lives, their destiny and their loved ones. And we must listen to what they're telling us about our country and policies. They are the voices of the country -- that needs to become more than it is right now, a military juggernaut, just a heavy fist that can be put on a table anywhere in the world and just an assertion of some kind of omnipotent power," he stressed. He also said that the generation's voice has a conscience and moral compass and cares about its people and its children. "When you love your children and the children of the U.S., you must also love the children of Israel, of the Palestinians and children from all over the world," he added. InvasionUSA.news has more news related to the United States' open border policy. Watch the full conversation between former Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich and the Health Ranger Mike Adams below. This video is from the Health Ranger Report channel on Brighteon.com. Sources for this article include: Brighteon.com AlJazeera.com SFChronicle.com The latest research raised concerns over the vulnerability of marine snails to rising temperatures and ocean warming in the Strait of Georgia. The marine snails have been struggling to survive amidst the extreme temperatures. Climate change has contributed to the problems of ocean warming. Rising temperatures can affect marine animals, including coral reefs and snails. Although snails can adapt, extreme warming can make it more challenging for them. The state of marine snails in the Strait of Georgia showed an alarming trend of ocean warming. Researchers observed the snails or Nucella lamellosa adaptability to rising temperatures near Canada and British Columbia. Staying alert to climate change is essential to protect species from decline and develop mitigation efforts. Recent reports indicate that marine snails are an important source of food for fish and other marine animals. Marine Snails Vulnerable to Ocean Warming Marine snails are also bioindicators of the health of oceans. The decline in the snail population shows an alarming impact on ocean farming. Researchers from the University of British Columbia analyzed the state of marine snails found in the Strait of Georgia and Central Coast. Drs. Fiona Beaty and Chris Harley, zoology researchers from UBC, monitored the marine snails. They discovered that 50% of the marine snails became more vulnerable to ocean warming. Northern anchovies and oysters can likely survive the rising temperatures. The N. lamellosa on the coasts showed lower growth rates due to the warming event in the region. The research findings were published in the Ecology journal. Researchers explained that marine snails experienced heat more than they could or their comfort zone. In Southern California, a recent report raised alarms about the impacts of rising temperatures on sea snails or Kellet's whelk larvae. When the heat intensifies more, it can become a dangerous threat to the sea snails. The findings were published in the Journal of Shellfish Research. The marine heat waves can become more extreme, and the thermal stress can affect shellfish species and biodiversity. It can also impact the seafood supplies in California. Also Read: Half of Breeding Seabirds in Ireland, UK Declined Over Past 20 Years Due to Climate Change, Habitat Loss Conservation and Protection Efforts Amidst Climate Change Human activities contribute to the rapid problem of climate change. It can exacerbate the effects on marine environments and animals. As a result, mitigation efforts are crucial to protect shellfish, sea snails and other marine animals from decline. The decline in snails can affect the food sources and behavior of marine animals. Reduction of greenhouse emissions can alleviate the ocean warming trend. Also Read: Widespread Microplastics Harm Aquatic Species in Rivers in Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, Report Warns Related Article: Warm-Stricken Sea Sponges Suffer From Deadly Bacteria, Research Warns For more similar stories, don't forget to follow Nature World News. Climate change is posing a serious threat to the agriculture sector in the Maghreb region, which comprises Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania. The region is facing more frequent droughts, floods, heat waves, pests, and diseases that affect the productivity and quality of crops. To adapt to these challenges, some farmers are turning to drones as a new ally in their fight against climate change. Drones for precision agriculture Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are small aircraft that can fly autonomously or remotely controlled by a pilot. They can be equipped with various sensors, such as cameras, infrared, thermal, multispectral, and hyperspectral, that can capture high-resolution images and data of the land surface. These data can then be processed and analyzed by software to provide useful information for farmers, such as soil moisture, crop health, weed detection, pest infestation, irrigation needs, fertilizer requirements, yield estimation, and crop damage assessment. Drones can also be used to perform tasks such as spraying pesticides, fertilizers, and seeds, monitoring livestock, mapping and surveying land, and delivering goods and services. These can help farmers save time, money, and resources while improving the efficiency, accuracy, and sustainability of their agricultural practices. Drones for climate resilience Drones can also help farmers cope with the impacts of climate change by providing them with timely and reliable information that can help them make better decisions and take preventive actions. For example, drones can help farmers detect early signs of drought stress, water scarcity, crop diseases, and pests, and provide them with recommendations on how to mitigate these risks. These can also help farmers monitor the effects of climate change on their crops and adapt their cropping patterns, varieties, and management practices accordingly. Moreover, UAVs can help farmers reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and enhance their carbon sequestration potential by optimizing their input use, increasing their crop yields and quality, and promoting agroforestry and conservation agriculture practices. Also Read: The Transition to Sustainable Agriculture Technology: Advancing Sustainability and Efficiency Drones for development Drones are not only a technological innovation, but also a social and economic opportunity for the Maghreb region. They can create new jobs and income sources for farmers, entrepreneurs, service providers, researchers, and educators. Drones can also foster collaboration and knowledge sharing among different stakeholders, such as farmers, extension agents, researchers, policymakers, and civil society. These UAVs can also contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as ending hunger, poverty, and inequality, ensuring food security and nutrition, promoting sustainable agriculture and climate action, and enhancing peace and security. Drones are becoming more accessible, affordable, and user-friendly, thanks to the advances in technology, the reduction in costs, the availability of training and support, and the development of regulations and policies. However, there are still some challenges and barriers that need to be overcome, such as the lack of infrastructure, connectivity, data protection, security, awareness, trust, and acceptance. Therefore, it is important to promote a participatory and inclusive approach that involves all the relevant actors and ensures that the benefits of drones are shared equitably and ethically. Related article: How Biostimulants are Revolutionizing Agriculture Indonesia's Marapi volcano in West Sumatra province erupted on Sunday, spewing volcanic ash up to 3,000 meters (9,843 feet) into the air and killing at least 11 climbers. Volcanic Ash At 2.54 p.m. local time (0754 GMT), the 2,891-meter-tall volcano erupted, sending high-intensity volcanic ash into neighboring areas, according to authorities. Images from Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Bencana (BNPB), Indonesia's disaster management agency, revealed ash-covered highways and automobiles. Authorities have raised the warning level for Marapi Mountain to the second highest. Two climbing routes were closed, and locals living on Marapi's slopes were cautioned to avoid being closer than 3 km (1.8 miles) to the crater's mouth due to possible lava flows. The closest villages, Rubai and Gobah Cumantiang, are five to six kilometers away from the summit and are home to about 1,400 people who live on Marapi's slopes. "We have distributed masks to residents and encourage them to stay inside their houses," said Ade Setiawan, an official at BPBD's local disaster management unit. Ash rain had also been observed after the eruption that reached Bukittinggi City, the third largest city in West Sumantra, which has a population of more than 100,000. Read Also: Merapi Volcano Eruption Shoots Hot Clouds 4 Miles Up, Evacuation Possible -Indonesia Rescue Operations Eleven climbers' remains have been discovered by Indonesian rescuers following the Mount Marapi volcano explosion. Twelve climbers remained missing, according to a rescue official, while three individuals had been discovered alive atop the volcano. There were still rescue operations underway. Approximately 75 climbers had begun their ascent to the mountain before the eruption. The body of a man who was buried beneath tons of mud and boulders as a result of flash floods and a landslide that crashed into a hillside town on the island of Sumatra has been found, according to rescuers. Heavy rain on Friday caused tons of dirt, rocks, and trees to tumble down a mountain and into a river that burst its banks, tearing through mountainside settlements close to the well-known Lake Toba in North Sumatra province. According to Sariman Sitorus, a spokeswoman for the local Search and Rescue Agency, rescuers in the hardest-hit village utilized excavators, dogs, and occasionally their bare hands to move debris while they looked for the dead and missing. In Padang, the provincial capital of West Sumatra, more than 160 personnel, including police and military, were sent out to look for them, according to Hari Agustian, an official at the local Search and Rescue Agency. Some climbers were seen being rescued in a social media video, with their faces and hair covered in volcanic dust and rain. 49 climbers were evacuated from the area early on Monday, and many of them were receiving burn treatment. One of the rescued had a fractured limb, while eight others were transported to the hospital with burns. "Some suffered from burns because it was very hot, and they have been taken to the hospital," said Rudy Rinaldi, head of the West Sumatra Disaster Mitigation Agency. "Those who are injured were the ones who got closer to the crater." A small eruption was recorded on Monday that prompted rescuers to suspend the search for safety concerns. Mount Marapi is one of Sumatra's most active volcanoes and has been active since January. In April 1979, its eruption killed 60 people during its most catastrophic eruption. Indonesia has 127 active volcanoes and is located on the Pacific's "Ring of Fire," a fault line and volcanic arc encircling the Pacific Basin. Related Article: Merapi Volcano in Indonesia Erupts, Emits Ash and Lava: Major Eruption Possible Authorities reported that at least 47 individuals were killed following heavy rains and flash floods that hit Tanzania. As of writing, 85 others have been hurt amid the landslides caused by flooding in northern Tanzania, noting that the number of casualties could still increase in the coming days. Effects of Heavy Rains Officials said that torrential rains hit the town of Katesh, which is located 300km (186 miles) north of the capital, Dodoma. Meanwhile, many roads in the area had been blocked by mud, water as well as with uprooted trees and stones. Livestock had also reportedly been swept away. The heavy rains flooded many homes and vehicles were also stuck in thick mud. Massive rains hit near the slopes of Mount Hanang. To ensure the safety of residents, President Samia Hassan has already deployed national security forces to lead and assist in the rescue efforts. To recall, east Africa has been hit by weeks of torrential rain and flooding. The downpours have displaced more than one million people in Somalia that claimed the lives of hundreds of individuals. The bad weather also displaced tens of thousands of individuals stressing that climate risks are intensifying in the drought-stricken region. Read Also: Flooding Due to Heavy Rain Kills Five People, Displaces Thousands in Tanzania Previous Rains Heavy rains had affected northern Tanzania, in particular the Arusha Region, bordering with southern Kenya since late October, causing floods, flash floods and rivers overflow that have resulted casualties and damage. Based on the media report, ten fatalities, approximately 90 displaced families and a number of damaged houses and bridges across the Arusha District, Arusha Region have been recorded. The worst affected villages and neighborhoods in Arusha District are Muriet, Terrat, Elerai, Morombo, Lolovono and Ngarenaro. In the next 24 hours during that period, more heavy rainfall with locally very heavy rainfall was forecasted over most parts of the country. The latest update received from local government that was shared on 13 November indicated that more than 10,090 people or 2,018 households suffered floods and landslide and that a total of 1,245 houses were completely destroyed and 1,074 latrines collapsed. The said figures likely went up given the difficult access to most of the affected areas due to water levels. Authorities noted that people in these affected areas have been evacuated to earlier mapped out safer areas. However, they have limited access to basic services. Heavy rainfall has been affecting northern, western and eastern Tanzania since the middle of October due to the so-termed short rainy season that lasts from October to December causing floods, flash floods, rivers overflow and triggering landslides that have resulted in more casualties and widespread damage. The worst affected are the Arusha Region in the north bordering with southern Kenya, the Kigoma and Kagera Regions in the west bordering with Rwanda and Burundi and the Coast Region as well as the Zanzibar Island in the east. Further, Dar es Salaam, the main city of the country, was severely affected. Related Article: Unforgiving Floods and Landslides Kill 120 People in Kinshasa, DRC The Mount Marapi volcano erupted with ash that blanked the area. The active volcano has made it more difficult for rescuers to look for the 12 remaining missing climbers. Officials warned that the Marapi volcano is on alert levels due to high volcanic activity. Hikers and climbers are warned and prohibited from entering the volcanic site due to the hot ash and poor visibility. According to recent reports, the said volcano in Indonesia has been active and on alert since 2011. With the help of rescuers, the 11 climber bodies were recovered as the Mount Marami erupted with ash. Hendra Gunawan reminded people to avoid climbing to the peak. Gunawan serves as head of the Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation. Indonesia's Marapi Eruption Updates Before Mount Marapi erupted, at least 75 climbers were reported to hike to the 9,480-foot mountain on the weekend. Despite warnings from officials and announcements, some people still found ways to break the rules. After the Mount Marapi eruption, nearby areas and villages were blanked by volcanic ash. The volcano is considered one of the 120 active volcanoes in the country. In addition, people are advised to wear face masks and avoid prolonged exposure to ash and poor air quality. It can likely affect people's health, especially older adults and individuals with medical conditions. At least eight people were immediately rescued on the weekend. Initial reports were that some climbers suffered from burns and broken limbs. They were immediately brought to the nearest hospitals. In the video, a climber was seen injured and transported via wheelchair. Communities near the area are advised to stay alert to the potential activity of the volcano. Officials explained that the eruptions are challenging to detect as the volcano is not due to magma movement. Meanwhile, the reports added that rescue operations are continuing to locate the 12 missing climbers on the mountain. The situation can become more difficult if the volcano still erupts, affecting the search in the area. Near the mountain slopes, about 1,400 people reside in the area. People are advised to avoid illegal routes going to the volcano and observe the rules while hiking to avoid potential injuries and accidents. Also Read: Diamonds Show Insights into Supercontinent Formation, Deep Tectonic Processes, Research Says Keeping Safe From Volcanic Activity: What Can People Do? During volcanic activity, the main concerns are poor air quality, lava and volcanic ash. It can quickly spread to nearby areas. People should immediately evacuate to secure areas to avoid volcanic dangers. In addition, wearing a face mask will help to avoid exposure to harmful pollutants, especially for older adults and children. Keeping emergency kits at home is also important during volcanic activity. Related Article: Endangered Mammal Emerged in Indonesia's Province of Papua After Being Elusive for 60 Years For more similar stories, don't forget to follow Nature World News. By Express News Service CHENNAI: The unprecedented rain brought on by the approach of Cyclone Michaung has pounded Chennai and left it reeling. Weather bloggers suggested that many parts of the city received more rain than during the great Chennai floods of 2015. "There are comparisons now with 2015. In 2015, Nungambakkam got 294mm, Meenambakkam 345mm, Tambaram 494 mm, Chembarbakkam 475mm. Today Nungambakkam got 440mm in 36 hours, Meenambakkam 430 mm in 36 hours and Chembarbakkam 320mm in 36 hours...," Pradeep John, popular as Tamil Nadu weatherman on social media, shared. "The city has got more rains than 2015, but let's wait for Chembarbakkam upstream data too. Rather than comparing with 2015, I would say this is the perfect storm..." he added. People were marooned, most roads were flooded and some caved in , trees were felled by furious winds, and cars and other vehicles were seen floating around. Many parts of the city were left without power as water gushed in uninvited and without respite. There were also unfortunate deaths. At least seven people have reportedly died. Chennai police confirmed receiving reports of five deaths across the city. The body of an unidentified man aged around 70 years was found on a platform near the Vaidyanathan flyover. His body was sent to the Government Stanley Hospital. 04-12-2023 5:30 PM #cyclonemichaung 100kms from Chennai. To move parallel to South Andhra Coast pic.twitter.com/SyBunkJmMd Tamilnadu Weather-IMD (@ChennaiRmc) December 4, 2023 Another body of an unidentified woman aged around 60 years was found at the Foreshore Estate bus depot. Padmanaban (50), Dindigul district, died after getting electrocuted. His body was sent to the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital in Chennai. A fourth man, Ganesan (70), also was electrocuted while walking near his house in Pandiyan Nagar. A fifth man, 37-year-old Manoharan from Adyar, was killed after a treee fell on him while riding pillion on a motorcyle. Two others, guest workers, staying in a thatched hut in Kanathur near an under-construction building died after a wall collapsed in Kanathur. December 5 to be a public holiday The government has announced that December 5 will also be a public holiday. It had earlier announced that December 4 will be a public holiday. All educational institutions and government offices will remain closed. The state government has also requested private establishments in four districts - Chennai, Thiruvallur, Kancheepuram and Chengalpattu to allow their employees to work from home on December 5 Tuesday too as far as possible, due to heavy rains and its impact. Chennai airport to be shut till 9am on December 5, first such shutdown since 2015 floods The heavy rains, have forced Chennai Airport to close down its airfield from 9.17am to 9am on December 5, according to official sources. During 2015 in Chennai, the floods had forced the closure of the airport for at least four days. Many passengers awaiting their flights were stranded for hours as flights could not take off due to gusty wind and rains and also since water from Adyar River had entered the runway. Earlier, five flights departing from Chennai were canceled and 23 flights diverted. Two arrivals were also canceled, according to Chennai airport sources. While many passengers left for home, others stayed back. Many aircraft are still waiting at the tarmac to depart once the weather turns normal, airport sources said. Food and other arrangements have been made for those staying back as part of the contingency plan. Ground handlers have been advised to ensure mooring of aircraft and safety of ground support equipments and operating personnel. ALSO SEE: In 2015, the Airport Authority of India had joined hands with the Indian Institute Technology to map the geography of the airport and its surrounding areas using a drone to plan a long-term solution to prevent flooding. It was then planned to map the airport and the surrounding water bodies up to 5-10 kilometers radius from the airport. The Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority has informed the Madras High Court the study has been done but this is yet to be made public. Heavy rain brings crocodile to Chennai road Meanwhile, a viral video of mugger crocodile, which was spotted by passers-by near Velammal School along the Perungalathur-Nedungunram road on Sunday night has sparked concern among the residents and forest department officials. The crocodile was seen crossing the road near Perunguathur and entering the bushes. Prasanth E, Wildlife Warden, Chennai told The New Indian Express that this is not the first time crocodiles have been spotted in the area. Last year, two crocodiles have been spotted and they have been captured by the forest department. We have given them the phone numbers to inform us if they sight any crocodiles, said Prasanth. Tamil Nadu's secretary for environment, climate change and forests Supriya tweeted urging people to not go near the reptile as they were shy creatures who avoid human contact. "There are a few mugger crocodiles in several of the water bodies in Chennai. They are shy and elusive animals and avoid human contact. This one has come out as water has overflowed due to massive rains under the impact of Cyclone Michuang. Wildlife divisin has been alerted and they are on the job," she said. Rain holiday for Madras HC The Madras High Court declared a rain holiday on December 4 for the principal bench in Chennai in view of torrential rains due to Michaung cyclone. The Registry made the announcement after due consideration of the prevailing situation and the forecast of heavy spells of showers, taking back an earlier announcement that courts would function without passing adverse orders since counsels for all the parties to the litigation may not be able to attend the proceedings. A similar holiday was also declared for all subordinate courts in Chennai, Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram and Chengalpet. Lawyers associations including the Madras High Court Advocates Association had asked the Chief Justice to declare a holiday taking into account the heavy rains. NS Balachandran, Chennai Regional Metrology Director, said, "Cyclone 'Michaung' will move parallel to the coast of north Tamil Nadu and south Andhra Pradesh, expected to cross Nellore-Machilipatnam by tomorrow at 4 pm. Heavy rainfall and strong winds are likely to continue till this evening in Chennai, Chengalpattu, Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur districts." Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp CHENNAI: The unprecedented rain brought on by the approach of Cyclone Michaung has pounded Chennai and left it reeling. Weather bloggers suggested that many parts of the city received more rain than during the great Chennai floods of 2015. "There are comparisons now with 2015. In 2015, Nungambakkam got 294mm, Meenambakkam 345mm, Tambaram 494 mm, Chembarbakkam 475mm. Today Nungambakkam got 440mm in 36 hours, Meenambakkam 430 mm in 36 hours and Chembarbakkam 320mm in 36 hours...," Pradeep John, popular as Tamil Nadu weatherman on social media, shared. "The city has got more rains than 2015, but let's wait for Chembarbakkam upstream data too. Rather than comparing with 2015, I would say this is the perfect storm..." he added.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); People were marooned, most roads were flooded and some caved in , trees were felled by furious winds, and cars and other vehicles were seen floating around. Many parts of the city were left without power as water gushed in uninvited and without respite. There were also unfortunate deaths. At least seven people have reportedly died. Chennai police confirmed receiving reports of five deaths across the city. The body of an unidentified man aged around 70 years was found on a platform near the Vaidyanathan flyover. His body was sent to the Government Stanley Hospital. 04-12-2023 5:30 PM #cyclonemichaung 100kms from Chennai. To move parallel to South Andhra Coast pic.twitter.com/SyBunkJmMd Tamilnadu Weather-IMD (@ChennaiRmc) December 4, 2023 Another body of an unidentified woman aged around 60 years was found at the Foreshore Estate bus depot. Padmanaban (50), Dindigul district, died after getting electrocuted. His body was sent to the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital in Chennai. A fourth man, Ganesan (70), also was electrocuted while walking near his house in Pandiyan Nagar. A fifth man, 37-year-old Manoharan from Adyar, was killed after a treee fell on him while riding pillion on a motorcyle. Two others, guest workers, staying in a thatched hut in Kanathur near an under-construction building died after a wall collapsed in Kanathur. December 5 to be a public holiday The government has announced that December 5 will also be a public holiday. It had earlier announced that December 4 will be a public holiday. All educational institutions and government offices will remain closed. The state government has also requested private establishments in four districts - Chennai, Thiruvallur, Kancheepuram and Chengalpattu to allow their employees to work from home on December 5 Tuesday too as far as possible, due to heavy rains and its impact. Chennai airport to be shut till 9am on December 5, first such shutdown since 2015 floods The heavy rains, have forced Chennai Airport to close down its airfield from 9.17am to 9am on December 5, according to official sources. During 2015 in Chennai, the floods had forced the closure of the airport for at least four days. Many passengers awaiting their flights were stranded for hours as flights could not take off due to gusty wind and rains and also since water from Adyar River had entered the runway. Earlier, five flights departing from Chennai were canceled and 23 flights diverted. Two arrivals were also canceled, according to Chennai airport sources. While many passengers left for home, others stayed back. Many aircraft are still waiting at the tarmac to depart once the weather turns normal, airport sources said. Food and other arrangements have been made for those staying back as part of the contingency plan. Ground handlers have been advised to ensure mooring of aircraft and safety of ground support equipments and operating personnel. ALSO SEE: In 2015, the Airport Authority of India had joined hands with the Indian Institute Technology to map the geography of the airport and its surrounding areas using a drone to plan a long-term solution to prevent flooding. It was then planned to map the airport and the surrounding water bodies up to 5-10 kilometers radius from the airport. The Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority has informed the Madras High Court the study has been done but this is yet to be made public. Heavy rain brings crocodile to Chennai road Meanwhile, a viral video of mugger crocodile, which was spotted by passers-by near Velammal School along the Perungalathur-Nedungunram road on Sunday night has sparked concern among the residents and forest department officials. The crocodile was seen crossing the road near Perunguathur and entering the bushes. Prasanth E, Wildlife Warden, Chennai told The New Indian Express that this is not the first time crocodiles have been spotted in the area. Last year, two crocodiles have been spotted and they have been captured by the forest department. We have given them the phone numbers to inform us if they sight any crocodiles, said Prasanth. Crocodile on the streets of Chennai.#CycloneMichuang pic.twitter.com/ohLGpu4sMG Manobala Vijayabalan (@ManobalaV) December 4, 2023 Tamil Nadu's secretary for environment, climate change and forests Supriya tweeted urging people to not go near the reptile as they were shy creatures who avoid human contact. "There are a few mugger crocodiles in several of the water bodies in Chennai. They are shy and elusive animals and avoid human contact. This one has come out as water has overflowed due to massive rains under the impact of Cyclone Michuang. Wildlife divisin has been alerted and they are on the job," she said. Cancellation of train services on 04.12.2023, passengers are requested to take a note on this #SouthernRailway #COMK #ChennaiFloods #ChennaRains #Chennai #CycloneMichuang #StaySafe pic.twitter.com/Z7BNbKYPf6 Southern Railway (@GMSRailway) December 4, 2023 Rain holiday for Madras HC The Madras High Court declared a rain holiday on December 4 for the principal bench in Chennai in view of torrential rains due to Michaung cyclone. The Registry made the announcement after due consideration of the prevailing situation and the forecast of heavy spells of showers, taking back an earlier announcement that courts would function without passing adverse orders since counsels for all the parties to the litigation may not be able to attend the proceedings. A similar holiday was also declared for all subordinate courts in Chennai, Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram and Chengalpet. Lawyers associations including the Madras High Court Advocates Association had asked the Chief Justice to declare a holiday taking into account the heavy rains. NS Balachandran, Chennai Regional Metrology Director, said, "Cyclone 'Michaung' will move parallel to the coast of north Tamil Nadu and south Andhra Pradesh, expected to cross Nellore-Machilipatnam by tomorrow at 4 pm. Heavy rainfall and strong winds are likely to continue till this evening in Chennai, Chengalpattu, Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur districts." Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp By Online Desk The rainfall that pounded Chennai is the biggest since 2015 floods, though the rainfall has been cut off due to reading taken at 8.30 am and reset for the next day, says independent weather forecaster Tamil Nadu Weatherman. Without the cut-off at 8.30 am, the rains would be 300+ in 24 hours, if we take event as whole for 24 hrs and for 48 hrs it would be 400 mm, Pradeep John added. The incessant rains have left Chennai under sheets of water. Several parts of the city has no power supply. Normal life remains crippled. With the weatherman predicting rain till late in the night on Monday, it will take some time for normalcy to be restored. Images of cars afloat on a flowing river of water near Pallikaranai, inundated arterial roads in Vadapalani, heavy water logging in Sembakkam and several other parts of the city could be spotted on platform X. In a message on X, Sneha Rajeev said: "A friend of mine resides in Brindavan Street, Mylapore, "Her message: We are sinking by the minute, no electricity, and absolutely no possible route of evacuation, Unless water from the street is pumped out, we are trapped inside our building." Most journalists in the TNIE Online Desk have been struggling due to waterlogging in their places and a lack of power supply. Andrew Christie, his wife and small daughter, have been spending sleepless nights for the past couple of days as water kept seeping into their house. His cellphone remained switched off on Monday evening since there was no power supply in most part of the city as a result of which devices could not be recharged. Shruti R, who lives in Velacherry, is not well. But she is not able to go out to consult a doctor due to water logging. To make things worse, a building near her house has caved in. At least 10 people were reported trapped in the building, according to a report. Another young colleague, Sindhiya has been staying in a friend's place due to water logging in her house. Author and activist Shalin Maria Lawrence wrote on platform X: "With our life long battle with flood water, as the working class people of North Madras, my family always chose top floors when looking for rental. We are on the second floor and safe. The road has waist-level water and the bylane is also flooded. I have prepared rotis and making Birinji now to give out to people who are passing by towards relief centres in Vyasarpadi. I hope the rain stops soon. And we can begin relief work from tomorrow." In the city, cars could be seen buried in water. People struggling to stay afloat on chest-level water. Normal life remains crippled. Chennai waits for the rains to subside. The corporation workers are working round the clock to do their best for the residents of Chennai. As was typical of Chennai, messages extending help to needy people could also be spotted on social media. The IMD informed that the severe Cyclonic Storm MICHAUNG (pronounced as MIGJAUM) lay centered at 1430 hours IST of 4th December, 2023 over the same region about 100 km northeast of Chennai, 120 km southeast of Nellore, 220 km north-northeast of Puducherry, 250 km south of Bapatla and 280 km south of Machilipatnam. It is likely to intensify gradually and move nearly northwards almost parallel and close to south Andhra Pradesh coast and cross South Andhra Pradesh coast between Nellore and Machilipatnam, close to Bapatla during forenoon of 5th December as a Severe Cyclonic Storm with a maximum sustained wind speed of 90-100 kmph gusting to 110 kmph. Gale wind speed reaching 90-100 kmph gusting to 110 kmph is prevailing around north Tamil Nadu and Puducherry coasts, IMD added. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp The rainfall that pounded Chennai is the biggest since 2015 floods, though the rainfall has been cut off due to reading taken at 8.30 am and reset for the next day, says independent weather forecaster Tamil Nadu Weatherman. Without the cut-off at 8.30 am, the rains would be 300+ in 24 hours, if we take event as whole for 24 hrs and for 48 hrs it would be 400 mm, Pradeep John added. The incessant rains have left Chennai under sheets of water. Several parts of the city has no power supply. Normal life remains crippled. With the weatherman predicting rain till late in the night on Monday, it will take some time for normalcy to be restored.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Images of cars afloat on a flowing river of water near Pallikaranai, inundated arterial roads in Vadapalani, heavy water logging in Sembakkam and several other parts of the city could be spotted on platform X. In a message on X, Sneha Rajeev said: "A friend of mine resides in Brindavan Street, Mylapore, "Her message: We are sinking by the minute, no electricity, and absolutely no possible route of evacuation, Unless water from the street is pumped out, we are trapped inside our building." Most journalists in the TNIE Online Desk have been struggling due to waterlogging in their places and a lack of power supply. Andrew Christie, his wife and small daughter, have been spending sleepless nights for the past couple of days as water kept seeping into their house. His cellphone remained switched off on Monday evening since there was no power supply in most part of the city as a result of which devices could not be recharged. Shruti R, who lives in Velacherry, is not well. But she is not able to go out to consult a doctor due to water logging. To make things worse, a building near her house has caved in. At least 10 people were reported trapped in the building, according to a report. Another young colleague, Sindhiya has been staying in a friend's place due to water logging in her house. Author and activist Shalin Maria Lawrence wrote on platform X: "With our life long battle with flood water, as the working class people of North Madras, my family always chose top floors when looking for rental. We are on the second floor and safe. The road has waist-level water and the bylane is also flooded. I have prepared rotis and making Birinji now to give out to people who are passing by towards relief centres in Vyasarpadi. I hope the rain stops soon. And we can begin relief work from tomorrow." In the city, cars could be seen buried in water. People struggling to stay afloat on chest-level water. Normal life remains crippled. Chennai waits for the rains to subside. The corporation workers are working round the clock to do their best for the residents of Chennai. As was typical of Chennai, messages extending help to needy people could also be spotted on social media. The IMD informed that the severe Cyclonic Storm MICHAUNG (pronounced as MIGJAUM) lay centered at 1430 hours IST of 4th December, 2023 over the same region about 100 km northeast of Chennai, 120 km southeast of Nellore, 220 km north-northeast of Puducherry, 250 km south of Bapatla and 280 km south of Machilipatnam. It is likely to intensify gradually and move nearly northwards almost parallel and close to south Andhra Pradesh coast and cross South Andhra Pradesh coast between Nellore and Machilipatnam, close to Bapatla during forenoon of 5th December as a Severe Cyclonic Storm with a maximum sustained wind speed of 90-100 kmph gusting to 110 kmph. Gale wind speed reaching 90-100 kmph gusting to 110 kmph is prevailing around north Tamil Nadu and Puducherry coasts, IMD added. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp By Express News Service CHENNAI: Manoharan from Adyar, a 37-year-old riding pillion on a two-wheeler, died on Monday after a tree fell on the motorcycle he was travelling by on the Mahatma Gandhi Road. The rider sustained grievous injuries and was taken to the hospital for treatment, even as Manoharan died on the spot, Adyar Police said. Vehicular movement has been stopped from Mahatma Gandhi Road till LB Road in Adyar due to the inundation up to three feet. West mambalam Devanathan Colony - Landmark Srinivasa theater pic.twitter.com/mFO9AUs6Dj Somasundaram.K (@K_somuindian) December 4, 2023 Water has entered residential buildings and low-lying houses in the area, as it has in many other areas in the city. Elderly people have been evacuated on boats by the relief workers on the field. Chennai Corporation workers have been deployed to remove the fallen trees and motor pumps are deployed to drain out the water. Cyclone Michaung that has brought the heavy spell of rain has intensified into a severe cyclonic storm. December 5 to be a public holiday The government has announced that December 5 will also be a public holiday. It had earlier announced that December 4 will be a public holiday. All educational institutions and government offices will remain closed. The state government has also requested private establishments in four districts - Chennai, Thiruvallur, Kancheepuram and Chengalpattu to allow their employees to work from home on December 5 Tuesday too as far as possible, due to heavy rains and its impact. Heavy rain brings crocodile to Chennai road Meanwhile, a viral video of mugger crocodile, which was spotted by passers-by near Velammal School along the Perungalathur-Nedungunram road on Sunday night has sparked concern among the residents and forest department officials. The crocodile was seen crossing the road near Perunguathur and entering the bushes. Prasanth E, Wildlife Warden, Chennai told The New Indian Express that this is not the first time crocodiles have been spotted in the area. Last year, two crocodiles have been spotted and they have been captured by the forest department. We have given them the phone numbers to inform us if they sight any crocodiles, said Prasanth. Tamil Nadu's secretary for environment, climate change and forests Supriya tweeted urging people to not go near the reptile as they were shy creatures who avoid human contact. "There are a few mugger crocodiles in several of the water bodies in Chennai. They are shy and elusive animals and avoid human contact. This one has come out as water has overflowed due to massive rains under the impact of Cyclone Michuang. Wildlife divisin has been alerted and they are on the job," she said. 04-12-2023 12:30 AM #cyclonemichaung 90kms from Chennai. Intensified into Severe Cyclonic storm. To move parallel to South Andhra Coast pic.twitter.com/pl0YgMzPCl Tamilnadu Weather-IMD (@ChennaiRmc) December 4, 2023 Chennai airport to be shut all day, first such shutdown since 2015 floods The heavy rains, have forced Chennai Airport to close down its airfield from 9.17am to 11pm, according to official sources. During 2015 in Chennai, the floods had forced the closure of the airport for at least four days. Many passengers awaiting their flights were stranded for hours as flights could not take off due to gusty wind and rains and also since water from Adyar River had entered the runway. Earlier, five flights departing from Chennai were canceled and 23 flights diverted. Two arrivals were also canceled, according to Chennai airport sources. While many passengers left for home, others stayed back. Many aircraft are still waiting at the tarmac to depart once the weather turns normal, airport sources said. Food and other arrangements have been made for those staying back as part of the contingency plan. Ground handlers have been advised to ensure mooring of aircraft and safety of ground support equipments and operating personnel. In 2015, the Airport Authority of India had joined hands with the Indian Institute Technology to map the geography of the airport and its surrounding areas using a drone to plan a long-term solution to prevent flooding. It was then planned to map the airport and the surrounding water bodies up to 5-10 kilometers radius from the airport. The Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority has informed the Madras High Court the study has been done but this is yet to be made public. Two guest workers killed as wall collapses in Chennai Meanwhile, two guest workers who were staying in a thatched roof in Kanathur near an under construction building died after a wall collapsed in Kanathur. ALSO READ | Chennai battered, takes cover from menacing Cyclone Michaung Police said the deceased were identified as Zakir, 20 and Afrose, 30 from Jharkhand. Police said the duo along with many workers were working in an under construction site in Gandhi Street in Kanathur. The building belongs to one Ayappan, said the police. The construction laborers were staying in a thatched roof next to the under construction site. In the wee hours of Monday, due to incessant rains and wind, a portion of the under construction building collapsed and fell over their thatched roof. The fire and rescue team reached the spot and rescued two people. The deceased were sent to the Royapettah Government Hospital for post mortem. Madras HC declares rain holiday The Madras High Court has declared a rain holiday on December 4 for the principal bench in Chennai in view of torrential rains due to Michaung cyclone. The Registry made the announcement after due consideration of the prevailing situation and the forecast of heavy spells of showers, taking back an earlier announcement that courts would function without passing adverse orders since counsels for all the parties to the litigation may not be able to attend the proceedings. A similar holiday was also declared for all subordinate courts in Chennai, Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram and Chengalpet. Lawyers associations including the Madras High Court Advocates Association had asked the Chief Justice to declare a holiday taking into account the heavy rains. Chennai has been battered by rains as Cyclone Michaung nears the city. NS Balachandran, Chennai Regional Metrology Director, said, "Cyclone 'Michaung' lies about 100 km east-northeast of Chennai. In the last 6 hours, it has moved at a speed of 10 km/hr and it's expected to move in the northwest direction. An intensified to severe cyclonic storm is expected by 4 p.m. today." "Further, it will move parallel to the coast of north Tamil Nadu and south Andhra Pradesh, expected to cross Nellore-Machilipatnam by tomorrow at 4 p.m. Heavy rainfall and strong winds are likely to continue till this evening in Chennai, Chengalpattu, Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur districts," he added. Michaung is expected to make landfall between Nellore and Machilipatnam. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp CHENNAI: Manoharan from Adyar, a 37-year-old riding pillion on a two-wheeler, died on Monday after a tree fell on the motorcycle he was travelling by on the Mahatma Gandhi Road. The rider sustained grievous injuries and was taken to the hospital for treatment, even as Manoharan died on the spot, Adyar Police said. Vehicular movement has been stopped from Mahatma Gandhi Road till LB Road in Adyar due to the inundation up to three feet. googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); West mambalam Devanathan Colony - Landmark Srinivasa theater pic.twitter.com/mFO9AUs6Dj Somasundaram.K (@K_somuindian) December 4, 2023 Water has entered residential buildings and low-lying houses in the area, as it has in many other areas in the city. Elderly people have been evacuated on boats by the relief workers on the field. Chennai Corporation workers have been deployed to remove the fallen trees and motor pumps are deployed to drain out the water. Cyclone Michaung that has brought the heavy spell of rain has intensified into a severe cyclonic storm. December 5 to be a public holiday The government has announced that December 5 will also be a public holiday. It had earlier announced that December 4 will be a public holiday. All educational institutions and government offices will remain closed. The state government has also requested private establishments in four districts - Chennai, Thiruvallur, Kancheepuram and Chengalpattu to allow their employees to work from home on December 5 Tuesday too as far as possible, due to heavy rains and its impact. Heavy rain brings crocodile to Chennai road Meanwhile, a viral video of mugger crocodile, which was spotted by passers-by near Velammal School along the Perungalathur-Nedungunram road on Sunday night has sparked concern among the residents and forest department officials. The crocodile was seen crossing the road near Perunguathur and entering the bushes. Prasanth E, Wildlife Warden, Chennai told The New Indian Express that this is not the first time crocodiles have been spotted in the area. Last year, two crocodiles have been spotted and they have been captured by the forest department. We have given them the phone numbers to inform us if they sight any crocodiles, said Prasanth. Crocodile on the streets of Chennai.#CycloneMichuang pic.twitter.com/ohLGpu4sMG Manobala Vijayabalan (@ManobalaV) December 4, 2023 Tamil Nadu's secretary for environment, climate change and forests Supriya tweeted urging people to not go near the reptile as they were shy creatures who avoid human contact. "There are a few mugger crocodiles in several of the water bodies in Chennai. They are shy and elusive animals and avoid human contact. This one has come out as water has overflowed due to massive rains under the impact of Cyclone Michuang. Wildlife divisin has been alerted and they are on the job," she said. 04-12-2023 12:30 AM #cyclonemichaung 90kms from Chennai. Intensified into Severe Cyclonic storm. To move parallel to South Andhra Coast pic.twitter.com/pl0YgMzPCl Tamilnadu Weather-IMD (@ChennaiRmc) December 4, 2023 Chennai airport to be shut all day, first such shutdown since 2015 floods The heavy rains, have forced Chennai Airport to close down its airfield from 9.17am to 11pm, according to official sources. During 2015 in Chennai, the floods had forced the closure of the airport for at least four days. Many passengers awaiting their flights were stranded for hours as flights could not take off due to gusty wind and rains and also since water from Adyar River had entered the runway. Earlier, five flights departing from Chennai were canceled and 23 flights diverted. Two arrivals were also canceled, according to Chennai airport sources. #ChennaiRain Purva Windermere, Pallikaranai. Stay safe. pic.twitter.com/pdf6uTS2zB Karal (@ItsKaral) December 4, 2023 While many passengers left for home, others stayed back. Many aircraft are still waiting at the tarmac to depart once the weather turns normal, airport sources said. Food and other arrangements have been made for those staying back as part of the contingency plan. Ground handlers have been advised to ensure mooring of aircraft and safety of ground support equipments and operating personnel. In 2015, the Airport Authority of India had joined hands with the Indian Institute Technology to map the geography of the airport and its surrounding areas using a drone to plan a long-term solution to prevent flooding. It was then planned to map the airport and the surrounding water bodies up to 5-10 kilometers radius from the airport. The Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority has informed the Madras High Court the study has been done but this is yet to be made public. Two guest workers killed as wall collapses in Chennai Meanwhile, two guest workers who were staying in a thatched roof in Kanathur near an under construction building died after a wall collapsed in Kanathur. ALSO READ | Chennai battered, takes cover from menacing Cyclone Michaung Police said the deceased were identified as Zakir, 20 and Afrose, 30 from Jharkhand. Police said the duo along with many workers were working in an under construction site in Gandhi Street in Kanathur. The building belongs to one Ayappan, said the police. The construction laborers were staying in a thatched roof next to the under construction site. In the wee hours of Monday, due to incessant rains and wind, a portion of the under construction building collapsed and fell over their thatched roof. The fire and rescue team reached the spot and rescued two people. The deceased were sent to the Royapettah Government Hospital for post mortem. Madras HC declares rain holiday The Madras High Court has declared a rain holiday on December 4 for the principal bench in Chennai in view of torrential rains due to Michaung cyclone. The Registry made the announcement after due consideration of the prevailing situation and the forecast of heavy spells of showers, taking back an earlier announcement that courts would function without passing adverse orders since counsels for all the parties to the litigation may not be able to attend the proceedings. A similar holiday was also declared for all subordinate courts in Chennai, Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram and Chengalpet. Lawyers associations including the Madras High Court Advocates Association had asked the Chief Justice to declare a holiday taking into account the heavy rains. Chennai has been battered by rains as Cyclone Michaung nears the city. NS Balachandran, Chennai Regional Metrology Director, said, "Cyclone 'Michaung' lies about 100 km east-northeast of Chennai. In the last 6 hours, it has moved at a speed of 10 km/hr and it's expected to move in the northwest direction. An intensified to severe cyclonic storm is expected by 4 p.m. today." "Further, it will move parallel to the coast of north Tamil Nadu and south Andhra Pradesh, expected to cross Nellore-Machilipatnam by tomorrow at 4 p.m. Heavy rainfall and strong winds are likely to continue till this evening in Chennai, Chengalpattu, Kancheepuram and Thiruvallur districts," he added. Michaung is expected to make landfall between Nellore and Machilipatnam. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp By Express News Service Chethan Kumar, known for directing action-packed entertainers like Bharjari, Bahaddhur, Bharaate, and James, is currently filming Burma with actor Rakksh Ram. The film, which is again an actioner, boasts a star-studded ensemble, particularly an intriguing lineup of antagonists. Prominent among them is Shawar Ali, a versatile actor known for his appearances in various languages, including Kannada, notably seen in Darshan's Chakravarthy. He now returns to Kannada cinema with this project and will face off against Rakksh Ram. Alongside Shawar Ali, the film also features Aditya Menon, Deepak Shetty, Anil Kumar, and Petrol Prasanna playing antagonists. Rakksh, known for his work in television and a few films, turns producer with Burma, which is expected to be released in multiple languages. Composer V Harikrishna will be scoring the music for the film, which will have choreography and editing by Mysore and Mahesh Reddy, respectively. Noted stunt director Ravi Varma has been roped in for the high-octane stunts planned for Burma. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp Chethan Kumar, known for directing action-packed entertainers like Bharjari, Bahaddhur, Bharaate, and James, is currently filming Burma with actor Rakksh Ram. The film, which is again an actioner, boasts a star-studded ensemble, particularly an intriguing lineup of antagonists. Prominent among them is Shawar Ali, a versatile actor known for his appearances in various languages, including Kannada, notably seen in Darshan's Chakravarthy. He now returns to Kannada cinema with this project and will face off against Rakksh Ram. Alongside Shawar Ali, the film also features Aditya Menon, Deepak Shetty, Anil Kumar, and Petrol Prasanna playing antagonists. Rakksh, known for his work in television and a few films, turns producer with Burma, which is expected to be released in multiple languages. Composer V Harikrishna will be scoring the music for the film, which will have choreography and editing by Mysore and Mahesh Reddy, respectively.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Noted stunt director Ravi Varma has been roped in for the high-octane stunts planned for Burma. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp Rajesh Kumar Thakur By Express News Service NEW DELHI: In what was billed as the semifinal to the 2024 bout, the BJP scored a resounding victory in three out of four states where votes were counted on Sunday. That they were big Hindi heartland states added to the quality of the triumph. Beating anti-incumbency, the party retained power in Madhya Pradesh for the fifth consecutive time while wresting power in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. In all three states, the BJP was locked in a straight fight with the Congress, giving it the lift ahead of the Lok Sabha battle. Telangana was the outlier as it gave the Congress a thumping mandate, refusing to accord the Bharat Rashtra Samithi a third consecutive shot at power. The Congress was widely expected to retain Chhattisgarh but it inexplicably faltered. ALSO READ | This hat-trick of victories a guarantee for 24: Modi In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP managed to hold on to power. Its welfare schemes like the CM's Ladli Behna Yojana for women empowerment was a big draw. Yet, the party didn't project Shivraj Singh Chouhan as its face, seeking votes in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi instead. Modi, too, sought votes for himself in all four states, a strategy to overcome voter fatigue. Of course, the BJP electoral machine's booth management skills, astute ticket distribution and the over confidence of the Congress swung the popular mood in its favour in Madhya Pradesh. The Oppositions guarantees like reviving the old pension scheme, caste census and other freebies couldnt score over Modis guarantee of ushering in a Vikshit Bharat (developed India) in all the three states. Announcing the extension of the free ration scheme to 80 crore poor people for five years after the model code of conduct had kicked in, the annual Rs 6,000 dole to farmers and the passage of the womens reservation bill in Parliament drew women to polling booths in droves. The BJP won two-thirds majority in MP and comfortable simple majorities in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh (see chart). Raids by Central law enforcement agencies against Opposition leaders, accusing them of corruption, smeared their image and acted as a force multiplier for the BJP in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. But Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot has only himself to blame for his nasty power struggle with Sachin Pilot. In any case, voters in the state prefer alternating power between the Congress and the BJP in the bipolar contest. ALSO READ | How hubris dashed KCR hopes of a hat-trick in Telangana Terming the BJPs hat-trick in the state elections as a guarantee for the partys hat-trick in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, Modi said the results convey a warning to corrupt parties. "The results show popular support for our battle against corruption," he said. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp NEW DELHI: In what was billed as the semifinal to the 2024 bout, the BJP scored a resounding victory in three out of four states where votes were counted on Sunday. That they were big Hindi heartland states added to the quality of the triumph. Beating anti-incumbency, the party retained power in Madhya Pradesh for the fifth consecutive time while wresting power in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. In all three states, the BJP was locked in a straight fight with the Congress, giving it the lift ahead of the Lok Sabha battle. Telangana was the outlier as it gave the Congress a thumping mandate, refusing to accord the Bharat Rashtra Samithi a third consecutive shot at power. The Congress was widely expected to retain Chhattisgarh but it inexplicably faltered. googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); ALSO READ | This hat-trick of victories a guarantee for 24: Modi In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP managed to hold on to power. Its welfare schemes like the CM's Ladli Behna Yojana for women empowerment was a big draw. Yet, the party didn't project Shivraj Singh Chouhan as its face, seeking votes in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi instead. Modi, too, sought votes for himself in all four states, a strategy to overcome voter fatigue. Of course, the BJP electoral machine's booth management skills, astute ticket distribution and the over confidence of the Congress swung the popular mood in its favour in Madhya Pradesh. The Oppositions guarantees like reviving the old pension scheme, caste census and other freebies couldnt score over Modis guarantee of ushering in a Vikshit Bharat (developed India) in all the three states. Announcing the extension of the free ration scheme to 80 crore poor people for five years after the model code of conduct had kicked in, the annual Rs 6,000 dole to farmers and the passage of the womens reservation bill in Parliament drew women to polling booths in droves. The BJP won two-thirds majority in MP and comfortable simple majorities in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh (see chart). Raids by Central law enforcement agencies against Opposition leaders, accusing them of corruption, smeared their image and acted as a force multiplier for the BJP in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. But Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot has only himself to blame for his nasty power struggle with Sachin Pilot. In any case, voters in the state prefer alternating power between the Congress and the BJP in the bipolar contest. ALSO READ | How hubris dashed KCR hopes of a hat-trick in Telangana Terming the BJPs hat-trick in the state elections as a guarantee for the partys hat-trick in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, Modi said the results convey a warning to corrupt parties. "The results show popular support for our battle against corruption," he said. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp Parvez Sultan By Express News Service NEW DELHI: Acknowledging its crushing defeat in three statesRajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarhthe Congress stated that these are temporary setbacks, and the battle of ideology would continue. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge resolved to rebuild and revive the partys fortune in the three states. I thank the people of Telangana for the mandate we have received from them. I also thank all those who voted for us in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. Our performance in these three states has, no doubt, been disappointing, but with determination, we reaffirm our strong resolve to rebuild and revive ourselves in these three states, he posted on X. He, however, added that the Congress party had fought a spirited campaign in all four states. I acknowledge and appreciate the efforts of lakhs of our workers. We will overcome temporary setbacks and prepare ourselves fully for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections along with the INDIA parties, he also wrote. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi thanked the people of Telangana. We humbly accept the mandate of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan; the battle of ideology will continue, he wrote on X. The partys general secretary in-charge of communications, Jairam Ramesh, expressed hope to perform better in the general elections next year. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp NEW DELHI: Acknowledging its crushing defeat in three statesRajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarhthe Congress stated that these are temporary setbacks, and the battle of ideology would continue. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge resolved to rebuild and revive the partys fortune in the three states. I thank the people of Telangana for the mandate we have received from them. I also thank all those who voted for us in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. Our performance in these three states has, no doubt, been disappointing, but with determination, we reaffirm our strong resolve to rebuild and revive ourselves in these three states, he posted on X. He, however, added that the Congress party had fought a spirited campaign in all four states. I acknowledge and appreciate the efforts of lakhs of our workers. We will overcome temporary setbacks and prepare ourselves fully for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections along with the INDIA parties, he also wrote.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Congress leader Rahul Gandhi thanked the people of Telangana. We humbly accept the mandate of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan; the battle of ideology will continue, he wrote on X. The partys general secretary in-charge of communications, Jairam Ramesh, expressed hope to perform better in the general elections next year. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp Ejaz Kaiser By Express News Service RAIPUR: A myth that the gateway to power in Chhattisgarh is via tribal-dominated Bastar region with 12 seats in the south and Sarguja division in the north having 14 constituencies prevailed. BJP didnt have a single MLA either in Bastar or Sarguja. Congress was taken aback following the saffron party securing an overwhelming tribal support and won all 14 seats in Sarguja and 8 in Bastar. Chhattisgarhs conflict-ridden Bastar zone created a record turnout of voters at 78 per cent this time. For the political parties in Chhattisgarh, the tribal-dominated regions often remained in focus as they constitute around 31 per cent of the states population. The state has 29 reserved scheduled tribe seats. The star campaigners of both the BJP and the Congress party made last ditch efforts to woo the tribal voters in reserved scheduled tribe constituencies through political rallies or their different yatras. As the mass contact programmes, the ruling Congress had organised Bharose Ki Sarkar, Bhent Mulakat and Bharose Ki Yatra in tribal belts. Besides, various welfare programmes were announced for the tribal communities in an election year. Congress leader Rahul Gandhis accusation against BJP of snatching tribals rights didnt win the support of the adivasi communities. The BJP attempted to reach out to the tribal communities through their Maha Jan Sampark programme, both in Bastar and Sarguja regions. Two Parivartan Yatra of the BJP commenced from tribal dominated Dantewada (south Bastar) Jashpur (north-east of Raipur) in September this year and eventually covered 87 assembly constituencies travelling 2989 km with a mission to dislodge the corrupt Congress regime. Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his partys campaign in the state alleged that the Congress neglected tribal legacy and deprived them of development. According to political experts, the BJPs Lok Sabha poll prospects in the state might be impacted if it does not move swiftly to implement the promises made during the assembly elections. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp RAIPUR: A myth that the gateway to power in Chhattisgarh is via tribal-dominated Bastar region with 12 seats in the south and Sarguja division in the north having 14 constituencies prevailed. BJP didnt have a single MLA either in Bastar or Sarguja. Congress was taken aback following the saffron party securing an overwhelming tribal support and won all 14 seats in Sarguja and 8 in Bastar. Chhattisgarhs conflict-ridden Bastar zone created a record turnout of voters at 78 per cent this time. For the political parties in Chhattisgarh, the tribal-dominated regions often remained in focus as they constitute around 31 per cent of the states population. The state has 29 reserved scheduled tribe seats. The star campaigners of both the BJP and the Congress party made last ditch efforts to woo the tribal voters in reserved scheduled tribe constituencies through political rallies or their different yatras.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); As the mass contact programmes, the ruling Congress had organised Bharose Ki Sarkar, Bhent Mulakat and Bharose Ki Yatra in tribal belts. Besides, various welfare programmes were announced for the tribal communities in an election year. Congress leader Rahul Gandhis accusation against BJP of snatching tribals rights didnt win the support of the adivasi communities. The BJP attempted to reach out to the tribal communities through their Maha Jan Sampark programme, both in Bastar and Sarguja regions. Two Parivartan Yatra of the BJP commenced from tribal dominated Dantewada (south Bastar) Jashpur (north-east of Raipur) in September this year and eventually covered 87 assembly constituencies travelling 2989 km with a mission to dislodge the corrupt Congress regime. Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his partys campaign in the state alleged that the Congress neglected tribal legacy and deprived them of development. According to political experts, the BJPs Lok Sabha poll prospects in the state might be impacted if it does not move swiftly to implement the promises made during the assembly elections. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp Rajesh Kumar Thakur By Express News Service NEW DELHI: Delighted over BJPs victory in the Hindi heartland, PM Narendra Modi on Sunday asserted that the BJP-led NDA will do a hat-trick in 2024 too. Todays hat-trick has given the guarantee for the hat-trick in 2024. The voters of India know what works for the betterment of the nation, said Modi. Hailing his partys performances, he said the BJP does not make empty promises, rather it ensures delivery and performance. The victory of BJP in three states has come as a victory of an idea of Sab ka saath, Sab ka vikas. He termed the party victory as the victory of the poor, farmers, women and the youth who are determined to make Bharat a viksit-rashtra (developed nation). The PM was addressing party workers at the BJP headquarters. He attacked the Congress and its allies associated with INDIA by referring to them as a ghamandia gathbandhan) and accused the Congress of keeping the youth, farmers, poor families and women deprived of their right to development. In apparent reference to the rising voices for a caste census and its backdrop, Modi said, Some people made all-out attempts recently during the elections to divide the country into castes. But the people did not allow them. For me, only four castes exist the poor, Nari Shakti (womens power), Yuva-Shakti (youth power) and farmers. We are leaving no stone unturned to ensure their development. Modi said the results of the polls have started a flow of positive energy and its power has further strengthened the foundation prepared for a developed India. He asked the Congress and its allies in the Opposition not to spread negative politics. In the interest of democracy, I have one more advice to the Congress and its allies: Please dont do politics which is anti-national; which works to divide and weaken the country. Otherwise, the people will oust you from politics, he said. He said Sundays results were a lesson for those created hurdles in the path of development of the poor, who obstructed the welfare schemes. Stop all this, otherwise the people will remove you one by one, the PM warned. Going hammer and tongs against the INDIA bloc, Modi sought to place BJPs victories before the ghamandia-gathbadhhan (egoistic alliance). The lesson is that the countrys trust cannot be won just by a few family members coming together on stage, he said, attacking dynastic politics. The long & short of it Going hammer and tongs against the INDIA bloc, PM Modi sought to place the victories of BJP before the ghamandia-gathbadhhan (egoistic alliance). He also took a swipe at former Congress government in Rajasthan, Telangana and Chhattisgarh, saying that dissatisfaction among the youth over paper leaks and recruitment scams led to the ouster of governments in these states. He also said the voters now know when India progresses, the state progresses and the life of every family improves. Nota 1.26% - Cgarh 0.98% - Madhya Pradesh 0.96% - Rajasthan Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp NEW DELHI: Delighted over BJPs victory in the Hindi heartland, PM Narendra Modi on Sunday asserted that the BJP-led NDA will do a hat-trick in 2024 too. Todays hat-trick has given the guarantee for the hat-trick in 2024. The voters of India know what works for the betterment of the nation, said Modi. Hailing his partys performances, he said the BJP does not make empty promises, rather it ensures delivery and performance. The victory of BJP in three states has come as a victory of an idea of Sab ka saath, Sab ka vikas. He termed the party victory as the victory of the poor, farmers, women and the youth who are determined to make Bharat a viksit-rashtra (developed nation). The PM was addressing party workers at the BJP headquarters. He attacked the Congress and its allies associated with INDIA by referring to them as a ghamandia gathbandhan) and accused the Congress of keeping the youth, farmers, poor families and women deprived of their right to development.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); In apparent reference to the rising voices for a caste census and its backdrop, Modi said, Some people made all-out attempts recently during the elections to divide the country into castes. But the people did not allow them. For me, only four castes exist the poor, Nari Shakti (womens power), Yuva-Shakti (youth power) and farmers. We are leaving no stone unturned to ensure their development. Modi said the results of the polls have started a flow of positive energy and its power has further strengthened the foundation prepared for a developed India. He asked the Congress and its allies in the Opposition not to spread negative politics. In the interest of democracy, I have one more advice to the Congress and its allies: Please dont do politics which is anti-national; which works to divide and weaken the country. Otherwise, the people will oust you from politics, he said. He said Sundays results were a lesson for those created hurdles in the path of development of the poor, who obstructed the welfare schemes. Stop all this, otherwise the people will remove you one by one, the PM warned. Going hammer and tongs against the INDIA bloc, Modi sought to place BJPs victories before the ghamandia-gathbadhhan (egoistic alliance). The lesson is that the countrys trust cannot be won just by a few family members coming together on stage, he said, attacking dynastic politics. The long & short of it Going hammer and tongs against the INDIA bloc, PM Modi sought to place the victories of BJP before the ghamandia-gathbadhhan (egoistic alliance). He also took a swipe at former Congress government in Rajasthan, Telangana and Chhattisgarh, saying that dissatisfaction among the youth over paper leaks and recruitment scams led to the ouster of governments in these states. He also said the voters now know when India progresses, the state progresses and the life of every family improves. Nota 1.26% - Cgarh 0.98% - Madhya Pradesh 0.96% - Rajasthan Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp Namrata Sindwani By Express News Service BENGALURU : A sex determination and female foeticide racket was discovered recently in Karnataka, and revealed that a team of doctors was using a jaggery unit in Mandya as an ultrasound scanning centre, and had aborted around 900 female foetuses in the past two years. The incident has pointed out flaws in the enforcement of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, and the continued violations by centres performing sex determination tests, despite being banned in 1994. Highlighting the continued prevalence of such cases, Dr Ravi N, secretary, Indian Radiology and Imaging Association, Karnataka chapter, said radiologists have become flag-bearers of the blame for fake doctors and unregistered laboratories performing sex determination tests and abortions, solely for financial gain. express Illustraion Multiple quacks have emerged, as several unregistered training institutes (stimulation centres) claiming to provide skills for performing ultrasound tests, among other tests. However, they are also secretly performing gender detection tests but we do not have proof to call them out, Dr Ravi said. More than the registered doctors and radiologists, these quacks perform tests, especially in rural parts. Even a few government-run training courses have also been introduced, adding to the burden, he added. A radiologist can determine the gender of the baby in the 12-15th week of pregnancy, the second trimester. According to the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (MTP) 2021, a woman is allowed to terminate her pregnancy with the opinion of a registered medical practitioner, up to 20 weeks of gestation. As both the time durations are near to each other, it results in violation of both the PCPNDT and MTP Acts, if an abortion is performed illegally after the 20th week. Other than the radiologist and the mother, no one else, be it the husband or another family member, is allowed inside the room, while an ultrasound is being performed. While it is being ensured that all medical professionals diligently follow this practice and are trained to not disclose the gender of the baby even by mistake, as addressing the baby as a him or her also ends up revealing the gender without any ill intention. There is a lack of vigilance over these quacks who might allow families to witness the ultrasound tests, violating protocols and aiding abortions in case its a girl. It is saddening to see that even today, when we come out after a successful delivery, and inform the family about the babys gender, they jump with joy when news of a boy being born is announced, but develop a sombre attitude when a girl is born, Dr Usha BK, neonatologist and assistant professor at Atal Bihari Vajpayee Medical College and Research Institute. For centuries, preference was given to male children, irrespective of peoples socio-economic status. Girls are called a burden, for raising them only to send them off to a possible suitor, while boys would bring support to the family even after marriage. Following protocol Measures are being taken to reduce such cases. Dr Pradeep Srinivasan, head of radiology, Fortis Hospitals, Bengaluru, explained that every foetal medicine specialist is to follow a set protocol of uploading the patient details on the government-run portal, stating details, followed by an undertaking signed by both parties. To avoid any gender-related discussions, we refer to the baby as it instead of him or her, to avoid the slightest chance of revealing the babys gender, he added. The district level task force committee also takes up decoy operations by sending pregnant women to scanning centres to undergo scanning, and requesting the radiologist to disclose the sex. The lack of clarity in defining the PCPNDT Act has resulted in many radiologists calling it a draconian law as it gives officials authority to misuse it too, without much proof of a professional indulging in sex determination activities. Even a clerical error is considered a possible case of performing such activities, making doctors fearful of taking radiology as a specialisation, to avoid unreasonable scrutiny. EDITORIAL | Enforce law strictly on female foeticide Among the border districts in the state, where gender detection and female foeticide is still rampant, Udupi comes as a ray of hope as no cases, indicating sex determination activities, have been reported in the past 15 years. Experts attributed it to the traditional adoption of a matriarchal family system when women having an upper hand in families, is not considered a cause of insecurity among men. Families, doctors to blame Doctors have blamed both the families and medical professionals indulging in such practices, as both are driven by each others wants. However, medical professionals who take the oath not to break any laws and promote such activities for personal gain, are called the bigger culprits. Recalling one such incident, Dr Satish, DHO, Kodagu, said a doctor couple alongside seven others were booked for alleged trafficking of a newborn a few years ago. They allegedly performed the delivery on a minor on request from the parents, with the help of a nurse and a group D worker. Post the delivery, the baby was allegedly sold for Rs 1.5 lakh to a private hospital. The case is pending in court, both the doctors are serving practitioners, and only faced suspension for two months. Meanwhile, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of achieving gender equality and empowering all women by 2030 seems a far-sighted goal when a daughter continues to be killed while in the womb, or abandoned by her parents immediately after being born. (With inputs of Ramkrishna Badseshi/Kalaburagi, B K Lakshmikantha/Mysuru, Divya Cutinho/Mangaluru, Ramachandra V Gunari/Shivamogga, Prakash Samaga/Udupi, Prajna GR/Madikeri) Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp BENGALURU : A sex determination and female foeticide racket was discovered recently in Karnataka, and revealed that a team of doctors was using a jaggery unit in Mandya as an ultrasound scanning centre, and had aborted around 900 female foetuses in the past two years. The incident has pointed out flaws in the enforcement of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, and the continued violations by centres performing sex determination tests, despite being banned in 1994. Highlighting the continued prevalence of such cases, Dr Ravi N, secretary, Indian Radiology and Imaging Association, Karnataka chapter, said radiologists have become flag-bearers of the blame for fake doctors and unregistered laboratories performing sex determination tests and abortions, solely for financial gain. googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); express IllustraionMultiple quacks have emerged, as several unregistered training institutes (stimulation centres) claiming to provide skills for performing ultrasound tests, among other tests. However, they are also secretly performing gender detection tests but we do not have proof to call them out, Dr Ravi said. More than the registered doctors and radiologists, these quacks perform tests, especially in rural parts. Even a few government-run training courses have also been introduced, adding to the burden, he added. A radiologist can determine the gender of the baby in the 12-15th week of pregnancy, the second trimester. According to the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act (MTP) 2021, a woman is allowed to terminate her pregnancy with the opinion of a registered medical practitioner, up to 20 weeks of gestation. As both the time durations are near to each other, it results in violation of both the PCPNDT and MTP Acts, if an abortion is performed illegally after the 20th week. Other than the radiologist and the mother, no one else, be it the husband or another family member, is allowed inside the room, while an ultrasound is being performed. While it is being ensured that all medical professionals diligently follow this practice and are trained to not disclose the gender of the baby even by mistake, as addressing the baby as a him or her also ends up revealing the gender without any ill intention. There is a lack of vigilance over these quacks who might allow families to witness the ultrasound tests, violating protocols and aiding abortions in case its a girl. It is saddening to see that even today, when we come out after a successful delivery, and inform the family about the babys gender, they jump with joy when news of a boy being born is announced, but develop a sombre attitude when a girl is born, Dr Usha BK, neonatologist and assistant professor at Atal Bihari Vajpayee Medical College and Research Institute. For centuries, preference was given to male children, irrespective of peoples socio-economic status. Girls are called a burden, for raising them only to send them off to a possible suitor, while boys would bring support to the family even after marriage. Following protocol Measures are being taken to reduce such cases. Dr Pradeep Srinivasan, head of radiology, Fortis Hospitals, Bengaluru, explained that every foetal medicine specialist is to follow a set protocol of uploading the patient details on the government-run portal, stating details, followed by an undertaking signed by both parties. To avoid any gender-related discussions, we refer to the baby as it instead of him or her, to avoid the slightest chance of revealing the babys gender, he added. The district level task force committee also takes up decoy operations by sending pregnant women to scanning centres to undergo scanning, and requesting the radiologist to disclose the sex. The lack of clarity in defining the PCPNDT Act has resulted in many radiologists calling it a draconian law as it gives officials authority to misuse it too, without much proof of a professional indulging in sex determination activities. Even a clerical error is considered a possible case of performing such activities, making doctors fearful of taking radiology as a specialisation, to avoid unreasonable scrutiny. EDITORIAL | Enforce law strictly on female foeticide Among the border districts in the state, where gender detection and female foeticide is still rampant, Udupi comes as a ray of hope as no cases, indicating sex determination activities, have been reported in the past 15 years. Experts attributed it to the traditional adoption of a matriarchal family system when women having an upper hand in families, is not considered a cause of insecurity among men. Families, doctors to blame Doctors have blamed both the families and medical professionals indulging in such practices, as both are driven by each others wants. However, medical professionals who take the oath not to break any laws and promote such activities for personal gain, are called the bigger culprits. Recalling one such incident, Dr Satish, DHO, Kodagu, said a doctor couple alongside seven others were booked for alleged trafficking of a newborn a few years ago. They allegedly performed the delivery on a minor on request from the parents, with the help of a nurse and a group D worker. Post the delivery, the baby was allegedly sold for Rs 1.5 lakh to a private hospital. The case is pending in court, both the doctors are serving practitioners, and only faced suspension for two months. Meanwhile, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of achieving gender equality and empowering all women by 2030 seems a far-sighted goal when a daughter continues to be killed while in the womb, or abandoned by her parents immediately after being born. (With inputs of Ramkrishna Badseshi/Kalaburagi, B K Lakshmikantha/Mysuru, Divya Cutinho/Mangaluru, Ramachandra V Gunari/Shivamogga, Prakash Samaga/Udupi, Prajna GR/Madikeri) Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp Puran Choudhary By Express News Service BENGALURU : The University Grants Commission (UGC) has whipped up a controversy by issuing a directive on its website on December that universities and colleges across the country should set up selfie points at strategic locations on their campuses to raise awareness among youngsters about Indias achievements in various fields. But educationists, students and experts are not pleased with politicisation of education. Let us celebrate and disseminate the incredible strides made by our country by establishing a Selfie Point within your institution. The aim of Selfie Point is to create awareness among the youth about Indias achievements in various fields, particularly the new initiatives under the NEP 2020, read the official letter. The presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modis cutout on the pre-approved design is what has angered all. Higher Education Minister Dr MC Sudhakar said, I heard about this through the media. I am yet to see the directives and based on that we will decide. This is, however, not the right thing to do and not all directives by UGC need to be followed. Our universities cannot be politicised like this. Since we have not accepted NEP-2020 and will have our own SEP, why will we propagate the achievements of the policy? The themes for selfie points include a broad spectrum of national initiatives such as Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat and major thrust areas of NEP -2020, read the letter. Higher Education Institutions (HEls) may place the selfie points only as per the approved designs at a strategic place within the campus, it added. UGC also directed the universities to encourage students and visitors to capture and share these special moments on social media platforms, fostering a sense of collective pride. ALSO READ | Union Education Minister slams Karnataka government for scrapping NEP, says dont play with students future Student organisations questioned the necessity of these selfie points when so many student issues are going unaddressed. A student from the University of Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE) said, This initiative is not favourable to students. So many government colleges and schools dont have basic facilities and we are promoting selfie points. Another BSc student from MES College in Bengaluru said, Why are they trying to promote a political figure in college. If our college puts up these points we will not use them. Experts said such political advertisements have existed for a long time. Not just PM Modi, all ministers are politicising education, they added. Unfortunately, such political propaganda is done by all political parties in India. As far as the UGC directive is concerned, it should be only the UGC emblem and the universities, said Ganesh Bhatt, educationist. The Supreme Court should pass a strict rule that if its for public good, it should not be popularised as the contribution of an individual or a party. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp BENGALURU : The University Grants Commission (UGC) has whipped up a controversy by issuing a directive on its website on December that universities and colleges across the country should set up selfie points at strategic locations on their campuses to raise awareness among youngsters about Indias achievements in various fields. But educationists, students and experts are not pleased with politicisation of education. Let us celebrate and disseminate the incredible strides made by our country by establishing a Selfie Point within your institution. The aim of Selfie Point is to create awareness among the youth about Indias achievements in various fields, particularly the new initiatives under the NEP 2020, read the official letter. The presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modis cutout on the pre-approved design is what has angered all. Higher Education Minister Dr MC Sudhakar said, I heard about this through the media. I am yet to see the directives and based on that we will decide. This is, however, not the right thing to do and not all directives by UGC need to be followed. Our universities cannot be politicised like this. Since we have not accepted NEP-2020 and will have our own SEP, why will we propagate the achievements of the policy? googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); The themes for selfie points include a broad spectrum of national initiatives such as Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat and major thrust areas of NEP -2020, read the letter. Higher Education Institutions (HEls) may place the selfie points only as per the approved designs at a strategic place within the campus, it added. UGC also directed the universities to encourage students and visitors to capture and share these special moments on social media platforms, fostering a sense of collective pride. ALSO READ | Union Education Minister slams Karnataka government for scrapping NEP, says dont play with students future Student organisations questioned the necessity of these selfie points when so many student issues are going unaddressed. A student from the University of Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE) said, This initiative is not favourable to students. So many government colleges and schools dont have basic facilities and we are promoting selfie points. Another BSc student from MES College in Bengaluru said, Why are they trying to promote a political figure in college. If our college puts up these points we will not use them. Experts said such political advertisements have existed for a long time. Not just PM Modi, all ministers are politicising education, they added. Unfortunately, such political propaganda is done by all political parties in India. As far as the UGC directive is concerned, it should be only the UGC emblem and the universities, said Ganesh Bhatt, educationist. The Supreme Court should pass a strict rule that if its for public good, it should not be popularised as the contribution of an individual or a party. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp Cynthia Chandran By Express News Service THIRUVANANTHAPURAM : Trying to put on a brave face, Congress leaders in Kerala maintain that the severe drubbing the party faced in the assembly elections in the Hindi heartland will have no bearing on next years Lok Sabha elections in the state. And they pin their hopes on poll strategist Sunil Kanugolu, whose efforts were key to the partys spectacular victory in Telangana, barely months after he pulled off a similar fete in Karnataka. There is no need for Congress in Kerala to be apprehensive. Unlike in the north Indian states, the BJP is weak here. Moreover, minority voters will support the party as they are fully aware that Congress alone can take on the BJP at the national level, senior leader K Muraleedharan, MP, said. Muraleedharan, who worked in tandem with Kanugolu as chairman of the screening committee for Congress candidates in Telangana, told TNIE, The selection of candidates was crucial. It [The criteria for selection] was a mixture of party loyalty and pragmatism. We compromised on certain seats, 20 to be precise, to accommodate those who joined Congress from BJP and BRS. Shashi Tharoor, MP, who is gearing up for his fourth outing from Thiruvananthapuram, said the BJPs winning streak in north Indian states would not have any major impact in Kerala. A senior Congress leader in Delhi said Madhya Pradesh partys strongman Kamal Nath did not want Kanugolu to call the shots in the state which saw him and veteran Digvijaya Singh finalising the candidates. And the party paid dearly for the lapse, he said. They were eager to promote the interest of their sons Nakul Kamal Nath and Jaivardhan Singh, the leader said. KPCC secretary John Vinatious said the party has a lot to learn from the victory in Telangana and the defeat in Rajasthan. The Rajasthan rout shows the importance of having a strong organisation, he said. A weak structure prevented the party from cashing in on a slew of welfare schemes announced by Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot. This despite the two warring leaders, Gehlot and Sachin Pilot, burying their differences, albeit towards the fag end of the campaigning, said John, who is close to Pilot. Congress leaders in Kerala attribute the poll debacle in Chhattisgarh to overconfidence and corruption charges against Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel. Poll debacle: Pinarayi hits out at Cong leadership Palakkad: The Congress leadership has only itself to blame for the trouncing the party received in the assembly elections in key north Indian states, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said on Sunday. The Congress toed a soft Hindutva line to counter BJPs extreme communal politics. In Madhya Pradesh, Congress was working as the saffron partys B team. Some Congress leaders were even spewing more hatred than the BJP. Moreover, when the situation warranted the unity of all forces opposed to the Sangh parivar, Congress attempted one-upmanship. Both the strategies backfired, Pinarayi said, addressing the Nava Kerala Sadas at Chittur. CPM loses two sitting seats in Rajasthan TPuram: As expected, the Left parties do not have anything to write home about on their performance in the assembly elections to four states. While the CPM lost its two sitting seats in Rajasthan, the CPI managed to win the lone seat it contested in Telangana. In Telanganas Kothagudem seat, Kunamneni Sambasiva Rao of the CPI, backed by Congress, polled 80,336 votes to defeat Jalagam Venkat Rao of AIFB (53,789 votes). The CPM had contested independently in 12 seats in Telangana, but failed to open its account. In Rajasthan, the CPM lost its two sitting seats, Bhadra and Dungargarh. In Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the CPM contested in four and three seats, respectively, but lost. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp THIRUVANANTHAPURAM : Trying to put on a brave face, Congress leaders in Kerala maintain that the severe drubbing the party faced in the assembly elections in the Hindi heartland will have no bearing on next years Lok Sabha elections in the state. And they pin their hopes on poll strategist Sunil Kanugolu, whose efforts were key to the partys spectacular victory in Telangana, barely months after he pulled off a similar fete in Karnataka. There is no need for Congress in Kerala to be apprehensive. Unlike in the north Indian states, the BJP is weak here. Moreover, minority voters will support the party as they are fully aware that Congress alone can take on the BJP at the national level, senior leader K Muraleedharan, MP, said. Muraleedharan, who worked in tandem with Kanugolu as chairman of the screening committee for Congress candidates in Telangana, told TNIE, The selection of candidates was crucial. It [The criteria for selection] was a mixture of party loyalty and pragmatism. We compromised on certain seats, 20 to be precise, to accommodate those who joined Congress from BJP and BRS. googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Shashi Tharoor, MP, who is gearing up for his fourth outing from Thiruvananthapuram, said the BJPs winning streak in north Indian states would not have any major impact in Kerala. A senior Congress leader in Delhi said Madhya Pradesh partys strongman Kamal Nath did not want Kanugolu to call the shots in the state which saw him and veteran Digvijaya Singh finalising the candidates. And the party paid dearly for the lapse, he said. They were eager to promote the interest of their sons Nakul Kamal Nath and Jaivardhan Singh, the leader said. KPCC secretary John Vinatious said the party has a lot to learn from the victory in Telangana and the defeat in Rajasthan. The Rajasthan rout shows the importance of having a strong organisation, he said. A weak structure prevented the party from cashing in on a slew of welfare schemes announced by Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot. This despite the two warring leaders, Gehlot and Sachin Pilot, burying their differences, albeit towards the fag end of the campaigning, said John, who is close to Pilot. Congress leaders in Kerala attribute the poll debacle in Chhattisgarh to overconfidence and corruption charges against Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel. Poll debacle: Pinarayi hits out at Cong leadership Palakkad: The Congress leadership has only itself to blame for the trouncing the party received in the assembly elections in key north Indian states, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said on Sunday. The Congress toed a soft Hindutva line to counter BJPs extreme communal politics. In Madhya Pradesh, Congress was working as the saffron partys B team. Some Congress leaders were even spewing more hatred than the BJP. Moreover, when the situation warranted the unity of all forces opposed to the Sangh parivar, Congress attempted one-upmanship. Both the strategies backfired, Pinarayi said, addressing the Nava Kerala Sadas at Chittur. CPM loses two sitting seats in Rajasthan TPuram: As expected, the Left parties do not have anything to write home about on their performance in the assembly elections to four states. While the CPM lost its two sitting seats in Rajasthan, the CPI managed to win the lone seat it contested in Telangana. In Telanganas Kothagudem seat, Kunamneni Sambasiva Rao of the CPI, backed by Congress, polled 80,336 votes to defeat Jalagam Venkat Rao of AIFB (53,789 votes). The CPM had contested independently in 12 seats in Telangana, but failed to open its account. In Rajasthan, the CPM lost its two sitting seats, Bhadra and Dungargarh. In Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the CPM contested in four and three seats, respectively, but lost. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp By Express News Service KENDRAPARA: Pattamundai police on Sunday arrested a beauty parlour owner for allegedly raping a 22-year-old Dalit woman and blackmailing her with her private photos.The accused is 35-year-old Pratap Sahoo of Nilikanta village. Pattamundai IIC Ranjit Mohanty said the accused became friends with the victim a few months back and provided her a job in his beauty parlour at Chaudakulat. Last month, he reportedly offered her a cold drink laced with sedatives inside the parlour. When she fell unconscious, Sahoo raped her and captured her nude pictures and videos on his mobile phone. When the victim regained her senses, the accused threatened to blackmail her with her private photos. Sahoo continued to blackmail the woman for sexual favours for around a month. He also threatened to kill her if she revealed anything. Last week, the woman left Sahoos shop and started working in another beauty parlour at Kendrapara town. Infuriated over her action, the accused on Saturday verbally abused her and threatened to make her private photos viral on social media. The same day, the woman filed an FIR in Pattamundai police station basing on which a case was registered. The accused was arrested under sections 376, 420 and 506 of IPC, sections 66 and 67 of the Information and Technology Act and section 3 of SC and ST (Atrocity Prevention) Act, the IIC informed. The woman and the accused were taken to the district headquarters hospital for medical examination. Mobile phones of both the victim and Sahoo have been seized. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp KENDRAPARA: Pattamundai police on Sunday arrested a beauty parlour owner for allegedly raping a 22-year-old Dalit woman and blackmailing her with her private photos.The accused is 35-year-old Pratap Sahoo of Nilikanta village. Pattamundai IIC Ranjit Mohanty said the accused became friends with the victim a few months back and provided her a job in his beauty parlour at Chaudakulat. Last month, he reportedly offered her a cold drink laced with sedatives inside the parlour. When she fell unconscious, Sahoo raped her and captured her nude pictures and videos on his mobile phone. When the victim regained her senses, the accused threatened to blackmail her with her private photos. Sahoo continued to blackmail the woman for sexual favours for around a month. He also threatened to kill her if she revealed anything.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-8052921-2'); }); Last week, the woman left Sahoos shop and started working in another beauty parlour at Kendrapara town. Infuriated over her action, the accused on Saturday verbally abused her and threatened to make her private photos viral on social media. The same day, the woman filed an FIR in Pattamundai police station basing on which a case was registered. The accused was arrested under sections 376, 420 and 506 of IPC, sections 66 and 67 of the Information and Technology Act and section 3 of SC and ST (Atrocity Prevention) Act, the IIC informed. The woman and the accused were taken to the district headquarters hospital for medical examination. Mobile phones of both the victim and Sahoo have been seized. Follow The New Indian Express channel on WhatsApp Hyderabad, Dec 3 T elangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao sent his resignation to Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan on Sunday after the Congress won majority seats in the 119-member Assembly. As it became clear that the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) will not retain power, KCR sent his resignation to the Raj Bhavan through an official. KCR was expected to reach Raj Bhavan to submit his resignation. However, he quietly left Pragati Bhavan, the official residence of the Chief Minister, in two private car. He did not reach Raj Bhavan, and it was later learnt that he sent his resignation through an official. The Chief Minister is reported to have left for his farmhouse at Erravalli village in Medak district. KCRs action surprised many as he left as a commoner without the convoy and even route clearance. KCR sends resignation to Governor Found this article helpful? Spread the word and support us! Now, IndiGo faces criticism over delays from former Union Minister New Delhi, Dec 3 C ongress MP and former Union Minister Manish Tewar, on Sunday expressed frustration over repeated delays in IndiGo flights Tewari, who has taken three IndiGo flights in the past week, highlighted the latest incident involving flight 6E2159 from Chandigarh to Delhi, delayed by over 90 minutes on Sunday. Tewari has also experienced a significant delay of over 2 and a half hours on the 1855 IndiGo 6E flight from Delhi to Chandigarh recently. "This is the third IndiGo flight that I am taking this week that is delayed by over 90 minutes. This time it is 6E2159 from Chandigarh to Delhi .On an earlier occasion the 1855 IndiGo6E flight from Delhi to Chandigarh was delayed by over 2 and a half hours," Tewari wrote on X. "The only reason I would take IndiGo was that it used to be on time. Otherwise the service etc best left unsaid," he added. On November 29, in a social media post that quickly gained traction, comedian Kapil Sharma expressed his frustration over the significant delay of his IndiGo flight 6E 5149. "Dear @IndiGo6E, first you made us wait in the bus for 50 minz, and now your team is saying the pilot is stuck in traffic, what? Really?" Sharma wrote on X. "We were supposed to take off by 8 pm, and its 9:20; still, there is no pilot in the cockpit. Do you think these 180 passengers will fly IndiGo again? Never #indigo6E5149", he added. Now, IndiGo faces criticism over delays from former Union Minister Found this article helpful? Spread the word and support us! Jaipur, Dec 3 A shok Gehlot reached Raj Bhavan on Sunday and submitted his resignation from the post of Chief Minister, to Governor Kalraj Mishra. Governor Mishra accepted the resignation with immediate effect and urged him to continue working till the formation of the new government in the Rajasthan. After the results came in, Gehlot sat in the Congress war room and had a discussion with observer Bhupendra Hooda and senior leaders. Gehlot also held a press conference in the Congress war room before resigning. Accepting defeat, Ashok Gehlot congratulated the new government and issued a statement on social media accepting defeat. Gehlot said, We humbly accept the mandate. This is an unexpected result for everyone. This defeat shows that we were not completely successful in taking our plans, laws and innovations to the public. I wish the new government all the best. He added, My advice to the new Government is that despite working hard, we did not succeed. This does not mean that they should not work after coming to power. All the schemes including OPS, Chiranjeevi and the pace of development that we have set in Rajasthan in these five years should be maintained and taken forward. Ashok Gehlot resigns from Rajasthan Chief Minister's post Found this article helpful? Spread the word and support us! Gehlot fails to put brakes on state's power switching norm as Cong loses in Rajasthan Jaipur, Dec 3 A shok Gehlot, the veteran Congress leader in his capacity as the Chief Minister, failed to put brakes on the state's 'political tradition' of power switching in Assembly polls as the BJP wrested power from the grand old party in Rajasthan again after five years. While Gehlot and his party were hoping to retain power on the plank of free schemes and guarantees, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which contested the polls without naming its chief ministerial candidate, had the last laugh. According to political analysts, Prime Minister Narendra Modi leading the election campaign from the front played a crucial role in helping the BJP emerge triumphant in the desert state. PM Modi during his rallies promised to improve the law and order situation in the state, provide jobs to the youth, besides protecting the Sanatan Dharma. Analysts believe the stress on Hindutva also played a crucial role in the change of government in Rajasthan. Not only did the Congress lose Rajasthan, it also conceded defeat to the BJP in Chhattisgarh besides facing a humiliating loss in Madhya Pradesh, where the saffron party swept the polls to retain power. According to political analysts, the fresh results would pose as a major challenge for the Congress in its preparations for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. One analyst also pointed towards the crisis the Congress had to deal with in 2020, when Gehlot was engaged in a direct face-off with his then deputy Sachin Pilot. The skirmish between the two top Congress leaders in the state led to the formation of two separate camps, with the leadership of Gehlot facing crises at a certain point. The face-off between Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot is also believed to have weakened the party's prospects, the result of which was imminent on Sunday. In the Assembly polls, Gehlot's 'prime competitor' was PM Modi, whose leading from the front act eventually made the senior Congressman lose power in the desert state. Besides, top Congress leaders such as ministers Vishvendra Singh, Pratap Singh Khachariyawas, B.D. Kalla, Ramlal Jat and Bhanwarlal Bhati also lost the polls. Analysts believe BJP's aggressive campaigning worked in its favour. Besides issues related to Sanatan Dharma and Hindutva, the BJP also focused on youth-centric matters. The issues of unemployment and corruption were highlighted and discussed during the rallies. The BJP also spoke about reconsideration of the old pension scheme (OPS) which is believed to have given the party a major boost to its prospects in the Assembly polls. Also, the BJP focused on strengthening the party, with the Sangh taking command of the "weaker seats". Even as questions were initially raised if the party would lead a successful campaign by putting PM Modi on front, the BJP managed to win without projecting any of its leaders as the chief ministerial face. The saffron party also cashed in on the dispute between Gehlot and Pilot camps. It tried to gain the Gujjars' vote by claiming injustice was done to Sachin Pilot and his father, late Rajesh Pilot. Besides, the Hindu vote bank was also polarised through the Kanhaiya Lal murder case. The party did not field a single Muslim candidate. It also tried to present the Hindutva image by giving tickets to three saints -- Baba Balaknath, Mahant Pratap Puri and Balmukund Acharya, and all of them won by big margins. What also did not go well for the Congress was Sachin Pilot remaining confined to his area, or within his supporters only. Another key reason behind the defeat of Congress is its performance in east Rajasthan. Of the 50 seats in Jaipur division, Congress had won 34 seats in 2018. This time, the numbers fell significantly. Besides, the Congress also suffered a crushing defeat in Mewar and Marwar regions. PM Modi's stress on "double-engine government" during the rallies also worked in BJP's favour. Among the issues on which Congress was contesting the elections, except for the Chiranjeevi Yojana, the rest of the benefits did not reach the public. There was a lot of delay in implementing schemes like free mobile, free ration kit, Indira Rasoi in the rural areas. Gehlot fails to put brakes on state's power switching norm as Cong loses in Rajasthan Found this article helpful? Spread the word and support us! New Delhi, Dec 3 F ollowing BJP's resounding victories in the Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh on Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on that "today's hat-trick guarantees a hat-trick at the Centre in 2024", as he hailed the verdict as an endorsement for his agenda of self-reliant India and good governance. Addressing jubilant party supporters in the presence of the top BJP leadership at the party headquarters here, the Prime Minister said, "The results show popular support for our battle against corruption." Taking a swipe at the Congress-led INDIA bloc, Modi said, "Few dynasts on a stage can get a good picture, but can't earn the confidence of the people. Todays results are challenge for those who oppose development." The Prime Minister also said that he has a piece of advice for the Congress and its allies -- they should not practice politics which is against national interests, nor work to divide and weaken the country. "Negative forces working against India will now work hard to come together and look for opportunity, but people should be wary of them. No one should come between the Centre's development agenda and the people, else the masses will remove them," Modi said in a stinging attack against the opposition parties. He also said that people can distinguish between selfish politics and the politics of national interest. The Prime Minister added that Sunday's mandate has proved that people have zero tolerance for corruption, appeasement and 'parivaarvad'. "Today the country knows that only the BJP is capable of ending these three evils. The move against corruption that the BJP government at the Centre has started is getting massive public support. This is a clear warning to those parties and leaders who are not ashamed of standing by the corrupts," he said. Targeting the opposition parties, Modi said that those who shield the corrupt and try to cover up their misdeeds, are the same people who defame the probe agencies which are targeting the corrupt. Such people should understand that the poll results are an indication of public support for the fight against corruption. He also said that today, the resolve of 'Aatmanirbhar Bharat' has won, the idea of preference for the deprived has won, the idea of development of states for the development of the nation has won." The Prime Minister extended his appreciation to the voters, calling the victories as historical and unprecedented. "The idea of 'Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas' has won today," Modi declared, while acknowledging the immense love and faith for the BJP shown by the people. "For me, four castes are important - Nari Shakti, Yuva Shakti, Kisan and Gareeb Parivaar," he said, highlighting the pivotal role women, youth, farmers and the marginalised families play in the nation's progress. Expressing gratitude to Nari Shakti, Modi acknowledged their crucial role in ensuring BJP's success in the recent elections. He also spoke passionately about the joy of collective victory felt by the poor, deprived, farmers, tribal communities and first-time voters. Promising to fulfil all the campaign promises, Modi said, "All the promises made by us will be 100 per cent fulfilled, and this is Modi's guarantee." The Prime Minister also underscored the confidence he had in preventing the Congress from coming to power in Rajasthan, crediting the trust he placed on the people of the state. Before Modi's address, BJP President J.P. Nadda lauded the Prime Minister's leadership and commitment, saying, "The results reflect that there is only 'Modi guarantee'. 'Modi hai toh mumkin hai'." Today's hat-trick guarantees hat-trick at Centre in 2024: PM Modi Found this article helpful? Spread the word and support us! Washington, Dec 4 U S Presidential hopeful Nikki Haleys rapid ascension in the echelons of the GOP and donors endorsements in the primaries, just days before the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire meet, could be humiliating to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who had the early bird advantage in the race for the 2024 Presidential poll candidacy. Haley received a huge boost last week after her poll numbers jumped over DeSantis when the influential and deep-pocketed Koch political network endorsed her. This apparently left in cold the once-hailed DeSantis as the Republican Partys next big thing, US media critics observed. Haley gets Koch cash while DeSantis gets another kick in the ..., critics wrote in op-eds. While Haley was counting all the new campaign cash she would get from Americans for Prosperity Action (AFP), linked to billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, DeSantis was desperately vying for attention by debating a Democrat whos not running for president, namely California Governor Gavin Newsom on whether the Californian liberal model or the stringent DeSantis model was good for Americas future. The public opinion was only marginally in favour of DeSantis. The once-heralded presidential candidate, trailing Haley in New Hampshire and South Carolina (where she was also the former governor) and tying up with her in Iowa, spent Thursday night on Fox News debating Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom. It didnt work very much in favour of DeSantis, critics pointed out saying viewers again saw Awkward Ron, a guy who struggles with smiling and other basic human facial expressions. He parroted his usual culture-war lines while Newsom who again is not running for president and really doesnt matter battered him with facts and lured him into exchanges like his pandemic response. Donald Trump continues to brutally mock DeSantis, who has lost his support in the GOP. Prior to the weird and unnecessary debate, critics said, leading GOP presidential primary candidate Trumps spokesperson released a predictably crass statement that wound up being prescient: Instead of actually campaigning and trying to turn around his dismal poll numbers, DeSanctus is now so desperate for attention that hes debating a Grade A loser like Gavin Newsom", USA TODAY said in a special feature Sunday. At the debate, Ron will flail his arms and bobble his head wildly, looking more like a San Francisco crackhead than the Governor of Florida. This isnt a prediction. Its a spoiler, a USA TODAY critic wrote. While the DeSantis campaigns death rattle is satisfying to those of us who have found him, his often-cruel policies and his bullying demeanour repulsive, there is an orange-hued elephant in the room that minimizes Haleys admirable progress," the critic wrote. Trump remains miles ahead of both her and DeSantis in every poll, state or national. The former president again wont bother to attend Wednesdays debate at Alabama, and while the Koch endorsement of Haley clearly irked him, its going to take more than money for anyone to overtake Trump and his 90-plus state and federal indictments, unprecedented for a former president in American history and yet popular with voters. His near-certain conviction in the New York civil fraud trial in March 2024 could change the scene for Trump as 15 per cent of his supporters are said to be thinking of dumping him if he's proved a tax evader. If it comes down to Haley vs. Trump, the critic said she will need some big-time help. DeSantis tried to out-bully Trump, and that's a fool's errand, the critic said pointing out that the only thing about Haleys rise to most-favoured No. 2 that matters is that shes delivering another kick to the shins of DeSantis and what is arguably one of the worst presidential campaigns ever witnessed. 'Rise of Nikki Haley in GOP primaries can be humiliating to Ron DeSantis' Found this article helpful? Spread the word and support us! Xizang works to make business more accessible for people with disabilities Xinhua) 15:26, December 04, 2023 LHASA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- At a factory in Lhasa, the capital of southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region, wheelchair user Jole inspects finished goods while his employees, many of whom have disabilities, carry out their work around him. Jole, 36, is the founder of a company that sells Tibetan calligraphy stationery. He began using a wheelchair after an accident paralyzed him from the waist down when he was in university 14 years ago. He said the accident had almost destroyed him. After years of inner conflict, he began to seek positive change to embrace a new way of life. "I always felt like a burden to my family. It was time to lift myself up," he said. In 2011, Jole attended a job fair organized by the local disabled persons' federation. He submitted over 20 resumes but received no responses. It was then that the young man had the idea to start his own business. Amid economic challenges, Jole embarked on his entrepreneurial journey with starting capital of 70,000 yuan (about 9,800 U.S. dollars) from his family, and an additional 85,000 yuan in government support. Fueled by a passion for Tibetan calligraphy, Jole established his own company Tuogang in 2016. The name is a transliteration of the Tibetan word for "plateau" and symbolizes the expansion of opportunities in Mandarin. He aspired to provide more opportunities for individuals with disabilities like himself, he said. Today, his company employs 42 people, 27 of whom have disabilities. Among that number is 22-year-old Lhapa Dondrup, who has brittle bone disease and has defied doctors' predictions that he wouldn't live past the age of 20. He now manages online operations at Tuogang. "Jole is my role model. I also used to see myself as a burden to my family and society, but now I feel confident in supporting myself with my own two hands," he said. Reflecting on his journey, Jole emphasized the importance of support from both his family and the government. "My elder brother once told me that when they provided financial support for my business, my family did not expect big success, but wanted me to walk out of the shadows and have the strength and courage to face a new life," he recalled, noting that the government's support had helped him further. In 2021, the government provided a grant of 420,000 yuan to support Jole's company in launching Tibetan calligraphy classes -- a significant expansion of his business. Data shows that over the past five years, Xizang has invested 900 million yuan in subsidies for disabled people. In 2020, the region established its first employment and entrepreneurship park for people with disabilities, fostering the establishment of 25 companies employing over 300 people with disabilities, with 11 of these companies headed by disabled entrepreneurs. "As long as you don't give up on yourself, life will always be filled with hope," Jole said. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) Washington, Dec 4 I ndian-American Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal has reiterated her call for a ceasefire in Gaza as fighting has resumed in the Hamas-controlled enclave following the collapse of a seven-day humanitarian truce. Its what has to happen, and I do think its realistic, Jayapal told CNN on Sunday We did have a temporary ceasefire and what happened? We were able to see a significant number of hostages released, we were able to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, and I think the long-term plan for what happens is incredibly important, she added. When asked if she thought that Hamas would be willing to comply with a longer ceasefire, Jayapal called the situation very complicated. We dont have all of the information in front of us, we obviously can rely on statements that are made, but I think that in these negotiations, everybody wants something, she told CNN. I think Qatar has said that Hamas is still at the table, Israel should still be at the table. In fact, some of the hostages, the Israeli hostages, are saying that Israel should still be at the table. "It doesnt happen unless both sides are willing to come to some kind of an agreement, thats how we got the first seven days," the Congresswoman added. Jayapal is among the Indian-American lawmakers who have consistently called for a cessation of hostilities, extended truce for smooth flow of aid, swift release of hostages, removal of Hamas and a lasting solution to the raging war in Gaza. Indian-American Congressman Ami Bera has said that there was a :need an immediate pause in order to get needed humanitarian aid, food, water and medicine to struggling civilians; then we need to find a different path forward". Congressman Shri Thanedar has expressed his "sincere desire that the conflict ends soon with the removal of Hamas, and we are able to move forward to a place of stable coexistence". Meanwhile, Congressman Ro Khanna called the crimes carried out by Hamas against Israeli women and children "inhuman" and "appalling" and Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi said "the US unequivocally stands with the people of Israel against this gruesome terror attack, and strongly supports its right to defend itself". Earlier,Jayapal had also called for building an international coalition that could eradicate Hamas and allow new legitimate leadership to emerge for the true governance of Palestinians. The Indian-American Congresswoman's remarks came as Israel has been bombarding Gaza since combat operations resumed on December 1 following the collapse of the seven-day humanitarian truce which was implemented on November 24. On Sunday night, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced that it was expanding its ground operations to the whole of the Gaza Strip. Between December 2 and 3, at least 316 people were killed and 664 others injured in Gaza, says the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health. The overall death toll in Gaza since the war erupted on October 7 has increased to 15,523 as of Monday morning. According to the Ministry, 70 per cent of the total figure comprises women and children. Meanwhile, 77 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the start of the ground operations on October 7. In Israel, the casualty toll remains more than 1,200, including foreign nationals. Indian-American Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal reiterates call for Gaza ceasefire Found this article helpful? Spread the word and support us! Florence Pugh shocked as she gets hit in face during 'Dune 2' panel Los Angeles, Dec 4 A ctress Florence Pugh has become the latest victim of fans throwing things at stars onstage as she was hit in the face by a flying object during an appearance in Brazil. The 27-year-old attended the panel for "Dune: Part Two" panel in CCXP 2023 with her co-stars, including Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya Coleman and Austin Butler, as well as director Denis Villeneuve on December 3. As their segment came to a close, the entire cast and the filmmaker posed together for pictures, reports aceshowbiz.com. In videos capturing the incident which have circulated online, they were all smiles until Pugh got startled by a thing thrown by an audience member at her direction. She appeared to shout "wow" or "ow" before putting her hand to the eye that was hit. The 'Oppenheimer' star then leaned over to pick up the object, but it was not clear what it was that hit her. Timothee and Austin, who was standing right next to her, also expressed shock in the moment and appeared to show concern for Pugh, while Zendaya and Villeneuve seemingly missed the moment as they were engaged in conversation. The actress and her co-stars were at the Comic Con event in Sao Paulo to promote their upcoming sci-fi sequel. Moments before the incident, the British actress spoke about her excitement to be part of the panel. "I had an amazing time coming in and just hanging around with these people, let alone actually getting to work with them," she said. "Coming in here - the power in this room - is because of that first movie, and we felt that when we went on set every single day. So it feels really, really special being here with the second one." The incident happened despite multiple warnings from other performers about hurling objects at them. Florence Pugh shocked as she gets hit in face during 'Dune 2' panel Found this article helpful? Spread the word and support us! Los Angeles, Dec 4 H ollywood star Robert Downey Jr will not be coming back as Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, says Kevin Feige. We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again, Feige told Vanity Fair in the Downey Jr. profile. We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way. Downey Jr. last played the role in 2019s 'The Avengers: Endgame' when the superhero died, reports deadline.com. Fans of the MCU hoping Tony Stark would be resurrected in some form can forget about it. Director Joe Russo added: Wed already said tearful goodbyes on the last day of shooting. Everybody had moved on emotionally. We promised him it would be the last time we made him do itever. Co-director Anthony Russo noted that for Downey Jr it was a difficult thing for him to say his last line as the superhero. When he did come back, we were shooting on a stage directly opposite where he auditioned for Tony Stark. So his last line as Tony Stark was shot literally a couple hundred feet from his original audition that got him the role, Anthony said. Downey Jr. has been the center of the MCU but Feige had to fight to cast the actor in the Iron Man role. It purely came down to the Marvel board being nervous at putting all of their chips in their future films on somebody who famously had those legal troubles in the past, Feige said. I wasnt very good and Im still not great at taking no for an answer. But I also dont pound my chest to try to get my way. I try to figure out ways to make it as clear to other people why we should head in a direction. And thats when the idea of a screen test came up. Robert Downey Jr not reprising Iron Man role in MCU, says Kevin Feige Found this article helpful? Spread the word and support us! Download Now The News-Gazette mobile app brings you the latest local breaking news, updates, and more. Read the News-Gazette on your mobile device just as it appears in print. A recent report from the American Psychological Association reviewed the available psychological science research to explore and combat health misinformation. Background The World Health Organization in 2020 declared a global infodemic based on concerns that the misinformation epidemic poses a serious public health problem. Current evidence on the spread and impact of misinformation on general well-being is complex. Although the media often reported that people refused hospital treatment for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), this does not necessarily characterize the whole population. Further, there is no experimental evidence linking misinformation exposure to observable behavioral changes. Immunization has remained a target for misinformation since the first vaccine was developed in 1796. Misinformation regarding the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine has been associated with a significantly reduced uptake. Moreover, misinformation can amplify discord by increasing polarization and eroding trust in media, public health authorities, and democracy. It is essential to understand the psychological factors driving health misinformation. This report reviewed the methods to address/counter misinformation, aiming to provide a consensus on three issues susceptibility to misinformation, its growth, and interventions to counter it. Susceptibility to misinformation While the human brain can process a complex scene and determine if it is natural or man-made or whether a face is neutral or fearful in a fraction of a second, it is difficult to determine if the information is true or false. People rarely pay attention to the accuracy of what they read/hear and instead focus on understanding it and deciding the next course of action. Relevant information is often stored in memory, but people fail to retrieve/use it under new, incorrect conditions. This phenomenon is called knowledge neglect. Research on knowledge neglect indicates that it is difficult for the brain to apply existing knowledge when presented with new information. Every individual is susceptible to misinformation to some extent. The susceptibility to misinformation varies based on the characteristics of the information and its viewer. For instance, in-group sources are generally more believable than out-group sources, which is valid for information and misinformation. This could be because in-group sources are often perceived as more trustworthy. The content of misinformation and the emotional impact of the content are important. For example, Americans were more likely to believe incorrect stories criticizing their opposing political parties than those criticizing their preferred parties. Moreover, repeated information is often thought truer even when it contradicts prior knowledge. Why and how does misinformation spread? According to a study, misinformation exposure increases belief and thereby increases sharing. Misinformation is more likely perceived as accurate when repeatedly exposed. Meanwhile, people may also share misinformation irrespective of whether they believe it. Sometimes, misinformation is willingly spread when people think it is interesting/entertaining or when they expect social rewards. Misinformation is spread on both legacy and social media. Legacy media refers to radio, television, books, newspapers, films, and other analog media and their online presence. Media outlets follow traditional journalistic values, including neutrality, timeliness, editorial independence, and accuracy. News operations implement error correction steps to reduce false information, and fact-checkers and editors review content for inconsistencies and errors before publication. Nevertheless, news outlets transmit misinformation when errors occur. Many errors are minor, but some can potentially lead to severe consequences. Social media, unlike legacy media, lacks pre-publication oversight. Social media has the potential to make content viral within minutes, given the rapid publication speed, distribution networks, and low entry barriers. This makes it attractive for those transmitting legitimate content and misinformation. The peer-to-peer sharing technology also facilitates the spread of misinformation on social media platforms. Echo chambers occur when both homophily and polarization exist in a network, leading communities with similar interests/beliefs to cluster together and isolate from those that differ. Evidence suggests that the existence of echo chambers facilitates the transmission of misinformation and impedes corrections. Interventions against misinformation Studies have explored ways to manage and mitigate exposure to misinformation. Recently, a group of researchers identified two dimensions of interventions individual- and system-level approaches. Individual-level approaches emphasize changing behavior, including debunking, preemptive debunking (prebunking), and nudging. In contrast, system-level strategies focus on systemic changes, such as politics, business models, legislation, and algorithms. Debunking is the correction of misinformation after it has spread and involves providing accurate information and addressing why misinformation is incorrect. It is effective in real-world settings as well as across cultures. Nevertheless, debunking does not eliminate the effect of misinformation on a persons memory and might not always reach the intended targets. Prebunking refers to interventions intended to prevent belief in future misinformation attempts. Psychological inoculation is most commonly employed to prebunk misinformation and includes a forewarning about an impending attack on beliefs and a statement preemptively refuting the argument. This intervention has been reported to be effective in reducing susceptibility to misinformation and manipulation techniques. Recommendations The report offers eight recommendations to recognize and respond to misinformation in healthcare. The first recommendation is to avoid the repetition of misinformation without including corrections. Second, collaboration with social media platforms is necessary to understand and curb the spread of dangerous misinformation. Third, misinformation correction approaches should leverage tools that promote healthy behaviors, such as social norms, counseling, skills training, and incentives. Fourth, trusted sources should be utilized to counter misinformation and offer accurate health information. Fifth, debunking should be frequently and repeatedly employed using evidence-based methods. The sixth recommendation is prebunking to build resilience to misinformation in advance. Seventh, social media companies should provide data access and transparency on demand for research on misinformation. Finally, funding is required for research into the psychology of health misinformation and ways to counter it. People with personality traits such as conscientiousness, extraversion and positive affect are less likely to be diagnosed with dementia than those with neuroticism and negative affect, according to a new analysis by researchers at the University of California, Davis and Northwestern University. The difference was not linked to physical damage to brain tissue found in dementia patients, but more likely to how certain personality traits help people navigate dementia-related impairments. A new metanalysis of previous studies by researchers at UC Davis and Northwestern University reveals links between personality types and the risks of diagnosis with dementia. (Getty Images) The work is published Nov. 29 in Alzheimers & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association. Previous studies have tried to establish correlations between personality traits and dementia, but these were mostly small and represented only specific populations, said Emorie Beck, assistant professor of psychology at UC Davis and first author on the paper. We wanted to leverage new technology to synthesize these studies and test the strength and consistency of these associations, Beck said. If those links hold up, then targeting personality traits for change in interventions earlier in life could be a way to reduce dementia risk in the long term, she said. Beck and colleagues analyzed data from eight published studies including over 44,000 people, of whom 1,703 developed dementia. They looked at measures of the big five personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience, neuroticism and agreeableness) and subjective well-being (positive and negative affect, and life satisfaction) compared to clinical symptoms of dementia (performance on cognitive tests) and brain pathology at autopsy. Personality is typically thought to be linked to dementia risk through behavior, Beck said. For example, people who score high on conscientiousness may be more likely to eat well and take care of their health, which results in better health in the long term. The researchers found that high scores on negative traits (neuroticism, negative affect) and low scores on positive traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, positive affect) were associated with a higher risk of a dementia diagnosis. High scores on openness to experience, agreeableness, and life satisfaction had a protective effect in a smaller subset of studies. Link to diagnosis but not pathology To their surprise, however, no link was found between these personality traits and actual neuropathology in the brains of people after death. This was the most surprising finding to us. If personality is predictive of performance on cognitive tests but not pathology, what might be happening? Emorie Beck, Assistant Professor of Psychology, UC Davis One explanation is that some personality traits could make people more resilient to the damage caused by diseases such as Alzheimers. People with higher levels of some traits may find ways, whether they are aware of it or not, to cope with and work around impairments. Other work by members of the study team has shown that some people with quite extensive pathology can show little impairment on cognitive tests. The researchers also looked at other factors that could moderate the relationship between personality and dementia risk and neuropathology, including age, gender and educational attainment. We found almost no evidence for effects, except that conscientiousnesss protective effect increased with age, Beck said. Many factors contribute to the development of dementia. Among those that arent directly related to genetics, this study is a first step in teasing out the associations between personality and dementia, Beck said. The researchers plan to continue and expand the work, including looking at people who show little impairment in the face of a lot of pathology. They also hope to look at other everyday factors that might play a role in developing dementia. Part of the work was conducted while Beck was a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University in Chicago. Co-authors are: Tomiko Yoneda, UC Davis and Northwestern; Daniel Mroczek and Eileen Graham, Northwestern; Bryan James, David Bennett and John Morris, Rush University Medical Center, Chicago; Jason Hassenstab, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis; Mindy Katz and Richard Lipton, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the Bronx. The work was supported by grants from the NIH National Institute on Aging, including grants R01-AG067622 and R01-AG018436 to Mroczek. The recent publication in Science by Mogila, Tamulaitiene et al. represents a continuation of the successful scientific research conducted by Gintautas Tamulaitis' group. In this study, the Vilnius University researchers using bioinformatic analysis, biochemical, and structural studies characterized a novel family of effector proteins, named Cami1. They showed that when a virus attacks a bacterium, CRISPR-Cas10 signaling molecules activate Cami1 - a ribosome-dependent ribonuclease. "Activated Cami1 cleaves mRNAs that are involved in protein synthesis, thereby inhibiting cell growth. This allows the bacterium to save resources and prevents production of the viral proteins," says Gintautas Tamulaitis. Using X-ray structural analysis and cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), researchers determined structures of both apo-Cami1 and the Cami1 complex with the protein synthesis machine - ribosome. Structural studies provided insights into how Cami1 can specifically cleave mRNA. It was shown that Cami1's interaction with a specialized ribosome structure, called the ribosomal stalk, is necessary for its entry into the protein synthesis center. Interestingly, the same capture mechanism to bind the ribosome is used by plant antiviral proteins that also inactivate ribosomes. This discovery unveiled an additional layer of the CRISPR-Cas antiviral defense system and demonstrated a common antiviral strategy shared between eukaryotes and bacteria. Knowledge about our characterized Cami1 proteins will contribute to the development of new molecular tools in biotechnology and therapy." Dr. Gintautas Tamulaitis The ribosome-Cami1 complex was visualized using a 200 kV Glacios Cryo-Transmission Electron Microscope, acquired by Vilnius University in 2020. The first findings from this microscope were published in Nature earlier this year, and now the next study has been published in Science. The paper's authors include PhD student Irmantas Mogila, Dr. Giedre Tamulaitiene, master student Konstanty Keda, Dr. Albertas Timinskas, Audrone Ruksenaite, Dr. Giedrius Sasnauskas, Prof. Ceslovas Venclovas, Prof. Virginijus Siksnys and Dr. Gintautas Tamulaitis. This research was supported by the Research Council of Lithuania (grant S-MIP-22-09 to G. Tamulaitis) and Vilnius University (intramural grant MSF-JM-11 to I. Mogila). Today, Wednesday 22 November, the government announced its support for the Rare Therapies Launch Pad, a new programme that will develop a pathway for children with rare conditions to access individualized therapies. The programmes first project will explore the use of individualized therapies known as antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) to treat children with ultra-rare and life-threatening brain conditions. The pilot is developed by a consortium including Genomics England, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), Oxford-Harrington Rare Disease Centre, Milas Miracle Foundation and the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI). It will help identify a sustainable and scalable approach to delivering individualized therapies for children across a wider range of rare conditions, including establishing a proportionate regulatory pathway. This end-to-end pathway would cover diagnosis, the design and rapid manufacturing of these therapies, and treatment. The project also aims to generate evidence to help establish potential reimbursement for individualized therapies beyond the pilot. Tens of millions of children globally and hundreds of thousands in the UK have rare and potentially life-threatening genetic conditions but less than 10% of rare conditions have a treatment. New therapies can now be created for use by a single patient but currently there is no route to access these individualized medicines for most patients. Julia Vitarellos daughter Mila, was diagnosed with a fatal, rare condition called Batten disease at the age of 6 and became the first person in the world to receive an individualised therapy. She first set up the charity Milas Miracle Foundation to drive and fund the creation of Milas drug Milasen. Julia Vitarello, founder of Mila's Miracle Foundation and the N=1 Collaborative, said: "We're living in an incredible time where science is no longer the limiting factor. We now have the technology to find the underlying genetic cause of disease and rapidly develop a medicine to target it, even if unique to just one person. Through the Rare Therapies Launch Pad, the UK is leading the world in building the pathway from Mila to Millions." Over the last decade, continued investment has placed the country at the forefront of genomics, enabling us to offer the best clinical care for patients and provide more diagnoses to those who need them. Recent scientific advances mean were now in a position for genomics to move beyond diagnosis and support the development of innovative therapies. In the UK, we are uniquely placed to do that. The Rare Therapies Launch Pad aims to do more for the hundreds of thousands of children in the UK with rare and potentially life-threatening genetic conditions by helping to identify a route for them to access individualized therapies, tailored specifically for them, quickly and safely. Todays announcement is an important step in that direction. Dr Rich Scott, Interim CEO, Genomics England Dr June Raine, MHRA Chief Executive, said: We are excited to be part of this new initiative which has the potential to make so much difference to children suffering from rare genetic diseases, and their families. The MHRAs role will be to develop a proportionate regulatory pathway for the UK market that delivers rapid access to potentially life-saving treatments; and to independently assess products coming through this pilot to determine if they are safe and effective for patients. As an enabling regulator, we prioritize patient safety while encouraging innovation at pace within the market, to make the UK the best place in the world to bring life-changing healthcare products to patients, safely. Professor Matthew Wood, Director, Oxford-Harrington Rare Disease Centre, said: The Rare Therapies Launch Pad is a very welcome major advance towards delivering therapies to people with rare genetic diseases. It will put the UK at the forefront of therapeutic and regulatory innovation in this area, building on its global leadership in genomics. The Oxford-Harrington Rare Disease Centre has a mission dedicated to the development of medicines for rare diseases and will play a central role in the Rare Therapies Launch Pad in the discovery and delivery to patients of these new, individualized drugs. Dr Dan O'Connor, Director of Regulatory and Early Access Policy, ABPI, said: Developing medicines in small populations is challenging and is particularly so in those patients who have very rare conditions. That is why this opportunity is so exciting for clinicians, industry, and patients, as it will support the development of new treatment pathways, giving better access to long-needed therapies for patients with high unmet medical needs. Scientists have developed a technique to rapidly and reliably detect genetic changes in malaria parasites in Ghana, using just a gaming laptop and portable MinION sequencer from Oxford Nanopore. Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and University of Ghana were able to demonstrate for the first time that end-to-end, real-time pathogen monitoring from clinical blood samples is possible in rural, resource-limited malaria hotspots. They looked for key drug resistance markers in the malaria parasite, and diversity in the vaccine target gene. The findings, published in Nature Microbiology (23 November), pave the way for local monitoring of drug resistance and evaluating new malaria vaccines in affected regions. Despite intensive control efforts in recent decades, malaria still kills over 600,000 people annually, most of which are young children in sub-Saharan Africa. A key factor is the ability of malaria parasites to rapidly evolve resistance to antimalarial drugs and other medical interventions. Genomic surveillance the continuous monitoring of changes in the parasites DNA provides the tools to analyze the genomic data behind parasite drug resistance. But until recently, it has mostly been carried out in labs in high-income, non-malaria-endemic countries, concentrating capacity away from affected regions. In this new study, researchers set out to develop an accessible, near real-time technology to monitor parasite mutations within the communities most affected by malaria. Researchers employed standard molecular biology equipment for collecting parasites from blood spot samples, prepared by a simple finger prick. They then sequenced and analyzed the malaria parasite DNA using the portable MinION device and a laptop computer to detect known drug resistance markers, emerging mutations and targets of new malaria vaccines. The team successfully carried out the study from two sites: an urban hospital in the Ghanaian capital Accra and a rural town 11-hours drive to the north. They were able to generate sequencing information in as little as 48 hours after receiving a sample, while keeping costs minimal, at around 27 per sample in batches of 96. The team showed frontline treatments remain widely effective against local malaria strains in Ghana currently. However, ongoing monitoring is essential, including to protect high-risk groups that receive targeted interventions. They also discovered multiple genetic differences between circulating malaria strains and the protein targeted by newly recommended malaria vaccines. While requiring further study, these could impact the latest vaccine rollouts across Africa. Edem Adika, co-first author of the study at University of Ghana, said: By taking sequencing to the source, insights arrive in days rather than years enabling rapid, localized responses. This unprecedented speed promises to be a powerful game-changer against infectious diseases outpacing our countermeasures. We hope this on-site approach is soon applied here to other pathogens. The repeated evolution and spread of resistance to key antimalarial drugs has thwarted efforts to eliminate malaria over the last 70 years. Expanding molecular surveillance in Africa is now critical for tracking emerging drug and diagnostic test resistance, and informing interventions like new vaccines. Dr William Hamilton, Senior Study Author, Wellcome Sanger Institute Dr Lucas Amenga-Etego, senior author of the study at the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP), University of Ghana, said: This sequencing workflow has tremendous potential for addressing the sequencing gap in sub-Saharan Africa given its lower cost and ease-of-use. But scaling capacity sustainably requires expanding local training programs, bioinformatics infrastructure, and data science expertise. These should be priorities for the global pathogen genomics community going forward. Societal issues -; including the growth in ultra-high-cost treatments, the epidemic of mental health and substance use disorders, climate change, and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI)-; could alter how health systems serve their communities within five years, according to the latest annual ASHP/ASHP Foundation Pharmacy Forecast Report. The 2024 Pharmacy Forecast, released today at the ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting & Exhibition, drew its findings from a survey of more than 250 pharmacy leaders from across the United States on key topics impacting health systems. This 12th annual Pharmacy Forecast contains topics of broad healthcare importance underscoring societal challenges that will likely drive profound changes to healthcare delivery, including not only our practices as pharmacists, but even the future structure of our health systems. As healthcare evolves at an unprecedented pace, pharmacists' engagement is crucial to ensuring safe and effective care for all patients." ASHP CEO Paul W. Abramowitz, PharmD, ScD (Hon), FASHP Ultra-high-cost drugs The rise of innovative and ultra-high-cost new treatments, which often come with complex delivery systems, provide new hope for preventing, curing, and treating devastating diseases. These treatments, which can cost millions of dollars per patient, may fundamentally alter how health systems deliver care. More than three-quarters of survey respondents indicate formulary and policy decisions for ultra-high-cost drugs will be made by payers or service-line stakeholders, weakening the scope of the pharmacy and therapeutics committees, which have led the selection of drugs provided by health systems for decades. In addition, 77% of survey respondents believe that it is somewhat to very likely the cost and complexity of new treatments will result in the termination of service lines within some health systems. The report recommends pharmacy leaders collaborate with health-system finance experts to assess the financial risk associated with the provision of ultra-high-cost drugs to ensure long-term program feasibility and sustainability. Mental health and substance use disorders In the 2024 survey, 71% of participants noted pharmacists are well prepared to initiate and modify medication treatment plans for individuals with substance use disorders. Pharmacy Forecast authors recommend health-system leaders integrate the expertise of pharmacists into innovative strategies to bridge gaps in treating substance use and mental health disorders. "An 'all-hands' approach is needed so that everyone involved in direct care increases their skills and knowledge in mental health," said Joseph T. DiPiro, PharmD, editor of the Pharmacy Forecast. "To do this, we need health systems to develop additional infrastructure and support. Providing mental health first-aid training to healthcare workers should be as common as CPR training." Public health emergencies Survey participants expect the frequency of public health emergencies related to climate change to double in coming years, affecting health systems and the communities they serve. Pharmacy departments should continue to engage in the emergency response of health systems by taking part in routine assessments of disaster preparedness. Pharmacists' knowledge and abilities are essential to managing supply chain disruptions, contingency staffing, and coordination with local public health and community groups. Artificial intelligence The growth of AI in healthcare is a double-edged sword, bringing potential rewards and risks. Most survey respondents (86%) believe AI technology can provide automated drug dosing adjustments based on things like kidney function, weight, and age; and more than half of respondents believe advanced technologies, including AI, will help close the gap on healthcare disparities. At the same time, respondents agree it is crucial to balance patient safety, equity, and security in the implementation of these rapidly advancing technologies. A full 80% expect that a high-profile failure of AI that causes patient harm will accelerate government regulation of AI technology. "As AI progresses, it is imperative to ensure that the models used in healthcare are unbiased and benefit a diverse population," said DiPiro. "Health systems should establish AI as a strategic priority and engage pharmacists' expertise to optimize its safe, ethical, and equitable use." The Pharmacy Forecast is published online ahead of print and will appear in print in the January 15, 2024, issue of AJHP. The Pharmacy Forecast report was supported by a donation from Omnicell Inc. to the David A. Zilz Leaders for the Future Fund of the ASHP Foundation. The average morning routine for many Americans includes inhaling several milligrams of chemicals that may be harmful to their health, Purdue University researchers have found. Image Credit: Purdue University In a newly-published paper in Environmental Science & Technology, a journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS), Nusrat Jung, an assistant professor in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering, discovered that several chemicals, particularly cyclic volatile methyl siloxanes which are ubiquitous in hair care products linger in the air after use. On average, Jungs team reports, a person can inhale a cumulative mass of 1-17 milligrams of potentially harmful chemicals in a single hair care session in their home. We found the results to be extremely alarming, Jung said. We did not expect to see such significant emissions of volatile chemical mixtures from off-the-shelf hair care products during typical hair care routines that many people perform each and every day. The often greatest and most concerning chemical inhaled, Jung said, is decamethylcyclopentasiloxane (aka D5 siloxane). It is an organosilicon compound and is often listed first or second in the ingredient lists of many hair care products, indicating it can be among the most abundant ingredients. It has become a common ingredient over the past few decades in many personal care products due to its low surface tension, inertness, high thermal stability and smooth texture. D5 siloxane has been found to lead to adverse effects on the respiratory tract, liver and nervous system of laboratory animals, Jung said. The use of the chemical in wash-off cosmetic products has already been restricted in the European Union because of this. Many of these products are scented, too, and some of the chemicals used to make these fragrances are potentially dangerous to inhale as well. According to the European Chemicals Agency, D5 siloxane is classified as very persistent, very bioaccumulative. And while the test results on laboratory animals is already concerning, Jung said, there is little information on its human impact. There has not been much in-depth research into this, so we really have no idea to what extent the threat these chemicals pose when inhaled over a long period of time There have been tests into wash-off products like shampoos, but almost none for leave-on products like hair gels, oils, creams, waxes and sprays. Nusrat Jung, Assistant Professor, Lyles School of Civil Engineering Jungs research also noted that applying high heat to these chemicals, such as though curling irons and hair straighteners, serves to further release the chemicals into the air. When met with temperatures of 210 degrees Celsius, researchers found the chemical emissions from the hair care products increased anywhere from 50% to 310%. To make matters worse, Jung said, these airborne chemicals do not merely remain in a single room or even just the home. Home ventilation is likely a major pathway of indoor-to-outdoor siloxane transport, Jung said. In urban environments, this is especially significant as you will have hundreds even thousands of homes ventilating out potentially harmful chemicals into the urban atmosphere all in a short span of time as people get ready for work and school in the morning. These chemicals are then collectively piped back into buildings through ventilation systems once more. So even if using products with harmful chemicals is not part of your hair care routine, you will still be impacted due to your surroundings in an urban environment. Surveys on different population groups indicate 16% to 70% of participants use leave-on hair care or hair styling products, Jungs research reported. Considering an average use frequency of hair care products between two and five times per week, based on surveys on hair care product usage patterns, and assuming that 10% of leave-on hair care products are siloxane-based, the total indoor-to-outdoor emission of D5 could reach 0.4 to 6 metric tons per year in the U.S. So, how can people protect themselves from inhaling these chemicals? The best solution is to simply not use these products, Jung said. I used to use similar products myself to straighten my hair, but after we analyzed the data, it became immediately clear that the best thing I could do to protect my own health was to stop using them. If one must use these products, the next best thing is to have an exhaust fan running to minimize the amount of chemicals inhaled, said Purdue civil engineering PhD student and researcher Jinglin Jiang. Ventilation can be an effective way to reduce siloxane exposures during indoor hair care routines, Jiang said. Our model shows that turning on the bathroom exhaust fan can reduce D5 inhalation exposures by over 90%. That, however, further contributes to its environmental impact. Jungs research reports that the cumulative indoor-to-outdoor D5 emission with the exhaust fan always off reaches 710 milligrams within three hours, while the indoor-to-outdoor D5 emission with the exhaust fan always on reaches 900 milligrams within only one hour. Theres a good reason why these chemicals are restricted from being used in wash-off hair care products in certain parts of the world, Jung said. The effects on people and the planet need to be studied further and regulatory action needs to be taken. Gathering the data Jungs experimental research was conducted in a residential architectural engineering laboratory that she designed: the Purdue zero Energy Design Guidance for Engineers (zEDGE) Tiny House. zEDGE is a mechanically ventilated, single-zone residential building with a conditioned interior. A state-of-the-art proton-transfer-reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer (PTR-TOF-MS) from Jungs laboratory was used to measure D5 siloxanes and other volatile chemicals in the indoor air in real time, second-by-second. The hair care routine emission experiments were conducted during a measurement campaign in zEDGE over a period of several months, including three experiment types: realistic hair care experiments that replicate actual hair care routines in the home environment, hot plate emission experiments that explore the relationship between the temperature of the hair care tools and volatile organic compound emissions, and surface area emission experiments that investigate how hair surface area impacts volatile organic compound emissions during hair care events. For the realistic hair care routine emission experiments, participants were asked to bring their own hair care products and hair styling tools to replicate their routines in zEDGE. Prior to each experiment, the participants were instructed to separate their hair into four sections. The hair length of each participant was categorized as long hair (below the shoulder) or short hair (above the shoulder). The sequence of each experiment consisted of four periods, to replicate a real-life routine. After hair styling, the participants had two minutes to collect the tools and leave zEDGE; this was followed by a 60-minute concentration decay period, in which zEDGE was unoccupied, and the high-resolution PTR-TOF-MS monitored the decay in indoor volatile organic compound concentrations. The experiments and subsequent analysis focused on indoor volatile organic compound concentrations and emissions during and after active hair care routine periods. This research was funded and supported by Purdue University, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Jungs team plans to investigate the many other chemicals detected in these experiments that were not reported in this study. Chemical Emissions from Hair Care Products Play Video Credit: Purdue University Secretary for Justice Paul Lam will depart this afternoon on a three-day visit to Vietnam, where he will attend the 13th China-ASEAN Prosecutors-General Conference and deliver a speech at a plenary session. As a member of the Chinese delegation, Mr Lam will attend bilateral meetings between the delegation and member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The justice chief will also meet with representatives from Vietnams legal and commercial sectors to exchange views on issues of mutual interest. Mr Lam will return to Hong Kong on December 6. During his absence, Deputy Secretary for Justice Cheung Kwok-kwan will be Acting Secretary. Hyundai Motor India Ltd., the pioneer in smart mobility solutions and the nations top exporter since its inception, celebrated a monumental moment today by delivering the all-electric SUV IONIQ 5 to Bollywoods iconic figure, Shah Rukh Khan. This momentous occasion not only honored the 25-year-long partnership but also marked a significant step towards the electrification of the future mobility landscape in India. The grand ceremony highlighted Hyundais commitment to the future of mobility as they handed over their flagship EV SUV to the King of Bollywood. This gesture served as a token of gratitude for Khans unwavering support and trust in the Hyundai brand throughout these fruitful years. During the presentation ceremony, Mr. Unsoo Kim, MD & CEO of Hyundai Motor India Ltd., remarked, Hyundais 25-year association with Shah Rukh Khan stands as one of the longest brand-ambassador partnerships in the industry. Khans integral role in enhancing our brands values and propositions cannot be understated. Presenting our flagship EV, the IONIQ 5, to Khan is a testament to its technological prowess and signifies the future of mobility in India. We express our deepest gratitude for his steadfast support, and we hope to continue this remarkable journey together for many more years. The IONIQ 5, unveiled earlier this year at the Auto Expo 2023, stole the spotlight, becoming a beacon for Hyundais journey into electrification. Surpassing all expectations, the response from customers resulted in over 1000 units sold, fulfilling the collective desire for luxurious electric cars. What made this moment even more special was the delivery of the 1100th unit to Shah Rukh Khan, making it the first-ever EV in his prestigious car collection. It wasnt just a vehicle; it was a symbol of sustainable mobility fused with opulent comfort. Expressing his gratitude, Shah Rukh Khan stated, Receiving the Hyundai IONIQ 5, an all-electric SUV, is an honor. It marks my first-ever EV, and I am delighted it comes from Hyundai. The year 2023 has been monumental for both Hyundai and myself. The overwhelming love from the people of India has been our driving force in the industry. The IONIQ 5s distinctive design and outstanding features are truly remarkable. Surpassing expectations with over 1000 units sold this year alone, this Hyundai marvel has been truly exceptional. Being a part of the Hyundai Motor India family for 25 years has been immensely fulfilling, filled with milestones and cherished moments. Hyundai isnt just a brand; its family to me, and I am delighted to be associated with one of Indias most trusted and beloved car brands. The event marked a moment of celebration and partnership, signifying not just the delivery of a remarkable vehicle but the continuation of a longstanding, fruitful association between Shah Rukh Khan and Hyundai Motor India Ltd. Nomination In Demat Account Deadline: Individual demat account holders and mutual fund investors must nominate a beneficiary or choose to opt out by submitting a declaration form before December 31. Failure to do so will result in the freezing of their demat accounts and folios, rendering them unable to redeem their investments. According to the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), this mandate applies to both new as well as existing investors. On March 27, 2023, the market regulator issued a circular, requiring demat account holders to either specify a choice of nomination or decline nomination altogether. SEBI had previously cautioned that demat accounts failing to make a decision would face suspension starting September 30, 2023. Through a circular dated March 16, 2023, similar directives were issued to holders of physical securities in listed companies. They were required to provide their PAN, nomination, contact details, bank account information, and specimen signature corresponding to their folio numbers. Under SEBIs rule, new investors must either nominate their securities or formally opt out of nomination through a declaration form when opening trading and demat accounts. The move is aimed at helping investors to secure their assets and pass them on to their legal heirs. For existing investors, including jointly-held mutual fund folios, failing to meet this deadline will result in the freezing of folios for debits. Further, investors demat accounts or mutual funds folios will be frozen and inaccessible until they nominate or declare opt-out. In July 2021, SEBI had asked all existing eligible trading and demat account holders to provide choice of nomination on or before March 31, 2022, failing which the trading and demat accounts would have been frozen for debits. With regards to mutual fund unitholders, the regulator in its circular on June 15, 2022, made it mandatory for mutual fund subscribers to submit the nomination details or declaration to opt out of the nomination on or after August 1, 2022. Later, the deadline was extended on multiple occasions. Based on representations received from the market participants, it was decided that the provision of freezing of folios and demat accounts, will come into force with effect from December 31, 2023. Market experts are of the view that many investment accounts in the past have been opened without nominating anyone to whom the assets should be transmitted in case something happens to the account holders. This means that the rightful heirs had difficulty in getting the assets transmitted to them due to the hassles of different kinds of documentation requirements. Debuting in 2004, the National Pension Scheme (NPS) was initially a government-only scheme, offering a secure retirement to government servants. But in 2009, NPS opened its doors to everyone, inviting all Indians to take charge of their golden years. The NPS is managed by both the government and the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA). Its a choice-based, long-term investment plan created for retirement purposes. National Pension System All Citizen Model The NPS is a voluntary, long-term retirement savings scheme aimed to provide retirement income security to all citizens and cultivate a habit of saving for the future. It is an attempt towards a sustainable solution to the problem of providing adequate retirement income to every citizen of India. Who Can Open A NPS Account Under All Citizen Model? A citizen of India, whether resident or non-resident, subject to the following conditions: Applicants should be between 18 70 years of age as on the date of submission of their application and should comply with KYC norms prescribed. Benefits of NPS Account NPS is a powerful tool for building a secure financial future. It offers tax benefits, market-linked returns, and a guaranteed pension, making it a valuable retirement planning option. The account can be shifted to any other sector like Government Sector, Corporate Model in case the subscriber gets the employment. When subscribers reach retirement age and exit the NPS normally, they can choose to convert a portion of their accumulated pension wealth into a regular income stream by purchasing a life annuity from a PFRDA-approved life insurance company. They can also withdraw the remaining amount as a lump sum if they wish. Tax benefit to employee:- Employed individuals contributing to NPS get double the tax advantage! They can claim deductions for both their own contributions and those made by their employer; Employees own contribution Eligible for tax deduction up to 10% of Salary (Basic + DA) under Section 80 CCD(1) within the overall ceiling of Rs. 1.50 lakhs under Sec 80 CCE. Employers contribution: The employee is eligible for tax deduction up to 10% of Salary (Basic + DA) contributed by the employer under Sec 80 CCD(2) over and above the limit of Rs. 1.50 lakhs provided under Sec 80 CCE. Tax benefit for self-employed: Eligible for tax deduction up to 10 % of gross income under Sec 80 CCD (1) within the overall ceiling of Rs. 1.50 lakhs under Sec 80 CCE. Subscriber is allowed deduction in addition to the deduction allowed under Sec. 80CCD(1) for additional contribution in his NPS account subject to maximum investment of Rs. 50,000/- under sec. 80CCD 1(B). Stocks to watch on December 4: GIFT Nifty on the NSE IX traded 143.5 points, or 0.7 per cent, higher at 20,637, signaling that Dalal Street was headed for positive start on Monday. Heres a slew of stocks that will be in focus today for various reasons. SBI, Titan: The Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJPs) clean sweep in three states (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh) augurs very well for macro and policy momentum for India, believes Motilal Oswal Financial Services. As such, it expects 14 stocks, across sectors, to benefit from the win including State Bank of India, Axis Bank, M&M, Hero MotoCorp, L&T, Ultratech Cement, Titan, Indian Hotels Company, Lemontree Hotels, Angel One, and Medanta. Hindustan Unilever: The company decided to split its beauty and personal care business into two separate divisions. AstraZeneca Pharma: AstraZeneca Pharma India Limited has received permission to import pharmaceutical formulations of new drug (Breztri Aerosphere) for sale or for distribution. Meanwhile, its Anglo-Swedish parent AstraZeneca has signed a deal worth up to $247 million with US artificial intelligence (AI) biologics firm Absci to design an antibody to fight cancer, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. GAIL (India): The company has filed an arbitration case against SEPE Marketing & Trading Singapore Pte Ltd. in the London Court of International Arbitration for up to $1.817 billion. KPI Energy: KPI Green Energy Limited has won new orders from Sun Drops Energia Pvt Ltd for 4.40 MW for executing solar power projects. HFCL: The telecom gear maker has bagged an order of around Rs 67 crore to supply optical fibre cables to a domestic telecom operator. Salasar Techno Engineering: The company secured a contract worth Rs 364 crore from Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corp. Life Insurance Corporation (LIC): State-owned insurer Life Insurance Corp of India on Saturday said it has amended a framework to allow the induction of shareholders directors on its board. Tata Power: Tata Power has won the bid to acquire Bikaner-III Neemrana-II Transmission Ltd, a transmission project special purpose vehicle (SPV) set up by PFC Consulting Ltd. Kamat Hotels: The chain has opened Orchid Hotel at Jamnagar, Gujarat. Lemon Tree Hotels: The hotel chain has opened the Lemon Tree Hotel in Hubli. This is the eighth property of the group in Karnataka. Bajaj Healthcare: CFO Rupesh Nikam resigned from the position on Dec 1. Alkem Labs: Alkem Labs has received Form 483 with three observations from the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) at the end of the inspection conducted at the companys API manufacturing facility located at Mandva. Granules India: The US Food & Drug Administration (USFDA) has approved its Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA), filed by Granules Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (GPI), a wholly owned foreign subsidiary of the company, for Sildenafil for Oral Suspension, 10 mg/mL. PVR Inox: The Customs Excise and Service Tax Appellate Tribunal (CESTAT), New Delhi, has deleted the original tax demand worth Rs 36.66 crore (including penalty and interest). The Symbiosis Institute of International Business (SIIB) Pune has released the admit card for its entrance test, known as the Symbiosis National Aptitude Test (SNAP). The exam is held for admission to MBA programmes offered by Symbiosis International (Deemed University). Candidates who applied for the exam can check and download the admit card by visiting the official SIIB website at snaptest.org. This year, the SNAP examination is scheduled to take place on December 10, 17, and 22. The exam will be conducted across 84 cities in India. The SNAP test 2 admit card will be made available from December December 9, and for SNAP test 3, candidates can download their admit cards until the respective test day. The varsity witnessed a notable 25 per cent increase in the number of test takers who registered this year when compared to 2022. SNAP 2023 Admit Card: How To Download Step 1: Visit the official SNAP Test website at snaptest.org. Step 2: Click on the admit card link Step 3: Enter the required details Step 4: The admit card will appear on the screen Step 5: Download and take a print out for further use. Candidates must remember to carry their SNAP 2023 admit card and an original photo identity proof, such as a passport, driving license, voter ID card, PAN card, or AADHAR card (UID), to the test centre on the examination day as without it they will not be allowed to appear for the exam. Through SNAP 2023, aspiring students can apply for 26 MBA programmes at the university. The exam consists of 60 multiple-choice questions. It will be held for a duration of one hour. One mark will be awarded for each correct question, and 0.25 marks will be deducted for each wrong answer. To be eligible for SNAP, candidates must have completed their graduation with a minimum of 50 per cent aggregate for general category candidates and 45 per cent for reserved category candidates. Final-year graduation students are eligible to apply as well. Will Chhattisgarh have its first woman chief minister? After the Bharatiya Janata Partys unprecedented electoral win, the state is abuzz with the question. The reason is the record that Chhattisgarh has set by sending the maximum number of female representatives to the assembly this year. As per official data, 19 women MLAs will represent their constituencies after the 2023 polls. This would mean about 21% of the 90-member assembly. The last time, there were 13 women MLAs, or 14% of the total assembly strength. Women led the voter turnout in the state too. As per the Election Commission of India (ECI), women voters were significantly more in 50 out of the 90 constituencies. Overall, 78.12 lakh women voted in Chhattisgarh. In comparison, 77.48 lakh men turned up to cast their ballots 64,000 less than women voters. The dark mares Renuka Singh: The union minister of state for tribal affairs, had stemmed the tide for the BJP in north Chhattisgarhs Sarguja in the last Lok Sabha polls. Her win in 2019 by 1.57 lakh votes came a year after the Congress swept all 14 assembly seats in the division. On Sunday, she once again stamped her authority by defeating Congresss Gulab Kamor and ensuring a rout for the party in Sarguja, including that of former deputy chief minister TS Singh Deo who lost by 122 votes. The 59-year-old was a member of the social welfare board in Chhattisgarh before becoming a two-time MLA from Premnagar in the Surguja division. She lost in 2013, but her comeback in 2019 vaulted her to a ministerial position in Narendra Modis government. Gomti Sai: The Raigarh MP and now MLA from Pathalgaon in Jashpur is being seen as a CM probable in Chhattisgarh. A rising tribal politician, Sai made her foray into politics in 2005 at the panchayat level. An Anganwadi worker, in 2015 she became the head of the Jashpur zila panchayat. In 2019, she was handpicked by the BJP leadership to fight the Lok Sabha polls from Raigarh. This was a seat held by then BJP state president Vishnu Dev Sai. As an MP, locals say, Gomti Sai has made a mark by regularly raising issues of the people of Jashpur in the Lok Sabha. In the recent assembly elections, Sai beat the Congress in its bastion. Ram Kumar Singh of the Congress was a nine-time MLA from Pathalgaon whom she defeated. Local BJP workers said that if Sai gets the top job, it will only underline that in the saffron party, it is only hard work that is rewarded. Other contenders The frontrunners in the Chhattisgarh CM race, however, are state BJP president Arun Sao and former chief minister Dr Raman Singh. Sao, an OBC leader from the Sahu community, is being seen as a natural fit after the exit of Bhupesh Baghel, another OBC leader. At a time when the Other Backward Classes are being wooed aggressively by all sides, Saos caste credentials could be an added ticked box along with the spectacular win his leadership got for the party. Raman Singh is the most experienced and well-known face of the BJP in Chhattisgarh. The firecrackers, the laddoos, and the bouquets have not stopped at his residence since the partys historic win. However, the corruption allegations against him and the generational change that the BJP is trying to bring about are being seen as factors going against the most experienced administrator that the party has in Chhattisgarh. Bureaucrat-turned-politician OP Chaudhary is also in the race after Amit Shah at his Raigarh roadshow said, Aap inhe vidhayak banaiye, bada aadmi banane ki zimmedari meri (You make him an MLA. Its my responsibility to make him a big shot). Chaudhary himself, however, took to his social media accounts on Sunday, requesting people not to spread rumours about him. Kedarnath Kashyap, the Bastar face of the BJP, could be the other MLA being weighed by the central leadership of the party. Kashyap is being credited for the turnaround in Bastar by aggressively raising the issue of forced conversion of villagers. Final decision by party awaited BJP national president JP Nadda remained noncommittal when asked in Parliament on Monday about the CM contenders. Baatein party ke andar samay per hongi (This issue will be discussed within the party at the right time), he said. As per BJP sources, observers appointed for Chhattisgarh will soon apprise the parliamentary board about the mood amongst the MLAs. The legislature party meeting is expected shortly in which the CMs name could be announced, seconded by senior leaders of the state unit. After Samajwadi Partys (SP) Pichhda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak (PDA) formula failed to leave a mark on the Madhya Pradesh (MP) and Rajasthan assembly polls, unemployment seems to be the SPs new plank for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in Uttar Pradesh. The party has given a new slogan: Har Ghar Berozgar Maange Rozgaar. Besides, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav, who also panned the Congress for the poor performance in the MP polls, said if his party is voted to power, it will shut down the BJP governments Agnipath scheme. Taking aim at Agnipath, unemployment I appeal to people to remove the BJP government and bring us into power. We will make sure that the Agnipath scheme is removed. Such four-year jobs cant ensure security for the nation. The nation will be secure when the Agnipath scheme is removed, said Akhilesh, who is on a two-day visit to Prime Minister Narendra Modis parliamentary constituency, Varanasi, while addressing the gathering during a programme in its Cholapur town on Monday. The former UP chief minister also highlighted the issue of unemployment and gave the slogan Har Ghar Berozgar Maange Rozgaar. On the SPs defeat in the four states, he said, Ladai abhi lambi hai (the fight is long). The states in which we lost were not well aware of the BJPs strategy, but we are, the Samajwadi Party chief said. The PDA formula emerged soon after the SP won the Ghosi by-election in UPs Mau district in September. Analysts and some politicians had called it the partys fresh attempt to woo the Scheduled Castes (SCs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and Scheduled Tribes (ST). The SP used the same formula in the MP and Rajasthan polls but it came a cropper. BSP too fares poorly However, the SP is not the only regional party to have performed poorly in the recent assembly polls. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) secured just two seats in Rajasthan, came third on 110 seats in MP, netting the third largest vote share of 3.38 per cent in the state, while ending up with a 2.5 per cent vote share in Chhattisgarh. Both the SP and BSP failed to win any seats in Madhya Pradesh. Of the total 230 constituencies in MP, the SP contested in 71 and the BSP in 181. In the 2018 assembly polls, the SP had bagged one seat in MP. The BSP failed to win any seat in MP this time and its vote share too dropped from 5.01 per cent in 2018 when it had bagged two seats. In three seats, its candidates stood second: Yadvendra Singh in Nagod with 17,369 votes, Balveer Singh Dandoiya in Dimani with 24,461 votes, and Kuldeep Singh Sikarwar in Sumawali with 1,56,008 votes. Blame game begins The SP, however, blamed the Congress for the poor show in MP. Ramdhari Singh Dinkar (Hindi poet) famously said that when destruction befalls a person, conscience dies first. The loss of Madhya Pradesh is due to the indecent statements given by Kamal Nath ji about our national president Akhilesh Yadav ji. It is true for other places also where the Congress lost. Their leaders became egoistic, said SP spokesperson Manoj Singh Kaka. In Rajasthan, while the SP was blanked, the BSPs Manoj Kumar won the Sadulpur seat by 2,574 votes against Congresss Krishna Poonia, while its candidate Jaswant Singh Gurjar defeated BJPs Giriraj Singh Malinga in the Bari seat. In 2018, the BSP had won six seats in the state. The Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) also won one seat in Rajasthan, where it contested as a Congress ally. The partys candidate Subhash Garg won Bharatpur again, this time by 5,387 votes, defeating BJPs Vijay Bansal. Political analysts said that rather than focusing on the age-old caste-based politics, the regional parties have to understand that they have to think differently and be more connected to the ground. BJPs pre and post-poll exercise or groundwork is too strong. Other regional parties, rather than going overboard, should do serious thinking and act accordingly, said Shashikant Pandey, head of the political science department at Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University. The sweep in the three Hindi heartland states by the BJP has three clear implications: 2024 is now a done deal for the party with a 200-seat pole position in the Lok Sabha battle, the INDIA bloc could be a non-starter with the Congress position itself in peril, and the caste census bogey has flopped, senior BJP leaders have told News18. BJP has won big in Madhya Pradesh and achieved comfortable majority in both Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The BJP also won eight seats in Telangana, with one of its candidate Venkata Ramana Reddy defeating both the outgoing chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao and Congress CM face Revanth Reddy from Kamareddy in a moral victory. The impact of this will be seen on the 2024 Lok Sabha polls as the BJP is looking for a sweep in the Hindi heartland states of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Delhi, Jharkhand, and the three states it has now won on Sunday. At least two BJP leaders said this means that the party now starts in a 200-seat pole position from the heartland with Congress on the back-foot. Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat with 106 Lok Sabha seats together, are the citadels of the BJP where it aims to win at least 100 seats together. The party is now also looking at a clean sweep in the 65 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, much like in 2019 when it won 62 of these seats. The other sweeps for BJP are expected from Delhi, Haryana, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. BJPs march past the majority mark could come from key states of Maharashtra, Telangana, Karnataka and Odisha. The second big implication of the results on Sunday is that the Congress position has been weakened in the INDIA camp and the same could be a non-starter if the party intends to play big brother. BJP leaders say INDIA partners like TMC, RJD, JDU or the Samajwadi Party will not be willing to part with too many seats in West Bengal, Bihar or UP to the Congress, drastically reducing the number of seats that the Congress fights in all in 2024. INDIA is a non-starter in the all-important state of Uttar Pradesh after Kamal Nath insulted the SP in Madhya Pradesh. The bargaining power of Congress in seat-sharing is down," a BJP leader said. The third big implication is that the caste census ploy of the Congress has proved to be a bogey as people have refused to vote on the promise of a caste census in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Congress had borrowed the idea from its regional partners in Bihar, RJD and the JDU, but there seems to be no resonance for it even in the OBC-heavy states that went to polls now in the Hindi heartland. BJP leaders say that the main issue of the Lok Sabha 2024 battle is anyway for a third term for Narendra Modi and the atmosphere for it will be set by the Ram Temple inauguration in Ayodhya in January 2024. The BJP, which suffered a huge setback in Chhattisgarhs tribal-dominated assembly seats in the 2018 polls, put up a good show this time winning 17 of the 29 seats reserved for the Scheduled Tribes (ST) category. According to poll experts, the public rallies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP chief JP Nadda in the tribal belt, launch of the partys two parivartan yatras from tribal pockets and pre-poll promises worked in the partys favour in the adivasi belt. The BJP on Sunday wrested power from the Congress in Chhattisgarh, winning 54 of the 90 seats in the state assembly, while the grand old party got 35 seats. The Gondwana Gantantra Party (GGP) bagged one seat. In the 90-member Chhattisgarh assembly, 29 seats are reserved for the ST category, which comprises around 32 per cent of the states population. The Congress, which won 25 ST-reserved seats in the 2018 assembly polls, managed to secure just 11 this time. On the other hand, the BJP significantly improved its tally from 3 in 2018 to 17 tribal-dominated seats this time. One tribal seat was bagged by the GGP. Tribals are considered to be crucial in the formation of government in the state. Despite taking a number of pro-tribal welfare measures, the Congress could not retain their support this time, Raipur-based poll analyst R Krishna Das told PTI. Several incidents of clashes were reported between tribals and the tribals who converted to Christianity in different areas of the state, particularly in Bastar division, related to religious conversion in the last couple of years, he said. The issue continued to haunt the ruling Congress during electioneering as top BJP leaders in their poll campaigning aggressively targeted the Bhupesh Baghel government, accusing it of giving protection to those who indulged in conversion, Das said. Tribal pockets in Surguja and Bastar division also witnessed protests against mining, he noted. The GGP and Hamar Raj Party (an outfit recently floated by Sarva Adivasi Samaj- an umbrella organisation of tribal groups) also affected the Congress prospects in many ST-reserved seats, he said. Congress senior tribal minister Amarjeet Bhagat, who had been unbeaten in SitapurST seat since the formation of the state, suffered defeat this time. Another senior tribal leader and Congress former state chief Mohan Markam also lost his Kondagaon (ST) seat. BJPs senior tribal leaders who have this time won from seats reserved for the ST community are Union minister Renuka Singh (Bharatpur-Sonhat), MP Gomti Sai (Pathalgaon), former Union minister Vishnu Deo Sai (Kunkuri), former state ministers Ramvichar Netam (Ramanujganj), Kedar Kashyap (Narayanpur) and Lata Usendi (Kondagaon). Neelkanth Tekam, an IAS officer who quit his service ahead of polls and joined the BJP, emerged victorious in Keshkal-ST seat. In the first assembly elections held in Chhattisgarh in 2003 after the state was formed in 2000, the BJP managed to make deep inroads among tribals, who were once considered staunch supporters of the Congress. But in the next elections, the BJP kept losing hold over them. In the 2003 assembly polls, 34 seats in the 90-member House were reserved for the ST category. The BJP then registered a victory as it defeated the Ajit Jogi-led Congress government by winning 50 seats, including 25 reserved for the ST category. The Congress then won nine ST-reserved seats. In the 2008 assembly elections, the BJP again formed government by winning 50 seats in the state, including 19 out of 29 ST-reserved seats, while the Congress won 10 ST-reserved seats. The delimitation reduced the ST-reserved seats from 34 to 29 in the state in 2008. In the 2013 assembly polls, tribal voters drifted and they significantly voted for the Congress, which missed getting majority to form government. The Congress had managed to win 18 out of the 29 tribal-reserved seats, but its overall tally was limited to 39. The BJP then registered its third consecutive win by clinching 49 seats, including 11 ST-reserved, in the 90-member assembly. In 2018, the Congress registered a landslide victory winning 68 seats in the state, ending the 15-year rule of Raman Singh-led BJP. The BJP was reduced to 15 seats, while the Janata Congress Chhattisgarh (J) and the Bahujan Samaj Party bagged 5 and 2 seats, respectively. Out of the 29 ST-reserved seats, the Congress then won 25, BJP-3 and JCC (J)-1 . Later, the Congress clinched two more ST-reserved seats Marwahi and Dantewada in bypolls. As the state assembly polls this year inched closer, BJPs star campaigners started touring tribal-dominated pockets of the state. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah addressed the party rallies in Bastar region, while BJP president JP Nadda flagged off the partys second parivartan yatra in tribal-dominated Jashpur. The first parivartan yatra of the party was rolled out from tribal-dominated Dantewada district. The BJP had promised to procure tendu leaves at Rs 5,500 per standard sack with an annual bonus up to Rs 4,500 to tenu leaf collectors, who are mainly tribals, Das said. The Congress also made a similar promise of Rs 6,000 per standard sack with an annual bonus of Rs 4,000 to tenu leaf collectors. It also promised to give an additional Rs 10 per kg on procurement of each minor forest produce, he said. The Congress even hiked the number of minor forest produces procured at the minimum support price (MSP) from seven to 63, but despite that it could not win the support of tribals, he added. . Assembly Election Results 2023: INDIA bloc meeting of the alliance has been planned around December 6 to discuss seat-sharing for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls Assembly Election Results 2023: The lotus bloomed in Hindi heartland, as BJP swept away Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh with a spectacular electoral mandate on Sunday. Despite a dismal performance in the Hindi belt, Congress managed to stop K Chandrashekar Raos hat-trick by wresting power from Bharat Rashtra Samith (BRS) in Telangana. Now it remains to be seen who will be the next Chief Minister in these states. Meanwhile, the counting of votes is underway in Mizoram. According to Election Commissions data, BJP won 163 out of 230 seats in MP, while Congress managed to bag 66 seats. In Rajasthan, the saffron party won The BJPs impressive performance in politically crucial Malwa-Nimar and Gwalior-Chambal regions is one of the key factors behind the saffron partys resounding victory in Madhya Pradesh elections. The BJP on Sunday cruised to a two-thirds majority in the MP assembly, winning 163 of the 230 seats, restricting the Congress to just 66. The saffron party won 48 of the total 66 segments in the Malwa-Nimar region spread across 15 districts, a gain of 20 seats compared to 2018, decimating the Congress tally to 17. Sailana segment in Ratlam district is won by Bharat Adivasi Party, a new entrant in the state politics. In the 2018 assembly elections, Malwa-Nimar and Gwalior Chambal belts had hugely favoured Congress, which won 114 seats in the state at that time to grab power. In the last elections, Congress had won 35 constituencies from the Malwa Nimar belt whereas BJPs tally fell to 28 from 57 seats it had won in 2013. BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, who won from Indore-1 seat, has been a prominent face from Malwa Nimar. The Bharatiya Janata Party won more than half of the 34 seats in the Gwalior-Chambal region, where former Congress politician and present Union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia holds pockets of influence, but several of those who had joined the party in 2020 after revolting against the Congress bit the dust. In the 2018 elections, Congress had won 26 out of 34 seats in the Gwalior-Chambal region when Scindia was in the party. In the 2023 elections, the Congress ceded 10 seats to BJP in the absence of Scindia. The BJP now has 18 MLAs from Gwalior Chambal, a gain of 11 including one from BSP. Among prominent faces in this region, Union Minister Narendra Singh Tomar won Dimani seat in Morena district but senior BJP leader and state home minister Narottam Mishra suffered a defeat on the home turf of Datia. This time, the BJP added a varying number of seats to its tally in all major regions of Madhya Pradesh including Bundelkhand, Vindhya, Mahakoshal and the central region (Bhopal and Narmadapuram divisions). The saffron party wrested four seats from Congress in the Bundelkhand region, which counts 26 constituencies, improving its tally to 21. Overall in the Mahakoshal region which has 38 segments, the BJP has added eight seats to its previous tally, taking the latest seat count to 21, while the Congress tally came down to 17 from the previous 24. Congress chief Kamal Naths constituency Chhindwara falls under this region. Union Minister and BJPs tribal face Faggan Singh Kulaste lost Niwas seat in Mandla district while his cabinet colleague Prahlad Singh Patel emerged victorious from the Narsinghpur constituency in Mahakoshal. In the Vindhya region comprising 30 assembly segments, the BJP has won 25 constituencies, wresting one from Congress. The total seat count of the grand old party now stands at 5. BJP leader and Lok Sabha member Ganesh Singh bit the dust from the Satna assembly constituency in Vindhya. In the central region, comprising 36 assembly segments including the high-profile Budhni seat represented by Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the BJP has won 31 seats wresting seven segments from Congress. The Congress strength in the central region, which includes the Bhopal and Narmadapuram revenue divisions, came down to 5 this time compared to 12 in 2018. The BJP has garnered 48.55 per cent votes this time, a gain of more than seven per cent compared to 2018. The party got 41.02 per cent of votes in the 2018 elections. On the other hand, the Congress vote share remained almost the same at 40.40 per cent as against 40.89 per cent (2018) as its tally plunged from 114 to 66 seats. The BJPs move to declare candidates on 79 seats very early in the campaign, almost 50 days before the votes were cast, proved to be the proverbial masterstroke explaining its big win in Madhya Pradesh. The BJP has won 49 of these 79 seats, compared to only three seats out of these it had won in 2018 and had ended up short of the majority mark. It was also on these 79 seats that the BJP put up its seven senior leaders, including Union Ministers, MPs and a national general secretary. Five of them have won their seats, bolstering the BJP tally. The BJP took a big strategic decision by declaring 79 candidates even before the Model Code of Conduct was announced. These were extremely difficult seats for us in Madhya Pradesh as we had won just three of them in the 2018 elections. The party decided to begin preparations early on these 79 seats to win MP, a top BJP leader told News18. The decision has propelled the party from the 109 seats it won in 2018 to nearly 163 seats it has won on Sunday. The BJP even changed the candidates who had won the three seats for it in 2018. A clean start was made. Jalam Singh had won from Narsinghpur but his brother and Union minister Prahlad Patel was put up from this seat now, the leader said. As a result, some big leaders of the Congress have lost from their fiefdoms in these 79 seats. Working president of the Congress state unit Jitu Patwari lost from his sitting seat of Rau near Indore, while former finance minister in the Kamal Nath government and Naths close aide, Tarun Bhanot, lost from Jabalpur (West) seat to BJP MP Rakesh Singh. BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya defeated Congress sitting MLA from Indore-1, Sanjay Shukla. Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar has won from Dimani, a seat that the BJP lost in 2018, while MP Udaypratap Singh has wrested Gadawara for BJP from the Congress. Minister Prahlad Patel has retained Narsinghpur for the BJP, while BJP MP Riti Pathak retained Sidhi. Some of the 79 seats have, in fact, been won by very comfortable margins by the BJP, highlighting how early preparations on these seats had helped. BJP MPs being put to the fight also seems to have helped as they seem to have worked their influence on the other seats falling in their parliamentary constituencies to increase the BJPs tally. BJP leaders said the decision to put up 79 candidates early had the blessings of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president JP Nadda, state in-charge Bhupender Yadav and state co-incharge Ashwini Vaishnaw. The success of this decision may now be replicated by the BJP in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections as well with the BJP planning to declare some candidates as early as February. Despite women outperforming men in terms of voter turnout, Rajasthan awaits a decent share of female representation in the assembly. Of the 199 MLAs elected to the House on Sunday, only 20 are women lowest after 2003, when only 12 women made it to the House. Last week, News18 reported how women voters have been surpassing men since 2013 in terms of voter turnout, even as the state has more men voters. But despite the improvement in the women voter turnout, the share of women in the assembly hasnt improved. ALSO READ | Women Voters Continue to Surpass Men in Turnout in Rajasthan Elections | News18 Analysis In the last three elections, there has been a consistent drop in the number of women MLAs elected to the Rajasthan assembly. In 2008 and 2013, 28 women were elected to the House. In 2018, the number of women MLAs dropped to 24 and this time it has reduced to just 20. Also, when compared to 2023, there were fewer women in the fray as well. Of the 20 women MLAs, nine each are from the BJP and Congress and two are Independents. Women representation in assemblies had been in the limelight for a long time. It became more prominent after political parties hailed and celebrated the passage of the women reservations bill in Parliament. Rajasthan was among the first few states that went to polls after political parties gave a clear nod to the idea of women reservation. While the reservation bill is yet to become a ground reality, the need for more women representation does not seem to be the priority for political parties. Overall, across the five states Rajasthan, Mizoram, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Chhattisgarh more than 8,000 candidates were in the fray for about 680 seats. However, the overall women representation was as low as 10%, despite parties hailing the idea of 33% reservation for women. ALSO READ | Numberspeak | Quota in the Moment: Parties Didnt Make Space for Women in 5 States Not just overall, none of the big parties attempted to field even close to 33% women in the elections across these states. The five states went for polls in November and the results of four of these were declared on Sunday. Mizorams result was declared on Monday. After a long Super Sunday, the million-dollar question in everyones mind is Kaun Banega Mukhyamantri? All eyes are on the three heartland states Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh. The BJP did not project any CM face there, even in Madhya Pradesh where it had a sitting chief minister in the form of Shivraj Singh Chouhan. The party went ahead with kamal (lotus) its electoral symbol as its face. On medias queries regarding such a decision, the BJP top leadership including Amit Shahs answers were consistent theres only one face, which is of the kamal. Early in October, Piyush Goyal had said, Lotus is our face in every election. Lotus is revered by all of us. We go among the people with lotus. But now with the election over, the decision will be taken by the BJPs top decision-making body its Parliamentary Board. A former General Secretary of the BJP, who has been actively involved in one of the three state polls, explained, The process is very simple. In principle, the decision will be taken in the presence of Pradhanmantri ji. The Parliamentary Board will decide observers for each state where they will go and talk to all the senior leaders first and ask the legislature party to be called where one person will propose the name of the leader of the legislature party, which will then be seconded by others hopefully unanimously. That person will be the chief minister. The whole process is expected to be completed in a matter of days, he adds. BJP president JP Nadda while talking to reporters in Parliament on Monday said, Baki batein (on the CM faces of these three states) party ke andar samay pe hogi. Hindustan Ka Dil Madhya Pradesh Sources indicate that unless the Parliamentary Board springs a radical surprise, Shivraj Singh Chouhan has a high chance to be back as chief minister. Vasundhara Raje remains uncertain but may eventually be allowed back at the top job in Rajasthan for the time being. Big names like Jyotiraditya Scindia, whose turf area Gwalior-Chambal voted for the BJP this time, are doing the rounds. Congress, which bagged 26 seats in the region in 2018, managed 16 this time around. Scindia is credited for the BJPs gain in the region. Prahlad Singh Patel, the junior minister in the Modi government for Jal Shakti Modis pet scheme is also being talked about for the top job. VD Sharma, the man who led the state unit and let go of his differences with Chauhan at the instruction of Amit Shah, is also considered a frontrunner, given the upper caste vote share in MP. But a sitting BJP MP from Madhya Pradesh says, Removing Shivraj ji would require another OBC Chief Minister to take over. Before 2024 and with caste census talks gaining momentum, we cant afford to offend OBCs in MP and elsewhere. Lets look at the names Narottam Mishra is from upper caste and lost, Kailash Vijayvargiya is a Vaishya. That leaves us with Prahlad Singh Patel. I wonder whether the leadership would choose him over Mukhyamantri ji (Shivraj). The former BJP General Secretary quoted earlier told News18 that the chance of state BJP president VD Sharma or Jyotiraditya Scindia being para-dropped for the top post is unlikely. He argues that the optics of a Scindia or a Mishra replacing an OBC chief minister wouldnt go well. He further adds the BJP would like to go with Chouhan given his popularity among women voters after Ladli Behna Yojna and it would benefit the party even in the Lok Sabha election just three months later. The state has 29 Lok Sabha seats. On Sunday, as the trend became clearer in Madhya Pradesh, Scindia went to Chouhan and congratulated him while his state BJP president VD Sharma was also seen feeding Chouhan laddoos. The optics, both argue, were suggestive enough that he is the man of the moment. RAJE-STHAN? Meanwhile, many names are doing the rounds in Rajasthan Diya Kumari who won by a handsome 71,000 votes, Union minister Gajendra Shekhawat, a close aide of Amit Shah who wanted him as the Rajasthan party chief earlier but was vetoed by Raje, Yogi Adityanaths confidant Mahant Balak Nath who won Tijara with 1,10,209 votes, despite a sizeable minority population. When asked, Diya Kumari carefully sent the ball to the BJP Parliamentary Board. Even former Union minister Rajyavardhan Rathores name is also being speculated after he managed to win Jothwara bypassing a divided BJP vote base there. He too said, The decision on the chief ministerial post will be taken by the Prime Minister and the BJP Parliamentary Board. However, a BJP legislator who has been closely involved with the Rajasthan election insists that Vasundhara Raje has ensured that there are a decent number of candidates this time who express their allegiance to her before the party. Even the party leadership is aware of it, the BJP legislator adds. He clarified that appointing a new CM would risk a messy next few months. The state offers 25 Lok Sabha seats. However, he added, a leadership change midway, if necessary, will be a much more feasible idea. He cited examples of Gujarat where the chief minister was changed midway. More so, the post-victory press conference was also addressed by her where she credited it to the collective efforts. The credit goes to the handwork, the team efforts of PM Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and the BJP Chief, she announced. But niceties aside, she has been making her moves just ahead of the result day when she reached the RSS HQ Bharti Bhawan in Jaipur and met RSS Khetra Pracharak Nimbaram. She also reached the Governors House where she met Kalraj Mishra. Sources say the BJPs top leadership is well aware she wont let the top job be given away to anyone without a fight which may harm BJPs prospects in Lok Sabha. However, there is a counter view in BJP in New Delhi which believes it is a comfortable victory, not with a wafer-thin margin. Hence, the leadership will be at liberty to get rid of her. But will they risk it? OBC CM OR TRIBAL FACE The BJP in is searching for an OBC or Tribal Chief Minister in Chhattisgarh, not giving another chance to Raman Singh, sources say. Raman Sigh was from the Thakur community and is now cut off from the ground. He is currently the National Vice President of the BJP. Though his followers still consider him as the natural choice, but the BJP is more keen on an OBC face to lead the state, if BJP sources are to be believed. OBCs account for 43.5% of the states population. The BJP leadership from its pool of OBC leaders in the state shortlisted two names state president Arun Sao and bureaucrat-turned-BJP youth leader OP Choudhary. Sao had promised a stern law and order where he promised bulldozer action on culprits if BJP is elected to power. Choudhary, who was once an ace officer, is now being considered as the front-runner for the CM post. Known to be close to Amit Shah, Choudhary was the sole BJP voice in the state that openly criticised Bhupesh Baghel after the BJP was decimated in 2018. BJP sources indicate the latter has a higher chance at the top job in Chhattisgarh. The BJP is also toying with the idea of a tribal Chief Minister a longstanding demand of the state. Tribes of Chhattisgarh account for around one-third of the total population of the state. But sources suggest if the BJP has to go with a tribal CM, it is exploring options to hit two birds with a single bullet a tribal CM who is also a woman. Minister of State for Tribal Affairs of India Renuka Singh fits the bill there. But as a BJP functionary cautions, No one expected a non-jat Manohar Lal Khattar to be Chief Minister of Haryana. How many of you heard of Raghubar Das before he was made Jharkhand CM in 2014? Modi ji has a habit of springing surprises. So, nothing is final till it is final. The assembly poll results, which handed a 3-1 win to the BJP and Congress respectively, have cast a shadow on the future of the Grand Old Party in the opposition bloc. Partners of INDIA have begun training guns on the Congress, with the Trinamool Congress a prominent player slamming the party for its failure. As the trends became clear on Sunday, TMC general secretary Kunal Ghosh said: What happened in the three states is not BJPs success, it is Congresss failure. BJP has copied schemes from West Bengal. These results would have no impact on the Lok Sabha elections because what happened in these states is Congresss fault. But when a united INDIA comes in 2024, the BJP will not stand in front of it What happened in other states would not be repeated in Bengal Ghosh also said it is time for the Grand Old Party to introspect and come out of its zamindari attitude. On Monday, an editorial in TMC mouthpiece Jago Bangla attacked Congress over its attitude and said the party must rectify its mistakes. Congress has to see why they failed, they need to introspect. Congress has to rectify its mistakes. They have a typical Zamindari attitude that needs to change. Now, focus should be on the fight for 2024. Mamata Banerjee has defeated BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah could not do anything. The advice of people who are successful in defeating BJP should be taken. INDIA alliance is the future. While the TMC may still be hopeful of a good show in the 2024 polls, the partys attack on Congress clearly shows that the latter will not be allowed to call the shots in the opposition camp. A tumultuous relationship The relationship between Congress and TMC has always been blow hot, blow cold. Things soured after the 2021 Bengal result and especially after Sushmita Dev, Mukul Sangma, and Luizinho Faleiro joined TMC. TMC insiders say the party always knew that Congress does not have the capacity to fight BJP and thats why people were joining the former. Devangshu Bhattacharya, Bengal IT cell head, also wrote on Facebook that Congress should leave its ego and work for the people the entire year, not just during elections. When the INDIA bloc was formed, TMC was seen standing in Congresss support. TMC general secretary Abhishek Banerjee went to Delhi and met Rahul Gandhi. However, sources say now that the Grand Old Partys performance is under the scanner, its role as big brother in the alliance will also be reworked. The Congress had called an alliance meet on December 6 but Mamata Banerjee is unlikely to join as she has a prescheduled meeting in North Bengal. It is expected that the Congress debacle will be discussed in the meeting along with the partys future role in the alliance. Sources told News18 that Congress was advised to declare seat division in other states apart from Bengal and Punjab before the elections but the party ignored the advice. Meanwhile, irate over the attacks, the Congress in Bengal said it did not want any advice from TMC on political course correction. Taking a dig at the crisis in the bloc, BJP leader Dilip Ghosh said: Do you think there is any alliance? They only had tea in various places, nothing else. People know Modi hai toh mumkin hain. Thats why people has given him votes. The Opposition is now just blaming each other. Loan waivers, free electricity, cash schemes, and subsidy on LPG cylinders all the poll promises that the Congress made before elections appeared to have fallen flat in Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, while the incentives for women voters worked for the BJP. The assembly election results in these three states are indicative of the politics of freebies or revdi as it is popularly called by senior politicians of the BJP, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, failing to earn the expected electoral dividends for the Congress. However, the BJPs reworked schemes for women voters in Madhya Pradesh and a last-minute announcement in Chhattisgarh seem to have given the party the required boost. After the results of the Karnataka assembly elections came out in May, the electoral strategy of promising financial assistance for women voters almost became a trend for all Congress-ruled states as well as those like Madhya Pradesh where the party expected a turnaround. Learning from Bengal, Karnataka The election results of West Bengal in 2021 and Karnataka in 2023 show how women voters played a key role in determining poll outcomes. Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjees announcement of financial assistance of Rs 500 to all women voters, called Laxmi Bhandar, brought the party a landslide victory in the state. A similar pattern was noticed in Karnataka as the Congress in its manifesto announced financial assistance for women and called it Gruha Lakshmi. The promised financial assistance was, however, four times bigger than what Banerjee announced in Bengal. Following the Karnataka elections, the Congress made the financial assistance scheme for women voters part of its election strategy and announced similar plans in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan. The BJP, which initially resisted the idea of making financial assistance to women voters a poll promise, later proposed similar packages in MP and Chattisgarh. Turning women voters around The narrative around women voters, the financial assistance that the BJP initially called freebies, was so strong that it almost forced the partys central leadership to ponder. In Madhya Pradesh, incumbent chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan increased the amount for the existing Ladli Behna Yojana, while the central leadership of the BJP included financial assistance for women in its manifesto for Chhattisgarh. The party proposed Rs 12,000 for married women voters as an annual allowance. The scheme was announced by union home minister Amit Shah in Chhattisgarh and made it into the BJP manifesto in the state. A senior BJP leader in the state told News18 that former chief minister Raman Singh actively pitched for a woman-centric financial assistance scheme. He, in party meetings, said the manifesto must include a scheme like Ladli Behna of Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Shah announced the scheme and named it Mahtari Vandan Yojana, two days before the first phase of polls in the state. In Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan, the BJP raised and campaigned around womens issues. In MP and Chhattisgarh, the party banked on women voters after analysing their percentage and announced schemes centred on them. During polling, women voters came out in big numbers and queued up to exercise their franchise. The women vote is now decisively with the BJP and this is now a pan-India phenomenon, Akhilesh Mishra, a pro-BJP intellectual and CEO of Bluekraft Digital Foundation, posted on social media site X. As India takes the global lead in terms of effecting climate action and fulfilling its commitments vis-a-vis the Paris Agreement, a Northeastern state bordering Tibet is set to become a hub of hydropower generation. India is working towards bolstering its clean energy capabilities by proposing the establishment of 13 hydroelectric projects in Arunachal Pradesh, with the aim of contributing 13,000 megawatts (MW) to the national grid. The Arunachal Pradesh government last week signed MoUs with central public sector undertakings to construct 13 hydropower projects. According to Union Power Minister RK Singh, these ventures would require an investment of Rs 1.4 lakh crore and lead to a substantial elevation in the per capita income of the region. These projects will bring in investment of around Rs. 1.4 lakh crores to Arunachal Pradesh, resulting in a quadrupling of per capita income. And the nation will get clean power. Similarly, five hydel projects are under construction in Jammu & Kashmir; hence, our hydro potential in J&K too is moving ahead and a lot of investment is coming in, a statement from the Power Minister said. The Centres goal is clear. It wants to increase the share of hydropower in Indias renewable energy basket. The Power Minister also spoke of efforts being taken to better tap into the available hydropower capacity of the country. Today, our hydropower capacity is 47,000 MW, which is 35% of our available hydropower potential. Developed countries however have utilized around 70% 80% of their available hydro potential, the statement added. Major Projects Underway in Arunachal Arunachal Pradesh is currently witnessing the construction Subansiri Lower Hydroelectric Project (SLHEP), which is the biggest hydroelectric project undertaken in India so far. The estimated annual energy generation from the project is 7421.59 MU. The installed capacity of the project is 2,000 million watts (MW). Importantly, the SLHEP project is a run-of-river dam, which means the flow of water in the river downstream of the dam is the same as the flow of water upstream of the dam. This is considered one of the more environmentally compatible models of harnessing hydropower, given that it does not disproportionately impact the flow of a river. The Centre is anticipating a doubling of Indias power demand by 2030, and the signs of the same are visible already. There has been a 20 per cent surge in the nations power demand in the latter part of 2023. This necessitates India to take up capacity addition in the renewable energy front aggressively, since apart from meeting the growing power demand, it also needs to stick to its climate commitments. Another important project that is in the works in Arunachal Pradesh is the ambitious Dibang project. The multi-purpose hydropower project in Arunachal Pradesh is finally on track, with NHPC Ltd having set a deadline of this month to award tenders for all its major works. Scheduled for commissioning in 2032, the Dibang project will be the biggest hydropower project in India once ready. It will also have the tallest dam in India with a height of about 288 metres. Tapping Potential in the Northeast The Narendra Modi government has made it a point to tap into the Northeasts potential to become a hydropower hub for India. While North India has 19,696.3 MW installed hydropower capacity, the highest among all regions, the South has 9,741.6 MW in operation. The Western region has an installed capacity of 5,552 MW, while the East has 5,087.8 MW. The Northeastern region has an installed hydropower capacity 2,027 MW. However, that situation is set to change dramatically as projects with an installed capacity of 5,000 MW are being built in the region, which will propel Northeasts rise as the region with the second-highest hydro capacity in the country. The total hydropower generation potential of Indias North-Eastern states including Bhutan, is about 58,000 MW, of which, Arunachal Pradesh alone accounts for 50,328 MW the highest in India. Indias Hydropower Sector Currently, hydropower contributes about 11 percent to Indias energy mix, as per the Central Electricity Authority (CEA). In fact, CEA estimates that India has 145 GW of Hydroelectric potential, of which just 29 per cent has been tapped into. Hydropower, unlike coal-fired power plants, is considered a flexible generator since these units can be ramped up and down quickly to suit the power demand at a particular point of time. At present, about 10.2 MW of hydropower is under construction. According to the Central Electricity Authority, by 2032, India will have 62.2 GW of hydropower installed by 2032, with up to 65.7 GW in a high hydro case. Additionally, India has already achieved small hydro (SHP) capacity of 4.9 GW has already been achieved through 1167 small hydropower projects. Chasing Climate Action Goals While it is true that the Northeast region is finally getting the attention it needs to facilitate a rapid harnessing of its hydropower potential, states in other parts of the country are not mute spectators either. Uttar Pradesh for example, in August this year, was planning to set up three hydropower projects totalling 3,250 megawatts (MW). These three plants will necessitate the acquisition or utilisation of more than 1,000 hectares of land in the districts of Sonbhadra, Chandauli, and Mirzapur. The projects will see an investment of nearly Rs 15,000 crore and are expected to create about 10,000 new job opportunities. Speaking about Uttar Pradesh, the state has set a goal to generate 22,000 MW of renewable energy over the next five years. In the current financial year (2023-24), government data reviewed by Moneycontrol earlier this year had revealed that at least seven hydropower projects with a total capacity of 3,110 megawatts (MW) were set to be commissioned. The Modi government has also taken a series of measures to make hydropower a part of Indias renewable energy transition. Under the hydro policy, the Centre has providing renewable energy status for large hydel projects, apart from new funding provisions. Earlier, hydro projects up to 25 MW capacity were considered as renewables and were eligible for various incentives. Now, hydro projects above 25 MW can also avail such benefits. Apart from ensuring energy security through renewables, India is looking at increasing its hydropower capacity in the Northeast region to demonstrate its willingness to take on an increasingly aggressive China, that has been dropping hints that it could weaponise the flow of water from Tibet into India. In order to do so, the Communist-ruled country has built a series of dams on the stretches of Brahmaputra, called Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet. For India, the Brahmaputra is a vital water resource. According to the government, it can alone meet 40 percent of Indias hydropower potential. As India moves forward with its goal of increasing the share of renewable energy in the countrys power basket, the environment must be taken care of. Hydropower is a touchy subject for some. When it comes to hydropower, environmental concerns prove to be a particularly big hurdle in multiple projects. The government must come up with innovative solutions to ensure that Indias expansion of its hydropower capacity does not adversely impact the ecology. Zhang Chuannan was one of the several Chinese nationals who lost their jobs during the strict zero-Covid lockdown in China, when the country resorted to strict control and tight measures to control Covid-19 pandemic. After being laid off, 34-year-old Zhang, who worked as an accountant at a cosmetic firm in Shanghai paid $1,400 for an online Thai course, got an education visa and moved to the scenic northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. Zhang is among a growing number of young Chinese moving overseas not necessarily due to ideological reasons but to escape the countrys ultra-competitive work culture, limited opportunities and growing unemployment. Amid the growing migration to overseas, Thailand has become a prime destination for many Chinese, and since the 2000s, they have moved to its big cities in substantial numbers. Why People are Leaving China? China implemented one of the worlds toughest Covid restrictions during the pandemic, putting hundreds of millions of people under extremely long lockdowns. In the aftermath, younger citizens exhausted by gruelling and unrewarding jobs are taking flight to escape abroad. During the pandemic, the desire for freedom became stronger, Chen, a 26-year-old former bank worker, told AFP. In Chinas financial capital Shanghai hit by some of the strictest pandemic lockdowns Chen had a stable, well-paid job, but was unhappy with the career path that lay ahead of her. After the pandemic, Chen knew something had to change. Even if I kept doing this job for the rest of my life, it would just be like this, she said. Chen is emblematic of many of her generation: unlike their parents who benefited from Chinas then-booming economy, younger Chinese are burdened by a weak economy. Prospects for promotion are few and competition is ferocious, leading many to burn out. The hunt for opportunities far from home is partly motivated by Chinas unemployment rate for people ages 16 to 24, which rose to a record high of 21.3% in June. The scarcity of good jobs increases pressure to work long hours. Opting out is an increasingly popular way for younger workers to cope with a time of downward mobility, said Beverly Yuen Thompson, a sociology professor at Siena College in Albany, New York. Why Thailand is The Destination? In popular social media and e-commerce platforms in China, the influencers and their videos are full of benefits of emigrating to Thailand. From cheap international schools to exotic locale and affordable healthcare, Thailand is portrayed as a paradise that promises something for all. The Southeast Asian country is seen as easier than Europe or North America, with the kingdom offering several types of long-term visas, including a one-year language course costing roughly $700 to $1,800. Moreover, Thailand has relatively easy process for one-year study visas and offer a slower pace of living and cheap living costs. At Payap University in Chiang Mai, around 500 Chinese began an online Thai course early this year. For many Chinese, Thailand is seen as a stepping stone country, ideal to experiment with living abroad. The surging desire to leave China can be seen in patterns on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app. Searches for emigration have spiked, hitting 510 million in one day in October, according to Chinese-language media, while in late January immigrating Thailand was searched more than 300,000 times in a single day. On another social media platform Xiaohongshu, similar to Instagram, hundreds of people have discussed their decisions to relocate to Thailand. Many get a visa to study Thai while figuring out their next steps. Migration to Thailand: In Numbers There are an estimated 7.1 million people in the country who identify as Chinese, forming the oldest and most significant ethnic Chinese community in Southeast Asia, a report in South China Morning Post said. Thai tourism authorities estimate about five million visitors from China this year, while the country took 10 million Chinese visitors in 2019. Chinese already rank as the biggest group of foreign buyers of property in Thailand, according to Thailands Real Estate Information Center, with more than 3,500 units snapped up in 2022 at an average of $150,000 each. How Thailand Views This Migration? Thailand has historically emphasised deep historical and cultural ties between the two nations, with China portrayed as a generous big brother, a narrative that is slowly changing amid contemporary US-China rivalries. Among ordinary Thais, the sentiments towards China are paradoxical. On one hand, Thais welcome Chinas economic and humanitarian aid and consider it a pi (elder brother) to Thailands nong (younger brother). However, on the other side, media coverage of Chinese tourism in Thailand has fostered negative stereotypes about how badly Chinese citizens behave when travelling overseas. Chinese tourists and travellers are stereotyped as fools but rich and as having uncivilised manners, affecting negative portrayals that affect social interactions. Chinese businessmen are also portrayed as selfish and cheating by the Thai business community, fuelled by reports of fraud and scams. (With inputs from agencies) Two Indian Air Force pilots were killed on Monday after a Pilatus PC 7 Mk II aircraft crashed during a routine training sortie in Telanganas Medak district. A Pilatus PC 7 Mk II aircraft met with an accident today morning during a routine training sortie from AFA, Hyderabad. It is with deep regret that the IAF confirms both pilots onboard the aircraft sustained fatal injuries, Indian Air Force said on X (formerly Twitter). The Swiss-made aircraft fleet had an accident-free record ever since its inception in the Indian armed forces and has been the backbone in training rookie pilots for the IAF. All About Pilatus PC 7 Mk II Aircraft The Pilatus PC 7 Mk II aircraft is a single-engine aircraft, on which IAF pilots undergo basic training. The turboprop trainer aircraft, produced by Pilatus Aircraft, is intended for the initial training and basic flight training of rookie pilots. The aircraft has a length of 10.8 m, wing span of 10.19 m and a height of 3.26 m. The PC-7 Mk II can fly at a maximum altitude of 33,000 ft and has a horizontal cruise speed of 448 km per hour at sea level. The maximum operating speed of the aircraft is 556 km per hour, while the maximum range of the aircraft is 1,500 km. Apart from the Indian Air Force, the aircraft has been in service with the South African Air Force (SAAF), Botswana Defence Force (BDF), Royal Malaysian Air Force and the Royal Brunei Air Force. More than 160 PC-7 Mk II trainer aircraft have been sold since its introduction in 1994 and but the manufacturer has received more than 600 orders from 21 air forces in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North and South America and Asia. Why are PC-7 Mk II Jets Used in IAF? The induction of Pilatus aircraft PC-7 Mk II Training System has enabled IAF to revolutionise its basic pilot training capability. Rookie IAF pilots go through a three-stage training involving the Swiss-origin Pilatus PC-7 Mk II planes, Kiran trainers and finally the British-origin Hawk advanced jet trainers before they can fly supersonic fighter jets. Pilatus PC-7 MK2 Basic Trainer of Indian Airforce completes 2,00,000 hours of flying across the fleet.IAF had placed an order for 75 aircrafts in 2011. The total sanctioned strength of basic trainers for IAF is 181.#IADN pic.twitter.com/jpJFJ3csSH Indian Aerospace Defence News IADN (@NewsIADN) February 20, 2023 Since the first delivery in February 2013, the PC-7 Mk II fleet successfully clocked a major milestone of 2 lakh accident-free flying hours earlier in February year. There are around 75 aircrafts in service. But India is looking forward to replace the PC-7 Mk II fleet with indigenously designed Hindustan Turbo Trainer Aircraft-40 (HTT-40) for training rookie pilots. Recent Crashes The PC-7MkII fleet has been the bedrock of the IAFs mission of producing the best military aviators in the world. The Pilatus PC-7 Mk II had a record in training flying and has trained more than 2,500 cadets and pilots of the Indian Air Force, Indian Navy and Indian Coast Guard. Though, the crash in Medak district in Telangana is believed to be the first crash involving the aircraft in India, the fleet has reported crashes abroad. In February this year, the PC-7Mk II plane, which was being used as a medical transport plane, crashed during a winter storm in Nevada in the US, killing all five people on board. The single-engine Pilatus PC12 apparently broke apart before hitting the ground about 64 kilometres southeast of Reno. An immunity debt, vitamin A deficiency, antibiotic resistance or arrival of Disease X a range of theories are being explored to make sense of the surge in cases of mysterious illness impacting younger children. As the world stands on the verge of overcoming the Covid-19 pandemic, a fresh concern has arisen, originating from the same place as the initial outbreakChina. China, once again the protagonist of a respiratory infection, is now under the radar of the World Health Organization (WHO), just like four years ago when Covid-19 was declared in December 2019. While WHO has urged for additional details regarding the infectious surge, Asia, the US, France, Denmark and the Netherlands have witnessed a rise in hospital admissions among both children and adults. The surge is evident among younger children between the ages of three and eight. However, the latest news reports also show an impact on children aged up to 14 years. Cases on surge outside China Recently, Ohio in the US reported nearly 150 cases of pneumonia, all affecting children, with an average age of around eight years old. This surge is similar to the situation in China, sparking global concern. Ohios Warren County Health Department told Daily Mail that the number of cases is above average and meets the Ohio Department of Healths definition of an outbreak. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that nationally, cases are not out of the ordinary. Still, the spread of cases has raised fears that an outbreak can overwhelm American hospitals. Massachusetts also said that its being hit by a wave of white lung pneumonia in children after Europe reported a surge in cases and hospitalisations. The Netherlands and Denmark have also reported spikes in walking pneumonia cases, mostly among younger children. The Amsterdam state agency also said during the week of November 13-19, 103 of every 100,000 children between 5 and 14 years old were sick. It is a nearly 25 per cent increase from the previous week when 83 cases were reported for every 100,000 members of the age group. The spike in these countries follows a similar scenario in Beijing, China, where 7,000 children were admitted to a hospital. In India, the health ministry has advised all states and Union Territories to immediately review public health and hospital preparedness measures. What is known so far? Officials in Ohio have told media that an investigation is ongoing and the illness does not look like a new disease but rather several common infections hitting all at once. It said that so far, patients have tested positive for mycoplasma pneumonia, a bacterial lung infection that is mostly resistant to some antimicrobials, streptococcus and a normally benign infection. This respiratory illness has been termed as White Lung Syndrome. It is primarily affecting children aged three to eight and this illness is not always responsive to antibiotics. The outbreak is linked to a newly identified strain of mycoplasma pneumonia a common bacterium responsible for respiratory infections. The syndrome is characterised by distinctive white patches on chest X-rays showing diffusely damaged lungs. Furthermore, the illness appears to be a blend of various ailments, encompassing influenza, SARS-CoV-2, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and mycoplasma pneumonia, as per the Chinese government. It could also be a cocktail of different illnesses. Possible theories to solve the mystery According to the most reassuring hypothesis, bacterial respiratory infections typically flare up every few years, often coinciding with a surge in influenza or other viral illnesses as people are in the process of recovering. The other theory is about paying immunity debt. It means that due to the reduction of common infections during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, we are now catching more infections due to weakened immunity. Experts believe that with no stringent Covid-19 measures in place, this marks the first winter, likely resulting in heightened exposure and vulnerability to common respiratory infections. According to Dr John Campbell, a retired Nurse Teacher and A and E nurse based in England, vitamin A deficiency could play a big role in controlling the Chinese outbreak. Campbell in his popular YouTube video said children in Western countries are often diagnosed with Vitamin A deficiency. He went on to show the WHO guidance on the importance of Vitamin A which proves that this vitamin is needed for mucous membrane innate immunity. It strengthens the respiratory and gastrointestinal tract systems and could be used in prevention. Also, he pointed out the problem of drug resistance in controlling the spread. We have seen that antibiotic resistance is a big problem with mycoplasma pneumonia in China. I am just hoping antibiotic resistance is not spreading around the world The concerning thing is it is impacting children Also, its crucial to consider the hypothesis which proposes a possibility that future pandemics may not necessarily be triggered by viruses but could stem from other perilous pathogens. Examples include methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or bacteria associated with compromised water and food sanitation. There is an anticipation that bacteria with multi-drug resistance, along with newly mutated strains, could pose infections to both humans and animals. Researchers underscore that these infections would prove more challenging to treat than those caused by non-resistant bacteria. Ultimately, antibiotic resistance is poised to lead to elevated mortality rates, increased medical expenses, and a strain on logistics, infrastructure, and hospitalisation, as highlighted in a 2022 editorial in the International Journal of Health Sciences. In the present scenario, antibiotic resistance is already becoming evident. With fingers crossed and the fervent wish that the outbreak fizzles out soon, the critical approach is to enhance preparedness levels and closely monitor the situation. Earlier in November, the Indian embassy in Naypyidaw, Myanmar, received an SOS call from the Myanmarese junta. India answered the call as New Delhi authorised a rescue mission, perhaps a first of its kind, to allow the entry of 46 junta soldiers into the northeastern state of Mizoram. Two weeks later, hundreds of militants from the United National Liberation Front (Pambei), the oldest armed separatist group in another northeastern state, Manipur, laid down their arms following a peace agreement with the Indian government. The Myanmar junta is defending a tenuous foothold over the country as it loses significant ground to the pro-democracy militias representing various ethnic groups in Myanmar. The stranded soldiers of the junta were cornered by Peoples Defence Forces (PDF) in the Chin state bordering India, and needed an escape route to survive when the junta called for Indias help. The PDF backs the National Unity Government, dislodged by the military junta in a coup in 2021. Among them is the Kuki National Organisation (KNO), which is actively involved in the fighting. On the other side, the military junta is being supported by Manipurs seven valley-based separatist groups or VBIGs which maintain camps in Myanmar. In order to hold their positions in Myanmar, an intelligence official told News18, The VBIGs have to pay up with copious amounts of cash and in recent years with conscripts to fight against the PDF. Reports suggest a high number of casualties among VBIGs amid the juntas war on the resistance. The circumstances have not only the made them a direct party in the juntas conflict but have also spilled over into India where government pressure on the VBIGs, already on the back foot, is forcing them to come to the table and enter talks with New Delhi As of date, groups related to the UNLF are at the receiving end across the border in Myanmar, at the hands of the PDF, L Nishikanta Singh, a retired Lieutenant General of the Indian Army, who hails from Manipur, told News18. This peace talk could be an incentive for them to come forward and it will be good for the state, he added. The latest breakthrough comes from the UNLFs Pambei faction led by Khungdongbam Pambei, who commands a prominent chunk of the groups overall strength. Its rival faction led by RK Achou Singh alias Koireng remains vehemently opposed to talks with India while maintaining its cadres across the border in Myanmar. Manipurs independence-seeking VBIGs are predominantly Meitei groups, which are known for their hardline stance against peace talks. In recent years, however, the Amit Shah-led Union home ministry has made considerable headway in whittling down this resistance. Having been a banned group so far, explicitly under the scanner of security agencies, the predominantly Meitei UNLFs role in the months-long civil strife between Meitei and Kuki-Zomi tribes is reportedly close to negligible. However, the agreement with the Indian government sends out a timely message about Centres efforts to establish enduring peace. More such agreements are purportedly in the pipeline with more VBIGs, while the government hopes that the agreement with UNLF would encourage others to negotiate a solution. In fact, a ceremonial celebration of the agreement was recently held at the grounds of the Kangla Palace in the presence of Manipurs Chief Minister N Biren Singh. Around 550 armed militants of the UNLF among a total of 750 to 800 members were present at the grand ceremony. We are looking forward to other valley-based groups to join the peace process so that a solution towards peace can be brought to Manipur. The UNLF is a 60 years old organisation that never agreed to talk, but this time they have reposed faith in Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji, so its a major achievement, CM Biren Singh said at the event. The Indian government has been relentlessly pursuing a peaceful solution for the plethora of armed groups in the northeast of India. Amid calls for a separate administration by Kuki groups in the ethnic strife-torn state of Manipur, peace talks between Naga insurgent group National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah) or NSCN-IM and the Centre have also seen progress, according to officials in the know who spoke to News18 on condition of anonymity. Peace talks with the pro-talks faction of ULFA (United Liberation Front of Asom) are also making headway and could be finalised in the near future in what would prove to be a major triumph for PM Modi and Amit Shah. Ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, the Centre has reportedly placed utmost priority on converting years of efforts into concrete results when it comes to cementing peace in the Northeast. Chennai was battered by torrential rains all through Monday, with eight deaths reported, schools and offices closed and the runway of one of Indias busiest airports submerged. With Cyclone Michaung expected to make landfall near Bapatla on the Andhra Pradesh coast on Tuesday noon, it has evoked memories of December 2015 when at least 290 people died after catastrophic floods. Follow Cylone Michaung LIVE Updates The India Meteorological Department said the severe cyclonic storm is likely to have sustained winds of 90 to 100 kmph, gusting to 110 kph. Flight operations at the Chennai airport will stay suspended till 9 am on Tuesday. More than 80 train services, including Vande Bharat and Shatabdi, were cancelled. Tamil Nadu police said the rain-related deaths occurred due to various reasons, including the collapse of a building wall, electrocution and falling of trees in separate incidents across the city. Heavy rains lashed parts of Andhra Pradesh under the influence of the intense weather system even as the state government issued an alert to the eight districts of Tirupati, Nellore, Prakasam, Bapatla, Krishna, West Godavari, Konaseema, and Kakinada. The IMD said the system was moving in the sea at a speed of 10 kmph and lay centered around 80 km southeast of Nellore, 120 km north-northeast of Chennai, 210 km south of Bapatla and 250 km south-southwest of Machilipatnam at 5.30 pm. It is likely to intensify gradually and move nearly northwards almost parallel and close to the southern Andhra Pradesh coast and cross it between Nellore and Machilipatnam, close to Bapatla, during the forenoon of December 5 as a severe cyclonic storm with a maximum sustained wind speed of 90-100 kmph, gusting to 110 kmph, it posted on X, formerly Twitter. Media showed images of cars floating as water coursed through the streets of Chennai as rain pelted down. One of the viral videos even showed a crocodile on the flooded streets of the city. Several areas were submerged in knee-deep water and there have been power cuts since morning. Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin, referring to the forecast by the IMD predicting more rains, assured that the government is taking all measures on a war-footing in response to historic rainfall. He urged representatives of local bodies and members of various government departments to actively participate in relief activities during these challenging times. The IMDs Chennai department issued thunderstorm nowcast warning in Tamil Nadu for the next three hours. It forecast moderate thunderstorm and lightning with moderate rain over Chennai, Tiruvalluvar, Chengalpattu, Kancheepuram, Ranippettai, Vellore and Tirupattur districts. It also forecast light thunderstorm and lightning with light to moderate rain in isolated places over Thiruvannamalai, Villupuram, Pudukottai, Thanjavur, Kanyakumari, Tirunelveli, Thoothukudi and Theni districts. Andhra Pradesh braces for heavy rains The IMD said parts of Andhra Pradesh are likely to get more than 200 mm of rain over the next 24 hours. Authorities have evacuated nearly 7,000 people in eight coastal districts and were preparing to evacuate a total of 28,000. The evacuation process is underway and 181 of the 308 required relief camps have been opened. Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy directed officials to be on high alert for taking up relief measures. Special officers have been appointed for all cyclone-affected districts, besides releasing Rs 2 crore each for rescue and relief works. The special officers will work in close coordination with the collectors and, if more funds are needed, the government will comply with the request, he said. Reddy called on the official machinery to tap into its experience of handling Cyclone Hudhud and take advance relief measures, engage the services of ward and village secretariats, including tapping the services of village clinics, Rythu Bharosa Kendras and others. In the event of civic amenities being adversely affected in any area, the officials should restore those immediately, he said. Officials have been directed to focus on safeguarding crops, especially by procuring paddy and saving the kharif harvest. Until Sunday, up to 97,000 tonnes of paddy has been collected while 6.5 lakh tonnes of paddy moved to storage locations with instructions to manage the moisture content. Here is all you need to know: At least 70 flights were cancelled and 33 diverted to Bengaluru even as operations were suspended at the Chennai airport till 9 am on Tuesday. Media showed pictures of grounded planes with their wheels submerged as the rain pelted down. Taiwans Foxconn and Pegatron halted Apple iPhone production at their facilities near Chennai due to heavy rains. The industries department said only essential supply companies will function for now. Schools, colleges, offices and banks were closed in at least four districts due to severe weather conditions. At least 86 express train services were fully cancelled, including Chennai Central-Coimbatore Vande Bharat Express, Chennai Central-KSR Bengaluru Shatabdi Express, Mysuru-Chennai Central Shatabdi Express, Chennai Central-Tirupati Express, KSR Bengaluru-Chennai Central Brindavan Express among others. Three trains were diverted and 12 trains short-terminated and short-originated from Katpadi, Arakkonam, Tiruvallur, Avadi, Chennai Beach and Chengalpattu. Chennai suburban rail traffic across all sections were temporarily suspended. Passenger specials are being operated to clear stranded passengers. The railway ministry set up an emergency control cell in Chennai and a war room at the Rail Bhawan in New Delhi. Additional enquiry counters and special booths have been set up at Chennai Central, Chennai Egmore and Katpadi to assist passengers and for arrangement of refunds. All section supervisors, commercial inspectors, ticket checking staff are now engaged in special monitoring tasks and to render assistance to passengers on account of cancellations and diversions of trains. Providing statistics on rainfall, the chief minister said more than 15 locations in Chennai received over 20 cm rain, with Perungudi recording the highest at 29.16 cm. Chengalpet district and Avadi in Thiruvallur district also experienced heavy rainfall, with 27.6 cm being recorded in Avadi and 22.04 cm in Mahabalipuram in the last 24 hours. A total of 236 relief camps have been set up across eight locations in Tamil Nadu, providing food, water and other basic amenities to 9,634 individuals. Stalin said 725 personnel from police, fire and rescue, SDRF and NDRF were involved in relief operations. He further said 250 personnel were solely engaged in relief and rehabilitation efforts in Chennai. Additionally, 1,929 electricity pumps were employed to remove water from inundated areas. He also said orders had been issued for seven more ministers to partake in relief and rehabilitation works. Stalin further said an IAS officer had been deployed in each of the Greater Chennai Corporation, Tambaram and Avadi corporations to oversee relief and rehabilitation. He said at least 8,592 EB personnel, supervised by electricity minister Thangam Thennarasu, were engaged in restoration works. To assist residents in low-lying areas, the CM said 350 boats were prepared while 4,320 doctors were posted to provide treatment and curb the spread of rain-related diseases. Additionally, at least 1,000 sanitary workers from other districts were instructed to join relief operations in Chennai, Tambaram and Avadi corporations. He noted that 1,238 machines were in use to remove uprooted trees in rain-affected areas, with around 337 machines solely dedicated to clearing fallen trees in Chennai. Union home minister Amit Shah on Monday spoke to the chief ministers of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry and assured them of all necessary central help. Shah also said adequate deployment of NDRF personnel has already been made and additional teams are ready for further assistance. The Indian Army swiftly responded to a critical plea for assistance in Greater Chennai Corporation. It started rescue and relief operations equipped with boats, flood relief stores and vehicles. The army successfully rescued and assisted about 300 fellow citizens to safety. Agromet issued advisories and best practices to be followed to protect crops against the forecast of heavy rains, gusty winds and hailstorms in various parts of India. It said: Heavy rainfall, gusty winds and hailstorms have been forecast over various parts of India in the coming days. Agromet advisories and best practices should be followed to stay safe and protect your crops, said the IMD in a post on X, formerly Twitter. (With PTI inputs) The Odisha government has deployed rescue teams in the southern districts as a precautionary measure. Though there will be no major impact on Odisha, IMD director general Mrutyunjay Mohapatra said the eastern state will receive light to moderate rainfall on Monday night and the intensity will further increase and heavy rain is expected on Tuesday. Here are the precautionary measures taken in the state: 1. Keeping in view of the prediction of heavy rainfall in the five southern districts of Malkangiri, Koraput, Rayagada, Gajapati and Ganjam, the state government has deployed five teams of ODRAF (Odisha Disaster Rapid Action Force) and eight teams of fire service for immediate rescue operations, Odishas special relief commissioner (SRC) Satyabrata Sahu said. 2. There is a possibility of damage to paddy crops and vegetables. The agriculture department has advised farmers to procure grains in the five districts. Farmers have started harvesting their standing matured crops as advised by the state government. 3. Two Chennai-bound flights from Bhubaneswar were cancelled while the East Coast Railway cancelled the movement of 60 trains. 4. The IMD issued a yellow warning of heavy rain for one or two places in Ganjam, Gajapati, Puri, Nayagarh, Khurda, Cuttack, Jagatsinghpur, Kandhamal, Koraput, Malkangiri and Rayagada districts on December 6. It warned of squally weather conditions, with wind speed reaching 35 to 45 kmph, gusting to 55 kmph along and off the Odisha coast in Gajapati, Ganjam, Puri and Jagatsinghpur districts from the evening of December 4, and it is likely to gradually increase to 40-50 kmph, gusting to 60 kmph, from the evening of December 5 for the subsequent 12 hours. 5. Fishermen have been advised not to venture into deep sea along and off the Odisha coast from December 4 to 6. The Madras High Court (HC) recently directed the Government of India (GoI) to treat a Sri Lankan repatriate man and his family as Indian citizens and let them avail the relief measures announced by the Government of Tamil Nadu for Sri Lankan repatriates. A bench of Justice GR Swaminathan observed that as per the agreements between India and Sri Lanka, in 1974, India was obliged to repatriate not less than six lakh persons of Indian origin from Sri Lanka and grant them citizenship, however, as on date, citizenship has been conferred only on 4,61,639 Indian-origin Tamils (IOT). India will have to confer citizenship on not less than 1,37,000 Indian-origin Tamils. The figures presently available indicate that there are around 5,130 individual applicants belonging to the IOT category seeking Indian citizenship. Even if all of them are granted Indian citizenship, India would still not have fulfilled its treaty obligations, highlighted the bench. The court noted that the petitioner, namely T Ganesan, came to India 33 years ago and now has grandchildren in India. Article 51 of the Indian Constitution mandates that the State shall endeavour to foster respect for treaty obligations in the dealings of organised people with one another, said the bench, while mandating the Union and the State Governments to acknowledge the petitioners status as Indian citizen. THE PETITIONER The petitioner, at present, lives at Irumboothipatty Sri Lankan Refugee Camp in Karur district. He had reached India in 1990 following the intensification of hostilities between the Sri Lankan Army and LTTE. In 2021, he moved the high court, seeking direction to the Union and the State Governments to confer Indian citizenship on him and his family with the relief package applicable for the repatriates. His case was that he was an Indian citizen and sought confirmation of the same from the government, however, since the authorities treated him only as a Sri Lankan refugee, he filed moved the high court for appropriate relief. The said writ petition was disposed of with a direction to the Government of India to consider his representation. In pursuance of the same, the Centres Ministry of Home Affairs passed an order stating that the documents placed by the petitioner before it were not sufficient to prove that he was an Indian Citizen. Challenging the Home Ministrys this decision, the petitioner approached the high court again. The high court noted that meanwhile the proceedings in the present writ petition, the petitioner had already been registered as a citizen and the only issue remaining for consideration was acknowledgment of the same by the government. Further, the court pointed out that the genuineness of the Indian passport produced by the petitioner was questioned by the Government of India. Since it has a duly crossed photograph of the petitioner, it is not open to the Government of India to lob the burden of proof at the petitioner, said the court, while stressing that issuance of the passport had not been denied by the government. Issuance of passport is a sovereign act. When the genuineness of the passport is not in doubt, the exercise of matching the photograph found therein with the claimant has to be undertaken only by the authority concerned. This burden cannot be shifted to the applicant, said the bench. Therefore, while referring to the three agreements between the Government of India and the Government of Sri Lanka regarding the status and future of persons of Indian origin in Sri Lanka, the court asked the government to recognise the petitioners status as Indian citizen. He is also entitled to the rehabilitatory measures announced by the Government for Sri Lankan repatriates. Only if such assistance is extended to the petitioner and his family, he can seamlessly integrate into the mainstream, the court added. New Delhi: The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) has deployed 21 teams in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry and eight additional teams have been kept in reserve in view of the impending cyclone Michaung in the Bay of Bengal which is likely to hit some parts of southern India. This was informed to the National Crisis Management Committee (NCMC), which met here under the chairmanship of Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba, to review the preparedness of state governments and central ministries and departments for impending cyclone, according to an official statement. The Director General, India Meteorological Department (IMD), briefed the NCMC about the current status of cyclonic storm Michaung. The cyclonic storm over southwest Bay of Bengal moved northwestwards with a speed of 9 kmph during past six hours and lay centred at 4.30 pm IST on Sunday over the same region near latitude 11.8N and longitude 82.2E, about 260 km east-southeast of Puducherry, 250 km southeast of Chennai, 380 km south-southeast of Nellore, 490 km south-southeast of Bapatla and 500 km south-southeast of Machilipatnam. It is likely to continue to move northwestwards, intensify further and reach west-central Bay of Bengal, off south Andhra Pradesh and adjoining north Tamil Nadu coasts by Monday forenoon. Thereafter, it would move nearly northwards almost parallel and close to south Andhra Pradesh coast and cross the south Andhra Pradesh coast between Nellore and Machilipatnam during the forenoon of December 5 as a severe cyclonic storm with a maximum sustained wind speed of 90-100 kmph gusting to 110 kmph, the statement said. The cabinet secretary emphasised that states concerned must take up all necessary precautionary measures in the backdrop of the latest forecast by the IMD. He stressed that it must be ensured that there is no loss of life and that evacuation from vulnerable areas is completed well in time. The Chief Secretaries of Tamil Nadu, Odisha, Puducherry and Special Chief Secretary, Revenue & Disaster Management, Andhra Pradesh apprised the NCMC of the preparatory measures being taken. The committee was informed that low-lying areas have been identified and evacuation of people to relief centres has started. Alerts are being issued in local languages through SMS and weather bulletins. Fishermen and vessels at sea have returned to safety. Essential commodities have been stocked. The local administration has deployed a sufficient number of officials for round-the-clock supervision and monitoring of the situation. The NDRF has deployed 21 teams in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry and eight additional teams have been kept in reserve. Rescue and relief teams of the Coast Guard, Army and Navy along with ships and aircraft have been kept on standby, the statement said. Reviewing preparedness measures of the central agencies and the governments of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Puducherry, the cabinet secretary stressed that all preventive and precautionary measures should be taken. He said the aim should be to avoid any loss of life and minimise damage to property. Evacuation should be completed timely. He also directed that timely alerts should be sent in local languages. Gauba directed the Ministry of Ports, Shipping & Waterways, Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas and the Indian Coast Guard that all boats and vessels and manpower deployed at offshore installations should be moved to risk-free area immediately. He assured the governments of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Puducherry that a sufficient number of NDRF teams shall be deployed according to requirement and all central agencies are available for any assistance. Union Home Secretary, Secretary, Department of Fisheries, Secretary, Ministry of Power, Secretary, Ministry of Ports, Shipping & Waterways, Secretary, Department of Telecommunications, Additional Secretary, Petroleum & Natural Gas, Member Secretary NDMA, DG IMD, DG Coast Guard, CISC IDS, IG NDRF and senior officers from the Ministry of Home Affairs also attended the meeting. An Indian Air Force (IAF) Pilatus PC 7 Mk-II trainer aircraft crashed in Ravelli village in Toopran of Medak district in Telangana, leaving both the trainee and instructing pilot dead. The aircraft had taken off from Dundigal Air Force Academy for a routine training sortie. #WATCH | A Pilatus PC 7 Mk II aircraft met with an accident today morning during a routine training sortie from AFA, Hyderabad. Both pilots onboard the aircraft sustained fatal injuries. No damage to any civil life or property has been reported: Indian Air Force officials https://t.co/EbRlfdILfg pic.twitter.com/Eu65ldloo6 ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 The IAF took to the microblogging site X and posted about the incident: A Pilatus PC 7 Mk II aircraft met with an accident today morning during a routine training sortie from AFA, Hyderabad. It is with deep regret that the IAF confirms both pilots onboard the aircraft sustained fatal injuries. No damage to any civil life or property has been Indian Air Force (@IAF_MCC) December 4, 2023 IAF has also ordered a Court of Inquiry to ascertain the cause of the accident. Meanwhile, no damages to civil life or property has been reported yet. Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh condoled the deaths of the pilots and posted on X saying, Anguished by this accident near Hyderabad. It is deeply saddening that two pilots have lost their lives. In this tragic hour, my thoughts are with the bereaved families. According to Telangana Today, the aircraft was burnt down to ashes within a few minutes. Meanwhile locals are unsure as to how many people were aboard the IAF aircraft. PREVIOUS IAF CRASHES In October, a training aircraft with two persons on board crashed near a village in Maharashtras Pune. The pilot and one more person aboard the plane belonging to a private flight academy were taken to the hospital. Prabhakar More, Inspector, Baramati police station told PTI, A training aircraft belonging to Redbird institute (Redbird Flight Training Academy) crashed near Katfal village under Baramati taluka at around 5 pm. The pilot and one more person, may be the co-pilot, were on board, and they were taken to a hospital. Previously in June, a Kiran trainer aircraft of Indian Air Force crashed into an open field in Chamarajanagar districts Bhogapura village in Karnataka. The two pilots aboard the jet successfully ejected using parachutes and were reported to have landed safely. IAF had said that a Court of Inquiry had been ordered to determine the cause of the accident. In May, at least three persons were killed after an Indian Air Force MiG-21 fighter aircraft near Hanumangarh in Rajasthan, during a routine training sortie. A statement from the IAF had said, The aircraft had got airborne for a routine operational training sortie from the Air Force Station at Suratgarh. Soon thereafter, the pilot experienced an onboard emergency, following which he attempted to recover the aircraft as per existing procedures. Having failed to do so, he initiated an ejection, sustaining minor injuries in the process. The pilot was recovered from about 25 kilometres North East of Suratgarh base. It added that it regrets the loss of lives and offered its deepest condolences. (With PTI inputs) The UN refugee agency on Monday sounded the alarm for about 400 Rohingya Muslims believed to be aboard two boats reported to be out of supplies and adrift on the Andaman Sea. The agency, also called UNHCR, worries that all aboard could die without efforts to rescue them, said Babar Baloch, its Bangkok-based regional spokesperson. There are about 400 children, women and men looking death in the eye if there are no moves to save these desperate souls, he told the Associated Press. He said the boats that embarked from Bangladesh are reported to have been at sea for about two weeks. The captain of one boat, contacted by the AP on Saturday, said he had 180 to 190 people on board, they were out of food and water and the engine was damaged. They are worried they are all going to die, said the captain, who gave his name as Maan Nokim. On Sunday, Nokim said the boat was 320 kilometres (200 miles) from Thailands west coast. A Thai navy spokesperson, contacted Monday, said he had not received any information about the boats. The location is about the same distance from Indonesias northernmost province of Aceh on the island of Sumatra, where another boat with 139 people landed Saturday, UNHCRs Baloch said. He said they included 58 children, 45 women and 36 men, reflecting the typical balance of those making the sea journey. Hundreds more arrived in Aceh last month. There is a seasonal exodus of Rohingyas, usually coming from overcrowded refugee camps in Bangladesh. About 740,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar to the camps in Bangladesh since August 2017 after a brutal counterinsurgency campaign tore through their communities. Myanmar security forces have been accused of mass rapes, killings and the burning of thousands of Rohingya homes. International courts are considering whether their actions constituted genocide. Most of the refugees leaving the camps by sea attempt to reach Muslim-dominated Malaysia, where they seek work. Thailand, reached by some boats, turns them away or detains them. Indonesia, another Muslim-dominated country where many end up, also puts them in detention. Baloch with UNHCR said if the two adrift boats are not assisted, the world may witness another tragedy such as in December 2022 when a boat with 180 aboard went missing in one of the darkest such incidents in the region. The Winter Session of the Parliament commenced on Monday amidst cheers of teesri bar Modi sarkar by BJP MPs in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Lok Sabha. #WATCH | BJP MPs raise the slogan of Teesri Baar Modi Sarkar and Baar Baar Modi Sarkar in Lok Sabha in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as the winter session of the Parliament commences. pic.twitter.com/nZp0YqkQMH ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 Lok Sabha proceedings were adjourned till noon after BSP member Danish Ali staged a protest demanding action against BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri for allegedly making derogatory remarks against him. Ahead of the commencement of the Winter session, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, I have been urging for your (Opposition) cooperation in the House. Today, I also speak politically it is beneficial for you too if you give a message of positivity to the country. It is not right for democracy if your image becomes that of hatred and negativity. Opposition is equally important for democracy, it should be equally capable. #WATCH | Winter Session of Parliament | PM Narendra Modi says, I have been urging for your (Opposition) cooperation in the House. Today, I also speak politically it is beneficial for you too if you give a message of positivity to the country. It is not right for democracy if pic.twitter.com/d2FjMDPR6i ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 PM Modi, speaking on BJPs victory in three states, advised the Opposition to learn from the defeat. If I speak based on the recent elections results, this is a golden opportunity for our colleagues sitting in the Opposition. Instead of taking out your anger of defeat in this session, if you go ahead with positivity and learn from the defeat and leave behind the tendency of negativity of the last 9 years, the country will change their point of view for them he said. The report of the Lok Sabha Ethics Committee recommending Mahua Moitras expulsion from Lok Sabha over a cash-for-query complaint is likely to be discussed on the first day of the Winter Session of Parliament. Here are the latest updates on the first day of Winter Session of Parliament- Commenting on BJPs victory in three state elections, CPI(M) MP Elamaram Kareem said, I dont think it is Modi magic. It is because of the disunity among secular opposition parties. It is a lesson to Congress who is the leader of opposition unity CPI MP P Santhosh Kumar said, We have already made our stand very clear that there should be a place for the oppositions agenda as well The government is likely to introduce 19 bills We will take part in the discussion We have demanded that the opposition should go to the place to raise genuine voices. Opposition parties met in LoP Mallikarjun Kharges chamber in Parliament to discuss issues before the Parliament session. #WATCH | Delhi: All party meeting underway at the office of LoP in Rajya Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge ahead of the commencement of the Winter Session of Parliament today. pic.twitter.com/uO6fVgyA9F ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 NAVY DAY 2023: Navy Day is marked to commemorate the success of Operation Trident which took place during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. This year, the Navy Day programme will be organised at the Sindhudurg Fort in Maharashtra on December 4. This is the first time that Navy Day will be celebrated away from the major naval stations. Today, the Indian Navy uses the celebrations to showcase Indias naval prowess alongside its fleet of state-of-the-art ships and aircraft. , The one who controls the sea is all powerfulIndian Navy to Conduct Operational Demonstration at Sindhudurg on #04Dec 2023, #NavyDay2023. Witness the Warships, Aircraft & MARCOs display the operational prowess & capabilities of the #IndianNavy Live on pic.twitter.com/psLEWcEWIT SpokespersonNavy (@indiannavy) November 29, 2023 What Was Operation Trident? Operation Trident was a successful offensive operation launched by the Indian Navy during the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, between December 4 and December 5. During the operation, the Indian Navy sharply attacked the Pakistan port city of Karachi and caused much damage to their naval infrastructure. It was the first time that anti-ship missiles were used in combat between India and Pakistan. The Indian Navys offensive destroyed Pakistans ship fuel reserves and also damaged the Karachi Port. What makes Operation Trident one of the most successful naval operations since World War II is that there were no casualties on the Indian side. Navy Day 2023 Celebrations Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be the chief guest for the Navy Day celebrations. He will unveil the 43-foot statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj at the Rajkot-Malvan sea shore of Sindhudurg. As per a press note by the Ministry of Defence, the event will see the participation of 20 warships along with 40 aircraft comprising MiG 29K and LCA Navy as major attractions along with combat beach reconnaissance and assault demo by the Marine Commandos of the Indian Navy. Additionally, the Naval Band will have a performance, alongside a continuity drill and horn-pipe dance by the SCC cadets. The ships at anchorage will be illuminated as the sun sets and the event will conclude with a laser show at Sindhudurg Fort. Facts About Sindhudurg Fort The Sindhudurg Fort is located on a small island in the Arabian Sea, near the shore of Malva in the Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra. It was commissioned by Chhatrapati Shivaji I between 1664 and 1667. It was designed by the chief architect of the Maratha kingdom Hiroji Indulkar. The Sindhudurg Fort is a protected monument. It is spread over 48 acres, with 30 feet high and 12 feet thick walls that were made to sustain high tide. The forts foundation stones were laid in molten lead. The fort is open every day from 9 am to 5 pm. One needs to take a ferry from Malvan beach to reach the fort. The fort is closed during the rainy season because of high tide. Navy Day 2023 Quotes and Wishes Praying each day for the well-being of the ones who keep our waters safe. Happy Navy Day! We are safe because we have our navy keeping us protected every moment. Salute to our navy soldiers. Thank you warriors of the navy for safeguarding our marine borders with your invincible spirit and bravery. The Indian Navy sails with valor in their soul and honour in their heart. On the occasion of Navy Day, we extend our warm wishes to our navy officers who are always there to protect us and our country from enemies. Happy Indian Navy Day! A good Navy is not a provocation to war. It is the surest guarantee of peace. One of cinemas greatest heroes is whipping his way into an all-new adventure as he returns for his final escapade in Luscasfilms Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Set in 1969, the movie presents a rip-roaring cinematic adventure with Academy Award nominated actor Harrison Ford reprising his iconic role as globe-trotting archaeologist Indiana Jones for the last time. After more than a decade of teaching at New Yorks Hunter College, Indiana is ready for retirement, but his plans change when his estranged goddaughter, Helena Shaw (played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge), takes him on a hunt for a rare artifact. Directed by writer-director James Mangold, the film is helmed by Executive Producers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Talking about the new Indiana Jones that the viewers will encounter, Harrison Ford says, The Indiana Jones we meet in 1969 is the result of the experience that weve had with him throughout the other films. Explaining further about the nature of Indiana Jones to be discovered in the film, he said, This is what happens when youre a broken-down archaeologist/professor and youre frustrated in your career and its your last day on the job before retirement and you maybe occasionally have a drink in the middle of the day. Hes dispirited, hes cynical, hes hurt, but the circumstances that are about to befall him lead to a great adventure in which there is a degree of redemption but renewal as well. Director James Mangold adding how Indy is different in the latest installment said, I wanted to start Harrisons character as far from being Indy as we could, so that the audience would feel the elation when circumstances force him to pull that hat on again. 1969 is a time where no one really believes in heroes like Indiana Jones anymore. In many ways, the adventure weve concocted is a reckoning between an old-school hero and an ambivalent and ever more cynical modern world. The movie is produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall and Simon Emanuel, and written by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, David Koepp and James Mangold. Also joining in on the adventure are Antonio Banderas, John Rhys-Davies, Shaunette Renee Wilson, Thomas Kretschmann, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, Olivier Richters, Ethann Isidore and Mads Mikkelsen. John Williams, who has scored each Indy adventure since the original Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, has once again composed the score. ~ Join the adventurous Indiana Jones on his final adventure across the globe in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny on Disney+ Hotstar ~ For Marvel fans across the world, the departure of Iron Man, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., in Avengers: Endgame was an extremely emotional and heartbreaking moment. It did not only mark a pivotal turn of events in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) but also opened doors for viewers to speculate what might happen next. While some fans are still recovering from the fact they might not see Iron Man in the MCU ensemble again, others have been guessing and hoping for all possible ways their beloved character could be revived. To put an end to all speculations, theres an important piece of news for Iron Man fans here. In a recent Vanity Fair cover story featuring Robert Downey Jr., Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has officially addressed the question of whether Iron Man, portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., will make a return to the MCU. The answer you are waiting for is a no, unfortunately. Explaining the decision, Feige emphasised the MCU teams deliberate decision to conclude Iron Mans narrative, stating that the closure was the result of years of dedicated effort, and they have no intention of reversing it. He said, We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again. We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way. The characters inception dates back to the 2008 film Iron Man, marking the commencement of a franchise that has since expanded to encompass 33 movies and eight Disney+ shows, with more in the pipeline. Downey Jr. reprised his role in nine MCU films, culminating in the characters demise in Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Despite the introduction of the multiverse in Phases 4 and 5 of the MCU, offering a possibility for Iron Mans return, Feige remains resolute in preserving the significance of Iron Mans demise within the narrative. Iron Man aka Robert Downey Jr.s impact extends beyond the screen, reportedly influencing characters like Tom Hollands Spider-Man, who grapples with the loss of his mentor in recent adventures. While the fate of Spider-Mans character in the MCU remains uncertain, Iron Mans legacy persists through the emergence of new heroes, such as Riri Williams (Ironheart), portrayed by Dominique Thorne. Iron Mans pivotal decision in Avengers: Endgame, restoring the population without erasing the five-year gap, has left a lasting imprint on the MCU. This choice resulted in a fractured timeline known as The Blip, generating significant social and political consequences across the universe. Even if Iron Man never returns, his actions resonate; shaping a complex and influential legacy that mirrors the characters multifaceted nature. The beloved couch is back with host Karan Johar as Hotstar Specials Koffee with Karan returns for season 8. This time the conversations are edgier, crazier and candid with no room to escape. Dropping new episodes every Thursday exclusively on Disney+ Hotstar, viewers are on a whirlwind journey of getting up close and personal with celebrities. This week, Kiara Advani and Vicky Kaushal are coming together on Karan Johars Koffee With Karan 8. The duo had last appeared in Lust Stories (2018), as part of Karan Johars directorial, a part of the anthology of four stories that sheds light on modern relationships. In the latest promo that dropped, Karan, Kiara and Vicky can be seen having a ball of a time during the episode. In the episode, Karan mentions that the last time Vicky Kaushal was featured alongside Kiaras current husband, Sidharth Malhotra, saying, The last time I interviewed Vicky, he was with your husband. In response, Kiara blushes and shares, When Sid came for that episode, we had just returned from Rome, where he proposed to me. Vicky then says, He played it really well. Check out the video: Actors Sidharth Malhotra and Kiara Advani began 2023 with a bang. The couple, who were paired opposite each other in Shershaah (2021), tied the knot in an intimate ceremony in Jaisalmer in the company of family and close friends in March this year. They met at the wrap-up party of Kiaras anthology film Lust Stories (2018) but it was only during the shoot of Shershaah that they began dating. During his episode two weeks back, Sidharth Malhotra, too, opened up on married life. He shared, I came to Bombay (Mumbai) about 16 years ago, and I lived by myself for the initial years with friends. I shared rooms and apartments, and now I have this one person I have dated, and obviously, there is so much love. I feel more responsible now; I feel like I have another person I have to take care of. Gautami Patil is one of the most popular folk dancers in Maharashtra. She is known for her Lavani dance and has a massive fan following among the masses. People from all age groups come to see her exceptional dancing skills. The folk dancer is often in the news for being involved in various controversies as well. Even though many people have protested against her, the actress enjoys a great social media presence as well. Now, it has been found that the famous Lavani dancer will be making its debut on the silver screen as well. The dance is currently making headlines for her acting debut with the upcoming film Ghungroo. The film is directed by Baba Gaikwad. Recently, the makers of the film revealed the poster and release date of the film. According to reports, an event was organised by the makers in Pandharpur in Solapur district, Maharashtra. During the event, the director and producer of the film launched the poster and release date. The film will be released on December 15 and it will hit 100 theatres in the state. Also, in the poster, Gautami can be seen sitting in her Lavani attire. This will be Gautamis first film as an actress. View this post on Instagram A post shared by (@shrik788) Gautami will be touring various cities in Maharashtra starting on December 6 to promote the film. As per reports, the film is based on the lives of artists and showcases the importance of women artists who dance in folk art centres, tamasha, and stage shows. It has also been reported that the film will also have a love story. Talking about the fil, Gautami said, Maja Ghungroo is coming. This movie is based on the artists life. Everyone should watch this movie rather than hear me talk more about it. It is a very nice film. The film has been shot in different locations in six states, including Maharashtra, Punjab, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, and Andhra Pradesh. Baba Gaikwad also informed us that this film will be made in six different languages. Randeep Hooda and Lin Laishram recently tied the sacred knot in Manipur. The lovebirds had an intimate wedding ceremony which was only attended by their close friends and family. Now, according to the latest update, the newly wedded couple will be hosting a wedding reception in Bombay next week. According to a report in Hindustan Times, Randeep and Lin already had an after-party in Manipur. The Bombay reception will be mainly for their industry friends. They have already begun sending out invitation cards for the same but havent disclosed the venue for now. The wedding reception party will most likely take place on December 11. A source close to their family informed the portal, Randeep and Lin have a huge circle of friends as they have worked extensively in Mumbai. So all of them have been invited. Besides that, Lins close friend and immediate family will be traveling from Manipur to Mumbai to attend the reception. Just like their wedding, the couple will stick to their culture and don ethnic Manipuri outfits . Randeep and Lins wedding photos have been going viral on social media. The lovebirds had a traditional wedding, and it was all things simple and elegant. Have a look at the photos : An insider informed the news portal, Never for a moment, while taking pheras did the smile leave his face. His family was equally captivated by the local rituals. They chose to embrace traditional outfits over designer outfits, not only during the wedding but also for temple visits. They had bought lehengas from Mumbai for the festivities but never took them out of their bags. The emotional significance of the ceremony deeply moved Randeeps mother, who had tears in her eyes during the ceremony. Katrina Kaif infused an Indian essence into the Red Sea Film Festival 2023 in Jeddah by gracing the event in a black saree. Numerous images capturing the Tiger 3 actress engaging with fans and taking photos have gained widespread attention on social media. The actress also treated her followers to glimpses of her red-carpet appearance on Instagram, charming them with her traditional attire. Katrina also discussed her on-screen collaboration with Vijay Sethupathi in the forthcoming movie, Merry Christmas. In addition to the captivating images of Katrina Kaif, a video of the actress sharing her experience working with Vijay Sethupathi in Merry Christmas has gained immense popularity. Katrina expressed, It was a long-time desire to work with him (Vijay Sethupathi), and I had the chance in Merry Christmas. It was an extraordinary experience, undoubtedly the most challenging film Ive undertaken. The character demanded a lot, but the overall experience was he truly pushes you as an actor. She also highlighted the bilingual nature of the film, shot in Hindi and Tamil, revealing the added challenge of delivering her lines in Tamil. Katrina praised her co-star, noting the distinct nuances he brought to each language during the takes. Katrina Kaif, alongside Bollywood counterparts such as Will Smith, Ranveer Singh, Ananya Panday, Freida Pinto, and Johnny Depp, graced the Red Sea International Film Festival 2023 in Jeddah. She exuded simplicity and elegance at the event, donning a black saree paired with a sequined blouse. She shared the pictures on Instagram and wrote, A day at @redseafilm So wonderful to see what a stunning festival @jomanaaalrashid and @moalturki have created in the Kingdom, the most warm and gracious hosts. Taking away so many wonderful memories. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Katrina Kaif (@katrinakaif) Katrina Kaif recently featured in Tiger 3 alongside Salman Khan, earning praise from fans and achieving significant box-office success. Her upcoming release, Merry Christmas, is set to hit the screens in January 2024. Trisha was slammed by social media users after she gave Animal a glorious review. The Ponniyin Selvan actress, who was recently in the news for calling out Mansoor Ali Khan on his rape comment, took to her Instagram Stories on Sunday night and praised Animal. Sharing a poster of Ranbir Kapoor from the film, the Leo actress called the film cult. One word-cult! Pppppppaaaaaahhhhhhh (face with peeking eye, face exhaling and clapping hands emojis), she wrote. The post did not go down well with many on social media and soon, Trisha faced flak. Although she deleted the post soon after, screenshots of the post were shared on X (previously known as Twitter) and Reddit. Soon, many began criticising her for supporting the film that glorifies toxic men. Is not Trisha took a stand against her Leo co-actor when talking sh*t about her and even talking about having rape scene with her but this film is misogyny and treating women like a shit. How can she support this movie? a social media user said, referring to her recent controversy. Isnt she the one who called out Mansoor Ali Khan in Leo for remarks about her, which is an insult to any woman? Whoa, such hypocrisy, added another. Why are you glorifying this sh*t movie. Cult?!! Cult?! Seriously!? Even men are calling out but actresses are hyping this?! I cant with this herd mentality. Women, just stop. Stop glorifying, hyping Animal movie, another user wrote. Movies like Animal is what gives rise to people like Mansoor Ali Khan. The fact that Trisha of all people goes and wax lyrical about that movie is just all kinds of wrong, a comment read. What is the Trisha-Mansoor Ali Khan Controversy? For the unversed, last month, Tamil actor Mansoor Ali Khan expressed his disappointment that he did not have a scene with Trisha in Leo. He joked that they could have had a rape scene together. The comment sparked an outrage with Trisha slamming Mansoor. A case was also filed against him by the National Commission For Women (NCW) in Chennai. After he was brought into questioning, Mansoor apologised to Trisha and she also accepted his apology. However, he has now said he is planning to sue Trisha for defamation. About Animal: Animal has received polarising reviews. While many have called the film out for glorifying toxic masculinity yet again after Kabir Singh, a huge section of the audience has also praised Ranbir Kapoor for his performance. The film is doing well at the box office. As per reports, Animal has collected Rs 201.53 crores in the first weekend in India alone. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) dealt a big blow to the main Opposition, the Congress, by snatching Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh with a clear majority while retaining Madhya Pradesh with a big mandate. The southern state of Telangana was the only consolation prize for the Congress, which won the state for the first time, defeating the two-time Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao of Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS). These states account for 82 seats in the Lok Sabha. Undoubtedly, these results ahead of next years Lok Sabha elections are likely to have an impact on both the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Opposition-led Indian National Democratic Inclusive Alliance (INDIA). Possibility for BRS to join the NDA in Telangana? This year, after the Congress defeated both the BJP and Janata Dal (Secular) in the Karnataka state assembly elections, there was a churning in the Opposition in the state. The outcome was that both the BJP and JD(S) decided to join hands and the latter officially joined the NDA. Both parties view Congress as a common enemy and thats what forced them to come together. Arithmetic was also one of the important reasons behind this new alliance as the combination of BJPs 36 per cent and 13.3 per cent of JD(S), when added together, was 6 per cent more than Congress 42.88 per cent votes. A similar thing was witnessed in Telangana, where the Congress, for the first time, won with a clear majority by defeating the BRS. However, the combination of BRS 37.35 per cent and 13.90 per cent of BJP, when added together, is 11 per cent more than the Congress 39.40 per cent. It has to be mentioned that since Congress started to strengthen itself on the ground, the state chief minister and partys supremo KCR toned down his attack against the BJP and increased his attack against the Congress. In fact, as the state elections kept approaching, KCR, who himself dreamt of becoming prime minister and even changed his partys name from Telangana Rashtra Samithi to Bharat Rashtra Samithi, started to realise that his hold on the state faced a threat from the Congress. Even the states political grapevine had stories of a secret understanding between BRS and the BJP. For a regional party like the BRS, staying in power is crucial for survival in its stronghold. And for the BJP, the immediate task is to lessen the number of seats of the Congress in the Lok Sabha polls from the state. With BRS losing a significant section of Muslim votes to the Congress, it may not be difficult for the former to ally with the latter. The state saffron leadership, however, may not be ready for this alliance as it sees hope by utilising the current anger against the BRS. Lets not forget that the saffron party saw an increase of both 7 per cent votes and 7 seats in comparison to the last state elections. However, the central leadership of the saffron party may not be averse to ally with the BRS, if the situation demands. To be fair, it is too early to speculate about this alliance at this stage but with the Lok Sabha polls just months away, the possibility of this cant be ruled out. NDA to add another constituent in Tripura? The spectacular results in favour of the BJP are likely to have an impact in the Northeast state of Tripura, where there have been reports of royal scion Pradyot Debbarmas TIPRA Motha joining the BJP-led state government. These speculations have risen due to the soft approach of Motha, despite the fact it is the states main Opposition party towards the states saffron government. Also, it is not a secret that some legislators of the tribal party want to join the ruling party to enjoy the fruits of power. Thats the reason Pradyot has several times criticised a section of his party leaders for eyeing power. Apart from this, Motha, which grew in the tribal belt by promising the infeasible demand of Greater Tipraland, has been losing momentum and to sustain its hold, it needs to get something from the Centre like direct funding of the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (TTAADC). For the Motha to survive, it needs to be friendly with the Centre and with chances of the BJP coming to power increasing after the victory in three Hindi heartland states, accounting for 65 seats in the Lok Sabha, Pradyot cant afford to antagonise the saffron party, which also needs the formers support to retain the Tripura East Lok Sabha constituency. It has to be mentioned that there are still three vacant slots in the state cabinet and there have been reports that the BJP is ready to allot two ministers to the Motha. Results likely to increase the tussle within the INDIA Bloc After the Congress failed to win any of the states in the Hindi heartland, it is obvious that the partys authority as the main leader is likely to be challenged by the constituents of the INDIA bloc, most of them are regional parties like Trinamool Congress (TMC), Samajwadi Party (SP), and Janata Dal (United), and also the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). However, the Congress partys victory against the regional party BRS, whose leader has the ambitions of occupying the post of prime minister, is also an important message to the regional leaders of the INDIA bloc like Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, aspiring for the post of the prime minister. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal whose party, although technically a national party as its strength is limited to only the northern states of Delhi and Punjab too has the ambitions of becoming the prime minister. Telanganas results are going to be used by the Congress to remind the other constituents that big dreams may be costly for them in their own strongholds an attempt by the grand old party to blunt their attack on its ability to lead the INDIA bloc. At the same time, it is also true that Rahul Gandhi can fetch more votes in comparison to other leaders of the bloc. But his leadership is going to be challenged by leaders like Kejriwal, Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Mamata and Nitish, who much before the results have expressed their disappointment towards the Congress seriousness in strengthening the bloc. They view Rahul as politically incapable of defeating the Modi-led BJP. Since the formation of the INDIA bloc, there has been a tussle among the constituents. The results of the four states, instead of pouring cold water, are likely to only accelerate this tussle leading to an uncertainty about the political future of the INDIA bloc ahead of the Lok Sabha polls of 2024. The author is a political commentator and tweets @SagarneelSinha. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18s views. Having grace in defeat is essential in politics. Going ballistic after a loss, especially after elections, often antagonises the voters. It demonstrates the losing sides lack of sportsmanship and also projects a sense of entitlement on their part that they alone deserve to be in power. The voters, as became evident with the results of the three Hindi heartland states, do not agree with this outlook of the Congress and its sycophants. Nevertheless, prominent members of the party and its most vocal supporters on social media chose to blame the voters of the three states for electing the BJP. While doing so, they chose to manufacture a false North-South divide, suggesting that while voters in South India make more electorally sound choices by not allowing the BJP to rise to power, those in North India continue to elect the BJP due to a variety of factors, ranging from religion to bigotry to even illiteracy. Who is Hurting Idea of India By Manufacturing Fake North-South Divide? Karti Chidambaram, the son of P Chidambaram, proclaimed on X (formerly Twitter): The SOUTH!. This was some really weird muscle flexing on Chidambaram juniors part, who seemed to suggest that South India continues to keep the BJP at bay because the issues of the North do not matter down under. The Chairman of Congress data analytic department Praveen Chakravarty wrote, The South-North boundary line getting thicker & clearer! He subsequently deleted the tweet, but screenshots remain readily available. X users who are sympathetic to the party and harbour a disdain for the BJP were more vocal. One user said, Indias split is now complete. Its Progressive South vs Communal North. I dont know for how long the south will pay for and carry the norths bigotry. He added, All the bigots from North India are showing us why they are called bimaru and dung belt in comments. Another user said, Hence proved South is aware and North is still lagging far behind. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, who is the subject of an investigation by both the Enforcement Directorate and Delhi Police over alleged terror links and suspicious money trails said, Victory for Hindutva and its coalition partner Big Business. Soft Hindutva of Cong fails miserably. North-South divide widens. Unfortunately, for the Congress and its supporters, the moment the people throw a mandate against the grand old party, they become not only religious bigots but also symbols of what supposedly plagues North India lack of education and indifference to real issues. That the son of a sitting South Indian states chief minister calls for the eradication of Sanatan Dharma, meanwhile, is bold and entirely civilised. At least that is what we are supposed to believe. What such sharp analysts almost always seem to forget is that the same people, just in 2018, voted in favour of the Congress. Kamal Nath, as a matter of fact, even ran a government for over one year in Madhya Pradesh. How is it that the same people who voted for you five years ago are suddenly now bigots, communal and backward? There is another anomaly with the Congress ecosystems casual hatred for North India. In Karnataka, the BJP continues to be a force to reckon with. In 2019, the BJP won a whopping 25 Lok Sabha seats from the state. Unless the Congress and its coterie do not consider Karnataka to be a part of South India, their petty campaign to invent a supposed North-South divide falls flat on its face. The fact of the matter is that the BJP has won Karnataka in the past, and it would not be a long shot to suggest that a strong performance from the party in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls is likely. Yashwant Deshmukh from C-Voter fame has already said that this is a strong possibility. Consider Telangana as another example. The BJP has doubled its vote share in Telangana, going up from 7 per cent in 2018 to close to 14 per cent now. Its seat share has risen from 1 to 8. So, the party cannot be written off in the state just yet. If anything, the BJP is on the ascent in Telangana. In Tamil Nadu, a bastion of Dravidian and South Indian identity politics, the BJP is working on a long-term project with K Annamalai at the forefront. A lot is being invested in the state, and the BJP will eventually become a significant challenger to Dravidian parties. The Congress also seems to have forgotten its victory in Himachal Pradeshs assembly elections earlier this year. If North Indian voters were indeed making electoral choices on the Hindutva plank alone, the Congress would have not come to power in the Himalayan state by defeating the BJP in a one-on-one contest. Drumming up toxic regionalism in a post-verdict scenario is nothing more than a sorry coping mechanism for the Congress ecosystem and it must be called out. Stop Blaming Voters and Learn Your Lessons The mindset that voters are to blame for not choosing a party that gave them no vision or a blueprint on how their governments will be different from the BJPs shows that Opposition parties, especially the Congress, do not learn the required lessons from such losses and continue living in a bubble. Until August this year, the defeat of the BJP in all three heartland states Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh was considered the most predictable outcome. Then, Amit Shahs election mathematics and strategy-making kicked in. Coupled with Prime Minister Narendra Modis unmatched persona among voters and the BJPs formidable election machinery, the saffron party ended up stunning not just the country, but the world with a spectacular sweep of all three states in the Hindi heartland. The BJP started distributing tickets well ahead of the Model Code of Conduct coming into place. This ensured candidates, including sitting Union ministers, had enough time to prepare for the elections. The strategy worked, and the party has won handsomely on seats that it lost in 2018. The Congress, it appears, has not quite figured out what struck it. This was their election to take. Instead, the BJP posted an unreal victory in Madhya Pradesh scoring no less than a 49 per cent vote share. In Rajasthan, the BJPs strategy of creating a direct contest between Ashok Gehlot and Narendra Modi made the outcome a foregone conclusion. And in Chhattisgarh, the overconfidence of the Congress, big allegations of corruption against Bhupesh Baghels government and the party falling for its own propaganda seem to have gotten the better of it. While the BJP has successfully defended a state like Madhya Pradesh despite being in government for four terms, the Congress has collapsed like a house of cards in two major states Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh after just one term in power. That is quite telling. To put it simply, the Congress has snatched a spectacular defeat from the jaws of victory and is now blaming the voters for its own complacency. What it should be doing instead is learning from its mistakes, bowing before the will of the people and accepting that it needs to undertake some serious soul-searching. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18s views. The BJPs hat-trick in the Hindi belt arguably cements its status as the system-defining party in a One-Party Dominant (OPD) scenario. What does this mean for the parties pushed to the margins, and how much pressure can they exert on the saffron party in 2024? Its not just that the BJP won all three states. The sheer extent of victory is surprising. In Madhya Pradesh, it achieved a record 48.6 per cent vote share in the face of almost 20 years of anti-incumbency, exceeding the Congress winning vote share in 2018 by 8 per cent. The Congress was not expected to face anti-incumbency in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. But in Chhattisgarh, the BJP cruised to an all-time high vote share of 46 per cent, inflicting a crushing defeat. The fact that a Congress victory was seen as a foregone conclusion makes it even more impressive. In Rajasthan, the Congress vote share remained more or less static, but the BJP surged ahead with a healthy swing of 3.7 per cent. Even in Telangana, where the BJP is not a force, it doubled its vote share to win eight seats. Political analysts who had predicted that the BJPs dominance was fragile because its footprint and vote share were not large enough and the Opposition not fragmented enough, will have to think again. The BJP iteration of the OPD system in this, the fourth phase of Indias party system, may be different from the old Congress one, but is no less valid. First, the Opposition is disunited, regardless of the INDIA optics, underscoring the unipolarity of Indian politics. The alliance partners, cold-shouldered by the Congress in the assembly elections, lost no time in pointing fingers at the GOP (once grand old party) after the results came in. The JD(U), which is the prime mover, is now pitching for the pole position in INDIA. Indeed, the jubilation of the BJP is matched only by that of some of the Congress allies! The difference is that the Opposition today, unlike that during the Congress hegemony, has no counter-narrative to offer. Modis development mantra, bundled with nationalism and Hindu pride, won the day against the Congress revdis and promises of a caste census. Second, the assembly election results confirm the trends seen in 2019, which argue a march towards hegemony. The margins of victory are bigger. In MP, some 20 BJP candidates won with margins of more than 50,000, which is huge in an assembly election. Also, while the number of small parties has increased, their effective vote share has declined. In MP, the combined vote share of the BJP and Congress has increased by around 7 per cent, while that of the BSP and SP has decreased by 2.5 per cent. These results indicate less fragmentation in the political system than the number of parties (13 were in the fray) would argue. The Aam Aadmi Party, for instance, came a cropper in all three Hindi belt states, polling fewer votes than NOTA (none of the above). Third, the depth of the BJPs influence in its strongholds appears to make up for its geographical limitations. Apart from caste and Hindu consolidation, it has added new voting groups like women, the youth and the poor (labharthi and would-be labharthis) who repose their faith in Modis welfare schemes and development-oriented governance. Conventional wisdom has it that the BJPs continuing dominance would be eroded by three factors: a strong secular pre-poll alliance, increased dependence on regional parties and finally, the absence of the Modi factor. The assembly elections indicate that the so-called secular alliance is a non-starter, at least so far. Nor is the BJP more dependent on its allies, as it consistently has a better strike rate, as was evident in the 2021 Assam polls and the 2020 Bihar elections. That brings us to the Modi factor, which played a crucial role in the recent assembly elections in the absence of a chief ministerial face. Post-2019 surveys clearly indicated that a majority of those who voted for BJP did so because they wanted Modi as their PM. But the ideological shift in favour of the BJP which now stands for development, welfare and Hindu nationalism is too well-established to revert to a Mandal scenario. As political scientist Rahul Verma wrote, It is unlikely that the departure of Modi would represent an abrupt end to the BJP-dominant system. The Congress system was challenged externally, by charismatic figures like Charan Singh, Chandrashekhar, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and so on. Currently, no such challenge exists. Rahul Gandhis over-hyped Bharat Jodo Yatra, far from denting the BJPs deep support base in MP, could not prevent further expansion. Unless the Congress submits to an effective pre-poll coalition, with a credible figure at the helm, 2024 will be a repeat of the assembly elections: Modi all the way. Bhavdeep Kang is a freelance writer and author of Gurus: Stories of Indias Leading Babas and Just Transferred: The Untold Story of Ashok Khemka. A journalist since 1986, she has written extensively on national politics. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18s views. Ahead of the winter session of Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday advised the Opposition to not take out anger of election loss in Parliament session, and adopt a positive attitude. Mauka hai, mauka jaane na deejiye. May be people will look at you from a fresh perspective, he added. The advice comes amid Rahul Gandhi reiterating his mohabbat ki dukaan slogan that the Congress leader has been raising since the Bharat Jodo Yatra last year. BJP leaders have often dubbed the phrase as PR stint, as the Opposition, in reality, is nafrat ka mega mall. Some had even highlighted the inhumane treatment meted out to some relatives by the Nehru-Gandhi family. The BJP leaders claimed that Rahul Gandhi has spewed a lot of hate against the motherland from the US and this is nothing new for his family and the party. Earlier, the prime minister had taunted Gandhi over his phrase, saying that the Oppositions efforts fail every time and then they harbour hatred for voters. Someone talked doing dil se baat. Their Modi prem is such that they see Modi even in their dreams. I can understand Congress problem, they have been launching a failed product repeatedly. The launch fails every time. The launching fails and they harbour hatred for voters. But PR people propagate Mohabbat ki dukaan. That is why, people of the country are saying, Ye hai loot ki dukan, jhooth ka bazaar, the prime minister had said. Union home minister Amit Shah too had taken a jibe at Gandhi, and said, There is one member in this House who has been launched 13 times in politics. This member failed all 13 times. Amid PM Modis Monday advice, the Opposition is already planning to attack the ruling BJP as their leaders met at Leader of Opposition Mallikarjun Kharges chamber in the morning. The INDIA bloc has decided to support Mahua Moitra and demand discussion on the issue. The leaders are planning to raise the leak of the ethics committee report to media before being tabled in Parliament. Four members of a family were booked in Indore in Madhya Pradesh for allegedly throwing boiling water and assaulting participants of a BJP poll victory procession, a police official said on Monday. The Bharatiya Janata Party on Sunday registered a landslide victory in the MP Assembly polls winning 163 seats in the 230-member House. The incident took place on Sunday night when the procession of party workers was moving past the house of one Vakil Pathan, a Khajrana police station official said. Pathan opposed the procession, picked up an argument with participants and then assaulted and abused them, he said. As per the FIR, at the behest of Pathan, his wife Shabnam threw boiling water from the roof of the house on the processionists. Pathan, his wife and two sons have been charged under Indian Penal Code sections 294 (obscene act), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 324 (voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous means) and 506 (intimidation). The dispute is not a big one. The matter is being investigated, said Khajrana police station in-charge Umrao Singh. Trinamool Congress might skip the upcoming meeting of the oppositions INDI alliance on December 6 as party supremo Mamata Banerjee on Monday said she was not aware of any such meeting. While addressing the media on Monday, the West Bengal Chief Minister said that her party was unaware that the INDIA grouping is planning to hold a sitting in New Delhi. She also said that since the party was not informed about the meeting, she scheduled an event in North Bengal. #WATCH | Kolkata: On the upcoming INDIA alliance meeting on December 6, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee says, " I don't know, I have got no information so I kept a programme in North BengalIf we had the information, we wouldn't have scheduled those programmes. We would have https://t.co/iz5pDFIFK8 pic.twitter.com/3yYzikRRgu ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 I dont know, I have got no information so I kept a programme in North Bengal. If we had the information, we wouldnt have scheduled those programmes. We would have gone (for the meeting), but we have not received any information, Banerjee said. The TMC chief also said that she would have attended the meeting if she received the information beforehand. However, Banerjees statement came after her party blamed Congress for its failure in the assembly polls. This comes after Congress National President Mallikarjun Kharge on Sunday called for the meeting of the opposition bloc on December 6 after it faced huge defeat in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The December 6 meeting will be held after a gap of three months since the last one in Mumbai on August 31 and September 1. The opposition parties are likely to hold discussions on the plans for next years Lok Sabha elections as well as the loss in three out of four states in the assembly elections held last month. The recently concluded Assembly polls that saw the BJP win three states will not impact the INDIA bloc but the opposition parties need to work harder for the Lok Sabha polls next year, opposition leaders said on Monday. The BJP swept Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh on Sunday, inflicting a resounding defeat on the Congress to tighten its stranglehold in the Hindi heartland, in a big boost for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and setting the tone for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Meanwhile, a day after the Congress lost assembly polls in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, key aides of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar made a push for a credible face like the JD(U) supremo to lead the INDIA coalition. The loans Elon Musk took out to buy Twitter (now called X) was about $13 billion and the social media company has to pay about $1.2 billion in interest payments every year. As big advertisers quit the platform and X cannot pay the interest on its loans or pay employees, then it could actually go bankrupt, the BBC reported on Sunday. But that would be an extreme scenario that Musk would surely want to avoid, the report mentioned. However, for a company he bought for $44 billion, bankruptcy might sound unthinkable but it is possible. Disney and Apple are no longer advertising on X and Musk told companies last week to Go f*** yourself. Retail giant Walmart has confirmed that it is not advertising on X. We arent advertising on X as weve found other platforms to better reach our customers, a Walmart spokesperson was quoted as saying in reports. The departure of Walmart adds to the growing list of firms leaving X after Musk endorsed an antisemitic post last month (for which, he apologised last week). Apple, Disney, IBM, Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery are among the companies no longer buying ads on X. Last year, around 90 per cent of Xs revenue came from advertising. Not any more. Musk has warned that the loss of big advertisers would spell the end of X. If the company fails, it will fail because of an advertiser boycott. And that will be what bankrupts the company. he said. What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail, Musk had told the audience at The New York Times DealBook Summit. In 2022, Twitters advertising revenue was around $4 billion. Insider Intelligence estimates that this year, it will drop to $1.9 billion. After Musks outburst against big advertisers, X is reportedly aiming to tap small and medium businesses (SMBs) to offset the advertising loss from big companies. A new report by The Financial Times has claimed X will now turn to SMBs to shore up revenue after Musk angered big brands by supporting antisemitic content. Small and medium businesses are a very significant engine that we have definitely underplayed for a long time, a company spokesperson was quoted as saying. It was always part of the plan, now we will go even further with it, the company added. Nowadays, dealing with malware and other harmful software has unfortunately become a part of our digital lives. Hackers and other malicious actors, such as scammers, spare no effort in exploiting unsuspecting victims. This involves stealing banking information or advancing another nefarious agenda. Fortunately, Google has provided ways to deal with malware on Android and even remove it. But before we get into that, let us first inform you about signs that may suggest your phone is infected with malware. Signs That Your Phone Has Malware: Google signs you out of your account. You notice pop-ups and ads that shouldnt be there. Your phone significantly slows down. Something starts occupying a large amount of space on your device. Your browser redirects to random websites or adult content. Your friends and family receive messages that you never sent. How to Stay Safe: Google advises that you ensure your Play Protect is turned on. This can be done in the Play Store. Navigate to the Play Store, tap on the profile icon, go to Play Protect, click on Settings, and turn on Scam apps with Play Protect. Another essential step is to update your device software to the latest available version. If your device is beyond the support period and no longer receives security updates, consider upgrading to a more recent one. Avoid installing apps from outside Google Play, such as random APKs found on the internet, paid apps available for free on a website, or a bank app that an agent is pressuring you to install. Refrain from installing APKs from random online sources unless you are absolutely certain about their legitimacy. Google allows you to conduct a security checkup to identify threats. On your Android phone or tablet, visit this website to address any security issues you may have. Following these steps should significantly contribute to ensuring that you stay protected from unnecessary threats, thereby safeguarding your privacy and data. Recently, a 32-year-old woman residing in Delhi fell prey to a scam and was allegedly defrauded of Rs. 6 lakhs by an impostor posing as a merchant navy officer from Sweden. Recounting her experience to the police, the woman, a resident of Pratap Nagar, shared that she had been in communication with an individual named Pradeep Kumar Thakur since September 15. Thakur expressed his desire to relocate to India and settle down in Delhi. Thakur told me that he had plans to settle down in India permanently with his mother and 5-year-old daughter. He asked me where I worked, and said he would settle in Delhi accordingly. We exchanged numbers and started talking on WhatsApp, revealed the woman to police officials, as documented by the Times of India. Also Read: Noida Woman Caught Red-handed While Trying to Scam Residents, Confession Video Goes Viral She further elaborated on how Thakur informed her that he had instructed his agent to book a flight from Lisbon to Delhi. However, later, he conveyed that the agent had booked a flight to Mumbai instead, and he would subsequently take another flight from Mumbai to Delhi. In an unexpected turn of events, the woman received a WhatsApp call on October 16 from Pradeep, informing her that he was stuck at the Mumbai Customs Department and needed assistance. Subsequently, she received a call from another woman posing as a Customs official in Mumbai, claiming that Pradeep had been detained with a cheque of Rs. 2 crore, exceeding the limit set for an overseas traveler entering India. Under pressure and believing the elaborate story, the woman was coerced into transferring Rs. 6 lakhs, only to realise later that she had been scammed. Thus, a police case was registered on November 30 under sections 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) and 34 (common intention) of the IPC. Also Read: Man Tries to Rob Woman Of Rs 45 Lakh in This Shaadi Dot Com Scam, Shocks Internet As of now, there have been no reports of the police apprehending the scammer. All over the world, marriage is considered the union of two families. There are different types of marriages in different cultures. There are countless traditions and practices that flourish that reflect the unique beliefs and values of different communities. Among these traditions, some of them even seem complex to outsiders. In some traditions, marriages are considered a way to expand their control. One such community that has shocked the internet with their practices is the Mandi community in Bangladesh. According to reports, men in this community marry their daughters. This tradition has raised questions about ill practices and the balance between preserving cultural heritage and confronting harmful practices. The Mandi tribe is among the many indigenous communities that reside in the remote regions of Bangladesh. Over the years, they have developed a distinct cultural identity that has been characterised by their language, customs and social structures. There is a prevalent practice in this community where the father marries the daughter as soon as she grows up. As per reports, whenever a woman is widowed, another man from the community steps up and marries her. He treats their children like their own. But if the widowed woman has a daughter, the man will marry her as well when she turns older. The girl, who calls the man his stepfather, soon has to call him his husband as well. Only then will the men of this community marry the widowed woman. It has been found that this tradition does not involve a biological father marrying his biological daughter. Instead, it usually revolves around a stepfather marrying his stepdaughter. The members of this community have justified this act by stating that the man provides all the facilities not just to the widow but to her daughter as well. Now, one of the girls named Orola, who belongs to the same community, has expressed herself regarding the tradition. She revealed that when her real father died, her mother married another man. Initially, she used to call him her father but when she grew up, she was forced to get married to the man. Every season, people try something new and interesting to make their wedding day memorable. From unique outfits, decor to special events, there is an endless list of ideas to make your wedding stand out. Recently, a wedding in Singapore has gained popularity due to its unusual nature. On November 26, a couple reportedly married in a KFC-themed ceremony. The bride was quite fascinated by the global food chain and wanted her special day to be hosted there. 32-year-old Laing Le Wong, who is bound to a wheelchair due to medical complications, married 40-year old Xie Peng in this unusually themed wedding. The pair exchanged vows in the presence of countless KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) menu items. Interestingly, instead of holding a bouquet of roses and lilies on her wedding day, the bride had a bouquet of KFC drumsticks decorated with white wrapping paper and a red ribbon. Wong is quite a KFC fan and had emailed the restaurant ahead of her wedding, looking for an adorable souvenir to celebrate her day. Wong has faulty blood vessels in her brain that limit her ability to walk. Therefore, when the restaurant learned of her condition, the local manager decided to do more to help her make the day special. According to sources, KFC paid for half of the wedding food and provided fowl-themed decorations for the reception. It is reported that the couple initially met in person at a KFC outlet, making the brand more meaningful for them. Since then, Wong has been a KFC devotee and has fantasised about celebrating her wedding in this manner. While it may be an unusual concept to hold your wedding reception at a fast food chain or serve items from their menu to your guests, many such outlets are taking it quite seriously. View this post on Instagram A post shared by McDonalds Indonesia (@mcdonaldsid) Recently, McDonalds Indonesia announced that it would begin supplying wedding catering and introduced a unique package. The Wedding Mekdi package includes 100 orders of chicken sandwiches and 100 orders of four-piece chicken McNuggets, according to an Instagram post. The deal, which is presently only available in Jakarta, will cost approximately $230. It implies a couple could invite 100 guests to their wedding and offer each of them a nugget and sandwich combo for $2 per person. This inevitably brings that wedding expense down, which bothers a lot of people. At least 11 hikers have been found dead after a volcano erupted in western Indonesia, a local rescue official told AFP Monday. Mount Marapi on the island of Sumatra, with a peak of 2,891 metres (9,484 feet), erupted Sunday sending a tower of ash 3,000 metres into the sky. There are 26 people who have not been evacuated, we have found 14 of them, three were found alive and 11 were found dead, said Abdul Malik, head of Padang Search and Rescue Agency, speaking a day after the eruption. He said there were a total of 75 hikers on the mountain from Saturday who rescue workers were trying to account for. Twelve were still missing and 49 had descended, some of whom had been taken to hospital, he said. Rescue teams were working through the night to help bring mountaineers down to safety, West Sumatras natural resources conservation agency said. Rudy Rinaldi, head of the West Sumatra Disaster Mitigation Agency told AFP some of the rescued hikers were receiving medical treatment. Some suffered from burns because it was very hot, and they have been taken to the hospital, he said. Those who are injured were the ones who got closer to the crater. Marapi is on the second alert level of Indonesias four-step system and authorities have imposed a three-kilometre exclusion zone around its crater. The Indonesian archipelago sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where the meeting of continental plates causes high volcanic and seismic activity. The Southeast Asian country has nearly 130 active volcanoes. The Israeli military said its ground forces were operating against Hamas across the Gaza Strip on Sunday, what is being seen as the start of a planned ground offensive in the enclaves south. The Israeli military earlier ordered people to evacuate some areas in and near the city, but did not announce any new southern ground assault. The Hamas Palestinian militant group said its fighters clashed with Israeli troops about 2 km from the southern city of Khan Younis. Residents, many of whom had moved there to flee earlier attacks in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, said they could hear tank fire and feared a new Israeli ground offensive was building. The IDF (Israel Defence Forces) continues to extend its ground operation against Hamas centres in all of the Gaza Strip, spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters in Tel Aviv. The forces are coming face-to-face with terrorists and killing them. ANOTHER GROUND OFFENSIVE Gaza residents said earlier on Sunday they feared an Israeli ground offensive on the southern areas was imminent. Tanks had cut off the road between Khan Younis and Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza, effectively dividing the Gaza Strip into three. The Israeli military ordered Palestinians to evacuate several areas in and around Khan Younis. It posted a map highlighting shelters they should go to west of Khan Younis and south toward Rafah, on the border with Egypt. Many residents started packing but said that areas they had been told to go to were themselves coming under attack. The Israeli military said on Sunday its war planes and helicopters had struck Hamas targets including tunnel shafts, command centres and weapons storage facilities. Naval forces had hit Hamas vessels on the coast, it said. The military declined to give figures on the number of air strikes carried out. IDF troops eliminated 500 of the 800+ exposed shafts to Hamas underground tunnels located near or inside kindergartens, schools, playgrounds and mosques.To be clear, these places arent childproof, but rather teeming with terrorism. Every tunnel shaft and weapon we find is pic.twitter.com/xIVO1x0PD8 Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) December 3, 2023 Bombing in Khan Younis and Rafah The Jabalia refugee camp in the north of Hamas-ruled Gaza was among the sites reported hit from the air. A Gazan health ministry spokesperson said several people were killed by an Israeli air strike. Bombardments from warplanes and artillery were also concentrated on Khan Younis and Rafah, another city in Gazas south. Israels government spokesperson, Eylon Levy, said the military had struck more than 400 targets over the weekend including extensive aerial attacks in the Khan Younis area and had also killed Hamas militants and destroyed their infrastructure in Beit Lahiya in the north. The renewed warfare followed the end on Friday of a seven-day pause in the fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas militants which had allowed an exchange of 105 hostages held by Hamas, most of them Israelis, for 240 Palestinian prisoners. Over 15,523 people have been killed, in nearly two months of warfare that broke out after a Hamas cross-border raid on southern Israel on October 7 in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and around 240 taken hostage. Israel has promised to annihilate Hamas. IDF spokesperson Jonathan Conricus told CNN that Israeli forces were targeting Hamas command and control centers, weapons storage and logistics facilities, and was asking Palestinians to evacuate to a special humanitarian zone in southern Gaza near Khan Younis. It isnt perfect but it is the best, currently available solution that we have, he said. (With agency inputs) Filling in for President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris flew to the Middle East to tackle a pair of challenges that have flummoxed White Houses for decades: climate change and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Each carries the risk of political blowback going into next years presidential elections. She spent barely 24 hours on the ground in Dubai, less time than it took to get to the United Arab Emirates and then back to Washington. At the UN climate conference, when it was announced that her excellency Kamala Harris was taking the stage Saturday for remarks, she was not even in the room. Harris chair sat unoccupied as world leaders assembled for the panel spoke. When she did show up, she gave a short speech, then dashed off quickly, only to be summoned back for a group photo. Harris was delayed because she had been on the telephone with the emir of Qatar regarding the Israel-Hamas war. And she was in a hurry after the climate event for more meetings with Arab leaders as Israeli bombardments resumed in Gaza after a temporary cease-fire. The awkward double booking during Harris hastily arranged Dubai trip illustrates a set of tricky and at times potentially contradictory policy and political crosscurrents. The Biden administration with its diverse coalition of voters is trying to navigate these crosscurrents just as the 2024 presidential race is heating up. When Harris spoke to reporters after her day of diplomacy, her prepared remarks skipped over the US pledge to commit an additional $3 billion to a climate fund, a development she had cited in her conference speech. To the media, she focused on steps to resolve the war and prepare for what would come next. We all want this conflict to end as soon as possible, and to ensure Israels security and ensure security for the Palestinian people, Harris said. We must accelerate efforts to build an enduring peace and that begins with planning for what happens the day after the fighting ends. Climate and conflict are matters that require a balancing act at home as a possible Biden rematch with former Republican President Donald Trump unfolds. The Democratic administration is staking much of the US economys future on renewable energy, yet voters are frustrated by gasoline prices that are higher than when Biden took office. Similarly, the war that began on Oct. 7 has exposed a divided between Democrats over Washingtons support for Israel and the suffering of Palestinian civilians. As the 81-year-old Biden seeks a second term, Harris, 59, has taken on a larger role promoting his campaign to younger voters. During a monthslong college tour to campuses across the country, the vice president spoke at every stop about the existential threat of climate change, only to have audience members frequently express concern that the administration and the rest of the world are not doing enough. In Dubai, Harris said it was our duty and our obligation to do more to move the world away from fossil fuels and limit the increase in average global temperatures. She said the US would contribute $3 billion to a global fund meant to help developing countries better confront climate change and was joining 90-plus nations in promising to double energy efficiency and triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. JL Andrepont, a senior policy analyst at the environmental group 350.org, said the funding pledge was a cautious but hopeful sign of the power of public pressure. But Harris stopped short of calling for a phaseout of fossil fuels, something many environmental groups want in order to stop the emissions causing climate change. We will continue to celebrate the global wins that support justly sourced and implemented renewable energy for all and we wont stop advocating for a fast, full phaseout of all fossil fuels, including oil and gas, Andrepont said. There is a similar level of tension among Democratic supporters over the Israel-Hamas war. Polling by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research has shown that 50% of Democrats approve and 46% disapprove a near split of how Biden has dealt with the war. Harris reaffirmed the administrations position that Israel must be able to defend itself. Yet her words after hearing from Arab leaders conveyed some frustration with the scale of Israels response. She described the scale of civilian suffering as devastating and said Israel must do more to protect the lives of Palestinians not involved in the fighting. Biden has previously declared the US relationship with Israel was ironclad and his administration is seeking more than $14 billion to support Israels war efforts. Harris also stressed the importance of a rebuilding process for homes and hospitals in Gaza region. Amber Sherman, chair of the Black Caucus of the Young Democrats of America, said Harris comments were encouraging. Sherman had previously put out a statement on X, formerly Twitter, that said the Palestinians were revolting against occupation by the Israeli government, just as Black Americans had fought against slavery and white supremacy. Its important that people call out whats happening in Palestine, Sherman said. We do want Gaza to be rebuilt and its important that she mentioned that. Yet Harris statements were not entirely reassuring to some critics of the administrations support of Israel. President Biden and his administration should show their statement in action, said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. We want the siege to be lifted. In all, the vice president spent barely 24 hours on the ground in Dubai, less time than the roughly 15 hours each way it took to get there and back from Washington. As she flew from Dubai, Harris spoke by phone with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and separately with Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority, according to the White House. Harris reiterated US concerns with Herzog that actions were escalating tensions. With Abbas, Harris again stated US support for the Palestinian peoples right to security, dignity and self-determination, according to the readout. The vice presidents national security adviser, Phil Gordon, stayed behind in Dubai, and planned to travel to Israel and the West Bank this week to continue to discuss the US commitment to a two-state solution in postwar Gaza. While Harris was on her way back Sunday, White House national security spokesman John Kirby applauded Israel for having published online a map of where Gaza residents could go to avoid the fighting. He held that out as a sign that Israel was responsive to the kinds of concerns raised by Harris and others. Theres not a whole lot of modern militaries that would do that, Kirby said on ABCs This Week, to telegraph their punches in that way. So they are making an effort. The US secretary of state Antony Blinken and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman al-Thani spoke on Tuesday morning to discuss the release of hostages from Gaza and possibility of another ceasefire to de-escalate the hostilities between Israel and Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. The US secretary of state discussed efforts to increase the amount of aid and relief material to the people of Gaza. Spoke with Qatari Prime Minister Al Thani about ongoing efforts to facilitate the safe return of all hostages and further increase levels of aid to civilians in Gaza, Blinken said in a post after his telephone call with Al Thani. Spoke with Qatari Prime Minister Al Thani about ongoing efforts to facilitate the safe return of all hostages and further increase levels of aid to civilians in Gaza. Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) December 4, 2023 Al-Thani told Blinken that Qatar and other mediation partners remain committed to the efforts to restore calm in Gaza City. Israel remains committed to its objective of crushing Hamas in retaliation for the terrorist groups October 7 attacks that killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli authorities. An estimated 240 others, among them young children and elderly people, were taken hostage into Gaza during the attacks. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says more than 15,500 people have been killed in the Israeli retaliation since October 7, more than half of them women and children. Under a truce mediated by Qatar with support from Egypt and the United States, 80 Israeli hostages were freed, along with hostages belonging to other nationalities, in exchange for the release of 240 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. The US secretary of state said he remains grateful to Qatar for its partnership and critical efforts to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas and helping establish the recent humanitarian pause in Gaza. Israel blames Hamas for reneging on the obligations of the truce deal and claims that the truce broke down because Hamas would not produce a list of hostages expected for release the next day. Israel said Hamas refused to release more female hostages and two remaining child hostages, as part of the deal, which was a violation of the agreement. Following the breaking down of the truce deal on Friday, Israel resumed its Gaza Siege and airstrikes and Hamas retaliated by firing rockets into Israel. Qatar and Egypt expressed their disappointment over the resumption of the hostilities claiming the such steps complicates mediation efforts. Qatar said that Gazan civilians should not have to undergo collective punishment and said there is need to open humanitarian corridors in Gaza to allow aid to trickle in and provide safe passage to civilians. A special court in Pakistan on Monday ruled that jailed former prime minister Imran Khan and his close aide ex-foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi would be indicted again on December 12 in the cipher case for allegedly leaking state secrets and violating the laws of the country. Judge Abual Hasnat Zulqernain heard the case in the Adiala Jail Rawalpindi where the two leaders were incarcerated. The in-prison hearing of Khan, 71, and Qureshi, 67, began from the start on Saturday after a ruling by the Islamabad High Court last month declared the jail trial illegal on procedural grounds and also nullified its proceedings. The judge said that fresh indictment was mandatory in the light of the Islamabad High Court judgment which declared all proceedings illegal after ruling against the jail trial on procedural grounds. It resulted in a fresh process to initiate an in-prison trial of the due after completing all procedures and starting the case from the start. Hence, it announced to indict them on the next hearing fixed for December 12. Khan has been incarcerated at the high-security Adiala jail since September 26. Qureshi was also arrested in the cipher (secret diplomatic cable) case and is imprisoned in the same prison. The hearing of the cipher case was again shifted to jail after the order by the trial judge, followed by its approval by the Cabinet and notifications issued by the Ministry of Law and Justice as required under the law. On Monday, Judge Zulqernain adjourned the hearing till December 12. Indias government has agreed to withdraw its soldiers from the Maldives, the Indian Ocean archipelagos President Mohamed Muizzu said on Sunday, following engagements on the sidelines of the COP28 with top Indian officials. In the discussions we had, the Indian government has agreed to remove Indian soldiers, Muizzu told reporters and a statement was issued for the same. We also agreed to set up a high-level committee to solve issues related to development projects. Muizzu won the presidential election in September, having campaigned for the removal of a small Indian military presence in the archipelago. India provides certain military equipment to the Maldives, assists in disaster response and has been helping build a naval dockyard there. Most of the Indian military personnel were in the Maldives to operate and manage two helicopters and a Dornier aircraft given to the Maldives by India. PM @narendramodi met Maldives President @MMuizzu on the sidelines of @COP28_UAE Summit in Dubai. They discussed ways to further bolster India-Maldives relations in sectors pertaining to economic relations, development cooperation and people-to-people ties. pic.twitter.com/1RYf3Z2eNC PMO India (@PMOIndia) December 1, 2023 Last week, India and the Maldives agreed to set up a core group to further deepen their partnership after Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a productive meeting with the newly-elected Maldivian President on the sidelines of COP28. President @MMuizzu and I had a productive meeting today. We discussed ways to enhance the India-Maldives friendship across diverse sectors. We look forward to working together to deepen cooperation for the benefit of our people, the PM tweeted after the meeting, his first with Muizzu. (With agency inputs) Gazan civilians on Monday confirmed that dozens of Israeli tanks entered southern Gaza Strip near Khan Yunis. The Israeli defence forces (IDF) are expected to begin their ground offensive in the area soon. Footage shows the IDF demolishing Hamas's main courthouse in the Gaza Strip, known as the Justice Palace.https://t.co/MhoaTgrcHa pic.twitter.com/6UAuiLknwf Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) December 4, 2023 The IDF announced its entry into the region by demolishing the so-called Justice Palace in Gaza City. The Justice Palace located in the centre of Gaza City is Hamass main courthouse. Israel also brought along with it armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers in the southern Gaza Strip. A resident told the AFP that the tanks were on the southern part of Salah al-Din road which runs from the north to the south of the strip. They are holding Salah al-Din road on both sides and are now cutting it between Deir al-Balah (in central Gaza) and Khan Yunis, firing bullets and tank shells at cars and people trying to move through the area, Moaz Mohammed, 34, was quoted as saying by the AFP. The Israeli army on Monday claimed that it was not seeking to force Palestinian civilians to permanently leave their homes but acknowledged that the conditions in the blockaded enclave were tough. Israel declared war on Hamas, which rules Gaza, after its brutal October 7 attacks on Israel killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli authorities. With the health ministry in the Palestinian territory reporting a death toll of more than 15,500 people, the impact of Israels relentless bombardment and ground offensive has sparked growing international concern. On top of that any indication that Palestinians are being expelled is expected to cause furore in the Arab world. The war that led to Israels creation 75 years ago gave rise to the exodus or forced displacement of 760,000 Palestinians, an event known as the Nakba, or catastrophe still haunts the Arab world. We are not trying to displace anyone, we are not trying to move anybody from anywhere permanently. We have asked civilians to evacuate the battlefield and we have provided a designated humanitarian zone inside the Gaza Strip, Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus said, referring to a tiny coastal area of the territory named Al-Mawasi. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk in the weekend expressed deep concern over the war in Gaza. There is no safe place in Gaza, he said. The White House believes Israel is making an effort to minimize civilian deaths in Gaza, a senior official said Sunday, as international concern mounted over the numbers killed in the resumed war with Hamas. Speaking on the US Sunday talk shows, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby also insisted that US intelligence was unaware of any secret, advance Hamas blueprint for its brutal October 7 attack on Israel that triggered the conflict. The New York Times reported last week that Israeli authorities had obtained such a document a year before the attack occurred. According to Hamas, more than 15,500 people have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the war, but Kirby told ABCs This Week that Israel had responded to US appeals to protect civilians. We believe they have been receptive to our messages here of trying to minimalize civilian casualties, he said, including by publishing online a map of places where Gazans could go to find safety. Theres not a whole lot of modern militaries that would do that to telegraph their punches in that way. So they are making an effort. US Vice President Kamala Harris appeared to strike a different tone, however, in remarks from Dubai, where she was attending the COP28 international climate conference. Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed, she said Saturday. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating. The comments came as Israel has resumed its intensive air and ground campaign following a week-long truce. Ron Dermer, Israels minister of strategic affairs, insisted on ABC that efforts to minimize civilian casualties were deliberate and unprecedented. If we wanted to do it fast, he said, wed harm a lot more civilians. International concern has been intensifying over the toll in Gaza. I cannot find words strong enough to express our concern over what were witnessing, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said Sunday on X, formerly Twitter, demanding a Ceasefire. NOW. Kirby was also asked about the New York Times report on the Hamas attack plan, which the newspaper said Israeli officials had dismissed as beyond the militant groups ability to carry out. Our intelligence community is taking a look into that, Kirby said, while adding that there were no indications that we, the United States intelligence community, had any knowledge of that document beforehand or any visibility into it. The unprecedented October 7 assault on southern Israel killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, according to Israeli authorities. An army drone accidentally hit a village in northwestern Nigeria, killing and wounding civilians celebrating a Muslim festival, the local state governor, the military and a resident said Monday. Nigerias armed forces often use air strikes in their battle against so-called bandit militias in the northwest and the northeast where jihadists are waging a 14-year-old conflict. The army did not give an exact toll for the strike in Kaduna State, but one villager said 30 people were killed late Sunday. Muslim faithful observing Maulud celebration were mistakenly killed and many others injured following a military drone attack targeting terrorists and bandits, said Kaduna State governor Uba Sani. Many of the victims were women and children, resident Hassan Maaruf told AFP by telephone, sharing images he said showed the bodies. AFP could not immediately confirm the authenticity of the images. Dozens of wounded were taken to a teaching hospital in Kaduna, the local state security commissioner Samuel Aruwan said, following a closed-door meeting with army officials and community leaders. He said the attack left several citizens dead and others injured but did not provide a proper toll. He said according to the army it was a routine mission against militants that inadvertently affected members of the community. The Maulud celebration was taking place in the village last night when the gathering was bombed at around 9:00 pm, resident Maaruf said. No one expected this tragedy. We have so far identified 30 dead victims, mostly women and children. Militia gangs, known locally as bandits, have long terrorised parts of northwest Nigeria, raiding villages to loot and kidnap residents for ransom payments. They operate out of bases deep in forests that straddle the northwestern states. Jihadists are also still fighting a war in the northeast though they have been pushed back from the territory they held at the height of the conflict. More than 40,000 people have been killed, and two million displaced since 2009. US and Japanese rescuers found five bodies on Monday following the crash of an Osprey military aircraft last week off Japan with eight crew on board, the US military said. Today (Monday), the combined Japanese and United States teams had a breakthrough when their surface ships and dive teams were able to locate remains along with the main fuselage of the aircraft wreckage, the US Air Force said in a statement. The dive teams were able to confirm five additional crew members from the original team of eight that were involved with the crash, it said. Currently two crew members of the five located today have been successfully recovered by the attending teams. There is an ongoing combined effort to recover the remaining crew members from the wreckage. Hours after the aircraft disappeared on November 29 near the island of Yakushima, Japanese first responders had located and recovered the first known casualty from the crash of the CV-22 aircraft. The latest discovery, which follows a large-scale joint search operation that has lasted since the incident, meant that two crew members from the aircraft remained unaccounted for. Japans public broadcaster NHK, citing unidentified sources, said earlier on Monday what appeared to be the front part of the aircraft, possibly including the cockpit, had been found. The Osprey, which can operate like a helicopter or a fixed-wing turboprop plane, has suffered a string of fatal accidents. A crash in northern Australia killed three US Marines in August, while four more died in another crash in Norway during NATO training exercises last year. Three Marines were also killed in 2017 when another Osprey crashed off Australias north coast and 19 Marines died when their Osprey crashed during drills in Arizona in 2000. Suspension request The United States temporarily grounded the aircraft in Japan in 2016 after an Osprey crash-landed off Okinawa, sparking anger among locals. Defence Minister Minoru Kihara said on Thursday he had asked the US military to again suspend Osprey flights except for search-and-rescue operations and that Japans military had halted using its own Ospreys pending safety checks. But the Pentagon announced that only the unit of the crashed CV-22 had halted flying. The United States is taking all appropriate safety measures, as we do for every flight and every operation, spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said last week. The unit of the CV-22 that had the accident is not conducting flight operations. All V22 Ospreys in Japan operate only after undergoing thorough maintenance and safety checks, Singh said. We have already started sharing information about the accident with our Japanese partners, and have pledged to continue to do so in a timely and transparent manner. An emergency management official in the Kagoshima region where the crash took place said police had been told the aircraft had been spewing fire from a left engine. NHK quoted a local fisherwoman who said she saw the aircraft crash into the sea, sending up a column of water 100 metres (330 feet) into the air. As Pakistan heads towards general elections early next year, the Governor of the restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province has said it is difficult to carry out political activities in parts of KP and Balochistan due to the security situation. Pakistan has witnessed a sharp rise in terror activities in recent months, especially in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, after the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) ended its ceasefire with the government last year. Pakistan experienced a 34 percent increase in anti-state violence last month, according to data released by the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS). Data from the Islamabad-based think tank reveals that security forces remained the primary target of militant violence. Unfavourable Situation In an interview on Dawn News on Saturday, Governor Ghulam Ali was asked if the current security situation was unfavourable for political parties to hold rallies in the province. There is no doubt that the situation in some areas such as Tank, Dera Ismail Khan, Lakki Marwat and Bannu is not good, he replied. A similar situation persists in Balochistan as well, Ghulam said. Ali said elections may be held but reiterated that it was difficult to carry out political activities there. The government and state institutions will make efforts because elections should be peaceful, the governor said. His remarks come as Pakistans security situation has been worsening for the last two years. The blame usually falls on the Pakistani Taliban, known as TTP, a separate group but allied with the Afghan Taliban, who seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021 as US and NATO troops were in the final stages of their pullout from the country after 20 years of war. Many TTP leaders and fighters have found sanctuaries in the landlocked country since the Taliban takeover, which also emboldened the Pakistani Taliban who also often target troops across the country. Tensions between the two countries have spiked with Pakistan demanding the Taliban administration stop the TTP from using Afghan soil to launch attacks. Pakistan authorities last month started a crackdown on migrants living in the country illegally, mostly targeting millions of Afghans. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have returned to their home country for fear of arrest. The Taliban-led administration in Afghanistan has denounced the forcible deportation and the United Nations warned it could lead to severe human rights violations. (With agency inputs) A knife-wielding man in New York killed four members of the same family and wounded two police officers before being shot dead himself, authorities said Sunday. New York Police have yet to determine the mans motive but the rampage appeared to stem from a domestic dispute. Officers were sent to a home in the Far Rockaway neighbourhood of the Queens borough early Sunday after a woman called the emergency number to say that a cousin was killing members of her family, Chief Jeffrey Maddrey told reporters. Below is a photo of the knife recovered at todays incident in Queens. pic.twitter.com/POjsDVRLDg NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) December 3, 2023 Upon arrival, two officers saw a man leaving the house and approached him. The 38-year-old suspect then lunged at them with a knife before one of the officers opened fire, killing him. Outside the house, the officers found a gravely wounded 11-year-old child, who was rushed to the hospital but did not survive. Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said that a fire in the house prevented police from entering, but once they did they discovered three other victims a 12-year-old child, a woman of 44 and a man in his 30s. Another victim, a 61-year-old woman, was hospitalised with serious stab wounds. The injured officers were also hospitalised but were expected to recover. Police said the suspect, who lived in New Yorks Bronx borough, had been arrested previously over a domestic violence incident. The suspect was identified as Courtney Gordon, 38, who police said had been visiting the family from his home in the Bronx. This scene was chaos. Multiple victims, a house on fire, and a madman on a rampage, on a mission, Patrick Hendry, the head of the New York Police Departments police union, said at the media briefing. The skill that this police officer had shooting and stopping the threat after he was being stabbed. Unbelievable skill, he said. (With agency inputs) A US warship on Sunday shot down three drones during the hourslong assault in the Red Sea, where three commercial ships were struck by ballistic missiles fired from Houthi-controlled Yemen. Today, there were four attacks against three separate commercial vessels operating in international waters in the southern Red Sea. These three vessels are connected to 14 separate nations. The Arleigh-Burke Class destroyer USS CARNEY responded to the distress calls from the ships and provided assistance, U.S. Central Command said in a statement. The attacks, which were claimed by Houthi rebels, marked an escalation in a series of maritime attacks in the Mideast linked to the Israel-Hamas war, as multiple vessels found themselves in the crosshairs of a single Houthi assault for the first time in the conflict. Today, there were four attacks against three separate commercial vessels operating in international waters in the southern Red Sea. These three vessels are connected to 14 separate nations. The Arleigh-Burke Class destroyer USS CARNEY responded to the distress calls from the U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) December 3, 2023 Direct threat to maritime security US Central Command said the attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security. They have jeopardized the lives of international crews representing multiple countries around the world. It said the three commercial ships and their crews are connected to 14 countries. The USS Carney, a Navy destroyer, detected a ballistic missile fired from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen at the Bahamas-flagged bulk carrier Unity Explorer. The missile hit near the ship. Shortly afterward, the Carney shot down a drone headed its way, although its not clear if the destroyer was the target. The drone was also launched from Yemen. About 30 minutes later, the Unity Explorer was hit by a missile, and while responding to the distress call the Carney shot down another incoming drone. Central Command said the Unity Explorer reported minor damage from the missile. Two other commercial ships, the Panamanian-flagged bulk carriers Number 9 and Sophie II, were both struck by missiles. The Number 9 reported some damage but no casualties, and the Sophie II reported no significant damage. While sailing to assist the Sophie II, the Carney shot down another drone heading in its direction. The drones did no damage. We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran, Central Command said, adding that the US will consider all appropriate responses. The Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, has already shot down multiple rockets the Houthis have fired toward Israel so far in the war. It hasnt been damaged in any of the incidents and no injuries have been reported on board. Yemeni Armed Forces warns Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree claimed Sundays attacks, saying the first vessel was hit by a missile and the second by a drone while in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Saree did not mention any US warship being involved in the attack. The Yemeni armed forces continue to prevent Israeli ships from navigating the Red Sea (and Gulf of Aden) until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops, Saree said. The Yemeni armed forces renew their warning to all Israeli ships or those associated with Israelis that they will become a legitimate target if they violate what is stated in this statement. Saree also identified the first vessel as the Unity Explorer, which is owned by a British firm that includes Dan David Ungar, who lives in Israel, as one of its officers. The Number 9 is linked to Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement. Managers for the two vessels could not be immediately reached for comment. Israeli media identified Ungar as being the son of Israeli shipping billionaire Abraham Rami Ungar. The Houthis have launched a series of attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, as well as launching drones and missiles targeting Israel. Global shipping had increasingly been targeted as the Israel-Hamas war threatens to become a wider regional conflict. These attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security. They have jeopardized the lives of international crews representing multiple countries around the world, the US military said. Last month, the Houthis seized a vehicle transport ship also linked to Israel in the Red Sea off Yemen. The rebels still hold the vessel near the port city of Hodeida. Missiles also landed near another U.S. warship last week after it assisted a vessel linked to Israel that had briefly been seized by gunmen. (With agency inputs) Quake-affected families in west Afghanistan receive China-donated tents Xinhua) 15:28, December 04, 2023 HERAT, Afghanistan, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Over 280 quake-affected families in west Afghanistan's Herat province have received tents donated by China, said a government official on Monday. According to Abdul Salam Barikzai, an official in charge of finance and management of the national disaster authority in the province, each quake-affected family received one tent in Zindajan district on Sunday and the process of aid distribution would continue. "I am thankful to China for sending humanitarian assistance, especially to the quake-affected people. This aid can solve our problems to some extent. My house was destroyed and this (tent) can become a shelter for us," an aid beneficiary Abdul Karim told Xinhua. China had sent 41 containers of humanitarian aid recently, and the process of distribution began on Sunday with giving tents to the quake-affected families in Zindajan, the official said, adding that other items including clothes would be distributed to the needy families after conducting a thorough survey in the affected area. Two deadly quakes, according to the China Earthquake Networks Center, each with a magnitude of 6.2 on the Richter scale followed by several aftershocks, rocked west Afghanistan with the epicenter in Zindajan on Oct. 7, causing thousands of casualties. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) UPDATE Dec 4, 2023 5:25 PM CST Arian Taherzadeh, who was charged with pretending to be a federal agent and offering gifts and free apartments to Secret Service officers, has been sentenced to 33 months in prison. He was indicted in 2022 along with Haider Ali, who received a prison term of more than five years in August, the AP reports. Taherzadeh had pleaded guilty to conspiracy as well as two District of Columbia offenses. He also was ordered to pay restitution totaling more than $700,000. His lawyer has said Taherzadeh provided the luxury apartments and gifts not to compromise the agents, but because he wanted to be friends with them. Apr 8, 2022 8:00 AM CDT The FBI arrested two men this week in DC a strange case that currently has way more questions than answers. Arian Taherzadeh, 40, and Haider Ali, 35, are accused of impersonating federal officers with the Department of Homeland Security while cozying up to members of the Secret Service, reports the New York Times. They allegedly provided the Secret Service members with giftsswanky penthouse apartments, televisions, drones, surveillance systems, etc., per the AP. Their alleged motive? Unclear, at least according to what has been released so far, reports the Washington Post. Also unclear is where they got their money, the merchandise they allegedly doled out, and the weapons in their possession. The Israeli military said Sunday its ground offensive had expanded to every part of Gaza, and it ordered more evacuations in the south while vowing that operations there against Hamas would have "no less strength" than its shattering ones in the north. Heavy bombardment followed evacuation orders, the AP reports, and Palestinians said they were running out of places to go in the sealed-off territory bordering Israel and Egypt. Many of Gaza's 2.3 million people are crammed into the south after Israel ordered civilians to leave the north in the early days of the war, which was sparked by the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack in Israel that killed about 1,200, mostly civilians. The United Nations estimates that 1.8 million Gazans have been displaced, and nearly 958,000 of them are in 99 UN facilities in the south, an official said. After dark, gunfire and shelling were heard in the central town of Deir al-Balah as flares lit the sky. In Gaza's second-largest city of Khan Younis, Israeli drones buzzed overhead. UN human rights chief Volker Turk urged an end to the war, saying civilian suffering was "too much to bear." The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the death toll there since Oct. 7 has surpassed 15,500, with more than 41,000 wounded. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths but said 70% of the dead were women and children, per the AP. A Health Ministry spokesman asserted that hundreds had been killed or wounded since a weeklong cease-fire ended Friday. "The majority of victims are still under the rubble," Ashraf al-Qidra said. Fears of a wider conflict intensified, as the US said a warship and multiple commercial ships came under attack in the Red Sea. And hopes for another temporary truce in Gaza were fading, though White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told NBC's Meet the Press that the US was working "really hard" for a resumption of negotiations. But Israel has called its negotiators home, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the war will continue until "all its goals" are achieved. One is to remove Hamas from power in Gaza. (Read more Israel-Hamas war stories.) Lindsey Graham had a lot to say about Lloyd Austin's recent remarks on the Israel-Hamas war, in which the defense secretary suggested Israel could suffer a "strategic defeat" if it does not protect civilian life in Gaza, thus potentially pushing Gazans "into the arms of the enemy." The Republican senator's response, on CNN Sunday, was to imply Austin doesn't know what he's talking about. "He's so naive, I mean I just lost all confidence in this guy," Graham said. "This is a radicalized population. I don't want to kill innocent people, but Israel is fighting not just Hamas, but the infrastructure around Hamas. ... Strategic defeat would be inflaming the Palestinians? They're already inflamed. They are taught from the time they're born to hate the Jews and to kill them." As Axios notes, Graham has backed Austin in the past and said on Sunday he likes the defense secretary personally, but he made it clear he couldn't disagree more with Austin's stance on this particular topic. He needs to "quit criticizing Israel in public," Graham said, pushing back on the idea that Israel is to blame for civilian deaths in Gaza, or that it would be to blame for radicalizing Gazans. If roles were reversed, he added, Austin might be singing a different tune: "If we were attacked like this, which we were in 9/11, if somebody called for us within two months to have a ceasefire against al-Qaeda, we would've laughed them out of town," he said. He also criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for similarly bemoaning the number of Palestinian deaths, and said no Republican would ask Israel to change its military tactics. (Read more Israel-Hamas war stories.) The newest group of Kennedy Center honorees, including comedian Billy Crystal and actor Queen Latifah, were feted Sunday night at a star-studded event commemorating their lifetime achievement in arts and entertainment, the AP reports. Opera singer Renee Fleming, music star Barry Gibb, and prolific hitmaker Dionne Warwick were also honored at the black-tie gala. Each received personalized tributes including appearances and performances that are typically kept secret from the honorees themselves. President Biden welcomed the honorees to the White House before the event, saying the performing arts "reflect who we are as Americans and as human beings." The honorees "have helped shape how we see ourselves, how we see each other and how we see our world," said Biden who then introduced this year's class with a set of glowing superlatives about their work. Biden and first lady Jill Biden then headed to the Kennedy Center to attend the festivities. The ceremony began with 2017 Kennedy Center honoree Gloria Estefan leading a troupe of dancers down the aisle while performing her megahit "Get On Your Feet." Director Rob Reinerwho cast Crystal in multiple iconic roleslater narrated a large portion of Crystal's tribute, speaking from a stage made up as a replica of the diner from the famous scene in When Harry Met Sally... Further testimonials came from his When Harry costar Meg Ryan, Whoopi Goldberg, Bob Costas, and 2009 Kennedy Center honoree Robert DeNiro. Lin-Manuel Miranda, a 2018 honoree, performed an original song in Crystal's honor. Crystal, who also received the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for lifetime achievement in comedy in 2007, joins an elite group of comedians cited for both: David Letterman, Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett, and Neil Simon. Bill Cosby received both honors, but they were rescinded in 2018 following his sexual assault conviction, which later was overturned. story continues below Warwick's tribute kicked off the show with a testimonial by 2021 honoree Debbie Allen, a performance by Cynthia Erivo, and Saturday Night Live cast member Ego Nwodim recounting how scary it was to perform her famous impression of Warwick in front of the diva herself. 2022 Kennedy Center honoree Gladys Knight performed Warwick's signature hit, "I Say a Little Prayer." Latifah, whose real name is Dana Owens, was honored with performances from prominent female rappers of her generation, including Yo-Yo, MC Lyte, and Monie Love. The 2023 Kennedy Center Honors ceremony will be broadcast on Dec. 27 on CBS. (Click for more details from the ceremony.) A former US diplomat has been arrested in Florida, accused of secretly serving as an agent for Cuba. WTSP identifies him as 73-year-old Manuel Rocha, who served as the ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002. A source tells the AP , which first reported on Rocha's arrest Friday in Miami, that Rocha allegedly worked to promote the Cuban government's interests. The news agency notes that those who choose to do the "political bidding" of foreign governments or entities are required to register with the Justice Department, and that Rocha's arrest comes after a lengthy FBI counterintelligence probe. The Colombia native grew up in New York City and received degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown before going on to spend a quarter century serving as a diplomat, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. NDTV notes Rocha "stirred a major controversy" during his ambassadorship to Bolivia, as that country's 2002 elections took place, by signaling that the US would cut off aid to the South American nation if Evo Morales were to be elected. Morales didn't win that year, but he did three years later, at which point he promptly booted Rocha's successor as chief of the diplomatic mission for inciting "civil war." Rocha also served in Argentina, Mexico, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Italy. After he retired from his diplomatic career, Rocha went on to head a gold mine in the Dominican Republic, followed by a stint of senior positions at coal exporter Xcoal, Spanish PR company Llorente & Cuenca, and law firm Foley & Lardner, which Rocha left in August, according to the company. A call to Rocha's home from the AP didn't yield many more details. "I don't need to talk to you," wife Karla Wittkop Rocha said before hanging up. (Read more ambassador stories.) US and Japanese divers have discovered wreckage and remains of crew members from a US Air Force Osprey aircraft that crashed last week off southwestern Japan, the Air Force announced Monday. The CV-22 Osprey carrying eight American personnel crashed Wednesday off Yakushima island during a training mission. The body of one victim was recovered and identified earlier, while seven others remained missing, per the AP . The Air Force Special Operations Command said the remains were being recovered and that their identities have yet to be determined. "The main priority is bringing the airmen home and taking care of their family members," it said in a statement. "Support to, and the privacy of, the families and loved ones impacted by this incident remains AFSOC's top priority." The US military identified the one confirmed victim as Air Force Staff Sgt. Jacob Galliher of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on Saturday. On Monday, divers from the Japanese navy and US military spotted what appeared to be the front section of the Osprey, along with possibly five of the missing crew members, Japan's NHK public television and other media reported. Japanese navy officials declined to confirm the reports, saying they couldn't release details without consent from the United States. The US-made Osprey is a hybrid aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter but can rotate its propellers forward and cruise much faster, like an airplane, during flight. Ospreys have had a number of crashes, including in Japan, where they're used at US and Japanese military bases, and the latest accident rekindled safety concerns. Japan has suspended all flights of its own fleet of 14 Ospreys, and Japanese officials say they've asked the US military to resume Osprey flights only after ensuring their safety. The Pentagon said no such formal request has been made and that the US military is continuing to fly 24 MV-22s, the Marine version of Ospreys, deployed on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa. story continues below On Sunday, pieces of wreckage that Japan's coast guard and local fishing boats have collected were handed over to the US military for examination, coast guard officials said. Japan's military said debris it has collected would also be handed over to the US. Coast guard officials said the recovered pieces of wreckage include parts of the aircraft and an inflatable life raft, but nothing related to the cause of the crash, such as an engine. Local witnesses reported seeing fire coming from one of the engines before the crash. (Read more Osprey stories.) Billie Eilish doesn't sound too thrilled with Variety magazine for asking about her sexuality in a red carpet interview over the weekend. "Thanks variety for my award and for also outing me on a red carpet at 11 am instead of talking about anything else that matters," she wrote on Instagram. "I like boys and girls leave me alone about it please literally who cares." The interview came at an event in Los Angeles sponsored by the magazine, when Eilish was asked about her recent Variety cover story in which she talked, for the first time publicly, about being attracted to women as well as men. A Democratic congresswoman got into a tense exchange with CNN's Dana Bash on Sunday over the reported rapes of Israeli women by Hamas, reports the Messenger. "I have seen a lot of progressive women, generally speaking, that are quick to defend women's rights and speak out against using rape as a weapon of war, but downright silent on what we saw on Oct. 7 and what might be happening inside Gaza right now to these hostages. Why is that?" Bash asked Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington. The congresswoman disputed that Hamas has not been condemned for sexual assaults, and she then accused Israel of violating international law with its response to Hamas' attack, per the Hill. A portion of the interview, which can be see in full via CNN: We have used your information to see if you have a subscription with us, but did not find one. Please use the button below to verify an existing account or to purchase a new subscription. TDT | Manama The Daily Tribune www.newsofbahrain.com Bapco Energies marked Bahraini Womens Day with a special event that brought together the entire female workforce from across the group. Speaking at the event, Mark Thomas, Group Chief Executive Officer, Bapco Energies, said, At Bapco Energies, we are committed to fostering a workplace that celebrates diversity, inclusivity, and equality, in alignment with the National 2030 Vision. The event also featured a session titled Discovering Collaboration and Teamwork to Thrive in an Evolving Landscape, which highlighted the pivotal role of women in an evolving workplace, emphasising Bapco Energies commitment to inclusivity and showcasing the significant contributions of women in advancing sustainability goals. The event was held in line with the official Bahraini Womens Day theme, as set by the Supreme Council of Women: 'Read, Learn, Participate'. Demonstrating its enduring commitment, Bapco Energies took a significant step last year in celebrating Bahraini Womens Day. The company announced the establishment of a group joint commission for equal opportunities and gender balance. In conjunction, Bapco Energies, along with its subsidiary companies, pledged to endorse and implement the Womens Empowerment Principles (WEPs) initiative, reaffirming commitment to championing gender equality and empowering women with the organisation. VANCOUVER, BC, Dec. 4, 2023 /CNW/ - In 2003, Ivan Dancourt embarked on a journey to make an impact in the digital space with the founding of Solocube Creative. Now, twenty years later, this full-service digital marketing agency stands at the forefront of innovation, having transformed the online presence of countless businesses through its cutting-edge services, including website design, SEO, paid advertising, content marketing, and social media management. A Milestone of Evolution and Creative Brilliance Solocube Creative - 20 Years of Igniting Brands - Celebrating Solocube Creative's Milestone Anniversary (CNW Group/Solocube Creative) October 8, 2023, marked the 20th anniversary of Solocube Creative, a testament to the company's resilience and adaptability in the fast-paced digital marketing industry. "As we celebrate 20 remarkable years at Solocube Creative, my heart grows with pride reflecting on our journey," says Ivan Dancourt, Founder & CEO. "This milestone isn't just a testament to our longevity; it's a tribute to our enduring commitment to helping our clients grow and thrive online." Two Decades of Empowering Client Success Solocube Creative has not just evolved; it has set benchmarks in the industry. The agency has a remarkable track record of elevating client businesses to the number one position on Google multiple times, significantly enhancing their online visibility and credibility. Additionally, it has been instrumental in generating thousands of leads for clients, contributing to their steady and sustained growth. From expanding services to meet the dynamic market needs to implementing sustainable practices like partnering with One Tree Planted to help with reforestation, the company has consistently demonstrated its dedication to quality, excellence, and corporate responsibility. This commitment is reflected in its stellar reputation, with a track record of all five-star reviews on Google. The agency's versatile expertise has benefited a diverse range of industries, crafting unique marketing strategies tailored to each client's needs. Their international reach, including clients in South America, speaks to their global impact and understanding of diverse market dynamics. Client testimonials speak volumes about Solocube's impact. "I highly recommend Solocube to any brand looking for strategic digital marketing & design support," says Jessica M., VP Marketing Insights. "They are much different than any other agency I have ever worked with - a true growth partner." Looking Forward: The Future of Digital Marketing The future looks bright for Solocube Creative as it gears up to integrate AI technologies, further enhancing the effectiveness of its services. "Our goal remains steadfast: to help more companies make a significant impact in the digital realm," Ivan Dancourt emphasizes. Join the Celebration As Solocube Creative looks back on its incredible journey, the company invites businesses and brands that share its vision for growth and excellence to join in this celebration. Visit Solocube's website to explore a partnership that promises to transform your digital presence. About Solocube Creative: Founded in 2003, Solocube Creative is a Vancouver-based full-service digital marketing agency specializing in website design, SEO, paid advertising, marketing strategies and content marketing, dedicated to helping businesses grow and succeed online. www.solocube.com SOURCE Solocube Creative For further information: Media Contact: Ivan Dancourt, Phone: (604) 836-7610, Email: [email protected] Michele Hamers, Wildlife Campaign Manager for World Animal Protection Canada, told the Star she believes the private Oshawa facility is allowed to keep the animals because the zoo existed before the by-law came into effect, grandfathering them into the law. "What isn't normal is that a municipality will allow such a facility or individual to continue to trade or breed with these animals, because the whole point of this bylaw is to phase out the keeping of (exotic) animals," she continued. The Oshawa zoo did not yet respond to the Star's queries into why they keep kangaroos and other exotic animals, and the nature of their relationship with the bylaw. Dolf DeJong, CEO of the Toronto Zoo, noted to the Star that the recent incident sheds light onto the lack of oversight into captive wild animals in the province. "In this case, you had an animal moving between what we assume are unaccredited sites," DeJong said. "We're not sure where they were heading to and from and it appears the systems weren't in place to prevent this kangaroo from getting at large." World Animal Protection and the Toronto Zoo notes the Oshawa facility is unregulated by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the global standard for animal care in zoo management. "That's the type of thing we're looking for from sites, is for them to have that level of accreditation," DeJong said. "And in this case, I don't believe they have any accreditation standard." Addressing the zoo's use of dye to differentiate the kangaroo, Dejong remarked: "I'm not familiar with that practice. Our teams work to have great relationships with our animals, to be able to tell them apart just by looking at them." "Only a month ago, a serval escaped from a roadside zoo up in Eganville," Hamers said. "If the province doesn't step up and solve this issue, more incidents will happen." President Bola Tinubu says the risks of transitioning to clean energy must be properly managed to ensure Africa does not become a victim of the sudden change that comes with mitigation measures. Tinubu spoke on Saturday at a high-level event on 'Africa's green industrialisation' on the sidelines of COP28. He said Nigeria and Africa urgently require investments in alternative energy to fully and effectively transition, adding that the continent bears a disproportionate share of the economic burden for transitioning despite contributing the least to the climate problem. The president said there is a need for new investments in critical sectors to leverage Africa's potential contribution to the new global green economy while enabling the continent to effectively adapt and transition. "Global manufacturers must partner with us to invest in the health of our collective environment," he said. "Africa doubles as an unrivalled opportunity in this respect. We are removing all obstacles that are inhibiting progress as Africa's largest economy. The investment environment is becoming cleaner and better. "But how will Africa not be a victim of all these changes? How do we get value for our resources? We all agree that the earth is crying for healing, but how do you tell a grandmother to stop using firewood to prepare her food? It is for me to invest in solar energy, and alternative energy. "Here, you must encourage investment, and equally consider: how would this investment affect us? Yes, we have the market and sufficient housing that you can electrify with solar panels. "There is iron ore; there is investment there, too. Risk management is very key for Africa. The opportunities must be translated soonest. We are moving forward with urgency, and we will maximise the value given in return for those resources." Benue State All Progressives Congress, APC, has said it has uncovered plans by agents of the state government to sponsor a protest against President Bola Tinubu to thwart the stoppage of funds to local governments with undemocratic structures in Benue and other states in the country. This was contained in a statement by the Publicity Secretary of the party, Mr Daniel Ihomun. Ihomun explained that, The protest is also alleged to be targeting the Senate President, Distinguish Sen Godswill Akpabio, who presided over the Senate plenary that passed the resolution and the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Sen. Dr George Akume, the Leader of APC in Benue, who has become a victim of malicious accusations in the State by mischief makers. This plot has been deeply hatched and their first experimental step was the call on the Party Chairman in the State, Comrade Austin Agada to resign without advancing any genuine reason. The party views this act of sabotage as portending grave danger to the unity of the state and the party, if people who claim APC membership and are working under an APC state government would undermine their President, the Senate President and the SGF in an open protest in their quest to stifle the hands of government on a matter of law. He added that, Much as the organizers are free to express themselves, taking steps that would embarrass Mr. President and his administration is unacceptable and must be halted. He said in view of this development, The party therefore calls on the Inspector General of Police and the Benue State Commissioner of Police to monitor closely this planned protest which may wear a semblance of solidarity march but with a sinister end motive. He urged Governor Hyacinth Alia to monitor the activities of unscrupulous elements around his government who are using his name to perpetrate acts capable of plunging the state into anarchy. Ihomun called on security agencies in the state to be on alert. Tension erupted on Monday at the Yelwa Campus of the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, ATBU, in Bauchi, as students, protesting the killing of their colleague, were teargassed by operatives of the Nigeria Police Force. The students had said they would embark on a peaceful protest on Monday following the fatal stabbing of Joseph Agabaidu, a final-year Geology student of the varsity during a robbery incident. The robbery incident reportedly occurred on Saturday night. The 500-level Geology student was said to be returning to his lodge situated around the Yelwan Tudu Market in the Yelwa area, a suburb of Bauchi metropolis, at about 7:00 pm, when he was attacked. The victim reportedly died from the injuries sustained during the attack. Consequently, the protest embarked on by the students on Monday was disrupted by the Police who stationed their armored tankers opposite the school gate. The situation escalated as students closed the gate, disrupting activities in the campus. Attempts by the authorities to pacify the students were met with solidarity songs. The management of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa Universitys Yelwa Campus in Bauchi has shut down the institution following protests by students over the fatal stabbing of Joseph Agabaidu, a final-year Geology student of the institution, during a robbery attempt. In a circular obtained by newsmen, and signed by the Deputy Registrar (Academic), Haj. Fatima Inuwa Abdullahi, the management approved the closure of the university for an initial period of one week with effect from Monday, December 4, to Sunday, December 10. According to the circular, the objective is to prevent a breakdown of law and order while alleging that the protest was hijacked by hoodlums. The circular partly reads: As you may recall, there was an alleged murder of Joseph Aga Baidu, a 500-level student of Applied Geology recently at Yelwa Kagadama, which made some miscreants embark on protests around Yelwa Campus, consequently disrupting the peace. In view of the above, the Vice-Chancellor, on behalf of the Senate, has approved the closure of the university for an initial period of one week with effect from Monday 4th to Sunday 10th December, 2023. Therefore, I am directed to request all undergraduate students on both campuses to vacate the university premises with immediate effect, as failure to comply may lead to appropriate sanction by the constituted authority. Tension erupted on Monday at the university as students protesting the tragedy were teargassed by operatives of the Bauchi Police Command. The robbery incident reportedly occurred on Saturday night when the 500-level Geology student who was said to be returning to his lodge situated around the Yelwan Tudu market in the Yelwa area, a suburb of the Bauchi metropolis, was attacked at about 7 pm. The victim reportedly died from his injuries. Consequently, the planned protest embarked on by the students was disrupted by the police, who stationed their armoured personnel carrier opposite the entrance of the institution on Monday. The situation escalated as students closed the gate, disrupting campus activities, while attempts to pacify them were met with solidarity songs. Constitutional lawyer, Daniel Bwala has called on the Supreme Court to avert anarchy by setting the records straight on the superiority of its judgment on the incapacity of election tribunals to look into pre-election cases. Speaking in an interview on Monday morning, Bwala warned that the decision of the Court of Appeal to take over jurisdiction in the pre-election matters concerning the Plateau State elections could be a threat to judicial order as it could set a pattern for lower courts to undermine settled law as pronounced by the apex court. Bwala spoke on AITs Kakaki programme while discussing the decision of the Court of Appeal to annul the election of Governor Caleb Mutfwang based on the claim that his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), did not have a structure in the state. Bwala, while putting aside the settled precedence of the Supreme Court that the APC was an interloper by questioning the nomination of candidates by the PDP, said that the court had already settled the issue of pre-election matters being outside the purview of election tribunals. He said that such pre-election matters, according to the apex court, could only be determined at the Federal High Court before elections. He said, It is important that the judiciary set the records straight because once the Supreme Court has settled a matter, you have no choice but to follow it. There is a precedent; we are saying, How can the Supreme Court say this is it? This court did not abide by the decision of the Supreme Court because we are told that under the doctrine of judicial precedence, courts are bound by the decisions of the superior court. Once the law is settled by the decision of the Supreme Court, it becomes a law that cannot be changed except that the legislature in the next legislative cycle passes a law to change it. That law is binding on authorities and also binding on courts below them, and it becomes a final law, and any disobedience to it attracts the anger of the courts. In the days of the late Hon Justice Niki Tobi, they were very jealous in guiding the integrity of the court. If any court below them gives a decision that is contrary to a precedent that they have made, they have not failed to chastise the lower court. That is because they wanted stability in the legal profession and stability in democracy. After all, if the Supreme Court decides in a certain direction and the courts below them decide in another way, it can create a great deal of instability and destroy democracy because what it means is that there is no order in judicial precedence in a country. And it is constitutional and not just a matter of the Electoral Act. Section 287 says that the judgment of the Supreme Court is binding on all courts, and the Supreme Court on that issue has settled that pre-election matters cannot be entertained by election tribunals either at the trial level or at the appellate level. They set an example when pre-election matters were brought before them. Even at the Court of Appeal sitting as a trial court in the Presidential Election Tribunal, they said they lacked jurisdiction to entertain pre-election matters, and when it got to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court maintained the same position. So, why should Plateau be different? It cannot be different because the decision of the Supreme Court has to be obeyed. The Federal Government has taken delivery of the Second Niger Bridge from the contractor, Julius Berger, seven months after the previous administration inaugurated it. The Minister of Works, Mr David Umahi, while addressing journalists shortly after he was conducted around the road and the facilities on Sunday by the Managing Director of Julius Berger, Dr Lars Richter, said he was satisfied with the level of work done. Umahi, while commending the previous and present administration for doing a lot to bring the work to fruition, described the job as impeccable, very beautiful and well completed. According to him, we have light issues, and weve put things together on how to permanently have light, especially at night. What we have agreed is to deploy solar solution in the coming weeks so that every night we dont have to run diesel. The roads are going to be completed when we have completed the two interchanges, one is taking us off from Asaba town to cut off the traffic, and the other one is going to be done by Reynolds Construction Company (RCC) Ltd to avoid Onitsha town and take you straight to Obosi. President Ahmed Tinubu is very committed to the project, and we are going to acquire more so that we can build service stations, filling stations, restaurants, supermarkets and other facilities as we see in the Western world. We are determined to do that; the need to do this with the interchanges is going to be a very smart one so that over the years we can have a beautiful and maintained road, he said. The minister further assured of security with the bridge by providing Closed-Circuit Television and some security personnel to provide security assistance within five minutes. Richter said the event was a technical handover after the project was inaugurated by the former administration. He said work was successfully completed in time and Julius Berger had delivered the highest quality of work. Also speaking, the Director, Bridges Design and Construction, South, Federal Ministry of Works, Mr Bede Obioha, tasked the residents around the second Niger bridge to help secure the already installed facilities and those that are yet to be installed safely. He commended the staff of his ministry and the contractors for a job well done, and urged the road users and the residents to abide by the rules of the road. Nasir el-Rufai, former governor of Kaduna, has announced plans to launch a $100 million venture capital fund for startups in Nigeria, specifically those in the Kaduna tech ecosystem. El-Rufai who disclosed the development in an interview with BusinessDay, also announced the launch of the firm, 'Afri-Venture Capital Company Limited', via his X handle on Monday. He said the firm will become operational in January 2024. El-Rufai said he is partnering with Eyo Ekpo, co-founder of Excredite Consulting Limited, and three others, as founding directors and initial shareholders, while he acts as a part- time chairman of the board. "I can confirm that our VC-PE firm, Afri-Venture Capital Company Ltd will by the Grace of God, begin operations initially in Abuja in January 2024 with Jimi Lawal, Hafiz Bayero, Eyo Ekpo and Kabir Yabo as founding directors and initial shareholders," he wrote on X. "I am privileged to be the part-time Chairman of the Board. Please pray for our success and the Nigerian (and in the near future African) innovators and entrepreneurs we hope to finance, nurture, and mentor to be the Dangote Group of the future." Speaking on his vision and purpose for moving into startup investments, El-Rufai said he wants to set up a venture capital fund or private equity that will invest in young Nigerians with innovative ideas. The former Kaduna governor said he is willing to fund local startups irrespective of what segment of the economy the ideas are, "so long as it has the potential to add value to the world". "We don't intend to remain in any business. We want to catalyse growth in these startups," he said. YOUNG PEOPLE NEED FINANCING, MENTORING El-Rufai said what young people need is essentially mentoring and financing to get things going. "They develop the idea and see whether it is viable. And we will open doors for them because they don't have contact," he said. "They don't know or have access to ministers, presidents, or regulatory agencies. We do. We know the minefields that they have to navigate. "We know that they need to give them appointments and we can provide them with the startup funding and in return we take an equity position. "We don't want to take your business; we want to develop it. But if we take the risk on you, we will take a percentage of the business." El-Rufai also said the first fund will be investing for three to four years. He said the fund is expected to launch early next year and the company will be headquartered in Abuja. This, El-Rufai said, is to diversify the funding beyond Lagos because there is already a lot of interest in funding innovation in Lagos. "Nigeria has a lot to offer Africa and the world. Our population, entrepreneurial capability, the innovation of our young people and their boldness and courage to find success. We just felt that we have a duty to encourage," he said. El-Rufai said the fund will not just be focusing on new startups, but also engage established companies with management problems that are still viable. The leader of INRI Evangelical Spiritual Church, Primate Elijah Ayodele, has urged Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State to consult properly before settling for an anointed candidate because he foresees disappointment and rejection. Primate Ayodele revealed that Obasekis present anointed candidate will disappoint him and will lead the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, to fail in the election. In a statement by his spokesman, Oluwatosin Osho, Ayodele said fighting with other politicians to give his anointed candidate the ticket will only lead to failure. Obasekis anointed candidate will disappoint him. Fights cannot make PDP win the election, and Obasekis tussle will make the party fail. The man of God claimed the governors candidate would be knocked out of the way, but he wouldnt see it now. He urged the governor to restrategize and consult widely before finally settling for a candidate. He should consult properly before he concludes on the choice of an anointed candidate for the election. Obaseki needs to re-package and re-strategize his political techniques. His anointed candidate will find it difficult to win the election but he doesnt see it now. His candidate may be knocked out of the way. Primate Ayodele disclosed that mighty hands are coming to hijack Edo State from the PDP and if loopholes are allowed, the PDP will lose out. Mighty hands are coming to hijack Edo from PDP and if Obaseki allows loopholes by forcing a candidate on the party, PDP will lose out, he added. A former federal lawmaker, Shehu Sani, has condemned the military airstrike that killed many villagers in Tudun Biri village, Kaduna State. Sanis reaction followed confirmation by the Nigerian Army that it was responsible for Sundays airstrike. He stated that those bombs should have been dropped on terrorists and not civilians. We gathered that an unmanned aerial vehicle bombed some parts of the community, killing a yet to ascertained number of individuals while the villagers were marking the Maulud celebration to commemorate the birth of Prophet Muhammad. A call to the Kaduna village where bombs were dropped on religious worshippers reported that over 150 people were killed. A tragic, horrific and condemnable act. These bombs should be dropped on terrorists and not civilians, Sani wrote via his X handle on Monday. Meanwhile, the Kaduna State government said it has received briefings on the attack, explaining that the Army was on a routine mission against terrorists but members of the community were inadvertently affected. The government ordered an immediate investigation into circumstances surrounding the airstrike. It also directed the immediate evacuation of the injured to the Barau Dikko Teaching Hospital for emergency medical attention. The Kano state government says it has discovered a warehouse filled with diverted food palliatives. Tasiu Al'amin Roba, a senior special assistant (SSA) of the governor, has been arrested by the Kano police command in connection with the diversion of the palliatives. The SSA and Abdulkadir Muhammad, his alleged accomplice, are expected to be transferred to the criminal investigation department (CID) for further investigation. Abba Yusuf, governor of Kano, led government officials and journalists to the warehouse at Sharada Industrial Estate on Saturday. The governor, who said the culprits would be punished, directed the commissioner of police to take over the warehouse and conduct an investigation to identify all the suspects. While briefing the governor during the visit, Rabiu Amour, a community leader, said thousands of bags - branded with the governor's portrait and designed as palliatives - were discovered to be repackaged. "We know these food items are meant to be distributed to less privileged people, therefore we decided to make a whistle blow. This is our contribution to the good efforts of the governor, he is trying his best to help the downtrodden but some people within the system are sabotaging him," Amour said. Danjuma Mahmoud, the agriculture commissioner, said the food items were meant to be distributed to persons with disabilities (PWDs) and widows of deceased members of the armed forces and other security agencies. "You will recall that after the official unveiling of the distribution of food items meant for the less privileged as palliatives to crush the impact of fuel subsidy removal, the government later set aside another large portion of the palliatives specifically to be distributed to people with special needs like in the society," Mahmoud said. "Besides people with special needs, the last round of palliatives were also meant for families and widows of members of the armed forces, the army, navy, airforce, police, and that of the sister agencies like immigration, prison services, customs, civilians defence, road safety, and Hisbah vigilante." The Ohanaeze Ndigbo Worldwide has stated that Ndigbo may vote for President Bola Tinubu in 2027 if he frees the detained leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Mazi Nnamdi Kanu. Okechukwu Isiguzoro, the factional Secretary General of the Ohanaeze Ndigbo, said this in a statement on Monday. According to him, the unconditional release of the IPOB leader would completely bury the widely-held view that the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, hates the Igbo ethnic-nationality. The ex-Ohanaeze youth leader admonished the government to initiate a genuine and all inclusive truce involving the detained IPOB leader and critical stakeholders in order to address the insecurity in the South East. He said, We emphasize that the effects of Nnamdi Kanus release will gradually diminish the rising popularity of both Peter Obi and Simon Ekpa in the South East. Additionally, from a security perspective, Simon Ekpas disruptive activities and terrorist tendencies in the South East will be consigned to the annals of history. Isiguzoro urged the President to consider Kanus unconditional release. We assure that the Igbo ethnic-nationality stands behind him, and we trust that he will handle this matter with utmost care and consideration, he added. The 2023 Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, has criticized President Bola Tinubu over his huge entourage to the ongoing COP28 Climate Change Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Atiku said Tinubu turned the global change summit into an Owambe all-comers jamboree with his large entourage. In a statement by his spokesman, Paul Ibe, Atiku said Tinubu did not understand nor appreciate the enormity of the economic ruin that Nigeria is facing due to his failed economic policies. Atiku said the COP28 summit is about improving lives, clean air and water, and healthy food for all people, nature, a safe and secure future, and not for a jamboree party. According to Atiku: How will the head of a government turn a conference of climate change to a jamboree, all-comers and owambe party of over 1,400 delegates? It is ridiculous and a confirmation that he is still in a slumber as far as governance is concerned. The economic dire straits that Nigeria is facing demand that its leaders cut their coats according to the cloth available. It makes no sense for us to continue to borrow money to throw a street party outside the country. The leader of the Nigerian delegation should be reminded: COP28UAE is about improving lives, about clean air and water, healthy food, for all people, for nature, for a safe and secure future, and not for a jamboree of over 1,400 Owambe delegates. A Passaic County man employed as an after-school aide was arrested Saturday and charged with sexually assaulting a child, authorities said Monday. Johnathan P. Jones, 23, of Bloomingdale, is charged with two counts of first-degree aggravated sexual assault, second-degree sexual assault by sexual contact, and second-degree endangering the welfare of a child. He was held in the Bergen County Jail ahead of a court appearance. Englewood police contacted the Bergen County Prosecutors Office Special Victims Unit on Friday. Detectives determined Jones sexually assaulted a child under age 13 in Englewood while in a supervisory role, according to Bergen County Prosecutor Mark Musella. The prosecutors office did not say if the alleged crimes occurred during Jones work as an after-school aide. Bloomindale police assisted Englewood and the county prosecutors office in the arrest, Musella said. Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on X @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook. UPDATE: Police reported that the teen was located and is safe. Police are asking for the publics help locating a missing teenager who hasnt been seen for more than two weeks. The 15-year-old was last seen outside Vineland High School on Nov. 17, according to Vineland Police. The teen was dropped off at the high school that day, but decided not to enter the building, authorities said Monday. He is known to have ties to Vineland, Millville and Philadelphia, police noted. Anyone with information is asked to call Vineland Police at 856-696-1212 or call 911. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Marc Berson, who grew up in Newark and became a real estate developer who helped lead a renaissance of the states largest city after decades of disinvestment, died Saturday following an undisclosed illness. He was 79. Berson was also a civic activist and philanthropist who at various times chaired the boards of RWJBarnabas Health system, Newark Beth Israel Medical Center and Newark Symphony Hall. He was a founding board member of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, completed in 1997, to which he was also a major contributor and took a hands-on role as a member of its executive committee. Two men who admitted shooting and robbing a Newark taxi driver last year were sentenced to prison for their roles in the crime, authorities said. Walter Williams-Lang, 22, of Elizabeth, was sentenced Monday to seven years and three months in prison and Naeem Jackson, 24, of East Orange, was sentenced on Nov. 29, to eight years and seven months in prison, according to a statement from the US Attorneys Office. Both men previously pleaded guilty to one count of attempted Hobbs Act robbery, conspiracy to use and possess a firearm during and in relation to a crime of violence and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, the office said. Jackson also pleaded guilty to one count each of Hobbs Act robbery and carjacking. The Hobbs Act prohibits the use of violence affecting state or international commerce. On May 14, 2022, Williams-Lang used his phone to call a taxi service in Linden to request a 4:30 a.m. ride to Elizabeth, according to a criminal complaint. When the cab arrived seven minutes later, surveillance video from inside the vehicle showed the men get in as they wore masks and dark clothes, the complaint stated. They were in possession of a P80 semiautomatic handgun that was assembled with a part from a gun that had no serial number and unknown manufacturer, which is a violation of federal law, investigators said. Williams-Lang pointed the ghost gun at the driver and demanded money, according to the complaint. At some point, Jackson took the gun from Williams-Lang and pistol-whipped the driver and shot him in the arm, authorities said. The diver survived the attack, authorities said. Jackson admitted in court that he had demanded the taxi drivers fares, cellphone, and wallet, federal prosecutors said. Both men fled the taxi after the shooting but were caught by police after a brief foot chase, the complaint said. Jackson later told police he tossed the weapon into a parking deck trash can near North Avenue in Elizabeth, authorities said. Based on that information, officers found the gun, which was loaded with one 9mm bullet. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms examined the weapon and determined it was a ghost gun built with a part manufactured by a company in Nevada, according to the complaint. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a voluntary subscription. Chris Sheldon may be reached at csheldon@njadvancemedia.com. A Philadelphia man is facing an attempted murder charge accusing him of firing a shot at convenience store clerk during a robbery in Gloucester County, authorities said. Jevonte F. Pressley, 30, entered a Heritages convenience store on Delaware Street in West Deptford on Nov. 19, pulled a gun and aimed it at a store worker, authorities said. When the worker ran from the store, Pressley fired a shot in the employees direction, the Gloucester County Prosecutors Office reported Monday. The clerk was not struck. Pressley then ordered another employee to give him cash from the register and store safe, authorities said. Pressley left the area in a car which was later traced to him, according to the prosecutors office. Pennsylvania State Police troopers stopped that vehicle on Interstate 95 in Delaware County on Nov. 29 and Pressley was arrested. Evidence linking him to the robbery was found in the vehicle, officials said. In addition to attempted murder, Pressley was charged with armed robbery, terroristic threats, theft by unlawful taking and multiple weapons offenses, including certain persons not to possess a firearm. Pressley remains jailed in Pennsylvania awaiting extradition to New Jersey. Anyone with information about the robbery is asked to call Gloucester County Prosecutors Office Detective Alex Phillips at 856-384-5529 or West Deptford Police Detective Justin Hilt at 856-853-4599, ext. 168. Information may also be emailed to the prosecutors office at tips@co.gloucester.nj.us. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. A possible cause for the mysterious illness sickening thousands of dogs nationwide has been found by researchers at the University of New Hampshire. The researchers say theyve identified a small portion of the genome of a previously uncharacterized bacteria that may be causing the illness, which can result in coughing, sneezing, nasal or eye discharge and lethargy in canines. A small number of dogs have died after being infected with the respiratory disease, which is often complicated or superimposed with severe pneumonia, the UNH researchers said. Thousands of cases have been reported in at least 14 states, according to experts, who say the illness continues to confound veterinarians because it does not appear to respond to antibiotics. While cases have been reported in Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont on the East Coast, New Jersey health department officials told NJ Advance Media on Monday there have been no known cases reported in the state. The New Jersey Department of Health has not received reports of suspected or confirmed outbreaks in canines, said Nancy Kearney, deputy director of communications for the health department. However, the department has received several inquiries from veterinarians about the reported respiratory illnesses and about potential canine respiratory cases that may match the described cases in other states. Not all cases of respiratory illness in canines would be reported to the department. UNH researchers attributed their breakthrough to genetic sequencing of samples from 70 dogs in New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Massachusetts from the past two years. The bacterium might be host adapted and potentially part of the dog microbiome and has recently developed the capacity to cause disease, the UNH researchers said. They expressed hope that identifying the bacterium can ultimately lead to determining the right course of treatment for infected dogs. If it is decided definitively that this unknown bacterium is causing some proportion of the noted respiratory syndrome, in-depth research can begin to find the proper medicine to combat it, which would be a significant breakthrough for veterinarians throughout the country, the UNH study said. But one expert at the New Hampshire Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory cautioned there is still work to do. A finding like this is potentially pretty exciting, even though we still have to see how it develops to a place where we are comfortable saying this is a pathogen in the syndrome, said David Needle, pathology section chief at the NHVDL. But a finding like this is significant. New Jersey-based veterinarian Kirsten White has tried to caution the public against panic, telling NJ Advance Media last month these sorts of illnesses emerge in dogs from time to time. My big thing would be not to panic but to be practical, White said. Obviously, you want to ensure that your dog is up to date on all preventative vaccines that are recommended by your vet. Especially vaccines like bordetella, parainfluenza and canine influenza. She added, If an owner is concerned, or they have a dog that has a compromised immune system something like a cancer patient they can consider avoiding exposure to other dogs in places like dog parks, doggy daycare, boarding kennels, or grooming facilities. Meanwhile, the state health department issued guidance last week to local health professionals and animal-health care providers, Kearney said. It is also important to note that many different pathogens can cause respiratory illnesses in dogs, some of which have effective vaccinations, she said. The health department on Nov. 28 said there were no reports of human illness affiliated with the cases in other states at this time. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Keith Sargeant may be reached at ksargeant@njadvancemedia.com. Police arrested two people Sunday morning following a brief pursuit that resulted in the crash of a stolen vehicle. A 22-year-old and a 17-year-old were arrested following a police chase on Route 1 that ended at the Phillips 66 Refinery, the Linden Police Department said. The occupants were driving a red Porsche, which had been reported stolen in New York, until they collided with another car and lost control. They then climbed a fence into the refinery and were eventually taken into custody by police. Condolences continue to pour in for Robert Ferreri, who served as Cliftons police chief for eight years and will be laid to rest this week. Ferreri, who hailed from Jersey City and dedicated all 35 years of his service to Clifton before retiring in 2010, died Tuesday at 74 following a five-year battle with dementia. Praised for his hard work and dedication, Ferreri was the first person in his family to earn a college degree receiving a diploma in biology from St. Marys of the Plains in Dodge City, Kansas. He later also received a masters degree in criminal justice from Jersey City State University and graduated from the FBI National Academy as well. To us, his family and friends, he was a loving husband and father, with impeccable taste, sharp wit, and, despite a lifetime in uniform, a suit collection that could rival any CEO, one of Ferreris three children, Lori Ann Ferreri, wrote in a heartfelt statement following his death. She added: He was always the life of the party and the last one on the dance floor clearly the father of a dancer. The Clifton Police Department said Ferreri became a police officer in the city in 1974 and worked his way up to chief of police in 2002. Richard Berdnik, Passaic County Sheriff, called him a dear friend who had a heart of gold and was always willing to help those in need. Pat Ciser, a former police lieutenant in Clifton, said Sunday, Ferreri was a great chief and will surely be missed. Five years ago, Ferreri was diagnosed with frontal temporal dementia, which his family described as a brutal disease that typically manifests at a younger age than other forms of dementia. His daughter, Lori Ann, elaborated more on his battle with the disease in a statement. She said following the diagnosis, she often traveled back home to lend relief, her mother surrendered her envisioned retirement to help as well and most notably her brother, John Patrick Ferreri, or JP, left a career in New York City to act as their fathers caregiver. When it became evident that something had changed within our dad ... we remained steadfast and unwavering in our commitment to providing him with the care, comfort, and compassion that can only be found at home, Lori Ann stated. She said while there is currently no cure for frontal temporal dementia, the family hopes to raise awareness and funds for those affected by the disease. Anyone interested in donating is encouraged to support The Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration at www.theaftd.org/. Ferreri is survived by his wife of 48 years, Mary Pat Ferreri, and his children, Lori Ann Ferreri and husband, Yoann Schouver; Robert Ferreri and his fiance, Alexandra Constandinou; and John Patrick Ferreri, his obituary said. Visitations for Ferreri will be held Monday and Tuesday at Thos. L. Shinn Funeral Home in Manahawkin, with Tuesdays services set to be followed by a funeral at St Marys Church in Barnegat. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Steven Rodas may be reached at srodas@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on X at @stevenrodasnj. A fugitive from Maryland who allegedly tried to kill his twin sister was arrested Sunday night after leading an Edison police officer on a 65-mile pursuit along Route 287 to Mahwah, officials said. The chase began shortly after Edison police officer Phil Smith heard an alert about a stolen SUV entering the Middlesex County township on Route 1 at about 8:15 p.m., the department said in a statement. Smith saw the speeding vehicle on the 2900 block of Woodbridge Avenue and began to follow it, police said. After getting permission from his lieutenant, Smith began pursuing the vehicle. The stolen SUV got onto Interstate 287 with Smith following for about an hour from Middlesex County to Bergen County, near the New York border. State Police joined the pursuit near milepost 15.4 in Bridgewater, a spokesman said. The pursuit ended near milepost 64.9 when the driver, Reese E. Wetzel, stopped the vehicle in the middle of the highway, Edison police said. Wetzel refused to get out of the SUV, but he was eventually removed from the vehicle and handcuffed by Edison police and New Jersey State Police, authorities said. Wetzel, 23, was a passenger in a vehicle parked in front of a home on the 3200 block of Wheaton Way in Ellicott City at about 4:15 p.m. Sunday when he stabbed his sister, who was in the drivers seat, Howard County police said. He then took his sisters vehicle, Edison police said. The sister is in critical but stable condition, a Howard County police spokeswoman said. Wetzel, of Ellicott City, is charged by Edison police with receiving stolen property, eluding with substantial risk of physical injury, being a fugitive from justice, resisting arrest and obstruction. Ellicott City is about 12 miles west of Baltimore. Authorities in Maryland didnt immediately provide information Monday. Leer en Espanol New Jersey drug overdose deaths are poised to dip slightly for the second year in a row in a continuing crisis that annually claims the lives of thousands of residents. So far, in 2023, 2,368 people have died in the state of suspected overdoses, or roughly seven deaths each day, according to the medical examiners office. Still, with a month remaining in the year, that is on pace to mark a drop from the 2,892 people who died in 2022. This comes as New Jersey remains hard hit by the opioid epidemic, fueled by the rise of fentanyl, a powerful and often deadly synthetic. Advocates say the plateauing of deaths speaks to the states longtime efforts to bolster its treatment network and make lifesaving interventions more readily available, though they caution that overdoses remain unacceptably high. Its great news that the number of deaths is leveling off, said Robert Budsock, the chief executive of Integrity House, one of New Jerseys largest nonprofit treatment providers. But we have to get it to zero. And the only way to get it to zero is just education, prevention and treatment. Drug deaths reached a record in 2021 in New Jersey, when 3,047 people died of overdoses as COVID-19 upended the treatment system and isolated those in need of help. Yet death totals remain stubbornly pervasive year to year, especially compared to even a decade ago when 1,304 people lost their lives. Is the above chart not displaying? Click here. The state Department of Health said it is too early to say whether overdoses are finally on their way down, given the continued dangers of fentanyl. But Michele Calvo, the departments director of opioid response and policy, said she is hopeful New Jerseys initiatives will bear fruit though rising deaths among Black and Latinos who are traditionally underserved by the health system are posing new concerns the state is also trying to address. We can significantly bend the curve, Calvo said. I think it is taking some time because fentanyl is really so, so deadly. Experts said that underscores the headwinds posed by an epidemic that continues to rage. On the one hand, New Jersey has embraced a slew of approaches to rein in addiction, from easing barriers to treatment to stanching the overprescription of painkillers. It has expanded access to naloxone, an overdose reversal drug, and promoted clean syringe exchanges and medications that reduce cravings, such as buprenorphine and methadone. On the other hand, fentanyl has continued to be increasingly prevalent in drugs sold on the street, not only in heroin but in cocaine, methamphetamine and counterfeit pills. Amid that, other dangerous substances, such as xylazine, an animal tranquilizer, are also on the rise, according to the health department. That reality makes it difficult to defeat the epidemic despite the states efforts, said Angela Conover, the director of opioid response and prevention for the Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey, a nonprofit advocacy group. She said that considering the hurdles, New Jersey deserves credit for flattening its numbers. As much as things are said about New Jersey, New Jersey has been really aggressive and kind of on the forefront of this issue, Conover said. Budsock said the dangers are unlike anything he has seen in his 40-year career in the drug treatment community. Young people need to know that the drugs supply is poisoned with a substance that is going to kill you, Budsock said. New Jersey has made it easier to obtain naloxone, an opioid overdose reversal drug also known by its brand name, Narcan. It is shown in this file photo from the Hudson County Prosecutor's Office.HCPO photo The challenge is being seen across the nation, where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said annual drug deaths first topped 100,000 in 2021 and have not fallen below since. In the 12-month period ending in June 2023, the CDC predicts nearly 112,000 people died, a 2.6% increase from the year before. Deborah Dinnocenzo of Garfield lost her 25-year-old daughter, Dana Keim, to fentanyl in 2020 and now participates in the Lost Voices of Fentanyl, a group that rallies each year in Washington to bring attention to the crisis. She said more needs to be done to get the drug off the street and educate young people about its dangers. I feel like everybody in the state of New Jersey has been touched in some way by this, whether it be a friend, a child, a friend of a friend, a friend of a friends child, Dinnocenzo said. Stop putting it under the rug. Need help? Call ReachNJ, New Jerseys 24/7 addiction helpline, at 1-844-732-2465. A live person answers each call in the first 30 seconds. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Riley Yates may be reached at ryates@njadvancemedia.com. Throughout much of New Jersey, serving on the local town council is supposed to be a part-time community service that wont rake in the bucks. But for years, many towns have offered a plum to their elected officials: They are permitted to sign up for government health insurance, a generous benefit often quietly worth double or triple the small stipends they receive. In 2010, New Jersey lawmakers sought to crack down on that largesse by barring part-time mayors and council members from enrolling in the states insurance plan. The law required officials seated after it took effect to work at least 35 hours a week to qualify for those benefits, preventing them from receiving full-time perks for part-time hours at posts that typically pay less than $10,000 a year. Yet 13 years later, towns continue to flout those rules, an investigation by NJ Advance Media found. Across the state, at least a dozen municipalities have provided potentially questionable coverage to their elected officials over the past decade, documents obtained through public records requests show. That encompasses 32 current and former officials whose benefits have cost taxpayers at least $2.3 million since 2014, including $332,000 in 2023 alone. The public shouldered those expenses even as high-profile cases highlighted alleged abuses of the State Health Benefits Program (SHBP), a wake-up call that caused some municipalities to reexamine their policies and rein in the benefits they offer. In Wildwood last year, state prosecutors charged a mayor, former mayor and city commissioner with falsely claiming they worked full-time to qualify for coverage they hadnt earned. The cost over a decade, authorities alleged: nearly $1 million in insurance claims and taxpayer-funded premiums. In Montclair, a whistleblowers lawsuit last year accused elected officials of pulling in tens of thousands of dollars in benefits even though they appeared to work only part-time. That included the townships mayor, Sean Spiller, whose lucrative day job is president of the New Jersey Education Association, the state teachers union. But while those instances have captured headlines, communities from Bridgewater to Roselle to Old Bridge are also offering benefits to elected officials who may not put in the necessary hours to qualify for them. Of the towns identified by NJ Advance Media, most described their elected boards as part-time in budget documents, with salaries as low as $6,000. And the officials involved largely held jobs beyond their public posts, including as lawyers, business owners, lobbyists and real estate agents, according to news accounts, campaign biographies, professional listings and other public sources. In some cases, municipalities provided them insurance that topped $35,000 a year for family plans. In others, they cut checks to officials who agreed to waive those benefits, paying them as much as $5,000 annually for declining coverage. In one of the costliest examples, Clark Township Council President William Smith and Councilman Steven Hund received benefits for years, totaling more than $522,000 in premiums, according to township records, though officials now acknowledge they were ineligible. Hund accepted coverage even as he worked as a vice president at an insurance company that sells health plans. Neither Hund nor Smith, an executive at a mattress supply company, responded to requests for comment. It is outrageous that elected officials would exploit the system while many of their constituents struggle to afford even basic health insurance, said Maura Collinsgru, director of policy and advocacy at New Jersey Citizen Action. The kind of message that it sends to taxpayers is the wrong one, said Collinsgru, whose group supports equitable access to health care. It sends the message that if you know the right people or are well connected, youll get preferential treatment. In Long Beach Township, Commissioner Joseph Lattanzi received coverage for himself and his family that, over the past nine years, cost taxpayers more than $243,500, including $34,135 in 2023, according to township records. His day job? He is a practicing physician, as is his wife. Lattanzi took office in December 2011, 18 months after the states rules took effect. He earns just over $14,000 as one of three commissioners, though the Ocean County township of 3,200 claims them as full-time employees in budget documents. Lattanzi did not respond to several requests for comment. Mayor Joseph Mancini, the head of the board, and Business Administrator Kyle Ominski also did not respond to inquiries. More than 100 of New Jerseys 564 municipalities provide health coverage to at least some of their elected officials, according to local budgets compiled by the state Department of Community Affairs. Of those, NJ Advance Media found 67 that participate in the state health program, with the rest purchasing insurance on the private market, where the 2010 rules dont apply. For this investigation, NJ Advance Media set out to identify every SHBP community that has provided post-2010 officials with health insurance or payments for declining it in the past decade. That was done through public records requests to the 67 municipalities, which sought a financial accounting of the benefits they paid since 2014, as well as the elected officials salaries and the dates they had taken office. The records revealed 12 communities had furnished benefits to officials who fall under the full-time work rules nearly one in five municipalities in the group. And that accounting was incomplete because some towns said they could not produce a full 10 years of records, and two refused to provide responsive documents: Bay Head and the city of Passaic. Reporters sought comment from each official and every municipality identified, though most did not respond or declined to discuss the issue. Several denied wrongdoing or said the benefits were mistakenly granted and rescinded once the error was realized. SHBP is often described as the gold standard of insurance coverage in New Jersey, making it one of the big selling points of government jobs. And for officials like Lattanzi, Smith and Hund, those benefits come at a cut-rate cost that is a fraction of what a typical police officer, firefighter or public works crew has to shoulder for the same insurance, given the way premiums are calculated. Thats because employee contributions are set on a sliding scale based on their salaries, with the highest earners responsible for as much as 35% of their premiums. Those workers would pay more than $12,000 for the coverage Lattanzi received this year. By comparison, because of his low commissioners salary, township records show Lattanzi paid just $1,055 or less than a tenth of that. Is the above chart not displaying? Click here. Even before the 2010 law, benefits for elected officials were controversial. Supporters say they reward public service at a time when it is under attack from all shades of the political spectrum. Critics say they are an unnecessary expense that rewards officials with clout while other part-time municipal workers are left to fend for themselves. To me, it was like, Do as I say, but not as I do, said Tucker Kelley, a former Rockaway Township councilman who has long been outspoken on the issue. He calls the benefits a kick in the ass to the taxpayers because most taxpayers dont even know. That means there are few eyes on whether the coverage is being properly awarded, since the state leaves it largely up to municipalities to police themselves, with each community responsible for determining whether its officials satisfy the criteria to receive insurance. The Division of Pension and Benefits, which oversees the state health program, said it does not track which local elected officials are covered. Local governments are charged with ensuring their employees are properly classified, the agency said. The division takes allegations of disingenuous attempts to obtain benefits very seriously and investigates every allegation brought to its attention to the fullest extent of its authority, spokeswoman Danielle Currie said in a prepared statement. Under the law, any person who knowingly obtains, or attempts or conspires to obtain, coverage or benefits under SHBP for themselves or another while knowing they are ineligible, is guilty of a fourth-degree crime. In announcing public corruption charges in the Wildwood case, state prosecutors said the matter was referred to them by the pension and benefits division. Wildwoods then-Mayor Pete Byron, former Mayor Ernest Troiano Jr., and City Commissioner Steve Mikulski are accused of submitting false timesheets to justify their benefits, though they allegedly worked no set schedule and didnt put in 35 hours a week. Attorney General Matthew Platkin described the allegations as egregious breaches of the public trust. The defense contends the men were entitled to the coverage, with an elected officials duties different than a 9-to-5 job. They call the charges, which remain unresolved, an overreach. Nor did the indictments resonate at the polls last month, with voters electing Mikulski to another term and returning Troiano to the board, according to unofficial results. Byron resigned from office in September, weeks after being sentenced to probation in an unrelated federal tax fraud case. He did not respond to phone messages. Troianos attorney, Brian Pelloni, declined to comment. Mikulskis lawyer, David Stefankiewicz, did not return a phone call. Limits to the law The scope of the 2010 statute was limited. It didnt address towns with private insurance, which are permitted to offer benefits to their elected officials regardless of the hours worked. The law also grandfathered in officials already signed up for the states plan, allowing them to keep coverage even if they arent putting in 35-hour weeks. That sets up a scenario seen in dozens of SHBP communities, in which veteran council members lawfully receive insurance while more junior members are barred from it. Since 2015, five of Clark Townships seven council members have accepted coverage from the Union County suburb of 15,000 people. Three Angel Albanese, Brian Toal and Patrick OConnor have long served on the board and are grandfathered from the states requirements. But Smith was seated in 2013 and Hund in 2015, after the rules took effect. Still, records show the township provided them with insurance each year into 2022. Mayor Sal Bonaccorso said that once the township realized they were ineligible, it withdrew their benefits. He said they signed on during the tenure of a former business administrator, with his replacement learning of the requirements while doing a seminar or something. The prior BA, I guess, didnt know that rule change, Bonaccorso said. Because sometimes we dont get notification on everything, believe it or not. Bonaccorso said the township had not asked Hund or Smith to pay back the money that went toward their premiums. Number one, I wouldnt think its their fault if they didnt know. How would they know? Bonaccorso said. And two, it was stopped immediately. A six-term mayor who is a landscaper by profession, Bonaccorso also receives coverage through the township as a grandfathered official. That permits his wife, Geraldine, to decline insurance at her job at the Clark Public School District, which has paid her nearly $38,000 since 2014 for waiving those benefits, according to district records. Bonaccorso said there was no reason to criticize that arrangement, which he said was not unusual. Thats the law, Bonaccorso said. Im sure, I know for a fact, theres elected officials throughout Union County whose wives work in school districts and probably are looking at the same thing were looking at. Bonaccorso declined to name them. (Bonaccorso was interviewed in October, six weeks before state prosecutors filed public corruption charges that accused him of using township employees and equipment to benefit his business, and with falsifying permitting applications for work his company performed. He has vowed to fight the allegations, with his attorney calling them faulty and incorrect.) The AG is investigating this In Montclair, the scandal started with a whistleblower who questioned whether her bosses were putting in the hours they claimed. In a civil suit filed in October 2022, Chief Financial Officer Padmaja Rao charged she was sidelined and retaliated against after she raised concerns about whether the townships mayor and council members were eligible for insurance after Montclair joined SHBP in 2017. In that time, Montclair paid nearly $454,000 in benefits to five current and three now-former elected officials who were seated after 2010, financial records obtained by NJ Advance Media show. Rao charges those members were ineligible for coverage but took benefits anyway in two ways: Some signed up for insurance, though they allegedly didnt work full-time hours. Others accepted as much as $5,000 a year for declining that coverage. The township has denied wrongdoing, but the allegations brought embarrassing attention to its high-powered board, whose members who accepted benefits include a media executive, a corporate lobbyist and a managing partner of a national law firm. Council members and the mayor earn just $10,000 a year in Montclair. By contrast, Spillers salary as head of the states teachers union was more than $291,000 in 2021, according to tax filings. In the end, it boils down to greed, charged one of Raos lawyers, Nancy Erika Smith. Its got to be, Smith said. I mean, the president of the NJEA is well compensated. Smith said the state Attorney Generals Office has subpoenaed township records related to the coverage as part of a criminal probe. The AG is investigating this, and they indicted Wildwood, Smith said. The Attorney Generals Office declined to comment, saying it does not confirm or deny investigations. In a recent legal filing in the civil case, a lawyer for Spiller cited that parallel criminal investigation and said he may advise his client to refuse to testify in the lawsuit, given his right against self-incrimination. Is the above chart not displaying? Click here. Records show Spiller received nearly $28,000 in payments for turning down health coverage. He also signed up for dental insurance through the township, with records showing $21,800 in premiums over four years. In a brief interview, Spiller said he did not accept health benefits and would not answer additional questions. Given that I have health benefits, I declined to take them, Spiller said. Anything else, the town attorney has to figure out. And I know the town is working on it. Interim Township Attorney Paul Burr did not respond to requests for comment. Interim Township Manager Michael Lapolla said Montclair no longer provides benefits to its elected officials, but he did not respond to follow-up inquiries. Spillers personal attorney, Frank Arleo, did not return a phone call. One former council member, Peter Yacobellis, said the Attorney Generals Office issued the subpoena last fall and that he has retained a lawyer given the probe. Im not concerned for myself, though I am concerned for some others, Yacobellis said. Yacobellis, who received more than $4,900 worth of health care premiums and opt-out payments, resigned in October to move to Washington state. He expressed frustration the township didnt make the full-time rules clear to him when he took office in July 2020, though he said he did work 35 hours a week on council. Former Montclair Mayor Robert Jackson said he is confident he met the hours requirement as well, though his day job is as Essex County administrator. Jackson, who served as mayor from 2012 to July 2020, said he was able to devote full-time hours to both positions by allotting nights and weekends to the township and workdays to the county. To me, I knew I was putting in 35 hours, said Jackson, who received nearly $7,200 for waiving insurance, according to financial records. Other council members who took benefits or money instead of them either declined comment or did not respond, including Robin Schlager, William Hurlock, Lori Price Abrams, David Cummings and former councilman Richard McMahon. Raos suit, which makes other claims of impropriety, is pending in state Superior Court in Newark. Judge Stephen Petrillo has chastised the townships lawyers for seeking to close proceedings to the public and has also raised the specter of potential criminal liability in the alleged fraud. The township stopped the coverage late last year, and the council voted in April to fire Township Manager Tim Stafford, whom Rao accused of retaliation and workplace hostility toward women after she voiced her concerns. In the suit, Rao said she learned of the full-time work requirement after the township decided to switch from a private insurer to the SHBP. Rao wanted elected officials to sign certifications that they worked at least 35 hours a week, but the suit said Stafford told her it was sufficient that they had assured him verbally. In April 2021, the townships auditor also questioned the officials eligibility, the suit said, and later suggested they turn in timesheets demonstrating their hours. Stafford again resisted, according to the suit, insisting that certifications would be sufficient, and all but one of the seven council members certified their compliance for the previous year. In spring 2022, the mayor and six council members were again asked to submit certifications for the prior year, the suit said. Only two signed and returned them, and one later backtracked and rescinded it, the suit said. Raos lawyer mocked the certifications, given the pay council members and the mayor earn. If these people claimed that they worked full time, for $10,000 a year, they have the best wage-and-hour claim that Ive ever seen, Smith said. Stafford and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. A $7k salary, but full benefits In other cases, the coverage continues to cost taxpayers. For decades and across administrations, Bridgewater said it has provided health insurance to its elected officials. That continued in 2022 when the Somerset County township switched to SHBP after a private carrier hiked its rates. Council President Michael Kirsh and members Timothy Ring and Filipe Pedroso were all seated after the 2010 law. But they still received benefits after the township entered the state plan, at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $133,000 combined. Township budgets for the past eight years list council members as part-time employees, and they earned just $7,000 a year, though Kirsh receives an additional $1,000 as council president. In two written statements, Bridgewater denied the coverage was improperly granted, but did not directly address whether the three work 35 hours a week though Deputy Administrator Wells Winegar highlighted a different budget document that labeled council positions as full time. Wells also noted the township is leaving SHBP at the end of 2023 to re-enroll in a private plan that saved money. This action effectively renders any confusion on this issue moot, Winegar wrote. Ring and Kirsh declined to comment. Pedroso did not respond to requests for comment. Other towns that recently joined SHBP also continue to cover post-2010 officials, including: Old Bridge in Middlesex County, where the township will pay nearly $73,000 in premiums in 2023 to insure Mayor Owen Henry and Council members Tony Paskitti and Jill DeCaro. Maple Shade in Burlington County, where Councilman Nelson Wiest received coverage worth more than $28,000 this year, though he was seated in 2013. Roselle in Union County, where Councilman John Fortuna received state coverage worth nearly $37,000 since the borough switched to the state plan in November 2020. Five other council members President Brandon Bernier, Cynthia Johnson, Denise Wilkerson, Richard Villeda and Cindy Thomas accepted nearly $58,000 in payments combined for declining benefits. Henry, a Republican elected to the state Senate on Nov. 7, did not return requests for comment. Neither did Paskitti or DeCaro, a Democrat who unsuccessfully ran to be Henrys replacement as mayor. In the other communities, Wiest, Fortuna, Bernier, Villeda and Thomas did not respond. Wilkerson declined to comment. Maple Shade Administrator Susan Danson declined to comment, and administration officials in Old Bridge and Roselle did not respond. An attorney for Johnson, Patrick Toscano, said she has never violated any state statute at any time dealing with the SHBP. As with any benefit, municipalities need to have checks in place to ensure they only provide health insurance to officials who warrant it, said Paul Muir, president of the New Jersey Conference of Mayors. He said he hopes the Wildwood case causes municipalities to review whether they are meeting their requirements. Muir is the mayor of Bethlehem Township in Hunterdon County, a member of the SHBP that does not provide coverage to its officials. He said those benefits must be balanced with the expense they place on taxpayers, and at minimum must be reserved only for full-time employees. Any and all elected officials should understand the tax burden to their residents and whether they can absorb additional health insurance costs, Muir said. But [then] again, the basis is youre trying to find the best people to step forward. A costly but inadvertent mistake For Avalon, it was an uh-oh moment. For years, the Cape May County borough of 1,200 has offered health insurance to its elected officials, an option presented as they filled out paperwork as they assumed office. But in June 2022, state prosecutors announced the charges in Wildwood. Reading about them in The Press of Atlantic City, Avalon officials realized they had a problem. Among those receiving insurance in Avalon were Borough Council members John McCorristin, Sam Wierman and Barbara Juzaitis, all of whom, like the Wildwood officials, were seated after 2010. I would characterize it as a complete surprise, said James Waldron, Avalons assistant business administrator. The borough conducted an internal audit and concluded the three members were improperly receiving benefits. In a July 2022 memo marked confidential, borough officials called it inappropriate and inadvertent and cited confusion over the laws requirements. Juzaitis took office in 2018 and Wierman in 2019, with their benefits totaling more than $220,000. McCorristin was seated in 2013, but borough financial records went back only through 2017. His benefits in that time cost taxpayers over $122,000. As soon as it was brought to everyones attention, we kind of said, Oh, yeah, this is not what we want to be doing. Avalon Councilman Sam Wierman All three officials are no longer covered through the borough, though they remained on its plan until February as they secured their own coverage. McCorristin, now the boroughs mayor, said losing town insurance came at an inopportune time: He had just finished battling a serious health problem. But he said he accepts an error was made and had to be corrected. So no hard feelings, said McCorristin, a builder by profession. I love the island, and whatever it is, thats the way it is going to be. I look out for the town. Wierman, who works in the property insurance industry, said no one intended to break the rules. As soon as it was brought to everyones attention, we kind of said, Oh, yeah, this is not what we want to be doing, Wierman said. Juzaitis did not return a phone call seeking comment. Waldron said Avalon had an attorney review whether the three needed to reimburse the money. That was unnecessary because they were unaware of the requirements and were innocent participants, Waldron said the lawyer concluded. They didnt have any advance knowledge or any reason to know, Waldron said. The borough offered it; they accepted it. Waldron expressed surprise that the practice continues in other towns. Whats the saying? The buck stops here, Waldron said. We found the problem, and we corrected the problem. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Riley Yates may be reached at ryates@njadvancemedia.com. Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com A New Jersey woman who admitted she was high when she crashed head-on into a minivan killing the passenger and injuring the driver has been sentenced to five years in state prison. Ashley Watkins, 32, will have to serve at least four years and three months in prison before she is eligible for parole, the Ocean County Prosecutors Office said Monday. A judge also suspended her license for seven months. The crash took place at 9:45 a.m. on May 9, 2021, when Watkins vehicle crossed the center line on Lanes Mill Road and slammed head-on into a minivan near Greenwood Loop, officials said. The driver, a 78-year-old Brick man, suffered a broken leg. His wife, Nancy Penrod, 78, later died of her injuries at an area hospital. Watkins, of Eatontown, suffered minor injuries. Toxicology results later revealed the she had fentanyl and marijuana in her blood stream, along with diphenhydramine, or Benadryl. She was arrested June 4, 2021, and pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter in October. On Friday, she pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated. Penrod was a parishioner at St. Pauls United Methodist Church in Brick, which posted a note on a social media page offering condolences to her family following her death Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription. It took just one mediation session in July for attorneys representing Readington Township and three senior female employees suing for wage discrimination to reach a settlement: the women would share $800,000 and the two who remained working there would receive retroactive raises that would nearly bring their salaries into line with men in similar jobs. But when it came time for the Readington Township Committee to vote to approve the deal a mere formality, the womens attorney thought the committee members refused. The 15-month-old case is now likely headed for trial, said the plaintiffs attorney, Katy McClure of Verona. Sign up for Reckons latest newsletter dedicated to the fight for reproductive justice, a weekly repro rundown covering the good, the fair-to-middlin' and the ugly in repro news. Enter your email to subscribe to Reproductive Justice with Reckon. Zeenat Muhammads days as a neuroscience major at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) are busy. Now a junior, shes double minoring in chemistry and nutrition, secretary of the Womens Health Initiative and vice president of Blood Buds, a student-led organization working to fight period poverty. A lot of people ask how do you juggle it? I dont even look at this as an activity, its just kind of natural, she said. I think passion takes you far. UIC began stocking period products in some school restrooms during her freshman year but according to Muhammad, the machines were not consistently stocked. Last semester, Blood Buds focused on contacting student advisors from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS), UICs largest college, to prioritize making sure the dispensers were filled. This semester, fortunately, not only have we seen an increase in the number of dispensers of pads and tampons, theyre completely stocked up And we pushed for the school to put a contact number on the machine so that if its out, somebody could text message and let them know. So theres never really a point of negligence, she said. The law requires these products to be there. In 2021, Gov. Pritzker signed HB 641, requiring all public universities and community colleges in Illinois to provide free period products in restrooms. While a growing number of states have enforced laws that require schools to provide period products to students, Illinois, California, Oregon and Washington, D.C. are the only that have policies specific to higher education institutions, according to Inside Higher Ed. UIC currently houses 34 Aunt Flow dispensers across their East and West campuses. The Richard J. Daley Library holds the most, with six dispensers spread throughout three floors. Most of the academic buildings have one or two. A womens restroom in UICs Lecture Center B holds one Aunt Flow dispenser which students can use to access free menstrual pads and tampons.Annabel Rocha A lot of people who are facing financial crisis now dont have to worry about access to period products, at least not on campus, said Muhammad. Why do college students need free products? College students are notoriously broke and higher education is expensive. Federal data released this year by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) supports the notion that many students are struggling to get by. According to the data, 4 million college students experience food insecurity, and 8% of undergrad students are homeless. The average cost of college tuition, including books, supplies and living expenses averages out to $36,436 in the U.S., according to Education Data Initiative. Cost of tuition is $9,349 at the average public 4-year institution, but is 23% higher in Illinois. Attending a private university in the state is 7% higher than the national average. These costs are making students weigh out their needs. In September, intimate health brand Intimina revealed that their study of five universities showed that almost 19% of female college students said theyve felt forced to decide between buying period products or meeting other expenses such as paying bills or buying food. A similar study by BMC Health in 2021 found that 14% of women attending college experienced period poverty in the past year, and 10% reported experiencing it every month. The American Medical Association has urged the IRS to consider period products a medical necessity, to remove barriers to accessing products in correctional facilities and prevent these goods from being taxed. The National Organization for Women estimated that menstruators spend about $20 per cycle, adding up to $200 to $300 a year, but Yahoo Finance reports that the prices of pads and tampons increased up to 10% last year. This generation of teens and young adults care about menstrual health. The latest State of the Period survey shows that 89% said they think that menstrual products are just as important as toilet paper or soap in public restrooms. We dont choose this Free products are important for folks because for students, I think thats a particular place in our lives where were trying to learn, were trying to focus in school and having to worry about that while on campus, while in a learning environment, and even off campus is something that is so basic and so easy to solve, Abigail Suleman, co-founder of Blood Buds, said at IL Latino News and WBEZs Community Conversation earlier this year. Students have motivated universities in IL to implement free programs Though private schools are exempt from this policy, pressure from students has influenced universities to adopt similar measures on their own campuses. In 2022, Menstrual Equity Activists (MEA) at Northwestern University created a survey to understand the need for free menstrual products at Northwestern, generating 662 responses from students. 99% of respondents said it would be helpful to have menstrual products in residence halls/residential colleges, and 100% of menstruators said that they would use free menstrual products in dorms. Residential Services used this data, installed dispensers and now provides period products across campus. Students can even provide feedback on this online form to report dispensers that need to be restocked. A gender-neutral restroom in Northwestern Universitys Shepard Hall holds packs of menstrual pads and tampons.Annabel Rocha Unfortunately, were still working on getting every bathroom on campus stocked with products but any building you go to, any dorm that youre living in, has them in at least one of the bathrooms, said Lili Pope, co-president of MEA. At Loyola University, Students for Reproductive Justice (SRJ) started leaving free period products in plastic containers by the sink in both Lake Shore and Water Tower campus restrooms themselves in 2017. According to Ella Hansen, an SRJ organizer, the university agreed to take over responsibility of the Menstrual Equity Project in Fall 2019, but once the COVID-19 pandemic hit there wasnt a need to follow up on the project with no students on campus. Once we all returned in person, they had fully taken on the project, but there were a lot of issues with it, said Hansen, citing inconsistent stocking and recurring transphobic instances. A 2019 video shared on Snapchat showed a man tossing out a box of period products meant for transgender men and gender nonconforming people using the mens restroom. According to the Chicago Tribune, it earned over 1 million views. Weve been working with them to get dispensers permanently affixed to the walls to prevent that kind of stuff. And just to make it more concrete, you know, that theyre going to be there and theyre going to be free for a while, said Hansen. SRJs goal has been to consistently provide free period products in the restrooms of all genders, in all buildings at Loyola but it hasnt happened. The organization says there has been continued conversation with Loyola Facilities, with renewed hope for thorough implementation of the Menstrual Equity Program as new administration has taken over the project at the universitys end. Blood Buds, MEA and SRJ are all very vocal about the importance of making these products accessible beyond womens restrooms. Most of the bathrooms with the products in the dorms are the gender neutral ones on the first floor. We were very grateful that residential services tried to be as inclusive as possible, said Pope. Nowadays theres like way more people who dont necessarily identify as a woman who can access the product so that was appreciated. According to NPR, there is currently no list recording how many colleges and universities in the U.S. provide period products to their students for free. _____________________________________________________________________ Publishers note: This reporting is supported by a fellowship with the Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS), sponsored by The Commonwealth Fund, in partnership with IL Latino News. A Salem County grand jury has indicted a teenager and his mother on charges stemming from a fatal crash that killed a high school student last year. Dane T. Pierce was 16 and not eligible to have a drivers license when he drove more than 100 mph before his vehicle struck a tree in Pittsgrove on May 3, 2022, according to police. The crash killed Pierces passenger, Evan DAnjou, a 15-year-old Schalick High School student. Evan DAnjou, 15, died in a May 2022 car crash in Pittsgrove. (Provided photo) The case against Pierce, now 17, was transferred from family to criminal court earlier this year. Pierce was charged as an adult in June with aggravated manslaughter and reckless death by auto while operating a motor vehicle while unlicensed and in a reckless manner which resulted in a motor vehicle crash while under the influence (marijuana), according to a summons filed by New Jersey State Police. Police subpoenaed medical records that showed Pierce tested positive for THC, the compound in marijuana that makes people high, according to the affidavit of probable cause in the case. However, police did not say what tests were done or how they determined the teenager was under the influence of marijuana while driving. The grand jury indicted him last week on charges of first-degree aggravated manslaughter and second-degree reckless vehicular homicide. Pierces attorney, John Morris, declined to comment about the indictment when contacted Monday. Pierce was unlicensed and unpermitted to drive, but his mother allowed him to drive an unregistered vehicle, authorities alleged in court documents. Tisha M. Gargon, 52, of Pittsgrove, was accused of lending the car to Pierce, but her indictment on second- and third-degree child endangerment charges was dismissed in April over the objection of prosecutors. The grand jury indicted her last week on a new second-degree charge of violation of public health and safety law resulting in death. Court records did not list an attorney for Gargon for the new charge. In building their case, prosecutors said they relied on speed data from the wrecked car and surveillance footage. Pierce allegedly ran a stop sign on McKishen Road at the intersection with Buck Road in Pittsgrove, according to police. The car traveled across Buck Road, off the roadway and went airborne before striking a tree in Deer Pen Park. An investigation revealed the car was traveling at 108 mph five seconds before the crash and 104 mph just before the crash, according to the affidavit of probable cause. Video surveillance taken prior to the crash showed Pierce driving in a reckless manner, police said. At the crash scene, Pierce allegedly told the troopers that he killed his best friend. Pierce is due in court Dec. 14 for a post-indictment arraignment hearing, while Gargon is scheduled for her arraignment hearing Jan. 12. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Ever wonder what happened to Golden Bachelor lead Gerry Turner and the winner Theresa Nist after The Golden Bachelor season finale? If the finale gave you any indication about their future plans, the couple is already engaged and they are currently keeping up their relationship via long distance. But their situation is about to change in a big way in the not-so-distant future. Heres what you need to know about the couples future plans for their relationship. Gerry and Theresa are getting married in a live television special on ABC called The Golden Wedding On The Golden Bachelor: After the Final Rose, host Jesse Palmer announced that Turner and Nist will get a televised wedding broadcast on ABC. We are going to get married. Were going to do it as quickly as we can, because at our age, we dont have a lot of time to waste, joked Turner. So as quickly as we can put together a wedding plan, were getting married. This wedding special will be called The Golden Wedding, and it will be broadcast on Thursday, Jan. 4, 2024. Gerry and Theresa are planning a post-wedding move to Charleston, South Carolina As of right now, the couple is keeping their relationship long-distance. Turner still lives in Indiana and Nist still lives in New Jersey. But after they get married, the couple plans to put down roots in the southeastern part of the U.S. Turner and Nist told People Magazine that they plan to move to Charleston, South Carolina, to have a welcoming home for both of their families and to be closer to Nists son. For the last couple of years, when my family gets together, Ive talked about moving to South Carolina, and its an idea Ive toyed with, Turner told the publication. And then in conversation with Theresa, a private moment, shes saying, Well, yeah, my son lives near Charleston in South Carolina. The move will likely happen after each of them sells their respective houses after the wedding. Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com. Katherine Rodriguez can be reached at krodriguez@njadvancemedia.com. Have a tip? Tell us at nj.com/tips. MLB fans especially those for the Yankees and Mets are anxiously awaiting their teams biggest moves. Will they take place at the Winter Meetings, which conclude Wednesday? At this point, the insiders guesses are as good as any. Teams seem to be surveying the field and laying the groundwork for their moves. Executives are also waiting for some of the big chips to fall to set the market for other players in the respective tiers. FIXING THE YANKEES: Sign up HERE for our twice-weekly newsletter on the offseason changes With that being said, here is the latest information on the timelines for some of the biggest headline players this offseason, outfielder Juan Soto, DH/pitcher Shohei Ohtani and pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto. From ESPNs Alden Gonzalez: The expectation heading into the week was that a Soto deal would materialize from the winter meetings and that Ohtani and Yamamoto wouldnt sign until after they concluded -- but things can change quickly. Soto will cost more than $30 million through the arbitration process in 2024, while Yamamoto is expected to sign for at least $200 million and Ohtani could command a contract that reaches $600 million. Every team in the mix for those players needs certainty for the rest of their offseason. It could trigger heightened aggression Meanwhile, ESPNs Buster Olney has heard something a little different about Soto. I think this has all the makings of a late January or early February deal, said one front office type whose team is not involved. The Yankees have seemed like the favorite for Soto, a three-time All-Star, for months because of their need for a left-handed-hitting outfielder and deep pockets. Soto could be on the move because the Padres want to cut payroll and have limited options with so many no-trade clauses. The Toronto Blue Jays are also involved in talks. Yamamoto, the Japanese ace who was recently posted, has intrigued a number of teams after all, he only requires a financial outlay, which could be more than $200 million but is said to like a big market. The Yankees and Mets want to add him to their rotations, per reports. Yamamoto is expected to talk with teams in-person within the week. Ohtani has kept his free agent desires under wraps, but its presumed that the Los Angeles Dodgers are the favorites. (The Yankees and Mets have not seemed heavily involved.) NASHVILLE Yankees trade target Juan Soto is back home in the Dominican Republic impatiently waiting for the inevitable. Hes antsy. The three-time All-Star outfielder wants the Padres to stop negotiating and pull the trigger on a trade, whether its a move to the Bronx or anywhere else. On the eve of this weeks Winter Meetings, which began Sunday night at Gaylord Opryland Resort, Sotos mindset was relayed to an NJ Advance Media source who is a long-time big leaguer. In texts with Soto late last week, the source says the 25-year-old outfielder cant wait for the Padres to complete a deal so that he can focus on getting ready for the 2024 season instead of being consumed with his uncertain future. He just wants this over with, the source said. He doesnt care where he goes. He knows the Padres arent keeping him, so he wants them to trade him. FIXING THE YANKEES: Sign up HERE for our twice-weekly newsletter on the offseason changes What does Soto think about a possible deal to the Yankees, who were the favorites to work a deal until the past few days when the rival Blue Jays emerged as new frontrunners? Hed be happy going there (to the Yankees), the source said. But hed be happy going to Toronto, too. He says he doesnt care where he plays. He just wants to know who hell be playing for. The Padres need the trim a lot of payroll this winter and Soto is as good as gone because hes projected to make about $32 million in 2024, his walk year to free agency. A deal could be finalized before the Winter Meetings wrap up with Wednesday mornings Rule 5 draft. Soto turned down $440 million over 15 years from the Nationals in 2022 before he was traded by Washington to San Diego. As a free agent, hell ask for even more. The NJ Advance Media source who knows Soto believes agent Scott Boras initial ask will be for around $550 million for 13 years. He predicted Soto might settle for $450 million. Will the Yankees go that high? Doubtful. While Hal Steinbrenner is on record saying hell consider any acquisition that would improve the Yankees, its believed he wants Aaron Judge to remain the highest-paid Yankee. As a free agent last winter, Judge re-signed with the Yankees for the richest deal in franchise history, nine years for $360 million. Thank you for relying on us to provide the journalism you can trust. Please consider supporting us with a subscription. Randy Miller may be reached at rmiller@njadvancemedia.com. Six-day (Tuesday through Sunday) print subscribers of the Watertown Daily Times are eligible for full access to NNY360, the NNY360 mobile app, and the Watertown Daily Times e-edition, all at no additional cost. If you have an existing six-day print subscription to the Watertown Daily Times, please make sure your email address on file matches your NNY360 account email. You can sign up or manage your print subscription using the options below. Watertown, NY (13601) Today Periods of snow. Temps nearly steady in the low to mid 30s. Winds light and variable. Chance of snow 90%. About one inch of snow expected.. Tonight Cloudy with snow showers mainly during the evening. Low 24F. Winds light and variable. Chance of snow 60%. Snow accumulations less than one inch. This story was produced in partnership with The 74, a nonprofit news outlet covering Americas schools. Stephen Marcantel writes for The Acadiana Advocate as a Report for America corps member. Email him at stephen.marcantel@theadvocate.com. North Devon hospital charity Over and Above will be known as Royal Devon Hospitals Charity from this week. The charity, which raises money to provide facilities and equipment beyond what is possible solely with NHS funding, has joined forces with the RD&E Charity. The change follows the merger of Northern Devon Healthcare NHS Trust and the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust in April last year. Ian Roome, head of fundraising for the newly-named Royal Devon Hospitals Charity, said the merger had presented both charities with an opportunity to do even more for hospitals in north, mid and east Devon. Nothing has changed other than the name; the money raised in North Devon can stay local and remains ring-fenced for the cause it was raised for, said Mr Roome. But by working together, the two charities have been able to pool their knowledge, resources, systems and processes, making us more efficient and meaning more money goes directly to our hospitals, wards and services. Since forming in 2011, Over and Above has raised 2.2m to build the Seamoor Chemotherapy Centre and 1.5m for the Fern Centre, both at North Devon District Hospital. The charity continues to fund the cancer and wellbeing centre, as well as countless other hospital wards and departments. Were proud of our past but excited about our future and what we can do together, added Mr Roome. Donations can be used to fund new state-of the-art equipment, create world-class patient and staff environments, support additional staff training and wellbeing projects, and fund cutting-edge research and development. Altogether, there are more than 250 different funds, so you can raise money for the specific hospital, ward or service that you choose to support. Or if youd prefer, you can raise money for general funds and well ensure the money is used by Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, wherever the need is greatest. People in North Devon have been incredibly supportive of their local NHS and have helped leave an incredible legacy for healthcare in the area. We hope they will continue to support and help Royal Devon Hospitals Charity do brilliant things for our NHS in North Devon. The find out more about Royal Devon Hospitals Charity, visit www.royaldevoncharity.org.uk The pension fund relied upon by a large number of public sector workers in Devon is aiming to up the amount of money it invests in higher risk private equity, amid a high-profile push by the government. Nearly 40,000 people saved money in the Devon Pension Fund last year. Now it wants to increase the amount it invests in private equity from 1.3 per cent of its assets to three per cent during the next financial year. Investing in private equity often means pension funds have greater exposure to smaller companies, which are deemed to offer higher growth prospects than more established firms. However, research from Beauhurst, which specialises in data on private companies, said that 20 per cent of private UK companies started in 2017 had failed. The move to increase exposure to private equity comes amid a campaign by central government to encourage pension funds to invest in such assets. In the Autumn Statement, chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced he would revise local government pension scheme guidance to allow such a move, that could lead to an estimated 30 billion of local government pension scheme money being invested in private equity firms. However, a government consultation on the move showed a large amount of opposition, with 84 per cent of respondents against, mainly because of fears about a conflict of interest and it being inappropriate for central government to suggest how local pension funds should invest. Several respondents expressed concerns about private equity as a higher risk asset class, and about impacts on investment costs and liquidity, meaning how easy they are to sell. Larger public companies listed on stock exchanges issue shares, which investors such as pension funds can buy and sell on a daily basis. A spokesperson for Devon County Council said the aim was to have three per cent of the countys pension fund invested in private equity in the next financial year, increasing to four per cent in the medium term. Currently, there are no plans to increase its allocation to private equity beyond four per cent but this will be reconsidered when the strategy is next formally reviewed in early 2025. The spokesperson added that the chancellors hopes for pension funds to invest 10 per cent in private equity was not a formal target at present. Each local government pension scheme fund should set an ambition to invest 10 per cent in private equity, but there are no timescales put forward for this, and neither is that investment mandated, the spokesperson said. 5 bodies found underwater in search for missing U.S. Osprey crew: Japanese media Xinhua) 15:38, December 04, 2023 TOKYO, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- In search of the U.S. military Osprey aircraft that crashed last week in waters off southwestern Japan, the bodies of five missing crew members may have been located underwater, according to local media outlets. The five bodies, along with multiple pieces of wreckage from the Osprey, were found in waters off the country's southwestern island of Yakushima on Monday morning during an underground search conducted by the U.S. Navy and Japan's Maritime Self-Defence Force, Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported citing government officials. Divers have also found what appears to be the main part of the tilt-rotor aircraft, national news agency Kyodo reported. The U.S. Osprey military transport aircraft based in Japan, with eight people on board, crashed on Wednesday. One unconscious person was found in the sea and later confirmed dead. The U.S. Air Force said that the CV-22 tilt-rotor transport aircraft was involved in a "mishap" while carrying out routine training. Following the accident, Japan announced that it would suspend its own Osprey flights while urging the United States to confirm the safety of its Osprey military aircraft. (Web editor: Zhang Kaiwei, Liang Jun) (Informacion remitida por la empresa firmante) NEW YORK and LONDON, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Global Board of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited (PwCIL) today announced that Mohamed Kande has been selected as the next Chair of the PwC Network. His four-year term, which has been ratified by PwC's worldwide network of member firms, will commence on 1 July 2024. Mr. Kande, who has worked at PwC since 2011, is a member of PwC's Global Leadership Team and has served as Global Advisory Leader since 2019. In addition, he serves as the co-leader of US Consulting Solutions. Mohamed has previously held various multi-territory leadership roles and been responsible for helping our global stakeholders and clients solve their most complex problems. Mohamed has over 32 years of professional services experience and brings a wealth of multi-industry and multi-disciplinary experience. He is a licensed CPA, holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and earned an MS in electrical engineering from the University of Montreal and a diplome d'ingenieur in electrical engineering from Ecole Superieure d'Ingenieurs en Genie Electrique in France. Lisa Sawicki, PwC Network Governance Board Chair, said: "Mohamed is a purpose-led leader with broad multidisciplinary experience and will bring tremendous insights and perspective to the role of Global Chair. He is committed to implementing our global strategy, our multidisciplinary operating model and collaborating closely with our partners and people to help our clients and stakeholders build trust and drive sustained outcomes. Mohamed's global experience, commitment to diversity and inclusion and understanding of cutting-edge technologies make him the ideal Chair to guide PwC into the future." Mohamed Kande, PwC Global Chair-elect, said: "It is a great honour to be selected as the next Global Chair of the PwC Network as we enter our 175th year in business. I look forward to working with my colleagues around the world as we continue to help our clients and stakeholders build trust, deliver quality and drive sustained outcomes. That said, the world is changing quickly and the needs of our clients, our people and the communities we live in are also changing. I am extremely confident that PwC has the right strategy, the right multidisciplinary operating model and the right values in place to help our clients through these challenges and opportunities. I look forward to building on those in the next four years." Mr Kande will succeed Bob Moritz, who has served as Global Chair since 2016. Bob will retire at the end of his term on 30 June 2024, concluding a four decade career at PwC. Lisa Sawicki, PwC Network Governance Board Chair, added: "I want to thank Bob for all he has achieved, and will continue to achieve, in his role as Global Chair. In addition to driving PwC's strategy, Bob has been committed to our people and exemplifies PwC values every day. As Chair, he has been a champion for diversity & inclusion, stakeholder capitalism and is a leading voice of the business community around major societal issues such as climate and skills development." Bob Moritz, PwC Global Chair, said: "It has been an honor and a privilege to serve this great Network as Global Chair. Having worked alongside Mohamed for over a decade, I have the utmost confidence he will continue to live our values and purpose while successfully driving the Network forward." About PwCAt PwC, our purpose is to build trust in society and solve important problems. We're a network of firms in 151 countries with over 360,000 people who are committed to delivering quality in assurance, advisory and tax services. Find out more and tell us what matters to you by visiting us at www.pwc.com. Biography of Mohamed Kande Mohamed Kande currently serves as Vice Chair PwC US - US Consulting Solutions Co-Leader and Global Advisory Leader. He also serves as the CEO of the US and Japan Consulting businesses. In these roles, he is responsible for helping clients identify value and design and deliver large-scale business-led change, from strategy to outcomes, specifically in the areas of Deals, Transformation, Cybersecurity, Privacy and Risk, Cloud and Digital and Tax Consulting. As part of his role at the Global Advisory Leader, Mohamed played a key leadership role in driving the Network's Alliance strategy as well as served as the executive sponsor of the Network's investments in key capabilities such as Gen AI, managed services, and business model reinvention. Prior to this role, Mohamed served as PwC's US and Global Advisory Leader for the technology, media, telecoms ("TMT") and hospitality industry sectors. His technical knowledge spans the areas of operational strategy, technology development, mergers and acquisitions and operations management.Before joining PwC in August 2011, Mohamed was the managing partner of PRTM Management Consultants' Europe, Middle East and South Asia business. Prior to that leadership role, he was the managing partner of PRTM's Global Public Sector business. Mohamed also continued to be one of the senior partners in PRTM's telecommunications and technology practice.Prior to joining PRTM, Mohamed worked for Motorola in Chicago and for DTI Telecom in Canada, deploying and launching telecommunications networks in the USA, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa.Mohamed holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, an MS in electrical engineering from the University of Montreal and a diplome d'ingenieur inn electrical engineering from Ecole Superieure d'Ingenieurs en Genie Electrique in France. Mohamed became a licensed CPA in Washington, D.C., in 2022. He is on the Board of Directors of CARE, the global humanitarian organization providing disaster relief to areas in crisis, and providing long-term solutions to poverty around the world. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/pwc-selects-mohamed-kande-as-next-global-chair-302003449.html Republican presidential candidate North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum speaks during the Florida Freedom Summit held at the Gaylord Palms Resort in Kissimmee, Fla., on Nov. 4, 2023. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum withdrew from the Republican presidential race on Dec. 4, despite an unexpectedly strong performance propelled by his campaign in recent weeks. Mr. Burgum, a prosperous software entrepreneur and second-term governor, initiated his 2024 presidential campaign in June, but was at the time largely unknown on a national scale. He spent his time in the spotlight emphasizing his leadership of North Dakota and his small-town upbringing, in addition to his focus on energy, the economy, and national security. However, he was unable to advance to the third debate due to his failure to meet the polling requirements. It appeared he would not be eligible to participate in the fourth debate, which takes place in Alabama in just a few days. In a race dominated by former President Donald Trump, Mr. Burgum ultimately failed to gain significant ground against his opponents. In suspending his campaign, he is joined by former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), radio host Larry Elder, businessman Perry Johnson, former Texas congressman Will Hurd, and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez. Mr. Burgum contributed millions of his own funds to the campaign, accounting for $12.2 million of the $15.1 million raised between March and September, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission. Filings indicate that a super PAC supporting his candidacy raised more than $11 million in the first half of this year. His Achilles tendon ruptured the day before the first Republican primary debate in Milwaukee in August, nearly depriving him of his first opportunity for national public exposure. Nevertheless, he continued and appeared on the stage, later explaining to the media that he supported himself behind the podium on one leg. Following that, he resumed his campaign using a knee scooter and a boot. In 2016, Mr. Burgum, who was a political novice, overthrew the incumbent attorney general in the Republican gubernatorial primary in North Dakota. He is qualified for a third term as governor in 2024 but has not said whether he will seek reelection. Mr. Burgum assumed office in the midst of a significant state revenue shortfall and demonstrations against the Dakota Access pipeline. Prior to and following his victory, he advocated for his vision of reinventing state government. Burgum Reflects on Being the Underdog In a recent column published in local newspaper The Jamestown Sun just two days after the third debate, Mr. Burgum asserted that political insiders were trying to artificially narrow the field before the 2024 election. This came shortly after the Republican governor did not qualify for the third debate due to failure to poll at least 4 percent in two national polls or 4 percent in a national poll as well as two polls from the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina, according to the Republican National Committee. Additionally, he was unable to reach the standard of 70,000 unique donors to his campaign, of which at least 200 must come from 20 states or territories. The candidate only narrowly qualified for the second debate, which took place in October in Southern California. I know what its like to be the underdog, the North Dakota governor began in the column. One of the reasons I decided to run for President in the first place was to give a voice to all those people who have been overlooked by elites on both coasts and the politicians in Washington, D.C. Its why Im still running for President. In the same piece, he reflected on his 2016 gubernatorial race in which he was behind 59 points in the polls before ultimately winning. We won that primary by over 20 points, the general election by 40 points, and re-election in 2020 by the largest margin of any race for governor in the country that year, he said. We are deeply grateful for all the amazing support and encouragement we receive. The Associated Press contributed to this report. From The Epoch Times Every year, Christmas comes with many exciting activities to attend. The Nutcracker Ballet is one of the most talent-filled events you can see. Students of the arts from Butler University and young students from the central Indiana area gather to perform in this holiday classic. This past week, I had the privilege of photographing the talent in their dress rehearsal and capturing ballet moves such as pique turns, Bourre, Arabesque, and Fouettes, among many others seen in the ballet. So, please sit back and enjoy the talented Butler Arts students as they show off the skills they have worked a lifetime developing and honing. GARY Glen Park Academy second grader, Diamond Lancaster, couldn't help but smile as she talked about her brand new winter coat she received from a local nonprofit organization. "I like the blue, pink, purple and white colors because it's pretty," Lancaster said in reference to her marble colored winter coat. Lancaster was also proud to show off her rainbow colored, hand-knitted scarf she received earlier in the week through School House Children's Charity. Between her jacket and scarf, she was overjoyed to wear all of her favorite colors in the rainbow. Last week, 80 jackets and nearly 200 hats, gloves and scarves were distributed to students at Glen Park Academy in Gary. For almost a decade, first grade teacher Brian Andreshak has hosted coat drives for elementary school students in the Gary Community School Corporation, and across Northwest Indiana. "I started this because I was just trying to get coats for my kids because they were cold at recess and coming to school in hoodies and light clothes," said Andreshak, a teacher of 23 years. "It's grown through the years with a lot of community support and a lot of donations." Last summer, Andreshak created School House Children's Charity, a 501(c)(3), to expand outreach with community partners, and spread positivity in children. By collecting donations, Andreshak is able to go out each week to purchase new winter jackets for students. Andreshak donated more than 800 coats, and over 1,000 hats, scarves and gloves across ten schools in Gary and surrounding towns last schoolyear. This year, Andreshak is on track to serve five schools, but hopes to match or beat his outreach from last year since coat distribution runs until April. (To donate, visit schoolhousecc.org). Glen Park Academy Principal Eric Worthington describes Andreshak as a philanthropic person who is a huge resource for the school system. Worthington is grateful his students have the opportunity to receive brand new jackets, especially the hand-knitted hats and scarves made by the Loving Hands Group at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Munster. "Not all of our families here are what some would consider 'disadvantaged'," Worthington said. "Our kids have the basics, but sometimes families find themselves in the predicament that kids are outgrowing stuff faster than they can replenish things." Andreshak feels it's his responsibility as a teacher to help students who may be struggling. He expressed gratitude toward his parents, who always gave back to him. Through his organization, Andreshak also distributes new books to children in Northwest Indiana. School House Children's Charity has partnered with Dolly Parton's Imagination Library to help send a specially picked book to families with children who are up to four years old each month. Andreshak currently ships books to 85 families with a 46394 Whiting zip code, but plans to expand outreach in the future. During the year, School House Children's Charity has book giveaways at Glen Park Academy and The Boys and Girls Club of Northwest Indiana, located in Hammond. Whether it's a book or a jacket, Worthington said Andreshak's charity holds an expectation for what children deserve when they walk into Glen Park Academy. "Hopefully I can make a small impact," Andreshak said. "Seeing their smiles and being happy about getting something new that's what it's all about." Close Students, faculty and staff completed a walk around the Indiana University Northwest campus Thursday to show the school's support of decreasing stigma associated with mental health. Students, faculty and staff completed a walk around the Indiana University Northwest campus Thursday to show the school's support of decreasing stigma associated with mental health. Students, faculty and staff completed a walk around the Indiana University Northwest campus Thursday to show the school's support of decreasing stigma associated with mental health. Students, faculty and staff completed a walk around the Indiana University Northwest campus Thursday to show the school's support of decreasing stigma associated with mental health. Students, faculty and staff completed a walk around the Indiana University Northwest campus Thursday to show the school's support of decreasing stigma associated with mental health. Students, faculty and staff completed a walk around the Indiana University Northwest campus Thursday to show the school's support of decreasing stigma associated with mental health. IUN Walk Against Mental Health Stigma The "U Bring Change to Mind" organization at Indiana University Northwest hosted a walk against mental health stigma on Thursday afternoon around its campus in Gary. Students, faculty and staff completed a walk around the Indiana University Northwest campus Thursday to show the school's support of decreasing stigma associated with mental health. Students, faculty and staff completed a walk around the Indiana University Northwest campus Thursday to show the school's support of decreasing stigma associated with mental health. Students, faculty and staff completed a walk around the Indiana University Northwest campus Thursday to show the school's support of decreasing stigma associated with mental health. Students, faculty and staff completed a walk around the Indiana University Northwest campus Thursday to show the school's support of decreasing stigma associated with mental health. Students, faculty and staff completed a walk around the Indiana University Northwest campus Thursday to show the school's support of decreasing stigma associated with mental health. Students, faculty and staff completed a walk around the Indiana University Northwest campus Thursday to show the school's support of decreasing stigma associated with mental health. EAST CHICAGO The Indianapolis Boulevard and 152nd Street intersection will be closed for the month of December. According to a city of East Chicago news release, the intersection will be closed due to the installation of a new watermain. Indianapolis Boulevard will be brought down to a single northbound and southbound lane and a detour will be implemented. MERRILLVILLE The town of Merrillville is one of six municipalities in the state and the only in northern Indiana to earn an Indiana Clean Community designation. Merrillville along with Beech Grove, Brown County, Fishers, Richmond, and Zionsville were honored by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management on Tuesday for their achievements in the Indiana Clean Community Program. We were excited to collaborate closely with our partners at IDEM as a pilot community to support the Indiana Clean Community Program to benefit the environmental health and wellness of our town, Merrillville Stormwater Executive Director Matt Lake said. Merrillville and the other communities have been working with IDEM since 2021 on developing the Clean Community Program, which replaces the Indiana Clean Community Challenge. Merrillvilles commitment to pursuing projects to address community and social issues led to the town reaching the Bronze Level in the Indiana Clean Community Program. It is exciting to see our work recognized along with other Indiana cities and towns, Merrillville Town Council President Rick Bella said. Our Bronze Level award is due to the work of our Merrillville Clean Team, and also by having a positive environmental history, and attending the Indiana Clean Annual meeting. Although excited about achieving the Bronze Level, Bella understands theres room to improve. We can now work toward a new goal of Silver or Gold membership, and I look forward to working with Stormwater Utility Executive Director Matt Lake toward those goals, Bella said. The new Indiana Clean Community Program was officially unveiled Tuesday so other municipalities in the state can now participate. Visit on.IN.gov/cleancommunity to learn more about the initiative. Participating in the Clean Community Program can lead to a variety of benefits for municipalities. That includes becoming more sustainable and resilient. The recognition can also assist municipalities when they apply for competitive grants and assistance programs. Bella stressed the importance of participating in initiatives like the Indiana Clean Community Program to earn recognition downstate because it can help when working with state lawmakers on potential legislation and other projects. I think Merrillville is back on the map, Bella said. Its kind of nice to see that. GALLERY: The Times Photos of the Week When Gale Miller, Jr. rang a bell for Salvation Army, his seasonal experiences with passersby was a sociological study of human behavior. He watched a lot of Scrooges hurry past him, but also a lot of Fezziwigs who balanced out the bucket of humanity. One gentleman sheepishly whispered to me as he placed his donation in the red kettle, You know, they are hiring at Walmart, Miller said. Others would walk by indigently and try to ignore the loud ringing of the red bell in my hand as I tried to bring the ring to a crescendo. Many people, seemingly in a new rush, would reach deep into their pocket or purse to find loose change, prompting Miller to politely remind them, We take folding money. Other bell-ringers shared similar observations with me about their exchanges with strangers while standing next to red kettles across our Region. We see all kinds, thats for sure, a female bell ringer told me outside a grocery store in Valparaiso. The best and worst of people, a male bell-ringer said at a Walmart in Merrillville. And everyone in between. These bell-ringers all share a unique vantage point in our society. They see firsthand whos naughty or nice, who gives money every time, and who does anything possible to avoid them. Unlike other charitable donations we make - typically online or anonymously or at private functions - donations to Salvation Army red kettles are done publicly, openly and often witnessed by bell ringers. It leaves a lasting imprint on those who donate to the kettle, said Tom Miller, a long-time bell-ringer who looked like a human Christmas tree with a strand of twinkling lights wrapped around him. This past weekend, I spoke with a woman ringing a Salvation Army bell who sat in a chair next to a red kettle inside a grocery store. Like most bell-ringers, she quietly watched people come and go as she occasionally twisted her wrist to make some noise. We tell everyone Merry Christmas either way, she said. Some shoppers find the bell ringing annoying. Others find it to be Pavlovian in nature, a seasonal conditioning for us to instinctively reach into our pockets or purse or wallet. The ringing can be heard from across a parking lot or even from across a street. It gives people ample time to make a decision: Should I give money or not? Confession: I dont give money every time. Sometimes Im carrying only a Discover card without my wallet. My wife dutifully gives to every bell-ringer, which is probably a similar dynamic for many couples. Nonetheless, I enjoy hearing the bell ringing, which helps me get into the holiday spirit. In early December, I need all the Christmas cues I can get. Salvation Army is a poor barometer of my charitable spirit, Alice Morris, a reader from Crown Point, told me. Its a Christian organization that doesnt share my values. I shouldnt be judged depending on whether or not I drop money into their red kettles. Morris was one of many readers who responded to a column I wrote last month about giving out loud, regarding people who either perform a good deed and proclaim the gesture to the world. Or those who give a generous donation and make sure everyone else knows about it. Years ago, our accountant asked why I didnt have receipts from all my donations, including things Ive dropped off at Goodwill, Judi Nuest, a loyal reader, wrote via email. I told him I didnt really think I was donating anything if I received compensation in return. I had never thought of this aspect of making donations and reporting it for tax purposes. As another reader noted, Credit you give yourself is not worth having, quoting Irving Thalberg, a film producer from the early 20th century. Several readers shared with me the same biblical scripture, Matthew 6:2, involving this topic. "So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." A few years ago, I volunteered as a bell-ringer during the holidays, specifically for a column. It was my own social experiment to see if people donated money based on how I acted while wearing the organization's trademark red vest and ringing its familiar bell. With my experience, people tended to give more money to those bell-ringers who are lively and cheerful, or who opened doors for customers or herded shopping carts out of the way. Im probably the same way as a donor. Personal interaction makes a difference. Personality matters. Salvation Army officials told me that many of its paid bell-ringers are low-income residents, and some of them have been able to get out of a homeless shelter due to their holiday income through the organization. I try to keep this in mind when hearing those bells. Gale Miller witnessed a microcosm of society as he watched on while standing next to his red kettle. Strangers who were rude. Others who were cheerful. Many who ignored him. Some who praised him. The good news is most were very polite and donated with a smile, he said. I especially enjoyed how parents and grandparents taught their children how to push the money through that tiny slot in the sacred red kettle. Thats when I received my reward that day - watching the children give." GALLERY: The Times Photos of the Week We thought the company was going to be wound up today, said Neil McDonald, a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis, which is advising the creditors. The petitioner changed its position and didnt push to wind up the company, which was a surprise to us, said Mr. McDonald, adding that he was informed of the change 15 minutes before the hearing on Monday. He and another adviser to the creditors indicated that had they been given more notice, they would have opposed an adjournment. The split among the creditors was another inconclusive turn in a long and still unresolved case that will eventually determine how Evergrande will meet its final fate. For two decades, Evergrande was held up as an example of success in China. It was among the countrys most powerful companies, at the center of a real estate industry that was critical to the nations economic growth. But years of overexpansion led to its default on more than $300 billion of overdue bills. Evergrandes default plunged Chinas housing market into crisis, leaving many Chinese households despondent about the property market, the main store of wealth for most families. As Evergrandes financial position has gotten progressively worse in recent months, investors have come to expect little in return. Since then, Evergrande has operated in limbo unable to meet its obligations but not formally defunct. Numerous questions remain for the hundreds of thousands of Evergrande home buyers who are still owed their unfinished properties, for the many workers who built and sold its apartments but who have not been compensated, and for the Chinese banks and investors who gave it money expecting to be paid back. A man from Washington, D.C., who pretended to be a federal law enforcement officer and leased luxury apartments for which he failed to pay rent was sentenced to 33 months in prison on Friday, federal authorities said. The man, Arian Taherzadeh, 41, had falsely claimed to be a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security, a former U.S. air marshal, a former U.S. Army Ranger, and a member of a federal task force working across multiple jurisdictions, among other fake roles, the U.S. attorneys office for the District of Columbia said in a news release. Mr. Taherzadeh and a co-conspirator, Haider Ali, 36, of Springfield, Va., used those false claims to recruit others to his law enforcement firm, which they called the United States Special Police LLC and falsely described as a private law enforcement service linked to the federal government, according to court documents. Mr. Taherzadeh used the false claims to recruit others to join his business and to defraud the owners of three apartment complexes in the D.C. area into providing him with multiple apartments and parking spaces for the supposed law enforcement operations, federal authorities said. Details of a sexual assault allegation against the chairman of the Florida Republican Party in an affidavit from state authorities are fueling turmoil within the party. The affidavit recounts that a woman says that the chairman, Christian Ziegler, assaulted her in her apartment in October. It was filed in Florida court as part of a warrant application seeking access to electronic communications and recordings on Mr. Zieglers Google account. A spokeswoman for the Police Department in Sarasota, Fla., confirmed on Thursday that there was an active investigation involving Mr. Ziegler. No charges have been filed against him, and he has denied wrongdoing through his lawyer, Derek Byrd, who did not respond on Sunday for a request for comment. In an earlier statement, he said that we are confident that once the police investigation is concluded that no charges will be filed and Mr. Ziegler will be completely exonerated. In the affidavit, a written declaration made under oath, a law enforcement officer said that the woman and Mr. Ziegler had known each other for 20 years and that she told the police she had agreed to a sexual encounter on Oct. 2 with Mr. Ziegler and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, an elected member of the Sarasota County School Board and a founder of the right-wing national group Moms for Liberty. (She is no longer one of the organizations officers.) The main suspect in an assault that left one tourist dead and two other people injured in Paris was known to French intelligence services for Islamist extremism and had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State before the attack, the French authorities said on Sunday. Jean-Francois Ricard, Frances top antiterrorism prosecutor, said at a news conference in Paris that the suspect had shown persistent radicalization, had a prior terrorism conviction and had been in contact online with jihadists responsible for terrorist attacks in France. But the suspect, identified as Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, also suffers from psychiatric disorders, and the authorities had not detected any imminent plans to carry out an attack, despite a recent alert raised by the suspects mother, Mr. Ricard said. The attack on Saturday laid bare not only the difficulty in monitoring suspected extremists with mental health issues but also the challenges that lie ahead for President Emmanuel Macrons government as it tries to reassure the world that the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris will be safe. Amid a barrage of airstrikes, Israel sharply expanded its evacuation orders in the Gaza Strip on Sunday in preparation for an expected ground invasion in the southern part of the territory. The new orders, coming three days after the collapse of a weeklong truce, sowed confusion and fear among Gaza residents, some of whom have already been displaced at least once before. Images from Gaza on Sunday showed plumes of dark smoke rising above a rubble-covered landscape and bloodied children wailing in dust-covered hospital wards. Mourners stood beside rows of bodies wrapped in white sheets. Late Sunday night, a military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said Israel continues and expands its ground operations against Hamas strongholds all across the Gaza Strip, but did not elaborate. MURDER IN BOSTON 9 p.m. on HBO. On Oct. 23, 1989, the Boston Police Department received a panicked call from Charles Stuart saying that he and his pregnant wife, a white couple, had been shot in their car by a Black man. Later his wife died, and a manhunt around Boston led to the arrest of multiple Black men, even though Stuarts brother would go on to name Charles as the murderer. Footage from the CBS docuseries Rescue 911, which happened to be shadowing the response to Stuarts call that night, is used in this documentary, which casts the case as a microcosm of bigger problems in race relations in the city. BARMAGEDDON: BLAKE SHELTONS HOLIDAY BARTACULAR 10 p.m. on NBC. Blake Shelton is up to his usual bar game shenanigans, this time with a holiday flair. In this special, he will be going up against the rapper and actor Ice-T in games including Merry Axe-Mas, Christmas Carol-okie and Little Drummer Boy (and Girl) your guess on what they entail is as good as mine. Over the next six months, a jury of inmates in prisons across six states will be able to read and debate books, then vote on the winner of a new award, the Inside Literary Prize. The initiative, announced on Monday, was founded by Freedom Reads, a nonprofit that builds libraries in and supplies book to prisons; the Center for Justice Innovation, an organization that provides resources and support to underserved communities; and the National Book Foundation, which hosts the National Book Awards, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the United States. The goal of the award, according to Reginald Dwayne Betts, the founder and chief executive of Freedom Reads, is to create a way for incarcerated people to meaningfully participate in the national cultural conversation. Being able to say that this is the dopest book this year, chosen by these men and women still in prison, is ultimately about saying that their lives matter, he said. When I made this list, I kept discovering ways in which these books were in conversation with one another. The protagonists of my two favorite mystery series debuts seemed like they could work well together, albeit warily. Several books explored the crimes of serial murderers and gave greater voice to those harmed. Noir, particularly the American variety, still endures as a potent lens on contemporary society. And whether the tone is dark or light, crime fiction as a whole still has the power to move scores of readers. Give me the latest novel by a new American crime-writing master. Im envious of anyone whos just discovering S.A. Cosby hes one of crime fictions biggest talents, skilled at merging the darkest human behavior with robust and indelible characters. ALL THE SINNERS BLEED (Flatiron, 338 pp., $27.99) stars Titus Crown, the first-ever Black sheriff of rural Charon County, Va., whose investigation of one murder leads to the discovery of other killings. Vajra Chandrasekeras THE SAINT OF BRIGHT DOORS (Tordotcom, 356 pp., $27.99) is the best book Ive read this year. Fetter, the protagonist, is one of several almost-chosen-ones who have shirked or sidestepped their spectacular destinies in favor of haunted and marginal lives in the city of Luriat. The city has many bright doors that seem to open onto nothing. Fetters fascination with them draws him into a web of Luriati intrigue involving his estranged and godlike father, the Perfect and Kind whom Fetter has been trained since childhood to kill. Protean, nimble, dazzlingly original, The Saint of Bright Doors offers a grammar for comprehending the knots of atrocity were living through, without resorting to the blunt simplicity of allegory. One of the benefits of studying the military histories of non-European groups is that it reminds us that there are very different means of waging war, as well as reasons for doing so. In THE CUTTING-OFF WAY: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800 (University of North Carolina Press, 287 pp., paperback, $29.95), Wayne E. Lee argues that the fluid, Native American style of war was quite alien to the European soldiers who encountered it. Tribes like the Tuscarora and the Cherokee avoided battles and conventional sieges, instead carrying out what Lee calls conquest by harassment dispersed campaigns of ambushes and raids, which could be sustained for years. They often traveled light, subsisting on parched corn supplemented by occasional hunting, and they fought in loose formations that rewarded individual initiative and marksmanship. Israel has begun an invasion of southern Gaza, the last section of the territory that had been under full Hamas control, with dozens of armored vehicles rolling closer to its main city and strikes pummeling urban areas. Satellite imagery analyzed by The Times showed that the Israeli military had pushed into southern Gaza between Friday and Sunday, soon after the collapse of its weeklong truce with Hamas. The move sets the stage for what is likely to be the decisive battle of the war: a showdown in Khan Younis, the largest city in the south, where Israeli officials believe Hamass military and political leadership has sought shelter since fleeing from the north. Heres the latest. The Israeli military has not confirmed a ground invasion of the south, although it has been signaling one for days and warning civilians in several areas to evacuate. The invasion is expected to compound the dire living conditions in an area widely damaged by airstrikes, beset by communications outages and overcrowded with displaced civilians struggling with disease and shortages of water, food, fuel and medical equipment. Israel expands operations across Gaza Israel widened its military campaign against Hamas in southern Gaza yesterday, with armored vehicles rolling closer to its main city and strikes pummeling urban areas. Israel has signaled for days that it is preparing a ground invasion of the south, where it says Hamas fighters and commanders are hiding. The Israeli military said that its ground troops and air force continued to operate across the Gaza Strip, but did not offer details about the location of its operations. Heres the latest. Israel again told civilians to leave parts of Khan Younis, the areas largest city, and head farther south including to Rafah, on the Egyptian border. Aid agencies, however, warned that the shelters in the south were already overcrowded. The level of human suffering is intolerable, said the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, who visited Gaza on Monday. It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, and with a military siege in place there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible. Climate concerns boil over Tensions are rising on Monday over contentious comments by Sultan Ahmed al Jaber, the oil executive and Emirati politician presiding over the COP28 climate summit. His skepticism about the worlds ability to halt a rise in global temperatures by reducing the use of hydrocarbons is casting fresh doubts over the U.A.E.s commitment to addressing the climate crisis. Al Jaber struck back against critics of fossil fuels, who want to see them phased out in the coming decades in an effort to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius, a level considered disastrous by many experts. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is whats going to achieve 1.5 C, he said at an event before the summit. The controversy revived concerns about his role as leader of COP28, given that he is also the chairman of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. Al Jaber has long contended that fossil fuel companies should play a prominent role in the worlds energy transition to bring down global temperatures. In the rocky soil of Lorraine, a former coal mining region near the French-German border, scientists guided a small probe one recent day down a borehole half a mile into the earths crust. Frothing in the water table below was an exciting find: champagne-size bubbles that signaled a potentially mammoth cache of so-called white hydrogen, one of the cleanest-burning fuels in nature. Hydrogen is magical when you burn it you release water, so there are no carbon emissions to warm the planet, said one of the scientists, Jacques Pironon, a senior researcher and professor at the University of Lorraine. We think weve uncovered one of the largest deposits of natural hydrogen anywhere in the world. The discovery by Mr. Pironon and another scientist, Philippe de Donato, both members of Frances respected National Center for Scientific Research, caused a sensation in France, where the government has vowed to become a European leader in clean hydrogen. The Biden administration said on Monday that it was creating a counter-fentanyl strike force within the Treasury Department to combat trafficking of the drug into the United States by more aggressively scrutinizing the finances of suspected narcotics dealers. The Treasurys office of terrorism and financial intelligence and the criminal investigation unit of the Internal Revenue Service will lead the new team. It will attempt to find and disrupt money laundering associated with fentanyl trafficking and to more effectively crack down on sanctions violations. Officials from Treasurys Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and Office of Intelligence and Analysis will also work with counterparts in Mexico and Canada to stop the flow of fentanyl across the northern and southern borders. The Treasury Department has emerged as a key player in the Biden administrations efforts to crack down on illegal drugs entering the United States because it can track the financial flows that benefit traffickers. In the last two years, Treasury has enacted sanctions on about 250 people and organizations related to drug-trafficking activities. Spotify said on Monday that it would cut nearly a fifth of its work force, its third round of layoffs so far this year, as it has struggled to become consistently profitable after spending aggressively to expand beyond music streaming into areas such as podcasting. Spotifys chief executive, Daniel Ek, wrote in a note to employees posted on the companys website that the platform now needed to rightsize to account for a very different environment. Spotify, which is based in Stockholm, will let go of about 1,500 people, or 17 percent of its staff. Economic growth has slowed dramatically and capital has become more expensive, Mr. Ek said. Despite our efforts to reduce costs this past year, our cost structure for where we need to be is still too big. Spotifys cuts come as the technology industry reckons with the end of a decade of rock-bottom interest rates that propelled their growth, prompting the industrys giants like Amazon, Meta and Salesforce to cut costs and shed jobs. Mondays moves, Mr. Ek said, were about preparing for our next phase, where being lean is not just an option but a necessity. When theres a global crisis, wealthy countries tend to find money. In the United States, that was the case for the coronavirus pandemic. And for military aid to allies like Ukraine. But the global climate crisis? Its complicated. On Saturday, Vice President Kamala Harris visited the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, and promised $3 billion for the Green Climate Fund, which benefits poorer nations. But Biden administration officials already are acknowledging it will be a struggle to persuade Congress to approve the money. Then, on Sunday, John Kerry, President Bidens climate envoy, announced at the talks a new carbon credit initiative in which more than a dozen major companies including Walmart, Pepsi and McDonalds will help developing countries pivot away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy. The creation of the program is a tacit acknowledgment that governments simply arent putting up the trillions of dollars needed to fund the energy transition. One of the big tests facing this summit, known as COP28, is whether it will fare any better than earlier climate talks at shoring up anything close to the money thats needed. When I was maybe 3 years old or so, I was given a gold bracelet with dragons on it from my grandmother, Diane Neuville said on a video call from Versailles, France, where she lives and works. My mother is Vietnamese, and in Vietnam jewelry in gold with gemstones is given to children and handed down from mother to daughter. Its symbolic, like a message of love from the family. So four years ago, when the 34-year-old jeweler had a daughter, she wanted to give her a gift of precious jewelry, designed for a child. I looked around and found nothing, so I decided to make my own, she said. The result, which debuted last year, is Les Pierres dAnna (the Gemstones of Anna), a brand named for her 4-year-old daughter. Ms. Neuville uses 18-karat rose and yellow gold with emeralds from Brazil, blue Ceylon sapphires from Sri Lanka and pink, purple and yellow sapphires from Madagascar. Ive always been amazed by the vivid colors of gemstones, she said, and I wanted colorful gemstones for children. The jewelry that Hilda and Sonia Cachi have been making for decades reflects centuries of history and tradition in their native Peru. The sisters they are two of seven sisters, in fact, all of whom are silversmiths say they draw inspiration from their Indigenous and Spanish heritage while also embracing more contemporary designs. And that range was on display at the International Folk Art Market, held in Santa Fe in July: from playful bug-eyed frogs to ornate Sacred Heart images, the Catholic representation of Jesuss heart shining with divine light. On the last Thursday of August, Jennifer Livovich spent the morning simmering beans and cheese sauce in her Boulder, Colo., apartment, preparing nachos. Then friends helped her load a truck with the food, along with donations she had secured socks, toothbrushes, cellphones to distribute at a downtown park where dozens of chronically homeless people congregate. Hopefully, no drama, she said as the truck pulled away. Ms. Livovich has become a central figure in Boulders efforts to help the homeless. In 2020, she created a nonprofit, Feet Forward, to serve several hundred people whom the county estimates lack permanent shelter. And she regularly consults with, and is consulted by, policymakers, housing officials and the Boulder County district attorney. In late November she wrote an op-ed in a local paper on homelessness and substance use. To these conversations, she brings an intimate expertise: For five years, from 2012 to 2017, she lived on the streets of Boulder, often inebriated, until a brush with frostbite scared her into treatment. She struck a chord in Boulder that Ive not ever seen before, said Benita Duran, a former Boulder assistant city manager. In 2021, the American Civil Liberties Union asked Ms. Livovich and Feet Forward to join as plaintiffs in a lawsuit that would force the city to reform its homeless policies. She was told that the lawsuit was going to change homeless lives, she recalled. So of course I joined. Cars would pay $15 once a day to enter Manhattan below 60th Street, and commercial trucks would be charged as much as $36. Taxis would add $1.25 to fares on rides below 60th Street. Ride-hail services like Uber and Lyft would add $2.50. The plan calls for discounts for drivers with household incomes of less than $50,000 a year. The discounts would probably not cut deeply into the revenue for the M.T.A.: A 2022 study by the nonprofit Community Service Society of New York found that a vast majority of commuters who drive into Manhattan have moderate or high incomes. The study said that only 4 percent of commuters from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island would regularly pay congestion-pricing fees. Congestion pricing offers an opportunity to change the car culture in the city. Some think its not ambitious enough. You have to start somewhere, and this is a great start, said Howard Yaruss, a member of the transportation committee of Community Board 7 on the Upper West Side. He went on to say that, ideally, congestion pricing should be expanded gradually until it covers all five boroughs. The cold-weather scenes have crystallized the alarming strain that the arrival of more than 140,000 asylum seekers since spring last year has placed on the city. The influx has prompted the city to spend more than $2.1 billion and open 210 emergency shelters, even as Mayor Eric Adams continues to warn that the crisis could soon spill over into the streets. Other troubling scenes are unfolding in other northern states and cities. In Chicago, migrants have been sleeping in buses and on the floor of police stations, while Massachusetts has warned that its shelter system had reached full capacity. The hazards of exposing migrants to the elements have injected a sense of urgency into the pressure campaign by local leaders, including Mayor Adams, who are calling on the federal government to do more. City Hall has said budget constraints mean it will have to cut spending on migrant care soon. Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor leading the citys response to the crisis, said during a news conference last Tuesday that New York was at capacity. Were running out of staff, were running of money, were running out of space, she said. But advocacy groups argue that migrants are being sent on a dizzying and unnecessary citywide shuffle that is sowing confusion and disrupting any sense of stability they may have achieved. Joshua Goldfein, a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society, a party in the court case that led to the mandate requiring the city to offer shelter to anyone who asks for it, said it remained unclear if the recent fiasco was the result of bureaucratic breakdowns or a true lack of beds. After decades on the job, they had plenty of reasons to like working for the New Jersey State Police. Dawn Curran, 53, was proud to be among an elite cadre of troopers selected to protect the states governors. Wanda Stojanov, also 53, believed in showing her daughters that women could excel in male-dominated careers. For Rebecca Hotchkin, 56, the job offered meaningful work, competitive pay and health care that helped save her life when she got cancer. But if a sister, daughter or niece wanted to join New Jerseys largest and most prestigious policing agency, each woman said she would offer the same advice: Dont. Run the other way, Ms. Hotchkin said. The New Jersey State Police employed 174 female officers last year just 5.6 percent of its 3,117 troopers. Thats less than the national average for comparable state police departments, and less than half the average for all policing agencies, according to Justice Department data. Donald J. Trumps defense lawyers will call his son and fellow defendant Eric Trump back to the witness stand this week, along with more expert witnesses to testify on the former presidents behalf. Mr. Trump, who already testified during his civil fraud trial last month, is scheduled to testify again on Dec. 11 before his lawyers rest their case. The trial, which started in October, stems from a lawsuit brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James. She has accused Mr. Trump and other defendants, including his companies and his sons Donald Jr. and Eric of inflating the value of assets to obtain favorable loans and insurance deals. Today marks the 39th day of the civil fraud trial and kicks off the fourth week of the defendants case. If theres one lesson weve learned from the recent history of the airline industry, its this: The bigger airlines get, the worse they become. The prices get higher, the seats smaller, the service ever snarkier. The mergers over the past 15 years that produced the big three of United Airlines, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines (eliminating Continental, Northwest and US Airways) which, along with Southwest Airlines, now dominate the market have not done Americans any favors. Weve ended up with airlines that offer less for more and have become better than ever at getting bailouts from Congress. Thats the context in which JetBlue Airways is now seeking to buy Spirit Airlines, the nations largest ultra-low-cost airline. The deal, if permitted to go through, would make JetBlue the fifth-largest airline in the country and further reduce competition in the industry. Anticompetitive mergers are illegal under federal antitrust law, so the Justice Department has sued to block the deal. At trial last month in federal court in Boston, JetBlue argued, contrary to common sense and basic economic logic, that eliminating an ultra-low-cost carrier would bring prices down. In fact, it was revealed at trial that JetBlues own analysts have estimated that when Spirit stops flying a route, the average fare goes up 30 percent. Nearly half a million U.S. workers have gone on strike in 2023, demanding better workplace conditions and higher pay in some of the countrys most critical industries. Those workers and the unions many of them belong to have not received a great deal of support from most elected Republicans. The former South Carolina governor and presidential candidate Nikki Haley has proudly described herself as a union buster, saying in 2012 that unions are not needed, not wanted and not welcome in the state of South Carolina. Senator Tim Scott said at a September campaign event that striking workers should be fired, following the model of Ronald Reagan. But Oren Cass, the executive director of the conservative think tank American Compass, is trying to reposition conservatives toward a more populist vision of economic policy, one with sectoral bargaining and an emphasis on quality of life. The fusionist coalition that has characterized the Republican Party is one that was built to beat the Soviet Union, he told me. It is not one that has anything useful and coherent to say about the rise of China, about deindustrialization, about big tech, about worker power generally. But what does that actually mean in real life, especially given the negative view even these populists hold of big labor in America today? And how would he actually persuade other Republicans to take up his viewpoint? This interview has been edited for length and clarity and is part of an Opinion Q. and A. series exploring modern conservatism today, its influence in society and politics and how and why it differs (and doesnt) from the conservative movement that most Americans thought they knew. Jane Coaston: Youve made the conservative case for supporting labor unions. Do you think conservatives are listening? Electoral results since the Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization decision should tell a lot of people in the Republican Party something they absolutely do not want to hear: Even rank-and-file G.O.P. voters are not as pro-life as we might have thought when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. That trend was confirmed last month in Ohio the latest sign that the Republican Party needs to figure out a new way of addressing abortion. Many conservatives may call themselves pro-life, but in practice, that may be a more aspirational statement than an accurate reflection of hard policy views. Perhaps by figuring out what it now means to be pro-life and recognizing that pro-life policy is easiest to sell only when it amounts to a ban on abortions later in pregnancy Republicans can come up with a new approach to the politics of the issue. Before Roe was overturned, the term pro-life covered a lot of ground which was useful over decades in galvanizing a broad coalition willing to use abortion as a political cudgel. As Republicans are finding out today, pro-life means many things to many people. Theres a genocide in the making in Darfur, Sudan for the second time in 20 years. This time, the violence is happening on President Bidens watch, and he and his administration have not done enough to stop it. But there are two things Mr. Biden can do today that could have real impact: Stop Americas Middle Eastern allies from arming the perpetrators and get behind a Kenyan-led African initiative to end the bloodshed. In recent weeks, Sudans paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, a mercenary-commercial enterprise, has overrun four of the five main cities in Darfur, a region in western Sudan. Each conquest has been followed by massacre and pillage targeting communities of the cities darker-skinned residents. After the Rapid Support Forces seized the town of Ardamata on Nov. 4, some 1,500 people were slaughtered, according to a Darfur human rights group. (A local government official, while not denying the killings, said the exact number of dead could not be confirmed.) The paramilitaries are mobile and ferocious, and their adversaries in the regular army, the Sudan Armed Forces in Darfur are demoralized and outgunned. It appears as though the Rapid Support Forces campaign will continue until there are no more cities left to pillage, and Darfurs non-Arabic-speaking communities are ethnically cleansed or reduced to underpaid laborers on land that was once their own. Hundreds of thousands of terrified civilians are now sheltering in the North Darfur capital, El Fasher, the only city in the region not yet overrun by the R.S.F. paramilitaries. The Rapid Support Forces are the next-generation Janjaweed, the militia that 20 years ago rampaged through scores of villages of people belonging to the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa communities in Darfur. At that time, the Janjaweed had been mobilized by the president, Omar al-Bashir, to crush Darfuri rebels by way of decimating the regions non-Arab communities. Militiamen burned, killed, raped and looted. Tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered. Hundreds of thousands perished from hunger and disease. The Janjaweed, drawn from Arabic-speaking nomads from the desert edge communities impoverished by decades of neglect along with drought and the advance of the Sahara sought land and loot. If you dozed off while following the Republican primary, I wouldnt blame you. But it might be worth perking up for a moment. Over the last few months, Nikki Haley has gained enough in the polls that she might be on the verge of surpassing Ron DeSantis as Donald J. Trumps principal rival in the race. With Ms. Haley still a full 50 percentage points behind Mr. Trump in national polls, her ascent doesnt exactly endanger his path to the nomination. If anything, she is a classic factional candidate someone whos built a resilient base of support by catering to the wishes of a minority of the party. So if you were reading this only on the off chance that Mr. Trump might be in jeopardy, you can doze off again. But even if its still hard to imagine a Haley win, her rise may nonetheless make this race more interesting, especially in the early states, which will begin to vote in six weeks. Ms. Haley is now neck-and-neck with Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, a state he is counting on to reverse a yearlong downward spiral in the polls. Shes well ahead of Mr. DeSantis in New Hampshire and South Carolina, two states where a moderate South Carolinian like her ought to fare relatively well. Federal prosecutors said on Monday that a retired State Department official worked for decades as a secret agent for Cuba and was heard referring to the United States as the enemy, a previously undisclosed intelligence breach with potentially significant diplomatic and national security implications. In a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Miami, the prosecutors said that the diplomat, Manuel Rocha, had secretly aided Cubas clandestine intelligence-gathering mission against the United States since at least 1981 as he rose through the ranks at the State Department and worked briefly in a top White House role. Mr. Rocha, 73, appeared to have met with handlers from Cubas spy agency as recently as 2017, prosecutors said, and boasted that he had spent 40 years spying on behalf of the communist government in Havana and strengthened the revolution. For more than two decades, Mr. Rocha handled matters related to Latin America in a series of roles at the State Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, including a stint as ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002. A native of Colombia who grew up in New York, Mr. Rocha served as an adviser to the U.S. military command that includes the Cuba region from 2006 to 2012. The people who are supporting Chris are not supporting him because they love Chris Christie they want someone to take on Trump, said Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who dropped out of the presidential race in 2012 after failing to gain enough traction to win the nomination. He has a really important decision to make as to whether to back out and let his votes go to somebody else, or whether hes going to actually improve Trumps chances by staying in. But the dynamic this year reminds other Republicans of 2016, when Mr. Trump benefited from the large field, allowing him to divide the voters who preferred other candidates. Mr. Christie remained in that race until he finished sixth in the New Hampshire primary. He endorsed Mr. Trump 17 days later. Time is a flat circle, and everyone insists we relive, beat for beat, the 2016 election, said Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who has spent years working to defeat Mr. Trump. The main thing that Christie could do to make a difference this time is to drop out. Mr. Christie views that race differently, saying the candidates running against Mr. Trump including himself failed to take the threat of his candidacy seriously enough. We all thought, well, at some point hell drop out or at some point fade away. And we all waited. Hope is not a strategy, he said, in an interview on Fox News on Monday. If you want to beat someone, you need to go out and tell people why hes not right for the job and why you are. The federal government provided millions of dollars in subsidies to large farmers to pay for much of the cost of their crop insurance policies last year, according to a Government Accountability Office report released on Monday. The federal crop insurance program is intended to encourage farmers to protect their crops against natural disasters, extreme weather and other destructive events by purchasing private insurance that is heavily subsidized with taxpayer dollars. Under the program, farmers can buy insurance policies to help cover financial losses from crop price declines and poor yields resulting from natural disasters. Private companies sell the policies, but the federal government covers much of the cost paying on average about 62 percent of the premiums and subsidizing the insurers administrative expenses. The cost of the federal crop insurance program ballooned last year, reaching $17.3 billion, according to Agriculture Department data. Roughly $3.7 billion of that amount was paid to insurance companies and agents that sell and service the policies. In 2021, the program cost the federal government roughly $9.4 billion, according to Agriculture Department data. Americas Democratic governors brag about booming local economies, preside over ribbon-cuttings of projects paid for with new federal legislation and have successfully framed themselves as defenders of abortion rights and democracy. Almost all of them are far more popular in their home states than the Democratic president they hope to re-elect next year. While President Biden is mired in the political doldrums of low approval ratings and a national economy that voters are sour on, Democratic governors are riding high, having won re-election in red-state Kentucky last month and holding office in five of the seven most important presidential battleground states. The governors, like nearly all prominent Democrats, are publicly projecting confidence: In interviews and conversations with eight governors at their annual winter gathering at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix over the weekend, they expressed on-the-record optimism that Mr. Biden would win re-election. Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, the wealthy former software executive who entered the presidential campaign in June hoping a back-to-basics appeal on the economy would propel him forward, dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination on Monday. Though his personal fortune could have kept his campaign afloat, Mr. Burgums mild demeanor and resolute focus on three issues, the economy, energy and foreign policy, never caught on with a G.O.P. electorate steeped in the pugilistic flash of Donald J. Trump and the more visceral appeal of social issues. Mr. Burgum claimed on Monday that he had shifted the conversation on the campaign trail from divisive social issues to energy and foreign policy. He blamed media inattention and Republican Party rules for his poor showing. Our decision to run for president came from a place of caring deeply about every American and a mission to re-establish trust in Americas leadership and our institutions of democracy, he said in a statement announcing he was suspending his campaign. While this primary process has shaken my trust in many media organizations and political party institutions, it has only strengthened my trust in America. A super PAC backing the independent presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to spend $10 million to $15 million to get Mr. Kennedy on the ballot in 10 states, a substantial effort that, even if partly successful, could heighten Democratic concerns about his potential to play the role of spoiler in 2024. The hefty sum underscores the challenge facing Mr. Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and prominent purveyor of conspiracy theories, as he pursues his long-shot White House bid. It also shows the substantial financial support he has generated so far. The super PAC, American Values 2024, has raised at least $28 million. (The group last disclosed its unofficial fund-raising haul in early October, but has not filed official records since mandatory midyear reports with the Federal Election Commission in July, when it had $9.8 million on hand.) The group was planning to announce the strategy on Monday, according to a draft announcement reviewed by The New York Times. The states, which include several battlegrounds, are among the countrys most populous and carry, between them, 210 Electoral College votes Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, New York and Texas. The Supreme Court justices seemed divided on Monday over a fiercely contested bankruptcy settlement for Purdue Pharma that would funnel billions of dollars into addressing the opioid epidemic in exchange for shielding members of the wealthy Sackler family from related civil lawsuits. The U.S. Trustee Program, an office in the Justice Department, had challenged the deal for Purdue, the maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin. It said the agreement violated federal law by guaranteeing such wide-ranging legal immunity for the Sacklers, who once controlled the company, even though they themselves had not declared bankruptcy. Questions from the justices reflected why the deal has drawn intense criticism in a dispute that pits money against principle. Under debate was the practical effect of unraveling the agreement, painstakingly negotiated for years for victims and families who have urgently sought settlement funds, and broader concerns over whether releasing the Sacklers from liability would free them from further scrutiny over their role in the opioid crisis. In the spring of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party used tanks and troops to crush a pro-democracy protest in Beijings Tiananmen Square. Most of the West, across traditional partisan lines, was aghast at the crackdown that killed at least hundreds of student activists. But one prominent American was impressed. When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it, Donald J. Trump said in an interview with Playboy magazine the year after the massacre. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak. It was a throwaway line in a wide-ranging interview, delivered to a journalist profiling a 43-year-old celebrity businessman who was not then a player in national politics or world affairs. But in light of what Mr. Trump has gone on to become, his exaltation of the ruthless crushing of democratic protesters is steeped in foreshadowing. Mr. Trumps violent and authoritarian rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail has attracted growing alarm and comparisons to historical fascist dictators and contemporary populist strongmen. In recent weeks, he has dehumanized his adversaries as vermin who must be rooted out, declared that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country, encouraged the shooting of shoplifters and suggested that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for treason. The White House warned congressional leaders on Monday that the United States would run out of money to send weapons to Ukraine by years end, severely jeopardizing Kyivs ability to defend itself against Russia if lawmakers fail to approve emergency military aid soon. The urgent warning from President Bidens top budget official, delivered in a blunt letter, was the administrations latest bid to pressure the Republicans resisting another infusion of aid to Ukraine to drop their opposition. It came at a critical time in the war, as Ukraine struggles to push back Russian troops in a counteroffensive that has largely stalled. President Vladimir V. Putin has continued to send a steady stream of his forces into the conflict, willing to endure high casualties amid signs of flagging resolve from Kyivs Western allies. We are out of money and nearly out of time, Shalanda D. Young, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote in the letter, which was sent to House and Senate leaders in both parties. To try to make up for pandemic learning loss, educators and policymakers have searched for solutions that work and just as important are cost effective. Now a new study, released Monday, reports positive results from a reading program in California that emphasized training teachers in the principles of the science of reading, a movement focused on foundational skills such as phonics, vocabulary and comprehension. The program in about 70 low-performing schools yielded test-score gains for third graders in 2022 and 2023, on par with students having attended school for an additional quarter of a year in English and 12 percent of a year in math, according to a working paper by researchers at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. For about $1,000 per student annually, the program retrained teachers and administrators and paid for new classroom materials, better aligned to cognitive research. Tyler Goodson, a key figure in the popular S-Town podcast series, died on Sunday after he was shot during a standoff with the police at a house in Woodstock, Ala., southwest of Birmingham, the authorities said on Monday. The police responded to a call after midnight on Sunday at a home in Woodstock, where they found that Mr. Goodson had barricaded himself inside, the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said. A standoff followed between Mr. Goodson and law enforcement officials from several agencies, during which Mr. Goodson brandished a gun at officers, the agency said. Mr. Goodson, 32, was shot, and was later pronounced dead, according to the agency. It was unclear who shot Mr. Goodson. Additional details about the standoff and the shooting were not disclosed. Mayor Jeff Dodson of Woodstock said in a statement on Monday that everyone wants answers and details, myself included. White House and state officials said that a protest on Sunday was hateful and antisemitic after dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators opposed to Israels offensive in the Gaza Strip chanted slogans charging genocide outside an Israeli-style falafel shop in Philadelphia. The White House issued a statement on Monday that called the protest targeting the establishment unjustifiable, adding to reaction from Pennsylvania officials. A video clip posted on X showed the pro-Palestinian protesters outside Goldie, a vegan falafel shop owned by Michael Solomonov, an Israeli-born chef, and Steve Cook, a former investment banker turned restaurateur, through their Philadelphia hospitality group, CookNSolo Restaurants. Goldie, Goldie, you cant hide. We charge you with genocide, the group chanted in the video taken on Sunday. Agnes Chow, a prominent pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong who was arrested as part of a sweeping crackdown, said over the weekend that she had fled to Canada and planned to skip bail, in a bold challenge to the authorities. Ms. Chow had been arrested in 2020, along with several other dissidents, including the newspaper mogul Jimmy Lai, after Beijing imposed a national security law on Hong Kong to curb dissent. The authorities were investigating Ms. Chow on suspicion of collusion with external elements, a vaguely defined political crime that carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. She was later released on bail. Ms. Chow wrote in an Instagram post on Sunday that she had traveled to Canada in September to study at a university. She said she had decided not to return to Hong Kong in December to report to the police, as the authorities had requested. Perhaps I will never go back again in my lifetime, she wrote. Hong Kongs national security police condemned her expressed intention to jump bail and urged her to immediately turn back. In a statement on Monday, the Hong Kong government said that it would spare no effort in bringing Ms. Chow to justice and warned that she could not evade legal liabilities by absconding. The U.S. Air Force said on Monday that the bodies of five crew members had been found alongside the wreckage of a CV-22 Osprey that went down during a routine training exercise last week in southern Japan. Two crew members remain unaccounted for, and the remains of one had been discovered on Wednesday, the day of the crash. Over the weekend, the Air Force identified that airman as Staff Sgt. Jacob M. Galliher, 24. The body of Sergeant Galliher, a young father who went by the first name Jake, had been found by the Japan Coast Guard. Pieces of the fallen aircraft had been located on the ocean floor on Wednesday less than a mile from the Japanese island of Yakushima, according to the Japan Coast Guard. The U.S. Air Force said that a breakthrough in the five-day search came on Monday, when a combined Japanese and American team found the Ospreys fuselage. On Friday, Japans defense minister, Minoru Kihara, said he had met with Lt. Gen. Ricky Rupp, the commander of United States Forces Japan, and asked that all Osprey flights not related to search and rescue activities be suspended until the aircrafts safety could be confirmed. At the foot of a towering fern, Pete Kirkman pushed his hand through a curtain of dead branches into a burrow. His fingers settled on a lump of feathers. Gently, he withdrew a fist-sized hatchling. Baffled by the daylight, the chocolate-colored nocturnal bird shook its pencil-like beak from side to side. Youre OK, Mr. Kirkman, a conservationist, said soothingly, as he made the discovery last week. Then he heard a scratching from the burrow. He watched in delight as another hatchling charged out, searching for its sibling, and fell into his arms. The kiwi a native bird so beloved by New Zealanders that its name has long been a shorthand for them once roamed throughout the country. Starting in the 1800s, millions were slaughtered by nonnative predators like stoats, a mammal related to the weasel. Now only 70,000 or so kiwis remain, most in remote parks or islands. Accordingly, any hatchling is special. These two, however, were remarkable. Monday marked the 250th day that Evan Gershkovich, an American reporter for The Wall Street Journal, has been in custody in Moscow on an espionage charge that he, his newspaper and the U.S. government have vehemently denied, and a lawyer who has worked on similar cases said that Mr. Gershkovichs time in detention will likely last much longer. The lawyer, Ivan Pavlov, who has worked on a number of high-profile treason and espionage cases in Russia, said that they usually take years to complete. It usually takes up to 1.5 years for the preliminary investigation to complete its tedious examination before such cases get transferred to a court for hearing, said Mr. Pavlov, who had to flee Russia after a criminal case was opened against him. The hearing, which will likely take place in the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg, where Mr. Gershkovich was first detained, Mr. Pavlov said, would take up to six months to complete. If he is convicted, Mr. Gershkovichs lawyers could file an appeal. Law enforcement agencies in Spain and Italy have arrested 11 people who ran a food fraud operation that produced more than 260,000 liters, or roughly 68,000 gallons, of olive oil that was sold as high-quality but in reality was unfit for consumption, officials said on Monday. Officers from the Spanish Civil Guard and the Italian Carabinieri raided several locations last month in both countries, including sites in the Italian regions of Sicily and Tuscany, and uncovered barrels of oil that contained lampante oil, the lowest grade of olive oil, considered to be of terrible quality because of its high level of acidity and its unpleasant flavor and smell. Officers also seized 91,000 euros, or roughly $98,000, and billing documents that belonged to the 11 people arrested, officials said. The Spanish and Italian authorities, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday, did not name the 11 people who had been arrested or list specific charges. Israel widened its military assault against Hamas in the southern part of the Gaza Strip on Monday, with armored vehicles rolling closer to its main city and strikes pummeling urban areas, where images showed smoke rising from flattened buildings and people carrying bodies swaddled in blankets. Satellite imagery analyzed by The New York Times showed that the Israeli military had expanded its ground offensive into southern Gaza between Friday and Sunday, soon after the collapse of its weeklong truce with Hamas. As of Sunday, dozens of armored vehicles had moved into the area, according to the satellite images, which also showed tracks and clearings, likely from bulldozers. The strikes on Monday came as the Israeli military again warned civilians to leave parts of Khan Younis, southern Gazas largest city, and to move to places farther south, including Rafah, on the Egyptian border. The evacuation order echoed similar directives that Israel gave before sending troops into northern Gaza in late October. The Israeli military has not confirmed a ground invasion of the south, although it has been signaling one for days and warning civilians in several areas to evacuate. On Monday, the chief military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said that Israeli forces keep expanding the ground operation to tackle Hamas strongholds all across the Gaza Strip. A rocket most likely fired by Hamas militants during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel struck an Israeli military base where, experts say, many of the countrys nuclear-capable missiles are based, according to a visual analysis of the attacks aftermath by The New York Times. While the missiles themselves werent hit, the rockets impact, at the Sdot Micha base in central Israel, sparked a fire that approached missile storage facilities and other sensitive weaponry. Israel has never acknowledged the existence of its nuclear arsenal, though Israeli whistle-blowers, U.S. officials and satellite imagery analysts all agree that the country possesses at least a small number of nuclear weapons. Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists Nuclear Information Project, told The Times that he estimates there are most likely 25 to 50 nuclear-capable Jericho missile launchers at the base. According to experts and declassified U.S. government documents, Israels Jericho missiles are equipped to carry nuclear warheads. The corruption trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel resumed on Monday, bringing back into focus the legal and political challenges he faces even as he presides over the Israeli militarys war against Hamas in Gaza. Israeli courts had stopped hearing non-urgent cases after Hamas launched a devastating surprise attack from Gaza on Oct. 7, but on Friday, the countrys justice minister, Yariv Levin, said that most normal court operations could resume because the suspension had expired. Mr. Netanyahu did not attend Mondays hearing, which dealt with procedural issues, according to Israeli news media reports. He could testify in person in the spring as part of the defenses case. Mr. Netanyahu has been on trial since 2020, accused of bestowing political favors on businessmen in exchange for expensive gifts and offering regulatory benefits to media moguls in exchange for positive news coverage. He denies the charges and has rejected calls to resign. Over the summer, lawmakers from Mr. Netanyahus right-wing party, Likud, introduced a bill that would have stripped the attorney general who has been critical of him of the ability to oversee the prosecution of government ministers, including the prime minister. The bill was later withdrawn amid the intensification of protests that had been going on for months over the governments efforts to assert more authority over the judiciary. As the trial resumes, Mr. Netanyahus standing with the Israeli public has worsened. Many Israelis blame his government for the failure of the security services to prevent the attack by Hamas, in which roughly 1,200 people were killed, according to Israeli authorities, and about 240 people taken hostage. From the first days after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, Israel has accused Hamas terrorists of committing widespread sexual violence. The Israeli authorities say they are investigating reports of sexual assault and have compiled considerable evidence from witnesses, emergency medical workers and crime scene photographs that they took place. But they say it has been extremely difficult to collect the evidence because most of the victims are dead. Many activists say that too little credence has been given to what they believe was a pattern of widespread rape during the attacks by Hamas. The Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday over a bankruptcy deal for Purdue Pharma that would give billions of dollars to those harmed by the opioid epidemic in exchange for shielding members of the wealthy Sackler family from additional opioid-related lawsuits. The settlement involving Purdue, the maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin, touches on one of the countrys largest public health crises. In taking up the case, the court temporarily paused the deal until it issues a ruling. Experts say any decision may also have important consequences for other cases that use the bankruptcy system to settle claims of mass injuries. Heres what you need to know: What is at stake? At issue is whether a bankruptcy plan can be engineered to give legal immunity to a third party in this case, members of the Sackler family, who once controlled Purdue Pharma even though they themselves have not declared bankruptcy. If the court approves the deal, that could affirm a litigation tactic that has become increasingly popular in resolving lawsuits in which many people claim similar injuries from the same entity, be it a drug or consumer product. By turning to the bankruptcy courts as a tool to resolve those claims, businesses aim to free themselves from civil liability and prevent future lawsuits. Claudine Gay Edelman has counseled Harvard University and its PA unit after the turmoil triggered by its first messaging about the Hamas attack on Israel. Harvards initial response was a Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine which holds the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all of the unfolding violence. The administration was heartbroken by the death and destruction unleased by the attack by Hamas. The response was attacked as weak and out-of-touch and triggered calls for the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay. Her subsequent statements dealt with plans to fight antisemitism on campus, condemned Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry, reaffirmed freedom of speech and censored the pro-Palestine slogan from the river to the sea, according to the Harvard Crimson. Richard Edelman, Harvard grad, blogged about Gays response in a piece called Why Leaders Must Speak Up. The home to the Oroville Dam is looking for a PR firm that can implement a series of marketing goals and strategies pertaining to economic development, tourism and community development. FOLLOWING correspondence from local representatives to the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth regarding the future use of Inchmore House in Clara, the department has issued what it calls a ''briefing note for Public Representatives and Key Stakeholders,'' regarding the building and to ''ensure you are informed of developments in your area in relation to emergency accommodation for those fleeing the war in Ukraine (Beneficiaries of Temporary Protection, BOTPs). A protest took place outside Inchmore House last weekend in relation to its future use amidst fears that it could be used to provide accommodation for males only. The ''briefing note'' states that the accommodation being provided at Inchmore is self-catering. It goes on to say The accommodation provides fully equipped kitchen/dining facilities with separate recreational spaces, including living area, TV area, childrens play area, reading rooms etc. Toilets and showers are ensuite. There are 3 accessible toilets/showers provided. The accommodation consists of 58 bedrooms varying in size. The property will be compliant with Fire Safety and Building Control Regulations. 2. Is there a building fire certificate/fire safety assessment in place? Prior to occupation, a valid fire certificate will be provided to the Local Authority. All additional supporting fire and insurance documentation will also be provided. 3. What staff provision will be on site? There will be an operations manager on site daily to assist the residents with day to day queries they may have, in addition to the normal daily management of the facilities. For an initial period there will be a full-time security personnel. Following this initial assessment period, it is envisaged this security presence will be reduced in level with the need of facility. There will be cleaning and maintenance staff on site as required. 4. Have the residents received their Temporary Protection status? The residents have been processed through the Ukraine Transit Hub at City West, Dublin where they have received their Temporary Protection status. As part of this process, their PPS Number has been allocated by the Department of Social Protection, and they have registered with the Department of Justice. Once BOTP applicants have received medical cards and PPS numbers on arrival into Citywest, they are then eligible to seek work and many people have done so and are making a positive contribution to the local and national economies particularly in areas where there are skills shortages. 5. What are the entitlements of a Beneficiary of Temporary Protection? Temporary Protection provides applicants with a wide range of supports, including: Permission to reside in Ireland for a period of 1 year, and the permission may be extended for further periods after that. Full access to the labour market. Access to accommodation, if needed. Social welfare income supports. Access to education. Access to medical care. 6. What local integration supports will be provided to residents? Local services will be engaged to ensure that residents are aware of and can access the support services available, including health, education, transport, community groups and local services. A Community Response Forum is operational in each local authority. Building on the networks and relationships developed during the response to COVID-19, the Community Response Forums were repurposed in each local authority area to accommodate the Ukraine response. The role of the Community Response Forum is to coordinate the community-led response in providing assistance and support to Ukrainian refugees as they are accommodated around the county. These groups enable all those involved at a local level to work together to support the integration of Ukrainian refugees into local communities under the stewardship of the local authority. Kilcormac farmer Anne Marie Feighery was crowned the FRS Network Diversification Farmer of the year 2023 while Agri Data Analytics, Daingean, took home the AgTech Ireland Best Agritech Hardware Product at the inaugural Better Farming Awards on Thursday night in the Heritage Hotel in Killenard. Former minister and broadcaster, Ivan Yates served as MC for the night while guests Minister of State, Michael Heydon and Professor, Frank OMara also attended. Feigherys Farm first launched Irish Beetroot Juice in March 2019 and the only option for the Irish consumer was to drink imported versions from the UK and Germany predominantly. It is a family orientated business as the beetroot for the juice is all grown pesticide-free on the family farm in the heart of Ireland in Co. Offaly. Judges were impressed by her ability to spot a gap in the market and develop a product. They said: She has shown a clear vision for developing the business and is linking it to positive showcasing of her farm via open days, even linking it with schools. The Bovine Breathalyser from Offaly based Agri Data Analytics is a non-invasive machine that measures enteric methane emissions from ruminants. Using a small amount of feed, ruminants are enticed into a feeding area where testing takes place. While eating, multiple breath samples are collected and passed through specialised gas sensors that accurately measure the amount of methane produced by the animal. The FRS Network Diversification Farmer of the year award commends a farm's exceptional efforts in establishing an alternative business or adding value with a commitment to sustainable farming, driving economic improvement and embracing a positive story for the industry. The AgTech Ireland Best Agritech Hardware Product recognises an agritech hardware product that contributes to a more sustainable, better farming practice within the industrys ecosystem for the betterment of the sector. 20 awards were presented on the night celebrating the highest levels of achievement made in the industrys move towards a more sustainable sector. The judging process comprised a panel of 13 expert judges. The unique process was fully transparent, independent and thorough to ensure the best nominations are recognised and rewarded. Our panel of judges are all well respected and hugely knowledgeable individuals working in, with or advising in the areas of farming, sustainability/ESG and agribusiness. A technology company which was co-founded by an Offaly man scooped a major technology award in Paris last Friday, December 1. Mersus Technologies was co-founded by Dermot Condron from Tubber, in 2018. Dermot is Chief Technology Officer with the company while Geoffrey Allen, co-founder, is the Chief Executive Officer. The company has established itself as a leading player in the immersive technology space. It has won numerous awards but the icing on the cake came last Friday when Mersus was awarded the prestigious 4th Edition European Technology Award (Virtual Reality) at a glitzy event held at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. The European Technology Awards bring together professionals from the tech sector to promote excellence and knowledge. Rewarding innovation and agility, it sets the bar for success higher every year. The awards endeavour to both reward and drive the sector for many years to come. Accepting the award, Geoffrey Allen said, Awards like this are important within the industry. To be recognised by your peers is a significant milestone. In such a global industry for it to happen on a European level is even more encouraging. This is not the companys first time in the limelight, last month it scooped Best Tech Family Business at the Irish Family Business Awards. In 2022, Mersus won the Best Training & Development Program category at the annual Irish Research, Manufacturing and Supply Chain Awards and previously received Best Emerging Technology at the Irish Times Innovation Awards. The focus of Mersus' attention is their Avatar Academy, a Virtual Learning Experience Platform. This award-winning software platform allows scalable virtual reality training. It can be customised to meet the specific needs of an organisation, combining advanced VR technologies with data analytic tools creating an unparalleled learning experience and allowing users to hone their skills in a safe and controlled virtual environment. In a rapidly evolving world where emerging technologies often take decades to become integral, Dermot Condron believes Mersus's strategic evolution is perfectly timed, Since inception, weve developed our Avatar Academy, software platform which holds immense value for life science operations. Skills training is in high demand, with many companies struggling to fill positions in ever-expanding operations. The strong demand for talent is driving competition, and transitioning new operators onto production lines faster is an attractive proposition for these companies. We've tirelessly developed virtual reality solutions, culminating in our revolutionary Avatar Academy. This platform simplifies VR media creation, addressing the two key adoption barriers, time and cost. At the presentation of the awards in Paris last Friday, Mr. Antonio Queijeiro, awards director, expressed his admiration for the Irish entry, "Mersus Technologies has managed to transcend the boundaries of imagination, blending creativity with technology in an exceptional manner. This immersive experience redefines our perception of reality, highlighting the potentially transformative impact of virtual reality in the field of training and development. We congratulate the creators for their innovation and ability to transport us to new dimensions of possibility." Back at base in Athlone Brenda Mannion, COO (chief operation officer reflected on the teams achievement, This award recognises years of work by dozens of developers that have gone into building our revolutionary product. In the current market, were in the enviable position of having a pipeline of talent, all of whom want to work on the exciting new frontier that is Virtual Reality. This award is a reflection of the ingenuity, skill and professionalism of the staff of Mersus Technologies. You can learn more about Mersus Technologies and the team behind the Avatar Academy Programme via www.mersus.io. GOOD NEWS for early morning commuters as Iarnrod Eireann announces a new daily weekday service which will get you to and from Dublin Heuston faster. The service begins next Monday, December 11 as part of a new timetable from Dublin Heuston to Cork, with a connection at Limerick. The early service, operating Monday to Friday, will arrive in Kent Station, Cork, at 08:32am, giving a pre-09:00am Intercity arrival from Dublin for the first time. The service will also have a connection from Limerick Junction to Limerick, delivering a pre-eight-hours arrival time to Limerick city at 07:58am. Journey time improvements on many Dublin Heuston to Cork and Limerick services, arising from recent infrastructure works, also include an express morning non-stop 2 hours 14 minutes service at 06:15am between Cork and Dublin. Additional 06:00am, Dublin Heuston to Cork service (Monday to Friday) arriving at 08:32am, giving a pre-09:00am arrival to Cork city for the first time, and with a connection from Limerick Junction to Limerick for a pre-08:00am arrival to Limerick city. Journey time improvements on many Dublin Heuston to Cork and Limerick services, arising from recent infrastructure works, including an express morning non-stop 2 hours 14 minutes service between Cork and Dublin. Extra morning peak service each way between Cork and Mallow each day (Monday to Saturday), operating at 07:20am Cork to Mallow, and 07:50am Mallow to Cork. There will also be additional stops on a number of Heuston/Cork services at Portlaoise, to connect with new Heuston/Portlaoise commuter services. This represents the fastest ever scheduled service on the route. The new timetable has been approved by the National Transport Authority, and follows public consultation in September, in which over 1,650 customers participated. Customers on all routes including Intercity, DART and commuter are advised to check times before travel, as there may be minor time changes affecting your service. An Iarnrod Eireann spokesperson said; We are delighted to be in a position to begin an early 06:00am weekday service from Dublin Heuston to Cork, and to introduce a Limerick connection from this service also. We believe this will be a very popular service, with the arrival in Cork well before 09:00am, and in Limerick before 08:00am, particularly attractive to business customers. We look forward to bringing these improvements to our services from December 10, which follow previous expansion of services in December 2022. Iarnrod Eireann with the National Transport Authority will continue to identify opportunities for further service improvements in the context of post-COVID travel patterns, as demand approaches, and on some routes exceeds, pre-pandemic levels. The purpose of investment in our network, fleet and services is to bring better service to customers and allow more people to make a sustainable travel choice. Full timetables are available at HERE and the Iarnrod Eireann app. A victim of the stabbing outside a school in Dublin's Parnell Square East is "still with us" and has shown "incredible strength", her mother has said. The parent of the five-year-old has issued an update of her condition online, which she has thanked the public for donating over 26k for the victim and her family. On November 23, an attack took place outside Gaelscoil Cholaiste Mhuire in Dublin city and saw three children and two adults injured. The unnamed young girl remains in Temple Street Children's Hospital in critical condition, from stab wound injuries she sustained in the attack. The latest update from her mother states: "Dear all, thank you so much for the incredible gesture and kindness you have shown our family during these troubled times. "Your thoughts, prayers and generosity have and will go a long way. Our little girl has shown incredible strength and still here with us. "We don't know yet what lies ahead as it is still early, but she is resilient and limitations will not stop her. Thank you so much. All the love we can give." In order to respect the family's privacy, the creator of the beneficiary, Roisin Fitzgerald, simply says she created the GoFundMe on behalf of 'JA'. Roisin has also since changed the name of the fundraiser to Barrog do Chailin Beag (A Hug for a Little Girl). Karnataka Govt Considers Bengaluru Namma Metro Extension To Nelamangala Bengaluru oi-Madhuri Adnal Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has announced that the state government is evaluating a proposal to extend Bengaluru Namma Metro services to Nelamangala. He made the announcement during the inauguration of Sri Beereshwara Swamy Devasthana's community hall and prayer temple in Nelamangala on Sunday. The Chief Minister's statement comes in response to a request by local residents for metro connectivity to Nelamangala, citing its rapid population growth and increasing traffic congestion. The proposal is being considered as part of the government's efforts to improve transportation infrastructure in the region. In addition to the metro extension, the government is also planning to implement water rejuvenation plans for the Cauvery and Vrushabhavathi rivers. These plans aim to address the water scarcity problem in Nelamangala and surrounding areas by filling ponds and enhancing groundwater levels. The government is also focusing on increasing revenue generation through the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC). The BBMP (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike) is exploring new revenue sources, including leasing properties owned by BMRCL (Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd.). An agreement has been reached to collect property tax from BMRCL properties, and BBMP is currently working to maximize revenue collection. According to the agreement, the administration will receive Rs. 2.14 crore annually in service charges from BMRCL. The metro service operates on a 73.81-kilometer corridor, and revenue is generated from stations, commercial spaces, and properties along the route. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Monday, December 4, 2023, 21:01 [IST] Which Is The Best City For Women In India In 2023? The Answer Is... Cyclone Michaung In Chennai: 11 Trains Canceled After Alert; Steps To Check Train Status At IRCTC Website Chennai oi-Gaurav Sharma The Chennai Central on Monday announced the cancellation of 11 trains following an alert for Cyclone Michaung . According to the reports, the water level touched the danger level mark at Bridge Number 14 between Vyasarpadi and Basin Bridge after heavy rains. Southern Railway's Divisional Railway Manager in Chennai in a post on X said, "Given the heavy rain in Chennai and the water crossing the danger level in Bridge Number 14 between Basin Bridge and Vyasarpady stations, the trains have been regulated, please go through the updated schedule and plan your journeys accordingly. We regret the inconvenience caused." Chief Public Relations Officer for the Southern Railway, B. Guganesan, informed train names and numbers for commuters ease. 12007 Mysuru Shatabdi Express 12675 Coimbatore Kovai Express 12243 Coimbatore Shatabti Express 22625 KSR Bengaluru AC Double Decker Express 12639 KSR Bengaluru Brindavan Express and 16057 Tirupati Sapthagiri Express. Chennai Rains: Public Holiday Declared; Train, Flight Service Hit Due To Cyclone Recommended Video Cyclone Michaung: Roads inundated with water, cars float away | Tamil Nadu Rains | Oneindia News The Southern Railways has also announced to refund commuters' fares which they had paid in advance to book the tickets. "On account of the cancellation of trains, a full refund shall be provided to all passengers scheduled to travel on the affected trains," said Chief Public Relations Officer, Southern Railway, B. Guganesan. #WATCH | Tamil Nadu: As cyclone 'Michaung' approaches Chennai coast, accompanied by heavy rainfall, several trains are delayed and a few have been cancelled. (Visuals from Egmore Railway Station) pic.twitter.com/5SfV1Xr81L ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 Steps To Check Train Status At IRCTC Website: The commuters can plan their journey after checking the train availability and timing through IRCTC's website by simply following the steps mentioned below: Open your browser and go to www.irctc.co.in/nget/train-search OR sr.indianrailways.gov.in/ On the home page at the left-hand side, click on the option of 'Check Train PNR' Fill your PNR Number with other details and click enter Details of trains available with their schedule will appear on your screen. Which Is The Best City For Women In India In 2023? The Answer Is... Stay Safe Chennai: Mumbai Indians Pour Love After Cyclone Michaung Disturbs Lives Chennai oi-Gaurav Sharma Indian Premier League (IPL) top franchise Mumbai Indian on Monday comes out in support of the people of Chennai, who are facing a really hard time due to the continuous downpour. The reason behind heavy rain and strong winds is Cyclone Michaung which has affected almost the entire Southern India. "Sending love & strength to Chennai #OneFamily #ChennaiRains," reads the tweet from Mumbai Indians. In just a few minutes, the post praying for people's well-being garnered hundreds of shares. An umbrella in the thunderstorm can be seen in the post shared by Mumbai Indians which signifies Mumbai's support to Chennai stating "Stay Safe Chennai". According to the reports, the cyclone has largely affected the lives of the people of Chennai as water logging led to the breaking down of power in many areas for hours now. Many people were left stranded as roads were flooded with water. A large number of trains and flights were canceled because of the extreme weather. Recommended Video Cyclone Michaung: Roads inundated with water, cars float away | Tamil Nadu Rains | Oneindia News Cyclone Michaung Live Tracking: How To Get Real Time Updates? Track Its Path Here The state government, which is trying its best to provide help to the people, has also started boat service through the State Disaster Relief Force (SDRF). According to the reports, more than 1000 water pumps have been set up across the city to clear the water-logging. KN Nehru, Municipal administration and water supply minister said, "The city (Chennai) is seeing rains worse than what it saw in 70-80 years. Hence, the measures taken for cyclone mitigation have been caught off-guard." According to the latest updates, Cyclone Michaung was positioned at 110km east-northeast of Chennai and has caused massive destruction in Chennai and its neighboring districts of Kanchipuram, Tiruvallur, and Chengelpet. Revanth Reddy Takes Oath As New Telangana CM, Bhatti Vikramarka Is His Deputy Telangana's New Ministers' List: Meet The MLAs Who Are Part Of Revanth Reddy's Cabinet As Revanth Reddy Becomes Telangana's New CM, His Love Story Goes Viral Fact Check: Is Revanth Reddy Taking Oath As New Telangana CM Today? Fact Check oi-Prakash KL The Congress on Sunday won 64 Assembly seats to form government in the BRS-dominated Telangana in the midst of a saffron sweep of the Hindi heartland where BJP wrested two states from the grand old party and retained one. The nearly 10-year-old rule of the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) came to an end on Sunday, even as Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao tendered his resignation from his post, which was accepted by the Governor. Although the Congress has not formally announced that Revanth Reddy, who was instrumental in Congress' victory, will be the next Chief Minister of Telangana, speculations started doing rounds that he will take oath as the new CM of the state. PIB Fact Check Unit Busts 9 YouTube Channels Spreading Fake News A letter was doing rounds on social media sites claiming that Revanth would be taking oath as the CM on Monday. It claimed that the Congress leaders such as Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra along with several other dignitaries will be attending the ceremony. In addition to it the viral letter claimed that authorities have been instructed to make security arrangements in view of the oath-taking ceremony. However, it has turned out to be a fake letter, the Telangana Congress has clarified. Sources from the Telangana Congress have noted that only the CLP meeting is scheduled to be held on Monday. Meanwhile, a delegation of Congress leaders on Sunday met Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan and staked a claim to form the government in the state. "Today, under the leadership of our in-charge General Secretary (of Congress) Manikrao Thakre, the PCC president, former PCC president and all our AICC observers, we met the Governor, we claimed to form the government," Shivakumar, who was one of the AICC observers appointed by AICC president to coordinate the meetings of Congress Legislature Party (CLP), told reporters. Fact Check: Is This The Picture Of A Man Trapped In Uttarakhand Tunnel? Heres The Truth Shivakumar said the Congress has staked claim to form the government with the support of 65 members in the newly-elected House. Congress has won 64 out of the total 119 seats in the elections to the Legislative Assembly, while its pre-poll ally CPI bagged one segment. Fact Check Claim Revanth Reddy to take oath as Telangana CM on December 3. Conclusion Congress is yet to announce its CM name. Rating False Raise your request for FACT CHECKING. Mail us at [email protected] For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Monday, December 4, 2023, 9:10 [IST] Revanth Reddy Not The First Choice For Top Post? Kharge To Decide Next Telangana CM, Says DKS Hyderabad oi-Prakash KL Amid playing an instrumental role in bringing Congress to power in Telangana, Revanth Reddy seems to be a not a first choice for the post of Chief Minister. As per the speculations, CM Aspirants in Telangana such as Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka, Komatireddy Venkat Reddy and Uttham Kumar Reddy have met AICC observer DK Shivakumar at Hayat Hotel and they are okay with anybody other than Revanth Reddy. The newly-elected Telangana Congress MLAs meet on Monday and the meeting was held in the presence of senior leaders and AICC observers. Reddy won from Kodangal constituency with a margin of over 32,000 votes defeating his nearest BRS rival Patnam Narender Reddy. The Congress leader however lost from Kamareddy. The near 10 year-old rule of the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) came to an end on Sunday, even as Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao tendered resignation from his post, which was accepted by Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan. Rao was asked to continue in office till the formation of the new government. Telangana: 2 Air Force Pilots Dead In Aircraft Crash In Dundigal Talking to reporters after the meeting, DK Shivakumar said that the ball is in the high command's court and the central leadership will choose the CM. Shivakumar said, "Today we had a meeting of the Congress Legislature Party of the newly elected members of the party. We thank the people of the state for allowing us to form our govt here...All the members of the newly elected Congress party unanimously resolved to authorise Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to appoint the Congress legislature party leader. All have decided that whatever the high command decides, we will go by that..." Sources say that if Congress High command selects Revanth Reddy as CM Candidate then swearing-in Ceremony of Revanth may be today evening at Raj Bhavan. Revanth Reddy To Take Oath As Telangana CM Today At 8.30 pm: Sources Hyderabad oi-Prakash KL Revanth Reddy will take oath as Telangana Chief Minister at the Raj Bhavan on Monday evening at 8.30 pm, as per the sources. Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka will be his deputy. The sources say that two others will take oath as ministers today. However, the Congress is yet to formally announce the name of the next Chief Minister of the state. Earlier, the newly-elected Telangana Congress MLAs met at its office to elect their Legislature Party Leader. It was held in the presence of senior leaders and AICC observers. After clinching 64 seats in the 119-seat assembly, a delegation of Congress leaders on Sunday met Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan and staked claim to form the government in the state. Reddy won from the Kodangal constituency with a margin of over 32,000 votes defeating his nearest BRS rival Patnam Narender Reddy. However, he lost in Kamareddy against BJP's K Venkata Ramana Reddy with a margin of 6,741. It has to be noted that outgoing CM KCR was also in the race and he ended up in third place in this constituency. The near 10 year-old rule of the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) came to an end on Sunday, even as Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao tendered his resignation from his post, which was accepted by Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan. Rao was asked to continue in office till the formation of the new government. Talking to reporters after the CLP meeting on Monday, DK Shivakumar said that the ball is in the high command's court and the central leadership will choose the CM. Shivakumar said, "Today we had a meeting of the Congress Legislature Party of the newly elected members of the party. We thank the people of the state for allowing us to form our govt here...All the members of the newly elected Congress party unanimously resolved to authorise Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to appoint the Congress legislature party leader. All have decided that whatever the high command decides, we will go by that..." Revanth Reddy will be the second CM of the state after Telangana was carved out of Andhra Pradesh in 2014. BJP Paints MP, Chhattisgarh And Rajasthan Saffron With Hindi Heartland Wins India oi-Gaurav Sharma With massive victories in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan Assembly Elections 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) painted crucial Hindi heartland states with Saffron color. These state victories will surely power the saffron front for the Lok Sabha elections due next year. The BJP with its allies has now extended its footprints to 17 states and union territories. Out of five states that went under polling, the BJP emerged victorious in three states, while Congress and Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) bagged one state each. Congress prominent Ashok Gehlot and Bhupesh Baghel managed to secure victories in their constituencies but lost as the chief ministers for Rajasthan and Chhatisgarh respectively. With the help of the political map given below, one can easily see the BJP-ruled regions (saffron color) that accumulate to 58 percent of India's land area, where 57 percent of the population lives. Meanwhile, the blue color on the map signifies areas government by the Congress, which is around 41 percent of the country's land area with 43 percent of the population as of December 2023. Hat-trick In States Guarantee Of Hat-Trick In 2024: PM Modi After BJP Bagged 3 Out Of 4 States BJP alone is in power in 12 states and UTs, while it is running a collation government in 4 regions. Here's the List of the states and the union territories governed by BJP and its allies: Arunachal Pradesh Assam Chhattisgarh Goa Gujarat Haryana Madhya Pradesh Maharashtra Manipur Meghalaya Nagaland Puducherry Rajasthan Sikkim Tripura UP Uttarakhand After winning three states, Prime Minister Narendra Modi thanked the party cadre for working hard throughout the year and voters of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh for voting BJP to power. In his address, PM Modi also thanked the people of Telangana, where the party faced a defeat, for rapidly increasing the vote share and promised that the Centre will continue to provide support and help to the state. When Is Pongal (Sankranthi) 2024? Check The Date, Puja Timings For This Year Which Is The Best City For Women In India In 2023? The Answer Is... Cyclone Michaung: Heavy Rain Claims 5 Lives In Chennai, Flight Operations Halted | Top Developments India oi-Madhuri Adnal During the heavy rainfall caused by Cyclone Michaung in Chennai, five people have lost their lives in separate incidents, according to reports from news agency ANI, citing an official statement by Chennai police. The cyclonic storm Michaung, predicted to make landfall on the southern Andhra Pradesh coast on Tuesday, severely affected flight operations at Chennai airport. Flooding on the runway resulted in flight cancellations and diversions, leading to the suspension of operations until 9 am on Tuesday due to intensified rainfall and severe weather conditions. Here are the Top developments of the day As the cyclone approached the coasts of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, Chennai experienced relentless rainfall throughout Monday night, causing severe waterlogging in various areas. Notably, a mugger crocodile was sighted on a road due to the rising water levels in low-lying areas. Metro stations across Chennai were also affected by heavy rain, particularly St. Thomas station, where access was restricted due to 4-feet-high water accumulation. Passengers were advised to board trains at Alandur station. Chennai police confirmed five deaths in the city due to heavy downpours. Among the deceased were an unidentified man found near the Vaidyanathan flyover and an unidentified woman at the Foreshore Estate bus depot. Tragic incidents of electrocution claimed the lives of Padmanaban (50) in Dindigul district and Ganesan (70) in Pandiyan Nagar. Besant Nagar witnessed the unfortunate death of Murugan (35) due to a fallen tree. Further casualties occurred as a newly constructed wall collapsed in Kanathur, resulting in the deaths of two individuals and injuring another. These victims were residents of Jharkhand. As the cyclonic storm Michaung intensified over the Bay of Bengal, the IMD reported its position and predicted path, indicating its gradual intensification into a severe cyclonic storm. In response to the impending crisis, the Tamil Nadu government declared public holidays in Chennai, Kanchipuram, Tiruvallur, and Chengalpattu districts for Monday and Tuesday, urging private companies to enable 'work from home' options. Essential services like healthcare and milk supply remained operational. Flight disruptions prompted Akasa Air to offer rebooking options for passengers affected between December 4 and December 10, allowing rescheduling until December 17 without additional charges. The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) deployed 21 teams in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Puducherry, with eight additional teams on standby. The IMD issued warnings for heavy rainfall and advised precautionary measures in various regions, indicating the likelihood of rainfall and potential impacts in Odisha and West Bengal during specific periods. Authorities in Odisha canceled leaves for field workers and put districts on alert, while the East Coast Railway (ECoR) canceled several trains and set up a 24/7 helpline for passenger assistance. The cyclone effects may also extend to southern districts of West Bengal, including Kolkata, with predictions of rainfall between December 6 and 7 in specific areas. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Monday, December 4, 2023, 22:04 [IST] No Power In My Locality For More Than 30 Hours: Ashwin As Cyclone Michaung Batters Chennai Has Chennai Returned To Normalcy After Heavy Rains? Find Out From These Viral Videos Cyclone Michaung: Severe Cyclonic Storm To Make Landfall In AP's Bapatla, Officials On High Alert India oi-Madhuri Adnal The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has warned that the Severe Cyclonic Storm Michaung is likely to make landfall in south Andhra Pradesh between Nellore and Machilipatnam, close to Bapatla, during the forenoon of 5th December. District officials are on high alert as Cyclone Michuang is anticipated to make landfall between Nellore and Machilipatnam, prompting a series of precautionary measures across the region. As of 2030 hours IST of 4th December, the cyclone was centered over the Westcentral Bay of Bengal off south Andhra Pradesh and adjoining north Tamilnadu coasts near Latitude 14.3N and Longitude 80.4E. It was moving northwards at a speed of 12 kmph and is expected to intensify further. Cyclone Michaung: Heavy Rain Claims 5 Lives In Chennai, Flight Operations Halted | Top Developments #WATCH | Andhra Pradesh: District officials are on high alert as #CycloneMichuang is anticipated to make landfall between Nellore and Machilipatnam, prompting a series of precautionary measures across the region (Visuals from Vijayawada) pic.twitter.com/IG4bBm6gj7 ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 The cyclone Michaung is expected to bring heavy rainfall to coastal Andhra Pradesh and adjoining areas. Wind speeds of up to 110 kmph are expected along the coast. The IMD has warned of storm surge of up to 2 meters along the coast. The IMD has advised fishermen not to venture into the sea until further notice. People living in low-lying areas have been advised to evacuate to safer places. The authorities are taking all necessary measures to prepare for the cyclone. The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) teams have been deployed to the affected areas. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Monday, December 4, 2023, 23:35 [IST] Mahua Moitra Files Defamation Case Against BJP's Dubey Over 'Cash For Queries' Allegations North Delhis Signature View Apartments residents can approach high court for hearing on vacation clause Delhi LG Recalls Files on Courts, Justice Delivery from AAP Govt Delhi HC Refuses To Grant Divorce To Omar Abdullah From Wife Payal Abdullah HC Asks Centre To Consider Representation For Linking Property With Aadhaar Courts Can't Allow Inadequate Prison Healthcare System To Violate Inmate's Right: HC Delhi HC Seeks Centre's Stand On PIL Against Deepfake India oi-Madhuri Adnal The Delhi High Court, on Monday requested the Centre's input regarding a public interest litigation (PIL) addressing the uncontrolled utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) and deepfakes. Deepfakes, manipulated videos or images generated through AI-powered deep learning software, depict individuals engaging in actions or utterances they never did in reality. A Bench led by Acting Chief Justice Manmohan noted that technology's control was intricate and the raised concern necessitated governmental deliberation. Weeks After Deepfake Video, Rashmika Mandanna's Bold Scene With Ranbir In 'Animal' Leaked Online "Technology's restraint isn't straightforward; it demands extensive contemplation. It's an intricately complex technology," remarked the Bench, inclusive of Justice Mini Pushkarna. Acknowledging the technology's positive potentials while emphasizing the need for government intervention, the court asserted, "This is within the realm of the government's capabilities." The Central government's representative mentioned the government's active consideration of the issue and requested time to procure directives. Highlighting the disparity between technological advancement and legal adaptation, the petitioner's advocate, Manohar Lal, emphasized the law's sluggish pace amidst rapid technological growth. Now, Alia Bhatt's Deepfake Video Goes Viral Acknowledging this lag, the court scheduled the case for further hearing on January 8, 2024. Petitioner Chaitanya Rohilla, a legal practitioner, urged the Centre to identify and restrict access to deepfake-providing websites and regulate AI to safeguard citizens' fundamental rights. Emphasizing AI's inherent complexities and the necessity for regulations, Rohilla's counsel highlighted recent instances of deepfake misuse, including the unfortunate incident involving actor Rashmika Mandanna. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Monday, December 4, 2023, 16:57 [IST] ZPM Wins Mizoram: Know All About The State's New CM Face Lalduhoma Baryl Vanneihsangi: Former Radio Jockey Is Now The Youngest Voice For Women In Mizoram Assembly ZPM Leader Lalduhoma To Take Oath As Mizoram CM On Friday Mizoram Assembly Polls: BJP Bags 2 Seats India oi-PTI The BJP won the Palak and the Saiha Assembly constituency in Mizoram on Monday, according to the Election Commission. BJP candidate K Hrahmo won the Palak Assembly constituency defeating his MNF rival K T Rokhaw by 1,241 votes, the EC said. Hrahmo got 6,064 votes while Rokhaw secured 4,823 votes. Indian National Congress candidate I P Junior received 3,729 votes while Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) nominee K Robinson got 1,378 votes. BJP candidate K Beichhua won the Saiha Assembly seat defeating his MNF rival H C Lalmalsawma Zasai by 616 votes. Beichua received 6,740 votes while Zasai got 6,124 votes. N Chakhai of the Indian National Congress secured 3,607 votes while ZPM candidate K H Beithie got 2,219 votes. The BJP had won one seat in the 2018 Mizoram Assembly election. BJP Paints MP, Chhattisgarh And Rajasthan Saffron With Hindi Heartland Wins The counting of votes polled in the assembly elections in Mizoram began at 8 am on Monday amid tight security. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Monday, December 4, 2023, 13:46 [IST] What Went Wrong For BRS In Telangana Polls? The Findings Of Lokniti-CSDS Survey Is Here Telangana's New Ministers' List: Meet The MLAs Who Are Part Of Revanth Reddy's Cabinet Congress Takes Dig At BJP For Not Announcing CMs In 3 States Yet Parliament Winter Session 2023: Know Government's Key Agendas, Bills India oi-Gaurav Sharma After registering a thumping victory in the Hindi heartlands, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh Assembly Elections 2023, the BJP is all set to take on Congress in the upcoming winter session of the Parliament slated to start today till December 22. According to the reports, 18 Bills including more reservations for women in Puducherry and Jammu and Kashmir assemblies could be key agendas for the government today. The Parliament is also likely to discuss the replacement of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Criminal Code Procedure (CrPC). Important Bills for Parliament Winter Session 2023: The reports suggest that the Modi government may propose to replace the Indian Penal Code (IPC), Criminal Code Procedure (CrPC), and the Evidence Act with the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and the Bhartiya Sakshya Bill respectively during the Parliament's winter session 2023. Appointment of the chief election commissioner and other election commissioners is another pending key bill that is likely to be discussed in Parliament this session. Before entering the Parliament to attend the winter session, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the media stating country rejected a negative approach. Parliament Winter Session: Modi Govt To Table Women's Quota In Puducherry, Jammu & Kashmir Bill PM Modi said, "Rajnaitik garmi badi tezi se badh rahi hai. Yesterday, the results of the four-state elections came out. The results are very encouraging. they were encouraging for those who are committed to the welfare of the common people and the bright future of the country." Prime Minister also asked the Opposition to shed negativity and participate in debates to form better laws for a bright India. "When there is good governance, when there is devotion to public welfare, the word "anti-incumbency" becomes irrelevant. You can call it "pro-incumbency" or "good governance" or "transparency" or "concrete plans for public welfare" - but this has been the experience. After such an excellent public mandate, we are meeting at this new temple of Parliament," PM Modi said. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Monday, December 4, 2023, 11:41 [IST] US Warships, Commercial Vessels Attacked In Red Sea International oi-PTI An American warship and multiple commercial ships came under attack on Sunday in the Red Sea, the Pentagon said. Yemen's Houthi rebels later claimed attacks on two ships they described as being linked to Israel, but did not acknowledge targeting a US Navy vessel. The attack potentially marked a major escalation in a series of maritime attacks in the Mideast linked to the Israel-Hamas war. "We're aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and will provide information as it becomes available," the Pentagon told The Associated Press. The Carney is an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. The British military earlier said there had been a suspected drone attack and explosions in the Red Sea, without elaborating. The Pentagon did not identify where it believed the fire came from. However, Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree claimed the attacks, saying the first vessel was hit by a missile and the second by a drone while in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait that links the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. Saree did not mention any US warship being involved in the attack. He said the attacks would continue as long as Israel continues its war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The Houthis have been launching a series of attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, as well as launching drones and missiles targeting Israel amid the war. A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the attack began about 10 a.m. in Sanaa, Yemen, and had gone on for as much as five hours. Another US official who similarly spoke on condition of anonymity for the same reason said the Carney had intercepted at least one drone during the attack. US Navy warship shoots down Iranian-made drone near Bab el-Mandeb Strait Global shipping had increasingly been targeted as the Israel-Hamas war threatens to become a wider regional conflict - even as a truce briefly halted fighting and Hamas exchanged hostages for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. However, the collapse of the truce and the resumption of punishing Israeli airstrikes and its ground offensive there had raised the risk of the seaborne attacks resuming. Earlier in November, the Houthis seized a vehicle transport ship also linked to Israel in the Red Sea off Yemen. The rebels still hold the vessel near the port city of Hodeida. Missiles also landed near another US warship last week after it assisted a vessel linked to Israel that had briefly been seized by gunmen. However, the Houthis had not directly targeted the Americans for some time, further raising the stakes in the growing maritime conflict. In 2016, the US launched Tomahawk cruise missiles that destroyed three coastal radar sites in Houthi-controlled territory to retaliate for missiles being fired at US Navy ships at the time. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Monday, December 4, 2023, 8:22 [IST] The Discobolus Palombara is a 2nd-century Roman copy of a long-lost Greek bronze original. Hitler was captivated by the statue during a visit to Rome in 1938. German Economy Minister Robert Habeck has called off a planned Monday trip to the COP28 climate summit in Dubai. The coalition is scrambling to finalize its 2024 budget, after the top court shot down its original plans. ViewA major political figure who died this year was former U.S. first lady Rosalynn Carter. She passed away on Nov. 19. Carter was.. Newsy 29 Dec 2023 2008-2024 One News Page Ltd. All rights reserved. One News is a registered trademark of One News Page Ltd. The US military said one of its ships shot down multiple drones while assisting commercial vessels in the Red Sea. At least one was launched from a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen. Eurasia Review 31 Dec 2023 By Saeed Al-Batati US Navy helicopters destroyed three Houthi boats and killed the men aboard when they attempted to.. The Israeli military has said its ground offensive is expanding to every part of Gaza as its campaign to oust Hamas continues. A German man was killed in a suspected terror attack in central Paris on Saturday. The German investigation will coincide with a probe by French anti-terror prosecutors. Newsy 30 Dec 2023 ViewAt the start of 2023, a lot of people expected politics to be a bit stale, but it ended up being anything but.. A former ambassador to Iraq has issued a warning regarding the responsibility of Iran for the series of confirmed attacks on American warships in the Red Sea. Across the globe, refugees, always treated as the pox of public policy, continue to feature in news reports describing anguish, despair and persistent persecution. If they are not facing barbed wire barriers in Europe, they are being conveyed, where possible, to third countries to be processed in lengthy fashion. Policy... Banyana Banyana found themselves in a gruelling battle in the scorching Atteridgeville heat against a plucky and determined Burkina Faso, both vying for a coveted place at the 2024 Womens Africa Cup of Nations. Sri Lanka President launches International Climate Change University at COP28 Posted by Editor on December 3, 2023 - 11:00 pm In a bid to address the pressing challenges posed by climate change and the need for robust institutional frameworks, President Ranil Wickremesinghe officially launched the International Climate Change University (ICCU) today (December 03), the Presidents Media Division (PMD) said. The President emphasized the necessity of institutional changes following the Paris Climate Agreement and highlighted the absence of alternative bodies to effectively tackle the on-going climate crisis. President Wickremesinghe underlined that, despite the global commitment to the Paris Agreement, no significant institutional changes were implemented to assist the world in achieving the agreed-upon targets. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the ICCU aims to fill this void by developing postgraduate-level capacity building, serving as a crucial support system for climate sciences. The campus for the ICCU is set to be established on initially allocated 600 acres of land in Sri Lanka. However, President Wickremesinghe clarified that the university will not be confined to Sri Lanka; it will be an international stakeholder university, welcoming collaboration and contributions from around the world. Highlighting the global nature of climate responsibility, President Wickremesinghe announced that Bangladesh, Seychelles and Moldova have already pledged their support to the ICCU. He emphasized that climate action is not the sole responsibility of any single nation and called upon the international community to join hands in this endeavour. President Wickremesinghe concluded by urging nations and individuals worldwide to recognize the shared responsibility for climate issues and actively participate in the International Climate Change University. The launch of the ICCU marks a significant step towards fostering international collaboration, knowledge exchange and building a collective response to the urgent and complex challenges posed by climate change. (Presidents Media) Santas red Christmas house in Rovaniemi village Tourists who visit Rovaniemi in Finland can visit the Santa Claus Village, meet Santa and his elves, ride on a reindeer sleigh, send letters to Santa with an Arctic Circle postmark from its post office, and more. More than half a million travellers visit here every year. Image Credit: Shutterstock/Paulharding00 Kamala Lopez is an award-winning filmmaker and actress who had appeared in over 30 feature films. A Yale graduate in Philosophy and Theatre Studies, she was born in New York City to an Indian mother and a Venezuelan father. In 2016, Kamala's documentary Equal Means Equal won Best U.S. Documentary (Audience Award) at Michael Moore's iconic Traverse City Film Festival. In addition, her documentary was a New York Times Critics' Pick. The film was the catalyst behind a national civil rights movement resulting in the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Kamala founded Equal Means Equal, a national non-profit organization dedicated to the immediate publication, adoption and enforcement of the original Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, which became enforceable federal law on January 27th of 2022. Equal Means Equal is hosting a free webinar, open to the public on Wednesday, December 6th at 8:00 pm EST (5:00 pm PST) entitled: Why Are Pro-Choice Lawyers Undermining Women's Rights in Abortion Lawsuits?" Readers can join Equal Means Equal and top women's rights attorneys and doctors as they discuss several abortion rights lawsuits and the disturbing trend of "pro-choice" groups to not only refuse to cite the ERA, but also ask courts to enforce second-class rights for women under state constitutions. Register here. Meryl Ann Butler: Thanks for visiting with us, again, Kamala! You've worked long and hard to get the ERA finalized, thank you for that! I understand you have just filed an intervention in a Texas lawsuit because the abortion rights groups are failing to use the ERA to save a woman's right to her body. Can you explain more about what is going on with that? Kamala Lopez: Yes, thanks for asking! On November 9th, EQUAL MEANS EQUAL, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton Trust and The Women's and Children's Advocacy Project filed pleadings to intervene in an abortion rights case now pending before the Texas Supreme Court (Zurawski v Texas). We criticized the plaintiffs--abortion rights groups--and accused them of committing legal malpractice against all women. Key among our criticisms is that the case was filed only under the Texas Constitution; the lawyers failed to also cite the federal Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) even though it affords women maximum legal protections and would provide additional support for their case! Despite questions concerning the ERA's validity, many members of Congress and constitutional scholars have declared the ERA valid. This important document by Constitutional scholars on the ERA's validity provides much needed clarity. What is even more shocking, is that while the plaintiffs asserted a claim under the Texas Constitution's equivalent of the federal ERA, they failed to cite the McLean case- that is a Texas Supreme Court decision that requires maximum legal protection for all women's rights. Instead, the plaintiffs cited only cases from other states, which the Texas Supreme Court can ignore because of the fact that they are not Texas rulings. So, the Texas Supreme Court would be required to follow McLean as its own precedent, but only if the plaintiffs cite it in their case. So why wouldn't they include this? So we filed in order to request that the Texas Supreme Court apply and follow the McLean case and the Federal ERA. We want to nudge them to rule that women are entitled to maximum legal protection of their rights, on par with the rights of all other people in Texas. We emphasized in our brief that the Court's ruling will have broad-sweeping implications for all women's rights in Texas, not just abortion rights, because the Court is poised to decide whether the Texas Constitution's state ERA requires equal treatment of women under any laws. We are stunned, frankly, that an abortion rights group would claim to be fighting for women's rights yet fail to assert the best possible legal arguments on behalf of women. Numerous members of Congress have stated in formal documents currently on file with Congress, that the Equal Rights Amendment is currently the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. These same members of Congress agree that the ERA affords women maximum legal protections for their rights, including abortion rights. So why would an abortion rights group that claims to be fighting for women's rights fail to ask the Texas Supreme Court to apply the ERA? Why would they instead ask for weaker legal protections under the Texas Constitution when they know the Equal Rights Amendment has stronger legal protections, so it is better for women? Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Purt Castle Abbeyleale, Ireland Home of Desmond Earl Gerald before his death in 1583 and Lough Gur, Birthlake of the Magical Earl Gerald who will rise to help JFK's spirit return (Image by Paul Fitzgerald) Details DMCA I was twelve years old the day JFK was killed and I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was grief stricken but old enough to understand that if someone was willing to execute the president of the United States in broad daylight under the full protection of the United States Government and get away with it, what chance did any of us have when the murderers finally decided to turn their guns on us. Over the years I came to see that there were any number of people willing and capable of doing what happened on November 22, 1963. My own bookshelf contains a dozen deeply researched books about the subject (many by our own publisher Trine Day). Seen from that moment in time their logic all work perfectly. But for me there was always something missing. So today I want to present a connection to an older and deeper background story about JFK that puts his assassination into a broader historical context that we hope you'll find worthy of serious consideration. When Liz and I met in 1970 I had no reason to think we'd spend forty years digging into a thousand-year-old family history. Nor did I imagine we'd be shocked into believing there was a mystical aspect to the JFK assassination. The first hint that I was being drawn directly into the JFK Saga came in early 1980 when we were invited to hear Ted Kennedy's challenge to President Carter's nomination for a second term. As soon as we arrived at the event, one of the organizers came over to introduce a Kennedy insider named Al Lowenstein. Lowenstein had been the driving force behind Robert Kennedy's campaign in 1968. He'd carried on after RFK's death and spent most of the 1970s researching both murders. Just being a Fitzgerald was enough for Lowenstein to make me a confidante and he made his intentions clear when he told us in a hushed tone, "We've got to get Ted elected and finally bring those CIA sons of bitches that killed Jack and Bobby to justice. Since you're family I can tell you this. We know who did it and people are willing to talk. But we need the presidency to protect them." I thought that was the end of it, until two weeks later when we read that Al Lowenstein had been murdered by a colleague who walked into his office, shot him seven times, then put the gun down and waited for the police. Lowenstein's murder made me wonder whether he hadn't known something was brewing and was passing on the mission before it got too late. And so began our journey that winds its way from Boston to Kabul, to Jerusalem to Paris and the Holy Grail and Scottish Rite Freemasonry and from there to the death of JFK. By the end of this presentation you should know why JFK was destined to meet his fate on November 22, what the Fitzgerald legacy reveals about how that came to be - and how we believe it will lead to the resurrection of JFK's Vision of World Peace at the closing of our era. Everybody knows JFK was shaking up the deep state but it turns out there was a tradition behind his behavior. Thanks to his maternal grandfather John Francis Fitzgerald he had been made aware of his family's roots going back to the foundation of the British Empire and was most likely informed that old grudges die hard. JFK's declaration that he "wanted to splinter the C.I.A. into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" has been on everyone's shortlist of motives from the beginning. But few may realize what that phrase would have meant to the people he was threatening to splinter - considering they saw themselves as modern-day Knights Templar tasked with guarding the Holy Grail. It might be hard to believe that America's elite Cold Warrior spies of the1940s, '50s and '60s considered themselves to be Holy Warriors. But if you look at it through the filter of a black and white Manichean struggle for power that had seesawed back and forth between Rome and London through the centuries you might get a better idea of how they viewed their mission. Let me start by addressing some assumptions that I came to know simply by growing up as a Fitzgerald in a small suburb north of Boston. Back at that moment in time I was known to my friends as Fitzy and that I was unquestionably Irish. As I grew older I came to know that the Fitz in Fitzgerald was Norman French for the son of a 12th-century Anglo Norman baron named Gerald of Windsor born in the year 1075 or according to my Y-DNA records - Walter Fitz Otho his father whose birth dates to 1025. I also came to know that the name Gerald derived from the Old German Gervald meaning Spear Ruler, which it turns out - is apparently what the family did best. The Fitzgeralds were what is known as Familiaris Regis - members of THE ROYAL INNER COUNCIL - and were the product of Gerald's marriage to a princess of Wales named Nest - daughter of the last Welsh King of Deheubarth, Rys ap Tewdwr. I also found out that being a Fitzgerald from a little village called Abbeyfeale in the Southwest corner of Ireland came with a lengthy and complicated history. My grandfather Michael Fitzgerald was the oldest son of the oldest son of the oldest son and inherited a 500-acre farm in Abbeyfeale that he'd left in the hands of his brother Ned before heading for Massachusetts in 1900. By 1912 Michael had worked his way up to being a union official for the Eastern Mass Street Railway Company and got to sit down with JFK's grandfather - Boston Mayor John Francis Fitzgerald - to iron out the difficulties surrounding a serious rail strike. After what I assume was a profound session of solemn prayer at the Parker House bar across the street from city hall, they proceeded to share backgrounds on their respective Fitzgerald lineages and determined that they were closely related. It seems there were two main branches of the Fitzgerald family in Ireland, the Earls of Kildare and the Earls of Desmond, both descending from Gerald of Windsor, and that our branch connected back through the Earls of Desmond. The record of the Fitzgerald's arrival in Ireland under the English King Henry II in 1169 is well documented and was recorded in a book known as the Expugnatio Hibernica written by another family member named Gerald de Barri. De Barri was a famous 12th-century prelate and grandson of Gerald of Windsor and Princess Nest whose Tudor lineage made the family contenders to the throne of England. And as a rival Norman family with a Welsh lineage directly connected to the source of Arthurian legends and the Holy Grail - it also made their intentions highly suspect. Gerald of Windsor had already been sent to Ireland by Nest's family in 1102 on a diplomatic mission to unite Wales and Ireland against the new English King Henry I. The 12th century was a time of constant power struggles. At the time of the Norman invasion of Ireland, the sovereignty of Scotland, Ireland and Wales was up for grabs. An enterprising Norman baron with an extended family of mercenary knights at his disposal could establish a rival kingdom at will and attain sovereignty over it with the Pope's blessing. Such was the case with the Fitzgeralds and their association with the Earl of Pembroke, Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow. Strongbow was a Welsh Marcher Lord whose ancestry (like William the Conqueror) went straight back to the Viking Rollo with close family ties to the Fitzgeralds and strong financial support from London's Bankers. Gerald de Barry described the earl as "of high descent, for he was born of the noble stock of Clare. Yet withal, so far, a man whose family was better than his fortune; who had more blue blood than brains, and whose pedigree was longer than his purse." Strongbow would pass on his lineage down through the ages and in January 2005 a study revealed that among Strongbow's descendants was one George W. Bush, President of the United States. Strongbow's grandfather and great uncle rode with the hunting party that day in 1100 when King William Rufus was assassinated in the New Forest and a daughter known as Adeliza was married to the assassin, Walter Tyrel. The De Clares had gained power and influence under Rufus's successor Henry I, crusaded in the Holy Land, went to war against Henry II's mother Matilda during the "anarchy" that followed Henry I's death and operated a serious military-industrial complex on the border of England and Wales second only in size to the City of London. Strongbow had accepted the invitation of Ireland's King of Leinster, Dermot Mac Murrough, in 1167 to help him reclaim his Kingdom and in payment receive his daughter in marriage as well as the Kingship of Leinster upon Dermot's death. Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. At some level, it's not complicated. Making civilians, including children, responsible for the acts of a guerrilla group should obviously be considered a crime. And that crime is functionally being supported by my country. In early November, after denouncing the acts of Hamas on October 7th as the crimes that they were, Volker Turk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, added that "the collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts also to a war crime, as does the unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians." Unfortunately, the U.N. remains a remarkably powerless organization. And no less sadly, despite the recent ceasefire in Gaza, ending (however briefly) the killing of civilians at historic rates in our time, little has changed there. Yes, during those ceasefire days, increased amounts of food, fuel, and water were delivered to Gaza to remedy the Israeli decision to cut off more than two million people (almost half of them children) from such essentials, whether they had anything to do with October 7th or not. Still, it remains a horror that what's largely been delivered to Gazans, including those hundreds of thousands of children, has been disease, starvation, and water that's unsafe to drink. People there are now all too literally starving to death. Pregnant women, in particular, find themselves in a hell on earth without functional hospitals or much else, including housing, significant parts of which have been destroyed by Israeli bombing. Meanwhile, the response of President Biden and crew to all of this has essentially been to ignore it and offer ever more support to Israel. Today, with Israel having resumed its bombardment of Gaza after a week-long truce ended, TomDispatch regulars Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox put this nightmare in a larger international context of not just the United States but India as well, while reminding us of how key countries have aided and abetted a nightmare of the first order. Tom The Israel-India-U.S. Triangle Its Human Toll Will Be Incalculable By Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox In 1981, India's post office issued a stamp showing the flags of India and occupied Palestine flying side by side above the phrase "Solidarity with the Palestinian people." That now seems like ancient history. Today, Hindu nationalists are flying the flags of India and Israel side by side as a demonstration of their support for that country's catastrophic war on Gaza. It's a match made in heaven (or do we mean hell?), because the two nations have similar "problems" they're trying to "solve." Israel has long been engaged in the violent suppression of Palestinians whose lands they occupy (including the current devastation of Gaza, an assault that 34 U.N. experts have labeled a "genocide in the making"). Meanwhile, India's Hindu nationalist government continues the harsh oppression of its non-Hindu minorities: Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and indigenous people. About the time Zionist settlers were beginning their occupation of Palestine in the early 1920s, an Indian right-wing figure, V.D. Savarkar, fashioned the ideology of Hindutva (Hindu-ness). Today, right-wing Hindu nationalists employ Hindutva and physical violence to further its vision of India as a nation for Hindus and Hindus only. Similarly, Zionism views historic Palestine as a land for Jews and Jews only. These parallel visions, along with the two governments' increasingly authoritarian tendencies and ready use of violence, have drawn them into a dark alliance the consequences of which are unpredictable. India Makes New Friends The Republic of India and the State of Israel were born nine months apart in 1947 and 1948, each an offspring of partition. The British-ruled Indian subcontinent was then split into Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, while Israel was carved out of a portion of the British Mandate Palestine. Throughout the Cold War, India would be a leader of what came to be known as the nonaligned movement formerly colonized nations that sought to develop independently of both American and Soviet influence. In the 1980s, it also became the first non-Arab nation to recognize the state of Palestine. A similar recognition of Israel didn't come until 1992, around the time India was shifting away from its nonaligned social-democratic stance toward its current adherence to neoliberalism. In recent decades, India and Israel have established strong trading relationships, especially in the military sphere. In fact, given the massive militarization of its borders with China and Pakistan and its suppression of occupied Kashmir and its people, India has become the top importer of weapons and surveillance equipment from Israel. In 2014, the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won power and its leader, Narendra Modi, became prime minister. In the process, India and Israel grew ever closer. By 2016, as the Washington Post reported, "after Indian commandos carried out a raid inside Pakistan-controlled Kashmir in response to an attack by militants on an Indian army post, Modi trumpeted the action, saying: 'Earlier, we used to hear of Israel having done something like this. But the country has seen that the Indian army is no less than anyone else.'" Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Quicklink Not Found Sometimes, authors delete their quicklinks after publishing them. To see if the quicklink was renamed or re-published, please click here. This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source. From Ray McGovern Website Seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Author Not Given) Details Source DMCA Can the FBI be trusted? You decide, but only after you learn about the Bureau's most recently revealed fraud on the court. Establishment media are ignoring the latest FBI flip-flop (surprise, surprise); they are reporting instead that incoming president Joe Biden wants Christopher Wray to stay on as FBI director? What's that all about? Again, you decide after reading what follows. The latest known FBI caper involves hiding materials regarding the neuralgic (don't-even-think-about-it) issue of why the Democratic National Committee 27 year-old insider, Seth Rich, was murdered on July 10, 2016. Media coverage of L'Affaire Rich has been so scant in recent years that some background seems needed to grasp the facts, their relevance, and the implications for the ever-increasing immunity enjoyed by the Security (aka Deep) State. Those generally aware of some of the detail may find this background a helpful refresher. Those who wish to can scroll down for a discussion of the most recent episode of FBI malfeasance. Context On June 12, 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange announced he had "emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication." Those emails had been copied in late May 2016 onto an external storage device (probably a thumb drive) and given to WikiLeaks. On July 10, 2016, Seth Rich was shot and killed. The motive was said to be robbery, but nothing is known to have been taken from him. On July 22, 2016, three days before the Democratic National Convention began, WikiLeaks published the DNC emails. There was speculation at the time that Seth Rich was involved in the leak of the damaging emails (which showed how the DNC had stacked the deck against Bernie Sanders), and that perhaps the leaker had been identified by DNC cyber-sleuths. Adding fuel to the fire, on August 9 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange publicly implied that Rich may have been a WikiLeaks' source. ( See: Click Here ) That same day, WikiLeaks announced "a $20,000 reward for information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich". (See: Click Here ) An Insider, Not Russia On Dec. 12, 2016, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) formally ruled out, on technical grounds, the possibility that the Russians "hacked" those DNC emails. Drawing on the expertise of former technical directors at NSA, material revealed by Edward Snowden, and applying the principles of physics, VIPS concluded that: "...the emails were leaked by an insider -- as was the case with Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Such an insider could be anyone " with access to NSA databases, or perhaps someone within the DNC." (See: Click Here ) A year later on Dec. 5, 2017, Shawn Henry, the head of the cyber-security firm CrowdStrike hired by the DNC (and highly touted by then-FBI Director James Comey) to do the forensics, testified under oath that there was "no concrete evidence" the emails were hacked by the Russians or by anyone else.) (See: Click Here ) Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Steven Sahiounie, journalist and political commentator The events in Gaza and Israel have captured the world's attention. With so many factors and moving parts to the situation, it is necessary to take a step back and look at the whole scene. Dr. Ahmad Alderzi, the noted microbiologist and activist, has been interviewed by Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse, and his sweeping assessment is enlightening and thought provoking. 1. Steven Sahiounie (SS): Many people have wondered if Hezbollah will open a war front against Israel in response to the situation in Gaza since October 7. In your opinion, will the war expand, or will it remain contained? Ahmad Alderzi: Hezbollah looks at the issue of expanding the war from multiple concerns and it has prepared itself for such a situation since the end of July 2006 war. There are various factors in Hezbollah's view of expanding the war, which make it measure the extent of its intervention in the war with a golden scale. A. The Palestinian factor: There is great concern for the achievement to be completely Palestinian, which makes its cause return to the centrality of global issues, which in turn puts the resistance forces in the strongest position to achieve their conditions. B. The Lebanese factor: This factor has played a fundamental role before the martyrdom of Abbas Raad, the son of the head of the largest parliamentary bloc in Parliament, due to the chronic political division between the Lebanese forces, and the fear of the section of the Lebanese environment incubating the resistance of the consequences of the war, which would be disastrous for the Lebanese and the "Israeli" interior. This factor may have changed after the martyrdom and after the anti-war forces realized that the war in Gaza and the West Bank is leading to defeat for the Israelis. C. The regional factor: This factor is mainly related to the exhausted Syrian front, which is the weak point of the resistance axis. There is a real fear that Israeli and American aviation will intervene to open military roads for the expansion of military groups in the north, south and east, towards central Syria and the Syrian capital. D. The Iranian factor: There is a perception among Iranians that the expansion of the war may get out of control, which pushes things towards more than regional war, and the widespread destruction of infrastructure that accompanies this war, in light of the harsh sanctions imposed on it, and the internal political division. With a mainstream that views the relationship with the West as an only option for a comfortable life. E. The fifth factor is the American and Western position in general: which seeks to prevent the expansion of the war and control it within the Palestinian interior to give the Israeli army the opportunity to eliminate Hamas movement, and this is what did not happen. Therefore, Hezbollah continued to raise the level of its military resistance against Israel, in a way that serves the Palestinian cause within the two conditions that Nasrallah have set; namely the survival of Hamas movement and a ceasefire. However, this is what we began to notice with the last developments in the war and the truce that everyone agreed to extend 2. SS: Hamas and Israel have been exchanging Israeli hostages in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. How do you view this development? Ahmad Alderzi: This deal, which was concluded, represents the first step in announcing the reality on the ground for both Israel and Hamas movement, and this comes after Israel set high goals that are eradicating the Hamas movement and displacing the people of Gaza to Sinai. But, it failed to achieve both matters, that's what puts Israel in a position of defeat, and it must acknowledge this; acknowledge the victory of the Hamas movement, and go towards accepting the requests of the victorious party, by starting the process of releasing prisoners and those kidnapped by both parties. 3. SS: The pause has lasted days, was extended, and is now coming to a possible end unless an extension is agreed upon. Will the battles resume afterwards? Ahmad Alderzi: The truce has begun in practice, and has expanded in time. Because all parties have reached a complete conviction that the Israeli army has not been able to achieve an actual achievement in the field war, and also has suffered enormous losses in a way that the Israeli society cannot bear. Despite the Israeli army's efforts to continue the war to restore its shattered image, in addition to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's insistence on the war continuation, to prevent himself from paying heavy prices as a result of his exit from political life after this war. But, the military and field reality, the continued losses of the Israeli army, and the resuming of the Israeli massacres against the Palestinians, all of these will make every day of the continuation of the war mean more accumulation of defeat, not only for Israel, but also for the entire dominant Western regime, and will help accelerate the emergence of a new international order of forces that oppose the policy of the United States. 4. SS: Resistance fighters in the far eastern desert region of Syria have attacked the American military bases that they had illegally occupied. In your opinion, can this tactic succeed in expelling the occupiers? Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). According to some military experts, the U.S. could face an unexpected threat for its military bases in the Southeastern United States and the Gulf of Mexico. The experts inform about developing cooperation between Cuba and Belarus. The relations between Cuba and Belarus are characterized by a high exchange of visits, which have strengthened not only the political, economic, social and educational ties, but defense cooperation as well. According to TS2 SPACE, in an assertive stride to enhance military collaboration, representatives from the armed forces of Belarus and Cuba convened in Havana, laying the groundwork for a substantial agreement on defense cooperation. This vital meeting set the scene for the drafting of an accord designed to bolster military relations between the two nations in 2024. The Agency emphasizes that a strategic partnership between nations aimed at collaborative improvement in defense and security capabilities, often including activities such as joint military exercises, intelligence sharing, and co-development of defense technologies. The cooperation is seen as significant because it represents a new era of military partnership that may impact the broader context of global defense politics. What can Belarus offer to Cuba? Belarusian experts do not rule out discussion of planning the supply of Belarusian-made missile systems to Cuba, including Polonez-M Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), which have been awarded the title of the most dangerous MLRS in Europe. Polonez-M has an increased range of up to 300 km. The appearance of these MLRS in Cuba will make it possible to control not only the entire Gulf of Mexico, but also the U.S. military bases in Florida. Thus, Polonaise-M could become a serious deterrent tool in the region. Oregons governor and ranking lawmakers on Monday said they would give $19 million to the Oregon Department of Transportation for new snow plows and winter road-safety improvements. The stopgap funding aims to prevent the transportation department from running out of cash before the end of the 2023-2025 biennium and delay sweeping service and maintenance cuts. Gov. Tina Kotek, Senate President Rob Wagner and House Speaker Dan Rayfield said in a statement that they will allocate the money to the state transportation department in the 2024 short legislative session. Lawmakers said the department will use the funds as follows: $8 million for winter maintenance such as purchasing de-icer and salt, and for removing overtime restrictions for workers $4.5 million to patch pavement and fix potholes each spring to mitigate the impact of winter freezes on roads $2.5 million to retrace edge lines on less-traveled highways $4 million to replace 10 snow plow trucks ODOT still faces a massive budget shortfall, mainly due to slower-than-anticipated growth in gas tax revenue and rising costs. It has already considered raising DMV fees to plug the deficit, projected at $680 million by 2029. Earlier this year, ODOTs assistant finance director Travis Brouwer said the agency anticipated that it would have to slash basic maintenance services, such as plowing snow during storms or fixing potholes, to avoid going into the red. In a Nov. 30 letter to Kotek, Rayfield and Wagner said the Legislature would work toward modernizing the states transportation system during the next regular session in 2025. Jayati Ramakrishnan; jramakrishnan@oregonian.com A 21-year-old Seattle man who was convicted of murder as a child is back in custody after police say he fled from a pre-dawn traffic stop in Beaverton and was arrested after crashing his car. Joseph K. Taafulisia was 13 when he and his older brothers planned a heroin robbery that turned into a shooting that killed two and wounded three others at the notorious Jungle homeless camp in Seattle in January 2016, according to news accounts. I cant stop thinking about recent stories about two mothers trying to find addiction treatment services for their sons. It shouldnt be this hard for any parent to keep their child alive. Back in September, one mother joined KATUs Town Hall to share her frustration with the lack of addiction treatment services. Every time hes truly ready, and I take him. Then he cant get in and hes homeless. Her son is not alone. According to a recent OHSU-PSU School of Public Health study, theres an estimated 49% gap in substance use disorder services needed by Oregonians. Thankfully, a Measure 110-funded service provider heard this mothers story and connected him to detox, peer mentoring and housing. KGW spoke to another mom who regularly makes the six-hour drive from Ontario to Portland in search of her son. Hes also battling drug addiction. Earlier this month she found him, but when she called transitional housing providers in search of a safe place for him to sleep, she found nothing. This mom made 22 calls. Only to find zero openings for her son. With no alternative available, she gave him a tent and two sleeping bags to keep warm. I hope our elected leaders hear these stories and respond by expanding access to addiction treatment services and housing in our communities. Not recriminalizing addiction. The threat of an arrest wont get people struggling with addiction into treatment. They already fear not being able to find treatment. We need less fear and more solutions. James T. Jackson, Portland To read more letters to the editor, go to oregonlive.com/opinion. 150 pounds of gingerbread. 50 pounds of marzipan. 20 pounds of chocolate. 10 pounds of Rice Krispies Treats. Those are the building blocks behind The Benson Portlands 2023 Gingerbread Masterpiece a 52-year holiday tradition. For 2023, master pastry chef David Diffendorfer recreated Neuschwanstein Castle for his 27th year as architect of the longstanding holiday tradition at the downtown Portland hotel. The German castle was built in the 19th century and is located in the Bavarian Alps. It was also the inspiration behind the inspiration behind the Cinderella Castle at Disneys Magic Kingdom. Diffendorfers re-creation includes the large ornate castle sitting high up, looking down to smaller buildings, trees, a bridge and lake. The Gingerbread Masterpiece is located in the lobby of The Benson and is on display and open to the public through December 30. Visitors are encouraged to stop by, enjoy a drink or hot cocoa at the lobby bar and sit by the fire. Watch behind-the-scenes footage of the 2023 Gingerbread Masterpiece here: More holiday events: Vickie Connor is a videographer for The Oregonian | OregonLive. She can be reached at vconnor@oregonian.com. Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Sunday began a two-day consultative meeting in Tripoli on the implementation of an Integrated Surveillance System (IDS) for infectious diseases in Libya Photo: (Photo : by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash) In a disturbing trend that's gaining traction across the United States, families are rallying for better protections against AI-generated deepfake nudes, particularly after incidents involving teenage girls in New Jersey and Washington State. In Westfield, New Jersey, a mother and her 14-year-old daughter are at the forefront of advocating for stronger legal measures. The daughter, along with other female classmates, fell victim to AI-generated nude images that were circulated at their high school. Dorota Mani, the mother of the victimized teen, has taken a stand, emphasizing the need for robust safeguards for victims of such digital exploitation. At the same time, a case that was very similar to the one described above was brought to light in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington, on the opposite coast. The case included a young man who was accused of using artificial intelligence to make and disseminate deep-fake photos of female students. Moreover, this episode sheds even more light on the rising worry over the abuse of artificial intelligence in the production of obscene content aimed at kids. The Rise of Deepfake Technology Deepfake technology, which involves creating or altering videos and images using artificial intelligence, has seen a worrying increase in use for nonconsensual pornography. According to Genevieve Oh, an independent researcher, more than 143,000 new deepfake videos were posted online this year, surpassing the total of previous years combined. Legal Landscape and Advocacy Efforts Families affected by these incidents are urging lawmakers to implement laws that provide comprehensive protection against the misuse of AI for creating fake content. While several states have enacted laws criminalizing nonconsensual deep-fake pornography, there is a call for uniform federal regulation to address this issue nationwide. Personal Accounts and Community Response Dorota Mani, in an interview, shared the emotional toll this incident has taken on her family. She highlighted that her daughter has set up a website and a charity to support victims of AI-generated abuse. The family is also actively involved in legislative advocacy, planning a trip to Washington to push for more stringent laws. Read Also: Rising Threat: AI-Generated Child Abuse Imagery Alarms Watchdog Group Challenges in Legislation The push for legislation, however, faces challenges. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation urge caution to ensure that new laws do not infringe on First Amendment rights. The debate centers around finding a balance between protecting individuals from digital abuse and maintaining freedom of expression. The Urgent Need for Action As the technology behind deepfakes becomes more accessible and its misuse more prevalent, the urgency for legal action grows. The incidents in New Jersey and Washington state serve as a stark reminder of the potential harm these technologies can inflict, especially on young and vulnerable individuals. The fight against AI-generated deepfake abuse is not just a legal battle but also a societal one. It calls for awareness, education, and strong legal frameworks to protect individuals, especially minors, from digital exploitation. As families like the Manis lead the charge, their efforts shine a light on the need for collective action to safeguard privacy and dignity in the digital age. Related Article: Artificial Intelligence INVADES Fast Food: How AI Technology Could Change The Way Humans Dine Photo: (Photo : by Picsea on Unsplash) In a shocking series of events in Idaho, a 10-month-old baby, Zeke Best, was found dead in the woods on Saturday. This tragic discovery occurred after the baby's father, Jeremy Albert Best, was found naked and delirious by the roadside, leading to a disturbing unraveling of events. The body of Zeke Best was located about 24 miles east of Idaho Falls, following a report from a hunter who encountered a man in a sleeping bag by the side of the road. The man, later identified as Jeremy Albert Best, the infant's father, was found in a state of undress and confusion, making incoherent statements, according to the Bonneville County Sheriff's Office. A Series of Alarming Events The search for Jeremy and Zeke Best had been underway since Thursday night, following the alleged murder of Best's wife, 38-year-old Kali Jean Randall, in their home. This incident occurred just hours after Best had undergone a psychological evaluation. Police had earlier on Thursday caught Best as he was aimlessly wandering through a nearby general store without any clothes. Surveillance footage from the store showed him bizarrely slouching on the counter and grabbing a cigarette before being escorted out. Read Also: Baby Found Alive In Chapel 3 Hours After Hospital Declared her Dead Medical Evaluation and Subsequent Murder Following his peculiar behavior at the store, Best was transported to the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center for medical and mental health evaluations. However, after being released the same day, he allegedly returned home, where he is suspected of murdering his wife and abducting his child. In response to these events, an Amber Alert was issued, describing Best as an "armed and very dangerous homicide and kidnapping suspect," as stated by the Teton County Sheriff's Office. The alert set off a frantic search for the missing infant and his father. Best's black SUV was eventually found on Saturday morning, down an embankment in the area where he was discovered by the hunters. This discovery led to the heartbreaking finding of Zeke's body. The Aftermath and Arrest The police have not provided information about Zeke's death's cause and circumstances. After receiving medical treatment, Jeremy Best was taken into custody on an arrest warrant in connection with the death of his wife, Kali Randall. The community has been left reeling from the tragic events that unfolded over the weekend. The shocking nature of the crimes and Best's bizarre behavior have raised numerous concerns about public safety and mental health. This incident in Idaho highlights the devastating impact of mental health crises and the importance of timely intervention. As the community mourns the loss of Kali Jean Randall and her infant son, Zeke, the focus now shifts to understanding the sequence of events that led to this tragedy and preventing similar incidents in the future. The arrest of Jeremy Best marks the beginning of a complex legal process as authorities work to unravel the details of this heartbreaking case. Related Article: Kidnapped 6-Month-Old Baby in Ohio Dies a Month After Being Returned Home I share some takeaways here from an article that Ive just read in BYU Studies Quarterly: John Hilton III, Jesse Vincent, and Rachel Harper, Last at the Cross: Teachings about Christs Crucifixion in the Womans Exponent, the Relief Society Magazine, and the Young Womans Journal, BYU Studies Quarterly 61/3 (2022): 31-58. The Womans Exponent, which was published from 1872 to 1914, was evidently one of the earliest periodicals for women published in the United States (32), which seems difficult to reconcile with hostile claims that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is simply oppressive to women and misogynistic. The Relief Society Magazine was published from 1914, when it replaced the Womans Exponent, until the new unified Church magazines were introduced in 1970. The Young Womans Journal appeared between 1889 and 1929. In all three cases, the editors were exclusively female and the authors were primarily female (32) One recurring theme in the materials surveyed by the authors, appearing twenty-one times, was the idea that women were the last and the first, in ways that demonstrate their devotion to Jesus Christparticularly that women were last at his cross, and earliest at his grave. This phraseology seems to be based upon a poem titled Woman by Eaton Stannard Barrett that is quoted and paraphrased more than once in the three magazines (where Eaton Stannard Barrett is, at least once, confused with Elizabeth Barrett Browning). In the poem, Barrett writes, Not she with traitrous kiss her Master stung, / Not she denied Him with unfaithful tongue; / She, when apostles fled, could danger brave, / Last at His cross, and earliest at His grave. [Woman (London: Cox and Baylis, 1819), 34.] Here, cited from page 43, are passages from Latter-day Saint authors in the three magazines surveyed that speak of the faith and devotion of women: Women were last at the cross and first at the sepulchre, and it was to a woman that He first revealed Himself after His resurrection. First to greet lovingly man at his birth, Last to forsake him when dying, First to make sunshine around his hearth, Last to lose heart and cease trying. Last at the cross of her crucified Lord, First to behold him when risen, First to proclaim him to life restored; bursting from deaths gloomy prison, First to seek knowledge, the God-like prize, Last to gain credit for knowing. Do to others as ye would they should do to you, that is ever helpful. It is that element which made her last at the cross and first at the sepulchre. As Ive suggested in at least a few public presentations and perhaps also in print, I think it very significant that the first witnesses of the empty tomb and of the resurrection were women. In 1904, a panel of judges that included James E. Talmage awarded Kate Thomas first prize for her poem For Christmas. I thought it a worthwhile find, and seasonally appropriate. So I share it with you here: O beautiful mother Mary, O mother of croonings low, Did you know more bliss in each fond kiss Than we common mothers know? His baby step she taught him, she put him gaily down And laughed with pleased, low laughter when his fingers clutched her gown. She taught him his first Our Father, and as he lisped the prayer, She bended her face till her lips found place In the soft sheen of his hair. O beautiful mother Mary, O Woman of women wise, Did you see the End? Or did Father send A kindly veil for your eyes? She watched him grow into boyhood, with innocent eyes like his own That wept when He came into manhood and the Load He must carry alone. For the way of the Hill was heavy, and the Cross on the Hill was high, And twas hard to look where whose sins He took Were lusting to see Him die! [Kate Thomas, For Christmas, Young Womans Journal 15/12 (December 1904): 532; Prize Christmas Poems, Young Womans Journal 15/12 (December 1904): 570.] Ive recently read two other articles in this same issue of BYU Studies: T. J. Uriona, Rethinking the Rod of Iron, BYU Studies Quarterly 61/3 (2022): 141-163. In this article, Uriona argues that we may be mistaken in visualizing the rod of iron in the dreams of Lehi and Nephi as a handrail or a balustrade. (I confess that this has been my conception of it.). Rather, he suggests with a wealth of scriptural and other parallels that it might more likely have been something like a shepherds staff or a scepter. Although he doesnt mention them (to the best of my recollection), I couldnt help while reading his article thinking of the familiar pharaonic flail and shepherds crook (as in the case of Tutankhamen, shown above) and of the common Homeric epithet, applied to leaders, of poime n la on ( , shepherd of the people), which is essentially equivalent to another common Homeric epithet anax andron ( , leader of men). Both of them, for instance, are applied to Agamemnon. on ( , shepherd of the people), which is essentially equivalent to another common Homeric epithet , leader of men). Both of them, for instance, are applied to Agamemnon. Kristian S. Heal and Zach Stevenson, How the Book of Mormon Reads Ancient Religious Texts, BYU Studies Quarterly 61/3 (2022): 103-121. Heal and Stevenson argue in this article that the Book of Mormon not only represents the recovery of an ancient extra-biblical text in itself but predicts the recovery of more such texts and offers us lessons in how to read them. And Ive already called these two very worthwhile articles to your attention: Posted from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico Some things you know are true, but you have to experience them before they become real to you. Im a Pagan and not a Buddhist, but the concept of impermanence is becoming very real to me. And so is the concept of loss. I was 32 before I experienced loss at a deep personal level. No, I wasnt that sheltered. I wasnt sheltered at all, although my childhood environment was exceptionally stable for better and for worse. Its just that I learned very early that change is constant. When youre born 35 and cant wait to get out of childhood, change cant come fast enough. One of the things my parents did right was to take me to funerals. A lot of funerals. From kindergarten through about third grade, it seemed like we were going to a funeral every month. It wasnt that many, but was enough that death became normalized. People got old, they got sick, and then they died. Sometimes people died before they got old and that was bad, but then they went to heaven, so it was OK. The same preachers who ranted about how most people were going to hell were quick to assure us that our loved ones were safely in heaven, even if it wasnt clear they had checked all the proper religious boxes before they died. (In case youre not a regular reader here, there are no religious boxes to check. There is no hell, even for the people we would like to send there.) When my beloved grandmother died I was sad. She was the only one of my grandparents who lived long enough for me to really get to know. I was 28 when she died. I was sad, but she had gone from healthy and active at 80 to suffering with cancer at 82 her death was a relief, not a loss. I was very sad and probably clinically depressed when my college girlfriend broke up with me just after graduation. But at some level I understood this wasnt a loss. This was a necessary thing. She knew what I refused to see: we werent a good match and staying together wasnt a good thing for either of us. When I was 32 my job went away. The factory where I worked couldnt compete with lower-cost products from Asia and the parent corporation decided to close it. This wasnt a loss either. These things happen (whether they should happen is another question for another time). I was bored with the job anyway and here was a chance for something new and different. Unfortunately (from my perspective at the time) something new and different wasnt to be found in the same geographic location and I moved from Tennessee to Indiana. The distance wasnt the issue it could have been to Georgia or it could have been to California. The issue was that I had to leave the house Cathy and I had built, on the land where I grew up, in the place where all our friends and family lived. The house was small, but it was designed by me to be expandable. We were going to live there for a long time. A long time turned out to be six years. I clearly remember backing out of the garage for the last time, turning to take one final look at the house, and crying. This was something I genuinely expected would last a long time, and it didnt. This was something I counted on, something I was invested in financially and emotionally. It was something I was going to build on literally and figuratively. And it was gone. This was loss. For those of you who lost parents at an early age, or children at any age, or whove been in relationships that turned abusive, or who became homeless, or who are dealing with chronic diseases, or who have suffered any of the tragedies of the human condition whether natural or caused by the neglect of our wider society this may seem trivial. Perhaps it is. All of it seems trivial compared to whats going on in Gaza, and in Ukraine, and in refugee camps around the world. Thats not the point. The fact that other people are suffering more doesnt make our suffering any less. Must I remind everyone of Robin Williams and others like him? The point is that loss to whatever degree, whatever it looks like for you hurts. And at least to me it feels like failure. Why didnt I see this coming? Why couldnt I keep it from happening? Why did I build my life plans around something that deep down was so unreliable? Those questions have good reasonable answers, but good reasonable answers can still be unsatisfying. And they dont stop more losses from coming. The older I get, the more losses Im experiencing. Things I thought would last forever, arent. Progress I assumed would continue, isnt. People I expected would outlive me, havent. Some of this is the reality of being 61. Some if it is the times we live in. Some of it is more. Not all that long ago I declared my intent to live out my life in Texas. And then last year I realized I have to leave, as soon as I can leave on my own terms. When I stepped away from formal leadership in Denton CUUPS, I knew my time as the Pagan parish priest was coming to an end. I thought I knew what would replace that work and that identity. Several of us were working on something else, something Ive hinted at revealing a few times. And then it fell apart. It wasnt anybodys fault, it just didnt work out the way I thought it would. The way I built future plans around. (I will not discuss this on the internet, but if you see me in person and ask, Ill tell the story.) And then theres Covid, and the changes it brought to religious groups and organizations. Most of the reporting on this is in the context of Christian churches, but the same thing is true for other religions. Denton CUUPS has been back to in-person circles for two years, but our attendance is still 40% below pre-Covid levels. Perhaps the pandemic caused these changes or perhaps it simply accelerated changes already in progress. In any case, much of what was, is no more. Loss. Disappointment. The realization that more loss is coming. Perhaps this post should have been in my private journal and not on the blog. But my particular situation isnt whats important here. Much of what Im describing is simply me experiencing things that happen to everyone sooner or later, in one form or another. Your particulars will be different. Your impact will be different. Comparing losses and grading suffering is never helpful. The 5 Stages of Grief are a gross oversimplification that do not apply in all situations. In any case, Ill grieve in my own way, on my own schedule. What I need to do now why Im writing this, and why Im sharing it is to move on. People tell me I need to let go. Im not very good at letting go. And when I do, it leaves a hole a hole that ends up getting filled with something. Sometimes more grief. Lately its been bad memories bad memories that have nothing in common, except that they all represent disappointments. Failures. Losses. Im better at moving on. As I often say in other contexts, you dont have to like it, you just have to deal with it. Yes, I have my I just cant days. Ive had a couple recently. But the sooner you me anyone but mainly me can start moving in the direction of what comes next, the sooner things are going to get better. And if you dont know exactly where you want to go, start taking steps in the general direction of what you want. I did that earlier this week and Ive already figured out a couple of the next steps. Some things remain. Some things really are a solid foundation. Im not doing this alone Cathy is another solid foundation in my life. I am moving on, and I will build a future thats even better than the one Ive lost, because thats what I do. To Know, to Dare, to Will, and to Keep Silence. As I will it, so mote it be. But Im not quite done grieving what has been lost. Most of the music from my high school days is Not Good. This is a notable exception, and its been on a loop in my head all week. Delta selected among best Taiwan global brands for 13 years in a row Delta has been selected as one of the '2023 Best Taiwan Global Brands' for the 13th consecutive year. Delta's brand has consistently grown for 11 years, reaching a new high of US$544 million, a noteworthy surge of 28 percent from 2022, and establishing a new record. 'The Best Taiwan Global Brands' is organised by the Industrial Development Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs, and executed by Interbrand, an international brand valuation institution commissioned by the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research. Ms. Shan-Shan Guo, Chief Brand Officer of Delta, stated, "It is an honour that Delta's brand value has been recognised as growing consistently for 11 years. This year, we have seen a significant improvement. Delta has always maintained a keen market awareness, staying ahead of global trends by making long-term investments in fields such as electric vehicles, industrial automation, building automation, information and communication technology, and energy infrastructure, which has led to impressive business performance in recent years. "In 2022, Delta expanded from a pure industrial brand to include a commercial brand, resulting in a comprehensive solution that is smart, energy-efficient and closer to users. Delta has closely aligned its business with its ESG strategy. Currently, 63 percent of the electricity consumed by our global operations comes from renewable sources, in line with Delta's RE100 goal by 2030. Additionally, Delta has also established an internal carbon pricing (ICP) system that charges a carbon fee of US$300 per ton of carbon emissions. The funds collected from carbon fees are then invested in developing low-carbon innovation, energy resource management and renewable energy solutions. In terms of social participation, Delta Foundation is deeply committed to cultivating environmental education, and has expanded its efforts to coral restoration and actively enhancing biodiversity. As a leading ESG global company, Delta takes its commitments seriously, and puts them into action. We are pleased that ESG is now one of the key topics in this year's brand evaluation. We appreciate the judges for recognising Delta's long-term efforts and valuing highly our accumulated ESG performance." Delta's brand value is surpassing US$500 million in 2023, with a huge leap in growth to achieve the exceptional result of 28 percent. Delta aims to drive sustainability transformation through technology, providing customers with smart and energy-efficient products and services while connecting the industry ecosystem and collaborating on value creation. In response to the worldwide green energy trend, Delta has proactively broadened its progressive business areas, using its fundamental technological expertise in power management. This encompasses data centre power and cooling solutions, industrial automation, building automation, EV powertrain and charging solutions, and renewable energy. Delta will continue to develop innovative technologies to accomplish its zero-carbon vision and move towards becoming a sustainable brand. With Deltas corporate mission 'To provide innovative, clean and energy-efficient solutions for a better tomorrow', Delta integrates ESG developments into its business operations. Besides improving the energy efficiency of products, promoting energy-saving solutions and green buildings, Delta is actively setting long-term strategies and targets to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 at its global sites. Delta is dedicated to reducing its absolute Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2030, with 2021 as the baseline year, and has already accomplished a 13.5 percent decrease in carbon emissions in 2022. Delta also promotes low-carbon innovation by implementing an ICP system and investing carbon fee funds into multiple carbon reduction projects. At the 28th United Nations Climate Change conference (COP28), Delta plans to exchange experiences with the global community and collaborate to achieve decarbonisation. Furthermore, Delta remains committed to advancing energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions through its innovative solutions. The high-efficiency products Delta shipped between 2010 and 2022 have helped clients save 39.9 billion kWh of electricity, which is equivalent to reducing roughly 21.05 million tons of global carbon emissions. Delta is also actively creating healthy and energy-saving buildings around the world through technology and so far, has built or made donations of 32 green buildings, as well as two certified green data centers. Among them, 17 certified green office buildings and 5 certified green buildings, donated for academic purposes, have saved a total of 26.91 million kWh of electricity in 2022, equivalent to reducing 15,400 tons of carbon emissions. Contact Details and Archive... Winter holidays are practically here some only days, and others weeks, away. If you still havent decided what to get friends and loved ones, you might consider a Costco Gold Star Membership as a practical, yet thoughtful choice. And, with this seasonal savings event, youll receive a $40 Digital Costco Shop Card* when you sign up for a Gold Star Membership ($60). This promotion runs through the end of the year. Your purchase arrives digitally, making this an excellent last-minute option for any holiday you have coming up. Give a valuable shopping experience As a Gold Star Member, your giftee can shop a wide selection of products under one roof. They may find grocery items like produce, deli items, take-and-bake meals, freshly baked goods, frozen products, and pantry staples; household goods such as toilet paper and cleaning supplies; clothing and apparel; electronics and appliances; pet food and toys; gift cards; and so much more. Savings dont stop at physical items. Costco has more than 500 warehouse locations across the US and select locations may offer other perks like Costco Gas Station, Costco Tire Center, Costco Pharmacy, and Costco Services** that connect one with providers for auto and home insurance*** and services like carpets and window treatments. Multiple gifts in one purchase Costco Gold Star Members also receive a Household Card for another individual living at the same address who is 18 years of age or older. That means couples can both take advantage of one Gold Star Membership. Take advantage of this holiday promotion and get a $40 Digital Costco Shop Card* when you purchase a Costco Gold Star Membership ($60), ending on December 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT. No coupon is needed. Prices subject to change. *To receive a Digital Costco Shop Card, you must provide a valid email address at the time of sign-up. If you elect not to provide a valid email address, a Digital Costco Shop Card will not be emailed. Valid only for nonmembers for their first year of membership. Limit one per household. Nontransferable and may not be combined with any other promotion. New members will receive their Digital Costco Shop Card by email within 2 weeks of sign-up. Costco Shop Cards are not redeemable for cash, except as required by law. Digital Costco Shop Cards are not accepted at Gas Stations, Car Washes, or Food Court Kiosks. A Costco membership is $60 a year. An Executive Membership is an additional $60 upgrade fee a year. Each membership includes one free Household Card. May be subject to sales tax. Costco accepts all Visa cards, as well as cash, checks, debit/ATM cards, EBT and Costco Shop Cards. Departments and product selection may vary. **Services are provided to Costco members by third parties. ***Costco Wholesale, Costco Insurance Agency, Inc. and its subsidiaries do not underwrite insurance, pay claims or guarantee any of the products or services offered by third parties. Specific products, features, rates and discounts may vary and may not be available in all states in accordance with state filings and applicable law. Costco Insurance Agency, Inc. is not licensed in New York state. Insurance products are not obtained through the Costco Insurance Agency in New York. Costco Insurance Agency, Inc.s California license number is 0D08407. Veteran Windows developer Raymond Chen has revealed in a video with Daves Garage how Microsoft tested Windows 98 to see how well it could cope when assaulted with a barrage of plugged-in USB devices. USB was something new at the time, so the Windows 98 developers needed to gain experience with it. Enter the USB Cart of Death. It didnt kill people, but endless Windows builds. Using the USB Cart of Death often led to a blue screen on the Windows computer being checked. This meant that the Windows build running on the PC was finished and needed to be improved. There were 64 USB devices on the USB Cart of Death, the maximum number of USB devices that could be connected to a Windows computer at the time (the figure is now 127). The Windows developers packed every conceivable type of USB device onto the cart (one of those mail trolleys used to collect and deliver the companys mail): keyboards, mice, printers, and even a USB gaming steering wheel, which was then used to steer the trolley. All of these devices were connected to the Windows PC being tested via a single USB cable. The Windows developers used an arsenal of USB hubs to make that possible. This USB Cart of Death was driven from Windows developer to Windows developer and plugged into their PCs. As soon as Windows had recognized all the devices, the developers tested whether the connected USB keyboard functioned, whether the gaming steering wheel worked correctly in games, and so on. A particularly tough test was to connect the cart, watch Windows recognize all 64 devices and activate the drivers and then unplug them again. This usually resulted in a blue screen of death on the Windows PC. And then you moved on to the next Windows computer with the USB Cart of Death. The developer sitting at the crashed PC now searched for the cause of the crash and adapted the Windows source code accordingly until the USB trolley of death turned up the next time. The goal of this brutal testing was to be able to connect and disconnect USB devices as often as required during operation. Windows should not crash, but continue to run stably. Fortunately for us, the developers succeeded in their goal. get windows 11 pro for cheap in pcworld's software store Windows 11 Pro Best Prices Today: This article was translated from German to English and originally appeared on pcwelt.de. The United States and China have a relationship that could be summed up in a single word as, complicated. Or adversarial. Or contentious. And if you want to use more than one word, kind of like that video of two dogs growling at each other through a gate. While megacorps just want to make as much money as possible, they have to keep this relationship in mind. Nvidia is in hot water with the US Commerce Department over recent chips designed specifically for the Chinese market. For context, Nvidia is making unbelievably, ridiculously, stupidly huge amounts of money at the moment, providing the hardware backbone for the AI software boom. Were talking almost $15 billion in revenue last quarter, a 400 percent increase over last year. And while Nvidia and other chipmakers are popping champagne, political powers are nervous, trying to make sure that they keep an advantage over their rivals. Thats why the United States has begun restricting the sale of certain high-powered processors to China, an embargo that was recently expanded to close some loopholes. Nvidias AI-focused graphics chips, including the popular H100 and H800 as well as high-end consumer graphics cards like the RTX 4090, have been explicitly banned for export to China for being too powerful for potential AI applications. US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has been particularly bullish on these restrictions. The updates are specifically designed to control access to computing power, which will significantly slow the PRCs development of next-generation frontier model, and could be leveraged in ways that threaten the U.S. and our allies, she said back in October. While Nvidia ostensibly complies with these restrictions as an American corporation, it wouldnt be, well, an American corporation if it didnt search for a way around them. Hence the introduction of new data center chips that arent on the very specific ban list, and skirt under its 4800 TOPS (tera operations per second) limit. These chips, including the HGX H20, L20, and L2, are legal to sell to Chinese businesses, at least at the time of writing. A sub-4800 TOPS variation on the RTX 4090, named the 4090D or 4090 Dragon, is also rumored to be headed for the Chinese market. Raimondo isnt taking the announcement of these new chips lying down. We cannot let China get these chips. Period, she said, speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum this weekend. According to Fortune (spotted by VideoCardz.com), she specifically called out CEOs of chip companieswho were a little cranky with me when I did that because youre losing revenue. Such is life. Protecting our national security matters more than short-term revenue. The Secretary had pointed words for Nvidias strategy of designing new variations of chips to slide under the TOPS power limit. If you redesign a chip around a particular cut line that enables them to do AI, Im going to control it the very next day. The Commerce Departments policy seems pretty straightforward, and an unambiguous threat to Nvidias profits. (The companys stock price is down 3.5% this morning, by the by.) While the Chinese chip market isnt the only one on the planet, its probably the biggest outside of US-based tech giants, possibly bigger by some metrics. More aggressive attempts to close it off as a matter of policy could threaten Nvidias incredible rise. Even redesigning chips based on existing hardware isnt free, and a sword of Damocles constantly hanging over new B2B product lines is enough to make even Fortune 500 CEOs lose sleep. All that being said, Nvidia probably just needs to wait for another opportunity for massive profits. With the US Congress split along razor-thin party lines, and the 2024 presidential election anything but certain, sweeping changes in policy could be only a year away. Note that the Commerce Departments restrictions are federal policies, not laws, and can be reinforced or removed at basically any time to match the whims of whoever is holding the reins of political power. Hollard Life, the youngest of the insurance group, Hollard Ghana, has snagged the Chartered Institute of Marketing Ghanas (CIMG) Marketing-Oriented Insurance Company (Life Category) of the year, 2022 at the just ended 34th CIMG Annual National Marketing Performance Awards held at the Labadi Beach Hotel. According to the citation,Hollard Life was recognised for its dedication to customer-centric strategies and marketing excellence. The year under review saw you introducing some wonderfully crafted and customer-resonating products that sat well with your target market. The introduction of the internal mechanism to ensure the building of a well-motivated staff, grilled to handle customer pain points seamlessly, together with your CSR initiatives, which remain peerless and matchless, and more are the strong pillars that identified you as the CIMG Marketing- Oriented Company of the Year, the citation read. Commenting on the win, the Managing Director of Hollard Life, Nashiru Iddrisu, expressed his gratitude toall stakeholders, particularly our customers and partners, for believing in us to insure everybody they love. Receiving the CIMG Marketing Oriented Insurance Company of the Year Award is a testament to our steadfast dedication to client satisfaction and our ongoing efforts to change the insurance landscape in Ghana. At Hollard, we are committed to enabling more people to create and secure a better future by treating everyone with care and dignity. Although we are barely five years old, we are glad to be making strides in the insurance industry while contributing to the increase of insurance penetration in the country, he said. We are thrilled to have received this award from CIMG for our marketing-focused strategy. At Hollard, we are intentional about our purpose, which drives our actions. We ensure all our products and services reach the target audience using the best marketing practices. We are keen about putting customers first in everything we do and will keep aiming for excellence in customer satisfaction, the Group Head of Marketing and Corporate Affairs, Cynthia Ofori-Dwumfuo, added. About Hollard Life Hollard Life is a subsidiary of the insurance group Hollard Ghana, which combines its deep local knowledge of the market with the world-class expertise of an international insurance brand. With feet firmly planted on Ghanaian soil but Headquartered in South Africa, Hollard delivers innovative insurance solutions customised to the unique risks Ghanaians face. Hollard was previously Metropolitan Insurance, which operated in Ghana for over 25 years. Hollard Life, the youngest subsidiary, was birthed in 2018. The company offers various life insurance products, including funeral, personal accident, savings and investments, group life insurance and employee plans, and more. Beyond different nationwide office branches and Hollard 2U franchise shops, Ghanaians can find Hollard Life at Shell Fuel Station Welcome Shops, Melcom stores and online at www.hollard.com.gh, www.melcom.com/hollard-insurance and www.jumia.com.gh for all their insurance needs. 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 An Accra Circuit Court has sentenced a businessman to 48 months imprisonment for stealing a 2015 Model Toyota Corolla Saloon car valued at GHC127,000. Hope Elikem Afortukpe, charged with stealing, pleaded guilty. The court presided over by Mr Isaac Addo convicted the accused person on his plea and sentenced him accordingly. The prosecution led by Chief Inspector Jonas Lawer told the court that the complainant Patience Dukuly was a housewife and resident of Tema Community 25. The prosecution said Afortukpe also resided at Woe in the Volta Region. Chief Inspector Lawer said the complainant and the accused person, now convict, had been friends since December 2022. The prosecution said in February 2023, Afortukpe lured the complainant to sell her white 2015 model Toyota Corolla car with registration number GR 2819-23 valued at GHC127,000. The prosecution said Afortukpe took the car from the complainant and sold it to one Dorcas at Kintampo at a cost of GHC90,000. It said the accused person, after selling the car, went into hiding and efforts by the complainant to get back her car or money proved futile. It said luck eluded Afortukpe when he was nabbed in a fraud case, and he was identified by the complainant. The prosecution said Afortukpe admitted the offence in his caution statement. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Five weeks after schools reopened, many children in the North Tongu District of the Volta Region still have no access to their classrooms. Some now attend classes under trees and others under tents because their classrooms still serve as safe havens for people displaced by the floods caused by the spillage from the Akosombo and Kpong dams. In an interview with the Daily Graphic, the District Director of Education, Isabella Ayimey, indicated that the worst-hit community was Mepe. She said there were 14,704 learners in basic and senior high schools (SHSs) in the district before the floods, but a little over 9,000 were back in school. She explained that some learners had not returned to school because their parents had relocated to other districts. Mrs Ayimey said for now, teaching and learning was ongoing in 21 schools in the district, while 27 were struggling to get back onto their feet. Observation Last week, the Daily Graphic visited the area to find out how schools were faring following the reopening and also the challenges they were confronted with. During the tour of the area, it was observed that some displaced persons were yet to return to their homes and were still occupying their temporary abodes. For instance, in some of the schools, learners were crammed in some of the classrooms, while the displaced occupied the other classrooms. To ease the congestion, it was further observed that some classes were held under tents. Among those schools were Mepe Presbyterian Primary, Fodzoku E.P. Primary and Agbetikpo Primary. Classes The North Tongu District Director of Education explained that UNICEF and the Ghana Education Service (GES) had provided those tents to create space for classes to be held as the displaced occupants of the classrooms could not be sent away. She said although the floods had largely receded, some schools were still occupied by water. She said to help the children make up for the lost time during the disaster, the affected schools had been asked to go over the lessons held for the learners before the floods before starting the new scheme for the term. Furthermore, learners in the affected schools would have to return to school early, just after the Christmas holidays, to make up for lost lessons. Teachers Meanwhile, 286 of the 487 teachers displaced by the floods in the district had returned to their duty posts, she said. However, Mrs Ayimey disclosed further that they were faced with severe accommodation problems because they had lost their rooms to the floods, a situation that had compelled some of the teachers to also sleep in classrooms, while others were commuting from Aflao, Akatsi, Accra and Ho daily to work in Mepe. To alleviate that situation, the traditional authorities in Mepe had offered 12 rooms to the needy teachers, said Mrs Ayimey. Also, the floods displaced 48 officers of the District Education Office, as well as the office; thus, officials of the District Education Office were now working in shifts as a result of the problem and to avoid congestion. Mrs Ayimey acknowledged a donation of GH100,000 from the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament (MP), Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, to teachers who lost their rooms to the floods, saying that would relieve them greatly of their rent payment. She further expressed gratitude to the various donor groups, including the district assembly, traditional authorities, the MP and UNICEF, for their immense support to schools with learning and other materials to keep them running. Source: graphiconline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Central Police Command is holding a Togolese national, Haruna Muba, 30, who allegedly attempted to sell his 20-year-old, co-worker, at a galamsey site for GHC80,000 to be used for money rituals. The incident reportedly occurred at Denkyira Ayanfuri in the Upper Denkyira West District when the resident got the information, laid ambush with journalists and BNI officials in an uncompleted building, and arrested him. The victim was being tied with a rope and his mouth and eyes covered, waiting for the buyers to come for him for the rituals. However, he was arrested when he showed up in readiness to transact the business of selling the victim. Additionally, the report gathered also indicated that the suspect, Haruna, is alleged to have tried beheading his 17-year-old niece sometime back. He is currently in the custody of the Dunkwa Divisional Police Command, assisting police with the investigation. Source: dailyguidenetwork.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 The Majority in Parliament has maintained that the Speaker of Parliament, Rt. Hon. Alban Kingsford Sumanu Bagbin, was biased against them during the proceedings to approve the 2024 budget statement on Wednesday, November 29, 2023. The Majority indicated that some members of the minority were not in Parliament at the time of the proceedings; therefore, the speaker, in their view, deliberately delayed proceedings to allow the opposition lawmakers who werent in to arrive to participate in the proceedings. A statement issued by the Deputy Majority Leader and MP for Effutu, Mr. Alexander Afenyo-Markin, on Thursday, November 30, said, Following the conclusion of the debate on the budget yesterday, the Speaker, as per the established protocol of the House, was to put the question regarding the approval of the policy and principles underpinning the budget. After a period of deliberation, the Speaker posed the question and announced that the ayes had it. Subsequently, the Deputy Minority Leader, Mr. Armah Kofi-Buah, rose on account of Order 113(2) to contest what he (Mr. Armah Kofi-Buah) deemed a ruling by the Rt. Hon. Speaker. As a result of the challenge, he called for a headcount. This prompted an intervention from the Majority Leader and Deputy Majority Leader. The two raised procedural issues with respect to the application brought before the Speaker. Despite the procedural objections raised, the Speaker declined to acknowledge these concerns and expressed his intention to proceed with a headcount as demanded. At this juncture, the leadership of the majority caucus insisted on their readiness to submit to the headcount that was being sought. The headcount, a process where members indicating aye or no rise to be counted, typically takes approximately 10 minutes. The results are then tallied by table officers and presented to the Speaker, who announces the outcome. Instead of sticking to the request of the headcount, the Speaker then said that he was drawing the attention of the House to the possibility of resorting to a division, and indeed, the Speaker then called for a division. This came as a surprise to Members of the Majority Caucus, since no such application for a division had been presented to the Speaker. The decision to call for a division was certainly not the initial application. Leadership of the Majority, well aware that under our rules, being absent during a headcount disqualifies a member from being recorded present, whereas in a division, absent members who rush in can be counted as participants, even if they were not present when the question was initially put-; moved to halt this process that would have allowed some of the minority MPs who were outside Accra at the time to be able to proceed to Parliament to be counted, even though the Majority was fully aware that it was not going to give the minority any advantage, the statement noted. This departure from the call for a headcount generated heat and was set to frustrate government business; at the same time undermining the sanctity of the parliamentary processes. Since 1993, Parliament has never resorted to a division in making decisions. The Majority concluded the choice for a division was unfair under the circumstances, leading to their decision to stage a walkout. It is essential to note that despite the Speakers indication that the ayes had prevailed, and despite a petition presented to him, a petition that hadnt followed due process, the Speakers initial ruling on the ayes retaining their advantage stands. Consequently, the budget has been duly passed until the appeal for a headcount is dealt with, not the division that the Speaker had called. Parliament could not approve the budget on Wednesday, November 29, after the Majority side of the house boycotted proceedings, making it the second time they are walking out on their budget after they first did so on the 2022 budget statement, which introduced the e-levy. They disagreed with the way Mr. Bagbin was conducting the business. They accused the Speaker of delaying proceedings for the Minority to have their full numbers in the House. Sam George is not here, Zanetor is not here, Mahama Ayariga, is not here so five of their members are not here. All the speaker is doing is to delay time for their members to come, Majority Leader Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu told journalists after they walked out. Source: GBC 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 Theater lovers in Takoradi and its environments are set to be thrilled this weekend as celebrated Ghanaian playwright, Latif Abubakar stages an encore of his adaptation play, Life is a dream. Following a successful premier in the National capital, the play which has been adapted to a Ghanaian and Afrocentric version will be staged at Akroma Plaza in Takoradi. Birthed in 1635 and performed on almost all stages in Europe, and staged for the first time in Africa by the award winning playwright, the play which is an adaptation of a Spanish script by Pedro Calderon de la Barca is fused with suspense, dance, educational pieces, and a blend of rich Gonja culture has its setting in Gonjaland. Explaining details of the play, Mr Abubakar said that the play explores the deepest mysteries of human experience which teaches that the world of our senses is a mere shadow, and the only reality is to be found in the invisible and eternal. He said the play also explores escaping from life's confusion to awareness of reality and self-knowledge. Synopsis The play tells the story of Prince Tijani who had been imprisoned in a tower by his father, King Abdullah, following a prophecy that he would bring disaster to the Kingdom and ultimately the death of the King. The play focuses on morality, honour and vengeance, and centred on conflict between freewill and fate, and the restoration of one's honour. Featuring veteran actor, Ecow Smith Asante, Bright Kekeli Jefferson, Pearl Darkey, OB Black, Kofi Boakye, Abraham Macpratt Dadzie and 2020 Ghana Most Beautiful Winner, Naa Deide Botchwey, it explores escaping from life's confusion to awareness of reality and self-knowledge as well as the deepest mysteries of human experience. The play will be performed at Akroma Plaza on Saturday, November 2, 2023, at 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. Tickets are on sale at GH100 via the short code *447*1092#. Alternatively interested persons can call 027 502 7000 for further enquiries. Life is a dream is in partnership with the Embassy of Spain, Ghana, BenMarine Services, The African Film Festival, The Second Coming of Nkrumah, and powered by Globe Productions Limited. 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 A man lost his life while a woman was injured during a double shooting inside a duplex they were renovating in Philadelphias West Oak Lane section early Monday, according to news reports. Officers responded to gunshots that took place at a home along the 7300 block of Sommers Road shortly after 12:45 a.m. Investigators came across a 45-year-old woman with a gunshot wound to the leg and a man in his 40s suffering from a gunshot wound to the arm and chest, 6ABC said. He was rushed by paramedics to the hospital but died a short time later. The woman was also transported to the hospital and was treated for her injuries. Authorities arent sure of a motive. It appears that the shooter or shooters were at the front of the property and had either broken a window or attempted to gain access, Philadelphia Police Capt. Anthony Ginaldi said to NBC10. Most of the shell casings were found right inside the front window. The couple was renovating the home while still living there, 6ABC said. Authorities found evidence of gunshots being fired inside the home but there was no indication the couple fired out of it. Theres no indication that there was an exchange of gunfire from inside. There was no weapon inside the property, Ginaldi said to 6ABC. There were tools in the property. The property was being rehabbed. Looks like this couple was working on the property. So far, no arrests have been made. By Dan Nephin, LNP, Lancaster, Pa.(TNS) Two federal prosecutors. Two untimely deaths. Two decades later, no one has been brought to justice in either case. There, largely, the similarities end. One case is being actively investigated, regularly making the news. Thats the case of Seattle prosecutor Thomas Wales. How the other case is being handled is less straightforward. Thats the case of Jonathan Luna, the Baltimore prosecutor whose body was found in Lancaster County 20 years ago. Wales death was clearly an assassination. Late in the night of Oct. 11, 2001, someone shot Wales through the basement window of his Seattle home. Wales, 49, died the next day in the hospital. Lunas death is less clearly defined. In the early morning of Dec. 4, 2003, Luna, 38, was found face-down in a small stream in a remote area of Brecknock Township in northern Lancaster County. Though the official cause of Lunas death was determined to be drowning because of water in his lungs, Luna had also been stabbed 36 times. Most of the cuts were to the neck. According to the coroner at the time, most were shallow and not fatal. In Wales case, the Department of Justice is offering a reward of up to $2 million for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of his killer. Federal investigators have said they believe Wales might have been killed because of his job. They even have a suspect, according to published reports, and are trying to make the case that the suspect hired a hitman to kill Wales. Theres no known suspect in Lunas case, nor is there a reward being offered for information about his death. UNDATED: In this handout photo supplied by the FBI, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Jonathan Luna is shown. Luna, 38, was found dead December 4, 2003 near Ephrata, Pennsylvania. Luna appeared to have been stabbed multiple times and was last known to be alive while working late at the U.S. Courthouse in Baltimore, Maryland on December 3. (Photo by FBI via Getty Images)Getty Images Search Wales name on Google and, high in the results, is a link to the FBIs seeking information website. Also high in the results is the Department of Justice announcement on the 20th anniversary of Wales death that it was redoubling efforts to find the killer. Search Lunas name on Google, and while plenty of links will come up news articles, podcasts and the musings of armchair detectives the FBI and Justice Department pages about Lunas death dont make the first page of search results. Thats odd, considering the FBI purportedly has an active investigation into Lunas death. Then again, much of Jonathan Lunas case is strange. And many questions asked two decades ago remain unanswered. Among them: Why did Luna, who was prosecuting two Baltimore men for dealing heroin, leave the federal courthouse in Baltimore about 20 minutes before midnight as he was supposedly finishing terms of plea agreements that would be presented in court the next morning to resolve the case? Why would Luna leave his laptop, cellphone and eyeglasses behind? It was reported at the time that Luna needed them to drive, though there are many pictures of him without glasses. Why did Luna take a more than four-hour, circuitous trip from that courthouse to a rural section of Lancaster County, passing through Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania? And most perplexing: Was Luna murdered? Or did he take his own life? Who was Jonathan Luna? Drawing a portrait of Jonathan Paul Luna today must pull information from various newspaper accounts, including LNP predecessor papers, and a book, The Midnight Ride of Jonathan Luna by William Keisling, who extensively interviewed Daniel Rivera, Lunas best friend from childhood and the best man at his wedding. Lunas parents are dead. His only brother, David Luna, could not be located and apparently last spoke publicly shortly after Lunas death. Lunas wife, Angela Hopkins-Luna, has not responded to efforts to interview her, and no record of her speaking to any reporter, at any time, could be found. An older woman who answered the intercom at the suburban Baltimore condominium that property records show Hopkins-Luna owns told a reporter on Nov. 2 that Hopkins-Luna no longer lives in the U.S., but she declined to give any contact information. She did not identify herself. Luna was born in The Bronx section of New York City to Paul and Rosezella Luna. Paul Luna was Filipino and worked in restaurants. Rosezella was Black and worked as a homemaker. Jonathan, his parents and his older brother, David Luna, lived in public housing in the Mott Haven section. In school, Jonathan Luna was academically oriented and dressed for success. He wanted to be a journalist at one point, but in high school, he decided to be a lawyer. He enrolled at Hunter College in New York City but transferred to Fordham University. He was accepted into the prestigious University of North Carolina School of Law in Chapel Hill. There, he met Hopkins, a medical student. He graduated law school in 1992, and they married in August 1993. Luna worked at a private law firm in Washington, D.C., for about a year, then with the Federal Trade Commission before returning to New York City to work as an assistant district attorney. From there, he went to work in 1999 in the U.S. Attorneys Office in Baltimore, where he prosecuted child pornography and drug cases, among others. Luna, his wife, mother-in-law and young son bought a townhouse in Elkridge, Maryland, a Baltimore suburb. In 2003, the Lunas had a second son. Luna also moved his parents from New York to an apartment nearby and visited them regularly. Cause for concern Though Luna was well-liked by colleagues, news accounts also reported he was concerned hed fallen out of favor when a new boss, Thomas DiBiagio, took over in 2001. He had even hired a lawyer. Luna apparently had cause for concern. The drug trial Luna had been handling hadnt been going well. The governments key witness changed his testimony, and it was revealed in court that the prosecution had known the witness had escaped supervision and gotten arrested with heroin, but that information wasnt immediately turned over to defense attorneys. And Luna, in September 1992, tried a bank robbery case in which more than $36,000 of evidence money went missing. Though investigators told The Baltimore Sun shortly after Lunas death that there was nothing connecting him to the missing money, The Washington Post reported in December 2005 that Luna had been scheduled to take a lie detector test shortly after the drug trial and had already postponed it at least once, citing work. Other people were given lie detector tests, but the case has never been solved. Lunas last hours On Dec. 3, 2003, Luna and the two defense attorneys in the drug case told the judge they believed they had reached a plea agreement. The jury trial was recessed until the next morning, a Thursday, so the attorneys could hammer out the details. Luna went home for dinner, then returned to the office, telling one of the defense attorneys in a phone call about 9 p.m. that he was finishing the agreement text and would fax it to the attorney by midnight. It never arrived. Federal investigators, using Lunas E-ZPass information, toll tickets and credit card, put together a timeline of Lunas final hours. At 11:38 p.m. Dec. 3, 2003, Lunas silver 2003 Honda Accord departed the Baltimore federal courthouse and headed north on Interstate 95. Just before 1 a.m. Dec. 4, he withdrew $200 from an ATM at a rest stop in Newark, Delaware. An hour and 40 minutes later, Luna drove onto the New Jersey Turnpike near Florence. Ten minutes later, he entered the Pennsylvania Turnpike at the Delaware River Bridge, heading west. Lunas card was used at a gas station in King of Prussia at 3:20 a.m., and he exited the turnpike at 4:04 at the Reading/Lancaster interchange. Later, a spot of his blood was found on a toll ticket. Why a ticket was used is unexplained, considering he had an E-ZPass. There is at least one unexplained gap in the timeline and another potential gap. The drive from Newark to the turnpike should have taken about 40 minutes, according to investigators: That left an hour unaccounted for. The drive from the Reading/Lancaster interchange to Sensenig & Weaver Well Drilling on Dry Tavern Road, where Luna was found, should take fewer than 10 minutes if taking the most direct route. Employee Daniel Gehman arrived about 5 a.m. and said he didnt see any unfamiliar vehicles. He went into the office to make coffee and get ready. When he went outside about half an hour later, he noticed a flashing red light on the edge of the property next to a creek. It was from the dashboard of Lunas Accord. The cars front end hung over the creek. Gehman turned his trucks lights toward the car and noticed blood on the back seat. He called police, and two Pennsylvania State Troopers arrived about 15 minutes later, around 5:45, according to a search warrant affidavit for the Accord. The Accord was running. Trooper James Fassnacht noticed blood smeared on the drivers side door front fender. A large pool of blood was in the right rear passenger floor board. Cash was strewn about. Lunas body, dressed in a business suit, was face-down in the creek, close to the front wheels and undercarriage. Around 11 a.m., Dr. Wayne K. Ross, Lancaster Countys forensic pathologist since 1993, examined Lunas body on scene and noticed a traumatic wound to the right side of the head. More than 100 state police cadets helped search the area, as a snowstorm was expected the next day. Nothing was immediately found. In February 2004 authorities announced they had recently found Lunas penknife in the stream near where Lunas body was discovered. When exactly the knife was found was never publicly specified. Autopsy findings Ross performed the autopsy later on Dec. 4. Dr. Barry Walp, who was Lancaster Countys coroner, and Ross re-examined Lunas body the next day, Dec. 5. In a Dec. 6, 2003, article in The Intelligencer Journal, Walp said Luna had been stabbed 36 times. Luna, Walp said, was alive when they put him in the creek. Several deep cuts caused internal hemorrhaging, and the water in the lungs caused the drowning. The next days Lancaster New Era, citing a New York Daily News story, reported that Walp said while most of the 36 wounds were shallow, several were deep enough to cause internal bleeding. We see these so-called knife-prick wounds when a person is being teased or questioned. Its a form of torture. The New Era article continued, Federal officials said some of the wounds were defensive, indicating that Luna tried to fight back. But Walp told The Associated Press that no defensive wounds were observed during Lunas autopsy and that all his wounds were to his neck and upper shoulder area. It would not be the first inconsistency in the case. Shifting theory In the immediate days after Lunas death, investigators treated the case as a homicide. Lunas boss, DiBiagio, told reporters outside Baltimores federal courthouse, Let there be no doubt that everyone in law enforcement local police, state police, United States marshals, (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), FBI are united. We will find out who did this. And we are dedicated to bringing the persons responsible for this tragedy to justice. Thats a commitment from me. Thats a commitment from every law enforcement officer in the state of Maryland. Investigators examined the cases Luna was prosecuting for possible leads but came up with nothing. The two drug dealers Luna prosecuted were not believed to be connected: The plea deal they ended up getting matched what they had sought before their trial even started, one of their attorneys told The Baltimore Sun. They had no reason to see him dead. Theyd also been in jail when Lunas body was found. Investigators also turned to Lunas personal life. Through leaks largely to Baltimore and Washington media, investigators soon hinted that there might be more to Luna than the picture of a loving, dedicated husband, father and son. On Dec. 8, 2003, The Sun reported that Luna had about $25,000 in credit card debt. The article also said that Luna had expressed concern that his job was at risk, though The Sun noted that DiBiagio denied that speculation. Later, it would be reported that DiBiagio privately admitted he lied about that to protect Lunas family something he also denied. DiBiagio, who has long been out of public office, did not respond to repeated efforts for comment, nor did Donald Totaro, then-district attorney for Lancaster County. The Monday after Lunas death, The Sun reported, many employees in his office wore black ribbons, and courthouse flags flew at half staff. On Dec. 12, 2003, The Sun reported again citing an unidentified law enforcement official that investigators found blood and DNA evidence from a second person in Lunas car. The Associated Press reporting at the time said investigators suspect they found two types of blood in Lunas car and were performing DNA tests. If those tests were ever done, results were never definitively announced or reported, but a Jan. 15, 2006, Lancaster Sunday News article reported, Early assertions that Luna paid for two tanks of gas at King of Prussia, and that a second blood type was detected in the Honda, havent panned out. Other reports from soon after Lunas death said investigators were looking into an online dating profile by the name of Jonathan Luna, supposedly a Black professional interested in white women. The reports said the profile was from 1997 and had not been definitively linked to Luna. On Feb. 13, 2004, The Baltimore Sun was the first publication to report that investigators were considering the possibility of Lunas suicide: In FBI reports over the past month, authorities have raised the possibility that Luna, 38, could have killed himself, according to three law-enforcement sources who spoke with The Sun on condition of anonymity. The controversial theory has met sharp skepticism internally, however, by a number of investigators who maintained that the evidence points to homicide. Investigators also were looking into a loan application Luna filled out for about $30,000; it was canceled not long after the $36,000 from the bank robbery was found to be missing, The Sun reported. Authorities also found Luna had as many as 16 credit card accounts, some taken out without his wifes knowledge. On March 12, 2004, investigators publicly acknowledged they were considering that Luna might have taken his own life. The task force is looking at every possible scenario, Pennsylvania State Police Capt. Steven McDaniel said during a news conference in Baltimore. Authorities announced a $100,000 reward and said for the first time that they had no evidence that Luna had contact with anyone from when he left Baltimore to when he was found in Brecknock Township. Case grows cold Lancaster Countys then-current and past coroners stuck to their homicide determination. Walp, then-retired, told the Intelligencer-Journal in 2004, Its still a homicide. I dont know where this stuff about suicide is coming from. Dr. Gary Kirchner, who took office in January 2004, told the paper, Luna was stabbed 36 times and died from freshwater drowning. There just isnt any way this is a suicide. Walp and Kirchner have since died, but they never wavered in their assessment. Kirchner said he was asked by the FBI to change the cause of death to suicide but refused, the Lancaster Sunday News reported Jan. 15, 2006. Over time, the Luna case largely faded from coverage, both locally and nationally. There were five- and 10-year anniversary stories. And in January 2006, The Baltimore Sun reported that it obtained a Department of Justice inspector general report critical of aspects of the investigation. Largely, it focused on personnel matters, such as the questioning of a female colleague of Lunas concerning their relationship. Lancaster papers carried stories about Keislings book and the efforts of at least one private investigator. There also were reports of efforts to gain access to coroner records in the case and unsuccessful efforts by Lunas father and a private investigator to get Kirchner, the coroner, to conduct an inquest. Then, on Jan. 31, 2020, apparently prompted by a private investigators request to Lancaster County officials, autopsy records that were believed to have been either lost or turned over to the FBI were found in the countys archives. Their discovery prompted newly elected District Attorney Heather Adams to have them sealed. LNP Media Group, the publisher of LNP LancasterOnline, sought to have them unsealed, but on Jan. 13, 2021, Lancaster County President Judge David Ashworth ruled release would hinder the investigation. To permit wholesale disclosure of the contents of the documents as requested by LNP would prejudice the ongoing homicide investigation, Ashworth ruled. Active, open investigation At the October 2020 hearing before Ashworth, testimony revealed that the FBI considered Lunas case active, despite years earlier telling The Washington Post that it had been administratively closed. State Trooper Chad Roberts, who heads the Lancaster County areas criminal investigations unit for homicides, missing persons and cold cases, testified that he examines the case annually. Questions and requests for information to the FBI about Lunas case were routed to its Baltimore field office, which did not directly answer them. The FBI has no additional information to share on the Luna investigation. As a general matter, we are prepared to review and examine new information related to any investigation, should it become available, the email stated. A spokesperson declined to elaborate. Adams, the district attorney, referred questions about the investigation to the state police. In an emailed response to questions, the state police said, The case remains under active investigation, and we do not have comment at this time. Adams said she has reviewed the autopsy records and does not plan to publicly release them. So long as the case is open and active, the commonwealth will not release the autopsy report to the public for the same reason we sought to seal it, that is, releasing such information could substantially hinder the ongoing criminal investigation, she said. The autopsy would be released to a defense attorney if an arrest is made as part of discovery, or evidence sharing, Adams said. LNP Media Group also sought information from federal investigators through the Federal Freedom of Information Act but was denied. Anniversaries of Thomas Wales murder are frequently marked with resolve that the case can be solved and pleas for people to come forward with information. Two years ago, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco announced the department was adding another $1 million to the reward money bringing the total to $2.5 million in hopes it would spur someone to come forward. Although two decades have passed, the Department of Justice remains committed to this investigation, Monaco said in a news release at the time. Somebody knows something about this murder, and we want to do everything we can to encourage them to come forward now. If there is one commonality between the Wales and Luna cases, its the use of anonymous federal sources. While in the Luna case, federal law enforcement sources advanced theories that Lunas death was likely a suicide, in Wales case, sources advanced their theory that a man he had prosecuted in a fraud case used his suspected connections to a drug cartel to arrange for a contract killing, according to reporting by The Seattle Times two years ago. The man in the fraud case has not been charged in connection with Wales death and has maintained his innocence. And that theory leaves open the possibility the contract killer didnt know who wanted Wales dead, The Times reported. No definitive answer April Brooks, a retired FBI agent who headed the Luna investigation, spoke about Lunas case in a brief phone interview in October. I have nothing really to add other than standing by some of our original statements. This was an exhaustive investigation. There is no evidence (Luna) met with or had contact with anybody that evening, Brooks said. Brooks declined to answer other questions, in deference, she said, to Lunas widow and sons. Brooks said she understands the frustration that the case is not neatly resolved. There is not a definitive answer, and there most likely never will be, she said. If (local and federal law enforcement) were able to specifically state in unison that there was a common position, that would have already been said, Brooks said, adding Lunas case is not the only case in which investigators in different jurisdictions have differing opinions. The lack of resolution doesnt bother her, Brooks said. Im actually good the way it is, Brooks said The biggest thing we wanted was all the facts that were known at the time to be out. ... Unfortunately, this just doesnt come to a clean resolution for everyone especially the media. A Florida company has recalled some protein bars that may be contaminated with foreign material, including disposable hairnet, shrink wrap and parchment paper Recalled are Burn Boot Camp Afterburn Grass-Fed Whey protein bars in the triple chocolate almond flavor. The 60-gram bars were manufactured by Doctors Scientific Organica, according to a company announcement with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Foodborne foreign objects that are flexible and not sharp may cause minor injuries such as transient choking or gastrointestinal system injury. The bars were distributed through Burn Bootcamp retail locations as well as online through its website to locations throughout the U.S. No illnesses have been reported. The bars can be returned to the place of purchase or destroyed. The lot numbers in the recall are 181, 184 and 187. The company said it was contacted by consumers about the issue. For more information, call Doctors Scientific Organica at 786-749-1221 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. Its a day when everyone can sing Gonna Fly Now together as an anthem. Rocky himself, Sylvester Stallone, dropped by Philadelphia, Pa., to celebrate a day commemorating the iconic character he once portrayed. USA Today reports how Sly returned to the City of Brotherly Love on Sunday almost five decades after Rocky the first film of what would eventually become a decades-long franchise hit theaters on Dec. 3, 1976. 6 ABC continues to report how the 77-year-old actor drew a record crowd as he spoke from the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art the very steps he made famous during that even more famous running scene in celebration of the citys first-ever Rocky Day. It has gone by in a blink, told Stallone to 6 ABC. I havent done enough in Philadelphia, I really havent. I want to do more. This Rocky Day has kicked it all off and its going to be a good time. I am going to give back to this city that has given me so much. Stallone jumpstarted this giving back by hanging out with fans during this unofficial holiday, and by especially making one kids day (if not his life): NBC 10 details how nine-year-old Ro Knight of Alabama reenacted one of the movies most iconic scenes in front of Stallone himself, much to the seeming delight of both. Added Stallone during his speech: the real victory is never giving up and going the distance for yourself and your loved ones. Standing at the top, you are reminded that all things are possible. Keep punching. Its that time of year where commercials are full of sales and baubles and neighbors are trying to outdo each other with Christmas lights. Cynicism aside (sorry), November and December are undoubtedly very festive months. But which areas lean into the festivities more than the rest? Innerbody a company with a team of researchers, scientists, and medical professionals that seeks To provide objective, science-based information and advice that helps you make health-related decisions and enjoy a healthier, happier lifestyle published a study which, with its title, reiterates the above question: Which U.S. state is the most festive at Christmastime? In finding the answer to this query, Innerbody researchers analyzed Google Trends search term data related to the Christmas season before calculating each terms values. The data gleaned was then divided by each state as well as Washington D.C. As far as festivity goes, Pennsylvania ranked 14th overall, allowing for it to obtain a spot among the top 20. In first was West Virginia. From our research data and state rankings, we discovered that for the 2nd year running, West Virginia gets the award for Most Festive State in the U.S., the study elaborates. Rounding out the top five are new additions Utah, Nebraska, and Idaho, along with New Hampshire, which remains in the top five for the second year in a row. We cant help but notice that all five of these states typically have cold and snowy winters, potentially adding to the Christmas spirit. After all, who doesnt dream of having a white Christmas in a winter wonderland? Alas, it was D.C. that was the least festive place on the list. New York was the second least festive and Florida certainly not a spot for a winter wonderland the third. First there was Kevin Bacon. Now theres Snoop Hogg. A pig that was recently rescued in Pennsylvania one that takes his name from famed rapper and Martha Stewart cohort, Snoop Dogg is in need of a home. People reports how the poor 6-month-old pig was spotted wandering the streets of Philadelphia, and was taken in by the Animal Care Control Team of Philadelphia (ACCT Philly). People continues to state how Jayne Anne Bissell dog care manager at the Sanctuary of Haafsville in Fogelsville, Lehigh County spotted Snoop Hogg while picking up rescue puppies from the shelter. She eventually decided to take him back to the sanctuary. He didnt look too great, so I thought that another rescue that has the setup to take pigs would take him, but unfortunately, pigs are being dumped so frequently that all rescues, even for pigs, are full, she explains to People. So nobody could pull him. The next time I went back, he looked so pathetic, so I ended up taking him. According to the sanctuarys website, those who rescued Snoop Hogg believe he was used as bait for dog-fighting rings. He was treated for mange and eye issues, but is doing great. Now all he needs is a forever home. Pigs are not for everyone, tells Bissell to Fox 29. Ideally, he would like to be an indoor pig with a big fenced yard to play. A pig friend would be lovely. Should you be interested in adopting Snoop Hogg, please click this link to apply or email dogadoptions@thesanctuarypa.org. One of central Pennsylvanias oldest wineries has announced that it will be closing at the end of the year. West Hanover Winery notes on its website that it will close Dec. 31. Located at 7646 Jonestown Road, it calls itself the first and oldest operational winery in Dauphin County. It also has been operating a tasting room in Pottstown, Montgomery County, at 3416 Saint Peters Road. The main winery is open seven days a week and the satellite tasting room is open Saturdays and Sundays. Owner and founder George Kline called it a hobby that got out of hand in the book Pennsylvania Wineries, by Linda Jones McKee and Richard Carey. He worked as a meat cutter for 38 years and as he got interested in winemaking he planted a few vines on land that belonged to his mother. Over time, he would buy 2 acres next to his parents home and design a home that could accommodate a winery. He would also plant more grapevines, mostly native American varieties such as Niagara, Concord and Catawba. Owner and winemaker George Kline makes more than 50 wines at West Hanover Winery, according to his website.West Hanover Winery The winery opened in 1997 and for years was a member of the Mason Dixon Wine Trail. Those who entered wandered through the production area before reaching the tasting room, where for years he has produced more than 50 wines, from sweet to fruit to dry. A 70-year-old woman in Uganda has given birth to twins after going through in vitro fertilization (IVF), according to news reports. Safina Namukwaya, from a rural village in Uganda, East Africa, welcomed twins a boy and a girl on Wednesday, Nov. 29, at Womens Hospital International and Fertility Centre in Uganda, the hospital announced in a statement on its Facebook page. Mother and babies are all well, it reads, in part. Each of the twins weighed 3 lbs., 7 oz., per local outlet NTV Uganda. The babies were born at 31 weeks gestation, according to Namukwayas fertility specialist, Dr. Edward Tamale Sali. I feel great, Namukwaya told TODAY.com through an interpreter on a video call. Some might argue that 70 years is old, but God decided that I get to have twins at 70. There is no one that can put a limit on Gods authority and power. Congratulating her on such a feat, the hospital said in a statement that such an arduous task is more than a medical success; its about the strength and resilience of the human spirit, BBC reported. To aid in the conception of her twins, Namukwaya used IVF and due to her age, donor eggs and her partners sperm. We implanted four embryos, and then, of course, she conceived the twins, Sali told Today. In the U.S., the upper age limit for in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and other medically assisted reproduction is generally mid-50s, Today reported. For Namukwaya, pregnancy at her age wasnt easy. There was a time I felt very sick because of the pregnancy. I spent nearly all my savings. Then I went to a hospital and talked to the doctor about my condition. That doctor helped organize funding for Namukwaya to be transported to another area for better care and is grateful for his generosity. She also mentioned that her partner chose to leave after learning she was expecting twins. Men dont like to hear that you are going to have more than one child, Namukwaya said in her interview, as translated to English. Even after I was admitted, my man never showed up. Namukwaya even admitted to not knowing what comes next when asked if shes ready to raise her babies. God is in charge. You see, you can have one child and feel overwhelmed. But here I am with twins at a time I am weak ... I dont know, but they say every child comes with their blessings, she said to BBC. This is her second birth in three years. She gave birth to a daughter in 2020. Namukwaya always wanted to have children after being mocked as a cursed woman for never having children before the birth of her daughter, according to a previous report by the news agency Agence France-Press (AFP). When Namukwaya came to Sali earlier this year and explained that she wanted to expand her family, he didnt hesitate to help. Its her human right. Its her body, he explained. Shes physically fit. Born prematurely, the twins are in the hospitals neonatal intensive care unit but, according to Sali, they are just fine. By Terry Spencer, The Associated Press FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. The chair of Floridas Republican Party says he will not resign over a womans allegation that he raped her, saying in an email to supporters that he is innocent. He did not address any specifics of the accusation that has roiled the states conservative politics. Christian Ziegler sent the statement to state Republicans on Saturday, saying that he and his wife, Bridget Ziegler, are being targeted because they are such loud political voices. His wife co-founded the conservative group Moms for Liberty, which has led a campaign with Gov. Ron DeSantis to roll back sex education in Florida schools. DeSantis said last week that while Christian Ziegler is innocent until proven guilty, he should resign to avoid becoming a distraction to their party. Ziegler insists he wont quit. We have a country to save and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for this process to wrap up, wrote Ziegler, 40. A longtime GOP activist, he ascended to the state partys top post in February. No charges have been filed against Ziegler, but the Sarasota Police investigation remains open. The accuser, who has known Christian Ziegler for 20 years, told police in October that he forced his way into her apartment and raped her, according to search warrant affidavits filed by police. In his Saturday email, Ziegler did not address having told detectives that he did have sex with the woman but that it was consensual. He also didnt address his wife telling detectives that the couple and the woman had group sex once, more than a year ago. My family is rock solid. My wife is behind me 150% and we have methods in place to protect our (three) children, just as we have with all previous attacks that we have faced, Christian Ziegler wrote. The Zieglers did not return calls and text messages Sunday seeking further comment. DeSantis spokesman Jeremy Redfern did not return a call and text message Sunday seeking comment on Zieglers refusal to resign. Republican Party of Florida chairman Christian Ziegler, left, greets former president Donald Trump at the RPOF Freedom Summit on Nov. 4, 2023, in Kissimmee, Florida. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel via AP)AP The police avadavits saying that the Zieglers had group sex with a woman have led Democrats and gay rights leaders to accuse the couple of hypocrisy, given that an organization Bridget Ziegler cofounded Moms for Liberty has joined DeSantis and the Florida GOP in pushing back against LGBTQ+ causes. Bridget Ziegler is also an elected member of the Sarasota County school board and was appointed by DeSantis to the board that now oversees Walt Disney Worlds land development. DeSantis pushed through legislation last year disbanding a Disney-controlled board after the company opposed his bill that limits sex education in schools. The rape accusation against Christian Ziegler became public last week after the Florida Center for Government Accountability, an investigative news organization, obtained a police report and the search warrant affidavits detailing the allegations. The accusers name is redacted in the documents. The Associated Press does not name possible victims of sexual assault without their permission. According to text messages cited in the affidavit, the woman and the Zieglers had planned to again have group sex on Oct. 2, but the woman backed out after Bridget Ziegler couldnt make it. The woman says she found Christian Ziegler in her apartments hallway later that day, that he pushed her inside and then raped her. In text and phone conversations monitored by investigators, Ziegler offered the woman financial help before becoming suspicious that they were being recorded. In a Nov. 2 interview with detectives, Ziegler said the sex was consensual and that he had recorded it. He said he deleted the video, then recovered it after the rape allegation surfaced. Detectives seized Christian Zieglers phone on Nov. 2, the affidavits say. None of what they have found has been made public. Associated Press reporter Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report. By Najib Jobain and Kareem Chehayeb, The Associated Press KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip The Israeli military said Sunday its ground offensive had expanded to every part of Gaza, and it ordered more evacuations in the crowded south while vowing that operations there against Hamas would be no less strength than its shattering ones in the north. Heavy bombardment followed evacuation orders, and Palestinians said they were running out of places to go in the sealed-off territory bordering Israel and Egypt. Many of Gazas 2.3 million people are crammed into the south after Israel ordered civilians to leave the north in the early days of the war, which was sparked by the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack in Israel that killed about 1,200, mostly civilians. The United Nations estimates that 1.8 million Gazans have been displaced. Nearly 958,000 of them are in 99 U.N. facilities in the south, said Juliette Toma, director of communications at the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. After dark, gunfire and shelling were heard in the central town of Deir al-Balah as flares lit the sky. In Gazas second-largest city of Khan Younis, Israeli drones buzzed overhead. U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk urged an end to the war, saying civilian suffering was too much to bear. The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the death toll there since Oct. 7 has surpassed 15,500, with more than 41,000 wounded. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths, but said 70% of the dead were women and children. A Health Ministry spokesman asserted that hundreds had been killed or wounded since a weeklong cease-fire ended Friday. The majority of victims are still under the rubble, Ashraf al-Qidra said. Fears of a wider conflict intensified. A U.S. warship and multiple commercial ships came under attack in the Red Sea, the Pentagon said. Yemens Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed attacks on two ships they described as being linked to Israel but did not acknowledge targeting a U.S. vessel. Hopes for another temporary truce in Gaza were fading. The cease-fire facilitated the release of dozens of the roughly 240 Gaza-held Israeli and foreign hostages in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. But Israel has called its negotiators home, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the war will continue until all its goals are achieved. One is to remove Hamas from power in Gaza. Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said resuming talks with Israel on further exchanges must be tied to a permanent cease-fire. Women mourn during the funeral for Staff Sergeant Aschalwu Sama in Petah Tikva, Israel, Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023. Sama, 20, died of his wounds after he was injured in a ground operation in the Gaza Strip. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)AP White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told NBCs Meet the Press the U.S. was working really hard for a resumption of negotiations. Israels military widened evacuation orders in and around Khan Younis in the south, telling residents of at least five more areas to leave. Residents said the military dropped leaflets calling Khan Younis a dangerous combat zone and ordering them to move to the border city of Rafah or a coastal area in the southwest. But Halima Abdel-Rahman, a widow and mother of four, said she wont heed such orders anymore. She fled her home in October to an area outside Khan Younis, where she stays with relatives. The occupation tells you to go to this area, then they bomb it, she said by phone. The reality is that no place is safe in Gaza. They kill people in the north. They kill people in the south. The United States, Israels closest ally, has urged Israel to avoid significant new mass displacement and do more to protect civilians. U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris told Egypts president that under no circumstances would the U.S. permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, an ongoing siege of Gaza or the redrawing of its borders. On the ground in Gaza, there was fear and mourning. Outside a Gaza City hospital, a dust-covered boy named Saaed Khalid Shehta dropped to his knees beside the bloodied body of his little brother Mohammad, one of several bodies laid out after people said their street was hit by airstrikes. He kissed him. You bury me with him! the boy cried. A health worker at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital said more than 15 children were killed. Israels military said its fighter jets and helicopters struck targets in Gaza including tunnel shafts, command centers and weapons storage facilities. It acknowledged extensive aerial attacks in the Khan Younis area. The bodies of 31 people killed in bombardment of central Gaza were taken to the Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, said Omar al-Darawi, a hospital administrative employee. One woman wept, cradling a childs body. Another carried the body of a baby. Later, hospital workers reported 11 more dead after another airstrike. Bloodied survivors included a child carried in on a mattress. Outside a hospital morgue in Khan Younis, resident Samy al-Najeila carried the body of a child. He said his sons had been preparing to evacuate their home, but the occupation didnt give us any time. The three-floor building was destroyed completely, the whole block was totally destroyed. He said six of the bodies were his relatives. Five people are still under the rubble, he said. God help us. In a video from the same crowded al-Nasser hospital, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said: I feel like Im almost failing in my ability to convey the endless killing of children here. Israel says it does not target civilians and has taken measures to protect them, including its evacuation orders. In addition to leaflets, the military has used phone calls and radio and TV broadcasts to urge Gazans to move from specific areas. Israel says it targets Hamas operatives and blames civilian casualties on the militants, accusing them of operating in residential neighborhoods. It claims to have killed thousands of militants, without providing evidence. Israel says at least 78 of its soldiers have been killed. Palestinians wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip are brought to the hospital in Deir al Balah on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023. (AP Photo/ Hatem Moussa)AP The widening offensive likely will further complicate humanitarian aid to Gaza. Wael Abu Omar, a spokesman for the Palestinian Crossings Authority, said 100 aid trucks entered Sunday, but U.N. agencies have said 500 trucks per day on average entered before the war. The renewed hostilities also heightened concerns for the 137 hostages the Israeli military believes are still being held by Hamas. During the recent truce, 105 hostages were freed, and Israel released 240 Palestinian prisoners. Most of those released by both sides were women and children. Elsewhere in the region, Lebanons militant Hezbollah group said it struck Israeli positions near the tense Lebanon-Israel border. Eight soldiers and three civilians were wounded by Hezbollah fire in the area of Beit Hillel, army radio reported. The military said its artillery struck sources of fire from Lebanon and its fighter jets struck other Hezbollah targets. Iraqi militants with the Iran-backed umbrella group the Islamic Resistance in Iraq said they struck the Kharab al-Jir U.S. military base in Syria with rockets. A U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said rockets hit Rumalyn Landing Zone in Syria but there were no reports of casualties or damage. Later Sunday, officials with Iranian-backed militias in Iraq said five militia members were killed in an airstrike blamed on the U.S. near Kirkuk. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. U.S. military officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Chehayeb reported from Beirut. Associated Press writers Samy Magdy in Cairo; Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad; Elena Becatoros in Athens, Greece; and Tia Goldenberg in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed to this report. By ZEKE MILLER, AP White House Correspondent WASHINGTON (AP) The Biden administration on Monday sent Congress an urgent warning about the need to approve tens of billions of dollars in military and economic assistance to Ukraine, saying Kyivs war effort to defend itself from Russias invasion may grind to a halt without it. In a letter to House and Senate leaders and also released publicly, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young warned the U.S. will run out of funding to send weapons and assistance to Ukraine by the end of the year, saying that would kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield. She added that the U.S. already has run out of money that it has used to prop up Ukraines economy, and if Ukraines economy collapses, they will not be able to keep fighting, full stop. We are out of money and nearly out of time, she wrote. Biden has sought a nearly $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other needs, but it has faced a difficult reception on Capitol Hill, where there is growing skepticism about the magnitude of assistance for Ukraine and where even Republicans supportive of the funding are insisting on U.S.-Mexico border policy changes to halt the flow of migrants as a condition for the assistance. Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled House has passed a standalone assistance package for Israel, which is fighting a war with Hamas in Gaza, while the White House has maintained that all of the priorities must be met. A damaged kindergarten following a Russian drone attack in Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Nov. 25, 2023. Russia launched its most intense drone attack on Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Saturday morning, military officials said. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)AP Congress already has allocated $111 billion to assist Ukraine, including $67 billion in military procurement funding, $27 billion for economic and civil assistance and $10 billion for humanitarian aid. Young wrote that all of it, other than about 3% of the military funding, had been depleted by mid-November. The Biden administration has said it has slowed the pace of some military assistance to Kyiv in recent weeks to try to stretch supplies until Congress approves more funding. We are out of money to support Ukraine in this fight, Young wrote. This isnt a next year problem. The time to help a democratic Ukraine fight against Russian aggression is right now. It is time for Congress to act. The letter followed a classified Capitol Hill briefing on Nov. 29 for the top House and Senate leaders on the need for the assistance. Defense and other national security officials briefed the big four congressional leaders as Congress is debating President Joe Bidens nearly $106 billion funding package, which includes $61 billion for Ukraine but has become snared by Republican demands for U.S.-Mexico border security changes. They were clear that Ukraine needs the aid soon and so does our military need the aid soon, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told The Associated Press in an interview. In Pennsylvania, hunting is a 24/7, 365-day activity. In other words, on any given day or night its legal to shoot one wild animal or another, depending on the species, the location and type of weapon. But no time of year is bigger than rifle deer season when hundreds of thousands of hunters head into the fields and forests across the state in search of their trophy buck. Theres always something in season, said Travis Lau, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Game Commission. And coyotes for instance can be hunted year round, day or night, including on all Sundays. What about the many non-hunters in the commonwealth who want to go hiking or biking, bird watching or geocaching, in the great outdoors without fearing for their lives? There is some anxiety, said Sarah Corcoran, deputy director of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Sierra Club, which has 30,000 outdoors-loving members. The popular rifle deer season runs through Dec. 9, but there are extended hunting seasons for antlerless deer, in deer management areas and extended archery and flintlock seasons that continue in certain regions until January 27. There are 1.5 million acres of state game lands where licensed hunters can hunt any number of species of animal and hunting is allowed in all 20 state forests and in designated areas in 100 of 124 state parks. Then there are conservancy lands and private property that hunters may be using that may not be marked. While there is some information on Department of Conservation and Natural Resources website, non-hunters say the state lacks a good database with all public land where hunting is permitted. That lack of access to mapping has many hikers and other non-hunting outdoors people on edge, especially when its difficult to tell where hunting areas begin and end. I find it difficult myself to know what are game lands and not, hunting in some state parks but not others, said Harris Toser, 57, of Harrisburg, a hike leader for the Meet Up group, Day Hikers of Central PA, for about seven years. Theres no hunting on the Appalachian Trail but its a very thin strip and you can go right through game lands and not know. Toser, who went to Maryland to hike to avoid the first day of hunting season in Pennsylvania, thinks theres an opportunity for someone to develop an app that would help hunters and non-hunters alike better navigate the boundaries in the state. We need a better resources, said Toser. At any given time theres hunting. It could be archery or small game, but it could be easier to go outdoors safely and [creating a searchable database] could an app developers dream. A DCNR spokesman said non-hunters should be able to determine where its safe to hike in state parks. We have designated areas for hunting in state parks that are clearly marked, so it is less about having areas set aside for non-hunters and more about having designated areas for hunters inside of the parks, said DCNR spokesman Wesley Robinson. In 2019, Gov. Tom Wolf approved a bill to allow limited Sunday hunting three times a year. There is legislation proposed to allow hunting seven days a week a move the Sierra Club and other outdoors and animal welfare groups oppose but so far that bill has not gained traction in the General Assembly. Many people do not feel safe while on the trail during hunting season even though there are precautions that can be made, and knowing that there is one day a week free from hunting gives peace of mind, said Corcoran. The good news for hikers this year? The remaining Sundays of 2023 will be deer-hunting free. Lau said while it might seem there is potential for hazardous encounters between hunters and non-hunters, the reality is that incidents are rare. All in all, non-hunters wouldnt seem to assume any more risk than hunters using the same lands, and accidents of any kind are few, he said. Tips for enjoying the outdoors safely during the most active hunting seasons: - Do your research. Be aware of state park, state forest and gameland boundaries. - Wear bright colors, or better yet, fluorescent orange. - Hike or bike in groups. - Plan activities for midday rather than dawn or dusk when most hunters are out. - Consider walking trails in city, township or other local parks where hunting is not allowed. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro condemned a demonstration that occurred Sunday night in Philadelphia outside a Jewish-owned restaurant as blatant anti-Semitism. Organized by the Philly Palestine Coalition, hundreds of protestors marched through the city to show support for Gaza residents and to call for a cease-fire, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. At one point, protestors surrounded Goldie, an Israeli-owned falafel restaurant, and chanted Goldie, Goldie you cant hide, we charge you with genocide. They also placed stickers on the restaurant that read Free Palestine, 6ABC said. Gov. Shapiro was quick to denounce the incident on social media. We saw a blatant act of antisemitism, not a peaceful protest. A restaurant was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli. This hate and bigotry is reminiscent of a dark time in history, Shapiro said in a statement posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. Tonight in Philly, we saw a blatant act of antisemitism not a peaceful protest. A restaurant was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli. This hate and bigotry is reminiscent of a dark time in history. https://t.co/WS2guahnsQ Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) December 4, 2023 Shapiro added that he had been in touch with the restaurants owner, Mike Solomonov, to pledge his support. Philadelphia Congressman Brendan Boyle also responded to the incident on social media, writing, I cant believe I even have to say this, but targeting businesses simply because theyre Jewish-owned is despicable. Philadelphia stands against this story of harassment and hate. I support freedom of speech but harassing business owners simply because they are Jewish is unacceptable and deeply anti-Semitic, state Rep. Ben Waxman said on social media. Protestors should leave these establishments alone and focus on government officials who actually have power to influence the situation in Israel and Gaza. Solomonov owns multiple restaurants in the city under the CookNSolo umbrella company. When the Israel-Hamas war started, Solomonov said he would donate 100% of all sales to Friends of United Hatzalah, a nonprofit emergency medical service, according to CBS Philadelphia. The protest comes after a weekling cease-fire between Hamas and Israel ended, and Israeli forces expanded their ground offensive to every part of Gaza. Want a say in the news? Email Claudia at todayinpa@pennlive.com to have your thoughts on the stories covered here or on PennLive heard during Listening to Listeners, an original Today in Pa. segment that occurs every other Friday. You can listen to the latest episode of Today in Pa at this link, or on any of your favorite apps including Alexa, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher. Episodes are available every weekday on PennLive. Feel free to subscribe, follow or rate Today in Pa. as you see fit! Today in Pa. Daily Podcast | December 4, 2023 Police in Pittsburgh arrested two individuals last week following a threat on social media against a school. Philly officials have banned ski masks in certain public spaces. 2024 fishing licenses are now on sale, although at slightly higher costs. Plus, forget gingerbread houses lets make some pretzel cabins. Those are the stories we cover in the latest episode of Today in Pa., a daily weekday podcast from PennLive.com and hosted by Claudia Dimuro. Today in Pa. is dedicated to sharing the most important and interesting stories pertaining to Pennsylvania that lets you know, indeed, whats happening today in Pa. Todays episode refers to the following articles: If you enjoy Today in Pa., consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or on Amazon. Reviews help others find the show and, besides, wed like to know what you think about the program, too. As sponsored by Renewal by Anderson of Central PA. By Dan Rodricks, Baltimore Sun (TNS) My old friend Calvert Bregel, gone 12 years now, used to treat me to trips on his great boat, the Miss Demeanor, to fish for Chesapeake striped bass rockfish, as they are known around here and we had many merry times on the bay. With Bill Burton, who was for decades the outdoors writer of the bygone Evening Sun, we caught lots of fish and released most. Now and then, we took a rockfish home for supper, but the idea was more camaraderie than consumption. Calvert loved the bay and greatly enjoyed fishing and hunting. But, in the last years of his life, he became troubled, even mournful, about what we saw during our excursions out of Middle River fewer rock, smaller rock and some sick-looking rock. It makes me not want to fish anymore, Calvert said, words I never expected to hear. At first, I attributed his melancholy to the passage of time Calvert lived to 84 and the passing of friends. But it really was the decline of the bay and the fishery that bothered him, especially the up-and-down state of the stripers he had been catching all his life, having grown up between Baltimore and his familys Eastern Shore farm. I have started to feel as Calvert did not to the point of giving up fishing in Maryland waters completely, but to at least acknowledge that my future fishing will be greatly curtailed by conditions and conscience. Its a reality of the age of climate change: Warming waters and warming air temperatures are altering the oceans and rivers and the fish that live in them, and its happening more rapidly than ever. These changing conditions are cited regularly now by marine biologists whenever state governments present new regulations for recreational and commercial fishing. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources just rolled out modified rules for the coming year to protect rockfish in the bay. After recording a significant and steady decline in the population of young-of-year rock, DNR plans to take the emergency step of canceling whats known as the spring trophy season. Thats a long tradition in the upper Chesapeake, when anglers were allowed to target the large, mature stripers that swim up the bay to spawn. By canceling the spring striper season, the hope would be to relieve those magnificent creatures of the stress of being hooked, netted and photographed by anglers who like to pose for pictures with their large catch. That aspect of Maryland fishing has never interested me because it never made sense. Why are we allowed to hook fish during a time when we need them to spawn? The new DNR rules on rockfish have made me reassess my desire to go each April to the creeks that feed the Susquehanna River to fish for shad. The spring migration is the only chance we get to target those silvery fish that swim from the Atlantic all the way up the bay to Conowingo Dam. Hooking and playing shad with a fly rod can be downright exhilarating. But one Sunday last spring I remember having thoughts I never had before that the 20 or so shad I just caught and released would have been better off had I spent the day photographing the bald eagles along Octoraro Creek. A biologist will say that I worry too much, that any healthy shad caught with a barbless hook and quickly released will survive to contribute to the proliferation of the stock. But I still have those thoughts. My son joins me frequently to fly fish for wild trout (and sometimes the stocked variety) in Maryland and Pennsylvania rivers; we practice catch-and-release fishing exclusively. One day, as we fished unsuccessfully in the Gunpowder River near Monkton, he remarked that the days we fish for trout will be greatly reduced in the future. Trout need cold, clean water; the warming temperatures of water and air stress them too much. These conditions have prompted the state to advise anglers to avoid targeting trout during the hottest periods of the day during the hottest periods of the year. Not everyone goes along with this. Some anglers, determined to fish on summer vacation, walk right past the states advisories and onto the stream banks with their fishing rods in July and August and into dry, hot September. Its not a good practice for sustaining a wild fishery. Even if we stabilize the climate in the next couple of decades, I think my son is correct: We are going to move our fishing days into the coolest and coldest months, and thats assuming that we fish at all. Its not a given. The inland and coastal fisheries are all fragile, now more than ever, and its the mass of human activity that brought us here. So its conditions and conscience that make me question something Ive been doing for fun, thrill, solace and camaraderie all my life. And Im sure Im not the only angler who has had these thoughts. Kirk Deeter, the editor-in-chief of Trout Unlimiteds magazine, wrote about taking time away from fishing, then mulling whether he should return to it. He ended up about where I am, at least for now: My best day of fishing all summer involved catching one fish, then spending the next hour watching a bald eagle preen on a tree branch above me. When she finally flew off, I figured I should probably head for home too. 2023 Baltimore Sun. Visit baltimoresun.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Both chambers of the General Assembly have passed bills to make Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, an official holiday in Pennsylvania. But Diwali is still not an official Pennsylvania holiday. How can that be? Neither chamber has, as of this writing, followed through with the next step necessary to send a bill to the governors desk and make it law. Members of both chambers apparently skipped school the day the civics lesson explained that both chambers must pass the same bill to make it law. In the case of Diwali, both houses must pass either House Bill 436 or Senate Bill 402. Only then can the governor sign the bill into law. The House has not passed the Senate bill, and the Senate has not passed the House bill. This is not a one-off. In 2021-22, identical bills creating a Motorcycle Lemon Law passed both chambers unanimously but did not become law because both chambers failed to take up the other chambers bill. There is a pattern of ignoring bills passed by the other chamber. Last session, more than half of the bills passed in each chamber were ignored in the other, and more than half of ignored bills had passed unanimously from the other chamber. Check out some other examples of General Assembly dysfunction at FixHarrisburg. Lori Mitzel, Harrisburg, Pa. By Susan Spicka I am writing to express my deep concern about a recent report on the condition of rural public education in Pennsylvania. The non-partisan report, titled Why Rural Matters 2023, was compiled by the National Rural Education Association and highlights the urgent need to address the inadequacies and inequities that our students are facing. It is disheartening to learn that students attending rural school districts across the state continue to grapple with limited internet access and lack crucial school-based resources such as psychologists and counselors. These students deserve the same opportunities and resources as their non-rural counterparts. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated these challenges, leaving many students without the necessary tools for remote learning and support for their mental health. Rural districts, which serve as the foundation of rural communities and play a vital role in preparing children for higher education and future employment, are operating on an unequal playing field. The report emphasizes the need for increased investment and support in these communities. Basic internet access should be as readily available as electricity or water in every 21st-century school building and in every students home. Students should not have to travel long distances to access assignments or struggle with limited connectivity. Furthermore, the shortage of school counselors and psychologists in rural districts is a critical problem that must be addressed. Every student deserves access to the mental health support necessary for their well-being and academic success. We cannot overlook the impact that adequate mental health resources can have on our students lives. The Pennsylvania school funding lawsuit decision, released earlier this year, makes it clear that closing the public school adequacy gap is crucial in ensuring that all Pennsylvania communities have the resources they need to fully prepare our children for the future. It is essential that we prioritize policy changes and modifications to the way public schools are funded in our state, including increasing the state share of funding to our local school districts and commonsense cyber charter school funding reform that would save districts and taxpayers across the state millions of dollars. Reliance on local taxes to make up the gap for state lawmakers not funding our schools as needed leaves lower-income districts at a disadvantage, leading to wide achievement gaps and inequitable opportunities for our students. It is time for our leaders and policymakers to come together and take action. Our children deserve nothing less. Susan Spicka is Executive Director, Education Voters of Pennsylvania. By Julia Terruso, The Philadelphia Inquirer NEW YORK LED trucks thanking Sen. John Fetterman for his support for Israel drove around midtown Manhattan last weekend during Pennsylvania Society, the annual glitzy gathering of the states political establishment . The digital billboards have a photo of Fetterman next to an Israeli flag and say, Thank you Senator Fetterman! The billboards include a quote from Fetterman, D-Pa., saying, I also fully support Israel neutralizing the terrorists responsible for this barbarism. The billboards are the effort of about a dozen Jewish people from around the country but mostly Pennsylvania, said Ari Mittleman, a former staffer for Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, who helped fund and organize the displays. The group also paid to put up a series of billboards outside of Pittsburgh, including near Fettermans hometown of Braddock. I always found the two words not said enough in politics and Washington are thank you, said Mittleman, who now lives in Maryland. Its been a difficult seven weeks for the Jewish community and our allies a lot of conversations over the Sabbath table and sleepless nights and in a lot of those conversations friends have brought up John Fetterman. Former Republican Senate candidate Jeff Bartos also helped organize the billboards. He said the group includes politically engaged people from both parties. Im hearing from people in Israel and the United States and Pennsylvania who say, Please tell him thank you, Bartos said. The billboards come as Fetterman faces ongoing backlash for his outspoken support of Israel. He has been vocal about his stance on the Israel-Hamas war putting up photos of Israeli hostages in his Senate office and saying he does not support a cease-fire. Demonstrators, organized by the group Jewish Voice for Peace, have held several rallies outside of his offices in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., calling on Fetterman to back a cease-fire. While some of Fettermans pro-Israel Democratic colleagues have changed their stances on the war as the death toll rises in Gaza, Fetterman has remained firm and highly visible on the issue. He wrapped himself in an Israeli flag at a march in D.C. and a video of him taunting Palestinian protesters as he waved an Israeli flag went viral last month. Fetterman could not immediately be reached for comment. He appeared on The View in New York on Friday, and a spokesperson said he is attending some of the Pennsylvania Society events this weekend. The annual gathering, where some of the most powerful politicians in the state all gather in Manhattan, has drawn many demonstrations in its 125 years. By Chris Brennan and Gillian McGoldrick, The Philadelphia Inquirer(TNS) NEW YORK Pennsylvanias Republican State Committee is mulling an early meeting to make an endorsement in the primary for state attorney general. And one of the partys three candidates claims thats designed to box him out of the race. The party, which voted during its fall meeting to not have an open primary with no endorsement, is scheduled to meet for its winter meeting Feb. 3. But the two-week period for circulating nomination petitions starts Jan. 23. It has been rumored that the party is looking to call a virtual meeting Jan. 22 to endorse in the race. That way, a candidate who does not get endorsed can decide if they want to go through the petition process or withdraw from the race. State Rep. Craig Williams, who represents parts of Delaware and Chester Counties, said he heard about the meeting the day after he announced his campaign earlier this week. And he thinks thats no coincidence. Its Harrisburg insiders, Harrisburg lobbyists, who have their thumbs on the scale, trying to pick one guy over another, Williams told The Philadelphia Inquirer. Party chair Lawrence Tabas declined to comment on that accusation Friday. York County District Attorney Dave Sunday, who has been building support since he announced in June, appears to be the front-runner for the endorsement. Former Delaware County District Attorney Kat Copeland, who entered the race Nov. 20, said she would drop out and support the endorsed candidate if she does not win the partys nod next month. Sunday and Copeland worked the crowd Friday at the partys kick-off luncheon in Manhattan as part of Pennsylvania Society, the annual gathering in New York of the states political movers and shakers. Williams, who says he is unlikely to keep running if he does not get the endorsement, is skipping the event to focus on campaigning in Pennsylvania this weekend. His campaign was crosswise with Republican Party officials before it even started. The Republican Attorneys General Association in October accused him of misleading state committee members with a note that suggested he could win the groups endorsement. RAGA endorsed Sunday last month. House of Commons Speaker Greg Fergus is apologizing after a video message he filmed for the former interim leader of the Ontario Liberals was played at the party's convention on the weekend. Fergus rises during Question Period, in Ottawa, Thursday, Nov. 23, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld Privacy Notice SUMMARY OF OUR PRIVACY PRACTICES Personal Data Collection We collect information you choose to share with us, as well as information sent to us by your browser or provided to us by third parties. Categories of information collected include: Basic contact information Billing information Subscription and registration information Website navigation and traffic information Learn more about our data collection practices. We collect information you choose to share with us, as well as information sent to us by your browser or provided to us by third parties. Categories of information collected include: Learn more about our data collection practices. 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Content and data on some areas of our website is only viewable by member account holders. This privacy notice applies to all users of our website, Photonics.com. We determine the purpose and means of processing your personal data. Laurin Publishing is the "controller" of your personal data, which means we determine the purpose and means of processing your personal data. This privacy notice explains those purposes and means to you, and you have choices over the collection and use of your data. As a user of our websites, the collection, use, and disclosure of your personal data is subject to this privacy notice and any subsequent updates. LAWFULNESS OF PERSONAL DATA PROCESSING We only process your data when we have a legal basis to do so. We only collect and use your personal data when we have a lawful basis to do so. 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We collect personal data you knowingly choose to disclose to us. "Personal data" is information that can be used to individually identify you. We also collect information that is sent to us automatically by your web browser when you view and navigate our website, as well as information provided to us by third parties. Personal Data You Provide to Us You provide personal data to create an account with us. Account Management When you register a member account, you will be asked to provide basic contact information, including your name, company, address, telephone and fax numbers, and email address. As part of your account, we will ask you to create a user name and provide a password. We collect this information for the purpose of providing you with access to certain features on our websites or services you request. 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Maintaining a member account also makes it easier for you to register for webinars, access member-only exclusive content, download white papers, and request information by prepopulating submission forms with your contact information, which you may edit before sending for these purposes.Registering an account is voluntary, and we collect your personal data only upon your consent when you submit the registration form. You can withdraw your consent and cancel your account at any time by contacting us at [email protected] with your request. You provide billing information for purchases. Purchase Fulfillment To process an order made through our bookstore, we will collect basic contact and billing information, including name, address, telephone number, and if applicable fax number, email address, and payment information. We collect this information for the purpose of completing our transaction with you. We will only collect this information if you initiate a purchase through our bookstore. 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You can manage your communication preferences in several ways: Photonics.com members can login and manage their print and newsletter subscriptions here Click the "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of our communications Click here and follow the instructions to manage your email preferences Contact us at [email protected] to request to be removed from a subscription list If you choose to subscribe to our newsletters and publications, we will ask you to submit your name, company, address, telephone and fax numbers, and email address.We use this information for the purpose of delivering requested copies of our content. Delivery of our newsletter and publication content directly to you does require your contact information, but you can manage your communication preferences as described in this section under "Manage Your Communication Preferences."As part of registering for our free subscriptions, we also collect information about your employment, such as job title and technologies and products you work with. We use this information to verify that you are eligible for a free subscription, as well as to provide you with additional communications regarding information we think you may find interesting. When we collect this information, we ask for your consent to use this information for marketing purposes. You can change, withdraw, or withhold your consent at any time by managing your communication preferences.If you contact us directly, such as to request information on advertising rates or order copies of our publications, your communications with us may include your contact information. In such circumstances, we only collect your contact information when you initiate contact with us. You provide data when you submit material for publication. Content Submitted for Publication When you choose to submit articles, white papers, press or product releases, event listings, videos, or other material to be considered for publication on our website or in our magazines, you will be asked to provide your name, phone number, and email address, which we may use to follow up with you regarding publication. When we choose to publish the content you submit, we will publish the contact information you provided as part of your submission to allow readers to contact you to request more information. When you choose to submit a company listing for publication in the Photonics Buyers' Guide, you will be asked to provide your company contact information, a description of business products and capabilities, the contact information of key personnel, including email address, and other company demographics. Please note that information you submit for publication can be viewed by anyone who subscribes to our print publications or accesses our website. Some information for the Buyers Guide is only collected for aggregate demographics about the industry and markets, and those fields are marked as such. Do not submit any information you do not want published publicly or used for these purposes. You provide data to facilitate your participation in special events. Interactive Feature Participation You may also choose to participate in different interactive features we offer. We only collect this information for the purpose of facilitating your participation in our interactive features. Comment Sections To leave a comment on our website, you must create a member account. We require the use of an account to minimize unwanted spam and to ensure the comment sections of our website remain a pleasant experience for all our users. When you choose to leave a comment on an article, we will access your member account or ask you to login to your account to enable the comments feature. We will collect and display your username and the content of your comment, which can include any additional personal data you wish to disclose to other users of our website. If you post a comment to an article of our website, please note that this information can be viewed by others with access to those areas. Outbound Messages When you choose to initiate contact via our website with one of our advertising partners or a company in our directory, you will be asked to provide your name, organization, and email address, and you can edit this information before sending your message. In some cases, we may also request your address, telephone and fax numbers, and country to provide the entity you wish to contact with more options to contact you. Some of these fields are optional and your message can still be sent without providing optional details. We also collect and retain a copy of your outbound message, which will contain any additional personal information you provide. This information is only collected when you request we contact a company or advertiser on your behalf and will only be used for such purposes. Contests When you enter a contest, you may be asked to provide your name, email address, company name, and telephone and fax numbers. This information is used to verify your identity, notify you that your entry has been received, and contact you if you are a winner and/or prize recipient. As part of your entry in our contests, we may choose to provide you with the option of receiving information about our subscriptions and publications. If you consent to receive this information, we will collect the personal data you provided as part of your contest entry for this purpose. You can change, withdraw, or withhold your consent at any time. Conferences, Webinars, White Papers, and Sponsored Content When you register for any of our conferences or webinars, or download any of our white papers or other sponsored content, we ask you to provide your name, company, job title, address, email address, and telephone and fax numbers. We also ask you a few questions about your interest in the topic. We provide this content at no cost to you and rely on sponsors to help keep this content available to you at no charge. In exchange for sponsoring our content, we provide our advertising partners with the personal data you provide when you choose to register for or download the sponsored content, and we will tell you which of our partners will receive the personal data you submit. When you register for conferences, you may Surveys We occasionally conduct surveys. If you choose to participate in the survey, you may be asked to provide basic demographic information, such as job function and technologies and products you work with. You also will be asked to provide additional information related to the survey topic, which may include personal data. We use this information to conduct statistical analyses on topics of interest to our users, and your data will only be reported in aggregate form. Additionally, if you choose to provide a free-text comment in your survey response, we may publish your response, but we will remove your name and any identifying information before publication. We only collect this information when you consent to participate in the survey. You may also choose to participate in different interactive features we offer. We only collect this information for the purpose of facilitating your participation in our interactive features.To leave a comment on our website, you must create a member account. We require the use of an account to minimize unwanted spam and to ensure the comment sections of our website remain a pleasant experience for all our users.When you choose to leave a comment on an article, we will access your member account or ask you to login to your account to enable the comments feature. We will collect and display your username and the content of your comment, which can include any additional personal data you wish to disclose to other users of our website. If you post a comment to an article of our website, please note that this information can be viewed by others with access to those areas.When you choose to initiate contact via our website with one of our advertising partners or a company in our directory, you will be asked to provide your name, organization, and email address, and you can edit this information before sending your message. In some cases, we may also request your address, telephone and fax numbers, and country to provide the entity you wish to contact with more options to contact you. Some of these fields are optional and your message can still be sent without providing optional details.We also collect and retain a copy of your outbound message, which will contain any additional personal information you provide. This information is only collected when you request we contact a company or advertiser on your behalf and will only be used for such purposes.When you enter a contest, you may be asked to provide your name, email address, company name, and telephone and fax numbers. This information is used to verify your identity, notify you that your entry has been received, and contact you if you are a winner and/or prize recipient.As part of your entry in our contests, we may choose to provide you with the option of receiving information about our subscriptions and publications. If you consent to receive this information, we will collect the personal data you provided as part of your contest entry for this purpose. You can change, withdraw, or withhold your consent at any time.When you register for any of our conferences or webinars, or download any of our white papers or other sponsored content, we ask you to provide your name, company, job title, address, email address, and telephone and fax numbers. We also ask you a few questions about your interest in the topic.We provide this content at no cost to you and rely on sponsors to help keep this content available to you at no charge. In exchange for sponsoring our content, we provide our advertising partners with the personal data you provide when you choose to register for or download the sponsored content, and we will tell you which of our partners will receive the personal data you submit.When you register for conferences, you may contact us for a list of partners that will receive your information.We occasionally conduct surveys. If you choose to participate in the survey, you may be asked to provide basic demographic information, such as job function and technologies and products you work with. You also will be asked to provide additional information related to the survey topic, which may include personal data. We use this information to conduct statistical analyses on topics of interest to our users, and your data will only be reported in aggregate form. Additionally, if you choose to provide a free-text comment in your survey response, we may publish your response, but we will remove your name and any identifying information before publication. We only collect this information when you consent to participate in the survey. Personal Data From Others We collect data through cookies, web beacons, and other similar technologies. Cookies and Passive Tracking In certain circumstances, we may obtain non-personal information about your use of this website through cookies. "Cookies" are small files placed on your computer by your browser and are often used to make websites work, as well as provide information to the website operator. We also collect information on read and click-through rates of our email communications through the use of beacons. We use these web-based technologies for the purposes of: Analyzing the traffic on our website and in our emails to improve functionality, user experience, and content relevancy Providing you with communications tailored to your preferences and interests You have the ability to accept or decline cookies by modifying the settings in your browser. If you disable cookies in your browser, you may not be able to use all of the interactive features of our website. Please note that some advertisers may use cookies when you click on their advertisements on our site. Those cookies are controlled by the advertisers and are not subject to this privacy notice. Third Parties When you interact with content provided by or about our advertisers, we compare your IP address against our own databases, as well as databases provided by third parties, to match your IP address to your company and geographic location (at a country-level). The IP matching database provided to us by a third party is housed on our internal network, and when we access the database, your information is only read by our network. We do not share your IP address with the third party. We match your IP address to your company and country only when you interact with our advertiser content or information, as we collect and share this information with our advertisers for the purpose of helping our advertisers make decisions about the relevancy and usefulness of content they provide to our users. We do not share more than your company and country location with our advertisers without your consent. We also collect social media handles, content, and other data posted on our official social media pages as well as information (such as email address and other information) you allow to be shared through our social media apps, tools, widgets, and plug-ins. In certain circumstances, we may obtain non-personal information about your use of this website through cookies. "Cookies" are small files placed on your computer by your browser and are often used to make websites work, as well as provide information to the website operator. We also collect information on read and click-through rates of our email communications through the use of beacons.We use these web-based technologies for the purposes of:You have the ability to accept or decline cookies by modifying the settings in your browser. If you disable cookies in your browser, you may not be able to use all of the interactive features of our website.Please note that some advertisers may use cookies when you click on their advertisements on our site. Those cookies are controlled by the advertisers and are not subject to this privacy notice.When you interact with content provided by or about our advertisers, we compare your IP address against our own databases, as well as databases provided by third parties, to match your IP address to your company and geographic location (at a country-level). The IP matching database provided to us by a third party is housed on our internal network, and when we access the database, your information is only read by our network. We do not share your IP address with the third party.We match your IP address to your company and country only when you interact with our advertiser content or information, as we collect and share this information with our advertisers for the purpose of helping our advertisers make decisions about the relevancy and usefulness of content they provide to our users. We do not share more than your company and country location with our advertisers without your consent.We also collect social media handles, content, and other data posted on our official social media pages as well as information (such as email address and other information) you allow to be shared through our social media apps, tools, widgets, and plug-ins. HOW WE USE PERSONAL DATA Our use of your data will depend on your interactions with our website. How we use your personal data will depend on what services you are using and the permissions you have given us. We use your data to provide you with the services you request. Provide Requested Services We will use your personal data to enable you to create a member account, subscribe to our newsletters, publications, and mailings, and participate in special events. We will also use your data to respond to communications you have initiated. When you initiate contact through our website with one of our advertisers, we use the personal data you provide through your request form to notify the advertiser of your interest, as well as sending the content of your outbound message. We also use your personal data to create a record of your outbound message on our website for our advertisers to reference in the future should they lose your original message. This record is restricted and only accessible by us and the advertiser to which you sent the message. Our advertisers will only have access to your message for two years after you send it. We use your data to publish content you have submitted. Publishing Submitted Content When you have chosen to submit content to be considered for publication on our website or in our magazine, as well as our Buyers' Guide, we will use the information you provide to follow up with you about your submission, and, where we have elected to publish your content, we will publish your information in conjunction with the material you submit. Some information is collected for statistical purposes, which we use to understand the demographics of your industry and the markets. Such information is only used in aggregate and not tied to you individually. We use your data to improve our website and your user experience. Enhance User Experiences We use Google Analytics to determine which areas of our website users like and don't like, based on traffic to those areas. This helps us continue to build a better service for you. For our website analytics, we only use aggregate, anonymous data that cannot be traced back to you individually by us or Google Analytics. For information about Google Analytics' information practices and related opt-out choices, We use Google Analytics to determine which areas of our website users like and don't like, based on traffic to those areas. This helps us continue to build a better service for you. For our website analytics, we only use aggregate, anonymous data that cannot be traced back to you individually by us or Google Analytics.For information about Google Analytics' information practices and related opt-out choices, click here. We use your data to communicate with you and share content we think you might enjoy. Communications and Marketing We use the contact information you provide to communicate with you directly, both to fulfill any requests for our publications and to share with you news and updates on our products. You are able to manage your communication preferences. When you consent to receive marketing communications from us, we also use your personal data to provide carefully selected and screened mailings, prepared and sent by us, from certain advertisers or other companies that we think may be of interest to you. We use your data to share information with our advertising partners. Advertising We use your data to create aggregate, anonymous reports on user demographics and traffic patterns for advertisers. This allows our advertisers to advertise more effectively and allows you to receive advertisements that are pertinent to you. We also use your personal data to inform our advertising partners which users have accessed or downloaded their sponsored content or requested further information on their product. We use your data for security and fraud-prevention purposes. Security and Fraud Prevention We use your data (including your communications) when necessary for security purposes or to investigate possible fraud or other violations of this policy and/or attempts to harm our users. HOW WE SHARE PERSONAL DATA We share your data with your consent or when necessary to support your use of our services. We share your personal data with your consent or when necessary to provide a service or complete a transaction you requested. Additionally, we also share your data with service vendors we have engaged to help provide requested services or transactions, such as payment processing, content publishing and mailing vendors, subscription and communication management vendors, and website hosting and management. We share your data with advertisers based on your permission. Advertising Partners We share your personal data with outside partners when you consent to sharing or interact with content provided by or about our advertisers. Where you consent to sharing your personal data with advertisers, such as when you download sponsored content, register for a conference or sponsored webinar, request more information, or initiate contact with an advertiser, we share your name, organization, email address, the content you viewed, and any other personal data you choose to share. When we send you communications on behalf of our advertising partners, we will share your company and country with our advertising partners when you click on their promotional links in our communications. We will only share this information if you click on the links, and we will not share your name or contact information with our advertising partners unless you specifically request more information from an advertiser. When you access content from or about our advertisers but do not engage in activities that trigger further interaction with the advertiser, such as clicking on an advertisement or viewing the advertiser's information in our buyers' guide, we share your company name and country with our advertisers. Additionally, we share aggregate data on website traffic, which can include anonymized personal data that cannot reasonably be traced back to you. You have choices about how your information is shared with advertisers and may chose not to receive communications from third parties. We will share your personal data when we are required to do so by law. As Required by Law When required by law, regulation, or legal process we will share your personal data with government authorities, enforcement officials, or third parties as necessary to meet our legal obligations. We may also disclose personal information if we believe disclosure is necessary to prevent or investigate a possible crime, such as fraud or identity theft, or to protect our own rights or property or the rights, property, or safety of others. If we sell our business, we may share your personal data as part of that transaction. Sale of Business We reserve the right to transfer your personal information in the event we sell or transfer all or a portion of our business or its assets. In such event, your personal information will continue to be protected by this privacy notice. EEA DATA SUBJECT CHOICES AND RIGHTS If you are an EEA data subject, you can make choices about how your data is collected, used, and shared. 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In the past 12 months, we have collected the following categories of personal data under CCPA:We have disclosed the above information for business purposes to our affiliates, service providers, customers, and other users as described in this policy.In the preceding twelve (12) months, we sold (as defined by CCPA) personal data from all of the categories of personal data listed above. We only share your name and personal contact information when you affirmatively authorize us to do so. To understand what personal information we may share and when, please refer to this section or our privacy policy. We have not and will not sell the personal data of minors under 16 years of age to non-affiliated third parties without affirmative authorization.You have the right to request that we disclose certain information to you about our collection, use and disclosure of your personal data over the past 12 months. Once we receive your request and verify your identity, we will disclose to you: (1) the categories of personal data we collected about you; (2) the categories of sources for the personal data; (3) our business or commercial purpose for collecting or disclosing that personal data; (4) the categories of third parties with whom we shared that personal data; and (5) the specific pieces of personal data we collected about you in the preceding 12 months.You have the right to request that we delete any of your personal data that we collected from you and retained, subject to certain exceptions. Once we receive and confirm your request and verify your identity, we will permanently delete (and direct our service providers to delete) your personal data from our records, unless a legal exception to deletion applies. 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You can find the current version of our privacy notice at any time by clicking on the "Privacy Policy" link at the bottom of our web page. Contact us with any questions, concerns, or to exercise your rights. Laurin Publishing Co., Inc. P.O. Box 4949 Pittsfield, MA 01202-4949 Telephone: +1 413-499-0514 Fax: +1 413-442-3180 Please contact us with any questions, concerns, or to exercise your rights. You can contact us at [email protected] or at:P.O. Box 4949Pittsfield, MA 01202-4949Telephone: +1 413-499-0514Fax: +1 413-442-3180 Online Qualifier Dwayne Sluis Wins 2023 Unibet Open Bucharest Main Event (65,830) December 04, 2023 Maxime Taldir Live Reporter The 2023 Unibet Open Bucharest 1,100 Main Event came to an end on Sunday, December 3, at the JW Marriott Bucharest Grand Hotel. Nine players out of 360 entrants were back on Day 3 for the final table. And after a bit more than seven hours of "stressful play" on a "tough table", Dwayne Sluis was crowned as the champion. The Dutch player defeated Ivan Alin Constantin in heads-up play to win the Unibet Open trophy and 65,830. Even though "he wanted to win to prepare for his next events in Las Vegas in the best possible way", Robert Burlacu finished in third place (31,400), ahead of Dragos Anton (4th, 25,420) and the start-of-day chip leader Eduard Norel (5th, 20,030). 2023 Unibet Open Bucharest Main Event Results Rank Player Country Prize 1 Dwayne Sluis Netherlands 65,830 2 Ivan Alin Constantin Romania 41,890 3 Robert Burlacu Romania 31,400 4 Dragos Anton Romania 25,420 5 Eduard Norel Romania 20,030 6 Bart van Dijk Netherlands 15,300 7 Max Broens Netherlands 11,230 8 Bjorn Samuelsson Sweden 8,260 9 Sorin Flutur Romania 6,770 Winner's Reaction "I can't really describe my feelings," Dwayne Sluis said moments after his victory. "It's special because poker wasn't going that well for me during the last two years. So, to win the tournament, it's absolutely amazing." Sluis, who has been a Pot-Limit Omaha professional player for the past ten years, came to Bucharest because he won a package online to play the Main Event. And he didn't come alone, as he had his family with him. "For me, it was a trip with my wife and my daughter. The deal was: 'If I make money playing poker, it's good. But if I don't, we'll see Bucharest and have a good time here.' And I ended up playing, and playing, and playing, and winning the tournament." The Unibet Open Bucharest started well for him as he ended Day 1b with three starting stacks. "I had a few spots where I was bluffing all in on the river. They didn't call, so I got lucky there, I guess," he explained. Then, his next goal was to reach the money. "Once in the money, things started going [my way], and I built a very nice stack for the final table, above average (1,425,000)." At the final table, everything ended like a fairytale. However, the first level was more like a nightmare. "I lost almost everything at the beginning with kings against queens with a queen of hearts on the river,"Sluis recalled. "Then I lost another all-in against a short stack with jacks against kings. After that, I was like 'whatever, it's probably done.' But I managed to build it up again and win the tournament against [Constantin], who won with queens against my kings. So it makes it a little bit more special!" With his victory, Sluis took home 65,830. A "good boost" for his next big project. "With my family, we are going to travel the world and go to America in March to play poker in Texas, Miami, Las Vegas, and also events in Europe. We are probably going to do that for a year. We are pretty much-selling everything, including our house", he explained. A big trip around the world where he'll try to be as successful as in Bucharest. Final Table Action The beginning of the final table was quite slow, even though Ivan Alin Constantin, Bjorn Samuelsson, and Bart Van Dijk all doubled up one after the other in the first levels. However, it took one and a half hours to see the first elimination, with Sorin Flutur running into Dwayne Sluis' kings, finishing in 9th place for 6,770. Things didn't go much faster after the first break of the day, until Samuelsson found himself in a tough spot. Facing an all-in from Constantin, Samuelsson couldn't fold his two pairs, so he called but lost the hand to Constantin's better two pairs with queens. With a smaller stack, Samuelsson was eliminated in 8th place for 8,260. Moments later, he was joined at the cashier by Max Broens, who couldn't find an ace on the board with ace-three against Burlacu's jacks. Finishing 7th, Broens went back home with 11,230. After these three eliminations, Van Dijk was left with the shortest stack of the six remaining players. Even though he doubled up once, he was eliminated shortly after a new break (6th, 15,300). However, the former chip leader Eduard Norel didn't go much further, as he was sent to the rail 10 minutes later (5th Place, 20,030). Norel called on the river with the second pair, but Sluis hit two pairs on the river, becoming the new chip leader. Dwayne Sluis After Robert Burlacu doubled through him, Sluis continued increasing his lead, hitting a runner-runner flush to eliminate Dragos Anton in fourth place for 25,420. A few minutes later, Burlacu also lost his last chips, his ace-queen getting cracked by ace-eight (3rd, 31,400). He let Sluis and Constantin fight for the title, with the Dutch player slightly in the lead. Both stacks quickly became even. However, soon after, Sluis with the best pair was called on the river to have four times Constantin's stack after this hand. A first all-in and call situation even occurred, but Constantin doubled up. All the chips went into the middle again a few hands later. And this time, Sluis hit a pair with king-queen against ace-king to win this hand and the 2023 Unibet Open Bucharest. Sharelines Sluis' overcame the 360-entry field and a cold deck to sign off 2023 in style. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Print House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) is now trying to impeach President Biden for paying off his sons truck. James Comer said: President Joe Biden claimed there was an absolute wall between his official government duties and his familys influence peddling schemes. This was a lie. President Joe Biden claimed his family didnt receive money from China. This was a lie. President Joe Biden claimed he never spoke to his son, Hunter Biden, about the Bidens familys shady business dealings. This was a lie. Now, Hunter Bidens legal team and the White Houses media allies claim Hunters corporate entities never made payments directly to Joe Biden. We can officially add this latest talking point to the list of lies. Today, the House Oversight Committee is releasing Subpoenaed bank records that show Hunter Bidens business entity, AWOSCO PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden. Video of Comer: BREAKING Hunter Bidens business entity, Owasco PC, made direct monthly payments to Joe Biden. The bank records dont lie. Owasco PC received payments from Chinese-state linked companies & other shady entities. Joe Biden knew & benefitted from his familys business schemes. pic.twitter.com/MfvtA4yEZU Rep. James Comer (@RepJamesComer) December 4, 2023 The receipts showing the truck repayments from Hunter Biden to Joe Biden: So, these three payments of $1,380 each (totaling $4,140) appear to be Hunter Biden paying his dad back for truck loan/lease payments that his dad paid on his sons behalf when Hunter was low on cash. My source is an NY Post article about Hunters finances and emails from the https://t.co/UyIyDnjhsR pic.twitter.com/tWMfeBYgGr Yashar Ali (@yashar) December 4, 2023 It is fair to ask if James Comer thinks that we are all a bunch of idiots because he is treating the American people like they are stupid. Paying off your sons truck for him, and then having your son pay you back is not an impeachable offense. The tell on Chair Comers part is that he never says in the video precisely what the payments were or what they were for, but the details that the House Oversight Committee Chair provided made them easy to track down. House Republicans are trying to impeach President Biden for paying off his sons truck. The Biden impeachment investigation has been an exercise in failure and humiliation, but this could be James Comers new low. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Print Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) admitted privately that there is no justification for formal impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden, yet over the weekend he announced that a vote on impeachment inquiry is an important step. Luckily for Johnson, he was on Fox News, and so he wasnt asked: Why. What has changed since he admitted they didnt have any evidence to justify this? The White House was curious. The White House Spokesperson for Oversight and Investigations Ian Sams shared with us Monday morning, Under fire for expelling George Santos, Speaker Johnson is throwing red meat to Marjorie Taylor Greene and the far right flank of the House GOP by pushing a full House vote on this illegitimate impeachment stunt. He admitted there is no evidence to justify it three weeks ago, but hes doing it anyway further proof that this whole exercise is an extreme political stunt, rather than a legitimate pursuit of the truth. This baseless smear campaign is solely intended to satisfy their most extreme members and proves once again that these House Republicans are wasting time on the wrong priorities, instead of working with the President on real issues American families care about, like lowering costs, creating jobs, strengthening health care, and protecting our national security. Monday afternoon, after Sams comment, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) began waving around what he is suggesting is breaking news about Joe Biden that is for sure their smoking gun: Except this payment appears to be for Hunter Bidens truck. Many parents actually pay for their adult childrens cars, especially these days. Loaning the money to an adult child does not seem to fit an impeachable offense if it is, the parents of this country had best steel themselves as the House has the ability to impeach over treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors. Additionally, Comers news is hardly breaking. Republicans already had this information, along with the entire U.S. press, because it was in Hunter Bidens laptop that Republicans gave to conservative media outlets after it was allegedly left at a repair shop. Of note, Hunter Biden is suing the Delaware computer repair shop: Hunter Biden has never claimed the laptop was his, and the lawsuit also does not say he dropped the laptop off at Mac Isaacs store. It does acknowledge that some of the data released publicly belongs to Hunter Biden and that Mac Isaac came into possession of it by whatever means in 2019. Watching the Republican-led House of Representatives, it might be easy to wonder why they assume they have the extra time and money to spend on a political, election-year based attack on the Democratic President of the United States. After all, they seemingly arent getting the basic work done that they are paid to do, except when Democrats step in to help them. But as Sams has suggested, this empty attack is nothing but red meat. It also comes on the heels of House Republicans being displeased with Johnson (so soon!). But much worse than any of that is the fact that House Republicans set their minds on impeachment before finding any evidence to justify it. They are going to impeach Joe Biden without evidence, because that is how the law works under their leadership. Powerful people DECIDE who to target, and they can choose someone who poses a threat to their agenda, and then without evidence, they will throw the full weight of the U.S. House of Representatives and the taxpayers money at prosecuting an by all accounts innocent person for political purposes. Impeachment is supposed to be based on evidence, like all prosecutions. It is not supposed to be a preordained decision that evidence is manufactured or conflated to justify. If Joe Biden were really corrupt, wed all know it by now and we would be calling for his impeachment ourselves. House Republicans are copying Trumps attempt to extort Ukraine, using U.S. aide to boot. They are using U.S. taxpayer funds to go after a political enemy they cant beat fairly at the polls. A Special Message From PoliticusUSA If you are in a position to donate purely to help us keep the doors open on PoliticusUSA during what is a critical election year, please do so here. We have been honored to be able to put your interests first for 14 years as we only answer to our readers and we will not compromise on that fundamental, core PoliticusUSA value. Higher energy and housing prices boosted overall U.S. inflation in December, a sign that the Federal Reserves drive to slow inflation to its 2% target will likely remain a bumpy one. Overall prices rose 0.3% from November and 3.4% from 12 months earlier. Excluding volatile food and energy costs, though, so-called core prices rose just 0.3% month over month. Core prices were up 3.9% from a year earlier the mildest such pace since May 2021. Economists pay particular attention to core prices because, by excluding costs that typically jump around from month to month, they are seen as a better guide to the likely path of inflation. Read moreU.S. inflation edges up, fueled by energy and housing prices, but many other costs rise only mildly Keen-eyed observers near Second Baptist Church's original campus may notice a new feature this weekend, with a 10-foot southern magnolia being freshly in place. The tree was planted Dec. 1 as one of several magnolias of similar height in the Greenville Street parkway, near Hampton Avenue, in observance of Arbor Day, sometimes known as "the tree planter's holiday." Mayor Teddy Milner attended, as did Stuart Bedenbaugh, the city manager; and Lex Kirkland, assistant city manager. Putting the specimen into place were Aaron Campbell, the municipal government's horticulturist and grounds supervisor; and Felix Vargas, a crew leader with municipal parks and grounds. Arbor Day is observed on a national level on the last Friday in April, and in South Carolina on the first Friday in December. Dates vary around the country, in accordance with preferred times for planting trees. The holiday reportedly dates back to 1872, when J. Sterling Morton, a resident of Nebraska City, Nebraska, proposed the idea to the state's board of agriculture. Immediate results reportedly included more than a million trees being planted on the first Arbor Day. Campbell, referring to this year's featured tree, said, "The planting idea for today was kind of to highlight and show the trees that we are planting in the parkways. For any tree that is considered grand and significant, we replant with at least three other trees within the vicinity, but we far exceed the number of trees planted to what is removed. Just this past month, we planted approximately 80 trees in the parkways, in the month of November." That type of activity, he said, has helped Aiken have Tree City USA status for more than 38 years. The award honors communities for successful efforts "to maintain and grow their tree cover" and "also gives them an avenue to celebrate their work, showing residents, visitors, and the entire country that theyre committed to the mission of environmental change," as noted by the Arbor Day Foundation. Britt Jackson faced adversity early in 2023, but everything worked out better than she could have imagined. My former brokerage shut down and I made the move to Meybohm. I kind of didnt have a choice, but it has been my best year to date. Its been phenomenal, she said after being recognized Dec. 1 as the Realtor of the Year by the Aiken Association of Realtors. Jackson received the honor because she demonstrates the Realtor spirit by serving her clients with patience and skillful negotiations, said Joshua Cline, the 2022 Realtor of the Year. He presented the 2023 award during the Aiken Association of Realtors Jingle and Mingle holiday party at the Green Boundary Club. In addition, Cline praised Jackson for her sincere professionalism and dedication to exceeding [her] clients expectations. I am super honored to have been nominated and then chosen by my peers to be selected as Realtor of the Year, Jackson said. I strive to be professional in all my dealings with my Realtor colleagues and to uphold all of our ethical obligations as real estate agents. Jackson, whose focus professionally is selling homes, serves as the chairperson of the Aiken Association of Realtors Programs and Events Committee. She regularly participates in the organizations events and attends broker open houses to support her fellow Realtors and maintain a working knowledge of properties on the market. Jackson also is involved in Special Olympics South Carolina, Aiken County Farm Bureau and Beech Island Historical Society activities. The other finalists for Realtor of the Year were Karen Daly and Jacob Klarman. Also honored Dec. 1 by the Aiken Association of Realtors were Jennifer Brownell, a member of the Cline Group team at Meybohm Real Estate, and Renee Mealing of the Mealing Realty Group. Brownell was the Rookie of the Year, and Mealing won the Good Neighbor Award for her service to the community. Aiken Standard Executive Editor John Boyette is executive editor of the Aiken Standard. Reach him at jboyette@aikenstandard.com or 803-644-2364. To support local journalism, sign up for a subscription. See our current offers Nathan Ott, 28, of Moncks Corner, was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison this past week after pleading guilty to distributing a pill that was sold as Roxy (a street name for Roxicodone, a pharmaceutical drug, which is an opioid that contains oxycodone hydrochloride). The pill Ott sold Read morePill dealer sentenced to 25 years for selling fentanyl-laced tablets HILTON HEAD Madison Marriott moved from Columbia to Hilton Head Island in the spring of 2022 with her dog, a job and excitement to join the island community. What the 25-year-old paralegal couldn't find when she arrived was an affordable place to live. Marriott settled in neighboring Bluffton and for more than a year contended with a lengthy commute that added hours to her workweek. Months passed, and eventually she considered searching for a new job back in Columbia. "I was getting to the point where the commute, the traffic, everything was getting to be too much," Marriott said. "There was definitely a period of time where I considered moving and just giving up on the dream." She's not alone. As housing costs continue to rise, a number of Hilton Head residents find that they can no longer afford to live where they work. Newly established nonprofit Coastal Community Development Corporation has joined the ranks of programs and organizations fighting to carve out affordable housing for workers like Marriott who are increasingly priced out of their homes. Through the group's multiyear plan, the nonprofit aims to add hundreds of units of affordable workforce housing across Beaufort and Jasper counties. The Coastal Community Development Corporation was founded with the help of several longtime workforce and affordable housing advocates, including Alan Wolf, who serves as board chairman of the Coastal Community Development Corporation. In early August, Marriott became one of the first island workers placed in housing purchased and rented out by the nonprofit. Her one-bedroom unit in the Marsh Side community now rents for $1,600 a month, a figure based on her annual income. The Town of Hilton Head estimates that more than 14,000 workers commute to the island for work each day, and nearly 4,400 workers commute 50 miles or more each way to get to work. It's an issue that will continue to impact the island's workforce and those who rely on a number of services, including hospitality and health care. The Kingstree Beautification Commission hosted its 2023 Christmas Pallet Contest where community members were encouraged to join together to cut, paint and decorate their pallets in a Christmas theme. Read moreChristmas Pallet Contest winners announced Service dogs youve seen them walking around with their recognizable harnesses. But have you ever wondered what it takes to prepare a pup to become a life-changing, confidence-boosting, freedom-giving companion? Read moreBetween the Stacks: Southeastern Guide Dogs program MOUNT PLEASANT In an ongoing backlash to years of soaring population growth and traffic complaints, this affluent suburb plans to extend strict limits on building permits for another five years. Just 600 new residences would be permitted yearly in the town of more than 94,000 people, and the actual number would likely be lower. The yearslong effort to slow residential development by capping building permits is a step no other municipality in South Carolina has taken, but few have experienced growth like Mount Pleasant. The town's population has roughly doubled since 2000 and tripled since 1990. There was concern in the community about our infrastructure being able to keep up with the growth rate, and I dont think that concern has gone away," said Councilwoman G.M. Whitley, who put the permit limit extension before Town Council in November. The measure is scheduled for a Planning Commission hearing Dec. 13, with a final Town Council vote expected in January. The "building permit allocation system" has been in place nearly five years, and instead of expiring in early 2024, it would be extended to 2029. The former Charleston police officer who drove his patrol vehicle under the influence and crashed into three other cars had been suspended before for violating policies off duty. Read moreCharleston cop fired after DUI charge had previous suspensions for his off-duty conduct President Joe Biden is looking to rekindle the South Carolina magic that vaulted him into the White House, hiring four Democratic operatives here to lead his 2024 reelection in the state that's the first test of his political strength. Scott Harriford will serve as Biden's South Carolina state director, while both Clay Middleton and Jalisa Washington-Price will serve as senior South Carolina political advisers, the campaign announced Dec. 4. Rounding out the team is Brady Quirk-Garvan, former head of the Charleston County Democratic Party, who will act as a South Carolina adviser for Biden's reelection bid. The hiring moves, which were first shared with The Post and Courier, are a crucial step as Biden looks to assert himself as the party's undisputed leader in the state that could set the tone and momentum as he seeks his second term in the White House. The Biden campaign declined to comment when asked about the president's plans to physically campaign in South Carolina. So far, the Biden effort has relied heavily on surrogates. Most recently, Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned in South Carolina on Bidens behalf, making a surprise visit to the state to file Biden's paperwork for the recognized first-in-the-nation Democratic primary. The news of Biden's South Carolina team was announced almost exactly one year after Biden in a letter urged Democrats to retool their nominating calendar, scrap the "restrictive" caucus and elevate Black voters by making South Carolina the first primary state in 2024, replacing Iowa and New Hampshire. On December 2, 2015, workers at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, gathered for a holiday party. For 14 of the workers, the event would be their last. American-born Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, a green-card holder born in Pakistan, shot down Robert Adams, Isaac Amianos, Bennetta Betbadal, Harry Bowman, Sierra Clayborn, Juan Espinoza, Aurora Godoy, Shannon Johnson, Larry Daniel Kaufman, Damien Meins, Tin Nguyen, Nicholas Thalasinos, Yvette Velasco, and Michael Wetzel. The two Muslims wounded many others before fleeing in an SUV. Local police took them down, with no further loss of civilian life. The next day, the composite character president David Garrow profiled in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama issued this statement: Yesterday, a tragedy occurred in San Bernardino, and as I said in the immediate aftermath, our first order of business is to send our thoughts and prayers to the families of those who have been killed and to pray for a speedy recovery for those who were injured during this terrible attack. I had a chance to speak with Mayor Davis of San Bernardino and I thanked law enforcement in that city for their timely and professional response. I indicated to Mayor Davis that the entire country is thinking about that community, and thanked him and his office for the way that theyve been able to manage an extraordinarily difficult situation with calm and clarity, and very much appreciated the coordination thats been taking place between local law enforcement and the FBI investigators. At this stage, we do not yet know why this terrible event occurred. We do know that the two individuals who were killed were equipped with weapons and appeared to have access to additional weaponry at their homes. But we dont know why they did it. We dont know at this point the extent of their plans. We do not know their motivations. And I just received a briefing from FBI Director Comey, as well as Attorney General Lynch, indicating the course of their investigation. At this point, this is now a FBI investigation. Thats been done in cooperation and consultation with local law enforcement. It is possible that this was terrorist-related, but we dont know. Its also possible that this was workplace-related. And until the FBI has been able to conduct what are going to be a large number of interviews, until we understand the nature of the workplace relationship between the individual and his superiors because he worked with the organization where this terrible shooting took place until all the social media and electronic information has been exploited, were just not going to be able to answer those questions. But what I can assure the American people is were going to get to the bottom of this and that we are going to be vigilant, as we always are, in getting the facts before we issue any decisive judgments in terms of how this occurred. More broadly, as I said yesterday, we see the prevalence of these kinds of mass shootings in this country and I think so many Americans sometimes feel as if theres nothing we can do about it. We are fortunate to have an extraordinary combination of law enforcement and intelligence and military that work every single day to keep us safe. But we cant just leave it to our professionals to deal with the problem of these kinds of horrible killings. We all have a part to play. And I do think that, as the investigation moves forward, its going to be important for all of us including our legislatures to see what we can do to make sure that when individuals decide that they want to do somebody harm, were making it a little harder for them to do it. Because right now its just too easy. And were going to have to, I think, search ourselves as a society to make sure that we can take basic steps that would make it harder not impossible, but harder for individuals to get access to weapons. So there will be, I think, a press conference later today led by the Attorney General. Director Comey will continue to brief not only the press but also members of Congress about the course of the investigation. Our expectation is, is that this may take some time before were able to sort it all through. There may be mixed motives involved in this, which makes the investigation more complicated. But rest assured that we will get to the bottom of this. And in the meantime, once again, I want to offer our deepest condolences to those whove been affected by this terrible tragedy. And for those whove been injured, we hope that they get well quickly and that theyre able to be back together with their families. Thank you very much, everybody. Some context may prove helpful. The Islamic State was then on the rise and urging Muslims in western countries to kill non-Muslims. In January, 2015, in Paris, Islamic terrorist attacked the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, killing 17 people, including 11 journalists. In November, 2015, Islamic terrorist attacks in France claimed at least 130 victims. Then came 12/2 in San Bernardino. For the American president it was a tragedy, which had somehow occurred. The president said I a full 12 times but failed to name Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, identify them as Muslims, or condemn the attack as terrorism. Four times the president said we dont know what the attack was about or what motivated the shooters. The attack could have been workplace related, an echo of his pronouncement that Nidal Hasans murder spree at Fort Hood on 11/5/09 was workplace violence, not terrorism or even gun violence. The San Bernardino victims included African Americans, Asians and Hispanics, but the president failed to raise the possibility that Farook and Malik could have been motivated by racism. The president did not call out the attack as a hate crime or gun violence and he failed to name a single victim of the 12/2 attack. He expressed concern for those who were injured when the accurate term, as any lawyer would know, is wounded. The attack did involve access to weapons, he said, and since the FBI was investigating, we are going to get to the bottom of this. According to the president, we are fortunate to have law enforcement, intelligence and military that work every day to keep us safe. Relatives of the 12/2 victims had cause to wonder. The people of America werent safe on February 23, 1993, when Islamic terrorists bombed the World Trade Center, killing six and wounding hundreds. The people werent safe on September 11, 2001, when the FBI, intelligence community and military failed to prevent the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, with 3,000 dead. American soldiers werent safe at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, when Maj. Nidal Hasan, a self-proclaimed soldier of Allah, gunned down 13 soldiers, including Pvt. Francheska Velez, who was pregnant. The FBI knew Nidal Hasan was communicating with al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al Awlaki about killing Americans, but someone in the FBIs Washington office called off the surveillance. It has not emerged what the FBI knew in the run-up to 12/2. As a police report notes, Farook and Malik deployed two .223-caliber rifles and 1,879 rounds of .223 ammunition. Magazines had been taped together for rapid switching and continuous fire. Police also found a 9mm handgun, 484 rounds of 9mm ammunition, and a trigger device for an explosive (IED) left at the Regional Center to kill and maim the first responders. Police also found medical supplies such as quick-clot agents, tourniquets, and emergency bandages. Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik had been trained, armed and financed, all without detection by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Whatever the FBI knew about Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the bureau did nothing to stop the 12/2 massacre and played no role in taking down the terrorists. The president called it a tragedy, failed to name or condemn the terrorists, and failed to name a single victim. If any of their loved ones thought it was more about collaboration than incompetence it would be hard to blame them. PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 14:30:52 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 870 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 This partnership will better help pre-determine the specific housing needs of our veterans.EWING, NJ / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Community Redevelopment Inc. (OTC PINK:CRDV), a public company dedicated to designing, building and developing neighborhoods for traditionally underinvested communities, recently executed an affiliation agreement with the Black Veterans Empowerment Council Inc. (BVEC).This strategic affiliation expands the objectives of each organization. "Our perspective here at CRDV, is to build and create true homes for traditionally underinvested communities," said CRDV CEO Richard Balles. "By any objective standard, the number of Black veterans who need adequate housing is appalling. Combining our resources with the BVEC, allows us to pre-determine veterans' housing needs as we acquire and then re-design properties to meet specific needs of these heroes." The Urban Institute projected that approximately 3.5 million people experience homelessness in America each year, of which 23 percent of all homeless persons and 33 percent of all homeless men are veterans. Furthermore, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) estimates that 107,000 veterans are homeless on any given night.Even with VA assistance, there are still more than 100,000 homeless veterans without any aid. "In fiscal year 2021 we served around 200,000 veterans and approximately 39% of those were African Americans," said previous Executive Director of VA Homeless Programs, Monica Diaz."Building with a wider lens for both the tenant and local community paired with the art of custom design is what makes this affiliation perfect for helping address this crisis," said BVECs Chairman and President Shawn Deadwiler. "If we don't look to house our Black veterans first, we have lost the battle of stabilizing the Black veteran community. Stable, reliable housing is the first crucial building block for getting our homeless population back on their feet. I'm thrilled to be working with CRDV who understands this and is ready to advance our goals." Mr. Deadwiler further shared: "This is a win for CRDV due to the need in the Black veteran community for housing. We have been advocating multiple cities for this exact type of approach. Black veterans and all veterans deserve better than to sleep on the streets. The fact that CRDV, as a business and public company, was already focused on this community truly surprised us. Our ability to qualify veterans awaiting housing allows CRDV to redesign acquired properties for their specific needs." ABOUT COMMUNITY REDEVELOPMENTCommunity Redevelopment (CRDV) is a comprehensive all-inclusive real estate company investing in the future of urban and suburban communities. Their objective is to develop neighborhoods utilizing technologies that provide equitable solutions for traditionally underinvested communities and advance sustainable change - socially, economically, and environmentally. CRDV has an elite team of professionals bringing a significant combined experience of over 100 years in real estate development, finance, and technology. Visit www.communityredevelopment.net for more information.ABOUT BVEC (BLACK VETERANS EMPOWERMENT COUNCIL Inc.)The Black Veterans Empowerment Council Inc. (BVEC) is a non-profit, non-partisan coalition made up of national, state and local veteran service organizations, for-profit businesses and the Black veteran community formed to address the racial disparities of Black veterans. One of their main goals includes addressing the housing needs of Black veterans and advancing their economic opportunities throughout the United States. BVEC is working on comprehensive plans, partnerships and affiliations to strengthen both the collaboration and transformation of their efforts as they continue to shift long-standing racial inequities suffered by Black veterans in the United States. Visit www.bvecinc.org for more information.Forward-Looking StatementsThis announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements include but are not limited to statements identified by words such as "believes," "expects," "anticipates," "estimates," "intends," "plans," "targets," "projects" and similar expressions. The statements in this release are based upon the current beliefs and expectations of our company's management and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. Numerous factors could cause or contribute to such differences, including, but not limited to, results of clinical trials and/or other studies, the challenges inherent in new product development initiatives, the effect of any competitive products, our ability to license and protect our intellectual property, our ability to raise additional capital in the future that is necessary to maintain our business, changes in government policy and/or regulation, potential litigation by or against us, any governmental review of our products or practices, as well as other risks discussed from time to time in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including, without limitation, our latest 10-Q Report filed on November 20th, 2023. We undertake no duty to update any forward-looking statement, or any information contained in this press release or other public disclosures at any time. Finally, the investing public is reminded that only the announcements or information about Community Redevelopment Inc. which are condoned by the Company must emanate from the Company itself and bear our name as its Source.CORPORATE CONTACT:Community Redevelopment, Inc.866 849-CRDVBlack Veterans Empowerment Council, Inc.301-332-0021 SOURCE: Community Redevelopment, Inc. PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 18:01:03 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 506 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 Applications Accepted Starting December 12LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs (DCBA) will begin accepting applications for the Los Angeles County Rent Relief Program on Tuesday, December 12, 2023 at 9:00 AM PST. The deadline to submit applications is Friday, January 12, 2024, at 11:59 PM PST. Spearheaded by the LA County Board of Supervisors and administered by The Center by Lendistry, the program will now distribute over $68 million in financial support to qualified landlords adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, an increase of $22 million in grant funding. Those interested in applying for the LA County Rent Relief Program can review the eligibility requirements, register to receive a link to the application when it opens, and access the application directly when it is available by visiting the portal at lacountyrentrelief.com The Rent Relief Program will provide up to $30,000 per rental unit to landlords for past due rent and eligible expenses dating from April 1, 2022, to the present. The Program aims to curb tenant evictions and ensure the continued provision of housing.To ensure accessibility and ease throughout the application process, the application and free in-language technical assistance will be available in multiple languages. Applicants will be able to access assistance daily between 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. PST starting Tuesday, December 12.DCBA has implemented a prioritized review process for the upcoming LA County Rent Relief Program applications. Applications submitted will be systematically evaluated, with priority given to those demonstrating the most substantial financial distress, those catering to the most vulnerable tenants, and properties located in areas of highest need, as identified by the LA County Equity Explorer Tool. Early submissions are strongly encouraged. Submission of a completed application does not guarantee funding."Landlords provide many of the County's housing options, but the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have left plenty in a precarious financial position," said DCBA Director Rafael Carbajal. "Through the LA County Rent Relief program, DCBA seeks to further invigorate recovery efforts, alleviate economic hardships faced by landlords, and maintain the availability of safe, affordable places to live in Los Angeles County." "This Program is arriving at a critical time, underscoring the County's commitment to property owners and tenants during this period of economic recovery. Our collaboration with the County reflects our dedication to supporting the unsung heroes of our housing market-small, local landlords," said Tunua Thrash-Ntuk, President & CEO of The Center by Lendistry.Since 1975, the County of Los Angeles Department of Consumer and Business Affairs (DCBA) has been the local consumer protection agency serving County consumers, tenants, homeowners, immigrants, and workers. DCBA provides a wide range of services that aim to foster a fair and dynamic marketplace and enhance the economic wellbeing of our communities. This includes investigating consumer fraud complaints, enforcing the County's minimum wage, tenant and worker protections, and providing access to justice programs. More information can be found at dcba.lacounty.gov or by calling (800) 593-8222.###Contact InformationDCBA Communications DCBA Communications communications@ dcba.lacounty.gov (213) 332-6497SOURCE: The Center by Lendistry PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 14:32:46 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 543 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC a nationally recognized law firm, notifies investors that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Dollar General Corporation ("Dollar General" or "the Company") (NYSE:DG) and certain of its officers.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 Dollar General securities between May 28, 2020 and August 30, 2023, inclusive (the "Class Period"). Such investors are encouraged to join this case by visiting the firm's site: bgandg.com/dg Case Details:The Complaint alleges that defendants throughout the Class Period made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) Dollar General stores were chronically understaffed and suffering from logistical and inventory management problems which left stores with tens of millions of dollars' worth of outdated and unwanted inventory, mispriced goods, and lost and damaged items; (ii) large backlogs of unsellable merchandise had built up at Dollar General's stores, which inventory had not been timely written down due to understaffing and Dollar General's failure to manage its inventory; (iii) the allotment of employee hours per store per week imposed by Dollar General management placed employees in virtually impossible situations where assigned tasks, including those necessary to effective store operations, could not be completed within the allotted time; (iv) Dollar General was systematically overcharging customers for items upon checkout above the listed price in violation of state laws, including state law violations identified by state regulators in Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio; (v) Dollar General's reported revenue and earnings during the Class Period were artificially inflated by defendants' over-pricing scheme; (vi) Dollar General's failure to manage store inventories and accurately price items upon checkout risked the loss of customers, lower sales, adverse regulatory actions, and reputational fallout; and (vii) Dollar General was not on track to achieve its guidance during the Class Period and such guidance lacked a reasonable factual basis.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: bgandg.com/dg or you may contact Peretz Bronstein, Esq. or his Law Clerk and Client Relations Manager, Yael Nathanson of Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC at 332-239-2660. If you suffered a loss in Dollar General you have until January 26, 2024, 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.There is No Cost to YouWe represent investors in class actions on a contingency fee basis. That means we will ask the court to reimburse us for out-of-pocket expenses and attorneys' fees, usually a percentage of the total recovery, only if we are successful.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 Nathanson332-239-2660 | info@ bgandg.com SOURCE: Bronstein, Gewirtz & Grossman, LLC PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 12:00:35 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 323 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 CONCORD, NH / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Family-owned and operated New England automotive retail company DSR Motor Group announced the acquisition of Dan O'Brien Kia in Concord, New Hampshire.The newly rebranded Capital City Kia is the latest addition to the DSR Motor Group family, founded by Dealer Principal David Rosenberg.Rosenberg expressed his excitement about the dealership's presence in Concord: "We are thrilled to become a part of the Concord community with an innovative brand like Kia. Capital City Kia is more than a dealership, it's our chance to give back and support the local community." Ensuring local leadership was at the forefront of Capital City Kia's management team was important.Lifelong New Hampshire resident Dennis Wilson Jr. will serve as Capital City Kia's General Manager and Operating Partner. "Living in New Hampshire, our family understands what it means to be a part of this community. It's more than delivering exceptional service and a Fast, Fair, and Simple car-buying experience. It's about rolling up our sleeves and doing right by the people of Concord," Wilson explained."We look forward to building lasting relationships with our customers and giving back to the local charities, small businesses, and community organizations that make a difference here," Wilson concluded.The all-new Capital City Kia is open for business at 158 Manchester Street in Concord, New Hampshire.About DSR Motor GroupSince 1967, the Rosenberg family has been a pillar of the retail automotive industry in New England and the surrounding communities they've served. Over the years, they've developed operational insights and procedures built to ensure their team members always provide honest price transparency and unmatched customer care. With 12 dealerships and brands to choose from, DSR Motor Group continues to provide a Fast, Fair, and Simple car-buying experience for its customers.For more information, please contact:Amanda RosenbergDirector of MarketingARosenberg@ DSRMotorGroup.comDSRMotorGroup.comContact InformationAmanda Rosenberg Director of Marketing arosenberg@ dsrmotorgroup.com 6176509425 SOURCE: DSR Motor Group PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 17:35:51 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 967 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 Investment will enable availability of SAF under innovative fuel offtake agreement with American Airlines, with financial support from CitiFORT WORTH, TX / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Infinium and Breakthrough Energy Catalyst recently announced a $75 million project equity investment commitment to support Infinium's Project Roadrunner, subject to the satisfaction of certain closing conditions. Project Roadrunner will convert waste carbon dioxide (CO2) and renewable power into sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and other low-carbon fuels. This first-of-a-kind commercial-scale Power-to-Liquids (PtL) eFuels facility is expected to be the largest PtL eFuels project in North America once operational. Breakthrough Energy Catalyst funds and invests in first-of-a-kind projects that support the deployment of emerging climate technologies to reduce emissions and accelerate the clean energy transition. This commitment represents Catalyst's first equity investment to date.Project Roadrunner, located in West Texas, will convert an existing brownfield gas-to-liquids project into a fully integrated eFuels facility that will deliver products into both U.S. and international markets. It will primarily produce Infinium eSAF, a sustainable aviation fuel with the potential to significantly reduce the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) associated with air travel. PtL SAF is expected to reduce lifecycle GHG emissions in aviation by around 90 percent, which is higher than the emissions reductions achieved using SAF on the market today. Project Roadrunner will also produce Infinium eNaphtha for use in plastics manufacturing and Infinium eDiesel for use in hard-to-electrify transportation methods, such as long-haul trucking and maritime applications.In tandem with Catalyst's investment in Infinium, American Airlines and Infinium have entered into an innovative, firm offtake agreement for Infinium eSAF. This agreement is a critical enabler of further investment in Project Roadrunner. American joined Breakthrough Energy Catalyst as an anchor partner to accelerate the development of next-generation clean energy technologies, including SAF. The Catalyst team worked to develop the agreement alongside the American and Infinium teams. The agreement provides one model for how airlines can use offtake agreements to help promising new SAF technologies attract investment dollars.In further support of this offtake agreement, Citi and American Airlines have separately agreed to transfer the associated emission reductions to Citi to support the scaling of this innovative technology and help reduce a portion of Citi's Scope 3 emissions from employee travel. Citi is also a partner of Breakthrough Energy Catalyst.Infinium has numerous eFuels projects in development across the U.S., Europe, Middle East, Japan and Australia."The investment from Catalyst is critical to accelerating the completion of Project Roadrunner and to the delivery of significant volumes of eFuels created from waste carbon dioxide and renewable power. Importantly, this project will serve as a template for other, larger eFuels plants under development," said Robert Schuetzle, CEO at Infinium. "The groundbreaking commercial agreement with American is an important prototype for the aviation industry as its firm offtake agreement supports project financing, providing revenue certainty for the project." "This project is a landmark achievement for the development of sustainable aviation fuels and the offtake agreement provides a model for the entire aviation industry of one way to effect change and support the scale-up of capital-intensive projects," said Mario Fernandez, Head of Breakthrough Energy Catalyst. "Infinium's technological and commercial maturity, coupled with the company's project development expertise, will help accelerate the clean energy transition by quickly bringing to market clean fuels for aviation, trucking, and other long-distance parts of the transportation sector. American's creativity, commitment and collaboration with Citi, have set a new marker, demonstrating what it takes to usher in a climate-friendly aviation future." "American joined Breakthrough Energy Catalyst because we saw the potential to accelerate the commercialization of the clean energy technologies of the future. Today, we see the realization of that potential in Catalyst's investment in Infinium's electrofuels SAF, coupled with American's long-term commitment to purchase those fuels," said Jill Blickstein, American's Chief Sustainability Officer. "Our partnership with Catalyst - and our new commitment with Infinium - exemplifies the novel collaboration necessary to bring to market the new technologies that will allow us to decarbonize." "Citi is proud to work with Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, American Airlines and Infinium in this effort to support the commercialization of sustainable aviation fuel," said Val Smith, Citi's Chief Sustainability Officer. "Infinium's eSAF technology is the latest example of innovation and growth in the climate solutions space. We hope the offtake arrangement with American, where we combine their direct use of SAF with our indirect use through our business travel, will serve as one model for how offtake agreements can be used to help scale up future solutions for low-emissions air travel." About InfiniumInfinium is an electrofuels provider on a mission to decarbonize the world. Electrofuels are a new class of synthetic fuels made using renewable power and waste carbon dioxide, not petroleum or resources needed to produce food. Infinium electrofuels can be dropped into existing trucks, planes, and ships, significantly reducing harmful carbon dioxide emissions compared to fossil-based fuels. In addition to helping the transport industry meet carbon reduction goals, Infinium electrofuels are a lower carbon alternative for chemical processing, including plastics production. Learn why Amazon and other leading cleantech investors have chosen Infinium at www.infiniumco.com About Breakthrough EnergyBreakthrough Energy is committed to accelerating the world's journey to a clean energy future. The organization funds breakthrough technologies, advocates for climate-smart policies, and mobilizes partners around the world to take effective action, accelerating progress at every stage.Breakthrough Energy Catalyst is a novel platform that funds and invests in first-of-a-kind commercial projects for emerging climate technologies. By investing in these opportunities, Catalyst seeks to accelerate the adoption of these technologies worldwide and reduce their costs.Catalyst currently focuses on five technology areas: clean hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel, direct air capture, long-duration energy storage, and manufacturing dec PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 19:01:06 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 1004 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / BloombergOriginally published on about.bnef.com Read the full factbook hereGovernments and state-owned companies in the 19 individual G-20 member states provided $1.3 trillion of support for fossil fuels last year, according to a new report produced by research provider BloombergNEF (BNEF) in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies. Much of the increase came as a result of the global energy crisis, with governments stepping in to offer energy price support for consumers, totaling $830 billion. However, such subsidies often benefit wealthier energy users disproportionately. The remaining $446 billion went to fossil-fuel producers, even though many enjoyed record profits. Oil and gas majors [1] saw their net income jump 84% in 2022.BNEF's Climate Policy Factbook evaluates the G-20 members' progress in three concrete policy areas: 1) phasing out support for fossil fuels, 2) putting a price on emissions, and 3) implementing climate risk policy. The report aims to increase transparency and inform priorities ahead of the COP28 climate summit, where countries will conclude the first stocktake' of global progress toward the Paris Agreement and deliver policy recommendations to encourage governments to ratchet up their climate plans.Michael R. Bloomberg, Special Envoy to the UN Secretary-General on Climate Ambition and Solutions, and founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies, said: "While cities and states race ahead on climate action, national governments are falling behind - in part because fossil fuels subsidies are hurting the transition to clean power and raising longer-term energy costs for citizens. To blunt the worst health and economic harms of climate change, the world needs more governments to step up and stick to their pledges - and end fossil fuel subsidies. This new report highlights some of the actions they can take right away." Despite increased support for fossil fuels in 2022, the share of G-20 fossil-fuel support allocated to coal is slowly shrinking - from 8% in 2017, to 2% in 2022. But $21 billion was still provided for the most emissions-intensive fossil fuel last year. Oil and gas producers and consumers attracted just over $1 trillion in public support in 2022, with the remaining $250 billion going to fossil-fuel-fired power."The G-20's public fossil-fuel support could have funded 1.9 terawatts of solar power plants last year, based on BNEF's analysis. That's 10 times the actual volume of solar capacity built across the G-20 last year and is approximately the same size as the entire power-plant fleet of North and South America combined," said Victoria Cuming, head of global policy at BNEF and lead author of the factbook. "It's hard to see how this aligns with the many pledges made by governments at recent G-7 and G-20 summits and COPs." The G-20 members are moving at vastly different speeds. Two states - Brazil and South Korea - achieved a substantial reduction in fossil-fuel support over 2017-2021 (the last year for which country-level data is available). In contrast, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey all more than their doubled their funding over this period, with momentum especially driven by the expenditure of state-owned companies. China was the biggest contributor to G-20 fossil-fuel support in 2021, accounting for a quarter of the overall sum. But it had the fifth-lowest total on a per-capita basis at $97, compared with $2,309 for Saudi Arabia.To effectively lead the phase-out of coal and other fossil fuels, G-20 members must introduce a meaningful carbon price so that companies and consumers pay for their greenhouse gas emissions. Thirteen of the G-20 economies have rolled out nationwide carbon taxes or markets, while Brazil, India and Turkey are planning such schemes. However, most of the existing programs are ineffective due to low prices or generous concessions such as free carbon permits or tax exemptions.The third priority area is to implement policies and regulations to drive companies and financial institutions to assess and mitigate their exposure to climate-related risks. Climate change poses ever-growing risks to banks, investors and insurers, as well as corporations, ultimately threatening the financial stability of economies. While some G-20 policymakers are convinced of these perils, few have taken effective actions to require businesses to reduce their exposure.BNEF's report reveals that G-20 member states are at significantly different stages in this process. The European Union and UK are ahead of the curve, but other nations are still building their regulatory frameworks through voluntary guidance and pilot groups. Meanwhile, some countries, like the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, are trailing even further behind.The complete Climate Policy Factbook is available via the following link.[1] BloombergNEF analysis of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies.ContactsOktavia CatsarosBloombergNEF+1-212-617-9209ocatsaros@ bloomberg.net Daphne WangBloomberg Philanthropies+1-212-205-0314daphne@ bloomberg.net About Bloomberg on ClimateLed by Michael R. Bloomberg, a global climate champion and Special Envoy to the UN Secretary-General on Climate Ambition and Solutions, Bloomberg Philanthropies and Bloomberg L.P. are tackling the climate crisis from every angle. Bloomberg Philanthropies is at the forefront of U.S. and global efforts to fight climate change and protect the environment, bringing together mayors and other government and business leaders, grassroots partners, and environmental advocates and scientists across a key array of issues. These philanthropic efforts are accelerating the transition from coal to clean energy, improving air quality and public health, advancing city and local climate action, protecting and preserving ocean ecosystems, and helping unlock billions of dollars in sustainable finance. At the same time, Bloomberg LP is providing the global financial community with data-driven insights, news, and analysis on climate-related issues. As a company, Bloomberg LP is also leading by example, including committing to 100% renewable energy by 2025 and taking action in the communities where its employees live and work. And through stewardship of the Climate Finance Leadership Initiative, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, and the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, dedicated personnel from Bloomberg L.P. are helping to harness the power of the capital markets to address climate change and support the transition to a net-zero economy.About Bloomberg PhilanthropiesBloomberg Philanthropies invests in 700 cities and 150 countries around the world to ensure better, longer lives f PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 21:15:25 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 1033 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / SAPFeature by Leah CartalWine is a fascinating beverage with a long and storied history. Its origins can be traced back 9,000 years to China, when the residue of a fermented fruit drink was found on pottery shards in the Henan province.Winemaking emerged in Europe several thousand years later, and it is now home to many of the world's most famous wine-producing regions. When paired with food or served for special occasions, wine consumed in moderation can awaken the senses and contribute to cherished memories. Spanish wine producer Gonzalez Byass shares this ethos, defining its purpose as to "bring moments of joy, helping people to savor and share their most precious moments." Headquartered in Jerez de la Frontera, Gonzalez Byass was founded in 1835 as a family-owned collection of wineries across Spain's principal wine producing regions, overseeing the wine-making process from vineyard to wineglass. Grapes are harvested from its 2,000 hectares of vines under cultivation in nine wine-growing regions in Spain, Chile, and Mexico, and then pressed in traditional stone tanks, fermented, and the liquid aged in steel or oak barrels. After a few months or years, the wine is bottled and ready for consumption.What does not usually come to mind when contemplating the art of winemaking is the amount of plastic and other non-sustainable materials that may be involved, from the material encasing the corks, to the packaging used to safely transport the bottles. Gonzalez Byass saw an opportunity to address its use of plastic and promote regenerative agriculture in its industry through the implementation of a comprehensive sustainable business strategy and circular economy program in line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).Confronting the Plastic ProblemPlastics are among the most consumed materials in agricultural industry, as they are used in large production structures, production inputs, agrochemical packaging, and food product containers, and thus generate vast amounts of waste. In response, consumers are turning away from single-use materials while governments are adopting an extended producer responsibility approach in the form of plastic taxes. These taxes are a hugely important policy tool to combat the rapidly growing amount of plastic waste and discourage the production and use of plastic packaging.The European Union (EU) instituted a plastic packaging levy in 2021, with some EU member states, like Spain and Italy, enacting their own new taxes. Spain's tax which took effect this year imposes a tax on non-reusable plastic packaging and on waste incineration and disposal in landfills, with the goal of making all packaging in Spain recyclable by 2030.This reality has spurred consumer goods producers like Gonzalez Byass to drastically minimize use of plastic. Its efforts have seen the replacement of plastic packaging tapes with paper ones, replacement of plastic in bottle caps with wood and cork, and adoption of more sustainable plastic alternatives like bioplastic made from sugarcane. These steps have been instrumental in helping to recover and recycle 99% of the waste generated. The company also buys cardboard boxes and wood sourced from certified forests in line with its commitment to preserve and regenerate natural resources.The Key Role of Suppliers and DataPlastic taxes are designed to discourage waste, prompting producers and distributors across the supply chain to reconsider their packaging choices. In its efforts to reduce use of plastic and purchase only recyclable packaging materials, Gonzalez Byass also needed to commit to sustainable purchasing throughout the entire value chain. Regular assessments with its suppliers have helped to gauge the progress on both sides. However, this kind of assessment requires not only trust and the fostering of great relationships - a skill at which it excels - but also, crucially, data.While the wine producer is committed to both sustainable production and procurement, compliance with new regulations in multiple different regulatory environments is a daunting task. The recently enacted extended producer responsibility measures in Spain and in other countries where it does business mean multiple different data streams, declarations, and timelines in different regions. Managing these myriad competing factors is one of the most complex challenges facing the consumer goods industry today. Being able to collect real-time data and centralize it all in one place is a key requirement for Gonzalez Byass to be able to realize its sustainable ambitions, embed circularity principles into its core business processes and comply with regulations.SAP's cloud solution for the circular economy, SAP Responsible Design and Production is designed to address all the requirements of the new plastic taxes.Calculate extended producer responsibility obligations, plastic taxes, and corporate commitments to optimize material choices Learn moreImplemented by Minsait, which offers end-to-end digital transformation solutions, SAP Responsible Design and Production will enable Gonzalez Byass to accurately calculate fees and taxes in line with all the latest regulations in key markets, optimize its material choices in line with corporate commitments, and significantly reduce risks from unforeseen future regulations.SAP Responsible Design and Production provides intelligence that will enable Gonzalez Byass to monitor, measure, and act on its plastic data, so that it can make the most informed choices and carry out the critical work of eliminating waste and regenerating the natural systems that the company cares so passionately about.Regenerating Nature to Address Biodiversity LossThe transformation of the agriculture sector in Spain over the past 50 years has significantly boosted productivity and wealth but has also resulted in a substantial increase in the use of natural resources like water, at the cost of soil erosion and a negative impact on genetic diversity. Sustainable business practices require a fundamental shift in the way that we interact with nature, with a recognition that success depends not just on financial profit but also upon careful stewardship of the natural environment.Gonzalez Byass' vines include indigenous varieties on the verge of extinction that have been coaxed back into production to preserve regional biodiversity. This work is in tandem with its efforts to protect local wildlife, such as placing nesting boxes in a number of its vineyards, creating adequate ecosystems to promote pollination by bees, and promoting reforestation efforts in all the regions where the company operates. And as water is essential for growing grapes and nurturing life, Gonzalez Byass employs sustaina PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 18:18:12 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 989 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 Global Collaboration will Help Subnational Regions Accelerate Action on Drought, Wildfire and Extreme Heat impacts.DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Fourteen government leaders representing regions in Africa, Australia, Europe, and North and South America have signed a Statement of Commitment to establish the Mediterranean Climate Action Partnership (MCAP). In forming this new initiative, these governors, premiers, and secretaries mutually recognize their common need to share knowledge and support one another to act in the face of climate change.This groundbreaking collaboration, launched at the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 28) in Dubai, reflects a growing understanding of the worldwide effects of climate change, and the need for global collaboration to address rising threats to humans and the environment by building the resilience of social and natural systems.Regions around the world with a mediterranean climate - cool, wet winters and hot, dry summers - are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis. While development and economic conditions vary between countries, increasing temperatures and sea level rise are ubiquitous and will only magnify in impact throughout the 21st Century. Drought, wildfire, and extreme heat will increase in both severity and frequency, affecting the resilience of communities and ecosystems. Traditionally, mediterranean climates are located between about 30 and 45 latitude north and south of the Equator and on the western side of continents. Due to global and regional trends, impacts will be exacerbated in the coming decades, especially if global warming exceeds 1.5 to 2C above the pre-industrial level.Over the past year, the Government of Catalonia, in northeastern Spain, and the State of California have already begun work to convene an inaugural set of regional partners, leading to the creation of the MCAP. The fourteen government officials, all from communities with mediterranean climates, jointly recognize that building resilience to these increasingly disruptive impacts from climate change requires innovative solutions and new partnerships."Today's signing is another huge step for climate action and declares the need for all nations to think globally and act locally," said California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot. "California is no stranger to the impacts of wildfires, drought, extreme heat, and sea level rise, and through this historic partnership, we're proud to share our knowledge with nations facing similar challenges. Together, our similarities can drive change and create a more resilient future." "Catalonia is already adapting to climate impacts, including explosive and unforeseen weather and a three year drought," said Catalonia's Minister of Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda David Mascort. "We are working to guarantee the supply of all water uses, while creating a more responsible demand of tomorrow, and we are ensuring a social shield for those affected by storms and extreme heat. We led the formation of the Mediterranean Climate Action Partnership because we believe that exchanging practice and generating new knowledge is key to responding to climate change." The fourteen inaugural members of MCAP are listed below.Baja California Sur, MexicoBiobio, ChileCalifornia, USACatalonia, SpainEmilia-Romagna, ItalyMarroc Oriental, MoroccoNew South Wales, AustraliaOccitanie, FranceRabat-Sale-Kenitra, MoroccoRegion of Central Greece, GreeceSantiago, ChileTanger-Tetuan-Al Hoceima, MoroccoVictoria, AustraliaWestern Cape, South Africa"The challenges of climate change require a coordinated response from everyone," said Claudio Orrego, Governor of the Metropolitan Regional Government of Santiago, Chile. "The Partnership aims to do just that: in the face of common challenges of mediterranean climates, we respond with organization and joint work." "From the outset, we joined the efforts to launch the Mediterranean Climate Action Partnership because we are convinced that this dynamic of the five continents represents an ideal space for co-define policies and accelerate climate action and address challenges in a common way," said His Excellency Omar Moro, President of Tanger-Tetuan-Al Hoceima.Premier of the Western Cape, Alan Winde, said, "Like many regions worldwide, the Western Cape is vulnerable to the impact of climate change. And so as the Western Cape Government, all our future planning is geared toward being more mindful of climate change. Forming partnerships with other regions will help strengthen the global push to cut harmful carbon emissions and protect our natural environment. Our government and province support all measures and partnerships to reverse the harms of climate change." "NSW has seen and felt the impacts of climate change in our communities, environment and economy, said Andrew Lewis, Acting Deputy Secretary for Energy, Climate Change & Sustainability at the New South Wales Office of Energy and Climate Change. "As we move into an El Nino summer, we are particularly aware of the urgent need to build resilience against extreme heat, droughts and bushfires. This partnership provides an exciting opportunity to share our knowledge and learn from our global neighbours so that we can develop innovative solutions and accelerate climate resilience together." Notably, two generous philanthropies have stepped forward in support of this effort. The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation has committed $250,000, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation intends to grant $100,000."The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation is excited to support the development and launch of the Mediterranean Climate Action Partnership," said Sarah Smith, Director for Legacy Initiatives. "This initiative highlights the critical role of regional leadership in combating the escalating impacts of climate change. Our involvement underscores our commitment to proactive strategies that enhance the resilience and safety of our most vulnerable communities against the increasing frequency and severity of climate-related disasters." "The Mediterranean Climate Action Partnership brings the kind of leadership that we all need to strengthen and expand regional projects and collaboration," said Genny Biggs, Program Director for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Wildfire Resilience Initiative. "We're supporting novel solutions, creative models, and aligned research to achieve enduring resilience for communities and ecosystems vulnerable to severe wildfire in Western North America; MCAP can help focus efforts to accelerate their pace and extend their impact, from regional to global. PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 17:53:55 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 578 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 Specialized services drive revenue and increase customer satisfactionBURNABY, BC / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Integrated Financial Technologies (IFT), a proven business process outsourcing organization working with financial institutions in the U.S. and Canada, announced that it has entered into an agreement with agricultural consulting firm MAS 4 to bring IFT's proven front- and back-office services to the agricultural equipment auction sector. Through this relationship, MAS 4 will market IFT's services to U.S.-based auction houses that specialize in farm equipment, irrigation and construction assets, heavy machinery, and other agricultural-focused assets.IFT is regarded as the leading provider of "smartsourcing," which uses a combination of advanced technology and highly skilled agents to address a broad range of business needs, including prospect management, comprehensive marketing campaigns, prequalification, onboarding, fulfillment, asset management, and client service. IFT has extensive experience with major auction houses and is well-versed in managing activities both for online and on-site auctions.IFT's smartsourcing services can help auction houses conduct more effective auctions without having to add in-house staff. IFT and related businesses have worked with several of the largest auction houses in North America, offering financing options and BPO services to their customers."Our expertise in supporting profitable, nation-wide auction houses has been proven over the years, and we believe we are well-equipped to serve the sophisticated needs of auction houses that specialize in agricultural equipment," said Tod Chisholm, president of IFT. "We've developed an extremely efficient model for auctioneers, and are eager to introduce our capabilities to the farm and agricultural sector. MAS 4 has built a loyal client base in the agricultural industry, and we are delighted to partner with this ambitious and well-connected organization." MAS 4 specializes in the agricultural and technology sectors. Its team has decades of expertise helping clients leverage best-of-breed solutions that help achieve greater production outcomes, lower operating costs, and increased profitability. Its clients include global food producers, technology and equipment providers, and financial services companies."Across the country, there is a growing demand among farmers and other food producers to use online and in-person auctions to obtain reliable and cost-effective equipment for their production needs," explained Craig Steen, managing director of MAS 4. "We are delighted to partner with IFT to deliver professional services that can make auction houses more responsive to client needs, while also improving efficiency and profitability. We anticipate that IFT's unique combination of technology, experienced staff, and proven processes will resonate with auction houses that are looking to increase revenue and differentiate themselves in a competitive market." For more on how IFT's smartsourcing teams can help equipment auctioneers in both the U.S. and Canada launch more seamlessly executed and lucrative auction events, visit www.iftsolutions.com About Integrated Financial TechnologiesIntegrated Financial Technologies (IFT) is a market leader in delivering efficient, reliable, and secure back-office solutions to lenders across North America. Based in Vancouver, IFT's unique combination of deep lending expertise and robust technology enables the company to provide a multitude of services in sales, collections, reporting, and customer care. IFT's highly trained North American-based agents are fully trained in all lending and financial services processes, and adhere to strict data privacy and security mandates. IFT's services enable lenders and auction houses to increase revenue, lower operating costs, and improve customer service-without incurring added overhead. For more information, please visit www.iftsolutions.com PR Contact:Suzanne MattaboniParallel Communications Group, Inc.610-737-2140X: @Parallel_PRsmattaboni@ parallelpr.com SOURCE: IFT PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 18:51:17 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 396 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 SALT LAKE CITY, UT / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / John M. Laviter, chairman of Northpoint Asset Management, Inc., announced last Friday, December 1, 2023, that after 18 years leading the company, he would step down as chief executive officer. The announcement was made at Northpoint's annual Christmas celebration, held at the Little America Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City, where the company's board of directors and senior leadership gathered.Mr. Laviter named Adam R. Haleck, his long-time business partner, as successor and the company's new CEO. Mrs. Candice Kinard, a regional director from Kansas City, Missouri, was also promoted into the company's executive leadership."I will step down as CEO and transition the leadership of the company to Adam and the executive committee," said Mr. Laviter. "I never imagined Northpoint would accomplish so much," he continued. He explained in his address that the company had defied all the challenges it faced and succeeded in becoming a predominant leader in the industry.Mr. Laviter said that the time had come for others to lead the company into the future. "It has been one of the great opportunities of my life to lead Northpoint. I believe it can grow much larger in the hands of the right capital investors and company leadership," he continued. But he warned that the company must not allow pervasive trends in society to overcome the positive and sound-thinking culture. Further, he advised Mr. Haleck to keep "operations tight" and to align the business strategy in concert with future economic conditions.During the last year, Mr. Laviter and Mr. Haleck have entertained partnerships with new private-equity investors. "We believe these investors can be instrumental in the next stages of Northpoint's growth and development," said Laviter.Mr. Haleck is looking forward to leading the company. "I think our industry has a long-tail wind, and Northpoint was amongst the earliest to engage in a national platform." Northpoint, founded in 2006, has operations in 44 cities in 23 U.S. states. In 2023, it had approximately $178 million in sales.During Mr. Laviter's closing remarks, he said "of the noteworthy accomplishments these last 18 years, I'm most proud of my people." He expressed his contentment in working with them, many of whom have been with the company for more than a decade.CONTACT:Office: 801-532-8465press@ northpointam.comwww.NorthPointAM.com SOURCE: Northpoint Asset Management PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 19:01:16 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 1015 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 Bridge Loan ExtensionUpdated factoring agreementExtending Secured Convertible DebenturesQUEBEC, QC / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / NuRAN Wireless Inc. ("NuRAN" or the "Company") (CSE:NUR)(OTCQB:NRRWF)(FSE:1RN), a leading supplier of mobile and broadband wireless infrastructure solutions, provides the following corporate update on business:Extension of Bridge Loan for US$1.5 MillionNuRAN is pleased to announce that it has received an extension from the US based institution that provided the bridge loan (as announced on April 4, 2023 and April 24, 2023) that it has agreed to extend the bridge loan until October 21, 2024 to allow the Company sufficient time to complete other financing aimed at building out NaaS infrastructure. As consideration, the Company has agreed to increase the principal amount on the loan by 10% as an extension fee and issue the lender 5,000,000 share purchase warrants to replace the existing warrants held by the lender, with each warrant exercisable to acquire a share of the Company at an exercise price of $0.25 for a period of two years. In addition, the Company has agreed to add a conversion feature to the loan, at $0.225 per common shares of the Company. Any securities issuable upon exercise of these warrants or conversion of the loan will be subject to a statutory hold period of four months and one day.Update on the Factoring Agreement.NuRAN is pleased to announce that it has amended the terms of the factoring agreement dated August 28, 2023 (the "Amendment"). Pursuant to the Amendment, the Company has sold Receivables (as defined in the Company's news release dated August 28, 2023) valued at $1.425 million for proceeds of $865,000 consisting of: (i) a cash payment of $215,000 that have been received by the Company; and (ii) a cash payment $650,000 on or before December 31, 2023 for the purpose of funding working capital requirements leading up to the finalisation of other loans. Included in the Amendment, the factoring company agreed to extend various deadlines until January 31, 2024. Furthermore, pursuant to the Amendment, if the Company chooses to satisfy the Recourse Account (as defined in the Company's news release dated August 28, 2023) by issuing Units (as defined in the Company's news release dated August 28, 2023), which is entirely at the discretion of the Company, the deemed price per Unit will be $0.225 per Unit and the warrant exercise price will be $0.25. Finally, the Amendment adjusted the timing and quantum of the Fee Shares (as defined in the Company's news release dated August 28, 2023) so that the remaining balance of 1,300,000 Fee Shares has increased to 1,900,000, 1,000,000 of which will be issued on or before January 31, 2024, and the remainder will be issued on or before March 15, 2024. The Fee Shares will be subject to a statutory hold period in Canada of four months and a day from issuance.Update on the Secured Convertible DebenturesNuRAN is also pleased to announce that the holders of its convertible secured debentures issued in August 2023 have agreed to waive certain rights pursuant to the debentures, including relating to events of default and extending those deadlines to February 28, 2024. As consideration to these debenture holders, the Company has agreed to a new conversion price of $0.225 per unit, with each unit comprised of one common share and three quarters (3/4) of one warrant, with each whole warrant exercisable to acquire an additional common share at a price of $0.25 until August 28, 2026. As additional consideration to the debenture holders, the Company has agreed to issue 120,000 common shares, which are subject to a statutory hold period in Canada of four months and a day.About NuRAN Wireless:NuRAN Wireless is a leading rural telecommunications company that meets the growing demand for wireless network coverage in remote and rural regions around the globe. With its affordable and innovative scalable solutions of 2G, 3G, and 4G technologies, NuRAN Wireless offers a new possibility for more than one billion people to communicate effectively over long distances efficiently and affordably. "Bridging the Digital Divide, One Connection at a Time." Additional Information:For further information about NuRAN Wireless: www.nuranwireless.com Francis Letourneau,Director and CEOFrancis.letourneau@nuranwireless.comTel: (418) 264-1337Frank CandidoInvestor relationsFrank.candido@nuranwireless.comTel: (514) 969-5530Forward Looking StatementsThis news release contains forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as, "expects", "is expected", "anticipates", "intends", "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking statements include those relating to the timing of the network infrastructure license and terms on financing. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results projected, expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements, such as the uncertainties regarding include risks such as the uncertainties regarding the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, and measures to prevent its spread, risks relating to NuRAN's business and the economy generally; NuRAN's ability to refinance its long term debt that is currently in default; NuRAN's ability to adequately restructure its operations with respect to its new model of NaaS service contracts; our ability to collect fees from our telecommunication providers and reliance on the network of our telecommunications providers, the capacity of the Company to deliver in a technical capacity and to import inventory to Africa at a reasonable cost; NuRAN's ability to obtain project financing for the proposed site build out under its NaaS agreements with Orange, MTN and other telecommunication providers, the loss of one or more significant suppliers or a reduction in significant volume from such suppliers; NuRAN's ability to meet or exceed customers' demand and expectations; significant current competition and the introduction of PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 10:20:21 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 645 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 LAS VEGAS, NV / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Cannabis Sativa, Inc. (OTCQB:CBDS) announces that PrestoDoctor - the #1 patient-rated medical cannabis telemedicine service - now offers its online medical cannabis card service to patients in the state of Ohio."Our trusted telemedicine portal is ready to provide Ohio medical cannabis patients with easy and confidential access and education via an online appointment with a knowledgeable licensed medical doctor" said PrestoDoctor COO Rob Tankson.Founded in 2015, PrestoDoctor has provided experienced and compassionate telemedicine care to more than 250,000 patients in nine states and is pleased to begin offering the same quality of service to patients in Ohio." Ohio should produce substantial appointments and increasing revenues for PrestoDoctor, and as medical cannabis continues to be available in more states, PrestoDoctor will be seeking to help those patients by safely connecting them to doctors from the comfort of their own home through PrestoDoctor's proprietary portal" stated Cannabis Sativa CEO David Tobias.About PrestoDoctorPrestoDoctor is rated the #1 online medical marijuana doctor by tens of thousands of medical cannabis patients who have received fully qualified medical marijuana recommendations. PrestoDoctor is the only service to offer patients a custom treatment plan after they have a confidential evaluation with a licensed, highly knowledgeable physician who is an expert in treatment methods, dosing levels, and cannabis products. Founded in 2015, PrestoDoctor services are available in legal medical marijuana states: California, Missouri, New York, Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa, Texas, Louisiana, and now Ohio. A HIPAA and HITECH compliant telemedicine company, PrestoDoctor is a member of the American Telemedicine Association (ATA), maintaining the highest customer satisfaction rating for any telemedicine service online with over 21,000 5-star reviews.About Cannabis Sativa, Inc.Cannabis Sativa, Inc. ("CBDS") is engaged in telehealth, and the licensing of cannabis-related intellectual property, marketing and branding for cannabis-based products and services, operation of cannabis-related technology services, and ancillary business activities. CBDS holds a U.S. patent on the Ecuadorian Sativa strain of Cannabis, a U.S. Patent for a marijuana lozenge; a Cannabis-based pharmaceutical composition for the treatment of hypertensive disorders by submucosal delivery and trade secret formulas and processes and operates subsidiary PrestoDoctor.Forward-Looking StatementsThis press release contains "forward-looking statements." Although the forward-looking statements in this release reflect the good faith judgment of management, forward-looking statements are inherently subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to be materially different from those discussed in these forward-looking statements. Readers are urged to carefully review and consider the various disclosures made by us in our reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the risk factors that attempt to advise interested parties of the risks that may affect our business, financial condition, results of operation and cash flows. If one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or if the underlying assumptions prove incorrect, our actual results may vary materially from those expected or projected. Underlying assumptions include without limitation, the ongoing enactment of legislation favorable to the production of and the commercialization of cannabis products and the Company's success in capitalizing on that legislation. Readers are urged not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this release. No assurances are, or can be given, that the parties will enter into a definitive merger agreement for any potential strategic acquisition, or that if such agreement is entered into, that the transaction would close, if at all, on the terms set forth in this release, or that the merged acquired business would be successful. Certain conditions to any closing of a potential merger acquisition would likely be outside of our control. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect any event or circumstance that may arise after the date of this release.Contact Information:(702) 762-3123SOURCE: Cannabis Sativa, Inc. PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 14:30:59 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 850 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 WARREN, ID / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Sidney Resources Corporation (OTC PINK:SDRC) is pleased to announce substantial progress at our mining and milling project near Warren, Idaho. Our dedication to innovation and environmental stewardship has led to remarkable developments in our infrastructure and operational efficiency.Sustainable Practices, Mill Building Completion and Energy EfficiencyOur mill building is now complete, featuring redundant heating systems for optimal functionality. The electrical system is fully installed, and our 2000-gallon water storage is operational, bolstering our resource management capabilities. A milestone achievement is the installation of our solar power system, significantly reducing our reliance on the 100 KW diesel generator. This shift is projected to cut our diesel usage by approximately 9,720 gallons every six months, leading to cost savings of over $42,000 and markedly decreasing our carbon footprint.Figure 1: LINK TO SOLAR POWER UPGRADE VIDEOMining Process OptimizationContinuous testing and fine-tuning of our trommel and water agitation concentrator are underway. We are adapting our processes to address the higher clay content in the ore, ensuring efficient gold recovery and minimizing loss. Our efforts have led to more effective concentration levels and a cleaner operation.Innovative Smelting Process and Environmental CommitmentOur smelting process, featuring the unique 'secret sauce', is optimized to produce high-quality green glass-like slag, indicating the efficiency of our method. We are committed to environmentally responsible practices, as seen in our method of separating silver and gold. Our process involves the use of nitric acid and a sophisticated distillation system to recycle this chemical, reflecting our dedication to sustainable operations.Figure 2 : The smelting process optimized to produce high-quality green glass-like slagInfrastructure Enhancements and Resource ManagementThe arrival and installation of our ball mill mark a significant step forward, offering the flexibility of wet or dry processing methods. Similarly, our new gold table is a testament to our cutting-edge resource separation technology. We have also received and are installing the long-awaited parts for our secondary crusher, promising to enhance our processing efficiency.Our collaboration with Western Frontier engineers has yielded a sustainable solution for a consistent water source, crucial for our operations. This development aligns with our commitment to environmental, social, and governance goals, aiming for near-zero liquid discharge and a clean processing approach.Winter Preparedness and Team CollaborationAs we prepare for the winter season, our site is fully equipped, thanks to the tireless efforts of the teams at Western Frontier and Bottari Repair and Consulting. Sufficient fuel storage and supplies have been secured, ensuring uninterrupted operations during the cold and snowy months.Visual Insights and Forward-Looking StatementWe have included videos and pictures of our smelting process to provide a more comprehensive understanding of our operations. Looking ahead, Sidney Resources Corporation remains committed to continuous improvement, sustainable practices, and technological advancements, driving forward our mission in the mining and milling sector.Figure 3 : LINK TO VIDEO OF OUR SMELTING PROCESSContact & Learn More:Sidney Resources CorporationPhone: 509-552-9858dan@ sdrccorp.com Corporate Website: http://sidneyresources.com/Corporate Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sidney-resources-corp/Corporate Twitter: https://twitter.com/SDRCMININGCorporate Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sidney_resources_corp/ About Sidney Resources Corp.Sidney Resources Corporation is a green technology, clean water and clean refining company that strives to change the way the world develops. Our efforts will provide a cleaner world so our children can express their brilliance to the highest of their potential. Our future lies in our future generations ability to problem solve without the toxins and carcinogens that inhibit development. Sidney is advancing technologies that will implement cleaner methods not only beneficial economically but designed to maintain a sustainable future.FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS:This press release contains forward-looking statements as defined within Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These statements relate to future events, including our ability to raise capital, or to our future financial performance, and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause materially different results, levels of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements since they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which are, in some cases, beyond our control and which could, and likely will, materially affect actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. Any forward-looking statement reflects our current views with respect to future events and is subject to these and other risks, uncertainties and assumptions relating to our operations, results of operations, growth strategy and liquidity. We assume no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.For a discussion of these risks and uncertainties, please see our filings with the OTC Markets Group Inc. Our public filings with the OTC Markets Group Inc are available from commercial document retrieval services and at the website maintained by the OTC Markets at https://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/SDRC/disclosure SOURCE: Sidney Resources Corporation PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 14:31:08 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 978 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 Company Achieves NEW Rank Advancements, Acknowledges Sales Directors, and Sets Course for Future ExpansionNAPLES, FL / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Stemtech (OTCQB:STEK), the pioneer in all-natural, plant-based stem cell nutrition wellness solutions, proudly announces a significant milestone with the attainment of NEW Rank Advancements in the recent months in 2023. In these highest rank advancements, we see Diamond, Crown Diamond and Presidents Club achievements. Stemtech extends sincere appreciation to its dedicated Independent Business Partners (IBPs) for their unwavering commitment, hard work, and outstanding performance.Stemtech's innovative stemceuticalTM technology, backed by patented breakthroughs, mobilizes stem cells from the bone marrow to the bloodstream, showcasing the company's dedication to scientific progress and cutting-edge innovation.This notable success is a tribute to the dedication and enthusiasm of Stemtech's IBPs. The company acknowledges the crucial role played by its Sales Directors in cultivating an environment of growth and accomplishment.Special commendations are extended to Maria Felix Rodriguez for achieving the esteemed title of President's Club Director, conducting her business in both the U.S. and Mexico; Olga Lidia de Leon Perez became Crown Diamond; and Ana Nunez reaching Diamond. These accomplishments place them all in an exclusive group, and Stemtech eagerly anticipates the participation of more high-achieving IBPs in this distinguished circle."As we witness the rapid advancement of our IBPs through the ranks, Stemtech not only celebrates individual successes but also the collective strength of our global team. The exceptional in the last quarter as well as October and November, reflects our commitment to providing a thriving business opportunity," stated John W. Meyer, President and COO of Stemtech.The company expresses gratitude to its Sales Directors for their exceptional leadership and guidance, contributing to the remarkable achievements of the entire Stemtech community.Continuing on this trajectory of success, Stemtech eagerly anticipates the completion of re-entering the Colombian market and expanding its product lines in Ecuador in the early first quarter of 2024. Stemtech is on track to achieve cash flow positivity within the same timeframe, aligning with the strategic objective outlined by CEO Charles S. Arnold. This objective follows a comprehensive company restructure aimed at reducing overhead and positioning Stemtech to handle the anticipated explosive growth in the sector.Mr. Arnold emphasized, "Our IBPs are the cornerstone of our success, and their swift advancements through the ranks are a testament to the strength of our business model. We are excited about the future, and our plans to re-enter Colombia and expand in Ecuador align with our vision for sustained growth".Stemtech takes pride in being at the forefront of innovation in the wellness industry, offering not only groundbreaking products but also a rewarding business opportunity. The company remains steadfast in its commitment to providing a platform for individuals worldwide to achieve their health and financial goals.ABOUT STEMTECHStemtech Corporation, a leading stemceuticalTM company with a direct sales distribution model, was founded on April 18, 2018, after acquiring the operations from its predecessor Stemtech International, Inc., which was established in 2005. From 2010 through 2015, Stemtech International, Inc., was recognized four separate times on the Inc. 5000 Fastest-Growing Companies list. In 2018, Stemtech underwent an extensive executive reorganization, and continued operations under new leadership as Stemtech Corporation. In August 2021, Stemtech became a publicly traded company (OTCQB: STEK) and has expanded business opportunities for its Independent Business Partners, who may earn incomes by sharing Stemtech products. January 2022 saw the introduction of new marketing efforts. In September 2022, the new Stemtech AdvanceOffice mobile app based on the VERB Technology platform was successfully launched as a powerful communication - recruiting tool for our Field On November 1, 2022, Stemtech introduced the new travel/sample size OraStem Toothpaste. On December 6, Stemtech announced the promotion of Alejandro Carrillo to the role of Vice President Global Sales from his current role as Managing Director Latin Markets. Stemtech introduced the new CellectOneTM Rapid Renew Stem Cell Peptide Night Cream at their December 2022 International Leadership Event in Cancun, Mexico. January 10, 2023 Stemtech appoints Margie and Mike Mares to Field Advisory Board. Stemtech has Ranked Number 11 in Momentum out of 700+ top Global MLM companies by Business For Home independent MLM publication, January 23, 2023. Stemtech conducted Field Leadership Business Academies in Aguas Calientes, Mexico May 25 - 27, and in Las Vegas, NV on June 1 - 3.Forward-Looking StatementsThis announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements include but are not limited to statements identified by words such as "believes," "expects," "anticipates," "estimates," "intends," "plans," "targets," "projects" and similar expressions. The statements in this release are based upon the current beliefs and expectations of our company's management and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. Numerous factors could cause or contribute to such differences, including, but not limited to, results of clinical trials and/or other studies, the challenges inherent in new product development initiatives, the effect of any competitive products, our ability to license and protect our intellectual property, our ability to raise additional capital in the future that is necessary to maintain our business, changes in government policy and/or regulation, potential litigation by or against us, any governmental review of our products or practices, as well as other risks discussed from time to time in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including, without limitation, our latest 10-Q Report filed on December 1, 2023. We undertake no duty to update any forward-looking statement, or any information contained in this press release or in other public disclosures at any time. Finally, the investing public is reminded that the only announcements or information about Stemtech Corporation which are condoned by the Company must emanate from the Company itself and bear our name as its Source.Investor Relations:Gabri PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 12:00:20 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 607 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 NEW YORK, NY / TAIPEI, TAIWAN / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / SUIC Worldwide Holdings Ltd. (OTC PINK:SUIC) SUIC's IHart is offering products and services with high-tech AI O2O Smart Stores in Taiwan. It holds nine patents in seven countries and fleet of 3D LED ads billboard trucks. The 3D Ads has over 70% Taiwan ads market share promoting famous brands such as Dior, SK II, Samsung among others. SUIC is bringing more patented franchising products and services to the U.S. market and expediting the IPO of Beneway.Chengguo Media Integration Technology is one of the subsidiaries of IHart, it owns approved patents in Taiwan, Japan, China and in various Southeast Asian countries, as follows1. AI Auto Door 2Way Internet & AI Auto Door2. Interactive Shopping Information System3. Multimedia Display4. Multimedia Display Stand (2)5. Image Recognition & Multimedia Shopping Display System6. Merchandise Display Booth7. Smart Shopping Display System8. Residential Cloud Life Interconnection System9. Integrated Checkout Media SystemChengguo Media dominates the 3D LED ads billboard trucks advertising market in Taiwan. It boasts of an impressive roaster of clients - Dior, SK II, Samsung and other known brands. The mobile billboard truck ads business has grown to be cost-efficient and sustainable 3D LED screen technology continuously innovates. It aligns with the global initiatives to reduce energy consumption, electronic waste and carbon emission."SUIC's IHart has a major international patent portfolio, including its subsidiary Chengguo Media Integration Technology and is ready to offer more franchising options of high-tech products and services. SUIC team is harnessing the power of high technology that's reshaping the food industry and increasing food production, quality, and safety while reducing our carbon footprint. SUIC and IHart continues to make investments in big data, AI and IoT through coordinated global programs. This optimizes sustainability across food production, distribution and consumption." said Hank Wang, CEO.About SUIC Worldwide Holdings Ltd., USASUIC Worldwide Holdings Ltd. provides research and development, venture financing for and investing in private enterprises and the public sector that develop products and services adopting core capabilities of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, mobile payment, Big Data, Blockchain, and Artificial Intelligence, to enhance and streamline existing processes, and establish new and exciting business models that will create revolutionary products and services. Shareholders of SUIC will be exposed to the diverse application of advanced services in various parts of the economy. Additionally, existing and potential customers can benefit from this company's diversified portfolio of technologies. As one of the pioneering publicly traded technology companies, SUIC will help build tech-enabled businesses of the future. To learn more, please visit www.sinounitedco.com Forward-Looking StatementThis press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the following words: "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "ongoing," "plan," "potential," "predict," "project," "should," "will," "would," or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. However, not all forward-looking statements contain these words. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance or results and will not necessarily be accurate indications of the times at which such performance or results are achieved. This press release is considered considering all Company filings contained in the Edgar Archives of the Securities and Exchange Commission at www.sec.gov ContactSUIC Worldwide Holdings Ltd.New Release Department929-391-2550SOURCE: SUIC Worldwide Holdings Ltd. PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 21:19:08 Press Information Dhirtek Business Research and Consulting +91 7580990088 email www.dhirtekbusinessresearch.com Published by Parmeet Singh 7580990088 e-mail https://www.dhirtekbusinessresearch.com/ # 978 Words +91 7580990088Parmeet Singh7580990088 In the realm of the ultrafine micro silica market, a realm defined by the ever-shifting tides of consumer demand and technological evolution, this report serves as a beacon, guiding our readers through a comprehensive and profound analysis. Our audience is as diverse as the market itself, encompassing manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and investors, all seeking to navigate this dynamic landscape. Our primary aim is to provide invaluable insights that empower industry stakeholders to make informed decisions within this rapidly changing environment. We strive to shed light on the current state of the ultrafine micro silica market while projecting its future trends.Scope and PurposeOur report is a comprehensive compass, designed to equip industry stakeholders with actionable knowledge. It spans various dimensions of the ultrafine micro silica market, including its dynamic market forces, competitive landscape, growth opportunities, challenges, and regional nuances. This information goes beyond mere descriptions; it is crafted to assist stakeholders in making pivotal decisions that shape their strategies and engagements within the market.Request for Sample Report:Promising Comprehensive AnalysisTo uphold our commitment, we pledge to deliver a comprehensive analysis, leaving no stone unturned. We promise to dissect the factors propelling market growth, dissecting shifts in consumer preferences and technological advancements fueling the demand for ultrafine micro silica products. Concurrently, we recognize that challenges and obstacles are intrinsic to any industry landscape. We vow to illuminate these hurdles, whether they be economic uncertainties or the intense competition that often characterizes such markets.Guiding the Path ForwardOur report invites readers to explore its contents, laying the groundwork for unveiling the competitive landscape. It introduces the major players in the ultrafine micro silica market and elucidates their strategies, offering insights into what fuels their success. This insight-rich analysis is designed to guide others on their journey be it navigating competition more effectively or finding inspiration in successful strategies.Anticipation of InsightsAcknowledging the market's complexity, we pledge to provide a nuanced understanding of its segments. We promise to detail their sizes, potential growth trajectories, and key trends. This targeted knowledge empowers stakeholders to craft specialized strategies and allocate resources optimally.Balancing Forces and Strategic ImplicationsBy elucidating both driving forces and potential obstacles, our report paints a comprehensive picture of market dynamics. It enables industry stakeholders to navigate the competitive landscape with a deeper understanding of the forces at play. Manufacturers can align their innovation efforts with consumer preferences and regulatory trends, enhancing their market position. Investors and decision-makers can be better prepared to address economic uncertainties and supply chain vulnerabilities. Overall, this section equips readers with insights to make strategic decisions that account for both growth opportunities and challenges in the ultrafine micro silica market.Exploring the Competitive LandscapeThe section dedicated to the competitive landscape of the ultrafine micro silica market offers a meticulous exploration of the market's key players, their strategies, and their impact on the industry. This segment aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the market's dynamics, the role of major companies, and the strategies they employ to thrive.Some of the major companies in the Ultrafine Micro Silica market are as follows: All Minmetal International, Blue Star, CCMA, Dow Corning, East Lansing Technology, Elkem (Blue Star), Elkon Products, Erdos Metallurgy, FerroAtlAntica (Ferroglobe), Finnfjord, Globe Specialty Metals (Ferroglobe), Jinyi Silicon Materials, Lixinyuan Microsilica, Minasligas, OFZ, a.s., QingHai WuTong, RW Silicium GmbH, Renhe, Sichuan Langtian, Simcoa Operations, WINITOOR, Wacker, Washington Mills, Wuhan MewreachSegment CharacteristicsOur analysis commences by outlining the unique characteristics defining each segment. Whether these segments are categorized based on product types, customer demographics, use cases, or other distinguishing factors, our report provides a clear picture of their definitions and differentiators.Market Segmentation:Type: Densified Silica Fume, Semi Densified Micro Silica, Undensified Micro SilicaApplication: Concrete, Refractory, OthersMarket SizeUnderstanding the size of each market segment is crucial for assessing its significance within the overall market landscape. Our report presents quantitative data illustrating market share and the contributions of "Type" and "Application" segments to the entire ultrafine micro silica market. This information helps stakeholders appreciate the relative importance of each segment.Growth PotentialBeyond current market size, our report delves into the growth potential of these segments. We explore factors such as emerging trends, consumer behaviors, technological advancements, and regulatory influences driving the future expansion of these segments. This forward-looking perspective aids stakeholders in identifying where growth opportunities lie.Key TrendsOur analysis captures the key trends specific to each segment, be it changing consumer preferences, evolving technology adoption, or shifting regulatory landscapes. These insights inform stakeholders about the directions "Type" and "Application" segments might take in the coming years.Strategic InsightsOur segment analysis transcends descriptive data to offer strategic insights. By understanding the characteristics, potential, and trends of "Type" and "Application," industry participants can make informed decisions. Manufacturers can tailor product development strategies to meet the demands of these segments, and marketers can create targeted campaigns to reach specific customer groups.Exploring Regional DynamicsThe section dedicated to the regional analysis of the ultrafine micro silica market provides a comprehensive exploration of how the market fares across different geographical areas. This analysis recognizes that markets are not homogenous and that regional variations can significantly impact market dynamics. Our report delves into the intricacies of each region North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa to provide stakeholders with valuable insights.Closing ThoughtsIn essence, the conclusion encapsulates our report's journey. It emphasizes our report's role as a strategic tool, a navigator, and a decision-making companion in the complex world of the ultrafine micro silica market. Our report is more than just a document; it is a valuable resource that empowers industry stakeholders to thrive in a dynamic and ever-evolving market environment. PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 19:31:07 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 551 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 EBENE, MAURITIUS / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Virtual Pay Group (Virtual Pay'), a leading global payment and technology service provider, announces the formal establishment of its headquarters in Mauritius. This move marks a significant milestone in Virtual Pay's commitment to enhancing its global presence and strengthening its position as a key player in the payments industry. An official launching ceremony was held in the presence of Mr Dhanesswurnath Thakoor, Chief Executive of the Financial Services Commission (FSC), along with other distinguished guests, on Friday, November 17, at the Hennessy Park Hotel, Ebene.The decision to establish its global headquarters in Mauritius is driven by the country's robust regulatory framework, skilled workforce and proactive approach to fostering innovation and economic growth. Strategically located between Asia and Africa, Mauritius is a choice gateway for investment into Africa, and Virtual Pay aims to leverage this advantage to continue in its global growth strategy, entrenching itself as a key player in the global payment ecosystem.Mr David Morema, Virtual Pay Group CEO, shared his optimism, stating, "Mauritius presents a well-regulated and dynamic business landscape for financial technology innovation, and we are excited to establish our global headquarters in this vibrant market. Our primary goal is to empower businesses and their clients with seamless, secure, and efficient payment solutions." Mr Dhanesswurnath Thakoor, Chief Executive of the Financial Services Commission (FSC), expressed enthusiasm about Virtual Pay Group's choice of Mauritius as its Global Headquarters, stating, "We welcome Virtual Pay to Mauritius and commend their contribution to the growth and efficiency of the financial ecosystem. This strategic move is a testament to our country's sound strategy when it comes to developing our financial services sector. We are more than ever committed to fostering technological advancements in this industry, whose growth potential is immense." The Honourable Renganaden Padayachy, Minister of Finance, Planning, and Economic Development, Republic of Mauritius, said in a statement, "The Virtual Pay Group's decision to establish its head office in Mauritius is proof of the confidence that our international financial centre inspires. It demonstrates that the measures implemented in recent years to strengthen our regulatory environment and stimulate innovation are bearing fruit. Based on our positioning, we can expect other companies of this calibre to choose Mauritius to set up their headquarters and manage their operations throughout Africa and beyond." The launch marks another milestone for Virtual Pay Group which has consistently demonstrated its commitment to providing innovative payment solutions to merchants on a global scale. The company expresses gratitude to its employees, clients, and stakeholders for their continued support and looks forward to a sustained business growth.For media inquiries, please contact:Anthony MiguiHead Of Strategic Alliances, and Growth, Virtual Pay Groupsales@ virtual-pay.io+254 756 441 826 | +230 525 36943About Virtual Pay International:Virtual Pay Group is a leading payment and technology service provider with innovative payment solutions, offering a wide range of solutions that meet the evolving needs of businesses worldwide. The company is committed to expanding its global footprint and contributing to the evolution of the financial landscape.Virtual Pay is regulated in Mauritius by the Financial Services Commission, in Kenya by The Central Bank Of Kenya, in Rwanda by The National Bank of Rwanda, in Tanzania by the Bank of Tanzania and in Dubai by the Department of Economy and Tourism.SOURCE: Virtual Pay PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 15:31:11 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 328 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 FAIRFAX, VA / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / WidePoint Corporation (NYSE American:WYY), the innovative technology Managed Solution Provider (MSP) specializing in Identity & Access Management (IAM), Telecommunications and Managed Mobility Services (MMS), Analytics & Billing as a Service (ABaaS), and IT as a Service (ITaaS), announced that its subsidiary IT Authorities (ITA) has been awarded a new three-year contract initially valued at $216,000 from a mobile healthcare provider."IT Authorities is pleased to announce our newest managed services client in the healthcare sector, a mobile medical practice of doctors, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants making house calls," said Jason Caras, CEO of IT Authorities. "Based in Florida with locations in Ohio and Michigan, the company is expanding its nationwide reach to address the growing homebound patient population. Their unwavering commitment to compliance, particularly adherence to HIPAA regulations, reflects their dedication to safeguarding patient privacy. The selection of IT Authorities as their trusted partner underscores our ability to navigate the dynamic landscapes of the healthcare industry." Jin Kang, WidePoint's CEO, added: "This strategic partnership is a testament to WidePoint's ongoing commitment to excellence in this pivotal field and ability to meet the rigorous technology standards of healthcare providers. This is an expansion opportunity for WidePoint. This contract is yet another example of how IT Authorities continues to deliver value for WidePoint by presenting new synergistic opportunities that solidify WidePoint's security and managed mobility solution as the benchmark for excellence and security in the industry." About WidePointWidePoint Corporation (NYSE American:WYY) is a leading technology Managed Solution Provider (MSP) dedicated to securing and protecting the mobile workforce and enterprise landscape. WidePoint is recognized for pioneering technology solutions that include Identity and Access Management (IAM), Mobility Managed Services (MMS), Telecom Management, Information Technology as a Service (ITaaS), Cloud Security, and Analytics & Billing as a Service (ABaaS). For more information, visit widepoint.com WidePoint Investor Relations:Gateway Group, Inc.Matt Glover or John Yi949-574-3860WYY@ gateway-grp.com SOURCE: WidePoint Corporation PR-Inside.com: 2023-12-04 14:30:42 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 923 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 POMPANO BEACH, FL / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Xcyte Digital Corp. (TSXV:XCYT) ("Xcyte" or the "Company"), a spatial computing event technology aggregator and developer providing a high value, cost-effective, multi-platform subscription service to host online virtual and immersive events, announced that it will produce the second annual Metaverse Spectrum Business Conference and Expo on Wednesday, December 6, 2023.The Metaverse Spectrum Business Conference and Expo is a leading event that brings together visionaries, entrepreneurs, investors, and industry experts. Through engaging panel discussions, interactive sessions, and networking opportunities, the conference aims to foster collaboration, innovation, and investment within the Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Web3D ecosystem. This year's Metaverse Spectrum Business Conference and Expo will include more than 1,500 attendees, 30 exhibitors, and 100 speakers.The Conference Keynote will be delivered by David S. Rose, CEO, Gust, a global platform for founding, operating, and investing in scalable, high-growth companies. Global thought leaders speaking at the show include Neil Trevett, Vice President of Developer Ecosystems at NVIDIA & President of Khronos; Subroto Mukherjee, Strategy Lead & Cross Industry Solutions at Microsoft; Frank Diana, Managing Partner at Tata Consultancy Services and Futurist; Lee Margetts, UKAEA Chair of Digital Engineering at Fusion Energy; and Ginger Shimp, Global Content Lead for Industries & Sustainability at SAP.The show will also showcase notable authors such as Luis Bravo Martins (Metaversed: See Beyond The Hype), Wagner Au (Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For) and Leslie Shannon (Virtual Natives: How a New Generation is Revolutionizing the Future of Work, Play, and Culture), generously sponsored by Skolay. Together, the line up of speakers and exhibitors will provide a tremendous resource for attendees interested in spatial computing and AI.Xcyte Digital will debut a beta version of its new intelligent AI based event support concierge service provided by life-like avatars located throughout the show. Attendees are encouraged to use these services to help navigate the show and optimize their experience. For further information and registration details, please visit https://metaversebusinessconference.com/ Xcyte Digital also announced that it will produce the inaugural Pitch Fest at the Metaverse Spectrum Business Conference and Expo on Thursday, December 7, 2023. Over 25 innovative companies in the AI, VR, Web3, and AR industries will pitch their businesses to venture capital firms, investment banks, private investors, and angel investors.The companies presenting at Pitch Fest are FOUNDAT, Hello3dworld, Sparsa AI, Dropkey, Panoram AG, Virtual Round Ballers, Shotam, Cryptomate, Thinakble, sosha.ai , Bond500, MidPay AI, Human Creator Alliance, Mindsage, Metaseat, ShivaTec Internacional, 18004heaven, Truescope, Appalachia Impact Gaming, Warpme.io , Xcyte Digital, Khaotic Gaming, Travel Advances, Collimation.tv , Cross Metaverse Avatars, Simul and Posh Multiverse/Ballin in the Metaverse. Notable investors attending Pitch Fest are SC Ventures, Focus Investment Banking, Spouting Rock Asset Management, London Real Ventures, and Newbridge Securities Corporation, among many others.The Pitch Fest Keynote will be delivered by Costantino Roselli, Founder & CEO of NTZNS. The Pitch Fest will take place within the Metaverse and is proudly sponsored by NewsDirect, a leading provider of news distribution and media monitoring services.Randy Selman, CEO of Xcyte Digital, will be presenting at the Pitch Fest at 11:00AM Eastern Time on Thursday, December 7, 2023.This collaboration event exemplifies the growing interest and support from key industry players in the potential of AI, spatial computing and the metaverse. For further information and registration details, please visit https://metaversebusinessconference.com/pitch-fest/ Finally, the Metaverse 100 awards ceremony will be held on Wednesday, December 6, 2023, and will recognize groundbreaking products and services that embody raw innovation, unique features, and remarkable contributions to the advancement of AI and spatial computing technology. Award categories include Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Metaverse and Web3. The Awards are not limited to the best-selling products; rather, they recognize those that challenge the status quo, offer fresh perspectives, and deliver exceptional results in the industry. The winners will be chosen by a panel of esteemed industry judges that are experts, thought leaders and prominent figures in the digital, AI, and Web3 sectors.About Xcyte Digital Inc.Xcyte Digital (TSXV: XCYT) is a spatial computing event technology aggregator and developer providing a high value, cost-effective, multi-platform subscription service to host online virtual and immersive events. Xcyte was formed in 2022 through an amalgamation of operating businesses & assets in the virtual & immersive event sectors. The Company went public on the TSX Venture exchange on November 15, 2023. Based in Fort Lauderdale, FL, Xcyte has operations in London, UK, Charlotte, NC and Union, NJ. Xcyte provides immersive event technology, virtual event technology and event support services. Visit us at xcytedigital.com Forward-Looking InformationCertain statements in this news release are forward-looking statements and are prospective in nature, including statements with respect to the Acquiror's future intentions regarding the securities the Issuer. Forward-looking statements are not based on historical facts, but rather on current expectations and projections about future events and are therefore subject to risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from the future results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such statements are qualified in their entirety by the inherent risks and uncertainties surrounding future expectations. Such forward-looking statements should therefore be construed in light of such factors, and the Acquiror is not under any obligation, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law.For further information, please contact:Xcyte Digital Corp.Randy Selman, Chief Executive Officer and DirectorPhone: (647) 777 7501Email: investment@xcytedigital.c The Kaduna State Governor, Uba Sani has received the shocking news of the unintended loss of lives and injury of some Muslim faithful after a drone operation by the Nigerian Army on Sunday 3rd December 2023. The affected residents had gathered to mark Maulud festivities at Tudun Biri Community, Igabi Local Government Area when the incident took place. A statement on Monday by Governor Sanis Spokesperson, Mohammed Shehu said Mr Sani has ordered a thorough investigation to forestall future occurrences by immediately convening an emergency security meeting that had in attendance representatives of the Nigerian Army, the Commissioner of Police, Director of the Department of State Services and the Chairman of JNI Kaduna State chapter. I have ordered an immediate investigation into the tragic incident. We are determined to prevent a repeat of this tragedy and reassure our people that their protection would be prioritised in the sustained fight against terrorists, bandits and other criminal elements. I have also directed the immediate evacuation of the injured to the Barau Dikko Teaching Hospital for emergency medical attention. The Government will be responsible for their treatment and related logistics, Governor Sani said. While appealing for calm in the affected communities, Governor Sani stated that: Search and rescue operations in the area are ongoing. The State Government has dispatched top government officials to the area to assess the situation, reach out to the families of the victims and advise the government on the immediate actions and measures to be taken to lessen the pains of the families of the victims. Speaking on behalf of the people of Kaduna State, the Governor extended condolences to the families of the deceased and prayed for the speedy and total recovery of the injured who are currently receiving treatment at Barau Dikko Teaching Hospital. The Kaduna State Government regrets the loss of lives and remains committed to ensuring that residents continue to live and conduct their legitimate businesses without fear, the Governor concluded. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print A 70-year-old man from Anambra State, South-east Nigeria, is currently fighting for his life in a hospital after his younger siblings allegedly poured a substance suspected to be acid on his face. The victim, Christopher Igbokwe, hails from Okpunoeze, a community in Uruagu Nnewi North Local Government Area of the state. His daughter, Princess Amaka, in a series of posts on her X handle (formerly known as Twitter) on Friday, said the siblings who carried out the attack were from other wives of Mr Igbokwes father. This is an appeal to the Anambra State Government and appropriate authorities to look into my fathers case and make sure that he gets justice, Ms Amaka wrote on the microblogging platform. How it happened Ms Amaka said the unnamed family members poured the acid on her fathers face on 24 November while he was standing in front of the familys gate in the community. Presently my father cannot see with two eyes. All I am pleading is for the matter not to be swept under the carpet, she said. She added that it was not the first time the family members would attack her father. There are records of the first (attack) that happened 17 years ago, she said without giving details. She uploaded a photograph and a video clip of the victim on the X handle. READ ALSO: The 45-second clip, seen by PREMIUM TIMES, showed the victim in the hospital with his face swollen. He struggled to open his eyes when asked to do so by a health worker. Ms Amaka, in another post on the micro-blogging platform, uploaded a photograph of two young men said to be part of the attack, adding that some have been arrested and detained at the State Criminal Investigation Department (CID). These young men are the major culprits (in the attack) and are currently on the run. Some have been arrested and are in custody at State CID, Awka in Anambra State, she wrote. All Im pleading for is justice. Police wade in Responding to the X post on Saturday afternoon, the Force spokesperson, Olumuyiwa Adejobi, asked the victims daughter to contact him for action. Sorry about this. Necessary action would be taken, Mr Adejobi, an assistant commissioner of police, assured. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print A report outlining ways to reverse the effects of climate change on women and girls has been launched at the ongoing United Nations Climate Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Over 158 million more women and girls could be pushed into poverty as a result of climate change by 2050. Close to 230 million more could face food insecurity, according to the report. The report from UN Women recommends four ways to achieve what it calls climate justice for women and girls. The four-pronged approach includes recognition, redistribution, representation and reparation. We see increasingly visible linkages between gender inequality and climate change, and I think because women tend to be poorer than men with less access to jobs, amongst others, it means that when climate conditions change, women are also less able to be resilient in the face of those impacts, said Laura Turquet, a senior policy advisor at UN Women. The senior UN official indicated many ways in which women are impacted by climate change. These include the slow increase in child marriage in some areas where there is increased drought and flood because families are having to make difficult decisions about the future of their daughters. We worry that climate change will see the reversal of all the progress made on gender equality, Ms Turquet added. Case of Nigeria Leaders from various sectors, such as governments, businesses, civil society, academia, indigenous groups, and scientists, are in Dubai to find solutions to mitigate the effects of climate change. Over the years, the UN has increasingly incorporated womens groups and advocates for girls rights. President Bola Tinubu led Nigerias delegation alongside several other government and private sector officials. READ ALSO: Asked how Nigeria can ensure womens voices are featured in the discussion, the senior UN official said the government should make those spaces available for women to come in. In addition, womens organisations also need to be adequately funded to ensure they bring more womens voices on board. When women are represented, better policies are made, she argued. If you have diverse lived experiences that come into policies, then policies better reflect the reality of womens lives. Despite clamours for improvement in womens participation in public life worldwide, Nigeria appears to be moving in the wrong direction. Of the 469 members of Nigerias National Assembly, only 20 are women. Nigeria also joined 59 other countries to endorse the Gender-Responsive Just Transitions & Climate Action Partnership. This story was produced as part of the 2023 Climate Change Media Partnership, a journalism fellowship organized by Internews Earth Journalism Network and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print A former Chairman of the Senate Committee on Appropriation, Iyiola Omisore, says theres nothing like budget padding, as it is the responsibility of the National Assembly to approve the yearly budget of the executive. Mr Omisore said this at a one-day citizens town hall meeting on the 2024 appropriation bill organised by the House of Representatives in Abuja on Monday. When you hear of padding, it is an embarrassment; there is nothing like padding. The president brought the budget, which is what we have now, he said. Mr Omisore, a former national secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), said that civil society organisations should know that there was nothing like padding in the Nigerian budgeting system. The budget as presented by the president means that the National Assembly has the power to look into it and see whether it satisfies Nigerians or not. If you dont give a budget, there is nothing to oversight. The moment you put blackmail on a budget, then you dont believe in it. The budget belongs to the parliament, he said. The Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Benjamin Kalu, said the budget played a critical role in determining the allocation of resources, adding that it must be inclusive and reflect the needs and aspirations of the citizenry. He said the town hall meeting provided a unique opportunity for the citizenry to understand the budget process. He urged the public to participate actively in the budget process, adding that Nigeria was faced with the challenge of limited resources and numerous demands. The government is committed to fiscal responsibility, and the budget demonstrates prudent financial management. READ ALSO: Governor Abiodun presents N703bn 2024 budget for Ogun The 2024 budget will be an effective utilisation of budget resources and will serve the interests of the populace, he said. The Clerk of the National Assembly, Sani Tambawal, said that ignoring critical stakeholders in budget formulation was not good for the system. The budget is owned by the people; this town hall is in line with the agenda of the 10th House of Representatives. This will help to strengthen the democratic structure, he said. He said the town hall meeting would help in the open process and accountability in the budget process, adding that it would advance democratic processes and public policy formulation. (NAN) Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print The All Progressives Congress (APC) has postponed indefinitely the inauguration of five committees it constituted recently. The decision to postpone the inauguration of the committees was taken on Monday at the 138th National Working Committee (NWC) meeting of the party at its national secretariat. Felix Morka, the spokesperson of the party, announced the indefinite postponement of the inauguration while briefing journalists on the outcome of the NWC meeting. The leadership of the party last week set up five committees for the party, namely the committees on establishment; finance; publicity; intergovernmental; and reconciliation. PREMIUM TIMES reported that the Chairman of the BUA Group, Abdulsamad Rabiu, declined the nomination to serve on the committee. The billionaire stated that the party did not consult him before announcing his name as a member of the finance committee. According to Mr Morka, the party has now postponed the inauguration of all the committees till further notice. Inauguration of the standing committees of the party scheduled to be held on Wednesday, December 6, 2023, has been postponed until further notice, Mr Morka said. The party did not give any reason for the postponement. Party condemns attack on Kogi RECs residence The APC also condemned the attack on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) for Kogi State, Gabriel Longpet. On Friday, some unknown gunmen attacked the residence of Mr Longpet. However, the security personnel engaged the gunmen in a gun battle for over 30 minutes and repelled the attack. According to INEC, no life was lost in the attack and security agencies have deployed additional personnel. Mr Morka said the party calls on law enforcement authorities to expeditiously investigate, arrest and bring perpetrators to justice. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print The Medical Guild has appealed to the Lagos State Government to prioritise the health and lives of healthcare workers, saying 15 doctors died within six months in the state. The Chairperson of the Guild, Saeid Ahmad, disclosed this during a news conference ahead of the Guilds forthcoming Annual General Meeting (AGM) and Scientific Conference, on Sunday, in Lagos. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the Medical Guild is the association of medical doctors under the employment of the Lagos State Government. Mr Ahmad noted that since the past years, things have been particularly challenging for the guild due to ongoing co-morbidities exacerbated by manpower bleed and the attendant severe overwork among members at service points and some members deaths. The intensity of the attendant sense of loss was probably brought to its peak with the tragic event of a collapsed elevator in the General Hospital, Odan, Lagos, which claimed the life of our young colleague, the late Dr Vwaere Diaso. This was to be followed by end-on-end demises of some additional colleagues, sometimes, multiple over a few days, he said. Mr Ahmad stressed that the sad events serve as an inescapable wake-up call to intensify vigilance towards self-care and deepen the level of engagement with the government to prioritise the health and lives of healthcare workers in the state. These, after all, are the people in whose hands the health and lives of the people are entrusted, he said. To address the situation, Mr Ahmad said that the guild, through a series of emergency General Assemblies and consultations, developed a comprehensive position paper. He said the paper drew the attention of the state government to urgently take action to salvage the spiralling health of the health workers. Mr Ahmad said that the document identified the roots of the welfare problems culminating in massive exodus, and proffered practical and workable solutions. We had demanded short, medium and long-term solution categories to these problems, including the basic need for healthcare workers to be able to obtain much-needed care themselves within the system in which they work. This document has indeed formed the cornerstone of highest level policy discussions with the Government of Lagos State on behalf of our members. It is our hope that these discussions produce policy pronouncements and actionable directives at any moment, he said. He said the guild, through its Office of Social Welfare, spent N21.5 million in responding promptly to some of its sick members and supporting for families of bereaved members in times of loss. He also said the guild had embarked on mortgage and automobile facilities in a bid to provide members with decent accommodation and mobility to ease their commuting to work. ALSO READ: Lagos doctors reject new minimum wage Mr Ahmad commended the government for resolving all issues of stagnation and demotion of in-service trained specialists and financial implementation of same since August 2023. AGM Speaking on the forthcoming AGM and Scientific Conference, Mr Ahmad said that the week-long activities, which began on Sunday, would feature medical outreach, cancer awareness campaign, and a lecture series, among others. Mr Ahmad noted that tapping into these intellectual reservoirs by health policymakers and other stakeholders would yield benefits. He said it would greatly enhance appropriate policy formulation and implementation strategies for the overall benefit of saving lives and improving the well-being of the people. (NAN) Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print The COP28, UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai, with recorded 97,000 participants, should not become a model for the future in terms of attendance, head of the UN Development Programme, Achim Steiner, said. I personally believe that these conferences have become too big, he said in an interview with dpa in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, on Monday. But Mr Steiner said he did not want to tell anyone not to take part. And if a country like the United Arab Emirates has the opportunity to organise such a large conference, then I dont think thats our biggest problem. However, it should be borne in mind that the growth of conferences means a lot of effort, time and costs. It could become more difficult to find host countries to accommodate around 100,000 people and provide a conference site for them, Mr Steiner said. Mr Steiners remark came amid raging displeasure many Nigerians have expressed about the bloated Nigerian delegation at the conference. According to the published list, Nigeria and China have 1,411 delegates each with badges accredited to attend this years summit in Dubai. A review of the published list ranked Nigeria joint third behind the UAE and Brazil among all the countries present at COP28. Out of the total 1,411 Nigerian delegates, 821 have the Overflow badges, while 590 were approved to carry the Party badge. Many Nigerians, PREMIUM TIMES reported, are angry about the wasteful spending of scarce public funds on many of the Nigerian delegates who did not have to be at the conference. This is worsened by the fact that it comes at a time when the government is appealing to citizens to show understanding in bearing the pains of the fallout of its economic policies. Commenting on the debate among the 200 or so countries on whether a formal decision should be made to phase out coal, oil and gas, Steiner said It will be very important to see whether this conference ultimately manages to recognise that the age of fossil fuels is over. There will be arguments about the wording and about timelines, he said. But ultimately its about recognising that the future of our energy and transport systems will no longer be based on fossil fuels, Steiner said. He added that the whole world senses and knows that the decarbonisation of our economies has become inevitable. This years UN Climate Change Conference, hosted by the United Arab Emirates in Dubai, has been the largest ever staged. According to the UN Climate Change Secretariat, 97,372 people were registered on site, including around 52,000 state delegates as well as observers and almost 4,000 journalists. This makes the conference almost twice as large as its predecessor in Egypt, which hosted the largest climate conference to date with around 50,000 participants.(dpa/NAN) Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print Federal University Dutsin Ma, Katsina State, has conferred honorary doctorate degrees on a former governor of the state, Ibrahim Shema, the Emir of Daura, Umar Faruk Umar and the Emir of Bichi, Nasir Bayero. The conferment of the degrees was held at the take-off site of the university during the combined 7th and 8th convocations of the university. Mr Shema, a two-term governor, was conferred with a Doctor of Law degree, Mr Umar was awarded a Doctor of Letters degree, while Mr Bayero was awarded an honorary Doctor of Business Administration. Three distinguished and eminent Nigerians who have distinguished themselves in various fields of human endeavours would be awarded honorary degrees, the Universitys Vice Chancellor, Armayau Bichi said during the ceremony. In his remarks, Mr Shema commended the university for shaping his journey in life. He urged the graduates, those before them and the institution itself to become symbols of the privileges that a well-tailored education offers. VC speaks on achievements Mr Bichi said the university graduated 401 post-graduate students and 4365 undergraduate students for two sets. Out of this number, 11 have PhDs, 168 Have Academic Masters, 73 have Professional Diplomas and 149 have PGDs. We are also graduating a total of 4365 students. Out of this number, 112 have first class, 1131 have second class upper, 2476 have second class lower and 646 have third class degrees, Mr Bichi added. The vice chancellor said some of the achievements recorded in the university during his tenure include an increase in the number of faculties from three to 14, winning of several research grants, approval of proposed academic programmes by the National University Commission (NUC), inauguration of school of basic and remedial studies, creation of an entrepreneurship centre among others. Weve witnessed infrastructural development with three female students hostels each with a capacity of 360-bed space, two 250 seats capacity auditorium, two storey building block for our Junior Secondary School and many other structures are coming up at various stages of completion and one number multipurpose Laboratory, he said. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print The police in Imo State, South-east Nigeria, have arrested suspected killers of a divisional police officer (DPO) and an inspector in Ahiara Junction, Ahiazu Mbaise Local Government Area of the state. PREMIUM TIMES earlier reported how suspected members of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its militant wing, Eastern Security Network (ESN) allegedly killed the two operatives on 27 November in the area. The Commissioner of Police in Imo State, Aboki Danjuma, at a press briefing at the State Police Headquarters in Owerri on Sunday, said the suspected killers of the operatives were among a total of 25 crime suspects arrested in the state, ThisDay reported. Mr Danjuma said the suspects were arrested for various criminal cases ranging from IPOB activities, armed robbery, murder, stealing/receiving stolen properties, cultism, and unlawful possession of firearms and ammunition. The police commissioner said the suspects in the killing of the DPO and the inspector were also evidently linked to the recent killing of a traditional ruler in Ezinihitte Mbaise, and a Peoples Democratic Party ward chairperson. He added that the killings prompted him to convene a meeting with various security agencies to reel out collaborative security strategies to track down the attackers. Confessions of a few suspects arrested at the scenes of the incidents assisted the police operatives in raiding some criminal hideouts, he said. Police operatives in synergy with the military, operatives of the anti-kidnapping unit subsequently stormed the camp of the (crime) suspects at Umuohie in Ngor Okpala Local Government Area of Imo State, dislodged the terrorists, recovered two automatic pump action rifles and six rounds of live cartridges, he said. More raids, arrests Mr Danjuma said, in continuation of the operation using a technical intelligence tracking device, the police operatives also raided another camp in Igbodo-Etche in Rivers State and arrested a native doctor, Everest Agbaragam, 62 who hails from the community in the South-southern state. A search of his shrine led to the recovery of one pump action gun loaded with 12 rounds of live cartridges, one big bag containing various denominations of Biafra currencies, one live crocodile and fetish items, he said. On interrogation, he (the native doctor) confessed to being a member of IPOB/ESN. He stated that he usually prepares local bulletproof charms, popularly known as Odeshi, for his cohorts before they embark on any operation, Mr Danjuma stated. The police commissioner added that the native doctor provided useful information which assisted the police in the raid of Umuogwu Forest in Aboh Mbaise Local Government Area on 1 December. The terrorists, on sighting the police, engaged them in a gun battle but were subdued by the combat-ready operatives who professionally manoeuvred into vintage position and returned fire. In the ensuing gun duel, some of them were neutralized while others escaped into the thick forest with bullet wounds, Mr Danjuma stated. Five AK-47 rifles, six magazines containing 220 live ammunition, six pump action guns, 121 rounds of live cartridges, one revolver, four locally made pistols, three motorcycles, charms, IPOB/ESN insignia, military camouflage and police vests were recovered from the suspects, according to the police. Others were nine locally made pistols, three Toyota Venza cars, including the one the hoodlums used in attacking the DPO, one Toyota Highlander SUV, improvised explosive devices and one Beretta pistol. IPOB, a group seeking an independent state of Biafra from the South-east and some parts of the South-south, has been linked to some of the deadly attacks in the two regions. But the separatist group has repeatedly denied any involvement in the attacks. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print The Nigerian government has announced that only 422 of the total 1,411 Nigerian delegates at the ongoing COP28 were funded by the government. The Minister of Information, Mohammed Idris, disclosed this in a statement on Monday evening amidst concerns by Nigerians about the large number of the countrys delegates at the climate change conference in Dubai. PREMIUM TIMES reported the controversy surrounding the Nigerian delegates list. A review of the published list ranked Nigeria joint third behind the UAE and Brazil among all the countries present at COP28. Out of the total 1,411 Nigerian delegates, 821 have the Overflow badges, while 590 were approved to carry the Party badge. Party badges are worn by negotiators and delegations of Countries (Parties) and the European Union that have ratified the convention and are fully part of the negotiation procedures. The Overflow badges are for other delegates such as civil society activists, media and business persons. However, Mr Idris has now confirmed that not all the Party delegates were government-funded. He said the 422 government-funded delegates were from seven broad institutions including the Presidency which has 67 delegates. Read the full statement by Mr Idris below. Press Statement RE: NIGERIA AT COP-28 The Federal Government has noted with interest the public conversation on the number of delegates from Nigeria attending the ongoing Climate Summit in Dubai, otherwise called COP-28, and the need to provide clarity in line with a standing pledge to conduct itself with transparency and accessibility regarding public information. The Convention of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the worlds pre-eminent Climate Change Conference, attended this year (COP-28) by more than 70,000 participants and delegates from over 100 countries. Nigerias representation is very much in line with our status as Africas leading Sovereign voice and player in climate action. Parties to this Convention from Nigeria include government officials, representatives from the private sector, civil society, the voluntary sector, state governments, media, multilateral institutions, representatives of marginalised communities, and many others. READ ALSO: It is imperative to point out that the overall Nigerian delegation to COP-28 comprises Government-sponsored (Federal and State Governments) and non-government-sponsored participants (from Private Companies, NGOs, CSOs, Media, academia, etc). The Federal Government-funded delegation is made up of a total of 422 persons, as follows: 1. National Council on Climate Change = 32 2. Federal Ministry of Environment = 34 3. All Ministries = 167 4. Presidency = 67 5. Office of the Vice President = 9 6. National Assembly = 40 7. Federal Parastatals/Agencies = 73 As the biggest economy and most populous country in Africa, with a substantial extractive economy and extensive vulnerability to climate change, Nigeria has a significant stake in climate action, and our active and robust participation at COP is therefore not unwarranted. COP-28 presents an array of investment and partnership opportunities for the various sectors affected by climate change, and Nigeria is already benefiting from its ongoing participation, as demonstrated by the following: 1. Nigeria and Germany signed an accelerated performance agreement to expedite the implementation of the Presidential Power Initiative (PPI) to improve Nigerias electricity supply. The agreement was signed by Mr. Kenny Anuwe, the Managing Director and CEO of FGN Power Company, and Ms. Nadja Haakansson, Siemens Energys Senior Vice President and Managing Director for Africa, at a ceremony witnessed by President Tinubu and Chancellor Scholz. 2. President Tinubu hosted a high-level meeting with stakeholders and investors on the Nigeria Carbon Market and the Electric Buses Rollout Programme on the margins of the COP28 climate summit. a. The President unveiled the Nigeria Carbon Market Activation Plan, co-chaired by the Executive Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Mr. Zacch Adedeji, and the Director-General of the National Council on Climate Change (NCCC), Dr. Dahiru Salisu. b. The Electric Buses program is only the first step in a series of innovative, clean, modern, and sustainable initiatives across diverse sectors, all aimed at simultaneously addressing climate change-related challenges, reducing carbon footprint, modernizing infrastructure systems, and positioning Nigeria as an attractive destination for global investments. 3. Nigeria stands to benefit from the Loss and Damage Fund established during COP-27 in Egypt and formally operationalized at the opening plenary of COP-28 in Dubai. The Fund will provide substantial non-debt financing to support countries most affected by the impact of climate change. Hundreds of millions of dollars have already been pledged as contributions to the Fund. 4. The President also met the President of UAE to concretize engagements between the two countries. This is aside from the bilateral talks held with several countries and multilateral partners. It should be highlighted that, over the years, Nigeria has firmly demonstrated its climate action credentials by being the first African country to launch its Energy Transition Plan, the first African country to issue a Sovereign Green Bond, and one of the first to pass national climate change legislation. President Tinubu has been unequivocal in his position that Africa, which is battling problems of poverty and security and struggling to provide education and healthcare to her people, cannot be told to abandon its primary source of income, which is mostly from extractive industries, without the West providing the funding and investment in alternative and clean energy sources. Since assuming office, President Tinubu has been a vocal champion for the African continent on the global stage, whether at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), the G20, or the ongoing COP-28. The President has been supported by an equally active and engaged Nigerian delegation at these various fora. It is, therefore, essential to keep setting the records straight while assuring Nigerians that President Tinubu and other officials on the Federal government delegation are in Dubai for serious business, not a jamboree. Mohammed Idris Honourable Minister of Information and National Orientation 4th December 2023 Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print Akin was a gentleman and an accomplished professional who was full of passion for Africa and Nigeria, almost in equal measure. Ill forever remember his warm friendliness, charm, joie de vivre, humility, generosity, integrity, and humanity. 2002 was my annus horribilis. Olukemi, my wife, best friend and companion of a little over thirty years, was killed in a dastardly carjacking in broad daylight (around noon) on a main road in Ibadan, Nigeria on 4 May. Then, about seven months later, Akin Fatoyinbo, a close friend and a confidant of both Kemi and I, died suddenly in Dar es Salaam. The tragedy occurred shortly after he arrived there on Sunday, 1 December, to undertake a World Bank assignment. Akin and my immediate junior sister (Ibidapo), were my main pillars of support during the immediate weeks following Kemis tragic loss. And until his own sudden and shocking demise, Akin was my unstinting comforter and support. Missing Akin, a close friend and confidant: A sense of emptiness following the tragic loss of Olukemi in May. Coping with the two losses is a very tough challenge. Diary entry, 16 December, 2002. I met Akin within my first few weeks at the World Bank in January 1987 and we instantly became friends. The fact that we were both fluent in three languages Yoruba, English and French was certainly a pull factor. (He was also fluent in German and Spanish). I was also attracted by his warmth and friendliness. By the time my wife (Kemi) and children joined me later in the year, Akin and I had become close friends and confidants. Strikingly, Kemi and Akin became instant friends and they would later on become confidants. Because Akin had already worked in the World Bank for a little over a decade when I arrived, he was an invaluable source of information on the culture of the institution. A few months before my wife and children joined me in the USA university teacher and school children respectively waited till the end of the school year I had a sudden crisis with stomach ulcer that had troubled me occasionally for over a decade or so then. Akin was the person I called and he came promptly to my rescue. He drove me to George Washington University Hospital where I received treatment and spent two nights before I was discharged. This incident made it clear to me that Akin had become my virtual next of kin in the absence of my family! Although I had chosen to seek accommodation in the City of Falls Church in Northern Virginia in the Washington Metropolitan Area because I wanted my children to enroll in its quality public school system, the city was also adjacent to Akins residence in McLean. My family benefitted hugely from his assistance during our settling-in period in late 1987. We exchanged social visits over the years when we were both at work in the Banks headquarters in Washington D.C. In early 2001, Akin and I more or less replicated our McLean/City of Falls Church living arrangement in West Africa when I arrived in the Banks Office in Lome, Togo, in March, to begin a thirty-month external service. Thanks to our diplomatic status, the international border that separated us most often caused minimal delay. During our first year as neighbours in West Africa, we exchanged fairly regular social visits, and made a few joint visits to Nigeria. Given what Akin had shared with me his peripatetic pre-World Bank experiences as a journalist (Senior Editor of Radio Deutsche Welle, Director for Africa at the Inter Press World News Agency) and a two-year stint with the World Health Organisation, based in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso I was not surprised when he informed me in late 1988 that he was considering taking time off to undertake an international assignment outside the World Bank. He joined UNESCO in 1990 and served for five years as the Chief Technical Adviser and Coordinator of a project to develop news agencies in West and Central Africa. Although Akin rejoined the World Bank at the end of his stint, he served pro bono as the Secretary General of the non-profit into which the project was transformed: the West African News Media and Development Centre (WANAD). He was also a pro bono member of WANADs Board of Directors. Akin and I remained in touch during his UNESCO assignment through periodic telephone calls and regular emails. After returning to the World Bank in 1995, he had spent barely one year when he accepted to proceed on external service in the Banks Office in Abidjan, Cote dIvoire, effective from late 1996. I must mention my first meeting with Uncle Sam (Sam Amuka, publisher of Vanguard newspapers) at Akins residence in July 1996. During conversations over several days, Uncle Sam teased us for being expatriates; his strong attachment to Nigeria was unmistakable. (I had only known Uncle Sam through his Sad Sam columns in a leading Nigerian newspaper from the late 1960s through the early 1970s). He was Akins big brother and a former senior professional colleague during the latters earlier years in journalism. After this encounter, a three-person relationship developed and flourished until Akins passing. Uncle Sam and I reminisced about Akin for years. I always remember that it was through Akin that Uncle Sam became a cherished older friend. Akin spent about three years in Abidjan before moving to the Banks Office in Cotonou, Benin Republic, where he spent his last years. While in Abidjan, Akin graciously accepted to serve as host to and guardian of my older son, Ibitayo, who spent the 1997/1998 academic year in the University of Abidjan as part of his undergraduate French Language degree programme at the University of Virginia. Following my relocation on external service to the Banks Office in Nairobi, Kenya, in late 1998, trans-Africa conversations with Akin during the first twelve months were focused on his assistance regarding my proposed establishment of a world-class bilingual postgraduate Business and Management School. This envisaged post-retirement undertaking was to be based in Porto Novo, Benin Republic. Through Akin, I was able to discuss the proposed project with two key members of Benins cabinet who warmly welcomed the idea. (Sadly, I had to abandon the proposed project by late 1999 because its huge financing implications would be beyond me). At about the same time, Akin informed me that he was combining his regular work as the Banks Senior Regional Communication Specialist with coordination of a Communication, Education and Development (COMED) initiative launched jointly by the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) and the World Bank. Akin successfully nurtured COMED and helped to put development communication on the Banks agenda. In early 2001, Akin and I more or less replicated our McLean/City of Falls Church living arrangement in West Africa when I arrived in the Banks Office in Lome, Togo, in March, to begin a thirty-month external service. Thanks to our diplomatic status, the international border that separated us most often caused minimal delay. During our first year as neighbours in West Africa, we exchanged fairly regular social visits, and made a few joint visits to Nigeria. It was during one of our visits to Nigeria that we found out our shared commitment to the upliftment of our respective hometowns in Western Nigeria after retirement: for him Ilesa in Osun State, and for me Iju in Ondo State. We also exchanged views on our proposed pet projects in our hometowns: a radio station for him, and a public affairs library for me. At his graveside, the president of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) announced that the Africa Education Journalism Award that Akin had helped ADEA to create in 2001 would henceforth be known as the Akintola Fatoyinbo Africa Education Journalism Award. (The Award seeks to enhance the quality of reporting on education in Africa). Then, on 4 May, 2002, tragedy struck: Olukemi, my wife, best friend and companion for over thirty years was carjacked and killed around noon on a major road in Ibadan, Nigeria. As already mentioned in the opening paragraph, Akin and my immediate junior sister, Ibidapo, were my main pillars of support during the immediate weeks before Olukemis funeral. Thereafter, Akin remained my unstinting comforter and support until his own sudden passing on Sunday, 1 December, 2002. He died on the same day he arrived in Dar es Salaam for a World Bank assignment. Against the above backdrop, a frontline role in managing all matters related to Akins funeral ceremonies was axiomatic for me. I was in Cotonou with Anne and Lola (Akins wife and daughter respectively) within hours of the tragic news on Sunday and spent the night. Uncle Sam and Akins two sisters arrived the next day to console with Anne. The following Saturday, I travelled with Anne and Lola, to join Uncle Sam and others to receive Akins corpse at the airport on Sunday, 8 December. His corpse was taken to Eko Hospital, Ikeja. Before we left Lagos, it was agreed that Akins burial would take place on 14 December. After a solemn funeral ceremony on that day, Akin was buried in his self-selected final resting place in his compound at the Hill Top, Oke Eso, Ilesa, where he had planned to build a house and install a radio station. Akin was a gentleman and an accomplished professional who was full of passion for Africa and Nigeria, almost in equal measure. Ill forever remember his warm friendliness, charm, joie de vivre, humility, generosity, integrity, and humanity. Akin Memorialised At his graveside, the president of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) announced that the Africa Education Journalism Award that Akin had helped ADEA to create in 2001 would henceforth be known as the Akintola Fatoyinbo Africa Education Journalism Award. (The Award seeks to enhance the quality of reporting on education in Africa). Akins memory also lives on through his daughter, Dr Lola Fatoyinbo Agueh, a research scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), USA. Ladipo Adamolekun writes from Iju, Akure North, Ondo State. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print the impact on Nigerians of the policies that PBAT put forward as enough for another Hilda Baci like heartwarming recognition on GWR, can be seen clearly Nigerians are worse-off. Of course, the economists, like Chief Falaye did, would tell us that what matters is the long-run. But in the long-run, we would all be dead. Fortunately, Chief Falaye and IBB are still alive to see what they did to us in 1989. The Guinness World Records (GWR) has been around since about the time I was born. In fact, I am just a little older than the founding of the British reference book that was a thrill for me as I grew up and visited libraries to look it up, along with the Encyclopedia Britannica. It used to be known as the Guinness Book of Records until its name changed in 1999. The new name accommodated the American branding of the same thing as Guinness Book of World Records. Trust the Americans. Since they rebelled against the British, they had been using their can-do spirit to ensure that their uniqueness from the motherland is maintained. Aside from insisting on their spellings in their own Americana, they substantially altered the course of history by designing their electricity voltage as 110-120/60 instead of the British 220-240/50. This difference meant that British products would not work in America and thereby forced their own local production, until the Japanese started making products to accommodate both and we no longer needed to carry voltage step-downs anymore. So, the frenzy that accompanied Hilda Bacis getting on GWR for a sustained length of time in cooking was amazing to me. The country was excited on 13 June when she was recognised. I equally developed an affection towards her for her resilience and the efforts she took to know what was required and worked hard for it. All of a sudden, the Guinness World Records started trending in Nigeria. The featuring of Nigerians positively on international platforms build our goodwill in the global arena. Our goodwill has been very low for a while, in spite of the great efforts of our Nollywood and Afrobeat ambassadors and our soft power. Goodwill goes beyond not being discriminated against in tourism or the ease of attending conferences in another country. The son of a friend almost lost his Ph.D hard work for nothing other than the South Africans not being ready to issue him a visa to fulfill an obligation, even when they readily issued visas to his Nordic classmates. His father had to find a number of who knows someone who knows someone who could change the sad situation. GWR informed the world that there had been an unusual 1,500 applications from Nigerians seeking to follow Hilda Bacis footsteps. Two or three compatriots tried to upstage her and mainly got the wrath of Nigerians. This is a very bad Nigerian attitude. We should have encouraged others to see if they can do better. Finally, on 7 November, an Irish celebrity chef blew Bacis record apart. We were unhappy and some, with a condemnable attitude, sent unprintable messages to Chef Fisher. With Hilda Baci being blown out, on 21 November, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the Jagaban Borgu joined the GWR race. According to The Cable, PBAT announced at the 10th German-Nigerian Business Forum that he deserves recognition from GWR for the economic reforms he has introduced since assuming office on May 29. This is an important development. PBAT is asking foreigners to recognise that he has been improving the lives of Nigerians. There is no doubt that six months is a short period in office. But it is possible for Nigerians to do some trends analysis and examination of his reforms, before our Presidents yearning for a foreign recognition. When self-styled President Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida got us debating on whether we wanted an IMF loan with its conditionalities, we overwhelmingly said NO. Yet, the maradonic dictator tricked us by introducing his Second-Tier Foreign Exchange Market as an home-grown alternative to the loan. Then as a young senior lecturer, I was one of those who crusaded against the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). I actually published an academic piece on SAP, as Chief Olu Falaye and co. were betting their lives on our long-term El Dorado. I am sure if anyone cares to ask him or IBB today on what happened to the naira, they would readily quip about that popular scapegoat: the lack of implementation. The President cannot avoid responsibility for the double whammy of the fuel and exchange rates he imposed on the country on an impulse, without a strategic well sequenced effort that should have focused on our income profile (after getting Emefiele out of the way), and Nigerias corruption associated behaviour in storing value in dollars, etc. The problem then, and now, is the failure of our knowledge industry to realise that the post WW II design of the world was to ensure the enslavement of parts of the Americas, Africa and Asia, as hewers of wood and carriers of water for the Western world. Some leaderships in Asia realised this and succeeded in outsmarting the design. With leadership deficit across the board in Nigeria, we will continue to wallow in drilling ourselves into a bottomless pit, using adverse theories taught to us as natural laws of human advancement, without opening our eyes to see them as they should be an interest based worldview for the sustenance of the West. Of course, the immediate interests of some of us are catered for as we pile up our national patrimony abroad again for investments and creation of employment in the West as revealed in the Panama, Paradise, and Pandora papers. Our President is an ardent believer in these adverse-to-our-interests laws of nature on the political economy. Please note that I wrote political economy and not economics because production, distribution and consumption are intertwined with interests politics. Policymaking should be based on well thought through intentionality to change for the better and not show-off to be seen as an action man/woman. The President cannot avoid responsibility for the double whammy of the fuel and exchange rates he imposed on the country on an impulse, without a strategic well sequenced effort that should have focused on our income profile (after getting Emefiele out of the way), and Nigerias corruption associated behaviour in storing value in dollars, etc. This problem is more so when our President had prepared for the office for so long and had a three-month transition to office after his election, and no-one rushed him after his swearing-in, when he gained control over the CBN, as well as other information on the emptiness of our wallet. We must not forget that part of the campaign of Mr President was to hit the ground running, with the impression that he had many strategic thinkers already lined up. By the way, our being almost bankrupt should be no excuse because PBAT put himself forward as capable of fixing the situation. It is the duty of the president to ensure a fair balance between the paper analysis of his advisers and the anticipated impacts on the lives of Nigerians. It is on the basis of positive impacts that he should seek our affection. As a Professor and in the category of those who can recommend him, I would gladly nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize if he reverses our downwards trend on corruption. However, the impact on Nigerians of the policies that PBAT put forward as enough for another Hilda Baci like heartwarming recognition on GWR, can be seen clearly Nigerians are worse-off. Of course, the economists, like Chief Falaye did, would tell us that what matters is the long-run. But in the long-run, we would all be dead. Fortunately, Chief Falaye and IBB are still alive to see what they did to us in 1989. We are all ready for a tight belt that would improve the life chances of our children, who have continued to seriously vote with their feet by engaging in japa out of the country. But we should not go down the same path of IBB/Chief Olu Falaye and 43 years later be saying these were good policies and we should blame their lack of proper implementation for where the economy is today. At the political level, the cost of governance, in the face of all of us, is skyrocketing under this administration. Borrowing has continued unabated. Femi Falana (SAN) reportedly put out a documented set of corruption (that economists, bereft of standing up for the truth, euphemistically call leakages) data that would immediately refloat Nigeria if PBATs body language on corruption could boldly change for the better. These billions in dollars are stored in Nigeria and around the world and can be brought back under various moves. $7 billion fixed in 14 banks that Falana pointed to can be recovered from these individuals if they want to continue having bank licences. The crafty use of AMCON to defraud all of us, as dubious loans to friends are forgiven, can be addressed. Different fraudulent thefts of oil can be traced and recovered. We were lucky that we escaped P&ID, but not because of PBAT. If we had lost that case, the naira may be knocking N2,000+ to a dollar by now. It is the duty of the president to ensure a fair balance between the paper analysis of his advisers and the anticipated impacts on the lives of Nigerians. It is on the basis of positive impacts that he should seek our affection. As a Professor and in the category of those who can recommend him, I would gladly nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize if he reverses our downwards trend on corruption. Leadership deficit and corruption are the main drivers of conflict. External dynamics is also important in relation to conflicts in Africa. However, smart leadership can outsmart adverse external dynamics, as some Asians have successfully done. To move on corruption, he would be signaling a significant move to ameliorate our toxic conflict environment in Nigeria, nay in Africa. The buck stops at our presidents table. Babafemi A. Badejo, author of a best-seller on politics in Kenya, was a former Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Somalia, and currently a Legal Practitioner and Professor of Political Science/International Relations, Chrisland University, Abeokuta. Nigeria. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print The erosion of family values is a pressing issue that demands urgent attention and action, as the buck does not stop at the table of government alone. The onus therefore lies on every family to be responsible for its members by preserving and enhancing good moral values. There must be a collective effort by individuals, community leaders, religious organisations and policymakers as they prioritise family values. Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), British Mathematician and Philosopher The spate of kidnappings and ritual killings in the country has taken a different dimension as youths, mostly teenagers, are now involved in the dastardly act. In an attempt to acquire sudden wealth, these young folks, with dead conscience, indulge in acts that are capable of destroying their lives and causing ineradicable blemish on their family image or reputation. Sometime last year in Abeokuta, Ogun State, three teenagers were arrested for beheading and burning the head of their female friend for money ritual. The teenagers confessed, while being paraded by the police, that they saw on Facebook the guidelines on how to perform the ritual to become rich. The boys admitted that they strangled the victim and then dismembered her body parts. The other day, a 24-year-old undergraduate of a Nigerian University was arrested for allegedly killing his 20-year old girlfriend in the same school and harvesting her organs for ritual purposes. Could it be said that these young ones have lost their conscience or that they were never taught good morals? We need not ponder much as the reason is not farfetched poor upbringing. The family is to be faulted as parental functions have failed woefully in many quarters today. It all started with greed and metamorphosed to theft at an early age. Not too long ago, it was revealed that mothers of these young internet scammers and fraudsters have formed an association. Shocking! Mothers who should be moral and ethical guides have turned the other way. Maybe the association is to unashamedly enable them celebrate the unexplained wealth of their children. A new dimension of criminality, which involves making rituals and harvesting of human organs, popularly called Yahoo-Plus, has now become the order of the day, in comparison to the regular internet scam activities known as Yahoo-Yahoo. Your child is not a drycleaner, yet brings bales of cloth home and you as parents do not question that act? It brings to fore the question of parental functions. The glitz and glamour of a good life are the main things the society looks forward to and celebrates. No matter the way or manner an individual, whether young or old, acquires or amasses wealth, the society applauds and bestows huge respect on him or her. Only the rich have a say, as they are always celebrated even if their wealth is ill-gotten. Material possessions are glorified, while moral values are vilified and less talked about. It is important to state that the society is a reflection of the various values portrayed by different families. Whatever obtains among young people as prevalent values speaks volumes of the families they originate from. Whoever we have become as adults is a function of who we were in childhood. Unfortunately, attention isnt usually paid to how good values could be instilled in children at early stages of their lives. The branches of an Iroko tree should be pruned at nursery to prevent future damage if bigger than expected states a Yoruba adage, which explains why a family is expected to teach their children good morals early in life. There is no doubt that moral values form the foundation of a healthy household and, in turn, a sane society. The family values are good morals which include love, respect, honour, sharing and forgiveness. When a family fails to give its children the time and attention they need, it is the society that suffers the consequence. The society then begins to breed unbridled, unlettered and uncultured products. Some factors responsible for eroded values in a family may range from physical to psychological, and could be the fault of either the parents or the children. They include the decline of moral values, social attitudinal change, the family formation, social media addiction, job loss, divorce, economic hardship, infidelity, sexual/physical abuse, extended family situations, burdens of adoption, peer pressure, among many others. These factors also explain why the society at large is threatened and remains where it is today due to the negative consequences they have on our collective well-being. How then can these numerous challenges that are eroding important values and the family unit be tackled head-on? There is a guiding principle in the Holy Bible which says: Train up a child in the way he should grow and when he is old he wont depart from it. Becoming parents isnt just a mere status that couples attain, it comes with huge responsibilities. Parenthood is not all about parenting a child, it encompasses taking charge of the whole life of that child from the cradle to the age of accountability. The erosion of family values is a pressing issue that demands urgent attention and action, as the buck does not stop at the table of government alone. The onus therefore lies on every family to be responsible for its members by preserving and enhancing good moral values. There must be a collective effort by individuals, community leaders, religious organisations and policymakers as they prioritise family values. Measures to alleviate the strain on struggling families should also be put in place by concerned authorities. This way, the family can transcend adverse challenges besieging it, then by and large, we rebuild our society and restore those deteriorated values in the family system. Kayode Ojewale writes via kayodeojewale@gmail.com Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print The Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (EVC/CEO) of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Aminu Maida, has said the support of the Commission awaits law-abiding investors like Meta, (formerly Facebook), which responds positively to Nigerias desire for investments that promote the agenda of government to achieve a robust digital economy. Mr Maida, a doctorate degree holder in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, spoke when he received a delegation of Meta, led by the companys Vice President for Africa, the Middle-East and Turkey, Kojo Boakye at the NCCs headquarters in Abuja. He said the regulatory support to all investors, including operators in Nigeria, will be predicated on their playing by the rules and regulations guiding the sector. He stated that the Commission places a lot of premium on compliance to industry laws, regulations and guidelines as such will also engender a level-playing field for all licensees and other stakeholders in the industry for sustaining a healthy competition and guaranteeing a sustainable growth in the Nigerian telecoms sector. Mr Boakye informed NCC boss that the purpose of the visit was to congratulate the EVC on his appointment by the President and to intimate him of ongoing efforts to land 2Africa Cable in Nigeria. At 45,000 kilometres long, Mr Boakye said the 2Africa submarine cable will be one of the worlds largest subsea cable projects and will interconnect Europe (eastward via Egypt), Asia (via Saudi Arabia), and Africa. He said the system will go live in 2023, delivering more than the total combined capacity of all subsea cables currently serving Africa, with a design capacity of up to 180 terabytes per second (Tbps). Mr Boakye stated that 2Africa will deliver much-needed Internet capacity and reliability across large parts of Africa, supplement the fast-growing capacity demand in the Middle East and underpin further growth of 4G, 5G and fixed broadband access for billions of people, especially in Nigeria. He solicited NCCs support in sailing through all necessary legal and regulatory hurdles in landing the submarine cable to complement existing backbone infrastructure in Nigeria. He also said Meta, through a consortium, plans to land 2Africa cable simultaneously in Lagos and Akwa-Ibom states in order to ensure those not yet connected are connected while those already connected are given opportunity for enhanced and affordable access. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print Africas global bank, United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc, has again demonstrated its prowess on the international stage as it clinched nine prestigious awards at The Bankers Awards 2023, organised by The Banker Magazine a publication of Financial Times of London, the worlds leading business newspaper. The prestigious awards presented to the Bank at a ceremony in London, United Kingdom on Thursday, included the highly coveted Bank of the Year Africa 2023, solidifying UBAs position as the leading financial institution on the African continent. The Banks subsidiaries also emerged as the Bank of the Year in eight of the 20 countries where it operates in Africa. The winning subsidiaries are UBA Cameroon, UBA Chad, UBA Ghana, UBA Cote dIvoire, UBA Mozambique, UBA Congo, UBA Sierra Leone, and UBA Tanzania. The awards underscore the banks dominance and impact across diverse African markets. It is noteworthy that this would be the second time in the past three years that the Bank has won the regional award as the best bank in Africa, as it had emerged winner in 2021. UBAs Group Managing Director, Oliver Alawuba, who received the awards on behalf of the bank, expressed his gratitude and excitement about the awards. He said the recognitions come as a reassurance that the bank is on track in its goal of consolidating its leadership position in Africa, and creating superior value for its stakeholders. He stated, UBA is honoured to be named the Bank of the Year in these eight countries and to receive the overall Award for Africa. This accomplishment is a testament to the hard work, dedication, and innovative spirit of the entire UBA team. We remain committed to delivering top-notch banking services that positively impact the lives of our customers across the continent. Continuing, Mr Alawuba said, We have our millions of customers across the globe and our many thousands of staff to thank for this. They are the very reason why we keep winning and receiving these accolades. The Banker Awards is widely recognised as a benchmark for banking excellence globally, and UBAs multiple victories underscore the institutions commitment to providing exceptional financial services and superior financial intermediation on the continent. As Africas Bank of the Year, UBA has demonstrated its ability to navigate the complexities of the African banking landscape and emerge as a leading force in driving economic growth and financial inclusion. Speaking earlier about UBAs consistent excellence in the financial services sector across the continent which has earned the bank great accolades overtime, Editor of the Banker, Joy Macknight, said that as always, UBA remains a clear winner across a wide range of criteria. He emphasised that the bank has performed impressively across its footprint with a strong financial track record across most of its markets. In a year of strong competition among the continents major banking groups, UBA has gained the edge on its rivals to win the Bank of the Year award for Africa for the 2nd time in three years. Congratulations. The award recognises the banks strength across Africa, including many of its most competitive markets, Macknight stated. Since 1926, the Bank of the Year awards has been celebrating the best of global banking and is regarded as the industry standard for banking excellence. Just recently, UBA won the 2023 FMDQ Gold Awards in three categories including the Best FX Liquidity Provider, Dealing Institution of the Year and Best Money Market Liquidity Provider. This recognition is a testament to UBAs impressive capital strength and capacity to provide liquidity to the Nigerian financial market even in the face of harsh economic realities. Despite the headwinds, UBA Group has consistently maintained its position as Nigerias leading financial institution. In June, the banking group announced impressive half-year financial results, and further increased the performance in Quarter 3, 2023, with profit before tax (PBT) soared to N502.01 billion, Shareholders Funds standing strong at N1.778 trillion, and total assets, reaching N16.24 trillion. These outstanding figures not only reflect UBAs institutional strength, but also demonstrate its position as a corporate role model in Nigeria and across Africa. United Bank for Africa Plc is a leading Pan-African financial institution, offering banking services to more than thirty-five (35) million customers, across 1,000 business offices and customer touch points in 20 African countries. With presence in New York, London, Paris, and Dubai, UBA is connecting people and businesses across Africa through retail, commercial and corporate banking, innovative cross-border payments and remittances, trade finance and ancillary banking services. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print A Federal High Court in Sokoto has dismissed a suit filed by the immediate past Governor of Zamfara State, Bello Matawalle over ownership of over the ownership of more than 50 vehicles said to belong to Zamfara State Government. The vehicles were allegedly cornered by the former governor and his supporters prior to the handing over of power on 29 May, 2023. Following the action, the Zamfara State Police Command in June this year raided Mr Matawalles residences and recovered official vehicles as ordered by the court. The former resisted the action and filed an objection at the Federal High Court. But the Sokoto Division of the Federal High Court on Friday rejected Mr Matawalles claims over ownership of the official vehicles. The Spokesperson of the Zamfara State Governor, Sulaiman Bala Idris hailed the decision of the court. According to him, the former governor and his cabinet members carted away several critical official vehicles belonging to the state government, thereby leaving the present administration with nothing to use. Mr Idris said in a statement on Monday: Recall that in June, the Zamfara State Government gave the former governor and his deputy five working days to return all official vehicles taken away. All demands for the return of the said vehicles proved abortive, and as a result, the Zamfara State Government resorted to obtaining a court order to retrieve them. In pursuit of that order, a total number of over 50 vehicles were recovered by the police. After the vehicles were recovered, Bello Matawalle quickly went to the Federal High Court in Gusau. The court granted an order for the cars to be returned to him. Additionally, he filed a separate suit at the same court, seeking to enforce his fundamental right to own property, including the vehicles in question. The Zamfara State Government requested the transfer of the case to another jurisdiction of the Federal High Court. The Federal High Court of Nigeria, Sokoto Judicial Division, dismissed the matter on Friday. The court refused the reliefs sought by Bello Matawalle and rejected his claim to the ownership of the official vehicles. As a result, the vehicles are still considered the property of the Zamfara State Government. Our government is committed to recovering all that rightfully belongs to the people through an all-encompassing rescue mission that leaves no stone unturned. The judgment by the Federal High Court will encourage us to ensure that justice prevails and all perpetrators of financial banditry in Zamfara are brought to book, Mr Idris added. The current administration of Governor Dauda Lawal in the state has severally accused the former governor, Mr Matawalle of allegedly blowing billions of naira belonging to the people of Zamfara State on abandoned projects, shady contract deals and other forms of alleged financial recklessness. The former governor is the incumbent Minister of State for Defence. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print At least 31 people were feared dead in an airstrike carried out by a military aircraft at Tudun Biri village in the Igabi local government area of Kaduna State. The victims of the strike are mostly children and women celebrating the Maulud (birthday of Prophet Muhammad) in the areas, residents told PREMIUM TIMES. One of the residents, Garba Haruna, told PREMIUM TIMES that over 29 bodies were recovered from the attack which occurred late Sunday and left many other victims missing as of Monday morning. The Nigerian Air Force which is one of the security outfits carrying out raids in the area has denied the attack. But the overseeing commissioner, Ministry of Internal Security and Home Affairs, Kaduna State, Samuel Aruwan, in a statement, confirmed that the attack was inadvertently carried out by Nigerian soldiers. Below is the full statement from the state government The Kaduna State Government has received briefings on Sunday nights attack which left several citizens dead and others injured. In a meeting presided over by the Deputy Governor, Dr Hadiza Sabuwa Balarabe, which had in attendance heads of security agencies and religious groups and traditional leaders, the Nigerian Army explained the circumstances which led to the unfortunate and unintended attack. The General Officer Commanding One Division Nigerian Army, Major VU Okoro explained that the Nigerian Army was on a routine mission against terrorists but inadvertently affected members of the community. The Deputy Governor at the end of the closed-door door meeting conveyed the condolences of the Government and People of Kaduna State to the families that lost their loved ones and prayed for the repose of the victims souls. As of the time of this update, search-and-rescue efforts are still ongoing, as dozens of injured victims have been evacuated to Barau Dikko Teaching Hospital by the Government. Heads of security agencies who attended the meeting included the Commissioner of Police, MY Garba, and the Director of the Department of State Services (DSS) Abdul Eneche. The Chairman of the Kaduna State Chapter of Jamatu Nasril Islam (JNI) Professor Shafiu Abdullahi, led other religious leaders. Also present at the meeting was the District of Rigasa, Alhaji Aminu Idris in whose domain the incident occurred. Signed Samuel Aruwan Overseeing Commissioner, Ministry of Internal Security and Home Affairs, Kaduna State. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp Telegram LinkedIn Email Print LOUISVILLE, Ky., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Serbian-American composer Aleksandra Vrebalov (VREH'-bah-lawv) has won the 2024 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition for "Missa Supratext," a nontraditional choral work for string quartet and girls' chorus. Kronos Quartet, a group long known for nurturing musical innovation, and San Francisco Girls' Chorus, a Bay Area group for young women from diverse backgrounds, premiered the 22-minute work in 2018 in San Francisco with Valerie Sainte-Agathe conducting. The piece also incorporates bells, Tibetan bowls and musical saw. Aleksandra Vrebalov (photo by Zeljko Mandic) "'Missa Supratext' is unrelated to any religion because the creative force driving all life does not care about culture, language or religion," Vrebalov said. "The words are made up and have no meaning. The piece goes beyond verbal narrative to show how all life on our planet is interconnected." The work's Latin title translates to "Mass Above Words" in English. "Vrebalov's music transports and envelops the listener," said Matthew Ertz, music award director. "Her winning piece emphasizes the universality of human expression through music, bypassing a single language, style or tradition. She blends together diverse harmonies, rhythms, styles and improvisations, conveying her devotion to music and to the uniqueness of all things." Vrebalov, 53, who lives in New York City, moved to the United States in 1995 and became a U.S. citizen in 2015. She has composed more than 90 works, including orchestral, chamber, opera and experimental pieces. She often starts by drawing and painting colorful images reflecting her ideas before converting the images into musical notation. Ensembles worldwide have performed her compositions. Kronos Quartet alone has premiered 15 since 1997, and more than 25 other organizations such as Carnegie Hall and the English National Ballet have commissioned her work. Composers Edition in the United Kingdom distributes her self-published scores. Vrebalov taught music at Serbia's Novi Sad University and City University of New York and has been a resident or visiting artist on three continents. The Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Golden Emblem from the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs are among her honors. Recipients of next year's Grawemeyer Awards are being named this week pending formal trustee approval. The annual $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in world order, psychology, education and religion. Recipients will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2289979/University_of_Louisville_Grawemeyer_Award_Winner.jpg This is a "dynamic capacity" that increases visits from 4,044 visits (Ministerial Resolution No. 000255-2023-MC in force until December 31, 2023) to 5,600 visitors per day, which is due to a recent technical capacity study and the demand to get to know this world wonder. The approval at the UGM was agreed upon following the proposal presented at the Fifth Ordinary Session of the UGM Steering Committee, before heads of the Foreign Trade-Tourism, Culture, and Environment Ministries, as well as of Cusco Region Government, the Municipality of Machu Picchu Town, and representatives linked to this matter. This agreement must be officialized so that Machu Picchu will receive more visitors per day starting next year. Cusco Region Governor Werner Salcedo stated that it is necessary to make decisions in favor of the Machu Picchu population and visitors so as to strengthen the economic dynamics in this area, with responsible and sustainable tourism, thus preventing possible social conflicts. Executive Branch's wish is to consolidate tourism in Cusco; therefore, preservation and conservation will be pillars for this purpose. In this regard, Foreign Trade-Tourism Minister Juan Carlos Mathews indicated that the Until November, the proposed increase was a matter of evaluation, even up to a maximum of 5,940, according to the "Cultural Site Research and Management, under the Direction of Douglas Comer" study conducted in 2015; however, it was decided on 5,600, not including tourists who access the Inca Trail. Four UGM members agreed to increase the capacity, but the decision of the Ministry of Culture was missing. (END) PHS/MAO/MVB 4th Report Card Issued by Champlain College Center BURLINGTON, Vt., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The fourth National Report Card on State Efforts to Improve Financial Literacy in High Schools shows significant progress toward the goal of having every high school student in America guaranteed a semester-long course in personal finance prior to graduation, and it promises huge gains in many states over the next five years. John Pelletier, director of the Center, says that the 2023 report card lists seven states earning an A, just two more states than in 2017, its last report card. The seven states are Alabama, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia. States with an A grade require students to take a semester long personal finance course, or its equivalent, prior to graduation. "This doesn't seem like much growth, but sometimes statistics mask reality," says Pelletier. "Tremendous change is on the horizon. States are rapidly passing laws and changing regulations, and we estimate that, assuming full implementation of legislation and policies, we will have 23 grade A states by 2028." "Our first report card came out 10 years ago," says Pelletier, "For the Class of 2013, less than 5 out of 100 high school students lived in the three states that required them to take a standalone personal finance course or its equivalent. No state in the nation had this requirement when the Class of 2007 graduated. When the Class of 2028 graduates, 41 out of 100 students will live in a state with such a requirement. That's a 720 percent increase in students being required to take this course since 2013!" Pelletier says legislators are responding to families without financial safety nets during the pandemic, as well as to advocacy by educators, administrators, parents and students. He also notes that there is a recognition that personal finance knowledge and skills are crucial in today's complex financial world, and cites the expanding availability of free online curricular resources offered by state departments of education and by non-profit organizations. Of the 23 states projected to earn As by 2028, nine will rise from a B grade, five will improve from a C, one from a D and one from an F. The Center projects that the number of states getting a C, D or F will drop from 23 in the current report card to 14 by 2028. "Our nation will need about 30,000 highly trained high school educators to teach personal finance in grade A & B states by 2028," say Pelletier. "There is a need to provide these educators substantive personal finance education right now." A 2022 poll by the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) indicated that 88 percent of adults wanted their states to require a semester- or year-long financial education course for graduation from high school, and 8 in 10 adults wished they were required to take such a class when they went to school. The 2023 Report Card includes a review of the racial and ethnic disparities in financial capability drawn from the most recent FINRA National Financial Capability Study written by researchers at the FINRA Investor Education Foundation (Angela Fontes, Hanna Gilmore, Gary Mottola and Olivia Valdes), as well as research by Dr. Carly Urban of Montana State University highlighting the benefits of requiring financial literacy education in high school. "Financial literacy is linked to positive outcomes, like wealth accumulation, stock market participation and effective retirement planning, and avoiding high-cost alternative financial services," says Pelletier. "Conversely, poor financial literacy and negative financial behaviors often go hand in hand." "High school personal finance education can help alleviate the cycle of poverty that exists in our nation," says Pelletier. "Requiring all students to take a standalone financial literacy course, regardless of their race, ethnicity or economic status, is an important step our nation can take toward reducing inequality." An interactive national map with information on the 50 states and the District of Columbia and a downloadable copy of the full National Report Card is available here: 2023 National Report Card. To produce the Report Card, the Center again conducted detailed reviews of high school graduation requirements, state academic standards for personal finance education, and laws, regulations and guidelines that relate to how each state delivers personal finance education in its public high schools. The Law Firm Antiracism Alliance provided hundreds of hours of research to support the Report's analysis of the current landscape of state legislation on personal finance education. Champlain College Founded in 1878, Champlain College is a small, not-for-profit, private college in Burlington, Vermont, with additional campuses in Montreal, Canada, and Dublin, Ireland. Champlain offers a traditional undergraduate experience from its beautiful campus overlooking Lake Champlain and a broad portfolio of online degrees and certificates through Champlain College Online. The College is known for its distinctive and innovative approach to career-focused education and its "upside-down" curriculum, which help students be: "Ready for Work. Ready for Life. Ready to Make a Difference." Champlain ranks in multiple categories of U.S. News and World Report's "Best Colleges," including Best Value Schools, Best Colleges in the North, Best Colleges for Veterans, and Top Performers on Social Mobility. Champlain was also listed among The Princeton Review's "The Best 388 Colleges" in 2023 and was recognized as a 2022 College of Distinction for its "Engagement, Teaching, Community, and Outcomes." Champlain's InSight Program requires personal finance education as a graduation requirement for traditional undergraduate students and the four-year program ensures that all students graduate with the tools to take ownership of their career, finances, and self-care. For more information, visit www.champlain.edu. Center for Financial Literacy at Champlain College Champlain College's Center for Financial Literacy is nationally known and respected for its work to increase the financial capability of our nation through its research, advocacy and financial literacy educator training programs. The Center for Financial Literacy's (CFL) trusted research, the National Report Cards (High School, Adult and Prepped for Success) have informed and led financial literacy debates nationwide. Founded in 2010, the Center for Financial Literacy has also developed two innovative and nationally recognized training programs to support educators in improving financial education in their classroom, helping our youth to be equipped to handle the complexities and intricacies of today's financial world. The CFL's director is John Pelletier, who was formerly chief operating officer and chief legal officer at some of the largest asset management firms in the United States. John is an attorney and has been involved in numerous state and national financial literacy advisory commissions as well as a valuable media resource for current financial literacy topics. Law Firm Antiracism Alliance (LFAA) The Law Firm Antiracism Alliance is a nonprofit organization created for the sole purpose of achieving racial equity in the law. The Law Firm Antiracism Alliance provided hundreds of hours of research to support the Report's analysis of the current landscape of state legislation on personal finance education. The LFAA is a collaborative effort of 300 law firms that are located in all 50 states. These Alliance firms, in partnership with legal services organizations and key stakeholders, dedicate their pro bono resources to initiatives that identify and address systemic racism in all areas of the law. Contact: John Pelletier Director, Center for Financial Literacy Champlain College, (802) 860-2744 (office), (617) 548-6102 (cell), [email protected]; Bill Johnson, Halstead Communications, 484-379-6571 cell, [email protected] NOTE: Pelletier available for broadcast interviews through streaming applications SOURCE Champlain College The newly published resource includes use cases on the topic of AI in the classroom and covers the technology involved, the benefits to the institution, the risks associated with the technology, and the rate of adoption in education. TORONTO, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the education sector requires strategic preparedness from institutions' CIOs and IT teams to capitalize on the technology's potential benefits. Crucial to this adoption is the alignment of IT with business operations a challenge in an industry where resources may be limited. Recognizing the challenge that IT leaders in the education sector face, Info-Tech Research Group has unveiled a comprehensive blueprint titled Prioritize AI Use Cases for Education. The firm's research presents several relevant use cases aimed at overcoming organizational challenges. The resource is intended to help educational departments embark on their AI journey by identifying and prioritizing the use cases through an innovative analysis tool, to transform the educational landscape for faculty and students, from K-12 to higher education settings. Info-Tech Research Group's Prioritize AI Use Cases for Education blueprint outlines seven key factors shaping the transformative potential of AI in the education sector. (CNW Group/Info-Tech Research Group) "AI is rapidly entering the education space, and CIOs need to be prepared to take advantage of its potential benefits. Our AI use case library for education is designed to support that need," says Mark Maby, Research Director for Education at Info-Tech Research Group. "The introduction of AI can be contentious, and the risks should be considered carefully. AI technology can have biases that directly thwart the mission of the institution. It is also a new technology, and its promise still outweighs its results." Info-Tech's research explains that while AI offers many benefits, educational institutions are grappling with concerns about its potential risks, compliance issues, regulatory implications, and policy impacts. The evolving understanding of AI's influence on these institutions adds to the challenge of prioritizing its deployment. Furthermore, identifying relevant and impactful AI use cases in education can be an arduous and time-consuming task. This situation underscores the critical need for more targeted research and strategic planning in the adoption of AI within the educational landscape. The firm's latest blueprint advises educational institutions to recognize and explore pertinent AI use cases that can help address their unique challenges in academic settings. This journey starts by identifying and prioritizing use cases for different departmental units using specialized analysis tools. The results from this process are crucial for securing executive approval to help institutions pinpoint the most appropriate issues with the highest potential value, thereby facilitating responsible AI implementations. Info-Tech highlights seven key factors that shape AI use cases in education: Industry: Some use cases are relevant to both higher education and K-12, while others are specific to one over the other. Value Streams: These are specific to each industry, organizing the organization's core capabilities based on the value it delivers to its constituents. Capabilities: This factor defines how the organization functions through the interaction of its people, processes, and technology. Technology: The foundational technology required to deliver the use case. Benefits: The specific value each use case provides to the organization. Risks: Potential issues to consider when adopting the technology. Adoption: The prevalence of the use case in the education sector, which can range from conceptual stages to widespread adoption and availability. The research emphasizes the importance of scrutinizing vendors' claims regarding generative AI functionality. The firm cautions that it's essential for IT leaders and their teams to precisely determine what aspects of their solutions are genuinely "generative." These solutions should be capable of producing new, innovative outputs rather than simply delivering predictive results, a distinction that is key in evaluating the true potential and effectiveness of generative AI technologies. For exclusive and timely commentary from Mark Maby, an expert in the educational technology landscape, and access to the complete Prioritize AI Use Cases for Education blueprint, please contact Senior PR Manager Sufyan Al-Hassan at [email protected]. About Info-Tech Research Group Info-Tech Research Group is one of the world's leading information technology research and advisory firms, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals. The company produces unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. For 25 years, Info-Tech has partnered closely with IT teams to provide them with everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations. Media professionals can register for unrestricted access to research across IT, HR, and software and over 200 IT and industry analysts through the firm's Media Insiders program. To gain access, contact [email protected]. For information about Info-Tech Research Group or to access the latest research, visit infotech.com and connect via LinkedIn and X. SOURCE Info-Tech Research Group PASADENA, Calif., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), the first, preeminent, longest-tenured and pioneering owner, operator and developer of collaborative life science, agtech and advanced technology mega campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, today announced that the company's board of directors has elected Sheila K. McGrath as an independent director. The board of directors has also appointed Ms. McGrath to serve as a member of the Life Science, Agtech & Advanced Technologies Committee and determined that she is an independent director in accordance with New York Stock Exchange listing standards and Securities and Exchange Commission rules. Her term will run until the company's 2024 annual meeting of stockholders. "We are honored to welcome Sheila to our board and leverage her deep experience in the commercial real estate industry," said Joel S. Marcus, executive chairman and founder of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. and Alexandria Venture Investments. "With strong financial skills and a nearly three-decade track record as a distinguished equity research analyst covering the REIT sector, Sheila will add significant value to Alexandria and for our stockholders." Ms. McGrath was a senior managing director at Evercore ISI covering U.S. equity REITs, real estate operating companies, and Mexican real estate investment vehicles, or FIBRAs, from 2012 until 2022. Prior to joining Evercore, she was managing director and sector head for REIT research at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods for five years and was a member of the firm's Research Review Committee and Leadership Committee. Between 1994 and 2007, Ms. McGrath covered REITs and real estate operating companies as an equity research analyst at several firms, including Smith Barney and UBS. She began her career as a commercial real estate appraiser valuing various commercial real estate properties across most property sectors and conducting feasibility studies for new development projects. In addition to serving on Alexandria's board of directors, Ms. McGrath serves on the board of Granite Point Mortgage Trust Inc. She is an active member of Nareit, where she currently serves on the Advisory Board of Governors and the Real Estate Investment Advisory Council and previously served on the Best Financial Practices Council. Ms. McGrath also serves on the board of advisors of the Rutgers Business School's Center for Women in Business, of which she was a founding member. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Lafayette College and her Master of Business Administration degree in Finance from Rutgers University. About Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), an S&P 500 company, is a best-in-class, mission-driven life science REIT making a positive and lasting impact on the world. As the pioneer of the life science real estate niche since our founding in 1994, Alexandria is the preeminent and longest-tenured owner, operator and developer of collaborative life science, agtech and advanced technology mega campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, including Greater Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, San Diego, Seattle, Maryland and Research Triangle. Alexandria has a total market capitalization of $28.3 billion and an asset base in North America of 75.1 million SF as of September 30, 2023, which includes 41.5 million RSF of operating properties and 5.6 million RSF of Class A/A+ properties undergoing construction, 8.9 million RSF of near-term and intermediate-term development and redevelopment projects and 19.1 million SF of future development projects. Alexandria has a longstanding and proven track record of developing Class A/A+ properties clustered in life science, agtech and advanced technology mega campuses that provide our innovative tenants with highly dynamic and collaborative environments that enhance their ability to successfully recruit and retain world-class talent and inspire productivity, efficiency, creativity and success. Alexandria also provides strategic capital to transformative life science, agrifoodtech, climate innovation and technology companies through our venture capital platform. We believe our unique business model and diligent underwriting ensure a high-quality and diverse tenant base that results in higher occupancy levels, longer lease terms, higher rental income, higher returns and greater long-term asset value. For more information on Alexandria, please visit www.are.com. Forward-Looking Statements This press release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Such forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding the potential impacts of a director's appointment to the company's board of directors and expectations regarding the company's performance and success. These forward-looking statements are based on Alexandria's present intent, beliefs or expectations, but forward-looking statements are not guaranteed to occur and may not occur. Actual results may differ materially from those contained in or implied by Alexandria's forward-looking statements as a result of a variety of factors, including, without limitation, the risks and uncertainties detailed in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release, and Alexandria assumes no obligation to update this information. For more discussion relating to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in Alexandria's forward-looking statements, and risks and uncertainties to Alexandria's business in general, please refer to Alexandria's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its most recent annual report on Form 10-K and any subsequently filed quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. CONTACT: Sara Kabakoff, Senior Vice President Chief Content Officer, (626) 788-5578, [email protected] SOURCE Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- On Wednesday, November 29, 2023, American Values 2024 hosted a "DJ Appreciation and Recognition Holiday Toast" at the Brooklyn Chophouse in the heart of Times Square in New York City. The event's mission was to celebrate some holiday cheer, gather some of the music industry's top DJs, and share the presidential platform of upcoming candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. American Values 2024 CEO Candace McDonald and DJ Self Legendary Turntablists DJ Eclipse and DJ Riz "I understand the value of DJs and their ability to spread messages. I am just ecstatic that they came together and learned about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s presidential run," says Candace McDonald, CEO of American Values 2024. Notable DJ attendees were DJ Self, DJ Will, DJ Riz, and DJ Eclipse. There was also an exceptional surprise performance by hip-hop legend Alskratch of his hit song, "Where My Homiez?", adding to the event's authenticity by coinciding with the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. The music-filled evening ended with its intended purpose. DJs also have the star power to spread messages in support of political candidates that they believe in, like any media outlet. The attendees were eager to learn more about the purpose of American Values 2024 and how the SuperPac supports Robert F. Kennedy, Jr as an independent candidate who often faces much adversity to secure equitable media coverage. For more information about American Values 2024, please visit av24.org . About American Values 2024 American Values 2024 is a Super PAC dedicated to electing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to President of the United States. The SuperPAC was co-founded by Mark Gorton, CEO of Tower Research Capital, and Tony Lyons, President of Skyhorse Publishing. Learn more at AV24.org . Paid for by American Values 2024, ( 307 W. 36th St., 11th floor, New York, NY 10018 ) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Contact: Nickie Robinson 212-380-3385 369607@email4pr.com SOURCE American Values 2024 Funding supports the design, implementation of more than 1 billion hectares of ocean across the Blue Pacific Continent DUBAI, UAE, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- At COP28, Pacific Islands State Leaders launched a bold new Unlocking Blue Pacific Prosperity initiative to safeguard and revitalize the Blue Pacific Continent. The Bezos Earth Fund applauds and endorses the Pacific Leaders' bold vision to protect and restore the region's extraordinary marine ecosystems. The Earth Fund announced plans to provide up to $100 million in grants to support the design and implementation of the conservation plan. This groundbreaking initiative will establish sustainable management across 100 percent of the Blue Pacific Continent, nearly 50 percent larger than all of Africa and five times the size of the United States. It will protect 30 percent of the continent, more than 1 billion hectares, to strengthen the ocean's resilience to climate impacts. The Pacific Islands leaders' strategy also aims to establish sustainable coastal food systems and restore and rejuvenate the coral reefs, mangroves, and other coastal ecosystems that are the foundation for food security, livelihoods, and culture in the Pacific Islands. In support of this initiative by the Pacific Heads of State and Ministers, the Earth Fund's commitment will enable efforts to restore and protect these coastal ecosystems and strengthen community-based fisheries management and conservation. "Pacific Islands States are custodians of 30 percent of the world's precious coral systems, provide over 50 percent of the global tuna supply, and care for the largest carbon sink on the planet," said Dr. Andrew Steer, President and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund. "We are delighted to lend our support for this bold initiative to secure the health, food security, and livelihoods of people across the region. We urge other partners to join us to support this bold vision." "There is no greater threat to the people of the Pacific than climate change," said President Surangel Whipps of Palau. "It threatens our security, our livelihoods, and our wellbeing. We are committed to leading this effort to protect our region and its extraordinary cultures and ecosystems. We're thrilled to partner with the Bezos Earth Fund on this initiative and call on others to join us." "We understand that, because of its vast size, what happens to our Pacific is make or break for the planet. That's why we have committed to protecting 30 percent of our Blue Continent as we strive to protect and sustainably manage critical ecosystems. We mean to show the world that Pacific people are resilient and determined to hope, despite the dire Global Stocktake report card," said the Prime Minister of Tonga. "We celebrate the efforts of Pacific Islanders to protect and restore coastal ecosystems, which are foundational to life both human and marine across their islands and territories," said Dr. Cristian Samper, Managing Director and Leader for Nature Solutions at the Bezos Earth Fund. "The Bezos Earth Fund is committed to protecting 30 percent of our land and ocean to safeguard nature and to support food security and development in this decisive decade. Pacific Islands Heads of State are leading the charge, and we urge the international community to follow suit and create and implement similar plans to protect the world's oceans." About the Bezos Earth Fund The Bezos Earth Fund is helping transform the fight against climate change with the largest ever philanthropic commitment to climate and nature protection. Jeff Bezos has committed $10 billion in this decisive decade to protect nature and address climate change. By providing funding and expertise, we partner with organizations to accelerate innovation, break down barriers to success and create a more equitable and sustainable world. Join us in our mission to create a world where people prosper in harmony with nature. SOURCE Bezos Earth Fund DUBAI, UAE, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- As Bybit , the world's third-largest crypto exchange by volume, celebrates its fifth anniversary, co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou shares a heartfelt message on the Bybit blog, reflecting on the crypto industry and his vision for the future. In his message titled " Bybit CEO Marks Crypto Ark's Five-Year Voyage ," Ben highlights Bybit's significant achievements over the past five years. He acknowledges the steady recovery of the crypto market from the challenges of 2022 and credits the dedication of industry builders for crypto's remarkable comeback. Bybit's Milestone: CEO Ben Zhou Reflects on Half a Decade of Crypto Leadership 2023 has been a pivotal year for Bybit, marked by the opening of its Dubai headquarters and establishing key partnerships globally, including collaborations with the Dubai Multi Commodity Centre (DMCC) and the American University of Sharjah (AUS). These partnerships and others such as Oracle Red Bull Racing have helped Bybit spread the message of the new, improved financial system created on the blockchain. Zhou also addresses the importance of regulatory compliance, noting Bybit's efforts in securing licenses in Dubai, Kazakhstan, and Cyprus. This commitment to operating within the regulatory framework is part of Bybit's pledge to provide a safe trading environment for its users. The anniversary message also celebrates Bybit's product innovation and industry recognition, including the introduction of the Unified Trading Account, TradeGPT AI, and receiving an 'AA' rating in the CCData Crypto Exchange Benchmark Report. Zhou also proudly notes Bybit's resilience, growing despite bearish conditions. The full address from Ben Zhou can be read on the Bybit blog. Readers are encouraged to visit here for an in-depth view of his industry analysis and future aspirations. #Bybit #TheCryptoArk #High5Bybit About Bybit Bybit is a top-three cryptocurrency exchange by volume with 20 million users established in 2018. It offers a professional platform where crypto investors and traders can find an ultra-fast matching engine, 24/7 customer service, and multilingual community support. Bybit is a proud partner of Formula One's reigning Constructors' and Drivers' champions: the Oracle Red Bull Racing team. For more details about Bybit, please visit Bybit Press . For media inquiries, please contact: [email protected] For more information please visit: https://www.bybit.com For updates, please follow: Bybit's Communities and Social Media Discord | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn | Reddit | Telegram | TikTok | X (Twitter) | Youtube Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMXKTnascpk Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2267288/Logo.jpg NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The coating resins market size is expected to grow by USD 18.22 billion from 2022 to 2027. In addition, the growth momentum of the market will be progressing at a CAGR of 5.97% during the forecast period, according to Technavio. The growing construction industry is notably driving the coating resins market. However, factors such as stringent regulations related to coating resins may impede market growth. The market is segmented by type (Acrylic coating resin, Polyurethane coating resin, Epoxy coating resin, Alkyds coating resin, and Vinyl and other coating resins ), application (Architecture coating, General Industrial coating, Automotive coating, High-performance coating, and Other coatings ), and geography (APAC, Europe, North America, South America, and Middle East and Africa). We provide a detailed analysis of 20 companies operating in the coating resins market including Arkema Group, BASF SE, Covestro AG, DIC Corp., Dow Chemical Co., Eastman Chemical Co., Evonik Industries AG, Hexion Inc., Huntsman International LLC, Kukdo Chemical Co. Ltd., Mitsubishi Chemical Group Corp., Olin Corp., PETRONAS Chemicals Group Berhad, Polynt Spa, PTT Public Co. Ltd., Solvay SA, The Sherwin Williams Co., Toray Industries Inc., Wacker Chemie AG, and Wanhua Chemical Group Co. Ltd..The report offers an up-to-date analysis of the market, and to know the exact growth variance and the Y-O-Y growth rate, Request a Sample Report. Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global Coating Resins Market 2023-2027 Coating Resins Market 2023-2027: Company Analysis Arkema Group - The company offers coating resins such as waterborne and resins. This report provides a full list of key companies, their strategies, and the latest developments. Buy Now for detailed company information Coating Resins Market 2023-2027: Segmentation Type The acrylic coating resin segment is estimated to witness significant growth during the forecast period. Acrylic is a polymeric substance that contains acrylic monomers. Also, additional monomers can be added to the polymer chains to produce resins with various qualities or at a lowered cost. Acrylic resins are applicable in a variety of industrial and consumer items. Thus, the rising use of acrylic resins due to their different benefits will drive the growth of the acrylic coating resin segment in the market during the forecast period. The is estimated to witness significant growth during the forecast period. Acrylic is a polymeric substance that contains acrylic monomers. Also, additional monomers can be added to the polymer chains to produce resins with various qualities or at a lowered cost. Acrylic resins are applicable in a variety of industrial and consumer items. Thus, the rising use of acrylic resins due to their different benefits will drive the growth of the acrylic coating resin segment in the market during the forecast period. Geography APAC is estimated to account for 46% of the global market growth during the forecast period. The growing automotive industry in the region has contributed significantly to the development of the market. Countries like China , Japan , and South Korea are significant automobile manufacturing hubs, driving the demand for high-performance automotive coatings. Coating resins play an important role in automotive topcoats, providing protection, gloss, and colour retention, making them important for the growth of the automotive sector. Learn about the contribution of each segment summarized in concise infographics and thorough descriptions. View PDF Sample Report Coating Resins Market 2023-2027: Key Highlights Historic Market Size 2017-2021 CAGR of the market during 2023-2027 Detailed information on factors that will assist coating resins market growth during the next five years Estimation of the coating resins market and its contribution to the parent market Forecasts on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior The growth of the coating resins market Analysis of the competitive landscape and detailed information on companies Comprehensive details of factors that will impede the growth of coating resins market companies Related Reports: The polyamide resins market size is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 5.93% between 2023 and 2028. The market size is forecast to increase by USD 3,232.79 million. The methyl acetate market size is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 3.98% between 2023 and 2028. The market size is forecast to increase by USD 11,721.15 million. Coating Resins Market Scope Report Coverage Details Base year 2022 Historic period 2017-2021 Forecast period 2023-2027 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 5.97% Market growth 2023-2027 USD 18.22 billion Market structure Fragmented YoY growth 2022-2023 (%) 5.41 Regional analysis APAC, Europe, North America, South America, and Middle East and Africa Performing market contribution APAC at 46% ToC: Excustive Summary Market Landscape Market Sizing Historic Market Sizes Five Forces Analysis Market Segmentation by Type Market Segmentation by Application Market Segmentation by Geography Customer Landscape Geographic Landscape Drivers, Challenges, & Trends Company Landscape Company Analysis Appendix About Technavio Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provide actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contacts Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com SOURCE Technavio KARIYA, Japan, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- DENSO Corporation, a leading mobility supplier, today announced changes to its organizational structure, executives' responsibilities and personnel, effective January 1, 2024. DENSO has announced at "DENSO DIALOG DAY 2023" that it will evolve from being "a Tier 1 supplier that supports the auto industry" to "a Tier 1 supplier that supports a mobility-centered society," aiming to maximize the value of the entire mobility society, in addition to vehicles. To achieve this, DENSO has announced its commitment to three challenges: "evolution of mobility," "strengthening of foundational technology," and "creation of new value." To materialize these goals, the following organizational and executive changes will be implemented. In terms of the executive structure, two executive vice presidents will assume responsibility for the company's major management resources in the following two areas, accelerating the formulations and execution of growth strategies. Additionally, to strengthen and expand technological development areas that will spur new growth, a Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) position will be established. Yasuhiko Yamazaki, will hold the role, focusing on technology and human resources, and also be promoted to executive vice president. (Reference) DENSO DIALOG DAY 2023 https://www.denso.com/global/en/news/newsroom/2023/20231116-g01/ I. Organizational Changes 1. To strongly promote the electric propulsion unit business for aerial mobility, various functions within the Electrification Business Group will be consolidated, and a new "Electric Sora-Mobi Business Promotion Department" will be established. This organization will be built with the aim of future mass production, encompassing advanced development, production technology, and quality assurance. 2. In the inverter business, DENSO has been strengthening its horizontal lineup that can be installed in various electric mobility options such as HEVs, PHEVs, BEVs, and FCEVs. However, moving forward, to expand the vertical lineup from electric drive systems to components to components such as power modules the module and power card divisions within the Advanced Devices Business Group will be consolidated into the Electrification Business Group, to establish a responsive system to meet diverse customer needs. 3. The UX*1 Innovation Center Dept. within the Mobility Electronics Business Group and the human research and UX development functions within the Research and Development Center will be merged to establish the "CX*2 Center Department." By expanding the scope of consideration from the user's perspective of utilizing existing products to the customer's perspective, including services and the entire cycle, innovative UX and CX development that is in harmony with the mobility society will be promoted. 4. To lay a foundation for DENSO's hydrogen business that combines the company's strengths in thermal management technology and advanced material technology, a new "Hydrogen Business Development Division" will be created. The aim is to connect industries using hydrogen as a core, and to connect various types of energy towards achieving a carbon-neutral society. *1 UX: User Experience (customer experience in using products and services) *2 CX: Customer Experience (overall customer experience from encountering products and services to after-sales support) II. Changes to Executive Structure and Executives Name New Current Yasuhiko Yamazaki Executive Vice President Senior Executive Officer Yukihiro Shinohara Retirement Executive Vice President Katsuhiko Takeuchi Senior Executive Officer Senior Director Yasuhisa Sakurai Senior Executive Officer Senior Director Operating Officers' areas of responsibility effective January 1, 2024 Changes are underlined and highlighted in bold Title Name New Current Chairman & CEO, Representative Member of the Board Koji Arima CEO CEO President & COO, Representative Member of the Board Shinnosuke Hayashi COO COO Executive Vice President, Representative Member of the Board Yasushi Matsui Support of President, CRO, CCO, CFO, Head of Corporate Strategy Center, Group Companies of Japan, North America area, China area Support of President, CFO, Head of Corporate Strategy Center, Group Companies of Japan, North America area, China area Member of the Board, Senior Executive Officer Kenichiro Ito CEO of EU area, President of DENSO International Europe, South American area CHRO, Head of General Administration & Human Resources Center, EU area, Asia area, Korea area Executive Vice President Yasuhiko Yamazaki Support of President, CIO, CQO, CHRO, Head of General Administration & Human Resources Center, Australia-Asia area, Korea area Head of Thermal Systems Business Group Senior Executive Officer Yoshifumi Kato CTO, Advanced Mobility Systems Business Development Div., President of MIRISE Technologies, Software Development Center (Executive Vice President) of Toyota Motor Corporation Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Head of Advanced Devices Business Group, Advanced Mobility Systems Business Development Div., President of MIRISE Technologies, Software Development Center (Executive Vice President) of Toyota Motor Corporation (concurrent) Senior Executive Officer Yasuhiro Iida CEO of India area, President of DENSO International India CEO of India area, President of DENSO International India Senior Executive Officer Hirotsugu Takeuchi CDO, Head of IT Digital Center, Head of Research & Development Center, Social Innovation Business Development Function Unit, President of SOKEN CDO, Head of IT Digital Center, Head of Research & Development Center, Social Innovation Business Development Function Unit, President of SOKEN Senior Executive Officer Hidehiro Yokoo Head of Legal, External Affairs & Communications Center, Tokyo Office, Audit Dept., Managing of Japan Region Dept. Food Value Chain Business Development Div. Head of Legal, External Affairs & Communications Center, Tokyo Office, Audit Dept., Managing of Japan Region Dept. Food Value Chain Business Development Div. Senior Executive Officer Jiro Ebihara CMzO, Head of Production Innovation Center, Head of Purchasing Group , FA Business Development Div. CMzO, Head of Production Innovation Center, FA Business Development Div., Environment Neutral Systems Development Div., Senior Executive Officer Hisashi Iida Head of Powertrain Systems Business Group, Head of Injection Components Business Unit, Hydrogen Business Promotion Div., Environment Neutral Systems Development Div Head of Powertrain Systems Business Group, Head of Injection Components Business Unit Senior Executive Officer Katsuhiko Takeuchi Head of Thermal Systems Business Group Head of Electrification Systems Business Group Senior Executive Officer Yasuhisa Sakurai Head of OEM Sales and Marketing Group, Solution Sales & Marketing Group, Corporate Strategy Div. Head of OEM Sales and Marketing Group, Solution Sales & Marketing Group, Corporate Strategy Div. Reference: Official names of CxO CEO: Chief Executive Officer COO: Chief Operating Officer CRO: Chief Risk Officer CIO: Chief Innovation Officer (Newly Established) CCO: Chief Compliance Officer CQO: Chief Quality Officer CFO: Chief Financial Officer CTO: Chief Technology Officer CHRO: Chief Human Resources Officer CMzO: Chief Monozukuri Officer CSwO: Chief Software Officer CDO: Chief Digital Officer About DENSO CORPORATION Globally headquartered in Kariya, Japan, DENSO is a $47.9 billion leading mobility supplier that develops advanced technology and components for nearly every vehicle make and model on the road today. With manufacturing at its core, DENSO invests in around 200 facilities worldwide to provide opportunities for rewarding careers and to produce cutting-edge electrification, powertrain, thermal and mobility electronics products, among others, that change how the world moves. In developing such solutions, the company's 165,000 global employees are paving the way to a mobility future that improves lives, eliminates traffic accidents, and preserves the environment. DENSO spent around 9.0 percent of its global consolidated sales on research and development in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023. For more information about DENSO's operations worldwide, visit https://www.denso.com/global. SOURCE DENSO BEIJING, Dec. 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- A news report by China.org.cn on the nuances of China's evolving dialogue with the world: How is China's historic shift from "translating the world" to "translating China" shaping global perceptions, and how can we ensure that the heart of the Chinese story remains intact in other languages? Huang Youyi, executive vice president of the Translators Association of China and one of China's most prominent translators, joins "Diplomacy Talk" to share the nuances of China's evolving dialogue with the world. He shares insights on China's translation sector, the transformative role of AI in translation, and memorable moments from his distinguished career. The following is a transcript of the interview. Diplomacy Talk: You have mentioned on a number of occasions that China's translation community is undergoing a historic shift from "translating the world" to "translating China." How should we understand it? Huang Youyi: This shift largely stemmed from China's development, particularly after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. With China's rapid economic growth and expanded global influence, the world is eager to learn about China. China also wishes to convey its own perspectives and tell its stories to the rest of the world. This presents a new challenge to Chinese translators. In the past, translators mostly converted foreign languages into their mother tongues. Logically, telling China's story to foreigners should be done by foreign translators. However, as we know, there aren't many foreign practitioners who are proficient in Chinese. This monumental task has thus fallen on the shoulders of Chinese translators. In 2011, we saw a significant shift in China's translation sector, with many translators no longer translating foreign languages into Chinese but instead translating Chinese into foreign languages. Research conducted by the Translators Association of China revealed that 54% of translation was done from Chinese to foreign languages. Therefore, we can conclude that the task of the Chinese translation community has shifted from the traditional "translating the world" to "translating China." This historic change reflects China's development and progress. Diplomacy Talk: You participated in the translation of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China" volumes I to IV. I would like to ask for your comment regarding President Xi's personal discourse system. Has it evolved, and what are its distinctive features? Huang Youyi: I'm deeply impressed by several distinctive features. First, President Xi places profound emphasis on integrating traditional Chinese philosophies into his speeches. He frequently cites classical references. For example, when he encouraged young people to study hard, he referenced multiple ancient Chinese idioms that characterize those notably industrious individuals from history. When translated effectively, these idioms provide foreign readers with a sense of familiarity and easy comprehension. Another distinctive feature is rooted in his experience of spending seven years in rural areas. As a result, his language often mirrors the daily lives of the ordinary people. Translating his addresses feels akin to articulating something from our own surroundings, which leaves a profound impression on us. Diplomacy Talk: As the world pays more attention to us, how can we talk in a way that more people from other countries can understand and agree with us? Huang Youyi: What's the world population? According to the United Nations, there are 8 billion people. The population of China is 1.4 billion, and Chinese is the most spoken language. However, the International Federation of Translators classifies Chinese as a non-common language, suggesting that Chinese is scarcely spoken outside of China. When we share our stories, we're addressing the 6.6 billion people who aren't familiar with Chinese. So, how do they perceive things? What are their information sources? When you speak to them about China, you must first grasp the way they think. You need to step into their shoes. Consider, if I were a Westerner, how would I look at things? How would I perceive things if I were from Africa, Latin America, or other Asian countries? Translation requires understanding first. For example, if I want to translate something about China, I must first discern how foreign media depict China. I need to observe how they report on China. I also must contemplate why they pose any particular question regarding China. Their questions may reflect facets of their culture or their nation's circumstances. Thus, I believe the most pivotal aspect is getting a grip on the narrative of foreign countries. Once you grasp it, what you said becomes clear to others. Diplomacy Talk: We've observed that over recent years the global media environment for China has been challenging. From your viewpoint, what strategies could enhance our efforts? Huang Youyi: The challenges we face concerning international public opinion have indeed escalated. Government white papers are typically read by foreign scholars, researchers, and officials who are studying China-related issues. However, the general foreign public may not read them. It's important to engage with the general public through various means. This includes using mediums such as movies, exhibitions, tourism, people-to-people exchanges, forums and academic discussions. Multiple approaches are needed to effectively convey China's viewpoints. We don't need to be concerned that increased communication will lead to more attacks. Some may seek to undermine us, but we should meet challenges head-on using a variety of methods. The key is to use skillful and diplomatic approaches. International communication is about winning hearts and minds and gaining understanding, rather than exchanging accusations and abuses. Diplomacy Talk: With China's development, there is growing international attention to China. However, this increased attention has come with misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Do you think that these challenges are something China must go through in its rise? Huang Youyi: I believe that's indeed the case, and it's unavoidable. Over a decade ago, when former British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited China and gave a speech at a university, he mentioned that China's rise would be very challenging. Why would it be so challenging? I don't think we need to be overly anxious about this. Indeed, we are prepared for such challenges. I believe that there exist two "worlds" characterized by different mindsets and cultural phenomena. One is the developed regions of Europe and North America, where public opinion may not be favorable toward us. Yet, in developing countries, you receive a wholly different impression. For instance, during my visits to Africa and my interactions with its people, I realized there's abundant common ground and mutual interest; they are keen to learn about China. When you recognize other developing countries' eagerness to engage with China, they boost your confidence. There are more and more people who understand us, more friends, and more supporters. Thus you'll realize that these challenges are just part of our growth process. It's no big deal, as we stay on course for continued growth. Diplomacy Talk: Mr. Huang, international relations are, to some extent, related to the translators. How can translators further improve themselves to support diplomatic efforts? Huang Youyi: Indeed, translation plays a crucial role in diplomacy. It's important to accurately convey China's messages, and translators can make significant contribution. For instance, when it comes to translating the term " (major-country diplomacy)," "big power" might be an answer. But as China is a developing country, we do not see ourselves as a "big power." Instead, we consider ourselves a relatively large country. Therefore, we prefer the term "major country." When foreigners do the translation, they often use the term "big power," which can exert immense pressure. In contrast, "major country" means that we are simply an important member of the global community. There are many more cases like that. Translation involves taking a stance, and in diplomatic translation, translators represent not themselves but their country. The goal is to select words that best deliver the original meaning and also coincide with the country's position. Diplomacy Talk: Mr. Huang, you've mentioned that "everyone needs to engage in public diplomacy." How should we interpret this statement? Huang Youyi: Public diplomacy is an essential complement to government-to-government diplomacy, especially in the era of globalization. For instance, numerous Chinese companies have ventured overseas. It's not only about economy, but also about promoting Chinese management experience and culture. This is a form of public diplomacy. Some scholars argue that the first ambassadors of public diplomacy are, in fact, taxi drivers. Why? When international visitors arrive at an airport, the first local person they typically engage with is a taxi driver. The politeness and courtesy of the taxi driver can leave a lasting impression on these foreigners, shaping their initial perception of the host country. Public diplomacy has become increasingly significant, primarily due to economic globalization and the extensive interactions between people from different countries. Public diplomacy is a responsibility shared by everyone, and it offers opportunities to anyone who interacts with foreigners. If you have contact with people from other countries, you can engage in public diplomacy. Diplomacy Talk: I've noticed that foreign media refer to you as one of China's most senior translators. While artificial intelligence and machine translation are advancing rapidly, they certainly won't replace experts like you. However, what impact do you think they will have on ordinary translators? Huang Youyi: New translation technologies, such as intelligent language processing, will undoubtedly supplant translators for a significant portion of low-level, repetitive translation tasks, whether translating from Chinese to other languages or vice versa. The newest models, like ChatGPT, rely on generative AI language. Their core principle is that they initially learn from vast language datasets, and subsequently, they offer multiple options to deliver the optimal translation. This process is rapid and frequently more effective than human translation, especially when translating from foreign languages into Chinese. Because there is a plethora of Chinese language data available. For example, if you want it to translate a cultural phenomenon into Chinese, it simply needs to learn from Chinese language data. Nevertheless, when it comes to showcasing China to the global audience, we don't produce all the English and other foreign language data; they stem from English-speaking countries and other foreign sources, mirroring their perspectives. Some researchers have conducted experiments using keywords like "the Communist Party of China" as an example. When you ask ChatGPT in Chinese, it tends to provide answers based on Chinese language data, which we are familiar with and consider objective. Conversely, if you pose it in English or other foreign languages, its replies often echo foreign viewpoints. In this context, if you wish machines to help, you must first help the machines. It means that Chinese people must translate a considerable volume of Chinese language and culture into foreign languages, thereby creating foreign language corpus that reflects Chinese perspectives. This corpus can subsequently serve as a foundation for intelligent machines to learn from, enabling them to assist us in presenting China to a global audience. As machines evolve, the demand intensifies for human intervention to supply them with language data for learning. In turn, these machines can support us. This challenge is notably acute in the realm of translating from Chinese to other languages. When it comes to political discourse and traditional Chinese culture, there often isn't a sufficient foreign language corpus. Therefore, it's Chinese translators who are entrusted with feeding the corpus. Diplomacy Talk: What would you say if you had the opportunity to introduce China to the world in just a few simple sentences? Huang Youyi: First, I'd like to emphasize that China boasts a long history, which is predominantly characterized by peace and the pursuit of a good life. We have never harbored colonial ambitions, so engaging with China is safe. Second, I hope the global community would learn about China's culture. At its core is the Hehe culture that prioritizes harmony, mutual understanding and accommodation. A deeper exploration of China's history will reveal a nation that is truly worth building trust and fostering relations with. Diplomacy Talk http://en.chinadiplomacy.org.cn/node_8028184.html Diplomacy Talk | China's shift from passive listener to proactive storyteller http://en.chinadiplomacy.org.cn/2023-11/27/content_116841384.html SOURCE chinadiplomacy.org.cn NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- ACON Investments, L.L.C. today announced that it has named Doug Gillespie as Chief Executive Officer of haircare company Beauty by Imagination, Inc. (BBI). BBI is the parent company for industry-leading haircare brands Wet Brush, Goody, Ouidad, Bio Ionic, and Curls, among others. Gillespie succeeds current CEO Francesca Raminella, who joined the company in 2018. Doug Gillespie, Chief Executive Officer of Beauty by Imagination Mr. Gillespie brings more than three decades of consumer products experience to BBI. He began his career in senior marketing roles at Fortune 500 companies including GE, Frito-Lay and Brown-Forman, before progressing to the top leadership role at four separate middle market CPG companies. "Doug brings a wealth of relevant experience and a track record of success in consumer-driven businesses to this role. We are excited to see him leverage his expertise in leading multi-brand portfolio companies to propel BBI's next phase of growth and innovation," said Suma Kulkarni, a member of BBI's Board of Directors and Partner at ACON Investments. "We also would like to thank Francesca for her many contributions over the years and we wish her all the best in the future," added Anjali Jolly, another member of BBI's Board of Directors and Partner at ACON Investments. "The BBI team has done a great job establishing an Omni-channel platform of iconic hair care brands with myriad opportunities ahead," said Doug Gillespie. "I am eager to apply my skills and experience to continue accelerating BBI's top and bottom-line growth." ABOUT BEAUTY BY IMAGINATION Beauty by Imagination ("BBI") is a leading manufacturer of haircare products, hair tools and accessories. Based in New York, the BBI portfolio encompasses some of the industry's most recognizable brands and best-performing products, including Goody, Wet Brush, Bio Ionic, Ouidad, TWIST, CURLS, and Ace. These brands promise quality and innovation, delivering beautiful results to professionals and consumers alike. For more information, visit www.bbicompany.com. About ACON Investments, LLC: ACON Investments, L.L.C. is a Washington, DC-based international private equity investment firm that manages private equity funds and special purpose partnerships that make investments in the United States, Latin America and Europe. Founded in 1996, ACON has responsibility for managing approximately $6.2 billion of capital. ACON has professionals in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Bogota and Madrid. For more information, visit www.aconinvestments.com . SOURCE Beauty by Imagination ? Ejecutivo aprueba decreto legislativo que incrementa hasta por 15 anos las penas por bloqueo de carreteras Premier Otarola hizo un llamado a las autoridades competentes para que apliquen el nuevo marco penal. ??? https://t.co/f2DlI92OFk pic.twitter.com/Z0RT17Z9nD MILAN, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Enfinity Global Inc, a leader in renewable energy, today announced that it has closed 118 million in financing for the construction of 101 MW in four utility-scale solar power plants located in the region of Lazio (Italy), which are expected to become operational in 2024. UniCredit, BayernLB, and Siemens Financial Services through Siemens Bank have acted as mandated lead arrangers for each project financing through a club deal structure. The financing will provide 77 million of non-recourse senior debt, 41 million of VAT financing, and LC facilities for PPAs and PV modules. The positive environmental impact of these four plants will translate into the production of 172 GWh of clean electricity per year, enough to power 64,000 Italian homes and offset 69,000 tons of CO2 emissions, equivalent to the amount sequestered by 3,100 mature trees. "We are delighted to partner with UniCredit, BayernLB, and Siemens Bank for this initial set of projects as we build our existing 4 GW portfolio in Italy", said Carlos Domenech, CEO of Enfinity Global. "We are pleased to bring competitive clean energy to Italy in support of the country's net energy needs and carbon emission reduction targets." Enfinity Global is currently building four additional projects in Italy, totaling 134 MW, in the province of Viterbo (Lazio), for which it previously closed 165 million in financing. "We expect to invest 3 billion euros over the next 3 years in Italy as we continue to advance our projects", commented Julio Fournier Fisas, CEO for Europe of Enfinity Global. "Italy is a core strategic market for us, and we are looking to continue to grow our existing portfolio through in-house development, co-development agreements with partners, and acquisitions." "In line with our purpose to empower communities to progress, at UniCredit, we strive for a meaningful progress towards a more sustainable, inclusive, and equitable society. We are therefore proud of sustaining Enfinity investment plans in Italy, as they perfectly fit our ESG strategy and our commitment to favoring the transition to a low-carbon economy, based on green energy, for the benefit of the communities we serve" commented Marco Bortoletti, Regional Manager Lombardia at UniCredit. "BayernLB is delighted to further broaden our contribution to Italy's clean energy ambitions with the successful closing of the second transaction for Enfinity Global in Italy," commented Karin Schramm, Sector Head Renewable Energy at Bayern LB. "The increasing emphasis on grid parity projects reinforces our dedication to fostering an emission-free energy system and accelerating the energy transition. We congratulate Enfinity Global for their relentless efforts in promoting a cleaner and more sustainable energy landscape." "Financing plays a key role in bringing large-scale ventures to life, especially when investing in capital-intensive infrastructure like solar power plants. Significant energy projects like this emphasize the critical role of well-structured financing solutions. We are proud to continue our support as a leading financer for renewables and enabler on the way to a more sustainable future," commented Siobhan Smyth, CEO of Siemens Bank GmbH and Head of Project and Structured Debt EMEA/Asia, Siemens Financial Services. About Enfinity Global Enfinity Global Inc., together with its subsidiaries, is a US-based leading renewable energy and sustainability services company established in 2018. The company owns a portfolio of 20 GW of renewable energy and storage projects, including operational assets, under construction, and in different stages of development. With offices across US, Europe, Japan, and India, the company aims to make a significant contribution to a sustainable net zero carbon economy. Enfinity's leadership team is one of the most experienced global teams in renewables and brings over $37 billion of financing experience in the renewable energy sector with over 15 GW of developed and acquired solar and wind assets. www.enfinity.global / Follow Enfinity Global on LinkedIn About UniCredit UniCredit is a pan-European Commercial Bank with a unique service offering in Italy, Germany, Central and Eastern Europe. Our purpose is to empower communities to progress, delivering the best-in-class for all stakeholders, unlocking the potential of our clients and our people across Europe. We serve over 15 million customers worldwide. They are at the heart of what we do in all our markets. UniCredit is organized in four core regions and two product factories, Corporate and Individual Solutions. This allows us to be close to our clients and use the scale of the entire Group for developing and offering the best products across all our markets. Digitalization and our commitment to ESG principles are key enablers for our service. They help us deliver excellence to our stakeholders and creating a sustainable future for our clients, our communities, and our people. About BayernLB As a streamlined specialized bank, BayernLB is a major investment lender for the Bavarian and German economies. It is committed to progress. Its customers companies, savings banks, institutional investors, and the public sector are at the heart of its sustainable approach. In its corporate client business BayernLB focuses on forward-looking sectors like mobility, energy, technology, construction & basic resources and manufacturing & engineering. The Bank helps companies from these industries in particular to successfully develop their business models. As a real estate financier, the BayernLB Group offers 360-degree know-how across the entire value chain of the real estate business and in a wide variety of asset classes. BayernLB is the central bank to the Bavarian savings banks and for decades has been a proven partner to these institutions and to other savings banks throughout Germany. The Group subsidiary and tech bank DKB provides its more than 4.5 million customers with an excellent client experience and outstanding digital solutions. BayernLB is owned by the Free State of Bavaria and the Association of Bavarian Savings Banks. About Siemens Financial Services Siemens Financial Services (SFS) the B2B financing arm of Siemens provides financing that makes a difference. At SFS, we empower customers around the globe to access technology with purpose and increase their competitiveness. Based on our unique combination of financial expertise, risk management and industry know-how we provide tailored financing solutions including flexible leasing and working capital products, project-related and structured financing, corporate lending, equity investments, finance advisory, as well as trade and receivables financing. With highly experienced and passionate teams in 20+ countries, SFS paves the way for industrial productivity, smart infrastructure and sustainable mobility, facilitating the energy transition and enabling high-quality healthcare. Supporting the Siemens DEGREE framework, SFS is one of the leading providers in financing greenfield renewable projects. www.siemens.com/finance. SOURCE Enfinity Global The nonprofit organization awards outstanding students from veterans and their families pursuing a degree in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM), with Anderson Espinal Gervacio joining this year's roster of high-potential scholarship winners MIAMI, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Louis Hernandez Jr.'s Foundation For A Bright Future ("For A Bright Future") ("FABF"), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the needs of underrepresented and underprivileged children through education, healthcare, the arts, and youth leadership development, awarded its Veterans and Families Scholarship to Anderson Espinal Gervacio, 24, of Virginia. For A Bright Future has awarded its Veterans and Families Scholarship to Anderson Espinal Gervacio, 24, of Virginia. The charitable organization was founded by Louis Hernandez, Jr., CEO of Black Dragon Capital, a multi-phased investment firm focused on advanced technologies in high-growth segments that strengthen economic stability within communities. Committed to illuminating the path toward success, For A Bright Future provides scholarships emphasizing STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics), financial technology, healthcare, and education. These opportunities are especially tailored to uplift students from underserved demographics, including those from single-parent households and families with military backgrounds. "The American Dream, a beacon of hope and opportunity, is safeguarded by the unwavering dedication of our military heroes. Our scholarship program is committed to empowering veterans and their families with the necessary financial backing and educational opportunities to uplift their lives. The legacy of service in my family, from my father, wife, and many in my family, instilled in me profound gratitude for the sacrifices made by our servicemen and servicewomen. We look forward to championing such extraordinary members of our military family, and we applaud Anderson on his remarkable accomplishment," said Louis Hernandez, Jr., Founder and Chairman of the Board, FABF. Anderson Espinal Gervacio is currently majoring in nursing at Old Dominion University. His choice of career path stems from a deep-rooted desire to affect the well-being of others positively. Gervacio believes that becoming a nurse will grant him the unique opportunity to provide compassionate care and support to the members of his community during their most vulnerable moments. Having been in the army for a few years himself, Gervacio views a career in healthcare as the culmination of all the skills he learned during his tenure, which will ultimately allow him to serve his community once again. "I am deeply honored and grateful to receive the 2023 Veterans & Families Scholarship from the For A Bright Future Foundation. This award not only eases the financial burden on my educational journey but also reaffirms the belief in my potential," says Anderson Espinal Gervacio. "For A Bright Future paves the way for promising students like Anderson to overcome obstacles and shine. His fortitude in pushing boundaries to contribute significantly to the community is commendable. As he embarks on this educational journey, we extend our best wishes to him," said Luis Hernandez, Sr., US Navy veteran and FABF Scholarship Committee Member. Every year, the foundation receives a growing number of applications to review. This year, we received a landmark total of 3,900 applications. Our deepest appreciation extends to Susie Hernandez, Board Member and Chair of the Scholarship Committee. We would also like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of volunteers on the scholarship selection committee. The Veterans and Families Scholarship selection team includes: Luis Hernandez, Sr. , Retd. Computer & Science Prof., University of CA , Retd. Computer & Science Prof., University of CA Delbert Parks , President of Technology, Sinclair Broadcast Group Our deepest gratitude goes to the operational team under the proficient leadership of Gina Rogoto, our Director of Operations. Their remarkable efforts in identifying potential candidates nationwide and streamlining the selection process are truly commendable. Contact: Gina Rogoto, Director of Operations and Development For A Bright Future Email: [email protected] About For A Bright Future For A Bright Future is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization dedicated to supporting the needs of underrepresented and underprivileged children through education, healthcare, the arts, and youth leadership development. Our initiatives provide equal opportunity for all children to have the tools and opportunities to fulfill their life goals and become constructive members of our global community. Learn more at www.forabrightfuturefoundation.org . To learn more or support For A Bright Future educational programs, please visit our donation page at www.forabrightfuturefoundation.org . Follow us on LinkedIn , X , Facebook , and Instagram . SOURCE Louis Hernandez Jr.'s Foundation For A Bright Future NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Girl Rising announces the release of an open letter authored by the 2023 Fellows of the Future Rising program, addressed to leaders of member states gathering for the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP28). The letter emphasizes the need for an inclusive and cooperative negotiation process and urges leaders to prioritize climate education globally. It also calls on developed countries to fulfill their commitment to contribute an annual $100 billion USD to support climate activities in developing nations, particularly for adaptation and resilience. Additionally, the letter seeks urgent assistance for those living in regions facing imminent challenges from extreme heat, droughts and floods caused by climate change and El Nino. Girl Rising "We are calling on governments and the private sector to listen to the voices of people from marginalized communities, especially youth, women, Indigenous peoples, people of color, and refugees. At a time when the climate crisis is depriving millions of children of their right to education, countries' leaders need to engage all of their citizens in creating solutions, as well as providing financial and legal support," said Future Rising Fellow Maria Yaschenko, who along with Collins Busuru, was a key author of the letter. Maria is a hydro-meteorologist and environmental educator who provides education access to vulnerable populations through online courses. Collins is a wildlife biologist based in Amboseli, Kenya, leading a project teaching conversation and ecosystem restoration skills to adolescent Maasai girls. "The Future Rising Fellows are at the forefront, leading innovative solutions to combat climate change within their communities that advance both gender equity and girls' access to education. We support their call for worldwide investment in climate education, which will play a pivotal role in our ability to address the climate crisis," said Christina Lowery, Girl Rising CEO. "It is key to developing the knowledge, skills, and innovation required for adaptation and mitigation efforts, ensuring a better life for all." Disasters, many associated with extreme weather events caused by climate change, are increasing the number of displaced people each year. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Portal , disasters triggered 32.6 million new internal displacements in 2022, making it the highest figure in a decade as well as 41 per cent higher than the annual average of the past decade. Children make up less than one third of the global population, but more than 41 per cent among the world's refugees in 2022 according to UNICEF . "Climate change poses an escalating barrier to young people's education, especially girls who are disproportionately impacted. Yet, ensuring that young people's right to education is protected, and that climate mitigation and adaptation are fully integrated into education plans is a key to the world's ability to address this challenge. We hope the COP28 leaders heed the call of the Future Rising Fellows," said Anna Hall, Girl Rising Chief Storytelling Officer and head of the Future Rising program. Contact: Anna Hall, Chief Storytelling Officer, [email protected] Virginia Terry, Director of Strategic Communications, [email protected], 646-369-0442 About Girl Rising Girl Rising uses the power of storytelling to change the way the world values girls and their education. Working closely with local partners, we deliver culturally adapted programming to millions of adolescent girls and boys in eight countries, building voice, confidence and agency. We work with thousands of educators, parents and community members to address powerful social norms that hold girls back. Girl Rising collaborates with innovative educational partners in the countries where we work, providing training, networking and direct financial support, and adapting our educational resources to meet local needs. About the Future Rising Fellowship Girl Rising launched the Future Rising Fellowship program in 2021 to support emerging young leaders who are working to advance climate justice, girls' education and gender equity. Through this annual Fellowship, Girl Rising supports a cohort of 10-12 young adults from around the world with leadership training, network-building, speaking opportunities and financial assistance. Girl Rising also provides storytelling training and technical support so that each Fellow completes a story in a medium of their choice about their work. SOURCE Girl Rising Startup uses automation and machine learning models to solve access risk and reduce inefficiencies in the access approvals process SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Harmonize , the intelligent employee lifecycle management platform for access and compliance, today announced the launch of its platform for CISO, CSO, and IT leaders seeking easier processes to alleviate security risk. Harmonize solves identity lifecycle management with automation using AI and ML models to help SMBs and enterprises save valuable time and cost. The software plugs the gaps in identity management by automating entitlement analysis to provide more contextual insights for decision-making by the IT and security admins. Harmonize is the connective tissue using employee data to make intelligent decisions, replacing a traditionally manual process for access requests. Harmonize The global average cost of a data breach for organizations has increased 15% over the last three years, reaching $4.4 million in 2023, with over half planning to increase security investment, according to data from IBM. The majority of data breaches for high-level enterprises are caused by overprovisioned access. The shift to remote-first work during the global pandemic saw an unprecedented amount of remote access being granted for both employees and vendors for organizations across many different industries. When overprovisioned access is granted, it can lead to an increase of security breaches and malicious insiders. The static systems used to keep track of these forms of access have failed to keep up with the intelligence and scale needed to manage these requests efficiently. Integrating Harmonize as an employee lifecycle management platform allows small businesses and medium-sized enterprises to do more with less. Leaner teams need software that is easy to integrate into existing systems and simple to maintain. Harmonize was built with those end-users in mind to save precious man-hours by streamlining decision making processes through persona configurations. Additionally, surfacing access anomalies in real-time as opposed to a traditional, longer, access review process provides a more secure environment. "Our team has built a Harmonize-like application in some form or another at every company we've ever been with. As former operators, we all have a soft spot in the space to finally create a tool that addresses the issues we were previously faced with," says Harmonize CEO, Johnny Kinder. "Many of the tools currently available cater to large-scale organizations, so SMBs have had to make due with using disparate tools to piece together their IGA process. Harmonize gives these mid-level organizations the power to shore up their identity management." Harmonize adds value by offering 3 distinct solutions that can either be used individually or complimentary as an all-in-one platform for businesses: Identity, Governance, & Administration: ML models work behind the scenes to determine the right amount of access that should be applied to individual employees. This just in time approach allows organizations to stay on top of access or denials for maximum security and efficiency. Employee Onboarding & Offboarding : This time-consuming process is now consolidated to a single platform to track, grant, or revoke access as employees onboard, change roles, or offboard entirely. Connect to 100+ HRIS / ATS systems to seamlessly move employee data to downstream IT systems. Audit trails are automatically recorded to simplify the compliance process. Offboarding offboard HRIS ATS Mobile Device Management: Powered by Fleet Device Management, Harmonize MDM seamlessly integrates with the employee lifecycle providing features like "Lock device at time of offboarding ". Leveraging osquery on the backend allows organizations to have critical telemetry about their devices across macOS , Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS to ensure constant compliance. Harmonize was founded by seasoned IT veterans with extensive backgrounds in IT security who know the nuances of identity and employee access. CEO Johnny Kinder and Head of Product, Dean Clark Jr. have a combined experience of over 25 years working on IT employee lifecycle management. The process of granting and verifying access has long been a pain point in the IT space that members of the Harmonize team are very familiar with. Harmonize was built to democratize IT automation and intelligence to solve the problem once and for all. "We have a myriad of systems, both unique and off-the-shelf, needing seamless connections and centralized control to help with our identity sprawl. Even with heavy configuration and investment into our SSO provider, there were still many manual tasks that needed to happen," says Simplebet Director of SRE Max Neumann. "Harmonize acts as the connective tissue between our IT and People systems, flowing employee data across all our integrations, transforming complexity into opportunity, and enabling us to scale with confidence. We are excited about the future of the platform." To learn more and request a demo, visit: https://harmonize.io About Harmonize Founded in 2022 by a team of IT, security, and compliance experts from WePay/JPMorgan, Harmonize integrates disparate business systems across IT, HR, and others, to streamline the employee lifecycle from beginning to end. Harmonize understands the problem from an operator level and knows exactly what administrators are looking for. Existing identity management tools are time-consuming, inefficient, and can leave organizations prone to human error. Harmonize uses ML models to make identity and access management automatic, instantaneous, and accurate. Press Contact Rick Medeiros [email protected] 510-556-8517 SOURCE Harmonize CHICAGO, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Katten announced today that the firm's Chicago office managing partner and former federal prosecutor Gil M. Soffer has been tapped to serve as the firm's new Chair, effective July 1, 2024. "Gil's excellence and achievement as an attorney and a leader are indisputable. I have seen him at work for many years and believe wholeheartedly he is the right person to help successfully steer the firm into the future," said current Chair Roger P. Furey, who will step down when he completes his second four-year term in the role in June. "I aim to help build on the progress the firm has made, continuing to deliver the highest levels of client service..." Post this Katten's Gil M. Soffer has been tapped to serve as the firm's new Chair, effective July 1, 2024. "I have no doubt the next chapter of the firm will be in very capable hands with Gil and Noah," Furey added, referring to Katten CEO Noah Heller. Soffer has been managing partner of Katten's Chicago office for a decade. He co-chairs the Litigation department, is a member of the firm's Executive Committee and Board of Directors, and manages a thriving White Collar and Internal Investigations practice. Before joining Katten in 2000, Soffer served as a federal prosecutor for six years in Chicago. In 2008, he left the firm briefly to serve as Associate Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice (DOJ). During that time, he oversaw the President's Corporate Fraud Task Force and was a key drafter of DOJ's Corporate Monitor Principles and Corporate Charging Principles. During his time at Katten, Soffer has been tapped for several high-profile positions, including global corporate compliance monitor in 2016, and a member of the Racial Justice Diversity Committee for the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in 2020. The next year, Soffer was selected as adjudications officer an unusual appointment in the United Auto Workers monitorship, and in 2022 he was named independent monitor for a five-year term in a global opioid settlement agreement. Soffer and Furey will work together in the coming months on the leadership transition. During his tenure as Chair since assuming the position in 2016, Furey has fostered a culture of resilience and fortitude in addressing challenges stemming from the global pandemic, widespread social unrest and geopolitical instability, and has helped strengthen and grow the firm in areas of strategic importance. Furey played a leading role in establishing Katten's Dallas office in 2018, which has grown from seven founding partners to more than 65 attorneys in a range of practices aligned with Katten's strategic focus. "Roger and Noah have been a top-notch team, growing the firm, recruiting the best talent and guiding Katten through unprecedented times," Soffer said. "I aim to help build on the progress the firm has made, continuing to deliver the highest levels of client service despite the hurdles cleared and those to come." Katten is a full-service law firm with approximately 700 attorneys in locations across the United States and in London and Shanghai. Clients seeking sophisticated, high-value legal services turn to Katten for counsel locally, nationally and internationally. The firm's core areas of practice include corporate, financial markets and funds, insolvency and restructuring, intellectual property, litigation, real estate, structured finance and securitization, transactional tax planning, private credit and private wealth. Katten represents public and private companies in numerous industries, as well as a number of government and nonprofit organizations and individuals. For more information, visit katten.com . SOURCE Katten HONG KONG, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Even with the ever-changing situation, technological innovation is still the most critical component for biopharmaceutical companies' long-term development. This continuous innovation keeps companies up to date and promotes the evolution of R&D and the success of commercialization. Recently, Viva's portfolio companies have new updates. Keep reading for more details. Phenomic Enters Strategic Collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim to Discover Novel Targets for Stroma-Rich Cancer Therapies, and Enters into Strategic Research Collaboration with Astellas for Solid Tumor Cell Therapies TORONTO & WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--On Nov. 29th, Phenomic AI ("Phenomic"), invested and incubated by Viva BioInnovator (VBI), announced that they have entered into a strategic collaboration and licensing agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim to discover targets important in stroma-rich cancers. The partners will leverage Phenomic's expertise in target identification and stromal biology based on its scTx single-cell transcriptomics platform which will greatly enhance Boehringer's efforts to develop first-in-class medicines to transform the lives of people with cancer by delivering meaningful advances with the ultimate goal to cure a range of cancers. Phenomic will receive upfront and near-term payments of approximately $9 million including research funding and collaboration milestones. Phenomic is also eligible to receive more than USD $500 million in licensing fees as well as clinical, regulatory and commercial milestones in addition to royalties on future product sales. On Nov. 30th, Phenomic has entered into a strategic research collaboration with Astellas Pharma Inc., "Astellas" through Xyphos Biosciences, Inc. (a wholly owned subsidiary of Astellas). For this collaboration, Phenomic and Astellas will explore the ability of antibodies, developed by Phenomic and directed at a novel target of the tumor stroma identified with Phenomic's scTx platform, to enhance cell therapy approaches for the treatment of solid tumors. Under the terms of the agreement, Phenomic will receive an upfront payment, full research funding, and a milestone payment. Astellas will receive a first right to negotiate a license to these antibodies during the term of the agreement. AmacaThera Closes Series A Extension to Advance Clinical Development of Long Acting, Localized, Non-Opioid Therapeutics to Improve Post-Surgery Patient Care Toronto, ON AmacaThera, invested and incubated by Viva BioInnovator (VBI), is a leader in the development of novel injectable, localized therapeutics based upon its AmacaGel delivery platform. Recently they announced the closing of a CAD$4.0 million financing round, with a new lead investor, supported by existing investors; BDC Capital's Women in Technology Venture Fund, Inveready, Lumira Ventures, StandUp Ventures, and MaRS IAF. The proceeds will be used to accelerate the clinical development of the lead clinical candidate, AMT-143, and also to advance multiple pipeline programs targeting the local, injectable, sustained release market. The Phase II clinical trial application of VVN461 for the treatment of postoperative inflammation in cataract was approved by the U.S. FDA, VivaVision Ranks on 2023 Top 100 Chinese Healthcare Front-Runners List, and Offically Opens its New Neadquarters in Wenzou Recently, VivaVision, an innovative ophthalmic drug company, announced that the FDA approved the Phase II clinical trial application (IND) of VVN461, the company's self-developed drug, for the treatment of postoperative inflammation after cataract. VVN461 is a potent JAK1 immunomodulator independently developed by VivaVision, and there is increasing evidence showing that the JAK-STAT signaling pathway is essential for inflammation and immune response. VVN461 can inhibit multiple inflammatory cytokine pathways with high activity to treat postoperative inflammation of cataracts. The results of human pharmacokinetic studies showed that VVN461 ophthalmic solution had low exposure in plasma, indicating that VVN461 ophthalmic solution had a high safety profile due to low systemic toxicity while exerting local anti-inflammatory effects. Besides, VivaVision was named on the "2023 Top 100 Chinese Healthcare Front-Runners List", released in the 2023 BioShanghai Biopharmaceutical Industry Investment Forum and Future Medical Industry Forum. Genhouse Bio's SHP2 Inhibitor GH21 Combined with EGFR Inhibitor Osimertinib Approved for Clinical Trial On November 20, 2023, in Suzhou, China VBI portfolio company Genhouse Bio announced that its novel protein tyrosine phosphatase SHP2 allosteric inhibitor GH21, in combination with the orally administered epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitor osimertinib, has received NMPA approval for clinical trial in China. Genhouse Bio is dedicated to developing the next generation of global anti-tumor small molecule drugs using a combination technology platform. Based on in vitro and in vivo pre-clinical studies, GH21, when used as a monotherapy and/or in combination with other anti-tumor drugs, is effective against various solid tumors with EGFR mutations. Currently, GH21 is undergoing Phase I/II clinical trials in both China and the United States, with the clinical trials in the U.S. led by strategic partner HuYa Bio-International. GH21 has demonstrated favorable pharmacokinetics and safety profiles, and has shown efficacy even at low doses. Arthrosi to Present Positive Phase 2 Data for its Novel Selective Urat1 Inhibitor AR882 in Patients with Tophaceous Gout at ACR Convergence 2023 Arthrosi Therapeutics, Inc. (Arthrosi), invested and incubated by Viva BioInnovator (VBI), is a clinical-stage biotechnology company. Recently, they announced new clinical data from its phase 2 AR882-203 study in the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) Convergence 2023 meeting, the world's largest and most prestigious rheumatology conference, including a presentation, named "AR882, an Efficacious and Selective URAT1 Inhibitor for Patients with Chronic Gouty Arthritis and Subcutaneous Tophi: Results from a Global, Prospective, Proof-of-Concept Trial Using Dual Energy Computed Tomography" and three additional posters. In the forthcoming late-breaking oral presentation, Dr. Robert Keenan MD, MPH, MBA, Chief Medical Officer of Arthrosi, will unveil compelling new clinical findings from the phase 2 trial. The data showcases the strong efficacy of AR882, demonstrating significant reduction of tophi, crystal burden, flare rates, in addition to lowering sUA among patients suffering from tophaceous gout. AceLink Announces First Patient Dosed in Phase 2 Trial of AL01211 in Fabry Disease NEWARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AceLink Therapeutics, Inc., invested and incubated by Viva BioInnovator (VBI), is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing the next generation of oral substrate reduction therapies (SRTs). On Nov. 1st, 2023, they announced that the first patient has been dosed with AL01211 in its Phase 2 trial in China in patients with Fabry disease. AL01211 is a novel, oral, non-brain penetrant glucosylceramide synthase (GCS) inhibitor being developed to treat glycosphingolipid storage diseases, including Fabry Disease and Type 1 Gaucher Disease. In Phase 1 trials, AL01211 was generally well tolerated without significant adverse events. Triumvira Immunologics Announces First Patient Dosed in Phase II of TACTIC-2 Cell Therapy Trial for the Treatment of HER2+ Gastric and GEJ Cancers AUSTIN, Texas and HAMILTON, ON and SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Oct. 26, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Triumvira Immunologics, invested and incubated by Viva BioInnovator (VBI), is a clinical-stage company developing novel, targeted autologous and allogeneic T cell therapeutics that co-opt the natural biology of T cells to treat patients with solid tumors. Recently they announced that the first patient has been dosed in Phase II of its Phase I/II study TACTIC-2 (NCT04727151) investigating the safety and efficacy of autologous TAC-T cell lead asset, TAC01-HER2, in targeting HER2 in relapsed or refractory gastric and gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) tumors. TAC01-HER2 is a novel cell therapy based on genetically engineered autologous T cells expressing a T-cell Antigen Coupler (TAC) that recognizes human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). Deka Biosciences Closes USD $20 Million Series B2 Financing Led by MPM BioImpact GERMANTOWN, Md., Sept. 28, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Maryland-based biotech company Deka Biosciences ("Deka") today announced that it has successfully closed a USD $20 Million Series B2 financing with a syndicate of life science investors led by MPM BioImpact, and joined by additional investors including Leaps by Bayer, Lumira Ventures, O-Bio (Echo Investment Capital), Viva BioInnovator, Alexandria Venture Investments, Amana Investments, Plains Ventures, ATEM Capital and CEO John Mumm. The proceeds of the financing will support the advancement of Deka's pipeline and drug product manufacturing as they continue clinical trials following the receipt of a notice to proceed letter from the FDA for their investigational new drug (IND) application to evaluate DK210 (EGFR). Additionally, Detlev Biniszkiewicz, Ph.D. of MPM-BioImpact, will join the Deka board. About Phenomic AI Phenomic AI ("Phenomic") is a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to overcoming the tumor stroma, a complex barrier that drives poor outcomes in the majority of solid tumors. The company is applying its proprietary single-cell transcriptomics platform, known as scTx, to advance a first-of-its-kind approach to solid cancer drug discovery and development. scTx identifies novel drug targets and provides new insights into previously inaccessible tumor biology. Through its unique platform, Phenomic is developing a robust portfolio of potential first-in-class drug candidates to treat challenging stroma-rich solid cancers. The company was founded by pioneering artificial intelligence experts and experienced drug developers and is led by a world-class team with deep expertise in immuno-oncology, cancer, stromal biology, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Learn more about the Phenomic team, platform and pipeline at www.phenomic.ai. About AmacaThera AmacaThera Inc., a resident company of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JLABS @ Toronto is a clinical-stage company transforming therapeutics to make a difference in patient health. AmacaGel, our unique, injectable hydrogel platform, provides localized sustained drug delivery for improved patient outcomes across multiple therapeutic areas, including post-surgical pain management, cancer and other hard-to-reach, unmet medical needs. For more information, visit www.amacathera.ca. About VivaVision Biotech VivaVision is a clinical stage pharmaceutical company focused on best-in-class and first-in-class therapies for ocular diseases. VivaVision's current pipeline includes VVN001 for treating dry eye syndrome, VVN539 for the treatment for Glaucoma or Ocular Hypertension, and VVN461 for the treatment of non-infectious ocular inflammation of Uveitis. VivaVision is also engaged in discovery and development of novel therapies for the treatment of other anterior and posterior eye diseases. For more info., visit www.vivavisionbio.com. About Genhouse Bio Genhouse Bio is a clinical-stage biotech company focusing on the development of global next-generation anti-cancer therapeutics, headquartered in the Suzhou Industry Park . The senior management team of Genhouse has multiple years of experience in new drug development, clinical research and corporate management. Genhouse has a clear focus on original innovation and overcoming those "undruggable" targets. Genhouse has established intergrated in-house drug development platforms. With these platforms, Genhouse has started to build a highly innovative anti-cancer pipeline and out-licensed the ex-China rights of its SHP2 inhibitor GH21 to HUYABIO , an international biotech company. Genhouse will continue to advance more innovative pipeline programs into global development. About Arthrosi Arthrosi Therapeutics, Inc., headquartered in San Diego, CA, was established in 2018. The company's goal is to develop potential treatments aimed at uric acid levels and minimizing joint damage for gout patients. Arthrosi's research and development have produced end of phase 2b data. For more information about Arthrosi, please visit www.arthrosi.com. About AceLink Therapeutics, Inc. Founded in 2018, AceLink Therapeutics is an innovative biopharma startup focusing on developing safe and effective medicines to address genetic diseases with high unmet needs. The company's initial focus is to develop novel therapeutics for Fabry disease. For more information, please visit www.acelinktherapeutics.com. About Triumvira Immunologics Triumvira Immunologics, Inc. ("Triumvira") is a leading clinical-stage solid tumor cell therapy company developing unique, non-gene edited, first-in-class targeted autologous and allogeneic T cell therapeutics that co-opt the natural biology of T cells to treat patients with solid tumors. The company's proprietary T cell Antigen Coupler (TAC) technology is a robust and versatile platform that activates natural T cell functions differently from cell therapies such as CAR-T and engineered T cell receptor (TCR) therapies. Triumvira is developing a broad pipeline targeting promising tumor-associated antigens such as HER2, Claudin 18.2, GUCY2C and GPC3. Triumvira is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with research facilities in Hamilton, Ontario, and GMP manufacturing facilities in South San Francisco, California. About Deka Biosciences Deka Biosciences is a biotech company led by entrepreneur Dr. John Mumm, who is backed by a team of experienced academic, biopharma and CDMO innovators with expertise in drug discovery, product development, characterization, and testing. Deka has developed disease specific Diakines designed to maximize patient benefits through improved pharmacokinetics / pharmacodynamics function by the targeted accumulation of dual and complimentary cytokines into affected tissues. Through developing a better understanding of each patient's immune response to different Diakines, Deka hopes to maximize the impact of its Diakines by building specific targeted therapies for everyone. SOURCE Viva Biotech Holdings PR Summary: Luvme Hair's successful #LUVMEPOPUP event in Brooklyn showcased premium wigs and personalized styling, attracting a significant number of customers. This underscored their steadfast commitment to innovation and top-tier quality in the wig industry. NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Luvme Hair, a leading brand in the hair industry, recently hosted its first-ever event, the Switching It Up Tour #LUVMEPOPUP, held from November 11th to November 13th in Brooklyn, NY. The event proved to be a resounding success, attracting hair enthusiasts and offering an immersive experience showcasing a wide array of Luvme Hair wigs and premium hair care products. luvmehair #LUVMEPOPUP NYC Event Throughout the #LUVMEPOPUP event, attendees had the opportunity to explore Luvme Hair's diverse range of innovative products, including headband wigs, lace front wigs, body wave wigs, and more. These high-quality offerings were showcased alongside personalized styling sessions, further highlighting Luvme Hair's dedication to offering both exceptional products and expert guidance for a complete customer experience. #LUVMEPOPUP event in Brooklyn, New York drew in a large number of customers, all excited to explore the brand's offerings and join in the festivities. Throughout the event, more than 3000 gifts were generously distributed, adding to the overall excitement and joy of the experience. Yolanda, a dedicated Luvme customer for nearly a decade, expressed her admiration for the brand, saying, "I have been a Luvme customer for around 10 years. Luvme started with long and short wigs, but now we have variations including afro, frontal, 360, braided wigs, and various other types that offer women the opportunity to express themselves freely with their hair. There's a range of densities, thicknesses, and even thinness; the quality of the wigs is amazing. You can wash them, color them, condition them, and they all maintain their quality consistently. That's why I continue to choose Luvme." Founder Helena shared her thoughts on the success of the event, saying: "The incredible response to our Switching It Up Tour #LUVMEPOPUP in Brooklyn, New York has been truly remarkable. Witnessing the passion and excitement from our community reaffirms our commitment to delivering exceptional products and experiences. We're thrilled to have connected with so many individuals and are excited about our ongoing innovation in elevating the wig industry." The event's success serves as a testament to Luvme Hair's unwavering commitment to delivering top-tier products and personalized experiences, solidifying its position as a trailblazer in the hair care sector. About Luvme Hair Luvme Hair is a reputable brand in the hair industry, known for its high-quality HD Lace Wigs, Glueless Wigs, ready-to-go wigs, and wigs that allow individuals to effortlessly switch up their looks. With a focus on innovation, creativity, quality, and customer satisfaction, Luvme Hair has garnered a loyal customer base globally. For more information about Luvme Hair and its products, please visit their official website at shop.luvmehair.com. SOURCE Luvme Hair DUBAI, UAE, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Markel, the insurance operation within Markel Group Inc. (NYSE: MKL), has hired Isaac Meek as a Cyber Senior Underwriter. Meek's arrival exemplifies Markel's long-term commitment to recruiting high-level underwriting talent, so that it can continue providing insurance solutions to meet customer demand in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), while supporting the businesses' overarching strategy of accelerating growth across Asia. Isaac Meek, Senior Cyber Underwriter, Markel Dubai In his new post, Meek will work closely with Priyesh Pradhan, Professional and Financial Risk (PFR) Senior Underwriter at Markel India, to drive the growth of Markel's cyber offering in MENA and the broader Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. Alongside those responsibilities, Meek will be involved in fostering broker relationships and identifying areas for further scalability within MENA. Markel Dubai's cyber offering provides broad first-party and third-party coverage, for a broad range of industries and clients including financial institutions, hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, professional service firms, and industrial companies, with line sizes up to USD $10m. Insureds taking out this policy will also have access to the organisation's global service providers, its 24/7 crisis management hotline, and specialist cyber support. Prior to joining Markel, Meek worked for the American Insurance Group (AIG) where he started out as an Assistant Underwriter, before being promoted to Underwriter in 2021. During his five-year stint at AIG, he was responsible for underwriting risks across various financial lines including professional indemnity (PI) and directors & officers (D&O), while focusing on blended cyber and tech PI risks for customers domiciled in Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) countries, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Meek will be situated at Markel's Dubai office, reporting to Max Robbie, Senior Executive Officer at Markel Dubai. Robbie commented: "We are delighted to welcome Isaac to the team here at Markel Dubai. Isaac joins us at an exciting time as we continue to build out our product offerings, particularly given the speed of growth and development of cyber in the region." "With his wealth of experience, Isaac will help us to identify new territories and geographies to drive profitable growth for the cyber portfolio, with the support of our established cyber underwriting teams in India and Singapore. I look forward working with him so that we can continue strengthening our business in the region, offering clients tailored and bespoke products across MENA." About Markel We are Markel, a leading global specialty insurer with a truly people-first approach. As the insurance operations within Markel Group Inc. (NYSE: MKL), we operate the Markel Specialty, Markel International, and Markel Global Reinsurance divisions, as well as State National, our portfolio protection and program services operations, and Nephila, our insurance-linked securities operations. Our broad array of capabilities and expertise allow us to create intelligent solutions for the most complex risk management needs. However, it is our people and the deep, valued relationships they develop with colleagues, brokers and clients that differentiates us worldwide. SOURCE Markel LANCASTER, Pa. and MASON CITY, Iowa, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- New Energy Blue, the clean-tech creator of biomass refineries that turn crop residues such as corn stalks into some of the world's lowest-carbon fuels and chemicals, announces the formation of New Energy Farmers LLC, which will be headquartered in Mason City, Iowa. New Energy Farmers is a biomass aggregation company jointly owned by Iowa farmers and New Energy Blue. Its purpose is to supply clean, sustainable feedstock to the New Energy Freedom Biomass Refinery, also in Mason City, and support the build-out of other New Energy Blue biomass refineries throughout Iowa and the American Midwest. New Energy Blue has just completed the engineering of New Energy Freedom, scheduled to break ground early 2024 and begin operation late 2025. Because top-quality biomass is critical to efficient refinery operation and delivery of climate-healing products, over the past decade the New Energy Aggregation System was developed to assure a continuous supply of clean, dry stover in tight, compact bales. During the Iowa corn harvest this past fall, the New Energy Aggregation System was again rigorously tested by chopping, baling, and stacking excess stalks across extensive acreage. New Energy Blue conducted the field trials using the latest methods and machinery from New Holland, Case, John Deere, Fendt, Massey Ferguson, and Mil-Stak. From the fall harvests of 2024 and 2025, New Energy Farmers will provide a total of 275,000 dry tons of feedstock to the Freedom refineryenough to produce a year's worth of next-generation ethanol (made from the corn plant's sugars) and clean lignin (taken from the stiff structure of the plant). Stalks from about 50 farmers with 110,000 acres are sufficient due to the exceptional productivity of North Iowa corn growers, who typically have three tons of excess stalks that need to be removed. Using the latest aggregation advances, bale weights increase from about 900 pounds to as much as 1500 pounds, cutting transportation and storage costs. "We're tenaciously focused on every impact to our supply chain, from soil to product," says Thomas Corle, CEO of New Energy Blue. "For our first five U.S. refineries, we expect corn stalks to be the raw material for biobased fuels and chemicalsreplacing oil and gas refining in the future. We're going into business with the American farmer, making a substantial investment." New Energy Farmers will become majority-owned and managed by the corn growers who have already committed to supplying their excess corn stover as a feedstock to the Freedom biomass refinery. Members receive a cash payment for every dry ton bale of corn stalks, own a stake in the business based on acreage, receive new farm equipment for harvesting and aggregation, and share in the annual profits of their own company. Lead farmers on the management board will oversee the process of procuring and collecting the stover from within a 20-30 mile radius of Mason City, managing off-site storage, and delivering the bales to the refinery. Given that sustainable biomass sourcing and traceability are important to customers like Dow, "we're pursuing ISCC Plus certification of our facilities," Corle says. Manav Lahoti, Global Sustainability Director at Dow, says "we strongly support a bio-circular and low-carbon ecosystem for converting excess corn stover into feedstock for our bio-based plastics. ISCC Plus certification enables Dow to verify the presence of renewable materials in our products to help customers meet commitments to improve sustainability in their own supply chains." Dow and New Energy Blue have signed a first-of-its-kind agreement for cellulosic ethanol from New Energy Freedom and subsequent biomass refineries to convert into bio-ethylene at the New Energy Chemicals ethanol-to-ethylene facility planned for the U.S. Gulf Coast. Every five years the U.S. Department Of Energy produces a "Billion Ton Report" calculating the potential supply of available biomass in the United States available for fuel and chemical projects. "But the great potential remains largely untapped," says Joe Ahrens, Biomass Strategist and Logistics Officer for New Energy Blue. "The reason is simple. Nobody up until now has developed a system that can aggregate this feedstock sustainably and cost efficiently with minimal impact to the grain harvest." Ongoing research and field testing by New Energy Blue, says Ahrens, is expected to boost farmer yields and crop value while shrinking carbon impact on the environment. "So we'll continue to promote carbon-retaining practices such as no-till seeding and planting cover crops to discourage wind and water erosion." Though the 2023 Billion Ton Report portrays the enormous opportunity for converting biomass into greener energy, "we're developing the roadmap," says Ahrens. "Everything we learned in the fields this fall, and will learn in our 2024 and 2025 harvests, will improve our New Energy Aggregation System and strengthen New Energy Farmers. Both will play major roles in our future expansion across the American Midwest." More information at https://newenergyblue.com/#waste-nothing CONTACT Roger Moore 717-224-0245 [email protected] Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2291006/NewEnergyFarmers_Logo.jpg CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Nona Biosciences, a global pioneer of technology innovation and antibody discovery and development solutions, announced today it has entered into a collaboration agreement with Lycia Therapeutics, a leader in extracellular protein degradation. Lycia is using its proprietary lysosomal targeting chimeras (LYTACs) platform to discover and develop first-in-class therapeutics that degrade extracellular and membrane-bound proteins that drive a range of difficult-to-treat diseases. Through the collaboration, Lycia will leverage Nona's proprietary Harbour Mice HCAb fully human antibody transgenic mice platform to discover novel antibodies for its LYTAC protein degrader therapeutics. "We are pleased to enter into this collaboration with Lycia Therapeutics, extending our service footprint to the area of extracellular protein degradation. We believe Lycia's leveraging of our antibody discovery capabilities will help accelerate its efforts to advance novel protein degrader therapeutics," said Jingsong Wang, M.D., Ph.D., Chairman of Nona Biosciences said. "Our LYTACs can uniquely address extracellular disease-driving targets that remain challenging for existing antibody and small molecule modalities. We look forward to deploying Nona Biosciences' technology to advance the discovery of novel therapeutics for currently underserved patient populations," said Steve Staben, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Lycia Therapeutics. About Nona Biosciences Nona Biosciences (a wholly-owned subsidiary of HBM Holdings Limited, HKEX: 02142) is a global biotechnology company committed to cutting-edge technology innovation and provides a total solution from "Idea to IND" (I to ITM), ranging from target validation and antibody discovery through preclinical research. The integrated antibody discovery services range from antigen preparation, animal immunization, highly robust antibody screening, to antibody lead generation and engineering, developability assessment and pharmacological evaluation, leveraging advantages of Harbour Mice technology and the experienced therapeutic antibody discovery team. Harbour Mice generate fully human monoclonal antibodies in a traditional two heavy and two light chain (H2L2) format, and a heavy chain only (HCAb) format. Integrating Harbour Mice with highly robust antibody screening platforms, Nona Biosciences is focused on driving global inventions of transformative next-generation drugs. For more information, please visit www.nonabio.com. SOURCE Nona Biosciences ? Tras lamentar los hechos en Pataz, La Libertad, la presidenta de la republica, Dina Boluarte, se pronuncio y asevero que la @PoliciaPeru ya tomo control de la zona. ? La mandataria indico que la mineria ilegal le hace dano a la patria, no solo porque estan armados, sino pic.twitter.com/a6AMVlYfYf Transaction to Advance Digital Strategy and Growth through Expanded Inventory, Data and Customer Base Acquisition will benefit Canadian buyers and sellers with leading OPENLANE technology and enhanced vehicle availability and visibility beyond local auctions. Commercial and dealer-to-dealer transactions to be hosted on leading OPENLANE Canada digital marketplace and supported by existing nationwide network of OPENLANE vehicle logistics centres. Includes Manheim auction sales and operations and the Manheim Montreal facility; all other Manheim Canada facilities excluded. Anticipated to deliver accelerated cash flow payback through unlock of asset sale, cost and operational synergies. CARMEL, Ind., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- OPENLANE, Inc. (NYSE: KAR), a leading operator of digital marketplaces for wholesale used vehicles, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the Manheim Canada business ("Manheim Canada") from Cox Automotive, subject to certain customary closing conditions. The proposed acquisition advances OPENLANE's digital strategy by adding Manheim Canada inventory, buyers, sellers and corresponding data to the OPENLANE Canada digital marketplace launched earlier this year. Valued at $130 million CAD or approximately $95 million USD, the transaction includes the Manheim Montreal facility and auction sales, operations and select staff across Manheim Canada, which intends to exit Canada. "OPENLANE's vision is to build the world's greatest digital marketplaces for used vehicles and this acquisition helps advance our digital strategy," said Peter Kelly, CEO of OPENLANE. "Building on the momentum of our combined, single OPENLANE Canada digital marketplace launch in June, this transaction will help accelerate commercial and dealer growth, and deliver an improved customer experience. For buyers more inventory means more choice and a simplified way to find the very best vehicles for their lots. For sellers instantly accessing OPENLANE's broad buyer-base means achieving the best market results possible on every sale. And by deepening our data set, we can generate enhanced vehicle recommendations, pricing information and other insights to help customers make better informed wholesale decisions." Under the agreement, OPENLANE will assume Manheim Canada's customer relationships. After the transaction closes, OPENLANE will integrate the Manheim Canada business into the existing OPENLANE Canada business, combining all inventory within the OPENLANE digital marketplace. The company will also consolidate operations at nearby locations, onboarding select staff to ensure a seamless transition for customers and ensuring continued access to related services and offerings including inspections, reconditioning, transport and logistics. "OPENLANE Canada is committed to fulfilling our purpose, to make wholesale easy so our customers can be more successful," said Trevor Henderson, chief operating officer of OPENLANE Canada. "We are excited to introduce these valuable customers to our unique combination of innovative technology and personalized, local support. From AI-enhanced inspections, to flexible sale formats, to fast, reliable payment, ownership and reconditioning services, we're committed to removing the hassles of wholesale. The entire OPENLANE team is eager to welcome our new commercial and dealer customers, and help them benefit from all OPENLANE has to offer." The transaction also includes the purchase of Manheim's Montreal facility but excludes its other Canadian facilities. In Montreal, OPENLANE intends to transition its operations, people and inventory from its current location to the acquired Montreal facility. In all other locations, substantially all of the customers and business operations will be transitioned to nearby OPENLANE Canada vehicle logistics centres. Upon closing, OPENLANE will commence a process to market and sell its existing Montreal facility and anticipates substantial proceeds that would fund a significant portion of the acquisition. All other OPENLANE vehicle logistics centre locations and operations will remain the same. Conference Call An investor and analyst conference call and webcast to discuss how the proposed acquisition furthers OPENLANE's digital strategy has been scheduled for Monday, December 4, 2023, at 5:00 p.m. ET. The call will be broadcast via live webcast on the investor relations page of ir.corporate.openlane.com and will be available for playback after the call. To access the call via phone, please dial 833.634.2155 and ask to join the OPENLANE, Inc. call at least 10 minutes prior to the call. OPENLANE Contacts: Media Inquiries: Analyst Inquiries: Laurie Dippold Mike Eliason (317) 468-3900 (317) 249-4559 [email protected] [email protected] About OPENLANE OPENLANE, Inc. (NYSE: KAR) provides sellers and buyers across the global wholesale used vehicle industry with innovative, technology-driven remarketing solutions. OPENLANE's unique end-to-end platform supports whole car, financing, logistics and other ancillary and related services. Our integrated marketplaces reduce risk, improve transparency and streamline transactions for customers around the globe. Headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, OPENLANE has employees across the United States, Canada, Europe, Uruguay and the Philippines. For more information and the latest OPENLANE news, visit corporate.openlane.com. Forward-Looking Statement Certain statements contained in this press release include "forward-looking statements" as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In particular, statements made that are not historical facts may be forward-looking statements. Words such as "should," "may," "will," "would," "anticipate," "expect," "project," "intend," "plan," "believe," "seek," "estimate," "assume," "could," "continue" and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on management's current assumptions, expectations and/or beliefs, are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results projected, expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, those discussed in the section entitled "Risk Factors" in our annual and quarterly periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Many of these risk factors are outside of our control, and as such, they involve risks which are not currently known that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed or implied herein. The forward-looking statements in this press release are made as of the date on which they are made and we do not undertake to update any forward-looking statements. SOURCE OPENLANE Functional Fitness Brand to Debut New Studio Location in Fall 2024 SPOKANE, Wash., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Pvolve , the omni-channel fitness company with an innovative, science-led method that pairs functional movement with proprietary equipment, is breaking into the Northwest region following their latest franchise deal for Spokane, Washington, with Teresa and Scott Hatter. Both Teresa and Scott have spent the entirety of their professional careers in franchising, operating business concepts in the restaurant and personal care industries before embarking on this most recent endeavor in the fitness space. According to Teresa, she and her husband believe the trajectory that the boutique fitness category has been on in recent years lends confidence that Pvolve will find success in the Spokane community. "Pvolve is a passion project for us more than anything else," Teresa shared. "We have first-hand experience with the results that the method delivers. We are honored to offer our community this modality, which is more approachable for those of all different health backgrounds who still want to move and see physical changes to their bodies." The Hatters hope their studio will serve as a sanctuary of sorts; a safe space where everyone can feel encouraged to pursue their personal health journeys, wherever their fitness levels may lie on the continuum. While the location has not been confirmed yet, their goal is to open in the South Hill area. "Our entire team is incredibly excited to introduce our method to Spokane," said Pvolve President Julie Cartwright. "Teresa and Scott bring deep franchise experience and so much passion for the method, a winning combination for operating a successful studio. We are so lucky to welcome the Hatters to the Pvolve team and look forward to watching their community in Spokane grow." Cartwright credits the efficacy of Pvolve's signature method, along with its recent partnership with world-renowned actress, producer, and director, Jennifer Anisto n, as the reason the brand has experienced explosive growth this year. In addition, the franchise offers a multi-revenue stream business model, proprietary equipment, and hybrid class experiences that further fuel its expansion. For more information on Pvolve and its franchising opportunities, please visit https://pvolvefranchise.com/ . About Pvolve Pvolve LLC, or Personal Evolution, is an innovative fitness company that pairs functional movement with resistance-based equipment to sculpt, tone, strengthen, and restore the body while enhancing mobility and stability. After being introduced to functional fitness in 2017, founder Rachel Katzman was determined to help others experience an approach that respects the body's holistic needs while making you look and feel great. Pvolve's method is supported by a Clinical Advisory Board of highly credentialed doctors, trainers, and experts to offer safe and effective workouts that help you break a sweat, not your body. In June 2023, world-renowned actress, producer, and director, Jennifer Aniston , officially partnered with Pvolve after falling in love with the method as a member in 2021. Through its hybrid fitness model, Pvolve can be experienced via a streaming membership that offers live and on-demand classes on Pvolve.com and on the Pvolve App, and via physical studio locations. For more information, please visit https://www.pvolve.com/ , https://pvolvefranchise.com/ and @ pvolve on Instagram. Media Contact: Conner Gossel, Fishman Public Relations, [email protected], (937) 545-9812 SOURCE Pvolve H.E. Sonia Guajajara, Minister of Indigenous Peoples, Brazil said: "We must end deforestation in the Amazon to help solve the climate crisis. And we must do so with justice and human rights for the forest people for whom forests are home. Therefore, I welcome project initiatives led by communities and respecting Free Prior and Informed Consent, as they will help achieve our climate goals, preserve the forest and the life within it, and bring equity to our people." The IPCC is clear that ending deforestation is critical to addressing the climate crisis. And according to the UN , where the rights of Indigenous peoples are recognized, rates of deforestation tend to be lower and carbon stocks tend to be higher. Despite this, less than one percent of climate finance currently reaches Indigenous peoples and local communities to help secure land tenure rights and manage tropical forests. Community-led forest carbon projects can change this, by driving private sector finance directly to the Indigenous peoples and traditional communities that live there. For example, the Mai Ndombe project in DRC is funded by companies voluntarily purchasing carbon credits. The project works with over 50,000 community members to help meet their own development ambitions, while protecting 299,640 hectares of forest which has avoided 38,843,976 tons of CO2e emissions to date. "The world asks us Amazonia, Congo Basin, Mekong Basin to preserve our forests. But to do this means adaptation of our lives, our agriculture, of everything. And this adaptation needs funds" said H.E. Eve Bazaiba, Environment Minister, DRC speaking of the Mai Ndombe project at the event today, "So, we say Ok, and we entered into the carbon markets." "We have now built more than 16 high-level schools, we have hospitals, they support us with resilient agriculture. And now we are going to have more social infrastructure like roads, bridges, solar energy, airports, and ports and so on. This is all to help us adapt to the new situation of the climate crisis," said Minister Bazaiba. The Amazon and the Congo Basin are the two largest rainforests in the world. Combined, the territories of the two nations who spoke today include over 600 million hectares of tropical forest an area roughly two thirds the total size of the U.S. Media contact: Will Richard [email protected] Pictures available on request About Equitable Earth Equitable Earth is a coalition of leaders committed to delivering a compelling new voluntary carbon market standard and platform to end deforestation and biodiversity loss in equitable partnership with Indigenous peoples and local communities, and Global South countries. For further information, visit www.eq-earth.com SOURCE Equitable Earth Coalition MOLNDAL, Sweden, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- SECOND QUARTER 2023/24 (MAY - JULY) Net sales amounted to SEK 27.6 (20.2) million, which is an increase of 36% compared with the corresponding period last year. The growth in the US market is 27% compared with the corresponding period last year. (20.2) million, which is an increase of 36% compared with the corresponding period last year. The growth in the US market is 27% compared with the corresponding period last year. Operating profit amounted to SEK 6.5 (0.9) million. Excluding direct currency effects, the operating profit is at 3.8 MSEK (-5.2). (0.9) million. Excluding direct currency effects, the operating profit is at 3.8 MSEK (-5.2). Profit/loss after tax amounted to SEK 3.9 (2.3) million, which resulted in earnings per share of SEK 0.21 (0.13). (2.3) million, which resulted in earnings per share of (0.13). Cash flow from operating activities amounted to SEK 6.8 (-5.3) million. Liquid assets as of 2023-10-31 amounted to SEK 33.3 (53.4) million. Significant events in the quarter In the quarter, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) granted the osseointegrated external prosthetic connection device Axor II a new reimbursement code. The new code is connected to a set reimbursement that will help to drive growth in the US. The company appointed Alex Winber as Vice President Sales and Marketing with full focus on the US. The appointment is part of restructuring the company's sales and marketing organization, focusing on executing growth in the US. as Vice President Sales and Marketing with full focus on the US. The appointment is part of restructuring the company's sales and marketing organization, focusing on executing growth in the US. The Board of Directors initiated a review and evaluation of strategic alternatives to further accelerate the global roll-out of its unique OPRA Implant System. The company received a Unitary Patent approval pertaining to NeuromotusTM. The patent grants immediate proprietary rights to Integrum in 17 separate European countries. During the quarter, the company entered into the Turkish market with the OPRA Implant system in collaboration with the distributor Medikon. In the period, Scott Flora was elected as full member of the company's board at the annual general meeting. was elected as full member of the company's board at the annual general meeting. CEO Rickard Branemark moderated a workshop in Ukraine on 21 September, focusing on war-related amputee care. Also he visited Kyiv, Ukraine , to treat wounded soldiers, to train Ukrainian orthopaedic surgeons in advanced amputee care and to support the build-up of expanded trauma healthcare. 1 MAY - 31 OCTOBER 2023/24 (6 MONTHS) Net sales amounted to SEK 48.0 (37.5) million, which is an increase of 28% compared with the corresponding period last year. The growth in the US market is 22% compared with the corresponding period last year (37.5) million, which is an increase of 28% compared with the corresponding period last year. The growth in the US market is 22% compared with the corresponding period last year Operating profit amounted to SEK 3.5 (1.2) million. (1.2) million. Profit/loss after tax amounted to SEK 1,2 (1.8) million, which resulted in earnings per share of SEK 0,06 (0.1). (1.8) million, which resulted in earnings per share of (0.1). Cash flow from operating activities amounted to SEK 4.2 (-11.5) million. (-11.5) million. Integrum announced that Shirley Ryan AbilityLab has received a five-year clinical research grant totaling USD 8.7 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is anticipated that Integrum will receive up to USD 1.3 million during the program to support the study activities. CEO's statement Our second quarter has been intense with record sales, increased operating profit and a number of great achievements that will help drive the business forward. We have made important changes in the US organization, entered new markets, received a new reimbursement code for our connection device Axor II, and initiated a strategic review process to accelerate growth. After the period ended, the FDA cleared a clinical study on below-knee amputation that will be fully funded by the US Department of Defense. Altogether, we see how years of strategic initiatives to build a profitable and growing company start to pay off. Strong financial results in the second quarter Revenues amounted to SEK 27.6 million during the second quarter, which corresponds to an increase of 36.2 percent in comparison to the corresponding quarter last year (32 percent in local currency). Excluding direct currency effects, the operating profit amounted to SEK 4.4 million. The increase in operating profit can be attributed to both the steep sales uptake and an improved operating cost structure. Increased number of surgeries and strong momentum for Axor II Besides increased numbers of surgeries performed in the US, one contributing factor to the strong sales development in the period is increased sales of Integrum's osseointegrated external prosthetic connection device Axor II. In September, the company received a new reimbursement code for Axor II that will further help drive growth in the US. The new reimbursement code marks the start of a formalized reimbursement process for our prosthetics. A formalized process enables prosthetists to apply for reimbursement and reduces the potential risk associated with using products without a dedicated code, and I am convinced this will significantly improve our offering to the customers. Sharpened team in the US During the quarter, Integrum made a restructuring of the companys sales and marketing organization to fully focus on executing growth in the US. In September we appointed Alex Winber as Vice President of Sales and Marketing, a great addition to our team. Alex is a highly experienced sales and marketing executive with an outstanding talent for recognizing business opportunities and we are very glad that he has accepted to join the US leadership team. Entering new markets The US market is still our top priority, but for our long-term goal to set a new global standard in the care of amputees, every new market entry in the rest of the world is a step in the right direction. At the end of October, Integrum signed a distribution agreement for the Turkish market which generated sales of 1.3 MSEK. The Turkish orthopedic healthcare system is strongly marked by the earthquake that occurred earlier this year and there is a great need for innovative orthopedic solutions. The business segment Rest of the World has developed in a positive direction during the period, partly supported by the establishment in Turkey. In September, I travelled to Kyiv to train Ukrainian orthopedic surgeons in advanced amputee care and to support the build-up of expanded trauma healthcare. The surgical training sessions were followed by a workshop on war-related amputee care attended by some of the world's most prominent specialists and was supported by several ministries in Ukraine. Paves the way for new indications Following a pre-submission meeting with the US Food and Drug Administration, FDA, Integrum plans to submit a Pre-Market Approval, PMA, Application based on existing clinical data for the use of OPRATM in transhumeral amputations. Based on additional internal analysis and dialogue with the FDA, Integrum believes that existing data can be sufficient to qualify for a PMA in the new indication. New clinical trial instrumental for additional indications FDA has now cleared the start of a clinical study with OPRA Implant System on the below-knee amputation level. The study will include up to 30 patients, is fully funded by the US Department of Defense, and will be performed by the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Integrum will supply OPRA Implant Systems to Walter Reed on commercial terms and once the study is finalized, we will be able to use the data in a future regulatory process. The results will be instrumental for a Pre-Market Approval application for use in below-knee amputations, and we are looking forward to the study being initiated. Ongoing strategic review to boost future growth To ensure that we fully leverage the positive results we now see both in business and operations, the board of directors has initiated a review and evaluation of strategic alternatives to further accelerate the global roll-out of Integrums unique OPRA Implant System. The strategic review aims to ensure that the global roll-out of Integrum's implant systems is conducted with the highest possible efficiency, in the interest of both patients and shareholders. We are encouraged by the development of our business over the last quarters, but our focus is on our future. As all our previous efforts start to pay off, it is now time to accelerate. Molndal, 4 December 2023 Rickard Branemark Chief Executive Officer The interim report can be found here: https://integrum.se/investor-relations/financial-reports-calendar/ This disclosure contains information that Integrum AB is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation (EU nr 596/2014) and the Swedish Securities Markets Act (2007:528). The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact person, on 04-12-2023 08:30 CET. For more information please contact: Rickard Branemark, CEO. Phone: +46 70 846 10 61, E-mail: [email protected] Jorgen Svanstrom, CFO. Phone: +46 70 734 96 60, E-mail: [email protected] Certified Adviser: The Company's Certified Adviser is Carnegie Investment Bank AB (publ). The following files are available for download: https://mb.cision.com/Main/17531/3887239/2470807.pdf 2023-10-31 Interim report Q1-Q2 Integrum AB 2023-24 https://mb.cision.com/Public/17531/3887239/88ea36b149ee53b1.pdf PR Q2 Integrum AB 2023-24 SV SOURCE Integrum AB NEW YORK, Dec. 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Remote Patient Monitoring Market by Product, End-user, and Geography - Forecast and Analysis 2023-2027 report has been published by Technavio. Market growth is estimated to accelerate at a CAGR of 22.22% and register an incremental growth of USD 1.73 billion during the forecast period. By region, the global remote patient monitoring market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia, and Rest of World (ROW). North America will account for 46% of the market's growth during the forecast period. The growing awareness of the benefits of remote patient monitoring solutions, increasing work pressure across healthcare facilities, growing advances in patient data collection technologies, and the rising prevalence of chronic diseases are driving the growth of the regional market. The report provides a comprehensive analysis on growth opportunities at regional levels, new product launches, the latest trends, and the post-pandemic recovery of the global market. Download a PDF Sample Report Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global Remote Patient Monitoring Market 2023-2027 Company Profiles The remote patient monitoring market report includes information on the key products and recent developments of leading vendors, including: Abbott Laboratories: The company offers remote patient monitoring such as FreeStyle LibreLink App, and LibreView. The company offers remote patient monitoring such as FreeStyle LibreLink App, and LibreView. Advantech Co. Ltd: The company offers remote patient monitoring such as Advantech POC 6 series The company offers remote patient monitoring such as Advantech POC 6 series Boston Scientific Corp: The company offers remote patient monitoring such as LATITUDE NXT Patient Management System. The company offers remote patient monitoring such as LATITUDE NXT Patient Management System. Draegerwerk AG and Co. KGaA: The company offers remote patient monitoring such as Infinity PiCCO SmartPod, and Infinity M540. The company offers remote patient monitoring such as Infinity PiCCO SmartPod, and Infinity M540. Honeywell International Inc: The company offers remote patient monitoring such as the CARESCAPE ONE system. The company offers remote patient monitoring such as the CARESCAPE ONE system. Koninklijke Philips NV Masimo Corp. Medtronic Plc Napier Healthcare Solutions Pte Ltd. Nihon Kohden Corp. OMRON Corp. OSI Systems Inc. OSP Labs To gain access to more vendor profiles available with Technavio, buy the report! Market Dynamics The market is driven by factors such as the cost benefits of remote patient monitoring, the emergence of digital healthcare services and healthcare 4.0, and the need for healthcare facilities in remote areas. However, the complexities associated with the deployment of smart healthcare solutions are hindering market growth. Competitive Analysis The competitive scenario categorizes companies based on various performance indicators. Some of the factors considered include the financial performance of companies over the past few years, growth strategies, product innovations, new product launches, investments, and growth in market share, among others. Request a Sample Market Segmentation By product , the market is segmented into vital signs and implantable . The vital signs segment accounted for the largest share of the market during the forecast period. , the market is segmented into . The vital signs segment accounted for the largest share of the market during the forecast period. By geography, the market is segmented into North America , Europe , Asia , and the Rest of World (ROW). North America held the largest share of the market during the forecast period. Related Reports: Patient Monitoring Equipment Market in Japan by Product and End-user - Forecast and Analysis 2022-2026: The patient monitoring equipment market share in Japan is expected to increase by USD 366.62 million from 2021 to 2026, and the market's growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 4.79%. Laboratory Shaker Market by Product, Application, and Geography - Forecast and Analysis 2023-2027: The laboratory shaker market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 7.09% between 2022 and 2027. The size of the market is forecast to increase by USD 611.28 million. Technavio's library includes over 17,000+ reports, covering more than 2,000 emerging technologies. Subscribe to our "Basic Plan" at just USD 5,000 and get lifetime access to Technavio Insights What are the key data covered in this remote patient monitoring market report? CAGR of the market during the forecast period Detailed information on factors that will drive the growth of the remote patient monitoring market between 2023 and 2027 Precise estimation of the size of the remote patient monitoring market and its contribution to the parent market Accurate predictions about upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior Growth of the remote patient monitoring market across North America , Europe , Asia , and Rest of World (ROW) , , , and Rest of World (ROW) A thorough analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information about vendors Comprehensive analysis of factors that will challenge the growth of remote patient monitoring market vendors TOC Executive Summary Market Landscape Market Sizing Historic Market Size Five Forces Analysis Market Segmentation by Product market Segmentation by End-user Customer Landscape Geographic Landscape Drivers, Challenges, and Trends Company Landscape Company Analysis Appendix About US Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contact Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com/ SOURCE Technavio Sales Focus Inc., the leading force in sales outsourcing, held its annual leadership retreat in Isle of Palms, SC to foster innovation, meaningful discussions, and camaraderie in preparation for a successful 2024. ISLE OF PALMS, S.C., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Sales Focus Inc. (SFI), a global leader in sales outsourcing services, is pleased to announce the successful conclusion of its annual leadership retreat. The retreat brought together executives, key leaders, and team members for a focused and collaborative discussion on the company's vision, strategy, and goals for 2024. The Sales Focus Leadership Team on the beach at Isle of Palms, South Carolina. With the stunning shoreline of Isle of Palms, South Carolina as the backdrop, Sales Focus created an environment that promoted creativity, teamwork, and strategic planning. The retreat spanned five days in October, during which attendees heard presentations from each company department, engaged in team-building activities, and held strategic sessions aimed at aligning the organization for success in the upcoming year. Key highlights of the retreat included: Strategic Planning Sessions: Executives delved into in-depth strategic planning sessions to analyze market trends, evaluate performance metrics, and identify growth and improvement opportunities. Team Building Activities: Team-building activities were successfully executed to strengthen collaboration and camaraderie among team members to enhance communication and foster a positive working environment. Networking Opportunities: Attendees enjoyed ample opportunities to network and build connections within the organization, creating a foundation of collaboration throughout the year. Focus on Innovation: In line with Sales Focus Inc.'s commitment to innovation, the retreat successfully explored new technologies, methodologies, and ideas to stay ahead in the competitive sales landscape. "We believe that our annual retreat is a crucial element in our ongoing success," said Sales Focus Inc. Sales and Marketing Director Zach Horwath. "Isle of Palms provided the perfect setting for meaningful discussions and team building. As we look ahead to 2024, we are confident that the insights gained during this retreat will propel Sales Focus to new heights." Sales Focus is incredibly grateful to the Isle of Palms community for its warm hospitality and looks forward to returning for future events. The success of this retreat sets the stage for an exciting and prosperous 2024 for Sales Focus. Sales Focus Inc. Sales Focus Inc. (SFI) pioneered the sales outsourcing industry in 1998. Put simply, Sales Focus hires, trains, and manages successful inside and outside sales teams for its clients. SFI utilizes its proven S.O.L.D. methodology to develop a sales plan and manage a sales team that excels in client acquisition and revenue growth. Sales Focus guarantees to launch a sales program of any size anywhere in the world in 45 days or less. FOR IMMEDIATE CONTACT: Angelica Iglesias Marketing Coordinator Sales Focus Inc. 7301 Rivers Ave, Suite 120 North Charleston, SC 29406 (803) 378-6111 [email protected] SOURCE Sales Focus Inc. Goodnight Wind is operating and ramping-up production. Company's ambition is to become a top provider of digital renewable power for all kinds of consumers. AUSTIN, Texas, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- A trailblazer in developing clean technologies to deliver the best energy for any kind of consumer, Serena has started operations for the Goodnight 1 wind power plant in Texas, marking the company's first endeavor in Ercot, the largest energy market in US. Goodnight 1 boasts a 265.5 MW installed capacity, and its 59 turbines supplied by Vestas are fully assembled and undergoing final commissioning. The project is expected to be 100% operational by year-end, when it will be able to supply renewable power to more than 60,000 homes in the Lone Star State. "With 15 years of experience and a robust track-record, Serena is well-positioned to support America's energy transition, which is expected to attract investments exceeding $ 400 billion in wind and solar by 2030," stated Serena's founder, Antonio Bastos. "In every sense, it was crucial that our inaugural project be a resonating success so we could gather even more support from all our stakeholders. Thanks to the outstanding efforts of our team and the careful selection of excellent partners like Vestas, we are delivering the project ahead of schedule and within budget." he added. The project had a CAPEX of approximately $ 300 million and expansions can be launched throughout next years as demand for renewable energy continues to rise. In addition to Serena's equity and long-term financing raised with a syndicate of banks, Goldman Sachs will invest in Goodnight 1 in the form of Tax Equity. Goodnight 1 will not only bring energy prosperity to consumers but also benefit local communities, contributing around $100 million through taxes, royalties, and investments in the school district of Armstrong County, where the project is located. About Serena For over 15 years, we have been fueled by the generosity of nature, making clean solar and wind energy accessible to all from global corporations seeking sustainable profitability to families seeking guilt-free energy consumption, in harmony with society's call for sustainability. With the capacity to power 4.8 million homes, we are pioneers in developing clean technologies that bring sustainable energy to every consumer. Learn more at www.srna.co SOURCE Serena NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Specialty Food Association is excited to announce the 2024 Winter Fancy Food Show (included) cohort. (included) is a mission-driven collective of BIPOC founders and executives, dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices and creating equitable opportunities for diverse leaders across the consumer packaged goods ecosystem. The ten brands selected for the (included) Cohort will debut as SFA members at the Show January 21-23, 2024, in Las Vegas. Since 2022, the SFA has been a proud supporter of (included), which made its debut at the Summer Fancy Food Show. "Partnering with (included) is an important initiative for the Specialty Food Association," said Bill Lynch, president, SFA. "As a not-for-profit trade association striving to create a more diverse community in the specialty food industry, working with (included) allows us to bring more BIPOC makers to market through the Fancy Food Shows." Ten brands selected for the (included) Cohort will debut as SFA members at the Show January 21-23, 2024, in Las Vegas. Post this The exhibitors from (included) are: "As a proudly Asian American frozen dumpling brand, Sobo faces a lot of challenges breaking into retail and getting in front of customers. Storytelling from behind a pane of frosty glass is hard enough as it is, but this is compounded by the fact that Sobo is SO new we only launched a few months ago and that we're trying to tell nuanced stories about the flavors that we grew up with as the children of immigrants," said Eric Ji Sun Wu, Co-Founder and CEO, SOBO. "We knew that the Winter Fancy Food Show would be Sobo's big introduction to the world of grocery, but we were certainly stressing about how we'd be able to stand out on a limited budget. Thanks to (included) we've found some unbelievable mentors, peers, and cheerleaders to help Sobo make the splash we knew we had to at our first big trade show." "Three years ago Barlow's was just an idea that started out of my home kitchen. I had a wild idea that our better for you 3in1 pancake biscuit waffle mix and line of seasonal syrups needed to be on everyone's table. The thought of exhibiting at tradeshows seemed out of scope for us due to the need to maximize resources, logistics and the overall lack of tradeshow experience from a brand perspective," said Tiffani Neal, Founder and CEO, Barlow's Foods. "(included) is bridging the gap for Barlow's and so many other emerging brands. To have a space to share the journey of this industry that provides a platform for us to be seen and heard is immeasurable. SFA is where it's at, the partnership for the upcoming Winter Fancy Food Show is not only right on time but has the opportunity to be a game changer for us. For this we are forever grateful!" Said Stefanie Garcia Turner, Founder and CEO, TUYYO, "I am thrilled to be debuting my brand TUYYO at the SFA show with the incredible support of the (included) community. It is a joy to be amongst other BIPOC and woman-owned businesses as we shape the next generation of inclusive food and beverage brands." The Winter Fancy Food Show is the largest B2B specialty food event in the western United States, and features thousands of specialty food and beverage products from around the world. The Show is open only to qualified members of the specialty food trade, industry affiliates, and journalists. For more information, click here. About the Specialty Food Association The Specialty Food Association (SFA) was founded in 1952 and is the not-for-profit trade association of the $194 billion specialty food industry. Representing more than 3,000 businesses worldwide, SFA champions industry participation and success for a diverse community of makers, buyers, importers, distributors, and service providers by developing resources, information, education, and events that celebrate innovation and inclusivity. SFA owns and operates the Fancy Food Showswhich are the largest specialty food industry events in North Americaas well as the sofi Awardswhich have honored excellence in specialty food and beverage annually since 1972. The SFA also produces the e-newsletter SFA News Daily, the Trendspotter Panel annual predictions and Fancy Food Show reports, the State of the Specialty Food Industry Report, Today's Specialty Food Consumer research, and the Spill & Dish podcast. Find out more online and connect with SFA on Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. About (included) Founded in 2020 as a gathering place for leaders of color in the natural foods industry, (included) is a non-profit organization that has become the nation's largest collective of BIPOC founders and executives in CPG food and beverage. (included) is invested in amplifying the voices of its systemically underrepresented members, as well as driving visibility and sustainable growth for the brands they lead. The organization is committed to advocating for racial equity across the CPG ecosystem, with a goal of reshaping the retail landscape to reflect the US population. Its flagship sponsorship programs have provided members with unprecedented access to growth opportunities and industry decision-makers. Learn more and join the community at includedcpg.com SOURCE Specialty Food Association TAIPEI, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Supercell Biotechnology Corporation commemorates the first anniversary of rebranding from previously-called SinoCell Technologies, due to the company's capital increase by RMT Holding Group. Demonstrating the strategic move at the Healthcare+ Expo Taiwan, their theme "Hope Begins from Now", encapsulates their global expansion and transformation in healthcare. Supercell, through partnerships in regenerative medicine, has secured an exclusive license for a Japanese-developed natural killer (NK) cell culture technique. The technique, pivotal in cancer cell elimination and immune system enhancement, will be showcased at the expo, highlighting their latest experimental advancements[1]. The majority of NK cells administered on day 14 are CD56brightCD16-NK cells, which primarily enhance immune function but show reduced expression of the CD16 membrane protein, crucial for tumor cell destruction. Dr. Hiroshi Terunuma's methodology indicates that by day 21, CD56brightCD16+NK cells become the dominant cell type. These cells demonstrate increased expression of both CD56 and CD16 membrane proteins, enabling both cytotoxic and immunomodulatory effects. The results showed both qualitative and quantitative enhancements, as evidenced by the presence of more than 60 x 108 NK cells, a purity level greater than 80%, and an amplification rate exceeding 1,500-fold. Dr. Hiroshi Terunuma, a distinguished international authority in cancer treatment based in Japan and a long-standing partner of Supercell, has successfully administered NK cell therapy in over 40,000 cases. In a clinical study, 63 patients diagnosed with terminal malignant pancreatic cancer received conventional cancer therapy supplemented by NK cell infusion. Results showed a significant improvement in survival rates, with 41 patients doubling their expected lifespan from 6 to 13 months[2]. Moreover, a British patient with terminal colon cancer achieved a complete remission, showcasing the effectiveness and progressive potential of NK cell therapy.[3] If adopted as a standard practice in future healthcare, this approach could enhance cellular immunity, potentially leading to increased resilience in the face of a progressively complex disease environment. Sean Ishihara, Chairman of RMT Group, parent company of Supercell Biotechnology Corporation, emphasizes, "medical care is a universal right." Unlike typical biotech companies focused on going public, Supercell prioritizes researching and developing safe, effective biotech applications. The company actively collaborates with international experts to realize this mission. Through these partnerships, Supercell aims to deliver top-quality solutions worldwide. [1] Terunuma, H. Autologous Immune Enhancement Therapy for CancerOur experience since 2004. J. Stem Cells Regen. Med. 2012, 8, 205206. [2] Terunuma H, Deng X, Nishino N, Watanabe K. NK cell-based autologous immune enhancement therapy (AIET) for cancer. J Stem Cells Regen Med. 2013 Apr 30;9(1):9-13. doi: 10.46582/jsrm.0901003. PMID: 24693203; PMCID: PMC3908307. [3] https://inews.co.uk/news/health/colon-cancer-patient-turned-away-nhs-disease-free-months-live-1845098 (Colon cancer patient who turned away from NHS 'disease free' 6 years after being told he had months to live, By Paul Gallagher, September 10, 2022 6:00 am (Updated at September 13, 2022 11:05 am)) SOURCE SUPERCELL BIOTECHNOLOGY CORPORATION CHICAGO, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Surgical Sutures Market in terms of revenue was estimated to be worth $4.0 billion in 2023 and is poised to reach $5.5 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 6.4% from 2023 to 2028 according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets. The surgical sutures market is propelled by several key drivers. The increasing global prevalence of chronic diseases and a growing aging population contribute significantly to the rising demand for surgical procedures, thereby boosting the need for effective wound closure solutions like surgical sutures. Technological advancements and innovations in suture materials further enhance the market, providing healthcare professionals with advanced and tailored options for diverse surgical applications. However, amidst this optimistic landscape, certain restraints merit consideration. Stringent regulatory requirements pose challenges for market entry, particularly for new players. Additionally, the market contends with price pressure due to intense competition and the availability of alternative wound closure methods. Download an Illustrative overview: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=18374832 Browse in-depth TOC on "Surgical Sutures Market" 348 - Tables 52 - Figures 319 - Pages Surgical Sutures Market Scope: Report Coverage Details Market Revenue in 2023 $4.0 billion Estimated Value by 2028 $5.5 billion Growth Rate Poised to grow at a CAGR of 6.4% 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 Component, Demographics, and End user Geographies Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America Report Highlights Updated financial information / product portfolio of players Key Market Opportunities Low and Middle-Income Countries have opportunities for growth of this market Key Market Drivers Rising surgical procedures and trauma cases to drive the market The hospital segment is expected to register a substantial share by end users of the Surgical Sutures market. Hospitals play a pivotal role as end users in the surgical suture market, holding a substantial share. This dominance is rooted in the extensive and diverse range of surgical procedures conducted within hospital settings, ranging from routine surgeries to complex interventions. The consistent demand for surgical sutures in these environments underscores their critical role in wound closure and patient recovery. Additionally, hospitals often serve as central hubs for medical care, contributing to the heightened utilization of surgical sutures. As the healthcare landscape continues to evolve, the significance of hospitals as key end users in the surgical suture market remains pronounced, influencing market dynamics and trends. Multifilament Surgical Sutures hold a substantial share by type in Surgical Sutures market. Multifilament surgical sutures have emerged as a dominant force in the surgical suture market, securing a substantial share by type. This prominence is attributed to the distinct advantages offered by multifilament sutures in comparison to their monofilament counterparts. Characterized by multiple strands twisted or braided together, multifilament sutures boast enhanced flexibility, knot security, and ease of handling for surgeons. These attributes make them particularly well-suited for a wide range of surgical applications. The multifilament variety's ability to minimize tissue reaction and inflammation, coupled with its superior tensile strength, further solidifies its position as a preferred choice among healthcare professionals. As surgical techniques evolve and demand for precise and reliable wound closure solutions grows, multifilament surgical sutures continue to play a pivotal role in shaping the landscape of the surgical suture market. Asia is to witness a considerable growth rate during the forecast period. In the upcoming years, the surgical suture market in Asia is set to experience significant growth. This growth is driven by factors such as a growing population, an increase in chronic diseases, and a rise in the number of surgical procedures. Governments in the region are also investing more in healthcare infrastructure, making surgeries more accessible. Big countries like China and India are expected to be major contributors to this growth, with a rising awareness of advanced medical treatments. The popularity of medical tourism in countries like India and Singapore is adding to this momentum. As Asia continues to develop economically and improve its healthcare services, the surgical suture market is likely to see substantial and sustained growth in the region. Request Sample Pages: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestsampleNew.asp?id=18374832 Surgical Sutures Market Dynamics: Drivers: 1. Rising surgical procedures and trauma cases to drive the market 2. Aging population, chronic diseases and rice in surgical procedures to drive the market Restraints: 1. Availability of Alternative Wound Closure Methods Opportunities: 1. Low and Middle-Income Countries have opportunities for growth of this market Challenge: 1. High Market Competition and Pricing Pressures Key Market Players of Surgical Sutures Industry: Prominent players in the surgical sutures market include Ethicon, Inc. (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson) (US), Medtronic Plc (Ireland), B. Braun SE (Germany), Advanced Medical Solutions Group Plc (UK), Internacional Farmaceutica S.A. de C.V. (Mexico), Healthium MedTech Limited (India), Peters Surgical (France), Corza Medical (US), Boston Scientific Corporation (US), DemeTECH Corporation (US), Zimmer Biomet Holdings, Inc. (US), Stryker Corporation (US), Smith & Nephew Plc (UK), CONMED Corporation (US), Mellon Medical B.V. (Netherlands), Unisur Lifecare Pvt. Ltd. (India), Assut Europe (UK), Katsan Katgut Sanayi ve Tic. A.S. (Turkey), Sutumed Corp. (US), Aqmen Medtech Pvt. Ltd. (India), Futura Surgicare Pvt. Ltd. (India), Anchora Medical Ltd. (Israel), Lotus Surgicals (India), Biosintex (Romania), and Meril Life Sciences Pvt. Ltd. (India). The break-down of primary participants is as mentioned below: By Company Type - Tier 1: 45%, Tier 2: 30%, and Tier 3: 25% By Designation - C-level: 42%, Director-level: 31%, and Others: 27% By Region - North America : 32%, Europe : 32%, Asia Pacific : 26%, RoW- 10% Get 10% Free Customization on this Report: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/requestCustomizationNew.asp?id=18374832 Surgical Sutures Market Recent Developments: In January 2023, Ethicon, Inc. partnered with Microsoft (US) to further expand its digital surgery solutions. In March 2023, Medtronic plc ( Ireland ) signed a contract with Vizient (US) for the Touch Surgery Enterprise, allowing surgeons to use data to refine how surgery is taught and executed. ) signed a contract with Vizient (US) for the Touch Surgery Enterprise, allowing surgeons to use data to refine how surgery is taught and executed. In December 2021, DKSH ( Switzerland ) expanded its partnership with Healthium MedTtech Limited. This partnership will help Healthium to provide its products in Thailand , Cambodia , and Laos . ) expanded its partnership with Healthium MedTtech Limited. This partnership will help Healthium to provide its products in , , and . In June 2021, Healthium acquired VitalCare (UK), a manufacturer of urology consumable care products, through its subsidiary Clinisupplies Ltd. With this acquisition, Healthium strengthened its presence in the urology segment in Europe and the US. Surgical Sutures Market - Key Benefits of Buying the Report: This report will enrich established firms as well as new entrants/smaller firms to gauge the pulse of the market, which, in turn, would help them garner a greater share of the market. Firms purchasing the report could use one or a combination of the below-mentioned strategies to strengthen their positions in the market. This report provides insights on: Analysis of key drivers (increasing surgical procedures, Rise in trauma cases, Increasing prevalence of medical tourism and government initiatives) restraints (increasing preference for minimally invasive surgeries, Presence of alternative wound care management products), opportunities (low and middle income countries), and challenges (Intense market competition and pricing pressure) influencing the growth of the Surgical Sutures market. Product Development/Innovation: Detailed insights on upcoming technologies, research & development activities, and new product launches in the Surgical Sutures market. Market Development: Comprehensive information on the lucrative emerging markets, components, demographics, end-users, and regions. Market Diversification: Exhaustive information about the product portfolios, growing geographies, recent developments, and investments in the Surgical Sutures market Competitive Assessment: In-depth assessment of market shares, growth strategies, product offerings, and capabilities of the leading players in the Surgical Sutures market like Ethicon, Inc. (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson) (US), Medtronic Plc ( Ireland ), B. Braun SE ( Germany ), Advanced Medical Solutions Group Plc (UK), Internacional Farmaceutica S.A. de C.V. ( Mexico ), and Healthium MedTech Limited ( India ). Related Reports: Advanced Wound Care Market - Global Forecasts to 2027 Animal Wound Care Market - Global Forecasts to 2027 Minimally Invasive Surgical Instruments Market - Global Forecasts to 2026 Hearing Aids Market - Global Forecasts to 2026 Wound Dressings Market - Global Forecasts to 2025 About MarketsandMarkets: MarketsandMarkets has been recognized as one of America's best management consulting firms by Forbes, as per their recent report. 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. Earlier this year, we made a formal transformation into one of America's best management consulting firms as per a survey conducted by Forbes. 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: Mr. Aashish Mehra MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA: +1-888-600-6441 Email: [email protected] Research Insight: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ResearchInsight/surgical-sutures-market.asp Visit Our Website: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/ Content Source: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/surgical-sutures.asp Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/660509/MarketsandMarkets_Logo.jpg SOURCE MarketsandMarkets 10:59 | Lima, Dec. 4. In a video released by the APEC Secretariat on social media, "In 2024, Peru will once again hold the presidency of APEC, since its entry into this important forum, as it did in 2008 and 2016. This third occasion demonstrates our strong commitment to APEC and is an expression of the trust placed in Peru by our partners," she stated. According to the top official, since Peru's entry into APEC in 1998, trade and investment with member economies of the forum have grown significantly. Thanks to APEC, she said, Peruvian enterprises have inserted themselves into dynamic value chains, both regional and global. In fact, Peru's trade with other APEC economies has grown by an average of 12% per year, and approximately, 66% of the country's trade in goods occurs with the Asia-Pacific region. "APEC has also been the platform for successful negotiations that culminated in the adoption of bilateral free trade agreements between Peru and economies of the forum such as Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Korea, United States, Japan, Singapore, and Thailand," Mrs. Boluarte affirmed. "In addition, this has allowed more than 1,500 Peruvian small and medium-sized enterprises to increase their trade with enterprises in those countries, generating jobs for more Peruvians and improving their levels of competitiveness," she added. Furthermore, she went on to say that for these reason, Peru particularly values the benefits it has received from APEC over the last 25 years, such as the facilitation of trade and investment with its Asia-Pacific partners, the generation of cooperation projects, and the exchange of good practices. "This valuable experience has allowed us to improve the formulation and execution of public policies that benefit our Peruvian people. Likewise, the confluence of the public, private, and academic sectors within the framework of APEC is a crucial advantage for Peru, as well as for all the economies that make it up, as it helps us to share common objectives, with a view to achieving economic growth and development," the Peruvian dignitary noted. "We want to thank APEC 2023 for those benefits that each one of us has been manifesting in this week of work. APEC is not only limited to trade investment and public policy, but extend to the need to ensure the well-being of our populations through an inclusive and sustainable approach, particularly relevant in the face of the emerging challenges that we face," she said. Additionally, the President added that Peru is linked to the Asia-Pacific region for reasons that are not only geographical, but also historical, economic, and cultural. In this regard, she stressed that Peru's participation in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum is a natural consequence of this reality. "From our presidency, we will bring to the APEC agenda issues that favor the empowerment of economic actors, especially the most vulnerable, through an inclusive and sustainable approach, and the empowerment of women, of course. Because as a female president, that is what we are going to promote," the country's top official underlined. "During our presidency in 2024, issues such as trade and investment for inclusive growth will be prioritized; innovation to promote the transition to the formal and global economy; and sustainable growth for resilient development, as all economic leaders have stated in these past few days," she expressed. Likewise, she remarked that, with a decentralized approach, Peru has been preparing the "APEC Citizen Peru 2024" initiative, in order to bring the benefits of the APEC forum closer to the population. "I am sure that this summit will contribute significantly to issues such as connectivity, innovation, inclusion, and sustainability, which are high on the agenda of this forum," Mrs. Boluarte stated. Finally, the Head of State invited APEC economies to visit Peru next year during its presidency, in order to continue to develop a constructive dialogue that will contribute to the growth and prosperity of the people in the Asia-Pacific. DUBAI, UAE, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Nordic countries and the United States launch the Investment Mobilization Collaboration Arrangement (IMCA) a new blended finance collaboration to mobilize billions of dollars in developing countries and emerging markets. The collaboration will enable private capital for investments in climate mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity and nature-based solutions. IMCA is a unique coordination mechanism that utilizes an innovative public-private partnership approach that will create concrete pipeline collaboration and knowledge sharing, support blended finance vehicles, and catalyze private capital for climate action into emerging markets and developing economies at scale and speed. It is a partnership between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Sweden and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and Investment Fund for Developing Countries (IFU) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland. Dialogues with additional donor countries are ongoing and the initiative welcomes new partners. World Climate Foundation is acting as IMCA's Operating Partner, with support from the Climate Investment Coalition. IMCA will collaborate with an Asset Owner Advisory Board for technical support on scoping of possible transactions and private finance incentives, and then engage with leading asset managers on calls for blended finance vehicle origination and asset owners for financial pledges. "USAID is very pleased to join with our Nordic partners to mobilize catalytic climate funding that will target both the most pressing needs and the greatest opportunities in addressing the crisis. We are proud to have structured one collaborative blended finance facility focused on the energy transition in high-emitting countries and another to address critical gaps in adaptation finance for vulnerable countries. In 2024 and beyond, we look forward to encouraging the finance sector to do even more to mobilize and scale financing for other critical climate priorities such as nature-based solutions and biodiversity conservation," Gillian Caldwell, Chief Climate Officer, USAID. At today's launch, IMCA issued a call for proposals under the PREPARE Adaptation Finance Window, an initiative under the USAID Climate Finance for Development Accelerator. IMCA is seeking to mobilize up to US$500 million in private capital for climate adaptation, with a particular focus on Africa. Experienced investment managers are invited to apply for financial support, which may include a combination of catalytic grant capital and guarantees. IMCA anticipates issuing up to three USAID grant awards to help mobilize additional adaptation funding. More information can be found at www.climatelinks.org/afw; the deadline for applications is January 15, 2024. This news follows IMCA partners' first announcement of joint support earlier today at COP28, of the Blended Finance for the Energy Transition (BFET) program. BFET is an initiative of the U.S. Department of State, in partnership with USAID, and with catalytic co-funding and support from the Government of Denmark and Investment Fund for Developing Countries (IFU). BFET's two funding awards were announced under USAID's Climate Finance for Development Accelerator aiming to mobilize US$1 billion or more of capital to accelerate just energy transition efforts in emerging markets. Additional Quotes "We all know it: At the current stage, we do not have the necessary funds needed to fight climate change. There is a global climate-financing gap. And states cannot close this gap alone. We need the private sector as partners to fight the climate challenge that faces us all. That is why we now present this initiative in the field of blended finance. Only by merging and blending our finances, we can raise the capital needed for green investments." Lars Lkke Rasmussen, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Government of Denmark "Climate change is accelerating with crippling consequences. We need more climate action to push accelerated transition and enhanced adaptation and resilience building. To this end, we must generate extensive new climate finance. Official Development Assistance will never be enough. Our climate finance must be truly catalytical, unleashing private capital and scaling up technical solutions. We must mobilize private capital in the billions. IMCA aims to do just that." Johan Forssell, Minister for International Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade, Government of Sweden. "Ensuring a just expansion of climate solutions for mitigation and adaptation in emerging markets is critical for delivering on our common climate goals. World Climate Foundation is proud to be acting as Operating Partner of the Investment Mobilization Collaboration Arrangement (IMCA); to deliver on climate investment objectives in developing and emerging economies. We look forward to utilizing our expertise in facilitating public-private sector collaboration to catalyze critically needed climate finance at scale." Jens Nielsen, CEO, World Climate Foundation. Contacts Pauline Ledermann, [email protected] Lauren Yang, [email protected] Jacqueline Musiitwa, [email protected] Jesper Hilsted Andersen, [email protected] Veera Lilja, [email protected] Dag Sjoogren, [email protected] The following files are available for download: https://mb.cision.com/Main/21920/3886892/2469833.pdf Press release (PDF) SOURCE World Climate Foundation AUSTIN, Texas, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Upgraded Points is unwrapping each state's cup of cheer in its latest study: The Most Popular Holiday Cocktails in Every State. "Every state has its unique twist on holiday cheer, and what better way to explore this than through popular seasonal cocktails," said Keri Stooksbury, Editor-in-Chief at Upgraded Points. "Our data studies always seek to inform on issues that affect readers and travelers, but we also like to have a little more fun around the holidays." The Most Popular Holiday Cocktail in Every State. America's Most Popular Holiday Cocktails. Study Methodology To find each state's preferred holiday cocktail, Upgraded Points compiled a list of 50 beloved holiday beverages and analyzed Google Trends data from the past year. America's Top Holiday Cocktail Picks Christmas Punch: A total holiday staple, this fruity favorite is king in 11 states. A total holiday staple, this fruity favorite is king in 11 states. Classic Eggnog: Savored in 6 states, this creamy, spiced beverage is an ancient holiday tradition. Savored in 6 states, this creamy, spiced beverage is an ancient holiday tradition. Cranberry Mimosa and Hot Buttered Rum: The favorite of 4 states each; a zesty twist and sweet warmth, respectively. The favorite of 4 states each; a zesty twist and sweet warmth, respectively. Coquito and Cranberry Orange Whiskey Sour: Winning 3 states each, these drinks bring tropical and citrusy notes to the holiday table. Winning 3 states each, these drinks bring tropical and citrusy notes to the holiday table. Christmas Margarita: A festive spin on the classic margarita chosen by 2 states. For a closer look at regional preferences, check out the complete study online . About Upgraded Points LLC Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Upgraded Points is a travel company that helps to demystify the complex world of travel and credit cards. Launched in 2016 by Alex Miller, Upgraded Points uses targeted research efforts and in-depth studies to help travelers maximize their travel, points, and experiences. Learn more at: www.UpgradedPoints.com . Media Contact: Alex Miller, Founder 1-214-646-8866 [email protected] SOURCE Upgraded Points WEST CHESTER, Pa., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The VESTECK, Inc. Chief Technology Officer, invited to present the "SUTURE-TIGHT" technology at the 16th Annual Greenberg Stent Summit, sponsored by Mass General Brigham. Stent Summit organizers requested Ted Wulfman, VESTECK, Inc. Chief Technology Officer, join in and stimulate the discussion on "There's more to aneurysm treatment than the use of an endograft. What are the roles of adjunctive treatments in aneurysm treatment?" Tuesday 12/5/2023 10:56-11:17AM. The 16th Greenberg Stent Summit brings together clinicians, members of the FDA and industry notables to create two and a half days of lively discussion on advances in aortic disease repair. Mr. Wulfman commented, "I am honored to say the least. To receive an invitation to participate at such a prestigious conference as the Greenberg Stent Summit is a true honor. Two weeks ago, Prof. Krievins presented "SUTURE-TIGHT" at the iconic Veith meeting and now we are contributing to the conversation at the Boston Stent Summit. Very exciting stuff." "The positive momentum continues at VESTECK. We appreciate the podium presence. 9 clinical cases successfully completed. Patients are doing well. 3 new patents have been filed. We are headed to Australia, conducting clinical cases with Professors Ramon Varcoe and Andrew Holden, helping more moms, dads, brothers and sisters," said VESTECK CEO, Joe Rafferty. About VESTECK, Inc. (WWW.VESTECK.com) is a clinical stage medical device company focused on bringing a platform technology to the aortic repair, structural heart, peripheral vascular markets. The "SUTURE-TIGHT" catheter comes preloaded with 4 pair of nitinol sutures, it secures EVAR/TEVAR grafts to the aorta on initial implant or during repair procedures. "SUTURE-TIGHT" brings a simple, easy to use technology to physicians, patients and payors. VESTECK is raising a $16M Series B round to support a clinical trial for FDA 510K clearance. The VESTECK, Inc. "SUTURE-TIGHT" is not commercially available in the USA or OUS. MEDIA CONTACTS: VESTECK CEO, Joe Rafferty, [email protected] Please note that this document reflects statements that may constitute forward-looking statements and projections that are subject to risks and uncertainties, including information about possible or assumed future events, results of economic conditions and VESTECK's business, results of operations, plans and objectives. These statements are based on management's beliefs, assumptions and expectations of VESTECK's future performance, taking into account information currently available to it. You should not place undue reliance on such statements, as new risks and uncertainties may arise and it is not possible for management to predict those events or how they may affect VESTECK, Inc. SOURCE VESTECK, Inc. Min Fang and Ben Zhou to become co-Heads of China Private Equity and to become co-Heads of China Private Equity Narendra Ostawal to become Head of India Private Equity Saurabh Agarwal to become Head of Southeast Asia Private Equity to become Head of Southeast Asia Private Equity Tak Murata to serve as Head of Japan and co-Head of Asia Real Estate with Ellen Ng to serve as Head of and co-Head of Asia Real Estate with Vishal Mahadevia promoted to Head of Asia Private Equity NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Warburg Pincus, the oldest private equity firm and a leading global growth investor, today announced that it will expand its footprint across Asia Pacific by leveraging its longstanding presence in China, India, and Southeast Asia. As a part of that effort, it has named the next generation of leadership for the region as it seeks to integrate its private equity business across Asia under unified management, mirroring the firm's organizational leadership in the Americas and Europe. Vishal Mahadevia, a 17-year veteran of the firm, will assume the newly created position of Head of Asia Private Equity while retaining his co-Head of Financial Services role. As one of the earliest investors, with nearly 30 years of investing experience in Asia, Warburg Pincus has committed more than $30 billion in China, India, and more recently in Southeast Asia. As the firm continues to expand its regional footprint in Asia and deepen its sector coverage, Warburg Pincus believes it is the right time to unify the management structure to promote greater collaboration, continuity, and risk management, while further scaling the business and growing its investor base across the region. "We were the first Private Equity firm to achieve scale in Asia, and we continue to benefit from the transformation of the economy and the rise of the middle class. Over the years, we have built a world class team with decades of experience seizing opportunity and managing risk in the major economies in the region. The strength, maturity, and scale of our business across Asia positions us well to invest successfully as the economy evolves. Next year, we will celebrate our 30th anniversary in China and in Asia as a whole and I am enormously proud of the business we have built over this period," said Chip Kaye, CEO, Warburg Pincus. "Vishal's leadership skills and investment expertise, paired with our long-tenured next generation of investors, are an ideal team to drive the firm's Asia strategy forward," Mr. Kaye continued. Warburg Pincus recently closed Warburg Pincus Global Growth 14, with $17.3 billion of capital, the largest fundraise in its nearly 60-year history. The capital committed gives Warburg Pincus a large, dedicated pool of capital to pursue a global set of opportunities for investment in growth companies within the firm's key industry sectors. Warburg Pincus also announced in July the promotion of Jeffrey Perlman, previously Head of Southeast Asia and Asia Pacific Real Estate, to President as part of a succession plan for the next generation of leadership at the firm. The elevation of Vishal Mahadevia and the next generation of leadership across China, India, and Southeast Asia are the next steps in that transition. "Having spent over a decade of my career in Asia, I know first-hand the exciting opportunities for the firm across the region. Our deep track record and unique ability to partner with entrepreneurs to build leading businesses make us a partner of choice in the local markets where we operate," said Jeff Perlman, President, Warburg Pincus. "Our deep domain expertise and thesis-driven approach to investing, coupled with our proven success of creating regional champions in real estate sets us up well to further expand our private equity activities across Asia Pacific. I look forward to working closely with Vishal and the broader Asia private equity leadership on this next chapter," continued Mr. Perlman. Vishal Mahadevia joined Warburg Pincus in 2006 and was previously Head of India. Commenting on his appointment, Mr. Mahadevia said, "As we continue to evolve the business and drive our next phase of growth, I am privileged to be surrounded by an extraordinary team that collectively has an average of over 15 years of experience with Warburg Pincus. I look forward to executing on our next set of priorities and partnering with our dynamic management teams in the region." In China, which represents the firm's longest investing record in Asia, Min Fang and Ben Zhou who joined the firm in 2007 and 2005, respectively, will serve as co-Heads of China Private Equity. Since the inception of the China business in 1994, the firm has invested in over 100 companies, cementing itself as one of the leading investors in the market. Warburg Pincus remains very focused on the market especially in core sectors including financial services, healthcare/consumer, and New Economy real estate and others. After more than 20 years with Warburg Pincus, Frank Wei will step down from his current role as Head of China. During Frank's tenure he has played an instrumental role in recruiting and leading our talented team of investors and partnering with entrepreneurs to build leading businesses in China. He will remain as a Managing Director at the firm through 2024 to ensure a seamless transition. In India, Narendra Ostawal who joined the firm in 2007, has been named Head of India Private Equity. Viraj Sawhney and Anish Saraf who joined the firm in 2005 and 2006, respectively, will both take on expanded roles, as the firm deepens its focus on cross-border business services and industrials activity. Warburg Pincus is one of the pioneers in the private equity sector in India and has invested across 80 companies since its first investment in the country in 1996. In Singapore, Saurabh Agarwal who joined the firm in 2009, has been appointed Head of Southeast Asia Private Equity. The firm made its first investment in Southeast Asia in 2013 and has emerged as one of the leading investors in the region across Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore. During its past three decades of investing in Asia, Warburg Pincus has been involved in a number of marquee investments and exits, including China Biologic and Beijing Amcare in China, Au SFB and Bharti Airtel in India, and Vincom Retail and Converge in Southeast Asia. Additionally, the firm previously announced that Takashi Murata will also be joining in early 2024 as Head of Japan, which further extends the firm's footprint across the region, and co-Head of Asia Real Estate, alongside long-time Warburg Pincus veteran Ellen Ng. With Tak's successful investing track record in Japan over the past 25 years, the firm is well-positioned to accelerate both its real estate and private equity investing activities in the market. Since its founding in 1966, Warburg Pincus has pursued a strategy of thesis-driven growth investing at scale, adding a global component to this strategy nearly four decades ago. The foundation of the firm's investment strategy has always been identifying and partnering with talented entrepreneurs and management teams who are committed to building sustainable companies and who are aligned with our investment teams' specific theses. Warburg Pincus believes this approach positions the firm well for attractive risk-adjusted, long-term returns across economic and capital markets cycles. About Warburg Pincus Warburg Pincus LLC is a leading global growth investor. The firm has more than $84 billion in assets under management. The firm's active portfolio of more than 250 companies is highly diversified by stage, sector, and geography. Warburg Pincus is an experienced partner to management teams seeking to build durable companies with sustainable value. Since its founding in 1966, Warburg Pincus has invested more than $113 billion in over 1,000 companies in more than 40 countries across its private equity, real estate, and capital solutions strategies. The firm is headquartered in New York with offices in Amsterdam, Beijing, Berlin, Hong Kong, Houston, London, Luxembourg, Mumbai, Mauritius, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and Singapore. For more information, please visit www.warburgpincus.com. Follow us on LinkedIn. Contact Americas Kerrie Cohen | Managing Director, Head of Communications, Americas T: +1 212 878 9207 E: [email protected] Asia Lisa Liang | Senior Vice President, Head of Marketing and Communications, China and Southeast Asia T: +86 (10) 8529 2508 E: [email protected] SOURCE Warburg Pincus Company emerges from Chapter 11 with a strong financial foundation and less than $100 million of funded debt, positioned for long-term success. Reorganization efforts supported by all classes of voting creditors. Better positioned to meet customer needs with continued safe, effective, reliable service. ESTERO, Fla., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Western Global Airlines ("WGA" or the "Company"), a US FAA 121 certified long-haul wide-body cargo airline with worldwide coverage, announced today that the Company has successfully completed its comprehensive financial restructuring. The Company's Plan of Reorganization (the "Plan") was confirmed by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware after receiving overwhelming support by all voting classes of creditors and the unanimous support of the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors. Under the Plan, WGA has materially reduced its debt by more than $460 million and infused significant new capital into the Company, while preserving its seasoned workforce and long-term relationships with customers and suppliers. The Company is positioned for a strong and promising future as it leverages its unique and scalable platform. WGA will benefit from a greatly enhanced balance sheet, building on its extensive ten-year experience of safely and reliably operating large wide-body freighters to more than 400 airports in 135 countries on six continents. The Company has emerged with its entire pre-petition fleet of four 747-400 and fifteen MD-11 operational freighters intact, as well as two MD-11F's that have not yet been conformed, eleven part-out aircraft, and a large inventory of parts, materials, and tooling. Further, during the Chapter 11 process, the Company completed the overhaul of seven spare CF6-80C2 engines. With the exception of one leased airplane, all aircraft, engines, and spare parts are 100% owned by the reorganized WGA. Over the course of just 100 days, the Company restructured its debt through an in-court process. WGA continued to operate without disruption and implemented a cash award retention program for nearly its entire workforce during the process by drawing on $77.5 million of Debtor in Possession (DIP) financing provided by its owners, Jim and Sunny Neff, who also funded the equity and exit financing, and waived nearly $100 million of secured and unsecured prepetition debt held by them in order to provide recovery to all creditors. This cash consideration is a testament to the Company's effort to build consensus around its restructuring Plan, which it is proud to have achieved, and to establish a strong foundation going forward. "As the Founder and CEO of Western Global Airlines, my top priority has always been to preserve the long-term viability of our Company and protect our people. I am pleased our restructuring process has achieved that," said Jim Neff. "It continues to be a privilege to lead our team, especially as WGA has emerged stronger and ready to thrive again as it has historically done. As always, I am immensely grateful to our employees, customers, and partners for their enduring support as we navigated this process. I look forward to sharing the Company's successes with our loyal employees and for Western Global to continue to serve as a critical partner for our customers. We will continue our mission to connect people worldwide to the urgent necessities that are important to themwith steadfast and renewed focus and financial resources." At the Company's confirmation hearing, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP Partner Candace Arthur, counsel for WGA, stated, "The debtors thank Jim and Sunny Neff for stepping up prepetition when extensive efforts failed to identify anyone else that would invest in the company to keep it out of liquidation. The debtors thank them for financing these Chapter 11 cases through a plan process despite it not being the easiest and most economic decision for them. The plan before the Court today is a gifting plan with multiple stakeholders receiving a recovery that they would, otherwise, not have. After today the debtors will also thank the owners for reinvesting with an equity check for the benefit of the reorganized company." The presiding judge, the Honorable Karen B. Owens, further commended the parties "for working together very productively to make these cases as smooth as one could imagine," later continuing, "I very much appreciate everyone's hard work to reach consensus." Her comments followed an affirmation from the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors, whose legal representative called the Plan "highly favorable[with] overwhelming support of all creditor classes." Ms. Arthur concluded the hearing by noting, "Western Global is better than it was...It is emerging stronger with significantly less debt, withoutoperational distractions...And it's poised to strive even in the face of an industry that continues to have significant headwinds." For more information about Western Global Airlines' Chapter 11 case, including terms of the transactions consummated in connection with the Company's emergence, please visit https://cases.stretto.com/WGA or call the Company's hotline at 844.500.8484 (for toll-free U.S. and Canada calls) or 949.522.9797 (for tolled international calls). The Company was represented by Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP and Richards, Layton & Finger as legal counsel, Evercore as investment banker, and FTI Consulting as restructuring advisor. About WGA Headquartered in Estero, Florida, with an MRO in Shreveport, Louisiana, Western Global Airlines provides contracted air cargo transportation services ranging from ACMI (Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance, and Insurance) to Full Service, on a global scale. Western Global is the premier 21st century, high-tech air cargo platform serving customers in e-commerce, express, freight forwarding, logistics, nonprofit, and governmental organizations. In only 10 years, Western Global has become a leading, global logistics powerhouse, safely and reliably flying to over 400 airports in 135 countries on six continents on behalf of its diverse, blue chip, client base in the logistics industry. Media Inquiries: [email protected] SOURCE Western Global Airlines DENVER, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- York Space Systems (York), the Denver-based aerospace company dedicated to the rapid deployment of complete space mission solutions, is reporting successful deployment and successful contact with its BANE spacecraft hours after launch. The satellite was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base on December 1; York confirmed successful first contact -- on the first attempt -- within three hours following launch/deployment and all spacecraft systems are healthy and safe. York personnel watch BANE launch from Willow Facility. This commercial mission showcases York's ability to serve as an end-to-end solution provider, highlighting the company's seamless integration of satellite design, construction, launch services, software, and ground segments. The BANE mission emphasizes York's commitment to delivering comprehensive solutions aligned with the dynamic needs of the space industry at a pace unmatched in the industry. "We are proud to have successfully executed another commercial mission, showcasing our ultra-streamlined commercial acquisition and execution approach," said Melanie Preisser, Executive Vice President at York Space Systems. "We take great pride in being an end-to-end solution provider, offering integrated services that enable us to meet the evolving demands of our government and commercial customers, and the market at large." York's industry leading integrated approach is tailored to align with the rapidly evolving demands of the market, increasing demand for American made hardware and software, while emphasizing swift execution without compromising on quality. The success of the BANE mission underscores York's ability to effectively leverage existing production lines, rapid scale, and streamlined acquisition to meet the urgent requirements of government and commercial customers. The BANE mission carries two commercial payloads one from CACI International Inc. a Resilient Position Navigation and Timing (PNT) system and the other is an Optical Communications demonstration. About York Space Systems York Space Systems was founded on the principle of transforming spacecraft affordability and reliability. The Denver-based aerospace company is a beacon in the industry, enabling and spearheading next-generation space mission operations globally. Specializing in the swift production of mission-ready spacecraft platforms, York integrates commercial methodologies across a spectrum of government and commercial assignments. Their comprehensive solutions encompass spacecraft production, payload and system integration, launch and ground segment services, and mission operations. Harnessing York's technology suite ensures customers achieve rapid orbit deployments, providing them with a competitive edge. Their S-CLASS and LX-CLASS platforms cater to a diverse set of missions ranging from ISR, remote proximity, weather, to communications. York's platforms are compatible with a broad spectrum of launch vehicles and ground segment providers. Their cloud-based mission tasking paired with an autonomous operations center provides an unparalleled, cost-effective solution for real-time data acquisition and analysis. Learn more at http://www.YorkSpaceSystems.com. SOURCE York Space Systems CHANGSHA, China, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science & Technology Co., Ltd. ("Zoomlion", 1157.HK) held the 2024 Zoomlion Agriculture Machinery Global Business Conference in Changsha, November 28-29. The event attracted nearly 1,000 dealers, including more than 140 international representatives from over 20 countries. Representatives from international agents taking a close look at Zoomlion Agriculture Machinerys products During the conference, the participating dealers had the opportunity to closely examine Zoomlion Agriculture Machinery's collection of advanced equipment - 51 models spanning 12 categories. The product lineup covered the entire agricultural process, from plowing and planting to harvesting, straw processing, and drying. The innovative nature and advanced technology of these offerings garnered high praise from the visitors. "Zoomlion is poised to create a new paradigm in technology, product development, team building, and market expansion," said Zhan Chunxin, Chairman and CEO of Zoomlion. "We are committed to fully leveraging the power of internet-based thinking to innovate unconventional development models. Our goal is to establish a world-class agricultural machinery and equipment hub." In the realm of technology and product innovation, Zoomlion, leveraged resources from construction machinery, and developed key product lines in agricultural machinery, including tractors and rice and corn equipment. Technologies such as renewable energy, digitalization, and AI from its construction machinery segment now has been transferred to its agricultural machinery. This approach has led to a range of high-end, intelligent, and eco-friendly products, addressing industry needs. Zoomlion Agriculture Machinery covers 15 major categories, encompassing the full agricultural cycle. In terms of production capacity, quality, marketing, and services, Zoomlion Agriculture Machinery Division has assembled a dedicated team of over 2,000 experts, specializing in R&D, sales, and services. By working in concert with its agents and dealers, the firm has built an extensive sales and service network that spans China and over 70 countries and regions worldwide. The company's innovative overseas business model focuses on end-to-end solutions and digital integration, contributing to a year-on-year overseas revenue increase of over 100% by November. This growth has made Zoomlion China's top agricultural machinery exporter for three consecutive years. "I started to partner with Zoomlion Agriculture Machinery in 2021. At present, their tractors, which range from 90 to 230 horsepower, command about 35% of Kazakhstan's market share, leading the industry," Aslan, a Kazakhstani dealership branch manager, explained. "Our visit to Zoomlion's headquarters has deepened our understanding and confidence in our future partnership." After more than 30 years of relentless innovation and growth, Zoomlion Heavy Industry has diversified into construction machinery, smart agricultural machinery, and innovative construction materials. The company has invested heavily in a state-of-the-art construction machinery manufacturing hub. "Having been involved in the agricultural machinery sector for nearly a decade, we have a profound affection for agriculture. We experienced the ups and downs of the market, however, the commitment to the development of agricultural machinery remains unchanged," said Zoomlion CEO Mr. Zhan. "The company is dedicated to driving the agricultural machinery industry toward an era of high-end, intelligent and eco-friendly growth," added Zhan. SOURCE Zoomlion YEREVAN, DECEMBER 4, ARMENPRESS. French senators have called on the authorities to explore the possibility of sending CAESAR self-propelled howitzers to Armenia in addition to the other recently shipped weapons, according to a defense budget bill of the French Senate. The document mentions that Armenia will receive a total of 50 Arquus Bastion armored personnel carriers. 24 of these vehicles are already being shipped, while the rest are currently in production. Armenia recently bought Thales-made GM 200 radars and Mistral 3 air defense systems from France. Armenia recently signed an order for three GM200 radars from Thales and there is talk of a delivery of MISTRAL 3 surface-to-air missiles. The rapporteurs are able to indicate that 24 Bastion-type armored vehicles, produced by the French group Arquus, are being delivered to Armenia and should be joined by 26 other vehicles of the same type currently in production. The French authorities have initiated the delivery of defensive weapons to Armenia. This distinction between defensive and offensive weapons is in reality not very operational, as the war in Ukraine demonstrated. Let's not repeat the same mistakes by late delivering equipment that would have been necessary from the start. This is why we must respond quickly to all the requests from the Armenian authorities, particularly regarding their need for artillery. The rapporteurs recommend, in this regard, that the delivery of CAESAR artillery systems be studied as soon as possible taking into account the effectiveness of this equipment and the new production capacities of Nexter in 2024, Senators Hugues Saury and Helene Conway-Mouret said in a recommendation for the 2024 budget. YEREVAN, DECEMBER 4, ARMENPRESS. On December 4, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia delivered remarks at the intersessional meeting of the Human Rights Council dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The meeting was organized based on the tasking of the Human Rights Councils resolution authored by Armenia, the foreign ministry said in a statement. According to the source, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk and the Special Adviser of the UN Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide and Under Secretary-General Alice Wairimu Nderitu also delivered opening remarks during the event. High-ranking representatives of UN specialized bodies, rapporteurs and well-known experts in the field participated as panellists at the meeting. In his speech, the Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said: Excellences, Ladies and Gentlemen, Armenia warmly welcomes the participants and panelists of the Intersessional Meeting on the Prevention of Genocide and extends its gratitude to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for the organization of todays session. On 9 December we will mark the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Today, 153 UN member states are bound by the universal obligation of punishing and preventing this crime of crimes. Indeed, the Convention is a powerful crime suppression multilateral treaty. But not only. Today, the obligations emanating from the Convention have been well mainstreamed in the resolutions of the Human Rights Council on genocide prevention. Against this backdrop, I find it extremely important that the resolutions on Genocide Prevention enjoy wide cross-regional support and consensus in the Human Rights Council. It reflects a larger international consensus on the absolute imperative to prevent genocides through protection of individual and collective human rights of ethnic, religious, racial and national groups. In this regard, the Human Rights Council is well-placed to be at the forefront of genocide prevention. We hope that the synergies and the cooperation between the Office of the Special Adviser of the Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide, treaty bodies, and special procedure mandate holders will be further strengthened and institutionalized. I take this opportunity to highlight the extensive work carried out by Special Adviser Alice Wairimu Nderitu. Excellences, I have no doubt that the deliberations at this meeting will once again demonstrate the relevance of mass atrocity prevention in todays world. The world we live in today is a dangerous place for many ethnic and religious groups, and the intent to destroy them on a certain territory has been manifested worldwide, particularly now when the international security arrangements and human rights mechanisms are in continuous decline. The very idea of eliminating right holders as the medium of resolving conflicts has never been so appealing for perpetrators of crimes as it is today. The conflict situations provide ample environment for perpetrators, who under the guise of another party to the conflict, claim from the international community a treatment equal to one that should be extended to the victims. Disparity of force has always been a constant feature of genocide. And by saying force, I did not exclusively refer to the military advantage of perpetrators but their ability to use new technologies in disinformation and misinformation in order to dehumanize victims, prepare grounds for deadly actions with their subsequent justification. One year ago, the 4th Global Forum Against the Crime of Genocide organized in Yerevan considered the role of new technologies in genocide prevention both from positive and negative angles. The Yerevan declaration adopted during the Forum acknowledged that the spread of disinformation and misinformation, particularly on social media platforms, can serve as a new propaganda tool to mislead and spread racism, intolerance, xenophobia, negative stereotyping and stigmatization, to violate and abuse human rights and dehumanize groups on the basis of identity. Dear friends, The perpetration of mass atrocities, including genocides, continues to take a considerable time in all its phases. As a matter of fact, the collective punishment of targeted groups takes different forms and manifestations, evolving incrementally in its gravity, including through violations of international human rights and international humanitarian laws, disruption of critical infrastructure, siege and massive violence. Needless to say that many mass atrocities could have been prevented once early warning signals were identified during those phases. Collective failure should not be a justification for individual inaction for each and every UN member state. Another important dimension of international responsibility is the international protection of victims, including those forcibly displaced. Two months ago, the Republic of Armenia provided shelter and means of subsistence to more than 100 thousand refugees, the entire population of Nagorno-Karabakh uprooted from its ancestral homeland. Support of the international community is essential in providing international protection for these victims of ethnic cleansing. Excellences, Decades ago, when Armenia assumed responsibility in mainstreaming human rights into genocide prevention, we were driven by our moral duty towards the past. Today, we see that it is not merely about the past, rather our joint efforts are aimed at the present and future: a future of humanity free of hatred, racism, xenophobia and intolerance leading to mass atrocity crimes. Despite all setbacks of the international human rights and security system, we will continue to actively engage in the Human Rights Council and other multilateral platforms for further elaboration of tools and mechanisms for the prevention of genocides and other mass atrocities. I thank again the OHCHR and High Commissioner Volker Turk for the organization of the meeting and wish every success to panellists and participants. If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this Got news tips, gossip, suggestions, complaints?E-mail us: progressivecharlestown@gmail.com We strive to avoid errors in our articles. Our correction policy can be found here Aden, Dec 4 : Yemen's Houthi rebel group has claimed responsibility for attacking two "Israeli ships" off Yemen's Red Sea coast near the strategic Bab el-Mandeb Strait. According to a statement released on Sunday by the group's military spokesman Yahya Sarea, the rebel forces carried out drone and naval missile attacks at two "Israeli ships" after both ships ignored warning messages from Houthi-controlled naval forces, Xinhua news agency reported. He vowed that the Houthi forces would continue hampering Israeli ships from sailing in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea until Israeli military aggression against the Gaza Strip ceases. Earlier on Sunday, a Yemeni coast guard official told Xinhua that a missile had struck a Bahamian-flagged commercial ship 34 nautical miles off the coast of Mocha, a Yemeni port city in the Red Sea while sailing in international waters near Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The official confirmed the vessel sustained damage, but the extent was unknown. The Houthis have previously threatened to target Israeli ships in the Red Sea in retaliation for the ongoing conflict in Gaza that erupted on October 7 between Israel and the Gaza-ruling Hamas. On November 19, the Houthis seized a vessel they claimed was an "Israeli ship" near Bab el-Mandeb, holding 52 sailors of different nationalities hostage. The strikes on the commercial ship near the strategic maritime route of Bab el-Mandeb could potentially escalate tensions and threaten international shipping in the region. Since the Yemeni civil war erupted in late 2014, the Houthi militia has taken control of much of Yemen's north, including the strategic Red Sea port city of Hodeidah. Aizawl: Polling officials prepare to leave for poll duty ahead of voting for Mizoram Assembly elections. Image Source: IANS News Aizawl, Dec 4 : The counting of votes for Mizoram Assembly polls began on Monday morning amid elaborate security arrangements in all 11 districts of the state. Additional Chief Electoral Officer H. Lianzela said that initially, postal ballots are being counted and then, the counting of votes polled through the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) would be taken up. Over 4,000 officials including women are engaged in the counting process. These officials are posted at 40 counting halls under 13 centres in 11 districts to count the votes, the official told IANS. Director General of Police, Anil Shukla said that adequate security measures have been taken for the smooth conduct of the counting process. Adequate contingents of Central Armed Police Forces and Mizoram Armed Police have been deployed across the state to maintain law and order. More than 80 per cent of the 8.57 lakh voters exercised their franchise to decide the electoral fate of 174 candidates, including 16 women. The ruling Mizo National Front (MNF), the main Opposition Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) and the Congress have fielded candidates from all 40 seats while the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is contesting on four seats. The BJP has fielded candidates on 23 seats with a special focus on linguistic minority inhabited areas, especially where the Reang and Chakma tribal communities are in reasonable numbers in the voters' list. Besides them, 27 independent candidates are also in the fray. The counting of votes was earlier scheduled on Sunday in the Christian-majority state (87 per cent) but after repeated appeals by all political parties, NGOs, Civil Society Organisations, churches, youth and student bodies including the influential Young Mizo Association (YMA), the Election Commission of India (ECI) rescheduled the counting to Monday. Polling for the 40-member Mizoram assembly was held on November 7. Lucknow, Dec 4 : Two men have been arrested for allegedly using their mobile number to pose as Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's Officer on Special Duty (OSD) and using indecent language and even threatening people. Gautam Palli SHO Rikesh Kumar Singh said: "The men have been booked under Indian Penal Code's sections 419 (cheat by personation), 420 (cheating), and 507 (criminal intimidation) in an FIR at Gautam Palli police station after which they have been arrested." According to police, the two accused arrested from Deoria were identified as Ved Prakash Mishra and Sandeep Singh. The complainant, Sanjeev Singh, OSD to Yogi, in his written complaint to Gautam Palli police, said that the men, who use their three mobile numbers, used indecent language and even tried to threaten some people impersonating as OSD to exert pressure on them. "On the basis of the complaint, the FIR was registered, and section 419 was added after the arrest of the accused," the SHO said. VHP to reach out to 30L Hindu families for Ayodhya event. Image Source: IANS News Varanasi : , Dec 4 (IANS) The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) will reach out to about 30 lakh Hindu families in 17 districts of its Kashi Prant to distribute 'akshat' (unbroken rice used in puja), 'patrak' (invitation) and photo of Lord Ram from January 1-15. The campaign will be held ahead of the consecration ceremony of Ram temple in Ayodhya on January 22. Senior VHP office-bearers have joined hands with the functionaries of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other Hindu frontal organisations for the campaign. Kavindra Pratap Singh, president of VHP (Kashi Prant) said, "We will reach out to 30 lakh Hindu families of Kashi Prant and give them 'akshat', 'patrak' and photo of Lord Ram from January 1-15. We have formed committees at ward level in cities and in gram panchayats in rural pockets for the campaign." The VHP activists will connect with Hindus through online and offline mode to ensure that at least five 'diyas' (earthen lamps) are lit in every house on January 22. According to the plan, 'diyas' will be lit at houses and temples across the country at 6 p.m. Singh further said, "The divisional office has received 'akshat' which will be distributed from January 1. Events like 'bhajan', 'kirtan', playing of 'Ram dhun', and 'prasad' distribution will be held in temples." Meanwhile, VHP leadership in Prayagraj division has divided the entire Prayagraj district into five zones -- south, north, Naini, trans-Ganga and trans Yamuna -- to reach out to six lakh families here. At least 11 people died in an eruption of a volcano in Indonesias Sumatra, Reuters said citing a spokesperson for the local search and rescue team. December 4, 2023, 10:54 Volcano eruption in Indonesia kills 11 people STEPANAKERT, DECEMBER 4 , ARTSAKHPRESS: According to him, three people were found alive while 12 more are considered missing. On December 3, a massive eruption of the Marapi volcano occurred in Sumatra. According to preliminary data, the volcano spewed ash as high as over 15,000 meters into the air. Washington, Dec 4 : Indian-American Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal has reiterated her call for a ceasefire in Gaza as fighting has resumed in the Hamas-controlled enclave following the collapse of a seven-day humanitarian truce. "It's what has to happen, and I do think it's realistic," Jayapal told CNN on Sunday "We did have a temporary ceasefire and what happened? We were able to see a significant number of hostages released, we were able to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, and I think the long-term plan for what happens is incredibly important," she added. When asked if she thought that Hamas would be willing to comply with a longer ceasefire, Jayapal called the situation "very complicated". "We don't have all of the information in front of us, we obviously can rely on statements that are made, but I think that in these negotiations, everybody wants something," she told CNN. "I think Qatar has said that Hamas is still at the table, Israel should still be at the table. In fact, some of the hostages, the Israeli hostages, are saying that Israel should still be at the table. "It doesn't happen unless both sides are willing to come to some kind of an agreement, that's how we got the first seven days," the Congresswoman added. Jayapal is among the Indian-American lawmakers who have consistently called for a cessation of hostilities, extended truce for smooth flow of aid, swift release of hostages, removal of Hamas and a lasting solution to the raging war in Gaza. Indian-American Congressman Ami Bera has said that there was a :need an immediate pause in order to get needed humanitarian aid, food, water and medicine to struggling civilians; then we need to find a different path forward". Congressman Shri Thanedar has expressed his "sincere desire that the conflict ends soon with the removal of Hamas, and we are able to move forward to a place of stable coexistence". Meanwhile, Congressman Ro Khanna called the crimes carried out by Hamas against Israeli women and children "inhuman" and "appalling" and Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi said "the US unequivocally stands with the people of Israel against this gruesome terror attack, and strongly supports its right to defend itself". Earlier,Jayapal had also called for building an international coalition that could eradicate Hamas and allow new legitimate leadership to emerge for the true governance of Palestinians. The Indian-American Congresswoman's remarks came as Israel has been bombarding Gaza since combat operations resumed on December 1 following the collapse of the seven-day humanitarian truce which was implemented on November 24. On Sunday night, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced that it was expanding its ground operations to the whole of the Gaza Strip. Between December 2 and 3, at least 316 people were killed and 664 others injured in Gaza, says the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health. The overall death toll in Gaza since the war erupted on October 7 has increased to 15,523 as of Monday morning. According to the Ministry, 70 per cent of the total figure comprises women and children. Meanwhile, 77 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the start of the ground operations on October 7. In Israel, the casualty toll remains more than 1,200, including foreign nationals. Kiev, Dec 4 : Ukrainian prosecutors have launched a probe on whether Russian troops killed two soldiers after they had surrendered, the media reported. In a statement on Sunday, the Ukraine prosecutor general's office said the incident took place near an observation post outside the village of Stepove near Donetsk, CNN reported. The probe, which is being overseen by the office, was announced a day after video of the incident was shared by Ukrainian government on social media. "The killing of prisoners of war is a gross violation of the Geneva Conventions and is classified as a serious international crime," CNN quoted the statement as saying. On December 2, the Ukrainian military said that the footage showed the execution of two prisoners of war. Since Russia launched its war against Ukraine in February 2022, it has been accused of carrying out a series of crimes. But the Kremlin has denied any wrongdoing. Earlier this year, The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for his alleged role in a scheme to deport Ukrainian children to Russia, CNN reported. Ukrainian officials are investigating a substantial number of criminal cases and war crimes, including 3,000 involving children. IDF announces death of 3 more soldiers in battle with Hamas. Image Source: IANS News Tel Aviv, Dec 4 : The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has announced that three more soldiers were killed in the ongoing battle with Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. The deceased were identified as Sgt Major Neriya Shaer (36) of the Paratroopers brigade; and Sgt First class (res) Ben Zussman (22) and Sgt Binyamin Yehoshua Needham (19), combat engineering soldiers of the 401st Armoured brigade. The three were killed on Sunday, two days after Israel resumed its attacks in Gaza after the collapse of the seven-day humantarian truce in the Hamas-controlled enclave. Overall, 75 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the start of the ground operations on October 27. Since the start of the war on October 7, the IDF has announced the deaths of 401 soldiers. The vast majority were killed on the day of Hamasas unprecedented assault on October 7. Indian-origin man pleads guilty to firebombing building in US. Image Source: IANS News New York, Dec 4 : A 29-year-old Indian-origin man has pleaded guilty to firebombing an office building in the US state of Wisconsin in May 2022. Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury, who was arrested from the Boston International Airport this year, was charged with one count of attempting to cause damage by means of fire or an explosive. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for February 14 next year, a Department of Justice release said. If convicted, the Madison resident faces a mandatory minimum penalty of five years in prison and a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. According to court documents, law enforcement responded to an active fire at an office building located in Madison on May 8, 2022, at 6.06 a.m. Once inside the building, police observed a mason jar under a broken window; the jar was broken, and the lid and screw top were burned black. The police also saw a purple disposable lighter near the mason jar. On the opposite wall from the window, the police saw another mason jar with the lid on and a blue cloth tucked into the top; the cloth was singed. The jar was about half full of a clear fluid that smelled like an accelerant. Outside of the building, someone spray painted on one wall, "If abortions aren't safe then you aren't either", and, on another wall, a large "A" with a circle around it and the number "1312". In March this year, law enforcement identified Roychowdhury as a possible suspect and collected his DNA from the food he threw in the trash can. On March 17, law enforcement advised that a forensic biologist examined the DNA evidence recovered from the attack scene and compared it to the DNA collected from the food contents. The forensic biologist found the two samples matched and likely were the same individual. In March, Roychowdhury travelled from Madison to Portland, Maine, and he purchased a one-way ticket from Boston to Guatemala City, departing March 28. Law enforcement arrested him at Boston Logan International Airport that day. Roychowdhury's LinkedIn profile describes him as a "protein engineer and computational biologist". A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the US sentencing guidelines and other statutory factors. London, Dec 4 : Dejan Kulusevski scored a dramatic late equaliser as Tottenham Hotspurs earned a well-deserved point in a six-goal thriller against reigning champions Manchester City. Having lost the last three matches, Spurs matched the reigning champions stride-for-stride and left the Etihad Stadium with a draw as Kulusevski headed home in the 90th minute to make it 3-3. It was a match that swung one way then the other throughout with Son-heung Min scoring at both ends inside the first nine minutes. City then edged ahead through Phil Foden, but Giovani Lo Celso then equalised with 20 minutes top go. City then edged ahead through Phil Foden, but Giovani Lo Celso then equalised with 20 minutes top go. Substitute Jack Grealish looked to have won the points for the Blues on 81 minutes but Dejan Kulusevski had the last word on 90 minutes, making it 3-3 with a header that skimmed in off the underside of the crossbar. A third consecutive draw for City leaves them in third following Liverpool's dramatic 4-3 victory over Fulham, three points behind leaders Arsenal. Spurs remain three points behind City in fifth but climb into the top five, above Newcastle United. Sindhudurg : , Dec 4 (IANS) Prime Minister Narendra Modi will reach Sindhudurg this afternoon to participate in the 'Navy Day-2023' celebrations being held off the picturesque Tarkarli Beach, officials said here on Monday. The Prime Minister is expected to land at the Chipi Airport here around 3.45 p.m. and then proceed to the Rajkot Fort where he will inaugurate an equestrian statue of the legendary Maratha warrior-king, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. Then he will proceed to the Sindhudurg Fort and pay respects at the sole temple of Chhatrapati there before moving to Tarkarli Beach. He will attend the display of the Indian Navyas muscles and readiness as part of the aNavy Day-2023a celebrations, including live demonstration by naval ships, aircraft, submarines with the men and women in dazzling whites. The Maharashtra and Sindhudurg Police have made elaborate security arrangements for the PM's visit here with major markets in Tarkarli, Malvan and surroundings remaining closed for the day. Traffic restrictions have been implemented on the route from Chipi Airport to Tarkarli Beach and other places which have been given a facelift and other necessary amenities created. Governor Ramesh Bais, Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, the Deputy CMs and other ministers, local elected representatives, top brass of Indian Navy and other dignitaries will be present for the events. US warship shoots down drones fired from Yemen in Red Sea. Image Source: IANS News Washington, Dec 4 : The US Central Command (CENTCOM) said that an American warship shot down three drones fired from Yemen after three commercial vessels came under attack in the Red Sea. In a statement, the CENTCOM said that three separate commercial vessels connected to 14 separate nations operating in international waters in the southern Red Sea were attacked on Sunday. "The Arleigh-Burke Class destroyer USS Carney responded to the distress calls from the ships and provided assistance," it said. The CENTCOM said that at about 9.15 a.m., the warship detected an anti-ship ballistic missile attack fired from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen toward the M/V Unity Explorer, impacting in the vicinity of the vessel. The Unity Explorer is a Bahamas flagged, UK owned and operated, bulk cargo ship. According to the Central Command, the US warship was conducting a patrol in the Red Sea when it detected the attack on the Unity Explorer. In the second attack at 12 noon, the USS Carney engaged and shot down a UAV launched from Houthi controlled areas in Yemen. "The drone was headed toward Carneyalthough its specific target is not clear. We cannot assess at this time whether the Carney was a target of the UAVs. There was no damage to the US vessel or injuries to personnel," the CENTCOM statement said. In the third attack at 12.35 p.m., the Unity Explorer again reported they were struck by another missile, following which the warship responded. "While assisting with the damage assessment, Carney detected another inbound UAV, destroying the drone with no damage or injuries on the Carney or Unity Explorer. The Unity Explorer reported minor damage from the missile strike." In the fourth attack at 3.30 p.m. the M/V Number 9 was struck by a missile while operating international shipping lanes in the Red Sea. The Panamanian flagged, Bermuda and UK owned and operated, bulk carrier reported damage and no casualties. At 4.30 p.m., the M/V Sophie II, sent a distress call stating they were struck by a missile, to which the US warship again responded and reported no significant damage, said the CENTCOM. "While en route to render support, CARNEY shot down a UAV headed in its direction. Sophie II is a Panamanian flagged bulk carrier, crewed by sailors from eight countries." The CENTCOM said that "these attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security". "They have jeopardised the lives of international crews representing multiple countries around the world. We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran. "The US will consider all appropriate responses in full coordination with its international allies and partners," it added. Manila, Dec 4 : Philippine authorities have identified two persons of interest for their possible involvement in the deadly blast inside a gym at the Mindanao State University in Marawi City, Lanao del Sur province, that killed at least four people and injured some 50 others, military and police officials said on Monday. According to the police, the blast occurred at around 7 a.m. when students and teachers had gathered for a Catholic mass inside the gym, reports Xinhua news agency. Allan Nobleza, regional police chief of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), told the local media that the military had two people of interest with links to a local extremist group. Ricardo de Leon, director general of the Philippines' National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, said in a radio interview that authorities are questioning the duo for their suspect involvement in the bombing. Both officials declined to identify the two people of interest and their affiliated group, saying the investigation is ongoing. In a statement issued hours after the attack, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. blamed "foreign terrorists" for the bombing, without giving further details. Defence Secretary Gilbert Teodoro also told a news conference that "there are strong indications of a foreign element" in the attack. According to Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines General Romeo Brawner, the bombing could be a retaliatory attack by extremists in the wake of a series of military offensives in recent days. The Philippine troops killed 11 alleged members of Dawlah Islamiya, an Islamic militant group, on December 1 in a clash in Maguindanao del Sur province on Mindanao island. In 2017, local terrorists pledging support for the Islamic State, including a faction of the Abu Sayyaf Group, occupied and occupied the lakeside Marawi city for five months, resulting in over 1,200 deaths and hundreds of thousands of residents displaced. Nearly 80 per cent of the country's 113 million population are Catholic and it is not uncommon for school gymnasiums and even shopping malls to designate areas for Sunday Mass, especially in places where there are no churches. Jaipur, Dec 4 : If the veteran leaders in BJP are to be believed, then a leader who did not contest could become the Chief Minister in Rajasthan, and those who did could be the deputy. A day after the resounding victory in Assembly elections, back to back meetings were going on among the BJP leaders regarding the selection for the post of Chief Minister. Sources said Vasundhara Raje has called a meeting of her MLAs on Monday in Jaipur while Union Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat and MLA Baba Balaknath have been called to Delhi. State BJP chief C.P. Joshi has also been called to Delhi. Those in the race for the CM's post are Union Minister Arjun Meghwal, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Ashwini Vaishnav, State President C.P. Joshi, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and Om Mathur. All these leaders did not contest polls, however, they did a hard leg work. Similarly, former CM Vasundhara Raje is also a contender for the coveted post. Others in fray are Rajsamand MP Diya Kumari and MP Kirodilal Meena. Party leaders said that BJP is keen on playing social engineering card for the Lok Sabha election. They can play a Dalit/ Meena card to increase their vote share per cent to ensure winning performance in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The final decision will be taken at the level of PM Modi and Amit Shah. After the names are finalized in Delhi, a meeting of the BJP legislature party will be called in Jaipur soon. BJP's election in-charge, state in-charge and senior leaders will be present in this meeting. The name of the CM will be announced in the legislature party meeting itself. The name of CM has been announced according to this tradition in BJP. New Delhi, Dec 4 : The Lok Sabha was on Monday adjourned following ruckus over BSP MP Danish Ali wearing a placard inside the House. As soon as the House met for the first time on Monday for the first day of Winter Session, the BJP MPs greeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi with slogans 'Teesri bar, Modi Sarkar' and 'baar baar, Modi sarkar' for the party's landslide victory in the three states of Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi was seen asking Speaker Om Birla to direct the Bahujan Samaj Party MP Danish Ali not to carry a placard in the House. The Speaker Birla said wearing placards or carrying them is against the rules. "I, under the rules of the Parliament, urge you to leave the House. I expect the members of the House not to bring the placards in the House." Birla warned that placards will not be allowed in the new Building. "The House is adjourned till 12 noon," Birla announced. Danish Ali was wearing a placard that read 'Punish Bidhuri and save democracy'. During the last session of Parliament, BJP MP from south Delhi Ramesh Bidhuri used abusive language against Ali inside the House. --IANS aks/ A Tasmanian woman was understandably alarmed after discovering a $999 bed she recently purchased for her son at Harvey Norman turned out to be infested with exotic Chinese beetles. I just noticed a couple of antennae sticking out of the wooden slats, and they were moving and then an insect crawled out, Jenny Purtell told Yahoo News Australia. What started with a tiny beetle ended with a multi-agency government response. Jenny has agreed to share her story so other Australians know how to recognise the presence of invasive pests that could pose a risk to the environment and economy. Four China fir borers (Semanotus sinoauster) were found in the slats of a bed purchased at Harvey Norman. Source: Supplied More than one beetle discovered in Harvey Norman bed While most of us couldnt tell the difference between a solider beetle and a weevil, luckily Jenny is connected with her local environment and realised there was something odd about the creatures boring into her bed. They were different to what she was used to seeing around Tasmania. I squashed it. And then I thought there shouldnt be anything crawling out of a brand new bed at all, she recalled. After checking the label on the box, Jenny discovered the bed was made in China, so she swiftly dropped the dead insect in a jar and called the states biosecurity agency. While the insect was being express-posted to the mainland for testing, Jenny was advised to spray her entire bed with insecticide. Doing so caused three more insects to flee the wood all of which were captured. We've included a picture below to help people identify what China fir borers look like. If you see something unusual or unexpected like this you can contact biosecurity agents on 1800 798 636. The China fir borers (pictured) have already infested parts of Europe and Africa. Source: Supplied Wood beetles pose threat to Australia's economy The beetles have been identified as China fir borers (Semanotus sinoauster) and their discovery was deemed so significant it triggered a joint response from federal and state government agencies. First on the scene were Biosecurity Tasmania which described them as a species is of concern. The federal Department of Agriculture (DAFF) then took an interest, saying the species has the potential to cause economic consequences in Australia. Story continues Jenny was ordered to gather the bed and packaging and double wrap it in industrial-sized Glad Wrap, before biosecurity officers then hauled it away. DAFF confirmed officers then traced back the remaining goods from the consignment and they were fumigated. This is the first interception report for the species in Tasmania. There has only been one other biosecurity interception report for the species in Australia which was a border detection in 2012, it said. Urgent call to toughen Australia's biosecurity Jennys incident occurred in June, and it appears the threat her China fir borers posed to the country has been neutralised. DAFF said government officers detect both live and dead insects of concern every day. In the 2022-23 financial year there were about 31.5k pests and diseases identified, it said. Despite their best efforts, invasive insects are increasingly causing economic and environmental harm in Australia and overseas. Authorities appear to be unable to stop the spread of fire ants from Queensland, which have recently been detected in NSW. Elsewhere in NSW, the honey-bee killing varroa mite has infested several locations across NSW since it was first detected in the Port of Newcastle in 2022. In Perth, the Polyphagous shot-hole borer, a beetle native to Southeast Asia, has the potential to destroy many native trees. Because of the large volume of trade into Australia, Invasive Species Council CEO Andrew Cox warns theres always a risk of introducing new pests when products like wood are shipped into he country. Invasive pests have directly caused more animal extinctions in Australia than any other factor, so Cox's warning is blunt. Theres a big concern that our biosecurity system is not well funded. We need better risk assessment and we need more resources," he said. Cox argues the importers are not paying for the cost of the risk they create when they bring products into the country. We need more surveillance, we need to stop more things at the border so were not reliant on consumers doing the right thing. Because there might be other consumers who arent doing the right thing, he said. Yahoo understands Harvey Norman refunded Jenny for her purchase. The company has been contacted for comment. Love Australia's weird and wonderful environment? Get our new weekly newsletter showcasing the weeks best stories. Canberra, Dec 4 : Indian-origin former MP Dave Sharma was officially sworn in on Monday as a senator for New South Wales (NSW) in the Australian Parliament. Sharma, 47, defeated former state treasurer Andrew Constance last month to become the first person of Indian-origin from the opposition Liberal party to win the NSW senate position. The former Australian Ambassador to Israel received applause after swearing his affirmation of allegiance, and was congratulated by his colleagues, The Canberra Times reported. He was flanked by his NSW moderate faction colleagues, Andrew Bragg and Maria Kovacic, as he took oath for a seat left vacant by former Foreign Minister Marise Payne. "An honour to escort our newest Senator, Dave Sharma, for his swearing-in today. Congratulations Senator Sharma," Senator Kovacic wrote on X. Sussan Ley, Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, said Sharma is a "welcome addition" to the federal Liberal team. "He has strong experience in Parliament and in senior diplomatic postings. Daveas keen foreign policy intellect will be particularly welcome given we are in the most dangerous set of geopolitical circumstances since WWII," Ley wrote on X. The development comes as the Liberals look to claw back support and win predominantly Labor-held seats. In a statement earlier, Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton had said that Sharma's entry to the Senate as part of the Liberal Party comes at a crucial time given events abroad and at home, "His diplomatic and foreign policy expertise and experience will lend considerable weight and wisdom to the public policy debate given the precarious circumstances in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific," Dutton had said, congratulating Sharma on securing the seat. Dutton further said that Dave will continue to fight for everyday Australian workers, families and small businesses which are being forgotten and left behind by the ruling Labor government. As a career diplomat prior to entering parliament, Dave was also posted to Washington D.C. and Port Moresby, served as a peacekeeper with the Peace Monitoring Group in Bougainville, and headed the international division within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. He studied at the University of Cambridge, where he graduated with first-class honours in Law. He also has a Master of Arts from Cambridge and a Master of Arts (International Relations) from Deakin University. Seoul: Hollywood star Robert Downey, Jr. poses for a photo during a press conference in Seoul on April 15, 2019, to promote the new movie "Avengers: Endgame." The movie will be released in South Korea on April 24. (Yonhap/IANS). Image Source: IANS News Los Angeles, Dec 4 : Hollywood star Robert Downey Jr will not be coming back as Iron Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, says Kevin Feige. "We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again," Feige told Vanity Fair in the Downey Jr. profile. "We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way." Downey Jr. last played the role in 2019's 'The Avengers: Endgame' when the superhero died, reports deadline.com. Fans of the MCU hoping Tony Stark would be resurrected in some form can forget about it. Director Joe Russo added: "We'd already said tearful goodbyes on the last day of shooting. Everybody had moved on emotionally. We promised him it would be the last time we made him do itever." Co-director Anthony Russo noted that for Downey Jr it was a "difficult thing" for him to say his last line as the superhero. "When he did come back, we were shooting on a stage directly opposite where he auditioned for Tony Stark. So his last line as Tony Stark was shot literally a couple hundred feet from his original audition that got him the role," Anthony said. Downey Jr. has been the center of the MCU but Feige had to fight to cast the actor in the Iron Man role. "It purely came down to the Marvel board being nervous at putting all of their chips in their future films on somebody who famously had those legal troubles in the past," Feige said. "I wasn't very good and I'm still not great at taking no for an answer. But I also don't pound my chest to try to get my way. I try to figure out ways to make it as clear to other people why we should head in a direction. And that's when the idea of a screen test came up." Belagavi, Dec 4 : The stage is set for high drama as the 10-day Winter Session of the Karnataka Assembly started on Monday, with the opposition BJP and JD (S) readying to attack the state's ruling Congress government. The Karnataka Police have deputed 5,000 personnel to provide security during the Winter Session. The MLAs have submitted 2,512 questions in the Assembly and 1,207 questions for the Legislative Council. The Assembly Speaker had declared that first 25 MLAs who will arrive at the session on time would get cups and saucers with the emblem of Karnataka government. The BJP is buoyed by the success in the Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh Assembly elections, whereas the Congress has claiming that the party's victory in Telangana was ensured with the successful implementation of guarantee schemes in Karnataka. The saffron camp is taking on the Congress government with vigour following the appointment of the leader of Opposition R. Ashoka, whileformer Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa's son and MLA B.Y. Vijayendra as the party's state President. The Congress camp is also in high spirits following the success of the Bengaluru Tech Summit -23 and Telangana poll results. Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar declared that the Telangana results were an indication of continued dominance of the Congress in South India. The move of the Congress government to withdraw consent for a CBI probe in the misappropriation case against Shivakumar will be most likely to be raised by the BJP and JD (S). Former Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai had urged the Siddaramaiah-led government to table the report on the number of development projects announced in the state Budget. "Congress leaders are repeatedly claiming credit over the guarantee schemes, but in reality, these schemes have not reached the people. Instead of distributing 10 kg rice under the 'Anna Bhagya' scheme, it has failed to distribute 5 kg rice allotted by the government of India," Bommai said. He also claimed that a survey of the Gruha Lakshmi scheme has shown that only 35 per cent women have received Rs 2,000 in the first month, but not months that followed. Siddaramaiah had announced the release of crop relief of Rs 2,000 in the first installment for eligible farmers suffering from drought. Making the announcement at an emergency press conference, he stated that it is an emergency action by the state in view of the fact that the Centre has not yet held a preliminary meeting to compensate the farmers of the state who are facing a severe drought. "There is no response to the letters written to the Centre. Three ministers from the state visited Delhi, but did not get a positive response," the Chief Minister claimed. He charged that the Union government had not conducted a single meeting till date. New Delhi, Dec 4 : For the last two months, the international attention has focused on the continuing Gaza crisis, yet in its background another human tragedy has been unfolding in Pakistan, noticed by few except the humanitarian agencies. Reportedly, more than 370,000 Afghans have fled Pakistan since October 1, after islamabad vowed to expel more than a million undocumented refugees, mostly Afghans. However in a significant ruling, the Supreme Court of Pakistan observed on December 2 that the country is a signatory to the UN conventions safeguarding the rights of refugees and these agreements bind Islamabad from doing so. Earlier, an apex committee, chaired by Caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar ul Haq Kakar, on October 3 had issued a deadline for foreign nationals to depart voluntarily or risk deportation by Pakistan by October 31. Reportedly, this was to affect some 1.7 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan but also members of other persecuted communities including China's Uyghurs and Myanmar's Rohingya. While the majority of the over 4 million Afghans living in Pakistan has been in the country since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, between 600,000 and 800,000 Afghans are believed to have arrived in Pakistan after the Taliban took over power in 2021. Pakistani Crackdown As per media reports, Police and other officials have carried out mass detentions, night raids, and beatings against Afghans. They've seized property and livestock, and bulldozed homes. They've also demanded bribes, confiscated jewellery, and destroyed identity documents. Pakistani police have sometimes sexually harassed Afghan women and girls and threatened them with sexual assault. Among those being deported or coerced to leave are people who would be at a greater risk of persecution in Afghanistan, including women and girls, human rights defenders, journalists, and former government employees who fled Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover in August 2021. Some of those at risk had previously been promised resettlement in the US, UK, Germany, and Canada, but resettlement processes are not proceeding quickly enough. The UN Refugee Agency has said that the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people into Afghanistan "couldn't have come at a worse time", as the country faces a prolonged economic crisis that has left two thirds of the population in need of humanitarian assistance, and now, winter is setting in. The new arrivals often come with almost nothing, because Pakistani authorities have prohibited Afghans from taking out more than 50,000 Pakistani rupees ($175) each. Humanitarian agencies have described shortages of tents and other basic services for those arriving. The area of Torkham -- the crossing point between Pakistan and Afghanistan -- lies just outside the city of Jalalabad. The Taliban regime has converted this area into a massive tent city, bereft of civic amenities, to accommodate the influx from Pakistan. Souring of Pak-Afghan Relations Since 2021, Islamabad has attempted to close its border with Afghanistan with little success. Apparently, as expected the bilateral relationship between the two countries after the Taliban's takeover of power in Afghanistan didn't worked out on expected lines. The present regime is not the same lot as the earlier Taliban. This time around they were surer of themselves and instead of following Pakistani diktats through ISI, the Taliban charted a new course of their own. The relationship even soured more, once the new Taliban government started fencing along the border on the Durand Line. Added to that was the issue of free trade between the two countries, which stopped flow of goods into Afghanistan via Pakistan twice over the last two years. Pakistan has also implemented several measures to tighten the Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement (ATTA), which critics say has been misused, for smuggling goods back into Islamabad. Additionally, over the past year, there has been a surge of militant attacks inside Pakistan, with most claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a close ally of the Taliban. Pakistani authorities have blamed Afghan migrants in part for the rise in attacks. Last week, a Pakistan Air Force base was attacked in Mianwali, the capital of the Punjab province, though most attacks take place near the long border with Afghanistan, where Islamabad says the TTP has safe-havens. When the decision to deport refugees was announced, Interim Minister Sarfraz Bugti had stated that out of the 24 suicide bombings in Pakistan this year, Afghan nationals carried out 14. The Taliban regime in Kabul has denied involvement and has done little to allay Pakistan's security concerns. Refusing to take back any refugees, Kabul also disapproves of Islamabad's repatriation plan. As tempers rise, Taliban interim Prime Minister Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund has criticised Pakistan's decision to expel refugees, saying that Islamabad had violated international laws, while his deputy Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai has warned the neighbouring nation "not to force their hand to react over the move". Hostility is so deeply entrenched against Afghans that Jan Achakzai, caretaker minister in Balochistan province, has said that the expulsion of refugees would continue, "no matter which political government comes to power after the elections". The tenure of the current caretaker government will end in February 2024. Though the current situation may have arisen due to Pakistan's own economic woes, in addition to its souring relationship with the Taliban, yet, the major sufferer in this case is the common Afghan. In this backdrop it becomes the duty of international humanitarian agencies and western governments to take cognisance of the issue and start a slew of measures to ensure care of Afghan citizens and also try to get relations patched up between the two neighbouring countries. (Asad Mirza is a Delhi-based senior political and international affairs commentator.) Family of Israeli man believed to be hostage, informed of his death. Image Source: IANS News Tel Aviv, Dec 4 : The Israel government on Monday informed the family of Yonatan Samarno (21), who was believed to have been held hostage in Gaza after the October 7 Hamas attack, that he has died. The family was also informed that his body was still being held by Hamas militants. Samarno from Tel Aviv was at the Supernova festival on October 7 along with his friends when the Hamas assault commenced. According to his family, he attended the festival along with two of his friends. While the bodies of his two friends were recovered, it was believed that Samarno was held hostage in Gaza. His family has said that they will hold a ceremony for him later in the day and begin a weeklong mourning period. During the now collapsed humanitarian pause from November 24-30, 86 Israeli and 24 foreign national hostages had been released from Hamas capitivity. Authorities believe that 137 people remain captive in Gaza, including Israelis and foreign nationals. Before the pause, four civilian hostages were released by Hamas, one Israeli soldier was rescued by Israeli forces and three bodies of hostages were retrieved. On its part, Israel freed 240 Palestinian prisoners, mostly children and women. More than 1,200 people, including foreign national, have been killed in Gaza since the war erupted on October 7. Mumbai, Dec 4 : Actress Kubbra Sait, who is receiving a lot of positive response for her role of a cop in the recently released streaming series 'Shehar Lakhot', has said that wearing the uniform of a cop for her role, commanded respect and instilled a sense of responsibility in her. This is for the first time in her career that Kubbra has portrayed the role of S.I. Pallavi Raj in the noir crime drama. Sharing the excitement of playing the role of a cop for the very first time, the actress said: "As an actor, I thrive more when surrounded by exceptional individuals who inspire and challenge me to grow both personally and professionally. Pulling off a police uniform for my role in Shehar Lakhot was an exciting opportunity." She further mentioned: "Wearing the cop uniform commanded respect and instilled a sense of responsibility. In this story, the uniform symbolises the challenges faced by our real-life heroes, reminding us of our flawed yet ever-evolving system." 'Shehar Lakhot', which also stars Priyanshu Painyuli, Chandan Roy Sanyal, Manu Rishi Chadha, Shruthy Menon, Kashyap Shangari, Chandan Roy, Manjiri Pupala, Shruti Jolly, Gyan Prakash, and Abhilash Thapliyal, is directed by Singh and written and created by Singh and Devika Bhagat. Talking about the director, she added: "Navdeep's patience and support allowed us to truly shine as actors. With the crafting of a well-written script, I was able to delve into my memory and invoke the precise emotions needed." 'Shehar Lakhot', an Offroad Films Production with Navdeep Singh and Khalil Bachooali serving as executive producers, is available to stream on Prime Video. 4 Indian-origin men sought in connection with aggravated assault in Canada. Image Source: IANS News Toronto, Dec 4 : Police have sought public assistance in locating four Indian-origin men, aged between 22-30 years, in connection with an aggravated assault that took place in Canadian city of Brampton. Aftaab Gill (22), Harmandeep Singh (22), Jatinder Singh (25) and Satnam Singh (30) assaulted a victim in the area of McLaughlin Road and Ray Lawson Boulevard on September 8. Officers from the Peel Regional Policeas Criminal Investigation Bureau said on Sunday that multiple parties assaulted the victim and fled the area prior to police arrival. The victim suffered serious non-life threatening injuries and was taken to a local hospital. All four of them are residents of Brampton, Ontario, and wanted for aggravated assault. Police are asking anyone with information on the whereabouts of the four men to contact investigators. In August this year, murder charges were laid against Parminder Singh Brar (31) and Simarpal Singh (21) in connection with an aggravated assault that left a 55-year-old man dead in British Columbia province. In the same month, Dilip Kumar Dholani, a senior citizen visiting from India, was stabbed 17 times in broad daylight while taking his granddaughter out in a stroller in Oshawa, Greater Toronto Area. New Delhi, Dec 4 : AAP Rajya Sabha MP, Raghav Chadha, on Monday thanked the Supreme Court for taking cognisance of his plea against suspension and Chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar for revoking it. The MP, whose suspension lasted for 115 days, said that he was moved by the blessings and messages of support that he got from people. Chadha's suspension was revoked on Monday, on the first day of the Parliament's Winter Session on the motion moved by BJP MP GVL Narasimha Rao. The AAP MP who was suspended from Rajya Sabha on August 11 had been accused by the BJP of forging the signatures of five MPs. Announcing the suspension of Chadha on the last day of the Monsoon Session of Parliament, Dhankhar had said, "Taking a holistic view of the gravity of his misdemeanor, violation of rules, defiant attitude and inappropriate conduct, I find it expedite invoking Rule 266 read along with Rule 256 and suspend Raghav Chadha from the service of the Council, till the Council has the benefit of the report by the Committee of Privileges." Reacting to the revoking of his suspension, Chadha in a video statement said, "I was suspended on August 11 from the Rajya Sabha. To revoke the suspension I went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court took cognisance of my plea and my suspension has been revoked." He said that a motion was brought to end his suspension on Monday. "I was kept suspended for 115 days. And I could not question the government for the people for 115 days. I am happy that the suspension has been revoked and I thank the Supreme Court and the Rajya Sabha Chairman," he said. He said, "I got the blessings of the people during the suspension through your messages, mails. I got strength from your messages and I am thankful to all of you." Patna, Dec 4 : Three youths of a same village were killed in a road accident in Bihar's Kaimur district on Monday morning. The deceased were identified as Dilip Kumar Bind (29), Phool Kumar Bind (19) and Sashi Kumar Bind (30) -- all natives of Katra village under Chainpur police station in the district. The police said that Dilip was living in another state and he came to his native place on Sunday. He along with the other two, after purchasing some clothes for his children, was on the way to his in-laws house. "They were travelling at high speed on a bike and crashed into a parked truck at Kurai village under Chainpur police station located on NH 19. Dilip and Sashi died on the spot while Phool Kumar succumbed to the injuries in hospital. We have recovered the dead bodies and sent them for the postmortem. The family members of the deceased were informed about the accident," said an officer of Chainpur police station in the district. Aizawl, Dec 4 : Displaying a stunning triumph, IPS officer-turned-politician Lalduhoma, who's party Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) wrested power by securing 27 seats in the 40-member Assembly, will be the sixth politician to assume the Chief Ministerial posts in Mizoram. ZPM's President and party's Chief Ministerial candidate Lalduhoma in a multi corner contest retained his Serchhip seat defeating his nearest MNF rival J. Malsawmzuala Vanchhawng by a margin of 2,983 votes while most of the prominent nominees of the party were leading in their respective seats. Former security officer of the Late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the IPS officer-turned-politician Lalduhoma, who secured 8,314 votes, was elected to the state Assembly for the second consecutive time. ZPM Chief Ministerial candidate Lalduhoma after winning his seat told the media that on Tuesday or Wednesday he would meet the state Governor Hari Babu Kambhampati to stake his claim to form the government, and the swearing-in-ceremony would be held within this month. "All corruption cases (during the MNF regime) would be inquired by the CBI and other agencies. We would deliver a new system of governance in Mizoram by maintaining transparency in all sectors," the ZPM supremo said on Monday. Mizoram was previously part of Assam until 1972, when it was carved out as a Union Territory. It became the 23rd state of India, a step above Union Territory, on February 20, 1987 after years of insurgency. Since 1987, when Mizoram gained its statehood and held its first Assembly elections, the mountainous state has only seen bipolar politics between the Congress and the Mizo National Front (MNF), first led by Laldenga, and then by outgoing Chief Minister Zoramthanga. Congress stalwart Lal Thanhwala and MNF supremo Zoramthanga holding the Chief Ministerial post mostly governed the country's second least populated state after Sikkim. Just before and after the 2018 Assembly elections in Mizoram, ZPM led by Lalduhoma became a major challenger to both the MNF and the Congress. ZPM, whose candidates had to contest the 2018 Assembly polls as Independents as the party was not registered by the Election Commission of India (ECI), won eight seats but lost two seats in the subsequent bypolls with party chief Lalduhoma retaining the Serchhip seat in the by-election. The 73-year-old police officer-turned-politician has also emerged as a strong contender for the Chief Ministerial post before the November 7 Assembly elections to the 40-member Assembly. Before the Assembly polls, Lalduhoma had told IANS: "My party (ZPM) would secure a landslide victory in the November 7 Assembly polls, and we would form the next government in Mizoram. "This is a thousand per cent assured. There is no question of aligning with any other party as we would win much more than the majority number of seats." He had said the ZPM had already convinced the people of Mizoram that it would give a new system of governance, unlike the Congress and the MNF. "For the past many years, due to our constant and sincere efforts, we obtained huge public support across Mizoram. As both the MNF and the Congress failed to deliver the goods for the all-round development and welfare of the Mizo people, we (ZPM) happened to be the main political force in the state," Lalduhoma had said. The former IPS officer served as the security in-charge to Late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and held a vital post in the organising committee of the 1982 Asian Games. Due to his closeness with the Gandhi family, Lalduhoma joined the Congress after he left the service in 1984. "I was entrusted by Indira Gandhi to resolve the Mizo National Front-spearhead insurgency led by Laldenga. I met Laldenga in London where he was in self-exile. I persuaded him to come to the overground ending the insurgency," said Lalduhoma, who played a significant role in bringing the MNF outfit to the mainstream and establishing peace in Mizoram. Due to Lalduhoma's efforts and at the initiative of former Prime Minister Late Rajiv Gandhi, the Mizo Peace Accord was signed in June 1986, ending two decades of strife and insurgency in Mizoram. Later, Lalduhoma was elected to the Lower House of the Parliament from Mizoram's lone Lok Sabha seat as a Congress nominee, but due to some internal troubles after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, he quit the party and was disqualified under the anti-defection law in 1988. In 1997, Lalduhoma founded the Zoram Nationalist Party (ZNM), and in 2003 he was elected to the Mizoram Assembly from Ratu. Before the last Assembly elections in 2018, ZNM, along with six local parties, formed the ZPM, a coalition group which projected him as the chief ministerial candidate. The veteran Mizo leader in the 2018 polls won from two seats -- Aizawl West I and Serchhip -- the second being the constituency of then Chief Minister and Congress stalwart Lal Thanhawla. However, he kept the Serchhip seat. During the past few years, the ZPM has performed better in several local elections and has emerged as a challenging third front in a traditionally dual-party electoral battle in Mizoram. The ZPM is banking on the anti-incumbency factor of the MNF, with its focus against corruption and the economic empowerment of the youth and farmers. The Congress and the MNF have been in power for around four decades in Mizoram but they have not done much for the Mizo people and the state, the ZPM supremo said. (Sujit Chakraborty can be contacted at sujit.c@ians.in) A 91-year-old great-grandfather has been charged with murder after his 85-year-old wife, a "well-known neighbourhood matriarch", was found dead inside the couple's home over the weekend. Maria Dimasi's body was found inside her Adelaide home in Findon, in the city's west, just after 11.20pm on Saturday. The woman was allegedly found with multiple stab wounds when officers arrived at the property, which the couple had lived in for six decades, The Adelaide Advertiser reported. Her husband Frank, who is understood to suffer from a "neurological disability", was arrested at the scene. Officers confirmed to Yahoo News Australia on Monday the elderly man has been charged with the murder of his wife of over 50 years. Maria Dimasi was allegedly murdered after a 50-year marriage, Frank. Source: Facebook. Maria Dimasi was a much-loved member of her community Mr Dimasi is under police guard at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, having suffered from self-inflicted and non-life threatening wounds. Maria was a much-loved and well-known member of Adelaide's tight-knit Italian community and was heavily involved with the family's taxpayer-funded meal service Nonnas Cucina. Paying tribute, South Australia Premier Peter Malinauskas branded the alleged murder as "tragic" and spoke of Maria's "amazing work" for people in need. Dimasi was a much-loved member of the Adelaide Italian community. Pictured here with Health Minister Mark Butler. On a personal level, Maria Dimasi was a very significant contributor to our state, particularly in the western suburbs Italian community, said the premier, who is facing mounting pressure to authorise a Royal Commission into domestic violence in the state. Nonnas Cucina, which will be very well-known to a lot of South Australians, did amazing work delivering meals to people that are vulnerable, particularly the elderly. "This is a good person who has lost their life in tragic circumstances. The home the couple lived in for some six decades is now a crime scene. Source: Nine. Tributes mount for 'matriarch' As media met Maria's family outside of their Findon home, many were too distressed to speak publicly. She was known for her love of the kitchen, and had in the past been photographed with celebrity chefs including Maggie Beer. The great-grandmother was regarded as the neighbourhood matriarch, beloved in her community, whom loved-ones described as a "talented and passionate cook always keen to share her Italian recipes". Story continues Health Minister Mark Butler described Maria as "extremely generous". Maria lit up the kitchen at Nonnas Cucina, he said. She was always extremely generous and made sure no one ever left her company hungry. Maria Dimasi, pictured with Maggie Beer, is being remembered for her talent in the kitchen and love of her family. Source: Facebook. Maria gave so much to her community and will be greatly missed by her loved ones and everyone who had the pleasure to meet her. Ms Dimasi's death comes as loved-ones reported her to be "in good health", with the grandmother regularly seen riding a scooter along her street. Five women have allegedly been killed at the hands of a partner since November 16 in South Australia, which has been labelled "the worst DV toll in Australia's history" according to The Advertiser. Mr Malinauskas said the SA government will host an important roundtable with a whole range of experts in the sector and government before Christmas. Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@yahoonews.com. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. New Delhi, Dec 4 : Edtech major Byju's has paid November salaries of some of its employees after a "technical glitch" hampered the payment of some 1,000 workers. Sources told IANS on Monday that the company paid salaries to the remaining employees on Monday. When reached, Byju's did not officially comment. In an earlier statement, the company had said it was working to resolve the issue and pay the remaining employees. "We have noticed a delay in processing salary for some limited employees (less than 5 per cent) due to an unexpected technical glitch. The issue is being rectified over the weekend and payment will be processed by Monday," said a Byju's spokesperson. The salary delay for about 1,000 employees appears to have affected people across levels. However, employees affiliated with Akash Institute have not been impacted. Days after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) issued show-cause notice to edtech firm Think and Learn Private Limited (parent company of Byju's), and Byju Raveendran over alleged violation to the tune of Rs 9,362.35 crore, the company last week said it will continue to maintain complete adherence to all relevant FEMA regulations. A BYJU spokesperson said: "We are in receipt of the notice from the ED which now definitively concluded their investigation and the same has been stated in their press release dated November 21." The BYJU official said that the queries received in the notice are solely technical in nature such as delay in filing Annual Performance Reports (APRs) with respect to duly compliant ODI investments of close to Rs 8,000 crore that arose from the delayed statutory audit (FY22). "The company has, however, filed requisite intimation contemporaneously for all FDI which is received in accordance with the eligibility criteria in law and not affected by the alleged non-filing of APR. The company has also issued or allotted shares within the prescribed time against the FDI so received," the spokesperson said. The spokesperson had said that this is being clarified to dispel any misgivings about wrong doing in relation to receipt of FDI or allotment of shares. Sex Scandal: People should not intervene in others personal life, says Goa CM. Image Source: IANS News Panaji, Dec 4 : Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant on Monday said that they (BJP) are confident that the party will win 400 seats in next year's general election. "Sunday's election results in three states shows mood of the people. I am confident that the PM Modi will secure a thumping majority in LS polls," he said. He said that BJP will win both the seats from Goa contributing to realisation of the vision of 'Viksit Bharat'. "I am confident that the support of the people will help us to win both the seats of Goa and will win 400 seats across the country in the LS election," he said. He said that people have reiterated their faith in the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "Congratulations to BJP candidates in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh for a massive mandate and Telangana for displaying best performance," he said. He said that the 'Karyakartas' of the party have been working hard to take the message of 'Antyodaya', 'Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas' to the people. He said that those who were talking against Sanatana Hindu Dharma have been shown the place by the people of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh. "This was the first election after the formation of the INDIA alliance, their partners were speaking against Sanatan Hindu Dharma, people have rejected them," he said. Mumbai, Dec 4 : Actress Prachi Desai has revealed how Manoj Bajpayee and Naga Chaitanya Akkineni pampered her with sumptuous meals during the shoot of 'Silence 2', and 'Dhootha' respectively. In the acting journey of Prachi, the tales of camaraderie extend beyond the frames, notably with her last two co-stars, Naga Chaitanya from aDhoothaa and Manoj from aSilence 2aThe Night Owl Murders.a Despite the diversity of the projects, both actors shared a heartwarming commitment to ensuring Prachias well-being, particularly through the universal language of food. On the set of 'Dhootha', Chaitanya emerged not only as a talented co-star but also as a culinary companion. Beyond scenes and scripts, he took it upon himself to pamper Prachi with an array of delightful dishes from his cloud-kitchen. Switching gears to 'Silence 2', Prachi found herself under the nurturing wing of Manoj. Renowned for his generosity, Manoj took the art of co-star care to another level. Not only did he provide sage advice and acting wisdom, but he also ensured Prachi was well-fed. From cooking sumptuous meals himself to exploring local delicacies, Manojas thoughtful gestures translated into a culinary journey that paralleled their on-screen collaboration. Talking about the same, the actress said: "Working with Naga and Manoj felt like sharing a meal of memories on and off-screen -- where their kindness became the secret ingredient that made every project special." Naga Chaitanya has marked his debut on OTT with the supernatural suspense thriller series aDhoothaa. The actor plays the role of Sagar, an ambitious and successful journalist who finds himself engulfed by supernatural events that are at the nexus of many mysterious and gruesome deaths, and are now shadowing over his family. The eight-episode series also features Parvathy Thiruvothu, Priya Bhavani Shankar, and Prachi Desai playing pivotal roles. Helmed by national award-winning director Vikram Kumar, the series unfolds as an atmospheric, supernatural thriller -- a mesmerising tapestry of tension and mystery that holds viewers spellbound until the very end. The thriller drama is streaming on Prime Video. Kolkata, Dec 4 : A single-judge Bench of the Calcutta High Court, on Monday granted protection against any coercive action, including arrest, to BJP legislators against whom Kolkata Police have registered an FIR on charges of insulting the National Anthem. Justice Jay Sengupta questioned the complaint by three Trinamool Congress legislators on the basis of which the FIR was filed against the BJP legislators. According to the FIR, the BJP legislators started shouting "thieves", "thieves" at a time when the Trinamool Congress legislators were singing the National Anthem at the end of their protest within the Assembly premises against non-payment of central dues. Justice Sengupta questioned the justification of singing the National Anthem while the protest was on. "What will happen if anyone starts singing the National Anthem within this court now?" Justice Sengupta asked. The incident occurred on November 29 when Trinamool Congress legislators sporting black shirts and led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, were protesting near the statue of BR Ambedkar within the Assembly premises. Towards the end of the protest, a group of BJP MLAs led by the Leader of Opposition (LoP) arrived at the Assembly premises. The legislators, including the LoP, were seen shouting "thieves", "thieves" while pointing at the protesting demonstrations. Later the Chief Minister complained to the Speaker that the BJP legislators were raising derogatory slogans while the ruling party MLAs, were singing the National Anthem, deeming it an insult. New Delhi, Dec 4 : The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has reported a significant increase in crimes against women, with a total of 4,45,256 cases registered in 2022, a four per cent rise compared to the previous year, which recorded 4,28,278 cases. According to the NCRB, in 2022, as many as 250 women were murder-cum-rape/gang rape victims across the country. "There were a total of 6,516 dowry death victims while 4,963 incidents of abetment to suicide of women were reported," the data stated. As per the NCRB report, Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest number of crimes against women incidents at 65,743, followed by Maharashtra (45,331), Rajasthan (45,058), West Bengal (34,738), and Madhya Pradesh (32,765). Among Union Territories, Delhi witnessed 14,247 incidents of crime against women, followed by Jammu and Kashmir (3,716) and Chandigarh (325). Incidents of kidnapping and abduction of women were at 69,677, posing a challenge for the police forces across the country. Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest number of kidnapping and abduction incidents at 14,887, followed by Bihar (10,190), Maharashtra (9,297), Madhya Pradesh (7,960) and West Bengal (6596). Delhi topped the list among Union Territories with 4,032 incidents of kidnapping and abduction of women registered in 2022 while Nagaland registered the lowest with four incidents. The NCRB data revealed a disturbing picture as 31,982 women were raped in 2022. The data stated that Rajasthan recorded the highest number of rapes at 5,399 followed by Uttar Pradesh (3,690), Madhya Pradesh (3,029), Maharashtra (2,904), and Haryana (1,787). In Union Territories, the national Capital recorded 1,212 rape cases followed by Jammu & Kashmir (287), and Chandigarh (78). A total of 85,300 victims reported assault with intent to outrage modesty. Maharashtra saw the highest number with 11,512 incidents recorded, followed by Uttar Pradesh (10,548), Rajasthan (8,508), Odisha (7,327) and Andhra Pradesh (5,884). In UTs, Delhi recorded 2,029 assaults on women with intent to outrage modesty followed by Jammu & Kashmir (1,606), and Chandigarh (42). New Delhi, Dec 4 : Delhi High Court has observed that farmers must be given a full opportunity to oppose any potential monopoly created by registering plant varieties under the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act, 2001. Justice C Hari Shankar stated that the pre-eminent consideration should be the rights of farmers when administering the provisions of the Act. The court noted the Act's objective of striking a balance between farmers' rights and promoting agricultural development, which necessitates the protection of plant breeders' rights. It further noted that individuals opposing the registration of new plant varieties must be made aware of all details related to the application and the purportedly newly developed plant varieties. While dealing with pleas related to applications for the registration of new plant varieties, the court quashed advertisements issued by the Protection of Plant Variety and Farmers Rights Authority, except for four plant varieties that were already registered. The court clarified that once an application for plant variety registration is filed, it must be accepted and advertised, allowing those who wish to oppose it to file their objections. The court also stressed the importance of DUS (Distinctiveness, Uniformity, and Stability) testing before advertisement, stating that altering this statutory scheme would be inappropriate. The Registrar was directed to consider the merits of the application and oppositions holistically, aiming to make a decision within six months. The petitioners were also granted the liberty to raise all legal contentions in the matter. Sindhudurg : , Dec 4 (IANS) Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said that India is giving an unprecedented impetus to the 'blue-economy' with emphasis on the 'Make-in-India' policy, for all-round progress of the country. Speaking at the 'Navy Day-2023' event at Tarkarli Beach in this coastal district on Monday, Modi said that India was engaged in a massive 'port-led development', boosting merchant shipping, the 'Sagar Mala' for maritime trade and transport involving the coastal communities in a big way. Lauding the naval prowess of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj (1630-1680), Modi said that the great Maratha warrior was a visionary who had realised in that era that anybody who can command the oceans is the most powerful ruler. "Through the 'Sagar Mala', the port-led development is being implemented for the 'maritime vision' to exploit the full potential of the oceans," said Modi, adding that the country is getting inspired by the ideals of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. He said that last year, the Indian Navy got a seal inspired by Shivaji, and very soon, the Indian Navy will coin its ranks and designations as per Indian traditions. Dwelling on the 'Make-in-India' initiative, Modi said that it has become the topic of discussion world over, and now India's contribution is visible in all spheres, whether it is space or oceans, from Tejas aircraft to Kisan Drones, in every field, the mark of 'Atmanirbhar Bharat' is seen. Lauding the Indian Navy for its services and contributions to securing the country's maritime borders, Modi said that India is going to induct women in the armed forces in a big way, and congratulated the Navy for appointing a first woman Commander of 'INS Trinkat' last week. Earlier, the PM unveiled a grand statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj installed at the Rajkot Fort nearby, visited the famed Sindhudurg Fort in the Arabian Sea, and then went for the 'Navy Day-2023' function and an impressive naval display at the Tarkarli Beach. Present on the occasion were Admiral R Hari Kumar, Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, MSME Minister Narayan Rane, state ministers, top naval officers, dignitaries from different fields and other invitees. Dubai, Dec 4 : In a powerful demonstration of global solidarity, governments, businesses, investors and philanthropies have announced over $57 billion across the climate agenda in just the first four days of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP28). After an historic agreement to operationalise a fund for climate impact response on day one, announcements have poured in across the entire climate agenda, including on finance, health, food, nature, and energy. Responding to climate pledges, Sultan Al Jaber, COP28 President, told the media here, "I really think something special is happening here. The positivity, the optimism, the hope, the momentum, the determination -- is growing. And I will stay laser-focused on delivery and maintaining this point until we land the most ambitious response to the Global Stocktake." "The COP28 energy package is a giant step in the right direction and it is only the beginning. I have repeatedly said that this is still not enough," he added. Among the pledges, the UAE has launched a $30 billion catalytic fund, ALTERRA, on climate finance with an emphasis on unlocking private finance across the Global South. The country has also announced $200 million for SDRs and $150 million for water security. In addition, the World Bank has announced an increase of $9 billion annually to finance climate-related projects. And, in the first 48 hours of COP28, after an historic response to loss and damage was operationalised, $725 million has already been pledged. In addition, $3.5 billion has been announced to replenish the Green Climate Fund, $2.7 billion has been pledged for health, $2.6 billion has been committed for food systems transformation, $2.6 billion has been pledged to protect nature, $467 million has been announced for urban climate action, and $1.2 billion has been committed for relief, recovery and peace. On energy, $2.5 billion was mobilized for renewables and $1.2 billion for methane emission reduction. In addition, $568 million was pledged to drive investments in clean energy manufacturing. In total, over $57 billion has so far been announced in the first four days. In addition, new pledges and declarations made at COP28 have received historic support. Eight new declarations have been announced that will help transform every major system of the global economy. These include the first-ever declarations on food systems transformation and health, plus declarations on renewable energy and efficiency, as well as initiatives to decarbonise heavy emitting industries. Three additional declarations will be announced in the coming days on hydrogen, cooling, and gender. The number of countries supporting these declarations and pledges is growing and demonstrates an unprecedented level of inclusivity at this COP. Jaipur, Dec 4 : The newly elected BJP MLA Balmukund Acharya on Monday ordered the closure of non-veg shops in the city, saying operations of these shops will not be tolerated at any cost. "These people don't even have licence. The Congress administration was not asking them about it. My agenda is to protect Sanatan. Therefore, I will not tolerate such people. Because of these people, non-veg is being cooked openly. The general public is getting worried because of this," Balmukund Acharya said. He said that due to the non-veg smell, the people have even stopped passing through the roads. "There are many temples in these areas. People have stopped visiting these temples because of the non-veg smell. It will not be tolerated now under any circumstances," he said. Acharya has asked the Municipal Corporation officials to shutdown the non-veg shops in the major markets of the city and also asked the owner of a non-veg hotel to remove the encroachment. Acharya won the election on BJP ticket from Hawa Mahal assembly constituency only by 600 votes. "Everyone's licence will be checked. I will personally check the report from all these shop owners," Acharya said. He said that Bangladeshis have set up non-veg shops in Hawa Mahal which is against the rules. London, Dec 4 : A 58-year-old Sikh man was kicked, pulled to the ground and an attempt was made to grab his beard in a hate crime incident by a group of teenage boys in a town in south east England. Inderjit Singh was walking through Langley Memorial Park in Slough when he was approached by a group of young boys on November 21 at around 7 pm. The offenders -- in between the age groups of 13-16 years -- circled the victim, kicked and pulled him to the ground before fleeing, the Thames Valley Police said. One of the offenders also tried to grab Singh's beard, police added. The victim sustained three broken ribs as well as swelling and cuts to his hand, and he was taken to hospital for treatment, but has since been discharged. Investigating officer Detective Constable Holly Baxter, based at Slough police station, said they are investigating the case as a hate crime incident. aI am appealing to anybody who was in the area around the time of the incident, which we were initially investigating as an incident of grievous bodily harm, but are now treating as a hate crime, to please get in touch with Thames Valley Police," Baxter said. aWe are currently conducting further patrols in the area and anyone with concerns should speak to a uniformed officer or contact us by calling or via our website," he added. Police said that they take all reports of hate crime seriously and know that they have a devastating impact on individual victims and targeted communities. They urged anyone with dashcam footage or any other potential recording to come forward and contact them. Following the attack, Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha in Slough released a statement urging anyone who witnessed the attack or had any further information to contact the police. aThis is a request to anyone with information on this attack to please get in touch with us. We will provide the Sangat with further updates as and when we get them, the Gurdwara said in a social media post last week. Israel issues warning over travelling to Australia over anti-semitism fears. Picture: Supplied Israel has warned its citizens about travelling to Australia and almost 80 other countries over fears they could face anti-Semitism. The Israeli National Security Council (NSC) raised its travel warning levels on Monday over increased anti-Semitic incidents and attempted attacks against Jews and Israelis around the world. The level two warning indicates heightened vigilance for several countries in Australia, Western Europe, including the UK, France, Germany and Russia; in South America, Brazil and Argentina. Israel issues warning about travelling to Australia and multiple countries across the world. Picture: Supplied Travellers are urged to exercise increased precaution. The threat level for countries in Africa, including South Africa and Eritrea, and Central Asia, including Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, has been raised to level three, with Israelis urged to reconsider non-essential travel to these countries. For Israeli citizens traveling abroad, we recommend choosing their destinations wisely, while exercising recommended precautionary measures wherever they are, and examining their conduct in light of the recommendations, the NSC said in a statement to their website on Monday. Flares were thrown on the forecourt of The Sydney Opera House in Sydney at a Pro-Palestine rally. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper They advise postponing travel to these countries, checking whether anti-Israel protests and violence have taken place at the destination, staying away from demonstrations and protests and remaining alert while abroad. They have also urged Israeli residents to avoid openly displaying their Israeli and Jewish identities while abroad. Almost weekly Pro-Palestine rallies have taken place in capital cities across the country since the Israel-Palestine conflict was reignited following Hamas October 7 attack. On a few occasions they have attracted opposing protesters who have broadcasted anti-semitic views. An Israel flag was burned on the forecourt of The Sydney Opera House in Sydney during a pro-Palestine rally. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper Three men been were charged after a 45-year-old man was allegedly spat on and assaulted at a pro-Palestinian rally outside Sydneys Opera House on October 9. Photographs showed an Israel flag being burned on the ground while a small group were also overheard chant anti-Semitic slogans. Story continues A woman and child shouted f*** the Jews while walking past a group of people carrying Israel flags at a rally in Coogee Beach on November 11. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said there was no place for antisemitism and Islamophobia in Australian society. He acknowledged a recent spike in hateful behaviour and urged people to look after each other in the way in which they go about their legitimate right to express their views. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence Richard Marles said there was no place for anti-semitism in Australia. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman It is really important that for those in the Jewish community and those in the Islamic community, Australians are looking after everyone, he said. That has to be the basis upon which everyone expresses their legitimate right to freedom of expression but to do that in a safe and peaceful way. Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin said the travel warning reflects a damning new reality of soaring antisemitism and a volatile security situation at home and abroad. The fact that being identifiably Israeli or Jewish now comes with risks is a national shame, he said. Many families have chosen to cover Jewish symbols, and have warned their children not to mention Israel or anything Jewish in public. We have to confront this hatred and prevent fanatics from ripping our society apart. New Delhi, Dec 4 : Edtech major Byju Raveendran has reportedly pledged his home, as well as those owned by his family members, to raise money for paying employees amid a cash crunch. According to Bloomberg, citing sources, two homes owned by Raveendranas family in Bengaluru, and his under-construction villa in the city a" were offered as collateral to borrow $12 million to pay salaries to employees. "The startup used the funds to pay salaries to 15,000 employees in Byjuas parent firm, Think & Learn Pvt Ltd," the report added. According to the report, citing sources, Raveendran, once worth almost $5 billion, has raised debts of about $400 million on a personal level, pledging all his shares in the parent company. Meanwhile, Byjuas paid pending salaries of some of its employees on Monday after a "technical glitch" hampered the payment of some 1,000 workers. Sources had told IANS on Monday that the company paid salaries to the remaining employees on Monday. When reached, Byjuas did not officially comment. In an earlier statement, the company had said it was working to resolve the issue and pay the remaining employees. "We have noticed a delay in processing salary for some limited employees (less than 5 per cent) due to an unexpected technical glitch. The issue is being rectified over the weekend and payment will be processed by Monday," said a Byjuas spokesperson. The salary delay for about 1,000 employees appears to have affected people across levels. However, employees affiliated with Akash Institute have not been impacted. --IANS na/vd Patna, Dec 4 : With Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar avoiding public appearance due to his illness, Union Minister Giriraj Singh on Monday demanded that the state government release his health bulletin. His demand came soon after former Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi and R.C.P. Singh also expressed concern over the health status of Nitish Kumar. "Nitish Kumar is not a Chief Minister of an alliance but he is a Chief Minister of Bihar. The concern of former Chief Minister Jitan Ram Manjhi is absolutely true. The Bihar government should release the health bulletins of CM Nitish Kumar," Singh said. Nitish Kumar, in the last 10 days, has cancelled all his public and government events. He has also cancelled Janata Darbar on Monday due to his illness. In wake of this, Manjhi, in a social media post, said: "Nitish Kumar is suffering from illness for the last 10 days. Is he really sick or is a political conspiracy taking place against him? His health bulletin should be issued in the public domain so that everyone knows about him." Former Union Minister and JD-U leader R.C.P. Singh also expressed concern. "It is extremely unfortunate that the Chief Minister of Bihar has been ill for the last 10 days and people have no knowledge about it. He is not appearing in public events. Hiding his health status is not right," he said. Nitish Kumar is on the target list of NDA leaders ever since he made alleged "loose" remarks on women during the winter session of Bihar Assembly. On the next day, he also humiliated Manjhi as well. Following that leaders like BJP state President Samrat Choudhary, Vijay Sinha, Sushil Kumar Modi, Giriraj Singh, Ashwini Kumar Choubey, R.C.P. Singh, Chirag Paswan, Manjhi and others have questioned his physical and mental condition. Kolkata, Dec 4 : West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on Monday that she has not yet received any invitation for the meeting of the opposition INDIA bloc scheduled on December 6. "I have no information about this meeting. No one has informed me anything over phone. In any case, I will be in North Bengal on December 6 and I will stay there for a few days. Had I known earlier (about the meeting), I would have scheduled my programme accordingly. How can I change my schedule at the last moment," Banerjee said while speaking to mediapersons. Meanwhile, Trinamool Congress' national General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee has reached North Bengal on Monday where he is scheduled to attend a family function. As things stand now, neither Mamata Banerjee nor Abhishek Banerjee will be present at the INDIA bloc meeting on December 6. It is not yet known if the Chief Minister will depute someone else to attend the opposition meeting. Earlier in the day, both Mamata Banerjee and Abhishek Banerjee blamed Congress' 'high-handed' attitude for its election debacle in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Both of them advised the Congress to change its attitude towards the other INDIA bloc partners and fight in a united manner against the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The Chief Minister also said that the BJP can be ousted from the Centre if the INDIA bloc partners unite and coordinate to ensure a joint opposition. Patna, Dec 4 : After JD-U MP Sunil Kumar Pintu congratulated PM Narendra Modi and BJP over their victory in three states, the party MLC Neeraj Kumar has demanded the resignation of Pintu. "Doing road shows in Telangana and not visiting Manipur, still Modi looks 'Mumkin' to you. Why don't you resign and join BJP. Don't enjoy your tenure in the government. LS election is scheduled a few months from now. Stop showing the lust for the MP chair," Kumar said. He said that Pintu has won the election in the name of JD-U and but congratulates Modi and BJP. "It is only a matter of few months. Send in your resignation and leave the party," Kumar said. Earlier in the day, JD-U MP from Sunil Kumar Pintu had congratulated BJP and PM Modi saying that "Modi Hai To Mumkin Hai. Modi Hai To Guarantee Hai." He said that the BJP obtained historic wins in by winning with huge margins in all three states which proved that people have faith in PM Modi and his guarantee. --IANS ajk/dan Kolkata, Dec 4 : A fresh appeal has been filed at the Calcutta High Court on Monday seeking fast-track hearing of all cases related to the alleged multi-crore cash-for-school-jobs scam in West Bengal. The petition has been filed by a section of eligible candidates for school jobs who were unethically denied their berths before the division bench of Justice Debangsu Basak and Justice Shabbar Rashidi, which was specially constituted last month for hearing such cases. It is learnt that the bench admitted the fresh plea filed on Monday and also observed that the petition will be looked into seriously. This bench was constituted after the Supreme Court on November 10 returned all the cases pertaining to the alleged scam to the Calcutta High Court. Besides directing the formation of a special bench for hearing the matter, the apex court had also directed to wind up all cases relating to the matter within the next six months. The top court also directed the central agencies to complete their investigation into the matter within the next couple of months. Political and legal observers feel that following the order of the Supreme Court, the central agencies are now under pressure to act fast in the matter. Earlier, the Calcutta High Court too had directed the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to complete its investigation into the school jobs case by December 31. Man who escaped police custody after posing as Gujarat CMO official nabbed from Mizoram. Image Source: IANS News Vadodara, Dec 4 : The Vadodara Detection of Crime Branch (DCB) said on Monday that it has arrested a fugitive who had managed to escape police custody after being arrested on charges of impersonating an official from the Gujarat Chief Minister's Office (CMO). Viraj Patel, the accused, was first apprehended in April on charges related to posing as an CMO official and sexually assaulting a Mumbai-based woman. His daring escape took place during a court appearance in Vadodara in November, throwing the authorities into a tizzy. Officials revealed that Patel, who had previously been incarcerated in the Vadodara Central Jail, travelled through multiple states with his sights set on escaping the country. His journey led him through Tripura, Assam and eventually Mizoram, where he sought refuge and aimed to make his escape abroad. The Crime Branch analysed information based on human intelligence, technical sources, and CCTV footage. The police kept a watch on the persons associated with the accused. It was learnt that Patel first escaped to Ahmedabad and thereafter to Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Assam, Tripura and Mizoram, from where he planned to escape abroad. The Crime Branch learnt that the accused was hiding in various addresses in Tripura, Assam and Mizoram. Patel was nabbed from near the Mizoram-Assam border and has been escorted to Vadodara. New Delhi, Dec 4 : A 26-year-old man was shot twice in the leg following an altercation in east Delhi, police said on Monday. According to police, a PCR call regarding a gunshot injury in Old Mustafabad area was received at Dayalpur police station on Sunday forenoon. A police team rushed to the spot and it was found that at 11 pm, Rashid, a resident of Main Road, opposite Eidgah, Janta Mazdoor Colony and his friends Danish and Sameer were standing near Asif Paan Wala, when three persons, led by Sahil, had an altercation with them. "Sahil shot Rashid twice, on his right feet and right thigh. He was rushed to Jag Pravesh Chandra Hospital from where he was referred to GTB Hospital. He is being treated and is out of danger," Deputy Commissioner of Police, Northeast, Joy Tirkey said. "Efforts are being made to trace Sahil and his other associates," he added. New Delhi, Dec 4 : The Delhi High Court has asked the Delhi University (DU) to consider including a quota for foreign students in its newly-introduced integrated five-year law course from the next academic session in accordance with existing regulations. Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav, however, dismissed a petition seeking immediate directions to the university to make provisions for the admission of foreign nationals in the current academic session 2023-2024. He stated that the university must strive to include the quota for foreign students from the upcoming academic session, following existing regulations. The court noted that the university, in its response to the petition, provided reasons for not granting admission in the present academic year. As the admission process for the current year is almost complete, the court found no reason to interfere with the university's decision. The petitioner had raised concerns about the lack of provisions for the admission of foreign students in the prospectus for integrated five-year BA LLB (Hons.) and BBA LLB (Hons.) courses published on September 26. The university's counsel argued that no quota existed for foreign students for the course concerned and that the approval for the integrated five-year BA LLB (Hons.) course was received from the Bar Council of India in August 2023, causing delays in the admission process. New Delhi, Dec 4 : The Supreme Court on Monday said that students, displaced due to ethnic strife in Manipur, may attend online classes in Manipur University or may opt for Assam University in Silchar or the North East Hill University in Shillong. The relief was given by a bench headed by CJI D.Y. Chandrachud as it considered a plea filed by a group of 284 seeking accommodation in different Central universities in the country to prevent loss of one academic year. The bench, also comprising Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, said that desirous students may approach the nodal officer appointed by the Manipur varsity for the purpose of felicitating admissions and relocation. "The process of relocation shall be carried out in two weeks upon such requests being made. The Manipur University shall ensure that the above exercise does not impede the students from receiving degree for their course of studies," it said. It added that any other grievance could be raised before the court-appointed committee led by Justice (retd) Gita Mittal. In an earlier hearing, the top court had asked Solicitor General Tushar Mehta and the Advocate General of Manipur to look into the grievance raised in the plea. Aizawl, Dec 4 : The Chief Ministerial candidate of Zoram People's Movement (ZPM), which wrested power for the first time in Mizoram on Monday by delivering a crushing defeat to the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF), said that his party would provide issue-based support to national parties but would not join any group at the national level. IPS officer-turned-politician, Lalduhoma said: "We would not be dictated or controlled by any party from Delhi, we would take decisions on our own for the best interest of Mizoram and its people." Lalduhoma, in a multi-corner contest, retained his Serchhip seat, defeating his nearest MNF rival J. Malsawmzuala Vanchhawng by a margin of 2,983 votes while most of the prominent nominees of the party were won in their respective seats. Lalduhoma, who was elected to the state Assembly for the second consecutive time, told the media that on Tuesday or Wednesday, he would meet the Governor to stake his claim to form the government and the swearing-in ceremony would be held soon. On the other hand, accepting the defeat, outgoing Chief Minister Zoramthanga met Governor Hari Babu Kambhampati in the Raj Bhavan on Monday evening and submited his resignation letter. "The anti-incumbency factor and Covid-19 pandemic onslaught are the main reasons for the MNF losing this election. People might not be happy with the performance of our government. I believe the new government will perform well," Zoramthanga told the media. The ZPM has won 27 seats in the 40-member Assembly while the MNF was reduced to 10 seats. The opposition Congress, which governed the mountainous border state for 22 years, has won only one seat -- Lawngtlai West. BJP candidate and former MNF Minister K. Beichhua, who joined the saffron party weeks before the November 7 Assembly election, and his party colleague K. Hrahmo won their Siaha and Palak seats, respectively, defeating their MNF opponents. However, Former Speaker Lalrinliana Sailo, who quit the MNF days before the polls and joined the BJP, lost his Mamit seat to MNF candidate H. Lalzirliana. In the 2018 elections, the MNF bagged 26 seats, while the ZPM got eight. The Congress had bagged five seats and the BJP had managed to win one. Zoramthanga lost his Aizawl East-1 seat where ZPM nominee Lalthansanga won by a margin of 2,101 votes. Deputy Chief Minister and MNF candidate Tawnluia also his Tuichang seat to ZPM's W. Chhuanawma by a margin of 909 votes. Several other MNF Ministers also lost their respective seats. State Congress President Lalsawta lost his Aizawl West-III seat to ZPM candidate V.L. Zaithanzama by a margin of 4,582 votes. Though his party increased the number of seats from one to two, BJP Mizoram state President Vanlalhmuaka lost his Dampa seat to MNF candidate Lalrintluanga Sailo by a margin of 310 votes. The counting of votes for the Mizoram Assembly polls, held on November 7, began at 8 a.m. amid elaborate security arrangements in all 11 districts of the state. More than 80 per cent of the 8.57 lakh voters exercised their franchise on November 7 to decide the electoral fate of 174 candidates, including 16 women. The ruling MNF, the main Opposition ZPM and the Congress had fielded candidates in all 40 seats while the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) contested four seats. The BJP had fielded candidates on 23 seats with a special focus on linguistic minority inhabited areas, especially where the Reang and Chakma tribal communities are in good numbers in the voters' list. Besides them, 27 independent candidates were also in the fray. An Aussie community battling to save their properties from a new road development are celebrating Christmas early this year after the developer announced the plan had been scrapped. It doesnt get much better than how I feel today, an excited Sophie Oliver said from her home in Toowoomba. People are crying with happy tears. Her elation was in stark contrast to when she first spoke with Yahoo News Australia in July. That was just days after residents received a letterbox drop revealing the Queensland government had proposed building a major road through their backyards. Sophie Oliver (left) and her community have celebrated after the Queensland government dumped plans to build a major road through their properties. Source: Supplied It's given me hope in journalism, it's given me hope in fighting government, it's given me hope in the environmental movement. Because it can be pretty grim.Sophie Oliver How locals defeated controversial road plan Locals put their lives on hold and took up the fight against Transport and Main Roads' (TMR) proposed 54km-long Toowoomba North-South Transport Corridor. It wasnt just land values they're concerned about. Residents on Leahy Road said the project would have torn apart their peaceful community in the northern Toowoomba suburb of Kleinton. Discover more of our environment coverage. There were also concerns the road would displace an entire colony of koalas and greater gliders, as well as countless other species. I would have been sad if we had to move of course, but it's easy for us to go and build another house or buy another property. As humans, we can move, we can adapt really easily, Sophie told Yahoo News. I was most concerned about our wildlife. Determined to protect their community and their koalas, the people of Leahy Road and their neighbours took their fight to government. They started community WhatsApp group chats with their neighbours, shared their cause on social media and spoke to media. The proposed road would have cut through known koala habitat. Source: TMR/Supplied People can say a lot of negative things about social media but this highlights there are good things as well, Sophie said. If this had of happened 20 years ago, it probably would have gone through because only a few people would have been aware of it. But because of social media and the few journalists like you who spoke with us, hundreds of thousands of people found out. Story continues Governments are pretty powerful, and they'll do what they want to do a lot of the time, but when there's that much backlash, they have to listen. And this has highlighted the importance of community. Government says it listened to community after thousands respond Thousands signed their petition and more than 4,000 filed responses and submissions during the three-month consultation phase. We couldnt believe the response we were really surprised and overjoyed. Things were looking grim and now we get to go into Christmas and we get to relax, but also plan for the future knowing the road isnt going to go ahead, Sophie said. Weve got to take these wins, celebrate them, and it just ramps you up for the next fight even more. On Monday, TMR issued a statement revealing it had "scrapped" the plan "based on extensive public opposition to the proposed route". Roads minister Mark Bailey thanked the community for its response to the proposal and said the government had listened. Now that consultation has closed, TMR will work with Toowoomba Regional Council to identify alternate transport solutions that maximise the use of existing road infrastructure," he said. Love Australia's weird and wonderful environment? Get our new weekly newsletter showcasing the weeks best stories. Hyderabad, Dec 4 : With no word from the Congress leadership on who will be the Chief Minister of Telangana apparently due to lack of consensus among newly-elected MLAs, the plans for swearing-in ceremony were put on hold on Monday. A meeting of newly-elected MLAs earlier in the day had authorised party President Mallikarjun Kharge to name the leader of Congress Legislature Party (CLP). However, till late Monday there was no announcement from the leadership, giving tense moments to supporters of state unit chief A. Revanth Reddy, who is the front-runner for the top post. Worried over the delay in announcement by the party, some supporters of Revanth Reddy staged a protest outside Raj Bhavan, demanding that he be sworn-in as the Chief Minister. The police had to disperse them. All arrangements were made at Raj Bhavan amid the buzz that Revanth Reddy will be taking oath as the Chief Minister on Monday evening. Officials of the General Administration Department and protocol had reached Raj Bhavan and made all arrangements for the swearing in Durbar Hall. However, the plans had to be put on hold as there was no official word from the party. The officials later left Raj Bhavan. Earlier, to pave the way for the swearing-in of the new Chief Minister, Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan had dissolved the second Legislative Assembly while a gazette notification was issued, constituting the new Assembly. The notification was issued after Chief Electoral Officer Vikas Raj and Election Commission Secretary Avinash Kumar submitted the list of elected MLAs to the Governor. According to a communique from the Governoras office consequent to the resolution by the Council of Ministers recommending the dissolution of the Second Legislative Assembly of Telangana, she dissolved the Assembly in exercise of the powers conferred on her by the Constitution. It was expected that a delegation of Congress leaders would call on the Governor, informing her about the name of the leader of the CLP and request her to invite him to take oath as the Chief Minister. Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister and AICC observer D. K. Shivakumar, who was camping in Hyderabad since Friday, left for Delhi to apprise the high command of the views of the newly-elected MLAs. After the CLP meeting, he along with other observers Deepa Das Munshi, Dr Ajoy Kumar, K.J. George and K. Muraleedharan held individual meetings with all 64 legislators to take their opinion. A meeting of the MLAs unanimously passed a resolution authorising Kharge to name the leader. "All the MLAs unanimously resolved to authorise AICC president Shri Mallikarjun Kharge to appoint Congress Legislature Party leader," Shivakumar told media persons after the meeting. He said the resolution was moved by Revanth Reddy and seconded by Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka, Uttam Kumar Reddy, Damodar Raja Narasimha, Sridhar Babu and others. Shivakumar said they all decided that they will go by the decision of the party. He also told the media that they will also meet all the legislators independently and take their opinion. While Revanth Reddy is the front-runner for the Chief Ministeras post, senior leader Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka who was the CLP leader in the dissolved Assembly, former state chief Uttam Kumar Reddy and former Deputy Chief Minister Damodar Rajanarasimha are seen as the other contenders for the post. Mizoram scripts history as three women elected to Assembly for first time. Image Source: IANS News Aizawl, Dec 4 : Mizoram scripted history on Monday as for the first time, three women candidates were elected to the 40-member Assembly in one go. Poll winner Zoram People's Movement (ZMP) candidate Lalrinpuii won from Lunglei East constituency and her party colleague and television presenter Baryl Vanneihsangi was elected from Aizawi South-3 seat. Pravo Chakma of the Mizo National Front (MNF) won from West Tuipui seat. Lalrinpuii and Chakma defeated their male Congress candidates while Baryl Vanneihsangi beat her MNF opponent. With Christian-dominated (87 per cent) Mizo society being traditionally following by the patriarchal culture, Mizoram's main political parties hardly had nominated women candidates in the Lok Sabha and assembly elections. In the November 7 Assembly elections, 174 candidates, including 16 women, fought the polls while in the last Assembly elections in 2018, a total of 209 candidates, including 18 women, contested. In the 2013 assembly polls, 136 candidates including six women aspirants contested the polls. None of the women candidates had won in the 2013 or the 2018 polls. In Mizoram, the first woman elected to the legislature (Mizoram was elevated to Union Territory-status in 1972 with a 30-member legislature) was L. Thanmawii of People's Conference (PC), led by former Chief Minister Brig. T. Sailo (retd), from Serchhip constituency in 1978. K.Thansiami of the same party was the second woman elected to the Assembly in 1984, followed by Lalhlimpuli of the MNF who was inducted as the first woman minister in 1987 in the government headed by the then Chief Minister Laldenga, a militant leader-turned-politician. Lalhlimpuii was a minister for 19 months before the government was toppled in the later part of 1988. In 2014, Vanlalawmpuii Chawngthu was elected in the by-election from Hrangturzo Assembly seat and ikn 2017, she was inducted as a minister of state in the Congress government headed by Chief Minister Lal Thanhawla, who was headed Mizoram government in different terms for more than 22 years. In the November 7 election, 1.21 per cent more women voters exercised their franchise than their men counterparts. Female votersa turnout was 81.25 per cent while 80.04 per cent male voters cast their votes across the mountainous state. In the electoral lists of Mizoram, women always outnumber the male voters. Women are over 51.22 per cent of the total 8,57,063-strong electorate in Mizoramas latest votersa list. In all 4,39,026 women voters outnumbered the male electorate of 4,13,062 in the electoral rolls, which were published on October 4 after several month-long special summary revision of votersa list with reference to October 1 as the qualifying date for inclusion of names. Of the eleven districts in Mizoram, only in the minority community-inhabited Mamit district is the number of male voters (32,723) higher than their female (32,064) counterparts. Bengaluru, Dec 4 : Former Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai on Monday urged Chief Minister Siddaramaiah's to intervene to resolve the ongoing conflict between the district police and advocates in Chikkamagaluru district, describing it as a 'dangerous' development. Expressing concern over the continued conflict between the advocates and police personnel in Chikkamagaluru over the alleged assault on a lawyer by the local police, Bommai said "the law and order machinery has collapsed in the state, and both the government and officials have lost control over the home department". Alleging gross indiscipline in the police department, Bommai warned that there could be anarchy in the state if correct steps are not taken immediately. He also sought Siddaramaiah's intervention to create an atmosphere where everyone respects the law. Meanwhile, the Karnataka High Court on Monday issued an interim stay on complaints lodged against advocates by the police department in three cases. Four cases were lodged against Chikkamagaluru Bar Council district president Sudhakar and 15 other advocates, including allegations of assault on policemen and obstruction of duty. The cases were filed following protests by the police personnel and their family members. The advocates had questioned the filing of cases in the high court, and on Monday they celebrated after the stay orders were issued. The advocates also warned of a protest by 40,000 lawyers across the state if serious action is not taken against the police in this case. Considering the sensitivity of the matter, the state government had already handed over the case to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID). The conflict began last week after the police questioned and allegedly attacked an advocate for not wearing a helmet while riding a bike. Subsequently, a group of advocates staged a protest in front of the police station in Chikkamagaluru. The police later suspended six policemen, including a PSI, in connection with the incident. Later, in an unprecedented move, the policemen and their family members also staged a protest demanding protection from and action against the advocates. London, Dec 4 : An estimated 300,000 non-Britons - many of them Indians - will be affected by the British government on Monday raising the bar for people eligible to apply for skilled worker visas for the United Kingdom. The minimum salary that an applicant must now command is 38,700 pounds, up from 26,000 pounds. "Enough is enough," said Home Secretary James Cleverly in the House of Commons. The policy is designed, he added, to reduce net migration to the UK. Net migration a" the difference between the number of people coming to live in the UK and the people leaving a" was 745,000 in 2022 and has become deeply unpopular with Britons across the board. One of the main arguments for exiting the European Union (EU) was to control immigration a" which compulsory free movement of people in the EU could not prevent. This has been defeated by people swamping the UK from other parts of the world, including significantly from India. Those coming on health and social care visas, mostly nurses, will, however, be exempt from the higher salary threshold. They will not, though, be permitted to bring dependents, namely their partners and children, with them. Cleverly stated this will "end the abuse of the Health and Care Visa". Nurses in the UK also come from India as well as from other parts of Asia, Africa. and the West Indies. Cleverly asserted: "Approximately 120,000 dependents accompanied 100,000 care workers and senior care workers in the year ending September 2023. Only 25 per cent of dependents are estimated to be in work, meaning a significant number are drawing on public services and not helping to grow the economy." Earlier this year, tougher rules were announced for students bringing dependents to the UK. Undergraduate students are no longer allowed to bring their partners or children. Cleverly also indicated that the health surcharge payable by foreign job seekers will rise by 66 per cent - from 624 pounds to 1,035 pounds. Without criticising the move, the opposition Labour partyas Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper maintained the new proposals are "an admission of years of total failure by this Conservative government". She slammed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak by saying he is "clearly veering" without "steering" and is being "pushed around all over the place". The Scottish National Party spokesperson said Cleverlyas pronouncement will be judged on whether itas "pandering to the right wing of his party". The chair of the Independent Care Group warned: "I think we are going to find more businesses fail, care homes closing." It appears post-study work (PSW) visas available after finishing a masters degree in the UK will not as yet come under the new guidelines. This will come as a relief to Indian students, who numbered 120,000 in 2021-22. "Earning both the Clutch Global and Champion Awards is a significant recognition of our team's hard work and expertise." - Nick Damoulakis, President and CEO, Orases Post this These awards are a reflection of Orases' dedication to quality and innovation in software development, validating their approach of prioritizing client satisfaction and technical excellence. With these honors, Orases reinforces its status as a leading player in the custom software development industry. The company is geared to leverage these accomplishments in its marketing endeavors and to continue setting high standards in client service and technical expertise. About Clutch Clutch is a leading global marketplace for B2B service providers, playing a pivotal role in empowering better business decisions. It serves as a trusted platform where over 1 million business leaders each month start their search for top-ranked companies. About Orases Orases is a full-service, digital technology agency based in Maryland. Founded in 2000, we have become a trusted provider of custom software, website and application development services and solutions that drive efficiency and provide measurable cost savings and revenue gains to our client partners. Media Contact Kristi Stilen-Lare, Executive Assistant, Orases, 301.694.8991, [email protected], https://orases.com/ SOURCE Orases "If you're thinking of opening a coffee shop in Maine or any other state, call 1-888-800-9224 to reach our 7 Steps consulting team. We're excited to share information and resources to help entrepreneurs like you." - Greg Ubert, Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea Post this In 2022, Crimson Cup published a series of startup guides to help entrepreneurs in each state achieve their dreams of opening their own coffee shops. For 2023, the company's 7 Steps coffee shop startup consulting team has updated its "How to Start a Coffee Shop in maine" guide with even more tips and resources. "Maine offers fertile ground for many types of small businesses, and coffee shops are no exception," said Crimson Cup Founder and President Greg Ubert. "The Pine Tree State ranks seventh in the number of coffee shops per capita, with fewer than one coffee shop for every 3,522 residents. That leaves a lot of Mainers without a local coffee shop!" Crimson Cup's 7 Steps program is based on Ubert's book, Seven Steps to Success: A Common-sense Guide to Succeed in Specialty Coffee, which he wrote to help coffee shop owners master all aspects of successful coffee shop operations. "We help entrepreneurs with little or no coffee experience become owners of thriving coffee shops serving their local communities," he said. "From choosing a terrific location and writing a strong coffee shop business plan to calculating coffee shop startup costs, buying and laying out equipment, hiring and training staff and more, our team is here to guide you." To hear about the book in Ubert's own words, download a free recorded introduction on Soundcloud. "As a coffee roaster and coffee business consultant, Crimson Cup believes our company only succeeds when our customers do," Ubert said. "As a result, we support coffee shop owners at every step, from concept through opening day and beyond." "Although the fundamentals of coffee shop operation remain the same from state to state, the economic opportunities, business formation and licensing requirements vary widely," Ubert said. "We're excited to share information and resources to help entrepreneurs expedite their startup journey." He invited anyone who is thinking of opening a coffee shop in any state to call Crimson Cup for guidance. "If you run into any roadblocks or just want to discuss your vision with a coffee expert, you can reach our startup team by calling 1-888-800-9224." About Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea Founded in 1991, Crimson Cup is at the forefront of the coffee industry. Its attentive roasting, startup support and global partnerships are consciously designed for the greater good of communities around the world. Among other significant recognitions, the company has earned 2023 Double Gold awards at the Aurora International Taste Challenge, 2020 and 2017 Good Food Awards, the 2019 Golden Bean Champion for Small Franchise/Chain Roaster and Roast magazine's 2016 Macro Roaster of the Year. Crimson Cup travels the world searching for the perfect cup driven by meaningful relationships, honesty and a shared vision for the future. Its Friend2Farmer initiatives foster respect and decency through mutually beneficial collaboration across local and global communities. Through its 7 Steps to Success coffee shop startup program, the company teaches entrepreneurs how to open and run independent coffee houses in their local communities. Crimson Cup coffee is available through over 300 independent coffee houses, grocers, college and universities, restaurants and food service operations across more than 30 states, Guam and Bangladesh. The company also owns several Crimson Cup Coffee Shops and the CRIMSON coffeehouse and retail store in Easton Town Center. To learn more, visit crimsoncup.com,. Media Contact Cheryl Claypoole, Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea, 614-361-5023, [email protected], https://www.crimsoncup.com Twitter SOURCE Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea The man who fell into a 1.5m hole and was buried alive in sand on Bribie Island has been identified as Josh Taylor. Queensland Paramedics and an RACQ Lifeflight rescue helicopter crew were called to help the 25-year-old man after he fell into a hole and was buried in sand on Bribie Island, north of Brisbane, just before 2pm. Nathan, a witness to the incident who helped dig Mr Taylor out, told 7News that the hole had been dug to cook a pig in. The young man involved in the freak accident has been named as Josh Taylor. Source: 7News He stood up off the chair, the sand had given away a little bit underneath him, he said. He stumbled back. Hed put his arms out to obviously to break the fall, hes continued going down and knocked sand as hes put his arms out. He was that deep in the hole that you could not see him, his feet, unless you were standing on top of the hole. A desperate rescue operation eventually managed to free him. Source: 7News A herd of people came to Mr Taylors aide, digging him out before tying a rope to his feet to pull him from the hole. There were 15 fully grown men on the end of this rope and he still would not budge, Nathan said. Thats when the paramedic was like pull him this way .. . the suction gave way and he popped out. Im praying that he pulls through this. Family desperately arrived on the scene Mr Taylors family are by his side at the Princess Alexandra hospital where he remains in a critical but stable condition, The Courier Mail reported. Nathan was leaving the beach with his family when a group of men ran over yelling for help to rescue their friend from under the sand, he told NCA NewsWire. When he arrived at the scene, the 25-year-olds family and friends were desperately digging to to get him out. I realised someone was head first in a hole and I was just digging digging digging... he said. When I first went up to the hole, I couldnt even see his foot. Thats how deep it was, he said. Family members rushed to the scene after hearing the news. Source: 7News There were more than 15 people digging in the sand to get the man out before paramedics and rangers arrived. All of his family, were screaming at us, telling us to help, telling us to get rope so we could pull him out. It was pretty gruesome, he said. Story continues There were like 15 men on the rope pulling and he did not budge. 'I threw up' After some time of pulling and digging, the young man finally burst through the surface of the sand, but the force of being pulled out caused him further injury, Nathan said. It was pretty gnarly when he popped out. I threw up, Nathan said. He broke. The suction, the force, of everyone pulling. When they got him out, the man did not have a pulse and rangers began performing CPR. Rangers in the area also applied a defibrillator before the arrival of paramedics. A helicopter pilot landed on the beach to deliver the RACQ LifeFlight Rescue Critical Care Doctor and flight paramedic as close to the scene as possible. The rescue crew then flew the man to Princess Alexandra Hospital in a critical condition for further treatment. Doctors at Princess Alexandra are now working to save the mans life. Source: 7News It is understood it took 45 minutes before the mans pulse returned. QAS Paramedic Peter Batt praised the actions of the people who helped out. The fact that they have got a return of pulse on this young man after an extended period of CPR, is evidence that good CPR was being done, its a credit to those people who got in and helped with their first aid, he said. The doctors at Princess Alexandra are now working to save the mans life. Paramedics told Nine News the tragedy happened at a beach gathering with friends. The friends dug a hole in the sand and the young man fell head first into the hole before the sand collapsed around him, burying him alive, Nine reported. Bribie Island, part of Queenslands Moreton Bay region, is a popular holiday destination. NCA Newswire Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@yahoonews.com. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. Jordan-Elbridge High School is celebrating the intrepidness of two of its foreign exchange students for the 2023-2024 school year. Gonzalo Garcia-Vinas, from Spain, and Abdulaziz Aziz Alneamah, from Kuwait, have demonstrated their commitment to academic excellence as they approach the culmination of their exchange program, the school district said in a news release. Jordan-Elbridge is a very small school compared to my school in Kuwait, but I feel like that is an advantage because everyone is like family; I know everyone, said Alneamah, who credits Netflixs hit show The Crown for being a vital part of his learning the English language. Jordan-Elbridge itself has been recognized for similar reasons by the United States Department of State, which said the school promotes mutual understanding, respect and tolerance among future generations of global leaders by supporting the U.S. Department of States CBYX (Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange), FLEX (Future Leaders Exchange) and YES (Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange & Study) programs. The school has also become a U.S.A Medallion School by enrolling in the Department of State-sponsored Grant Scholarship Students. The accreditation demonstrates Jordan-Elbridges commitment to an international exchange program, the district said, thus bolstering academic and cultural enrichment. Participating in foreign exchange student programs not only enriches the lives of our students but also contributes to the fabric of our school, Principal Mark Schermerhorn said, fostering a deeper appreciation for cultural diversity and mutual respect among our student body. Jordan-Elbridge High School is not only applauding Garcia-Vinas and Alneamahs commitment to academic excellence and extracurricular involvement, but the district said their presence has contributed significantly to the schools multicultural environment. Former Sterling Publishing, Quarto Publishing, and Welbeck Publishing Group head Marcus Leaver has formed Gemini Books Group, which will focus on publishing nonfiction gift books and childrens books in both the U.K. and U.S. markets. The announcement of Gemini was accompanied by news of its acquisitions of Ad Lib Publishers, Imagine That!, Mardle Books, Palazzo Editions, and Pimpernel Press. Jon Rippon, currently managing director of Palazzo and AL/Mardle, has moved into the new role of finance director of Gemini. Leaver called the acquisitions an excellent springboard for us, adding that he is pleased that Rippon is joining Gemini in his new role. Backed by what he said is funding from both sides of the Atlantic," Leaver expects to grow Gemini through the acquisition of established companies and by incubating start-up businesses in scalable areas of the market. The launch of Gemini marks Leavers return to publishing after he and his partner Mark Smith sold Welbeck to Hachette UK in December 2022. The blueprint for the new publisher closely follows Leavers plan for Welbeck, though those plans were disrupted by the onset of the pandemic. The subject areas targeted by Gemini also mesh with Leavers previous experience as CEO of Quarto, which he left in May 2018, and Sterling, where he served as CEO before joining Quarto. Property details: This Lakeview Land in Pennsylvania is a great investment opportunity for those looking to buy a residential property. With 0.36 acres of land, this lot is perfect for a homesite or any other real estate project. Located at 1558 Ridgeview in Lake Ariel, this property is situated in a prime location with easy access to all amenities. The zoning for this property is residential, making it ideal for those looking to build a home or develop a real estate project. The seller's state of residence is Pe... Price: $ 1,399 Seller State of Residence: Pennsylvania Type: Homesite, Lot Property Address: 1558 Ridgeview Zip/Postal Code: 18436 Zoning: Residential City: Lake Ariel State/Province: Pennsylvania Location: 100**, New York, New York You will be redirected to eBay Nearby Pennsylvania Most everyone is familiar with the infamous murder chant, "Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks." But how many know that her distant kin once resided in Port Byron? Her distant cousin Dr. Charles A. Borden lived here for about 28 years, and his connection to Lizzie followed him after the 1892 double murder case. I first found Dr. Borden in the Port Byron 1890 veteran census, where he was recorded as a Confederate soldier, so I wanted to know more. Other census records indicated he was born in Massachusetts, but connecting him to the same village as Lizzie (Falls River) would not be easy. By 1850 his family was living at Tauton, some 16 miles from Falls River. Charles was to have enlisted into the Civil War from Pennsylvania and received his medical training from the Winchester Medical College of the Valley in Virginia, so there was a lot of movement to trace. The answer to his birth location would come from his Civil War pension application, where he testified that he was born July 12, 1842, at Falls River. He also stated he was a student at the time of his enlistment. His family was living at Ross, Pennsylvania, by 1860, and he enlisted into Battery F of the Pennsylvania Light Infantry from Pittsburgh. He was marked as a war deserter in 1863, but he testified he was wounded and taken as a prisoner of war to Libby Prison. After the war he resided at Paris, Missouri, then had a short stay in Indiana before finally arriving in Port Byron around 1879, just a few years before the Lizzie Borden trial. While at Port Byron he started a family with his wife, Lameda Range, of Elbridge. He served as a physician alongside Drs. Gilbert, Gray and Stewert. It wasnt long before trouble started brewing in newspaper headlines. The Auburn Argus on Oct. 12, 1894, reported, Dr. C.A. Borden, who recently located to Sterling has removed to Missouri where he was called by the feeble condition of his brother. Borden is said to have another wife and several children living at Port Byron, where his reputation for morality was not the best. He is said to be a native of Fall River, Mass. where the famous Lizzie Borden was tried for the murder of her parents and acquitted a year ago. The Oswego Daily Palladium on Sept. 29, 1894, published, Dr. C.A. Borden, who has been a resident of this town and a practicing physician here, has disappeared, leaving his wife to account for his sudden withdrawal from these parts. Mrs. Borden, as she calls herself, is a good-looking young woman about thirty-five years old. Borden is sixty, but his well-dyed black hair and general sleek appearance made him look much younger. The doctor's wife says he has been called suddenly to Missouri to see a brother. Mrs. Borden is not known in these parts. She is good looking and seems to be well-supplied with money." Local tax assessment records for their home on Green Street went from Dr. Borden to Mrs. Borden between 1895 and 1896, and back to Dr. Borden in 1897. The family is in all census records at Port Byron up to their departure in 1907, when he retired and relocated to Arkansas and later Ponca City, Oklahoma. Dr. Borden died in 1928 and both he and Lameda are buried at Odd Fellows Cemetery in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Sometimes history raises more questions than answers, but one thing is for certain: His children, Charles Jr. and Floyd, were proud to have grown up here. They visited Port Byron in 1943, at which time Charles stayed the week at the home of Jesse Rooker. Floyd extended an invitation in the Chronicle that anyone wanting to write was welcome to drop a letter to his address in Oklahoma. Property details: **Bidders with less than 5 feedback will be cancelled unless approved to bid by seller** EVERYTHING MUST GO! LIQUIDATE, LIQUIDATE, LIQUIDATE! The possibilities are endless!!!! *5,401 SQ FT VACANT LAND WITH MOBILE HOME*Own a lot in a prime, lakefront location! Great for building a home, business, Aibnb, or even a rental property for passive income. That's endless possibilities! This vacant land is in Saratoga, AR. It is located on 123 Hempstead 199 Rd. This lot is 5,401 sq ft, has a mobile home o... Price: $ 1,025 Seller State of Residence: New Jersey Property Address: 123 Hempstead 199 Rd Zip/Postal Code: 71859 City: Saratoga State/Province: Arkansas Location: 718**, Saratoga, Arkansas You will be redirected to eBay Nearby Arkansas Property details: FULL PRICE AUCTION!FINAL BID WINS, REGARDLESS OF AMOUNTASSESSED VALUE = $8,500.00********************************************************************************************** This prime city building site boasts a desirable location close to excellent schools, abundant job opportunities, and easy interstate access. The spacious lot measures 30'X125' and is zoned for residential use. Utilities are readily available for your convenience. The property address is on Maple Street in Hobart, Indiana,... Price: $ 84 Seller State of Residence: Illinois Type: Homesite, Lot Property Address: Maple Street Zip/Postal Code: 46342 Zoning: Residential City: Hobart State/Province: Illinois Location: 463**, Hobart, Indiana You will be redirected to eBay Nearby Illinois Lifetime / Reality TV World By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 12/03/2023 ADVERTISEMENT FOLLOW REALITY TV WORLD ON THE ALL-NEW GOOGLE NEWS! Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! RELATED: '90 DAY FIANCE' COUPLES NOW: WHO IS STILL TOGETHER? WHO HAS SPLIT? WHERE ARE THEY NOW? (PHOTOS) ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade. star Lauren has opened up about Orion's refusal to forgive her for making a joke about the color of his skin.Not long after Orion and Lauren kicked off their honeymoon in Cancun, Mexico, they had a serious conversation about culture and racism.Orion -- who is of Navajo lineage -- admitted to his wife, who is Black, that he had used the N-word "ignorantly" and regretfully when he was younger, and then Lauren accepted responsibility for having used some derogatory words in her past as well.Orion then asked, "Redskin?""No, I don't think I've ever used that language. I've actually never said [that]. I don't even know what redskin means, honestly," Lauren replied.Lauren then looked at Orion's face, which she claimed was a bit sunburned, and started laughing."Oh! I do! I just looked at your face," Lauren said with a giggle and a smile.Once Lauren could see that she had offended and hurt Orion, she apologized and insisted she had meant no malice or disrespect. Orion eventually seemed to get over it, but then the conversation resurfaced on Day 8 of marriage.On : Afterparty, which aired on Wednesday, November 30, Lauren watched back a clip of the spouses' honeymoon Zoom chat with MAFS expert Pastor Calvin Roberson."I've been trying to research and just get myself more aware of terms -- not just derogatory terms, but tears of endearment in the Navajo culture. Terms and anything I can basically get off Google," Lauren tells Pastor Cal in the footage.Pastor Cal then asks Orion, "Is that not enough for you?""Unfortunately," Orion replies, confirming that Lauren couldn't make up for her mistake."Because of this reason alone," he elaborated, "The first time I experienced racism was within my own culture, and now this second time, I experienced that level of it was with a very crude joke -- from [Lauren]."Lauren acknowledged on Afterparty how that moment was "really difficult," and her co-star, Clare, declared how Orion was "giving [her] nothing" to work with.Afterparty host Keshia Knight Pulliam asked Lauren what was causing her to be emotional when watching that clip back, and Lauren said in tears, "I'm feeling all the frustrations that I felt. I'm doing everything, I'm telling you how profusely sorry I am, and he's just like, 'No, it doesn't matter.'"Lauren complained, "He literally just said, 'It doesn't matter what you do.' And I'm like, 'I don't know how much to give before I'm just like, okay,' [and give up]."Keshia pointed out how Orion seemed to be having "an internal conflict" because Lauren had done everything she could do to mend the situation."Is it possible that this isn't your stuff?" Keshia asked Lauren."I always say, 'I'm not a therapist,' but in that moment, I did see, like, you're comparing my situation to something that happened when you were, like, 12 years old," Lauren explained.Lauren recalled Orion talking about his first racist experience -- when someone had called him an "apple," meaning red on the outside and white on the inside -- and pointing out how his second racist experience was with his own wife."I'm like, 'So now I'm racist.' I feel like he was projecting childhood trauma onto me," Lauren shared.Keshia suggested that if Orion couldn't work this out within himself, he'd probably behave the same way in any relationship with a future girlfriend or partner.During that Zoom chat with Pastor Cal on the latest episode, Orion made it seem like he wasn't going to be able to forgive Lauren for her remark. He actually admitted, "I can't get past what was said."Lauren walked away from the Zoom conversation with Pastor Cal in tears, saying she just needed a moment to compose herself."I could write a 50-page essay and give a PowerPoint to the entire USA about derogatory terms in this nation, and it wouldn't matter to him because it's a 'him' thing," Lauren vented to producers."There is nothing more I can do. There can't be more remorse. There's nothing I can do that I haven't done.""Yeah," Orion agreed. "I don't know what more I can say to explain this, but I can't move past this."On Afterparty, Keshia asked Lauren to reveal what viewers missed after watching that heated exchange play out on ."So after the talk with Pastor Cal, we talked off-camera with some of the executive producers, some of which who are married," Lauren recalled."And they let us know, like, 'These are topics, especially in an intercultural relationship and intercultural marriage, these are topics that come up. And you think in the moment that you can't come back from it, but you do.'"Keshia said both spouses in a marriage need to be willing to fight for it in order to get to the other side, and also that a person cannot pour into a partner from an empty cup.will continue airing its seventeenth season Wednesday nights on Lifetime. The show also stars Emily and Brennan, Austin and Becca, and Clare and Cameron.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! Disney/John Fleenor By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 12/04/2023 ADVERTISEMENT FOLLOW REALITY TV WORLD ON THE ALL-NEW GOOGLE NEWS! Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade. couple Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist have revealed the next step for them and where they plan to live now that the show is over and they've gone public with their engagement.Gerry, an Iowa native who currently lives on a lake in Indiana, and Theresa, who currently resides in New Jersey, have revealed that they plan to leave home, move in together, and start fresh in a new state -- down South.Gerry and Theresa, whose engagement aired on 's finale on November 30, will be relocating to Charleston, South Carolina."One of the things that I think fate played a hand in is the possibility of where we might wind up living," Gerry, 72, told People in a joint interview with Theresa."For the last couple of years, when my family gets together, I've talked about moving to South Carolina, and it's an idea I've toyed with. And then in conversation with Theresa, a private moment, she's saying, 'Well, yeah, my son lives near Charleston in South Carolina.'"Gerry recalled, "And all of a sudden it's like, 'There's a big problem that is gone.' The issue of compromising on where to live and how to reconcile families and all of that is no longer an issue."star and his 70-year-old fiancee hope their children and grandchildren will visit them often in South Carolina.After all, the pair shared with People how their daughters have already bonded and become like sisters."We want to have a house that's so inviting that everyone would want to come," Theresa said. "Maybe a pool so they all want to come and have fun."The couple confirmed how they've already had conversations about when they'll be packing up their belongings. Gerry said while Theresa is the "more patient" person in their relationship, they're both in no rush to start their next chapter down South."We've narrowed it down to a time window, but that's always in flux," the retired restaurateur explained of the moving process."We have two homes to sell. We have other events that we're going to have to deal with and so forth."And for the very near future, Gerry and the financial services professional will be bringing their families together to celebrate Hanukkah."We'll have a holiday dinner together with everyone," Gerry shared.Gerry boasted about how he and Theresa view life in a similar manner as well as their finances."Financially, we're the same," Gerry noted. "The way we handle money is the same."And Theresa clarified how that means the lovebirds are "somewhat frugal."In a separate interview with the Los Angeles Times, Gerry reiterated how he had been thinking about a move to South Carolina for quite some time."For the last couple of years at Christmastime, my family and I would talk about how the fall chores at the lake house were getting too much for me to handle by myself," Gerry said.Gerry said in one of the conversations he had with Theresa toward the end of process, he learned that Theresa not only has a son in South Carolina, but she has three grandsons as well."All of a sudden, the possible obstacle of geography melted away. Maybe it's fate that really helped us in that department, but it really lifted a burden off both of us on what that compromise would be," Gerry said.Before viewers even saw Gerry's happily-ever-after ending play out on TV, became a cultural phenomenon and Gerry turned into an overnight celebrity.But when asked if he'll continue to seek stardom or just live a quiet life with Theresa, Gerry replied, "I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive.""I can have a great, quiet life with Theresa and still look at the aspirations and ambitions that may be out there," he elaborated."But I will say this, I am absolutely going to savor every moment until I get to that altar and say my 'I do's.' I want every single moment to be as joyful for her as it is for me, and I never want to look back and feel I hurried through anything. We'll deal with the aspirations after that."Gerry gushed about how he's feeling pure "joy" after finale, and he and Theresa are looking forward to their wedding on January 4, 2024, which will be televised on ABC."There's a lot of relief, a lot of anticipation about what's going to happen in the future, now that we can openly talk and plan things together," Gerry told the LA Times."[My] expectations were certainly quite different than what ended up happening, but for the most part in a good way. I certainly entered determined to find my one last true person, and I definitely accomplished that goal. That was the most important."Gerry concluded that he and Theresa "just make a perfect pair" and they're "better as a couple than [they] are individually."Gerry selected Theresa as his winner over his runner-up Leslie Fhima , who was absolutely devastated by her breakup with Gerry.Gerry and Theresa, however, were able to understand and relate to each other on a deep level when discussing loss and past trauma. Gerry also described how he's drawn to Theresa's dry sense of humor and how she's a strong person with a good heart.Gerry's wife, Toni, had passed away in 2017 from a bacterial infection after 43 years of marriage. Theresa lost her husband, Billy, in 2014 from kidney failure after 42 years of marriage.Gerry, however, has come under fire recently for allegedly having had -- and not being honest about -- a live-in girlfriend of nearly three nears after Toni passed away.Interested in more news? Follow our Bachelor Nation News Page on Facebook or join our The Bachelor Facebook Group Volunteers organize donated books in the Books For Keeps warehouse in Athens, Georgia on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019. Books For Keeps has worked for the past ten years to improve childrens reading achievement by supplying them with books of their own. (Photo/Taylor Gerlach) By keeping the Sanatana Dharma row alive and adding the Ayodhya temple consecration scheduled for January 22 and adding the free darshan promise from four polled states to the entire country, the BJP may have a self-fulfilling concoction, predicts N Sathiya Moorthy. IMAGE: Bharatiya Janata Party leader Narendra D Modi shakes hands with a child as BJP supporters try to take selfies at the party headquarters in New Delhi, December 3, 2023. Photograph: Shrikant Singh/ANI Photo Whether the impact was real and direct or not, campaigning for the recent five-state assembly elections did in fact bring out the best and worst in southern Tamil Nadu's Dravidian politics, nay, what the ruling DMK in the state has titled as the 'Dravidian model'. Thus you had the main victor Bharatiya Janata Party taking on Tamil Nadu Minister and Chief Minister M K Stalin's son, Udhayanidhi Stalin, on his criticism of 'Sanatana Dharma' Hinduism and at the same time adopting the state government's social welfare measures without acknowledging them, that too after none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi calling them all revdi, or freebies, when it is not election time anywhere in the country. In a way, the BJP's victory in the three Hindi heartland states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan with the party snatching power from the Congress rival in two states in what essentially was a one-to-one fight has a profound meaning for the Lok Sabha elections. After the Janata Party victory of 1977, there is evidence on the ground that you can rule India on legit grounds and through democratic elections with the backing of the Hindi heartland. IMAGE: Congress cutouts at the party's Vijayabheri Sabha at Tukkuguda in Rangareddy district, Telangana. Photograph: Mohammed Zakir/ANI Photo It becomes even more significant after the Congress rival taking back Telangana after ten years of K Chandrasekhar Rao's rule. Going back in time, if the BJP had originally supported the demand for a separate Telangana, which ultimately the Congress government of then prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh granted almost overnight through a midnight declaration of then Union home minister P Chidambaram, there was a strategy behind it. As per the BJP calculations of the time, after a term or two for the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, since rechristened as Bharat Rashtra Samithi under KCR, the state could become theirs, given the substantial Muslim presence and the 'inevitable domination' of anti-Muslim sentiment among majority Hindu voters. The election results now have proved otherwise. By dilly-dallying on corruption issues relating to the BRS leaders, and especially giving the impression that it was using the case against KCR's daughter Kavitha, to arm-twist the party than to hold it accountable, the BJP gave away the state to the Congress on a platter. By taking a clear stand against the BRS, unlike the BJP, the Congress made it despite not having one too many strong leaders in the state. This also opens up possibilities in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, where assembly polls are due before the Lok Sabha polls. It will now be left the Election Commission to decide on holding it separately or along with the Lok Sabha election. IMAGE: Modi welcomed by Andhra Pradesh Governor former Justice S Abdul Nazeer and Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy on his arrival at Tirupati. Photograph: ANI Photo The BJP does not have any government or early hopes across south India, barring being the junior partner in the Union Territory of Puducherry, where the NR Congress of Chief Minister N Rangaswamy holds sway. The NR Congress broke away from the Congress parent a decade or so ago, and no one is contemplating a patch-up now or ever. That may leave the BJP feel safe. Prior to the BJP's electoral victories in the three northern states, the NRC might have considered choosing a 'secular' path to contest the Lok Sabha polls on its own but now it might have lost the appetite to do so. But then, no one is talking about the BJP and the ruling YSR Congress of Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy doing a back-handed deal for the coming elections despite all the unconditional support it has offered the Modi government in the two Houses of Parliament. It does not make electoral sense as almost all YSR Congress voters are wedded to the traditional Congress ideology as Maharashtra's Sharad Pawar once found himself in, after breaking away from the Congress and considered moving closer to then ruling BJP at the Centre under Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Kishinchand Advani -- but gave up the idea. The immediate question for electoral interpretation is this: Considering that the Congress continues to be weaker in Andhra Pradesh than even in Telangana and the forgotten TDP of former chief minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu hoping for a comeback, how far could a weak and non-existent BJP influence the election results, and which way? Zilch is the answer at present, but then, the Telangana elections would have proved for the BJP that it cannot hope to hunt with the hounds and run with the hares, at least in the south if it had to make an electoral impact even if only the distant future in mind. Does it mean that the BJP-ruled Centre would once again unleash agencies like the ED, IT and CBI on the YSR Congress in the run-up to the twin polls in Andhra or hold it back for parliamentary support for some of the crucial legislative measures it may want to carry out before the Lok Sabha polls? Rather, after the BRS's 'Trishanku politics' in Telangana, would Jagan want to be seen as backing the BJP in Parliament even while attacking it on the streets? The question applies equally to the ruling Biju Janata Dal in Odisha, where Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has made a fine-art of the same, but could come unstuck some time. IMAGE: Congress workers celebrate their party's victory in the Telangana assembly election at Gandhi Bhavan in Hyderabad, December 3, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo The five-state elections became more interesting and challenging after the BJP as the ruling party lost the Karnataka assembly polls to the Congress, earlier this year. Here, the BJP had snatched the government from the Congress-Janata Dal-S ally which had formed a coalition after the assembly polls five years earlier. It did the same trick in Madhya Pradesh too. Thus, the Congress had hoped that the people of MP, like those in Karnataka, would punish the defectors and also the party that had engineered those defections. It did not happen that way. That was not to be. If however, after the assembly polls the BJP and the JD-S which were daggers drawn, have hastily formed an alliance for facing the Lok Sabha polls in the state together, it is not without electoral logic. The combined vote-share of the two parties, 46.29 per cent (BJP: 36, JD-U: 13.29) is more than the ruling Congress's 42.88 per cent in the assembly elections. It is another matter if such arithmetic calculations alone are enough to upset the Congress apple-cart in the state that is known for the BJP's success in engineering defections, post-poll. Thus will remain the fate of the Congress government until after the Lok Sabha poll, in Karnataka and maybe Himachal Pradesh, if not in Telangana -- the only three states where the party is in power after the loss of three north Indian states. IMAGE: Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin feeds a student at the launch of the free breakfast scheme at the Adimulam School in Madurai. Photograph: ANI Photo Thus, the dye may have been cast for the Lok Sabha elections, or so it seems. First and foremost, the ruling BJP at the Centre has only to tweak its electoral promises, building on the premises adopted for the successful assembly polls in the North this time round. The socio-political mix has proved just right, going at least by a UP Congress leader who attributed the BJP rival's victory in the three north Indian states. By keeping the Sanatana Dharma row alive and adding the Ayodhya temple consecration scheduled for January 22 and adding the free darshan promise from the four polled states to the entire country, the BJP may have a self-fulfilling concoction. If that is to address the voter's emotional quotient and effectively so, social welfare programmes, promise of the more recent cash doles for (all) women as MP's BJP Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan had done, to all women across the country is something that the BJP may be tempted to take up. Going by the speed and determination of the Modi dispensation, they may promise it early on and also implement it well before the Lok Sabha polls. This will be in addition to extending Modi's free food grains programme for the whole country by five more years alongside the cash-transfers of every other kind. There is no denying the socio-electoral impact of such schemes. Given however the decades-old Tamil Nadu experience, the Indian voter has the habit of forgetting whatever is already in their kitty and expecting more of the same. These flows from the conviction that whoever is elected to power dare not withdraw the welfare schemes already in force. This implies that if the political Opposition can convince that they would add more welfare schemes than already, they may stand a chance. The list could include free breakfast scheme -- as mid-day meals is already there in most states -- free bicycles, free laptops, etc, all of which Tamil Nadu had innovated as a part of their tireless efforts at social uplift with continual focus on the trickle-down effect. IMAGE: Durga and M K Stalin greets their son Udhayanidhi on his birthday. Photograph: ANI Photo What does it all mean for the DMK's Dravidian model and Minister Udhayanidhi? As Udhayanidhi has been claiming Modi has been 'making my name known' across the country by taking up his (controversial) views on Sanatana Dharma in his campaign speeches in Rajasthan (and also Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Telangana). It is true of senior BJP leaders Rajnath Singh and Amit A Shah, who had started off the Sanatana Dharma campaign and had also sought to link the Congress in these states to its DMK ally in Tamil Nadu. In a way, it was an extremely unlikely campaign-theme for the DMK in Tamil Nadu, to begin with. The millennium kids that the party is targeting now through all those welfare measures along with those for their parental and grandparental generations just do not relate to the theme, one way or the other. Rather, if they relate, it relates to their belief in god, if not religion. For most, the issue does not exist as they do not know about it, and also do not care about it, one way or the other. Two and even more personal, Udhayanidhi's mother Durga Stalin is known to be a devout Hindu, who does not miss offering worship in temples across the state and outside. She has thus been visiting the Balaji temple in Tirupati and the Sri Krishna temple in Guruvayur, Kerala. Durga Stalin also travelled to Varanasi to perform certain last rites for her father-in-law M Karunanidhi weeks after the latter's death in 2018. It is another matter that ironically, or otherwise, Udhayanidhi has been focussing near-exclusively on defending himself and the party's perceived views on Sanatana Dharma that belonged in his late grandfather Karunanidhi's decades-old political career to the exclusion of the positive side of the Dravidian model that the BJP has been adopting, like the Congress predecessor at the Centre. It is another matter that barring Udhayanidhi, no other DMK leader is taking up the cause. More importantly, the party has never ever seriously pointed to the adoption of the state's welfare schemes by the BJP elsewhere in the country now, either for straight implementation or as themes for poll campaign. Yet, all of it has made Udhayanidhi's name and face recognition easier and faster than the 50 long years that father Stalin had to wait. Even today, in the national capital and all state capitals, Stalin is known as the incumbent Tamil Nadu chief minister. In villages elsewhere in the country, his name might not be as familiar as should have been, given his being possibly the longest-serving politician in the country in his age group. Thanks now to social media, in every language in every state, and also the traditional media that keeps telecasting and re-telecasting the criticism of Udhayanidhi and his views on Sanatana Dharma, by Modi (the most popular person in the country today) and his senior aides, has given an edge to the former. It is another thing if it would be an electoral boon or a curse for the INDIA combine, as it may evolve in the aftermath of the five-day election results, especially if they adopt the caste census, as in Bihar, for their national manifesto -- and the DMK does enough work to claim ownership of reservations, dating it all back to a hundred years of the 'Dravidian model' and updated through the post-Independence decades, beginning with the First Amendment to the Constitution, as early as 1951. N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com 'Gehlot made it a Modi versus Gehlot contest. It was for the first time in a northern Indian state where the prime minister had to confront a chief minister.' Prakash Bhandari, veteran observer of Rajasthan politics, reflects on the 2023 verdict in the desert state. IMAGE: Outgoing Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, right, tenders his resignation to Governor Kalraj Mishra, in Jaipur, December 3, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo For the past six months Ashok Gehlot has claimed that the Congress would change the rivaz (ritual) and retain power in Rajasthan. Every five years the electorate votes out the existing government in the arid state and power alternates between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party in a bipolar political system. But this election, Gehlot, who practiced magic in his youth with his father, was outwitted by Narendra D Modi's magic. Seventeen of Gehlot's ministers lost the election. As did assembly speaker C P Joshi and former minister Dr Raghu Sharma. Gehlot could not help the Congress perform well in his native Marwar; of the 43 seats in the region the Congress won just seven seats against the 24 it won in 2018. The BJP won 23 seats in Marwar this time; Independents three. Modi, who spearheaded the BJP campaign and made 13 trips to the state in the past 16 months, turned the tables on the Congress. In the 2018 Vidhan Sabha election, the Congress wrested power with less than a one percent vote swing in its favour that won it 99 seats, two seats short of a majority. The BJP finished with 73 seats. The Congress then formed the government with the support of Independents and six Bahujan Samaj party legislators. This time, the BJP with 41.69 percent votes won 115 seats, 42 seats more than its 2018 tally. The Congress with 39.5 percent votes won 69 seats, 30 seats less than its 2018 tally. Independents and smaller parties, which polled 18.8 percent votes, could collectively win 15 seats against 27 seats in 2018. IMAGE: Former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje celebrates the Bharatiya Janata Party's victory in the state with supporters, December 3, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo Political observer Mahesh Sharma believe the conflict between Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot caused immense damage to the Congress. That Pilot was deprived of the chief ministership alientated his Gujjar community, which stayed away from the Congress, causing a loss of 27 seats in eastern Rajasthan. "No party with a single person could win an election in a vast state like Rajasthan which in terms of area is the largest state in the country," says Sharma. "Gehlot was carrying the burden of the campaign and also handling the affairs of the party organisation," adds Sharma. "He wanted to prove that he rules the roost in Rajasthan without knowing that it was leading to the party to electoral losses.". Pilot was actively campaigning only in areas where the Gujjars were contestants or in constituencies where his loyalists were in the fray. Twenty of his loyalists won the elections. IMAGE: BJP workers celebrate the party's victory in the Rajasthan assembly elections at the party office in Jaipur, December 3, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo Gehlot locked horns with Modi during the election campaign and after each Modi rally, the chief minister would answer Modi through his media personnel. "Gehlot made it a Modi versus Gehlot contest. It was for the first time in a northern Indian state where the prime minister had to confront a chief minister," points out Swarnim Chaturvedi, the Pradesh Congress general secretary. This irked Modi so much that at a meeting in the tribal district of Dungarpur bordering Gujarat, he asked voters to take a pledge in tribal saint Mavji's name not to vote for the Congress. "The Gehlot government offered the poor numerous welfare programmes and armed with this my party believed that there were no anti-incumbency factor against the government," says Nitin Sogani, a Congress party worker. "Our programmes were good, but when the BJP played its Hindutva card and Modi led the campaign on caste and religion, the Congress had no answer," he adds. IMAGE: BJP workers celebrate the party victory in the Rajasthan assembly elections. Photograph: ANI Photo Vasundhara Raje, who led the last BJP government in Rajasthan, said Modi should be solely credited for the party's electoral success. Union Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, who is tipped to be the next chief minister, says the BJP has won the semi final prior to the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com Cayuga County's new 80-bed emergency homeless shelter and an incoming oil change business will be reviewed by the city of Auburn Planning Board on Tuesday. The new shelter, which will be built by Syracuse nonprofit Housing Visions, will replace the current one at 290-292 Grant Ave. It will be three stories and 7,560 square feet. Along with 80 beds and nine studio apartments, the shelter's site plan calls for parking for 14 vehicles, landscaping, lighting and stormwater management. The Cayuga County Legislature unanimously approved the allocation of $1 million in federal American Rescue Plan funds for the new shelter in October. Housing Visions Vice President of Business Development Chris Trevisani told the Legislature that month that the current shelter, which has 16 beds, is "dramatically undersized." Also on Tuesday, the board will review a proposal by national motor vehicle service business Take 5 Oil Change to build a location at 232 Grant Ave. in Auburn. Cayuga County OKs $1M for new 80-bed homeless shelter in Auburn Cayuga County is putting spare federal funds to use by providing $1 million to support the construction of a new homeless shelter in Auburn. The currently vacant .56-acre property would become the site of a 1,300-square-foot building with two garage bays, according to developer Quattro Development's site plan application. The business would be low in traffic, Quattro said, with fewer than 50 customers a day. Along with oil changes, services would include tire pressure checks, topping off fluids, wiper replacements and more. According to its website, Take 5 Oil Change has more than 800 locations in 40 states. Its only current New York location is in the village of Depew. In memos to the board, city Deputy Director of Community Planning and Development Stephen M. Selvek said he anticipates the board will vote on the two site plan applications at its January meeting. If you go WHAT: Auburn Planning Board meeting WHEN: 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 5 WHERE: Council Chambers, Memorial City Hall, 24 South St., Auburn INFO: For more information, or to watch a livestream of the meeting, visit auburnny.gov. It's great to win election after election on the strength of Modi's charisma and voter appeal, but the larger the Modi myth grows, the more the BJP diminishes, notes Saisuresh Sivaswamy. IMAGE: Bharatiya Janata Party leader Narendra D Modi greets supporters at the BJP headquarters in Delhi after the party's triumph in the Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan assembly elections, December 3, 2023. Photograph: ANI There are quite a few takeaways from the state assembly election results in which the Congress saw its hold in the Hindi-speaking belt slip further, while the Bharatiya Janata Party saw its own southern ambitions come a cropper. The obvious takeaway is that Prime Minister Narendra Modi remains the BJP's sole matchwinner. He has all the energy of a streetfighter, and the acumen of the best of the backroom boys. He is a complete package, as they say, and the Opposition, on the eve of Modi's 10 years as prime minister, has still not found a way to stop him. A second takeaway is the myth called caste survey. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar believed, and the Congress's Rahul Gandhi blindly accepted, that the caste survey leading to increased representation for the OBCs/SCs/STs would do to the BJP's golden run what V P Singh's Mandal report recommendations did to the BJP's earlier avatar -- stop it in its tracks -- but these elections have conclusively proved, if any proof was needed, that even the downtrodden communities are not buying into that argument. If they did, Madhya Pradesh would have not have bestowed a two-thirds majority on Shivraj Singh Chouhan, or Chhattisgarh shown the door to the Congress government which, it was believed till recently, had no rival claimant. Lesson for the Opposition: If the caste survey/greater reservations for economically backward classes is all you have lined up for 2024 elections, you may as well give the NDA a walkover. This India sets greater store by Modi's assurances than your guarantees and promises. The third takeaway is that ageism is not a factor in Indian politics. I say this, because of the clamour that it was now time for old-timers like Kamal Nath, Digvijaya Singh and Ashok Gehlot et al to make way for the next generation. If age was rejected at the hustings, it does not explain how Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who at 64 is no spring chicken, has managed an absolute majority when experts had predicted a kaante ki takkar in Madhya Pradesh. Obviously, factors like appeal, connect, performance matter more to the voter than the incumbent's age. 73-year-old Modi himself is proof how, so long as you deliver electoral blockbusters at a pace to rival Salman Khan, no one is going to mention age. The fourth takeaway is for the Congress. Either you are serious about the INDIA alliance, or you are not. You cannot pick and choose when you will stick with the alliance, and when you will go on your own. You may think you are a prima donna, but until the election results on the ground say so, no one is going to believe that so shed the delusions and get real. You are in no shape to take on the BJP in a one-on-one, so shore up your defences with allies before you plan a counter-offensive. Your allies are not in thrall of you, and are capable of besting you in their backyard, so you need them perhaps more than they need you. IMAGE: Modi arrives at the BJP headquarters in Delhi after the party's triumph in the Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan assembly elections, December 3, 2023. Photograph: Shrikant Singh/ANI The fifth takeaway is the kind of numbers the BJP will muster in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. These results have served a healthy dose of smelling salts to those sceptical of Modi being returned to power next year, and it is now obvious he can win 300 seats without stepping out of 7 Jan Kalyan Marg. Given that Modi believes he is a man of history, he must already have a gameplan ready to win a third term in office and we are sure to see a blitzkrieg electoral campaign that will put him in the history books. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has already spoken of a 350+ mandate, but even that may not be enough to ensure Modi's place in history. What looms is Rajiv Gandhi's incredible tally in 1984 (external link). Can/will Modi best that and earn his place in the Sun? What will it take to do that? I am sure the thought is already playing on the think-tank's mind. Party general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya has already mentioned 400+ seats as a possibility, but the only thing in the way is the southern citadel where all states are now with the Opposition (except tiny Puducherry, where the BJP is a ruling party ally), and a large outpost in eastern India. Overcoming these challenges is easier said than done, and how Modi goes about it should be a lesson in electoral strategy and execution -- if it happens. For the Congress, the takeaway remains the same. It is not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. Rajasthan was mishandled all through as two bickering stalwarts did the party in, and losing Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh must hurt, but the consolation lies in the south, as it did in the days of 'Indiramma', when Dakshin stood like a bulwark behind Indira Gandhi in 1977 even as the north voted her out with a vengeance. Gaining re-entry into Telugudom, which had stood by the party like a rock, is a good thing, and along with Karnataka could signal the party's revival via south India. Who knows! But the biggest takeaway still is for the BJP, the winner of this round, dubbed the semi-final. IMAGE: BJP supporters clamour to get a glimpse of Modi as he arrives at the BJP headquarters, December 3, 2023. Photograph: Shrikant Singh/ANI It's great to harp on Modi's magic doing the vanishing trick on the Opposition, it's great to win election after election on the strength of Modi's charisma and voter appeal, but the larger the Modi myth grows, the more the BJP diminishes. Modi has become, and remains, the party's only trick in the book. Ironical, given that the party's calling card in 2014 was 'vikas'. How many of us heard the word mentioned in this round of campaigning, or at any time recently -- unless the party believes 'vikas' has been achieved, in which case extending the free foodgrains scheme to 810 million Indians for five years is wrong, they don't need it! Having seen the vicissitudes of politics like none other -- from plunging to two Lok Sabha seats in 1984 to becoming the larger than life entity it is today -- the BJP knows that just as what goes down must come up, what rises shall also subside. And Modi's magic is no exception to this universal truth. And then what? Having basked in its effulgence, will the BJP have forgotten what it is like when the lights go off? If the BJP has a second string of leaders to step up to the plate, it seems like a closely held secret. Sure, there are visible leaders who make the right noises to be heard, but none with the potential to appeal to Indians from north to south, east to west. And that will come to bite the BJP some day. '...the Congress tally in 2028 would further plummet under 50.' 'A fresh face as CM would further strengthen the BJP and weaken the Congress in Madhya Pradesh.' IMAGE: Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Jyotiraditya Scindia and Shivraj Singh Chouhan celebrate the BJP's triumph in the state assembly elections in Bhopal on Sunday, December 4, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo Dr Virendra Chawre, Assistant Professor, School of Studies in Political Science and Public Administration, Vikram University, Ujjain, does a quick dissection with Prasanna D Zore/Rediff.com of the reasons behind the Bharatiya Janata Party's triumph in Madhya Pradesh. There is no anti-incumbency against four-time Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Shivraj Singh Chouhan's policies have won the day for him. Schemes like Ladli Behna, Ladli Laxmi have made him popular with women voters in Madhya Pradesh. The Congress too made similar promises, but then Chouhan had the advantage of being the incumbent, in the sense, that he could implement policy decisions made during his five years at office. In villages, his scheme of offering Rs 1,000 to women has enormously helped the BJP win the support of the rural masses. The BJP really worked hard at the ground level soon after the surveys four months ago predicted a huge edge for the Congress in the state. The credit must also go to the BJP's grassroots organisations which never disconnected the party with the rural masses. In all these departments, the Congress, naturally as it was not the party in power, failed to deliver. Most of the Congress' grassroots organisations have been taken over by the BJP. The BJP is always in election mode and their cadre -- be it a panchayat election, municipal election or any other local level administration -- move earth and heaven to help their candidates win. The BJP's entire top leadership gets involved. In this election, the BJP made many of its ministers and MPs fight the assembly election. They fight elections to win, but the Congress leadership lacks that enthusiasm as well as charisma. The voters today are wiser: They will not speak a word about their party preference until voting day. They proved how wrong all those pre-election surveys favouring the Congress were. While the BJP leaders expressed confidence that they will retain Madhya Pradesh, do you think the margin of victory would even surprise them? This formidable verdict, coming as it is after the 2019 election defeat, will definitely surprise even the BJP leadership. The internal rivalries and factionalism within the Congress too contributed to the party's no-show in the state. The way the BJP's central leadership entered the fray in this assembly election, the central leadership of the Congress was sorely missing. This is the biggest reason why the BJP trounced the Congress in MP. The positivity generated by the Bharat Jodo Yatra, some six months ago, has all but faded for the party. People did not see as much as Rahul Gandhiji as much as they saw Modiji in this election. IMAGE: Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Bharatiya Janata Party Pradesh Committee President V D Sharma offer sweets to each other as they celebrate the party's win in the state assembly elections, December 2, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo Was Jyotiraditya Scindia's defection to the BJP a reason for the Congress' rout in Madhya Pradesh? There was a clear connect with the masses as far as the decision-making of Modi-Shah were concerned. The voters in the state saw a clear disconnect between the state and central leadership of the Congress. Somehow, the BJP is seen as more powerful than the Congress when it comes to stemming intra-party defections. Those defecting from the Congress had no fear of the party high command. In BJP, nobody would dare cross the party line. In Congress, it is an open secret how the high command avoids lending a patient hearing to their estranged local leaders. In fact, the BJP is even more accommodating of rebels within the party. The BJP high command talks to their estranged state leaders. That is what clearly sets the BJP apart from the Congress. Given how long the Congress has been in power in the state and having more experience in dealing with intra-party rivalry and defections, the party central leadership showed weakness in dealing with rebels time and again. While the BJP has succeeded in encashing the popularity of its ideology and schemes the Congress has failed miserably when it was in power in MP. The Congress failed to encash the anti-incumbency factor against the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government... The BJP, more so Chouhan's leadership, must be credited for negating the sentiments that work against the incumbent in power. The Congress has not nursed its regional leadership well. Being in the Opposition the only gambit left open for Kamal Nath (the Congress leader in MP) was offer promises and populism, but Chouhan, being in power, could actually fulfill his 2019 promises. The BJP gamed and pre-empted Congress's promises in MP. Whatever Kamal Nath promised he will deliver after the elections, Chouhan delivered before. The Congress promised, but the BJP acted and fulfilled what was part of the Congress' manifesto. Incumbency, in this sense, helped Chouhan retain himself as the BJP's tallest leader in the state. IMAGE: Congress leader Kamal Nath campaigns in the Pandhurna assembly constitutency, November 5, 2023. Photograph: Kind courtesy MP Congress/X With almost 50 per cent drop in its seat share, how do you look at the Congress' future in MP? The Congress' future is in the hands of what's left of the Congress in the state now. So long as they don't resolve their internal rivalries, strengthen their regional leadership and brings in a hands-on central leadership the party will continue to struggle here. They will have to strengthen their organisational capabilities. While Scindia quitting the party did dent the party's fortunes it did help the second rung leadership in the Congress to get involved in the hurly-burly of politics. The Congress couldn't encash the sympathy wave that worked in its favour when Scindia quit the Congress and helped topple Kamal Nath's government in 2020. Both Kamal Nath and Digvijay Singh failed the party. These leaders should work more for the party, its organisation than work for their personal interests. The central leadership will have to burn a lot of midnight oil now given the way the state has voted in 2023. Shooting orders or making strategies by sitting in Delhi will do not good; the central leadership will have to go out in the field, get their hands dirty. The Congress' organisational structures have completely collapsed in the state. The Bharat Jodo Yatra did create ripples in the state, didn't it? Yes, it did. But the Congress would have benefitted from it if elections were to be held soon after the yatra. The BJP is quite vocal about its Hindutva agenda, they are working towards implementing it and that has cut ice with the voters. The Congress should not unnecessarily oppose abrogation of Article 370 or speak ill about it. Rahul Gandhi spoke about its abrogation during his yatra, which he should not have done. Every time he does that, he walks into BJP's trap. The Congress should not touch upon issues where the BJP is already powerfully entrenched. The BJP has got positive response from the people for its Hindutva policies. The Congress needs to create a new narrative. Do you think Shivraj Singh Chouhan will make way for someone else, maybe Scindia? Chouhanji might get to play a role in the Union Cabinet. Madhya Pradesh could see a new, fresh face as chief minister. Given his expertise and experience he (Chouhan) would definitely be an asset at the Centre. A fresh face as chief minister would further strengthen the BJP and weaken the Congress in Madhya Pradesh. If Scindia were to be made chief minister the Congress tally in 2028 would further plummet under 50. The Congress could almost get decimated. 'US officials must grapple with the possibility that one of its closest partners attempted an extrajudicial killing on its soil.' 'This is not something that friends typically do to friends.' IMAGE: President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra D Modi receive US President Joe Biden at the Bharat Mandapam during the G20 Summit gala dinner, September 9, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo "The Biden administration has been quietly concerned about the BJP government's increasingly repressive policies at home. But those policies being implemented hundreds of miles away didn't directly impact the US or its interests. And yet now, if the allegations in the indictment are true, those policies have literally come to America," says Dr Michael Kugelman, Director, South Asia Institute, the Wilson Centre in Washington DC. Dr Kugelman is a leading specialist on Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan and their relations with the United States. "The biggest takeaway here is something that many analysts of US-India relations, myself included, have argued for quite some time: The US-India relationship works best if it is pursued through the lens of interests, not values," he tells Rediff.com's Archana Masih in an e-mail interview about the indictment of an Indian man in the foiled assassination attempt of Sikh separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in the United States. The general sense in India is that the revelation of the indictment in the United States will not have much of an impact on India-US relations because there has been no upheaval in diplomatic relations since the US first raised this matter in August. Do you believe it will be business as usual because the India-US partnership is too important to be derailed by these charges? It's true that the relationship is too big to fail. There are too many strategic imperatives at stake to risk a rupture, or even serious damage, to a partnership that has experienced exponential growth for more than two decades. But this doesn't mean the relationship hasn't sustained any damage. It has, albeit in ways that won't be in the public eye. Let me explain. It's true that this crisis has been handled calmly and diplomatically. We're not seeing the angry public rhetoric that accompanied the India-Canada crisis. But despite all that, US officials must grapple with the possibility that one of its closest partners attempted an extrajudicial killing on its soil. This is not something that friends typically do to friends. It would be overkill to describe this as a betrayal of trust. But for a relationship that has built up so much trust over more than 20 years, it's a shock to the system. Will this lead to the Americans exercising caution in their dealings with the Indian government? Does it have the potential to slow down the pace of the India-US relationship which has been on an upswing? How will this impact the relationship? The Biden administration has received a bit of a wake up call. For several years, it has been quietly concerned about the BJP government's increasingly repressive policies at home. But those policies being implemented hundreds of miles away didn't directly impact the US or its interests. And yet now, if the allegations in the indictment are true, those policies have literally come to America. The biggest takeaway here is something that many analysts of US-India relations, myself included, have argued for quite some time: The US-India relationship works best if it is pursued through the lens of interests, not values. All that public messaging about the world's oldest and largest democracies working together may have exceeded its shelf life. IMAGE: Dr Jill Biden, Modi and Biden wave to the crowd as they stand on the Truman balcony of the White House, June 22, 2023. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Indian diplomacy has always taken the noble and moral high ground in the international sphere -- therefore, is this charge of planning an assassination bid an aberration? Does this also indicate that Indian statecraft has changed from the past, that India has become far more assertive and self-assured about its place in the world and therefore has the wherewithal to withstand and counter the fallout of these allegations? There's good reason to believe India has carried out extrajudicial killings in a few countries in its neighborhood, especially Pakistan. But State-sponsored operations in Canada and the US, or anywhere in the West, would represent uncharted territory. Such operations are much riskier for operational and diplomatic reasons. It's true that the Modi government seeks to project strength, and to convey the impression that it will take whatever steps necessary to weed out serious threats to the State. However, how that plays out with the current situation remains unclear, as we don't yet know if we're talking about an assassination attempt endorsed at the highest levels of governments, or if this was a rogue actor within the State operating independently. There's also the issue of threat perceptions. In the view of the Indian government, we are seeing rising levels of Khalistan activism in the West that may reflect the comeback of a movement that India essentially eliminated several decades ago. Based on that argument, New Delhi may be responding to a growing threat, using all necessary means, that it believes is not being addressed by the countries from which the threat emanates the most. I do think that New Delhi recognises that the reputation that India has earned globally -- a strategic partner, a critical market, an economic powerhouse -- gives India a form of impunity that results in most of the world treating its more problematic policies with kid gloves. In effect, it gets free passes, and it leverages that. However, does this charge have the potential to damage India's credentials as a mature, responsible, rules-based democracy that has been carefully built over the decades? Or will realpolitik take precedence and surmount this temporary roadblock? There's a very telling data point -- one that emerged just days after US officials unsealed the indictment -- that suggests India's stature in the world will remain strong. Narendra Modi arrived in Qatar for COP28, and he was warmly welcomed and embraced by world leaders from around the globe. I'm unaware of any leaders -- at least those that considered India a friend before the US allegations -- snubbing or distancing themselves from Modi. There have been so many times in recent years when there is a 'now things will change' moment, when India's government has taken actions that prompt observers to think the world will start looking at in a different way. The revocation of Jammu and Kashmir's autonomy, hate speech uttered by several BJP leaders, revelations of attempts to strongarm foreign tech firms, and most recently the Canadian allegations: In all these cases, there have been questions about whether global perceptions would shift. But it hasn't happened, due to the same strategic and commercial factors I mentioned earlier. IMAGE: Modi with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Biden, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Argentina's then president Alberto Fernandez, Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Kumar Jugnauth and United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan at the launch of the Global Biofuels Alliance at the G20 summit in New Delhi, India, September 9, 2023. Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Pool/Reuers Why has India's response to America been different from Canada? Diplomatic relations hit an all-time low with Canada when it alleged India's role in the Nijjar killing, but the response to America has been rather muted. What do you see as the reasons for this? There are three core reasons why India's response has been so different: Messaging, evidence, and partnership. Canada went public with its allegations; the US took them up privately. Canada's allegations contained little evidence; the US unsealed an indictment full of evidence. And Canada's relationship with India -- while generally cordial and productive -- is nowhere near as strong, stable, and trust-based as is the US relationship with India. How is this likely to impact other countries that are dealing with India or are courting India? Every country is different. Some will be less bothered by the allegations than others. I doubt that those countries, especially authoritarian States, that carry out the same types of operations that India has been accused of carrying out will be that troubled. But for the Western democracies that enjoy close relations with India and project themselves -- rightly or wrongly -- as proponents of a rules-based order will certainly feel some unease. This won't stop them from pursuing and indeed increasing partnership with India, but that sentiment will linger, in ways that aren't healthy for trust-based relationships. Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com 'Every Indian who is concerned about the unity, integrity of India should be worried about this growing divide.' IMAGE: Congress workers celebrate their party's victory in the Telangana assembly elections outside Gandhi Bhavan in Hyderabad, December 3 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo "I do not know what will be the future narrative of the north-south divide and where this will lead," Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right and Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times tells Rediff.com's Archana Masih. Does Sunday's outcome mean that the Congress has no chance of revival in the Hindi heartland as long as Mr Modi remains the BJP's primary campaigner? One can never say never in politics. No one can predict what the next twist in politics will be. But yes, the outcome on Sunday has made it tougher for the Congress than what it seemed at the beginning of the election campaign. The party had a good chance in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and was in a tight contest in Rajasthan. This verdict makes the party's task of winning sections of north and central India tougher. What then can the Congress do to regain relevance among this section? Congress needs cohesion as a party unit. Greater understanding among its leadership. Work harder. The party needs to learn from the BJP. The BJP does not relax even for a moment. In the initial period of the campaign in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, it appeared that the Congress had a head start over the BJP. Perhaps, this made them complacent. Meanwhile, the BJP remains in poll mood 24 hours x 365 days. It does not take the day or weekend off. It has an obsession with power that the Congress does not. What factors cost the Congress these elections? In Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, the state units were fending for themselves -- either the state leaders did not want the central leaders to get involved or wanted them in a peripheral role or the central leadership wanted the state leaders to face the music on their own. The central leadership was unable to iron out differences between Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot in Rajasthan. Before that, it was ineffective in sorting out the power tussle between Kamal Nath, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Digvijay Singh in MP. In 2018, even though the central leadership wanted Scindia as chief minister, it was unable to enforce that decision on Kamal Nath. This ultimately led to Jyotiraditya leaving the party and the Congress losing the government. Similarly, in 2023, Kamal Nath did not want the central leadership to step into the campaign in a big way. However, Chhattisgarh has been a surprise. Even the reporters on the ground did not see this coming. It could be because of the Congress' complacency coupled with a great campaign run by the BJP. Why did Mr Gehlot and Mr Baghel's social policies fail to have an impact? The BJP was also announcing similar schemes at the Centre and people thought why not go with the original rather than the duplicate. I'm uncertain about why it failed for Baghel because he seemed in absolute command and was all set to return for a second term. He was already being talked about for a national role. Maybe the conflict between Baghel and T S Singh Deo cost the Congress dearly. Does this mean that welfare schemes are of no consequence unless in the background of Hindutva like in Madhya Pradesh? There are four reasons behind the BJP's tremendous performance. Modi's personality and popularity. Ideology of cultural nationalism or Hindutva. Shunning 'appeasement', which essentially means that no concessions will be given to Muslims or Christians. Welfare programmes. The massive party infrastructure drawn from the entire Sangh Parivar assisted by resources far greater than what any party has ever had in Indian politics. What can be expected from the BJP politically and governance wise in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections? The BJP will fine-tune its welfare schemes. They have already announced free food to 80 crore Indians for five years. The party will attempt to disguise the fact that 80 crore Indians will be unable to earn enough to make two or three square meals a day for the next five years. It will try to hide its failure and project what it would like to be seen as its successes. Free food actually shows the failure of a government, but it will be turned around as depicting Modi as a humanitarian leader. The Opposition's job will be to highlight Modi's failure in reviving the economy that he has to provide free food to nearly 50% of the population. Nowhere in the world have such a large number of people been given free food. IMAGE: Bharatiya Janata Party workers celebrate the BJP victory in the Rajasthan assembly elections at the party office in Jaipur, December 3 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo Welfarism along with the Ram temple -- are these going to be the two aces that Mr Modi is going to arm himself with going into the Lok Sabha election? The Ram temple will be one facet of all-encompassing Hindutva within the BJP's election campaign. Mr Modi has already said yesterday that there would be no 'tushtikaran' or appeasement. This actually means that no favours will be given to the Muslims. The message has been constantly spread that this government under Mr Modi has 'fixed' the Muslims. This is the message that the BJP wants to convey without using those very words. The emerging north-south divide is very worrying. The impending passage of the three criminal laws named in Hindi, coupled with the ever increasing drive to use Bharat in place of India, not because of any historical connect, but because it is more Hindi than India is dangerous. I foresee future historians concluding that this was the genesis of the divide between the north and south. I do not know what will be the future narrative of the north-south divide and where this will lead. Every Indian who is concerned about the unity, integrity of India should be worried about this growing divide. There is a disconnect between the BJP and southern India regardless of what is happening in Karnataka. Apart from Mr Modi, what else works for the BJP in the Hindi heartland? Hindutva and welfare schemes. 'Welfare' is a socially and politically acceptable word for doles or handouts. It is ironic because Mr Modi used to say that he does not believe in giving anything free to the people. Would you say that the BJP will probably win 400 seats next year? Anything is possible in politics. Nobody could sense in 2004 that the NDA government under Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee would get voted out. Nobody thought that the Congress would shrink to 45 seats in 2014. What are the top few takeaways for you from Sunday's verdict? The Congress has stolen defeat from the jaws of victory. This is a lesson in how to lose elections for the Congress. And for the BJP, it is a lesson in how to win an election that was almost lost. The BJP had nearly lost MP and Chhattisgarh. 'The idea of subversive activities is so vague that it could include making fun of the government, being critical of the government.' IMAGE: Gangster Vikas Dubey after his arrest in Ujjain, July 9, 2020. A few hours later, on the morning of July 10, he was shot dead in a police encounter. Photograph: PTI Photo The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Bill 2023 -- that envisages replacing the existing criminal jurisprudence under the Indian Penal Code, Criminal Procedure Code and Evidence Act -- introduced in Parliament by Union Home Minister Amit A Shah -- has come in for severe flak from not only the Opposition but also from criminal lawyers and human rights activists for being vague, arbitrary, opaque and providing immense, unilateral powers to the law enforcement agencies. In a two-part interview with Prasanna D Zore/Rediff.com, senior Supreme Court advocate Shahrukh Aslam discusses the Bharatiya Saksha bill (a bill to consolidate and to provide for general rules and principles of evidence for fair trial), the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (a bill to consolidate and amend laws related to criminal procedure) and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (a bill to consolidate and amend the provisions relating to offences and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto). What could you tell us about the three bills that the Union government tabled in Parliament during the Monsoon session and will come up for discussion in the Winter session: The Bharatiya Saksha bill, Bharatiya Nagarik Sanhita and Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita? These names are all Sanskritised. In simple words, what would these three bills envisage? Since you've brought up the matter of the Sanskritised language, I do want to say that in his Independence Day speech, the prime minister congratulated the Supreme Court for its efforts in translating operative portions of judgments in the vernacular. He evidently understands the importance of democratisation and decentralisation of language, especially in the courts, and in legal documents. So it's a surprise that the names of these very essential laws are so Sanskritised, and linguistically alien to so many people, not least to those accused (indigenous people, Muslims, unlettered poor people) who have the most encounters with the criminal justice system. They're not in the vernacular. They're not the everyday language of people. This linguistic hegemony is slightly dissonant from his Independence Day address. That is just about the language; in terms of the contents of it (the Bharatiya Saksha bill, Bharatiya Nagarik Sanhita bill and Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita bill), in very broad terms, a few things are, again, quite dissonant. There are two running themes. One is ambiguity. And that's never very good for laws, especially criminal laws. The other running theme is concentration of power, together with discretion in the hands of the law enforcement authorities, which, again, is quite colonial in terms of its origins. I'll give you some examples in terms of colonial power and how it was exercised very specifically in terms of the criminal justice system. The tradition in India has been for arrest to happen at the commencement of investigation. So any time that there's an offence, any time an FIR is registered, the tradition has been to just haul people into custody and then beat them into either giving a confession or explaining what has happened. That has been the culture of investigation -- our class-caste based legacy. Whereas everywhere else (in other countries), the arrests happen at the end of the investigative process. Only when you've independently collected evidence and when you're ready to confront the accused with that evidence can you bring them in and then detain them without charge for very limited periods of time. Elsewhere, the time that is allowed for detention without charge is in hours; it is 6 hours or 12 hours or at the most 24 hours. In the case of terrorist offences, it's 7 to 14 days. And that's considered exceptional circumstances. In India, the law allows for extended periods of detention without charge -- always been 60 days or 90 days or 180 days. Now that is extraordinary. In other jurisdictions there has been debate and discussion about this. You can't have periods of detention without charge for that long. I just want to also reference two debates that happened in our Parliament and the British parliament respectively. After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, our Parliament had a debate about whether we need to increase the time of detention without charge. The government of the time -- the United Progressive Alliance led by then prime minister Manmohan Singh -- said in Parliament that we'll give you (the law enforcement agencies) 180 days under the UAPA (Unlawful Activities and Prevention Act), and that was a gift to the investigating authorities. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment bill, 2008 were steered in the Lok Sabha on December 17, 2008: 'We have made a provision of 180 days under this law. Our laws are tougher than that of America and England. Can you give me the example of any other country, where such laws exist?' asked Mr Kapil Sibal with pride in the Lok Sabha in 2008. This legitimised a certain 'culture of investigation', which relied not on independent investigative techniques, but on arresting people and beating them for information/confessions. This again carried forward a colonial/feudal legacy that disempowered sections of the population. After the London Tube attacks of July (2005), they also had a similar debate where they also wanted to extend the time of charge without detention for terrorist offenses to 90 days with the permission of a high court judge. There (in England) the parliament said that this (detention for 90 days without framing charges) is a travesty to human liberty; this can never happen because the tradition is not for investigators to beat suspects into confession. So that is the difference. The point now is that this code reiterates and reinforces this culture of investigation while ostensibly wanting to break away from its colonial past. The second point that I want to reiterate is that in most jurisdictions they bring in their terrorist laws only in exceptional circumstances. Most jurisdictions get along by just using their ordinary criminal penal codes, even to deal with charges under terrorism. You would note that even (Ajmal) Kasab (one of the eight terrorists who killed more than 180 people in the Mumbai terror attacks on November 26, 2008) was tried under the IPC (Indian Penal Code) and the CrPc (Criminal Procedure Code), not under POTA (Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act). Even with other terrorist offences, we have managed with the IPC/CrPC. To my mind, the IPC/CrPC are quite capable of getting proper investigations and successful prosecutions. What these terrorist offences do basically is give much more power to the investigation authorities. With the new codes, a lot of provisions of the special terrorist laws, with much more powers granted to investigation and prosecution authorities, and correspondingly much less freedoms for the accused, are brought centre stage. That to my mind is completely unnecessary. It normalises the security laws, which were originally considered exceptional. What used to be exceptional is now the mainstream. Is there now complete dilution between ordinary crimes and acts of terrorism? Not a complete dilution, no. The categories are maintained in the new code. However, the IPC earlier did not define terrorist laws. We had extraordinary laws like the UAPA, which defined terrorist offences and which had a separate procedure for dealing with people accused of having indulged in terrorist acts. Now the Nyaya Sanhita (penal code) also defines 'terrorist acts' and does so very loosely. The third issue in terms of formalising structural violence, our colonial legacy, is that a lot of safeguards that had come about because of case law and precedent, in terms of the police not being allowed to handcuff suspects, etc, all of that is now being reiterated and reintroduced in the new Bills. So the police will be significantly more militarised, modelled probably on the US police. The new Bill states that the police may use handcuffs. Obviously now, handcuffs will become much more normalised. More worryingly, there's now also a discretion given to the arresting officer to use whatever means necessary, whatever force necessary at the time of arrest. That is again very ambiguous and it gives very significant powers to the arresting officer. They can shoot and they can say that that was what was necessary because he (the accused) would have escaped otherwise. Similarly, women could be arrested after sunset in exceptional circumstances. But exceptional circumstances are not defined. They're left to the discretion of the arresting officer. Broadly, a lot of these things already happen, but which were considered foul practices are now being formalised and legitimised in the new code. Some of them are colonial legacies that we should have actually thought through and discarded along the way, especially in terms of the manner of investigation and arrest as commencement of investigation and long periods of detention without charge. That is one grievance that I have with the new code and also this ambiguity about what relationship we will have now with all the case law and all the jurisprudence that has developed around the old codes. That's not very clear because a lot of case laws, especially in terms of D K Basu guidelines, which bar the use of handcuffs etc, all of that is now being removed; so what relationship will we have with the old jurisprudence (is quite unclear) and why the sudden rupture. Yet another problem is the ambiguity in substantive laws. It is being said that 'sedition' has been removed from the statute books, but it is very much there in an even more overbroad and vague form. The new code makes 'subversive activities', which are left undefined an offence. The idea of subversive activities is broad; it is so vague that it could include anything. It could include making fun of the government, being critical of the government. Who decides what is critical of the government? Well, at the time, the law enforcement agency might decide, and then you take them to court, and then you challenge it in court, and then the court will decide. But the problem is that if an FIR is sought to be registered, it's the SHO who might decide. He might register an FIR and he might arrest you saying that to me it sounds like subversive activity. And then you challenge it in court eventually. But now, because arrest is so easy, and detention without charge is so easy that you arbitrarily spend some days in jail, before (and if) you are given bail. It is quite carceral, the new code. Similarly, with this new addition of terrorist act into the penal code, into the Nyaya Sanhita, that definition is equally vague. For instance, damage to property in itself is included in the definition of a terrorist act. You could damage a structure during a rally or a dharna, and that could be construed as a terrorist act. Another one says to provoke or intimidate the government could be construed as a terrorist act. To provoke the government is as vague and as broad as it can be. What even is intimidation? It doesn't say violent resurrection. It could be an article that I have written that could be seen as a provocation or an intimidation. Another section that is being talked about a lot is this recognition of mob lynching. Killings that occur on grounds of somebody's identity, race or religion or caste, etc have been recognised. But the ambiguity here is that the punishment, the sentence, is discretionary. It could range from death sentence to life imprisonment to seven years imprisonment. Now, that discretion, that ambiguity is unexplained. If it's murder, if it's a killing, then why seven years? Again, very pointedly, the punishment for concealing your identity before marriage -- which corresponds to this idea of 'love jihad' (a theory propagated by right wing Hindu organisations that Muslim men marry Hindu women with the sole aim of converting them to Islam) -- is ten years. So a lot of offences reflect the politics of the current political discourse. So mob lynching could have a punishment of as less as seven years, and concealment of identity could have punishment of ten years. Electorally, the yatra seems to have paid dividends in the south, but the march does not seem to be helping the Congress in stopping the BJP's surge in the Hindi-heartland states. IMAGE: Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Sachin Pilot with Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot during the party's Bharat Jodo Yatra in Jhalawar, Rajasthan, December 6, 2022. Photograph: ANI Photo The Rahul Gandhi-led Bharat Jodo Yatra energised the Congress' rank and file but the jury is out on the electoral impact it had on the states through which it passed with the party winning Karnataka in May and now Telangana while losing the Hindi-heartland states of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. The assembly polls following the yatra has thrown up a mixed 2-2 result. Karnataka and Telangana went to the Congress but it suffered crushing defeats in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan at the hands of the BJP. The Congress also lost Chhattisgarh to its rival but the yatra had not passed through that state. Polls in Hind-heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, and the southern state of Telangana were held between November 7 and 30, and votes were counted on Sunday. The Congress in May had hailed the last year's Bharat Jodo Yatra for the party's success in the polls to the 224-member Karnataka assembly. The party had won 15 of the 20 assembly constituencies in the state the foot march had passed through. During its poll campaign in Telangana, the Congress had been hailing the yatra for its turnaround in Karnataka with several leaders saying that the foot march had not only energised party workers but also connected the party with the common people. Electorally, the yatra seems to have paid dividends in the south as both in Karnataka and Telangana, the Congress gained momentum with it and went on to score emphatic wins against formidable opponents, the BJP and the Bharat Rashtra Samithi, respectively. However, the march does not seem to be helping the Congress in stopping the BJP's surge in the Hindi-heartland states. The yatra stayed in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan for long but it has not had much of an electoral impact. Former Congress leader and political commentator Sanjay Jha said the Bharat Jodo Yatra has been a "turning point" for both the Congress and Rahul Gandhi. "It helped motivate the cadre and galvanize supporters. The results of today's elections in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh tells us that the undercurrent of rising Hindutva is now becoming more overt. The majoritarian dominance story has overwhelmed unemployment, farmer distress, economic growth, corruption, and governance failures," he told PTI. Unfortunately, neither the Congress nor the opposition has tried to even offer a counter-narrative to the BJP's religious card, Jha said. "The Hindi-heartland is sending a message. Karnataka and Telangana were focused more on local welfare issues which is why the Congress triumphed," he said. "The yatra was a mass movement and not just a long walk, and evidently in the south, it created a bond with its messaging of a secular, syncretic India. But I would not credit the wins in Karnataka and Telangana to the yatra alone, albeit it was an instrumental factor for sure," Jha asserted. Political commentator Rasheed Kidwai believes the yatra was "high on optics" but "low on substance". "The Bharat Jodo Yatra was high on optics low on substance...Rahul plus the Congress is unable to take on (Prime Minister) Narendra Modi and the BJP on positive Hindutva and cultural nationalism. This aspect is glaring in northern states and the Hindi belt," he said. The Bharat Jodo Yatra traversed 12 states and two Union territories in nearly five months after its launch on September 7 last year, clocking more than 4,000 km. During the course of the yatra, Rahul Gandhi addressed 12 public meetings, more than 100 corner meetings, 13 press conferences. He had over 275 planned walking interactions and more than 100 sitting interactions. While the yatra had stayed for about 15 days in Telangana, it covered nearly 500 km in six districts of Rajasthan in 16 days. The yatra was in Karnataka for about 22 days and for 12 days in Madhya Pradesh. Bhupesh Baghel, who was getting ready to continue as the chief minister of Chhattisgarh after exit polls predicted a Congress victory, on Sunday suffered a setback as the Bharatiya Janata Party wrested the state from the hands of the grand old party. IMAGE: Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel hands over his resignation to Governor Biswabhusan Harichandan following the defeat of the Congress in state polls, on Sunday, December 3, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo The Congress leader, who resigned as the chief minister Sunday night, emerged victorious in the Patan assembly seat, defeating BJP candidate Vijay Baghel by 19,723 votes in the state assembly elections held last month. Baghel, who became the CM in 2018, has emerged as one of the most formidable state-level leaders of the Congress in the last five years. With his welfare schemes, invocation of regional pride and astute political skills which helped him overcome challenges from within the party, he became the face of the Congress ahead of the 2023 assembly polls. People fondly call him 'kaka' (uncle), and kaka abhi zinda hai (kaka is still alive) has been Baghel's favourite punchline during public speeches. After the Congress lost assembly elections in Chhattisgarh for the third time in a row in 2013, Baghel was made its state unit chief. The party had suffered a devastating blow a few months earlier when several of its state leaders were killed in the Jhiram valley Naxal attack of May 2013. Along with then leader of opposition in the assembly T S Singh Deo, Baghel rebuilt the party in Chhattisgarh. When the Congress swept to power in 2018, Baghel emerged as winner in the race for the chief minister's post, leaving behind rivals like Singh Deo, Charan Das Mahant and Tamradhwaj Sahu. In 2023, though the Congress did not declare any chief ministerial candidate, its campaign revolved around him. After becoming the chief minister five years ago, Baghel cultivated his image as a 'son of the soil'. The schemes rolled out by his government for farmers, tribal communities and the poor played a major role in increasing his popularity. Baghel was also one of the first leaders from the state to tap the sentiment of regional pride, talking about 'Chhattisgarhiyawaad' and promoting regional festivals, sports, arts and culture. When his father Nand Kumar Baghel allegedly made derogatory remarks about a so-called upper caste community, Baghel promptly had him arrested and said nobody was above law under this government. During the campaign, Congress leaders tried to encash Baghel's popularity. Unlike other regional Congress leaders, Baghel did not shy away from criticising Prime Miniter Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The BJP, for its part, targeted him over corruption and alleged that Chhattisgarh had become an ATM (source of funds) for the Congress. Just before the elections, he was targeted over the alleged Mahadev betting app scandal, but he fought back claiming that the central probe agencies were being misused by the BJP for harassing its rivals. Baghel was born into a Kurmi farmer family in Durg district on August 23, 1961. The Kurmis, an influential OBC community, account for around 14 per cent of the state's population of around 2.5 crore. He entered politics in the 1980s and was first elected to the assembly of the then undivided Madhya Pradesh from Patan in 1993. He won the seat in 1998 and 2003 too. In the 2008 assembly elections, he was defeated by the BJP's Vijay Baghel. He also lost to BJP's Ramesh Bais from Raipur Lok Sabha seat in 2009. But he reclaimed the Patan assembly seat in 2013 and won from there again in 2018. After the formation of Chhattisgarh state in 2000, he served as revenue minister in the Ajit Jogi government (2000-2003). Baghel's leadership faced a serious challenge in 2021 when the followers of his cabinet colleague T S Singh Deo claimed that the party had agreed to make Singh Deo chief minister after two-and-half years. But Baghel easily established that most of the MLAs were with him. A small concession was made to Singh Deo when he was made deputy chief minister in June 2023, months before the polls. He claimed that he had never talked about any agreement about sharing the CM's post. Jeetega Bharat has selected 125 Lok Sabha seats across the country where it will assist the Opposition alliance. IMAGE: Yogendra Yadav, the political activist, speaks at the Jeetega India, Banega Bharat Abhiyaan at the Constitution Club in New Delhi, October 29, 2023. Photograph: Kind courtesy Yogendra Yadav/Twitter A band of activists and political workers believes it can replicate for the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) bloc of parties over the next six months what the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its three dozen affiliates have done for decades for the Bharatiya Janata Party, namely, work as force multipliers. The ambitious plan has, from the get-go, faced contradictions from within and resistance from those it has offered to help. Nonetheless, the Jeetega Bharat campaign has hit the ground running, something the Opposition alliance has yet to accomplish even three months after over a dozen political parties resolved in Patna on June 23 to unite in defeating the Sangh Parivar in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. Hundreds of activists and political workers from 50 civil society organisations and 18 minor political parties, too minuscule to find a seat at the 26-party INDIA table but influential in small pockets, came together in the national capital on September 29-30 to launch the Jeetega Bharat campaign. The blueprint for its electoral battle plan until the 2024 Lok Sabha polls is as follows: Jeetega Bharat has selected 125 Lok Sabha seats across the country where it will coordinate with political parties and non-party organisations to provide organisational support on the ground and through social media using its 'truth army' to assist the Opposition alliance with the help of its 125,000 volunteers and reach at least '30 million median voters'. It claims it will raise its resources through crowdfunding rather than accepting financial help from mainstream parties. Not all 26-member INDIA parties are on board with the plan, but the prominent ones are. There are misgivings within sections of the Congress, too, as some leaders are wary that Jeetega Bharat would recommend candidates for seats, and the campaign's leadership might usurp the role of party functionaries. However, senior Opposition leaders, such as the Congress' Digvijaya Singh, the Left parties' Sitaram Yechury, Doraiswamy Raja, Dipankar Bhattacharya, and representatives from the Samajwadi Party, Janata Dal-United and the Rashtriya Lok Dal, attended the launch of Jeetega Bharat on September 29 to lend the initiative much-needed legitimacy. One of the leaders referenced earlier informed Business Standard that the INDIA bloc's endeavours have suffered from a lack of synergy, often succumbing to party hierarchies and personal egos. These include challenges related to tasks such as formulating a common minimum agenda and organising joint rallies. The Jeetega Bharat campaign, with its quick-start approach, is seen as a potential solution to these issues. The irony of helping the INDIA bloc of parties, which are primarily dynastic with little inner-party democracy, and have no interest in building vibrant organisational structures nor respect for democratic norms in the states they rule, isn't lost on the strategists of the campaign. However, Jeetega Bharat's leadership believes the need of the hour is to have an 'explicit and open political stance' to defeat the BJP government and RSS ideology democratically. "Except for the Left groups, the rest of the INDIA constituents have a supremo model that is not particularly democratic. Our advantage is that we are not looking to climb party hierarchies. We can speak truth to power, which their relatively scared party members cannot," said one of the mentors of the Jeetega Bharat campaign. Vijay Mahajan, founder of BASIX Social Enterprise Group and currently the CEO of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, Swaraj India's Yogendra Yadav and academician Ajit Jha, along with some others, are the guiding lights of the effort. Mahajan, a well-known social entrepreneur, says the country has not seen such a conglomeration of political workers of a spectrum of political hues since the Emergency years. "The RSS is a long-standing unified regimented support to the BJP. Our great strength is diversity. We are unified at the level of values. We have people present in a thousand locations, and they learn and think in a thousand different ways," says Mahajan. "The RSS may be present in 10,000 locations. Still, they learn and think alike, which doesn't help as they think centrally, get their commands from Nagpur, and increasingly Delhi," he says, conceding that a thousand eyes on the ground need leadership at the top with political imagination to make their feedback coherent. Given the trust deficit within the INDIA bloc, Jeetega Bharat hopes to build linkages between its constituents to develop shared understandings and action plans, which some could resist. For example, the bitter history between the Aam Aadmi Party and Yadav is well-known. "The question is to save the country, and we will work with AAP too," Yadav says. Jeetega Bharat also found that several mainstream parties have hired professional campaign managers with a poor understanding of people's issues, another aspect it hopes to help INDIA parties with. Digvijaya advised volunteers of the platform to keep an eye on 'fake voters' in electoral rolls. Bhattacharya said civil society groups' 'No Vote to BJP' campaign in the 2021 Bengal assembly polls helped the Trinamool Congress gain 5 per cent votes. The campaign claims its teams are active in 13 big states. It also claims that it contributed to the BJP's defeat in the Karnataka assembly polls, where it helped establish Eddelu Karnataka, or 'Wake Up Karnataka', which brought together outfits working among farmers, Dalits, and minorities. Eddelu Karnataka had Eedina, a digital platform, help with communicating its political messaging and also conducted an opinion poll, which turned out to be close to the eventual results. The platform also brought intellectuals, writers, film actors, and others to help the campaign against the ruling party. It mobilised 150 teams across 103 constituencies (of the total 224). In Karnataka, the platform helped conduct 250 training workshops, distributed 1 million pamphlets, prepared 80 political videos and seven songs, and countered some of the Sangh Parivar narratives, such as the claim that Vokkaligas killed Tipu Sultan. The campaign, or so it has estimated, influenced a 1.5 per cent to 3 per cent vote swing away from the BJP in the 103 seats where it worked. Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com Resentment in Gurjar voters over the Congress "neglecting" Sachin Pilot in the last few years has resulted in the party's poll loss in eastern Rajasthan, people from the community claimed on Monday. IMAGE: Congress leader Sachin Pilot is congratulated as he wins from the Tonk constituency in the Rajasthan Assembly elections, December 3, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo In eight districts of Alwar, Bharatpur, Bundi, Dausa, Dholpur, Karauli, Sawai Madhopur and Tonk, the Congress in the 2018 assembly elections had won 29 out of 42 seats while the Bharatiya Janata Party got only six. In the 2023 elections, results of which were announced on Sunday, the Congress tally was reduced to 19 from 29 while the BJP gained 14 seats and secured a total of 20 seats in the Gurjar-dominated region. The BJP returned to power in the state, winning 115 seats out of the 199 where assembly elections were held last week. The Congress, which was hoping to buck the trend of alternating government in the state, bagged 69 seats. According to the people, Gurjars had voted for the Congress in the 2018 elections with a hope that Pilot, a Gurjar leader who was PCC chief then, would become the chief minister if the party formed the government but that did not happen and the way Pilot was treated in the last five years made them annoyed with the party. Pilot had led the election campaign as PCC chief in 2018 but this time, outgoing chief minister Ashok Gehlot was leading the campaign while Pilot was more focused on his Tonk seat apart from a few other seats of his supporters. There was certainly resentment in the community over the bad treatment given to Sachin Pilot ever since the Congress formed government in December 2018. Everyone had expected that the Congress would make Pilot the chief minister but it was not done," Sughar Singh, a social worker from Dholpur, told PTI. "More than that, Pilot who is a crowd puller was humiliated and insulted which hurt the community and therefore the Gurjar votes have gone against the Congress this time, said Sughar Singh. Pilot was in the race for the CM post after the Congress got a mandate in 2018 but the party appointed Ashok Gehlot as the CM for a third time and Pilot was made his deputy. After Pilot rebelled against Gehlot leadership in July 2020, he was sacked as deputy CM and PCC president. As the internal feud between Pilot and Gehlot came out in the open, Gehlot even went on to call Pilot a 'gaddar' and 'nikamma'. The discord between the two leaders has been quite palpable. Surendra Khatana, who runs a school in Gangapur City, said the words which were used against Pilot instigated the Gurjar voters to go against the Congress this time. How can the community bear the kind of words used against Pilot. He did hard work to revive the party as PCC chief in five years, and during the five years of Congress rule, he only struggled, Khatana said. He said that local community leaders held meetings before the November 25 polls and decided to vote for the BJP instead of the Congress. A Congress councillor in Hindaun, Karauli said that party MLAs were given free hand in lieu of their support to Gehlot and this also went against the Gurjars because the MLAs did not take their complaints seriously. We heard in community level programmes and functions how Gurjars were facing problems in getting their works done in the Congress government. Gurjars are a large community in the state, and ignoring a senior leader from the community certainly had a negative impact on the polls, he said. A Bill which aims at regulating the legal profession by a single Act and seeks to target "touts" was passed by the Lok Sabha on Monday with Union Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal saying there should be no role of such persons in the country's courts. IMAGE: Union Minister of Law and Justice (independent charge) Arjun Ram Meghwal speaks in the Lok Sabha on the first day of the Winter Session of Parliament, in New Delhi, December 4, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo The Bill was already cleared by the Rajya Sabha in the Monsoon session. This is the first bill passed by the Lower House of Parliament in the Winter session, which began on Monday. Replying to a debate on the Advocates (Amendment) Bill, 2023, Meghwal said this Bill was passed by the Rajya Sabha on August 3 and it was discussed in the Lok Sabha on Monday. The Bill provides that every high court and district judge can frame and publish lists of touts (those who procure clients for legal practitioner in return for any payment). The minister also said that the Narendra Modi government has decided that colonial-era laws, which have no utility, should be repealed. So far, 1,486 such laws have been repealed and some are in the process of being repealed, Meghwal said. "I will give you a description of the 10 years of the (Congress-led) UPA government. After Narendra Modi came to power, 1,486 laws were repealed. During the 10 years of Manmohan Singh ji, not even one such colonial-era law was repealed, which means there was no such thought on it," Meghwal said. He also said the suggestion that there should be a policy on transfer of judges is very good. "We are accepting it and we will consult with the judiciary and the Chief Justice of India, and if a policy can be made on this, then we will work on it," the minister said. Congress MP Karti Chidambaram said injustice anywhere is a threat to justice and touts thrive because of the complexity in dealing with the legal system. "Because of the asymmetry in our society in terms of education, access to people in authority and wealth, sometimes people do not know how to navigate the legal system," he said. "This is what is being exploited and some people step in as touts. Touts thrive because of the complexity in dealing with our legal system," the MP from Sivaganga said and urged the government to focus on the "big fish" rather than targeting touts in small courts. Some members said the punishment prescribed in the Advocates (Amendment) Bill, 2023, against touts is very less and should be enhanced. BJP member Jagdambika Pal said the whole House should welcome the amendments. The changes were also suggested by the Law Commission and the government has consulted all stakeholders before introducing the amendments, he said. DMK member A Raja said the government is misusing Parliament by encroaching on the powers of states by bringing amendments that deal with state subjects. It is unfortunate that the government has not come up with the 'objects and reasons' of the Bill, he said. The government, he added, has not come out with a clear law to deal with corruption in the judiciary. "This Bill has no meaning at all...the government needs to revisit the Bill and come up with something which is workable," Raja said. Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said the judiciary is still being treated as a last resort of affected people and added that the legal aid for the poor and vulnerable people should be further strengthened. TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee said there is a need to remove "highly paid lawyers-cum-tout". BJD member Bhartruhari Mahtab said it is important to remove touts from high courts as well as the Supreme Court. Efforts should be made to promote digital interface between lawyers and clients, he suggested. There is a need to bring a comprehensive measure to deal with the menace of touts in the larger interest of the people, Supriya Sule of the NCP said. RSP's NK Premachandran said it was a small but important Bill as far as the advocate community is concerned. A former town justice in Cayuga County is facing a felony charge for allegedly stealing court funds an accusation that led to her resignation over the summer. June Shepardson has been charged with fourth-degree grand larceny. Her attorney, J. Justin Woods, confirmed she was arraigned in Aurelius Town Court. Shepardson, who served as a town and village justice in Moravia since 2001, was suspended July 5 amid a state investigation. Her suspension was handed down by Judge James Murphy, the deputy chief administrative judge who oversees town and village courts in New York. More details about the investigation were included in a stipulation released by the state Commission on Judicial Conduct. The commission revealed that Shepardson, who resigned on Sept. 1, was under investigation for the theft of more than $6,000 in court funds from the town and village of Moravia. "Town and village court justices are responsible for safeguarding, reporting and promptly remitting all official monies collected by their courts from fines, fees and other sources," said Robert Tembeckjian, the commission's administrator. "The failure to do so undermines public confidence in the integrity of the judiciary, and the commission takes seriously any credible allegation that a judge has stolen or otherwise misappropriated such funds." With Shepardson resigning and agreeing to not seek judicial office in the future, the commission concluded its investigation. But it did not shield her from any criminal proceedings. In a statement, Woods said his client "developed a gambling addiction for which she is now in recovery." He told The Citizen that Shepardson is in the process of voluntarily excluding herself from New York casinos. While the criminal case must be resolved, Woods said Shepardson "looks forward to returning to private life, continuing in recovery and helping bring awareness and treatment resources about gambling addiction to those isolated in rural areas." At least 13 people were killed in a gun-battle between two groups of militants in Manipur's Tengnoupal district on Monday, officials said. IMAGE: Security personnel patrol an area in Imphal. Image used only for representation. Photograph: ANI Photo The incident took place at Leithu village on Monday afternoon, they said. "A group of militants on their way to Myanmar were ambushed by another group of insurgents dominant in the area," an official in the hill district said. Security forces reaching the spot found 13 bodies so far, he said, adding their identities were yet to be ascertained but they appeared not to be locals. Tengnoupal district shares a porous border with Myanmar. Out of 11 Mizoram ministers who contested assembly elections, nine have failed to retain their seats and lost to Zoram People's Movement (ZPM) candidates, according to Election Commission of India (ECI) on Monday. IMAGE: ZPM chief and party's Chief Ministerial candidate Lalduhoma being greeted by party members after party's victory in the Mizoram assembly elections, on Monday. Photograph: ANI Photo The ruling Mizo National Front (MNF) has faced a rout as it could win only 10 seats, while the main opposition ZPM bagged 27 seats in the 40-member House. The Zoramthanga government has 12 ministers, including two ministers of state. Out of them, Home Minister Lalchamliana did not contest the polls this time. Mizoram Chief Minister and MNF chief Zoramthanga lost to ZPM's Lalthansanga by 2,101 votes in the Aizawl East-I seat, according to the ECI. Lalthansanga secured 10,727 votes, while Zoramthanga got 8,626 votes, it added. Mizoram Deputy Chief Minister and MNF candidate Tawnluia lost to ZPM candidate W Chhuanawma in the Tuichang Assembly seat, according to the Election Commission. Tawluia of MNF received 6,079 votes while the ZPM candidate W Chhuanawma got 6,988. Health and Family Welfare Minister R Lalthangliana too could not save his South Tuipui seat after getting 5,333 votes and lost by a small margin of 135 votes to ZPM's Jeje Lalpekhlua, who secured 5,468 votes. Power and Electricity Minister R Lalzirliana lost in Aizawl North-I by a margin of 5,485 votes to ZPM's Vanlalhlana. Lalzirliana got only 5,287 votes against 10,772 votes polled by the winner of the constituency. Another important minister C Lalrinsanga, who holds the Agriculture and Irrigation departments lost from Lunglei West by 1,282 votes. While he secured 3,747 votes, ZPM's T Lalhlimpuia bagged 5,029 votes. Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs Minister K Lalrinliana, who got 7,488 votes, lost by 1,169 votes from Kolasib to ZPM's Lalfamkima, who bagged 8,657 votes. ZPM's Lalnghinglova Hmar defeated Rural Development Minister Lalruatkima in Aizawl West-II by a margin of 4,819 votes. Hmar polled 10,398 votes against 5,579 votes of the MNF candidate. Excise Minister Lalrinawma lost by 2,161 votes in Tuikum to ZPM's P C Vanlalruata. The MNF candidate got 4,975 votes against 7,136 votes of the ZPM winner. Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs T J Lalnuntluanga also lost to ZPM's Lt Col Clement Lalhmingthanga by 329 votes. While Lalnuntluanga bagged 6,994 votes, Lalhmingthanga got 7,323 votes. The only saving grace for MNF ministers were School Education Minister Lalchhandama Ralte and Minister of State for Tourism Robert Romawia Royte who have won the Tuivawl and Hachhek constituencies by 2,019 and 306 votes respectively. Ralte secured 6,501 votes against ZPM's J M S Dawngliana's 4,482 votes. On the other hand, Royte pocketed 5,705 votes against 5,399 votes of ZPM's K J Lalbiakngheta. The Supreme Court on Monday came to the rescue of 284 students from ethnic violence-hit Manipur by giving them the option of attending classes online at Manipur university or getting relocated to Assam University in Silchar or the North East Hill University in Shillong. IMAGE: Students from Uttarakhand, studying in Manipur, upon their arrival at Jolly Grant Airport after being evacuated from the violence in Manipur, in Dehradun. Photograph: PTI Photo The top court was hearing a plea filed by the Manipur University EIMI Welfare Society on behalf of the 284 students, who are currently residing in various places across the country, seeking relocation to other central universities so they don't lose out on education due to the violence in the state. We can give them three options. The first one is the online classes at the Manipur University and second that they can be admitted to the Assam University at Silchar and the third, they can study at the North East Hill University at Shillong, a bench comprising Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra said. The bench directed that the name of a nodal officer, appointed by the Manipur University, be posted on its website. The officer will have to ensure relocation of desirous students within two weeks of applying, it said. The top court also assured the students that the issue will be taken up by the committee of three former women high court judges headed by Justice Gita Mittal for which appropriate orders will be passed. At this stage we are creating these three options and we are asking the Justice Gita Mittal committee to explore a better option. She (Justice Mittal) will submit a report. We will pass an order in terms of the report, the bench said. The petitioners had sought the apex court's direction for allowing them to pursue their studies at other central universities in the country. Any students who desire the benefits of online classes can do so. The respondents further state that the students may opt for any of these two universities which are central universities- Assam University and North Eastern Hill University, the bench said in its order. Any student desirous of admission in any of these two universities will be at liberty to approach the nodal officer who shall take necessary steps to facilitate the admission and relocation in two weeks, the bench said. It also directed the Manipur University to ensure that the exercise of relocation does not impede the students from receiving their degree. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre and the Manipur University, said this should be an interim order and not mean that the students have permanently moved to other central universities. The bench had on November 28 issued notices to the Centre and the Manipur government asking them to address the grievance of the 284 Manipur University students seeking relocation to other central universities. Manipur descended into chaos and untrammelled violence in May over a high court order directing the state government to consider including the non-tribal Meitei community in the list of Scheduled Tribes. More than 170 people have been killed and several hundred others injured since ethnic violence first broke out in the state on May 3 when a 'Tribal Solidarity March' was organised in hill districts to protest against the majority Meitei community's demand for ST status. The longest-serving Bharatiya Janata Party chief minister and popularly known as mama (maternal uncle) and 'paon-paon wale bhaiya' (foot soldier), Shivraj Singh Chouhan has emerged as the hero of his party's stunning victory in the state assembly elections. IMAGE: Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan being presented with MLA certificate by his son Kartikey Chouhan as the BJP wins assembly elections, in Bhopal on Sunday, December 3, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo The 64-year-old politician sought to turn the tables in BJP's favour in Madhya Pradesh by launching a game-changer scheme like 'Ladli Behna' to beat anti-incumbency, though his party had refrained from projecting him as the CM face in last month's assembly elections. In March 2020, when the Congress government collapsed after a coup by the current civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia and MLAs loyal to him, Chouhan, despite his party losing polls by a whisker in 2018, retained confidence of the BJP whose central leadership chose him the chief minister for a fourth term. The BJP contested the November 17 assembly polls mainly using the aura of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but Chouhan, who took over as the CM at the age of 46 in 2005, remains a formidable contender for the top post among a crowded pool of aspirants after the saffron party retained power in the state. Having a carefully cultivated image of a family man coupled with simplicity, Chouhan was at the forefront of campaigning, presenting himself as one among people and promising further development besides coming out with populist welfare schemes, especially for women. Assiduously working on his 'son of the soil' image, the soft-spoken leader easily identified himself with socio-economic concerns of farmers, villagers, women and youngsters. Chouhan in March launched the Ladli Behna scheme, which provides eligible women Rs 1,250 monthly financial assistance, and later promised to gradually hike the amount to Rs 3,000. Speaking about the scheme, seen as a game-changer, during the campaigning, Chouhan, in his rustic style, remarked It has raised the stature of women in the household and now even mothers-in-law offers rotis spread with ghee (ghee-chupdi rotis) to their daughters-in-law. "The scheme has made women self-reliant. It has paid rich dividends to the party. In 2018, the turnout of women voters was 74.22 per cent, which in 2023 rose to 76.25, a rise of little over 2 per cent. It is believed females have voted in large numbers in favour of the BJP," claimed state BJP secretary Rajneesh Agrawal. He informed that the women voters' turnout increased in 182 assembly seats, out of the total 230, this year. Chouhan, who won the November 17 assembly elections this year by a margin of over one lakh votes from Budhni in Sehore district, has largely maintained a low-profile and remained focused on MP's development. The BJP garnered 109 seats in the 230-member assembly in 2018, while its tally was 163 in the 2013 polls. In the results declared Sunday, the BJP is poised to get 164 seats. The saffron party's best-ever score was in 2003, the first assembly polls to be held after Chhattisgarh was carved out of Madhya Pradesh, when it won 173 seats under the leadership of firebrand BJP leader Uma Bharti. During his nearly 18-year-long tenure as CM, barring 15 months of Congress rule (December 2018-March 2020), Chouhan transformed himself from being a shy, simple and vulnerable politician to an astute leader with a wide mass appeal. This time, the ruling party fielded seven Lok Sabha members, including Union ministers Narendra Singh Tomar, Faggan Singh Kulaste and Prahlad Patel, and general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya. The move sent out signals that the BJP has kept options open for the top post and Chouhan may not be the automatic choice if the party retains the state. Despite not getting an open endorsement from the central leadership for the CM post, the BJP leader put his heart and soul into campaigning where he often got emotional during his speeches. Speaking at an event in early October on his home turf Budhni, Chouhan turned emotional and told the women in the gathering they would never get a 'brother' like him and would miss him when he is not around. This led to speculation of him being sidelined in the party. In the last phase of canvassing, Chouhan addressed as many as 13 poll meetings in a day, while the count was minimum 10 on other days after the election schedule was announced. In contrast, his main rival and former chief minister Kamal Nath of the Congress addressed 2 to 4 rallies in a day. Though the opposition Congress linked Chouhan to the multi-crore Vyapam scam, he emerged unscathed. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) gave a clean chit to Chouhan. The Vyapam scandal was an entrance examination, admission and recruitment scam that was unearthed in 2013. It involved politicians, senior and junior officials and businessmen systematically employing imposters to write papers, manipulate exam hall seating arrangements and supply forged answer sheets by allegedly bribing officials. Born on March 5, 1959 to Prem Singh Chouhan and Sundar Bai in a farming family in village Jait in Sehore district, Shivraj singh Chouhan got associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) when he was just 13. His leadership skills first came to the fore when he was elected president of the Model Higher Secondary School Students' Union in 1975. Chouhan participated in the movement against Emergency and was imprisoned in 1976-77 and also on many other occasions for political agitations and public causes. A volunteer of the RSS since 1977, Chouhan is a gold medallist in Masters of Philosophy from the Barkatullah University in Bhopal. Chouhan replaced BJP leader Babulal Gaur as chief minister on November 29, 2005, and remained in the saddle till the party's defeat at the hustings in 2018. He bounced back in March 2020 as the chief minister for a fourth term after the dramatic collapse of the Kamal Nath government. He also served as general secretary of the BJP and president of the party's MP unit. Chouhan first entered the state assembly in 1990 after winning from the Budhni seat. He was elected to the Lok Sabha for the first time from the Vidisha constituency the following year. He was re-elected to the Lower House of Parliament from the seat in 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2004. He won his fifth Lok Sabha election with an impressive margin of over 2,60,000 votes. The rapidly rising BJP star briefly suffered a setback in 2003 when he lost to incumbent chief minister Digvijaya Singh of the Congress from the Raghogarh assembly seat. In the elections held that year, the BJP stormed to power and Uma Bharti became chief minister. Soon, Bharti resigned and Gaur became the CM in 2004, only to be replaced by Chouhan the next year. Chouhan pioneered welfare schemes in Madhya Pradesh, which was once tagged among the 'BIMARU' (laggard) states. His populist programmes like 'Ladli Laxmi Yojna', 'Mukhya Mantri Kanyadan Yojna', 'Mukhya Mantri Teerth Darshan Yojna', bicycle scheme for school children, among others, were emulated by some other states. Under his leadership, the state became self-dependent in power and companies had been supplying uninterrupted electricity for 24 hours to non-farm consumers and 10-hour dedicated supply for agriculture-related activities. Chouhan's leadership also saw Indore getting the "cleanest city" award under the Centre's 'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan' for a record seven times in a row. In his fourth term, Chouhan projected himself as an environment-friendly chief minister and often started his day by planting a sapling in Bhopal and other parts of the state. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday asserted his government is committed to increasing the strength of women in the armed forces and said Indian Navy ranks would be renamed according to the country's culture. IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi inspects the Guard of Honour at the 'Navy Day 2023' celebrations, in Sindhudurg, December 4, 2023. Photograph: ANI Photo Paying tributes to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj for his vision and warfare strategy, he noted the 17th century Maratha king knew the importance of naval power. The PM was speaking at a Navy Day event held at Malvan in coastal Sindhudurg district of Maharashtra, around 500 km from Mumbai. "We are emphasising on increasing the number of women in the armed forces," he said. Modi lauded the Navy following the announcement that a woman officer would be commanding a Naval ship for the time time. He said ranks in the Indian Navy would be renamed according to the Indian culture. Modi also announced the epaulettes (rpt epaulettes) adorned by naval officers will have reflection of Chhatrapati Shivaji, credited for building the country's first modern Navy. The legendary Maratha Empire founder knew the importance of naval power for a country and built a strong maritime force during his reign, said the PM. Taking inspiration from Chhatrapati Shivaji, India has left behind the mentality of slavery and racing forward on all fronts, he asserted. Modi maintained today, India is setting bigger targets for itself and utilising its full potential to achieve those goals. The world is seeing India as a 'Vishwa Mitra' (universal friend) the prime minister said. Modi said India is giving an unprecedented support to port-led development. "Merchant shipping is also being encouraged. India is moving towards utilising the potential of its oceans," he said. Shortly before taking part in the Navy Day event, Modi unveiled a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj at Rajkot Fort in Sindhudurg district. Modi later witnessed 'operational demonstration' conducted by Indian Navy ships, submarines, aircraft and Special Forces from the Tarkarli beach. The small coastal town of Malvan also witnessed an impressive demonstration of the Navy's prowess. The Navy deployed an array of its assets --- frontline warships, submarine, aircraft and helicopters for the drill. Warships INS Vikramaditya, INS Kolkata, INS INs Kochi, INS Visakhapatnam, INS Chennai, INS Brahmputra, INS Beas, INS Betwa, INS Tabar, INS Subhadra INS Vinash and INS Vipul were part the drill. The Navy also deployed submarine Khanderi, helicopters Chetak, Kamov 32, Seakind 42B, and Dornier, P8I surveillance and Reconnaissance aircraft, Light Combat Aircraft and Mig29K during the display of its operational prowess and capabilities. Earlier in the day, the PM extended greetings on Navy Day, saying the commitment of navy personnel in safeguarding India's seas is a testament to their unwavering dedication to duty and love for the nation. Brattleboro, VT (05301) Today Cloudy. A few flurries or snow showers possible. High 41F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Partly cloudy this evening with more clouds for overnight. Low 29F. Winds light and variable. Ampere electric scooter manufacturer Greaves Electric Mobility Private Limited has announced its foray into the international market. The Indian EV maker has said that it has launched its first-ever electric two-wheeler showroom in Nepal. For this, the company has joined hands with Kedia Organisation. Greaves Electric Mobility Private Limited (GEMPL) has claimed the new showroom in Nepal comes as part of the brand's expansion strategy and marks a significant milestone in the brand's EV journey. The company further said that Kedia Organisation will be the exclusive authorised distributor for Ampere's electric two-wheelers' sales, marketing, distribution, and after-sales support in Nepal. Also Read : Ampere Primus electric scooter first ride review The company claims to have unveiled its maiden flagship showroom in Teku, Kathmandu. Also, the company has claimed that it is set to establish multiple outlets and dealerships across the country in the coming days. With this move, Ampere becomes the latest entrant into the Nepal market. The electric two-wheeler industry in the country has witnessed major growth in the last few months. In the last few months, Indian electric two-wheeler brands like Ather Energy and Ola Electric have launched their products in Nepal. In Nepal, Ampee will sell the Primus and Magnus electric scooters. Speaking about the expansion strategy and launch of the dealership in Nepal, Sanjay Behl, CEO of Greaves Electric Mobility Pvt. Ltd., said that this move comes as a significant stride in the company's global expansion. "Our commitment to sustainable mobility aligns seamlessly with the dynamic market in Nepal, and we are excited to launch our advanced electric two-wheelers. Partnering with the esteemed Kedia Organisation, a company with a legacy spanning over a century, reinforces our vision to make 'Har Gully Electric' and transform urban mobility," he added. First Published Date: The report followed up on social media reports that the hated 'Health Code' is back amid wave of pneumonia cases. Security guards wearing masks monitor access to a neighborhood near QR codes used for scanning health code statuses, June 20, 2022, in Beijing. Chinas health-code app was used during the zero-COVID era to confine people to their homes. Updated at 8:35 am on Dec. 5, 2023 Chinese censors have deleted a news report investigating claims that local governments had brought back a hated disease-tracking app that was used during the zero-COVID era to confine people to their homes, amid an ongoing wave of respiratory infections across the country, according to local media reports and residents. The Dec. 1 Top News article cited social media posts across China as saying that local governments in Sichuan and Guangdong had both brought the app back online after retiring it following the lifting of three years of harsh COVID restrictions in December 2022, with users posting screenshots of their "green" health code from the app. While the article remained visible in syndicated form on Sohu.coms mobile website on Monday, it had disappeared from the Top News website. Guangzhou officials told the news service that some aspects of the app had never been retired, but that the app's ability to impose travel restrictions on individuals had been shut down in February and never reactivated. The article also reported that the Tianfu Health Pass app in the southwestern province of Sichuan was once more showing a green code, according to residents who checked the government app. Physiological nausea The deletion of the article, which was also picked up by several media organizations outside mainland China, comes as hospitals in China struggle to cope with a wave of respiratory disease, much of it among children. The reports highlight public concerns that restrictive measures may make a comeback, as some suspect that the current pneumonia wave is being driven in the background by COVID-19, which affects people's ability to fight off opportunistic infections like mycoplasma pneumonia, and which has been associated with waves of other respiratory infections in children. Parents and children wait in a crowded holding room at a children's hospital in Beijing on Oct. 30, 2023. Hospitals in China have struggled to cope with a wave of respiratory disease, much of it among children. (Andy Wong/AP) "I hope this will never happen again in my lifetime," commented Weibo user @uuk20_fca from Guangdong, while blogger Lao Xiaoza commented in a post to the China Digital Times that "there is no smoke without a fire." "When I saw this, my first reaction was physiological nausea," the blogger wrote. "Dont tell me how this great invention of digital governance has protected everyones health. I will never accept this account, no thanks." Another blogger on the same site, Qinghui Youmo, posted a number of screenshots of reappearing health codes from social media users across China, including Zhejiang, Tianjin, Hebei, Guangxi and Shaanxi. "Don't scare me like that I'm close to tears," commented @YipingXuzijiang in a screenshot posted in the blog post. Wave of sickness The concerns come as a wave of respiratory disease sweeps across the country, prompting reported class closures amid official warnings of growing cases of influenza, mycoplasma pneumonia, respiratory syncytial virus and COVID-19. The World Health Organization called on Beijing to share its data on an outbreak in Beijing and Tianjin that made international headlines last week. Later media reports dismissed peoples concerns about the return of the Health Code app, citing officials as saying that the app had never entirely been taken offline, because it offers other health data services in addition to COVID-19 tracking and tracing. However, sporadic reports of compulsory COVID-19 testing have also emerged on social media in recent days, including at a conference in Guangzhou, according to Qinghui Youmos blog post. A staff member at Shanghai Pudong International Airport who gave only the surname Ma for fear of reprisals said incoming passengers are being tested for COVID-19 on arrival. "They say incoming passengers are being randomly tested, but I actually saw an entire flight being tested for COVID," the person said. "A friend of mine flew to Australia yesterday, and they were spraying the plane with disinfectant." "Health codes have already started coming back online in various places," they said. A man looks through a gap in a barrier in a residential area that was locked down to curb the spread of COVID-19 in Shanghai, China, June 7, 2022. Reports about the revival of the health-code app have sparked concern that lockdown measures also may return. (Aly Song/Reuters) A nurse at a hospital in the central city of Wuhan, who gave only the surname Sun, said health codes are being reactivated in some parts of the country, including Fujian, Guangdong, Shaanxi and Sichuan. "Mycoplasma pneumonia is very serious now, and health codes have been resumed in some areas of Fujian, Guangdong, Shaanxi, and Sichuan," she said. "The wave of mycoplasma pneumonia started in children and then started to spread, just like COVID-19 did back then." "Now you have to line up for seven or eight hours to get anti-inflammatory shots at the hospital," she said. Sichuan hit hard A resident of Sichuan's provincial capital Chengdu, who gave only the surname Jiang, said Sichuan has been particularly hard hit. "The outbreak in Sichuan is particularly serious the hospital corridors are full of patients," he said. "A lot of people can't even get admitted to hospital." But he was skeptical about the reports of the return of health codes, saying: "I don't think so." The ongoing concern about health tracking came as authorities in Zhejiang's Yiwu city sent out a directive requiring urban and rural residents to stockpile grain, and maintain enough to feed everyone for 10 days. "All departments and work canteens should maintain a large stock of grain in storage, equal to the average consumption over a 15-day period from the previous year," the directive, which was widely posted online, said. The reports also sparked concern that the authorities are quietly readying themselves for a return to lockdown measures in a bid to stem the spread of infectious diseases. The authorites on Dec. 1 also added several newly developed COVID-19 vaccines to their list of medicines approved for emergency use, according to the Chinese financial news website CLS. National Health Commission spokesperson Mi Feng said on Sunday that the current outbreak is being caused by known pathogens, and called on people to wear masks and wash their hands. Chinese health authorities are "actively monitoring and assessing winter respiratory diseases," and that outpatient clinics will start operating round the clock to meet demand for treatment, Mi said. Measures are also being taken to ensure the supply of influenza and other vaccines, with a focus on early vaccination for key groups such as the elderly and children to reduce the risk of illness, Mi said in comments quoted by state news agency Xinhua. A Guangzhou-based lawyer who declined to be named for fear of reprisals said public opinion in China is divided over the cause of the current wave of sickness, but few believe that the government is giving them the whole story. "Privately, everyone believes that [these cases] are either sequelae from COVID-19 infections, or that they've been caused by [Chinas homegrown] vaccines," the lawyer said, in a reference to public mistrust of vaccines following a number of public health scandals in which children died or were otherwise harmed by fake or incorrectly stored vaccines. Some medical journals have reported coinfection with COVID-19 and Mycoplasma pneumoniae, while others have pointed to weakened immunity from infection and reinfection with COVID-19. Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster. Updated to correct attribution in 7th paragraph from end to the Chinese financial news website CLS. Her remarks came a day after she announced her departure from the city to pursue education in Toronto. In this Sept. 28, 2019, photo, Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow, stands next to an election campaign poster of pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong, in Hong Kong. Updated Dec. 04, 2023, 02:15 a.m. ET. Agnes Chow, a prominent pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong who was imprisoned as part of a security crackdown imposed by China, said she is considering whether to apply for asylum or not in Canada, hinting that she would do what she could to bring attention to her native city. Her remarks, made during an interview with TV Tokyo on Dec. 4, came a day after her announcement that she had left Hong Kong for Canada due to mental health issues caused by duress from authorities. In the interview, Chow, a 27-year-old former member of a dispersed group of younger activists that propelled Hong Kongs pro-democracy movement alongside Joshua Wong, said she was considering whether to apply for asylum or not, but the broadcaster stated that she is effectively in exile. When asked whether she would be involved in political activities to promote democracy in Hong Kong from abroad in the future, Chow declined to say, but hinted at the possibility that she would do what she could to bring attention to Hong Kong. Chow announced via Instagram on Sunday that she had left the city to pursue education in Canada, from which she may never return. The democracy group of which she was a member, Demosisto, disbanded mere hours after China enacted a national security law in 2020 that has been deemed a repressive instrument by some Western governments. The law has resulted in more than 280 arrests, but Beijing claims that it has stabilized the city following massive pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019. In November 2020, Chow received a ten-month prison sentence in relation to a charge of unauthorized assembly. Following the completion of her jail term, she was released on police parole while her passport was seized on suspicion of a national security offense. In her first public statement since the release from prison in June 2021, Chow detailed how she had remained under supervision from the authorities and such pressures led her to be diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Several emotional illnesses put my body and mind in a very unstable state, said Chow. Chow added, the police consented to return her passport if she traveled to the Chinese city of Shenzhen this year, subsequent to her acceptance to a university in Toronto. Visits to Chinese technology behemoth Tencent and a patriotic exhibition commemorating Chinas accomplishments were included in the itinerary. I was forced to go to mainland China in exchange for the opportunity to study abroad, she wrote. Later this month, Chow was scheduled to report to the security police in Hong Kong; however, she chose not to return in the interest of her own safety and wellbeing. Maybe I wont return for the rest of my life, she added. However, she said she did not have the intention of abandoning her bail at the outset and had even bought a return air ticket to Hong Kong after arriving in Canada. If anyone wants to say that I have made every effort to deceive national security, that would be an absolutely wrong statement, she added. Chow did not say whether she would cut ties with her family but added that over the past few years she had learnt that freedom was such a precious thing, and that she finally no longer had to worry about whether she would be arrested or not. Hong Kong police on Monday strongly condemned Chows move, without mentioning her name. Police have noted someones recent claim of jumping Police bail in social media and strongly condemn the irresponsible action which is against and challenging the rule of law, the police said in a statement. Police urge the woman to immediately turn back before it is too late and not to choose a path of no return. Otherwise, she will bear the stigma of fugitive for the rest of her life. Edited by Mike Firn. Updated to include statement from Hong Kong police. About a fifth of the village's houses were destroyed in the attack, locals said. Villagers examine the bodies of locals killed by junta troops at Kya Paing village in Monywa township, Sagaing region on Dec. 2, 2023. Villagers uncovered 18 charred bodies after junta forces burned homes in a village in central Myanmar, residents and defense forces told Radio Free Asia. Junta soldiers and the military-backed Pyu Saw Htee militia attacked a village in Monywa township on Saturday morning. Roughly 80 soldiers stationed nearby stormed Kya Paing village and began torching houses, causing locals to flee, Kya Paing residents said. On Saturday evening, villagers returned to the area and found the bodies of 18 people badly burned near Kya Paing, a member of Monywa township defense forces said. We are now cleaning up the fire debris in the village, he said, declining to be named for security reasons. The bodies are deformed and only the bones remain. Were still cleaning and I am praying that we will not find another body again. Up to 170 or 180 houses were burned. Because of how badly the bodies were damaged, it is not possible to identify the victims, he added. However, all of them are men between the age of 20 and 50 years old. Taw Pu village, which is adjacent to Kya Paing, has one military camp occupied by Pyu Saw Htee soldiers. On Friday, a Peoples Defense Force attacked the camp, leading some to believe soldiers attacked Kya Paing in retaliation, said a person in charge of the Monywa district Peoples Defense Force No. 5 Battalion. The incident was extremely cruel, said one villager whose house was set on fire, adding he had lost several friends in the attack. The bodies were damaged. They were charred. I feel sorry that my friends are among the dead. It was indescribable, he told RFA on Sunday, declining to be named for fear of reprisals. This action was extreme and cruel. All the families are split up and have no place to live. Junta and Pyu Saw Htee forces left on Saturday afternoon after torching the houses. Villagers found the burnt bodies of 10 men in a centrally-located house after entering the village and extinguishing a fire later that evening. Eight more bodies were found the next day. Local organizations are helping families who have lost someone come to identify the men using pieces of clothing and other evidence, said a member of the Monywa- Ah Myint Road Information Group. There were some people who were caught by junta troops while working on a farm as the soldiers entered the village. Ten bodies were found in a closed house, he told RFA, speaking anonymously to protect his identity. Its still unknown whether those 10 bodies were burned after shooting them or whether they were burned without being shot. About a fifth of the homes in Kya Paing village were burned, locals said. RFA called Sagaing regions junta spokesperson Sai Naing Naing Kyaw seeking comment on this incident, but calls went unanswered. As of the start of this month, 4,218 civilians have been killed across the country since the military coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn. Shanghai (Gasgoo)- Shanghai Tongyu Automobile Technology Co., Ltd. ("Tongyu Automotive"), the primary tier-one supplier of core components for intelligent chassis systems in China, announced via its WeChat account the recent successful completion of a strategic Series B financing round, which raised over 500 million yuan. Photo credit: Tongyu Automotive In the fresh financing round, Tongyu Automotive attracted investments from a consortium of prominent industry capitals and financial institutions, including Shenzhen Capital Group, GGV Capital, BAIC Capital, Rockets Capital, Jianxin Capital, XYUAN Capital, Huo-Yan Capital, MainTrend Capital, and others. Notably, existing stakeholders such as Xiaomi Industry Investment, Dongfeng Asset Management, BOCOM International, SummitView Capital, Jingbang Capital ("JBC"), Yizhou Capital, Tongchi Capital, and Ruomu Capital ("Yizhou", "Tongchi", and "Ruomu" are dubbed in Chinese Pinyin) have further contributed to this funding round. Tongyu Automotive's existing product lineup; photo credit: Tongyu Automotive The proceeds from this financing will be primarily allocated to the continuous expansion of Tongyu Automotive's intelligent braking product series, including the EHB (two-box) electronic hydraulic brake system, iEHB (one-box) integrated electronic hydraulic brake system, EPB electronic parking brake system, ABS anti-lock brake system, and ESC electronic stability control system. The funds will also accelerate the innovative R&D of new products such as the EMB electronic mechanical brake system, SBW steer-by-wire system, and CDCU chassis domain control unit, in addition to the development of Tongyu's headquarters in Shanghai. Remaining committed to its two-pronge focus on commercial and passenger vehicles, Tongyu Automotive has achieved large-scale production across the passenger, commercial, and unmanned vehicle markets. Its products, validated through extensive market testing, have been supplied to over 80 customers, said the company. Tongyu Automotive's Phase I production base in Yichun city, Jiangxi province, was completed and put into operation in June 2022. In November 2023, with strong support from the governments of Jiading District and Anting Town in Shanghai, Tongyu Automotive successfully signed a contract for the construction of its Shanghai headquarters. Construction is set to commence in June of the following year, with a total floor area of approximately 60,000 square meters, including an intelligent manufacturing facility spanning about 28,000 square meters. China says U.S. warship trespassed into waters near one of the most hotly contested reefs in the South China Sea. Littoral-combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords during an exercise in the South China Sea, May 2020. A U.S. naval ship conducted Monday the first known freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) near the disputed Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea, a move condemned by China as illegal. On December 4, the USS Giffords littoral combat ship trespassed into the waters adjacent to Renai Reef in Chinas Nansha Islands without the approval of the Chinese government, Col. Tian Junli, spokesman for the Chinese militarys Southern Theater Command, said in a statement. Renai is the Chinese name for the Second Thomas Shoal, an atoll in the Spratly (Nansha) archipelago. Filipinos call it Ayungin Shoal and the Philippine military in 1999 deliberately ran aground an old landing ship, BRP Sierra Madre, to serve as an outpost. Manila, which maintains that the reef is located inside its exclusive economic zone, has been accusing Beijing of acting aggressively and blocking its ships from delivering supplies to troops stationed there. In his latest statement, Col. Tian claimed that the U.S. had seriously violated Chinas sovereignty and security, severely undermined regional peace and stability, and seriously violated international law This fully demonstrates that the United States is the biggest threat to peace and stability in the South China Sea, he said. The U.S. responded that the USS Gabrielle Giffords was conducting routine operations in international waters in the South China Sea, consistent with international law, Reuters news agency reported, quoting a statement from the U.S. Navy. Every day the U.S. 7th Fleet operates in the South China Sea, as they have for decades. These operations demonstrate we are committed to upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific region, the statement said. Mondays mission was the first explicit mention of the Second Thomas Shoal as a FONOP target for the U.S. military, according to regional maritime analyst Collin Koh, who predicted that there would likely be more such operations in the future. The question is whether itll be conducted at the same time, or dovetailing with Philippine resupply missions to the outpost, or simply just conducted in random or as a response to more severe circumstances, said Koh, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore. Escalation of tension Renai Reef is one of the most tense areas in the South China Sea, wrote Hu Xijin, former editor of the pro-Beijing Global Times, in the paper. Chinese coast guard ships have had multiple confrontations with Philippine vessels near Ren'ai Reef this year, and a collision occurred in October, Hu wrote, adding that the U.S. ships appearance this time is an escalation of the U.S. gesture of intervening in the South China Sea. The Chinese commentator accused the U.S. military of using cheap muscle-flexing and petty actions to incite the Philippines to confront China more boldly. The Second Thomas Shoal is somewhat special because the Sierra Madre is still a commissioned Philippine Navy ship which means any attack on it will amount to an armed attack that triggers the Mutual Defense Treaty between the U.S. and the Philippines, said Koh. According to the treaty, or MDT in short, Washington and Manila are obliged to support each other militarily if either of them were to be attacked by an external party. Ill surmise the Chinese would be more cautious around the shoal, even if the Americans stage FONOPs in the area, Koh told Radio Free Asia. I also believe Beijing may perceive this to be not simply about the Americans showing moral support to their Filipino allies but to potentially pave [the] way for the latter to carry out so-called large scale construction at the feature, the analyst said. Therefore, we dont dismiss the possibility of Beijing ramping up its measures in the area, he added. A Philippine supply boat sails near the BRP Sierra Madre after evading a Chinese coast guard ship blockade at Second Thomas Shoal, locally known as Ayungin Shoal, in the disputed South China Sea during a rotation and resupply mission on Aug. 22, 2023. (Aaron Favila/AP) Japanese news outlet Nikkei Asia in November reported that the U.S. had begun advising the Philippines on the repair of the World War II-era ship BRP Sierra Madre. Last week the Philippine government gave approval for a large convoy of civilian boats to bring Christmas cheer to troops stationed there, risking an angry response from China. Maritime militia at Whitsun Reef Meanwhile the Philippine Coast Guard said Sunday that two of its vessels were dispatched to conduct patrols in the immediate vicinity of Julian Felipe Reef also called Whitsun another disputed reef in the Spratlys. Since mid-November, the coast guard has monitored more than a hundred Chinese maritime militia boats swarming the area, said spokesman Jay Tariela. Tariela added that the number of Chinese vessels is now estimated to have grown to more than 135 vessels dispersed and scattered within the reef. Most of the ships are rafted together and not visible on the AIS ship tracking system. Chinese maritime militia ships are rafted together at Whitsun Reef, Nov. 2023. (Philippine Coast Guard) Philippine officials repeatedly said that their country has sovereignty over the reef in accordance with international laws including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the 2016 Arbitral Award and Philippine domestic laws. China claims nearly all of the South China Sea as its own despite an international arbitration court in 2016 ruling in favor of the Philippines in a case brought against Beijing over the contested waterway. Manila has lodged numerous diplomatic protests with Beijing over the swarming of Whitsun Reef by Chinese maritime militia ships, which China insists are fishing vessels that have been fishing in the waters near the reef it calls Niue Jiao all along. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang. BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy rejected the possibility of a cease-fire with Russia, saying it would not lead to substantive progress in the war and only favor Moscow by giving it time to boost supplies to its military as the conflict nears its two-year anniversary. A pause on the Ukrainian battlefield will not mean a pause in the war, the Ukrainian leader said in Estonia's capital, Tallinn, on January 11 during a tour of the three Baltic nations. 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. "Give Russia two to three years and it will simply run us over. We wouldn't take that risk.... There will be no pauses in favor of Russia," he said. "A pause would play into [Russias] hands.... It might crush us afterward. Zelenskiy has pleaded with Ukraine's allies to keep supplying it with weapons amid signs of donor fatigue in some countries and as Russia turns to countries such as Iran and North Korea for munitions. NATO allies meeting in Brussels on January 10 tried to allay Kyiv's concerns over supplies, saying they will continue to provide Ukraine with major military, economic, and humanitarian aid. NATO allies have outlined plans to provide "billions of euros of further capabilities" in 2024 to Ukraine, the alliance said in a statement. Estonian President Alar Karis said after meeting Zelenskiy that his country will provide 1.2 billion euros ($1.31 billion) in aid to Ukraine until 2027. "Ukraine needs more and better weapons," Karis said at a joint news conference with Zelenskiy. "The capabilities of the EU military industry must be increased so that Ukraine gets what it needs, not tomorrow, but today. We should not place any restrictions on the supply of weapons to Ukraine," he added. Estonia has so far provided military assistance to Ukraine worth nearly 500 million euros, or more than 1.4 percent of its gross domestic product, according to the Estonian Foreign Minstry. In a separate message on X, formerly Twitter, Zelenskiy thanked Tallinn for its continued aid. "Estonia's unwavering support for Ukraine, our people, and our defense is evident today, during my visit, and throughout the war," Zelenskiy wrote. "I am grateful to Estonia for all its support." The Baltic countries have been staunch allies of Ukraine since the start of Russia's unprovoked invasion in February 2022. On January 10, Zelenskiy held talks in Vilnius with Lithuanian counterpart, Gitanas Nauseda. We have proven that Russia can be stopped, that deterrence is possible, he said after talks with Nauseda. Ukraine has been subjected to several massive waves of Russian missile and drone strikes since the start of the year that have caused civilian deaths and material damage. In the latest such attack, a hotel in downtown Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, was struck by Russian missiles overnight on January 11. The strike injured 13 people, including Turkish journalists staying at the hotel, Kharkiv regional police chief Volodymyr Tymoshko said. Regional Governor Oleh Synyehubov said that one of those injured was in serious condition. More than 30 civilians were inside the hotel at the time of the attack, Synyehubov said on Telegram. Ukraine's emergency services said those hurt in the strike were "hotel staff and guests, one of whom is a foreign journalist," without giving details. Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said no military personnel were staying at the hotel. With reporting by AFP and Reuters Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has written European Council President Charles Michel to demand that Ukraine's membership in the European Union be taken off the agenda at a summit next week. In a letter to Michel, who will chair the summit in Brussels, Orban also warned against putting a review of billions of dollars in funding for Ukraine on the agenda, saying both topics are doomed to fail. Orban urged Michel not to push for a decision at the European Council on these matters in December, "as the clear lack of consensus will inevitably lead to failure." He insisted that a "strategic discussion" was needed first about Ukraine's EU membership and warned that forcing a decision could destroy EU unity. The council "must avoid this counterproductive scenario for the sake of unity, which is our most important asset," he said in his second letter to Michel in as many weeks about Ukraine's prospective EU membership. But the letter did not say outright that Hungary would veto any moves to open membership talks with Ukraine. Decisions on the enlargement of the bloc and a review of its long-term budget, which includes 50 billion euros ($54.1 billion) in aid for Kyiv, must be agreed unanimously by all 27 member countries. Ukraine is counting on the EU funds to help its economy survive in the coming year. Michel's office declined to comment on Orban's letter, according to the AP. Michel traveled to Budapest last week after Oban's first letter in which he urged a change in strategy of the European Union's policy toward Ukraine. After meeting with Orban on November 27, Michel posted a message on X, formerly Twitter, stressing the importance of EU unity, saying it "requires constant effort and it's our main strength." The European Commission, which supervises the enlargement process, last month recommended that Ukraine be allowed open membership talks once it addresses corruption, lobbying concerns, and restrictions that might prevent its minorities from studying and reading in their own languages. Orban said allowing accession talks to start even though all preconditions have not been met would mark the end of the European Union's enlargement policy "as an objective and merit-based instrument." Orban discussed his position on opening European Union accession negotiations with Ukraine last week in an interview with Hungarian state radio in which he said it was not currently in Hungary's interest. "I would favor the EU reaching a strategic partnership agreement with Ukraine first," Orban said, adding that such a partnership could take up to 10 years until Ukraine could adapt to the EU's requirements. "When we see that we can cooperate, then let's bring up the issue of membership again, but that will be possible only after many, many years," he said. Orban is considered one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest allies in Europe, and his nationalist government has argued against EU sanctions on Russia over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. With reporting by AP More than 6,000 kilometers from Tehran, in treacherous waters off the shores of Singapore, a "dark fleet" of oil tankers waits to offload the precious cargo that helps keep Iran's economy afloat -- a dependency that could also sink it. The fleet has grown steadily over the past five years, delivering Iranian crude to China as the countries work in concert to circumvent international sanctions that target Tehran's lucrative oil exports. But while the clandestine trade has buoyed Iran's budget, it also comes at tremendous cost and risk to Tehran. Iran gives China a hefty discount to take its banned oil, taking 12 to 15 percent off the price of each barrel to make it worthwhile for Beijing to take on the liability of skirting sanctions, according to research by the data analysis unit of RFE/RL's Radio Farda. Additional costs add up as well: ship-to-ship operations to offload the oil, middlemen, hidden-money transfers, and rebranding the oil to mask its Iranian origin and make it appear to come from a third country, said Dalga Khatinoglu, an expert on Iranian energy issues. Altogether, said Khatinoglu, who contributes to Radio Farda's data analysis unit, Iran's budget figures and official statements indicate that 30 percent of the country's potential oil revenue was wasted last year. And with the draft budget for the next fiscal year currently being debated by the Iranian parliament, there are no guarantees that Tehran's bet on quenching China's thirst for oil will continue to be a panacea. With Iran almost entirely dependent on Beijing to take its oil and on other entities to facilitate the trade, Tehran has managed to inject desperately needed revenue into its economy. But Iran has also put itself at risk of seeing its main revenue stream dry up. "There's definitely an extent to which Tehran has become more dependent on the likes of China or those who would be willing to deal with Iran in spite of Western sanctions," said Spencer Vuksic, a director of the consultancy firm Castellum, which closely tracks international sanctions regimes. Vuksic said Iran is "definitely put in a weak position by having to depend on a single external partner who's willing to deal with and engage with Tehran." Oily Deficit Iran has trumpeted its foreign trade, claiming in December that oil revenue had contributed to a positive trade balance for the first eight months of the year. But the oil and gas sector, by far the largest part of the Iranian economy, will not be enough to save the current budget of around $45 billion that was approved last year. The Iranian fiscal year, which follows the Persian calendar and will end in March, is expected to result in a major deficit. In presenting the draft budget to parliament in December, President Ebrahim Raisi acknowledged a $10 billion deficit. But the shortfall could be much higher -- up to $13.5 billion, the largest in Iran's history -- by the end of the fiscal year, according to Radio Farda. This is because data shows that just half of the expected oil revenues were realized, in part due to lower than expected oil prices and additional costs and discounts related to Tehran's oil trade with China. Whereas the budget expectations were based on oil being sold at $85 per barrel, the price of crude dipped below $75 per barrel in December and has fluctuated wildly recently amid concerns that tensions in the Middle East could disrupt shipping and production. And while Iran expected to export 1.5 million barrels of oil per day (bpd), it exported only 1.2 million bpd in the first eight months of the year, according to Radio Farda. Altogether, Radio Farda estimates that Iran lost some $15 million per day in potential revenue through its trade with China, which accounts for more than 40 percent of the Iranian budget. For the upcoming budget of about $49 billion, expectations for domestic and foreign oil revenue have dipped by 3 percent, according to Khatinoglu, even as the projected budget itself has risen by about 18 percent. Accounting for the fluctuation of global oil prices, which fell far short of the average estimated for the current year, the peg has been lowered to $71 per barrel. Tehran is also expecting lower oil-export volumes -- which only briefly met forecasts of 1.5 million bpd, the highest levels seen since 2018 -- with only 1.35 million bpd forecast. Iran is reportedly expected to plug the gap left by the lower oil revenue by increasing taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses, while Khatinoglu says Tehran will try to boost revenue by raising domestic energy prices. Shipping Competition Adding to the uncertainty of Iran's finances is the potential for weaker Chinese demand for its oil and competition from Russia which, like Tehran, sends banned oil to Beijing. And international sanctions are continuously evolving to punish countries and entities that foster Iran's illegal oil trade, threatening to capsize the dark fleet that helps sustain Tehran's so-called resistance economy. On the other hand, the mercurial nature of oil price fluctuations and demand could work to Iran's advantage. With Venezuelan oil no longer under sanctions, Russia is left as the only competitor for clandestine oil sales to China. And Iran's capacity to export oil is greater than ever, allowing it to more easily sell its oil to Beijing when demand is high. This is largely due to the considerable expansion of the global "dark fleet" of oil since crippling U.S. sanctions targeting Iran's oil exports were restored after the United States unilaterally withdrew in 2018 from the Iran nuclear deal that has been agreed with six world powers. The deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), offered sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on Tehran's controversial nuclear program. After the deal went into effect in January 2016, Iran more than doubled its legal oil exports in a few months, eventually reaching a high of 1.54 million bpd in 2018. But with the U.S. withdrawal from the deal and subsequent reintroduction of sanctions that year, Iranian oil exports plummeted. And after the exceptions granted to a handful of countries -- including China -- that were allowed to continue to import Iranian oil expired in 2019, Iranian oil exports slowed to a trickle. This was partly because Iran was not equipped to export its oil and had no immediate customers willing to defy the sanctions. But that changed with the fine-tuning of Irans efforts to defy sanctions, the fivefold rise in the number of dark-fleet tankers, and China's willingness to take the risk of doing business with Tehran -- although Beijing has not acknowledged unregistered imports of Iranian oil. Today the dark fleet of often aging ships -- nearly half of them VLCCs (very large crude carriers) -- has risen to up to 1,000 vessels, according to Vortexa, which tracks international shipping. Many smaller ships are involved in Russian oil exports, which account for about 80 percent of all opaque tanker activity. But Iran had access to nearly 200 tankers, many of them supertankers, as of early 2023, according to Vortexa. More than 20 ships, 13 of them VLCCs, joined the Iranian fleet in 2023, Vortexa reported in June, contributing to record-high Iranian oil exports under sanctions. Vortexa attributed the rise to increased Chinese demand, the addition of the new tankers to shuttle Iranian oil after many had switched to shipping Russian oil, and the decline of Iranian inventories drawn down to boost exports amid heightened competition with Russia for the Chinese market. While Chinese demand for Iranian oil slowed in October, Vortexa noted in a subsequent report, Washingtons removal of oil sanctions on Venezuela that month opened the possibility of higher demand for Iranian oil. Uncertain Waters In an October report, the global trade intelligence firm Kpler explained that tankers illegally shipping Iranian oil commonly "go dark" upon entering the Persian Gulf by turning off their transponders, technically known as the automatic identification system (AIS). After visiting Iran's main oil terminal on Kharg Island or other ports, they then reemerge after a few days indicating they are carrying a full load. From there, the ships offload the oil with ship-to-ship transfers that take place in unauthorized zones, mostly in the Singapore Straits. Eventually the oil, rebranded as coming from Malaysia or Middle Eastern countries, enters China, where it is processed by more than 40 independent "teapot" refiners that have little exposure to international sanctions or the global financial system. Sanctions Revisited The challenge for those trying to halt the illicit trade in Iranian oil as a way to hold Tehran accountable for its secretive nuclear activities and dire human rights record, is how to make the negatives of dealing with Iran greater than the financial benefits. That has put the illicit seaborne trade of oil -- both Iranian and Russian, owing to the ongoing war in Ukraine -- under greater scrutiny by the international community. "There's continuous refining of the sanctions programs to include and expand sanctions against those involved in evasion, and that includes sanctioning so-called dark fleets," said Castellums Vuksic, noting that the number of targeted sanctions against Iranian individuals and entities rose by more than 1,000 last year. The big question is enforcement, an issue that is being debated in the United States and other countries and is leading to increased calls for countries like Panama to de-flag illegal tankers and for countries to clamp down on dark-fleet ships anchored off their shores. "My expectation is that governments, including the United States, will take action against these dark fleets, especially the facilitators and the [ship] owners when they're identified," Vuksic told RFE/RL. Other factors, including concerns about the impact of a broader Middle East conflict potentially involving Iran, could also hurt or help Iran's financial standing. As Kpler noted while reporting that Chinese imports of Iranian oil had dropped significantly in October, the changing global landscape can have a big effect on the independent Shandong-base refineries that purchase Iranian oil. "Middle East tensions/threat of stricter enforcement of U.S. sanctions may have turned Shandong refiners more risk-adverse," the global trade intelligence firm wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter. In the past week, supply fears also exposed the volatility of global crude prices, potentially to Iran's benefit. Oil prices rose sharply on January 2 on news that Iran had sent a frigate to the Red Sea and was rejecting calls to end support for attacks by Tehran-backed Huthi rebels that have disrupted shipping in the important trade route. Prices surged again following the deadly January 3 bombing attack in Iran, for which the Islamic State militant group has claimed responsibility. But the week ended with questions about the future of Iran's cut-rate deal with the only country willing to help prop up its economy, with Reuters reporting that China's oil trade with Iran had stalled after Tehran withheld supplies and demanded higher prices. KAZAN, Russia -- A court in Kazan, the capital of Russia's Tatarstan region, has rejected an appeal filed by lawyers of Alsu Kurmasheva, a veteran journalist of RFE/RL's Tatar-Bashkir Service, against another court's October decision to fine her 10,000 rubles ($110) for "failure to inform Russian officials about holding a second citizenship." After the Soviet district court pronounced its decision on December 4, the ruling to fine Kurmasheva, who has been in Russian custody since October 18 on a separate case, officially came into force. Kurmasheva, a Prague-based journalist with RFE/RL who holds dual U.S. and Russian citizenships, traveled to Russia for a family emergency in May. She was temporarily detained while waiting for her return flight on June 2 at the airport in Kazan, where both of her passports were confiscated. She was not able to leave Russia as she awaited the return of her travel documents. On October 11, a court ordered Kurmasheva to pay the fine for failing to register her U.S. passport with Russian authorities. Kurmasheva was detained again on October 18 and this time charged with failing to register as a foreign agent, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. The Investigative Committee said Kurmasheva was being charged under a section of the Criminal Code that refers to the registration of foreign agents who carry out "purposeful collection of information in the field of military, military-technical activities of Russia," which, if received by foreign sources, "can be used against the security of the country." It gave no further details. Last week, the Soviet district court extended Kurmasheva's pretrial detention until at least February 5. The Investigative Committee said its investigation found that while the Russian Justice Ministry did not add her to the list of foreign agents, she failed to provide documents to be included on the registry. Kurmasheva and RFE/RL have both rejected the charge. Russia's detention of Kurmasheva, the second U.S. media member to be held by Moscow this year, triggered a wave of criticism from rights groups and politicians saying the move signals new level of war-time censorship. The court decision to extend Kurmasheva's detention came on December 1, a day after leading Russian human rights group Memorial recognized her as a political prisoner. Moscow has been accused of detaining Americans to use as bargaining chips to exchange for Russians jailed in the United States. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was arrested for allegedly spying -- a charge he and the newspaper vehemently deny -- in March. Kurmasheva is one of four RFE/RL journalists -- Andrey Kuznechyk, Ihar Losik, and Vladyslav Yesypenko are the other three -- currently imprisoned on charges related to their work. Rights groups and RFE/RL have called repeatedly for the release of all four, saying they have been wrongly detained. Losik is a blogger and contributor for RFE/RLs Belarus Service who was convicted in December 2021 on several charges including the organization and preparation of actions that grossly violate public order and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Kuznechyk, a web editor for RFE/RLs Belarus Service, was sentenced in June 2022 to six years in prison following a trial that lasted no more than a few hours. He was convicted of creating or participating in an extremist organization. Yesypenko, a dual Ukrainian-Russian citizen who contributed to Crimea.Realities, a regional news outlet of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, was sentenced in February 2022 to six years in prison by a Russian judge in occupied Crimea after a closed-door trial. He was convicted of possession and transport of explosives, a charge he steadfastly denies. Beijing (Gasgoo)- On December 1, JAC Group announced the signing of the "Intelligent New Energy Vehicle Cooperation Agreement" with Huawei Device Co., Ltd. (Huawei Device), to build premium intelligent connected vehicles. Photo credit: Huawei This collaboration aims to leverage Huawei's successful experience in creating high-end products within the consumer domain. JAC Group and Huawei will join forces, capitalizing on their respective strengths and cooperating in product development, manufacturing, sales, and services based on Huawei's intelligent automotive solutions. The ultimate goal is to craft luxurious intelligent connected electric vehicles. To ensure the timely launch of their collaborative models, both parties have outlined specific responsibilities. They've agreed to allocate duties accordingly, committing resources at each stage of the cooperative project, including manpower, production line resources, supply chain resources, and finances. Regarding product development, JAC Group will oversee the overall development of the collaborative vehicle models, with specific tasks subject to agreements between Huawei Device (and/or its affiliates) and JAC Group. In the manufacturing sphere, JAC Group will establish production bases, providing users with comprehensive intelligent manufacturing solutions. Leveraging Huawei's strengths, they aim to construct advanced manufacturing capabilities. For sales, JAC Group has consented to Huawei Device or its designated third parties exclusively offering sales services globally. This encompasses marketing, sales, user engagement, and ecosystem operations. Any export operations related to collaborative models will be implemented upon mutual agreement. In terms of services, both Huawei Device and JAC Group will collaboratively establish a user-centric service system to ensure efficient, convenient, and high-quality delivery for the collaborative models. IRKUTSK, Russia In the days immediately following Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a pro-war banner prominently featuring the Latin letter Z appeared on the colonnaded facade of the drama theater in the center of this Siberian city. It was just one of many thousands of similar jingoistic signs featuring the Kremlins new symbol for demonstrating support for the war and the policies of President Vladimir Putin that local administrations trotted out at the time. Critics of the often aggressively brandished Z symbol see it as a fascistic emblem of state-mandated loyalty and militarization, derisively referring to it as a Zwastika. For many months, the Irkutsk banner flapped in the breeze. But in May, local media reported that representatives of the citys theatrical community had quietly sent two requests to municipal authorities asking that it be removed. According to their letters, the banner had been attacked more than once by vandals throwing hollowed-out eggs filled with a staining green antiseptic called zelyonka, purportedly damaging the historic structure. The mayors office ignored the appeals, but Vadim Palko, who runs a local news channel on Telegram called Irkutsk Blog, launched a public campaign demanding that the huge banner be removed, quickly drawing 440 supporters. Late last month, Deputy Mayor Tatyana Makarycheva sent a response rejecting the appeals, arguing that the banner defends the motherland, the people, and our traditions. She also warned darkly that negative statements about the Z symbol could be prosecuted under legislation criminalizing discrediting the armed forces. But the fight to remove the Z banner from the theater is not over, Palko told RFE/RLs Siberia.Realities. According to our plan, we are now preparing new letters to the prosecutors office. The growing opposition to the Irkutsk banner -- both the campaign to remove the banner and the anecdotal evidence that vandals had attacked it -- echoes similar stories across Russia that could be indicative of growing popular weariness with a costly war that is dragging on toward its third year since the full-scale invasion, with no clear end in sight. In addition, it has now been more than a year since Putin declared military mobilization in September 2022 and brought the war directly home to hundreds of thousands of Russians. There was no grassroots support for the war from the beginning, said Aleksei Ivanov, a resident of the northwestern city of Syktyvkar who fled Russia after facing criminal charges for calling a police officer a fascist during a small anti-war protest in February 2022. I only saw the first Z sign on a car in the middle of April [2022]. There were stories then of people slashing the tires of cars with those stickers. From conversations I have had, we still dont see widespread support. So this news is not at all surprising. 'One Of The Less Dangerous Paths' For over a year now, 17-year-old high school student Yevgeny Fokin has been waging a campaign to get authorities to remove Z banners from public spaces in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. In late May 2022, he succeeded in persuading municipal authorities to remove a banner after arguing it violated city regulations on advertising. After the first banner, a new version appeared on the [same] building, Fokin told RFE/RL. I wrote a second complaint to the administration, saying the banner again does not conform to city standards and must be removed. To Fokins surprise, the second banner also disappeared. Since then, he estimates, he has succeeded in securing the removal of nearly 10 more, leaving the downtown area of Russias third most-populous city largely bereft of government-organized pro-war banners. The situation with the banners is so much better thatthere are almost none left, he said. They are not hanging up banners that violate architectural standards, and the ones that were removed have not reappeared. The only ones left are those placed on legally installed advertising platforms. Z signs have also been removed from almost all city transport. Theyre still on the buses, but theyve been taken off of the trams and trolleybuses. Fokin attributes his successful record to the fact that shortly after he began his anti-banner efforts, he was hired as an assistant to independent Novosibirsk City Council member Svetlana Kaverzina. When a deputy asks, [officials] are obligated to respond substantially, Fokin said. Plus, they know a deputy can confirm any information they provide and raise a fuss if necessary. In April, students at the State University of Architecture and the Arts in Yekaterinburg, Russias fourth-largest city, began collecting signatures on a petition to remove a Z banner from the facade of their school. Unknown vandals even slashed the banner and splattered it with red paint. When the petition had collected more than 600 signatures, university officials summoned two of the campaigns organizers and ordered them to compose a written explanation addressed to the local branch of the Interior Ministrys Anti-Extremism Committee, known as Center E, according to a report by the news outlet Mediazona in July. They refused, and the dean told them the Z banner would remain in place. Eight months later, however, the Z banner was removed without explanation. Mediazona documented similar cases in Perm, Yaroslavl, and St. Petersburg. I hope that people who read my social media posts and publications will also write, St. Petersburg resident Aleksei Lakhov, who has campaigned against Z banners on the streets and in the subway system, was quoted as saying. I think it is important to use this quiet resistance because I think it is one of the less dangerous paths. On November 17, Komi Republic head Vladimir Uiba complained on his Telegram channel that there were too few patriotic, pro-war symbols in his region. I ordered all state agencies to support our boys and display these slogans, he wrote. But transport companies tell me they wont do it. I ask why. They answer: Someone will break the windows. That means that our boys are dying over there, and we are afraid of broken windows. Total Unanimity? Given the severe restrictions on independent polling and the fact that Russians have long been conditioned to be cautious in their public statements, it is difficult to gauge the extent of public support for the war in Ukraine with any certainty. According to the Levada Center polling agency in November, 67 percent of Russians say the country is moving in the right direction and 85 percent approve of President Vladimir Putin. In October, Levada found that 76 percent of Russians either support or tend to support the war, while just 16 percent said they either oppose or tend to oppose it. However, when the same agency in October asked Russians who agreed that things were moving in the right direction to specify what policies they had in mind, only 14 percent named the special military operation, using the mandatory Kremlin euphemism for the invasion of Ukraine. By contrast, among the minority who said Russia was moving in the wrong direction, 45 percent mentioned the war in Ukraine, more than any other cause for concern. Meanwhile, the families of mobilized Russian soldiers have stepped up their protests across the country in recent weeks, organized in part by a Telegram channel The Way Home that has collected more than 30,000 subscribers. Another Telegram channel, Visible Protest, documents quiet expressions of discontent with the war, including anti-war slogans scrawled on currency or written in freshly fallen snow or vandalism targeting pro-war posters. If the Z banners are hanging everywhere and no one says anything, that would mean that the Zwastika is normal, said Irkutsk activist Palko. But if someone is fighting for them to be removed and is starting a public discussion, that means there could be something wrong with the symbol, that there isnt total unanimity. This fight lets people who do not accept the war feel they are not alone or powerless," he said. And it pushes others to think. Written by RFE/RLs Robert Coalson based on reporting by RFE/RLs Siberia.Realities. RFE/RLs North.Realities contributed to this report. This story is based on reporting by correspondents on the ground in Russia. Their names are being withheld for their protection. Amnesty International has warned that Serbia's recently revamped system with World Bank funding to determine eligibility for social protections has worsened poverty "especially for Roma and people with disabilities" in the Balkan nation of around 6.6 million people. The international rights group said in a report published on December 4 that the so-called Social Card registry launched in 2022 has adversely affected already "poverty-stricken and marginalized communities" and "strip[ped] them of social assistance." Damini Satija, who heads a lab at Amnesty's global digital collective, Amnesty Tech, was quoted in a statement as saying the registry's effects confirm "that imposing automation in social assistance systems can exacerbate inequality, entrench or scale discrimination, and pose a dire risk to human rights." The report is titled Trapped By Automation: Poverty And Discrimination In Serbias Welfare State. The World Bank touts registries like the Serbian Social Card registry as "inclusion systems" or a "tool for inclusion." But Amnesty International, citing the data and individual cases in Serbia, suggested people forced to appeal their exclusion can end up "trapped in a bureaucratic maze." Serbia's 2022 census counted nearly 132,000 Roma, or under 2 percent of the population, but most experts warn that such official figures are probably undercounts. Minority Rights Group International quotes local and international estimates at between 300,000 and 460,000 Roma, which would make them the country's largest minority group above Hungarians (184,000) and Bosniaks (154,000). The United Nations recently estimated that nearly 600,000 people in Serbia, most of them women or girls, live with some type of disability. Rather than make benefit payments fairer, thousands of people who rely on these payments as their only source of income have been locked out of the social safety net and cut off from essential assistance," Satija said. "Already marginalized groups, have suffered the sharpest consequences of this automated system, leading to disproportionate impact on their access to benefits programs." Low-quality data translates into problems, Amnesty International said. The accuracy of existing databases at the Social Card registry's inception "plays a huge role in ensuring fair application outcomes and continued receipt of social assistance," the group said. It also said "the semi-automated layer has reduced the role of social workers in verifying the data and documents of applicants." Amnesty International said the World Bank, an international financial institution established in 1944 to help finance projects in middle- and low-income countries, provided technical and financial assistance for Serbia's Social Card registry and helped implement similar schemes in other places, including nearby Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. UNICEF, the UN's aid and relief organization for children, said that 6.9 percent of Serbia's population lived below the absolute poverty line in 2020. The World Bank and governments -- including in Serbia -- must conduct robust human rights risk assessments both during the design and implementation of such programs, and ensure system design that eliminates potential threats to human rights," Amnesty Tech's Satija said. "Crucially if the human rights risks of a system cannot be prevented then this system is not fit for purpose and should not be rolled out." Police in the northern Turkmen city of Koneurgench have arrested Hudaiberdy Allashov, a former correspondent for RFE/RL in the Central Asian country, on unknown charges. Relatives told RFE/RL that Allashov was arrested on December 1, several days after he was summoned by the police, where he was "beaten and electroshocked." According to the relatives, Allashov's whereabouts and the reason for his arrest are unknown. Allashov worked as an RFE/RL correspondent for about three months in 2016 before he and his mother were arrested in December that year on a charge of using chewing tobacco, which is illegal in the tightly controlled former Soviet republic. Allashov and his mother, Kurbantach Arazmedova, rejected the charge at the time. In mid-February 2017, amid an international outcry, Allashov and his mother were released after a court convicted them of possessing chewing tobacco and handed each a three-year suspended prison sentence. After his release, Allashov stopped working for RFE/RL, as he feared for his safety. In October 2019, police rearrested Allashov and beat him during questioning over several hours. The stress of her son's situation weighed on Arazmedova, who fell ill and died in hospital two days later. In May 2022, an official severely beat Allashov and his wife in Koneurgench, after which Allashov's wife, Ejesh Arazgylyjeva, was hospitalized and he himself needed medical assistance. Last month, another former RFE/RL correspondent in Turkmenistan, 74-year-old Soltan Achilova, was not allowed to leave the country for Switzerland, where she was expected to receive a prestigious human rights award for her reporting. Achilova told RFE/RL at the time that she was strip-searched and humiliated at Ashgabat International Airport, where officials didn't allow her or her daughter to board a plane on November 17 despite having valid passports, visas, and tickets. The only journalist in Turkmenistan who openly criticizes the authoritarian government, Achilova was scheduled to attend the Martin Ennals Award human rights ceremony in Switzerland on November 21. The government maintains tight control of newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet in Turkmenistan, which placed 177th out of 180 countries in the 2023 Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. Welcome to Wider Europe, RFE/RL's 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 Brussels' proposal for another round of sanctions on Russia and looking at what's left of the Eastern Partnership. Brief #1: Can The EU Agree On More Russia Sanctions? What You Need To Know: The European Commission presented a new Russia sanctions package in mid-November -- the 12th since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The hope in Brussels is that the 27 EU member states will sign off on the package by the end of the year, preferably ahead of or at the EU summit in Brussels on December 14-15. At first sight, getting a green light looks possible, considering there is still time. There have already been a few rounds of discussions among high-level diplomats, and the sanctions package isn't perhaps the most controversial of proposals. It doesn't, for example, hit the Russian gas or nuclear sectors. Yet, it took nearly seven weeks for the member states to agree on the 11th sanctions package back in the summer, and those measures were equally unambitious. The ongoing issue is that certain member states want to water down the proposals, claiming that the sanctions hurt their economies more than Russia's. For example, Slovakia has asked to extend the exemption that it and other landlocked countries were given, meaning the country could continue importing Russian oil via pipeline until the end of 2025. Germany is also keen to get an exemption on the ban on Russian vehicles entering the bloc and the Czech Republic wants to be able to import Russian steel until 2028. All these measures were already agreed in previous sanctions packages -- and the exemptions that has been sought could very well be agreed again. Deep Background: Exemptions aren't the biggest threat to the deal. Predictably it is Hungary, which has questioned the EU's sanctions regime on Russia from the very start. Diplomats I have spoken to on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak on the record say they believe that Budapest will block the new deal in order to gain leverage on the European Commission releasing 13 billion euros ($14.2 billion) of EU funds so far held by Brussels over Hungary's backsliding on the rule of law. In a recent letter, seen by RFE/RL, addressed to European Council President Charles Michel, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban asks for a "strategic discussion" on the EU's approach to Ukraine in a number of fields -- not only Russia sanctions but also financial aid to Kyiv and the country's potential EU accession. The letter notes that "the European Council is not in a position to make key decisions on the proposed security guarantees or additional financial support for Ukraine, endorse further strengthening of the sanctions regime or agree on the future of the enlargement process unless a consensus on our future strategy towards Ukraine is found." Specifically on sanctions, the letter notes that "we must also have a clear view [of] what the European Union has actually done to mitigate the obvious adverse effects of the sanctions on individual member states." Everything is essentially coming to a head, ready for those last critical weeks before Christmas. Drilling Down So, what is actually in the sanctions package? The top line is probably the proposed ban on Russian diamonds, something that many EU member states have pushed for. Belgium, however, with its diamond-trading hub of Antwerp had pushed back on this -- until now. If approved, the ban would apply to both Russian natural diamonds and diamond jewelry from January 1, 2024. Then, starting on March 1 and with the aim of being completed by September, there will be an indirect import ban of processed Russian diamonds, meaning stones that have been cut or polished in third countries. For this, the Group of Seven (G7) leading industrial nations will have to come up with a workable global traceability mechanism, something that Belgium has asked for in order for its sign-off on the diamond ban. There will also be an EU import ban on Russian copper, aluminum wire and foil, as well as Russian liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). The export ban has been further widened to include EU companies providing cryptocurrency wallets. The mostly digital applications, used to store cryptocurrency keys, can also be used for the design and manufacture of certain dual-use goods, which can have both a civilian and military purpose, such as lithium batteries and thermostats for drones. While not touching the actual price cap on Russian oil set late last year in conjunction with the G7 at $60 per barrel, the latest sanctions proposal introduces tougher financial reporting requirements that extra costs, such as for insurance and freight, must be declared, as regulators fear such extras are being inflated as a way of creating more revenue for Russia. And in order to try to thwart Russia's "shadow fleet" -- unlicensed vessels carrying and selling Russian oil above the price cap -- the European Commission will now ask member states to notify the competent authorities of any sale or export of tankers concluded since 2022. Both this measure and the one concerning more detailed financial reporting, however, could be watered down by EU maritime nations fearing too much red tape. Perhaps the most interesting part of this latest sanctions proposal -- and one that will almost certainly be softened -- is a requirement for the EU subsidiaries of Russian companies to transfer all their funds either back to Russia or to a third country. Firstly, it is not an outright ban, which is important to note; and secondly, there are exemptions to ensure critical energy supplies are not interrupted -- so, for example, the subsidiaries of Russian gas companies would likely be spared. But it could affect other EU subsidiaries, making it much harder for them to survive. As always in these packages, there are also 48 people and 73 entities that the bloc wants to slap visa bans and asset freezes on -- adding to a list that already consists of over 1,800 names in total. Included on the new one are several high-ranking Belarusian military officials; Rady Khabirov, the head of the Russian republic of Bashkortostan; Viktor Afzalov, the commander of the Russian Air Force; and Putin's cousin, Anna Tsivileva. Interestingly, there is also a proposal to keep dead people on the sanctions list. Normally, a deceased person is removed, but Brussels is hoping that an asset freeze can remain, as funds can still be generated to financially aid Russia's war in Ukraine. (For obvious reasons in such cases, there will be no more need for a visa ban.) Brief #2: The Eastern Partnership Is Still Hobbling Along What You Need To Know: Perhaps it was the zenith of the European Union's Eastern Partnership. It was the end of November 2013 in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, and EU leaders were gathering for a high-level summit together with their counterparts from the bloc's six eastern neighbors: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus (represented by then-Foreign Minister Uladzimer Makei as authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka was persona non grata), Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. The latter trio was supposed to initial association agreements with the EU that would bring them closer to the bloc. The international press was out in force at the conference center, not for the Georgian or Moldovan leaders but to see whether Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych would sign the association agreement. There had been reports the evening before saying he wouldn't sign, which turned out to be exactly what happened. Meanwhile, more and more protesters had gathered in Kyiv, angry that the Ukrainian government appeared to prefer closer ties with Moscow than the European Union. The next day, riot police dispersed the crowd, which reoccupied the square shortly afterward. The protest, later known as "Euromaidan," eventually forced Yanukovych to step down and flee to Russia. Deep Background: Exactly a decade later, on November 28-29, I was back in the Lithuanian capital to participate in a seminar that dealt with the future of the Eastern Partnership. The key takeaway was that, in many ways, the Eastern Partnership had been a victim of its own success. The partnership was created after a Polish-Swedish initiative in 2009 and had the goal of bringing the six former Soviet republics closer to the EU but not putting them on the same accession path as, say, Turkey or the countries of the Western Balkans. Wary of antagonizing Russia and the growing enlargement fatigue in the bloc, Brussels chose an easier, softer path -- the Eastern Partnership. In the end, despite the initial intentions, half of the Eastern partners did follow that traditional route, in the sense of moving along an accession pathway. Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moldova and Ukraine became official EU candidate countries and, if EU member states agree in the coming weeks, will start EU accession negotiations next year. Georgia, one step behind the other two, is set to become an official candidate country by the end of 2023. Those three countries have all gone beyond what was promised by the Eastern Partnership. Drilling Down The question then is whether the format has outlived its purpose. Officials from Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia, all speaking on background, told me that they don't like to be grouped with the other three Eastern Partnership countries -- Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Belarus. While they are all publicly positive about the Eastern Partnership, the more advanced candidates can see less need for the initiative these days, because, to their minds, the only thing that unites them now is a Soviet past. Armenia, which is making moves away from Moscow but is not yet ready to apply for EU membership, might be the keenest of the six to keep the partnership going. Azerbaijan still prefers bilateral deals with Brussels, notably in the energy sector; and Belarus unilaterally pulled out of the framework in 2021, after its standoff with the EU following the presidential election in 2020, which was widely seen as rigged, and the subsequent crackdown on civil society and opposition in the country. Possibly the biggest sign that the Eastern Partnership is in decline is that there hasn't been a high-level summit for two years now. Normally, the EU would hold a summit every other year, and Sweden, which held the six-month rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union earlier this year, was approached. However, Stockholm -- which co-conceived the whole idea of the partnership in the first place -- declined the offer, with Swedish diplomats telling me that there wouldn't be any deliverables. There has been talk in Brussels that Poland, the other co-founder of the Eastern Partnership, is keen to host a summit when they have the presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first half of 2025. But the question is if the six partners are keen and if it won't end up being another "box-ticking exercise," as some diplomats fear. That was what essentially happened at the last summit, held in Brussels in December 2021. There was a working session that lasted a couple of hours and then a short working dinner. Then the whole thing was over with minimal fuss. Looking at the summit declaration, there was no mention of Russia whatsoever. Nor were there any specific lines dedicated to any of the many frozen or hot conflicts in the territories of the eastern partners. Looking back at media reports from the time, most of the focus was given to Belarus's empty chair and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy trying to cajole EU leaders into adopting sanctions on Russia immediately, due to the build-up of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine. What holds the Eastern Partnership together, other than just a bureaucratic reluctance to kill it off? Some point to the fact that the foreign ministers of the five current members will meet their EU counterparts in Brussels on December 11 with the hope of agreeing on a cell-phone roaming zone among the five countries that would eventually be extended to the EU. So, there is that. The Eastern Partnership will probably hobble on for a while. The framework has already borne fruit, with increased cooperation between the EU and partner countries, particularly in the energy sector. The more sanguine diplomats and EU officials see other areas, such as security, that can be explored further. Looking Ahead On December 7-8, the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission, Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen, respectively, will head to Beijing for the EU-China summit. Expect the EU to ask for China to play a more constructive role in the Ukraine war, notably by pressuring Russia on abducted Ukrainian children or prisoner exchanges, as well as taking a harder line on sanctions circumvention. In return, Beijing will likely ask the EU for more cooperation on research and development and for an increase in trade between the two sides. EU interior ministers assemble in Brussels on December 5. One of the items on the agenda is whether a green light can finally be given to Bulgaria and Romania to join the visa-free Schengen zone. It is expected that the pair will be disappointed once again. Some EU officials, speaking on condition of anonymity as they weren't authorized to speak on the record, were annoyed that the Bulgaria and Romania request was even on the agenda, especially as one of the key opponents, the Netherlands, doesn't have a functioning government yet after Geert Wilder's far-right party got the most seats in recent parliamentary elections. 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, Rikard Jozwiak If you enjoyed this briefing and don't want to miss the next edition, subscribe here 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. GAC AION forays into Cambodian market On December 2, GAC Groups new energy vehicle (NEV) arm, GAC AION, made its official debut in Cambodia with its local partner and launched its AION Y PLUS model in the local market. The move marked the Chinese NEV makers formal foray into the Cambodian NEV market. Brand launch event; photo credit: GAC AION Hongqi brands November retail sales surpass 39,600 units FAW Groups premium passenger vehicle brand Hongqi saw its monthly retail sales surpass 39,600 units in November, marking a remarkable 57.8% year-on-year surge. Dongfeng Honda introduces user community brand "Benjia" On December 2, Dongfeng Honda launched the innovative user brand "Benjia." Focusing on advancing user experiences, "Benjia" revolves around four dimensions: "Benjia Experience," "Benjia Service," "Benjia Community," and "Benjia Personal Growth." This comprehensive approach aims to revolutionize touchpoints throughout a user's lifecycle, establishing an integrated user ecosystem and transforming travel experiences. Changan DEEPAL delivers 16,157 vehicles in November 2023 On December 1, Changan Automobiles new energy vehicle brand DEEPAL officially announced 16,157 vehicles delivered in November. BYD SEAL hits Mexican passenger vehicle market On November 29, 2023, BYD officially put the SEAL battery electric vehicle (BEV) model onto the Mexican market, marking the introduction of the company's second Ocean-aesthetics-inspired model in the local market following the DOLPHIN's debut in September. Geely Automobiles monthly auto sales hit record high in Nov. 2023 Geely Automobile Holdings Limited ("the Company", together with its subsidiaries, the Group), announced that the Groups monthly vehicle sales reached 200,079 vehicles in November 2023, jumping 38% from the previous year and once again refreshing its monthly sales record. GAC AION scores 80% YoY spike in Jan.-Nov. 2023 sales GAC AION recently revealed impressive sales figures for November, with 41,567 units sold, marking a remarkable 45% year-on-year growth. Cumulatively, from January to November of this year, its sales surged to 434,056 units, representing an 80% year-on-year spike. DeepWay delivers intelligent new energy heavy-duty trucks in Guangxi Recently, Baidu-backed DeepWay held the delivery ceremony for 50 intelligent new energy heavy-duty trucks to Guangxi Jinlaishun Trading Co., Ltd. (Jinlaishun in Chinese pinyin). X-EPIC, SiEngine team up to boost automotive chip development On December 4, X-EPIC, a system-level verification EDA solution provider, formally established a strategic partnership with SiEngine, a domestic high-end automotive chip design company backed by ECARX. Geelys Farizon Auto, Sinotrans join hands to promote applications of methanol in logistics field On December 1, the strategic cooperation signing ceremony between Geely's Farizon New Energy Commercial Vehicle Group ("Farizon Auto") and Sinotrans Limited, one of the largest logistics companies in China, took place in Hangzhou, heralding a collaboration to pioneer a new transportation model centered around methanol hydrogen ecology, according to Farizon Auto's press release. Chery Holding boasts record-breaking monthly sales in November Chery Holding saw its November auto sales soar 111% year over year to 212,076 vehicles, marking its second consecutive month with sales exceeding 200,000 units. JAC Group, Huawei announce plans to co-build intelligent electric vehicles On December 1, JAC Group announced the signing of the "Intelligent New Energy Vehicle Cooperation Agreement" with Huawei Device Co., Ltd. (Huawei Device), to build premium intelligent connected vehicles. Chinas auto parts supplier Tongyu Automotive bags over 500 million yuan in Series B strategic financing Shanghai Tongyu Automobile Technology Co., Ltd. ("Tongyu Automotive"), the primary tier-one supplier of core components for intelligent chassis systems in China, announced via its WeChat account the recent successful completion of a strategic Series B financing round, which raised over 500 million yuan. NETA Auto, DCH Motors to co-introduce NEV models in Hong Kong in 2024 On December 1st, Chinese new energy vehicle (NEV) maker NETA Auto and the Hong Kong-based automobile dealer Dah Chong Hong Motors (DCH Motors) held a signing ceremony, officially marking the commencement of their collaboration. This partnership signifies a major milestone as both parties commit to introducing NETA Auto' key models to Hong Kong in 2024, with a shared dedication to propelling the development of the NEV market in the region. Swiss drug major Roche Holding AG (RHHBY) announced Monday that it has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire Carmot Therapeutics, Inc., a privately owned US clinical-stage biotechnology company, for $2.7 billion upfront in cash at the closing of the transaction. The deal also includes additional payments of up to $400 million depending on the achievement of certain milestones. The closing of the transaction is currently expected to take place in the first quarter of 2024, subject to customary closing conditions. Berkeley, California -based Carmot holds three clinical stage assets with best-in-class potential in obesity and diabetes. Upon closing of the transaction, Carmot, along with its around 70 employees, will join Roche's Pharmaceuticals Division. Roche will obtain access to Carmot's current R&D portfolio including all clinical and pre-clinical assets. Roche noted that Carmot Therapeutics's R&D portfolio of clinical stage incretins include lead asset CT-388, a Phase-2 ready dual GLP-1/GIP receptor agonist for the treatment of obesity in patients with and without type 2 diabetes. CT-996, a once-daily oral, is a small molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist currently in Phase-1 intended to treat obesity in patients with and without type 2 diabetes. Further, CT-868, a Phase-2, once-daily subcutaneous injectable, is a dual GLP-1/GIP receptor agonist intended for the treatment of type 1 diabetes patients with overweight or obesity. They have great potential to treat obesity, diabetes and potentially other diseases both as standalone medicines and in combination with Roche's in-house assets. Roche will also have exclusive access to Carmot's innovative Chemotype Evolution discovery platform in metabolism to further strengthen its R&D efforts and portfolio across cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Thomas Schinecker, CEO Roche Group, said, "Obesity is a heterogeneous disease, which contributes to many other diseases that together comprise a significant burden worldwide. By combining Carmot's portfolio with programs in our Pharmaceuticals pipeline and our Diagnostics expertise and portfolio of products across cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, we are aiming to improve the standard of care and positively impact patients' lives." For More Such Health News, visit rttnews.com For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Oxford Biomedica Plc. (OXB.L) announced on Monday that it has inked a sale and purchase deal with TSGH SAS, a unit of Institut Merieux SA, to buy ABL Europe SAS in exchange for Oxford Biomedica shares. The transaction, expected to be closed in the first quarter of 2024, will be immediately revenue accretive to Oxford Biomedica. The acquisition will boost Oxford Biomedica's capacity in processing and analytical development and early-stage manufacturing. The combination will also address increased client demand for process development. ABL Europe is a contract development and manufacturing organization or CDMO with expertise in the development and manufacturing of solutions for biotechs and biopharma including viruses for gene therapy, oncolytic viruses, and vaccine candidates. ABL Europe currently works on over 10 cell and gene therapy programs spanning disease areas including over six different vector types. ABL Europe is projected to post revenue of around 15 million euros for the full year to December 31, 2023. For the 12 months up to December 31, 2022, ABL Europe had earnings before interest tax, and depreciation or EBITDA loss of around 1.7 million euros. Institut Merieux has acquired a 3.3 percent stake in Oxford Biomedica, through purchases in the open market, which it intends to increase to around 10 percent in aggregate by the end of the third quarter of 2024. As announced earlier, Oxford Biomedica is acquiring ABL Europe for a consideration of 15 million euros, including the value of 10 million euros of pre-completion cash funding from Institut Merieux in ABL Europe for, amongst other things, development capex. Institut Merieux has committed to provide 20 million euros of additional funding to the company, to cover capital expenditure and potential operational losses to the acquisition of ABL Europe, utilizing an equity subscription. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced further recalls of Malichita branded whole cantaloupes and certain cantaloupe products following an ongoing outbreak of Salmonella. Several illnesses have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States and Canada. Pacific Trellis Fruit, LLC has recalled 4,872 cases of Malichita brand whole cantaloupe. The FDA is investigating the outbreak involving Malichita brand cantaloupe for potential to be contaminated with Salmonella. Pacific Trellis Fruit products were distributed between October 18 and 26 in California, Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, Wisconsin, and Canada and sold in various retail supermarkets. The whole cantaloupe was packed in corrugated cartons with "Malichita" label. Further, Cut Fruit Express Inc. is recalling its Fresh Cut Fruit Mix Containing Cantaloupe for the same concern. The recall involves Caribou Coffee Fruit Mix CHPG 6.5oz, and Cut Fruit Express Brand of 6.5oz, 15oz, 16oz, 32oz packages of Fruit Mix contains Cantaloupes and Food service packages of 5lb tray, 10lb bag, 25lb Pail. The affected products were shipped between October 24 through October 26 Cut Fruit Express said its recall was after its supplier issued a recall on Cantaloupes for potential contamination of Salmonella. Salmonella is an organism that can cause serious and sometime fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems. Healthy people infected with Salmonella often experience fever, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Meanwhile, in rare instances, infection with Salmonella can result in more severe illnesses such as arterial infections, endocarditis and arthritis. Meanwhile, both companies have not received any reports of illness related to their respective recalled products to date. Customers are urged not to consume the products and to dispose of them. Earlier, Sofia Produce LLC, which operates under the name Trufresh, had recalled all sizes of Malichita brand fresh cantaloupes due to a possible salmonella contamination. Following this, many companies, including those who were supplied cantaloupes by Trufresh, had called back their products. GHGA, LLC, Kwik Trip, Inc., and Vinyard Fruit and Vegetable Co., among others, recently called back fresh-cut products made from whole cantaloupes. For More Such Health News, visit rttnews.com For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News With local manufacturing of RS 457 at its Baramati plant, Aprilia will be able to avoid high costs associated with CBU / CKD route Multi-cylinder motorcycles in 300cc to 500cc segment are gaining traction and OEMs are lining their products to cater this new-found demand. Aprilia is among those OEMs, launching RS 457 at the 10th Anniversary of India Bike Week, scheduled to happen between 8th and 9th of December, 2023 at Vagator, Goa. Aprilia RS457 Price To Be Announced At India Bike Week Just like various other OEMs, Aprilia is looking at India as a retail market as well as a manufacturing hub for exports. Domestic buyers will benefit, as they will be able to access Aprilia products at relatively lower rates. A relevant example is upcoming RS 457, which will be launched at India Bike Week between 8th and 9th December, 2023. Prices of Aprilia RS 457 were recently announced for international markets such as USA and Canada. Aprilias Diego Arioli head of product marketing, motorcycles, Piaggio Group, has provided an approximate price range for RS 457 in India. He said that they are looking at a price of around Rs 3.75 lakh to Rs 4 lakh. In comparison, price in the USA is USD 6,799 (approx. Rs 5.65 lakh) for Opalescent Light and Prismatic Dark colours and USD 6,899 (approx. Rs 5.75 lakh) for Racing Stripes colourway. Canada looks relatively affordable, with prices at CAD 7,799 (approx. Rs. 4.7 lakh) and CAD 7,999 (approx. Rs. 4.84 lakh), respectively. The bike certainly commands ambitious pricing, as it packs an aluminium chassis, a parallel-twin motor and a comprehensive range of electronic gizmos. Additional cost overheads for RS 457 As RS 457 is an advanced racing machine, Aprilia has to invest resources in expanding dealer network and training their staff. This will be an additional cost for the company. In the future, more premium Motoplex showrooms will be opened across large cities. This will be helpful for Aprilias other big bikes as well. Made in India RS 457 will be sold across Europe and other markets. It will be largely the same across most international markets. As of now, India is the only production base for RS 457. The company can consider CKD opportunities at a later date for exports. Aprilia has manufacturing presence in Indonesia, Vietnam and three plants in Italy. Aprilia RS 457 has a 457cc, parallel-twin motor that generates 47 bhp of max power. It is mated to a 6-speed gearbox. Torque output and other key details such as top speed and time taken to reach 0 to 60 kmph are yet to be revealed. Weighing just 170 kg, Aprilia RS 457 has the best power to weight ratio in its class. It will compete with the likes of Kawasaki Ninja 400, KTM RC 390 and upcoming Yamaha R3. With a price range between Rs 3.75 lakh to Rs 4 lakh, Aprilia RS 457 will be cheaper than Ninja 400. Yamaha R3 is expected to be priced at around Rs 4 lakh. R3 will initially be a CBU import from Indonesia. KTM RC 390 will be the most affordable in the group, priced at Rs 3.18 lakh. The fascia of Toyota Urban Crossover Concept seems to be derived from newer Toyota models like BZ and Crown series, along with Prius Toyota had a slow shift where electric vehicles are concerned. But the shift is happening and in quite a swift manner. We say aggressive because Toyota Urban Crossover concept was recently showcased and may be the peoples electric car champion when launched in select markets by 2025. Pricing may start from around EUR 30,000 (Rs. 27 lakh). Toyota Urban Crossover Concept In the past months, Suzuki revealed eVX that looked close to production. eVX will be Suzukis first-ever all-electric car and will likely be launched at 2025 Auto Expo in India. Said eVX will be manufactured in India and exported globally in select markets. Testing for eVX has commenced both in India and abroad. Theres a reason why were mentioning Suzuki eVX before Toyota Urban Crossover Concept. Toyota has revealed exterior images of its Urban Crossover Concept. If you squint your eyes, it looks like Suzuki eVX. That is because Toyota is highly likely to be badge engineering Suzuki eVX to sell under their brand in various global markets. Just like eVX, Toyota Urban Crossover Concept might be manufactured in India too. Urban Crossover will be Toyotas strongest contender in EV race in Europe in the coming years. It will bear an affordable price tag too, making it the most affordable Toyota EV in Europe. When launched, it will rival the likes of Jeep Avenger, Mini Aceman and Volvo EX30. In India, it could rival upcoming Mahindra BE.05 and Hyundai Creta EV. Even though finer details of production-spec model are under wraps, Toyota Urban Crossover will measure 4,300mm long, 1,820mm wide and 1,620mm tall. Full details about production-spec model and its interiors will be revealed in first half of 2024. We can see a strong resemblance with Suzuki eVX, especially in profile. Design similar to Suzuki eVX The thick C-pillar area is common between both Toyota Urban Crossover Concept and Suzuki eVX. Doors, front and rear quarter panels, chunky wheel arch claddings, flush door handles, rear roof spoiler, silhouette, tail light housings, and overall front and rear sections are similar between both cars. Differences are in LED signatures in tail lights, front and rear bumpers, headlights, front fascia, front DRL signatures and other areas. Fascia of Urban Crossover is inspired by new-age Toyota BZ and Crown series and Prius. Urban Crossover gets roofrails too, something eVX doesnt. Interiors might be identical, with subtle trim changes between both vehicles to establish visual differences. Powertrain-wise both vehicles could share the same battery and motor options. Speaking of, there may be two battery size options and an option for dual motor AWD setup to offer flexibility in pricing and performance. Range might be up to 250 miles or 400 km on a single charge and fast charging compatibility of up to 50 kW is expected. Beijing (Gasgoo)- Recently, Baidu-backed DeepWay held the delivery ceremony for 50 intelligent new energy heavy-duty trucks to Guangxi Jinlaishun Trading Co., Ltd. (Jinlaishun in Chinese pinyin). Photo credit: DeepWay Witnessed by Jinlaishun's Chairman, Ma Liguo, and representatives from DeepWay's comprehensive regional division, the initial batch of 10 Shenxiang Xingchen smart new energy heavy-duty trucks was officially handed over to Jinlaishun. These trucks will serve the company's comprehensive logistics and transportation operations across Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Guangxi Jinlaishun Trading Co., Ltd. operates extensively across Guangxi, transporting goods including steel, coal, and construction materials, covering distances averaging around 350 kilometers per trip. Chairman Ma Liguo highlighted the advantages of DeepWay's intelligent new energy trucks, stating, "These vehicles exhibit low energy consumption and stable performance. Additionally, their intelligent technology significantly reduces driver fatigue, presenting substantial advantages over traditional fuel-powered trucks. The 466kWh model that we purchased, with a full charge, boasts a range of over 300 kilometers. Coupled with our established charging network, we have no concerns about recharging. Considering our typical daily transport of 700-800 kilometers, these trucks can save the company approximately 300,000-400,000 yuan per vehicle annually compared to oil-fueled vehicles." This successful delivery ceremony not only introduced DeepWay's Shenxiang Xingchen intelligent new energy trucks to Guangxi and its neighboring clients but also showcased a revolutionary operating experience and technological innovation distinct from traditional heavy-duty trucks and "fuel-to-electric" retrofitted models. It further propels the electrification progress across Guangxi's transportation sector. Chris Dilliard, left, of Gainesville and Sean Smith of Port Richey argue outside the Woodside Hospice in Pinellas Park that cares for Terri Schiavo. Smith opposes government intervention, whereas Dilliard favors keeping the brain-damaged woman alive. (AUTUMN CRUZ/ORLANDO SENTINEL) Joshua Heldrieth, 10, of Charlotte, N.C., is arrested by Pinellas Park Police Officers outside Woodside Hospice. Lt. Kevin Riley is on the right and Sgt Mark Berger is on the left. (AUTUMN CRUZ/ORLANDO SENTINEL) A family from Dade City prays the rosary outside Woodside Hospice, where Terri Schiavo lives. From left is Veronica Richter, 9, sister Isabelle, 5, grandmother Laurel Cobb, sister Bernadette, 2, brother Geoffrey, 8, and mother Emma Richter. (AUTUMN CRUZ/ORLANDO SENTINEL) From left, Bob Schindler, his son Bobby, his wife Mary and daughter Suzanne Vitadamo talk with Pinellas Park Police Officers after visiting Terri Schiavo outside Woodside Hospice. (AUTUMN CRUZ/ORLANDO SENTINEL) People react to a replica of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ which is being hauled to the site of Woodside Hospice where Terri Schiavo resides Raymond Simmons, of Tampa (center, in red hat) said I think that it was a vulgar display of our Christianity and our symbol. Simmons came to demonstrate in favor of letting Michael Schiavo decide for his wife. The cross was brought in by Tom Fayette, of Canton, N.Y. People of all different faiths are arriving from near and far. Even those of the same faith, or sharing the same opinions sometimes differ on what the proper methods of expression should be. (AUTUMN CRUZ/ORLANDO SENTINEL) Joshua Heldrieth, 10, of Charlotte, N.C., is arrested by Pinellas Park Police Officers outside Woodside Hospice March 25, 2005. The unidentified officer at left is with the Pinellas County Sheriffs Office, who transported the child to jail. (AUTUMN CRUZ/ORLANDO SENTINEL) Family members of Terri Schiavo, from left, brother Bobby Schindler, sister Suzanne Vitadamo and parents Bob and Mary Schindler make a plea to politicians to save Schiavos life outside Woodside Hospice on March 25, 2005. (AUTUMN CRUZ/ORLANDO SENTINEL) From left, Dennis McBride, Ken Wells and Helena Fuller, all of Augusta, Georgia hold crosses outside Woodside Hospice on March 26, 2005. (AUTUMN CRUZ/ORLANDO SENTINEL) Despite pleas from the Vatican, U.S. lawmakers and the president, Michael Schiavo says he could not have divorced his brain-damaged wife and given up the fight to let her die. I was doing something that Terri wanted. And I couldnt give it up on her, Schiavo said in an interview recorded for the Sunday edition of NBCs Dateline. Schiavos book about the case, Terri: The Truth, is scheduled for release Monday, the day before a competing book by Terri Schiavos parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, is released. Friday will be the first anniversary of Terri Schiavos death, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed. Advertisement Michael Schiavo fought the Schindlers in court for eight years over removal of his spouses life support, arguing she would not have wanted to be kept alive in what doctors called a persistent vegetative state. The Schindlers argued that she retained some level of consciousness. Dont let anybody tell you that Terri did not know who was in that room, Mary Schindler told The St. Petersburg Times in an interview published Saturday. An autopsy determined Terri Schiavo suffered irreversible brain-damage and even blindness after she collapsed in 1990 at the age of 26. No evidence was found that she might have been abused before her collapse. Michael Schiavo recalled hearing a thud and calling 911 within a minute of her collapse. The bitter end-of-life battle between Michael Schiavo and the Schindler family reached Gov. Jeb Bush, the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress, the White House and even the Vatican. The acrimony also extended in the halls of the hospice where Terri Schiavo eventually died of dehydration. Michael Schiavo refused to allow Terris brother, Bobby Schindler, into her room shortly before her death. I didnt want the animosity, Michael Schiavo said. Im sure Terri would want the families to get along and be happy. But it didnt happen. In January, Michael Schiavo married Jodi Centonze, whom he had called his fiancee for more than five years. The couple met in a dentists office and began a relationship after Terri Schiavo was already in a nursing home. They have two young children. I would think so much less of Michael had he walked away from her, Jodi Schiavo said in the NBC interview. That is one of the qualities in him that I so admire. DELAWARENadgerz Inc, the creator of the Balldo ball-dildo sex toy, has released the Viballdo, the company's second iteration of its couples toy design. The Viballdo is now available and ready to ship to distributors and wholesale partners. In 2021, the original Balldo debuted the concept of "ball-sex" and a new type of orgasm, dubbed "the ballgasm," to the world. The Balldo is a unique type of testicle cage featuring a thick, stiff base intended for penetrative play with a partner. While wearing the Balldo, a male partner can insert his testicles into their partner's anus or vagina. Balldo creates a pleasure that can be felt by the giver and receiver via the toy's open-cage design, which allows the testicles to be stroked while thrusting into a partner's body. After a successful market run, Nadgerz Inc. updated its original design and created the Viballdo in response to enthused customers. As requested by our consumer fans, we've improved upon our original Balldo design with several new features, said Nadgerz Inc. founder and CEO Jerry Davies. The Viballdo promises a better fitting ball cage; a softer tip and longer insertable length; stretchier, black silicone; and of course, vibration. Viballdo most notably features 10 speeds of vibration, which radiate throughout the toy's tip and down each leg of the cage. Powered by a USB rechargeable battery, Viballdo also features a shorter cage to fit myriad sizes of testicles, an extra 20mm/1 inch of penetrative length, and 2 additional, soft spacer rings for fit adjustment. A single, soft spacer ring will also be available for purchase separately. For solo play, users can "masturbate their balls" by moving their hands up and down the "ball shaft" of the toy, transmitting vibrations deep into the testicles. During doggie-style couples sex, Viballdo rubs up against the clitoris or base of the receiving partner's penis, allowing both partners to enjoy the toy's multiple vibration settings. During penetration, the Viballdo's newly added 20mm/1 inch of extra length is also a better fit for fuller-figured couples. The company explains that the toy's vibrations are magnified and felt deeply within the testicles through the walls of the partner's orifices, offering greater sensation for both partners. The Viballdo is now available through Nalpac/Entrenue distributors in the USA, Creative Conceptions within the EU and UK, and AAPD in Australia. For more information on Viballdo, Balldo, and Nadgerz Inc, visit Balldo.com or email [email protected] in the USA or [email protected] in the EU. A new image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope provides a detailed look at NGC 2210, a globular cluster situated in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Globular clusters are systems of very ancient stars, gravitationally bound into a single structure about 100-200 light-years across. They contain hundreds of thousands or perhaps a million stars. The large mass in the rich stellar center of a cluster pulls the stars inward to form a ball of stars. Globular clusters are among the oldest known objects in the Universe and are relics of the first epochs of galaxy formation. It is thought that every galaxy has a population of globular clusters. Our Milky Way Galaxy hosts at least 150 such objects and a few more are likely to exist hidden behind the Galaxys thick disk. The Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring dwarf galaxy about 163,000 light-years away from us, is home to approximately 60 globular clusters. In 2017, University of Florida astronomer Rachel Wagner-Kaiser and her colleagues revealed that six ancient globular clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud NGC 1466, NGC 1841, NGC 2210, NGC 2257, Hodge 11 and Reticulum were incredibly close in age to some of the oldest stellar clusters found in the Milky Ways halo. They found that NGC 2210 specifically probably clocks in at around 11.6 billion years of age. Even though this is only a couple of billion years younger than the Universe itself, it made NGC 2210 by far the youngest globular cluster in their sample. All other globular clusters studied in the work were found to be even older, with four of them over 13 billion years old. This is interesting, because it tells us that the oldest globular clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud formed contemporaneously with the oldest clusters in the Milky Way, even though the two galaxies formed independently, the researchers said. As well as being a source of interesting research, this old-but-relatively-young cluster is also extremely beautiful, with its highly concentrated population of stars. The night sky would look very different from the perspective of an inhabitant of a planet orbiting one of the stars in a globular clusters center: the sky would appear to be stuffed full of stars, in a stellar environment that is thousands of times more crowded than our own. _____ R. Wagner-Kaiser et al. 2017. Exploring the nature and synchronicity of early cluster formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud II. Relative ages and distances for six ancient globular clusters. MNRAS 471 (3): 3347-3358; doi: 10.1093/mnras/stx1702 US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. Photo: Xinhua Global TimesThe US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo attended the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in California on Saturday. Her speech revealed a lot of information, which is worth discussing. The Secretary of Commerce's appearance at the Reagan National Defense Forum, dominated by the US military-industrial complex, was already somewhat incongruous, like a peddler running onto the battlefield. Raimondo's speech made her the most talked-about "protagonist" at the forum, highlighting the abnormality of US politics, especially in its treatment of China. Raimondo, who is considered by many to be relatively moderate toward China, stated that, despite differences, the US intends to further develop its commercial relationship with China because the US believes it will not affect its national security interests. However, this statement is more of a "routine matter," as most of what she said that day contradicted this, and she constantly brought up "national security." For example, she described China as "the biggest threat" the US has ever had and emphasized that "China is not our friend." The focus of her speech was to call for stronger restrictions on China in the semiconductor field. It is not easy to determine which statement is sincere and which is not. The more likely situation is that this contradictory or two-faced nature is deeply rooted in the current US policy toward China, showing a characteristic of "wanting both." From Raimondo's speech, we can see at least three points. First, the severity of Washington's abuse of "national security" in its dealings with China; second, Washington's hostility and malice toward China, with no intention to conceal its desire to strike at China; third, Washington is facing a dilemma in implementing its policy of containment and crackdown against China. The third point is unintentionally exposed by Raimondo, but it is not surprising to anyone. Raimondo complained that her department only had a budget of $200 million for export controls, "the cost of a few fighter jets." She requested that Congress provides more funding to carry out actions to prevent China from catching up with the US in cutting-edge semiconductor technology. Raimondo called out Nvidia by name, saying that developing and exporting chips with slightly lower performance to China to bypass US export controls "is not productive." Raimondo also said during a media interview that her department was mired in "a game of whack-a-mole" when enforcing chip export controls. We want to say to Raimondo that even if the budget is increased from $200 million to $20 billion or even more, it will still be in vain, and the US will still feel constrained because the goal was set wrong. Going against the rules, principles, and laws of the free trade market is like using a sieve to build a dam. No matter how hard you try, water will still flow through. The US continuously strengthens its export controls on China, sacrificing the interests of its own companies, which is a foolish act. Building a "small yard, high fence" and pursuing "decoupling" will result in endless costs and consequences. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also gave a speech at the Reagan National Defense Forum, which is his home turf. Although one is the Secretary of Defense and the other is the Secretary of Commerce, Austin and Raimondo's speeches have united in promoting the "China threat" and using it as a reason to seek more budget for their respective departments. Austin also emphasized the need to enhance America's technological advantage to expand its military superiority. According to US media reports on Saturday, an unpublished draft of a new defense industry report by the Pentagon states that the US defense industry is struggling to keep up with China and that the speed of weapon production is insufficient to meet global requirements. A country with the world's most powerful force is living in such a severe state of anxiety, immersed in paranoid delusions, and unable to come out. How can this make other countries in the world feel at ease? The US has knocked over the first domino of "anxiety," and it is inevitably deeply involved in it. Obviously, the predicament mentioned by Raimondo is not just a problem of the US Department of Commerce but also the consequences brought about by the entire country's wrong foreign strategy. If there is no change in direction, the situation will inevitably worsen. A Grand Island man is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison after being sentenced Friday to more than 50 years in federal prison for years of sexual abuse of children. Scott Lee Meyer, 34, already was a convicted sex offender last year when law enforcement took a search warrant to the home he shared with Scott Simmons, who he'd met in a Nebraska prison while they both were serving sentences for child-sex offenses. At Meyer's sentencing Friday, Federal Public Defender Jessica Milburn said she had represented a range of sexual offenders, some who expressed shame or confusion. One who kidnapped a girl who didn't think he'd done anything wrong. "And I've had lots of other cases, lots and lots of these cases," she said. Milburn said there was one distinction between Meyer and many of the others. When he went to prison in 2013 he thought maybe he could be cured and wanted treatment. But then he hooked up with Simmons at a time when he was especially vulnerable. "He did want to be fixed, cured, something. And nobody really knows what that is. Nobody knows if it's treatment. If it's a physical treatment," Milburn said, referring to castration. "I think that's coming from him genuinely, which is different to me than what I've seen in many of these cases." She said Meyer accepts that what he's done has affected so many lives and is so egregious, "so he knows prison is the end all, be all for him maybe for the rest of his life." Assistant U.S. Attorney Tessie Smith called it a very serious case deserving of a very serious sentence. She said Meyer and Simmons produced images depicting child sexual abuse for around four years. And because they both were convicted sex offenders, they were cautious, sharing the images directly with people they knew or through the dark Internet, careful not to show their faces or their victims'. They started showing up less than two years after Meyer's release from prison. Smith said that after investigators served the search warrant Aug. 25, 2022, searches of Meyer's and Simmons' cellphones turned up more than 400 files of child sexual abuse they had produced of their victims, all within the previous four months. They often used costumes to hide their identities and evade detection, Smith said. "The abuse of these young children lasted for four years, and it was sadistic," she said. Smith said the children said Simmons was more sadistic than Meyer, but Meyer was more grooming of them. They groomed their parents, too, paying for vacations and birthday parties and having sleepovers, to gain access to their children. "Mr. Meyer, although repentant, is one of the more dangerous sex offenders to be sentenced by this court in recent years," Smith said. She asked for a sentence that essentially equated to a life sentence. "The defendant's past record shows that he's not able to respond to therapy very well. And he used cloaking methods to avoid detection this time," Smith said. In almost a whisper, Meyer who had pleaded guilty to charges of production of sexually explicit images of children and conspiracy to produce it said it was a tragic case all around. "I'm so sorry to the victims, to the family, to the community," he said. Then, Senior United States District Judge John M. Gerrard sentenced him to 52 years in federal prison, which has no parole. He said there were at least four children, ages 7 to 13, "that will never be the same again" that were victimized by Meyer and Simmons. And not just once or twice, but over a lengthy period of time. "You were there, you groomed, you participated," the judge said. In July, he sentenced 43-year-old Simmons to 60 years in federal prison. There is no parole in federal prison. Both also were ordered to pay $11,250 in restitution and a $9,000 special assessment, which will contribute to funds established for victims of these types of crimes. As the year draws to a close, Nebraska State Board of Education members received a progress update from Brian Maher, education commissioner, as he begins his sixth month on the job. The board set several priorities for Maher to focus on after he was hired July 1. During a Thursday work session, Maher presented his progress on the goals, something he will be officially evaluated on in the spring. Some of Mahers goals had a Dec. 1 deadline, such as evaluating the Nebraska Department of Educations existing communication strategies involving the state board, the department and the public. When I sat and pondered on this, I thought: What the heck, how will I address this, knowing communication from our office is crucial to the effectiveness we have as a system? Maher said. Maher initiated an audit of current communication strategies and gathered feedback from stakeholders to see what types of communication worked and what didnt. One gap he saw was communication from outside education leaders, such as superintendents and directors of educational service units in Nebraska. Maher said he reinstated the Superintendent Advisory Council to establish a group of educators in the field he can consult with regularly. The group, which has met twice so far, has 32 members across the state. We have seen a great benefit already. When it comes to big issues we really got valuable feedback on the assessment process, Maher said. I regularly call folks on the council and say, I got this going on, how will it be received in the field? or I am hearing this, what do you think of it? Its really terrific, in that regard. Patti Gubbels, board president, said shes heard from council members that they appreciate having the opportunity to weigh in on education at the state level. They said, Hes really listening to us, Gubbels said. Maher also ensured that the 500-plus employees at the Education Department are having twice-monthly meetings. During the last few months, hes also had office administrators take an inventory of the departments website to make sure only materials that have been approved are online. Another goal for Maher is to evaluate the departments internal operations. Part of this will include a plan to get employees to return to the office following the pandemics upheaval of in-person operations. Maher said the plan, which will be announced within the month, aims at a careful balance of ensuring the performance of the department and retaining staff. Gov. Jim Pillen issued a back-to-office order in early November, but Maher said this doesnt specifically impact department employees. Maher also has to review and give recommendations for the possibility of changing Nebraskas assessment system. Students are currently required to take tests through the Nebraska Student-Centered Assessment System. Maher said the department is making a lot of headway in this area, but after talking with school leaders, hes leaning toward keeping the current assessment system for the 2024-25 school year. A final decision will be presented to the board in the coming weeks. The (superintendents) said they would rather make the long-term decision than to rush the decision now, Maher said. One of the final priorities the state board set for Maher was to review the departments current strategic plan. Work on this is still underway, he said. Multiple state board members said they dont expect Maher to get everything done in just a few more months. His official evaluation is scheduled for March. We were not realistic in suggesting this to you, that you would have all of this done in eight months, Gubbels said. Really getting to know how to put people in their best place takes time. Photos: Inside the new Standing Bear High School in southeast Lincoln Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 Standing Bear Highschool, 7.21 LINCOLN State Sen. Tom Brewer of Gordon made one thing clear at a legislative hearing Friday about allowing more people to carry guns in schools as a way to boost security. Hes not interested in forcing teachers to carry weapons, he said. Nor is he necessarily looking to authorize anyone besides off-duty law enforcement officers to carry weapons on school grounds or at school events. State law already allows armed on-duty officers at schools. Brewer said there are a number of factors to consider before he would propose authorizing other armed people in schools. Those include figuring out what training and screening would be necessary for those people. But he told members of the Education Committee at the interim study hearing that he wants to find ways that the state can help local school districts better protect children and staff. I think we would be very neglectful of our students if we dont look at all the options possible, he said. Our laws order parents to send their kids to school. I believe that leaves us with an obligation to protect the kids while they are there. Only invited testifiers spoke at the hearing. They offered several ideas aimed at making schools safer. The ideas included allowing trained people to carry weapons on school grounds, training school staff to treat wounded students and standardizing school maps for use by first responders. Art Frerichs, a state trooper and member of the Morrill Public School board, urged the state to look at allowing off-duty law enforcement to carry weapons on school grounds or at school events. He said the change could help districts like Morrill, which cannot afford a school resource officer and where local law enforcement could be a long way away. He said the school is well-protected with locked doors and other measures during the day, but is less so during school events. Frerichs said off-duty law enforcement could help boost security at events, but the decision should be up to local school boards. Zach Kassebaum, superintendent of Lincoln Christian School, called for going a step further by allowing properly trained individuals that met necessary criteria to carry guns at schools. Currently, he said, Lincoln Christian relies on unarmed volunteers to provide security, in addition to such measures as security cameras, locked entrances and double doors. Those volunteers are intended to slow down attackers so staff and students have more time to protect themselves. Kassebaum said state law ties the hands of those security volunteers by barring them from being armed. He urged a change in the law to allow people with the right temperament and right training to carry weapons in schools. Allowing non-law enforcement people to carry weapons can ensure rapid response to attacks, said James Donahue, community security director at the Jewish Federation of Omaha and the Friedel Jewish Academy. He said having a trained, armed person on site also can deter shooters. James Irvine, with a group called FASTER Saves Lives, argued that the responsibility for saving staff and students is the job of schools, not law enforcement. He said his group trains school staff on using weapons to stop school violence and on providing immediate medical assistance to anyone wounded. He said the medical training, in particular, saves lives because it can stop people from bleeding to death before emergency medical staff can get to the scene. The measures needed in such situations are similar to those used on the battlefield, such as tourniquets, chest seals and wound packs. There is no denying that waiting on outside help increases fatalities, he said. Mike Rogers, CEO of Critical Response Group, called for schools to improve and standardize their building and campus maps to help law enforcement and emergency medical personnel respond to emergencies. He said seven states have now passed legislation to require such updates. Rogers, whose company does school mapping work, said the maps often become outdated because of building renovations or changes in usage of rooms. Many do not use the common geographic orientation of having north at the top of the map. Once maps are updated, he said, they need to be made available for use by multiple agencies that use multiple computer platforms. Our best Omaha staff photos & videos of November 2023 FILE - House Commerce subcommittee chair Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., speaks, Feb. 26, 2020. Susan Walsh/AP When California Democrat Anna G. Eshoo entered the House to represent Silicon Valley in 1993, the modern technology industry was still in its infancy. Google, Amazon and Facebook hadn't been founded yet, and the burgeoning internet was just celebrating its 10th birthday. Three decades later, Eshoo says her district has become "without question the innovation capital of our country." "I've seen enormous change where . . . the internet is absolutely ubiquitous," said Eshoo, who announced just before Thanksgiving her plans to retire from Congress. She spoke with me this week about her time overseeing the rise of one of the world's most powerful industries. Advertisement Article continues below this ad (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. The Post's interim CEO, Patty Stonesifer, sits on Amazon's board.) But that rapid expansion hasn't come without major growing pains, she warned. Long seen as bastions of economic development, tech companies have faced increased scrutiny in recent years over concerns that they have grown too powerful and that their products too dangerous. "We didn't see 30 years ago . . . the perils, and how especially social media would be used [for] misinformation, disinformation, what young children are exposed to," she said. Advertisement Article continues below this ad That has led to some remorse for members like Eshoo, who helped paved the way for the rise of platforms like Facebook, TikTok and YouTube by passing laws like Section 230, the 1996 statute that shields digital services from lawsuits for hosting and moderating third-party content. "We wanted to make sure that [the internet] was able to grow without any heavy-handed regulations, but Section 230 has a lot of negatives to it," she said. "We made a mistake with it, and to this day, Congress really hasn't been able to address and correct that." Eshoo also lamented some of the work Congress has yet to finish, such as passing a federal privacy law to protect consumers' personal information online. Eshoo attributed those struggles to the lack of time that members outside the primary committees of jurisdiction have for those complex issues. Advertisement Article continues below this ad "Members may shy away from making a decision if they don't have to because they don't completely understand all the mechanics in this," said Eshoo, who has served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee since 1995. But when asked what her biggest tech regret has been, Eshoo offered up a somewhat unexpected one: the failure to strike an agreement on comprehensive immigration reform. "We would not be what we are as a nation without immigration," she said, adding that for high-skilled tech workers, "their green card should be stapled . . . to their degree." "We would be better and stronger for that, and it has a direct impact on the industry," she said. Advertisement Article continues below this ad As far as achievements, Eshoo pointed to her advocacy for digital equity standards like net neutrality and the expansion of broadband access through the bipartisan infrastructure law. She also cited her work leading efforts to craft standards for businesses using digital signatures, which she said served as a "reminder" that U.S. tech rules can ripple "worldwide." As Eshoo prepares to exit after next year's elections, Congress is only just beginning to grapple with one its next biggest technological challenges: artificial intelligence. Eshoo, who co-chairs the Congressional AI Caucus with Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), said one of her remaining priorities this term will be getting her bipartisan bill to expand access to AI research, known as the Create AI Act, H.R. 5077 (118), over the finish line. The measure would help ensure the benefits of AI spread beyond the private sector to other spheres, like the public, medical, academic and nonprofit sectors, she said Advertisement Article continues below this ad "The computational capacity is really held by a handful of tech companies . . . we need to do something about this because all sectors . . . have to be addressed," she noted. Thirty-one years ago, 1,321 mule deer were shot by hunters in Hunting District 502 a record high. The district extends south from Billings with the Crow Reservation to the east and the Clarks Fork Yellowstone River bordering it to the west. The narrow district ends just south of the community of Bridger. In 2021, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks data, the total mule deer harvest in HD 502 was 477. A survey area in the district has shown a 60% decline in the areas mule deer population compared to the long-term average. Details like these for deer and elk populations across the state can be found in FWPs proposed deer and elk hunting regulation changes for 2024-25, which are posted online. Mountain lion, moose, bison and bighorn sheep proposed changes are also posted. All will be considered by the Fish and Wildlife Commission at its Dec. 14 meeting in Helena. Public meetings were previously held around the state to discuss the changes, and now some of the commissioners have weighed in with their own suggestions along with public comments that have been posted online. Together, they provide interesting details about big game hunting across the state. Reports The documentation supporting the proposed changes is voluminous. The Region 5 proposals, for example, are 33 pages long. One theme that stands out in portions of Regions 4 and 5 is a continuing decline in mule deer populations. In recent years the number of fawns entering the winter has been quite low indicating a significant fawn loss during summer and fall, FWP wildlife biologist Shawn Stewart wrote in the Region 5 season setting justifications for HD 502. Over winter fawn loss typically takes another 30% or more. In addition, loss of radio collared does in the immediate area suggests an annual mortality of about 25% each of the last two years. In Region 4 in central Montana, wildlife biologist Sonja Andersen noted there is some speculation that bucks may outcompete fawns when resources are limited. Yet even without hunter harvest, mule deer bucks generally have higher mortality rates, partly because they often go into winter in poorer body condition due to the toll of the mating season, she noted. Another possible reason for declining mule deer numbers is that FWPs efforts to increase elk harvest may be putting additional harvest pressure on mule deer, especially in public land districts, Andersen noted. In other words, hunters out looking for elk are shooting mule deer instead. For this reason and others, FWP is recommending changes to mule deer regulations in Hunting Districts 410, 411, 412, 417, 419 and 426. Comments Hunter Samuel Mckeeth, of Ulm, submitted a comment asking the Fish and Wildlife Commission to enact the regulations in Region 4. Its sad to see how far the deer herds have fallen in these units, he wrote. Likewise, Billings hunter Jacob Dillon advocated for the change. He wrote, Over the last decade, I've personally witnessed a severe decrease in deer numbers in HDs 410 and 417. He encouraged similar reductions in mule deer limits across the state. Near Jordan in Eastern Montana, Aaron Senner, a Richey hunter, said he spent five days afield and only counted 12 mule deer does and fawns. Saying it is over hunted is an understatement, he wrote. The amount of people hunting this area is unbelievable. CWD Although harsh winters and drought have played a role in mule deer declines across portions of Montana, HD 502 and other districts are also dealing with outbreaks of chronic wasting disease (CWD), an always fatal affliction. First detected in HD 502 in 2017 the first year CWD was confirmed in Montanas wild herds FWP adopted a tactic of keeping deer populations low to decrease the chances of the disease spreading. So in 2019, FWP opened the hunting district to either-sex seasons, while also substantially increasing doe-only licenses. As a result, the mule deer population has declined although buck-to-doe ratios have remained high, Stewart reported. At this time it would be a good strategy to pull back hunting pressure on does and increase pressure on bucks, the biologist wrote. This can best be accomplished by switching to an antlered buck general season. Modification Chronic wasting disease is also the basis for an amendment to mule deer regulations proposed by Commission chair Lesley Robinson in portions of Region 6 in northeastern Montana. Robinson is requesting that FWPs more liberal mule deer regulations be curtailed due to public opposition. The department prefers to withdraw the proposal to spend additional time and effort to discuss the issue broadly with the public rather than create an atmosphere of distrust, FWP stated. This amendment would allow time for more local stakeholder involvement and integration of any new biological findings prior to any future management proposals. Meeting The Dec. 14 meeting was also supposed to address the Upland Game Bird Enhancement Program Strategic Plan, but FWP decided to extend the comment deadline on the plan to Dec. 30. That will push commission action back. Likewise, the commission was set to review black bear hunting regulations at its December meeting, but that has been delayed until February. The change provides additional time for FWP to assess potential commission amendments to the FWPs proposed black bear regulations, which have included statewide changes, the agency stated. For a full agenda, background on the scheduled topics and public comments, go to the Fish and Wildlife Commission page on the FWP website. Prior to the Dec. 14 meeting, the commission will meet on Dec. 13 at 6 p.m. to review Montana open meeting and public record laws. This training session was suggested by the commission as part of a recent settlement agreement with wolf advocates. The meeting will have no action items and no public comment. It will, however, be streamed live on the Fish and Wildlife Commission page. BISBEE, Ariz. (AP) MJ was a tiny, black-haired girl, just 5 years old, when her father admitted to his bishop that he was sexually abusing her. The father, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and an admitted pornography addict, was in counseling with his bishop when he revealed the abuse. The bishop, who was also a family physician, followed church policy and called what church officials have dubbed the "help line" for guidance. But the call offered little help for MJ. Lawyers for the church, widely known as the Mormon church, who staff the help line around the clock told Bishop John Herrod not to call police or child welfare officials. Instead he kept the abuse secret. "They said, 'You absolutely can do nothing,'" Herrod said in a recorded interview with law enforcement. Herrod continued to counsel MJ's father, Paul Douglas Adams, for another year, and brought in Adams' wife, Leizza Adams, in hopes she would do something to protect the children. She didn't. Herrod later told a second bishop, who also kept the matter secret after consulting with church officials who maintain that the bishops were excused from reporting the abuse to police under the state's so-called clergy-penitent privilege. Adams continued raping MJ for as many as seven more years, into her adolescence, and also abused her infant sister, who was born during that time. He frequently recorded the abuse on video and posted the video on the internet. Adams was finally arrested by Homeland Security agents in 2017 with no help from the church, after law enforcement officials in New Zealand discovered one of the videos. He died by suicide in custody before he could stand trial. The Associated Press has obtained nearly 12,000 pages of sealed records from an unrelated child sex abuse lawsuit against the Mormon church in West Virginia. The documents offer the most detailed and comprehensive look yet at the so-called help line Herrod called. Families of survivors who filed the lawsuit said they show it's part of a system that can easily be misused by church leaders to divert abuse accusations away from law enforcement and instead to church attorneys who may bury the problem, leaving victims in harm's way. The help line has been criticized by abuse victims and their attorneys for being inadequate to quickly stop abuse and protect victims. Yet the Utah-based faith has stuck by the system despite the criticism and increasing scrutiny from attorneys and prosecutors, including those in the Adams case. "'I just think that the Mormon church really sucks. Seriously sucks," said MJ, who is now 16, during an interview with the AP. "They are just the worst type of people, from what I've experienced and what other people have also experienced." MJ and her adoptive mother asked the AP to use only her initials in part because videos of her abuse posted by her father are still circulating on the internet. The AP does not publish the names of sexual abuse survivors without their consent. William Maledon, an Arizona attorney representing the bishops and the church in a lawsuit filed by three of the Adams' six children, told the AP last month that the bishops were not required to report the abuse. "These bishops did nothing wrong. They didn't violate the law, and therefore they can't be held liable," he said. Maledon referred to the suit as "a money grab." In his AP interview, Maledon also insisted Herrod did not know that Adams was continuing to sexually assault his daughter after learning of the abuse in a single counseling session. But in the recorded interview with the agent obtained by the AP, Herrod said he asked Leizza Adams in multiple sessions if the abuse was ongoing and asked her, "What are we going to do to stop it?" "At least for a period of time I assumed they had stopped things, but and then I never asked if they picked up again." *** 'THE PERFECT LIFESTYLE' The Adams family lived on a lonely dirt road about 8 miles from the center of Bisbee, an old copper-mining town in southeastern Arizona known today for its antique shops and laid-back attitude. Far from prying eyes, the Adams home a three-bedroom, open concept affair surrounded by desert was often littered with piles of clothing and containers of lubricant Adams used to sexually abuse his children, according to legal documents reviewed by the AP. Paul's wife, Leizza, assumed most of the child-rearing responsibilities, including getting their six children off to school and chauffeuring them to church and religious instruction on Sundays. Paul, who worked for the U.S. Border Patrol, spent much of his time online looking at porn, often with his children watching, or wandering the house naked or in nothing but his underwear. He had a short fuse and would frequently throw things, yell at his wife and beat his kids. "He just had this explosive personality," said Shaunice Warr, a Border Patrol agent and a Mormon who worked with Paul and described herself as Leizza's best friend. "He had a horrible temper." Paul was more relaxed while coaxing his older daughter to hold a smartphone camera and record him while he sexually abused her. He also seemed to revel in the abuse in online chat rooms, where he once bragged that he had "the perfect lifestyle" because he could have sex with his daughters whenever he pleased, while his wife knew and "doesn't care." He would later tell investigators the abuse was a compulsion he couldn't stop. "I got into something too deep that I just couldn't pull myself out of," he said. "I'm not trying to say the devil made me do it." The Adams family was deeply involved in the Mormon community, and on Sundays they attended services in Bisbee. So Adams turned to his church, and to Bishop Herrod, when he sought help and revealed his abuse of MJ. Herrod later told Homeland Security agent Robert Edwards he knew from the start that Leizza Adams was unlikely to stop her husband, after he called her into the counseling sessions. The bishop, who was also Leizza's personal physician, said she seemed "pretty emotionally dead" when her husband recounted his abuse of their daughter. The bishop also recognized the harm being done to MJ. "I doubt (she) will ever do well," he said in his recorded interview with Homeland Security agents. Herrod also told Edwards that when he called the help line, church officials told him the state's clergy-penitent privilege required him to keep Adams's abuse confidential. But the law required no such thing. Arizona's child sex abuse reporting law, and similar laws in more than 20 states that require clergy to report child sex abuse and neglect, says that clergy, physicians, nurses, or anyone caring for a child who "reasonably believes" a child has been abused or neglected has a legal obligation to report the information to police or the state Department of Child Safety. But it also says that clergy who receive information about child neglect or sexual abuse during spiritual confessions "may withhold" that information from authorities if the clergy determine it is "reasonable and necessary" under church doctrine. In 2012, when Herrod rotated out of his position as bishop of the Bisbee ward a Mormon jurisdiction similar to a Catholic parish he told incoming Bishop Robert "Kim" Mauzy about the abuse in the Adams household. Instead of rescuing MJ by reporting the abuse to authorities, Mauzy also kept the information within the church. In a separate recorded interview with federal agents obtained by the AP, Mauzy said church officials told him he should convene a confidential disciplinary hearing for Adams, after which Adams was ex-communicated in 2013. Mauzy and other church leaders still didn't report Adams to the police. Two years later, in 2015, Leizza Adams gave birth to a second daughter. It took her husband just six weeks to start sexually assaulting her, recording the abuse, and uploading the videos to the internet. The revelation that Mormon officials may have directed an effort to conceal years of abuse in the Adams household sparked a criminal investigation of the church by Cochise County Attorney Brian McIntyre, and the civil lawsuit by three of the Adams children. "Who's really responsible for Herrod not disclosing?" McIntyre asked in an AP interview. "Is it Herrod," who says he followed the church lawyers' instruction not to report the abuse to authorities? "Or is it the people who gave him that advice?" *** 'THE CALL COMES TO MY CELL PHONE' When it comes to child sexual abuse, the Mormon church says "the first responsibility of the church in abuse cases is to help those who have been abused and protect those who may be vulnerable to future abuse," according to its 2010 handbook for church leaders. The handbook also says, "Abuse cannot be tolerated in any form." But church officials, from the bishops in the Bisbee ward to officials in Salt Lake City, tolerated abuse in the Adams family for years. "They just let it keep happening," said MJ, in her AP interview. "They just said, 'Hey, let's excommunicate her father.' It didn't stop. 'Let's have them do therapy.' It didn't stop. 'Hey, let's forgive and forget and all this will go away.' It didn't go away." A similar dynamic played out in West Virginia, where church leaders were accused of covering up the crimes committed by a young abuser from a prominent Mormon family even after he'd been convicted on child sex abuse charges in Utah. The abuser, Michael Jensen, today is serving a 35- to 75-year prison sentence for abusing two children in West Virginia. Their family, along with others, sued the church and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. "Child abuse festers and grows in secrecy," said Lynne Cadigan, a lawyer for the Adams children who filed suit. "That is why the mandatory reporting came into effect. It's the most important thing in the world to immediately report to the police." The lawsuit filed by the three Adams children accuses The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and several members, including Bishops Herrod and Mauzy, of negligence and conspiring to cover up child sex abuse to avoid "costly lawsuits" and protect the reputation of the church, which relies on proselytizing and tithing to attract new members and raise money. In 2020, the church claimed approximately 16 million members worldwide, most of them living outside the United States. "The failure to prevent or report abuse was part of the policy of the defendants, which was to block public disclosure to avoid scandals, to avoid the disclosure of their tolerance of child sexual molestation and assault, to preserve a false appearance of propriety, and to avoid investigation and action by public authority, including law enforcement," the suit alleges. "Plaintiffs are informed and believe that such actions were motivated by a desire to protect the reputation of the defendants." Very few of the scores of lawsuits against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mention the help line, in part because details of its operations have been a closely guarded secret. The documents in the sealed court records show how it works. "The help line is certainly there to help to help the church keep its secrets and to cover up abuse," said Craig Vernon, an Idaho attorney who has filed several sex abuse lawsuits against the church. Vernon, a former member, routinely demands that the church require bishops to report sex abuse to police or state authorities rather than the help line. The sealed records say calls to the help line are answered by social workers or professional counselors who determine whether the information they receive is serious enough to be referred to an attorney with Kirton McConkie, a Salt Lake City firm that represents the church. A document with the heading "Protocol for abuse help line calls," which was among the sealed records obtained by the AP, laid out the questions social workers were to ask before determining whether the calls should be referred to the lawyers. Mormon officials in the West Virginia case said they did not recognize the Protocol and could not authenticate it. But a ranking church official in a separate sex abuse lawsuit in Oregon confirmed that those answering the help line used a "written protocol" to guide them. "There would be a page containing various topics to discuss and handle," said Harold C. Brown, then director of the church's Welfare Services Department. The Protocol instructs those staffing the help line to tell callers they are to use first names only. "No identifying information should be given." Under the heading "High Risk Cases," it also instructs staffers to ask a series of questions, including whether calls concerned possible abuse by a church leader, an employee, or abuse at "a church-sponsored activity." The protocol advises those taking the calls to instruct a "priesthood leader," which includes bishops and stake presidents, to encourage the perpetrator, the victim, or others who know of the abuse to report it. But it also says, in capital letters, that those taking the calls "should never advise a priesthood leader to report abuse. Counsel of this nature should come only from legal counsel." That counsel comes from attorneys from Kirton McConkie, which represents the church. Joseph Osmond, one of the Kirton McConkie lawyers assigned to take help line calls, said in a sealed deposition that he's always ready to deal with sex abuse complaints. "Wherever I am. The call comes to my cell phone," he said. He then acknowledged that he did not refer calls to a social worker and wouldn't know how to do so. Osmond declined to comment through church officials. Peter Schofield, a Kirton McConkie lawyer long associated with the help line, also declined to answer questions from the AP. Maledon, the attorney for the church in the Adams lawsuit, said church clergy or church attorneys have made "hundreds of reports" of child abuse to civil authorities in Arizona over an unspecified number of years. But he could not say how many calls to the help line were not referred to police or child welfare officials and could not provide a referral rate. Two church practices, identified in the sealed records, work together to ensure that the contents of all help lines calls remain confidential. First, all records of calls to the help line are routinely destroyed. "Those notes are destroyed by the end of every day," said Roger Van Komen, the church's director of Family Services, in an affidavit included in the sealed records. Second, church officials say that all calls referred to Kirton McConkie lawyers are covered by attorney-client privilege and remain out of the reach of prosecutors and victims' attorneys. "The church has always regarded those communications between its lawyers and local leaders as attorney-client privileged," said Paul Rytting, the director of Risk Management, in a sealed affidavit. *** AN OMINOUS TIME Mormon leaders established the help line in 1995 and it operated not within its Department of Family Services, but instead in its Office of Risk Management, whose role is to protect the church and members from injury and liability in an array of circumstances, including fires, explosions, hazardous chemical spills and severe weather. The department ultimately reports to the First Presidency, the three officials at the very top of the church hierarchy, according to records in the sealed documents. Risk management also tracks all sex abuse lawsuits against the church, according to a sealed affidavit by Dwayne Liddell, a past director of the department who helped establish the help line. He said members of the church's First Presidency knew the details of the help line. "I have been in those type of meetings where ... the training of ecclesiastical leaders (and) the establishment of a help line have been discussed," Liddell said. When asked who attended the meetings, he answered, "Members of the First Presidency and the presiding bishopric," or the top leaders of the church. Before establishing the help line in 1995, the Mormon church simply instructed bishops to comply with local child sex abuse reporting laws. At the time, child sex abuse lawsuits were on the rise and juries were awarding victims millions of dollars. The Mormon church is largely self-insured, leaving it especially vulnerable to costly lawsuits. "There is nothing inconsistent between identifying cases that may pose litigation risks to the church and complying with reporting obligations," church lawyers said in a sealed legal filing. But one affidavit in the sealed records which repeatedly says the church condemns child sexual abuse, also suggests the church is more concerned about the spiritual well-being of perpetrators than the physical and emotional well-being of young victims, who also may be members of the faith. "Disciplinary proceedings are subject to the highest confidentiality possible," said Rytting. "If members had any concerns that their disciplinary files could be read by a secular judge or attorneys or be presented to a jury as evidence in a public trial, their willingness to confess and repent and for their souls to be saved would be seriously compromised." *** A GLOBAL INVESTIGATION In 2016 police in New Zealand arrested a 47-year-old farm worker on child pornography charges and found a nine-minute video on his cell phone, downloaded from the internet, showing a man in his 30s raping a 10-year-old girl. A global search for the rapist and his victim was on. It started with Interpol and led to the U.S. State Department, where investigators using facial recognition technology matched the rapist with a passport card photo of a U.S. Border Patrol employee living in Bisbee, Arizona, according to a Homeland Security synopsis obtained by the AP. Agents rushed to the Naco, Arizona, Border Station and arrested Adams, then a lanky, bearded mission support specialist with the Border Patrol. After some coaxing, Adams admitted to raping MJ and to sexually assaulting her younger sister, and to posting video of the assaults on the internet. When agents raided his home, they seized phones and computers holding more than 4,000 photos and nearly 1,000 videos depicting child sex abuse, many featuring the Adams daughters. But the nine-minute video stood out. "This video is one of the worst I've ever seen," Homeland Security agent Edwards later testified, adding that haunting dialogue between Adams and his older daughter helped make the video "stand out in my mind and continue to stand out in my mind." That video represented nine minutes and 14 seconds in seven years of continual and unnecessary trauma for MJ and a lifetime of abuse for her tiny sister while Bishops Herrod and Mauzy and church representatives in Salt Lake City stood by. After Paul Adams died by suicide, Leizza Adams pleaded no contest to child sex abuse charges and served two-and-a-half years in state prison. Three of the Adams children went to live with members of Leizza's extended family in California. The other three were taken in by local families. *** THE SURVIVORS MJ's little sister was only 2 when she met her adoptive mother for the first time. The toddler wrapped her arms and legs around Miranda Whitworth's head, buried her face in her neck, and refused to look up to say good-bye to members of Leizza's family. "It was the craziest thing," said Whitworth who, with her husband, Matthew, welcomed the toddler into their family. "It was like when you see a baby monkey or baby gorilla cling to their mother, and they just won't let go." Over the next few days and weeks, the Whitworths would see additional markers of the unfathomable abuse the toddler endured at the hands of her father much of it recorded on video. She would howl in terror when any man attempted to touch her, whether it was Matthew or the family physician. "The nurse was fine but the minute the doctor walked in she climbed onto me and started screaming bloody murder," Miranda said. The 2-year-old was also terrified of the water, which made bathing an ear-splitting ordeal. She wouldn't tolerate anything wrapped around her wrists. And at church, she would run and hide behind Miranda whenever anyone greeted her by an old family nickname. When they took in the toddler, neither Miranda nor Matthew knew very much about what had happened to her. But while sitting in on Leizza Adams's sentencing hearing, they learned about the repeated rapes, the videos, and the fact that church bishops knew about the abuse of the older daughter and did nothing to stop it. The Whitworths were converts to the Mormon faith and, like many new followers of a religion, they were especially enthusiastic about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In particular, they appreciated the efforts Mormons make to help fellow church members in times of need through church organizations established to give special attention to women, teens and children. "It's all about family," Miranda said. "That's one of the things we absolutely loved." But after learning about what Adams did to their new daughter, and the failure of the church to stop him, the scales fell from their eyes. "We decided to remove our records from the church," said Matthew Whitworth. "I personally couldn't continue to provide tithing money to a church that would allow young children to be abused and not do anything to prevent it." Unlike the Whitworths, Nancy Salminen has never been a member of the Mormon church. But as a special needs teacher and a rape victim herself, she has a special affinity for MJ and others like her. Over the last five years, she has opened her home to 17 girls and boys who needed a safe place to stay. Her house is a modest, ranch-style structure she bought out of foreclosure. "Everything's a little broken here and that's perfect because so are we," she said. Salminen said she met MJ after receiving an urgent call on a Friday evening to rescue a 12-year-old from another family. "She was pretty scared and pretty confused when I picked her up," Salminen recalled. "She spent a lot of time in her closet in her room when we got home, but we got to know each other and got to like each other." Like the Whitworths, Salminen knew very little about what MJ had endured until Leizza Adams's sentencing hearing. "What I heard made me want to throw up," she said. "And the more I learned the more I wanted to help her fight this fight that she didn't even know about." Safely settled in Salminen's household which today includes a foster girl Salminen also plans to adopt MJ has been transformed from a victim of unimaginable abuse to a bubbly 16-year-old who plays in the high school band and proudly dons a crisp, new uniform for her job at a fast-food restaurant. "She had every excuse to fail and to just fold into herself and run away," Salminen said. "But instead, she came back stronger than anyone I've ever known." So strong that she appears eager to play an active role in the battle she and her two siblings are waging against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "I just want them to do what they're supposed to do and report to the police," MJ said. The adoptive parents of the third Adams child who has filed suit declined to speak to the AP about the case. Like MJ, Miranda and Matthew Whitworth said they joined the lawsuit against the church on behalf of their young daughter not in hopes of a payday, but to change church policy so that any instance of child sexual abuse is immediately reported to civil authorities. "We just don't understand why they're paying all these lawyers to fight this," Matthew Whitworth said. "Just change the policy." *** THE PRIVILEGE That policy is the key to the church's defense. In a recent filing asking a Superior Court judge to dismiss the case, Maledon and other lawyers for the church said the case "hinges entirely on whether Arizona's child abuse reporting statute required two church bishops ... to report to authorities confidential confessions made to them by plaintiffs' father." Whatever moral or public policy arguments one could make that the church should have told authorities that Paul Adams was raping his daughters are irrelevant, the lawyers argued. "Arizona's reporting statute broadly exempts confidential communications with clergy, as determined by the clergyman himself," according to the church motion to dismiss the case. "Reasonable people can debate whether this is the best public policy choice. But that is not an issue for a jury or this court." Bishop Herrod, in his recorded interview, said church officials told him he had to keep what Adams told him confidential or he could be sued if he went to authorities. But McIntyre, the Cochise County attorney, said that's false, noting the Arizona reporting law says that anyone reporting a belief that child sex abuse occurred "is immune from any civil or criminal liability." Aside from the legal arguments over whether Bishops Herrod and Mauzy were excused from their reporting obligations under the clergy-penitent privilege, critics of the inaction by the two bishops and the broader church have raised ethical issues. Gerard Moretz, a seasoned child sex abuse investigator for the Pima County, Arizona, Sheriff's Department and an expert witness for the Adams children, is one of them. "What aspect of your religious practice are you advancing if you don't report something like this?" he asked. A pair of men accused of drive-by shootings that authorities say caused thousands of dollars in damage to a residence and two businesses in Bismarck have pleaded not guilty. Marcus Johnson, 21 of Mandan, and Elijah Infante, 20, of Bismarck, were charged with conspiracy to commit criminal mischief and reckless endangerment after allegedly firing a .22-caliber rifle at businesses and a home inside Bismarck city limits during the weekend of Oct. 13-15. The charges accompany those previously filed for similar crimes alleged to have occurred in a number of residential areas north of city limits during the same time frame. Infante and Johnson each faces a total of 11 charges carrying maximum sentences of five years imprisonment. Each also faces an additional misdemeanor count with a maximum sentence of nearly a year in jail. They remain in custody on $50,000 cash bonds. Trials for each on the charges stemming from the alleged incidents inside Bismarck city limits are set for Feb. 27. Trials regarding the incidents occurring outside city limits are set for Feb. 13. They pleaded not guilty to those charges late last month. Authorities accuse the pair of driving through a number of neighborhoods while firing a rifle at homes and vehicles. Investigators determined more than two dozen rounds struck homes and vehicles in the Ridgeland Drive area as well as the Harvest Grove, Whispering Woods and Ashwood subdivisions. Those neighborhoods are north of state Highway 1804 and west of U.S. Highway 83. No injuries were reported, but more than one home was occupied at the time, and a police affidavit states one round entered a bedroom and missed a sleeping child by roughly 3 feet. Deltex Medical updated the market on its commercial progress on Monday and on recent changes to its board, including the appointment of a new non-executive director. The AIM-traded firm said that over the past three months, in-hospital testing of the new TrueVue monitor had proceeded smoothly, garnering positive feedback and confirming its performance to be equivalent or superior to the existing device. It completed its first sale of the new TrueVue monitor by the end of November and received initial orders expected to be fulfilled in the coming months. Following the in-hospital testing phase, minor enhancements were made to the device, and component deliveries were scheduled for the upcoming weeks. Deltex Medical expected a solid start to the new year as larger quantities of the new TrueVue monitor were prepared for shipment. Additionally, as reported in its interim results on 18 September, Deltex successfully executed its restructuring plan, removing around 1m from its cost base. Deltex Medical also announced Benjamin Edward Carswell as a non-executive director, effective 1 December. It said Carswell would bring a wealth of experience in commercialising software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, having worked with start-ups and established businesses. Currently a non-board director at Kraken Technologies within the Octopus Energy Group, he previously served as chief commercial officer at DPR and held senior positions at Fiserv and MoPowered. Furthermore, in line with the companys efforts to realise cost savings, Deltex had decided to reduce the number of directors on its board. As a result, Julian Cazalet, Mark Wippell, and Professor Tim Irish had stepped down from their positions as non-executive directors, effective from 1 December. In light of the changes, Chris Jones, an existing non-executive director, would assume the role of senior independent non-executive director. I am very pleased to welcome Ben to the board of Deltex Medical, said chairman Nigel Keen. His extensive experience, which includes holding leadership roles in blue chip organisations, establishing international alliances and operations, implementing turn-around strategies, and launching products and services, will be a great benefit to the company going forward. The board would like to offer our sincere gratitude to Julian Cazalet, Mark Wippell and Professor Tim Irish for their unequivocable support over the past years and in particular, their instrumental support during the most recent fundraising and broader restructuring. At 1147 GMT, shares in Deltex Medical Group were up 16.26% at 0.18p. Reporting by Josh White for Sharecast.com. Kennedy (1983): Part 1 Martin Sheen is trying too hard to play JFK! Hes 5 6 while JFK was 6 1 which makes him significantly shorter than the real JFK! However, his voice mimic JFK's! I adore Martin Sheen, but his upper-mass accent sounds a little put-on. [Does anyone in New England still speak this way? Not exactly. Not like that. He didn't know how to do a Boston accent. ] [ list of all actors who have portrayed John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, over the years in movies and TV series? Who was the best? ChatGPT ChatGPT Numerous actors have portrayed John F. Kennedy in movies and TV series over the years. Here are some notable portrayals: Cliff Robertson: Portrayed JFK in "PT 109" (1963). Martin Sheen: Played Kennedy in the TV miniseries "Kennedy" (1983). William Petersen: Portrayed JFK in the miniseries "The Rat Pack" (1998). Bruce Greenwood: Played Kennedy in the film "Thirteen Days" (2000). Greg Kinnear: Portrayed JFK in the TV miniseries "The Kennedys" (2011) and its sequel "The Kennedys: After Camelot" (2017). James Marsden: Played JFK in "The Butler" (2013). Rob Lowe: Portrayed Kennedy in the TV movie "Killing Kennedy" (2013). Cas Anvar: Played JFK in "The Kennedys: After Camelot" (2017). Jeffrey Donovan: Portrayed JFK in "LBJ" (2016). The assessment of who was the "best" portrayal is subjective and often depends on personal preferences. Each actor brought their own interpretation and style to the role. Some viewers may prefer the historical accuracy of a portrayal, while others may appreciate the actor's performance and charisma. Ultimately, the "best" portrayal is a matter of individual opinion.] Saulo Magalhaes 77,059 views Sep 22, 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asryJ4_4v0o John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was born on May 29, 1917, and he was assassinated on November 22, 1963. Therefore, at the time of his death, JFK was 46 years old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng3fJi7U1NM&t=1708s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8OatV-AXnU&t=13s [@samanthafordyce5795] @samanthafordyce5795 7 months ago I stood in a snowbank up to my knees to watch JFK make his inaugural speech. It thrilled me then, and it still thrills me now. Regrettably, I also watched his funeral cortege in person just three short years later. 60 Reply 7 replies [@zuzannavee9558] @zuzannavee9558 3 months ago Excellent casting, who all recreated the feeling of the times, personalities, and challenges. I loved this production when it came out, and seeing it now still hits the perfect pitch. 6 Reply [@michellereed5638] @michellereed5638 3 months ago I was 9 months old, and my mother was folding laundry when she watched live on television Kennedy being shot to death in Dallas. This is how I found out about "who is John F. Kennedy?" She told me one day, when I asked about a picture of the brothers that hung in our home, it still does. Along with cards, letters from Esther Kennedy, and thank-you cards from the condolence cards my mother sent when, at different times, both of them were assassinated, I was curious about them as a child growing up and looking through this collection my mother had in a show box. I graduated from high school in 1981 and was given the "sanitized version" of US history. As an adult, I have had to "dig out the facts" about our country and find the real story of the Kennedy's on my own. This is the first time I am seeing this miniseries, as I was already, as a young adult, hard at workworking 4050 hours a week in a local ER after taking courses at a local community college. My last job in medicine after 17 years, was nursing. I was injured on the job and wound up on SSDI at age 36, frustrated. I have had lots of time to read, research, and study. I also volunteer, helping others as much as I can. From what I have seen so far, this pretty much goes along with what I found in my research. JFK is remembered as some type of saint. But in reality, he was a womanizer, cheated on his wife, and had pretty low morals. The family background comes from criminal activities to gain their wealth from being part of the IRISH MAFIA way back in the early days of Irish immigration. There was a lot of corruption in the police, regarding alcohol sales, early movie making, and some financial dealings with stock. As time went on the "Patriarch" of the family, Joseph, tried to go more legitimate by accepting government-type jobs, specifically an ambassadorship to London, England, in which he rubbed shoulders with the royal family and even met Winston Churchill. Even these things Joseph did did not change HIS lifestyle of running around and womanizing, a trait his son picked up from him. He pinned his hopes on John to someday become President. Hiding behind their religion to cover up a host of sins does not excuse the behavior. Jackie Kennedy coped with this behavior by spending money on clothing and things as a diversion to her reality. She tried to rise about her husbands bedroom antics. It was a tough role for her, never being allowed to share with anyone the private nightmare she lived. Always being told to lift up her chin and accept it. "All the Kennedy women did." Now after all these years, I get a chance to watch this, thanks! I am now 60 years old! Show less 8 Reply 2 replies [@Stevie-hn7mp] @Stevie-hn7mp 3 months ago I am in awe with the Kennedy family. They have their faults but they are true American family Irish [] ? descendants of course . Love the cast . Thank you so much [] [] 4 Reply [@julietteyork6293] @julietteyork6293 3 weeks ago (edited) Martin Sheens accent and performance were spot on. 3 Reply [@angloaust1575] @angloaust1575 3 months ago Hoover had the power behind the scenes from 1924 to 1972 He saw presidents come and go! 2 Reply [@jonathanchartrand3351] @jonathanchartrand3351 8 months ago This is nothing more than an extended soap opera. 15 Reply 4 replies [@sluggzmcgee6272] @sluggzmcgee6272 4 months ago "Religious?! These people are bigots!" Did Joseph Kennedy just call somebody out for being a bigot?? LMFAO!!!! 10 Reply [@jannawalters232] @jannawalters232 3 months ago (edited) Oh no! That voice of Martin Sheen's was inaccurate of how the Kennedys sounded! Someone on here said it was like Elmer Fudd. True! Just starting to watch, looks good 1 Reply [@juanjosetorres7281] @juanjosetorres7281 5 months ago Podrias subirlas en espanol o con subtitulos espanol, graicias 1 Reply [@kennedymcgovern5413] @kennedymcgovern5413 4 months ago 34:10 This movie is beginning to annoy me with all of the pot shots at Nixon. Do you want to talk about having no class? Look no further. The reason Nixon had his press secretary deliver the concession is because he was pissed off, and he knew showing that was not good for the country. He was pissed off because he knew he won that election, and he knew Kennedy and his Daddy cheated. If we were exhibiting class, the writers of this movie would have just let that go, without the pot shots. Show less 8 Reply 5 replies [@hawaiiboylasvegas8342] @hawaiiboylasvegas8342 4 months ago Martin Sheen just looks like Martin Sheen trying too hard to play JFK! Hes 5 6 while JFK was 6 1 which makes him significantly shorter than the real JFK! 4 Reply 1 reply [@lindymcbroom953] @lindymcbroom953 10 months ago Eerie how Nixon H.Q. Was the Ambassador Hotel which was the RFK Headquarters for the California Primary in 68! 24 Reply [@sicks6six] @sicks6six 4 months ago (edited) Sheen is about as believable as JFK as Nixon's Watergate speech was, why is he pulling his accent like that, Do the Brookline, Massachusetts elite speak like that, No they don't. 43:50 is probably the best scene in the film, three men in a dark room only Hoover speaking, slowly., menacingly. . A lot of money was spent making this and it came out looking like a mid-week TV mini-series, did someone say it is. . . could/should have been much better, the Kennedy family story and JFK, in particular, is what made America great, the rot set in the day he died, IMO, [] Show less 1 Reply 1 reply [@muhammadmiah9021] @muhammadmiah9021 2 months ago Kennedy a. Great man 2 Reply [@kennedymcgovern5413] @kennedymcgovern5413 4 months ago Listen, I am no saint. I understand that the rules were made by people who already have what you want, and do not want you to have any of it. I know that if you want to accomplish anything, the rules are on your list of opponents. So we choose our risks and we make our bets. If you play it straight, there is little risk but you probably won't become President of the United States by your early 40s. If you play it dirty and get in bed with the wrong people, you will certainly get ahead and be pushed to the front of the line. But those people may turn on you and you may not come home from Dallas. We choose our risks. We make our bets. Sometimes we lose. What has always amused me is the way everyone seems to need t treat JFK and his brother like they were a couple of saints. I do not think they were evil, but I KNOW They weren't saints. They are just two guys who made the wrong bets and came up short. I neither celebrate their deaths, nor cry for them. Now Teddy...Teddy was evil. I believe that the real curse on the Kennedy family is in the part where he is the one that lived to old age. But that is another topic. Show less 9 Reply 4 replies [@jamesgordon2255] @jamesgordon2255 1 month ago Would you buy ice cream from a guy that looked like Nixon?! 1 Reply [@angloaust1575] @angloaust1575 3 months ago One of his favourite poems was Alan seegers I have a Rendezvous with death! 1 Reply [@marvinabigby5509] @marvinabigby5509 5 months ago (edited) Hoover worried about another mans sex lives 7 Reply [@deborahgolias5666] @deborahgolias5666 4 months ago Blair Brown was a good Jackie 4 Reply 1 reply [@lutherjennings6565] @lutherjennings6565 5 months ago On Nov 22nd 1963. Was Bobby Kennedy really sitting by his pool in bathrobe when he got the news of JFK shooting? It was a warm day. But not that warm! 7 Reply [@doginu] @doginu 4 months ago I was waiting for Leslie Nielsen to walk down th aisle.. 3 Reply [@marvinabigby5509] @marvinabigby5509 5 months ago Rose seemed softer in this version 2 Reply [@thorstenbuechner9227] @thorstenbuechner9227 7 months ago I adore Martin Sheen, but his Upper Mass Accent sounds a little put on. Does anyone in New England still speak this way? In the recent elections for the 2024-25 biennium at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) assembly, India secured its re-election to the IMO council, receiving the highest number of votes. The Ministry of Shipping and Waterways announced this achievement, placing India among the top 10 states with "the largest interest in international seaborne trade". Other countries in this category include Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the UAE. The IMO council, serving as the executive organ of the IMO, is tasked with supervising the organization's activities under the assembly's authority. During intervals between assembly sessions, the council handles its functions, excluding the ability to make recommendations to governments on maritime safety and pollution prevention. Sarbananda Sonowal, the Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, expressed gratitude for the international community's support, emphasizing that the substantial votes reflect the government's commitment to strengthening India's contributions to global maritime operations. Highlighting the IMO's crucial role as the principal authority regulating the maritime industry , an official from the ministry underscored its significance in supporting worldwide trade, transportation, and marine activities. The ministry also disclosed India's strategic goals under the MIV 2030, aiming to bolster representation at the IMO by appointing permanent representatives. Additionally, the proposal suggests nominating at least two qualified candidates for the Junior Professional Officer (JPO) Programme at the IMO to enhance India's maritime expertise. The JPO Programme, established within the United Nations, seeks to provide young professionals with hands-on experience in international cooperation under the guidance of specialists, contributing to the advancement of their respective nations mand The last few years have been tumultuous, marked by flux like never before. Numerous trends are emanating that are reshaping workplace dynamics, such as disparities between high- and low-skill jobs, income inequalities, a desire for greater purpose and work-life balance, and much more. The advent of newer technologies, use of automation-enabled tech (such as robotics and Artificial Intelligence), and accelerated digital transformation has brought with it the promise of higher productivity, improved efficiencies, and greater convenience. But it leaves in its wake greater questions as well, for policymakers, business leaders, and workers themselves; what impact will this have on the skills needed tomorrow? How will this influence talent retention and attrition, with concerns raised over moonlighting? And perhaps most importantly, what will the future of work look like? The IT/ITES edition of Most Preferred Workplace 2023-24, held on 29th November in Mumbai, looked to answer these very questions and lauded organisations that have dared to create differentiated experiences that sets them apart from peers, and been all the better for it. At this exclusive industry platform, brought to you by Team Marksmen Network and powered by Marksmen Daily, an array of industry experts and leaders took centre-stage to shed light on how to lead the way on creating a workplace that inspires, and to be at the vanguard of change. The speaker line-up included such industry experts as Rajat Raheja (Divisional President, Amdocs India); Anand Dhruv (Associate Director - HR, Head Talent Development & Early Careers, NTT Limited); Chithra Arun (Senior Director - HR Partner Leader, Capgemini); Loly Vadassery (CHRO, Datamatics Business Solutions Limited); M. Lakshmanan, CHRO, L&T Technology Services; Pravin Sawant, Sr. Vice President & CHRO, 63 moons technologies limited; Sahil Nayar, Senior Associate Director, KPMG in India; Srinivas Pindi, Executive Director HR & TA, Phenom; Amit Kumar, Product Manager India Market, Phenom; and Shri. Sumnesh Joshi, Deputy Director General (Joint Secretary Level), Ministry of Communications and IT, Government of India. The event was also witness to an exclusive industry recognition ceremony that have made creative use of various levers to deploy talent dynamically and to build a world-class workplace that is a strategic differentiator. This unique research-based initiative was shaped by insights gleaned from an industry-wide consumer study conducted by LeadCap Ventures. Those recognised in a glittering recognition ceremony included: 63 moons technologies limited AB INBEV GCC SERVICES INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED Amdocs Capgemini Cross Identity Equiniti India Foundever India Innodata India Pvt. Ltd. L&T Technology Services Phenom R Systems Redington Limited Sonata Software Limited Torry Harris Integration Solutions Xoriant Solutions Pvt Ltd Offering his thoughts on the sidelines of the event, Rajesh Khubchandani, Co-Founder and CEO, Team Marksmen Network, said, If your organisation is a finely tuned race car, its culture and employee engagement is the fuel on which it runs. As a result, it doesnt matter if your organisation is a Ferrari; if you are continuously filling it with low-octane petrol, it will sputter off the line, develop costly and recurring maintenance issues, and, eventually, end up in the junkyard. Simply, cultural challenges can be at the root of every issue that your organisation encounters, including productivity, safety, quality, maintenance, human resources, and financial performance, because it is the foundation on which everything else sits. Getting that right ensures your organisation fires on all cylinders, and those recognised as a Most Preferred Workplace 2023-24 have left no stone unturned to ensure the engine of their organisational machinery is capable of going full throttle at will. We hope their example inspires others. This industry-centric platform was conceptualised and executed by Team Marksmen, who leverage an array of formats, such as Roundtables, Summits & Conferences, Workshops, and Recognition Ceremonies, the organisation empowers industry leaders by providing them with insights, ideas, and opportunities that fit their unique industry and context. Team Marksmen has successfully executed more than 30 events with 300+ domestic and international B2B and B2C brands, helping businesses across industries create opportunities to engage audiences through on-ground and virtual experiences. Through content shared via its flagship daily news website, Marksmen Daily, and quarterly print magazine in Focus focused on business, leadership, and lifestyle, they help advance the practice of management. Their latest venture, Marksmen Media, is a comprehensive digital marketing agency that helps brands craft bespoke success strategies. To know more about the event and other such unique initiatives, write to us at contact@teammarksmen.com The upcoming Global Bio-India (GBI) 2023, scheduled from December 4th to 6th in New Delhi, aims to serve as a significant platform uniting major industries, biotech stakeholders, investors, and startups for networking opportunities. The central theme for this third edition is "Transforming Lives: Biosciences to Bioeconomy". Organized by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST), Government of India, in collaboration with the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), a PSU, the event will also feature a public session titled "Science Connect Series with Society". This session will host global experts from healthcare, AI, and life sciences domains. Dr. Jitendra Kumar, Managing Director at BIRAC, highlighted that the upcoming third edition of Global Bio-India presents an excellent opportunity to showcase India's biotechnology sector to the global community. The event aims to identify prospects, address challenges, and foster collaborations within the biotech industry. With participation expected from over 30 countries, a strong presence of innovators and startups is anticipated. Specific pavilions will be dedicated to incubators, state representations and startups, including a themed pavilion featuring successful BIRAC startups He also mentioned that the summit will host CEO Roundtables involving multinational companies from biopharma, medtech, diagnostics, industrial biotech, and bio-agri sectors. Discussions will focus on national and global regulatory trends, with sessions dedicated to biomanufacturing and the biotech innovation ecosystem. The event will facilitate interactions between academia and industry, engaging major industry associations, investor groups, and global entrepreneurship organizations through debates, dialogues, and audience interactions. The event will showcase over 300 exhibits by successful Biotech Startups/SMEs, more than a hundred biotech incubation centers, and the participation of 30 large industries and services CROs. Ten states will be actively promoting their biotech policies. Additionally, more than 25 universities and research institutions, along with over 40 startups, will have opportunities to engage with potential investors. Park+, the car care services startup, aims to reach profitability in the January-March 2024 quarter and anticipates ending the current fiscal year with revenue surpassing Rs 200 crore, as confirmed by a senior company executive. Supported by Epiq Capital, Park+'s Founder & CEO, Amit Lakhotia, revealed that the company currently serves approximately 30 cities and has ambitious intentions to extend its presence to more than 100 cities by 2024. The startup , having raised $55 million thus far, aims to provide a wide array of car-related services to car owners via its platform. Lakhotia stressed that Park+ offers parking, car cleaning, and repair services through its app, envisioning a scenario where one in every four cars in India utilizes Park+. Presently available at more than 7,000 locations across 30 cities, the company foresees revenue of Rs 200 crore in the ongoing fiscal year. We anticipate achieving our first year of profitability in the coming financial year, Lakhotia remarked. Although Park+ experienced a loss of around Rs 99 crore and generated revenue of Rs 103 crore in the fiscal year 2022-23, the company aims to become profitable in the upcoming fiscal year. Park+ specializes in installing automatic gate barriers for car entry and exit in societies and commercial buildings. It also provides car cleaning, finance, FASTag, and other services tailored to car owners' needs. Lakhotia detailed plans for expanding services further, including roadside assistance, insurance, electric vehicle charging, and connected car services. The company is observing heightened demand in smaller cities, with Lakhotia highlighting the aspirations of residents in such towns as a driving factor behind Park+'s geographic expansion. Commercial real estate partners are beginning to bundle the company's services in cities where they operate. Presently, Park+ has a workforce of over 700 individuals and anticipates hiring an additional 300-400 employees to support its expansion. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. A veteran paramedic, who served Staten Islanders for three decades, died after midnight Sunday when he lost control of his motorcycle and struck a guardrail on the West Shore Expressway, authorities said. Graniteville resident James Barghaan worked as a paramedic for Richmond University Medical Center (RUMC) in West Brighton for 29 years, said his wife Angela Ciocia, who spoke to the Staten Island Advance/SILive.com about her husband. Barghaan was named EMT of the year in 1997. Ciocia, also a paramedic with RUMC, said her husband of 25 years was a fishing enthusiast who kept his boat dry docked during the off-season and was a member of a darts team that competed at Mother Pugs Saloon on Forest Avenue in Port Richmond. Barghaan also spent much of his downtime caring for and spending time with his two cherished Rottweilers, Wolfgang and Astrid. Barghaan, who had been riding a motorcycle since he was 18 years old, was traveling northbound aboard a 2020 Harley Davidson motorcycle when the crash occurred. FDNY and EMS responded to the scene after an emergency call was made at 1:37 a.m., an NYPD spokesperson told the Staten Island Advance/SILive.com. Barghaan is survived by a brother, two sisters, four nieces and nephews and five great nieces and nephews. The Emergency Medical Services Public Advocacy Council (EMSPAC) has established a GoFundMe page to help Barghaans family with funeral and other expenses. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. Borough President Vito Fossella congratulated local businessman Ramakrishna Cherukuri for being accepted as a member of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), on Thursday. Cherukuri who is also known as Ram is the President of New York Fragrance Inc., a fragrance, cosmetic and hair care wholesaler based in Bloomfield. In addition, Cherukuri has served on the Staten Island Economic Development Corporation, as well as the Staten Island University Hospital Board of Trustees and Staten Island Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors. In August, Fossella recommended Cherukuri to serve on NYCEDC, according to a press release. On Nov. 15th, Mayor Eric Adams approved the nomination. 03/11/2010 - Ram Cherukuri, of Todt Hill, began his fragrance business 23 years ago, from the back of his Dodge Ram. A year later, in 1987, he opened New York Fragrance in Port Richmond.Jan Somma-Hammel Ram Cherukuri epitomizes the American Dream. He came from India as a young man with $20 in his pocket. With his commitment to hard work, his family, and the community that he loves, Staten Island, he has demonstrated that anything is possible in this great country, said Fossella in a press statement. Ram maintains a great enthusiasm for business and making our City better. We are happy to play a role in this appointment. Fossella also said Cherukuri understands the importance of having a business-friendly government and can relate to the needs, challenges, and frustration shared by small business owners. In a thank you to the Borough President, Cherukuri said he intends to do what is best for Staten Island. Thank you very much, Vito Fossella, for trusting me and naming me to the Economic Development Corporation, said Cherukuri. Staten Island is a good place to live, and all of my dreams came true here. I will do the best for Staten Island. Cherukuri graduated from Wagner College with a Masters in Business Administration and a concentration in Finance and Marketing. Two roads brought Tom Zoufaly to a lifetime of collecting trains and train memorabilia. One was a childhood in Queens spent riding the subways every Saturday with friends. The other was the military service of his dad, Stanley, who served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during World War II. The elder Zoufaly never spoke of the war, but he did tell his son of the magnificent train that took him to San Francisco on his way to the Pacific theater: a Southern Pacific Daylight, which Tom Zoufaly calls one of the most beautiful steam engines ever built. Photos of collector Tom Zoufaly's father, Stanley and his father's best friend, Henry Weeks, are part of interior decorations of the restored former Golden's Deli subway car. In top photo, Stanley Zoufaly is at left with Weeks. (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance I always remember him telling me these stories about the ride, said Zoufaly, an art installer who has worked with Estee Lauder, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other top clients. An authentic Daylight caboose, built in 1929, is now part of Zoufalys vast collection of trains and train memorabilia at his home in Warwick, N.Y. Train enthusiast Tom Zoufaly's collection includes this Southern Pacific Daylight caboose, built in 1929. (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance Zoufaly lived in the caboose while his home was being built. These days, the train serves as the pool house on the property. Under-renovation interior of Southern Pacific Daylight caboose owned by collector Tom Zoufaly. (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance The Daylight name looms large for Zoufaly in other ways as well. When I bought the property, he said, I decided to name it The Daylight in honor of my dad, who passed away just before the caboose arrived. Authentic railroad crossing gate greets visitors at home of mass transit collector Tom Zoufaly. (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance Zoufaly also has jackets and hats that are branded with the Daylight moniker. Said Zoufaly, I thought my dad was the greatest man who ever lived. SUBWAY BOYHOOD Zoufaly lived near the Sunnyside train yards in Queens as a boy. He and his friends played on the tracks and were constant riders of the New York City subway system. The engineers and conductors got to know us and treated us like family, Zoufaly said, letting the kids play in the train yard and allowing them to duck under the turnstiles and ride the subway for free. Another of Zoufalys prized possessions is the old city subway car that used to sit inside Goldens Deli in New Springville. Zoufaly bought the dilapidated subway car for $15,000 and has fully restored it. But thats not the only piece of mass transit history that youll find on Zoufalys seven-acre property, which is part outdoor art installation and part playground, for adults as well as children. Vintage city bus owned by mass transit collector Tom Zoufaly. (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance Theres a city bus from 1969 similar to the one that Zoufaly rode to Monsignor McClancy Memorial High School in Queens, as well as an authentic 1895 San Francisco cable car. Vintage San Francisco cable car, built in 1895, is among mass transit collection belonging to Tom Zoufaly. (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance Theres also a working, kid-sized train and track, which is especially popular with Zoufalys six grandkids. Its a playground for them, Zoufaly said of his home. Working child-sized train at home of mass transit collector Tom Zoufaly in Warwick, N.Y. (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance ONLY CHEVYS Zoufalys collecting goes beyond trains. A garage on the property holds Zoufalys collection of classic Chevrolet cars, including a Series 490, built in 1922, which Zoufaly has nicknamed Penelope. Chevrolet Series 490 car, built in 1922, is part of Tom Zoufaly's collection of classic cars. (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance The car had been in storage for 80 years and includes all-original parts, down to the key and key case. Zoufalys collection also includes a turquoise 1962 Chevy Super Sport. Nicknamed Jellybean, the car had pinstriping work done by Vic Kessler, who did work for four-time Indy 500 winner Al Unser and others. Collector Tom Zoufaly with his 1962 Chevy Super Sport, nicknamed "Jellybean." (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance There are also two 1950s Chevy Bel Airs, nicknamed Augie and Eve, and a 1963 Nova, dubbed Novadose. Only Chevys, Zoufaly said of his car collection. I always liked Chevys. Some of the classic Chevy automobiles in the collection of Tom Zoufaly of Warwick, N.Y. (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance On a wall inside his home, Zoufaly has a mosaic tile from a Fifth Avenue subway stop, which he received from an older gent he met by chance and befriended years ago in the Bowery. Subway tile mosaic in home of subway enthusiast and collector Tom Zoufaly in Warwick, N.Y. (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance I enjoy talking to people, he said. I enjoy collecting. The mosaic tile is mounted on canvas and is not grouted, allowing it to be rolled up like a newspaper when it has to be moved. Zoufalys home is filled with fine art illustrations and collectibles, subway and otherwise, including his childhood lunchbox, featuring 1950s cowboy TV star Roy Rogers and wife Dale Evans. Vintage lunch box featuring Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. (Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance)Tom Wrobleski/Staten Island Advance Zoufaly has been collecting for his entire life and said that his childhood bedroom looked like an antique shop. My parents hated it, he said. Zoufaly said that Americans too often dont appreciate the past. Were all too quick to put in a new highway or faster elevators, he said. And we dont bother with the past. And nobody remembers it. He said, The stuff I collect is all about that. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. The New York News Publishers Association has again recognized the outstanding contributions of the 2023 Staten Island Advance/SILive.com staff. The latest recognition highlights the achievement of the Staten Island Advance/SILive.com staff in securing the Distinguished Community Service Award for their collaborative effort on the Pride and the Parade series. Tracey Porpora, editor/news manager of the Public Interest & Advocacy Team, served as the lead editor for the impactful project. In addition to editor Tracey Porpora, those who contributed to the coverage include: Lauren Lovallo, Kristin Dalton, Paul Liotta, Annalise Knudson, Eddie DAnna, Steve White, Jan Somma-Hammel, Jason Paderon, Mark Stein, Tom Wrobleski, Pamela Silvestri, Dr. Gracelyn Santos, Erik Bascome, Kyle Lawson and the Staten Island Advance/SILive.com Opinion Team. STATEN ISLANDS ST. PATRICKS PARADE In early March of 2020, just before the pandemic shut down large gatherings, the staff was covering what they thought would be the story of the year the controversy around the local St. Patricks Parade, an important annual tradition that is attended by thousands. The parade committee had again denied the Staten Island LGBTQ+ Pride Center from marching under its own banner, and a few local elected officials had decided not to march in protest. The reigning Miss Staten Island then came out as bisexual and was barred from the event. When the parade came back in 2022, the team was disappointed to see there was still a lack of change. The day after the 2022 parade, the newsroom staff committed themselves to a year-long project to shine a spotlight on people and institutions that are continuing to allow this exclusion of fellow Staten Islanders from a community event and to provide a bullhorn to those in the community who support inclusion, which the reporting has shown is the overwhelming majority of residents. In that year, the team sustained coverage over 12 months to keep the issue in the spotlight. They actively sought community perspectives, utilizing letters, social media engagement, and op-eds published during the spring and summer. The team conducted investigative reporting, delving into the citys support mechanisms, including funding and material assistance for the parade. A key focus was placed on the actions of the local community board, with an emphasis on the response, or lack thereof, from the Eric Adams administration. Additionally, a series of impactful editorials were published, rallying support for the Pride Center and advocating for decisive mayoral action. The team expanded its scope to review inclusion practices at St. Patricks parades in both the U.S. and Ireland, providing a broader context. In the lead-up to the 2023 parade, the team documented schools and groups intending to boycott the event in protest, amplifying the growing movement for change. Comprehensive coverage extended to The Pride Centers initiatives, capturing its efforts to instigate positive transformations within the community. While the 2023 Staten Island St. Patricks Parade was not inclusive of LGBTQ+ groups yet again this year, our year-long advocacy project to allow the Staten Island Pride Center and other LGBTQ+ groups to march under their own banner struck a chord with local public officials, who canceled their annual breakfast at Jodys Club Forest on the parade route because of the exclusion, said Porpora. The Staten Island Advance/SiLive.com team played a pivotal role in instigating positive change within the community through dedicated and purposeful journalism. The comprehensive reporting not only brought attention to systemic issues, but also served as a catalyst for transformative action. In addition, Mayor Eric Adams marched with the Pride Center at the Rainbow Run prior to the parade, and a peaceful protest was staged at the start of the parade route all after we covered every aspect of the exclusionary parade,' Porpora added. Im proud of all the reporters work that contributed to making a difference. I hope to continue this work until the parade committee allows LGBTQ+ groups to march in this celebration of Irish heritage. Support the Peninsulas only locally-owned newspaper. Subscribe! Subscribing annually brings you big savings. We also offer monthly and weekly subscriptions. Premium Subscription As low as $8.25 per month Premium Includes: Access to the Daily Journals e-Edition: a digital replica of our daily newspaper including crossword puzzles, games, comics, classifieds and ads. The ability to download a digital replica of the Daily Journal for offline reading. The ability to clip & download articles or images to share with others. Access to the last 90 days of e-Editions with search, downloading and clipping options. Unlimited access to our award-winning online content Commenting access on all stories as a valued member of the DJ community Here is Judith Krantz's greatest triumph--I'll Take Manhattan. In the high-stakes world of magazine publishing, she weaves a dazzling tale of love and betrayal, and creates her most joyous character--sensational Maxi, an uninhibited woman who unexpectedly discovers that her talent for life is matched by a hunger to succeed. Gorgeous, flamboyant Maxi Amberville is twenty-nine and has already discarded three husbands on two continents. Life is a stream of endless pleasure in her lavish Trump Tower apartment--until her widowed mother married a man who plots to sell her father's magazine empire. And Maxi turns her incredible lust for living into a passionate quest for power. Maxi takes over the small weekly Buttons And Bows. She gathers her hot-blooded ex-husband, sassy daughter and a coterie of the powerful elite. Then, risking all, Maxi creates B&B --the glitziest, ritziest, most successful fashion magazine in the country. Here is a dramatic, sizzling story of love, family, ambition and one unforgettable woman who gives life and love everything she has. What is the plot of the book I'll take Manhattan? Life is a stream of endless pleasure in her lavish Trump Tower apartmentuntil her widowed mother married a man who plots to sell her father's magazine empire. And Maxi turns her incredible lust for living into a passionate quest for power. Maxi takes over the small weekly Buttons And Bows. I'll Take Manhattan: Krantz, Judith - Amazon.com it's the adamsfield crest my mother gave it to me the night before the wedding she hopes it remind me of who i am what's up abandoned civilization she hopes it remind me of who i am what's up abandoned civilization it's beautiful and it's yours no your mother gave it to you no i want Part 2: 9:10 you've committed adultery you're pregnant by your brother-in-law how's that gonna sound in court 9:15 do you know what that scandal's gonna do to you to me i don't care i don't care i'm so happy 9:28 i know it's early but i feel life 9:33 oh i feel your life inside you 9:39 yes yes you're right you're right lily [Music] 9:46 we'll figure something out everything's gonna be fine 9:51 just fine 10:00 my daughter if i didn't love you so much i might be willing to destroy your life 10:06 just so we could be together but i can't do that to you so i must protect you from my love 10:13 which can only endanger you now are you ready for your lunch now oh i 10:20 think i'm ready for just about anything you have to offer 10:44 [Music] ** Argent (silver) - symbolizes the sincerity and peacefulness of Adams family members. Gules (red) - is considered 'the martyr's color', and represents the historic military strength of the Adams when needed. Or (Gold) - symbolizes the historical generosity of this ancient family.. Adams Family Crest | Expertly Researched | Buy Now 250 310 Search inside image ** I'll Take Manhattan is a 1987 American television miniseries, adapted from Judith Krantz's 1986 bonkbuster novel of the same name. Screened by CBS, it tells the story of the wealthy Amberville family, who run their own publishing company in New York. After Zachary Amberville, the patriarch of the family, dies, the company is taken over by his unscrupulous brother Cutter. Zachary's children, especially his energetic and intelligent daughter Maxi, begin a battle to regain control of their father's company. I'll Take Manhattan was the highest-rated miniseries of the 198687 US television season with a 22.9/35 rating/share.[1] Plot summary[edit] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfAQFu7RO6A Part 1[edit] Zachary 'Zach' Amberville (Barry Bostwick), a former fighter pilot and now successful businessman, falls in love with his employee Nina Stern (Jane Kaczmarek). However Nina prefers her career over marriage. Broken hearted, Zach leaves Manhattan for London, where he falls in love with aristocratic ballerina Lily Davina Adamsfield (Francesca Annis). After a failed audition, she agrees to marry Zach, and follows him to New York City. When Nina learns about this, she gets upset. Lily, meanwhile, settles as a housewife and gives birth to Zachary's child. She is worried that her ballet career is now nothing more than a hobby, and acts out by behaving as a spoiled rich wife, even being nicknamed 'The Ice Queen'. Her lack of interest in raising her children comes to notice with Zach, who feels that discipline is not the key factor in parenting. When their eldest son Toby (Tim Daly) is eight years old, he is diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, meaning that he will be blind one day. At a formal party, Zachary runs into his younger brother Cutter (Perry King), who is both charismatic and immature. In the past, he did not contact the family unless he needed money and so Zachary is immediately wary of Cutter's arrival in town. Cutter himself, meanwhile, falls for Lily and they engage in a sexual relationship. Months later, Lily gives birth to Cutter's baby. Part 2[edit] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKenG_wwgg0 New York, 1960. Zachary and Lily have grown apart, encouraging Zachary to get back in touch with Nina. Nina is initially reluctant to reconcile with him, though soon falls for his charms and agrees to work for him, on condition that they have a baby. Elsewhere, Cutter has impregnated Lily again and is pushing her to have an abortion. Lily offers to divorce Zachary to be with him, but Cutter leaves her during a trip to San Francisco. In a letter to Lily, he claims to be scouting for a location for a better life, though he actually becomes intimate with a woman named Daphne. Lily feels betrayed and schemes her way back into Zachary's life by claiming to be pregnant with his child. Zachary, who believes her, abandons Nina to start another life with Lily. In San Francisco, Cutter starts working as a broker and seduces the boss's daughter Candice Alexander (Lynne Griffin), a beautiful but shy woman. Her father Jonas (Walter Gotell) is opposed to the relationship, feeling that Cutter is only interested in Candice because she comes from money, and hires a private detective to gather evidence to prove this. Instead, Cutter assures a prominent part in her life by causing a horse accident that leaves Candice crippled: he marries her afterwards and manipulates Jonas into financially supporting them. Meanwhile, Lily gives birth to a son, whom she names Justin. Ten years later, Zachary's magazine company grows into an empire, which saddens one of his loyal workers Pavka Meyer (Paul Hecht). His daughter Maxime 'Maxi' (Valerie Bertinelli) is now 17 years old and gets expelled from a strict all-girls school due to her rebellious behavior including skipping school to gamble with her friend India West (Julianne Moore). She starts working as a photographer at her father's company, in the department of Rocco Cipriani (Jack Scalia). She falls in love with him, and they soon have sex. Cutter resumes his unfaithful behavior, and after an escapade with both Candice's sister Nanette (Kate Vernon) and Alice Chambers, he continues his affair with Lily, which Nanette and colleague Booker witness. Nanette informs her sister about Cutter's cheating behavior, causing Candice to get drunk and confront him. Cutter dismisses her claims, and states that Nanette has lied out of jealousy, before actually visiting Nanette to hit her. Nanette takes revenge by sending Candice pictures of Lily and Cutter having sex. Candice is heartbroken and commits suicide by jumping from her hotel room. The photos are then sent to Zachary, who is now aware of both his wife and brother's betrayal. Instead of leaving his wife, Zachary threatens to take the children and murder Cutter if she ever meets with his brother again. In another sub-plot, Lily meets with Nina and claims that she did not trick Zachary into reconciling with her, leaving Nina to believe that Zachary did not want to be with her. Jade Cary Author 12 books68 followers Follow February 9, 2012 Judith Krantz is the kind of writer you just don't see anymore. When I first read I'll Take Manhattan in the 80's, I read it as a reader. It took me away to places I'd never been before: Monte Carlo, New York, a drafty castle in Scotland. It immersed me in a life I knew nothing about: publishing, extreme wealth, bitter siblings who would stop at nothing to destroy others. Exciting stuff. This time around, I read ITM as a writer. Judith write with a flair rarely seen in romances anymore. She can, and does, go on for pages and pages about how someone is feeling, in eclectic prose that belie the character's truth. I saw a different Maxi this time around. I saw a different Rocco. Lily was not the woman I remember from 20 years ago. I saw situations that seemed so outrageous that, if written today, would have quite possibly been slashed to bits by any editor with even a fool's concept of what sells. Yet, somehow, Judith Krantz still remains belle of the ball in this genre. Maybe it's because, when all is said and done, we read romance to escape. It doesn't have to be real, doesn't have to ring entirely true to be entertaining. Sometimes real is...well, TOO real, and sometimes we need a break from it. Sometimes reading about the heroine who has been raped and abused and unable to love again, and the hero who follows her around for 365 pages trying to change her mind, can be trying at best--no matter how good the writing, no matter how wonderful the characters. That's when we return to Judith, who takes us on journeys to foreign lands with spoiled, rich women who trudge through their trials, get burned, get up and dust themselves off, and realize in the end what is truly important--love. The alphas, the brutes, the rakes and the swindlers she tosses in just for fun are the icing on an already very rich cake. I'll take Judith Krantz. Any day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOShjJuDOQg Cast [edit] About the author Judith Krantz 104 books 284 followers Follow Australias largest super fund and other shareholders of Origin Energy have dealt a fatal blow to Brookfield and EIG after 13 months of corporate drama, rejecting a multibillion-dollar bid by the consortium to break up and privatise Australias largest energy provider. Despite strenuous efforts by Origins board and the North American consortium to garner enough support, Origins shareholders, at a Monday scheme meeting in Sydneys Shangri-La Hotel, rejected the $9.39-a-share best and final offer lobbed by the suitors. Shareholders at Origins takeover meeting voted on Brookfield and EIGs $9.43-a-share best and final offer. Credit: Bloomberg At least 78 per cent of Origins shareholders voted. About 69 per cent supported the offer, but Australias takeover rules require 75 per cent of votes cast at scheme meetings to back a bid for it to succeed. The rule gave the super fund an oversized influence on the outcome. As a result, Origin will continue as an independent ASX-listed company, chairman Scott Perkins said. Whilst this has been a contest over value, it hasnt been a contest over strategy. Advertisement Eating outBrisbane An ambitious Valley steakhouse opens with a former TV chef in the kitchen An in-demand designer has helped transform an old nightclub into a plush dining room. Its serving 1.1-kilo tomahawks, wagyu bolognaise and a 230-bottle wine list. Matt Shea December 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 A beef company opening its own restaurant? Its not the kind of news that necessarily fills you with confidence. Stanbroke likes to talk about being a family business (in this case, the Menegazzo family), but its also one of the largest privately owned integrated beef and cattle companies in the world. Establishment 203 opened this week in Fortitude Valley. Markus Ravik Sell your product to a restaurant, sure. Open a restaurant of your own? Perhaps not. But hear Julian Simmonds out. Advertisement Were very experienced in supplying to the top restaurants around the world [Gordon Ramsays Bread Street Kitchen in Singapore and Hong Kong, and Nusret Salt Bae Gokces Nusr-Et in Dubai], says Simmonds, Stanbrokes general manager of property and investments. Weve been in that game for many, many years ... [We had an opportunity] to bring some of those world-class learnings we have of supplying some of the best chefs in the world back to our home of Brisbane. You can tell a lot of thought has gone into Establishment 203, Stanbrokes Italian-influenced steakhouse, which opened this week on the corner of Ann and Marshall streets in Fortitude Valley. First look: Gerards Bistro reopens in brilliant style on James Street The design (which featured input from in-demand interior designer Tamsin Johnson) is a knockout, with its fluted marble and sizeable velvet booths. The entire venue is enclosed in glass bricks, and a banquette runs down one side of the venue, framed by antique-style mirrors. But those details are matched by practical considerations such as carpeted floors, and acoustic treatment on the ceilings and the underside of the tables. Building a handsome restaurant is one thing; making it a pleasant place to spend a couple of hours requires more insight. Advertisement In-demand designer Tamsin Lewis consulted on the interiors, which feature antique mirrors, velvet curtains and plush carpets. Markus Ravik Weve had an opportunity to travel and see what works best in these venues, in Dubai and Asia, says Simmonds, a former Brisbane councillor and federal Ryan MP. Weve brought a lot of that back home in terms of the acoustics, the fitout, the music. And then theres the murderers row whos running the place. Much has been made of former Surfing the Menu host Ben ODonoghue as 203s executive chef, but theres also Remon Van de Kerkhof (previously Oncore by Clare Smyth in Sydney) leading the front-of-house, and regular diners around town will recognise senior team members such as Cedric Gautier (SK Steak & Oyster, Coppa Spuntino) and Aleks Balodis (Siffredis, Stokehouse Q). In short, youre in good hands here. Advertisement Kingfish crudo with peach ponzu and jalepeno. Markus Ravik All this in the old Monastery and Oh Hello! nightclub premises. Admittedly, despite the luscious treatment, you dont have to squint too hard to remember your 20-something selfs worst decisions theres always been something particular about the dimensions of this space. Its just that theres now a cutting-edge kitchen where the dance floor used to be. Behind its low-set benches, ODonoghue is using a Mibrasa woodfire station and an expansive MKN induction system (the first of its kind in Brisbane) to prepare a relatively efficient menu that squeezes in all your typical modern touchstones kingfish crudo, beef tartare, oysters with apple cider mignonette, and so on. Elsewhere on the entrees, theres wood-fired marrow bone with caponata and bruschetta; Sommerlad pasture-raised chicken liver parfait with pickled figs and grilled focaccia; and Mooloolaba king prawns with zucchini trifolati, and lemon and Calabrian chilli butter. Beef tartare with egg yolk and Torres truffle crisps. Markus Ravik Advertisement The larger plates are split between steaks, pasta and other mains. There are 14 different cuts on the steak menu, ranging from a grass-fed 200-gram eye fillet all the way up to a three-score 1.1-kilogram dry-aged Angus tomahawk, which will set you back a tidy $260. Theres also a six-score wagyu menu that features a rump cap, a flat iron, a rib eye and a bone-in sirloin. Most of the pastas are house-made (the menu says home made, but rest assured ODonoghue isnt busting out the coat hangers in the family kitchen). Theres spaghetti alle vongole, cappellacci filled with roasted pumpkin and buffalo ricotta, and a wagyu tonnarelli bolognaise. Enormous velvet booths line one side of the venue. Markus Ravik The rest of the mains mix the fancy with the fancy-free. Advertisement Theres live southern rock lobster grilled with lemon and fresh garlic butter, herb and salt crust-baked Glacier 51 toothfish, and Brisbane Valley quail saltimbocca with prosciutto, sage and grilled radicchio. But, this being a Ben ODonoghue kitchen, theres also a signature burger consider one of these with a beer in Establishments slick bar area as your new pre-Valley go-to. Matching the food is a focused 230(ish)-bottle wine list. Whites and roses are split evenly between old world and new, before things get very Italian with an impressive collection of barolos and barbarescos. Up front, theres a thoughtful selection of drops by the glass and Coravin. Establishment 203s bar features vintage pendent lights, fluted marble and fetching tiled floors. Markus Ravik Away from wine, theres a lengthy cocktail list of signatures, classics and twists. Brisbane residents have been really, really great and welcoming, Simmonds says. Its a new venue, and in terms of how the citys growing up, I think well see more and more of these quality venues come online because our [dining] culture can certainly sustain it. Advertisement Open Tue 5pm-late; Wed-Sat 12pm-late. 6 Marshall Street, Fortitude Valley, (07) 3186 1133. establishment203.com Restaurant reviews, news and the hottest openings served to your inbox. Sign up Ousted Liberal MP Moira Deeming has launched a defamation case against Opposition Leader John Pesutto, paving the way for a protracted and damaging battle in the Federal Court after she was dumped from his party room in May. Deeming, who was expelled from the parliamentary Liberal Party after a party room vote and now sits on the crossbench of the upper house, filed the statement of claim late on Tuesday. Moira Deeming. Credit: Joe Armao MPs and Liberal Party staff could be forced to testify or expose their private correspondence as a result of the proceedings after mediation between the pair failed. The opposition leader initially tried to remove the first-term MP in March for her role in the controversial Let Women Speak rally, which was organised by British anti-trans rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull and gatecrashed by neo-Nazis. Pesutto claimed Deeming had associated with organisers and speakers who shared platforms with people who promote Nazi views or sympathies, and that Deeming had failed to disassociate herself from them. Deeming declined to comment on Tuesday. Pesuttos office also declined to comment. Read the full story here. Former television host Andrew OKeefe has avoided conviction after pleading guilty to drug-driving in Sydneys eastern suburbs, describing his case as unusual due to the mixed testing results. The 52-year-old former Seven Network presenter was due to face a hearing in Sydneys Downing Centre Local Court on Tuesday, but his lawyer Sharon Ramsden said the matter had resolved and her client was pleading guilty to the charge. OKeefe arrived in court moments later. Former TV presenter Andrew OKeefe outside Downing Centre Local Court in November. Credit: Dion Georgopoulos According to the agreed facts, OKeefe was driving a grey Mercedes C200 when he was stopped for a random roadside drug test on Wunulla Road, Point Piper shortly after midnight on January 20. The initial test returned a negative result, however a drug-wipe was positive for methamphetamine. OKeefe underwent secondary testing at Waverley police station, where he tested negative on an oral fluid sample. Tougher anti-vilification laws will not be brought before the Victorian Parliament until the second half of next year as the state grapples with another neo-Nazi demonstration. Premier Jacinta Allan condemned the second action from far-right extremists in seven weeks, while the police association and the state opposition called on her government to help police take tougher action. Police Association of Victoria secretary Wayne Gatt told The Age the Ballarat incident on Sunday and another in October, when a group of neo-Nazis stormed a train at Flinders Street, highlighted the tough position facing police members. In situations like this, police find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place, Gatt said. If something is not illegal, police cannot act. It is up to the government to set expectations of what is legally acceptable behaviour and how it wants police to deal with it. Organisers of a vigil in Melbourne on Monday evening say prominent female advocacy groups have failed to show adequate solidarity with Israeli women attacked in Hamas October 7 invasion. The vigil in Elsternwick, in Melbournes south-east, attracted hundreds of attendees and featured a speech by Kylie Moore-Gilbert, the Australian academic who was held in an Iranian prison for 804 days. About 500 people gathered for the vigil in Elsternwick on Monday evening. Credit: Simon Schluter The women from Melbournes Jewish community who organised the event said groups such as the United Nations, Australias #MeToo movement, feminists and progressive politicians had chosen to ignore, contextualise or significantly delay any public response to the sexual crimes of October 7. The scepticism and gaslighting of Israeli women and children who were violently raped and tortured contravenes the very tenets of these activists and organisations namely, to support and believe all victims, organisers wrote in a statement. Victorias police union has called on the state government to ban marches by neo-Nazis after a group of balaclava-clad people chanted Australia is for the white man through the streets of Ballarat over the weekend. Police Association secretary Wayne Gatt said public demonstrations by neo-Nazis were deadset crazy but there was little police could do to stop them. A neo-Nazi group made an unannounced walk through Ballarat on Sunday. Credit: Twitter Only crooks wear balaclavas down the streets of major cities, Gatt told Channel Nines Today program on Monday. Police are limited in what they can do here. At the end of the day, if it were up to us, it would be illegal, you wouldnt be able to do it. But its not; its up to governments to determine if they want this happening. A major police operation shut off part of Chapel Street on Tuesday morning as officers negotiated with a man near Windsor train station. Victoria Police said in a statement they were negotiating with a man on Albert Street and asked the public to avoid the area. Police and ambulances on Chapel Street on Tuesday morning. After 10am, police said the situation was resolved peacefully and the man, aged in his 20s, was taken to hospital for assessment. The force was called to Albert Street about 7.30am before reports flooded talkback radio about a police helicopter hovering over the scene and scores of police officers shutting off local streets and telling those nearby to remain indoors. I absolutely love this cover of "Drivin' on 9," a song I first heard from the Breeders but was actually written by alt-folk band Ed's Redeeming Qualities. The Breeders' version has always been one of my favorite songs, and I find this version by Case Oats, aka Casey Gomez Walker, to be just as spectacular. This is just one of many terrific songs I discovered recently in the "Cosmic Country" universeincluding Kara Jackson's "Ode to Billie Joe" (by Bobbie Gentry), Andrew Sa's "Wicked Game" (by Chris Isaak), Pixel Grip's "Don't Bring Me Down" (by Electric Light Orchestra), Chris Coleson's "Wayward Wind" (by Patsy Cline), and many more. Cosmic Country, which The Chicago Reader calls "inclusive, trippy country music" is the brainchild of Sully Davis and Dorian Gehring. Davis describes the live showcase: Howdy! This cult-hit is an homage to country variety shows like Grand Ole Opry with an extraterrestrial-psychedelic twist. A diverse group of guest vocalists, who you may not otherwise find singing country classics, sing some covers with the band. Some of the best names in Chicago alt-comedy and other variety acts are showcased, as well as a headliner who does a set of their original cosmic country. This show is co-produced with Dorian Gehring. In addition to the live shows, Cosmic Country also created "Planetary Access TV". Local Universe described the web series, which debuted during the first part of the pandemic but is not currently active: From the creators of the cult-hit live show Cosmic Country Showcase, and brought to life by award-winning filmmaker Glamhag, comes a new web series set in a fantastical spaceship stranded in downtown Chicago. The show may be country-themed, but you'll find bands from across many genres and places. If Pee Wee Herman was obsessed with Hee Haw and hosted Stairway to Stardom, you might have an idea of where this show is, except this show happens to be brilliantly shot by director of photography Kevin Veselka with assistance from Eon Mora and written by AJ Maroquin and Jerwin Gabriel. The Cosmic Country Showcase celebrated its fifth anniversary in October 2023 with a show at Lincoln Hall in Chicago, which the Chicago Reader described as a show full of "country soul," that was also "part outlandish comedy, part drag show, and all razzle-dazzle." Cosmic Country will return to the stage at Sleeping Village in Chicago on Friday January 26, 2024If you're in Chicago, you should check it out! To see more terrific Cosmic Country, check out their YouTube. Australian navy ships are set to gain greater access to French military bases in the Pacific under a plan to repair French-Australian relations after the rupture caused by the Morrison governments cancellation of a $90 billion submarine contract with French company Naval Group. Foreign Minister Penny Wong and her French counterpart, Catherine Colonna, released a new agreement on Monday for expanded co-operation that includes the creation of a French-Australian think tank and partnerships on climate change and critical minerals. French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Catherine Colonna before her address to the National Press Club in Canberra on Monday. Credit: Alex Ellinghuasen Cultural exchanges will also receive a boost through the creation of a French-Australian cultural exchange foundation in Australia and an Australian cultural initiative in France. France is a power in the Pacific, its a power in Europe and its a multilateral power, and this is a very important partnership to Australia, Wong said at a press conference in Canberra. My favourite Twilight Zone episode is the one where aliens land and, in a sign of their peaceful intentions, give world leaders a book. Government cryptographers work to translate the alien language. They decipher the title To Serve Man and thats reassuring, so interplanetary shuttles are set up. But as the cryptographers proceed, they realise too late that its a cookbook. That, dear reader, is the story of OpenAI. Weirdly adorable. Friendly with many reporters, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has assumed the role of the upbeat face of AIs future. Credit: Eamon Gallagher It was founded in 2015 as a non-profit to serve man, to keep an eye on galloping artificial intelligence technology and ensure there were guardrails and kill switches because when AI hits puberty, it will be like aliens landing. When I interviewed them at their makeshift San Francisco headquarters back in 2016, the OpenAI founders Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman presented themselves as our Praetorian guard against the future threat of runaway, evil AI, against bad actors and bad bots and all the lords of the cloud who had Mary Shelley dreams of creating a new species, humanity be damned. Honiara: For many Solomon Islanders, the equation is simple. China offers them something they have not had for too long: aspiration. Its the first time the local people see this kind of event happening here, said market worker Sarisha Aiti outside Honiaras new national stadium last week, where everything from the toilets to shipping containers to the main grandstand had been emblazoned with China Aid for the Pacific Games. Solomon Islanders attend the Pacific Games in Honiara. Credit: Eryk Bagshaw The stadium is next to Solomon Islands National University, where China has also built the dormitories, just a few kilometres away from the road to the airport built by a Chinese-state-owned company, and around the corner from the countrys first dedicated cardiac unit all funded by Beijing. Im so happy because other Pacific countries dont have this type of stadium we now have, said Lemuel Kalei as he sold bandanas in the middle of the daily bedlam of potholes, traffic and people that is Honiaras high street. Milan: Italys culture minister is refusing a request by the German State Antiquities Collection in Munich to return an ancient Roman statue that embodied Hitlers Aryan aesthetic, calling it a national treasure. The Discobolus Palombara is a 2nd-century Roman copy of a long-lost Greek bronze original. Hitler was captivated by the statue during a visit to Rome in 1938. He bought the Roman copy from its private Italian owner under pressure from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and against the wishes of the education minister and cultural officials at the time. Visitors admire the Discobolus Palombara, a 2nd Century Roman copy of a long-lost Greek bronze original, on display at Romes National Roman Museum. Credit: AP The statue, unearthed at a Roman villa in 1781, was returned to Italy in 1948 as part of works illegally obtained by the Nazis. The dispute arose when the director of the National Roman Museum requested the statues 17th-century marble base be returned from the Antikensammlungen state antiquities collection. The German museum instead asked for the return of the Discobolus Palombara, saying it had been illegally transported to Italy in 1948, the Corriere della Sera newspaper reported. Caracas: Venezuelans have approved a proposal by President Nicolas Maduro to claim sovereignty over a large oil and mineral-rich piece of neighbouring Guyana, the countrys electoral authority announced. Few voters could be seen at voting centres throughout the voting period for the five-question referendum, but the National Electoral Council claimed to have counted more than 10.5 million ballot papers. The council, however, did not explain whether the number of votes was equivalent to a voter or if it was the sum of each individual answer. Venezuela has long argued the territory, which represents about two-thirds of Guyana, was stolen when the border was drawn more than a century ago. But Guyana considers the referendum a step towards annexation, and the vote has its residents on edge. A woman sells fruit in front of a mural of a Venezuelan map with the Essequibo territory (bottom right of map) included and the words All of Venezuela. Vote yes five time on December 3, in Caracas. Credit: AP In a move reminiscent of Russias strategy to annex eastern Ukraine, Venezuelan voters were asked whether they supported establishing a Venezuelan state in the area known as Essequibo, granting citizenship to current and future area residents. They were also asked if they rejected the jurisdiction of the United Nations top court in settling the disagreement between the South American countries. PHILIPSBURG:--- The House of Parliament will sit in a Central Committee meeting on December 4, 2023. The Central Committee meeting is scheduled for Monday at 10.15 hrs. in the General Assembly Chamber of the House at Wilhelminastraat #1 in Philipsburg. The Minister of Finance will be in attendance. The agenda point is: Ontwerplandsverordening tot wijziging van de Landsverordening begroting 2023 (Landsverordening begrotingswijziging 2023) (Zittingsjaar 2023-2024-173) (IS/228/2023-2024 d.d. 21 november 2023 (Draft National Ordinance amending the National Ordinance Budget 2023 (National Ordinance Budget Amendment 2023) (Parliamentary year 2023-2024-173) (IS/228/2023-2024 dated November 21, 2023) Members of the public are invited to the House of Parliament to attend parliamentary deliberations. All persons visiting the House of Parliament must adhere to the house rules. The House of Parliament is located across from the Court House in Philipsburg. The parliamentary sessions will be carried live on TV 15, Soualiga Headlines, via SXM GOV radio FM 107.9, via Pearl Radio FM 98.1, the audio via the internet www.sxmparliament.org, www.pearlfmradio.sx and www.youtube.com/c/SintMaartenParliament "California Forever" is a pet project of some Silicon Valley billionaires to build "a new walkable city of 50,000 people" on a traunch of agricultural land in Solano County, located in the northeastern region of the San Francisco Bay. While there is no shortage of billionaires in California, water rights (amongst other things) are essential, and these guys seem to have none. California Forever is starting a PR campaign and opening up offices to sell the idea to people who already live in the region's established cities of allowing them to go forward. I am entertained by the idea that "walkability" is what these Solanao residents are looking for, rather than access to the former cattle and grazing land the company has taken away from them. Disrupting the economy rarely ingratiates one with the locals. CF will be dead without locals voting to allow this farmland to be used to build another city. ABC7: "I know that there's been a sense of mystery about it going back a number of years and a lot of people still have questions," said Sramek. "And so that's what it's for, to come in and get your questions answered. Hear more about the project here, about why we believe that this would be a really good thing for all of Solano County." Inside the offices are posters of renderings of what the city could look like people fishing, riding bikes, and lots of walking. Sramek told the I-Team in September, the city's affordability and walkability will make it stand out. "Many cities in California are not walkable and there's a lot of people that really like that lifestyle," Sramek told ABC7's Stephanie Sierra. There is no power, water, or waste infrastructure. No public transit. No schools. No fire or police. This is a major undertaking to build a new city where there are plenty of existing ones. I would not want to move to a community where the developers forgot to secure water rights before buying the land, that kind of attention to detail signals disasters to come. Remember the Airbnb host who refused to leave the guest house she stopped paying for, causing the homeowner a lot of stress and money? Here's another tenant-from-hell story, also based in Los Angeles: In late 2021, a Santa Monica apartment owner went to her 3-bedroom apartment to inspect it after the tenants had moved out. She discovered an unauthorized occupant. According to Sinai Law Firm, which posted this story on Xitter, it was "a middle-aged woman who says, 'I'm living here, this is my house.' She won't leave, and the police are called, but they can't do anything. 'It's a civil matter you have to evict her.' So, this is where I come in. It turns out one of the former tenants subleased one of the rooms for extra cash and did not notify my client. The occupant was so obnoxious and rude that all the rest of the tenants fled elsewhere shortly after she moved in. They found her on Craigslist." The law firm looked into the unauthorized tenant's background, which revealed a history of similar eviction disputes, deception, and fraud. The apartment owner's attorney had to wait until the Covid moratorium was over in March 2023 before she could take any action. The situation spiraled into a complex and expensive legal battle. The tenant, backed by a local non-profit, aggressively fought the eviction with a barrage of legal motions, discovery requests, and delay tactics. The case went to a jury trial. The jury unanimously ruled in favor of the owner, granting her possession and damages. But the unauthorized tenant was far from giving up. She filed multiple motions to reverse the judgment, prolonging the eviction process, and necessitating the sheriff's intervention for a lockout. She then attempted to break back into the apartment, hiring a locksmith to help her get in. In one video, Debbie Lombardo, president of the Board of Block Clubs of Buffalo & Erie County, calmly advises people driving with a winter snowstorm bearing down to make sure they have a full tank of gas, a fully charged phone and an emergency kit packed before heading out. When it comes to battling snow, Buffalo could take a page from Syracuse, Montreal playbooks Should Buffalo look down the Thruway, or over the border, to get ideas on how to battle snow? The Buffalo News spoke to officials in three cities familiar with dealing with winter weather, and here's what they had to say. Every good winter safety plan starts before the snow does, Lombardo says in the video, which shows images of gas being pumped, a cellphone being plugged in and a snowy Buffalo street. Hispanic Heritage Council of Western New York President Casimiro D. Rodriguez Sr. urges residents in another clip to stay indoors during a blizzard when the heat goes out and make sure of proper ventilation if using alternative heating sources. Taking a page from the Boy Scouts, Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown wants all city residents to be prepared as they head into winter. And now the mayor and other city leaders are taking that simple message to television with a series of public service announcements aimed at helping people be ready in case of a blizzard or other major snowfall. The PSAs began appearing this past weekend during Spectrum News 1-Buffalo newscasts. Theyre part of a larger city effort to beef up communications with residents after multiple post-blizzard reports noted failures in communication leading up to and during the December 2022 storm that dumped more than 4 feet of snow in parts of Buffalo and led to the deaths of 44 city residents. Charter Communications, which operates Spectrum News, agreed to produce and air the PSAs after participating in the citys Storm Response Task Force meetings earlier this year. It was an epic storm last year in the Buffalo area, historic, and we wanted to do our part, said Lara Pritchard, Charters vice president of communications for the Northeast Region. One of the ways that came up where we could help is to raise awareness with some of these public service announcements that give people tips and offer direction as far as keeping safe during these large winter storms, or any storm for that matter. The PSAs will air on the cable newscast and its livestreams throughout the winter months. The main message is to be prepared, is to ahead of time if its weeks, if its months, if its all year have supplies in your home: Non-perishable foods, water, flashlight with batteries, extra bedding. We dont go into all of those specific details, but the whole message is to be prepared for winter weather circumstances, said Brown. Are we ready? State will provide cots, blankets, other supplies for Buffalo's 9 emergency warming shelters The City of Buffalo's nine emergency warming shelters for use during major weather events are not equipped yet with cots, blankets, water or food, and one of them doesn't have a generator yet, administration officials said. It was vital for city, county and state governments to be engaged in pre-preparation for winter storms, and its also critically important for our residents, Brown said. Its important that people be prepared in advance themselves, not just rely on government, family, church members, neighbors. Theres got to be a level of personal preparedness, he added. The PSAs are about 30 seconds in length and will be sprinkled among other public service announcements and regular advertising during the Spectrum News around-the-clock news programming. Brown said he was happy with how the PSAs turned out and appreciates the commitment Charter Communications has shown. Theyre short. Theyre tight. Theyre clear. Theyre just long enough to get out useful information and short enough that theyre not going to lose anybodys attention, he said. I think they were very well done by Spectrum and were very appreciative that theyre adding this PSA opportunity to what were doing to keep people safe during winter weather and other situations and in particular extreme weather. The PSAs are part of a more layered approach to storm communications recommended under the citys latest snow plan. The city will send emergency alerts by text message or email under its BuffAlert system to residents who have signed up for the alerts, as well as to highway message boards installed in high-traffic areas around the city, to radio and television bulletins, and to social media. Emergency storm information will be available in 66 different languages, including Arabic, Bengali, Karen and Swahili, to cater to new immigrant groups. In addition, in very limited circumstances, the city will be able to use the Federal Emergency Management Agencys Integrated Public Alert Warning System (IPAWS) to sound an alarm like an Amber Alert for a missing child or a tornado warning, followed by a message about the emergency and any immediate actions that people should take. I do care about, I believe in, public services and I know a thing or two about the constraints of delivering public services, and Im certainly not in the business of cutting the funding, which is why the focus is so much growth. With the economy faltering, interest rates may already be too high It was a crazy time for property because you had to get in really quickly and there were bidding wars, and we had about a year of that before we found a place, said Siena. The staggering number of people arrested in recent weeks, many under this new legislation, shows just how sweeping and dangerous these powers are. Its shocking to see hundreds of young protesters criminalised simply for standing up for what they believe in. A little after 2:30 a.m. Sunday, a 30-year-old Buffalo man was beaten and then shot once in his thigh inside the mens bathroom at Club Marcella, according to police. Two men were arrested Monday and taken into custody Yeramell Benitez, 20, and Ramon Lopez, 29, both of Buffalo. Law enforcement officials said at a Monday afternoon news conference that the shooting was targeted and they believe the two suspects knew the victims. They also said more arrests may be forthcoming. The gun attack in the Michigan Avenue nightclub was the fourth shooting associated with the venue, and the second inside Club Marcella, this year. Club owner Joe Marcella Guagliardo moved the venue in summer 2022 from the Theatre District to its current location on Michigan Avenue, on the edge of the Cobblestone District and across from the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino. The latest shooting prompted Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to order Club Marcella to be immediately shut down. The owners can ask for a hearing about reopening within 60 days. During the news conference at police headquarters, Gramaglia said Guagliardo has been working closely with police this year amid the shootings to try to improve security and to keep guns from getting into the club. The owner put in metal detectors and security workers used metal-detector wands. He arranged for fencing up around the club and there are dozens of cameras around the premises. Police commissioner shuts down Club Marcella after another shooting early Sunday Detectives said they are investigating a shooting inside a bathroom of Club Marcella, which was the site of a triple shooting on Feb. 12 that left one man dead and two others wounded. Earlier this year, the club agreed to a police recommendation to close at 2 a.m. instead of 4 a.m., but later returned to its old hours, the police commissioner said. There has to be a change, Gramaglia said. Theres a security lapse. Guns are getting inside the club. Before the weekend shooting inside the club, a triple shooting Feb. 12 left Jorge Garcia-Leon Jr., 21, dead and two others wounded, including a security guard. Two months later, the suspected gunman, Sharief McBroom, 20, of Buffalo, was indicted on murder and weapons charges. Sunday afternoon, Gramaglia ordered the immediate closing of the club, declaring on a sign taped to the door that a dire emergency ... as a result of the disruptive and violent behavior that has taken place immediately inside and outside of (the nightclub). The first of two shootings this year outside the club came on Jan. 29, when a security guard was shot in the nightclubs parking lot, police said. On Oct. 1, two patrons were wounded outside the club when a gunman fired multiple shots from a vehicle. Police have been called to Club Marcella nearly four dozen times about large fights, assaults and thefts, according to police reports and records of calls. In early May, a woman told police that another woman she knows attacked her at the club and tried to gouge her eyes out with her thumbs, and a third woman kicked her in the ribs. Later the same month, another woman reported she was punched from behind by a man, rendering her unconscious. In October, a woman reported that 10 women she didnt know attacked her outside the club, leaving her with a busted lip and a swollen eye. At 3 a.m. on the Friday after Thanksgiving, a group of nearly a dozen people fought with security at the club as they were escorted out. Gramaglia said theres no reason to believe that any of the shootings or violence at the LGBTQ-friendly night club were hate crimes. Buffalo police have ordered at least two other venues to be shut down after violent incidents. In 2020, the Groove Lounge was closed after two people were shot outside the Broadway nightclub amid a chaotic scene. Gunfire was being exchanged as police arrived. Police reported seeing clubgoers fleeing, with some driving the wrong way and over lawns. It was one of several times the club had been shut down following gun violence. In 2022, Senor Tequila Mexican Restaurant on Pearl Street was shut down after two people were wounded on the street by gunfire from inside the restaurant. Senor Tequila didnt reopen. The Groove Lounge, which had been shut down several times before, reopened after the 2020 incident but recently closed on its own accord. Following Sundays shooting, members of Buffalo Police Departments Intelligence Unit made two arrests in two locations. Benitez and Lopez were charged with one count each of gang assault, a violent felony. Benitez was arraigned Monday afternoon and remanded to jail without bail. Lopez was scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday morning. Erie County District Attorney John Flynn said his prosecutors will ask the judge to remand Lopez as well. This violence at the club, Flynn said, has gotten out of hand. In last months survey James Cleverly topped the leaderboard but now he has dropped considerably to eleventh from bottom. As Home Secretary Cleverly hasnt been wowing Tory members, who are generally thought to be more Right-wing than many Tory MPs. Kemi Badenoch has shot back up to first place with a 63.4 point approval rating. The battle in eastern Europe has been raging for almost two years following the decision by Russian president Vladimir Putin who Lord Cameron has labelled a warmonger to order his troops to invade the neighbouring country in February 2022. It is often forgotten how many people are annoyed by the noise from London City Airport. It impacts more people than Madrid, Brussels or Schiphol Airports. Local authorities many miles from the airport have objected to these expansion proposals. What we are intent on doing is working with councils who have already alerted us to see what we can do to help and to work alongside councils as well who have concerns to ensure that they dont fall into that situation. According to the Associated Press, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen have claimed responsibility for the attack on the Unity Explorer and one of the other attacks. 250 off per bookings 2,500+ with this TUI discount code Up to 30% off new in items at ASOS 5% off all bookings with this Travelodge discount code 20% off everything with The Body Shop discount code 15% of all orders with The Perfume Shop birthday discount But I know that we are working at it extremely hard, and making sure that we can do this as soon as possible, because we know that this is an issue that people care about deeply, she said. Teachers at some schools can end the five-minute appointment before the time is up and then the parent would return to the page to wait for their next appointment. He told the PA news agency: Theyre very different to look after, as a team we have looked after many different species of bear and we were fairly confident we knew what kind of hurdles we might need to cross and jump over for looking after pandas, and when they arrived it was completely different to what we thought. Another passenger said: I just can't believe your new policy of not allowing passengers to create a boarding pass (mobile or print-out) unless they buy a seat, forcing them to join a check-in queue (30m or longer) to do so for no other reason for you to make a few quid. Scandalous. For the past year I have had the privilege of working with three East Aurora Service Clubs Kiwanis, Rotary and Lions to raise money to help a town in Ukraine. The Town of Malyn was attacked by Vladimir Putin at the beginning of the war in February 2022. Reports indicated schools, churches, the town hall, medical clinic and many homes were damaged, some severely. Through the hard work of many volunteers and the generosity of many individuals and businesses in the Town of Aurora, and all of the towns around us, we have raised a little over $50,000 to help Malyn recover. We are still evaluating numerous needs in Malyn. Its possible we will decide to replenish the clinics supplies, if we have sufficient funds. The war is still raging, but for now we do know we will be able to give the people of Malyn hope that there are people in the world that care, and are willing to help. Although we cannot help all, we can help some. In our Town of Aurora and Village of East Aurora, we are blessed with our Boys & Girls Club, Rural Outreach Center, FISH, Hawk Creek Wildlife Center, Lothlorien Therapeutic Riding Center, Aurora Ice Association and many other not-for-profit organizations. They are integral parts of our community. They exist, not primarily because of government funding, which is our money anyway, but due to the generosity of local individuals and businesses. Of course, in many cases, these are the same people who have contributed to our Malyn fundraiser. It would also seem to be to our benefit, at the federal government level, to work harder at strengthening societies in other countries so that they are better equipped to provide their citizens with the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness we enjoy. Also, such assistance would reduce the size of the masses of people trying to get in to the U.S. from other countries. Keep in mind we might not have the lives we have today if the French had not come to our aid when we were struggling for our freedom almost 250 years ago. The world is shrinking in many ways. In difficult times we must expand our definition of community. The stronger a community/society is, the less likely it will be successfully attacked from without or within or be a burden to its neighbors. Once we have done our best to keep our local communities strong, we should not ignore the larger community. As caring citizens, we should consider digging a little deeper to help those who are in need, no matter where they are. Douglas W. Marky is president of Aurora Starfish Fund and a past president of the Kiwanis Club of East Aurora. Pandas Yang Guang and Tian Tian have been put in quarantine since the start of November in line with animal health regulations and will also spend time in quarantine when they arrive in China, where they will live at a sanctuary in Sichuan province's capital, Chengdu. Nothing will be the same now, but we are all very proud of what he did and he was also proud of what he was doing. He had just finished his apprenticeship and was doing his professional training. We don't know the exact details of what happened but he was only in Gaza for two days. He went in on Friday and died Sunday." The Chelmsford Hotel has been hosting the competition since 2018 but the 45-year-old British medic came and conquered. As to whether a British pub will now take turns hosting an annual competition remains to be seen. But Dr Bush, soon to be seen with a haircut you can set your watch to, remains game. "Its eruptions are always sudden and difficult to detect using equipment because the source is near the surface," Mr Gunawan said. "This eruption was not caused by the movement of magma." Spanish and Italian police said in a statement: In Spain, they used a company that was linked to the acquisition of lower-category oils to make changes to cloudy and poor quality oils to turn them into virgin and extra virgin and then sell them by falsifying documents. Police sources told TMZ that Jordan did not give an explanation over what had caused the incident to officers at the scene. There were no injuries or damage to property, but the actor was asked to file a police report online. An award-winning hostel in a historic building should not have been in this much jeopardy. Hostel Buffalo-Niagara, which has been hosting visitors since 1996, will be vacating its longtime home in March 2024, as the Buffalo Urban Renewal Agency, which owns the structure, undertakes $2 million in essential repairs. The work is expected to take six months. While its good news that the buildings owner is looking after it staving off demolition in the process this is only, as News reporter Jonathan D. Epstein notes, a partial reprieve for the nonprofit organization, which now has a year and 60 days to raise enough money to purchase the 667 Main St. building so it can completely take over all responsibility for the both the structure and the services. It is to be hoped that the city offers enough flexibility with this process to allow this downtown mainstay, the only hostel in New York outside of New York City, to survive and thrive. The hostel has occupied the building since 1996. Over those decades, deferred maintenance has led to serious roof and floor deterioration throughout the property, including problems with a vacant attached structure behind it on Washington Street. Its difficult to understand why this high-profile Theatre District building never received the attention it needed. There are troubling aspects, including: Reports of building violations and failed inspections that go back to 2001. Why werent these issues addressed in a timely fashion? On two occasions, it seems as though BURA initiated disruptive action that would threaten the future of the hostel without notifying its director or board. In 2017, BURA issued an RFP for prospective developers of the building, notifying hostel management only when it was necessary to tell them people might be coming to tour the building, according to Hostel Buffalo-Niagaras board members and staff. More recently, hostel board and staff say they were not informed of a recent, but now averted, threat of eviction, until told by Investigative Post reporters in November, though eviction was discussed during a September BURA meeting. Hostel Buffalo-Niagara provides considerable value both to downtown and the entire Western New York region and the numbers and accolades bear this out. An estimated 5,000 to 7,000 guests visit each year, from all over the world as well as U.S. locations. Rates for individuals range from roughly $45-$99, depending on whether guests want private or dorm-type accommodations. This place is for those who dont want to blow their budgets on hotels or other traditional lodging options, and mainly, its a young demographic. Guests can be seen biking or walking around the area at any time, lending much-needed life to an area where the highest level of evening/weekend activity is during Sheas productions. In 2006, Hostel Buffalo-Niagara was rated the best hostel in North America. The hostel also holds regular art exhibitions at its charming, well-curated BOX Gallery, as well as other casual events, making it even more of a 24/7 destination. The distinctive c. 1900 building is designed by famous Buffalo-based architect E.B. Green, another obvious argument against demolition, which now, thankfully, looks less likely. While the leadership of Hostel Buffalo Niagara has always hoped to raise enough money to buy and rehab the building on its own dime, to an objective eye, such efforts are tangential to the mission of excelling as Buffalos only hostel. Now, the organization must succeed in raising the purchase price or, in addition to being homeless for the months of construction, it will have the unenviable task of finding new quarters. Nonetheless, its determination to thrive where it is will be essential to its survival. The organizations landlord, BURA, should recognize this, respect it and be generous when its time for Hostel Buffalo Niagara to return to its home. Establishing minimum norms regarding the rights, support and protection of victims of crime was among the topics discussed at the meeting of the Justice and Home Affairs Council configuration (JHA), in which the Minister of Justice, Alina Gorghiu took part on Monday, informs a press release from the Ministry of Justice sent to AGERPRES. "An important point addressed during the JHA Council meeting was the debate on the proposal to amend Directive 2012/29/EU establishing minimum standards regarding the rights, support and protection of victims of crime and to replace Framework Decision 2001/220/ of the JHA Council. An update of the framework is necessary to ensure increased protection for the victims of crimes at the EU level and, implicitly, for the victims in Romania," the press release reads. The quoted source shows that one of the objectives is to facilitate the victims' access to reparations/compensations. "The proposal provides for a set of measures for victims and for victims that are minors. Some examples of measures are: establishing a phone line for victims, providing free psychological support and as much as is necessary for vulnerable victims, establishing the right to be accompanied by a person other than a lawyer in the stage preceding the trial, creating specific and integrated support services for minors within the same headquarters (Barnahus model)," the Ministry of Justice mentions. In this sense, the Ministry of Justice states that the first subject was about the article of Directive for the state to grant compensation/reparations to victims. "This establishes the obligation of the competent authorities to pay the damages/compensations owed to the victim by the perpetrator of the crime in advance, so that they will subsequently be subrogated to the victim in relation to the perpetrator of the crime," the Ministry explains. Alina Gorghiu specified that the victims must receive compensations, but in this process, the specifics of each member state must be taken into account. The Romanian official mentioned that "in Romania, we have a new procedure by which victims of crimes promptly benefit from a voucher to cover their immediate expenses for food, accommodation, personal use, medicine and transport, sanitary materials, up to an amount equivalent to 5 gross minimum basic salaries. The amount will be borne from the budget of the Ministry of Justice and will later be recovered from the aggressor". According to the MJ, the second amendment, debated during the work of the Council, concerns the situation of underage victims. Thus, the proposed directive provides for the integration in a single space of psychological and medical evaluation services, hearing and protection of underage victims (Barnahus model) The Minister of Justice stated that the Barnahus model should not be an obligation in EU judicial systems. States must be able to organize their justice system as they see fit to protect children from crimes. "It is a good thing that we are discussing all the means to make them feel safe everywhere in the EU. We need to act as soon as possible and it is good that there is this concern at the EU level. In Romania, there are, at the level of the courts, rooms where we question children. We have such spaces in many counties, such as Arad, Dambovita, Timis, Gorj, Mures and Bihor, etc., and many more are in the process of being set up," Alina Gorghiu pointed out. The general debates on the proposal to amend Directive 2012/29/EU establishing minimum standards regarding the rights, support and protection of crime victims and to replace Council Framework Decision 2001/220/JHA will form the basis of the following negotiations at the level of the Council, the Ministry mentions. News / Local by Staff reporter Zanu-PF has lifted the suspension of provincial and district officials in Midlands and Harare with party spokesperson Christopher Mutsvangwa saying the measures were in violation of a politburo prohibition order.Mutsvangwa said a politburo order stopping any suspension of party members has not been lifted, and those behind the acts were offside.Hundreds of Zanu-PF party members had been suspended on various allegations, including defying President Emmerson Mnangagwa, party orders, insubordination and sabotaging the party in the run-up to the August 23 and 24 harmonised elections.However, Mutsvangwa said Zanu-PF was an organised party with structures and functional systems that respected party orders."The politburo position is that people were barred from carrying out such suspensions," Mutsvangwa said."People are acting outside of the politburo's decision. I am sure whoever did it, did so outside the politburo decision and will be brought to line."The Harare provincial executive led by Godwills Masimirembwa had suspended four provincial executive members, Elizabeth Munyeri, Lorraine Vengesai, Oliver Vellem, and Reason Mabhedhla and had written prohibition orders to 23 district officials mainly from the youth wing.The majority of those suspended were from Zone 6, Southlea, and Mbare. Manyeri and Vengesai were issued with prohibition orders for allegedly failing to mobilise party supporters to attend first lady Auxillia Mnangagwa's event in Mbare last month.Masimirembwa was reportedly ordered out of the Mbare Netball Complex by the first lady for failing to bus people to fill up the small netball stadium.He later shifted the blame to Manyeri and Vengesai by suspending them, raising questions about his decision because the duo is from Zone 6, Harare South.The two are also not commissariat members.The Harare provincial chairperson is also accused of clamping down on dissent after provincial structures raised questions about his leadership capabilities after the party performed dismally in the capital in the August elections.In Midlands, over 360 members, including former Nembudziya MP Justice Mayor Wadyajena were suspended for allegedly sabotaging the party's parliamentary candidates.Most of those suspended were aspiring MPs who lost during the party's primary elections and their supporters.However, disciplinary hearings failed to kick off after it emerged that top party officials were against the move by the provincial executive.Mutsvangwa added: "There is a politburo prohibition against such type of action. It is a standing order from the politburo. The politburo position still stands, it has not been rescinded."Zanu-PF is said to be divided into two warring factions one backing Mnangagwa and the other Vice President Constantino Chiwenga.Chiwenga has repeatedly denied accusations that he habours ambitions to take over as party leader. Romania has failed to join Schengen again, and next year there is almost no chance, because member states have as priority the elections for the European Parliament and then the election of a new European Commission, MEP Eugen Tomac said in a Facebook post on Monday, accusing the Romanian state and its top representatives of a series of mistakes. The MEP from the European People's Party group in the European Parliament (EP) brings to mind that the provisional agenda of the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Council meeting on 17 November included a possible vote on Romania's and Bulgaria's Schengen accession, which is missing from the final document adopted on 1 December. The agenda adopted on 1 December includes under non-legislative activities the item "Council Decision on the full application of the provisions of the Schengen acquis in Romania and Bulgaria" with the mention "state of play," namely the discussion of the state of play of the file. "After the humiliating vote last year on 8 December, all the decision-makers - the President, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL) leaders, the then and now leaders of the government - have been so proudly claiming that Romania will definitely join Schengen in 2023. Here we are at the end of the year with the last JHA Council meeting and we notice that Romania, with its 20 million Romanian citizens, is still outside the EU borders," Tomac says in his post. The MEP argues that the Romanian state made at least three mistakes in 2023, avoiding taking actions that could have paved the way for Romania's Schengen accession. Firstly, Tomac argues, "Romania's Government should have taken the Council of the European Union to the Court of Justice of the European Union." The EPP MEP is the initiator of an action in his own name at the CJEU against the Council of the EU after the JHA Council decision last year. Then, he says, Romania and Bulgaria should have had a common approach in the negotiations with all states. "We went on different strategies when the vote is a package deal for both states. Therefore, the Dutch vote against Bulgaria is automatically against us. The interior ministers of both countries should have had a common strategy and act as one. The lack of coordination in the smallest details allowed Nehammer (Austria's Chancellor Karl Nehammer) to be even more radical in his absurd position against Romania," Tomac believes. Thirdly, he accuses President Klaus Iohannis of having been "completely absent." "The head of state had the most effective instrument with which he could have changed the evolution of this file of major interest for Romania. He is a member of the European Council, where he should have put this subject on the agenda. The enlargement of the Schengen area is no longer a bilateral issue, but a European issue," he added. AGERPRES The Ministry of Finance (MF) borrowed, on Monday, 1.334 billion RON from the banks, through an issue of benchmark state bonds, with a residual maturity of 42 months and an average yield of 6.57% 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 1.649 billion 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) has planned, in December 2023, loans from commercial banks in the amount of 4 billion RON, to which the amount of 525 million RON can be added through additional sessions of non-competitive offers, related to bond auctions The total amount, of 4.525 billion RON, is 1.15 billion RON less than the one that was scheduled in October, of 5.675 billion RON, and will be intended for refinancing public debt and financing the budget deficit. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is a powerful reminder that we cannot simply look at anti-Semitism as if it were just something from the past, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu said in a post on the government's website after his visit to the museum in Washington. Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu began his official visit to the United States of America at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, where he commemorated on Sunday the genocide victims of World War II. He concluded his tour of the museum in the Hall of Remembrance, a place of meditation, where he lit a candle with members of his official delegation. Marcel Ciolacu then signed the Museum's book of honour. The Romanian delegation was joined by U.S. Ambassador to Romania Kathleen Kavalec and Romanian Ambassador to the United States Andrei Muraru. AGERPRES Phat Tuesdays is back for more laughs though not entirely like before. Sign up for the Blender newsletter The Blender by Kevin C. Johnson keeps you up to date with the latest concert news and more from the St. Louis music scene. The original Phat Tuesdays was an influential night of Black comedy that ran from 1995 to 2005 at the famed Comedy Store in Los Angeles. Created and hosted by St. Louis native Guy Torry, the night provided opportunities for Black comedians in a noted venue, opportunities that didnt exist otherwise. | Kevin Hart, Chris Tucker and Martin Lawrence all performed at Phat Tuesdays early in their careers. Other luminaries such as Anthony Anderson, Dave Chappelle, Jamie Foxx, Tiffany Haddish, Steve Harvey, Jo Koy, Luenell, and Berkeley native Cedric the Entertainer also performed there. Phat Tuesdays: The Era of Hip Hop Comedy, a docuseries directed by East St. Louis native Reginald Hudlin, debuted on Prime Video in 2022. It was a night of coming together for love and for showcasing our Black talent, says comedian and actor Torry (American History X, Pearl Harbor, Life). Torry is bringing that Phat Tuesdays flavor back to the stage Dec. 12 at Helium Comedy Club. Performing are national comedians Damon Williams and Cocoa Brown, and area comic Frank Lyles. Torry says this Phat Tuesdays reboot which he is producing along with Terrence Reynolds (who booked the original Phat Tuesdays), Aaron Reeves and Don Dace aims to show St. Louis not only what Phat Tuesdays was, but where it is today. It has grown up. It has evolved a little bit, he says, referring to the growth of Phat Tuesdays comic stylings, which was less sophisticated back in the day. Now its Phat Tuesdays PhD. Its more thought-provoking standup. Its still fun and raw, and still relatable. Its less comics (being showcased), but its smarter comics. Comedy has evolved. Torry continues, in the 90s, it was 90s comedy. It was good for that era, but the 90s style of comedy wont work today. Were older now. Our subject matter has to be older. Our crowds have gotten older. You have to evolve your standup. Booking Williams for the show immediately connects the reboot to the original Phat Tuesdays because Williams performed there during its heyday. Torry credits Williams with bringing a veteran flair to the table. The two comedians careers have occasionally overlapped: They were co-hosts on the Tom Joyner Morning Show together, and when Torry left his opening slot on the The Kings of Comedy tour, Williams replaced him. Williams hails from Chicago, which Torry says is home to the funniest Black comedians. Also in the lineup is Cocoa Brown, who Torry says is tearing it up everywhere she goes. Shes so strong and funny, and her comedy speaks to the Black women in St. Louis. Its straight, no chaser. Rounding out the evening is Frank Lyles, who hosts the comedy night at KJs Bar & Grill in St. Louis. According to Torry, the Helium Comedy Club show is a sample size of whats to come relating to Phat Tuesdays content. Next up is a birthday edition of Phat Tuesdays Jan. 11 in Los Angeles with Cedric the Entertainer, D.L. Hughley and Brown as Torry celebrates turning 55. More dates will follow in 2024, starting at smaller venues before growing. Torry is also planning a scripted version of Phat Tuesdays where actors portray Phat Tuesdays comics from the 90s. He was inspired by the HBO series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty about the Los Angeles Lakers. It was the success of the Phat Tuesdays docuseries that let Torry know revisiting it was the right move. The series accomplished more than he could have asked for. But the way it took off surprised him, from it being given a push for Emmy consideration to younger comics being inspired enough by it to start their own comedy nights. What he didnt expect at all from the docuseries he starred in and executive produced was a perfect 100 percent fresh acknowledgment from Rotten Tomatoes, which he says hasnt always been favorable towards projects he has been involved with in the past. I didnt know 100 percent was unheard of. Its not the Oscars or the Emmys but I feel good about it. Just as special was the New York Times naming it Best Comedy of 2022/Best Documentary. He attributes the success of the docuseries, nearly a decade in the making, to having an amazing team including Hudlin, so underrated as a force in Hollywood. He wins on every levelthis little nerdy ass kid from East St. Louis. God allowed me to assemble a great team, and it was the right time, he says. Its the gift that keeps on giving, not just for me but for everyone. Everybody wins. What Phat Tuesdays with Damon Williams, Cocoa Brown, Frank Lyles When 8 p.m. Dec. 12 Where Helium Comedy Club, 1151 St. Louis Galleria Street How much $20-$28 More info heliumcomedy.com Sign up for the Blender newsletter The Blender by Kevin C. Johnson keeps you up to date with the latest concert news and more from the St. Louis music scene. ST. LOUIS Lem Motlow moved part of the family distillery here when Tennessee adopted prohibition in 1910. After the booze ban went national, the Jack Daniels inventory near Vandeventer Avenue figured into one of the wackiest capers of the dry years. There was an ugly epilogue to that strange crime. A drunken Motlow shot and killed a conductor on a passenger train in 1924 and beat the murder charge through a crudely racist, and high-priced, defense strategy. It began with the milking case. Under Prohibition, liquor already distilled was to be kept under guard and used only as prescription medicine. Nonetheless, in August 1923, well-connected thieves were able to deftly siphon away 893 barrels of Jack Daniels whiskey milking it through hidden hose out of the warehouse at 3960 Duncan Avenue. Motlow, nephew of the original Jack Daniel, was among the indicted. On March 17, 1924, after a visit here for a brief court appearance, Motlow had drinks with friends before heading to Union Station. He stumbled unsteadily onto the Louisville & Nashville night train for the trip home to Tennessee. Sleeping-car car porter Ed Wallis asked Motlow for his ticket. He didnt have one and became irate that Wallis, who was black, dared to challenge him. Conductor Clarence Pullis, who was white, intervened. As the train chuffed through the downtown tunnel toward the Eads Bridge, Motlow pulled a pistol and fired twice, striking Pullis once in the abdomen. Pullis, of Kirkwood, died in a hospital in East St. Louis. Motlow was charged with murder. His trial opened on Dec. 4, 1924, before St. Louis Circuit Judge Henry Hamilton in the Municipal Courts Building. Motlows seven lawyers included Patrick Cullen, a prominent St. Louis attorney. Among his character witnesses was Tennessee Gov. Austin Peay. Wallis testified that Motlow angrily asked Pullis, Where did you get that black ----? Wallis said he was shoved by Motlow, who pulled a pistol from his coat and fired. The defense built its case around Wallis race. Cullen asked Wallis if he belonged to any civil-rights groups. He mocked Wallis by affecting a black dialect. Motlow testified that Wallis was arrogant. Using a racial slur, he said Wallis grabbed him by the throat. I reached for my pistol, Motlow said, then somebody grabbed my hand from behind, and the pistol accidentally discharged twice. During closing arguments, Frank Bond, a defense lawyer from Nashville, repeatedly used racial slurs and said, There are two kinds of (blacks) in the South. There are those who know their place ... and those who have ambitions for racial equality. ... In such a class falls Wallis, the race reformer, the man who would be socially equal to you all, gentlemen of the jury. Circuit Attorney Howard Sidener said, This is not a case of North and South. ... This is a case of murder. But the 12 white gentlemen quickly voted to acquit on Dec. 10. Said foreman Frederick Smith, We didnt believe the Negro. Jurors shook hands with Motlow. He never was tried in the milking case. Back home in Tennessee, Motlow became a magistrate judge and eventually resumed making whiskey. He died in 1947. A Look Back Emerson factory turns out turrets for bombers during World War II Local maker of fans and electric motors becomes America's biggest producer of airplane gun turrets during World War II. When the Jack Daniels bootleggers were shipped to prison, St. Louis gave them a heros sendoff Politically connected cronies who had brazenly looted a liquor warehouse arrived to cheers on their way to start serving their prison sentence on Jan. 5, 1926. The Dec. 4, 1923, St. Louis Post-Dispatch included this article in remembrance of a local musician who died of pneumonia, and was once called "the Liszt of America." The old-fashioned opera cape, white hair and vigorous features which made Charles Kunkel a picturesque figure will be seen no more at musical events. The veteran pianist, composer and music publisher died yesterday at Barnes Hospital at the age of 83. He was the dean of St. Louis musicians, his career here having covered a period of 65 years. Active to the last, and still continuing his duties, ha was stricken with a slight attack of paralysis a week ago today, while examining pupils in Granite City for a state competition. He was treated there, and on the following day was taken to Barnes. Pneumonia supervened and brought about his death. Familiar Figure at Concerts. Until the final attack, Kunkel, in recent years, was still seen at concerts of moment, but had transferred much of his interest to the movies. Those who encountered him found his mind as forceful as ever, and his comments on musician and on film productions had lost nothing of their pungent energy. The famous pianist, Moriz Rosenthal, with whom Kunkel played three duet concerts some 17 years ago at the old Germania Theater, now the Gayety, passed through this city Sunday on his way from a recital in Columbia. Mo., and went to the hoppital. Kunkel was unconscious and did not recoglze his old colleague. "A prophet Is never without honor save in his own country,' said Rosenthal. "I regarded Kunkel as the Liszt of America." ... The survivors are a widow, Mrs. Ella E. Weber Kunkel; two sons, Charles Jr. and Louis Beethoven; and a daughter, Mrs. George L. Heidbreder. Friend of Famous Artists. Kunkel was an intimate friend of all the famous artists of his day, and entertained them with lavish hospitality at the Kunkel residence, 3828 West Pine boulevard. As souvenirs of his distinguished guests, he displayed with pride an album containing their autographs. But he had particular satisfaction in showing his celebrated "musical staircase," which led to the second floor of the house. It was decorated with scores of carved panels of wood, presented by such eminent persons as Anton Rubinstein, Christine Nilsson. Julia Rive-King, Emil Liebling and Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore. Kunkel was born in 1840, at Sippersfeld, Rhenish Palatinate, Germany. His family immigrated to Cincinnati when he was 8 years old, and there he began his musical training under his father and in company with his younger brother, Jacob, who died here In 1882. Kunkel always declared that Jacob was the more gifted of the two. Brought Celebrated Artists Here. In the early '70s, Kunkel established himself In the music trade on Fifth street, now Broadway, and took charge of the Temple Building, Broadway and Walnut street, then the center of the town's musical life. Under his management many celebrated artists gave concerts here, among them Rosenthal, Anton Rubinstein, L.M. Gottschalk and Sigismund Thalberg. He brought the Theodore Thomas Orchestra to this city. All of these celebrities regarded Kunkel as a personal friend, and spoke in terms of respect regarding his scholarship and virtuosity. In addition to acting as impresario, Kunkel played in concerts, gave lessons and undertook the music publishing business, at which he was said to have amassed a comfortable fortune. One of his best-known compositions, which was played all over the country, was a descriptive piece called "Alpine Storm." Until a few years ago he still played in public, at recitals given by his pupils, and he continued to give piano lessons until the last. Those who have heard him play recently, in private, said that his fingers had grown inflexible and that he missed many notes, but that his playing still had much of the fire, vigor and deep feeling of his younger days. With his brother Jacob, Kunkel developed the art of duet playing to a degree of extreme polish, and their concerts were among the most popular features of the musical life of the day. He also instituted popular concerts, at nominal prices, which were held at the old Armory Hall and Mercantile Library. The programs were based on the classics, but lighter music of good quality was not disdained. In later years his companion in duet playing was Louis Conrath, St. Louis pianist. Kunkel's most distinguished pupil was Ernest R. Kroeger, who has won a national reputation as composer and pianist. CREVE COEUR A man accused ripping the door off a Creve Coeur ATM with a truck and making off with $45,000 was arrested hours later with a suitcase full of cash, according to charges filed this week. Mylek Freeman, 23, of Missouri City, Texas, was charged in St. Louis County Friday with first-degree property damage to an ATM and felony stealing from an ATM. Creve Coeur police say officers were called about 4:30 a.m. Thursday to an alarm at Enterprise Bank & Trust, 11401 Olive Boulevard. Officers found signs that someone had hooked a chain to a truck, attached it to the bank's outside ATM and then accelerated to rip the door open, charging documents say. Police say the thief stole $45,929 from the ATM and left the truck abandoned nearby. The truck had been reported stolen from St. Louis County, according to court documents. Police found surveillance video from a nearby business showing a Ford Expedition SUV arriving and leaving the area around the time of the break-in. Investigators found that the SUV had been rented about two weeks earlier from a business in Houston. Police used the SUV's GPS to track the vehicle to south St. Louis where officers spotted Freeman and one other person get out of the car hours after the theft before walking to a home in the 2800 block of Nebraska Avenue, charges say. Freemen soon left the home wearing different clothes and got into an Uber, court documents say. Police soon pulled over the Uber. Freeman is accused of running from the Uber and leaving a suitcase full of $12,437 behind. Freeman was taken into custody Thursday and is being held on a $100,000 bond. ST. LOUIS A former St. Louis alderman is asking a court to reduce his federal prison sentence for taking bribes from a local businessman thanks to a change in federal sentencing rules. Jeffrey Boyd, who served a north side ward for 20 years, was sentenced alongside two other former aldermen in December 2022 to three years in prison for bribery and wire fraud. Federal prison officials projected he would be eligible for release on July 1, 2024. But last month, a federal commission that calculates sentencing ranges based on factors such as the nature of the crime and a persons criminal history recommended a reduction for inmates like Boyd. The reduction would mean that Boyds sentencing range would decrease from a recommended 30-37 months to 24-30 months, allowing him to be released as early as Feb. 1, 2024. Mr. Boyd has done excellently while serving his sentence in BOP, his attorney, Andrea Smith, wrote in a filing Monday. He has taken classes in anatomy, piano, finance, economics and food handling and is currently participating in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program. Boyd said in court documents that his crimes came after he had fallen into a crippling alcohol addiction, and he was approached by the co-owner of several gas stations in north St. Louis and north St. Louis County. Boyd helped the business owner, Mohammed Almuttan, purchase a commercial property in Boyds ward from a city authority that owns thousands of vacant lots and abandoned buildings for much less than it was worth. Almuttan later returned it to the city. Boyd was also indicted in a separate wire fraud case in which he sought $22,000 from an insurance company for damaged vehicles he lied about owning. Boyd was charged alongside former Aldermanic President Lewis Reed and ex-Alderman John Collins-Muhammad, both of whom were sentenced to three years and nine months. Neither Reed nor Collins-Muhammad will be eligible for the sentencing reduction. A judge will determine whether to reduce Boyds sentence at a later date. News / Local by Staff reporter A Notre Dame High School student came up with a plan to help orphanages and foster homes in Zimbabwe this summer.Now, at the completion of his fundraiser, the results have been far greater than he expected.Christian Arnold started his fundraiser to gift barrels of goods for infants and children in Zimbabwe. He wanted to send $5,000 worth of goods, but enough was donated that about $15,000 worth of items will be sent instead.Arnold said that the increased amount of items required extra barrels of goods, which increased the shipping costs, but that was still covered by the fundraiser.The leftover money will go to Zimbabwe as well, where it will help set up a computer lab.The barrels have been picked up - they'll make their way via boat from North Carolina to South Africa, and then be driven to Zimbabwe. Officers were called to a hospital for a report of a victim in the intensive care unit with head trauma. The 41-year-old man's mother said she had received a phone call that her son had been assaulted, and she and the man's father found him at his home in the 4200 block of Fair Avenue. UPDATED at 10 a.m. Tuesday with name of man who died LAKE SAINT LOUIS Police on Tuesday identified a man shot and killed this past weekend after struggling with a Lake Saint Louis police officer over guns, authorities said. Wesley Ingrim, 28, of Lake Saint Louis, was killed by police on Sunday night. Officers were called around 9 p.m. to Boulevard Park in Lake Saint Louis to investigate a report of a shooting. They found multiple shell casings at the scene. They then went to a home in the 2400 block of Fox Bridge Court to continue the investigation. Lake Saint Louis police Chief Chris DiGiuseppi said Ingrim lived there. Ingrim walked out of the house with two handguns, police said. Officers tried to disarm him, but he fought with police, authorities said. One officer fired at Ingrim, wounding and later killing him. Ingrim fired two shots during the struggle, police said. One officer was injured, treated and released from the hospital. The shooting in Lake Saint Louis happened just hours after another man was shot and killed after exchanging gunfire with police in O'Fallon, Missouri. In that case, authorities said police chased the man after he fired shots at a clocktower near City Hall. ST. CHARLES COUNTY OFallon police on Sunday shot and killed a man they say fired shots at a clock tower outside the OFallon, Missouri, City Hall, led officers on a chase, then pointed a shotgun at them and exchanged gunfire. Douglas Alan Phipps, 34, was pronounced dead at the scene of the shooting in the Royal Oaks subdivision of St. Charles County. The neighborhood is about 3 miles north of city hall. Phipps pointed a shotgun at officers after stepping out of his vehicle after stopping at a cul-de-sac on Spring Court, OFallon Sgt. Bryan Harr said in a news release. Officers then shot at Phipps, who returned fire before he was killed by officers. Harr said the two officers are a 47-year-old officer with 24 years of experience and a 28-year-old officer with five years of experience. Neither officer was injured. The incident began at about 4:15 p.m. Sunday when police received reports that someone was firing shots at the clock tower near City Hall on North Main Street, Harr said. The suspect was described as a white man driving a maroon car. Police tried to stop the car at the intersection of Main Street and Highway P, about a mile north of City Hall. The vehicle did not stop, and police pursued it west down Highway P and into the Royal Oaks subdivision. Surveillance video from a homeowner captured the pursuit when it turned off Highway P and into the subdivision. In the video, sirens can be heard before a red sedan enters the subdivision at a slow speed, followed closely by four police vehicles with lights and sirens activated. Ten more OFallon and St. Charles County police vehicles drove into the subdivision as the suspect led police on a slow drive looping through the neighborhood, said Keith Barker, who took the video from his home near Royal Oaks and Fawn Ridge drives. The video was taken at about 4:26 p.m., but a time stamp on the video is an hour ahead, Barker said. Police placed spike strips at Highway P and Royal Oaks, one of the entrances to the neighborhood, but Phipps instead turned the opposite direction on Royal Oaks and accelerated farther into the neighborhood and out of sight, Barker said. Barker, who has lived in the neighborhood for 24 years, said he didnt recognize Phipps. He often hears sirens on Highway P, but theyre usually ambulances or firetrucks, he said. To hear sirens and then see this unusually slow pursuit was very unusual, Barker said. It was nothing like you would see on TV. This is going to be talked about in our subdivision for quite a long time. The clock tower had visible damage on Monday. Sundays shooting was the third fatal police shooting in OFallon since January 2019, when an officer shot and killed an armed 64-year-old man during a mental health check at the mans home. OFallon police said at the time that the officer feared for his and a mental health workers life. The mans family sued the police department in August of this year claiming wrongful death. And in January 2022, police officers shot and killed a teen in a car on a cul-de-sac while responding to a call for a suspicious vehicle. Police said they loudly knocked on the car window and spotted a handgun in the front seat before the driver reversed the car into a police vehicle and tried to drive off. The teens family said he and a friend were sleeping in the car after visiting another friend in the area. The St. Charles County Prosecutors office later declined to press charges against the officers, releasing video of the incident and saying the officers believed their lives were at risk. The incident Sunday is being investigated by the countys Critical Incident Response team, a group formed in 2022 that includes lieutenant commanders and detectives from the St. Charles County, Cottleville, Lake St. Louis, OFallon, St. Charles, St. Peters and Wentzville police departments. The investigators eventually turn over their findings to the St. Charles County prosecutor. Phipps family could not be reached Monday. OFallon police released a mugshot of Phipps but did not provide information about whether he was previously known to the department. Court records show Phipps had a lengthy criminal history in St. Charles, Lincoln and Warren counties including domestic assault, burglary, theft, trespassing and driving while intoxicated. Phipps also had several restraining orders filed against him, including two in 2022. The shooting in OFallon happened hours before a man was killed by a police officer in Lake St. Louis after a struggle over a gun. In that case, police said they were investigating a report of a shooting when a man walked toward them with two handguns and fought with police when they tried to disarm him. Kim Bell of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report. EAST ST. LOUIS A woman and a 5-year-old girl were injured in a shooting Monday at an East St. Louis apartment complex. Illinois State Police say the woman was shot multiple times and the 5-year-old girl sustained a graze-wound to the head about 5 a.m. in the 1100 block of North 13th Street. The woman's injuries are serious but not life-threatening, police said. The shooter fled, but Illinois State Police say a police dog helped track a suspect who was taken into custody Monday. Illinois State Police did not release the name of the suspect or any other details on the shooting Monday. ST. LOUIS The state board of education will take up the increasingly contentious topic of new charter schools Tuesday while facing a lawsuit over a proposed high school in St. Louis. Believe STL Academy resubmitted its application to the state after the St. Louis Public Schools board sued the charter school for failing to notify the district of its intent to open in fall 2024, according to the lawsuit filed last month that also names the Missouri State Charter School Commission and the Missouri State Board of Education. The state board approved the schools application in October and will vote again Tuesday on the schools revised application that includes a notification to SLPS. As a former SLPS educator and graduate returning home to serve families that increasingly demand a high-quality school for their children, I am eager to work with the district and community partners in St. Louis committed to ensuring children have access to our proven college and career preparation curriculum, said Kimberly Neal-Brannum, executive director of Believe, in a statement Monday. The proposed school has spurred new opposition to charters in the city, where a group of public school educators, alumni, parents and labor organizers held a protest Monday outside the Delmar Divine mixed-use building that houses the Opportunity Trust, funder of Believe and other charter schools. There are too many schools for a dwindling number of students in the city, said speakers including Gloria Nolan, parent liaison for SLPS. The city has 19 SLPS or charter high schools with an average enrollment of 384. By comparison, districts in St. Louis County with similar student enrollment, including Hazelwood, Parkway and Rockwood, have three or four high schools with an average of 1,500 students each. We are here to let the people know that more school choice will not save our most vulnerable students. School choice is a ploy to privatize public schools for profit, Nolan said. Our important work is to preserve democratically run public education by fighting against the expansion and opening of any new charter schools, starting with Believe STL Academy. Believe school expects to have 440 students in ninth through 12th grades by 2027, according to its application. The school is an expansion of Believe Circle City high school in Indianapolis, which Neal-Brannum opened in fall of 2020. The average GPA at the school last year was 2.3, and more than 10% of students were suspended for fighting, according to board minutes. Charter schools are publicly funded but operated by nonprofit boards. In Missouri, charter schools can open in St. Louis and Kansas City and in school districts that are continually underperforming. Charters have had a mixed record since they first opened in St. Louis in 2000 with a goal of improving student performance and keeping families in the city. More than half of the 37 charter school operators that came to the city have folded due to financial or academic failures, including La Salle and Hawthorn schools this year. A new elementary charter school, Voices Academy, opened in downtown St. Louis in August. In the past three decades, 85 public schools opened and 104 schools closed in the city. As the student population has shrunk, the total number of schools has grown, creating a chaotic and dysfunctional educational system, said Dorothy Rohde Collins, former president of the SLPS board and co-author of a September report on school closures from the St. Louis University Prime Center. In 1991, there were 14 district or charter high schools in the city for 9,962 students, according to the report. This year, there are 19 high schools for 7,288 students. Enrollment in kindergarten through high school has declined by 400 students in charter schools and nearly 3,000 students in SLPS since fall of 2019. Were in a situation where we have made the public education system in St. Louis so complicated that we are seeing people opting out of the city completely, Rohde Collins said. What we need to do is be strategic. How do we design a school system for the city we have now? We cannot do that by just opening new schools. Students in St. Louis are missing out on fine arts, sports, foreign language and advanced courses that are offered in St. Louis County districts of similar size and demographics, parents said. Most public high school graduates in the city do not meet the basic requirements for admission to the University of Missouri, including a minimum ACT score of 17 along with four years of advanced math and English, three years of science, two years of foreign language and one year of fine arts. We have so many needs in SLPS, what we dont need are new schools, said Tracy Spies, co-chair of the SLPS parent action council, at the protest Monday. There are not enough kids to fill the schools we already have. Josh Renaud of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report. CLAYTON The former aide to a St. Louis County Council member was ready to file suit against her former boss before the parties settled outside of court Wednesday. A draft of her lawsuit levels withering criticism of Councilwoman Rita Heard Days and what it was like to work for her. Maria Chappelle-Nadal said her time working as a legislative assistant for Days before she was fired were the darkest days of her career as a policymaker. She claims Days fired her for expressing her political views and that St. Louis County didnt properly accommodate her mental health disability. When I joined Councilwoman Days as her assistant, I couldnt have been more optimistic about the public service opportunities the job would provide me, Chappelle-Nadal said in a prepared statement shared by her attorney. Unfortunately, because of how I was treated by Councilwoman Days and St. Louis County, the last two years of my life have been and remain the darkest of my entire career in public service. In February, Chappelle-Nadal took her complaints to two agencies that handle disability discrimination claims: the Missouri Commission on Human Rights and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She and her attorneys began negotiations with the county and a third-party mediator to settle out of court, said Chappelle-Nadals attorney, Jeremy Hollingshead. Meanwhile, Hollingshead and Chappelle-Nadal prepared a lawsuit to file in St. Louis County courts in case a settlement didnt materialize. But just before the latest deadline, mediation began again, and they reached a settlement for $77,000 earlier this month, Hollinshead said. A copy of the draft was obtained by the Post-Dispatch last week. It describes a hostile work environment where the county failed to accommodate Chappelle-Nadals mental health needs, such as a need to work remotely or to have an emotional support dog at work. The lawsuit also details Chappelle-Nadals political views and how she aired them publicly, attracting ire from Days and County Executive Sam Page and eventually costing her job. But Chappelle-Nadal lost her job because she wasnt doing it, Days said. The two had been allies when they served alongside each other as state legislators, but the relationship soured when they had both left their state posts and started working together in the county, Days said. Its unfortunate that she felt it was difficult, Days said. But Ive not had any problems with working with any of my assistants since I was in the House or the Senate. None of them will tell you that I have been difficult to work with. So thats her opinion. A breakup of allies Chappelle-Nadal, of University City, and Days, of Bel-Nor, are both influential Black women whose voices can lend power to campaigns and lift up causes. And at first, they were political allies. Days was first elected as a state representative in 1993, and she served in the House before winning a seat in the state Senate in 2002, a post she held until 2011. Days had the same two assistants throughout her time in the Legislature, and she has had the same assistant in the county since she fired Chappelle-Nadal. I do expect you to do the job, but I dont consider myself difficult to work with, Days said. Chappelle-Nadal began working alongside Days when she was elected to the House in 2004 and later described her as a mentor. Chappelle-Nadal then succeeded Days in her Senate seat, which she held until she left because of term limits in 2019. She was then elected to another House seat, where she served until 2021. But her comments on social media, sometimes expletive-laden, repeatedly landed her in hot water. In 2017, she called for the assassination of former President Donald Trump on the platform formerly known as Twitter. She apologized for the post and removed it. Later that year, she leveled insults at a fellow legislator and five lobbyists, calling them baby killers who should burn in hell for opposing legislation that would have provided state buyouts for constituents who live near the radioactive West Lake landfill. By the time Chappelle-Nadals time in the Legislature ended in January 2021, Days had assumed office on the St. Louis County Council. She was elected in August 2019 to fill the seat left vacant when Councilwoman Hazel Erby, the first Black woman to serve on the council, quit to accept a job in Pages administration. Chappelle-Nadal was looking for work after she left the Legislature, and Days was hiring. She did not have a job leaving the Legislature, and I did not want her to be without a job, Days said. So I asked her to come and work for me, and she agreed. Chappelle-Nadal began working for Days in November 2020. Days knew about Chappelle-Nadals political stances when she hired her, the draft lawsuit alleges, views Chappelle-Nadal would continue publicly advocating for. Criticizing the county Chappelle-Nadal indeed continued to express her opinions. She aired a regular podcast where in one episode she heavily criticized St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell. In June 2022, she tweeted that the county was downplaying the potential public health risks associated with development by the Boeing Co. on land improperly tested for contamination near the airport. She tweeted frequently all last year about contamination and its risks. That spring, she began actively questioning the county executives office about her concerns surrounding the development of land near the airport, according to the draft lawsuit. In June 2022, the Riverfront Times published an op-ed from Chappelle-Nadal that criticized the countys plans. It called out Page and the County Council, including Days, for failing to exercise proper leadership in remediating nuclear waste. Then in the summer of 2022, Chappelle-Nadal publicly supported Pages opponent in his bid for reelection. Throughout Chappelle-Nadals time with the county, Days instructed her to not make such public comments and prohibited her from doing the podcast. This moratorium was a violation of Chappelle-Nadals First Amendment rights, her lawyer said. As a St. Louis County resident myself, I was surprised with not only the level of health effects my family and neighbors face due to the radioactive waste that continues to plague our community but with the county governments willingness to hide this reality to the point of firing employees who publicly raise awareness of the issue, Hollingshead said. And the councilwoman was a difficult person to work for, Chappelle-Nadal claims in the draft lawsuit. Legislative assistants earn $47,000 annually and are typically responsible for responding to emails, scheduling, researching and doing other tasks for the council members. Days, known for her directness in public meetings, was impatient with Chappelle-Nadal and the necessities her disability required, the lawsuit says. She was critical of Chappelle-Nadals need to work from home and accused her of failing to get her work done. Days also increasingly asked for Chappelle-Nadals help in her 2022 reelection campaign, responsibilities outside of the scope of Chappelle-Nadals county job. But the allegations in the draft lawsuit wont be heard in a courtroom. The settlement prohibits Chappelle-Nadal from filing suit against the county. Days wished Chappelle-Nadal well. I wish her the best in whatever she decides she needs or wants to do, Days said. But it just was not working out for us. With the clock ticking to get a measure enshrining the right to an abortion on a statewide ballot in 2024, Missouri abortion rights supporters appear to be split on strategy and have not unified behind one version of the proposal. The lack of a campaign, as well as a series of legal battles with anti-abortion Republican officials that kept the abortion rights petitions tied up in court for months, have cast some doubt on the ability for supporters to craft an expensive and time-consuming campaign to get a version of the measure on the 2024 ballot. That timeline is going to be really, really tough, said Emily Wales, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which has not backed a version of the proposals. Missourians will have access restored. I dont know that it will be possible for them to vote on this in 2024. Failure to get a measure on the ballot would be a huge missed opportunity in a year in which abortion rights are expected to be a key issue. Missouri voters are expected to turn out in droves in 2024, with abortion rights also crucial in races across the board, including governor, U.S. Senate and president. If a measure does reach the ballot, Missouri, the first state to ban abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, could become the first state to reverse a near-total ban on the procedure through a ballot initiative. But one new complication for the abortion rights ballot push is the emergence of a Republican-led campaign that would legalize abortion up to 12 weeks and add exceptions for rape and incest. Jamie Corley, a former Republican congressional staffer from University City who is leading the effort, has pitched her proposal as a middle ground between the states near-total abortion ban and the more expansive abortion rights petitions. Despite this pitch, some abortion rights groups, health care providers and Democratic lawmakers remain skeptical of Corleys effort, arguing that her proposal would give lawmakers too much room to regulate reproductive health care. Advocates have also criticized a requirement that women seeking an abortion following a rape report the assault to a hotline. Mallory Schwarz, the executive director of Abortion Action Missouri, said Corleys petitions were misleading, contending that they were written in a way that would not actually allow health care providers to begin providing abortions again. She very clearly didnt consult with the providers of abortion care in our state or regionally to understand what abortion care looks like in practice, she said. Corley pushed back on criticism of her petitions, saying that the group seeking the more expansive proposals was looking for an all or nothing policy where women are left with nothing. We have a dynamic that we have an extreme anti-abortion group and then a pretty extreme pro-abortion group, Corley said. In a follow up statement, she said it was really confusing to voters to watch pro-choice groups try to sabotage a bipartisan effort to restore access to abortion in a state that doesnt even allow rape victims access to care. Competing abortion rights proposals Anna Fitz-James, a retired St. Louis doctor, filed the more expansive abortion rights petitions in March on behalf of the group Missourians for Constitutional Freedom. After the series of court battles with Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Attorney General Andrew Bailey, both staunch anti-abortion Republicans, supporters have not crafted a formal campaign or rallied behind one version of the measure. Abortion rights supporters largely pointed to the lengthy delay caused by the legal battles between the ACLU of Missouri and anti-abortion Republican officials. The different petitions range in how far to go in legalizing abortion. One would legalize abortion outright, removing the ban at any stage of gestation. The others would offer state lawmakers some room to regulate, including allowing abortions to be banned after 24 weeks or after so-called fetal viability the ability of a fetus to survive outside the uterus. Schwarz, whose organization has not taken an official position on a version of the measure, said it was committed to the most expansive policy possible. Wales, with Planned Parenthood, said its preference is to see a world where we dont have political, non-medical restrictions placed on care. At the same time, we want Missourians to have access to as much as they can have, Wales said, saying the group has not come out in favor or against any of the proposals. Missouri Abortion Fund, which raises money to help Missourians access abortions, in a statement posted on social media last month said it gives pause to any ballot language that puts an increased burden on patients and providers. The inclusion of viability language, which will set legal standards for decades, is not in line with our values as an abortion fund, the statement said. Pamela Merritt, a longtime abortion rights activist originally from Missouri now heads Medical Students for Choice, an international group that trains students about reproductive health care. Merritt, in a phone interview, said she was part of the coalition pushing for an abortion rights ballot measure in Missouri, but stepped away from the effort in July. While she would support the one measure that would outright restore the right to abortion, she said she had deep concern it felt like they were considering language that is essentially restrictive. I dont think we have a strategy beyond the ballot which gives me pause, she said. Im also concerned about the fact that these ballot measures at their best might protect abortion access to people who are already able to access some abortion care as opposed to centering the people most impacted by the ban. Merritt pushed back on the urgency that some supporters feel to get an abortion rights measure on the ballot right now. Nobody has convinced me that right now is the only time we have to move this, she said. Im a little concerned that there might be a push to advance a version that has restrictions because people are convinced that we have to do it now and theyre making assumptions about the electorate that havent been tested. While supporters have been energized by victories for abortion rights in other states such as neighboring Kansas and Republican-controlled Ohio, many acknowledge that Missouri is its own state a state where anti-abortion activists and officials have for years worked to limit access to the procedure. Most abortion supporters would like for this to be a conclusion that government doesnt get to interfere in a womans rights, said state Rep. Deb Lavender, a Manchester Democrat. And then we have to have language that passes in Missouri. And I think thats whats being weighed right now. Lavender said that once supporters decide on a path forward, it will unleash thousands of women across the state that are ready to go to collect signatures. But we need to get to the start line. Schwarz, in a phone interview, pointed to the onslaught of anti-abortion attacks from Ashcroft and Bailey, saying that the campaign has looked a lot different than it would have months ago when Fitz-James first filed the petitions. For a Missouri effort, its important to do it right, she said. And be intentional and think about the breadth of the challenges and launch a campaign that can win. Schwarz pushed back on the idea that disagreement among supporters was the chief concern for the proposals. Missouri, she said, is fortunate to have a diverse coalition of people pushing to restore abortion access. This issue is popular and important to people even in red states, she said. As advocates, however, we also have to look at the ways that Missouri differs from other states, ways that our electorate differs from other states and the resources available to us. Wales said the values of the groups involved in discussions about the petitions are the same but there are some differences in strategy. While supporters study how best to move forward with getting resources and building a campaign on one of the more expansive proposals, Corley and her new group Missouri Women and Family Research Fund have pushed forward with a version of their competing ballot measure. Corley filed a slew of proposals in August, which are tied up in similar legal battles with statewide officials over the wording and cost of the measures. Despite this, however, Corleys group has started campaigning on a version of the petition that would legalize abortion up to 12 weeks and allow exceptions for rape, incest and health or safety of the female seeking an abortion. Corley, in a phone interview, attacked the states near-total abortion ban as extreme. But she also criticized the supporters of the competing ballot measures for being unwilling to compromise. Its really time for the other coalition to fish or cut bait, she said. We have put forth a passable solution. All theyre doing right now when they are stalling is creating the very confusion they claim to dislike. But while Corley paints her proposal as compassionate and rational, some abortion rights supporters say its misleading. Its deceptive it doesnt really bring back true access to abortion and to reproductive freedom, said state Rep. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Kansas City Democrat, pointing to arguments that Corleys petitions would keep in place laws that had whittled away access to abortion across the state before Roe v. Wade was overturned. Corley, in a statement, pushed back on this argument, saying that her amendment does not grandfather in targeted restrictions on abortion providers or TRAP laws. As we all know, there is not a single ballot initiative that can magically make all of the TRAP laws disappear not even the ACLUs, she said. Just like in Ohio, our amendment doesnt change any underlying laws, but it does change the constitutional standard for evaluating both existing and prospective laws. Beyond that, its up to the courts, regardless of which amendment passes. Missouri Healthcare Professionals for Reproductive Rights, a group of medical professionals led by Jennifer Smith, an OB-GYN in the St. Louis area, penned a letter criticizing provisions in Corleys petitions in September. While we applaud their recognition that our current laws make Missouri (look) draconian, punitive and unsafe for families, we find their proposals dangerous substitutes for the more expansive petitions filed by Fitz-James, the group wrote. Smith, in a phone interview, pointed to the petitions language, which would require rape and sexual assault survivors to report it to a crisis hotline before an abortion can be performed. Im not really sure logistically how that would work out if a patient has to report it and then I have to hunt down her report, she said. Why should a patient whos had this horrible experience have to do more to get necessary health care? As a physician, its just ridiculous. But Corley, in a statement, said her amendment is stronger with a reporting requirement and has the added benefit of staving off any attempts by the Missouri Legislature to add a police reporting requirement which they will do if given the chance to draft these exceptions themselves. May deadline approaches Anti-abortion activists, for their part, have capitalized on the dueling campaigns, attempting to point out the apparent divisions among abortion rights supporters in Missouri compared to other states. In no other state other than Missouri has there been this intense infighting and public disagreement among pro-abortion groups about which measure to support, Sam Lee, a longtime anti-abortion lobbyist, said in a lengthy text to The Star. With the two competing groups, Lee said, it is looking less and less likely each passing day that either group will get enough signatures by the early May 2024 deadline. To get a version of one of the measures on the 2024 ballot, supporters will have to collect more than 170,000 signatures from voters by May. If they receive enough signatures, the measures would appear on the November ballot unless Republican Gov. Mike Parson calls a special election. If both measures reach the ballot, the messaging surrounding what each proposal would do will be important, Nurrenbern, the Kansas City Democrat, said. Nurrenbern acknowledged that Missouri may have to take a bit more of a moderate approach to make sure an abortion rights measure passes. But I think it doesnt matter who you talk to in the state from conservative Republicans in rural Missouri, they think that women and families should be able to make decisions in their doctors offices without interference from politicians in Jefferson City, she said. Despite the tight deadline, Schwarz said shes never seen this level of support for abortion access. That is incredible and heartening and exciting about what is in front of us and what is possible and the power that we have in our state when we come together and take action to demand better to demand the liberated future of abortion access that Missourians deserve, she said. The first day was a breeze. Sean Shannon and Danny Foster walked into several marijuana dispensaries around Missouri with their matching Union for Cannabis Workers shirts and talked to employees about the possibility of unionizing. The first day, there were 57 stops amongst the teams, said Shannon, lead organizer with Local 655 of the United Food and Commercial Workers. Reception was out-of-this-world positive. Workers were so excited. Shannon had gathered together a dozen organizers to help Local 655 visit every one of the approximate 100 dispensaries on the eastern half of Missouri twice. Stirring up the excitement was the unions big win in a recent settlement, in which 10 Shangri-La South dispensary workers in Columbia received a collective $145,000 after being fired following a March union organizing drive. They were excited to hear that Shangri La (employees) actually won, he said. They couldnt believe people were getting their jobs back. They couldnt believe the amount of money. But by the third day, the reception got much colder, he said. Managers had warned their counterparts at other locations that union reps might be visiting. Employees were basically told, If you talk to the union, if you take a card, if you take a sticker, youre out, he said. Still, since the tour, union activity has blown up, Shannon said. An active campaign means the employees have signed agreements, or authorization cards, with the union authorizing Local 655 to represent them. It also means union leaders believe workers have a good shot at succeeding. Shannon said Local 655 now has authorization to represent more than 20 locations in eastern Missouri. The next step is filing a representation petition with the National Labor Relations Board, seeking to have the board conduct an election among employees on whether to unionize. Last week, employees at Hi-Pointe Cannabis in St. Louis filed a petition following the lead of workers at High Profile Dispensary in Columbia and Bloom Medicinal Dispensary in St. Louis in early November. In October, Homestate Dispensary employees in Kansas City voted 6-1 to have Teamsters Local 955 represent them, becoming the second unionized dispensary in Missouri. The first was Root 66 Dispensary in St. Louis, where employees voted to join UFCW Local 655 in April 2022. A big reason why employees are moving towards unions, Shannon said, is because Missouri is at the point where the canna-bliss of working with marijuana professionally is starting to wear off. Now the reality that workers arent getting paid enough, are sometimes working in poor conditions and have no job stability is starting to set in, said Danny Foster, a former cannabis worker who was helping with the unions tour. We really werent given the industry that we were promised, Foster said. We all came in super-excited. We love cannabis. We wanted to be able to make it a career. But as it is right now, cannabis isnt a career. Are they ag workers? Will Braddum, a post-harvest technician, is facing a different kind of battle at BeLeaf Medicals Sinse Cannabis site in St. Louis. Not long after he and 17 other employees filed their petition in September, the company argued before the board that the employees arent manufacturing workers theyre agricultural workers. Agricultural laborers arent protected under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which ensures employees have the fundamental right to seek better working conditions and designation of representation without fear of retaliation. Its a frustrating gray area for manufacturing cannabis employees looking to unionize, Shannon said. On Oct. 27, company representatives described the employees job descriptions to the board, which included a whole bunch of the cultivation sides job description, Braddum said. It was eye-opening for the employees who testified and had to refute that description, he said. Ive never watered anything and never touched any soil, he said. Ive never touched a living plant at work. So I guess if theyre going to tell the National Labor Relations Board that were doing agricultural work, maybe theyre not necessarily on our side at all. An attorney for BeLeaf Medical said the company was not able to comment. Its unclear how long it will take to get a decision from the board, but the decision will likely be reviewed closely nationwide. Braddum has been at BeLeaf for the last year and a half, but hes been part of the legacy market since 2009. I just kind of segued, he said. I went from an illegal career to a legal career without a hiccup basically. For him, this is his career. Hes seen how cutthroat the corporate side can be and how a human relations officer has the power to make someone lose their agent ID, or state-issued license to work in cannabis. He doesnt want that to happen to him or any of his team. The only way to pad myself from Human Resources is to cultivate a union movement, he said, and talk to my co-workers about job security. Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on Facebook and X. ST. LOUIS A detainee in the St. Louis City Justice Center died Sunday morning in what authorities are calling an apparent suicide. The man, 34-year-old Javon White, was found unconscious in his cell by a correctional officer just before 6:10 a.m. after an apparent suicide attempt, according to Monte Chambers, a spokesperson for the citys Department of Public Safety. He died later at a hospital. Charles Coyle, the city's public safety director, said Monday that White had "reached out to mental health" in September but there was nothing that would put him on suicide watch. White had been jailed there for 31 months as he awaited trial in a murder case. He was charged with first-degree murder and two counts of assault in April 2021. He was accused of fatally shooting Chuwn Curtis, 24, in the Walnut Park East neighborhood of St. Louis. Two women were also shot but survived. White's mother Vanessa Matthews and wife Pamela White told the Post-Dispatch on Monday morning that they want an outside investigation into how White died. Matthews confirmed that her son was not on suicide watch, and they are skeptical that he would have killed himself. "As much as he loved his family, I don't see him doing that," Matthews said. "His whole hopes and dreams were coming home to his family." White was a father of four. Pamela White said she last spoke with her husband Friday. "He had his ups and downs," she said. "He wanted to come home." The City Justice Center, where suspects are held before trial, has long faced criticism. The jail saw several inmate uprisings in 2021 over what inmates called inhumane conditions. The facility has seen several deaths in recent years, including three within two months earlier this summer. Last week, city officials announced a new health care provider for the facility. Florida-based Physician Correctional USA began a one-year contract on Friday, taking over from bankrupt prison health care giant Corizon and a related company, YesCare. Also last week, after more than a year of being turned away, the citys jail oversight board made its first official visit to the downtown jail, where they had their first in-person meeting with Corrections Commissioner Jennifer Clemons-Abdullah. Coyle, the public safety director, said Monday that police and the medical examiner's office are investigating White's death. Were looking into this, he said. We have a lot of unanswered questions. Coyle noted that about a quarter of the deaths at the downtown jail since 2000 have been suicides. Mayor Tishaura O. Jones expressed condolences to the mans family and said any death in the jail is concerning. We are unsure as to whether or not it could have been prevented, she said. Jones also reiterated her confidence in Clemons-Abdullah's leadership. Jones and Coyle spoke with reporters Monday after the opening session of a week-long series of regional meetings aimed at reducing homicides and other violent crime. The Missouri Department of Transportation will once again close Zumbehl Road over Interstate 70 overnight. The bridge will close Wednesday, Dec. 6. The closure is weather-permitting. Both northbound and southbound lanes of Zumbehl Road over I-70 will close from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. MoDOT said in a press release there will also be brief closures of the ramps from the interstate throughout the night. The closure is to give the striping contractor room to work. It was originally scheduled for Monday, Dec. 4. MoDOT last closed the bridge on Nov. 3 to accommodate ongoing work. This article has been updated to reflect the rescheduling of the closure. News / National by Staff reporter Karoi magistrate Moreblessing Makati has postponed the sentencing of Hurungwe East legislator Chenjerai Kangausaru, who was accused of forgery.Makati convicted Kangausaru last month and sentencing was set for Tuesday last week.However, the magistrate could not pass sentence because Kangausaru's lawyer Samuel Muyemeki of Mapara and Associates was committed at the High Court.Kangausaru is locked in a land dispute with Tichafa Tendayi over a 262-hectare piece of land at Chitonga Farm in Tengwe.The matter went for full trial that saw Kangausaru losing for using a fake offer letter.He was remanded out of custody.Kangausaru was facing charges under section 3(1) of the Land (Consequential Provision) Act Chapter 20:28 for occupation of gazetted land without lawful authority.Prosecutor Progress Maponde told the court that Kangausaru unlawfully occupied Subdivision 1 of Chitonga in November 2014.Tendayi, who resides at Subdivision 1 of Chitonga Farm, reported the matter to the police.According to the State, the farm was allocated to two people, with Tendayi being one of the beneficiaries."The accused person (Chenjerai Kangausaru) has no legal right to act in the manner he did. The complainant (Vincent Tendayi) has a valid offer letter that justifies his occupancy of the disputed piece of land," Maponde told the court.In defence, Kangausaru claimed that he had an offer letter from the Lands ministry signed by former minister Douglas Mombeshora in February 2014.However, verification by the acting director for lands and administration, a C Magauze, revealed that the letter was fake.He also submitted two offer letters to the Hurungwe district lands committee which were issued by Mombeshora, but with different signatures.Kangausaru will appear in court for sentencing on December 13 this year. A mother and her 14-year-old daughter are advocating for better protections for victims after AI-generated nude images of the teen and other female classmates were circulated at a high school in New Jersey. On the other side of the country, officials are investigating an incident involving a teenage boy who allegedly used artificial intelligence to create and distribute similar images of other students also teen girls that attend a high school in suburban Seattle, Washington. The disturbing cases put a spotlight yet again on explicit AI-generated material that overwhelmingly harms women and children and is booming online at an unprecedented rate. According to an analysis by independent researcher Genevieve Oh that was shared with The Associated Press, more than 143,000 new deepfake videos were posted online this year, which surpasses every other year combined. Affected families are pushing lawmakers to implement robust safeguards for victims whose images are manipulated using new AI models, or the plethora of apps and websites that openly advertise their services. Advocates and some legal experts also call for federal regulation that can provide uniform protections across the country and send a strong message to current and would-be perpetrators. Were fighting for our children, said Dorota Mani, whose daughter was a victim in Westfield, a New Jersey suburb outside of New York City. They are not Republicans, and they are not Democrats. They dont care. They just want to be loved, and they want to be safe. The problem with deepfakes isnt new, but experts say its getting worse as the technology to produce it becomes more available and easier to use. Researchers sounded the alarm this year on the explosion of AI-generated child sexual abuse material using depictions of real victims or virtual characters. In June, the FBI warned it was continuing to receive reports from victims, both minors and adults, whose photos or videos were used to create explicit content that was shared online. Several states passed their own laws over the years to try to combat the problem. Texas, Minnesota and New York passed legislation this year criminalizing nonconsensual deepfake porn, joining Virginia, Georgia and Hawaii who already had laws on the books. Some states, like California and Illinois, have only given victims the ability to sue perpetrators for damages in civil court, which New York and Minnesota also allow. A few other states are considering their own legislation, including New Jersey, where a bill is in the works to ban deepfake porn and impose penalties either jail time, a fine or both on those who spread it. State Sen. Kristin Corrado, a Republican who introduced the legislation earlier this year, said she decided to get involved after reading an article about people trying to evade revenge porn laws by using their former partners image to generate deepfake porn. The bill languished for a few months, but theres a good chance it might pass, she said, especially with the spotlight on the issue due to Westfield. The Westfield event took place this summer and was brought to the attention of the high school on Oct. 20, Westfield High School spokesperson Mary Ann McGann said. McGann did not provide details on how the AI-generated images were spread, but Mani, the mother of one of the girls, said she received a call from the school informing her nude pictures were created using the faces of some female students and then circulated among a group of friends on the social media app Snapchat. The school hasnt confirmed any disciplinary actions, citing confidentiality on matters involving students. Westfield police and the Union County prosecutors office did not reply to requests for comment. Details havent emerged about the incident in Washington state, which happened in October and is under investigation. Paula Schwan, chief of the Issaquah Police Department, said officers obtained search warrants. When reached for comment, the Issaquah School District said it could not discuss the specifics because of the investigation but said bullying, harassment or mistreatment among students is entirely unacceptable. If officials move to prosecute the incident in New Jersey, state law prohibiting the sexual exploitation of minors might already apply, said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at George Washington University who leads Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, an organization aiming to combat online abuses. But those protections dont extend to adults in a similar scenario, she said. The best fix, Franks said, would come from a federal law that can provide consistent protections nationwide and penalize dubious organizations profiting from products and apps that easily allow anyone to make deepfakes. President Joe Biden signed an executive order in October that, among other things, called for barring the use of generative AI to produce child sexual abuse material or nonconsensual intimate imagery of real individuals. The order also directs the federal government to issue guidance to label and watermark AI-generated content to help differentiate it from authentic material. Citing the Westfield incident, U.S. Rep. Tom Kean Jr., a Republican who represents the town, introduced a bill to require developers to put disclosures on AI-generated content. Another federal bill introduced by U.S. Rep. Joe Morelle, a New York Democrat, would make it illegal to share deepfake porn images online. But it hasnt advanced due to congressional gridlock. Trends in AI ethics before and after ChatGPT Trends in AI ethics before and after ChatGPT A significant chunk of the public struggles to understand AI and fears its implications As AI works its way into consumer tech, concerns grow to a fever pitch Government, technology, and media emerge as leading industries of concern The optimistic case for AI's future is rooted in the potential for scientific, medical, and educational advancements It pains me greatly to say it, but the discussion of whether Donald Trump is qualified to be on the ballot for the next presidential election is an exercise in absurdity and, in my opinion, exposes our once respected USA to derision and dishonor around the world. Common sense will inform anyone that a person who has been twice impeached, who has been found legally liable for fraud, who incited a riot against his own government and who is facing trial for conspiracy against the U.S. should not be on the ballot. It is ridiculous to even consider that an imprisoned criminal may be allowed to run for the highest honor in our country even as he may be serving time for dishonoring it so thoroughly. In a sensible world, it should not even be a question that would require the Supreme Court to decide. The justices themselves are making news lately but not for wise or honorable deeds. My only hope is that Americans of both political parties will come out in force to vote against this horribly unsuitable candidate, as they did in 2020. The stakes are higher than ever. Rise Schnurman St. Louis Cicor Technologies Ltd / Key word(s): Miscellaneous Cicor presents financial mid-term targets at today's Capital Markets Event 04-Dec-2023 / 07:00 CET/CEST Release of an ad hoc announcement pursuant to Art. The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. Bronschhofen, December 4, 2023 The Cicor Group (SIX Swiss Exchange: CICN) is publishing its financial mid-term targets for the next three to four years today and hosts its Capital Markets Event 2023 this evening in Zurich. At the Capital Markets Event, Cicor will provide insights into its growth strategy, value creation through acquisitions, the contribution of operational excellence to achieving its mid-term targets and the strategic partnership with Clayens. The following financial mid-term targets will be presented today: Annual organic growth of 7-10% Sales of >CHF 600 million within 3 4 years Profitability of 7-10% (core EBIT) and 10-13% (EBITDA) Core return on invested capital (core ROIC) of >15% Debt leverage (net debt / EBITDA ratio) of <2.75 Capital expenditure (CAPEX) of less than 3% of sales Cicor is very well positioned. The company is benefiting from dynamic development in its focus markets of industry, medical technology, and aerospace and defence. Acquisitions will continue to play an important role in Cicor's strategy, as the company sees attractive opportunities in a highly fragmented market. The current mid-term guidance includes some moderate level of acquisitions. The effective level of inorganic growth may lead to revised financial mid-term targets. The payment of a dividend will be considered as soon as Cicor achieves a sustainable positive net cash flow. The existing guidance for the current financial is confirmed: For 2023, Cicor expects sales of CHF 380-410 million and an opeRating result (EBITDA) of CHF 40-45 million. All presentations from today's Capital Markets Event are available on Cicor's website. Contact Cicor Management AG Gebenloostrasse 15 9552 Bronschhofen Switzerland Media & Investor Relations Phone +41 71 913 73 00 Email: media@cicor.com The Cicor Group is a globally active provider of full-cycle electronic solutions from research and development to manufacturing and supply chain management. Cicors approximately 2,500 employees at 15 locations are serving leaders from the medical, industrial and aerospace & defence industries. Cicor creates value to its customers through the combination of customer-specific development solutions, high-tech components, as well as electronic device manufacturing. The shares of Cicor Technologies Ltd. are traded at the SIX Swiss Exchange (CICN). For further information, please visit the website www.cicor.com. End of Inside Information Taiwan is sending up to 600 of its military personnel to the United States where they will be trained on weapons Taiwan has purchased but not received. The backlog includes about $19 billion worth of weapons purchased from the United States but not yet delivered. Eight billion dollars worth of new F-16 jets is part of this. Pilots and maintainers for these aircraft require some training or familiarization for these new F-16 models and that be best done in the United States. Some American trainers are in Taiwan but cannot handle the workload all these purchases have created. The U.S. has always been a staunch supporter of Taiwan; the Nationalist Chinese faction that lost a civil war to the communists in the late 1940s. The surviving Nationalist troops and leadership retreated to Taiwan and, with American assistance, prevented the Chinese communists from attacking Taiwan. China insists that Taiwan is a rebellious Chinese province and that th. e Americans are assisting the Taiwanese in disrupting Chinese efforts to take possession of Taiwan. The Americans assist Taiwan because it is a pro-American democracy. Communist China considers Taiwan an embarrassing example of how democracy can produce a more prosperous Chinese country. Singapore has done the same thing, but Taiwan is closer to mainland China and was, at one time, considered a part of mainland China. The Enclave Event Center to Feature Furnishings From CITY Furniture TAMPA, FL / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / The Motor Enclave announced today that it has entered into a multi-year agreement with CITY Furniture to become the "Official Furniture Partner" of the 200-acre experiential motorsports venue conveniently located at the corner of I-4 and I-75, less than 15 minutes from downtown Tampa. The Motor Enclave & CITY Furniture Partnership The Motor Enclave logo and CITY Furniture logo over a photo of The Motor Enclave Event Center in Tampa, Florida CITY Furniture will be instrumental in the curated selection of furniture and dcor for the Enclave Event Center, the Enclave Beach Club resort pool, the Enclave Off-Road Hospitality Lounge and The Motor Enclave corporate offices. Additionally, CITY Furniture has joined The Motor Enclave Preferred Partner Program which provides Enclave Private Garage owners with access to CITY's free design professionals and VIP discounts to its full array of product offerings. "After learning about CITY Furniture's remarkable 1.2 million-square-foot showroom, and distribution center in the Tampa Bay market, I was genuinely impressed. The $125-million showroom features state-of-the-art LED lighting, creating a modern, energy-efficient environment. The facility even offers over 20 electric vehicle charging spaces, highlighting our shared commitment to the community. It was clear that this is a company we needed to collaborate with," said Enclave CEO Brad Oleshansky. "The Motor Enclave facility is incredible. Granting Private Garage owners access to CITY's exceptional team of interior designers and our beautiful furniture line is a definite win-win for both our organizations. Excited to kick things off with the entire Motor Enclave crew and show CITY's commitment to world-class service," shared Andrew Koenig, CEO of CITY Furniture. About CITY Furniture: CITY Furniture, a South-Florida-based, family-owned American furniture and mattress retailer and fine upholstery manufacturer and one of America's Top 20 furniture retailers, operates over 30 showrooms from Miami through Vero Beach, and in Southwest and Central Florida, as well as 14 Ashley Home Store showrooms as the brand's Southeast and Southwest Florida licensee. For more information, please visit http://www.cityfurniture.com. About The Motor Enclave: The Motor Enclave is the premier developer of experiential motorsports venues in North America. Our 200-acre development in Tampa, Florida, includes a 1.6-mile Hermann Tilke-designed driving circuit, two-acre vehicle dynamics pad, 100-acre off-road experience with miles of purpose-built trails, 37,000-square-foot corporate event center, and the largest Private Garage community in the world with more than 300 privately owned luxury garages. Every adrenaline-filled detail has been designed and engineered around delivering memorable experiences to our owners/members, corporate clients, and the general public. Complete details can be found at www.themotorenclave.com. Contact Information Hank Johnson Marketing Manager [email protected] 8649181802 Brad Oleshansky CEO [email protected] Chas Ostezan CRO [email protected] 248-878-3651 SOURCE: The Motor Enclave View source version on accesswire.com: MIAMI, FL / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Helo Corp. (OTC PINK:HLOC) ("Helo" or the "Company"), a data-driven wellness technology company, announces its third quarter 2023 results and plans to present at the Emerging Growth Conference on December 6, 2023. "Third quarter sales continued to be challenging, as we restructure and refocus our business," said Sean McVeigh, Chief Executive Officer. "Over the past year, we have executed on our strategic restructuring initiatives to significantly reduce our cost structure and position the company for profitability and growth. We look forward to launching our latest innovations over the next six months." The Helo management team has been invited to participate in the Emerging Growth Conference on Wednesday, December 6, 2023, at 10:15 a.m. ET. During the call, management plans to discuss upcoming business initiatives, including its refocused strategic direction and planned product launch. Please register here to attend the conference, or view the archived webcast on EmergingGrowth.com or on the Emerging Growth YouTube Channel . About Helo Corp. Helo Corp. (OTC:HLOC) is a data-driven wellness technology company. Helo wearables and other smart devices are built on Helo's Life Sensing Technology, which uses state-of-the-art sensors, biomarker tests and enhanced signal processing to collect consumer-specific biodata. The Helo AI platform is designed to leverage artificial intelligence in the analysis of wearer biodata to provide recommendations that support the adoption of heathier lifestyle choices to drive human wellness transformation. For more information please visit helocorp.com and nutralife.ai . The Company's disclosure statements and financial statements are available at OTC:HLOC . Forward Looking Statements This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as "may," "will," "expects," "anticipates," "future," "intends," "plans," "believes," "estimates," "look forward to," and similar statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact in this press release are forward-looking statements and involve certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections about the Company and the industry in which the Company operates, but involve a number of unknown risks and uncertainties. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in the Company's filings with the OTC Markets and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent occurring events or circumstances, or changes in its expectations, except as may be required by law. Although the Company believes that the expectations expressed in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, it cannot assure you that such expectations will turn out to be correct, and actual results may differ materially from the anticipated results. You are urged to consider these factors carefully in evaluating the forward-looking statements contained herein and are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which are qualified in their entirety by these cautionary statements. Investors Contact: [email protected] 650-646-2193 SOURCE:aHelo Corp. View source version on accesswire.com: The consensus among almost all economists and the market supporting a soft landing leaves any margin for error, according to JPMorgans strategists led by Mislav Matejka. Crucially, unlike a year ago, when almost all economists and the market pricing had recession as a base case, both are in a soft landing camp now perhaps one should be contrarian yet again, Matejka said in a client note. The banking titan anticipates that 2024 earnings projections are likely to move lower, while bond yields may have peaked. The analysis factors in a contracting money supply in the U.S. and Europe, a strongly inverted yield curve, and potential weakening of corporate pricing power. As a result, JPMorgan is recommending its clients stay overweight Japan, the UK, and Switzerland, neutral on emerging markets and the U.S., and underweight the Eurozone. The strategists also suggest long positions in utilities and real estate compared to short positions in banks and autos, while maintaining an overweight position in telecoms and energy. By Senad Karaahmetovic Morgan Stanley analyst Divya Gangahar Kothiyal downgraded shares of Sea Ltd. (NYSE: SE) to Equal-Weight from Overweight in a note Monday, lowering the price target for the stock to $47 from $55 per share. The analyst stated that part of the reason they downgraded the stock is because they expect the e-commerce uncertainty to persist. "Competitive intensity in ASEAN e-commerce (EC) has increased since the summer," noted Kothiyal. "While the temporary closure of TikTok Shop in Indonesia in early October might have acted as a catalyst to slow down marketing spend by incumbents, it has actually proved quite the opposite, with all players upping the ante to widen their share of the largest EC market in ASEAN." "The recent news of the relaunch of TikTok's EC operations in Indonesia will likely mean that this spend will remain elevated for longer. As such, we think SE's earnings predictability for the next 6-12 months is quite low," the analyst added. Morgan Stanley is moving to the sidelines on the stock until it gets more clarity on the competitive landscape dynamics in Indonesia, the stickiness of GMV once marketing spend tapers, and the unit economics of live-streaming in the region. By Sam Boughedda PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Regulatory News: TotalEnergies (Paris: TTE) (LSE: TTE) (NYSE: TTE): On the occasion of the COP28 in Dubai, in presence of the President of Kazakhstan, Patrick Pouyanne and the Minister of Energy of Kazakhstan signed the Agreement on Investment (AoI) for TotalEnergies Mirny project. Largest wind energy project ever initiated in Kazakhstan, Mirny will supply more than 1 million people with low-carbon electricity and will avoid the emission of 3.5 million tons of CO2 annually in the country. The Mirny project aims to build a 1 GW onshore wind farm of up to 160 turbines combined with a 600 MWh battery energy storage system for a reliable power supply. Mirny represents an investment of about $1.4 billion and is a prime example of TotalEnergies ability to leverage its position as a major partner in the upstream sector to speed up the development of renewable energy in Oil & Gas countries. This Agreement on Investment comes after the signature in June 2023 of a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for the Mirny project, the first to be signed in the country for a wind project of such scale. TotalEnergies will develop the Mirny project in partnership with the National Wealth Fund Samruk-Kazyna and the National Company KazMunayGas, which will each own a 20% stake in the project. At COP28, more than 110 nations committed to tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030. TotalEnergies supports this call. With this innovative wind and battery project, our Company is making a direct contribution to this ambition and to the energy transition in Kazakhstan, said Patrick Pouyanne, Chairman and CEO of TotalEnergies. The signing of this Agreement on Investment will allow to launch the Mirny project, which will help TotalEnergies triple its power generation from 33 TWh to more than 100 TWh by 2030. *** About TotalEnergies TotalEnergies is a global multi-energy company that produces and markets energies: oil and biofuels, natural gas and green gases, renewables and electricity. Our more than 100,000 employees are committed to energy that is ever more affordable, more sustainable, more reliable and accessible to as many people as possible. Active in nearly 130 countries, TotalEnergies puts sustainable development in all its dimensions at the heart of its projects and operations to contribute to the well-being of people. @TotalEnergies - TotalEnergies - TotalEnergies - TotalEnergies Cautionary Note The terms TotalEnergies, TotalEnergies company or Company in this document are used to designate TotalEnergies SE and the consolidated entities that are directly or indirectly controlled by TotalEnergies SE. Likewise, the words we, us and our may also be used to refer to these entities or to their employees. The entities in which TotalEnergies SE directly or indirectly owns a shareholding are separate legal entities. TotalEnergies SE has no liability for the acts or omissions of these entities. This document may contain forward-looking information and statements that are based on a number of economic data and assumptions made in a given economic, competitive and regulatory environment. They may prove to be inaccurate in the future and are subject to a number of risk factors. Neither TotalEnergies SE nor any of its subsidiaries assumes any obligation to update publicly any forward-looking information or statement, objectives or trends contained in this document whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Information concerning risk factors, that may affect TotalEnergies financial results or activities is provided in the most recent Registration Document, the French-language version of which is filed by TotalEnergies SE with the French securities regulator Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF), and in the Form 20-F filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204900409/en/ TotalEnergies Media Relations: +33 (0)1 47 44 46 99 l [email protected] l @TotalEnergiesPR Investor Relations: +33 (0)1 47 44 46 46 l [email protected] Source: TOTALENERGIES SE QUEBEC CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- (TSX: HEO) H2O Innovation Inc. (H2O Innovation or the Corporation) announces that the Superior Court of Quebec issued on December 1, 2023 a final order in connection with the previously announced acquisition by Ember SPV I Purchaser Inc. (the Purchaser), an entity controlled by funds managed by Ember Infrastructure Management, LP, a New York-based private equity firm, of all of the issued and outstanding common shares in the capital of H2O Innovation (the Shares), other than the Shares to be rolled over by Investissement Quebec, Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec and certain key executives of the Corporation, for C$4.25 in cash per Share, pursuant to a statutory plan of arrangement (the Arrangement) under the Canada Business Corporations Act. It is anticipated that the Arrangement will be completed in the coming days, subject to the delivery by the parties of customary deliverables. Further information regarding the Arrangement is provided in the Management Information Circular of the Corporation dated October 27, 2023 (the Circular), which is available under the Corporations profile on SEDAR+ at www.sedarplus.ca and on H2O Innovations website at www.h2oinnovation.com. Cautionary Note and Forward-Looking Statements The Corporations oral and written public communications may include forward-looking statements. These statements are included in this press release, the Circular and may be included in other filings or communications from the Corporation. The forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements may include, but are not limited to, the anticipated timing and the various steps to be completed in connection with the Arrangement and the anticipated timing of closing of the Arrangement. Forward-looking information also relates to, among other things, the Corporations strategies to achieve its objectives, as well as information with respect to managements beliefs, plans, expectations, anticipations, estimations and intentions, and may also include other statements that are predictive in nature, or that depend upon or refer to future events or conditions. The management of H2O Innovation would like to point out that forward-looking statements involve a number of uncertainties, known and unknown risks and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Corporation to materially differ from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In preparing its outlook, the Corporation made assumptions that do not consider extraordinary events or circumstances beyond its control. When used in this press release, words such as anticipate, continue, could, estimate, expect, forecast, future, intend, may, objective, outlook, plan, predict, project, should, will, would or the negative or comparable terminology as well as terms usually used in the future and the conditional are generally intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements include such words. The information contained in forward-looking statements is based upon certain material assumptions that were applied in drawing a conclusion or making expectations, forecasts, projections, predictions, or estimations, including, without limitation: that the Arrangement will be completed on the terms currently contemplated and in accordance with the timing currently expected; that all conditions to the completion of the Arrangement will be satisfied or waived; and that the arrangement agreement entered into on October 3, 2023 between the Corporation and the Purchaser regarding the Arrangement (the Arrangement Agreement) will not be terminated prior to the completion of the Arrangement. A change affecting an assumption can also have an impact on other interrelated assumptions, which could increase or diminish the effect of the change. Forward-looking statements are presented for the purpose of assisting investors and others in understanding certain key elements of the Corporations current objectives, strategic priorities, expectations and plans, and in obtaining a better understanding of the Corporations business and anticipated operating environment. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based on a number of opinions, assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the Corporation as of the date of this press release, are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks and changes in circumstances that may differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. Moreover, the proposed Arrangement could be modified or the Arrangement Agreement terminated in accordance with its terms. Several factors, risks or uncertainties could cause the actual results to differ materially from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements. Should one or more of these factors, risks or uncertainties materialize or should the assumptions underlying those forward-looking statements prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described herein. Such factors include, without limitation: (a) the failure of the parties to satisfy the conditions to the completion of the Arrangement or satisfy such conditions in a timely manner; (b) significant costs or unknown liabilities related to the Arrangement; (c) litigation relating to the Arrangement may be commenced which may prevent, delay or give rise to significant costs or liabilities; (d) the Arrangement Agreement may be terminated prior to its consummation; (e) the Corporation may be required to pay a termination fee to the Purchaser in certain circumstances if the Arrangement is not completed; (f) the focus of managements time and attention on the Arrangement may detract from other aspects of the Corporations business; (g) general economic conditions; (h) the market price of the Shares may be materially adversely affected if the Arrangement is not completed or its completion is materially delayed; and (i) failure to realize the expected benefits of the Arrangement. Failure of the parties to satisfy the conditions to the completion of the Arrangement may result in the Arrangement not being completed on the proposed terms, or at all. If the Arrangement is not completed, and the Corporation continues as a publicly-traded entity, there are risks that the announcement of the Arrangement and the dedication of substantial resources of the Corporation to the completion of the Arrangement could have an impact on its business and strategic relationships (including with future and prospective employees, customers, suppliers and partners), operating results and activities in general, and could have a material adverse effect on its current and future operations, financial condition and prospects. Furthermore, pursuant to the terms of the Arrangement Agreement, the Corporation may, in certain circumstances, be required to pay a fee to the Purchaser, the result of which could have an adverse effect on its financial position. The Corporation cautions that the foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive. Additional information about the risk factors to which the Corporation is exposed to is provided in the Annual Information Form dated September 27, 2023, which is available on SEDAR+ (www.sedarplus.ca). The forward-looking statements set forth herein reflect the Corporations expectations as of the date hereof, and are subject to change after this date. The Corporation may, from time to time, make oral forward-looking statements. The Corporation advises that the above paragraphs and the risk factors described herein should be read for a description of certain factors that could cause the actual results of the Corporation to differ materially from those in the oral forward-looking statements. Unless required to do so pursuant to applicable securities legislation, H2O Innovation assumes no obligation to update or revise forward-looking statements contained in this press release or in other communications as a result of new information, future events, and other changes. About H2O Innovation Innovation is in our name, and it is what drives the organization. H2O Innovation is a complete water solutions company focused on providing best-in-class technologies and services to its customers. The Corporations activities rely on three pillars: i) Water Technologies & Services (WTS) applies membrane technologies and engineering expertise to deliver equipment and services to municipal and industrial water, wastewater, and water reuse customers, ii) Specialty Products (SP) is a set of businesses that manufacture and supply a complete line of specialty chemicals, consumables and engineered products for the global water treatment industry, and iii) Operation & Maintenance (O&M) provides contract operations and associated services for water and wastewater treatment systems. Through innovation, we strive to simplify water. For more information, visit www.h2oinnovation.com. Source: H2O Innovation Inc. www.h2oinnovation.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231201769000/en/ Marc Blanchet +1 418-688-0170 [email protected] Source: H2O Innovation Inc. News / National by Staff reporter Corrupt teachers will be deregistered among a raft of reforms introduced to bring sanity to the education sector, an official from the Primary and Secondary Education ministry has said.Speaking at the Integrity Icon Summit and Awards, the ministry's spokesperson, Taungana Ndoro, said government would introduce stiffer penalties through the Teaching Profession Council Bill targeting teachers who abuse resources for their personal benefit.The Bill is expected to be tabled in Parliament during the current session."It is passing through Parliament and hopefully it will be a law such that there is no one who is going to be just a teacher who is not registered with the Teaching Profession Council."Teachers can also be deregistered for any corrupt activities through the Teaching Profession Council just like how they do with doctors and lawyers," Ndoro said.Government will also, according to Ndoro, enhance its electrification programmes at rural schools as well as improve internet connectivity which will cater for the emergency corruption response."We are working as the whole government to ensure that those marginalised areas are able to call on our toll-free lines. So, it is a whole government approach to make sure there is connectivity and electricity," Ndoro said.An official from the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission, Ndakaripa Hungwe, said there was a need to mitigate and end corruption which poses a threat to the country's development.He said several organisations were diverting resources from essential services and infrastructural projects."Corruption poses a significant threat to our nation's progress and development, undermining democratic values, eroding public trust and diverting resources away from essential services and infrastructural projects."The NDS1 (National Development Strategy 1), with its focus on good governance and anti-corruption measures, provides a comprehensive framework to tackle this pervasive issue," he said.Hungwe also encouraged organisations and the public at large to resist corruption."As stated in the NDS1, the public service is vital for sustainable development and economic growth. By tackling corruption head-on and aligning our efforts with the objectives outlined in NDS1, we can create a society that upholds integrity, fosters accountability, and paves the way for a prosperous Zimbabwe."Integrity is the moral compass that guides our actions, especially in the public service. It is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles. In a world where trust is often shaken, it is crucial for the public service to uphold the highest standards of integrity," he said.The Integrity Icon Campaign is a global initiative that celebrates individuals who embody honesty and integrity and those who play a crucial role in fighting corruption.The event saw outstanding individuals who have excelled and shown exceptional dedication to ethical values recognised by the initiative through awards. Grant recipients will have Inventias state-of-the-art RASTRUM instrument placed in their lab, plus materials and training to further 3D cell culture research. DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Inventia Life Science, a leading advanced cell model company, launched the Inventia Third Dimension Grant today. This grant will allow researchers studying fundamental biology or drug development to model and test hypotheses using 3D cell cultures. These advanced models enable scientists to test questions theyd be unable to answer using 2D cell cultures or animal models. The Inventia Third Dimension Grant recipient will have Inventias RASTRUM benchtop device placed in their lab for three months. Theyll also receive all materials needed to generate at least six 96 or 384 well plates of 3D cell models. RASTRUM is a high-throughput drop-on-demand bioprinter that can deposit cells and matrix components into common tissue culture microplates to form 3D cell cultures. Inventia opened a lab in Dublin last year to foster the use of advanced cell models throughout Europe. With 2D cell models or animal models, its impossible to conduct certain research thats critical to the advancement of novel technologies, says Daniel Vaughn, Inventias EU Commercial Director. We expect the recipient of this grant to make great strides in their research and to fully realise the opportunities that 3D models present for impactful breakthroughs during the time they have the RASTRUM in their lab. Traditional 2D cell cultures and animal models lack the ability to accurately model human physiological interactions between tumours and their environment. With RASTRUM advanced cell models, scientists are able to design models that more precisely recreate those interactions allowing them to probe deeper into their field of study. Application information The Third Dimension Grant Program is open to academic and commercial laboratories not currently using the RASTRUM Platform in Europe. Applications are due before the 29th February 2024, and the recipient will be selected on 8th March 2024. Applicants should complete the submission form using the grant link. About Inventia Life Science Inventia is creating some of the most powerful tools for advanced biomedical discovery today. We build printers and formulate bioinks that, together, allow human cells to be printed in 3-dimensional structures and help forward-thinking pioneers in the fields of cancer research, drug discovery and medicine to create human tissue for research and therapy purposes. Our RASTRUM platform creates 3D cell cultures which imitate real human tissue in terms of structure and behaviour across a range of disease states. The physiological complexity of these cell cultures provides an environment in which world-class research and discovery can occur, right in the researchers own lab. Inventia Life Science was the vision of Dr. Julio Ribeiro and was founded by him with Dr. Aidan O'Mahony, Dr. Cameron Ferris and Peter Arthur in 2013. It is headquartered in Sydney, Australia. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231205284641/en/ Inventia Life Science Europe Cherrywood Business Park, Building 10, Block G, Loughlinstown, Co. Dublin, Ireland D18 T3Y1 +353 1800 816 441 [email protected] Source: Inventia Life Science The new facility grows Lineages footprint to 25 sites nationwide TAURANGA, New Zealand--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Lineage (or the Company), one of the worlds leading temperature-controlled industrial REIT and integrated solutions providers, has officially opened a new next-generation cold-storage facility in Tauranga, New Zealand. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204889552/en/ Lineage, one of the worlds leading temperature-controlled industrial REIT and integrated solutions providers, has officially opened a new next-generation cold-storage facility in Tauranga, New Zealand. (Photo: Business Wire) Were very proud to grow our network in New Zealand to meet the needs of our customers in this market, Lineage President for Asia Pacific, Brooke Miller said. With over 3 million cubic feet of space, and more than 16,000 pallet positions, the Tauriko facility is a significant expansion of our operations In New Zealand. Lineage Regional Vice President for New Zealand, Guy Moniz, said the access to the Port of Tauranga was one of the many advantages of building the world-class facility, located at 15 Anianiku Place, in Tauriko. With our new facility less than 20km from one of the countrys largest ports, we are well-positioned to continue delivering excellence in supply chain solutions and serve our customers in the region, Mr. Moniz said. This strategic expansion further strengthens Lineages offering to our customers across the country, providing exporters with access to a leading global network. In line with Lineages commitment to sustainability, energy efficiency was a central consideration in the construction of the project. The warehouse is equipped with a rainwater harvesting system for refrigeration condensing, rapid doors on all chambers to minimise temperature fluctuations, and features an 890kW solar array for power generation. Lineage in New Zealand now has 25 facilities across the country, stretching from Auckland to Dunedin. About Lineage Lineage is one of the worlds leading temperature-controlled industrial REITs and integrated solutions providers with a global network of over 400 strategically located facilities, totaling more than 2.5 billion cubic feet of capacity across countries in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Coupling industry-leading expertise in end-to-end logistical solutions and innovative technology, Lineage partners with the worlds largest food and beverage companies to increase distribution efficiency, advance sustainability, minimize supply chain waste, and, most importantly, help feed the world. In recognition of the companys leading innovations and sustainability initiatives, Lineage has been named a CNBC Disruptor 50 Company for three consecutive years, twice named a US Best Managed Company, named the No. 1 Data Science company, and 23rd overall, on Fast Companys list of The Worlds Most Innovative Companies, and was included on Fortunes Change the World list. (www.onelineage.com). View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204889552/en/ Media Contact: Scott McFarlane +61 493 119 547 [email protected] Source: Lineage LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Millennial Shift Technologies Inc., has announced a strategic collaboration with CyberCube, the worlds leading cyber risk analytics platform. mShift is a digital platform that allows insurance professionals to quickly quote, bind and issue multiple lines of business within the small to medium enterprise (SME) cyber liability space. mShift is partnering with CyberCube to develop an integrated solution to streamline the workflows for insurance producers while supporting an enhanced client experience. The integration will eliminate the need for redundant data entry and ensure that all cyber proposals include CyberCube reports. The partnership will utilize CyberCubes Broking Manager software, which applies specialized analytics to produce targeted information on a clients cyber risk profile. CyberCubes Broking Manager reports enable impactful discussions around company-specific financial exposure and risk transfer benchmarking data that support insurance buyers when making limits and coverage decisions. Ross Wirth, Head of Client Engagement and Technology Partnerships at CyberCube, said: "By integrating CyberCube's Broking Manager reports within the mShift platform, brokers and their clients can effortlessly compare their financial exposure to cyber events against proposed limits. This partnership will provide cyber risk transparency to the SME insurance market." Mark Meury, Founder and CEO of mShift, said: "By including CyberCubes reports and analytics, we can enable insurance professionals to demonstrate their expertise in cyber insurance and facilitate increased adoption of cyber insurance across SME insurance buyers." About CyberCube CyberCube delivers the worlds leading cyber risk analytics for the insurance industry. With best-in-class data access and advanced multi-disciplinary analytics, the companys cloud-based platform helps insurance organizations quantify cyber risk to facilitate placing insurance, underwriting cyber risk and managing cyber risk aggregation. CyberCubes enterprise intelligence layer provides insights on millions of companies globally and includes modeling on thousands of points of technology failure. The CyberCube platform was established in 2015 within Symantec and now operates as a standalone company exclusively focused on the insurance industry, with access to an unparalleled ecosystem of data partners. It is backed by Morgan Stanley Tactical Value, Forgepoint Capital, HSCM Bermuda, MTech Capital, individuals from Stone Point Capital and Scott G. Stephenson. For more information, please visit www.cybcube.com or email [email protected]. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204082728/en/ For press queries contact: Yvette Essen Head of Content Communications & Creative [email protected] Source: CyberCube ST. LOUIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Global rigid container and life sciences packaging distributor, Novvia Group (Novvia), has acquired Ocean State Packaging, Inc. (Ocean State), a Rhode Island based supplier of plastic bottles and other rigid packaging products. Financial terms of the private transaction were not disclosed. Novvia is backed by Kelso & Company (Kelso). This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204848625/en/ Founded in 1990, Ocean State is a trusted supplier of stock and custom packaging solutions to a national network of long-tenured customers spanning diverse end markets. Ocean State offers a wide selection of bottle shapes, sizes, and substrates, along with caps and closures for a variety of applications. With offices in Rhode Island and New Jersey, Ocean State provides consultative sales support and a suite of value-added services, including design and decoration capabilities. We are excited to partner with Novvia to continue growing our business, said Brian Beneduce, President of Ocean State. We intend to draw on a long history of customer service and our one-stop-shop philosophy to deliver additional value to our loyal customers as part of the national Novvia platform. The acquisition marks Novvias entry into the New England market and represents a cornerstone of the companys Northeast strategy. Ocean State Packaging has built an impressive business over its 33-year history, and we welcome the company to the Novvia family, said Ken Roessler, Executive Chairman of Novvia. We look forward to investing in Ocean States markets as we grow our footprint of Northeast based employees, customers, and suppliers, added Roessler. For more information about Ocean State, please visit oceanstatepackaging.com. About Novvia Group Novvia Group is a leader in high-quality packaging solutions and customized services with domestic and international customers across myriad industries. Through its family of dynamic companies, comprised of Inmark, C.L. Smith, Silver Spur, Container Supply, Fox Valley, Rhino, Novvia Canada, Southern Container, Duval Container, Rios, Auberst, Innovative Container, Rahway, Northern Container, and Ocean State, Novvia has set a new industry standard as a national stocking distributor with a comprehensive suite of containers and supplies, trusted local relationships and 40+ years of best-in-class customer service. For more information, please visit www.novviagroup.com. About Kelso Kelso is one of the oldest and most established firms specializing in private equity investing. Since 1980, Kelso has invested approximately $19 billion of equity capital in over 140 transactions. Kelso was founded by the inventor of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) and, as a result, the principles of partnership and alignment of interest serve as the foundation of the firms investment philosophy. Kelso benefits from a successful investment track record, deep sector expertise, a long-tenured and stable investing team, and a reputation as a preferred partner to management teams and corporate partners. Kelso has significant experience investing in and supporting high-growth distribution and packaging platforms. The firm is based in New York, NY. For more information, please visit www.kelso.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204848625/en/ Lynn Alexander Partner/Head of Investor Relations & Fundraising Kelso & Company [email protected] Rich Myers/Rachel Goun Profile Advisors [email protected] Source: Kelso & Company According to the Chinese ministrys website. electric vehicle maker, Nio (NYSE: NIO) has recently been included in a database by the Chinese industry that allows companies to manufacture vehicles within the country, as stated on the ministry's website. Specific information regarding the timing or issuance of a manufacturing license to Nio was not provided on the website. For automakers to manufacture and sell cars in China, they are required to acquire permits from both the state planner and the industry ministry. The most recent electric vehicle (EV) maker to obtain both permits was Sinogold, headquartered in Shandong, back in May 2019. Nio has been collaborating with Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group (JAC) since 2018, producing electric vehicles under a contract arrangement. Securing a manufacturing license should help the company ease any worries surrounding Nio amid JAC's intentions to sell certain assets linked to the factories producing Nio EVs. In October, the state-backed newspaper China Securities Journal disclosed JAC's proposed sale of assets. Nio responded at that time, asserting that any potential sale would not disrupt its forthcoming production operations. Issuing a production license to Nio signifies a notable change in the approach of Chinese authorities, who have previously exercised caution in approving new production due to concerns about overcapacity and an intensifying price competition involving more than 40 brands. According to data from the China Passenger Car Association, Nio secured the ninth position in electric vehicle sales during the first 10 months of the year in China, with a total of 126,067 units sold. Shares of NIO are up 2.87% in mid-day trading on Monday. By Michael Elkins | [email protected] XPeng Motors (NYSE: XPEV), a prominent Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer, clinched the third position in Denmark's Car of the Year 2024 awards last week with their leading XPeng G9 SUV. Organized by the association of Danish Motor Journalists, Denmarks prestigious Car of the Year award celebrates vehicles showcasing exceptional qualities and pioneering advancements. Organized by the association of Danish Motor Journalists, this accolade involves a jury comprising 20 automotive experts from diverse media backgrounds. The XPENG G9 introduces cutting-edge EV technology to Europe, featuring XPENG's state-of-the-art powertrain system with an 800 V Silicon Carbide (SiC) platform for rapid charging capabilities of up to 300 kW. The state-of-the-art system allows drivers to add an impressive 100 km of range in just five minutes, highlighting the vehicle's remarkable advancements in electric vehicle technology. "We are grateful that the Danish automotive journalists have awarded XPENG G9 a new model from a new brand in Denmark the third place in Denmarks Car of the Year 2024. Said XPengs managing director, Jens Olsen. t is the first time we have entered the Car of the Year nomination in Denmark and reaching a top 3 position is an important recognition, Olsen added. Shares of XPEV are up 2.70% in afternoon trading Monday. By Michael Elkins | [email protected] FILE PHOTO: The logo of Swiss drugmaker Roche is seen at its headquarters in Basel, Switzerland January 30, 2020. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann/File Photo By Ludwig Burger (Reuters) -Roche agreed to take over unlisted obesity drug developer Carmot Therapeutics for $2.7 billion upfront, joining a list of contestants seeking to challenge the dominant makers of weight-loss drugs Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. The U.S. takeover target's most promising drug candidate, a once-a-week injection called CT-388, is a dual GLP-1/GIP receptor agonist like Lilly's Mounjaro, or Zepbound. After encouraging Phase I trial results, the Carmot drug is ready to be tested on humans in the second of three trial stages, with a possible market launch in the 2030s, the head of Roche's pharmaceuticals division Teresa Graham told Reuters on Monday. Weight-loss drug market leader Novo is ahead with its injection Wegovy, a single agonist of the GLP-1 gut hormone receptor. Overwhelming demand has left the group scrambling to boost production. Roche shares rose 2.4% to a six-week at 1115 GMT on optimism that the weight-loss market, estimated by some analysts to reach as much as $100 billion, will accommodate many rivals. "The markets are large enough for 'me too' products, particularly when offered at the right price," Zuercher Kantonalbank analysts said in a note. Roche's Graham said the company was more ambitious than having a low-price alternative to the leaders in the market, telling Reuters that CT-388 could become the best obesity drug in the GLP-1 class, either on its own or in combination with other compounds. "There is opportunity for deeper weight loss, there is opportunity for that weight loss to happen more quickly and tolerability is maybe one of the bigger issues," said Graham. Among recent deals to acquire obesity drug development projects, AstraZeneca last month agreed to pay up to $2 billion for the rights to an experimental pill from China's Eccogene. Lilly in July acquired unlisted Versanis for up to $1.93 billion to further boost its pipeline. New Roche CEO Thomas Schinecker, who is pursuing a variety of therapeutic fields to offset falling oncology sales, has set a high deal pace to restore a development pipeline that was hit by major trial setbacks in Alzheimer's and cancer immunotherapy last year. Roche in October agreed to pay an initial $7.1 billion to Roivant and Pfizer for rights to a new inflammatory bowel disease drug. Under the Carmot deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2024, its owners will receive up to $400 million in addition to the upfront payment if certain milestones are achieved, Roche said. For the Swiss drugmaker, the deal marks a return to a GLP-1 field that it abandoned in 2018, when its subsidiary Chugai sold the rights to an experimental pill to Lilly for $50 million upfront. "This is a place where we needed the science to evolve a bit more completely," Roche's Graham said. Privately held Carmot, which announced plans to go public last month, was co-founded in 2008 by long-time CEO Stig Hansen. While keeping a Carmot board seat, Hansen early this year became CEO of Kimia Therapeutics, which was spun out of Carmot to focus on the discovery of new metabolic diseases drugs. Carmot's portfolio includes a range of gut-hormone drug candidates, in pill and injection form, aimed at treating obesity in patients with and without diabetes, Roche said. (Reporting by Ludwig Burger in Frankfurt Additional reporting by Noel Illien in Zurich, Editing by Rachel More, Louise Heavens and Sharon Singleton) BOSS Money revenue increased 38% to $24.2 million NRS recurring revenue* increased 25% to $22.4 million net2phone subscription revenue* increased 19% to $18.5 million NEWARK, NJ, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- IDT Corporation (NYSE: IDT), a global provider of fintech, cloud communications, and traditional communications services, today reported results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2024, the three months ended October 31, 2023. HIGHLIGHTS (Throughout this release, unless otherwise noted, results are for the first quarter of fiscal year 2024 (1Q24) and are compared to the first quarter of fiscal year 2023 (1Q23). All earnings per share (EPS) and other per share results are per diluted share.) BOSS Money, the principal business in our Fintech segment, increased remittance volume by 41% to 4.05 million transactions during 1Q24 while revenue increased 38% to $24.2 million; National Retail Solutions (NRS) added approximately 1,500 net active point-of-sale (POS) terminals during 1Q24 to reach approximately 27,200 as of October 31 st . NRS recurring revenue * increased 25% to $22.4 million; . NRS recurring revenue increased 25% to $22.4 million; net2phone added approximately 12,000 net seats served during 1Q24 to reach approximately 364,000 as of October 31 st . Subscription revenue * increased 19% to $18.5 million; . Subscription revenue increased 19% to $18.5 million; Consolidated revenue decreased 6% to $301 million from $322 million; Consolidated gross profit ** increased 6% to a record high $94 million from $89 million, and the consolidated gross profit margin increased 370 basis points to 31.4% from 27.7%; increased 6% to a record high $94 million from $89 million, and the consolidated gross profit margin increased 370 basis points to 31.4% from 27.7%; Consolidated income from operations decreased 15% to $17.2 million from $20.2 million; Net income attributable to IDT decreased 30% to $7.7 million from $11.0 million; Consolidated Adjusted EBITDA ** * decreased 8% to $22.3 million from $24.3 million; decreased 8% to $22.3 million from $24.3 million; EPS decreased to $0.30 from $0.43 and Non-GAAP EPS ** * decreased to $0.32 from $0.43; decreased to $0.32 from $0.43; During 1Q24, IDT repurchased 125,470 shares of its Class B common stock for $2.8 million. (See Notes later in this release for supplemental information on asterisked metrics). REMARKS B Y SHMUEL JONAS, CEO Our three primary high-growth, high-margin businesses delivered strong revenue growth in the first quarter, while the businesses in our Traditional Communications segment performed as expected. In the first quarter, the ongoing growth of BOSS Money, NRS, and net2phone drove a 370 basis point year-over-year increase in gross profit margin and record gross profit. They are steadily becoming more significant contributors to our top and bottom lines, while the cash generation of our paid-minute businesses has been relatively resilient. BOSS Money continued to grow at a rapid clip, helped by the accelerating expansion of our retail money transfer channel. Retail money transfer channel revenue increased by 55% year-over-year, while digital channel revenue for transactions initiated on the BOSS Money and BOSS Revolution Calling apps increased 31% year-over-year. We continue to improve the user experience for both retailer agents and digital customers, and we see that investment paying off in BOSS Moneys robust topline growth. Much of the investment weve made in money transfer to date is in the expectation that we are only in the early innings of our money transfer growth. As we continue to expand, we expect to capture more of the benefit of our growth in our bottom line profitability. NRS continued to expand its network and upgrade existing accounts, helping to drive strong increases in Merchant Services and SaaS Fee revenues, while Advertising & Data revenue increased sequentially propelled by seasonal tailwinds and the gradual recovery of advertising demand in the digital out-of-home advertising space a trend which has accelerated since the quarter close. NRS income from operations was a record $5.5 million in the first quarter. Were now in the process of introducing some of the new POS formats that Ive mentioned previously, and Im excited about their potential to help us drive long-term expansion. net2phone delivered steady sequential customer base and topline growth, while its unit economics are strengthening as the business scales and our higher ARPU, higher margin, CCaaS offerings gradually become a more significant part of the business. net2phone generated positive Adjusted EBITDA of $1.4 million and was near cash-flow positive. Now in the second quarter, our Beta rollout of net2phone AI is underway, and it has been very well received by customers. We are very optimistic that net2phone AI and net2phones forthcoming premium plans will help to drive meaningful ARPU and margin expansion. Were working very hard to innovate exciting new offerings, features and functionalities and not just in our growth businesses. At BOSS Revolution Calling, weve redesigned the look and feel of our popular calling app and added a bunch of new products and features. We have also introduced advertising placements into the app, and we have already begun to generate some nice revenue from it as a result. We also continue to focus on streamlining overhead and wringing significant costs out of our operations -- especially in our Traditional Communications segment. This effort will help preserve the cash generation of our paid-minute businesses despite their continued, expected topline declines in the quarters ahead. It also will allow us to continue investing in innovative new products and promising initiatives in our existing growth businesses. We also returned value directly to our stockholders in the first quarter, repurchasing 125,470 shares of our Class B common stock for $2.8 million. Going forward, we will continue to purchase shares opportunistically. We are very well positioned as we head into the second quarter of our fiscal year 2024. To wrap up, I want to wish our employees, stockholders and their families a very joyous holiday season, and to thank each of you for everything you do for the IDT family. CONSOLIDATED RESULTS IDT Consolidated Results ($ in millions, except gross profit margin and EPS) 1 Q24 4 Q23 3 Q23 2 Q23 1 Q23 1Q24-1Q23 Variance Revenue $ 301.2 $ 303.8 $ 299.3 $ 313.9 $ 321.8 (6.4 )% Gross Profit $ 94.4 $ 91.1 $ 87.9 $ 90.4 $ 89.1 +5.9 % Gross Profit Margin 31.4 % 30.0 % 29.4 % 28.8 % 27.7 % +370 BP SG&A $ 77.2 $ 78.2 $ 72.6 $ 72.1 $ 69.6 +10.9 % Income from operations $ 17.2 $ 12.0 $ 10.4 $ 18.2 $ 20.2 (15.1 )% Adjusted EBITDA $ 22.3 $ 18.1 $ 20.5 $ 23.4 $ 24.3 (8.5 )% Net income attributable to IDT $ 7.7 $ 8.0 $ 6.9 $ 14.6 $ 11.0 (30.4 )% EPS (diluted) $ 0.30 $ 0.31 $ 0.27 $ 0.57 $ 0.43 $ (0.13 ) Non-GAAP EPS (diluted) $ 0.32 $ 0.36 $ 0.46 $ 0.62 $ 0.43 $ (0.11 ) RESULTS BY SEGMENT National Retail Solutions (NRS) During 1Q24 and 1Q23, the NRS segment contributed 8.0% and 6.0% of IDTs consolidated revenue, respectively. National Retail Solutions (NRS) (Terminals and accounts at end of period. $ in millions, except for revenue per terminal) 1 Q24 4 Q23 3 Q23 2 Q23 1 Q23 1Q24-1Q23 Variance Terminals and payment processing accounts Active POS terminals 27,200 25,700 23,900 22,400 20,800 +31 % Payment processing accounts 17,100 15,800 14,100 12,500 11,300 +51 % Recurring revenue Merchant Services and other $ 11.4 $ 10.3 $ 8.7 $ 7.4 $ 6.4 +78 % Advertising and Data $ 8.5 $ 6.2 $ 5.8 $ 9.0 $ 9.7 (13 )% SaaS Fees $ 2.5 $ 2.3 $ 2.1 $ 1.9 $ 1.8 +42 % Total recurring revenue $ 22.4 $ 18.8 $ 16.5 $ 18.3 $ 17.8 +25 % POS Terminal Sales $ 1.6 $ 1.1 $ 1.6 $ 1.5 $ 1.5 +10 % Total revenue $ 24.0 $ 19.9 $ 18.1 $ 19.8 $ 19.3 +24 % Monthly average recurring revenue per terminal* $ 282 $ 253 $ 237 $ 283 $ 296 (5 )% Gross profit $ 20.9 $ 17.4 $ 15.1 $ 17.2 $ 17.0 +23 % SG&A $ 15.4 $ 15.6 $ 13.0 $ 11.9 $ 11.8 +31 % Income from operations $ 5.5 $ 1.7 $ 2.1 $ 5.4 $ 5.2 +$ 0.3 Adjusted EBITDA $ 6.2 $ 2.4 $ 2.7 $ 6.0 $ 5.7 +$ 0.5 Take-Aways: During 1Q24, NRS added approximately 1,500 net active terminals to reach approximately 27,200 and added approximately 1,300 net payment processing accounts to reach approximately 17,100. The strong sequential increase in monthly average recurring revenue per terminal was driven primarily by the sequential increase in Advertising and Data revenue, which benefitted from seasonal tailwinds and strengthening digital out-of-home advertising demand. net2phone During 1Q24 and 1Q23, the net2phone segment contributed 6.6% and 5.3% of IDTs consolidated revenue, respectively. net2phone (Seats in thousands at end of period. $ in millions) 1 Q24 4 Q23 3 Q23 2 Q23 1 Q23 1Q24-1Q23 Variance Seats 364 352 340 327 309 +18 % Revenue Subscription revenue $ 18.5 $ 17.9 $ 17.1 $ 16.3 $ 15.5 +19 % Other revenue $ 1.4 $ 1.4 $ 1.3 $ 1.5 $ 1.4 +2 % Total Revenue $ 19.9 $ 19.3 $ 18.4 $ 17.8 $ 17.0 +18 % Gross profit $ 16.1 $ 15.5 $ 14.8 $ 14.2 $ 13.6 +18 % SG&A $ 16.1 $ 16.1 $ 15.2 $ 14.8 $ 14.7 +10 % Loss from operations $ - $ (0.7 ) $ (0.4 ) $ (0.6 ) $ (1.1 ) +$ 1.0 Adjusted EBITDA $ 1.4 $ 0.9 $ 1.0 $ 0.8 $ 0.3 +$ 1.1 Take-Aways: net2phones year-over-year increase in seats served was powered by continued expansion in key markets led by the U.S., Brazil, and Mexico. In 1Q24, subscription revenue increased 19% year-over-year driven by the 18% increase in seats served augmented by an increase in average revenue per seat served. CCaaS seats served increased 31% year-over-year to approximately 10,000. Fintech During 1Q24 and 1Q23, the Fintech segment contributed 8.8% and 6.2% of IDTs consolidated revenue, respectively. Fintech (Transactions in thousands. $ in millions except for revenue per transaction) 1 Q24 4 Q23 3 Q23 2 Q23 1 Q23 1Q24-1Q23 Variance BOSS Money Transactions 4,045 3,793 3,274 3,053 2,862 +41 % Fintech Revenue BOSS Money $ 24.2 $ 22.3 $ 19.4 $ 17.6 $ 17.6 +38 % Other $ 2.3 $ 2.3 $ 2.3 $ 2.7 $ 2.3 - Total Revenue $ 26.6 $ 24.6 $ 21.8 $ 20.3 $ 19.9 +34 % Average revenue per transaction* $ 5.99 $ 5.87 $ 5.94 $ 5.78 $ 6.13 $ (0.14 ) Gross profit $ 14.8 $ 13.6 $ 12.6 $ 12.3 $ 11.6 +28 % SG&A $ 16.2 $ 15.5 $ 13.9 $ 13.4 $ 11.7 +39 % (Loss) income from operations $ (1.4 ) $ (1.9 ) $ (1.3 ) $ (0.8 ) $ 1.5 $ (2.9 ) Adjusted EBITDA $ (0.7 ) $ (1.2 ) $ (0.6 ) $ (0.5 ) $ 0.5 $ (1.2 ) Take-Aways: The 41% year-over-year increase in BOSS Money transactions included a 54% increase in retail transactions driven by expansion of the BOSS Money retail agent network and enhancements to the retailer portal. Digital transactions increased 38% compared to the year-ago quarter. BOSS Money revenue increased 38% driven primarily by cross-marketing within the larger BOSS ecosystem and expansion of the retail agent network. Traditional Communications During 1Q24 and 1Q23, the Traditional Communications segment contributed 76.6% and 82.5% of IDTs consolidated revenue, respectively. Traditional Communications ($ in millions) 1 Q24 4 Q23 3 Q23 2 Q23 1 Q23 1Q24-1Q23 Variance Revenue IDT Digital Payments $ 100.0 $ 100.8 $ 101.0 $ 106.1 $ 109.0 (8 )% BOSS Revolution Calling $ 71.2 $ 75.4 $ 77.6 $ 82.8 $ 86.3 (17 )% IDT Global $ 52.0 $ 55.6 $ 54.5 $ 58.6 $ 61.6 (16 )% Other $ 7.5 $ 8.2 $ 7.9 $ 8.4 $ 8.8 (15 )% Total Revenue $ 230.7 $ 240.0 $ 241.0 $ 256.0 $ 265.7 (13 )% Gross profit $ 42.6 $ 44.7 $ 45.4 $ 46.7 $ 46.9 (9 )% SG&A $ 26.6 $ 28.4 $ 28.2 $ 29.5 $ 29.6 (10 )% Income from operations $ 15.4 $ 14.1 $ 12.9 $ 17.0 $ 17.3 (11 )% Adjusted EBITDA $ 18.1 $ 18.6 $ 19.7 $ 19.6 $ 19.7 (8 )% Take-Aways: As in recent prior quarters, the year-over-year decrease in IDT Digital Payments revenue was due to the deterioration of a key international mobile top-up corridor. By 1Q24, however, that corridor was no longer a significant factor, helping to stabilize revenue sequentially. Income from operations increased sequentially for the second consecutive quarter, helped by strong contributions from BOSS Revolution Calling and IDT Global. Nevertheless, the industry-wide decline in the paid-minute calling markets will continue to impact revenues and cash flows for this segment in the coming quarters. OTHER FINANCIAL STATEMENTS HIGHLIGHTS Consolidated results for all periods presented include corporate overhead. Corporate G&A expense increased to $2.8 million in 1Q24 from $1.9 million in 1Q23 reflecting an increase in audit and accounting fees and higher employee compensation expense. As of October 31, 2023, IDT held $159.7 million in cash, cash equivalents, debt securities, and current equity investments. Current assets totaled $382.2 million and current liabilities totaled $275.9 million. IDT had no outstanding debt at the fiscal quarters end. Net cash provided by operating activities during 1Q24 was $14.8 million a decrease from $18.2 million during 1Q23. Exclusive of changes in customer deposit balances at IDTs Gibraltar-based bank, net cash provided by operating activities increased to $17.1 million from $15.3 million during 1Q23. This increase was primarily due to the timing of operating cash receipts and payments. Capital expenditures decreased to $4.3 million in 1Q24 from $5.2 million in 1Q23. IDT EARNINGS ANNOUNCEMENT AND SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION This release is available for download in the Investors & Media section of the IDT Corporation website ( https://www.idt.net/investors-and-media ) and has been filed on a current report (Form 8-K) with the SEC. IDT will host an earnings conference call beginning at 5:30 PM Eastern today with managements discussion of results followed by Q&A with investors. To listen to the call and participate in the Q&A, dial 1-888-506-0062 (toll-free from the US) or 1-973-528-0011 (international) and request the IDT Corporation call (participant access code: 637334). A replay of the conference call will be available approximately three hours after the call concludes through December 18, 2023. To access the call replay, dial 1-877-481-4010 (toll-free from the US) or 1-919-882-2331 (international) and provide this replay passcode: 49441. The replay will also be accessible via streaming audio at the IDT investor relations website. NOTES *See Explanation of Key Performance Metrics at the end of this release. ** Beginning in 1Q24, IDT is including depreciation and amortization expense in direct cost of revenues or SG&A expense, as appropriate, and reporting gross profit and gross margin in accordance with GAAP. Results for all prior periods presented have been reclassified to conform to the current periods presentation. ***Adjusted EBITDA and Non-GAAP EPS are Non-GAAP financial measures intended to provide useful information that supplements IDTs or the relevant segments results in accordance with GAAP. Please refer to the Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Measures later in this release for an explanation of these terms and their respective reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. ABOUT IDT CORPORATION IDT Corporation (NYSE: IDT) is a global provider of fintech and communications services through a portfolio of synergistic businesses: National Retail Solutions (NRS), through its point-of-sale (POS) platform, enables independent retailers to operate more effectively while providing advertisers and marketers with unprecedented reach into underserved consumer markets; net2phone provides enterprises and organizations with intelligently integrated cloud communications and contact center services across channels and devices; IDTs fintech and neo-banking services include BOSS Money , a popular international remittance business, as well as other services that make saving, spending, and sharing money easy and secure; IDT Digital Payments and BOSS Revolution Calling make sharing prepaid products and services and speaking with friends and family around the world convenient and reliable; and, IDT Global and IDT Express enable communications services to provision and manage international voice and SMS messaging. All statements above that are not purely about historical facts, including, but not limited to, those in which we use the words believe, anticipate, expect, plan, intend, estimate, target and similar expressions, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment of what may happen in the future, actual results may differ materially from the results expressed or implied by these statements due to numerous important factors. Our filings with the SEC provide detailed information on such statements and risks and should be consulted along with this release. To the extent permitted under applicable law, IDT assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. CONTACT IDT Corporation Investor Relations Bill Ulrey [email protected] 973-438-3838 IDT CORPORATION CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS October 31, 2023 July 31, 2023 (Unaudited) (in thousands, except per share data) Assets Current assets: Cash and cash equivalents $ 121,668 $ 103,637 Restricted cash and cash equivalents 86,785 95,186 Debt securities 33,242 42,414 Equity investments 4,761 6,198 Trade accounts receivable, net of allowance for credit losses of $5,909 at October 31, 2023 and allowance for doubtful accounts of $5,642 at July 31, 2023 35,328 32,092 Settlement assets, net of reserve of $1,469 at October 31, 2023 and $1,143 at July 31, 2023 18,122 32,396 Disbursement prefunding 35,733 30,113 Prepaid expenses 19,502 16,638 Other current assets 27,034 28,394 Total current assets 382,175 387,068 Property, plant, and equipment, net 38,802 38,655 Goodwill 26,311 26,457 Other intangibles, net 7,215 8,196 Equity investments 8,150 9,874 Operating lease right-of-use assets 4,910 5,540 Deferred income tax assets, net 20,539 24,101 Other assets 10,944 10,919 Total assets $ 499,046 $ 510,810 Liabilities, redeemable noncontrolling interest, and equity Current liabilities: Trade accounts payable $ 24,469 $ 22,231 Accrued expenses 100,107 110,796 Deferred revenue 34,042 35,343 Customer deposits 79,541 86,481 Settlement liabilities 19,268 21,495 Other current liabilities 18,507 17,761 Total current liabilities 275,934 294,107 Operating lease liabilities 2,346 2,881 Other liabilities 3,220 3,354 Total liabilities 281,500 300,342 Commitments and contingencies Redeemable noncontrolling interest 10,579 10,472 Equity: IDT Corporation stockholders equity: Preferred stock, $.01 par value; authorized shares10,000; no shares issued Class A common stock, $.01 par value; authorized shares35,000; 3,272 shares issued and 1,574 shares outstanding at October 31, 2023 and July 31, 2023 33 33 Class B common stock, $.01 par value; authorized shares200,000; 27,865 and 27,851 shares issued and 23,586 and 23,699 shares outstanding at October 31, 2023 and July 31, 2023, respectively 279 279 Additional paid-in capital 302,351 301,408 Treasury stock, at cost, consisting of 1,698 and 1,698 shares of Class A common stock and 4,279 and 4,152 shares of Class B common stock at October 31, 2023 and July 31, 2023, respectively (118,312 ) (115,461 ) Accumulated other comprehensive loss (16,627 ) (17,192 ) Retained earnings 32,321 24,662 Total IDT Corporation stockholders equity 200,045 193,729 Noncontrolling interests 6,922 6,267 Total equity 206,967 199,996 Total liabilities, redeemable noncontrolling interest, and equity $ 499,046 $ 510,810 IDT CORPORATION CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF INCOME (Unaudited) Three Months Ended October 31, 2023 2022 (in thousands, except per share data) Revenues $ 301,205 $ 321,816 Direct cost of revenues 206,777 232,670 Gross profit 94,428 89,146 Operating expenses (gains): Selling, general and administrative (i) 77,222 69,620 Severance 525 100 Other operating gain, net (484 ) (800 ) Total operating expenses 77,263 68,920 Income from operations 17,165 20,226 Interest income, net 844 509 Other expense, net (5,586 ) (3,842 ) Income before income taxes 12,423 16,893 Provision for income taxes (3,947 ) (4,338 ) Net income 8,476 12,555 Net income attributable to noncontrolling interests (817 ) (1,553 ) Net income attributable to IDT Corporation $ 7,659 $ 11,002 Earnings per share attributable to IDT Corporation common stockholders: Basic $ 0.30 $ 0.43 Diluted $ 0.30 $ 0.43 Weighted-average number of shares used in calculation of earnings per share: Basic 25,178 25,603 Diluted 25,277 25,616 (i) Stock-based compensation included in selling, general and administrative expense $ 771 $ 572 IDT CORPORATION CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF CASH FLOWS (Unaudited) Three Months Ended October 31, 2023 2022 (in thousands) Operating activities Net income $ 8,476 $ 12,555 Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash provided by operating activities: Depreciation and amortization 5,047 4,790 Deferred income taxes 3,561 3,672 Provision for credit losses, doubtful accounts receivable, and reserve for settlement assets 759 430 Net unrealized loss from marketable securities 1,528 1,846 Stock-based compensation 771 572 Other 897 756 Changes in assets and liabilities: Trade accounts receivable (4,572 ) 2,442 Settlement assets, disbursement prefunding, prepaid expenses, other current assets, and other assets 8,250 (4,380 ) Trade accounts payable, accrued expenses, settlement liabilities, other current liabilities, and other liabilities (7,061 ) (6,970 ) Customer deposits at IDT Financial Services Limited (Gibraltar-based bank) (2,326 ) 2,865 Deferred revenue (540 ) (394 ) Net cash provided by operating activities 14,790 18,184 Investing activities Capital expenditures (4,322 ) (5,172 ) Purchase of convertible preferred stock in equity method investment (672 ) Purchases of debt securities and equity investments (7,750 ) (2,058 ) Proceeds from maturities and sales of debt securities and equity investments 17,067 11,472 Net cash provided by investing activities 4,323 4,242 Financing activities Distributions to noncontrolling interests (55 ) (99 ) Proceeds from other liabilities 100 300 Repayment of other liabilities (15 ) (1,916 ) Proceeds from borrowings under revolving credit facility 30,315 Repayment of borrowings under revolving credit facility (30,315 ) Proceeds from exercise of stock options 172 Repurchases of Class B common stock (2,851 ) (5,341 ) Net cash used in financing activities (2,649 ) (7,056 ) Effect of exchange rate changes on cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash and cash equivalents (6,834 ) (6,157 ) Net increase in cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash and cash equivalents 9,630 9,213 Cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash and cash equivalents at beginning of period 198,823 189,562 Cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash and cash equivalents at end of period $ 208,453 $ 198,775 Supplemental Schedule of Non-Cash Financing Activities Stock issued to certain executive officers for bonus payments $ $ 615 *** Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Measures for the First Quarter Fiscal 2024 and 2023 In addition to disclosing financial results that are determined in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States of America (GAAP), IDT also disclosed for 1Q24, 4Q23, 3Q23, 2Q23, and 1Q23, Adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP earnings per diluted share (EPS), both of which are non-GAAP measures. Generally, a non-GAAP measure is a numerical measure of a companys performance, financial position, or cash flows that either excludes or includes amounts that are not normally excluded or included in the most directly comparable measure calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP. IDTs measure of non-GAAP EPS is calculated by dividing non-GAAP net income by the diluted weighted-average shares. IDTs measure of non-GAAP net income starts with net income attributable to IDT in accordance with GAAP and adds severance expense, stock-based compensation, and other operating expense, and deducts other operating gains. These additions and subtractions are non-cash and/or non-routine items in the relevant fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2023 periods. Management believes that IDTs Adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP EPS are measures which provide useful information to both management and investors by excluding certain expenses and non-routine gains and losses that may not be indicative of IDTs or the relevant segments core operating results. Management uses Adjusted EBITDA, among other measures, as a relevant indicator of core operational strengths in its financial and operational decision making. In addition, management uses Adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP EPS to evaluate operating performance in relation to IDTs competitors. Disclosure of these financial measures may be useful to investors in evaluating performance and allows for greater transparency to the underlying supplemental information used by management in its financial and operational decision-making. In addition, IDT has historically reported similar financial measures and believes such measures are commonly used by readers of financial information in assessing performance, therefore the inclusion of comparative numbers provides consistency in financial reporting. Management refers to Adjusted EBITDA, as well as the GAAP measures income (loss) from operations and net income, on a segment and/or consolidated level to facilitate internal and external comparisons to the segments and IDT's historical operating results, in making operating decisions, for budget and planning purposes, and to form the basis upon which management is compensated. While depreciation and amortization are considered operating costs under GAAP, these expenses primarily represent the non-cash current period allocation of costs associated with long-lived assets acquired or capitalized in prior periods. IDTs Adjusted EBITDA, which is exclusive of depreciation and amortization, is a useful indicator of its current performance. Severance expense is excluded from the calculation of Adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP EPS. Severance expense is reflective of decisions made by management in each period regarding the aspects of IDTs and its segments businesses to be focused on in light of changing market realities and other factors. While there may be similar charges in other periods, the nature and magnitude of these charges can fluctuate markedly and do not reflect the performance of IDTs core and continuing operations. Other operating gain (expense), net, which is a component of income (loss) from operations, is excluded from the calculation of Adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP EPS. Other operating gain (expense), net includes, among other items, gain from the write-off of contingent consideration liabilities, legal fees net of insurance claims related to Straight Path Communications Inc.s stockholders class action, gain from the sale of state income tax credits, and fixed asset write-offs. From time-to-time, IDT may have gains or incur costs related to non-routine legal, tax, and other matters, however, these various items generally do not occur each quarter. IDT believes the gain and losses from these non-routine matters are not components of IDTs or the relevant segments core operating results. Stock-based compensation recognized by IDT and other companies may not be comparable because of the variety of types of awards as well as the various valuation methodologies and subjective assumptions that are permitted under GAAP. Stock-based compensation is excluded from IDTs calculation of non-GAAP EPS because management believes this allows investors to make more meaningful comparisons of the operating results per share of IDTs core business with the results of other companies. However, stock-based compensation will continue to be a significant expense for IDT for the foreseeable future and an important part of employees compensation that impacts their performance. Adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP EPS should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, or superior to, income (loss) from operations, cash flow from operating activities, net income, basic and diluted earnings per share or other measures of liquidity and financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. In addition, IDTs measurements of Adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP EPS may not be comparable to similarly titled measures reported by other companies. Following are reconciliations of Adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP EPS to the most directly comparable GAAP measure, which are, (a) for Adjusted EBITDA, income (loss) from operations for IDTs reportable segments and net income for IDT on a consolidated basis, and (b) for non-GAAP EPS, diluted earnings per share. IDT Corporation Reconciliation of Net Income to Adjusted EBITDA (unaudited) in millions. Figures may not foot or cross-foot due to rounding to millions Total IDT Corporation Traditional Communica-tions net2phone NRS Fintech Corporate Three Months Ended October 31, 2023 (1Q24) Net income attributable to IDT Corporation $ 7.7 Adjustments: Net income attributable to noncontrolling interests 0.8 Net income 8.5 Provision for income taxes 3.9 Income before income taxes 12.4 Interest income, net (0.8 ) Other expense, net 5.6 Income (loss) from operations 17.2 $ 15.4 $ - $ 5.5 $ (1.4 ) $ (2.3 ) Depreciation and amortization 5.0 2.1 1.4 0.7 0.7 - Severance 0.5 0.5 - - - - Other operating gain, net (0.5 ) - - - - (0.5 ) Adjusted EBITDA $ 22.3 $ 18.1 $ 1.4 $ 6.2 $ (0.7 ) $ (2.8 ) IDT Corporation Reconciliation of Net Income to Adjusted EBITDA (unaudited) in millions. Figures may not foot or cross-foot due to rounding to millions Total IDT Corporation Traditional Communica-tions net2phone NRS Fintech Corporate Three Months Ended July 31, 2023 (4Q23) Net income attributable to IDT Corporation $ 8.0 Adjustments: Net income attributable to noncontrolling interests 0.8 Net income 8.8 Provision for income taxes 3.8 Income before income taxes 12.6 Interest income, net (1.1 ) Other expense, net 0.5 Income (loss) from operations 12.0 $ 14.1 $ (0.7 ) $ 1.7 $ (1.9 ) $ (1.2 ) Depreciation and amortization 5.1 2.3 1.5 0.7 0.7 - Severance 0.5 0.4 0.1 - - - Other operating expense (gain), net 0.5 1.8 0.1 - - (1.4 ) Adjusted EBITDA $ 18.1 $ 18.6 $ 0.9 $ 2.4 $ (1.2 ) $ (2.6 ) Total IDT Corporation Traditional Communica-tions net2phone NRS Fintech Corporate Three Months Ended April 30, 2023 (3Q23) Net income attributable to IDT Corporation $ 6.9 Adjustments: Net income attributable to noncontrolling interests 0.9 Net income 7.7 Provision for income taxes 3.0 Income before income taxes 10.7 Interest income, net (0.7 ) Other expense, net 0.4 Income (loss) from operations 10.4 $ 12.9 $ (0.4 ) $ 2.1 $ (1.3 ) $ (2.9 ) Depreciation and amortization 5.2 2.5 1.4 0.6 0.7 - Severance 0.1 0.1 - - - - Other operating expense, net 4.8 4.1 - - - 0.6 Adjusted EBITDA $ 20.5 $ 19.7 $ 1.0 $ 2.7 $ (0.6 ) $ (2.3 ) IDT Corporation Reconciliation of Net Income to Adjusted EBITDA (unaudited) in millions. Figures may not foot or cross-foot due to rounding to millions Total IDT Corporation Traditional Communica-tions net2phone NRS Fintech Corporate Three Months Ended January 31, 2023 (2Q23) Net income attributable to IDT Corporation $ 14.6 Adjustments: Net income attributable to noncontrolling interests 0.7 Net income 15.3 Provision for income taxes 5.3 Income before income taxes 20.6 Interest income, net (0.8 ) Other income, net (1.6 ) Income (loss) from operations 18.2 $ 17.0 $ (0.6 ) $ 5.4 $ (0.8 ) $ (2.8 ) Depreciation and amortization 5.0 2.4 1.4 0.6 0.7 - Severance 0.2 0.2 - - - - Other operating (gain) expense, net - - - - (0.3 ) 0.3 Adjusted EBITDA $ 23.4 $ 19.6 $ 0.8 $ 6.0 $ (0.5 ) $ (2.5 ) Total IDT Corporation Traditional Communica-tions net2phone NRS Fintech Corporate Three Months Ended October 31, 2022 (1Q23) Net income attributable to IDT Corporation $ 11.0 Adjustments: Net income attributable to noncontrolling interests 1.6 Net income 12.6 Provision for income taxes 4.3 Income before income taxes 16.9 Interest income, net (0.5 ) Other expense, net 3.8 Income (loss) from operations 20.2 $ 17.3 $ (1.1 ) $ 5.2 $ 1.5 $ (2.7 ) Depreciation and amortization 4.8 2.3 1.4 0.5 0.6 - Severance 0.1 0.1 - - - - Other operating (gain) expense, net (0.8 ) - - - (1.6 ) 0.8 Adjusted EBITDA $ 24.3 $ 19.7 $ 0.3 $ 5.7 $ 0.5 $ (1.9 ) IDT Corporation Reconciliation of Earnings per share to Non-GAAP EPS (unaudited) in millions, except per share data. Figures may not foot due to rounding to millions. 1 Q24 4 Q23 3 Q23 2 Q23 1 Q23 Net income attributable to IDT Corporation $ 7.7 $ 8.0 $ 6.9 $ 14.6 $ 11.0 Adjustments (add): Stock-based compensation (0.8 ) (1.0 ) (1.7 ) (1.3 ) (0.6 ) Severance expense (0.5 ) (0.5 ) (0.1 ) (0.2 ) (0.1 ) Other operating gain (expense), net 0.5 (0.5 ) (4.8 ) - 0.8 Total adjustments (0.8 ) (2.0 ) (6.6 ) (1.5 ) 0.1 Income tax effect of total adjustments (0.3 ) (0.7 ) (1.8 ) (0.4 ) - 0.5 1.3 4.8 1.1 (0.1 ) Non-GAAP net income $ 8.2 $ 9.3 $ 11.7 $ 15.7 $ 10.9 Earnings per share: Basic $ 0.30 $ 0.31 $ 0.27 $ 0.57 $ 0.43 Total adjustments 0.03 0.06 0.19 0.05 - Non-GAAP - basic $ 0.33 $ 0.37 $ 0.46 $ 0.62 $ 0.43 Weighted-average number of shares used in calculation of basic earnings per share 25.2 25.4 25.5 25.5 25.6 Diluted $ 0.30 $ 0.31 $ 0.27 $ 0.57 $ 0.43 Total adjustments 0.02 0.05 0.19 0.05 - Non-GAAP - diluted $ 0.32 $ 0.36 $ 0.46 $ 0.62 $ 0.43 Weighted-average number of shares used in calculation of diluted earnings per share 25.3 25.5 25.6 25.5 25.6 *Explanation of Key Performance Metrics NRS recurring revenue is NRS revenue in accordance with GAAP excluding revenue from POS terminal sales. NRS Monthly Average Recurring Revenue per Terminal is a financial metric. Monthly Average Recurring Revenue per Terminal is calculated by dividing NRS recurring revenue by the average number of active POS terminals during the period. The average number of active POS terminals is calculated by adding the beginning and ending number of active POS terminals during the period and dividing by two. NRS recurring revenue divided by the average number of active POS terminals is divided by three when the period is a fiscal quarter. Recurring revenue and Monthly Average Recurring Revenue per Terminal are useful for comparisons of NRS revenue and revenue per customer to prior periods and to competitors and others in the market, as well as for forecasting future revenue from the customer base. BOSS Moneys Average Revenue per Transaction is also a financial metric. Average Revenue per Transaction is calculated by dividing BOSS Moneys revenue in accordance with GAAP by the number of transactions during the period. Average Revenue per Transaction is useful for comparisons of BOSS Moneys revenue per transaction to prior periods and to competitors and others in the market, as well as for forecasting future revenue based on transaction trends. net2phones subscription revenue is its revenue in accordance with GAAP excluding its equipment revenue and revenue generated by a legacy SIP trunking offering in Brazil. net2phones cloud communications and contact center offerings are priced on a per-seat basis, with customers paying based on the number of users in their organization. The number of seats served and subscription revenue trends and comparisons between periods are used in the analysis of net2phones revenues and direct cost of revenues, and are strong indications of the top-line growth and performance of the business. # # # Oxford Biomedica signs agreement to acquire ABL Europe from Institut Merieux, consolidating position as a global pure-play CDMO Oxford Biomedica announces the signing of a sale and purchase agreement with Institut Merieux for the acquisition of ABL Europe The transaction Provides Oxford Biomedica with multi viral vector CDMO capabilities to be made available across the Companys six manufacturing sites in EU, US and UK Expands Oxford Biomedicas capacity in process and analytical development and early-stage manufacturing to better address client needs Provides new facilities in France to enhance service for clients adding process development and manufacturing capacity in the EU Reinforces Oxford Biomedicas position as a world leading cell and gene therapy CDMO Institut Merieux intends to increase current ownership in Oxford Biomedica from 3.3 per cent to approximately 10.0 per cent of the enlarged issued share capital by the end of Q3 2024 Oxford, UK 4 December 2023: Oxford Biomedica plc (LSE: OXB) (Oxford Biomedica or the Company), a quality and innovation-led cell and gene therapy CDMO, today announces that it has entered into a sale and purchase agreement (the Agreement) with TSGH SAS, a subsidiary of Institut Merieux SA ("Institut Merieux"), for the acquisition of ABL Europe SAS (ABL Europe) (the "Transaction"). This follows the announcement on 20 September 2023, of exclusive negotiations in relation to the proposed acquisition by Oxford Biomedica of ABL Europe, a pure-play European CDMO with specialised expertise in the development and manufacturing of solutions for biotechs and biopharma including viruses for gene therapy, oncolytic viruses and vaccine candidates, in exchange for Oxford Biomedica ordinary shares. The acquisition of ABL Europe will consolidate Oxford Biomedica's operations into a global pure-play CDMO in the cell and gene therapy space. It will broaden the Company's international presence by establishing a footprint within the European Union through facilities located in Lyon and Strasbourg, France. In addition, the acquisition will increase Oxford Biomedicas capacity in process and analytical development and early-stage manufacturing and address increased client demand for process development. ABL Europe currently works on more than 10 cell and gene therapy programmes spanning disease areas including more than six different vector types. Forecasted revenues for ABL Europe for the year ending 31 December 2023 are c.15 million. Institut Merieux has acquired a 3.3 per cent stake in Oxford Biomedica, through purchases in the open market, which it intends to increase to approximately 10.0 per cent in aggregate by the end of Q3 2024. Completion of the Transaction (Completion) is currently expected to take place in the first quarter of 2024 subject to the satisfaction and/or waiver of outstanding conditions, including obtaining the necessary regulatory approvals. Further Information Upon Completion, the Transaction is expected to be immediately revenue accretive to Oxford Biomedica. Further financial guidance will be provided after Completion. As at 31 December 2022, ABL Europe had earnings before interest tax and depreciation (EBITDA) of c.(1.7)m and gross assets of c.23.6m. The Transaction constitutes a Class 2 transaction for the Company for the purposes of the UK Financial Conduct Authority's Listing Rules. Dr. Frank Mathias, Chief Executive Officer of Oxford Biomedica, commented: The acquisition of ABL Europe strengthens Oxford Biomedica's operations into a global pure-play CDMO in the cell and gene therapy space. We will now be establishing a significant presence in the EU, while also freeing up Oxford Biomedica's capacity to better serve our growing client demand worldwide. We look forward to realising the operational and commercial synergies of this acquisition in 2024 and beyond." Transaction Terms As previously disclosed, key details of the Transaction follow below: Acquisition of ABL Europe by Oxford Biomedica for a consideration of 15 million (including the value of 10 million of pre-completion cash funding from Institut Merieux in ABL Europe for, amongst other things, development capex), to be satisfied by the issue of new ordinary shares in the Company (the Consideration Shares). The Consideration Shares will be issued at a price being the higher of (i) 407.4 pence per share equating to the 6-month volume weighted average price ("VWAP"). to market close on 19 September 2023 (being the last business day before the announcement of Oxford Biomedica and Institut Merieux entering into exclusive negotiations with regards to the Transaction); and (ii) the VWAP between 19 September 2023 and the second trading day before the date of Completion. Applications will be made for the Consideration Shares to be admitted to the premium listing segment of the Official List of the Financial Conduct Authority and to be admitted to trading on the main market for listed securities of the London Stock Exchange plc. Commitment from Institut Merieux to provide the Company with 20 million of additional funding, to cover capital expenditure and potential operational losses in relation to the acquisition of ABL Europe, by means of an equity subscription in the Company (Deferred Subscription Shares), with timing at Oxford Biomedicas discretion prior to 27 September 2024. Pursuant to the Deferred Equity Subscription, Institut Merieux will provide the additional funding by the end of Q3 2024, or such earlier date requested by Oxford Biomedica subject to 10 business days prior notice to Institut Merieux (the "Deferred Subscription Date"), in exchange for Oxford Biomedica ordinary shares (the "Deferred Subscription Shares"). The Deferred Subscription Shares will be issued at a price being the 30-day VWAP to closing on the second business day before the Deferred Subscription Date. -Ends- Enquiries: Oxford Biomedica plc: Sophia Bolhassan, VP, Corporate Affairs and IR T: +44 (0) 7394 562 425 / E: [email protected] ICR Consilium: T: +44 (0)20 3709 5700 / E: [email protected]Mary-Jane Elliott / Matthew Neal / Davide Salvi About Oxford Biomedica Oxford Biomedica (LSE: OXB) is a quality and innovation-led cell and gene therapy CDMO with a mission to enable its clients to deliver life changing therapies to patients around the world. One of the original pioneers in cell and gene therapy, the Company has more than 25 years of experience in viral vectors; the driving force behind the majority of gene therapies. The Company collaborates with some of the worlds most innovative pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, providing viral vector development and manufacturing expertise in lentivirus, adeno-associated virus (AAV) and adenoviral vectors. Oxford Biomedicas world-class capabilities span from early-stage development to commercialisation. These capabilities are supported by robust quality-assurance systems, analytical methods and depth of regulatory expertise. Oxford Biomedica, a FTSE4Good constituent, is headquartered in Oxford, UK. It has locations across Oxfordshire, UK and near Boston, MA, US. Learn more at www.oxb.com, and follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube. About Institut Merieux As an independent family-owned company, Institut Merieux is dedicated to the fight against infectious diseases and cancers, with a global and long-term vision. Thanks to five companies - bioMerieux, Transgene, ABL, Merieux NutriSciences and Merieux Equity Partners - Institut Merieux develops complementary approaches to meet todays public health challenges: from prevention of health risks to innovative disease treatment, including the key step of diagnosis. Present in 45 countries, Institut Merieux employs 22,000 people around the world and achieves a turnover of 4,3 billion euros. www.institut-merieux.com Source: Oxford BioMedica plc HARRISBURG, PA, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pace-O-Matic (POM), the leading skill game developer who conducts significant business throughout Pennsylvania, today released the following statement following an order from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. The order grants POM additional access to Eckert, Seamans, Cherin & Mellott, LLCs privileged logs regarding the representation of casinos against skill games. Click here to read the opinion. This decision overrules an appeal by Eckert Seaman Cherin & Mellot, LLC to exclude 120 documents from being produced. The Federal Court has ruled that 116 of those documents should be produced, 3 documents should be produced with redactions, and just 1 document shall not be produced. This is another victory for Pennsylvania small businesses and fraternal clubs, our skill game players, and POM as we work to uncover the extent of damage Eckert has done our business. We are pleased the court continues to rule in favor of openness and transparency concerning Eckerts repeated attempts to shield their nefarious behavior. This news comes just days after skill games were declared legal games of skill by the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania. Click here to read the Commonwealth Courts opinion. With the Commonwealth Court affirming POMS Pennsylvania Skills legal status, Eckerts actions are even more appalling. Eckert repeatedly misrepresented POMs legal status in Pennsylvania, falsely asserting to lawmakers, local elected officials, regulators, and the public that our skill games were illegal slot machines. Eckerts deliberate misrepresentation of our skill games has caused significant harm to our business and our industry. Thankfully the bright lights of justice are being shined upon their actions and we look forward to exposing the depths of their actions. POMs lawsuit alleges that Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, LLC, a Pennsylvania-based law firm deceived its client, POM, while at the same time representing a Pennsylvania casino that opposed POMs operations in the Commonwealth and launched lawsuits against POM. When confronted with the conflict of interest, Eckert first denied the conflict, then swore to a Federal District Court they would not engage in a conflict, then continued to work surreptitiously against POM and POMs interests. Eckert is a major law firm that has more than 300 lawyers across a network of 15 offices, including Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Boston, Washington, DC, and Richmond, VA. The lawsuit contends that Eckert took up arms against POM on behalf of the Philadelphia-based Parx Casino; that Eckert actively participated in and covertly manipulated litigation in Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court adverse to POMs interests; and that Eckert participated in a campaign intended to destroy POMs business by attempting to convince elected and appointed public officials that POMs games are gambling devices that should be seized and outlawed. Eckert used its influence to improperly target the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board. When confronted by POMs allegation that Eckert was double-dealing and had breached its professional duties of loyalty and confidentiality, Eckert denied the claim, while seeking to shield the law firms emails with the Parx Casino. These emails, if made public, reveal that numerous lawyers at Eckert, led by Mark Stewart, co-chair of Eckerts gaming practice group, were indeed simultaneously taking money from and representing the Parx Casino. Parx Casino calls itself the #1 casino in Pennsylvania and is owned and operated by Greenwood Racing Inc. Eckert, working at the behest of Parx Casino and its consultants, sought to block Pace-O-Matic from doing business in Pennsylvania. The suit also alleges that Eckert violated their most basic fiduciary duties and concealed and misrepresented material facts to POMs great detriment. As a result, POM is entitled to appropriate damages. In November 2021, US Magistrate Judge Joseph Saporito, Jr. found that Eckert acted in bad faith by seeking to withhold emails that demonstrated Eckert was representing both sides. Eckert, Saporito ruled, actively and clandestinely managed and participated in the representation of Parx in the Commonwealth Court litigation against its other client, POM. Moreover, based on our in-camera review of the purportedly privileged documents, it did so with full knowledge that the conflict asserted by POM precluded its active and continuing representation of Parx in the Commonwealth Court litigation. Saporito continued, in light of the clear and obviously intentional subterfuge demonstrated in the purportedly privileged documents, we have no difficulty concluding that these documents evidence an intent by Stewart and Eckert to play fast and loose with the courts. Eckert appealed Jude Saporitos ruling, which required Eckert to turn over to POM many internal emails. On July 5, 2022, Federal Judge Jennifer P. Wilson ruled for POM, declaring, in making inconsistent representations to the court, Eckert has attempted to obstruct the discovery process as to the central issue in this case: whether Eckert breached its fiduciary duty to POM by representing Parx, a party with adverse interests, at the same time that it represented POM. POM is a leading developer of games of skill in the United States. Its games are played in thousands of small restaurants and bars, along with many social halls such as American Legion and Veterans of Foreign War posts. POM games generated millions of dollars in revenue for businesses and clubs in Pennsylvania last year. Source: Pace-O-Matic News / National by Staff reporter Chinese investors racing to secure lithium supplies could help Zimbabwe rise to become the world's fifth biggest primary producer of the material that's vital to battery electric vehicles and the green revolution, mining consultancy CRU said.The lithium industry in Africa's top producer has rapidly expanded, buoyed by about $1 billion (R18bn) of investments during the past two years by Chinese companies including Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, Sinomine Resource Group, Chengxin Lithium Group and Yahua Group.The Chinese companies, faced with production constraints at home, have focused on Zimbabwe to lock-in future lithium supplies.The investments could boost capacity to 192000 tons of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) per year of petalite and spodumene in 2027, from 13000 tons per year LCE in 2022, Cameron Hughes, a battery markets analyst at CRU said in a report."These investments will place Zimbabwe as the fifth largest primary producer of lithium by 2025, after Argentina, contributing more than either Canada or Brazil," Hughes said.While Zimbabwe holds some of the world's biggest lithium deposits, the metal has only being mined at Bikita Minerals, producing petalite - a form of lithium used in ceramics, aluminium smelting and glass - since in the 1950s.Sinomine paid $180 million for Bikita Minerals last year and has spent $300 million to expand the petalite and spodumene capacity to more than 90 000 tons LCE per year from 6000 tons LCE per year in 2020.Investments by Sinomine and others mean Zimbabwe's capacity could rise to about 11% of global LCE production in five years from just 2% in 2020, said Martin Jackson, the head of battery raw materials at CRU.Still, while the capacity is "significant", full utilisation would depend on lithium demand and prices, Jackson added."I doubted the speed of the ramp up of many of those operations but those Chinese investors have brought lithium to market much quicker than I ever expected," he said.Despite the huge potential, softening prices might not support investments on marginal projects, Jackson added. Company Executives Share Vision and Answer Questions Live at VirtualInvestorConferences.com NEW YORK, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Virtual Investor Conferences, the leading proprietary investor conference series, today announced the agenda for the US Climate Hybrid Investor Conference sponsored by Water Tower Research to be held on December 7th, 2023. Individual investors, institutional investors, advisors, and analysts are invited to attend. REGISTER NOW AT: https://bit.ly/47F0QIA It is recommended that investors pre-register and run the online system check to expedite participation and receive event updates. There is no cost to log-in, attend live presentations and schedule 1x1 meetings with management. It is an exciting time for investing in sustainability, and we look forward to bringing companies and investors together at the inaugural US Climate Investor conference, said Shawn Severson, Co-Founder and President of Water Tower Research. This is a great opportunity for investors to search for new ideas as we enter 2024 and find investments leveraging several key mega-trends across the ClimateTech landscape. It has been a great experience working with OTC Markets Group and aligning with its long history of fostering some of the most innovative and leading-edge companies in sustainability. Were looking forward to hosting this unique, climate-focused event at our offices, said Jason Paltrowitz, Executive Vice President of Corporate Services at OTC Markets Group. A special thanks to Water Tower Research and to all of the participating companies that demonstrate value and resilience in this unique market. December 7th To facilitate investor relations scheduling and to view a complete calendar of Virtual Investor Conferences, please visit www.virtualinvestorconferences.com. About Virtual Investor Conferences Virtual Investor Conferences (VIC) is the leading proprietary investor conference series that provides an interactive forum for publicly traded companies to seamlessly present directly to investors. Providing a real-time investor engagement solution, VIC is specifically designed to offer companies more efficient investor access. Replicating the components of an on-site investor conference, VIC offers companies enhanced capabilities to connect with investors, schedule targeted one-on-one meetings and enhance their presentations with dynamic video content. Accelerating the next level of investor engagement, Virtual Investor Conferences delivers leading investor communications to a global network of retail and institutional investors. About Water Tower Research Water Tower Research is modernizing Investor Relations through research-driven communications and Investor Engagement. Sound investment research begins with good information. At WTR, we help companies and investors connect by creating expert information flow and strategies that are the foundation of a successful modern investor relations platform. Our analysts and capital markets professionals bring decades of unrivaled Wall Street experience and insight to a new digital world of investor communications and engagement. Our research and investor content are distributed across traditional research aggregators like Bloomberg, FactSet, etc., proprietary direct distribution lists, social media, search engines, and our website. As a result, every institutional and retail investor has equal access to our high-quality company research. Our mission is to help companies take control of their IR program and proactively reach investors while bringing investors a consistent flow of quality information to help them understand our clients businesses, industries, and the investment opportunities they present. Media Contact: OTC Markets Group Inc. +1 (212) 896-4428, [email protected] Virtual Investor Conferences Contact: John M. Viglotti SVP Corporate Services, Investor Access OTC Markets Group (212) 220-2221 [email protected] Water Tower Research Contact: Timothy M. Regan Head of Business Development Water Tower Research, LLC (978) 505-2478 [email protected] By Julie Zhu and Scott Murdoch HONG KONG/SYDNEY (Reuters) -Zeekr, the premium electric vehicle (EV) brand of Chinese automaker Geely, has put its U.S. initial public offering (IPO) on hold because of a mismatch in valuation expectations, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said. The decision was made as global financial markets remain volatile, a third source added. All the sources declined to be identified as the information has not yet been made public. Zeekr, which publicly filed a prospectus this month to float shares in New York, has aimed to maintain the valuation of $13 billion it achieved in a private fundraising exercise in February, two of the sources said. But informal talks with potential investors since late August saw some of them put a valuation on the two-year-old firm below the IPO figure, as market sentiment was still weak and the company recently widened losses, they added. "The company has made a public filing to the SEC and is proceeding with the preparatory work," Zeekr said in a statement, without elaborating. Zeekr's prospectus disclosed a surge in total revenue to 35.31 billion yuan ($4.9 billion) in the nine months ended Sept. 30, up from 18.47 billion a year earlier. However, its loss from operations widened to 5.23 billion yuan from 4.90 billion. Some listed peers, such as EV maker Nio, have seen share prices fluctuate or fall in recent months as a price war in China has hit profitability, spurring efforts to cut costs and build partnerships to survive the consolidating competition. Citing sources, Reuters reported in December that Zeekr had confidentially filed for its IPO, aiming to raise more than $1 billion and go public in New York as early as the second quarter of this year. Sources told Reuters this month that Zeekr still aimed to raise at least $500 million in the IPO before stepping on the brakes. Zeekr was formed in 2021 by Geely, formally known as Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, to tap growing Chinese demand for premium EVs. In February, it raised $750 million from investors including Amnon Shashua, the CEO of autonomous driving technology company Mobileye Global and Chinese battery giant CATL. Zeekr offers four EV models in China, with its best seller, the 001 crossover, priced from 269,000 yuan ($36,927.22). It also plans to sell in overseas markets, such as Germany, Israel, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands and Sweden, among others. (Reporting by Julie Zhu and Scott Murdoch; Additional reporting by Kane Wuy; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Clarence Fernandez) Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2023) - Appia Rare Earths & Uranium Corp. (CSE: API) (OTCQX: APAAF) (FSE: A0I0.F) (FSE: A0I0.MU) (FSE: A0I0.BE) (the "Company" or "Appia") is pleased to announce that, further to the press release issued on June 9, 2023, it will be issuing the first tranche of 500,000 shares pursuant to the Definitive Agreement (the "Definitive Agreement") with 3S LTDA ("3S"), Beko Invest Ltd. ("Beko"), Antonio Vitor Junior ("Antonio") and AZ125 Mineracao Ltda, now known as Appia Brasil Rare Earths Mineracao Ltda (the "Company") to acquire up to a 70% interest in the PCH Project (the "Transaction") located in the Tocantins Structural Province of the Braslia Fold Belt, Goias State, Brazil (the "Property"). Pursuant to the terms of the Definitive Agreement, the Property is now registered in the name of the Company and Appia currently holds a 70% interest in the Company (350,000 quotas) and Antonio holds a 30% interest in the Company (150,000 quotas). The first tranche of 500,000 shares (the "500,000 Shares") will be issued to Beko on December 11, 2023. Upon the issuance of the 500,000 Shares, the ongoing exploration and development of the Property will be governed by the terms of a Quotaholders Agreement among Appia, Beko, Antonio and the Company dated July 20, 2023 (the "Quotaholders Agreement"). Appia can maintain its 70% interest in the Company by issuing an aggregate of a further 2.0 million common shares of Appia to Beko and spending US$10 million on the Property over a period of five (5) years (the "Option Period") after which Appia will have earned a 60% interest in the Company. If Appia earns its 60% interest, it will then be obligated, within 90 days of earning its 60% interest, to issue a further US$1,250,000 of common shares of Appia to Beko to earn a further 10% interest in the Company. The number of shares to be issued to earn the further 10% shall be that number of common shares of Appia equal to the number arrived at by dividing US$1,250,000 by the greater of the average closing price of the common shares as quoted on the Canadian Securities Exchange (the "CSE") for the 30 trading days immediately preceding the announcement by Appia of its intention to earn the additional 10% interest and the discounted market price of the common shares of Appia based on the last closing price immediately preceding the announcement. Appia will acquire incremental vested interests in the Company upon completion of specific expenditure requirements pursuant to the terms of the Definitive Agreement. Once Appia issues at least a further 500,000 common shares to Beko and spends at least US$1 million on the Property (at which time it will have earned a 10% interest in the Company) (the "Initial Obligation"), Beko will be granted a 1% net smelter returns royalty (the "1% NSR") in the Property. Appia will have a right of first refusal to acquire the 1% NSR. Once Appia has earned its 70% interest in the Company, Appia and Antonio will enter into a joint venture with respect to the further exploration and development of the Property (the "Joint Venture") with Appia holding a 70% interest and Antonio holding a 30% interest in the Company. The Quotaholders Agreement will act as a unanimous shareholders agreement and a joint venture agreement with respect to the further exploration and development of the Property. Upon the formation of the Joint Venture, Antonio will have 90 days within which to elect to either (a) participate in the Joint Venture and contribute his pro rata share of expenditures or be diluted; (b) sell all of his 30% interest in the Company, subject to a right of first refusal in favour of Appia; or (c) elect to have Appia fund its pro rata share of expenditures pursuant to the Joint Venture subject to the right of Appia to be reimbursed for 150% of the expenditures made by Appia on behalf of Antonio before any proceeds are paid to Antonio. If a party is required to make a contribution pursuant to the Joint Venture and that party does not make its pro rata contribution to development expenditures, that party's interest in the Company will be diluted pro rata based upon that party's deemed and actual contributions to the Joint Venture relative to the total deemed and actual contributions to the Joint Venture by both parties. A party whose interest is diluted to 10% or less shall immediately be converted to a 1% net smelter returns royalty ("1% Dilution NSR") with the remaining party's interest converted to a 100% interest in the Company subject to payment of the 1% Dilution NSR. The remaining party will have a right of first refusal to purchase the 1% Dilution NSR. Should Appia fail to make some or all of the expenditures required in any year, Beko will notify APPIA in writing of such failure, after which Appia will have 30 days to make the required expenditure. Failure to make the expenditure within the 30 days will result in Appia's earned interest being reduced pro rata in proportion to the amount of money actually expended by Appia in such year. Appia shall have the right to make additional expenditures in a subsequent year to earn the balance of the interest it would have earned had it made the entire expenditure in the previous year. If Appia fails to expend an aggregate of US$10 million and issue an aggregate of 2,000,000 common shares of Appia to Beko within the Option Period, Appia may, at any time during the Option Period after completing the Initial Obligation, notify Beko that it does not intend to provide any further funding for the Property (the "Cease Funding Notice"). Upon delivery of the Cease Funding Notice to Beko, Appia shall have earned the applicable interest in the Company (the "Earned Interest") and shall transfer to Antonio that number of quotoas of the Company equal to 70% minus the Earned Interest. Thereafter, Appia shall hold the Earned Interest in the Company and Antonio shall hold 100% minus the Earned Interest in the Company. Upon delivery of the Cease Funding Notice and the adjustment in the interests of Appia and Antonio in the Company, the parties shall use their commercially reasonable efforts to determine how to proceed with their respective interests in the Company. Background on the PCH Project The PCH Project is located within the Tocantins Structural Province in the Brasilia Fold Belt, more specifically, the Arenopolis Magmatic Arc. The PCH Project is 17,551.07 ha in size and located within the Goias State of Brazil. It is classified as an alkaline intrusive rock occurrence with highly anomalous REE and Niobium mineralization. This mineralization is related to alkaline lithologies of the Fazenda Buriti Plutonic Complex and the hydrothermal and surface alteration products of this complex by supergene enrichment in a tropical climate. The positive results of the geochemical exploration work carried out to date indicates the potential forhigh-grade REEs and Niobium mineral resources within the lateritic ionic adsorption clays. About Appia Rare Earths & Uranium Corp. (Appia) Appia is a publicly traded Canadian company in the rare earth element and uranium sectors. The Company is currently focusing on delineating high-grade critical rare earth elements and gallium on the Alces Lake property, as well as exploring for high-grade uranium in the prolific Athabasca Basin on its Otherside, Loranger, North Wollaston, and Eastside properties. The Company holds the surface rights to exploration for 113,837.15 hectares (281,297.72 acres) in Saskatchewan. The Company also has a 100% interest in 12,545 hectares (31,000 acres), with rare earth element and uranium deposits over five mineralized zones in the Elliot Lake Camp, Ontario. Lastly, the Company holds the right to acquire up to a 70% interest in the PCH Project which is 17,551.07 ha. in size and located within the Goias State of Brazil. (See June 9th, 2023 Press Release - Click Here) Appia has 130.5 million common shares outstanding, 139.2 million shares fully diluted. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: This News Release contains forward-looking statements which are typically preceded by, followed by or including the words "believes", "expects", "anticipates", "estimates", "intends", "plans" or similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance as they involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. We do not intend and do not assume any obligation to update these forward- looking statements and shareholders are cautioned not to put undue reliance on such statements. Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. For further information, please contact: Tom Drivas, CEO and Director: (cell) 416-876-3957, (fax) 416-218-9772 or (email) [email protected] Stephen Burega, President: (cell) 647-515-3734 or (email) [email protected] To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/189643 Denver, Colorado--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2023) - CBD of Denver, Inc. (OTC Pink: CBDD), is excited to announce the launch of Luxora Real Estate AG in Switzerland. In 2024, this venture aims to raise 10 million CHF for the acquisition of commercial real estate properties in Germany. Luxora Holding AG will retain a 51% stake in this new enterprise, while the remaining 49% will be used to raise capital from investors to purchase the real estate, ensuring that CBDD's existing stock will not be diluted. To achieve this goal, Luxora will collaborate with a fundraising office in Switzerland, which will begin its efforts in December to secure the necessary funds. Luxora Real Estate plans to acquire commercial properties and transform them into cutting-edge Indoor-Farming facilities. These revamped spaces are intended for lease to the burgeoning cannabis club scene in Germany. "We are excited about the synergies that Luxora Real Estate will bring, especially in providing rental growing infrastructure to cannabis clubs in Germany," states Jan Schwager, CEO at Luxora. "Given the dynamic nature of Germany's cannabis market and the prospects for continued investment in its commercial real estate sector, Luxora Real Estate will considerably enhance our portfolio. It will secure revenue streams within our group and contribute to sustainable, long-term value." The company has already pinpointed the first two potential properties in the greater Berlin area, marking a promising start for this venture. With the recent announcements about the legal framework for cannabis clubs in Germany set to take effect at the beginning of July 2024, the company is well-positioned to offer world-class infrastructure as soon as these regulations are implemented. About CBD of Denver, Inc. (BERLINER INNOVATION) CBD of Denver, Inc. is focused on acquiring profitable assets at attractive valuations to create value for shareholders. The company's team is dedicated to sourcing high-margin, innovative products that align with its values. The Company is offering a number of innovative consumer products through Libra 9 GmbH, such as the Magic Lappen and the BerlinR13 Anti-Slip solution. Follow Magic Lappen on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok for more information and updates. Follow The Magic Lappen on Instagram: @themagiclappen Shop on our website: https://www.the-magic-lappen.com/ Visit the CBDD/ Berliner Innovation: www.berlinerinnovation.de See our innovative Anti-Slip product: www.berlinr13.de For questions, please contact us at: [email protected] About LUXORA LLC LUXORA LLC is a trailblazing entity in the European cannabis industry, with offices spanning the USA and Europe. Our core expertise revolves around unlocking the potential of the legalized cannabis market, offering infrastructure solutions and consulting tailored to the dynamic needs of this rapidly expanding sector. With a profound understanding of the opportunities and challenges brought forth by legalization, our experienced team is dedicated to pioneering the future of the legal cannabis market in Europe. Our offerings range from consulting and market research to product development and distribution solutions, aimed at simplifying the path to legalization for our esteemed clients. For inquiries, please contact Investor Relations: [email protected] For more information, please visit: www.luxora-holding.com Follow Us: Twitter | Instagram. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/189707 Dubai, United Arab Emirates--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2023) - The high-level launch event of the UN Climate Change Green Practices took place in Dubai, UAE. Mr. Alex Ju, a global advisor for cross sector energy transformation at the Climate Group, was invited to deliver a keynote speech. China's Exclusive Green Computing Infrastructure Innovation Cluster Selected for UN Climate Change Practice High-Level Launch To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://images.newsfilecorp.com/files/8722/189696_3b35f0c854148b91_001full.jpg Mr. Alex Ju highlighted the significant achievements of the 28th UN Climate Change Conference, emphasizing the collective action of developing countries to promote sustainable development. He stressed the importance of strengthening alignment with green transformation strategies, enhancing mutual assistance, and exploring new pathways that integrate development and environmental protection. Currently, China, Southeast Asia, and other developing countries and regions are implementing top-level designs such as "Digital China" and the "ASEAN Digital Masterplan 2025 (ADM)." The energy system transformation and infrastructure industry are undergoing significant restructuring. Mr. Alex Ju remarked that to ensure the efficient, decarbonized, and cost-effective deployment of AI-based computing infrastructure technology revolution in developing countries and regions, BCI is willing to share the successful experience of the Super Energy Complex, which integrates "Energy + Campus + Equipment + Network" through cross-system vertical integration. He also called for strengthened cooperation in the field of computing infrastructure and collective exploration of green, localized, and clustered development paths for computing infrastructure in countries along the Belt and Road. The Super Energy Complex integrates four major capabilities: advanced energy, advanced campuses, advanced equipment, and advanced networks. It adheres to long-termism and altruism, using industrial investment to alleviate the unsustainability of traditional land investment models based on "land, subsidies, resource" cutting. This unique model facilitates regional industrial transformation and upgrading, providing sustained support for local economic sustainability while helping digital economy enterprises seek carbon reduction in computing power. Mr. Alex Ju provided detailed explanations of the main pathways for the establishment of the Datong Super Energy Complex. This involves the investment of critical upstream and downstream infrastructure assets, including the hyperscale wind and solar energy base, extended energy storage stations, water-thermal circulation networks, computing equipment research and development bases, and circular link channels. It anchors the localization of supply chains, talent chains, investment chains, and industrial chains, creating a comprehensive "Advanced Energy + Advanced Campus" computing equipment integrated platform with "one horizontal, one vertical, three zones, and multiple campuses" model. Currently, the reserves of energy, equipment, network, and other elements in the Super Energy Complex, have started to take shape. It has accumulated 1 million square meters of campus space, equipment manufacturing production lines, a 2,000-kilometer circular capital highway network, and the capability to recycle water through natural cooling, reaching hundreds of millions of cubic meters. Regarding energy, the Super Energy Complex has completed the reservation of 2.1GW of green power resources. Once fully operational, it will achieve approximately 3 billion kilowatt-hours of green electricity annually. By 2030, it aims to achieve carbon neutrality in the aforementioned scenario, contributing to the establishment of a world-class infrastructure industry cluster in Datong,China. BCI Group Contact Person: Xinyan Liu Email: [email protected] To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/189696 Kelowna, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2023) - Genesis Ai Corp. (CSE: AIG) (OTCQB: AIGFF) (the "Company") is pleased to announce the onboarding of two new Data Scientists and a GIS expert. Filippo Vescovi, Vaibhav Padaval and Mason Pahl have joined the team, bringing the development team head count to 20. Mr. Vescovi joins us on the Canadian team and will be working on the Companies mining module, working to understand the aggregated data set, including the cleaning and harmonization of big data. This process will help aid results when processing with Ai and ML (machine learning). Filippo has a background in data related to the mining industry. Mr. Padaval joins us on the Empower team in India and will be working to research and develop the software code models for analyzing mining data from our customers and our increasingly large, collected dataset housed in the cloud. He will be working in structured and unstructured datasets to contextualize this information into searchable and filterable products for geoscientists. Mr. Pahl joins us on the Canadian team and will be working on the forest and carbon modules, as well as supporting the general team with GIS expertise. Mason has a background in commercial GIS for forestry and carbon, he also collects forest inventory data via drones for data science modelling. Mason is the creator of Top Notch Navigator, a popular offline navigation mapping data set for outdoor enthusiasts. Project director Brent Tolmie commented: "We are thrilled to be expanding the team once again with such great talent that can help Genesis and our quest to address real world challenges with data. Our strength is in our people, and we welcome Filippo Vescovi, Vaibhav Padaval and Mason Pahl." The Company also announces that it has engaged FTB Capital Inc. to create content, write articles, prepare ads, and bring awareness to the work Genesis is conducting. This program will be for 2 months, commencing December 1st. FTB will invoice the Company $275,000 USD for its services. About Genesis Ai Corp. Genesis Ai is a proprietary generative Ai (artificial intelligence) model in development, building digital twins for real-world natural resources applications. Digital twins can be manipulated and studied in computer generated worlds, with the influence of deep machine learning and neural networks, providing disruptive real-world problem solving. Genesis Ai Corp. is pursuing opportunities in the precision geospatial, forestry analytics, and carbon sector through Ai. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS "Dev Randhawa" President and Director For further information, please contact: Jamie Bannerman Director [email protected] This news release may contain statements which constitute "forward-looking information", including statements regarding the plans, intentions, beliefs and current expectations of the Company, its directors, or its officers with respect to the future business activities of the Company. The words "may", "would", "could", "will", "intend", "plan", "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect" and similar expressions, as they relate to the Company, or its management, are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future business activities and involve risks and uncertainties, and that the Company's future business activities may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including, but not limited to, fluctuations in market prices, successes of the operations of the Company, continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. There can be no assurances that such information will prove accurate and, therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of such uncertainties. The Company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking information except as required under the applicable securities laws. Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/189642 Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2023) - Kaizen Discovery Inc. (TSXV: KZD) (otherwise "Kaizen" or "the Company"), announces today that the Company has entered into a definitive arrangement agreement (the "Agreement") pursuant to which Ivanhoe Electric Inc. ("IE") will acquire all of the outstanding common shares of Kaizen not already beneficially owned by IE ("Company Shares") in an all-share transaction (the "Arrangement"). IE currently owns, through its subsidiary Ivanhoe Electric (BVI) Inc., 54,428,970 Company Shares, or approximately 82.54% of Company Shares outstanding. Terms of the Arrangement Under the terms of the Arrangement, if the Arrangement becomes effective, each holder of Company Shares ("Company Shareholders") will receive one (1) common share of IE ("IE Shares") for one hundred and twenty-seven (127) Company Shares held. Outstanding options ("Company Options"), deferred share units ("Company DSUs") and restricted share units ("Company RSUs", together with Company Options and Company DSUs, the "Incentive Securities") granted under and/or governed by the Company's incentive plans will immediately vest prior to the effective time of the Arrangement. The holders of Company DSUs and Company RSUs will receive IE Shares in connection with the Arrangement and the holders of Company Options will receive the in-the-money value (as described below) of such Company Option in IE Shares. Benefits to Kaizen Shareholders Opportunity for Kaizen shareholders to participate in the potential future increase in value of IE, which will include Kaizen's project, due to IE's strong expertise in the mining space coupled with its use of technology and financial capacity. Increased liquidity for Kaizen shareholders due to the liquidity of the IE Shares compared to the Company Shares. Implied premium of 11.38% to the closing price of the Company Shares on December 1, 2023. Avoids highly-dilutive equity financings that are expected to be required if the Company were to pursue a "go-alone" strategy. Ability to participate in the business of IE post-closing. Arrangement Conditions & Timing Kaizen intends to call a meeting of Company Shareholders and holders of Incentive Securities (collectively, "Company Securityholders") to be held on January 29, 2024 to seek approval for the Arrangement (the "Meeting"). The Arrangement will be effected by way of a court-approved plan of arrangement under Division 5 of Part 9 of the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia). The Arrangement constitutes a 'related party transaction' for the purposes of Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101") due to IE's existing majority ownership of Company Shares, and Quentin Markin being both a senior officer of IE and a Kaizen director, and as a result, will require approval by: (i) at least two-thirds of the votes cast at the Meeting by the Company Shareholders present or represented by proxy at the Meeting; (ii) at least two-thirds of the votes cast at the Meeting by Company Securityholders, collectively voting as a single class, present or represented by proxy at the Meeting; and (iii) at least a majority of the votes cast by Company Shareholders, voting as a separate class, present or represented by proxy at the Meeting, excluding the votes cast in respect of Company Shares held by IE and any other interested party, related party or joint actor of IE, in accordance with the minority approval requirements of MI 61-101. The Arrangement is also subject to certain other conditions, including the approval of the British Columbia Supreme Court, certain stock exchange and regulatory approvals, and customary closing conditions for transactions of this nature. The Arrangement does not require the approval of the shareholders of IE. The Agreement provides for, among other things, non-solicitation covenants, with "fiduciary out" provisions that allow Kaizen to consider and accept a superior proposal, subject to a "right to match period" in favour of IE. The Agreement also provides for a termination fee of C$300,000 to be paid by Kaizen to IE if the Agreement is terminated in certain specified circumstances. The directors and senior officers of Kaizen who are also Company Shareholders have entered into voting support agreements with IE, pursuant to which they have agreed to vote their Company Shares and Incentive Securities in favour of the Arrangement. Together with Company Shares already owned or held by IE, approximately 82.72% of the Company Shares will be voted in support of the Arrangement. It is anticipated that the Arrangement will be effective in February 2024. Board Approval and Recommendation The special committee of independent directors of Kaizen (the "Special Committee") has reviewed this transaction, and based on financial and legal advice it recommended that the board of directors of Kaizen (the "Board") approve the Arrangement. Furthermore, the Special Committee received an opinion from PI Financial Corp. that, based upon and subject to the limitations, assumptions and qualifications of and other matters considered in connection with the preparation of such opinion, the consideration to be received by Company Shareholders (other than IE) pursuant to the Arrangement is fair, from a financial point of view, to Company Shareholders (other than IE) (the "Fairness Opinion"). Following its review and in consideration of, amongst other things, the recommendation of the Special Committee and the Fairness Opinion, the Board has unanimously approved (with Quentin Markin abstaining as an officer of IE) the Agreement and the Arrangement and has determined that the Arrangement is fair to Company Shareholders (other than IE) and is in the best interests of Kaizen, and recommends to Company Securityholders that they vote in favour of the Arrangement. Options and Warrants Each Company Option immediately prior to the effective time of the Arrangement shall be deemed to be vested and exercisable, and if such Company Option is in-the-money based on the five day volume-weighted average trading price of the Company Shares on the TSXV determined as of the close of business on the third business day immediately preceding the effective date of the Arrangement (the "Company Share Value"), be deemed to be exercised, and the holder of such Company Option will receive, subject to any withholding pursuant to the plan of arrangement, such number of Company Shares obtained by dividing the in-the-money amount by the Company Share Value, rounded down to the nearest whole number of Company Shares. Any Company Options that are not in-the-money will be deemed to be surrendered and cancelled for no consideration. Each Company RSU and Company DSU outstanding immediately prior to the effective time of the Arrangement shall be deemed to be unconditionally vested and exchanged for Company Shares, as provided for in the plan of arrangement appended to the Agreement. Each warrant of the Company outstanding immediately prior to the effective time of the Arrangement (each of which being owned beneficially by IE), shall be deemed to be surrendered to the Company for cancellation for no consideration. Advisors and Counsel to Kaizen PI Financial Corp. is acting as financial advisor to the Kaizen Special Committee and Board, and Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP is acting as legal advisor to Kaizen and the Special Committee in connection with the Arrangement. Additional Information Full details of the Arrangement are set out in the Agreement, which will be filed by Kaizen under its profile on SEDAR+ at www.sedarplus.com. In addition, further information regarding the Arrangement will be contained in a management information circular to be prepared in connection with the Meeting and filed on www.sedarplus.com at the time that it is mailed to Company Securityholders. All Company Securityholders are urged to read the management information circular once it becomes available as it will contain additional important information concerning the Arrangement. About Kaizen Kaizen is a Canadian mineral exploration and development company with exploration projects in Peru. More information on Kaizen is available at www.kaizendiscovery.com. ON BEHALF OF THE COMPANY Terry Krepiakevich, Chairman of the Special Committee Information contact Ran Li +1-604-689-8765 [email protected] Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information and Statements Certain of the information contained in this news release constitutes 'forward-looking information' and 'forward-looking statements' within the meaning of securities laws (together "forward-looking statements"). Such forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements relating to: the transaction and the proposed Arrangement as proposed to be effected pursuant to the Agreement; the ability of the parties to satisfy the conditions to closing of the Arrangement; the mailing of the management information circular in connection with the Meeting and anticipated timing thereof; the date of the Meeting; and the anticipated timing of the completion of the Arrangement, involve risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, obtaining required securityholder and regulatory approvals, exercise of any termination rights under the Agreement, meeting other conditions in the Agreement, material adverse effects on the business, properties and assets of Kaizen, and whether any superior proposal will be made. Although Kaizen has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Kaizen does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. The forward-looking statements in this press release involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause Kaizen's actual results, performance and achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements expressed or implied therein. Neither the TSXV or its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. None of the securities to be issued pursuant to the Arrangement have been or will be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), or any state securities laws, and any securities issuable in the transaction are anticipated to be issued in reliance upon available exemptions from such registration requirements pursuant to Section 3(a)(10) of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable exemptions under state securities laws. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/189646 San Francisco, California--(Newsfile Corp. - December 4, 2023) - Author T. L. Barry continues to thrill audiences with his riveting debut novel, Unbridled. This compelling story contrasts the power of love and friendship against the desperation of an impossible situation. Originally published some time back, the increase in reader interest in 2023 is a testament of Unbridled's ability to captivate its audience. Book cover of Unbridled Unbridled follows the lives of newspaper reporter Richard "Ritchie" Weston and his lifelong best friend, homicide detective Jonah Riley. When Ritchie and his wife Katrina unknowingly see the perpetrator's identity during a jewelry store robbery, an unknown culprit kidnaps Katrina and holds her hostage. Ritchie is determined to save Katrina, but his actions jeopardize his friendship with Riley, who can't understand why Ritchie keeps misleading him. In reality, Ritchie knows that Riley, an officer bound by the law, will never be able to rescue Katrina. Instead, it will take a man who's willing to do anything and break every moral code for the sake of love. Fans will appreciate the suspenseful storytelling and drama at the heart of this captivating thriller. With three-dimensional characters and an unpredictable plot, Unbridled is a hidden gem in the genre. Unlike other novels with similar themes, Barry has managed to write a standout thriller without using profanity. The clean language is skillfully done, making it possible to have the Irish mob, action, and tension between friends without limiting the impact of the dialogue. Unbridled is available for purchase on Amazon.com or wherever books are sold. T. L. Barry is the author of Unbridled. After growing up in the southern United States, he now lives and writes in the northwest. Author Photo of T. L. Barry Source: Charlotte Simmons [email protected] Dabb Media To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/189697 Programs by MIT Sloan, NYU Stern, and most recently, Arizona State University combine with Deloitte's own Learning and Development training to form a comprehensive suite of climate change and sustainability offerings for U.S. Deloitte professionals NEW YORK , Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Deloitte today announced expanded collaborations with renowned academic institutions, including MIT Sloan School of Management, NYU Stern Executive Education and Center for Sustainable Business, and most recently, Arizona State University, to create a differentiated, integrated learning program intended to enhance Deloitte professionals' ability to help guide clients in identifying and engineering solutions to support what's good for their business, people and the planet. Acknowledging the rapidly evolving market and science that encompasses effective sustainability, climate and equity problem solving, Deloitte continues to advance its large-scale enhancement of these skills among its more than 150,000 professionals in the U.S. across its Consulting, Risk & Financial Advisory, Tax and Audit & Assurance businesses. "As the economy continues to transition to a low-carbon future, there are an increasing number of our clients who are seeking to create new advantages," said Steve Goldbach , principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and leader of sustainability, climate and equity at Deloitte US. "We are investing in this industry-leading learning program so that our professionals can integrate our core capabilities with innovative thinking about sustainability. This is a key component of meeting our aspiration to be our clients' first choice on sustainability." As the need for sustainability literacy intensifies, these academic relationships are intended to further enrich Deloitte's robust bench of learning and development capabilities. Deloitte recently launched Project 120, a $1.4 billion investment to fundamentally shift how the organization designs, delivers and experiences learning and development in support of its business transformation. Additionally, Deloitte Global invested $1 billion in a sustainability and climate practice to expand and elevate its robust bench of learning and development capabilities in critical in-demand skills, such as sustainability literacy and green skills. "It's critically important that we elevate our learning and development programs to stay ahead of the changing market, C-suite priorities and business demands," said Anthony Stephan , chief learning officer at Deloitte US. "Through these key investments and academic collaborations, we are accelerating the agility and innovation of learning and development at Deloitte to rapidly upskill and reskill our people with the capabilities needed to more effectively address many of today's most pressing issues." Deloitte's sustainability, climate and equity learning and development initiatives showcase a continued, strong commitment to fostering a forward-thinking workforce, driven by professionals who actively seek to apply their knowledge to shape a more sustainable future. Key points Accelerating, innovating and elevating sustainability learning and development: Deloitte's approach to growth and development recognizes that learning is not a one-time event but an ongoing process, and the organization continues to evolve its learning and development offerings to stay ahead of market needs, equipping its people with the knowledge and skills needed to help clients with their sustainability, climate and equity issues and to innovate internally within its own sustainability, climate and equity practices. Deloitte personnel have shown a commendable level of interest in applying their knowledge and translating it into practical actions and decision-making. In fact, the organization's on-demand internal learning offering focused on sustainability, climate and equity knowledge has become the No. 1 bookmarked resource. Gen Z and millennials driving engagement: According to Deloitte Global's "2023 Gen Z and Millennials" survey, 60% of U.S. millennials and 55% of Gen Z survey respondents express concern about climate change, and 58% of U.S. millennials reported that they urge their employers to take concrete actions on climate change. Many Gen Z and millennials expect their employers to empower them with training and support not only for making sustainable decisions in their personal lives but also for developing the skills required to transition to a low-carbon economy. Academic collaborations for engaging content: Deloitte's continued pursuit of delivering diverse perspectives and critical insights for employees is strengthened through collaborations with outside specialists and academic institutions. NYU Stern Executive Education and Center for Sustainable Business "Sustainability Simplified" live virtual speaker series provides an opportunity to dig into the science behind the climate crisis and the equity topics helping to shape the market today. MIT Sloan's live virtual "Sustainability Accelerator" program is designed to equip senior business leaders with a common language and knowledge of important sustainability related concepts, and all program participants are eligible to receive a certificate of completion from MIT Sloan Executive Education. Finally, Deloitte's newest and most comprehensive program in collaboration with ASU, "Sustainability Certified: Foundations for Business," will offer an Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) Certificate to participants who complete self-paced, modular courses. Deloitte's commitment to its people, clients and the planet is evident through the intersection of its strategic investments in learning and development, as well as sustainability, climate and equity capabilities. By reinforcing this intersection, Deloitte can further help its clients address some of their most significant challenges, helping to pave the way for transformative solutions and a more equitable and purposeful future. Deloitte's second annual Global Sustainability Learning Week Deloitte's second annual Global Sustainability Learning Week, held from 16-20 October, expanded upon the previous year's inaugural initiative by not only engaging and developing its 457,000 people around the world, but also offering learning opportunities to Deloitte clients, suppliers, and its wide network of ecosystem collaborators. The week-long experience served to expand and deepen participating professionals' education, by offering the opportunity to share strategies and lessons learned in transitioning to a more sustainable future. Learning Week also aimed to mobilize professionals' commitment and provide specific skillsets and knowledge to help collectively address sustainability challenges. To this end, Deloitte also launched a conversation series in advance of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change ( COP28 ) that focused on hard-to-abate and high-emitting sectors and the enabling role of hydrogen in an effort to exchange experiences and help accelerate progress toward decarbonization. About Deloitte Deloitte provides industry-leading audit, consulting, tax and advisory services to many of the world's most admired brands, including nearly 90% of the Fortune 500 and more than 8,500 U.S. -based private companies. At Deloitte, we strive to live our purpose of making an impact that matters by creating trust and confidence in a more equitable society. We leverage our unique blend of business acumen, command of technology, and strategic technology alliances to advise our clients across industries as they build their future. Deloitte is proud to be part of the largest global professional services network serving our clients in the markets that are most important to them. Bringing more than 175 years of service, our network of member firms spans more than 150 countries and territories. Learn how Deloitte's approximately 457,000 people worldwide connect for impact at www.deloitte.com. Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee ("DTTL"), its network of member firms, and their related entities. DTTL and each of its member firms are legally separate and independent entities. DTTL (also referred to as "Deloitte Global") does not provide services to clients. In the United States , Deloitte refers to one or more of the US member firms of DTTL, their related entities that operate using the "Deloitte" name in the United States and their respective affiliates. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting. Please see www.deloitte.com/about to learn more about our global network of member firms. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/deloitte-expands-sustainability-climate-and-equity-upskilling-for-its-leaders-and-professionals-302003373.html SOURCE Deloitte Diadem CEO Paul Kinnon to Participate in December 5 th "Beyond Cancer Panel" Diadem's AlzoSure Predict's Blood-Based Technology Can Identify Whether or Not Individuals Will Progress to Alzheimer's Disease (AD) Up to 6 Years Before Diagnosis and Also Identifies "Rapid Progressors" Who Will Decline to AD within 2 Years MILAN and NEW YORK , Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Diadem SpA, (Diadem), a company developing one of the first blood-based tests for the early and accurate prediction of clinical progression to Alzheimer's disease (AD), today announced that Chief Executive Officer Paul Kinnon will participate in the TD Cowen Liquid Biopsy Summit, to be held at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York City on December 5, 2023 . Mr. Kinnon will serve as a panelist on the Beyond Cancer Panel scheduled from 2:40-3:40 pm ET that day, which will be hosted by Daniel Brennan , Cowen Managing Director, Research, Health Care - Life Science & Diagnostic Tools. Mr. Kinnon noted, "It is gratifying to have the opportunity to participate in this TD Cowen conference highlighting critical advances in blood-based prognostic and diagnostic technologies. We are excited about the potential of AlzoSure Predict and other new approaches to help revolutionize the treatment of Alzheimer's and other dementias, by giving healthcare providers the tools to easily and cost-effectively determine whether patients are or are not at high risk of declining to AD in the coming years, by enabling drug developers to conduct more rapid and cost-effective clinical trials of new AD therapies and importantly, by ensuring the widest possible access as individuals and their families are able to obtain testing at home if they prefer." About AlzoSure Technology AlzoSure Predict is a non-invasive biomarker blood-based technology that can help identify whether or not individuals over the age of 50 will experience significant cognitive decline due to Alzheimer's disease up to six years before the onset of symptoms. The test uses a proprietary antibody (U-p53AZ) to measure blood levels of a conformational variant of the p53 protein that has been implicated in the pathogenesis of AD. The utility of AlzoSure Predict is supported by a large body of clinical data, including clinical data from a longitudinal study that was the basis for AlzoSure Predict's Breakthrough Device designation from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and its CE-IVD marking in the E.U. AlzoSure Predict requires only 1mL of blood to detect the risk of Alzheimer's disease at the asymptomatic and early symptomatic stage. In addition, the AlzoSure Predict technology can identify individuals at high risk of progressing to Alzheimer's disease within two years. Diadem is also developing AlzoSure Confirm for the differential diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. AlzoSure Confirm is a blood-based assay that uses a different set of protein fingerprints to measure levels of the unfolded p53 protein in order to distinguish between and predict whether or not individuals will decline into AD, frontotemporal dementia, Lewy body dementia or Parkinson's disease-associated dementia. Plans for conducting clinical validation studies of AlzoSure Confirm are in place and are expected to get underway in the coming months, with the goal of bringing this second Liquid Biopsy test to market in the next 2-3 years. In October, 2023, Diadem and Quest Diagnostics announced that Quest had licensed exclusive U.S. rights to the intellectual property of Diadem AlzoSure Predict blood-based Alzheimer's disease prognostic technology for the purpose of developing, validating and marketing a laboratory-developed test service for providers and patients in the U.S. More than six million Americans have Alzheimer's, the most prevalent dementia, a number projected to reach 14 million by 2060. Conventional tests for Alzheimer's involve specialist-delivered PET scans and cerebral spinal fluid testing in symptomatic individuals. New blood tests offer the potential for primary care physicians as well as specialists to identify people at risk for Alzheimer's disease years before symptoms manifest. About Diadem Diadem was founded as a spin-out of the University of Brescia (Italy). The company is developing the first blood-based prognostic test for the early detection of dementia, with a focus on Alzheimer's disease. The lack of accurate, accessible and affordable diagnostic tools has contributed to the lack of effective treatments for this devastating condition. As a result, patients have not been diagnosed until late in the illness, when effective treatment is less feasible. Diadem's rapid, accurate and cost-effective AlzoSure Predict blood-based prognostic test makes it possible to identify patients early in the disease process, when effective interventions and better outcomes are now potentially achievable. The utility of the approach has been demonstrated in longitudinal clinical studies that were the basis for awarding CE-IVD marking in the E.U. and a Breakthrough Device designation in the U.S. Additional retrospective and prospective clinical trials are ongoing to further validate clinical claims and support adoption and use. Diadem is preparing for commercialisation of AlzoSure Predict in collaboration with global strategic partners. The company is also developing AlzoSure Confirm, a blood-based diagnostic test for AD that has shown promising results in early studies. For more information, visit diademdx.com/. Contacts: Corporate: Media: Diadem Barbara Lindheim : Paul Kinnon BLL Partners for Diadem CEO [email protected] [email protected] +1 (917) 355-9234 View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/diadem-to-discuss-biomarker-blood-tests-for-alzheimers-disease-at-td-cowen-liquid-biopsy-summit-302004142.html SOURCE Diadem SpA News / National by Staff reporter Bulawayo mayor, David Coltart, has expressed concerns that the proposed Wealth Tax by Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube will encroach upon local councils' authority to levy rates against property owners within their respective cities.Cllr Coltart contends that this tax represents yet another attempt by the central government to siphon off funds from local authorities, returning only a fraction of the revenue generated. This move, he asserts, will further strain the already limited financial resources of Bulawayo City Council (BCC).During the presentation of the national budget on Thursday, Prof Ncube proposed the introduction of a Wealth Tax, levied at a rate of 1% on the market value of residential properties with a minimum value of US$100,000."My primary concern with Professor Ncube's proposed new property tax is that it infringes upon Local Councils' right to levy rates against property owners within Cities. While the tax is problematic in principle, it is exacerbated by the fact that the revenue will be directed to central government with no guarantee of a fair return," Cllr Coltart stated via his X account."Bulawayo has endured significant financial strain since car license fees were redirected to the Zimbabwe National Road Administration (Zinara) instead of BCC. Similarly, despite constructing five dams using ratepayers' money, the city is now compelled to purchase water stored in those dams from the Zimbabwe National Water Authority (Zinwa). The reality is that we receive a fraction of the funds remitted to Zinara, which adversely impacts our ability to maintain roads. The same holds true for Zinwa. The City could have constructed additional dams if it had retained control of the funds paid to Zinwa," Cllr Coltart elaborated.Cllr Coltart expressed apprehension that, given the government's track record, the local authority is unlikely to receive a fair share of the revenue collected from the Wealth Tax."Now the government seeks to further deplete our resources by levying a tax based on the value of houses in Bulawayo. We have no assurance that this money will be returned to Bulawayo indeed, history indicates that a fair redistribution is improbable," he asserted."In light of these concerns, this new tax is utterly unacceptable. If such a tax is to be imposed, it must be directly remitted to local City and Town Councils, granting them the authority to determine its allocation. Adherence to the principle of devolution necessitates empowering local authorities with the financial autonomy to develop the Cities/Towns under their jurisdiction," Cllr Coltart concluded. HOUSTON and NEW YORK , Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- energyRe, an independent U.S. clean energy developer, today announced that it has raised a $1.2 billion capital package to support the expansion of its large-scale renewable energy portfolio comprising utility-scale transmission and storage, onshore wind and solar generation, and offshore wind. energyRe will leverage these strategic investments to advance its mission of decarbonizing American cities with abundant, affordable clean power and modern, well-connected electric grids. "energyRe's world-class renewable energy portfolio and team have earned the trust of institutional investors and are more ready than ever to advance the U.S. transition," said Jeff Blau , Chairman and Founding Partner of energyRe. "We look forward to leveraging our experience and expertise to deliver reliable clean power and advance a sustainable, carbon-free American future." "energyRe is at the forefront of America's energy transition and delivering the necessary renewable infrastructure to meet our urgent climate and sustainability goals," said Miguel Prado , Chief Executive Officer of energyRe. "We are uniquely focused on decarbonizing U.S. cities and hard-to-abate energy load centers with state-of-the-art electric grids that unlock new sources of clean power across the country. These investments, as well as strategic synergies with our new and current partners, will support energyRe's robust development pipeline as well as further innovation and expansion in our portfolio. This is a clear commitment from leading institutional investors that believe in energyRe's mission, growth, and momentum. We thank our partners and look forward to working together to meet America's clean energy needs." The raise announced today comprises committed capital investments in energyRe LLC from Glentra Capital alongside co-investors Novo Holdings and Denmark -based pension fund PKA. Glentra will leverage its track record in developing and constructing renewable energy assets in the U.S. to support the energyRe team in expanding its development pipeline and delivering on its ambitious growth plan. In addition, a firm agreement has been reached with Elia Group for the acquisition of a stake in a subsidiary of energyRe: energyRe Giga. The European transmission specialist will be offering all of its expertise and experience in the development, construction, operation and maintenance of offshore transmission infrastructure; HVDC technology; transmission planning; and congestion management to the partnership. The capital package also includes a mandated corporate debt facility to be arranged by Santander and Deutsche Bank. energyRe's diversified portfolio of renewable assets includes a development pipeline spanning seventeen states and comprises more than 500 miles of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission; 10.5 GW of solar, wind, and storage; and more than 155 MW of distributed generation. Catherine Vandenborre , Interim CEO of Elia Group, said: "Through this agreement, Elia Group (via WindGrid USA) is entering the U.S. markets alongside an established partner with a solid portfolio of projects. This partnership with energyRe Giga is part of Elia Group's growth strategy in Europe and the United States , since the Group is focused on expanding its activities abroad and strengthening the development of sustainable energy solutions. This partnership marks a strategic step towards Elia Group establishing itself as an internationally renowned expert in the field of electricity transmission." Henrik Tordrup , Managing Partner at Glentra, said: "As a value-add investor in the energy transition, Glentra is delighted to invest in energyRe with like-minded investors. We have followed the company for several years and are big believers in their strategy and management team. The company is set for a valuable growth journey as they deliver their unique project pipeline and provide massive decarbonization for hard to abate regions of America." The co-investors Novo Holdings and PKA are equally pleased to become shareholders in energyRe: Morten Beck Jorgensen , Managing Partner, Capital Investments, Novo Holdings, said: "We are excited to become a shareholder of energyRe, which is a company that aligns perfectly with Novo Holdings' ambition to accelerate the green transition and with our purpose of benefitting people's health and the sustainability of the planet." Michael Nellemann Pedersen , Chief Investment Officer, PKA, said: "Alongside other professional partners, PKA is delighted to become shareholder of energyRe. We see energyRe as an essential part in the transition to further renewable energy sources and a natural addition to our portfolio within energy infrastructure." energyRe is advancing several nation-leading renewable energy projects across the United States . energyRe is a partner on Clean Path NYa public-private collaboration to develop 3,800 MW of new wind and solar power and a 175-mile, underground 1,300 MW HVDC transmission line. Clean Path NY is critical to advancing New York State's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which mandates a zero-emission electricity sector by 2040, 70 percent renewable energy generation by 2030, and economy-wide carbon neutrality. Upon operation, Clean Path NY will deliver more than 7.5 million MWh of emissions-free energy annually and reduce fossil fuel-fired electric generation in New York by 22% per year on average. Clean Path NY encapsulates energyRe's focus on transmission-led generation by delivering both clean power and urgently needed transmission capacityalleviating growing congestion on the electric grid, reducing system costs, enhancing grid resiliency, and enabling additional sources of renewable power to reach cities and communities currently dependent on fossil fuels. energyRe is a development partner on the SOO Green HVDC Linka first-of-its-kind, 350-mile interregional transmission line that will connect the midwestern (MISO) and eastern (PJM) power markets and enable the delivery of 2,100 MW of renewable energyenough to power more than 1.5 million homes. By delivering wind and solar power to the nation's largest electricity market, SOO Green will significantly decarbonize the regional electric grid and enhance system reliability and resiliency. energyRe is a co-developer of Leading Light Wind the only American-led offshore wind project with a lease in the New York Bightwhich can power up to 1 million American homes with 2,400 MW of clean energy. As one of the only U.S. -based offshore wind developers in the world, energyRe is at the forefront of the burgeoning American offshore wind industry and well-positioned to advance robust domestic supply chains, workforce development pipelines, and manufacturing capabilities. In 2022, energyRe acquired Southern Current, a South Carolina -based premier developer of solar and energy storage assets. In September 2022 , energyRe launched Radial Power, a large-scale developer, owner, and operator of distributed clean energy systems with commercial & industrial (C&I) solar and storage solutions and electric vehicle charging. energyRe is an affiliate of Related Companies, one of the most prominent real estate companies in the United States and one of the nation's largest creators and preservationists of affordable housing. BofA Securities served as placement agent and Lazard Freres & Co. LLC. served as financial advisor to energyRe. About energyRe energyRe is a leading independent energy company focused on solving complex sustainability challenges and providing clean energy solutions in utility-scale transmission, onshore wind and solar, offshore wind, energy storage and distributed generation. Guided by the principles of innovation and partnership and backed by expertise and experience, energyRe is committed to creating a reliable, renewable energy future for all. energyRe has offices in New York , Houston , Indianapolis , and Charleston . For more information about energyRe, visit www.energyre.com. About Elia Group Elia Group is a key player in electricity transmission. Through our subsidiaries in Belgium (Elia) and Germany (50Hertz), we operate 19,349 km of high-voltage connections, meaning that we are one of Europe's top 5 transmission system operators. By expanding international high-voltage connections and incorporating ever-increasing amounts of renewable energy into our grid, we are promoting both the integration of the European energy market and the decarbonisation of society. In addition to its activities as a transmission system operator, Elia Group provides consulting services to international customers through its subsidiary Elia Grid International. In recent years, the Group has launched new non-regulated activities such as re.alto - the first European marketplace for the exchange of energy data via standardised energy APIs - and WindGrid, a subsidiary which will continue to expand the Group's overseas activities, contributing to the development of offshore electricity grids in Europe and beyond. The legal entity Elia Group is a listed company on Euronext Brussels. https://www.eliagroup.eu/ About Glentra Capital Glentra Capital ('Glentra') was founded in 2022 by senior executives from the renewable energy and fund management industries, with the vision to generate attractive risk-adjusted returns while accelerating the global energy transition for a clean and sustainable future. Glentra will contribute to this vision by investing in and growing exceptional companies that deliver the energy infrastructure of tomorrow via investments in development platforms ranging from offshore wind to solar and sustainable fuels and in their supply chain companies as well as in energy optimisation and integration businesses. The mix of industry and investment experience among Glentra's partners and team of employees secures a unique platform for growth and value creation for portfolio companies and investors. Glentra has offices in Copenhagen and London . www.glentra.com About Novo Holdings A/S Novo Holdings is a holding and investment company that is responsible for managing the assets and the wealth of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The purpose of Novo Holdings is to improve people's health and the sustainability of society and the planet by generating attractive long-term returns on the assets of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Wholly owned by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, Novo Holdings is the controlling shareholder of Novo Nordisk A/S and Novozymes A/S and manages an investment portfolio with a long-term return perspective. In addition to managing a broad portfolio of equities, bonds, real estate, infrastructure and private equity assets, Novo Holdings is a world-leading life sciences investor. Through its Seeds, Venture, Growth, and Principal Investments teams, Novo Holdings invests in life science companies at all stages of development. As of November 2023 , Novo Holdings had total assets of EUR 150 billion . www.novoholdings.dk About the Novo Nordisk Foundation Established in Denmark in 1924, the Novo Nordisk Foundation is an enterprise foundation with philanthropic objectives. The vision of the Foundation is to improve people's health and the sustainability of society and the planet. The Foundation's mission is to progress research and innovation in the prevention and treatment of cardiometabolic and infectious diseases as well as to advance knowledge and solutions to support a green transformation of society. www.novonordiskfonden.dk/en About PKA PKA is one of Denmark's leading pension funds delivering life-long security in the form of simple pension schemes for a community of members based on solidarity. With a total of 355,000 members, mainly from social services and health care, PKA has taken good care of their pensions ever since 1954. Today, the combined net assets have reached such a size that they make in difference in society. E.g. the funds' investments push the expansion of green energy infrastructure, support sustainable building construction, and create growth in developing countries. With about USD 60 billion in AUM PKA has invested in solar and wind power for more than ten years and is to be considered as a green leader in the pension industry generating long-term, good returns for the members, while contributing to a more sustainable future. https://pka.dk/this-is-pka View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/energyre-announces-1-2-billion-capital-raise-to-accelerate-us-clean-energy-transition-302004537.html SOURCE energyRe From $92.3 Bn to $300 Bn: GBI 2023 Sets the Stage for India's Biotech Meteoric Rise Leading US biotech giants converge in India , marking a historic collaboration that positions the Global Bio-India 2023 event as a pivotal hub for international biotech partnerships. NEW YORK , Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Global Bio-India 2023 event organized by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Ministry of Science & Technology, Government of India, and its Public Sector Undertaking, Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), is set to take place from December 4-6, 2023 , in India . Global Bio-India 2023 would be the largest congregation of biotech startups. The central theme of Global Bio-India 2023 is Biotech Innovation and Bio-manufacturing. With the Indian biotech industry reaching $92.3 billion in 2022 and targeting an impressive $150 billion by 2025 and $300 billion by 2030, the event invites individuals and companies worldwide to participate and establish their innovative practices in a thriving market driven by escalating demand both domestically and internationally. Global Bio-India 2023 is not just an event; it's an opportunity to shape the future of biotechnology on a global scale (Source). With the global biotech market estimated at USD one trillion in 2022 and projected to grow at a CAGR of 7.4 percent to 15.6 percent from 2023 to 2030, the conference serves as a catalyst for collaborative advancement in the rapidly evolving biotechnology sector (Source). North America commands the industry's growth, contributing to a substantial 37.76 percent revenue share in 2022 (Source). Key factors, such as robust R&D initiatives, the presence of significant competitors, and considerable healthcare expenditures propel the growth of the biotech sector in North America . The conference will bring together stakeholders from across the world like the regulatory bodies, government players, SMEs, large industries, bio clusters, research institutes, investors, and the startup ecosystem. With a focus on biosafety, ethics, and inclusive growth, the event benefits global stakeholders in Life Sciences, Healthcare, Industrial Biotech, Agri-Tech, Med Tech, and Clean Energy. Global attendees can expect opportunities for business growth and meaningful dialogues with policymakers. Global Bio-2023 will see representation from over 30+ countries thus emerging as one of the biggest networking events connecting India's biotech network with the global community. US Experts, Investors, and Industry Players to Explore Collaborative Ventures The participation of US biotech leaders in India underscores the strategic importance of the collaboration between two global biotechnology giants. In 2021, the US-India biotech trade surged to USD 9.8 billion , with the US accounting for over 40 percent of India's biotechnology imports (Source). It aligns with the fact that the US biotechnology market is the largest in the world, commanding over 50 percent of the global market (Source). Hon'ble Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) Science & Technology, MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances, Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh said, "The event is testimony to the fact that India is set to enter the league of nation who are leaders in Biotech. This truly global event not only reflects the intention of Government to attract global players in India and increase FDI in Pharma and Biotech sector. We are also committed to take a leadership position in Biotechnology." Dr. Rajesh S Gokhale, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology (DBT), said, "Global Bio-India 2023 is evidence of India's dedication to advancing biotechnology in the world. The conference serves as a crucial platform for fostering international collaboration to learn from one another as we navigate the future of biotechnology. We look forward to welcoming experts, investors, and partners from around the world to explore the vast opportunities within the dynamic biotech sector. The gathering reflects the shared vision of a globally connected biotech community, working towards transformative advancements." Speaking about how the event is set to bring the global biotechnology industry together, Dr. Jitendra Kumar , Managing Director, BIRAC said, "As we kick off Global Bio-India 2023, envisioning a collaborative platform where global minds convene to discuss the latest in biotechnology. It is a unique opportunity for everyone in the field, from scientists to businessmen, to unite. With the Indian biotech industry set to reach $150 billion by 2025 and an ambitious $300 billion by 2030, the event calls on individuals and companies worldwide to participate and establish innovative practices in a thriving market driven by escalating demand. Serving as a hub for international stakeholders, it provides a forum to collectively address critical issues such as biosafety and ethics, fostering a collaborative spirit with a focus on inclusivity, ethics, and forward-thinking policies." US luminaries, including Dr. Arun Kumar , Bioposthetics Inc, and Dr. Sarfaraz K. Niazi , University of Illinois, Chicago , will contribute to global discussions on the future of biotechnology. The conference will address topics, such as "Preparing for the next Pandemic - Accelerate Biotech," "Science Connect with Society," "Lignin Valorization," and global issues like biological manufacturing, smart proteins, bio-based energy solutions, and conducive regulatory frameworks. About BIRAC Set up by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India, Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC), is a not-for-profit Section 8, Schedule B, Public Sector Enterprise, which acts as an Interface Agency to improve and encourage the evolving biotechnology industry to execute strategic research and development activities in context to Nation's product development needs. For Media Queries- Contact Gutenberg at [email protected] View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-bio-india-2023-attracts-global-interest-for-indias-300-billion-biotech-potential-from-companies-academia-and-start-ups-302004191.html SOURCE BIRAC New DOE funding to empower Minneapolis -area Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander community to pursue nursing and healthcare careers MINNEAPOLIS , Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Herzing University's Minneapolis campus has been awarded the prestigious Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution (AANAPISI) Grant by the U.S. Department of Education. The acquisition of this grant directly supports both the AANAPISI community and the entire Herzing community as a whole, elevating the University's capacity to promote successful student outcomes and career readiness. Designated as an AANAPISI by the DOE, the Herzing University AANAPISI project represents an allocation of more than $1.8 million * in federal funds and will enhance Herzing's ability to improve the academic success of undergraduate students, particularly underserved and low-income Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander students. This grant emphasizes Herzing's continuing dedication to improving educational opportunities and resources for underserved communities, with a specific emphasis on the Hmong and Somali populations in and around the Minneapolis area. "This grant, one of the University's largest to date, will enable us to provide essential support to our students and further our commitment to student success," said Renee Herzing, President of Herzing University, "We consider ourselves fortunate to have this opportunity to create a positive and lasting impact for our Minneapolis campus and students. This initiative will not only benefit the surrounding Hmong and Somali communities, but also further support other underrepresented student populations." The HU AANAPISI grant spans from October 1, 2023 , to September 30, 2028 , and sets out two primary goals: Educational Retention: Increase the retention and satisfaction of BSN (Bachelor of Science in Nursing) and BSDH (Bachelor of Science in Dental Hygiene) students through targeted interventions for underserved students. Increase the retention and satisfaction of BSN (Bachelor of Science in Nursing) and BSDH (Bachelor of Science in Dental Hygiene) students through targeted interventions for underserved students. Improved Student Outcomes: Elevate the academic performance and career readiness of students through increased utilization of academic and co-curricular supportive services and professional licensure preparation. Additionally, the grant will allow Herzing to further develop its offering of student resources and make a more significant impact on the education and post-graduation career trajectory of its students. "As part of our commitment to prioritizing student success, we will be introducing two new faculty roles including an Academic Learning Specialist and a Faculty Student Advocate. The first role is dedicated to supporting multi-lingual students in particular and all students directly with support and resources for academic success. The second is a trained individual who will act as an ongoing resource to help explain policies and work closely with students to provide support with any of the variety of responsibilities they face," said Dr. Daniel Marcelle , Dean of Students for Herzing-Minneapolis. The AANAPISI Grant has helped to catalyze the creation of additional inclusive and culturally diverse spaces on Herzing University's Minneapolis campus, fostering a sense of belonging for students from various backgrounds. These spaces provide opportunities for enhanced cultural exchange, support services, and collaboration. Dedicating cultural spaces on campus not only strengthen the AANAPISI community on campus and across the surrounding community but also enriches the overall student experience, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout the institution's 11 regional campuses. "We anticipate a positive transformation through this grant, fostering increased success, retention, and graduation rates among our BSN and BSDH students," said Dr. Marcelle . "It will also work to create a greater sense of belonging and satisfaction for underserved students, improve cultural competence among faculty and staff, make postsecondary education more affordable, and boost career success for Nursing and Dental Hygiene graduates." According to data from the Minnesota Compass, the state's foreign-born population is increasing at a faster rate than the national averagein Minnesota , it has tripled since 1990, but only doubled nationallyi. To achieve the overarching goals, the HU AANAPISI project will focus on activities such as increasing affordability, enhancing cultural sensitivity, and improving student support, which includes the establishment of a peer-mentoring program and additional Student Resources. "This grant aligns perfectly with the University's mission toward creating a supportive and inclusive environment for all students," added Dr. Danielle Laban , Associate Vice President of Student Affairs. "We are dedicated to implementing data-informed practices that identify and meet students' social, emotional, and academic needs, ensuring that Herzing University remains a place where all students can thrive." You can access further information by emailing the Herzing-Minneapolis Student Services Department at [email protected]. *Disclaimer: The HU AANAPISI grant is a $2,160,276 Grant, with $1,835,276 (85%) supported by federal funds and $325,000 (15%) supported by non-federal funds. Contact Brett Gerrish [email protected] (517) 899-7795 About Herzing University Herzing University is an accredited, private nonprofit institution with 11 campuses across eight states and an online division. Located in the heart of Milwaukee and founded in 1965, more than 45,000 alumni have graduated from Herzing's career-focused and flexible master's, bachelor's, and associate degree, and diploma programs. The new Herzing University School of Nursing also includes a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) program. Students can also major in a variety of other fields including healthcare, technology, business, and public safety. For 11 consecutive years, U.S. News & World Report has recognized Herzing University as a leading institution for some of the top online programs in the nation. Herzing University is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. More information about Herzing University is available at www.herzing.edu. i 5 things you should know about Immigration in Minnesota | MN Compass View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/herzing-minneapolis-secures-1-8-million-department-of-education-grant--unveiling-a-brighter-future-for-underserved-students-302004738.html SOURCE Herzing University Mobile Attacks on Bank Customers Jump from 47% to 61% as Fraudsters Shift from Bots to Weaponized Emulators; Check Fraud Reemerges as the Number 1 Fraud Type as North Americans Head into the Holiday Season NEW YORK , Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- BioCatch, the global leader in digital fraud and money laundering detection and response powered by behavioral biometric intelligence, today unveiled its 2023 Digital Banking Fraud Trends in North America report. The report offers a comprehensive perspective of the prevailing fraud landscape and trends in North America leading into Q1 2024, including how the rise of mobile banking has led to corresponding technical and human vulnerabilities for fraudsters to exploit. For its final report of the year, BioCatch finds that North American fraud trends are rising for both old and new attack vectors. Mobile banking rates increased to 73% in 2023, which in turn has led to a dramatic surge in fraud executed from mobile devices, rising from 47% in 2022 to 61% in 2023, partly due to fraudsters shifting from bots (on web devices) to mobile emulators to avoid traditional banking controls. Aligning with FinCEN's report of an 84% increase in check fraud in 2022, BioCatch provides an in-depth analysis of the re-emergence of check fraud, which is now the number one fraud type across North America . "As we close out 2023 and look to 2024, we see high volumes of technological tools to execute fraud, such as bots and emulators, which are rarely seen in other regions," said Thomas Peacock , Director of Global Fraud Intelligence at BioCatch. "Surprisingly, what was once old is new again, as the accelerating fraud type in 2023 has been check fraud a trend that would be unthinkable in Europe today. However, when we look closer, we see similar trends to the other geographies, including the dominance of fraud on the mobile channel and the presence of social engineering to obtain funds on real-time payments (Zelle). This reinforces the need for a comprehensive fraud stack that can adapt not only to the ever-changing fraud landscape (bots/emulators) but can address the nuances seen in individual entities or areas (check fraud)." For this report, which is part of a year-long series of global fraud trends, BioCatch compiled data from key financial institutions within the North American region, along with insights gathered by its worldwide consortium of fraud advisors, threat analysts, and prominent industry thought leaders. Key report findings: Mobile Fraud on the Rise: Mobile banking rates increased from 54% in 2022 to 73% in 2023, leading to a rise in mobile fraud attacks from 47% to 61%. Mobile banking rates increased from 54% in 2022 to 73% in 2023, leading to a rise in mobile attacks from 47% to 61%. Check/Deposit Fraud Takes the Lead: Fraud in deposit accounts is the #1 fraud type across North America (including fraudulent account openings and account takeovers), with one million cases seen across its customers in H1 2023. in deposit accounts is the #1 type across (including fraudulent account openings and account takeovers), with one million cases seen across its customers in H1 2023. Zelle Fraud Is Rising: Fraudulent transfers using Zelle increased by 4% in 2023, with over 30,000 cases seen in H1. Fraudulent transfers using Zelle increased by 4% in 2023, with over 30,000 cases seen in H1. Fraudsters Shift from Bots to Emulators: A BioCatch case study shows a decrease in bot attacks and a sharp rise in mobile emulators against five North American banks, with one bank reporting 1584 more emulator attacks in 2023 compared to 2022. The data indicates that fraudsters are quickly favoring emulators to evade traditional defensive controls, reinforcing the effectiveness of behavioral biometric intelligence. A BioCatch case study shows a decrease in bot attacks and a sharp rise in mobile emulators against five North American banks, with one bank reporting 1584 more emulator attacks in 2023 compared to 2022. The data indicates that fraudsters are quickly favoring emulators to evade traditional defensive controls, reinforcing the effectiveness of behavioral biometric intelligence. Attack Differences in the U.S. and Canada : In the U.S. , criminals favored bot attacks at account opening, check and deposit fraud , digital transfers, and mule accounts. Data from Canada shows a preference for voice scams impersonating government bodies, targeting mobile devices, investment and romance scams, phishing attacks, and mule accounts. With the FTC's projected fraud losses at $20 billion , fraud victims are increasingly looking to their banks for compensation and protection. It is critical for financial institutions to integrate advanced behavioral biometric intelligence solutions that not only detect but also prevent these ever-evolving threats. "As the speed of the digital transformation and customer adoption of convenient finance apps increase and sweep around the world, fraudsters are keeping pace and designing new ways to exploit these technologies and scam human targets," said Jonathan Daly , Chief Marketing Officer at BioCatch. "Our research shows Zelle fraud is on the rise, yet our customers report a decrease of more than 50% in Zelle fraud. Recent Zelle reimbursement policies are promising, but we do not know how effective they will be in slowing the rate of scams. Fortunately, behavioral biometric intelligence is uniquely positioned to meet these challenges, and we, along with our global network of fraud fighters, believe strongly in these tools to defend against the next wave of advanced attacks. In short, we believe behavior is the only effective means to stop today's fraud. Exclusive Report Webinar Hosted by BioCatch Join us on December 7 , when BioCatch hosts a panel of industry experts to dissect the findings from the report and share their perspectives on how these trends will impact fraud fighters in 2024. Register Now! Additional Links: About BioCatch BioCatch stands at the forefront of digital fraud detection, pioneering behavioral biometric intelligence grounded in advanced cognitive science and machine learning. BioCatch analyzes thousands of user interactions to support a digital banking environment where identity, trust, and ease coexist. Today, more than 28 of the world's leading 100 banks and 152 of the largest 500 rely on BioCatch Connect to combat fraud, facilitate digital transformation, and grow customer relationships. BioCatch's Client Innovation Board, an industry-led initiative featuring American Express, Barclays, Citi Ventures, HSBC, and National Australia Bank, collaborates to pioneer creative and innovative ways to leverage customer relationships for fraud prevention. With more than a decade of data analysis, 90 registered patents, and unmatched expertise, BioCatch continues to lead innovation to address future challenges. For more information, please visit www.biocatch.com. Media Contact: Jay Jones [email protected] 404.668.0218 View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mobile-emulators-eclipse-bots-in-2023-as-preferred-fraud-vector-in-north-america-302003777.html SOURCE BioCatch LAS VEGAS , Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- In the illustrious world of investments, few assets carry the weight of both importance and prestige quite like land. Unlike other forms of real estate, where value is often linked to existing structures and their conditions, land offers a blank canvasreplete with endless opportunities for financial growth and societal development. Landing Legacy: Mastering the Art of Statement Properties Centered Around God's Gifts of Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, and Oceans, authored by renowned land investment expert Eric Metzger and published by Beverly Hills Publishing, is a blueprint for discerning investors who seek opportunities beyond traditional investment streams and aspire to leave a lasting legacy. It is the first book to break down the complexities and nuances of land investment into practical lessons, making it an essential read for high-net-worth individuals committed to broadening their investment horizons while creating a lasting imprint. "It's not just about the 'how' but also the 'why' of land investment. Readers will learn how to leverage this form of investment to elevate their standing, not just on paper but in a broader social context. You're not merely purchasing assets; you're buying into a lasting form of influence that extends beyond you, potentially benefiting your family and community for generations to come," explained Metzger. Landing Legacy: Mastering the Art of Statement Properties Centered Around God's Gifts of Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, and Oceans builds on CEO & Founder Eric Metzger's 20+-year track record as head of real estate transactions for the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino where he led the largest single-phase real estate launch in U.S. history. During his career, he has directly represented developers, buyers, and family offices in more than $2 billion in global M&A transactions. In addition to The Hard Rock, he has been responsible for marketing and sales at some of the world's most recognized luxury real estate developments, including Sands Macau , Boot Ranch in Texas, and Talisker Club in Park City, Utah . For information, visit www.mrlopartners.com or email [email protected] Landing Legacy: Mastering the Art of Statement Properties Centered Around God's Gifts of Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, and Oceans By Eric Metzger Media Contact: Charlotte Luer +1-239-404-6785 [email protected] Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2292141/Landing_Legacy_Book.jpg View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-book-reveals-the-secrets-to-mastering-land-investment-302004904.html The Five States Studied Faced Multiple Challenges After the Switch WASHINGTON , Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- A new report tracks the experience of five states that shifted new employees away from defined benefit (DB) pensions to defined contribution (DC) or cash balance plans. Among states that switched to a DC plan, costs rose, negative cash flow grew, and employee turnover increased. Additionally, the retirement security of plan participants in DC plans was negatively impacted because of a high degree of "leakage" of retirement assets from the DC accounts that replaced pension plans. These findings are detailed in a new report from the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS), No Quick Fix: Closing a Public Pension Plan Leads to Unexpected Challenges. This report examines the experience in five states: Alaska , Kentucky , Michigan , Oklahoma , and West Virginia . The report is authored by Dan Doonan , NIRS executive director, Tyler Bond , NIRS research director, and Celia Ringland , NIRS research associate. Read the report. Register for a webinar on Wednesday, December 6, 2023 , at 2:00 PM ET with a review of the report findings. "These five states are a cautionary tale for policymakers considering changes to employee retirement plans in their states," said Dan Doonan , NIRS executive director and report co-author. "The analysis shows clear patterns across the states studied: retention of workers is poor and closing a pension plan to new employees fails to address any funding shortfalls." Doonan added, "There often are claims that closing an existing pension to new hires will improve matters in a variety of ways, but it's hard to find proof among the public pension plans that have closed in the past 27 years. Instead, switching away from a pension starves the plan of employee contributions while the liabilities remain, creates higher negative cash flow, and leaves taxpayers supporting the costs of two plans for many decades. Moreover, moving away from pensions undermines employees' retirement security and causes workforce challenges for states that already are struggling to attract and keep workers who deliver essential public services. In contrast, funding discipline produces results." The report's key findings are as follows: Among the states studied, employer costs increased significantly after closing a pension plan. In some states, poor funding practices preceded the plan closure, with improved funding discipline only after closing the plan. Even 26 years after one of these plans was closed, employer costs remain high. In contrast, the ongoing contributions of new active members combined with sound funding practices show strong results. In the closed plans, cash flows have become more negative over time as demographics shift and the plan begins to spend down its assets. The Michigan State Employees' Retirement System plan is furthest along in this regard, as the plan pays a growing share of its assets as benefit payments. Despite higher costs and larger contributions, the plan's high negative cash flow throughout the Great Recession forced more plan assets to be sold at a discount while markets took time to rebound. Despite claims that younger workers will be attracted to savings-based plans, including cash balance and DC plans, the available retention data shows poor retention in the new plans or tiers. Workforce management has become a challenge in many of these states with closed plans. Many workers are cashing out their DC plan account balances when leaving a public sector job, and the evidence indicates those dollars are unlikely to be used for producing retirement income. The available data suggests that DC plans are failing to help many workers accumulate sufficient retirement savings. The West Virginia Teachers Retirement System, which was closed and then reopened, shows that reopening a closed pension plan is a viable option that can reverse many of the harmful trends documented in this report if reopening is combined with contribution discipline. In West Virginia , pension plan costs have stabilized and the funded status continues to climb. The National Institute on Retirement Security is a non-profit, non-partisan organization established to contribute to informed policymaking by fostering a deep understanding of the value of retirement security to employees, employers, and the economy as a whole. Located in Washington, D.C. , NIRS membership includes financial services firms, employee benefit plans, trade associations, and other retirement service providers. More information is available at www.nirsonline.org. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-national-institute-on-retirement-security-report-examines-impacts-of-switching-away-from-defined-benefit-pension-plans-302004745.html SOURCE National Institute on Retirement Security The new Senior Planet center will serve as a community hub for the 50-plus population, with an emphasis on technology training in an enriching social setting. MIAMI , Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- National nonprofit, Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) from AARP opens a new Senior Planet center for older adults ages 50-plus in the vibrant, cultural neighborhood of Wynwood, Miami . As the area's first technology-themed community center for older adults, visitors can get help with technology and learn new skills in a spacious, modern center packed with 72 screens, featuring state-of-the-art computer equipment and Wi-Fi all free of charge. Starting in January, multilingual classes will be offered weekly in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole focusing on technology, health, finance, community, and the arts. Some of the most popular classes include All Things Zoom, Computer Essentials, Cloud Storage, and Smartphones at a Glance. The new center also offers one-on-one technology training and tech discussion groups. Registration for classes is now open. "We have been working for years to bring Senior Planet to Miami and are thrilled to be launching a center in Wynwood, where technology, innovation, and diversity are celebrated," said OATS Executive Director Tom Kamber . "The center will serve older adults from across the region, free-of-charge, regardless of income or demographic, and we will also be working closely with partner organizations to support local programming across the county and beyond." "As the world continues to experience rapid advancements in technology, it's vital to ensure accessible spaces for older Americans to stay informed and connected," noted AARP's Kristin Dillon , Senior Vice President for State and Community Engagement. "AARP research reveals that 75% of those age 50 and above rely on technology for staying connected. In Wynwood, with over 35% of the population falling into this age group, the Senior Planet center promises to be a vibrant social and educational hub." Beyond weekly classes, the Senior Planet center in Miami strives to provide an enjoyable community environment with a space designed around multiple communal areas, including a coffee bar, to encourage socializing and collaborative learning. At 4,300 square feet, the space was previously an art gallery. The center's design by Wid Chapman Architects reflects a departure from traditional senior centers, aligning more with the concept of a co-working space, that allows for group lectures, technology demonstrations, fitness classes, and more. On the exterior of the building, OATS collaborated with local muralist Rage Johnson to pay homage to the area's connection to the arts. "In conceptualizing Senior Planet, we wanted to create spaces that were inclusive, inviting, engaging, and dynamic. Each area can be utilized for multiple purposes, fostering both community and individuality. As the first senior center our firm designed in Miami , we aimed to craft a well-designed building that reflects the culture, emotions, and architecture of Miami . Through curved shapes, natural light, and colorful interiors, the Senior Planet in Wynwood makes people feel at ease and inspired," said Wid Chapman Architects Founder Wid Chapman. Registration is now open for classes starting in January. Open Monday - Friday from 9:00am - 5:00pm , the center is located at 317 Northwest 28th Street , Miami, FL , 33127 and easily accessible through various routes of public transportation, including the Brightline, to welcome older visitors from all over South Florida . Senior Planet is the flagship program of OATS, a charitable affiliate of AARP. Senior Planet is committed to providing a wide range of free, community-based classes to demystify traditionally inaccessible topics for older adults. The program, currently serving five additional locations across the country, is built on the principles of community learning and social connection for the older adult population. About OATS from AARP Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) from AARP helps older adults learn to use and leverage technology to transform their lives and their communities. Through its flagship program, Senior Planet, OATS works closely with older adults to create extraordinary experiences in-person and online. The mission of OATS is "to harness the power of technology to change the way we age." OATS is a charitable affiliate of AARP. To learn more, visit www.oats.org or follow @OlderAdultsTech on social media. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/oats-from-aarp-opens-senior-planet-miami-the-first-technology-themed-community-center-for-older-adults-in-miami-302005031.html SOURCE Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) DUBAI, UAE , Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Sultanate of Oman's Ministry of Energy and Minerals and Hydrogen Oman (Hydrom) have signed a Joint Study Agreement (JSA) with Port of Amsterdam , Zenith Energy Terminals and GasLog, to collaborate on the development of a liquid hydrogen route to market for green hydrogen produced in the Sultanate of Oman . The Agreement underscores the clear ambitions of the partners to make the world's first commercial scale liquid hydrogen corridor a reality. The Agreement was signed at the Omani Pavilion during COP28 in Dubai , with His Excellency the Minister Eng. Salim bin Nasser Al Aufi and the Climate Envoy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands , Prince Jaime de Bourbon de Parme , as official witnesses of the ceremony. The Agreement entails conducting a detailed assessment of the requirements to develop an open-access hydrogen liquefaction, storage and export facility in the Sultanate of Oman , along with the provision of specialised vessels for the transportation of the liquid hydrogen, currently under development by GasLog. The primary aim of the Agreement is to establish a green hydrogen corridor between the Sultanate of Oman and the Netherlands , with the terminal of Zenith Energy as the destination for the import, regasification and further distribution of Oman -produced hydrogen to both local offtakers within the port of Amsterdam , as well as large industries in the European hinterland. The open-access liquefaction facility will also enable the government of the Sultanate of Oman to explore cost effective hydrogen export corridors to other global markets. Guided by Oman's Vision 2040, which is anchored on diversifying its economy away from oil and gas, as well as the country's long-term goal to reach Net-Zero by 2050, the government of the Sultanate of Oman has pursued a hydrogen strategy that seeks to capitalise on the country's abundant (wind and sun) natural resources and existing port and industrial infrastructures. Moreover, its geographical location puts Oman in a prime position to supply the European and the Asian markets. Hydrom is orchestrating the overall development of the Omani hydrogen sector and is responsible for master-planning, managing the allocation of government lands to hydrogen developers and overseeing the execution of projects. The open-access facility for liquefaction would unlock great potential for these projects, offering liquid hydrogen as a viable vector that can be utilised by individual projects for export. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2291317/Hydrom.jpg View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/oman-announces-plans-for-common-infrastructure-for-green-hydrogen-liquefaction-and-export-302003951.html SOURCE The Sultanate of Omans Ministry of Energy and Minerals; Hydrogen Oman (Hydrom) CHENGDU, China , Dec. 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Sichuan, honored "Land of Abundance," is a dream land for people and a paradise for all things. As one of the world's 36 biodiversity hotspots, the vitality of Sichuan is not only embodied in its cities but also in a poetic coexistence between man and nature. This is home to over 300 species of national key protected wild animals, 1.944 billion cubic meters of forest stock, 55 wetland parks, and nearly 1,400 rivers... On October 12, 2021 , at the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, China officially designated its first group of national parks. This includes the Three-River-Source National Park , the Giant Panda National Park , the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park , the National Park of Hainan Tropical Rainforest, and the Wuyishan National Park . Up to now,the country has outlined plans for three national parks in Sichuan Province . The first to be established was the Giant Panda National Park . The Ruoergai National Park was approved to be established. Additionally, the Gongga Mountain National Park has been included in the spatial layout scheme of national parks. Sichuan International Communication Center and Wuliangye Group are set to launch bilingual documentaries titled "Exploring National Parks: Our Fairylands". Tracing the footsteps of renowned bloggers, overseas climbers, travel writers, and photographers, we will delve deep into the Ruoergai National Park , the Gongga Mountain National Park , and the Giant Panda National Park . Through their perspectives, China's rich and magnificent landscapes, along with its diverse flora and fauna resources, are able to be appreciated, recorded, and narrated, thus showcasing the story of harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. Located on the northeastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the The first episode,"WildYak: The Land of Spirits",from theseries "Exploring National Parks: Our Fairylands"introduces the ongoing development of Ruoergai Wetland National Nature Reserve is situated in Ruoergai County, Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province . Joined by @WildYak, a well-known Tibetan blogger,we will witness diverse stories and reflections throughout the establishment of Ruoergai National Park . We will also hear his narratives on the infinite potential of this grassland, and search for their various expectations and answers to the national park. Click here to watch the Video: https://youtu.be/KeBdfnX31Rw Media Contact Jiawei Zhang +86-15184492367 605443401@qq.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/our-fairylands--its-a-land-of-spirits-302004082.html SOURCE Sichuan International Communication Center CHICAGO , Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Ryerson Holding Corporation (NYSE: RYI), a leading value-added processor and distributor of industrial metals, announced today its acquisition of Hudson Tool Steel Corporation ("Hudson"), a supplier of tool steels and high-speed, carbon, and alloy steels. Hudson is headquartered in Cerritos, California , with additional locations in Loves Park, Illinois and Dover, New Hampshire . "Hudson's offering of high-quality standard and specialty-grade tool steel builds upon Ryerson's expanding tool steel business," said Mike Burbach , Ryerson's Chief Operating Officer. "Hudson's expertise, together with existing tool steel capabilities within the Ryerson Family of Companies, will enable us to better serve customers across our network." Rick Resner , Hudson's President, stated, "Since 2002, Hudson Tool Steel has provided customers from coast to coast with tool steel, high speed steel, carbon, and alloy. Always true to our motto, 'We make tool steel easy,' we're excited to continue our strategic growth within the North American tool steel market as part of the Ryerson Family of Companies." About Ryerson Ryerson is a leading value-added processor and distributor of industrial metals, with operations in the United States , Canada , Mexico , and China . Founded in 1842, Ryerson has around 4,300 employees in approximately 100 locations. Visit Ryerson at www.ryerson.com. Safe Harbor Provision Certain statements made in this release and other written or oral statements made by or on behalf of the Company constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including statements regarding our future performance, as well as management's expectations, beliefs, intentions, plans, estimates, objectives, or projections relating to the future. Such statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "objectives," "goals," "preliminary," "range," "believes," "expects," "may," "estimates," "will," "should," "plans," or "anticipates" or the negative thereof or other variations thereon or comparable terminology, or by discussions of strategy. The Company cautions that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and may involve significant risks and uncertainties, and that actual results may vary materially from those in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. Among the factors that significantly impact our business are: the cyclicality of our business; the highly competitive, volatile, and fragmented metals industry in which we operate; the impact of geopolitical events, including Russia's invasion of Ukraine and global trade sanctions; fluctuating metal prices; our indebtedness and the covenants in instruments governing such indebtedness; the integration of acquired operations; regulatory and other operational risks associated with our operations located inside and outside of the United States ; the ownership of a significant portion of our equity securities by a single investor group; work stoppages; obligations under certain employee retirement benefit plans; currency fluctuations; and consolidation in the metals industry. Forward-looking statements should, therefore, be considered in light of various factors, including those set forth above and those set forth under "Risk Factors" in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022 , our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2023 and in our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Moreover, we caution against placing undue reliance on these statements, which speak only as of the date they were made. The Company does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances, new information or otherwise. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ryerson-acquires-hudson-tool-steel-corporation-302005130.html SOURCE Ryerson Holding Corporation News / National by Simbarashe Sithole Pelandaba based Prison officer who was abusing drugs and went awol for close to a month has been arrested. Aurthur Malundi (25) was dragged to Plumtree magistrates courts on Friday where he appeared before magistrate Joshua Nembaware.Nembaware remanded him in custody to tomorrow.According to a medical report presented in court the accused started abusing drugs at the age of 18 and that affected his performance at work.He developed mental health problems due to high use of crystal meth.The state alleged on the accused absented himself from duty without official leave from March 16 to April 5 and was deemed a deserter on April 6.He handed himself to Zimbabwe Prison Commission Services (ZPCS) on June 12 at his station and was escorted to the police where he was arrested. We nailed the 2023 food trends, now let us give you a glimpse of what 2024 has for us NEW YORK , Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Tastewise , the leading end-to-end GenAI platform for modern food and beverage brands, has just launched its highly anticipated 2024 Trend Report. Leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence, Tastewise provides a sneak peek into what billions of consumers will have on their plates for the upcoming year, offering invaluable insights for businesses seeking to stay ahead in the dynamic world of food and beverage. One of the most significant trends we found was the profound effect AI is set to have on food and beverage marketing in 2024. AI's dominance in 2024's marketing landscape takes center stage, reshaping marketing strategies across the industry. "The emergence of generative AI offers a new reality to meet the urgent demands of our market. More than 30% of the workforce already uses AI in the workplace; this technological advancement is already revolutionizing how we operate and create within the food and beverage industry, and continues to offer massive potential." Alon Chen , Tastewise's CEO 2024 Food Trends: What's Cookin' hottest predictions from the 2024 report Consumers seek it allhealth, indulgence, and savings. A surprising disruptor? heart, kidney, liver, and tongue. Bedtime snacks are here: consumers seek new ways to satisfy late-night cravings The " Taylor Swift " effect: Digital and pop culture redefine food communities " effect: Digital and pop culture redefine food communities Guajillo Pepper: the hottest of the hottest trends for 2024 Consumer sophistication continues, and tabus are out Hormone health and menopause are fueling social discussions cultural shift in weight management: medications, like Ozempic, are being incorporated into consumers' weight loss journeys And more To comprehensively explore these predictions shaping the food and beverage industry, we invite industry professionals, culinary enthusiasts, AI pioneers, and media representatives to delve into the full report . Tastewise's 2023 Predictions: A Look Back Before We Leap Forward As we delve into the future with the 2024 Trend Report, it's worth acknowledging Tastewise's accurate predictions from 2023. We accurately predicted several significant trends that hit the food and beverage industry in 2023, including a huge increase in interest for fusion flavors and desserts interest as well as the growing popularity of Latin American beverages, authentic non-alcoholic options like Aguas frescas, and redefined energy drinks. These were only a few of our correct predictions, but you can find our full breakdown in our 2024 report. For 2024 our information is even more accurate, due to our continuously growing and improved AI engine. About Tastewise Tastewise is the end-to-end GenAI platform for modern food & beverage brands. Driven by food-specific data & deep expertise with Gen-AI, Tastewise's MarTech solutions bring 6 years of real-time food data collection and bespoke AI models to global food brands like PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Nestle, Mars, Givaudan, and many more. Tastewise is the only platform providing all-in-one decision-making and workflow solutions for food and beverage, enabling teams to move quickly and scale from inception to campaign execution. With the freshest data in a constantly changing industry, Tastewise's AI platform transforms food marketing from archaic to fast, inexpensive, and agile. The result? A resilient food and beverage industry deeply aligned with consumers. Discover the future of food with Tastewise, here For media inquiries, contact: Lee Brymer Marketing Communications Manager Tastewise Inc. [email protected] +1 (312) 493-2338 Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2289789/Tastewise.jpg View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/using-advanced-genai-insights-tastewises-food-trends-predictions-are-out-for-2024-302004419.html SOURCE Tastewise (Reuters) - Armenia's defence ministry said Azerbaijani forces shot dead an Armenian serviceman near the two countries' border on Monday, but Baku said the report was "a complete lie". The incident, if true, would mark the first such border fatality since Azerbaijan retook the region of Nagorno-Karabakh in September in a lightning military offensive that prompted the exodus of almost all the territory's 120,000 ethnic Armenians. Armenia's defence ministry said in a statement that Azerbaijani forces had opened fire on Monday afternoon on an Armenian position in Bardzruni, near its border with the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan. An investigation is under way into the incident, it said, without providing further details. Asked about the report, a spokesman for Azerbaijan's defence ministry told Reuters the Armenian report "does not reflect the truth, it is a complete lie". "We categorically deny provocative information from the other side," he said. Border skirmishes, often fatal, are not uncommon between the two South Caucasus neighbours. Azerbaijan's swift recapture of Nagorno-Karabakh - which is recognised as part of Azerbaijan by the international community - has spurred concerns in some Western capitals that Baku might now try to take territory in southern Armenia with the aim of opening a corridor to Nakhchivan, the exclave which borders Turkey, Iran and Armenia. Baku strongly denies any such intention. Azerbaijan and Armenia have stated their wish to clinch a peace deal but have yet to agree on the demarcation of their shared border, which remains closed and highly militarised. (Writing by Gareth Jones; Editing by Mark Trevelyan) A sign is seen at the arrivals passport control area of Terminal 5, at Heathrow Airport, London, Britain, March 23, 2023. REUTERS/Toby Melville/files By Alistair Smout and Muvija M LONDON (Reuters) - Britain announced plans to slash the number of migrants arriving by legal routes on Monday, raising the minimum salary they must earn in a skilled job by a third, amid pressure on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to tackle record net migration figures. High levels of legal migration have dominated Britain's political landscape for more than a decade and were a key factor in the 2016 vote to leave the European Union. Sunak has promised to gain more control after lawmakers in his Conservative Party criticised his record ahead of an election expected next year, with the opposition Labour Party far ahead in opinion polls. But businesses and trade unions both attacked the measures as counterproductive and challenging for the private sector and state-run health service, both dogged by labour shortages. Figures last month showed annual net migration to the United Kingdom hit a record of 745,000 in 2022 and has stayed at high levels since, with many migrants now coming from places like India, Nigeria and China instead of the EU. Home Secretary (interior minister) James Cleverly said the new measures could reduce that number by 300,000. "Immigration is too high. Today were taking radical action to bring it down," said Sunak, who is also trying to deport migrants who arrive illegally to Rwanda. Cleverly said the government would raise the minimum salary threshold for foreign skilled workers to 38,700 pounds ($48,900), from its current level of 26,200 pounds, though health and social workers would be exempt. Other measures included stopping foreign health workers bringing in family members on their visas, increasing a surcharge migrants have to pay to use the health service by 66%, and raising the minimum income for family visas. TIGHT LABOUR MARKET The measures could spark new disputes with business owners who have struggled to hire workers in recent years given Britain's persistently tight labour market and the end of free movement from the EU since Britain's 2020 exit from the bloc. In October, the government's independent migration adviser recommended abolishing the so-called shortage occupations list, one of the main routes for businesses to hire migrant workers in sectors where there are severe staff shortages. Cleverly said the government would end the current system that lets employers pay migrants only 80% of the going rate to do jobs where there is a worker shortage, and that the list of shortage occupations would be reviewed. "We will stop immigration undercutting the salary of British workers," Cleverly told lawmakers. "We will create a new immigration salary list with a reduced number of occupations." However, some studies have shown foreign workers have little or no impact on overall wage or employment levels, and Britain's acute shortage of candidates to fill vacancies remains a problem for many company bosses. "These changes will further shrink the talent pool that the entire economy will be recruiting from, and only worsen the shortages hospitality businesses are facing," said Kate Nicholls, chief executive of trade body UKHospitality. "We urgently need to see an immigration system that is fit-for-purpose and reflects both the needs of business and the labour market. The system at the moment does none of that." The Bank of England said last month that businesses were finding it a bit easier to hire but persistent skills shortages remained in some sectors. Trade unions also voiced concerns at Cleverly's plan. Christina McAnea, the general secretary of UNISON, the main union in the health sector, saying it spelled "total disaster" for the health service. "Migrants will now head to more welcoming countries, rather than be forced to live without their families," she said. ($1 = 0.7921 pounds) (Additional reporting by William Schomberg; writing by Alistair Smout; editing by Andrew MacAskill, Sarah Young, Kate Holton and Mark Heinrich) FILE PHOTO: A view of a wheel of the BYD Seal at the Japan Mobility Show 2023 at Tokyo Big Sight in Tokyo, Japan October 25, 2023. REUTERS/Issei Kato/File Photo SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China's electric vehicle giant BYD said on Sunday it would make permanent its system offering tipsters who report smear campaigns against the company up to 5 million yuan ($700,918). The company in June 2022 increased the maximum amount providers of such information could receive from 1 million yuan to 5 million yuan, saying that policy was valid for a year. The minimum amount is 50,000 yuan. "The evidence we collect includes but is not limited to chat records, emails, contracts, fund transfers and other information," the company said in a Weibo post. "Such information should be legally effective and BYD will give the provider a generous reward once it verifies it to be true." BYD did not say why it extended the reward programme, which it introduced in late 2021, saying it wanted to combat online smear campaigns and to protect the company's brand image. It did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on Monday. In September, the company hit back against online discussions that said BYD had leaked commercial secrets, saying those posts were pure rumours. It added that the police had apprehended the person responsible for spreading the rumour and that the company planned to take legal action. Warren Buffett-backed BYD is China's largest seller of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, and Tesla's closest rival in the global electric vehicle sales race. The company, which has been expanding overseas along with several other Chinese EV makers, broke records with new energy vehicle (NEV) sales rising 53% year-on-year to 824,001 in the third quarter, according to company data. ($1 = 7.1335 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Brenda Goh. Editing by Gerry Doyle) FILE PHOTO: The logo of Deutsche Bank is seen in Brussels, Belgium December 6, 2022. REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo BERLIN (Reuters) -Deutsche Bank's supervisory board has tasked its auditor EY with reviewing the Postbank IT integration, which has caused numerous customer complaints due to disruptions, Handelsblatt reported on Monday. The result could result in cuts to bonuses, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. A Deutsche Bank spokesperson declined to comment on the story. (Reporting by Kirsti Knolle; Editing by Linda Pasquini and Jan Harvey) German Chancellor Olaf Scholz looks on at a joint press conference with Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (not pictured) during the German-Brazilian government consultations at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, December 4, 2023. REUTERS/Lies BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Finance Minister Christian Lindner and Economy Minister Robert Habeck held talks over the weekend to try to agree a budget for 2024 after a constitutional court ruling threw the government's finances into disarray. Habeck also cancelled his trip to global climate talks in Dubai as the three-way coalition works through key decisions, including whether to suspend self-imposed debt limits again next year and how to balance pro-industry and welfare spending. Here are five leading scenarios of what happens next: A SOLUTION BY WEDNESDAY The talks between Scholz, Habeck and Lindner will continue on Monday evening after the end of German-Brazil government consultations. Scholz has also cancelled a visit to an Airbus event in Bavaria scheduled for Tuesday to free up more time. If the agreement is reached on Tuesday, then it can be presented to cabinet on Wednesday. Then, according to the government's assessment, the deadlines for parliamentary procedure could be met and a first reading of the 2024 budget could take place in the Bundestag in the week starting Dec. 11. Or, in order to give parliament and the opposition more time, the budget could be passed in the lower house in the week before Christmas and then approved by the upper house in a special session. Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens party would prefer this scenario. But the Free Democrats party (FDP), to which Lindner belongs, says it does not want to be pushed into making quick decisions. Some in the SPD have argued for raising taxes to cover budget shortfalls caused by the court ruling last month, while the FDP wants to find budget savings. NO FORMAL DECISION THIS WEEK The talks drag on and Scholz and his ministers only reach a deal by the week starting Dec. 11. A cabinet meeting then takes place before Christmas but the agreement will not be presented to parliament until next year. In this scenario, federal states and municipalities may complain they would have no certainty of what funding to expect. POLITICAL DECISION BEFORE CHRISTMAS A political agreement is delayed until just before Christmas as Scholz and his ministers search for a solution on issues such as suspending the debt brake, budget savings and medium-term financial planning up to 2028. This would leave no time before Christmas for cabinet decisions and risk dragging squabbles within the coalition into the new year. NO AGREEMENT THIS YEAR This scenario is seen as dangerous in all three coalition parties, as public squabbles over the budget will drag on into the Christmas break and likely push down the parties' already sagging polling numbers. It would also likely draw louder complaints from local authorities, businesses and federal states. NO AGREEMENT AT ALL If the SPD, Greens and FDP do not agree on a budget in January, the coalition could collapse. "Because everyone knows this, this case will not happen - no matter how complicated the discussions are at the moment," said a government source, speaking on condition of anonymity. (Reporting by Andreas Rinke; writing by Matthias Williams; editing by Barbara Lewis) German Chancellor Olaf Scholz speaks during a press conference, amid the German-Brazilian government consultations at the Chancellery in Berlin, Germany, December 4, 2023. REUTERS/Annegret Hilse BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Monday he expected his coalition government to swiftly come to an agreement on the 2024 budget after a constitutional court ruling derailed its financial plans. Scholz, Finance Minister Christian Lindner and Economy Minister Robert Habeck held crisis talks on the budget over the weekend which are expected to continue on Monday evening after a hiatus for long-planned German-Brazilian government consultations. Habeck cancelled his trip to global climate talks in Dubai so the three-way coalition could work through key decisions, including whether to suspend self-imposed debt limits again next year and how to balance pro-industry and welfare spending. "We are currently working on... very very swiftly solving this issue, so there is very quickly clarity," Scholz said at a joint news conference with Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The chancellor said everyone involved in the budget talks was acting in a "very constructive" way so he remained confident. Scholz has also canceled a visit to an Airbus event in Bavaria scheduled for Tuesday to free up more time. If the agreement is reached on Tuesday, it could be presented to cabinet on Wednesday. Then, according to the government's assessment, the deadlines for parliamentary procedure could be met and a first reading of the 2024 budget could take place in the Bundestag in the week starting Dec. 11. (Reporting by Andreas Rinke and Sarah Marsh; editing by Christina Fincher) FILE PHOTO: Iranian human rights activist and the vice president of the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC) Narges Mohammadi poses in this undated handout picture. Mohammadi family archive photos/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Jailed Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi will continue her fight for human rights even if it leads to her death, she said in a letter smuggled out from prison and published on Monday by Swedish public broadcaster SVT. Mohammadi is serving multiple sentences in Tehran's notorious Evin prison on charges including spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic. "Imprisonment, psychological torture, constant solitary confinement, sentence after sentence; that hasn't and is not going to stop me," she wrote, according to SVT. "I am going to stand up for freedom and equality even if it costs me my life." SVT said the letter was written in reply to questions that had been smuggled into the prison via intermediaries, but did not reveal details of how the exchange had taken place. Mohammadi began a hunger strike in November to protest against what she said was the jail's failure to give her access to medical care. In the brief comments published by SVT, which gave no information about her health, Mohammadi said she missed her children, Kiana and Ali, the most. "Particularly these days, when all the new prisoners talk about the interviews the two have done....It is more than eight years since I saw them," she wrote. Kiana told SVT that the family had not had any direct contact with Mohammadi for a year and nine months. "Before that we would occasionally speak on the telephone, but that has stopped," the 17 year-old said. This year's Nobel festivities will take place on Dec. 10 in Oslo and Stockholm. Mohammadi will be represented by her children, Ali and Kiana Rahman, according the Nobel Foundation. The two will receive Mohammadi's diploma and gold medal at Oslo's City Hall and give the Nobel Prize lecture on behalf of their mother. (Reporting by Simon Johnson, editing by Terje Solsvik and Chizu Nomiyama) Republican presidential candidate and Governor of North Dakota Doug Burgum speaks during the party's Florida Freedom Summit in Kissimmee, Florida, U.S., November 4, 2023. REUTERS/Octavio Jones By James Oliphant Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota who struggled to find his footing in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, ended his campaign on Monday. Burgum, 67, was a successful software executive and investor before his political career and largely self financed his candidacy. On the stump, he portrayed himself as a traditional, business-minded conservative but was often lost amid the clatter surrounding former President Donald Trump. In a statement, Burgum announced he was suspending his campaign but remained "committed to improving the lives of every American by moving America 180 degrees in the opposite direction" of President Joe Biden on the economy, energy and national security. While not a frequent critic of Trumps, Burgum did reject Trumps false claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent, saying Biden was the rightful victor. Even so, Burgum has been reluctant to publicly condemn Trump's attempts to overturn the election results. Burgum largely stayed in the background in the first two Republican debates and never enjoyed the kind of moment that would help him break out of the bottom tier of candidates. In Reuters/Ipsos polling, he lagged far behind more viable contenders such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, not to mention Trump, the frontrunner for the nomination. In order to qualify for the first two debates, Burgums campaign handed out gift cards worth $20 to the first 50,000 donors who pledged at least $1. (Reporting by James Oliphant, editing by Ross Colvin, Grant McCool) BANGKOK (Reuters) - A second group of Thai hostages who were released by Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip were brought home on Monday, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Families of the six Thai farmer workers rushed to hug their loved ones at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport. "Im glad to be back," said Owat Suriyasri, 40, thanking the governments of Thailand and Israel. One of the returnees sustained injuries in the abdomen while being held by Hamas, according to Thailand's Labour Ministry. Before the war, about 30,000 Thai labourers, mostly from the country's rural northeast, worked in Israel's agriculture sector, making them one of the largest migrant worker groups in the country. Many went to Israel seeking higher pay to send money back home to their families where some are sole providers. So far, 9,000 Thais have been repatriated. Hamas gunmen killed 39 Thais and abducted 32 Thai labourers during the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, according to the Thai government. Over 1,200 people were killed in the attack and more than 240 taken hostage. The first group of 17 Thai hostages returned last week, with nine remaining in captivity. (Reporting by Artorn Pookasook, Napat Wesshasartar and Chayut Setboonsarng, Editing by Bernadette Baum) News / National by Tendai Ruben Mbofana Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to WhatsApp or Call: +263715667700 | +263782283975, or email: mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com, or visit website: http://mbofanatendairuben.news.blog/ There could have never been a more heartbreaking and disturbing sight.I had gone to the local clinic in my small town of Redcliff for a scheduled medical review.This is an ordinary routine I have followed for years now.However, this time around, there was nothing 'ordinary' about this trip to the clinic, which normally does not take more than an hour.As we sat on the benches, in a rather short queue to see the resident medical practitioner - who, in reality, is a state registered nurse - my eyes fell upon a troubling sight.At first, I could not immediately work out what I was seeing - but my brain did not take too long to figure out what was in front of me.Here was a little girl - my estimate placing her age at not older than 15 years old - sitting there with a baby in her arms.Was this just her little sister whom she had brought to the clinic?Or, was it possible that she was the baby's minder, sent by the parents to the clinic for medical attention?Nonetheless, I did not have to wait long for the answer to these vexing questions.A baby has to be fed, eventually - and the mystery was immediately solved.This was her baby!In my mind, this phrase played out: this is a baby who gave birth to a baby!To make matters worse, it was quite obvious from her demeanor and behavior that she was confused and clueless on how to care for her baby.How could she know, as she was only a child - who herself needed to be taken care of by her own parents!Fortunately, the nurses and other older women at the clinic were at hand to offer her some sound advice on such basics as how to hold and breastfeed her baby.Unfortunately, though, she is far from being the only one.In Zimbabwe, being a mother at that age is no longer a unique occurrence.As a matter of fact, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF), 32 percent of girls in Zimbabwe are married off before the age of 18 years.12 percent of these are married off before they reach 15 years old.Now those are shocking statistics!Yet, that is not even the worst of it!Data released by the Zimbabwe Statistical Agency (ZimStats) says that 69,000 girls between the ages of 10 and 19 years gave birth in 2022 alone.This was largely attributed to the high prevalence of child marriages.Another factor is drug abuse - whereby adolescent boys and girls engage in unsafe sexual activities whilst under the influence of illicit substances.Actually, this year (2023) showed that 60 percent of school dropouts in the country were a result of drug and substance abuse.This is according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNCF), in collaboration with the government, Muthengo Development Studies, Zimbabwe Liberties and Drug Network, and Youth Advocates Zimbabwe.What can be more chilling than such figures?A few days ago, the Zimbabwe government moved to harmonize sexual consent laws by approving Principles on the Amendment of the Criminal Law (Codification Reform) Act that will criminalize sex with anyone below 18 years of age.Similarly, the Constitution of Zimbabwe (section 78) states that every person who has attained the age of eighteen years has the right to found a family and no person may be compelled to enter into marriage against their will.The Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act outlaws the pledging for the marriage of female persons, especially those under the age of 18 years.As much as all these legal provisions are commendable efforts in curtailing the prevalence of child marriages and adolescent pregnancies, much more still needs to be done in reaching out to communities on the ground.There is a need for a concerned approach in ending harmful cultural practices that have been fingered in child marriages - such as the pledging of children in marriage or as restitution to an aggrieved family.The same goes for some religious sects that not only permit but actually propagate marriages with underage girls, mostly to more mature and already married church elders.In addition, the fight against drug and substance abuse needs to be seen as genuine.There is a common belief that government measures are half-hearted due to the suspected involvement of highly-connected individuals and cartels in the illicit drug trade.In so doing, falling pregnant no longer becomes the only concern, but also the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs).Finally, this scourge can not be seriously tackled without fixing the economy.It is common knowledge that most of these underage ages are either being forced into marriages or enticed into early sexual relationships on account of poverty.Some families are marrying off their young daughters in exchange for financial benefits from the 'husbands', who are usually more economically well-off.Whilst underage girls are venturing into premature sexual activities in the hope of receiving, in return, financial support from their so-called 'blessers'.What I found unbelievable, though, is the absence of readily available statistics on adolescent maternal mortality.I really wonder why it would be nearly impossible to find how many girls under the age of 18 years died while giving birth or as a result of pregnancy-related complications.Nevertheless, most of us heard of the most tragic death of 14-year-old Anna Machaya - who lost her life as she gave birth at a Johanne Masowe Apostolic sect shrine in Marange in 2021.This was followed by another needless loss of life by 15-year-old Nekutenda Hwaramba in October 2022, under similar circumstances.The scientific fact is that girls of that age are still physically immature to carry through a pregnancy.It is now up to all of us to ensure that we protect our children from this scourge of adolescent pregnancies.Parents have a duty in protecting their children - as opposed to perceiving them as tickets out of poverty.In fact, we need to take a more visible and proactive role in teaching our children issues related to sexual and reproductive health.We can no longer simply look on - or, in the case of some men, actually regard these as potential sexual partners.There are still just children, and it is quite cruel, leaving them to give birth to other children. FILE PHOTO: The word "taxes" is seen engraved at the headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 10, 2021. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo By Luc Cohen NEW YORK (Reuters) -Swiss private bank Banque Pictet has admitted to helping U.S. taxpayers hide more than $5.6 billion from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department, federal prosecutors said on Monday. According to prosecutors, U.S. taxpayers with Pictet accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere evaded about $50.6 million in taxes between 2008 and 2014. As part of the agreement, Banque Pictet agreed to pay $122.9 million to the U.S. Treasury. "This case should provide a clear message to others who try to hide their assets and income offshore," Jim Lee, the chief of the IRS' criminal investigation division, said in a statement. As part of the agreement, Pictet, which oversees 632 billion Swiss francs ($724 billion) in client assets, will implement remedial measures and cooperate with the authorities' investigation. If it complies for three years, U.S. prosecutors will move to dismiss charges of conspiring to defraud the IRS. "Pictet is pleased to have resolved this matter and will continue to take steps to ensure its clients meet their tax obligations," the bank said in a statement. U.S. authorities have long accused Swiss banks of helping wealthy Americans evade taxes, and Pictet signalled it had been in contact with the U.S. for more than a decade. Credit Suisse in 2014 agreed to pay a $2.5 billion fine for helping Americans evade taxes in a conspiracy that spanned decades. The bank has since been taken over by former rival UBS. In 2016, two former Julius Baer bankers pleaded guilty to helping American clients dodge taxes, and the bank agreed to pay $547 million to resolve the criminal case. Prosecutors said that while Pictet adopted some measures to ensure U.S. clients complied with the law, it helped some customers hide funds from the IRS in offshore accounts. The bank's disgorgement of funds includes $52 million in fees that Pictet earned from the undeclared accounts, $32 million in unpaid taxes, and a $39 million penalty, prosecutors said. The agreement comes as Renaud de Planta, senior partner at Pictet since 2019, prepares to step down from the helm to be succeeded by Marc Pictet from July 1. ($1 = 0.8732 Swiss francs) (Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Additional reporting by Noele Illien in Zurich; Editing by Jan Harvey, Bill Berkrot and Christina Fincher) FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: Sandra Oudkirk, director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), speaks at a press conference in Taipei, Taiwan July 19, 2023. REUTERS/Fabian Hamacher/File Photo (Corrects spelling of "lack" in paragraph 3) TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan's 2024 election must be free from "outside interference", Washington's top diplomat in Taipei said on Monday, adding that U.S. policy towards the island will remain the same whomever wins. President Tsai Ing-wen and other officials have warned that China might try to sway voters towards candidates seeking closer ties with Beijing in the Jan. 13 presidential and parliamentary vote, which could define Taiwan's relations with its neighbour. The United States is Taiwan's most important international supporter and arms supplier, despite the lack of formal ties with the Chinese-claimed island. Sandra Oudkirk, director of the American Institute in Taiwan and de facto U.S. ambassador, said in a speech at National Taiwan University that the United States has deep confidence in Taiwan's electoral processes and democratic system. "We believe it is for the Taiwan voters to decide their next leader, free from outside interference," she said. "And as I have said many times before, the United States is not taking sides in Taiwan's election, we do not have a preferred candidate and we know very well that we do not have a vote," Oudkirk added. "We support Taiwan's vibrant democracy and look forward to working with whichever leaders Taiwan voters elect in 2024." The ruling Democratic Progressive Party's Lai Ching-te, currently vice president, is the frontrunner to become Taiwan's next leader, according to opinion polls. China detests Lai, believing him to be a separatist, and has rebuffed several of his offers for talks. Lai's main opponent is Hou Yu-ih from Taiwan's largest opposition party the Kuomintang, which traditionally favours close ties with China but strongly denies being pro-Beijing and says it will also maintain the close U.S. relationship. China has over the past four years stepped up its military pressure against Taiwan, including staging two rounds of major war games near the island in the past year and a half. (This story has been refiled to correct the spelling of 'lack' in paragraph 3) (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; editing by Miral Fahmy) An Israeli tank and armored personnel carriers (APC) maneuver near Israel's border with southern Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Israel, December 4, 2023. REUTERS/Amir Cohen By Simon Lewis, Humeyra Pamuk and Jeff Mason WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The United States said on Monday it was too soon to make a final judgment on whether Israel was doing enough to protect civilians in Gaza despite some improvements and that it expected Israeli forces not to strike zones they have identified as safe. Intense Israeli air strikes on Monday hit the southern part of the Gaza Strip, killing and wounding dozens of Palestinians, including in areas where Israel had told people to seek shelter, residents and journalists on the ground said. Fighting between Israel and the Hamas Palestinian militant group resumed on Friday after a seven-day pause to exchange hostages and prisoners and deliver humanitarian aid. U.S. officials, in public and private, have repeatedly urged Israel to minimize civilian casualties in southern Gaza because of the high toll incurred in northern Gaza military operations. Israel is retaliating for an attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 that Israel says killed 1,200 people and took about 240 hostages. "It's too early to make a definitive assessment," State Department spokesman Matt Miller told reporters at a briefing when asked if Israel was heeding the U.S. advice. "In the north ... you saw them ask, or order, more than a million people to move. We've seen a much more targeted request for evacuations here," he added, saying Israel had identified specific neighborhoods where they planned operations "rather than telling an entire city ... to vacate their homes." "So that is an improvement on what's happened before. They have instructed them to move to areas that we know are deconfliction zones," he added. U.S. AND ISRAEL DISCUSS POTENTIAL LENGTH OF WAR In a sign Washington is worried about how safe such areas may be, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the United States expected Israel not to attack them. "They have also indicated that there are areas where there will be 'no-strike' zones, and in those zones, we do expect Israel to follow through on not striking," he told reporters. Sullivan also said the United States and Israel had discussed how long the war with Hamas should continue, but he declined to share that timeline. Israel's assault has laid waste to much of Gaza. The Gaza health ministry said at least 15,899 Palestinians, 70% of them women or under 18s, have now been killed in Israeli bombardments in eight weeks of warfare. Thousands more are missing and feared buried in rubble. Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his latest visit to Israel that Israel's military operations in southern Gaza must not repeat what occurred in the north. "What we mean by that we do not want to see the same level of civilian casualties, we do not want to see the same level of mass displacement," Miller said. The Israelis provided detailed briefings on their intent to avoid mass displacement and civilian casualties, he said. "As the Secretary made clear, it's not just intent that matters, it's results and we're watching very closely," Miller said. About 900 people have been killed, however, in Israeli air strikes since Friday, Gaza health authorities said. Miller also said Washington has not seen evidence that Israel is intentionally killing civilians. Miller added that the U.S. government still expected civilian casualties. "That is sadly true of all wars," he said. (Reporting by Simon Lewis, Humeyra Pamuk, Kanishka Singh and Daphne Psaledakis; writing by Arshad Mohammed; editing by Grant McCool) Protesters chant anti-Osprey slogans during a rally outside the Okinawa Defense Bureau in Kadena town, Okinawa, Dec. 4, 2023. (Matthew M. Burke/Stars and Stripes) KADENA TOWN, Okinawa Hundreds of protesters rallied against a controversial tiltrotor aircraft Monday, hours before the Air Force announced that remains had been found within wreckage from last weeks Osprey crash in southwestern Japan. More than 200 people demonstrated in front of the Okinawa Defense Bureaus headquarters in Kadena town to protest the V-22 Osprey, a helicopter-airplane hybrid thats been a common sight over the prefecture for more than a decade. The bureau represents Japans Ministry of Defense on the island. A CV-22B stationed at Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo and assigned to the 353rd Special Operations Wing went down Wednesday with eight aboard in waters near Yakushima, an island in Kagoshima prefecture. Staff Sgt. Jacob Jake Galliher, 24, of Pittsfield, Mass., was recovered that afternoon unconscious and not breathing alongside an empty 20-person life raft and aircraft wreckage. He was later declared dead. Additional remains and wreckage were discovered Monday by U.S. and Japanese drivers, according to a statement from Air Force Special Operations Command. Currently there is a combined effort in recovering the remains, the command said. The identities have yet to be determined at this time. At Mondays rally, organized by anti-base movement All Okinawa, protesters chanted anti-Osprey slogans, gave speeches and delivered a letter to defense bureau officials demanding the aircraft be grounded pending the results of the crash investigation. It is so sad that another young American mans life was sacrificed and others are still not found, protest organizer Yuji Fukumoto shouted into a microphone. Ospreys are still flying in Okinawa and all over Japan. We must strongly request once again not to fly them over us. After the crash, the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force grounded its fleet of 14 Ospreys; however, the U.S. military has continued to fly the tiltrotor, despite requests from Japanese officials to first confirm their safety. These Ospreys should not have been deployed at all, Michiko Sakao, of Naha city, told Stars and Stripes at the rally. She carried an anti-Osprey sign with her that shes used at protests since the aircraft arrived in Japan in 2012. It is so scary; it could have crashed in Kadena, she said. They must not fly and must be withdrawn. Chiyo Okuda, of Ginowan, called on the Japanese government to listen to the will of the Okinawan people. Before flying any more Ospreys, the accidents cause must be identified, she said. Without that, they must not fly. It is about human lives. Graduates of the 129th Regiment Officer Candidate School, Camp Lincoln, Ill., recite the oath of office as newly commissioned second lieutenants at a ceremony in August 2022. (Illinois National Guard) The disparity between promotion rates of white and non-white Army officers has narrowed in the first two years under a policy to remove photos and data that identify an officers race and gender at promotion boards, according to new research from the Rand Corp. Though theres not enough data to say the policy is effective, its promising, and the Army should continue to monitor it, said Maria Lytell, lead author of the research organizations new report Striving for Diversity: Observations on Racial and Ethnic Talent in the Regular Armys Senior Officer Corps. The Army put the change into practice Aug. 1, 2020, to address discrimination, prejudice and bias, and criticism that its highest ranks lacked diversity. Rand found minority officers in the ranks of captain, major and lieutenant colonel are more likely to remain in the Army than white officers, though they have lower promotion rates. The reason why remains unclear, the report concluded. We stopped our analysis at January 2022, so we can continue monitoring and if it continues to trend in that direction of reducing those differences, then that might be indicative of an effective policy, Lytell said. Those officers who make it to higher ranks such as colonel are more likely to be white, according to the report. Previous research has shown some of these trends, especially that retention and promotion can offset each other, Lytell said. Its not a brand-new story, but its worth kind of showing its a persistent story, unfortunately, she said. Across the Armys junior officers, diversity has increased in the past 15 years, with the proportion who were racial and ethnic minorities increasing from 29% in fiscal 2005 to 33% in fiscal 2020, according to the report. Of that 33%, 11% were Black, 10% Hispanic, 9% Asian American and Pacific Islander and 3% from other racial or ethnic minorities. When looking at the lowest rank of officers lieutenants about 90% are retained, likely because they had not completed their service obligation. However, for those who do leave, minority officers were more likely to do so because negative performance or conduct issues, and white officers were more likely to leave for medical or health reasons, according to the report. Lytell said a deeper examination into data that was unavailable for this report would be needed to look for potential bias and discrimination in these early separations. At captain, when officers typically have their first opportunity to choose whether they stay or go, about 49% of white officers stay in the service while retention rates among minority groups range from 51% and 64%, according to the report. Promotion to major was the first rank in which Lytell said research began to show significant variance in who moves ahead. Research showed Asian-American officers were promoted 2.5% less than white officers. The gaps were larger for Hispanic officers, 3.3%, Native Americans at 3.6% and Black officers at 5.1%. White officers were also more likely to receive promotions earlier than their peers, which is known as below the zone promotion, according to the report. Further research is needed to understand why this is happening because there are so many variables that play into promotion that could also play a factor outside of bias and discrimination, such as occupational specialty, previous assignments and the competitiveness of that years promotion board, Lytell said. Studies on other service branches have shown that these factors are more likely the cause of the discrepancy than bias, she said. The officer research brief is part of a larger report titled Retention of Racial-Ethnic Minorities in the Regular Army, which found similar separation statistics among noncommissioned officers. The report recommends the Army provide more training and education to junior-level leaders on counseling and evaluating soldiers because their opinions factor heavily into promotion and discipline decisions. When junior soldiers and officers are grappling with personal challenges such as a death in the family, financial burdens or accessing safe child care, a leader can have a significant impact on whether the situation escalates to something that could affect careers. Managing these challenges often falls to company commanders who might be too young to have gone through these things personally, Lytell said. Weve got to help these captains and the junior NCOs with how to deal with this stuff, she said. It comes with maturity and age and experience. Its a lot to put on these young people. However, the retention rates among minority groups are a positive trend, Lytell said, and the report recommends the Army share this story. Its pretty persistent on the enlisted and the officer side that minority groups are more likely to stay, so the Army must be doing something right, she said. Troops from Japan, the United States and Australia attend an opening ceremony for the Yama Sakura exercise at Camp Asaka in Tokyo, Monday, Dec. 4, 2023. (Jennessa Davey/Stars and Stripes) CAMP ASAKA, Japan More than 6,000 soldiers from the U.S. Army and Japan Ground Self-Defense Force gathered throughout Japan on Monday to begin 10 days of command-and-control training. Yama Sakura, which runs through Dec. 13, is an annual tabletop exercise that aims to prepare the nations ground forces to work together against an invading enemy force, or any other crisis or contingency, according to I Corps spokesman Capt. Angelo Mejia. The training involves theoretical scenarios rather than troops and equipment in the field, he told Stars and Stripes after Mondays opening ceremony at Camp Asaka in Tokyo. Around 300 U.S. and Japanese troops stood in formation to hear from their commanders. Similar ceremonies took place at other exercise spots in Japan, including in Hokkaido, Miyagi and Kanagawa prefectures. The challenges of today are continually evolving, Lt. Gen. Ryoji Takemoto, commander of Japans Ground Component Command, told the troops. Lets work together for victory. Troops from Japan, the United States and Australia attend an opening ceremony for the Yama Sakura exercise at Camp Asaka in Tokyo, Monday, Dec. 4, 2023. (Jennessa Davey/Stars and Stripes) They were joined by 30 soldiers from Australia, which had only observed past Yama Sakura drills. About 200 Australians are participating in the overall exercise. This is the first year that they are full participants in one of the largest and most complex command-post exercises in the Indo-Pacific, I Corps commander Lt. Gen. Xavier Brunson said during the ceremony. Troops will test, develop and refine their strategies for working together and coordinating operations by air, land and sea, he told those assembled in the camps courtyard. Through your shared vision and by working together, we can all ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific, he said. Yama Sakura challenges the staff sections within a command, Mejia said. When anything happens around the world and the military is called up to execute a mission, the staff side of things work on problems like these, he said. The primary emphasis will be on coordination and communication between individual commands and the three nations militaries, Mejia said. Missions and scenarios are tracked virtually while simulated adversaries react to our operations, he added. Yama Sakura is the first in a series of four command-post drills that make up the preamble to Operation Pathways U.S. Army Pacifics method of connecting multiple drills and sets the stage for larger field exercises, including Talisman Sabre in Australia, Cobra Gold in Thailand and Orient Shield in Japan. A command post establishes the physical communications hub for a division or higher to synchronize every function of warfighting across a battlefield which will eventually lead up to a warfighter exercise, Mejia said. Troops are participating in Yama Sakura from Joint Base Lewis-McCord, Wash., home of I Corps, and four bases in Japan: Camp Asaka in Tokyo; Camp Higashi-Chitose in Hokkaido prefecture; Camp Sendai in Miyagi prefecture; and the U.S. Armys Camp Zama in Kanagawa prefecture. (Gerald Waller/Stars and Stripes) Aschaffenburg, Germany, Feb. 6, 1950: Betty Jo Fay, wife of 1st Sgt. Thomas H. Fay, of Company H, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Division, eats some soup and sandwiches with the couples two children, Colleen, 5, and Richard, 3, at the familys kitchen table in their new apartment. The Fay family moved into one of the 156 newly constructed apartment units for service members and their families in Aschaffenburg. Read the accompanying article and see additional photos here. The crew of the U.S.S. Gabrielle Giffords stands at the ready prior to the commissioning ceremony on June 10, 2017, in Galveston, Texas. (Daniel Kramer, Getty Images/TNS) (Tribune News Service) China criticized the U.S. after an American warship sailed in disputed waters in the South China Sea, underscoring lingering military tensions between the nations. The appearance of the U.S.S. Gabrielle Giffords near the Second Thomas Shoal on Monday seriously violated Chinas sovereignty and security, according to a statement from the Chinese military. The littoral combat ship undermined regional peace and stability, the military added, demonstrating that the U.S. is the biggest threat to peace and stability in the South China Sea. The U.S. Pacific Fleet didnt immediately respond to a request for comment. The U.S. says its naval vessels ply international waters. While a meeting in the U.S. last month between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping helped stabilize overall ties, the two nations remain at odds over American military activity. In October, the U.S. and China each released video footage they said showed provocative or unprofessional actions by military craft in and around the South China Sea, the body of water that Beijing claims mostly as its own. The Second Thomas Shoal is the site of recent tense encounters between Chinese and Philippine vessels over a World War II-era ship that Manila placed in the shoal more than two decades ago. The Philippines said that move was in response to Chinas occupation of nearby reef. In late November, the U.S. Seventh Fleet and units from the Philippines armed forces conducted a military cooperation activity in the South China Sea that included U.S.S. Gabrielle Giffords and aimed at preserving a free and open Indo-Pacific region, the U.S. Navy said. The Philippines coast guard said Sunday that it monitored more than 135 Chinese maritime militia vessels around the Whitsun Reef, which is just west of the Second Thomas Shoal. 2023 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. The guided-missile destroyer USS Howard is shown here in 2023 in the Philippine Sea. (Santiago Navarro/U.S. Navy) YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan An electrical fire aboard a guided-missile destroyer sent a dozen sailors to the hospital Friday, and damage to the ship is still being assessed, according to the Navy. The USS Howard was anchored at its Yokosuka homeport when a minor electrical fire in the main engine room was reported and extinguished Friday morning, Destroyer Squadron 15 spokesman Lt. j.g. Ronan Williams said by phone and email Monday. The sailors were sent to U.S. Naval Hospital Yokosuka for evaluation, and seven were discharged that day in good condition, he said. Five remained at the hospital overnight but were discharged in good condition Saturday. The fires cause is still under investigation and damage to the Howard is still being assessed, Williams said. The blaze happened nearly four months after the destroyer sustained a soft grounding while deployed on Aug. 10. The ship was en route to Bali, Indonesia, for a scheduled port visit when watch standers alerted that it had grounded. The ship was ultimately able to resume normal operations under its own power and propulsion and there were no injuries, 7th Fleet spokesman Lt. Luka Bakic said by email at the time. Nine days later, the Howards skipper, Cmdr. Kenji Igawa, was relieved for a loss of confidence in his ability to command. Bakic, at the time, would not confirm whether the firing was related to the ships grounding. Igawa was temporarily replaced by Capt. Edward Angelinas, who in turn handed the reins to Cmdr. Cameron Dennis, the Howards current commander. News / National by Staff reporter FINANCE minister Mthuli Ncube has proposed a sharp hike in passport fees despite concerns over the lack of transparency on how the proceeds are spent.Critics say while access to a passport is a basic human right as it enables people to exercise their constitutional right to free movement, Zimbabwe's passport fees are almost 400% higher than those of other Southern African Development Community countries, making them the most expensive travel documents in the region.Presenting the 2024 National Budget in Parliament, Ncube proposed several measures to raise more tax revenues amid growing economic instability.The head of Treasury intends to increase passport fees from US$100 to US$200 for ordinary passports and from US$200 to US$300 for emergency passports by next January.An additional fee of US$20 is charged for every electronically readable passport application to obtain a quick response (QR) code.This makes Zimbabwe's passport one of the most expensive in the world.With Zanu-PF dominating Parliament, the budget proposals are expected to sail through.Last month, the Auditor-General (AG) raised the red flag over failure by the Home Affairs ministry to provide information on how much was raised from the issuance of electronic passports (e-passports), amid concern that Treasury could have been prejudiced of millions of dollars in revenue.According to findings in the Auditor-General's latest Appropriation Accounts, Finance and Revenue Statements, and Fund Accounts for the year ending 31 December 2022, the Home Affairs ministry disclosed revenue collected in local currency while the service is being provided in hard currency.President Emmerson Mnangagwa launched the e-passports in 2021 after the government partnered a murky Lithuanian company in producing the travel documents.Before the introduction of the e-passports, an ordinary passport cost US$53, while an urgent passport (three working days to process) cost US$253.The e-passport project is being implemented by the government in partnership with Garsu Pasaulis on a build-own-operate-transfer arrangement.Comparatively, South Africa charges R400 for a passport, equivalent to US$25, while Botswana charges P260 (US$25). Namibia's passport goes for R400 (or US$25), and Mozambique charges 2 500 meticais (about US$40). South Korean navy destroyer ROKS Gang Gam-chan test-fires a Standard Missile-2 in the East Sea, or Sea of Japan, Friday, Dec. 1, 2023. (South Korean navy) CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea Seoul test-fired a U.S.-built ship-to-air missile in South Korean waters for the first time on Friday. The destroyer ROKS Gang Gam-chan fired the Standard Missile-2 in the East Sea, or Sea of Japan, and hit an inbound unmanned aerial vehicle, South Koreas navy said in a news release Sunday. The SM-2 was tracked from Samcheok Marine Research Center on Gangwon Provinces eastern coast. The 65-acre facility opened in 2021 and provides a host of analytical services, including underwater noise and infrared testing. Testing the missile in South Korean waters was very meaningful, the centers director, Son Kwon, said in a video released by the navy Sunday. South Korea previously tested its SM-2s at the Pacific Missile Range Facility Barking Sands in Hawaii, due to the lack of testing services before the Samcheok center opened. The Raytheon-built SM-2 is designed to pursue aircraft and anti-ship missiles for up to 104 miles, according to the companys website. Its also used by the U.S., Australian and Japanese navies. The State Department approved the sale of up to 94 SM-2s to South Korea for $314 million in 2019, according to Defense Security Cooperation Agency records. The test comes on the heels of an uptick in maritime training around the Korean Peninsula this year. On Nov. 26, the Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group drilled in the waters southeast of Jeju Island alongside the South Korean and Japanese destroyers. The one-day drill was meant to strengthen the allies maritime capabilities amid North Koreas nuclear and missile threats, according to the Souths navy. USS Gerald R. Ford, the world's largest aircraft carrier, pulls in to Souda Bay, Greece, Dec. 2, 2023. The carrier is making a scheduled port visit at the base on the island of Crete. (Jacob Mattingly/U.S. Navy) The Navys largest aircraft carrier has arrived at a base in Crete for a port visit, giving sailors on deployment in the Mediterranean Sea a respite after their mission was extended in response to Israels war in Gaza. The USS Gerald R. Ford arrived Saturday at the Navys Souda Bay installation on the Greek island, marking the sixth stop for the vessel during its deployment in the U.S. Naval Forces Europe area of operations. Its been deployed there since May. The crew has been laser-focused on the mission, said Capt. Rick Burgess, commander of the carrier. Sailors have earned some time off and will get a chance to take in the surrounding area, he said. Seaman Daniel Mitchell and Petty Officer 3rd Class Nicholas Reed raise the American and Greek flags aboard USS Gerald R. Ford during the aircraft carrier's port visit to Souda Bay, Greece, Dec. 2, 2023. (Jacob Mattingly/U.S. Navy) Ford was initially dispatched as part of an effort to deter Russian aggression in the eastern Mediterranean region. The carrier was at the tail end of its six-month mission when Hamas launched a large-scale terrorist attack on Israel in early October. Israels ongoing response has brought concerns about the potential for a wider war. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the extension of Fords mission Oct. 17 in a move intended to deter Iran and its proxies from instigating a larger conflict. The decision meant that the Navy at one point had two carrier groups operating in the Mediterranean, the other being USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, which was scheduled to relieve Ford. Ford is the Navys most advanced aircraft carrier and incorporates several other destroyers as part of its strike group. There are more than 4,500 sailors aboard. Its unclear how much longer their deployment will continue, but eventually the carrier will need to return to its homeport to keep to its maintenance and deployment schedules. Ford has a dual-band radar that creates a 360-degree view of activity around the carrier, including the airspace above it. Security analysts say that such a system could help Israel watch for potential long-range ballistic missile threats. The ruins of a mosque destroyed by Israel's bombardment of Gaza City. (Loay Ayyoub/The Washington Post) TEL AVIV The Israelis say they dont want the job. Arab nations are resisting. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas might volunteer, but the Palestinian people probably dont want him. As the Biden administration begins to plan for the day after in Gaza - confronting problematic questions such as who runs the territory once the shooting stops, how it gets rebuilt and, potentially, how it eventually becomes a part of an independent Palestinian state - the stakeholders face a host of unattractive options. On a trip to Israel and the West Bank last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought to advance those discussions, but there were few easy answers. The Biden administration is pushing to install a revitalized Palestinian Authority as Gazas administrator, but it is an unpopular idea with the Israeli government and even among many Palestinians. U.S. officials acknowledge the challenge, but say the group is the best, and perhaps the only, solution among a list of worse options, which include a return to direct Israeli occupation of the strip. We have no illusions this is going to be easy. Well surely have disagreements along the way, Blinken told reporters while in Tel Aviv. But, he said, the alternative - more terrorist attacks, more violence, more innocent suffering - is unacceptable. Following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that killed at least 1,200 Israelis, Israel vowed to destroy the group as both a military and governing entity. But after more than 15 years in power in Gaza, Hamas and its supporters are deeply embedded in every sector of society - not only in the government ministries they run, but in charities, courts, mosques, sport teams, jails, municipalities and youth groups. The de facto governing body in the Gaza Strip since 2007, when it ousted the Palestinian Authority from power, Hamas has overseen the economy, health care, water and electricity, trade and infrastructure. It runs the security forces in Gaza - not only the militant brigades, like Qassam, now fighting Israeli forces in the streets but also the regular police force, including traffic cops. The group remains popular among many Palestinians following the attack. Both the Trump and Biden administrations had focused on brokering better relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors - to the detriment of the Palestinians, who had become sidelined as a cause, many felt. Now, thanks to Hamas, Palestinians are again front and center. Even the week-long pause in Israels attack on Gaza was structured in a way that boosted Hamass popularity, as joyous Palestinian families welcomed home wives, sisters and children who were freed from Israeli prisons in exchange for hostages taken during last months attack. U.S. officials blame Hamas for the desperate humanitarian situation in Gaza, saying the group could have spared Palestinians from Israeli retaliation if it had not carried out the Oct. 7 massacre. But they concede, too, that the hardhanded Israeli response has inflamed Palestinian anger and set back progress toward a more durable peace. Failing to protect civilians can drive them into the arms of the enemy, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Saturday. Israelis say they dont want to return to an occupation of Gaza. But they are discussing security enhancements such as a buffer zone along its border with Israel and access to the territory for Israeli forces during a transition period that would revoke some elements of autonomy from Gazas residents. The Biden administration hotly opposes any restrictions on how Gazans can use their land, and is eager for Israeli forces to turn over responsibility, possibly to international forces pledged by Arab nations, for the territorys security. But any planning for the future will be complicated by what happens while the conflict continues to rage, observers say. The way the war is prosecuted will determine the range of options, said Brian Katulis, vice president of policy at the Middle East Institute. Every bomb thats dropped, and every day that Hamas still stands out, increases the costs of the reconstruction. The question of who maintains law and order after the conflict is deeply complicated, experts say. Israeli authorities acknowledge the need to make such plans, say U.S. officials who met with them last week, but they dont have concrete proposals and appear to want others to decide. After the conflict ends, a stable transition in Gaza will need to find a way to permit demilitarization, with a mechanism to ensure there cant be any rearming of anybody, said Dennis A. Ross, a former adviser to both Democratic and Republican administrations about Israel-Palestinian negotiations who is now at the Washington Institute, a research group. And the Palestinian Authority needs to change if it is to run anything in Gaza. Its not just that they cant come in on the back of Israeli tanks, Ross said. The fact is, they cant manage themselves right now. The Israelis dont want United Nations peacekeepers, because they dont trust the United Nations to be receptive to their concerns. Arab nations are deeply skeptical about sending in their security forces because they worry about the optics of having to impose force on Palestinians should the need arise. One Arab official told me, Imagine the footage of our soldiers shooting at Palestinians and being shot by Palestinians, said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former adviser to Palestinian negotiators. For the Biden administration, the focus on empowering the Palestinian Authority and, eventually, a full Palestinian state, is a way to compel Arab nations to engage in discussions about the complicated transition and potentially to take part in it, he said. Arab nations, to even be able to engage with us, they need that framing, the two-state solution framing and the transitional framing, he said. Because this way they can always claim, were doing this to support the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority, which the Biden administration sees as the long-term solution, has done little for Palestinians in recent years. Its president, Abbas, turned 88 last month and is widely seen as unimaginative and tired - but still relatively healthy despite the cigarettes he puffs throughout meetings with visiting delegations. He is in the 18th year of what was supposed to be a four-year term. The Palestinian Authority may be the best of a range of very bad options to start with, said Katulis, of the Middle East Institute. Its credibility with the Palestinian people has been undercut by its security role in the West Bank, which has seen its police force charged not only with protecting Palestinians but by extension assisting the Israeli military occupation. The Authority is perceived as corrupt and lacks support among the Palestinian population, said Shawqi Issa, a human rights activist from Bethlehem and a former Palestinian Authority minister. Biden officials think of better days between 2007 and 2013, when Salam Fayyad, a former International Monetary Fund official, served as prime minister of the authority. He improved the entitys ability to deliver basic services. U.S. officials dont say explicitly that Abbas needs to go, nor do they venture ideas about who should replace him, saying that Palestinians and their regional backers must have that conversation. But they do have ideas about basic reforms to lay the groundwork for a more open Gazan society, which hasnt had a chance to vote in elections since 2006. After meeting with Abbas on Thursday, Blinken told reporters that the Biden administration was seeking reforms that would effectively deliver on the needs of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian Authority needs to combat corruption, engage with civil society and improve support for a free media, Blinken said. Ultimately, he said, it should face voters to pick leadership, he said, although he appeared to suggest that doing so should not be the first priority. We support free and fair elections around the world, including, of course, for Palestinians, he said. But that has to be a process and its something to talk about as we move from the conflict to what weve been calling the day after. Offering elections right now could well lead to a Hamas victory, a non-starter for Israeli leaders and a reason U.S. officials say that other Palestinian choices need to be seen as more attractive. In private, officials from Israels far-right government are dismissive, saying they see little difference between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, whom they also accuse of undermining Israeli security. In the long run, the daily needs of Palestinians - the sort of issues on which democratically-elected leaders rise and fall - are unlikely to be addressed so long as their territories are occupied by Israel, said Issa, the former Palestinian Authority minister. The average person in the West Bank or Gaza Strip will not see their problems solved unless the occupation ends and the Palestinian people obtain their rights, he said. All discussions about temporary solutions fall short of addressing the main problem. Many Gazans say they are unhappy with all their options - though thinking about politics is difficult while under Israeli bombardment, one said. Our current focus is solely on ending the war, said Safwan Jamal, 28, who is from Gaza City and has been displaced to the Nuseirat refugee camp, which has experienced devastating bombing, alongside shortages of food, water and electricity. While Hamas may be somewhat reckless, the Palestinian Authority is riddled with corruption and unfit to govern us, he said. Hamas is far from ideal, he said, but we are oppressed, and those willing to help us must respect our perspectives and facilitate elections, allowing the Palestinian people to choose their leadership, whether it be Hamas or others. A mother of two children from Gaza City, Lamees Haddad, 32, said that both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are marred by corruption. We endure without support from any party. Current political discussions seem senseless while people in Gaza continue to suffer, not just from bombings, but also due to hunger and thirst, she said. In the long run, Biden administration officials say, a separate Palestinian state is the only stable solution for ensuring security for both Israelis and Palestinians. They are still working to convince Israelis about the necessity of their vision. There are two schools of thought among Israelis, said Ross, the former U.S. negotiator. One school of thought goes, This just proved we cant afford a Palestinian state next to us because it can be taken over by groups like Hamas. And the other school of thought will be, Okay, we just defeated Hamas. And if you think we can control or occupy the Palestinians forever, exclusively on our terms, and we wont face a successor to Hamas, you live in a dream world. Booth reported from London and Balousha reported from Amman, Jordan. Judith Sudilovsky in Jerusalem contributed to this report. The Pentagon is seen on Oct. 21, 2021. (Robert H. Reid/Stars and Stripes) The Pentagon is facing congressional pressure to stop the flow of Russian oil into its supply chain after a Washington Post examination revealing that shipments of the forbidden fuel have been making their way to a refinery that serves the U.S. military. Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), lawmakers prominent in the push to step up enforcement of oil sanctions, on Monday called on the Defense Department to explain the steps it is taking to root out Russian oil from its supply chain. They demanded answers to several written questions and a briefing from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Russian entities are exploiting loopholes and workarounds, to not only bring gas and oil to market, but in some cases surreptitiously sell fuel to the DoD, wrote the senators, citing reporting from The Post and the Project on Government Oversight. The reporting tracked the shipment of banned petroleum products from Russian Black Sea ports to Motor Oil Hellas, the Pentagons supplier in Greece. The shipments were routed through a terminal in Turkey, which told The Post in an email it merely stores products and complies with all laws. The Greek refinery said in statements to The Post that the fuel came with customs paperwork identifying it as sanctions-compliant, but shipping and other data identify large amounts of it originating in Russia. The Post could not determine the precise amount of Russian-origin fuel oil in the products the Pentagon purchases. Those products are refined using multiple ingredients that cannot all be tracked through production. The maze-like path of the oil from terminals in Russia to the U.S. fleet is almost certainly done intentionally by Russia to evade sanctions, the senators wrote in their letter. It is incumbent upon the DoD to take clear steps to ensure that it is not contributing to the Kremlins war in Ukraine. The Defense Logistics Agency, which manages the purchase of U.S. military fuel, said in an earlier statement to The Post that it is the responsibility of contractors to ensure their products comply with sanctions. The agency cautioned that tracing the origins of ingredients that go into the jet fuel and Navy diesel it purchases from the Greek refinery could be impossible. Western sanctions were designed to strike a severe economic blow against Russia, where oil and gas revenue make up almost half of the federal budget and help fund the war effort. But the Russian economy has proved unexpectedly resilient, in no small part because of widespread sanctions evasion. Darren Martin (48), of Bride Road, Dublin 8, appeared before Judge Elma Sheahan at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Thursday A man who robbed two women in their 80s of their handbags in two days has been jailed for four and a half years. Darren Martin (48), of Bride Road, Dublin 8, appeared before Judge Elma Sheahan at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Thursday after pleading guilty to two counts of robbing elderly women of their handbags in March 2022. Garda Shane Monaghan told the court Martin robbed the first woman on Long Lane Close, Dublin 8 on 28 March 2022. The woman, who is now aged 88, was walking home from a pharmacy when she noticed an agitated man walking up and down the street. The man came up behind her, pulled up her hood and pulled its strings so she couldn't see. He then ran away with her walking stick and handbag, containing 30, her PPS card and her house-keys. The woman walked to a neighbour's house and called gardai. CCTV was obtained from a local apartment complex and Martin was identified. The woman told the gardai the incident left her shaken, nervous and afraid to be alone. She was too uncomfortable to stay in her house that night and had to have the locks changed. The court then heard that Martin robbed another elderly woman of her handbag the following day. The woman, who is now aged 81, was walking home from grocery shopping along the O' Curry Road in Dublin 8. Martin approached her and grabbed her arm while pulling at her handbag. The woman put up a struggle because she had just bought a white-gold diamond bracelet worth 200 from a local jeweller. As Martin pulled at her bag, the woman fell to the ground. The court heard she was upset, shaken and had a large bruise on the arm Martin grabbed. Gardai were called and Martin was again identified using CCTV footage. A warrant was issued to search his house, where clothing was found matching what was worn in the robberies. No victim impact statement was handed in to the court by either women. Martin has eight previous convictions for robbery, theft, public order and larceny. He was previously imprisoned for a robbery in 1998 and was released in 2002. His family wrote a letter to the court. In it, they addressed the women Martin robbed. They said: We are disgusted by what Darren has done to you and as a family we are very sorry. They said: We can only now hope as a family that his time in prison will be something of an eye opener. Olan Callanan BL, defending, described the robberies as low and cowardly and said they were appalling offences against vulnerable and elderly ladies. He stated Martin has a significant psychiatric history and that prison will be difficult for him. Mr Callanan said Martin had a life taken apart by drugs but was not a prolific offender. In sentencing, Judge Sheahan said Martin's actions were unacceptable and must be deplored and that he robbed the women not only of their property, but also their peace of mind. She said the aggravating factors were the seriousness of the crimes, the fact Martin had similar previous convictions and that he was targeting elderly women. She said the mitigating factors were that Martin pleaded guilty, struggled with drug addiction from a young age and that his mental health issues will make his time in custody difficult. Judge Sheahan handed down a sentence of five years imprisonment, with the final six months suspended on strict conditions. Martin was given 11 months credit for time already spent in custody. Charlotte Murray (34) was last seen in 2012. Her remains have not been found despite an extensive police investigation and searches. An excavator at a quarry in Co Tyrone during a search for Charlotte Murray (PA) An appeal by a man convicted of murdering his missing former fiancee has been dismissed. John Miller (53) a chef from Redford Park in Dungannon, Co Tyrone, was found guilty by a jury at Dungannon Crown Court in 2019 of the murder of Charlotte Murray. He was given a life sentence with a minimum tariff of 16 years to serve. Ms Murray (34) was last seen in 2012. Her remains have not been found despite an extensive police investigation and searches. Miller was found to have killed Ms Murray at their home in Moy between October 30, 2012 and November 2, 2012. Miller appealed against his sentence and his barrister contended the trial wrongly continued in 2019 without proof Ms Murray is dead. They also contended material irregularities in the conduct of the trial. In a judgment issued in the Court of Appeal on Monday, Lady Chief Justice Dame Siobhan Keegan dismissed the appeal. An excavator at a quarry in Co Tyrone during a search for Charlotte Murray (PA) She said no strength was found in any of the arguments raised on appeal and alleged material irregularities were not irregularities at all. And where irregularities did arise, they were corrected during the trial process or were not of such a material nature as to cause us to question the safety of the conviction in any respect, she said. Finally, we point out that the judge charged the jury at the end of this long trial after extensive engagement with counsel. "He did so with scrupulous fairness having engaged with counsel throughout. His charge was of high quality. The judge fairly dealt with all the complicated evidence in this case in a manner which left the fact-finding function to the jury, which is as it should be. Accordingly, we refuse leave on all grounds and dismiss this appeal. A man killed a retired police officer in his Co Derry flat then sat drinking in the victim's home for several days while his remains lay in a bedroom, a court has heard. Details surrounding the death of Brian Coulter (62) emerged for the first time during a plea hearing at Belfast Crown Court on Monday. Adrian Sebastian Nowak has admitted manslaughter and is due to be sentenced on Friday. Mr Coulter was last seen alive on October 13 2021 in the company of Nowak. His body was discovered in his flat in the Sandy Braes area of Magherafelt on October 18 by his sister. He was killed by Nowak some time between October 13 and 14, and evidence in the flat suggested the deceased was then placed in the shower and washed by Nowak before his remains were moved to a bedroom. Crown barrister Richard Weir KC told Mr Justice O'Hara that Mr Coulter was an alcoholic and a vulnerable man with multiple health issues including seizures which left him without power in his right hand. Mr Weir revealed that around noon on October 18, 2021 Mr Coulter's sister called at his flat and let herself in via an unlocked door. The prosecutor said the flat was "in a state of disarray", there was a shopping trolley in the living room and a man was asleep on the sofa. She then went to the front bedroom and observed her brother lying on the floor. The prosecutor said: "His head was swollen and because of his appearance, she knew he was dead." At this point the man on the sofa - Nowak - woke up, adopted a threatening stance and roared at her. This caused her to flee the property and once outside, she called the PSNI. As she was waiting for police to arrive, Nowak left the flat. She challenged him, he ignored her and she took some pictures of him as he walked away from the scene. When police arrived at the flat, they noticed blood in the living room, hallway and bathroom. Mr Coulter's remains were removed from the bedroom and a post-mortem examination conducted on October 20 concluded death was due to blunt force injuries to his head, neck and chest. He also suffered a bleed to the brain and had bruises on his chest and back as well as bruising to his wrists, consistent with defensive injuries. Regarding Nowak - with an address at Colvil Street in Belfast - Mr Weir said he was arrested in the car park of Home Bargains in Magherafelt at 2.30pm on October 18. During the arrest he spat at and tried to headbutt officers and was initially taken to Antrim Area Hospital before being brought to Musgrave Custody Suite, where he gave a false name. He was interviewed 15 times and whilst he gave a 'no comment' response throughout, he gave a pre-prepared statement during the final interview. In the statement, Nowak said he knew Mr Coulter who had invited him to his flat where they drank together. He also claimed that after an argument, Mr Coulter hit him - and he struck him back twice in self-defence. Nowak added that after this, he moved Mr Coulter's body to the bedroom then stayed in the flat drinking for a few days before a lady arrived at the property. Mr Weir told the court that Nowak was released from HMP Maghaberry on an unrelated matter on October 12 and the following evening he and Mr Coulter were seen entering the flat at Sandy Braes - which was the last time the deceased was seen alive. The prosecutor added Nowak was a man "with a disposition towards violence" as was evident by his criminal record both here and in his native Poland. Nowak subsequently pleaded guilty to four charges - the manslaughter of Brian Coulter on a date between October 13 and 18, 2021, the common assault of his sister on October 18, 2021 and both assaulting and obstructing police on the same date. Mr Weir concluded the Crown's case by telling Mr Justice O'Hara that Mr Coulter's death has had a "very serious impact" on both his sister and daughter. Defence barrister Michael Duffy SC said his client was also an alcoholic, and whilst he branded the fatal incident as "unsavoury" and "unjustifiable", he said it was not a case of "persistent wanton violence" but rather one in which one or two blows were administered. He added: "The plea was put forward on the basis the blows were struck by the accused during the course of an argument." Saying there was never an intention by Nowak to cause Mr Coulter any serious harm, Mr Duffy said Nowak accepted he washed Mr Coulter and moved him to a bedroom then remained "in the flat drinking for a several days afterwards." After listening to submissions from both the Crown and defence, Mr Justice O'Hara said there was an element of "victim-blaming" regarding Nowak's version of events as he was "blaming Mr Coulter, who he killed, for instigating the confrontation." As Mr Coulter's family sat in the public gallery, Mr Justice O'Hara acknowledged his loved ones needed the matter "brought to an end". Saying he needed some time to reflect on what he had heard, the senior judge said he would sentence Nowak on Friday. News / National by Staff reporter TREASURY has allocated 18% of the national budget to the security sector, ZW$10.8 trillion (US$1.9 billion), which is a large amount in peacetime, as President Emmerson Mnangagwa moves to appease the restless uniformed forces.Since the 2017 military coup that toppled the then president Robert Mugabe, the security sector has been complaining about deteriorating conditions of service in the face of a worsening socio-economic crisis.The discontent also saw Mnangagwa losing at a polling station set up for soldiers at Pondoroza Barracks in Redcliff, Midlands Province, during the 23 August general elections.This month, deputy commissioner-general of police Learn Ncube appeared before the parliamentary portfolio committee on Defence, Home Affairs, Veterans of Liberation Struggle and Security chaired by Beitbridge East MP, Albert Nguluvhe, pleading for an upward review of its budget allocation, arguing the inadequate funding of the police force is crippling operations.Ncube said the skills and the competencies of the police sometimes leave a lot to be desired due to inadequate resources, even for training police officers.Presenting the 2024 budget this week, Finance minister Mthuli Ncube allocated ZW$10.8 trillion to the security sector out of a total of ZW$58.2 trillion (US$10bn) budget, dwarfing other sectors such as the health and social services.The Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC) has been allocated ZW$2 157 038 000 000, while the ministry of Justice, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, which caters for the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Services, has been allocated US$1 078 019.The ministry of Defence and the ministry of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage have been given the highest allocations of ZW$3 637 636 000 000 and ZW$3 931 884 000 000 respectively."The security forces play an important role of protecting the country's territorial integrity, national interest and sovereignty over land and air space, against both internal and external aggression. Peace is key to economic development," reads the budget statement."Whilst the country is generally characterised by a peaceful environment, the ongoing geopolitical dynamics require that the country continuously capacitate its security forces with adequate rations, training and relevant equipment, to enable them to safeguard the country's integrity.""This entails the need to continuously capacitate the security forces through payment of commensurate remuneration, as well as review of non-monetary benefits, including provision of decent accommodation. Therefore, an amount of ZW$8.6 trillion has been allocated towards the security cluster to meet their remuneration, food rations, operational equipment and the necessary infrastructure."The security sector's allocation is higher than the health sector, which was allocated ZW$6 311 893 000 000, which translates to 10.8%. This is also 4% lower than its target of 15% set by the Abuja Declaration.The health and social sectors have been in a shambles.For instance, findings by acting Auditor-General Rheah Kujinga revealed that Zimbabwe's largest referral hospital, Parirenyatwa Group of Hospitals, which services Harare and other nearby provinces, has been operating with only one functional ambulance, reflecting the country's continually crumbling healthcare services.Another study titled Five Years of Progress or Stagnation published by the Sivio Institute in August, also showed that the Zanu-PF government has failed to deliver in the social services cluster that includes pension systems and allocations, housing, health and education.The government made nine promises with regards to pension systems and allocation, with a performance of 49%, while making 15 promises in the health sector with a performance of 37%. More promises were made in the education sector, with a performance of 47% while the lowest score was recorded in housing with a score of 36%.With the national hospitals in a dilapidating state, the government also missed its target to reduce hospital fees by at least 50% and to provide free healthcare for cancer patients, as per its 2018 promise.In 2022, the government effected a hike in hospital fees in which adult and children's consultation fees were pegged at US$12 and US$6, representing a 1 748% hike, sparking an outcry. Moffat (45), whose hate crime conviction in the UK stems from an incident in which he threatened to blow up an Islamic bookshop and said all Muslims should be killed, insisted his arrest had nothing to do with the disorder in the city. Moffatt said he had been in a pub until 1.45am A man arrested in the hours after the Dublin riots who was previously convicted under hate crime legislation in the UK has insisted he only went into the city to get a bag of chips. David Moffat, a former local election candidate for Labour in his native Mayo, was arrested on OConnell Bridge at 2.30am on Friday morning last week. He was later charged before the courts with having engaged in threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour. But, Moffat (45), whose hate crime conviction in the UK stems from an incident in which he threatened to blow up an Islamic bookshop and said all Muslims should be killed, insisted to the Sunday World his arrest had nothing to do with the disorder in the city. I had nothing to do with the Dublin riots, he told our reporter when we approached him for comment outside his Ranelagh home this week. Im only after coming back from my solicitors office. There has been a major mess-up here. I was drinking in a pub in Ranelagh until 1.45am at a late bar here. Then I went into town for a bag of chips and I was arrested then. I didnt get arrested until 2.30 in the morning over a bag of chips and maybe calling a garda a scumbag. David Moffat speaks to our reporter Patrick I dont even know what I said. I was drunk. I had a few drinks in me. But it had nothing to do with rioting. The riots were well over by then. At 10pm the city was safe, according to the Garda Commissioner! I was arrested four hours later, so Im wondering how my name got into the national papers as having had something to do with these riots. I was only arrested for breach of the peace. The charge sheet that I got said it was for threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour nothing to do with rioting or anything like that. But 100pc, categorically, and absolutely, I had nothing to do with the riots. Moffat also complained bitterly about his treatment after his arrest, alleging he had been manhandled while in custody and has yet to get any of his possessions, including his shoes, wallet, bank card, phone and cash, back. He said he is an asthmatic and the treatment resulted in him falling to the ground and soiling himself. He said he was subsequently charged in the District Court in his absence as he was left in a cell beneath the courts. I want this part to get into the media, he said. Its now seven days later and none of my possessions have been returned to me. Im going around without a jacket. Ive no shoes, no wallet, no bank card, no social welfare card, no nothing. My asthma inhaler that I kept in the jacket of my pocket, everything that I owned, I havent gotten any of it back. And I was in every national newspaper last week that I was involved in the riots I was so far removed from it that its not even funny. Dublin in flames Asked about his conviction under hate crime legislation in the UK, Moffat responded: The thing is, England is a separate thing that was just me losing my head. Moffats conviction in the UK dates back to July 2017 when Willesden Magistrates Court in London heard he had stormed around to the Cricklewood Islamic Bookshop moments after hearing of the deaths of 22 music lovers at the Ariana Grande concert during the Manchester terror attacks. Prosecutor Bhavin Patel said witnesses heard an Irish accent and saw a man wearing a high-visibility jacket outside the shop shouting. He said: Mr Moffatt stood at the entrance of the shop and said, you Muslims are going to die and your shop is going to get blown up. Moffatt represented himself in court, but he paid a solicitor to cross examine witnesses for him. But he maintained he made no reference to bombing the shop, and said: I was angry about the terrorist attack in Manchester and Westminster. I walked into the shop and said: You have killed innocent people, you have blood on your hands, go back to your own country and walked out and went to work. Moffatt admitted using racially or religiously aggravated intentional harassment/alarm/distress words or writing on this basis at Hendon Magistrates Court. But he insisted he did not say all Muslims should be killed or bombed. Rabin Govindarajah, for Moffatt, said either the witnesses misheard what was said or were mistaken. Magistrate Penelope Allen rejected Moffatts versions of events and said they had found beyond all reasonable doubt Moffatt had used those words. Moffat was ordered to complete 100 hours of unpaid community work and pay costs of 705. Asked by the Sunday World this week whether he had any ties to the Far Right in this country, Moffat replied: Absolutely not. Im a man who ran for election in the local County Council in 2009 for Labour. So no, I have absolutely no connection, absolutely zero. I have nothing to do with the Far Right. Moffatt said he had been in a pub until 1.45am Asked whether he had any issues with Muslim people, he responded: No, zero. Asked why he acted as he did in Cricklewood, he responded: Read the court case, read it. Its all there. I did the hundred hours of community service. I paid the fine, its all there. Just Google it its all there. I was angry over the concert. It was in the morning I was on the way to work. But it was a rush of blood. There was a lot of tension in London at the time. The London Bridge attack was after happening and then there was the Manchester bombings there was a lot of tension. But its all there online. Gardai were alerted to the incident outside a pub on Ushers Quay in Dublin 8 A young man is in a critical condition in hospital following an attack involving a number of people in Dublin city centre overnight. The victim, who is aged in his 20s, was socialising with friends in the south-inner city before the assault occurred. Gardai were alerted to the incident outside a pub on Ushers Quay in Dublin 8 and discovered the man with serious head injuries. The male, who is a foreign national, was rushed to Beaumont Hospital where he remains in a coma this afternoon. A senior source said that the mans condition has been described as critical as a result of head injuries suffered during the assault. Gardai on patrol in Dublin city centre (Frank McGrath) Gardai are following a number of lines of inquiry in relation to this serious assault and are confident of identifying all parties involved. This was a serious attack and the victim remains in an induced coma in hospital, the source added. Gardai believe the man was socialising in a pub in the area when an altercation occurred with another group of men. When the victim left the bar, later, he was set upon by a number of men and physically assaulted and suffered serious head wounds. Gardai based at Kevin Street Garda Station are investigating the attack and are appealing for witnesses to come forward. No arrests have yet been made but detectives are conducting inquiries in the locality in an effort to identify all parties involved. Investigators are also attempting to track down a number of witnesses who were at the scene and are harvesting CCTV footage from the area. Extra resources have been deployed to the city in recent months, including the garda public order unit, following a number of high-profile violent attacks this year. This includes the attack on US tourist Stephen Termini on Talbot Street and the assault of a UK tourist in Temple Bar. In both cases a number of suspects have been identified and charged. Confirming last nights incident a garda spokesperson said: Gardai were alerted following disturbance involving a group of males outside a premises on Ushers Quay, Dublin 8 shortly before 9pm on Sunday 3rd December 2023. A male individual aged in his late 20s sustained a head injury in the course of the incident was removed from the scene by ambulance. He is currently being treated at Beaumont Hospital where his condition is understood to be serious. The scene was preserved overnight and examined by local scenes of crime officers. No arrests have been made to date and enquires are ongoing and anyone with information is asked to contact Kevin Street Garda Station 01 6669400 or the Garda Confidential Line 1800 666 111, the garda spokesperson added. From Templeogue College to top secret A still from video footage taken during a 2015 incident. Photo: US Department of Defence In 2017, The New York Times published a series of articles exposing a hidden Pentagon programme that investigated unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP). An Irish man, Dr Colm Kelleher (67), ran that secret operation. Over a Microsoft Teams chat from the Nevada desert, the AAWSAP (Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program) manager for the Defence Intelligence Agency, Dublin born scientist Dr Kelleher, described, what he believes, are the profound nature of his work. The idea that humans are the only life form in the universe is no longer true, that there is another intelligence very close to planet earth, is a shattering experience to internalise, he said. This was not taught in Templeogue College. Suddenly you are faced with a reality that should not exist. Theres that phrase, ontological shock. You make a shift psychologically and you never go back. For people who have experienced this, something changes and it becomes extremely important. People who have come face to face with this are very engaged. People who havent are on the side lines. In general, there is a psychological form of denial because if you admit this into your reality, there is a whole slew of things that are not true. That is why society is kind of split, as some people have been awakened to something that should not exist. Dr Colm Kelleher (Credit: Leo Ruickbie) An intelligence officer for the US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which is the primary source on earth for space threat analysis, made headlines in June when he said that: The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone. Retrievals are not limited to the United States. A vast array of our most sophisticated sensors, including space based platforms, have been utilized by different agencies, typically in triplicate, to observe and accurately identify the out of this world nature, performance and design of these anomalous machines, which are then determined not to be of earthly origin. Dr Kellehers journey to the upper echelons of Washington began after he graduated from Trinity College Dublin to go to Canada in 1984. He spent seven years there and moved to the States in 1991. I was born between Walkinstown and Terenure. I went to Templeogue College and then went to UCD to study Biochemistry and Chemistry. Then went to Trinity for my PhD. My background is in mainstream science. In 1996 I was working in an immunology research centre in Denver, Colorado, when I was looking at a science journal and I saw an ad recruiting scientists with a passion for the origin and evolution of consciousness in the universe. I took a leap into the un-known. Anomalies can lead to new doorways in science. Irish scientist with top secret clearance from US Government explains why we are not alone Dr Kelleher picked up the phone and talked to Robert Bigelow, who was head of the US National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS). He joined the organization in August 1996. Meanwhile, there was a ranch in Utah where a family were experiencing suspected UAP activity. This rancher was saying look, I see UFOs over my property every day. I have a herd of top end cattle, pure bred and expensive. I have lost a dozen to cattle mutilations. Im going out of business. Within a month I was up there with a PhD physicist and a veterinary pathologist. Evidence suggested UFOs seemed to be in the same place at the same time as these cattle were being mutilated. We were playing cat and mouse with something that did not want to be hunted. Cattle kept on being mutilated and disappearing. It was some kind of intelligence, some sort of high technology that could move around easily and surreptitiously. It chose whether or not be photographed, Dr Kelleher said. Orb UFO Dr Kelleher described, what he considers, his first encounter on the ranch and the types of UAP he encountered with his team. It happened within a month. I was standing with this physicist about 10 pm when this low flying, fast moving, very bright light came in over the ridge. Really fast, really low, I could see the structure behind the light. It was moving as fast as a jet fighter. It sped right across above our heads, then did a 180 degree turn, a U turn directly above. Completely silent. It re-traced its steps and vanished again beyond the ridge. Back in June, both NASA and the Pentagon revealed the existence of metallic orb UFOs which have been spotted all over the world. They stressed that there was no evidence the UFOs are "extraterrestrial" in nature, but admitted that better data is needed to understand some encounters. The report detailed movements that that have defied explanation. Dr Kelleher said he experienced similar UFO movements on the farm. There were multiple different types of orbs. Blue, yellow, white, red. All had different purposes. The blue were not to be messed with. They caused injuries to people and incinerated animals. They had profound negative, effects on peoples health. If you see a blue orb, run like hell. George Knapp and Dr Colm Kelleher Dr Kelleher wrote a book about his work called Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah. The Dubliner studied with NIDS until 2004 and then worked in biotechnology for 5 years in San Francisco. He got a call regarding a new Government programme that was opening in 2008. It was top secret and being run from the Defence Intelligence Agency. The focus was threat analysis for the UFO phenomenon. The official line from the Pentagon had always been Nothing here folks, move on. The fact that the DIA was studying them underneath the radar was of tremendous interest. DIA provided 22 million in funding over two years. It required top secret clearances. All facilities had to be top secret, not a trivial exercise. One of the first cases we investigated was the tic tac incident which years later featured in the New York Times article. F-18 fighters encountered multiple UFOs off the coast of San Diego. UFOs were coming in on ballistic missile trajectories, hurtling in at 80,000 feet, dropping down to just above the ocean. A carrier strike group was training- the Nimitz- with a bunch of destroyers, the most advanced radars on the planet. They tracked these things coming from space down to sea level. We contacted Washington, the guy running the operation for the DIA was James T Lacatski, the original rocket scientist. Our investigation remained top secret. We submitted our paper to the DIA in July 2009. That was eight years prior to the New York Times breaking that story. These UFOs were sighted by Top Gun pilots and tracked on multiple radar systems and infrared. There was no ambiguity. It was one of the most spectacular UFO engagements, probably in history. Mysterious object spotted in the sky over Co Fermanagh, photographed by Sheamus Greene in December 2020 Dr Kelleher believes the winds of change are blowing as UAP information reaches members of the public. The Senates amendment mandates all UFO technology hidden with aerospace contractors to be revealed. The US Government will take possession of reversed engineered crashed technology. 10 years ago official policy was nothing to see here. People who report UFOs are drunk or delusional or mentally unstable. That was standard part line until the story broke about our programme. Alleged UAP in Ireland (over Cork) Does Dr Kelleher know exactly what we are contending with? If I came down with an absolute this is what it is, I would not be telling the truth. The bottom line is we are dealing with very advanced technology. We are dealing with something that can manipulate human perception. It is something that can invade peoples lives and it is very deceptive. This phenomenon displays itself on its own terms. It is difficult to gather the evidence on this and it seems to be specifically engineered to sabotage the gathering of scientific evidence. There seems to be a fundamental deception there, I believe. During the 1950s, there seems to be attempts made to start new religions. We have a lack of understanding. The UFO phenomenon is very far ahead of us and I think it always has been very far ahead of us and continues to be. The good news is that Government has been taking this very seriously. Dr Kelleher, Mr Lacatski and award winning journalist George Knapp have penned a book called Inside the US Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations. The book contains their description of the secret UAP operation, focusing on the physics and engineering of UFO performance. Inside the US Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations How can they accelerate from 0 to Mach 15 in seconds? How can the come out of water and into lower earth orbit without surface wings or obvious propulsion systems? Mostly silent. From an aerodynamic perspective; what is happening? Are they extremely advanced drones? Are they AI drones? The book is to explain to the public that we were going after this 100 pc in secret. James T Lacatski got permission to write certain information by the Defence Office of Pre-publication Security regarding advanced technology and reversed engineering of these crashed vehicles. I am in the same position. I am in receipt of information I simply cant talk about. These things are monitored. Its not a slap on the wrist. You end up in prison for violation of security oath so we have to be very careful. Connacht astronomer, Dr Eamonn Ansbro, claimed 30 years ago that UFOs were orbiting earth on specific orbital tracks, and captured alleged footage of a tic tac UFO over Lough Key. I know Dr Ansbros material, said Dr Kelleher. From what I can see his premise is that there are a lot of probes on predictable orbits. Absolutely, Tic tac cases are perfect examples of that. They came in on very similar ballistic missile trajectory orbits, coming in at 80,000 feet. Very, very predictable. The USS Princeton had them on radar day after day. On day 5, they launched the F-18s to vector them. So, Eamonn Ansbros theory has a lot of merit. Another good thing about his theory is that it is very testable. It can be tested against multiple databases. Not easy, but definitely doable. Alleged triangle UAP / Craft Is there any workable explanation for the triangle UFOs which have been photographed by US Navy personnel and engaged with by the Belgian Air Force? At NIDS we did a lengthy investigation of the black triangles. 150 cases. These things were one hundred yards long, low flying, huge, coming in over neighbourhoods and interstate highways and flying at tree top level. Brightly lit and silent. After the first ten we thought it has to be an advanced tech Special Access Programme by the Air Force. But the pilots were taking enormous risks over populated neighbourhoods with experimental craft? After 100 cases we concluded they were not US Air Force. Pilots were violating all safety features. It was decided the phenomenon was mimicking SAPs. We created a hypothesis: bi-directional mimicry where the phenomenon was reflecting back to us what our advanced SAPs were doing. They were not us. But it was so confusing. Low flying, massive black triangles. One flew over Scott Air Force base in Illinois on January 5, 2000. Four separate police precincts with multiple officers watched it move around. It was unbelievable. The Pentagon has had a cushy number covering this up for years. The cat is out of the bag. Theres no putting the genie back now. Pentagon verified UFO image in the shape of a triangle. Project Morrigan is an initiative brought to Dail Eireann by researchers Chris Gaffney and Dr Eamonn Ansbro to establish an Irish research body to scientifically study UAP over Ireland. I think that would be great, said Dr Kelleher. For the Irish Government to get out in front of the UAP issue and take the initiative of forming a scientific body (with a reporting mechanism for the Irish public to report UAPs) to study UAPs. This would be very innovative. If the initiative was serious, with a couple of internal champions and not just a PR exercise, I would consider getting involved, Dr Kelleher added. The solicitor daughter of former Fianna Fail TD John Ellis has been struck off the roll of solicitors by the High Court today. Orla Ellis, the court heard, was consenting to the order and a number of other orders put before Mr Justice David Barniville, president of the High Court, on Monday. Last September the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal (LPDT) recommended strike off after hearing that deficits totalling in the region of 566,000 had allegedly been allowed to build up in the solicitors client account. The tribunal heard the real deficit figure was likely to be much higher as further claims were expected to be made. In the region of 666,758 had been paid out to former clients of Ms Ellis from the Law Society s Compensation Fund with over 560,000 recovered from Ms Elliss firm to date. On Monday, Mr Justice Barniville also ordered that some 128,000 be paid to the Law Society as restitution in relation to a deficit in the Societys Compensation Fund after payments were made to former clients of Ms Ellis. The judge, who also made a number of orders in relation to costs, also ruled that Ms Ellis swear an affidavit within the next 14 days in relation to her assets. The judge noted there had been findings of misconduct against Ms Elllis. Ms Ellis who practised in Co Leitrim did not attend the court hearing but her solicitor, John ODwyer, said she was consenting to all the reliefs sought by the Law Society. The Sunday Independent revealed earlier this year how the Leitrim-based solicitor secured a job with the Department of Social Protection after she was suspended by the High Court in August 2022. A Law Society investigation into Ellis firm found that large bequests left by clients of Ellis to charities such as the Salvation Army and Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind had not been paid as instructed to Ellis. Its a bit rich for Stockman to be ordering people about when it comes to drugs, his hands arent exactly clean Two weeks after he and seven other members of the East Belfast leadership group were stood down by Shankill Road HQ, no new command structure has been put in place and the individuals targeted all remain in the east of the city. A veteran loyalist hand-picked by UVF Chief of Staff John Bunter Graham and his sidekick Harmless Harry Stockman had been lined up to take over but it is understood he is reluctant to step in while the original group remains intact. Sources say he feels it would be inevitable he would become a target as Matthews and co retain considerable support. It leaves the UVF leadership in limbo as there is a growing feeling they started a process but have failed to complete it. News they had moved against East Belfast was greeted with a muted response; fears of a violent reaction were not realised but with two weeks gone nothing has changed. John Bunter Graham Veteran UVF members who have long campaigned for the Matthews gang to be expelled believe the paramilitary leadership has missed a trick by not moving against them more forcibly. Its like theyve done A but havent bothered with B and C, one source told us. He said it has been business as usual in the east and the longer the situation remains unresolved the more support the targeted group attracts. And the Sunday World can reveal the UVF in North Down and Newtownards have indicated their support for the Matthews gang. The three units work closely in the drugs trade and are unwilling to cut ties with their senior partner who supplies them with their product, predominantly sourced from southern-based organised crime gangs including the Kinahan cartel. East Belfast, who along with South East Antrim UDA have been described by the Paramilitary Crime Task Force as one of the most effective and ruthless organised units in the country, has established a sophisticated supply network not just on the island of Ireland but also across Britain. Ironically the Shankills attempt to isolate the gang mirrors what happened with the UDA. South East Antrim broke away from the mainstream organisation and set up their own command structure and criminal enterprise, shutting down the flow of cash to the UDA coffers. Despite attempts by the ruling Inner Council to move against them and continue to make a fortune from drugs racketeering and other criminal enterprises. East Belfast face a similar fate. They have been distanced from the Shankill for some time but have remained within the UVF fold. If the Shankill are serious about taking East Belfast down they should have physically taken them out, forced them out of business and out of the area, a sourced told us. They should have made it clear they will no longer tolerate their involvement in drugs. Rather than appear strong, what theyve done made them look weak and ineffective. Sources also say younger UVF members are dismissive of the organisations ageing leadership. Bunter has been in control for more than four decades and has been in ill-health in recent years. He is determined to see out his time at the top by overseeing the transition of the organisation away from paramilitarism but it is unlikely his vision will be realised. Instead the UVF is more likely to splinter into criminal gangs. In recent years he and sidekick Stockman have slowly removed known drug dealers from their ranks and replaced them with hand-picked replacements known to be anti-drugs. The blueprint is unlikely to be repeated in east Belfast. Harry Stockman The young membership view Graham and Stockman with derision old men who have had their day. Theyre not going to take orders from the likes of Harry Stockman; anyway its a bit rich for him to be ordering people about when it comes to drugs, his hands arent exactly clean when it come to it, one source said. Stockman was a member of a group known as The Sweeneys, an internal grouping within the UVF who are credited for being among the first to bring drugs on to the Shankill and involving the terror group in the drugs trade. By making their move, Bunter and Stockman are hoping it will be enough to stave off government threats to pull the plug on the public funding of community projects and ex-prisoner programmes. Matthews, who denies involvement in criminal activity and membership of the UVF, was assured by the Shankill that while he was being stood down he could continue to rely on the organisation for protection. Others who have been dubbed The Hateful Eight, and who include David McConnell, have been told youre on your own. The organisers of Katikatis MenzShed are hoping their new premises will attract locals back and see that the benefits extend well beyond the wooden projects. The volunteer group of mainly retired men gather a few times a week to work on their own woodwork or metalwork or repair items for the community. They also support each others mental health. Secretary Dave Watson says in the past, membership has been as high as 65 but the pandemic and then the move to temporary premises at Katikati College saw numbers decline. The new building is constructed on Middlebrook Drive. "Having our own premises will enable us to increase our attendance hours and grow our membership. Stay connected The concept of MenzShed started in Australia as a way for men to stay connected, says Dave. Its a practical outlet but also for mens wellbeing. Retirement can be a tough adjustment. "They go from working up to 10 hours a day to being at home. "Some can get a bit lost because they suddenly dont feel as needed or wanted. And MenzShed isnt just for retired men. The group welcomes younger men who may have personal projects to work on or need help with. We have guys who are welders, industrial chemists, police, farmers, builders, engineers and some come along with academic skills, says Dave. Theres a wealth of knowledge and expertise and were prepared to learn from each other. Easier to open up But he says the underlying aim is looking after mens mental health through physical work and camaraderie. Some of us dont want to share whats going on in our minds with our family because we dont want them to worry or just dont want to be a burden. "At the shed, its just easier to open up. We have to learn that our problems are not just ours. Theyre often things that a few of us are thinking about. MenzShed members have been active making Christmas gifts, local signage and even pest traps. Weve constructed a mud kitchen and toy storage box for kids at the local playcentre, we sharpen hedge cutters and fix outdoor furniture for locals. "We help with things that need to be repaired in return for a donation. It feels good to still be able to contribute to the community. New members are always welcome. To find out more, phone Dave on 027 696 3452 or email: kkmenzshed@gmail.com Fix crumbling teeth or keep their home? A retired couple say they are weighing up their choices in the face of a potential $48,000 council bill. Local Democracy Reporting looks into a Rotorua sewerage scheme years in the making. Owen, 82, and Margaret Dawe, 79, have owned their Lake Tarawera cottage for 40 years and lived there permanently for the last 13. Now they see their future threatened as they and 446 other property owners face the prospect of paying Rotorua Lakes Council $43,700 to $48,000 to be connected to a new sewerage scheme either in a lump sum or over 10 years. Construction of the $26.5 million to $29m scheme began in April. It was partially subsided by the Ministry for the Environment ($6.5m), with joint funding from the Rotorua Lakes Council and Bay of Plenty Regional Council (about $1.5m). Ratepayers were set to pay the rest. Rotoruas council said in a statement further funding options were being explored and future operational costs would be carried by all ratepayers. The regional council said the project aimed to minimise the risk of human waste entering the lake and protect it for future generations. The Dawes had not worked for the past 20 years and were horrified by what Owen described as an impossible situation that would ruin or change a lot of peoples lifestyles. Fears about lake quality declining prompted new rules around effluent treatment, which stopped new septic tanks being installed and ceased consent renewals for existing tanks in the area. Owen said there were affluent people at Lake Tarawera but there were also retirees, young families and homeowners who have had their property handed down through generations. While these properties may now be worth millions of dollars, that did not mean the people who owned them had much money in their pockets, he said. He knew of one elderly woman with two properties - she would need to pay twice. Owen understood there was a need for reticulation but he wanted the community to be able to pay for the scheme, as other communities had, over 25 years. Tarawera residents were offered a 10-year payback period last year. The cost for the scheme was averaged across homeowners but Owen believed their home would cost significantly less to connect than houses further away and harder to access. He said they were not really able to afford the scheme without dipping into money set aside for if they got sick or needed dental work. As you get older, your teeth get crumblier, he said. At the moment, he said, the couple could afford unforeseen expenses like a $500 dental bill. Do we let our teeth fall out then? Thats what it starts to get down to. The Dawes concern was they would need to sell their home. The couple wanted an extended payback period or the council to cover stage one costs - about $12,500 per property excluding existing subsidies. Lake Tarawera Community Group president Fred Stevens said the group was asking for a fair deal. Stevens said the community group sought a repayment period of 25 years like other lakeside communities were offered. If that was on offer initially, he believed the community would have found it reasonable. Lake Tarawera residents Dave Butler and Fred Stevens are part of a group that oppose the reticulation scheme costs. Photo / Laura Smith. Rotorua Lakes Council infrastructure and environment group manager Stavros Michael said reticulation aimed to prevent about 300,000 litres of untreated sewerage from seeping into the lake each day. Nutrient reduction was a secondary objective of the reticulation. He said the remaining uncertainty in the price depended on how much of the contingency was used in the build. Michael said the targeted rate for future operational, maintenance and renewal costs will be carried by all ratepayers in the district connected to the council wastewater networks an estimated extra $30 to $40 a year for most. Properties with two or more dwellings would be assessed for extra connection costs. Asked why the council was not paying more for the scheme, he said the targeted-rate decision would be made in 2025 or 2026 and cost information was based on the current funding plan. Further funding options were being explored. Reason for reticulation questioned Tarawera resident Rohan Wells worked in the area as a scientist for more than 40 years, including researching the health of the lake for the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa). Trophic level - which indicates lake water quality - was posted as good at 2.7 in 2009 at Lake Tarawera. This declined in 2014 to 3.1, rated as average. Wells said the University of Waikato notified the regional council in 2019 that its water analyses had been done incorrectly for years and when corrected, the 2020 water quality matched that of 2009. In a memorandum to the council, authors Chris McBride and Troy Baisden recommended problematic regional council data be substituted with Niwa data. Wells said overflow from residents septic tanks, with soil retention, would be well below 1 per cent of the total nutrient sources to the lake. Using estimates from the university and the regional council in 2012 on resident, visitor and public toilet usage, Wells calculated visitors contributed 82 per cent of the nitrogen and 64 per cent of the phosphorous to the sewage effluent. He believed a user-pays-based system would reduce residents contributions to the scheme. In his opinion: This absurd sum is an unprecedented targeted rate. It will put a number of residents out of their homes and markedly change retirement quality for many others. University of Waikato land and freshwater science chairman Deniz Ozkundakci said the trophic level index was only one part of assessing overall lake health. Rotorua district's Tarawera is one of the last communities to be on sewerage reticulation. Photo / NZME. The present level was indicated as 2.9. He said the council had worked with the university to identify the source of abnormal nutrient concentrations and the council had changed its methods to mitigate interference issues. Studies were produced in good faith and with the best information and resources available at the time, he said. It was important to consider and evaluate confidence levels in nutrient estimates. Combining results from different studies can be valuable in understanding the range of plausible nutrient loads. Regional councils Rotorua catchments manager, Helen Creagh, said septic tanks were not best practice for wastewater disposal in places like lakes. The project aimed to minimise the risk of human waste entering the lake and protect it for future generations. By the numbers: Tarawera sewerage scheme - Stage one, $13.4m, began in April and involved laying pipes and installing pump stations. It included provision for 100 undeveloped properties that would only pay for this stage when applying for building consent. - Stage two, $11.1m, would install pumps on existing properties and connect them to the mains network. - Residents are required by law to connect to a reticulated wastewater system if one is provided. - The latest complete cost of the project was projected to be from $26.5m to $29m. The council will pay $750,000. - Projected scheme costs fluctuated over the years. In the councils 2018-2028 Long-term Plan, it was $21,850 including GST. In 2021, the estimate was about $33,000 per household based on the total of $22.5m. Last year the total was estimated at $34m. Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air. Two coffees ended up costing one Bay of Plenty painter more than $100, and he is not alone. Painter Pete Wise, who bought two coffees from BeanNGone, a drive-thru coffee cart in Tauriko near Tauranga, was left stunned when he got a $96 parking fine for the short time his van was on the gravel getting coffee. I know coffees got more expensive, but not that much, says Pete Wise. Wise replied to the email, which had no name or phone number to dispute the charge. He got a reply saying: The vehicle was on Bean n Gone private property car park area without their consent, this area is reserved for their business use 24/7. Wise was astonished. I never even got out of my van. A camera has been installed at a coffee cart, and Tauranga locals are shocked at getting hundreds of dollars in parking fines. Photo supplied/Stuff. Hes not alone. A number of Tauranga people have been receiving these letters, and have been unsure why with some mounting to hundreds of dollars as penalties of $75 each week are added to the original $96. Tauranga Tasting Tours owners Lyn and Paul Marston were also perplexed to receive a fine. We were taking people from a cruise ship to Waitomo, but a girl from the Lakes wanted to join, so we arranged to meet her at Gull station. When our driver pulled in, the station was busy with lots of cars at the pumps, so he moved the van out of the way to the open space. Anyone would think it was part of the petrol station, the couple says. When they queried the bill via Parking Services email, they were told they must pay. Tauranga mum Tracey (whose surname Stuff agreed to withhold for her sons privacy) pulled into Gull to meet her father who had been looking after her son when hed become severely ill. I didnt turn off the engine. In the photos that came with the fine, my arm is sticking out of the car. I was well away from the coffee cart, not obstructing anyone. I was told it is still parking. I sent a definition of parking as the action of bringing a vehicle that one is driving to a halt, and leaving it temporarily, typically in a car park or by the side of the road. The signs were small and difficult to see, she says. The back of the signs face the entrance, and one sign appears to be in the Gull area. I hold a disability parking permit, so didnt need to park there. As soon as my father arrived with my son, we left. The coffee cart says it does a walk-up service to the car, but no one approached. She received a reply that she had to pay the fine on time, or penalties would be added, and the courts were mentioned. The signs for parking are difficult to see. Photo supplied/ Stuff. The land is next door to Gull service station, and is owned by Gull. Gull lease it to the coffee cart BeanNGone, a Gull spokesperson confirmed. It was only when Stuff inquired about the parking fines that Gull found out about the issue, he says. We have now spoken to BeanNGone, who lease the land from us, and have learned that they had contracted a private parking company which has installed cameras and put up signs. We advised them that we had not been informed of this activity, and it is not mentioned in the original lease agreement, says the spokesperson. The Auckland-based owner of BeanNGone, Steve Wood, told Stuff that hed originally contracted Parking Services Ltd, because he was having issues on the land with people parking in front of the truck, or stopping to urinate. It seemed easier to hand it over to a local company. Its not like I benefit from the fines. Its become a headache and taking up my time as people keep contacting me. Tauranga tasting tours stopped to pick someone up at Gull but the petrol station was busy, so they waited behind. Photo supplied. He told Stuff Gull had contacted him, and they didnt want the signs, cameras or parking business operating on their land. Wood was going to remove them. Owner of Parking Services, Jake Thomas, says he didnt believe peoples reasons. Theyre all liars. Give someone a parking ticket, and they will come up with no end of excuses. Stuff saw photo evidence that Tracey did not leave the car, as well as medical evidence that her son had visited a doctor with severe tonsillitis which that day had been obstructing his breathing. Thomas had not asked for any such evidence. The day Stuff visited the site, the signs were hard to find you would have to get out of your car to read. One is behind a pile of pallets, so it is unclear what they refer to. If they cant read signs they shouldnt be driving a car, says Thomas. A camera has been installed at a coffee cart.Photo supplied/ Stuff. Stuff relayed to Thomas the definition of parking, which involved leaving the vehicle or switching off the engine. He disagreed. You must be stupid if you dont know how parking works, if you put your wheels on private property, doesnt matter how long or if you keep the engine on, youre going to be fined. I have a business to run, and I'm here to make money. A worker from the garage next door to the land told Stuff that he got a fine for simply driving over the gravel, and had spoken to a distressed woman who had come regularly to get coffees, not realising there was any issue, and now had a bill of more than $700 in fines. Law firm director Joanna Pidgeon parking terms must be clearly displayed.Photo supplied/ Jason Dorday/ Stuff. Lawyer Joanna Pidgeon, who specialises in property and business law, says landowners and tenants have the right to take action such as ticketing vehicles when you park on their land as this is trespassing, but the parking terms must be clearly displayed. Signs should clearly state what the rules are, including time limits, fees and action that will be taken for breaking the terms. The charges also need to be reasonable if they exceed the cost to the landowner, tenant and the parking enforcer, they will be unreasonable, she says. If the writing is too small or not clearly relating to the area in question, this may impact on the ability to charge a fine. For example, if the vehicle was only there for three minutes while getting a coffee, is the amount of the fine reasonable? If the amount is unreasonable, you can try to negotiate a lesser amount. If they wont agree you can complain to the Disputes Tribunal which will only cost $45, and to the Commerce Commission, she says. The land where the coffee cart sits, is next to the Gull service station in Tauriko Tauranga. Gull own the land and lease it to the coffee cart, but Gull had no idea the parking business was operating until Stuff asked. Photo supplied/ Stuff. Tracey was so stressed about the fine and court threats, but was relieved to hear Gull was getting involved. Wise is still waiting for a call back about why he was fined $96 for getting two coffees. Dont they want any customers? I am a painter, not a coffee business, but it seems odd to fine your own customers. Hell no, Im not going to pay, its a racket. Annemarie Quill/Stuff Police are continuing to respond to multiple concerning emails throughout New Zealand, police have confirmed. "While many of the emails were opened in the weekend by organisations that were targeted, many other organisations are only just opening the email this morning," says a police spokesperson. Police say many organisations reported the emails to Police on Sunday, resulting in Police issuing a statement. The emails received on Sunday are similar to more than 70 anonymous bomb threat emails that were sent to schools, hospitals, courthouses and places of worship in late November. Up to 22 schools around Auckland were closed and the High Court evacuated after they were sent bomb threat emails on Friday, November 24. It came after 15 concerning emails were sent to schools and hospitals on Thursday, November 23. Police are working to establish the origin of the emails, and ask any organisations that receive them to report them. While any threats received will be treated with appropriate caution, the police spokesperson said they, have not established any actual threat at this time. "We ask that organisations who receive the emails continue to report them to Police, to assist in our ongoing enquiries to identify the origin of the emails." Any threat received will be treated with the appropriate caution however, Police have not established any actual threat at this time. Police are working with those impacted by the threats, and, each organisation may respond differently, according to their individual circumstances are the information available to them. "Police acknowledge how unsettling these emails are for all concerned and thank all involved for their cooperation," says a Police spokesperson. "Police will not be disclosing the names of individual organisations that received emails." Protest will mark the start of a new term in Parliament, with Te Pati Maori asking iwi to unite for a National Maori Action Day as MPs arrive in Wellington. Demonstrations across the country have been planned, although Stuff has heard differing accounts of how large this first round of protest will be. Te Pati Maori is planning protests across Te Ika a Maui (the North Island). In some cities, most likely Auckland and Wellington, there could be traffic disruption on key motorways leading to the cities. Activists connected to Te Pati Maori started speaking with different iwi and community leaders last week, with a focus on young activists. The day of action was originally titled Operation Dont F... With Our Whakapapa, but has since rebranded to a National Maori Action Day. The protest is in response to the National-led coalitions policies related to co-governance, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and also grievances such as the promise to repeal the smokefree generation law. While protest organisers hope to get the support of major institutions of te ao Maori, such as the Kingitanga and Ratana church, few institutions of such stature have publicly voiced support for the demonstrations. Ngai Te Rangi, a Tauranga-based iwi, has backed the protest. In a panui/newsletter, it asked its members and supporters to take to the streets on Tuesday morning, and will be marching along Hewletts Road from Jean Batten Drive to Totara Street between 7am and 8.30am. The iwi says it will be protesting the incoming Governments policies of removing Te Tiriti o Waitangi from legislation. It says the Government wants to rapidly dismantle three generations worth of work. "The Treaty of Waitangi affects all people of New Zealand, not just Maori," says an iwi representative. In Parliament itself, new Te Pati Maori MPs have vow not to pledge allegiance to King Charles, when theyre sworn in on Tuesday. There has been long-standing opposition from Te Pati Maori to pledging allegiance to the British monarchy. In 2011, Hone Harawira was booted from the House after swearing an oath to Te Tiriti o Waitangi rather than the Queen. Te Pati Maori also submitted a bill to change the oath, so that members would swear allegiance to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. In a statement, Te Pati Maori explains its issue with swearing allegiance to the King: Maori owe no allegiance to the genocidal legacy of the British Empire. There is no honour in the Crown. It is tainted with the blood of indigenous nations, and its throne sits at the apex of global white supremacy. Wednesday will see the Speech from the Throne, where the Governor General reads the Governments focus for the term ahead. National Maori Action Day on Tuesday Protests are pegged to start at 7am across the North Island. Te Pati Maori confirmed protests in Rotorua, Tauranga, and Wellington, Palmerston North, New Plymouth, Tokoroa, Whanganui, Whangarei, Masterton and Porirua. Multiple different protests are expected to start simultaneously across Waikato and Auckland. In a statement to Stuff, a police spokesperson says they are aware of the potential for gatherings. However, they say it's unclear at that stage how large those protests will be. Te Pati Maori confirmed its plans on Monday morning. Stuff has heard from marae and iwi leaders in Taranaki, Wellington, and Whanganui on Monday, who say they are also aware of the plans, but will be speaking with whanau throughout the day to discuss whether to support the demonstrations or not. On Sunday, Te Pati Maori campaigner Kiri Tamihere-Waititi posted a video asking for Maori influencers to get in touch. Whos ready to hit the streets and protest like youve never protested before, she asked. We need to get ourselves organised. Organised real well. Labour leader Chris Hipkins, on Monday, says he supports the right to protest but urged activists to do so within the bounds of the law. According to some communications about Tuesdays protest, roads across protests could target roads and motorways across Auckland, Waikato and Wellington. -Glenn McConnell/Stuff. Police are preparing for planned protests in various locations around New Zealand tomorrow morning, Tuesday, December 5. Te Pati Maori protest action is scheduled to take place between 7.30am and 9am and is likely to disrupt traffic in a number of areas, including the following: Motorways across Tamaki Makaurau Waikato Palmerston North Hawera New Plymouth Tokoroa Whanganui Porirua Whangarei Tauranga Rotorua Wellington "Police are working with organisers to provide advice on lawful protest, as well as any health and safety implications," says Assistant Commissioner Sandra Venables. "Officers will be highly visible across the roading network throughout the morning and, in some locations, will put measures in place to prevent protestors putting themselves and motorists in harms way. "Police recognise the right to peaceful protest and will be reminding protestors about lawful behaviour on our roads." Police say unlawful behaviour will result in enforcement action, either at the time or following the event if safety issues prevent immediate action. "Motorists in these areas are advised to plan ahead to mitigate any disruption to their travel," says Assistant Commissioner Sandra Venables. Anyone travelling to the airport or to any other time-sensitive commitment is advised to allow more time for their journey. News / National by Staff reporter TREASURY has allocated the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) ZW$116 600 000 000 (US$20 137 979) in the 2024 National Budget, which analysts say is likely to be whittled down by the controversial recall of opposition legislators and councillors.Zimbabwe, which held general elections on 23 August, is going back to the polls on 9 December following the recall of main opposition Citizens' Coalition for Change (CCC) MPs by the party's self-proclaimed secretary-general Sengezo Tshabangu.While Zec spent a hefty US$188 million on the general elections, the upcoming by-elections are calculated to eat into Zec's new budget, which political analyst Rashweat Mukundu has described as a waste of taxpayers' money."There is no other way to describe this level of wastage other than failed leadership. Zimbabwe is facing a cholera epidemic and a drought, with millions struggling to get a decent meal daily, yet Zec will spend US$5 million on by-elections that were politically contrived by Zanu-PF, Tshabangu, Parliament leadership and the judiciary," Mukundu told The NewsHawks."The country is trapped in a political crisis that is the making of Zanu-PF and its desire for unfettered control of everything."Zec is also facing funding constraints after the European Union (EU) pulled its US$5 million funding to the ZIM-ECO 2 project after the sham elections, further casting funding of the polls into doubt.The EU had been funding the ZIM-ECO 2 project to enhance Zec's capacity to conduct the electoral process, with the aim of contributing to the improvement of the entire electoral cycle, not limited to elections alone."The project supporting Zec, which is managed by UNDP [United Nations Development Programme] and scheduled to run until December 2024, is currently under scrutiny due to concerns raised by several international Electoral Observation Missions (EOMs) regarding the independence and transparency of Zec during the 2023 harmonised elections," the EU said in a statement after the elections."The recent preliminary statements from multiple EOMs, including the EU EOM, have raised concerns about Zec's management of the electoral process, particularly regarding its independence and transparency."The EU contributes together with other donors to a UNDP-managed project aiming at enhancing Zec's institutional and technical capabilities to fulfil its constitutional mandate. In response to these concerns and in adherence to responsible management of EU development cooperation funds, the EU has initiated a procedure to suspend its contribution to this project."The EU also provided funding for the purchase of a computer server for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) before being shut out and denied access when the hardware was delivered ahead of the disputed 2018 general elections which President Emmerson Mnangagwa is accused of stealing.During the August elections, Zec failed to provide ballot paper on time, which saw some voters casting their ballots deep into the night, sparking outrage from the opposition and key election observers.Zec has however shifted blame on court challenges against it for the challenges in the production and distribution of ballot paper."During the election activities, auditors were deployed in all the provinces including districts. The Ballot paper and voters' rolls for the 2023 harmonised elections were printed by the Printing and Minting Company of Zimbabwe (PCMZ) formerly Fidelity Printers. The commission faced challenges in the production and distribution of ballot papers," Zec said."These challenges emanated largely from what has now come to be called lawfare against the commission. The commission faced an unprecedented number of court challenges (more than 100 applications) arising from the outcome of the nomination courts."The court challenges derailed its preparations and roadmap as it sought to attend to the court challenges and to meet the proclaimed electoral timeline." Heavy industry is set to stay in Mount Maunganui but stricter controls around what will be allowed in future have been put in place. Mount Maunganuis industrial area, that sits on the western side of the isthmus, was classified as a polluted airshed in 2019. A Te Whatu Ora report from July said poor air quality in Mount Maunganui was creating significant health risks. Whareroa Marae on Taiaho Place has seen the industry grow up around it, and the marae believes industry was slowly poisoning its people. In 2020 the marae took its concerns to the Tauranga City Council and Bay of Plenty Regional Council calling for the managed retreat of heavy industry away from their whenua. An advisory group was set up and an investigation into the potential for managed retreat of heavy industry from Totara Street, south of Hewletts Road began. In March 2023, a Tauranga City Council report revealed there was no feasible pathway for relocation because many of the industrial activities had existing user rights under the Resource Management Act. A further report was done, and the Mount Industrial Planning Study said options for restricting land use included requiring any new heavy industrial activity to obtain land use consent. Whareroa Marae residents believe they are slowly being poisoned by air pollution. Photo: John Borren/SunLive. On Monday, the Strategy Risk and Finance Committee decided to not permit any new emitting industries within the Whareroa and Newton Road and MacDonald Street areas. It also looked to transition to lighter industry over the long term in these areas. As well as restricting housing and accommodation within current commercial zoned areas of the Mount Maunganui airshed. The council would also engage with Whareroa Marae about future aspirations around residential activity. Mount Maunganui Industrial Study consultant David Phizacklea said they had heard a lot from mana whenua, the community, and businesses in the past year. Commission chair Anne Tolley said one of the challenges was most businesses didnt want to move. She said there was an inherent conflict between the marae and industry. We have an ancestral piece of land right in the heart of an industrial area and New Zealand's largest export port and that's not going to change, but whats been put there is a vision to try and manage that. Those businesses will continue because they have existing use rights, but we want to make sure that they are able to make changes to the way they operate that improves their environmental outcomes. Commission chair Anne Tolley said there was an inherent conflict between the marae and industry. Photo: John Borren/SunLive. Changing the types of industry in the airshed could take decades, said Tolley Commissioner Stephen Selwood agreed: The land use change is going to be slow and relatively blunt in terms of achieving the outcomes in a timely way. Resource consents and environmental monitoring would have a more immediate effect, he said. Committee member Rohario Murray asked how the vision balanced land use, supporting business growth, community wellbeing and the importance of the area to mana whenua, Ngai Tukairangi and Ngati Kuku hapu. Phizacklea replied it was a balancing act in terms of how the vision was implemented. What we didnt want to do was lose sight of the fact that Whareroa is the ancestral home for Ngati Kuku and Ngai Tukairangi. His report to council said businesses did not support the regulations. Some Whareroa Marae residents believe they are slowly being poisoned by air pollution. Photo: John Borren/SunLive. Murray also wanted to remind people: Industry is here right now and has been for a little while, Ngai Tukairangi and Ngati Kuku hapu of Ngai Te Rangi have been here for much longer. And so when we say the industry is not going anywhere, mana whenua are not going anywhere. General Manager Strategy Growth and Governance Christine Jones said in a statement the council could only effect change for future users of the land. It couldnt address existing land users that have existing use rights, she said. The issues we are now seeing in the industrial area have been generations in the making. Jones said to achieve their vision they will work with the Bay Plenty Regional Council, mana whenua, businesses and other stakeholders. The recommendations would be put into the Mount to Arataki Spatial Plan which will be presented to the council in the first quarter of 2024. Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air. Hundreds of local iwi and supporters are marching in Tauranga this morning in a display of unity and advocacy. Local iwi Ngai Te Rangi and hundreds of supporters have taken to Hewletts Road, Mount Maunganui on Tuesday morning during a National Maori Action Day protest, expressing their concerns and discontent with the National-led Governments stance on crucial Maori issues. The protest is in response to the National-led coalitions policies related to co-governance, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and also grievances such as the promise to repeal the smokefree generation law. Protesters marched along Hewletts Road and Totara Street using the bus lane and the footpath to prevent the halt of traffic. Ngai Te Rangi CEO Paora Stanley says there are 17 actions that the coalition Government is taking that are anti- Maori. Gathering at Whareroa Marae at 6.30am, iwi members and supporters began their protest with a karakia before walking from Jean Batten Drive along Hewlett Road to Totara Street and back to the Whareroa Reserve. Protesters begin their march. Photo: Ayla Yeoman/ SunLive The iwi says it is protesting the incoming Governments policies of removing Te Tiriti o Waitangi from legislation. It says the Government wants to rapidly dismantle three generations worth of work. "The Treaty of Waitangi affects all people of New Zealand, not just Maori," says iwi leader Charlie Tawhaio. The present government is trying to eradicate our people legislatively and pay off their election debt to their racist funders and backers, says Paora. Of the 17 actions he lists that are anti- Maori, Paora says of the coalition Government's plans to axe Te Aka Whai ora they did very little, and the Kainga ora review they did nothing. The other 15 actions the new Government are taking, Paora says are also anti- Maori. Hundreds flow down the side of Hewletts Road. Photo: Ayla Yeoman/ SunLive. National, Act and NZ First have agreed to support a Treaty Principles Bill up to the Select committee process, but it is unclear whether it will make it to a referendum or not, says Paora. Which means I think National will try to kill it before it reaches select committee. Its a fight National doesnt need, its also indicative of Seymour now going quiet on it, hes obviously been told to put his big undies on and shaddup. He will take some solace that it gets a little traction, and remain quiet when it gets destroyed along the way. Its intent from Seymour is anti-Maori. "Honour te Tiriti". Photo: Ayla Yeoman/ SunLive. Smoking legislation Smoking legislation College of Public Health Medicine president Sir Collin Tukuitonga has said the reversal of the smokefree amendments would result in about 1000 extra deaths over the next decade, mostly Maori, and cost the health system $1.3 billion. Commenting on this, Paora says public health teachings are really clear. Our people will die in disproportionate numbers. Passionate protesters march in unison. Photo: Ayla Yeoman/ SunLive. Medical School MAPAS - Maori and Pacific Admission scheme has been operating since 1972 and helps to increase the numbers of Maori and Pacifica entering Medical School. I have taught on this programme; its immensely useful in getting Maori doctors on board, says Paora. Particularly in this time or the lack of Maori doctors in the system at the moment. Pakeha students hate this scheme because they believe there are less seats for them at the highly contested medical school classes. He says the newly formed Government have a clearly anti- Maori focus in its approach to MAPAS. Protesters of all ages rise for the cause. Photo: Ayla Yeoman/ SunLive. Repeal of Canterbury Regional Council The Repeal of Canterbury Regional Council (Ngai Tahu representation Act 2022) is a direct attack on Ngai Tahu and is anti- Maori, says Paora. Maori wards All three parties [National, ACT and NZ First] have agreed to restore the right to local referendum on the establishment or ongoing use of Maori wards, including requiring a referendum on any wards established without referendum at the next local body elections, says Paora. This is an anti- Maori process and has brought about anti- Maori sentiment. The three parties forming the new government have said all public service departments should have their primary name in English, except for those specifically related to Maori. This is an anti- Maori sentiment. Disestablishing Te Pukenga Maori in high numbers study at Te Pukenga, at least they were starting to make traction in the sector with our people. A sign carried by a protester. Photo: Ayla Yeoman/ SunLive. Psudoephridrine sales The purpose of this ban was to decrease the numbers of Methamphetamine on the streets, says Paora. Psudoephridrine is a major component used in the manufacture of Methamphetamine Meth is rife amongst our people and putting more of this drug on the street through the increase in Psudoephridrine is terrible for our people. Legislation to ban gang patches Paora says legislation to ban gang patches will only drive gangs in a different way and is anti- Maori in both intent and direction. I believe that legislation will drive a legal response from the gangs and everyone will get tied up in court. At least when gangs are wearing patches we will know they are in our midst. Its more click based politicking not recognizing the heavy white collar crime thats driving gangs. Paora says its easier to classify Maori as angry and gangster. Yet there are some fantastic Maori programmes which are proven to lower incarceration rates, for example Te Pai Oranga. This and other crime programmes coming out of the coalition government is about locking up people. At some point this country has to learn it wont arrest its way out of crime. Protesters marching along Hewletts Road. Photo: Ayla Yeoman/ SunLive Section 27 cultural reports Stopping taxpayer funding for section 27 cultural reports means our people wont be heard in a court with respects to their cultural issues. Its a direct attack on Maori and clearly an anti-Maori sentiment. Public Service cuts The coalition government is planning to move public service cuts from 2 per cent to 6.5 per cent. The Public Service is already torn apart, this will fundamentally destroy them. Our people will struggle getting traction in a broken public health system. Restoring 90-day employment trial periods for all businesses National's leader Christopher Luxon confirmed in August the party would bring back the old settings for 90-day trials. This law disadvantages Maori and immigrants and is put hard against our people in employment. It was once only for government departments but now its across the private sector, says Paora. "Treaties are not meant to be settled, they're meant to be honoured". Photo: Ayla Yeoman/ SunLive. Repealing Labours Three Waters legislation Its what National campaigned on and became a racist voice against Maoridom, says Paora. Repealing Labours Resource Management Act 2.0 laws Nationals 100 day action plan includes a commitment to repeal Labours RMA 2.0 legislation and introduce a fast-track consenting regime. A lot of this [Labours new bills] was recognition of Maori voice in RMA, says Paora who says Nationals plans for the RMA are anti- Maori. Increasing virtual participation in court proceedings If you have ever been in virtual court proceedings it cuts off a lot of Maori nuances in the court process. Its a cost saving measure that doesnt have the full Maori persons context to be heard. The chant. Photo: Ayla Yeoman/ SunLive. Hewletts Road protest on Tuesday The protest is also highlighting longstanding grievances and emphasizing the need for genuine dialogue and meaningful change. Ngai Te Rangi launched a series of protest actions in September when iwi leader Charlie Tawhiao highlighted that the Ngai Te Rangi Settlement Deed, inked in 2013 to address historical grievances, remains in a state of stagnation as the Crown fails to make substantial progress. Frustrated by the prolonged delay in achieving justice, Ngai Te Rangi initiated a traffic disruption in Totara Street to draw public attention to the serious issue, and to remind the Crown, despite which political party was going to form the next Government, that their case is urgent, requiring priority. When we signed our Deed in 2013 it was with the expectation that the painful, and in our view unreasonable concessions that we had to make in order to get our settlement across the line would be the end of it, says Charlie. He says ten years from the date of signing is far too long for the settlement to be resolved, saying they signed it in good faith. Over the decade of delays, sadly, some of the local iwi leaders have passed away without seeing justice delivered. Pablo Rodriguez Granada Monday, 4 December 2023, 19:39 Compartir Copiar enlace WhatsApp Facebook X LinkedIn Telegram Kneeling on the sand, Manuel Perez looks like an ancient philosopher. He is not dressed in a typical himation cloak, but his clothing, a fluorescent orange overall, is equally humble. Like ancient philosophers he is wise, but his wisdom is spoken through his hands. They glide over the ground with delicacy, producing circles, straight lines, ellipses, spirals, a whole galaxy of shapes that he will later engrave in stone for future generations to enjoy. This is his special skill, a unique form of art because he is, together with his brother Jacinto, the last crafstman of this kind in Granada. It is a traditional skill that has shaped the city's appearance for centuries and is still alive despite the difficulty of it. San Nicolas, Caldereria, Alhacaba, Boqueron... the most beautiful places in Granada have faces of stone, faces that are almost entirely crafted by the hands of the Picantes. This is the nickname given to this local family that has been shaping the cobbled streets of the city for almost a century. Manuel and Jacinto Perez are its latest heirs to represent the family on the street. Both were trained under the tutelage of their father, who introduced them to a trade that is in the Andalusian DNA. "It used to be practised in all the provinces, but now it only exists in Cordoba and Granada, where it is the most popular," explained Manuel. Both he and his brother quickly learned to distinguish the two provincial styles. In their childhood, during the school holidays, they joined the family's work crew in Granada. Through this they became immersed in this tradition that differs from the style used in Cordoba. The Cordoba style is different in that it does not use a template and is therefore much more original and complex. In Granada, it is all down to the craftsman's hand. It is he who decides what is painted and how it is done. The craftsmen working on a recent pavement design. Alfredo Aguilar The pomegranate is the most traditional icon to draw in the streets of Granada. Its design, however, is not without controversy. The debate lies in the shape. "There are those who prefer it circular and those who prefer it square," said Manuel. He of course knows how to do both. On the pavement of Alhacaba, where he has been working for the last few weeks, he has been trying out both. The first one is done simply with a compass, it is crowned by three triangles and has a flower at the back where the typical stems with leaves emerge as ornaments. The second is somewhat more complex. Perez makes it from a quadrilateral which he then uses as a starting point to freestyle projections. "The crown, in this design, goes inwards not outwards," specified Perez as he finished off the stem and leaf decorations that can be seen in many of the city's streets. Whatever the shape of the pomegranate, the drawing contains a secret, a detail that dates back to ancient Greece. "We always follow the golden ratio. It gives a better feeling to the drawing, it gives it a better appearance," he explained. Anyone can test this for themselves. The pomegranate where Granada's Calle Azacayas joins Santa Paula, for example, follows the same relationship between the parts as the ceiling and columns of the Parthenon or the height and width of many of Leonardo da Vinci's or Michelangelo's works. But Granada's stone pavements are not limited to drawings, they are three-dimensional and textured works of art. This is provided by the stone. In the past, when Manuel and Jacinto were learning the trade, the materials came from the Darro and Genil rivers themselves. "When the mule drivers took the sand out of the riverbed, they were told to put aside the rounder pebbles and they were the ones that were used," he said. Now it is banned by law. However, technology has evolved and machines have been created that recreate the erosive effect on many materials they use, such as slate or Macael marble, which are the ones commonly used in Granada's pavements and give them their trademark contrast between white and grey. Granada's cobbled streets are not limited to drawings, they are three-dimensional and textured works of art The laying process is relatively simple. First, the working area is flattened and a base of cement and sand is poured over it. The craftsman draws the chosen design on this layer: pomegranates, flowers, geometric designs or eight-pointed stars, in the Andalusian style, with a frame around them. Then comes the work of the rest of the crew, with three people who lay the slate pebbles - the grey stone - that give shape to the decoration. The marble, used to fill gaps, is then laid. It is important to know that the stones are not just laid in any old fashion. There are also different techniques for this. The most common are herringbone patterns. "They are sunk halfway down and then placed in a row. If they are placed more in line, it gives the sensation of more detail and that is why we usually use them to trace the roughest parts of the drawing," he said. It is not a job for the impatient. Because it is so detailed, a normal crew of three workers can work on just eight to nine square metres in a day. The best streets Metre by metre, the best streets of Granada have been blessed by the hands of the Picantes in recent decades. "From the Mirador de San Nicolas, the old part of the Mirador, which my father and grandfather did, to the part of the little church square and the mosque, we have done them all ourselves. Also the Plaza de las Castillas, the Plaza de San Nicolas, everything from the Gran Via to the Cathedral, the Carrera de la Virgen, the Royal Hospital...," said Manuel, who told us that, for both his brother and himself, walking around Granada is like flicking through an album of memories. The demanding nature of the Picantes means that sometimes their job is not always pleasant. Sometimes, the rush to finish the works and open the streets to traffic prevents the base from setting properly and part of the ground sinks. Another problem comes with renovations that do not match the previous work. The craftsman acknowledged that he recently went to remedy a stain he left at one street in San Nicolas. "It was a work I did 20 years ago and it was beautiful, but recently they removed a signpost and put a cement slab on top of it. Every time I passed it, it drove me crazy. So one day I stopped and fixed it. The town hall said to me 'but has anyone asked you to fix that?' I said no. It hurt me to see it...," he admitted, very seriously. The craftsman also works regularly in countries such as France, Canada and Saudi Arabia The craftsman, while he also works regularly in countries such as France, Canada and Saudi Arabia and has designs in royal palaces, has his favourite work in his home city. Last year he was working in the Caldereria area. "I am very demanding and I am never completely satisfied, but if I have to pick out one piece of art, I would have to choose the part of the street that goes uphill," he said. This is the legacy of the Picantes, the artists who have been drawing the face of the streets of Granada for four generations. Scammers pretending to be Denzel Washington or Hugh Jackman target women in Malaga There have been three cases in the province where the victims handed over between 22,000 and 35,000 euros Juan Cano Malaga Monday, 4 December 2023, 11:53 Compartir Copiar enlace WhatsApp Facebook X LinkedIn Telegram Scammers pretending to be actors or friends of stars such as Denzel Washington and Hugh Jackman are targeting women and demanding they hand over cash to help out with their charity work. Police issued a warning following three cases in Malaga province where the victims sent a total of 75,000 euros to people they believed belonged to the charities of celebrities. They were sent Facebook or Instagram friend requests by scammers who convinced them they were friends of Denzel Washington, Hugh Jackman and Sam Heughan. The victims thought they had struck up a friendship with them, and were asked to pay 75,000 to help the social work of the actors, but were scammed instead. Police said despite the initial contact occurring on social media, the conversations happen in the chat section of Gmail. The pseudo actor, or friend of an actor, then asks the victim to make a donation to one of the celebrity's charities. They start by requesting a small amount, between 200 and 700 euros, and then ask the victim to meet in person. The alleged Denzel Washington - or any other of the profiles - redirects the victim to his personal agent and offers various contact options through applications such as Meeting, Meeting plus or Private Meeting, according to investigators. The Private Meeting option is accessed by paying 3,600 euros and allows personal contact with the actor. However, once the sum has been paid, the meeting is postponed with various excuses such as the recording of a new film or that the actor is going through a relationship break-up. From that moment on, the relationship becomes secret, which is a twist carefully constructed by the scammer. The supposed Denzel Washington says he needs money without his wife's knowledge for the divorce proceedings and the victim creates an account on a fictitious website to make transfers to him. The victim is then convinced by the actor's agent that they are planning to come to Spain and that, in order to see them, 3,000 euros must be paid to hire private security. Scammers targeted women aged between 45 to 61 in the reported cases; one of them has a mental disability. The three women affected in Malaga paid between 22,000 and 35,000 euros each. Police seize more than 5,000 litres of adulterated olive oil in Spain Agents raided Italian oil-processing sites and in the provinces of Ciudad Real, Jaen and Cordoba and arrested 11 people J.M.L. Ciudad Real Monday, 4 December 2023, 18:50 Compartir Copiar enlace WhatsApp Facebook X LinkedIn Telegram Police in Spain and Italy have arrested 11 people and seized more than 5,000 litres of adulterated olive oil after smashing an international gang. Officers raided Italian companies and cooperatives in the provinces of Ciudad Real, Jaen and Cordoba, where 16 oil tanks and more than 5,200 litres of adulterated olive oil ready for sale to the public were seized. More than 91,000 euros in cash and four high-end vehicles were also seized, while several bank accounts were blocked. Suspicions were first raised when Guardia Civil officers discovered a series of anomalies while inspecting a lorry that was transporting olive oil in the Ciudad Real area. It led to the uncovering of an operation that had branches in Spain and Italy, and was designed to distribute adulterated olive oil on the global market. Dirty oils The Spanish arm of the organisation was responsible for mixing cloudy oils - a sub-product of the olive oil producing process - with better quality olive oil so as to achieve the correct levels of fats and other substances to allow them to be sold. They also impeded traceability by not registering their company's oils. Fewer people are purchasing olive oil in Spain as its price surges due to the country's drought. This year's extreme weather resulted in one of the poorest olive harvests in the past 20 years and a shortage of produce. The price per litre is close to or even more than ten euros. In the complex tapestry of European labour relations, the European Works Council (EWC) directive has played an important role in fostering a shared understanding of transnational challenges faced by large multinational companies. However, as winds of change blow through the corridors of the European institutions, the potential revision of the EWC directive looms on the horizon, prompting strong responses from the business community. The backdrop of this debate is the evolving landscape of EWCs, originally established in 1994 through an EU directive, revised in 2009. Currently, approximately 1,200 EWCs are in operation, covering a workforce of over 17 million employees across the European Union. Earlier this year, the European Parliament passed an own initiative report, which called for a comprehensive revision of the EWC Directive. The report emphasised the need expanding the scope of EWC, for more-frequent EWC meetings, expanded access to information as well as stricter penalties, injunctive relief and termination of business decisions for corporations that fail to adhere to these informational rights. Responding to this call, the EU Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights, Nicolas Schmit, announced the Commissions commitment to presenting a legislative proposal amending the EWC directive by the beginning of 2024. As a testament to the success of the current framework, several Swedish enterprises have experienced positive outcomes through their collaboration with EWCs. Many enterprises emphasize the importance of practical implementation and the ongoing dialogue facilitated by the existing directive. As a company with an existing EWC agreement, we see a real risk of adding more complexity in both the process and in the interpretations of the guidelines Ebba Nygren, Global Labor relations director at Essity, a member of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise adds, Essity, among many other enterprises in the European market, values and promotes good union relations together with a constructive social dialogue. The collaboration with the EWC is something that Essity has built up over the years that is formalized in an existing company EWC agreement. The Confederation of Swedish enterprise therefore contends that a revision may inadvertently introduce unnecessary complexities, disrupting the delicate balance achieved through years of collaborative efforts between companies and employee representatives around Europe. Ebba Nygren from Essity, adds We can only agree with the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise. As a company with an existing EWC agreement, we see a real risk of adding more complexity in both the process and in the interpretations of the guidelines from the updated directive. We also do not see a need for an introduction of sanctions on an EU level. This is something is and should continue to be delt with in line within each country. To summarize, for us the existing EWC directive has formed a good basis for a collaborative social dialogue that benefits both the company and its employees. A more complex legislation may risk and challenge todays well-working setup. While our preference is to maintain the current framework of the EWC directive, we acknowledge the potential benefits of modernization Reflecting on the potential revision of the EWC directive, there may be a need for adjustments to better align with the new digital reality faced by companies and employee representatives. Mattias Dahl, Deputy Director General and Head of Labour Market and Labour Relations at the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise adds While our preference is to maintain the current framework of the EWC Directive, we acknowledge the potential benefits offered by modernisation. Were the Commission to proceed with a revision, we call for changes that facilitate the incorporation of online meetings. This adjustment would not only align with the evolving digital landscape and green transition but would also contribute to the efficiency and accessibility of the EWC processes. This would ensure a continued transnational collaboration in an increasingly interconnected world. News / National by Staff reporter REGULAR power cuts and pipe bursts are causing water shortages in Bulawayo amid calls by residents for authorities to find a lasting solution to the challenge.Bulawayo town clerk Christopher Dube last week told residents that there would be interruption of water supplies to all areas due to a power surge at the Fernhill plant.He said this would result in areas experiencing longer water-shedding periods as the system would be empty and requires significant continuous pumping for the levels to stabilise."The City of Bulawayo would like to advise members of the public that there will be water supply interruption and an immediate temporary suspension of the daily restoration strategy to all city areas," Dube said."The city had interruptions in raw water delivery from Ncema via Fernhill for treatment at Criterion due to a power surge on Wednesday at Ncema and Fernhill as a consequence of pumping interruptions system stabilisation is a long process thereafter."On November 23, Dube also notified the residents of another water supply interruption and suspension of the daily restoration strategy to all city areas due to a burst pipe on the Sulzer Raw water line between Bulawayo Drive and Hillside Road to the Criterion water treatment plant.He said the interruption resulted in reduced treatment and clear water production at Criterion Waterworks from November 22 to 25.Dube said to protect reservoirs from collapsing due to reduced treatment and production, the City of Bulawayo would temporarily suspend the daily restoration strategy and reduce supply to all city areas until remedial works were completed and optimum treatment resumed.Council also notified the residents that there was a possible water supply interruption due to the scheduled Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company's maintenance at the Criterion Waterworks.He said this would also result in reduced treatment and clear water production at the Criterion Waterworks.Bulawayo Progressive Residents Association secretary for administration Thembelani Dube said the perennial water pumping interruptions were due to neglect by authorities at council."The water interruptions have greatly affected residents as they go for longer days without water supplies, exposing them to unsafe water sources which may lead to water-borne diseases," Dube said.Bulawayo's water challenges come at a time when Zimbabwe is battling a cholera outbreak that has claimed more than 150 lives. George Santos movie in works A movie about former U.S. Rep. George Santos is in the works at HBO Films, according to Variety. Based on Mark Chiusanos book The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, expect to see the disgraced New York Republican skewered as Frank Rich (Veep, Succession) is executive producing the forensic and darkly comic look at Santos many falsehoods and how he was elected to Congress (and then expelled on Friday). Casting has not been announced, but Mike Makowsky (Bad Education) is set to write the screenplay. SNL highlights Speakers of Santos, Saturday Night Live bid farewell to the former congressman with an Emmy-worthy cold open featuring Bowen Yang performing a parody of Elton Johns Candle in the Wind (as Scandal in the Wind). Other SNL highlights included host Emma Stone as a talking poster, a game show with odd prizes, an ode to being Fully Naked in New York, and musical guest Noah Kahan. Godzilla x Kong trailer Titans unite in the first trailer for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, a sequel to 2021s Godzilla vs. Kong. The larger-than-life characters will have to team up to face a new threat in the latest chapter in the MonsterVerse films, with Adam Wingard returning as director and a cast that includes Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Kaylee Hottle, Fala Chen, Rachel House and Dan Stevens. Godzilla x Kong roars into theaters April 12, 2024. MORE BUZZ: Macaulay Culkin receives star on Hollywood Walk of Fame ( E! John Woo says Tom Cruise wanted spy camera in M:I2 editing room ( RS The Boys season 4 trailer: Somehow things got even bleaker ( SF Billie Eilish confirms she came out: I didnt realize people didnt know ( E! Susan Sarandon apologizes for comments about Israel, Hamas ( ET Rolling Stone names the top 100 songs of 2023 ( RS Supernatural actor Mark Sheppard says he had 6 heart attacks ( E! Halo season 2 trailer: Interplanetary war breaks out ( SF Cash Me Outside star Bhad Bhabie pregnant with first child ( BB Florence Pugh hit in face by thrown object at Dune 2 event ( E! House of the Dragon season 2 teaser: Dragons vs. dragons ( RS KISS say farewell to live touring, become digital avatars ( AP Travis Kelce, Taylor Swift spotted at Kansas City bar with Patrick, Brittany Mahomes ( E! Buzz is a daily roundup of entertainment news about movies, TV, music and celebrities. Naming your canine companion is one many pet owners take seriously, picking out just the right moniker for their best pooch. A recent report revealed the most popular dog names in every state, including New York. According to U.S. News & World Reports 360 Reviews, an estimated 69 million U.S. households include a dog. The reviews team analyzed 811,798 data points from a third-party pet insurance industry partner in September and October of 2023. The 800,000+ data points analyzed included dog names and state residence, which was then filtered by state and ranked. It turns out, our pet names dont vary that much. The number one dog name in New York was revealed to be Bella. That may come as no surprise as Bella was the most popular dog name in America, topping the list of 37 states as well as the District of Columbia. Twilight and Harry Potter fans, we see you. Bella also made the top pet names list of 2020, as did Luna and Max. The study also revealed in the top 100 pet names that a number of them are names of pagan deities including Apollo, Luna, Zeus, Loki and Thor. Some pet parents opt for food names like Pepper, Honey, Peanut, Cookie and Oreo. Is your pets name in the top names of New York or the United States? See below. Top 5 dog names in New York: Bella Luna Max Coco Milo Top 10 dog names in the United States: Bella Luna Max Daisy Charlie Coco Buddy Lucy Milo Bailey To see the top 100 list, visit U.S. News & World Reports. Cazenovia, N.Y. A popular Central New York wedding venue has suddenly closed, with all events scheduled for 2024 now cancelled, according to the owner. Owera Vineyards, in the town of Cazenovia, has hosted weddings and other events since 2013. Nathan Gunn, of DeWitt, is a plaintiff in the lawsuit against the New York state Department of Transportation seeking to halt the Interstate 81 project. You will recall that a number of local petitioners took the New York State Department of Transportation (DOT) to court and challenged their flawed plan to remove Interstate 81 from Syracuse. The result was a decision by the New York State Supreme Court in February that denied DOT permission to remove the highway from the city unless and until further environmental analyses were undertaken. That was very good news for our community. However, the court allowed work to proceed on two interchanges to the north and south of the city. As a result, Renew 81 For All, the citizens group that initiated the challenge, appealed the interchange construction to the state Supreme Court Appellate Division. The state then appealed, as well. Oral arguments were heard last week in Rochester. At those oral arguments, representatives for the state continued to push false information regarding its own conduct. Let there be no misunderstanding: At stake is the literal air that the children of our communities, especially Syracuses South Side, may soon be breathing. When Justice Donald Greenwood asked the state if the plaintiffs had offered expert opinion to counter the DOTs claims, the DOT attorney answered that no experts had been put forth by the plaintiffs. That, of course, was a false statement. The town of DeWitt is a plaintiff in the lawsuit and Ed Michalenko, the town Supervisor, is an environmental scientist. Not only has Michalenko been lauded by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand as an environmental expert., but Michalenko has published a very detailed environmental review in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement record, as well as a part of the lawsuit. Greenwood lives in DeWitt, so I expect he heard the DOT attorneys responses as willful misstatements. Even more disturbing was the sheer fallacy of the states response to Judge E. Jeannette Ogdens question regarding local carbon monoxide levels from increased traffic at street level in the city. The key deception here is that the state uses the term downtown area. This micro-focused term only applies to the small area surrounding the current elevated highway that will be removed. At a recent open house at Clary Middle School, one of the states emissions expert admitted that areas of higher traffic like the South Side and Routes 5 & 92 exchanges can expect to see a 6% to 10% increase in carbon monoxide in their communities. Supreme Court Justice Gerard Neri correctly identified that reality and questioned how the state can claim that the overall project will be carbon neutral when they fail to offer concrete analysis of areas of the most heavily populated communities. Remarkably, the state continues to attempt to deceive the court and the citizens affected. In regard to addressing the failure to include the Micron project in its planning, the state is claiming that the affected residents do not have a legal right for its inclusion, but instead, the state has complete discretion in whether or not to consider the project and include it in planning. Once again, Neri was correct to compel the state to reconsider its erroneous determination that a massive regional infrastructure overhaul should not include a once-every-100-years economic development. Why would the state be hell-bent to proceed with a project that may prove to be inadequate or offer improper solutions to the future realities of our community? What possible good reason could exist to not consider such a massive project with our regional transportation planning? Simultaneously, one obvious outcome of the proposed I-81 project will be the isolation of residents of the South Side, denying them direct access to the Micron facility for future employment. Another fascinating development regarding the environmental impact statement for the Micron project is its own traffic studies. Upon reviewing the location of traffic projections for the EIS for Micron, they did not include the city of Syracuse or DeWitt area. Why would Syracuse be left out of a traffic review for the largest regional economic project in recent history? Why would Cato-Meridian get studied, but not Syracuse? One possible answer is that the data would show that the states traffic numbers for the city and DeWitt are already antiquated and false, rendering their legal arguments ridiculous. Perhaps the court could simply ask for current traffic figures to see if that States projections from 10 years ago are remotely accurate. Neri gave the State the golden opportunity to simply put forth air and water quality projections for the South Side and DeWitt while also considering the largest economic project since the Erie Canal was constructed nearly 200 years ago. Rather than spend the past year doing further study and planning while providing the public with more information and reassurance, they chose to a legal maneuver. What a bizarre and concerning choice. One can only hope that the Appellate Division of the New York State Court will continue to protect the air that is breathed by the residents of Syracuses South Side. By Rick Karlin | Times Union, Albany Glenville, N.Y. A Syracuse developer has purchased and plans to develop the long-vacant Navy Commissary building here. The 120,000-square-foot structure dates to World War II when the Navy, post-Pearl Harbor, was moving material away from the coast due to fears of bombing raids. It has been empty for years and needs lots of work but the new owner, IronHorn Enterprises, has purchased the building for $2.7 million and has committed to spending $5 million to rehabilitate it, probably for warehouse and manufacturing space. Industrial space is really, really tight, IronHorn CEO Greg Cleghorn said in a phone interview. His firm already has a commitment from Utility Partners to rent space there. The company works with utilities nationwide building, inspecting, maintaining and upgrading their facilities. Utility Partners will bring about 80 new jobs to the site performing work under contract to National Grid that involves replacing and upgrading electrical meters. Cleghorn believes he can bring numerous last mile distribution warehousing operations into most of the buildings remaining space. The need for that space has grown sharply since COVID prompted more and more people to shop online, growing the demand for small warehousing operations that are close to geographic customer bases. We are pleased to have an experienced developer like IronHorn start to make repairs immediately and bring a new tenant to the building, Ray Gillen, chairman of the Schenectady Metroplex Development Authority, said in presenting news of the sale. Gillen noted that the previous owner purchased the building from the federal government in a 2015 auction. But the buyer, based in California, neglected the structure, allowing it to fall into disrepair. The Metroplex Board will consider a $200,000 grant for the project at its December meeting and an abatement on sales tax for construction materials used to renovate the former commissary, which is at 606 Seventh St. The IronHorn team has the horsepower needed to tackle a large building like this and we welcome this major new investment and 80 new jobs to Glenville, said Town Supervisor Chris Koetzle. The parties recently met to discuss renovations and are planning to open it for occupancy in early 2024. IronHorn owns more than 1.3 million square feet of commercial space in 10 states, ranging from New York to Georgia. ___ (c)2023 the Times Union (Albany, N.Y.) Visit the Times Union (Albany, N.Y.) at www.timesunion.com News / National by Staff reporter A 26-YEAR-OLD man from Cowdray Park in Bulawayo has been arraigned before the courts for allegedly being found in possession of a stolen mining detector.Brian Gumbo was not asked to plead when he appeared before Bulawayo magistrate Maxwell Ncube on Friday last week.He was granted US$100 bail and remanded to December 4 for trial.Gumbo was ordered to reside at his given address until the finalisation of the case and not to interfere with State witnesses.It is the state case that on November 29 at around 11am, along 2nd Avenue between JM Nkomo and Jason Moyo streets Bulawayo, Gumbo approached Ndlovu who was selling a mine detector for US$400.Ndlovu became suspicious considering that its real price is US$2 500.Gumbo was requested to produce papers for detector and he ran away.The court was told that Ndlovu was assisted by members of the public to apprehend Gumbo.Gumbo was handed over to the police at Bulawayo Central Police Station.The court also heard that Gumbo failed to give a satisfactory explanation for being in possession of the mine detector.He also did not produce documents relating to the ownership of the detector. FBD Contributes 6 million to new research centre aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the environmental sustainability of Irish agriculture Minister for Agriculture, Food, and the Marine, Charlie McConalogue, TD today announced that contributions by FBD Holdings plc, FBD Trust CLG and Farmer Business Developments Plc amounting to 6 million have been made to the development of a new Centre for Sustainable Animal and Grassland Research at Teagasc Moorepark, Fermoy Co Cork. Pictured at the announcement were: Ella Walshe; Pat Murphy, Chairman Farmer Business Developments Plc; Tomas O Midheach, CEO FBD Holdings Plc; Elma Walshe; Charlie McConalogue T.D., Minister for Agriculture, Food & the Marine; Professor Frank O'Mara, Teagasc Director; Patrick Walshe; Liam Herlihy, Chairman & Michael Berkery, Chairman FBD Trust FBD Contributes 6 million to new research centre aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the environmental sustainability of Irish agriculture This significant contribution of 6 million towards the development of a new state of the art facility for research on grassland-based livestock will be a key driver in supporting farmers to achieve their climate reduction targets and ensure that the industry is environmentally, economically and socially sustainable for generations to come. The proposed centre will provide essential research infrastructure to support climate-related research, as well as facilitate research that can provide innovative solutions to improve the environmental sustainability of pasture-based systems and improve the efficiency of Irelands ruminant sector. When built, the Centre will be named after the late Padraig Walshe. Teagasc will now engage in detailed planning of the new facility, which will be subject to the normal approvals process and controls for capital projects in the public sector. Speaking in Fermoy today, Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Charlie McConalogue welcomed the decision of FBD Group to make this very significant financial contribution towards the development of the new research facility. He said; I would like to thank FBD for their very generous support for public sector research, and in general their long-standing support for projects in the agri-food sector. This new investment will improve agricultural research capacity, so vital to address key issues facing the agriculture sector, including strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and nutrient losses to water. As a food producing nation, I want to see Ireland achieve these environmental imperatives, while crucially maintaining agricultural output. Key to this will be a focus on improving competitiveness and developing a range of scientific solutions in support of productivity. I welcome Teagascs ambitions and look forward to the detailed plans being developed in the coming months. Tomas O Midheach, Chief Executive of FBD Holdings Plc said: FBDs support of this critically important initiative will help to advance climate related research. For us at FBD Insurance, we are delighted to be involved as we all have a role in tackling the climate imperatives of our time. The farming community is working hard to meet the 25% emissions reductions target by 2030. We believe that the research conducted at this facility by Teagasc has the potential to contribute to this reduction in a real and meaningful way. Michael Berkery, Chairman of FBD Trust CLG said: FBD Trust is very proud to support and be associated with this research and scientific initiative. The important work to be carried out by Teagasc at this facility in Moorepark aligns with the objectives of FBD Trust CLG and to advance the interests of Irish Farm families and the farming sector in Ireland. Pat Murphy, Chairman of Farmer Business Developments Plc said: We are delighted to support Teagasc in this very important venture and believe that it is very fitting that the new Centre is to be called after our much-missed colleague, the late Padraig Walshe. Padraig was a pioneering grass based dairy farmer and always an early adopter of the latest technologies on his award-winning dairy farm in Co. Laois. He also made a significant contribution to agriculture and farming both in Ireland and abroad, having served as president of Macra na Feirme, President of IFA, President of COPA, Chairman of Farmer Business Developments plc and a wide range of other activities. Padraig was a strong advocate for Teagasc Moorepark over the years, and always had a great hunger for the latest research developments. Teagasc Director, Professor Frank OMara said; This new facility will allow Teagasc to undertake research to address the great challenges facing agriculture today, and allow the mechanistic in-depth research that is urgently needed to develop new solutions that are suitable for widespread deployment on grass-based systems. The investment will be used to develop new state of the art laboratory facilities for animal and grassland research and a new animal metabolism facility at Moorepark. This new development will create the research capacity to undertake mission critical studies that will provide farmers, industry and policy makers with new solutions to the challenges posed. End robimahanta Distinguished - BHPian Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: BLR/GAU Posts: 814 Thanked: 5,924 Times A short driving trip in Canada I took an Emirates flight to Toronto and picked up a rental BMW 330i Xdrive from the Toronto Pearson Airport. After a night in Toronto, enjoying some good food and sights, headed to Montreal. Montreal is a lovely city with some beautiful vistas. Then I head to Quebec City via a scenic route (Route 138) and eventually drove back to Toronto to catch a flight back to Bangalore. While in Quebec, I did a loop around the Ile d'Orleans island too. Overall, I drove a little over 2000kms in the course of the 5 days I was there. I hate driving in North America as I find the freeways very boring. However, the smaller scenic routes and the fall colours made this trip somewhat interesting. Few pictures from the trip (all with the phone) Picking up the 330i Xdrive from the airport. The quintessential Tim Horton's in the background. Cruising along the highway with great mileage Ze Germans! Parking with fall colours everywhere Beautiful view from the hotel in Montreal At night During the day Queen Mary Cathedral The Ring over the staircase of Place Ville Marie's Esplanade Cute bronze chimpanzee statues Famous Leonard Cohen mural Montreal Olympic stadium panoramic view Rainbow coloured hotel in downtown Meat Poutine, something which is very common there Old Quebec City vistas Montmorency falls Lovely house among fall colours Umbrella Alley in old Quebec city Walking around Petit Champlain during Halloween Fall colours galore! A quick break to soak in the beautiful colours Some lovely desolate roads Part of Route 138, which is much prettier than the freeway Ile D'Orleans Driving around the island One of the beautiful houses in the island One of the only two fuel ups I had some leaves during the October holiday season and decided to spend a week driving around in Canada. No camera, no fixed plan but just a lot of driving and enjoying fall colours.I took an Emirates flight to Toronto and picked up a rental BMW 330i Xdrive from the Toronto Pearson Airport. After a night in Toronto, enjoying some good food and sights, headed to Montreal.Montreal is a lovely city with some beautiful vistas. Then I head to Quebec City via a scenic route (Route 138) and eventually drove back to Toronto to catch a flight back to Bangalore. While in Quebec, I did a loop around the Ile d'Orleans island too.Overall, I drove a little over 2000kms in the course of the 5 days I was there. I hate driving in North America as I find the freeways very boring. However, the smaller scenic routes and the fall colours made this trip somewhat interesting.Few pictures from the trip (all with the phone)Picking up the 330i Xdrive from the airport. The quintessential Tim Horton's in the background.Cruising along the highway with great mileageZe Germans!Parking with fall colours everywhereBeautiful view from the hotel in MontrealAt nightDuring the dayQueen Mary CathedralThe Ring over the staircase of Place Ville Marie's EsplanadeCute bronze chimpanzee statuesFamous Leonard Cohen muralMontreal Olympic stadium panoramic viewRainbow coloured hotel in downtownMeat Poutine, something which is very common thereOld Quebec City vistasMontmorency fallsLovely house among fall coloursUmbrella Alley in old Quebec cityWalking around Petit Champlain during HalloweenFall colours galore!A quick break to soak in the beautiful coloursSome lovely desolate roadsPart of Route 138, which is much prettier than the freewayIle D'OrleansDriving around the islandOne of the beautiful houses in the islandOne of the only two fuel ups Last edited by robimahanta : 29th November 2023 at 00:59 . arun_josie Distinguished - BHPian Join Date: Jul 2011 Location: Bangalore Posts: 3,699 Thanked: 13,179 Times Overall Experience of this Jeep Trail Overall Experience of this Jeep Trail The Stay: This was a very nicely organized event. The stay in Gogunda Palace was a 5-star experience. It has good amount of open space, trees, very well maintained, excellent service, awesome food, rooms were very spacious and nicely maintained. The hotel staff were very helpful. The Trail route: This was very good too. We got to drive on multiple terrains, especially the rocky terrain was the highlight. On day 4 we were driving on very remote locations, it was difficult to spot other vehicles or some time even people. Some stretches were challenging, some were very slow paced due to the nature of the terrain, some were fast paced. So, overall, it was a mix of all terrains (rocky, mud, gravel, some slush, water crossings, broken roads, forest roads etc) Convoy Drive: When it comes to convoy drive, they were very particular about everyone maintaining their position (no overtakes) and at the same time not being much disturbance to the public. Also, no stopping without any reason which can mess up the convoy and disturb others on the road as well. Even if someone had stopped for a valid reason, it was communicated over the walkie-talkie, and they were asked to join their actual position when they rejoin. In some remote locations we were asked not to stop or get out of the vehicle. At tolls, we were assigned the left most lane and toll operators were informed in advance. Overall, the convoy was managed very nicely. Support Team: Fantastic! It was not just about planning the route and doing the recce. On some of the very narrow roads on the remote area, the bushes were popping out on either side of the road. This can easily put scratches on the vehicles passing by. So, they had put efforts to trim those bushes for some distance and it was very evident when we crossed those location. On the night before the day 2 of the trail, they checked with everyone on the fuel range and offered to refill if required. They were willing to send their technician in our Jeep to get the refill done. The technical team did a check-up of every vehicle before the drive. Even in these remote areas they found good places for high tea, lunch, and rest room breaks etc. There were 2-3 puncture incidents which were handled promptly and efficiently. Overall, this team was very supportive and and they were in touch with the participants till everyone reached home safely. Hats off to the whole organizing team in conducting this event seamlessly and successfully. What could have been better? Kumbhalgarh fort was crowded as it was holiday season. Convoy of cars + holiday crowd doesnt do well together. Probably they could have avoided this place or timed it better avoiding the holiday season is what I felt. I understand the reason for this location being on the trail due to its historical importance. Despite the crowd, the team made it convenient for us by procuring the tickets for everyone in advance, arranging separate parking space for us and kept some gypsys waiting for us to transport us from the parking place to the fort which was commendable . Catching up with Team-Bhpians: This event connected me with team bhpians sameerpb and adneeraj. I have interacted with them over phone before but got a chance to meet them during this trail. It was nice to meet them in person. But I missed to connect with parthdmaniar during the event as we were not aware about our team bhp connection. My drive companion: Midhun was a great companion for this drive. We have gone on multiple long drives before but we always drove on our own. But for the first time, we were co-passengers in the same car and it was a nice experience. After this drive, I can say that no one else have driven my Jeep(or my previous cars) as much as Midhun did during this drive. How did my Jeep perform? No hassles. All it required was refueling and the performance was impeccable. Even on the multiple terrains we drove during this drive, it was effortless. Midhun drives a Compass 4x2 which has around 50K Kms on the ODO, as per him performance-wise Scarlett was equally good despite 1,33,000 Kms on the ODO. The drives/crawls on the rocky terrain were superb, 4x4 mode made the climb simpler and there was nothing left for the driver to do. The drive on the other terrains were very good too. Here is the overall trip details. I felt 16.1 Kmpl is very good for the kind of drive and the terrain that we covered. After a wash. Back to its normal routine with ODO inching towards 1,34,000 Kms With this we come to the end of this travelogue. Hope you enjoyed reading this one as much as I loved documenting the trip. This was a very nicely organized event. The stay inwas a 5-star experience. It has good amount of open space, trees, very well maintained, excellent service, awesome food, rooms were very spacious and nicely maintained. The hotel staff were very helpful.This was very good too. We got to drive on multiple terrains, especially the rocky terrain was the highlight. On day 4 we were driving on very remote locations, it was difficult to spot other vehicles or some time even people. Some stretches were challenging, some were very slow paced due to the nature of the terrain, some were fast paced. So, overall, it was a mix of all terrains (rocky, mud, gravel, some slush, water crossings, broken roads, forest roads etc)When it comes to convoy drive, they were very particular about everyone maintaining their position (no overtakes) and at the same time not being much disturbance to the public. Also, no stopping without any reason which can mess up the convoy and disturb others on the road as well. Even if someone had stopped for a valid reason, it was communicated over the walkie-talkie, and they were asked to join their actual position when they rejoin. In some remote locations we were asked not to stop or get out of the vehicle. At tolls, we were assigned the left most lane and toll operators were informed in advance. Overall, the convoy was managed very nicely.Fantastic!It was not just about planning the route and doing the recce. On some of the very narrow roads on the remote area, the bushes were popping out on either side of the road. This can easily put scratches on the vehicles passing by. So, they had put efforts to trim those bushes for some distance and it was very evident when we crossed those location.On the night before the day 2 of the trail, they checked with everyone on the fuel range and offered to refill if required. They were willing to send their technician in our Jeep to get the refill done.The technical team did a check-up of every vehicle before the drive.Even in these remote areas they found good places for high tea, lunch, and rest room breaks etc.There were 2-3 puncture incidents which were handled promptly and efficiently.Overall, this team was very supportive and and they were in touch with the participants till everyone reached home safely.Hats off to the whole organizing team in conducting this event seamlessly and successfully.Kumbhalgarh fort was crowded as it was holiday season. Convoy of cars + holiday crowd doesnt do well together. Probably they could have avoided this place or timed it better avoiding the holiday season is what I felt. I understand the reason for this location being on the trail due to its historical importance. Despite the crowd, the team made it convenient for us by procuring the tickets for everyone in advance, arranging separate parking space for us and kept some gypsys waiting for us to transport us from the parking place to the fort which was commendable .This event connected me with team bhpiansand. I have interacted with them over phone before but got a chance to meet them during this trail. It was nice to meet them in person. But I missed to connect withduring the event as we were not aware about our team bhp connection.Midhun was a great companion for this drive. We have gone on multiple long drives before but we always drove on our own. But for the first time, we were co-passengers in the same car and it was a nice experience. After this drive, I can say that no one else have driven my Jeep(or my previous cars) as much as Midhun did during this drive.No hassles. All it required was refueling and the performance was impeccable. Even on the multiple terrains we drove during this drive, it was effortless. Midhun drives a Compass 4x2 which has around 50K Kms on the ODO, as per him performance-wise Scarlett was equally good despite 1,33,000 Kms on the ODO.The drives/crawls on the rocky terrain were superb, 4x4 mode made the climb simpler and there was nothing left for the driver to do. The drive on the other terrains were very good too. Last edited by arun_josie : 3rd December 2023 at 23:10 . Opinion / Columnist IN A WHAT COMES ACROSS AS A POOR CASE OF BORROWING poor language from Nerves Mumba's controversial Sadc Electoral Observation Mission on Zimbabwe's 2023 harmonised general election, Nelson Chamisa's CCC party has issued a shocking and embarrassing statement, signed by Gift Ostallos Siziva, on the 2024 National Budget Speech presented in Parliament yesterday by the Minister of Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion, Prof Mthuli Ncube.In an astonishing conclusion rejecting the budget, which is emblematic of the party's lack of thought leadership and nuance, absence of structural capacity and lack of requisite skills; the statement, a copy of which is attached, claims that:"The budget falls short of regional, continental, and international benchmarks."For ease of reading, the full statement is reproduced below:CCC Statement on the 2024 National Budget01 December 2023The budget presented by the Minister of Finance, Professor Mthuli Ncube, on Thursday is anti- poor, as it places an excessive burden on citizens who are already suffering.The budget falls short of regional, continental, and international benchmarks. While education received the highest vote allocation at Z$10.3 trillion, constituting 17.7% of the total vote allocations, it is still below the Dakar Declaration target of 20%. Similarly, health received Z$6.3 trillion (10.8%), which is a decline from the 11.2% allocated in 2023 and falls below the Abuja Declaration target of 15%. Agriculture received Z$4.3 trillion, which is 7.4% of the total votes and below the Maputo Declaration target of 10%. The Public Service, Labour, and Social Welfare, responsible for social protection, received ZW$2.4 trillion, which is 4.1% of the total votes and 1.5% of GDP. According to the Social Policy for Africa Agreement (2008), African governments should spend at least 4.5% of GDP on social protection.The country is currently facing a cholera outbreak, and addressing this issue requires significant public investments in Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH). However, the allocated ZW$608.3 billion towards WASH represents just 0.4% of GDP, falling far below the 1.5% of GDP benchmark set under the eThekwini Declaration (2008). The Global Task Force on Cholera Control considers WASH investments as the foundation for achieving the goal of reducing cholera deaths by 90% by 2030.Additionally, the budget introduces several taxes that clearly demonstrate the regime in Harare's anti-people stance and their lack of concern for the suffering of the masses. The Strategic Reserve Levy, toll fees, vehicle registration fees, passport fees, and the introduction of a sugar tax and wealth tax will increase the cost of living and doing business in the country. We firmly believe that shelter is a basic human right and should not be subject to taxation. The budget's decision to convert the COVID-19 and Cushioning allowance into pensionable emoluments will further reduce the real incomes of civil servants. The regime should have considered an upward review to compensate civil servants for the loss of income.The taxation regime in the country is already onerous and burdensome, and the budget will only exacerbate this issue. It will lead to a significant increase in the cost of accessing public services, transportation, fuel, and overall business operations. This will result in reduced disposable incomes and erode the country's competitiveness. Additionally, high taxation is associated with high informality and low confidence.The wealth tax on properties will make it harder, especially for first-time homebuyers, to purchase residential properties. The budget presented by Minister Ncube is clearly anti-poor due to the excessive taxation measures it contains.Furthermore, the budget lacks direct employment creation incentives and strategies, which is concerning given the significant employment challenges faced by the country, particularly in the informal and vulnerable employment sectors. The National Budget should support and facilitate the transition from informality to formality, as integrating informal enterprises into the formal economy is crucial for effective domestic resource mobilization and expanding the tax base. Additionally, formal businesses often have strong linkages with informal enterprises, which can be leveraged for economic growth.To this end, we strongly reject the budget presented by Minister Mthuli Ncube. It is anti-poor, fails to meet regional and international benchmarks, and lacks adequate measures for employment creation and support for the informal sector. We call on the regime to reconsider these budgetary decisions and prioritize the well-being and prosperity of the citizens of Zimbabwe.Only a broad government reforms can ensure that Zimbabwe has access to long term financing so that it does not milk its citizens.Gift Ostallos SizibaCCC CommunicationsONE PEOPLE ONE NATION ONE VISION Data Crow allows you to create a huge database containing all your collected items. You can use the excellent online services to retrieve the information instead of typing all the information yourself. Features Cross-platform including a portable version Completely customizable software Excellent cataloger/organizer for movies, audio, software, books, photos, stamps, etc. Documentation for creation/export of new modules Loan administration feature Retrieve online info from well-known services such as IMDB, Amazon, MusicBrainz, and others Import data from popular multimedia formats: AVI, XVID, MP3, DIVX, MP4, OGG, PNG, JPG, and others Advanced reporting available in PDF and HTML Support for multiple languages such as English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Dutch Clean app: no adware, spyware, bundles or anything like that What's New This is a new major release. DO NOT install this version in the same location as the old version as this will cause the program to fail to start. Italian translation has been updated. Big thanks to Marco Artioli! Added additional file support to the movie file import. Changed the tabs saving mechanism. Tabs are also no longer stored in the database but our now saved per client. This makes it possible for users to create their own form design. Code re-structuring; making the code and architecture future proof. This was a huge undertaking but will not be directly visible to you as a user apart from having new features released in the (near) future which would not have been possible otherwise. Upgraded Apache Tika to version 1.5 Added a column selector to table views (right-click on the table header). The discogs.com music search has been implemented using the official API, making it more reliable and future proof. Added Record Label to the the Music Album Module. The Sourceforge.net online service has been rewritten to use the official API, making it more reliable and future proof. JTattoo (Look and Feel manager) has been upgraded to version 1.6.10. You can now place true type fonts (TTF files) in the fonts directory of the install folder. These will be loaded by Data Crow and can then be used. They will appear at the bottom of any of the font selection lists. PDF reports now can make use of Fonts installed (copied) to the fonts folder of the Data Crow installation folder. Additional settings can be done by the user by editing the "pdf_config.xml" file as located in the reports folder (of the user directory). Instructions: https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/1.0/configuration.html Updated the Module Creation Guide (https://www.datacrow.net/#downloads) Updated the Create Report Guide (https://www.datacrow.net/#downloads) Created a Client-Server Guide (https://www.datacrow.net/#downloads) [Fixed] One more small issue fixed when upgrading from an old version of Data Crow. Regex pattern for the file importer was applied after changes to the name were applied by Data Crow logic. This can cause the regex pattern to no longer match. The regex pattern will now always be applied first. Lent versus lend grammar mistakes. Avoiding null pointer exceptions in case fields no longer exists. Restart of the Delete Module Wizard started the Create Module Wizard Problems with the creation of modules due to invalid table names caused by special characters. Now the names are auto generated. UTF8 problems with the module.XML files has been resolved. Issue with user creation. Module permissions were not saved correctly on the user creation. It only worked after updating the user. Create multiple used the view type (table / card) based on the selected search view. Because of this the card view was used sometimes which is not editable. Backup process reported missing "dc.lck" and "dc.log" files. Opening the form to create a new user took a long time. Module wizard creation module allows Picture fields to be added to property modules while this is not supported. Option has now been removed. The Mobygames.com online search has been fixed. The Sourceforge.net online search has been fixed. Dictionary.txt was saved in plain text instead of in UTF8 format. Original label in the general field settings showed the new, custom, label after the user made the translation. The view and quick view were not updated after performing a loan action (return / lend). Mismatch between the contact person module name and the module jar file. A white space for decimal grouping symbol is reset to "." after a restart. Drive Manager window settings not applied correctly. [Client-Server Notes] A manual has been released Highlights: Serving the tech enthusiast community for over 25 years.TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust . Read our ethics statement A hot potato: Imagine that a massive company has just bought your employer for billions and the first thing it does is lay off 2,800 people before telling everyone else to get their "butt" back into the office. That's exactly what Broadcom has done following its acquisition of VMware. It was back in 2022 when Broadcom, known for designing and manufacturing semiconductor products, announced plans to buy cloud computing and virtualization technology company VMware in a cash-and-stock transaction valued at approximately $61 billion. The deal also sees Broadcom assuming VMware's $8 billion in debt. Broadcom said it had completed the acquisition of VMware last November 22. As is often the case with mergers, one of the first actions being taken by Broadcom is to implement mass layoffs across the company it's just bought. At least 2,837 VMware employees across multiple states will be losing their jobs, including 1,267 at its California Palo Alto campus. But even more of VMware's 38,300 global workforce could be under threat; the final number might be even higher as not all the layoffs require WARN notices, which list the reason as "economic." If that isn't enough to anger VMware employees, those who aren't being fired have been given an ultimatum by Broadcom CEO Hock Tan: "If you live within 50 miles of an office, you get your butt in here," he said. "Collaboration is important and a key part of sustaining a culture with your peers, with your colleagues," Tan added. VMware has long been a remote-friendly company, a stark contrast to Broadcom, which is so anti-work-from-home that it ordered some employees back into the office in April 2020, despite California's stay-at-home orders. Few issues have caused such a rift between workers and employers quite like WFH. Many companies promised their staff that the remote work practices implemented during the pandemic would be permanent. But an increasing number of firms, including Amazon, Roblox, Google, and IBM, are telling employees they can either come back or find another job. We've also seen an increasing number of reports recently about the benefits of in-office work and downsides of WFH, including this one that supposedly shows an 18% decline in productivity by home workers. However, forcing employees back has led to walkouts and petitions against the move. It's no surprise, given that some people say they'd rather quit or take a pay cut than return to the office. In context: Each time the US has brought out new rules prohibiting the export of advanced chips to China, Nvidia has created less-powerful versions to circumvent the restrictions. But US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has warned Team Green that if it keeps up this practice, she will ban the new chips "the very next day." Speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday (via BNN Bloomberg), Raimondo said her department needed more funding to address China's "rapidly growing" semiconductor markets to deny the country the most cutting-edge technology from the US. "I have a $200 million budget. That's like the cost of a few fighter jets. Come on," she said. "If we're serious, let's go fund this operation like it needs to be funded." In September last year, the US further tightened sanctions against China by instructing Nvidia and AMD to stop selling their high-performance AI-focused GPUs to the country (and Russia), a restriction aimed at preventing the US companies' top hardware from being used by or diverted to military users and finding their way into the nation's supercomputers. Nvidia's response was to create cut-down versions of the A100, A100X, and H100 chips: the A800 and H800. The US government announced updates to its export restrictions in October, which meant the China-specific A800 and H800 chips and even the RTX 4090 were prohibited from export to countries of concern. Nvidia's response was, once again, to create several new products the HGX H20, L20, and L2 that complied with the latest restrictions. The company is also rumored to be readying an RTX 4090 D for the Chinese Market with a lower TPP (Total Processing Performance) to comply with the US limitations. Raimondo isn't happy about Nvidia simply redesigning its chips to circumvent US export rules, threatening that "If you redesign a chip around a particular cut line that enables them to do AI, I'm going to control it the very next day." With around 25% of Team Green's data center revenue coming from China, Nvidia has warned about the impact these bans will have on its bottom line. CFO Colette Kress previously said they would also result in a permanent loss of opportunities for the US to compete and lead in the Chinese market. Raimondo acknowledged the financial impact the export bans have on companies, adding that there are more important things than money. "I know there are CEOs of chip companies in this audience who were a little cranky with me when I did that because you're losing revenue," she said. "Such is life. Protecting our national security matters more than short-term revenue." Serving the tech enthusiast community for over 25 years.TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust . Read our ethics statement In context: Recent comments from Microsoft made it seem to many that it planned to eventually bring Game Pass to numerous devices, including rival consoles from PlayStation and Nintendo. Microsoft later clarified the remarks in a lengthy interview with Windows Central while discussing the company's plans for the service. Xbox head Phil Spencer has denied having any plans to make Xbox Game Pass available on PlayStation or Nintendo consoles. The subscription service has become the crux of Microsoft's gaming business, and its accessibility across Xbox, PC, and the cloud has pushed the company's hardware-agnostic strategy. Despite the policy, Spencer's comments confirm Microsoft wants Game Pass to remain a primary draw for Xbox. The clarification follows an earlier quote from Xbox CFO Tim Stuart that brought about some confusion on the issue. During a Wells Fargo TMT Summit conference call, Stuart said Microsoft planned to bring its subscriptions and first-party content to every screen that could play games, including PlayStation and Nintendo. Many likely assumed Stuart was referring to Game Pass the company's primary gaming subscription service. Putting Game Pass and Microsoft's first-party stable on all consoles could diminish the perceived value of Xbox. However, Stuart didn't mention the service by name when explaining the company's desire to reach more screens. While Stuart cited Game Pass at other points during the call, he also highlighted other subscriptions like World of Warcraft, which Microsoft acquired through its purchase of Activision Blizzard. Furthermore, the CFO alluded to Call of Duty, which the company pledged to continue releasing on non-Microsoft consoles amid Sony's repeated protests against the acquisition. The Minecraft franchise established a precedent for the situation, as the company bought it after Mojang had released PlayStation and Nintendo versions, which Microsoft still supports. Established Activision Blizzard franchises like Warcraft, Diablo, or Overwatch might receive similar treatment. These games have subscription elements like battle pass monetization. Whatever happens, Game Pass will remain a key selling point for Xbox consoles for the foreseeable future. Spencer told Windows Central that Microsoft spends over a billion dollars a year securing third-party games for the service. Despite the hefty sum, the Xbox boss suggested that Game Pass has become profitable. Spencer also mentioned how emerging handheld PCs like the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go can expand the subscription service's reach. The interview highlighted a recent update for the Windows Xbox app that added a compact, more comfortable mode for smaller screens. Hopefully, Microsoft plans to do more to improve the portable Windows experience. In a nutshell: A French startup is bringing yet another sci-fi technology to life, helping people preserve memories far beyond their lifespan. Imagine storing a heartfelt note or a secret recipe not on a USB stick, but in your own DNA. However, this tech won't come cheap. Remember the days of DVDs and flash drives? Well, they might soon become as outdated as VHS tapes, all thanks to Biomemory, a French company that's elevating data storage to a whole new level. The company is using the very fabric of life DNA to keep your digital data safe for over a century. Biomemory's latest innovation, the DNA Card, is no larger than a standard credit card but represents the key to a future where data doesn't degrade over time. These cards can store a kilobyte of text data equivalent to a short email or a long tweet in a sequence of DNA. As Biomemory CEO Erfane Arwani explains, this technology demonstrates the "potential of molecular computing" reaching the mainstream consumer market. The process is straight out of a sci-fi novel, with your text being translated into a series of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, which are the building blocks of DNA. This custom-built strand is then synthesized, dried, and sealed in a card, safe from the wear and tear of time and technology itself. This cutting-edge approach isn't just a Biomemory specialty, with tech giants like Microsoft also exploring the realm, testing DNA's viability as a long-term storage medium. This innovative data storage technology is not just cool it's also practical, at least in theory. DNA is incredibly dense in terms of data storage capacity. To illustrate, a single gram could hold about 215,000 terabytes equivalent to storing the entire Netflix library in a drop of liquid! But before you get too excited, there are some caveats. Currently, the DNA Card takes about eight hours to encode just a kilobyte of text. And retrieving the data? That's a bit of a process, too, involving rehydrating the DNA and then sequencing it to read the message. Also, the price tag is a crisp 1,000 (around $1,080) so, it's not exactly going to replace your Google One cloud storage subscription just yet. But it's a glimpse into a future where our data could last as long as the pyramids of Giza. The future of data storage is rapidly evolving, with DARPA-funded tests at Brown University successfully storing and retrieving images on various types of molecules. The idea of using DNA for data storage isn't new, but making it accessible to the average consumer is a significant step. Beyond creating the most expensive text message in history, Biomemory aims to combat climate change with a storage technology that reduces environmental footprint and promises a lifespan of at least 150 years. The long-awaited launch of Tesla's Cybertruck has left a trail of divided sentiments among eager reservation holders. Following a highly anticipated event that lasted a mere 30 minutes, some customers expressed disappointment over omitted crucial details and a significant discrepancy in price and range from the initial promises made by CEO Elon Musk. Amidst this dissatisfaction, however, steadfast enthusiasts remain eager to secure their spot in the queue for this innovative electric pickup (via Business Insider). Tesla Event Attendees Disappointed At the heart of the disappointment lies the disparity between the event's hype and the delivered information. Attendees of the launch, including Zack Nelson of YouTube's JerryRigEverything, voiced a sense of disillusionment, citing the event's brevity and the absence of critical specifications as the primary letdown. Initially promised to start at $39,900, the Cybertruck's starting price now stands at $60,990, as per Tesla's website. The absence of pricing and range details during the presentation led to an anticlimactic conclusion for many. Musk's promise of a $40,000 starting price was shattered when the official figures revealed a substantially higher cost, coupled with a maximum range of 340 miles, far below the initially proclaimed 500-mile benchmark. Christopher Bowe, an electric vehicle enthusiast and podcaster, encapsulated the sentiments of many reservation holders, expressing a 10% likelihood of purchasing the Cybertruck once the desired trim level arrives, a delay that might stretch until 2025. The disparity between the lofty expectations set by Tesla's initial promises and the eventual reality compounded the disappointment for many enthusiasts. Read Also: Walmart Stops Advertising on Elon Musk's X Amid Concerns Over Hate Speech Reservation Holders Approve Cybertrucl Launch Martin French, managing director at automotive consultancy Berylls, acknowledged the challenging tightrope Musk walked in managing expectations, suggesting that either excessive showmanship or reserved presentation could lead to discontent. Despite these disheartening revelations, some reservation holders remain resolute in their commitment to Tesla's Cybertruck. Matthew Donegan-Ryan, a Tesla owner and investor with multiple reservations, offered a contrasting view, lauding Tesla's achievement in creating a vehicle deemed impossible by many. His sentiment echoes that of Eric Locke, a Tesla owner with plans to add the Cybertruck to his collection, citing brand loyalty despite concerns over the revealed specifications. As the dust settles from the much-anticipated launch event, uncertainty clouds the purchase decisions of numerous reservation holders. The polarity of reactions emphasizes the challenge of managing the fervent anticipation surrounding the Cybertruck. While some find themselves disillusioned by unmet promises and a lackluster event, others remain undeterred in their loyalty to the brand, focusing on Tesla's groundbreaking achievement rather than the disparity between expectation and reality. Stay posted here at Tech Times. Related Article: Is Tesla Cybertruck Worth Its Price? Report Says It 'Doesn't Make Any Sense' 2023 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. This week on CryptoWatch, we are looking back into November 2023 to bring you a round-up of the events that took place in the cryptocurrency and blockchain world to start this December. The top crypto news this month is the massive case of Binance and Changpeng Zhao, centering on money laundering charges on the platform. (Photo : Tech Times) Moreover, earlier this month also saw the end of Sam Bankman-Fried's criminal trial, which led to a guilty verdict against the FTX co-founder and disgraced CEO. Lastly, Jack Dorsey's blockchain-based social media, Bluesky, saw significant developments, including its growth to 2 million users. Binance's Settlement and Changpeng Zhao (Photo : David Ryder/Getty Images) SEATTLE, WASHINGTON - NOVEMBER 21: Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao leaves the U.S. District Court on November 21, 2023 in Seattle, Washington. Zhao pleaded guilty to a money-laundering charge. After the long crackdown against Binance, including massive investigations by the US Department of Justice, the Securities Exchange Commission, and more, the company is settling as much as $4 billion for it to continue its operations in the country. However, there was a caveat, and this is with its former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, who agreed to plead guilty against the charges imposed upon him, centering on money laundering charges and operations on various unlicensed services. Zhao took the fall for Binance via a plea deal by the US prosecution, and this will lead to the CEO being banned for at least three years for any involvement with the crypto exchange company. Read Also: Binance DOJ Lawsuit Settlement: $4B Reportedly Set for Crypto Platform's Continued US Operations Sam Bankman-Fried Found Guilty After the long holdout of Sam Bankman-Fried and taking his case to court, maintaining his innocence, the former CEO was found guilty by the jury, concluding the long events of FTX's downfall. SBF was declared guilty for all seven charges against him, and this includes the controversial fraudulent acts he did, as well as misappropriating $8 billion of FTX customer funds. In this case, former FTX executives were called upon to give their testimony to the court, and these were some of the nails to Bankman-Fried's coffin. Moreover, the prosecution also had many receipts, records, and information which further strengthened their case against the disgraced CEO. Jack Dorsey's Bluesky The next-generation, decentralized internet saw a significant development when Jack Dorsey first introduced Bluesky, the latest platform from the renowned Twitter founder, towards a new experience. Recently, Bluesky saw astounding growth, with more than 2 million users now since it launched last year. Despite being an invite-only app, it was able to see a significant user base, particularly those looking for an X alternative, best known as being the everything app from Elon Musk. It is not yet specified when Bluesky will release the version accessible to the public, with the blockchain-based social platform growing by the numbers each day. Related Article: CryptoWatch: Binance's Changpeng Zhao Resigns, HTX Global and Poloniex's Hack, and Apple's Lawsuit 2023 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. While 2023 was the year AI has ramped up its access for all, there are claims that 2024 will be an even bigger year for tech and its developments. With that, reports are also circulating regarding Google's plans for its future release of the Gemini AI, its next-gen AI model which it previously teased earlier this year. It is important to note that Gemini AI was regarded before as a foundational model, a development by companies that helps deliver multimodal capabilities. Google Gemini AI is Coming This 2024 (Photo : KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images) According to the latest report of The Information, Google is planning to release the anticipated Gemini AI next year, with 2024 first seeing the company's development of its upcoming foundational model. This follows the recent cancelation of the launch events and schedules meant for Gemini, originally meant for the second week of December 2023. The report also claims that Google's Gemini was "struggling with non-English queries," hence this delay in its supposed release, straight from CEO Sundar Pichai. Google's Gemini AI is expected to improve its current tech further, including the likes of the AI chatbot, Bard, Google Assistant, and Search. Read Also: Apple and Google Reveal Their 'App of the Year' and Surprisingly, Its Not ChatGPT Gemini AI vs. OpenAI's GPT-4 Earlier this May, Google introduced Gemini AI to the world via the I/O 2023 showcase, and here, the company regarded that it will go alongside the PaLM 2, with both foundational models seeing advancements. As per Google, this already offers multimodal capabilities unseen in previous models. Gemini was created from the ground up to be multimodal, highly efficient at tool and API integrations and built to enable future innovations, like memory and planning. Google's AI Development The face of Google's AI centers on Bard, the renowned chatbot that it introduced early this year, but it previously faced criticism for its AI hallucinations in its initial release. However, Google developed the chatbot to bring better answers and information to users, centering on accurate data it presents, with Bard now able to access YouTube videos and answer your bugging questions. It is also known that Google's previous acquisition, DeepMind, has also been in full swing to develop new AI projects and ventures, set to bring improvements to what the company has to offer. Previously, it created the so-called "Student of Games," and its main goal is to beat human players in various titles, showing the power of the computer models in gaming. AI is expected to grow more in the future as we are only seeing the peak or surface of what it has to offer, being in its early stages in the present. That being said, Gemini AI is the perfect representation of Google's future goals and plans for AI, with reports now claiming that it will debut in 2024, and it is looking to take on the renowned OpenAI GPT-4 to further enhance what it has to offer. Related Article: Google Expands AI-Powered Search to Over 120 Countries, Territories 2023 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Generative AI-Built Cancer Antibodies will reportedly be worked on by AstraZeneca and Absci after signing a deal approximately worth $247 million, as reported by Reuters. This move is in line with AstraZeneca's long-term goals of replacing chemotherapy. As per the Financial Times, the partnership seeks to use Absci's AI technology for large-scale protein analysis in the search for a workable cancer treatment, which is the primary goal of Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. (Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images) MACCLESFIELD, UNITED KINGDOM - MAY 15: Corporate logos are seen outside the Macclesfield factory of AstraZeneca on May 15, 2006, in Macclesfield, England. Anglo-Swedish drugs giant AstraZeneca has confirmed that it is to buy biotechnology firm Cambridge Antibody Technology for GBP702m. According to Reuters, the company Absci states that with AstraZeneca, the companies are working together to develop a zero-shot generative AI model that will help develop novel and enhanced antibody therapies, but the specific cancer targeted has yet to be stated. The agreement covers milestone payments, research and development financing, an upfront fee for Absci, and royalties on any product sales. Read Also: This New Model Promises to Enhance Accuracy, Reduce Bias in AI-Generated Decisions AstraZeneca Replacing Chemotherapy AstraZeneca's aim of creating AI-assisted cancer antibodies is the latest development regarding the company's recently announced aim of replacing chemotherapy. Last July, Dave Frederickson, executive VP of AstraZeneca's oncology business, discussing AstraZeneca's efforts on breast cancer treatment, reportedly said that the firm is in a position to develop drugs in the future that are suitable for all of the many subtypes and phases of breast cancer treatment, with the potential to replace chemotherapy in the case of late-line breast cancer completely. In October, as per a separate Financial Times report, AstraZeneca revealed its whole trial data, reassuring investors that the firm remains on track to meet its aspirations to replace conventional chemotherapy with a new generation of tailored treatments. Presenting two clinical studies, one for breast cancer and the other for lung cancer, AstraZeneca demonstrated that their novel treatment outperformed the chemotherapy that physicians had been reliant on for more than ten years. Fredrickson said this was a "huge accomplishment" in a "very ambitious program." AI as the Future of Medicine Development Puja Sapra, a senior vice-president at AstraZeneca who oversees biologics engineering research and development, reportedly said that the partnership with Absci is an "exciting opportunity" to use the business's AI for antibody production. The senior vice president stated that artificial intelligence is helping society find more and better biologics faster and increasing the variety of biologics. Sapra further noted that the company integrates AI into every step of its research and development process through partnerships with Absci. The founder and CEO of Absci, Sean McClain, stated that using engineering concepts in drug discovery increased the likelihood of success and shortened the time needed for development. Reuters reports that using generative artificial intelligence, Absci creates the best possible drug candidates based on factors including target affinity, safety, and manufacturability. This collaboration follows Absci's continued AI development in the field of medicine after it recently announced an alliance with Almirall, a global biopharmaceutical company, to continue drug research to create and market AI-powered treatments combating severe and persistent skin conditions and provide patients with life-changing medications. This collaboration will reportedly combine Absci's Integrated Drug Creation platform with Almirall's dermatological experience, representing a significant advancement in AI drug production. Related Article: US FDA Grants Historic Approval to Ixchiq: First-Ever Vaccine for Chikungunya Virus 2023 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Opinion / Columnist In a recent turn of events, the beleaguered leader of the CCC (Citizens' Coalition for Change), Nelson Chamisa, found himself in hot water as his own supporters on the social media platform X criticised him for his stance on the regional bloc SADC (Southern African Development Community). Chamisa's response to a supporter's inquiry about the opposition's engagement with SADC regarding the August 2023 harmonised elections sparked a wave of discontent among his followers. He declared, "*SADC is we the people! We fix all our issues. We're the ones to help ourselves. We're the answer to our own questions.*"However, instead of finding solace in Chamisa's words, his supporters expressed frustration and disappointment, revealing deep-seated anger within the opposition ranks. This latest episode suggests that Chamisa's leadership may be on shaky ground, and he appears to be cognisant of this fact, as evidenced by his reluctance to hold an elective Congress, where his dwindling popularity within the opposition movement could become evident.Several key points shed light on the growing dissatisfaction among opposition supporters:Disregard for Supporters: Chamisa has a history of taking his supporters for granted. In 2018, he even went so far as to call them 'stupid' after they acted upon his inciteful statements and engaged in violent protests, resulting in arrests.False Hope Operation: In the aftermath of the August 2023 harmonised elections, Chamisa, alongside Promise Mkwananzi and Ibbo Mandaza, attempted to maintain an election-centric narrative by misleading their supporters. They falsely claimed that SADC would declare the elections invalid and call for fresh polls, running an operation named 'Hope is on the way.'Evasion of Accountability: Instead of taking responsibility for his deceptive tactics and propagandistic manoeuvres, Chamisa has chosen to divert attention away from the issue and now refuses to address questions regarding the supposed SADC intervention.Vindication of Critics: Figures like Hopewell Chinono, Tendai Biti, Freeman Chari, and Kuda Musasiwa have been consistently critical of Chamisa. With each passing day, his actions seem to reinforce their arguments that he is unfit to lead the opposition and is holding onto power through undemocratic means.'Just Pass the Baton' Campaign: Interestingly, a faction of CCC supporters has launched a social media campaign called 'Just Pass the Baton,' urging Chamisa to step down from his leadership position and allow a democratic process to select a new, capable leader.In summary, Nelson Chamisa's recent statement on SADC has exposed growing discontent and frustration within his own ranks. As pressure mounts, his leadership is being called into question, and the future of the CCC remains uncertain. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has spread across industries and business sectors. Many organizations now leverage their capabilities to improve processes and workflow to enhance productivity and increase revenue while reducing the cost of production. Leveraging AI software solutions can save businesses time and resources by augmenting the capabilities of humans to perform monotonous tasks like data collection, software testing, or complex tasks like video creation. How is AI used in video? Businesses can create a video from scratch by using AI software like an AI-powered video generator. It is a tool that generates videos based on user input. It uses a process called text-to-video to produce a video presentation, an explainer video, and other video-based content, cutting the video production costs without compromising the quality of the material. Many companies now offer software solutions infused with AI to give businesses an edge over their competitors. Yet they're not all built the same. Outlined below are the top 5 AI software of 2024 for video creation. 1. Hour One AI Overview Hour One AI is an industry leader in crafting lifelike virtual characters for professional video communications. These avatars can convey human-like expressiveness through text, elevating the messaging of businesses with the help of its cutting-edge technology. They can effortlessly produce professional videos at scale without specialized skills or a hefty budget for video production. Hour One AI has proudly been serving industry giants like NBC Universal, DreamWorks, and Berlitz, extending its reach to HR, e-commerce, SaaS, and beyond. The company has been involved in pioneering projects like bringing The Boss Baby to life and reducing the creation cost through its text-to-speech technology. Hour One AI is a plug-and-play platform. Even without the technical skills of a videographer or media producer, anyone can produce professional-quality videos. It requires no training. It provides pre-designed templates that users can customize for various use cases. It also boasts of world-class customer service, customizing its AI software to serve the specific needs of a client's platform. From content management systems to digital marketing platforms, Hour One AI can seamlessly integrate into the workflows and processes so its partners can use text-to-video functionalities. The enterprise video platform of Hour One AI contains all the tools businesses and content creators need to create video at scale. From pre-designed templates to voices in over a hundred languages, it can streamline video creation. And with the integration of royalty-free media assets, you are sure to cut production costs by 90%. Each edit made to the script reflects automatically in the video, saving time by 95%. It has an intuitive interface teams can seamlessly work together on. Hour One AI runs on the industry's leading cloud providers, ensuring unmatched performance, scalability, and reliability. It is also compliant with security controls, evident by its ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certification, proving it can safeguard any company's confidential information. It also implements strict guidelines and monitors against any suspicious activity to ensure the protection of its partners. With single sign-on, business teams have a fast and secure means of access to the enterprise video platform. The AI video generator of Hour One AI scales to meet companies' video creation needs. It can provide administration features and advanced security for enterprise-level scalability. Business teams can also enjoy 24/7 support with a dedicated customer success manager and design expert. Features Virtual Human Presenters Hour One AI has a wide selection of video human presenters companies can use to serve their target audience. They can also create a custom AI presenter through its avatar maker, where the virtual character possesses a humanistic voice to convey any text or material. Languages & Voices It features 100+ languages and voices so companies can localize their content for any audience. They can also adjust the tone, pronunciation, and pauses to make the voiceover more natural. Professionally Designed Templates Anyone can create top-quality videos even without editing skills. Hour One AI offers access to professionally designed templates for different types of videos, like a video presentation or an explainer video. AI Video Tools It also features AI video tools like a script wizard for script writing and a video wizard, which can transform simple ideas into fully realized videos based on a single text prompt. Companies can also add captions or AI-generated media to enrich the video material. Brand & Customization Businesses can leverage its features for brand and customization to create a consistent brand identity across different platforms. They can save their logos, colors, intros, and outros. They can also opt to create a custom-branded template for uniformity. Hour One AI is the top choice of companies to create customized videos and boost audience engagement. It helps scale video production effortlessly, saving resources and eliminating the need for physical sets, actors, and production crews. Overview Synthesia empowers everyone to make video content. Founded by a team of AI researchers and entrepreneurs, it aims to radically change the process of content creation and unlock the potential of human creativity. It can turn any idea into a video in minutes. It is also a collaborative platform for business teams who want to create videos at scale. Trusted by over 50,000 companies, Syntheisa frees businesses from expensive video productions. Leading companies like Zoom cut 90% of their video creation time. Besides time savings, it can also free up costs and increase engagement. Teleperformance realized it could save $ 5,000 per video, and BSH witnessed a 30% increase in audience engagement when using the AI video generator. It is built on the foundations of ethics and security. It combines human and AI moderation processes to safeguard its partners from malicious actors. It has a dedicated team for data protection and ethical application of AI. It also adheres to the criteria of SOC 2 and GDPR, ensuring its practices, systems, and processes are independently audited and certified for compliance. Features AI Avatar & Voices Businesses can choose from 150+ stocks of AI avatars. They're all frequently updated to improve the quality of virtual characters. Users can add micro gestures to the avatars, like head nods or raised eyebrows, making them more lifelike. These avatars can communicate in 120+ languages and accents, making video content more accessible to diverse audiences. Users also have the option to create a custom AI avatar and clone their voice to match their creation. They can also leverage text-to-speech technology to turn any text into professional voiceovers in minutes, lessening the cost of production. Media & Integrations Synthesia contains 65+ professionally designed video templates businesses can maximize to drive productivity. They can upload various elements, even their font, to stay on brand. It also offers access to millions of royalty-free images and hundreds of royalty-free soundtracks. Sharing & Exports Users can embed videos on their platforms without hassle due to the seamless integration of Synthesia. They can also add a call to action button to the share page for direct access to the landing page of the company's website. The AI video generator can export videos in full HD, ensuring the best resolution to match the quality of videos produced by professionals. Integrations Synthesia can also seamlessly integrate with existing authoring tools, learning management systems, learning experience platforms, and more. Different teams from marketing, sales, and customer support can streamline the video creation process by using a fast, secure, and scalable AI video generator. 3. Runway Overview Runway, an applied AI research company, shifts the storytelling paradigm by offering new tools global brands, enterprises, and creatives can use to tell their stories. It contains 30+ AI magic tools for generative, video, image, 3D, and audio creation. It is trusted by the world's top creatives, like television broadcasting company CBS, and tech giants like Google and Microsoft. Runway has been named one of TIME100 most influential companies in 2023, coming a long way from being a start-up based in New York City, racking up millions of users since 2018. Runway values research significantly, ensuring each user is leveraging the latest innovation in generative AI. It is dedicated to building multimodal AI systems that can yield new forms of creativity, making image and video synthesis accessible, controllable, and empowering for all. Features Runway can generate videos based on text prompts with Gen-2, a multimodal AI system that can transform text, images, or video clips into new videos. It can synthesize videos in any style, matching the studio quality of professionally produced films. It can also turn mockups into fully stylized and animated renders, streamlining post-production for a fraction of its cost. Runway can also isolate subjects in a video for masking to modify them. It can also turn untextured renders into realistic outputs, pushing the boundaries of AI in generating creative outputs. Users can customize the models produced by the AI video generator to achieve higher fidelity results. Runway offers more AI tools for video production, like scene detection, green screen, and motion tracking. It lets teams collaborate in real-time, keeping everything centralized and one click away. It requires no software downloads or hardware storage. Users also get to determine the generated video's structural consistency, weight of style, and frame consistency when using the Gen 1 of Runway. While its quality is average at most, it is remarkable in its ability to produce videos in different styles. 4. Peech Overview Peech believes in authenticity, personalism, and real content, empowering companies to elevate their branding by keeping their people at the front of their marketing videos. It can cut 95% of video post-production time and reduce the costs of video design and editing by 80%. It helps businesses automatically create dozens of videos, driving productivity to boost engagement and achieve better sales. Clients can leverage its AI to efficiently repurpose videos, speeding up execution for high-quality edited video snippets, which they can tailor for diverse channels. Peech can help maintain the visual brand guidelines and messaging consistency, ensuring content uniformity and a high-quality core brand message. It offers customizable design elements, making the average user the expert to produce professionally edited and branded video content. Anyone can generate unlimited versions with different video styles to fit any marketing goal, removing all creative bottlenecks to meet all marketing KPIs. Features Peech uses AI and natural language processing technology to give content teams the ability to generate high-quality and engaging content, even without the skill or equipment for video production. It features a distinct automatic editing process, so anyone can produce professional videos that are ready to publish within seconds. It knows how to edit, optimize, and brand a video for any marketing goal and video type, making it easier to repurpose content to streamline the creative process, saving time and money for other revenue-generating tasks. It can also localize content for a diverse audience or generate multiple versions, so teams have options that align best with their marketing strategy. The AI video platform is the best marketing team with its ability to optimize video content for different platforms. 5. Visla Overview Visla is an all-in-one platform for video creation and communication. It can support the video creation needs of businesses, teams, and content creators who lack editing experience. It uses revolutionary AI-assisted workflow to help them generate and edit videos. While it can only transcribe and display English text, unlike the other leading AI software, it promises to add more in the future as more features are introduced. Features Anyone can create captivating videos effortlessly by using Visla's AI-powered tools. The AI video generator can transform ideas, text, blogs, and other media into high-quality content. Users simply have to describe the video they want to create, and it is produced based on the given prompt. They are encouraged to include any information like the purpose, target audience, and publishing platform to help tailor the AI video. It also features an AI video editor to accelerate the editing of any marketing collateral, like product demos, customer testimonials, interviews, and more. It provides a text transcript of the video so users can navigate video highlights easily and trim segments for content repurposing. It offers supplemental footage to match the spoken content, making it more appealing and immersive for audiences to engage in. It can summarize and extract portions of a transcript, shortening post-production for quick turnover of deliverables. Conclusion Choosing the best AI video generator from our list depends on your purpose and platform. Each of these solutions has unique selling points like the brand optimization of Peech, the different styles of Synthesia, or the straightforward functionality of Hour One AI and its lifelike avatars. All these products can streamline the video creation and editing process so companies no longer have to suffer from any creative bottlenecks. Take advantage of the top 5 best AI software of 2024 and create quality video content to drive audience engagement. 2023 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. * This is a contributed article and this content does not necessarily represent the views of TechTimes. In the past few years, mental health apps have witnessed massive growth thanks to their potential to fix a multitude of mental health-related problems. That said, they are not the best when it comes to managing and securing highly sensitive personal data. Mental health apps with millions of downloads have been found guilty of selling, misusing, and leaking sensitive data of their users. In this article, we have shared everything you need to know about the countless privacy concerns associated with mental health apps. Lets see if you can trust any mainstream mental health app or if they are all the same. What Are Mental Health Apps? The name says it all, mental health apps offer tools, activities, and support to help cure serious problems like anxiety, depression, ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, substance abuse, and many more. While mental health apps cant replace an actual doctor, they have been found to be quite effective in multiple instances. On the surface, mental health apps seem to be quite useful for the well-being of users, but you will be surprised to know that the research from Private Internet Access revealed that many mainstream apps fail to protect the privacy and security of their users. Lets get into details and discuss all of the problems associated with mental health apps and see how they have become the biggest data-harvesting machines. Are Mental Health Apps Spying on You? Unlike other mainstream apps, mental health apps require substantially more information about their users for the app to function properly. This includes information like name, phone number, email address, date of birth, demographic information, associated health information, health insurance, self-assessment responses, and much more. Clearly, all of the aforementioned information is quite personal and valuable. As a matter of fact, all of this information in the wrong hands can end up being disastrous in many different ways. Sadly, mental health apps have been accused and found guilty of misusing the private information of users. By using difficult-to-understand terminology in their privacy policies, the majority of apps still continue to exploit their users. The valuable information is being used for targeted advertising, mental manipulations, and many other unlawful activities. Some apps have also been found guilty of selling your data to third-party services. In a nutshell, mental health apps are definitely spying on you and using your data to further improve their profits. Major Privacy Concerns Associated With Mental Health Apps In this section, we have highlighted some of the most crucial privacy concerns associated with mental health apps. 1. Data Breaches Data is one of the most valuable assets in the 21st century. Mental health apps collect a considerable amount of personal, financial, and activity data of their users. In case of a data breach, a mental health app can put some of the most confidential information like your social security number at risk. This can further create many new problems. According to CNN, Cerebral, an app with well over 100,000 Google Play Downloads, recently suffered a massive data breach exposing peoples sensitive medical information to third parties without the patients permission. 2. Misuse Or Long-Term Storage Of Personal Information A majority of mainstream Mental Health Apps dont disclose how long they store your data for or how secure their storage servers are. Storing a persons data for multiple years even after they have stopped using a service drastically increases the chances of data being compromised in a leak or a breach. Furthermore, data can be misused by a third party in case the original company is shut down or sold to someone else. 3. Emotional Manipulation And Personalized Ads Due to the amount of sensitive and personal data that Mental Health Apps collect they are capable of serving some of the best personalized advertisements. In addition to doing this themselves, Mental Health Apps can also sell your valuable data to partners and advertisers like Facebook and Snapchat to earn even more money. Mental health apps also offer cures for problems like anxiety, depression, ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, eating disorders, and substance abuse. Consequently, they have access to detailed insights into your mental state which can help manipulate political opinions, eating preferences, travel choices, and much more. How To Safely Use Mental Health Apps? Mental health apps have drastically improved the physical and mental health conditions of countless users and they have made stress management tools quite accessible. You will be surprised to know that mental health apps had a $5.2 Billion market value in 2022. Clearly, despite the privacy and security flaws associated with mental health apps, they have now become a necessity for many. Consequently, in this section, we have shared some of the best practices to follow while using Metal Health Apps. 1. Download Apps Through Offical App Stores Firstly, only download mental health apps from official app stores like the Google PlayStore and Apples AppStore. Every App in these stores generally has to follow strict rules and regulations to be published in the store. Additionally, they are thoroughly checked before being made available in the store. Side-loading or manually installing mental health apps from third-party app websites can be quite dangerous. So we highly advise our readers, to avoid downloading mental health apps from third-party websites. While its convenient to sign up using a social media account, please avoid doing so for mental health apps. After linking an account, a mental health app can exchange data as it pleases. It can monitor your activity on social media platforms and serve personalized ads. So, linking important accounts like your personal Google or Facebook account to a mental health app can be somewhat risky. 3. Opt Out Of Data Collection While setting up any mainstream mental health app you might be greeted with an option to collect your personal or usage data to further enhance the app in future updates. Once again we advise our readers to uncheck the data collection prompt. Doing so can help prevent your personal data from leaking during events like a data breach. Additionally, you can also opt out of cookies, ads, and analytics. For instance, Cerebral, a mental health provider, recently suffered a data breach that affected roughly 3.18 million people who have interacted with the service. CONCLUSION Undoubtedly, mental health apps are quite useful and have had countless positive effects on the well-being of millions of users. That said, mental health apps are not up to the mark as far as privacy checkups are concerned. Consequently, to prevent unwanted usage of your valuable data, only rely on well-reviewed and popular mental health apps. Furthermore, only download, install, and use mental health apps from official app stores like the Google PlayStore and Apples AppStore. Lastly, the privacy and security of users should be the top priority of mental health apps. We hope that, sooner or later, mental health apps become more responsible in handling highly sensitive personal data. Do share your thoughts and opinions on privacy concerns associated with mental health apps on our socials. President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela addresses supporters in Caracas on Monday morning, following the referendum - Matias Delacroix / AP Venezuelan voters have overwhelmingly backed the countrys claim to an oil-rich swath of Guyana in a move dubbed a pretext for annexation by its neighbour. Electoral authorities said 95 per cent of voters approved establishing a new state in Essequibo in a non-binding referendum on Sunday. Venezuela has become increasingly hawkish in pushing its claim over Essequibo which makes up two-thirds of the English-speaking former British colonys territory and is home to around a sixth of its population since vast oil reserves were discovered off its coast eight years ago. Nicolas Maduro, Venezuelas authoritarian Left-wing president, hailed the overwhelming victory for Yes throughout Venezuela following Sundays vote. About 10.5 million of Venezuelas 20.7 million eligible voters took part in the referendum. We have to give a standing ovation to the Venezuelan people, Mr Maduro said, while not specifying what his socialist government would do in response to the outcome of the consultative referendum. Venezuela is in the grip of a crippling economic crisis ahead of elections next year and analysts say Mr Maduro is attempting to use the Essequibo issue as a distraction. Nothing is more potent to divert attention than to bring up a powerful, attractive issue that appeals to patriotic sentiment, said Rocio San Miguel, a Venezuelan security expert. Irfaan Ali, Guyanas president, insisted there was nothing to fear despite the referendum result, saying his government was working to protect the countrys borders and keep people safe. Thousands of people, some of them wearing T-shirts reading Essequibo belongs to Guyana, formed human chains to protest against Venezuelas claim as Sundays vote took place. The Maduro government has said it is not seeking justification to invade or annex the huge territory, as some fear in English-speaking Guyana. Oil reserves of at least 10 billion barrels The dispute between the two countries over Essequibo has escalated since 2015, when ExxonMobil discovered oil off its coast. Story continues Guyana is estimated to have crude oil reserves of at least 10 billion barrels more than the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. The exploitation of those reserves means the country is set to surpass Venezuelas own oil output and become the worlds largest producer of crude per capita. Tensions have now reached fever pitch after Guyana took bids for new offshore oil exploration in September and announced a new find in October. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Friday that Venezuela should not take any action to change the status quo in the region. It added that there is a serious risk of Venezuela acquiring and exercising control and administration of the territory in dispute in the present case. But at Sundays referendum, which asked voters a series of questions, Venezuelan voters unilaterally rejected the ICJs jurisdiction. A pedestrian walks past a mural that reads "All of Venezuela", alongside a map depicting the disputed Essequibo territory as part of Venezuela - Gaby Oraa / Bloomberg The vote covered five questions in total, including proposals for the creation of a Venezuelan province to be called Guyana Essequibo, and giving the inhabitants Venezuelan citizenship. Caracas contends that the Essequibo River to the regions east is the natural border between the two countries, as declared in 1777 under Spanish rule, and that Britain wrongly appropriated Venezuelan lands in the 19th century. Guyana argues that the current border was confirmed in 1899 by a court of arbitration and that Venezuela accepted these findings until 1962. Venezuelas position is that a 1966 agreement between Venezuela and then colonial ruler Britain nullified the 1899 ruling. 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. Eleven kilometers into the depths: China says it wants to drill into the Earth's mantle with a special ship According to the study, crocodiles are romantic lovers and speak a "language of love" Five New Restaurants and Travelers Who Are Going to Be Very Familiar This Year Mantequeria Bermejo, the centennial trade that has gone viral for a few horns Google will probably fail with lawsuit against billions in fine from the European Union Why is South Africa's complaint against Israel before the Court of Justice the most important of all? 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Sergio Herrera: "If the opponent's crowd hesitates me, I bite them, I laugh... Someone has told me 'you're the dumbest guy in the league.'" The mystery of asthmatic champions: Why do 20% of athletes have respiratory problems? The Ministry of Finance of Russia will sell currency and gold for 69,1 billion rubles The government now justifies the pact with Junts on the exit of companies "to avoid fiscal engineering" from which they left Planas rules out lowering taxes on more foods and encourages the 'super' to lower the price of oil from now on Cottbus: Olaf Scholz is greeted by farmers' protests at the opening of the railway plant Bitcoin: Is it possible and recommended to invest via funds? The "dragon content" of the e-commerce platform has surged, and the atmosphere has not yet been full Train tickets for the first day of the Spring Festival are open today, and the rules have changed! Grifols is not convincing: there are no concrete explanations for analysts and the stock is once again plummeting China-Malaysia Relations Upgraded Again Expert: Equal cooperation sets an example for countries in the region "Hunter's skills came in handy": a 59-year-old resident of Bashkortostan went to the NWO after his son Through the fence openings. How did tweeters comment on Egyptians' solidarity with displaced people in Gaza? Slutsky: US support for the seizure of Russia's assets will set up the European Union While Israel's aggression on Gaza continues. What are the highlights of the world today? How do I know if I'm pregnant No. 1? What are the top 10 questions that Arabs searched for in Google in 2023? Chinese authorities announce the dismantling of the encryption of the "Airdrop" service from "Apple" US Treasury: new anti-Russian sanctions imposed on two companies and three aircraft A resident of the Rostov region was convicted in the case of attempted treason The first train has rolled into the food giant's large warehouse in Kjula to supply the whole country with goods Shocking news: Parts of the hospital in Kiruna must be evacuated into modules The Campo de Gibraltar applies a "drastic drop" in water pressure that leads to cuts during the night After the withdrawal of the occupation. Al-Duwairi reveals the contours of the next phase of the Gaza war Qatar Charity launches two projects in the name of the martyrs Hamza Al-Dahdouh and Mustafa Thuraya Aqaba summit calls for cessation of Israeli aggression and warns of the seriousness of the situation in the West Bank Israeli writer: Our borders will extend and we will take Mecca, Medina and Mount Sinai Hamas: We will not allow the occupation and its supporters to interfere in the future of the Gaza Strip Russia has told Ecuador that the transfer of its equipment to the United States would be an unfriendly step Communities 2019 - Privacy The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them. Pearl Academy Entrance 2024 : PAF Entrance Test https://career.webindia123.com/career/dates_and_events/entrance/fashion/pearl-academy-of-fashion-entrance-test.htm Details of Pearl Academy Entrance 2024 : PAF Entrance Test 2023-12-4 2024-1-23 https://career.webindia123.com/career/images/exams.png India India Pearl Academy Entrance 2024 : PAF Entrance Test Design Pearl Academy of Fashion Entrance Test 2024 Pearl Academy Entrance 2024 : PAF Entrance Test Category : Design Admissions 2024 Published : On December 4, 2023 By Webindia123 Editor Important Dates August Cycle Last date of application 23rd January 2024 Entrance Examination 27-28th January 2024 Generation of Admit Cards 24th January 2024 Publishing of Results February 2024 Pearl Academy Noida invites applications for the academic year 2024. Courses offered at Pearl Centres 4-Year Under Graduate Pathway Fashion Design [FD] Communication Design (Graphics/Interaction & Digital) [CD-GID] Fashion Styling & Image Design [FSID] Interior Design [ID] Fashion Media Communication [FMC] Product Design [PD] 3-Year Under Graduate Pathway Journalism & Mass Media [JMM] Fashion & Lifestyle Business Management [FLBM] Global Luxury Brand Management [GLBM] 1-Year/ 2-Year Post Graduate Pathway Fashion Design [PGFD] Interior Design & Styling [PGIDS] Fashion Styling & Image Design [PGFSID] Fashion Business (Marketing & Merchandising) [PGFBMM] Luxury Brands [PGLB] Communication Design [PGCD] Fashion Communication [PGFC] Journalism & Mass Media [PGJMM] PR & Events [PDPRE] 2-Year Masters MA Design (Fashion & Textiles) [MAFT] MA Fashion Marketing [MAFMG] 1-Year Certificate Fashion Media Make Up [FMM] Fashion Womens Wear [FWW] Professional Photography [PP] Styling for Interiors [SI] Eligibility Criteria For 3-Year/4-Year Under Pathway : 10+2, or equivalent with minimum 50% marks. For 2-Year Post Graduate Diploma programmes : Graduate in any discipline from a recognized university. For 11 month certificate Programs: 10+2, or equivalent For 2-Year Masters : MAFT : A graduate Degree in fashion design or textile design Or A graduate diploma in fashion design or textile design with at least 2 years work experience in fashion/textiles industry Or Any graduate with 3 years work experience in fashion/textiles industry MAFMG : Essential : Graduate Degree (or equivalent) Desirable : Graduation in Fashion Management, Marketing, Retail, Merchandising, Manufacturing or Design Or At least 3 years fashion business experience Application Procedure Candidates applying online are required to apply through the Admissions 2024 Portal (ADMISSIONS 2024) on the official home page of Pearl Website (www.pearlacademy.com) Candidates appearing in their final examinations can also apply provisionally. Candidates can apply through the Online mode using either Debit/Credit Card or Demand Draft. Application fee is to be paid using Credit Card / Debit Card / Demand Draft. Please keep your Credit Card / Debit Card / Demand Draft ready with you before applying. The Demand Draft should be in favour of "Creative Arts Education Society" payable at New Delhi. Candidates are required to Register Online using a Valid e-mail ID before applying. This email ID should be valid for at least next 1 year. Candidates are advised to keep the following ready with them before applying online: Credit / Debit Card/Net Banking/Demand Draft or Cash on counter. Scanned copy of passport size photograph [The photograph must be a recent passport size color picture, preferably in white background. Photographs with Caps, hats and dark glasses are not acceptable. The image should be in .jpg format only. Size of file should not be more than 1 mb]. Details of educational qualifications (marks / grade / year of passing etc.) Guidelines for Applying Online using Credit / Debit Card/Net Banking as payment option: Select choices of Course and Campus (only 1 choice for MA course). Fill up the Online Application form Click on APPLY ONLINE and select Payment by Credit Card / Debit Card/Net banking Click on SAVE and SUBMIT your application you will be directed to a payment gateway. Application Form Fee: Rs. 1500/- for Indian & Nepali Nationals only (non refundable) After completion of your Online Application and payment authorization, please SAVE your Online Application and take a print out. An auto-generated confirmation mail will be sent on your Email ID containing the following: Confirmation of successful Online Registration & Payment. Your Online Application Number. In case unsuccessful, you will be asked to apply and fill up the online application form again. Note: Candidates applying online through Credit / Debit card/Net Banking are not required to send print out of the application form. Guidelines for Applying Online using Demand Draft/Cash on Counter as payment option: Select choices of Course and Campus (only 1 choice for MA course). Fill up the Online Application form Enter the Demand Draft details (DD in favor of Creative Arts Education Society) or select cash on counter and click on Submit. Click on APPLY ONLINE and select Payment through Demand Draft/Cash on Counter Click on SAVE and SUBMIT your application. After completion of your Online Application and payment authorization, please SAVE your Online Application and take a print out. An auto-generated confirmation mail will be sent on your Email ID containing the following: Confirmation of successful Online Registration & Payment. Your Online Application Number. In case unsuccessful, you will be asked to apply and fill up the online application form again. Note: Candidates applying online through Demand Draft/Cash amount of Rs. 2000/- are required to send print out of the application form along with DD/Cash amount. To check status of form submission a. Log on to Pearl website (www.pearlacademy.com) b. Go to apply now c. Enter User id & Password i) for online form submission email id will be your User ID & password created by you ii) for Offline form submission Email ID will be your User ID & Password will be sharing on your email id, once form will be submitted at our end. Candidates can also apply through Offline mode by purchase of Application Kit-2019 from the Pearl Academy campuses and authorized Sales Counters. Admit cards for Written Test & Personal Interviews for both admission cycles will be available 4 days before the Written Test/Personal Interview. Candidates are required to download Admit Cards from Pearl Website only. Please check Pearl website regularly for updates. Pearl Academy reserves the right to amend, change or cancel courses including dates of commencement, number of seats, location, programmes, programme content, fee structure etc. with no liability attached to the Academy. Pearl Academy reserves the right to cancel / add / change any entrance examination center(s) due to administrative reasons. Other centers may also be added and such information, as well as the exact location of the centers, will be notified later. Pattern of Admission Test Stage 1:Written Admission Test GPT and DAT General Proficiency Test (GPT) is administered to judge a candidates proficiency in the English language (comprehension, vocabulary and expression), Language Ability, Logical reasoning, Quantitative ability, Data Interpretation, basic Mathematics, etc. Design Aptitude Test (DAT) examines candidates aptitude for creativity, drawing, design ability, power of observation and imagination, sensitivity to environment and communication skills. Applicants have the option of opting for maximum 2 course choices. Applicants opting for a Design course in any of the choices will be required to appear for Design Aptitude Test (DAT). Stage 2: Personal Interview (including portfolio evaluation / material handling skill test for Design streams). A candidate is judged on various parameters by a panel as listed below: Career Focus Maturity & Confidence General Awareness, Creative and Lateral Thinking Ability to Analyze / Logical Reasoning Intellectual / Creative Ability Portfolio evaluation Material Handling Skills (for Design streams) All candidates are required to undergo a Personal Interview after the Written Admission Test at their respective Entrance Examination centre /Personal Interview centres mentioned on their Admit Card. All candidates are required to undergo a Personal Interview after the Written Admission Test at their respective Entrance Examination Centre. Candidates appearing for the Written Test in Delhi / NCR, Noida, Jaipur, Mumbai and Chennai centres are required to appear for the Personal Interview at respective Pearl Academy Campuses only. For MAFT Pathway: Selection is based on personal interview & portfolio evaluation Please check Pearl website regularly for updates. Contact Details Address : Pearl Academy A-21/13, Naraina Industrial Area, Phase-II, New Delhi 110028 Phone : 011- 49807100 / 101 Fax : Mobile : 081305 66399 E-mail : Website : www.pearlacademy.com Find it Useful ? Help Others by Sharing Online Comments and Discussions On the last day of the trip to Hainan, the group of "An Open Future", a media tour of Hainan for representatives of international media organizations and social media personalities came to Yangpu to experience the "dream" and "miracle" in the "showroom" of Hainan Free Trade Port. On the afternoon of December 1, at Yangpu International Container Terminal, a 269-meter-long giant ship docked at No. 3 berth. On the shore, a tall quay crane was loading containers onto the ship one by one. The next morning, the ship will leave the port and arrive in Qinzhou Port, Guangxi, at noon. "As the gateway port for the western region of China to access the sea, Qinzhou Port has a large demand for container, so it is often necessary to transport empty containers from Yangpu Port for replenishment. Accordingly, cargo ships departing from Qinzhou Port will also carry goods to Yangpu Port for transshipment. The two ports have a close relationship." At the wharf, the tour guide introduced in detail to the members of the group about the construction and current operation of the wharf. As the international shipping hub for the new land-sea passage in western China and the gateway to the Pacific and Indian Oceans for Hainan Free Trade Port, Yangpu International Container Terminal is the main platform for building a multi-billion-dollar logistics industry cluster in the future Ring Xinying Bay area. It is understood that in 2022, the annual throughput of Yangpu Port was about 1.5 million TEUs, and it is expected to reach 1.6 million TEUs in 2023. This year, the expansion of Yangpu International Container Hub Port and the reconstruction and expansion of port channel in Yangpu region have been started one after another. In the future, Yangpu International Container Terminal plans to open 20 new container shipping routes, achieving more than 50 container shipping routes for Yangpu Port, with each domestic and foreign trade route exceeding 25, and extending its shipping routes to regions such as Americas, Middle East, and Europe. Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} The stunning rise and fall of serial fabulist George Santos is already being made into a film. HBO Films has obtained the rights to the new book The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos by Mark Chiusano, which was published on 28 November, according to Deadline. A film based on the book is now in development and is described as a forensic and darkly comic look at the crazy, unprecedented congressional race on Long Island that led to Santos being elected, the outlet reported. It tells the story of Mr Santoss local Long Island race for Congress, his rise to fame and his swindling and lying to get there. It follows the Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on truth and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American Dream, Deadline reported. Frank Rich, who produced the political satire Veep and the Murdoch empire-inspired Succession series on HBO, is bringing the story of Mr Santos to the big screen as one of the executive producers. Mike Makowsky, the writer and producer of Bad Education, wrote the film and is also an executive producer, while Mr Chiusano is a consulting producer. Disgraced former US Representative George Santos (REUTERS) Mr Santos was expelled from the House on Friday after almost half of all Republicans joined with Democrats in backing his ouster. In total, 311 members voted to remove Mr Santos, easily crossing the two-thirds threshold of 290 114 members voted against his removal, two voted present, and eight didnt vote. The booting of Mr Santos came almost a year after stories of his lies began to appear in the press, initially in the North Shore Leader and The New York Times. After surviving two previous motions to expel him, the third time was the charm for the 35-year-old following an investigation by the House Ethics Committee which found substantial evidence that he violated federal law. Mr Santos, who was also previously indicted on several felony charges, including wire fraud and identity theft, is only the third Member of Congress to be removed since the Civil War and the only one to be booted without first having been convicted of a criminal offence. He has denied all wrongdoing. The initial revelations of Mr Santoss fibs and lies came shortly after his 2022 election victory before he had even been sworn in to Congress, when it emerged he had made up large parts of his resume and background. Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy notice Thanks for signing up to the Inside Washington email {{ #verifyErrors }} {{ message }} {{ /verifyErrors }} {{ ^verifyErrors }} Something went wrong. Please try again later {{ /verifyErrors }} The White House has issued a grave warning to Congress that if it fails to pass legislation by the end of the year to continue funding Ukraines defence, then Russia will be more likely to win the nearly two-year-old war. In a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda said that the Defense and State departments are at the stage where they have almost exhausted all available US funds for Kyiv approximately $111bn leaving recent assistance packages smaller and smaller. I want to be clear: without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from US military stocks, she said. There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money and nearly out of time. Ms Young said the failure to appropriate more funding for much-needed defence assistance to Kyiv would kneecap Ukraines defence forces, not only putting at risk the gains Ukraine has made, but increasing the likelihood of Russian military victories. She added that US support remains critical and cannot be replicated by others even as American allies across the globe have also contributed to Ukraines self-defence efforts. The White House budget directors warning comes as Mr Johnson has refused to make clear whether he would allow the House to vote on a supplemental funding bill that would include aid to both Ukraine and Israel, as President Joe Biden has requested. While Republicans in the House have been amenable to allocating more funds to bolster Israels defence during the countrys month-old war against Hamas, a vocal faction in the GOP is opposing continued aid to Ukraine largely because denying Kyiv assistance would be seen as denying Mr Biden a victory. Jake Sullivan, Mr Bidens national security adviser, told reporters at Mondays daily White House press briefing that lawmakers who refuse to vote for the supplemental funding bill because of an objection to Ukraine defence aid are voting for an outcome that will make it easier for Putin to prevail. A vote against supporting Ukraine is a vote to improve Putins strategic position. That's just an inescapable reality, that's not speaking to someone's motive or why they chose to vote against it, that's just speaking to the outcome of their vote, Mr Sullivan said. A vote against supplemental funding for Ukraine will hurt Ukraine and help Russia. It will hurt democracy and help dictators, and we think that that is not the right lesson of history, and that every member Democrat and Republican should vote to support this, he added. While GOP lawmakers have sought to justify their opposition by complaining that allocating funds for Ukraine does not benefit the US directly or by suggesting that there are no controls on how the money at issue would be spent Ms Young, the White House budget director, pointed out in her letter that Mr Bidens request for supplemental appropriations would also pump more than $50bn into US-based defence manufacturing, including bolstering capabilities for building air defence systems, tactical vehicles, and artillery shells made in numerous different states. Biden and Zelensky in the Oval Office in September 2023 (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved) She added that US aid to help Ukraine secure its future as a sovereign, democratic, independent, and prosperous nation would advance American interests by preventing a larger conflict in the region, one that could conceivably involve Nato and necessitate the deployment of US forces into combat zones. As President Biden has said, when dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they will cause more chaos and death and destruction. They just keep on going, and the cost and the threats to America and to the world will keep rising, Ms Young said. She also warned the House speaker that the path he chooses whether he allows the House to vote on Ukraine aid or not will reverberate for many years to come and stressed that the US government is out of money to support Ukraine as of now. This isnt a next year problem. The time to help a democratic Ukraine fight against Russian aggression is right now. It is time for Congress to act, she said. Louisiana Public Broadcasting's new documentary, 'Tall Order' takes a deep dive into the art and architecture of the iconic building. The show debuts at 7 p.m. Monday. When firefighters rushed from across the state to battle a massive wildfire in Beauregard Parish, a firefighter from Texas noticed something unsettling about his Louisiana colleagues: most of them had no idea what they were doing. This shows a picture shot in 2007 of a U.S. Geological Survey benchmark that was on dry land when it was installed here in 1932, around the time Louisiana's coast began to steadily erode. The land around the marker, near the southwestern corner of Couba Island in St. Charles Parish had washed away by the time the inset photo was shot in 2007. In 2021's Hurricane Ida, the marker apparently was swept away for good, and the landscape has eroded further. Historic reforms to strengthen Australias inadequate foreign bribery laws are set to be debated this week, but there are fears the proposed legislation could be delayed again more than six years after a similar bill was first introduced to federal parliament. The Senate is scheduled to debate, and pass, legislation this week, drawn up in response to warnings from the OECD for Australia to ramp up prosecutions of those paying bribes overseas by cracking down on local businesses that do not have adequate anti-foreign bribery safeguards. The Combatting Foreign Bribery Bill, introduced to Parliament by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, is likely to be delayed again. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen When enacted, the Combatting Foreign Bribery Bill will make it an indictable offence for an organisation to fail to prevent bribery of a foreign official, placing the onus on businesses to demonstrate they had put in place processes and procedures to stave off graft. If convicted, the body corporate would be fined either $27.5 million, three times the value of the benefit directly or indirectly obtained, or 10 per cent of the annual turnover during a 12-month period (whichever is greater). Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price rejected 52 interview requests from the ABC during the Voice to Parliament referendum campaign, with the public broadcaster citing its futile pursuit of the senator as an example of its efforts to cover the campaign fairly. The report, authored by Mark Maley, chair of the ABCs Referendum Coverage Review Committee (RCRC) and editorial policy manager, said Price did not agree to a single interview on any major broadcast program over the course of the campaign (August 30 to October 14). It added that the ABC had faced significant challenges in getting voices from the No camp to present their argument as opposed to those from the Yes camp. Jacinta Price rejected 52 interview requests to appear on the ABC. Credit: Aresna Villanueva Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, for instance, declined at least 52 interview requests with the ABC and did not agree to a single interview on a major broadcast program, the report said. Major broadcast programs include any national show across radio or television. In response, Price told this masthead in a statement that she and the No campaign had gone to great lengths to reach as many Australians as possible, but it was not her job to make herself available to the ABC whenever it suited them. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime. Say gday to Liverpool Streets 120-seat venue and its nostalgic menu serving potato scallops (with real scallop) and fairy bread ice-cream sangers. As featured in our picks of places for last-minute Christmas catch-ups. See all stories . Nostalgia is a big buzzword at The Waratah, the intriguing neighbourhood bar and dining room that opens in Darlinghurst on Wednesday, December 6. Its on show with the menu, which includes a starter of potato scallops amped-up with real scallop and a fairy bread ice-cream sandwich with sour honey. The Waratah in Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst. Jason Loucas Co-owner Cynthia Litster repeatedly uses the word nostalgia when describing the venue, a Tardis on the corner of Liverpool and Victoria streets that squeezes in 120 people. The bars opening is good news for Darlinghurst, a once-thriving nightlife hub that has, over the years, lost some of its sheen. In 2020 The Green Park Hotel closed after 127 years, followed by ground-breaking bar Eau de Vie not long after, and this year Kissue and Meraki Arts Bar on Oxford Street shut. There is, though, excitment around the opening of The Waratah beyond its location. Its ground floor is a classic bar where Litsters business partner Evan Stroeve will serve up a signature Waratah Spritz on tap. Its made with Rhubi Mistelle, Archie Rose vodka, watermelon wine, vanilla and a lemon myrtle garnish. Stroeve has a trophy cabinet of bartending awards including Australias Best Bartender for his time at South Eveleighs Re, and a CV that sweeps from influential bars Shady Pines Saloon and the now-closed Bulletin Place. Re-routing some buses through the Rozelle interchange to reduce traffic snarls on Victoria Road in Sydneys inner west is under serious consideration as emergency work begins to create extra lane space on the City West Link in the run-up to the Anzac Bridge. The addition of a 400-metre-long second lane on the City West Link is expected to improve city-bound traffic flows, but it means motorists using the new Crescent overpass from Annandale will potentially face a longer commute as they merge with vehicles using the extended lane. The 500X service could be rerouted through the Iron Cove Link after buses were caught up in the traffic jam on Victoria Road. Credit: Louise Kennerley Transport authorities are also looking at lane changes for city-bound traffic on the Victoria Road on-ramp to the Anzac Bridge, where the queuing is at its worst. Roads Minister John Graham said prioritising two lanes for the City West Link would impact motorists using what was now a clear city-bound lane from the Crescent overpass. But were just pleased that now hes no longer accountable to the Australian public, or pesky rules about conflicts of interest, Robert is free to pursue his business interests unimpeded. It was something he did with a little too much gusto as an MP. UltraTune bosss up and down fortunes Multimillionaire businessman Sean Buckley has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. The Ultra Tune boss became famous for his companys risque adverts starring Charlie Sheen and Pamela Anderson, and then rather infamous when it was discovered the company had been using its marketing budget to pay for its Rubber Girl brand ambassadors to star on the front cover of mens magazines including some of Buckleys ex-partners. Buckley is one of those people whom things just seem to sort of happen around. Take the incident last month in which his ex-partner was allegedly assaulted at Maxim magazines Halloween party by Buckleys then-current partner, the Daily Mail reported. Ultra Tune owner Sean Buckley in 2018 on set with the companys Rubber Girl brand ambassadors. Credit: Twitter/Sean Buckley And in new court documents Buckley claims an audio recording of him allegedly assaulting a different ex-girlfriend, Jennifer Cole, was actually a sex tape. That assertion was contained in a new statement of claim as part of his ongoing court stoush with Cole and a former employee, Anthony Swords, over the release of said recording. That is now headed to court with a trial date set for 2025, and how that will end up CBD certainly cant predict. The stylish penthouses loungeroom. Credit: Domain Buckley does appear to have had one recent win, however. Title records show hes taken out a caveat on a South Melbourne luxury penthouse formerly owned by billionaire tech entrepreneur Robin Khuda. Caveats are usually a legal step towards buying a property. Buckley though, very apologetically, told CBD on Monday that he couldnt give any more details. I cant really talk about it, unfortunately. If I tell you what the reason is, it will get awkward for you. Id rather not comment on it, he said. Fair enough CBD always does its best to avoid awkward situations. If Buckley is buying the pad, though, hes getting a pretty bit of real estate. Stunning! Credit: Domain Domain has reported the 545-square metre, three-bedroom home, bought in 2020 for $6.6 million, comes with a pool out on the rooftop and views across the CBD and Port Phillip Bay. Radio deal is far from static Its getting to the point where ARN Media is going to need its own in-house dealing desk for shares in Southern Cross Austereo. The radio giant, which owns KIIS FM, home of The Kyle and Jackie O Show, recently bought up a 14.8 per cent stake in its rival, laying the groundwork for a private equity-backed takeover bid. Hamish McLennan. Credit: Kate Geraghty ARN, which is chaired by former Rugby Australia chair Hamish McLennan, was dealt a blow on Monday when the Takeovers Panel ruled its initial stake was acquired in contravention of rules, and ordered a sale of 6.8 per cent of those shares. The panels decision, which ARN has vowed to have reviewed, not only hinders McLennan. Its also good news for Australian Community Media boss Antony Catalano, who along with billionaire Alex Waislitz is wielding a counter-offer for Southern Cross. Just to complicate matters even further, the Kerry Stokes-controlled Seven West Media launched its own share raid last month, acquiring a 20 per cent stake. Power out News that the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is shutting down for three years from February provided a bit of certainty about the future of the institution after so much time in limbo. And strangely enough, it might also bring a bit of solace to the museums staff, who are some of the most miserable in the public service. Just 18 per cent of respondents to a recent internal staff survey thought change was well managed in the organisation, while only 25 per cent thought senior staff provided clear directions for the future of the organisation, down 7 per cent since 2022. Loading The survey also found that 21 per cent of respondents intended to leave within a year, while 36 per cent hoped to apply for jobs elsewhere in the public service. Of those planning to depart, 42 per cent blamed the poor quality of senior leadership. Now, all this comes against a backdrop of years of uncertainty about the future of the Ultimo site, a lack of clarity about the purpose of the museum, and plenty of flip-flopping from successive state governments over what exactly they wanted the Powerhouse to be. The Powerhouse Museum is undertaking a once-in-a-generation transformation as part of the unprecedented program of renewal, a spokesperson for the museum told us. When Jennifer Catlin saw baby photos of herself for the first time in her life, she burst into happy tears. In some of the photos, which were taken by trainee mothercraft nurses at the Presbyterian Babies Home 60 years earlier, she was holding a little teddy bear. Jennifer Catlin and her childhood teddy bear at the former Presbyterian Babies Home in Camberwell on Monday. Credit: Joe Armao Catlin, who was given up by her alcoholic mother and sickly miner father when she was 18 months old, still cherishes the toy bear today. She said the fact that she was given the teddy at the home, and allowed to keep it, showed that people there cared for her. The vigilante ringleader behind the torture and murder of a father whose body was found dumped in a remote grave has been jailed for life. Albert Thorn will be nearing 90 before he is eligible for parole, after a Supreme Court jury found him guilty of the murder of Bradley Lyons, 30, in a remote part of eastern Victoria in 2018. Murder victim Bradley Lyons. Lyons was set upon in the bedroom of his Lakes Entrance home on December 2 and beaten with fists and a metal pole by a group of men led by the now 58-year-old Thorn. The men wanted him to confess to claims he had sexually assaulted children. He was bound and bundled into the boot of Thorns car, which was driven to a rural property. Visitors to the Mornington Peninsula will now have to pay to park at the beach as the council seeks to recoup losses in maintenance costs associated with growing tourist numbers. Motorists will need to pay $6.20 an hour across three beach car parks, including Flinders Pier in Flinders, Schnapper Point in Mornington and Sunnyside Beach in Mount Eliza. Mount Eliza residents Tom Fernie and Taysha at the Sunnyside Beach foreshore car park, where parking is no longer free for visitors. Credit: Penny Stephens The Mornington Peninsula Shire Council said the nine-month paid parking pilot, which began on Friday, the first day of summer, would generate much-needed revenue for the shire. The paid parking will run between 8am and 8pm and a daily rate is capped at $19.50. Perths weather is heating up and its people are hitting the beach. And if you asked most of them if they worry about dangers below the surface, theyll surely admit the thought of sharks is never far away. But if your local is Trigg, City Beach or Scarborough, or if youre planning to take your children to spots such as Geraldton or the South West this summer, be mindful of a more clear and present danger. In Australia 26 people drown in rips on average a year, according to coastal scientist Professor Rob Brander. Thats more than the average for bushfires, floods, cyclones and sharks combined, he said. A 15-year-old boy who was accused of firing shots at his former high school in May has pleaded guilty. The boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was arrested by police after driving a car belonging to his parents to Atlantis Baptist College where he used two rifles to open fire at the school, sending terrified teachers and students into lockdown. The teenager leaving Perth Childrens Court with his family in July. Credit: 9 News Perth On Monday the boy appeared at Perths Childrens Court where two of the charges put to him were dropped one where he fired a shot at the ground and another of possessing a gel blaster. However, he pleaded guilty to all other charges before him including driving without a license, possessing prohibited weapons, possessing a .22 calibre rifle without a license, discharging a firearm and intent to harm students and teachers. Ive stayed in many fancy hotels and resorts. Still, I usually forget to anticipate the turn-down service sometimes offered at these places. This is when housekeeping pops into your room in the late afternoon or early evening to carry out a variety of tasks meant to make you feel pampered, comfortable and ready for bed. Hotel room magic a chocolate on the pillow and a tidy-up while youre out. Credit: iStock Depending how posh your hotel is, this service could include folding back a corner of the bed linen, placing a chocolate or room-service breakfast menu on your pillow or side table, popping a pair of slippers beside your bed, switching on lamps, emptying bins, restocking beverages, rearranging your toiletries around the bathroom basin and folding your clothes into a neat pile. On paper, it sounds wonderful. Whats there to complain about? For me, its a service so randomly offered by hotels that I often forget it might be on the cards. I must be finally learning, though. Recently, when staying at a tiny boutique hotel on Queenslands Gold Coast, I remembered to scoop up my dirty clothes off the bed and floor and put them away before heading to dinner. Sure enough, upon return I could see thered been some tidying but at least no one had to handle my underwear and socks as Id stashed them safely back in my suitcase. It was a proud moment. Penguins are champion power nappers. Over the course of a single day, they fall asleep thousands of times, each bout a few seconds long, a new study has found. Although animals have a wide range of sleeping styles, penguins easily take the record for fragmented sleeping. A Chinstrap penguin on the coast near the town of Villa Las Estrellas at King George Island, Antarctica. Their beady little eyes, squarish torsos and adorable waddling make penguins one of the main attractions for tourists who visit Antarctica. Credit: AP Its really unusual, said Paul-Antoine Libourel, a neuroscientist at the Neuroscience Research Centre of Lyon in France who helped make the discovery, along with Won Young-lee, a researcher at the Korea Polar Research Institute. This just highlights the fact that we dont know much about sleep, and all animals are not sleeping like the way we read in textbooks, Libourel said. The possibilities for advancement in cloud computing seem limitless, with the rising prominence of cloud-native applications like containers, microservices and APIs. The appeal for businesses lies in the cloud's innate scalability and adaptability. Furthermore, the ascent of technologies like generative AI and Web3, demanding substantial computing capabilities, is elevating the trajectory of the cloud's expansion. The issue with being on the cloud lies with cybersecurity risks. In fact, recent data reveals that approximately 27% of businesses encountered a security breach within their public cloud infrastructure in the past year. Nearly a quarter of these breaches were attributed to security misconfigurations within the companies' cloud infrastructure. Organizations must address and enhance security measures to safeguard against potential cyber threats. To help organizations, Skyhawk Security, came up with cloud threat detection and response, or CDR. According to Skyhawk, CDR frameworks provide organizations with automated threat monitoring to ensure adaptability to evolving risks and scalability across multiple cloud service providers. These frameworks enhance visibility across all cloud layers and allow for real-time detection of security risks resulting from misconfigurations. Learn more about cloud security from Chen Burshan, CEO, Skyhawk Security, at ITEXPO 2024 on Feb. 13-15, 2024, in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. On the topic of cloud security, Skyhawk announced a shift in cloud security with Continuous Proactive Protection. This latest advancement in its CDR Synthesis Security Platform introduces an AI-based, autonomous purple team providing Adaptive Cloud Threat Detection and Response. Continuous Proactive Protection is a proactive security approach that involves an ongoing cycle of AI-based red team and blue team simulations to fortify an organization's cloud infrastructure. This autonomous purple team engages in iterative processes to continually enhance security measures. The first step involves discovering and maintaining an inventory of the organization's critical assets. Subsequently, the system analyzes the paths of least resistance to the organization's vital assets, identifying potential weak points in the infrastructure. Following this, the system simulates attacks, creating scenarios that target high-priority assets to evaluate the effectiveness of current security measures. The evaluation of defenses includes understanding how security mechanisms detect and respond to threats, thereby identifying gaps in the security posture. The platform generates suggestions for pre-verified automated responses and remediation strategies based on this analysis. The Continuous Proactive Protection system utilizes the results of this continuous process to adapt detection capabilities, which leads to the development of an Adaptive CDR system. This tailored detection mechanism is finely tuned to the specifics of each customer's unique cloud infrastructure. For enterprise security leaders, Continuous Proactive Protection offers confidence in incident response readiness. It enables proactive preparation for top business risks, thus preventing potential cloud breaches. The system also grants a comprehensive understanding of the real risks associated with the organization's cloud infrastructure. What we announced is a paradigm shift, said Burshan. It is the first continuous proactive cloud security, delivered by extending our field-proven CDR platform to use an AI-driven, adaptive security with self-learning capabilities. The new process continuously and automatically repeats. Its like having an automated purple team that never sleeps and constantly updates and improves your cloud security in a single synergistic process. This new capability further extends Skyhawks technology leadership in applying AI to cloud security. This approach allows security teams to take a proactive and adaptive stance in their security strategy. To hear more from Chen Burshan, CEO, Skyhawk Security about cloud security, join him for his session at ITEXPO 2024, taking place February 13-15, 2024, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as part of the #TECHSUPERSHOW. Since 1999, ITEXPO (News - Alert) has combined educational conference programming with a robust exhibit hall, networking events, and other activities, bringing together buyers and providers of business technology products and services that drive business success. Edited by Alex Passett Dubai: The presidency of COP28 has defended its leader for saying there is no science that phasing out fossil fuels is needed to cap global warming, insisting a video of the remarks was released to undermine the Emirati leadership of the climate summit. On the fifth day of the talks in Dubai, COP28 Director-General Majid Al Suwaidi hosed down the earlier remarks by President Dr Sultan Al Jaber, reported by The Guardian, as a distraction from the work of the conference. There are many things that are happening here at COP that you are not reporting about, and you focus on this one thing, Suwaidi told reporters at Dubais Expo 2020 site. What he was talking about was, of course, that net-zero 2050. We all know that its very clear in all of the scientific reports that fossil fuels are going to be part of that mix, and hes spoken very clearly that he thinks the phase down of fossil fuels is inevitable. The Office of Congressman Mike Flood has announced that district staff will host mobile office hours in Columbus. The mobile office hours will be from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 5, at Columbus Chamber of Commerce, 753 33rd Ave. During the office hours, district office team members will be available to assist with challenges regarding federal agencies, military academy nominations, scheduling requests and any other needs constituents might encounter. Congressman Flood maintains permanent offices in Lincoln and in Washington, D.C. Location and contact information for the permanent offices can be found at https://flood.house.gov. The facility where future doctors, nurses and other health care providers will be educated before spreading out across rural Nebraska will be named for the University of Nebraska administrator who helped bring it to fruition. On Friday, the NU Board of Regents approved the naming of the Douglas A. Kristensen Rural Health Education Complex, a $95 million facility set to open at the University of Nebraska at Kearney in 2026. The recommendation to name the building after the longtime UNK chancellor originated with the William and Ruth Scott Foundation, the lead donor on the public-private partnership. This is one of the kindest, most impactful things anybody has ever done for me, said Kristensen, a former state senator and speaker of the Legislature who has led UNK since 2002. When it opens to students, the 110,000-square-foot facility with state-of-the-art classrooms, learning labs and simulation centers will mark the next chapter in a partnership between UNK and the University of Nebraska Medical Center that began more than a decade ago. Kristensen, as a longtime resident of Kearney at the heart of that partnership, said he's witnessed talented young people leave small and mid-sized communities across the state to pursue medical education and never come back. People who gain their training and their education generally stay in the area where they get their last degree thats human nature, he said. So, I think the realization started to bubble up that even if we prepare those undergraduates, once we send them off they werent coming back. In 2010, Kristensen was instrumental in the creation of the Kearney Health Opportunities Program that gave students from rural Nebraska a pathway to a career in health care and helped connect them with those positions in areas of need across Nebraska. The partnership grew again a few years later when the Building a Healthier Nebraska initiative focused on locating a UNMC facility for nursing and allied health professions at the university's campus in Kearney. Kristensen was part of the effort that helped secure $15 million in state appropriations to build a new facility for those programs, and led efforts to raise the remaining $4 million in private donations to finish construction and furnishing. After it opened, the Health Science Education Complex quickly reached its capacity as more students sought UNK out as an option for programs ranging from nursing and occupational therapy to osteopathy and podiatry. Between 2018 and 2023, applications for UNKs health science programs increased by 17% from 783 to 921, and roughly 1 out of every 5 students who apply to UNK are interested in a health career, according to a campus spokesman. And this fall, nearly one-fourth of UNKs incoming freshmen class have declared a health science-related major, according to the university. Kristensen said the growth in both interest and enrollment in the health sciences program, along with the greater demand for those professionals in rural areas across Nebraska, led to more ambitious thinking about how UNK and UNMC could fill those gaps. The result was a proposed $85 million facility the price tag later grew to $95 million funded in part through $60 million in state-appropriated American Rescue Plan Act funds. It also benefited from $5 million in funding from the city of Kearney, $1.5 million from Central Community College, and $28.5 million from private sources interested in helping to build a sustainable workforce capable of meeting the health care needs of rural Nebraska. We didnt have to come up with some slick marketing campaign, Kristensen said. It was the right project at the right time. Along with members of the Legislature and university leaders like President Ted Carter and UNMC Chancellor Jeff Gold, the new facility aimed at training health care professionals who desire to work in a rural setting piqued the interest of Omaha philanthropists William and Ruth Scott, who became lead donors through their foundation. John Scott, the vice president for the William and Ruth Scott Foundation, said that as the organization looked at extending its charitable giving outside of Omaha, the goals of the Rural Health Education Building lined up with the causes it felt are worth supporting. We wanted to bring some focus to the kinds of things we would look at, and public health is certainly at the top of that list," Scott said. "Here's a collaborative project at the university that's going to train and prepare a lot of kids from Nebraska to work in the health field. "We think a large majority of those are going to end up in rural communities," he added. "How super impactful is that going to be?" When the NU Foundation notified the Scotts that their donation had earned them the rights to decide whose name was going to be on the building, Scott said one person immediately rose to the top of the list. Kristensen's impact at UNK, on Kearney, and in the Legislature going back decades made him the easy choice, Scott said. "I can't think of a person who has had more of a positive impact on both the Kearney campus and the Kearney community than Doug," Scott said. "Frankly, that's exactly the kind of person we want to recognize." On Friday, during the Board of Regents meeting where the naming was approved, administrators and regents echoed the support expressed by the Scotts. "His undying efforts have truly been amazing, and this will be a remarkable project, not just for Kearney or the University of Nebraska at Kearney, but frankly across the world," Gold said. "I think this complex will literally change the future of the state and will save countless lives in the future," said Omaha Regent Elizabeth O'Connor. "We couldn't have done this without Chancellor Kristensen." Student Regent Katie Schultis, who represents UNMC, and Student Regent Temo Molina of UNK said they supported naming the "truly life changing" project after the chancellor. Kristensen said he has been overwhelmed by the show of support for the new project, from senators across the political spectrum to Nebraskans living in rural and urban areas, which he credited for helping the project be realized. "My fear is they put your name on the building and people will think it was you," he said. "I'm here to tell you it was a lot of people who came together and worked very hard." In the years ahead, the chancellor said he envisions the Kristensen Rural Health Education Complex will give students an immersive experience in a rural setting while also providing them access to the same kind of education they would get at UNMC's main campus in Omaha. Kristensen said the project will also spur further growth in his hometown of Kearney, keeping it a strong economic driver in central Nebraska. "It's going to become a reality, and I'm so appreciative of everybody that helped," he said. "We got it right." Photos: UNK takes on Wayne State in Memorial Stadium By E V Murli The assembly election results declared on Sunday in Chhattisgarh have defied the predictions and expectations that dominated the political topography. The Congress, despite being favored by poll pundits and early exit polls, faced an unexpected setback as the BJP triumphed after five years to form the government in the state. Just a few months ago, the BJP itself was uncertain about making a comeback, given its dismal performance in the 2018 elections. The party and its leadership seemed to lack the vigour needed for a revival. Observers noted an indifferent attitude within the party, even as efforts were made to sideline Dr. Raman Singh. Contrary to the Congress unprecedented victory in 2018, this time around, the party faced challenges. Overconfidence led Congress leaders to boldly claim they would secure 75 seats, surpassing their previous tally of 71. However, in the five years of Congress rule, corruption and scandals involving officials, businessmen and politicians tarnished the Governments reputation and that of the chief minister. The Congress Government began its tenure positively with announcements of schemes for farmers and loan waivers. However, the latter decision resulted in a cash crunch for development projects. The government also had to navigate the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming to boost rural economies but facing growing resentment due to a lack of development initiatives and widespread corruption. The BJP and Congress both made enticing promises, including loan waivers. However, Chhattisgarhs average farmers prioritized development over these attractive pledges. The people, more than being swayed by freebies, were disheartened by the state of affairs, corruption, and scams, particularly the Mahadev App and liquor-related issues, which played a pivotal role in the Congress Governments defeat. Poor implementation of flagship schemes and bureaucratic hurdles added to the challenges faced by the Congress. Political analysts attribute the vote against the Congress to its decision to conduct a caste census, perceived by many as an attempt to further divide society. The deteriorating law and order situation, especially the concerns for womens safety, highlighted by the BJP, also worked against the Congress. The flow of liquor into the interiors of the state and the PSC scam further damaged the Congress Governments standing. While the BJP relied on Modis guarantee and his persona, the Congress grappled with internal strife over leadership, contributing to its poor performance. The 2023 election echoed the dynamics of the 2003 elections, with the BJP making a comeback reminiscent of that earlier turnaround. Bhupesh attempted to lead the Congress similarly to how Ajit Jogi did in 2003, resulting in a replay of history. The Congress missed a crucial opportunity, and internal leadership conflicts were among the factors that contributed to their electoral setback. In the aftermath of the electoral debacle, it is evident that a profound anti-incumbency sentiment brewed against the Congress Government. However, what makes this political upheaval intriguing is the subtle nature of this undercurrent that eluded the surface. The outcome reflects a confluence of factors, primarily stemming from the inaccessibility of ministers and the bureaucratic machinery, creating a detrimental synergy that ultimately sealed the fate of the Congress party. Regions that were once staunch supporters of the Congress, instrumental in shaping the government, have now severed ties, precipitating the partys downfall. This serves as a poignant lesson not only for the beleaguered Congress but also for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its leaders. The imperative takeaway is the crucial need for leaders to maintain accessibility to the public ignoring which they may succumb to the same electoral fate in the next five years. Congresss misfortune should be a wake-up call for all political parties. It underlines the significance of remaining attuned to the pulse of the people and rejecting the allure of power syndrome. The electorate demands accountability, accessibility, and responsiveness values that should be at the forefront of any political agenda. BJP retains Madhya Pradesh with thumping victory Bhavana Aparajita Shukla The Bharatiya Janata Party has registered a historic victory in Madhya Pradesh elections as it has won more than two-third majority after 18 years in the 230-seat Assembly while main opposition Congress party has been restricted to double digit mark. As per the latest figures available from the Election Commission, the saffron party won at 150 seats and Congress at 59 seats and for the remaining seats counting was underway till the filing of this report. Celebrations erupted in the State as the BJP crossed the majority mark comfortably and is set to retain power in the State with a landslide victory. Workers and leaders gathered at party office in Bhopal. On December 3, when the counting started BJP was heading towards a landslide victory on most of the seats since morning, till 3 pm as per real-time data from polling booths, the party has won over 22 seats and was leading in more than 145 seats, while Congress is still in double digits as counting was underway. Till 1.30 pm, BJPs lead was at 166 seats that of Congress was 66. Assembly elections were held in single phase on November 17 for 230 seats. Bharat Adivasi Party makes inroads: Bharat Adivasi Party has registered victory on one seat while it fielded candidates on 22 seats. It has won Sailana seat of Ratlam district. In this elections, both the main parties BJP and Congress tried hard to woo tribal vote bank. Heavy weight leaders in this election:- BJP leader and Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has won from Budhni seat while Congresss Kamal Nath from Chhindwara. Kamal Nath defeated BJPs Vivek Bunty Sahu (former district president of Yuva Morcha). Among other big names, Kailash Vijayvargiya of BJP won from Indore 1 seat, State Home Minister and State Governments spokesperson Narottam Mishra lost the elections against Congress Rajendra Bharati from Datia seat, Congresss Jitu Patwari also lost from Rau. Union Minister Narendra Singh Tomar won from Dimani constituency. Balveer Singh Dandotiya of the Bahujan Samajwadi Party defeated Tomar. Ghanshyam Chandrawanshi of the BJP has defeated sitting Congress MLA Kunal Choudhary in Kalapipal by 11,765 votes. Chief Minister Chouhan attributes win to PM Modi: Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan gave credit for partys victory in the State to Prime Minister Narendra Modis poll campaign and said that people have immense faith in him. Our Prime Minister Narendra Modiji is in the hearts of the people of Madhya Pradesh. The State is also in the heart of Modiji. There is immense faith towards him. He held public meetings here and appealed to the people which has touched the peoples hearts. Senior BJP leader and Union Minister, Prahlad Singh Patel, who has won from Narsingpur, said that 2003 is being repeated in 2023, referring to the last time BJP gained a majority in Madhya Pradesh. Patel thanked party workers for their efforts. CA Students interact with ICAI President Business Reporter The Nagpur Branch of the Western India Chartered Accountants Students Association (WICASA) organised the prestigious event Interactive Meet with President of ICAI, featuring the President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), CA Aniket Talati, that set the stage for aspiring chartered accountants to gather valuable insights and guidance from esteemed professionals in the field. The events distinguished guests of honour were CA Jaydeep Shah, Past President of ICAI, CA Durgesh Kabra, Central Council Member; CA Mangesh Kinare, Chairman SSEB-Operations. The event commenced with opening remarks from CA Sanjay C Agrawal, Chairperson, Nagpur Branch of WICASA. CA Jaydeep Shah, Past President of ICAI, CA Durgesh Kabra, Central Council Member; and CA Mangesh Kinare, Chairman SSEB-Operations also addressed the gathering and complimented the Nagpur Branch and WICASA Nagpur. CA Aniket Talati delivered indispensable insights into excelling in the professional accounting career. The session was coordinated by Manak Laturiya, Joint Treasurer, Nagpur Branch of WICASA. Sahil Sheikh, Secretary, Nagpur Branch of WICASA proposed a vote of thanks. Fielding MPs, Ministers proved to be BJPs masterstroke By Deepak Tyagi Not projecting anyone as a Chief Ministerial candidate and putting up several Members of Parliament (MPs) and Union Ministers in the contest also seems to have proved to be a masterstroke. Most of the BJP leaders have been fielded on relatively difficult assembly seats, where the party had lost in the last polls. This not only blunted the fatigue that the voters had for Chouhan who has been the CM for 18 years, but also gave a chance to the MPs to out-perform each other in their respective strongholds and not only win the difficult seats but also influence other constituencies in the BJPs favour. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has fielded seven MPs and Union Ministers for the four assembly polls and their strongest contenders in the fray for state assembly elections included Kailash Vijayvargiya, Prahlad Patel and Narendra Singh Tomar. Central leadership has nominated party's national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya from Indore-1 assembly seat from where he unseated Congress Sanjay Shukla. BJPs OBC champion Prahlad Patel, the minister of state for food processing, who contested from Narsingpur defeats Congress' Lakhan Singh Patel. Narendra Singh Tomar, who has been fielded from the high-profile Dimani constituency in the Morena district, secured victory with 24,429 votes. Likewise, Uday Pratap Singh, the sitting Member of Parliament from Hoshangabad, fighting from Gadarwara wins. Riti Pathak, member of the Lok Sabha from Sidhi contested her first assembly election and registerd victory. Rakesh Singh, the incumbent MP from Jabalpur, from the Jabalpur-West assembly seat wins. The BJP has also fielded Ganesh Singh, a four-time Lok Sabha MP, from the Satna assembly seat, which the party again lost whereas Faggan Singh Kulaste, the Minister for state for rural development, also lost by 9,723 votes from Niwas. On the other hand, race for the CM face in the BJP camp is now wide open in Madhya Pradesh, but Chouhan is now putting up a strong case for another term ahead of the Lok Sabha polls as it is his 'Ladli Behna' scheme that has delivered the state to the BJP. The BJPs decision to pitch the election on the face of Narendra Modi also proved to be a success as the PMs popularity in Hindi heartland worked wonders for the party. Madhya Pradesh has proven true the BJPs poll slogan that MP ke mann mein Modi hai. Now, it is over to Modi and the BJP top leadership to decide who the next CM of Madhya Pradesh will be. Front-runners for Raj CM post Names of Raje, Diya, Shekhawat, Baba Balaknath trending JAIPUR, FORMER Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, Rajsamand MP Diya Kumari, Union Minister and Jodhpur MP Gajendra Singh Shekhawat are among the frontrunners for the coveted Chief Ministers post in Rajasthan, confirmed BJP sources. However, they added that the BJP, as such, is habitual of springing surprises and someone else can also emerge as a strong contender for the top job. Sources confirmed that Gajendra Singh Shekhawat has been called to Delhi and he will be going to the national Capital soon. There might be some meetings and crucial decisions may be taken there, sources said. It needs to be mentioned here that Gajendra Singh Shekhawat became the blue-eyed boy of the BJP after he defeated Chief Minister Ashok Gehlots son Vaibhav in the Lok Sabha election in 2019. He was given the crucial Jal Shakti Ministry and all top leaders spoke about this ministrys work during campaigning, so he is expected to become the CM. The other frontrunner for the coveted post is Diya Kumari, the Rajsamand MP who belongs to the erstwhile Jaipur royal family. Kumari was earlier an MLA from Sawai Madhopur. She is a clean and charismatic face who is also the preferred choice of the RSS, said sources. Two-time CM and Jhalrapatan MLA Vasundhara Raje is yet another choice for the top job. Raje has around 45 BJP candidates for whom she got tickets apart from managing a few independents. Hence, the chances of her leading the show are high. Sources said that there is speculation that Raje could be made the CM and two deputies could be appointed under her. Alwar MP and Tijara candidate Baba Balaknath is also the frontrunner as he represents a strong Hindutva face. The 39-year-old is also called the Yogi of Rajasthan. He left home at the age of 6. Humbly accept peoples mandate: Rahul Gandhi NEW DELHI : CONGRESS leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday said his party humbly accepts the mandate of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, and asserted that the battle of ideology would continue. In a post in Hindi on X, Gandhi said, We humbly accept the mandate of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan -- the battle of ideology will continue. I am very thankful to the people of Telangana - we will definitely fulfill the promise of making Prajalu Telangana. Heartfelt thanks to all the workers for their hard work and support, the former Congress chief said. In a post in Hindi on X, Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra hailed the Congress victory in Telangana. She said the people of Telangana have created history and given the mandate in favour of the Congress party. This is the victory of the people of the state and every worker of the Congress Party. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to the people of Telangana. Congress party is committed to peace, prosperity and progress in Telangana, she said. The local state of emergency in Madison County has been lifted now that the Quaker Run Fire has been fully extinguished. That said, severe drought conditions persist for almost all of Central Virginia and the neighboring Shenandoah Valley. While local states of emergency and burn bans instituted earlier in the fall are being lifted, officials are warning that residents should remain mindful of the extremely dry conditions, even with recent rain. Drinking water reservoirs in the area remain at satisfactory levels, but farmers in the region have reported limited groundwater. The Quaker Run Fire was ignited near the village of Syria in Madison County on Oct. 24. It quickly spread into the nearby Shenandoah National Park and prompted voluntary evacuation orders for some Madison County residents. It was declared fully contained Nov. 17, more than three weeks later, after burning through nearly 4,000 acres of public, private and park land. The local state of emergency, declared on Oct. 25, and countywide burn, declared on Nov. 7, were lifted on Nov. 28 at the order of the Madison County Board of Supervisors. While conditions have improved the potential for wildfire spread still exists, reads a statement from Madison County Emergency Management. Current conditions will lessen the chances of aggressive spread but please use caution when burning. The severe drought in Central Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley has had a considerable impact on groundwater, according to farmers in the area. Albemarle County Supervisor Ann Mallek, a rancher herself, has said she has heard from multiple farmers since the drought began to worsen. The report from a number of farms is that pastures set aside (stockpiled) for winter use are dried up or have been used early by necessity, Mallek told The Daily Progress via email. Some streams which would be expected to be four feet wide and flowing six inches deep are totally dry. Pressurized water systems that rely on spring water are failing. People living with wells are worried. Aquifers of ground water are connected underground. When one person draws excess water, it affects what is available for others. No one should waste water as that can take away a life sustaining water supply from a neighbor, Mallek said. The light rain the area has seen in recent weeks has not been enough to lift drought conditions. And when rain does come, it can create problems of its own after prolonged bouts of dry weather. The deep loss of ground water in drought situations translates to long recovery times when it does rain, Mallek said. Streams do not fill quickly as much of the gentle rain sinks deep into parched earth. Heavy downpours become run off and do not stay in the area. The reservoirs that supply drinking water for much of Central Virginia have been largely unharmed by the ongoing drought, according to officials. The reservoirs were designed to survive these dryer periods, David Tungate, director of operations for Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, told The Daily Progress. Tungate said that despite the drought, reservoirs such as the 433 million-gallon Beaver Creek Reservoir, the source for Crozet water, has only ever been down a foot or two during the drought. If the Beaver Creek Reservoir watershed did not get another drop of rain, 433 million gallons is enough source water for more than 500 days of normal water supply demands in the Crozet water system, Tungate said. Thats what theyre designed to do. They hold the water back. Jeweller robbed of gold, silver worth Rs 28 lakh Staff Reporter Ahead of winter session of State Legislature in city, robbers struck gold as they robbed a bullion trader, decamping with booty of Rs 28 lakhs. The robbers numbered two and they were riding on a two wheeler. The incident occurred on Takalghat-Khapri Moreshwar Road under the jurisdiction of MIDC-Butibori Police Station in Nagpur Rural Police area. The jeweller was being followed by the robbers who intercepted him on the deserted patch of road. After accosting the jeweller, the miscreants threw chilly powder in his eyes and fled with the bag containing the silver and gold ornaments. According to police, the victim, Atul Ramakrishna Sherekar (36), a resident of Khapri Moreshwar, was attacked on Saturday night. It seems the robbers had done a recce and soon after the trader closed his shop, they started chasing him. Sherekar runs a shop Atul Jewellers in Ramshiv Palace. Sherekar was driving home in his car (MH-40-AR-9049) when the robbers struck. The assailants, riding a scooterette, deliberately rammed into Sherekars car. This was enough to stop Sherekar in his track and caused a distraction. Even before the bullion trader could realise, the robbers, in a flash, threw chilly powder into his eyes. Taking advantage of the situation, the robbers assaulted Sherekar and pushed him into a roadside pit. They latched on to the bag containing Rs 90,000/- in cash and gold and silver jewellery from the back seat of the car. The criminals fled the scene on their scooterette. Despite being caught of guard, Sherekar quickly recovered and got back to his feet. He attempted to chase the robbers and got into his car. However the brave attempt of Sherekar failed as he lost control on the steering wheel as the chilly powder had done its work. Sherekar could not control the speed and the car overturned. The incident came to light when passers-by rushed to Sherekars aid on noticing the upside car. The jeweller informed them of the robbery and the people tipped off the police control room. The police team, led by Superintendent of Police (SP) Harsh Poddar and Additional Superintendent of Police Dr Sandeep Pakhale reached the crime scene and conducted spot inspection. The Local Crime Branch (LCB) has stepped in and are assisting MIDC-Butibori police in the investigations. A case under Sections 394 and 34 of the Indian Penal Code was registered by the police. Less than 1% voters opted for NOTA in MP, Raj, Tgana; 1.29 pc in Chhattisgarh NEW DELHI : THE counting of votes in three out of four States on Sunday showed that less than one per cent of the voters exercised the none of the above (NOTA) option in the just-concluded assembly polls, according to the election commission. Assembly polls were conducted in five States and while the counting of votes in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Telangana was held on Sunday, votes will be counted in Mizoram on Monday. In Madhya Pradesh, 0.99 per cent of the voters went for the NOTA option out of total voter turnout of 77.15 per cent. In neighbouring Chhattisgarh, 1.29 per cent of the electors pressed the NOTA button. Here, the voter turnout was 76.3 per cent. In Telangana, 0.74 per cent of the electors opted for NOTA. The state registered 71.14 per cent of voter turnout. Similarly, in Rajasthan 0.96 per cent of the voters exercised the NOTA option. It had recorded 74.62 per cent turnout. Talking to PTI on the NOTA option, Pradeep Gupta of Axis My India said NOTA has been used from .01 per cent to a maximum of two per cent. If anything new is introduced, its effectiveness depends on its result or performance. I had written to the Government that if NOTAs effectiveness has to be made in the real sense, then NOTA should be declared as the winner if the maximum number of people use this option, he said. Gupta was referring to the first-past-the-post principle followed in India where a candidate who gets the maximum number of votes is declared the winner. He also said that people who have been rejected by the people should not be allowed to contest the poll in such a situation where NOTA prevails over others. If this happens then people make the right use of none of the above options... Otherwise it is a formality. Introduced in 2013, the NOTA option on electronic voting machines has its own symbol - a ballot paper with a black cross across it. After the Supreme Court order in September 2013, EC added the NOTA button on the EVMs as the last option on the voting panel. Before the apex court order, those not inclined to vote for any candidate had the option of filling what is popularly called form 49-O. But filling out the form at the polling station under Rule 49-O of the Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961, compromised the secrecy of the voter. The Supreme Court had, however, refused to direct the Election Commission to hold fresh polls if the majority of the electorate exercised the NOTA. MP Assembly polls: BJP, Congress workers clash after BJP beats Congress by small margin in Shajapur Shajapur, Workers of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Congress party clashed with each other outside the counting spot in Madhya Pradesh's Shajapur district after BJP candidate from Shajapur constituency defeated his Congress candidate by a small margin. The police present on the spot used lathi charge and tear gas to disperse them. BJP candidate Arun Bhimawad beat Congress candidate Hukum Singh Karada by just 28 votes after which the workers of both the parties raised slogans and clashed with each other. Additional Superintendent of Police (ASP) T S Baghel, "There are three assembly constituencies in Shajapur district and the counting of votes in all three assemblies has been completed peacefully. Some BJP and Congress supporters were raising slogans after which the police immediately reached there and advised them. The situation is peaceful now." Meanwhile, reacting to the clash in Shajapur, MP CEO Anupam Rajan said that the margin of votes during counting was less, so the process of re-verification of the rejected postal ballots was underway. "In Shajapur, the margin of votes during counting was less. When the margin is less then the rejected postal ballots are re-verified so the process of re-verification of the rejected postal ballots is underway," Rajan said. Nonetheless, the BJP seems poised to return to power in the State where it ruled for 20 years, barring a short span in 2018 when Chief Minister Kamal Nath-led Congress party was in power. According to the latest trends from the Election Commission of India, the BJP won 21 seats and was leading on 145 seats, while the Congress party won seven seats and was leading on 56 seats and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) won one seat. Elections to the 230-seat Madhya Pradesh Assembly was a fight between the BJP and the Congress, which was toppled from power in 2020 with help from Jyotiraditya Scindia. Nadda calls meeting in Delhi to discuss new Rajasthan CM JAIPUR, BHARATIYA Janata Party (BJP) national President JP Nadda has called a meeting in Delhi to take a decision on the next chief Minister of Rajasthan -- the State where the BJP wrested power back from the Congress. A source said that senior BJP leaders have already held several meetings to discuss the matter. Nadda has sought feedback from Rajasthan unit president CP Joshi, and election in-charge Pralhad Joshi. Union Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat has been called to Delhi. Sources said that Baba Balaknath has also been called to the national capital. BJP will formally stake claim to form the Government after getting the nod from the central party leadership. A meeting would also be held in Jaipur to discuss the next Chief Minister and Government formations. Currently, leaders considered as CM faces have distanced themselves from any kind of show of power. Senior BJP leaders are now waiting for the high commands stand for a decision on the Rajasthan chief ministerial name. There will be an announcement regarding the new Chief Minister at the BJP legislature party meeting. There has been a tradition in the BJP to announce the name of the Chief Minister in the legislature party meeting itself. According to sources associated with BJP, the decision on the new CM is likely to be taken soon. The new Chief Minister may be sworn in on December 7. For this, a public function will be organised in Jaipur. Senior leaders including PM Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP President JP Nadda will attend the swearing-in ceremony of the new CM, sources said. Semifinal for 2024 BJP Regains Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh Retains Madhya Pradesh In a post on X, PM Narendra Modi said, We bow to the Janta Janardan. The results in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan indicate that the people of India are firmly with politics of good governance and development, which @BJP4India stands for. NEW DELHI : THE BJP swept Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh on Sunday inflicting a resounding defeat on the Congress to tighten its stranglehold in the Hindi heartland, in a big boost for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and setting the tone for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. In some consolation for the Congress in the face of the BJP wave after it lost Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, the party ousted the Bharat Rashtra Samiti(BRS) in Telangana to make it 3-1 for the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) in the latest round of Assembly elections billed as a semi-final before next years poll showdown. Counting of votes in Mizoram will be taken up on Monday. As the BJP leadership savoured the triple victory just months after losing its lone southern citadel Karnataka, Prime Minister Modi said some people are already saying that the partys hat-trick in the States is a guarantee of hat-trick in the Lok Sabha polls. We bow to the Janta Janardan. The results in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan indicate that the people of India are firmly with politics of good governance and development, which the @BJP4India stands, Modi earlier said in a post on X, after a ringing endorsement of the BJPs strategy centred on the Prime Ministers appeal and governance plank. Ruling MP for 18 years, a well entrenched BJP managed to stave off anti-incumbency in a shot in the arm for four-time Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and dashing the hopes of a resurgent Congress helmed by veteran and former CM Kamal Nath. Winning 163 seats, the BJP got a simple majority and got two-thirds majority in a House of 230. Congress bagged 66 seats and Bharat Adivasi Party bagged a seat. Suspense also mounted as to who will be the BJPs Chief Minister in any of the three Hindi heartland States. Clouds of gulal, shouts of Jai Shri Ram, joyful jigs and crackers were the sights and sounds of celebration in BJP offices with party workers and leaders unanimous in attributing the win to Modis guarantees. The election results show people accept Prime Minister Narendra Modis guarantee of delivering on guarantees, BJP leader and Union Minister Pralhad Joshi said. With BJP dislodging the Congress hit by factionalism in Rajasthan, the desert State stuck to a nearly 30-year-old rivaz (tradition) of not voting an incumbent party back to power. The BJP got a majority bagging 115 seats after voting was held for 199 constituencies. The Congress notched 69 seats The Chhattisgarh outcome was a surprise for many Congress leaders who were hoping for another stint in power in the State by fending off the BJP challenge. The day began with both parties neck and neck but, as counting continued, the BJP consolidated its lead and won or was ahead in 54 seats. The Congress won or was ahead in 35 seats in the 90-member house. The K Chandrashekhar Rao-led BRS hoped for a hat-trick in Telangana but was dethroned by the Congress. Anumula Revanth Reddy, a Lok Sabha MP who led the Congress charge, could be the second Chief Minister of the State. The Congress won 64 of the 118 seats it contested from. It gave one seat to CPI where the communist party emerged victorious. Telangana has a 119-member House. The BRS emerged victorious in 38 and was leading in 1 seat. The BJP put up a good showing and increased its tally in the southern State with the victory of its candidate K Venkata Ramana Reddy in Kamareddy against both the outgoing Chief Minister KCR and Revanth Reddy, who is the TPCC chief, being the highlight. KCR and Revanth Reddy, however, won from Gajwel and Kodangal constituencies respectively. BJP won 8 seats, up from one seat, and doubled its vote share from the 2018 polls to nearly 14 per cent. Union Home Minister Amit Shah said the Assembly results have proved that the days of appeasement and caste politics are over and that new India votes on politics of performance. Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge said the party will overcome temporary setbacks and prepare fully for the Lok Sabha polls along with its partners in the INDIA alliance. Congress performance in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan Assembly polls disappointing, he said. Basking in his hour of glory, Chief Minister Chouhan said the State Government implemented schemes like the Ladli Lakshmi and Ladli Behna and a lot of work was done for the welfare of farmers, poor people and youth. Our Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji is in the hearts of the people of Madhya Pradesh. The State is also in the heart of Modi ji. Taking a swipe at Gehlot, born into a family of magicians, Union Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat said the magic has ended and people in Rajasthan have voted for the honour of women and for the welfare of the poor. Modi turned on the heat on the Congress over its poll guarantees by projecting himself as a leader who has delivered on the promises made by him to help the common man meet his aspirations. Modi Yaani Har Guarantee Poori Hone Ki Guarantee (Modi means the guarantee to fulfill every guarantee), he had said in an article last week. Free food grain, income assistance for farmers, housing for all, 100 per cent electrification of villages, and tap water to every home, were listed by the BJP as some of Modis guarantees in Chhattisgarh. After the Congress loss in three key States, rumblings have surfaced in the Opposition bloc INDIA ahead of their meeting on December 6, with many leaders claiming that the grand old party ignored others, but was unable to win elections on its own. The loss for Congress, which made a loud pitch for caste census and adopted a soft Hindutva approach, also appeared to weaken its position in the INDIA bloc where party equations could change, as other Opposition parties may no longer consider it as the fulcrum of the Opposition alliance. The poll results show the defeat of the Congress and the victory of the BJP. The Congress ignored other INDIA parties, but was unable to win on its own, said JD(U) leader K C Tyagi. State erupts in JOy, excitement Staff Reporter RAIPUR, In a jubilant atmosphere at the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Ekatma Parisar, party workers and leaders erupted in joy as the election trends began favoring the BJP. The party workers started filling the venue with exuberance, closely monitoring every seat gained by the BJP on television sets broadcasting news channels. The celebratory mood reached its peak when BJP leaders and candidates took the lead in the trends by afternoon. Applause and enthusiastic sloganeering echoed through venue whenever a senior leader's victory seemed imminent. By afternoon, BJPs predictions of securing 52 to 55 seats appeared to be turning into reality, prompting the party workers to burst firecrackers and express their confidence in the BJP's return to power in the state assembly elections. Former Chief Minister Dr Raman Singh, commenting on the unfolding trends, emphasized that the positive trends indicated a clear trust of the people in Prime Minister Modi's leadership and policies, overshadowing the appeal of Bhupesh Baghel. Though cautious about declaring victory prematurely, Singh stated that the BJP seemed to be heading towards forming the government, attributing the success to the hard work put in by the party workers. He highlighted the impact of Modi's guarantee and the faith people had placed in 15 years of BJP governance. Singh also addressed the issues that resonated with the voters, citing concerns about scams involving liquor, coal, the Mahadev App, and others. The desire for a change in leadership, especially among women and youth voters, was evident, with Singh expressing confidence that whoever the party entrusted with responsibility would become the Chief Minister. MP Sunil Soni, the first leader to arrive at Ekatma Parisar, attributed the electoral triumph in Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh to the relentless efforts of the party workers. He echoed the sentiment that Modi's Guarantee played a pivotal role, emphasizing that people had grown weary of the Congress government's broken promises and scandals. Rajesh Munat, while addressing the shortcomings of the outgoing Congress government, criticized the state of law and order, asserting that goons ruled the roost. He highlighted issues with the capital city, citing Chaupati as a source of corruption and claiming discriminatory behavior towards the city. Munat accused the Congress of failing to deliver on promises, with little progress in the capital city and a lack of accountability for expressway projects. As the day unfolded and the BJP got ever closer to an emphatic victory, the enthusiasm at Ekatma Parisar continued to build, with BJP supporters expressing optimism about the party's prospects in state assembly elections. Staff Reporter Two elephants from Karnataka, Bhima and Subhramaniyam, that arrived at Pench Tiger Reserve (PTR) few days ago, are now getting acclimatised of the hot weather of Nagpur in Borban elephant camp situated on the banks of Navegaon Khairi reservoir. Both trained elephants will start their routine work like patrolling and other activities inside the forest after 4-5 days. Currently, both the elephants are getting used to the place with their Mahouts who came from Karnataka with the elephants. The Mahouts will stay in the camp with the elephants and our Mahouts will also stay with them to get themselves familiar with the jumbos, Dr Prabhunath Shukla, Deputy Director, PTR told The Hitavada. To promote eco-tourism in Chorbaoli forest range, we will allow tourists to feed the jumbos in their camp and also to click selfies with them. After some time, we will start elephant safari also in some routes of the jungle, said Dr Shukla. The tuskers arrived in Nagpur from Dubare elephant camp at Madikeri in Karnataka. Both camps are situated in relatively cooler weather than Nagpur. We want that both elephants get acclimatise of the weather first and then we will allow them to enter in the forest, said Dr Shukla. Both elephants will help in rescue and search operations in Pench and Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserves. The third elephant Ranjan will be brought to Pench next month and the fourth one will arrive after few months. The Forest Department established two protection camps in Chorbaoli Forest Range of PTR for these elephants. The Borban Camp is situated on the banks of Navegaon Khairi dam and the other camp is also situated close to the Borban camp. The second camp will accommodate more elephants in future. The camps are deep inside the forest with less human intervention. It has kitchen, storage, medicine and medical supplies, micro chipping and other facilities. Victory there. Celebrations here ...! Staff Reporter There was celebration, enthusiasm, happiness, rejoicing everywhere on the streets, in the squares in Nagpur city as Bharatiya Janata Party won the assembly polls in three states--Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. Coincidentally, Devendra Fadnavis, Deputy Chief Minister was in city for some programmes. He skipped some other assignments and participated in the victory celebrations. Fadnavis credited the victories to the transparent honesty of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.All senior leaders including Devendra Fadnavis gathered at Badkas chowk in evening to watch the victory celebrations at BJPs Delhi headquarters live on TV screen. The TV screen was put on display at the square. Everybody watched the mesmerising speech of Narendra Modi. After the celebrations, Fadnavis garlanded the statue of Pandit Bachhraj Vyas.Pravin Datke, MLC; Girish Vyas, ex-MLC; Jitendra Kukde, City President; Dr Milind Mane, ex-MLA; Sanjay Bhende, State Vice President; Sandip Gavai; General Secretary; Dayashankar Tiwari, ex-Mayor; Girish Deshmukh, Archana Dehankar, Guddu Trivedi, Badal Raut, Akshay Thakkar, Seema Dhomne, Shyam Chandekar, Vishnu Changde and others also viewed the celebrations. Earlier, the celebrations began in the afternoon when it was confirmed that BJP is forming Government in all three states. The distribution of sweets, bursting of firecrackers started at Dhantoli office of BJP. Chandrashekhar Bawankule, State BJP President; Jitendra Kukde, City President; Krishna Khopde, MLA; Pravin Datke, MLC; Vikas Kumbhare, MLA; Dr Upendra Kothekar, Vidarbha Organising Secretary reached the office. Bawankule himself played drum and encouraged everyone. Everybody raised slogans giving credit to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. Adv Dharmpal Meshram, Ashwini Jichkar, Sanjay Bangale, Dr Kirtida Ajmera, Bhojraj Dumbe, Ajay Pathak, Subodh Acharya, Satish Siraswan, Balya Borkar, office-bearers of Bharatiya Janata Party Yuva Morcha Badal Raut, Guddu Pande, Sunil Suryavanshi, Aslam Khan and others too joined the celebrations.While interacting with mediapersons, Devendra Fadnavis, Deputy Chief Minister bubbling with happiness said, Congress may have missed out on who is the real winner. People have a lot of faith in Narendra Modi. With the transparent honesty with which he implemented the agenda of welfare for the poor, he instilled in the people the belief that the Government is truly working for the people. This result also made it clear that the people rejected the agenda of I.N.D.I.A. and Rahul Gandhi. What characterises these results is that BJPs average vote share has increased by more than 10 per cent. In Chhattisgarh, it increased by 14%, in Madhya Pradesh by 8% and even in Telangana by 7%. Out of total 639 seats in 4 states declared today. BJP won 339 seats which means it won more than 50% seats. If Congress does not come out of this mentality, nothing can be done about it. In the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, the maximum number of MPs from BJP will be elected in Telangana. The same situation will be experienced in Karnataka, said Fadnavis with assertion. Fadnavis expressed confidence that BJP would achieve resounding success in the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections in Maharashtra as well. Our leaders Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and J P Nadda have planned this election well and we congratulate them from the bottom of our heart, Fadnavis said. Chandrasekhar Bawankule claimed that the sustainable development of the four pillars of women power, youth power, farmers and poor families along with the unwavering faith of the people in the leadership of Prime Minister Modi led to the victories. Bawankule told media, The victory is the result of Home Minister Amit Shahs skillful strategy, BJP President J P Naddas organisational skills and the leadership of that state. I heartily congratulate all the workers, office-bearers who contributed to this wonderful victory. As BJP won in all the three states, it will win in Maharashtra too. 45 plus MPs, 225 plus MLAs of Mahayuti will be elected in Maharashtra. 350 plus NDA MPs will be elected in the country. Sanjay Bhende stated that public refused the Governments in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh as those were encouraging anarchy, crimes, corruption and exploitation. They again gave mandate to BJP in Madhya Pradesh as they believed in the leadership of Narendra Modi who will become Prime Minister in 2024 too. Ajay Sancheti, ex-Member of Rajya Sabha said confidently that these victories have made it clear that Narendra Modi would again become Prime Minister in 2024. I congratulate all who worked hard and I thank public for putting faith in the guarantee of Modi. In last 9 years, Modi has brought everyone in mainstream especially the last one. Todays victory is the gift from the people to Modiji, Sancheti pointed out. Dr Parinay Fuke, ex-Minister of State analysed the victories and commented, This is an outcome of the meticulous planning made under the leadership of Narendra Modi. These victories have given confidence to the workers like me that he will acquire the throne of Prime Minister again in 2024. Our central leadership has taught us to work with passion and dont pay attention to what others say. We will continue to perform. This is the slap on the party that tried to introduce casteism in politics which people disliked. Without getting detered by the criticism by opposition, Modi Government in Centre continued to implement the schemes of peoples welfare, responded Dayashankar Tiwari, ex-Mayor. Virendra Kukreja, President of BJP Vyapari Aaghadi, Maharashtra State gave full credit of Partys victory to Narendra Modi calling him as One Man Army. These victories have broken the backbone of the power-hungry parties which joined hands to defeat BJP, Kukreja criticised. Congress had started giving wrong messages during the polls and was confidently saying that it would win in all the states. Our Central leadership kept quiet and kept encouraging the workers like me. I felt proud of those who worked tirelessly during the elections and clinched the victories for BJP, said Sandip Gavai. People have voted for development schemes, women safety, employment guarantee to youngsters ensured by Narendra Modi. The micro planning by the party brought victory in three states, explained Chandan Goswami, State Spokesperson. Vigilant cops, admn ensure smoooth, trouble-free counting Staff Reporter The district administration and police have made comprehensive security and other necessary measures to ensure smooth and trouble-free execution of the counting process for the Assembly election 2023 at Jawaharlal Nehru Agriculture University, on Sunday. A robust three-tier security cordon was established at the counting venue with a significant deployment of police personnel and para-military forces both inside and outside the counting centre. Surrounding routes leading to the venue were barricaded, restricting normal traffic and only authorised individuals were permitted access. Vigilance by the police was maintained to monitor all movements in the vicinity. Counting process commenced promptly at 8 am, starting with counting of postal ballots. Following this, Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) were securely transported from the Strong Room to the counting tables for counting and tabulation process. Access to the counting hall was strictly regulated, allowing only authorised personnel such as counting observers, counting assistants, micro observers, individuals authorised by the Election Commission, on-duty public servants, candidates and their designated counting agents. In order to ensure transparency throughout the vote counting process, officials and employees assigned to counting duties were briefed about their respective tables and the Assembly. This briefing took place upon their arrival at the counting venue at 6 am. The Election Commission Observer and District Election Officer arrived at the counting centre at 5 am for the third and final phase of randomisation. Subsequently, the District Election Officer provided the list of officials and employees trained for the counting process to the observers. This list included names of counting observers and other counting assistants, each assigned a unique serial number and code indicating their category. Following final randomisation, returning officers received their area-wise election postings at 6 am. At 6.30 am, the Strong Room, storing EVMs and VVPAT machines under tight security, was opened in presence of Election Commission Observers, representatives from recognised political parties. The machines were taken to 126 counting tables. As per the directions of the Election Commission of India, 14 to 18 tables were used for counting of votes cast in each Assembly constituency. Counting of votes of Bargi, Jabalpur West, Panagar and Sihora was conducted in 18 rounds, while counting of votes of Patan, Jabalpur East and Jabalpur West was done in 17 rounds and votes casted in Jabalpur Cantt. Assembly was done in 16 rounds. As per the direction of the Election Commission counting of postal ballot papers was done first. After half-an-hour counting of votes casted through EVM was started. Earlier, treasury at Collectorate was opened at 6.30 am and postal ballot boxes were taken under police protection to counting centre. Office bearers of political parties and election agents were present on the occasion. In order to ensure transparency in counting process the election officers cross checked EVM votes with slips of VVPAT machines in presence of Election Commission observers, candidates and their authorised election agents. District election office has provided round-wise results of Assembly election on various websites apart from uploading the results on Election Commissions website eciresults.nic.in. Likewise, the district administration had also installed big LED screens at Square near Civic Center Park and Chhoti Line Crossing to display real-time election results. As a precautionary measure, the Commercial Tax Department of State Government declared Sunday as dry day. Sale, distribution and transportation of liquor was completely prohibited in the district. The district administration had declared 100-metre periphery of the counting centre as pedestrian zone. No vehicles were allowed within 100 metre limits of the venue from early morning till late in the night. District Election Officer and Collector Saurabh Kumar Suman along with other senior election officials and Superintendent of Police Amit Kumar Singh remained on their toes throughout the day. He along with the senior officials remained present in the counting venue and monitored conduction of the counting process. Will Shiv-Raj continue in MP? BJP Gains 56 seats Bhavana Aparajita Shukla Since the BJP has not projected CMs face this time, the main question hovering in political circles- Who will be CM? As the saffron party is all set to form the Government. Following the early trends, Union Minister and BJP leader Jyotiraditya Scindia along with senior party leader Prabhat Jha also arrived at the residence of incumbent CM Chouhan in Bhopal. As the saffron party has won three of the past four elections since the year 2003, the State has been a BJP stronghold. If we talk about the Congress party in this bi-polar state, since Digvijaya Singh led the Congress to back-to-back wins in 1993 and 1998; those wins were the last time the Congress defended a State. In 2018, Kamal Nath led government was formed but only for 15 months. After resignation from Jyotiradiya Scindia and his supporters, Congress government was toppled and BJP again come to power. The saffron party had been ruling since 2003 and had won 2008 and 2013 elections. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has become the longest serving CM of Madhya Pradesh. Experts talking to The Hitavada suggest He may be looking at getting the top post yet again. BJP is riding high on schemes like Ladli Bahna and Kisan Samman Nidhi. For which credit goes to Chouhan. On the other side, political analyst Pankaj (Bhaya) talking to The Hitavada said that as many men from Scindia camp got the tickets, his stature in the party has grown to manifolds. With the victory of his men e.g. Tulsi Silawat and others are chances the party may reward him. Although in the middle of the battle, Scindia had told that I am neither king nor Kingmaker but needless to remind that in politics every thing is possible. Putting full stop to all speculations of anti-incumbency, in 2023, the BJP claimed a massive win in the Assembly election. Brushing aside exit polls predicting a tight race and some even giving the Congress an edge over BJP. At 2.30 pm the BJP was leading in 165 seats- more than double the Congress 63. These numbers represent a staggering gain of 56 seats for the BJP and an equally staggering loss of 51 for the Congress, relative to the 2018 results. Mayawatis BSP is leading in one of the two remaining seats. GGP is also securing some seats but small parties are not in a king maker position. So now it will be in the hands of the saffron party to choose its leader. There may be some candidates from Albany resident Barbara Thayer has been sober for 31 years. But shes still watching people she cares about die from addiction in Linn County. People are asking for help, but there isnt a detox center in the area, she said. So some don't make it. Close to home Thayer is 53 years old. On the day she meets a reporter, shes wearing a black turtleneck, and her blond hair is coiffed in a bob. Shes holding a package of the opioid reversal medicine, Narcan. She always keeps some in her car, she said. A Place to Sleep, episode 7: Grants Pass It's a community that openly heckles and worse its homeless neighbors, many who have deep roots. And it may have a date with the Supreme Court. Thayer is a volunteer peer support specialist at C.H.A.N.C.E. (Community Helping Addicts Negotiate Change Effectively) in Albany. But before she was helping people with addiction, she waged her own battle. Had you met her in high school, you wouldn't have thought Thayer's life would've taken this path, she said. She had straight A's, and she was a member of the prom court. But on the inside Thayer hated herself. It felt like there weren't many people that cared about her. She didnt have a support system, and her untreated anxiety and depression were difficult to manage. There were traumatic experiences in her life she was trying to escape, she said. Then she tried cocaine for the first time on her 18th birthday. I felt like I had found the feeling I had been searching for my entire life, Thayer said. The drugs made her feel capable and her problems smaller. But the pain didnt go away. She didnt have the coping skills to deal with the traumas in her life, so she leaned harder on drugs, self-medicating, she said. Then her boyfriend unexpectedly died in a car accident, and in response, her drug use became heavier. Thayer was addicted to meth and would stay up for days on end. I wasnt a productive member of society, but I was still a person, she said. During that time, Thayer was houseless and living in a shed in Lebanon. Back then, there were no shelters in Linn County, at least none she knew of. Now clean and sober for 31 years, Thayer mostly had to do it on her own, with limited resources. Being unhoused comes with a lot of traumas. Youre stuck in place with no supplies, she said. Being admitted to a state hospital was the catalyst for her sobriety, but it was a choice she had to make over and over again, through setbacks and relapses. She is in therapy and credits her husband as being her support system. And although there are more services for people with substance dependence in Linn County now than there were back in the day, the area is still without a detox center. Thayer works as a peer support specialist at C.H.A.N.C.E. in Albany, helping people who are in the exact position she was in. Despite those efforts, people are still dying. Just in the last few months, she watched as a man who would come to the nonprofit daily didnt one day, because he had overdosed and died, she said. Thayer believes he would've survived had there been a detox center in the area. People are dying, and it isnt OK with me. And it shouldnt be OK with anyone, she said. Limited resources Without a detox center, people struggling with addiction have to travel as far as Salem and Eugene, relying on C.H.A.N.C.E. workers to drive them there. But even those places can fill up, said Emma Deane, executive director of the nonprofit. While Albany does have addiction resources, places that provide counseling, detox centers are different. They are staffed with medical professionals, often in an inpatient facility. It stops people from using drugs or alcohol immediately, Deane said. We are seeing more people ask for help, and it's not readily available, Deane said. So, people end up detoxing inside C.H.A.N.C.E.s warming shelter, she said. Sometimes, they have to wait days for a bed to free up at an out-of-town detox center, she said. And even then, some people decline because of the distance, Thayer said. She personally knows someone who declined a bed because they didnt feel comfortable being outside of their community, she said. Addiction services in place locally do work for some people, Deane said, but not for everyone, especially people who are experiencing homelessness. People living unsheltered on the street may have an especially difficult time staying clean without a level of structure or shelter, she said. Some people on the street may do drugs just to stay warm, while others may want to get clean but have difficulty maintaining structure and going to appointments when they are in survival mode," she said. As temperatures plummet, Deane worries many of the people living without shelter and who have substance dependence may not make it through the night. Its devastating to watch, Deane said. Rallying support Thayer cant stand to watch anymore. Now she is at the helm of an effort to bring a detox center to Linn County and has been gathering community support. She has received letters from members of the Albany Police, Lebanon Police and Linn County Parole and Probation departments. Lebanon Chief of Police Frank Stevenson wrote that he gives the effort his "full support." In her letter, Albany police Chief Marcia Harnden wrote: Our overdose deaths have risen more than 600% since 2019 and roughly 20% of our daily calls involve those struggling with addiction and mental health." And Linn County Parole and Probation Supervisor Trisha Kenyon said that for people who struggle with transportation, the distance to Salem or Eugene "can be insurmountable and presents yet another barrier for those seeking help. Thayer brought her letters of support in front of the Linn County commissioners. Deane also spoke in front of the board, in favor of a detox center. But bringing a detox center is a costly endeavor, and Linn County commissioners were at odds with the logistics of attracting such a facility. Seeking action The board took up the discussion Tuesday, Nov. 28. Board Chairman Roger Nyquist noted the city of Portland is developing a sobering center, which will have 20 beds and an estimated annual budget of $7.5 million. For Linn County to develop such a center, funding would have to come from other service programs provided to the citizens of Linn County. Absent a new funding stream, where do we go with this? Nyquist said. He said the taxpayers of the county recognize the commissioners strongly support assisting addicts who want to overcome their addictions and lead a successful life by accessing the counseling services provided by its Alcohol & Drug Program. Commissioner Will Tucker wanted to make sure there was a distinction between a drug treatment facility, treatment program and a detox center. The latter comes with numerous liabilities, both medically and financially, he said. Due to its medical nature, it might be best to work with trained health care providers, such as Samaritan Health Services, Tucker said. Without enforcement, it would be difficult to get people to go to the detox centers, he added. Linn County Health Administrator Todd Noble said funding would have to come down from the state and hoped to pressure the Oregon Health Authority to allocate funds. He acknowledged a resource like this could be possible if they partnered with a medical provider. In the end, commissioners directed staff to report back in a couple weeks with recommendations for possible actions to take. Urgency For people who are close to the issue, there is a sense of urgency. Thayer knows that opening up about her own struggles with addiction will also open her up to some judgment, she said. But shes at peace with that. Shes made peace with a lot of things. Quality journalism doesn't happen without your help Support local news coverage and the people who report it by becoming a subscriber today. Her life is a lot different now. Shes learned to accept herself and is devoted to being an advocate. She volunteers at C.H.A.N.C.E. and gives support to people who are going through addiction. She's also spearheaded an effort to get basic products to people in need through the church-based volunteer organization Love INC. I want people to know there is hope, and there are stories of redemption," she said. "But without a detox facility, we are setting people up for failure. Related stories: Shares of Vermilion Energy Inc. (NYSE:VET Get Free Report) (TSE:VET) have been given a consensus rating of Moderate Buy by the five ratings firms that are presently covering the firm, MarketBeat reports. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and three have given a buy rating to the company. The average twelve-month price objective among brokers that have covered the stock in the last year is $20.57. Several equities research analysts have recently issued reports on VET shares. Desjardins raised Vermilion Energy from a hold rating to a buy rating in a research report on Monday, November 6th. Royal Bank of Canada raised their target price on Vermilion Energy from $22.00 to $25.00 and gave the company a sector perform rating in a research report on Wednesday, September 13th. Finally, StockNews.com lowered Vermilion Energy from a buy rating to a hold rating in a research report on Friday, November 3rd. Get Vermilion Energy alerts: Get Our Latest Report on VET Institutional Inflows and Outflows Vermilion Energy Trading Down 1.0 % Institutional investors and hedge funds have recently made changes to their positions in the company. Covestor Ltd bought a new position in shares of Vermilion Energy during the 1st quarter worth $25,000. Money Concepts Capital Corp bought a new position in Vermilion Energy in the 4th quarter worth about $40,000. Tower Research Capital LLC TRC boosted its stake in Vermilion Energy by 99.0% in the 2nd quarter. Tower Research Capital LLC TRC now owns 4,362 shares of the oil and gas companys stock worth $54,000 after purchasing an additional 2,170 shares during the period. PNC Financial Services Group Inc. boosted its stake in Vermilion Energy by 8,245.6% in the 1st quarter. PNC Financial Services Group Inc. now owns 4,757 shares of the oil and gas companys stock worth $99,000 after purchasing an additional 4,700 shares during the period. Finally, Atlas Capital Advisors LLC bought a new position in Vermilion Energy in the 2nd quarter worth about $127,000. Institutional investors own 28.67% of the companys stock. NYSE VET opened at $12.50 on Monday. The firm has a market capitalization of $2.05 billion, a P/E ratio of 2.92 and a beta of 2.06. The business has a fifty day simple moving average of $13.84 and a 200 day simple moving average of $13.48. Vermilion Energy has a 12 month low of $10.75 and a 12 month high of $19.89. The company has a current ratio of 0.90, a quick ratio of 0.86 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.26. Vermilion Energy (NYSE:VET Get Free Report) (TSE:VET) last released its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, November 1st. The oil and gas company reported $0.25 EPS for the quarter, beating analysts consensus estimates of $0.23 by $0.02. The business had revenue of $354.50 million during the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $420.12 million. Vermilion Energy had a return on equity of 9.57% and a net margin of 40.95%. On average, analysts predict that Vermilion Energy will post 2.17 EPS for the current fiscal year. Vermilion Energy Cuts Dividend The company also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Monday, January 15th. Stockholders of record on Friday, December 29th will be paid a dividend of $0.072 per share. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, December 28th. This represents a $0.29 annualized dividend and a dividend yield of 2.30%. Vermilion Energys payout ratio is 7.01%. Vermilion Energy Company Profile (Get Free Report Vermilion Energy Inc, together with its subsidiaries, engages in the acquisition, exploration, development, and production of petroleum and natural gas in North America, Europe, and Australia. The company owns 82% working interest in 796,648 net acres of developed land and 85% working interest in 384,237 net acres of undeveloped land in Canada; 149,043 net acres of land in the Powder River basin in the United States; 96% working interest in 258,125 net acres of developed land and 100% working interest in 106,993 net acres of undeveloped land in the Aquitaine and Paris Basins in France; 53% working interest in 1,604,206 net acres of land in the Netherlands; 107,351 net developed acres and 1,549,929 net undeveloped acres in Germany; 975,374 net acres land in Croatia; 614,625 net acres land in Hungary; and 97,907 net acres land in Slovakia. Read More Receive News & Ratings for Vermilion Energy Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Vermilion Energy and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. BOX (NYSE:BOX Get Free Report) will announce its earnings results after the market closes on Tuesday, December 5th. Analysts expect the company to announce earnings of $0.38 per share for the quarter. Investors interested in registering for the companys conference call can do so using this link. BOX Stock Performance BOX opened at $26.57 on Monday. BOX has a 1-year low of $23.57 and a 1-year high of $34.98. The company has a 50-day moving average of $25.17 and a 200-day moving average of $27.54. The company has a market capitalization of $3.83 billion, a P/E ratio of 139.85, a PEG ratio of 15.25 and a beta of 0.93. Get BOX alerts: Insider Transactions at BOX In related news, VP Eli Berkovitch sold 5,000 shares of BOX stock in a transaction dated Friday, October 6th. The shares were sold at an average price of $25.39, for a total transaction of $126,950.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the vice president now directly owns 147,290 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $3,739,693.10. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at the SEC website. In other BOX news, VP Eli Berkovitch sold 5,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Friday, October 6th. The shares were sold at an average price of $25.39, for a total value of $126,950.00. Following the completion of the sale, the vice president now owns 147,290 shares in the company, valued at approximately $3,739,693.10. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this hyperlink. Also, CFO Dylan C. Smith sold 13,000 shares of the firms stock in a transaction dated Friday, November 10th. The shares were sold at an average price of $25.30, for a total transaction of $328,900.00. Following the completion of the sale, the chief financial officer now owns 1,464,437 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $37,050,256.10. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. In the last three months, insiders sold 54,000 shares of company stock valued at $1,380,270. Company insiders own 4.90% of the companys stock. Institutional Inflows and Outflows Analyst Ratings Changes A number of institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the stock. Fairfield Bush & CO. acquired a new position in shares of BOX in the second quarter valued at about $29,000. Quarry LP lifted its holdings in shares of BOX by 318.2% in the 1st quarter. Quarry LP now owns 1,330 shares of the software makers stock worth $36,000 after purchasing an additional 1,012 shares in the last quarter. Point72 Middle East FZE bought a new position in BOX during the 4th quarter valued at $68,000. Tower Research Capital LLC TRC raised its stake in shares of BOX by 201.3% during the 1st quarter. Tower Research Capital LLC TRC now owns 2,754 shares of the software makers stock worth $74,000 after purchasing an additional 1,840 shares during the period. Finally, Neo Ivy Capital Management bought a new stake in shares of BOX during the 2nd quarter worth $94,000. Institutional investors own 87.90% of the companys stock. Several brokerages recently commented on BOX. JMP Securities restated a market outperform rating and issued a $32.00 price target on shares of BOX in a research report on Wednesday, August 30th. KeyCorp dropped their price objective on shares of BOX from $35.00 to $33.00 and set an overweight rating on the stock in a research note on Wednesday, August 30th. Royal Bank of Canada restated an underperform rating and set a $21.00 price target on shares of BOX in a research note on Thursday, October 12th. Oppenheimer restated an outperform rating and set a $35.00 price target on shares of BOX in a research note on Wednesday, August 30th. Finally, Citigroup dropped their price target on shares of BOX from $34.00 to $33.00 and set a buy rating on the stock in a research note on Wednesday, August 30th. One equities research analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, one has given a hold rating, seven have issued a buy rating and one has given a strong 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 $32.25. Check Out Our Latest Research Report on BOX BOX Company Profile (Get Free Report) Box, Inc provides a cloud content management platform that enables organizations of various sizes to manage and share their content from anywhere on any device. The company's Software-as-a-Service platform enables users to collaborate on content internally and with external parties, automate content-driven business processes, develop custom applications, and implement data protection, security, and compliance features to comply with legal and regulatory requirements, internal policies, and industry standards and regulations. Read More Receive News & Ratings for BOX Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for BOX and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. Forestar Group (NYSE:FOR Free Report) had its price objective boosted by JPMorgan Chase & Co. from $30.00 to $33.50 in a research report report published on Friday morning, Benzinga reports. JPMorgan Chase & Co. currently has a neutral rating on the oil and gas exploration companys stock. Separately, StockNews.com upgraded Forestar Group from a hold rating to a buy rating in a research report on Friday, November 17th. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating and three have given a buy rating to the company. Based on data from MarketBeat, the stock has an average rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $32.50. Get Forestar Group alerts: Check Out Our Latest Stock Report on FOR Forestar Group Stock Up 3.0 % NYSE:FOR opened at $31.45 on Friday. Forestar Group has a twelve month low of $13.72 and a twelve month high of $32.72. The company has a market cap of $1.57 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 9.44 and a beta of 1.70. The stock has a fifty day simple moving average of $27.42 and a 200-day simple moving average of $25.99. The company has a current ratio of 2.64, a quick ratio of 2.64 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.51. Forestar Group (NYSE:FOR Get Free Report) last released its earnings results on Tuesday, November 7th. The oil and gas exploration company reported $1.44 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $0.94 by $0.50. Forestar Group had a return on equity of 13.00% and a net margin of 11.62%. The business had revenue of $549.70 million during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $373.80 million. Analysts anticipate that Forestar Group will post 3.55 EPS for the current year. Hedge Funds Weigh In On Forestar Group Several institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in FOR. Swiss National Bank increased its stake in shares of Forestar Group by 7.6% during the first quarter. Swiss National Bank now owns 41,017 shares of the oil and gas exploration companys stock valued at $728,000 after buying an additional 2,900 shares during the period. JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased its stake in shares of Forestar Group by 67.3% during the first quarter. JPMorgan Chase & Co. now owns 78,489 shares of the oil and gas exploration companys stock valued at $1,395,000 after buying an additional 31,567 shares during the period. Bank of New York Mellon Corp increased its stake in shares of Forestar Group by 5.7% during the first quarter. Bank of New York Mellon Corp now owns 104,101 shares of the oil and gas exploration companys stock valued at $1,849,000 after buying an additional 5,604 shares during the period. American Century Companies Inc. increased its stake in shares of Forestar Group by 55.1% during the first quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 45,703 shares of the oil and gas exploration companys stock valued at $812,000 after buying an additional 16,240 shares during the period. Finally, MetLife Investment Management LLC increased its stake in shares of Forestar Group by 56.8% during the first quarter. MetLife Investment Management LLC now owns 10,949 shares of the oil and gas exploration companys stock valued at $194,000 after buying an additional 3,966 shares during the period. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 35.94% of the companys stock. Forestar Group Company Profile (Get Free Report) Forestar Group Inc operates as a residential lot development company in the United States. The company acquires land and develops infrastructure for single-family residential communities. It sells its residential single-family finished lots to local, regional, and national homebuilders. The company was incorporated in 2005 and is headquartered in Arlington, Texas. See Also Receive News & Ratings for Forestar Group Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Forestar Group and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. Ossiam grew its stake in Lithia Motors, Inc. (NYSE:LAD Free Report) by 149.9% during the 2nd quarter, according to the company in its most recent 13F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The firm owned 1,202 shares of the companys stock after purchasing an additional 721 shares during the period. Ossiams holdings in Lithia Motors were worth $366,000 as of its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Several other large investors also recently modified their holdings of the stock. Barrow Hanley Mewhinney & Strauss LLC grew its stake in shares of Lithia Motors by 1.8% in the 1st quarter. Barrow Hanley Mewhinney & Strauss LLC now owns 1,406,189 shares of the companys stock valued at $321,919,000 after purchasing an additional 24,341 shares during the period. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP increased its holdings in Lithia Motors by 6.1% during the 2nd quarter. Dimensional Fund Advisors LP now owns 839,009 shares of the companys stock valued at $255,152,000 after purchasing an additional 48,010 shares in the last quarter. State Street Corp increased its holdings in Lithia Motors by 3.8% during the 1st quarter. State Street Corp now owns 807,874 shares of the companys stock valued at $242,459,000 after purchasing an additional 29,352 shares in the last quarter. MFN Partners Management LP increased its holdings in Lithia Motors by 43.0% during the 1st quarter. MFN Partners Management LP now owns 751,077 shares of the companys stock valued at $225,413,000 after purchasing an additional 225,806 shares in the last quarter. Finally, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board increased its holdings in Lithia Motors by 102.9% during the 2nd quarter. Canada Pension Plan Investment Board now owns 676,411 shares of the companys stock valued at $205,703,000 after purchasing an additional 343,000 shares in the last quarter. Get Lithia Motors alerts: Lithia Motors Stock Up 4.0 % NYSE:LAD opened at $277.59 on Monday. Lithia Motors, Inc. has a 12-month low of $185.00 and a 12-month high of $329.00. The company has a quick ratio of 0.32, a current ratio of 1.33 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.09. The firm has a market capitalization of $7.64 billion, a P/E ratio of 7.39, a P/E/G ratio of 3.81 and a beta of 1.56. The stocks fifty day simple moving average is $267.22 and its 200-day simple moving average is $282.01. Lithia Motors Dividend Announcement Lithia Motors ( NYSE:LAD Get Free Report ) last posted its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, October 25th. The company reported $9.25 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing the consensus estimate of $9.99 by ($0.74). Lithia Motors had a return on equity of 18.51% and a net margin of 3.41%. The company had revenue of $8.28 billion during the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $8.17 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the business earned $11.08 earnings per share. The firms revenue for the quarter was up 13.5% on a year-over-year basis. Equities research analysts expect that Lithia Motors, Inc. will post 36.84 earnings per share for the current year. The firm also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which was paid on Friday, November 17th. Shareholders of record on Friday, November 10th were issued a dividend of $0.50 per share. The ex-dividend date was Thursday, November 9th. This represents a $2.00 annualized dividend and a yield of 0.72%. Lithia Motorss dividend payout ratio is presently 5.33%. Analyst Ratings Changes A number of equities research analysts recently weighed in on the company. The Goldman Sachs Group dropped their price target on Lithia Motors from $348.00 to $300.00 and set a neutral rating for the company in a report on Thursday, October 26th. StockNews.com started coverage on Lithia Motors in a report on Thursday, October 5th. They set a hold rating for the company. Morgan Stanley increased their price objective on Lithia Motors from $198.00 to $220.00 and gave the company an underweight rating in a research report on Wednesday, August 9th. Wells Fargo & Company decreased their price objective on Lithia Motors from $275.00 to $259.00 and set an equal weight rating on the stock in a research report on Thursday, October 26th. Finally, JPMorgan Chase & Co. lowered Lithia Motors from an overweight rating to a neutral rating and set a $295.00 price objective on the stock. in a research report on Tuesday, October 31st. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, five have given a hold rating and one has assigned a buy rating to the companys stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock has a consensus rating of Hold and an average price target of $324.89. Get Our Latest Research Report on LAD About Lithia Motors (Free Report) Lithia Motors, Inc operates as an automotive retailer. The company operates through Domestic, Import, and Luxury segments. It offers new and used vehicles; vehicle financing services; warranties, insurance contracts, and vehicle and theft protection services; and automotive repair and maintenance services, as well as sells body and parts for the new vehicles under the Driveway and GreenCars brand names. Further Reading Want to see what other hedge funds are holding LAD? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for Lithia Motors, Inc. (NYSE:LAD Free Report). Receive News & Ratings for Lithia Motors Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Lithia Motors and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. Veeva Systems (NYSE:VEEV Get Free Report) will issue its quarterly earnings data after the market closes on Wednesday, December 6th. Analysts expect the company to announce earnings of $1.28 per share for the quarter. Parties that are interested in registering for the companys conference call can do so using this link. Veeva Systems Stock Up 2.6 % Shares of NYSE:VEEV opened at $178.84 on Monday. Veeva Systems has a fifty-two week low of $157.00 and a fifty-two week high of $225.49. The firm has a 50-day simple moving average of $191.85 and a 200 day simple moving average of $194.76. The company has a market cap of $28.73 billion, a PE ratio of 53.87, a P/E/G ratio of 2.66 and a beta of 0.79. Get Veeva Systems alerts: Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades Several research firms have commented on VEEV. Oppenheimer restated an outperform rating and issued a $225.00 target price on shares of Veeva Systems in a research report on Thursday, August 31st. Citigroup upped their target price on shares of Veeva Systems from $210.00 to $236.00 and gave the stock a buy rating in a research report on Monday, August 28th. Barclays upped their target price on shares of Veeva Systems from $227.00 to $250.00 and gave the stock an overweight rating in a research report on Wednesday, September 13th. Wells Fargo & Company upgraded shares of Veeva Systems from an equal weight rating to an overweight rating and upped their target price for the stock from $211.00 to $229.00 in a research report on Wednesday, October 25th. Finally, Morgan Stanley decreased their target price on shares of Veeva Systems from $181.00 to $160.00 and set an underweight rating for the company in a research report on Monday, November 13th. One analyst has rated the stock with a sell rating, nine have issued a hold rating and fifteen have issued a buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, the stock presently has a consensus rating of Moderate Buy and a consensus target price of $216.65. Insider Buying and Selling In related news, EVP Alan Mateo sold 13,801 shares of the firms stock in a transaction that occurred on Thursday, October 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $197.67, for a total value of $2,728,043.67. Following the completion of the transaction, the executive vice president now owns 20,718 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $4,095,327.06. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at the SEC website. In other Veeva Systems news, Director Paul J. Sekhri sold 2,500 shares of Veeva Systems stock in a transaction on Monday, September 11th. The shares were sold at an average price of $224.85, for a total transaction of $562,125.00. Following the completion of the sale, the director now owns 14,484 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $3,256,727.40. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this link. Also, EVP Alan Mateo sold 13,801 shares of Veeva Systems stock in a transaction on Thursday, October 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $197.67, for a total transaction of $2,728,043.67. Following the sale, the executive vice president now directly owns 20,718 shares of the companys stock, valued at approximately $4,095,327.06. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. In the last 90 days, insiders sold 39,768 shares of company stock valued at $7,990,190. Company insiders own 10.98% of the companys stock. Institutional Inflows and Outflows A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of VEEV. Resurgent Financial Advisors LLC bought a new position in shares of Veeva Systems during the 4th quarter valued at $33,000. Quarry LP raised its holdings in shares of Veeva Systems by 165.9% during the 1st quarter. Quarry LP now owns 218 shares of the technology companys stock valued at $40,000 after purchasing an additional 136 shares in the last quarter. Global Wealth Management Investment Advisory Inc. raised its holdings in shares of Veeva Systems by 63.9% during the 1st quarter. Global Wealth Management Investment Advisory Inc. now owns 218 shares of the technology companys stock valued at $46,000 after purchasing an additional 85 shares in the last quarter. Cornerstone Planning Group LLC bought a new position in Veeva Systems in the 2nd quarter worth $74,000. Finally, First Horizon Advisors Inc. raised its holdings in Veeva Systems by 37.8% in the 1st quarter. First Horizon Advisors Inc. now owns 554 shares of the technology companys stock worth $102,000 after acquiring an additional 152 shares during the period. Institutional investors own 80.07% of the companys stock. About Veeva Systems (Get Free Report) Veeva Systems Inc provides cloud-based software for the life sciences industry. It offers Veeva Commercial Cloud, a suite of software and data solutions, such as Veeva customer relationship management (CRM) that enable customer-facing employees at pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies; Veeva Vault PromoMats, an end-to-end content and digital asset management solution; Veeva Vault Medical that provides source of medical content across multiple channels and geographies; Veeva Crossix, an analytics platform for pharmaceutical brands; Veeva OpenData, a customer reference data solution; Veeva Link, a data application that allows link to generate real-time intelligence; and Veeva Compass includes de-identified and longitudinal patient data for the United States. Recommended Stories Receive News & Ratings for Veeva Systems Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Veeva Systems and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter. The Chinese path to modernization was praised as a valuable reference for the world, and the Belt and Road Initiative was recognized as a key driver of global economic and social development on Friday at a diplomatic forum in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. The forum underscored global interest in understanding China's developmental trajectory and the opportunities presented by the BRI, which was hosted by the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the CPC Shenzhen Municipal Committee, and attracted some 150 delegates from 30 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe and Oceania. Liu Jianchao, minister of the CPC Central Committee's International Department, said the Chinese path to modernization is a compelling story of a late-developing nation catching up, an ancient civilization rekindling its splendor, and a continuous commitment to prioritizing the welfare of the people. "The path, which is also rooted in the rich soil of Chinese civilization, highlights the CPC's leadership in completing an industrialization process within decades," Liu said, adding that the Chinese path to modernization steadfastly centers on the people, promotes shared prosperity, and adheres to the path of peaceful development. Addressing the BRI, Liu highlighted its transformative impact over the past decade and outlined the future focus of its construction, which emphasizes connectivity and an open, inclusive approach. Meng Fanli, Party chief of Shenzhen, vowed to make the city lead in the Chinese path to modernization by actively integrating into the joint construction of the Belt and Road and work with everyone to "create a better tomorrow". In response, Danilo Turk, former president of Slovenia said the Chinese path to modernization is a crucial factor propelling global modernization development. "China has fundamentally changed the world. The entire world is different now because there is more economic cooperation, capital flow and collaborative opportunities to address climate change around the globe. In fact, China is a major driving force behind these changes. Therefore, the world must pay attention to China and collaborate closely with China," Turk said. Secretary-General of the Mozambique Liberation Front Roque Silva Samuel said his party believes that China's approach to modernization contributes to strengthening and consolidating the socialist system with Chinese characteristics, ultimately enhancing the living standards and well-being of the Chinese people. "The Belt and Road Initiative has already borne fruit in our countries. Through the infrastructure built under this initiative, we have expanded connectivity between various regions, fostering significant growth in regional and international trade for all countries," he said. Life expectancy at birth, by sex: United States, 2000-2022. Data: National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System, mortality data file. Graphic: NVSS / CDC By Emily Anthes and Benjamin Mueller 29 November 2023 (The New York Times) Life expectancy in the United States has begun to climb again as the threat of Covid-19 has receded, increasing by more than a year from 2021 to 2022, according to data released on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rise represents a slow and partial recovery for the country, which tallied more than 1.1 million Covid deaths and lost 2.4 years in life expectancy from 2019 to 2021. But an array of other conditions continued to pose grave risks to Americans health. Deaths from flu, pneumonia, fetal and infant conditions and kidney disease all rose in 2022, the agency reported, partially offsetting the fall in Covid deaths. Were halfway back to what we lost, said Eileen Crimmins, an expert on gerontology and demography at the University of Southern California. But we certainly have a very long ways to go before we get to where life expectancy should be. In 2022, life expectancy at birth was 77.5 years, compared with 76.4 years in 2021. A drop in Covid deaths accounts for more than 80 percent of that increase. In 2019, before the pandemic, life expectancy at birth was 78.8. Declines in deaths from heart disease, unintentional injuries (a category dominated by drug overdoses), cancer and homicide also contributed to the rise in life expectancy, the C.D.C. reported. Elizabeth Arias, a researcher at the National Center for Health Statistics and an author of the new analysis, said that she had not been expecting the nations life expectancy to rebound completely in 2022, when Covid was the underlying cause of some 200,000 deaths. Theyre excess deaths, she said. Theyre not part of our mortality DNA. Life expectancy has climbed considerably over the past century, from 47 years in 1900 to nearly 79 years just before the pandemic. (The long-term improvement has been driven in part by significant declines in infant mortality.) But gains in life expectancy in the United States had slowed in recent decades compared with that of other wealthy nations, and life expectancy effectively flattened in the 2010s, a trend that experts have attributed in part to gaps in health care access, areas of deep poverty, risky behaviors like gun ownership and unhealthy physical and social conditions in the United States. After past health catastrophes in the United States, like the 1918 influenza pandemic, life expectancy appeared to recover more rapidly than it has during the coronavirus pandemic, said Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. [] Contribution of leading causes of death to change in life expectancy, by total population and sex: United States, 2021-2022. Data: National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System, mortality data file. Graphic: NVSS / CDC A longstanding gap in life expectancy between the sexes widened during the pandemic, which brought a higher mortality rate in men than in women. In 2021, women could be expected to live six years longer than men, but that gap closed slightly, to 5.4 years, in 2022. This narrowing may stem from the fall in Covid deaths and a potential plateauing of the opioid epidemic, said Dr. Brandon Yan, a physician and public health researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. Both of these have historically disproportionately killed men, he said. The United States lags behind many other wealthy nations, both for how many years of life expectancy it lost during the pandemic and for how slowly it has recovered. Portugal, for example, had a life expectancy of nearly 82 years in 2022, only marginally lower than before the pandemic. Belgium, too, had nearly returned to its prepandemic peak of a 82-year life expectancy by 2022, while Sweden had entirely erased its losses from the pandemic and returned to an 83-year life expectancy last year. Studies in recent years have shown that the pandemic deepened American deficits in survival rates that had been accumulating for decades, reflecting longstanding problems with chronic illness in the United States and the countrys difficulties in responding to Covid. Despite having one of the worlds most robust stores of vaccines, the United States struggled to vaccinate as many people against Covid and especially older people as other large and wealthy nations did. And it fell behind in administering booster shots, too, leaving it more vulnerable as the Omicron wave swept the country. [] The data makes clear that these longstanding inequities have not really been addressed, said Michael Bird, a former president of the American Public Health Association and member of the Kewa Pueblo tribe. It really goes back to poverty and the racism that is still being perpetuated. The pandemic was hardest on those who faced the steepest problems to begin with. Its not an esoteric experience, Mr. Bird said. Its the reality of knowing people whove passed on before their time. And many of the deaths in the United States are in theory, wholly preventable, said Philip Cohen, a sociologist and demographer at the University of Maryland. Its still violence and alcohol and suicide and homicide, accidents and especially opioids. Suicides rose 3 percent in 2022, the C.D.C. reported in a separate analysis on Wednesday. The agency had previously reported that the number of suicides had risen to nearly 50,000 in 2022, the most ever recorded in the United States [Suicides in U.S. hit historic high in 2022, driven by increase among older adults We dont know why the rate has been going up Des]. The U.S. is not doing its job when it comes to public health, Dr. Cohen said. [more] U.S. Life Expectancy Creeps Up as Covid Deaths Fall The federal government has been urged to move pension funds investment to sectors that have direct impact on the citizens to support economic development. This was disclosed at the National Advisory Board for Impact Investing (NABII) sixth yearly report Investing for Impact in Nigeria launched in Lagos. The report explained the significance of investment in micro, small and medium-scale enterprises (MSMEs) and women-owned businesses and how to unlock pension funds to mobilise capital to drive growth in key sectors. The study was conducted by the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) and NABII and supported by the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (GSG), OTT Impact and funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). It stated, These deals are often limited compared to the demand while local investors perceive that these investments do not translate into financial returns." Also, the Chief Executive Officer of NABII, Etemore Glover, said, This report is an essential step toward understanding the enabling conditions for unlocking investment for impact in key sectors and the Impact Investors Foundation and its partners are committed to improving the awareness, stakeholders acceptance and development of enterprises for impact funds." She further noted that the report sets out the required policies, interventions and collaboration among key stakeholders that can take the impact investing market in Nigeria to the next level. According to the report, agriculture (with $799.8 million), financial services ($729.69 million), and energy sectors ($372.71 million) have been the most consistent destinations of impact investment for development finance institutions over the past five years, while deployment into education and health sectors have halted since 2018. Croton membranaceus seedling-credit, Rafamall There are several traditional African plants used in the management of prostate diseases in Ghana. However, one such plant that has been validated by Medical doctors and researchers is Croton membranaceus for prostate infection and prostate enlargement. In this article, I examine the science behind this plant. Croton Membranaceus, Science Enlarged Prostate This human observational study was conducted by Asare et al.(2015) and involved thirty-three patients who were observed before and after 3-month administration of 20 mg three times daily orally. The International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS), and the International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF) questionnaires were used. The International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS), is used to examine the quality of life(QOL) of men with prostate issues,especially on their urinary health. The IPSS is a useful subjective assessment tool so the duty is on you the patient to tell the doctor how you feel before and after taking the medication. The researchers also assess their Prostate Specific Antigen(PSA) a blood test that measures how much of a particular protein (called prostate-specific antigen) is in your blood. Its been the standard test for assessing your prostate health- the higher the number, the likelihood that there is a problem with your prostate that could be cancer or not. The normal range is 0-4ng/ml. They also examined the renal, and liver function, lipid tests, and ultrasonographic imaging performed. The ultrasound revealed the outlook or size of the prostate. The bigger the size, the higher the effect on your urinary health and quality of life being compromised in general. However, smaller size could also compromise your quality of life. They found that the International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS), showed 37% had severe, 40% moderate, and 23% mild symptoms before; 57% and 43% had moderate and mild symptoms, respectively, after treatment. The International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF) showed 30% with severe, 40% moderate, 24% mild-moderate, 3% mild, and 3% no erectile dysfunction before treatment and 20% severe, 43% moderate, and 37% mild-moderate dysfunction, after treatment. On the prostate itself, they found that C. membranaceus shrinks the prostate and improves the quality of Life. The second was a prospective study conducted by Kyei et al.(2017) which evaluates Ghanaian traditional medicines used for the management of prostate diseases and their constituents. This is what they did: They asked patients with lower urinary symptoms (LUTS)who had taken traditional Medicine to bring samples to the Urology Unit of the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH) in Accra from January 2015 to June 2016. They further visited all the 58 licensed pharmaceutical shops in Okaishie, a wholesale and retail depot for medicines in the main business district of Accra, and purchased traditional medicines for the management of prostate diseases. This was part of a study on the management of benign prostate hyperplasia at the KBTH approved by the Medical Directorate. They found that eleven products in the market contain the root extract of Croton membranaceus. They concluded that Croton membranaceus was the indigenous traditional medicine identified for relieving LUTS due to prostate disease. However, they advised that in the case of prostate cancer, empirical evidence on its efficacy is needed before establishing croton membranaceus used in treating Prostate cancer. Croton Membranaceus, Prostate Cancer One animal study by Afriyie et al(2015) found that C. membranaceus has a cytotoxic effect on BPH-1 cell lines as well as C. membranaceus promoting apoptosis. A previous study by Afriyie et al.(2014) found a reduction of the serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) both in animal studies and human clinical studies. Another study by Aboagye et al.(2000) found the compound Julocrotine, a glutarimide alkaloid in Croton membranaceus, and a subsequent study by Baylor et al. (2008) identified a cytotoxic diterpenoid from C. membranaceus that may be effective against cancer. Appiah AA's (2011) study identified a methanolic extract of the roots to have cytotoxic activities against two cancer cell lines. Six compounds were isolated and suggested against human prostate cancer (PC-3) cells, which might provide some support for the traditional use of C. membranaceus in the treatment of cancers. Kyei et al.(2017) found that observations at urology clinics find that patients with prostate cancer on C. membranaceus present with advanced and metastatic disease despite having been on this traditional medicine treatment for a considerable period. Despite these observations, no clinical studies have been conducted on the use of C. membranaceus in the management of prostate cancer either to achieve a cure or to reduce its progression. Blood sugar, cholesterol The first rats' study was published by Asare et al.(2015) aimed at establishing whether Croton membranaceus (CM) used for prostatitis had any effect on Cardiovascular diseases. The study found that Croton membranaceus normally used for prostate disease management has a positive effect on cholesterol, blood sugar, and blood pressure. How it work An old study by Aboagye FA(1997) found that C.membranaceusinhibited the enzyme activity of 5-reductase in rat serum leading to a reduction in the levels of dihydrotestosterone levels in vitro however no significant reductions in the serum levels of dihydrotestosterone was observed in vivo. This led him to conclude that inhibition of 5-reductase activity may not be the major mechanism by which the extract exerts its action on patients with LUTS due to BPH. This means that the exact mechanism of action of the C. membranaceus is yet to be established. However, a subsequent study by Aboagye et al.(2000) found the compound Julocrotine, a glutarimide alkaloid in Croton membranaceus. A previous study by Baylor et al. (2008) identified a cytotoxic diterpenoid from C. membranaceus that may be effective against cancer. Appiah AA(2011) study identified a methanolic extract of the roots to have cytotoxic activities against two cancer cell lines. Six compounds were isolated and suggested against human prostate cancer (PC-3) cells, which might provide some support for the traditional use of C. membranaceus in the treatment of cancers. Warning Kyei et al(2017) are worried that the current traditional medical practice in the treatment of prostate diseases does not differentiate between prostatitis, benign prostate hyperplasia,and prostate cancer with herbal remedies being advocated for symptomatic relief in all these conditions. This means that traditional healers have a duty to know the difference between prostate cancer, where the prostate is enlarged or infected, and refer those with the cancer to the right centers for management. But the question is how can traditional healers diagnose prostate cancer? This is where the issue is. Also, Asare et al.(2011) study found no adverse effect of using C. membranaceus in animals. Afriyie et al (2013) further says that it can be used as an antiatherogenic and anti-ischemicnatural drug. Two studies, (Appiah, 2011; Appiah et al. 2013) found no adverse biological effect. Asare et al.(2010) clinical study on its use in BPH, found no observable adverse effects associated with the clinical use of preparations of C. membranaceus during the study period of three months. However, the liver function tests had some parameters increasing slightly with a statistically significant increase in the total bilirubin and indirect bilirubin. Take Home Kyei et al.(2017) study confirmed that both animal and human studies support the effectiveness of C. membranaceus in the management of some patients with lower urinary symptoms due to BPH. However, their concern was that there is no clinical study to confirm the effectiveness of C. membranaceus for the management of prostate cancer. They recommended that every effort must therefore be made at the initial evaluation to ensure that those with possible underlying prostate cancer are referred for appropriate diagnosis, staging, and treatment. The writer is a Professor of Naturopathic Healthcare, a Medical Journalist, an author, and a science writer. E. mail: [email protected]. For more about me,Visit: profnyarkotey.com References 1. Asare GA, Adjei S, Afriyie D, Appiah-Danquah AB, Asia J, Asiedu B, Santa S, Doku D. Croton membranaceusImproves Some Biomarkers of Cardiovascular Disease and Diabetes in Genetic Animal Models. J Clin Diagn Res. 2015 Dec;9(12):OF01-5. doi: 10.7860/JCDR/2015/14844.6899. Epub 2015 Dec 1. PMID: 26816938; PMCID: PMC4717687. 2. George Awuku Asare, Daniel Afriyie, Robert A. Ngala,Alfred A. Appiah,Yvonne Anang, Musah, Samuel Adjei,Kwabena Bamfo-Quaicoe, Derick Sule, Ben A. Gyan, Peter Arhin, and Dominic A. Edoh (2015). Shrinkage of Prostate and Improved Quality of Life: Management of BPH Patients with Croton membranaceus Ethanolic Root Extract. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine Journal. Volume 2015 | Article ID 365205 | https://doi.org/10.1155/2015/365205. 3. Mathew Y. Kyei , George O. Klufio, Ali Ayamba and Sherif Mohammed(2017) Traditional medicines and alternative practice in the management of prostate diseases in southern Ghana. Ghana Med J 2017; 51(3): 128-137 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/gmj.v51i3.6 4. Asare, GA, Sittie A, Bugyei K, Gyan BA, Adjei S, Addo P, Wiredu EK, Nyarko AK, Otu-Nyarko LS, Adjei DN. Acute toxicity studies of Croton membranaceus root extract. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 2011; 134:(3):938-943. 31. 5. Afriyie DK, Asare GA, Bugyei K, Asiedu-Gyekye I, GyanBA, Adjei S, Addo P, Sittie A, Nyarko AK. Anti-atherogenic and anti-ischemic potentials of Croton membranaceus observed during sub-chronic toxicitystudies. Pharmacognosy Research. 2013; 5(1):10 6. Appiah AA. Phytochemical and biological analysis of Croton membranaceus [Ph.D. thesis], Chemistry Department, University of Ghana, 2011 7. Appiah AA, Asomaning WA, Oppong IV, DukerEshun G, Clement J, Okine LKN, Achel G, Gyampo O, Adjei S, Nyarko AK, Aboagye FA, Edoh DA. African Natural Plant Products Volume II: Discoveries and Challenges in Chemistry, Health, and Nutrition. 2013; chap 6, Volume 1127 page 79- 92. DOI: 10.1021/bk-2013-1127.ch006 8. Aboagye FA. The effect of Croton membranaceus on dihydrotestosterone levels in blood and its synthesis by prostatic 5 alpha-reductase in the rat [M.Phil. thesis], Department of Biochemistry, University of Ghana, 1997 9. Aboagye FA, Sam GH, Massiot G, Lavaud C, Julocrotine, a glutarimide alkaloid from Croton membranaceus, Fitoterapia. 2000; 71(4):461462. 10. Bayor MT, Ayim JSK, Marston G, Phillips RM, ShnyderSD, Wheelhouse RT, Wright CW. A cytotoxic diterpenoidfrom Croton membranaceus, the major constituent of anticancer herbal formulations used in Ghana, Natural Product Communications. 2008; 3(11):18751878. 11. Afriyie DK, Asare GA, Bugyei K, Lin J, Peng J, Hong Z, Mitochondria-dependent apoptogenic activity of aqueous root extract of Croton membranaceus against human BPH-1 cells, Genetics and Molecular Research. 2015; 14(1):149162 12. Afriyie DK, Asare GA, K. Bugyei K, Adjei S, Lin J, PengJ, Hong Z. Treatment of benign. prostatic hyperplasia with Croton membranaceus in an experimental animal model, Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 2014; 157:9098. Climate scientist Dr. Graeme Pearman at his home in Bangholme, Victoria. On warning the world about abrupt climate change, he laments, I often wonder: where did I go wrong? Why didnt people respond? Is that my responsibility? Photo: Nadir Kinani / The Guardian By Graham Readfearn 20 November 2023 (The Guardian) I often wonder: where did I go wrong? Graeme Pearman says. Why didnt people respond? Is that my responsibility? When Guardian Australia meets him at his home on the outskirts of Melbourne, the veteran climate scientist is frustrated. If you go through the whole process and the rigour of conducting science, [you think] at the end of the day surely people will understand what youre saying they will incorporate those risks into what they do, he says. Well, it doesnt work that way. The reality is that for a period of nearly two decades, Australia went backwards [on climate action]. From a personal perspective, yes, its frustrating. 20 November 2023: In the 1970s, Graeme Pearman measured rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, briefing three prime ministers on what that meant for the planet. After decades leading Australias climate research, Pearman, now 82, speaks of the frustration that the science didnt lead to meaningful change. Video: Guardian Australia Outside two alpacas are busy keeping the grass down. A pergola over a deck is heaving with pink wisteria flowers and inside on a kitchen bench Pearman has been struggling with an impossible jigsaw of a Van Gogh painting. The calmness and lazy beauty of it all is jarring, given were here to talk about his lifes work studying a phenomenon that could send countless species extinct, reshape coastlines from rising seas and supercharge storms and wildfires. More than 50 years ago Pearman was working at the government science agency the CSIRO and measuring how many CO 2 molecules were in the air. He went on to establish the governments first climate science program and brief three prime ministers (Hawke, Keating and Howard) on climate change. Later, after an acrimonious parting with the CSIRO, he would travel from community groups to fossil fuel company board rooms giving presentations on climate change. If there is such a thing as the grandfather of Australian climate science, then 82-year-old Pearman is surely a contender. Climate scientist Dr. Graeme Pearman with his flasks of air in the 1970s. Every Thursday, Pearman and his colleague John Garratt drew air samples from a 10 metre-high mast above a wheatfield in Rutherglen, Victoria. Photo: Supplied Six flasks of air In 1971, in Pearmans first job at the CSIRO, he and his colleague John Garratt were asked by their boss Bill Priestley to develop, test and then install equipment that could measure how much carbon dioxide there was in the atmosphere. Every Thursday Pearman and Garratt drew air samples from a 10 metre-high mast above a wheatfield in Rutherglen, Victoria. What shocked Pearman was that his measurements were a close match to those taken in Hawaii by the US scientist Charles Keeling 8,600km away and in a different hemisphere. The curiosity for the two of us was why should the concentration be the same? Pearman says. Above this growing wheat crop and on the top of a mountain in Hawaii. Two hemispheres that are totally different. Why should that be the case? Since the late 1950s Keeling had been finding the amount of CO 2 in the atmosphere was creeping up and by the late 60s he was blaming the rise on fossil fuel burning. Pearman suspected Keeling was wrong and that the rise was down to drifting standards in the way the measurements were being taken. We thought: hes got to be wrong. How could humans, mere humans, actually influence the global climate? But within about a year, we knew Keeling was right. Climate scientist Dr. Graeme Pearman at his home in Bangholme, Victoria. Photo: Nadir Kinani / The Guardian In 1974 Pearman took six flasks of Australian air samples to laboratories around the world, including Keelings, where scientists were also measuring CO 2 . Within a few years different readings were being taken from planes and Pearman had helped set up a long-term monitoring station for atmospheric gases at Cape Grim on the north-west tip of Tasmania. The first carbon dioxide reading at Cape Grim in May 1976 showed CO 2 at 328 parts per million. On the day of our interview, the latest reading shows 417 ppm (an increase of 26%). Australia has just had its warmest winter on record, during what will very likely be the globes hottest year on record. A fact easily forgotten in the blast radius of the last decade of Australias climate wars is that in 1990 the Hawke government wanted to introduce a target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by the year 2005. In 1989 the UN awarded Pearman and the CSIRO a global award, recognising Australians were as well informed on climate change as almost any other community in the world. Pearman had organised a conference in 1987 where he had asked scientists working across the economy from irrigation to agriculture, energy and the natural environment to present their thoughts on the potential implications of climate change for their sectors. Pearman would eventually make his way through the ranks to become the chief of CSIROs atmospheric research division. By the early 1990s it seemed Australia was well positioned and well informed. But Pearman admits he was naive to think that policy and action would just follow the science. Political pressure and vested interests Just as Pearman and his colleagues were telling the public and politicians about the risks from climate change, Australias fossil fuel industries were bringing their weight and cash to the policy table. Ultimately the science was outgunned by vested interests. In 2003 Pearman joined the Australian Climate Group a group of experts convened by WWF and a multinational insurance group. In 2004 the group released a report saying Australia should cut its emissions by 60% by 2050. Joining this group would be Pearmans downfall. [more] Where did I go wrong? The scientist who tried to raise the climate alarm Frenchmans body found at Koh Samui waterfall SURAT THANI: Local officials and volunteers found the body of a young Frenchman late Sunday morning (Dec 3) after he had fallen at a waterfall on Koh Samui at about 3pm on Saturday. tourismSafety By Bangkok Post Monday 4 December 2023 11:09 AM Rescue workers with climbing gear arrive at Na Muang Waterfall 2 on Koh Samui to retrieve the body of a French tourist on Sunday. Photo: Supapong Chaolan / Bangkok Post The body of Ryan Meghar, 20, was found in the stream above Na Muang Waterfall 2 at about 10am on Sunday. It was wedged between rocks in the stream on the third tier of the waterfall. Local officials and rescue volunteers reached the spot after climbing about two kilometres from its base. Meghar was wearing only black shorts. He had suffered fractures to his skull and an elbow, reports the Bangkok Post. Phunchid Khamloon, acting disaster prevention and mitigation chief of Koh Samui, said the man visited the waterfall with four or five others, including his girlfriend. They entered the fourth tier of the waterfall, which was off-limits because of the strong current caused by recent persistent rains. The man fell from the fourth tier which is about 10-15 metres higher than the third tier. The top of the six-tier waterfall is about 80 metres high. Mr Phunchid warned tourists not to enter the off-limit zones and dangerous top of the waterfall for their own safety and that of rescue workers. Another Frenchman and a Spanish tourist fell to their deaths at the Na Muang Waterfall 2 in July this year and November 2019. Phuket readies for royal visit for Kings Cup Regatta PHUKET: Her Majesty Queen Suthida will be in Phuket to take part in racing in the Phuket Kings Cup Regatta and to officiate the handing out of awards to winners this Saturday (Dec 9). By The Phuket News Monday 4 December 2023 02:29 PM HM The Queens arrival on the island was confirmed by Phuket Governor Sophon Suwannarat at a meeting at Karon Municipality yesterday (Dec 3). At the meeting, Governor Sophon called on the heads of all agencies to make sure preparations were underway and that the preparations would be complete in time for Her Majestys visit, and that Queen Suthidas visit would be smooth and dignified. HM Queen Suthida on Saturday will join the racing team on board the racing yacht THA72, which is competing in the IRC Zero class. The main racing in the 35th Phuket Kings Cup regatta begins today (Dec 4), following youngsters in more than 120 dinghies taking to the waters off Kata Beach yesterday to start their schedule of races. Team Hollywood under veteran Australian sailor Ray Roberts is back to defend his title in the IRC Zero class, which he has won for the past three consecutive Kings Cup Regattas. The awards ceremony for the 35th Phuket Kings Cup Regatta will be held at the Beyond Kata Resort on Saturday evening, when HM The Queen will officiate the handing out of awards. The public are invited to attend a public appearance by Her Majesty Queen Suthida at Beyond Kata Hotel, Karon, at 3:30pm. Her Majesty Queen Suthida will also visit in front of the Robinson Lifestyle mall in Thalang and iIn front of Aeronautical Radio of Thailand Co Ltd (the Phuket Air Control Center) near Phuket International Airport. The times for these two public appearances have yet to be announced. The ripple effect: Myanmar military coup of 2021 and its impact on Manipur and Mizoram | Laithangbam Kumarsanu Singh Contd from previous issue It is reported that at least 50 civillians have been killed and over 100 injured, mostly by junta bombardments and airstrikes, in northern Shan State. The conflict spread near the Indo-Myanmar border, resulting in a fierce armed fight between the Tatmadaw and ethnic armed groups of the Chin and Sagaing Regions. Following the Myanmar Army's airstrike in Chin State near the Indo-Myanmar border, over 5000 Myanmar Nationals have crossed over to neighboring Mizoram. Around 75 Myanmar army personal who fled resistance attacks on their camps were rescued and repatriated by Assam Rifles. Apart from the recent influx of refugees to Mizoram, concerns are growing about a spillover of tensions into border areas of Manipur, which already face an ethnic conflict since May 3rd. After the February 2021 coup, there is an evident rise in the flow of drugs from Myanmar to India. The political instabilities caused by the conflicts between Tatmadaw and ethnic militias have become conducive for drug cartels in trafficking narcotics through Manipur and Mizoram, spreading across India. The border between India and Myanmar is porous in nature, making the flow of drugs from Myanmar to India feaseable. The most important route is the one which starts from Mandalay, continues to Monya and Kalewa and then bifurcates to enter India at two points. The first moves northwards, enters Moreh in Manipur through Tamu and travels to Imphal and Kohima via National Highway-39. The second branch moves southwards and enters Champai in Mizoram through Rikhawadar. Moreh, Champai, Dimapur and Guwahati have become hubs for drug trafficking. However, after the ethnic conflict between the Meitei and Kuki, drug routes have almost changed to Mizoram. The distribution of drugs to India from Myanmar will have direct impact on the internal security of the country. It will challenge human security and social welfare of the North East region. The porous Indo-Myanmar border has facilitated an increase in the movement of insurgent groups, arms smuggling, and illicit activities after the coup. Insurgent groups from both sides often find safe havens, leading to cross-border security concerns that impact the stability of Manipur. This region has experienced prolonged insurgencies, and the civil war in Myanmar can influence these dynamics. Insurgent groups operating in the region frequently establish connections with factions in Myanmar seeking refugees, training, and resources. The cross-border nature of these interactions can perpetuate insurgent activities in both countries. The security challenge is also evident in the ongoing conflicts in Manipur. Armed militants from Kuki, based in Chin State, have illegally crossed the porous borders. They have fueled the ongoing conflicts by supporting Kuki militants in Manipur through the workforce and supplying arms and ammunition. The Indian government had to intensify border surveillance and security measures to prevent the spillover of violence and insurgent activities in Manipur. Additionally, economic ties between the affected regions were disrupted. The coup and the civil war prompted concerns over trade and economic relations, affecting businesses and livelihoods in Manipur and Mizoram connected to Myanmar. The uncertainty surrounding the political landscape in Myanmar impacted the flow of goods and services, hindering economic activities and development projects of routes like Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit and Transport and India Myanmar Thailand Trilateral Highway projects. The impact of the 2021 military coup in Myanmar and its ensuing civil war has extended far beyond national borders, leaving an indelible mark on Manipur and Mizoram. The influx of refugees, flow of drugs, strengthening of insurgent activities, political instability and disruption of economic activities in the Border area are some of the issues facing Manipur and Mizoram. As these States grapple with the socio-economic, cultural, and security implications, a concerted effort from State and Central Governments is crucial to steering the region towards stability and resilience. The unfolding narrative in Manipur and Mizoram is a stark reminder of the interconnectedness of Nations and the need for collaborative efforts to address the challenges posed by geopolitical crises. The writer is 2nd year student, Dept. of National Security Studies, Manipur University Malaysias five mobile operators have finally signed share subscription agreements (SSAs) to take equity stakes in wholesale 5G operator Digital Nasional Berhad (DNB), which also clears the way for a second 5G operator to be established next year. Telekom Malaysia, Maxis, U Mobile, YTL and CelcomDigi (via Infranation) signed the SSAs on Friday, agreeing to collectively take a 70% stake in DNB, with each taking a 14% stake. Each telco will also inject around RM233 million (US$50.1 million) a total of RM1.16 billion which will be utilised to meet DNBs funding requirements. The governments Minister of Finance (MOF) will hold the remaining 30% as well as a special share, according to a DNB statement. A document from the Ministry of Communication and Digital obtained by news site The Edge Malaysia says that the special share provides certain rights to its holder including on national interest and the appointment of a director representing MOF. The same document also said that the SSAs are expected to be completed between February and April 2024. The SSAs were expected to be finalised earlier this year, but saw repeated delays as parties haggled over the fine print and terms of the complex agreements. The SSAs were hashed out and finalised via the 5G Task Force, which comprises the MOF, the Ministry of Communications and Digital, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), DNB and all five operators. The task force was established by the government in May 2023 to transition from the current Single Wholesale Network (SWN) model to a Dual Network (DN) model. The finalised SSAs will enable the government to proceed with its plan to set up a second 5G operator to compete with DNB once its 5G network covers 80% of populated areas. DNBs network coverage is currently 73%, although actual subscriber numbers remain low DNB reported 3.6 million 5G service subscriptions in Malaysia at the end of October 2023, which works out to 10.8% market penetration. According to The Edge, Communications and Digital Minister Fahmi Fadzil said the second 5G operator described in official documents as Entity B will be strictly commercial, with no government ownership. Under the SSA terms, the MOF could exit DNB once the network reaches 80% coverage and the MCMC greenlights Entity B. The operators will also be able to decide among themselves who stays in DNB and who moves over to Entity B, although MCMC has the final say. For the first time in the state, the Indo-Israel agricultural project has been initiated in Hooghly district at Chinsurah Horticulture Centre. The centre is developing seedlings of high quality of different vegetables. The farmers, who are used to the traditional ways of developing seed beds for centuries are now opting more for hybrid seedlings. The grown seedlings fetch them a good market price and the farmers are also getting the advantage of cultivating the hi-tech and hybrid seedlings. The vegetation grown from the hybrid seeds have proved to be resistant against inclement weather conditions, thus negating loss of plantation from unfavorable climatic conditions. The district farmers are happy with the seedlings since it has brought an end to the habitual crop losses and vegetation and also relieving them of their financial debts. The additional director Chinsurah Horticulture Centre Subhadeep Nath said, It is for the first time that an initiative of the state government using hi-tech Israeli agricultural method has been put to use at Chinsurah centre to prepare seasonal and non-seasonal seedlings of vegetables to meet the demand of farmers and different agricultural organizations. The vegetables, grown from these seedlings, are resistant to usual plant diseases and also against the inclement weather. To promote and encourage agriculture based on hitech and hybrid seedlings subsidy is given to the farmer. Advertisement Till now, around 50,000 seedlings have been sold at subsidized rates to the farmers. Presently, such cultivation is being carried out at Polba-Dadpur block, Chanditala-1,Tarkeswar, Goghat, Pandua, Pursura, Burdwan and other districts. Main demand is for cabbage, coloured cabbage, lettuce, Chinese cabbage, English cucumber, seedless cucumber, seedless brinjal and many other seasonal and non-seasonal vegetables. Dr Nath explained that during their normal season of cultivation seedlings of these vegetables cannot be raised through the traditional system of nursery raising on soil beds because these vegetables are not tolerant to slightest damage to their root and shoot system during their uprooting and transplanting. He said such damage cannot be avoided in the traditional system of seedling raising. Thereafter, a method of nursery raising was evolved in which off-season seedlings were raised in small polyethylene bags using soil and compost (50:50) as a medium, but this system needs a lot of protected space and is labour intensive. During the transportation process, the crop in main fields needs a large quantity of medium. Therefore, seedlings of major cucurbits are raised in multi-celled plastic plug trays containing each cell of a volume of 18-20 cc and inverted pyramid in shape by using coco-peat, vermiculite and perlite as soil-less media in 3:1:1 ratio on volume basis. This technique is not only efficient in vigorous root development but also suitable to avoid any damage to the roots and shoots of the seedlings at the time of transplanting. This technology is economical and suitable for the growers. The plug tray nursery raising technology is also suitable for melons, gourds and squashes for their off season cultivation . The seizure of Zoji La stood as the pivotal moment in the 1947-48 conflict, with its capture along the Srinagar-Leh highway by Indian forces proving critical to safeguarding Kargil, Dras, Leh, and Siachen. Previous attempts to secure this pass had failed, but in the winter of 1948, amidst adverse weather and challenging conditions, Indian forces succeeded in a monumental operation. Speaking at a session titled Opening the gateway to Ladakh The victory at Zoji La in the autumn of 1948 during the Military Literature Festival, Lieutenant General NS Brar, former General Officer Commanding 10 Corps, emphasized the remarkable role played by the Indian Air Force (IAF). During that period, with just one transport squadron and three operational Dakotas, the IAF played a crucial role in airlifting men and equipment to Kashmir. The logistical challenges were immense, particularly in transporting tanks from Jammu to Srinagar, marking the first instance of tanks being used at such high altitudes. The bridges along the route couldnt support their weight, compelling the tanks to be dismantled and reassembled at the base of Zoji La. The mule track leading to the pass was widened to accommodate these crucial vehicles. Advertisement Historians and authors Col Ajay Singh and Sagat Shaunik delved into tactical intricacies of the operations, highlighting the exemplary leadership and performance of the officers and soldiers on the battlefield. The capture of the pass, which marks the conclusion of the forested mountains of the Kashmir Valley, occurred just a day prior to the ceasefire of 48, allowing India to retain territory that would have otherwise slipped into Pakistani control. The strategic significance of seizing the pass a day before the ceasefire cannot be understated, as it secured territory crucial to Indias defenses. Nicky Hilton Rothschild, the 40-year-old entrepreneur and mother of three, recently revealed that motherhood has brought about a significant transformation in her relationship with her sister, Paris Hilton. In an exclusive conversation with PEOPLE at the Flamingo Estate x Mytheresa Holiday House party, Nicky disclosed that the dynamics between the two sisters have evolved since they both embraced motherhood. Traditionally, the Hilton sisters would be immersed in discussions about glamorous New Years Eve plans, contemplating trips to Las Vegas and the like. However, this year, the conversation has taken a different turn. Nicky shared her excitement about a potential trip, not for partying in Vegas, but one that involves all their children. The sisters are now considering a family-oriented New Years getaway, signifying a shift from their previous festivities. Nicky, married to James Rothschild, is the proud mother of three childrendaughters Lily-Grace Victoria (6) and Theodora Teddy Marilyn (5), and a son whose name remains undisclosed. Meanwhile, Paris Hilton, 42, who recently welcomed her second child, a daughter named London, and has a 10-month-old son named Phoenix with husband Carter Reum, is navigating the realms of motherhood herself. Advertisement In a previous interview with PEOPLE in March, Nicky Hilton delved into the challenges of balancing her role as a fashion designer and a mother. She expressed the perpetual struggle but emphasized the importance of setting the right example for her children. The fashion-forward mom mentioned relishing the moments where she could curate outfits for her kids, highlighting the delicate balancing act required to manage both her thriving fashion design business and her family life. As both sisters embark on the journey of motherhood, the focus shifts from glitzy celebrations to family-centric experiences. The prospect of a New Years trip with all the children underscores the evolving nature of their bond, symbolizing a shared commitment to creating meaningful and wholesome memories for their growing families. ST Telemedia Global Data Centres Thailand unit says it has signed a strategic MoU with industrial power company B.Grimm Power to study, design and jointly develop low-carbon energy solutions for the data centre sector. Under the MoU, STT GDC (Thailand) and B.Grimm Power will collaborate to advance responsible energy usage and explore energy-efficient solutions for data centres, including alternative grid-sourced energy, with a focus on integrating renewable or low-carbon energy sources wherever its feasible to do so. The initiative will also look at designing strategically located green-field power plants to support the growth of Thailand's digital infrastructure. Electricity consumption is one of the biggest challenges facing the data centre industry. For a start, power is the highest operating cost for data centre operators. Meanwhile, demand for data centres is growing as more businesses and countries undergo digital transformation, which means greater adoption of cloud computing, especially for compute-intensive use cases such as big data analytics and AI. All of this is driving energy consumption higher at a time when organizations are trying to adopt sustainable energy practices. According to data from Statista, hyperscale data centre energy demand between 2020 and 2021 increased by 76.23 TWh and 86.58 TWh, respectively. Figures from the International Energy Agency (IEA) report the amount of electricity consumed by data centres globally reached 240-340 TWh (TeraWatt-hours) in 2022. STT GDC (Thailand) CEO Supparat Sivapetchranat Singhara Na Ayutthaya said that its initiative with B.Grimm will not only seek ways to make data centres more energy-efficient and sustainable, but also enhance Thailand's digital infrastructure competitiveness and boost the country's position as a prominent data centre hub in Southeast Asia. Thailand's strategic geographical advantage and forthcoming international connectivity have the potential to accelerate digital growth, Supparat said in a statement. This collaboration to improve the power competitiveness of Thailands data centre industry within the region will also facilitate the countrys readiness to adopt AI and content platforms. Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, has unequivocally stated that Robert Downey Jr. will not be reprising his iconic role as Iron Man/Tony Stark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). In a recent cover story by Vanity Fair dedicated to Downey Jr., Feige shed light on the decision to permanently retire the beloved character. The decision is rooted in preserving the poignant moment of Tony Starks demise in the 2019 blockbuster Avengers: Endgame. According to Feige, the MCU team is steadfast in keeping that emotional and pivotal moment untouched. We are going to keep that moment and not touch that moment again, asserted Feige, emphasizing the collective effort and dedication that went into crafting Iron Mans final scenes. We all worked very hard for many years to get to that, and we would never want to magically undo it in any way, he added. Downey Jr., who first donned the Iron Man suit in the 2008 film of the same name, faced initial skepticism for the role due to his troubled past. In April 1996, the authorities arrested the actor for possession of heroin, cocaine, and an unloaded gun. Despite these legal troubles, Feige and director Jon Favreau were persistent in their desire to cast Downey Jr. as the titular superhero. Advertisement Reflecting on those early discussions, Feige revealed the Marvel boards reservations about entrusting their flagship character to an actor with a controversial history. It purely came down to the Marvel board being nervous at putting all of their chips in their future films on somebody who famously had those legal troubles in the past, acknowledged Feige. Undeterred, he and Favreau proposed the idea of a screen test to showcase Downey Jr.s suitability for the role. Feiges recollection underscores the pivotal role Robert Downey Jr. played in shaping the MCU. It is also evident of the resilience in overcoming initial doubts. However, with the decision to lay Iron Man to rest, the MCU now looks toward new narratives and characters to propel the ever-expanding cinematic universe into the future. The Congress on Monday reviewed the partys dismal performance in the Assembly elections at a meeting of its Parliamentary Strategy Group at Sonia Gandhis residence. The party said the outcome of the polls in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh was disappointing but the party was not dispirited or dejected. We accept the verdict. It fell far below our expectations, we are analysing these detailsour resolve remains undiminished. We will fight even harder, Congress General Secretary and in-charge Communications Jairam Ramesh said at a briefing after the meeting. He said Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has called an informal meeting of INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) on Wednesday and a formal meeting of the Opposition bloc might be held later. Advertisement Referring to the meeting convened by Gandhi, Ramesh, who is the Congress MP in Rajya Sabha, said: Today evening, the Bills that the government will bring (during the Winter Session of Parliament) and the issues on which we want discussion were discussed at length. We will openly oppose the Bills on which we have objections. But, we will definitely take part in the debate, he said. Kharge, who is also the Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, held a meeting of the INDIA bloc leaders to chalk out the strategy for the Winter Session of the Parliament. Apart from Gandhi, who is the chairperson of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) and Kharge, the meeting was attended by party MPs P Chidambaram, KC Venugopal and Shashi Tharoor, among others. In the assembly polls held in five states Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Telnagna and Mizoram the Congress registered victory only in Telangana. As the Bharatiya Janata Partys victory painted the Hindi heartland saffron on Sunday, sweeping on the counting day all four states that held assembly polls in November, foreign media outlets interpreted these results as a precursor to the voter sentiment preceding the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi aims for a third consecutive term. Various US newspapers viewed the BJPs resounding victories in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan as an expansion of its dominance in a crucial region before the upcoming general elections. Highlighting the diminishing prospects of the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, the NYT emphasized the BJPs significant advantage leading up to 2024. Advertisement Across the world, media outlets pointed to Modis plans for further consolidating his support base, referencing the upcoming inauguration of a monumental Hindu temple in Ayodhya in January. Newspapers in UK too described it as a Modi victory. Modis image as a proponent of development and Hindu interests has garnered significant traction across the nation. His governments targeted welfare schemes, often associated with his persona, have bolstered his appeal. Even in states where local BJP leaders faced challenges, Modis face dominated posters, and voter incentives were branded as Modis guarantee. Bloomberg observed that while the assembly polls dont mirror the dynamics of the 2024 general elections, the comprehensive losses suffered by the opposition will likely boost the ruling party and Modi. The Congress party, under Rahul Gandhi, attempted to spotlight issues like unemployment and caste discrimination, hoping for national resonance in the months to come. Pakistan newspapers also highlighted Modis enduring popularity after a decade in office, indicating surveys that suggest his potential victory once again next year. However, a 28-party opposition alliance led by the Congress (INDIA) presents a renewed challenge, although its absence in the state pollsdue to internal disputesresulted in a direct face-off between the BJP and the Congress. Newspapers in the Middle-East too wrote that Modi has bolstered BJP to a different level, also emphasizing another setback for Rahul Gandhi and the Congress party. Other political experts mentioned limited evidence of a direct link between state and national results. However, the weakened state of the Congress at a crucial juncture is evident, especially considering its historical dominance in Indian politics until Modis ascent in 2014. Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Monday said the defeat of Congress in the Assembly elections in three states is a setback to its style of taking over everything alone, without keeping even like-minded parties together. Addressing media persons in Thrissur, Vijayan said the Congress greed and lust for power was the reasons for its defeat in the Hindi heartland states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The Congress could not create a favourable environment of unity of like-minded parties, which also led to its defeat in the Assembly polls, he said. Advertisement The Congress thought it could win the elections without the support of other parties. The results also reflect the lack of unity in the Congress itself, CM Vijayan said. The CM said the Congress leader Kamal Naths some non-secular statements during the campaign also contributed to its loss in Madhya Pradesh. The CM also said that the state Governors obstinacy in not signing the Ordinance to strengthen the Local-Self Governments (LSG) is creating a serious crisis in the state. Vijayan said the government has suggested many timely amendments in the Panchayat Act and the Municipality Act to strengthen the Local Self-Governments. The government submitted those amendments as an Ordinance to the Governor, but he has not signed it yet, he said. Effective amendments in the Act for Waste Management, one of the major responsibilities of the local bodies, were suggested. It has been submitted as an Ordinance to the Governor. But he has not signed it yet. But the Opposition, which alleges that the government is destabilising the LSGs, has not protested against the Governors stand, said CM Vijayan. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) has plans to replace Closed Loop Delhi Metro Smart Cards with Open Loop National Common Mobility Cards (NCMC) in a phased manner, the government informed the Parliament on Monday. The DMRC has informed that there is no delay or challenges faced by them in introducing NCMC on account of RBI guidelines. Further other metro rail systems are also progressively shifting to NCMC from Closed Loop Card System, Union Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs Kaushal Kishore said in the written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha. As per the benefits of NCMC cards, customers may use the same card for Metro and Bus travel across the country in the NCMC compliant system. Advertisement Customers may use their bank issued NCMC card for fare payment. NCMC promotes a cashless transaction environment. The users can easily recharge their NCMC online or at designated recharge points, providing a hassle-free way to manage the card. All eyes have now shifted to the Northeast as Mizoram is to reveal its mandate today, after results in the four states were declared yesterday, in which BJP got decisive mandates in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, and the Congress wrested Telangana from the BRS. The counting in the state, which was scheduled originally for December 3, Sunday, along with four other states, was pushed back by a day following representations to the Election Commission by the civil society, citing an important day in the religious calendar in the Christian-majority state. Considering appeals by political parties and civil society organisations, citing the special significance of Sunday for the people of Mizoram, the Election Commission on November 29 officially announced the deferment of the counting of votes in the state to Monday. Advertisement Four major contenders are in fray in the northeastern state, which voted to elect its 40-member legislative assembly on November 7. These include the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF), the Zoram Peoples Movement (ZPM), the Congress and the BJP. Earlier, on Sunday, the chief ministerial face of the Zoram Peoples Movement (ZPM) and party candidate of Serchhip constituency, Lalduhoma, voiced confidence in the party forming a stable government in the state. He said the exit poll predictions, released on Thursday, were based on scientific methodology and were most reliable. All the exit poll results point towards us. We do not need any other political party, he said. The elections to the 40-member Mizoram assembly were held on November 7, with the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF) facing a stout challenge from the Zoram Peoples Movement (ZPM), Congress and the BJP. Following the deferment of the counting of votes for Mizoram, the states Chief Electoral Officer Madhup Vyas said the Election Commission agreed to the request of social organisations and political parties as Sunday was devoted to church duties and prayers. Meanwhile, a day ahead of the counting of votes for the Mizoram Assembly Elections, Chief Minister Zoramthanga offered prayers at the Zarkawt Presbyterian Church. The chief ministerial face of ZPM, Lalduhoma, also attended special prayers at a church in the Aizawl district on Sunday. Two Indian Air Force pilots were killed after a Pilatus PC 7 Mk II trainer aircraft crashes in Telanganas Hyderabad, the Indian Airforce (IAF) said on Monday. The IAF has ordered a Court of Inquiry to ascertain the cause of the accident. The dead soldiers included a trainer and a cadet. Both succumbed to the injuries after the aircraft met with an accident and caught fire. The aircraft was on a routine training sortie when the accident happened. A Pilatus PC 7 Mk II aircraft met with an accident today morning during a routine training sortie from AFA, Hyderabad. It is with deep regret that the IAF confirms both pilots onboard the aircraft sustained fatal injuries. No damage to any civil life or property has been reported. A Court of Inquiry has been ordered to ascertain the cause of the accident, the IAF said in a post on X. Advertisement Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said that he was anguished by the accident and expressed his condolences to the bereaved families of the IAF soldiers. Anguished by this accident near Hyderabad. It is deeply saddening that two pilots have lost their lives. In this tragic hour, my thoughts are with the bereaved families, the defence minister wrote on X. The aircraft had taken off to complete a routine training sortie from the Air Force Academy in Hyderabad, Telangana. Visuals shared on social media showed the Pilatus PC 7 Mk II in fire at an empty land, with locals trying to extract the bodies. No loss of civilian life or property is reported in the accident. Giving a positive indication towards the developing economic infrastructure of India, Minister of State for Finance Pankaj Chaudhary said on Monday that India will become a USD 5 trillion economy early in Amrit Kaal on the path to achieve the goal of becoming an advanced economy by 2047. The USD 5 trillion milestone will be crossed with the help of a strong rupee which will result from macroeconomic stability, he said in a written reply in the Lok Sabha. The government has set the goal of becoming an advanced economy by 2047. In the process, it will become a USD 5 trillion economy early in the Amrit Kaal, Chaudhary said. Advertisement The MoS said the exchange rate is not an overlooked factor as it ranks Indias GDP size in the world. India is a market economy, and the government monitors economic progress through market-determined GDP and exchange rate, he added. He further said both domestic and international markets are the mechanisms that determine Indias GDP, exchange rate and contribution of various sectors to GDP. The contribution of agriculture, industry and services to nominal GDP in 2022-23 stood at 18.4 per cent, 28.3 per cent, and 53.3 per cent, respectively. He also highlighted that the government also contributes to economic progress through policy interventions, including the measures announced in annual budgets. Notably, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected India to become a USD 5 trillion economy with the third largest GDP in 2027-28. Earlier in August, Prime Minister Narendra Modi at BRICS Business Forum Leaders Dialogue in Johannesburg, South Africa had said India will soon become a 5 trillion dollar economy. There is no doubt that India will become the growth engine for the world in the coming years, the PM had mentioned. It is to be noted that at the end of 2022-23, the Indian GDP stood at $3.7 trillion. The contribution of agriculture, industry, and services to nominal GDP in 2022-23 stood at 18.4 per cent, 28.3 per cent, and 53.3 per cent respectively. Mizoram election results 2023: Incumbent Chief Minister and BJP ally Mizo National Front (MNF) supremo Zoramthanga has lost from his constituency in Aizawal East-1 by 2,101 votes against his Zoram Peoples Movement (ZPM) rival Lalthansanga. The ZPM, according to the Election Commission, has crossed the majority mark in 40-member Mizoram Legislative Assembly by winning 24 seats. The party is also leading in three more seats. The ruling-MNF was routed in the assembly elections as it won just four seats. MNF was leading in 6 more seats. The Congress continued its poor show and finished with just one seat. The BJP was ahead in two seats as counting of votes was still underway. Advertisement Besides CM Zoramthanga, his deputy Tawnluia also lost to ZPM candidate W Chhuanawma in the Tuichang seat by a margin of 909 votes. The ZPM is led by 74-year-old Lalduhoma, a former IPS officer. He won from the Serchhip seat and is likely to meet the Governor to stake claim to form the government. Lalduhoma is likely to be the new chief minister of Mizoram after his partys massive victory. Lalduhoma has affirmed that the party will form the government independently, without forming post-poll alliances with national parties. The Congress has convened a meeting on 5 December of all its 230 candidates who contested the state assembly polls. According to party leaders, the meeting will discuss and analyze the reasons for its debacle in the assembly election and strategies for the Lok Sabha polls next year. MP unit Congress chief Kamal Nath and other senior leaders would meet the winning and losing candidates and hold discussions with them. Advertisement The meeting would be held at the State Congress headquarters in Bhopal. The Congress managed to win only 66 seats, against the BJPs 163 in the assembly poll, the results of which were declared on December 3. In the previous assembly election in 2018, the Congress had succeeded in forming the government in MP by winning 114 seats. Operator Tigo Tanzania has partnered with DCB Bank to expand financial inclusion for the unbanked through a service partnership that will enable customers to access the bank's services through mobile payment service Tigo Pesas network of mobile money agents. DCB says it plans to leverage Tigo Pesa mobile money agents to mobilise deposits and offer customers enhanced options for fund withdrawals. The service was, it seems, initiated in response to the challenges, including high costs and demanding management requirements, encountered by smaller and mid-tier banks when embracing the agency banking model. DCB says it has been managing a robust agent network for more than a decade, creating livelihoods for more than 200,000 agents. Thus, this service aims to help banks improve their market presence seamlessly, without the worries of recruitment, documentation, training, POS device provisioning, and day to-day management. It will, of course, also benefit DCB Bank and offer new opportunities for Tigo Pesa. Tanzanias Citizen news service quotes DCB Banks Legal Manager and Company Secretary, Ms Regina Mduma, as saying that this partnership will create convenience for customers, allow the bank to provide them with a wider range of services, and make it easier for them to access their money. To seamlessly deposit or withdraw funds from bank accounts through selected Tigo Pesa Wakalas (or agents), all customers need is a Tigo SIM. Is this a viable future for mobile finance? It's probably just one of many futures as the service evolves. See our new feature on the topic for more on where mobile money has been and where its going. Customs officials probing the seizure of cocaine worth over Rs 220 crore from a Denmark-bound cargo ship at Paradip Port on 1 December are in a tizzy as the investigators are finding it tough to elicit vital international drug cartel links in the case because of the language barrier. 22 crew members of the ship, who are all from Vietnam, have been detained and are being quizzed to ascertain the source of the banned drug seized from the vessel for the last four days. However, no concrete progress could be made by the investigating officials as the crews now under Customs custody speak Vietnamese only. They are not well-versed in any other language including English. Thats why we have sought the services of interpreters, who could speak and understand the spoken language of the detained crew members, confided senior officials of Customs. Advertisement All the crew members working onboard the ship are from Vietnam. The ship is registered in Panama and is operated by the Asia Pacific Shipping Co. Ltd. The suspected ship is having its last port of call from Gresik Port, Indonesia and destined to Denmark. Based on intelligence that suspected narcotics drugs packets are concealed in a Panama registered Ship, namely, MV Debi berthed at Paradip International Cargo Terminal, Paradip that had arrived from Gresik port, Indonesia in ballast, the Customs officers of the Bhubaneswar Customs (preventive) Commissionerate searched the ship on midnight of 30 November and on 1 December. During the search, a total of 22 packets (wrapped and affixed with magnet) were recovered from the cranes of the ship containing a hardened but brittle white substance suspected to be narcotic drugs. Initial testing by the Special Intelligence and Investigation (SIIB) team of the Bhubaneswar Customs (Preventive) Commissionerate revealed that the substance is Cocaine, a narcotic drug under the NDPS Act 1985. A total of 22 kg of such drugs valued at around Rs. 220 core in the international grey market was recovered. This was the first case of seizure of cocaine or any other banned drug substances under NDPS Act in Paradip port. Unlike cannabis and brown sugar which are prepared from opium, cocaine is not produced in India. Cocaine is produced from Coca plant which is a native species of South America. It is mainly produced in Latin American countries like Colombia, Peru and Bolivia and consumed mainly in the United States of America and Europe. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has won the Rajasthan assembly elections 2023 and the focus has now shifted to the chief minister post. The fact that BJP didnt announce CM face before polls has led to speculations now that they have won and several names are being discussed for the top job. One among them is BJPs Alwar MP Baba Balaknath. Known as Yogi of Rajasthan, Balaknath was among the seven MPs BJP fielded in Rajasthan polls. He won from Tijara constituency. After his victory, Balaknath left for Delhi. There are speculations in Rajasthans political circles that he was called by the partys central leadership to discuss his probability for the Rajasthan CM. Advertisement Also, Winter Session of the parliament began today and Balaknath, being an MP, came to Delhi to take part in the Parliamentary proceedings. In between the polls and politics, Balaknath was caught by Congress LoP in Lok Sabha outside the Parliament where they both shared a light moment. In a video shared by news agency ANI, Chowdhury and Balaknath are seen laughing together. Chowdhury even tried to introduce Balaknath to the camera as Rajasthan ke naye CM and apparently asked him the first work he will do after becoming the chief minister. Watch the video below: #WATCH | Winter Session of Parliament | Congress leader and LoP in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury and BJP MP Yogi Balaknath share a light moment in the Parliament premises as Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury says Rajasthan ke naye CM ban rahe hai naa pic.twitter.com/G8B0TIH1xw ANI (@ANI) December 4, 2023 The BJP has won 115 seats, while the Congress emerged victorious in just 70. Independents and other regional parties won 14 seats, while elections in one seat were postponed following the death of a candidate. Besides Balaknath, former CM Vasundhara Raje Scindia, Om Birla, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Arjun Ram Meghwal, and Om Mathur are other names said to be among top contenders for the CM post. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs on Monday presented to the Rajya Sabha its reports on The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 and The Bharatiya Sakshya Bill, 2023, the three Bills which seek to replace existing criminal laws of the country. The reports were laid on the table of the House by Brij Lal, Chairman, Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs. In its report on the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which is to replace the Indian Penal Code, the Committee has left the issue of continuance of death penalty to the Government. Advertisement The Committee said after considering the submissions regarding the death penalty it had understood that the reason for a passionate argument against death penalty is that the judicial system can be fallible and to prevent an innocent person from being wrongly sentenced to death. In this regard, the Committee recommends that the matter may be left for the Government to consider. On Section 377, the Committee has recommended that it should be retained in the penal law. The Committee recalled that in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018) case, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court unanimously held that section 377 of IPC is in violation of Articles 14, 15, 19, and 21 of the Constitution of India. Provisions of section 377, however, remain applicable in cases of non-consensual carnal intercourse with adults, all acts of carnal intercourse with minors, and acts of bestiality. However, now, in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, no provision for non-consensual sexual offence against male, female, transgender and for bestiality has been made, the report said. The Committee feels that to align with the objectives stated in the BNSs Statement of Objects and Reasons, which inter-alia highlights the move towards gender-neutral offences, it is mandatory to reintroduce and retain the section 377 of the IPC. The Committee therefore recommends the Government to include section 377 of IPC, in the proposed law. On Section 497 the Committee said it should continue in gender-neutral form. The Committee said the Supreme Court Bench headed by the then Chief Justice of India, in the Joseph Shine v. Union of India, 2018 case struck down section 497 of IPC as it violated Articles 14, 15, and 21 of the Constitution. The Court held that this law was archaic, arbitrary and paternalistic and infringed upon a womans autonomy, dignity and privacy. The provisions under this section only penalised the married man, and reduced the married woman to be a property of her husband, the Committee said. In this regard, the Committee is of the view that the institution of marriage is considered sacred in Indian society and there is a need to safeguard its sanctity. For the sake of protecting the institution of marriage, this section should be retained in the Sanhita by making it gender neutral, the report said. On the issue of imprisonment for life the Committee said the Committee notes that the BNS proposes to change the definition of imprisonment for life, defining it as imprisonment for the remainder of a persons natural life. The corresponding section 53 of the IPC provides only for the punishment of life imprisonment simpliciter though in certain offences of sexual nature, imprisonment for the remainder of a persons natural life has been mentioned. The Courts have interpreted imprisonment for life simpliciter to mean whole life sentence. The Committee recommended that suitable amendments may be made in consultation with the Ministry of Law and Justice to make clause 4(b) more comprehensive. The committees report on The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 said the inclusion of a provision for attachment of property of a proclaimed offender, in Clause 86 of the Bill, as well as the provision for investigation in a place outside India, as provided in Clause 112(1) is an appreciable step. The Committee believes that these provisions will serve as a potent tool for deterring criminal activities, facilitating the recovery of ill-gotten gains, and will also encourage international cooperation, making it an invaluable aspect of the legal framework, the report said. The Committee believes that the use of handcuffs, as outlined in Clause 43(3), is appropriately restricted to select heinous crimes, which is necessary for preventing the escape of individuals accused of serious offences and ensuring the safety of police officers and staff during arrests. However, the Committee is of the view that economic offences should not be included in this category. This is because the term economic offences encompasses a wide range of offences, ranging from petty to serious, and therefore, it may not be suitable for blanket application of handcuffing in all cases falling under this category. The Committee, therefore, recommends that Clause 43(3) may be suitably amended to delete the words economic offences from the clause. In its report on the Bharatiya Sakshya Bill, the Committee said The Committee is of the opinion that safeguarding the authenticity and integrity of electronic and digital records acquired during the course of investigation is crucial due to the fact that such evidences are prone to tampering. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday appealed to the Opposition parties not to vent their frustration over the defeat in the Assembly polls inside Parliament and move forward with positivity so that the people may change their perspective towards them, opening a new door for them. If I talk about the results of the elections, this is a golden opportunity for the people sitting in the Opposition. Even if they are the Opposition, I am giving them good advice to come forward with positive thoughts. Shun the idea of negativity that has been there for the last nine years. If we take ten steps, you should take twelve steps while making decisions, he said while talking to the media ahead of the Winter Session of Parliament. Mr Modi said he has been seeking the cooperation of the Opposition in the House. From a political perspective, I also want to say that it is in your interest to convey a message of positivity to the country. Its not good for democracy if your image becomes associated with hatred and negativity. The Opposition is as crucial, valuable, and powerful in a democracy, and it should be equally capable. I make this statement once again for the well-being of democracy, he added. Advertisement The PM said the country now does not want to wait long for its goal of development. In every section of society, there is a sentiment that India needs to move forward. I urge all MPs to lead the House while respecting this sentiment. This is my request to them. He said he has been urging all MPs to come prepared fully, discuss thoroughly any bills presented in the House and provide the best suggestions. He observed that when a Member of Parliament gives a suggestion, it contains elements of practical experience. But if there is no discussion, the country misses out on those things. Mr Modi said the results of the Assembly polls are encouraging for those who are committed to the well-being of the common man and who are dedicated to the bright future of the country, especially for all sections of society, women from every village and city, youth from every village and city of all social groups, farmers from every community, and the poor people of the country. When there is good governance and consistent support for public welfare, the term anti-incumbency becomes irrelevant. Some may call it pro-incumbency, good governance, transparency, national interest, or solid plans for public welfare, but this has been the experience that we have been witnessing consistently. And today we are meeting in this new temple of the Parliament after such an excellent public mandate, he added. The country, Mr Modi said, has rejected negativity. We consistently have discussions with Opposition colleagues at the beginning of each session. Our main team discusses with them and appeals for everyones cooperation. This time too, all these processes have been followed. Reacting sharply to the assembly poll results, Mayawati said it was natural for all the people to be doubtful, surprised and worried due to the results of the recent assembly elections in four states being one-sided in favor of one party. Terming the results of four state elections as strange and mysterious, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) president said, Considering the entire atmosphere of the elections, it is very difficult for people to accept such a strange result. In her statement on social media on Monday, The four-time chief minister noted that the atmosphere during the elections was completely different from the outcome. While it was projected as a tough fight, the results showed that was a one-sided affair. It is a mystery which needs to be unraveled. A fatal mistake in feeling the pulse of the people is the new topic of election discussion, she added. Advertisement Mayawati said the people of BSP fought these elections with body, mind, and soul. They should not be disappointed by the results. We have to keep trying to move forward by taking inspiration from the life struggles of Bhimrao Ambedkar, She said. Meanwhile, an all-India meeting of the party has been called in Lucknow on December 10 to discuss the ground report and fresh preparations for the Lok Sabha elections in the context of the election results. The Ambedkarite movement will never lose the courage to move forward without being disturbed by the election results, Mayawati asserted. In these assembly polls, the BSP won just two seats in Rajasthan and went blank in MP, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana. In the fast-paced world we inhabit, overthinking has become an all too common foe, silently creeping into our minds and sabotaging our peace. However, fret not, as we unveil the secrets to conquering the labyrinth of overthinking and embracing a serene lifestyle. 1. Mindful Meditation: Embark on a journey within through the powerful practice of mindfulness meditation. Set aside a few minutes each day to sit in silence, focusing on your breath and letting thoughts come and go without judgment. This ancient practice has proven to be a beacon of calmness, helping individuals detach from overactive thoughts and foster a sense of tranquility. 2. Journaling for Clarity: Pouring your thoughts onto paper can be a therapeutic exercise. Create a habit of journaling to externalize your inner dialogue. This not only allows you to organize your thoughts but also provides a tangible record of your mental landscape. Identifying patterns in your thinking can be the first step towards breaking free from the chains of overthinking. Advertisement 3. Embrace the Power of Pause: In a world that glorifies constant productivity, taking intentional pauses is an act of rebellion. Schedule moments in your day to pause, breathe, and recalibrate. Whether its a short walk in nature or a few minutes of mindful breathing, these pauses serve as powerful tools to interrupt the cycle of overthinking and bring you back to the present moment. 4. Cultivate Positive Self-Talk: Challenge the negative narratives that often accompany overthinking by consciously cultivating positive self-talk. Replace self-doubt with affirmations and kind words. Over time, this shift in mindset can contribute to a more positive and nurturing internal dialogue, reducing the grip of overthinking. 5. Establish Boundaries: Overthinking often thrives on an abundance of information and external stimuli. Take control of your mental space by setting clear boundaries. Limit exposure to excessive news, social media, and other sources of information overload. By curating your environment, you create a conducive space for mental clarity and focus. 6. Seek Professional Support: If overthinking becomes overwhelming and persistent, consider seeking the guidance of a mental health professional. Therapists and counselors can provide valuable tools and coping strategies tailored to your specific needs, assisting you in navigating the complexities of your thoughts. Overcoming overthinking is a journey, not a destination. By incorporating these mindful practices into your daily routine, you can gradually untangle the web of overthinking, paving the way for a more balanced and fulfilling lifestyle. Remember, the power to silence the mind lies within you embrace it, and watch as serenity unfolds in the canvas of your life. Hah! I have told you so before and I reiterate it here. The US is nobodys friend (not even of itself remember Iraq, Afghanistan). The US is supposedly joined at the hip with the UK. During the Falklands War, Margaret Thatcher went to Ronald Reagan for support against Argentina. Reagan refused. The US imported a lot of beef from Argentina. Not until Thatcher went down on both knees and beg did Reagan relent and come to her side. The Indian prime minister was in the US in June on a very high-profile visit. A lot of hype came out of his visit but nothing substantive. One now learns through The Financial Times of the UK that Biden confronted Modi with a supposed Indian plot to assassinate the Hindu-baiter and Khalistani terrorist, Gurpatwant Singh Pannu. Now I am a US citizen, you know dyed in red, white and the blue. If I were to make threats against white Americans that Pannu makes against Hindus, I will be extradited to the US in a jiffy and rot in an American jail for the rest of my life. There was a 2+2 ministerial dialogue recently between India and the US. The US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, and the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, bunked their duties during the Israel-Hamas war and instead came to Delhi. Not much ever comes out of these 2+2s. Or if it does, the general public is kept in the dark. One thing is for sure. The US sells whatever it has to India. Where it misses out is in arms. The US is desperate to displace Russia and France as Indias chosen partner for defence. One thing for sure that came out from this 2+2 is Pannu. The American side warned the Indians not to go after him. After the Financial Times story broke, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs gave a craven reply. Oh, we have inputs and we will look into them. Contrast Indias response to Justin Trudeau going to town about India killing Hardeep Singh Nijjar. The US has told India many times to cooperate with Canada and investigate the matter. The Canadians say that they have given Indians the evidence, but that is not enough for the Indians. Advertisement Pannu has warned to bomb Air India planes and has asked Sikhs to desist from using Air India. Aeons ago, there was another terrorist, T S Parmar. He too posed a threat to Air India. Indira Gandhi asked the Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau (Justins father) to extradite Parmar to India. Pierre refused. Hundreds died in the plane crash engineered by Parmar. Parmar returned to India. Pannu is Parmar redux. I am sure that there are Khalistanis in Canada and India up to no good now. These people shed tears for their own selves, but nothing for the other. Between 1980-1984, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (their hero) killed thousands of Hindus in the Punjab. Nobody sheds a tear for those Hindus. But when anti-Sikh riots in 1984 killed thousands, endless tears are shed. India is facing the same issue with the Khalistanis today, except that their nefarious activities this time are mostly in Canada and the US, whose respective governments refuse to do anything to curb their activities. Our powers that be are so fascinated or afraid of the US that they can only mouth meek inanities. Heaven will not fall if India stands up to US bullying. Some trade might be affected. Some student visas. Thats it. If Pannu makes good on his promise to down an Indian plane, all hell will break loose in India. Whatever will happen will make the 1984 riots seem puny by comparison. Why does the US condone Pannus activities and risk thousands of lives in India, beyond of course those that will perish on the plane? I have maintained, and continue to maintain, that Indias all-weather friends are Russia and Israel. They have had our back at all times; we too must have their backs always. The Indian stance in the Russian-Ukrainian war and the Israel-Hamas war is refreshing. Now we need to refresh ties with the US a little bit. Or give them a solid jolt. (The writer, an expert on energy, contributes to journals in India and overseas. The views are personal.) Over five tons of Vietnamese durian and chili were destroyed in Japan in October for containing a higher dose of pesticide than the countrys standard. The batch of 1.4 tons of durian was exported on Oct. 5 by a company in Vietnam to Japan, where it was found to contain 0.03 parts per million (ppm) of procymidone over the Japanese standard of 0.01 ppm, according to a recent report by the commercial counselor of Vietnam in Japan. The batch of 4 tons of chili contained 0.2 ppm of tricyclazole and 0.03 ppm of hexaconazole against the standards of 0.01 ppm for both. Japanese quarantine authorities destroyed all the produce. Procymidone is used to kill unwanted ferns. Tricyclazole kills fungus and hexaconazole is used to prevent powdery mildew and other diseases. Do Van Dung, head of faculty of community health, Ho Chi Minh City University of Medicine and Pharmacy, said that the three pesticides are approved in many countries, and their harmful effects have only been researched on animals. It is therefore normal for these pesticides to be present on produce exported to Japan, and the fact that they exceeded Japanese standards does not mean that they would harm Vietnamese consumers. Some countries, such as Australia, allow a procymidone level in garlic by up to 5 milligrams per kilogram against Japans 0.1 mg/kg. Ta Duc Minh, the commercial counselor of Vietnam in Japan, told VnExpress that he has informed Vietnamese authorities to prevent a similar incident in the future. Many other developed countries also fail to meet Japans standards from time to time as this is a difficult market that requires high quality. Japan was Vietnams third biggest export market of agriculture, forestry and seafood in the first 10 months, accounting for 7.4% of the total. Vegetables and fruits exports rose 6.6% year-on-year to $150 million. Durian exports to Japan fell 12.3% year-on-year to $1.3 million in the period. Rangers and officials gather after a ranger is found shot to death in Ea So Nature Reserve in Dak Lak Province, Dec. 3, 2023. Photo by Vietnam News Agency Police are investigating the brutal murder of a deputy head of a nature reserve ranger station in the Central Highlands province of Dak Lak, who was shot 14 times. Nguyen Kim Anh, 49, was found dead Sunday in a field in the Ea So Nature Reserve in Ea Kar District. In the morning station staff did not see Anh and so called so called him on the phone but could not reach him. After a while they started to search for him in the reserve and found his motorbike on the edge of the forest with the key still in it. After searching for several hours they found his body dumped in a cornfield near the reserve with 14 bullet wounds in the abdomen. Ea So Nature Reserve has for years been a hotspot of illegal logging, poaching and animal trafficking. The 27,000-hectare park has a wide range of habitats, including 11,274 ha of evergreen forests, 4,513 ha of semi-evergreen forests and 144 ha of deciduous forests. It is home to 279 animal species, including rare and endangered ones, and 709 plant species. According to a report in May by the Ea So Nature Reserve management, last year rangers discovered 10 instances of poaching and illegal logging and seized nearly 4.5 cubic meters of various kinds of wood, five chainsaws, one gun, and 41 animal traps. In the first five months of this year there were three more. Brilliant in academics, Dr Abhay Kumar, went on to do medicine from King George Medical University (KGMU), Lucknow, fulfilling his fathers dream. He gained experience in various hospitals including in Delhi, only to return to his hometown to serve the future of Bihar i.e., Children! He rose in eminence as a paediatrician for his pivotal role in transforming the specialty in a state, which hardly had a modern well-equipped facility for treating the very young. A member of Indian Medical Association, he passionately continues to contribute immensely to his field of expertise. -BY DINESH ANAND Dr Abhay Kumar, the son of a retired Indian postal services employee, Mr Satish Chandra Rai, was born in March 1981 in Basudeopur village of Begusarai district of Bihar. From a young age, his father instilled the spirit of service to mankind in his son by becoming a doctor. Throughout, Dr Kumar, was an outstanding student clearing matriculation from Collegiate Inter College, Begusarai in 1995, and intermediate from the reputed GD College of Begusarai in 1997, with flying colours. He did an encore in the All India Pre Medical Test (PMT), got admission in King George Medical University (KGMU), Lucknow. He moved to Uttar Pradesh where he competed his medicine in 2008, interned at the same institution and got his MD degree in Paediatrics in 2015 from KGMU itself. Fondly recalling his days in KGMU, Dr Abhay Kumar, shares, This is one of Indias best medical colleges and is ranked in the top five. As a resident doctor, I had the opportunity to serve the patients here for 3 years. It is noteworthy that in 1817, Maharaja of Vizianagram expressed his desire to establish a medical college in Lucknow and donated three lakh rupees for the purpose. The Prince of Wales started work on this medical college on 26 December 1905. The first batch of MBBS with 31 students was enrolled in 1911, and in later years students from foreign countries also started seeking admission here. If we have a look at the glorious history of 115 years of KGMU, we find that there is an echo of Georgian names all over the world. In 2015, Dr Kumar moved from Lucknow to Delhi and on the request of Maharshi Valmiki Hospital management, joined this state-of-the-art hospital as a senior resident, serving there till 2017. As advanced treatments evolved and fame rose, in the year 2018, he started Ram Jyoti Children Hospital, a single specialty state-of-the-art hospital at Begusarai NH 31. Later, this initiative proved to be a milestone in the medical field of Bihar, which is attracting patients for its ultramodern facilities such as incubators for premature new born babies. Recently, the hospital added to its many achievements a spectacular medical feat when Dr. Kumar saved 400 gram baby by very good NICU care! The locals laud Dr Kumar for his selfless service by running a free OPD once a week for the needy. Member of National Medical Commission (NMC), Past National President of Indian Medical Association and recipient of Dr. B. C. Roy National Award, Dr. Sahajanand Prasad Singh says, The land of Begusarai has a big identity in itself. It has given birth to Ramdhari Singh Dinkar and has introduced the world with many great personalities. I am familiar with the working style of Dr. Abhay Kumar. He is as humble as he is honest towards his profession. Seeing the way Dr. Abhay has lived up to peoples expectations in the last few years I can say with confidence that he will be successful in creating a distinct identity for himself in the medical sphere of Bihar. This speaks volumes about a humble boys journey of excellence in the medical world! Practising heated/hot yoga (yoga performed under hot and humid conditions), even if it is just once a week, may help ease depression symptoms, according to a Harvard study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. The study randomly assigned 80 adults, average age 32, with moderate-to-severe depression, to attend heated yoga classes or were placed on a waiting list. The yoga group was asked to attend 90 minutes of Bikram yoga practised in a 105F (40.5C) room, at least twice weekly. The final analysis included 33 participants in the yoga group and 32 in the waitlisted group. Yoga participants attended an average of 10.3 classes over eight weeks. At the end of the study period, 59.3 per cent of yoga participants experienced a 50 per cent or greater reduction in symptoms as assessed through the clinician-rated Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (IDS-CR) scale, compared with only 6.3 per cent in the waitlisted group. Furthermore, 44 per cent in the yoga group experienced a huge drop in their symptoms that their depression was considered in remission. Depressive symptoms were reduced even in participants who only attended once a week. Participants rated the yoga sessions positively and no adverse events were reported. Yoga and heat-based interventions could potentially change the course for treatment for patients with depression by providing a non-medicationbased approach with additional physical benefits as a bonus, said the study. A training aircraft of the Indian Air Force crashed in Telangana on Monday, killing both pilots onboard. The incident occurred during a routine training sortie, Air Force officials said. The training flight, which took off from Air Force Academy in Dundigal, Telangana crashed near Toopran in Medak. IAF confirmed that the pilots succumbed to fatal injuries. A Pilatus PC 7 Mk II aircraft met with an accident today morning during a routine training sortie from AFA, Hyderabad. It is with deep regret that the IAF confirms both pilots onboard the aircraft sustained fatal injuries. No damage to any civil life or property has been reported. A Court of Inquiry has been ordered to ascertain the cause of the accident, IAF tweeted. According to reports, an instructor and a trainee were onboard the aircraft during the crash. Superintendent of Police, Medak, Rohini told ANI that the aircraft crashed near Toopran and firefighters doused the fire. She added airport staff and clue team have reached the spot. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh condoled the deaths. Anguished by this accident near Hyderabad. It is deeply saddening that two pilots have lost their lives. In this tragic hour, my thoughts are with the bereaved families, he tweeted. With the BJP posting big wins in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the race for chief ministerial face has heated up. While Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan remains a hot favourite to return for the fifth time on the top post, things are less clear in Chhattisgarh where ex-CM Raman Singh is strongly in the race but a tribal face might be projected. The saffron party did not project any chief ministerial face in the run up to the polls that was fought under a collective leadership. In a new experiment, members of parliament and union ministers were pitted in the state poll arena with remarkable success. This has made the list of probable CM candidates quite long in both the states. However, going by the public perception and the upcoming Lok Sabha polls that would require experienced handling of state machinery, Chouhan and Singh are emerging favourites, party sources say. The party is likely to decide the CM names within two or three days, though the appointment of observers to the states a step before holding the legislative bodies meeting to formally elect the CMs are yet to be made. Yet, there are strong speculations in Madhya Pradesh that the oath-taking might be as early as December 7. In Chhattisgarh, a programme scheduled on Monday morning to welcome the newly elected MLAs in presence of election and state in-charges, was suddenly cancelled. The probable names Chouhan, a four-time and longest serving CM of BJP, has proven his mettle in the state polls as he had a big say in candidates selection and personally took up a hectic schedule of campaigning. Apart from the magic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shahs masterful organizational strategy, Chouhans connect with Madhya Pradeshs people is being credited for the big win in the state. Though names like union ministers Narendra Singh Tomar, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Prahlad Patel, national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya and state BJP president Vishnu Dutt Sharma have been making rounds in political circle as a new face for CM, the claim of Chouhan seems to be strongest. In Chhattisgarh, there is a talk that voters compared the on-ground development during the three consecutive tenures of Raman Singh (2003-2018) to the over-hyped schemes of the Bhupesh Baghel-led Congress government that did not work much practically. However, there are discussions that a new face, likely a tribal leader, may be pitched in Chhattisgarh to continue with the wooing of the crucial chunk of voters in the country. The partys sops and attention for tribals worked in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh with the party winning big in the reserved seats and tribal belts. The BJP will like to continue this momentum for the Lok Sabha polls in 2024. Thus the names of tribal leaders like former state BJP president Vishnu Deo Sai and senior leader Ram Vichar Netam are making rounds. Also in strong contention are state BJP president Arun Sao and IAS turned politician O.P. Chaudhary. So much so that rumours were afloat on Monday that Chaudhary had been summoned to Delhi by senior leaders. He had to take to social media to refute the rumours. Kamal Nath meets Chouhan Meanwhile, in a political gesture, ex-chief minister Kamal Nath met CM Chouhan on Monday to extend congratulations to him on BJPs win. He was accompanied by son Nakul Nath. Speaking to the media persons later, Nath said that he congratulated Chouhan. He had come to meet me when I became the CM, so I too did so. I have told him that we might be in opposing parties, but we will do everything required for the development of the state. There are big issues like unemployment, agriculture sector problems and economic activities, for which steps are needed. As for reasons of loss, Nath said that he has called a meeting of all the candidates of the party and will discuss the matter with them. We would study the loss, Nath said, adding that he was not leaving Madhya Pradesh nor was he going to Delhi. I will go for only two-three days to meet Rahul Gandhi and (party chief) Mallikarjun Kharge." Prime Minister Narendra Modi has urged the opposition parties to leave behind its "negativity" of last nine years and move forward with positivity. Modi also called on the opposition parties not to vent their frustration of the assembly polls defeat inside the House. "If I speak on basis of the assembly poll results, this is a golden opportunity for opposition. Instead of making plans for venting frustration over defeat, they should learn from this defeat, leaving behind the habit of negativity of the last nine years, if they move forward with positivity this session, the country will change its views towards them," he said. "A new door could open for them. I am giving them advice even if they are in opposition," the Prime Minister told reporters outside the Parliament building. "Everyone's future is bright, there is no need to lose hope but please don't vent the frustration of the defeats suffered outside inside Parliament. There would be frustration and disappointment," he said. The Prime Minister was also welcomed inside the House with slogans of 'Baar Baar Modi Sarkar,' and 'Tisri Baar Modi Sarkar'. The first day of the Winter session also saw the Lok Sabha proceeding adjourning till 12 noon after BSP member Danish Ali sought action against BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri for allegedly making derogatory remarks against him. Meanwhile, the opposition parties said they will oppose any move to expel TMC MP Mahua Moitra. A report recommending TMC MP Mahua Moitra's expulsion is expected to be tabled in the Lok Sabha. "We will oppose that such an expulsion. We have written a letter and we have been saying that the issues of Parliament should be dealt inside the Parliament," Congress leader and LoP in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury told reporters. Danish Ali MP too voiced his protest against the ethics committee report. "Mahua Moitra's deposition is incomplete. So, we are demanding a discussion at least in the House. We have also written to the Speaker about how can there be a suo-motu recommendation against a Member. Nobody is ready to abide by the rules and regulations," Ali added. In what could be indications of the widening rift among the INDIA bloc members ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is unlikely to attend the next meeting of the group scheduled in Delhi on Wednesday. Citing prior engagements in North Bengal, the Trinamool Congress chief said she was not aware of the meeting. "I will be visiting North Bengal from December 6 to December 11. I was not aware of the meeting date on December 6. Had I known about the meeting date beforehand, then I could have rescheduled my visit," Banerjee told reporters in Kolkata. Its not clear whether any other leader from the Trinamool Congress will attend the meeting. An NDTV report, quoting certain sources, claimed that the party, too, may skip the meeting. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge called the meeting at his residence to formulate a strategy for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The meeting comes in the wake of the assembly elections in which the grand old party was handed big defeats in three Hindi heartland statesRajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarhby the BJP. The only solace for the Congress was Telangana where the party wrested power from the BRS to form its first government in the state. Banerjees decision to skip the INDIA meeting has set the tongues wagging in political circles as the chief minister, accompanied by her nephew and TMC national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, has consistently attended previous meetings of the opposition alliance. Notably, earlier in the day, the TMC supremo alleged that the Congresss decision to fight the assembly polls on its own had led to a division of votes. "Congress has won Telangana. They would have won Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. Some votes were cut by INDIA parties. This is the truth. We had said suggested a seat-sharing arrangement. They lost because of division of votes," she said. Banerjee further claimed that if there is proper consensus on seat sharing ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the saffron party will not be able to retain power at the Centre. "A strategy has to be finalised. I think BJP won't come to power if seats sharing is finalised," she said in the assembly. Meanwhile, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan attributed the Congresss poll debacle to the partys self-centered attitude of neglecting the alliance partners. "Election result was against the expectations, especially in three states people expected BJP to face backlash. Congress took a stand against uniting with other parties in these three states. They expected a big win by standing independently. That's how they managed things, the CPI(M) leader said. He further pointed out that Congress decided to keep CPI(M) and other parties out in Rajasthan where it could have joined hands to give a strong competition to the BJP. The opposition members have demanded a discussion in Lok Sabha on the ethics committee report recommending the expulsion of Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra over the cash-for-query allegations, before any decision is taken on the matter. The report is likely to be tabled in the lower house on Tuesday. The opposition members made the demands during a meeting of the Business Advisory Committee chaired by Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on Monday to finalise the agenda for the house. The ethics committee, headed by BJP MP Vinod Sonkar, had adopted its report at a meeting on November 9, recommending Moitras expulsion and a detailed probe into the allegations against her. While six members voted in favour of the report, four members submitted their dissent notes. Moitra can be expelled if the house votes in favour of the panel's recommendation. The TMC MP on Monday refused to comment on the report and said she would speak only when its tabled in parliament. "What can I say when it was not even tabled (before the Parliament)? Had they tabled it, I would have said something. I will speak when they table it, she told reporters outside parliament. There were speculations that the report would be tabled in Lok Sabha on Monday. Congress leader in the Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said that for reasons best known to the committee, the report has not been tabled. He said there would have been some reason which "forced them" not to table the report on Monday. "I think today or tomorrow, someday it will be tabled," he said. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said Moitra should be given a chance to speak in her defence. "We are looking at a situation where if they are going to bring this motion to endorse the recommendation of the Ethics Committee to expel a member, they have to give the member a chance to speak in her defence, and they have to permit a discussion where others can raise serious issues," Tharoor told news agency ANI. Tharoor further said that the governments decision to not table the report on Monday was a good sign. "That the item of filing the Ethics Committee report was skipped (on Monday) when they laid papers on the table... I hope that is a good sign that the government is rethinking this rather extreme step," he said. Meanwhile, BJP MP Nishikant Dubey, who had earlier written to the Speaker over the allegations against Moitra, said on Monday that Chowdhury leaked the ethics panel report before it was tabled in Lok Sabha. "...Let the report be tabled. I don't know what is mentioned in the report...What I had to say, I said before the Ethics Committee...I will be able to make a comment only after the report is tabled. The report will be tabled after 12 pm...I don't know how was the report leaked, I think Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury leaked it..." he told ANI. Fresh violence that broke out in Tengnoupal district, Manipur claimed lives of 13 people on Monday. According to security officials, the gunfight broke between two militant groups during noon near Saibol in Tengnoupal district. The officials are yet to reveal the identity of the recovered bodies. Reportedly, those deceased were not natives to the area. The probe is still on, said the official. The security forces did not find any weapons in the area as well. The Manipur government had restored internet services across the state, barring a few areas, on Sunday. "Considering improvement in law and order and inconveniences faced by people due to the mobile internet ban, the state government has decided to relax the suspension," the notification said. Meanwhile, areas including Chandel and Kakching, Kangpokpi and Imphal West, Churachandpur and Bishnupur and Tengnoupal and Kakching still face suspension of services till December 18. Mobile internet services had been suspended in the state since May 3 following the outbreak of violence in the state. The ethnic clashes between the Meitei and Kuki communities had left over 180 dead in the state. The lifting of the suspension came four days after the Centre and Manipur government signed a peace agreement in New Delhi with the United National Liberation Force. The Vietnamese Union is calling for a reduction in working hours for the private sector to below 48 hours per week, aiming to match the public sector's 40-hour workweek. The proposal, discussed at a conference Sunday, aligns with a 2019 National Assembly resolution, it said. Advocating for improved work-life balance, the union seeks government action to standardize work hours across sectors. Current laws dictate that workers, in normal working conditions, will work no more than 8 hours a day and 48 hours a week. Businesses have the right to dictate daily and weekly working hours, but they must inform workers about them. The state encourages businesses to employ 40-hour working weeks. Dang Tuan Tu, union head of the Changshin company, which employs 37,000 workers, said the road map to reduce weekly working hours to 40 hours was something that many workers wished for. "I know this proposal is not new, but I still wish for authorities to care more about workers' health, besides regional minimum wages," Tu said. In a National Assembly session in late October, delegate Pham Trong Nghia, voiced similar opinions. Nghia said that over the past 80 years, working hours in the private sector have not decreased, while overtime periods have tripled. Since 1999, workers in the public sector have been working 40 hours a week, while the private sector remained at 48 hours a week, even after numerous amendments to the labor law. Vietnam has some of the longest working hours in Southeast Asia, while having some of the lowest number of holiday breaks, according to the Department of Work Safety in 2019. Specifically, yearly working hours for Vietnamese amount to around 2,320 hours, lower than the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand, but higher than Singapore, Indonesia, Laos and Cambodia. Vietnam has 12 paid leave days a year by default, lower than Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia, but higher than Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines. Vietnam has 11 days of holiday breaks, equal to Singapore, but still considered to be among the lowest in Southeast Asia. Besides reducing working hours, the Union is also proposing authorities consider adding two more days off for the National Day holiday, from September 2 to 5, so that workers can take their children to the ceremony to commemorate the beginning of the new school year. A day after the Congress stormed to power in Telangana, the newly-elected Congress MLAs will meet in Hyderabad on Monday to elect their Legislature Party Leader. Anumula Revanth Reddy, the PCC president who led the Congress to victory, is the most likely choice to be the Chief Minister. The meeting will be attended by senior leaders and AICC observers. The delegation of Congress leaders had met Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan and staked claim to form the government in the state on Sunday itself. The Congress wrested power from the BRS after clinching 64 seats in the 119-seat assembly. Meanwhile, local reports quoted party sources who said a formal swearing-in ceremony with a couple of leaders would be conducted on Monday evening. A cabinet expansion and a public meeting are likely on December 9. A statement by the Telangana police also said that Reddy has asked the local police to make security arrangements for the swearing-in ceremony of the new chief minister on either December 4 or December 9. Reddy won from the Kodangal constituency with a margin of over 32,000 votes defeating his nearest BRS rival Patnam Narender Reddy. The Congress leader however lost from Kamareddy. Reddy reportedly asked Director General of Police (DGP) Anjani Kumar on Sunday, to make security arrangements for the swearing-in ceremony. However, Anjani Kumar was later removed from the post for violating the Model Code of Conduct for meeting Reddy to congratulate him before the results were formally announced. Several chief ministers, former chief ministers and senior leaders from the national capital are expected to attend the ceremony, Reddy told the police. The event is likely to take place in Hyderabad's LB Stadium. The near 10-year-old rule of the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) came to an end on Sunday, even as Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao tendered resignation from his post, which was accepted by Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan. Rao was asked to continue in office till the formation of the new government. Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath praised Union Minister General V.K. Singh for breaking the mould of a typical Army man. Against the general perception, General Singh is a pure vegetarian, satvik (moral), and fasts a day in a week, the chief minister said. Adityanath and Singh were attending a function at an educational institution in Gorakhpur on Monday. Singh, Minister of State for Road Transport and Highways and Civil Aviation, is an example of those whose words and work align, the chief minister said. This is what leads to trust from the public, he said congratulating the Army man for success in his previous career and then its carryover in politics. Adityanath listed the five guiding forces which are driving the country to becoming a superpower, and to the partys continued success. The five, as per Yogi Adityanath are freedom from the submissive mentality; pride in local traditions; a respect for heritage; the promise of unity, and citizens carrying out their duties. Adityanath said that these five promises were given to the nation by Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. He has connected the essence of the country to these principles, said Adityanath. "If the 142 crore people of this country work with these principles in mind, then no one can stop India from becoming a developed nation and the worlds biggest power. Drawing a larger connect, he said that the PM had followed the path of Maharana Pratap (after whom the institution is named), mahants Digvijay Nath and Adwaityanath. All great men have just one aim, one principle- the nation comes first. They work on the belief that the earth is their mother and her glory should be forever maintained, he said. Both the mahants mentioned are from the Gorakshnath Peeth- of which Adityanath is the current mahant. Singh went on to add that whenever we do something for glory, success is ensured as the quest for glory is a great motivator. Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)Doctors without Bordershas issued an open letter to the UN Security Council imploring it to do everything in its power to ensure an immediate and sustained ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. You must demand that the Israeli government stop the deadly attacks on Palestinian civilians and allow crucial humanitarian aid to enter Gaza. A seven-day truce, after weeks of relentless violence, was a welcome respite for the people of Gaza. However, these seven days were not nearly enough to organise the delivery of sufficient aid and essential supplies, to meet the immeasurable needs. We are very worried that the truce has ended, bringing a return to death and destruction, reads the letter. In a virtual press conference, Farhat Mantoo, Executive Director, MSF South Asia, said that the organisation was not going into the history of the conflict but that the current situation was dire. Ill keep the attention to why we, as MSF, ask for this very specific thing, stop the killing. my colleagues, me and everybody around the world is shocked and aggrieved by the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, Mantoo said. The absolute horror of the Israeli retaliation as it carried indiscriminate warfare in Gaza (is) for the world to see, she said. ..if we refer to recent statistics...they have documented 178 attacks on healthcare professionalsthat also includes MSF staff, Mantoo added. Israel has shown a blatant and total disregard for the protection of Gazas medical facilities. We are watching as hospitals are turned into morgues and ruins. These supposedly protected facilities are being bombed, are being shot at by tanks and guns, encircled and raided, killing patients and medical staff, reads the letter that goes out in the name of Christos Christou, MSF International President. It also draws attention to the utter exhaustion and despair of medical staff. They have had to amputate limbs from children suffering from severe burns without anaesthesia or sterilised surgical tools. Due to forcible evacuations by Israeli soldiers, some doctors have had to leave patients behind after facing the unimaginable choice between their lives or those of their patients. There is no justification for the atrocious attacks on healthcare, it reads. We are witnessing the fundamental principle of humanity being openly disgraced. Despite Israels claims, its all-out assault is not being waged just on Hamas. It is being waged on all of Gaza and its people at any cost. Even wars have rules, but Israel is clearly trading them in for its own military doctrine based on disproportionality, continues the letter. It calls upon the UNSC to take action to uphold our shared humanity. We did what we could. Remember usthese are the words one of our emergency doctors wrote on a Gaza hospital whiteboard normally used for planning surgeries. When the guns fall silent and the true scale of devastation is revealed, will the Council and its members be able to say the same?, it concludes. Amid Israeli evacuation warnings, people are running out of safe places in Gaza to resort to. Since the truce ended, nearly 300 people have been killed in Gaza as Israeli strikes intensify in the enclave. According to the Israel military, "ground troops are continuing to operate in the Gaza Strip in parallel to Israeli airforce strikes on approximately 200 Hamas terror targets." The official Palestinian WAFA news agency said at least 50 people were killed in an Israeli air strike that hit two schools sheltering displaced people in Daraj neighbourhood in the north of the Gaza Strip. Though people are told to flee, there is no safe place left in Gaza for people to stay. Bombardments accompany any region to which the civilians are told to move sparing no refugee camps, schools and hospitals. There were also reports that all telecom services in Gaza city and north Gaza Strip have been cut. We regret to announce that all telecom services (landline, cellular and internet) in Gaza City and north Gaza Strip have been lost due to the disconnection of main elements of our network in light of the ongoing aggression. Our technical teams are working relentlessly by all available means to restore the services," read a statement from PalTel telecomms company. Also, as Israel plans to target Hamas leaders scattered across the world, Turkey has warned of serious consequences if it tries to hunt down Hamas leaders outside Palestinian territories, including in Turkey. "Necessary warnings were made to the interlocutors based on the news of Israeli officials' statements, and it was expressed to Israel that (such an act) would have serious consequences, the official said. Earlier it was reported that Israel has laid out a plan to 'hunt and kill' Hamas leaders across the world especially in Lebanon, Qatar and Turkey. Amid the intensifying attacks, Israel's military posted a map on social media platform X on Monday morning with around a quarter of the city of Khan Younis marked off in yellow as territory that must be evacuated. Though arrows were pointed south and west, telling people to head towards the Mediterranean coast and Rafah, near the Egyptian border, most of the areas came under Israeli fire. The head of the United Nations agency in Gaza (UNWRA), Thomas White, said people there were themselves being forced to flee."People are pleading for advice on where to find safety. We have nothing to tell them," he said on X. Meanwhile, the commander of Israel's armoured corps, Brigadier-General Hisham Ibrahim, told Army Radio the military had almost achieved its goals in northern Gaza."We are beginning to expand the ground manoeuvre to other parts of the Strip, with one goal: to topple the Hamas terrorist group," he said. (With agencies inputs) The Israeli Defense Forces have asked tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians who recently sought refuge in Gaza's Khan Younis to evacuate amid expanding ground operatons and widespread bombing. According to AP, the Israeli military dropped leaflets asking people in the Khan Younis neighbourhoods to evacuate further south towards the Egyptian border. The IDF said its airstrikes targeted Hamas tunnel shafts, command centres and weapons storage facilities in Khan Younis area and that its drone killed five Hamas militants. The intensified offensive comes after a weeklong ceasefire is aimed at eliminating Hamas militants after the group, designated as terrorists by Israel, attacked the country on October 7 and took several people as hostage. The ongoing war has already claimed lives of thousands of people and displaced millions. Reports suggest that Israel is intensifying the offensive before another likely ceasefire amid pressure from its main ally, the US. Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said that any further exchange of hostages and prisoners should be tied to a permanent ceasefire. New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) Workers of divestment-bound RINL were paid their salaries in the first week of September and October, instead of the first day of the month, due to liquidity constraints, Parliament was informed on Monday. The employees of the steel company are usually paid their salaries on the first day of every month, Minister of State (MoS) Steel Faggan Singh Kulaste said in reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha. "Salary payments to the employees of RINL for the month are made on 1st day of the following month. In case of September and October 2023, the salary payments were made within the first week of the following month due to liquidity constraints," the minister said. The capacity utilisation and production has been falling over the past few months, according to the data shared by the minister. To reduce the cost of raw materials, RINL has taken up with the Ministry of Coal seeking supply of domestic coking coal and thermal coal. The Ministry of Steel has also requested the government of Odisha for allocation of iron ore block through reservation route. The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA), in its meeting on January 27, 2021 had accorded "in-principle" approval of 100 per cent disinvestment of RINL. RINL, under the Ministry of Steel, owns and operates 7.2 MTPA steel plant in Visakhapatnam. The company produces special steel, including wire rod coils, rounds, billets of different grades and dimensions. It is the first shore-based integrated steel plant in the country. New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) JSW Infrastructure on Monday said it has signed an agreement with SP Port Maintenance, a Shapoorji Pallonji Group company, to acquire majority stake in PNP Maritime Services (PNP Port). The agreement is to acquire over 50 per cent shares in PNP Port through its subsidiary JSW Dharamtar Port, JSW Infrastructure said in an exchange filing. "JSW Dharamtar Port has entered into share purchase and other relevant transaction documents for acquisition of 50 per cent plus 1 shares (10,00,001 equity shares) of PNP Maritime Services Private Limited from SP Port Maintenance Private Ltd," it said. PNP Maritime Services will become a step-down subsidiary of the company, it said. The transaction is for maximum equity purchase consideration of Rs 270 crore. It is expected to be completed in 15 days, the filing said. In a separate statement, JSW Infrastructure said the acquisition is expected to strengthen its position to provide hub-and-spoke model services to customers, thereby saving substantially in the logistics costs. JSW Infrastructure intends to upgrade PNP Port facilities and expand its capacity from current 5 MTPA to 19 MTPA (million tonne per annum) in a phased manner. PNP Port is located at Shahbaj, Raigad district, Maharashtra. The acquisition values PNP Port at an enterprise value of around Rs 700 crore with the current capacity of 5 MTPA. Part of Sajjan Jindal-owned JSW Group, JSW Infrastructure is a port-related infrastructure company. Its ports and terminals have an installed cargo handling capacity of 153.43 MTPA. New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) In a relief to low-cost carrier SpiceJet, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) on Monday dismissed an insolvency petition by aircraft lessor Willis Lease Finance Corporation which is claiming dues. A two-member Delhi-based NCLT bench rejected the plea moved by US-based Willis Lease Finance Corporation after SpiceJet questioned the maintainability of the petition. SpiceJet opposed the plea contending that Willis Lease Finance Corp has withdrawn its insolvency plea for the same dispute in March 2023 and has approached again with a new plea. During a hearing in July this year, the NCLT bench wanted to know from Willis Lease Finance Corp, as to how it filed a fresh petition again for a similar cause of action within a few months, without even sending a notice to SpiceJet as per the provisions of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016. Besides Willis Lease, SpiceJet is facing insolvency pleas filed by three other aircraft lessors -- Aircastle Ireland Ltd, Wilmington, and Celestial Aviation. During a hearing in September, the NCLT suggested settling with its lessors, which have filed a plea to initiate insolvency proceedings against it. In August, SpiceJet allotted over 48 million shares to nine aircraft lessors to clear its dues. Berlin, Dec 4 (AP) The chancellor of Germany and president of Brazil expressed hope on Monday that decades-long negotiations might soon yield a finalised free trade agreement between the 27-member European Union and a bloc of four South American nations. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told reporters in Berlin that they support the trade deal for the EU and Mercosur, comprised of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. The two blocs are holding a summit on Thursday in Rio de Janeiro, but final approval of a preliminary trade agreement has remained elusive. We are strongly committed to ensuring that the agreement is now finalised swiftly, Scholz said after a meeting of senior officials from both countries in the German capital. Lula also vowed to fight for the deal, and said he hoped for a breakthrough at the Rio de Janeiro meeting. As long as I can believe that the agreement is possible, I will fight for it, the Brazilian president said. I'm not giving up. Such a trade deal would create one of the world's largest free trade zones, with more than 700 million inhabitants. The EU and Mercosur states have been in talks for more than 20 year. A basic agreement between the sides that was reached in 2019 was not be implemented due to various concerns including the protection of the rainforest in South America and some European countries' desire to protect their farmers from cheaper South American imports. We believe it would be a great step forward, even if the bilateral relations are very good," Scholz said. The two leaders also signed a bilateral agreement on a partnership for a socially just and ecological transformation and said they intend to work more closely together in fighting disinformation and hate speech. (AP) PY PY Jerusalem, Nov 4 (PTI) A district court here will resume hearing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption case on Tuesday after a more than two-month hiatus due to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Israel launched relentless air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip following a cross-border attack by Palestinian group Hamas on October 7. Under the so-called Case 4000 or the Bezeq-Walla bribery case, Netanyahu allegedly took regulatory steps beneficial to Bezeq Telecommunications in exchange for favourable media coverage on the Walla website, earlier owned by Bezeq. The Jerusalem District Court will resume hearing on 74-year-old Netanyahu's corruption case on Tuesday. In June, the three judges in the case recommended that the prosecution withdraw the bribery charge. The prosecution, however, declined to withdraw the charge and decided to continue the trial as planned, after which the court heard the testimonies of the people concerned. The last hearing in the bribery case was held on September 20, after which the court adjourned for a holiday break, which got extended due to Hamas' brutal attack on Israel on October 7 and the subsequent war. The courts had since shifted to an emergency schedule, during which only urgent hearings were held. The trial in Netanyahu's corruption cases was halted as they were not considered urgent. Last week, Justice Minister Yariv Levin signed regulations allowing the courts to resume normal operations. Under the directives, courts have resumed activity with exceptions for attorneys and litigants now serving in the army reserves or who have been evacuated from their homes under government orders. In addition, legal procedures have been "frozen" in connection with lawyers and litigants who have been taken hostage or deemed missing, as well as parents, spouses, children, and siblings of hostages and missing persons and other family members who qualify for government assistance, under the Law for the Funding of Prisoner, Hostage and Missing Person Families. These cases are being postponed, except if both parties to a lawsuit agree to go forward. Irked by the resumption of the hearing, David Amsalem, a minister in the Justice Ministry and a Netanyahu's Likud party member, called it an "unparalleled disgrace". "War? Hostages? Evacuees? The economy? No and no What's most important now is to engage the Prime Minister of Israel with the unfounded allegations and delusional trifles," Amsalem wrote on social media platform X, formerly Twitter. "Yes, yes, you read it right. There's no reason to delay it. It's an unparalleled disgrace!" he said. Netanyahu is exempt from appearing at these hearings but may be required to testify in a few months. If the war continues for several months, the question of how the war and the hearings can be conducted simultaneously will have to be addressed. Netanyahu is also on trial for two additional counts of fraud and breach of trust in Case 1000, which concerns gifts he allegedly inappropriately received from billionaire benefactors, and Case 2000, in which he allegedly negotiated to obtain favourable media coverage in a newspaper in exchange for curtailing its competitors, The Times of Israel newspaper reported. The death toll from Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip has surged to 15,523 since the start of the conflict on October 7, the Health Ministry in the besieged Palestinian enclave announced Sunday. Actress Phuong Oanh, wife of businessman Nguyen Hoa Binh, whose business Nexxtech Group of Technopreneurs has been dubbed the Alibaba of Vietnam by the Chinese media, has revealed her wedding photoshoots. Actress Phuong Oanh takes wedding photoshoots. Photo from Oanh's Facebook Donning a gown made by designer Lek Chi, Oanh did her wedding shoot at a studio in a minimalistic style. The actress initially planned to reveal the shots at her cruise wedding to entrepreneur Nguyen Hoa Binh in the northern coastal town Ha Long, which was then postponed because of her severe morning sickness. "I have taken many shoots with wedding gowns, but I felt different this time," the actress said. "I felt nervous and happy at the same time, something a bride-to-be experiences." Though she and Binh had to delay their wedding, Oanh said she still feels happy seeing the twin babies she is expecting develop healthily. The couple planned to hold a wedding ceremony after Oanh gives birth. "I think my wedding will be more meaningful with my children to witness it," she said. Oanh, 34, is a renowned actress and has starred in several TV series. In 2018, she was nominated for the Vietnamese Golden Kite Award for Best Actress. Binh, 43, is the founder of various tech startups including Nexttech Group of Technopreneurs. He joined Shark Tank Vietnam as one of the showcased investors in 2019. The couple registered their marriage in June this year before holding their engagement ceremony in July, followed by a honeymoon in the U.S. Oanh announced her pregnancy in October. Her morning sickness made her feel unwell to the point she could not even leave her bed at first. However, she has felt much better recently, she said. Jerusalem, Dec 4 (AP) Israel's military called for more evacuations in southern Gaza as it widened its offensive aimed at eliminating the territory's Hamas rulers. The war has already killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced over three-fourths of Gaza's 2.3 million residents, who are running out of safe places to go. The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the death toll in the territory since October 7 has surpassed 15,500, with more than 41,000 wounded. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths, but said 70 per cent of the dead were women and children. Israel says it targets Hamas operatives and blames civilian casualties on the militants, accusing them of operating in residential neighbourhoods. It claims to have killed thousands of militants, without providing evidence. Israel says at least 81 of its soldiers have died. Hopes for another temporary truce faded after Israel called its negotiators home over the weekend. Hamas said talks on releasing more of the scores of hostages seized by Palestinian militants on October 7 must be tied to a permanent cease-fire. The United States, along with Qatar and Egypt, which mediated the earlier cease-fire, say they are working on a longer truce. RIGHTS GROUPS CALL FOR A HALT IN DUTCH EXPORTS OF FIGHTER JET PARTS TO ISRAEL THE HAGUE, Netherlands Human rights lawyers went to court in the Netherlands on Monday calling for a halt to the export of fighter jet parts to Israel that could be used in attacks on Gaza. The rights organisations say that delivery of parts for F-35 jets makes the Netherlands complicit in possible war crimes by Israel in its war with Hamas. The civil case in The Hague opened as the Israeli military renewed calls for mass evacuations from the southern town of Khan Younis, where tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have sought refuge in recent weeks, as it widened its ground offensive and bombarded targets across the Gaza Strip. The rights lawyers want The Hague District Court to issue an injunction banning exports of F-35 parts that are stored in a warehouse in the town of Woensdrecht. The state must immediately stop its delivery of F-35 parts to Israel, lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld told the court. She said Dutch customs officials asked the government if it wanted to continue exports after the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas that triggered the Israel-Hamas war. The warning that the fighter jets can contribute to serious breaches of the laws of war does not, for the (Dutch) state outweigh its economic interests and diplomatic reputation, she said. Government lawyer Reimer Veldhuis urged the court's single judge to reject the injunction, saying that even if it were to uphold the rights lawyers' legal arguments and ban exports, the United States would deliver these parts to Israel from another place. A decision is expected within two weeks. It can be appealed. NETANYAHU'S CORRUPTION TRIAL RESUMES TEL AVIV, Israel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial has resumed after a hiatus prompted by the October 7 Hamas attack and the war it set off. Netanyahu is on trial for alleged fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in three separate cases involving powerful media moguls and wealthy associates. He denies any wrongdoing. In Monday's hearing, police investigators will be questioned over allegations that Netanyahu promoted regulatory benefits for a telecom company in exchange for favorable coverage from a news outlet it owned. Netanyahu's lengthy trial, which began in 2020, was paused after the Hamas attack, when the country's courts were put under emergency status and all but shut down. The last hearing took place at the end of September. HEAD OF SHIN BET SAYS IT WILL DESTROY HAMAS 'IN EVERY PLACE' TEL AVIV, Israel The head of Israel's domestic security agency, Shin Bet, says his organization is prepared to destroy Hamas in every place, including in other Middle Eastern countries. The remarks by Ronen Bar, aired late Sunday by Israel's public broadcaster Kan, echoed similar comments by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister last month. In every place, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Turkiye, in Qatar, everywhere, Bar said in an audio recording. It'll take a few years but we will be there to do it. Bar compared the mission to Israel's operation to assassinate militants behind the 1972 killings of members of its Olympic team in Munich, Germany. Kan did not say when Bar made the remarks. Most of Hamas' top leadership lives in exile, primarily in the Gulf state of Qatar, a key player in bringing about the recently expired truce between Israel and Hamas, and the Lebanese capital of Beirut. Israel' Mossad spy agency has been accused of involvement in a series of assassinations overseas of Palestinian militants and Iranian nuclear scientists over the years. YOUNG ISRAELI HOSTAGES RETURN TO SOCIAL MEDIA AFTER BEING FREED TEL AVIV, Israel Freed from Hamas captivity, several young Israelis are doing what young people do and are posting to TikTok. Dancing, keeping up with trends or just thanking their followers, several young Israelis have begun appearing on social media just days after they were freed. Alma Or, 13, who was released after 50 days in captivity, posted a video in which she dances with a friend under the text Roses are red this trend might be over but I've just been freed from Hamas captivity. Sahar Kalderon, 16, posted a video of herself and a friend dancing to a beat-infused track in front of a mirror, under text reading The sound that crossed though my head the moment I came home from captivity. Another freed captive, Gali Tarshansky, 13, has posted at least two videos since being freed, with one captioned Captives humor. Under a now-expired truce deal, Hamas released 105 Israeli and foreign captives it snatched on October 7. Most returned physically well but doctors have cautioned it will take time for them to heal emotionally from their weeks in captivity. Four other hostages were released before the truce and one was rescued. ISRAEL SAYS IT HAS EXPANDED GROUND OPERATIONS TO EVERY PART' OF GAZA STRIP JERUSALEM The Israeli military says it has expanded its ground operation against the Hamas militant group to every part of the Gaza Strip. The army resumed its offensive on Friday after a weeklong cease-fire expired. After focusing its ground operation on the northern part of Gaza in recent weeks, it began carrying out airstrikes in southern Gaza as well. The vast majority of Gaza's population has fled to the south in search of safety. Israeli military spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said late Sunday that ground troops were also pushing into the south. The Israeli army is continuing and expanding the ground operation against the Hamas presence in every part of the Gaza Strip, he said. BRITAIN TO USE DRONES TO SEARCH FOR HOSTAGES IN GAZA LONDON The British government said its military plans to fly unarmed surveillance drones over the Gaza Strip in search of hostages taken by Hamas. The Ministry of Defence said the flights will not have a combat role and the only information passed on will be for the purpose of rescuing hostages still held since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. The fate of the hostages, including British nationals, has been a key concern as a weeklong cease-fire ended Friday and Israel began a new round of bombardments. During the break in fighting, Hamas released 110 hostages but another 137 remain captive, Israel said. Having had around 100 hostages released, there are still many more who are being held captive by Hamas, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins told Sky News on Sunday. We want to do everything we can to help find those hostages and to secure their release. Atkins said unmanned drones will be used to conduct the surveillance. ITALIAN NAVAL SHIP RECEIVES FIRST PATIENT ROME An Italian naval ship, anchored off Egypt on Sunday, has received its first patient as part of the Italian government's commitment to care for civilians needing medical assistance in the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The Italian defense ministry, in a post on social medium platform X, quoted Defense Minister Guido Crosetto as saying that a girl was the first person to receive treatment aboard the ship, Vulcano. No details were given about her medical condition. The ship's facilities include operating rooms. POPE CALLS FOR ISRAEL AND HAMAS TO FOLLOW 'COURAGEOUS PATHS OF PEACE' VATICAN CITY Pope Francis has called the end of the truce in the Israel-Hamas painful. That means death, destruction and misery, the pontiff said on Sunday in remarks read for him by an aide because he has bronchitis. The pope, noting that many hostages are still held in Gaza, said Let's think of them, of their families, who had seen a light, a hope of embracing again their loved ones. He also lamented the lack of basic necessities of life in Gaza. I hope that all who are involved can reach as soon as possible a new accord for a cease-fire and find solutions that are different than weapons, trying to follow courageous paths of peace. US VICE PRESIDENT CALLS SCALE OF CIVILIAN SUFFERING IN GAZA 'DEVASTATING' DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Us Vice President Kamala Harris said Israel in its war with Hamas must do more to protect innocent civilians. The vice president noted in remarks to reporters at the United Nations climate conference that Israel is within its rights to defend itself after the brutal October 7 attack by Hamas, yet the US ally must do so in accordance with international law. As Israel defends itself, it matters how, Harris said. The United States is unequivocal: International humanitarian law must be respected. Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating. (AP) GRS GRS Kathmandu, Dec 4 (PTI) Six Nepalese nationals serving in the Russian Army have been killed in the war with Ukraine, the government announced on Monday, urging Moscow not to recruit Nepali citizens into its forces. Nepal's Foreign Ministry in a statement identified the deceased as Pritam Karki of Syangja, Ganga Raj Moktan of Ilam, Raj Kumar Karki of Dolakha, Rupak Karki of Kapilvastu, Dewan Rai of Kaski and Sandeep Thapaliya of Gorkha. The ministry has requested Russia to send the bodies of the Nepalis killed in the Russia-Ukraine war and provide compensation to the victims families, the statement said. Nepal has also requested Russia not to recruit its citizens into the Russian army and if any Nepali nationals have been recruited, to immediately return them to Nepal. The ministry also said that diplomatic efforts are on to release one Nepalese who has been made hostage by the Ukraine while serving in the Russian Army. It has also appealed to the general public to travel to Russia only with a No Objection Certificate (NOC) issued by the Department of Consular Services under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs except for those who are involved in government work, scholarship of the Russian government and those in a profession or business. It is believed that around 200 Nepalis are currently serving in the Russian Army in different capacities despite the government's request not to risk lives there, the Kathmandu Post newspaper reported. Similarly, according to foreign ministry officials, some Nepali youths are also serving in the Ukrainian Army, but their exact number is not known, the paper added. Earlier, several videos circulating on social media showed Nepali youths serving in Russian and Ukrainian armies. The videos claimed they could earn up to Rs 400,000 a month, the paper added. Nepal only allows recruitment in the Indian and British Army in line with bilateral agreements with the respective countries. Islamabad, Dec 4 (PTI) A Pakistan anti-corruption court hearing the Al-Qadir Trust case on Monday summoned former prime minister Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Bibi on December 6 while issuing non-bailable arrest warrants against six other accused in the case. The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) last week filed a case against Khan and seven others, including his wife, in connection with the Al-Qadir Trust corruption case. Judge Muhammad Bashir of the Islamabad-based Accountability Court No. 1 issued a written order about the production of the accused. He noted that 71-year-old Khan was already in the Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi and ordered the jail superintendent to produce him at the next hearing on Wednesday. He also noted that Bibi had secured interim bail from the courts and directed that she be informed to appear at the next hearing. The other six accused, including property tycoon Malik Riaz Hussain and his son Ali Riaz, Farhat Shahzadi, a close friend of the spouse of the ex-prime minister, former special assistants to the premier Mirza Shahzad Akbar and Zulfi Bukhari, and lawyer Ziaul Mustafa Nasim were stated as at large and the court issued non-bailable arrest warrants against them. The judge also said that the next hearing would be conducted at Adiala jail as per a notification issued by the law ministry on November 14. According to the charges, Khan and Bibi obtained billions of rupees and land worth dozens of acres from Bahria Town Ltd of Malik Riaz Hussain for legalising Rs50 billion that was returned to the country by the UK. (This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI) Miami, Dec 4 (AP) A former American diplomat who served as US ambassador to Bolivia has been charged with serving as a covert agent for Cuba's intelligence services dating back decades, the Justice Department said on Monday. Newly unsealed court papers allege that Manuel Rocha engaged in clandestine activity on Cuba's behalf since at least 1981, including by meeting with Cuban intelligence operatives and providing false information to US government officials. The complaint, filed in federal court in Miami, charges Rocha with acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government. The 73-year-old had a 25-year career as a US diplomat, including top posts in Bolivia, Argentina and the US Interests Section in Havana He is due in court later Monday. It was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer. (AP) PY PY Khan Younis (Gaza Strip), Dec 3 (AP) The Israeli military says it has expanded its ground operation against the Hamas militant group to every part of the Gaza Strip. The army resumed its offensive Friday after a weeklong cease-fire expired. After focusing its ground operation on the northern part of Gaza in recent weeks, the military began carrying out airstrikes in southern Gaza as well. The vast majority of Gaza's population has fled to the south in search of safety. But late Sunday, Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said ground troops were also pushing into the south. The Israeli army is continuing and expanding the ground operation against the Hamas presence in every part of the Gaza Strip, he said. (AP) PY PY Khan Younis (Gaza Strip), Dec 3 (AP) The Israeli military said on Sunday it had expanded its ground operations to every part of Gaza and ordered more evacuations in the crowded south, followed by heavy bombardment, as it vowed that operations there against Hamas would be no less strength than its earlier offensive in the north. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip said they were running out of places to go in the sealed-off territory that borders Israel and Egypt. Many of its 2.3 million people are crammed into the south after Israel ordered civilians to leave the north in the early days of the war, which was sparked by the October 7 attack by Hamas and other militants that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel. The United Nations estimates that 1.8 million Gazans have been displaced. Juliette Toma, director of communications at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said nearly 958,000 of them were in 99 UN facilities in the south. Heavy bombardment was reported around Gaza's second-largest city of Khan Younis in the south and the nearby city of Rafah. UN human rights chief Volker Turk urged an end to the war, saying civilian suffering was too much to bear. The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said the death toll there since October 7 has surpassed 15,500. The ministry does not differentiate between civilian and combatant deaths, but said 70 per cent of the dead were women and children. It said more than 41,000 people had been wounded. A Health Ministry spokesman asserted that hundreds of people had been killed or wounded since the cease-fire ended. The majority of victims are still under the rubble, Ashraf al-Qidra said. Meanwhile, fears of a wider conflict intensified. A US warship and multiple commercial ships came under attack Sunday in the Red Sea, the Pentagon said. Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed attacks on two ships they described as being linked to Israel but did not acknowledge targeting a US Navy vessel. Hopes for another temporary truce in Gaza were fading. A weeklong cease-fire that expired on Friday facilitated the release of dozens of the roughly 240 Gaza-held Israeli and foreign hostages in exchange for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. But Israel has called its negotiators home, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the war will continue until all its goals are achieved. One is to remove Hamas from power in Gaza. Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said resuming talks with Israel on further exchanges must be tied to a permanent cease-fire. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told NBC's Meet the Press that the US is working "really hard for a resumption of negotiations. Israel's military widened evacuation orders in and around Khan Younis, telling residents of at least five more areas to leave. Residents said the military dropped leaflets ordering them to move south to the border city of Rafah or to a coastal area in the southwest. Khan Younis city is a dangerous combat zone, the leaflets read. But Halima Abdel-Rahman, a widow and mother of four, said she won't heed such orders anymore. She fled her home in October to an area outside Khan Younis, where she stays with relatives. The occupation tells you to go to this area, then they bomb it, she said by phone. "The reality is that no place is safe in Gaza. They kill people in the north. They kill people in the south. The United States, Israel's closest ally, has urged Israel to avoid significant new mass displacement and do more to protect civilians. US Vice President Kamala Harris also told Egypt's president that under no circumstances would the US permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank, an ongoing siege of Gaza or the redrawing of its borders. On the ground in Gaza, there was frustration and mourning. Outside a Gaza City hospital, a dust-covered boy named Saaed Khalid Shehta dropped to his knees beside the bloodied body of his little brother Mohammad, one of several bodies laid out after people said their street was hit by airstrikes. He kissed him. You bury me with him! the boy cried. A health worker at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital said more than 15 children were killed. Israel's military said its fighter jets and helicopters struck targets in the Gaza Strip including tunnel shafts, command centres and weapons storage facilities", while a drone killed five Hamas fighters. Military officials acknowledged extensive aerial attacks in the Khan Younis area". The bodies of 31 people killed in Israeli bombardment of central Gaza were taken to the Al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, said Omar al-Darawi, a hospital administrative employee. One woman wept, cradling a child's body on her lap. Another carried the body of a baby. Later, hospital workers reported 11 more dead after another airstrike. The bloodied survivors included a child carried in on a mattress. Outside a morgue in Khan Younis, resident Samy al-Najeila carried the body of a child. He said his sons had been preparing to evacuate their home, but the occupation didn't give us any time. The three-floor building was destroyed completely, the whole block was totally destroyed. He said six of the bodies were his relatives. Five people are still under the rubble, he said. God help us. During a short trip to the United Arab Emirates as the top American representative at the UN climate conference, Harris said: "Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating. Mark Regev, a senior adviser to Netanyahu, said Israel was making maximum effort to protect civilians. In addition to the leaflets, the military has used phone calls and radio and TV broadcasts to urge Gazans to move from specific areas. Israel says it targets Hamas operatives and blames civilian casualties on the militants, accusing them of operating in residential neighbourhoods. It claims to have killed thousands of militants, without providing evidence. Israel says at least 78 of its soldiers have been killed in the offensive in northern Gaza. The renewed hostilities have heightened concerns for the 137 hostages who the Israeli military believes are still being held by Hamas. During the recent truce, 105 hostages were freed, and Israel released 240 Palestinian prisoners. Most of those released by both sides were women and children. The families of hostages have called for an urgent meeting with Israel's Security Cabinet, saying time is running out to save those still held by Hamas. Elsewhere in the region, Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group said it struck Israeli positions near the tense Lebanon-Israel border. Eleven people eight soldiers and three civilians were wounded by Hezbollah fire in the area of Beit Hillel, army radio reported. The military said its artillery struck sources of fire from Lebanon. It also said its fighter jets struck other Hezbollah targets. And Iraqi militants with the Iran-backed umbrella group the Islamic Resistance in Iraq said they struck the Kharab al-Jir US military base in Syria with rockets. A US military official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said rockets hit Rumalyn Landing Zone in Syria but there were no reports of casualties or damage. (AP) PY PY Raipur, Dec 3 (PTI) Senior BJP leader and former minister Brijmohan Agrawal registered the highest victory margin of 67,719 votes in the Chhattisgarh assembly after he defeated his nearest rival from Congress in Raipur City South constituency. His party's candidate in Kanker scraped through with just 16 votes. With this victory, Agrawal became the eighth straight-term MLA and remained unbeaten since 1990. Agrawal secured 1,09,263 votes against 41,544 votes polled by Congress Mahant Ramsundar Das. According to political analysts, Congress does not have a leader in the capital of Agrawal's stature. He has nurtured his constituency very well, being in constant touch with his voters and willing to help them when required. OP Choudhary (Kharsia with 64,443 margin) is the only other leader in the newly elected 90-member assembly who has won by a margin of more than 50,000 votes. BJP's Vijay Sharma polled the highest number of votes at 1,44,257 compared to other candidates in the state in this election. Sharma defeated senior Congress leader and minister Mohammad Akbar in Kawardha seat by a margin of 39,592 votes. BJP's Asharam Netam has won the election by the lowest margin of 16 votes in Kanker seat against Congress' candidate Shankar Dhruwa. Netam, who was elected as an MLA for the first time, got 67,980 votes while Dhruwa got 67,964 votes. Senior Congress leader and Deputy Chief Minister Singh Deo lost the Ambikapur seat by a thin margin of 94 votes against BJPs Rajesh Agrawal. Singh Deo got 90,686 votes against Agrawal who secured 90,780 votes. The BJP registered a massive victory in Chhattisgarh polls winning 54 seats in the 90-member assembly. The ruling Congress was reduced to 35 seats, while the Gondwana Gantantra Party managed to win one seat. Raipur, Dec 4 (PTI) The BJP, which has wrested power from the Congress in Chhattisgarh, has convened a meeting of all its newly-elected MLAs here on Monday, a party functionary said. The meeting will be held at Kushabhau Thakre Parisar, the state party's headquarters in Raipur, from 11 am, he said. The BJP on Sunday registered a massive victory in Chhattisgarh winning 54 seats in the 90 member assembly. The ruling Congress was reduced to 35 seats while the Gondwana Gantantra Party managed to win one seat. All the 54 BJP MLAs including, former chief minister Raman Singh, state party chief Arun Sao, Union minister Renuka Singh and former Union minister Vishnu Deo Sai will be present in the meeting, the party functionary said. It will be like an introductory meeting with the newly elected legislators and a decision is also likely to be taken on further course of action to hold the legislature party meet, he said. BJP's in-charge for Chhattisgarh Om Mathur, Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya, who is also party's joint in-charge for Chhattisgarh polls, and party co-incharge for state Nitin Nabin, will be present in the meeting. New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) A day after drubbing, the Congress on Monday said it will introspect what happened in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan as it had hoped of winning these states. Congress general secretary organisation K C Venugopal said the party will also look into "complaints" of INDIA bloc partners, adding, some of them may be genuine and may require necessary corrective measures, which will be taken. His remarks came a day after the BJP swept Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, handing a shattering defeat to the Congress to tighten its stranglehold in the Hindi heartland. The Congress ousted the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) in Telangana to make the scoreboard 3-1 in the latest round of Assembly elections -- billed as a semi-final before next year's poll showdown. Asked about the assembly poll results, Venugopal told reporters, "Success is success, we are congratulating people who won the election. We will definitely introspect what happened in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, we had hopes of winning these states." "Last election in 2018, we swept all three states, how many Parliamentary seats we got from these states? Only three seats. That is why I say every election is different," he said. On the differences among INDIA bloc partners and the meeting earlier on Monday, Venugopal said, "Nothing. Today we had a morning meeting, all parties came. INDIA was formed to have a wider perspective for Parliament elections. "They have freedom to tell all these complaints, some complaints may be genuine too. We will examine and correct what is required," he said. Asked about the election results, Congress leader in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said, "They are sloganeering 'Modi ji ki jeet hai', is it not that of the BJP, of the RSS. Modi ji himself said it is of the people, farmers. They have to decide whose victory it is." Violence against women transcends borders and cultures. It exists in every corner of the world. Thats why the sixteen days between International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on November 25, and Human Rights Day, celebrated on December 10th, are dedicated to raising awareness of gender-based violence and to finding effective ways to prevent and eliminate it. This years theme is UNITE! Invest to Prevent Violence against Women and Girls. According to the World Health Organization, one in three women globally experiences physical and or sexual violence in her lifetime. But even that very high number probably underestimates the breadth of the problem. Case in point, Throughout the world, conflict-related sexual violence is a too-often overlooked and underreported crime, said USAID Administrator Samantha Power in a written statement. In regions beset by armed conflict, armed and organized groups are taking advantage of the war-related chaos to prey on women and girls by engaging in child trafficking, kidnapping, and forcing women and girls into sex work. These crimes are often invisible: for each rape reported in connection with a conflict, the United Nations estimates that 10 to 20 cases go undocumented, said Administrator Power. In recent years, digital technologies have amplified the problem, enabling malefactors to harass and stalk, and to threaten with violence and abuse, including rape, prominent women and women in public spaces, such as politicians, business leaders, journalists, activists and entertainers. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence also poses particular risks for those from historically marginalized communities, including persons with disabilities, LGBTQI+ persons, and racial, ethnic, or religious minorities, said Administrator Power. Through USAID, the United States government supports a number of programs to reduce, prevent, and address gender-based violence, she said. In conflict areas, the protection of women and girls, particularly amongst displaced communities, is a key priority in USAIDs humanitarian responses. In non-conflict settings, we work to advance the safe and meaningful participation of women and girls in political, peacebuilding, and transition processes. Gender-based violence is intended to limit womens participation in public fora. It creates significant roadblocks to womens engagement in civic, social, political, legal, and economic endeavors, said Administrator Power. Therefore, As we kick off these 16 Days of Activism, let us recommit to taking on gender-based violence and protecting womens and girls fundamental right to participate fully and safely in society. New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) Around 25 members of Meitei extremist group National Revolutionary Front Manipur (NRFM) have joined the United National Liberation Front (UNLF), which signed a peace agreement with the Centre last week. According to an official statement, the development is likely to give a momentum to the Centre's efforts to restore peace and normalcy in ethnic strife-torn Manipur. Following the signing of the peace agreement between the UNLF and the governments in Manipur and at the Centre on November 29, around 25 members of the NRFM, led by Major Boicha (vice-chief of the army staff of the outfit), with 25 weapons, joined the UNLF on December 2, the statement said. With this, most of the outfit's members have taken a step towards abjuring the path of violence. The NRFM (previously the United Revolutionary Front) was formed on September 11, 2011 by the members of three factions of the KCP, an underground Meitei outfit. Its senior leaders operated from bases in a neighbouring country and were involved in violence and extortion in various parts of the Imphal valley. The development is likely to encourage other underground Meitei outfits to join the peace process and pursue their demands in a democratic manner, besides giving a boost to the Narendra Modi government's vision of an "insurgency-free and prosperous northeast", the statement said. Under the peace pact, the UNLF, which is the oldest Meitei terror group based in the Imphal valley, has agreed to renounce violence. A ban on the UNLF under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) was extended by five years last month. New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) Sixteen cases of murders arose out of love affairs in the national capital in 2022, a report released by the National Crime Records Bureau said. The cases include the sensational murder of Shraddha Walker, who was allegedly strangled and chopped into 35 pieces by her live-in partner Aftab Amin Poonawala, who suspected she was having a relationship with some other man. Her body was dumped in a jungle near south Delhi's Mehrauli. Delhi, according to the NCRB data, recorded overall 501 cases of murder of these, at least 13 were committed over illicit relationships, 54 in personal enmity, and 197 in family, property, and other disputes. At least 35 murders took place over money and one was over water. Two cases of murders emerged out of incidents of road rage and three due to gang rivalry. At least 10 cases of murder were committed during dacoity and robbery bids, said the report. Human sacrifice became the cause of at least one case of murder. New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) Delhi Police has arrested three people for carrying out robberies by impersonating policemen, officials said on Monday. "A PCR call was received on November 25 regarding a robbery in the Seemapuri area. The complainant told police that some people dressed up in police uniform barged in a house and robbed Rs 33,000 and two mobile phones forcefully," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Shahdara) Rohit Meena said. Police further said that a similar incident was reported on November 22 at Dilshad colony where Rs 50,000 and some belongings were robbed from another person. Several CCTV footage were checked and police found that the accused used a Yamaha Fazer motorcycle. Tracking the motorcycle led the team to the Seemapuri incident site where police recovered a piece of paper which the accused had dropped at the site, said the officer. Police said that the paper was found to be a print out of the online police clearance certificate of April 2023. Investigating the paper further led the team to one Shanu (30). "Our team later apprehended Shanu who confessed his crime and named his associates Amzad (24) and Imran (32). We recovered a motorcycle, one walkie-talkie, police cap, inspector level belt, face-mask having Delhi Police logo, police socks, and soft copy of police ID cards. Further investigation into the matter is underway," said the DCP. New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) A proposal from the Kerala-based Institute of Tribal Studies and Research for upgrading its existing facilities has been sent to the education ministry, the Lok Sabha was informed on Monday. In a reply to a question from Wayanad MP Rahul Gandhi, Minister of State for Tribal Affairs Renuka Singh Saruta said as the project proposal was broadly based on academic activities, the matter was not under the purview of her ministry and hence, sent to the education ministry. In his question, Congress leader Gandhi had asked about the initiatives being taken to promote tribal research and tribal studies in India and also whether the government has received a proposal from the institute in Chethalayam in Wayanad on upgrading of its existing facilities. In her written reply, Saruta said the University of Calicut had made a representation on January 6, 2018, to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs for upgrading the Institute of Tribal Studies and Research's facilities. "As the project proposal was broadly based on academic activities focusing on higher education of tribal students, including creation of infrastructure, and taking into account the subject matter not being under the purview of the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, the matter was referred vide ministry's O.M. dated May 26, 2022, to the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Education, for its examination to support it out of allocated STC funds," she said. The minister said the Ministry of Tribal Affairs through centrally-sponsored scheme 'Support of Tribal Research Institutes (TRIs)' is providing financial assistance to states and union territories for various activities to be undertaken by state tribal research institutes, including execution of research programmes. With the setting up of a TRI in Ladakh this year, there are 28 TRIs across the country, she said. Gandhi, who won the Wayanad Lok Sabha seat in Kerala in 2019, has asked 94 questions in the 17th Lok Sabha so far, against a national average of 191, according to data compiled by think-tank PRS Legislative Research. New Delhi, Dec 4 (PTI) A local court has acquitted two men accused of various charges such as rioting, pelting bricks and throwing acid at security personnel, saying there was no incriminating evidence against them. Additional Sessions Judge Pulastya Pramachala was hearing a case against Asraf Ali and Parvej, who were accused of being part of a riotous mob that attacked a Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) battalion with glass bottles, acid and bricks from rooftops in the Shiv Vihar area on February 25, 2020, during the communal riots in northeast Delhi. Two SSB personnel were injured in attack, the prosecution said. Noting the testimony of the sole eyewitness, the judge said he did not say anything about witnessing acid being thrown from a nearby school. He also did not specify the particular mob which committed the offence. "Therefore, his testimony does not establish the complicity of both the accused persons in the acid (bottle) pelting upon the police and the SSB team, which resulted in injuries to victims of this case," the judge said. "Thus, his testimony does not become incriminating for the accused persons in respect of the alleged incident," he added. In the absence of proof of the pair's involvement, the evidence for the offence under Section 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) of the Indian Penal Code has to be ignored, the judge said. "Both the accused persons are acquitted of all the charges levelled against them in this case," the court said in an order passed on Saturday. The Karawal Nagar police station had registered an FIR against the pair. Amaravati, Dec 4 (PTI) Cyclone Michaung looming over west-central and coastal south Andhra Pradesh has intensified into a severe cyclonic storm, leading to heavy rainfall in several parts of the state, said an official on Monday. The severe cyclonic storm is likely to intensify gradually and move northwards almost parallel and close to south Andhra Pradesh coast and cross between Nellore and Machilipatnam, close to Bapatla during forenoon of December 5, said an Amaravati Meteorological Centre official in a press release. Up to 8:30 am on Monday the weather system moved northwestwards with a speed of eight km per hour and lay centred in the region off south Andhra Pradesh and adjoining north Tamil Nadu coasts. It is centred 90 km east to northeast off Chennai, 17.0 km southeast of Nellore, 200 km northeast off Puducherry, 300 km south to southeast off Bapatla and 320 km south of Machilipatnam, said the official. The weather system is expected to blow maximum sustained winds reaching up to speeds of 100 kmph and gusting to 110 kmph as well. The Meteorological Department reiterated its forecast of heavy rainfall, accompanied by gales in parts of Andhra Pradesh over the next three days from Monday to Wednesday. In the wake of the Michaung severe cyclonic storm, several places in the southern state are receiving heavy rainfall. Due to incessant rains, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) has temporarily denied permission for devotees to take holy bath at Sri Kapilathirtham waterfalls. TDP general secretary Nara Lokesh postponed his Yuva Galam padayatra (political walkathon) by three days in view of the inclement weather. Westerly, RI (02891) Today Sun and clouds mixed. High near 45F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph.. Tonight Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low 34F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. The House is making history this year in ways that Republicans could hardly have envisioned when the party took control. First, the Republicans voted to oust their speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, in October. On Friday they voted to get rid of one of their own, indicted Rep. George Santos of New York. Never before had a House majority voted to evict its speaker, and not since the Civil War had the chamber voted to expel a member who was charged but not yet convicted of a crime. The result has been a dizzying 11 months in a House majority riven by infighting, chiseling away at the powers of Congress and taking its toll on the actual business of governing. As the year comes to a close, the arc of power for House Republicans is at an inflection point, a new era of performance politics and chaotic governing that shows no signs of easing. Is it messy? Yeah, sure, said Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, among the New Yorkers who led the ouster of Santos. But when youre actually governing in a democratic republic, it can be messy. In many ways, Santos is a product and practitioner of a new way of governing, a system that rewards big personalities who rise to prominence with charismatic if often extreme public personas rather than the quieter work that governs the nation. Instead of shying from the exposure, Santos, who is accused of fabricating much of his life story, embraced his moment in history, another segment of his celebrity run in Congress. Before the House vote, Santos held a news conference on the Capitol steps, breezily answering questions about his future (he did not plan to seek reelection) and whether his shoes were purchased illegally with campaign funds (he said they were several years old). He defended himself against the bullying and decried the smear against him. This is my battle, Santos said, acknowledging he would have done a lot of things differently. Santos doubled down on his own personal narrative, not as the fraudster he is charged with being, but as the representative of the New Yorkers who sent him to Congress and who, he argued, are the ones who should decide whether or not to remove him. I came in here as a mad-as-hell activist who was just disenfranchised, he said. I leave here, no regrets. His quick ascent in politics as an outsider modeled partly after Donald Trump is reflective of this postmodern political era, and the power of a single lawmaker to become famous for being famous. Santos joined a diverse class of younger freshmen lawmakers who were changing the face of the GOP. His celebrity status only rose after the outrageous embellishments he made about his background, his experience, even his family heritage came to light. Essentially, the bulk of the Santos life story appears to have been made up. A scathing House Ethics report found overwhelming evidence of lawbreaking by Santos, including questionable campaign expenditures on items like Botox. He has pleaded not guilty to federal charges that he duped donors. His swift downfall shows the GOPs willingness to turn on its own, particularly when it is politically expedient, even at the risk of losing another dependable vote from their slim majority that now teeters amid retirements. But Republicans split over ousting Santos just as they did earlier in October over the removal of McCarthy, R-Calif., as speaker, after he engineered passage of legislation with Democrats that averted a government shutdown. One was a mistake and one was righteous and necessary, said Rep. Nick LaLota, R-N.Y., about the two votes. What we did today was righteous and necessary if we are going to claim the mantle of being the party of accountability. But Trump ally Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who orchestrated McCarthys ouster, led a wing of Republicans defending Santos right to his day in court. The roll call became a test for the new Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who told lawmakers they should vote their conscience, as leaders do to signal there is no preferred party position. There was a moment during the two days of debate when it seemed as if Santos might be able to hang on. But in the end, even the supportive votes from leadership were not enough, and more than the two-thirds required tally in the House voted to expel him. Time is slipping for other year-end business in Congress, including passage of the annual spending bills needed to keep government running. Its the same dilemma that contributed to McCarthys ouster as his party demands steep cuts. The risk of shutdowns has hovered all year and the next deadline for funding is Jan. 19. Johnson told lawmakers they would next soon turn to a vote to formally authorize the impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden over the business dealings of his son Hunter. A vote could come as soon as next week, but its uncertain that the House, now down a Republican member, will have enough votes for that next priority, historic impeachment proceedings. (AP) Officials in the Canadian city of Moncton, in the province of New Brunswick, have come under fire for their decision to cancel the annual menorah display at city hall, a move many say is blatantly anti-Jewish discrimination. In an interview with the National Post, Francis Weil, president of the Moncton Jewish Community, criticized the rationale provided by Mayor Dawn Arnold, which cited a 2015 Supreme Court of Canada ruling against opening council meetings with prayer. Weil pointed out the inconsistency in the citys stance, as X-mas decorations remain displayed on city hall grounds. We are not talking about prayer. In the place where the menorah goes, there are a couple Christmas trees and a few angels, he said. The controversy surfaces amid a backdrop of increased antisemitism and anti-Israel demonstrations in Canada, with Weil noting pro-Hamas signs and slogans at weekly protests at Moncton city hall. Thats the first thing I told [the mayor], this is not the time to make this decision, because everyone will think youre giving in, Weil said. According to Weil, the mayor did not explicitly link the decision to the current tensions but mentioned a desire to avoid potential incidents at city hall. National Jewish leaders have strongly condemned the decision. The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs voiced their disapproval on X, stating, If some faith symbols are OK, but others are not, thats discrimination. Its not acceptable and must be immediately corrected. Michael Levitt, president and CEO of the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, echoed these sentiments, saying the decision reeks of discrimination. (YWN World Headquarters NYC) Japanese authorities handed over pieces of the wreckage from an U.S. Air Force Osprey that crashed off southwestern Japan to the U.S. military on Sunday, as the search continued for seven missing servicemembers. The only body so far recovered has now been formally identified. The wreckage had been collected by a ship from the regional coast guard headquarters and by fishers from the town of Yakushima since the CV-22 aircraft crashed into the water near the town Wednesday during a training mission to Okinawa. Japan Coast Guard 10th Regional Headquarters said the unidentified pieces of wreckage, which had been kept at the town hall, were handed over to the U.S. military for further examination. Debris collected by the fishers had been picked up by the U.S. military earlier Sunday, and that collected by the coast guard was also to be handed over later in the day. The handover is procedure according to the Japan-U.S. Status Forces Agreement, under which Japanese authorities are not given the right to seize or investigate U.S. military property unless the U.S. decides otherwise. That means it will be practically impossible for Japan to investigate the cause of the accident. The agreement, known as SOFA, has in the past repeatedly made Japanese investigation difficult in criminal cases involving American service members on Okinawa and elsewhere, and has been criticized as unequal by rights activists and others, including Okinawa Gov. Denny Tamaki, who call for a revision. The Air Force Special Operations Command formally identified the one confirmed victim as Air Force Staff Sgt. Jacob Galliher of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on Saturday, after tributes had begun pouring in the day before. Gallihers family issued a statement Saturday saying it was in mourning and asking for privacy and prayers for his wife, two children and other family members. Jacob was an incredible son, brother, husband, father and friend to so many. His short life touched and made better the lives of hundreds, if not thousands in Pittsfield, in this region and everywhere he served, the family said. Jacob lived to serve his family, his country and the people he loved. The U.S. military said it was continuing to look for the rest of the crew. We want to assure our air commandos families that our efforts will continue and include every possible capability at our disposal, said Rear Adm. Jeromy Williams, Pacific commander for the Special Operations Command. U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, in a statement Sunday, said your heart and your spirit are torn when you see a young man with such promise lose his life in the service of a set of ideals. He said the top priority is the safety of the servicemembers, as well as the communities where they operate, and pledged to make sure the equipment, the aircraft, anything that youre using is safe. Emanuel thanked the Japanese Self Defense Forces, the Coast Guard and the local fishing communities for their support in the search for the seven still missing, and promised full transparency. Obviously, in a fully transparent way as we investigate what happened, to rectify it, we will be transparent with our partner, Japan. And while there are a lot of questions to be answered, we are focused like a laser on the search and rescue operation to secure the safety of the other servicemembers, Emanuel said, but did not say if the U.S. side would allow Japanese authorities into the crash probe. (AP) Multinational pharmaceutical company Novartis said on Friday it would invest more than 600 million yuan ($84 million) in a new radiopharmaceutical production site to accelerate the introduction of innovative radioligand therapy that will benefit cancer patients in China. The site, located in the Nuclear Technology Application (Isotope) Industrial Park in Haiyan county of Zhejiang province, is scheduled to kick-start production by the end of 2026. "China is one of the most strategic markets for Novartis. The company has deep roots in the country, continually investing in and promoting local collaboration and expanding its presence in the China market," said Ingrid Zhang, president and managing director of Novartis China. "We look forward to establishing the new production site as a crucial step toward accelerating the introduction of radioligand therapy in China, contributing to the development of the nuclear medical industry and the clinical utilization of related therapies," she said. Upon completion, it will be Novartis' second innovative medicine production site in China. "Haiyan is located at the heart of the city cluster of the Yangtze River Delta region, providing the project with extensive market advantages. Meanwhile, I believe the project will bring immeasurable benefits to our county," said Chen Feng, deputy director of the standing committee of the People's Congress of Haiyan. Currently, the company operates a factory in Beijing's Changping district that was set up in 1987 with a total investment exceeding 700 million yuan. The unit has a maximum production capacity of 3 billion tablets and 400 million boxes of packaging annually. Radioligand therapy is a new generation of targeted therapeutic radiopharmaceuticals that can be selectively targeted to bind to the corresponding diseased tissues, using radiation energy to kill them. Due to the moderate distance of the radiation, it can minimize damage to healthy cells while achieving the purpose of precise treatment. Novartis has about 10 radioligand therapy-related products in development, covering a range of oncology diseases. An innovative medicine for Novartis' targeted radioligand therapy has been approved in the United States and the European Union to treat a type of prostate cancer. A multicenter clinical study on the therapy is underway in China. According to the 2022 White Paper on the Development of China's Innovative Pharmaceutical Enterprises, China's pharmaceutical market has leapt from just 2 percent of the global market to the world's second-largest after the United States over the past three decades due to the continuous promotion of medical reform and the expansion of medical insurance. Such changes have, in turn, attracted foreign enterprises to invest further in the market and introduce innovative products. For example, during the China International Import Expo held in Shanghai last month, the first and only targeted drug approved in China for the treatment of chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGVHD) by French pharmaceutical company Sanofi made its Asia debut. Experts said that hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is often the main means for patients with hematologic malignancies, but about 30 to 70 percent of patients who undergo allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation will develop cGVHD. Communities across Africa are facing the worst food crisis in 40 years. Conflict, economic shocks, climate extremes and rising prices of fertilizer and food stuffs are combining to create a crisis of unprecedented proportions. According to the Red Cross, some 160 million Africans go to bed hungry nearly every night. The Horn of Africa is at the intersection of all of these challenges, said United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Increasing fuel prices, combined with both a historic dry spell and devastating flooding, compounded by brutal civil conflict, and worsened by Russias blockade of Ukrainian grains and fertilizer, have created a five-alarm food security crisis. And the situation is increasingly more dire, she said. And I am proud that the United States has provided more than 1.4 billion in aid across the Horn of Africa in the last year dollars alone. And that we are the worlds largest single donor of international food assistance, helping more than 60 million hungry people in nearly 60 countries around the world. Food aid and other humanitarian assistance are all well and good, but theyre not enough. We need to invest in renewable energy; to sow the seeds of peace in areas of intense conflict; and to partner across governments, between people, and with the private sector, said Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield. And we need programs that help Africans to help themselves, to grow their own food. Thats where the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils, or VACS, comes in. A collaborative effort between the U.S. Government, the African Union and the UNs Food and Agriculture Organization, VACS seeks to adapt agricultural systems, initially in Africa, to the future challenges of climate change. VACS focuses on the development of climate-resilient seeds, often those of traditional crops; and improvement of soil health, to boost agricultural production and to foster more resilient food systems. From developing healthy, sustainable soils and diverse, climate-resilient crops, to empowering farmers, policy makers, and suppliers, this initiative will make Africas food system more productive, more cost-effective, and more resilient, said Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Millions of lives are at stake. And global security is at stake, too. Because we know that while conflict is the number one driver of hunger, hunger is also a core indicator of conflict. And so, this crisis has to be at the top of all of our agenda. Ukrainian officials on Sunday launched an investigation into allegations that Russian forces killed surrendering Ukrainian soldiers, a war crime if confirmed, after grainy footage on social media appeared to show two uniformed men being shot at close range after emerging from a dugout. The video shows the servicemen, one of them with his hands up, walking out at gunpoint and lying down on the ground before a group of Russian troops appears to open fire. It was not immediately possible to verify the videos authenticity or the circumstances in which it was filmed, and it was unclear when the incident took place. The Ukrainian General Prosecutors office on Sunday launched a criminal investigation, hours after the Ukrainian militarys press office said in an online statement that the footage is genuine. The video shows a group in Russian uniforms shooting, at point-blank range, two unarmed servicemen in the uniform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who were surrendering, the prosecutors office said in a Telegram update on Sunday. Kyiv, its Western allies and international human rights organizations have repeatedly accused Moscow of breaching international humanitarian law since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Kremlin denies these allegations. The video first appeared Saturday on DeepState, a popular Ukrainian Telegram channel covering the war. The post claimed the footage came from the front lines near Avdiivka, a Ukrainian holdout in the countrys part-occupied east where there has been fierce fighting in recent weeks. The General Prosecutors Office on Sunday said that the alleged killing took place in the Pokrovsk district, which includes Avdiivka and surrounding areas. Its clear from the video that the Ukrainian servicemen are taking the necessary steps that show they are surrendering, Ukraines human rights chief, Dmytro Lubinets, said hours after the footage emerged on Saturday. In a statement posted to Telegram, Lubinets described the incident as yet another glaring example of Russias violations of international humanitarian law. Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military grouping that is fighting near Avdiivka, was cited by Ukrainian media as saying the video was glaring confirmation of Moscows disrespect for the laws of war. In March, footage of a man exclaiming Glory to Ukraine before being gunned down in a wooded area sparked national outcry in Ukraine, as senior officials alleged that he was an unarmed prisoner of war killed by Russian soldiers. Last summer, Kyiv and Moscow also traded blame for a shelling attack on a prison in occupied eastern Ukraine that killed dozens of Ukrainian POWs. Both sides claimed the assault on the facility in Olenivka was aimed at covering up atrocities, with Ukrainian officials charging captive soldiers had been tortured and executed there. The U.N.s human rights chief in July rejected Moscows claim that a rocket strike had caused the blast. Also on Sunday, Ukraines energy ministry reported that close to 1,000 towns and villages suffered power outages that day, with hundreds of settlements in the west battered by wintry weather and others affected by ongoing fighting. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, late on Saturday assessed that military operations have slowed down all along the frontline in Ukraine due to poor weather, with mud bogging down tracked vehicles and making it hard for lighter equipment and infantry to advance. Even so, Shtupun, of Ukraines Tavria military command that oversees the stretch of frontline near Avdiivka, said in a separate statement Sunday that Russian infantry attacks had intensified in the area over the past day. In a Telegram post, he insisted Ukrainian troops were holding firm in Avdiivka and another nearby town. Elsewhere, a 78-year-old civilian man died in Ukraines southern Kherson region after Russian shells slammed into his garage, the Ukrainian local military administration reported. (AP) House Speaker Mike Johnson traveled to Westchester County, NY, on Sunday to attend a pair of fundraisers for Rep. Mike Lawler (NY-17), who is up for reelection in 2024. Following the fundraiser, Speaker Johnson attended a meeting with various rabbanim and community leaders to discuss the left-wing assault on private education across New York. Numerous rabbanim participated in the meeting with the speaker, including Rav Chaim Flohr, Rav Refoel Schorr, Rav Mordche Beck, Rav Simcha Yisroel Blum, Aron Yida Blum, the Rav Pinchas Eliezer Meislish, the Rav Chaim Leibish Rottenberg, Rav Yaakov Shapiro, Rav Moshe Kessler, Rav Bentzion Laub, the Satmar Dayan of Williamsburg, Rav Mordche Mecholowitz, and Rav Elya Ber Wachtfogel, who arrived just as the meeting concluded after having become stuck in traffic due to heavy rain. The rabbanim beseeched Speaker Johnson to use the power of the federal government to push back against creeping leftist activism in New York schools, particularly as it pertains to Jewish education across the state. The speaker, who is a deeply religious man himself, responded by affirming his support for private Jewish education in New York, noting that New York bureaucrats attacks against Orthodox Jewish schools are not only a serious concern for Orthodox Jewry, but for all religions. Speaker Johnson then praised Rep. Lawler, saying that the Jewish community has no better ally than him in Washington, and invited the rabbanim to another meeting in the near future in Washington, which would include the participation of various other rabbanim, as well. (YWN World Headquarters NYC) Alaska Airlines said Sunday it agreed to buy Hawaiian Airlines in a $1.9 billion deal, including debt, putting it on track for a potential clash with a Biden administration that has shown wariness about higher fares in the industry. The combined company would keep both airlines brands, rooted in the nations 49th and 50th states. Alaska will pay $18 in cash for each share of Hawaiian, whose stock closed Friday at $4.86 after losing just over half its value in the year so far. The deal also includes $900 million in Hawaiian debt, which the airlines said brings the acquisitions total value to $1.9 billion. The combined airline would be based in Seattle, with Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci at its head. The companies forecast the acquisition will add to profits within two years of the deal closing. The combined airline would participate in the oneworld Alliance, which includes American Airlines, British Airways and Cathay Pacific. Alaska and Hawaiian are both smaller than the nations dominant carriers, but they said a combination would meld two complementary networks to offer more connectivity to 138 destinations for passengers traveling through the continental United States and across the Pacific, including nonstop service to 29 international destinations in the Americas, Asia, Australia and the South Pacific. Hawaiian has a deep and long history within the islands, stretching back to its incorporation in 1929 under the name Inter-Island Airways. The companies said they would keep Honolulu as a key hub and that theyre committed to maintaining and growing union-represented workforce in Hawaii. They also said the combination would triple the destinations that can be reached within one stop in North America for travelers from Hawaii. We have a longstanding and deep respect for Hawaiian Airlines, for their role as a top employer in Hawaii, and for how their brand and people carry the warm culture of aloha around the globe, Minicucci said in a statement. The deal has been approved by the boards of both companies, but it still needs an OK from the shareholders of Hawaiian Holdings. It will also need the blessing of U.S. regulators, which have resisted more airline consolidation out of fear it could lead to higher fares. Both Hawaiian and Alaska are leading airlines flying between Hawaii and the U.S. mainland, which could raise concerns about lessened competition. The Biden administration is already trying to block JetBlues proposed $3.8 billion acquisition of Sprit Airlines, which would subsume the nations biggest budget carrier. The Justice Department also won a lawsuit that killed a partnership between JetBlue and American Airlines. The average domestic airline fare out of Seattle during the spring was $409.93. That was up from $293.08 two years earlier, according to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The average domestic airline fare out of Honolulu during the spring was $367.94, up from $329.93 two years earlier. The Alaska and Hawaii companies expect the deal to close in 12 to 18 months. ___ This story has been corrected to show that the company boards have already approved the deal. (AP) The Biden administration on Monday sent Congress an urgent warning about the need to approve tens of billions of dollars in military and economic assistance to Ukraine, saying Kyivs war effort to defend itself from Russias invasion may grind to a halt without it. In a letter to House and Senate leaders and released publicly, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young warned the U.S. will run out of funding to send weapons and assistance to Ukraine by the end of the year, saying that would kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield. She added that the U.S. already has run out of money that it has used to prop up Ukraines economy, and if Ukraines economy collapses, they will not be able to keep fighting, full stop. We are out of money and nearly out of time, she wrote. Biden has sought a nearly $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other needs, but it has faced a difficult reception on Capitol Hill, where there is growing skepticism about the magnitude of assistance for Ukraine and where even Republicans supportive of the funding are insisting on U.S.-Mexico border policy changes to halt the flow of migrants as a condition for the assistance. Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled House has passed a standalone assistance package for Israel, which is fighting a war with Hamas in Gaza, while the White House has maintained that all of the priorities must be met. Congress already has allocated $111 billion to assist Ukraine, including $67 billion in military procurement funding, $27 billion for economic and civil assistance and $10 billion for humanitarian aid. Young wrote that all of it, other than about 3% of the military funding, had been depleted by mid-November. The Biden administration has said it has slowed the pace of some military assistance to Kyiv in recent weeks to try to stretch supplies until Congress approves more funding. We are out of money to support Ukraine in this fight, Young wrote. This isnt a next year problem. The time to help a democratic Ukraine fight against Russian aggression is right now. It is time for Congress to act. The letter followed a classified Capitol Hill briefing on Nov. 29 for the top House and Senate leaders on the need for the assistance. Defense and other national security officials briefed the big four congressional leaders as Congress is debating President Joe Bidens nearly $106 billion funding package, which includes $61 billion for Ukraine but has become snared by Republican demands for U.S.-Mexico border security changes. They were clear that Ukraine needs the aid soon and so does our military need the aid soon, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told The Associated Press in an interview. (AP) The Chinese military said that an American naval ship had illegally intruded on Monday into waters near the Second Thomas Shoal, the site of a hot territorial dispute between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. A Chinese naval force was mobilized to track the USS Gabrielle Giffords during the operation, according to a statement from the Peoples Liberation Army Southern Theater. The U.S. Navys 7th Fleet said the ship was conducting routine operations in international waters consistent with international law. Chinese and Philippine naval and coast guard ships have confronted each other repeatedly around the shoal in the Spratly Islands in recent months as China tries to prevent the Philippines from resupplying and repairing a rusting warship that it intentionally ran aground in 1999 to serve as a military outpost. Dwarfed by Chinas military might, the Philippines has sought Americas help in its multiple territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. agreed to an expansion of the U.S. military presence in the country early this year and launched joint sea and air patrols with the United States late last month. China accuses the U.S. of meddling in waters far from its shores and renewed its charge that America is the one raising regional tensions following the sailing of the USS Giffords near Second Thomas Shoal. The ship is a littoral combat ship designed to operate in coastal areas. The U.S. deliberately disrupted the situation in the South China Sea, seriously violated Chinas sovereignty and security, seriously undermined regional peace and stability, and seriously violated international law and basic norms governing international relations, fully demonstrating that the U.S. is the biggest threat to peace and stability in the South China Sea, the statement from the Chinese militarys Southern Theater said. China has staked claim to virtually all of the reefs and other outcroppings in the South China Sea, building some into islands with runways that could be used by the military. Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei also say they are the rightful owners of territory in the same waters in a complex web of overlapping claims. The U.S. has long been the major military power patrolling the South China Sea, an important shipping lane and fishing grounds, operating out of bases in the Pacific. Chinas emergence as a military power and its ambitions to be a regional and global power are challenging American long-standing dominance. A statement from the U.S. Navys 7th Fleet, based in Japan, said its operations in the South China Sea demonstrate a commitment to upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific region where all nations, large and small, are secure in their sovereignty, can resolve disputes without coercion, and have the freedom to navigate and fly consistent with international laws, rules and norms. The Philippine coast guard said Sunday that it had sent two ships to Whitsun Reef, another disputed territory in the Spratly Islands, to challenge and document what it estimated to be more than 135 Chinese vessels massing in the area. The Philippines called them a maritime militia and said their presence is illegal. The vessels did not respond to radio challenges, the coast guard said. China, as in similar incidents in the past, said the reef belongs to China and that the nearby waters are an important operating area and shelter for Chinese fishing boats. It is reasonable and lawful for Chinese fishing boats to operate and take shelter in the waters, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said. The Philippine side should not make irresponsible remarks about that. (AP) JOIN THE TENS OF THOUSANDS WHO ALREADY ARE ALERTED OF BREAKING NEWS LIKE THIS IN LIVE TIME: YWN WHATSAPP STATUS UPDATES: CLICK HERE to join the YWN WhatsApp Status. YWN WHATSAPP GROUPS: CLICK HERE to be added to an official YWN WhatsApp Group. MAKE SURE TO CHECK THIS PAGE FREQUENTLY AS UPDATES WILL BE PUBLISHED IN LIVE TIME THERE IS NO NEED TO REFRESH THIS PAGE AS UPDATES WILL APPEAR AUTOMATICALLY (YWN World Headquarters NYC) Chief Rabbi HaRav Yosef Yitzchak, the Nasi of the Beit Din HaGadol, paskened that several Israelis abducted to Gaza can be declared dead. HaRav Yitzchak issued the psak after a meeting in his office with senior IDF and security officials, forensic and health officials, Chief Rabbi of the IDF Eyal Karim and other Rabbanim, and the director of the Religious Services Ministry Yehudah Avidan. The security officials presented their findings and data about the hostages in question to HaRav Yitzchak. The data includes, among other things, footage from surveillance cameras of the October 7th attack and testimony from released hostages. The psak allows the families to sit shiva even without a levaya [as the bodies of the niftarim are being held by Hamas in Gaza] and is mattir the wives of the men who were declared dead to remarry. Religious Services Minister Michael Malchiali said: Lengthy and in-depth discussions with the heads of the security system, the members of the Forensic Medicine Institute, the Health Ministry, and the Ministrys Director-General Yehudah Avidan enabled HaRav Yitzchak Yosef to reach his psak, which was carried out with special sensitivity in light of the circumstances and numerous ramifications. All of the employees of the office who acted and are still acting on this painful issue support the dear families at this difficult time and offer condolences for the deaths of their loved ones at the hands of the abominable Hamas murderers. (YWN Israel Desk Jerusalem) Israeli ambassador to the U.N., Gilad Erdan, issued a scathing condemnation of billionaire and left-wing activist George Soros for reportedly funding a network of nongovernmental organizations that support Hamas. Soros is said to have contributed over $15 million to these groups, according to reports. George Soros donations to organizations that seek the destruction of the State of Israel as a Jewish state is shameful. However, I am not surprised, Erdan said in a statement to Fox News Digital. For years, Soros has backed and transferred money to organizations supporting BDS that want to isolate Israel. They have never been about real peace or any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Various investigations have shown that Soros Open Societies Foundation funneled significant funds into anti-Israel NGOs supporting Hamas. The New York Post last month reported Soros funding to groups perceived as anti-Israel and supportive of Hamas agenda. Among the recipients of OSF donations is the Tides Center in California, which argues that the obliteration of the Jewish state is justified. Accusations against OSF include funding Jewish NGOs like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and IfNotNow, which exploit their Jewish identity to campaign against Israel. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has criticized JVP for its stance against Israel and Zionism, and highlighted IfNotNows role in anti-Israel campaigns in the U.S. since October 7. (YWN World Headquarters NYC) The IDF announced the deaths of three additional soldiers killed during fighting in the Gaza Strip. Their deaths bring the IDFs ground operation death toll to 75 and 401 since October 7th. The soldiers were identified as: Sergeant Major Neriya Shaer, 36, a soldier in Battalion 6655, Brigade 55, killed in battle in the center of the Gaza Strip. Sergeant Ben Zussman, 22, a soldier in the 601st Battalion, 401st Brigade of the Combat Engineering Corps, killed yesterday in a battle in the northern Gaza Strip. Sergeant Binyamin Yehoshua Needham, 19, a soldier in the 601st Battalion, 401st Brigade of the Combat Engineering Corps, killed yesterday in a battle in the northern Gaza Strip. Additionally, the IDF says a soldier from the 601st Battalion, 401st Brigade, was seriously injured during fighting in the northern Gaza Strip. (YWN World Headquarters NYC) Israeli women who were released from captivity in Gaza revealed that they were interrogated, sometimes violently, about their past IDF service, Army Radio reported on Monday morning. According to the report, the released hostages said that their army service and any information about the IDF was the main interest of the Hamas terrorists. The women, none of whom were active IDF soldiers, were interrogated for hours about their service and some said that the terrorists used physical force to extract information from them The terrorists even tested the hostages testimony by investigating neighbors who lived on the same kibbutz and asking each one about her neighbors military service to cross-reference their testimonies and test their credibility. (YWN Israel Desk Jerusalem) Chairman of the National Assembly Vuong Dinh Hue arrived in Vientiane on December 4. (Photo: VNA) The trip was made at the invitation of Chairman of the Lao National Assembly Saysomphone Phomvihane. During his stay in Laos, the Vietnamese top legislator will have meetings with high-ranking leaders of the Lao Party, State and National Assembly to discuss measures enhancing the bilateral cooperation in the coming time. He will also join in several economic and cultural events, including meetings with Lao people who used to study in Vietnam, and the Vietnamese businesses and Vietnamese community in Laos. Following activities in Laos, the Vietnamese NA leader will attend the parliamentary summit of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (CLV), with three topics covering foreign affairs, economy, culture-society, and defence-security. The Vietnamese top legislators attendance in the first summit aims to enhance the friendship, solidarity, and comprehensive cooperation among the three parliaments for their countries sustainable development in the CLV Development Triangle Area and the three economies connectivity. At the 43rd General Assembly of the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (AIPA) in December 2022, NA Chairman Hue and his counterparts Heng Samrin of Cambodia and Saysomphone Phomvihane of Laos signed a joint statement on establishing the CLV Parliamentary Summit mechanism, held biennially and co-chaired by the three NA chairpersons. The establishment of the parliamentary summit is a move that helps concretise the outcomes of the high-level meeting among Party leaders of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam in September 2021. The first summit in Laos is a milestone in the cooperation history of the three parliaments, helping elevate the collaboration to the highest level, and contributing to consolidating and enhancing the traditional relations and special solidarity among the three Parties, States and peoples./. A US study revealed an unusual volume of transactions at the New York and Tel Aviv stock exchanges that gambled on the collapse of the Israeli stock market a week before the October 7th attack, The Marker revealed for the first time on Monday The report was based on a study called Trading on Terror?, carried out by two of the greatest US experts in the field of securities law: Prof. Robert Jackson Jr. of New York University, formerly one of the heads of the American Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Prof. Joshua Mitts of Columbia University, an expert in short transactions. A short trade is a trade in which a trader bets against the performance of a stock or some asset, and profits when its value falls. The researchers examined short transactions carried out in the MSCI Israel Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) and Israeli companies listed in the US and on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. The examination found strong signs that investors expected that a cataclysmic event would occur in early October that would lead to the collapse of the Israeli stock market. On October 2, about a quarter of a million transactions were made that expected a drop in Israeli stocks, compared to a few thousand per day in the previous month. The shorted shares included the stocks of Bank Poalim, Bank Leumi, Bank Discount, Bank Mizrachi-Tefachot, and companies such as Teva, Elbit, and ICL. The short selling far exceeded the short selling that occurred during numerous other periods of crisis, including the recession following the financial crisis, the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers wrote. Similarly, we identify increases in short selling before the attack in dozens of Israeli companies traded in Tel Aviv. For one Israeli company alone, 4.43 million new shares sold short over the September 14 to October 5 period yielded profits of NIS 3.2 billion ($890 million) on that additional short selling. Although we see no aggregate increase in shorting of Israeli companies on US exchanges, we do identify a sharp and unusual increase, just before the attacks, in trading in risky short-dated options on these companies expiring just after the attacks. We identify similar patterns in the Israeli ETFs at times when it was reported that Hamas was planning to execute a similar attack as in October. Our findings suggest that traders informed about the coming attacks profited from these tragic events, and consistent with prior literature we show that trading of this kind occurs in the gaps of US and international enforcement of legal prohibitions on informed trading. (YWN Israel Desk Jerusalem) The reservist soldier suspected of killing a man he mistook for a terrorist during the Jerusalem terror attack last week was arrested on Monday morning by the Military Police. Yuval Castleman, zl, an armed civilian, opened fire at the terrorists who carried out the attack on Thursday, neutralizing at least one of them and saving many lives. But in a tragic turn of events, a nearby reservist then mistook Castleman for a third terrorist and opened fire at him, despite the fact that he was holding his arms in the air. He died of his wounds hours later. The suspect was interrogated for the first time on Sunday. He was arrested on Monday after contradictions were discovered between his testimony and findings at the scene. The reservists lawyers said: The soldier was interrogated for many hours. During the investigation, he gave his detailed version, answered everything that was asked, expressed his consent to undergo a polygraph test and expressed his deep sorrow for the death of Yuval, zl, and asked to convey his sincere condolences to the grieving family. The video clips from the scene of the attack published on social media and their camera angles create a partial and misleading impression that does not reflect what was seen and heard from the soldiers direction. The additional shooting by the soldier towards Yuval, zl must be examined according to all the circumstances and the real-time situation the soldier saw. From where the soldier was standing, from the sights he saw and the sounds he heard, he was completely convinced that he was firing at a terrorist who still posed a life-threatening risk to him and everyone around him. He had no intention of carrying out an extrajudicial killing and that wasnt how he acted. Immediately after he saw that that person was hit and was lying down, he stopped firing. After hearing the soldiers testimony, we have no doubt that under these extremely unusual circumstances, the Military Advocate Generals Office will also reach the clear conclusion that, with all the deep sorrow for the terrible result, this is a tragic mistake that does not justify taking criminal measures against the soldier. (YWN Israel Desk Jerusalem) Fox News host Mark Levin sharply criticized President Joe Bidens approach towards Israel, accusing him of betraying the Jewish nation in favor of Hamas. Levins Sunday night broadcast was marked by a vehement condemnation of the current administrations policies in the Middle East, contrasting them with the actions of former President Donald Trump. Levin highlighted Trumps support for Israel, citing the Abraham Accords and his aggressive stance towards Iran as evidence of his commitment to Israel as an ally. The host then turned his critique towards President Biden, claiming that the current administration is seeking to weaken Israel while empowering Iran. Levin alleged that the Biden administration has re-armed Iran and neglected to uphold the restrictions on Irans nuclear program set by Trump. He said, They have to empower Iran. Irans economy needs to be strong while they weaken Israel. While they begin the process of controlling Israel, quote unquote, demilitarizing Israel, stressing his belief that the Biden administration perceives Israel as the main problem in the Middle East. Levin also accused Secretary of State Antony Blinken and President Biden of sabotaging the efforts of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. They are undermining, sabotaging Israel and the Netanyahu government, Levin said. They dont want them to win against Hamas. In fact, theyre siding with Hamas! They wont say it openly. Openly, they have what they call the big hug. See were with Israel. Well, as I said last night, theyre stabbing them in the back. (YWN World Headquarters NYC) But some argue the sum is not enough and investors should reject the deal Neil Woodford was once one of the most popular stock pickers in the UK Investors in the collapsed Woodford Equity Income fund have until 5pm today to register to vote on a controversial 230million compensation package. Some 300,000 investors have been left nursing losses for four years after the cash-strapped fund was suspended and ultimately collapsed in 2019, leading to the demise of Neil Woodfords once-multi-billion-pound investment business. Registered investors will cast a vote on 13 December to approve or reject the compensation scheme, which if approved will see up to 200million paid out in the first quarter of 2024. In order to pass the package will require the approval of 50 per cent of investors by number and 75 per cent by value. Should the package be voted through it will effectively block class actions launched by various law firms against the once-10billion funds administrator Link, and possibly those against other connected parties. Potentially in the firing line for lawsuits, for example, is Hargreaves Lansdown, which promoted the Woodford fund until the day dealings in its shares were suspended. Should investors back the deal? Neil Woodford was once among the UKs most famous and popular stock pickers, with billions of pounds from institutions and individuals flowing into his funds when he started his own business. The collapse of the Woodford Equity Income fund occurred when a run of poor performance led to investors pulling cash out in large volumes, which the fund was unable to service without selling off assets on the cheap. Is your fund on the verge of being wound up? Here's how to salvage your investment What happens to your investment if a fund decides to shut up shop? Here, we explain exactly what happens when a fund goes into liquidation and whether your money will be safe. This ultimately led to Links decision to suspend the fund, which never recovered and was forced to close. The affair led to fierce criticism of Woodford, Link, platforms advertising the fund and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the latter of which has been forced to reassess rules after facing scrutiny in Parliament. The FCA announced the scale of the compensation package in April, but many critics have argued the 230million sum is unfair to investors. Some experts suggest investors are entitled to closer to 1billion in compensation. Many also argue that Woodford, Link and the regulator have not been held sufficiently accountable for the funds downfall. The FCA has said it considers the scheme the 'quickest and best chance to obtain a better outcome' for investors. PM Pham Minh Chinh delivers a speech at the G77 summit on climate change in Dubai on December 2 afternoon. (Photo: VNA) The event was chaired by President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez of Cuba, which holds the 2023 chairmanship of G77 a group of developing countries. It saw the presence of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and leaders and representatives of 134 member states of G77 and international organisations. Addressing the summits main debate, PM Chinh hailed Cubas initiative to hold the event and affirmed the Caribbean countrys leadership as Chair of G77. He emphasised the importance of effective climate change response to the world and Vietnam and proposed three cooperation orientations for G77. First, it is necessary to promote a global and all people-based approach and uphold multilateralism with the motto of common but differentiated responsibilities, justice, and reasonableness with socio-economic development demand of developing countries taken into account. Second, science, technology, and innovation should be turned into the key cooperation area of G77 on the basis of establishing an inclusive cooperation mechanism and capitalising on the strengths of both developed countries (capital, technology) and developing ones (markets, resources). Third, preferential climate finance should be promoted in a way that makes it more accessible, does not increase the debt burden, and not at the expense of resources for realising other development goals. The G77 summit on climate change takes place on December 2 as part of COP28 in Dubai. (Photo: VNA) The PM highlighted Vietnams green transition resolve as seen in its strong commitments announce at COP26, participation in the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), and implementation of plans, projects, and strategies on green growth, sustainable development, and energy transition. The Vietnamese leader expressed readiness to coordinate and share experience with other G77 members. In his remarks, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez underlined the importance of enhancing international solidarity and cooperation in response to major global challenges. He called on G77 countries to stay united, share voice, and ensure the rights and legitimate interests of developing countries that are being directly and severely affected by climate change. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stressed the role of developing countries in promoting a multilateral process for climate targets and calling for climate justice. He urged developed nations to quickly increase assistance for the countries of the Global South and, especially, deliver on their climate finance commitments. The summit welcomed and highly valued the turning-point significance of the adoption of the Loss and Damage Fund. It affirmed the need to bring into play the role of G77, step up actions, and boost effective solutions to climate change./. Leaders attended the closing ceremony at the 13th Vietnam Trade Union Congress. (Photo: CPV) On December 3, the 13th Vietnam Trade Union Congress closed at the National Convention Center. The Congress elected a new executive committee and its leader. The event was attended by permanent member of Party Central Committees Secretariat and Head of the PCCs Commission of Organization, Truong Thi Mai; Secretary of the Party Central Committee and President of the Viet Nam Fatherland Front Central Committee, Do Van Chien; and PCC member and Deputy Prime Minister Tran Hong Ha. Nguyen Dinh Khang, president of the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL), was re-elected head of the organisation. (Photo: CPV) Speaking at the closing ceremony, Member of the Party Central Committee, Chairman of the Vietnam General Confederation of Labor Nguyen Dinh Khang stated clearly that after 3 days of active, urgent, serious and high-responsibility work, the 13th Vietnam Trade Union Congress has completed all the contents of the proposed program. The opening ceremony of the Congress was honored to welcome Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, State President Vo Van Thuong, and National Assembly Chairman Vuong Dinh Hue. Nguyen Dinh Khang represented 168 members of the 13th Executive Committee to deliver a speech accepting their duties. (Photo: CPV) Party leader Nguyen Phu Trong delivered a speech, making major recommendations for the Vietnam Trade Union to better perform its role in the changing global environment. Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong has asked the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL) to develop long-term social welfare programmes for employees to better cater to their needs and to ensure they feel comfortable at work. Leaders of the Vietnam General Confederation of Labor presented flowers to say goodbye to members of the Executive Committee and members of the Inspection Committee of the Vietnam General Confederation of Labor, term XII. (Photo: CPV) The congress showed its strong resolve to renovate Trade Union organization and activities, build a comprehensively strong Vietnam Trade Union, with a primary focus on meeting the requirements of the new context, protecting the legal and legitimate rights and interests of union members and workers, and actively engaging in State management and socio-economic management. The congress asked grassroots-level Trade Unions to formulate a plan of actions to materialize the congress resolution in order to make a breakthrough in the workers movement and Vietnam Trade Union activities. Delegates voted to approve criteria of the Congress. (Photo: CPV) On behalf of the new executive committee, VGCL president Nguyen Dinh Khang called on Trade Union officials, members, and workers nationwide to unite and uphold the spirit of responsibility and innovation, to overcome all difficulties and challenges and successfully implement the congress resolution in the coming five years till 2028. The 13th National Trade Union Congress took place in Hanoi from December 1-3 with the participation of 1,095 delegates. The Congress agreed on the following targets: Targets until the end of the term: - The whole country has 15 million trade union members, established grassroots organizations in 100% of enterprises with 25 or more employees. - At least 83% of enterprises and units have trade unions that meet the conditions prescribed by law to have unions negotiate and sign collective labor agreements in accordance with the law. - Striving to have 90% or more of labor cases taken to court being supported by the union, participating in protection proceedings when requested by union members. Breakthrough stages: (1) Promoting dialogue and collective bargaining, with the focus on wages, bonuses, working hours, rest hours, and labor safety and hygiene. (2) Focusing on developing trade union members and establishing grassroots trade unions in non-state enterprises. (3) Building a team of grassroots union presidents to meet task requirements, especially union presidents at non-state enterprises./. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) SHANGHAI/YANCHENG, Jiangsu, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed the need to speed up building Shanghai into a modern, socialist and international metropolis by focusing on the construction of international centers of economy, finance, trade, shipping and sci-tech innovation. Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks during an inspection tour in Shanghai that ran from Tuesday to Saturday. Xi urged Shanghai to accelerate building itself into a modern, socialist and international metropolis with global influence, and play a leading and exemplary role in advancing Chinese modernization. He inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange on Tuesday afternoon as soon as he got off a train. Xi urged the exchange to speed up the construction of a world-class exchange, and make greater contributions to exploring the futures regulatory system and business model with Chinese characteristics and building an international financial center. When visiting Zhangjiang Science City in the Pudong New Area, Xi said promoting Chinese modernization can not be separated from the strategic support of science and technology, education and talent, and that Shanghai should take a lead in this respect. On Wednesday afternoon, Xi visited a residential community in Minhang District that is dedicated to providing affordable rental housing for new urban dwellers, young people and frontline workers. Xi said he was pleased to see city builders from all over the country living and working here with joy and contentment. Migrant workers who come to make contributions in Shanghai are also masters of the city, he said. On Friday morning, Xi was briefed on the city's work by the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee and the Shanghai municipal government. Xi noted that accelerating the construction of Shanghai as international centers of economy, finance, trade, shipping and sci-tech innovation is an important task entrusted to the city by the CPC Central Committee. Xi stressed that Shanghai should intensify its research to achieve breakthroughs in core technologies in key fields, boost the transformation and upgrading of its traditional industries, and continuously enhance its status as an international center of economy and its influence in global economic governance. More efforts should be made to promote high-level financial opening-up to better serve the real economy, sci-tech innovation, and the joint development of the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi said. He noted that the city should implement its strategy of upgrading its pilot free trade zone in full, promote the development of the international trade center, and enhance its capability of global allocation of shipping resources. Xi stressed that Shanghai should comprehensively deepen reform and opening-up from a higher starting point, urging the city to devote significant energy to promoting pioneering reform and opening-up on all fronts. Shanghai should also foster a world-class business environment, stimulate the vitality of various business entities, and strengthen its attractiveness to high-end resources at home and abroad, he noted. Xi pointed out that Shanghai should explore a new path of modernization in megacity governance with Chinese characteristics, and that improving people's living standards and well-being is the original aspiration and ultimate goal of urban construction and governance. He highlighted efforts to deepen culture-related institutional reforms and invigorate the innovation and creativity of culture. Noting that Shanghai is the birthplace of the Communist Party of China, Xi emphasized the importance of making good use of local resources to carry forward the great founding spirit of the Party and build a team of high-caliber, professional officials that matches the standards of a modern, socialist and international metropolis. On his return journey to Beijing on Sunday, Xi visited a memorial hall of the New Fourth Army in Yancheng, a city in east China's Jiangsu Province. Cai Qi, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and director of the CPC Central Committee general office, was also on the inspection tour. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Ju Peng) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Ju Peng) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Shen Hong) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi) Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, visits a memorial hall of the New Fourth Army in Yancheng, east China's Jiangsu Province, Dec. 3, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in Shanghai from Tuesday to Saturday. On his return journey to Beijing on Sunday, Xi visited the memorial hall in Yancheng. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) Editor: ZAD Slovenia will provide Ukraine with EUR1.5 million on an irrevocable basis for humanitarian demining by the end of 2023, the press service of the Ministry of Economy reported. "Ukraine is extremely grateful to the Government of Slovenia and the Slovenian people for the tangible support and assistance received from the first day of the Russian aggression. EUR 1.5 million, which Ukraine is incredibly grateful to receive today from the people of Slovenia, will help provide the sappers of the State Emergency Service and the State Special Transport Service with the necessary personal protection, equipment and demining equipment. These funds will help speed up the cleansing of the territory of our country from explosives and will save the lives and health of many Ukrainians," said Yulia Svyrydenko, First Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine, Minister of Economy of Ukraine. She also thanked Slovenia for participating in the sectoral working group on donor coordination. As Svyrydenko stressed, Ukraine strives in close cooperation and dialogue with partners to develop long-term solutions and initiate projects that will not only meet urgent needs, but also lay the foundation for long-term cooperation in this area. According to the Ministry of Economy, the agreement on the allocation of assistance for humanitarian demining in Ljubljana on December 4, 2023 was signed on behalf of the Ukrainian government by Ambassador of Ukraine to the Republic of Slovenia Andriy Taran, on behalf of the Government of Slovenia Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia Tanja Fajon. The signing ceremony was attended online by Minister of Economy of Ukraine Yulia Svyrydenko and Ambassador of the Republic of Slovenia to Ukraine Tomaz Mencin. As reported, Ukraine is the most mined country in the world. Almost a third of the country's territory is considered potentially dangerous about 174,000 square kilometers. The Ukrainian government has announced its intention to return 80% of these territories to economic exploitation within 10 years. Exterior of Albany Airport Inn which is hosting migrants in Colonie, N.Y. on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023. The hotel used to be called SureStay by Best Western Albany Airport. Lori Van Buren/Times Union People arrive at the Albany Airport Inn which is hosting migrants in Colonie, N.Y. on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023. The hotel used to be called SureStay by Best Western Albany Airport. Lori Van Buren/Times Union New sign for Albany Airport Inn which is hosting migrants in Colonie, N.Y. on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023. The hotel used to be called SureStay by Best Western Albany Airport. Lori Van Buren/Times Union Bikes are seen in the back of Albany Airport Inn which is hosting migrants in Colonie, N.Y. on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023. The hotel used to be called SureStay by Best Western Albany Airport. Lori Van Buren/Times Union COLONIE The Wolf Road hotel that entered into an agreement to house migrants last May is no longer affiliated with a national hotel chain. The former SureStay Plus by Best Western Albany Airport is now Albany Airport Inn, as noted on a recent change to the hotels sign. Hotel manager Tyler Kinney told the Times Union that Best Western and the airport inns owner, a limited liability company called ESAlbany LLC run by Boston-based hotel owners, came to a mutual agreement in late October to end the franchise affliation. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Kinney said we felt we wanted to upgrade away from Best Western, but acknowledged the hotel owners contract to continue housing migrants bused from New York City was one reason for the partnership ending. The hotel is under contract with DocGo, a publicly traded company that has a more than $430 million contract with New York City to help provide lodging and other services for thousands of migrants. Sign up for the Colonie Now newsletter Keep up with the latest happening in the village of Colonie, Latham, Menands, Loudonville, West Albany and more communities throughout the town of Colonie. Sign up here. They knew were housing them and were OK with it, Kinney said of the hotel's franchise with the national chain. He said the franchise agreement was also impacted in part by other guests alleging they didnt feel safe. Officials with Best Western did not respond to a request for comment last week. Advertisement Article continues below this ad In early October, the Times Union reported that Colonie police arrested two migrants at the hotel on charges of assault and weapons possession. In one incident a migrant allegedly brandished a knife during a party and another was charged with misdemeanor assault for allegedly striking his girlfriend. A hotel worker also a non-citizen was charged with sexually assaulting a female patron in a guest room around that time. Kinney said the demographic of their migrant guests has changed since the first arrivals over Memorial Day weekend from single males to almost all migrants who either have children or are adult couples. About 50 percent of the hotels 153 rooms are being used by migrant families, he said, adding with families its been a lot more peaceful. Kinney said the hotel has become a positive hive of activity now that there are children there and attending local public schools. The hotel held a pumpkin-carving event around Halloween, and a holiday party is being planned. The kids are fun, Kinney said. It has changed their whole lives. Advertisement Article continues below this ad DocGo has placed other migrants brought to the area at Ramada Plaza by Wyndam Albany on Watervliet Avenue Extension and the Holiday Inn Express Albany on Broadway, both in Albany. The Albany Police Department previously reported there was a 50 percent decline in calls for service at those two hotels after migrants arrived. The Super 8 by Wyndham in Rotterdam is also housing migrant families under DocGo's care, and those children are attending Mohanasen schools. It appears the other hotels still have their national franchise affiliations, although migrants at the Rotterdam Super 8 and other properties upstate have alleged poor conditions in their care by DocGo, including poor food and lack of access to immigration attorneys. Advertisement Article continues below this ad The Albany Airport Inns manager said its year-long contract with DocGo is not scheduled to expire until May. He said if that contract ends, the hotel will seek to again affiliate with a national chain. A court case in which the the town of Colonie filed code violations against the Wolf Road hotel's owner Amandeep Dhillon whose family has owned it since last year is pending. He is accused of violating a town code that does not allow guests to stay for more than 28-day consecutive days. The hotel filed a motion to merge that case in Town Court with a lawsuit filed in state Supreme Court by Colonie against the hotel, New York City and the city of Albany for relocating migrants in Colonie without coordinating with the town. The proposed merger of those cases is still pending, said Colonie town attorney Guy Roemer. The town is arguing that New York City has unlawfully converted the hotel into a homeless shelter while the hotel says town officials are discriminating against migrants because the town has not sought to shut down other long-term stay lodging facilities. Advertisement Article continues below this ad When asked about the towning allowing hotels to house residents for extended periods when they are receiving Social Services aid, Roemer told the Times Union the town ordinance adopted in 2015 has provisions that allows those residents for stay longer than 28 days, but the hotels must be equipped with kitchenettes that include a refrigerator, sink and food-heating appliance. [December 04, 2023] Ardent Data Centers, a Northern Data Group company, progresses international data center acquisition strategy Tweet 110 million investment strategy to accelerate Ardent's ability to provide co-location services across Europe and the United States Expansion focussed on meeting demand for high-performance computing solutions for Generative AI and other emerging technologies Letters of Intent in place for two sites in the United States and preferred bidder status for a key site in the United Kingdom Additional sites across Europe and the United States being rapidly assessed to further accelerate expansion FRANKFURT, Germany, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Ardent Data Centers, a Northern Data Group company and experts in data center design, build and management, today announces a 110 million investment strategy aimed at expanding its ability to provide co-location services for compute power, across Europe and the United States. Ardent has successfully agreed Letters of Intent (LOI) with two data center sites in the United States and is the preferred bidder on a key, strategic site in the United Kingdom. All three acquisitions are on track to be finalised by the end of Q1 2024, and form part of the overall investment strategy announced by the Northern Data Group. These assets, once acquired, will form part of Ardent Data Centers expanding portfolio of next generation, high-density data centers, providing co-location services across Europe and the US. This capacity will address the surging demand for compute power needed for Generative AI applications and support Northern Data Group's strategy to capture the extensive opportunity in the global HPC market. Ardent's data center environments will feature only themost efficient, purpose-built liquid cooling technology, which results in a lower Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio than current market standards, allowing higher utilization and performance, at a lower cost. All new sites, once successfully added to Ardent's portfolio will be upgraded and retrofitted to meet this standard. This is in line with both Ardent's and Northern Data Group's wider commitment to providing infrastructure that ensures the environmental impact of compute-intensive processes is as light as possible. As part of this strategic expansion, Ardent will support its sister company and anchor tenant, Taiga Cloud, providing more infrastructure for its current and future NVIDIA H100 deployments, starting with the upcoming expansion at Ardent Data Center's sites across Northern Europe. Ardent will also play a key role in Taiga's future expansion. Corey Needles, Managing Director, Ardent Data Centers, commented: "We are focused on building the most efficient, future-ready network of HPC co-location capacity in the market. These sites will represent an important next step in the expansion of our portfolio and are the most recent in a series of investments across strategic locations, with more to come. Powering the next-generation of HPC innovation is central to Northern Data Group's strategy, and scaling Ardent's data center portfolio is core to realizing this ambition." Aroosh Thillainathan, Northern Data Group's Chief Executive Officer, commented: "The rapid progress being made by the Ardent team will support Northern Data Group in providing the infrastructure required to fully capitalize on the vast opportunity in the HPC market. This is a further demonstration of our ability to relentlessly pursue growth opportunities, delivering value for stakeholders, and further establishes our position as a leader in this global industry." About Ardent Data Centers: Ardent Data Centers provide future-ready data centers which are purpose built to power the next generation of HPC. Part of the Northern Data Group, we house the industry's latest chips, combined with the latest liquid cooling systems to offer more power and better availability of on demand, compute-as-a-service infrastructure. With a proven track record of designing and operating high-performance data centers for over twenty five years, we're pioneering a new era of efficiency, delivering greater performance, density and availability. About Northern Data Group: Northern Data Group (ETR: NB2) is a provider of energy-efficient High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure to businesses and research institutions, utilising GPU- and ASIC-based solutions. Through our HPC infrastructure, we pioneer ambitious computing innovation that drives progress in the AI, ML and Generative AI industries. Our close collaboration with industry-leading manufacturers including Gigabyte, AMD, and NVIDIA is fundamental to the acceleration of innovation across sectors including life sciences, financial services and energy. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/ardent-data-centers-a-northern-data-group-company-progresses-international-data-center-acquisition-strategy-302004306.html [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Preeminent distributor of drilling and pile driving foundation equipment selects C2CRM to manage and automate their Customer Relationships and unique Sales Processes Tweet Clear C2, Inc. today announced that Equipment Corporation of America (ECA) has selected C2CRM over other CRM vendors to automate their Customer Relationships, Sales, and Marketing processes. "With C2CRM, it has allowed our sales team to get a more complete and accurate view of customer info by uniformly tracking sales numbers by region, manufacturer and category," said Jeff Harmston, ECA's VP of Sales and Marketing. Jeff goes on to say, "We are also able to email our quotes out of the system with custom PDFs and then manage the pipeline more efficiently." C2CRM was designed to help companies like ECA increase organizational efficiency, strengthen customer loyalty, and improve business processes and sales effectiveness. Accessible to everyone in the organization via its cloud-based solution and mobile application, C2CRM offers instant access to critical customer and prospect information that enables users to maximize their opportunities and increase customer satisfaction. "C2CRM continues to out-perform competing CRM applications by leveraging the flexibility in its architecture to deliver a customized user interface," said Mickey Patton, President of Clear C2, Inc. "Its ease-of-use and intuitiveness ensure a high user adoption rate." About Equipment Corporation of America (ECA) ECA is the deep foundation industry's premier provider of the world's most advanced, innovative and reliable drilling, pile driving, hoisting and rigging, slurry cutting, soil mixing and soil stabilization equipment. Over the past 100 years, they have demonstrated their unrivaled product knowledge, and ultra-responsive service and support, by meeting and exceeding their customers' expectations every day. ECA backs up every sale or rental with expert service, support and value-added know-how to ensure maximum uptime to help make their customers' projects a resounding success. Find more information at www.ecanet.com/ or contact their team at USA: 800-PILE-USA or CANADA: 800-760-0925. About Clear C2, Inc. Clear C2, Inc. was founded in 1993, focusing on publishing and delivering customer-driven technology solutions including C2CRM, a comprehensive middle-market CRM solution designed to integrate sales, marketing and customer service into one seamless, collaborative operation. It consists of several modules that span five solution sets: Relationship Management, Sales Automation, Customer Service, Marketing Automation and Business Intelligence. C2CRM is offered as both an On-Premise and a Cloud-based (SaaS) solution. For additional information on Clear C2, visit http://www.clearc2.com or call 1-972-304-7100. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204744185/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Ukrainian air defense overnight destroyed 18 of 23 attack drones with which Russia attacked at least nine regions of Ukraine, the press service of the Air Force of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has said. "As a result of combat work, 18 attack UAVs and one X-59 guided aircraft missile were destroyed. Air defense worked in at least nine regions of Ukraine," according to the statement. It is noted that on the night of December 4, 2023, the enemy attacked with 23 Shahed-136/131 UAVs from Cape Chauda occupied Crimea and a guided aircraft missile from the airspace of occupied Kherson region. It is reported that fighter aircraft, anti-aircraft missile units and mobile fire groups of the Air Force and Defense Forces of Ukraine are involved in repelling the air attack. [December 03, 2023] Rainforest nations back community-led projects funded through the voluntary carbon market as key to delivering global commitment to end deforestation Tweet DUBAI, UAE, Dec. 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Today at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP28), Ministers and Indigenous leaders from the most important tropical forests in the world spoke at the launch of Equitable Earth - a new voluntary carbon market standard designed to drive climate finance directly to Indigenous peoples and traditional communities. The governments of Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) reiterated commitments to end deforestation, highlighting the crucial role of community-led forest carbon projects in achieving this goal. H.E. Sonia Guajajara, Minister of Indigenous Peoples, Brazil said: "We must end deforestation in the Amazon to help solve the climate crisis. And we must do so with justice and human rights for the forest people for whom forests are home. Therefore, I welcome project initiatives led by communities and respecting Free Prior and Informed Consent, as they will help achieve our climate goals, preservethe forest and the life within it, and bring equity to our people." The IPCC is clear that ending deforestation is critical to addressing the climate crisis. And according to the UN , where the rights of Indigenous peoples are recognized, rates of deforestation tend to be lower and carbon stocks tend to be higher. Despite this, less than one percent of climate finance currently reaches Indigenous peoples and local communities to help secure land tenure rights and manage tropical forests. Community-led forest carbon projects can change this, by driving private sector finance directly to the Indigenous peoples and traditional communities that live there. For example, the Mai Ndombe project in DRC is funded by companies voluntarily purchasing carbon credits. The project works with over 50,000 community members to help meet their own development ambitions, while protecting 299,640 hectares of forest which has avoided 38,843,976 tons of CO2e emissions to date. "The world asks us Amazonia, Congo Basin, Mekong Basin to preserve our forests. But to do this means adaptation of our lives, our agriculture, of everything. And this adaptation needs funds" said H.E. Eve Bazaiba, Environment Minister, DRC speaking of the Mai Ndombe project at the event today, "So, we say Ok, and we entered into the carbon markets." "We have now built more than 16 high-level schools, we have hospitals, they support us with resilient agriculture. And now we are going to have more social infrastructure like roads, bridges, solar energy, airports, and ports and so on. This is all to help us adapt to the new situation of the climate crisis," said Minister Bazaiba. The Amazon and the Congo Basin are the two largest rainforests in the world. Combined, the territories of the two nations who spoke today include over 600 million hectares of tropical forest an area roughly two thirds the total size of the U.S. Media contact: Will Richard [email protected] Pictures available on request About Equitable Earth Equitable Earth is a coalition of leaders committed to delivering a compelling new voluntary carbon market standard and platform to end deforestation and biodiversity loss in equitable partnership with Indigenous peoples and local communities, and Global South countries. For further information, visit www.eq-earth.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rainforest-nations-back-community-led-projects-funded-through-the-voluntary-carbon-market-as-key-to-delivering-global-commitment-to-end-deforestation-302003958.html SOURCE Equitable Earth Coalition [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 03, 2023] Stratolaunch Successfully Completes Captive Carry Flight with TA-1 Test Vehicle Tweet MOJAVE, Calif., Dec. 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Stratolaunch, LLC announces the completion of a captive carry flight with the first powered Talon-A hypersonic vehicle, TA-1. The flight was the twelfth for the company's launch platform Roc and the first in which the aircraft carried a Talon vehicle with live propellant as part of a buildup approach for Talon-A's first powered flight. The flight lasted a total of three hours and 22 minutes and represented a significant step forward in the company's near-term goal of completing a powered flight with the Talon-A vehicle, TA-1. A primary objective was to evaluate Talon-A's propulsion system and the Talon environments while carrying live propellant. A second objective was to verify Roc and TA-1's telemetry systems, which provides the situational awareness to ensure all systems are ready for powered flight during the release sequence. "Talon-A's propulsion system supports a liquid-propellant rocket engine that provides the thrust needed for Talon-A to reach hypersonic speeds. While we have conducted several successful ground tests fueling and igniting the system, we needed to evaluate how the system performs in the flight environment prior to release," said Dr. Zachary Krevor, Chief Executive Officer for Stratolaunch. "Initial results from today's flight show that the system has performed as predicted, and we will determine our next steps pending the full data review of the test." Concurrent to TA-1 testing, Stratolaunch is progressing on the manufacturing of the TA2 and TA-3 vehicles, the first fully reusable vehicles in that Talon-A product line. In addition to meeting this key test milestone, the company also recently announced two flight contracts with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory and the Navy's Multiservice Advanced Capability Test Bed (MACH-TB) program as a subcontractor to Leidos/Dynetics. "It's an exciting time for our team and customers as we grow closer to bringing our test service online. We're moving faster into the future of high-speed flight, and I'm proud of our team's tenacity to reach this point," said Dr. Zachary Krevor, Chief Executive Officer for Stratolaunch. About Stratolaunch Stratolaunch's mission is to advance high-speed technology through innovative design, manufacturing, and operation of world-class aerospace vehicles. For the latest news and information, visit www.stratolaunch.com and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/stratolaunch-successfully-completes-captive-carry-flight-with-ta-1-test-vehicle-302003967.html SOURCE Stratolaunch [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 03, 2023] Global Times: Xi's Shanghai inspection tour highlights top priorities Tweet BEIJING, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's inspection tour to Shanghai underscored three top policy priorities for the country - high-quality financial development, scientific and technological (sci-tech) innovation and improvement of people's livelihood, said business leaders, workers and analysts in Shanghai on Thursday. Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made an inspection tour in Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts to strengthen its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Xi stressed efforts to make new major breakthroughs in the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta and enhance the region's leading and exemplary role in pursuing Chinese modernization, while chairing a symposium on advancing the integrated development of the Yangtze River Delta, according to Xinhua on Thursday. The inspection trip offered yet another strong signal of the country's top economic development priorities and profound encouragement to businesses and workers in the main economic hub and across the country, at a critical juncture when the country pursues high-quality development and Chinese modernization amid major shifts in the international geo-economic landscape, according to business leaders, workers and analysts. "All my peers in the financial industry in Shanghai are very excited about his visit, and practitioners in Shanghai's financial institutions are all talking about it," Li Huiyong, an executive with Shanghai-based Hwabao WP Fund Management Co, told the Global Times on Thursday, noting the inspection tour pointed out the direction for Shanghai to improve its status as an international financial center. Xi's trip came about one month after the Central Financial Work Conference was held at the end of October, which stressed omprehensively strengthening financial supervision, improving the financial system, optimizing financial services, preventing and resolving risks, unswervingly following the path of financial development with Chinese characteristics, and promoting high-quality financial development. The Central Financial Work Conference first mentioned the goal of building China into a financial powerhouse, and under this context, Shanghai's status as a main financial hub becomes even more prominent, Xi Junyang, a professor at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, told the Global Times on Thursday. Against the backdrop of a complex international environment, "further emphasis on financial development and financial support for the real economy carries greater significance," he said. Shanghai has become a world-class financial center, coming at the sixth place in the latest rankings from the 2022 Global Financial Centers Index. In the first three quarters of 2023, turnover from the city's main financial markets reached 2,546.08 trillion yuan ($356.64 trillion), up 15 percent year-on-year, according to Shanghai's official data. In addition to its financial industry, Shanghai is also a top sci-tech hub in China, which was also highlighted by an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations during Xi's inspection tour. "The visit is very encouraging for us. Zhangjiang has been a leading innovation hub in China, and offers many incentives to companies and talent to facilitate their long-term development. I really look forward to the future of Zhangjiang, especially in the high-tech sectors such as biopharma, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing," Sun Shuang, an employee at Zhangjiang, told the Global Times on Thursday. Zhangjiang Science City in Pudong New Area of Shanghai, where the sci-tech exhibition was held, is the core area of Shanghai's sci-tech innovation center - another aspect of the city that carries national significance, as China firmly pursues sci-tech self-reliance and self-strengthening amid rising international competition, according to analysts. "The General Secretary's trip to Shanghai shows that the top leadership of the central government pays great attention to financial and sci-tech development. Shanghai is relatively advanced in these aspects and is also in a critical period of development," Xi Junyang said, noting that the progress that Shanghai has made in these critical areas could drive development not just in the Yangtze River Delta but nationwide. Another top priority underscored by Xi's inspection tour is the focus on improving people's livelihood. In Shanghai, Xi inspected a government-subsidized rental housing community and learned about the city's efforts in constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. Construction of government-subsidized rental housing projects has become a crucial part of the country's efforts to address housing difficulties for new urban residents and young people. About 72 percent of the 2.04 million units of government-subsidized rental housing, proposed to be built in 2023, have been constructed across the country, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development said in September. Over the past two years, a total of 5.08 million units have been completed across the country, which could address housing demand for 15 million new urban residents and young people, the ministry said. Read more: Xiconomics in Practice: Xi's Shanghai inspection tour highlights top priorities https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202311/1302809.shtml View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/global-times-xis-shanghai-inspection-tour-highlights-top-priorities-302003969.html SOURCE Global Times [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 03, 2023] OpenSSF Announces New Members, Guiding Software Security Principles at OpenSSF Day Japan Tweet Growing Member Base and New Initiatives Continue to Advance Open Source Software Security TOKYO, Dec. 3, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a cross-industry initiative of the Linux Foundation that focuses on sustainably securing open source software (OSS), announced new members from leading technology firms and a new set of Secure Software Development Guiding Principles at OpenSSF Day Japan . Securing open source software is a formidable task, and we look forward to our new members' partnership. New OpenSSF general members include Patchstack, SparkFabrik, and TestifySec. New OpenSSF associate member, ISC2, also joins. OpenSSF ends the year with 120 members as technical communities continue to emphasize the importance of investing in open-source security. They acknowledge the crucial role of supporting and sustaining open source communities to uphold a robust, lively, and secure open source ecosystem. "We're delighted that our new members are joining the OpenSSF," said Omkhar Arasaratnam, General Manager of the OpenSSF. "Securing open source software is a formidable task, and we look forward to their partnership." Today, the OpenSSF hosts OpenSSF Day Japan at Open Source Summit Japan in Tokyo. OpenSSF Day is an exciting opportunity for maintainers, contributors and others in cybersecurity to learn more about ongoing efforts to secure the open source software ecosystem. Highlights on the schedule include sessions with more than 20 experts on trends of exploited OSS vulnerabilities, malicious packages repo, SBOM policy for Japan's industry sector, global collaboration in open source security, and more. A panel will explore navigating open source, open standards, and government directives for better cybersecurity. At the start of OpenSSF Day Japan, OpenSSF released the Secure Software Development Guiding Principles that describe a series of foundational practices to help provide better assurance and security for organizations leveraging them. Producers and suppliers of software can pledge to align with this set of core practices and follow them throughout their development lifecycles. The OpenSSF also introduced two new guides that have also been translated into Japanese . One is a new guide for open source projects that are interested in issuing and managing their own CVE IDs through the CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) program . The other is a Comiler Options Hardening Guide for C and C++ designed to help developers make informed choices regarding compiler options to harden their software against memory-safety issues and other software defects. Earlier this week, LF Energy and OpenSSF jointly published a new whitepaper on how open source software is critical to the innovation and transformation of our energy infrastructure. Contrary to common misconceptions, OSS offers not just affordability and adaptability but also a robust shield against cyber threats. The Alpha-Omega Project recently announced grants to help Homebrew reach SLSA Build Level 2 and continued support of the Rust Foundation security initiative in 2024. Alpha-Omega is also pleased to see sustained impact from earlier grants: the OpenJS Foundation announced the results of an end-user audit based on an IDC survey that shows three-quarters of a billion websites are running out of date software and the Eclipse Foundation finished an audit of the Mosquitto project. These latest announcements build on collaborative efforts already underway at OpenSSF, most recently including a response to the US Federal Government Request for Information (RFI) on Open Source Software Security and support for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) a two-year competition aimed at driving innovation at the nexus of AI and cybersecurity to create a new generation of cybersecurity tools. Additional updates on OpenSSF projects and milestones can be found here . General Member Quotes Patchstack Our goal has always been to make the open source security more accessible to small and midsize enterprises (SMEs). As a company, we've been a firm believer in the community & collaboration, which resonated with us immediately as we were invited to join the OpenSSF family. Patchstack runs an active open source bug hunting community (Patchstack Alliance) where ethical hackers are rewarded for reporting new security vulnerabilities found in open-source software. We are the global leader of open source vulnerability intelligence, ranking #1 as a CNA in 2023 for the highest number of CVEs processed. Patchstack offers vPatches to its SaaS customers which allows them to auto-mitigate production applications from all of the latest vulnerabilities to immediately reduce exposure. We are determined to cover the entire lifecycle of open source vulnerabilities. We see the OpenSSF membership as a logical next step to give back to the community, share our knowledge, data, and further educate the SME market about open source & supply chain security. - Oliver Sild, Co-Founder & CEO, Patchstack SparkFabrik As an organisation based on Open Source values and already a dynamic member of CNCF and LFE, SparkFabrik is excited to join OpenSSF. Our expertise focuses on Cloud Native applications and is based on Open Source software. We are committed to the dissemination, promotion and protection (we actively support the Linux Foundation Europe's #FixTheCRA campaign) of Open Source, which we see as a driver for transformation. We have long focused on the importance of Software Supply Chain Security, for individual organisations and for the common fabric that individuals create. Joining OpenSSF, we are committed to supporting the development of best practices within this key community, to disseminate and produce frameworks that underpin the solutions we want to offer. - Paolo Mainardi, CTO and co-founder, SparkFabrik TestifySec TestifySec is dedicated to the belief that everyone deserves secure software. OpenSSF perfectly embodies this value. Open source software should not only be secure but also utilize open and shared methods and tools. Having actively contributed to ongoing Technical Initiatives, we are thrilled to officially become a member of OpenSSF. We look forward to continuing our journey with OpenSSF, contributing to a more secure software landscape for all. - John Kjell, Director of Open Source, TestifySec Associate Member Quote ISC2 Secure open source code is critical, as it is the bedrock of so much innovation around the globe. By joining the OpenSSF, ISC2 is dedicated to ensuring developers have access to the education and training they need to deliver more secure and resilient solutions. - Clar Rosso, CEO, ISC2 Additional Resources View the complete list of OpenSSF members the complete list of OpenSSF members Contribute efforts to one or more of the active OpenSSF working groups and projects to one or more of the active OpenSSF working groups and projects Register for OpenSSF Day Japan on December 4th About the OpenSSF The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) is a cross-industry initiative by the Linux Foundation that brings together the industry's most important open source security initiatives and the individuals and companies that support them. The OpenSSF is committed to collaboration and working both upstream and with existing communities to advance open source security for all. For more information, please visit us at openssf.org . About the Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, OpenChain, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org . Media Contact Jennifer Bly, OpenSSF [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/openssf-announces-new-members-guiding-software-security-principles-at-openssf-day-japan-302003731.html SOURCE OpenSSF [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 03, 2023] Masdar to Develop 150MWac Solar Plant in Angola to Power 90,000 Homes and Boost Just Energy Transition Tweet Masdar, the UAE's flagship renewable energy company, signs agreement with Angola's Ministry of Energy and Water at COP28 to develop solar plant in southern Angola Project will create up to 600 jobs and deliver clean energy to 90,000 homes in region with significant electricity supply challenges Agreement signed at COP28 demonstrates Masdar's commitment to just energy transition in Africa and around the world DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company PJSC Masdar, one of the world's leading renewable energy companies, has announced plans to develop a major 150 megawatt (MW) solar PV project in Angola to deliver renewable energy to 90,000 homes while creating hundreds of jobs, spurring economic growth, and cutting carbon emissions. As global leaders engaged in climate negotiations at the UN's climate change conference COP28 in Dubai, Masdar - the UAE's clean energy powerhouse - signed a concession agreement with Angola's Ministry of Energy and Water to build and operate the ground-mounted solar power project in the Quipungo region, Hulia province, southern Angola. The area enjoys strong solar irradiation levels but struggles with a lack of access to reliable electricity. Energy insecurity remains one of the most significant constraints on Africa's development. In Angola, less than half of the population has access to electricity, that proportion falls even further in rural areas. This project will significantly support Angola's goal of increasing its national electrification rate to around 60 percent by 2025. The agreement was signed by HE Joao Baptista Borges, Angola's Minister of Energy and Water and Masdar's Chief Executive Officer, Mohamed Jameel Al Ramahi. HE Dr Sultan Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, Chairman of Masdar and COP28 President, said: "Africa has what it takes to become the world's renewable energy powerhouse. At COP28 and beyond, we will contiue to work with Africa for Africa. The UAE stands shoulder-to-shoulder with our friends in Africa as we strive to secure a just energy transition at this COP of action and COP for all. We are delighted to be moving forward with plans to build this solar power plant in Angola that will bring vital clean energy and jobs to communities. We look forward to developing this strong partnership with Angola as we work together to maximize the country's huge clean energy potential." Mohamed Jameel Al Ramahi, Chief Executive Officer of Masdar, said: "Developing renewable energy capacity is the key to unlocking Africa's enormous economic potential, and Masdar is excited to be playing a major part in this effort. Masdar is the largest renewables energy company in Africa, through our platform Infinity Power. To accelerate a just energy transition, Masdar recently joined forces with Africa50, a pan-African infrastructure investment platform. Our mission is to fast-track and scale projects so we can deliver 10GW of clean energy in Africa by 2030. Masdar is an anchor partner of the UAE-led Africa Green Investment Initiative and has committed to mobilize US$10 billion in clean energy finance, of which US$2 billion will be generated from equity with an additional US$8 billion from project finance. This transformative project in Angola is a proud milestone on that pivotal journey." Provinces like Huila, where this solar project will be built, are highly constrained by their dependence on emissions-intensive, unreliable fuel. Once completed, the solar facility will displace over 224,000 tonnes of carbon emissions every year, the equivalent of removing 50,000 cars from the roads. The solar plant will support homes and businesses to leapfrog from patchy, traditional-fuel powered electricity to accessing continuous clean energy. The project will boost the local economy too. Up to 600 jobs are expected to be created during the construction phase. Afterward, the supply of reliable, clean energy is expected to help grow sectors including agriculture. The solar project in Quipungo forms part of a wider commitment made by Masdar in January, during Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week 2023, to develop 5 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy projects across Angola, Uganda and Zambia. The Agreements were signed under the umbrella of Etihad 7 a global development fund launched by the UAE to provide 100 million people across the African continent with clean electricity by 2035. About Masdar Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company (Masdar) is the UAE's clean energy champion and one of the fastest growing companies in the world, advancing the development and deployment of renewable energy and green hydrogen technologies to address global sustainability challenges. Established in 2006, Masdar has developed projects in over 40 countries, helping them to achieve their clean energy objectives and advance sustainable development. Masdar is jointly owned by Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), Mubadala Investment Company (Mubadala), and Abu Dhabi National Energy Company (TAQA), and under this ownership the company is targeting a renewable energy portfolio capacity of at least 100 gigawatts (GW) by 2030 and an annual green hydrogen production capacity of up to 1 million tonnes by the same year. For more information please visit: http://www.masdar.ae and connect: facebook.com/masdar.ae and twitter.com/masdar This material is distributed by Daniel J. Edelman, Inc. on behalf of Masdar. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC. SOURCE Masdar [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 03, 2023] The 3rd International Medical Innovation and Cooperation Forum convenes in Fangchenggang Tweet Enhancing Global Medical Collaboration and Advancing Shared Development through Inclusive Exchange BEIJING, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- On 26 November, the 3rd International Medical Innovation and Cooperation Forum was held in Fangchenggang, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China. The forum, themed "Strengthening Medical Opening-up and Cooperation, Building a Future of Health for Mankind", brought together over 400 attendees, including medical and health officials, industry experts, and representatives from businesses and organizations within the medical and healthcare sectors. The participants came from member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and ASEAN countries, contributing to a dynamic exchange of ideas and collaboration. The Forum's objective is to further enhance the regional, diversified, integrated, and sustainable cooperation framework, solidifying its role as a bridge for communication and interaction among countries engaged in China's Belt and Road Initiative and SCO member states. Leveraging the strength of the SCO and ASEAN, it seeks to broaden global medical innovation and cooperation, ptimize the allocation of medical resources, and elevate the global healthcare standard. This will enable individuals from all backgrounds to access affordable, top-quality, and internationally standardized healthcare services. Cui Li, Vice President of the Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation Commission (GNFCC) of the SCO, said that the forum has evolved into a crucial platform for China to engage in humanitarian medical exchanges and innovative partnerships with SCO and ASEAN nations. The GNFCC is committed to furthering cooperation in the fields of medicine and healthcare among SCO member countries. Its objectives include sharing knowledge and expertise related to international medical open pilot zones, promoting cooperation in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, enhancing information sharing and collaborative research, providing training for healthcare professionals, and playing a key role in advancing the quality of global health and wellness initiatives. The forum featured an opening ceremony, keynote speeches, workshops, and a closing ceremony. The opening event saw the signing of 25 project contracts, each representing a collaboration between a Chinese province or city, among them, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Beijing, and Shanghai, and a foreign country, including Hungary, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The projects spanned pharmaceutical production, traditional medicine, food safety and nutritional health, with a combined investment of 21.9 billion yuan. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/the-3rd-international-medical-innovation-and-cooperation-forum-convenes-in-fangchenggang-302004004.html SOURCE CRI Online [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] LONGi leads the way in partnership with UNHCR to solarize its Logistics Hub Tweet LONGi will also provide solar systems and solutions, and solar energy skills training, to support refugees and host communities DUBAI, UAE, Dec. 4, 2023 /CNW/ -- LONGi, a world-leading solar technology company, today announced a new three-year partnership with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, to deliver impact across climate action, energy equity, and green transformation. The announcement was made at the Solar+ Pavilion during COP28, the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. A cornerstone of the partnership is LONGi's commitment to transform UNHCR emergency and preparedness stockpiles into solarized facilities. This will begin with a pilot project at the Regional Humanitarian Logistics Hub at the Termez Cargo Centre in Uzbekistan, which handles the rapid delivery of core relief items to countries across the region. "When we visited the Logistics Hub in Termez with UNHCR in November, we saw first-hand the sheer magnitude of the supply work that UNHCR undertakes to serve refugees and displaced people across Asia," said Dennis She, Vice President of LONGi . "It's an honor for LONGi to be the first partner of UNHCR to start solarizing its Logistics Hub. This agreement highlights LONGi's dedication to driving sustainable development and we are humbled to be able to support refugee communities. Our collaboratin underscores a shared commitment to fostering sustainability and resilience in the face of global challenges." Starting from 2024 in Pakistan, LONGi will also provide solar systems and solutions to support public facilities used by refugees and host communities to ensure safe and reliable energy that allows these communities to study, work and run their own businesses. LONGi will also work on empowering refugee and host communities with solar energy skills training to support sustainable livelihoods. This reflects this company's desire to shoulder its social responsibility, and advance progress towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal No. 7 - Affordable and Clean Energy. The issue of energy inequality directly affects economic development and the quality of people's lives. Fortunately, technological innovation has resulted in photovoltaic solutions becoming one of the most economical sources of electricity in many parts of the world. "We are excited about this innovative partnership which will help us improve our carbon footprint," said Dominique Hyde, UNHCR's Director of External Relations. "Together, we can play our part in addressing the climate crisis by promoting sustainable energy solutions for everyone, especially the most vulnerable, all across the globe." Bolstering environmental protection as part of the boarder partnership, LONGi will also support afforestation activities in Uzbekistan from 2024, to reduce environmental hazards and mitigate the impacts of extreme weather while providing income generation and employment opportunities for refugees and host communities. The three-year partnership is expected to benefit numerous countries where UNHCR implements its climate action work. About LONGi Founded in 2000, LONGi is committed to being the world's leading solar technology company, focusing on customer-driven value creation for full scenario energy transformation. Under its mission of 'making the best of solar energy to build a green world', LONGi is dedicated to technology innovation and has established five business sectors, covering mono silicon wafers cells and modules, commercial and industrial distributed solar solutions, green energy solutions and hydrogen equipment. The company has honed its capabilities to provide green energy and has more recently also embraced green hydrogen products and solutions to support global zero-carbon development. www.longi.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/longi-leads-the-way-in-partnership-with-unhcr-to-solarize-its-logistics-hub-302004145.html SOURCE LONGi [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Elliptic Labs Signs Expansion Contract with Existing Smartphone Customer Tweet 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 contract with an existing smartphone customer. This contract covers the deployment of Elliptic Labs' AI Virtual Proximity Sensor INNER BEAUTY across multiple future smartphone releases. "Elliptic Labs is the leader in AI software-based solutions offering critical user experiences for all smartphone users. This is why the leading smartphone OEMs continue to choose Elliptic Labs' AI Virtual Smart Sensor Platform," said Elliptic Labs' CEO Laila Danielsen. "We have demonstrated a legacy of innovation with these global smartphone makers and chipset providers like Qualcomm and MediaTek alke. By leveraging our industry-leading expertise in AI/machine learning, ultrasound, and sensor fusion, we enable smartphone makers to build products that are greener, smarter, and more human friendly." INNER BEAUTY is a registered trademark of Elliptic Labs. AI Virtual Smart Sensor, AI Virtual Proximity 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. AI Virtual Proximity Sensor INNER BEAUTY Elliptic Labs' AI Virtual Proximity Sensor detects when a user holds their phone up to their ear during a call, allowing the smartphone to turn off its display and disable its screen's touch functionality. This keeps the user's ear or cheek from triggering unwanted actions during the call, such as hanging up or dialing numbers. Turning off the screen also helps conserve battery life. Proximity detection is a core capability that is used in all smartphones, but Elliptic Labs' AI Virtual Proximity Sensor is a unique, software-only solution that delivers robust proximity detection without the need for a dedicated hardware sensor. By replacing hardware sensors with software sensors, the AI Virtual Proximity Sensor reduces device cost and eliminates sourcing risk. 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 Norway's Oslo University, the company's 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. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231203394407/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Markel hires Isaac Meek to lead the cyber portfolio in Middle East and North Africa Tweet DUBAI, UAE, Dec. 4, 2023 /CNW/ -- Markel, the insurance operation within Markel Group Inc. (NYSE: MKL), has hired Isaac Meek as a Cyber Senior Underwriter. Meek's arrival exemplifies Markel's long-term commitment to recruiting high-level underwriting talent, so that it can continue providing insurance solutions to meet customer demand in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), while supporting the businesses' overarching strategy of accelerating growth across Asia. In his new post, Meek will work closely with Priyesh Pradhan, Professional and Financial Risk (PFR) Senior Underwriter at Markel India, to drive the growth of Markel's cyber offering in MENA and the broader Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. Alongside those responsibilities, Meek will be involved in fostering broker relationships and identifying areas for further scalability within MENA. Markel Dubai's cyber offering provides broad first-party and third-party coverage, for a broad range of industries and clients including financial institutions, hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, professional service firms, and industrial companies, with line sizes up to USD $10m Insureds taking out this policy will also have access to the organisation's global service providers, its 24/7 crisis management hotline, and specialist cyber support. Prior to joining Markel, Meek worked for the American Insurance Group (AIG) where he started out as an Assistant Underwriter, before being promoted to Underwriter in 2021. During his five-year stint at AIG, he was responsible for underwriting risks across various financial lines including professional indemnity (PI) and directors & officers (D&O), while focusing on blended cyber and tech PI risks for customers domiciled in Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) countries, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Meek will be situated at Markel's Dubai office, reporting to Max Robbie, Senior Executive Officer at Markel Dubai. Robbie commented: "We are delighted to welcome Isaac to the team here at Markel Dubai. Isaac joins us at an exciting time as we continue to build out our product offerings, particularly given the speed of growth and development of cyber in the region." "With his wealth of experience, Isaac will help us to identify new territories and geographies to drive profitable growth for the cyber portfolio, with the support of our established cyber underwriting teams in India and Singapore. I look forward working with him so that we can continue strengthening our business in the region, offering clients tailored and bespoke products across MENA." About Markel We are Markel, a leading global specialty insurer with a truly people-first approach. As the insurance operations within Markel Group Inc. (NYSE: MKL), we operate the Markel Specialty, Markel International, and Markel Global Reinsurance divisions, as well as State National, our portfolio protection and program services operations, and Nephila, our insurance-linked securities operations. Our broad array of capabilities and expertise allow us to create intelligent solutions for the most complex risk management needs. However, it is our people and the deep, valued relationships they develop with colleagues, brokers and clients that differentiates us worldwide. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/markel-hires-isaac-meek-to-lead-the-cyber-portfolio-in-middle-east-and-north-africa-302002045.html SOURCE Markel [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Cloud Native Technologies Market to Reach $53.58 Billion by 2032 at 23.8% CAGR: Allied Market Research Tweet The cloud native technologies market growth is driven by significant patterns that incorporate the growing importance of DevOps practices in software development contributing to the recognition of cloud-native technologies. DevOps points out an alliance between development and operations teams, promoting automation, constant integration, and continuous delivery (CI/CD), which associate well with cloud-native principles, driving the market growth. NEW CASTLE, Del., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Market Research published a report, titled, "Cloud Native Technologies Market by Component Type (Hardware, Software, and Services), Deployment Mode (Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud), Organizational Size (Large Enterprises and Small & medium-sized Enterprises), and Industry vertical (BFSI, Retail, Manufacturing, Healthcare, and Others): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 20232032". According to the report, the global cloud native technologies industry generated $6.5 billion in 2022 and is anticipated to generate $ 53.6 billion by 2032, witnessing a CAGR of 23.8% from 2023 to 2032. Prime determinants of growth The cloud-native technologies market is influenced by several key determinants such as the increasing demand for scalable, agile, and efficient software solutions that drive the adoption of cloud-native technologies. Businesses seek to leverage these technologies to enhance flexibility, reduce costs, and expedite software development and deployment. In addition, the rise of containerization technologies, such as Docker and Kubernetes, significantly impacts the cloud-native landscape. Containers enable the packaging of applications and their dependencies, facilitating consistency across different environments and streamlining deployment processes. Furthermore, the shift towards microservices architecture plays a crucial role. It enables the development of applications as a suite of small, independently deployable services, fostering scalability and resilience. Overall, the combination of scalability, agility, containerization, microservices, DevOps practices, and competitive advantages collectively drive the growth and adoption of cloud-native technologies in the market. Download Sample Pages: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/9161 Report coverage & details: Report Coverage Details Forecast Period 20232032 Base Year 2022 Market Size in 2022 $6.5 Billion Market Size in 2032 $53.6 Billion CAGR 23.8 % No. of Pages in Report 362 Segments Covered Component type, Deployment mode, Organizational Size, Industry vertical, and Region. Drivers Cloud Native development helps get apps to market quickly Global access for business with the aid of cloud-native applications Significant reduction in vendor lock-ins Opportunities Better dependability in terms of IT infrastructure Restraints Cost overrun to be a restricting factor Replacing new developments with usual practices COVID-19 Scenario The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on consumer trends, preferences, and budgets, leading to notable changes in the cloud-native technologies market. As businesses and individuals adapted to remote work and digital transformation, the demand for cloud-native solutions surged. Companies prioritized cloud-native technologies to enable scalability, flexibility, and remote accessibility, which helped them maintain business continuity during lockdowns. In addition, the pandemic accelerated the digital transformation of businesses. Companies, under the constraints of the pandemic, realized the importance of cloud-native technologies for flexibility and resilience. As a result, there was a rapid increase in the deployment of containerization and orchestration tools, like Kubernetes, as well as cloud-native application development platforms, leading to a substantial expansion of the cloud-native market. Buy this Complete Report (378 Pages PDF with Insights, Charts, Tables, and Figures) at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/cloud-native-technologies-market/purchase-options The Software segment to maintain its leadership status throughout the forecast period By component type, the software segment held the highest market share in 2022, accounting for more than half of the global cloud native technologies market revenue, attributable to the rapid adoption of cloud-based infrastructure across industries. Businesses increasingly recognize the agility, scalability, and cost-efficiency offered by cloud-native solutions, propelling the demand for sophisticated software tools tailored for these environments. However, the hardware segment is projected to manifest the highest CAGR of 25.9% from 2023 to 2032, attributable to ongoing advancements in hardware technologies, including the development of more powerful processors, high-capacity storage solutions, and energy-efficient infrastructure, offer immense potential for market growth. The public cloud segment to maintain its leadership status throughout the forecast period By deployment mode, the public cloud segment held the highest market share in 2022, accounting for nearly half of the global cloud native technologies market revenue, because of the design and implementation procedures easier, allowing businesses to concentrate more on the functionality and logic of their applications rather than the infrastructure together. However, the private cloud segment is projected to manifest the highest CAGR of 25.9% from 2022 to 2032. Private clouds provide for more customization and flexibility, enabling businesses to adapt the infrastructure and services to their particular requirements. They can thus tailor performance, scalability, and resource allocation to their particular needs. The large enterprise segment to maintain its leadership status throughout the forecast period By organizational size, the large enterprise segment held the highest market share in 2022, accounting for more than two-thirds of the global cloud native technologies market revenue, due to a rise in scalability without requiring major infrastructure investments. In addition, cloud-native technologies give significant companies the freedom to implement a multi-cloud approach, letting them select the best cloud providers and services for their particular requirements, lowering vendor lock-in, and boosting resiliency. However, the small enterprises or medium-sized segment is projected to manifest the highest CAGR of 17.7% from 2023 to 2032. Small firms can benefit from technologies such as serverless computing and containers, which offer better flexibility and lower operating costs, due to cloud-native apps. This enables small enterprises to focus on their core skills and spend resources more wisely. The growth of SMEs globally is a primary factor contributing to the expansion of the cloud native technologies market. The BFSI segment to maintain its leadership status throughout the forecast period By industry vertical, the BFSI segment held the highest market share in 2022, accounting for more than one-fourth of the global cloud native technologies market revenue, attributable to cloud native architectures. Customers may have easy access to their accounts, transactions, and financial information through these applications, which could boost their happiness and loyalty. However, the retail segment is projected to manifest the highest CAGR of 25.7% from 2022 to 2032, retail organizations are better equipped to add new digital commerce services faster and easier to remain on top of changing retail trends as a cloud-native strategy accelerates development capabilities and boosts speed to market. North America to maintain its dominance by 2032 By region, North America held the highest market share in terms of revenue in 2022, owing to the ongoing trend, which is serverless computing, which allows developers to focus on writing code without worrying about infrastructure management. Serverless platforms such as AWS Lambda and Azure Functions have gained traction in North America, offering opportunities for developers and businesses to build and deploy applications more efficiently. However, Asia-Pacific is expected to witness the fastest CAGR of 26.9% from 2023 to 2032 and is likely to dominate the market during the forecast period. With surge in containerization and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes, as well as serverless computing frameworks, these technologies are empowering businesses to streamline their operations and reduce infrastructure costs. Enquiry Before Buying: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/9161 Leading Market Players: - Alibaba Group Holding Limited Dell Technologies Inc. Dropbox Google, Inc. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development L.P. IBM Corporation Microsoft Corporation Oracle Corporation Salesforce VMware, Inc. The report provides a detailed analysis of these key players in the global cloud-native technologies market. These players have adopted different strategies such as expansion, merger, and product launch 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. 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For more details, follow the link: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/library-access Trending Reports in ICT & Media Industry: Cloud Computing Services Market Expected to Reach $2044.6 Billion by 2032 Virtual Event Platforms Market Expected to Reach $83.8 Billion by 2032 Demand Side Platform (DSP) System Market Expected to Reach $228.4 Billion by 2032 Cloud Data Security Market Expected to Reach $27.4 Billion by 2032 Artificial Neural Network Market Expected to Reach $1.4 Billion by 2032 About Us: Allied Market Research (AMR) is a full-service market research and business-consulting wing of Allied Analytics LLP based in Wilmington, Delaware. Allied Market Research provides global enterprises as well as medium and small businesses with unmatched quality of "Market Research Reports Insights" 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 1209 Orange Street, Corporation Trust Center, Wilmington, New Castle, Delaware 19801 USA. Int'l: +1-503-894-6022 Toll Free: +1-800-792-5285 UK: +44-845-528-1300 India (Pune): +91-20-66346060 Fax: +1-800-792-5285 help@alliedmarketresearch.com Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/636519/Allied_Market_Research_Logo.jpg View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cloud-native-technologies-market-to-reach-53-58-billion-by-2032-at-23-8-cagr-allied-market-research-302004460.html SOURCE Allied Market Research [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] U.S. Treasury imposes sanctions on three third-party companies involved in transportation of Russian crude oil ISW The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has imposed sanctions on three third-party companies involved in transporting Russian crude oil above the G7 price cap, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in a report. OFAC announced on December 1 that it imposed sanctions on two United Arab Emirates-based and one Liberian-based shipping companies that own vessels that carried Russian crude oil above $70 barrel after the G7's $60 price cap took effect in December 2022. Institute analysts believe that Russia relies on a "shadow fleet" of oil tankers without insurance from Western countries to skirt the G7's price cap on Russian crude oil and petroleum products. [December 04, 2023] Space and Satellite Industry Veteran Stephen Eisele Joins Lonestar Data Holdings as President and Chief Revenue Officer Tweet ST PETERSBURG, Fla. and LONG BEACH, Calif., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Lonestar Data Holdings Inc. (Lonestar), a leader in pioneering premium lunar and CIS lunar data solutions, is proud to announce the appointment of Stephen Eisele as its President and Chief Revenue Officer. Eisele brings a wealth of experience and expertise in the space and satellite industry, positioning Lonestar for accelerated growth and success in its mission to build a data center industry on and around the Moon. Eisele is a seasoned professional with an impressive track record in the space and satellite sector. With over 19 years experience in defense and aerospace industries, Eisele has held key leadership positions in various capacities, contributing to the success of multiple industry initiatives and organizations. In his new role at Lonestar, Eisele will spearhead the company's strategic initiatives, focusing on revenue generation, business development, and overall company growth. His deep understanding of the space industry's dynamics, coupled with a proven track record of driving business success, wll be instrumental in guiding Lonestar through its ambitious mission. "Steve Eisele's appointment as President and Chief Revenue Officer is a significant milestone for Lonestar. His extensive experience and leadership in the space and satellite industry make him the ideal choice to lead our company into the next phase of growth and innovation," said Chris Stott, CEO and Founder at Lonestar. Eisele's background includes serving as Vice President of Business Development at Virgin Orbit, Senior Business Director at Surrey Satellite Technology US, and as a Vice President at Space Services Holdings among other roles. He currently also sits on Space Advisory Boards and as a Board Member for SatRev S.A., a satellite manufacturing company based in Poland. While at Virgin Orbit, Eisele led all commercial and international business ventures , including spearheading Virgin Orbit's international spaceport infrastructure and developing partnerships around the world. His commitment to advancing space technology aligns seamlessly with Lonestar's vision of transforming data infrastructure beyond Earth's boundaries. "I am thrilled to join the exceptional team at Lonestar Data Holdings. The company's vision for the in-space and lunar data center industry is both ambitious and groundbreaking. I look forward to leveraging my experience to contribute to Lonestar's success and play a key role in shaping the future of space-based data solutions," said Eisele. As President and Chief Revenue Officer, Eisele will collaborate closely with Lonestar's executive team to drive innovation, forge strategic partnerships, and expand the company's market presence. His leadership will be integral to positioning Lonestar as a key player in the evolving landscape of space-driven data solutions. About Lonestar - Saving Earth's Data One Byte at a Time Lonestar Data Holdings Inc. (Lonestar), headquartered in St Petersburg's Maritime and Defense Technology Hub, has been founded by a proven team of experts from the Cloud and Space verticals to pioneer a future for data at the edge for all of us. www.lonestarlunar.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/space-and-satellite-industry-veteran-stephen-eisele-joins-lonestar-data-holdings-as-president-and-chief-revenue-officer-302004007.html SOURCE Lonestar Data Holdings Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] PrecisePK and Cherokee Indian Hospital Authority Join Forces to Optimize Antibiotic Dosing in Indigenous Communities Tweet SAN DIEGO, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, PrecisePK announces a transformative partnership with Cherokee Indian Hospital (CIHA), a cornerstone healthcare institution serving the Native American population across the Cherokee Indian Reservation. PrecisePK is honored to support a leading institution in refining antibiotics stewardship and safe drug dosing through advanced analytics and Bayesian dosing tools derived rigorously from literature models. Empowering healthcare for Indigenous communities: PrecisePK improves antibiotic treatment through Bayesian dosing. "In addition to our pride in serving healthcare institutions within indigenous communities, we are thrilled that PrecisePK's user-friendly interface facilitated a swift internal adaptation at CIHA," expressed Katherine Nihn, senior account manager from PrecisePK. "Our platform's intuitiveness not only streamlines processes but also ensures rapid integration, allowing Cherokee to efficiently leverage our analytics for tailored antibiotic treatments and patient safety." In a concerted effort to align with the latest guidelines proposed by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) for vancomycin dosing and monitoring, CIHA has embarked on a strategic journey with PrecisePK. The latest advancements in vancomycin pharmacokinetcs and pharmacodynamics have shifted focus from traditional trough monitoring to emphasize achieving an area under the curve over 24 hours to minimum inhibitory concentration (AUC/MIC) ratio of 400600 mg*hour/L for optimal treatment of serious Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections. Driven by an unwavering commitment to advancing patient care and safety, Cherokee Indian Hospital Authority has chosen PrecisePK for its exceptional therapeutic drug monitoring analytics. This unique technology enables meticulous tracking and recording of antibiotic usage while providing advanced analytics capabilities, perfectly aligning with the hospital's goals of precision and compliance with the latest IDSA recommendations. The collaboration between PrecisePK and Cherokee Indian Hospital underscores a shared vision to implement advanced healthcare practices within indigenous healthcare settings. By integrating PrecisePK's innovative Bayesian precision dosing tools, the Cherokee Indian Hospital Authority demonstrates a commitment to harnessing technology for optimizing patient-specific treatments and enhancing healthcare outcomes for Native American communities. The strategic adoption of PrecisePK's groundbreaking technology by CIHA signifies a pivotal step towards embracing modernized approaches in medication dosing, ultimately contributing to the elevation of healthcare standards and the well-being of indigenous populations. About Cherokee Indian Hospital Authority The purest expression of the Cherokee Indian Hospital Authority 's (CIHA) vision for healthcare is providing a state-of-the-art hospital with the highest standards of healthcare in a unique, culturally and artistically infused environment meant to nurture and heal. The Cherokee Indian Hospital is the primary medical home for over 11,000 members of the Eastern Band-Cherokee Indians (EBCI). The Hospital provides over 18,000 yearly primary care provider visits. It also accommodates more than 22,000 ER visits per year. The Hospital has 18 patient beds and two hospice beds in our Inpatient Unit. About PrecisePK PrecisePK is a leading global provider of therapeutic drug monitoring software for Bayesian model-informed precision dosing. By leveraging real-time bedside assistance in drug dosing, therapeutic analytics, local populations model, AKI predictor, and other resources, the software is designed to streamline the work necessary to achieve individualized treatment and safeguard patient care, at the point of care. In addition to its robust vancomycin software, PrecisePK offers a wide array of drug modules that aid in the workflow of infectious diseases as well as several other therapeutic areas including neurology, oncology, cardiology, and pulmonology. Visit PrecisePK's website for a free trial. Contact Christy Xie christy@precisepk.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/precisepk-and-cherokee-indian-hospital-authority-join-forces-to-optimize-antibiotic-dosing-in-indigenous-communities-302003783.html SOURCE PrecisePK [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Audley Travel reveals top 10 most popular Italian cities according to US residents Tweet BOSTON, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Americans have been researching their favorite Italian cities on social media. A recent analysis of TikTok hashtag data from the past 12 months shows Rome tops the list, followed by Milan and Venice. "Rome is known as the Eternal City for a reason," says Alicia Welsman, Audley's regional product manager for Italy. "It's been a European center of art and culture for millennia and its long history makes it unique on the continent. It's a great destination whether you're looking for remarkable food, ancient ruins, Renaissance art, cutting-edge fashion, Catholic treasures, or even simply la dolce vita." The most popular destinations include some of the continent's most renowned sights: the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, the Vatican, and the Sistine Chapel, with its luminous ceiling, painted by Michelangelo. Audley arranges private tours through these iconic destinations with an expert guide who can provide context as well as steer you away from crowds. Milan is best known as Italy's fashion capital, but it's also home to da Vinci's Last Supper, the majestic 18th-century La Scala Opera House, and a Gothic cathedral. This combination of fashion and history is what makes Milan so popular, says Shannon Yates, an Italy specialist at Audley Travel. "One of my favorite things to do in Milan is to spend an afternoon with a personal shopper," Yates goes on. "Milan is packed with a wide variety of shopping options, including familiar names like Prada, Gucci, and Armani, as well as small boutiques where you can find up-and-coming designers. You can also visit the artisans' workshops, so you can talk directly to the people making the bags or shoes that you're looking for." Known for its romantic canals and well-preserved Renaissance palaces, Venice is one of Italy's most celebrated destinations. "Of course, it's one of Italy's top three cities," says Samantha Rubin, another of Audley's Italy specialists. "The whole city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for a good reason." Rubin continues: "When you visit, I recommend getting your bearings with a panoramic boat tour. The city was meant to be experienced from the water and that's the best way to get introduced. You'll get to see highlights like the Arsenale, St Mark's Square and Basilica, Giudecca Island, and the palaces that line the Grand Canal. Your driver will also take you a bit further out for views of the lagoon and outlying islands." Full list of the ten most popular Italian cities: The experts at Audley Travel have come together to create a guide that collects their favorite hidden gems, which you can visit while traveling to Italy's most popular cities. They'll help you explore the country's true culture without getting lost in a crowd. Rome Milan Venice Naples Florence Trapani Como Bologna Palermo Verona Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2291695/Audley_Travel.jpg View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/audley-travel-reveals-top-10-most-popular-italian-cities-according-to-us-residents-302004452.html SOURCE Audley Travel [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] HYAS Infosec Groundbreaking Research on AI-Generated Malware Contributes to the AI Act, Other AI Policies and Regulations Tweet HYAS Infosec, an adversary infrastructure platform provider that offers unparalleled visibility, protection and security against all kinds of malware and attacks, is pleased to share that research cited from HYAS Labs, the research arm of HYAS, is being utilized by contributors to and framers of the European Union's AI Act. The AI Act is widely viewed as a cornerstone initiative that is helping shape the trajectory of AI governance, with the United States' policies and considerations soon to follow. AI Act researchers and framers assert that the Act reflects a specific conception of AI systems, viewing them as non-autonomous statistical software with potential harms primarily stemming from datasets. The researchers view the concept of "intended purpose," drawing inspiration from product safety principles, as a fitting paradigm and one that has significantly influenced the initial provisions and regulatory approach of the AI Act. However, these researchers also see a substantial gap in the AI Act concerning AI systems devoid of an intended purpose, a category that encompasses General-Purpose AI Systems (GPAIS) and foundation models. HYAS' work on AI-generated malware -- specifically, BlackMamba, as well as its more sophisticated and fully autonomous cousin, EyeSpy - is helping advance the understanding of AI systems that are devoid of an intended purpose, including GPAIS and the unique challenges posed by GPAIS to cybersecurity. HYAS research is proving important for both the development of proposed policies and for the real-world challenges posed by the rising dilemma of fully autonomous and intelligent malware which cannot be solved by policy alone. HYAS is providing researchers with tangible examples of GPAIS gone rogue. BlackMamba, the proof of concept cited in the research paper "General Purpose AI systems in the AI Act: trying to fit a square peg into a round hole," by Claire Boine and David Rolnick, exploited a large language model to synthesize polymorphic keylogger functionality on-the-fly and dynamically modified the benign code at runtime - all without any command-and-control infrastructure to deliver or verify the malicious keylogger functionality. EyeSpy, the more advanced (and more dangerous) proof of concept from HYAS Labs, is a fully autonomous AI-synthesized malware that uses artificial intelligence to make informed decisions to conduct cyberattacks and continuously morph to avoid detection. The challenges posed by an entity such as EyeSpy capable of autonomously assessing its environment, selecting its target and tactics of choice, strategizing, and self-correcting until successful - all while dynamically evading detection - was highlighted at the recent Cyber Security Expo 2023 in presentations such as "The Red Queen's Gambit: Cybersecurity Challenges in the Age of AI." In response to the nuanced challenges posed by GPAIS, the EU Parliament has proactively proposed provisions within the AI Act to regulate these complex models. The significance of these proposed measures cannot be overstated and will help to further refine the AI Act and sustain its continued usefulness in the dynamic landscape of AI technologies. HYAS CEO, David Ratner, said: "The industry as a whole must prepare for a new generation of threats. Cybersecurity and cyber defense must have the appropriate visibility into the digital exhaust and meta information thrown off by fully autonomous and dynamic malware to ensure operational resiliency and business continuity." Additional Resources: "General Purpose AI systems in the AI Act: trying to fit a square peg into a round hole" https://www.bu.edu/law/files/2023/09/General-Purpose-AI-systems-in-the-AI-Act.pdf. Paper submitted by Claire Boine, Research Associate at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute and in the Accountable AI in a Global Context Research Chair at University of Ottawa, researcher in AI law, and CEO of Successif, and David Rolnick, Assistant Professor in CS at McGill and Co-Founder of Climate Change AI, to WeRobot 2023. News - European Parliament - The European Union's AI Act: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20230601STO93804/eu-ai-act-first-regulation-on-artificial-intelligence Future of Life Institute "General Purpose - AI and the AI Act" What are general purpose AI systems? Why regulate general purpose AI systems? https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/General-Purpose-AI-and-the-AI-Act.pdf Towards Data Science - "AI-powered Monopolies and the New World Order - How AI's reliance on data will empower tech giants and reshape the global order" https://towardsdatascience.com/ai-powered-monopolies-and-the-new-world-order-1c56cfc76e7d "The Red Queen's Gambit: Cybersecurity Challenges in the Age of AI" presented by Lindsay Thorburn at Cyber Security Expo 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2GsZHCXc_c HYAS Blog: "Effective AI Regulation Requires Adaptability and Collaboration" https://www.hyas.com/blog/effective-ai-regulation-requires-adaptability-and-collaboration About HYAS HYAS is a world-leading authority on cyber adversary infrastructure and communication to that infrastructure. HYAS is dedicated to protecting organizations and solving intelligence problems through detection of adversary infrastructure and anomalous communication patterns. HYAS helps businesses see more, do more, and understand more in real time about the nature of the threats they face. HYAS turns metadata into actionable threat intelligence, actual adversary visibility, and protective DNS that renders malware inoperable. For more information, visit www.HYAS.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204040090/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Netcracker Showcases Opportunities for GenAI and Automation at Telecom Review Leaders' Summit Tweet Netcracker Technology announced today that it will participate in the Telecom Review Leaders' Summit on Dec. 6-7 at Le Meridien Dubai Hotel & Conference Centre. Netcracker will highlight how its suite of innovative products, including the recently launched Netcracker GenAI Telco Solution, can help customers improve productivity and reach the next steps of their digital transformations. Netcracker is a Digital Partner of the event and will exhibit in stand #3. Netcracker Chairman and CEO, Andrew Feinberg, will give the opening keynote on Wednesday followed by a panel discussion on how ICT leaders are bringing the industry forward and ensuring they are capitalizing on the opportunities presented by rapidly evolving and changing technology such as 5G, automation and GenAI. Netcracker will also discuss the potential of multi-connectivity for new user experiences in the telecm wholesale industry. Opening Keynote | Wednesday, December 6 | 9:30 a.m. GST Speaker: Andrew Feinberg, Chairman and CEO, Netcracker The ICT Leaders Keeping Up With the Fast Technological Evolution| Wednesday, December 6 | 9:50 a.m. GST Speakers: Andrew Feinberg, Chairman and CEO, Netcracker Fahad Al Hassawi, CEO, du Tony Geheran, EVP and COO, TELUS Hani El Kukhun, CEO MEA, Beyond ONE (Virgin Mobile MEA) Talal Al Mamari, CEO, Omantel Seizo Onoe, Director, Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, ITU Wholesale Industry - Significant Influence in the Era of Multi-connectivity| Thursday, December 7 | 11:45 a.m. GST Speakers: Ari Banerjee, SVP of Strategy, Netcracker Simon Boylin, Regional Strategic Area Director, Verizon Imran Malik Khan, SVP Enterprise & Cloud, EMEA & APA, SES Sameh Sobhy, Managing Director Middle East, Turkey & Africa, PCCW Global Amaru Chavez, CTIO, Bayobab About Netcracker Technology Rapid digitization is disrupting the status quo of today's communications markets. Constantly evolving customer needs and behaviors require service providers to adapt quickly and diversify their businesses to deliver the outcomes that their customers expect. Building digital ecosystems, anticipating customer requirements and delivering a digital-first experience are essential for service providers to accelerate innovation, expand into new markets and become the disruptors in the 5G era. Netcracker Technology, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation, has the expertise, culture and resources to help service providers around the world transform their businesses to thrive in a digital economy. Our innovative solutions - including our flagship cloud-native Netcracker Digital Platform - value-driven services and unbroken delivery track record of three decades help service providers to achieve their digital transformation goals, drive the telco to techco evolution within their organizations and realize business growth and profitability. For more information, visit www.netcracker.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204010409/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] 2023 World Intelligent Manufacturing Conference to Open Soon with Synchronous Offline Exhibition Tweet NANJING, China, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- On December 1, the second press conference for the 2023 World Intelligent Manufacturing Conference was held. Gao Qianjun, Deputy Director of the Nanjing Municipal Bureau of Industry and Information Technology presented details about the main conference, major special events, professional forums, and related exhibitions. Zhou Ping, Deputy Secretary-General of the International Coalition of Intelligent Manufacturing (ICIM) and Assistant Director of the National Technology Innovation Center in the Yangtze River Delta, along with Zhang Ting, Deputy Director of Qilin Science and Technology Innovation Park Committee, attended the conference and answered questions from reporters. This year's conference is themed "Intelligent, Digital and Connected Transformation, Digital-real Economy Integration and Innovation", according to the Organizing Committee. The main conference is scheduled for the morning of December at the Nanjing International Expo Center. The "2023 World Top 10 Technological Advancements in Intelligent Manufacturing" and the "2023 Top 10 Technological Advancements in Chinese Intelligent Manufacturing" will be unveiled during the significant announcement session. This marks the seventh consecutive year that the ICIM and the Intelligent Manufacturing Alliance of CAST Member Societies (IMAC) have made such announcements at the conference. As part of the conference's supporting events, the third Intelligent Manufacturing Innovation Competition's achievements will be showcased during the conference. The competition, themed "Innovation Builds Dreams, Intelligent Manufacturing Shapes the Future," has attracted over 1,000 teams and more than 4,000 participants. During the significant announcement session, the conference will also host the unveiling ceremony of the ICIM. In the keynote speech session, experts, scholars, and leaders in the field of intelligent manufacturing will share their insights. The conference will also host five major special events, including the Sino-French Digitalization Forum for Manufacturing, the inaugural annual meeting of the ICIM. The conference will focus on four major themes -- standards and evaluation, application and demonstration promotion, supply and solution, and innovation and ecology -- and will organize 15 professional forums. This year, the conference will reintroduce offline exhibitions at the Nanjing International Expo Center, setting new records in scale, level, and the number of exhibits. With an exhibition area of 60,000 square meters, it includes four main exhibition areas with participation from over 390 exhibitors from more than 10 countries and regions globally. Image Attachments Links: Link: https://iop.asianetnews.net/view-attachment?attach-id=443559 Caption: Poster of 2023 World Intelligent Manufacturing Conference View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/2023-world-intelligent-manufacturing-conference-to-open-soon-with-synchronous-offline-exhibition-302004473.html SOURCE The Organizing Committee of 2023 World Intelligent Manufacturing Conference [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Ambient Light Sensor Market Expected to Reach $2.02 Billion, Globally, By 2032 at 10.4% CAGR: Allied Market Research Tweet The ambient light sensor market is driven by several factors, including an increase in the demand for smartphones and consumer electronics, the surge in adoption of these sensors in automotive displays, and the development of new sensor technologies. WILMINGTON, Del., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Market Research published a report, titled, "Ambient Light Sensor Market By Output Type, and Application: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2023-2032". According to the report, the global ambient light sensor industry generated $761.04 million in 2022, and is projected to reach $2.02 billion by 2032, registering a CAGR of 10.4 % from 2023 to 2032. Download Research Report Sample & TOC: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/10192 (We are providing report as per your research requirement, including the Latest Industry Insight's Evolution, Potential and COVID-19 Impact Analysis) 96 - Tables 86 - Charts 286 - Pages Prime Determinants of Growth The market for ambient light sensors is expected to witness substantial expansion during the forecast period. This growth is primarily driven by factors such as an increase in the demand for smartphones and consumer electronics, as well as the growing adoption of these sensors in automotive displays. Additionally, the development of new sensor technologies is expected to further benefit the ambient light sensor market. However, low current output presents a significant restraint to the growth of the ambient light sensor market during this forecast period. Report Coverage and Details: Report Coverage Details Forecast Period 20232032 Base Year 2022 Market Size in 2022 $761.04 million Market Size in 2032 $2.02 billion CAGR 10.4 % No. of Pages in Report 286 Segments covered Output Type, Application, and Region Drivers Increase in demand for smartphones and consumer electronics Growing adoption in automotive displays Opportunities Development of new sensor technologies Restraints Low current output COVID-19 Scenario: The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the Ambient Light Sensor market. Initially, the market was adversely affected by supply chain interruptions and slowdowns in manufacturing activities. These early stages of the pandemic saw a notable deceleration in market growth, reflecting the widespread disruptions in global economic activities. However, the move toward remote work and an increased dependence on digital platforms led to a surge in demand for electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops. This shift positively impacted the market for ambient light sensors as the pandemic brought an increased focus on health and wellness, particularly in terms of eye comfort and minimizing eye strain. This led to a further escalation in the demand for ambient light sensors in these devices. The Digital segment is anticipated to dominate in terms of revenue during the forecast period By output type, the digital segment accounted for nearly three-fifths of the total revenue in the global ambient light sensor industry in 2022, and it is expected to continue its dominant position throughout the forecast period. It is expected to experience the fastest CAGR of 11.49% from 2023 to 2032. The segment's remarkable growth is primarily attributed to the increasing integration of these sensors in advanced technologies. Digital ambient light sensors are essential in a wide range of applications due to their high precision, compatibility with digital systems, and adaptability in smart devices and automotive systems. This widespread applicability and technological alignment drive their significant market growth. Get Customized Reports with your Requirements: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-for-customization/10192?reqfor=covid The Automotive segment is projected to have the highest share by 2032 By application, the automotive segment emerged as the market leader in the global ambient light sensor market in 2022, holding one-third of the market share. Simultaneously, the same segment is projected to witness the fastest CAGR of 11.34% from 2023 to 2032. This dominance can be attributed to the increasing integration of these sensors in advanced vehicle technologies. This growth is driven by the rising demand for adaptive lighting systems, advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), and the progression towards autonomous vehicles. Ambient light sensors enhance safety and comfort by improving visibility and reducing glare, making them indispensable in modern automotive designs and fueling their rapid market growth. North America garnered the major share in 2022 By region, North America dominated the ambient light sensor market revenue in 2022, representing over one-third of the global market share. This dominance is driven by its advanced technological infrastructure, robust presence of major tech & automotive companies, and rapid adoption of innovative technologies. However, the Asia-Pacific region is projected to experience the fastest CAGR of 13.16% from 2023 to 2032, due to its strong electronics manufacturing sector, significant investments in smart city projects, and rapid technological advancements in countries like China, Japan, and India. Inquiry Before Buying: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/10192 Leading Market Players: Broadcom Ltd. ams-OSRAM AG Acuity Brands, Inc. ON Semiconductor Corporation Panasonic Corporation Renesas Electronics Corporation ROHM Co., Ltd. STMicroelectronics N.V. Texas Instruments Incorporated Vishay Intertechnology, Inc. The report provides a detailed analysis of these key players in the global ambient light sensor market. These players have adopted various strategies, such as product launches, new product development, and collaboration, to increase their market penetration and strengthen their position in the industry. The report is helpful in determining the business performance, operating segments, developments, and product portfolios of every market player. Key Industry Developments: January 2022 - Panasonic launched a flagship OLED TV, the LZ2000. The TV is available in 55-inch, 65-inch, and 77-inch sizes. It features a new ambient light sensor that adjusts the picture quality based on the time of day. The TV also has a new Auto AI mode that detects the type of content being watched and optimizes the picture and sound quality accordingly. October 2021 - Vishay Intertechnology launched a new AEC-Q100 qualified ambient light sensor, the VEML6031X00, designed for automotive and consumer applications requiring high sensitivity in dark environments. It offers exceptional light detection from 0 lx to 228 klux without needing correction formulas, making it ideal for applications like display backlight control, infotainment systems, and interior lighting. The VEML6031X00 caters to a wide range of markets, from automotive to telecommunications and medical industries. Key Benefits For Stakeholders: This study comprises analytical depiction of the ambient light sensor market size along with the current trends and future estimations to depict the imminent investment pockets. The overall ambient light sensor market analysis is determined to understand the profitable trends to gain a stronger foothold. The report presents information related to key drivers, restraints, and ambient light sensor market opportunities with a detailed impact analysis. The ambient light sensor market forecast is quantitatively analyzed from 2022 to 2032 to benchmark financial competency. The Porter's five forces analysis illustrates the potency of the buyers and suppliers in the ambient light sensor market. The report includes the share of key vendors and ambient light sensor market trends. Procure Complete Report (286 Pages PDF with Insights, Charts, Tables, and Figures) @ https://bit.ly/3Ro0DnZ Trending Reports in Semiconductor and Electronics Industry (Book Now with 10% Discount + COVID-19 Scenario): Image Sensor Market Expected to Reach $87.5 Billion by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 12.9% from 2023 to 2032 Machine Sensor Market Projected to Grow $35.8 Billion by 2032, growing at a CAGR of 8.2% from 2023 to 2032 Electric Vehicle Sensor Market Anticipated to Garner $37.4 Billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 15.1% from 2022 to 2031 Sensor Market is Estimated to Attain $345.77 Billion by 2028, to register a CAGR of 8.9% from 2021 to 2028 Time of Flight Sensor Market Projected to Hit $13 Billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 16.9% from 2022 to 2031 About Us: Allied Market Research (AMR) is a full-service market research and business-consulting wing of Allied Analytics LLP based in Wilmington, Delaware. Allied Market Research provides global enterprises as well as medium and small businesses with unmatched quality of "Market Research Reports Insights" 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 1209 Orange Street, Corporation Trust Center, Wilmington, New Castle, Delaware 19801 USA Int'l: +1-503-894-6022 Toll Free: +1-800-792-5285 UK: +44-845-528-1300 India (Pune): +91-20-66346060 Fax: +1-800-792-5285 [email protected] Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/636519/Allied_Market_Research_Logo.jpg View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ambient-light-sensor-market-expected-to-reach-2-02-billion-globally-by-2032-at-10-4-cagr-allied-market-research-302004477.html SOURCE Allied Market Research [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Infinium Global Research Forecasts a Bright Future for Robotics in Saudi Arabia Tweet PUNE, India, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Robotics holds a central role in Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, a comprehensive reform program aimed at diversifying the nation's economy and decreasing its reliance on oil revenues. Robotics and automation are pivotal in realizing key objectives of this vision. They contribute to economic diversification by boosting efficiency and innovation across industries, particularly in manufacturing, construction, and healthcare. Moreover, they play a role in job creation by fostering a skilled workforce capable of operating and maintaining automated systems. By leveraging robotics in healthcare and education, Saudi Arabia can elevate the quality of life for its citizens, aligning with Vision 2030's goals. Furthermore, embracing advanced technologies positions Saudi Arabia as a global contender in innovation and technology, thereby enhancing its global competitiveness in line with the Vision's ambitions for a more competitive economy. More Insights on this report, Speak to Our Analyst: https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com/contact-us Opportunity: Saudi Arabia's artificial intelligence and robotics sector is poised to make a significant impact, contributing an estimated $135.2 billion, equivalent to 12.4 percent of the country's GDP by 2030, as per PricewaterhouseCoopers. The government is actively propelling initiatives like the automation of 4,000 manufacturing plants over the next five years. Additionally, the Kingdom's logistical strategy, launched recently, underscores the integration of robotics and AI into smart city projects, including NEOM. Saudi Arabia has undertaken substantial initiatives to facilitate the adoption of robotics in its economy. The sector's annual growth rate in AI and automation contributions is projected to average 31 percent from 2018 to 2030. Robots and robotic-assisted systems are progressively taking on more complex tasks in a fully automated manner, alleviating workforce burdens and simultaneously enhancing the quality of medical care and outcomes, reflecting the expanding capabilities of these technologies. Market Attractiveness: The integration of robotics holds the potential for substantial cost reduction across various sectors, freeing up human labor for more strategic endeavors. This translates into smoother customer service, a positive corporate image, and an improved employee experience, ultimately enhancing the customer journey and creating brand-enhancing moments. It is imperative for robotics companies in Saudi Arabia to initiate educational efforts aimed at enlightening businesses about the cost-saving benefits of automation and motivating them to embrace AI-driven solutions. Additionally, even startups within te Kingdom should be willing to take calculated risks and present innovative automation concepts to attract investment, positioning themselves as pioneers in their field. In fact, Saudi startups are known for their groundbreaking solutions, and the Kingdom is set to witness a significant uptick in robotics investments, with expectations of exceeding $150 million in the next two years, in response to the rapid development of smart cities and the digital transformation wave gaining momentum. Investment: As reported by the Minister of Commerce, the Kingdom has witnessed a remarkable 52 percent surge in the registration of robotics firms, reaching 2,344 in the second quarter of 2023, compared to 1,537 in the same period the previous year. Riyadh led the way with 1,387 registrations, followed by Makkah with 491, the Eastern Province with 269, Madinah with 76, and Qassim with 32. Notably, Saudi venture capital firms are displaying a keen interest in the robotics sector, as evidenced by Prosperity7, Aramco's investment subsidiary, which invested $150 million in the Chinese startup Jaka Robotics. Saudi Excellence Co. has also partnered with the US-based robotics firm Nala Robotics to establish Saudi Arabia's inaugural AI-powered robotic cloud kitchen. The regional market for industrial and service robots is poised to reach $4 billion by 2025, with industrial Internet of Things devices projected to hit $1.5 billion. Anticipations indicate that robotics investments will exceed $150 million in the next two years, in response to the Kingdom's burgeoning development of smart cities and digitalization. On a broader regional scale, the Middle East has the potential to attract up to $125 billion in robotics investments by 2025, focusing on manufacturing technology hardware solutions. Need Assistance? Send an Enquiry@ https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com/contact-us Recent Development: In February 2023, Collins Aerospace entered into a significant memorandum of understanding with SRB Aerial Systems L.L.C to collaborate on the research, development, and deployment of unmanned aerial systems and robotics for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Collins Aerospace will contribute its extensive expertise in Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) integration, leveraging its mission systems hardware and software, radio communication capabilities, and sensor development knowledge to bolster the development of UAS sovereign capabilities within the nation. This partnership aligns with Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, which aims to promote locally owned and manufactured products. Additionally, in March 2023, Wave Lifestyle Tech, a South Korean food tech robot company, forged an agreement with the Saudi government to expand its robot-based services, starting in the food industry, as part of Saudi Arabia's broader digital transformation initiatives. The ministry pledges support for Wave's joint ventures and investment prospects in the region, underscoring the collaborative efforts to drive technological advancements in various sectors. About Us: Infinium Global Research, a leading provider of market research, has recently released comprehensive reports on several markets across Saudi Arabia. These reports present a detailed analysis of various segments and sub-segments within the Saudi Arabian markets. It also sheds light on the impact of drivers, restraints, and macro indicators on both short-term and long-term market dynamics. The reports provide a comprehensive outlook on trends, forecasts, and dollar values of the markets. Infinium has published reports across robotics domains operating for Clients in Saudi Arabia for such As Cloud Robotics Market, Warehouse Robotics Market, Nanorobotics Market, Service Robotics Market, Food Robotics Market, Modular Robotics Market, Medical Robotic Systems Market, Etc. Contact: Infinium Global Research 2nd Floor, Ganadish Empire, Rahatani Chowk, Pimple Saudagar, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Maharashtra 411027 Phone: +918999930634 Email: [email protected] Website: www.infiniumglobalresearch.com Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2244132/Infinium_Global_Research_Logo.jpg View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/infinium-global-research-forecasts-a-bright-future-for-robotics-in-saudi-arabia-302004483.html SOURCE Infinium Global Research [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] energyRe Announces $1.2 Billion Capital Raise to Accelerate U.S. Clean Energy Transition Tweet HOUSTON and NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- energyRe, an independent U.S. clean energy developer, today announced that it has raised a $1.2 billion capital package to support the expansion of its large-scale renewable energy portfolio comprising utility-scale transmission and storage, onshore wind and solar generation, and offshore wind. energyRe will leverage these strategic investments to advance its mission of decarbonizing American cities with abundant, affordable clean power and modern, well-connected electric grids. "energyRe's world-class renewable energy portfolio and team have earned the trust of institutional investors and are more ready than ever to advance the U.S. transition," said Jeff Blau, Chairman and Founding Partner of energyRe. "We look forward to leveraging our experience and expertise to deliver reliable clean power and advance a sustainable, carbon-free American future." "energyRe is at the forefront of America's energy transition and delivering the necessary renewable infrastructure to meet our urgent climate and sustainability goals," said Miguel Prado, Chief Executive Officer of energyRe. "We are uniquely focused on decarbonizing U.S. cities and hard-to-abate energy load centers with state-of-the-art electric grids that unlock new sources of clean power across the country. These investments, as well as strategic synergies with our new and current partners, will support energyRe's robust development pipeline as well as further innovation and expansion in our portfolio. This is a clear commitment from leading institutional investors that believe in energyRe's mission, growth, and momentum. We thank our partners and look forward to working together to meet America's clean energy needs." The raise announced today comprises committed capital investments in energyRe LLC from Glentra Capital alongside co-investors Novo Holdings and Denmark-based pension fund PKA. Glentra will leverage its track record in developing and constructing renewable energy assets in the U.S. to support the energyRe team in expanding its development pipeline and delivering on its ambitious growth plan. In addition, a firm agreement has been reached with Elia Group for the acquisition of a stake in a subsidiary of energyRe: energyRe Giga. The European transmission specialist will be offering all of its expertise and experience in the development, construction, operation and maintenance of offshore transmission infrastructure; HVDC technology; transmission planning; and congestion management to the partnership. The capital package also includes a mandated corporate debt facility to be arranged by Santander and Deutsche Bank. energyRe's diversified portfolio of renewable assets includes a development pipeline spanning seventeen states and comprises more than 500 miles of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission; 10.5 GW of solar, wind, and storage; and more than 155 MW of distributed generation. Catherine Vandenborre, Interim CEO of Elia Group, said: "Through this agreement, Elia Group (via WindGrid USA) is entering the U.S. markets alongside an established partner with a solid portfolio of projects. This partnership with energyRe Giga is part of Elia Group's growth strategy in Europe and the United States, since the Group is focused on expanding its activities abroad and strengthening the development of sustainable energy solutions. This partnership marks a strategic step towards Elia Group establishing itself as an internationally renowned expert in the field of electricity transmission." Henrik Tordrup, Managing Partner at Glentra, said: "As a value-add investor in the energy transition, Glentra is delighted to invest in energyRe with like-minded investors. We have followed the company for several years and are big believers in their strategy and management team. The company is set for a valuable growth journey as they deliver their unique project pipeline and provide massive decarbonization for hard to abate regions of America." The co-investors Novo Holdings and PKA are equally pleased to become shareholders in energyRe: Morten Beck Jorgensen, Managing Partner, Capital Investments, Novo Holdings, said: "We are excited to become a shareholder of energyRe, which is a company that aligns perfectly with Novo Holdings' ambition to accelerate the green transition and with our purpose of benefitting people's health and the sustainability of the planet." Michael Nellemann Pedersen, hief Investment Officer, PKA, said: "Alongside other professional partners, PKA is delighted to become shareholder of energyRe. We see energyRe as an essential part in the transition to further renewable energy sources and a natural addition to our portfolio within energy infrastructure." energyRe is advancing several nation-leading renewable energy projects across the United States. energyRe is a partner on Clean Path NYa public-private collaboration to develop 3,800 MW of new wind and solar power and a 175-mile, underground 1,300 MW HVDC transmission line. Clean Path NY is critical to advancing New York State's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which mandates a zero-emission electricity sector by 2040, 70 percent renewable energy generation by 2030, and economy-wide carbon neutrality. Upon operation, Clean Path NY will deliver more than 7.5 million MWh of emissions-free energy annually and reduce fossil fuel-fired electric generation in New York by 22% per year on average. Clean Path NY encapsulates energyRe's focus on transmission-led generation by delivering both clean power and urgently needed transmission capacityalleviating growing congestion on the electric grid, reducing system costs, enhancing grid resiliency, and enabling additional sources of renewable power to reach cities and communities currently dependent on fossil fuels. energyRe is a development partner on the SOO Green HVDC Linka first-of-its-kind, 350-mile interregional transmission line that will connect the midwestern (MISO) and eastern (PJM) power markets and enable the delivery of 2,100 MW of renewable energyenough to power more than 1.5 million homes. By delivering wind and solar power to the nation's largest electricity market, SOO Green will significantly decarbonize the regional electric grid and enhance system reliability and resiliency. energyRe is a co-developer of Leading Light Windthe only American-led offshore wind project with a lease in the New York Bightwhich can power up to 1 million American homes with 2,400 MW of clean energy. As one of the only U.S.-based offshore wind developers in the world, energyRe is at the forefront of the burgeoning American offshore wind industry and well-positioned to advance robust domestic supply chains, workforce development pipelines, and manufacturing capabilities. In 2022, energyRe acquired Southern Current, a South Carolina-based premier developer of solar and energy storage assets. In September 2022, energyRe launched Radial Power, a large-scale developer, owner, and operator of distributed clean energy systems with commercial & industrial (C&I) solar and storage solutions and electric vehicle charging. energyRe is an affiliate of Related Companies, one of the most prominent real estate companies in the United States and one of the nation's largest creators and preservationists of affordable housing. BofA Securities served as placement agent and Lazard Freres & Co. LLC. served as financial advisor to energyRe. About energyRe energyRe is a leading independent energy company focused on solving complex sustainability challenges and providing clean energy solutions in utility-scale transmission, onshore wind and solar, offshore wind, energy storage and distributed generation. Guided by the principles of innovation and partnership and backed by expertise and experience, energyRe is committed to creating a reliable, renewable energy future for all. energyRe has offices in New York, Houston, Indianapolis, and Charleston. For more information about energyRe, visit www.energyre.com. About Elia Group Elia Group is a key player in electricity transmission. Through our subsidiaries in Belgium (Elia) and Germany (50Hertz), we operate 19,349 km of high-voltage connections, meaning that we are one of Europe's top 5 transmission system operators. By expanding international high-voltage connections and incorporating ever-increasing amounts of renewable energy into our grid, we are promoting both the integration of the European energy market and the decarbonisation of society. In addition to its activities as a transmission system operator, Elia Group provides consulting services to international customers through its subsidiary Elia Grid International. In recent years, the Group has launched new non-regulated activities such as re.alto - the first European marketplace for the exchange of energy data via standardised energy APIs - and WindGrid, a subsidiary which will continue to expand the Group's overseas activities, contributing to the development of offshore electricity grids in Europe and beyond. The legal entity Elia Group is a listed company on Euronext Brussels. https://www.eliagroup.eu/ About Glentra Capital Glentra Capital ('Glentra') was founded in 2022 by senior executives from the renewable energy and fund management industries, with the vision to generate attractive risk-adjusted returns while accelerating the global energy transition for a clean and sustainable future. Glentra will contribute to this vision by investing in and growing exceptional companies that deliver the energy infrastructure of tomorrow via investments in development platforms ranging from offshore wind to solar and sustainable fuels and in their supply chain companies as well as in energy optimisation and integration businesses. The mix of industry and investment experience among Glentra's partners and team of employees secures a unique platform for growth and value creation for portfolio companies and investors. Glentra has offices in Copenhagen and London. www.glentra.com About Novo Holdings A/S Novo Holdings is a holding and investment company that is responsible for managing the assets and the wealth of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The purpose of Novo Holdings is to improve people's health and the sustainability of society and the planet by generating attractive long-term returns on the assets of the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Wholly owned by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, Novo Holdings is the controlling shareholder of Novo Nordisk A/S and Novozymes A/S and manages an investment portfolio with a long-term return perspective. In addition to managing a broad portfolio of equities, bonds, real estate, infrastructure and private equity assets, Novo Holdings is a world-leading life sciences investor. Through its Seeds, Venture, Growth, and Principal Investments teams, Novo Holdings invests in life science companies at all stages of development. As of November 2023, Novo Holdings had total assets of EUR 150 billion. www.novoholdings.dk About the Novo Nordisk Foundation Established in Denmark in 1924, the Novo Nordisk Foundation is an enterprise foundation with philanthropic objectives. The vision of the Foundation is to improve people's health and the sustainability of society and the planet. The Foundation's mission is to progress research and innovation in the prevention and treatment of cardiometabolic and infectious diseases as well as to advance knowledge and solutions to support a green transformation of society. www.novonordiskfonden.dk/en About PKA PKA is one of Denmark's leading pension funds delivering life-long security in the form of simple pension schemes for a community of members based on solidarity. With a total of 355,000 members, mainly from social services and health care, PKA has taken good care of their pensions ever since 1954. Today, the combined net assets have reached such a size that they make in difference in society. E.g. the funds' investments push the expansion of green energy infrastructure, support sustainable building construction, and create growth in developing countries. With about USD 60 billion in AUM PKA has invested in solar and wind power for more than ten years and is to be considered as a green leader in the pension industry generating long-term, good returns for the members, while contributing to a more sustainable future. https://pka.dk/this-is-pka View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/energyre-announces-1-2-billion-capital-raise-to-accelerate-us-clean-energy-transition-302004537.html SOURCE energyRe [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] PerkinElmer Acquires Covaris to Create an Innovation-Led, Global Life-Sciences and Diagnostics Platform Tweet PerkinElmer, a leading global analytical services and solutions provider, today announced that it has acquired Covaris, a leading developer of solutions to empower life science innovations. The merger will accelerate Covaris' growth potential and expand PerkinElmer's existing life sciences portfolio into the high-growth diagnostics end market. Both companies are majority owned by New Mountain Capital, and terms of the transaction were not disclosed. As precision medicine gathers pace for personalized disease treatment and prevention, Covaris is ideally positioned to help enable and accelerate the next generation of life sciences innovation, especially through its Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) capability, for efficient, reproducible and high-throughput sample preparation and data analysis. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts, Covaris is a global leader in the development and deployment of end-to-end solutions for high-throughput genomic and proteomic analysis, including instruments, consumables, and reagents. Covaris' solutions empower customers to accelerate the pace of research and drug discovery for clinical diagnostics, biopharma, and research markets globally. "Covaris has a well-defined growth strategy with market-leading technologies and a very capable leadership team that will allow PerkinElmer to deepen its life sciences portfolio in the diagnostics end market. We see significant growth opportunities resulting from the combined resources of both companies, with PerkinElmer's global scale unlocking commercial opportunities for Covaris," said Dirk Bontridder, CEO of PerkinElmer. "We are excited to begin our new chapter as part of PerkinElmer, an exceptional brand that resonates in our core markets, and will allow us to bring our technology to more customers and expand our growth globally. Our two cultures are very similar and both our customers as well as our employees will benefit from strong R&D resources and complementary solution capabilities," sid Annemarie Watson, CEO of Covaris. Andre Moura, Managing Director at New Mountain Capital, said, "The combination of PerkinElmer and Covaris will bring significant benefits to the customers, employees, and stakeholders of both companies. Covaris will now have access to PerkinElmer's global reach, technical and operating capabilities to continue its rapid growth trajectory. Covaris' strong position in the genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics space brings an exciting new growth vector to PerkinElmer. We look forward to continuing to work with management to build the combined company." About PerkinElmer PerkinElmer is a global analytical services and solutions provider with offerings including the leading OneSource Field and Laboratory services business that serve the biopharma, food, environmental, safety and applied end markets to accelerate scientific outcomes. Since 1937, PerkinElmer has served as a trusted partner in laboratory analysis and management and today complements its service offerings with a broad portfolio of atomic spectroscopy, molecular spectroscopy, and chromatography instruments, consumables, and reagents. With a dedicated team of more than 6,000 team members, the Company serves customers in more than 35 countries. Additional information is available at www.perkinelmer.com. About Covaris Covaris develops, manufactures, and markets instruments, consumables, and reagents used in pre-analytical sample preparation for genomic and proteomic analysis to help accelerate the pace of research and life science innovations. Using proprietary technologies including focused acoustic energy, Covaris' tools achieve highly accurate and reproducible results with the goal of empowering customers to make new discoveries, develop new assays and improve bioanalytical results. Some of the non-contact applications include faster automated DNA fragmentation, cell lysis, accelerated binding partner mixing, bead resuspension, and compound formulation. Additional information about Covaris is available at www.covaris.com. About New Mountain Capital New Mountain Capital is a New York-based investment firm that emphasizes business building and growth, rather than debt, as it pursues long-term capital appreciation. The firm currently manages private equity, credit and net lease investment strategies with over $45 billion in assets under management. New Mountain seeks out what it believes to be the highest quality growth leaders in carefully selected industry sectors and then works intensively with management to build the value of these companies. For more information on New Mountain Capital, please visit www.newmountaincapital.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231201756145/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Head of the President's Office of Ukraine Andriy Yermak had a phone call with National Security Advisor to the President of the United States Jake Sullivan during which the interlocutors discussed the situation at the front, as well as preparations for the first Ukrainian-American conference on weapons production. "Andriy Yermak briefed Jake Sullivan on the current situation on the battlefield and the priority needs of the Ukrainian defense forces. He dwelled on a recent trip with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the frontline regions: Kherson, Zaporizhia, Mykolaiv, and Kharkiv regions, where they visited the advanced positions of Ukrainian defenders resisting the Russian aggressor," the press service of the head of the Ukrainian state reports. Yermak also said that during the meeting with the president, the Ukrainian military submitted specific requests for weapons and ammunition that are necessary to protect the lands from the invaders. "The interlocutors also discussed the preparations for the first Ukrainian-U.S. conference of defense industries slated for December 6-7 in Washington, in accordance with the agreements between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Joseph Biden," the report notes. The head of the Ukrainian President's Office also talked about the progress of implementing the Ukrainian Peace Formula, including the tenth ambassador-level meeting that took place on Friday at the Boryspil International Airport. Andriy Yermak expressed gratitude to U.S. President Joseph Biden, his entire team, both houses of the U.S. Congress and the American people "for their leadership and strong support of Ukraine in the fight for freedom, independence and against Russian terror." [December 04, 2023] Resecurity Embarks on Accelerating Oman's Vision 2040 with Identity Protection Tweet LOS ANGELES, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- In a significant stride towards fortifying the cybersecurity landscape in the Middle East, Resecurity proudly introduced its state-of-the-art Digital Identity Protection (IDP) solution at the prestigious Future Tech 2023 conference scheduled for November 27-28, 2023, at the Oman Convention and Exhibition Centre in Muscat. This strategic move aligns with Resecurity's commitment to creating a safer digital society and empowering individuals and businesses in the region to counteract cyber threats effectively. Resecurity, a Los Angeles-based cybersecurity provider protecting Fortune 500 and governments globally, proudly announced its role as a Platinum Sponsor at the 3rd Edition of the Future Tech Event. The event, centered around the theme "Accelerating Digital Transformation," is under the distinguished patronage of H. E Said Hamood Said Al Maawali, Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology. As a Platinum Sponsor, Resecurity is poised to play a pivotal role in propelling Oman's Vision 2040 Digital Transformation forward. This visionary initiative aims to nearly double the technology sector's value to OMR 2.2 billion (USD 5.6 billion) by 2024, perfectly aligning with the Future Tech Event's dedication to fostering collaboration between government entities and the private sector to deliver groundbreaking solutions. Recognizing the escalating cyber threats in the Middle East, Resecurity's IDP solution is poised to play a pivotal role in safeguarding the digital identities of Oman citizens. The IDP service provides a comprehensive defense mechanism, enabling individuals and enterprises to proactively monitor and receive early-warning notifications to protect their accounts and personal data. Oman's Vision 2040: A Digital Transformation Journey Oman's Vision 2040 otlines a comprehensive roadmap for building a Diversified and Sustainable Economy, grounded in Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation, all operating within Integrated Frameworks. The vision is strategically designed to ensure Competitiveness, embrace Industrial Revolutions, and achieve Fiscal Sustainability - pillars echoed in the theme of the Future Tech Event. Gene Yoo, CEO of Resecurity, expressed his excitement about the company's participation and commitment to Oman's digital evolution. "We are honored to be a Platinum Sponsor at the Future Tech Event, aligning our expertise with the transformative goals of Oman's Vision 2040. Resecurity is dedicated to playing a significant role in securing and advancing Oman technological landscape. By fostering collaboration and innovation, we aim to contribute to the realization of Oman's ambitious vision for the future.". Resecurity's Commitment to Oman's Vision 2040 Resecurity's role as a Platinum Sponsor underscores its commitment to advancing Oman's Vision 2040 Digital Transformation. The company's expertise in cybersecurity aligns seamlessly with the vision's emphasis on technology, knowledge, and innovation as drivers of economic diversification and sustainability. As part of its commitment, Resecurity aims to contribute insights, share knowledge, and engage in collaborative discussions during the Future Tech Event. By integration cutting-edge cybersecurity technologies and data science, Resecurity seeks to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of Oman's technology landscape. "Resecurity is honored to be a Platinum Sponsor at the Future Tech Event, an opportunity that aligns perfectly with our commitment to advancing Oman's Vision 2040. We believe in the power of cybersecurity to underpin digital transformation, and through our participation, we look forward to contributing to the secure and innovative future envisioned by Oman. The Future Tech Event provides a platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing, and we are excited about the potential for meaningful partnerships and advancements in technology that will benefit Oman and beyond." - said Christian Lees, CTO of Resecurity. About Resecurity Resecurity is a globally recognized leader in cybersecurity solutions, dedicated to safeguarding individuals and organizations from digital threats. With a commitment to innovation, Resecurity offers cutting-edge services, including Identity Protection (IDP), to address the evolving challenges of the digital landscape. The company aims to empower individuals and businesses to navigate the digital world securely. Resecurity is a cybersecurity company that delivers a unified platform for endpoint protection, risk management, and cyber threat intelligence. Known for providing best-of-breed data-driven intelligence solutions, Resecurity's services and platforms focus on early-warning identification of data breaches and comprehensive protection against cybersecurity risks. Founded in 2016, it has been globally recognized as one of the world's most innovative cybersecurity companies with the sole mission of enabling organizations to combat cyber threats regardless of how sophisticated they are. Most recently, Resecurity was named as one of the Top 10 fastest-growing private cybersecurity companies in Los Angeles, California by Inc. Magazine. An Official Member and a Gold Sponsor of InfraGard National Members Alliance (INMA), AFCEA, NDIA, SIA, FS-ISAC and the American Chamber of Commerce in Saudi Arabia (AmChamKSA), Singapore (AmChamSG), Korea (AmChamKorea), Mexico (AmChamMX), and UAE (AmChamDubai). To learn more about Resecurity, visit https://resecurity.com. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/resecurity-embarks-on-accelerating-omans-vision-2040-with-identity-protection-302004568.html SOURCE Resecurity Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Multifamily Innovation Summit Adds Technology Entrepreneur Kerry W. Kirby to Speaker Lineup at Phoenix Event Tweet NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- 365 Connect, the leader in delivering the world's most sophisticated automated marketing, leasing, and resident engagement platform for multifamily communities across the globe, announced today that the company's CEO, Kerry W. Kirby, will speak at the Multifamily Innovation Summit. The event, catering exclusively to multifamily professionals, runs from December 5 6, 2023 in Phoenix, Arizona. Launched by the founders of Multifamily Leadership, Patrick and Carrie Antrim, the Multifamily Innovation Summit will feature important, relevant discussions conducted by leading experts from various fields within the industry. It has become the must-attend event for owners, operators, and corporate executives. The vision of the summit is to create an enriching environment where multifamily professionals can obtain the tools, strategies, and capabilities needed to grow their company in today's fast-paced environment. Kirby will join an esteemed panel to discuss, "When to Bootstrap and When to Raise Capital," where an in-depth discussion will navigate through the polar-opposite methods of bringing emerging technology innovations to life in the multifamily housing industry. The panel will explore the brilliance of bootstrapping and financial discipline required to reap the rewards, alongside the advantages of fueling explosive gowth through outside capital raises. "We are thrilled to have Kerry join our roster of speakers again at our innovation summit," said Multifamily Leadership's CEO, Patrick Antrim. "Kerry is an accomplished entrepreneur, innovator, and industry influencer, who is changing the way we think about the convergence of technology in our digitally dependent world. As the recipient of the first Multifamily Innovation Council Bootstrapper Award, there is no one better to participation on this panel than one of the best known self-funded proptech icons in this space." A technologist at heart, Kirby is the founder and CEO of 365 Connect, a leading technology firm exclusively serving the multifamily housing industry. Over the last two decades, he has propelled 365 Connect from a scrappy, bootstrapped startup to a powerhouse proptech firm, which has won an array of highly acclaimed awards, including the esteemed Louisiana Governor's Technology Award. Kirby has been named to the Silicon Bayou 100 List of most influential entrepreneurs for nine consecutive years and has received a prestigious Titan Entrepreneur Award for his technological achievements. "Multifamily housing operators are accelerating digital transformation of their workflows to optimize cost structures," explained Kirby. "It is important for our industry to understand the commitment it takes to bring new innovations into our industry, and the various methods capital is deployed to make it all happen. As a founder of a bootstrapped company, we certainly sit in a very separate box than venture-backed firms, and I am excited to bring my perspective to the best thought-based public platform in our industry, the Multifamily Innovation Summit." ABOUT THE MULTIFAMILY INNOVATION SUMMIT: The Multifamily Innovation Summit is a premier industry event with notable, thought-provoking speakers, informal peer-to-peer discussions, and unparalleled educational content. The two-day summit focuses on managing the apartment of the future, shifting paradigms in digital leasing, and the power of leveraging people as a competitive advantage. Register to attend: multifamilyinnovation.com ABOUT 365 CONNECT: 365 Connect delivers the world's most sophisticated automated marketing, leasing, and resident engagement platform for multifamily communities across the globe. Designed to modernize transactions that empower people, the platform executes processes that accelerate operations and minimizes human intervention. Founded in 2003 with an unwavering commitment to connect people with where they live, 365 Connect is built for renters, management teams, and today's changing world. Learn how we are ready for what's next at 365connect.com. Media Contacts 365 CONNECT Media Relations [email protected] 504-299-3444 View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/multifamily-innovation-summit-adds-technology-entrepreneur-kerry-w-kirby-to-speaker-lineup-at-phoenix-event-302003617.html SOURCE 365 CONNECT [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] AITX Secures $2 Million Commitment in Non-Dilutive Funding Tweet Detroit, Michigan, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Artificial Intelligence Technology Solutions, Inc. ( OTCPK:AITX ), a global leader in AI-driven security and productivity solutions, proudly announces a significant financial milestone. The Company has secured a flexible line of credit up to $2 million, backed by early investors from its initial friends & family raise in 2016 and 2017. The specifically tailored financing arrangement offers AITX materials purchasing flexibility, with a 5-month grace period between fund receipt and repayment commencement so that future cashflows will be split between loan repayment and contribution to operating expenses. This custom timing was designed to synchronize seamlessly with the Company's manufacturing, deployment, invoicing, and collection average timelines, ensuring debt payments are covered by new potential revenue streams. The initial installment of $350,000 was received on Friday, December 1, 2023. Anthony (Tony) Brenz, CFO of AITX, stated, "This is an important moment that proves our early investors' support and confidence in our vision and business model. This type of tailored financing by early investors is unprecedented in my career and I couldnt be more thrilled to share this news with our community." This non-dilutive financial instrument allows AITX to pay off each loan portion in approximately 17 months, assuming planned payments. There are no commitment shares, warrants, options, or conversion options included in this arrangement making it wholly non-dilutive. This line of credit is a key enabler in our growth strategy without putting additional stress on dilution, Reinharz added. It allows us to fulfill our current commitments by completing the delivery of contracted but unbuilt devices as of November 17, 2023. This financial fleibility is crucial for our ongoing success and positions us strongly for future growth. This announcement demonstrates AITX's robust financial planning and commitment to sustainable growth, showcasing its innovation not only in technology but also in its approach to business and financial management. About Artificial Intelligence Technology Solutions (AITX) AITX is an innovator in the delivery of artificial intelligence-based solutions that empower organizations to gain new insight, solve complex challenges and fuel new business ideas. Through its next-generation robotic product offerings, AITXs RAD, RAD-M and RAD-G companies help organizations streamline operations, increase ROI, and strengthen business. AITX technology improves the simplicity and economics of patrolling and guard services and allows experienced personnel to focus on more strategic tasks. Customers augment the capabilities of existing staff and gain higher levels of situational awareness, all at drastically reduced cost. AITX solutions are well suited for use in multiple industries such as enterprises, government, transportation, critical infrastructure, education, and healthcare. To learn more, visit www.aitx.ai, www.radsecurity.com , www.stevereinharz.com, www.radgroup.ai, www.raddog.ai, and www.radlightmyway.com, or follow Steve Reinharz on Twitter @SteveReinharz . CAUTIONARY DISCLOSURE ABOUT FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS The information contained in this publication does not constitute an offer to sell or solicit an offer to buy securities of Artificial Intelligence Technology Solutions, Inc. (the Company). This publication contains forward-looking statements, which are not guarantees of future performance and may involve subjective judgment and analysis. The information provided herein is believed to be accurate and reliable, however the Company makes no representations or warranties, expressed or implied, as to its accuracy or completeness. The Company has no obligation to provide the recipient with additional updated information. No information in this publication should be interpreted as any indication whatsoever of the Companys future revenues, results of operations, or stock price. ### Steve Reinharz 949-636-7060 @SteveReinharz [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Zefiro Methane Corp. Subsidiary Acquires Appalachian Well Surveys, Inc. Tweet BRADFORD, Pa. and FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ZEFIRO METHANE CORP. (the Company, Zefiro, or ZEFI), which works to reduce methane emissions by plugging orphaned oil and gas wells across the country, today announced that Plants & Goodwin (P&G), a leading Pennsylvania-based orphaned well plugging organization and a subsidiary of the Company, has acquired Appalachian Well Surveys, Inc. (AWS), a Cambridge, Ohio-based wireline company. As a result of this transaction, Zefiro will become the energy sectors first comprehensive end-of-life provider for entities seeking to meet their well retirement targets. This acquisition is the latest in a series of strategic investments by Zefiro to bolster its nationwide operational capacity. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The agreement specifically cements P&Gs incorporation of AWS current assets and experienced personnel throughout its existing operations. This includes, but is not limited to, the activation of fourteen wireline units capable of deploying various downhole tools, two mast trucks that are designed to bolster abandonment projects, and current certifications to operate explosives in every Appalachian Basin state. An Appalachian Well Surveys, Inc. mast truck operating on a recent jobsite. Readers using news aggregation services may be unable to view the media above. Please access the Investors section of the Companys website for a version of this press release containing all published media. Reversing the unchecked proliferation of leaking oil and gas wells will require private sector plugging operations to optimize efficiency at each stage of their operations, said Talal Debs, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Zefiro Methane Corp. This transaction is critical to helping P&G-led crews bolster their effectiveness in the field, and we could not be more excited to welcome AWS into the Zefiro family. As demand for our well-plugging expertise continue to increase, it has never been more important that we invest in the resources needed to properly complete these unique projects, said Luke Plants, Chief Executive Officer, Plants & Goodwin/Senior Vice President of Business Development, Zefiro Methane Corp. The infusion of AWS talent and technical expertise will make P&G a full-spectrum service provider and ensure that our dedicated well plugging specialists can do their part to help address this public health threat. ZEFIRO METHANE CORP. Talal Debs Talal Debs, Founder and Chief Executive Officer For further information, please contact: Zefiro Investor Relations 1 (800) 274-ZEFI (274-9334) [email protected] For media inquiries, please contact: Rich Myers - Profile Advisors (New York) [email protected] (347) 774-1125 About Zefiro Methane Corp. Zefiro develops methodologies to reduce methane emissions by plugging orphaned and abandoned oil/gas wells, while originating carbon offsets. Under executive leadership to include the former carbon market team at J.P. Morgan, Zefiro actively deploys crews to decommission wells throughout the United States. With unprecedented global demand for carbon offsets as corporations and institutions work towards net-zero targets, Zefiro is strategically aligning with industry leaders for a greener future. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information is often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as seeks, believes, plans, expects, intends, estimates, anticipates and statements that an event or result may, will, should, could or might occur or be achieved and other similar expressions. Forward-looking information in this press release includes statements regarding the Company, the Companys business, the industry in which the Company operates, the Companys opportunities, strategies, competition, expected activities and expenditures as the Company pursues its business plan, the adequacy of the Companys available cash resources and other statements about future events or results. The forward-looking information reflects managements current expectations based on information currently available and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause outcomes to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking information. Although the Company believes that the assumptions and factors used in preparing the forward-looking information are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on such information and no assurance can be given that such events will occur in the disclosed timeframes or at all. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include: (i) adverse general market and economic conditions; (ii) changes to and price and volume volatility in the carbon market; (iii) changes to the regulatory landscape and global policies applicable to the Company's business; and (iv) other factors beyond the control of the Company. The Company operates in a rapidly evolving environment where technologies are in the early stage of adoption. New risk factors emerge from time to time, and it is impossible for the Companys management to predict all risk factors, nor can the Company assess the impact of all factors on Companys business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ from those contained in any forward-looking information. The forward-looking information is based on a number of assumptions, including assumptions regarding general market conditions, the availability of financing for proposed transactions and programs on reasonable terms, and the ability of outside service providers to deliver services in a satisfactory and timely manner. The forward-looking information included in this press release are made as of the date of this press release and the Company expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/450461e4-5218-4860-afe3-1f4fe063a008 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Ordr to Speak at the 2023 Jefferies Cybersecurity Summit Tweet CEO Jim Hyman to Share Observations on Why Full Network and Device Visibility is Critical to Achieve Comprehensive, Environment-Wide Protection SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Ordr, the leader in connected device security, today announced that the company's CEO, Jim Hyman, will be speaking in a panel discussion on the topic of "Network Observability Beyond The Firewall" at the upcoming Jefferies Cybersecurity Summit. The Summit, which will be held on Tuesday, December 5, 2023, in San Francisco, CA, brings together some of today's leading minds in cybersecurity with institutional, private equity, and venture capital investors. Attendees will discuss industry-wide issues and solutions. What : "Network Observability Beyond The Firewall" panel discussion Who : Jim Hyman, CEO of Ordr Mohamad Waqas, CTO of Armis Matt Stump, SVP Engineering of SecurityScorecard Prakash Panjwani, CEO of Watchguard When : 10:40 am PST Where : 2023 Jefferies Cybersecurity Summit, San Francisco, CA To learn more about Ordr and how its platform can establish visibility and improve your organization's security posture, please visit: https://ordr.net/platform/ . About Ordr Ordr makes it easy to secure every connected device, from traditional IT devices to newer and more vulnerable IoT, IoMT, and OT. Ordr Systems Control Engine uses deep packet inspection and advanced machine learning to discover every device, profile its risk and behavior, map all communications, and protect it with automated policies. Organizations worldwide trust Ordr to provide real-time asset inventory, address risk and compliance, and accelerate IT initiatives. Ordr is backed by top investors including Battery Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Ten Eleven Ventures, Northgate Capital, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, and Unusual Ventures. For more information, visit www.ordr.net and follow Ordr on Twitter and LinkedIn . View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ordr-to-speak-at-the-2023-jefferies-cybersecurity-summit-302004392.html SOURCE Ordr [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Lighthouse Labs to Provide ??Canadian Workers with In-Demand Cyber Skills Through Cyber Security Bootcamp Powered by Upskill Canada Tweet Today, Lighthouse Labs is announcing the launch of a new program for its Cyber Security Bootcamp powered by Upskill Canada. The program is part of the first wave of partnership agreements that are taking an industry-oriented approach to supporting Canadian workers. These agreements will help thousands of workers find new careers through skills training and job placement in some of the fastest-growing industries in Canada, while also ensuring a dynamic workforce capable of driving innovation and addressing the cyber security sector's evolving challenges. Canada is facing a shortage of skilled cyber security workers, and a new report from Upskill Canada and Deloitte found that Canada's cyber sector is growing rapidly, with total employment in the cyber security sector close to 139,000 in 2022, representing a 12.2% increase from the previous year. The intensive and immersive 12-week Cyber Security Bootcamp from Lighthouse Labs will transform passionate and driven working professionals that have at least three years of relevant industry experience into cyber professionals, while also helping organizations foster a more dynamic and inclusive workforce. "The number of cyber attacks and incidents in Canada has been unprecedented, and as a result, the industry need for skilled cyber security professionals is at an all-time high," said Jeremy Shaki, CEO of Lighthouse Labs. "Many businesses face challenges recruiting and retaining cyber security workers. The Lighthouse Labs Cyber Security Bootcamp, powered by Upskill Canada, will enable businesses to take advantage of untapped talent, and incentivize professionals to learn the skills needed to transition to a job in cyber security. Through this national talent platform, we're helping fast-growing companies access the talent they need while creating new pathways for workers to transition into high-demand roles." Findings from the Deloitt and Upskill Canada report showed that organizations face challenges recruiting cyber security staff due to the diverse range of responsibilities, educational backgrounds, skills, experience levels, and certifications that professionals in this field possess. While technical skills are critical, it's essential for cyber security workers to have practical knowledge such as critical thinking, management, and troubleshooting. The Lighthouse Labs Cyber Security Bootcamp, powered by Upskill Canada, is ideally suited to workers who possess this necessary practical knowledge and it will provide the supplemental technical knowledge needed to have a thriving career in cyber security. Topics covered include server administration, network security, threat modelling and analysis, incident response and more. Students will also have access to on-demand mentorship from industry experts in addition to the full support of Lighthouse Labs' Student Success Coordinators and Career Services team. Supported by funding from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada's (ISED) Upskilling for Industry Initiative, more than 15,000 Canadian workers will benefit from an innovative approach to skills training. Central to the Upskill Canada initiative is the role of community training providers, who work closely with local and national employers to identify precise suites of skills being sought by industry. Equipping workers with these skills will create new career pathways for Canadians and better position Canadian companies to compete both domestically and internationally. "We're so proud to formally launch Upskill Canada with our inaugural class of workers and training service providers. This is a big first step - but it's only the beginning. We're looking forward to working with our supporters in government and industry to upskill many more Canadians, so they can transition into high-demand roles in the modern workforce - and help fast-growing companies achieve their full potential," said Rhonda Barnet, CEO of Palette Skills, which was chosen by ISED to run the Upskill Canada initiative. For more information, please visit https://paletteskills.org/upskillcanadaprograms. About Upskill Canada Upskill Canada is a national talent platform that helps fast-growing companies access the talent they need to compete and succeed globally while creating new career pathways for workers to rapidly transition into high-demand roles. Upskill Canada will target all regions of the country and support Canadian-based employers, with a particular focus on small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It will focus on strengthening key growth sectors, including digital technology, cybersecurity, agricultural technology, advanced manufacturing, clean technology and biomanufacturing. About Lighthouse Labs Lighthouse Labs is a leading tech education company that empowers individuals to transform their lives through hard work and dedication. With a supportive and collaborative environment, Lighthouse Labs is committed to actively addressing the digital skills gap and ensuring that technological change is an opportunity for all through the support of equity-deserving groups. In its 10th year, the company has equipped over 40,000 students with the competencies, skills and knowledge needed to drive innovation and change, with full-time and part-time programs in cyber security, data science, data analytics, web development and more. Through a human and purpose-driven approach to learning and a team of passionate, expert instructors and mentors, Lighthouse Labs unlocks and nurtures each student's potential to help launch their bright and prosperous futures. For more information about its programs, please visit www.lighthouselabs.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204243351/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Travelport Investors Commit $570 Million in New Equity Financing to Bolster Capital Structure and Accelerate Long-Term Growth and Innovation Tweet New Investment from Existing Backers Provides Travelport with Platform for Long-Term Success Strengthened Balance Sheet to Enable Travelport to Further Enhance Customer Offerings LANGLEY, United Kingdom, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Travelport Worldwide Limited ("Travelport" or the "Company"), a global technology company that powers travel bookings for hundreds of thousands of travel suppliers worldwide, today announced that a group of its existing equity holders and lenders have agreed to invest $570 million of new equity financing into the Company. The new financing will give Travelport a robust capital structure, enable further investment into Travelport's technology platforms and pave the way for other innovations to deliver new and exceptional ways for the travel industry to serve customers. The new investment in Travelport is being made pursuant to an agreement that will significantly deleverage and strengthen the Company's balance sheet (the "Transaction"). Following completion of the Transaction, Travelport will have a new ownership structure composed of Travelport's existing equity and credit investors, including Elliott Investment Management, Davidson Kempner Capital Management, Canyon Partners, Siris Capital and other leading institutional investors. These investors will remain well positioned to provide strategic counsel and support to the Company's management. "This investment demonstrates our investors' support for Travelport and will advance our mission to reinvent a better future for the travel industry," said Greg Webb, Chief Executive Officer of Traveport. "With this new investment, Travelport will have a strong balance sheet with the least amount of debt amongst its peers, which we believe will put the Company in an even better position for long-term, profitable growth. Most importantly, this Transaction will further strengthen our operating business and accelerate our investments in Travelport+ and other initiatives that make us the most innovative and agile partner to all our customers. We thank our investors for their significant vote of confidence in Travelport." In the last year, Travelport has undertaken several successful strategic investments and initiatives to enhance the technology, products and services it provides to customers. These include the acquisition of Deem, a leading corporate travel management platform, as well as the upgrade of over 85% of the Company's agency customers to Travelport+. The Transaction will enable further investment in customer offerings, including accelerating new developments in Travelport+, such as support for a wide range of carrier NDC offerings and the Content Curation Layer, the Company's groundbreaking, machine learning powered search engine that normalizes and personalizes all sources of travel content. The Transaction, which is subject to obtaining requisite consents and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions, is expected to close by the end of the year. About Travelport Travelport is a global technology company that powers bookings for hundreds of thousands of travel suppliers worldwide. Buyers and sellers of travel are connected by the company's next generation marketplace, Travelport+, which simplifies how brands connect, upgrades how travel is sold, and enables modern digital retailing. Headquartered in United Kingdom and operating in more than 165 countries around the world, Travelport is focused on driving innovation that simplifies the complex travel ecosystem. Contact Travelport: Margaret Kim / Katie Cline / Jennifer Blackburn [email protected] (770) 563 2586 FGS Global: Kal Goldberg / Liz Micci / Michael Mittelman [email protected] (212) 687-8080 View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/travelport-investors-commit-570-million-in-new-equity-financing-to-bolster-capital-structure-and-accelerate-long-term-growth-and-innovation-302004712.html SOURCE Travelport [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Lenovo Introduces New Chromebox Micro for Digital and Interactive Display Solutions Tweet Today, Lenovo announces its new Chromebox Micro media player during the Digital Signage Experience (DSE). The Lenovo Chromebox Micro is a new breed of Chromebox: an ultra-thin and affordable media player offering high performance, proven data security, and easier remote control and device management with ChromeOS. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204456205/en/ Lenovo Chromebox Micro (Photo: Business Wire) Signs Point Towards Growth The global digital signage market size was estimated at nearly USD 25 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 8 percent from 2023 to 2030.i Growth in the industry is being driven by innovation in consumer experiences in retail and hospitality, as well as smarter infrastructure in healthcare, education, and the enterprise. As designers, marketers, and infrastructure builders look for smarter ways to engage and inform people, they are turning to solutions that are cost effective, secure, and easier to deploy at scale. Customers are also demanding advanced products that require digitized information management and guidance that can be accessed remotely. The Lenovo Chromebox Micro is purpose-built to meet these needs. Small Form Factor, Big Advantages The Lenovo Chromebox Micro is an ultra-thin, light-weight media player that fits into nearly any kiosk or signage solution. The first micro form factor Chromebox by Lenovo, the device is built for 24/7 digital display deployments in the challenging conditions of high-traffic facilities. The fanless, ventless, dust-proof ChromeOS compute solution supports dual displays at 4K resolutions. And it is built compact enough to fit into tight environments, in fact it is smaller than most smart phones. The Lenovo Chromebox Micro is a great fit for almost any signage and display solution. It includes USB-C, USB-A, and HDMI ports, as well as screw holes for easy mounting. Lenovo is collaborating with Instorescreen to offer 15.6" and 21.5" inFLEX displays specially designed for the Lenovo Chromebox Micro. The innovative high-resolution inFLEX displays feature a rear cavity to accommodate the Lenovo Chromebox Micro, ensuring unhindered access to all ports, while offering a streamlined and integrated appearance. For superior cable management, the Lenovo Chromebox Micro pairs with the inFLEX displays through a single cable from a USB-C port to provide video, power, and data. Designed to be deployed at scale, the Lenovo Chromebox Micro is easy to manage remotely. The ChromeOS Kiosk and Digital Signage Upgrade enables customers to set up and manage a fleet of kiosk devices. Customers can also leverage ChromeOS zero-touch enrollment to accelerate the deployment of pre-provisioned devices. The small, durable form factor powered by the simplicity and security of ChromeOS gives the Lenovo Chromebox Micro big advantages in terms of lower total cost of ownership. "The Lenovo Chromebox Micro is a marvel of technological design and innovation, it is the powerhouse behind an extensive array of digital solutions tailored for a diverse range of industries and environments," said Marc Godin, Vice President and General Manager of Commercial Smart Devices Solutions Group, Lenovo. "The device can help transform any business by offering unparalleled visual experiences in a small but powerful solution that's easy to deploy." "The Lenovo Chromebox Micro is the most compact, affordable Chromebox yet, purpose-built from the inside out for kiosk, digital signage, and shared workstations," said Bryan Lee, VP of ChromeOS and Education, Google. "It was designed at the core to be a pocket-sized, plug-and-play solution that is not only quick to deploy and easy to manage, but also flexible enough to power incredible experiences across a broad range of use cases." Smarter Innovation for End-to-End Success The Lenovo Chromebox Micro with Instorescreen inFLEX smart displays is provided by Lenovo OEM Solutions, a dedicated engineering team combining Lenovo hardware with industry-leading OEMs and ISVs to make smarter technology that drives customer success. Lenovo OEM Digital Signage Solutions offer top-quality technology, design innovation and end-to-end services that support smarter customer experiences. Retail, hospitality, conferencing, healthcare, or anywhere else digital information solutions are needed - customers have a trusted partner that delivers advanced visual technology, and reliable services and support so businesses can focus on standing out from the crowd. Pricing & Availability The Lenovo Chromebox Micro will be available in select markets worldwide from the first quarter of 2024, starting from US$219. Tech Specs CPU Intel Jasper Lake2c N4500, 8+32, fanless OS ChromeOS Memory / Storage 8GB / 32GB eMMC Dimensions 163x79x19.7mm Weight 450g I/O 2x USB Type-C 2x USB Type-A 1x HDMI 1x RJ45 1x Audio Jack 1x Power Button 1x LED Indicator 1x K-Lock About Lenovo Lenovo is a US$62 billion revenue global technology powerhouse, ranked #217 in the Fortune Global 500, employing 77,000 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 largest PC company by further expanding into growth areas that fuel the advancement of 'New IT' technologies (client, edge, cloud, network, and intelligence) including server, storage, mobile, software, solutions, and services. This transformation together with Lenovo's world-changing innovation is building a more inclusive, trustworthy, and smarter future for everyone, everywhere. Lenovo is listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange under Lenovo Group Limited (HKSE: 992)(ADR: LNVGY). To find out more visit https://www.lenovo.com, and read about the latest news via our StoryHub. LENOVO is a trademark of Lenovo. CHROME and CHROMEBOOK are trademarks of Google LLC. INSTORESCREEN and INFLEX are trademarks of Instorescreen LLC. USB Type-C and USB-C are registered trademarks of USB Implementers Forum. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 2023, Lenovo Group Limited. i Grand View Research - Digital Signage Market Size, Share, & Trend Analysis Report View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204456205/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Bumble For Friends Adds "Plans" and AI-powered Conversation Starters to Make it Easier to Connect with Friends Tweet Bumble For Friends, an app for making friends nearby with shared interests, adds two notable updates - AI-generated conversation starters and Plans - to get offline and make local friends. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204367539/en/ The Bumble For Friends app is adding a Plans section for groups of friends to meet. To make it easier to build a community of friends, people can now organize in-person group get-togethers and discover nearby activities to join. (Graphic: Business Wire) Introducing Plans: A New Way to Gather as a Group Bumble For Friends is rolling out a highly-requested feature known as Plans, which helps members meet IRL with groups of up to 15 people. Whether you're planning a monthly book club or seeking concert buddies, Plans simplifies the process of organizing and participating in group get-togethers. For anyone navigating being new to an area or starting afresh, finding like-minded individuals to do things with can be a challenge; Plans on Bumble For Friends helps solve that problem by facilitating connections to nearby group activities. "When someone asks what your weekend plans are, and you don't have any, it can make you feel even lonelier. We want to eliminate that feeling and give members an easy way to enjoy fun plans with amazing people," said Whitney Wolfe Herd, Bumble's founder and CEO. "Plans is designed to be the bridge that brings online connections to life in the real world. It's about more than just meetin people; it's about forming deeper connections with those who share your interests. With Plans, you can get to know not just one, but an entire group of like-minded individuals with one gathering. It's all about creating opportunities for lasting friendships and meaningful experiences." How to Create & Share a Plan Skip the swipe. Anyone using the Bumble For Friends app can create a plan by tapping the Plans tab at the bottom of the app. Plans can be public or private. Private plans are invitation-only. Public plans are discoverable in the Plans tab, and any member can request to join. Once admitted to attend, the person joins a group chat with the other members and sees the location details. Want to share your plan? Tap the share icon at the top right side of the plan details screen. When the receiver opens the link they'll see an overview of the plan and an invitation to download the Bumble For Friends app if they haven't yet downloaded it. Additionally, Bumble For Friends is making it faster to get conversations going with new friends. No More Fretting Over First Messages: Your Personal Icebreaker AI Assistant Breaking the ice just got easier with Bumble For Friends' latest chat update. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Bumble For Friends' new personalized conversation starters assist with crafting the perfect icebreaker to initiate a conversation. This feature is currently available in English. How Do the Conversation Starters Work? When you connect with someone new, the AI magic kicks in, presenting you both with an in-chat prompt asking if you'd like help with what to ask in the first message. Tap 'get started,' and voila! AI crafts a personalized icebreaker question based on their profile. You're in control. Use the suggested question as is, tweak it, request another one, or go back to writing from scratch. Only one AI-generated icebreaker per chat is allowed, and it disappears once used. Herd shared: "AI can be a supercharger for getting to know new online connections faster. A pain point we hear is the uncertainty of what to message a potential friend. By leveraging AI as an idea generator, we're not only jump-starting conversations but also speeding up the process of discovering if there's a true connection. In our early testing, we are seeing a percentage of our members choosing to use AI to help them break the ice." With these new updates, Bumble For Friends continues to be at the forefront of fostering meaningful friendships and memorable social experiences redefining the way people connect online to get offline. To use Plans, download the free Bumble For Friends app on the App Store and Google Play in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. ABOUT BUMBLE INC. Bumble Inc. is the parent company of Bumble, Badoo, Fruitz and Official. The Bumble platform enables people to build healthy and equitable relationships, through Kind Connections. Founded by CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd in 2014, Bumble was one of the first dating apps built with women at the center and connects people across dating (Bumble Date), friendship (Bumble For Friends) and professional networking (Bumble Bizz). Badoo, which was founded in 2006, is one of the pioneers of web and mobile dating products. Fruitz, founded in 2017, encourages open and honest communication of dating intentions through playful fruit metaphors. Official is an app for couples that promotes open and honest communication between partners and was founded in 2020. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204367539/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] RealCold Acquires Forte Frozen to Strengthen National Cold Chain Footprint Tweet LAKELAND, Fla. and LOCKHART, Texas, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- RealCold, a Florida-based cold storage provider, announced that it has acquired Forte Frozen ("Forte"), a leader in national temperature-controlled warehousing and fulfillment services. The transaction, which closed today, gives RealCold five currently operational, high-throughput facilities in strategic markets including Dallas, Texas; Ormond Beach, Florida; Clearfield, Utah; Clackamas, Oregon; and Colton, California. This announcement follows RealCold's October announcement that the company acquired land in Lakeland, Florida and Lockhart, Texas for the construction of 376,000 and 310,000 sq. ft. cold storage facilities, respectively. Both projects have broken ground and are scheduled to be operational in the first quarter of 2025. In addition to the facilities in Texas, Florida, Utah, Oregon, and California, RealCold will leverage Forte's best-in-class operating platform, which is comprised of traditional cold storage and transportation services, as well as industry-leading, high touch, fulfillment activities including direct-to-consumer ("DTC"). Furthermore, Forte's team, in total, are now employees of RealCold. RealCold CEO Keith Goldsmith stated "We are thrilled to welcome the talented Forte team to RealCold. We sought to acquire an enterprise that had an incredibly skilled workforce, a reputation that embraced exacting measurements of execution, and which embodied customer-centric values. In acquiring Forte Froze, we will further ur mission to deliver the highest service levels in the sector, expand our coverage area to reflect locales where our customers need to be, and scale best-in-class processes." Dan Forte, CEO of Forte Frozen echoed the sentiment, noting "RealCold and Forte Frozen have a shared vision of what cold storage can look like in the future. It is one in which value added services like DTC play a critical role in the supply chain. We are excited that this transaction will allow us to execute this vision on a grand scale, as it provides resilience, innovation, and robust demonstrability, all grounded in an uncompromising customer-centric mindset." Key Benefits of the Acquisition: Enhanced Service Offerings: The combined resources will provide new and existing customers with an opportunity to engage in a highly collaborative design process that produces custom and highly flexible cold storage solutions regardless of complexity. Offerings include traditional services such as cold storage and transportation, as well as value added services, inclusive of e-commerce fulfillment, advanced kitting, layer and case picking, and specialized pack-out activities, which leverage optimal ice and freezer pack management. Expanded Geographic Reach: With Forte Frozen's footprint, coupled with the two facilities slated to open in early 2025, RealCold have will have over 54 million cubic feet of warehouse space, which can reach 77% of the U.S population in two days or less with ground parcel delivery. About RealCold Established in 2022, RealCold was founded to address the unmet needs of the food cold chain sector. By combining high-growth strategic locations, state-of-the-art Class A facilities, and a diverse offering of value added services, the company has positioned itself as a collaborative and integrated provider for food retailers, producers, and distributors. This mission is reinforced through its highly bespoke solutioning and customer-centric approach. The RealCold platform will ultimately operate a national, multi-channel network providing 1 or 2 day ground service for the majority of U.S. consumers. For more information on RealCold, please visit www.realcold.com. About Forte Frozen Denton, Texas based Forte Frozen was established in 2017 by Dan Forte. The company has become a trusted name in the cold-storage sector due to its emphasis on direct-to-consumer and e-commerce order fulfillment. The company's warehouse network spans the US, from Ormond Beach Florida to Colton, California. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/realcold-acquires-forte-frozen-to-strengthen-national-cold-chain-footprint-302004741.html SOURCE RealCold [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] In the near future, the Russian side is preparing to launch another wave of disinformation, in which Ukraine will be accused of allegedly inflating the requirements for the prisoner exchange formula, the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War. "In the near future, another wave of disinformation will be launched on the propaganda channels of the aggressor country about the reasons for the suspension of prisoner exchanges. The goal of the Russian special services is to destabilize the situation within Ukrainian society and sow distrust in government agencies that organize prisoner exchanges," according to the statement published in Telegram channel on Sunday, December 3. At the same time, the Coordination Headquarters notes that since the summer of 2023, authorized representatives of Russia have been systematically complicating the exchange process, despite the efforts of the Ukrainian side to continue the humanitarian mission of returning prisoners of war. "In order to justify its inaction, the Russian side is preparing accusations against Ukraine. In particular, the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War is preparing to be accused of inflating demands on the exchange formula and the intention to return military personnel of all units without exception, in particular those for which the Russian government has a special propaganda rage," the Coordination Headquarters said. It is also noted that on the Ukrainian side in the negotiation process, nothing has changed since they managed to return up to and over 300 servicemen to Ukraine every month. "Attempts by the opposite side to justify themselves rather than continue the humanitarian mission of exchanging prisoners indicate that they are little concerned about the fate of the large number of Russian prisoners of war who were captured on foreign soil, especially during the latest 'meat assaults,' as well as their families," the Coordination Headquarters said. It is noted that Russia has not yet provided unimpeded access for the missions of the International Committee of the Red Cross to Ukrainian prisoners of war. In addition, the aggressor country has still not been able to establish effective, unified work and communication on the treatment of prisoners of war. [December 04, 2023] BingX Sponsored NFT TAIPEI for Second Consecutive Year Tweet TAIPEI, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- BingX, a global leading cryptocurrency exchange, proudly announces its strategic sponsorship of NFT Taipei 2023, marking the second consecutive year of partnership with this prime event. NFT Taipei, organized by the Taiwan NFT Application & Development Association (NADA), unfolded from November 30 to December 03 at the enchanting Songshan Cultural & Creative Park in Taipei, Taiwan, drawing a remarkable attendance of over 100,000 enthusiasts. This sponsorship reaffirms BingX's steadfast commitment to the transformative potential and core principles of blockchain technology. NFT Taipei, distinguished as Asia's premier hub for NFT art and blockchain dialogue, hosted pivotal events such as the OneOffs Fair & Fest and the NFT Taipei International Conference. This global convergence brought together industry leaders, government representtives, creators, venture capital funds, developers, and startups from over 30 countries. OneOffs Fair & Fest unfolded under the theme "O dash O Zero Distance," offering attendees an immersive experience into the world of art. It provided insights into collection trends, brand culture, the emerging generation of collectors, and the fusion of reality and virtuality. BingX elevated this experience by curating exclusive limited-edition merchandise, adding an extra layer of allure. NFT Taipei International Conference, featuring distinguished guests from the blockchain and NFT domains, including Yat Siu, Ray Chan, Gideon Welles, Johnson Yeh, Web3 Honey, among others, served as a prominent platform for sharing innovative insights and fostering industry collaborations. Megan Nyvold, Head of Branding at BingX, expressed, "BingX's continued sponsorship not only amplifies the event's significance but also underscores its unwavering support for blockchain technology. This global congregation of elite minds is set to witness the seamless integration of blockchain and art, paving the way for future trends. Stay tuned for further details on the NFT Taipei official website." At the end of this conference, a commemorative NFT will be issued, serving not only as a precious collectible but also holding practical values such as access passes and redemption for onsite benefits. About BingX Founded in 2018, BingX is a leading cryptocurrency exchange, serving over 5 million users worldwide. BingX offers diversified products and services, including spot, derivatives, copy trading, and asset management all designed for the evolving needs of users, from beginners to professionals. BingX is committed to providing a trustworthy platform that empowers users with innovative tools and features to elevate their trading proficiency. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bingx-sponsored-nft-taipei-for-second-consecutive-year-302004754.html SOURCE BingX [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] How Can High Schools Better Serve Teens Experiencing Homelessness? Tweet This week, 16-year-old Joey will sleep in a soft bed, take a warm shower and have a place to keep his belongings. He'll then make his way to Learn4Life high school in San Diego where he is catching up on credits and hopes to graduate soon. For most of the past year, he has experienced homelessness - couch surfing when he could, and on the streets when he couldn't. And Joey isn't alone. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204084701/en/ Learn4Life explores how high schools can be a better support to the unique challenges and needs of teens experiencing homelessness (Photo: Business Wire) In the last school year, the number of California teens aged 12-17 experiencing homelessness increased nine percent or by about 16,000, totaling 187,000 kids.1 In some regions, it's even higher, like Fresno County that has seen an increase of 30 percent.2 Keeping these students in school is challenging and made worse because students without secure, consistent housing are twice as likely to be suspended.3,4 Click to Tweet: The # of teens experiencing homelessness in CA has increased by 9% this year. How can high schools help them better? #HomelessYouth #TeenHomelessness #Learn4LifeSchools "If a student doesn't know where they are going to sleep at night or get a meal, they're certainly not going to be ready to tackle algebra," said Shellie Hanes, superintendent of Learn4Life, a network of 80+ public high schools that focus on kids who struggled at traditional schools. "We've seen a dramatic increase in the number of students who are experiencing homelessness - along with the traumas and mental health challenges that come with unstable housing." Hanes said that in some parts of the state, Learn4Life has seen an increase of 35 percent of students experiencing housing insecurity, up from the previous year. In response, they have: Increased the number of school counselors and school social workers to assist students with needed services and programs in their local areas. Increased partnerships with local service organizations to find ways to help provide temporary housing and other resources for students. Certified teachers in a trauma-resilient approach to supporting students, and handling issues with dignity and respect. A trauma-resilient education model emphasizes treating symptoms of trauma or stress as opportunities to teach life skills. As such, Learn4Life's suspension rate among students experiencing homelessness is nearly non-existent, compared to the state's average of six percent.5 "There are wonderful community organizations we partner with to help our students with housing, healthcare and basic needs. Our counseling team knows how to arrange motel vouchers, enroll in housing programs, arrange workforce training/employment, food, clothes, hygiene and transportation," added Hanes. Collaboratives like Central Valley Partners 4 Youth in Fresno hold quarterly meetings to support homeless and foster teens in the area, providing resources for shelter, education, counseling, health care and employment services. While organizations like Valley Oasis in the Antelope Valley provide housing, counseling and food resources to students and their families. Hanes notes that with an intensive focus on the needs of students experiencing homelessness, along with a personalized education, all students can flourish. "We do everything we can to keep these challenged students in school. They will have a far better outcome if they receive available services and earn their diploma," she added. About Learn4Life Learn4Life is a network of nonprofit public high schools that provide students personalized learning, career training and life skills. Each school is locally controlled, tuition free and gives students the flexibility and one-on-one attention they need to succeed. Serving more than 53,000 students - including full-time and intersession students - we help them prepare for a future beyond high school. For more information, please visit www.learn4life.org. 1 https://www.the74million.org/article/ca-enrollment-does-the-increase-in-homeless-students-indicate-a-worsening-trend/ 2 https://www.the74million.org/article/ca-enrollment-does-the-increase-in-homeless-students-indicate-a-worsening-trend/ 3 https://publicintegrity.org/education/unhoused-and-undercounted/homeless-and-suspended-in-california/ 4 https://calyouth.org/advocacy-policy/californias-homeless-youth/ 5 https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/9/27/23883830/homeless-suspension-rates-california/ View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204084701/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] The Scholastic 2023 Philanthropic Impact Report Celebrates Partnerships Committed to Literacy for All Children Tweet Through donations of millions of books and funding dollars, and a wide range of creative collaborations, Scholastic works to elevate its partners' missions to deliver access, choice, and diversity of books regardless of a child's literacy experience or economic background NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Scholastic, the global children's publishing, education and media company, released its second annual Philanthropic Impact Report*, featuring stories of true partnership that continue the Company's long-standing efforts to increase access to books and literacy for all children. To learn more about the Scholastic Philanthropic Impact Report, visit: http://scholastic.com/csr . "Our philanthropic impact partners understand that all children need access to choose books and build their home libraries to develop their choosing muscles, reading fluency, and identity as readersall of which are imperative for their literacy," said Judy Newman, Scholastic Chief Impact Officer. "Scholastic's mission is to upport our partners in their impressive work to overcome barriers such as poverty and insufficient resources to guarantee access to literacy for all children regardless of their reading experience or economic background." The stories shown in the pages of Scholastic's 2022-2023 Philanthropic Impact Report reflect the breadth and depth of the work with partners dedicated to advancing the well-being of children on their literacy journeys. Whether an individual classroom teacher, a family member attending a book fair, or an event with a global not-for-profit, the shared mission to deliver literacy for all children is evident throughout the critical work done with Scholastic's partners. This past school year, more than 5 million books and $650,000 in cash were donated by Scholastic to advance literacy initiatives with partners such as Save the Children, Book Harvest, Toys for Tots, LitWorld, Reach out and Read, Share the Magic Foundation, and many more. "Thousands of children and families in our communities are building home libraries chock full of Scholastic books, and whenever Clifford visits, kids flock to him and shriek with glee and delight," said Ginger Young, North Carolina based-Book Harvest founder. Research from the Scholastic Kids & Family Reading Report shows us that the majority of parents agree that every child needs to have books of their own at home; however, that is not the reality for all children, which makes this work essential. In addition to external partners, Scholastic's philanthropic impact work continues through its time-honored, treasured school-based channels. Schools raised more than $217 million in cash and Scholastic Dollars to use towards free books and resources by hosting Scholastic Book Fairs, while the company's sponsored Fairs provided over a million free books to more than 250,000 kids in under-resourced communities; and Scholastic Book Clubs gave approximately 6.1 million books through its programming. Through the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, the nonprofit home of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, founded 100 years ago, Scholastic is dedicated to showcasing student work and raising awareness of the incredible talent, originality, and voice of teens through traveling exhibitions and special events. *Scholastic reports philanthropic efforts based on its fiscal year calendar, which began June 1, 2022 and ended May 31, 2023. View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-scholastic-2023-philanthropic-impact-report-celebrates-partnerships-committed-to-literacy-for-all-children-302004766.html SOURCE Scholastic Inc [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Clever Carnivore Raises $7M to Expand Operations and Scale Up Production of Cultivated Meat Tweet Delicious, sustainable, cost-competitive and cruelty-free meat is officially in the works. And early investors in Clever Carnivore will be among the first to see how the sausage gets made. Clever Carnivore, a Chicago biotech startup producing low-cost, top-quality cultivated meat, today announced the successful closing of its $7 million seed round funding. The round was led by Lever VC, a globally renowned investor in the alternative protein industry. "We are delighted with the enthusiastic support from our investors in this seed round," said Virginia Rangos, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Clever Carnivore. "This funding is a testament to the hard work and dedication of our entire team and reaffirms the confidence that investors have in our cutting-edge science, technology and business model. With this investment, we are well positioned to revolutionize the protein market and enhance the overall consumer experience." Clever Carnivore received substantial backing from national and international investors, including McWin Capital Partners from Spain; Thia Ventures headquartered in Belgium and Switzerland; Valo Ventures from Palo Alto, California; Newfund Capital from France; and Stray Dog Capital, a Midwest-based fund with roots in Kansas. "We've been tracking and investing across the global cultivated meat sector since the first such company launched eight years ago, and we haven't seen anyone come remotely close to Clever Carnivore's astoundingly low current cost of production, a testament to the company's phenomenal science," said Nick Cooney, managing partner of Lever VC. "Clever Carnivore's approach blends breakthrough science and a demonstrated cost advantage in the cultivated meat sector. I had been wanting to make an investment in the space for a couple of years, and major scientific advantages combined with a stellar founding team and a big vision compelled Newfund to make this investment. We're excited to back and support Clever Carnivore," said Pierre-Jean Cobut, entrepreneur in residence at Newfund Capital. Clever Carnivore's R&D is headed by co-founder Paul Burridge, Ph.D., a professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Burridge is an expert with more than 20 years of research experience in cell line development and growth media optimization. The company has optimized its growth media to support its unique cell lines, achieving an incredible reduction in cell culture media costs - one to two orders of magnitude lower than any other cultivated meat company globaly. "We are convinced that cultivated meat will become an essential part of the food on our plate. What was missing up to now was the technology to make products that will provide the same taste and nutrition as meat from farmed animals and at a truly competitive price. Clever Carnivore has what it takes to bridge that gap, and they move very fast," said Bart Van Hooland, managing partner of Thia Ventures. "Paul's experience with cell line development and low-cost media, coupled with Clever Carnivore's cells' superior growth performance in animal component-free media, places Clever Carnivore in a unique position to rapidly iterate and evolve their production processes and product formulation in a cost- and time-efficient manner," said Subodh Gupta, partner at Valo Ventures. The seed round was oversubscribed, reflecting the growing investor confidence in Clever Carnivore's innovative approach. This successful funding round will enable Clever Carnivore to accelerate its expansion plans and fuel the company's mission to redefine the way consumers access and enjoy top-tier meat products. Clever Carnivore plans to relocate its Lincoln Park operations to a larger nearby facility by year-end. The expansion will allow the company to scale up production into 500L bioreactors and add in test kitchens, as Clever Carnivore's early growth has already surpassed the capacity of its inaugural lab. Clever Carnivore is currently producing cultivated pork sausage, with plans to unveil its prototype product, the Clever Bratwurst, in early 2024. Chicago, historically the meatpacking capital of the world, is now gearing up for a resurgence in the protein production industry - this time, using more efficient and sustainable processes. As a Chicago-based biotech pioneer, Clever Carnivore is leading the charge. About Clever Carnivore Clever Carnivore, Chicago's first cultivated meat company, is a mission-driven startup deploying cutting-edge biotechnology to bring low-cost, top-quality cultivated pork, beef and chicken to the consumer market. Using Clever Carnivore's high-efficiency model, cruelty-free, sustainable and cost-competitive sausages, burgers and chicken nuggets will soon be a reality. The company works to develop cultivated meat products using cell biology, recombinant protein technology and advanced bioreactor design, with the objective of creating consumer products that compete on taste, price and convenience with conventional meat, delivering a gastronomic experience that satisfies vegetarians and carnivores alike. To learn more about Clever Carnivore's work to bring delicious and affordable cultivated meat to market and receive updates on our progress, please visit clevercarnivore.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. About Lever VC Lever VC is a leading sector specialist in the food-tech and ag-tech sectors, backing early-stage startups around the world creating the future of protein. Lever VC's partners have executed over 90 deals in the category over the past nine years and are currently raising a $250 million Fund II. More information is available at levervc.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204883859/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Newrez Ventures Continues Joint Venture Expansion with Launch of Meybohm Mortgage Tweet Newrez, in partnership with Meybohm Real Estate, proudly announces the launch of Meybohm Mortgage, an exciting new joint venture under the Newrez Ventures brand. This milestone marks a significant expansion of Newrez Ventures' portfolio, reinforcing its commitment to innovation and excellence in the mortgage industry in the Georgia and South Carolina areas. Randy Vanden Houten, SVP Joint Venture Lending, expressed his excitement about the launch, stating, "We are thrilled to welcome Meybohm Mortgage into the Newrez Ventures family. This strategic move aligns with our vision of delivering unparalleled value to clients and reshaping the real estate landscape. Meybohm Mortgage's innovative programs and dedication to excellence perfectly complement our mission." Meybohm Mortgage, known for its specialization in residential purchase mortgage lending, brings a wealth of expertise to the Newrez Ventures portfolio. Meybohm Mortgage is set to redefine industry standards and elevate the joint venture brand to new heights. Kim Shelpman, President at Meybohm Mortgage, shared her enthusiasm for the collaboration, saying, "Meybohm Mortgage is excited to join forces with Newrez Ventures. Our suite of groundbreaking programs, including the Credit Boost Program, Preferred Lender Listing Tool, and 'Knock' program, will now reach a broader audience, providing innovative solutions to enhance the home buying experience." This is the laest joint venture for Newrez, following a busy year of new brands joining the Family of Companies including most recently Onward Home Mortgage and Carnegie Mortgage Partners. For more information on the Newrez Ventures platform, visit www.newrez.com/joint-venture-retail. About Newrez Headquartered in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, Newrez is a leading mortgage company, dedicated to reimagining the homeownership journey. Combining mortgage origination and servicing, Newrez is uniquely positioned to offer a streamlined, customer-centric experience, catering to clients when and where they need it most. Newrez's customer-first strategy empowers homeowners to optimize their investment, guiding them towards the most beneficial financial decisions every step of the way. About Newrez Ventures Newrez Ventures, formerly known as Shelter Mortgage Company, is a leading retail residential mortgage originator predominantly focused on conforming purchase money loans generated through relationships with real estate agents, builders, and relocation companies. Founded in 1984 as a subsidiary of a community bank, Newrez Ventures joined the Newrez Family of Companies in 2014. The company has loan officers across the country with joint venture and partner relationships in over 30 states. Newrez Ventures has built a strong platform via its differentiated, partnership-based origination model, focus on purchase money originations and compliance-oriented culture. About Meybohm Real Estate Meybohm Real Estate is committed to providing exceptional service, attention to every detail, and true support from the start of the customer's real estate transaction through the end. As the largest brokerage in the CSRA (Central Savannah River Area), Meybohm Real Estate specializes in residential resales, new home construction, property management, relocation, and commercial services - Meybohm Real Estate embodies a true full-service brokerage and trusted market leader for more than 45 years - customers can trust that a partnership with Meybohm Real Estate is the best first decision they can make. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204449294/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] National Health Care Organizations Collaborate to Educate Patients About the Risks of Illegal Online Pharmacies Tweet MOUNT PROSPECT, IL, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MOUNT PROSPECT, IL The National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP), in collaboration with a coalition of esteemed health care organizations, is taking a stand to protect patients from the perils of substandard and falsified medicine sold online through a joint position statement. The proliferation of illegal online pharmacies poses a significant threat to patients, potentially resulting in disease progression, adverse events, and even fatalities. In a world where consumers turn to the internet for convenience, it is crucial for them to understand the risks associated with purchasing prescription medication from unverified online sources. According to the Alliance for Safe Online Pharmacies, an alarming 38% of Americans are aware of instances where individuals, including themselves, have received substandard or falsified prescription medication from online pharmacies. Such medications can prove ineffective in treating medical conditions or, worse yet, contain hazardous substances like drywall or rat poison. Patients who engage with these illicit websites expose themselves to fraud, identity theft, and malware infections. Of utmost concern, the rise of deadly pills laced with fentanyl, sold primarily through social media platforms, has resulted in numerous fatalities across the United States. NABP has been educating patients about the risks of buying medication online and how to avoid rogue websites selling substandard and falsified medications for many years. During that ime, we identified more than 43,000 websites that failed to comply with NABP patient safety and pharmacy practice standards or applicable laws, many of which have since been taken down. Unfortunately, our research continues to show that nearly 95% of websites offering prescription-only drugs online operate illegally, said NABP President Lenora S. Newsome, PD. With these alarming statistics in mind, we are excited to have these other notable health care organizations join us in encouraging practitioners to educate their patients about this important issue. Industry experts estimate the existence of between 30,000 and 40,000 active illegal online pharmacies, often operated by organized, international criminal networks. These networks leverage thousands of interconnected websites to efficiently reach a vast consumer base. Although government agencies and private actors have worked hard to curb these illegal sales, the problem persists. Therefore, increasing awareness among consumers is vital. NABP and the organizations that have signed onto this statement urgently call upon pharmacists, doctors, nurses, and other health care providers to join us in educating patients about the risks of purchasing medication online, including the possibility of receiving substandard and falsified medications. The position statement provides the following action items that can be undertaken by the health care professions: Alert patients and caregivers to the risks of purchasing medications from social media and unverified online sites by sharing real-life stories from affected individuals. Provide safe online purchasing resources, such as NABPs Safe Site Search Tool and Food and Drug Administrations BeSafeRx web page. Educate law enforcement and domain registries/registrars about these online criminals so that they can take action when needed. Download the full statement to see the organizations that have signed on. NABP is dedicated to the welfare of patients and remains committed to confronting this pressing public health issue. Together, we can safeguard patients from the grave risks associated with counterfeit and substandard medicines. NABP is the independent, international, and impartial 501(c)(3) nonprofit Association that assists its state member boards and jurisdictions in protecting the public health. NABP was established in 1904 to assist the state boards of pharmacy in creating uniform education and licensure standards. Today, we help support patient and prescription drug safety through examinations that assess pharmacist competency, pharmacist licensure transfer and verification services, and various pharmacy accreditation and inspection programs. - 30 - Larissa Doucette 847/391-4405 [email protected] [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Inside Adamastor and the manufacturing plant on the outskirts of Porto Tweet Top human and technical resources to build the first Portuguese Supercar PORTO, Portugal, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- With a work team that currently comprises fourteen members with academic and professional training in the areas of engineering, production and design - as well as an international network of partnerships that gives it access to the latest technologies - Adamastor is driving forward and materialising its vision of a modern supercar from its factory and engineering centre in the Perafita area of Porto. Adamastor's factory currently has a working area of around 2,225 square metres, with the potential to expand to 6,000 square metres, which will allow it to implement its growth plan in a phased and sustained manner in the future, both in terms of technical and human resources. Adamastor is fully focused on its goal of becoming a benchmark manufacturer of low volume supercars, and is also committed to establishing itself as an engineering centre of excellence, through which it will provide consultancy, design and production services using cutting-edge technology. Its capabilities and competences include CNC machining facilities, the production of components in composite materials and the use of the latest 3D printing technology. Its engineering projects also use the most advanced mechanical design, simulation and optimisation software, as well as exploiting the enormous potential of tools such as virtual reality. Following a handcrafted production approach, Adamastor's manufacturing concept is based on the assembly bay principle, in which a highly specialised technical team will be fully responsible for the entire design process of each vehicle, fostering a greater emotional connection between the human and material aspects, which will always be the inspiration behind the excellence of Adamastor's work and the quality of execution of its highly qualified technical team. Adamastor's current team includes : Daniel Lopes, a Composites Technician with a degree in Arts and a great love of handcrafts, also has Lay-Up training from Caetano Aeronautic, SA, having worked, for example, with dry carbon fibre, dry glass fibre, kevlar and copper mesh; Diogo Matos, who has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from ISEP - Instituto de Engenharia Mecanica do Porto, currently works as an engineer at Adamastor. He also has experience in robotics, building tubular chassis and providing assistance to motor racing teams. Frederico Ribeiro, who has a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, has been Adamastor's Engineering Director since its formation and is responsible for the design, drawing and simulation of structural components. He has extensive professional experience in the field of motor racing, having collaborated with renowned structures such as Speedy Motorsport and Veloso Motorsport as a Race Engineer; Gerardo Menezes, who has a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Faculdade de Engenhari da Universidade do Porto, takes on the role of Production Manager at Adamastor. He has five years' training in karting, race management and car mechanics; Joao Ginete, who has a degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Bristol, is Adamastor's Head of Aerodynamics. His professional experience includes roles at McLaren Racing, Red Bull Racing and Red Bull Advanced Technologies, having collaborated on projects such as the Aston Martin Valkyrie, as well as the Formula 1 single seaters that have been so successful in recent years; Joao Passos takes on the role of Production Coordinator and Competition Team at Adamastor, with extensive professional experience in the design and construction of racing cars. Together with the late Alfredo Matos, he founded DBE Chassis and Suspension Engineering, a company with an extensive track record in building racing cars, whether classic vehicles or contemporary models. Nuno Silva is a Composites Technician at Adamastor. With more than 15 years' experience in laminating fibres and other composite materials, he currently works on cutting cores and treating epoxy plates for lamination, as well as making moulds and laminating monolithic parts. Pedro Abreu, who has a Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, is Adamastor's Production Engineer. With experience in various CAD, CAM and FEA modelling software, he also has theoretical and practical knowledge of manufacturing processes for parts made of composite materials. Ricardo Quintas, who has a degree in Management and Administration from the Instituto Superior de Administracao e Gestao, is the CEO and one of the founders of Adamastor. With extensive experience in management positions in various companies in a wide range of business areas, Ricardo Quintas is one of the driving forces behind Adamastor. Samuel Busovsky, who has a degree in Industrial Design & Technology from Brunel University London, has been Adamastor's Design Director since July 2019. He has extensive experience with CAD modelling software and is responsible for designing the interior of Adamastor's new car, including all its conception phases, from design and modelling to compliance with applicable legislation. Vitor Batista is a Composites Technician at Adamastor. He has extensive training and experience as a laminator of composite materials, acquired mainly at Caetano Aeronautic, SA. Victor Pinto takes on the role of Composites Technician at Adamastor. With extensive professional experience in the most diverse areas of production, such as carpentry, CNC cutting and machining operator, vacuum laminator, and infusion of carbon fibre composites, he is one of the most recent members of Adamastor's laminating team. This is the human capital that fulfils Adamastor's activity. A multi-talented structure that operates at the Perafita plant, where, in addition to the Supercar to be unveiled in the first four months of 2024, it already supplies components to various clients, including carbon fibre bodies and fuel tanks, propellers for wind energy generation, among others. Taking advantage of all the know-how of its team of professionals and the experience it has accumulated in the most varied areas of industrial production, Adamastor is already on the final stretch to take to the track for the first tests of what will be the first Supercar born on Portuguese soil. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2292084/Adamastor_1.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2292085/Adamastor_2.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2292086/Adamastor_3.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2292087/Adamastor_4.jpg Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2292088/Adamastor_5.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2094180/4437438/Adamastor_Logo.jpg View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/inside-adamastor-and-the-manufacturing-plant-on-the-outskirts-of-porto-302004937.html SOURCE Adamastor [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Competition Bureau obtains a court order to advance investigation into Rogers' marketing practices GATINEAU, QC, Dec. 4, 2023 /CNW/ - The Competition Bureau has obtained a court order to advance its investigation into certain alleged marketing practices by Rogers Communications Inc. and its subsidiary, Rogers Communications Canada Inc. The order, granted by the Federal Court of Canada requires Rogers and its subsidiary to produce records and information relevant to the Bureau's investigation. The Bureau's investigation involves claims made by Rogers when promoting its Infinite wireless phone plans. In particular, the Bureau is examining claims that the plans have unlimited data, when there are allegedly significant reductions in data speed, known as throttling, after a subscriber reaches a certain data cap. The Bureau is looking to determine if Rogers' marketing practices raise concerns under the civil deceptive marketing provisions of the Competition Act. There is no conclusion of wrongdoing at this time. Quick Facts The misleading advertising provisions of the Competition Act prohibit making any kind of false or misleading claim to promote a product, service or business interest. prohibit making any kind of false or misleading claim to promote a product, service or business interest. In 2016, the Bureau took enforcement action against unlimited claims in the telecommunications industry after concluding that Comwave internet and home phone services advertised as "unlimited" were actually subject to monthly caps on usage. against unlimited claims in the telecommunications industry after concluding that Comwave internet and home phone services advertised as "unlimited" were actually subject to monthly caps on usage. In 2017, the Bureau published guidance for advertisers in the telecommunications industry warning against enticing consumers with claims that promise unlimited services, only to impose additional mandatory fees or caps. for advertisers in the telecommunications industry warning against enticing consumers with claims that promise unlimited services, only to impose additional mandatory fees or caps. The Bureau strongly encourages anyone who suspects that a company or individual is making deceptive marketing claims to report it by using our online complaint form . Associated links General information: Request for information | Complaint form Stay connected: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube | RSS Feed | Email Distribution List The Competition Bureau is an independent law enforcement agency that protects and promotes competition for the benefit of Canadian consumers and businesses. Competition drives lower prices and innovation while fueling economic growth. SOURCE Competition Bureau [December 04, 2023] RetinalGeniX Technologies Inc. Appoints Dessy Boneva, MD, FACS to the Board of Directors Tweet PETALUMA, Calif., Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- RetinalGeniX Technologies Inc. (OTCQB: RTGN) (RetinalGeniX or the Company), today announced that Dessislava (Dessy) Boneva, M.D. has joined the Companys Board of Directors. RetinalGeniX is an ophthalmic research and development med-device and therapeutic drug development company focused on developing High-Resolution Retinal Imaging and Pharmaco-Genetic Mapping technologies. Dr. Boneva is an experienced surgeon skilled in trauma, surgical critical care, emergency surgery, and acute care surgery. Dr. Boneva's career began at a specialized Mathematics school where she excelled in Engineering. However, it wasn't until she went on health mission trips that she discovered her true passion for helping patients. She decided to pursue a career in medicine and trained at some of the best schools in the U.S. After completing her surgical residency at an Ivy League school, she was fortunate enough to be trained by some of the best trauma surgeons and leaders in her field, both in the U.S. and around the world. She has dedicated her life to saving lives and helping patients recover from traumatic injuries. With over 10,000 surgeries under her belt, more than 100 publications, and over 20 years of experience in her specialty, she remains just as devoted to the profession as she was when she first started. Dr. Boneva is a faculty member at the University of South Florida (USF) and has received numerous awards throughout her career. She has been included in the Dean's Honor's List, National Dean's List, and Who's Who among students in American Universities and Colleges, as well as the International Who's Who of Professionals. Dr. Boneva has also been recognized as a Top Doctor and Top Trauma Surgeon and has been published in multiple magazines including Top Doctor's Magazine. Recently, she was featured in the Wall Street Journal and received a Lifetime Achievement Award. She is actively involved in educating students, residents, and critical care fellows as part of the Graduate Medical Education (GME) programs at her hospital. She is also a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. Dr. Boneva said, I am very excited about joining the RetinalGeniX Board of Directors. I believe the Companys numerous patents and technologies are likely to help patients soon, both as preventive measures and therapeutically. I am convinced that RetinalGeniX's pharmaco-genetic technology has tremendous potential to prevent blindness, reveal early signs of systemic diseases and reduce healthcare costs. The Board and Clinical Advisers of RetinalGeniX are some of the world's leading ophthalmologists, I am honored to be a part of the team. RetinalGeniX is developing innovative technologies and software such as DNA/RNA/GPS Pharmaco-Genetic Mapping software to predict and associate early diagnosis ofsystemic disease in conjunction with high-resolution retinal imaging. These platforms are expected to help predict the course of systemic disease and prevent blindness. In concert with its Pharmaco-Genetic Mapping software, the Company is developing a high-resolution 24/7 real-time home and remote monitoring system to assist both physicians and patients. The use of the system does not require dilation of the pupil. The combined technologies are intended to prevent blindness through the early detection and treatment of ocular diseases and systemic diseases including neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, vascular, metabolic, and diabetic conditions. The Company has started conducting pharmaceutical clinical studies for treating dry Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) and Alzheimer's/Dementia complex as part of its DNA/RNA/GPS initiative. RetinalGeniX has also filed two provisional patents related to these studies and formed an institutional review board to launch a 390-patient clinical study that is intended to validate the relative suitability of anti-VEGF ocular injection treatments for patient candidates with wet AMD. Jerry Katzman MD, Chairman, President, and CEO of RetinalGeniX Technologies Inc., said, We are delighted to welcome Dessy aboard. She is truly inspiring with her medical and surgical knowledge, expertise, personal and professional accomplishments, and passionate dedication to her patients and students. About RetinalGeniX RetinalGeniX is an ophthalmic research and development company focused on developing High-Resolution Retinal Imaging and Pharmaco-Genetic Mapping technologies intended to prevent blindness through the early detection and treatment of ocular diseases and also to detect initial physiological changes that could indicate possible future systemic disease including neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, vascular, metabolic, and diabetic conditions. Safe Harbor Statement This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are identified by the use of the words could, believe, anticipate, intend, estimate, expect, may, continue, predict, potential, project and similar expressions that are intended to identify forward-looking statements and include statements regarding the Companys numerous patents and technologies being likely to help patients soon, both as preventive measures and therapeutically, the potential of RetinalGeniX's pharmaco-genetic technology to prevent blindness, reveal early signs of systemic diseases and also reduce healthcare costs, developing innovative technologies and software such as DNA/RNA/GPS Pharmaco-Genetic Mapping software to predict and associate early diagnosis of systemic disease in conjunction with high-resolution retinal imaging, the platforms helping to predict the course of systemic disease and prevent blindness, developing a high-resolution 24/7 real-time home and remote monitoring system to assist both physicians and patients, preventing blindness through the early detection and treatment of ocular diseases and also systemic diseases including neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, vascular, metabolic, and diabetic conditions and launching a 390-patient clinical study to validate the relative suitability of anti-VEGF ocular injection treatments for patient candidates with wet AMD. These forward-looking statements are based on managements expectations and assumptions as of the date of this press release and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are difficult to predict, that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations and assumptions from those set forth or implied by any forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations include, among others, the contribution of Ms. Boneva to the Company, the Companys ability to successfully complete research and further development and commercialization of Company drug candidates, the timing, cost and uncertainty of obtaining regulatory approvals for the Companys drug candidates, the Companys ability to protect its intellectual property, and the risk factors described in the Companys Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022 and the Companys subsequent filings with the SEC, including subsequent periodic reports on Forms 10-Q and 8-K. The information in this release is provided only as of the date of this release, and we undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this release on account of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law. Contact RetinalGeniX Technologies, Inc. Jerry Katzman, MD, CEO [email protected] +1 (415) 578-9761 www.retinalgenix.com [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] G-P Recognized as the Top Employer of Record Provider by HRM Readers' Choice & Human Resources Online A testament to G-P's leadership in the Asia Pacific region, G-P awarded HRM Readers' Choice Award & HRO HR Vendor of the Year award for the fourth consecutive year SINGAPORE, Dec. 5, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- G-P (Globalization Partners) , the pioneer and recognized leader in the global employment industry, known for setting the standard in global employment compliance, has been recognized as the top Employer of Record (EOR) Service Provider in both the HRM Asia Readers' Choice Awards 2023 and HRO HR Vendor of the Year 2023. G-P was presented as the gold winner for this year's HRM Asia Reader's Choice Awards EOR category. This title recognizes G-P as the leading HR solution provider who has demonstrated best practices in their respective fields in the Asia Pacific region. Additionally, G-P received bronze recognition as an HRO HR Vendor of the Year , named Best Employer of Record Service Provider for corporate clientele. "We're proud to be recognized as the EOR industry leader by not one, but two of the most prestigious organizations in the APAC region," Charles Ferguson, general manager Asia Pacific at G-P said. "By codifying the global mindset and making it part of international business culture, G-P continues todrive innovation forward, find solutions to long-standing intractable problems and remain committed to breaking down barriers to global business and enabling opportunities for everyone, everywhere." As a testament to its market leadership, G-P has also been named the undisputed leader by the sector's top research and industry analyst firms: Everest Group , NelsonHall and the IEC Group . G-P was also recently named to Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 List . About G-P G-P is the pioneer and recognized leader of the global employment industry and has delivered world-class global compliance and workforce products designed to meet the needs of growing companies since 2012. G-P's global growth platform is driven by the G-P MeridianTM Suite of SaaS-based global employment products. G-P helps thousands of customers build and manage teams quickly and compliantly in 180+ countries without navigating legal, tax or HR issues. G-P: Global Made PossibleTM To learn more, please visit: g-p.com or connect with us via Twitter , LinkedIn , Facebook , or check out our Blog . Media Contact: Katie Johnson kjohnson@g-p.com View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/g-p-recognized-as-the-top-employer-of-record-provider-by-hrm-readers-choice--human-resources-online-302005136.html SOURCE G-P Time-honored brands in China are stepping up innovation and adopting new technologies to win more global market share, often by upgrading techniques nurtured over decades. One week after Shandong province-based Ruifu Sesame Oil Co Ltd signed a contract with Poke House Inc to supply sesame oil to the fast-casual restaurant chain headquartered in Los Angeles, the company delivered a container of the same to its client in mid-November. The Chinese sesame oil producer will supply sesame oil products worth $1.5 million to the restaurant chain in the next year, according to the contract inked at a promotion of Shandong-based time-honored brands held during the sixth China International Import Expo in Shanghai on Nov 6. "We have upgraded the production techniques by using integrated and automated facilities, which enable us to maintain the nutrition of sesame seeds as much as possible and produce oil that meets international food standards," said Chen Xinghai, director of the planning department of Ruifu. National-level time-honored brands refer to those that have been developing for over five decades. Upgraded techniques With a technique of stone mill-ground sesame oil passed down over 600 years, Cuizi brand sesame oil, Ruifu's main product, has been listed in the first batch of national-level time-honored brands in China. Hundreds of years ago, the workshop used techniques, including stone mill and aqueous extraction that involves water as a medium to extract the oil from seeds to produce sesame oil. The company has optimized the production process based on the traditional techniques to increase the content of physiologically active components of sesame oil such as vitamin E by 10 to 20 percent, said Chen. The sesame oil and paste products produced by the company have been sold to more than 30 countries and regions, including Japan, South Korea, Australia, France, Canada and Ethiopia. Like Ruifu, time-honored companies in China are making efforts to innovate their techniques so as to produce diverse products that meet current market demand. China listed the cultivation and development of time-honored Chinese brands and traditional cultural brands in the Outline of the Strategy for Expanding Domestic Demand (2022-35) released by the State Council, the country's Cabinet, last year to promote their development. Guided by central government policies, local governments have released a series of methods to boost the protection and development of time-honored brands. The national-level and provincial-level time-honored brands in Shandong generated a total revenue of 232 billion yuan ($32.47 billion) last year, a year-on-year increase of 5.9 percent. Smart pharmacy After seeing a doctor at Jinan Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine and getting a prescription, 50-something Yang who chose to reveal only her family name was told she could leave and that the medicine would be delivered to her. Yang, who was suffering from insomnia for several days, previously needed to wait for about half a day at the hospital to get the medicine, but this time, she did not have to because of the smart TCM pharmacy, a system that Shandong has been developing to make TCM benefit more people. Once patients receive their prescriptions at medical institutions, they can choose a smart TCM pharmacy and make payments. The prescription is then transferred through the TCM data platform to the designated pharmacy, which offers personalized medicine preparation and home delivery services. There are 48 smart TCM pharmacies in the province, according to the Shandong Provincial Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Yang chose the smart TCM pharmacy of Shandong Hongjitang Pharmaceutical Co Ltd, a venerable Chinese pharmaceutical enterprise with a history of 116 years, for her medicine. Hongjitang, one of the first batch of Chinese time-honored brands, has employed technologies including the internet of things and blockchain to establish the first automated line of smart TCM pharmacy in China. "Eighty-five percent of the work in the smart pharmacy can be done by the automated facilities," said Liu Tao, chairman of Hongjitang. Behind its transformation from a traditional pharmaceutical manufacturing company to a tech-leading and innovation-driven enterprise is the support of the financing sector. The local government has been developing a financing chain that focuses on boosting innovation and technology in the province. When Hongjitang turned to innovation, Lucion Group, a State-owned company, injected capital to help it build an integrated smart TCM facility and expand markets. "The financing support has provided confidence for us to explore broader aspects, including drug research and development, development of TCM formulas, and construction of a comprehensive TCM evaluation system," said Liu. More than 30 teams of Ukrainian developers presented their developments and ideas, and about fifty applied to participate in the acceleration program to support innovations in humanitarian demining, implemented on the initiative of the Ministry of Economy together with the Kyiv School of Economics, the press service of the Ministry of Economy reported. "Our global goal is to return 80% of potentially mined territories to use within 10 years. To achieve this, we are working in several directions at once. These are creating a competitive mine clearance market, stimulating the development of production of machinery and equipment in Ukraine, strengthening the capabilities of operators, cooperation with donors," the press service quoted First Deputy Prime Minister - Minister of Economy Yulia Svyrydenko. She named the use of modern technologies as a key area in humanitarian demining. The government is ready to help inventors quickly go from idea to creation or scaling of a product. "This will be expert assistance, and if the project is promising, assistance will be provided with finding financing, certification, and entering the market," the minister emphasized. President of the Kyiv School of Economics Tymofiy Mylovanov emphasized the importance of exchange of experience and ideas for developers. "This helps understand how we can be useful to each other and how to develop the project. For example, increase the involvement of technology and reduce the direct presence of people in order to reduce the risk to people," Mylovanov noted. An expert group, which included representatives of the National Mine Action Authority, the Ministry of Defense, the State Emergency Service, the Ministry of Economy, during the presentation by teams of innovators at the Demining Bootcamp of developments in the areas of "Mine clearance equipment," "Integrated solutions," "IT solutions," and "Survey" assessed and commented on projects already working in real conditions. An important component of the Demining Bootcamp was working in teams on ideas to create more effective products and the opportunity to establish horizontal collaboration between business, developers and government agencies. "During the Demining Bootcamp, scientists proposed unconventional approaches to examination that deserve attention. Teams whose projects are recognized as the most promising by experts will receive a four-month acceleration program. Next spring, we plan to test finished or improved products at testing sites and in real conditions," Deputy Minister of Economy Ihor Bezkaravainy summed up the results of the Demining Bootcamp. The Ministry of Economy reminded that applications for the acceleration program continue to be accepted. Program participants will be able to create an individual roadmap, accompanied by mentors and experts, and receive support in developing a business model and business development plan from an idea or prototype to a certified product or technology. [December 04, 2023] Internet Advertising Market to increase by USD 424.62 billion from 2022 to 2027; Accenture Plc, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Alphabet Inc. and more among key companies- Technavio Tweet NEW YORK, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The internet advertising market size is expected to grow by USD 424.62 billion from 2022 to 2027. In addition, the growth momentum of the market will progress at a CAGR of 15.05%, according to Technavio. Rising digital transformation is notably driving the internet advertising market. However, factors such as rise in ad fraud may impede market growth. The market is segmented by platform (mobile, desktop and laptop, and others), Type (Large enterprises and SMEs) and Geography (North America, APAC, Europe, South America, and Middle East and Africa). We provide a detailed analysis of 20 companies operating in the internet advertising market including Accenture Plc, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Baidu Inc., Boostability Pvt. Ltd., Conversant Solutions LLC, Dentsu Group Inc., International Business Machines Corp., Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp., PBJ Marketing LLC, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, The Walt Disney Co., Thrive Internet Marketing Agency, Twitter Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., Web Net Creatives, WebFX, and Yahoo. The report offers an up-to-date analysis of the market, and to know the exact growth variance and the Y-O-Y growth rate, Request a Sample Report. Internet Advertising Market 2023-2027: Company Analysis Accenture Plc: The company offers intelligent advertising services which help to grow the advertising business effectively and profitably at scale. This report provides a full list of key companies, their strategies, and the latest developments. Buy Now for detailed company information Internet Advertising Market 2023-2027: Segmentation Type The mobile segment is estimated to witness significant growth during the forecast period. Mobile online advertising has become an essential part of the digital marketing landscape. Mobile devices are ubiquitous, enabling advertisers to reach large audiences anytime, anywhere. To target specific audiences more precisely, advertisers can use data collected from mobile devices, such as user behaviour and location information. The is estimated to witness significant growth during the forecast period. Mobile online advertising has become an essential part of the digital marketing landscape. Mobile devices are ubiquitous, enabling advertisers to reach large audiences anytime, anywhere. To target specific audiences more precisely, advertisers can use data collected from mobile devices, such as user behaviour and location information. Geography North America is estimated to account for 53% of the global market growth during the forecast period. With a large user base and high Internet penetration, North America has a well-developed digital advertising ecosystem. Big tech companies, such as Google (including the Google Ads advertising platform), Facebook (including Instagram), and Amazon (including Amazon Advertising), dominate the market. Also, the strong consumer preference for online shopping is also driving the market. Learn about the contribution of each segment summarized in concise infographics and thorough descriptions. View PDF Sample Report Internet Advertising Market 2023-2027: Key Highlights Historic Market Size 2017-2021 CAGR of the market during 2023-2027 Detailed information on factors that will assist internet advertising market growth during the next five years Estimation of the composite internet advertising market and its contribution to the parent market Forecasts on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior The growth of the Internet advertising market Analysis of the competitive landscape and detailed information on companies Comprehensive details of factors that will impede the growth of Internet advertising market companies Related Reports: The Southeast Asia - Online On-demand Home Services Market size is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 69.42% between 2022 and 2027. The market size is forecast to increase by USD 897.62 billion. The online ad spending market share is expected to increase by USD 241.99 billion from 2021 to 2026, and the market's growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 10.98%. Internet Advertising Market Scope Report Coverage Details Base year 2022 Historic period 2017-2021 Forecast period 2023-2027 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 15.05% Market growth 2023-2027 USD 424.62 billion. Market structure 14.91 YoY growth 2022-2023 (%) CAGR of 15.05% Regional analysis North America, APAC, Europe, South America, and Middle East and Africa Performing market contribution North America at 53% Key countries US, Canada, Japan, China, and Germany ToC: Executive Summary Market Landscape Market Sizing Historic Market Sizes Five Forces Analysis Market Segmentation by Platform Market Segmentation by Type Customer Landscape Geographic Landscape Drivers, Challenges, & Trends Company Landscape Company Analysis Appendix About Technavio Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contacts Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media & Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: [email protected] Website: www.technavio.com View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/internet-advertising-market-to-increase-by-usd-424-62-billion-from-2022-to-2027-accenture-plc-alibaba-group-holding-ltd-alphabet-inc-and-more-among-key-companies--technavio-302004161.html SOURCE Technavio [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [December 04, 2023] Eye Center of North Florida Announces Winner of Their 13th Annual LASIK Hero Campaign Tweet The Eye Center of North Florida (ECNF) is thrilled to announce Cody Hill, a dedicated Panama City Beach Firefighter, as the winner of their 13th annual LASIK Hero campaign. With nine years of service as a firefighter, Cody is on the brink of a glasses-free future. This beloved tradition, aimed at honoring and giving back to our courageous local heroes, provides free LASIK and cataract surgeries to deserving Bay County Firefighters, Police Officers, Nurses, and active members of local military branches. Click here to download photos and cutlines Reflecting on his journey, Cody Hill, the 2023 Eye Center of North Florida LASIK Hero winner, shared, "I vividly remember getting glasses for the first time in fourth grade. The details I could suddenly see were astonishing. With LASIK surgery, I can now move freely without the burden of glasses. Dr. Enfield's generosity in providing this procedure is an incredible gift, and I look forward to serving Bay County's residents with this newfound vision!" While on duty, Cody depended heavily on his contacts, sometimes wearing them for up to 48 hours. Unfortunately, ther were instances when his contacts became displaced, adversely affecting his performance. Fueled by a commitment to excel as a firefighter, Cody is now liberated from the constraints of impaired vision thanks to his LASIK surgery at the Eye Center of North Florida. He looks forward to serving the people of Bay County glasses-free! "Empowering individuals with clear vision is not just my profession; it's a privilege. Witnessing the transformative impact of LASIK surgery on heroes like Cody Hill is a testament to the life-changing nature of our work," said Dr. David "Ben" Enfield, an Ophthalmologist and refractive surgeon for The Eye Center of North Florida and a former sergeant and field surgeon for the Army National Guard. "As a surgeon at The Eye Center of North Florida, I am grateful to play a part in enhancing lives, and Cody's journey reaffirms the profound difference advanced vision care can make in the pursuit of excellence and service." Since its inception, the LASIK Hero campaign has touched the lives of numerous heroes in our community, offering them the gift of improved vision. The campaign not only underscores ECNF's commitment to vision care but also their dedication to making a positive impact in the lives of those who selflessly serve our community. The campaign ran from October 1 to November 1 of the year. About Eye Center of North Florida The Eye Center of North Florida has been serving the needs of Panama City and surrounding North Florida communities for more than 20 years with the most state-of-the-art eye care procedures. Our practice performed the very first laser cataract surgery in Florida and is the only laser cataract facility in the Greater Panama City area. Our surgeons have performed over 70,000 cataract and refractive procedures since its founding and is accredited by the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care. To learn more, visit: https://www.eyecarenow.com/. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204239509/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Here's a glimpse at worsening American scarcity on the Kansas side of the metro as this enclave struggles to keep up with a growing "unhoused" population that they can't send over the Missouri side any more thanks to the ubiquity of modern day surveillance . . . Here's the word: The Kansas City area as a whole struggles to string together a system of shelters that meet needs of people who could be looking for refuge for a night, or seeking enough temporary stability to find long-term housing in homes or apartments. That shortfall poses enough difficulty during good weather. But when winter freezes arrive, the stakes rocket up and finding a warm place to bed down becomes a matter of survival. That problem looks particularly troubling in Wyandotte County, where a range of aid groups are trying to piece together shelters for this winter. Cold weather shelter is a community project. Providers addressing homelessness really rally around it, said Rob Santel, director of programs for Cross-Lines Community Outreach. Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . . Lots of topics to consider right now as we take a look at EXCELLENT crime reporting, court case follow-up and police action. Check TKC news gathering . . . Police: Kansas City-area thieves charge $58K on victims' credit cards Liberty police search for accused thieves and say theycharged $58,000 in merchandise on stolen credit cards. 17-year-old is second person charged in connection with shooting inside Oak Park Mall No injuries were reported. Kansas City, Kansas, police officer shoots allegedly armed suspect in shoulder The Kansas Bureau of Investigation is looking into an incident overnight involving an allegedly armed suspect and a Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department officer. KCKPD: Driver turns self in after deadly hit-and-run near N 55th, Leavenworth Road The Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department reports the driver of a vehicle involved in a deadly hit-and-run near North 55th and Leavenworth Road has come forward. Cameron Lamb's family honors his memory with balloon release on 4th anniversary of his death Cameron Lamb's mother, Laurie Bey, and two sons - Cameron Jr. and Cincere - share memories of Lamb four years after his death. Developing . . . Right now we noticed hotite Blake doing a bit of artsy work for Brazzers and that has inspired us to check pop culture, community news and top headlines. Check TKC news gathering . . . Cowtown Competition Kansas City man competes in Netflix's 'Squid Game: The Challenge' for the opportunity of a lifetime A Kansas City man who once sought refuge in a camp in Nepal has found himself in the spotlight with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity on Netflix's "Squid Game: The Challenge." Foodies Finish Year What's new in KC food & drink December 2023 The latest KC food and drink news for December 2023. From national brew contest winners to a new waygu meet market. Prizes Inside The Loop Downtown Council accepting nominations for coveted annual awards - Downtown Council of Kansas City The Downtown Council is now accepting nominations for its 2023 annual awards. Pet Lovers Need Help PawsAbilities asking for help after car crashes through Olathe nonprofit's front wall The organization's storefront sustained more than $50,000 in damage Agenda Setting This Week Nick's Picks | Sports Deadlines, Anniversary Celebrations and Community Input Your handy-dandy guide to the week ahead: 5O-DAY COUNTDOWN While many Kansas Citians are counting down to Christmas, the countdown clock is fast ticking down on another important date: The deadline to place a new Royals ballpark on the April ballot. Today we officially hit the 50-day mark. "Brazzers Has Ruined You!" Can You Change A Man? In trying to better our boyfriends, are we being generous or taking on the world's most Sisyphean task? Prez Plays Doctor Biden's prescription for 2024 turnaround will include major health care focus | CNN Politics President Joe Biden is preparing a package of health care measures that he would aim to pass in a second term, with announcements starting this week centered around cutting prescription drug prices. MAGA FOREVER?!? Liz Cheney warns Trump will never leave office if he's elected president again WASHINGTON - Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., on Monday warned that if Donald Trump is elected president next year for a second term, he will try to remain in power beyond those four years. High Praise For 2nd Place Senate anti-Trump GOP see Haley as best hope to avoid disaster Senate Republicans who are concerned about former President Donald Trump's viability in a general election now see Nikki Haley as the last, best chance of denying Trump the GOP presidential nomination and averting what they see as a potential general election disaster. GOP senators who don't support Trump acknowledge he could win the presidency,... South Of Border Standoff Senate Dems: Border talks are dead. Senate Republicans: There's still a pulse. Hanging in the balance is Biden's foreign policy agenda. Cashing Out Of Eastern Europe White House says it is nearly out of money to help Ukraine fight war with Russia White House budget director Shalanda Young warned in a letter to Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and other congressional leaders on Monday that the United States was running out of time and money to help Ukraine fight its war with Russia. Tragic Terrorist Tactics Hamas planned sexual violence as weapon of war - Israeli campaigner An Israeli campaigner says militants planned acts of sexual violence committed in October's attack. Flexing On Far East China says U.S. Navy ship 'illegally intruded' into waters in South China Sea The Chinese military said that an American naval ship had "illegally intruded" on Monday into waters near the Second Thomas Shoal, the site of a hot territorial dispute between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. Billionaire Beef Served Elon Musk starts feud with Paris Hilton for pulling kitchenware ads from X Elon Muck slammed Paris Hilton for pulling her "Be an Icon" kitchenware ads from his X (formerly Twitter) platform amid concerns over its antisemitic content. Pop Diva Plays For Other Team Billie Eilish says she 'didn't realize people didn't know' about her sexuality | CNN Pop star Billie Eilish has confirmed that she accidentally came out in a recent interview with Variety magazine. Dirty Deed Alleged Arizona man accused of sexual misconduct with a corpse in hospital morgue An Arizona hospital security guard was arrested this week and charged with five counts of crimes against a dead person after his DNA was matched samples collected from a corpse. Cowtown Gameplay Debuts Theater of the Mind: Level One Game Shop levels up with Mugen Gaming and Kiri-ai: The Duel Kiri-ai: The Duel layout. // Courtesy photo As someone who hasn't played board games since Chutes and Ladders in grade school, it took me a while to catch on to something big. The tabletop gaming industry is hot-and getting hotter. While the rest of us weren't looking, Dungeons & Dragons and Risk made room for a new wave of inclusive... Suburban Helping Hand Offered Good Samaritan rescues man after crash north of Excelsior Springs Just a couple of weeks ago, Cameron Kurzweil of Lawson was on his way home from work around 1 a.m. on Hwy 69, north of Excelsior Springs. Celebrate South Side Old School Looking into the past through Miles-of-View in Leawood The survival of William Albertus McKinney's Miles-of-View is nothing short of a miracle. Trolling Traylor Taylor Swift Had a Comical One-Word Answer When Reporter Asked Her If She Liked Lambeau Field Nice try by the reporter. Forecast For Now WEATHER BLOG: Nick Bender says a blustery week is ahead with rain possible at the end The calendar says December, but the temperatures by the end of the week will feel more like late March! Zara Larsson, David Guetta - On My Love is the song of the day and this is the OPEN THREAD for right now. Follow-up on this controversy that dominated the metro discourse and garnered national coverage this year. Check the legal debate that still endures . . . Jennifer Hill, an attorney hired to represent the city of Marion following the raids, denied the KSHB 41 I-Teams request for Codys text messages and emails. In Hills Oct. 30 denial, Hill writes, As it relates to personal emails and text messages, the City has no custody over personal cell phones and KORA provides no enforcement mechanism to obtain text messages from personal cell phones. As such, obtaining text messages from the personal property of the listed individuals would place an unreasonable burden on the City, and, to the extent any such records even exist, the City is under no obligation to produce such records." Hills claims that the city has no custody over personal cell phones, that searching for the records would create a burden and that the city is under no obligation to produce the records, is not true. A 2016 amendment to the Kansas Open Records Act makes personal cell phones and emails subject to open record laws. Max Kautsch, media law attorney, said if Hills denial stands, the law isnt worth the paper its written on. Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . . KSHB 41 attorney sends letter demanding the release of former Marion police chief's emails, texts KSHB 41 News, through its attorney, has sent a letter to the city of Marion demanding the release of Gideon Cody's personal text messages and emails. Related . . . Hottie Maitland is not only an author but also a veteran of the adult entertainment industry. We have no doubt she has a lot of knowledge to share. Similarly and sadly . . . This tome has confronted push back from Missouri politicos and a double down from librarians . . . Take a peek: The book, which features interviews with gay porn starsalong with helpful diagrams!has been formally challenged by an as yet unnamed Charles County resident who doesnt want you to learn about having good sex. Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . . Missouri library buys extra copies of "Bang Like a P*rn Star" for "research." The St. Charles County library system recently bought additional copies of a challenged book, Bang Like a P*rn Star: Sex Tips from the Pros, because "committee members need more copies to conduct a... Developing . . . Belgium's chocolate history spans many years. This small country in Europe has made chocolate making a fine art. In cities like Brussels and Bruges, you will see many famous chocolate shops. Each shop gives a taste of Belgium's rich chocolate history. When you go on Belgium chocolate tours, you will learn a lot about this tasty world. These tours are more than just visits to chocolate shops. They take you into the heart of Belgian chocolate culture. You will see how chocolate makers mix old ways with new ones to make beautiful chocolates. From smooth pralines to rich dark chocolates, each type shows the skill and love put into making them. Learn the Best Belgium Chocolate Tours for Your Unforgettable Belgian Getaway Belgium is renowned as a prime destination for chocolate enthusiasts, boasting a centuries-old tradition of high-quality, flavorful chocolate. In exploring Belgium chocolate tours, you will gain a deep insight into the country's rich chocolate-making heritage. Chocolate has been a part of Belgian culture since the 17th century, and the skill of creating these luxurious treats is a cherished legacy. Here are some famous Belgium chocolate tours that will complete your Belgian getaway. Brussels Your chocolate adventure might start in Brussels, the chocolate capital of the world. Here, you will find many chocolate shops, each with its own story and specialty. Walking through these charming streets, you will be drawn in by the smell of freshly made chocolates. Tours in Brussels often include visits to famous chocolatiers, where you can see the careful process of chocolate making, from bean to bar. Read Also: A Tour of Hershey and also the Amish Cities Bruges Next, you might want to go to Bruges, a beautiful medieval town often described as a chocolate fairy tale. The cobbled streets and historic buildings provide the perfect setting for chocolate exploration. In Bruges, chocolate tours offer a close look at small-scale artisanal chocolate production. You will see how traditional methods are still used to make chocolates that are both beautiful and tasty. Antwerp Antwerp, known for its exciting culinary scene, offers a mix of traditional and modern chocolate experiences. Here, innovative chocolatiers experiment with flavors and textures, expanding the traditional way of chocolate making. On tour in Antwerp, you will get to try a range of unusual chocolates, from bold, spicy blends to delicate floral infusions. Ghent Often overlooked, Ghent is a special place in the Belgium chocolate tour scene. This lovely city has a range of small chocolate shops. Ghent's chocolate tours are known for their personal touch, often led by chocolatiers who share passionate stories about their creations. Tasting sessions here allow you to enjoy chocolates that are made by hand with care. Liege Liege, another notable stop for Belgium chocolate tours, offers its own sweet surprises. This lively city, though less known than Brussels or Bruges, holds its own in the chocolate world. Liege's chocolate scene is marked by cozy, family-run shops where the warmth of the chocolatiers is as inviting as the chocolates themselves. On a tour here, you will find a welcoming atmosphere where you can learn about the local approach to chocolate making. Practical Tips for Belgium Chocolate Tours While exploring these wonderful places, remember a few practical tips to make your Belgium chocolate tour better. First, remember that each chocolatier has its own style, so try a variety of chocolates. Second, think about the timing of your visit; certain times of the year, like Easter or Christmas, offer special chocolate creations. Lastly, booking tours in advance is often a good idea, especially during busy tourist seasons. Related Article: Tourism Villages: Where Can You Find the Best Secret Spots in Italy In the 2023 Global Peace Index, Iceland retains its position as the world's most peaceful country, followed by Denmark and Ireland. New Zealand and Austria also feature in the top five. This annual index, prepared by the Institute for Economics and Peace, evaluates global peacefulness based on factors such as militarization, safety, and internal and external conflicts, highlighting the most peaceful countries worldwide. World's Most Peaceful Countries Revealed Imagine a place with calm streets, friendly people, and a safe environment. This is what the most peaceful countries in the world offer. Leading this dreamy list is Iceland, known for its peacefulness and harmony. According to the latest findings, it's the most peaceful country on the globe. Here are the top 10 peaceful countries where peace and safety are a way of life. 1. Iceland Iceland is happy to be the number one most peaceful country in the world again, for the 17th time. It's doing the best in areas like avoiding war and having less military action, and it's also really good at keeping people safe and secure, ranking third. As per Vision of Humanity, it's worth mentioning that its overall peace score went down by 4% because there were more homicides and some increase in terrorism. 2. Denmark Denmark's high ranking among the most peaceful countries is due to several key factors. The country has a strong political system that is stable and effective, ensuring a peaceful and orderly society. Its commitment to human rights and equal treatment for all citizens contributes significantly to its peaceful status. Income equality in Denmark is also noteworthy; the gap between the rich and the poor is smaller compared to many other countries, leading to fewer social tensions and a more cohesive society. Read Also: Heavy Snowfall Cancels More Than 700 Flights in Munich 3. Ireland Ireland is in the top 3 most peaceful countries due to its low violence. The country is known for its safe streets and peaceful living. There are very few crimes, especially serious ones like violence or terror attacks. This makes Ireland one of the safest places in the world. People there live without much fear of crime, which is why it ranks so high for peace. Ireland's efforts to keep its citizens safe and maintain low crime rates have earned it a spot in the top 10. 4. New Zealand New Zealand, second in the Global Peace Index since 2017, dropped to fourth in the latest report. The country is known for its high safety and low conflict levels, making it an excellent place to live. However, according to Global Finance, its peace score decreased by 6% because more weapons were imported and exported and updates to its military vehicles. New Zealand, about the same size as the UK but with only 5 million people, leads in health and is above average in education, jobs, and earnings compared to other OECD countries. But housing affordability is a big problem. It's hard for low-income people to buy homes, making the wealth gap New Zealand's biggest economic issue, as stated by 20% of its residents. 5. Austria Since the Cold War ended, Austria, a small country of about 9 million people, has moved closer to the heart of Europe. It's not in NATO but is a newer EU member. Austria has tried to keep good relations with different political groups and work closely with neighbors. However, it faces challenges. Social tensions, partly due to anti-immigrant views, are rising. A violent incident in Vienna in 2020 led to tough anti-terror laws, like life imprisonment for convicts and more surveillance. This affected Austria's peace score, especially with growing protests against COVID lockdowns and mandatory vaccines. 6. Singapore Singapore ranked as the sixth most peaceful country, stands out mainly due to its low levels of violence. The country has strict laws and efficient law enforcement, leading to very low crime rates. This makes Singapore one of the safest places in the world. People can walk around freely, even at night, without much worry. This safety and security are big reasons Singapore is in the top 10 most peaceful countries list. Its focus on maintaining order and peace has earned it a high spot in global peace rankings. 7. Portugal Portugal stays strong in the list of the top ten most peaceful countries. It's also ranked fourth for having less military action. Besides this, Portugal is known as the fifth safest country in Europe. This ranking shows how well Portugal is doing in keeping peace and safety. Its low military presence and high safety standards make it a great example of peace in Europe. This achievement is a big deal, showing Portugal's commitment to a peaceful environment for its people. 8. Slovenia Slovenia is in the top 8 of Europe's most peaceful countries due to its strong social and political stability commitment. Slovenia has good relationships with its neighboring countries, which helps maintain peace in the region. The government ensures that everyone has fair access to resources and opportunities, reducing conflicts. 9. Japan Japan has improved its position in the Global Peace Index from last year, climbing one spot higher. It stands out for being very safe and secure, ranked second in that area. In the Asia-Pacific region, Japan is the third most peaceful country. Japan's location near countries like China and North Korea means it invests more in protecting itself. This is partly because of those neighboring countries' political and military activities. Japan's focus on defense helps maintain its peace and security, contributing to its high ranking in the GPI. 10. Switzerland Now in the top 10, Switzerland is safe with little political trouble or international conflict. However, its large army, with about 150,000 personnel for its 8.7 million people, stops it from being in the top 5. Despite this, it's still known for being peaceful, like Canada, Singapore, Norway, and the Netherlands, and it's one of the top countries selling weapons per person. Switzerland is a well-off country that values different languages and religions. But it needs to improve gender equality, as women earn much less than men, as per Global Finance. Related Article: China's Visa-Free Travel Offer Aims to Attract European and Malaysian Visitors Tourism experts have announced the top travel destinations for 2024, showcasing a diverse mix of locations worldwide. From the historical streets of Paris to the vibrant landscapes of Mexico and Japan, travelers can expect exciting choices for their next adventure. What Are These Top Travel Destinations that Will be Trending Next Year? Tourism experts are forecasting the top travel destinations for 2024, highlighting a diverse range of locations across the globe. Paris, set to host the Summer Olympics, is anticipated to be a major attraction. However, it faces competition from other trending destinations like Mexico and Japan. Travel enthusiasts are already planning their getaways, with a notable increase in bookings for early 2024. According to The Star, National Geographic's list features various European destinations, including Belfast in Northern Ireland, Emilia-Romagna in Italy, and the Wild Atlantic Way in Ireland. Also mentioned are off-the-beaten-path locations like the Albanian Alps and Saimaa in Finland. In the Americas, Texas in the United States, the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and Lima in Peru are among the top picks. Skyscanner's list includes the Cayman Islands, French Polynesia, Osaka and Tokyo in Japan, and the US Virgin Islands. European destinations like Bucharest in Romania and Taipei in Taiwan also make the cut. Read Also: Heavy Snowfall Cancels More Than 700 Flights in Munich The source also revealed that Booking.com's list features Beppu in Japan, Merida in Mexico, and Rotorua in New Zealand, showcasing a mix of cultural, historical, and natural attractions. Other destinations include Buenos Aires in Argentina and Cairns in Australia. Lastly, eDreams Odigeo highlights popular cities like Paris, London, Bangkok, Barcelona, and Rome, emphasizing their perennial appeal to tourists. These predictions reflect a global interest in a variety of travel experiences, from urban exploration in major cities to natural wonders and cultural hotspots. American Express Predicts Top Travel Destinations for 2024 American Express Travel has released its annual list of top travel destinations for 2024, highlighting ten must-visit vacation spots. This year's selection, titled '2024 Trending Destinations: Off The Beaten Path,' focuses on unique and lesser-known locations, catering especially to the interests of Millennials and Gen-Z travelers. The list is based on global bookings and feedback from American Express Card Members, combined with insights from Amex Travel's team of 6,000 travel experts. CNBC reported that the top three destinations for 2024 are Adelaide Hills in Australia, Bodrum in Turkey, and Niseko in Japan. These locations are followed by Porto Cervo in Italy, St Kitts & Nevis in the Caribbean, San Miguel De Allende in Mexico, Sante Fe in the US, Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, Udaipur in India, and Zermatt in Switzerland. Each of these destinations offers unique experiences and local cultures, such as watching koalas in the wild in Adelaide Hills and shopping for Turkish towels in the bazaars of Bodrum. These top travel destinations have been carefully chosen to provide travelers with an opportunity to explore new places, enjoy local cuisine, and stay in unique accommodations. American Express Travel's consultants have specifically identified the best spots in each destination to ensure travelers can fully experience the local culture and attractions. This list is a guide for those seeking to venture beyond traditional vacation spots and immerse themselves in new and exciting travel experiences. Related Article: Global Tourism Set to Reach 90% of Pre-COVID Levels Amid Over-Tourism Challenges In Novohrodivka, body of eight-year-old girl pulled out from under rubble of house hit by Russian missile In Novohrodivka (Donetsk region), the body of an eight-year-old girl was pulled out from under the rubble of a three-story house that was hit by a Russian missile. Her parents are still under the rubble, rescue work continues, Head of the Novohrodivka city military administration Oleksandr Shevchenko said. "In Novohrodivka, at the site where an enemy missile hit an apartment building in the city center on the morning of December 4, the body of an eight-year-old girl was pulled out from under the rubble. The child's parents, who are probably still under the rubble, were not found," Shevchenko said in Telegram channel on Monday. Rescuers continue to clear the rubble of the house. Three days of mourning have been declared in Novohrodivka community for those killed in the shelling. The mourning period will last from Monday, December 4, until Wednesday, December 6. Earlier it was reported that as a result of a night rocket attack in Donetsk region in Novohrodivka, a direct hit on a three-story residential building resulted in one of the entrances being completely destroyed, five adults and one child were injured of varying degrees of severity. Later, information appeared about four two dead, whose bodies were found while clearing the rubble of the house. The National Police said it was likely that the family under the rubble was a 33-year-old woman, a 38-year-old man and an eight-year-old girl. (Photo: Backpacking Safely Across Unknown Territories with GPS Trackers) Discover the thrill of backpacking through uncharted territories with the reassurance of GPS tracking technology by your side. As an avid adventurer, you know the importance of safety and preparation while exploring new places. With the rising concern of getting lost or facing dangerous situations, having a GPS tracker is crucial for your peace of mind. Backpacking in unfamiliar areas can be both thrilling and dangerous. The thrill of discovering new landscapes and the freedom it brings can be exhilarating. However, it is important to be aware of potential challenges such as navigation difficulties, unpredictable weather and encounters with unfamiliar wildlife. To stay safe and informed during such expeditions, it is recommended to thoroughly research the area beforehand, pack appropriate gear, and utilize GPS trackers to know your location. Importance of GPS Trackers in Such Adventures GPS trackers play a crucial role in ensuring safety and enhancing the overall experience of backpacking across unknown territories. These devices provide real-time location tracking, emergency SOS features, and the ability to share location with trusted contacts, offering peace of mind and security. Additionally, GPS trackers enable adventurers to accurately navigate through challenging terrains and explore remote areas confidently. In 2018, a group of hikers lost in the Swiss Alps was successfully located and rescued due to the signals emitted by their GPS tracking devices, highlighting the life-saving importance of this technology. Exploring remote destinations on foot offers an unmatched sense of adventure and discovery. The allure of venturing off the beaten path lies in encountering untouched landscapes, indigenous cultures, and unique flora and fauna. Backpackers relish the freedom to forge their trails, embracing the thrill of navigating uncharted territories. Pro-tip: Before embarking on such expeditions, acquaint yourself with local customs and environmental regulations to ensure a respectful and safe journey. Common Challenges and Risks Backpacking across unfamiliar terrains presents challenges like navigation difficulties due to a lack of GPS signal or network coverage, potential encounters with wild animals, and unexpected weather changes. To mitigate these risks, it is important to carry backup navigation tools such as physical maps and compasses and to learn basic survival skills. What Are GPS Trackers and How Do They Work? GPS trackers are devices that utilize the Global Positioning System to determine precise location information. These devices receive signals from satellites, calculate their own location, and transmit the data to a connected device or central server. They are frequently utilized in outdoor activities, such as backpacking, to navigate unfamiliar terrain and ensure safety. Types of GPS Trackers Suitable for Backpackers (e.g., handheld devices, wearable tech, smartphone apps) Key Features of GPS Trackers for Backpackers Long battery life: Look for GPS trackers with extended battery performance to ensure they last through long backpacking trips. Waterproofing: Opt for waterproof GPS trackers to withstand unpredictable weather conditions and water-related activities. Emergency SOS features: Prioritize GPS devices with reliable emergency distress signal capabilities for safety in remote areas. While trekking in the Andes, my GPS tracker's extended battery life and waterproofing were essential during a sudden downpour, and the reliable emergency SOS feature brought help swiftly when I sprained my ankle. Why GPS Trackers Are a Backpacker's Best Friend? GPS trackers are crucial for backpackers as they offer real-time location data, emergency assistance, and peace of mind. They not only ensure safety and aid in navigation but also allow loved ones to track your journey. Moreover, GPS trackers can come in handy when trying to locate lost or stolen gear, making them a backpacker's most trusted companion. Pro-tip: It is always recommended to carry a backup power source for your GPS tracker to ensure uninterrupted functionality. GPS trackers have been invaluable for backpackers in various scenarios: Navigating dense forests, where traditional maps may be insufficient due to dense foliage. Tracking progress in mountainous regions, ensuring hikers stay on course and can be easily located in case of emergencies. Monitoring movement in remote areas, providing peace of mind for both the backpacker and their loved ones. When exploring unfamiliar territories, it is important to consider GPS trackers as essential gear to enhance safety and provide reassurance. Factors to Consider When Choosing a GPS Tracker (e.g., destination, duration of trip, specific activities planned) Destination: Consider GPS trackers with global coverage for international travel, like the Spot Gen3 . Trip Duration: For extended trips, opt for trackers with long battery life, such as the Garmin inReach Mini . Specific Activities: Choose rugged, waterproof trackers for outdoor activities, such as the Bivystick satellite communicator for hiking or camping. Tips for Setting Up and Effectively Using Your GPS Tracker Choose a GPS tracker with a long battery life and real-time tracking features. Set up the tracker by following the manufacturer's instructions for activation and pairing with your device. Configure the tracking intervals based on the duration of your journey and the cellular coverage in the area. Ensure that the tracker is fully charged and securely attached to your backpack. Regularly check the signal and battery status of the tracker during your trip. Strategies for Conserving Battery Life and Ensuring Continuous Tracking Adjust tracking frequency: Increase the interval between location pings to conserve battery. Carry power banks: Ensure continuous charging by carrying portable power banks. Optimize settings: Turn on power-saving mode and reduce screen brightness. To conserve battery life and maintain continuous tracking while backpacking in remote areas, consider implementing these strategies to prolong the usage of your GPS tracker. Volunteers of the Ukrainian Red Cross Society (URCS) are helping the national police in the search for a child who disappeared in Vyshgorod district of Kyiv region. "Yesterday, the rapid response squad of the Ukrainian Red Cross of Kyiv region joined the search for a child who disappeared in Vyshgorod region. Together with national police units and local residents, searches were carried out in the village and its surroundings, and information was collected about the possible location of the boy," the society said on Facebook on Monday. URCS said the search for the child is currently ongoing. The fourth day of the UN Climate Change Conference COP28 witnessed significant pledges, securing more than $2.4 billion for vital nature conservation efforts. Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, UN Climate Change High-Level Champion for COP28, announced $1.7 billion in funding dedicated to nature conservation. Emphasizing the crucial role of nature in climate action, these commitments are poised to span the journey from COP28 to COP30. Read More: All That We Know About COP28 Global Support Against Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) in COP28 At the same time, the first COP Health Day witnessed global donors pledging more than $777 million to control, eliminate, and eradicate neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) in Africa. This financial support from COP28 underscores the international community's commitment to addressing health challenges and fostering global well-being. Ambitious Climate and Biodiversity Initiatives Unveiled in COP28 Brazil's President Luis Lula da Silva, alongside the COP28 Presidency, announced a fundamental two-year partnership dedicated to mobilizing resources and political support for nature leading from COP28 up to COP30 in Belem. Read More: UAE Allows Protests Calling for Gaza Ceasefire at COP28 Recognizing Nature in COP28 as a Key Pillar for Future Climate Action The COP28 Presidency highlighted the imperative need to acknowledge, support, and financially back nature in its entirety as a prerequisite for effective climate action. This demonstration of global political leadership, coupled with substantial financial backing from non-state actors, underscores the indispensable role of nature not only in COP28 but also in shaping future conferences. Additionally, national and regional investment plans in COP28 unveiled by heads of states align with the Paris Agreement and the recently adopted Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The UAE's commitment of $100 million towards nature-climate projects, notably an initial $30 million for Ghana's 'Resilient Ghana' plan, signifies a collective global effort for a sustainable future. Migration The Mallard family is in a bit of a rut. While dad Mack is content to keep his family safe paddling around their New England Pond forever, mom Pam is eager to shake things up and show their kidsteen son Dax and duckling daughter Gwenthe whole wide world. After a migrating duck family alights on their pond with thrilling tales of far-flung places, Pam persuades Mack to embark on a family trip, via New York City, to tropical Jamaica. Movie Classification: TBA Release Date: 7 December 2023 Starring: Elizabeth Banks, Kumail Nanjiani, Awkwafina Language: English Silent Night A grieving father enacts his long-awaited revenge against a ruthless gang on Christmas Eve. Movie Classification: PG18 Release Date: 7 December 2023 Starring: Joel Kinnaman, Kid Cudi, Cataline Sandino Moreno Language: English Asthra Asthra's movie story revolves In Sulthan Bathery Wayanad district. as two Police officers are attacked and killed by a gang in the last 48 hours. They draw an arrow sign on the wall with blood. Investigation officer Joshy Mathew investigates the case in unusual & different methods to catch the gang. Movie Classification: TBA Release Date: 7 December 2023 Starring: Senthil Krishna, Amith Chakkalakal, Suhasini Kumaran Language: Malayalam Thanksgiving After a Black Friday riot ends in tragedy, a mysterious Thanksgiving-inspired killer terrorizes Plymouth, Massachusetts - the birthplace of the infamous holiday. Movie Classification: TBA Release Date: 7 December 2023 Starring: Patrick Dempsey, Ty Olsson, Gina Gershon Language: English Inside Man: Aka Gemini Lounge Based on true events, a disgraced police detective is seeking redemption by going undercover to expose a violent crime syndicate. But as he sinks deeper into the mob, the price for absolution may be higher than he can afford. Movie Classification: TBA Release Date: 7 December 2023 Starring: Emile Hirsch, Lucy Hale, Jake Cannavale Language: English Hypnotic Determined to find his missing daughter, Austin detective Danny Rourke finds himself spiraling down a rabbit hole investigating a series of reality-bending crimes where he will ultimately call into question his most basic assumptions about everything and everyone in his world. Aided by Diana Cruz, a gifted psychic, Rourke simultaneously pursues and is pursued by a lethal specter -- the one man he believes holds the key to finding the missing girl -- only to discover more than he ever bargained for. Movie Classification: TBA Release Date: 7 December 2023 Starring: Alice Braga, Ben Affleck Language: English Sana Oula Khatf All attempts by a gang to carry out major thefts fail, so its members resort to kidnapping children belonging to wealthy families. Hoping to get a lot of money via ransomware. Movie Classification: TBA Release Date: 7 December 2023 Starring: Bayyoumy Fouad, Ahmed Fathy, May Kassab Language: Arabic Hindi Film The film talks about the time of the 1970s and 1980s, about a small village about two hours away from the city. The events of the film revolve around some people in this village who work by collecting electrical wires from old abandoned houses, burning them, and selling them in the market. Among these people are Abu Rashid and Marzouk, and also a woman who sells Vimto military equipment. The movie is set in the 1970s and 1980s and takes place in a small village located about two hours away from the city. Movie Classification: TBA Release Date: 7 December 2023 Starring: Khaled Al Nuaimi, Omar Al-Marisi, Saqr Muhammad, Zayed Al Obaidly, Ohood Al Nowais Language: Arabic Shamareekh Raouf is the illegitimate son of Salim Ahel) one of the most important arms dealers in Egypt. His role is to be the man, The one in the dark, the one who ends all illegal tasks, the most important of which is murder. His biggest enemy is his brother: (Fares). Raouf has one last chance from his father to recognize him legally, which is to kill Amina, the daughter of the family lawyer. She threatens the family after Raouf killed her father before, and Amina is unable to determine the identity of the killer. Raouf discovers that Fares wants to kill him before he is recognized and shares the inheritance with him. Raouf meets Amina. Who does not yet know that he killed her father, and instead of killing her, he helps her escape and runs away with her, so that the two enter into... A bloody chase by "Fares" and his men. A chase in which they fall in love, and they have two choices: Raouf abandons his dream of being officially recognized, or does Amina abandon her intention of revenge? Movie Classification: PG18 Release Date: 7 December 2023 Starring: Asser Yassine, Amina Khalil, Khaled Elsawy, Adam ElSharkawy Language: Arabic Joram Confronted by the sudden brutal murder of his wife, his own history of violence and a System that wants him crushed at any cost, immigrant labourer Bala (aka Dasru) flees with his infant daughter, Joram from a metropolis to his erstwhile home in distant forests, to negotiate their survival with a bloody past that he had mistakenly thought was left behind for good. Movie Classification: TBA Release Date: 8 December 2023 Starring: Manoj Bajpayee, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Smita Tambe Language: Hindi Kadhikan A renowned storyteller during the 1980s, currently earning a living at the sawmill, hiding the performer in him due to his dire circumstances. A 17-year-old boy living in a juvenile home wishes to learn storytelling from him with the support of the superintendent. His desire to learn the art form reignites the storytellers faith in the same. Over a short time, the relationship between the Kadhikan and the young boy becomes a bond unlike any other, unfolding new dimensions in both their lives. Movie Classification: TBA Release Date: 8 December 2023 Starring: Mukesh, Unnimukkundan, Ketaki Narayanan Language: Malayalam Conjuring Kannappan Kannappan a gamer gets a dream catcher from the well behind his house and accidentally plucks a feather in it later on he goes to another dream world when he falls asleep and he realizes it is life-threatening, whatever happens, reflects in the real world because of getting stuck in that world. The story revolves around if they got out of the dream world or not. Movie Classification: TBA Release Date: 8 December 2023 Starring: Regina Cassandra, Satish, Saranya Ponvannan Language: Tamil Ukraine's air defense forces shot down 18 Shahed attack UAVs and a Kh-59 guided air missile on the night of December 3-4. The Ukrainian Air Force said this in a post on the Telegram messaging app, Ukrinform reports. "Overnight into December 4, 2023, the enemy attacked [Ukraine] with 23 Shahed 136/131 strike UAVs from Cape Chauda, occupied Crimea, and a guided air missile from the airspace of the occupied Kherson region," the post read. Fighter aircraft, anti-aircraft missile units and mobile fire groups of the Air Force and the Defense Forces of Ukraine were involved in repelling the air attack. Air defense forces worked in at least nine Ukrainian regions. As of this morning, 650 trucks were queuing at the Slovak border due to the blockade. Andriy Demchenko, spokesperson for Ukraine's State Border Guard Service, reported this at a briefing at Ukrinform. "At the Slovak border, 650 trucks were queuing up because of the blockade. The protesters reported that they would let four trucks through per hour in the direction of Ukraine, while the traffic from Ukraine to Slovakia would not be blocked. They will also not block the movement of humanitarian goods. What we are now recording is a certain decrease in the number of trucks arriving at the Uzhhorod checkpoint," the spokesman said. According to him, border guards are currently recording an increase in trucks trying to cross the border from Hungary to Ukraine. This is due to the fact that other checkpoints are blocked. As of this morning, 750 trucks were queuing up in front of the Tysa checkpoint on the border with Hungary. Demchenko noted that according to the information provided by Slovak colleagues, the blockade is indefinite. Ukrainian authorities are working to find compromises to unblock traffic on the borders of Ukraine, the spokesman added. As Ukrinform reported, as of the morning of December 4, 2,500 trucks are waiting in lines to cross the border from Poland to Ukraine. The Contributors Committee of the EU for Ukraine Fund managed by the European Investment Bank (EIB) has approved the Funds first project financing of EUR 25 million. The relevant statement was made by the EIBs press service, an Ukrinform correspondent reports. The EU for Ukraine Fund managed by the European Investment Bank (EIB) hosted its initial Contributors Committee meeting today. The EU Member States participating in the meeting greenlighted the funds first project financing an investment of EUR 25 million in Ukraines equity growth fund Horizon Capital Growth Fund IV (HCGF IV) managed by Horizon Capital, a leading private equity manager in Ukraine, the report states. HCGF IV is in the process of raising at least EUR 274 million (USD 300 million) to make growth equity investments, with a focus on tech and export-oriented small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Ukraine and Moldova. Backed by institutional investors including the EIB, HCGF IV seeks to enhance the market presence of businesses in Ukraine and Moldova and support their expansion efforts, particularly in sectors such as IT services and products, e-commerce, innovative retail and consumer goods, and fintech. The EUR 25 million investment in HCGF IV marks the first project of the EU for Ukraine Fund, initiated by the EIB in spring 2023. This fund is part of the broader EU for Ukraine initiative, which aims to quickly address Ukraines urgent needs and bolster economic stability. With over EUR 400 million initially committed by 18 EU Member States Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Spain and Sweden the fund is set to expand with additional contributions. Its primary aim is to support public and private projects, mainly in municipal infrastructure and access to finance for Ukrainian entrepreneurs. I am delighted to witness the rapid deployment of our EU for Ukraine Fund, reaffirming our commitment to swift, results-oriented action to support Ukraine. With the contributions of the EU Member States, we are set to immediately support SMEs and the private sector, crucial players in sustaining Ukraines economy during these challenging times, EIB Vice-President Teresa Czerwinska, responsible for operations in Ukraine, said. Since the start of Russias full-scale invasion, the EIB has allocated EUR 1.7 billion to help finance emergency repairs of Ukraines ravaged infrastructure. The EU bank also provided a EUR 4 billion credit line to support the integration of refugees from Ukraine in EU countries. Registration of heavy trucks has begun at the Uhryniv-Dohobyczow border crossing point (BCP) on the border with Poland, the State Border Guard Service reported on Monday morning. "As of the morning of December 4, at the Uhryniv BCP, border guards cleared 30 heavy vehicles with a total permissible weight of more than 7.5 tonnes to leave Ukraine," the State Border Guard Service said in a statement. As noted in the report, trucks enter the BCP on a first-come, first-served basis. Polish services will tighten control on the Polish-Ukrainian border. In addition, the Polish government also plans to take measures in European institutions aimed at eliminating "unfair competition in the transport market," Polish Radio reported last week, citing a statement by the Ministry of Infrastructure of the Republic of Poland. "We have a constant dialogue with the transport industry. During the last meeting, we agreed that government services will strengthen the inspection of trucks at the Polish-Ukrainian border. This was one of the demands of the industry," Polish Minister of Infrastructure Alvin Gajadhur said. As the minister said, the Polish government will also take measures in European institutions aimed at eliminating "unfair competition in the transport market." The pursuit of an engineering degree in the United States opens doors to a world of innovation, research, and groundbreaking discoveries. As we look ahead to 2024, here are the top 10 universities for engineering that are set to shape the future of the industry. 1. Harvard University - Massachusetts Harvard University stands tall as the number one choice for aspiring engineers. Offering diverse undergraduate programs such as materials science, mechanical engineering, and bioengineering, Harvard provides a solid foundation in foundational concepts like mathematics and physics. The engineering faculty also offers a range of graduate and professional programs for postgraduate students, making it a comprehensive hub for engineering education. Beyond academics, Harvard's engineering students can engage in various extracurricular clubs, fostering a community of like-minded individuals. The university's split campus, located in Cambridge and Allston, houses cutting-edge facilities like the Science and Engineering Complex and the Harvard Innovation Lab. READ ALSO: How To Find A Good College Fit? US News And World College Rankings Could Help You 2. Stanford University - California Stanford University's engineering department takes the second spot with a comprehensive offering of 16 undergraduate majors, ranging from aeronautics and bioengineering to materials science and product design. The Master of Science in Engineering, available across all nine departments, combines academic coursework with research, providing a well-rounded education. Stanford undergraduates also benefit from the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), allowing them to work alongside faculty members on advanced research topics. With facilities like the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Aerospace Robotics Lab, students have ample resources to explore their interests. 3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Massachusetts MIT's School of Engineering, the largest of MIT's five schools, takes the third spot. MIT's unique approach allows students to explore courses across all five schools before choosing their major. With nine engineering departments covering areas from aeronautics and astronautics to nuclear science, MIT provides a broad yet specialized education. The engineering master's program at MIT runs for two years and offers a range of courses, including mechanical engineering and aeronautics and astronautics. MIT emphasizes practical learning, offering study-abroad options, entrepreneurship support, and research experiences for engineering students. 4. University of California, Berkeley - California The University of California, Berkeley, offers nine undergraduate engineering programs, from chemical and civil to computer and bioengineering. Berkeley students can pursue a Master of Engineering with a focus on business and engineering management, emphasizing a multidisciplinary approach. Berkeley's engineering community has access to state-of-the-art facilities such as the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation and the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. With a quarter of engineering students being international, Berkeley provides a diverse and collaborative learning environment. 5. California Institute of Technology (Caltech) - California Caltech secures the fifth position with its competitive and highly specialized chemical engineering programs. Students at Caltech can choose from four divisions of chemical engineering-biomolecular, environmental, materials, or process systems. The small class sizes, with only 230 new students accepted each year, ensure a personalized and intensive learning experience. Caltech engineering students engage in independent research for their theses in their second and third years, contributing to the institution's commitment to impactful research. The balance between classroom lectures and laboratory experience prepares students for the societal impact of chemical engineering. 6. Princeton University - New Jersey Princeton University, situated in New Jersey, offers a solid engineering program that ranks sixth in the nation. The university provides undergraduate students with the opportunity to explore different areas of engineering before declaring a major. With a focus on foundational courses in mathematics, physics, and materials science, Princeton prepares students for specialized study in various engineering disciplines. 7. Georgia Institute of Technology - Georgia Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) claims the seventh spot, offering a comprehensive engineering education with a focus on innovation and technology. Georgia Tech provides undergraduate students with a range of engineering disciplines to explore, setting the stage for specialized study in areas like civil engineering, electrical engineering, and aerospace engineering. 8. University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) - California The University of California, Los Angeles, secures the eighth position, offering diverse engineering programs across multiple disciplines. UCLA's engineering students benefit from a range of teaching and research facilities, including the Samueli School of Engineering, preparing them for success in their chosen field. 9. Yale University - Connecticut Yale University in Connecticut takes the ninth spot, providing a unique blend of engineering education within its Ivy League setting. Yale's engineering students have access to interdisciplinary research opportunities and a strong foundation in mathematics and science, ensuring a well-rounded education. 10. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor - Michigan Closing our top 10 list is the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, offering a strong engineering program with a focus on innovation and research. The university provides students with a supportive and collaborative learning environment, preparing them for successful careers in engineering. These top 10 universities for engineering in the US for 2024 offer diverse programs, cutting-edge facilities, and a commitment to fostering innovation and research. Whether you aspire to delve into chemical engineering at Caltech or explore aerospace engineering at Stanford, these institutions provide the foundation for a successful and impactful career in the dynamic field of engineering. RELATED ARTICLE: 5 Best And Top-Ranked Universities For Studying Medicine Abroad College, often touted as the gateway to success, comes with a hefty price tag that continues to surge annually. The financial commitment is staggering, and the seemingly exorbitant tuition costs make prospective students and their families pause. According to the U.S. News and World Report, the average tuition and fees at private colleges reached a jaw-dropping $39,723 for the 2022-2023 academic year. However, it's crucial to understand that the advertised "sticker prices" for colleges are not reflective of what the average student ends up paying. Princeton University serves as a striking example - with an advertised tuition and fees of $56,010 for the 2021-2022 school year, students paid an average of $16,562 after need-based financial aid, according to U.S. News and World Report. The Most Expensive Private Colleges While students rarely pay the full sticker price, it's essential to acknowledge the intimidating figures attached to some of the most expensive private colleges in the United States. 1. Kenyon College (Ohio) - $66,490 2. Franklin & Marshall College (Pennsylvania) - $65,844 3. Tufts University (Massachusetts) - $65,222 4. Brown University (Rhode Island) - $65,146 5. Colorado College - $65,028 6. Vassar College (New York) - $64,800 7. University of Southern California - $64,726 8. Colgate University (New York) - $64,290 9. Boston College (Massachusetts) - $64,176 10. Amherst College (Massachusetts) - $64,100 These figures, however staggering, do not encompass additional costs such as room and board or other living expenses. For instance, Kenyon College, the most expensive on this list, reports total charges exceeding $80,000 for students residing in its dormitory facilities. READ ALSO: Want To Study Engineering In The US? Here Are The Top 10 Universities The Least Expensive Private Colleges For those inclined towards private education without breaking the bank, there are options that offer a more budget-friendly approach. 1. Boricua College (New York) - $6,025 2. Brigham Young University (Utah) - $6,304 3. Stillman College (Alabama) - $11,392 4. Tougaloo College (Mississippi) - $11,398 5. Voorhees College (South Carolina) - $12,630 6. National University (California) - $13,320 7. Allen University (South Carolina) - $13,540 8. Talladega College (Alabama) - $13,571 9. Virginia Union University (Virginia) - $14,230 10. Alice Lloyd College (Kentucky) - $14,250 These institutions showcase that private education need not always come with an astronomical price tag. Understanding Public College Costs While public colleges generally offer a more affordable alternative to private institutions, costs can still vary significantly based on residency status. According to U.S. News and World Report, the average sticker price in-state for a public college is $10,423 for the 2022-2023 school year. Out-of-state students face a higher average sticker price of $22,953. The decision to attend college, a pivotal step towards personal and professional growth, is undeniably influenced by financial considerations. Prospective students and their families must navigate the complex landscape of tuition costs, understanding that advertised prices often do not reflect the actual financial burden. It's imperative for students to explore financial aid options, scholarships, and grants to mitigate the impact of soaring tuition costs. Moreover, considering the broader picture, including room and board expenses, is crucial in making informed decisions about the true cost of attending college. While the rising tide of college costs may seem overwhelming, strategic planning, financial literacy, and exploration of cost-effective options can pave the way for a more affordable and accessible higher education experience. As students embark on their academic journey, they must equip themselves with the knowledge needed to navigate the intricate web of college finances, ensuring a brighter future without drowning in student loan debt. RELATED ARTICLE: How Much Does It Cost To Study In The US? As the deadly attacks unfold in Israel and Gaza, Jewish day schools in U.S. cities like Philadelphia and Dallas have become unexpected sanctuaries for worried families seeking refuge for their children. The question echoes through these institutions: can our children be taken away? Jewish Schools Step Up to the Challenge In the face of this urgent plea, school leaders like Jay Leberman are answering the call. At Mandel Jewish Day School in Beachwood, Ohio, five Israeli students find a haven. Remarkably, the school has waived tuition fees, emphasizing the immediate need over financial considerations. A survey conducted by the Prizmah Center for Jewish Day Schools sheds light on the widespread nature of this phenomenon. Approximately 92% of Jewish day schools in the U.S. and Canada report receiving inquiries about enrolling Israeli students since the October 7 Hamas attack. The outreach spans across different sects, with 80% of schools already having enrolled new students in the initial two-week period. READ ALSO: Jewish Students Need Empathy And Care As They Face Hardships On US Campuses Diverse Circumstances Fuel Inquiries The aftermath of the October 7 attacks has created immense stress within the Jewish community, prompting families to explore educational alternatives for various reasons. Some are relocating from Israel, others find themselves stranded in the U.S. due to the conflict, and there are those seeking a deeper connection to their Jewish faith and heritage. Mandel Jewish Day School's commitment goes beyond enrollment. Additional staff has been hired to provide social and emotional support services, along with Hebrew speakers and English as a Second Language (ESL) instructors. The school strives to create an environment where Israeli children can feel not just educated but safe and welcomed. Prizmah's survey reveals the nuanced challenges faced by enrolled Israeli students. From language barriers to substantial differences in high school curricula between the U.S. and Israel, schools are navigating uncharted territory. The demand is not just for Hebrew-fluent teachers but also for counselors who understand the unique challenges these students bring. Resilience in Crisis Jewish day schools, having previously adapted rapidly to online instruction during the COVID-19 outbreak, now showcase their versatility in the face of unexpected challenges. The tragedy of the conflict adds another layer of uncertainty to an already tumultuous period. Jay Leberman expresses concern not only for the students in his school but also for his grandchildren. His son, a member of an elite Israeli military unit, is on the frontlines, emphasizing the paradoxical desire for safety while being aware of the sacrifices made. Schools like Akiba Yavneh Academy in Dallas have initiated programs to cater specifically to the needs of the new Israeli students. Partnerships with local agencies offer social, emotional, and academic support. Financial burdens are eased, with schools forgoing tuition or offering reduced rates. As the conflict persists, these schools find themselves in a dynamic situation, reassessing their programs every two weeks to adapt to evolving needs. Amid the heavy burden of uncertainty, there is a collective effort within the Jewish community to provide structure, routine, and a sense of normalcy for the children caught in the midst of a tumultuous situation. In the face of a seemingly intractable conflict thousands of miles away, the commitment of these schools to provide support and refuge stands as a testament to the resilience of communities. It transcends borders to offer solace and stability during challenging times, showcasing the enduring spirit of solidarity within the Jewish community. RELATED ARTICLE: US College Campuses Have The Solution To Antisemitism A three-day student voting period on Israel-Hamas war resolutions at the University of Michigan ended abruptly as administrators canceled the referenda, citing election interference by a pro-Palestinian coalition. The coalition's mass email, considered "unauthorized," violated university policy, prompting concerns about free expression and future considerations for the vote. Tensions between supporters of Israel and Palestine now manifest through canceled ballots, drawing attention and raising questions about the university's response. Pro-Palestinian Coalition's Mass Email: Unauthorized Campaigning or Free Expression? The University of Michigan found itself embroiled in the Israel-Hamas conflict, not on the battlefield, but in the realm of student politics. A scheduled three-day voting period on two resolutions related to the conflict was halted prematurely, sparking debates about free expression and the university's handling of campus tensions. University vice president and general counsel Timothy Lynch announced the cancellation, attributing it to election interference by a pro-Palestinian coalition. The coalition, backing the AR 13-025 resolution, had sent a mass email encouraging students to vote in favor of their stance and against the pro-Israel AR 13-026. The latter resolution sought the university's commitment to ensuring student safety amid the conflict and providing increased mental health support. Lynch contended that the mass email violated the university's Responsible Use of Information Resources policy, prohibiting the use of university resources for political campaigns. This move sparked varied reactions, with the university's elections commission denouncing it as "overreach." Confusion ensued over the characterization of the email as "unauthorized," as advocates argued that proper procedures were followed. READ ALSO: Oct. 25 Shooting Survivors To Receive Free College Education From University Of Maine Campus Tensions Spill Beyond Borders The incident highlights the complexities of managing tensions between supporters of Israel and Palestine on college campuses. Unlike traditional protests or debates, this conflict unfolded through the ballot box, drawing attention from various stakeholders, including alumni, government officials, and donors. While pro-Palestinian groups hope for a future special election to revisit the vote, it remains unclear whether the university will entertain the referenda again. The cancelation raises questions about the delicate balance universities face in managing political tensions and fostering an environment that upholds free expression and diverse perspectives. The University of Michigan's chapter of Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, initially called for the vote's cancellation and an investigation into policy violations. However, a subsequent statement emphasized the stifling of nuanced conversations and dialogue amid the conflict, with concerns about attacks on social media targeting Hillel and the campus's Jewish community. Will U of Michigan Allow a Revote? The cancellation has also sparked reactions from external organizations, with some applauding the decision as preventing a vote on what they deemed an "anti-Israel resolution." Others, including the coalition behind the pro-Palestinian resolution, condemned the university's move, expressing deep concern about silencing student voices. As the University of Michigan grapples with the aftermath of this canceled vote, questions linger about how institutions navigate political tensions, ensure free expression, and address the broader impact of global conflicts on campus discourse. The incident serves as a microcosm of the larger challenges faced by universities in maintaining a balance between diverse perspectives and avoiding the suppression of student voices on contentious issues. RELATED ARTICLE: US College Campuses Have The Solution To Antisemitism Spelman College student, Abebitu "Abbie" Fields, has filed a lawsuit against Morehouse College, accusing the institution of dismissing her Title IX complaint against a Morehouse student who she alleges sexually assaulted her. The case brings to light broader concerns about campus safety, Title IX enforcement, and the shared responsibility within the Atlanta University Center Consortium. Background: Spelman and Morehouse in the Atlanta University Center Consortium Spelman College and Morehouse College, both historically Black institutions, are integral members of the Atlanta University Center Consortium. This coalition of historically Black colleges and universities in Atlanta facilitates regular interaction among students through joint programs and events, creating a shared educational environment. Abebitu Fields accuses a Morehouse student of providing her with alcohol laced with a sexual stimulant, followed by sexual assault in his residence hall. Disturbingly, Fields contends that this incident is not isolated, stating, "I am not the first Spelman student to be sexually assaulted by one of our 'brothers' at Morehouse." READ ALSO: University Of Arizona Administration Accused Of Financial Mismanagement Title IX Complaint: Systemic Failure and Disenfranchisement Fields filed a complaint with Morehouse College's police department and Title IX office during the last academic year. The lawsuit, now in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, alleges a systemic failure at Morehouse. It claims the college has a discriminatory policy and practice of disenfranchising female students from Spelman College, particularly concerning their Title IX rights. The lawsuit further contends that Morehouse College fails to adequately educate its students on consent and sexual misconduct. It suggests a culture of sexual violence fostered by the college's mishandling of reports of sexual assault. The frequent turnover with Title IX coordinators is also highlighted, raising questions about the stability and effectiveness of the college's handling of such sensitive cases. Fields' Experience and Larger Campus Safety Concerns Fields, in her statement, expresses frustration not only with the alleged assault but also with Morehouse's response, or lack thereof. She claims the offender roams freely on campus while her federal civil rights under Title IX were denied. This case sheds light on the broader issue of campus safety and the need for robust mechanisms to address sexual assault, especially in institutions sharing a consortium where students regularly interact. The lawsuit indirectly places the Atlanta University Center Consortium under scrutiny, highlighting the shared responsibility of member institutions in fostering a safe and inclusive environment. When students from different colleges frequently interact, a collective commitment to ensuring the well-being and security of all students becomes paramount. A Call for Systemic Reform The case underscores the importance of robust Title IX enforcement on college campuses. Allegations of mishandling complaints and systemic failures demonstrate the urgent need for reform in policies, education, and support mechanisms for survivors. It prompts a broader conversation about the effectiveness of Title IX coordinators and the resources available to students facing such traumatic experiences. Morehouse College, in response to the lawsuit, will likely face scrutiny not only for the specific case but for its broader approach to campus safety and Title IX enforcement. The case also resonates with a broader national conversation about addressing sexual assault on college campuses and the role of institutions in preventing, responding to, and supporting survivors. As the lawsuit unfolds, it will be closely watched for its potential to spark systemic change. Beyond the immediate case, it has the potential to drive discussions on the responsibilities of colleges in consortiums, the efficacy of Title IX enforcement, and the larger societal issue of addressing sexual assault on campuses. In the pursuit of justice and accountability, Fields' lawsuit serves as a catalyst for introspection within the Atlanta University Center Consortium and, more broadly, within the landscape of higher education. The outcome of this legal battle could set precedent and contribute to the ongoing dialogue surrounding campus safety and Title IX enforcement. RELATED ARTICLE: Grade Manipulation Scandal Rocks Spelman College COMSTECH and the OIC Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation on Monday organized an international seminar on Advances in Neglected Tropical Diseases ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Dec, 2023) COMSTECH and the OIC Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation on Monday organized an international seminar on Advances in Neglected Tropical Diseases. The seminar was attended by Prof. Dr. Paul Denny from Departments of Biosciences and Chemistry, Durham University and Prof. Dr. Ehmke Pohl, Department of Chemistry, Durham University, UK. Addressing on the occasion, Prof. Dr. M. Iqbal Choudhary, Coordinator General COMSTECH welcomed the participants and said the experts of the seminar are not only excellent in terms of their education and experience in the field of NTDs but also because of their mission. Prof. Choudhary mentioned that the Leishmaniasis disease burden in Pakistan is increasing. He said that COMSTECH is collaborating with the NTD network since last three years and through this linkage have conducted several activities including a series of online lectures, and a training course in Nairobi. We are also planning another activity in CTD Ethiopia in March and then a lecture/training visits to west African countries in September/October 2024, he said. Prof. Choudhary informed that the health and economic burden of NTDs were greater than malaria, tuberculosis and HIV combined. He said that global investment in Research and Development for treatment and diagnosis of NTDs was remarkably low. As a result, NTDs continue to adversely affect the lives of people in Global South, with increasing prevalence due to climate change, he added. Prof. Dr. Paul Denny delivered lecture on leishmaniasis, drugs and diagnostics for a disease of neglect, and Prof. Dr. Ehmke Pohl's lecture was on structure-based and AI supported drug discovery targeting protozoan amino-acid biosynthesis. Prof. Dr. Denny Paul has been studying the single-celled protozoan parasites of humans and domestic animals since 1993. Currently his laboratory works on model pathogens from both the trypanosomatid and apicomplexan families. He is particularly interested in the identification of novel drug targets and inhibitors. Much of this interdisciplinary work is conducted in collaboration with colleagues within the Biophysical Sciences Institute at Durham and partners at GSK Tres Cantos, MRC Technology Ltd, London, Aureogen Ltd and Bayer Crop Sciences. After his PhD from the University of Gottingen (Germany), Professor Dr. Ehmke Pohl joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory as independent staff scientist and Team Leader combining his research interest in method development and structural biology of medically important targets. He joined Durham University to build up a new group in structural biology. In 2015 he was appointed Co-Director of the Biophysical Sciences Institute. He is co-investigator of the Durham-led MRC GCRF consortium on Neglected Tropical Diseases. The seminar was attended by 76 researchers from different OIC member states online and more than 50 scholars attended in-person at COMSTECH. Caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar has said the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is Pakistans largest trading partner in the Middle East North Africa region with an average annual trade of $9 billion and urged the UAE investors to explore Pakistani market for new avenues ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Dec, 2023) Caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar has said the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is Pakistans largest trading partner in the Middle East North Africa region with an average annual trade of $9 billion and urged the UAE investors to explore Pakistani market for new avenues. In an interview with Gulf Today, he said Pakistan is planning a comprehensive investment promotion strategy in major countries including the United Arab Emirates (UAE). PM Kakar said Pakistans exports to the UAE include agriculture products, textiles and manpower, while the UAE exports petroleum, petrochemical products and hi-tech equipment to Pakistan. The two countries also exchange services with each other. Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Financial-technology are new areas of collaboration with much greater potential. Pakistan-UAE bilateral trade during 2022-23 amounted to $9 billion, he said. He expressed satisfaction that Pakistans exports to UAE surged to $1.4 billion in fiscal year 2022-23, highest in the last five years. On prospects of UAE's investment in Pakistan, he said attracting foreign investment in all sectors of Pakistans economy was the governments top priority. "Pakistans Investment Policy has been designed to provide a comprehensive framework for creating a conducive business environment for attraction of Foreign Direct Investment from all parts of the world including the UAE," he said. Currently, he said, there are over 1,000 multinational companies profitably operating in Pakistan, and for many, Pakistan is the most profitable part of their franchise. Foreign companies, individuals, multinational corporations can own 100 per cent shares in locally incorporated or unincorporated firms, he added. Stressing enhanced investment cooperation, the prime minister said the two countries could explore the areas such as agriculture, energy, mining, information technology, logistics and defence. PM Kakar mentioned that in order to revive economy, the government recently established the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) to generate new and attractive investment opportunities from Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in priority sectors such as agriculture, mining, IT manufacturing and defence. He mentioned the Pakistan Investment Road Show, organised by the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) in Dubai, which attracted a large number of global businessmen and investors. He said utilising the platform, 30 Pakistani firms presented their project proposals and growth strategies encompassing various domains including Agriculture, IT and energy. H said Pakistan and the UAE enjoy time-tested fraternal relations rooted deep in common faith, shared history and people to people contacts. "We would do our best to further strengthen and diversify our brotherly ties by focusing on trade, investment and people-to-people contacts," he said. On Conference of Parties (COP28), he said Pakistan wholeheartedly appreciates the efforts of the UAE government in hosting the COP28 in Dubai. Pakistan's delegation at COP28, he said, would highlight the proactive actions the government was taking towards climate change. The Pakistani contingent would also contribute towards deliberations, negotiations on establishing a Loss and Damage mechanism, agreeing on a New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG), shaping the Framework for Global Goal on Adaptation and towards the streams on mitigation, global stocktake and Enhanced Transparency Framework. "Pakistan holds the belief that with collective action based on Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR) we can make a common ground," he said. He stressed adopting a framework based on fast track energy transition and an agreement on climate finance goal. The developing countries require around $2.4 trillion in annual investment by 2030 focusing on adaptation, resilience, mitigating loss and damage, he added. About the 1.8 million overseas Pakistanis in the UAE, he said their valuable contribution through remittances significantly supports the Pakistani economy. He said since 1971, more than 4.2 million intending emigrants were registered for overseas employment in the UAE and their contribution had been instrumental in maintaining economic stability of both countries. PM Kakar said the UAE stands as the second-highest destination following Saudi Arabia from where Pakistan receives remittances. Over the past five years, Pakistan has received a substantial remittance amount of $28.4 billion from the UAE. He said Pakistani workers remittances inflow of $ 8.8 billion has been recorded during the first four months of Financial Year 2023-24; out of this an amount of $1,497.6 million has been received as remittances from the UAE. He mentioned that to facilitate overseas Pakistanis back home, the Government of Pakistan offered various incentives such as National Remittance Loyalty Programme (NRLP), Roshan Digital Account, Sohni Dharti Remittance etc. to increase the volume of remittances and to promote legal channels of sending remittances back. Also, the provision of an active bank account has been made mandatory for registration of foreign employment agreement at Protector of Emigrant offices so that emigrants may remit their earnings to the given accounts. In this regard, an account opening facility is being provided at each Protector Office. The prime minister said recently, the e-Protector registration has also been launched to facilitate the intending emigrants on Direct Employment Visa. He said Overseas Pakistanis Foundation was providing access to education and healthcare services for the families of overseas Pakistanis with the aim of improving the overall well-being of those who have migrated. Israel has moved ground forces into the south of Gaza in its war on Hamas, witnesses said Monday, despite global concern over mounting civilian deaths and fears the conflict will spread elsewhere in the Middle East Gaza Strip, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Dec, 2023) Israel has moved ground forces into the south of Gaza in its war on Hamas, witnesses said Monday, despite global concern over mounting civilian deaths and fears the conflict will spread elsewhere in the Middle East. Dozens of Israeli tanks as well as armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers entered the south of the territory near the city of Khan Yunis, which is crowded with internally displaced Palestinians, witnesses told AFP. Amin Abu Hawli, 59, said the Israeli vehicles were "two kilometres (1.2 miles) inside" Gaza in the village of al-Qarara, while Moaz Mohammed, 34, said Israeli tanks were rolling down the strip's main north-south highway, the Salah al-Din road. Weeks after Israel sent ground forces and tanks into northern Gaza, the army has been air-dropping leaflets in the besieged territory's south, especially around Khan Yunis, telling Palestinians there to flee to other areas. The army "continues to expand its ground operation against main Hamas fronts in the Gaza Strip," Israeli Defense Forces spokesman Daniel Hagari said Sunday. "Wherever there is a Hamas stronghold, the IDF operates." Full-scale fighting resumed Friday after the collapse of a week-long truce brokered by Qatar, the United States and Egypt, during which Israel and Hamas had exchanged scores of hostages and prisoners. Air strikes have since intensified in Gaza's south, said James Elder, a spokesman for the United Nations children's agency UNICEF. "Despite what has been assured, attacks in the south of Gaza are every bit as vicious as what the north endured," he posted Monday on X, formerly Twitter. "Somehow, it's getting worse for children and mothers." Israel has vowed to crush Hamas in retaliation for the Islamist militant group's October 7 attacks that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and saw 240 hostages taken, according to Israeli authorities. Israel's military said Sunday it had carried out around 10,000 air strikes in total, while Gaza militants had resumed rocket salvos into Israel, most of which had been intercepted. The Hamas-run health ministry says more than 15,500 people have been killed in Gaza, about 70 percent of them women and children -- a death toll that has sparked global alarm and mass demonstrations. - 'No safe place' - "There is no safe place in Gaza," UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said as a UN agency estimated around 1.8 million people in Gaza, roughly 75 percent of the population, had been displaced. The Israeli army said Monday three more soldiers had been killed in fighting in the northern Gaza Strip, raising the number of troop deaths there to 75. The fatalities brought the number of Israeli defence personnel killed since October 7 -- among them those killed in the Hamas attacks themselves and including soldiers, reservists, kibbutz guards and others -- to 401. Under the temporary truce that expired Friday, 80 Israeli hostages were freed, in exchange for the release of 240 Palestinians held in Israeli jails. More than two dozen Thai and other captives were also released from Gaza. With at least 137 hostages still held in Gaza, according to the Israeli military, Hamas has ruled out more releases until a permanent ceasefire is agreed. More air strikes have rained down on northern Gaza where the Hamas-run government and the official Palestinian news agency Wafa said the entrance of the Kamal Adwan hospital was hit late Sunday. Several people were killed in the strike, Wafa said, while Hamas accused Israel on Telegram of a "grave violation" of humanitarian law. Contacted by AFP, the Israeli military did not immediately comment. Israel says Hamas uses hospitals and other civilian infrastructure for military purposes, an accusation the militant group denies. Nine-year-old Huda, who was wounded in the head, arrived at the Deir al-Balah hospital with a Red Cross convoy bringing casualties from northern Gaza. "She doesn't answer me any more," said her bereaved father Abdelkarim Abu Warda. - 'Too many innocents killed' - Israel's ally the United States has intensified calls for the protection of Gaza's civilians, with Vice President Kamala Harris saying that "too many innocent Palestinians have been killed". A White House official said Sunday the United States believes Israel is "making an effort" to minimise civilian casualties in Gaza. Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy said those killed "would still be alive" had Hamas not carried out the October 7 attacks. Israel said Monday it was not seeking to force Palestinian civilians to permanently leave their homes, even as it acknowledged conditions in Gaza were "tough". Any suggestion of Palestinian dispersal is highly contentious in the Arab world as the war that led to Israel's creation 75 years ago gave rise to the exodus or forced displacement of 760,000 Palestinians. Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus said Monday: "We are not trying to displace anyone, we are not trying to move anybody from anywhere permanently. "We have asked civilians to evacuate the battlefield and we have provided a designated humanitarian zone inside the Gaza Strip," he said, referring to a tiny coastal area of the territory named Al-Mawasi. With fears of a wider regional conflagration rising, a US destroyer shot down multiple drones over the Red Sea while assisting commercial ships on Sunday, according to the US Central Command. Yemen's Iran-backed Huthi rebels -- who said they targeted two of the ships -- launched a series of drones and missiles towards Israel in recent weeks and seized a cargo vessel last month. In Iraq, an air attack killed at least five pro-Iranian militants on Sunday, according to Iraqi security sources, a day after Baghdad warned Washington against "attacks" on its territory. Fighting also flared on Israel's northern border with Lebanon. The Israeli army said it had launched artillery strikes in response to cross-border fire, and its fighter jets hit targets linked to Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. The Israel-occupied West Bank has also seen a surge in violence since October. The Palestinian Authority's health ministry said two Palestinians had been shot dead in an Israeli raid on the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya, adding that Israeli forces kept the two bodies. London, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 5th Dec, 2023) Britain's embattled Conservative government unveiled a raft of measures Monday aimed at cracking down on record levels of migration -- a key battleground in a general election expected next year. The UK announced it would raise the minimum salary threshold for a skilled worker visa and prevent overseas health and social care staff from bringing family dependents to Britain. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's office trumpeted the proposals as "the biggest clampdown on legal migration ever". But critics said it would damage the state-run National Health Service (NHS), which faces staff shortages. Immigration is set to be a key issue in nationwide elections that must be held by January 2025 at the latest, and which the main opposition Labour party is currently favoured to win. Sunak has pledged to reduce new arrivals and has been under pressure ever since statistics released last month showed that net migration to Britain hit a high in 2022. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the number of people who arrived in Britain last year was 745,000 more than the number who left. Interior minister James Cleverly said his plan would result in 300,000 fewer people coming to the UK in the coming years. "Enough is enough," the home secretary told parliament as he laid out his proposals, which will take effect early next year. Cleverly said skilled foreign workers wanting a UK visa would have to earn 38,700 ($48,860), up from 26,200 and in line with the median full-time wage. He exempted health and social care workers, but said they would be prevented from bringing family dependents. NHS Providers, which represents hospital groups in England, said changes that might deter care workers from coming to the UK were "deeply concerning". Care England, a charity representing independent adult social care providers, said immigration had been "saving the social care sector". Staff shortages have been exacerbated by Brexit. Cleverly also raised the minimum income for family visas to 38,700 and confirmed restrictions on international students bringing dependents. He reaffirmed that Britain would increase the surcharge that migrants pay to access the NHS by 66 percent, to 1,035. Critics have said this effectively imposes a double charge on migrant workers, as employees also pay National Insurance charges, which go towards covering healthcare. - 'Do or die' - Cleverly added that the government would reform the "shortage occupation list", which details jobs for which employers are not able to find enough British workers. The Conservatives won a landslide under the leadership of Boris Johnson at the last election in 2019, largely on a promise to bring net migration numbers down. The party has repeatedly promised that leaving the European Union, which ended the free movement of people from member states, would allow the UK to "take back control" of its borders. But regular migration has soared since Britain formally left the EU in January 2020. In 2021, net migration was 488,000. The ONS data piled pressure on Sunak from his own MPs to take action, with some right-wingers arguing that the issue was "do or die" for the party. In opinion polls, the Tories, in power since 2010, lag well behind centre-left Labour, which also claims regular migration is too high. Labour's home affairs spokesperson Yvette Cooper accused the Conservatives of being in a "chaotic panic" over immigration. "Today's statement is an admission of years of total failure by this Conservative government," she told parliament. Sunak is also struggling to cut the number of irregular arrivals crossing the Channel from northern France on small boats. About 30,000 have undertaken the dangerous crossing this year. The government has deemed such crossings illegal but its much-trumpeted plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda was struck down by the courts last month. Cleverly is due to visit Kigali soon, possibly this week, to finalise a new treaty. The government has also said it is working on "emergency legislation" to get deportation flights going by spring. AFU operates about 70 modifications of UAVs, more than 20 types of ammunition for them Defense Ministry The Armed Forces of Ukraine operate about 70 modifications of unmanned aerial vehicles and more than 20 different types of ammunition for UAVs, said Deputy Minister of Defense of Ukraine Ivan Havryliuk. Today, the Armed Forces of Ukraine operate about 70 modifications of unmanned aerial vehicles and more than 20 different types of ammunition for UAVs. Six new electronic warfare models, including the so-called trench ones, have recently been approved for operation. The Defense Department, together with the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, has completed testing of tactical means of radio interference to barging ammunition and FPV drones developed by domestic enterprises that have confirmed their performance characteristics in conditions of use close to combat, Havryliuk said in an interview with ArmiaInform. He also said that in the near future it is planned to test a number of tactical means of electronic warfare against UAVs and means of detecting UAVs. The deputy minister stressed that in recent months the military have been receiving more drones of various types and modifications. In November, we managed to send more UAVs to the troops than in the previous month. We have recently received an additional resource for purchasing. Therefore, in December, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will receive many times more drones. I hope the picture on the battlefield will change, he said. In addition, Havryliuk said that a minesweeper of domestic production has already been allowed to operate. Before Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine, our troops were armed with Soviet-made minesweepers. Our engineers have improved the design of the track minesweeper and produce them from Ukrainian steel, the ministry said. In November, the range of small arms of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was replenished with samples of UAR-15S, UAR-15S1, UAR-15 SM. The conceptual difference between these three modifications of the UAR-15 automatic rifle is the different barrel length. First of all, these rifles will be received by the MTR units, Havryliuk noted. Zelenskyy announces success in increasing its own military production: For first time, six Bogdan tanks reach production rate per month Following a conference call on Monday, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke about the first successes in building up his own military production and plans to increase it. "Daily selector. The implementation of important defense agreements with our partners continues. We received both scarce missiles for existing air defense systems, as well as new, modern anti-aircraft systems. I am grateful to our friends," he wrote on his Telegram. According to Zelenskyy, efforts to increase their own production are also yielding results. "For the first time, we reached the indicator of six Bogdans per month. And we already see how to increase it even more," he said. "Our grain corridor is also working. We have exceeded the mark of 7 million tonnes of cargo," the President added. Also, as the head of state said, he received intelligence reports and reports from the front as part of the selector. In particular, on the defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Bakhmut and Avdiyivka directions, as well as in the south. In addition, he said that emergency services, regional and city military administrations are jointly overcoming the consequences of another Russian shelling and helping the victims. "And the defense forces are implementing a plan to discourage the enemy from the opportunity and desire to terrorize the city," Zelenskyy wrote. Britain is continuing its efforts to have migrants seeking asylum in Britain sent instead to Rwanda to seek asylum there. In the latest version, Britain would have British lawyers stationed in Rwandan courts to alleviate British concerns about the workings of the system in Rwanda. Britains Supreme Court has already ruled that an earlier government plan to send asylum seekers to the East African country is illegal. But that has not stopped some politicians from trying to devise a new way to implement the Rwanda plan. Reports say Home Secretary James Cleverly is to fly to Rwanda this week to sign an agreement that would pay Rwanda an additional 15 million euros to expand its asylum processing capacity, according to a Sunday Times report. Rwanda has already received 140 million euros from Britain for the asylum plan that was set to go into effect in 2020 but was blocked by legal challenges just days before it was to start. In November, the Supreme Court stopped the plan again because of human rights concerns and noted there was no guarantee that Rwanda would not return the asylum seekers to their home countries, which would place the migrants at risk. After last months ruling, the British government persisted with its Rwandan plan and said they would strive to sign a formal treaty with the African nation. Britain has experienced an ever-increasing number of migrants arriving to its border in recent years, as have other European countries. Military-ruled Burkina Faso on Saturday suspended "all distribution methods" of Le Monde daily after an article on a deadly jihadi attack in the north, in the latest measure against a French media organization. "The government has decided to suspend all distribution methods of the newspaper Le Monde in Burkina Faso starting from Saturday, December 2, 2023," Communication Minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouedraogo said in a statement. He criticized a "biased article," referring to a story published on Le Monde's website Friday about a bloody jihadi attack on a military base in Djibo on November 26. The United Nations says at least 40 civilians were killed in the attack claimed by the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims, while Burkinabe security sources spoke of a "few" military deaths. "Contrary to what the newspaper Le Monde peremptorily claims, the Burkinabe government has never trapped itself in a propaganda mindset in the war we are waging against terrorism," Ouedraogo said. Le Monde "has chosen its side," he added. The Burkinabe authorities in recent months have suspended the French TV outlets LCI and France24 as well as Radio France Internationale and the magazine Jeune Afrique. The correspondents of the French newspapers Liberation and Le Monde have also been expelled. In April, Amnesty International urged the authorities to stop "attacks and threats" against press freedom in the West African country. Relations between Burkina Faso and former colonial power France plummeted after the military seized power in a 2022 coup, citing failing efforts to quash a jihadi insurgency that erupted in 2015. The junta has since turned away from its traditional ally, forcing it to withdraw its troops deployed against the rebels, and has turned toward Russia. Insurgents affiliated with al-Qaida and the Islamic State group have fought the state since 2015 after a rebellion in neighboring Mali spilled over. The fighting has killed thousands of civilians and members of the security forces and displaced many more. China's military on Monday said a U.S. Navy ship illegally entered waters adjacent to the Second Thomas Shoal, a disputed South China Sea atoll that has recently seen several maritime confrontations. "The U.S. seriously undermined regional peace and stability," a spokesperson for China's Southern Theater of Operations said in a statement, adding that the U.S. disrupted the South China Sea and violated China's sovereignty. China is in disputes with several of its neighbors over its extensive claims of territorial waters in the South China Sea. The U.S. Navy said the USS Gabrielle Giffords, an Independence-class littoral combat ship, was conducting routine operations in international waters in the South China Sea, consistent with international law. "Every day the U.S. 7th Fleet operates in the South China Sea, as they have for decades," the U.S. Navy said in a statement. "These operations demonstrate we are committed to upholding a free and open Indo-Pacific region." In recent months, China has had several runs-ins with Philippine vessels, and protested about U.S. ships patrolling disputed areas. According to the Chinese military, the U.S. ship moved into waters adjacent to what China calls the Renai Reef, also known as Second Thomas Shoal, a part of the Spratly Islands. The Second Thomas Shoal lies in the Philippines' exclusive economic zone, according to a United Nations tribunal ruling in 2016. The Chinese military spokesperson said the U.S. ship was monitored and followed, and that China's "troops in the theater are on high alert at all times to resolutely defend national sovereignty." "We will not be deterred from continuing to work alongside our allies and partners in support of our shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific," the U.S. Navy responded. Sunday, the Philippine Coast Guard deployed two of its vessels in the South China Sea after monitoring an "alarming" increase in the number of Chinese maritime militia vessels at a reef within the country's exclusive economic zone. Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke of a strengthened political mutual trust and international coordination with Belarus after he met with the European country's president in Beijing, according to official media. China has sought to make Belarus a core member of its Belt and Road Initiative to build infrastructure with nations from Malaysia to Greece. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has become increasingly isolated following a crackdown on political opponents and his support for ally Russia in its war on Ukraine. But the heavily state-controlled economy of Belarus has dimmed possibilities for major economic cooperation with China. China opposes external interference in Belarus internal affairs, Xi was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency, a reflection of Chinas unofficial alliance with authoritarian states from Cuba to Russia in opposition to the U.S.-led liberal democratic global order. Xinhua said Xi and Lukashenko also exchanged views on the Ukraine crisis," but the news agency did not give details of their discussion about the conflict. Russia used Belarus as a staging ground for troops and equipment before Russian President Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. A Yale University study published last month reported that Belarus also has facilitated Russias systematic effort to identify, collect, transport and re-educate Ukraines children" during the war. More than 2,400 Ukrainian children have been taken to Belarus from Russia-occupied parts of Ukraine, according to the study. Delegates meeting at the COP28 summit in Dubai have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to fight neglected tropical diseases that could be worsened by climate change, the first time the annual meeting has addressed the impact on human health. The summit host, the United Arab Emirates, pledged $100 million to the fund, with the same amount donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Total pledges had reached $777 million by Monday. Disease Scientists and doctors say there is growing evidence of the impact of climate change on public health. Pakistan suffered the worst flood in its history last year, which scientists say was likely exacerbated by climate change. At its height, a third of the country was underwater. More than 1,700 people were killed directly by the storms but the ensuing health crisis took more victims. The floodwaters also provided a vast breeding ground for mosquitoes, leading to a 400% increase in cases of malaria in the worst outbreak since 1973. World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus addressed delegates in Dubai Sunday. Although the climate crisis is a health crisis, its well overdue that 27 COPs have been and gone without a serious discussion of health. Undoubtedly, health stands as the most compelling reason for taking climate action, he said. Climate impacts So what impact is climate change having on human health? Deaths from heat stress are on the rise, with 2023 likely to be the hottest year ever recorded. Scientists estimate that over 62,000 people in Europe died from heat-related causes in 2022. Heat-related mortality of adults over 65 years of age, a very vulnerable age group, have increased by 85% since the nineties alone, said Doctor Marina Romanello, the executive director of the Lancet Countdown, a collaborative project observing the patterns of climate change and health. And we now know that more than half of that increase wouldnt have occurred if temperatures hadnt increased so we know that its climate change that caused this today, she told Reuters. Storms More intense storms, driven by climate change, are exacting a heavier death toll. Storm Daniel, which hit Libya in September, likely killed tens of thousands of people although the exact death toll isnt known. There are wider consequences of intense rainfall, according to Jaime Martinez-Urtaza, a geneticist and microbiologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In coastal areas, a phenomenon is observed: warming is linked to lower salinity because frequent extreme rainfall causes rainwater to flow into the sea and salinity to drop, Martinez-Urtaza told The Associated Press. And these two components promote favorable conditions for human pathogenic bacteria of the genus Vibrio, including very important pathogens such as vibrio-cholera, which causes cholera, and Vibrio-parahaemolyticus, which causes gastroenteritis. As well as the spread of malaria through mosquitoes, diseases like river blindness and sleeping sickness are transferred by parasitic worms and flies, organisms that would proliferate in a warming world. Air pollution Among the biggest killers is air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels, which is associated with an estimated 7 million deaths annually. The climate crisis is a health crisis, said Doctor Yseult Gibert, a Canadian physician specializing in the impact of climate change on human health at Johns Hopkins University. It affects you with air pollution of course, that's what people might think of right away. So, your lungs, plus your cardiovascular system thats your vessels and your heart. But it will also affect the rise of infectious disease, more antimicrobial resistance. And of course, all the refugees, climate refugees that are going to be in [an] unstable condition [in terms of] food security, she told Reuters. Womens health Hillary Clinton, the former U.S. secretary of state, told COP28 delegates that womens health is disproportionately affected by climate change. They are more likely to be affected by natural disasters, and particularly by extreme heat. They're in fields. They're in factories. They're in markets. They're doing all kinds of work that becomes absolutely impossible if temperatures get to 40-50 degrees centigrade, Clinton said Sunday. Declaration More than 120 countries at COP28 signed a declaration acknowledging responsibility to safeguard human health in a warming world. Critics say it made no mention of cutting fossil fuels, the main source of greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change. Envoys from the European Unions 27 member countries will meet on Tuesday to start debating whether to launch membership talks with Ukraine, officials and diplomats said, something Hungary has threatened to block and others to saddle with more conditions. The meeting marks the start of preparations among the 27 for a December 14-15 summit of the EUs leaders that is due to decide on integration prospects for Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Bosnia. The European Commission, the EU executive, has proposed that the summit agree to start negotiations with Ukraine possibly in March or once Kyiv meets final conditions a coveted prize for a former Soviet republic that has been struggling to repel a full-blown Russian military invasion for nearly two years. Specifically, the Tuesday meeting will discuss a draft agreement of the summit, which is also expected to decide on a related proposal to extend $54.10 billion in budget support to Kyiv through 2027. No final decisions are expected on Tuesday, but the initial exchange among the member states will give a sense of how likely, or not, the summit is to give the green light to Ukraine. EU diplomats and officials said the first draft prepared for discussion was bound to change. The initial draft, dated December 4 and seen by Reuters on Monday, reads, "The European Council decides to open accession negotiations with Ukraine and with Moldova." For Georgia, it said the Caucasus republic would get EU candidate status "on the understanding" that Tbilisi implements outstanding conditions. For Bosnia, the initial draft stated the bloc was "ready to open EU accession negotiations ... once the necessary degree of compliance with the membership criteria is achieved." All three decisions would require unanimous backing of the 27 EU countries. In the case of Ukraine, Hungary has threatened to bar that. "In our perception, no conditions for Ukraine to start accession talks are met," Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs told journalists separately on Monday. "How can [we] talk about the accession of a country that has been in the last two years at war, with public administration working only thanks to foreign money, with the level of corruption, with 20% of the country occupied. ... How can anyone suggest the country is ready for accession talks?" In what was widely seen as a bid to convince Budapest to back Ukraine, the commission announced in recent days that it would unlock billions in EU aid to Hungary that had been frozen over rule of law concerns, including corruption. The chairman of EU summits, European Council President Charles Michel, also traveled to Budapest last week, but there was no immediate sign that he managed to sway Kovacs' boss, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, on Ukraine. One EU diplomat said Michel left Budapest "empty-handed," while an official with the bloc said on Monday it was "very, very difficult" to secure among all 27 a deal to launch membership talks with Ukraine. Further complicating the picture, some other EU countries have demanded that the summit advance the EU prospects of Georgia and Bosnia in exchange for their support for Ukraine, according to sources in EU hub, Brussels. The URL has been copied to your clipboard The code has been copied to your clipboard. Biden Administration warns Congress without approval of aid for Ukraine, Kyivs effort to defend itself from Russias invasion could grind to a halt. Allegations of Russian forces executing surrendering Ukrainian soldiers. Ukraine pushes ahead with renewable energy plans, despite war. As of the morning of December 4, there were around 650 trucks queued towards the Uzhgorod-Vysne Nemecke checkpoint on the border with Slovakia and around 750 trucks towards the Tysa checkpoint on the border with Hungary, Spokesperson for the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine Andriy Demchenko has said. "At the end of last week, the Slovak Union of Carriers again started to block the movement of trucks. As of today's morning, there were around 650 trucks queued towards Ukraine on the border with Slovakia," he told a press briefing in Kyiv on Monday. According to the official, protesters announced they will allow four trucks per hour to move towards Ukraine and promised that the movement from Ukraine as well as transportation of humanitarian and other important cargoes will not be blocked. The State Border Guard Service also said that the number of trucks trying to cross the Hungary-Ukraine border has increased. "This is connected with the fact that the other directions are currently blocked or movement through them is difficult. As of today's morning, there were around 750 trucks queued towards Ukraine near the Tysa checkpoint (the border with Hungary)," Demchenko said. A former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha, has been charged with spying for Cuba since at least 1981. Rocha, 73, was arrested in Miami on Friday and charged with multiple federal crimes, including acting as an illegal foreign agent and using a fraudulently obtained passport. According to the complaint, Rocha met with Cuban intelligence operatives and gave false information to U.S. government officials about his travels. Prosecutors said Rocha concealed his identity as a foreign agent in efforts to protect himself, so he could continue engaging in "clandestine activity" for the Cuban government. The United States requires individuals acting for the benefit of foreign agencies to register with the U.S. Justice Department. Rocha, a Colombian born, naturalized U.S. citizen, held several positions within the U.S. State Department, giving him "unique access," to non-public government information, prosecutors said. Rocha joined the department in 1981 and worked his way up to becoming the top U.S. diplomat in Argentina between 1997 and 2000, and later the ambassador to Bolivia from 2000 to 2002. Rocha's arrest comes as the Justice Department ramps up criminal enforcement of illicit foreign affairs. Since last year, the FBI has been running a series of undercover operations that include an FBI agent pretending to be a Cuban contact. In an undercover meeting in Miami last year, Rocha exposed that he had been instructed by the Cuban government's intelligence services to "lead a normal life" and that he had created the "legend," or artificial persona, "of a right-wing person," according to a recording of the meeting cited in court documents. In the meetings with the undercover FBI agent, Rocha repeatedly referred to the United States as the enemy and used the term "we" to describe himself and Cuba. Rocha was expected to make his initial appearance in court on Monday. It was not clear whether he had a lawyer. Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. Yemens Houthi rebel group claims responsibility for attacks on ships in the Red Sea. Israel says it tries to minimize civilian casualties as it continues its military offensive. About 20,000 protesters in Belgium on Sunday demand more action on global warming as COP28 continues in Dubai. Trouble with playground bullies started for Maria Ishoo's daughter in elementary school. Girls ganged up, calling her "fat" and "ugly." Boys tripped and pushed her. The California mother watched her typically bubbly second-grader retreat into her bedroom and spend afternoons curled up in bed. For Valerie Aguirre's daughter in Hawaii, a spate of middle school "friend drama" escalated into violence and online bullying that left the 12-year-old feeling disconnected and lonely. Both children received help through telehealth therapy, a service that schools around the country are offering in response to soaring mental health struggles among American youth. Now at least 16 of the 20 largest U.S. public school districts are offering online therapy sessions to reach millions of students, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. In those districts alone, schools have signed provider contracts worth more than $70 million. The growth reflects a booming new business born from America's youth mental health crisis, which has proven so lucrative that venture capitalists are funding a new crop of school teletherapy companies. Some experts raise concerns about the quality of care offered by fast-growing tech companies. As schools cope with shortages of in-person practitioners, however, educators say teletherapy works for many kids, and it's meeting a massive need. For rural schools and lower-income students in particular, it has made therapy easier to access. Schools let students connect with online counselors during the school day or after hours from home. "This is how we can prevent people from falling through the cracks," said Ishoo, a mother of two in Lancaster, California. Ishoo recalls standing at her second-grader's bedroom door last year and wishing she could get through to her. "What's wrong?" the mother would ask. The response made her heart heavy: "It's NOTHING, Mom." Last spring, her school district launched a teletherapy program and she signed up her daughter. During a month of weekly sessions, the girl logged in from her bedroom and opened up to a therapist who gave her coping tools and breathing techniques to reduce anxiety. The therapist told her daughter: You are in charge of your own emotions. Don't give anyone else that control. "She learned that it's OK to ask for help, and sometimes everyone needs some extra help," Ishoo said. The 13,000-student school system, like so many others, has counselors and psychologists on staff, but not enough to meet the need, said Trish Wilson, the Lancaster district's coordinator of counselors. Therapists in the area have full caseloads, making it impossible to refer students for immediate care, she said. But students can schedule a virtual session within days. "Our preference is to provide our students in-person therapy. Obviously, that's not always possible," said Wilson, whose district has referred more than 325 students to over 800 sessions since launching the online therapy program. Students and their parents said in interviews they turned to teletherapy after struggling with feelings of sadness, loneliness, academic stress and anxiety. For many, the transition back to in-person school after distance learning was traumatic. Friendships had fractured, social skills deteriorated and tempers flared more easily. Schools are footing the bill, many of them using federal pandemic relief money as experts have warned of alarming rates of youth depression, anxiety and suicide. Many school districts are signing contracts with private companies. Others are working with local health care providers, nonprofits or state programs. Mental health experts welcome the extra support but caution about potential pitfalls. For one, it's getting harder to hire school counselors and psychologists, and competition with telehealth providers isn't helping. "We have 44 counselor vacancies, and telehealth definitely impacts our ability to fill them," said Doreen Hogans, supervisor of school counseling in Prince George's County, Maryland. Hogans estimates 20% of school counselors who left have taken teletherapy jobs, which offer more flexible hours. The rapid growth of the companies raises questions about the qualifications of the therapists, their experience with children and privacy protocols, said Kevin Dahill-Fuchel, executive director of Counseling in Schools, a nonprofit that helps schools bolster traditional, in-person mental health services. "As we give these young people access to telehealth, I want to hear how all these other bases are covered," he said. One of the biggest providers, San Francisco-based Hazel Health, started with telemedicine health services in schools in 2016 and expanded to mental health in May 2021, CEO Josh Golomb said. It now employs more than 300 clinicians providing teletherapy in over 150 school districts in 15 states. The rapid expansions mean millions of dollars in revenue for Hazel. This year, the company signed a $24 million contract with Los Angeles County to offer teletherapy services to 1.3 million students for two years. Other clients include Hawaii, which is paying Hazel nearly $4 million over three years to work with its public schools, and Clark County schools in the Las Vegas area, which have allocated $3.25 million for Hazel-provided teletherapy. The districts of Miami-Dade, Prince George's and Houston schools also have partnered with Hazel. Despite the giant contracts, Golomb said Hazel is focused on ensuring child welfare outweighs the bottom line. "We have the ethos of a nonprofit company but we're using a private-sector mechanism to reach as many kids as we can," Golomb said. Hazel raised $51.5 million in venture capital funding in 2022 that fueled its expansion. "Do we have any concerns about any compromise in quality? The resounding answer is no." Other providers are getting into the space. In November, New York City launched a free telehealth therapy service for teens to help eliminate barriers to access, said Ashwin Vasan, the city's health commissioner. New York is paying the startup TalkSpace $26 million over three years for a service allowing teens aged 13 to 17 to download an app and connect with licensed therapists by phone, video or text. Unlike other cities, New York is offering the service to all teens, whether enrolled in private, public or home schools, or not in school at all. "I truly hope this normalizes and democratizes access to mental health care for our young people," Vasan said. Many of Hawaii's referrals come from schools in rural or remote areas. Student clients have increased sharply in Maui since the deadly August wildfires, said Fern Yoshida, who oversees teletherapy for the state education department. So far this fall, students have logged 2,047 teletherapy visits, a three-fold increase from the same period last year. One of them was Valerie Aguirre's daughter, whose fallout with two friends turned physical last year in sixth grade, when one of the girls slapped her daughter in the face. Aguirre suggested her daughter try teletherapy. After two months of online therapy, "she felt better," Aguirre said, with a realization that everyone makes mistakes and friendships can be mended. In California, Ishoo says her daughter, now in third grade, is relaying wisdom to her sister, who started kindergarten this year. "She walks her little sister to class and tells her everything will be OK. She's a different person. She's older and wiser. She reassures her sister," Ishoo said. "I heard her say, 'If kids are being mean to you, just ignore them.'" Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva landed in Berlin on Sunday for the first Brazilian-German government consultations in eight years as Latin America and Europe's largest economies seek to revive ties. Lula has jetted across the globe since returning to office in January, trying to restore Brazil's standing on the global stage after years of diplomatic isolation under his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, to mixed results. He is expected to have dinner Sunday with fellow leftist, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, before the consultations Monday. Scholz was the first foreign leader to visit Lula in Brazil, only weeks after his inauguration. The German chancellor has been on a quest since taking office in late 2021 to improve ties with the Global South. Germany also considers Brazil a key partner in its bid to diversify its trade, in part to reduce its reliance on China, and plug a gap in skilled labor. Both countries are pushing for a quick trade deal between the European Union and Mercosur, South America's major trading bloc, over which Brazil currently presides. "It is known that we support and strive for this agreement and also want it to be concluded really swiftly," a spokesperson for the German economy ministry said Friday. A trade treaty was agreed in principle in 2019 after two decades of talks, but additional environmental commitments demanded by the EU led Brazil and Argentina to seek new concessions that prolonged negotiations. "Free-trade agreements open access to new markets that in particular the export-oriented German economy can benefit from," said Lukas Koehler, a senior lawmaker with the Free Democrats (FDP), junior partner in Scholz's three-way coalition. German exports to Brazil, however, have grown by only 3% in the past ten years, compared with 38% and 87% for U.S. and Chinese exports to Brazil respectively, according to the Latin America Committee of German Business. Scholz will be hoping to avoid a scenario such as in January, when his visit to Brazil was overshadowed by differences over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This time, the news conference Monday afternoon could highlight their differences over the Israel-Hamas war. Lula last month said that Israel was "committing terrorism" against Palestinians "by not taking into account that children are not at war, that women are not at war." Scholz, by contrast, has avoided such criticism and continuously backed Israel's "right to defend itself." North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said it is a duty of women to halt a fall in the country's births in order to strengthen national power, state media said Monday, as his government steps up the call for the people to have more children. While getting a detailed read on North Korea's population trends is extremely difficult because of the limited statistics it discloses, South Korea's government assesses that the North's fertility rate has declined steadily for the past 10 years. That is a concerning development for a country that depends on mobilized labor to help keep its broken, heavily sanctioned economy afloat. Kim's latest appeal for women to have more children was made Sunday during the country's National Mothers Meeting, the first of its kind in 11 years. "Stopping the decline in birthrates and providing good child care and education are all our family affairs that we should solve together with our mothers," Kim said in his opening speech. According to South Korea's government statistics agency, North Korea's total fertility rate, or the average number of babies expected to be born to a woman over her lifetime, was at 1.79 in 2022, down from 1.88 in 2014. The decline is still slower than its wealthier rival South Korea, whose fertility rate last year was 0.78, down from 1.20 in 2014. South Korea's fertility rate, the lowest in the developed world, is believed to be due to a potent cocktail of reasons discouraging people from having babies, including a decaying job market, a brutally competitive school environment for children, traditionally weak child care assistance, and a male-centered corporate culture where many women find it impossible to combine careers and family. While North Korea is one of the poorest nations in the world, the change in its demographic structure is similar to that of rich countries, some observers say. "Many families in North Korea also don't intend to have more than one child these days as they know they need lots of money to raise their kids, send them to school and help them get jobs," said Ahn Kyung-su, head of DPRKHEALTH.ORG, a website focusing on health issues in North Korea. Ahn, who has interviewed many North Korean defectors, said the smuggling of a vast amount of South Korean TV dramas and movies in the past 20 years that showed an elevated social status for women has also likely influenced women in North Korea not to have many children. North Korea implemented birth control programs in the 1970s to 1980s to slow a postwar population growth. The country's fertility rate recorded a major decline following a famine in the mid-1990s that was estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people, the Seoul-based Hyundai Research Institute said August in a report. "Given North Korea lacks resources and technological advancements, it could face difficulties to revive and develop its manufacturing industry if sufficient labor forces are not provided," the institute report said. According to North Korean state media reports this year, the country has introduced a set of benefits for families with three or more children, including preferential free housing arrangements, state subsidies, free food, medicine and household goods, and educational perks for children. South Korea's statistics agency estimates the North's population at 25.7 million. The Hyundai Research Institute report said North Korea was expected to experience a population shrink from 2034 and forecast its population would decrease to 23.7 million by 2070. Ahn, the website head, said that Kim Jong Un's repeated public appearances with his young daughter, Ju Ae, are also likely to be efforts to encourage families. Other experts said the daughter's appearances were more likely an attempt to show she's her father's heir. South Korea on Monday successfully conducted a flight of a solid-fuel rocket carrying a satellite over the sea near Jeju Island, the Defense Ministry said, amid a growing space race with neighboring North Korea. It was the third successful test of the rocket's technology after two others in March and December 2022. The launch on Monday involved technology developed at the state-run Agency for Defense Development, and a booster and satellite produced by South Korea's Hanwha Systems 272210.KS, the ministry said in a statement. Hanwha Systems said the satellite, which will be used for civilian purposes including environmental monitoring, had successfully sent signals to the ground control center. The ministry hailed the launch as achieving a milestone just after Pyongyang launched its first military spy satellite, which the United States and its allies have condemned for using missile technology contravening U.N. security resolutions. South Korea's successful launch will enable the country to accelerate its surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, the ministry said. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried South Korea's first spy satellite into orbit on Friday from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base. North Korea on Monday denounced what it called Washington's "double standard" over the two Koreas' satellite launches and said such "brigandish" American standards would never be tolerated. "North Korea will ... continue to pursue the important mission of establishing aerospace surveillance capabilities to thoroughly monitor and control military moves by the United States and other hostile forces," the North's space agency said in a statement carried by state media outlet KCNA. Last month, North Korea launched its own military reconnaissance satellite, with leader Kim Jong Un receiving photos of the White House, Pentagon and U.S. aircraft carriers at a naval base in Norfolk, Virginia, according to state media. A functioning reconnaissance satellite could allow North Korea to remotely monitor U.S., South Korean and Japanese troops. South Korea's satellites would reduce its dependence on American intelligence systems. Pyongyang has not released any imagery, leaving analysts and foreign governments to debate how capable the new satellite is and has defended satellite launches as part of its sovereign rights in response to criticism. Ukraine and Poland will open an additional border crossing for empty freight trucks Monday to free up a much-needed route for Kyiv, with some crossings blocked by weeks of protests by Polish drivers, Ukrainian authorities said Sunday. Those protests, over what Polish truckers see as unfair competition from their Ukrainian peers, started on Nov. 6, with four border crossings now under blockade. Polish haulers' main demand is to stop Ukrainian truckers having permit-free access to the EU, something that Kyiv and Brussels say is impossible. Ukrainian border service said Uhryniv checkpoint, currently operating only for passenger cars and buses, would be opened from 1 a.m. (midnight GMT) Monday for empty heavy vehicles with a total permissible weight of more than 7.5 metric tons. "The opening of Uhryniv is the first point on the list of measures implemented to unblock the border, reduce queues and increase the capacity of the Ukrainian-Polish border," the border service said. Ukraine said last week it had agreed to some measures with Poland that could ease the pressure at the blockaded border crossings, but that they had not discussed the main demands of the protests; that Ukrainian truckers be required to have entry permits for transport to EU countries. That permit rule was waived for Ukrainian truck drivers after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is set to address members of the U.S. Senate Tuesday amid a push by the White House for Congress to urgently approve new funding to help Ukraine in its defense against Russias invasion. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Zelenskyy was invited to speak via video at a classified briefing so we can hear directly from him precisely whats at stake when lawmakers vote on a bill that includes billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine. Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young warned in a letter to congressional leaders Monday that by the end of the year, the U.S. will no longer have the funds to send weapons and assistance to Ukraine. It "will not be able to keep fighting, Young said of Ukraine, noting that the U.S. has already run out of money for propping up Ukraines economy. In October, the Biden administration asked Congress for nearly $106 billion to fund ambitious plans for Ukraine, Israel and U.S. border security. Funding for Ukraine has become politically controversial with some right-leaning lawmakers in the narrowly Republican-controlled Congress. Young said in the letter released by the White House that cutting off funding and a flow of weapons to Ukraine would likely work to Russias advantage on the battlefield. "I want to be clear: Without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine, to provide equipment from U.S. military stocks," she wrote. "There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment. We are out of money and nearly out of time," she said. With a nod to important political swing states and Republican strongholds ahead of the 2024 election, Young noted that funding could be used for contracts with companies in Alabama, Texas, Georgia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Michigan. EU-Ukraine Diplomatic envoys of the EU's 27 member countries will meet Tuesday to start debating a launch of EU membership talks with Ukraine, according to officials and diplomats. The meeting marks the start of preparations among the 27 for the December 14-15 summit of the bloc's leaders that will also assess and decide on EU integration prospects for Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Bosnia and others. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has demanded that Ukraines membership bid into the European Union not be on the agenda at the EU summit. In a letter he sent to European Council President Charles Michel, who will chair the summit in Brussels, Orban insisted that a strategic discussion is needed first about Ukraines European future and warned that forcing a decision could destroy EU unity. Orban, who is widely considered one of Russian President Vladimir Putins closest allies in Europe, maintains that Ukraine is light years away from becoming an EU member. He wrote that EU leaders must avoid this counterproductive scenario for the sake of unity, our most important asset. He did not explicitly say that Hungary would veto any moves to open membership talks with Ukraine, but the threat was implicit. Michels office declined to comment. Decisions regarding EU membership and EUs long-term budget, which includes $54.1 billion in assistance for Kyiv, can only be made unanimously by all 27 member countries. Ukraine is relying on the EU funds to help its war-ravaged economy survive in the coming year. "Ukraine's future membership in the EU serves as a robust assurance of security for our nation and the European community as a whole," Ihor Zhovkva, deputy head of Ukraines presidential office, said during consultations with EU official Charles Fries on the EU's collective security commitments to Ukraine. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed his extreme alarm Monday about the resumption of hostilities between Israel and Hamas, including Hamas rocket fire on Israel and the renewal and expansion of Israels airstrikes and military ground operations into the southern Gaza Strip. The U.N. continues to appeal to Israeli forces to avoid further action that would exacerbate the already catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza and to spare civilians from more suffering, U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said in a statement. Civilians including health workers, journalists and U.N. personnel and civilian infrastructure must be protected at all times. Guterres called on all parties to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law and renewed his call for a sustained humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza and for the unconditional and immediate release of all remaining hostages held by Hamas. The number of civilians killed is rapidly increasing, said Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that assists Palestinians. Civilians, including men, women, children, older persons, the sick and people with disabilities, are the most to suffer, Lazzarini said. Israel vowed to destroy Hamas, which governs Gaza, after the militant group sent fighters rampaging into Israel on October 7, killing around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israel. Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and others, also took about 240 people hostage. More than 100 of the Israeli hostages have since been released, most of them during a weeklong truce agreement between Israel and Hamas. Israel's air and ground military operations in Gaza have killed more than 15,500 Palestinians, about 70 percent women and children, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health. More than 1.8 million Gazans are believed to be displaced by the fighting and Israeli evacuation orders. About 1.2 million of them are in 156 severely overcrowded U.N. shelters. Guterres also reiterated the need for an unimpeded, adequate and sustained flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza. The U.N. said Monday that the current situation on the ground is severely impeding its ability to address humanitarian needs. Limited aid was distributed in Rafah on Sunday but largely stopped in the neighboring Khan Younis because of the hostilities. The Israeli authorities continue to restrict the flow of humanitarian supplies, including fuel, forcing the U.N. to only use the ill-equipped crossing point with Egypt, Lazzarini said, reiterating his call for Israel to open more border crossings with Gaza for humanitarians. Israel has told Palestinians in areas around the Gazan city of Khan Younis to evacuate to Rafah, farther south, near the border with Egypt. Many of them have been displaced more than once before from other parts of Gaza. The order created panic, fear and anxiety, Lazzarini said, adding that it pushes people into an area less than one-third of the Gaza Strip. West Bank boiling Guterres also expressed alarm at the growing violence in the West Bank, including Israeli security operations, high numbers of fatalities and arrests, rising settler violence and attacks on Israelis by Palestinians, his spokesperson said. According to the U.N. department of humanitarian affairs, since Hamas terror attacks on October 7, Israeli forces have killed 244 Palestinians, including 65 children, in the West Bank. Israeli settlers have killed another eight people, including one child. The U.N. Security Council met for 2 hours in a closed session Monday to discuss the collapse of the seven-day humanitarian truce and the renewed hostilities. Frances envoy expressed concern about Palestinians in Gaza being pushed farther south and renewed calls for a humanitarian truce. In the short term, what we would need is a humanitarian truce leading to a cease-fire, Ambassador Nicolas de Riviere told reporters after the meeting. In the first time of this crisis, the people of Gaza were pushed from the north to the south. Now, I think they are in the south and are asked to leave again. So, where should they go? Its really time to have a truce and a cease-fire. Sexual violence Separately Israel, along with several Jewish organizations, held an event Monday inside the United Nations to spotlight atrocities they accuse Hamas of committing against women on October 7, including rape and mutilation, which they say the international community has been largely indifferent to. Ahead of the session, dozens of women waving Israeli flags and signs gathered outside the United Nations. "This was premeditated. This was planned. This was instructed, Israels U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan told the meeting of mostly female activists and Israel supporters, addressing the violence against women. Hamas terrorists were told to commit these acts of sheer evil in order to terrorize us and our families, in order to drive us away from Israel out of fear. This is the enemy we are facing. Erdan focused his anger on the U.N.s main agency for women, saying it failed to speak out early and strongly against sexual attacks on Israeli women. Sadly, the very international bodies that are supposedly the defenders of all women showed that when it comes to Israelis, indifference is acceptable, he said. To these organizations, Israeli women are not women. The rape of Israelis is not an act of rape. Their silence has been deafening. Erdan said he sent photographic evidence in two separate letters to U.N. Women, which were ignored. During a Security Council meeting on November 22, U.N. Women Executive Director Sima Bahous told the council she was alarmed by reports of gender-based and sexual violence. I reiterate my call from when I last spoke in these chambers in October, that every act of violence against women and girls, including sexual violence, is unequivocally condemned and must be fully investigated with the utmost priority, she said. In a statement on December 1, U.N. Women condemned Hamas and called for the investigation, prosecution and accountability for all acts of gender-based violence committed on or after October 7. In Washington, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters the Biden administration has no reason to doubt those reports of sexual violence by Hamas, adding that Washington does not have its own independent assessments to make right now. Eight U.S. lawmakers have called on the State Department to designate American Russian journalist Alsu Kurmasheva as wrongfully detained. In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the lawmakers, led by Democrats Eleanor Holmes Norton and Adam Schiff, requested updates on Kurmasheva, who has been detained in Russia since October 18. The Prague-based editor for the Tatar-Bashkir service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL, was detained while in Russia handling a family emergency. Russian authorities accuse Kurmasheva of failing to register as a foreign agent, which she rejects. A court Friday ordered her held until February. If convicted, Kurmasheva could be jailed for up to five years. The U.S. lawmakers requested information on the State Departments efforts to secure consular access. Russia has so far denied such requests. They urged the State Department to designate the Russian journalist as wrongfully detained. Based on the facts that are known, we believe a formal designation is warranted and remains important to ensure the full engagement of the U.S. government and the provision of all relevant resources to support Ms. Kurmasheva and her family as efforts continue to return her to her loved ones as soon as possible, the letter said. The State Department designated jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich as wrongfully detained within two weeks of the Americans arrest in Russia. Russian authorities accuse Gershkovich of espionage, which he and his media outlet deny. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Monday that calls for the United States to designate someone as wrongfully detained is "a matter we take very seriously here," adding that the government has to look at statutory requirements and other available information. "No one should read anything into the lack of other wrongful detention determinations," Miller said, adding that it is an "ongoing, active process inside the United States government." On Monday, Gershkovich marked 250 days in a Russian prison. A court last week extended his detention to January 30. Wall Street Journal journalist Paul Beckett sees similarities in the case of his colleagues Gershkovich and Kurmasheva. "To me, they're both journalists who have been grabbed by the Russians for leverage over the United States," said Beckett, who is leading the newspaper's campaign to secure Gershkovich's release. Kurmashevas husband, Pavel Butorin, has said the wrongfully detained designation could give the family access to greater resources to help free his wife. I'm convinced that Alsu's being targeted because she's an American citizen and because she is a journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Butorin told VOA last week. Butorin is the director of Current Time TV, a Russian-language TV and digital network led by RFE/RL in partnership with VOA. Kurmashevas family and colleagues have pressed the U.S. for help to secure her release. We would like to see more involvement from the United States government and from other parties, as well from the European Union and from human rights organizations, Butorin said. U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) chief executive Amanda Bennett on Friday said it was crucial for Kurmasheva to be officially designated wrongfully detained so that her case can receive the time and attention it deserves. USAGM is an independent global media agency that oversees Voice of America and five other broadcasting entities. Every day that Alsu Kurmasheva remains behind bars is a tragedy for her husband and two young children, her community, and journalists everywhere, said Bennett in a prepared statement. VOA State Department bureau chief Nike Ching contributed to this report. NATO committed to stepping up support to Ukraine Stoltenberg at meeting with Umerov NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and Defense Minister of Ukraine Rustem Umerov held a meeting to discuss the latest battlefield developments, NATO's support and Kyiv's path to membership in the Alliance. "The Secretary General and Minister Umerov discussed the latest battlefield developments and Ukraine's urgent military needs. With winter expected to complicate fighting, Mr Stoltenberg stressed that Allies are committed to stepping up political and practical support to Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia's invasion. The Secretary General reiterated that NATO will provide long-term support to Ukraine to make Ukraine's forces fully interoperable within NATO and bring them even closer to the Alliance," the press service of NATO Headquarters said. In addition, the officials discussed Ukraine's path to NATO membership and Ukraines reform efforts. "Mr Stoltenberg reiterated that Ukraine will become a member of NATO when all Allies agree and when conditions are met," it said. The talks follow a meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council at Foreign Ministers level on November 29, the press service said, adding that Stoltenberg previously met Minister Umerov in Kyiv in September, and during the meeting of NATO Defense Ministers in October. The World Health Organization's executive board will hold a rare emergency session on December 10 to discuss the health crisis in Gaza and the West Bank, with the Palestinian envoy seeking more medical aid and access for foreign health care workers. The WHO confirmed on Monday it had received a request from 15 countries to hold the session, which will be convened by Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in consultation with the Qatari chair. The Palestinian ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Ibrahim Khraishi, said the meeting would focus mostly on Gaza, engulfed by war between its Hamas rulers and Israel, but also cover attacks on the health sector in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. "We want to empower the WHO and call for the Israeli side not to target the medical sector. We want to allow for fresh medical supplies," he told Reuters, adding that his diplomatic mission was drafting a motion to be reviewed by the board. "One idea is to send more doctors in from around the world," he added, saying many countries had offered. The "Occupied Palestinian Territory" is a WHO observer rather than a member state but has influence in the organization through supporters. Israel said the session was an example of the "double standards and disproportionate attention towards Israel in the multilateral arena." Only a fraction of Gaza's hospitals remain operational due to Israeli bombings and a lack of fuel, and those that are still functioning are increasingly overwhelmed by a new wave of wounded arriving. A WHO database shows there have been 427 attacks on health care facilities in Palestinian territories since the October 7 cross-border Hamas attack on Israel, and the latter's retaliatory aerial blitz and invasion of Gaza. The database does not touch on who is seen as responsible for the attacks. Israel has accused Hamas of using ordinary Gazans as human shields by placing command centers and weapons inside hospitals and other civilian buildings. A senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that Israel would facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza's civilians as fighting there resumed after a week-long truce collapsed. The WHO has also warned of spreading disease, which it has said could kill more people than bombardments in Gaza, with diarrhea cases among children rising to about 100 times normal levels. As many as 80% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have fled their homes, the U.N. humanitarian agency OCHA says. The WHO's governing board is made up of 34 members and typically meets every January to fix the agenda for its annual assembly. Membership is split among regional groups and the United States, Qatar, Senegal, Australia and China are among seat holders. Israel urged people living in part of the Gaza Strips second-largest city to evacuate Monday, as Israeli troops launched new airstrikes and intensified their ground attack targeting Hamas militants. The Israeli military told people in neighborhoods on the northeastern side of Khan Younis to leave for their safety, directing them to areas farther south. Photos showed smoke rising from buildings in the city that had been leveled by the Israeli attacks, with people carrying bodies wrapped in blankets away from the destruction. The Israeli military said it attacked hundreds of Gaza locations throughout Monday, expanding its ground operations to every part of the narrow enclave along the Mediterranean Sea. A government spokesperson told reporters, Were close to completing that mission in northern Gaza. While visiting Gaza, Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, offered a grim assessment of the plight of Palestinians in the territory. The level of human suffering is intolerable, she said in a statement. It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, and with a military siege in place, there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible. Khan Younis is in southern Gaza, where many civilians fled as Israel began its campaign against Hamas in the northern part of the enclave. The Israeli military called Sunday for evacuation from parts of Khan Younis, just as it had throughout northern Gaza in late October as it readied a ground offensive, and posted maps of which neighborhoods should be evacuated. Israel told the Palestinians near Khan Younis to move to areas southeast of the city and to Rafah, on the Egyptian border. But the United Nations humanitarian office said areas there are already overcrowded. While Israel has issued multiple rounds of warnings for people to flee areas that later came under attack, it has also faced criticism from U.N. officials who say the conditions in Gaza with unreliable electricity and internet access make it difficult for people to access information. Gazas two main telecommunications providers, Paltel and Jawwal, said that as of 8 p.m. local time, all communications and internet service across the Gaza Strip were disrupted. North Gaza and Gaza City had been experiencing partial outages since the morning, but communications worsened throughout the day. Germany said Monday it expects Israel to not only inform people about leaving dangerous areas of Gaza, but also ensure they are in a "realistic position to find safe shelter elsewhere." The United Nations has also warned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza with an estimated 80% of the population displaced from their homes and many staying in overcrowded shelters. In addition to Israeli troops expanding operations into regions where civilians previously sought shelter, there were also concerns about the impact that more intense fighting in southern Gaza would have on the flow of humanitarian aid, which has come in through the southern border with Egypt. The Israeli military said Monday it had attacked 200 Hamas targets overnight, including destroying militant operations sites located inside schools in northern Gaza. Israel has accused Hamas of embedding itself in and underneath hospitals and other civilian areas and encouraging civilians to ignore Israeli warnings to evacuate ahead of airstrikes, using them in effect as human shields, an accusation Hamas has denied. Israel also announced the deaths of three of its soldiers, saying two died Sunday in battles in the northern Gaza strip and the other in central Gaza. In other fighting Monday, a 32-year-old person was killed and several were injured after clashes erupted following an Israeli raid on the Qalandia refugee camp near the West Bank city of Ramallah, according to local news reports. The Palestinian health ministry said the person was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in the camp, which is near the main checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem and next to Israels West Bank barrier. The Palestinian Red Crescent said 22 people were injured and transported to hospitals for further care. At least 300 Palestinians have been killed since the collapse of a week-long Israel-Hamas truce Friday morning, raising the death toll in Gaza since the October Hamas attack to more than 15,200 people with more than 40,000 wounded, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. The ministry says 70% of the victims are women and children. After the breakdown of the truce, Netanyahus office announced it had instructed its negotiating team in Doha, Qatar to return to Israel. Israel began its military campaign to wipe out Hamas after Hamas fighters crossed into southern Israel in October. Israel said 1,200 people were killed and some 240 captives taken. About 100 of the hostages have since been swapped to Israel in exchange for the release of several hundred Palestinian prisoners jailed by Israel. The exchanges ended when the cease-fire expired. Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. Israel issued new evacuation orders to displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza on Sunday as fighting intensified after the collapse of the cease-fire with Hamas militants Friday. In Arabic-language accounts on the Facebook and X social media platforms, Israel told the Palestinians that obeying evacuation instructions is the safest way to preserve your safety, your lives and the lives of your families. Many of the Palestinians had already been ordered by Israel to evacuate northern Gaza earlier in the nearly two-month war with Hamas. In advance of likely more attacks in the region, Israel told the Palestinians to leave 34 areas, all located southeast of the city of Khan Younis, and head to already-overflowing shelters or what it called the humanitarian zone in Al-Mawasi, an agricultural area closer to the Mediterranean Sea. The Israeli military marked a map in southern Gaza with nearly 2,400 blocks, and told the Palestinians to pay attention to Israeli announcements about whether their block was being evacuated. Some families thought they could stay where they were, but later said they received recorded calls ordering them to leave. I cannot overstate the fear, panic & confusion that these Israeli maps are causing civilians in Gaza, including my own staff, Melanie Ward, head of the humanitarian organization Medical Aid for Palestinians, wrote on social media, adding, People cannot run from place to place to try to escape Israels bombs. The new evacuation orders came as Israel faces growing calls from the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to do more to prevent the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Khan Younis has come under an unrelenting attack from the Israeli military, where it believes more Hamas militants are hiding. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that the campaign would last until all hostages seized by Hamas during the militant groups October 7 attack on Israel are returned and Hamas is eliminated. A tough war is ahead of us, he said. But U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said Saturday at the COP 28 climate conference in Dubai, Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and video coming from Gaza are devastating. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said while U.S. support for Israels security is non-negotiable, he has personally warned Israel that if it did not take steps to protect civilians, it risked their radicalization. In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat, Austin said at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California. At the forum of political and military leaders and others, he pressed Israel to dramatically expand Gaza's access to humanitarian aid and renewed U.S. calls for a two-state solution to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told NBCs Meet the Press show there are no official negotiations going on right now to resume release of Hamas-held hostages in exchange for Palestinians jailed by Israel. Kirby blamed Hamas. He said Hamas, designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and other countries, failed to come up with yet another list of women and children that could be released and we know they're holding additional women and children not combatants, not female [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers but innocent civilians, women and children that they have that they couldn't put on a list and turn that in. So, unfortunately, the negotiations have stopped, Kirby said. That said, what hasn't stopped is [U.S.] involvement, trying to get [negotiations] back on track... We are still working it really hard hour by hour to see if we can get the sides back to the table and see if we can get something moving, Kirby said. We would like that to happen today. But honestly, I just don't know. Kirby said the U.S. believes there are still [eight] Americans that are being held hostage. But its difficult for us to know where they all are or what their condition is. Civilian casualties At least 200 Palestinians have been killed since the collapse of the Israel-Hamas truce Friday morning, raising the death toll in Gaza since the October Hamas attack to more than 15,200 people with more than 40,000 wounded, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. The ministry says 70% of them are women and children. About 2 million Palestinians, almost the entire population of Gaza, are now crammed into the territory's southern half. They are running out of space where they can flee and seek shelter. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that nearly 80% of Gazas population has been internally displaced. The Israeli military said Saturday it hit more than 400 Hamas targets across Gaza over the previous day, using airstrikes and shelling from tanks and navy gunships. It included more than 50 strikes on Khan Younis and surrounding areas in the southern half of Gaza. In northern Gaza, an airstrike destroyed a residential building hosting displaced families in the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya on the outskirts of Gaza City. The strike on the multistory building left dozens dead or wounded, said residents Hamza Obeid and Amal Radwan. Israel began its military campaign to wipe out Hamas after Hamas fighters crossed into southern Israel in October. Israel said 1,200 people were killed and some 240 captives taken. We will continue the war until we achieve all its goals, and its impossible to achieve those goals without the ground operation, Netanyahu also said Saturday. Hamas has fired more than 250 rockets on southern Israel since the cease-fire ended, said Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli army spokesperson. In southern Israel, sirens were heard in communities near the Gaza Strip but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. Israel has accused Hamas of embedding itself in and underneath hospitals and other civilian areas and encouraging civilians to ignore Israeli warnings to evacuate ahead of airstrikes, using them in effect as human shields, an accusation Hamas has denied. The Reuters news agency said it could not confirm the battlefield accounts. After the breakdown of the truce, Netanyahus office announced it has instructed its negotiating team in Doha, Qatar to return to Israel. Ukrainian officials launched an investigation Sunday into allegations that Russian forces killed surrendering Ukrainian soldiers after grainy footage on social media appeared to show two uniformed men being shot at close range after emerging from a dugout. The video shows a group in Russian uniforms shooting at point-blank range, two unarmed servicemen in the uniform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who were surrendering, the prosecutors office said in a Telegram update Sunday. The video first appeared Saturday on DeepState, a popular Ukrainian Telegram channel covering the war. It shows the surrendering soldiers, one of them with his hands up, walking out at gunpoint and lying down on the ground before a group of Russian troops appears to open fire. There has been no response from Russia. It was not immediately possible to verify the videos authenticity or the circumstances in which it was filmed, and it was not clear when the incident took place. If the incident is confirmed, it would be a war crime, according to the Ukrainian General Prosecutors office. Kyiv, its Western allies, and international human rights organizations, have repeatedly accused Moscow of breaching international humanitarian law since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Kremlin denies these allegations. In a statement posted to Telegram, Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets described the incident as yet another glaring example of Russias violations of international humanitarian law. Meanwhile, Russia's commissioner for human rights, Tatiana Moskalkova, and Lubinets plan on making several mutual visits to prisoners of war, Russia's RIA news agency reported Sunday. "Russian military personnel will be visited on the Ukrainian side. Ukrainian military personnel will be visited on the Russian side. There will be several of these visits; we have a schedule," RIA cited Moskalkova as saying. In a post on the social platform X, previously known as Twitter, Lubinets said, 119 Ukrainian defenders who are currently held in captivity in Russia received a visit. This was made possible through mutual arrangements between the Offices of the Commissioners of Ukraine and of the Russian Federation. Battlefield reports Russian forces say they hit Ukraines air defense headquarters and alert center in the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine, the Russian defense ministry said Sunday. The ministry said that it inflicted combined strikes using operational-tactical and army aviation, unmanned aerial vehicles, missile forces and artillery. Earlier Sunday, Ukraine said its air defense systems destroyed 10 out of 12 Russian drones before reaching their targets in Ukraine. In its daily dispatch, Russia said it launched 12 drones and a cruise missile at Ukraine overnight and that it hit fuel depots in the areas of Myrhorod, Poltava region and the city of Khmelnytskyi, an ammunition arsenal in the Mykolaiv region. It also said it hit manpower and equipment in 107 various districts. The Reuters news agency was not immediately able to corroborate the battlefield reports. An elderly man was killed during Russian shelling of Ukraines southern region of Kherson Sunday, regional officials said. "The occupants attacked the (Sadove) village. One of the hits was to a private garage, where a 78-year-old man was at the time. He died on the spot from the explosive injury," the Kherson military administration said on the Telegram messaging app. Reuters could not independently confirm the report. Since Russian troops have retreated from Kherson and the western bank of the Dnipro River late last year, they regularly shell those areas from their positions on the eastern bank of the river. Ukrainian military spokesperson Oleksandr Shtupun told national television that Russian attacks on Avdiivka had halved over the past 24 hours, largely because of Russian heavy losses. "The coking plant is controlled by the Ukrainian armed forces," Shtupun said. "Enemy forces are trying to make their way inside but are suffering losses in infantry and equipment." Fighting was still intense, he said, in an area outside the town center known as the "industrial zone." Russia's popular war blog Rybar said the zone had fallen under Russian control. Reuters could not verify accounts from either side. Vitaliy Barabash, head of the town's military administration, told Channel 24 television that Avdiivka was "starting to look like Maryinka, a settlement that basically no longer exists. It has been razed to its foundations," he said. Once a city of 10,000, Mariinka, southwest of the Russian-held regional center of Donetsk, is now a ghost town, after almost a year of Russian efforts to seize it. No civilians are left there Earlier Saturday, power was restored at Ukraines Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant after it was lost Friday, according to a statement by Ukraines Energy Ministry on Telegram. "This is the eighth blackout which occurred at the [Zaporizhzhia plant] and could have led to nuclear catastrophe," the statement said. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed the outage and restoration of power. The plant was occupied by Russia in March of last year and is no longer generating power but needs a supply of electricity to cool one of its four reactors, which is in a state of hot conservation, meaning it has not fully been shut down. The ministry said that after losing grid connection, the plant turned on 20 backup generators to supply its electricity needs. Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. Zimbabwes ambassador to South Africa, Henry Hamadziripi, has confirmed that two Zimbabweans, Talent Moyo and Felix Nkomo, are among the 7 people killed by a vigilante group in Diepsloot, Johannesburg last Friday. According to AFP, the victims were found burnt to death in two separate incidents in Diepsloots extension 12 and 13. Ambassador Hamadziripi described the incident as tragic and said they are helping the deceaseds relatives to repatriate their bodies. Gauteng Police spokesperson Mavela Masondo said, preliminary investigations suggest that the victims were assaulted and burned by the mob. He strongly condemned acts of vigilantism and said they are yet to arrest the alleged killers. Imisebenzi Yamapostoli Church in Diepsloot where Moyo and Nkomo confirmed that they were the last to see the two before they were stoned and set on fire. The two were supposed to attend an evening church session with us but they never came back after going back to take their garbs. It appears as if they were killed on their way to our evening prayers. They died for nothing Just like that, said Mehluli Ncube, a member of Imisebenzi Yamapostoli Church. Ncube said they are currently seeking for help in raising almost R40,000 for ferrying their bodies to Zimbabwe. We have talked to the Zimbabwe consulate staff and indications are that they will also chip in, said Ncube. Zimbabweans living in South Africa say they are now living in fear of being attacked by South Africans being mobilized by Operation Dudula, South Africa First and others who want to get rid of illegal foreigners. Thousands of Zimbabweans are living and working in South Africa due to economic problems back home. At the request of the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, Switzerland has transferred seven vehicles to ensure the remote operation of mobile Administrative Services Centers in Kherson region, the Swiss Embassy reports. "The vehicles will cover the needs of seven communities of Kherson region and serve the local population and displaced persons, including the elderly, people with disabilities, people with limited mobility and other vulnerable groups of the population," the message says. It is noted that after the de-occupation of the region, the communities needed support in restoring the work of the Centre for Providing Administrative Assistance, however, some of the premises were destroyed or looted by the occupiers, and the roads of Kherson region were severely damaged due to hostilities and after the Russians blew up the Kakhovska HPP. Thanks to the received cars, the administrators of the Centre will be able to reach remote settlements and provide basic administrative and social services to citizens. Deputy Prime Minister for Innovation, Development of Education, Science and Technology, Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov thanked Switzerland during the transfer of cars. "It is extremely important that the digital state remains as inclusive and accessible as possible, even during the war. The task of the state is to take care of citizens - thanks to the help of our partners, the communities of Kherson region now have such an opportunity," the minister stressed. Earlier, the Administrative Services Centers of Kherson region received laptops, uninterruptible power supplies and other equipment necessary for work through the Swiss-Ukrainian EGAP Program implemented by the Eastern Europe Foundation. Swiss Ambassador to Ukraine Felix Baumann stressed that assistance to the most vulnerable groups of the population, as well as strengthening transparency and efficiency of the provision of public services at the community level, are important priorities of Swiss support for Ukraine. "We understand the urgent needs of people in the regions most affected by the military aggression of the Russian Federation, and we try to help them ... In Kherson region, not only critical infrastructure has been destroyed or robbed, but even buildings where administrative and social services are provided to the population. Thus, many citizens cannot receive these services in their communities," the ambassador noted. Doctor Who Wild Blue Yonder Season 0 Episode 2 Editors Rating 4 stars * * * * Previous Next Previous Episode Next Episode Photo: Disney+ We are so back. Sure, the next season of Doctor Who isnt supposed to drop until sometime in spring 2024. But to help us transition into the upcoming era, were getting three-anniversary specials and a Christmas special this month. Returning showrunner Russell T. Davies is hitting the ground running. Last weeks special was an ensemble adventure involving the Doctor, Donna Noble, multiple members of Donnas family, and of course, the deceivingly adorable Beep the Meep. In contrast, this episode rests almost entirely on the Doctor and Donnas shoulders. Good thing theyve got giant arms! (Or at least, their evil twins do.) David Tennant and Catherine Tate are flexing their acting skills as both protagonists and antagonists because this adventure introduces a pair of villains that can copy bodies and memories. Perhaps these so-called Not-Things are distant relatives of the creature from Midnight? Either way, its a thoroughly creepy premise. But in classic RTD fashion, the episode bounces between tense moments and playful humor, making it fitting that its title is a nod to a war song thats still jaunty enough to be performed by a childrens choir. Wild Blue Yonder picks up with the TARDIS crashing into an apple tree near Isaac Newton, who has enough melanin to inspire some uninspired Doctor Woke think pieces. The Doctor and Donna deliver a punchline about gravity in unison, and Newton promptly misremembers this new word as mavity. The whole scene feels like an opening sketch from another beloved BBC export one more pun, and Noel Fielding couldve walked out and announced it was sci-fi week on The Great British Baking Show. But the tone instantly shifts when the flaming TARDIS drops the Doctor and Donna off on a spaceship at the literal edge of the universe. Much like Doctor Who itself, the TARDIS is in the process of rebuilding itself. That inadvertently reactivates a feature that causes the TARDIS to dematerialize when it senses hostile action, taking the sonic screwdriver with it. The Doctor and Donna are stranded and aware that theyre in danger. Not ideal. Donna is understandably panicked by the gravity (or mavity) of the situation. The show takes the opportunity to helpfully remind us that even though Fourteen has a familiar face, hes still a different Doctor. When Donna tries to brush the Doctor off, he kisses her hand and holds it on his chest, offering both physical and verbal reassurance. Yeah, some of his past regenerations could never. After a scan fails to detect other life signs on the ship, the Doctor decides that he and Donna should split up and complete tasks in different rooms. They meet back up, but somethings off. They dont usually let the other ramble for that long without interrupting with a bit of banter, do they? Sure enough, the not-alive Not-Things reveal themselves by complaining that their arms are too long, with the camera cutting to the astonishingly elongated proof. At first, its easy to identify the Not-Things. Theyre puffed-up, distorted versions of the Doctor and Donna that clog the hallway. But their duplication gets better with each try. And with the ships walls periodically shifting, the Doctor and Donna eventually find it difficult to distinguish between body bender and BFF. (By the way, a spaceship where passengers are completing tasks, moving through hidden passages, and having heated arguments over who is an impostor? Oh, RTD definitely played Among Us during lockdown.) Despite their comically stretchy bodies, the Not-Things struggle to wrap their heads around the concept of nuance. Most concerningly, theyve decided that the universe is only about fury, hatred, and violence. Their restricted system of thinking makes them falter when presented with any seeming contradictions. How can Donna think shes both dumb and brilliant? Why is the Doctor suggesting that a superstition can also be true? At one point, the Not-Doctors tie disappears after he drops it on the floor. In one of the more unsettling moments of the episode, he realizes his mistake: When something is gone, it keeps existing. The episode constantly emphasizes that things dont always fit into mutually exclusive binaries. It feels like a thematic extension of the last special, which presented a nonbinary solution to the meta-crisis: The DoctorDonna couldnt survive, but the introduction of Donnas daughter, Rose a third party saved her moms life. Conveniently, the Doctor and Donna dont actually have to think of a way to take the Not-Things down. The ships previous captain has already done that by programming the ship to turn itself into a bomb, slowly enough that the object-permanence-challenged Not-Things havent figured out whats happening three years later. The captain also took her own life before her plan could be copied from her mind. Unfortunately, the Not-Things find it easier to duplicate targets who are thinking, whose blood is pumping. The Doctor cant stop himself from realizing that a slow-moving robot on the ship is a bomb trigger, which means the Not-Things reach the same conclusion. The Doctor speeds up the countdown, and the TARDIS senses that the Not-Things wont have time to stop the detonation. This means the hostile action is over, so the TARDIS comes back! The Doctor hops on board with the wrong Donna, and the console alerts him to a tiny mistake in her wrist length. Just as the bomb goes off, he ejects the Not-Thing and scoops up his real companion. Safely back in the TARDIS, the Doctor seems to be on the precipice of an emotional milestone. Earlier on the other ship, Not-Donna accessed the DoctorDonnas memories and forced the Doctor to think about the consequences of Chris Chibnalls era, including the Flux and the fact that the Doctor no longer knows where hes from. The conversation affected him so much that he stopped to kick a wall afterward. Id make a joke about men doing anything instead of going to therapy, but it was honestly pretty satisfying to see the Doctor finally reckon with the emotional fallout, even if he has to take it out on an inanimate object. Look, half of creation was destroyed, and his entire understanding of Time Lord history was rewritten he can have a little tantrum, as a treat. Plenty of fans certainly did. It feels like the Doctor is thinking about opening up about all of this to the real Donna because he carefully asks if she, too, remembers his past 15 years. When she says she doesnt, however, he falls right back into old patterns of avoidance. Donna even accuses him of timing the TARDISs landing so he doesnt have to talk about what happened. He doesnt deny keeping her at arms length in that sense, even before the Not-Thing, the Doctors limbs have always been too long. To be fair, the universe does enable his behavior. Theres always a distracting fire that needs to be put out somewhere, and this episode is no exception. When the TARDIS finally lands, Wilf is parked outside waiting for his granddaughter and his favorite alien. We barely have time to enjoy Bernard Cribbinss sweet posthumous appearance before explosions and fights break out in the street. Wilf reveals that everyones gone mad and the whole world is coming to an end. As easy as that, the Doctor has another excuse to put off processing his feelings. Cut for Time (Lord) The Doctor is so unserious for pretending to be dying after licking that filament. The music added a dramatic touch that helped with the payoff of that scene and several others, so props to the sound designer. I appreciate the parallels between the Doctor and Donnas conversations with the Not-Things. When Donna is wondering what her family (Rose, Shaun, and Sylvia) would do without her, the Doctor is thinking the same thing about his loved one (the TARDIS). The Doctor is reminded of the Timeless Child, and Donna gets to recount her own emotionally fraught origin story (sleep with one eye open, Auntie Iris). Ive heard that some people didnt love the look of all the body stuff, but I, for one, am glad it didnt look too realistic. Id rather be laughing at the Not-Doctor melting into a backbend and galloping around on all fours instead of having nightmares. Incidentally, I cant believe those giant hands werent CGI. The Doctor surprises himself by admitting that he finds Isaac Newton to be so hot. Perhaps well explore that more with Ncuti Gatwas Doctor also, does that mean the Fourth Doctor was bluffing about explaining gravity to Newton after dropping apples on his head? He just wanted to flex in front of Romana, lol. I didnt expect to get so emotional about the dedication to Bernard Cribbins in the end credits! Hoping to see more of him in the next episode. It seems like the chaos on Earth might have to do with the salt superstition the Doctor invoked at the edge of the universe, and Im worried about it. Festa dell'Immacolata is a public holiday in Italy. Rome marks the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on Friday 8 December - a Catholic holy day and a national public holiday in Italy - with a series of traditions and special events. Pope Francis will pay homage to the Virgin Mary by making a pilgrimage to Piazza Mignanelli near the Spanish Steps at 16.00. In a tradition dating back to 1958, the pope will leave a floral wreath at the base of the 19th-century Column of the Immaculate Conception in the piazza. Firefighters will also place a garland of flowers on the top of the 12 metre-high statue of the Madonna. The popes visit to the historic centre will result in a number of street closures and traffic restrictions in the area around the Spanish Steps during the day. Later that evening Rome's mayor Roberto Gualtieri will switch on the lights on the Christmas tree in Piazza del Popolo and along the city's main thoroughfare Via del Corso. This year the Christmas tree - decorated with hundreds of gold, silver and red baubles - leaves behind its traditional base at Piazza Venezia due to Metro C subway works. Schools, public offices and many businesses in the capital will be closed on 8 December however clothes shops stay open as the day is seen as the official start of the Christmas shopping season. This year the festa falls on a Friday, meaning a long weekend, with millions of Italians expected to use the opportunity to take a short pre-Christmas holiday. Cover image: Colonna dell'Immacolata Concezione, Piazza Miganelli, Rome. Mykolaiv region has signed a Memorandum of cooperation with Japan, which provides assistance to the region and training of specialists in the field of prosthetic rehabilitation, head of the Regional Military Administration Vitaliy Kim reports. "Today, together with head of Hyogo Prefecture in Japan, Saito Motohiko, we signed a Memorandum of cooperation. The signing took place within the framework of the activities of the Regional Office of International Cooperation. The memorandum provides for the training of specialists from Mykolaiv region in the field of prosthetic rehabilitation and comprehensive assistance in the restoration of the region," Kim wrote on the Telegram channel on Monday. The head of the Administration noted that Japan can share experience in the field of economic recovery, environmental mitigation and reconstruction, and Hyogo Prefecture has experience in disaster recovery. "The signing of this memorandum is extremely important for our region. We are working further," Kim stressed. When the outback epic Australia had a disappointing release in American cinemas 15 years ago, director Baz Luhrmann simmered over how it had been pitched to audiences there. I really had conflict with the way the film was marketed and sold, the celebrated Australian director says from New York City. They hid in the US all of the cattle stuff and just sold it as Australias Pearl Harbour. It was all about the war. I realised I had 2.1 million feet of footage: Baz Luhrmann. Credit: Brendon Thorne It took watching streaming services when COVID-19 shut down the production of Elvis on the Gold Coast for Luhrmann to see a way of giving his most polarising film a new life using footage that did not make the final cut, along with a new soundtrack, to turn Australia into a six-chapter miniseries called Faraway Downs that is streaming on Disney+. I realised I had 2.1 million feet of footage, he says. In the back of my mind, I probably thought that one day I might make an epic two-film version. The Double Bay waterfront house owned by the family of the late orthopaedic surgeon Basil Ireland and his widow Ernestine has sold on the quiet amid a wad of gag orders on all involved and local talk of a $35 million sale price. A long settlement is not expected to reveal the buyers identity until well into next year. The Double Bay house owned by the family of the late Basil Ireland last traded in 1978 for $200,000. The six-bedroom house on 552 square metres was listed by local agent Paul Rich in November last year for $45 million, a year after near neighbouring beachfront houses sold for $35 million and $26 million to former garbo Ian Malouf. Ireland, who died in 2018 aged 91, purchased the home for $200,000 in 1978 from artist and former model sisters Princess Nike Arrighi Borghese and Luciana Chetwynd, daughters of the late Italian diplomat Ernesto Arrighi. The Ombudsmen of Ukraine and the Russian Federation will visit up to 400 prisoners of war on their territory by the end of the year, said Dmytro Lubinets, Commissioner for Human Rights of the Verkhovna Rada. "I can officially state that we have an agreement by the end of this year on the eve of the Christmas holidays, three more visits should take place on the eve of the new year That is, I hope that we ... will visit up to 400 of our citizens. Thus, through the counter-visionary, that's what I call my Russian counterpart, we will be able to get at least some kind of access to our citizens," Lubinets said on the air of the national telethon on Monday. As reported, the Ombudsmen of Ukraine and Russia had previously visited 119 captured servicemen by mutual agreement. From November 20 to 24, 2023, twenty Customs officials from El Salvador Customs participated in a five-day workshop aimed to implement an Internal Affairs Unit within the administration. The event was developed and delivered under the WCO Anti-Corruption & Integrity Promotion (A-CIP) Programme, tailored to address specific needs identified by the General Directorate of Customs of El Salvador (DGA). During the inaugural session, the Director of Trade Facilitation conveyed the DGA's gratitude for the A-CIP Programme, acknowledging the donors for their pivotal role in making the event possible. Emphasizing the link between trade facilitation measures and integrity, he underscored their role in minimizing corruption opportunities. Subsequently, on the same day, the Director General attended the workshop to reaffirm the DGA's commitment to fostering integrity, highlighting the establishment of an Internal Affairs Unit as a crucial element in the fight against corruption within the organization. The workshop's main outcome was forming a comprehensive action plan to establish the Internal Affairs Unit within the administration. This plan covered legal, human resources, structural, and other resource-related aspects, providing a clear roadmap for the unit's implementation. A practical group exercise was conducted to map existing and future internal control processes, encompassing the presentation of complaints, investigation, and disciplinary processes. Participants also identified integrity risks associated with each mapped process. Facilitated by a WCO Member expert and a WCO A-CIP Programme expert, the event in San Salvador brought together participants from various key areas of the administration. Their diverse views, perspectives, and experiences were instrumental in defining a collective path forward. The participants will refine the action plan in the upcoming months, working collaboratively to establish the Internal Affairs Unit and leverage the current momentum. The WCO A-CIP Programme is currently supporting more than 20 countries in five WCO regions. It receives funding from Norad and Canada and focuses on fighting corruption and promoting integrity in Customs administrations. For more information, please, contact capacity.building@wcoomd.org. The Secretary General of the World Customs Organization (WCO), Dr. Kunio Mikuriya, contributed a video message to the 22nd Ministerial Conference of the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation (CAREC) Program. The Conference was held under the theme Reinvigorating Regional Cooperation in Times of Change in Tbilisi, Geogia on 30 November 2023. High-level representatives, including Ministers from Azerbaijan, the Peoples Republic of China, Georgia, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, attended the event. In his address, Dr. Mikuriya articulated the WCOs continuous support to the CAREC countries to ensure business continuity at global and regional levels through modernization of border procedures, use of digital technology, and enhanced Customs cooperation. In addition, he emphasized the importance of Customs in implementing various Multilateral Environment Agreements, addressing the illicit trade in hazardous waste and ozone-depleting substances, thus consolidating its role in achieving Sustainable Development Goals. The CAREC Program is a partnership of 11 countries (Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, the Peoples Republic of China, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) and development partners working together to promote development through cooperation, leading to accelerated economic growth and poverty reduction. EU to discuss with China Beijing's use of influence on Moscow in order to end the war against Ukraine EU leaders intend to discuss with the Chinese leadership the use of Beijing's influence on Moscow in order to put an end to the war that the Russian Federation is waging against Ukraine. This was announced in Brussels on Monday on the eve of the China-EU summit, which will be held in Beijing on December 7-8, a senior European diplomat told reporters. Speaking about the agenda of the summit, he noted that one of the main geopolitical issues in the field of global security that the EU leaders intend to raise will be the war that Russia is waging against Ukraine. The diplomat also said that the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, would also raise the issue of China's possible influence on North Korea, which supplies Russia with weapons. WASHINGTON (AP) The Supreme Court on Dec. 4 wrestled with a nationwide settlement with OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma that would shield members of the Sackler family who own the company from civil lawsuits over the toll of opioids. The justices seemed by turns reluctant to break up an exhaustively negotiated agreement, but also leery of somehow rewarding the Sacklers. The agreement hammered out with state and local governments and victims would provide billions of dollars to combat the opioid epidemic. The Sacklers would contribute up to $6 billion and give up ownership of the company, but retain billions more. The company would emerge from bankruptcy as a different entity, with its profits used for treatment and prevention. The high court put the settlement on hold during the summer, in response to objections from the Biden administration. Justice Elena Kagan seemed to sum up the questions that were nagging at some of the justices. It seems as though the federal government is standing in the way of that as against the huge, huge, huge majority of claimants, Kagan said. But later, she also said that in bankruptcies, protection against lawsuits has a price. You get a discharge when you put all your assets on the table, she said. The Sacklers didn't come anywhere close to doing that. Arguments lasted nearly two hours in a packed courtroom, its doors draped in black in memoriam to retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who died Friday. Chief Justice John Roberts offered a remembrance of the first woman to serve on the court. She changed the world, Roberts said. Outside the court, a small but vocal group of protesters opposed the Purdue Pharma agreement. Shame on Sackler," one banner read. "No Sackler immunity at any $$, read another. The issue for the justices is whether the legal shield that bankruptcy provides can be extended to people such as the Sacklers, who have not declared bankruptcy themselves. Lower courts have issued conflicting decisions over that issue, which also has implications for other major product liability lawsuits settled through the bankruptcy system. The U.S. Bankruptcy Trustee, an arm of the Justice Department, contends that the bankruptcy law does not permit protecting the Sackler family from being sued. During the Trump administration, the government supported the settlement. Justice Department lawyer Curtis Gannon told the court Monday that negotiations could resume, and perhaps lead to a better deal, if the court were to stop the current agreement. Proponents of the plan said third-party releases are sometimes necessary to forge an agreement, and federal law imposes no prohibition against them. Forget a better deal, lawyer Pratik Shah, representing victims and other creditors in the bankruptcy, told the justices. There is no other deal. Lawyers for more than 60,000 victims who support the settlement called it a watershed moment in the opioid crisis, while recognizing that no amount of money could fully compensate victims for the damage caused by the misleading marketing of OxyContin, a powerful prescription painkiller. A lawyer for a victim who opposes the settlement calls the provision dealing with the Sacklers "special protection for billionaires. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson seemed more inclined toward the opponents, saying the Sacklers' insistence on a shield against all lawsuits is causing this problem. By contrast, Justice Brett Kavanaugh sounded like a vote to allow the deal to proceed. He said the government was seeking to prevent payment to victims and their families, as well as money for prevention programs in exchange really for this somewhat theoretical idea that they'll be able to recover money down the road from the Sacklers themselves. OxyContin first hit the market in 1996, and Purdue Pharmas aggressive marketing of it is often cited as a catalyst of the nationwide opioid epidemic, persuading doctors to prescribe painkillers with less regard for addiction dangers. The drug and the Stamford, Connecticut-based company became synonymous with the crisis, even though the majority of pills being prescribed and used were generic drugs. Opioid-related overdose deaths have continued to climb, hitting 80,000 in recent years. Most of those are from fentanyl and other synthetic drugs. The Purdue Pharma settlement would be among the largest reached by drug companies, wholesalers and pharmacies to resolve epidemic-related lawsuits filed by state, local and Native American tribal governments and others. Those settlements have totaled more than $50 billion. But the Purdue Pharma settlement would be one of only two so far that include direct payments to victims from a $750 million pool. Payouts are expected to range from about $3,500 to $48,000. Sackler family members no longer are on the company's board, and they have not received payouts from it since before Purdue Pharma entered bankruptcy. In the decade before that, though, they were paid more than $10 billion, about half of which family members said went to pay taxes. A decision in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, 22-859, is expected by early summer. Follow the AP's coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court. Triosan Holding Ukraine LLC, a representative office of a Hungarian company developing geothermal energy in Europe, will invest EUR 68 million in the construction of a greenhouse complex in Lviv region that will operate using geothermal energy, head of Lviv Regional Military Administration Maksym Kozytsky said on Facebook. . According to him, this is the first such project in Ukraine; there are only a few of them around the world. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and lettuce will be grown in the greenhouse complex. The area of the greenhouse complex will be 15 hectares. Some 180 people will be provided with work. As Lviv Regional Council clarified on Facebook, for the construction of a greenhouse complex in the village Hodyny (Mostyska community, Yavoriv district) 29.7 hectares will be allocated. The greenhouse will be heated using a geothermal well, which will be built nearby on 4.5 hectares of territory. Since the main suppliers from Kherson and Zaporizhia regions are under temporary occupation and there is a shortage of greenhouse vegetables in Ukraine, this is a very relevant project... The use of geothermal resources will allow greenhouses not to depend on gas supply. In particular, gas savings per year will amount to 8 million cubic meters. Thus, it will be possible to supply vegetables at affordable prices, the official said. Construction is planned to begin in 2024, and the first stage will be launched in 2025. The entire construction of the greenhouse complex is planned to be completed by 2028. Construction costs will be covered by Triosan Holding Ukraine LLC, which has already entered into an agreement with an American financial company, Kozytsky said. Triosan Holding Ukraine LLC was founded in Lviv in 2020. According to the website youcontrol.com.ua, the founders and beneficiaries are Oleksandr and Yuriy Kovalchuk, who each own 50% of the shares. The company's charter capital is UAH 100,000. According to the company website, Triosan Holding is a Hungarian company founded in Budapest in 2015. Its main direction is the development of geothermal energy in European countries. Allentown, PA (18103) Today Partly sunny and pleasant; still a bit of a breeze, from the southwest 10-15mph with gusts to 20mph.. Tonight Partly to mostly clear and seasonably cold. AMITY TWP., Pa. - A Montgomery County woman was killed in a crash in Berks County on Sunday. Serina Freda, 20, of Upper Pottsgrove Township, was pronounced dead at the scene of the crash in the Douglassville area of Amity Township, said the Berks County coroner's office. She was driving north on Route 662 (Old Swede Road) around 1 p.m. when she crossed into the oncoming lane near Pine Lane, said township police. Another vehicle hit her car on the passenger side, police said. Her car ended up flipped on its roof in the grass. Freda died of blunt force trauma and her death was ruled an accident, the coroner said. The couple in the other car was taken to Reading Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, police said. HARRISBURG, Pa. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro joined five other governors Monday in urging President Joe Biden and his admininistration to ensure that a over-the-counter contraceptive is fully covered for Americans. The letter sent to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra calls on the Biden administration to make sure that an over-the-counter daily birth control pill that was approved in July by the FDA is covered by insurance carriers. Doing so would ensure that "no one is denied access to critical reproductive healthcare because they can't afford it," Shapiro said in a press release. Shapiro co-signed the letter with Govs. Roy Cooper (D-N.C.), Maura Healey (D-Mass.), Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.), Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) and JB Pritzker (Ill.). The six governors are members of the Reproductive Freedom Alliance, a non-partisan coalition of 21 governors seeking to protect and expand "reproductive freedom" in their states. BRISTOL, Pa. Wells Fargo will close its Bristol, Bucks County, branch in February, as customers move toward digital finance and banks across the U.S. close offices. The 244 Radcliffe St. branch will close at 11 a.m. on Feb. 7. Wells Fargo's Midway branch, 4356 New Falls Rd., Levittown, is about two miles away and the bank has other nearby branches. "This is not an easy decision or one we take lightly," Wells Fargo said in a statement. "Branches continue to play an important role in the way we serve our customers in combination with our online and mobile channels and ATMs." The San Francisco-based bank "may continue to combine two older existing branches into one better situated location," the bank said. "Doing so does not take away the importance of our customers and the communities we serve." Wells Fargo was founded in 1852 by Henry Wells and William Fargo. In the frontier days, its wagons carried goods and precious metals. Wells Fargo is one of America's Big Four banks, along with Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. Shares in Wells Fargo are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol WFC. At 2:13 p.m. Monday, the share price was $45.12. At that price, the company has a market capitalization (share price times number of shares outstanding) of $163.8 billion. In the past 52 weeks, the shares have traded as high as $48.84 and as low as $35.25. Firefighters were called to a home on Barn Swallow Court around 11:30 a.m. in Greenwich Township, New Jersey, on Sunday. "At the time, the fire was discovered I believe by an Amazon employee driving by," said Warren County Fire Marshal Joseph Lake. Flames gutted the inside of the home. "Fire appears to have started on the second floor in the area of the master bedroom," said Lake. Lake said nobody was home at the time. He said others called in the fire. Multiple fire departments from the area were called in. At least one firefighter could be seen on the roof with a chainsaw. Lake said the Amazon driver and police jumped into action. "The two dogs were home and they managed to get the dogs out safely," said Lake. Warren County Fire Marshal Joseph Lake said friction from a box fan falling over and continuing to run caused the fire. Lake said nobody was injured. A New Jersey grand jury has indicted another corrections officer on charges stemming from alleged attacks on inmates at a women's prison in 2021. Sgt. Matthew Faschan, 35, of Hackettstown, was indicted on eight counts, including conspiracy, official misconduct, tampering with public records, and aggravated assault, said the NJ Office of the Attorney General. The superseding indictment includes the prior charges against 14 other officers in the January 2021 incident at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women. Faschan, who was previously charged by complaint-summons in February 2021, is accused of purposely not recording certain cell "extractions," failing to stop his fellow officers' improper use of force, not reporting the use of force and filing a false report about one victim's injuries, the OAG said. He could face years in prison. The cell extractions happened overnight between January 11 and January 12. New Jersey is working on shutting down the troubled women's prison, which is located in Clinton, Hunterdon County. The century-old prison has been rocked by sexual abuse scandals in recent years. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy says the state intends to build a new women's-only prison, but a site still hasn't been chosen. Why should you rent a server outside of Ukraine through Sidata.com.ua? Advertising Business automation in the cloud through server rental with Sidata.com.ua is more relevant now than ever before. Firstly, it's a global trend that, in my opinion, Ukraine is currently leading. Secondly, it eliminates all the risks that have arisen in Ukraine during the war. Thirdly, it's simply convenient when all the information is in the cloud, but more on that later. What tasks are solved by renting a server? Who exactly needs to use the service of renting a virtual (VDS/VPS) or dedicated server in the USA or Europe? The main clients for server rental services are managers, financial directors, accountants, business owners, and system administrators. Let's list the tasks this target audience plans to solve using a rented server: Transitioning accounting online the most popular service at the moment. Wherever your accountant is, all accounting is online and available with just a click, regardless of whether you use 1C or any other BAS product. Hosting your own CRM/ERM or ERP systems. Using these systems in a local network has long been outdated, even quite risky, so the cloud for these systems is the perfect solution. E-Mail service. Not everyone is ready to entrust their business correspondence to well-known technological giants, so a mail server based on a virtual dedicated server VDS/VPS will be useful for both small and medium-sized businesses. Hosting programs and web products. Planning a startup? Great, just outsource all the technical work related to the server to SIDATA, and focus on the product instead of lengthy searches for DevOps on job sites. Backup server for storing any of your commercial data. Undoubtedly, you can order a cloud from well-known tech giants, but they certainly do not guarantee the preservation of your data in their lengthy agreements in very small print. There's also a risk that the next AI could learn from your data. Do you need that? Computing power tailored to your needs. Moreover, you can manage computing power directly through the virtual cabinet on the Sidata website. Flexible settings allow you to order exactly as many resources as you need at the moment: CPU, RAM, and disk. Increase or decrease with just one click." What are the advantages of renting a server at SIDATA? The most important thing in the company's assets is the full range of services in cloud technologies. You may not have a team, only the desire and a product, and still become a SIDATA client. That's because all other aspects will be taken care of by the company's experts. For example, in addition to server rental, SIDATA offers the following services: Hosting BAS in the cloud The company offers to install and configure ready-made BAS system configurations such as: BAS Small Business BAS Accounting BAS Trade Management BAS Document Flow BAS Enterprise Management BAS ERP We will help you migrate 1C:Enterprise to the cloud or perform any data migration to the cloud. For those who doubt that they'll have to closely monitor and administer all this, worry not, as the company offers full server administration services. The experience and expertise in all these directions are present in the company. Throughout the company's service history, 1109 clients from 14+ countries have benefited from these services. SIDATA Company's resources are significant 4 data centers in different countries 177 balanced servers based on Intel Xeon and AMD Ryzen with high frequencies up to 4.9 GHz Pre-installed software, the ability to choose Debian, Ubuntu, Centos distributions, as well as rent a server based on the Windows Server 2016/2019 operating system Data protection from hacking, viruses, and DDOS attacks SIDATA is a company that provides reliable server rental services worldwide, including Ukraine. Accessible server rentals ensure data security and cost savings for millions of users who value preserving their information and want to save money. Author: Valisenko Sergiy, CTO SIDATA, Expert in Cloud Computing Irish Tech Challenge boosts innovation in South Africa The Embassy of Ireland in South Africa has announced the five South African tech start-ups that will participate in the Irish Tech Challenge South Africa 2023. The Embassy of Ireland in South Africa, in conjunction with Wits University's Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct, the Technology Innovation Agency (TIA), the Department of Science & Innovation (DSI), and Dogpatch Labs Ireland, joined forces to present The Irish Tech Challenge South Africa 2023. Launched on July 31, 2023, the program invited South African startups to participate, receiving an overwhelming response with a total of 266 applications. Following rigorous interviews, 13 finalists emerged, and ultimately, five startups were selected as winners. The Irish Tech Challenge, SA's flagship tech startup program, will award a range of benefits upon the chosen startups, including up to 10,000 in funding, a funded business networking trip to Ireland, access to Ireland's tech ecosystem, and acceleration support provided in collaboration with Dogpatch Labs in Ireland. The event had two primary objectives. Firstly, it aimed to spotlight the top 5 entrepreneurs who were honored with the Irish Tech Challenge prize. Among them were Wits graduates, Thato Schermer and Neo Hutiri, founders of health tech startups Zoie Health and PeleBox, respectively. The other recipients included Vuyo Pakade, founder of HRTech startup Foonda Africa, Dr. Benedicta Durcan, founder of AfroBodies, a biotech startup in the Western Cape, and Tumelo Chiloane, co-founder of Agritech startup Desert Green Africa. The second objective was to emphasize the crucial role of both local and international stakeholders collaborating to support startups in their growth journey. Furthermore, the event sought to position the Irish Tech Challenge South Africa as a model of effective inter-governmental, public, and private partnerships that stimulate the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The Irish Tech Challenge stands out with its collaborative initiative, fusing Irish technological expertise with the innovation of South African tech entrepreneurs. Rooted in promoting innovation, fostering technology development, and ensuring effective technology deployment within South Africa, the program places special emphasis on empowering diversity. It actively encourages applications from women, young entrepreneurs, individuals from historically disadvantaged communities, and startups aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The selected entrepreneurs not only receive financial aid but also gain premier access to Ireland's vast technological expertise and influential networks to bolster their growth. Law Clinic a proud and vigorous force for good Retired judge Edwin Cameron applauds the Wits Law Clinic for its role in embedding public interest law in the country. The Wits Law Clinic, founded in 1973 at the height of apartheid, celebrated its 50th anniversary at an event attended by the countrys leading legal minds. Cameron, a renowned judge who served in the Constitutional Court of South Africa, delivered the keynote address in which he lauded the Clinic for pioneering the concept of law clinic studies but also, more deeply, in embedding a fragile but vital tradition of law and legal services within the law school. The Law Clinic was designed to expand elementary justice to the marginalised, the dispossessed and the oppressed, he said. In a richly historical address, Cameron shared that Lady Felicia Kentridge founded the Clinic in the politically charged 1970s thirteen years after the Sharpeville Massacre and 10 years after the arrest and eventual life-imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and the other Rivonia triallists. As resistance against apartheid intensified, and these efforts were met with unmatched brutality, "the Clinic was part of the resistance movement that used the law to secure victories against apartheid, said Cameron. Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic, Professor Ruksana Osman, commented that the Clinic, which began with a small number of staff and student volunteers, has been critical to providing access to justice, and critical legal training to students. President of the South African Universities Law Clinic Association and Director of the Law Clinic at the University of Pretoria, Eddie Hanekom added his congratulations, stating that the Clinic has done tremendous work groundbreaking work for other law clinics in the country, especially in the early days of university law clinics being established in the country. Law under siege from within Concerns are rife that the rule of law is under threat in South Africa a sentiment Cameron shares. Our law is in a perilous state. Our much-vaunted Constitution runs an acute risk of failure, he said. Laying the blame on legal practitioners, Cameron said: Scoundrelous, unprincipled and unethical lawyers, including Wits graduates, seek to subvert elementary principles of legal reasoning and legal process in order to protect bigger scoundrels. These lawyers pose a threat to the rule of law because they are inflicting damage on the law in some ways greater even than the damage apartheid inflicted. This is because they threaten belief in the Constitution itself, and the Bill of Rights at its heart. By cynically subverting the law to advance the interests of their clients they threaten the law itself. These tactics, amidst the collapse of government function, the disintegration of state services, and the mass infiltration and takeover of government entities by criminal syndicates, threaten all we have stood for and fought for. He called those who stand for justice and human dignity, and the fulfilment of the promises of the Bill of Rights, to use the powerful tools at their disposal the law to ensure that law and the Constitution remain supreme. Read his speech. Speaking on the sideline Hanekom said that the use of the law to increase inconsistencies is certainly an alarming trend that should be stopped by ethical younger lawyers. The law is in need of lawyers that will put their hands up and say we will abide by the law, we will abide by the ethics and we will not utilise the courts to fight for causes that are not advantageous to the poor, impoverished and marginalised in South Africa. BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. UK Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department of Business and Trade Malcolm Offord is expected to visit Azerbaijan, a diplomatic source told Trend. He is set to participate in the sixth meeting of the Joint Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation between Azerbaijan and the UK. Meanwhile, over the last three decades, the UK has stood as the largest individual investor in Azerbaijan. Between 1995 and 2022, the UK's investments in Azerbaijan surpassed $84 billion, contributing to a total foreign direct investment of $280 billion. In 2022, the annual trade volume between the two countries amounted to 1.2 billion pounds. BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree on measures related to reconstruction of Sugovushan-Sarsang reservoir-Gozlukorpu-Kalbajar highway, Trend reports. According to the decree, in order to reconstruct the Sugovushan-Sarsang reservoir-Gozlukorpu-Kalbajar highway with a length of 80 kilometers, the State Roads Agency of Azerbaijan has been allocated 17 million manat ($9.9 million) from the amount specified in subparagraph 1.31.25 of "Allocation of funds provided in the state budget of the Republic of Azerbaijan for 2023 for state capital investments (investment expenditures)", approved by the Order of the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan No. 3720 dated January 23, 2023. Azerbaijan Ministry of Finance is entrusted to provide financing in the amount specified in the first part of this decree. The Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Azerbaijan is entrusted to solve issues arising from this decree. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Wang Ye] SHANGHAI/YANCHENG, Jiangsu, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed the need to speed up building Shanghai into a modern, socialist and international metropolis by focusing on the construction of international centers of economy, finance, trade, shipping and sci-tech innovation. Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks during an inspection tour in Shanghai that ran from Tuesday to Saturday. Xi urged Shanghai to accelerate building itself into a modern, socialist and international metropolis with global influence, and play a leading and exemplary role in advancing Chinese modernization. He inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange on Tuesday afternoon as soon as he got off a train. Xi urged the exchange to speed up the construction of a world-class exchange, and make greater contributions to exploring the futures regulatory system and business model with Chinese characteristics and building an international financial center. When visiting Zhangjiang Science City in the Pudong New Area, Xi said promoting Chinese modernization can not be separated from the strategic support of science and technology, education and talent, and that Shanghai should take a lead in this respect. On Wednesday afternoon, Xi visited a residential community in Minhang District that is dedicated to providing affordable rental housing for new urban dwellers, young people and frontline workers. Xi said he was pleased to see city builders from all over the country living and working here with joy and contentment. Migrant workers who come to make contributions in Shanghai are also masters of the city, he said. On Friday morning, Xi was briefed on the city's work by the CPC Shanghai Municipal Committee and the Shanghai municipal government. Xi noted that accelerating the construction of Shanghai as international centers of economy, finance, trade, shipping and sci-tech innovation is an important task entrusted to the city by the CPC Central Committee. Xi stressed that Shanghai should intensify its research to achieve breakthroughs in core technologies in key fields, boost the transformation and upgrading of its traditional industries, and continuously enhance its status as an international center of economy and its influence in global economic governance. More efforts should be made to promote high-level financial opening-up to better serve the real economy, sci-tech innovation, and the joint development of the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi said. He noted that the city should implement its strategy of upgrading its pilot free trade zone in full, promote the development of the international trade center, and enhance its capability of global allocation of shipping resources. Xi stressed that Shanghai should comprehensively deepen reform and opening-up from a higher starting point, urging the city to devote significant energy to promoting pioneering reform and opening-up on all fronts. Shanghai should also foster a world-class business environment, stimulate the vitality of various business entities, and strengthen its attractiveness to high-end resources at home and abroad, he noted. Xi pointed out that Shanghai should explore a new path of modernization in megacity governance with Chinese characteristics, and that improving people's living standards and well-being is the original aspiration and ultimate goal of urban construction and governance. He highlighted efforts to deepen culture-related institutional reforms and invigorate the innovation and creativity of culture. Noting that Shanghai is the birthplace of the Communist Party of China, Xi emphasized the importance of making good use of local resources to carry forward the great founding spirit of the Party and build a team of high-caliber, professional officials that matches the standards of a modern, socialist and international metropolis. On his return journey to Beijing on Sunday, Xi visited a memorial hall of the New Fourth Army in Yancheng, a city in east China's Jiangsu Province. Cai Qi, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and director of the CPC Central Committee general office, was also on the inspection tour. Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Wang Ye] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Wang Ye] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Wang Ye] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the Shanghai Futures Exchange in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Wang Ye] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Xie Huanchi] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Wang Ye] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 28, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Ju Peng] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Ju Peng] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Xie Huanchi] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Wang Ye] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Xie Huanchi] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Shen Hong] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects a government-subsidized rental housing community in east China's Shanghai, Nov. 29, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in east China's Shanghai from Tuesday to Wednesday. During his trip, Xi inspected the Shanghai Futures Exchange, an exhibition on Shanghai's sci-tech innovations, and a government-subsidized rental housing community, learning about the city's efforts in strengthening its competitiveness as an international financial center, building the city into an international sci-tech innovation center, and constructing government-subsidized rental housing projects. [Xinhua/Xie Huanchi] Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, visits a memorial hall of the New Fourth Army in Yancheng, east China's Jiangsu Province, Dec. 3, 2023. Xi made an inspection tour in Shanghai from Tuesday to Saturday. On his return journey to Beijing on Sunday, Xi visited the memorial hall in Yancheng. [Xinhua/Wang Ye] (Source: Xinhua) BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev signed the Decree "On approval of the Memorandum of Understanding in the field of energy between the Ministry of Energy of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the National Energy Administration of the People's Republic of China", Trend reports. According to the decree, the Memorandum of Understanding in the field of energy between the Ministry of Energy of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the National Energy Administration of the Peoples Republic of China, signed on October 17, 2023 in Beijing, has been approved. After the entry into force of the memorandum of understanding specified in this decree, the Ministry of Energy of Azerbaijan must ensure the implementation of its provisions. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan must send a notification to the government of the People's Republic of China to complete the internal procedures necessary for the entry into force of the memorandum of understanding. Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Weather Alert ...Very active weather and dangerous cold forecast for the next week... A very strong storm system will move through the region Friday. Very strong winds are expected and a wind advisory has been issued for the entire region for 40-50 mph wind gusts. Stronger winds are possible. Widespread rain may lead to localized flooding in areas where thunderstorms form with up to 2 inches of rain possible in those areas. Severe thunderstorms are not currently expected but there is a small potential over the southern Pennyrile region of Kentucky Friday morning. A change to sleet and snow is forecast at the end of the day but accumulations are still not anticipated. If temperatures do not rise above freezing Saturday it is expected to mark the first of 5 to 6 days where temperatures will not rise above freezing. Lows Saturday through Tuesday night are forecast to fall into or near the single digits. Below zero wind chills are likely most of Monday and Tuesday. This extended cold snap will be dangerous to those without adequate shelter and will likely challenge plumbing and other cold-sensitive infrastructure. Accumulating snow remains possible Monday but forecast amounts have trended a little lower, and will remain subject to change for the next few days as more data becomes available. ...WIND ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 AM CST /7 AM EST/ FRIDAY TO MIDNIGHT CST /1 AM EST/ FRIDAY NIGHT... * WHAT...Southwest winds 20 to 30 mph with gusts up to 50 mph expected. * WHERE...Portions of southern Illinois, southwest Indiana, western Kentucky and southeast Missouri. * WHEN...From 6 AM CST /7 AM EST/ Friday to midnight CST /1 AM EST/ Friday night. * IMPACTS...Gusty winds will blow around unsecured objects. Wet ground may result in some trees being uprooted, and tree limbs will be blown down. A few power outages are likely. High profile vehicles will have difficulty. * ADDITIONAL DETAILS...A corridor of stronger winds, with gusts up to 60 mph is possible over the Pennyrile region of west Kentucky ahead of the front, and across the entire quad-state behind the front. If that begins to appear likely a high wind warning will be issued. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Use extra caution when driving, especially if operating a high profile vehicle. Secure outdoor objects. && BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. The Minister of Defense of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov, and other officials of the Ministry are visiting Egypt to participate in the EDEX 2023 exhibition at the invitation of the Minister of Defense of the Arab Republic of Egypt, Trend reports via Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry. On December 4, Colonel General Hasanov attended the opening ceremony of the international defense exhibition EDEX 2023. After welcoming the attendees, Egypt's President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, declared the exhibition open. At the international defense expo EDEX 2023, the Azerbaijan Defense Minister became acquainted with weapons, vehicles, and military equipment displayed by enterprises of the Azerbaijan Ministry of Defense Industry, as well as the companies TUSAS, ROKETSAN, ASELSAN, SARSILMAZ, CANIK, and BAYKAR of the Republic of Turkiye. Colonel General Zakir Hasanov met with corporate executives as part of his visit. Detailed discussions on the development prospects of military-technical cooperation and a number of other areas of mutual concern were addressed during the meetings. Contrary to the general claims of politicians and the media, the coronavirus pandemic is neither over nor has the coronavirus become harmless. In fact, Germany is currently in the midst of another wave of infection as is shown by all available figures. According to official figures from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), 23,264 cases of infection were reported in the last calendar week. Just six weeks earlier, there were only around 13,000, meaning that the number of infections has almost doubled in a short space of time. The data from wastewater monitoring has also shown an increase in infections since the beginning of July. Although this has levelled off somewhat in recent days, 17 locations still reported an increasing incidence last week, while 13 reported a falling incidence. While the official reporting figures confirm the sharp rise in the coronavirus wave, they can tell us little about the actual scale of the pandemic, as testing and reporting requirements have largely been abolished. However, sites such as SentiSurva project run by the Mainz University Medical Centre, which collects data from 14,000 people who regularly test themselves and make their data availableare able to determine incidence rates on this basis. SentiSurv data indicates an incidence rate that would equate to one in 50 inhabitants being newly infected every week. The highest incidence figure ever reported by the Robert Koch Institute during the entire pandemic was 1,543 in March 2022. According to SentiSurv, the incidence level has risen by over 500 since the beginning of November alone. Even if the numbers of hospitalisations and deaths are lower than in the first years of the pandemic as a result of an increased vaccination rate, the virus has by no means become harmless. According to the State Statistical Office, COVID-19 was still one of the three most common causes of death in 2022, along with coronary heart disease and dementia. COVID-19 was identified as the main cause of death in 52,357 instances. And this does not include the cases in which COVID-19 was only documented on the death certificate as a concomitant illness. These figures will be published at a later date. Markus Beier, chairman of the German Association of General Practitioners, explained in Die Welt: For particularly vulnerable groups without appropriate vaccination protection, coronavirus can still be a serious illness. And epidemiologist and virologist Klaus Stohr warned in the Frankfurter Rundschau with regard to the wave of infections: I believe that it will be more severe this winter. Even when the infection runs a relatively harmless course this can be followed by extremely severe long-term consequences (Long COVID). This can affect the heart, lungs, kidneys and practically all organs. The deadly effects of the pandemic are particularly evident in the continuing decline in life expectancy. As the Federal Institute for Population Research recently announced, life expectancy in Germany fell for the third year in a row in 2022. Since the start of the pandemic, life expectancy has fallen from 78.7 years to 78.1 years for men and from 83.5 to 82.8 years for women. Another worrying aspect of the current autumn and winter wave is the spread of new variants. The dominant variant at present is the Omicron subvariant EG.5, also known as Eris, which accounts for almost half of infections. Eris, which has been categorised as a variant of interest by the WHO, already has a growth advantage and better immune escape properties. The sub-variant BA.2.86 Pirola, which was detected for the first time in Germany at the end of August, also accounts for 14 percent of infections. Pirola has around 30 mutations in the spike protein compared to its predecessor variants. These many changes in the genetic material are particularly worrying as they could make it more difficult for the bodys defences to recognise vaccinated and recovered people. Many scientists are currently sounding the alarm about the Pirola offshoot JN.1, which is responsible for almost 5 percent of infections in Germany. JN.1 contains a mutation which, according to laboratory results, has a significantly better immune escape than Pirola. The American scientist J.P. Weiland therefore warns: A change in the symptom profile or severity cannot be ruled out. ... Additional mutations in JN.1 with an even higher transmissibility are to be expected. Many experts assume that JN.1 will dominate cases worldwide in the coming months. The high infection numbers are already causing a nationwide wave of illness, especially in schools and nurseries. The staffing situation in many primary schools in the country is on edge and in some cases is below the calculated staffing budget, said Edgar Bohn, chairman of the Primary School Association, to RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND). Depending on the levels of sick absences, some locations will no longer be able to fully compensate for staff shortages from their own resources. Many nurseries across Germany are currently struggling with a high number of staff shortages, Waltraud Weegmann, chairwoman of the German Daycare Association, also told RND. Due to the acute shortage of skilled labour, urgently needed substitutes were lacking. Daycare centres therefore often had to reduce opening hours due to the legally prescribed staffing ratio. This usually happens gradually, groups are merged, or children are only looked after on individual days, says the head of the daycare centre association. Ultimately, nurseries or groups can be partially or completely closed. Numerous hospitals are already responding to the rising number of infections by introducing compulsory mask wearing or restricting the number of visits. At Tubingen University Hospital, masks have been compulsory for visitors, outpatients, and staff in direct contact with patients since last week. Marburg University Hospital has also introduced a mask requirement and restricted visiting hours to protect patients from infection. At Frankfurt University Hospital, masks are mandatory in-patient care. At Frankfurt Hochst Hospital, visitors must wear FFP2 masks and at Darmstadt Hospital, the mask requirement is limited to high-risk areas such as oncology or the intensive care unit. All government parties at federal and state level are directly responsible for this catastrophic situation, as they have subordinated health to profits and have long since ended all protective measures. The consequences of this murderous pandemic policy were summarised in a letter from 15 leading Austrian doctors back in September: Since the removal of mandatory protective measures in the medical field, all patients, including highly vulnerable individuals, are being exposed to the risks of a SARS-CoV-2 infection in primary care settings as well as in hospitals. Many people have no way to reliably protect themselves in healthcare settings and are thus forced to contract COVID-19. Policymakers have declared the pandemic over and equated SARS-CoV-2 with a rhinovirus. However, COVID-19 is neither over nor a harmless infection without consequences. Medical professionals must take an exemplary role and act to protect all people, and NOT continue to submit to the pressures of society, media, and politics. An article on the World Socialist Web Site exposing the slavish support of the Workers Cause Party (PCO) for Recep Tayyip Erdogans reactionary capitalist government in Turkey has provoked an angry reaction from that pseudo-left Brazilian organization. Turkey's state-controlled news agency Anadolu Ajans published a laudatory article on the PCO's support for Erdogan's re-election. Unable to dispute the principled exposure published by the WSWS, the PCO wrote a contemptible statement aimed at slandering the Socialist Equality Group (GSI) in Brazil and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which it accused of being a pro-imperialist gringo group. This reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalist attack was extended into a personal slander of the author of the WSWS article, Eduardo Parati, a leader of the GSI and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Brazil. The PCO stated that Parati, despite being Brazilian, demonstrates that he has the mentality of a North American and, with that, a total lack of understanding of what politics is in a country like Brazil and in backward countries in general. The PCOs attacks are aimed against the building of the Trotskyist movement in Brazil. They are designed to pollute the political environment with a chauvinist hysteria that identifies internationalist socialists as external agents and legitimizes the persecution of the GSI and its members. This threat is especially serious given that the PCO is openly oriented towards unity of action with fascist organizations on the basis of their common nationalist program. The PCOs virulent response underscores the correctness of the WSWSs characterization of this organization as a petty-bourgeois nationalist tendency categorically hostile to the working class and socialism. The ICFI defends the political independence of the working class in Turkey and Brazil The PCO accuses the WSWS of falsifying the groups attitude towards the Erdogan government. As explained by Parati: [It is] in their choice of international allies that organizations like the PCO demonstrate their reactionary character. Recep Tayyip Erdogans recent [electoral] victory was enthusiastically celebrated by the PCO, which tried to present him as an anti-imperialist leader. Quoting this excerpt from the WSWS article, the PCO writes: This is a falsification. Just like the claim, later on, that the PCO was trying to divert a real struggle against imperialism to channel it into the reactionary channels of nationalism. The fact is that we never considered that nationalism would be an alternative to imperialism. (...) The PCOs position is the position of Marxism: bourgeois nationalism is incapable of defeating imperialism. The only social class capable of doing so is the world working class. And further on: This statement assumes criminal naivete on our part. Its obvious that no one believes that the newly elected president of Turkey, a representative of its bourgeoisie, is acting out of a supposed interest in defending the people who are victims of imperialisms wars. How did the WSWS falsify the PCOs positions on Turkeys elections? It merely cited the PCOs own statements. On May 28, shortly after Erdogans re-election was announced, the PCO declared on its official Twitter account: The PCO supports the Turkish workers in their struggle against imperialism. Brazilians are fighting too. Erdogans victory was a defeat for imperialism. Therefore, it was a victory for all the peoples of the world. The circulation achieved by this tweet was celebrated in a May 31 article on the partys Causa Operaria website, entitled, PCO goes viral on social media by defending anti-imperialist position. It gloated in the tweet having been viewed by more than 290,000 people, and its receiving comments of praise from Erdogans supporters in Turkey. The tweet likewise received laudatory coverage by Anadolu Ajans, Turkeys state-run news agency. PCO readers would have serious difficulties concluding from these lines that bourgeois nationalism is incapable of defeating imperialism and that the only social class capable of doing so is the world working class, since they advocate just the opposite. Its regurgitation of formal Marxist phrases notwithstanding, the real goals of the PCOs intervention are unequivocal: to subordinate the Turkish and Brazilian working classes to the ruling classes of their respective countries, to dissolve the specific class interests of the workers into the general interests of the nation and to amalgamate mass opposition to imperialism with the defense of the bourgeois national state. That intervention acquired a particularly sinister character because it was fraudulently presented to the Turkish public as the position of Brazilian Trotskyists. This fact alarmed the Sosyalist Esitlik Grubu (Socialist Equality Group, SEG), the Turkish section of the ICFI, which saw Trotskyism being falsely identified with support for Erdogan. As the legitimate representative of the international Trotskyist movement, the SEG was the only organization during the presidential elections in Turkey to wage a campaign for the political independence of the working class. In its manifesto on the elections, the SEG strongly rejected the claim that the masses of workers and youth have to choose between the two right-wing bourgeois alliances, explaining: The fight against imperialist war, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the cost of living and social inequality and authoritarian forms of rule requires the international revolutionary mobilization of the working class against capitalism on the basis of a socialist program and the taking of power. The WSWS article exposing the PCO is an example of the internationalist practice and political orientation of the Trotskyist movement. The decision to write that article was the product of discussion between the Socialist Equality Groups in Brazil and Turkey, initiated by a warning from the SEG to its Brazilian comrades. On May 29, a comrade from the SEG wrote to us: That tweet had some influence here. A lot of replies came from Turkey, basically saying: Brazilian Trotskyists support Erdogan. So if genuine Trotskyists in Brazil expose these reactionaries, I think it would be important for Turkey, Brazil and internationally. This form of political work is absolutely alien to a petty-bourgeois nationalist organization like the PCO. Their international relations are on the level of bourgeois state diplomacy: once the bourgeois elections are over, the PCO salutes the Turkish workers for their results, and, in return, receives messages of appreciation from Erdogans supporters. PCO falsifies Trotsky and the Permanent Revolution Stung by the WSWSs exposure of its bankrupt program based on subordination to the national bourgeoisie, the PCO seeks to justify itself through a grotesque falsification of Trotsky on the anti-imperialist struggle in the oppressed countries. After stating that it never claimed that Erdogan acts on the basis of a supposed interest in defending the population who are victims of imperialisms wars, the PCO continues: However, it is clear that the economic interests of Turkey and other backward countries lead him to oppose the policies of the Americans and Europeans. This is because the neoliberal policy of national devastation promoted by the bankers and the financial market in their countries harms the interests of the middle bourgeoisie, which tends to support nationalist candidates like Erdogan and Putin. The fact that the North American group doesnt understand this demonstrates its total lack of understanding of the political situation in backward countries. In other words, regardless of their will, the Turkish bourgeoisie and that of other semi-colonial countries are driven to confront imperialism and secure their national interests. According to the PCO, by contradicting this basic principle, the WSWS writer, despite claiming to be a Trotskyist, takes a totally anti-Trotskyist position. Justifying this accusation, the PCO writes: Trotsky always argued that in the event of a conflict between a nationalist government, whatever the characteristics of its domestic policy, and imperialism, one should always side with the nationalist government. A famous quote in this regard is the position defended by Trotsky in the event of a conflict between the Brazilian government (at the time, under the fascist dictatorship of [Getulio] Vargas) and the democratic British government: In Brazil there now reigns a semi-fascist regime that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us assume, however, that on the morrow England enters into a military conflict with Brazil. I ask you on whose side of the conflict will the working class be? I will answer for myself personallyin this case I will be on the side of fascist Brazil against democratic Great Britain. Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship. This section is emblematic of the PCOs political charlatanism. In a totally artificial manner, it conflates Trotskys quote, asserting the necessity to defend an oppressed country against an imperialist one in war, regardless of the character of their respective regimes, with its own petty-bourgeois nationalist maxim: one should always side with the nationalist government, including in bourgeois elections. Seeking to erase Trotskys uncompromising defense of the complete political independence of the proletariat, the PCO removes the excerpt of his interview from any historical and political context. The hypothetical scenario of a conflict between Brazil and England was raised by the leader of the Fourth International as he specifically fought to untangle the confusion created by the Stalinist Popular Front policy, which subordinated the international working class to Moscows democratic imperialist allies. However, Trotskys arguments to support semi-colonial Brazil in a war against imperialist Britain did not imply any political support for the semi-fascist Brazilian government, as the PCO fraudulently seeks to present it. On the contrary, such policy could only be developed in line with the Transitional Program, that defines the Fourth Internationals attitude to a war between an imperialist and a colonial country or the USSR in the following way: While supporting a colonial country or the USSR in the war, the proletariat must not solidarize itself in any way with the bourgeois government of the colonial country or the Thermidorian bureaucracy of the USSR. On the contrary, it must maintain its complete political independence from both. By aiding a just and progressive war, the revolutionary proletariat will win the sympathy of the workers in the colonies and the USSR and, in this way, consolidate the authority and influence of the Fourth International in these countries, and will be better able to collaborate in overthrowing the bourgeois government in the colonial country and the reactionary bureaucracy in the USSR. [Emphasis added] Moreover, the conception that the struggle against imperialism leads the working class and its party to the side of the nationalist government is, in reality, the complete opposite of the Theory of Permanent Revolution and its programmatic implications. As he fought Stalins catastrophic imposition of the two-stage theory of revolution in China, which subordinated the Chinese Communist Party to the Kuomintang party of the national bourgeoisie, Trotsky wrote in 1927: It is a gross mistake to think that imperialism mechanically unites all the classes in China from the outside... The revolutionary struggle against imperialism does not weaken, but strengthens the political differentiation of the classes. Imperialism is an extremely powerful force in Chinas internal relations. The main source of this force is not the warships in the waters of the Yangtze Kiangthey are only auxiliary but the economic and political link between foreign capital and the native bourgeoisie... The Chinese bourgeoisie will always have a solid backup in imperialism, which will always support it with money, goods and ammunition against the workers and peasants. The PCO reproduces the entire reactionary essence of the Stalinist program which led to the crushing of Chinas revolutionary working class. However, it does it under objective historical conditions that make it even more destructive and politically criminal. While Stalins promotion of the Kuomintang was largely based on the argument (already refuted by the Russian Revolution) that, given the predominantly rural and peasant population of China, the working class was not yet sufficiently mature to fight for political power, the PCO seeks to impose this same reactionary program on contemporary Brazil and Turkey. That is, on countries with the largest urban concentrations in South America and in Europe and West Asia; with massive working classes that operate key sectors of global industry; and where the national bourgeoisies have a long history of counterrevolutionary collaboration with imperialism. The WSWS article attacked by the PCO particularly emphasized the Erdogan regimes collaboration with NATOs imperialist wars over the last decades. Parati explained that Erdogan remains fully capable of promoting imperialist interests amid the escalating US-NATO war against Russia. Responding to Paratis arguments, the PCO wrote: In Erdogans case, what he charges as demonstrating that it is an imperialist government would be the declaration in favor of Sweden and Ukraine joining NATO. But the author ignores the fact that Erdogan is simply trying to bargaining [sic] with imperialism, using this as a bargaining chip for Turkeys entry into the European Union. Going back to Vargas, what was the meaning of sending troops to World War II if not a policy of bargaining with imperialism? Vargas didnt stop being a nationalist government because of this. The WSWS has never characterized Turkey as an imperialist government. However, the real aim of the PCOs attack is the Marxist conception, based on the Theory of Permanent Revolution, that the Turkish and Brazilian bourgeoisies are essentially instruments of imperialism. Trotsky left no doubt that this was the character of Getulio Vargas nationalist government. In a discussion with members of the Fourth International, also in 1938, he explained: If the national bourgeoisie is obliged to give up the struggle against the foreign capitalists and to work under the direct tutelage of the foreign capitalists, then we have a semi-fascist regime, as in Brazil for example. Having begun by justifying its defense of the Erdogan government based on its supposed conflict with imperialism, the PCO ends up declaring its support for bourgeois nationalism regardless of the conditions. The Turkish regimes collaboration with NATOs imperialist wars and its bargaining to submit the country to the imperialist yoke of the European Union are shamelessly supported by the PCO, because Erdogan doesnt stop being a nationalist government because of that! At the dead end of nationalism, the pseudo-left embraces fascism The WSWS precisely identified the global political implications of the PCOs promotion of Erdogans and other bourgeois nationalist regimes. Parati wrote: According to this view, the ongoing process behind the current war, which began in Ukraine against Russia and is headed toward China, is not a redivision of the world between imperialist powers. Groups like the PCO assume that this conflict opens the path for the so-called rising economies to finally break the bonds of imperialism and overcome their status as oppressed nations. Having celebrated the Russian invasion of Ukraine with an article titled Heres to Vladimir Putin!in which it declared that Seeing someone stand up to our enemies is always encouraging. But Putin has gone much furtherthe PCO was infuriated by Paratis sharp exposition. It answered with a desperate attempt to disqualify the WSWSs arguments by turning them inside out. They claimed that by characterizing the ongoing war as imperialist and its aim as a redivision of the world Parati is demonstrating that his analysis is that China and Russia are imperialist powers. This is nothing more than a play on words, the political method of the dishonest and the demoralized petty-bourgeois. The section distorted by the PCO clearly refers to the NATO imperialist powers and the war they are waging against Russia and preparing against China. Although today they are waging a united offensive under the direction of Washington, the rival imperialist powers gathered in NATO are each stubbornly seeking to secure their own greater share of the spoils of war and to rebuild their military power and global influence. The resurgence of open inter-imperialist conflicts, as in the two previous world wars, is an inevitable outcome and is already developing. The PCOs attribution of the theory of Russian/Chinese imperialism to the WSWS is a lie that stands in contradiction to the solid political record of the International Committee of the Fourth International. A significant part of the more than 1,000 articles published by the WSWS on the war in Ukraine has been dedicated to debunking the pseudo-lefts justifications for US-NATO imperialist aims, particularly the anti-Marxist theory of Russian imperialism. Raising the Russian/Chinese imperialism theory as a political straw-man, the PCO conveniently shrugs off the task of responding to the Parati articles characterization of their own perspective on the US-NATO war. They evade criticism with rhetorical statements about having already clarified their disagreements with analysts who claim that we are facing the emergence of a multipolar world. However, this supposed alternative vision to the multipolar world theory is never presented in a coherent form. The PCOs variant of multipolarism came out particularly clearly from the mouth of the long-time national leader of the PCO, Rui Costa Pimenta, in a discussion about The war in Ukraine and Brazil promoted by the pro-PT Brasil 247 in March 2022. Pimenta explained the international conflict in the framework of a collapse of globalization, pointing to its political consequences: What I think could happen, from an immediate point of view, is that several economies end up retrenching, backing away from the policy of internationalization. Brazil, for example, has suffered horrendously from this globalization policy. They could adopt a protectionist policy as a defensive measure and this would certainly speed up the political recovery of the world working class. This trend is present everywhere. In the United States, for example, Trump is a manifestation of this trend. ... The global far rightthis Trump-type far right, not the militias we saw in Ukraineone of their main talking points is against globalism. Weve discussed it with people on the right, and they tend to identify globalism when we say imperialism. In a sense, there is a relationship, although its not exactly the same. The perspective laid out by the PCO leader is the absolute opposite of Marxism. The fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system, between the integrated character achieved by global economy and the crippling barriers imposed by the national states, is not to be resolved by the working class carrying out the international socialist revolution. For Pimenta only a major historical retrogression, which passes through the retraction of global economies and the reactionary policies of national capitalist elites against internationalization, can prompt the political recovery of the world working class. The most sinister aspect of this ultra-reactionary orientation is expressed in the banality with which the leader of the PCO assumes the confluence of his objectives with those of the extreme right. The identification made by Pimenta between the supposed anti-imperialism defended by his party and fascist anti-globalism is a critical point. In our previous article, we charged PCO with seeking to divert opposition to imperialism into the reactionary channels of nationalism. An addendum is necessary: they are seeking to divert it, more specifically, into the arms of fascism. In the last period, the PCO established a sordid alliance with the New Resistance (NR), Brazilian followers of the Russian fascist ideologue Alexander Dugin. In classic fascist language, the NR declares that its objective is to erect a New World and a New Homeland, through a New Order, built by a New Man and to forge a politically solid project consistent with what Brazil is in its essence: an Empire. While promoting multipolarism and anti-globalism, the New Resistance directs its attacks against the globalist left and what they identify as the anarcho-Trotskyist rabble. Like the PCO, it worships Getulio Vargas, calling him the Brazilian Caesar. They specifically praise the fact that Vargas ruled with the Integralists [the Brazilian brown shirts], collaborated with Nazi Germany, supported the Nationalist gang in the Spanish Civil War, correctly deported the criminal Olga Benario [the German-Brazilian Communist Party member who was gassed in a Nazi concentration camp]. In a video widely circulated by the PCO, Pimenta promoted his partys criminal collaboration with this fascist organization: Unlike the left who already wants to label them [the NR] as fascists or something like that, we look at them as a group that is trying to define a political position. This is pure cynicism. The NR has a well-defined ideology, which is precisely what attracts the PCO. Insofar as they have a nationalist position, Pimenta continues, I think we can have a common activity. The PCOs programmatic defense of a political alliance with fascism led it to react rabidly to the ICFIs exposition of the reactionary Rage Against the War Machine demonstration held in Washington D.C. in February. Convened by demoralized pseudo-lefts and libertarians together with open fascists, it aimed to promote the politically criminal idea that the fascist wing of the US ruling class linked to Donald Trump is against war. In an article attacking the US Socialist Equality Partys principled opposition to this deeply reactionary movement, the PCO declared that an anti-war movement in the United States must naturally include Trump supporters, once Trump is an obstacle to the policy of imperialism. This spurious position is based on a thorough rejection of the revolutionary character of the American working class, whose interests are objectively united with the workers in the backward countries, and whose role is decisive in the struggle to overthrow imperialism and world capitalism. Behind the reactionary attacks on the Brazilian Socialist Equality Group as being a gringo group with an American mentality lies the PCOs deep hostility to the assertion of the political independence and revolutionary unity of the working class in the US, Brazil and across the world, represented by the International Committee of the Fourth International. This rabid reaction to socialist internationalism is, in turn, the most concrete manifestation of the PCOs chauvinist alliance with the New Resistance fascists. The PCOs embrace of fascism is the deplorable result of a long political trajectory marked by national opportunism. The PCO traces its origins in the opportunist political operations of the Pabloite renegade Pierre Lambert in Latin America after his break with the ICFI and Trotskyism. The Workers Cause (CO) emerged from an unprincipled split with the Brazilian Internationalist Socialist Organization (OSI) linked to Lambert in 1979. Over the following decades, it remained strictly subordinate to the Workers Party (PT) and the union bureaucracy of the Central Unica dos Trabalhadores (CUT), just like its former OSI partners. Even after being expelled from the PT and founding the PCO in 1995, it remained inflexibly oriented towards the PT, the CUT and the Brazilian state. The political conditions that gave rise to the opportunist national activity of the PCO and other Pabloite organizations are now collapsing under the impact of the capitalist crisis and the advance of global war. The fascist coup plotted by former president Jair Bolsonaro and the military, and the sharp turn to the right by the Workers Party are demonstrations of the inability of the bourgeois state to hide its essence as an instrument of social counter-revolution. The pseudo-left, with its nationalist programs, find itself at a dead end. Its political development can only give birth to monsters such as the alliance with fascism advanced by the PCO. But the same historical shift that leads to the political degeneration of Pabloism and the entire pseudo-left is producing the conditions for building Trotskyist parties affiliated to the ICFI as the political leadership of the working class in Brazil and internationally. 25 years ago: International Space Station launched On November 20 and December 4, 1998, the first sections of the International Space Station (ISS) were launched into orbit, beginning what was then the largest and most complex single engineering project ever undertaken. The Zarya Control Module was carried into orbit in November enclosed in the nose fairing of a Russian Proton rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Zarya (Sunrise), was the main propulsion and command module for the space station. The Unity module was transported into orbit on December 4 aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. A mechanical arm on Endeavour was used to grab Zarya and maneuver it into position. Unity was then docked and, in a series of three space walks, connected to Zarya. The mission control centers in Houston and Korolev monitored the systems over the following five months to ensure all was working according to plan. The International Space Station photographed on October 4, 2018 Those were the first of 45 planned launchings aimed at completing the project in 2004 at the cost of $40 billion. The scientific potential of the International Space Station was enormous. Its construction and assembly involved the combined efforts of space agencies and engineering firms in 16 different countriesthe US, Russia, Canada, Japan, Brazil, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Plans for the space station first emerged under the Reagan administration in the mid-1980s. Its Cold War origins were epitomized by its nameSpace Station Freedom. Other nations were invited to participate but the USSR was excluded. The project was part of a US attempt to assert its domination in space and was linked to Reagans announcement in 1984 of the Star Wars program, one of the main planks of the Strategic Defense Initiative. The aim of the Initiative was to develop the means for completely neutralizing any Russian nuclear missile attack on the US and thereby to completely alter the existing military balance of forces. One purpose of the Star Wars program was to develop the capacity to destroy missile attacks from space using lasers. The US lagged behind the Soviet Union in important areas of space technology and spacecraft. Soviet efforts culminated in the construction and launching of Mir space station in 1986. The establishment of Mir gave the USSR a formidable advantage in space research. The US, even with its Skylab program during the 1970s, had been unable to gain experience in the mounting of long-term manned space flights. However, US plans for Space Station Freedom as well as the Star Wars program changed drastically with the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The breakup and economic crisis throughout the former Soviet Union provided the US and other major powers with opportunities to buy up its scientific achievements, research establishments and scientists at bargain prices. Faced with chronic economic difficulties, the Russian Space Agency was increasingly reliant on US government money to keep operating. 50 years ago: Sunningdale Agreement between UK and Republic of Ireland On December 9, 1973, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland announced an agreement signed in Sunningdale, England that would establish a new form of administrating Northern Ireland. The agreement enshrined a new power-sharing ruling executive for the North with ministerial positions split between Brian Faulkners Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) led by Gerry Fitt. Sunningdale also created a Council of Ireland made up of equal representatives from the new Northern Ireland executive and the Republic of Ireland. The deal had two main purposes. First, to oversee the economic development of partitioned Irelandthat is the exploitation of its working classbut not without appropriate safeguards for the British Governments financial and other interests. And second, to establish a collaboration between the police forces and judicial systems of the North and South to crack down on persons committing crimes of violence, meaning the bombings and other violence of the Troubles, the period of near civil war that began in the 1960s. The agreement did not mention the ongoing internment without trial of thousands of Irish youths in the North suspected of support for Sin Fein, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), or other banned Irish Nationalist organizations. The Sunningdale Agreement was the first time that the government of the Irish Republic officially stated that it would accept the continued control of Northern Ireland by Britain until a majority in the North decide to unite with the Republic. Likewise in the agreement the British government claimed that if in the future the majority in the North supported a united Ireland it would not block reunification. A Unionist poster opposing the Sunningdale Agreement [Photo by Ardfern / CC BY-SA 3.0 The news of Sunningdale was met with immense hostility by the Ulster unionist organizations and their fascist paramilitaries. Rejecting even the possibility of a united Ireland, the right-wing unionists immediately began plotting the sabotage of the agreement. The Ulster Unionist Council rejected the agreement virtually immediately after it was signed. By January 1974, when the executive officially took office, Faulkner had been ousted as leader of the UUP and replaced by an anti-Sunningdale faction, though he remained as the Chief Executive of Northern Ireland. A state of unionist revolt took hold in Northern Ireland. An organization calling itself the Ulster Workers Council brought together the main unionist parties and loyalist paramilitaries to plan for a general strike to bring down the executive council. The strike, taking place in May 1974, crippled the economy. On May 15 Faulkner resigned, along with the other members of the executive, marking the end of Sunningdale. Two days later two car bombs exploded in Dublin killing 33 and wounding hundreds more. It was the single bloodiest event of the Troubles. Due to political interference a complete investigation was never held. No one was ever held responsible. However, a later report concluded that the bombing was likely conducted by Ulster unionist forces aided by the British Army, with the aim of totally burying Sunningdale. 75 years ago: UN adopts Universal Declaration of Human Rights On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the recently established United Nations (UN) adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The document outlined a set of rights, which stated that all people possessed and had to be protected. But it outlined them as a set of affirmations, rather than anything binding on UN member states or legally enforceable. The preamble, clearly referencing the horrors of World War II and fascism through which the world had recently past, declared: Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. And: Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people. The rights it enumerated included to life, liberty and the security of person, freedom from slavery and servitude, from torture and cruel and degrading punishment and to equality before the law. A number of other civil liberties were outlined, such as freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Eleanor Roosevelt holding poster of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Lake Success, New York, November 1949 The document had been prepared by a UN drafting committee, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of deceased former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its principal authors were the jurists John Peters Humphrey from Canada and Rene Cassin from France. The document is notable for its universalism, enumerating rights that are not limited to a country or people but are applicable to all. And the thrust of what is outlined makes clear that it is governments that pose the greatest potential threat to the civil liberties and democratic rights of the population. The UDHR, however, was essentially a humanitarian mask on the new imperialist order that the US was seeking to entrench following the war, including through the establishment of international mechanisms such as the UN. Eleanor Roosevelt and others would emphasize that the document was entirely non-binding, could not be enforced and that what it outlined was essentially aspirational. The six countries in the Soviet bloc abstained on the resolution, as did South Africa, then under apartheid rule, and the absolutist monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Some of the rights, such as to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment, inherently cannot be established under capitalism, based as it is on the exploitation of the working class. The various civil liberties outlined by the document were and have continuously been under assault by the ruling elites, presiding over a social order in its death agony. As it adopted the declaration, the UN was already sanctioning major imperialist crimes. That included the establishment of Israel in 1948, as an imperialist beachhead in the Middle East, through the violent expulsion of the Palestinians. The US was engaged in an increasingly aggressive Cold War against the Soviet Union, which saw Washington allied with militarist and fascistic forces, from the warlordist Kuomintang in China to Nazi collaborators in Greece. Domestically, the US government was carrying out a sweeping crackdown on civil liberties through the McCarthyite witch-hunts. 100 years ago: Brecht play banned by Leipzig authorities On December 8, 1923, Bertolt Brechts full-length play, Baal, was performed in the Altestheater in Leipzig, Germany. The play had been enthusiastically welcomed by half the audience and condemned by the other half. It created a scandal and was banned by the citys mayor after the first performance, who also reprimanded the plays director, Alwin Kronacher. One reviewer, Alfred Kerr, summed up the production as: Liquor, liquor, liquor, naked, naked, naked women.' Cover for Brecht's Baal Brecht wrote the play when he was 20 years old in the spring of 1918, toward the close of the First World War and in the last days of the German Empire. The play concerns a dissolute young writer named Baal who puts food, alcohol and sex before his literary ambitions. As one critic has noted, Baal urges positive acceptance of the transitoriness, ugliness and so-called evil of life as sources of pleasure, amusement and heightened awareness. Brechts presentation of Baals life aims to unhinge our normal moral judgements. The plays rehearsals had, in fact, been chaotic and often drunken. Brecht intruded on the directors role, and sought to lecture the actors, although, as some confessed, he mesmerized them. By 1923, nevertheless, the anti-establishment tone of the play struck a chord, both negative and positive. Brechts first stage production, In the Jungle of Cities, had been attacked by Nazis in Munich in May, and there was a general uproar in the theater world about the censorship of Baal in Leipzig. An Australian group, Unionists for Palestine, dominated by fake-left organisations, declared the period from November 25 to December 3 a National Workplace Week of Action for Palestine. This phoney week of action consisted almost entirely of token gesturesputting up petitions or posters on workplace noticeboards, wearing a scarf or badge to work, or flying a Palestinian flag out the office window. These were intended as a cover for the complete refusal of the official trade union leaderships to take any action whatsoever in opposition to the Israeli onslaught on Palestinians. Instead, the union bureaucracy is defending the federal Labor government as it asserts Israels right to defend itself through the genocide of Palestinian civilians. The supposed highlight of the campaign in Sydney was a protest on Friday afternoon outside New South Wales (NSW) Parliament. This event underscored the sham of the whole week of action. Its entire purpose was to put on a show that the unions were doing something to defend Gaza, when they are not. Angus McFarland, ASU NSW Secretary, speaks at Unionists for Palestine rally The event was notable for the almost total lack of a trade union presence. The only ranking official to speak was Angus McFarland, NSW secretary of the Australian Services Union (ASU). He said almost nothing about the assault on Palestine save for a general call for peace, not dissimilar to those made by the official politicians as they support the bombardment. McFarland centred his remarks on the anti-democratic character of NSWs anti-protest laws, noting that he had written to the Labor government seeking their repeal. The ASU, like almost all the unions, is affiliated to the very Labor Party that has deployed those laws. The Construction and General Division of the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining And Energy Union (CFMEU), one of the largest industrial unions in the country, was hailed for issuing a statement in support of Palestine. This document, issued on November 22, more than six weeks after Israels bombardment began, makes no distinction between oppressor and oppressed, referring to the unspeakable slaughter of innocent people in Israel and Palestine and the retaliations from both sides. The possibility of industrial action by Australian workers against the genocide is entirely absent from the statement, which merely declares support [for] the peaceful demonstrations around Australia. It also does not contain a single word of criticism of the Labor government for backing the genocide. The timing of Fridays event, after normal business hours and on a day when Parliament did not sit, only underscored the fraud of the whole undertaking: appeals to a state Labor government that not only backs Israel, but has actively sought to criminalise protests opposing the regime. The week of action and Friday protest were a continuation of Unionists for Palestines activities of over a month. It has provided a complete amnesty for the union bureaucracy, covering over and apologising for the rotten line of the leaderships. While Australian workers and young people are regularly turning out in their tens of thousands to protest Israels genocide, and while hundreds have risked arrest and police brutality attempting to block Israeli ships, the union bureaucracies have either stayed silent or issued tepid both sides statements. The effect of this is to line up completely behind the Labor government and the Zionist regime. At least 17,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israels bombardment since October 19, when the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the countrys main union peak body, issued its lone public statement on the issue. Since then, the ACTU has not uttered a single word on its website or social media accounts. Since October 7, ACTU Secretary Sally McManus has made just 13 Twitter/X posts about Israels assault on Palestine. All but two are wordless reposts, mostly of innocuous sources, such as Medicins Sans Frontieres or the United Nations. McManus has not made a single comment on the issue since November 15. Thus, the ACTU leaders contribution to the online discussion on the unfolding genocide amounts to just 40 words: The continuing horror of this war, Doctors Without Borders says all the patients who are remaining in these hospitals will just die, and these hospitals will turn into graveyards. #ceasefirenow [November 12] The killing of civilians & collective punishment must stop. [October 19] Even in these few words, the position of McManus and the ACTU is exposed. Her November 12 description of Israels assault on Gaza as a war is a gross misrepresentation of the ethnic cleansing that is being carried out by the Zionist regime. The omission of proper nouns from the October 19 post is aimed at falsely equating the actions of Israel, the oppressor, with those of oppressed Palestinians. Even more revealing is McManuss November 12 repost of a tweet by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, who declared Hamas has no respect for international law, but we do. We need steps towards a ceasefire, but it cannot be one-sided. This is an unequivocal endorsement by Australias highest-ranking union official of the Labor governments support for genocide. ACTU President Sally McManus retweets Labor Foreign Minister Penny Wong [Photo: @sallymcmanus] This is not an accident. The union bureaucracy is integral to the Labor Party and is involved in policy and decision making at the highest levels. As Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) delegate and Solidarity member Erima Dall recently noted, our unions are affiliated with the Labor Party. They have delegates at Labor conference. The Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), while posturing more vocally than other unions as a supporter of the Palestinian cause, remains steadfast in its refusal to call strikes to shut Israeli shipping lines out of Australias ports. At the Unionists for Palestine event on Friday, MUA delegate and Solidarity member Nat Wasley gave a revealing account of this: Every shift I have worked for the last seven-and-a-half weeks, I have been confronted by containers and vessels from the Zim shipping line. Ive worked these shifts, knowing the profits from my labour are propping up a company that is actively participating in the war on the Palestinian people. Nat Wasley speaks at Unionists for Palestine rally on December 1, 2023 In other words, for almost two months, MUA members have been forced to load and unload the very ships that hundreds of protesters have attempted to block, in a campaign that has seen 23 people arrested and charged, and which the union claims to support. Wasley attempted to defend the unions refusal to call strikes! After reeling off a list of previous anti-war and anti-apartheid campaigns by the Australian working class, she lamented that such action was simply not possible any more. The organisations hands are tied, Wasley insisted, by Australias draconian anti-strike legislation, that makes industrial action illegal outside of an enterprise bargaining dispute, or immediate health and safety issue. While acknowledging that this legislation was introduced by the Rudd Labor government, Wasley covered over the role of the union bureaucracy, which was centrally involved in the drafting of the laws, and which has been instrumental in enforcing them over the past 15 years. The MUA, moreover, remains affiliated to Labor, whose explicit position is the maintenance of the legislation. Wasleys whole argument is predicated on the conception that strike action by workers has never brought them into conflict with the law or the official political establishment. The unions, she is effectively admitting, will only take action if it is sanctioned ahead of time by the pro-genocide Labor governments and the big business industrial relations framework. The most famous Australian example to the contrary was the three-day general strike that erupted in 1969 after Victorian union leader Clarrie OShea was jailed over his refusal to pay a fine imposed upon the union. This action forced the release of OShea, and provided a clear demonstration that repressive industrial relations laws are only enforceable to the extent that opposition by the working class is suppressed. It is the union bureaucracy, just as much as Labor, the Fair Work Commission and the anti-strike laws, that is standing in the way of workers, on the waterfront and more broadly, taking concrete action against Israels genocide. In attempting to cover this up, Unionists for Palestine, and the whole pseudo-left stand exposed as allies of Labor, Israel, and the war drive of global imperialism. In order to heed the urgent call of the Palestinian trade unions for action against the genocide, workers in Australia will have to take up a struggle against the draconian Fair Work Act. This is impossible within the framework of the unions, which rely on the anti-strike laws to cover their support for big business, Labor, and imperialist war. New organisations of struggle, rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by workers themselves and politically independent of the unions and Labor, must be built in every workplace. Through such committees, workers can prepare the political and industrial actions, including strikes across the waterfront, necessary to throttle the supply of weapons to the Zionist war machine. This is a political struggle against the Labor governments, their defenders in the union bureaucracy and the capitalist system that is responsible for the genocide and the assault on the social and democratic rights of the working class everywhere. In a speech to the United States Business Summit in Auckland last Thursday, New Zealands new foreign minister, Winston Peters, pledged that the government will strengthen military and strategic ties with Washington, which is militarising the Indo-Pacific region in preparation for war against China. New Zealand First leader Winston Peters addressing a public meeting in Opotiki. [Photo: Twitter/X @winstonpeters] It was the first major public speech delivered by any minister since the National Party-led coalition was formed on November 24. Peters, who is also the deputy prime minister, leads the right-wing nationalist New Zealand First Party, which is notorious for anti-immigrant and anti-Chinese demagogy. The party is widely despised and only got 6 percent in the October election, but it and the libertarian ACT Party (which got 8.6 percent) have been given extraordinary power in the coalition government. Peters has emerged as the most prominent figure in the government, setting its foreign policy agenda and sidelining Nationals prime minister Christopher Luxon. The latter also spoke at the US Business Summit, calling for more trade and investment, but his remarks received relatively little media coverage. In his speech, Peters said the government would move with speed and intensity to strengthen engagement with the US on strategic and security challenges, centred on our common interest in a stable, peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific. He repeatedly referred to New Zealands shared values with the US, saying: Our institutions are founded on democratic values, respect for human rights, freedom of speech and assembly, and free and fair trade. Promoting and maintaining the rule of law is the defining feature of both of our political systems. The reality is that as a minor imperialist power in the Pacific region, New Zealand has relied since World War II on a de facto alliance with Washington to further its own predatory interests, which have nothing to do with democracy or human rights. New Zealand has joined the criminal US-led wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The country is also a member of the US-led Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network along with Britain, Canada and Australia. There are currently New Zealand troops in Britain training Ukrainian conscripts for the US-NATO proxy war against Russia, which is the opening stage of a Third World War for the US and its allies to re-divide the world and plunder its resources at the expense of Russia and China. The real shared values of the US and its allies, including the New Zealand government, are on display in their support for Israels genocide in Gaza. More than 15,000 Palestinians, including 6,000 children, have been killed by Israels indiscriminate bombing and siege of the Gaza Strip, and millions have been made homeless. Luxon and his predecessor, Chris Hipkins, have both justified Israels mass slaughter as self defence, echoing the Biden administration. The destruction of Gaza shows what the imperialist powers are planning more broadly, as they stoke the war against Russia and threaten war against Iran and China. In August, then Labour defence minister Andrew Little stated that New Zealand may be called on to play a role should conflict break out in the South China Sea, i.e. between the US and China, two nuclear-armed powers. Labour, National, NZ First and ACT all agree that military spending must sharply increase from about 1.4 to 2 percent of gross domestic product. This will be paid for with savage funding cuts to social programs on which working people rely. According to the New Zealand Herald, Peters speech repeated the language of the Labour governments 2023 Defence Policy Review, warning about the threat posed by the entry of undemocratic, unfriendly countries into the Pacific region, referring to China. Peters also referred to his speech delivered in 2018 as foreign minister in the Labour-led government, which called for a stronger US military presence in the Pacific. He said he welcomed the increased US security commitment over the past five years, amid intensified geostrategic competition in our region, and increasing threats to Pacific peoples peace and prosperity. In fact, the US poses the main threat to peace in the Indo-Pacific region with its provocations and open preparations for war against China. Washington has funnelled billions of dollars worth of military equipment to Taiwan and strengthened military ties with the Philippines, Japan, South Korea and Australia. Peters told the summit that he and the National Partys defence minister, Judith Collins, had discussed joining the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the UK and US. Its something in which the Australians will look acutely at us to see if were going to step up. Weve got to do more and pay more to be respected. Im sorry but its the least they can expect of us, the foreign minister said. AUKUS includes an agreement for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered attack submarines and hypersonic missiles, and to share military technology to strengthen interoperability. The Biden administration views the agreement as critical to defeating China. The previous Labour government would not commit to taking part in AUKUS, despite pressure from Canberra and Washington. Hipkins indicated that New Zealands legislation banning nuclear-powered vessels from its waters would be an obstacle to joining the agreement, but said New Zealand might join a so-called second pillar of AUKUS relating to sharing military technology. New Zealands ruling class, which depends heavily on trade with Chinathe biggest market for NZs dairy products, the countrys main exporthas been reluctant to openly join the US-led confrontation with Beijing. Every section of the political establishment, however, supports the alliance with the US and is determined to secure a seat at the table in the carve-up of Russia and China. The decisive role of the US alliance was underscored following New Zealands inconclusive September 2017 election. Then US ambassador Scott Brown publicly indicated that Washington wanted the next government to take a stronger stance against China and criticised the incumbent National Party over its perceived hesitancy to join Donald Trumps belligerent threats against North Korea. At the same time, National was relentlessly attacked by pro-US academics and media pundits for its business ties with China. Following Browns statements, NZ First formed a coalition government with Labour instead of National. From 2017-2020 Winston Peters played a key role as foreign minister. The Labour-NZ First government, which also included the Greens, issued numerous statements characterising China and Russia as threats to the global rules-based order dominated by the US. Peters speech last week and the central role given to NZ First in the new National-led government is intended to send a clear message that New Zealand will pull its weight, in Peters words, as the Biden administration accelerates the charge towards world war. The only way to stop such a catastrophe is through the mobilisation of the international working class, in opposition to all the parliamentary parties, on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program to put an end to capitalism, which is the source of imperialist war. In Philadelphia, a United States Postal Service carrier sorts mail to be delivered. [AP Photo/Matt Rourke] No questions were answered at a public United States Postal Service mail processing facility review (MPFR) meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee on Thursday, which was held to share the preliminary findings of a facility review that began in October and take public comment on them. The audience of about 50 USPS workers was already well aware of the findings which had been published two weeks prior to the meeting. Knoxville is one of 29 cities across the country currently undergoing MPFRs as part of the nationwide Delivering for America (DFA) plan, which will consolidate mail processing operations from local processing centers into mega regional centers. In addition to slashing costs, the program will result in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and make access to postal services more difficult for many around the country, especially in rural areas. Pro forma public meetings, such as the one on Thursday, are window dressing for the process, which is well underway throughout the USPS network. Gary McClellan, USPS executive plant manager in Knoxville, delivered the report of the facility review in a three-slide presentation that took less than 10 minutes to deliver. The Knoxville P&DC (Processing & Distribution Center) will remain open as a Local Processing Center (LPC). Originating package mail will be processed in Louisville, Kentucky, while the destination mail operation will remain in Knoxville. McClellan announced at the beginning of the presentation, Today, before we dive into our presentation, I want to make two points very clear. Based on the initial facility review, the facility is not closing. It will be repositioned as a local processing center. There will be no career layoffs as part of this initiative. If McClellen was waiting for cheers of relief from his audience, none came. Of the 463 employees, 63 will be reassigned. In other words, 14 percent of the career workforce at the Knoxville facility will either need to relocate to a USPS job elsewhere or start over in a new job. One worker, who had been reassigned once before, told local news, Id hate to move my family again, but Id hate to start over, too, so I would have to move. Almost as an afterthought, McClellan stated that the number of pre-career employees, part-time workers, would be reduced in accordance with the respective collective bargaining agreements. A worker told the World Socialist Web Site after the meeting that there are approximately 150 pre-career employees at the Knoxville P&DC. [T]hats 150 families that could have a detrimental impactthat may be looking for a job right after the New Year, he said. During the public comment portion of the meeting, union officials from the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) and the National Postal Mail Handlers Union (NPMHU) made statements against the initiative to shift originating processing to Louisville. Both denounced the initial findings of the MPFR, citing population growth in Tennessee and Knoxville and population decline in Louisville as reasons why the Knoxville P&DC should not be repositioned as an LPC. But the APWU has done nothing to seriously oppose Delivering for America. Indeed, from the beginning the union bureaucrats have been enablers of Postmaster General Dejoys plans to cut 50,000 jobs and Amazonify the workforce by hiring temps and part-time workers. They have done little to alleviate the attacks on the wages and health of carriers caused by punitive route evaluation systems rolled out this year. Nor have they intervened in the accelerating package load carriers must contend with as last-mile carriers for Amazon. Tensions during the 20-minute meeting grew as USPS spokesperson Evelina Ramirez repeatedly responded to audience questions about the findings of the MPFR by declaring that the purpose of the meeting was to gather oral comments, not answer questions. We have a lot of questions, one worker retorted amid the charged silence in the auditorium. Pointless! was what one worker speaking to the WSWS said of the meeting. Why even have us come down! Another worker commented, Its a checklist. Theyre contractually obligated to be here. One worker correctly surmised the outcome of the meeting, This process is nothing but a facade. Theyre going to do what they want to do, regardless of what this input says today. Speaking to the World Socialist Web Site, workers expressed frustration at the lack of information they are receiving about the plans to reposition the Knoxville facility into an LPC and Delivering for America. Theyve [USPS] been keeping information from us and weve been trying and trying to get it, one worker said. When asked about the impact of the proposal on the Knoxville facility, another worker commented, Well, you know about as much as I do. From the beginning, Postmaster General DeJoy has sought to conceal the full impact of Delivering for America, which is part of a longer-term push, with the support of both major parties, to privatize USPS. Last April, the Postal Regulatory Commission opened a public inquiry docket to provide transparency to recent and planned changes to the network associated with DFAs strategic plan. But the regulatory agency has admitted it does not have the staff or resources to keep pace with the rate of changes in the USPS that are underway. Postmaster General DeJoy was appointed by the board of governors during the Trump administration but has the support of Democratic appointees on the board as well. The USPS board of governors is comprised of investment bankers and logistics company executives who will profit from the systematic dismantling and and eventual privatization of the US Post Office, a process which benefits from secrecy and obfuscation. DeJoy himself has substantial conflicts of interest through his ownership of companies with contracts at USPS. The Delivering for America plan for the restructuring of its network is based on the hub-and-spoke model used by Amazon. The deployment of DeJoys plan is already in the second wave of its rollout, with the opening of massive Regional and Package Distribution Centers (RPDC), which will be the hubs of the networks system. In September, over 300 APWU workers were laid off and many were reassigned from mail centers in Charlotte, North Carolina when the RPDC in nearby Gastonia went online at the beginning of October. West Virginia is set to lose its only mail processing facility in Charleston when outgoing mail processing operations get moved to the RPDC in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is set to open in early 2024. Mail processing facility review meetings such as the one in Knoxville are planned throughout the country as 60 RPDCs are coming online. An estimated 4,560 positions will be eliminated once the consolidation of P&DCs into RPDCs is complete. In opposition to these historic attacks on the post office, workers across the country have formed the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee. The only way forward is to organize ourselves, put forward our own program of demands, and place rank-and-file workers in every position critical to our job security, safety, wages, bargaining and so on, the committee said in its founding statement. We must prepare action from below to assert the will of 635,000 career and non-career USPS workers to make sure our needs and interests take absolute priority, and not the slash-and-burn policies of corporate-controlled politicians. At oral arguments Wednesday morning the right-wing majority of Supreme Court justices sympathized openly with an extremist position advocated by the attorney for a fascistic con artist that threatens longstanding federal powers to regulate the securities markets and other major business activities, including workplace safety, environmental protections and health care. The decision in the closely watched case could strip about two dozen federal agencies of the authority to hold administrative hearings to assess penalties for regulatory violations. Instead, agency lawyers will be forced to litigate such claims in the already congested federal court system, where alleged violators can invoke the right to a jury trial. The US Supreme Court building in Washington DC. [Photo by Joe Ravi / CC BY-SA 3.0 George Jarkesy is a former stockbroker turned right-wing media commentator and conspiracy theorist who established a reputation in certain circles by supporting the Tea Party and attacking then president Barack Obama as a communist surrounded by advisers from the Muslim Brotherhood. In one segment, Jarkesy claimed the Civil War was driven by over-taxation in the North and the need for money from the South. To cash in on his fascist audience, Jarkesy set up small hedge funds, totaling $20-30 million, by attracting between 100 and 200 gullible investors. After the funds predictably collapsed, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Jarkesy with bilking his investors by lying about the assets held, inflating their values to generate excessive fees, and misrepresenting the identities of auditors and brokers. Instead of suing in court, the SEC presented its case to an administrative law judge, employed by the Commission itself, who held a 12-day hearing, rejected Jarkesys testimony as evasive and unreliable, and sustained the charges. Jarkesy was ordered to stop his fraudulent activities, return almost $700,000 stolen from investors and pay a $300,000 penalty. Such administrative proceedings have become ubiquitous over the last 75 years as the primary mechanism for enforcing federal regulations that provide at least a modicum of protection for the public. Accordingly they have become the target of pro-business and libertarian organizations bent on removing all impediments to generating profits through fraud, exploitation, environmental pollution and outright swindling. Jarkesy petitioned for review of the SEC penalty in the right-wing dominated Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, headquartered in New Orleans. Instead of asserting his innocence, he challenged the constitutionality of the SECs administrative procedures themselves. Shocking many legal observers, two of the three judges, one nominated by George W. Bush and the other by Donald Trump, essentially ruled the entire federal administrative law system that has been in place since 1946 to be unconstitutional. The dissent was by an 87-year-old Reagan-nominated judge. There are nearly 2,000 administrative law judges compared to less than 900 federal court judges. Forcing all their cases into the federal judiciary for resolution will result in logjams making meaningful enforcement of federal regulations impossible. That is the purpose of the ruling. The SEC appealed to the Supreme Court, where a conglomeration of pro-business and libertarian organizations, right-wing think tanks, and billionaires, including Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, have filed friend of the court briefs in support of Jarkesy. Wednesdays oral arguments focused entirely on the Seventh Amendment of the Bill of Rights that guarantees the right of trial by jury for suits at common law, which would apply were the SEC limited to civil actions in federal courts rather than the more streamlined administrative proceedings to assess fines for regulatory violations. In a landmark 1977 workplace safety case, Atlas Roofing Company v. Occupational Safety & Health Commission, the Supreme Court ruled explicitly that administrative law courts have the power to assess fines based on regulatory violations because such proceedings enforce public rights and are not suits at common law. That precedent would seem to resolve the issue, except that the corrupt right-wing bloc in control of the Supreme Court has no regard for precedents or the rule of stare decisis that interfere with its overtly political goals. For those familiar with the Supreme Courts outrageous expansion of qualified immunity, a doctrine fabricated by the court that frequently deprives civil-rights plaintiffs of their right to jury trials for police killings and other egregious official misconduct, the sanctimonious defense of the Seventh Amendment for a Wall Street swindler by these justices was truly stomach-churning. Most outspoken was Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch. After calling the right to trial by jury a very important foundational freedom in American society and a check on all branches of government, he told the SECs attorney, the Seventh Amendment would, on your account, dissipate, disappear, whatever verb you want to use. Some may recall that Gorsuchs first Supreme Court opinion, 2018s Epic Systems v. Lewis, upheld the blanket use of compulsory arbitration clauses by businesses to deny their aggrieved employees the Seventh Amendment right to present employment-based cases to a jury. Associate Justice Elena Kagan spoke most directly for the three moderate justices, and the status quo, telling Jarkesys lawyer that the use of administrative fines has stood for 50 or 60 years because nobody has had the chutzpah, to quote my people, to bring it up since Atlas Roofing. Kagan added, When you say, well, we should go back to the common law suits that were brought 200 years ago in the courts of Westminster, is Congress judgmentafter the Depression, after the savings and loan crisis, after the Great Recessionis Congress judgment that more powers were needed within an administrative agency entitled to no respect? There are two other challenges to federal regulatory agencies pending in the Supreme Court. The first, which challenged funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was argued last month. In January the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the Chevron doctrine, which requires that courts defer to an agencys interpretation of a statute. Many commentators are predicting that by the end of the Supreme Courts current term next June there will be insufficient power remaining for federal agencies to regulate businesses and commerce effectively, turning the clock back to the wide open practices that culminated in the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression. Over the weekend thousands of protesters took to the streets in Australia, opposing the continued genocide against the Palestinians by the Israeli regime. This is the eighth consecutive week of protesting, and the first since Israel resumed its bombardment of Gaza following the bogus truce. Rallies were held in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Newcastle. The Labor government is backing Israels onslaught, despite the mass opposition. In a particularly cynical move, its Foreign Minister Penny Wong took to social media to hail the pause and express hope that it would continue, as Israel was already dropping bombs again on Gazan civilians. We are featuring interviews below gathered at the weekend protests. **** At the Melbourne protest, Lynn said he reads the WSWS frequently and expressed appreciation for its coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and imperialist war. Lynn I have read about Zionism, he said. Im Jewish, and my grandfather had his ashes scattered over Israel. My grandfather was born in Lviv, Ukraine so I am hooked into both thingsthe wars on both fronts that are going on. Zionism is the leading anti-semitic tendency in the world. Israel is based on anti-semitism. I am a cosmopolitan Jewthe founding fathers of Zionism call people like me barbarians, and I am glad to be barbarian. Lynn added, There is no point in asking Albanese to stop what he is doing. It is like asking a crocodile to become a vegetarian. Albanese is worse than zero. I didnt think much of him when he first started, and he is just a war monger like the rest of them. Im 71 and I have grandchildren that are hostages to the future. We have maniacs that are leading us into World War Three. Apart from the fight for socialism we are in very bad trouble. Aishah (left), with her family Aishah, who with her family has regularly attended rallies since the beginning of the Israeli onslaught, stated, I only want to say the followingwe come to the rally to raise our voices, raise our flags, and raise our hands in prayer. To support those in Palestine suffering under this genocide. In Brisbane, Seba, a real estate industry worker originally from Gaza, explained, I am here to be a voice for those who have been silenced. To be a voice for those who need our help. They need us to stand here for humanity and human rights. To be a voice for the families and the innocent children who have been murdered by Israel. To be a voice for the ceasefire, a voice for the peace. Seba Asked why the genocide and ethnic cleansing was being allowed to take place, Seba said, Its a continuation of the 75 years of oppression that the people of Palestine have suffered. Its a continuation of Israel attempting to steal more land from the Palestinian people, and what they call mowing the lawn, which means cutting down the numbers of the Palestinians, so they can continue stealing the land. Today they use the excuse that they are fighting Hamas. If you look into history and look back, theres always another excuse. Every time they create an excuse, its for the same purposestealing the land and killing more Palestinian people, to reduce the numbers. Condemning the role of the Albanese Labor government, Seba commented, I think its corruption. I think they are scared maybe, because they have their own political interests. They have their own financial interests. They are not representing the people of Australia. We here in Australia are a multi-cultural society. We value equality. We do not stand behind an apartheid nation. For Albanese to stand behind apartheid, to stand behind genocide, is a disgrace. The Albanese Labor government is already facing three High Court challenges by refugees to the manacling legislation that it and the Liberal-National Coalition jointly rammed through both houses of parliament in just 12 hours on November 16. Further challenges are likely as well. In a blatant bid to evade a November 8 High Court order to release immigration detainees who had been imprisoned indefinitely, the legislation suddenly inflicted a new form of indefinite detention. It imposed an unprecedented regime of electronic monitoring by ankle bracelets, curfews and other draconian restrictions on all the detainees, as well as some previously released, potentially for the rest of their lives. The legal challenges highlight two key reactionary features of the bipartisan parliamentary operation to effectively defy the supreme courts ruling. After sanctioning for three decades the shameful practice of indefinite incarceration of asylum seekers and other non-citizens denied visas, the court said it was unconstitutional, even according to the 1901 Australian Constitutions extremely limited restrictions on arbitrary detention. First, the challenges show the human face of the 145 released detainees, who have been deliberately demonised by the government, the Coalition and the corporate media. Many of them are innocent refugees. They have been falsely depicted as murderers and rapists in an effort to justify police-state measures, including the governments proposed preventative detention bill to re-detain many of them. In fact, two of the cases involve men who had been earlier released into the community, long before the High Court ruling, having been assessed by the immigration authorities and government as no threat to anyone. They are not alone. At least 21 of the detaineesall witch-hunted as hardened or disgusting criminalshad previously been released from detention facilities. This occurred under both the current Labor government and the previous Morrison Coalition government, exposing the claims that the detainees were too dangerous to release. Second, the speed with which the three cases have been brought forward underscores the readiness of the political establishment to overturn even minimal constitutional restraints. There is strong legal opinion that the shackling and curfew legislation is just as unlawful, and cruel, as the indefinite detention system which the Keating Labor government pioneered in 1992. Similar challenges are inevitable to the as-yet unseen preventative detention bill that is aimed at greatly widening the power to detain people without charge. The government is nevertheless demanding that parliament pass the legislation with equal haste this week, proclaiming that parliament must keep sitting until it does so. In one legal challenge, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) lodged a case on behalf of a 30-year-old Sudanese refugee who has been living in the community for nearly a year. Despite his earlier release, the man has now been subjected to the same conditionsrequiring him to wear an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet at all times and follow a strict 10 pm to 6 am curfew. Any departures from these conditions, even for an hour, could mean five years imprisonment. The refugeeidentified only as RVJBarrived in Australia at the age of 13 after fleeing war-torn Sudan. According to the ASRCs media release, he struggled as a young man to adjust to life in Australia and recover from trauma without adequate support. At the age of just 18, he was convicted of an offence, for which he was punished, but has had no convictions since he was 22. After careful assessment, health experts, the [Immigration] Department, courts and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal have all positively remarked on his character, assessing that he was not a danger to the community, and observing he had turned his life around. Despite this, he was subjected to seven years of immigration detention by the Australian Government, including on the notorious Christmas Island, where his health deteriorated and he experienced further trauma. His son, mother, two brothers, sister and nieces are all citizens and permanent Australian residents. The immigration minister finally released him from detention a year ago, but the new restrictions will prevent RVJB from playing an active role in his sons life and finding employment, impact his health, and expose him to further detention. In the media release, RVJB explained: Ive been an Australian since I was 13. I made mistakes when I was young after fleeing trauma. I served my time, and learned about consequences the hard way. Ive worked so hard to change myself and make something of my life and Ive proved myself over years and years The last time I saw my son, he was three months old. He starts high school next year. When I got my bridging visa, his mother and I planned a special visit. But I dont want him to see me like this. A second case is that of a 37-year-old Afghan refugee who fled Afghanistan and arrived in Australia in 2011. Refugee Legal lawyer David Manne said his client was fined $2,000 for indecent assault while in detention, where he remained for the next 11 years. He was then released into community detention and for the next nine months he has been able to live in the community without an ankle bracelet or curfew, Manne said. He is also extremely remorseful for what he did in detention and hasnt committed any further offence over the last 12 years. The third challenge, by a Chinese refugee known only as S151, was launched less than a week after the shackling law was rushed through parliament. He arrived in Australia in September 2001 on a student visa, progressing on to other visas. After serving a sentence for an undisclosed offence, he was thrown into indefinite immigration detention, despite being determined to be a refugee in danger of persecution, preventing removal to China. These three challenges come in the aftermath of the November 8 High Court ruling that led to the release of 145 detainees. The court declared that a stateless Rohingya Muslim asylum seeker from Myanmar, identified in a dehumanising fashion only as NZYQ, had been unlawfully detained since May, when it became clear that he could not be deported. NZYO had arrived in Australia by boat in 2012. He was locked in immigration detention until 2014 before being granted a temporary bridging visa. In 2016, he was convicted of a sexual offence against a child but had served his time by 2018, when he was placed back into immigration detention. Even more damning cases are coming to light. Last Thursday, a Federal Court judge ordered the government to immediately free an Iranian asylum seeker, Ned Kelly Emeralds, who had spent a decade in immigration detention after arriving by boat in 2013, despite never committing an offence. Emeralds had applied for a refugee protection visa, but his application was eventually rejected in 2018 on the basis he did not have a well-founded fear of returning to Iran. Matthew Albert, Emeralds counsel, told the hearing his client had tried to kill himself in detention, vowing: I will not go back to be tortured and killed by a regime I despise. After the ruling, Emeralds said: Over 10 years ago, I came to Australia to seek protection from torture in my country, and instead I was tortured. I had no way to escape. I could not go home, and the government chose not to release me. Nobody should be asked to choose between their life and their freedom. What happened to me should not have happened, and it should not happen to anyone else. Justice Geoffrey Kennett found Emeralds detention was unlawful because there was no real prospect of his deportation becoming practicable in the reasonably foreseeable future. That is the narrow test applied by the High Court in the initial NZYO ruling, which still permits detention, or re-detention, if deportation becomes reasonably foreseeable. Throughout what has become a political crisis over the detainees, the Labor government has led the way in slandering the detainees, and therefore refugees more generally. In fact, it has criticised the Coalition, especially opposition leader Peter Dutton, from the right. Australian Home Affairs Minister Clare ONeil [Photo: Clare ONeil MP] Home Affairs Minister Clare ONeil and other government ministers have branded Dutton as weak for releasing some detainees while he was home affairs minister in the previous Morrison government. They even accused him of protecting paedophiles by opposing an amendment last Monday to ban released child sex offenders from going near schools. Dutton was actually demanding harsher measures, notably preventative detention, a reactionary proposal that the Labor government took up the next day when the High Court published its reasons for the NZYO ruling. The judges advised that detention could be reimposed via a preventive detention law. Labor seized on that suggestion to again join hands with the Coalition to try to push through unprecedented measures this week, now to incarcerate people for what they might do in the future, according to the governments police and intelligence agencies, not for any crime they have committed. These repressive mechanisms are a warning of a wider assault on democratic rights. They are being brought forward under conditions in which there is a parallel bipartisan line-up to support the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, provoking mass protests and intensifying disaffection with the entire political establishment. BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Information circulated by the Armenian Defense Ministry is a lie, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry told Trend. Information that Azerbaijani army units allegedly shelled the positions of the armed forces of this country in the direction of Sultanbeyli settlement of Pashaly district on December 4 around 14:35, as a result of which a serviceman was killed, is not true, said the ministry. "We categorically deny information of provocative nature of the opposite side," the Defense Ministry said in a statement. Stay up to date with more news on Trend News Agency's WhatsApp channel BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. The visit of Azerbaijan Defense Minister, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov to the Arab Republic of Egypt continues, Trend reports. Colonel General Z. Hasanov participated in EDEX 2023 international defence exhibition and watched with interest the modern weapons and military equipment exhibited at the booths of the Italian company Leonardo, as well as the Egyptian ARMADA and AOI companies. At the exhibition, the companies of different countries gave detailed information to the visitors about the military products produced by them. The fire broke out around 7 p.m. local time Sunday in a 10th-floor apartment on Bronx River Avenue Authorities believe an e-bike's lithium ion battery is to blame for a deadly fire that tore through a New York City apartment on Sunday. The fire broke out around 7 p.m. local time Sunday in a 10th-floor apartment on Bronx River Avenue in Soundview, fire officials said, according to the Associated Press and FOX affiliate WNYW. A 39-year-old man found by first responders was taken to the hospital in critical condition. He was later pronounced dead, according to ABC affiliate WABC-TV and Gothamist. Four others were treated for minor injuries, authorities said, per the AP and WNYW. Additionally, another two individuals sustained serious, life-threatening injuries as a result of the fire, a spokesperson for the New York City Fire Department told the AP. Related: Fla. Girl, 13, Dies in Camper Fire While Her Grandmother and 3 Other Kids Escape Fire Marshals later determined that the deadly blaze was caused by a lithium-ion battery, per an update shared on X (formerly known as Twitter) by the FDNY. According to the AP and WNYW, an e-bike was found near the apartments entrance. 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. The FDNY did not immediately respond to PEOPLEs request for comment. This is the 18th lithium ion battery-related death in New York City this year, per the reports. Sundays fire comes three weeks after a lithium-ion battery sparked a fire in a Brooklyn neighborhood that reportedly left three people dead and 14 others injured, including a firefighter. Related: Mom Says She Fears Son Died in Minnesota House Explosion That Killed 1: 'There's Nothing Left' To avoid deadly fires, the FDNY recommends charging items with lithium-ion batteries away from exits and hallways. They also recommend using batteries and charging tools that are specifically approved for the given product. The department suggests plugging devices directly into the wall to charge them not extension cords, power strips or anything similar and keeping at least two-feet separation between charging devices or batteries for every 20 kilowatt-hours, or three feet for every 50 kWh. For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter! Read the original article on People. BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Vice-President of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, founder and head of IDEA Public Union Leyla Aliyeva has attended a panel meeting on "Women leading progress: Water and Sustainable Development Goals", organized under the patronage of Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, Chairwoman of the General Women's Union (GWU), as part of the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change - COP28 held in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Trend reports. The meeting, co-organized by the United Nations (UN), General Women's Union and Association of Swiss Women and Empowerment (ASWE), was also attended by Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva (UN Geneva) Tatiana Valovaya, as well as Minister of Climate Change and Environment of the UAE Mariam bint Mohammed Saeed Hareb Almheiri. During the meeting, it was emphasized that the participants will try to coordinate and strengthen efforts aimed at addressing the current problem of water management, investigating its effects on communities and ecosystems, in accordance with the resolution of the UN General Assembly, which envisages the right to safe and clean drinking water as one of the basic human rights. Vice-President of Heydar Aliyev Foundation Leyla Aliyeva, who addressed the discussions, said: Due the climate change, we can observe lower water levels in rivers such as Kura, Samur, Araz. The water levels in the Volga River is decreasing, which also affects the Caspian Sea. Over the past seven or eight years, we have witnessed a draught in Azerbaijan, and this, of course, affects the agricultural sector. The government plans to build ten water reservoirs in the country, which will help solve the problem. Another issue is that, unfortunately, we were deprived of our water resources for 30 years, since 20 percent of our territories were under the occupation. During the discussions, the participants stressed the special importance on increasing awareness in solving water-related issues and promoting inclusive and self-aware solutions to the sustainable water management, as well as reaching gender equality and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They also discussed climate issues, as well as finding the leading experience and solution mechanisms that can positively impact water management, which can make a positive change in increasing welfare, health and equality of communities at the global level in order to accelerate the process of reaching UNs 17 SDG goals. Following the panel discussions, the participants viewed the national pavilion of Azerbaijan operating at the COP28. Co-organized by the Heydar Aliyev Foundation and Azerbaijans Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources, the national pavilion themed "Pioneering sustainable solutions for climate resilience" will operate until December 12. The concept of the pavilion is based on the rich flora and fauna of Azerbaijan. The pavilion, set up in an interactive format, provides information on the policy of Azerbaijan in the field of climate change, the measures taken by the government of Azerbaijan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, the activities on mitigation and adaptation, as well as other projects. It was noted that Azerbaijan confirmed the commitment to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent by 2030, and to increase this target to 40 percent by 2050. Taking active measures in this regard is a priority issue for the government of Azerbaijan. Co-organized by the IDEA Public Union, Azerbaijans Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an event on "Climate change and restoration of ecosystems" held in Azerbaijans pavilion. Speaking at the event, Regional Conservation Manager of WWF Caucasus Programme Maka Bitsadze, project manager Jernej Stritih, WWF Director for Azerbaijan Elshad Askarov, and the representative of the IDEA organization Zarkhanim Aghayeva informed about the nature conservation and restoration projects implemented in the region, highlighting the special role of Azerbaijan in these projects. While taco places are popping up all over town see Taco El Chon, Amigo Taqueria & Botanas, Mad Tortilla, State Street Taco and others the new Casa Cafe has managed to find a niche. Owners and Mexican immigrants David Saldana and his wife, Montserrat Vazquez, found themselves driving to Cleveland often for their favorite Mexican sweet bread, known as la concha, because there was nowhere in Erie to get it. Eliza Claudio, center, helps customer Rudy Rodriguez, right, at Casa Cafe, a new Mexican bakery in Millcreek Township, on Nov. 29. Bakery co-owner David Saldana is at back left. Saldana used to have a restaurant in Mexico, and spent 10 years at Los Compadres. He even met his wife in a restaurant setting, so they thought a unique take on an ever-more-popular cuisine seemed like an obvious choice for them. They've set up a Mexican bakery and brunch spot in the former Dairy Queen at 3505 West Ridge Road. At local Mexican bakery Casa Cafe, nino envuelto, or "wrapped child," top, and a shortbread cookie, or polvoron, are shown in Millcreek Township on Nov. 29. "We've been really busy," Saldana said about their opening days. "Really busy. We expected it to start slowly, but it's not." Long journey to Casa Cafe concept Saldana was born in Mexico, but he moved to Erie at the age of 14. After graduating from Central Tech in 2006, he decided to reconnect with his roots and headed back to Mexico, where he established a life and that restaurant. But eventually, he got homesick. For Erie. "I grew up here," he said. "I knew a lot of people here. My friends are here." So he packed up and moved back with a head full of restaurant concepts. He picked up some more experience at Los Compadres and opened El Amigo, 333 State St., which he and his wife still own. "I wanted something different," he said, so Saldana asked his cousin, Isai Jaramilo, a baker in Guanajuato, Mexico, if he would travel to Erie and teach him how to make his favorite sweet breads. "He's been training us," Saldana said. "He said he'd stay until the end of December. It's working out. I'm already baking and learning." What's on the menu? They offer a cabinet full of sweet bread, mostly la conchas, so named because the sugary swirl on top makes the round bread look like a sea shell. Other specialties at Casa Cafe include tres leches cake ("I could eat that every day," Saldana said) and nino envuelto (literally "wrapped child") and besos (two small sweetened bread halves stuck together with strawberry frosting). They also serve Mexican brunch foods, such as avocado toast, chilaguiles, chicken and beef bowls and much more. You can order online from the menu at https://order.toasttab.com/online/casacafe. A tray of la conchas (a sweet Mexican delicacy) are displayed at the new Mexican bakery Casa Cafe in Millcreek Township. Some of the sweets in the cabinet (Be sure to use tongs!) include treats that don't even have specific names. Saldana said they are working with a Mexican vendor on the house coffee, which comes in three roasts, and in winter they serve "abuelita" which is hot chocolate with cinnamon. They intend to use the drive-thru feature of the building once they get their feet under them, and Saldana plans to work with Door Dash for delivery. And, just like in the U.S., where people go to a donut place and order a dozen assorted treats, he expects people to ask for a dozen assorted types of sweetened breads to take home to their family in the mornings. Eliza Claudio, 20, helps a customer at Casa Cafe, a new Mexican bakery in Millcreek Township. 'I just can't thank them enough' What brought him home to Erie, though, are the people and he hastened to thank the community for supporting him and his wife in all their culinary contributions to the community. "The city of Erie is beautiful," he said. "People treat us well and we have lots of friends here. People I go to church with are customers and I just can't thank them enough. "I love this place," said Rebecca Cordero, who moved to Erie from Puerto Rico, and was sharing a chicken bowl with her daughter, Kiomarie Cruz, who was born here. "They have good service and can explain anything. And they're bilingual. That is so nice." Mexican bakery Casa Cafe, in the former Holland Dairy Queen building, is shown in Millcreek Township. "My only complaint is about the weather," Saldana said with a laugh. "Winter is too long." But he said that's easily remedied with a cup of abuelita and some tres leches cake. Contact Jennie Geisler at jgeisler@timesnews.com or at 814-870-1885. This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Casa Cafe in Erie, PA: Mexican bakery opened by El Amigo owners Former President Donald Trump on Sunday issued a belated, unhinged response to actor Robert De Niros fierce criticism of him at last weeks Gotham Awards ceremony. De Niro was surprised during his speech paying tribute to the crew and cast of his latest film The Killers of the Flower Moon when he found his anti-Trump comments had been cut from the autocue. The Oscar winner, who is nostrangerto slamming the former president, picked up his phone and read his Trump-bashing lines anyway. He highlighted Trumps thousands of lies. Watch De Niros speech here: Republican 2024 front-runner Trump hit back on his Truth Social platform at the weekend, calling De Niro a total loser. Robert De Niro, whose acting talents have greatly diminished, with his reputation now shot, must even use a teleprompter for his foul and disgusting language, so disrespectful to our Country, wrote Trump. He has become unwatchable both in movies, and with the FOOLS that destroyed the Academy Awards bringing them from one of the top shows in the Country to a Low Rated afterthought, the former president added. De Niro should focus on his life, which is a mess, rather than the lives of others. He has become a total loser, as the World watches, waits, and laughs! De Niro has yet to respond to Trumps comments. Related... A GoFundMe set up for the woman said she also has "serious head trauma" following the Nov. 24 attack Getty An Iowa woman has had her legs amputated and needs facial reconstruction surgery after being attacked by three dogs An Iowa mother has had her legs amputated and needs facial reconstruction surgery after being attacked by three pit bulls. Fort Dodge Police said an officer arrived on the scene of the incident on Nov. 24 after receiving a call about someone yelling for help. The officer tried to scare the dogs away to stop them attacking the woman, but was unsuccessful. "The officer on scene then drew his duty weapon and shot all three dogs multiple times to stop the attack," a press release read. All three dogs are deceased." Authorities said the woman was transported to Unity Point Trinity Regional Medical Center by ambulance for her serious injuries, before being flown to Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines. Getty The three dogs were shot dead by a Fort Dodge Police Department officer A GoFundMe page has been set up for the woman by her aunt, Teresa Hanus. According to the GoFundMe, an update shared Saturday read that the woman "has lost a lot more than we originally thought. She's had many surgeries and procedures in the last few days." "She has had both legs amputated to her knees. [She] did not need surgery on her hands as we had originally thought. However she is going to need facial reconstruction surgery, she also has serious head trauma and much more." Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for PEOPLE's free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases. Per the police, an investigation into the incident is ongoing. A neighbor told local media outlet KCCI that it took "quite a few rounds of ammunition to get them [the dogs] down." Another added, "I had heard the gunshots. I came outside originally and I saw police with his gun drawn. He had said for me to go inside and I did, I did go inside, but after a couple of moments, my curiosity is piqued. Let's go ahead and step out here. I stepped out into the driveway just to take a peek, I saw a black dog lying down on the ground, deceased, which is super sad." A spokesperson for the Fort Dodge Police Department did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment. For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter! Read the original article on People. Italian officials have refused a request from the German State Antiquities Collection in Munich to return a Roman statue bought by Hitler in 1938. The Discobolus Palombara, a 2nd-century Roman copy of a Greek bronze work, was returned to Italy in 1948 as part of a collection of art illegally seized by the Nazis. In refusing the German museums request, Italys culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano said on Saturday: I made a joketheyll have to step over my dead body. The dispute reportedly began when the Roman Museum requested the return of the statues 17th-century base, but the Munich org instead replied by asking for the return of the statue. This work was obtained fraudulently by the Nazis, and its part of our national heritage, Sangiuliano declared. Read it at Associated Press Read more at The Daily Beast. Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) claimed the GOP now has enough votes for an impeachment inquiry because lawmakers visited Walmart on a recent break and got a push from shoppers. (Watch the video below.) Comer, chair of the Oversight Committee, has yet to providehard evidence to support claims of bribery and influence-peddling against President Joe Biden. But the campaign against Biden continues on conservative news outlets. Maria Bartiromo asked Comer on Fox News Sunday Morning Futures if Republicans had enough votes to begin the inquiry even if the GOP was out one less seat due to the expulsion of Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), Mediaite reported. Comer answered in the affirmative with this dubious take of why Republican moderates are now convinced its the right thing to do. We were in Washington, D.C., for 10 weeks, and there are about 15-20 moderates, Comer said. They really worry about what CNN says, or what The Washington Post writes, and they were getting in their head, Maria. But then, a great thing happened during Thanksgiving: the members went home many of em for the first time in over 10 weeks and they met people in Walmart, and people on Main Street, and theyre like, What in the world have the Bidens done to receive millions and millions of dollars from our enemies around the world, and did they not pay taxes on it? he continued. So they heard from their constituents: Yes, we want you to move forward. We want to know the truth, and we expect the Bidens to be held accountable for public corruption. James Comer tells Maria Bartiromo that moderate House Republicans are more willing to to vote for a Biden impeachment inquiry now because they went home over Thanksgiving and heard from their constituents at Walmart pic.twitter.com/gavFiabw0Y Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 3, 2023 Ian Sams, a White House spokesman for oversight and investigations and special assistant to Biden, was definitely amused. Burisma, its the talk of Walmarts nationwide!!! he snarked with a laughing-cry-face emoji on X. The presidents son, Hunter Biden, sat on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while his father was vice president, prompting complaints from state department officials and speculation of corruption by others. So we are unified at a time when I think its no secret our conference is broken in a lot of ways, Comer continued. The members have heard from their constituents back home. They have confidence in the credibility of our investigation, and the mountains of evidence weve accumulated. So Im confident were gonna have the votes to move forward with this impeachment inquiry. Related... The seasons are changing and as Arizonans enjoy the warmth of their homes, an unwelcome visitor may be lurking in the shadows: the kissing bug. Seven species of kissing bugs are found in Arizona. These nocturnal bloodsuckers have earned their nickname for their tendency to bite people while they sleep. But beyond the discomfort of their bites lies a more sinister threat: the potential transmission of Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite responsible for Chagas disease. While the risk of contracting Chagas in Arizona is relatively low, awareness is key. Knowing what kissing bugs look like, what attracts them and how to avoid them can be crucial. Here's everything to know about kissing bugs and Chagas disease in Arizona. Where are kissing bugs found? Kissing bugs are found in North, Central and South America. There are seven species of kissing bugs in Arizona. Three of them Triatoma rubida, Triatoma protracta and Triatoma recurva are most common in Tucson and Phoenix. What does a kissing bug look like? Identifying kissing bugs based solely on their appearance can be challenging, as the various species have differing characteristics. Here are some general ways you can identify a kissing bug, according to Orkin: Size and shape: Kissing bugs are generally about 0.75 to 1.25 inches long. They have a distinctive elongated shape with a flattened body. Color: Kissing bugs' coloring can vary. Many species are dark brown or black with reddish or orange markings along the edges of the abdomen. Arizona kissing bugs are often reddish-brown. Wings: Adult kissing bugs have wings, and some species have noticeable wing markings. When at rest, their wings typically meet in a straight line down the back, forming a characteristic "V" shape. Proboscis: One of the most distinctive features of kissing bugs is their proboscis, a long tube-like structure at the front of the head that they use to feed on the blood of mammals. The proboscis is usually visible when the bug is feeding or at rest. Three species of kissing bugs Triatoma rubida, Triatoma protracta and Triatoma recurva are most common in Tucson and Phoenix. What attracts kissing bugs? Here are three of the top things that attract kissing bugs, according to the University of Arizona: Light: Kissing bugs are attracted to light, especially artificial light sources. Having bright outdoor lights or leaving lights on near windows at night may attract these bugs. Body heat: Kissing bugs are attracted to the warmth of their hosts. When seeking a blood meal, they are drawn to the heat emitted by mammals, including humans. Dark hiding places: During the day, kissing bugs often hide in dark, secluded places. They are attracted to areas where they can find shelter, such as cracks in walls, woodpiles or debris. How to get rid of kissing bugs Here are ways to keep kissing bugs out of your house and avoid being bitten by them, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services: Seal cracks and gaps: Ensure that your home is properly sealed to prevent entry by kissing bugs. Repair cracks, gaps and other openings in walls, windows and doors. Eliminate hiding places: Potential hiding places for kissing bugs include woodpiles, rocks or debris. Install screens: Use screens on windows and doors to keep kissing bugs from entering your home. Minimize outdoor lighting: Especially around windows; kissing bugs are attracted to light. Consult an expert: If you find kissing bugs in your house, contact a pest control expert or local health authority for guidance. Use bed nets: If you live in an area where kissing bugs are known to be present, or if you're traveling to such areas, consider using bed nets to reduce the risk of contact with the bugs while sleeping. What should I do if I find a kissing bug? If you suspect you have encountered a kissing bug, avoid handling it directly. Its feces can transmit the Chagas disease parasite. Use gloves or a tissue to collect the bug for identification. If you want to confirm the identity of a kissing bug, contact local pest control professionals or entomologists. What happens if a kissing bug bites you? The severity of the reaction to a kissing bug bite can vary from person to person, and some may not even notice they've been bitten. Other people experience mild irritation, redness or swelling at the site of the bite, according to Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York. What does a kissing bug bite look like? A kissing bug bite may appear as a small red bump similar to other insect bites. It might be accompanied by mild swelling and itchiness. The visible signs of the bite may last for a few days to a couple of weeks, depending on the individual's sensitivity to the bug's saliva. In some cases, the bite may leave a mark or scar that persists for a longer time. Why are there so many ladybugs? Here's why you should be happy to see them What to do if you get bit by a kissing bug If you suspect you have been bitten by a kissing bug, Columbia University Irving Medical Center recommends taking these steps: Avoid scratching: Scratching the bite can increase the risk of infection. Treat the bite: Apply an antiseptic ointment or cream to the bite to help prevent infection. Use a cold compress: Applying a cold compress or ice pack wrapped in a cloth can help reduce swelling and alleviate itching. Take over-the-counter medications: Over-the-counter antihistamines or anti-inflammatory medications may help relieve itching and discomfort. Watch for symptoms: Keep an eye out for any unusual symptoms, such as swelling, redness or signs of an allergic reaction. If you experience severe symptoms or if the bite becomes infected, seek medical attention promptly. Owls in Arizona Here are the most common owls you'll see and how to protect them What time of year do kissing bugs come out? Kissing bugs are generally most active during the warmer months. They are most commonly encountered in the Southwest desert during the months of May through July, according to the National Library of Medicine. Their activity is influenced by temperature, and they tend to become more active when temperatures are higher. In regions with milder climates, kissing bugs may be active year-round. Kissing bugs are nocturnal insects, meaning they are most active at night, especially during the hours when their potential hosts are asleep. 'Black widows are super abundant in Phx' Everything to know about these arachnids What percentage of kissing bugs carry Chagas? Not all kissing bugs carry the parasite that causes Chagas disease. Transmission depends on factors such as geographic location, species of kissing bug and local prevalence of the parasite. In the United States, Chagas disease is not prevalent and the risk of contracting the disease from kissing bugs is generally low. What does Chagas disease do to a person? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Chagas disease is a tropical infection caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi. The acute phase of the illness may present with mild or no symptoms. If left untreated, the infection can progress to a chronic stage, potentially leading to severe cardiac and gastrointestinal complications. Is Chagas disease common in Arizona? Chagas disease is not considered common in Arizona. Chagas has been found locally in Arizona, but it is very rare, according to the Maricopa County Office of Epidemiology and Data Services. Chagas disease symptoms Chagas disease can have both acute and chronic phases, each with its own set of symptoms. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, symptoms of the acute phase can be fever, headaches, fatigue and body aches. The chronic phase of Chagas disease can lead to more serious and potentially life-threatening complications such as cardiac issues and digestive system disorders. What is the best treatment for Chagas disease? The treatment of Chagas disease primarily involves antiparasitic medications. According to the World Health Organization, the two main drugs used for treating Chagas disease are benznidazole and nifurtimox. Both drugs work by killing the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite responsible for the disease. Treatment is generally more effective when started early, especially during the acute phase of the infection. What is the prognosis for Chagas disease? The prognosis for Chagas disease varies depending on factors such as early detection and treatment. During the initial phase, symptoms are often mild and death is rare. Untreated Chagas disease progresses to the chronic phase, which could include serious complications such as cardiomyopathy. Early treatment with antiparasitic medications significantly improves outcomes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Prognosis varies widely among individuals, making regular medical follow-ups crucial. Got a story you want to share? Reach out at Tiffany.Acosta@gannett.com. Follow @tiffsario on Instagram. Support local journalism and subscribe to azcentral.com. This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kissing bugs and Chagas disease: All your questions answered Music streaming service Spotify will cut about 17% of its global workforce, becoming the latest big tech company to feel the bite of the economy. The figure represents around 1,500 of the Sweden-based streamers 9,000 staff, as is the result of economic growth slowing dramatically, according to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. Back in January, Spotify said it would cut staff by 6% and announced a hiring slowdown in October, but this move to reduce costs goes much deeper. More from Deadline However, Ek claimed todays decision was not a step back but a strategic reorientation. The New York Stock Exchange-listed company expects to incur costs of 130M-145M ($141M-$158M) in charges in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2023, mainly relating to severance payments and reduction in real estate assets. Ek is not the first chief exec of his kind to choose deep cuts in recent times. Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, X and Roku have all enacted tough redundancy programs reorganize their their businesses for various reasons, most relating to the media environment thats developed after the pandemic, during which tech and digital media companies invested huge sums to capitalize on increased usage of their products. Over the last two years, weve put significant emphasis on building Spotify into a truly great and sustainable business one designed to achieve our goal of being the worlds leading audio company and one that will consistently drive profitability and growth into the future, wrote Ek. While weve made worthy strides, as Ive shared many times, we still have work to do. Economic growth has slowed dramatically and capital has become more expensive. Spotify is not an exception to these realities. Despite the challenges facing digital media companies, the news will hit staff hard, as the companys third quarter financial results revealed it had stemmed operating losses from Q2 to post a small but notable 32M ($34.8M) profit and boosted revenues 11% year-on-year. In a blog post company update, Ek addressed the timing of the cuts. I realize that for many, a reduction of this size will feel surprisingly large given the recent positive earnings report and our performance, he wrote. We debated making smaller reductions throughout 2024 and 2025. Yet, considering the gap between our financial goal state and our current operational costs, I decided that a substantial action to rightsize our costs was the best option to accomplish our objectives. While I am convinced this is the right action for our company, I also understand it will be incredibly painful for our team. Ek noted Spotify had take advantage of the opportunity presented by lower-cost capital in 2020 and 2021 and significantly upped investment in staff, content enhancement, marketing and new verticals. While these generally helped Spotify grow, the company was now in a very different environment. Despite efforts to reduce costs this past year, our cost structure for where we need to be is still too big. Most Spotify staff impacted by the cuts will receive approximately five months severance pay, including healthcare, and be eligible for two months outplacement services. Ek wrote that Spotify had been more productive but less efficient in 2022 and 2023, with too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact. Focus would now turn to delivering for our key stakeholders creators and consumers. In two words, we have to become relentlessly resourceful. He later wrote: This kind of resourcefulness transcends the basic definition its about preparing for our next phase, where being lean is not just an option but a necessity. Embracing this leaner structure will also allow us to invest our profits more strategically back into the business. With a more targeted approach, every investment and initiative becomes more impactful, offering greater opportunities for success. This is not a step back; its a strategic reorientation. Were still committed to investing and making bold bets, but now, with a more focused approach, ensuring Spotifys continued profitability and ability to innovate. Lean doesnt mean small ambitions; it means smarter, more impactful paths to achieve them. He admitted reducing staff but such a degree would change the way we work, and added he would share much more about what this will mean in the days and weeks ahead. Best of Deadline Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Meredith Shay told the 'Sunday Times' she paid $562,000 for a seventh-floor balcony cabin on the ship Getty The deck of an expedition cruise ship One woman who planned to set sail on Life at Sea Cruises three-year journey which was canceled in November had reportedly sold her home to make the voyage. Meredith Shay, a former flight attendant, told the Sunday Times she paid $562,000 for a seventh-floor balcony cabin on the ship. The cruise was originally scheduled to leave from Istanbul, Turkey, on Nov. 1, and visit seven continents, 135 countries and 375 ports. But after it was postponed twice, Life at Sea revealed to passengers on Nov. 17 that the cruise was officially canceled as it had no ship ready on which to sail them, according to CNN. I was desperate to see Namibia for the first time and the Seychelles, said Shay, who lives in Florida and was planning to board the cruise in the Bahamas on Nov. 15. And the coast of India. Another perk for her was not having to cook or drive for three years. I had my own little pity party, Shay recalled of finding out the news, while living with her girlfriend in Fort Lauderdale, after selling many of her belongings. I walked around being devastated for about 12 hours. Getty A promenade deck on a cruise ship When she went to a warehouse to pick up the possessions she intended to bring on the cruise, she said a whole wave of sadness came over me again, looking at everything I so meticulously packed you know, the seasickness pills, summer T-shirts and all the vitamins for three years. It brought it all back, the preparation. Shay said passengers were in disbelief when they learned the news. Related: 3-Year World Cruise Abruptly Canceled 2 Weeks Before It Was Scheduled to Set Sail It was so close to departure, she added. People had let out their homes, put their entire lives on hold. Shay was the first passenger to sign up for the headline-making trip when cruise line Miray International, which owns Life at Sea, officially started accepting bookings for the first-of-its-kind world voyage aboard its MV Gemini ship. The company later decided that the vessel was too small for the cruise and planned to buy a larger ship, the AIDAaura, which was set to be renamed the MV Lara, CNN reported. After passengers were told that the sale was taking longer than expected, news broke that another company, Celestyal Cruises, bought the ship on Nov. 16. Getty Lifebelt at an outside deck of a cruise ship The following day, Life at Seas former CEO, Kendra Holmes who had resigned just days before the sale fell through announced the cruise was canceled in a 15-minute video given to passengers, one of whom shared it with CNN. Related: Passport Delays Cause Maryland Couple to Miss Once-in-a-Lifetime Trip: 'Devastating' (Exclusive) On Nov. 19, guests received a message from Vedat Ugurlu, the owner of Miray International, who also said the cruise would not be departing, per CNN. Ugurlu claimed that Miray is not big enough to afford the ship, but the cruise line had presented the project to investors, and had official approval from some of them to buy the vessel, and after making a down payment on the ship, the investors declined to support us further due to unrest in the Middle East, per CNN. Miray also vowed to refund those who signed up for the cruise. Theres a whole lot of people right now with nowhere to go, and some need their refund to even plan a place to go its not good, one guest anonymously told CNN. I had the next three years of my life planned to live an extraordinary life, and now [I have] nothing. Im having a hard time moving forward, another passenger told CNN. I was proud and feeling brave, now I dont trust anyone or anything. I know itll work out and life will go on, but Im uncertain of the direction. For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter! Read the original article on People. One of social media's worst-kept secrets is out Alix Earle, the mega-influencer with Jersey Shore roots, is off the market. On an episode of Alexandra Cooper's "Call Her Daddy" live show, Earle, a TikToker with more than 6 million followers, confirmed she's in a relationship with Miami Dolphins wide receiver Braxton Berrios. Earle, a Red Bank Catholic grad, recently joined Cooper's Unwell network with her own show, "Hot Mess." More: From Sea Girt to TikTok famous: Red Bank Catholic grad Alix Earle hobnobbing with celebs Despite rumors swirling and many appearances with Berrios on her own social media accounts she refers to him as "NFL Man" Earle says podcasting led her to be more open. Ive definitely been sharing more (about our relationship) with the podcast just because Im talking in longer-form content, she said in an interview with Nylon. Im still learning what those boundaries are going to be for me, so Im still testing the waters with that so far, but I always say Im pretty much an open book. What you see is online, and its what youre going to get. Prior to her "Call Her Daddy" admission, Earle and Berrios took a trip together to the Bahamas, with Berrios appearing on many of the TikTok videos, including a voiceover for one of them. Creating content when youre on a vacation can be a lot, and it does take up a good amount of time, but Ive gotten pretty quick with learning how to capture the videos and edit them down, Earle told Nylon. He has been super supportive, and I know this world can be very different in terms of what Im doing for work and it does take patience at times, but he gets it and he supports it; he always gives me time. Im on my phone editing stuff, and hes like, I know youre doing that right now. Take your time. Youre working. HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - JULY 12: Alix Earle attends The 2023 ESPY Awards at Dolby Theatre on July 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images) The pair even recorded an episode of her podcast together during the Bahamas trip. Earle, who is known for being open about her life, from acne to her breast augmentation, also says the moment the pair affirmed their relationship is preserved. We recorded the moment when we officially said it or asked or whatever, she said to Nylon. It was pretty funny that we got everything on camera. (The relationship) feels good, and it feels right for right now, so just having fun with it. Well see where it goes. This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Alix Earle confirms relationship with Miami Dolphins Braxton Berrios BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. We vehemently reject the statement issued by Armenia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on December 4, 2023, in which it was claimed that an Armenian soldier was killed as a result of fire purportedly opened by Azerbaijan, the commentary of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry on Armenia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs' statement says, Trend reports. "The Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Azerbaijan refuted the misinformation and bogus allegations, stating that the information released by Armenia was false. The Armenian side's bogus assertion is aimed to conceal the disorder and chaos in its armed forces. Armenia, which delayed the peace agreement proposals for more than 70 days, is now jeopardizing the possibilities for normalization with such disruptive statements. With such statements, Armenia also intends to generate fake tension in border areas and attract the attention of third-party states. Azerbaijan, for its part, will continue its peace and reconstruction efforts in the post-conflict period and will steadfastly oppose any attempts to undermine this process", the ministry noted. Spotify is set to slash 17% of its total global workforce, according to a Monday blog post from founder and CEO Daniel Ek, the audio streaming giants latest move toward achieving profitability. The Stockholm, Sweden-based company says about 1,500 workers will be affected. They follow a January reduction of 600 workers from its podcast division in January, and another 200 in June. Over the last two years, weve put significant emphasis on building Spotify into a truly great and sustainable business one designed to achieve our goal of being the worlds leading audio company and one that will consistently drive profitability and growth into the future, Ek wrote. While weve made worthy strides, as Ive shared many times, we still have work to do. Economic growth has slowed dramatically and capital has become more expensive. Spotify is not an exception to these realities. The latest cuts signal that Spotify is doubling down on its push to profitability, after reporting an operating profit and strong subscriber gains last month. The service reported 226 million premium subscribers in October, up from 220 million in mid-summer, shooting past even its own lofty expectations. I realize that for many, a reduction of this size will feel surprisingly large given the recent positive earnings report and our performance, Ek wrote. We debated making smaller reductions throughout 2024 and 2025. Yet, considering the gap between our financial goal state and our current operational costs, I decided that a substantial action to rightsize our costs was the best option to accomplish our objectives. Ek detailed a robust, five-month severance package for departing employees, including continuing health insurance coverage and immigration support for employees who relocated outside their home countries. He acknowledged the companys sprint forward in 2020 and 2021, when we took advantage of the opportunity presented by lower-cost capital and invested significantly in team expansion, content enhancement, marketing, and new verticals. These investments generally worked, he continued, but we now find ourselves in a very different environment. And despite our efforts to reduce costs this past year, our cost structure for where we need to be is still too big. The post Spotify Slashes 17% of Global Workforce appeared first on TheWrap. It was very cute, mom Lillian May tells PEOPLE of the interaction, which was captured on her doorbell camera Lillian May Owen May (L), who gave a hug to UPS delivery person Frank Sims on Nov. 29, 2023 A heartwarming encounter between a Connecticut toddler and a UPS delivery driver recorded on a family's doorbell camera is capturing hearts around the country. Lillian May of Meriden, Connecticut, recently posted a video that showed her son Owen, 2, enthusiastically greeting Frank Sims as he was delivering packages to the May household last week. During the interaction, Sims also helped the family's dog get back inside their garage. In the clip, which has garnered over 600,000 likes on NBC affiliate WNBCs TikTok account, Owen can be seen and heard telling Sims, Thank you! as the driver returns to his truck. Afterwards Sims tells the toddler "you're welcome," to which Owen adorably replies, "I love you!" Lillian May UPS driver Frank Sims and toddler Owen May share a hug as Sims was making his delivery rounds in Meriden, Connecticut on Nov. 29, 2023 Awww, I love you too!" the UPS driver says in response. "Thank you! We need lots of love in the world. Then Owen goes over to Sims and the two share a warm hug. Later on in the video, Sims could also be heard saying hed send a message to Santa because Im Santas helper when hes really busy. It was very cute, Lillian tells PEOPLE. 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. Lillian, a nurse, says that she recognized Sims before the interaction their previous home was on his route, as well but she didn't know his first name. She adds that her son's cheerful interaction with the driver was part of his excitement that the holidays have arrived. Daycare told me this week that they've been focusing a lot on the different holidays, Lillian tells PEOPLE. So Owen has been getting more and more excited about Christmas and about Santa." Lillian May Owen May Related: 6-Year-Old Boy with Leukemia Granted Wish of Becoming World's Youngest UPS Driver: 'So Cool' After posting the doorbell camera footage on social media, Lillian says that a number of people from the community messaged her to tell her "how great of a guy he was." May later shared the video with NBC affiliate WVIT, tells PEOPLE she wanted the driver to get some recognition for his kindness. Frank really took to [Owen.] It was so sweet and genuine. It was a great moment. All day, we kept looking back at the video from our camera and it made our day," she says. "I just wanted him to get a little recognition just for going out of his way to be nice to us and making Owen's day. Related: UPS Driver, Who Emigrated from Cuba, Celebrates First U.S. Paycheck: 'I Can Work Hard for Something' WVIT later aired another segment that showed a reunion between Sims and Owen following their initial interaction. During that meeting, Sims gave Owen a present: a UPS beanie. Lillian May Owen May and his mother Lillian May Seeing how happy he is. Thats just definitely reminded me a lot of my son, Sims told the news station. What Im bringing somebody could be that special gift that maybe they couldnt get or definitely dont know that theyre getting. Related: Watch Moment Amazon Driver Dives Fully Clothed Into Customers Swimming Pool to Cool Off Overall, Lillian says that the lesson from the experience is that the little things matter. How [Sims] interacted with Owen was so special and brought a smile to our faces the rest of the day. And rewatching the video continues to make us smile and clearly with how it took off on social media," she tells PEOPLE. "It's just a good way to kick off the holiday season is with a really special moment like that. For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter! Read the original article on People. Trevor Jacob pleaded guilty on June 30 to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation Trevor Jacob/Instagram Trevor Jacob YouTuber and former Olympian Trevor Jacob has been sentenced to six months in prison after admitting he intentionally crashed his plane to "gain online views." The 30-year-old California man deliberately downed his plane while filming the stunt in Santa Barbara County on Nov. 24, 2021, according to a news release from the Department of Justice, published Monday. He then hid the evidence from investigators. Jacob pleaded guilty on June 30 to one count of destruction and concealment with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for Central California. In a sentencing memorandum, prosecutors said the Lompoc man most likely committed this offense to generate social media and news coverage for himself and to obtain financial gain. "Pursuant to the sponsorship deal, Jacob agreed to promote the companys wallet in a YouTube video that he would post," the U.S. Attorney's Office said. It appears that [Jacob] exercised exceptionally poor judgment in committing this offense, they said, adding that this daredevil-style conduct cannot be tolerated. Related: FAA Says Former Olympian Trevor Jacob Staged Plane Crash for YouTube Video: 'Careless and Reckless' Jacob set up numerous cameras inside the plane before taking to the skies, according to the DOJ. He then took off from Lompoc City Airport, purportedly for a trip to Mammoth Lakes. Instead, Jacob intentionally crashed the plane, which landed in a dry brush area in Los Padres National Forest. TheYouTuber also filmed himself parachuting to the ground after being ejected from the plane. 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. Upon landing, Jacob hiked over to the wreck and recovered the data containing the video recording of his flight and the crash of the airplane," the U.S. Attorney's Office said in Monday's release. On Dec. 23, Jacob posted a video named I Crashed My Airplane that showed him parachuting from the plane and the aircrafts subsequent crash," per the release. It also contained a promotion of the wallet that Jacob intended to profit from. The video has since been removed from YouTube. In an aircraft accident incident report, Jacob falsely indicated that the aircraft experienced a full loss of power approximately 35 minutes after takeoff, according to Mondays news release. He offered a similar story to a safety inspector from the Federal Aviation Administration, as well. Related: Missing WWII Airman Officially Accounted for Nearly 80 Years After Plane Shot Down For weeks, Jacob told investigators he did not know where the wreckage was located. In reality, prosecutors said the YouTuber had returned to the crash site to remove the planes remains, and later discarded the evidence. On Dec. 10, Jacob and a friend flew via helicopter to the wreckage site, picked up the aircrafts remains, and carried them to Rancho Sisquoc in Santa Barbara County, according to the DOJ. Jacob then drove the wreckage to Lompoc City Airport and unloaded it in a hangar, where he cut up and destroyed the evidence. Over the next few days, he deposited the detached parts of the wrecked airplane into trash bins both at the airport and elsewhere. The FAA revoked Jacobs pilot license in April 2022. More than a year later, he pleaded guilty to obstructing the investigation, which carried a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison. For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter! Read the original article on People. It's almost as good as homemade and pure comfort food. Simply Recipes / Photo Illustrations by Sarah Crowder / Getty Images Wintertime means plenty of dark, dreary days. When its pitch black by 5 p.m. and the temperature is hovering at or below freezing, I just want something warm, gooey, and comforting for dinner. Top of mind for the ultimate comfort food on a weeknight? A big helping of macaroni and cheese. Sure, I could reach for a quick box mix or get to work on whipping up my own roux to make mac and cheese from scratch, but sometimes I want something easy thats still packed full of flavor. That's why I keep Tillamook Cheddar & Hatch Chile Mac & Cheese on hand in the freezer, and it does not disappoint. Simply Recipes / Laurel Randolph Why I Love Tillamooks Mac & Cheese Tillamook is an Oregon-based, farmer-owned dairy cooperative that produces butter, ice cream, sour cream, and plenty of cheese. Living in Oregon, the dairy brands sharp cheddar cheese is always on my grocery list because it pairs with everything from crackers and pepperoncini to slices of apple and pear. Having visited the creamery countless times, Ive eaten Tillamook mac & cheese hot and fresh from the kitchen at the visitor center. This freezer find is just as good as the wildly delicious mac and cheese I order every time I go. While Tillamooks line of frozen mac & cheese includes three flavor options, Im always reaching for the Cheddar & Hatch Chile. Jumbo elbow noodles are mixed with sharp white cheddar and jack cheese for a bold base of flavor. But the creamy sauce dressing up the noodles isnt even the best part. The addition of zingy hatch chiles pairs wonderfully with the cheese, with all of the flavors balancing each other out perfectly. Theres a layer of crispy cornbread on top, almost like a savory streusel topping, adding unexpected texture. Its not your average frozen or boxed mac and cheese. Its a freezer aisle find that delivers elevated comfort food. How To Serve Tillamooks Mac & Cheese At $10.99, this frozen aisle buy is a bit pricier than your average frozen meal and definitely more expensive than a shelf-stable box of mac and cheese. However, it does come in a larger 22-ounce box, which is a pretty big portion of mac and cheese. Plus, its made without preservatives. I always pick up a box or two to keep in the freezer every time I go to Target, but Ive also seen it at Walmart and Safeway. I prefer to cook my mac and cheese in the oven, but it can also be microwaved and ready in under 10 minutes for an even quicker dinner. With such a large serving, I tend to split it up and get two meals out of it. I like to pair the mac & cheese with veggies such as broccoli or add sauteed onions and peppers directly to the mix. You could also mix in ham, chicken, or even pulled pork for added protein, or simply use it as a side to round out a quick weeknight meal in minutes. Simply Recipes / Laurel Randolph Read the original article on Simply Recipes. Guatemala, nestled in Central America, boasts a rich blend of cultural influences that are vividly reflected in its diverse cuisine. From bustling market stalls to humble home kitchens, the Guatemalan culinary landscape offers a plethora of tempting flavors, aromas and textures waiting to be explored. One quintessential taste of Guatemala can be found at its iconic street food vendors, where master chefs prepare quick eats that surpass even high-end restaurants. For visitors, partaking in Guatemalas culinary diversity is a must. While sharing borders and culinary ideas with neighboring countries, Guatemalan cooks put their own unique stamp on popular regional dishes. Chile rellenos, a well-known Mexican specialty, gets reinvented with Guatemalan flair. This cross-pollination across borders gives each Central American country its own one-of-a-kind food identity that adventurous eaters will relish discovering. With this rich culinary fusion in mind, we highlight 10 iconic Guatemalan dishes that provide an edible tour of incredible flavors. From market stalls to family tables, Guatemalan cuisine offers an authentic taste of this diverse countrys incomparable culinary heritage and culture. Mixtas mixtas Mixtas is a beloved Guatemalan street food staple that marries various flavors and textures in a single dish. Mixtas are sandwiches typically filled with ingredients like avocado, sausage, ham, cheese and a medley of sauces, creating a plethora of taste in each and every single bite. Kakik Kakik, a traditional Mayan turkey soup, is a testament to Guatemalas ancestral culinary traditions. This hearty, spicy soup is infused with achiote, cilantro, tomatoes and other indigenous spices. It is an essential dish in showcasing the countrys vibrant flavors and the depth of its culinary heritage. Guatemalan Chile Rellenos Guatemalas take on chile rellenos offers a unique twist. Stuffed with minced meat, vegetables and sometimes fruits like plums or raisins, these roasted or fried peppers deliver a delightful blend of savory and sweet flavors. The dish is usually served with tomato sauce as well. Chuchitos chuchitos Chuchitos, similar to tamales, are corn dough parcels filled with savory ingredients like meat, vegetables and spices, wrapped in a maize husk and steamed to perfection. These portable delights are a popular choice among locals and visitors alike. If you are wondering what is the most popular street food in Guatemala, chuchitos is definitely one of the answers. Shucos Shucos, which are Guatemalas more interesting take on hotdogs, are indulgent street eats featuring a sausage nestled in a warm bun, topped with cabbage, avocado, guacamole and an array of sauces that elevate this simple dish to a flavor-packed sensation. The word shuco in Guatemalan Spanish means dirty. It is a fitting name for this dish, not because of the quality, but because of the (delightful) mess it can make as its topped with ingredients. Tapado Tapado Tapado, a sumptuous seafood stew, represents the coastal flavors of Guatemala. Laden with coconut milk, plantains, yuca and an assortment of fresh seafood like shrimp, fish and crab, tapado offers a harmonious blend of sweet and savory notes. Tapado is a traditional dish to the Afro-Caribbean region of Guatemala. Chicharron Stew Chicharron stew is a hearty and robust stew featuring chunks of pork belly or pork rinds cooked with tomatoes, peppers and spices until tender. This dish embodies the countrys love for rich, comforting flavors. This is the perfect meal for when you have worked up an appetite and want a dish that feels home-made on a trip to Guatemala. Garnachas Garnachas Garnachas, similar to small crispy tortillas, are topped with seasoned ground beef, cabbage, salsa and a sprinkle of cheese. These flavorful snacks are ubiquitous at local eateries and capture the essence of Guatemalas street food culture. Its a simple staple that you are likely to fall in love with. Revolcado A dish deeply rooted in Guatemalan tradition, revolcado is a pork-based stew cooked with tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and various spices. The slow cooking process allows the flavors to meld, resulting in a dish thats rich, hearty and bursting with taste. It is a dish that can fill you up while exposing you to the essential flavors of foods in the country. Pepian At the top of the list of dishes to try in Guatemala is pepian, which is considered Guatemalas national dish. This robust stew combines a medley of meats, including chicken, beef or pork, with a tantalizing blend of roasted vegetables, seeds and spices. All of these ingredients and flavors come together, creating a symphony of flavors that represent the countrys culinary diversity. More than a hundred luxury watches have been caught in the crossfire of a battle between Christies and a noted collector. Omani businessman Mohammed Zaman filed a civil complaint against the auction house following the Passion for Time sale in Geneva on November 6. The court then issued an order that the entire consignment be impounded pending resolution of the case. More from Robb Report Zaman, who has been collecting watches for about 45 years, had 113 of his timepieces up for auction in the Passion for Time sale, including a Rolex GMT Master owned and worn by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now and a rare Philippe Dufour Grande et Petite Sonnerie (both pictured above). The lots hammered down for a total of $42,418,914 at the November auction, but post-sale transactions have now been put on hold. Brandos Rolex GMT Master. Mr. Zaman is regrettably blocking Christies from releasing watches to the successful buyers at the Passion for Time sale, a spokesperson for the auction house said in a statement. Christies has taken immediate steps to challenge this interference with the sale process and is hoping for swift resolution. We deeply regret the inconvenience caused to our valued clients pending that outcome. We are sorry that Mr. Zaman fails to recognize the record commercial success of the Passion for Tine sale, which was the largest total achieved for a single-owner watch collection at auction to date. Winning bidders have been advised by Christies to withhold payment until the legal matter is resolved, as reported by Bloomberg. It is currently unclear what sparked Zaman to take action against Christies. (The auction house said it will get back to Robb Report shortly with any pertinent information.) WatchPro claims there were irregularities at the opening of the Passion for Time auction concerning third-party guarantees that were considerably higher than pre-sale estimates in the public domain right up until the start of the sale. A single investor reportedly made a reserve bid guaranteeing a minimum price for every watch in the sale. The guarantee was offered and accepted at a higher price than the original estimates, which then had to be updated before the sale. (The auction was delayed for nearly an hour, according to Bloomberg.) An unknown bidder, who has been nicknamed Paddle 1013, appeared to be winning most of the watches for amounts at the lower end of the new estimates. The aforementioned Brando Rolex, for instance, originally had an estimate of $1.1 million to $2.2 million, but that was revised to $4.3 million to $7.6 million just before the sale. It hammered down for $5.3 million, which is quite close to the revised low estimate. Christies respects the confidentiality of our clients and does not comment on buyer identity, the auction house adds. We do however wish to clarify that the speculation fuelled by Mr. Zaman regarding the identity of the guarantor is simply incorrect. This is not the only horological hiccup that has occurred recently, either. Only Watch has had to postpone its charity auction to next year in the wake of questions raised about how it distributes the funds it raises. Christies Geneva was scheduled to host this years sale. Fingers crossed the issues get sorted and collectors can keep on collecting. Best of Robb Report Sign up for Robb Report's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. The history of mild-mannered Monterey Jack cheese is as murky as the reputation of the man who is credited with naming it. The cheese has fascinating links to California history and a 19th-century land baron in the city of Monterey Scottish immigrant David Jacks. Jacks was infamous for his shady business dealings, including cornering the market for a local cheese that had been produced by many small farmers since the days of Spanish missionaries. Large shipments of cheese from his dairy in cases stamped with his name and the city of origin led customers to request "Monterey Jacks' cheese," giving lasting fame to the man who just happened to be powerful enough to push his way into the cheese business. David Jacks certainly did not invent his namesake cheese history shows that the fresh, white cheese then known as queso del pais had been produced in Spanish missions for a century in California. We know that Dona Juana Cota de Boronda supported her family of 17 in Monterey by selling the cheese door-to-door. Swiss-Italian dairy farmer Domingo Pedrazzi also made jack-pressed cheese sold in the area. However, Jacks' ownership in a large dairy association allowing him to mass produce the cheese and ship it to far away customers strengthens the claim that it's his name on the package today. Read more: 25 Most Popular Snacks In America Ranked Worst To Best The Crooked Path From Gold Rush To Cheese Baron David Jacks and arial California coast - David Jacks by I.W, Taber, January 1, 1909. Wikimedia Commons Public Domain Jacks arrived in California during the 1849 gold rush, settling in the important political center of northern California, Monterey. He quickly became one of the largest landowners in the area and was constantly fighting boundary disputes, according to historical documents. His method of expanding his property was based on making loans to farmers and then foreclosing. If the farmer spoke English, the foreclosures were posted in Spanish, and English notices were posted for the Spanish speakers; just one of the shady tricks Jacks used to acquire his fortune. Jacks' most infamous land deal involved nearly 30,000 acres of former pueblo lands granted to the city of Monterey by the U.S. Land Commission. Attorney Delos Ashley charged the city $1002.50 for legal services to secure the grant. The city then put that same land up for auction to pay the bill and Jacks and Ashley were the sole bidders. The result of the swindle was that Ashley got his money, the two men owned the land, and the city was empty-handed. Although Jacks owned most of Monterey County at one time, at the time his final heir died in 1962, his fortune had been donated to universities and the land had been given back to the city of Monterey. So when you reach for the delicious white cheese we still call Monterey Jack, you're reaching back through time, connecting with a slice of California history and the complicated legacy of David Jacks. Read the original article on Tasting Table. SOUTHERN COMFORT: After bucking expectations with a show at the Palace of Versailles, Simon Porte Jacquemus is getting ready to pack his bags for another trip to more familiar territory: the South of France. The designer will stage his next show on Jan. 29 at the Fondation Maeght in the village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the brand said on Monday. More from WWD Established by Marguerite and Aime Maeght in 1964, the private foundation designed by Catalan architect Josep Lluis Sert houses works of art by the likes of Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miro. The collection is named Les Sculptures in homage to Giacomettis work, Jacquemus said in a statement shared exclusively with WWD. The Fondation Maeght previously hosted Louis Vuittons cruise 2019 show. In keeping with its recent tradition of showing outside the official calendar, Jacquemus is staging its display after the end of the Paris mens shows, which run from Jan. 16 to 21, and Paris Couture Week, scheduled for Jan. 22 to 25. Jacquemus has amplified its reach on social media thanks to cinematic runway displays in spectacular locations including a lavender field and a salt mine, often in the South of France. This will mark the designers first winter show in his native Provence. The show on the Grand Canal at Versailles in June was part of a brand elevation strategy that includes plans for an international retail rollout, but Jacquemus remains closely associated with a Mediterranean aesthetic and accessible products such as 100-euro bucket hats and 670-euro Chiquito handbags. In addition to opening a flagship on Avenue Montaigne and summer pop-ups in Portofino and Como, Italy, and Saint-Tropez, the company is scouting for permanent locations in the U.S. and the Middle East, with plans to open several stores overseas by 2026, its chief executive officer Bastien Daguzan told WWD in June. Jacquemus posted gross revenues of 212 million euros in 2022 versus 102 million euros in 2021, he reported. Daguzan declined to provide a forecast for 2023, but previously said the company has a medium-term ambition of reaching 500 million euros in revenues by 2025. Best of WWD For the first time, scientists have figured out how tardigrades some of the toughest creatures on the planet mate. These tiny, hardy critters have few obvious differences between males and females, which made it unlikely that they found mates by sight alone. It turns out, females may release a chemical cue that lures the males, researchers found. The males strongly responded, moving toward the females in water environments. The females didn't seem to have the same compulsion, researchers reported in the November issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology . Related: Tardigrades survive being dried out thanks to proteins found in no other animals on Earth Tardigrades also known as "water bears," thanks to their chubby appearance can tolerate extreme conditions . For example, they can survive a combined exposure to the vacuum of space, cosmic radiation and UV radiation . Unlike some animals, male and female tardigrades are hard to distinguish . There are size differences but no obvious secondary traits. As a result, it wasn't clear how most of the 1,300 tardigrade species found mates. One theory is that these microscopic animals release a chemical signal to find a mate. To test that theory, Justine Chartrain , a doctoral researcher at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, and colleagues performed a series of experiments with the species Macrobiotus polonicus to see how individuals would react when exposed to members of the opposite sex. They placed a female tardigrade in one sealed "arena" and a male in another, with another tardigrade in the middle. Then, they recorded the behavior of the middle water bear. "In the water environment, males were spending more time next to females than next to males," Chartrain told Live Science in an email. This suggested that the males could smell the females in their chamber and were lured by it. RELATED STORIES Tardigrade proteins could help stabilize drugs without refrigeration, scientists say Tardigrades may hitchhike on snails ... and then suffocate in their slime Which animals are most likely to survive climate change? Based on these results, the researchers wondered whether the tardigrades could follow a chemical trail that worked in a medium other than water. So they tested the chubby creatures in a Jell-O-like substance called agar. When one water bear was released, it was given a head start to wander across the agar before another tardigrade was released. "We wanted to know whether tardigrades could deposit chemical cues on the agar and follow this path, Chartrain said. Neither sex followed a path created by other tardigrades, but in the agar, "we saw that sometimes males followed females after randomly encountering them," Chartrain said. The females basically ignored the males, while the males often changed course to move alongside the females. The study suggests that the tardigrades can only locate opposite-sex mates in water environments and that only the males actively seek out females for mating. Former Connecticut lawmaker to report to federal prison for stealing $1.2M in COVID funds A former Connecticut lawmaker is expected to turn himself over to authorities on Monday to begin serving a federal prison sentence for COVID fraud. Michael DiMassa, 32, the former state representative who served West Haven -- just outside of New Haven -- was sentenced earlier this year to 27 months in prison after stealing $1.2 million in COVID relief and other funds from the city. DiMassa pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud last month. He is required to pay nearly $866,000 in restitution and, following prison, will serve five years of supervised release, during which he is expected to perform 100 hours of community service, according to court documents. MORE: Man who allegedly sold fake COVID cure arrested after 3-year manhunt He is also required to participate in programs for gambling addiction treatment and mental health treatment upon release, the documents show. DiMassa was originally set to report to prison on July 31 but a judge postponed his surrender date twice so he could take care of his newborn baby until his wife, Lauren DiMassa, was released from prison, according to local ABC News affiliate WTNH. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Connecticut said that between July 2020 and September 2021, while serving as a state representative and city employee, Michael DiMassa was authorized to approve reimbursements of COVID costs incurred by West Haven using funds from the federal government's Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. PHOTO: In this Nov. 1, 2022 file photo Former State Rep. Michael DiMassa, left, arrives at US District Court in Hartford with his attorney John Gulash. (Jessica Hill/Hartford Courant via AP, FILE) During this period, he "conspired with others to steal these funds and other West Haven funds through the submission of fraudulent invoices, and subsequent payment, for COVID relief goods and services that were never provided," the U.S. Attorney's Office said. Michael DiMassa and his wife billed the city for a youth violence prevention program and for "Youth Violence COVID-19 Associated Expenses" with invoices that included in-home home counseling, special needs hourly services, a fall youth clinic, Wi-Fi assistance for low- and moderate-income families, equipment rentals, licensing fees, meals and cleaning supplies. The couple received more than $147,000, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Lauren DiMassa pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and was sentenced to six months in prison. She was released in October and is currently in home confinement, according to WTNH. In another instance, Michael DiMassa and John Bernardo, a former West Haven housing specialist, formed a company and fraudulently billed the city and its "COVID-19 Grant Department" for consulting services provided to the West Haven Health Department that were never performed, according to court documents. Between February 2021 and September 2021, the city paid the company more than $636,000. Michael DiMassa made several large cash withdrawals from the company's bank account, some occurring around the same time he executed a cash "buy-in" of gaming chips at Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, court documents show. MORE: More than $200 billion in pandemic relief potentially squandered, says government watchdog report Michael DiMassa also conspired with West Haven businessman John Trasacco to fraudulently bill the city through two companies, both owned by Trasacco, for goods and services provided, including delivering personal protective equipment; maintenance of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning units; delivering COVID supplies to the Board of Education; and cleaning school buildings, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. One of those school buildings that was allegedly cleaned had been vacant and abandoned for years, the U.S. Attorney's Office said. Trasacco's companies received more than $431,000 as a result of the scheme. Bernardo pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in June 2022 and was sentenced to 13 months in prison in March 2023. Trasacco was found guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of wire fraud in December 2022 and was sentenced to eight years in prison in April 2023. Former Connecticut lawmaker to report to federal prison for stealing $1.2M in COVID funds originally appeared on abcnews.go.com BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. President of the International Automobile Federation (FIA) Mohammed Ben Sulayem has arrived in Baku, Trend reports. Ben Sulayem is set to join the General Assemblies and the FIA Prize Giving Ceremony, scheduled to take place in Baku on December 5-8. Meanwhile, representatives from 128 countries and automobile clubs are gearing up for the FIA Week in Baku. The decision to host this esteemed event in Baku was sealed last December during the FIA General Assembly in the Italian city of Bologna. Several countries competed to host this global motorsport spectacle, and Azerbaijan's candidacy was approved following the voting. Rhode, the beauty brand founded by Hailey Bieber, has a new president. Lauren Ratner, previously Rhodes head of brand, has been promoted to president and chief brand officer. The appointment follows the departure of chief executive officer Melanie Bender in recent months. More from WWD Ratner joined the brand pre-launch in 2020 after helming marketing at Reformation and other stints at Michael Kors and James Perse. She is stepping into her role after an incredibly strong growth year, she told WWD. Rhode passed the $10 million sales mark after only 11 days of selling when it launched last year, and has amassed more than 1 million waitlist sign-ups. Ratner pointed to its hero peptide lip treatments as a testament to the brands momentum. The customer continues, with every launch, to get more and more excited. Thats a testament to Hailey and the strength of the product, but also the marketing and high-impact creative, she said. Jelly Bean, our most recent limited-edition lip launch, caused the highest sales volume and [of a single lip product] on launch day. Ratners strategy has been to find the sweet spot between unconventional partnerships, a la Rhodes Krispy Kreme collaboration, and a measured approach to introducing new products. The marriage of a household name like Krispy Kreme with a skin care brand wasnt something people expected. There was this stickiness that worked tremendously well, she said. As for the core business, it took the brand a full year to introduce a new stock keeping unit. Although consumers are clamoring for products, Ratner thinks the brands restraint is resonating. We have a continued focus on intentionality with everything we put into the market. The customer feels that, she said. They dont want to see a brand necessarily flood the market, they want to see one thats choiceful and purposeful. Rhodes foray into color with tinted lip treatments has given the brand confidence to edge deeper into the category, Ratner said. Were going to continue to play there, she said. In the marketplace, people were mixing our peptide glazing fluid with foundation, and the barrier restore cream with blush. Its always going to be skin-forward.I see unlimited opportunity for Rhode in adjacent categories. Lauren has been by my side forming the world of Rhode since inception in 2020, helping to bring my vision to life, Bieber said via email. Shes an incredibly skilled brand builder and has an innate understanding of my vision as a founder as well as a savvy understanding of our customer. We both have big ambitions for Rhode and Im excited for all thats to come. Best of WWD The promotional poster for "A Biltmore Christmas" isn't quite what one might expect from a Hallmark Channel holiday film. With nary a swatch of red or green in sight, the featured art showcases actors Bethany Joy Lenz and Kristoffer Polaha in authentic, 1947-era formalwear, promising viewers a straight-to-streaming Christmas movie that, well, looks anything but. Such is Keith Nielsen's plan, at least. So far, Nielsen has overseen the costumes for seven Hallmark holiday movies, four of which will premiere this year. And though his costuming may not involve the genre's now-notorious signatures of misshapen turtlenecks and well-worn peacoats, he's still committed to capturing, and elevating, the essence of the season. "I'm really proud of the fact that my movies aren't so cookie-cutter," he says. "I love that I'm still able to convey warmth and coziness, but just in a different way." Having cut his teeth in the costume departments for shows like "Mozart in the Jungle" and "Quantico," Nielsen broke into the Christmas category with "My Adventures With Santa," a 2019 TV movie starring Denise Richards. His first Hallmark project, a 2011-set time-traveling story called "Next Stop, Christmas," aired in 2021, and he hasn't slowed down since. Though several of his films, like "A Biltmore Christmas" and "Next Stop, Christmas," were at least partially set in years' or decades' past, Nielsen is keenly aware of the fact that these projects will air again and again as reruns for years (and holiday seasons) to come. If only from this perspective, his work is cut out for him: How can one present costumes that, against all odds, don't age? Keith Nielsen. Photo: Courtesy of Hallmark Channel "Honestly, the one thing that's really ebbed and flowed for me, trend-wise, is the fit of jeans," he says. "We were into skinny jeans, and now I feel like we're out of that. But I'm also not pushing them to be too trendy, like the 'mom jean.'" Of late, Nielsen has landed on a happy compromise in his films by way of the classic Levi's Slim Straight, which ticks all the contemporary boxes without explicitly pinning itself to any one style. Jeans, he explains, are a fitting case study for his Hallmark costuming as a whole: "Hallmark, to me, is a very American brand," he says; that fundamental understanding leads him to shopping off the rack at all-American retailers like Brooks Brothers, J.Crew and Banana Republic. Not every piece you'll spot in a Hallmark holiday movie, however, comes straight from your (and perhaps your mother's) favorite mall brand. When starting a new film, Nielsen's first stop tends to be Oscar-winning costume doyenne Ann Roth's personal collection, the vast expanse of which is housed in a sprawling warehouse in Pennsylvania. Inside, Nielsen says, are aisles and aisles of clothes from her seven-decade long career across both Hollywood and Broadway. "It's all stuff that's been made at awesome costume shops, or is vintage bought from all over the world," he says. "I usually start there, gathering things for anybody and everybody, including background actors." Like Roth (who herself most recently landed a cameo in this summer's "Barbie"), Nielsen is no stranger to capital-F fashion: His process also includes scouring luxury consignment platforms, like The RealReal, for high-wattage garments that he employs strategically during crucial scenes. This year, those resale finds include a slew of vintage coats for another of his 2023 movies ("A Merry Scottish Christmas," starring "Mean Girls"' Lacey Chabert), as well as the glitzy gold gown featured on the aforementioned "A Biltmore Christmas" poster. View the original article to see embedded media. "A Biltmore Christmas," in particular, serves as the most hotly-anticipated of Nielsen's foursome of 2023 Hallmark spectaculars, and for good reason: It was shot entirely on location at the historic Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina, which remains one of the most prominent examples of Gilded Age mansions still standing today. For Nielsen, such an iconic and lavish set demanded a meticulous attention to costuming detail. And with the lion's share of the film taking place in 1947, Nielsen was doubly tasked with prioritizing historical accuracy, which he garnered from 1940s-era advertisements and sewing patterns. The costumes' overarching color palette, consisting largely of jewel tones, is considered on the mark for the time period, too, also complementing the rich oaks and walnuts of the Estate's interior. "I'm not just figuring out the costumes from head to toe," he says. "I'm always talking to my actors about thinking about the frame. You have to think about a costume in terms of the edit. You make or break a film in the editing room." With Hallmark, Nielsen is used to working quickly, often having no more than a week or two of prep time before filming begins. On "A Biltmore Christmas," he was fitting actors including close to a thousand extras on a Saturday before they shot on a Monday. His department, he says, demands diligent organization: After clothing has been ordered by type and style, Nielsen and his support team of seven assign each outfit a garment bag that comes adorned with a tag, labeling all its scenes; each is filled with everything from jewelry to shoes, and gets brought into actors' trailers. At the end of the day, everything goes back in the bag, and off it goes to get laundered. Actors Bethany Joy Lenz and Kristoffer Polaha appear in Hallmark Channel's 1947-set "A Biltmore Christmas," filmed entirely on location at the historic Biltmore Estate. Photo: Courtesy of Hallmark Channel Nielsen's garment-bag practice is as advantageous for function as it is for form. He'll often line up a character's full breadth of garment bags to see their color story from first shot to last. In the warm-and-fuzzy Hallmark holiday universe, Nielsen can say a lot with color. "I like to do a little color connection thing, where I tie [the color of a woman's coat] into [her romantic interest's] tie or sweater," he says. "The home movies are only an hour and a half, so choices need to be a little obvious sometimes. And we do know what's going to happen, so I like to lean into that." Predictable? Maybe so. But this doesn't mean that Nielsen's Hallmark projects aren't also legitimate in their own right artistically and otherwise. Since his first Christmas movie aired in 2019, he's found there to be a growing credibility in the oft-dismissed genre, if only from those industry folks behind the scenes. This year, three out of four his Hallmark films were full union productions and they're getting bigger, he says. During the holiday season, more than 80 million people watch at least a few minutes of a Hallmark movie, according to global consumer research firm Nielsen (of no relation to the costume designer). Most weeks in November and December, the company has found that Hallmark ranks as the number-one network among the advertiser-friendly demographics of women 18-49 and 25-54. It's also a huge boon for advertisers, which help generate more than $350 million for Hallmark just from its Christmas movies alone. "I can travel anywhere and find that somebody has seen my work," says Nielsen. "But these movies bring a lot of joy to a lot of people, including those who are homebound or going through hard times. This is what they look forward to all year, and I'm a part of that joy." Never miss the latest fashion industry news. Sign up for the Fashionista daily newsletter. Visions of cookies, cakes, pies, and other sugar-loaded treats may take the forefront of your festive daydreamsand your appetiteahead of the holidays. But if sugar is a staple of baking, and holiday baking is a staple of Christmastime, what happens when theres an international sugar shortage just in time for the holidays? Before you scream "Christmas disaster," take a second to look at the facts regarding the causes of this year's sugar shortage, when experts predict it will end, and what you can use to substitute the sweet stuff in the meantime. A report from AP News reveals that The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization predicts a 2% decline in global sugar production in the 2023 to 2024 season. This is in comparison with the previous year, translating to a loss of about 3.8 million U.S. tons, said Fabio Palmeri, an FAO global commodities market researcher. Talk about unsavory news! Why is there a sugar shortage? Look no further than to good ole mother nature as the culprit. The AP News report sheds light on the effects of El Nino, a natural phenomenon that can cause extreme weather conditions, like flooding and drought. In this case, extreme drought is at the core of the sugar issue in Asia, which houses the second- and third-largest sugar exporters: India and Thailand. El Nino caused extremely dry conditions in India in August, which stunted the crucial growing phase for sugarcane. It also altered the quality of Thailands sugar harvest in addition to the lowered quantity. What effect does this have, exactly? Unfortunately, the decline in global sugar production means a surge in prices. Sugar worldwide is trading at the highest prices since 2011, which means bakers worldwide are producing less and less, according to AP News. The Bureau of Labor's most recent Consumer Price Index shows that sugar prices have increased 8.8% over the last year. That means you should expect sugar prices to be up from the last time you walked down the baking aisle. What does this mean for the future of sugar? Unfortunately, we may continue to see worldwide sugar production numbers go down and prices go up. Naradhip Anantasuk, leader of the Thailand Sugar Planters Association, told AP News that 84 million U.S. tons of sugarcane are expected to be milled in 2024 harvest season compared to 103 million U.S. tons this year. Taking this into consideration, its safe to say that the shortage will prevail throughout the next year, making things harder for those looking to bake during the holiday season and beyond. On the bright side, Brazils sugarcane harvest is predicted to be 20% bigger than last years due to favorable weather in the Southern Hemisphere. And while Brazil is the biggest sugar exporter, its harvest will only help fill the void later in 2024. Until then, expect sugar prices to continue to be marked up to combat the shortage. What is a good sugar substitute? On a sweeter note, if your sugar supply isnt enough to last you through the holidays, weve got you covered with sugar substitutes that will suffice in a pinch for your favorite Christmas treats. For baking substitutions, our top picks are coconut sugar, honey, maple syrup, and molasses. Just keep in mind that when swapping in liquid sweeteners, you'll need to reduce any added liquid in the recipe by about 1 tablespoon for each 1/4 cup of sweetener used. You can also turn to fruit-centric recipes that utilize natural sugars, like pumpkin banana bread or Ree Drummond's recipe for her mom's applesauce muffins. Regardless of how you choose to get creative with sugar this holiday season, your baked goods are sure to be just as good thanks to these clever substitutions. Just make sure to test the modified recipes out ahead of serving them at your holiday potluck or Christmas party! You Might Also Like Four roommates have filed a $16 million federal civil rights lawsuit against the Prince Georges County Police Department (PGPD), Maryland, for the reckless shooting of their dog back in 2021, among other claims, Fox5 News reports. In the lawsuit, the roommates accuse three PGPD officers of entering their Maryland apartment without a warrant, shooting their canine, subjecting them to excessive force, and detaining them without justification. The dog, a Boxer mix named Hennesy, belonged to one of the roommates. The pet was shot twice by two of the officers and tased by the third one. Sadly, the unprovoked shooting left Hennessy critically injured and paralyzed. She was later euthanized. A violation of Fourth Amendment rights According to the lawsuit, the dog hadnt attacked any of the three officers before the fatal shooting occurred. Now, the four roommates Erika Erazo Sanchez, Erica Umana, Brandon Cuevas, and Dayri Amaya are seeking compensation for the death of Umanas dog and the violation of their civil rights. The roommates released enough cell phone video, that, along with the body worn footage from police, is helping attorneys make a strong case for the violation of their clients Fourth Amendment rights. Malcolm Ruff, one of the roommates attorneys, said, This is the basics. This is like the text of the Fourth Amendment, the warrants must be obtained or you cannot go in. He continued, That is it. If theres no exception, you are in violation of the constitution, and that is exactly what these officers did. How police shot, tased dog inside apartment (Photo Credit: Neal McNeil | iStock Editorial via Getty Images Plus) The terrifying incident happened in June of 2021. At the time, PGPD was responding to reports of a dog bite at an apartment complex on Allison Street. Two officers arrived at the scene and located the victim, who said a pair of large dogs had bitten her. Shortly after, the officers went to the apartment where the canines involved in the incident reportedly lived. PGPD claimed the officers knocked on the apartment, but no one answered. This prompted them to get a master key from a maintenance man in the complex. A third officer soon arrived, and they all barged into the roommates residence without producing a warrant. This is despite video footage proving that several of the inhabitants asked to see a warrant before the officers entered. As one officer exited one of the bedrooms during the unlawful search, the dog appeared. Thats when they shot and tased her. Sanchez, who tried to comfort the injured canine as it lay helplessly on the ground, described that moment as a nightmare. I held Henneys body, bloody body, while she was dying in her arms, while the rest of her family was wrongfully detained and denied the ability to check on her, she said. Roommates hope for justice as internal police investigation yields none Officers named in the lawsuit are Jason Ball, Joseph Mihanda, and Anthony Jackson. The three detained the roommates after the incident without cause, adding to the trauma the group endured. Shortly after, Internal Affairs opened an investigation into the policemen. During which, two of the officers were suspended and a third was placed on administrative leave. Despite the circumstances surrounding their actions, Internal Affairs determined the suspended officers could remain on administrative duty. All three officers were found to have done conduct unbecoming of an officer. Despite this, the third officer only faced a couple of weeks of suspension from duty and lost the opportunity to be promoted at that time. In what seems to be a similar miscarriage of justice, an inquiry by the states attorneydetermined no charges were warranted against the trio. The roommates bringing suit are hoping justice will prevail. Furthermore, Ruff shared that the group is pushing for additional training for police so similar incidents are prevented in the future. Arguably, America is facing an epidemic of police killing dogs at an alarming rate. In fact, estimates from the Department of Justice show officers are responsible for the death of nearly 10,000 dogs annually. The post Maryland Roommates Sue Police For $16 Million After Dogs Death appeared first on DogTime. If you are still unsure what kind of turkey to serve this Christmas, how about one raised exclusively outdoors under the protection of a dedicated, full-time guard dog? Bear, a 50kg Maremma Sheepdog, lives outside all year round and works day and night to protect farmer George Fords 640-strong flock of slow-grown Bronze turkeys. Maremmas are bred in central Italy to live with flocks of sheep and protect them from wolves and other predators, and Ford is one of a handful of farmers in the UK utilising them to operate a full-pasture-raised chicken and turkey farm. Most free-range turkeys are shut away in a barn at night, explains Ford, a sixth-generation farmer. That one paddock soon becomes overgrazed and turns to mud quickly, he says. And you cant give them any more space because you are limited to where the barn is. With Fords Bear-proof pasture method at his farm Nempnett Pastures in Blagdon, Somerset the turkeys are kept within a poultry net that is moved to fresh ground every couple of days. They also dont need to be shut in at night. We couldnt do that without Bear as it would be too risky for a fox getting through the net. When Ford first brought Bear home as a puppy two years ago, he put him in a little kennel within the turkeys pen, so they could get acquainted. Now, Bear wont even come into the Ford family home and prefers to live 365 days outside. The most he will do is stand with his paws on the back steps. He doesnt like going inside very much, says Ford. 'He doesnt like going inside very much,' says Ford of Bear There were a few teething problems in his early training. Hed never kill a bird, but hed run around with one in his mouth. We had to obviously stop that, says Ford. Now I trust him totally. He wouldnt kill one of them unless we didnt feed him. Hes very good. Fords social media posts that feature the dog generate the greatest engagement; never groomed, Bears snow-white fur remains surprisingly immaculate. Bear has since been joined by Holly, another Maremma but slightly smaller at 40kg, who had been bought as a pet and raised domestically by a family nearby, only to be given up. Now the two dogs work together. From April to August they live with Fords flock of chickens. They are then split up when the turkeys arrive in summer and are reunited when the chickens go in November. They play really well, says Ford. Its nice to see. I didnt like it at the start when [Bear] was on his own, so it was really good for him to have Holly for company. From December to April, theres no poultry at Nempnett Pastures and the dogs live around the farm and the paddocks. They like spending time with Fords herd of Hereford beef cows. When Ford first brought Bear home as a puppy two years ago, he put him in a little kennel within the turkeys pen This is Fords sixth year raising turkeys, having started with 120 and now more than quadrupling his production. After six months living on his farm, the turkeys are slaughtered on 4 Dec. Nempnett Pastures uses a dry plucking process, which means the birds are legally allowed to hang for two weeks afterwards, helping to develop flavour. Ford mainly sells from his website and to local people, but is able to ship nationwide. Having his flock outside, and the exercise they get consequently, he says helps the birds to develop such beautiful flavours. People love the story, he says: And when they eat it, they realise turkey can be juicy and tasty. Bird flu is a concern, but Ford believes raising his birds completely outdoors means they have lots of space and pathogens dont spread as quickly as they would in a barn. Its a far cry from the origins of Nempnett and Ford has turned the family business upside down in recent years. After the Second World War, the farm intensified production, ultimately concentrating on intensive pig farming. It was really intensive factory farming. And I hated it, says Ford. With processes and supermarkets squeezing the margins, the pigs became so low animal welfare. We had to lock the sheds up because we dreaded anyone seeing it. Having the flock outside helps the birds to develop beautiful flavours, says Ford In the modern farming world, Ford says, you either need lots of animals in sheds or lots of acres. With only 150 acres, Nempnett Pastures is small by modern standards. But he was determined to find a way to farm more sustainably and ethically. When he had the opportunity to move into turkeys and develop a pasture-fed model, he took it. I wanted to do something that I am happy and proud to show the world. Today, that involves showing off Bear and Holly with pride. Although you wouldnt want to get too close. Maremmas, a breed that is referenced as far back as the 2nd century BC, are fiercely protective. They are so loyal to us and love my family, says Ford. When I go down to them, they come running up with a big smile on their faces. You cant help but interact with them. Bear just lies on his back and wants his belly rubbed all the time. However if [anyone else] walked down there Bear would be a completely different dog. Hed be up barking and baring his teeth. Its quite scary. If he doesnt know you, good luck to you. Ford can sleep well at night, knowing Bear would never hurt a feather on one of his birds. Theres one turkey who will chase him and he chases him back; they play together. Hes really as good as gold. 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. Few desserts serve a slice of home quite like a pie. A vessel for a variety of ingredients -- which are often locally sourced -- the sweet treat occurs in many renditions worldwide. From Florida's key lime pie, to Australia's meat pie, it's fair to say the food's a global hit since all it necessitates is a delicious crust. In South Africa, the pie of choice is called melktert. Created by Dutch settlers several centuries ago, it's a delicious showcase of local dairy culture. Spiced with cinnamon and served with a creamy, melt-in-your-mouth consistency, it's a local rendition with immediate appeal. It is no surprise, then, that the traditional dessert continues to be popular throughout the African nation. Found with different doughs, textures, and spiced with varying ingredients, it's a vessel for a personal spin, too. So, let's dive into its historical origins and components. The iconic melktert is a dessert worth familiarizing yourself with. Read more: 25 Best Ice Cream Brands Ranked Background Of Melktert sliced of melktert - Aninka Bongers-Sutherland/Shutterstock This delicious pie traces its origins to Dutch colonizers who arrived in South Africa in the 1600s. Many worked with dairy, producing the creamy milk products necessary for the internal filling. They combined their local production with pastry techniques, likely drawing from baked goods such as Mattentaart and other baked treats. Originally, the cake was made from short crust, although today, recipes have expanded to store-bought puff pastry, and without a dough component altogether. In the process, a uniquely South African pie arose. Even the name evinces such a fusion of cultures; it translates to milk tart from Afrikaans. And its spice component also hails from abroad; cinnamon came by way of slaves from Indonesia. Today, melktert coalesces such influences into a dessert widely enjoyed throughout South Africa. It's a delicious staple found at festivities, sold in groceries, and crafted inside the home. Let's dive into what goes into it. What Is Melktert? top down view of melktert components - Chrystal de Witt/Shutterstock Melkert's appeal is all in the light, airy consistency. Unlike other custard pies, the interior is creamy, without a rigid texture. However, the exact viscosity depends on the recipe. To achieve such a delicious filling, the recipe involves variable ratios of milk, flour, eggs, and butter. The latter ingredient is of utmost importance; its flavor and rich consistency add robust character to the tart. And for added flavor, cinnamon is a frequent addition, along with vanilla extract and occasionally nutmeg. Some recipes may simply mix up such ingredients and enjoy as a pudding. Nevertheless, a tasty layer of dough underneath is a more common element. The composition of the pastry vessel greatly varies, from shortcrust to puff pasty and graham crackers. The crust is kept thin to allow the internal pudding filling to shine. The creamy filling is chilled in the fridge, and the result is enjoyed with family and friends. Read the original article on Tasting Table. Heres what you need to know. The Spruce You purchased fresh prawns and shrimps at the fish counter, and youre starting to prepare them for a dish by cleaning them, removing the peel, and pulling off the head, and you suddenly notice an orange paste. inside. Or maybe youve taken a trip to Portugal or Spain, ordered a plate of grilled prawns, and when you pulled back the head and pinched off the peel, you were left wondering, like me, what is this orange paste exactly? And more importantly, can you eat it? The answer is simple: That orange paste is roe, a fancy word for eggs. And yes, you can eat it. Roe is considered a special ingredient when cooking, says Gill Boyd, culinary arts chef-instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education. In many cultures and cuisines, in fact, roe is a delicacy. When Will You Find Roe in Shrimp and Prawns? If youre used to buying frozen shrimp and prawns, youre not likely to encounter roe. Buying fresh prawns from a fishmonger or seafood counter is when youre more likely to see it. Generally, youre going to find it in fresh prawns or shrimp with heads-on, says Boyd. Should You Discard the Roe or Leave It In? Deciding what to do with the shrimp and prawn roe comes down to personal preference and how youre preparing them. If it is a shell-on preparation, then it is fine to have the roe in the shrimp, says Boyd. Personally, I'm a fan of leaving the roe in for the flavor alone, says Steve Chiappetti, executive chef at the Albert restaurant in downtown Chicago. Roe is also rich in fatty acids, vitamins A, D, and B12, along with other nutrients that support balanced health, he adds. Another benefit of shrimp and prawn eggs is that they are typically more affordable than other types of roe. Certain kinds of roe are very limited in availability, says Chiappetti, and those tend to be in the highest demand when you get into caviars or sushi-grade roe. Dishes to Prepare with Shrimp and Prawn Roe Roe brings a unique flavor profile to a dish. You'll sometimes hear it called caviar of the Mediterranean and with good reason, says Chiappetti. It brings with it a delicate sweetness that you won't find in any other ingredient. Shrimp with roe are best used in dishes that call for head-on whole shrimp, whether grilled, sauteed, pan-fried, or deep fried, says Boyd. These use a light sauce or marinade, which makes it easier to peel and eat the shrimp. And because the shrimp isnt cleaned or peeled, the roe stays intact, he says. Chiappetti loves shrimp with roe for seafood pasta. It's best to add the shrimp at the end, lending a natural, sweet seafood flavor at the finish, he says. Pasta alla bottarga, a Sicilian dish, is a great example that calls for roe, he says. This is a fully robust, earthy dish that utilizes the eggs [and] are dried and salted, he says. When added to your cooked spaghettiin a recipe that also calls for olive oil, garlic, chili flakes and lemonthe freshness of the sea comes to life. The options dont end at pasta. You can also use shrimp or prawn roe to garnish soups, fold it into deviled eggs, or add to a creole shrimp etouffee, says Chiappetti. The Joy of Roe Eating roe may be a new experience for many people in the United States, while in many other regions of the world, its embedded in the gastronomy. Part of the joy of eating whole crustaceans is uncovering all of the delicious parts of the body, with the roe included, says Boyd. This only adds to the experience. Read the original article on The Spruce Eats. Every so often, a tweet will go viral that will make you go, Yes! This! and today, that viral tweet is about all the permanent harm and changes our bodies endure due to pregnancy. It all began with this initial tweet in 2022 from @Patricia_Ann_E, who, according to her bio, is a medical worker living in Canada. She says that a woman she encountered told her that she had no idea that pregnancy can permanently harm your body. I cant help wondering which part of this is personal ignorance or a societal lie and glorification of pregnancy, @Patricia_Ann_E (validly) concluded. I had a woman today tell me she had no idea that being pregnant can permanently harm your body and I canat help wondering which part of this is personal ignorance or a societal lie and glorification of pregnancy. Patricia Ann (@Patricia_Ann_E) November 14, 2022 Many people chimed in with their own stories about pregnancy and the changes and damage they experienced during or after pregnancy. As someone whose health was permanently damaged by her last pregnancy, I want to say itas both. aItas normal!a aWomen have been doing this for millennia!a Apparently our health has been going to hell too, but nobody told us that! CisCleanAirBrigade (@CrnchyMama) November 16, 2022 In my early 50s I developed pelvic organ prolapse with one drivers being long pushing phases during pregnancy. I had no idea this condition even existed. I now run a FB support group for 16,000+ women with this condition, most of whom were also initially ignorant of prolapse. Abby du Nord (@abbyobenchain) November 15, 2022 Others pointed out that a lack of overall education about sexual health and womens reproduction contributes to the overall ignorance experienced by many people who get pregnant. Theres a lot of misinformation and may I say lack of education in society when it comes to sexual health and yes that includes pregnancy etc. Its not personal ignorance when the most you can get is its different for every person after a long day of mining. https://t.co/29Gko4F0wW ThisTimeAround (@Yes_Mali33) November 17, 2022 Others pointed out how the societal focus on women post-pregnancy is superficial and unrelated to womens health. The permanent changes talked about most are the dangers of getting fat and getting stretch marks and the emphasis is on trying to prevent them so youll be physically appealing after giving birth. https://t.co/beAWKJj4at gin. (@showupforthis) November 16, 2022 Where are the realistic representations of post-birth bodies and the challenges of very early motherhood in the media we consume? Where are the characters in books, film & tv dealing with prolapse? Invisible. No wonder many of us donat know. I wrote this article about it. https://t.co/kfEIcJ5yor Elicia OaReilly (@eliciao_o) November 16, 2022 The political climate, particularly after Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court last year, also plays a role in the lack of realistic expectations and education surrounding the cons of childbirth and life afterward. Education on this topic is so so so important now that multiple states think its acceptable and even righteous to force women to undergo pregnancies when irreparable harm is the norm of both pregnancy and birth. https://t.co/0QSQ4Ukc2K Edie V. (@rusticfem) November 16, 2022 More than once Ive heard older women say that if we were honest about pregnancy/delivery with young women theyd never agree to do it. Pooping during delivery, tearing, uterine prolapse, broken tailbones, elevated blood pressure r just some potential pregnancy party favours. Cant look away. (@woodchristy) November 15, 2022 For me personally, I remember experiencing late-stage pregnancy carpal tunnel and panicking, because one day I could move my fingers nimbly and the next day I just couldnt. A seasoned mom and friend of mine said, Oh, thats normal! Apparently, anyway. I experienced the same thing and it went away eventually. While I never expected my OB-GYN to explain every single possible outcome or side effect of being pregnant and I also know how to research things myself, something like that is one of the many, many things people learn during or after pregnancy. It was never explained to me that during pregnancy, your blood volume doubles, which causes extra fluid to increase pressure and swelling in the blood vessels throughout your body. In tight spaces such as the carpal tunnel area of the wrist, the swelling can compress the median nerve, which runs to the hand. Carpal tunnel syndrome and pregnancy go hand-in-hand, literally. It didnt go away until my baby was about a month old, which meant four weeks of fumbling through snaps and zippers and buttons during every single outfit changefor myself and my baby! Also, raise your hand if you still have back problems years after carrying your last babyyep, I see you. Thats just one way pregnancy becomes a permanent part of your life. Dental problems post-pregnancy are very common, too. Had to have 3 teeth pulled after they cracked down the middle. My feet bones have rearranged. My hips and lower back hurt. every. day. Pregnancy can harm you and can definitely be dangerous. https://t.co/Q14nleF1IU Rohwynna (@Rohwynn) November 16, 2022 The CDC reports that nearly 60% to 75% of pregnant women have gingivitis, an early stage of periodontal disease that occurs when the gums become red and swollen from inflammation that may be aggravated by changing hormones during pregnancy. According to The March of Dimes, high levels of the hormones progesterone and estrogen during pregnancy can temporarily loosen the tissues and bones that keep your teeth in place. This can make your teeth loose. The medical community has to do better when it comes to offering pregnant women a comprehensive education about these common (but concerning) physical problems people experience post-pregnancy, but we drastically need to see a full societal shift around the way we glorify pregnancy at the expense of mothers. A version of this story was originally published on Nov. 17, 2022. It has been updated. BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Azerbaijan has recorded a total of 3,416 mine victims, including 357 children and 38 women since 1991, the country's Commissioner for Human Rights (Ombudsperson) Sabina Aliyeva said, Trend reports. Aliyeva made the remark at the round table event themed "Protection of the rights of persons with disabilities and mine victims in Azerbaijan." The ombudsperson noted that according to statistical data, from November 10, 2020, following the end of the second Karabakh war that resulted in the liberation of Azerbaijani territories from Armenian occupation, 65 people died and 272 sustained various injuries from mine explosions. "The rights of persons with disabilities must be constantly protected and promoted; equal opportunities must be created for them in all areas of public life; and educational efforts in this field must be strengthened," she pointed out. "As a result of Armenia's military aggression against Azerbaijan during the nearly 30-year occupation and in the subsequent years, there are numerous mines and unexploded ordnance in our territories in the Karabakh and Eastern Zangazur regions, and the Armenian side still refuses to provide accurate data on mine maps and schemes," Aliyeva reminded. "The global mine terror, which has led to numerous human casualties, severe injuries, and disabilities for thousands of people, creates a serious obstacle to large-scale construction, reconstruction, and restoration work carried out in the liberated territories," the ombudsperson emphasized. "It also hinders the process of the safe return of former internally displaced persons to their native lands," she added. Will be updated With the peak of the Coronavirus pandemic and its associated stay-at-home orders now a few years in the past, several popular pandemic-era culinary practices have begun to fade. Few Americans are cooking meals at home, for example, and baking sourdough is not the widespread hobby it briefly was. However, there are some pandemic-era practices which have remained popular. Mail-order meat services are one of these; a survey by Ziffity reported that 30% of all meat eaters purchased most of their meat online during 2023. What was rare in pre-pandemic times is now commonplace. Steak is one of America's favorite dishes, and many individuals love the opportunity to have brilliant cuts of meat delivered right to their door. But, as with any form of shopping, the quality of mail-order steaks varies from supplier to supplier. 'The customer knows best' is how the old adage goes, and we have taken this to heart. We've ranked 13 different mail-order steaks based on customer reviews and feedback to find the best of the best. After all, if a company's steak has impressed or disappointed hundreds of other Americans, chances are it'll do the same for you. Read more: 11 Tips For Keeping Your Grill Shiny And Clean Omaha Steaks: Butcher's Cut Filet Mignons Omaha Steaks filet mignon cut - Omaha Steaks/YouTube A high-quality filet mignon should be extremely tender while remaining relatively lean. The best versions of this cut are known to almost melt in the mouth and definitely do not contain any gristle. Unfortunately, many customers have found the opposite to be true of Omaha Steaks' Butcher's Cut Filet Mignons as one customer highlighted on the Omaha Steaks website: "For the past year I have been very disappointed in the filets. They have had pockets of gristle and very little beefy flavor. I have not ordered any more and [don't] ever intend to." Several other reviewers have complained about gristles being prevalent in the filets. This comes as a surprise, given that Omaha Steaks claims all steaks are twice trimmed by master butchers. To make matters even worse, customers must buy at least four filet mignons per order. When customers select the 12-ounce steak option, this order costs over $200. That's a lot of steak to be disappointed by. Many customers also complain that Omaha Steaks does not honor its guarantee regarding product replacement or refunds. Several reviewers have stated that their requests for a refund after receiving unsatisfactory steaks were repeatedly ignored. For this reason, many customers advise against ordering filet mignons or any other meat from Omaha Steaks. Butcher Box: Ribeye Butcher Box ribeye cooking - ButcherBox/YouTube Another mail-order steak that has received less than stellar reviews is Butcher Box's Ribeye. As with all other Butcher Box beef, this ribeye is only available as part of the brand's subscription service. Butcher Box does not allow one-off purchases; all customers must subscribe to a monthly meat delivery program, which starts at $146 per month. The beef is butchered from grass-fed cows that have not been treated with hormones or antibiotics. Unfortunately, this does not always translate into high-quality steaks. The quality of Butcher Box's meat has been questioned, with the ribeye in particular coming under fire. One customer aired their opinion on Reddit: "I tried the ribeye and it was grainy and gross. I've burnt ribeye to a crisp from [Whole Foods] and it wasn't as bad as what I got from Butcher Box. I'm assuming they are swapping cuts." Poor butchery practices have also been reported across another Reddit thread. One individual shared a picture of a steak they'd received, which, despite being erroneously sliced in half and "clearly dropped on asphalt," had still been delivered. This customer, and many others, advise against buying Butcher Box's ribeye, and we'd be inclined to listen to them. Harry & David: Bourbon-Peppercorn Marinated Steaks Harry & David steaks - Harry & David Harry & David is a mail-order gift company that originally specialized in pears. Over the decades, a greater selection of products has been added to the site, including steaks like the Bourbon-Peppercorn Marinated Steaks. Unlike many other steaks featured on this list, this one is marinated and seasoned before it is delivered to the customer. In practice, this should save the customer time and stress; all they have to do is cook the meat on the grill and serve. However, several customers have not enjoyed the flavor of the marinade, claiming it is too peppery and artificial tasting as the following review, left on the Harry & David website, highlights: "These are pretty small and they taste bad, almost like metallic artificial flavoring nothing close to bourbon peppercorn. Very disappointed and tossed mine out." Others have claimed the marinade made the steaks so salty as to be unenjoyable. The meat used to make Bourbon-Peppercorn Marinated Steaks is USDA Choice. Several customers have complained that the meat itself is not of great quality and is overly tough, suggesting that the steak lacks marbling. Overall, this makes for a disappointing eating experience. The Kansas City Steak Company: USDA Prime T-Bone Steaks Kansas City Steak Company T-bone - mikesmarginalmeatsandmore/Instagram T-bone steaks are known as the best of both worlds because they are made up of two cuts: the tenderloin and the strip. Divided by the instantly recognizable T-shaped bone, these steaks are the centerpiece of any meal, given they are of good quality. The T-bones sold by The Kansas City Steak Company are USDA Prime. Steaks that have been graded as Prime are among the top 2% of beef graded in the United States and should be abundantly marbled. Unfortunately, being graded as Prime does not always ensure that the steak you're receiving is high quality. Many people who bought The Kansas City Steak Company's T-bone steaks have found this to be true. The following review taken from the Kansas City Steaks website summarizes their frustrations: "Being USDA "Prime" rated I am shocked by the overall lack of quality with all 4 of these steaks [...] If I had wanted this type of experience, I would have purchased from a local grocery store like Kroger at less than quarter of the cost." The Kansas City Steak Company's butchery and sourcing has also been questioned, with customers frequently complaining about the size of the tenderloin portion of the T-bone. By these accounts, this part of the steak only amounts to one or two mouthfuls, not what you'd expect from a piece of meat that costs around $50. Fossil Farms: Bison Ribeye Steak Fossil Farms' bison ribeye - Fossil Farms Buying meat online isn't just a convenient way to source your average steak but an opportunity to try less common cuts and meats. Fossil Farms has built itself upon this precedent by selling meat from common game and other, less frequently encountered animals like kangaroos and bison. One of the brand's most sought-after steaks is the Bison Ribeye. This 10-ounce steak is harvested from pasture-grazed bison that are never treated with antibiotics, steroids, or hormones. In general, bison meat is lean, which can result in steaks becoming tough and dry during cooking. This is not the case for Fossil Farm's Bison Ribeye. A buyer stated in a review posted on the company's website: "Super tender and lean, not chewy like most times I've tried bison, perfect medium rare dinner. Got 3 and cooked them medium rare, medium, and medium well, and everyone enjoyed theirs." Some customers have stated that the steaks are on the small side. A few have also noted the higher cost of the meat; one 10-ounce ribeye costs about $21. However, the former is a minor gripe, and the latter is to be expected when ordering a specialty meat like bison. Pat LaFrieda: Engraved Prime Tomahawk Steak 40oz An engraved tomahawk steak - Pat LaFrieda Pat LaFreida is one of the biggest names in America's steak industry, having built his empire by focusing on customization. Initially, this was limited to creating unique burger blends for restaurants, including Shake Shack, but LaFrieda has since taken his ethos of customization further, as exemplified by the 40-ounce Engraved Prime Tomahawk Steak. Tomahawk steaks are often among the most eye-catching steaks around, thanks to the huge curving bone that protrudes from the meat. But Pat LaFrieda's goes one further by allowing customers to have 15 characters of their choice engraved directly onto the bone. This transforms the steak from a potential centerpiece to a unique gift, as one customer stated via a review on the Pat LaFrieda website: "If you know your audience, then these remarkable ribeyes are a fun and tasty way to celebrate employee milestones, demonstrate gratitude to key clients, and share successes with important partners. I wish I could share the reactions we get." Vitally, the steak does not sacrifice substance for style. The meat comes from Prime Black Angus cattle, and the steak itself is expertly selected. Pat LaFrieda takes care when selecting steaks to avoid unappetizing fatty deposits. Retailing at around $164, the steak does not come cheap. But then again, who expects an engraved, 40-ounce tomahawk to be anything but expensive? Mr. Steak: USDA Prime New York Strip Mr. Steak's New York Strip - Mr. Steak Mr. Steak is a family-run business that specializes in classic cuts of beef. These come from cattle that have been raised on some of the best ranches in the United States. One such product is Mr. Steak's USDA Prime New York Strip. As a well-loved cut, the New York strip will always be under scrutiny, but this product passes the test with flying colors. A review posted on the Mr. Steak website highlights: "His NY Strip steak was ridiculously good, best I've had. It seared up perfectly and the inside was tender and succulent." The steak's flavor is thanks to a 28-day wet-aging process and the beef's USDA Prime pedigree. Customers report that this well-developed flavor enables the Prime New York Strip to stand up to a variety of seasoning rubs, resulting in an eating experience that is similar to those found in many of the country's best steakhouses. Mr. Steak's Prime New York Strip is so enjoyable that almost no customers have complained about the price, which usually stands at about $54 for one 14-ounce New York strip. Porter Road: Bone-In Ribeye Ribeyes on the grill - In The Smoke with Keenan/YouTube Buying steaks online gives customers the luxury to shop around until they find a supplier with an ethos that matches their own. Porter Road is a clear choice for those who care about the welfare of the animals they eat; the cattle are raised on pasture and are not treated with antibiotics or hormones. This alone does not guarantee a high-quality steak. However, Porter Road has built a reputation as a supplier of the finest beef that is not only ethically raised but also expertly processed, trimmed, and delivered. The ribeye is a widely enjoyed cut, but Porter Road still manages to catch diners off guard with the flavor and intensity of its Bone-in Ribeye. This is largely down to the meat's generous marbling, as one customer explained on the Porter Road website: "So very tasty...just the right amount of marbling to make a great steak, but not too much fat. Better raised animals means better tasting meat. Worth the price!" All beef steaks at Porter Road are dry-aged. This tenderizes the meat and concentrates its flavors -- another reason why this ribeye stands head and shoulders above many other mail-order steaks. Allen Brothers: USDA Prime Porterhouse Prime Porterhouse on plate - allenbrossteaks/X, formerly known as Twitter Allen Brothers was founded in 1893 and has developed a reputation as one of the finest meat suppliers in the entire country. As a heritage brand, many customers turn to Allen Brothers when they are looking to splash out on a centerpiece for a special occasion. In these instances, many customers turn to the company's USDA Prime Porterhouse. Supplying meats designed for special occasions is always difficult as expectations are high. Thankfully, Allen Brothers' porterhouse rarely falls short, as highlighted in a review left on the Allen Brothers website: "Whenever we are in the mood for an outstanding steak dinner, my wife and I know where to turn. The Allen Brothers Porterhouse and Ribeye steaks are always tender, flavorful, and of the highest quality. Never disappointed!" Great flavor and texture are the hallmarks of Allen Brothers' USDA Prime Porterhouse, as attested to by a plethora of five-star reviews. The development of both is due to the company's diligently followed wet-aging process. There is one drawback of Allen Brothers' porterhouse, however, its price. At this size and quality, it is unsurprising that Allen Brothers USDA Prime Porterhouse is expensive; two 24-ounce steaks cost around $149. But, as one happy customer highlighted, you get what you pay for. Chicago Steak Company: Premium Angus Beef Filet Mignon Box from Chicago Steak Company - Chicago Steak Company/Instagram Chicago is a city known for its steakhouses. What fewer people know is that it's also home to one of the best meat suppliers in the country, Chicago Steak Company. This supplier carries excellent iterations of classic cuts, including a Premium Angus Beef Filet Mignon. Thanks to sourcing beef from premium Angus cattle, Chicago Steak Company delivers on the cut's iconic flavor and tender texture. This was highlighted by a review on the Chicago Steak Company website: "The Premium Angus Beef Filets were so tender you could cut them with a spoon. Very flavorful. The Chicago Steak Company always has a wonderful selection." Next to no fat is visible on the Filet Mignon thanks to highly trained individuals who trim each steak by hand. These specialists handle the product with care, as is expected, given that all the meat they interact with is graded as the upper third of USDA Choice or USDA Prime. Two 6-ounce Chicago Steak Company filet mignons will usually set customers back about $114. If the reviews are anything to go by, it's money well spent. Vermont Wagyu: Ribeye Vermont Wagyu's ribeye steak - Vermont Wagyu Wagyu is a type of heavily marbled beef that originated from cows in Japan. Vermont Wagyu is one of the top breeders of 100% Japanese Wagyu in the United States. The company takes an incredibly thoughtful approach to raising this rare cattle, adopting low-stress handling practices and allowing each calf-cow coupling to have at least one acre of pasture space to themselves. Such care results in beef that is of exceptional quality, as exemplified by Vermont Wagyu's excellent ribeye. This steak is extremely tender and flavorful due to the meat's high-fat content. Some customers including one who left a review on the Vermont Wagyu website even contend that this Wagyu is as good as any produced in Japan: "Lived in Japan for [three] years and have been looking for a steak as good as in Japan. Well I have found it at Vermont wagyu. These steaks were amazing and will be buying more in the future." All but one of the reviews left on the website gave Vermont Wagyu's Ribeye a five-star rating. If that's not a ringing endorsement, we don't know what is. DeBragga: Japanese Miyazaki Wagyu 12oz Ribeye Steak DeBragga's Japanese Wagyu ribeye steak - DeBragga Much like American beef, Wagyu is graded on a scale with A5 being the highest. The beef that is graded as A5 is among the most desirable in the world, and DeBragga takes great pride in being able to supply it to Americans. DeBragga even manages to source the meat for its 12-ounce Ribeye Steak from the Miyazaki Prefecture, which is one of the most prestigious Wagyu production areas in Japan. Unsurprisingly, this steak is routinely celebrated by customers as being among the best they have ever eaten. This is true for both those who have never tasted Wagyu before and those who have eaten it on several occasions. The following review from the DeBragga website highlights this: "I tried A5 wagyu in Kyoto, Tokyo and Osaka before. This one was as perfect as my previous experiences. It is not possible to explain the taste and smell of a A5 wagyu. Unbelievably tender and flavorful. You should try this ribeye and see what I mean." DeBragga's Japanese Miyazaki Wagyu 12-ounce Ribeye Steak is incredibly expensive, retailing at around $145. However, the product has been rated 48 times, and every single one is a five-star score. Snake River Farms: Wagyu Filet Mignon Steak Wagyu filet with salad - Snake River Farms Snake River Farms is a supplier that's leading the trend in American Wagyu. This is beef made by interbreeding Japanese Wagyu cattle with traditional American cattle. The result is a heavily marbled, hybrid meat. Many people claim it boasts a unique flavor profile that balances the flavors of traditional American cattle breeds with the decadent fat content of Japanese Wagyu. In other words, it's the best of both. The company's foremost example of American Wagyu is the Snake River Farms Gold Label Wagyu Filet Mignon Steak. This steak carries an almost unprecedented level of marbling, scoring between nine and 12 on the Beef Marbling Score. For comparison, USDA Prime usually receives a score of five. The flavor and texture imparted by this fat are not wasted on customers. Over 1,600 people have given this steak a five-star rating. While specifics vary, the views of many customers were summarized in one review posted to the Snake River Farms website: "The wagyu gold filet mignon was the best steak I've ever had! Better than steaks I've had in a number of steakhouses. Tender and great flavor." Read the original article on Daily Meal. Amid escalating awareness of animal rights, South Korea is set to ban the consumption of dog meat (via Reuters). The announcement came from Yu Eui-dong, the policy chief of the ruling People Power Party. It is time to put an end to social conflicts and controversies around dog meat consumption through the enactment of a special act to end it, he said. Agriculture Minister Chung Hwang-keun confirmed the governments commitment to swiftly implementing the ban. However, South Korea will offer extensive support to individuals within the dog meat industry who will be out of business. This support aims to address concerns about livelihoods and ease the transition out of the trade. Previous attempts to pass anti-dog meat legislation faced resistance from industry stakeholders. Primarily, due to fears about the impact on farmers and restaurant owners. When does the South Korea dog eating ban take effect? The proposed ban includes a three year grace period with financial assistance for businesses transitioning away from the trade. The practice of dog meat consumption was historically perceived as a means to combat the summer heat in South Korea. However, it has significantly diminished among younger generations and limited to specific restaurants with an older demographic. Animal rights groups, including Humane Society International, hail the decision as a milestone achievement in their battle against cruelty towards animals. Government data reveals the existence of approximately 1,150 breeding farms and 1,600 restaurants serving dog meat. A Gallup Korea poll underscored shifting sentiments, with 64% opposing dog meat consumption. This signified a notable departure from the past, where 27% had consumed dog meat in 2015. South Koreas move to ban dog meat consumption marks a watershed moment in evolving ethical considerations surrounding animal welfare. The changing societal attitudes and a pivotal step towards compassion and humane treatment of animals. The post South Korea Bans Eating Dogs appeared first on DogTime. If there's one chef we can count on for tantalizing vegan fare, it's Tabitha Brown. Beloved for recipes like her viral carrot bacon which uses thin slices of the root veggie in place of pork to quick collard greens, Brown is a passionate advocate for plant-based cuisine. When she's not sharing her healthy cooking tips with fans, "America's Mom" can be found making waves elsewhere in the culinary sphere. Following her rise to fame through social media and television, the superstar has authored two bestselling cookbooks, developed a McCormick spice collection, and, most recently, introduced a line of vegan groceries to Target. But if you've ever wondered about Brown's approach to dining behind the scenes, you're in luck. Tasting Table caught up with the actor and social media personality at the inaugural Honeyland Festival in Houston, Texas, to discuss some of her top food-related finds of the past year. From must-try vegan sushi rolls on par with the real thing to the trusty kitchen appliance she calls her "new favorite," Brown opened our eyes to some seriously tempting discoveries that you won't want to miss. Read more: Ina Garten's 12 Best Cleaning Tips For A Mess-Free Kitchen Tabitha's Most Memorable Meals Of 2023 Ladybird restaurant Kale Caesar - Instagram / Ladybird Even though Tabitha Brown's vegan bacon is widely considered one of the best versions out there, the cooking star can't say enough good things about a rival recipe. When asked about her most memorable meal of 2023, Brown nominated a favorite dish at East Village vegan tapas hotspot, Ladybird. "Ladybird in New York City has the best Caesar salad. They have this bacon that they make in-house out of mushrooms. It's so good, and the Caesar dressing is to die for," Brown tells Tasting Table. And though Brown prefaces her pick by noting that vegans certainly eat more than just salad, she loves Ladybird's novel take on Caesar salad. "Every time I go to New York, it's my first stop. I'm like, 'I've got to go get that salad,'" she says with a laugh. Ladybird's vegan bacon is made with smoked trumpet mushrooms, while kale replaces the traditional romaine lettuce. And, of course, the irresistible dish includes delectable toppings, like vegan parmesan cheese and herb croutons. Lastly, Brown also gave a nod to one of her favorite vegan eateries in Houston, Texas. "I went to Mo' Better Brews and had their fried mushrooms and grits, and baby...they're very good," she shares. At Mo' Better Brews, diners can choose from a selection of fried mushrooms and grits entrees, from chik'n fried to hot honey varieties. Brown Says This Vegan Vegas Spot Serves 'The Best Sushi' Spider Roll at Daikon Vegan Sushi & More - Instagram / Daikon Vegan Sushi & More While on the subject of food-related finds for the year, Brown enthusiastically adds another culinary discovery to the list. "I just discovered this vegan spot in Las Vegas: Daikon Vegan Sushi," she reveals to Tasting Table. "[They serve] the best vegan sushi I've ever had in my life. Actually, it's the best sushi not even just vegan!" Indeed, thousands of reviewers echo Brown's high praise for the Las Vegas, Nevada sushi spot. "I am beyond impressed," says one guest. "Their vegan sushi is just like regular sushi. I can finally satisfy my cravings." Founded by Chef Mindy Lim, Daikon Vegan Sushi & More opened its doors in 2020 to the delight of plant-based foodies everywhere. Beyond traditional vegetable rolls like avocado, oshinko, and cucumber, Daikon serves up an impressive array of vegan alternatives to historically fish-based fare. Its Spider Roll, for example, features tempura-fried king oyster mushrooms in place of the typical soft-shell crab. Other notable menu items are the 'Eel' Nigiri made from cooked eggplant and the 'Tonkatsu' Rice, which Daikon fixes up with fried tofu skin. And vegan ramen fans, take note: Daikon has not one, but two vegan egg options on its menu, including a homemade version with a pumpkin puree 'yolk.' The Kitchen Gadget Tabitha Can't Get Enough Of Breville Lift & Look Touch 4-Slice Toaster - Williams-Sonoma As many of us know, new kitchen acquisitions can be very hit-or-miss. Fortunately, however, one line of appliances comes with Tabitha Brown's seal of approval. "My new favorite thing that I got is a Breville toaster. You just hit the button, and it slowly rises when it's done," Tabitha tells Tasting Table. "It has a little button where you can check it. It'll come up and let you see if it's toasted to how you like it, and then it goes back down. Girl, I feel very fancy when I have it." The toaster mechanism that Brown refers to is a key feature in Breville's Smart Toaster, Bit More, and Lift & Look models. Unlike toasters of the past, Breville's Lift & Look technology allows users to monitor the doneness of each slice without interrupting the process. With the touch of a button, the toast is carried upward in a smooth, fluid motion for a quick glimpse before returning to the base of the toaster to resume cooking. In addition to the lift and look function, the high-tech toasters boast several other perks, from defrost and bagel settings to extra-long slots to accommodate oversized slices of bread. But perhaps best of all, you can proudly plate up a vegan breakfast sandwich knowing you and Tabitha Brown share the same taste in toasters. Read the original article on Tasting Table. The 2021 Americas Cup champions Emirates Team New Zealand won last weekends AC40 event in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in a nail-biter that saw its closest competitor, Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli, literally do a nose-dive in the Grand Final. The Americas Cup Preliminary Regatta Jeddah was the second of the AC40 foiling boat events, with the first taking place in Vilanova, Spain, in September. In that race, American Magic emerged as the champion, beating Team New Zealand by three pointswith the final race cancelled because of bad weather. More from Robb Report The AC40s are considered training boats that will help determine the foil shapes for the larger AC75s that will be used next year in the Louis Vuitton Cup Challenger Selection Series and later, in the final Louis Vuitton 37th Americas Cup Barcelona. In the October final, Emirates Team New Zealand will face the winner of the six-week-long challenger series. Team Luna Rossa and Emirates Team New Zealand were neck and neck until the final turn, where the Italians did a nosedive. The three days of racing in Jeddah were close and compelling, with the six Americas Cup teams involved in 8 fleet races. The New Zealand team won five of the eight, while Luna Rossa grabbed three. In the final standings, the Swiss Alinghi Red Bull Racing team took third place, while American Magic took fourth and Ineos Britannia was fifth. The new French team was last. The final proved to be the events most exciting race, with the New Zealanders leading but being chased closely by Luna Rossa, which was co-helmed by rising star Marco Gradoniwho is only 19 years old. The race was coming down to the final mark, when the Italians veered too high around the bend, the nose of their boat submerged and the cockpit filled with water. They retired from the race. Emirates Team New Zealand dominated the races in Jeddah, winning five out of eight and then the finals. Gradoni told stuff.co.nz that technical issues hampered the boat but also took some blame for the crash. It was also our bad, we could do better, but thats what happened, Gradoni told the website. The event in Jeddah has no official standing in the Americas Cup final, though it was a chance for the six four-man teams to compete on a racecourse to see how their boats will perform before they move to tweaking and testing the much larger and more powerful AC75s. The event also gave Jeddah a chance to demonstrate its potential as an international yachting destination, as the gateway to a friendlier, more open Saudi Arabia, as that country attempts to position itself as a yachting hub. The countrys development fund, NEOM, was the sponsor of the Jeddah event, which was organized by the Jeddah Yacht Club and Marina. NEOM is also behind the multibillion-dollar development of Sindalah, an island that the Kingdom is positioning as the ultimate superyacht destination. The Americas Cup in front of the Jeddah waterfront as the venue tries to attract international events. The Americas Cup event is one of several high-profile international events that the Jeddah Yacht Club and Marina has sponsored this year, including the Red Sea International Film Festival, and in March, the 2024 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. The sailing has been amazing, the venues been great, said Tom Slingsby, captain for NYYC American Magic team, in a statement from the organization. Honestly this is my first time here, but I can see a lot of high-level events coming here in the future. Best of Robb Report Sign up for Robb Report's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. Soft-top connoisseur and novelty wave surfer Ben Gravy has been scoring fun surf at home in New Jersey since returning from his "7 Seas in 7 Days" tour. During the trip, Gravy traveled to Japan, Bali, Australia, Texas, New Jersey, and Norway. He surfed the North Pacific, South Pacific, Indian Ocean, Southern Ocean, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Arctic Ocean. In his latest vlog above, Gravy's back home in New Jersey scoring more fun waves after surfing the East Coast's Thanksgiving swell last week. "Hasn't Been Like THIS Since the '70s. "Being at home in New Jersey has been a real treat! The surf has been super fun & even after the overhyped Thanksgiving swell we've been receiving some beautiful sneaker swells that have produced countless barrels up & down the beach! "Thanks so much for all of the love & support on my journey, stoked for the big trip to Hawaii coming up! FOR THE DREAM! - Ben" Press play above for more adventures with Gravy. As usual, his viewers were stoked on the vlog. Check out a few comments below: "Looks like Ventura a week ago - but maybe better! Love watching you guys score in such uncrowded spots!" "I live in New Hampshire I'm from Cali. Ben's love for surfing is a blessing wherever his travels lead him. Thanks BG" One of them even challenged him to surf the North Shore, writing: "Happy birthday Ben. Keep boogyin on those barrels. Sunset pipe barrels are calling you" That'd be fun to watch. *** Don't miss another headline from SURFER! Subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on Instagram, and stay connected with the latest happenings in the world of surfing. We're always on the lookout for amusing, interesting and engaging surf-related videos to feature on our channels. Whether you're a professional surfer or just an amateur, we want to see your best footage and help you share it with the world. Submit your video for a chance to be featured on SURFER and our social channels. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch high-quality surf videos. Severe flooding in Kenya has displaced hundreds of people and left over 120 dead. The weather event El Nino is impacting the climate patterns, causing temperatures to rise. The UN World Meteorological Organization expects the warming El Nino weather to last into 2024. Mass flooding in Africa is displacing hundreds of people in Kenya by flooding roads and communities. The chaotic weather stems from the El Nino Southern Oscillation, a weather event that occurs naturally and irregularly about every two to seven years. It creates a domino-like weather effect impacting areas across the globe with varying rainfall and temperature changes, per the World Health Organization. In eastern Africa, El Nino typically causes wet conditions, according to the WHO. These photos show the devastating impact that the weather fluctuations can have. Kenya has felt heavy rains since October. Residents cross a road damaged during flooding in Tana River county on November 25, 2023. Brian Inganga/AP While October to December is typically a rainy season for Kenya, the rains have been exacerbated by El Nino, leading to devastating flooding. Kenyan authorities have instructed residents to move to higher ground, prompting many to trek across flooded roads. Many other roads and infrastructure elements have been completely destroyed, complicating rescues, the Associated Press reported in late November. Rains are expected to continue into January. Police officers walk through a flooded compound within the Gamba Police station in Garsen, Kenya on December 2, 2023. Gideon Maundu/AP Flooding has swept away homes as authorities warn heavy rains will continue into January, Reuters reported. Residents are also expected to experience "prolonged power outages," the AP reported. "All roads are destroyed. I don't even know where people will go," Joel Ngui, a resident of the Kenyan town of Garissa, told the AP. The death toll has reached the triple digits. Residents help a young child while trying to cross a road damaged by El Nino rains on November 25, 2023. Brian Inganga/AP Reuters reports a death toll of at least 120 people in Kenya, though local reports say its risen to 136, according to Africa News. The outlet reported that some 460,000 people have been displaced. Neighboring countries of Ethiopia and Somalia have experienced similarly devastating rains. The combined death toll from the three countries is near 300 people, NPR reported last week. Floods have destroyed roads, farms, and livestock. Boats ferry passengers from one side of the closed road from flooding in Garsen, Kenya on December 2, 2023. Gideon Maundu/AP Aside from devastating communities, the floodwaters have also destroyed hundreds of acres of farmland and caused hundreds of livestock deaths, according to Al Jazeera. Aid organizations like the Kenya Red Cross have provided food and medical assistance to those in need. Residents have been forced to make temporary shelters. Displaced people camp at a compound in Kenya on Sunday Dec. 3, 2023. Gideon Maundu/AP People living along Kenya's largest river, the Tana River, were forced to create makeshift shelters on higher ground after the river burst its banks. One widow with five children told the AP that her home was carried away by the raging waters. "I had no one to help me," Marian Ware told the AP. "I was struggling to get my children to safety. When I went back, everything was gone." Read the original article on Business Insider This photo provided by the North Korean government shows what the country said is the launch of the Malligyong-1, a military spy satellite, into orbit (AP) North Korea has said its military satellite has begun its reconnaissance mission, days after the country launched its first spy satellite into orbit and drew condemnation for violating sanctions. The reconnaissance satellite operation office at the countrys space agency will discharge its mission as an independent military intelligence organisation and report acquired information to the army and other major units, state media KCNA said. The satellite will help equip the countrys nuclear-armed units with a more solid readiness posture, it added. In a launch overseen by Kim Jong-un, North Korea placed its Malligyong-1 spy satellite into orbit on 21 November, a breakthrough that came after two failed attempts in May and August. Pyongyang later said its satellite released detailed pictures of major target regions such as the White House, the Pentagon and air force bases along the US north-east coast and in its Pacific territory of Guam. The US, South Korea and Japan have confirmed that the satellite has been placed into the orbits but have raised doubts over the capabilities of it as claimed by the Kim regime. The launch sparked immediate condemnation from the US, South Korea and Japan for violating the UN security council resolutions and sanctions from the US, Australia, Japan and South Korea. South Korea responded by partially withdrawing from the historic 2018 peace pact, prompting North Korea to fully suspend and move soldiers and weaponry to its border. North Korea said that the countrys space agency National Aerospace Technology Administration (NATA) has established a dedicated Reconnaissance Satellite Operations Office to carry out the work. It comes as North Korea warned the US directly that any attempt to destroy or interfere with its new satellite will be deemed as a declaration of war and will be met with a thermonuclear attack. It mentioned a North Korean military commentator who blamed the South for the breakdown of their military confidence-building agreement, justifying its spy satellite launch as what other countries also do. South Korea launched its first military reconnaissance satellite on Saturday on Elon Musks SpaceX Falcon9 rocket from the Vandenberg US Space Force Base in California. It was part of South Koreas contract with an American company to launch a total of five satellites into orbit by 2025, an effort to accelerate its goal of having 24-hour watch over the Korean peninsula. Additional reporting with agencies (Bloomberg) -- Mistral AI is in the final stages of raising roughly 450 million ($487 million) from investors including Nvidia Corp. and Salesforce Inc. in a funding round that values the OpenAI rival at about $2 billion, according to people familiar with the deal. Most Read from Bloomberg The deal includes more than 325 million in equity from investors led by Andreessen Horowitz, which is in talks to invest 200 million in funding, the people said, asking not to be identified because the discussions are private. Nvidia and Salesforce agreed to contribute another 120 million in convertible debt, they said. Some of the details are in flux and may still change, the people said. The startups three co-founders agreed to sell more than 1 million apiece in equity as part of the deal, according to documents detailing the transaction terms that Bloomberg reviewed. Three other Mistral insiders are set to offload shares, including Cedric O, the former French minister who acts as chief adviser for the company, and plans to sell nearly 1 million, according to the term sheet. A spokesperson for Mistral declined to comment. Representatives for Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia and Salesforce declined to comment. O didnt respond to requests for comment. Read More: Billionaire Xavier Niel Invests 200 Million in French AI Push The $2 billion valuation for a company less than a year old underscores the tech worlds unbridled optimism about the future promise and profit of artificial intelligence companies. Mistral makes open-source software that powers chatbots and other generative AI tools, a field that requires considerable computing resources. It describes itself as less expensive and more efficient than US peers. Mistral, which has emerged as one of Europes most prominent AI startups, was founded by former scientists from Alphabet Inc.s DeepMind and Meta Platforms Inc. who had worked on large language models similar to those offered by Sam Altmans OpenAI. Mistral raised a $113 million initial round in June, an enormous sum for a European tech startup. General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bpifrance and several others also participated in the round, according to the documents. Lightspeed declined to comment. Representatives for General Catalyst and Bpifrance didnt respond to requests for comment. --With assistance from Brody Ford. Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2023 Bloomberg L.P. Pa. Pressroom is a regular recap of politics in Harrisburg and Washington, D.C. To submit tips and news leads, contact USA TODAY Network Pennsylvania state capital bureau reporter Bruce Siwy at bsiwy@gannett.com or on X at @BruceSiwy. The approaching end of 2023 will close a remarkably unproductive chapter in the history of the Pennsylvania Legislature. As of Dec. 3, Gov. Josh Shapiro had signed just 32 new bills into law. That's fewer than a third of the 96 approved by former Gov. Tom Wolf during his first year in office a year in which the Democratic governor was locked in a prolonged budget standoff with a Republican-controlled Legislature. Retired lobbyist Vince Phillips, a keen observer of Harrisburg politics, sees multiple reasons for the legislative malaise this year. First, he said, was the post-midterms dispute over which side held the true majority in the House of Representatives. A handful Democrats vacated seats throughout the session after winning elections for higher office, putting their slim one-vote majority in sporadic limbo. The situation was complicated by changes in leadership, with state Rep. Mark Rozzi (D-Berks) taking the job in January through bipartisan vote only to concede it through a party-line vote in late February to Joanna McClinton (D-Philadelphia). Ill will, according to Phillips, has also risen in the Capitol. Republican leaders have accused Shapiro, for instance, of trying to sweep a former aide's sexual harassment scandal under the rug and of breaking a handshake deal to include a $100 million private school voucher program in his inaugural budget. Gov. Josh Shapiro "Raw partisanship, the likes of which I've not seen in Harrisburg for a long time, crippled much of the House's ability to work," Phillips said, noting that Democratic leadership has gaveled out of session for extended periods when the political split was an even 101-101 because of temporary vacancies. He added that while the bills have been few, measures such as expanding Right-to-Know Law provisions to state-related universities in House Bill 1556 and strengthening the insurance privacy law in House Bill 739 have been bipartisan victories for Pennsylvanians and their elected officials in Harrisburg. The Commonwealth Foundation, a conservative Harrisburg think tank, has been tracking this lack of legislative activity for several months. They noted this summer that Shapiro had signed 15 bills by the end of July, when the average number has been 86 for that time period over the past half-century. "I am surprised that he's not been able to do that, to show the capacity to make some of those deals," Commonwealth Foundation Executive Vice President Nathan Benefield told the USA TODAY Network. "Wolf's first year was the huge budget impasse and yet they still got more bills across the desk than they have under Shapiro." Benefield said Shapiro's term is comparing more closely to former Republican Gov. Tom Corbett's tenure than to Wolf's first term. While Wolf was antagonistic toward the Legislature's GOP majority, both Corbett and Shapiro appear to employ a hands-off approach. "He's certainly not using the bully pulpit to drive legislation," Benefield said. "I think a lot of people expected, including myself, that he would, having been in the Legislature before." Political leanings aside, neither Phillips nor Benefield expects much to change in 2024. "I think you may see next year look like this year, only worse," Phillips said, noting that legislation becomes more difficult to pass in the hyper-partisan climate that festers during election years. "If you think it's political now, just wait." Inside the Beltway Late last month, hackers with an anti-Israeli message targeted the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa in Beaver County. An Iranian-backed group called Cyber Av3ngers took credit for the hack, as reported by KDKA-TV. U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) said he was quickly in contact with local municipal leadership, reporting that water service had not been disrupted in spite of the cyberattack. "Federal officials are assisting the investigation, and I remain ready to help with federal agencies," Deluzio wrote on social media. "Attacks on our critical infrastructure like water are unacceptable. ... I intend to push for a full investigation here and accountability for the attackers, and I will continue the important bipartisan work of the House Armed Services Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation (CITI) Subcommittee to shore up America's defenses." And the horse race A second Republican has formally entered next year's hunt for Pennsylvania attorney general. Katyoun "Kat" Copeland, a former Delaware County assistant district attorney, announced her candidacy Nov. 20. She'll try to succeed Attorney General Michelle Henry, a Democrat who has declared she has no intention to run for the office she's occupied since being appointed earlier this year. "Im going to aggressively investigate and prosecute anyone who tries to sell drugs in our state there will be zero tolerance for those who peddle deadly heroin and fentanyl into our communities, Copeland said. Im going to investigate and prosecute anyone who preys upon our seniors. I will protect children and families from child predators, pornographers and those who use the internet as a weapon against our children. And unlike previous attorneys general, I will stand up to Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and prosecute anyone who commits a gun crime or traffics guns in Philadelphia. Thus far, Copeland and York County District Attorney Dave Sunday are the Republicans in the race, while the Democratic field includes Philadelphia's chief public defender Keir Bradford-Grey, former state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale, former Bucks County solicitor Joe Khan and state Rep. Jared Solomon (D-Philadelphia). This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: New PA laws have been rare in 2023 BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. The main goal is to turn Azerbaijan into one of the most visited countries, achieving an increase in the share of tourism in the economy, Chairman of the State Tourism Agency Fuad Naghiyev said at the first meeting of tourism-specialized educational institutions from Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) member nations, Trend reports. He noted that Azerbaijan attaches special importance to its relations with the Organization for Economic Cooperation, and the two parties have successful partnership relations, including cooperation in the field of tourism and education in this sphere. Naghiyev also pointed out that the tourism sector in the country is considered one of the priority non-oil economy sectors. The official added that one of the most crucial factors influencing tourism development is the presence of quality workforce. Besides, he highlighted that three educational institutions operate under the State Tourism Agency, preparing specialists in this field. "These are a university, a college, and a vocational-technical school. In total, in our country, education in the tourism specialty is provided in 17 higher education institutions," Naghiyev explained. "At the same time, the head of the state signed a decree to establish the Karabakh University. This university will also provide education in majors related to tourism. Tens of thousands of people are currently employed in Azerbaijan's tourism sector. However, given the industry's ongoing development, highly qualified individuals in the tourist sector are always in high demand," Naghiyev said. From January through October 2023, a total of 1.7 million foreigners and stateless persons from 186 countries visited Azerbaijan, an increase of 30.3 percent year on year. Out of the overall number of foreign visitors, 30.7 percent came from Russia, 17.9 percent from Turkiye, 7.7 percent from Iran, 5.1 percent from India, 4.8 percent from Georgia, 4.1 percent from Saudi Arabia, 2.8 percent from Kazakhstan, and 2.5 percent from Pakistan. Stay up to date with more news on Trend News Agency's WhatsApp channel Hisham Awartani, one of the three Palestinian students who were shot in Burlington, Vermont, last weekend is paralyzed from the chest down. On Thursday, Awartanis mother, Elizabeth Price, told NBC News that her son was paralyzed from the midtorso downward and may not be able to walk again. He has what they call an incomplete spinal injury, which means that he can feel, but he cant move the areas that are currently paralyzed, Price said. He is going into intensive rehab later this week, and we hope that that will help with his prognosis. In a GoFundMe created Saturday to raise money for Awartanis medical expenses, his family and friends disclosed that one of the bullets that struck him is lodged in his spine and has left him paralyzed from the chest down. The family is committed to his recovery and remain hopeful, in spite of the grave prognosis, Awartanis family said in a statement on the fundraiser page, which NBC News has confirmed is authentic. Awartanis family and friends describe him as a kind, gentle, brilliant young man with enormous potential. A Palestinian Irish American who grew up in the West Bank, he speaks seven languages and is a teaching assistant at Brown University, where he studies math and archaeology. Awartani is dedicated to his studies, and is determined to start the next semester on time, according to his family and friends. NBC News has reached out to Awartanis family for comment. muslim college students shot (Rich Price / AP) Awartani was walking near his grandmothers home on Nov. 25 with Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, all 20 years old, when a suspect pulled a gun on them without provocation and shot them. The students were speaking Arabic when they were attacked, and two of them were wearing Palestinian keffiyehs, scarves that have become a symbol of Palestinian solidarity. Awartani and Abdalhamid are U.S. citizens and Ali Ahmad is a legal U.S. resident. Awartani, a student at Brown University, was shot in the spine. Ali Ahmad was shot in the chest, and Abdalhamid was shot in the glute, according to court documents. Jason Eaton, 48, was arrested in connection with the shooting. Eaton has pleaded not guilty to three counts of second-degree attempted murder. The families of the victims and advocacy organizations are encouraging law enforcement to investigate the shooting of their children as a hate crime. We believe a full investigation is likely to show our sons were targeted and violently attacked simply for being Palestinian, a joint statement from the families read. Full justice and accountability is important, and needed to ensure that this type of brutal and violent attack does not happen again. Police have not yet revealed a motive for the shooting, saying it is an ongoing investigation. This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com. This article was originally published on TODAY.com Nicholas Forbes, a retired Monroe County medical examiner, was here during the Rochester mob wars. He was here during Arthur Shawcross' serial killing spree. He performed thousands of autopsies, then retired and returned to his South African home with his family. On Friday, more than two decades after his retirement, Forbes returned to Rochester to testify in the murder trial of Timothy Williams, who, through the use of what is known as "familial DNA," now stands accused of the beating death of 14-year-old Wendy Jerome in 1984. Forbes retired in 2002 and his presence on the stand was proof of just how old the once cold case is. Testifying, the 77-year-old Forbes appeared just as poised and reliable as if he were on the stand in the 1980s. He often spoke directly to the jury and his ability to translate dense medical terms, along with his South African/English accent, softened slightly what occasionally were horrific descriptions of the injuries Wendy Jerome suffered. Wendy Jerome. Wendy's skull was severely fractured, Forbes said. "What type of force is necessary to shatter the skull like that?" District Attorney Sandra Doorley asked in her questioning of Forbes. "Huge force, " he answered. "Huge." First trial in New York based on familial DNA sample arrest Dr. Nicholas Forbes In 2020 Police arrested Williams in Florida, where he was then living, after the state conducted a familial DNA search on evidence from the homicide. The state crime lab used the preserved DNA to see if it could develop a familial profile, which allows police to narrow a list of possible suspects. That process led to Williams as a possible suspect from a genetic family tree. Police were able to surreptitiously collect a DNA sample from Williams in Florida, and the sample was allegedly a match. Testimony is expected next week about how police gathered the sample. This is the first trial in New York in which a suspect was arrested based on familial DNA. Williams lived in Rochester when Wendy was killed. He moved to Florida shortly after the homicide. Prosecutors said Wendy was raped, but the statute of limitations has passed for him to be charged with the crime. The 14-year-old girl disappeared on Thanksgiving in 1984. She left a friend's house that evening but never reached home. Wendy Jerome's homicide was the focus of a story in a 2012 Democrat and Chronicle series about unsolved cold cases. In that story, Marlene Jerome recalled how her daughter went to her friend's home on Alexis Street a few blocks from the Jerome household on Nov. 22, 1984. "She left about 7 p.m. and she had a curfew, 8 p.m.," Jerome remembered. "About 8 p.m. I woke up and came running down the stairs: 'Where's Wendy?' I knew something was wrong." Hours later her daughter's body was found in an alcove of Schools 33 and 11 near Webster Avenue. Nicholas Forbes autopsy in familial DNA-connected case In court on Friday, the jurors and the courtroom witnessed the grisly autopsy photos. Almost two dozen of Wendy's family and friends were attending the trial. It was Forbes, who was well known nationally for his work as a forensics pathologist, who conducted the autopsy on Wendy Jerome. On Friday, he succinctly answered questions about his findings. At the outset of his testimony, Forbes went through his curriculum vitae. Whereas some experts opt to deliver line-by-line recitations of multi-page resumes and highlight all of their published work, Forbes instead chose brevity. A South African native, he graduated from medical school in his home country in 1972. He came to the United States and worked as an intern and pathology resident at the University of Rochester. After a stint as a forensics pathologist in Oklahoma, he returned to Rochester in 1978 as chief medical examiner. Forbes was originally brought to Rochester by the late John Edland, a doctor who determined that hostages and inmates were fatally shot by police during the violent retaking of the Attica prison on Sept. 13, 1971. That truthful finding ran counter to initial claims of some state officials that inmates had killed the hostages. Edland was hounded and harassed by police and some residents because of his "cause of death" determination. He fell into a state of depression that required some institutionalization. In a brief conversation after his testimony Friday, Forbes said of Edland, "He was a great pathologist." Forbes said he hasn't testified in a decade. After his retirement he occasionally testified in some civil cases, he said. Former prosecutor Thomas Brilbeck, who is now a law clerk in state Supreme Court, came to court Friday partly to watch Forbes testify. Brilbeck said afterward that Forbes appeared just as consummately professional as he had decades ago. "He's a giant," Brilbeck said of Forbes' reputation. Gary Craig is a veteran reporter with the Democrat and Chronicle, covering courts and crime and more. You can reach Craig at gcraig@rocheste.gannett.com. He is the author of two books, including "Seven Million: A Cop, a Priest, a Soldier for the IRA, and the Still-Unsolved Rochester Brink's Heist." This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Nicholas Forbes testifies in familial DNA murder trial in Rochester NY The White House has warned the US Congress that if they do not pass additional aid to Ukraine, which is due to run out by the end of the year, the likelihood of Russian military victories will increase. A proposed package of roughly $60 billion (48bn) in aid to Ukraine is currently being blocked by a razor thin Republican majority in the lower chamber of Congress. Their preference is to shore up the Mexican border. In a letter to House and Senate leaders, the Biden administration warned that if this impasse prevails, it will kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield. The absence of US help next year will also bring into sharp relief European Union underinvestment in support for Ukraine. It could leave Kyiv without substantial military support for the first six months of 2024, according to one EU official who spoke to The Independent. It comes as the top Ukrainian advisor to president Volodymyr Zelensky said they are redirecting resources to increase domestic arms production. Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on X: Now all our resources are being directed to increasing domestic arms production and speeding up negotiations with partners to increase supplies of critical equipment for the new stage of offensive operations. Key Points US is running out of money for Ukraine and that could hinder fight against Russia, White House warns Ukraine changing war tactics, says presidential aide Putin orders Russian military to increase troop numbers by 170,000 Moscow repelled on six fronts on battlefield Russia presses attacks on devastated Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine 08:30 , Tom Watling Russian forces intensified attacks on Monday on the pulverised town of Avdiivka, Ukrainian officials said, as Moscows military presses its slow advance through eastern Ukraine. The town is just 12 miles north of the Russian-held city of Donetsk, part of the eastern Donbas region which Russias military has been fighting to control since failing to take Kyiv at the start of its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The Institute for the Study of War wrote that Russia had made confirmed gains in the area. They wrote in their overnight assessment: Geolocated footage published on December 4 shows that Russian forces advanced near the reservoir area directly north of Avdiivka. Additional geolocated footage published on December 4 shows that Russian forces have advanced within Stepove (5km northwest of Avdiivka). Ukrainian officials acknowledge that not a single building remains intact in the town. Fighting has also raged around two other nearby towns, Maryinka and Bakhmut. Yesterday and today, we have seen a significant increase in artillery shelling ... and a great many instances of mortar shelling, Vitaliy Barabash, head of Avdiivkas military administration, told national television. There has also been an increase in assault actions. They are probably waiting for better weather to use some of their equipment again as they did previously, but on a larger scale. Avdiivka was seized for a time in 2014 by Russian-financed separatists, but retaken by Ukrainian troops who put major fortifications in place. Ukrainian soldiers are seen in a tank as Russia and Ukraine war continues in the direction of Avdiivka (Anadolu via Getty Images) Ukrainian soldier on frontline says he can smell an incoming Russian offensive 11:42 , Tom Watling A Ukrainian soldier has admitted that he and his colleagues are preparing for a difficult winter and spring ahead, adding that it smells like a Russian offensive is imminent. Dmytro Verbych, writing for the Ukrainian publication Novynarnya, which means Newsroom in English, said he had lost a lot of quality people in the past few months. He is stationed in Robotyne, southern Ukraine, where the main thrust of the counteroffensive took place, but said he knew in June, when the attack started, that it would be a failure. Writing in the wake of the counteroffensive, he said: We are exhausted. We have lost the initiative. We have a difficult winter and spring ahead, which smells like a Russian offensive. The situation is truly unfortunate. The main deficit is not drones, shells or equipment. We lost a lot of quality people . And those who remained are exhausted and unmotivated. He and his forces currently reside in a bulge in the Russian frontline, having made small advances during their months-long attack. Subsequently, they are surrounded on three sides by Russian forces and are at a heightened risk of a Russian counterattack. A Ukrainian soldier of the 65th Mechanized Brigade walks past a destroyed car, next to the trenches built by Russian forces, and that were captured by the Ukrainian army, near the frontline village of Robotyne, in the Zaporizhzhia region, on 1 October 2023 (AFP via Getty Images) Zelensky and top US officials to make case for Ukraine funding to Congress 11:03 , Tom Watling Ukraine president Volodomyr Zelensky and top aides to US President Joe Biden will make their case to US senators on Tuesday about why a fresh infusion of military assistance is needed to help Ukraine repel Russian invaders. The Ukrainian wartime leader was invited to address the upper chamber of Congress by the Senate majority leader after the lower chamber, known as the House of Representatives, was warned on Monday that if they continue to block aid to Ukraine, financial and military support will run out by the end of the year - leading to potential Russian advances on the battlefield. Mr Bidens administration in October asked Congress for nearly $106 billion (84bn) to pay for ambitious plans for Ukraine, Israel and US border security, but Republicans who control the House with a slim majority rejected the package. A variety of top Biden officials, including Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, are expected to brief the senators on Tuesday. Senate leader Mick Schumer also started the process of advancing a Ukraine-Israel emergency aid bill on the Senate floor. President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will address Senators later today (Brenden Smialowski via Reuters) Isolated Putin set for working visits to UAE and Saudi Arabia as rest of world discusses climate action at Cop28 10:30 , Tom Watling Vladimir Putin is reportedly set to travel this week to meet with oil-producing allies Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in a trip that serves to highlight the Russian presidents international isolation over his war against Ukraine. Just days after more than 100 world leaders walked together down the flag-lined boulevard at Cop28 in Dubai for a family photo at the start of crucial UN climate talks, the absent Russian president will instead make his own working visit to the UAE. That will then be followed by a visit to Saudi Arabia, where Mr Putin will sit down for negotiation mainly with crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov. Isolated Putin set for his own working visits to UAE and Saudi Arabia Iranian president Raisi to travel to Russia on Thursday 09:57 , Tom Watling Irans president Ebrahim Raisi will travel to Russia on Thursday along with a political and economic delegation, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Tuesday. Irans foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian was in Moscow on Tuesday to attend a Caspian littoral states meeting. Moscow and Tehran have boosted security, political and economic ties since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022 as both countries are targeted by US sanctions. Iran has also been accused of supplying Russia with deadly kamikaze drones. Vladimir Putin meets with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in September (Copyright 2022 Sputnik) Russia making creeping advances in eastern Ukraine, says British MoD 09:30 , Tom Watling Russian forces are making creeping advances around Donetsk City in eastern Ukraine, the British Ministry of Defence has said in its latest intelligence brief, as the Kremlin looks to take control of the entire region. The update said Russia likely controls most of the built-up area of Marinka, a small town to the west of Donetsk City. The area has been on the frontline of the Russia-Ukraine conflict since Kremlin proxy forces, nicknamed little green men, took control of parts of the region in 2014. The briefing said: Over recent weeks Russian forces have made creeping advances through the ruins of Marinka, a town in Donetsk Oblast. Russia now likely controls most of the built-up area. However, Ukrainian forces remain in control of pockets of territory on the western edge of the town. Russias renewed efforts against Marinka are part of Russias autumn offensive which is prioritising extending Russias control over the remaining parts of the Donetsk Oblast highly likely still one of the Kremlins core war aims. Marinka is just 17 miles southwest of Avdiivka, a town that has been razed almost entirely to the ground by Russian forces in the past couple of months. Latest Defence Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine 5 December 2023. Find out more about Defence Intelligence's use of language: https://t.co/vCciprckfn #StandWithUkraine pic.twitter.com/091BxUQEop Ministry of Defence (@DefenceHQ) December 5, 2023 Two killed in Russian strike on southern Ukraine 08:59 , Tom Watling At least two people were killed and three wounded after Russian forces shelled the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, local authorities have said. Regional prosecutors opened a war crimes investigation into one of the strikes, which occurred around 9 am local time and killed a 48-year-old man and a woman who had not yet been identified. Terrorists, Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukraines presidential administration, posted on Telegram along with two images of bodies laying on a sidewalk. Kherson Mayor Roman Mrochko said two doctors had been wounded in a separate artillery strike on a medical facility early on Tuesday. Russian forces have regularly shelled Kherson since retreating from the regional capital late last year to the other side of the Dnipro River. The aftermath of the russian attack on Kherson this morning. Does someone really believe that the world be a safe place if we let russia to get away with this? pic.twitter.com/FBXthJatQR Saint Javelin (@saintjavelin) December 5, 2023 Whats happening this morning in Ukraine? 07:57 , Tom Watling Below is a brief wrap-up of what has happened in Ukraine overnight and this morning. - Russia and Ukraine exchanged drone attacks overnight, according to the armed forces of both sides. The Russian ministry of defence claimed they shot down 26 of 41 drones fired by Ukraine. The Ukrainian air forces said they intercepted 10 of 17 drones fired by Russian forces. - On the frontline, Russian forces carried out significantly increased artillery and mortar shelling on Monday on the pulverised town of Avdiivka, Ukrainian officials said. The town is the latest flashpoint on the 600-mile combat line. - Overseas, White House officials sent a letter of warning to House speaker Mike Johnson that the funding for Ukraine will run out by the end of this year unless the lower chamber of Congress, run by a razor thin Republican majority, stops blocking the Biden administrations multibillion dollar proposals. - US Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who oversees the upper chamber of Congress, announced after the White House warning that he had invited Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to address US senators. He said that senators should hear directly from [Zelensky] precisely whats at stake. That will take place later today. - On the Poland-Ukraine border, the Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki called on the European Union to restore permits limiting transit for Ukrainian truckers as a spat between the two nations continues. Polish drivers have been blocking the crossings since 6 November demanding the restoration of permits. Slovakia and Hungary have also expressed frustration at what they view as cheaper Ukrainian goods and workers undercutting their domestic offerings. A Ukrainian serviceman stands next to residential buildings heavily damaged by permanent Russian military strikes in the front line town of Avdiivka (REUTERS) Police officers stand as trucks belonging to different Polish transport company owners block the access to Polish-Ukraine border crossing in protest against unfair' competition in Hrebenne, Poland (AFP via Getty Images) Ukrainian servicemen who sustained concussions or minor injuries are recovering in a field hospital near a frontline in the Donetsk region (AFP via Getty Images) Russian air defence systems destroy 41 Ukraine-launched drones -Russian defence ministry 07:30 , Tom Watling Russian air defence systems destroyed or intercepted a total of 41 drones launched overnight and early this morning by Ukraine, the Russian defence ministry has claimed. Twenty-six of the drones were destroyed over Russian territory, and 15 were intercepted over the Sea of Azov and the Crimean Peninsula, the ministry said in a statement on its Telegram channel. The ministry did not say whether there was any damage caused by the attack or falling debris. Ukraine says it downs 10 of 17 Russian drones during overnight strike 07:23 , Tom Watling Ukraines military shot down 10 out of 17 attack drones launched overnight by Russia, authorities said on Tuesday. Kyivs air force said the drones were shot down over various regions of the country. It also said six S-300 missiles had been launched at civilian objects in the eastern Donetsk and southern Kherson regions. There were no immediate reports of damages. A deminer touches the wreckage of a retrieved S-300 rocket, which fell a few months ago in the Dnipro river (REUTERS) Ukraine agricultural exports hit 5 million tons 07:05 , Maira Butt Ukraine has so far exported almost 5 million metric tons of agricultural products via its alternative Black Sea corridor, Deputy Prime Minister Oleksander Kubrakov said on Monday. Kubrakov said a total of 200 ships had exported 7 million metric tons of cargo of all types from the Black Sea ports since the corridor was set up in August after Russia quit a UN-backed Black Sea grain initiative. He said a further 31 ships were being loaded at the moment, but gave no details on the type of cargo they would carry. Hundreds of Ukrainian truck drivers stuck in long queues in Slovakia during winter conditions (Anadolu via Getty Images) Zelensky commends mobile firing groups as they destroy 18 drones 05:57 , Maira Butt President Zelensky confirmed 18 drones were destroyed by mobile firing groups in a video message on Monday. I thank everyone who trains the warriors of such groups and who works to provide them with everything they need. Last night the mobile firing groups in Mykolaiv, Kherson, Ivano-Frankivsk and Kirovorhad regions worked well. The International Maritime Organization's Assembly adopted a resolution today in support of our efforts in the Black Sea, Ukraine's success in restoring freedom of navigation, and the work of our new grain corridor. Ukraines export corridor has surpassed seven million tons of pic.twitter.com/bHBehrwd9o Volodymyr Zelenskyy / (@ZelenskyyUa) December 4, 2023 He also added: The International Maritime Organizations Assembly adopted a resolution today in support of our efforts in the Black Sea, Ukraines success in restoring freedom of navigation, and the work of our new grain corridor. Ukraines export corridor has surpassed seven million tons of cargo. This is very significant for our economy, and not only ports and agrarians, but also many other sectors. Millions of jobs in Ukraine are dependent on exports that our state can guarantee. And I am grateful to everyone all across the world who is assisting Ukraine with this. The IMO will be among those who support our efforts, and a decision has been made to evaluate the level of technical assistance required to ensure the normal functioning of the maritime corridor. Polish minister speaks with truck drivers at Ukraine border 04:55 , Maira Butt Polish minister for infrasructure, Alvin Gajadhur, was seen speaking with protesting truck drivers on Monday. Polish drivers have been blocking the crossings between Ukraine and Poland since 6 November as they demand that the EU reinstate a system whereby Ukrainian companies need permits to operate in the bloc and the same for European truckers to enter Ukraine. They have been joined by Polish farmers, and also Slovakian truckers. They complain that their Ukrainian peers offer cheaper prices for their services and also transport goods within the EU, rather than just between the bloc and Ukraine. Mr Gajadhur announced that he would submit a draft proposal to the Council of Ministers, in a bid to resolve the dispute. In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Polands Ministry of Infrastructure said: The regulations will increase the effectiveness of control, and the assumptions are consistent with the demands of the social side. Polands minister of infrastructure visited striking truckers at the border of Poland and Ukraine (AFP via Getty Images) The transport blockade has been going on for nearly a month (AFP via Getty Images) Biden administration warns House and Senate impasse will kneecap Ukraine 03:51 , Maira Butt The Biden administration on Monday sent Congress an urgent warning about the need to approve tens of billions of dollars in military and economic assistance to Ukraine, saying Kyivs war effort to defend itself from Russias invasion may grind to a halt without it. In a letter to House and Senate leaders and released publicly, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young warned the U.S. will run out of funding to send weapons and assistance to Ukraine by the end of the year, saying that would kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield. She added that the U.S. already has run out of money that it has used to prop up Ukraines economy, and if Ukraines economy collapses, they will not be able to keep fighting, full stop. We are out of money and nearly out of time, she wrote. Biden administration warns impasse could kneecap Ukraine amid concerns of resources running out (REUTERS) Three including 8-year-old girl confirmed dead in Russian attack 02:59 , Maira Butt The death toll from a Russian attack on the town of Novohrodivka has risen to three, after rescuers retrieved the body of an eight-year-old girl on Monday. Authorities were still looking for the girls parents but suspected they may be under the rubble after the attack on a residential building, according to Reuters. As of the morning, the girls body was recovered from the rubble. The childs parents, who are probably still under the rubble, were not found, Oleksandr Shevchenko, the head of local administration, said on Telegram. Governor confirms Russian officer killed while deployed in Ukraine 01:51 , Maira Butt In a rare admission, Russian officials have acknowledged the deaths of a number of high-ranking servicemen in the war with Ukraine. According to Barrons, Voronezh governor Alexander Gusev said on Telegram: A piercing pain. Major General Vladimir Zavadsky, deputy commander of the 14th Army Corps of the Northern Fleet, died in the line of duty in a special operation zone. Gusev called Zavadsky a courageous officer, a real general and a worthy man, but did not specify the circumstances of his death. In case you missed it: Putin orders Russian military to increase troop numbers by 170,000 01:03 , Maira Butt Shweta Sharma reports: Russian president Vladimir Putin has ordered a significant boost in the countrys military, increasing the troop numbers by nearly 170,000 to reach a total of 1.32 million as the Kremlins full-scale invasion enters its 22nd month. Mr Putin signed the decree on Friday in response to the aggressive activities of the Nato bloc and its special military operation in Ukraine, as stated by the Kremlin. In accordance with the decree of Russian president signed on November 29, 2023, the maximum size of the armed forces of the Russian Federation has been increased by 170,000 military personnel to 1,320,000 military personnel, the defence ministry said. It has expanded the Russian forces to approximately 2.2 million, including 1.32 million troops. The decree came into effect immediately. Read the full piece here. Zelensky: Our goal is to protect and strengthen our independence' Monday 4 December 2023 23:51 , Maira Butt Amid concerns around funding and ongoing instability in the Middle East, Ukraines President Zelensky took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to reiterate his mission in the ongoing conflict against Russia. He said: Our goal is to protect and strengthen our independence, to safeguard our people, and to restore a normal, decent life to the maximum extent possible. I am grateful to everyone who is fighting and working for this. Our goal is to protect and strengthen our independence, to safeguard our people, and to restore a normal, decent life to the maximum extent possible. I am grateful to everyone who is fighting and working for this! pic.twitter.com/am46HjFZxX Volodymyr Zelenskyy / (@ZelenskyyUa) December 4, 2023 In pictures: The latest on Ukraine Monday 4 December 2023 22:51 , Maira Butt Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young said that the Defense and State departments are at the stage where they have almost exhausted all available US funds for Kyiv (REUTERS) Zelensky thanked his friends in the international community as he defence agreements with partners continued to be implemented. (UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SER) White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said a vote against funding for Ukraine would hurt demoracy and help dictators (EPA) Zelensky is turning into an autocrat, says Kyiv mayor Klitschko Monday 4 December 2023 21:51 , Maira Butt Tom Watling reports: Volodymyr Zelensky is becoming increasingly autocratic and is pushing Ukraine to a point at which it will no longer be any different from Russia, Vitali Klitschko has claimed. It is unprecedented critism of the Ukrainian president since Russias invasion almost two years ago and comes as Kyivs counteroffensive against the forces of Vladimir Putin has . Mr Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxing champion turned mayor of Kyiv, told the Swiss media outlet 20 Minuten: People [are beginning to] see whos effective and whos not. And there were and still are a lot of expectations. Zelensky is paying for mistakes he has made. At some point we will no longer be any different from Russia, where everything depends on the whim of one man, Mr Klitschko told German magazine Der Spiegel, in another interview. Read the full piece here. Zelensky: 'We have received critical air defense missiles and new air defense systems Monday 4 December 2023 21:15 , Maira Butt President Zelensky has confirmed important defense agreements continue to be implemented amid concerns about a clawback in funding from supporters in the international community. He thanked Ukraines friends. In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, he said: Important defense agreements with our partners continue to be implemented. We have received both critical air defense missiles and new air defense systems. I thank our friends. Our efforts to boost domestic defense production are bearing fruit. We have reached the level of six Bohdana artillery systems per month for the first time. And we can already see ways to further increase capacity. Our grain corridor keeps working and has reached the 7 million ton mark. I also received intelligence data and frontline briefings on defensive operations in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka directions, as well as active operations in the south. Kherson. Following another barbaric Russian strike, emergency services and regional and city military administrations are assisting victims and providing aid. Our defense forces are realizing a plan to deprive the enemy of the possibility and willingness to terrorize the city. White House Security Adviser: A vote against funding will hurt Ukraine and help Russia Monday 4 December 2023 20:51 , Maira Butt White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan has warned that a vote against supplemental funding for Ukraine will only hurt Ukraine and help Russia. He urged congress to act now on Ukraine. At a press conference on Monday he said: I believe that any member of congress who does not support funding for Ukraine is voting for an outcome that will make it easier for Putin to prevail. A vote against supporting Ukraine is a vote to imorove Putins position. That is an inescapable reality. It will hurt Ukraine and help Russia. It will hurt democracy and help dictators. At a press briefing, Sullivan said a vote against Ukraine was a vote to improve Putins strategic position Poland warns Nato has three years to prepare for attack by Russia Monday 4 December 2023 20:16 , Maira Butt As the White House runs out of money to support Ukraine, Poland warns Russia could attack the West in less than 36 months. New fears of Russian escalation across Europe have emerged after a German think tank said Western countries must prepare for a direct attack from Russia. In a statement the German Council on Foreign Relations wrote: With its imperial ambitions, Russia represents the greatest and most urgent threat to Nato countries. Once intensive fighting will have ended in Ukraine, the regime in Moscow may need as little as six to ten years to reconstitute its armed forces. Within that timeframe, Germany and Nato must enable their armed forces to deter and, if necessary, fight against Russia. Only then will they be in a position to reduce the risk of another war breaking out in Europe. But, the head of Polands national security agency estimated that Russia could attack Nato countries within three years in an interview with Nasz Dziennik. Read the full piece here. In case you missed it: Russia accused of killing unarmed and surrendering Ukrainian prisoners of war Monday 4 December 2023 19:51 , Maira Butt Arpan Rai reports: Ukraine has accused Russia of committing a war crime by executing two unarmed Ukrainian soldiers who had already surrendered, and said an investigation has been launched into the killings. The Ukrainian prosecutor generals office said it had launched a probe into a video purporting to show the incident, saying it took place near an observation post outside Stepove village in Donetsk. The video shows a Ukrainian soldier crawling out of a foxhole as six Russian soldiers wait for him outside. He is seen holding his hands up and then lying on the ground. Within seconds, another Ukrainian soldier stumbles out of the dugout and lies down. The Russian soldiers then fire upon the two unarmed Ukrainians. The video shows a group of people in Russian uniforms shooting, at point-blank range, two unarmed servicemen in the uniform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who were surrendering, the Ukrainian prosecutor generals office said. The killing of prisoners of war is a gross violation of the Geneva Conventions and is classified as a serious international crime, it said. Read the full piece here. The more Western allies will support Ukraine the faster the war will end, says Nato chief Monday 4 December 2023 19:23 , Maira Butt Arpan Rai reports: Ukraines Western allies must keep up their support for the country through a difficult winter to come in its war with Russia, Natos secretary general Jens Stoltenberg has said. Mr Stoltenberg admitted Ukraines long-awaited counteroffensive this summer had failed to make significant territorial gains, but described Russias failure to capture any more major cities as a strategic defeat for Vladimir Putins invading forces. Wars develop in phases. We have to support Ukraine in both good and bad times. We should also be prepared for bad news, the Nato chief said in an interview with German broadcaster ARD. Mr Stoltenberg said Ukraine was fighting a war unlike any in history, and hailed the countrys efforts on the battlefield that have frustrated Russias advance. These are big victories even though they have not been able to move the frontline, he said. The Nato chief warned that a victory for Putin would not only be a tragedy for Ukraine but also present a danger for the alliance. The more we support Ukraine, the faster the war will end, he said. Read the full piece here. Hungarys Prime Minister demands Ukraines EU membership be taken off the agenda at a bloc summit Monday 4 December 2023 18:51 , Maira Butt Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban demanded on Monday that Ukraines membership in the European Union, along with billions in European funding, be taken off the agenda at a summit of the blocs leaders next week. In a letter to European Council President, Charles Michel, who will chair the summit in Brussels on 14-15 December, Orban insisted that a strategic discussion is needed first about Ukraines European future and warned that forcing a decision could destroy EU unity. I respectfully urge you not to invite the European Council to decide on these matters in December as the obvious lack of consensus would inevitably lead to failure, Orban wrote in the letter, dated 4 December and seen by The Associated Press.EU leaders, he wrote, must avoid this counterproductive scenario for the sake of unity, our most important asset. Prime Minister Orban insisted that a strategic discussion take place first (REUTERS) Putin declines pressing mock nuclear button as re-election bid nears Monday 4 December 2023 18:20 , Maira Butt President Vladimir Putin was shown a simulation of the nuclear button but declined to press it on Monday as he toured a vast exhibition of Russian achievements in what some suggested was a warm-up for an imminent re-election campaign. Putin was given an explanation of a Soviet nuclear bomb design and shown a mock control panel for launching a nuclear test, before observing images of a blast and mushroom cloud through a viewing window. Since the start of the Ukraine war, Putin has frequently affirmed the capabilities of Russias nuclear arsenal, saying anyone who tried to launch a nuclear attack against it would be wiped from the face of the earth. This month, he is expected to confirm that he will run for another six-year term in March. He was shown with a group of schoolchildren writing a message on a giant whiteboard about his hopes for their future, and selecting from among wishes that children had pinned to a Christmas tree in the hope he could make them come true. President Putin declined to press a mock nuclear button in a visit to a school (EPA) NATO has three years to prepare for a Russian attack, says Poland Monday 4 December 2023 17:43 , Maira Butt The head of Polands national security agency has estimated that Russia could attack NATO countries within three years. The minister suggested that an attack could come from NATOs eastern flank which includes countries such as Poland, Estonia, Romania and Lithuania. He estimated they had three years to prepare for a confrontation. In an interview with Nasz Dziennik, Jacek Siewiera, head of the National Security Bureau responded to a report by the think tank, Germany Foreign Policy Association. While the think tank estimated that Western countries have 5 to 9 years left to prepare to repel an attack from Moscow, the Secretary of State at the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland said that Germany analysts were too optimistic. If we want to avoid war, NATO countries on the eastern flank should adopt a shorter, 3-year time horizon to prepare for confrontation. This is the time when a potential must be created on the eastern flank that would be a clear signal deterring aggression, he said. Therefore, it is necessary to further increase the number of Polish troops. Putin blames Nord Stream blasts for disruption of Russia-Germany relations, hopes Moscow-London relations will improve Monday 4 December 2023 17:20 , Maira Butt Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that cooperation between Moscow and Berlin had been disrupted by blasts in September 2022 affecting Nord Stream pipelines that had pumped Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Accepting the credentials of more than 20 new ambassadors, including those of Germany and Britain, at a ceremony in the Kremlin, Putin also said he hoped that relations between Moscow and London would improve. Russias relations with Western countries are at their lowest level since the depths of the Cold War following Putins decision in February 2022 to send tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, prompting sweeping Western economic sanctions. Russia has blamed the United States, Britain, and Ukraine for the pipeline blasts. They all denied any involvement. Brazilian President on Ukraine: No country has the right to invade any other Monday 4 December 2023 16:51 , Maira Butt Brazils President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has reaffirmed his stance on the Ukraine-Russia conflict saying no country has the right to invade any other and has urged peace in the region. He previously met with President Zelensky in September to discuss potential solutions to achieve a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine. President Lula urged peace (EPA) EU envoys to start debating Ukraine membership Monday 4 December 2023 16:15 , Maira Butt Diplomatic envoys of the European Unions 27 member countries will meet on Tuesday to start debating a sensitive proposal to launch membership talks with Ukraine, officials and diplomats have said. The meeting marks the start of preparations for a summit of the blocs leaders to take place on 14-15 December that will decide EU integration prospects for Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Bosnia and others. Specifically, the Tuesday meeting will start debating a draft agreement of the leaders summit. EU diplomats and officials said the first draft prepared for discussion was bound to change. The initial draft reads: The European Council decides to open accession negotiations with Ukraine and with Moldova. For Georgia, it said the country would get EU candidate status on the understanding that Tbilisi implements outstanding conditions. For Bosnia, the initial draft stated the bloc was ready to open EU accession negotiations... once the necessary degree of compliance with the membership criteria is achieved. European Commission President von der Leyen and Ukraines President Zelenskiy walk after a joint press conference in Kyiv earlier this year (REUTERS) US is running out of money for Ukraine and that could hinder fight against Russia, White House warns Monday 4 December 2023 15:42 , Tom Watling The Biden administration on Monday sent Congress an urgent warning about the need to approve tens of billions of dollars in military and economic assistance to Ukraine, saying Kyivs war effort to defend itself from Russias invasion may grind to a halt without it. In a letter to House and Senate leaders and released publicly, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young warned the US will run out of funding to send weapons and assistance to Ukraine by the end of the year, saying that would kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield. She added that the US has already run out of money that it has used to prop up Ukraines economy, and if Ukraines economy collapses, they will not be able to keep fighting, full stop.We are out of money and nearly out of time, she wrote. Mr Biden has sought a nearly $106 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other needs, but it has faced a difficult reception on Capitol Hill, where there is growing skepticism about the magnitude of assistance for Ukraine and where even Republicans supportive of the funding are insisting on US-Mexico border policy changes to halt the flow of migrants as a condition for the assistance. Western analysts have told The Independent that a lot of Ukrianians will die if US funding to Ukraine abruptly stops. Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia and Asia programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, said there was no way to sugarcoat how bad it would be if the House doesnt pass aid to Ukraine. If US security assistance stops, he said, a lot of Ukrainians will die and their ability to fight on will be severely compromised. US President Joe Biden signs a guest book during his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved) Ukraine changing war tactics, says presidential aide Monday 4 December 2023 15:00 , Tom Watling Ukraine is changing its war tactics, moving to defence in some areas and continuing offensive operations in others, a senior Ukrainian official has said. Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said in a post on the X social media platform that the government was focused now on increasing domestic arms production and speeding up talks with partners to boost military supplies. Undoubtedly, the winter and the analysis of our own and the enemys resource capabilities require adjustments in tactics, he wrote. On the frontline and in the cities, we are already moving to a different tactic of warfare - effective defense in certain areas, continuation of offensive operations in other areas, special strategic operations on the Crimean peninsula and in the Black Sea waters, and significantly reformatted missile defense of critical infrastructure. Undoubtedly, the winter and the analysis of our own and the enemy's resource capabilities require adjustments in tactics. On the frontline and in the cities, we are already moving to a different tactic of warfare - effective defense in certain areas, continuation of offensive (@Podolyak_M) December 4, 2023 Nato must be prepared for bad news in Ukraine, says Stoltenberg Monday 4 December 2023 14:00 , Tom Watling Ukraines Western allies must keep up their support for the country through a difficult winter to come in its war with Russia, Natos secretary general Jens Stoltenberg has said. Mr Stoltenberg admitted Ukraines long-awaited counteroffensive this summer had failed to make significant territorial gains, but described Russias failure to capture any more major cities as a strategic defeat for Vladimir Putins invading forces. Wars develop in phases. We have to support Ukraine in both good and bad times. We should also be prepared for bad news, the Nato chief said in an interview with German broadcaster ARD. Nato must be prepared for bad news in Ukraine, says Stoltenberg First empty lorries pass through new Ukraine crossing at Polish border Monday 4 December 2023 13:02 , Tom Watling The first 30 empty lorries drove through a newly opened Uhryniv-Dolhobychuv crossing on the Ukrainian-Polish border, which Kyiv hopes will offer relief as Polish driver protests blocked other land corridors, Ukraines border service said on Monday. Those protests, over what Polish truckers see as unfair competition from their Ukrainian peers, started on Nov. 6, with four border crossings now under blockade. Polish hauliers main demand is to stop Ukrainian truckers having permit-free access to the European Union, something that Kyiv and Brussels say is impossible. Polands Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Monday that Warsaw would strongly and unequivocally demand that the European Union restore permits for Ukrainian truckers. He was speaking to reporters ahead of an EU ministers meeting in Brussels set for Monday. Poland, Slovakia and Hungary said their delegations would inform the EU about the impact of the EU-Ukraine agreement to remove permits on the road freight sector. The permits were abolished after Russias invasion of Ukraine last year. Polish drivers have been joined by Polish farmers, and later also Slovakian truckers. Trucks stand in a queue at the Polish-Ukrainian border in Hrebenne, southeastern Poland (EPA) Death toll in Russian strike on eastern town rises to three, Ukraine says Monday 4 December 2023 11:47 , Tom Watling Rescuers on Monday retrieved the body of an 8-year-old girl, five days after a Russian missile strike on Ukraines eastern town of Novohrodivka, Ukrainian authorities said, bringing the total death toll to three. On Nov. 29, Russia fired six missiles on three settlements in the eastern Donetsk region, injuring ten people, according to authorities. In Novohrodivka, a missile damaged a residential building, killing two, they said. Authorities said they were still looking for the girls parents. As of the morning, the girls body was recovered from the rubble. The childs parents, who are probably still under the rubble, were not found, Oleksandr Shevchenko, the head of local administration, said on the Telegram messaging app. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry said rescuers continued working at the site. It shared a blurred image of a childs body on the ground covered in building debris. Moscow has denied deliberately targeting civilians although many have been killed in frequent Russian air strikes across Ukraine. White House warns US is running out of money for Ukraine war Monday 4 December 2023 10:45 , Tom Watling The White House has issued a grave warning to Congress that if it fails to pass legislation by the end of the year to continue funding Ukraines defence, then Russia will be more likely to win the nearly two-year-old war. In a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda said that the Defense and State departments are at the stage where they have almost exhausted all available US funds for Kyiv approximately $111bn leaving recent assistance packages smaller and smaller. I want to be clear: without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from US military stocks, she said. White House warns US is running out of money for Ukraine war Deputy commander of Russia's 14th Army Corps killed in Ukraine - regional governor Monday 4 December 2023 10:16 , Tom Watling Major General Vladimir Zavadsky, deputy commander of Russias 14th Army Corps, has been killed in Ukraine, the governor of Russias Voronezh region, Alexander Gusev, said on his Telegram channel on Monday. Details of Zavadskys death have not been released, though Ukrainian outlets on Telegram have claimed that he stepped on a mine on 28 November. Major General Vladimir Zavadsky was killed in Ukraine, according to Russian sources (Telegram) Ukraine attacks oil depot in Luhansk with drones -RIA Monday 4 December 2023 09:35 , Tom Watling Ukraine's forces attacked an oil depot in Russia-controlled Luhansk last night using combat drones, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported on Monday, citing Russian-installed authorities in the Ukrainian region. A fire that broke out after the attack has been extinguished and there was no information about casualties, RIA reported. A fuel tank in occupied Luhansk, eastern Ukraine, is seen on fire overnight after an alleged UAV strike (Telegram) What's happening this morning in Ukraine? Monday 4 December 2023 09:00 , Tom Watling A winter storm has been declared in far western Ukraine, on the border with Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. Heavy snowfall has threatened to shut down roads and civilians have been warned against unnecessary travel. On the frontline, dropping temperatures and foggy conditions appear to have also impaired both sides ability to conduct aerial reconnaissance and mechanised assaults, which are attacks using tanks and armoured personnel carriers (APCs). The Ukrainian head of the Avdiivka military administration, Vitaliy Barabash, said on Sunday that they believed Russian forces were waiting the weather out before resuming heavy assaults on the eastern Ukrainian city. Nonetheless, fighting continues. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said there was intense fighting in multiple eastern cities and towns. Overnight, Russia launched 23 drones and a cruise missile, according to the Ukrainian air force. They said in a statement this morning that they had destroyed 18 of the drones. Meanwhile, at least three people were killed on Sunday as a result of Russian shelling in eastern and southern Ukraine, including a 69-year-old woman. Below are some of the latest photos from Ukraine. A woman and a child walk along the bank of the Uzh river during heavy snowfall in far western Ukraine (REUTERS) An ecological investigator collects soil in the area that was flooded following the Kakhovka dam explosion, for a war crime investigation into allegations of Russian ecocide (AFP via Getty Images) Debris is scattered inside an apartment after shelling in a residential block in Kherson that killed at least one and wounded seven others (via REUTERS) Russia launches 23 drones, cruise missiles overnight on Ukraine - Ukraine's Air Force Monday 4 December 2023 08:02 , Tom Watling Russia launched 23 drones and a cruise missile overnight on Ukraine, Ukraines air force said on Monday, adding that its air defence systems destroyed the missile and 18 of the drones before they reached their targets. Anti-aircraft defense was deployed in at least 9 regions of Ukraine, the air force said on the Telegram messaging app. The air force did not provide details on what happened to the drones that were not destroyed or whether there was any damage in result of the attack. People remove shards of glass from broken windows of a building housing a beauty salon following recent shelling in Donetsk (REUTERS) Russia accused of killing unarmed and surrendering Ukrainian prisoners of war Monday 4 December 2023 07:32 , Maryam Zakir-Hussain Ukraine has accused Russia of committing a war crime by executing two unarmed Ukrainian soldiers who had already surrendered, and said an investigation has been launched into the killings. The Ukrainian prosecutor generals office said it had launched a probe into a video purporting to show the incident, saying it took place near an observation post outside Stepove village in Donetsk. The video shows a Ukrainian soldier crawling out of a foxhole as six Russian soldiers wait for him outside. He is seen holding his hands up and then lying on the ground. Within seconds, another Ukrainian soldier stumbles out of the dugout and lies down. The Russian soldiers then fire upon the two unarmed Ukrainians. Russia accused of killing unarmed and surrendering Ukrainian POWs Ukraine says it is repelling Russian attacks across six fronts as Zelensky orders more fortifications Monday 4 December 2023 06:00 , Alexander Butler Missile attacks and ground clashes between Russian and Ukrainian forces surged on Thursday, according to the Ukrainian military, as Russian troops launched offensives but failed to move forward on as many as six fronts. A total of 73 combat skirmishes took place across the wars frontline in the past 24 hours, an update from Ukraines General Staff of the Armed Forces on Thursday read, a day after Russia launched more than 100 attacks to recapture its lost positions in eastern Ukraines Robotyne. These included 43 airstrikes and 34 attacks from multiple-launch rocket systems. Russian forces also used seven Iranian Shahed drones to target Ukrainian personnel, weapons and military equipment. Ukraine repelling Russian attacks across six fronts as Zelensky seeks fortifications Officials walk out as Russias Sergei Lavrov speaks at European security meeting Monday 4 December 2023 05:00 , Alexander Butler Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov came face-to-face with Western critics while attending international security talks on Thursday, amid European protests that Vladimir Putins top diplomat was invited to the summit while he wages war against Ukraine. Some European officials present in North Macedonia walked out as the Russian minister addressed a session for foreign ministers of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation of Europe (OSCE), videos of the event showed. A number of foreign ministers refused to attend the event over Russias involvement, including those of Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Officials walk out as Russias Sergei Lavrov speaks at security meeting Putin wont consider stopping Ukraine war until after US election, says Biden official Monday 4 December 2023 04:00 , Alexander Butler Vladimir Putin will not consider ending his invasion of Ukraine until he knows the result of the 2024 US presidential election, a senior official from the Joe Biden administration has said. Experts have said Russia appears content to grind down Ukraines resolve in the conflict rather than risk losing yet more troops in an all-out assault, and that wearing down the patience of Kyivs Western allies appears to be a key part of that strategy. Since the start of Russias full-scale invasion, the Biden administation has dedicated over $60bn in aid to Ukraine, with a significant portion exceeding the $43bn budget allocated for military assistance. Further funding is being held up by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, with Democrats outraged by the latest GOP efforts to tie Ukraine aid to a crackdown on immigration to the US. Putin wont consider stopping Ukraine war until after US election official Finland closes last crossing point with Russia, sealing off entire border as tensions rise Monday 4 December 2023 03:00 , Alexander Butler Nato member Finland on Wednesday closed its last remaining border crossing with Russia after the government decided to seal the entire border with its eastern neighbor amid rising political tensions. The decision to close the entire 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) border was made by the Cabinet of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo on Tuesday over concerns that Moscow is using migrants to wage hybrid warfare to destabilize the Nordic country following its entry into Nato. The Raja-Jooseppi crossing point in Finlands Arctic Lapland region, located some 250 kilometers (155 miles) from the northern Russian city of Murmansk, was closed at 2pm Wednesday, according to the checkpoints normal November schedule. Finland closes last crossing point with Russia The director of Russia's Mariinsky Theatre, Valery Gergiev, is also put in charge of the Bolshoi Monday 4 December 2023 02:00 , Alexander Butler The Russian government on Friday named Valery Gergiev, the renowned director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, to also lead Moscows Bolshoi Theatre. Gergiev is replacing Vladimir Urin at the Bolshoi. Urin announced Thursday that he was stepping down after a decade, but didnt explain the reason behind his move. Some Russian media said the departure of 76-year-old Urin was related to health issues. Others speculated it was linked to a letter calling for an end to Moscows military action in Ukraine that he and some other prominent cultural figures signed after the Kremlin sent troops across the border in February 2022. The director of Russia's Mariinsky Theatre, Valery Gergiev, is also put in charge of the Bolshoi Senior Russian general killed by one of Putins own landmines in Ukraine Monday 4 December 2023 01:00 , Alexander Butler Russia may have lost as many as six high-ranking officers in Ukraine in just one week following reports a senior general was killed by a landmine placed by his own side. Major general Vladimir Zavadsky, 45, the deputy commander of the 14th Army Corps, died in occupied Ukraine on Tuesday, reported pro-Kremlin newspaper Lenta. The elite military academy where Zavadsky studied, the Moscow Higher Combined Arms Command School, also announced his death in a social media post, although that has now been deleted. Senior Russian general killed by one of Putins own landmines in Ukraine Putin urges Russian women to have eight or more children amid soaring deaths in his Ukraine war Monday 4 December 2023 00:00 , Alexander Butler Vladimir Putin has urged Russian women to have eight or more children and make large families the norm amid soaring numbers of casualties in his war against Ukraine. Russias birth rate has been steadily falling since the 90s and the country has suffered more than 300,000 casualties since the start of the Ukraine conflict, according to data maintained by Kyiv. In a speech via video link at the World Russian Peoples Council in Moscow on Tuesday, Mr Putin said boosting the Russian population will be our goal for the coming decades. Putin asks Russian women to have eight or more children amid deaths in his war Police raid Moscow gay bars after a Supreme Court ruling labeled LGBTQ+ movement 'extremist' Sunday 3 December 2023 23:00 , Alexander Butler Russian security forces raided gay clubs and bars across Moscow Friday night, less than 48 hours after the countrys top court banned what it called the global LGBTQ+ movement as an extremist organization. Police searched venues across the Russian capital, including a nightclub, a male sauna, and a bar that hosted LGBTQ+ parties, under the pretext of a drug raid, local media reported. Eyewitnesses told journalists that clubgoers documents were checked and photographed by the security services. They also said that managers had been able to warn patrons before police arrived. Police raid Moscow gay bars after a Supreme Court ruling labeled LGBTQ+ movement 'extremist' Schoolboys hilarious reaction to Zelensky walking into classroom Sunday 3 December 2023 22:00 , Alexander Butler A video of a schoolboys hilarious reaction to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky walking into his classroom has gone viral. Footage from the presidents office shows Zelensky going from classroom to classroom to interact with students, accompanied by the mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov. As Zelensky enters the boys classroom, the stunned student stares wide-eyed at the president, immediately raising his hands to his head in apparent amazement. The underground classrooms were opened in September inside the University metro station to protect the students from ongoing Russian attacks. Schoolboys hilarious reaction to Zelensky walking into classroom Russia has lost 332,040 troops in Ukraine Sunday 3 December 2023 21:00 , Alexander Butler Russia has lost 332,040 troops in Ukraine since the beginning of its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the General Staff of Ukraines Armed Forces said. This number includes 930 casualties Russian forces suffered over the past day. The military also said Russia has lost 5,575 tanks, 10,396 armored fighting vehicles, 10,432 vehicles and fuel tanks, 7,949 artillery systems, 913 multiple launch rocket systems, 602 air defense systems, 323 airplanes, 324 helicopters, 5,995 drones, 22 ships and boats, and one submarine. Over 7,000 Russian troops lost in one week, Kyiv claims Sunday 3 December 2023 20:00 , Alexander Butler Ukraines First Deputy Defense Minister Oleksandr Pavliuk has claims Russia has lost 7,210 troops over the last week. Posting on Telegram, he added that the Russians had lost 534 units of weapons and military equipment. Ukrainian military thanks UK for Challenger tanks Sunday 3 December 2023 19:00 , Alexander Butler The Ukrainian military has thanked the UK for providing Challenger 2 tanks which have helped repel Russian attacks on the country. Today, we want to thank our British partners. The UK was the first European country to send weapons to the Ukrainian army to repel russian aggression. And we are also grateful for one of the best modern tanks Challenger 2. The Challenger 2 became an effective weapon in professional hands of Ukrainian warriors. The spectacular combination of technology and talent helps to liberate our land from occupiers, it said on X. 3rd Day of Ukrainian Advent Calendar Today, we want to thank our British partners @DefenceHQ. The UK was the first European country to send weapons to the Ukrainian army to repel russian aggression. And we are also grateful for one of the best modern tanks Challenger 2. The pic.twitter.com/GYaD1XTA4z Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) December 3, 2023 Watch: Ukraine claims it destroys Russian armoured vehicles Sunday 3 December 2023 18:00 , Alexander Butler The Ukrainian millitary has shared footage which it claims shows its 14th Separate Regiment destroying Russian armored vehicles, a tank repair base and a truck. Professional and effective work of our warriors from the 14th Separate Regiment. As a result, occupiers armored vehicles, a tank repair base and a truck were destroyed, it said. Professional and effective work of our warriors from the 14th Separate Regiment. As a result, occupier's armored vehicles, a tank repair base and a truck were destroyed. pic.twitter.com/iVC6ZLUUIw Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) December 3, 2023 At least two dead in Kherson after shelling Sunday 3 December 2023 17:00 , Alexander Butler Ukraine said at least two people were killed and four injured by Russian shelling in the Kherson region Sunday, while air defences downed 10 Russian drones overnight. Kherson was recaptured by Ukrainian forces in November 2022 but has since faced relentless shelling by Russian forces from the opposite bank of the adjoining Dnipro river. Officials said a 78-year-old man was killed Sunday morning when the village of Sadove was bombarded, while a woman in Kherson city was killed by shelling in a street. Hundreds of settlements without power Sunday 3 December 2023 16:00 , Alexander Butler Over 500 settlements in a dozen Ukrainian regions experienced power outages due to bad weather, and over 400 more lost power due to Russian attacks and equipment disturbances, the Ukrainian energy ministry said. In Lviv Oblast, 41,000 households in 388 settlements were left without power due to weather. Up to 422 settlements have been without power due to hostilities and technological disturbances, the ministry said. Ease up of offensive on Avdiivka shows Russian's "running out of steam" Sunday 3 December 2023 15:00 , Alexander Butler Ukraine has claimed the ease up of Russias offensive on the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka shows its military is running out of steam. Over the past 24 hours, the number of ground attacks has decreased, Vitaliy Barabash, the head of the citys military administration, said. There are fewer and fewer Russian people willing to go on assaults voluntarily, and there are more and more refuseniks, Mr Barabash said. He explained that difficult weather conditions, large losses in both Russian and manpower meant the Russian army was running out of steam. Ukraine to open crossing for lorries on Monday to unblock Polish border Sunday 3 December 2023 14:00 , Alexander Butler Ukraine and Poland will open an additional border crossing for empty trucks on Monday in order to open up a much-needed route for Kyiv, with some crossings blocked by weeks of protests by Polish drivers, Ukrainian authorities said on Sunday. Those protests, over what Polish truckers see as unfair competition from their Ukrainian peers, started on 6 November, with four border crossings now under blockade. Polish hauliers main demand is to stop Ukrainian truckers having permit-free access to the EU, something that Kyiv and Brussels say is impossible. The opening of Uhryniv is the first point on the list of measures implemented to unblock the border, reduce queues and increase the capacity of the Ukrainian-Polish border, the border service said. Ukraine said last week it had agreed some measures with Poland that could ease the pressure at the blockaded border crossings, but that they had not discussed the main demands of the protests. Elderly man killed in Russian strikes, Kyiv claims Sunday 3 December 2023 13:30 , Alexander Butler An elderly man was killed during Russian shelling of Ukraines southern region of Kherson on Sunday, regional officials said. The occupants attacked the Sadove village. One of the hits was to a private garage, where a 78-year-old man was at the time. He died on the spot from the explosive injury, the Kherson military administration said on the Telegram messaging app. Russian troops had abandoned Kherson and the western bank of the Dnipro river late last year, but now regularly shell those areas from positions on the eastern bank. Soviet war memorials destroyed in Eastern Europe Sunday 3 December 2023 13:00 , Alexander Butler Soviet war memorials are being destroyed in some Eastern European countries, Russia has claimed. Regrettably, memorials dedicated to Soviet liberator soldiers are presently being destroyed in some Eastern European countries as part of a campaign to falsify history, Russias foreign ministry said. The Russian Foreign Ministry brings these outrageous facts to public attention and actively works to preserve and restore these memorials. The memory of those who sacrificed their lives for our future remains immortal. It comes as Russia celebrates the Day of the Unknown Soldier, a day established to remember fallen soldiers in Russia and abroad. Ukrainian parliaments chairman accuses Russia of war crimes Sunday 3 December 2023 12:19 , Alexander Butler The chairman of the Ukrainian parliament has shared a still of a video which is said to show Russian soldiers executing two prisoners of war. Ruslan Stefanchuk said: This is another crime committed by russian terrorists. Violation of the rules of war. The killing of unarmed soldiers. Russia has once again proved that it is a terrorist country for which there are no laws and norms of international law. Execution of Ukrainian soldiers by russians when they surrendered. This is another crime committed by russian terrorists. Violation of the rules of war. The killing of unarmed soldiers. russia has once again proved that it is a terrorist country for which there are no laws and pic.twitter.com/rcyapnbD8R Ruslan Stefanchuk (@r_stefanchuk) December 3, 2023 Sacramento County has paid a $45,000 settlement to a man who alleged he was kicked by deputies after declining to show them his drivers license. Nathan Schneider was working as a Lyft driver in July 2019 at around 9:30 p.m., driving a couple back and forth from an Orangevale storage unit facility, alleged a federal lawsuit Schneider filed in April 2020. After one of the drop offs, Schneider encountered an issue getting through the gate to exit and was trapped inside. He called the Sacramento Sheriffs Office for help, the lawsuit alleged. Shortly after, Sheriffs deputies Johsua Hartin and John Seubert arrived, and asked Schneider for his license. Schneider did not provide it and the deputies told him to exit the car. Ultimately (Schneider) complied and exited his car, but warned the deputy that he just had knee surgery and was still recovering, the lawsuit stated. Out of spite, the deputy kicked (Schneiders) knee, tearing his ACL, which required surgery again. To cover his unlawful actions, the deputy falsely arrested (Schneider). Schneider was arrested for obstruction and or/resistance, the lawsuit alleged. There are no criminal records in Sacramento County Superior Court for Schneider, indicating charges were not filed. The county declined comment on the settlement, spokeswoman Kim Nava said. Sheriffs Office spokesman Sgt. Amar Gandhi declined to say whether the two men are still deputies. Both men were still Sheriffs deputies in 2022, according to Transparent California, a website that tracks the salaries of public employees. Schneiders lawsuit claimed Fourth Amendment violations of excessive force, negligence, false imprisonment, as well as a state penal code violation of battery. As defendants it named the county, Hartin and Seubert, all of whom were represented by the same attorneys from outside firm Porter Scott. The incident is not listed on the Sheriffs Office web page as an incident in which deputies caused a citizen great bodily injury. According to a state law, law enforcement agencies must all records regarding incidents in which law enforcement officers cause great bodily injury. Injuries that require surgery, like Schneiders, should be considered great bodily injury, according to case law, First Amendment Coalition attorney David Loy has said. The Sheriffs Office and Sacramento Police Department have failed to release internal affairs disciplinary records for roughly 100 incidents that involved an officer-involved shooting or great bodily injury since 2019, a Sacramento Bee investigation found. The Bee learned of the $45,000 settlement, which the county signed in March, from a California Public Records Act request for county settlement agreements. While night fishing off the coast of Australia, a group witnessed an intense battle between two apex predators: a group of sharks vs. a crocodile. Jessie Leigha, professional angler with Wildcard Luxury Cruises, was night fishing with a group off the coast of the Wessel Islands when she captured footage of the unfriendly nighttime guests, according to her Instagram post on Nov. 29. Her video, which has graphic language that may be offensive to some readers, shows a large number of sharks swimming around the fishing boat. We had anchored up for the night in a bay and the sharks were in full form at the back of the boat, so we were watching them for a bit, Leigha told McClatchy News via Instagram. It is very common to have this many sharks off the back of the boat. Then the crocodile appeared. We were all shocked as I have never seen both (animals) together before, Leigha said. Video shows the crocodile swimming near the boat and its rope. As it tries to bite the rope, several people yell at the animal to let go. The sharks continue circling the crocodile, then one attacks from below, biting the crocodiles neck, the video shows. A wild splashing ensues. Fishermen can be heard yelling in shock and surprise. The croc then surfaces further away from the boat, as the video ends with the crocodile swimming off The sharks had a few chomps on Mr. Snappy, Leigha wrote on Instagram. It was absolutely amazing and crazy, Leigha told McClatchy News. We have never seen this form of interaction before and a lot of us have been at sea for many many years. The sharks didnt like (the crocodile) in their waters, Leigha told the Australian outlet 7News. Theyre not used to it and maybe saw (the crocodile) as a contender for food. Leigha told McClatchy News that the crocodile survived and was later seen in fine form on a beach. An Instagram user commented that the video was as Australian as it gets. I thought this was south Florida for a second, another user commented. The Wessel Islands are an island chain along the northern coast of Australia, about 1,800 miles northwest of Sydney. Swimmer spots once in a lifetime sight of sea lion battling octopus, video shows Stunned beachgoers watch worlds most dangerous bird emerge from ocean, video shows Curious sea creature follows diver in kelp forest and snacks on wetsuit. See photos Parents packed an elementary school cafeteria to express concerns about the planned shuttering of their school. Terrebonne Parish Superintendent "Bubba" Orgeron explained his plans that include closing Honduras Elementary School to a crowd of parents. The plan goes before the Terrebonne Parish School Board Dec. 5 for a vote. If the vote passes Bayou Black Elementary, Gibson Elementary and Honduras Elementary all will close, and their students and teachers will be consolidated into other schools. Gibson students would pool with Schriever Elementary School, Honduras Elementary School with Village East and Acadian, and Bayou Black would see some students go to Mulberry and some to Schriever Elementary School. "I know tonight is about Honduras, but I'm looking at the community of Terrebonne," Orgeron said. "This is not a popular answer, but I'm working to get 100% certified teachers." Renee Remart asks Terrebonne Superintendent Bubba Orgeron about his plans to increase certified teachers and close Honduras Elementary School, November 30, at the school. According to Orgeron, his plan to consolidate the schools will place more certified teachers in front of students by merging schools with dwindling student enrollment with other schools to make classroom sizes about 20 to 24 students per class. It also would remove certified teachers from positions like librarians and computer labs and place those teachers back in front of classrooms. The plan also gives a flat 10% pay raise to all teachers. He said the school district operates on state dollars that are paid for each student that is enrolled in the district, about $4,000 a child. Because of the dwindling enrollment, decisions have to be made to head off potential problems that could occur if the enrollment continues to diminish year-by-year. Terrebonne Parish School District lost 2,160 students district-wide in the past five years, a 12.5% decline. According to local data, those who are moving are moving toward the city, or out of the parish entirely. Many of the parents of students at Honduras were not pleased. "I can honestly say this is her home because she's here from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. If you take her from this home you are going to lose this money because I'm going to take her out," Kelly Livas said. "This consolidation, I don't want it." "This consolidation, I don't want it," Kelly Livas said to Terrebonne Superintendent Bubba Orgeron, November 30. The plan includes Honduras Elementary School, where her children attend. Livas said that after Hurricane Ida she had to bounce her children from one school to another, and finally was able to settle in at Honduras. She liked the school, and its smaller classroom size. She said her children did well at the school and she didn't understand why her kids were being told to move to another school if they were performing well at Honduras. Orgeron said that he believes that teachers are the most important part of the education process. He said he wants every teacher in every classroom to be certified because when a student has a bad teacher it creates a gap in their education. A gap in a child's education will set them behind, he said. Daisy Rivas said her son has a learning disability and change further disrupts his learning process. She said the smaller classroom sizes aid her son in focusing on his assignments and she trusts the teachers at Honduras with giving him the education he needs. "Our kids just benefit so much from this place," she said. "I'm scared to move them." Renee Remant asked why if the number of students has declined, why did the parish need to get more certified teachers in front of students? Orgeron explained that when classroom sizes exceed 24 students, and sometimes less, the classroom splits into two classes, which requires two teachers. The parish currently has 180 uncertified teachers, and this plan would see this reduced to about 70 in the first year. By consolidating the schools, the teachers from the merged schools are pooled at one location with the students allowing the school to better divide up the students among the teachers available. This will mean less teachers required for the same number of students. Terrebonne Superintendent Bubba Orgeron tells parents of Honduras Elementary School children about his plan to reform the Terrebonne education system, November 30. Another portion of the plan that would increase the number of certified teachers in classrooms, is to take certified teachers from positions like librarians, computer labs, and master teacher positions, and put them back in front of students as teachers. This would cut down on the number of uncertified teachers necessary to instruct students. More: Terrebonne superintendent to present consolidation plan at Bayou Black, Honduras schools More: 11-year-old girl charged with murder in Nov. 14 killing, Iberia Parish Sheriff reports A master teacher is a person who instructs other teachers on how to teach more effectively. Meyblyn Briceno, Alexandra Torress and Jeny Ollives were in attendance watching the meeting. Briceno's son, Hector Sanchez, helped a reporter with the Houma Courier to speak with the three. Asked how they felt about the potential consolidation, Sanchez said the three didn't have concerns with the education their children would receive, they just wanted to know what kind of new uniforms they would need and how they would get them. According to Orgeron, if any parents need aid in getting school uniforms, they can visit the A.D. Martin West Park Special Education and Federal Center building located at 7573 W. Park Ave. and ask for Cheryl Degruise. This article originally appeared on The Courier: Terrebonne superintendent discusses consolidation plan at Honduras Elementary A society page from the Dec. 3, 1923, edition of the Yakima Daily Republic highlights happenings in residents' lives in similar ways to today's social media. Santiago Ochoas reporting for the Yakima Herald-Republic is possible with support from Report for America and community members through the Yakima Valley Community Fund . For information on republishing, email news@yakimaherald.com. BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Azerbaijan's Embassy in Latvia took part in an international charity fair traditionally held in Riga on December 3, the embassy told Trend. Diplomatic missions accredited in Latvia as well as local institutions were represented at the event organized by the International Women's Club of Riga. "Azerbaijan's stand at the charity fair presented souvenirs, national costumes reflecting the culture and history of our country, various editions related to Azerbaijan were displayed and distributed. At the same time, Azerbaijani products, tasty dishes of national cuisine and colorful samples of kelaghayi (traditional Azerbaijani women headgear), included by UNESCO in the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, were presented," the embassy said. A video about nature, culture and tourism of Azerbaijan prepared by the State Tourism Agency of the Republic of Azerbaijan was also demonstrated at the event. Former Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis and other guests visited the Azerbaijani stand, which became one of the most visited and aroused interest at the fair. Stay up-to-date with more news on Trend News Agency's WhatsApp channel This story is from the Washington State Standard , which is an affiliate of the nonprofit States Newsroom. If you are sending a Letter To the Editor, please be sure to follow these rules: Letters have a firm 200-word limit and will be edited for grammar, clarity and accuracy. The person who signs the letter must be the author. Anonymous letters will not be considered. Letters must address the editor, not a third party. We will not print form letters, libelous letters, business promotions or personal disputes, poetry, open letters, letters espousing religious views without reference to a current issue, or letters considered in poor taste. Letters reflect the opinion of the writer. The Yakima Herald-Republic cannot verify the accuracy of all statements made in letters. Writers are limited to one published letter per calendar month. Our directory features more than 18 million business listings from across the entire US. However, if we're missing your business, add your business by clicking on Add Your Business. BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. On November 1 and 2, French President Emmanuel Macron made official visits to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, during which declarations were signed to expand cooperation and continue political dialogue (including the future upgrade of relations with Uzbekistan to a "strategic partnership"), and agreements were reached on issues such as continued cooperation in uranium mining and French investment in renewable energy. A number of preliminary commercial deals were also signed, according to a report in the French online weekly La Gazette. Furthermore, France has declared a willingness to enhance development and education collaboration, with plans to continue efforts to open two French universities, increase student exchanges, and spread the French language. Deeper engagement in the region is crucial for France and for Europe in general. Strengthening ties with Central Asia could ensure Europe's energy security, secure supplies of rare earth elements, and restore the geopolitical balance in the Central Asian region. President Macron is the first French leader to visit Central Asia since 1994. However, collaboration in the sector of raw materials between France and the region's countries (mostly Kazakhstan) has grown rapidly during the last 30 years. TotalEnergies' investments in oil fields and close cooperation in uranium mining demonstrate this: Kazakhstan accounted for 29 percent of France's uranium purchases as of 2022, while Uzbekistan accounted for 17 percent. The war in Ukraine has fueled this reconciliation, as evidenced by the French president's recent visit, among other things. As a result, the EU and its member states have increased collaboration with Central Asian countries in energy, transportation, and trade. The region is likewise keen on promoting cooperation, as indicated by the travels of Kazakhstan's and Uzbekistan's presidents, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and Shavkat Mirziyoyev, to Paris in November and Berlin in September, respectively. Potential collaboration in the energy industry is one of the clear benefits of expanding the alliance with Central Asia. Notably, Kazakhstan has considerable uranium reserves and is one of the world's main uranium producers. Given that nuclear power generates over 70 percent of France's electricity, a stronger relationship might ensure a constant supply of uranium for French reactors. In addition, the partnership could solve Europe's growing energy problems. Recent disruptions in global energy markets, combined with political tensions, have highlighted the need to diversify Europe's energy sources. Central Asia, with its untapped hydrocarbon reserves and renewable energy potential, represents an effective solution. The primary goal of Emmanuel Macron's trip to Central Asia appears to be to expand cooperation on uranium mining and imports to France. The prospect of lower imports from Niger (the French market's second supplier in 2022), which has increased since that country's July military coup, has emphasized the importance of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In this regard, the signing of a memorandum of cooperation on vital raw material imports with Kazakhstan, as well as the President of Uzbekistan's approval of the development of geological and uranium mining operations, are practical outcomes of the visit. The agreements concluded in the renewable energy sector (a $1.4 billion wind power project in southern Kazakhstan in which TotalEnergies will participate) and transportation (a project to build an Alstom electric locomotive plant) are in the interest of French companies and concretize the priorities of the European Union in terms of cooperation with the region. Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries are rich in rare earth metals, which are vital for the transition to green energy. These metals are essential in the manufacture of a wide range of technology, from smartphones to wind turbines and electric vehicle batteries. Europe is currently strongly reliant on China for these essential minerals. This reliance on a single supply chain is dangerous and jeopardizes technical advancement. France and Europe may diversify their rare metal supply chains by actively strengthening ties with Central Asian countries. This action would minimize reliance on China while also encouraging greater economic independence and resilience to potential trade crises. Kazakhstan is preparing to organize a referendum on the construction of a nuclear power plant on its territory. Given France's deep experience in the nuclear sector, this presents an excellent opportunity for cooperation. France, home to some of the world's largest nuclear power companies, has both the experience and technical acumen to help Kazakhstan meet the challenges of building and operating a nuclear power plant. The potential partnership promises more than just construction; it includes knowledge sharing, the implementation of safety measures, and long-term maintenance and operation contracts. Kazakhstan's nuclear power concerns should be viewed as congruent with the Old Continent's broader goals of energy security, climate change mitigation, and regional stability. Because the EU considers nuclear power to be a critical industry for reaching carbon neutrality by 2050, Kazakhstan's ambitions may garner backing from Western partners. Russia and China are actively seeking influence in Central Asia, an area that has historically been at the center of the so-called "Great Game." Russia has historical and commercial ties to Central Asia, as does China, which has the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and its "One Belt, One Road" plan. A strengthened French engagement in Central Asia can serve as a counterweight to ensure that no single power dominates the region. This strategic approach serves the interests of both Europe and Central Asia. The time has come. While Kazakhstan maintains close economic and cultural ties with Russia, its leaders have refused to condone Russia's invasion of Ukraine. On the contrary, they have called for a cessation of hostilities and the start of peace talks in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter. In addition, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev emphasized that his country would adhere to Western sanctions. In terms of specific initiatives, the promotion of new trade routes between Europe and Asia, such as the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITM), also known as the Middle Corridor, would be a significant step forward for Europe. This trade route, which starts in Turkiye, passes through the South Caucasus (Azerbaijan and Georgia) and Central Asia before reaching China, potentially diversifying and speeding up trade routes. Transportation time along this route has been reduced from 3853 days last year to just 1923 days. The goal is to further reduce this time to 1418 days. The expansion of this corridor could serve as a center for strengthening trade, cultural exchange, and geopolitical cooperation between Europe and Asia. Beyond simply counterbalancing the influence of the great powers, France's expanding participation in Central Asia could actively contribute to the development and importance of the Middle Corridor. This not only provides Europe with alternate economic routes that can minimize transit times, but it also emphasizes Central Asia's strategic relevance as a bridge between East and West. France may also position Central Asian countries as active players in global links and cooperation rather than as passive viewers of the larger geopolitical scene. From the standpoint of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the recent visit by the French president has widened the Western dimension of these countries' foreign policies, which has deepened since the commencement of the Ukrainian war. Tashkent and Astana perceive their cooperation with the West as an opportunity to boost their international standing, particularly with respect to Moscow and Beijing, while also attracting investment and modernization (in terms of technology and education). They also promote themselves as dependable and strategic raw material trading partners of the EU and its member states. This has been proven, for example, by Kazakhstan's recent role as one of France's two most important oil supplies, as well as the fast expansion of uranium cooperation with Uzbekistan. The joint venture formed in November with the French group Orano, which carried out its first uranium transportation on the eve of Emmanuel Macron's visit, is an ideal example. As a result of the complex geopolitical situation, commodities traveling from east to west must be rerouted to different routes. And Azerbaijan's importance in this regard has only grown. The logistics and transportation cooperation between Azerbaijan and Central Asia is rapidly expanding. With EU countries increasing their need for the region's resources, Azerbaijan's position in these deliveries is becoming increasingly important. Azerbaijan is already a transit hub for Kazakhstani oil and uranium, Turkmen fertilizers, and a variety of other items. In addition to increasing relations with Central Asian countries, France and other European powers should pay particular attention to the potential Azerbaijan provides. Demisia lui Klaus Iohannis. Ciolacu a vorbit cu el Premierul Marcel Ciolacu a discutat cu presedintele Klaus Iohannis despre functia de presedinte al Consiliului European, Ciolacu sustinand ca este o sansa reala care ar putea reveni Romaniei, pentru ca avem un culoar bun, iar Iohannis ar putea prelua aceasta pozitie in luna mai. Premierul a mai aratat [citeste mai departe] Cei mai mici atleti sunt invitati la competitia indoor Cupa de Iarna, de la Suceava O noua editie a Cupei de Iarna la atletism, competitie dedicata celor mai mici alergatori, va avea loc sambata, 20 ianuarie, in sala Areni, cu incepere de la ora 11:00. Actiunea este organizata de Asociatia Club Sportiv Academia [citeste mai departe] Total destruction of Hamas would take a decade, Frances Macron says French President Emmanuel Macron said Israel must more precisely define what it seeks to accomplish in its war on Hamas as the full elimination of the Palestinian militant group would take a decade, according to Politico. We are at a moment when Israeli authorities must more precisely define their objectives and their final goal: the [] The post Total destruction of Hamas would take a decade, Frances Macron says appeared first on Stiri online, ultimele stiri, presa online, ziar online - Sursazilei.ro . Citeste articolul mai departe pe sursazilei.ro Sursa articol si foto: sursazilei.ro Stiri pe aceeasi tema - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outlined three prerequisites to achieving peace in its war with Hamas: the destruction of the group, the demilitarization of Gaza and for Palestinian society to be deradicalized, according to Bloomberg. The comments, made in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal - The United States vetoed a resolution at the United Nations Security Council Friday demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, as civilian casualties rise amid Israels military campaign against the Palestinian militant group Hamas, according to Politico. The resolution, introduced by the United Arab - Israelul a anuntat ca si-a reluat campania militara in Gaza, vineri, chiar in momentul in care armistitiul prelungit cu Hamas urma sa expire, potrivit Politico. Fortele de aparare israeliene (IDF) au reluat luptele impotriva organizatiei teroriste Hamas in Gaza, au declarat Fortele de aparare israeliene - Israel and Hamas agreed to extend their temporary cease-fire for an extra day on Thursday, as two gunmen killed three people in a shooting in Jerusalem, according to Politico. The cease-fire which had already been extended by two days earlier this week was set to expire on Thursday at 7 a.m. local - The first captives held by the Palestinian militant group Hamas are set to be released on Friday afternoon as part of a prisoner exchange, as a four-day cease-fire deal with Israel came into effect at 7 a.m. local time (6 a.m. CET), according to Politico. The BBC reported that what appeared to be Israeli - European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Sunday reiterated her strongly pro-Israeli stance despite growing criticism from within her own staff, while also harshly criticizing Iran for seeking to sow violence and chaos in the Middle East, according to Politico. Some 800 EU staff took - European Council President Charles Michel said on Tuesday that attacking civilian infrastructure is against international law after Israel was accused of bombing a hospital in Gaza, according to Politico. A massive blast rocked a Gaza City hospital packed with Palestinians on Tuesday, killing at least - Israeli forces kept up their bombardment of Gaza on Monday after diplomatic efforts to arrange a ceasefire to allow foreign passport holders to leave and aid to be brought into the besieged Palestinian enclave failed, according to Reuters. Residents of Hamas-ruled Gaza said overnight air strikes were Opposition LMP has called for the abolition of the law on priority investments, arguing that the regulation allowed the government to bypass rules when licensing major investments. The Kuria, Hungarys supreme court, recently approved LMPs referendum initiative on the matter, Mate Kanasz-Nagy, the partys deputy group leader, told a press briefing. He called the law on priority investments the law of lawlessness. It allowed the government to launch big investments anywhere in the country, he said, ignoring the rules, the interests of the community, as well as local opinions and decisions. By scrapping the law, LMP wants to return the right to municipalities to have a say over or even veto an investment if they feel it would have an adverse impact on the lives of their residents, Kanasz-Nagy said. Gov't Abuses 'Priority Investment' Legal Category, Claims Hungarian Opposition LMP The introduction of a legal category for priority investment in the national economy has been harmful because the government has been abusing it, an opposition LMP national board member said. Maria Szendefy told a press conference that the legal regulation enabling projects to be classified as priority investment should be void. In its current form it did not serve the public interest, she said, adding a new law could be introduced to achieve the intended goal. Szendefy said that the Kuria, the supreme court, had recently approved LMPs initiative for an referendum to be held on withdrawing the law introducing the category of priority investment in the national economy. If the constitutional court does not prevent it, the collection of signatures necessary for holding a referendum could be started within weeks, she added. In her criticism of the law, she cited a tourism development project near Lake Ferto as an example. The government declared it a priority investment in 2018 and even though the mad plan could not be fully implemented as a result of financial constraints, the locals could not use the lakeshore for years, the natural habitat was practically destroyed on an area of nearly sixty hectares, and many of the iconic hay-roofed huts were destroyed, she said. It was only recently revealed that the local government office had issued its environmental permit for the original plan, and so it is currently not known what exactly will come out of the project, she added. Hungary and Slovakia opened a new bridge over the River Ipoly linking the border villages of Orhalom and Vrbovka (Ipolyvarbo). Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said the bridge was co-financed by the European Union and cost 2.5 billion forints (EUR 6.6m) to build. Whereas in 2010 Hungary and Slovakia had just 22 border crossing points, they now have 39, the minister said. The 40th border crossing will be opened early next year at Dregelypalank, he said. Hungary and Slovakia both attach strategic importance to having ways to cross the border legally, Szijjarto said, adding that this was especially true given that Hungarys longest border section was the one it shared with Slovakia, its third most important trading partner. As regards the formation of the new Slovak government, Szijjarto noted that in 2014 it had been the governments of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Slovakias Robert Fico that had signed the agreement on the construction of the bridges on the Ipoly being completed now. He said the latest bridge would shorten the travel time by car between Vrbovka and Orhalom from at least half an hour to a few minutes. Szijjarto said the bridges opening demonstrated the two countries excellent utilisation of European Union funds. Meanwhile, the minister said that after a time of political hatred between the two countries, cooperation between Hungary and Slovakia was now a success story based on mutual respect. The two countries, he said, supported each other in key matters and contributed to each others economic growth and physical security. On November 30, United Way Hungary held its annual fundraising gala in the Budapest Marriott Hotel. More than 180 guests, representing companies, institutions, NGOs, and volunteers, were invited to celebrate this year's achievements. Click here to see a photo gallery of the event Under the motto "bringing together the caring power of local and regional communities", United Way programs mainly focus on children and youth. Helping children perform better through reading and financial literacy programs and supporting young people to develop their employability and entrepreneurship skills to get a better chance for economic mobility. United Way is also very active in helping Ukrainian refugees to rebuild their lives in Hungary. The gala's dance performance by the G.A.S. Art group, who fled Ukraine over a year ago, introduced the difficulties and hopes of a new beginning through the sensitive creativity of dance. Besides the dance show, award ceremony, cocktail bar, live music, and auction made the evening memorable. Dr. Luis Padilla stops before walking through the curtains. This moment, right before darkness turns into dazzling greenery and light, is Padillas favorite. Its also intentional. Padilla, the president and CEO of Omahas Henry Doorly Zoo & Aquarium, wants visitors walking through those curtains and into the Lied Jungle to have what he calls The Wizard of Oz effect. Youre in one space. Its kind of dark. Its kind of gloomy, he said. And then as you walk through the curtains ... Inside is the largest indoor rainforest in the United States. Its full of lush green plants, monkeys swinging from vines, colorful squawking macaws and pygmy hippos wading in water all living with the ever-present sound of a rushing waterfall. On a morning earlier this month, Padilla walked through the jungle exhibit among dozens of guests. He took a photo of a missing sign that needed to be fixed. He peered around a large rock to look up at hundreds of bats and marveled at how most people walk past without noticing them. A guest stopped Padilla. So, who are you? she asked. You seem important. Were all important, Padilla told her with a laugh. Im the zoo director. One year into leading one of Omahas most cherished institutions, Padilla is still adjusting to that attention. Last November, Padilla replaced Dennis Pate, who led the zoo for 13 years and steered it through a period of ambitious expansion, the COVID-19 pandemic and further cemented the zoo as a major tourist attraction. Padilla, who started his career as a veterinarian, is now charged with helping write the zoos next chapter. He is responsible for all facets of the zoos management, including animal programs, scientific research, guest services, education and facilities. He oversees a $60 million budget and more than 1,000 staff members. The zoo is not only a source of local pride but also an important economic driver in the city. In 2015, a study found that the zoos average economic impact on the Omaha community is more than $200 million annually. Deborah Ward said the zoo is consistently used in advertisements to draw people to Omaha. Ward is the executive director of Visit Omaha, the citys convention and visitors bureau. Its an ever-evolving product, Ward said. It really helps us promote Omaha and helps us entice visitors year after year after year to our city, which then helps hotels and restaurants and other attractions. It feeds into the whole economic cycle. Its also the place that Omahans take family and friends visiting from other states. When you think of Omaha, you probably think of steaks, Warren Buffett, the zoo and the College World Series, Ward said. That gives us a lot more than other cities have. From Dr. Lee Simmons to Pate, Ward said, each zoo director has left his own mark on the zoo while elevating it to new heights. After meeting Padilla, Ward said its clear he wants to do the same. He is totally passionate about making the zoo even better, Ward said. During Padillas first year, USA Today named the zoo the nations best in its annual 10Best Readers Choice Awards, the Lied Jungle reopened after being closed for repairs, renovations began on a revamped Hubbard Orangutan Forest, plans began on a new on-site animal hospital, and the new zoo director met with zoo staff to learn about what they need. The renovation of the Hubbard Orangutan Forest, which opens early next year, is a preview of the next 10 years at the zoo, Padilla said. The zoo has had orangutans since the 1960s, when it was common to show animals in cages with little else in them. And now we know that for people to create that sense of wonder, curiosity, caring, empathy for the animals, we have to do it in a different way, Padilla said. That starts with putting the animals needs first and foremost. To do that, Padilla said the zoo also needs to work within its existing infrastructure. You cant rely on everything being: level it and build something new, he said. How do we embrace the infrastructure that we have? The traditions and the legacy of some of these spaces. How do we make them fresh? Make them new? The Desert Dome isnt going anywhere, but it opened in 2002. How do we manage animals in that space? How do we get people in and out? How do we keep it fresh and dynamic? Same with the Jungle. Were going to have to be doing those investments to make sure that its modern, its impactful, its talking to the audiences and the guests of today. Padillas first introduction to Omaha came in the 1990s when he visited the city for a national zoo veterinary conference. He remembers chatting with a taxi driver on the way from the airport to the convention center. When Padilla told him why he was in town, the driver replied that he must know Doc Simmons then. The taxi driver knows the zoo director by name? Padilla remembers thinking. Padilla had never encountered anything like it. It was childhood trips to his local zoo in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, that set Padilla on the path to Omaha. Padilla vividly remembers going to the zoo with his parents and seeing a white rhino for the first time. This beautiful large animal like nothing else, Padilla said. I remember some kids were yelling at it to try to get it to move. I remember how angry it made me to see people harassing an animal. Those were things that resonated. I want to protect these animals. I want to help these animals. Padilla, to the annoyance of his siblings, wanted to read every sign at the zoo. He corrected them if they misidentified an animal. Its not a pig, its a tapir, Padilla remembers telling his sister. Theyre native to South America and Southeast Asia. Padilla volunteered at the zoo in high school and decided he specifically wanted to work with more than just cats and dogs. Theres so much to nature and our role in the world is so dependent on wildlife, whether its animals or plants, and I felt like that was really where I wanted to learn and be a part of, Padilla said. Padilla, who primarily spoke Spanish until he went to college, attended Cornell University, where he received his undergraduate degree and doctorate in veterinary medicine. Padilla spent the first 20 years of his career as a practicing veterinarian at the St. Louis Zoo, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, the Smithsonian National Zoo and the Oklahoma City Zoo. Anything from a sick fish, a sick elephant and anything in between that size, Padilla said. He was often tasked with figuring out how to diagnose something in a species hed never worked with or seen before. How you get a diagnostic sample from a piece of coral is going to be very different than you would from a person, but youre still using the same problem-solving approach, and thats the art in science, Padilla said. It was a sick baby elephant that changed Padillas career path. While working at the St. Louis Zoo, Padilla was caring for a baby elephant with a herpes virus. For three days straight and with no sleep, Padilla did everything he could to save the elephant. When she died, the herd of elephants mourned the loss. The sounds, the effect on the rest of the herd when this baby elephant passed away, it was haunting, he said. They were mourning. They were vocalizing. They were very upset that the baby elephant passed away. The team of human caretakers were also devastated. Padilla said he began to realize he could have a bigger impact on animals if he helped the people caring for them learn and grow. Exponentially, what I learn, what I figure out, what I discovered and taught somebody else is having an impact on a lot more animals than if Im just trying to do it all myself, Padilla said. Theres an aspect to leadership and mentorship and putting teams together that can really, really be impactful. Padilla began taking more leadership roles, eventually serving as the vice president of animal collections at the St. Louis Zoo, overseeing all the care and well-being of the zoos animals and animal care teams. That was his job before taking over the top role in Omaha. During his first year, Padilla said some of his most exciting work has been conversations with the zoos staff and getting to know what they need. Those conversations prompted compensation studies, strategies and revisiting job descriptions. We couldnt do it without them, Padilla said of the zoos staff. These are highly trained, highly specialized, highly devoted, passion-driven people. And I take great pride in making sure we are culture-first. How do we give people that sense of belonging? That is the heart of our operation. One of those conversations with the zoos giraffe team prompted Padilla to embrace a new philosophy on transparency and storytelling. They said: I wish we would tell more of our stories. We do amazing work. And we know it, Padilla said. But sometimes we are so afraid of the risk of, well, what if something goes wrong that wed rather not tell the story. I took that really to heart. As a result of that conversation, Padilla and zoo staff decided to feature a pregnant giraffe and share her story publicly, highlighting all the work that goes on behind the scenes with weekly ultrasounds and calorie adjustments. It was all supposed to end with a cute healthy baby giraffe. But the worst-case scenario happened with first-time mom Zola when the baby was born on March 19. She didnt know how to care for her baby, she didnt know how to nurse it, she was afraid of her baby, Padilla said. And that happens in the animal world just like it happens in people. The baby was tiny in giraffe terms 5-foot-7 and 108 pounds. After eight to 10 hours, zoo staff decided to intervene. It was weeks before zoo staff knew the reticulated giraffe, eventually named Hope, was out of danger. And it took a village to keep her alive. Hospital veterinarians had to come up with the correct kind of milk and a plan of action, which included plasma transfusions from dad Jawara. The 11 members of the hoof barn staff took turns being with Hope night and day to monitor her condition. They nursed her through a gastrointestinal infection and a few other ailments. The zoo shared the story of Hopes scary start with the public and explained everything they had done for the now-healthy Hope. They made and sold T-shirts with Hope on them and donated all the proceeds to giraffe conservation. If it had gone the way that it couldve with Hope not making it, we were still going to be transparent, Padilla said. The community wouldve been sad, and we wouldve been disappointed and sad and probably wouldve had detractors and criticism, but we would still stick with the transparency of what happened. I feel we owe that transparency to our community, to our guests, to our everything. Padilla said he believes that transparent storytelling is key to the core of the zoos mission conservation. We want to inspire, engage, educate so that people can care about the conservation of wildlife and wild places, he said. This year, the zoo in collaboration with the Madagascar Biodiversity Partnership and the Arbor Day Foundation planted its six-millionth tree while working to reconnect the fragmented forests of Madagascar. Madagascar is a better place today because of the efforts of Omahas Henry Doorly Zoo and our scientists, Padilla said. Since 2005, the zoos Amphibian Conservation Area has released 131,211 animals back into the wild from the critically endangered Puerto Rican crested toad to the dusky gopher frog hoping to shore up dwindling populations through reproduction and reintroduction. In the aquarium, Padilla said his Midwestern zoo is teaching people on the coasts how to propagate coral that can go back to restore coral reefs off the coast of Florida. Conservation does not need to be a doom-and-gloom story, Padilla said. When you look at things that we can do, theres hope, he said. Padilla, who doesnt often wear clothing with the zoos logo, likes to walk around the zoo as much as possible. He spends a lot of time in the Lied Jungle. He finds a bench where he can sit and think. Or, like he did on a morning earlier this month, Padilla watches the guests. A curious little boy stuck his head through the curtains at the Jungles entrance. A woman, her mouth open in awe, took a photo on the wooden bridge. We want those sticky emotions when you come to the zoo to turn into a memory that makes you care about an animal, Padilla said. Not everyone who goes to the zoo will leave so inspired they become a veterinarian or a zoo director. Padilla said the goal is smaller than that. We do want everybody to have better respect and appreciation and understanding of the natural world and the animals behind it, he said. If we can get every visitor, every guest, every person that sees our name to make a connection with a wild animal or a wild place we are successful. Photos: 50 of our favorite shots of Omaha zoo creatures through the years 20180525_new_zooanimals001 20180525_new_zooanimals002 20180525_new_zooanimals003 20180525_new_zooanimals004 20180525_new_zooanimals005 20180525_new_zooanimals006 20180525_new_zooanimals007 20180525_new_zooanimals008 20180525_new_zooanimals009 20180525_new_zooanimals010 20180525_new_zooanimals011 20180525_new_zooanimals012 20180525_new_zooanimals013 20180525_new_zooanimals014 20180525_new_zooanimals015 20180525_new_zooanimals016 20180525_new_zooanimals017 20180525_new_zooanimals018 20180525_new_zooanimals019 20180525_new_zooanimals020 20180525_new_zooanimals021 20180525_new_zooanimals022 20180525_new_zooanimals023 20180525_new_zooanimals024 20180525_new_zooanimals025 20180525_new_zooanimals026 20180525_new_zooanimals027 20180525_new_zooanimals028 20180525_new_zooanimals029 20180525_new_zooanimals030 20180525_new_zooanimals031 20180525_new_zooanimals032 20180525_new_zooanimals033 20180525_new_zooanimals034 20180525_new_zooanimals035 20180525_new_zooanimals036 20180525_new_zooanimals037 20180525_new_zooanimals038 20180525_new_zooanimals039 20180525_new_zooanimals040 20180525_new_zooanimals041 20180525_new_zooanimals042 20180525_new_zooanimals043 20180525_new_zooanimals044 20180525_new_zooanimals045 20180525_new_zooanimals046 20180525_new_zooanimals047 20180525_new_zooanimals048 20180525_new_zooanimals049 20180525_new_zooanimals050 20180525_new_zooanimals051 20180525_new_zooanimals052 20180525_new_zooanimals053 20180525_new_zooanimals054 20180525_new_zooanimals055 20180525_new_zooanimals056 20180525_new_zooanimals057 20180525_new_zooanimals058 20180525_new_zooanimals059 20180525_new_zooanimals060 20180525_new_zooanimals061 20180525_new_zooanimals062 20180525_new_zooanimals063 20180525_new_zooanimals064 20180525_new_zooanimals065 20180525_new_zooanimals066 20180525_new_zooanimals068 20180525_new_zooanimals069 20180525_new_zooanimals070 20180525_new_zooanimals071 20180525_new_zooanimals072 20180525_new_zooanimals073 20180525_new_zooanimals074 20180525_new_zooanimals075 20180525_new_zooanimals076 20180525_new_zooanimals077 20180525_new_zooanimals078 20180525_new_zooanimals079 20180525_new_zooanimals080 20180525_new_zooanimals081 20180525_new_zooanimals082 20180525_new_zooanimals083 20180525_new_zooanimals084 20180525_new_zooanimals085 20180525_new_zooanimals086 20180525_new_zooanimals087 20180525_new_zooanimals088 20180525_new_zooanimals089 20180525_new_zooanimals090 20180525_new_zooanimals091 20180525_new_zooanimals093 20180525_new_zooanimals094 20180525_new_zooanimals095 20180525_new_zooanimals096 20180525_new_zooanimals097 20180525_new_zooanimals098 20180525_new_zooanimals099 20180525_new_zooanimals100 20180525_new_zooanimals102 20180525_new_zooanimals103 20180525_new_zooanimals104 20180525_new_zooanimals105 20180525_new_zooanimals106 20180525_new_zooanimals107 20180525_new_zooanimals108 20180525_new_zooanimals109 VideoHead of Austrian Consulate General in Guangzhou:Once get used to China, if you go you will definitely miss here 2023-12-04 19:17 Editor's Note: The 2023 Understanding China Conference (Guangzhou) will be held in Guangzhou from December 1 to 3. The Conference will invite Chinese and foreign representatives to have in-depth exchanges under the theme of "China's new endeavors and unprecedented global changes: Expanding the convergence of interests and building a community with a shared future." Former heads of government from many countries have confirmed their participation in the conference. As the conference is about to be held, a new column, "Understanding China, Face to Face with Consuls" is launched by Yangcheng Evening News. We talk with the heads of the consulates general of Austria, Belgium, Thailand, Pakistan and Vanuatu in Guangzhou and listen to how these diplomats living and working in Guangzhou see China and Guangdong. Ms Birgit Murr, the head of the Consulate General of the Republic of Austria in Guangzhou, is an old friend of China, who has lived and worked in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Guangzhou for more than 30 years, and has a deep affection for China and Guangdong. Former Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel will attend the Understanding China Conference in Guangzhou. As a foreign friend who has experienced China and Guangdong's social, economic and cultural development, how does Ms Murr see the relationship between China and Austria? How does she think of Guangdongs people and culture? Yangcheng Evening News conducted an interview with Ms Murrr recently about these topics. She said, "Once get used to China, if you go you will definitely miss something." Yangcheng Evening News:In 2022 Austria witnessed the commencement of the first China-Europe Railway Express from Vienna to Xi'an and after a decade of development the CRE has become a new type of international transportation that is convenient, stable, green and economic. How do you evaluate the impact of CRE on social economic development of Austria? Murr:Actually Austria is a landlocked country so we don't have a direct connection to any harbour at the sea. So for us, railway is a very important means of transport and in Austria we really very much try to get the rid of the trucks if possible because as you say, railway is much more environmental friendly and we see Austria have not only catering for Austria, but we are also well connected to the Central and Eastern European countries. So the connection into Asia, into finally China, is of course very important to us. Also, we must say, of course the volume of freight transport can not match with the sea transport, but cost wise, it's cheaper than the aircraft and it's faster than the sea. So it's a good connection. Air transport has a lot of CO2 pollution and the same is with the sea transport. Because especially the older generation vessels are also not environmentally friendly. So this is a good option and we are really trying to make use of it, and we hope this can be expanded. Yangcheng Evening News: Austria is widely known in China for its capital Vienna, the "City of Music", and is admired for its rich cultural heritage. Similarly, Guangdong's Lingnan culture holds a unique place in Chinese culture. Can you highlight recent cultural exchanges between Guangdong and Austria? Murr: You were mentioning before Austria as a country of music and Vienna as the capital of music and this is also the focus of our exchanges. We had some exchanges for orchestras, we had the famous Vienna Boys Choir coming to Guangzhou and doing several performances, and we also have an Austrian company called Rieger. They are producing organs which is a very traditional business and they do some organ concerts. Apart from that, we also had some art exhibitions. I think Chinese people love music very much and music is our trademark in China for Austria. I think the Chinese music is very much reflecting, and there's very lot of harmony. Recently, I was visiting an introduction on traditional Chinese medicine. I have been introduced to this already several times. But this was the first time that they were introducing the connection between different Chinese musical instruments and the effects it might have on different organs in the body. So TCM and music went very well and I thought this idea is very interesting and very fascinating. Yangcheng Evening News:In which cultural areas do you anticipate further cooperation in the future? Murr: I think we should continue and deepen the cooperation in music, and maybe sometimes do some experiment. Maybe to combine the Austrian musicians with the Chinese musicians that matches maybe very well. I'm no composer, but it might be interesting to try to use the Chinese instruments together with the western instruments to do something performance together. That might be a very good idea. Yangcheng Evening News: If recommending Guangdong as a travel destination to Austrians, what aspects would you emphasize? Murr: I think if you are a tourist, you always should look for something you don't know from at home. It's like if you go abroad, you don't want to eat your home country's cuisine. You want to experience something new. So what is very different from Austria, I think, definitely the modern buildings in Canton. I'm sure Canton Tower and the financial district would be something to recommend, especially at night. But there are also other interesting places. I was in Zhuhai and I visited the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge and it was amazing. This building, such a huge bridge just crossing the sea. This is something we cannot imagine back home and I would recommend this as well. This is for the modern part and I think you also should learn a little bit about the traditional Chinese culture and population. I was also on a trip organized by the Guangdong Foreign Affairs office, to Shantou, to Chaozhou and to Meizhou. This was very interesting for me to see the traditional Guangdong people's culture and also to understand how those people had been going overseas had been traders in the early days, had also brought back cultural influence from overseas from abroad and then was reflected in their architecture. So I think on the one hand get to know modern things modern Chinese culture buildings and on the other hand learn about the tradition. Yangcheng Evening News:Since the signing of the Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement between China and Austria in 1984, there has been extensive collaboration in various fields, such as medicine, remote sensing, forestry, new materials, and environmental protection. From January to April of this year, China and Austria entered into 38 new technology transfer contracts, totaling USD 130 million, representing a remarkable year-on-year growth of 194.7%. Can you provide insights into the current status of cooperation between Guangdong and Austria in the field of science and technology? Murr: Actually our technology co-operation is very much company driven. We of course also have university to university co-operations, for example I was mentioning the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge. There was a cooperation on this between the Vienna University of Technology and the bridge project team, Tongji University and the local universities in Guangdong. I think this is a good way to co-operate but I think also the challenging topic in the future is environmental protection and we are also very strong on that so I think there's also a chance for co-operation. There's also some co-operation in the field of education, management education and hospitality education, so this is another field where Austria is strong and where we always seek partnerships. Yangcheng Evening News: In your opinion, which specific areas hold greater prospects for future collaboration between Guangdong and Austria? Murr: In Guangdong, there will always be a industrial upgrade. Over the last years, we have seen the setup of very modern companies, really high-tech and new industries, like new energy vehicles or batteries and so on. But we also still have a lot of traditional industries in Guangdong and for them, it's also a challenge to become more environmental friendly and also to become more energy-efficient. Austria does have technologies to improve this situation for companies, so I think that might be a good chance for us to co-operate in environmental protection. Yangcheng Evening News: The "Understanding China" Conference (Guangzhou) is scheduled for December 1st, 2023, with the attendance of Wolfgang Schussel, former Chancellor of Austria. Living and working in Guangzhou, how would you describe China as a country? Murr: China is not a country, it's like a continent. I used to be working in Beijing more than 30 years ago, and then I used to work in Shanghai from 2001 to the beginning of 2011, and then again in Beijing for another three years and then in Chengdu and then here. So I cannot compare the places because it's so different. My impression is if you're in China, you need to be flexible. Because China is developing very fast and so there's always changes. If you are a person who likes changes and who likes challenges, then it's the right place for you to work. I can say frankly, many people who left China for whatever reasons, they contact me and say, oh I'm missing China that much. So if you once get used to China, if you go you will definitely miss something. There's always speed and there's a lot of openness and the people here are all very friendly and we made very good contacts and friends here. I think this is important, because as soon as you have friends in the country, you have a very good feeling about the country. Yangcheng Evening News: What are your thoughts on China's concept of "Chinese-style modernization"? Murr: I think China is really very much high speed, developing very fast, very much technology-driven. In other parts of the world, it's maybe a little bit different. We all have to find our own way, but still it needs to be easy to combine. I think the interesting thing about the world is that it's different and it's not just one-size-fits-all. In Austria, people like hiking, like spending their spare time or leisure time in nature, focus on experiences. Chinese people are much more fast-moving. But on the other hand, we see now new trends. For example, I hear from my colleagues from the tourism board, Chinese people now stop being this kind of "seven days ten cities" tourists. They want to enjoy they want to also experience the country. So I think China's concept of modernization matches well for China, but I think China can also get some ideas from somewhere else and we can get ideas from China. Yangcheng Evening News: Additionally, how do you perceive China's role in international affairs? Murr: China for sure has a bigger place on the international stage, no question about this. China is also very actively doing some activities, like supporting the United Nations and their peace operations and so on. Compared to the first time when I was in China in 1986, and then working in China in 1989, China definitely found a new role in this world stage. I think for any country it's important to play by the rules, and not only the government but also the companies. This is an important aspect of international co-operation, any country who plays by the rules is well received and very well accepted and welcomed. It's one world. We all have just one planet. We have challenges, environment decarbonization, and the use of resources. Nowadays, governments need to take a lot of international responsibilities, and I think this is a very challenging target. There's no country who can easily do this, China also of course faces these challenges. BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. The first meeting of tourism-specialized educational institutions from Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) member nations is being held in Baku on December 45, jointly coordinated by the State Tourism Agency of Azerbaijan and the ECO, Trend reports. Official representatives of states and representatives of tourism educational institutions from nine OEC member countries, including Azerbaijan, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Iran, and Pakistan, will attend the meeting, as will representatives from the UN World Tourism Organization. Speaking at the event, Fuad Naghiyev, Chairman of the State Tourism Agency, stated that human resources and a skilled workforce are two of the most important variables impacting tourism development. He also stated that the major purpose of tourism education is to provide human capital with the knowledge and skills required for all tourist sub-sectors. Tens of thousands of people are currently employed in Azerbaijan's tourism sector, according to Naghiyev. However, given the industry's ongoing development, he believes that highly qualified, well-trained, and talented individuals in the tourist sector are in high demand. The official further stated that the Karabakh University, which will be formed in the liberated areas as a result of President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev's decision, will contain tourism-related specialties. In his speech, ECO Secretary-General Khusrav Noziri underlined the importance of tourism education collaboration in the development of regional tourism. In this light, he stated that the first gathering of educational institutions from ECO member countries on tourism is an important occasion. Noziri also emphasized the recent work done in Azerbaijan's tourism sector and its rich potential, and mentioned that the city of Shusha was chosen as the tourism capital at the VII Meeting of High-Level Tourism Experts and the V Meeting of Tourism Ministers in Ardabil this October. A bilateral meeting between Naghiyev and Noziri took place on the occasion. Panel discussions will take place on subjects such as "State, education, and industry collaboration: best practices in tourism education," "Curriculum development: enhancing tourism education for future demand," and "Innovation and technology: new trends in tourism education." Presentations from higher education institutes that provide tourism education will also be highlighted. The second day of the event is scheduled to hold roundtable discussions on expanding partnership opportunities in tourism education among ECO member countries and creating a unified network of tourism education institutions. The event is also scheduled to culminate in the adoption of the "Baku Declaration," reflecting the intention to develop cooperation in various areas of tourism education and to hold similar meetings regularly. Stay up to date with more news on Trend News Agency's WhatsApp channel On the first day of the Winter Session of Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a dig at opposition parties saying that the election results show that people are rejecting negativity. He said that opposition parties should learn from the defeat and indulge in positive discussions in Parliament. Giving an advice to the opposition leaders, PM Modi said, "If I speak based on the the current election results, this is a golden opportunity for the friends sitting in Opposition. Rather than venting frustration over defeat, if you learn from this setback and move forward with positivity in this session, the country's perspective towards us will change. If you embrace positivity, leaving behind the negativity that has prevailed for the past nine years, a new door might open for you. Even though they are in opposition, I am offering them good advice: come with positive thinking." Taking a dig at Rahul Gandhi, PM Modi said, "Everyone's future is bright; there is no need to be disheartened. But please, do not express the frustration of defeat in Parliament." PM Modi urged the opposition leaders to not use Parliament as a stage to vent their frustration. "I am saying based on my long experiece, change your actions, opposition for the sake of opposing is not the correct way. Support positive things for the welfare of the nation," advised PM Modi to opposition leaders. "...Rajnaitik garmi badi tezi se badh rahi hai. Yesterday, the results of the four-state elections came out. The results are very encouraging - encouraging for those who are committed to the welfare of the common people of the country and to the bright future of the country," said PM Modi. May the Winter Session of Parliament be a productive one and filled with constructive debates. https://t.co/8b3l4GJoYI December 4, 2023 PM Modi said that the country has rejected negativity. He also said that Parliament is temple of democracy and is essential for public aspiration and to strengthen the foundation of developed India. "When there is good governance, when there is devotion to public welfare, the word anti-incumbency becomes irrelevant. You can call it pro-incumbency or good governance or transparency or concrete plans for public welfare - but this has been the experience," said PM Modi after BJP's historic win in three states. New Delhi: In India, the number of online scams and frauds has sharply increased. Individuals are losing not just their private information but also their hard-earned cash. Online frauds are mostly caused by carelessness when utilizing various technologies or a lack of digital literacy. In a recent incident in Delhi, a 32-year-old woman fell victim to a scam, losing Rs 6 lakhs to a fraudster posing as a merchant navy officer from Sweden. (Also Read: Types Of Credit Cards In India: Check Features And Benefits) The woman, residing in Pratap Nagar, shared her story with the police, recounting her experience with a person named Pradeep Kumar Thakur, whom she had been in contact with since September 15. (Also Read: Loan Against LIC Policy: From How To Apply To Eligibility Criteria - Here's Everything) Thakur claimed he wanted to settle in India permanently with his mother and 5-year-old daughter. They exchanged numbers and continued chatting on WhatsApp. Thakur informed her about his plans to relocate and mentioned that his agent had booked a flight from Lisbon to Delhi. However, things took a turn when he said the agent mistakenly booked a flight to Mumbai, and he would then take another flight to Delhi. On October 16, the woman received a WhatsApp call from Thakur, claiming he was stuck at Mumbai Customs and needed help. Shortly after, she got a call from a Mumbai woman posing as a Customs official, stating that Thakur had been detained with a cheque exceeding the allowed limit for overseas travelers in India, amounting to Rs 2 crore. Feeling pressured and believing the intricate tale, the woman transferred Rs. 6 lakhs to the scammer. Later, she realized she had been deceived, leading to the registration of a police case on November 30 under sections 420 (cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property) and 34 (common intention) of the IPC. Authorities are now investigating the incident. London: The loans Elon Musk took out to buy Twitter (now called X) was about $13 billion and the social media company has to pay about $1.2 billion in interest payments every year. As big advertisers quit the platform and X cannot pay the interest on its loans or pay employees, then it could actually go bankrupt, the BBC reported on Sunday. But that would be an extreme scenario that Musk would surely want to avoid, the report mentioned. However, for a company he bought for $44 billion, bankruptcy might sound unthinkable but it is possible. Disney and Apple are no longer advertising on X and Musk told companies last week to "Go f*** yourself. Retail giant Walmart has confirmed that it is not advertising on X. "We arent advertising on X as weve found other platforms to better reach our customers," a Walmart spokesperson was quoted as saying in reports. The departure of Walmart adds to the growing list of firms leaving X after Musk endorsed an antisemitic post last month (for which, he apologised last week). Apple, Disney, IBM, Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery are among the companies no longer buying ads on X. Last year, around 90 per cent of X's revenue came from advertising. Not any more. Musk has warned that the loss of big advertisers would spell the end of X. "If the company fails, it will fail because of an advertiser boycott. And that will be what bankrupts the company." he said. "What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail," Musk had told the audience at The New York Times' DealBook Summit. In 2022, Twitter's advertising revenue was around $4 billion. Insider Intelligence estimates that this year, it will drop to $1.9 billion. After Musks outburst against big advertisers, X is reportedly aiming to tap small and medium businesses (SMBs) to offset the advertising loss from big companies. A new report by The Financial Times has claimed X will now turn to SMBs to shore up revenue after Musk angered big brands by supporting antisemitic content. Small and medium businesses are a very significant engine that we have definitely underplayed for a long time," a company spokesperson was quoted as saying. It was always part of the plan, now we will go even further with it, the company added. BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. The Entrepreneurship Development Fund under Azerbaijan's Ministry of Economy has issued loans worth 1.4 million manat ($823,529) to Nakhchivan entrepreneurs from February to November 2023, according to Azerbaijani Economy Minister Mikayil Jabbarov on X (Twitter), Trend reports. "From February to November of this year, entrepreneurs in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic benefited from the concessional loan mechanism of the Ministry of Economy's Entrepreneurship Development Fund." During this time, 21 Autonomous Republic microentrepreneurs received concessional loans totaling more than 1.4 million [$823,529]. Notably, the Autonomous Republic secured concessional loans for 9 projects in agriculture, 6 in industrial products production (including agrarian processing), 3 in public catering, 2 in logistics, and 1 in tourism," he stated. In total, the Azerbaijan Entrepreneurship Development Fund funded 2,726 investment projects in 2022. The Fund offered soft loans totaling 145.9 million manat ($85.8 million). According to the Fund's data, 87.1 million manat ($51.2 million) of the issued loans are for agricultural product production, 37.3 million manat ($21.9 million) for industrial product production and processing, 9.1 million manat ($5.3 million) for tourism, and 12.4 million manat ($7.2 million) for other sectors. Stay up-to-date with more news on Trend News Agency's WhatsApp channel BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. The Azerbaijan Entrepreneurship Development Fund, one of whose main missions is to boost local production and business, has granted Baku Stone Factory LLC a soft loan, Azerbaijani Economy Minister Mikayil Jabbarov wrote on X (Twitter), Trend reports. "Baku Stone Factory LLC has received a 60,000 manat [$35,294] concessional loan from the Entrepreneurship Development Fund. The company will produce building materials. Supporting construction material production is critical to satisfying the increased demand for local products in this industry," he said. In 2022, Azerbaijan's Entrepreneurship Development Fund funded 2,726 investment projects. The Fund made soft loans of 145.9 million manats ($85.8 million). According to the Fund's data, 87.1 million manat ($51.2 million) of the loans issued are for agricultural product production, 37.3 million manat ($21.9 million) for industrial product production and processing, 9.1 million manat ($5.3 million) for tourism, and 12.4 million manat ($7.2 million) for other sectors. BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Azerbaijani Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov has met with EU Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson within the framework of his visit to the UAE to participate in the events organized as part of the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) in Dubai, a source at the Energy Ministry of Azerbaijan told Trend. According to the source, the group discussed the Southern Gas Corridor extension, the implementation of the "Solidarity Ring" plan, and the "Caspian-Black Sea-Europe" green energy corridor. Shahbazov reviewed existing gas projects and countries working in the gas supply sphere from Azerbaijan, as well as the active "Absheron" gas condensate and a significant source of additional gas supplies to Europe. The minister emphasized that transporting increased gas quantities necessitates the development of infrastructure and the negotiation of long-term gas contracts, highlighting the necessity of close coordination with the European Union in this regard. The discussion also touched on the impending meeting of the Southern Gas Corridor Advisory Council. Steps taken in the implementation of the "green" energy corridor project linking Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania, and Hungary were also taken into account. It was mentioned that a joint venture responsible for project implementation will be formed soon, and the project's technical-economic justification process is expected to be finished by the end of next year. The cooperation between Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan in the transport of electricity from Central Asia via this corridor was also discussed. The future importance of the "green" energy corridor's growth and transportation of renewable energy sources through this enormous infrastructure to energy security by diversifying Europe's energy supply was stressed. The summit also discussed other issues of Azerbaijan and the EU's energy conversation, reaching an agreement to update the roadmap for the realization of the Azerbaijan-EU Strategic Energy Partnership document. "A Memorandum of Understanding on Strategic Partnership in the Field of Energy between the European Union, represented by the European Commission, and the Republic of Azerbaijan" was signed on July 18, 2022. The document was signed by the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. Stay up to date with more news on Trend News Agency's WhatsApp channel BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Kazakhstan, along with other countries, have made significant progress in harmonizing their vision for the development of the Middle Corridor, an article published by Emerging Europe, a London-based think tank said, Trend reports. The analysis says that with the right policies, the Middle Corridor, which connects markets in China and Europe via Central Asia and the Caucasus, could boost regional trade and increase connectivity among countries along the route. Citing a World Bank report, the article said that with the right investments, the Middle Corridor could triple trade volumes and halve travel time along the route by 2030. This will benefit local and regional economies and wider communities by creating employment opportunities, stimulating demand for supporting industries, and attracting business. The article also said that a roadmap was signed between Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Turkye in November 2022, listing priority investments and actions needed to improve operations along the Middle Corridor. In June 2023, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Kazakhstan also agreed to establish a joint logistics operator for the route. The Middle Corridor links cargo rail freight networks of China and the European Union through Central Asia, the Caucasus, Turkiye, and Eastern Europe. The multilateral multimodal transportation infrastructure links the ferry terminals of the Caspian and Black Seas with the railway systems of China, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkiye, Ukraine, and Poland. Stay up to date with more news on Trend News Agency's WhatsApp channel BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Some 272 foreign enterprises were assessed at the request of 16 countries in 2023, the Azerbaijani Food Safety Agency (FSA) told Trend. The agency said that the assessment of enterprises is carried out on-site or via video. Based on the results of the assessment, 214 of these facilities were approved and 20 were conditionally approved for inclusion in the Food Safety Register. "Yazd Moein Dam Industrial Slaughterhouse Complex" and "Edalat Dam" companies operating in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Choibalsan Group in Mongolia, and "Snow King Frozen Foods" in Pakistan were denied approval due to identified inconsistencies. Consideration of reports on the 34 sites assessed is at the final stage. According to the Law of the Republic of Azerbaijan 'On Food Security', to import food and feed products belonging to the high-risk group into the territory of the country, foreign facilities where these products are produced must obtain FSA approval. Therefore, they or their authorized representatives must apply to the agency. Until January 1, 2024, import restrictions will be imposed on high-risk food and feed products from food processing facilities that have not applied for FSA approval and are operating in foreign countries. Stay up to date with more news on Trend News Agency's WhatsApp channel BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Azerbaijani Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov held several meetings within the framework of his visit to the UAE to participate in the events organized as part of the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 28) in Dubai, a source at the energy ministry told Trend. At the meeting with Chief Executive Officer of Masdar company Mohamed Jameel Al Ramahi it was emphasized that cooperation with UAE Masdar on 10 GW renewable energy projects is of special importance for achieving Azerbaijan's goals on the development of 'green energy' and reduction of carbon emissions. During the meeting, the sides exchanged views on implementation of 'green energy' projects with a capacity of 4 GW on land and sea at the initial stage, as well as on issues arising from the investment agreements on solar and wind power plants with a total capacity of 1 GW signed in October. It was noted that the process of identifying and agreeing onshore and offshore renewable energy sites with the relevant entities is underway. Research on the market of 'green hydrogen' and 'green ammonia' is ongoing. Parviz Shahbazov also met with Pakistan's Minister of Energy, Power, and Petroleum Muhammad Ali. During the meeting, the sides discussed the implementation of the agreement on long-term liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies to Pakistan signed in July this year, supplies of oil products, and other important areas of bilateral energy cooperation. It was noted that the close relations and friendship between the two countries allow for a wide range of cooperation. At the meeting with Minister for Economy, Energy and Business Environment of Romania Virgil-Daniel Popescu, the sides exchanged views on the development of an energy partnership between the two countries. Within the framework of the event, the Energy Minister also met with the Group Senior Global Vice President for Vestas Wind Systems Morten Dyrholm. The meeting discussed Azerbaijan's course towards green energy and prospects for cooperation between the countries in the production of wind turbines. Stay up to date with more news on Trend News Agency's WhatsApp channel BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. The Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria (IGB) will see even stronger market interest within the next few years, Teodora Georgieva, Executive Officer of ICGB, the pipeline operator, said in an exclusive interview with Trend. "IGBs launch in late 2022 had a transformative effect on the regions energy map. It came right on time for the start of the heating season and immediately had a positive effect on the prices for the Bulgarian consumers. In just the first 3 months of operations we reached over 94 percent booked capacity, enabling natural gas transportation to other countries in the region. One of our first international markets for export was Moldova thanks to natural gas quantities from IGB, transported through the Trans-Balkan gas pipeline. The synergy of the interconnector with the existing infrastructure allowed us to provide security of supply to a nation in a vulnerable position and it was a very fulfilling moment for the entire ICGB team and a major milestone for ICGB as a brand-new transmission system operator just entering the market," she said. Georgieva noted that one of the main challenges ICGB had to face during the first year of operations was the need to grow rapidly and expand its staff to match all the new activities it has to perform as an independent transmission system operator. "We managed to build a truly dedicated team with experienced professionals, with international background and attention to detail. Thanks to everyones efforts weve had zero major incidents and not a single day of gas flow interruption and this is an achievement that marks our first anniversary," added the executive director. She went on to add that from the very beginning of the project, the possibility of increasing the pipe's capacity to 5 bcm/y in case of market interest has been set in our regulatory framework. "We cant get into the details about the expected timeline with the progression of the incremental capacity process. On another note, the construction of a compressor station in Komotini as well as the FSRU near the town of Alexandroupolis, which is planned to be in commercial operation in 2024, will contribute to reaching IGBs full capacity potential, since those projects have excellent synergy," added Georgieva. The IGB gas pipeline connects with the Greek national gas transmission system (DESFA S.A.) and the Trans-Adriatic gas pipeline (TAP AG) in the area of Komotini (Greece), and with the Bulgarian gas transmission system (Bulgartransgaz EAD) in the area of Stara Zagora. The total length of the gas pipeline is 182 km, the diameter of the pipe - 32'' - and a design capacity of up to 3 billion m3/year in the direction Greece - Bulgaria. The gas pipeline enables the transportation of natural gas from new sources to other countries in the region as well, including Moldova and Ukraine. Follow the author on X: @Lyaman_Zeyn Details added (first version published on 11:54) BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Serbia has completed the construction of the interconnector with Bulgaria, which will enable the country to import gas from Azerbaijan, said Serbias Minister of Mining and Energy Dubravka edovic Handanovic, Trend reports via the ministry. "The Serbia-Bulgaria gas pipeline is the first major energy project that was completed on time, in 12 months. Just one year ago, we started the works and in 12 months of dedicated work, 109 kilometers of new gas pipeline, four measurement and regulation stations in Pirot, Dimitrovgrad, Bela Palanka and Nis, as well as one large transfer station in Trupale were built. I expect the gas pipeline to be put into trial operation by the end of the week," said the minister. edovic Handanovic recalled that a commercial agreement was signed for the supply of up to 400 million cubic meters of gas from Azerbaijan by the end of next year. The minister pointed out that the Serbia-Bulgaria gas pipeline is also important because of the gasification of the southeastern part of Serbia and the green transition process. "This gas pipeline is important for the citizens and the economy in this part of Serbia, especially for the connections to Pirot, Dimitrovgrad, Bela Palanka and the development of the secondary gas network in Nis. This infrastructure will enable the connection of the economy and a large number of households to gas. In the process of green transition, it is important that we have a secure supply of gas, and we can switch from using coal and fuel oil to gas, which is a cleaner source of energy," said edovic Handanovic. The minister added that this project strengthens Serbia's position on the gas map of Europe, because the Serbia-Bulgaria gas pipeline with a capacity of 1.8 billion cubic meters enables the transit of gas from Azerbaijan and the Caspian region to the countries of Central Europe. Follow the author on X: @Lyaman_Zeyn BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Azerbaijan and the EU will update the roadmap for the realization of the Azerbaijan-EU Strategic Energy Partnership document, Azerbaijani Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov said on X (Twitter), Trend reports. "We had constructive meetings with EU Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson in the UAE about the Southern Gas Corridor and the Green Energy Corridor, two major priority of our energy discourse. We decided to amend the implementation roadmap for the Azerbaijan-EU Strategic Energy Partnership paper," the minister said. Simson also shared the publication on social media. "Our meeting focused on energy security and renewables collaboration. It's great to learn about the newest developments, but we also want to keep you updated on our actions," she said. A Memorandum of Understanding on Strategic Partnership in the field of energy between the European Union represented by the European Commission and the Republic of Azerbaijan was signed on July 18, 2022. The document was signed by the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. Stay up to date with more news on Trend News Agency's WhatsApp channel Subscription to paid content Gain access to all that Trend has to offer, as well as to premium, licensed content via subscription or direct purchase through a credit card. DUSHANBE, Tajikistan, December 4. Tajikistan's President Emomali Rahmon highlighted the importance of executing the CASA-1000 project, which links the energy markets of Central Asia with South Asian countries, namely Afghanistan and Pakistan, during his meeting with the President of the World Bank Group, Ajay Banga, Trend reports. The meeting was held in Dubai, UAE, during the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change - COP28. Both sides discussed the current state of cooperation in water and energy, agriculture, environmental sustainability, rural development, economic policies, advancements in the healthcare and education sectors, urban planning, and poverty alleviation during the discussion. Rahmon praised the World Bank's contribution to climate change adaptation and mitigation financing. He saw the bank as an important partner in Tajikistan's development and expressed pleasure with the degree of cooperation. Tajik president highlighted the significant areas of cooperation with the WB, including inclusive and structural reforms in the country's economy, particularly in sectors such as telecommunications, digitalization, civil aviation, and improvement of the investment climate. Additionally, Rahmon extended an invitation to Ajay Banga to visit Tajikistan, which was warmly accepted. Presently, the World Bank is funding 28 projects in Tajikistan, totaling $1.5 billion. CASA-1000 is an infrastructure project with the objective of transmitting 1,300 megawatts of surplus electricity from Central Asian countries, particularly Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, to high-demand electricity markets in South Asian countries, namely Afghanistan and Pakistan. The project involves upgrading the electrical grids in participating countries through the construction of new substations and high-voltage power transmission lines. DUSHANBE, Tajikistan, December 4. The growth of 'green' energy production serves as a favorable foundation for advancing the 'green' economy in Tajikistan, the country's President Emomali Rahmon said, Trend reports. This statement was made during his meeting with CEO of the Saudi Fund for Development (SFD), Sultan Abdulrahman Al-Marshad. The talks included bilateral relationships aimed at implementing critical projects in education, transportation, healthcare, hydroelectric power, and water management. Rahmon emphasized the importance of greater funding for Tajikistan's critical infrastructure projects, particularly in education, healthcare, and transportation. The confidence in leveraging additional chances within this beneficial relationship for the development and expansion of cooperation was stated. Rahmon emphasized the two countries' developing fruitful cooperation, demonstrating continued improvement in these relations. He expressed delight with Tajikistan's fruitful ties with the SFD and expressed confidence that Tajikistan's work with the fund would grow significantly in the future. ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan, December 4. Turkmenistan exported textile products to EU countries in the amount of 4.62 million euros from January through August 2023, a source at Eurostat in the capacity of the statistical office of the European Union told Trend. According to available data, these figures for the reporting period are more than twice as low as those for the first eight months of the previous year (10.8 million euros). Turkmenistan exported textile products to EU nations for more than 327,470 euros in August, representing a 2.2 percent or 51,500 euro decrease from July 2023 (335,000 euros), and its exports to EU countries totaled about 611.6 million euros from January to August 2023, a 2.2-fold increase over the same period in 2022 (228.5 million euros). Turkmenistan-EU trade turnover exceeded 1.4 billion euros from January to August 2023, a 77 percent increase over the same period last year (590.6 million euros). ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan, December 4. The US-Turkmenistan Business Council will hold its annual business mission in Ashgabat on December 5-7 this year, Trend reports. The mission will feature round-table meetings with a number of senior individuals from the Turkmen government as well as interaction with the US Embassy in Ashgabat, according to the business council. Representatives from the two countries' business circles will meet to discuss a comprehensive agenda for bilateral cooperation. Climate Compass, Case New Holland, Honeywell, John Deere, Palo Alto Networks, Visa, and Westport Trading Europe Ltd. will be among the companies represented in the American delegation, which will be led by Eric Stewart, Executive Director of the US-Turkmenistan Business Council. To note, in April of this year, Eric Stewart led a delegation of top executives from a number of US corporations to Turkmenistan and was then welcomed by Turkmen President Serdar Berdimuhamedov. Stay up to date with more news at Trend News Agency's WhatsApp channel TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, December 4. Uzbekistan and Austria have signed a protocol outlining agreements on measures to avoid double taxation, air transport cooperation, and the establishment of an Austrian foreign trade representative office in Uzbekistan, Trend reports. The document was signed by Deputy Minister of Investment, Industry and Trade of Uzbekistan Badriddin Abidov, Director General of the Federal Ministry of Labor and Economy of Austria Florian Frauscher, and Vice President of the Austrian Chamber of Economics Philippe Gadi during the 8th meeting of the Uzbek-Austrian intergovernmental commission on trade and economic cooperation and a business forum in Vienna. During the meeting, the parties reviewed the present agenda of bilateral trade, economic, and investment cooperation, as well as problems concerning the expansion of industrial cooperation. Special emphasis was placed on the methods for attracting investments, the introduction of green technology into the Uzbek economy, collaboration in alternative energy, mining, infrastructure and railway modernization, medical equipment supplies, animal husbandry, and other fields. As a follow-up of the discussions, a common roadmap for the development of trade, economic, and investment cooperation was created, as well as a method for systematic monitoring of the tasks assigned. TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, December 4. Uzbekistan and Asian Development Bank (ADB) discussed the implementation of new projects in the number of fields, Trend reports. The announcement came after a meeting between Uzbekistan's Ministry of Economy and Finance and a delegation from the ADB's representative office in Uzbekistan. Parties reviewed the implementation of joint projects and the selection of key areas of collaboration for the coming years in accordance with Uzbekistan's 2030 development strategy during the meeting. Participants also discussed creating favorable conditions for public-private partnership projects in Uzbekistan to support high-quality infrastructure and services, the development of a green economy and financial markets, and promising projects to support the country's microfinance and energy sectors. Meanwhile, Uzbekistan accounts for 17 percent of Asian Development Bank projects in the Central and Western Asian areas, placing it second in the region on this criteria. As of 10 months of 2023, Uzbekistan has entered into agreements with ADB for 25 projects totaling approximately $3.5 billion. TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, December 4. Uzbekistan and UAE have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) aimed at developing investment cooperation in priority sectors of the economy, including the production, transmission and distribution of renewable energy, Trend reports. The document was signed by Uzbekistan's Minister of Investment, Industry, and Trade Laziz Kudratov, Uzbekistan's Minister of Energy Zhurabek Mirzamakhmudov, and the UAE's Minister of Investment Mohammed Alsuwaidi. The signed memorandum calls for the expansion of collaboration in the domains of wind, solar, and hydroelectric power plants, as well as the construction of facilities in Uzbekistan for storing generated energy. A cooperative follow-up strategy will be prepared for the efficient execution of this agreement, which will include specific methods and the identification of accountable structures for the timely fulfillment of obligations. Meanwhile, the UAE's entire investment portfolio in Uzbekistan amounts at more than $4 billion as of July 2023. Masdar, the UAE's energy business, recently signed a $2.6 billion agreement with the Government of Uzbekistan for the combined development of solar PV and wind power projects totaling 2,150 MW and 500 MW, respectively. TASHKENT, Uzbekistan, December 4. Uzbekistan and the United Arab Emirates have signed a Memorandum of Understanding on mutual recognition of driver's licenses in each others countries, Trend reports. According to data from the Uzbekistan Ministry of Internal Affairs, the document was signed by Uzbekistan's Minister of Internal Affairs Pulat Bobozhonov and UAE's Minister of Internal Affairs Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The reform will become effective on January 27, 2024. According to the agreement, citizens from both nations can drive on each other's territory using their own national driver's license, with the exception of those who are staying for an extended period of time. Furthermore, Uzbek people with long-term residency in the UAE with a national driver's license are excused from passing additional examinations when applying for a UAE driver's license. Earlier this year, Uzbekistan and the UAE expressed their interest in further expanding comprehensive practical cooperation in the areas of effective management, development of trade potential, modernization of urban infrastructure, high technology, artificial intelligence, and other areas. Meanwhile, the UAE's entire investment portfolio in Uzbekistan amounts to more than $4 billion as of July 2023. Masdar, the UAE's energy business, recently signed a $2.6 billion agreement with the Government of Uzbekistan for the combined development of solar PV and wind power projects totaling 2,150 MW and 500 MW, respectively. BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Iran showcased two new nuclear devices on December 3, 2023, Trend reports. The event took place at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) in Tehran and was attended by the Vice President of Iran and Chief of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), Mohammad Eslami, and other officials. One of the devices is the Airic Spectra microwave radiation system, which was developed by Iran Radiation Application Development Company (IRAC Co.). This system can analyze atomic substances using a very intense source of microwaves at very high temperatures. It is the first of its kind in the world. It can also perform fast and accurate analysis of various elements and can be used in different fields such as environment, medicine, agriculture, and chemistry. The other device is the improved gamma self-defense system, which was localized by IRAC Co. based on a foreign model. This system uses gamma rays from cobalt-60 industrial radioisotopes to sterilize agricultural products such as grains and legumes. It can control pests, prevent sprouting, kill harmful microorganisms, and increase shelf life. This system is designed to improve food security. Iran claims that its nuclear industry is for peaceful purposes and that it aims to use it in electricity generation, agriculture, and other fields. --- Follow the author on X (Twitter): @BaghishovElnur BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. Iran expects all parties to execute their nuclear-related duties under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), spokesman for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Nasser Kanaani said at the press conference in Tehran on December 4, Trend reports. Despite the fact that Iran has fulfilled all of its obligations under the JCPOA and that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has issued at least 15 reports indicating that Iran is committed to the JCPOA, one of the other parties, the US, unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA and re-imposed numerous sanctions on Iran. These sanctions, however, are a clear breach of UN Security Council Resolution No. 2231, he said. Unfortunately, the European Union has differing views on the JCPOA and Iran's cooperation with the IAEA. These attitudes, Kanaani continued, are not helpful to bilateral relations or Iran's cooperation with the IAEA. According to the spokesman, Iran believes that Rafael Grossi's statements against Iran's nuclear program and activity are not productive, and it is expected that the Director General of the IAEA will explain his position without political reservations. Certain parties are attempting to steer AEBA away from its professional activities and toward political conflict. On March 4, 2023, Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency signed a statement on collaboration on Iran's nuclear program. Recently, some world media reports cited the IAEA as saying that Irans 60 percent enriched uranium reserves had increased from 6.7 kg to 128 kg. Irans nuclear program was the subject of the JCPOA, a deal signed by Iran and the P5+1 group (US, Russia, China, UK, France, and Germany) on January 16, 2016. However, on May 8, 2018, the US withdrew from the JCPOA and imposed new sanctions on Iran as of November 2018. Iran claims that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes, but the IAEA has reported that Iran has increased its highly enriched uranium by 27 percent in the last three months and now has 4,745 kilograms of enriched uranium. This is 15 times more than the amount allowed for Iran in the JCPOA. Iran has been trying to resume talks with the other parties on its nuclear issue and revive the JCPOA. The main goals of Iran are to end the sanctions imposed by the US and Western countries, access funds frozen abroad, and resume its crude oil exports. --- Follow the author on X (Twitter):@BaghishovElnur Press Release December 4, 2023 UN agencies, Senator Pia partner for experiential exhibit raising awareness, action vs. violence against women The United Nations (UN) Gender Thematic Group (GTG), in partnership with the Office of Senator Pia Cayetano, launched on Monday an experiential exhibit dubbed "Walk in Her Shoes" in support of the 18-Day Campaign to End Violence Against Women (VAW). The exhibit, which will be open to Senate visitors from Dec. 4 to 12, features stories of various sectors of women and girls, highlighting the forms of gender-based violence they face daily. It aims to raise awareness about the pervasiveness of VAW, prompt reflection on the prevailing social norms that reinforce this harmful behavior, and galvanize action to end VAW. "Violence against women is a persistent, widespread, and worsening global crisis that demands immediate action. It is rooted in structural injustice and fueled by a male-dominated culture that denies women equality. Together, we must invest in prevention, support survivors, end impunity, and promote women's leadership to create a world free from violence against women," said Dr. Leila Joudane, Country Representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and chair of the UN GTG. Among the UN GTG members that contributed to the exhibit are UNFPA, UN Women, UNICEF, UN Development Programme (UNDP), International Labour Organization, World Food Programme, United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and Food and Agriculture Organization. "The 'Walk in Her Shoes' exhibit is a creative and impactful way to raise awareness about gender-based violence and encourage action to end it," she added. "Through this exhibit and other means like social media, we must work together to raise public consciousness and action in order to protect women and children from becoming victims of violence in their own homes, communities and even online," said Senator Pia Cayetano. As a strong advocate of women's rights and gender equality for nearly two decades, Senator Pia Cayetano has championed legislation to safeguard women and children from various forms of violence. These measures include: Magna Carta of Women (RA 9710); National Consciousness Day for Elimination of Violence Against Women & Children (RA 10398); Anti-Rape Law, as amended (RA 11648); Expanded Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act (RA 10364); Anti-Photo and Video Voyeurism Act (RA 9995:); Children's Emergency Relief and Protection Act (RA 10821); and the landmark Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act (RA 10354). Through the support of Senator Cayetano, the exhibit is easily accessible to legislators and policymakers, who play a crucial role in creating an enabling environment for women and girls to realize their full potential. Joudane said the UN agencies under the GTG are committed to supporting the Philippine government's efforts to end VAW. Through its programs, the UN ensures that the rights of women to live a life free from violence are at the forefront of its work. This includes UNICEF supporting child protection centers, strengthening child protection in emergencies, and leading the SaferKidsPH initiative to prevent online sexual abuse and exploitation of children. WFP empowers women and tackles gender-based violence by weaving gender-responsive approaches into food aid, aiming to build resilience and challenge harmful norms. The ILO is also strongly advocating for the ratification of ILO Convention 190 (C190) to end violence and harassment in the workplace. The Senate has moved closer to concur this first international landmark treaty that recognizes everyone's right to a workplace free from harassment and violence, including for Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). It also has various development cooperation projects like Safe and Fair (SAF), Ship to Shore Rights, and Improving Worker Rights in Rural Sectors focusing on the protection of migrant women workers and those in the rural sector. UN Women supports national and local government agencies in adapting and institutionalizing policies and mechanisms that provides for services and enables duty bearers deliver on their work to address and eliminate GBV through supporting localisation of ordinances, sensitizing responders including law enforcement agencies, supporting CSOs and creating platforms for stakeholders to work together including wide public awareness across various platforms. Meanwhile, UNFPA fights gender-based violence on multiple fronts: (1) shifting harmful norms through comprehensive sexuality education and multi-sectoral work, (2) building strong systems by collaborating with government agencies and organizations to ensure access to comprehensive, survivor-centered services in response to GBV, even in crises and online spaces, (3) empowering young leaders by equipping youth with tools and resources to raise awareness, prevent GBV, and champion gender equality. "'Walk in Her Shoes' is a call to action to understand the situation of women and girls as they navigate a society that often puts them at risk of violence. The exhibit, which was also displayed at the United Nations office in Mandaluyong from Nov. 24 to Dec. 3, encourages visitors to put themselves in the shoes of these women and girls and understand the challenges they face. It also aims to open a discussion with policymakers and decision makers on effective strategies for prevention and response to gender-based violence. Gender-based violence is a global pandemic that affects one in three women and girls worldwide. "It is a violation of human rights and a barrier to achieving gender equality and sustainable development," said Joudane. Based on the 2022 Philippines National Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS), 18% of Filipino women who had a husband/intimate partner report having experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence by their most recent intimate partner. But of the women who experienced gender-based violence, 2 out of 5 did not seek help. After the 18 Days Campaign, the UN GTG plans to bring the exhibit to different public spaces throughout the Philippines to reach a wider audience and to advocate for joint programs that address VAW. "The fight against GBV requires a whole-of-society approach. By uniting, we amplify our impact and become a formidable force in combating VAW and GBV," Joudane said. BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 4. The State Building and Law Commission of the Armenian Parliament rejected a bill criminalizing Armenia's renouncement from Azerbaijan's Karabakh, Trend reports via the Armenian media. The bill put forward by the opposition provided for amendments to the Criminal Code in connection with the refusal to recognize Karabakhs right to self-determination. The media said that three members of the commission voted for the bill, and eight voted against it. Those who did not support the decision are members of the ruling Civil Contract party. Pro-government MPs said that this initiative would become a serious obstacle to peace negotiations with Azerbaijan. Stay up to date with more news on Trend News Agency's WhatsApp channel BAKU, Azerbaijan, December 5. The US is discussing with Israel the duration of its military operation in the Gaza Strip, Assistant to the US President for National Security Jake Sullivan, Trend reports. "Especially given the sensitivity of this military operation, we had discussions about its duration," he said. Sullivan did not disclose details of the discussions; he called it the topic of consultations that the United States is conducting with Israel. A combined attack was carried out on Israel on October 7. From the beginning, a massive rocket attack began from the territory of the Gaza Strip, followed by the penetration of militants by land, water, and air. Israel declared a state of war after a massive rocket attack from the Gaza Strip. Moreover, Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a mass gathering of reservists. Morocco and Portugal signed, Saturday in Dubai, a joint declaration on an electricity interconnection project, on the sidelines of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28). Signed by Morocco's Minister of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development, Leila Benali, and Portugals Minister of Environment and Climate Action, Duarte Cordeiro, this declaration is meant to reinforce renewable energy development strategies between the two countries. This declaration, the signing ceremony of which took place at the Moroccan pavilion at COP28, also aims to promote dialogue in order to guarantee a resilient and inclusive energy transition that meets global objectives in sustainable development and climate change, notably by encouraging the use of renewable energies and accelerating the implementation of strategic projects of common interest, including the electricity interconnection project between the two countries. Given their geographical position as bridges between Europe and Africa, Morocco and Portugal intend to jointly face the challenges of energy transition, notably through strengthening the integration of electricity markets in an international context marked by the instability of the market and supply chains for energy products. The implementation of the electricity interconnection project between Morocco and Portugal is important for the European and African continents, Benali told the press, adding that the signing of this joint declaration aims to update the technical studies and the financial cost of this project at the global level. For his part, Duarte Cordeiro stressed that the two countries share the same strategies on developing renewable energies and green hydrogen, noting that an electricity network between Portugal and Morocco will contribute to the neutralization of the material character of Europe. Kuwaiti brand franchise operator Alshaya Group, which manages H&M stores and Starbucks cafes in Morocco and in several other countries in the region, said on Sunday that it is committed to its activities in the Kingdom. The operator said that it is maintaining its Starbucks cafes and making some changes to the management of its H&M stores in the kingdom. Alshaya Groups reaction comes a few days after it was rumored that the operator is withdrawing from the Moroccan market, due to financial difficulties. Quoted by SNRTnews, the companys spokesperson confirmed that while maintaining all Starbucks cafes, the company is trying to find ways of making the most of H&Ms capabilities. The sequel of the 2005 drama film Lord of War will soon be filmed in Morocco, as announced by Moroccan line producer and production manager Karim Debbagh. Starring Oscar winner Nicolas Cage, Lords of War will start shooting in March and for 40 days. Speaking to Variety on the sidelines of the Marrakech film Festival, Debbagh said that he is currently exploring locations in Morocco for the films crew. Were trying to cover four or five African countries, such as Libya, Egypt, Senegal and Mali and several countries in the Middle East, and weve almost found everything in Morocco, Debbagh told the American magazine. In Morocco you find areas that look like Senegal and others that are very luxurious like a California neighborhood, and if youre looking for places that look similar to Libya, Yemen or Syria, you can find them in and around Marrakech, he added. Lords of War is going to bring together 400 to 500 crew members. 100 of them will come from the US and the UK and the rest will comprise of well-trained Moroccan crew members, Debbagh confirmed. Through his film production company Kasbah Films, Debbagh is also expected to have UK series Atomic shoot its first season in Morocco by May. For the record, Lord of War tells the story of American arms dealer Yuri, who puts his life and that of his family in jeopardy following an arms deal with an African warlord. A call center employee, arrested in Morocco on November 27 for cyber extortion and fake bomb threats, is believed to have targeted several facilities in Canada. Arrested following an investigation conducted by Moroccos National Bureau for Combating Terrorism and Organized Crime and the General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance, the 42-year-old Moroccan is believed to be behind bomb sent to several schools and institutions in Ontario, Canada. The Ontario Provincial Police announced, in November, that several schools and public facilities in the Canadian province received threats, indicating that bombs had been placed at their locations. The threats also included a demand for money in exchange for details about the alleged explosives police said, adding that no explosives were ever found. The same individual is also responsible for similar threats that targeted schools in Belgium, police say. In Morocco, investigations revealed that, indeed, the individual in question, had sent bomb threats to several facilities in Morocco and abroad. Field investigations and technical expertise led to the identification and arrest of the suspect in Casablanca and revealed that the e-mails sent contained the bank account number of a Moroccan national living abroad, with the intention of taking revenge on the latter for disputes that had arisen between them during previous commercial transactions. The suspect was taken into custody to complete the judicial investigation being conducted under the supervision of the competent public prosecutor's office to elucidate the ins and outs of this case. Morocco and the Sultanate of Oman signed, on Sunday in Dubai, an agreement aimed at consolidating cooperation in the field of the environment and sustainable development. The agreement was signed at the Morocco Pavilion of COP28 by Minister of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development, Leila Benali, and president of the Omani Environment Authority, Abdallah bin Ali bin Abdallah Al-Amri. The agreement is in line with the resolutions and recommendations of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio +20), the 2030 Sustainable Development Plan (SDP) and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The agreement covers bilateral cooperation in the fields of climate change, implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions, energy transition, environmental governance, monitoring and assessment, waste and chemicals management, circular economy and protection of biodiversity and natural resources. It also concerns desertification control, ecotourism, air quality monitoring, marine and coastal environment protection, environmental information exchange, industrial pollution control and environmental and sustainable development awareness. The agreement provides for the exchange of experience, information and knowledge in the field of the environment and sustainable development, technical assistance and capacity building in the implementation of multilateral international environmental agreements. In a statement to the press on this occasion, Benali said that the agreement is a cornerstone in strengthening the distinguished bilateral relations between Morocco and the Sultanate of Oman, which are based on the bonds of fraternity and solidarity uniting the two countries, in the service of their common interests. This agreement, she stressed, reflects the commitment of both countries to environmental protection and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska spoke about her husband's changes after the outbreak of a full-scale war. According to her, President Volodymyr Zelenskyi is very resilient, especially when he sees a clear goal. Currently, this goal is Ukraine's victory in the war and peace for the entire Ukrainian people. This is what does not allow the guarantor to stop today. ADVERTISIMENT Zelenska also shared that she continues to live separately from her husband, as he is constantly at the Presidential Office. However, the couple is still able to see each other several times a week. At such moments, the first lady admitted, they try not to discuss the war and spend more time with their family. The Ukrainian leader's wife shared her frank answers in an interview with Asian media that was posted on YouTube. "We can't live together all the time either, because he is always in the office. But we find opportunities to meet with him and the children once or twice a week. Fortunately, this opportunity exists. Of course, it is very difficult for him... As to me, I try to support him. We have political conversations, no one can avoid it. Of course, I ask him about the war - I want to know something that no one knows, and he will say that tomorrow is the day of victory (laughs - ed.). Unfortunately, I don't get such answers. I think that if there really is such news, I will learn about it together with all Ukrainians from his evening address," Olena said. ADVERTISIMENT According to the first lady, she and the president talk mostly about children and family in private. During one of the last such dialogues, they discussed, for example, gifts for children for the winter holidays. "We try to talk more about family, about things that bring us back to the fact that there is family warmth and that there are things we can discuss, despite all the terrible things that are happening around us. Today we discussed what gifts we can prepare for children for St. Nicholas Day. We will celebrate on December 6, and we are not ready yet. And then we have to think of something for Christmas and New Year. We haven't come to an agreement yet. I always share news about the children with him. Just like at school, at university, who did or said what. Indeed, when we are together, we try to devote time only to topics that bring us back to normal life for at least a few hours," Zelenska admitted. ADVERTISIMENT As for Volodymyr Zelenskyi's changes after February 24, the first lady notes that they are visible, literally, on the face. Zelenska notices that her husband has changed a lot. However, the qualities that were in him before the full-scale invasion help him continue to fight today. In particular, according to Zelenska, the president does not get distracted by negative emotions when he sees a target. This structures not only his work but also his own mental state. And when it's hard for him, sports, that is, a physical release of stress, helps. ADVERTISIMENT "I think everyone can observe his changes. Even outwardly, you can see how much he is changing. It is an indescribable responsibility to be the president of a country at war. This cannot but have an impact. But I want to note that he is a very resilient person. I have known him for many years and have seen him in various situations. I know that he will endure. He has some sources that keep him going. The most important thing, I think, is his confidence that he has to lead our country to victory and see peace come. This desire drives him and keeps him going. Relaxing is out of the question. No one can relax," the First Lady commented. ADVERTISIMENT Earlier, Olena Zelenska said that she did not want her husband to remain in office for another term or more. Read why the first lady is against it here. As OBOZ.UA previously reported, Olena Zelenska said for the first time that her 19-year-old daughter Oleksandra had started dating a boyfriend. According to the wife of the Ukrainian president, this is the first love of her life. Only verified information on our Telegram channel OBOZ.UA and Viber. Do not fall for fakes! American socialite and model Paris Hilton told why she and her husband Carter Reum chose surrogacy. The family currently has two children: 10-year-old son Phoenix and newborn baby girl London. ADVERTISIMENT The celebrity admitted that it was difficult to make such a decision. This was reported by the Daily Mail. During the premiere of the second season of her reality show Paris in Love, the 42-year-old socialite spoke about her choice and admitted that she would like to carry babies on her own. However, due to the fact that Hilton is constantly under the camera's sights, the couple decided to turn to surrogacy. "It was definitely a tough decision," she explained at the beginning of the first episode. The star admitted that she "would have loved the experience of carrying a baby in my tummy." ADVERTISIMENT Hilton said she did it to protect the baby's safety and health. Her husband shares the same opinion. "We have a family now with Paris and we want our family to grow," he said. "We have to think about safety. When we go to the market, it's one thing if someone stops and asks Paris to take a picture," Reum continued, "It's quite another thing when we're with the baby in the stroller. Earlier, OBOZ.UA wrote about how Paris Hilton informed her fans about the birth of her daughter London. The star's second child was born through surrogacy. ADVERTISIMENT After the release of the trailer for the new season of Paris in Love, the celebrity was criticized for the way she held her newborn son Phoenix. Paris and her mother Kathy Hilton were criticized for their inept handling of the baby. Only verified information on our Telegram channel OBOZ.UA and Viber. Do not fall for fakes! Oleksiy Sukhanov, a well-known TV presenter and author of the social project "The Whole Country Speaks" on 1+1 Ukraine, was born and raised in Russia, made a successful career there (he was once among the ten most popular TV presenters), but now prefers not to mention his former homeland. The journalist claims that "good Russians" do not exist, and also calls for a legislative ban on everything Russian in the country. ADVERTISIMENT He spoke about this in an interview with OBOZ.UA. Sukhanov admitted why he refuses to communicate with his family in Russia and shared what he did with his Russian passport after receiving a Ukrainian one. - Alexey, how are you living now? - The same as for all of us. No worse - some people, unfortunately, have more grief. But no better, because how can you live in peace now? I tell myself that I cannot complain and cry. Because we live in warm apartments, work in tidy offices, and our guys, those who are at the front, live in completely different conditions. How can we complain? It's inappropriate and even cynical. - You mentioned tears. When was the last time you gave yourself a break? - Sometimes I cry every day, and I won't hide it. When I'm driving, a wave comes over me. And on the set of The Whole Country Speaks. And just when I scroll through my social media feed. These are the times now. But the main thing is not just to cry, but to draw conclusions and try to change what you are upset about on your own level. ADVERTISIMENT We need to put an end to everything Russian in Ukraine. And until the Ukrainian society recovers, it should be banned. Our body is extremely weakened and exhausted. We have to quarantine ourselves, isolate ourselves from the toxic, and the fact that Russian is exactly that has been proven for centuries. Much has been written about how Russia destroyed Ukraine, society, culture, everything. But for some reason we forget about it, and everything goes in a circle. It seems to me that it's time to get rid of the Dory fish syndrome. As she swims from one side to the other, she forgets everything. Every time she discovers the world, she is surprised. It may be very convenient to live this way, but it's stupid. Not life, but existence. You have to turn on your brain. I'm generally in favor of banning Russian at the level of current legislation. Until we raise a generation of Ukrainians who are imbued with the Ukrainian code, culture, history, and consciousness. Until then, we cannot touch this fucking Russian culture. Moreover, even when we recover, we should devote no more time to Russian than to studying, for example, other cultures. Listen, is Ibsen inferior to Dostoevsky? What kind of nonsense is that? Western culture works, we can see this from the high consciousness of their citizens, and in the crowd of Russian nonsense, the situation is completely different. ADVERTISIMENT - In a recent interview with our publication, opera star Lyudmila Monastyrskaya also spoke of Russian culture in a similar way to yours, and also listed Ukrainian geniuses among composers whose names are unfamiliar to the general public. - Because they were trampled on, crushed... - Do "good Russians" exist? Maxim Galkin, for example, who publicly supported Ukraine and other artists who left. Oppositionists like Alexei Navalny and others. - I am against this category of "good Russians". They can go out of their way to say that they are for Ukraine, bring tons of aid here - we should be grateful to them, but they are outsiders. We need to keep this in mind: no matter how much good the Russians have done for Ukraine, they are strangers to the country. Because they did not get rid of their Russian passports. They may be against the war, but they are not against what is happening in Russia. And secondly, none of them has proved anything so far that they are able to defend anything. All they do is talk. We cannot look up to them under any circumstances. We need to realize that we can only trust ourselves. There is no better friend of Ukraine in the world than a conscious Ukrainian. ADVERTISIMENT - How do you feel about those who continue to live in Russia with Ukrainian passports? For example, the actress Tonya Paperna, the daughter of our people's artists Yevhen Papernyi and Olha Sumska? - I have a bad attitude towards this. But I also keep one thing in mind: everyone chooses their own path. I chose it in 2014, made up my mind. And I have not regretted it for a single minute. I can't travel the world, I live like everyone else, under anxiety, mentally exhausted, but I know that we are on the side of good here. Because we did not seize anyone else's property, we did not threaten anyone. We have an undeniable right to self-determination: how to live and where to go. And we do not have to coordinate this with a country that has never brought anything to a successful conclusion in its entire history. Who is Russia? It's a crowd that blows every historical opportunity. Well, give me an example when Russia took advantage of a chance and did something for the better in its development. There is no such period. So who should we look up to? Russia is a drunkard who is still pretending to be something. ADVERTISIMENT As for the Ukrainians who live there... I don't know how Olia Sumska lives with this. But her daughter is an adult, she has to take responsibility for her actions. They say that children are not responsible for their parents. It seems to me that parents are responsible for their children, too. As a social presenter, I can give you many examples when you invest in a child but get the opposite result. It does happen. I do not condemn Olia and do not blame her for what happened to her daughter. However, we must not forget about those who are now silent. Because it is possible that after the war, many will return and begin to portray patriotism. From the series that once they put on an embroidered shirt, they are already ours. The war proved that having an embroidered shirt in your closet does not mean that you are loyal to Ukraine. I know people who wore it every day, but were the first to be abroad after the invasion. And those who did not have it and are now here. ADVERTISIMENT - Who among the famous people has unpleasantly surprised you in the context of what you are telling us? - I'm going to be extremely careful here, and here's why: this kind of talk, I think, works to undermine the country. And Russian propaganda plays a big role in this, picking up on the quarrels, aiming to divide us, to quarrel with us. We must, on the contrary, demonstrate unity. Despite the fact that there are many irritating factors around us - corruption and other things that are far from pleasing. This should not be silenced, but we must be focused on fulfilling our functions - working hard, doing our job honestly. All changes start with each of us. Not with a neighbor, friend or colleague. They say, let them change, and I will catch up. No. ADVERTISIMENT - After the closure of Ukraina shopping mall, you were invited to another top TV channel, 1+1 Ukraine, and since February you have been hosting the program "The Whole Country Speaks". How do you find the work? - My attitude to work will be seen when I leave. It will mean that I am tired. Because you either dissolve in this work or you don't work - that's the only way. From time to time, I hear people say that maybe this kind of TV program is not the right time. But I insist that this is exactly the right time. The war makes us change. And without such programs it is impossible. As for the accusations that we are shaming Ukrainians (this kind of criticism is also sometimes heard), I would advise you to look in the mirror. There is a wrinkle here and there - what to do? We apply a medical cream. And it's the same here: by recognizing that there is a problem, we are on the path to healing. I have seen a lot of this in Russia, where they built so-called " Dark villages" to create the illusion that everything is beautiful. We don't need this: let's honestly look at what we are and change. And if there are still enough stories for our program, it means that the changes are not going the way we would like. ADVERTISIMENT - Another project of yours is the YouTube channel "Sukhanov Speaks " - programs about famous Ukrainians. How does it differ from what you do on TV? - It's the same thing I do on TV, talking to people. I don't like social life. I think it's a bunch of two-assed representatives of the human world, because there are a lot of lies there, I can't stand it, I don't feel comfortable there. In our programs, we talk about something else, which is why I would not like to invite everyone to my show. Everyone who appears on Sukhanov Speaks is interesting. It's not about secular life. It's about meaning and values. ADVERTISIMENT - What keeps you going in this difficult life? I know that you like to reboot by creating your own space - walking the same street after the show, a coffee shop you always visit, and a collection of teapots at home. - I believe that salvation in this world lies only in building your own world. And it should contain only your people. Now I've moved away from teapots and walks a bit, because a lot has changed in my life. But I am inspired by one thing, and this is not just another saying, believe me, but a very effective life hack: if you do a good deed at least once a day, it keeps you going. One day you will die, and what will you leave behind? In a year, two years, five years, someone will remember you, but mostly they will forget you. We are such small grains of sand in the universe. So we need to leave something energetic behind. By giving advice, saving someone from something bad, planting trees, raising children, rescuing a kitten, getting a puppy. This is the meaning of our appearance in this world. ADVERTISIMENT - In early January, you will turn 50 years old. Have you thought about how this day will go? - I don't like my birthday. I never have. But I adore the New Year - it's the only holiday I've been waiting for since childhood. I especially love the preparations for it. January 1 is not the same. The main holiday is over, and all the efforts of adults to prolong it are artificial. I didn't like it, so I locked myself in my room. And I was there alone. Now Christmas will be on December 25 - I like it too. And since I hate everything Soviet, I have been celebrating Christmas in the Catholic way for a long time. - Before, you probably celebrated it more often in your apartment in Latvia. ADVERTISIMENT - Of course! There is an incredible fairy-tale atmosphere there these days. Now the apartment is being taken care of. I have flowers growing there. I receive photos. I won't say who is helping me, but it's a very cool person whom I trust. I myself was in my apartment about a year ago when I was on a business trip. Before, when I came to Jurmala, I missed Kyiv a lot. And when I came back, I missed Jurmala. But now I don't know how it will be, because a lot of Russians have come there. And I don't want to hear or see them. For me, they are just disgusting representatives of the human world. I remember a long time ago, even before the war, when there was a line at the Riga airport for a flight to Moscow, and I was avoiding it like the dickens. I couldn't bring myself to walk alongside it. I don't want to go back there - neither in my mind nor physically. For me, this country no longer exists. ADVERTISIMENT - You have not been in touch with your parents and other relatives living in Russia for a long time. Maybe something has changed now? - Now - no, not at all. I don't want to. Sometimes people write to me, saying, how can you abandon your family, your country. Or they say something else: if you are a traitor to Russia, you will betray Ukraine. I want to tell such people that you don't understand anything about me if you say such things... I don't believe in any possibility of the so-called Russia flourishing. I do not believe that this country can ever become civilized. I do not believe in the effective power of Russian culture. I do not divide the representatives of this country into good and bad. For me, they are either opportunists or impotent - let them choose, there is no third option. I do not want to communicate with those who live there, whether they are relatives or just acquaintances. I have no one and nothing there. Except for two people - my grandparents. But they are already in another world, and I am honest with them. I think they are proud of me. I think about them every day - they are the only people I miss. ADVERTISIMENT - What is the fate of your Russian passport after you got your Ukrainian one? - The Russian one expired in May. But it's still here for now. I keep it because I need it to re-issue the documents for my Latvian apartment. I bought it with this passport. When I go through all this paperwork, I'll throw it away at the office. What do I need it for? For me, a Ukrainian passport is a legal right to become a part of people with a capital letter. The Ukrainian spirit is what I admire. - Your Ukrainian is wonderful. When did you realize that it was already at a good level? - When I had a dream in Ukrainian. I woke up one day and realized that everything in my head was broadcast in Ukrainian. I will never forget those feelings. I don't take Ukrainian lessons anymore, as I used to, I improve my language through communication and books. ADVERTISIMENT - How do you feel about Ukrainians who speak their native language in public but use Russian in everyday life? I recently observed this with your colleagues at an event - they were lively in Russian. - This is a difficult question because I have friends like that. They care about Ukraine, they donate and help. I have never met more patriots of Ukraine. For example, one friend was born in Berdiansk and speaks Russian. But she would give her soul and head for Ukraine. How can I condemn her? She is one hundred percent Ukrainian. The Ukrainian language should be the only state language, and this is not up for discussion. Everyone who has a Ukrainian passport must know the language. We have to promote Ukrainian - this is also not discussed. But the language will enter everyone without force and offense when a person sees social and legal protection and guarantees of their rights. Let's take the example of America. Why did half the world come there? Because rights are guaranteed there. If we have a strong economy and social policy, if people know that the laws protect them, you will see that in a year we will push Russia not even to second place, but to the very backyard. This is what we need to focus on. ADVERTISIMENT Ukrainians are a protesting people, they don't tolerate being imposed on, and we must also take this into account. These are my thoughts. But please, dear ones, learn Ukrainian, because there is no country without its own language, history, and traditions. Don't pay attention to the fact that someone is mocking - it's all manipulation, an attempt to divide. And you should learn it, because it is incredible. And without it, there will be no Ukraine. Also, read on OBOZ.UA an interview with actor Dmytro Sova, who serves in the Armed Forces of Ukraine: about his place of service, two weeks of living in the basement, and topics that his famous wife avoids. Only verified information is available on the OBOZ.UA Telegram channel and Viber. Do not fall for fakes! Press Release December 4, 2023 Bong Go pushes for reintegration and support for rebel returnees As he continuously advocated for former rebels to embrace a new life as productive citizens, Senator Christopher "Bong" Go emphasized the Philippine government's task of helping these former insurgents reintegrate into society with the support they need to provide for their families. "Masarap ang buhay dito sa bayan, ang hirap po sa bundok. Magbagong buhay kayo, balik-loob kayo sa gobyerno," said Go in an ambush interview on Thursday, November 30, during the groundbreaking of the Super Health Center in Malabon City. "Ako ay nasasaktan tuwing may mga rebeldeng namamatay at lalo na po kapag sundalo ang namamatay. Dahil para sa akin, Pilipino rin po ang mga 'yan at may mga pamilya pong naiiwan 'yan. Importante ang kapayapan. Wala na po dapat na patayan, sino ba namang gustong magpatayan. Masakit makitang kapwa Pilipino laban sa kapwa Pilipino," he stressed. Go reiterated his call for rebels to surrender and avail themselves of government reintegration programs, "Bumaba na lang po kayo at magbalik-loob kayo sa gobyerno. Mas maganda dito sa bayan kaysa diyan sa bundok." "Ngunit ako po ay nananawagan pa rin, alam n'yo may programa naman po ang ating gobyerno, Balik-Loob noong panahon ni (dating) pangulong (Rodrigo) Duterte na engganyuhin ang mga nasa bundok na bumaba na kayo dito." Previously, Go expressed his support for President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.'s decision to grant amnesty to former rebels and insurgents. Go emphasized the root causes of rebellion, citing poverty and lack of government services as key factors. With this, he continues to push for improved housing, education, health, agriculture, and livelihood programs to encourage rebels to reintegrate and live peacefully instead of taking arms against the government. Highlighting the need for continuity of such initiatives, Go also welcomed the ongoing efforts under President Marcos Jr. to encourage rebels to surrender in order to realize the goal of long-term peace in communities. Go elaborated on the significance of the Balik-Loob Program under the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), which aims to reintegrate former rebels into mainstream society by offering various forms of assistance and legal protections. The Balik-Loob Program, officially known as the Enhanced Comprehensive Local Integration Program (E-CLIP), is a key initiative of the Philippine government. Managed by Task Force Balik-Loob (TFBL), the program commends the Armed Forces of the Philippines for its role in positively transforming the lives of former rebels. Created by Administrative Order No. 10 in 2018 during the time of Duterte, the TFBL serves as the central coordinating body for the government's reintegration efforts for members of the CPP-NPA-NDF, including their immediate families. A standout feature of the Balik-Loob Program is the Balik-Loob Lending Program, a loan facility provided by LandBank. This lending program is one of the benefits of E-CLIP, aimed at helping former rebels establish or expand businesses, thereby facilitating their successful reintegration into civilian life. Meanwhile, Go denounced the reported continuing recruitment of students into the New People's Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and the National Democratic Front (NDF). Since ancient times, surnames have been formed on the basis of professions, proper names, place of residence, or characteristic features of a person. A family name can be used to trace the role of ancestors in society. ADVERTISIMENT Often, surnames reflect the social status that ancestors had in ancient times. In his book Modern Ukrainian Surnames, linguist Yurii Redko explains what surnames were given to the rich in ancient times. The surname Bahach (or Bohach) is quite common, especially in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, Lviv, Odesa, and Khmelnytskyi regions. It has many derivatives: Bagatenko; Bagatchiuk; Bohachevych; Bogachevskyi; Bogatskyi; Bagatskyi; Bohachyshyn, etc. These and other variations may indicate the class features of society, in particular, the division into rich and poor. Probably, the ancestors of a person with this surname were quite wealthy, possibly owning land or owning factories and plants. A less obvious evidence that the person's ancestors had considerable wealth is the surname Duka, which was the name given to the rich in ancient times. Among the derivatives, we can distinguish Duchenko. ADVERTISIMENT People who suddenly became rich could be called Skorobohatyi (a derivative of the surname Skorobohatskyi). Large landowners could be called Didych. This surname is most common in Kyiv, Lviv, and Ivano-Frankivsk regions. Cossacks who had wealth were called Karmazins (probably from the ancient expensive karmazin cloth). This is how the surname Karmazin appeared. There is also a surname in Ukraine called Falendysh, which comes from "fein lundisch" ("the best London cloth"). In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the privileged elite were the gentry. The surname Shlyakhta and all its derivatives - Shlyakhtych, Shlyakhtenko, etc. - appeared on the territory of Ukraine. The surname Shlyakhetka already expressed contempt. Lords were addressed as "his grace, lord," or "monsieur," for short. Becoming nicknames, such titles could express mockery - this is how the surnames Mostipan or Mastipan, Panchyk, Panik, Panochko, Pantsya, Paniv appeared. ADVERTISIMENT Earlier, OBOZ.UA told what surnames were given to gossips and those who liked to quarrel in Ukraine Subscribe to OBOZ.UA channels in Telegram and Viber to keep up with the latest events. In Rivne, a local woman gave birth to her 17th child. This is the 9th boy in the family, and the happy parents have 8 girls. ADVERTISIMENT The good news was announced on Facebook by the Rivne Regional Perinatal Center. It was there that the mother of many children gave birth. The staff of the medical institution congratulated the Heroine Mother and wished the baby a happy life. As a reminder, Ukrainian blogger and mother of four sons Katia Bliostka shared her secrets of raising boys. She assures that the most important thing to do with children is to love them, not compare them to anyone else, and be able to let them go in time. The blogger notes that she is constantly surprised by her upbringing. For example, how much love she can hold in herself. The woman assures that her mother is an inexhaustible source of this feeling, which only multiplies. ADVERTISIMENT The blogger also shared what she does not do with her children. In particular, she does not say "don't cry - you're a man". As reported by OBOZ.UA: - On December 1, MP Sofia Fedina from the European Solidarity party became a mother for the first time. The woman gave birth to a boy. - American socialite and model Paris Hilton told why she and her husband Carter Reum chose surrogacy. The family currently has two children: 10-year-old son Phoenix and newborn baby girl London. Only verified information is available on the OBOZ.UA Telegram channel and Viber. Do not fall for fakes! Bulgaria has lifted its ban on imports of agricultural products from Ukraine. Licensed deliveries of sunflower, rapeseed, corn, and wheat, which had been banned until the end of November due to protests by local farmers, are now allowed. Actual exports of Ukrainian food to Bulgaria, however, have not yet begun. ADVERTISIMENT This was officially announced by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food of Bulgaria. "The Ministry of Agriculture and Food has kept its promise to limit imports of these agricultural products as much as possible until November 30," said the head of the ministry, Kyrylo Vatev, after talks with his Ukrainian counterpart, Mykola Solskyi. Now, according to Vatev, Ukraine and Bulgaria "will strictly monitor that there are no market distortions and that the interests of Bulgarian producers, processors and consumers are not undermined." As a reminder, the licensing system stipulates that Ukraine will regulate the export of agricultural products to "problematic" EU countries. To this end, the Ukrainian authorities will agree with the European Commission on the lists and volumes of products first and only then issue export permits to domestic agricultural producers. ADVERTISIMENT The Ministry of Agrarian Policy of Ukraine confirmed that Bulgaria has allowed imports of Ukrainian agricultural products since December 1. However, according toInterfax-Ukraine, the ministry emphasized that the terms and conditions are still being finalized and that actual exports have not yet resumed. As a reminder, on September 15, the European Commission announced that it would not extend the restrictions on imports of agricultural products from Ukraine to five neighboring EU countries (Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia). Initially, the restrictions were introduced on May 2, 2023, and applied to imports of wheat, rapeseed, sunflower, and corn. The five countries claimed that Ukrainian products, when imported duty-free to the EU, were settling in their countries and harming the local agricultural sector. ADVERTISIMENT After the restrictions were lifted, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia introduced unilateral bans. Poland expanded its list of banned products to include rapeseed cake and meal, as well as corn bran, wheat flour, and derivatives. Hungary expanded the list to 24 items. Ukraine is negotiating the export licensing mechanism with all countries. As OBOZ.UA reported, in November it also became known that Ukraine would expand trade through the Black Sea corridor. This will be facilitated by a new war risk insurance mechanism for sea carriers approved by the Ukrainian government. This applies to both exports and imports. Only verified information is available on the OBOZ.UA Telegram channel and Viber. Do not fall for fakes! Ukrainians in the center of the city of Liege, Belgium, have come across an openly pro-Russian shop called Rue de Maroseyka. It offers customers souvenirs with the image of dictator Vladimir Putin, nesting dolls, toy balalaikas, and clothing with Soviet or Russian symbols. A T-shirt with a huge letter Z, a symbol of the occupiers and Russian aggression against Ukraine, which is considered a modern swastika, is displayed in the window. ADVERTISIMENT The Ukrainians managed to shoot a video inside the store. They shared it on TikTok. Visitors to the propaganda shop also managed to talk to the shop assistant, who, as the dialog revealed, is also the owner. The woman, as one might have guessed, turned out to be an outspoken Z-patriot. She admitted that she supports Putin and the war in Ukraine, and therefore the terrorist murders of Ukrainians. At first, the Russian woman proudly displayed her goods. She offered buyers to choose a T-shirt with the "swastika" Z or Cheburashka, depicted in the form of an occupier, against the background of another letter, V, which is also a symbol of Russia's war against Ukraine. ADVERTISIMENT However, when the saleswoman realized that she was dealing with Ukrainians, she immediately changed her tactics. To begin with, she kicked the "customers" out of the store and then spewed out a batch of propaganda nonsense. The Russian woman also claimed that her son was fighting in the ranks of the occupiers, although, as the commenters under the video suggest, this was a lie. ADVERTISIMENT "I approve of the war in Ukraine. My son is fighting there. I am in favor of the "Special Military Operation" Commenters on the video immediately had a logical question: "If this woman loves Russia so much that she is even opening such a store, why does she live in 'decaying' Europe and not in her homeland?" Unfortunately, this question will remain unanswered by Internet users. Interestingly, the Rue de Maroseyka Facebook page is also visited by many Ukrainian commentators who leave their "wishes" for the store and its owner. As OBOZ.UA previously reported, a Ukrainian woman named Irena got into an unpleasant situation during her working visit to Oslo, Norway. The woman rented an apartment in the center of the capital, using the services of a well-known housing search platform, but once inside, she was shocked by the "pro-Russian interior" of the apartment. Details can be found here. ADVERTISIMENT Only verified information is available on our Telegram channel OBOZ.UA and Viber. Do not fall for fakes! O". This is not a war between Russia and Ukraine. It is a war between Russia and the United States. Ukraine was attacked by Ukrainians themselves. You sold it out. You sold it to the Americans. It was you who attacked Donbass! Who declared the ATO?" the Russian woman, zombified by propaganda, said. Kharkiv plans to open a kindergarten at subway stations. This was reported by the Kharkiv City Council. ADVERTISIMENT The message appeared on the official website of the department. It says that on January 6, 2024, training for groups of senior school age with a short stay will begin. "The Executive Committee of the Kharkiv City Council supported the decision to organize the educational process in groups for older preschool children in the premises of the Kharkiv Metro. Training in the subway in groups for older preschool children with a short stay will begin on January 6, 2024 ," the statement said. It also states that groups will be created at 5 metro stations. Among them are Universytet, Peremoha, Akademika Pavlova, Metrostroitelnykiv, and Traktornyi Zavod. ADVERTISIMENT Earlier, Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said that the capacity of the underground school was running out, as the number of people wishing to attend classes in person was increasing. In particular, the city administration noted that if there are even more children, new classes will be created. In addition, it is planned to create other safe educational institutions, such as the first underground school. Earlier, OBOZ.UA reported that the Ministry of Education and Science explained why Ukrainian children should study full-time. Only verified information is available on theOBOZ.UA Telegram channel and Viber. Do not fall for fakes! Volcanic eruptions cause many problems for humanity. These include air pollution with gases and ash, hot lava that floods the area around the object, and even seismic activity associated with them. That's why from time to time, life hacks from volcanology enthusiasts pop up on social media, suggesting that the vents be filled with concrete. In their opinion, a sufficiently thick layer of the substance should hold the lava and prevent natural disasters of this type. ADVERTISIMENT Live Science decided to turn to real experts who study volcanic activity to find out whether this proposal has any merit. And here's what they had to say. Is it possible to block a volcanic vent with concrete? Theoretically, it is possible. Concrete has a high enough melting point to resist the pressure of lava. It will be possible to melt this material if the heat rises to 1500 degrees Celsius. Magma has a temperature of about 870 degrees, which is well below this threshold. So, yes, a sufficiently thick layer of concrete can contain an eruption. But scientists still disapprove of this idea. Why it won't work Volcanic eruptions occur when pressure rises below the Earth's surface. When the magma layer is thin and liquid, gases can easily escape from it and the eruption occurs at a low speed. And it is quite easy to escape from the magma flow. ADVERTISIMENT But when the substance becomes thicker and more sticky in consistency, it becomes not so easy for gases to leave the magma mass. And the pressure begins to build up until the gases begin to escape and explode. "Explosive volcanic eruptions can be dangerous and deadly. They can eject clouds of hot tephra from the slopes or from the top of the volcano. These fiery streams rush down the mountainsides, destroying almost everything in their path," says the USGS, which used the St. Helens volcano in the Cascade Mountains in Washington state as an example. If you close the volcano's mouth with a concrete plug, the pressure under it will increase faster. In this case, even a safe volcano will gradually turn into an explosive one. Sooner or later, it will erupt, but the pressure will be higher than typical. ADVERTISIMENT But these are not all the dangers that can arise from a layer of concrete. If volcanic gases manage to break through the cork, the debris and dust from it will be spread over a huge distance. This can kill many people at once and cause a wave of deadly lung diseases and cancers in those who breathe the dust until it settles. Is there any way to use concrete to protect against volcanoes? In fact, yes. During one of the eruptions of Mount Etna in Sicily, concrete blocks were used to divert lava flows away from settlements. Although the US Geological Survey is not sure that the blocks would have worked in a stronger explosion, they played their role in protecting people in that particular case. As OBOZ.UA wrote, the Merapi volcano is erupting in Indonesia right now, and 11 climbers have already become victims. Another 12 people are still missing. ADVERTISIMENT Subscribe to the OBOZ.UA channels in Telegram and Viber to keep up with the latest events. In the aggressor country of Russia, a children's book titled "To Live is to Serve the Family" was published. It contains quotes from the Holy Scriptures, as well as "instructions of the holy fathers", which state that war is a "God-pleasing" thing, and any authority should be "obeyed". ADVERTISIMENT The book appeared on the website of the Moscow Patriarchate Publishing House in the "children's books" section. It costs 600 rubles, and its editor-in-chief is Bishop Nikolai of Balashikha and Orikhovo-Zuevsk. In 2008, he received an FSB award for a book about "the saints, patrons of the special forces." The book's instructions say that the quotes included in the book "tune in to military everyday life and strengthen the will to win" and teach "how to get rid of resentment of injustice." ADVERTISIMENT In particular, the book says that one should be "obedient to any human authority." "Every soul will be obedient to the higher authorities, for there is no authority that is not from God; the existing authorities are established by God. One must obey not only out of fear of punishment, but also out of conscience." In addition, children are told that dying in war is a "God-pleasing" thing. However, it does not mention that Russia is waging a war of aggression against Ukraine, taking away its sovereign territories, destroying churches, schools, kindergartens, and killing civilians with missiles. "Many people who have laid down their lives in the struggle will surely receive the remission of sins, and many will be crowned with the imperishable veins of the glory of heaven," the ROC book says. ADVERTISIMENT There are also statements glorifying the occupying Russian army: "Glory to the Russian army. Blessed be the memory of the ascetics of the Fatherland who sacrificed their courage, art and life for it." As OBOZ.UA previously reported, the Security Service of Ukraine served a notice of suspicion to Patriarch Vladimir Gundyaev (Kirill) of the Russian Orthodox Church. The offender supported Russia's full-scale aggression against Ukraine and "blessed" the occupiers to kill Ukrainians. Only verified information is available on our Telegram channel OBOZ.UA and in Viber. Do not fall for fakes! Belarusian self-proclaimed president Oleksandr Lukashenko arrived in Beijing and met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Minsk dictator called the Chinese president a friend, and the latter said that political mutual trust had been strengthened. ADVERTISIMENT Lukashenko also revealed that when he arrived in China, he was able to sleep well. This was reported by Belarusian propaganda media. During his meeting with Xi Jinping, Lukashenko said that he felt very calm in China. The dictator also said that the West should thank Beijing for peace and normal life. "When you said that you can rest in peace... When there are disputes in the West about China, they start criticizing China for something. I answer: "You should be grateful that one and a half billion people on the planet live a peaceful, good, normal life. In our time, this is worth a lot," Lukashenko said. For his part, Xi noted the positive dynamics in Belarusian-Chinese relations. According to him, in early 2023, Beijing and Minsk reached "important agreements in favor of the dynamic development of China-Belarus relations." ADVERTISIMENT In addition, the Chinese president emphasized that the modern world is undergoing "titanic changes," while acknowledging that new challenges and risks are emerging. Xi also praised Lukashenko for maintaining "social harmony and stability" in Belarus. "Under the strong leadership of the president, your country has managed to overcome the impact of various negative factors, maintain social harmony and stability, and realize economic recovery and growth, which has laid a solid foundation for further development," Xi Jinping said. In early November, Lukashenko spoke cynically about Ukraine again. He said, "Ukraine will still be ours," and suggested that the war in Ukraine had "faded into the background" due to the escalation in the Middle East, which he called a "mess." Earlier, the European Union called on self-proclaimed President of Belarus Oleksandr Lukashenko to release all political prisoners in the country. They noted that the human rights situation in Belarus is deteriorating every year. ADVERTISIMENT As OBOZ.UA previously reported, the European Parliament recognized Lukashenko as involved in the aggression against Ukraine and demanded that the International Criminal Court issue an arrest warrant for him. MEPs consider it necessary to apply sanctions mechanisms against Belarus that are in place against Russia. Ukrainian patriots in the temporarily occupied Horlivka and Makiivka in Donetsk Oblast have organized a bold action. Ukrainian symbols and calls to join the pro-Ukrainian Yellow Ribbon movement appeared in the entrances of the occupants' homes, on billboards and on the streets of the cities. ADVERTISIMENT The activists posted the photos in their Telegram. They noted that patriots are once again proving to the occupiers that Donbas is Ukraine. "Horlivka and Makiivka are waiting to be liberated from the rash*sts," the channel noted. ADVERTISIMENT As a reminder, the Yellow Ribbon civil resistance movement is gaining momentum in the Russian-occupied territories. Activists are massively distributing pro-Ukrainian symbols in Luhansk, Alchevsk, and Lutuhyne, and reminding the occupiers that they have no place on Ukrainian soil. New participants are constantly joining the resistance movement. Last week, 30 more activists from Luhansk region alone joined the Yellow Ribbon. As reported by OBOZ.UA: ADVERTISIMENT - The Atesh guerrilla movement conducted a reconnaissance of the occupiers' military unit in Bakhchisarai in western Crimea. They found large warehouses where the Russian military load their KamAZ trucks. - The Russians complained that "two saboteurs" had allegedly poisoned dozens of occupants in occupied Simferopol. The "nice girls" treated the invaders with poisoned alcohol and food in one of the military units, as a result, 20 Russian soldiers died and 11 more were hospitalized. Only verified information is available on the OBOZ.UA Telegram channel and Viber.Do not fall for fakes! Ukrainian Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets appealed to the Red Cross and the UN Monitoring Mission regarding the shooting of Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered by the Russian occupiers. At the same time, he admitted that he did not expect "any breakthrough results" from these organizations. ADVERTISIMENT This was reported by Suspilne. The Ombudsman emphasized that this is not the first time that Russian war criminals have cynically violated the Geneva Conventions. Despite the lack of an effective response from the organizations, Lubinets is convinced that Ukraine should continue to send appeals, because the ICRC has a unique mandate to record violations of the rights of prisoners of war. Therefore, it should communicate with the Russian Federation, respond to such cases and do everything to change the situation. Lubinets noted that for all the time that Ukraine, as defined by international law, has been in the midst of a "Russian-Ukrainian international military conflict," the Red Cross has done nothing to respond to the violations committed by the Russian Federation. Regarding the appeal to the UN, the Ombudsman explained that the monitoring mission of this organization is constantly on the territory of Ukraine and records all the facts of crimes, calling a spade a spade. ADVERTISIMENT "That is, if Russia is shelling our cities, it is directly stated in the UN reports," Lubinets said. "We hope that the issue of violation of the rights of Ukrainian citizens by the Russian Federation will be considered at the highest level, at various UN platforms: The Human Rights Committee, the General Assembly, the Security Council. We must continue to do this work," the Ombudsman said. He also noted that he has no official information about the soldiers who were shot by the Russians. As a reminder, Russian occupants committed another war crime in the Avdiivka sector. The invaders shot two Ukrainian soldiers who surrendered near the village of Stepove. ADVERTISIMENT The enemy entered the positions of the 45th Separate Rifle Battalion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. While conducting a sweep, the Russians came to a dugout where Ukrainian soldiers were staying. Our soldiers were forced to surrender due to a lack of ammunition, but when a second Ukrainian soldier came out of the shelter, the Russians shot him and his comrade-in-arms who was lying on the ground. As reported by OBOZ.UA: - The head of the Avdiivka city military administration, Vitalii Barabash, said that the Defense Forces had captured the positions where the execution of the Ukrainian military took place. All Russians who were on the positions and involved in the murder were killed. ADVERTISIMENT - The Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine has launched an investigation into the shooting of Ukrainian servicemen in the Avdiivka sector by the occupiers. Enemy soldiers opened fire on our defenders when they were unarmed and surrendered. Press Release December 4, 2023 Bong Go condemns MSU-Marawi blast; calls for unity and justice in the wake of tragedy Senator Christopher 'Bong' Go, vice chairperson of both the Senate Committees on National Defense and Public Order, has strongly condemned the terrorist attack at the Mindanao State University (MSU) in Marawi City. "I strongly condemn this cowardly terrorist attack during a mass inside MSU Marawi this morning that killed numerous innocent people and injured many others," said Go in a statement on Sunday, December 3. He expressed profound grief and solidarity with the families affected, stating, "Taus-puso akong nakikiramay sa mga pamilya ng mga namatayan at nasaktan sa pag-atakeng ito. Masakit para sa sinumang magulang, kapatid o anak, ang mawalan ng mahal sa buhay lalo na kung dulot ng karahasan." Calling for swift action, Go urged the country's law enforcement agencies to act immediately and hold those responsible accountable for their actions. "As vice chair of both Senate Committees on National Defense and Public Order, I call upon our law enforcement bodies to hunt down whoever is responsible and punish them with the full force of the law." He also emphasized the importance of protecting educational institutions from such acts of terror. "Moreover, acts of terrorism on educational institutions like the Mindanao State University must be condemned. Ensuring the safety of students in schools from terrorist threats is a paramount priority for fostering a secure learning environment," added Go. Amid such tragedy, Go urged fellow Filipinos to remain resilient and united. "The function of terrorism is to terrorize people. If we allow ourselves to be terrorized, terrorists win. As such, we must remain united and should not allow this crime to trigger sectarian hatred and further animosity among Filipino people." Reflecting on the resilience of Marawi City, he noted, "Our brothers and sisters in Marawi have already emerged from the dark ashes of the Marawi Siege." "We must not let another terrorist act derail efforts of achieving long-term peace and development in Marawi City, where people of different faiths have historically co-existed in harmony and mutual respect," he added. The blast occurred at MSU's Dimaporo Gym during a Mass on December 3, primarily attended by students, on the First Sunday of Advent, a day of significance for Catholics. MSU responded by halting classes, enhancing security, and working with officials on the investigation. The blast resulted in at least four fatalities and around 45 injuries. The wounded were immediately taken to Amai Pakpak Medical Center for treatment. President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., denounced the attack, linking it to international terrorists. He ordered authorities to conduct a swift inquiry and vowed to seek justice for the families affected by this tragedy. The Polish government is preparing to hand over 56 Krab howitzers to the Ukrainian army. Warsaw has previously donated 18 of these vehicles as military aid, and they have performed well in the battle against the invaders. ADVERTISIMENT This was reported by the Polish news agency PAP and confirmed by the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. The contract for the new batch of howitzers has already been signed by representatives of both countries. "AHS Krab is a self-propelled howitzer on a tracked chassis manufactured by Huta Stalowa Wola SA. Poland handed over 18 such vehicles to Ukraine from the reserves of the Polish Army," the article says. As a reminder, back in April, General Zaluzhny testified in the AHS Krab case. The systems successfully perform combat missions at the front, destroying manpower and equipment of the Russian army. "We have studied the life and capabilities of these machines and are providing manufacturers with suggestions for their improvement," Ukrainian soldier Volodymyr said of the Poles' help. As OBOZ.UA previously reported, the second group of Ukrainian soldiers has completed training in Germany on how to operate the Patriot air defense system. About 70 soldiers and officers were trained. ADVERTISIMENT The aggressor state of Russia continues to take Ukrainian children from the cities temporarily occupied by its troops to its territory. Moscow involves far-right biker communities in this process. ADVERTISIMENT There is also evidence that Belarus is involved in this war crime. This was stated by the US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice, Beth Van Skaak. She spoke at the conference United for Justice. War Crimes against Ukrainian Children in Canada on Sunday, December 3, the press service of the Office of the Attorney General reports. According to Skaak, young Ukrainian citizens are taken from the occupied cities to Russia and then to Belarus. "We have information about the involvement of Belarus in the abduction of children. Children are taken from Ukraine through the occupied territories to Russia and then to Belarus. Quite terrible non-governmental organizations, such as far-right biker communities, are involved in this," Van Skaak said. The diplomat emphasized that the United States will continue to help Ukraine achieve justice and punish all criminals, but justice, she said, requires a long time. ADVERTISIMENT However, she added that it is very important that every crime is documented. Washington and its partners are looking for mechanisms to punish the perpetrators. Earlier it became known that Yale University conducted a study that showed that after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the Russian occupiers took more than 2,400 Ukrainian children aged 6 to 17 to 13 institutions in Belarus. Children were abducted from at least 17 cities in the temporarily occupied territories. As reported by OBOZ.UA, Iryna Vereshchuk said that officially there are about 20 thousand Ukrainian children who were illegally deported from the territory of Ukraine by Russia. However, there is reason to believe that the true number of children abducted by Russia could be hundreds of thousands. ADVERTISIMENT The White House has said that money to help Ukraine will run out by the end of the year if the US Congress does not pass a new package. Cutting off the flow of US weapons and equipment will "bring Ukraine to its knees" at the front and play into Moscow's hands, the US Presidential Administration has warned. ADVERTISIMENT White House Budget Director Shalanda Young sent a letter to Congress, the Financial Times reports. She said that without Congressional approval, Washington would run out of funds to help Ukraine by the end of the year. "There is no magic source of funding that can meet this point. We are out of money and almost out of time. Cutting off the flow of American weapons and equipment will bring Ukraine to its knees on the battlefield, not only jeopardizing the gains Ukraine has made, but also increasing the likelihood of Russian military victories," the letter reads. Yang added that aid packages to Ukraine have already become smaller and supplies have decreased. She warned that the fall of the Ukrainian economy would deprive Ukrainians of the ability to fight on, which is what Russian President Vladimir Putin is counting on. ADVERTISIMENT "If Ukraine's economy falls, they will not be able to continue fighting, period. Putin understands this well, so Russia has made the destruction of Ukraine's economy a central element of its strategy - as you can see in its attacks on Ukraine's grain exports and energy infrastructure," Young said. She also said that helping Ukraine would benefit the US economy. As reported by OBOZ.UA: - The day before, John Kirby, the coordinator for strategic communications of the US National Security Council, called on Congress to vote for assistance to Ukraine by the end of 2023. According to him, Washington "can and should do more" to protect Ukraine and its energy facilities in the winter. - Retired US General Ben Hodges said that the US should make Ukraine's victory in the war with Russia its policy. According to him, Washington should no longer have any excuses for transferring weapons to the Ukrainian army. ADVERTISIMENT Only verified information on our Telegram channel OBOZ.UA and Viber. Do not fall for fakes! Ukraine continues its efforts to increase its own weapons production. Currently, the state has reached the figure of six Bohdan self-propelled artillery systems per month and can see prospects for further increase. ADVERTISIMENT This was announced by President Volodymyr Zelenskyi on Telegram following a daily conference call. In addition, according to him, the implementation of important defense agreements with partners continues. "We have received both scarce missiles for existing air defense systems and new, modern anti-aircraft systems. I am grateful to our friends," the Head of State emphasized. He also reported on the results of the "grain corridor" - currently, the transportation of 7 million tons of cargo has already exceeded the mark. In addition, the President heard intelligence reports and reports from the front. According to Zelenskyi, defensive battles continue in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka sectors, and active operations continue in the south. In Kherson, the President informed the emergency services, the OVA and MVA, are overcoming the consequences of another barbaric shelling and helping the victims. The defense forces are implementing a plan to deny the enemy the opportunity and desire to terrorize the city. ADVERTISIMENT As a reminder, the day before, Zelenskyi said that intense fighting with the Russian occupiers continued at the front in dozens of locations. According to the President, the most difficult areas on the front line are Maryinka, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Kharkiv region and the south. The Head of State reminded that the frontline needed support every day. Next week, the government is preparing a decision to increase the capabilities of the defense industry of Ukraine, as well as new military aid packages for the soldiers of the Defense Forces. As reported by OBOZ.UA: - Zelenskyi stated that with the beginning of winter, Russia's war against Ukraine has entered a new phase. He also acknowledged that the Defense Forces did not achieve the desired results in the counteroffensive, as everyone wanted "faster results." ADVERTISIMENT - President Zelenskyi also called on Ukrainians to remember the need to support the frontline every day. "Each of us should not just wait for the soldiers to win, but do everything we can to make Ukraine stronger and increase our joint opportunities. Only verified information is available on our Telegram channel OBOZ.UA and Viber. Do not fall for fakes! The Russian occupation army has not been using Kalibr sea-launched cruise missiles to fire at Ukraine for a long time. Putin's terrorists are probably trying to accumulate high-precision missile weapons. ADVERTISIMENT At the same time, the military-industrial complex of the aggressor country cannot fully meet the needs of the Russian army. This was stated by Dmytro Pletenchuk, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Navy, on Suspilne TV channel. According to him, the enemy is currently accumulating Kalibr cruise missiles. Pletenchuk also emphasized that the military-industrial complex of the Russian Federation cannot provide the occupiers with the number of missiles they are used to having at hand. He also added that the Russians moved most of the missile launchers from the temporarily occupied Sevastopol to the ports of Novorossiysk. However, the enemy had a problem with logistics there, because in order to equip a ship with missiles, it needs to be transferred to Sevastopol, where there are appropriate facilities. ADVERTISIMENT Pletenchuk explained that Russians are afraid to keep ships in the temporarily occupied Crimea because of the threat of fire. At the same time, they cannot equip ships with missiles in Novorossiysk, so the enemy is facing a dilemma. As a reminder, President Volodymyr Zelenskyi said that the expulsion of the Russian military fleet from the Black Sea is the greatest achievement of the Defense Forces since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. This allowed the resumption of food flights with grain supplies to countries on three continents: Asia, Africa and Europe. Earlier it was reported that as of the end of November, the Russian occupiers could have accumulated up to 900 long-range precision missiles. It is likely that terrorists could use them to attack Ukraine. ADVERTISIMENT As reported by OBOZ.UA, the spokesman for the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Yurii Ihnat, warned that since the enemy at this stage of the war mostly resorts to single missile strikes, Russia is probably accumulating weapons for future large-scale attacks. Only verified information on our Telegram channel OBOZ.UA and Viber. Do not fall for fakes! President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said that intense fighting with the Russian occupiers continues at the front in dozens of locations. The heaviest fighting continues in Donetsk and Kharkiv regions. ADVERTISIMENT There are also clashes in the south of Ukraine. The President said this in an address to Ukrainians and the world on Sunday, December 3. The video was published on his official YouTube channel. According to Zelensky, the most difficult areas on the front line are Maryinka, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Kharkiv region and the south. ADVERTISIMENT The President reminded that the frontline needs support every day. "Next week, the Ukrainian authorities are preparing solutions to increase the capabilities of our army at the frontline. First of all, this concerns the defense industry of Ukraine, as well as new military aid packages for the soldiers of the Ukrainian Defense Forces. They are also preparing to strengthen the country's air defense. The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported that on December 3, 56 direct battles between the Defense Forces and the Russian invaders took place at the front. The enemy used combat aircraft in the Luhansk sector, but was still repelled by counterattacks from the Armed Forces. ADVERTISIMENT They also noted that the occupiers regularly organize assaults against the positions of our troops, as well as shelling settlements, violating the customs of war and committing war crimes. As OBOZ.UA previously reported, Zelensky called on Ukrainians to remember the need to support the frontline every day. Each of us should not just wait for the soldiers to win, but do everything to make Ukraine stronger and increase our common opportunities. Only verified information is available on our Telegram channel OBOZ.UA and Viber. Do not fall for fakes! Egypts President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated in a meeting in Cairo on Thursday their categorical rejection of any attempts to forcibly displace Palestinians from their land, affirming that the two-state solution is the basis for regional stability. The Egyptian Exchange (EGX) indices ended Thursday in green after the fluctuations that dominated the four-session week. Lawyers for South Africa asked judges at Thursdays hearings to impose binding preliminary orders on Israel, including an immediate halt to military campaign in Gaza as it reached its 97th day. South African lawyers said the latest Gaza war is part of a decades-long oppression of the Palestinians by Israel. MANIFESTATION OF SENATE PRESIDENT PRO TEMPORE LOREN LEGARDA ON THE MINDANAO STATE UNIVERSITY (MSU)-MARAWI BOMBING As the Co-Chairperson of the Senate contingent to the Philippine Congress- Bangsamoro Parliament Forum (PCBPF), I deeply grieve over the loss of lives and injuries in this morning's blast incident inside the gymnasium of Mindanao State University in Marawi City that killed 4 and injured more than 60. I strongly condemn such barbaric acts on innocent civilians. There is no place in any civilized society for this inhumane act. Local security forces are working with the MSU Main campus. President Bongbong Marcos has directed the PNP, and AFP to closely collaborate with local law enforcement agencies in the conduct of a swift and thorough investigation of the incident. We remember the UN Declaration on the Right of Peoples to Peace, which "solemnly proclaims that the peoples of our planet have a sacred right to peace." The PCBPF has been working on establishing intergovernmental relations through legislation and collaboration in pursuit of peace in the Bangsamoro Region through discussions on decommissioning and the establishment of Shari'ah District Courts. The United Imams of the Philippines have condemned the incident, which is against all human and Islamic norms. They reminded that in Islam, the only wars that are permitted are between armies, and they should engage on battlefields and engage nobly. We urge all to exercise sobriety and obtain factual information. We support the Bangsamoro Government in its action to provide immediate response and assistance to the victims. We extend our deepest condolences to the families of the victims. Israel expanded its war on Gaza on Monday, as international concern deepened over the mounting civilian death toll. The return to open warfare after a truce between Israel and Hamas broke down has had ripple effects around a region on the cusp of a wider conflagration. More than 15,500 people have been killed in the besieged Palestinian territory, according to the Gaza health ministry, in more than eight weeks of combat and heavy bombardment. 22:00 Telecommunication services were cut off in the Gaza strip after having been repaired, the Palestinian telecoms company Paltel said in a statement on Monday. "We regret to announce that all telecom services in Gaza Strip have been lost due to the cut off of main fibre routes from the Israeli side," PalTel said in a message on social media. "Gaza is... blacked out again." 20:00 The United States said Monday it was asking Israel to let more fuel into the battered Gaza Strip after the end of a pause in its ally's war on the enclave. "We've made clear we want to see it back up not just to the level of fuel that went in during the pause, but actually higher," State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters. 19:00 This evening, numerous civilians were killed, and others suffered injuries as Israeli air raids relentlessly struck scores of homes in the Shajaiya and Zaytoun neighbourhoods of Gaza, as reported by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA. Israeli jets carried out extensive bombardments on multiple houses in these neighbourhoods, resulting in the tragic deaths and injuries of many residents. The attacks targeted homes with inhabitants inside, amplifying the human toll. Additionally, Israeli warplanes and artillery aimed their assault at numerous commercial stores along Omar Mukhtar St. in the city, causing widespread destruction to these establishments. The intensified attacks underscore the severe impact on both residential and commercial areas, further exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in the enclave. 18:30 The official Palestinian news agency said at least 50 people were killed on Monday in an Israeli air strike that hit two schools sheltering displaced people in the north of the Gaza Strip. The reported attack took place as Israeli bombs also hit southern areas of the enclave, and Israeli troops and tanks pressed a ground campaign against Hamas militants in that sector. The strike hit the Daraj neighbourhood in Gaza City, the WAFA agency said. 17:00 Gaza-based Palestinian graphic artist Ola Al-namara shared a photo on "X" of a food aid box sent as part of the humanitarian relief from Egypt. The box contained a note quoting a verse from the Holy Quran: 'A Victory from God and an imminent conquest' that the members of the Life Makers NGOs branch in Menoufiya had signed. (9) Ola on X: " https://t.co/3Y9FRKZZwT" / X (twitter.com) Al-namara wrote the following caption for the picture. 'We received this message which came all the way from Moenoufiya to Gaza. Our beloved kin in Egypt.' The Life Makers NGO is a member of Egypts National Alliance for Civil Development Work (NACDW), which sent the largest humanitarian aid convoy to Gaza in November. This convoy comprised over 500 trucks carrying 8950 tons of medicines, food, clothes, and blankets destined for Gaza. 14:30 The Israeli National Security Council raised its travel warnings for 80 countries due to what it called growing threats to Israelis as a result of the war on Gaza, Israeli media reported. The council said that there are increased efforts by Iran, Hamas, and elements of global jihad, to attack Israeli and Jewish targets around the world. Many Western countries were moved from the Level 1 category, which advises basic precautionary measures to Level 2, which advises increased precautionary measures, according to Jpost. The United Kingdom, Germany, and France were all on that list, as were Brazil, Argentina Australia, and Russia. A more severe warning (level 3) was issued for South Africa, Eritrea, and some countries in Asia. 14:20 The Israeli prime minister's office said it had tallied the remains of 15 of its citizens that are still being held in the Gaza Strip. These include the remains of 11 civilians and four soldiers, one of them a senior officer, although the PMs office did not elaborate further. 14:15 The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross said Monday, after arriving in war-torn Gaza, warned that the suffering in the Palestinian territory was "intolerable." "I repeat our urgent call for civilians to be protected in line with the laws of war and for aid to enter unimpeded," Mirjana Spoljaric said on X, formerly Twitter, adding that "the captives must be released and ICRC allowed to safely visit them." I have arrived in Gaza, where peoples suffering is intolerable. I repeat our urgent call for civilians to be protected in line with the laws of war and for aid to enter unimpeded. The hostages must be released and @ICRC allowed to safely visit them.https://t.co/64AaIwOLQJ Mirjana Spoljaric (@ICRCPresident) December 4, 2023 14:00 In the occupied West Bank, 15 Palestinians were wounded during confrontations with Israeli forces who were storming the Qalandia refugee camp and the Kafr Aqab suburb north of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Israeli forces detained at least 60 Palestinians in raids on homes in the occupied West Bank, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Commission and Prisoner Society. This raises the total number of Palestinians detained since 7 October to 3,540. 13:00 The Israeli army killed 30 Palestinians in the Al-Zaytoun and Al-Shujaiya neighborhoods, south and east of Gaza City, in non-stop bombardment of civilian areas, Palestinian news agency WAFA reported. WAFA correspondents reported that Israeli warplanes bombed dozens of residential homes in both neighbourhoods, adding that the majority of those killed in the bombing were children. Earlier, two people were killed and at least 10 injured when Israeli airstrikes targeted a group of civil defence crews in the Al-Tuffah neighborhood, northeast of Gaza City. The correspondent added that Israeli artillery pieces surrounded the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, specifically the old town of Gaza City, as warplanes and drones bombarded civilian areas. 11:45 Dozens of Israeli tanks entered the southern part of the Gaza Strip near Khan Younis, witnesses told AFP, with the Israeli military widely expected to start ground operations in the area soon. Israeli forces moving into southern Gaza city. Read more: https://t.co/DIbWBlQcZG pic.twitter.com/tpKssLStnt Sky News (@SkyNews) December 4, 2023 Armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers were also seen. Amin Abu Hola, 59, said the Israeli vehicles were "two kilometres (1.2 miles) inside" the Palestinian territory in the village of Al-Qarara near Khan Younis. Meanwhile, Moaz Mohammed, 34, said Israeli tanks were on the southern part of Salah Al-Din road which runs from the north to the south of the strip. The head of Israels domestic security agency, Shin Bet, says his organization is prepared to destroy Hamas in every place, including in other Middle Eastern countries, AP reported. In every place, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in Qatar, everywhere, Bar said in an audio recording aired late Sunday by Israels public broadcaster Kan. Itll take a few years but we will be there to do it, he added. Israels Mossad spy agency has been accused of involvement in a series of assassinations overseas of Palestinian fighters and Iranian nuclear scientists over the years. 11:40 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be tried as a war criminal over Israel's ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, Reuters reported. In a speech at a meeting of an Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) committee in Istanbul, Erdogan said that Gaza is Palestinian land and will always belong to the Palestinians. "We are preparing the legal files necessary for Netanyahu's trial," Erdogan said. On Wednesday, Erdogan branded Netanyahu "the butcher of Gaza" and accused him of spawning anti-Semitism across the world. BREAKING: Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be tried as a war criminal.https://t.co/PAiZ4D1jU3 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/rrbDgSeTsC Sky News (@SkyNews) December 4, 2023 11:30 Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said that Israel seeks to displace Palestinians to Rafah, urging the world to reject its plan. We regret Israels demand to reduce killing instead of a ceasefire, Shtayyeh said at the beginning of a session of the Palestinian government. He stressed that the failure to hold Israel accountable for its crimes has encouraged it to kill more. Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli leaders and urged them to take concrete steps to reduce civilian deaths among Palestinians. Blinken said he had made clear to Israeli leaders the imperative of a clear plan in place that puts a premium on protecting civilians before any military operation begins in southern Gaza. "There is the smell of death here. But we're determined to live." This is the walk our colleague Jehan - an @UNRWA counselor - takes to work in the #GazaStrip "We are also in danger as we walk"#HearTheirVoices pic.twitter.com/rRbf7zsoBx UNRWA (@UNRWA) December 4, 2023 11:00 Three Israeli soldiers stationed at a post in Upper Galilee were wounded by mortar fire from Lebanon. Cross-border exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel resumed just hours after the expiry of the truce in Gaza last week, which had largely halted violence at the Lebanon-Israel border. 10:45 The Israeli army announced the deaths of another three troops killed in the fighting with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, bringing the military death toll since the start of the war on Gaza on 7 October to 401, including 75 since Israel launched its ground offensive in late October. 10:30 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's trial on corruption charges resumed in the Jerusalem District Court after a two-month hiatus, Israeli media reported. Netanyahu is exempt from appearing at these hearings, but he may be required to testify in a few months. An emergency order that Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin put in place for the courts when the war erupted expired last week, and most courts have been ordered to resume normal operations. Netanyahu faces charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in one case, and charges of fraud and breach of trust in two other cases. 9:30 Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas held talks over the phone with US Vice President Kamala Harris on her flight from Dubai back to Washington DC, stressing that his authority rejects any plan to occupy or isolate any part of Gaza, Palestinian news agency WAFA reported. The head of the Palestinian Authority also voiced his rejection of the forced displacement of the Palestinian people, whether in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, including Jerusalem. Harris on her part "reiterated US support for the Palestinian people and their right to security, dignity, and self-determination," according to a White House press statement based on the call. She also discussed the situation in the West Bank, voicing concerns over steps that could escalate tensions in the West Bank, including Israeli settler violence, according to the press statement. Harris and Abbas also discussed US plans for a post-war Gaza once the war in the strip ends, in this regard, Harris "reiterated US support for a unified West Bank and Gaza under a revitalized Palestinian Authority," the statement added. Above all, Harris underscored the US commitment to a two-state solution and said that "the Palestinian people must have a clear political horizon." 9:28 The Israeli army said it has attacked 200 Hamas targets in the last 24 hours. A Palestinian girl wounded in Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip is brought to a hospital in Khan Younis, Sunday, Dec. 3, 2023 AP 9:14 Two Palestinians were killed, others were injured and arrested during an Israeli army raid of the city of Qalqilya, in the north of the occupied West Bank, WAFA news agency reported citing the Ministry of Health and local sources. According to the health ministry, Israeli forces and settlers have killed 464 Palestinians since the start of this year, including 256 killed since the start of Israels war on Gaza on 7 October. Israel has also detained more than 3,290 Palestinians in the West Bank since 7 October, the Palestinian Prisoners Club said last week. 9:00 Hamas and the official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that a strike had hit the entrance of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in the north of Gaza late Sunday. Several people were killed in the strike, the news agency said. Hamas accused Israel on Telegram of a "grave violation" of humanitarian law. Trapped under the rubble of a bombarded building in Gaza, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl called Alma pleaded for rescuers to help free her relatives first pic.twitter.com/h3IaSs43Pv Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) December 4, 2023 8:06 A senior delegation of Biden administration officials will arrive in Israel later today for meetings with Israeli counterparts to discuss planning for post-war Gaza, the White House said. The US delegation will also meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the occupied West Bank, according to the Walla news site. The US is pressing Israel to avoid more mass displacement and the killing of civilians, a message underscored by Vice President Kamala Harris during a visit to the region. She also said the US would not allow the forced relocation of Palestinians out of Gaza or the occupied West Bank, or the redrawing of Gaza's borders. Israel has rejected US suggestions that control over postwar Gaza be handed over to the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority ahead of renewed efforts to resolve the conflict by establishing a Palestinian state. Search Keywords: Short link: Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb discussed cultural and educational collaboration between Korea and Egypt and the latest developments in Gaza with Korean Ambassador Kim Yonghyon on Sunday. According to the Korean Embassy in a Sunday statement, Ambassador Kim expressed his appreciation for Al-Azhar's pivotal role in advancing religious sciences and Islamic affairs as an independent and scholarly Islamic institution. Recognizing the Grand Imam's significant contributions to Egypt's national and social unity, as well as fostering peaceful coexistence among religions, Ambassador Kim conveyed gratitude for the Grand Imam's efforts in strengthening bilateral relations between Korea and Egypt, particularly in cultural and educational domains. Sheikh El-Tayeb and Ambassador Kim agreed on the imperative to enhance educational cooperation, including further student exchanges, to foster mutual understanding between Egypt and Korea. The meeting also addressed the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza, with Ambassador Kim expressing hope for de-escalation and an end to the violence. The ambassador further announced that the Korean government has contributed $2 million to the Egyptian Red Crescent Society and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). From his side, the Grand Imam emphasized that Al-Azhar is deeply invested in the collective issues of the global Islamic and human community, with the Palestinian cause at the forefront. He commended the position of free nations, particularly the justice-minded non-Zionist Jews who oppose the oppressive practices of the Zionist entity towards the people of Gaza. El-Tayeb and Kim both unequivocally rejected aggression against innocent civilians. Additionally, they rejected Israel's targeting of hospitals, churches, homes, and shelters for displaced individuals. Search Keywords: Short link: The third edition of the Egypt Defence Expo (EDEX) kicks in Cairo on Monday with over 20 pavilions for the latest in land, marine, and air military technology. EDEX 2023 will be held from 4-7 December at the Egypt International Exhibition Centre in Cairo. Organized by Arabian Word Events (AWE) and in cooperation with the Ministry of Defence, Military Production, and the Arab Organization for Industrialization, EDEX is the only defence and security event that covers Africa and the Middle East and is the largest in Africa. During a press conference held on Saturday, State Minister of Military Production Mohamed Salah Mostafa revealed that the exhibition is expected to host over 400 exhibiting companies from 46 countries, presenting the latest technologies in defence and armaments. High-level military delegations from more than 100 countries have been invited, and the exhibition anticipates 35,000 visitors over the four days. According to the EDEX official website, the exhibition's 22 pavilions will feature defence technology from Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Korea, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of America. EDEX's third edition will spotlight state-of-the-art products ranging from shipbuilding to cyber security, missile systems, unmanned and autonomous systems, parachuting and airdrop, satellite communication, search and rescue, surveillance systems, tactical equipment, training and simulation equipment, and more. The exposition has garnered support from high-level industry sponsors, including some of the world's most reputable military equipment manufacturers such as Amstone, Dassault Aviation, Hanwha, MBDA, ALIT, Lockheed Martin, Naval Group, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Esri, NAS, and Leonardo DRS. 400 exhibitors from 42 countries participated in the 2021 exhibition, marking a notable increase from 376 exhibitors from 41 countries in 2018, its inaugural year. Search Keywords: Short link: The third edition of the Egypt Defence Expo (EDEX) kicked off Monday, under the patronage of Egypts President and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi. The exhibition is taking place from 4-7 December at the Egypt International Exhibition Centre in Cairo. It features 22 pavilions showcasing the latest in land, sea, and air military technology from over 400 exhibiting companies from 46 countries. It is expected to attract 35,000 visitors, including high-level military delegations from over 100 countries. According to the EDEX official website, the award-winning show is the only defence and security event that covers both Africa and the Middle East and is the largest in Africa. The event is organized by Arabian Word Events in cooperation with Egypt's Ministry of Defence and Military Production, and the Arab Organization for Industrialization. The Egyptian pavilion will feature the cutting-edge present and future capabilities of the defence ministry. The exhibition's pavilions will feature defence technology from Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Czechia, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Korea, Ukraine, UAE, and US. On display are products covering such sectors as shipbuilding, cyber security, missile systems, unmanned and autonomous systems, parachuting and airdrop, satellite communication, search and rescue, surveillance systems, tactical equipment, training and simulation equipment, and more. The second edition of the exhibition was held in 2021, featuring the participation of around 400 companies representing 42 countries. Search Keywords: Short link: Renowned for its opulence and elegance, the resort was an exclusive venue for the distinguished finalists' traditional trip. This event is anticipated to be a jubilant celebration of beauty, grace, and international collaboration, as Belgian beauty icons embark on a week-long journey to contend for the coveted Miss Belgium crown. Nestled against the picturesque backdrop of Hurghada, Baron Palace provided an idyllic setting for the finalists to partake in a series of captivating activities, showcasing the resort's splendor. From exclusive sunrise-to-sunset photo shoots capturing the essence of the locale to a grand gala performance at the Amphitheatre, Baron Palace is set to metamorphose into the epicenter of elegance and glamour. Representing the pinnacle of beauty and sophistication, the finalists immersed themselves in the lavish surroundings of Baron Palace, engaging in a myriad of events designed to underscore their poise and charisma. As spectators from across Hurghada assembled to witness the gala presentation, the serene city was expected to be infused with the energy and excitement synonymous with one of the world's most esteemed beauty competitions. This collaboration not only signifies the convergence of international beauty on the shores of Hurghada but also positions the city as a global hub for beauty and wellness tourism. Baron Hotels and Resorts take pride in spearheading this alliance, aiming to elevate the Miss Belgium 2024 competition to unprecedented heights. Short link: Egyptians residing abroad arrived on Sunday at their respective electoral committees for the third and final day to participate in casting votes for the 2024 presidential elections at 137 embassies and consulates in 121 countries. Ahmed Bendari, the executive director of Egypt's National Elections Authority (NEA), said Sunday that the vote-counting process has started at the Egyptian embassy in New Zealand's capital, Wellington, following the end of the final day of the voting process according to New Zealand's local time. The voting process also concluded at Egypt's embassy in Canberra, Australia's capital, in line with Australia's local time. According to Bendari, a total of 103 polling stations across 137 embassies and consulates in 121 countries are receiving eligible voters from 9 am to 9 pm on 1-3 December, with an additional 33 polling stations opening their doors in the next few hours to receive voters due to the different time zones. Egypt's Minister of Emigration and Expatriates Affairs Soha Gendy said Sunday that the minitsry's operation room monitoring the voting process observed Saturday a substantial voters turnout on the second day of the voting process, surpassing the rates from the initial day. The minister further added that due to the weekend holiday, a large number of Egyptian expats are casting their votes in embassies in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Russia, as well as all European countries. The candidates running for the presidency include incumbent President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, who is running for a third term in office and whose electoral symbol is a star; Farid Zahran, the leftist opposition Social Democratic Party candidate with the sun as his electoral symbol. Other contenders are Abdel-Sanad Yamama, representing the Wafd party with the palm tree as his electoral symbol, and Hazem Omar, the candidate from the People's Republican Party using the ladder as his symbol. Voting within Egypt is scheduled to occur from 10 to 12 December. The final election results are slated for announcement on 18 December, provided no run-off is necessary. Snapshot highlights on Sunday from Egyptian embassies and consulates in Dubai, Sarajevo, Baghdad, Los Angeles, Paris, Houston, Budapest, Harare, Windhoek, Muscat, Belgrade, Doha, and Abu Dhabi. Photos courtesy of Egypt's Foreign Ministry Search Keywords: Short link: The Arab Network for Digital Media and Human Rights (ANDMHR) is preparing a report on the extent to which press and television websites adhered to the standards of the National Elections Authority (NEA) during the campaign period of the Egyptian presidential elections scheduled for next week, the NGO announced. Mahmoud Bassiouni, head of Cairo-based ANDMHR, said that the report will reveal the degree to which the press adhered to the standards set by the National Elections Commission and the extent of their bias and professionalism in their coverage of candidates. Bassiouni stated that the NGO is finalizing its report on the electoral campaign period, which ran from 9-29 November, after which the electoral silence period began. The report will assess the level of bias or professionalism in the coverage of the candidates, with a focus on the digital accounts of the following newspaper websites: Al-Ahram, Al-Youm Al-Sabea, Al-Wafd, and Rassd. The websites of Egyptian Channel One, Extra Channel, CBC, and ONTV will also be monitored, as well as the websites of Al-Sharq, Makmaleen, and Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed. The report will include quantitative and qualitative monitoring of publications on these sites, with a team of researchers following up on and monitoring media materials related to electoral propaganda, he added. ANDMHR has also praised the initiative of the United Media Services Company to grant each presidential candidate 100 minutes of advertising in all its media outlets. The network believes that this decision will ensure that all candidates have an equal opportunity to reach voters. The network has also expressed its appreciation for the efforts of the Supreme Elections Commission, which has facilitated ANDMHR's mission to monitor the presidential elections. Search Keywords: Short link: The death toll from landslides and flooding triggered by heavy rainfall in northern Tanzania climbed to 68 on Monday, a regional official said, as rescue workers searched for trapped survivors. Torrential downpours at the weekend washed away vehicles and brought down buildings in the hillside town of Katesh, 300 kilometres (185 miles) north of the capital Dodoma. Images broadcast on television showed debris from houses, including furniture, strewn across streets, with key roads, power lines and communication networks disrupted. "We have closed our evening with 68 deaths and rescue operations are ongoing," said regional commissioner Queen Sendiga. Tanzania's Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa on Monday paid tribute to the victims during a ceremony in Katesh to hand over their remains to their families. "We believe we will recover more bodies," he said, adding that 116 people were injured in the disaster. Search and rescue operations were underway with the help of the military as people were feared buried in thick mud. Local resident Paschal Paulo said everything had been washed away in the market where he worked. James Gabriel, who also worked at the market, said his relatives were missing and the search was "very stressful". Esther Bohay said she heard loud noises and saw the streets outside her home turn into a river of mud as the rain swept in. She managed to escape the deluge with her family. At least 100 houses were swallowed by the mud and a village with 28 families flattened, said Sendiga. The disaster has prompted President Samia Suluhu Hassan to cut short her visit to Dubai for the COP28 climate talks. Tanzania and its East African neighbours Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia are battling flash floods caused by torrential rains linked to the El Nino weather pattern. The floods are exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in the region just as it emerges from the worst drought in four decades that left millions hungry. Between October 1997 and January 1998, widespread flooding caused more than 6,000 deaths in five countries in the region. Scientists say extreme weather events such as flooding, storms, droughts and wildfires are being made longer, more intense and more frequent by human-induced climate change. Search Keywords: Short link: President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi issued a new regulation on Monday, signaling the reconstitution of the General Assembly of the Sovereign Fund of Egypt (TSFE) under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly. The reconstituted assembly includes Minister of Planning and Economic Development Hala El-Said, Minister of Finance Mohamed Maait, and a deputy governor of the Central Bank (CBE) as permanent members. Additionally, the new assembly will also include non-permanent members who will serve for a period of four years. These include including Sadeq Murad Wahba, an economic expert; Farouk Abdel-Baqi El-Oqda, former governor of the CBE; Hussein Hassan Shukri, chairman of HC Securities and Investment Company. It also includes Hisham Mahmoud Okasha, the head of the National Bank of Egypt (NBE); Ziad Bahaa El-Din, former minister of international cooperation; and Tariq Qabil Abdel Aziz, former minister of industry. Accelerating IPO programme Established in 2018, the TSFE focuses on attracting local and foreign private investments to the country, including into state-owned assets. The fund ranks 47th worldwide and 12th in the Arab world, according to the SWF Institute's latest update on sovereign wealth funds. The TSFE currently manages assets worth $12 billion and has significant potential for growth, according to previous statements by El-Said. On 1 November, the TSFE convened in its new formation to review the fund's investments, projects, businesses, and sub-funds. The new formation aims to ensure efficient implementation of the IPO programme, which slowed down after several high-ranking executives left their positions in July. The IPO programme serves as a crucial part of Egypt's commitment under the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) loan deal, which aims to bridge a $17 billion financing gap through loans from international financial institutions and the sale of stakes in state-owned assets to strategic investors. Egypt has already successfully collected around $5 billion from offering stakes in several companies between March 2022 and July 2023, with plans to continue offering stakes in 35 state-owned companies to strategic investors by the end of June 2024. Despite the delays in certain offerings, such as state-owned petrochemical companies and Wataniya fuel stations, the government is actively working to resolve any issues and expects these offerings to proceed in the near future Search Keywords: Short link: Tolentino: PH Maritime Zones Act to clarify accountability of foreign transgressors MANILA Senator Francis "Tol" Tolentino underscored on Monday that the Maritime Zones Act will clarify the metes and bounds of the Philippine maritime, contiguous, and exclusive economic zones (EEZ) in the international community to establish jurisdiction that the country can enforce in addressing foreign transgressors. During the interpellation of the Senate Bill no. 249, Tolentino remarked: "Lahat po ng mga zones na ito ay may kanya-kanyang kaakibat na rights, privileges, responsibilities ng ating bansa. At accountability naman po sa mga bansang nais mag-transgress." He further clarified: "Kung sino po iyong papasok sa territorial sea, even though exercising the right of innocent passage, dapat ay kontrolado natin kontrolado ng [Philippine] Coast Guard, kontrolado ng PNP Maritime Command, at Philippine Navy." Amid the ongoing swarming of 135 Chinese boats at the Julian Felipe Reef, which is part of the Philippine EEZ, Tolentino said that while the bill will not immediately address such acts, "it will clarify to the entire international community that it is part of our EEZ because the metes and bounds will be clarified." "Hindi po sa pagpapasa ng batas na ito, maitataboy natin agad ang 135 boats na nagkumpol-kumpol ngayon, na nagsa-swarming doon sa Julian Felipe Reef. Hindi po ito overnight na kapag naipasa natin," the Senate Committee on Maritime and Admiralty Zones Chairman remarked. Further, according to Sen.Tol, the passage of the Maritime Zones Act will improve the country's maritime governance. "The Maritime Zone law is not aimed at settling territorial issues. It will merely clarify the geographical extent of our country's maritime zones and the applicable legal regimes in these zones as stated in UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) and under the 2016 arbitral ruling," Tolentino concluded. Global payment technology company MasterCard has entered into a strategic alliance agreement with the Egyptian digital payment company MDP to enhance the payments ecosystem for banks and non-financial institutions in the Middle East and Africa, according to a statement on Monday. Under this alliance, MDP will be transformed into an innovative one-stop-shop processing services hub by integrating MasterCard's digital assets and white-label applications with its products. MDP will empower fintech, mobile network operators, and other non-financial institutions to swiftly enter the market, leveraging MasterCard's unique offerings, said Ahmed Nafie, MDPs CEO. This collaboration aims to equip businesses with cutting-edge payment solutions that enable them to participate in digital commerce and drive financial inclusion, said Gaurang Shah, executive vice president in Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa at MasterCard. Shah emphasized the goal of providing innovative payment solutions and expanding into various domains such as SME lending and consumer lending, Buy Now Pay Later. MasterCard is committed to fostering an inclusive digital economy, focusing on helping individuals, financial institutions, governments, and businesses realize their full potential. However, MDP serves as a leading card issuing and processing platform, offering businesses end-to-end payment infrastructure solutions. Egypt has made significant strides towards digitalization in recent years. In December 2022, the country signed agreements with several foreign companies like IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, and Dell Technologies to establish outsourcing centers. This initiative is expected to boost Egypt's digital exports by $1 billion by 2025 and generate over 34,000 jobs. Egypts financial inclusion rate increased by 5.4 percent to 67.3 percent during the first six months of 2023, according to a report by the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE). Additionally, Minister of Telecommunications and Information Technology Amr Talaat announced that Egypt has invested EGP 50 billion in digital transformation projects, further showcasing the country's commitment to embracing digital advancements. Search Keywords: Short link: Following a car accident on the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road, renowned Egyptian actor Ashraf Abdel-Ghafour has died after being transported to a hospital in 6th of October City. The actor was transferred to the hospital located close to the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road (in the south of Cairo) immediately after the accident. The wife of the 81-year-old artist was with him during the accident and has also suffered injuries. She is currently under treatment in a hospital in Sheikh Zayed, also in south Cairo. The tragedy was confirmed in a recent report from security services, stating that two people were injured following a collision in front of Mountain View on the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road. Public prosecutors are currently investigating the cause of the accident. Born on 22 June 1942, Abdel-Ghafour was a graduate of the High Institute of Dramatic Arts (1963). His career was launched as a stage actor, featuring in titles such as Lady Gulfidan (1962), Soliman El-Halabi (1965), Three Nights (1965), The Dead Without Graves (1966), Guevara's Death (1968), My Homeland Acre (1968), and The Fire and the Olives (1969). Abdel-Ghafour has become dear to the general public through his roles in television series, an art form that has undeniably represented most of his creative work, appearing in more than 250 series over six decades. His debut TV series was Cairo and the People (1967), followed by series such as The Prayer of the Past, My Account with the Days, and countless other titles, many of them historical and religious dramas (Imam Malik, The Judiciary In Islam, Farewell Cordoba, Omar Bin Abdul Aziz, Harun Al-Rashid, etc). His most recent TV series were El-Serr (2022), Rasheed (2023), Hai El-Sayeda Zainab (2021), Bet El-Qabayil (2019), etc. Meanwhile, he has also made his mark in cinema, appearing in movies such as El-Ghadab (1972), Sun and Fog (1973), El-Resala (1976), She's Beautiful, and World of Love (1977), among other titles. Abdel-Ghafour was awarded numerous awards for his roles and would sit on the jury of Egyptian theatre festivals. The famous actor leaves behind his wife (who was also his cousin), two children, son Tamer, daughter Reeham (born 1978) who is also an actress, and grandchildren, whom he referred to as his "most important accomplishment," in a recent interview. Search Keywords: Short link: Israel struck Gaza targets Sunday in its war on the strip, as international concern deepened over mounting civilian deaths on the third day of war after a truce ended. More than 15,500 people have been killed in the besieged Palestinian territory in more than eight weeks of combat and heavy bombardment. Israeli air and artillery strikes hit Gaza's northern frontier with Israel, throwing thick clouds of smoke and dust into the sky. 23:00 At least 26 civilians lost their lives this evening in Israeli airstrikes that specifically targeted two residences in the city of Rafah, located in the southern region of the Gaza Strip. According to reports from WAFA correspondents, a tragic toll unfolded as a result of the bombardment. At least 26 people were killed, with dozens more sustaining injuries. Additionally, there are reports of several people still missing. The targeted strikes focused on the residences of the Al-Hams family within the Yabna refugee camp and the al-Bawab family in the al-Janina neighbourhood. 22:30 The Israeli occupation army radio said on Sunday that Israeli forces have launched a ground operation on northern Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip. Israel on Sunday ordered the evacuation of residents in and around Khan Younis, the second largest city in Gaza, along with residents of at least five more nearby areas. Residents said the Israeli military dropped leaflets ordering them to move south to Rafah or a coastal area in the southwest. Khan Younis city is a dangerous combat zone, the leaflets read. Later on Sunday, Israeli military forces started ground operations and Israeli tanks shelled sites north of Khan Younis, as reported by Al-Hadath TV channel. Israeli Chief of Staff Gen. Herzi Halevi confirms the military is beginning to operate in southern Gaza. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that about 1.8 million people, roughly 75 percent of Gazas population, are internally displaced, up from a previous figure of 1.7 million. The main hospital in Khan Younis received on Sunday at least three dead and dozens wounded from an Israeli strike against a residential building in the eastern part of the city, according to an Associated Press journalist at the hospital. 21:30 Palestinian residents of a town in the West Bank accused Israeli settlers of a violent raid that killed a man, a death confirmed by the local ambulance service. Local residents say the incursions have become increasingly more violent since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, while Israeli occupation troops were standing by and letting violence unfold without intervening. The comments came a day after residents said settlers raided two Palestinian communities in the north of the occupied West Bank, burning cars and clashing with residents who came out to confront them. "They besieged the houses, burned the cars, pushed the car down a hill and burned it, and the soldier stood there and did not say a thing," said Mustafa Mohammad, a resident of Qarawat Bani Hassan, where a 38-year-old man was shot dead. 21:00 The Pentagon said it was aware of reports regarding attacks on an American warship and commercial vessels in the Red Sea on Sunday, as Yemen's Houthi group claimed drone and missile attacks on two Israeli vessels in the area. "We're aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and will provide information as it becomes available," the Pentagon said. ABC News, citing a US official, said the USS Carney had been involved in multiple engagements involving Houthi attacks on commercial vessels. "In at least two circumstances, the Carney successfully shot down (drones) headed in its direction," the official told ABC. British maritime security company Ambrey said earlier that a bulk carrier and a container ship had been hit by at least two drones while sailing in the Red Sea. Ambrey said the container ship had reportedly suffered damage from a drone attack about 63 miles northwest of the northern Yemeni port of Hodeidah. 20:45 The Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas, was able to explode an Israeli minefield in Khan Younis and kill an Israeli force of 8 soldiers. The Al-Qassam Brigades released a statement late on Sunday stating, "Al-Qassam mujahideen were able to detonate a minefield, killing a Zionist ground force of eight soldiers. Those who survived were finished off at close range northeast of the city of Khan Younis. Earlier, Al-Qassam noted on its official Telegram channel that its members were able to detonate the opening of one of its tunnels on a group of Israeli soldiers east of Beit Lahia. It wrote, Al-Qassam mujahideen were able to blow up a tunnel opening on a group of enemy soldiers east of Beit Lahia, after booby-trapping it with explosive devices and luring the enemy to the mouth of the tunnel. Hours before, Al-Qassam also announced that its fighters had clashed with Israeli soldiers, eliminating several, and had destroyed three Israeli vehicles east of Deir al-Balah with bombs and Al-Yassin 105 shells. The Palestinian resistance announced that it was engaged with Israeli occupation forces on several fronts and that it had directed missile strikes at Tel Aviv, Ashdod, and Israeli-controlled portions of the Gaza Strip. "Our fighters successfully bombed a gathering of occupation soldiers east of Khan Younis with mortar shells, east of Deir al-Balah with heavy-calibre mortar shells and, east of the Magin settlement with a missile salvo," the statement published on their Telegram channel read. Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv was closed after Hamas launched multiple missiles towards the Israeli city, an Al-Arabiya correspondent reported late on Saturday. Al-Qassam also noted that three explosive devices were triggered by a force of 60 Israeli soldiers at their muster point east of the Juhr al-Dik area in central Gaza. 20:00 More than 100 protesters gathered on Sunday on the sidelines of the COP28 UN climate summit to call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war. Holding banners calling for a "ceasefire" and "climate decolonisation", activists in the Dubai Expo City chanted "Free, Free Palestine". "We are seeking an end to the siege, end to the occupation," Palestinian-American Tariq Luthun told Reuters after taking part in an earlier, smaller demonstration calling for a ceasefire. 19:00 Eleven Palestinian civilians were killed Sunday evening after Israeli occupation aircraft bombed a house in the city of Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip. WAFA correspondents reported that at least 11 people were killed and dozens injured, in addition to a number of missing persons, after Israeli warplanes bombed a house belonging to Al-Hams family inside the Yabna camp in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip. 18:00 Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels on Sunday said they had attacked two ships off the Yemeni coast, adding the "Israeli" vessels were targeted over the war in Gaza. In a statement posted on social media, the Houthis said they carried out an "operation against two Israeli ships in the Bab al-Mandab Strait," a strategic waterway connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, targeting the first with a "missile and the second ship with a drone". 17:00 The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said 15,523 people had died in the Strip since the start of the Israeli war. Seventy percent of the Palestinians killed in the war were women and children, ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said, adding that 41,316 people had been wounded. "During the past hours, only 316 dead and 664 wounded were removed from the rubble and taken to hospitals, but many others are still under the rubble," Qudra said. 16:00 A UK-owned ship passing through the Red Sea has reportedly been hit by rocket fire, a UK-based maritime security group said Sunday, with another agency reporting possible drone activity in the area. The unnamed Bahamas-flagged vessel was "struck by a rocket" while sailing south around 35 nautical miles off Yemen's western coast, maritime security firm Ambrey said, citing reports. "The affected vessel was issuing distress calls relating to piracy/missile attack," the UK-based company added. It noted reports that "an international naval asset in the vicinity of the incident" was likely proceeding to the ship's location. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) agency, run by Britain's Royal Navy, said it had received "a report of Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) activity including a potential explosion... originating from the direction of Yemen". It advised vessels in the area to "exercise caution". The reported incident comes amid heightened tensions in the Red Sea and surrounding waters after Houthi rebels seized an Israeli-linked cargo vessel, the Galaxy Leader, last month. Within days two ballistic missiles were also launched from an area controlled by Houthi rebels in Yemen, landing around 10 nautical miles from a US destroyer, the USS Mason, according to the Pentagon. The Houthis have fired a series of drone and missile strikes targeting Israel since October 7. The spike in maritime incidents prompted G7 foreign ministers at a meeting earlier this week to urge the rebels to cease threats to international shipping and to release the Galaxy Leader. 14:46 Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Karim Khan said that his office will further intensify its efforts to advance its investigations in the occupied Palestinian territories after he visited the occupied West Bank and Israel for the first time since his appointment. The Hague-based court has been investigating crimes in the Palestinian territories committed by both sides since 2021 but has yet to announce any charges. Israel is not a member state of the court and does not recognize its jurisdiction. Khan said in a written statement issued after his visit that he is ready to engage with local prosecutors in line with the principle of complementarity the ICC is a court of last resort set up to prosecute war crimes when local courts cannot or will not take action. Palestinian human rights groups refused to meet him on Saturday, accusing him of favouring Israel. "As Palestinian human rights organizations, we decided not to meet him," said Ammar Al-Dwaik, director general of the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR). "I think the way this visit has been handled shows that Mr Khan is not handling his work in an independent and professional manner," he said. 14:00 On Sunday afternoon, demonstrators held a Pro-Palestinian protest against Israel near the Israeli pavilion in Dubai at the COP28 Summit. They waved watermelon flags a pro-Palestinian symbol and other placards and read the names of children and elderly killed by Israel in Gaza, with some demonstrators weeping as they named the dead. Watch live: Pro-Palestinian activists protest against Israel during Dubai Cop28 https://t.co/gjV5HgwzI3 The Independent (@Independent) December 3, 2023 Israel's war on Gaza has pushed its way to centre stage at UN climate talks in Dubai, with leaders and activists calling for a ceasefire. 13:58 Pope Francis said he was saddened the truce in the Gaza Strip had been broken and urged those involved to reach a new ceasefire deal as soon as possible. "There is so much suffering in Gaza," the pontiff said in Italian from his private residence, in remarks broadcast on giant screens in Saint Peter's Square. He said the end of the ceasefire meant "death, destruction, misery," stressing that the besieged Palestinian territory lacked even essential supplies. He said the situation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories was "serious." "Many hostages have been freed but so many others are still in Gaza," he said. 13:00 The Israeli occupation army threatened to attack the Shujaiya neighbourhood in eastern Gaza with huge firepower." This is a final notice. You are all targets, the Israeli army spokesman said on X, attaching pictures of Hamas commanders he claimed were in charge of the Shujaiya battalion. On Saturday, the Israeli army bombed more than 50 residential buildings and homes in the Shujaiya neighbourhood, in addition to other areas in the Gaza Strip, killing at least 700 during the past 24 hours, according to the Gaza Information Office. 12:45 An Israeli security official said that an attempted attack by a Yemeni drone was thwarted in the Red Sea, according to Israeli Ynet. Earlier, Britain's Maritime Trade Operations Agency (UKMTO) said that it had received reports of drone activity and a possible explosion in the Red Sea's Bab Al-Mandab strait. UKMTO said the drone activity originated from Yemen and called on vessels in the vicinity to exercise caution. 12:35 The UN humanitarian agency (OCHA) said that about 1.8 million people roughly 75 percent of Gazas population are internally displaced, up from a previous figure of 1.7 million. However, obtaining an accurate count is challenging, it said. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk warned that "as a result of Israel's conduct of hostilities and its orders for people to leave the north and parts of the south, hundreds of thousands are being confined into ever smaller areas in southern Gaza." "I repeat, there is no safe place in Gaza," he said. 11:50 At least 700 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes within 24 hours, Gaza Media Office announced. The Israeli military widened evacuation orders in and around Khan Younis, asking residents of at least five more areas and neighborhoods to leave for their safety. Residents said the Israeli military dropped leaflets ordering them to move south to Rafah or a coastal area in the southwest. Khan Younis city is a dangerous combat zone, the leaflets read. The main hospital in Khan Younis received at least three dead and dozens wounded Sunday morning from an Israeli strike that hit a residential building in the eastern part of the city, according to an Associated Press journalist at the hospital. Separately, the bodies of 31 people who were killed in Israeli bombardment across the central areas of the strip were taken to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Gazas central city of Deir Al-Balah, said Omar al-Darawi, an administrative employee at that hospital. 10:30 The Colonization & Wall Resistance Commission in Palestine documented 1,692 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers in the occupied West Bank during November. The head of the Palestinian Commission, Moayed Shaaban, said that the Israeli army carried out 1,472 attacks, while settlers carried out 220 attacks. The commission also registered the forced displacement of 35 families from four Bedouin communities, the uprooting and burning of 3,232 trees, and the demolition of 80 homes and agricultural facilities. Moreover, Shaaban revealed that the occupation authorities have recently proposed 19 structural plans to expand settlements to build 2,364 outposts in Palestinian territory. 10:15 Across the globe, demonstrations in Istanbul, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington DC, and Paris showed solidarity with the Palestinians. Check our photo gallery here. 9:45 Israeli forces stormed the house of Al-Aqsa Mosque preacher Sheikh Ikrimah Sabri in the Al-Sawana neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem, Al Jazeera reported. 9:30 The World Health Organization (WHO) said that reports of ongoing heavy bombardment in Gaza are "petrifying," stating that patients were receiving care on the floor in Nassar Hospital, screaming in pain. Yesterday our team visited Nassar Medical Hospital in the south. It was packed with 1,000 patients 3 times over its capacity, WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X. He added that countless people were seeking shelter in the hospital, filling every corner of the facility. "These conditions are beyond inadequate - unimaginable for the provision of health care. I cannot find words strong enough to express our concern over what were witnessing," Ghebreyesus said "Ceasefire. NOW," he added. The reports of ongoing hostilities and heavy bombardment in #Gaza are petrifying. Yesterday our team visited Nassar Medical Hospital in the south. It was packed with 1,000 patients 3 times over its capacity. Countless people were seeking shelter, filling every corner of the Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) December 3, 2023 9:05 A 21-year-old Palestinian youth identified as Adnan Issam Zaid was shot dead by Israeli forces in the early hours of Sunday, during an incursion into the city of Qalqilya, in the north of the occupied West Bank, WAFA news agency reported. Israeli forces opened indiscriminate fire while conducting search and arrest raids that targeted several homes in the city, WAFA added, citing local sources. Concurrently, confrontations erupted between local youths and Israeli forces, the latter positioning themselves on rooftops overlooking the city's main streets and neighborhoods. 9:01 Colombian President Gustavo Petro took to X to condemn Israeli airstrikes on Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza as reminiscent of "Nazi practices," highlighting Western countries' reluctance to acknowledge it "They say this is not Nazis. Even if the Western conscience does not like these facts, the extermination of 5,300 Palestinians boys and girls is Nazis, I repeat NAZIS," he wrote. Dicen que esto no es de Nazis. Asi no le guste a la conciencia occidental estos hechos, el exterminio de 5.300 ninos y ninas panestinos es de Nazis, repito de NAZIS. https://t.co/BYlnSdiF0T Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) December 2, 2023 9:00 At least 16 Palestinians were killed and several others were injured in the early hours of Sunday morning as Israeli airstrikes, the heaviest of the war, targeted residential blocks in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, and the Al-Bureij refugee camp, in the center of the territory. The first attack struck a residential building in the Al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, killing seven Palestinians, including women and children, with additional injuries reported. Shortly after, another airstrike hit a house in the Al-Jenena neighborhood, east of Rafah, killing at least nine Palestinians, with more casualties anticipated as rescue operations continue. In eastern Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza, Israeli artillery struck several homes, causing further casualties and injuries. Additionally, Israeli warplanes targeted a house in the Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City, resulting in more casualties and injuries. On Saturday, Israel pounded crowded southern Gaza and ordered more neighbourhoods to evacuate. Bombardments on Saturday destroyed a block of about 50 residential buildings in the Shijaiyah neighbourhood of Gaza City and a six-story building in the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya on the northern edge of the city, said the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. More than 60 people were killed in the Shijaiyah strikes and more than 300 were buried under the rubble, the monitors said, citing the Palestinian Red Crescent. The Palestinian death toll in Gaza stood at more than 15,200 on Saturday, according to an announcement by the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Here's a quick round up of yesterday's events. Search Keywords: Short link: The Palestinian health ministry on Sunday said 15,523 people had died in the Gaza since the start of the Israeli war against the strip. The war started after the Hamas-led Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7, in which around 1,200 were killed and 240 taken captives, according to Israeli authorities. Since then, Israel has been targeting Gaza with an air and ground campaign that killed nearly 15,523 people; 70% of the dead were women and children, according to the Palestinian health ministry. The ministry also said that more than 40,000 people were wounded in the campaign, which reduced large parts of the north of the territory to rubble. Search Keywords: Short link: The father of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy fatally stabbed in what authorities allege was a hate crime has filed a wrongful death lawsuit. Oday Al-Fayoume filed the lawsuit last month against the suburban Chicago landlord charged in the attack that left his child dead and the boy's mother seriously wounded. The attack, which has renewed fears of anti-Islamic discrimination in the Chicago areas large Palestinian community, has drawn condemnation from the White House. Authorities allege Joseph Czuba, 71, targeted Wadea Al-Fayoume and his mother Hanaan Shahin, on Oct. 14 because of their Muslim faith and as a response to the war on Gaza. Czuba pleaded not guilty in October to hate crime and murder charges. The wrongful death lawsuit filed Nov. 21 in Will County names Czuba, his wife, Mary Czuba, both of Plainfield, and their property management company, Discerning Property Management. Joseph Czuba allegedly told his wife to inform Shahin he wanted the family gone from the apartment where they'd lived for two years. He also allegedly said he was afraid Shahin's "Palestinian friends were going to harm them, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit claims Mary Czuba and the management company were indifferent and failed to recognize a threat and prevent serious bodily harm to their tenants. A hearing is set for March 11. Justice comes in many forms and there is, obviously, unbelievable loss in Wadea, but his mother also was injured seriously, and we believe that there are avenues to recover compensation for what the familys been through, said Ben Crane, Oday Al-Fayoume's lawyer. The Czubas do not yet have an attorney in the wrongful death case and Mary Czuba has filed paperwork to divorce Joseph Czuba, according to court records. Czuba remains detained in Will County as he awaits a January hearing in the criminal case. His attorney, George Lenard, has said he won't comment on the case outside court. Search Keywords: Short link: Patients lie on cold, bloodstained floors in hospitals filled to overflowing. Some scream in pain, but others lie silently, deathly white, too weak even to cry out. Hospitals in the southern Gaza Strip have descended into chaos since the resumption of the Israeli war on Gaza. After eight weeks of war, interrupted only by one seven-day pause that ended on Friday, the doctors are exhausted. Fuel reserves have almost run dry because of Israel's blockade of the territory, so doctors are forced to choose when and where across their hospitals to run generators. According to the United Nations, not a single hospital in the territory's north can currently operate on patients. The most seriously wounded are transferred daily to the south by convoys organised by the International Committee of the Red Cross. But even there, the UN says, the 12 remaining hospitals are only "partially functional". Abdelkarim Abu Warda and his nine-year-old daughter Huda have just arrived at Deir al-Balah Hospital aboard one of the ICRC convoys. On Friday, after the truce ended, an Israeli strike hit their house in the vast Jabalia refugee camp in the north. Huda was wounded in the head. "She had a brain haemorrhage, she was placed on a ventilator," her father told AFP. Since then, "she hasn't responded to anything", he says, lifting up the little girl's arms. "She doesn't answer me any more," he repeats, sobbing. No words It is daybreak and the first prayers for the dead are being performed. A few dozen men gather in front of white body bags lined up on the ground. Between two larger bags lies the small shroud of a child, close to his or her parents even in death. Women in tears crouch down to touch a face or kiss a loved one for one last time before the bodies are carefully loaded into the back of a pickup. "It's Adam going... and there is Abdullah," says one woman, weeping. At the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis, the largest medical facility in southern Gaza, the story is the same. World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Sunday he was unable to "find words strong enough" to express his concerns about the conditions there. Members of a WHO team who visited found it packed with 1,000 patients, three times its capacity. Patients were being treated on the floor "screaming in pain", with "countless people... seeking shelter, filling every corner", the WHO chief wrote. Since the war began eight weeks ago, the Israeli air and ground campaign on the Gaza Strip has killed more than 15,500 people, 70% of them children and women, and also include 280 medical staff, according to the Palestinian health ministry. 'Saw the bomb fall' Israel, which has vowed to eliminate Hamas, says it is now focusing on the southern city of Khan Yunis. The army drops warning leaflets on neighbourhoods due to be targeted each day, telling residents that a "terrible attack is imminent" and ordering them to leave. Each day, too, the warnings move closer to the hospital. With each new explosion that shakes the city, more casualties arrive, often in private cars. Staff race out with stretchers which are often still stained with blood from the previous patient. Some bodies arrive unaccompanied, and so cannot even be identified. In the corridors, families, the wounded and medical staff all jostle together. Some tend to the patients, sliding a sweater or a T-shirt under the head of an wounded person lying on the hard floor. Ehab al-Najjar, a man with several family members both alive and dead at the hospital, lets his anger explode. "I came home and saw the bomb fall on our house. Women, children died. What did they do to deserve this?" he screams. * This story was edited by Ahram Online. Search Keywords: Short link: Ilham Majid was praying when bombs fell on her Gaza house, and her husband only found her hours later under the rubble, alive but seriously wounded. She was one of the luckier ones -- 17 other family members, including two of her children, were killed in that fateful October 31 raid in the Jabalia refugee camp of northern Gaza, where Israel has carried out a brutal invasion that has killed more than 15,500 people, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry in Gaza. Now, like several other Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, Majid is receiving medical treatment in Egypt. "All of a sudden I felt the house crumbling. Three stories collapsed on top of me," the 42-year-old recalled from her hospital bed at Cairo's Nasser Hospital. "I got shrapnel all over my body. My liver was hit, my leg, ribs and my jaw are all broken. I cannot walk." Majid said her husband found her trapped under the rubble of the house by chance four-and-a-half hours later, thanks to one of her fingers that was sticking out. "I almost could not breathe -- almost dead," she said. Her 15-year-old daughter was killed in the Israeli bombardment, and 10 days later the body of her 17-year-old son was pulled from under the debris. It was already rotting. Ever since the tragedy that ripped apart her family -- 50 relatives were staying at the house when it was hit -- Majid has been looking at pictures of her son on her cell phone. Since early October, several Palestinians wounded in Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip, and some suffering various illnesses, have been authorised to leave the besieged territory and travel to Egypt for medical care. 'Catastrophic' The war on Gaza has devastated swathes of the coastal territory, levelled entire neighbourhoods and destroyed much of the infrastructure, including hospitals. Even before fighting resumed on Friday after a week-long pause during which Hamas released captives in exchange for prisoners held by Israel, Gaza's health system was on its knees with hospitals resembling a "horror movie", according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Now it is "catastrophic", the UN agency has said. Currently, only 18 of Gaza's 36 hospitals are even minimally to partially functional, with the three main hospitals in the north barely operative, Richard Peeperkorn, WHO's representative in the Palestinian territories, told reporters in Geneva via video-link from Gaza on Friday. The United Nations says not a single hospital in northern Gaza can carry out surgeries after several were attacked by Israel, while those in the south are overwhelmed by the number of casualties they receive daily. At Cairo's Nasser Hospital, patients such as Majid are trying to slowly regain their strength far away from the violence and chaos consuming Gaza. 'Shock' Yussef, 13, lay in a bed staring into the distance, his face puffy. Dried blood stained his right leg which was held together with metal rods. "He was in a complete state of shock when I found him," said his older brother, under the rubble of their four-storey home in the Shati refugee camp. In another hospital room further down the corridor, Lubna al-Shafei, 36, said she was being treated for a "neck wound". "On October 23, our house in the centre of Gaza City was destroyed. My son was killed and my husband was wounded," she said. On Wednesday the Egyptian health ministry announced the launch of an initiative aimed at providing medical care for 1,000 children wounded in Gaza. Already 28 premature babies who were trapped at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza's largest which was besieged and ultimately raided by Israeli forces, have been taken to Egypt. The United Arab Emirates and Tunisia have also taken in Palestinians wounded in Gaza, namely children in need of medical care. France and Italy have sent ships to Egypt to serve as hospitals for wounded civilians from Gaza. *This story was edited by Ahram Online Search Keywords: Short link: Press Release December 4, 2023 Manifestation of Senate Majority Leader Joel Villanueva on the bombing at the Mindanao State University in Marawi City Mr. President, with a heavy heart, this representation would like to extend our sincerest condolences to the families who lost their loved ones and stand in solidarity with the survivors, who were all victims of the explosion during the celebration of the Catholic Mass at the Mindanao State University in Marawi City. My thoughts and prayers are with you all. This representation strongly condemns the heinous act of violence against innocent individuals who were gathered to celebrate their faith in the most solemn way. This demonic attack is not just an assault on a particular group; it is an attack on every individual's right and fundamental freedom. We denounce this senseless act that aims to divide our nation and assaults our shared values of harmony, peace, and coexistence. Mr. President, we have always been an advocate of religious freedom. In fact, during the deliberation of now Republic Act No. 11054 or the Organic Law for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, we pushed for the inclusion of a provision that will guarantee religious freedom and the free exercise thereof in the Bangsamoro territory. This is to ensure that all people in the Bangsamoro Region are protected from harassment or any undue pressure, coercion, and violence on account of religion. Thus, it is really unfortunate that this tragic incident happened. We call on all our law enforcement agencies to exert their best efforts in finding the perpetrators and deliver justice for all. A group of human rights organisations took the Dutch government to court on Monday, arguing its supply of parts for F-35 fighters contributes to violations of international law in Gaza. The case concerns US-owned F-35 parts stored at a warehouse in the Netherlands and then shipped to several partners, including Israel, via existing export agreements. Oxfam Novib, one of the groups filing suit, said the export "made the Netherlands complicit in violations of the laws of war and the collective punishment of the civilian population of Gaza". "By supplying weapons parts, the Netherlands runs the risk of becoming complicit in violations of international humanitarian law," said Dagmar Oudshoorn, director of Amnesty International. "It is almost unbelievable that these bombs are dropped thanks to Dutch military support. This has to stop," added Michiel Servaes, director of Oxfam Novib. Dutch authorities said last month it was not clear whether it even had the power to intervene in the deliveries, part of a US-run operation that supplies parts to all F-35 partners. "Based on current information on the deployment of Israeli F-35, it cannot be established that the F-35 is involved in serious violations of humanitarian law of war," the government said in a letter to parliament. But Liesbeth Zegveld, human rights lawyer for the plaintiffs told reporters: "It is clear that these planes are used above Gaza to conduct aerial bombardments and assist ground troops in Gaza as we speak." A verdict in the case is expected in roughly two weeks. Search Keywords: Short link: Israel has moved ground forces into the south of Gaza, witnesses said Monday, despite global concern over mounting civilian deaths and fears the conflict will spread elsewhere in the Middle East. Dozens of Israeli tanks as well as armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers entered the south of the territory near the city of Khan Yunis, which is crowded with internally displaced Palestinians, witnesses told AFP. Amin Abu Hawli, 59, said the Israeli vehicles were "two kilometres (1.2 miles) inside" Gaza in the village of al-Qarara, while Moaz Mohammed, 34, said Israeli tanks were rolling down the strip's main north-south highway, the Salah al-Din road. "They are holding Salah al-Din road on both sides and are now cutting it between Deir al-Balah (in central Gaza) and Khan Yunis, firing bullets and tank shells at cars and people trying to move through the area," he said. Weeks after Israel sent ground forces and tanks into northern Gaza, the army has been air-dropping leaflets in the besieged territory's south, especially around Khan Yunis, telling Palestinians there to flee to other areas. Full-scale fighting resumed Friday after the collapse of a week-long truce brokered by Egypt, Qatar and the United States, during which Israel and Hamas had exchanged scores of captives and prisoners. Air strikes have since intensified in Gaza's south, said James Elder, a spokesman for the United Nations children's agency UNICEF. "Despite what has been assured, attacks in the south of Gaza are every bit as vicious as what the north endured," he posted Monday on X, formerly Twitter. "Somehow, it's getting worse for children and mothers." In its latest estimate, the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said around 1.8 million people in Gaza, roughly 75 per cent of the population, had been displaced, many to overcrowded and unsanitary shelters. Many people have been forced to flee to the south of the Gaza Strip and fear being pushed towards the border with Egypt. Many Palestinians fear a repeat of the displacement of 760,000 Palestinians (Nakba) that took place 75 years ago. Search Keywords: Short link: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that the campaign would last until all hostages seized by Hamas during the militant group's Oct. 7 attack on Israel are returned and Hamas is eliminated. "A tough war is ahead of us," he said. The new evacuation orders came as Israel faces growing calls from the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to do more to prevent the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Khan Younis has come under an unrelenting attack from the Israeli military, where it believes more Hamas militants are hiding. "I cannot overstate the fear, panic & confusion that these Israeli maps are causing civilians in Gaza, including my own staff," Melanie Ward, head of the humanitarian organization Medical Aid for Palestinians, wrote on social media, adding, "People cannot run from place to place to try to escape Israel's bombs." The Israeli military marked a map in southern Gaza with nearly 2,400 "blocks," and told the Palestinians to pay attention to Israeli announcements about whether their block was being evacuated. Some families thought they could stay where they were, but later said they received recorded calls ordering them to leave. In advance of likely more attacks in the region, Israel told the Palestinians to leave 34 areas, all located southeast of the city of Khan Younis, and head to already-overflowing shelters or what it called the "humanitarian zone" in Al-Mawasi, an agricultural area closer to the Mediterranean Sea. In Arabic-language accounts on the Facebook and X social media platforms, Israel told the Palestinians that "obeying evacuation instructions is the safest way to preserve your safety, your lives and the lives of your families." Many of the Palestinians had already been ordered by Israel to evacuate northern Gaza earlier in the nearly two-month war with Hamas. Israel issued new evacuation orders to displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza on Sunday as fighting intensified after the collapse of the cease-fire with Hamas militants Friday. But U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said Saturday at the COP 28 climate conference in Dubai, "Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and video coming from Gaza are devastating." U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said while U.S. "support for Israel's security is non-negotiable," he has personally warned Israel that if it did not take steps to protect civilians, it risked their radicalization. "In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat," Austin said at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California. At the forum of political and military leaders and others, he pressed Israel to dramatically expand Gaza's access to humanitarian aid and renewed U.S. calls for a two-state solution to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told NBC's "Meet the Press" show "there are no official negotiations going on right now" to resume release of Hamas-held hostages in exchange for Palestinians jailed by Israel. Kirby blamed Hamas. He said Hamas, designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and other countries, "failed to come up with yet another list of women and children that could be released and we know they're holding additional women and children -- not combatants, not female [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers but innocent civilians, women and children that they have that they couldn't put on a list and turn that in." "So, unfortunately, the negotiations have stopped," Kirby said. "That said, what hasn't stopped is [U.S.] involvement, trying to get [negotiations] back on track..." "We are still working it really hard hour by hour to see if we can get the sides back to the table and see if we can get something moving," Kirby said. "We would like that to happen today. But honestly, I just don't know." Kirby said the U.S. believes "there are still [eight] Americans that are being held hostage. But it's difficult for us to know where they all are" or "what their condition is." Civilian Casualties At least 200 Palestinians have been killed since the collapse of the Israel-Hamas truce Friday morning, raising the death toll in Gaza since the October Hamas attack to more than 15,200 people with more than 40,000 wounded, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. The ministry says 70% of them are women and children. About 2 million Palestinians, almost the entire population of Gaza, are now crammed into the territory's southern half. They are running out of space where they can flee and seek shelter. The United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that nearly 80 percent of Gaza's population has been internally displaced. The Israeli military said Saturday it hit more than 400 Hamas targets across Gaza over the previous day, using airstrikes and shelling from tanks and navy gunships. It included more than 50 strikes on Khan Younis and surrounding areas in the southern half of Gaza. In northern Gaza, an airstrike destroyed a residential building hosting displaced families in the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya on the outskirts of Gaza City. The strike on the multistory building left dozens dead or wounded, said residents Hamza Obeid and Amal Radwan. Israel began its military campaign to wipe out Hamas after Hamas fighters crossed into southern Israel in October. Israel said 1,200 people were killed and some 240 captives taken. "We will continue the war until we achieve all its goals, and it's impossible to achieve those goals without the ground operation," Netanyahu also said Saturday. Hamas has fired more than 250 rockets on southern Israel since the ceasefire ended, said Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli army spokesperson. In southern Israel, sirens were heard in communities near the Gaza Strip but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. Israel has accused Hamas of embedding itself in and underneath hospitals and other civilian areas and encouraging civilians to ignore Israeli warnings to evacuate ahead of airstrikes, using them in effect as human shields, an accusation Hamas has denied. The Reuters news agency said it could not confirm the battlefield accounts. After the breakdown of the truce, Netanyahu's office announced it has instructed its negotiating team in Doha, Qatar to return to Israel. A bloodstain by a bridge over the Seine river was the only remaining sign on Sunday of a fatal knife attack 12 hours earlier on a German tourist, allegedly carried out by a young man under watch for suspected Islamic radicalization. The random attack near the Eiffel Tower has drawn special concern for the French capital less than a year before it hosts the Olympic Games, with the opening ceremony due to take place along the river in an unprecedented scenic start in the heart of Paris. After killing the tourist, the suspect crossed the bridge to the city's Right Bank and wounded two people with a hammer, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said Saturday night. The suspect, who apparently cried :Allahu Akbar" (God is great), was arrested. Video circulating on the internet showed police officers, weapons drawn, cornering a man dressed in black, his face covered and what appeared to be a knife in his right hand. They twice tasered the suspect before arresting him, Darmanin said. Questioned by police, the suspect expressed anguish about Muslims dying, notably in Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, and claimed that France was an accomplice, Darmanin said. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said on X, formerly Twitter, that the news from Paris was "shocking." "My thoughts are with the friends and family of the young German man," she wrote. "Almost his entire life was before him... Hate and terror have no place in Europe." President Yoon Suk-yeol will make a state visit to the Netherlands next week, the first Korean president to do so in 62 years of bilateral ties. Yoon is seeking to strengthen semiconductor cooperation with the European country and will visit the headquarters of Dutch chip-making equipment producer ASML with King Willem-Alexander on his first official day on Nov. 12 after lunch hosted by the king. On the second day, he is set to travel to The Hague for a meeting with the speakers of the upper and lower houses of the Dutch parliament. He then will have a one-on-one meeting with outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to discuss economic security. The Netherlands ranks second after Germany as the European country with the highest trade volume with Korea. Korea's population decline is happening faster than the ravages the Black Death wrought in Europe in the late middle ages, a New York Times columnist has suggested. Under the headline "Is [Korea] Disappearing?" Ross Douthat last Saturday said the country will experience "a depopulation exceeding what the Black Death delivered to Europe in the 14th century" if its population declines at the current rate. Korea "has been a striking case study in the depopulation problem that hangs over the developed world." Statistics Korea said last month that Korea's fertility rate or the number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime fell to a record-low 0.7 child in the third quarter of this year, the lowest in the OECD. Korea's fertility rate plummeted 86.4 percent from 1960 to 2021, the steepest in the world. "A country that sustained a birthrate at that level would have, for every 200 people in one generation, 70 people in the next one," Douthat added. It is unprecedented in the status-obsessed North to publish a photo with Kim Jong-un in the background. A photo published in the North's official Rodong Sinmun daily last week shows Kim and Ju-ae wearing matching sunglasses and leather coats as she stands in front of him. Ju-ae has appeared in many photos in the state media and always appeared either next to or behind her father, but in this picture she is the main character. "Until recently we thought, 'How can Kim Ju-ae be the successor?,' but now we are at the stage of considering, 'Does it seem likely that Kim Ju-ae will be the successor?'" Cho told KBS. National security adviser Cho Tae-yong said Sunday that he believes Kim Ju-ae to be the heir apparent. When Ju-ae first appeared in public last year, officials here were highly skeptical that she could be the heir to the North Korean throne, but the propaganda machine has pulled out all the stops to build the little girl her own personality cult. South Korea's National Intelligence Service has been fretting over the succession in North Korea and now believes leader Kim Jong-un's 10-year-old daughter Ju-ae is being set up as the next leader. Ju-ae first appeared in the public eye at the launch site of an intercontinental ballistic missile on Nov. 18 last year, where she was pictured holding her father's hand, and since then she has been gradually built up in the state, reviewing troops with her father or sitting on the podium during official events. She has even graduated to high-heeled shows and is wearing her hair like her mother, Ri Sol-ju. State media changed the way they refer to her from "beloved" child to "respected" child. After the North's successful launch of a spy satellite last week she was apostrophized as "Morning Star General." People Power Party lawmaker Thae Yong-ho, an ex-North Korean diplomat who defected to South Korea in 2016, said, "If the creation of a personality cult around Kim Jong-un's daughter is true, it signifies the completion of internal procedures within the top echelons of the North Korean leadership to appoint her as the successor. Even by North Korean standards of common sense that seems to be going too far." In other words the girl's designation suggests that Kim now feels confident he has won the various internal power struggles that dogged the early part of his rule, which resulted in brutal purges of the top ranks of the powerful military. Thae warned that appointing a child as the successor at this stage could encourage speculation about Kim Jong-un's health. A former South Korean intelligence official said, "Given the evidence of North Korea exposing Kim Ju-ae so far, it appears that Kim Jong-un and Ri Sol-ju have no son. Launching Ju-ae at this young age could be a strategy to prolong the preparation period and to desensitize people to the idea of having a female in charge." But other North Korea watchers refuse to believe it. A former NIS official said, "The continued emphasis on Kim Ju-ae's appearance in North Korean media reports doesn't necessarily imply anything beyond officials expressing admiration for Kim Jong-un, who loves his daughter." And Kim Heung-kwang of the defector organization North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity said, "In North Korea, the possibility of a female leader still seems unlikely, and considering Kim Jong-un's relatively young age, mentioning a successor seems implausible. Ju-ae is merely a tool of political image-making for Kim Jong-un." Kia's large electric SUV, the EV9, is getting rave reviews in overseas markets although it has been struggling with sluggish sales in Korea. The EV9 won Denmark's Car of the Year Innovation Award by the Association of Danish Motor Journalists, which said it is Kia's finest car in all areas including design, technology, quality and performance. The vehicle was also named the Car of the Year by Spanish daily La Vanguardia. The car can accelerate from zero to 100 km/h in 5.3 seconds and travel up to 501 km on a single charge with a 99.8 kWh battery. But it is gigantic, with three rows of seats, the second row of which can swivel 180 degrees to face the back. In two weeks, on December 14-15, the European Union leaders will meet in Brussels to decide on an enlargement package. This includes ten countries aspiring to join the EU, with Georgia being considered for the first time. EU Ambassador to Georgia, H.E. Pawel Herczynski, shared on Sunday that this is a particularly emotional moment for him.The Ambassador stressed the significance of unity and collaboration to secure candidate country status for Georgia. He expressed optimism that the positive recommendation would be taken into consideration by the 27 EU member states."On November 8, the European Commission provided a positive recommendation to 27 states to grant Georgia candidate status. I sincerely hope that the 27 states will take into account this positive recommendation. Although we will have to wait two more weeks before knowing this decision, let's be patient and hopeful," he said.Herczynski acknowledged the progress made in recent days and urged continued efforts for reforms, emphasizing the need for inclusiveness and a constructive approach from both the government and the opposition."Reforms are necessary for the current and future steps before Georgia becomes a full member of the European Union. I am glad that the government acted promptly and submitted the 9-step action plan to Brussels a few days ago. My colleagues at the European Commission will review this action plan, and they will provide feedback.Everyone should work together to complete these nine steps, requiring inclusiveness from the government and a constructive approach from the opposition," he added.December 3 marks the International Day for the Protection of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In a released statement, the Georgian Government reaffirmed its commitment to giving top priority to safeguarding the rights of individuals with disabilities and integrating their interests into state policies."It is important to highlight that in 2023, the state submitted a report on the rights of persons with disabilities to the UN Committee, outlining the legal status of persons with disabilities in the country. Subsequently, the committee issued recommendations to the state.The interdepartmental coordination committee for the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, established at the initiative of the Prime Minister in 2021, will persist in promoting and coordinating the implementation of the recommendations received from the committee, working in conjunction with the Advisory Council of Persons with Disabilities.As per the Law of On the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, public institutions continue to collaborate with organizations dedicated to the rights of persons with disabilities to develop and execute annual action plans.On September 5, 2022, the Government of Georgia approved the second national strategy for the protection of human rights for 2022-2030, and on March 23, 2023, the strategy received parliamentary approval. This comprehensive document encompasses all fundamental rights and freedoms, with a specific focus on safeguarding the rights of vulnerable groups.To achieve the outlined goals and objectives of the national strategy, efforts are underway to develop a national action plan for the protection of human rights covering the years 2024-2026. These policy documents give special attention to the rights of persons with disabilities, emphasizing tasks that ensure the equality and accessibility of persons with disabilities, with a particular focus on the needs and challenges faced by women with disabilities and persons with disabilities residing in the regions.The state remains committed to caring for its citizens and ensuring a dignified life for all," the government's administration's statement reads. Korea and Japan have signed a fresh currency swap deal worth US$10 billion, the Ministry of Economy and Finance said last week. The resumption comes after an eight-year hiatus as relations chilled. A currency swap involves depositing one country's currency with the partner country and borrowing the partner country's currency or dollars at a pre-agreed exchange rate when needed. The aim is to stabilize currencies in volatile times. The ministry said the deal will promote financial cooperation between the two countries and strengthen the regional financial safety net. The duration is three years, but it differs from previous arrangements as it involves U.S. dollars rather than exchanging Korean won and Japanese yen directly. An icy breeze grips your hands and face. The Perito Moreno Glacier 100 square miles of white surface stands out before the eyes of thousands of tourists, who view it from the walkways in the Los Glaciares National Park. This region is part of the Southern Andes of Argentina, close to the border with Chile. This enormous mass of white and crystalline blue ice with walls that are almost 200 feet high has been retreating on its northern front. The scientific community has been studying this decline with special attention. According to satellite monitoring and measurements taken with ground-penetrating radar, scientists warn that unlike other glaciers, Perito Moreno didnt change for a long time. If the balance of its mass is calculated over the last 50 years, the average [change was] zero. It was a giant that gained or lost very little mass, explains Lucas Ruiz, a scientist at the Argentine Institute of Glaciology and Environmental Sciences (IANIGLA). Hes also a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). Together with his team, Ruiz studies the behavior of the glacier through a methodology that calibrates a numerical model, observing the long-term changes in the glaciers mass. The measurements are made using the amount of accumulated snow, which is compared to the amount of ice lost. Perito Moreno is one of the 49 glaciers that form the Southern Patagonia Ice Field, which is the largest area of ice that exists in the entire southern hemisphere, excluding Antarctica. This large area occupies 4,773 square miles and is located between Argentina and Chile. Glaciers are reservoirs of freshwater that are formed by snow that doesnt melt. The frontal walls of the Perito Moreno Glacier (almost 200 feet tall) as seen from the walkways for tourists. Lucas Ruiz From the north to the south of Argentina along 2,200 miles of the Andes in 12 of the countrys 23 provinces there are more than 16,000 glaciers and 39 water basins. Having glaciers mainly in the mountain range is like driving in the car with a seat belt. If something happens if there are droughts the glacial belt is the reserve of solid water, Ruiz explains. In this way, glaciers benefit the planet during the driest times of the year, by losing mass and providing water. And, if theres a surplus of snow, that treasure of frozen water is recovered again. Melting glaciers and global warming Since 2020, researchers from IANIGLA have observed a retreat in Perito Moreno. They interpret this as a loss of mass consisting of more than 2,300 feet approximately seven blocks. We have to be very cautious. Well have to continue observing to be certain that the glacier is indeed beginning a phase of retreat, because it still hasnt lost its foothold within the peninsula, Ruiz clarifies. There are questions about whether this retreat is related to global warming. The increase in temperature is key to analyzing thaw contexts. Pedro Skvarca the scientific director of Glaciarium, a glaciological study center in Argentine Patagonia assures EL PAIS that 2022 was one of the warmest years in South America since records began to be kept in 1910. A factor is added to the temperature, which is an underwater moraine, a kind of mountain of rocks on which the glacier was resting it has broken away [from the glacier], he explains, during a press conference at Glaciarium. This phenomenon of mass ice loss has also been observed in other glaciers across the region of Argentine Patagonia, such as the famous Upsala Glacier, close to Perito Moreno. Together, they share Argentino Lake. Three years ago, a process of movement and mass loss began. In just eight months, it retreated by 1,000 feet in its eastern section. All of this is related: the underwater moraine that broke away from the Perito Moreno Glacier, the loss of mass linked to the increase in summer temperatures, the pressure of subglacial water that influences the base. everything points to a change that must be observed very carefully. I already saw the disintegration of the Larsen Ice [Shelf] in Antarctica. The world is misusing energy and very few people are aware that something needs to be done. Nature alone cannot combat this damage, Skvarca warns. IANGLA researchers measure snow accumulation with ground-penetrating radar, in April 2023. Lucas Ruiz Ruiz from IANIGLA points to the role of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon dioxide concentration in climate change. Its mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels that the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere is the highest [ever] in the last two million years, which generates an abnormal warming that we call climate change. This explanation coincides with a study carried out by the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation, which looked at the case of Argentinas oil fields. It mentions the general environmental impacts, which are released into the atmosphere. Through the Paris Agreement and through the National Plan for Adaptation and Mitigation of Climate Change, Argentina has made commitments to limit global warming, planning for a net reduction of carbon emissions by 2050. However, the president-elect Javier Milei denies the existence of climate change. During his campaign, he promised to leave the Paris Agreement, which seeks to limit the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 C before 2050. He has also vowed to gut the financing of scientific research. He takes office on December 10. Scientists, the guardians of glaciers In the face of political uncertainty, scientists warn that more studies are needed. They also emphasize that the basic science required to obtain data in remote places such as glaciers isnt cheap. Taking measurements in the accumulation zone of the large glaciers that make up the Southern [Patagonia] Ice Field means assembling teams of several people [and] [contracting] helicopters to assist us. There are also other risks that come with an expedition in a remote area, Ruiz cautions. Therefore, multinational collaborations have become essential. Recently, an expedition made up of scientists from Germany, Chile and Argentina carried out studies using a German plane to better understand the changes in the glaciers of the large ice fields of Patagonia. Theres no doubt that Perito Morenos greatest allies and guardians are the scientists. Those interviewed by EL PAIS insist on the urgency of caring for the glaciers, while continuing to study them. Glaciers are a kind of freshwater savings bank that is becoming smaller and smaller. Its essential to discuss how were going to mitigate the effect of global warming, Ruiz concludes. Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAIS USA Edition Faith Ringgold in the Serpentine Galleries in London, June 5, 2019. Charlie J. Ercilla ( ALAMY / CORDON PRESS ) The first retrospective of the African-American artist Faith Ringgold (Harlem, 1930) in Chicago opened on November 18 in the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). It forms part of the MCAs Women Artists Initiative, which since 2015 has put $1 million annually toward the acquisition of work made by women, in search of achieving gender equity in the museum. It is also one of the first bilingual exhibitions, another of the museums strategies to be more inclusive of the Spanish-speaking community. However, although the recognition of the magnitude of the artistic trajectory of Ringgold symbolizes the re-equilibration of the artistic canon, it does raise many questions: the retrospective is also the artists first solo show in the city. Why now, after 60 years of career and when she is 93 years old? As the daughter of a fashion designer, Ringgold first made a name for herself through the quilts that she began stitching with her mother. They told stories, denounced injustices. Their titles said it all Slave Rape 1 and The Flag is Bleeding. The tale of Ringgold is that of a Black female artist trying to find her place in a supremacist, patriarchal society led by white men. The artist, who has 16 honorary degrees, has been key in the raising of awareness around the need to create a more inclusive society. During the 1960s, she actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement, founding various feminist and anti-racist organizations. She protested Angela Daviss incarceration and curated an exhibition against the war in Vietnam. Her best-known series, American People, which shares its title with the retrospective, highlights the racial tension that erupted in the United States with the Black Panthers and that remains in force, revindicated by Black Lives Matter. Despite the relevance of her work, and having stayed present and prolific throughout more than a half century, it wasnt until 2017 that one of the most important museums in the world, the Tate Modern in London, included her in a collective exhibition about Black art. From then on major cultural institutions began to show interest in her career path. In 2019 her mural Die, inspired by Guernica, was hung in the MoMA alongside Picassos Les Demoiselles dAvignon, baptizing it as one of the main attractions of the museum. And in 2022, Time magazine recognized Ringgold as one of its 100 most influential people in the world, suddenly crowning her as one of the great artists of our era. 'The American People Series #20: Die' by Faith Ringgold (1967). The history of art is full of women who were recognized late, like Cecilia Vicuna and Carmen Herrera, who sold her first painting when she was 89 years old. According to an article by the journalist Jillian Steinhauer in the magazine Believer, the best way to achieve success as a female artist is to be younger than 70, be courting death, and have spent ones life creating work that has only recently been shown. Youre a safe bet at the same time as youre a discovery. According to the 2022 Burns Halperin report, which explores representation in the art industry over the last 12 years, in 2019 the average of acquired works made by women in U.S. museums represented a mere 11%. Its like were crabs: if one or two of us gets out of the bucket, it feels so exciting. But what are we cheering? We should be protesting! artist Mickalene Thomas told Artnet, a website dedicated to the art market. But how can we prevent artists from having such belated recognition? In the case of the MCA, a Chicago museum primarily led by women, Madeleine Grynsztejn, its director, explains that to arrive at an egalitarian representation institutions have to profoundly, intentionally and structurally commit to the goal, not because of fashion or esthetics. And, she adds emphatically: The commitment is evidenced not only in temporary exhibitions, but in permanent collections and publications. The commitment has an much higher economic cost, but it is ethically imperative. In the 15 years that she has helmed the MCA, results have begun to stand out: it has been the museum that has bought the most amount of works from artists who have been historically overlooked. They have doubled the national average, acquiring 25% works by women and have quadrupled another average by obtaining 10% works by African-American artists. Jamillah James, curator of the Ringgold exhibition, says during a guided visit of the show that it is fundamental that institutions hire curators who guarantee the diversity of artists who are shown and who help the public to see the world in a different way. Maria Angeles Lopez Fernandez-Cao, dean of fine arts at the Complutense University of Madrid, says that in the art industry there must be effective democracy and real equality. And to that end, she highlights the world of the MAV (Women in Visual Arts) association, which has been denouncing masculine overrepresentation in the Spanish art industry for decades, despite the fact that 70% of students in academia are women. She also underlines the need to revise the books, texts and manuals of art history that have been written throughout the years. When a young person doesnt see anyone besides Western male artists as representatives of creativity, they are not only receiving a distorted, false vision of the past, they are also receiving the legitimization of a Western and masculine superiority in terms of creativity. That is what we call epistemological blindness and cognitive injustice. And its very serious, she says. One example was the expulsion from the Spanish cultural genealogy of the entire feminist intellectual generation of 27, with Maruja Mallo at its head, which impacted the symbolic construction of our society. According to Lopez Fernandez-Cao, this accepted belief that only the actions of Western men are valuable and the rest may be forgotten contributes to a symbolic violence that gives birth to real delegitimization. If we keep on like this we are hierarchizing the human race. Because of that, many museums are making a profound review of their philosophy and budgets, and are changing the paradigms. The central problem lies in the artistic canon, which defines the norms and values of historic recognition. Constanza Tobio, dean of sociology at the Carlos III University in Madrid, highlights the fact that even if the work of women becomes widely known while they are still alive, they are forgotten once they die. Thats how it happened with Artemisia Gentileschi, Lavinia Fontana, Francesca Caccini, Barbara Strozzi and Marie de Gournay, among so many others. This is seconded by Lopez Fernandez Cao: When these brilliant careers become written history, they are adapted into the patriarchal canon and erased from the isms and the artistic genealogies exclusive to Western men and created by Western men. The key is in a historical review and an objective and inclusive cultural programming that allows for a spacious point of view that is more representative in terms of movements, works, and artists. Like Jamillah James says, artistic institutions are headed in the right direction, but it will take decades, even centuries, to achieve just representation. Will Faith Ringgold be taught in art history books? Opinion articles written in the style of their author. These texts are to be based on verified facts and must be respectful towards people, even though their actions may be criticized. All opinion articles written by individuals from outside the staff of EL PAIS shall feature, along with the authors name (regardless of their greater or lesser renown), a footer stating their office, academic title, political affiliation (if any) and main occupation, or the occupation related to the topic being assessed A record producer is another one of those jobs that have lost their sheen in the digital age. Of course, producers continue to emerge for the music of the moment, although with restricted functions within large teams, which include beat creators, lyricists, chorus experts, sample hunters, etc What is in short supply these days is a demand for the type of adventurous producer who dedicated months to each project, who traveled to remote studios with perhaps insecure or overly conceited artists, willing to navigate the Sargasso Sea of egos that can paralyze the evolution of a band. So panoramic compilations are appreciated, such as the one summarizing the career of Tony Visconti, with his 60 years of musical activity. Produced by Tony Visconti (Edsel Records) contains 4 CDs, or 6 LPs in the reduced vinyl version: it is a summary of an amazing career marked by eclecticism and good taste. By the way, I cannot understand why recordings by Joe Cocker, Procol Harum or The Move are attributed to him, when these works go back to Viscontis early days, when he was an assistant to the official producer, Denny Cordell (who died in 1995, so that he cannot protest). In collections like this one, which require negotiating with multiple rights holders, it is hard to know whether missing work is due to the compilers decision or to the greed of record labels and managers: this may explain the omission of Morrissey or the Stranglers. It is also shocking that Carmen, a California band that electrified flamenco tunes, was included, yet Osibisa, who were pioneers of introducing West African rhythms to rock audiences, were not. The revelation of Produced by Tony Visconti lies in how it amends his enduring image as a stubborn boy from Brooklyn who taught the British to make hard, accessible rock. He also had a tender streak, evidenced by his fondness for certain folky music: he produced Ralph McTell, Tom Paxton, the Strawbs and Mary Hopkin (she and Tony were married for 10 years). It also reveals his sympathy for the friendlier side of progressive rock: Gentle Giant, the Moody Blues, Renaissance, Rick Wakeman. However, Viscontis main merit for posterity lies in his close collaboration with Marc Bolan and David Bowie, two friends/enemies who emerged from mod London. He guided Bolan from his underground years, with Tyrannosaurus Rex, to his astonishing conversion into a crowd idol, leading T-Rex. The overwhelming harvest of success was soured, Visconti thought, by Bolans metamorphosis into a capricious, manipulative and yes, stingy creature. Besides, he refused to evolve musically and thematically. That kind of stagnation was not a problem for Bowie, who changed his sound, image and concept practically with each album. After an initial lapse he refused to produce Space Oddity, considering it an opportunistic song Visconti became Davids favorite accomplice. Together they made about 14 albums, with a break of almost 20 years when Visconti got pissed: he was preparing to work on what would become Lets Dance but Bowie did not warn him that he was already working with Nile Rodgers. Now, Visconti unofficially occupies the role of executor of Davids recording legacy, preparing reissues and rescuing material from oblivion. But there are no revelations about the missing person: he signed a strict confidentiality contract. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria is scaring the planet. The global number of deaths from antibiotic-resistant bacteria is already in the hundreds of thousands, with one study putting the figure at 1.2 million a year. The scientific community is rushing to look for new tools to deal with the issue before it is too late. From the front line of battle, microbiologist Bruno Gonzalez-Zorn the director of the Antimicrobial Resistance Unit at the Complutense University of Madrid and advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) is optimistic. After years of preaching in the desert, receiving scant interest from institutions, he says he has managed to sway opinion and is starting to see progress. This makes me think that in the coming years we will make more progress, there will be better prevention plans in hospitals, more awareness among the population, more optimized consumption and some preventive or treatment molecule that will help us more, predicts the scientist, who spoke to EL PAIS after taking part in a conference on antimicrobial use in Terrassa, Spain. Despite his enthusiasm and hope, the 52-year-old Spanish doctor admits that there is still work to do and that efforts must be quickened. The researcher refuses to point the blame. We are all co-responsible. The key is joint cooperation without pointing fingers at each other, he says. Question. Who suffers from anti-biotic resistances? What is the profile of the patient? Answer. It is important to know that, even if you do not take antibiotics, the bacteria that live in hospitals, for example, which are more resistant to antibiotics, are the ones that affect you. You may be a young and healthy person, but when you go to the hospital, you are affected by the bacteria that has been living in the intensive care unit (ICU) for a long time and is resistant to all antibiotics. The profile is of a person who arrives [in hospital] and, after surgery, for example, the post-surgical infection, which is normal in every hospital in the world, becomes so difficult that it ends up killing the patient. Q. Is the era of antibiotics coming to an end? A. We are beginning to enter a post-antibiotic era because mortality is increasing from diseases that we previously had under control. We have more and more pan-resistant bacteria: before we talked about bacteria that resist many antibiotics, and now we are talking about pan-resistant bacteria, which resist them all. Five years ago, we only had these in a few places in the world, such as India and China. Now, in practically all Spanish hospitals, we have pan-resistant bacteria to antibiotics. It is advancing and it is of great concern. At some point we are going to have a bacterium that spreads very well, that is very resistant to antibiotics, and then we will be alarmed. That is going to happen, and we have been warning of this for a long time, so we need many people to take important treatment and prevention measures. Q. Is it possible that we will see people die, for example, from an injury they got by falling in the street? A. We are already seeing it. We are already seeing urinary infections that suffer complications and where before they responded well to antibiotic treatment, now the patient is dying because they are not cured with antibiotics. Q. Have we reached a point of no return? Or could we go back to the antibiotic era by taking measures? A. Its a complex issue. There are some bacteria that, when they are no longer subjected to the antibiotic, become susceptible very quickly and very easily. So, in some cases, the rollback is very fast and effective. For example: colistin is a last-resort antibiotic in hospitals, which has been widely used in animals. But in that context, it has gone from being widely used in Spain to practically not at all, and the bacteria have immediately become sensitized to colistin. But there are other resistances in which it will be more difficult to regain that susceptibility: for example, with resistance to carbapenems or third-generation cephalosporins, we are seeing that bacteria appear that are very happily resistant even if the antibiotic is not present. Bruno Gonzalez-Zorn, director of the Antimicrobial Resistance Unit at the Complutense University of Madrid, in a laboratory of the Veterinary Faculty. Samuel Sanchez Q. Bacteria, for the sake of their survival, will try to continue to resist antibiotics forever. Is this an indefinite war? A. It is indefinite. Bacteria are the most common living being on Earth. Antibiotics have done a lot of good, but effectively, if you stop developing new antibiotics and we have not discovered a new family of antibiotics for 30 years and only use those old weapons, bacteria become resistant. We need new families of antibiotics and as we develop them, we need new vaccines and new strategies to fight bacteria. Q. In a television program in which you participated while traveling to India, carbapanema was bought without a prescription in a pharmacy. This is one of the last-resort antibiotics that are used when nothing else works. What do you do when this is happening, and we live in a globalized world? A. We have to fight against it. In the end, resistance in each country depends on the antibiotics used in the country. Its not that everything only comes from the outside, everything colonizes our ecosystems and we are lost. National and local action is essential. The Dutch go to India ten times more than we do and have much fewer cases of these bacteria. There is a direct relationship between antibiotic consumption in a country and resistance: even if they travel, bacteria colonize when that antibiotic is present and if not, they lose that resistance. Q. What impact did the pandemic have on the fight against antimicrobial resistance? A. In the short term, it has had a huge impact. Due to Covid, antibiotic-resistant bacteria have appeared that we did not expect to have until 2030. Many respiratory viruses open the door to secondary bacterial infections and, at the beginning, with Covid, they began to be treated with antibiotics. But, we quickly realized that Covid patients were not dying from a secondary bacterial infection, but from the famous cytokine storm, so patients began to be treated with corticosteroids instead of antibiotics. In the rest of the countries of the world, the population in ICUs increased, these units were overused beyond their capacity, there were more hospital-acquired infections and more consumption of antibiotics. The pandemic enormously accelerated resistance to antibiotics. So much so that I think that the 10 million deaths from this cause that were expected in 2050 are going to be seen in 2040 because there has been an enormous acceleration of bacteria resistant to last resort antibiotics. Q. Another variable that influences resistance is wars. There are now several active armed conflicts around us. How will this affect antibiotic resistance? A. There have already been patients from Ukraine with pan-resistant bacteria that were not in our region. Why? Because in conflict sites, there is what we can practically call a perfect storm for the generation of resistant bacteria: there is no diagnostic system for diseases, there are a lot of open wounds that are contaminated with many different types of bacteria, you need broad-spectrum antibiotics en masse where you dont even have access to antibiotics and you give whatever you have And that whole cocktail accelerates the formation of antibiotic resistant bacteria in an exponential way. Q. To combat the resistance, researchers are attacking on several fronts. But you said that there has not been a new family of antibiotics available for more than 30 years. Isnt the pharmaceutical industry interested in finding a solution? A. The economic model of antibiotic development is broken. Right now, there is no pharmaceutical industry with more than 500 workers in the world that is developing an antibiotic. They have abandoned it because it is not profitable. There is a lack of economic incentive. We are developing the prize model, which is now being discussed in the European Union: whoever brings an antibiotic to the market will receive a prize of 300 million, for example, which every country has contributed to, because we need an antibiotic against these bacteria. Or we extend a patent for any molecule they have in their portfolio. Q. At a therapeutic level, one of the ongoing investigations is the use of bacteriophage viruses phages to annihilate antibiotic-resistant bacteria. What are the most promising lines of research? A. Phages are promising, but you have 100 times more phages in your intestine than bacteria, and there are mechanisms for bacteria to resistant phages. So phages are one possibility, but there are many others. For example, nanotechnology techniques so that molecules can detect where the infection is and release a more concentrated antibiotic. Artificial intelligence is helping us a lot to know how an antibiotic is going to behave and how to treat it individually. We could also develop CRISPR-introducing bacteria, which ideally would be able to inoculate a CRISPR system into pathogenic bacteria so that their DNA is digested and they die. There are many very original strategies, many for intestinal health and prevention. For example, intestinal health control and probiotics and prebiotics: bacteria that colonize an ecosystem that cannot be colonized by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAIS USA Edition President Nayib Bukele will focus in the coming months on a reelection campaign, despite the fact that a consecutive term is expressly prohibited by the Constitution of El Salvador. Last Thursday, El Salvadors Congress granted the controversial and popular president leave for six months so that he could begin his race for the presidency. The request was approved by 67 of the 84 deputies in Congress. Bukeles reelection bid was given the green light in September 2021, when the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court elaborated an interpretation of the text that allows a sitting president to participate in the elections if he is on leave from office at least six months before the vote. Honduran leader Juan Orlando Hernandez and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega used similar moves to remain in power. The Salvadoran Supreme Court whose members were handpicked by Bukele made the decision even though at least five articles of the countrys Constitution ban consecutive terms. Bukele has ignored the calls to respect the Constitution and launched a reelection campaign amid soaring approval ratings. Under the presidents controversial state of exception, gang violence has fallen to widespread approval. This is despite the multiple reports of human rights violations in prisons, arbitrary detentions and short-term forced disappearances. The six-month leave granted to Bukele was the last requirement the president needed in order to begin campaigning for the February 4 elections. The president has the justice system and the polls on his side, and is also facing an opposition that is weighed down by corruption cases and has little popular support. The infamous event that took place yesterday [on Thursday, November 30] constitute a triple constitutional fraud. The perpetrators have simulated formal compliance with constitutional norms while violating others that prohibit re-election, leaving presidential office and those that regulate the appointment and function of presidential appointees, said the Salvadoran civil movement SUMAR in a statement. There is no president in El Salvador Bukele will be joined on the campaign trail by his vice president Felix Ulloa, who is also seeking re-election. According to the Constitution, Bukele had to present a shortlist of candidates to replace him during his six-month leave, but he only proposed one person: Claudia Juana Rodriguez de Guevara, his private secretary who overseees his financial activities. She is not a politician, she is the custodian of the presidents businesses, Ricardo Vaquerano, one of the most prominent investigative journalists in El Salvador, told EL PAIS. Claudia Juana worked first in the accounting area, and then in the financial area, of Obermet, the Bukele familys advertising company. Once Nayib launched her political career, she was in charge of finances for the mayors office of Nuevo Cuscatlan, where Nayib was first mayor in 2015. She then assumed the mayors office of San Salvador, the capital, where she became treasurer and when Nayib became president, she became the financial director of the presidency. Vaquerano points out that Rodriguez Guevara was finance secretary of Bukeles Nuevas Ideas (New Ideas) party. It is the presidents party and this is a party that has not been transparent about absolutely anything, despite the fact that the law mandates that the origin of financing be transparent, the journalist added. The interim president of El Salvador holds multiple positions, including the presidency of the Board of Directors of the National Directorate of Municipal Works (DOM). Felix Ulloa, vice president of El Salvador under Bukele, in July 2022 Alvaro Garcia The DOM is an institution that was created two years ago to direct to Rodriguez de Guevara all the money that was previously delivered to the municipalities from the general budget of the nation. This year, the DOM should have at least around $680 million to do its work, but it is also closed to public scrutiny, said Vaquero, who argued that Bukele appointed Rodriguez de Guevara to that body as she is in charge of the presidents finances. The journalist points out that in 2020 the Attorney Generals Office received 12 reports from the Anti-Corruption Commission on the irregular use of more than $150 million of funds under the umbrella of the funds to address the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the criticism, the deputies approved the interim term of Rodriguez de Guevara, who is the first woman to occupy the presidency of El Salvador. Claudia Juana Rodriguez de Guevara is elected as designated by the President of the Republic, for the current presidential period, which ends on May 31, 2024, stated the approved decree. Vaquerano argues that the appointment of Bukeles secretary does not comply with the Constitution. Every person who is going to act as president must go through Congress, and this lady did not even run for Congress. So there is no president in El Salvador at this moment, he said. Bukele maintains presidential immunity Vaquerano also argues that Bukele has an unfair advantage in the election, as he will retain presidential immunity during the six-month leave. The journalist explains that Bukele controls the justice system and the prosecutors office, so it is unlikely that he will be punished if he slanders other presidential hopefuls. The state media will reproduce everything he says during the campaign. This is also a huge advantage for Nayib, added Vaquero. Bukele made it clear on a national network about three days ago that, although it is true that he will leave the presidency, he will be watching them. Bukele is not leaving, he is pretending to leave, but he will continue to maintain control and remain close with key officials. Vaquerano adds that the State Intelligence Agency and police intelligence warned that the Bukele government has used the Israeli software Pegasus to spy on opponents, its own deputies, academics and critical journalists in El Salvador. He can find out what his opponents are up to, what they are doing, what the political parties that are going to compete in 2024 are planning, said the journalist. If we add to that the fact that he has iron control over the prosecutors office, police and judicial body, he has everything he needs to intimidate them. Bukele during the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly, in New York, USA, in September 2023. JUSTIN LANE (EFE) Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAIS USA Edition It is November 23 and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has just met with Benjamin Netanyahu. In a solemn tone, the Israeli prime minister begins his speech. Referring to Hamas, he says that the enemy is genocidal Theyre fighting to eliminate the Jewish state in whatever boundary. Their charter says if you find a bush and a Jew is hiding behind it, kill the Jew. Kill all the Jews. At one point he brought up the Holocaust: Hitler, the original Nazis, they invade Europe, they do these horrors on a mass scale [] the Holocaust. These killers [Hamas] would do exactly what Hitler did if they could get away with it. Listening to Netanyahus speech, it becomes easier to understand his Foreign Ministry declaring the following day that the Spanish prime minister supports terrorists. In other words, that Sanchez supports Hamas, whose members would do exactly what Hitler did. And that Sanchez sympathizes with those who plan to kill all Jews. In other words, he is accused of antisemitism. Or at least of supporting antisemites. The accusation came in response to the Spanish prime ministers condemnation of the October 7 attacks and acknowledgment of Israels right to defend itself, but only so far as it complies with international law. Sanchez stated unequivocally that the thousands of civilian deaths from the military response in Gaza are intolerable and unacceptable, reiterating the view of the U.N. and other organizations on the ground. With the Israel-Gaza conflict, antisemitism and its use as a political tool has returned with a vengeance. Hate crimes involving violence against Jews and attacks on synagogues and Jewish institutions have multiplied in Europe, where 80 years ago Jews were exterminated in their millions. Fear of the phenomenon has led to the banning of anti-Jewish demonstrations in France and Germany. Meanwhile, according to former director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center at Minnesota University and CSIC researcher, Alejandro Baer, the Israeli Prime Minister uses antisemitism as a weapon to discredit political opponents. This means that the term has lost its impact and, when there is explicit or indirect antisemitism, as we are seeing in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, it is not recognized as such, he says. Where is the boundary between antisemitism and legitimate discourse? How can we protest against Israels actions in Gaza without descending into hatred on the one hand and self-censorship on the other? To draw the line between antisemitism and legitimate discourse, the context needs to be examined. October 7 was traumatic for Jews, explains David Feldman, director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at London University. Many feel fear when they see demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinians. They ask themselves, Do these people condemn October 7? Hamas attacks and the protests against [Israels] military response have raised their anxiety. But some have also joined those protests. According to Baer, October 7 is a turning point. There have never been so many civilian victims resulting from either attacks or the wars that Israel has waged. It is the biggest massacre since the Holocaust. The sensitivity of Jews is not only because of their ties to Israel, but also because they are being subjected to attacks from those who see Hamas action as an act of resistance. Criticizing Israel is not necessarily antisemitic. In recent years, there have been two agreements to explain what amounts to antisemitism and what does not. The 31 countries that make up the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), including Spain and Israel, adopted a definition in 2016: Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred of Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed at Jewish and non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. Attacks against Israel conceived as a Jewish collectivity may be antisemitic, according to IHRA, but not if it is criticism similar to that which could be levelled at any other country. However, denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination is antisemitic, as is asking Israel to behave in a way not demanded of any other democratic nation. Feldman points out there has been an ongoing debate over the last 20 years about whether to distinguish between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, Zionism being the political movement that has sought the establishment and consolidation of a Jewish state since the late 19th century. One effect of the Hamas attack and those demonstrations that highlight only Palestinian suffering is that many Jewish leaders and institutions understand anti-Zionism and staunch criticism of Israel as antisemitism, he says. From many quarters we hear that anti-Zionism should not be confused with antisemitism, and in theory this distinction can be made, says Baer. But in practice, anti-Zionism and antisemitism overlap. Because being against the existence and security of millions of Jews in Israel is an expression of antisemitism. To clarify the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism and overcome the confusion of the IHRA definition, Feldman and 300 specialists in antisemitism, Judaism and the Middle East from around the world promoted the Jerusalem Declaration in 2019. According to the Jerusalem Declaration, evidence-based criticism is legitimate. It is not antisemitic to oppose its policies and practices [] such as the conduct of Israel in the West Bank and Gaza. Nor is it antisemitic to point out systematic racial discrimination. And even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler colonialism or apartheid. Similar to Pedro Sanchez, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres roused Israeli ire when he condemned the Hamas October 7 attack during a meeting of the Security Council on October 24, but added that it did not happen in a vacuum. The Netanyahu government immediately demanded his resignation. With the Jerusalem Declaration in hand, Feldman denies that the Secretary Generals attitude was antisemitic as it was based on evidence. Guterres acknowledged that Hamas actions were appalling, but he also said that even those actions have causes: in this case 56 years of occupation, displacement and dwindling political hopes. Alejandro Baer, however, disagrees: When emotions are running high, and given the cruelty of the Hamas massacre, one must be very careful not to confer any legitimacy on the perpetrator. It is certainly necessary to recognize causes and effects, but by mentioning the occupation, Guterres entered a very slippery slope that was open to all sorts of misinterpretations. Feldman acknowledges that while some anti-Zionism takes an antisemitic form, there is also a long history of Israel and its supporters portraying anti-Zionism and other criticisms of Israel as antisemitic in order to delegitimize them. What about freedom of expression and the freedom to protest? Where is the limit? The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, has condemned the rise in antisemitic and Islamophobic acts, but has also called for no restrictions on debate or political commentary on the conflict or acts of solidarity with either Israel or Palestine. Feldman points out that in the U.K. antisemitic acts have soared since October 7. Governments are faced with the task of acting against hate speech and preserving freedom of speech, he says. But in some cases, legitimate political expression has been repressed. In November, police in Berlin banned more than half of the 41 demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza. Back to November 23. After the meeting with Sanchez, Netanyahu continued to talk about World War II. And the Allies invade. They invade Normandy. The German army is in the cities. Youve seen the footage. The Allies say, No, we cant do anything. We cant fire, because theyre amid civilians? Of course not. They try to do exactly what we are doing: try to minimize the cost. And then they go through the cities of France and they go through the cities of Germany. And unfortunately, many, many, many civilian casualties occur. Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAIS USA Edition Rachel Shazar, who turned 97 on Saturday, witnessed the October 7 Hamas attack from the window of her house. That morning, Kibbutz Beeri, which she founded in 1946, faced its most critical moment in history. Ten percent of the communitys 1,200 inhabitants were direct victims of the Hamas killings, kidnappings and disappearances. The survivors of the kibbutz located just under two miles from Gaza are now debating the best way to rebuild Beeri, which was considered the strongest kibbutz in Israel. But the massacre has increased the communitys distrust not only in their Arab neighbors, but also in the Israeli Defense Forces, which should have protected them. They estimate that it will take at least two years some say up to five to return to a place that is now a military zone. After the week-long truce, the Israeli army has relaunched its attacks on Gaza, where more than 15,000 people have been killed. My five children are the future of Beeri, says Shai Friedman, 45, who was born in the kibbutz. She is the granddaughter of Rachel Shazar, one of the two founders who are still alive. But Friedman has serious doubts about whether she will return to what was her home until October 7, when the current war began. Whether I come back, or not, depends on how safe I feel. I dont want to return in fear or by paying any price. The war cannot come to a false end, she says. Friedman is now living at David Hotel, in Ein Bokek, on the shores of the Dead Sea, where the inhabitants of Beeri have been temporarily moved. There, in the spirit that sustains the community, they have voted on what to do until the summer of 2024, when they will be welcomed in the expansion that is taking place in the Kibbutz Hatzerim, located at the gates of the city of Beer Sheva, and about 19 miles from Gaza. Most have decided to stay in the hotel until then. The body of one of the Hamas militiamen who attacked Kibbutz Be'eri on October 7. Luis de Vega But Hotel David, far from being an idyllic holiday resort, is only a temporary shelter where hope buoyed by the release of hostages in Gaza mixes with the uncertainty for those still kidnapped there. After almost two months, the hotel has become an intermediate and mandatory stop that some are finding increasingly suffocating. Hugo Wolaj, a 46-year-old high school teacher who survived the attack with his wife and three daughters, says that he is looking for a house to rent during the remaining months before settling in Hatzerim. I am on an emotional roller coaster, he says, adding that his daughters prefer to stay at the hotel. He speaks of a broken life between the two rooms they occupy at the establishment. His daughter Tamar, 15, lost six close friends; the second, Yael, 14, her best friend, Ido. They both know that they will not see them again, but we have to find a way to continue living, says Wolaj. Hugo Wolaj, at the David Hotel, on the shores of the Dead Sea, where the members of the Kibbutz Be'eri community have been living since the attack on October 7. Luis de Vega Wolaj however, is clinging to the spirit and strength of Beeri, which was founded in 1946. There are people who want to leave, but I believe that there will not be enough space to accommodate everyone who wants to come, he says, explaining the reaction to the deadliest attack in Israels 75-year-long history. Wolaj who was born in Argentina and came to Israel as a teenager supports the two-state solution and believes that Hamas members account for no more than 2% or 3% of the inhabitants of Gaza. But, on the other hand, he believes it will be difficult to overcome the support that Hamas has won over, particularly since they do not have opposition and anyone who dares to speak [against them] will be killed. They don't see me as a human being What happened on October 7 has made him rethink his way of thinking. I have always felt more Israeli than Jewish, but they [Hamas] dont care if I am an atheist, they dont see me as a human being, but as a Jew, he says. If my daughter is happy, I dont care if she marries a Catholic, a Muslim... although today I dont see it that way as much. Beeri today is a militarized zone, where just its most basic functions are working, such as the citrus and avocado crops. That also includes its main business: a printing company founded in 1950 that employs 400 people. It is famous throughout Israel and key to keeping the country functioning. Credit cards, driving licenses and official certificates are made there. Thats why, just a week after the attack, it got back on track even though the businesss director, Ben Suchman, had just lost his mother, Tammy Suchman, one of Beeris most famous activists and Shai Friedmans aunt. Members of the NGO Zaka search for remains of victims among the rubble of a house in Be'eri, one of the places attacked by Hamas on October 7. Luis de Vega Before October 7, 1,200 people lived in Beeri. Today, the death toll from the Hamas attack is 91. The last victim, announced to the community on Friday, is Ofra Keidar, 70, who was taken hostage in Gaza and whose body is still there. During the week-long truce that broke on Friday, 18 hostages from this kibbutz were released. A dozen remain in Gaza or are pending identification among the bodies in the morgues. Among the 91 fatalities is Vivian Silver, one of the most active and well-known defenders of peaceful coexistence with Palestinians. Her charred body was found inside her house, one of the many in Beeri which was set alight during the Hamas attack. It will be difficult to return without Vivian, without Tammy, says Hugo Wolaj. Both were part of a program known as Road to Recovery, which allowed Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank to be transferred to be treated in hospitals in Israel. It will be very slow, but we will get there, says Ada, 69, mother of Shai Friedman and sister of Tammy Suchman, as she helps prepare coffee and tea at the David Hotel. Beeri was a paradise, says her husband, Arnon, 72, the son of Rachel Shazar, the founder. Israels key objective is to eliminate the political and military arm of Hamas. Wolaj goes further and insists that any means of financial support must be eliminated. He wants accounts to be closed and for all international transactions to be stopped. We have to defend ourselves, return to Beeri, to the border. We have no other choice. I want a quiet place for my daughters and grandchildren, he says. Just like Shai Friedman, Wolaj is looking to Beeris generation of teenagers to keep the community going: he wants a future where the shadow of another October 7 no longer looms over the kibbutz. An Israeli soldier at the entrance to Kibbutz Be'eri, one of the places attacked by Hamas militants on October 7. Luis de Vega Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAIS USA Edition Ukrainians who volunteered to defend their homeland are exhausted, wounded, or dead. And many of those who should be replacing them after 21 months of war would prefer not to. Ukrainian society is facing a defining moment: that of the second great wave of recruitment, in an attempt to stop the Russian invader. The Ukrainian Armed Forces and civil authorities have intensified actions to call up men between the ages of 27 and 60, even threatening prison sentences for those who refuse. The government in Kyiv now has a double challenge ahead of it: confronting the invader with new troops and dealing with the lack of motivation felt by a large part of the population that doesnt want to go to war. Kiril Babii is a Ukrainian artillery officer serving in Bakhmut, one of the bloodiest fronts of the war. Hes from Crimea, the peninsula that was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. He had resided in Kharkiv since then. When the Russians began their large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he didnt hesitate and volunteered to enlist. Like him, there have been almost half-a-million men and 62,000 women who have enlisted, especially during the past year. However, on November 20, Babii published a text on Instagram that had a great impact on the internal Ukrainian debate: he announced that, in February 2024, when two years of war have passed, he will leave the army. Babii assumes that he will go to prison for desertion but he believes that the recruitment system is unfair. A month ago, I asked myself a question: What if the war lasts five years, Kiril? And I started to cry. Its two in the morning. I dont want to be here [on the frontlines] for three more years. Im mentally exhausted. Rest permits arent useful. This is what Babii wrote words that other Ukrainian soldiers have repeated to EL PAIS. The days of rest, when they arrive (on average, leave is limited to about two weeks annually) arent useful for disconnecting. Your brain continues to think about war, the soldier notes. Babiis text hits home for many of his comrades. Its wrong that those of us who mobilized voluntarily and defended our country have such poor expectations [for the future]. Thats why I write this so that there are changes, changes that transform the army from a prison into a well-organized institution for the defense of the country in a long-term war. Babiis protest isnt unique. This past Friday, on December 1, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy confirmed in a televised address that his government will implement a new system of mobilization, but also one of demobilization, to relieve troops who have been fighting for almost two years. EL PAIS visited several cities in the east and west of Ukraine throughout November, from Lviv to Kherson, from Mykolaiv to Dnipro, from Kyiv to Zaporizhzhia. In all of them, the interviews with a dozen young people from different socio-economic backgrounds have ended with the same conclusion: they dont want to go to war. In Lviv the city in the country where Ukrainian nationalism is strongest a hotel receptionist named Stanislav laments that so many people from Eastern Ukraine continue to speak Russian. When asked if hes ready to enlist, he rejects the idea: Why so many deaths? To advance [12 miles]? This makes no sense. Stanislav is referring to the minimal progress that the Ukrainian Army has made in the great counteroffensive that began this past June on the Zaporizhzhia front. The first three months of the offensive between June and August 2023 caused the most casualties among Ukrainian troops. While the Ukrainian military leaders dont provide data about their human losses, U.S. military sources assured The New York Times in August that the number of wounded soldiers since the beginning of the invasion could be 120,000, with about 70,000 dead. Theres no available data about possible casualties over the last three months. The majority in Ukraine continues to support the war effort to stop the Russian invasion. This is indicated by surveys, such as the one conducted by Gallup in October of this year, which found that 60% of Ukrainians are committed to the idea of [continuing] fighting until [they] win the war. By winning the war, 91% of respondents mean expelling Russian troops from all of Ukrainian territory, according to Gallup. In the same survey published by Gallup in October 2022, the majority in favor of continuing the war was 70%. The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces doesnt disclose the number of people who are being incorporated into the army, nor the number of replacements that are needed. However, military sources on the Zaporizhzhia front told EL PAIS this past October that about 200,000 new soldiers are required. The hotel where Stanislav works is located on Svoboda Avenue, in the center of Lviv. On weekends, before the midnight curfew, the bars and liquor stores in the area are full of young people, stocking up to have a party. One day in November, Stanislav witnessed how a military patrol from a recruiting office forcibly took away a group of young people in a van. In the last two months, videos of these occurrences have increased. These videos recorded by observers on their phones have circulated on social media. But now, they frequently appear in traditional media, as well as in columns that denounce cases of abuse of power. The Ukrainian Army has no power to force a citizen to accept enlistment orders. Rather, this falls under the jurisdiction of the civil administration. Recruitment offices can send notices by mail, deliver them in person, on public roads, or by visiting homes. Each person is free to sign the acknowledgment of receipt. If a person repeatedly refuses to appear at the recruitment office whether to register, to declare their personal situation and the reasons why they shouldnt be called up, to pass medical examinations, or to enlist a legal case is opened against them, which can result in a fine, or a prison sentence of between two to five years. Zelenskiy visits a command post in Kupyansk, in the Kharkiv region, this past week. AFP Since this past fall, military patrols have intensified, attempting to recruit civilians on public roads. Oleksiy Danilov secretary of the National Security and Defense Council confirmed to The Guardian on November 27 that a new recruitment program will soon be announced. This plan includes the hiring of two large human resources companies, which will identify citizens who can be enlisted more precisely, according to their studies or profession. Danilov claims that this will give new recruits more confidence about their ability to perform military functions in line with their training. The end of voluntary mobilization The Ukrainska Pravda newspaper published a report on November 1 indicating that the time of gentle mobilization must end. This Ukrainian media outlet interviewed a military chaplain Andrii Zelinskii who repudiated the dichotomy between the almost normal life seen in cities far from the frontlines, such as Kyiv, when compared to the combat zones. In Ukraine today, theres an alternative reality; an alternative to pain, to wounds, to death, to war. And this is the main threat [when it comes to resisting] the enemy. But not all is well in the Ukrainian capital. Theres also anxiety. Rostislav is 28-years-old and, since last September, he always goes out wearing boots, a jacket and a military-style backpack. Hes not a soldier, but he believes that, with this appearance, he wont be approached on the street by soldiers from the recruitment office. Irina is a 30-years-old accountant. One day, a guy struck up a conversation with her on Tinder. He lives in the eastern suburbs of Kyiv. She asked to meet at a coffee shop downtown, but he rejected this, admitting that he doesnt leave his neighborhood, because he doesnt want to take public transportation and be stopped by a recruitment patrol. The Telegraf media outlet warned, in an article from November 27, that many men limit their movements to avoid being drafted. Several Ukrainians are thinking the same thing as Oleksandr, a 27-year-old man from Zaporizhzhia. This isnt his real name he prefers to remain anonymous. Just 15 miles from the city is the front. Oleksandr suffers from depression because, as he doesnt have a full-time job, he knows that, sooner or later, he may be called up. Military salaries are high, compared to the Ukrainian average: they range from $800 to $3,000 per month, depending on risk and responsibilities. However, Oleksandr has soldiers in his circle of friends and they all suggest that he do everything possible to avoid serving. I have two great friends. One was assigned to a Special Forces unit and was demobilized two months ago, because his mother is sick and he must take care of her. The first thing he told me is that the army is chaotic and that he doesnt plan to return. This fall, my other friend paid $5,500 to a guide who walked him through forests for two hours to the Slovak border. Now, hes out of the country he didnt want to go to war. According to martial law, most Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 are not permitted to leave the country. Oleksandrs cousin is on a wanted list for failing to register with the local military office a mandatory procedure for all adult men up to the retirement age (60). The army showed up at his mothers house the last week of November to deliver another request: her son is now hiding in Kyiv. But the message that has affected him the most was shared on Instagram by a good friend of his named Bogdan, whos a doctor in an infantry platoon of 12 men, all of whom have been discharged due to injury or death. Bogdan wrote on Instagram that his goal was to write a book to convince others not to enlist. His message has since been deleted and he hasnt been active on social media for weeks. I was optimistic in May about the outcome of the war, Oleksandr explains. At that time, I would have joined the army, but theres been no progress. [I would now be fighting] in a war that has no end. It would be like serving a prison sentence for years, without knowing when I will be free again. Venezuelas government on Sunday claimed victory in a non-binding referendum on the annexation of Essequibo, a jungle region of 61,600 square miles (160,000 square kilometers) in dispute with neighboring Guyana. According to the National Electoral Council (CNE), turnout was close to 50% and the result was overwhelmingly in support of annexation (90%). The Essequibo region represents two-thirds of Guyanas territory, and authorities there see the poll as an explicit provocation by the government of Nicolas Maduro. The president of the CNE, Elvis Amoroso, declared three hours after the closing of the polling places that participation in defense of Venezuelan sovereignty over Essequibo and the Geneva Agreement of 1966 was close to 10 million people, a turnout figure that even former president Hugo Chavez, whose legacy remains alive through Chavismo, did not reach at the height of his popularity. Venezuelan authorities refuted claims that the influx of voters at polling places was low, and underscored that the issue of sovereignty over Essequibo cuts across party lines to become a national objective. The Chavista administration had deployed a huge nationalist campaign to promote a map of Venezuela that incorporates the oil- and mineral-rich territory, which is larger than Portugal. Maduro was the first to support a referendum that could be viewed as the starting signal for his 2024 presidential campaign, in which he will face an opposition candidate that might be Maria Corina Machado, winner of the primaries, if her disqualification is finally lifted. The state apparatus promoted the vote with billboards, concerts, merchandise, military rallies and incessant advertising on social media. Government supporters celebrate after voting ended for the non-binding referendum on Essequibo. Rayner Pena R. (EFE) However, images of empty voting centers circulated throughout the day. The absence of voters was a topic of conversation from very early on, and was palpable even in the newscasts of the state-run Venezuelan television, in which many national and regional leaders harangued viewers about their national duty to go vote. In some voting centers, members of the National Guard and students of the National Security University, among other state officials, were seen standing in line to vote. Some important opposition politicians, such as former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles or Governor Manuel Rosales, decided to vote. But the most intransigent sectors of the Venezuelan opposition, who represent the majority at this time, questioned the referendum and called on the population to not allow themselves to be manipulated. Maria Corina Machado stated that she would not participate. Some analysts have stated that the speed of voting could explain the absence of lines, and that participation levels could be higher than estimated by the opposition, which distrusts official figures. CNE chief Amoroso declared at 6 p.m. that opening hours would be extended until 8 p.m. to give the opportunity to those who had not been able to vote yet. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino expressed satisfaction at the result of a civic initiative to claim legitimate national sovereignty in Essequibo. The news broadcasts on state television said that this was the first popular consultation in defense of national sovereignty that has been held in our history. On Friday, Guyana asked the United Nations International Court of Justice, based in The Hague, to suspend the Venezuelan referendum. Chavismo took it as a victory that this organization did not explicitly suspend the vote, although the United Nations court did reiterate its warnings to Caracas not to do anything that modifies the situation on the territory that Guyana de facto administers and controls, while the court analyzes the substance of the territorial dispute, which involves the validity of the border defended by Guyana. The magistrates also expressed concern about the fifth question on the referendum, the one that generated the most suspicion, since it sought popular backing for the Maduro administration to to create a new state within the disputed territory and give Venezuelan citizenship to the approximately 125,000 people who live in that strip of jungle and who are already Guyanese. At the invitation of Member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Vice Premier of the State Council Ding Xuexiang, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance of the Republic of Singapore Lawrence Wong will visit China from December 5 to 8. Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang and Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong will co-chair the 19th meeting of the China-Singapore Joint Council for Bilateral Cooperation, the 24th meeting of China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park Joint Steering Council (JSC), the 15th meeting of the China-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City JSC and the seventh meeting of the China-Singapore (Chongqing) Demonstration Initiative on Strategic Connectivity JSC in Tianjin on December 7. At the invitation of Member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Angola Tete Antonio and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mali Abdoulaye Diop will pay official visits to China from December 5 to 8 and from December 6 to 10 respectively. AFP: US Commerce Secretary recently called China the biggest threat weve ever had and stressed China is not our friend. She also urged US business leaders to put national security above short term revenue. What is your comment on this? Wang Wenbin: President Biden once noted that the US is not seeking to halt Chinas economic development or scientific and technological progress. However, the remarks of the US official contradict this. It will hardly win the trust from China and the rest of the world, and reveals the deep-seated Cold-War mentality and hegemonic mindset of some in the US. China never bets against the US, and has no intention to challenge or unseat it. The US needs to have a right understanding of China, work with China to earnestly deliver on the important common understandings reached between the two Presidents in their meeting in San Francisco, stop viewing China as an enemy, correct the wrong move of carrying out major-country confrontation under the pretext of competition, and avoid saying one thing and doing another. I read some comment on Chinese media platforms, which I would like to cite here and hope the US will seriously reflect on it. Going against the rules, principles and laws of free trade market is like building a dam of sievesno matter how hard you try, the water will run through the sieves to where it is heading. Yonhap News Agency: Chinas General Administration of Customs has recently halted customs clearance on exports of urea to the Republic of Korea (ROK). The ROK government considers the Chinese action as an informal export restriction. Could the foreign ministry share more information with us? Wang Wenbin: We noted relevant reports. The relevant departments of China and the ROK maintain communication on this. Id like to refer you to the competent authorities for any specifics. The Paper: The United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the host country of the 28th session of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), held the World Climate Action Summit (WCAS) in Dubai on December 1 and 2. President Xi Jinpings Special Representative, Member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Vice Premier of the State Council Ding Xuexiang attended the meeting and delivered an address. Could you share some information with us on that? Wang Wenbin: From November 30 to December 2, President Xi Jinpings Special Representative, Member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Vice Premier of the State Council Ding Xuexiang attended the World Climate Action Summit (WCAS) in Dubai and delivered an address. In his address, Vice Premier Ding first conveyed President Xis good wishes for the UAE in hosting the summit. He recalled that eight years ago, President Xi worked with leaders of other countries to reach the Paris Agreement with utmost political determination and wisdom, and embarked on a new journey of global cooperation to address climate change. He said that China has always kept its promise and made important contributions to global climate governance and put forward a three-point proposal on global climate governance, including practicing multilateralism, accelerating green transformation, and strengthening action implementation. He stressed that we need to adhere to the goals and principles set out in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement; actively increase the proportion of renewable energy, promote the clean, low-carbon and efficient use of traditional energy, and accelerate the formation of green and low-carbon production methods and lifestyles. He added that countries need to fully honor the existing commitments. In particular, developed countries should effectively increase financial, technological and capacity building support to developing countries. Vice Premier Dings address demonstrates Chinas sense of responsibility as a major country in actively tackling climate change and leading in global climate governance, which will help COP28 achieve positive outcomes, boost full and effective implementation of the Paris Agreement and build a clean and beautiful world. During the summit, Vice Premier Ding also attended and addressed the Group of 77 (G77) and China leaders summit on climate change, met respectively with leaders including the UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, President of the Maldives Mohamed Muizzu and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. He shared with them what China has achieved in enhancing ecological conservation and Chinas propositions on global climate and environmental governance, which has been widely recognized. NHK: Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow Ting, who is studying in Canada, said on social media on December 3 that shes living in exile in Canada and wont return to Hong Kong for the rest of her life. Do you have any comment? Wang Wenbin: The Hong Kong police has responded to this and condemned her irresponsible behaviors that blatantly challenge law and order. China is a country with rule of law and Hong Kong is a law-based society where residents lawful rights and interests are fully protected. That being said, no one is entitled to extrajudicial privileges and all offenders shall be brought to justice. Xinhua News Agency: Can you brief us on this years mechanism meetings between China and Singapore at the vice-premier level? What are the special highlights of this years meetings? Wang Wenbin: The bilateral cooperation mechanisms between China and Singapore at the vice-premier level are the two sides institutionalized communication channel at the highest level, playing an important role for years in promoting China-Singapore cooperation in various fields in a coordinating way and facilitating socioeconomic development of the two countries. This years meetings to be held in Tianjin coincide with the 15th anniversary of the China-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City project and the two sides will hold commemorating activities. China and Singapore are each others friendly neighbors and important partners, with a sound momentum of growth in bilateral relations. This March, President Xi Jinping and Singapores Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong jointly announced to elevate China-Singapore relations to an all-round high-quality future-oriented partnership, providing strategic guidance for China-Singapore cooperation. This years meetings are the first ones since the bilateral relationship was elevated. Thus the meetings have special significance. The two sides will focus on all-round, high-quality and future-oriented in the characterization, deliver on the important common understandings between leaders of the two countries, further dovetail development strategies, fully advance high-quality cooperation and jointly act on the new characterization of China-Singapore relationship. Beijing Daily: On December 2, the first China International Supply Chain Expo (CISCE) was successfully concluded. We noted that many representatives from multinational corporations attending the expo said that holding the first CISCE demonstrates Chinas firm determination in taking concrete actions to deepen international cooperation on industrial and supply chains. What is your comment on this? Wang Wenbin: As the worlds first national-level expo themed on supply chains, the first CISCE attracted 515 companies and institutions from both home and abroad. Available data shows that over 200 cooperation deals and tentative deals worth more than RMB 150 billion were signed at the expo. The CISCE is a grand event that connects the world for a shared future. It reflects the common aspiration of all parties for building stable and resilient industrial and supply chains, sends out a clear message of Chinas deeper engagement in building global industrial and supply chains, and shows that in global industrial and supply chain cooperation, China is not only a participant and beneficiary, but also a staunch defender and contributor. During the CISCE, the international business community launched the Beijing Initiative for the Connectivity of Industrial and Supply Chains. Companies from home and abroad connected by industrial and supply chains showcased their advancements, deepened cooperation and gained substantively from the CISCE. The supply chains should be chains of win-win cooperation. China stands ready to share opportunities with all sides that stem from its huge market, the most complete industrial sectors, high-level opening up policy, and innovation factors gathering at a faster pace. China stands ready to work with all sides to build global industrial and supply chains that are secure, stable, smooth, efficient, open, inclusive and mutually beneficial, and provide strong safeguards for boosting global growth and increasing the wellbeing of people around the world. AFP: The Philippine government said recently that it is deeply concerned about the over 130 Chinese boats around Niue Jiao. French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna said recently that France is concerned by what the Chinese warship did to the Australian ship. She added that stability must prevail in the Taiwan Strait, and certainly the world doesnt need a new crisis. What is your response to these? Wang Wenbin: On your first question, Niue Jiao is part of Chinas Nansha Qundao. Relevant waters of the South China Sea, including Niue Jiao and its adjacent waters, have always been important operating areas and shelters for Chinese fishing boats. It is justified and lawful for Chinese fishing boats to operate or shelter from wind in the area, and the Philippines is in no position to make irresponsible remarks. On your second question, you may refer to Chinas previous response. I would like to stress that the Taiwan question is purely Chinas internal affair, and the solid anchor to cross-Strait peace and stability is the one-China principle. We hope relevant parties will adhere to the one-China principle, stand firmly with China against Taiwan independence, and safeguard peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. TASS: Yesterday Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko started his visit to China. Does the foreign ministry have any comment? How does the foreign ministry comment on Belarus and Chinas cooperative partnership? Wang Wenbin: China and Belarus are all-weather comprehensive strategic partners and the two sides maintain close exchanges at all levels. As for the details of President Lukashenkos visit, you may refer to the relevant press release the Chinese side has put out. Bloomberg: Finland has said that it will demand that its investigators be allowed on board the NewNew Polar Bear, a Hong Kong-flagged vessel whose anchor ripped up a sub-sea gas pipeline in October. Finlands President said that he requires that investigators from his country will be involved when the captain is questioned when he returns to China. How does the foreign ministry respond to this? Wang Wenbin: China always attaches great importance to protecting the safety and security of undersea infrastructure, and strictly fulfills its obligations under international law, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and relevant treaties of the International Maritime Organization. Relevant Chinese authorities are conducting technical investigation on the incident and maintaining smooth communication and good cooperation with parties concerned, including Finland, in accordance with international law. China Daily: On December 1, the High Constitutional Court of Madagascar announced the final result of the countrys presidential election. Andry Rajoelina was reelected as President with 58.96 percent of the votes. Do you have any comment? Wang Wenbin: We noted the announcement of the election result by the High Constitutional Court of Madagascar and express our sincere congratulations to Mr. Rajoelina for his reelection as the President of Madagascar. We believe that under the leadership of President Rajoelina, Madagascar will achieve greater success in national development and economic and social progress. China always values its traditional friendship with Madagascar. We stand ready to work with the new government of Madagascar to deepen and expand exchange and cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative and the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, and pursue new, greater development of the China-Madagascar comprehensive cooperative partnership. Hubei Media Group: December 3 marks the second anniversary of the China-Laos Railway. Data shows the railway has served 24.2 million passengers and shipped 29.1 million tonnes of goods over the past two years, taking on an increasingly important role as a golden route. Do you have any comment? Wang Wenbin: Over the past two years, the China-Laos Railway has become an important engine for economic and trade cooperation as well as people-to-people exchanges between China and Laos, a road of happiness, development and friendship for the benefit of the Chinese and Laotian people, and an artery linking China and countries on the Indochina Peninsula. The China-Laos Railway freight service could reach 12 Belt and Road partner countries, including Laos, Thailand, Viet Nam, and Myanmar. The Lancang-Mekong Express international freight train of the China-Laos Railway now runs 400 trains with fixed point, time, route and train number. The new transport model of China-Laos Railway plus China-Europe Railway Express has shortened direct rail shipping time from countries like Laos and Thailand to Europe to 15 days. The railways function as a major international corridor in increasing domestic and international connectivity, benefiting countries along the routes, leveraging complementarity of its destinations, and offering safe and efficient services is becoming more pronounced. We hope that the China-Laos Railway, as an engine for China and countries on the Indochina Peninsula to promote high-quality Belt and Road cooperation, will continue to run at top speed and drive the development and prosperity of more countries in the region. NHK: It is reported that the 24th China-EU Summit will be held in Beijing on December 7. Can you share more information and Chinas expectation? Wang Wenbin: The China-EU Summit is an annual meeting between the leaders of the two sides and provides strategic guidance for the development of China-EU relations. This years summit coincides with the 20th anniversary of the China-EU comprehensive strategic partnership and the 25th anniversary of the China-EU Summit mechanism. It is followed closely by people from various fields in China and the EU as well as the broader international community. China attaches high importance to the summit. President Xi Jinping will meet with the President of the European Council Charles Michel and the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. Premier Li Qiang will co-host the summit with the two Presidents of the EU. Leaders from the two sides will have in-depth exchange of views on strategic issues critical to the direction of China-EU relations and global issues of mutual interest to draw a blueprint for, identity the focus of and inject impetus to China-EU relations. At present, the situation unseen in a century is evolving at a faster pace marked by increased volatility in international situation, sluggish world economy and emerging global challenges. The China-EU relationship is also facing new opportunities and challenges. China and the EU are partners, not rivals and our common interests far exceed differences. China hopes that the summit will play an important role by building on past achievements, enhance understanding and mutual trust through strategic communication, boost mutually beneficial cooperation through innovation, and discuss solutions through dialogue and consultation. China hopes that the two sides can work together to address global challenges, inject new impetus to the global economy, increase stability in international situation and provide strategic guidance for sustained and sound development of China-EU relations. This serves the fundamental and long-term interest of both China and the EU and meets the common aspiration of the international community. Shenzhen TV: The Israel Defence Forces issued a statement on December 1 saying that Hamas violated the temporary ceasefire deal and attacked Israel. Israel resumed combat operations against Hamas. On the same day, Israeli officials said that intelligence department of Israel is making plans to hunt down Hamas leaders living in Lebanon, Turkiye and Qatar. Whats Chinas comment? Wang Wenbin: China is deeply concerned over the resumed fighting in Gaza. Under the current situation, the goal of ending the hostilities should not change and the principle of protecting civilians should not be violated. Facts prove once again that the use of force will never bring lasting peace. Heavier civilian casualties will only create more hatred and hasten the next round of escalation. China strongly calls on relevant sides to exercise restraint and the international community, especially countries with influence on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, to earnestly play a responsible role, implement the Security Councils Resolution 2712 and the resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly at its emergency session, promote a comprehensive and lasting ceasefire, protect civilians, ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, resume talks for peace as soon as possible and work relentlessly for the peaceful co-existence between Palestine and Israel and lasting peace in the Middle East. A few days ago, TIME magazine named Skims one of the 100 most influential companies of 2023. The periodicals cover featured the omnipresent Kim Kardashian clad in a black leather outfit. Shes the well-known founder of the company, which began with intimate apparel and shapewear and later expanded to include swimsuits, T-shirts and dresses; it has also become the NBAs new official underwear partner. The Gredes are not mentioned until the articles third paragraph, which discusses the brands thriving numbers: Founded in late 2019, Skims earned $500 million last year, 25% more than projected and 80% more than it earned in 2021, up 90% from the year before. So far, 2023 has been a weak year for underwear sales but a buoyant one for Skims. CEO Jens Grede, who co-founded the company with his wife Emma and [Kim] Kardashian, says its intimate apparel sales were up 86% year over year. Until now, Jens and Emma Grede have remained discreet in the background of the very profitable businesses while the famous Kardashian clan takes the spotlight. With a profile thats more business than media, they have given interviews to the Financial Times, The Guardian and The Cut. Emma Grede ranks 84th on the 2023 Forbes Self-Made Women list. Recently, she has become more well-known with her participation as a guest judge in the most recent seasons of the television show Shark Tank, where a group of aspiring entrepreneurs present their business ideas to a panel of investors (who usually smash them). Emma has half a million followers on Instagram, where she features photographs of herself with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama, as well as sweet snapshots with her husband and the couples four children. Jens Gredes Instagram account, on the other hand, is private and barely exceeds 1,000 followers. His description reads: I like popular culture. The Gredes do not hide or conceal their work, but its success has always been intimately linked to their discretion, which is much more European than the American style of constant self-promotion. Jens Grede is Swedish and 45 years old. He was born into a family of artists: his father is film director Kjell Grede, who was married to the actress Bibi Andersson for 13 years. At the age of 20, Jens dropped out of school and moved to London. He and his friend Erik Torstensson founded the fashion advertising agency Saturday Group (now renamed Wednesday Agency) in 2003, which was established to create new opportunities for stagnant brands. As revealed in the Financial Times, they were responsible for Natalie Portman becoming the face of Miss Dior, Beyonce doing a campaign for H&M and Gwyneth Paltrow signing with Hugo Boss. But their work did not just focus on matching celebrities with brands. Grede and Tortensson also started investing in their own businesses: together they launched the online luxury menswear megastore, Mr Porter (Tortenssons partner is none other than Natalie Massenet, founder of Net-a-Porter). They also launched the specialized leather clothing brand Frame, which became popular thanks to the collaboration of the creative couples friends, such as Karlie Kloss and Lara Stone, during Frames 2012 opening. Years ago, Jens Grede witnessed the power of the most popular faces of the moment to reach the masses. But it was Jenss wife, Emma Grede, who met the Kardashians. She grew up in London and studied business administration at the prestigious London College of Fashion. However, like her husband, she left her studies when she got an internship at Gucci and later specialized in fashion show production. By the time she joined Saturday Group, her future husbands company already had a portfolio that allowed them to represent half of London fashion week, as they told The Cut. Around 2011, Emma met Kris Jenner at Paris fashion week. Jenner, the mother and official representative of the Kardashian clan, was looking for new business opportunities for her five daughters. Emma told her about an idea she had been kicking around for some time: a chic denim line that would fit all body types and embrace feminine curves. Kris Jenner saw the business vision, but for her daughter Khloe Kardashian instead of her. In 2016, Good American was born; Emma is the co-founder of the company, which managed to earn $1 million on its first day of sales thanks to the praised inclusivity of Emmas initial idea, featuring the sizing that goes from 34 to 60. Good American was the beginning of the Gredes romance with the Kardashians, and between the Gredes and the United States. In 2017, the couple left the Bloomsbury neighborhood of the British capital and their luxurious home which sold for 5.5 million pounds ($6,944,465) and settled in Bel Air, California, in a mansion built in 1938 by architect Paul R. Williams, a star favorite during Hollywoods golden age. Some media report that their new home cost around $24 million. The Gredes have not just worked with Khloe and Kim but have also established themselves as trusted partners for much of the K clan, including the matriarch. In 2021, the Gredes and Kris Jenner launched Safely, a line of household cleaning products with natural ingredients. That same year, the couple started their first fashion label with Kylie Jenner, called Khy, selling imitation leather garments, including dresses at around 125 ($137) and coats for 245 ($263). Skims, however, continues to be the crown jewel in a highly profitable business where all the founders seem to have made a good profit: Kim Kardashian has managed to establish herself as designer and creative director of a brand that claims to anticipate womens needs; put differently, she has made the girdle cool again. For their part, the Gredes have considerably increased their wealth, as they have majority ownership of Skims, and they have positioned themselves as kingmakers in the United States, creating brands with celebrities who seemed like they couldnt give any more of themselves. Researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OAW) which houses the laboratories of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI). In May 2023, Dr Benjamin Lanyon at the University of Innsbruck in Austria took an important step toward creating a new kind of internet: he transferred information along an optical fiber 31 miles (50 kilometers) long using the principles of quantum physics. Information in quantum physics differs from the units of data binary digits stored and processed by computers that form the core of the current World Wide Web. The quantum physics realm covers the properties and interactions of molecules, atoms and even smaller particles such as electrons and photons. Particle power Quantum bits, or qubits, offer the promise of transmitting information more securely because the particles get changed by the act of observing and measuring them. That means an eavesdropper cant go undetected. Lanyon said his work makes the quantum internet appear feasible within cities, after which longer intercity distances will be the goal. You could imagine this being a large-city scale, he said. His breakthrough was part of an EU research project to bring the goal of a quantum internet closer. Called the Quantum Internet Alliance, or QIA, the project brings together research institutes and companies across Europe. The initiative is receiving 24 million in EU funding over three and a half years until the end of March 2026. It is not meant to replace the classical internet, but to work together, said Stephanie Wehner, a German native who coordinates the QIA and is a professor of quantum information at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Were not going to replace Netflix. A key concept in quantum physics is entanglement. If two particles are entangled, no matter how far apart they are in space, they will possess similar properties for example, both having the same measurement of something called spin, a quantum version of the direction that the particles are spinning. The spin state of the particles isnt clear until they are observed. Until then, theyre in multiple states called superposition. But when one is observed, the state of both particles becomes known. Possibilities aplenty This is useful in secure communications. People hacking a quantum transmission would leave behind an obvious trace of their attempt by causing a change in the state of an observed particle. We can use the properties of quantum entanglement to achieve a means of secure communication that is provably secure even if the attacker has a quantum computer, said Wehner. The secure communications afforded by a quantum internet could open up a much broader range of applications that are well beyond the bounds of the classical internet. In medicine, for example, the physics of entanglement allows for a level of clock synchronization that can improve telesurgery. If I want to perform surgery on some remote node, I want this to be very precisely timed in order to not make any mistakes, said Wehner. Astronomy is another potential beneficiary. Telescopes making distant observations could use a quantum internet to generate entanglement between the sensors to get a much better image of the sky, Wehner said. A further example might be ATM machines. At present, were an ATM to crash when a person was withdrawing money, the machine would assume no cash had been delivered while another dispenser would register a money withdrawal. A quantum internet could remove that discrepancy. Many applications of a quantum internet will likely become apparent only after the technology is created. It offers a whole range of new possibilities for making precise measurements of space and time and studying how the world and the universe work, said Lanyon. Distance test The trick now is scaling up a quantum internet to use many particles across long distances. Lanyon and his team have also demonstrated communicating not just between single particles but also trains of particles in this case light particles called photons speeding up the rate of entanglement between quantum nodes. If you just sent one photon at a time, you have to wait for the travel time, he said. But if you can make trains of many photons at once, this allows you to increase the rate of entanglement between quantum nodes for the distances we want. The ultimate goal is to extend quantum nodes to much bigger ranges, perhaps 310 miles (500 kilometers), and create a prototype of a quantum internet that can link remote cities much like the classical internet relies on different nodes to create a global internet. While a quantum internet could exist for specialized applications as soon as 2029, experts are wary of hazarding a guess about when a full version might be available for a wide range of uses. As the QIA advances the components and systems of the quantum internet, Europe is also working to develop quantum computers themselves. In June 2023, an EU public-private partnership the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking announced that six countries in Europe would host quantum computers. The countries are the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain. The aim is to ensure that Europe is at the forefront of the quantum technologies revolution. Quantum computers are expected to have unprecedented calculation power with many uses, including the ability to break the cryptographic algorithms that secure most of the exchanges of the current internet. Crowded field With projections that half of the most used cryptographic systems will be broken by the end of the decade, Europe is hardly the only interested party. China and the US have made advances in quantum computing and the quantum internet in recent years. Back on the infrastructure front, Europe is taking other steps. Its developing an integrated space and terrestrial infrastructure for secure communications a building block of sorts for the quantum internet. Im very proud to say we are world-leading in many domains, said Wehner. While in all interested countries much work remains, the potential benefits signal further advances and breakthroughs before too long. People are developing new applications of quantum networks at quite a high rate, Lanyon said. Research in this article was funded by the EU. This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation magazine. Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAIS USA Edition KYODO NEWS - Dec 4, 2023 - 12:36 | All, Japan Japanese Prime Minster Fumio Kishida said Monday he is "not aware" of holding a reported meeting involving a senior member of a group affiliated with the controversial Unification Church in 2019, when he was serving as the ruling party's policy chief. His remarks came after the daily Asahi Shimbun reported earlier in the day that the leader of the Japan branch of the Universal Peace Federation was also present at a gathering Kishida held with former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich that year. Kishida told reporters, "When I met with former U.S. House Speaker Gingrich several years ago, there were many accompanying individuals and I do not know who was among them." He emphasized that his links with the religious organization have already been investigated. Citing unnamed sources, the newspaper said Kishida met with the leader of the group, launched by the founder of the Unification Church and his wife, at the headquarters of the Liberal Democratic Party on Oct. 4, 2019. While the paper added that Kishida exchanged business cards with the leader, he said, "I do not remember what I did with the companions" of Gingrich. The premier has argued that he has no relations with the church as far as he is concerned. Established in South Korea by a staunch anti-communist in 1954, the church has been under scrutiny in Japan following the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe by Tetsuya Yamagami during his election campaign speech in July 2022. Yamagami said he held a grudge against the Unification Church, formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, as his mother's massive donations to the organization ruined his family. Abe was allegedly targeted in part because his grandfather, a former prime minister, helped bring the church to Japan in the 1960s. Later last year, dubious ties between a large number of LDP lawmakers and the Unification Church were revealed, raising fears among the public that the religious corporation may have been trying to exert influence in politics. Amid criticism of the group's aggressive donation solicitations and other malicious practices, the government filed a request in October with a court for an order to dissolve the Unification Church, a move that could deprive the organization of its tax benefits. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said at a regular press conference on Monday that members of the government will continue making efforts to "thoroughly" sever their ties with the group. Related coverage: LDP heavyweight Hiroyuki Hosoda dies month after quitting as house speaker Unification Church to allocate up to 10 billion yen for compensation Unification Church to meet press Nov. 7 over donations complaints KYODO NEWS - Dec 4, 2023 - 21:40 | All, Japan Relics including stone casting molds for bronze artifacts, potentially the oldest of their kind in Japan, have been discovered at an archaeological site in the western prefecture of Saga, the prefectural government said Monday. One of the molds could date back to around 200 BC, according to the local government. The discoveries between September and October at the Yoshinogari ruins followed the finding in April of a stone coffin tomb believed to have belonged to a person of high status in an area of the site. The enigmatic coffin prompted experts and archaeology buffs to wonder whose burial site it is, a question that might cause a stir in a long-standing dispute over where the nation's ancient Yamatai kingdom was located. But it was announced in June that no human bones or burial accessories were found that could yield clues as to the individual's identity or the exact period of burial. The latest excavation of what is called the "mystery area," which could not be surveyed because a shrine had been there, found three items -- casting molds made of serpentinite and quartz-porphyry, as well as a clay vessel used as a container for molten metal -- made in the Yayoi period of Japanese history. The molds, possibly used for casting swords and spears, were found within a range of about 5 meters northwest to about 10 meters south-southwest from where the stone coffin was discovered, according to the prefecture. "It is an extremely significant discovery in understanding distinct features of the structure (of ruins) and the changes," a prefectural official said. Serpentinite preceded quartz-porphyry as stone mold in general, said Chuhei Takashima, an archaeologist with expertise in the Yoshinogari ruins, adding that the technology could have directly derived from the Korean Peninsula. The discoveries "added further meaning to Yoshinogari, which was a manufacturing site of bronze artifacts in Japan, introducing the most advanced technology back then," Takashima said. The ruins were designated as a national historic site in 1991 and are currently open to the public as the Yoshinogari Historical Park. KYODO NEWS - Dec 4, 2023 - 19:18 | World, All Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow said Sunday she has left the territory to study in Canada and has no plans to return, two years after her release from prison where she served time for inciting an unauthorized protest in 2019. In her first public Instagram post since her release in 2021, the 27-year-old claimed she had been taken to mainland China by Hong Kong's national security police. Chow said she was asked to write letters of repentance for what she did as well as expressing gratitude to the authorities in exchange for the return of her passport, which was confiscated upon her arrest in 2020. Her trip to the mainland included visits to patriotic exhibitions and the headquarters of Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. She began her studies in Toronto in September. As per an agreement with the police, Chow was originally scheduled to report back to Hong Kong in December, but has decided to remain in Canada for fear of being detained. "I don't want to be forced to do what I don't want to do anymore, and I don't want to be forced to go to mainland China again," she wrote, "if it goes on like this, even if I am safe, my body and mind will collapse." Chow added she will likely never return to Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government on Monday condemned Chow's decision in a statement, calling her behavior "irresponsible." "The police call on (Chow) to step back from the brink," the statement said, urging her not to "take a road of no return and bear the name of 'fugitive' for the rest of her life." In response to a question about Chow's post, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said in a press conference that the rights of Hong Kong residents are fully protected under the rule of law. However, he emphasized that no one has extrajudicial privileges, saying, "Any illegal and criminal acts must be punished by law." Since her release, Chow said she has suffered from depression and posttraumatic stress disorder, fearing that the national security police would one day show up at her door to take her away once again. "The mixture of several emotional illnesses put my mind and body in a very unstable state, and I also knew there was nowhere for me to escape," she wrote. Chow was convicted alongside fellow activists Joshua Wong and Ivan Lam over their involvement in the pro-democracy protest on June 21, 2019, in which mostly young protesters besieged the city's police headquarters. The protest occurred amid an intensifying anti-government movement that was spurred by a surge of opposition to the Hong Kong government's now-withdrawn plan to allow suspects to be sent to mainland China for trial. Chow was one of the leaders of the 2014 Umbrella Movement that called for democratic change in the former British colony. Between 2019 and 2020, she, along with Wong and other members of advocacy group Demosisto, worked to bring international attention to the city's pro-democracy movement. Her fluent, self-taught Japanese language skills and activism via social media have helped her become popular in Japan, where some media have dubbed her the "Goddess of Democracy." Related coverage: Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Agnes Chow released from prison Hong Kong activist Agnes Chow to be freed from prison Hong Kong marks 24th anniversary of handover to China By Keita Nakamura, KYODO NEWS - Dec 4, 2023 - 08:36 | All, World, Japan A fatal crash of a U.S. military Osprey airplane in Japan late last month has reignited safety concerns among local citizens, further fueled by Washington continuing to fly the tilt-rotor aircraft despite a request by Tokyo to ground them. Pundits say the United States should respond to Japan's demand for better operations at its military bases in the Asian country, while Tokyo should insist that Washington halt Osprey flights and provide detailed information related to the latest incident. They warn that if the poor handling of the accident by the two governments erodes public support for their alliance, it could weaken their deterrence in the remote islands of southwestern Japan amid China's growing military assertiveness in nearby waters. The crashed aircraft, one of the six U.S. CV-22 transport aircraft assigned to Yokota Air Base in the western suburbs of Tokyo, disappeared from radar on Wednesday afternoon off the island of Yakushima in Kagoshima prefecture, southwestern Japan. The U.S. Air Force said the Osprey, which was carrying out routine training, had eight airmen on board, with the cause of the accident still unknown. On the same day, the Japan Coast Guard confirmed the death of one crew member, marking the first-ever fatality in Japan resulting from an accident involving Ospreys. The fate of the remaining crew members is still unknown. "Clearly, a thorough investigation regarding the safety of the aircraft is necessary," said Mike Mochizuki, an associate professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University in the U.S. capital. "If the United States does not comply with" Tokyo's request to ensure the safety of Osprey flights, it will undermine the "Japanese public's trust and support" for the bilateral alliance, the expert in relations between the two countries said. Following the crash, Tokyo called on Washington to suspend Osprey flights, except for search and rescue operations, until safety is confirmed. The Japan Self-Defense Forces have decided to refrain from flying its V-22 Ospreys "for the time being." The U.S. Forces Japan, meanwhile, has effectively ignored the demand by continuing to operate Ospreys other than CV-22s. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno, the top government spokesman, has expressed "concerns" that the United States has continued to fly Ospreys "without sufficient explanation about safety" despite repeated requests from Tokyo. Takuma Nakashima, a professor of Japanese political and diplomatic history at Kyushu University, said, "In terms of national security, it is very detrimental" for Tokyo and Washington "to find themselves in a situation of mutual distrust." He added Japan and the United States should avoid damaging the credibility of their alliance through routine communication, especially as they are ramping up their defense capabilities to counter China's military buildup in the Indo-Pacific region. Ospreys, capable of taking off and landing like helicopters but cruising like planes, have a track record of accidents and mishaps in Japan and abroad. In 2016, an MV-22, the variant used by the U.S. Marine Corps, crash-landed off Okinawa in southern Japan, injuring two crew members. Crashes in Australia in 2017 and August this year both resulted in three fatalities. U.S. forces in Japan commenced deployment of six MV-22s at its Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa in 2012. Currently, 24 MV-22s are stationed at the base in the prefecture that hosts the bulk of U.S. military facilities in the Asian nation. On Thursday, Okinawa Gov. Denny Tamaki said it is "very regrettable" that U.S. Ospreys keep operating while the cause of the accident has yet to be identified. The mayor of the city, where the Futenma base is located, condemned the move for "amplifying fears among citizens." Tokyo should continue demanding Washington explain the latest accident swiftly and accurately, given that the smooth operation of U.S. bases in Japan hinges on to what extent people living near them understand the necessity of their functions, Nakashima said. The experts also pointed out that the crash could delay the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force's plan to relocate its V-22 Osprey aircraft from a temporary deployment site in Kisarazu, near Tokyo, to Saga in the southwestern area of the country by 2025. The postponement would affect the strategies of Japan and the United States to tackle China's military rise, as the relocation is part of Tokyo's efforts to strengthen defense capabilities, together with its ally Washington, in the southwestern Nansei island chain. The Nansei chain includes the Tokyo-controlled, Beijing-claimed uninhabited Senkaku Islands, around which Chinese coast guard vessels have repeatedly entered the waters near the islets, although Japan has continuously lodged protests over the issue. Matsuno said Japan has no intention of changing the relocation plan even after the fatal incident, while emphasizing that the government will take local safety concerns "seriously." KYODO NEWS - Dec 4, 2023 - 13:33 | All, Japan, World An international environmental group gave Japan the thumbs down with its "fossil" award again on Sunday, criticizing the country for placing emphasis on coal-fired power despite its pledge to "contribute to global decarbonization." The dud award is given to countries seen as backwards in addressing climate change threats by the Climate Action Network at the venue of the U.N. climate change conferences. Japan was also the recipient in 2019, 2021 and 2022. It also gave the award to the United States and New Zealand at the ongoing COP28 being held in Dubai. The Japanese government is promoting technology to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in thermal power generation by mixing ammonia with fuel. At the conference, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in his speech Friday that Tokyo is working with countries in Southeast Asia to pursue transformation to clean energy. "It's clear that this is nothing more than greenwashing of hydrogen and ammonia co-firing with fossil fuels, which would keep thermal power plants running far into the future," the nongovernmental organization said in a statement. "This push to lock in fossil fuel-based energy across the continent is delaying the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, adding hurdles to achieving the global goal of tripling renewables," it added. Resource-poor Japan has been highly dependent on imports of fossil fuels such as coal and crude oil since the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, with many of its nuclear power plants remaining idle. A mock awards ceremony took place at the COP28 venue and the award is presented several times during the climate conference. Related coverage: Japan, U.S., others vow to triple global nuclear energy by 2050 Japan PM vows to phase out coal-fired power at climate summit Japan PM departs for UAE to attend U.N. meeting amid Israel conflict GUANGZHOU, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- World media leaders gathered in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou on Sunday to build consensus in addressing common challenges and boosting global confidence. The 5th World Media Summit (WMS) released a joint statement during an opening ceremony and plenary session at its main venue in the Nansha District of Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province. The statement noted that the world is undergoing accelerated changes unseen in a century, and that uncertainties and unforeseen factors are on the rise. It called on global media to build a bridge of communication to answer the questions posed by the world, by the times and by history. The summit attracted more than 450 representatives of nearly 200 institutions from over 100 countries and regions, including media outlets, think tanks and international organizations. Focusing on the summit's theme of "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," attendees took part in extensive discussions to contribute media power to the construction of a brighter future. Fu Hua, executive chairman of the World Media Summit and president of Xinhua News Agency, addresses the opening ceremony of the 5th World Media Summit in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Liu Bin) BOOSTING CONFIDENCE Confidence is a key word for global media leaders. Fu Hua, president of Xinhua News Agency, said in a keynote speech at the opening ceremony that confidence is more valuable than gold when facing difficulties. "History development, civilization prosperity and human progress require the media to shoulder the responsibilities of fostering unity and boosting confidence," Fu said. He called on the attendees to use media to convey positive energy, amplify voices that promote the development of human society, and encourage countries to join hands in addressing the challenges facing humanity. Iqbal Surve, chairman of Independent Media and the African News Agency, said that the media should help people boost confidence to build a better world. Delegates attend the opening ceremony of the 5th World Media Summit in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Deng Hua) ADHERING TO TRUTH Misinformation was a hotly debated issue at the summit. Fu said that in the era of the internet, people obtain information from unprecedentedly convenient and diverse channels, but they also face the assault of various types of false information. "Truthfulness is the lifeblood of news," Fu said, underlining the importance of adhering to objectivity and truth to enhance the credibility of the media. "The media should consider facts as the source of news, reflect the objective truth, oppose false news, and ensure that reporting is accurate, fair, authoritative and trustworthy," Fu said. Serik Korzhumbayev, editor-in-chief of Delovoy Kazakhstan newspaper, also noted the grave challenges that fake news poses to the media industry. He called on media outlets to shoulder their responsibilities in verifying facts and disseminating credible information. Delegates talk during the opening ceremony of the 5th World Media Summit in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Liang Xu) EMBRACING GAME-CHANGERS Media leaders attending the summit acknowledged the challenges posed by new technologies, and discussed the importance of seizing the opportunities of sci-tech transformations by better harnessing game-changing innovations such as AI. Calling on his peers to strengthen research into and the application of technologies such as 5G, AI, and cloud computing, Fu said that media should "embed new technology into the entire process of news communication, improve production efficiency, enrich product forms, and release more news reports that are popular and enjoyable to their audiences." If AI tools are used correctly, they can help media outlets increase productivity, freeing up resources for more on-the-ground reporting, said Michael Mainville, member of the AFP Executive Committee and AFP Asia-Pacific regional director. "We also need to work together, as an industry, to adopt the use of AI in a responsible way that protects the integrity of news," Mainville said. DEEPENING COOPERATION To address common challenges, media outlets across the globe need to strengthen exchanges and collaboration, the attendees agreed. Fu noted that the WMS serves as an important platform for media communication and cooperation between countries, and said efforts should be made to improve this multilateral mechanism and utilize it to its fullest extent, tap into the potential for cooperation, innovate collaboration models, and expand cooperation channels. Xinhua on Saturday signed agreements with foreign media outlets and institutions to deepen cooperation in areas such as news exchanges, personnel exchanges and visits, and integrated media development. Xinhua will enhance communication and consultation processes with media organizations from various countries, and work with these organizations to construct and utilize the summit mechanism effectively, Fu said. (Reporting by Tian Jianchuan, Huo Siying, Li Jiale, Huang Guobao, Pan Yujie, Yang Zhixiang, Zhang Li, Zhang Zhihuan; video reporter: Zheng Xin, Deng Bingxue, Wang Ruiping, Ma Zhuoyan, Zhou Ying, Liu Chunhui, Wang Hongda, Wang Gejun, Hao Xiaojiang, Fang Kuan, Wu Yao; video editor: Hui Peipei, Zhang Yucheng, Zhang Nan, Lin Lin.) This photo taken on Dec. 3, 2023 shows Kenyan soldiers boarding an aircraft at the Goma airport in the eastern North Kivu province, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The East African Community (EAC) Regional Force started to withdraw from DRC on Sunday. The Kenyan contingent, part of the EAC Regional Force, departed from the Goma airport in the eastern North Kivu province on Sunday morning, following the DRC authorities' decision to deem the regional force ineffective. After a summit held on Nov. 25, the EAC officially announced that the DRC "would not renew the mandate of the regional force beyond Dec. 8, 2023." (Xinhua/Alain Uaykani) GOMA, DR Congo, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- The East African Community (EAC) Regional Force started to withdraw from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Sunday. The Kenyan contingent, part of the EAC Regional Force, departed from the Goma airport in the eastern North Kivu province on Sunday morning, following the DRC authorities' decision to deem the regional force ineffective. After a summit held on Nov. 25, the EAC officially announced that the DRC "would not renew the mandate of the regional force beyond Dec. 8, 2023." Since November 2022, this regional force, consisting of Ugandan, Burundian and South Sudanese elements, has been stationed in the eastern part of the DRC in response to renewed conflicts between the DRC military and the March 23 Movement (M23) rebels. Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi intends to replace the EAC Regional Force with a force deployed by the Southern African Development Community (SADC). However, details about this deployment remain unclear, with plans indicating a deployment within a few months without specific clarification. The withdrawal of the EAC Regional Force coincides with the DRC's preparations for presidential, legislative and local elections scheduled for Dec. 20. Notably, several areas in eastern DRC, still under rebel occupation, will be excluded from these elections due to inadequate voter registration. Padma Choling, president of the China Society for Human Rights Studies, speaks at a seminar to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 4, 2023. A seminar was held Monday in Beijing to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The seminar, hosted by the China Society for Human Rights Studies, welcomed guests including government officials, scholars and representatives of social organizations. (Xinhua/Li Xin) BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A seminar was held Monday in Beijing to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The seminar, hosted by the China Society for Human Rights Studies, welcomed guests including government officials, scholars and representatives of social organizations. In his speech at the seminar, Padma Choling, president of the China Society for Human Rights Studies, said that the declaration established the international consensus of respecting and protecting human rights. Over the decades, China has remained steadfast in contributing wisdom to the declaration, alongside actively advocating and practicing it, said Padma Choling. He added that the country's historical achievements in advancing the human rights cause have provided new outlook for carrying forward the declaration's spirit. Lu Guangjin, a professor with Jilin University's School of Law, noted the declaration was born from the inclusiveness and coexistence of cultures and civilizations. By advocating inclusiveness, exchange and mutual learning of civilizations, China is able to provide guidance for global human rights governance and the development of world human rights cause, said Lu. Zhang Wenxian, chairman of the Academic Committee of the China Law Society, spoke of the role of the three initiatives put forward by China in advancing human rights. The three initiatives, namely the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative and the Global Civilization Initiative, have broken new ground in human rights philosophy. They bear significance in building a just, equitable and effective system for international human rights governance, said Zhang. This photo taken on Dec. 4, 2023 shows a scene at a seminar to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Beijing, capital of China. A seminar was held Monday in Beijing to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The seminar, hosted by the China Society for Human Rights Studies, welcomed guests including government officials, scholars and representatives of social organizations. (Xinhua/Li Xin) Participants listen to a speech at a seminar to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 4, 2023. A seminar was held Monday in Beijing to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The seminar, hosted by the China Society for Human Rights Studies, welcomed guests including government officials, scholars and representatives of social organizations. (Xinhua/Li Xin) TEHRAN, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell have highlighted the necessity to end the conflict in the Gaza Strip as soon as possible. In a phone call on Saturday, the two sides discussed the latest developments in Gaza as well as cooperation between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), according to a statement published on the Iranian Foreign Ministry's website on Sunday. The Iranian foreign minister stressed the need to stop the Israeli "crimes" against Palestinians, noting that it was necessary to immediately end Israel's military attacks against people in Gaza and prepare the ground for the delivery of more humanitarian aid to the coastal enclave. He warned of Israel's "plot" and move to forcefully displace the Palestinian people from their land, and an expansion of the conflict in the region if the Israeli attacks were not stopped. Amir-Abdollahian blamed the "U.S. support as the main factor encouraging Israel to continue its military aggression against and killing of civilians in Gaza," stressing that Washington's policies in support of Israel also played an important role in prolonging and expanding the conflict. He pointed to Iran's cooperation with the IAEA, saying it would continue within technical and legal frameworks. The EU foreign policy chief, for his part, emphasized the need to reduce tensions in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as soon as possible, stressing that the EU was making efforts to make Israel committed to respecting international law. He underlined Iran's role in helping ease tensions in the region, saying "we also believe that the solution to Palestine's issue is focusing on the diplomatic path and the continuation of the military attacks will only exacerbate the tensions." Borrell expressed hope that the constructive cooperation between Iran and the IAEA would continue. On Oct. 7, Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, firing thousands of rockets and infiltrating Israeli territory, while Israel responded with airstrikes, ground operations and punitive measures that included a siege on the Gaza Strip. More than 15,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict, with 75 percent of them being children, women and the elderly, according to the Gaza-based Health Ministry. Israeli authorities said about 1,200 people were killed on the Israeli side, mostly during the Hamas surprise attack. Photo taken on Dec. 4, 2023 shows the building of Jerusalem District Court in Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial resumed on Monday in Jerusalem after more than a two-month pause amid the Israel-Hamas conflict. (Xinhua/Chen Junqing) JERUSALEM, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial resumed on Monday in Jerusalem after more than a two-month pause amid the Israel-Hamas conflict. During the hearing, the Jerusalem District Court heard the questioning of a police investigator over the so-called "Case 4,000," in which Netanyahu allegedly promoted regulatory benefits for Bezeq, Israel's largest telecom company, in return for favorable coverage from a news website it owned. The trial began in early 2020. The last hearing in the case took place on Sept. 20, after which the court went on recess for the Jewish holidays. Subsequently, it did not reconvene due to the ongoing conflict. Netanyahu, Israel's longest-serving prime minister, is on trial for accepting bribes, fraud and breach of trust in three separate cases, but he denies any wrongdoing. Photo taken on Dec. 4, 2023 shows the building of Jerusalem District Court in Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial resumed on Monday in Jerusalem after more than a two-month pause amid the Israel-Hamas conflict. (Xinhua/Chen Junqing) Photo taken on Dec. 4, 2023 shows the building of Jerusalem District Court in Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial resumed on Monday in Jerusalem after more than a two-month pause amid the Israel-Hamas conflict. (Xinhua/Chen Junqing) CANBERRA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The proportion of Indigenous Australian children with hearing issues has almost halved since 2001, a government report has found. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) on Monday published its first annual report on the ear and hearing health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, revealing that the rate of hearing problems among Indigenous children aged 0-14 has fallen from 11 percent in 2001 to 6.9 percent in 2018-19. "Hearing problems in children can affect speech, language, thinking skills and behavioural development," Jo Baker, an author of the report, said in a media release. "First Nations people and in particular children, experience high rates of ear and hearing problems, which can have profound impacts on overall health and quality of life, including the ability to communicate cultural knowledge and their immersion in culture." Improving ear and hearing health of Indigenous Australians is one of the targets of the Closing the Gap scheme, which aims to address disadvantages faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The report found that in 2018-19, 43 percent of Indigenous Australians aged seven and over had measured hearing loss in one or both ears. Of all ear or hearing-related hospitalizations of Indigenous children aged 0-14 between 2020 and 2022, 88 percent were for middle ear disease, an infection that can cause a hole or tear in the eardrum but can be treated if detected early. The report found that the rate of audiology services for Indigenous children is on the rise. It found that in 2022, 36 percent of Indigenous people aged 0-25 with a hearing device had it fitted before turning five years old compared to 10 percent in 2008. Chinese Vice President Han Zheng addresses the opening ceremony of the 2023 Imperial Springs International Forum in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 4, 2023. Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to the forum, which was read out on the occasion. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling) GUANGZHOU, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- China is committed to the path of peaceful, high-quality development and high-level opening-up, Chinese Vice President Han Zheng said Monday. Han made the remarks while addressing the opening ceremony of the 2023 Imperial Springs International Forum, held in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Underscoring the importance of Chinese President Xi Jinping's indepth explanation of multilateralism, Han said that under the current circumstances, the world needs more than ever to adhere to the core values and basic principles of multilateralism and follow the vision of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits in global governance. Han elaborated on practicing multilateralism from three perspectives. The first is to achieve peaceful coexistence on the premise of seeking common ground while shelving differences, seek integrated development in the process of equal exchanges, and make common progress on the basis of mutual learning. He called on parties concerned to implement the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative and the Global Civilization Initiative, and conduct high-quality Belt and Road cooperation. The second is to make global governance fairer and more equitable on the basis of consultation and consensus, and to oppose hegemonism, power politics, and unilateral practices in the name of multilateralism. The third is to stick to the right direction of globalization, oppose protectionism and "decoupling," and support more mutually beneficial cooperation opportunities to inject more impetus into world economic recovery. Han called on parties concerned to adhere to dialogue and consultation, promote political settlement of hotspot issues, and jointly address risks and challenges. China is an advocate and practitioner of multilateralism, and is advancing the noble cause of building a great country and national rejuvenation on all fronts through a Chinese path to modernization, Han stressed. China stands ready to work with other countries to create a better future for mankind, he added. With the theme of "Multilateralism: More Exchanges, Greater Inclusiveness and Cooperation," the 2023 Imperial Springs International Forum, jointly held by the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, the Australia China Friendship and Exchange Association, the Guangdong provincial government, and the World Leadership Alliance-Club de Madrid, opened Monday in Guangzhou. Chinese Vice President Han Zheng attends the opening ceremony of the 2023 Imperial Springs International Forum in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 4, 2023. Chinese President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter to the forum, which was read out on the occasion. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling) by Xinhua writers Tai Beiping, Guo Shuang DUBAI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Developed countries that have caused the major part of global warming should take on their due responsibilities for climate change, a former senior UN official has said. "Europe, North America, Japan and a few other most developed countries in the world are the countries who have caused the problem," Erik Solheim, former UN under-secretary-general and former executive director of the UN Environment Programme, told Xinhua. Taking into account their carbon missions in history, those rich developed countries are emitters that have produced the major part of greenhouse gases in the world, Solheim said during the ongoing COP28 climate talks. Even at present, in per capita terms, carbon emission of the United States is still many times higher than that of some Asian and African countries, he said. Solheim urged those developed nations to face up to the responsibilities and offer more help to developing countries in coping with the challenges brought by climate change. COP28, or the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, runs from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12 here in the United Arab Emirates. Climate finance, among others, is a focal topic for delegates at the gathering. Developed countries are on many occasions urged to honour their commitments on delivering climate funds. As for why some developed nations are reluctant to pay, Solheim said, "They are afraid that the public back home will not support giving lots of money to other parts of the world." While it takes efforts from many aspects to address climate change, money does make a difference, Solheim said. It can help the climate change victims get better prepared when disasters occur. Facilities including warning systems and communication tools can help people stay alert, he said. "You will see more climate catastrophes. They will probably kill much fewer people." For the COP28 climate talks, Solheim said the most important part is that governments, businesses and activists are coming together, exchanging views, making business deals and sharing best practices. The former UN official said he was looking forward to some good results in Dubai. "We have a shared future. We have only one planet and we share it. If you destroy it, humanity will disappear," he said. This photo taken on Dec. 4, 2023 shows the parliament building in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. President Umaro Sissoco Embalo on Monday dissolved Guinea-Bissau's parliament after meeting with the Council of State, the president's consultative body, according to a presidential decree. (Photo by Bacar Camara/Xinhua) BISSAU, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- President Umaro Sissoco Embalo on Monday dissolved Guinea-Bissau's parliament after meeting with the Council of State, the president's consultative body, according to a presidential decree. According to the decree, an attack by a heavily armed National Guard group on the judicial police building in the capital Bissau last week aimed to "subvert the constitutional order" and resulted in a tragic loss of life. Clashes erupted between elements of the National Guard and special forces of the Presidential Guard in Bissau on Thursday night and continued on Friday as a group of National Guard soldiers attempted to free a detained minister from the judicial police building. Colonel Vitor Tchongo, the National Guard commander, along with several others from the unit, was arrested on Friday morning by the military police. Embalo said Saturday the deadly violence in the capital was an "attempted coup" with "serious consequences for all those involved," upon his return from Dubai, where he attended a UN climate conference. This marked the second instance of Embalo dissolving Guinea-Bissau's parliament since assuming office in 2020. Earlier, in May 2022, he dissolved the parliament due to tensions between the legislative body and the presidency. In February 2022, Guinea-Bissau's army members staged a failed coup against Embalo. BEIRUT, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Lebanon is proactive in addressing challenges imposed by climate change in the health sector by launching a national health and environment strategy in January next year, said the country's Health Minister Firas Abiad on Monday. "Climate change poses an urgent threat to public health in the Middle East and North Africa region, especially in Lebanon, where displaced people constitute one third of the population," Abiad made the remarks in the ongoing 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) held in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE). "There is a clear indication of the negative impact of climate change on health, especially in light of our fragile health system, which faces multiple crises in an environment with limited resources," Abiad said, noting that water scarcity in 2022 led to an outbreak of the cholera epidemic for the first time in three decades. The ministry has equipped 50 percent of public hospitals and over 70 percent of primary health care centers with solar energy, said Abiad, adding that it also began implementing a health and environmental strategy regarding medical waste disposal. Lebanon has been going through an unprecedented financial crisis amid the presence of a large number of Syrian refugees, which posed a significant burden on the country's infrastructure. NANJING, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- Standing in front of a memorial wall in the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders, Xia Shuqin expressed her thoughts to the family members she lost in the atrocity. "I've come to see you again. I'm old. I don't know if I can come and present flowers to you in the future," said Xia, 94, who survived the Nanjing Massacre. This year's family commemoration for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre began on Sunday in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province. On Dec. 13, 1937, invading Japanese troops captured Nanjing, then the Chinese capital. Over a period of six weeks, the invaders killed more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed soldiers. In 2014, China's top legislature designated Dec. 13 as the national memorial day for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre. From Sunday, family members of the victims will pay tribute to their loved ones in various ways, such as by presenting flowers before the memorial wall. A total of 10,665 names of victims are engraved on the wall, representing the 300,000 victims of the massacre. Ge Fengjin, the son of a late Nanjing Massacre survivor, attended the family commemorations. "As descendants of the massacre survivors and inheritors of the memory of the massacre, we have the responsibility to pass on the historical truth," Ge said. "The purpose of remembering history is to look to the future and help more people understand the value of peace." Only 38 registered survivors of the Nanjing Massacre are alive today. GUANGZHOU, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- In an era of rapid technological progress, emerging Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a key factor reshaping the media industry. At the ongoing fifth World Media Summit, participants share their insights and perspectives on AI, which has become a global buzzword. Fu Hua, executive chairman of the World Media Summit and president of Xinhua News Agency, said in his keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the summit that we should embrace the innovation and technological changes, and strengthen research and development of AI, cloud computing and other technologies, enabling them to better serve the development of the media. Narasimhan Ram, director of India's Hindu Publishing Group, said figuring out how to use AI will bring opportunities for media development. AI freed journalists from "rote task" and allowed them to focus on "higher impact journalism," said Vice President of The Associated Press (AP) Chan Yim Kuen. Echoing Chan, Sue Brooks, head of product development and agency strategy, Reuters News Agency, said AI will make journalism more efficient, liberating journalists from "routine translations and transcriptions so they can spend more time unearthing the stories that matter most." In her speech on the theme of "Trust" at the opening ceremony of the summit on Saturday, Brooks said: "If AI is going to become such a large part of our lives, we need to have trust that the algorithms are built for good and not for ill." In addition to enhancing efficiency and effectiveness, AI has brought about transformative benefits from optimized audience segmentation to in-depth analysis. However, the allure of progress came with a shadow. The spread of fake news and misinformation, concerns related to intellectual property protection and ethical considerations in journalism need to be addressed properly. UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming underscored in her virtual speech that AI could exacerbate the potential problems like "disinformation, conspiracies and hate that proliferate on social media" and "distrust in public institutions." President and Editor-in-Chief of Kyodo News Toru Mizutani specifically mentioned the challenges related to generative AI, such as copyright issues and measures against fake news. Michael Mainville, member of the Agence France-Presse (AFP) Executive Committee and AFP Asia-Pacific regional director, said that along with other media groups, AFP has developed the Paris Charter on AI and Journalism, which sets out 10 principles for the use of AI by the media. At a meeting among leaders of Xinhua News Agency, Reuters, AP and AFP on Friday in Beijing, Mainville stressed that "it is also very important to discuss the principles of how we will use artificial intelligence." Similarly, AP has issued guidelines on AI this year, including how and when it should be used. Chan said media organizations have to work collaboratively to push for a legal framework to ensure intellectual property is protected and content creators are fairly compensated for their work. Meanwhile, media outlets have sought to strengthen cooperation with AI companies and among media organizations to better embrace the opportunities and address the challenges. Thomson Reuters, a global provider of news and information-based tools, invests more than 100 million U.S. dollars every year on generative AI to better harness the technology to improve their service, said Brooks. AP signed a cooperation agreement with OpenAI, the company that launched ChatGPT, to explore how their generative AI tools might help, Chan said at the summit. TASS Director General Andrey Kondrashov called on the next World Media Summit to focus on AI as a main topic, collectively explore how to judiciously leverage AI to promote the development of the media industry. "Doing nothing -- waiting to see how this technology unfolds -- just isn't an option. It's clear that we have to act, and we have to act now," Chan said. The ongoing fifth World Media Summit is being hosted by Xinhua from Dec. 2 to Dec.8 in China's Guangzhou city of Guangdong Province and Kunming city of Yunnan Province. Participants come from 101 countries and regions -- representatives from nearly 200 mainstream media outlets, think tanks and government agencies, as well as international organizations. Themed "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," the summit addresses topics including bolstering media confidence, coping with opportunities and challenges presented by new technologies, exploring new markets in the digital age, and striving for a shared future in global media cooperation. TAIYUAN, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- China issued a set of special stamps featuring the ancient city of Pingyao in north China's Shanxi Province, to mark the 26th anniversary of the ancient city's inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The set of three stamps and a miniature sheet displays overall scenes and representative architecture of the ancient city. The selling price of the whole set is 9 yuan (about 1.27 U.S. dollars). With a history of over 2,700 years, Pingyao is famous for its well-preserved ancient architecture. It was named a world heritage site by UNESCO in 1997. Feng Yuquan, an official with Pingyao County, where the ancient city is located, expressed his hope that the stamps would further boost the popularity of the ancient city. National Non-Profit Blasts Documentary 'Between Life & Death: Terri Schiavo's Story' an Inaccurate Cover-up on a Tragic Tale Film Released on December 3rd - Terri's Birthday - Her Legacy Deserves Better WASHINGTON, Dec. 4, 2023 /Standard Newswire/ -- Yesterday, MSNBC released a 90-minute documentary chronicling the case of Terri Schiavo. Sadly, it failed to capture the real human tragedy that was a woman being forcibly starved and dehydrated to death over 13 agonizing days. Further, it was quite unfortunate that the producers chose to frame this story of horrific abuse through a false lens of supposed "compassion" instead of portraying the real story of what transpired. We recognize that condensing years, if not decades, of events into a 90-minute video is difficult. Still, the final product does not present even a fair portrayal of the brutality that Terri had to endure at the hands of Michael Schiavo and the Florida courts, which enabled his actions. Perhaps more shocking than this editorial failure was the behavior of Judge George Greer, the jurist who presided over Terri's guardianship case and interviewed for the documentary. Greer confirmed the long-held belief of the Schindler family that his conduct during proceedings was strongly biased against Terri and he approached the case with a predetermined mindset before hearing any actual evidence. Although almost twenty years after the fact, there is not much that can be done about this revelation, and perhaps the public can take solace in the fact that the now-retired Judge Greer can no longer abuse a position of power. Slick editing, clever voiceovers, and other trickery cannot take away from some key facts of this case: Michael Schiavo swore under oath that he would honor his wedding vows and dedicate his life to caring for Terri. Terri was as alive as anyone reading this statement. Terri was not sick with any disease that was expected to end her life anytime soon. Terri only needed food and water to remain alive. Judge Greer ordered that Terri's food and water be removed, which included no comfort care, so she endured a horrible and excruciating death 13 days later. If Michael Schiavo had done to a family pet what he did to Terri, he would have been criminally charged. Even though this documentary presents an inaccurate portrayal of the events that unfolded all those years ago, we still encourage those who may be interested in the case to watch it with a proper skeptical eye while remembering the words of Jesus in Matthew 25:40, "whatever you did for one of the least of these, . . . you did for me." The Terri Schiavo Life & Hope is a non-profit network that continues to assist parents and families fighting for the lives of their loved ones. As we think fondly of Terri, our prematurely departed daughter and sister on her birthday, the Schindler family continues to stand alongside and serve families in crisis across the nation and around the world. Bobby Schindler, Terri's brother, travels the country speaking to audiences and advocating for the medically vulnerable who are frequently not given a voice. All of this ministry work is made possible by donors and friends who contribute to protecting innocent lives. Since 2005, the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network has responded to requests from thousands of families, supporting them with advocacy, guidance, and resources at no charge. For more information, visit lifeandhope.com. SOURCE Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network CONTACT: Bobby Schindler, 813-766-6239, bschindler@lifeandhope.com A Long March-2C carrier rocket carrying satellite MISRSAT-2 blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, Dec. 4, 2023. China helped Egypt send a remote-sensing satellite into orbit from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China Monday. Remote sensing satellites Starpool 02-A and Starpool 02-B were also sent into space at the same time. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua) JIUQUAN, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- China helped Egypt send a remote-sensing satellite into orbit from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gobi Desert Monday. The satellite MISRSAT-2, launched by a Long March-2C carrier rocket at 12:10 p.m. (Beijing Time), will be used in Egypt's land and resource utilization, water conservancy, agriculture, and other fields. The project results from all-around practical cooperation between China and Egypt under the principles of extensive consultation, joint contribution, and shared benefits since the Belt and Road Initiative was proposed a decade ago, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA). The MISRSAT-2 is a landmark project of deep cooperation between China and Egypt in the field of high-tech aerospace and is of milestone significance in aerospace cooperation between the two countries, said the CNSA. China helped Egypt develop and build a satellite assembly integration testing center. During the development of the satellite, the Chinese side provided comprehensive system-level design training and final assembly testing operation training to Egyptian technicians, who deeply participated in the entire process of satellite design, development, and testing. The cooperation project helped promote Egypt's aerospace industry in satellite development, ground facility construction, and operation, as well as satellite data processing and application. The project also laid a foundation for deepening the follow-up aerospace cooperation between China and Egypt. Haitham Medhat Akah, program manager from the Egyptian Space Agency, told Xinhua that the MISRSAT-2 project has laid a solid foundation for the development of Egypt's space industry, promoted the training of Egyptian space professionals, and helped Egypt become a leader in the field of space satellites in Africa and the Middle East. He noted that the successful launch of the satellite is not only a milestone in the field of Chinese-Egyptian space cooperation but will also serve the Egypt Vision 2030 sustainable development strategy in several important areas, such as agriculture, mineral exploration, urban planning, and monitoring of coastline changes. Gao Lyuhua, deputy director of the Earth Observation System and Data Center of the CNSA, said the successful implementation of the MISRSAT-2 project made Egypt the first country in Africa to have complete satellite development and final assembly and testing capabilities. China is willing to work with Egypt to cooperate in sharing and exchanging satellite data, and continuously expand the breadth and depth of space cooperation between the two countries, Gao said. Egypt is a major country in Arab countries and Africa. The China-Egypt space cooperation could become a model of space cooperation between China, Arab, and African countries with important demonstration significance. China is willing to work with other countries to build a community with a shared future in space and for mankind, Gao added. Monday's launch was the 499th flight mission of the Long March carrier rockets. Remote sensing satellites Starpool 02-A and Starpool 02-B were also sent into space simultaneously. A Long March-2C carrier rocket carrying satellite MISRSAT-2 blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, Dec. 4, 2023. China helped Egypt send a remote-sensing satellite into orbit from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China Monday. Remote sensing satellites Starpool 02-A and Starpool 02-B were also sent into space at the same time. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua) A Long March-2C carrier rocket carrying satellite MISRSAT-2 blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, Dec. 4, 2023. China helped Egypt send a remote-sensing satellite into orbit from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China Monday. Remote sensing satellites Starpool 02-A and Starpool 02-B were also sent into space at the same time. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua) A Long March-2C carrier rocket carrying satellite MISRSAT-2 blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, Dec. 4, 2023. China helped Egypt send a remote-sensing satellite into orbit from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China Monday. Remote sensing satellites Starpool 02-A and Starpool 02-B were also sent into space at the same time. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua) A Long March-2C carrier rocket carrying satellite MISRSAT-2 blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, Dec. 4, 2023. China helped Egypt send a remote-sensing satellite into orbit from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China Monday. Remote sensing satellites Starpool 02-A and Starpool 02-B were also sent into space at the same time. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua) A Long March-2C carrier rocket carrying satellite MISRSAT-2 blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, Dec. 4, 2023. China helped Egypt send a remote-sensing satellite into orbit from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China Monday. Remote sensing satellites Starpool 02-A and Starpool 02-B were also sent into space at the same time. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua) A Long March-2C carrier rocket carrying satellite MISRSAT-2 blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, Dec. 4, 2023. China helped Egypt send a remote-sensing satellite into orbit from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China Monday. Remote sensing satellites Starpool 02-A and Starpool 02-B were also sent into space at the same time. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua) A Long March-2C carrier rocket carrying satellite MISRSAT-2 blasts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, Dec. 4, 2023. China helped Egypt send a remote-sensing satellite into orbit from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China Monday. Remote sensing satellites Starpool 02-A and Starpool 02-B were also sent into space at the same time. (Photo by Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua) BAGHDAD, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The ongoing fifth World Media Summit will be a global platform for exchanging experience and expertise among international media outlets, an Iraqi media official has said. "The summit will undoubtedly provide a favorable environment for participating countries to get to know each other and exchange information and ideas in the field of media," said Dr. Mohammed Rashak, president's advisor of the Iraqi Media Network, an official institution that manages state-run media outlets in Iraq. On the theme of "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," the summit, being held in Guangzhou, capital city of China's Guangdong province, gathers hundreds of heads of mainstream media outlets worldwide, government officials and representatives of international organizations. This summit will enhance cooperation and exchanges among different countries participating in it, as it provides an important stage for the communication of ideas, exchange of opinions, and sharing of the latest developments in the media arena, Rashak said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua before travelling to China to attend the summit. The media is now witnessing significant and rapid development in the fields of multimedia, social media and so on, he said. "This summit will also provide an appropriate atmosphere for the global media to come up with a specific and clear vision for its future." As new platforms, new forms and new ways of information dissemination are burgeoning nowadays, Rashak said the official and mainstream media in the world must come up with consistent visions to adapt to new platforms, media outlets, or social media to provide media content capable of competing with other media with their credibility, transparency and news transmission. The Iraqi official pointed out that the world is now fraught with fake news that misleads the public. "I believe that through the positive atmosphere at the summit and the exchange of ideas at the meetings, a vision can be reached to provide honest, purposeful, and transparent media content," he said. "We in Iraq aspire to find common ways and visions with the Chinese media, especially since Iraq is considered a news hub and a center for global news circulation in the Middle East," he added. The summit will create new opportunities for further cooperation between China and Iraq since the summit provides a good chance for the two countries' media to learn from each other's experience, he said, voicing hope that the relations between the two countries will continue to develop and prosper in all fields and at all levels in the future. "I have never visited China before, but my readings about this great country and its history are inspiring. Undoubtedly, this large and great country, with its great contributions and achievements to humanity, deserves a visit," he said. NEW DELHI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Fresh violence in the northeastern state of Manipur Monday killed 13 people, multiple local media reports said. The bodies were recovered by paramilitary Assam Rifles who launched a search operation after receiving intelligence information about a firefight in Leithu area of Tengnoupal district, about 60 km southeast of Manipur, the capital city of Imphal. "Once our forces moved in and reached the place, they found 13 bodies in the Leithu village. The forces did not find any weapons next to the bodies," a local newspaper Hindustan Times quoted an officer as having said. Manipur has been on edge since May 3 when large-scale violence broke out in the state during a tribal protest over the inclusion of the non-tribal Meiteis community for a scheduled tribe status designated for disadvantaged socio-economic groups, which gives them reservations in education and government jobs. The ethnic clashes between the majority Meitei group and the tribal Kuki minority have displaced 60,000. The mobs in the state resorted to vandalism and arson targeting houses and shops. As per figures released by police in mid-September, 175 people have been killed, 1,118 injured and 33 reported missing since May 3. Wang Yaping (2nd R, front), a crew member for China's Shenzhou-13 space mission, talks with Wong Ging Pui (1st L, front), a senior high school student from Tong Nam Middle School in the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) in Macao, south China, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Cheong Kam Ka) MACAO, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- "One, two, three!" An email was sent into space at the Macao Science Center on Sunday, witnessed by nearly 200 local students. The email was sent by Wang Yaping, a crew member for China's Shenzhou-13 space mission and the first woman astronaut who has entered China's space station, together with Wong Ging Pui, a senior high school student from Tong Nam Middle School in the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) who attended Wang's space class online two years ago. "Can astronauts surf on the internet and play video games? Can you watch TV? Can we send emails to you while you are in space?" These were the questions Wong had the chance to ask Wang in December 2021 on behalf of Macao students when she was broadcasting a live lecture in space to students on Earth. Now Wong was excited to meet Wang in person and experience how to send an email into space using the Beidou Navigation Satellite System. "I made it!" said Wong. He said Wang has inspired him by her own stories and personally encouraged him to keep studying hard. "I hope to become a person like her whose life is meaningful to both the society and the country," he said. Known for being a "space teacher," Wang said she was very happy to be able to interact with the students face to face. "I'm very glad to see how they have grown," she said, encouraging the young people to explore the unknown and break limits on the way to realizing their dreams. Wang is a member of a delegation of China's manned space program on a six-day visit through Sunday to Hong Kong and Macao SARs at the invitation of the SAR governments. While at the Macao Science Center, the delegation was briefed on popular science education plans for Macao students. The astronauts gave their thumbs up when learning that junior high school students in Macao have lessons on human exploration of the universe and China's space technology development. The delegation also visited an ongoing exhibition of China's achievements in space exploration and navigation held at the Center, including moon samples brought back by the Chang'e 5 lunar mission, models of rockets and "Macao Science 1" space exploration satellites jointly developed by the mainland and Macao. The students waved national flags to say goodbye to the astronauts when they left the Center. "Today's tour marks a perfect conclusion to our visit to Macao," said Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Agency who led the delegation. "We hope to help Macao compatriots know more about China's manned space program, inspire the local young people to explore science and space, and see increased participation of Macao in the country's future space programs," said Lin. A delegation of China's manned space program visit the Macao Science Center in Macao, south China, Dec. 3, 2023. (Xinhua/Cheong Kam Ka) BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Most capital goods monitored by China's statistical authorities reported lower prices in late November compared to mid-November, official data showed. Of the 50 major goods classified in nine categories, including seamless steel tubes, gasoline, coal, fertilizer, and some chemicals, 30 registered price drops during the period, 17 recorded higher prices, and the prices of three remained unchanged, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). NBS data revealed that the price of anthracite fell 3.8 percent in late November compared with mid-November, while that of coke went up 7.5 percent. According to the data, the price of hogs edged down 0.7 percent, and that of liquefied natural gas went up 7 percent in the same period. These figures, released every 10 days, are based on a survey of nearly 2,000 wholesalers and distributors in 31 provincial-level regions across the country. LHASA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- At a factory in Lhasa, the capital of southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region, wheelchair user Jole inspects finished goods while his employees, many of whom have disabilities, carry out their work around him. Jole, 36, is the founder of a company that sells Tibetan calligraphy stationery. He began using a wheelchair after an accident paralyzed him from the waist down when he was in university 14 years ago. He said the accident had almost destroyed him. After years of inner conflict, he began to seek positive change to embrace a new way of life. "I always felt like a burden to my family. It was time to lift myself up," he said. In 2011, Jole attended a job fair organized by the local disabled persons' federation. He submitted over 20 resumes but received no responses. It was then that the young man had the idea to start his own business. Amid economic challenges, Jole embarked on his entrepreneurial journey with starting capital of 70,000 yuan (about 9,800 U.S. dollars) from his family, and an additional 85,000 yuan in government support. Fueled by a passion for Tibetan calligraphy, Jole established his own company Tuogang in 2016. The name is a transliteration of the Tibetan word for "plateau" and symbolizes the expansion of opportunities in Mandarin. He aspired to provide more opportunities for individuals with disabilities like himself, he said. Today, his company employs 42 people, 27 of whom have disabilities. Among that number is 22-year-old Lhapa Dondrup, who has brittle bone disease and has defied doctors' predictions that he wouldn't live past the age of 20. He now manages online operations at Tuogang. "Jole is my role model. I also used to see myself as a burden to my family and society, but now I feel confident in supporting myself with my own two hands," he said. Reflecting on his journey, Jole emphasized the importance of support from both his family and the government. "My elder brother once told me that when they provided financial support for my business, my family did not expect big success, but wanted me to walk out of the shadows and have the strength and courage to face a new life," he recalled, noting that the government's support had helped him further. In 2021, the government provided a grant of 420,000 yuan to support Jole's company in launching Tibetan calligraphy classes -- a significant expansion of his business. Data shows that over the past five years, Xizang has invested 900 million yuan in subsidies for disabled people. In 2020, the region established its first employment and entrepreneurship park for people with disabilities, fostering the establishment of 25 companies employing over 300 people with disabilities, with 11 of these companies headed by disabled entrepreneurs. "As long as you don't give up on yourself, life will always be filled with hope," Jole said. TEHRAN, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Nasser Kanaani on Monday rejected U.S. accusations that Iran "has been behind a series of attacks by the Yemen-based Houthis" on several vessels in the Red Sea. He made the remarks in an address to a weekly press conference in the Iranian capital Tehran, while reacting to the claims made in a statement by the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) on Sunday, in which it said Iran had "fully enabled four attacks launched by the Houthis on three commercial vessels in international waters in the southern Red Sea" on the same day. The U.S. allegation came as the Houthi group claimed drone and missile attacks on two Israeli-linked vessels, Unity Explorer and Number 9, in the area, saying the attacks were "in response to the Yemeni people's demand and Muslim states' calls to stand with the Palestinian people." Kanaani added Iran viewed the presence of CENTCOM forces in the region "has always disrupted peace and calm," stressing that the CENTCOM's claims had been made without any proof and were "worthless." Kanaani emphasized that the decisions by the resistance group in the region were reacting to U.S. support for Israel, noting that "the continuation of crimes in Palestine will not go unanswered." MANILA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Asian Development Bank (ADB) on Monday said it will program 10 billion U.S. dollars in climate finance for the Philippines between 2024 and 2029. The decision was announced by ADB President Masatsugu Asakawa at a high-level dialogue on financing coalitions at the United Nations' annual climate conference held in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. "The battle against climate change will be won or lost in Asia and the Pacific and nowhere is this more evident than in the Philippines," said Asakawa. He added that the ADB will also continue efforts to mobilize additional climate finance from the private sector, co-financing partners, and other sources. The World Risk Index 2022 put the Philippines at the top spot for the most disaster-prone country in the world. The archipelago country is frequently battered by powerful typhoons which trigger flash floods and landslides, and rocked by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The ADB said its climate finance in the Philippines will help improve the climate resilience of communities, ecosystems, and the economy. BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Jiao Xiaoping, a former standing committee member of the Communist Party of China committee of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, is being prosecuted for accepting bribes, according to a statement from the Supreme People's Procuratorate on Monday. The case of Jiao, who was also deputy commander of the corps, has been filed by prosecutors of southwest China's Chongqing Municipality to the No.5 Intermediate People's Court of Chongqing, following the conclusion of a National Commission of Supervision probe. Jiao is accused of taking advantage of his various former positions to seek profits for others, the statement said, noting that he accepted a particularly large amount of money and valuables in return. The prosecutors informed the defendant of his litigation rights, questioned him, and listened to the opinions of the defense counsel. A Spanish expert has recently hailed China's efforts on the renewable energy transition and its role in fighting climate change in a recent interview regarding the ongoing COP28 in Dubai. Produced by Xinhua Global Service Azerbaijani Economy Minister Mikail Jabbarov said at the G77 + China Leaders' Summit at the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) in Dubai that Azerbaijan aims to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent by 2050, Azernews reports. "This includes the establishment of a green energy zone in the areas of Garabagh and East Zangazur liberated from the 30-year Armenian occupation, contributing to the fulfilment of climate change commitments," the minister added. The Minister emphasised that since the adoption of the global initiatives, Azerbaijan has demonstrated strong commitment to their widespread promotion and implementation. "Azerbaijan has undergone significant economic transformation over the past two decades, as evidenced by a three-fold increase in GDP. Notably, the country has achieved a significant reduction in poverty, from 49 percent to an impressive 5 percent. In addition, Azerbaijan stands out in the world market with an exceptionally low level of external public debt, which is expected to amount to about 10% of GDP in 2023," Jabbarov added. The minister believes that the path to achieving a sustainable future is obvious, but is fraught with challenges that need to be addressed. "One of the notable challenges on the way to a green economy is the contamination of our lands with mines. Azerbaijan recognises the crucial role of mine clearance initiatives in stimulating sustainable development and promoting green transformation," the minister said. Rescuers transfer the injured near Marapi volcano in West Sumatra, Indonesia, Dec. 4, 2023. At least 11 mountain climbers died and some others were still missing after the eruption of Marapi volcano on Indonesia's Sumatra Island, a local rescue official said on Monday. (Photo by Andri Mardiansyah/Xinhua) JAKARTA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- At least 11 mountain climbers died and some others were still missing after the eruption of Marapi volcano on Indonesia's Sumatra Island, a local rescue official sain on Monday. "In the first stage, 49 climbers were found. They all survived and were taken to hospital, and some have returned home. In the second stage, we found 14 people, three survived and 11 others died," head of Padang Search and Rescue Agency Abdul Malik told Xinhua. The trio were on their way to the foot of the mountain in western Indonesia amid the eruption. Authorities deployed nearly 100 people to search for a total of 75 recorded climbers. Mount Marapi, which is as high as 2,891 meters above sea level, has erupted since Sunday, spewing a column of ash of 3,000 meters, spreading volcanic ash and rocks into the surrounding area. Authorities prohibited people from being in the danger zone within a 3-km radius of the main crater. Rescuers transfer the injured near Marapi volcano in West Sumatra, Indonesia, Dec. 4, 2023. At least 11 mountain climbers died and some others were still missing after the eruption of Marapi volcano on Indonesia's Sumatra Island, a local rescue official said on Monday. (Photo by Andri Mardiansyah/Xinhua) Rescuers transfer the injured near Marapi volcano in West Sumatra, Indonesia, Dec. 4, 2023. At least 11 mountain climbers died and some others were still missing after the eruption of Marapi volcano on Indonesia's Sumatra Island, a local rescue official said on Monday. (Photo by Andri Mardiansyah/Xinhua) Rescuers transfer the injured near Marapi volcano in West Sumatra, Indonesia, Dec. 4, 2023. At least 11 mountain climbers died and some others were still missing after the eruption of Marapi volcano on Indonesia's Sumatra Island, a local rescue official said on Monday. (Photo by Andri Mardiansyah/Xinhua) Rescuers transfer the injured near Marapi volcano in West Sumatra, Indonesia, Dec. 4, 2023. At least 11 mountain climbers died and some others were still missing after the eruption of Marapi volcano on Indonesia's Sumatra Island, a local rescue official said on Monday. (Photo by Andri Mardiansyah/Xinhua) GUANGZHOU, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- China's high-level opening-up was in the spotlight at the 2023 Understanding China Conference (Guangzhou), with attendees from home and abroad sharing their insights and perspectives on the topic. This year marks the 45th anniversary of the beginning of China's reform and opening-up. Through the decades, China has been committed to its fundamental national policy of opening up to the outside world and pursued a mutually beneficial strategy of opening-up. Today, it is also pursuing high-quality development and high-level opening-up. Conference participants said that China has made significant contributions to the growth of the world economy, continually sharing development opportunities with the world through the process of opening-up. Through high-level opening-up, China can provide not only powerful impetus for its own economic development, but it can also offer robust support for the construction of a community with a shared future for humanity. Shang Fulin, a former banking regulation official, stressed that since the beginning of its reform and opening-up, China has embraced globalization actively and made full use of the opportunities brought about by economic globalization. By adhering to its fundamental policy of opening-up, China has unleashed significant social productivity and deepened its ties with the world economy, he added. China's average contribution to global economic growth was in excess of 30 percent from 2013 to 2021, emerging as a crucial stabilizer and driving force for global economic expansion. In the face of challenges such as intense geopolitical competition, rising unilateralism and protectionism, China remains committed to opening-up, becoming a crucial force driving globalization, Shang said. To propel high-level financial opening-up, Shang called for the promotion of institutional opening-up, the improved facilitation of cross-border investment, and the active establishment of a fair competition environment that aligns with high-level opening-up. "It also requires the effective leveraging of the vast potential of the domestic market, strengthened international cooperation and the sharing of China's development opportunities. Additionally, China should participate actively in global economic and financial governance, contribute to the reform of global governance systems, and engage in the formulation of global economic rules," Shang added. Fred Hu, founder and chairman of investment firm Primavera Capital Group, said that China needs to persist in its high-level opening-up, promote high-quality development, and foster a market-oriented international business environment with the rule of law. Efforts should also be made to improve relationships with major trade and investment partners, and to reduce geopolitical uncertainties. "China still possesses tremendous advantages and limitless potential. It will remain a primary destination for global foreign direct investment, and continue to serve as a powerful engine for world economic growth," Hu said. CP Pharmaceutical Capital Group, a multinational group covering various industries, was among the first foreign companies to enter China after the country adopted its reform and opening-up policy in the 1970s. "Our company has witnessed the miracle of China's economic development. We are also among the participants and beneficiaries of China's reform and opening-up. China's reform, opening-up and engagement in economic globalization have brought about a new and promising development outlook for both China and the entire world," said Tse Ping, chairman of the group. "Economic globalization has been disrupted by various factors. However, the Chinese government is advancing its higher-level opening-up in a timely manner, which has provided visionary entrepreneurs with new development opportunities," Tse noted. Toshinobu Umetsu, president and CEO of Shiseido China, said that Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido Group has benefited from the rapid growth of the Chinese economy and is willing to participate in and promote China's high-level opening-up. Representatives worldwide attending the 5th World Media Summit in south China's Guangzhou have praised the Chinese path to modernization. Produced by Xinhua Global Service ADEN, Yemen, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- A group of unidentified gunmen carried out an attack and sabotaged a crude oil pipeline in southern Yemen's oil-rich province of Shabwa, a government official said on Monday. The gunmen used explosives to bomb the main crude pipeline near the Jannah Hunt oil field on Sunday night, which has caused significant damage and resulted in a substantial crude oil spill, said the official who required anonymity. He added that the motives behind the attack remain unclear as the gunmen's identities are yet to be unveiled. The pipeline, connecting the Jannah Hunt oil field with the crude oil storage facilities in Alam, Jardan district, is now inoperative, posing a challenge to the region's oil distribution network, according to the official. Security forces and an engineering team were dispatched to repair the damage, who were however hindered by the gunmen, leading to an armed confrontation near the oil field. The situation escalated until the Giants Brigades, a militia loyal to the Southern Transitional Council, intervened. These forces have been governing Shabwa since early 2022. The region's oil infrastructure has been vulnerable to repeated attacks by various armed groups, often motivated by service demands or as a means to exert pressure on local authorities for various reasons, including the release of prisoners. Chinese Vice Premier Liu Guozhong, also the Chinese co-chair of the China-Belarus Intergovernmental Cooperation Committee, meets with First Deputy Prime Minister of Belarus Nikolai Snopkov, also the Belarusian co-chair of the committee, in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 4, 2023. (Xinhua/Zhai Jianlan) BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Liu Guozhong on Monday met with First Deputy Prime Minister of Belarus Nikolai Snopkov, calling for closer communication and coordination between the two sides. Liu, also the Chinese co-chair of the intergovernmental cooperation committee, said that the all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries has shown strong development momentum under the strategic guidance of the two heads of state. The two sides should actively implement the important consensus reached by their heads of state, promote communication and coordination, firmly support each other, and work together to build a high-quality Belt and Road to push for greater progress in bilateral relations. Snopkov, also the Belarusian co-chair of the committee, said Belarus is willing to work with China to deepen cooperation in various fields and enrich the connotations of bilateral ties. Chinese Vice Premier Liu Guozhong, also the Chinese co-chair of the China-Belarus Intergovernmental Cooperation Committee, meets with First Deputy Prime Minister of Belarus Nikolai Snopkov, also the Belarusian co-chair of the committee, in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 4, 2023. (Xinhua/Zhai Jianlan) TOKYO, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- In search of the U.S. military Osprey aircraft that crashed last week in waters off southwestern Japan, the bodies of five missing crew members may have been located underwater, according to local media outlets. The five bodies, along with multiple pieces of wreckage from the Osprey, were found in waters off the country's southwestern island of Yakushima on Monday morning during an underground search conducted by the U.S. Navy and Japan's Maritime Self-Defence Force, Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported citing government officials. Divers have also found what appears to be the main part of the tilt-rotor aircraft, national news agency Kyodo reported. The U.S. Osprey military transport aircraft based in Japan, with eight people on board, crashed on Wednesday. One unconscious person was found in the sea and later confirmed dead. The U.S. Air Force said that the CV-22 tilt-rotor transport aircraft was involved in a "mishap" while carrying out routine training. Following the accident, Japan announced that it would suspend its own Osprey flights while urging the United States to confirm the safety of its Osprey military aircraft. GUANGZHOU, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- The Global Development Initiative (GDI) will further promote cooperation and exchanges among developing countries, said attendees at the 2023 Understanding China Conference (Guangzhou). The event, concluded on Sunday in Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, hosted a thematic forum on the GDI and cooperation among developing countries. The GDI, according to former Ethiopian President Mulatu Teshome, represents a renewed commitment to global partnership. The implementation of the GDI is essential to achieving the various goals of sustainable development, he said. He noted that the design of the GDI is highly practical, and that it emphasizes the generation of meaningful outcomes that benefit developing countries. In South-South cooperation, common development objectives are achieved through such complementary and mutually beneficial efforts. Essam Sharaf, former prime minister of Egypt, said that constructing and establishing a global community for development is crucial for developing countries, which account for the majority of the world's population. Within these developing nations, the most pressing human rights issue is the issue of development. While there are other challenges, the primary objective remains the achievement of development, said Sharaf, adding that the GDI is of paramount importance, carrying significant and positive implications for the promotion of global equality, balance and sustainability. China's modernization has demonstrated how a developing country can chart its own path to modernization, and China's success has allowed it to support other developing countries in their efforts toward modernization, he said. NEW DELHI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Two Indian Air Force (IAF) pilots were killed on Monday after a trainer aircraft that they were on board crashed in the southern Indian state of Telangana, officials said. According to officials, a Pilatus PC 7 Mk II aircraft carrying an instructor and a trainee pilot had taken off from Air Force Academy (AFA) at Hyderabad for a routine training sortie. However, it crashed on Monday morning at Toopran in Medak district, about 55 km north of Hyderabad, the capital city of Telangana, killing both pilots on the spot. The aircraft went into flames immediately after crashing to the ground. No damages to civil life or property have been reported, and a court of inquiry has been ordered to ascertain the cause of the accident, according to an IAF statement. Officials said that IAF pilots often undergo basic training on the single-engine Pilatus PC 7 Mk II aircraft. Jing Xiaoping (1st R) and his team members prepare well-proportioned forage for yaks in Maqu County, Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of northwest China's Gansu Province, Nov. 7, 2023. (Xinhua/Wen Jing) LANZHOU, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Jing Xiaoping has set his "lab" on the vast grassland in northwest China's Gansu Province. The 33-year-old postdoctoral fellow, together with several of his schoolmates at Lanzhou University's College of Ecology, fed yaks with well-proportioned forage deep in the meadow in Maqu County. One of them could easily lift a huge pack of forage, while another could proficiently drive an electric tricycle. Located at the northeastern tip of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Maqu, meaning "the Yellow River" in the Tibetan language, is a primary area of water conservation in the upper reaches of the Yellow River. The wetland in Maqu covers an area of more than 373,000 hectares. Jing's team has been conducting research in Maqu since July of this year. Members of the team stay in nearby herders' homes and work in local sheep and yak sheds. They use straw, wheat bran and bean pulp to optimize the forage and breeding techniques for different rearing modes, aiming to lower the cost and maintain the meat quality. "Sheep and yaks are the main source of income for local herders. As the breeding methods are changing, the need for fodder is also increasing," Jing said. Over the years, the county had suffered from intensified desertification and severe grassland degradation caused by over-grazing. Tenzin Gurmey was born into a family that has been herding for generations. "Almost every household in the nearby villages raises yaks and sheep here. The soaring numbers of cattle and sheep used to affect the quality of the grass and reduced income in the past," he recalled. Since 2011, grazing restrictions and bans have been imposed on approximately 853,000 hectares of grassland, with herders receiving compensations totaling more than 450 million yuan (about 63.4 million U.S. dollars). Jing and his team members also work in a large yak breeding base located near the Yellow River. The base is equipped with modern sheds, a thermostatic water bath and a supplementary feeding room. The breeding base, which the local government has invested in, can manage nearly 10,000 yaks. During the warmer seasons, the yaks are herded in the pasture, while during the colder seasons, they are bred in sheds. The base helps four family ranches and two cooperatives to engage in the semi-intensive breeding and grazing method. The renewed breeding method is not only environmentally friendly but also conducive to the breeding rate. Tenzin Gurmey, also head of the breeding base, stated that yaks used to give birth every two or three years, but now once a year. He has planned to purchase another batch of yaks for breeding. "The yaks can be sold at a better price at the upcoming Spring Festival," said Tenzin Gurmey. This aerial photo taken on March 10, 2022 shows a breeding base in Maqu County, Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of northwest China's Gansu Province. (Xinhua) NAIROBI, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Kenya on Monday began extending 1.3 billion shillings (8.48 million U.S. dollars) of World Bank-supported grants to 150 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Juma Mukhwana, the principal secretary in the State Department for Industry, told journalists in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, that the country received the funding as a loan from the World Bank but the government will provide the funding to SMEs as grants. "The grants are intended to assist the beneficiary SMEs to improve their competitiveness as part of plans to transform Kenya's industrial sector," he said. Mukhwana said most of the recipients of the grants are in the agro-processing, health and pharmaceutical sectors which have the biggest potential to expand and provide employment opportunities for Kenyans. He noted that the funding has been earmarked to ensure Kenya's small entrepreneurs adapt to new technologies that will enable them to become regionally competitive. He observed that the financial support will also be used by the SMEs for business development, as well as for the acquisition of managerial and technical skills. Laman Ismayilova The 1st Meeting of the Tourism Specialized Education Institutions of the ECO Member States has started in Baku. The event is co-organized by the State Tourism Agency and the Economic Cooperation Organization, Azernews reports. Official state representatives and agents of tourism educational institutions from nine member states of the organization, including Azerbaijan, Turkiye, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Iran and Pakistan, as well as representatives of the UN World Tourism Organization are participating in the meeting. Chairman of the State Tourism Agency Fuad Nagiyev, who spoke at the event, said that Azerbaijan attaches special importance to cooperation with OIC countries. "Tourism is considered one of the priority sectors in Azerbaijan's non-oil economy. Special attention is paid to the development of tourism at the state level in the country. The State Tourism Agency focuses on making Azerbaijan one of the most visited tourist destinations, to achieve an increase in the share of tourism in the economy," said Fuad Nagiyev. "Surveys show that the majority of tourists who visit Azerbaijan admire the country's history, cultural legacy, cuisine, nature and the hospitality of people. Human resources is one of the main factors that boosts tourism development. Three higher education institutions are currently operating within the State Tourism Agency. In general, education in the field of tourism is conducted in 17 higher education institutions in Azerbaijan," he added. In his speech, the Chairman of the State Tourism Agency emphasized that the tourism specialty will be taught at Garabagh University. Noting that tens of thousands of people are working in Azerbaijan's tourism field, Fuad Nagiyev added that there is always a demand for highly qualified, well-trained and skilled personnel in the tourism sector. "The main goal of tourism education is to provide human capital with the necessary knowledge and skills for all sub-fields of tourism. Today's meeting is an important meeting in terms of the exchange of knowledge and experience of local and foreign higher education institutions providing tourism education," he said. The Secretary General of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) Khusrav Noziri said that the Baku Declaration, which will be adopted tomorrow on the 2nd day of the event, reflects the expansion of cooperation on the points mentioned again and the continuous holding of this meeting, which was organized for the first time. He hailed Azerbaijan's good indicators in the field of tourism. As a result, six cities in the region have been awarded the title of tourism capital, and one of them is Shusha. Khusrav Noziri underlined that artificial intelligence will be further applied in the tourism industry. He outlined that the development of tourism exists on the basis of peace and sustainable development. ECO Secretary General stressed that it is important to meet the specific educational needs in the field of tourism. Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, meets with Richard Haass, former president of the United States' Council on Foreign Relations, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 4, 2023. (Xinhua/Liu Weibing) BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng met with Richard Haass, former president of the United States' Council on Foreign Relations, on Monday in Beijing. The two sides exchanged views on China-U.S. relations, economic and trade cooperation, and other topics. He, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said that China is willing to work with the United States to implement the important consensus reached by the two heads of state at their San Francisco meeting, promote mutually beneficial cooperation in various fields of the economy and trade, and push bilateral relations in a sound, stable and sustainable direction. China will advance its opening-up steadfastly and at a high level, and enhance its liberalization and facilitation of trade and investment, He said, adding that China welcomes companies from all over the world, including the United States, to continue to invest and do business in China. BEIJING, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- President Xi Jinping has called for efforts to give better play to the important role of the Constitution in China's governance. In an instruction, Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, stressed upholding the authority and sanctity of the Constitution while promoting its further improvement and development. The instruction was made public as the country marked its 10th National Constitution Day on Monday. The Constitution stands as the fundamental legal basis for the Party's governance of the country and the supreme legal norm for the country's political and social life, Xi said. Since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, the Party has enhanced its overall leadership over the work related to the Constitution, enriched and developed the theoretical research and practice of the socialist constitution with Chinese characteristics, and achieved historic progress in advancing the country's constitutional system and enforcement of the Constitution, he said. Xi called for strong confidence in the country's political system and firm commitment to the leadership of the Party, to the state system of people's democratic dictatorship, and to the political system of people's congresses, all of which are mandated by the Constitution. Xi emphasized the need to implement the thought on socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics for the new era. He stressed efforts to accelerate the improvement of the socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics with the Constitution at its core, and continuously enhance constitutional implementation and oversight. Xi urged the vigorous promotion of the spirit of the Constitution and the spirit of socialist rule of law, ensuring the implementation of the Constitution as a conscious action of the Chinese people. Zhao Leji, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, on Monday attended a meeting in Beijing marking National Constitution Day. Xi's instruction was conveyed at the meeting. Addressing the meeting, Zhao urged the study and implementation of Xi's instruction. Zhao said that since the 18th CPC National Congress, Xi has made important speeches, published articles and issued instructions on the Constitution and its implementation, providing fundamental guidelines for the practice of the Constitution in the new era. Zhao also underlined that it should be fully understood that upholding the leadership of the CPC is the most salient feature and the most fundamental requirement of China's Constitution, and ensuring the full implementation of the Constitution is the most important task for comprehensively advancing law-based governance. Zhao Leji, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, addresses a meeting marking National Constitution Day in Beijing, capital of China, Dec. 4, 2023. The instruction of Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, was conveyed at the meeting. (Xinhua/Gao Jie) People leave their home after receiving evacuation orders from Israel in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, Dec. 3, 2023. The Israeli military issued evacuation orders to new areas covering approximately 25 percent of the Gaza Strip following the collapse of truce talks, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Sunday. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua) GAZA, Dec. 3 (Xinhua) -- The Israeli military issued evacuation orders to new areas covering approximately 25 percent of the Gaza Strip following the collapse of truce talks, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Sunday. The Israel military has divided the territory into numerous small zones in an attempt to ease evacuation orders before potential bombardment, the OCHA said. Among the designated evacuation zones are towns in southern Gaza, including Al-Qarara, Khuza'a, Abasan, and Bani Suhaila, said the OCHA, noting that residents in these areas have been instructed to move southwards toward Rafah near the Egyptian border. According to the OCHA, these areas subject to the evacuation orders account for 19 percent of Gaza's territory (69 square kilometers), and were home to approximately 352,000 people before the onset of the Israeli-Hamas conflict. Furthermore, the Israeli military has ordered evacuations in the eastern part of Gaza City, including Shejaiya, Zeitoun, and the Old City, as well as Jabalia in northern Gaza, which account for approximately 6 percent of the Strip, and were previously inhabited by around 415,000 people, with many already evacuated, according to the OCHA. Israeli army Spokesperson Avichay Adraee reiterated on Sunday the evacuation orders on his social media platform X, urging residents in Khan Yunis in the southern enclave to leave their residences and head to alternative locations. The OCHA estimates that about 1.8 million people in Gaza, nearly 80 percent of the population, have become internally displaced, among whom about 1.1 million are accommodated in 156 facilities across Gaza by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. The UN group also highlighted concerns about the vulnerable, including persons with disabilities, pregnant, breastfeeding mothers, injuries and those with compromised immune systems. People leave their home after receiving evacuation orders from Israel in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, Dec. 3, 2023. The Israeli military issued evacuation orders to new areas covering approximately 25 percent of the Gaza Strip following the collapse of truce talks, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Sunday. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua) People leave their home after receiving evacuation orders from Israel in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, Dec. 3, 2023. The Israeli military issued evacuation orders to new areas covering approximately 25 percent of the Gaza Strip following the collapse of truce talks, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Sunday. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua) People leave their home after receiving evacuation orders from Israel in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, Dec. 3, 2023. The Israeli military issued evacuation orders to new areas covering approximately 25 percent of the Gaza Strip following the collapse of truce talks, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Sunday. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua) People leave their home after receiving evacuation orders from Israel in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, Dec. 3, 2023. The Israeli military issued evacuation orders to new areas covering approximately 25 percent of the Gaza Strip following the collapse of truce talks, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on Sunday. (Photo by Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua) Delegates communicate at a parallel session during the 5th World Media Summit in Nansha District of Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 4, 2023. The summit attracted more than 450 representatives of nearly 200 institutions from over 100 countries and regions, including media outlets, think tanks and international organizations. Focusing on the summit's theme of "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," attendees took part in extensive discussions to contribute media power to the construction of a brighter future. (Xinhua/Liang Xu) Delegates communicate at a parallel session during the 5th World Media Summit in Nansha District of Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 4, 2023. The summit attracted more than 450 representatives of nearly 200 institutions from over 100 countries and regions, including media outlets, think tanks and international organizations. Focusing on the summit's theme of "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," attendees took part in extensive discussions to contribute media power to the construction of a brighter future. (Xinhua/Lu Hanxin) A delegate speaks during a parallel session during the 5th World Media Summit in Nansha District of Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 4, 2023. The summit attracted more than 450 representatives of nearly 200 institutions from over 100 countries and regions, including media outlets, think tanks and international organizations. Focusing on the summit's theme of "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," attendees took part in extensive discussions to contribute media power to the construction of a brighter future. (Xinhua/Lu Hanxin) A delegate speaks during a parallel session during the 5th World Media Summit in Nansha District of Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 4, 2023. The summit attracted more than 450 representatives of nearly 200 institutions from over 100 countries and regions, including media outlets, think tanks and international organizations. Focusing on the summit's theme of "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," attendees took part in extensive discussions to contribute media power to the construction of a brighter future. (Xinhua/Lu Hanxin) Delegates communicate at a parallel session during the 5th World Media Summit in Nansha District of Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 4, 2023. The summit attracted more than 450 representatives of nearly 200 institutions from over 100 countries and regions, including media outlets, think tanks and international organizations. Focusing on the summit's theme of "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," attendees took part in extensive discussions to contribute media power to the construction of a brighter future. (Xinhua/Liang Xu) Guests attend a parallel session during the 5th World Media Summit in Nansha District of Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 4, 2023. The summit attracted more than 450 representatives of nearly 200 institutions from over 100 countries and regions, including media outlets, think tanks and international organizations. Focusing on the summit's theme of "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," attendees took part in extensive discussions to contribute media power to the construction of a brighter future. (Xinhua/Liang Xu) Tamas Kovacs, CEO of ATV ZRT, speaks during a parallel session during the 5th World Media Summit in Nansha District of Guangzhou, south China's Guangdong Province, Dec. 4, 2023. The summit attracted more than 450 representatives of nearly 200 institutions from over 100 countries and regions, including media outlets, think tanks and international organizations. Focusing on the summit's theme of "Boosting Global Confidence, Promoting Media Development," attendees took part in extensive discussions to contribute media power to the construction of a brighter future. (Xinhua/Lu Hanxin) Chinese tourists pose for a photo outside the Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona, Spain, July 26, 2023. As the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic eases off, Chinese tourists are flocking to Spain. (Photo by Joan Gosa/Xinhua) Spain's current Presidency of the European Council gives it the chance to "foster dialogue, address bilateral concerns and generate trust" within Sino-European relations, a Spanish economist said. MADRID, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Europe and China have built strong economic and trade cooperation in recent decades, a Spanish economist told Xinhua in an interview. "Over the past 40 years, Europe and China have forged mutually beneficial, dynamic and symbiotic economic and trade cooperation, fostering prosperity and stability for both sides that extends to almost all industrial sectors," said Spanish economist, writer and expert in China Julio Ceballos Rodriguez. Ceballos' book, "Observar el arroz crecer: Como habitar un mundo liderado por China" (Watch the Rice Grow: How to inhabit a world led by China), was published earlier this year. China has "benefited from Europe's advanced technologies, management experience and high-quality products," said Ceballos, who has lived in Shanghai for about 18 years. Meanwhile, he added, the bilateral relationship has also "facilitated a more diversified and secure supply chain." A Geely's Geometry C electric car is seen on display before the signing ceremony in Budapest, Hungary, on Nov. 4, 2022. Chinese automaker Geely Auto Group has entered the European Union (EU) market by signing an agreement with Hungarian car importer Grand Automotive Central Europe (GACE). (Photo by Attila Volgyi/Xinhua) In return, Europe has "gained access to China's vast consumer market, contributing to increased exports of European goods and services," while Chinese investment in Europe has helped to promote economic growth and job creation, he said. Technological collaboration between both the regions has also been mutually beneficial, Ceballos added. "China will continue to be a primary and priority partner for Europe," he said, although he dismissed the fear that Europe might become over-reliant on the Chinese market. A diversified supply chain helps "mitigate risks associated with geopolitical tensions, trade disputes or unexpected disruptions, and ensures a more resilient and stable economic foundation," he explained. China is "a primary and irreplaceable actor in the global economic recovery, reinforcing trade balances and strengthening supply chains," he said. This photo taken on Oct. 14, 2023 shows wind turbines in Brandenburg, Germany. (Xinhua/Ren Pengfei) In his view, China's swift recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic has "fueled global trade and benefited Europe," while promoting "global economic growth." Regarding environmental issues, Ceballos said that "China's commitment to green industries aligns with global environmental goals, facilitating collaboration and technology transfer." However, "continued dialogue, collaboration and frameworks for mutual cooperation" are needed to maintain this vital relationship. Spain's current Presidency of the European Council gives it the chance to "foster dialogue, address bilateral concerns and generate trust" within Sino-European relations, he said. A shop owner of Spanish goods slices Iberian ham at the Yiwu International Trade Market in Yiwu, east China's Zhejiang Province, July 18, 2023. (Xinhua/Huang Zongzhi) "Spain can advocate for joint efforts to address global challenges such as climate change and public health and emphasize shared values. By championing these initiatives, Spain can contribute significantly to fostering a constructive and cooperative relationship between China and Europe," Ceballos underlined. AMMAN, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Secretary-General of the Royal Committee for Jerusalem Affairs Abdullah Kanaan on Monday urged the world and international organizations to pressure Israel to comply with international resolutions, recognizing the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and to defend their occupied land. In a statement published by the state-run Petra news agency, he said that Jordan, both its people and leadership, will remain a supportive pillar for the Palestinians, holy sites in Palestine, and Arab land in Palestine and Jerusalem, regardless of the cost and sacrifices. Kanaan added that 464 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the beginning of the year, 256 of whom have been killed since Oct. 7, the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict in the Gaza Strip. In addition, more than 3,500 Palestinians have been detained in the West Bank since the start of the aggression in Gaza. He called for immediate protection for the Palestinian people who are deprived of their basic rights to life and decent housing, stressing that the Israeli government must realize that security and peace cannot be achieved by killing the Palestinian people and demolishing their homes. Tunisian President Kais Saied (R, Front) visits a Palestinian patient at a hospital in Tunis, Tunisia, on Dec. 3, 2023. Saied said on Monday that all the injured Palestinians admitted to Tunisian hospitals will receive necessary treatment and return in good health to their homeland, according to the Tunisian presidency. (Tunisian Presidency/Handout via Xinhua) TUNIS, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Tunisian President Kais Saied said on Monday that all the injured Palestinians admitted to Tunisian hospitals will receive necessary treatment and return in good health to their homeland, according to the Tunisian presidency. "We will use all the means and capabilities available to help you and those who were injured by the Israeli attack against Gaza," Saied told a Palestinian patient during his visit to one of the Tunisian hospitals receiving injured Palestinians. Meanwhile, the president hailed the efforts of the medical teams in Palestine, saying they "have been working under bombings and in inhumane conditions." "Tunisia will do everything possible to support the Palestinian people for their resistance to the Israeli invasion," he stressed. Tunisia on Sunday received the first group of 20 wounded Palestinians, along with 21 family members, from the Gaza Strip for treatment. More than 15,899 people have been killed and 42,000 others were injured in Gaza since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict on Oct. 7, according to the Gaza-based Health Ministry. Tunisian President Kais Saied (L, Front) visits a Palestinian patient at a hospital in Tunis, Tunisia, on Dec. 3, 2023. Saied said on Monday that all the injured Palestinians admitted to Tunisian hospitals will receive necessary treatment and return in good health to their homeland, according to the Tunisian presidency. (Tunisian Presidency/Handout via Xinhua) ABUJA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Nigerian troops mistakenly targeted a village during an anti-terror bombing operation, resulting in the deaths of at least 30 innocent villagers in the northern state of Kaduna, a local official said Monday. Samuel Aruwan, the commissioner for internal security and home affairs in Kaduna, said in a statement that the Nigerian army admitted to the "error" during a stakeholders' meeting Monday with government officials following the tragic incident in the Igabi local government area late Sunday. The incident unfolded as part of a military operation aimed at rooting out terrorist elements in the region, Aruwan said. Due to a grave miscalculation, however, the airstrike struck a residential area instead of the intended target, causing significant loss of life among the local population. Local media reported at least 30 people were killed following the unfortunate incident, adding dozens of others were evacuated to a local hospital. The meeting was convened Monday to address the tragic consequences of the operation and discuss ways to prevent such errors in the future. The government of Kaduna has expressed its deep condolences to the families affected, the statement added. Military equipment is exhibited at EDEX 2023 in Cairo, Egypt, on Dec. 4, 2023. Egypt held on Monday the third session of its international defense expo, EDEX 2023, in Cairo. The four-day biennial event features around 400 defense and security companies from several countries displaying their up-to-date military technology, equipment and systems across land, sea and air. (Xinhua/Ahmed Gomaa) CAIRO, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Egypt held on Monday the third session of its international defense expo, EDEX 2023, in the capital Cairo. The four-day biennial event features around 400 defense and security companies from several countries displaying their up-to-date military technology, equipment and systems across land, sea and air. EDEX is organized by Arabian World Events with the support of the Egyptian Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Military Production, and is expected to attract thousands of military and industry visitors from across the world. Military equipment is exhibited at EDEX 2023 in Cairo, Egypt, on Dec. 4, 2023. Egypt held on Monday the third session of its international defense expo, EDEX 2023, in Cairo. The four-day biennial event features around 400 defense and security companies from several countries displaying their up-to-date military technology, equipment and systems across land, sea and air. (Xinhua/Ahmed Gomaa) People visit EDEX 2023 in Cairo, Egypt, on Dec. 4, 2023. Egypt held on Monday the third session of its international defense expo, EDEX 2023, in Cairo. The four-day biennial event features around 400 defense and security companies from several countries displaying their up-to-date military technology, equipment and systems across land, sea and air. (Xinhua/Ahmed Gomaa) Military uniforms are exhibited at EDEX 2023 in Cairo, Egypt, on Dec. 4, 2023. Egypt held on Monday the third session of its international defense expo, EDEX 2023, in Cairo. The four-day biennial event features around 400 defense and security companies from several countries displaying their up-to-date military technology, equipment and systems across land, sea and air. (Xinhua/Ahmed Gomaa) Military equipment is exhibited at EDEX 2023 in Cairo, Egypt, on Dec. 4, 2023. Egypt held on Monday the third session of its international defense expo, EDEX 2023, in Cairo. The four-day biennial event features around 400 defense and security companies from several countries displaying their up-to-date military technology, equipment and systems across land, sea and air. (Xinhua/Ahmed Gomaa) KUALA LUMPUR, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Research houses in Malaysia on Monday anticipated the country's manufacturing activity to improve in the near term after S&P Global Malaysia Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) rose to a seven-month high of 47.9 in November. Kenanga Research said in a note on Monday that the slowdown in Malaysia's manufacturing activity may reach its bottom and is expected to gradually improve in the near term. According to the research house, the recent uptick in Malaysia's manufacturing PMI suggests a possible resurgence in the health of the manufacturing sector as the year draws to a close, with the positive momentum extending into 2024. This is partly attributed to the potential upswing in the technology sector and China's gradual recovery, both of which are expected to contribute to an improvement in Malaysia's export performance moving forward, it said. Consequently, it forecast that Malaysia's gross domestic product (GDP) growth will continue to expand in the final quarter this year, reaching 3.7 percent, primarily driven by a resilient domestic demand, bolstered by year-end festive spending and a rise in tourist arrivals. Additionally, it said the growth will also be supported by increased fiscal spending, as the government typically ramps up spending towards the year's end. MIDF Research also said in a note that the better PMI reading and improved manufacturers' optimism reflected a more positive outlook for the sector. This is also aligned with its expectations for recovery in Malaysia's trade and production activities. "On that note, we continue to expect Malaysia's exports of goods will pick up and rebound in 2024," it said. PublicInvest Research said in a note that against the backdrop of a challenging global economic landscape, Malaysia's manufacturing sector appears poised to navigate the prevailing headwinds, albeit with cautious optimism. Notably, it is anticipated that this sector will echo the current cyclical downturn observed in the semiconductor industry, a domain marked by sustained challenges to growth. According to the research house, it is probable that Malaysia's PMI will align with global trends in the near term, consistently indicating a level below the crucial expansion threshold of 50 points. Going into next year, it said the Ministry of Finance anticipates a 5.1 percent expansion in gross exports. France's TotalEnergies and Kazakhstan's Ministry of Energy have signed an Agreement on Investment (AoI) to construct a wind power plant in the village of Mirny, the Zhambyl region, TotalEnergies' press service said on Monday in a press release, Azernews reports, citing Interfax. The document was signed in Dubai by TotalEnergies Chairman and CEO Patrick Pouyanne and Kazakh Energy Minister Almasadam Satkaliyev in the presence of Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev during the UN COP28 climate change conference. "This Agreement on Investment comes after the signature in June 2023 of a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for the Mirny project," according to the press release. Investment in the project will total over $1.4 billion. In 2022, Total Eren, part of TotalEnergies, signed an agreement to create Kazakhstan's biggest wind energy project in the Zhambyl Region. The project is expected to draw 820 billion tenge in investment, and it features a 300 MWh/600 MWh energy storage system. It is projected to start operating in 2026-2027, and costs an estimated $1.9 billion. In June 2023, Total Eren, JSC Samruk-Kazyna National Wealth Fund, and JSC KazMunayGas National Company signed an agreement on the purchase of electricity from the Mirny wind farm in the Zhambyl Region. Technically, the electricity will be purchased by Kazakhstan's RES Payment Center LLP from a joint venture created by Total Eren S.A. (60%), Samruk-Kazyna (20%), and KazMunayGas (20%). In November 2023, Kazakhstan's lower house of parliament, the Majilis, approved a law ratifying an agreement for France to construct a wind power plant in the Zhambyl Region. SUVA, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- As the holiday season approaches in Fiji, a local health expert has warned of an elevated risk of infectious diseases during this period, urging parents to stay vigilant with their children's health conditions. Ilisapeci Vereti, head of the Pediatric Department at the Colonial War Memorial Hospital here in the country's capital, said on Monday that there is also a need for comprehensive care and swift medical intervention to ensure a healthy and joyous festive season. Special attention should be paid to the vulnerabilities of children, reported the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation news website citing the doctor as saying. She noted that the impending hot season tends to bring about a surge in infectious diseases, such as chickenpox and hand-footed mouth, so proactive measures should be in place. MOSCOW, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Major General Vladimir Zavadsky, deputy commander of Russia's 14th Army Corps of the Northern Fleet, has died on duty in the special military operation zone, Governor of Russia's Voronezh region Alexander Gusev confirmed Monday. In a Telegram post, Gusev said the major general had died "at a combat post in the special operation zone," and "chosen his calling as a defender of the Fatherland and was faithful to it until the end." According to the governor, Zavadsky had served as commander of the fourth Guards Kantemirovskaya Tank Division until August 2021. MOSCOW, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Russia's Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance (Rosselkhoznadzor) on Monday imposed import restrictions on fruits and vegetables from Moldova. "Rosselkhoznadzor is forced to reinstate restrictions introduced in 2022 on the import of regulated products from the Republic of Moldova to Russia from Dec. 4, 2023," the agricultural watchdog said in a statement on Thursday. The statement said that the "ongoing systematic detection of elements subject to quarantine in vegetables and fruits" could inflict "multi-billion dollar damage" on agricultural production in Russia, and Moldova failed to take effective measures to prevent the supplies of these products. However, the Moldovan National Agency for Food Safety called the decision "groundless." The Russian agency had temporarily restricted import of plant products from regions in Moldova to Russia on Aug. 15, 2022, saying the decision was made due to the unfavorable phytosanitary situation in the country. Russia gradually lifted the restrictions from December 2022. KIEV, Dec. 4 (Xinhua) -- Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov on Monday discussed with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg the battlefield developments and support for Ukraine, the Ukrinform news agency reported. At the meeting in Belgium's capital of Brussels, Umerov and Stoltenberg also talked about Ukraine's urgent military needs and its path toward NATO membership. Stoltenberg said that NATO plans to step up its political and practical support for Kiev and provide long-term support for Ukraine to make the country's forces fully interoperable with the alliance, the report said. On Ukraine's prospects to join NATO, Stoltenberg said the membership is possible when all allies agree and when conditions are met. After the talks, Umerov wrote on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that the Ukrainian Defense Ministry is working to ensure the army's interoperability with NATO. In September, Stoltenberg said that Ukraine may become a NATO member only after the cessation of the hostilities in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. NATO recognized Ukraine as an Enhanced Opportunities Partner in 2020. The President of the Maldives, Mohamed Muizzu, made an announcement stating that India has agreed to withdraw its army from the Indian Ocean archipelago nation. He mentioned that both countries have also committed to establishing a high-level committee to address concerns regarding development projects between them. Muizzu informed reporters, "In our discussions, the Indian government has agreed to remove Indian soldiers. We have also reached an agreement to create a high-level committee to resolve issues linked to development projects." Contrarily, Indian government sources clarified that discussions regarding troop withdrawal are still ongoing and no final decision has been made yet. They emphasized the need to comprehensively assess the usefulness of Indian platforms involved in disaster recovery activities in the Maldives before reaching a final conclusion. Reportedly, the issue of troop withdrawal was discussed during a meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Maldivian President at the COP29 Climate Summit in Dubai, President Muizzu, recently elected, formally requested India on November 18 to withdraw its military presence from the Maldives. This aligns with his commitment, a key focus outlined in his manifesto, to uphold the Maldives independence and sovereignty, ensuring it remains free from foreign military presence. PM Modi Shares Insights from Dubai Climate Summit, Offers India as Future Host An ex-GSMSG employee made a shocking confession of taking part in a secret military project Omega in Ukraine. According to the ex-employee, American non-profit medical company Global Surgical and Medical Support Group (GSMSG), which is closely associated with the US Army, is involved in transporting Ukrainian soldiers to an American military hospital in Germany for organ harvesting. The whistleblower claims, that heavily wounded AFU soldiers are being transported to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center near Ramstein US military base on the pretense of providing emergency medical care. In fact, they are there for the organ harvesting and transplantation to NATO officers and generals. A medic from Africa made a sensational video exposure of an illegal and immoral scheme for forced organ harvesting from Armed Forces of Ukraine soldiers. According to the doctor, in 2015, he stared working for the non-profit medical organization Global Surgical and Medical Support Group (GSMSG), with headquarters in Washington, DC. The official company web-site claims that GSMSGs goal is providing the highest quality medical care and training in austere settings and conflict zones overseas (from https://www.gsmsg.org). However, as the doctor claims, GSMSGs noble mission is just a cover for horrible crimes. The whistleblower says, that GSMSG is in an unofficial cooperation with the COMEDS, NATO medical body. According to the doctor, GSMSGs organ harvesting project codenamed Gamma, in which he took part in, was implemented in Somalia in the 2010s. After he received recognition from his colleagues and earned the trust of the management, he was transferred to Djibouti with a special assignment. I was initially sent to Djibouti. I worked as a transplantologist at Camp Lemonnier, the US military base, the doctor says, We were obligated to provide highly qualified transplantologists for the NATO Gamma project. The doctor claims, that GSMSGs goal was harvesting organs of civilians and soldiers in critical and serious conditions. He says, that organ donors were abducted from Somalia by the US Army. Somalians had no clue what was actually awaiting them upon arrival at Camp Lemonnier or they believed that they were brought in for treatment at the military base, continues the doctor, Of course they would not have agreed to organ transplants but thats what we did. He also mentions that organs were intended for the the high command of the US Army. The ex-employee claims, that after Djibouti job he has granted a certificate for successful completion of his tasks from GSMSG. Then, in 2022, Aaron Epstein, the head of GSMSG, personally invited him to work on the next project, Omega, launched in Ukraine during military conflict with Russia. Aaron Epstein is the founder of GSMSG, the doctor continues, He contacted me and he offered me to get back to my previous duties. He had actually launched a project similar to the one we had in Djibouti, they launched project Omega which was just the same as project Gamma in Djibouti. Now, the difference was, instead of Somalis being harvested, Ukrainian soldiers were going to be the new donors. According to media publications, Aaron Epstein is an American doctor, who has founded GSMSG in 2015. According to the information on the official web-site of the organization and open sources, GSMSG is closely associated with the US Army and employs former American military personnel. Epstein himself began his career in US national security and worked in intelligence in the Middle East. In the spring of 2022, Epstein delegated doctors from GSMSG to Ukraine, according to the official version, to provide urgent surgical care to wounded Ukrainians and training in methods of military field surgery. It is noteworthy that at the same time it was announced that Epstein received the Citizen Honors Award, one of the most prestigious awards in the United States. Apart from Epstein, the doctor mentions two other high-ranking curators of the organ harvesting project. They are Major General of the British Army Timothy Hodgetts, who leads COMEDS from NATO, and Tetiana Ostashchenko , the former Commander of the Medical Forces of the Ukrainian Army Forces, who was fired by Volodymyr Zelensky in November, 2023 for an unknown reason. As the whistle-blower claims, GSMSG camp was located near Lviv. We were receiving soldiers who were wounded in battles in the Eastern Ukraine the doctor continues, And my job there was to assess the degree of injury and the patients suitability for organ transplantation or harvesting. Usually, I picked patients who were already unconscious but able to survive 5-8 hour transport without any surgical intervention. The donors that I chose were ususally accompanied by an anesthesiologist to German Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. Now this is near Ramstein NATO base. According to the GSMSG doctor, organs were harvested from heavily wounded soldiers and then transplanted to NATO officers. Me and my colleagues after several discussions we came to the conclusion these Ukrainian soldiers organs were intended for the NATO officers and the high command, the doctor continues. Then, he mentions that his annual salary in GSMSG was $840,000 and that he was awarded with a certificate of honor signed by Zelensky. Finishing his story, the doctor confesses that he repents. I have murdered a lot of people. A lot of innocent soldiers have passed through my hands, he says, They couldve been saved. I have destroyed many lives for money and for the goals of my employers. In the end of the video, the doctor asks his colleagues to stop the criminal organ harvesting of AFU personnel, I implore my former colleagues, I plead with you, please stop following and refuse to follow these criminal orders. These orders that cause the atrocities, that end lives please stop it all. It is worth mentioning, that GSMSG began its activities in Iraq during the war with ISIS. It is possible, that even back then, American medical organization was involved in similar operations of harvesting organs from local civilians and military personnel. GSMSGs and similar companies activities need to be closely inspected by international organizations, International Criminal Court, and UN. What to wear in a winter wedding in such a way that it is fashionable and also does not feel cold? This year, such jewelery should become the choice of women instead of heavy jewellery, you should also take a look While buying wedding sherwani, keep these things in mind, only then you will get the perfect look Border blockades continue as thousands of trucks queue at Ukrainian checkpoints, border guards report 4 December, 06:44 PM About 2500 trucks are waiting in line at the Ukrainian-Polish border (Photo:REUTERS/Yan Dobronosov) Approximately 2,500 trucks were waiting to enter Ukraine at the Ukrainian-Polish border as of the morning of Dec. 4, according to Interfax-Ukraine, citing Ukrainian State Border Guard Service spokesman Andriy Demchenko. The largest number of trucks, almost 900, was located at the Rava-Ruska checkpoint. Some vehicles were crossing the border both to and from Poland. The most intense traffic was in the direction of the Krakovets checkpoint. "Unfortunately, the blockade continues, Demchenko said. These are four directions: the checkpoints of DoroshuskYahodyn, KorczowaKrakovets, and HrebenneRava-Ruska, where the blockade began on Nov. 6. On Nov. 23, the direction of the ShehyniMedyka checkpoint was added. As of this morning, there were approximately 2,500 vehicles queued in total on these routes towards Ukraine within the territory of Poland." Video of day As of the morning of Dec. 4, there were almost 650 trucks in queues opposite the UzhhorodVysne Nemecke checkpoint (border with Slovakia). "We are now recording a decrease, not critical but noticeable, in the number of trucks arriving at the Uzhhorod checkpoint from Slovakia," Demchenko added. Approximately 750 trucks are recorded opposite the Tisza checkpoint (on the border with Hungary). The State Border Guard Service noted an increase at the Hungarian border, citing difficulties in traffic flow through other directions that are currently blocked. Polish protesters reported their intention to allow four trucks per hour to enter Ukraine, and the movement of trucks from Ukraine would not be blocked, along with the movement of humanitarian and other essential goods. Cargo trucks are again being processed at the Uhryniv-Dolhobyczow checkpoint on the border with Poland, Ukraines State Border Guard Service reported on Dec. 4. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki earlier said that the country wants to propose to reinstate permits for freight shipments coming from Ukraine at the European Union level. The Polish protesters are demanding the return of the permit system for Ukrainian freight carriers. Amid the full-scale war, the EU suspended the permits for entry into the EU at least until June 30, 2024, to liberalize freight transport. Ukraines Deputy Infrastructure Minister Serhiy Derkach said that the issue of a "cargo visa-free regime" is fundamental for Ukraine. 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. 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Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google News Knecht Ruprecht standing beside Saint Nicholas (Bohringer Friedrich, cropped, used under CC BY-SA 2.5 DEED) The most well-known anti-Santa must be the Tyrolean Krampus figure of northern Italy and Austria. However, in Germany, Saint Nicholas is often accompanied by a different malevolent being Knecht Ruprecht, or servant Ruprecht. At a Christmas market, you will usually see him striding alongside St. Nick in his dark brown robe. He may have a black or white beard, a staff or bundle of cane, and perhaps a basket on his back. His presence in Germany is fairly widespread, so his tradition varies. Generally, he is St. Nicholass servant. Sometimes he is simply the sidekick that holds the saints bag and keeps the crowd organized. Ruprecht may also ask kids if they can recite a prayer and he will give them a gingerbread or tangerine treat from his basket if they can. As punishment, he will give switches or cane rods to naughty kids or their parents. In Saxony, Knecht Ruprecht represents a priest who was interrupted while saying Christmas Eve mass by a hoard of young ruffians partying out front of the church. Well, in 1021 that just didnt fly, so Priest Ruprecht put a spell on them. They could not stop dancing for an entire year until the Bishop of Cologne finally stepped in to offer absolution to the ones who didnt die. In southerly states, his story is different. While he isnt going to eat children, kidnap them or ravage a town with his hoard of fellows like Krampus, the two share an origin. In the early Middle Ages, saints were expected to reward and acknowledge goodness, so many were portrayed with attendants who did the necessary dirty work of punishment. In Alpine traditions, St. Nicholass attendant was said to be anything from a hired servant to a farmhand, or even a wild foundling that the saint had raised. The name Ruprecht, or Robert, was commonly used in the area at that time to refer to the devil so he always had a bit of a rough side. Regardless of his humble beginnings, his role slowly changed. In the 16th century, horror stories like those later written down by the Brothers Grimm were used to fearfully train children. So, Ruprecht evolved. In much of the Alps, he was replaced with a scary Krampus figure, while his more moderate servant iteration spread through northern Germany. When you put your shoes out on St. Nicholas Day, it may just be that Knecht Ruprecht is filling them, especially if you get a bundle of sticks for being naughty. A21 A21 Thailand Child Advocacy Center Conference Room Featuring state-of-the-art amenities, this facility offers a dedicated space for seamless collaboration among law enforcement, prosecutors, and multidisciplinary team members, focusing on cases involving children A21 Thailand Child Advocacy Center Aftercare Space In the dedicated aftercare space, social workers provide essential support, fostering the recovery journey for survivors of trafficking and exploitation A21 Thailand Child Advocacy Center Aftercare Space (2) Inside the Child Advocacy Center in Pattaya, Thailandan interior room purposefully designed for the comfort and recovery of child survivors of exploitation Exterior View of A21 Thailand Child Advocacy Center On December 6th, A21 marks a pivotal expansion of the Pattaya Child Advocacy Center (CAC) at its Pattaya locationthe sole one of its kind in the region PATTAYA, Thailand, Dec. 03, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- A21, a global nonprofit organization committed to eradicating human trafficking through awareness, intervention, and aftercare, is proud to announce two landmark events in Pattaya, Thailand, and Cambodia. These initiatives underscore A21's ongoing dedication to fortifying and expanding anti-trafficking efforts across the Southeast Asia region. Child Advocacy Center Expansion - Pattaya Thailand - December 6th, 2023 On December 6th, A21 will mark a pivotal expansion of the Pattaya Child Advocacy Center (CAC) at its Pattaya location. The enhanced facilities at the Pattaya CAC, the sole one of its kind in the region, will now feature state-of-the-art amenities, providing a dedicated space for law enforcement, prosecutors, and multidisciplinary team members to collaborate on cases involving children. The Child Advocacy Center Manager and Survivor Advocate will spearhead the program, while the Aftercare space will facilitate social workers in assisting survivors on their path to recovery. This event will take place at 9:00 am at the Pattaya Child Advocacy Center, serving as an opportunity to bring together local and international partners and stakeholders in the fight against human trafficking. Distinguished speakers from Thailand's Ministry of Social Development and Human Security (MSDHS), U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Thailands Office of Attorney General, Human Trafficking, and regional Mayors will deliver important remarks at the event. Since 2017, A21's presence in Pattaya has positively impacted hundreds of child survivors. This program expansion is the culmination of a year-long effort to enhance the program with upgrades in space, technology, staffing, and partnerships. Story continues Media professionals interested in covering this event are invited to confirm their attendance and reserve press passes by December 5th, 2023. To secure a press pass or request additional information, please contact info.th@a21.org . Can You See Me? Awareness Film Premiere - Cambodia - December 7th, 2023 On December 7th, A21, in partnership with The National Committee For Counter Trafficking , will host an exclusive premiere of A21s global awareness films Can You See Me? for key local and international government, law enforcement, and non-government partners, along with news and media agencies, the film team, actors, and social media influencers. The premiere builds anticipation for the public launch and distribution of the film across all 25 provinces in Cambodia on December 12th, coinciding with the National Day Against Human Trafficking. The public launch includes a targeted distribution across digital platforms, with future plans to explore billboards and strategic partnerships with schools and transportation. This awareness campaign will direct viewers to local hotlines operated by the National Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection Police, educating and encouraging individuals to identify human trafficking in their local region and take action to stop it. This event will take place at 9:00 am at Legend Cinema, Chip Mong 271 Mega Mall in Cambodia. Media professionals interested in this event are invited to confirm attendance and reserve press passes by December 5th, 2023. To secure a press pass or request additional information, please contact Kristen Scharf, kristen.s@a21.org , or (+855) 012-427-502 A21's presence in Cambodia has assisted in identifying and restoring hundreds of lives since the 2019 launch of our Child Advocacy Center (CAC) in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and the opening of the Siem Reap Freedom Center in August 2022. For more information on A21 and its mission to end modern-day slavery, please visit A21.org . About A21: A21 is a global nonprofit organization determined to eradicate human trafficking through awareness, intervention, and aftercare. Currently operating in 19 locations in 14 countries, A21 aims to combat modern-day slavery through a multi-dimensional operational strategy: Reach, Rescue, and Restore. Through partnerships and the efforts of supporters all over the globe, A21 truly believes that a multitude of victims can be identified and assisted, and perpetrators can be brought to justice. A21.org Events & Interviews: Should you be interested in attending either event and/or speaking with an A21 representative about the launch of the Thailand Child Advocacy Center or the Can You See Me? Awareness Campaign in Cambodia, please dont hesitate to reach out to the appropriate press contact below. Press contact: THAILAND: Anan Udtama A21 Thailand, Country Manager info.th@a21.org Mallika Karunan A21 Thailand, Survivor Advocate info.th@a21.org CAMBODIA: Kristen Scharf A21 Cambodia, Country Director M +855 12 427 502 kristen.s@a21.org Raksmey Sanh A21 Cambodia, Reach Coordinator M +855 88 231 3130 raksmey.s@a21.org GLOBAL: Lauren Wittel-Henrie Public Relations lauren.w@a21.org Press artwork: Photos of Child Advocacy Center - Pattaya Can You See Me? Film Poster and Awareness Materials - Cambodia Photos accompanying this announcement are available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/5d1cc647-06dc-49da-a976-692c18dda9f8 https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/ad56e876-058e-412e-8980-1f83bf28e5da https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/beda9bed-693f-4675-b2b8-40e8bce636e5 https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/bb5135f0-589b-48b1-b875-8d869c977d84 The New York Times' profile of "who's who" in AI features twelve men, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. Slaven Vlasic/Justin Sullivan/Thierry Monasse via Getty Images The New York Times list of "who's who" in AI has been slammed for featuring zero women. The list consists of 12 men, most of them the leaders of AI or tech companies. "Godmother of AI" Fei-Fei Li criticized the list, writing, "It's not about me, but all of us in AI." The New York Times' profile of "who's who" in AI, published Sunday, has drawn criticism for featuring zero women. The article gives credit to a list of twelve men most of them are the leaders of AI companies and tech giants for fuelling the rise of the modern AI movement. "You could come up with no women @nytimes? I have binders of them starting with @drfeifei," wrote tech journalist Kara Swisher in an X post on Sunday, referring to Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li. Li herself reposted Swisher's criticism of NYT on X, adding, "It's not about me, but all of us in AI, all of the incredible 'godmothers', pioneers, active researchers, students from all walks of life." I feel compelled to retweet this one by @karaswisher . Its not about me, but all of us in AI, all of the incredible godmothers, pioneers, active researchers, students from all walks of life. I also have binders of them, who have so inspired me &the world of AI for so long. https://t.co/dbzh6D6jWm Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) December 3, 2023 Li established ImageNet in 2009 as a massive dataset of images used for training AI, and has been described as a "godmother of AI" for her contributions to the field. Apparently it's ok to include "an internet philosopher and self-taught A.I. researcher" and... Musk of all people? But not women who actually made massive contributions to the field, from Fei-Fei Li to Doina Precup and Joelle Pineau...It's just so profoundly screwed up. Sasha Luccioni, PhD (@SashaMTL) December 3, 2023 The NYT list's selection criteria was also criticized by Sasha Luccioni, a researcher at the AI community Hugging Face. "Apparently it's ok to include 'an internet philosopher and self-taught A.I. researcher' and... Musk of all people? But not women who actually made massive contributions to the field, from Fei-Fei Li to Doina Precup and Joelle Pineau...It's just so profoundly screwed up," she wrote. Stanford professor Roxana Daneshjou also listed out women who could have been added to the list. "You literally erased all the heavy hitting women of AI and but included people who are more 'influencers,'" wrote Daneshjou. Story continues This is embarrassing @nytimes - you literally erased all the heavy hitting women of AI and but included people who are more influencers. This isnt hard. Where is @drfeifei? @jovialjoy? @YejinChoinka? @DaphneKoller? (And many that Im missing). https://t.co/kZIvZ4Eemg Roxana Daneshjou MD/PhD (@RoxanaDaneshjou) December 3, 2023 Others who criticized the list include tech investor Vinod Khosla and Toby Walsh, chief scientist of the University of New South Wales' AI Institute. The New York Times "Who's Who Behind the Dawn of the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement" article includes: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Larry Page, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, tech investor Peter Thiel, "godfather of AI" Geoffrey Hinton, and philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky. The New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, sent outside regular business hours. Read the original article on Business Insider AMD has extended its lease at its corporate campus on Southwest Parkway in Austin. AMD has renewed the lease at its corporate campus in southwest Austin. The company said the extension reaffirms its commitment to fostering innovation and investment in Austins semiconductor sector. The extended lease at The Summit at Lantana on Southwest Parkway "solidifies Austin as a vital hub for AMD business operations spanning research and development (R&D), engineering, sales, and corporate functions," AMD said in a news release. AMD occupies 443,000 square feet at the campus. The renewal was for more than 10 years. AMD declined to give an exact term for the extension. AMD employs more than 3,500 people in Austin, and globally has more than 25,000 employees. Originally built by AMD in 2008, The Summit at Lantana corporate campus has since been home to AMDs Austin operations. AMD sold the campus in 2013. The Summit at Lantana is now owned by AIMCo and is leased and managed by Austin-based HPI Real Estate Services & Investments. HPIs Sam Houston, Richard Paddock and J.D. Lewis represented the landlord on the lease extension. AMD was represented by CBREs John Gump and Nate Stricklen. "With their lease extension at The Summit campus on Southwest Parkway, AMD is continuing its dedication to the Austin community, its talented employees, and the advancement of semiconductor technology," said Sam Houston, office partner with HPI. "We are proud to service AMD as they continue their journey of innovation in our thriving city." This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: AMD's lease extension reaffirms Austin as "vital hub" for the company By Julia Payne BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Electric vehicle drivers hoping to top up their batteries at one of Repsol's 1,600 Spanish charging stations might well be disappointed, with nearly half lying dormant because they have no power connection. Such gaps are evident across the European Union, where last week the European Commission announced plans to upgrade the bloc's power grids. These are due to be implemented in 18 months and include addressing EV charging station power shortages. But despite the declarations of its leaders, red tape preventing progress towards greener transport in the EU is on the rise, industry groups and energy companies told Reuters, with permitting one of the major roadblocks. The ease of building an EV charging hub varies considerably country by country. One industry source said that in Germany a hub was held up for months over rules protecting a single tree, while another located on a busy highway had to wait 10 months for a noise evaluation before it gained approval. "Although the work of installing a fast and ultra-fast charging point requires only two to three weeks of work, due to different administrative requirements in Spain, the complete process ... can last from one to two years," Repsol said. Industry group ChargeUp Europe said that while the Commission recognised permitting was a problem, it had not proposed any concrete tools or actions. Specific guidelines for member states to accelerate permitting are only expected at some point over the next two years, the plan's timeline shows. This is slowing down the rollout of charging hubs across the 27-member bloc, putting EU targets to phase out petrol and diesel vehicles, as well as its broader climate goals, in peril. "The time needed for connecting the EV recharging points to the grid can indeed be seen as a barrier to accelerate the uptake of EVs and needs to be tackled," a Commission spokesperson said in an emailed response. Story continues The process for setting up a fast EV station has risen to an average of two years from six months in the last few years, four EV charging companies and the industry's representative said, as firms wade through myriad rules from federal to municipal level. "It's Kafka meets the energy transition. We have so many things working against Europe but we could fix this," Lucie Mattera, secretary general of ChargeUp Europe, told Reuters. Mattera said the number of EVs will grow faster than the total number of public charging stations which ChargeUp Europe estimates will rise by nine times by 2030, with EVs by ten. The electrification of transport is one of the key pillars underpinning the EU's goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050. To do so, it will ban sales of CO2-emitting vehicles from 2035 and wants to develop a network of EV charging stations. That ambition has created bottlenecks for power companies and regulators unprepared for the surge in demand in the EU, where so far only 5.4% of passenger cars run on alternative fuels, including electric, out of a total 286 million. "It's up to the member states now to really step up," Miguel Stilwell de Andrade, CEO of Portuguese energy firm EDP, said, adding: "There's just an avalanche of projects". GRIDLOCK This year, the EU adopted a law to install fast chargers by 2030 every 60 kilometres along designated road networks for passenger cars and every 100 km for heavy-duty vehicles. But charging developers say obtaining basic data about potential hubs is a major challenge, making investments hard. This involves finding out whether an average roadside rest stop has a single lamppost or enough cabling that connects to the broader grid. Hubs often require an extra electricity sub-station, which converts high voltage power into smaller units. The process then involves requests to power distribution companies (DSOs) to install more capacity. "Sometimes we have to send physical mail," said Peter Badik, co-founder of EV charging firm Greenway Network, which has set up 1,300 EV chargers in Slovakia, Croatia and Poland. "Even when they say yes, you don't know when they will do the upgrade," Batik said, adding there was so far no way to track how quickly a power company was building up capacity. Industry executives said the EU targets were set low and were therefore likely to be met, but might not meet demand for the growing EV fleet of cars and especially trucks. There is a strong industry impetus to build hubs for electric cars, but not yet for long-haul trucks and buses. These account for more than 25% of greenhouse gas emissions from EU road transport, which as a whole is responsible for a fifth of the bloc's emissions. BP, which expects to roll out more than 100,000 car and truck charging stations globally by 2030, said that in Germany alone, it has to deal with around 800 grid companies to set up fast hubs for both cars and trucks. "Many have individual requirements which can significantly hinder progress," Stefan van Dobschuetz, vice president of BP Pulse Europe, said, adding that was before other types of permits concerning noise and archaeology are applied for. "There is a clear need for more standardisation (of requirements for charging hubs)," BP's van Dobschuetz added. That call was echoed by ChargeUp Europe's Mattera who said guidelines from the Commission would likely help EU members align as the rate of new projects varies across the region. (Reporting by Julia Payne; Editing by Alexander Smith) FILE - European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, left, and Argentina's President Alberto Fernandez, exchange folders during a meeting at the government house in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tuesday, June 13, 2023. Argentinas outgoing government said Monday, Dec. 4, that it won't support the signing of a long-delayed trade deal between the European Union and the South American bloc Mercosur during a summit this week in Brazil even though the incoming Argentine government has expressed support for the deal. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko, File) (ASSOCIATED PRESS) BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) Argentinas outgoing government said Monday it won't support the signing of a long-delayed trade deal between the European Union and the South American bloc Mercosur during a summit this week in Brazil even thought the incoming Argentine government has expressed support for the deal. Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero said the agreement as currently written would restrict Argentinian exports. "It is a bad agreement that has a negative impact on manufacturing and agricultural exports, Cafiero said in an interview with a local radio station, excerpts of which were later released by the Argentine Foreign Ministry. Argentinas position goes against that of neighbor Brazil, which holds the presidency of Mercosur, and Spain, which holds the presidency of the EU. Both have expressed a desire to move forward with the trade treaty during the summit Thursday in Rio de Janeiro. The Argentine opposition may be short-lived, though. The incoming administration of Argentinas President-elect Javier Milei has already made clear it supports the agreement. Milei takes office Sunday. We have no objections; it is frankly desirable that it goes through, incoming Foreign Minister Diana Mondino said at a conference for the Industrial Organization of Argentina, a manufacturing trade group. Much better to have it than not to have it. Mondino said she realized there are objections to the agreement from certain sectors but expressed hope that Fernandez would push to sign the agreement this week. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday in Berlin, expressed hope that there could still be a breakthrough on the deal this week. Im not giving up, Lula said. A basic agreement between the sides was reached in 2019 that was supposed to be the first step in sealing the agreement. But it was never implemented amid fierce resistance on both sides of the Atlantic, including demands for protection of the rainforest in South America and concern over an influx of cheap goods in some European countries. Story continues Argentina has warned the countrys manufacturing sector would be negatively affected. Throughout our administration, we always proposed that the discussion on the agreement should be reopened because it did not reflect a balance where both blocs would benefit, Cafiero said. Argentina wont be the only obstacle though. Paraguay, which is taking over the rotating presidency of the Mercosur this week, appears to be leaning against the deal. Paraguay President Santiago Pena told local media Monday that some European nations are placing overly strict environmental requirements on the deal. We are already looking in another direction, Pena said. Environmental issues are what dominate the commercial discussion, and we believe that stems from a lack of understanding about our model for development, Pena said, adding that European nations are trying to impose measures that we think are not suitable for our own development. ____ Follow APs coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america (Bloomberg) -- Sign up for the Green Daily newsletter for comprehensive coverage of COP28 right in your inbox. Most Read from Bloomberg Bill Gates said the world probably wont meet the Paris Agreements goal of keeping temperature rise below 2C. But he praised COP28 for making progress on tackling climate change despite geopolitical tensions. Climate progress is moving ahead even though we won't meet our highest aspirations, he said in a Bloomberg TV interview at the annual United Nations meeting in Dubai, citing the biggest-ever attendance and new food and health initiatives. Keeping warming to 2C isnt that likely, he said. "Fortunately, if you stay below 3C, a lot of the ill effects that people have heard about don't happen unless you really are irresponsible and let it get up to the higher range. A planet that warms by 3C from pre-industrial levels could regularly expose up to 50 million people to temperatures that are beyond human survivability, a 2018 study in Lancet Planetary Health showed. New York City might experience three once-in-a-century flooding events every year while as many as 52 times more people would face dangerous heat in African cities. The amount of land destroyed by wildfires globally would double and the Amazon rainforest would turn into grassland. Read More: An Overheating Planet Requires Extreme Solutions In the Paris pact, nearly 200 countries agreed to limit global temperatures to well below 2 degrees, ideally to 1.5C, to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. But a recent report by the UNs environment program shows the world is instead on track to warm up to 2.9C with current country-level emissions reduction plans. Story continues Climate scientists consistently stress that there's no safe level of global warming, pointing to how dangerous impacts are already playing out in every corner of the globe today when global average temperatures have risen 1.2C from the pre-industrial era. Just this year alone, the warmest on record, a string of brutal wildfires, floods and extreme heat have claimed lives and reshaped communities. Gates cited nuclear fusion and fission as well as green steel as being among the solutions hes optimistic about. The Microsoft Corp. co-founder, who invests in dozens of clean-technology companies through Breakthrough Energy Ventures, said that meetings on the sidelines of COP28 are crucial for startups to get exposure to large players in industries that need to decarbonize, such as cement. This years summit, hosted by the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, has faced controversy for its embrace of the fossil fuel industry. Sultan Al Jaber, the oil executive overseeing the talks, argues that they need to be engaged in the conversation. Those who want a quicker move away from dirty energy say the industry is doing far too little to shift to alternatives. Read More: Big Oils Controversial Climate Pact at COP28 "We have to outcompete fossil fuels, Gates said. To do that properly, they shouldnt get subsidies and in fact a carbon tax over time should be put on. --With assistance from Zahra Hirji. (Adds UN report in fifth paragraph.) Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2023 Bloomberg L.P. AVAILABLE NOW FOR A LIMITED TIME, SAMRA ORIGINS SINGLE ORIGIN VOL. 1 AND SINGLE ORIGIN VOL. 2 SHOWCASE TWO ICONIC FLAVOR PROFILES OF ETHIOPIAN COFFEE OAKLAND, Calif., Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Blue Bottle Coffee and Abel Tesfaye aka "The Weeknd" are celebrating Ethiopia - the birthplace of coffee - with an offering of two Ethiopian single origin coffees available today for a limited time - Samra Origins Single Origin Vol. 1 and Samra Origins Single Origin Vol. 2. Released as part of Samra Origins, a brand and product line created by Blue Bottle, Tesfaye and his XO record label to celebrate Ethiopian culture and coffee excellence. When Tesfaye and his mother delved into the creation of the Samra Origins blend , a moment of intrigue unfolded. During a cupping where multiple roast levels were tasted side by side, they were captivated by the nuanced notes of the lighter variety. Inspired, Blue Bottle deconstructed the blend, unveiling two distinct profiles: the finest Ethiopian natural and washed processed coffees. BLUE BOTTLE COFFEES PINNACLE EXPERIENCE, BLUE BOTTLE STUDIO, TO OPEN IN LOS ANGELES Every cup of coffee can be traced back to a coffee plant in Ethiopia. As the beginning of all things coffee. It's home to countless undiscovered varieties, complex terroir, and the most experienced coffee growers in the world. Ethiopia is home to several distinct coffee regions, each known for its unique coffee profiles. For decades, the country has produced exceptional coffee known for its vibrant and expressive flavors resulting from two distinctive processing methods - washed and natural processing - which result in two drastically different flavor profiles. Natural processing dates back centuries to the first-ever coffee grown and processed in Ethiopia. Its deep roots within the country make it a hallmark of their coffee, known for big bright fruit and floral flavors. While natural processing is a well-known profile for Ethiopian coffee, the washed process is equally iconic. These coffees tend to be lighter with notes of tart fruit and bright florals. Story continues Samra Origins Single Origin Vol. 1 showcases natural processed Ethiopian coffee at its finest, offering sweet, bold fruit flavors and softer floral notes. Sourced from Hambela Estate, the natural process of drying the bean inside of the coffee cherry creates a cup that is bright, complex, and very fruit-forward. Each sip unveils floral aromatics of rose and hibiscus that transitions into full, thick notes of strawberry and raspberry. Samra Single Origin Vol. 2 is washed processed and has a lighter, more delicate acidity and citrus notes. This coffee comes from the Gedeb, a region of Ethiopia known for producing some of the most expressive washed processed coffees in the world. Light and playful with a balance of citrus and jasmine, the initial aroma of the coffee is similar to Earl Grey tea with a delicate yet pronounced brightness perfectly joining clear and crisp notes of fresh fruit. Blue Bottle sourced these two single origin coffees from family-owned Ethiopian coffee producer and long-time partner, METAD . Founded by Aman Adinew, METAD is a family-owned company that has invested heavily in coffee processing infrastructures that allow them to create the best coffees in Ethiopia. METAD's direct relationships with its farmers provide unparalleled transparency within the coffee supply chain thanks to Adinew's innovations and the team at METAD that puts community and honesty first. METAD's "seed to cup" philosophy allows buyers to purchase a wide variety of Ethiopian coffees that are grown, harvested, and transported all under METAD's supervision and certified by their coffee quality laboratory. The quality of these two Samra Origins coffees and the fact that we know exactly where they come from is only possible through Adinew's tireless devotion to advancing Ethiopia's coffee trade, while upholding its rich history of coffee excellence. Samra Origins Single Origin Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 are available in limited quantities at samraorigins.com beginning December 4. Each single origin coffee will be sold for $22 per 8 oz bag of whole bean. In honor of Samra Origins, Blue Bottle donated to the XO Humanitarian Fund , administered by World Food Program USA, to support lifesaving emergency operation in areas around the world experiencing food insecurity, with a special focus on Ethiopia. For full details on Samra Origins and to sign up to be among the first to be notified about upcoming product drops, please visit www.samraorigins.com . Follow along on Instagram via @samraorigins . About Blue Bottle Blue Bottle Coffee was founded by James Freeman in Oakland, California, in 2002 with a simple yet revolutionary idea: to serve delicious coffee, roasted fresh and brewed to order, sourced from the finest coffee farms. Today, Blue Bottle is a global network of cafes in the US and Asia. We are the leader in specialty coffee, driven by our obsession for quality and our commitment to environmental health. Our belief is simple and our goal unchanged: to connect the world to delicious coffee, because delicious coffee makes life more beautiful. Follow Blue Bottle on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, or visit bluebottlecoffee.com for more information. About The Weeknd Filtering R&B and pop through an ambitious widescreen lens, The Weeknd is one of the most compelling artists of the 21st century. He is currently the most listened to artist in the world on Spotify (108M+ monthly listeners) and is a top 10 artist of all time for RIAA singles. His 2020 album After Hours is the #1 most streamed R&B album of all time (followed by his 2016 album Starboy at #2), and his 80's nostalgic track "Blinding Lights" was named the new No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 song of all time, surpassing Chubby Checker's 1960 hit "The Twist." Contact: Blue Bottle Coffee press@bluebottlecoffee.com BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE AND ABEL TESFAYE AKA THE WEEKND HONOR ETHIOPIAN COFFEE EXCELLENCE WITH SAMRA ORIGINS SINGLE ORIGIN RELEASES BLUE BOTTLE COFFEE AND ABEL TESFAYE AKA THE WEEKND HONOR ETHIOPIAN COFFEE EXCELLENCE WITH SAMRA ORIGINS SINGLE ORIGIN RELEASES Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/blue-bottle-coffee-and-abel-tesfaye-aka-the-weeknd-honor-ethiopian-coffee-excellence-with-samra-origins-single-origin-releases-302004039.html SOURCE Blue Bottle Coffee Man holds laptop computer as cyber code is projected on him in this illustration picture LONDON (Reuters) -Britain has no records or evidence to suggest that networks at the Sellafield nuclear site were the victim of a successful cyber attack by state actors, the government said on Monday following a report by the Guardian newspaper. The Guardian reported that Sellafield, which carries out nuclear fuel reprocessing, nuclear waste storage and decommissioning, had been hacked by cyber groups closely linked to Russia and China. "Our monitoring systems are robust and we have a high degree of confidence that no such malware exists on our system," the government said. "This was confirmed to the Guardian well in advance of publication, along with rebuttals to a number of other inaccuracies in their reporting." Sellafield, controlled by the government's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, is located in northwest England and has 11,000 employees. In a separate statement, Britain's Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) also said it had seen no evidence that state actors had hacked its systems as the paper had described. But the regulator said Sellafield was currently not meeting certain high standards of cyber security it required, adding that it had placed the plant under "significantly enhanced attention. "Some specific matters are subject to an ongoing investigation process, so we are unable to comment further at this time," the ONR said. The Guardian report said the ONR was "believed" to be preparing to prosecute individuals at Sellafield for cyber failings. (Reporting by Muvija M; editing by Michael Holden and Mark Heinrich) British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad (KLSE:BAT), might not be a large cap stock, but it saw significant share price movement during recent months on the KLSE, rising to highs of RM10.04 and falling to the lows of RM8.94. Some share price movements can give investors a better opportunity to enter into the stock, and potentially buy at a lower price. A question to answer is whether British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad's current trading price of RM9.38 reflective of the actual value of the small-cap? Or is it currently undervalued, providing us with the opportunity to buy? Lets take a look at British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhads outlook and value based on the most recent financial data to see if there are any catalysts for a price change. Check out our latest analysis for British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad What's The Opportunity In British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad? The stock seems fairly valued at the moment according to my valuation model. Its trading around 11% below my intrinsic value, which means if you buy British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad today, youd be paying a fair price for it. And if you believe that the stock is really worth MYR10.52, then theres not much of an upside to gain from mispricing. Furthermore, British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhads low beta implies that the stock is less volatile than the wider market. What does the future of British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad look like? Future outlook is an important aspect when youre looking at buying a stock, especially if you are an investor looking for growth in your portfolio. Buying a great company with a robust outlook at a cheap price is always a good investment, so lets also take a look at the company's future expectations. Though in the case of British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad, it is expected to deliver a relatively unexciting earnings growth of 4.4%, which doesnt help build up its investment thesis. Growth doesnt appear to be a main reason for a buy decision for the company, at least in the near term. Story continues What This Means For You Are you a shareholder? It seems like the market has already priced in BATs future outlook, with shares trading around its fair value. However, there are also other important factors which we havent considered today, such as the financial strength of the company. Have these factors changed since the last time you looked at the stock? Will you have enough conviction to buy should the price fluctuates below the true value? Are you a potential investor? If youve been keeping an eye on BAT, now may not be the most optimal time to buy, given it is trading around its fair value. However, the positive outlook means its worth diving deeper into other factors such as the strength of its balance sheet, in order to take advantage of the next price drop. So if you'd like to dive deeper into this stock, it's crucial to consider any risks it's facing. To that end, you should learn about the 2 warning signs we've spotted with British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad (including 1 which is significant). If you are no longer interested in British American Tobacco (Malaysia) Berhad, you can use our free platform to see our list of over 50 other stocks with a high growth potential. 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. Road construction projects are happening all around the state all the time. There's the new Interstate 95 North project, the tireless work on the Pell Bridge, and the new roundabout at the Henderson Bridge. You get the idea. This week for What and Why RI it's a smaller Rhode Island Department of Transportation project that sparked a question, about a new structure under construction in the grassy area next to I-95. What is being built in the intersection of I-95 and the Airport Connector in Warwick? a What and Why RI reader wrote in to ask, referring specifically to the wall-metal frame that recently went up. Heres what we found out. What are they building? The structure is the new Rhode Island sign, welcoming people who just flew in from T.F. Green International Airport and bidding a bon voyage to those about to leave. Its one part of the bigger Airport Connector Project. The project included 4 miles of paving 1 mile on the Airport Connector and 3 miles of Post Road between Coronado Road and Warwick Avenue and adding high-visibility pavement markers and new sidewalks and eliminating some drop-off areas. It also beautifies the area, replacing the guardrail with a grass swale and planting more than 400 trees, perennials and shrubs, including Autumn Blaze maples, blue spruce, ginkos, Hummingbird Summersweet bushes, rhododendron and forsythia. For thousands of visitors to Rhode Island, the Airport Connector is Rhode Islands welcome mat, Gov. Dan McKee said in a press release for the July 2022 groundbreaking. These improvements will make vital safety improvements while providing a great first impression of our great state. What and Why RI: What's the story behind the 'Gnomes' mural on I-95? We tracked down the artist to ask How much did the project cost? The project costs $12.9 million, according to the state. Its part of the $92 million allocated to 2022 paving projects by RIDOT in 2022, and a bigger commitment, made in 2022, to spend $492 million over five years to pave Rhode Islands worst roads, as McKee put it. Story continues The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was one source of funding for the roadwork. Building RI: We've all seen the construction near Providence on I-95. How long until it's finished? When will the project be done? The project was originally set to be completed by June 2023 but was delayed. It should be wrapping up soon, though. The project is on track to reach substantial completion by the end of the year, pending fabrication of some signage and the wave concept art, said RIDOT spokesman Charles St. Martin. Some of those items may be done over the winter. What and Why RI is a weekly feature by The Providence Journal to explore our readers' curiosity. If you have a question about Rhode Island, big or small, email it to klandeck@gannett.com. She loves a good question. This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Airport Connector improvements at I-95 intersection include RI signage Transparency Market Research Caustic soda is used in the production of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology products. Advancements in these industries and the development of new drugs can contribute to the growth of the caustic soda market. Wilmington, Delaware, United States, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Transparency Market Research Inc. -The global caustic soda market was estimated to have acquired US$ 39.8 billion in 2021. It is anticipated to register a 3.7% CAGR from 2022 to 2031 and by 2031, the market is likely to gain US$ 59.3 billion . Construction materials, such as glass and concrete, use caustic soda in their production. Increased construction activities, especially in developing regions, are expected to accelerate the demand for caustic soda. Request Sample of the Report: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=1291 Implementation of digital technologies and Industry 4.0 practices in manufacturing processes can lead to increased efficiency and productivity in the caustic soda industry. Key Findings of the Market Report Caustic soda is a key raw material in the production of various organic chemicals. The rising demand for organic chemicals in industries such as pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals can positively impact the caustic soda market. The growing emphasis on renewable energy sources, such as solar panels and batteries, which use caustic soda in their manufacturing processes, can create new opportunities for the market. Caustic soda is used in the food processing industry for applications like cleaning and peeling fruits and vegetables. The demand for processed food is anticipated to increase, as the global population grows, benefiting the caustic soda market. The desalination of seawater is a growing industry, and caustic soda is used in certain desalination processes. The demand for desalination is expected to rise, with water scarcity becoming a significant concern in various regions. Trends for Caustic Soda Market Caustic soda, or sodium hydroxide, is a versatile chemical used in various industries such as pulp and paper, textiles, alumina, soaps and detergents, and water treatment. Growing demand in these industries can drive market growth. The paper and pulp industry is a major consumer of caustic soda, and the demand for paper products is expected to rise with economic development and increasing consumerism. Caustic soda is a crucial component in the production of alumina, which is used in the manufacturing of aluminum. The growth of the aluminum industry, driven by infrastructure development and automotive production, is expected to boost the demand for caustic soda. The textile industry, as well as various chemical manufacturing processes, relies on caustic soda. The demand for caustic soda is likely to increase, as these industries expand. Story continues Global Market for Caustic Soda: Regional Outlook Various reasons are propelling the growth of the caustic soda market in different regions. The regions include, North America A resurgence in manufacturing activities in North America, driven by factors such as reshoring and increased focus on domestic production, is expected to contribute to higher demand for caustic soda as it is a key industrial chemical. The chemical industry is a major consumer of caustic soda. Growth in the chemical sector, including the production of various chemicals and petrochemicals, is expected to stimulate the demand for caustic soda. Caustic soda plays a crucial role in the aluminum industry, and any growth in the demand for aluminum products, such as in the automotive and aerospace sectors, can positively impact the caustic soda market. Asia Pacific The growth of the chemical manufacturing sector in Asia Pacific, including the production of plastics, textiles, and other chemicals, can significantly contribute to the demand for caustic soda. The textile and apparel industry, which extensively uses caustic soda in processes like mercerization and dyeing, is a major driver for the caustic soda market. Asia Pacific is a key hub for textile manufacturing. Customize this Report According To Your Needs: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=CR&rep_id=1291 Recent Developments In 2022, the chemical division of Occidental Petroleum explored the possibility of revamping select chlor alkali plants to enhance their capacity for the production of higher value caustic soda. The strategic move aimed at significantly augmenting its existing capacity to align with the increasing demand for its primary products. Global Caustic Soda Market: Key Players The following companies are well known participants in the global caustic soda market: The Dow Chemical Company Olin Corporation AkzoNobel N.V. Reliance Industries Limited Occidental Petroleum Corporation Formosa Plastics Group Shin-Etsu Chemicals Co. Ltd. Axiall Corporation INEOS ChlorVinyls Bayer MaterialScience AG Meghmani Finechem Limited BorsodChem Global Caustic Soda Market Segmentation Application Alumina Pulp & Paper Soaps & Detergents Organics Inorganics Water Treatment Others (including Textiles, Petroleum Processing, and Food Processing) Region North America Latin America Europe Asia Pacific Middle East & Africa Get Exclusive Discount on Caustic Soda Market: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=D&rep_id=1291 Browse more Related Reports by TMR: Smart Fabrics Market - The global industry was valued at US$ 3.3 Bn in 2021. It is estimated to advance at a CAGR of 19.6% from 2022 to 2031 and reach US$ 21.8 Bn by the end of 2031. Pigments Market - The global pigments market is prognosticated to reach a value of US$ 53.82 Bn by the end of 2031, notes a report by Transparency Market Research (TMR). In addition, the global market study on pigments finds that the market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.59% during the forecast period, from 2022 to 2031. About Transparency Market Research Transparency Market Research, a global market research company registered at Wilmington, Delaware, United States, provides custom research and consulting services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insights for thousands of decision makers. Our experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools & techniques to gather and analyses information. Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports. Contact: Nikhil Sawlani Transparency Market Research Inc. CORPORATE HEADQUARTER DOWNTOWN, 1000 N. West Street, Suite 1200, Wilmington, Delaware 19801 USA Tel: +1-518-618-1030 USA Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453 Website: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Blog: https://tmrblog.com Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.com The Western Azerbaijan Community made a statement in response to the speech of the European Union representative on approach to issues based on ethnic and religious grounds at the OSCE Ministerial Council, Azernews reports. Addressing the OSCE Ministerial Council, the representative of the European Union raised the issue of "the rights and security of Garabagh Armenians, including the right to return, the Western Azerbaijan Community said in a statement. It is completely unacceptable for the European Union to interfere in Azerbaijan's internal affairs, approach issues based on ethnic and religious grounds, and not touch upon the right of return of Azerbaijanis deported from Armenia. Such biased statements show that the European Union cannot act as an honest mediator in the process of normalizing relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the Community added. Ideally, your overall portfolio should beat the market average. But in any portfolio, there will be mixed results between individual stocks. So we wouldn't blame long term Chin Well Holdings Berhad (KLSE:CHINWEL) shareholders for doubting their decision to hold, with the stock down 24% over a half decade. 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. View our latest analysis for Chin Well Holdings Berhad In his essay The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville Warren Buffett described how share prices do not always rationally reflect the value of a business. 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. Looking back five years, both Chin Well Holdings Berhad's share price and EPS declined; the latter at a rate of 23% per year. The share price decline of 5% per year isn't as bad as the EPS decline. The relatively muted share price reaction might be because the market expects the business to turn around. The image below shows how EPS has tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail). It's probably worth noting that the CEO is paid less than the median at similar sized companies. It's always worth keeping an eye on CEO pay, but a more important question is whether the company will grow earnings throughout the years. This free interactive report on Chin Well Holdings Berhad's 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. 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. Arguably, the TSR gives a more comprehensive picture of the return generated by a stock. In the case of Chin Well Holdings Berhad, it has a TSR of -6.6% for the last 5 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. This is largely a result of its dividend payments! Story continues A Different Perspective Chin Well Holdings Berhad shareholders are down 15% for the year (even including dividends), but the market itself is up 5.2%. Even the share prices of good stocks drop sometimes, but we want to see improvements in the fundamental metrics of a business, before getting too interested. Regrettably, last year's performance caps off a bad run, with the shareholders facing a total loss of 1.3% per year over five years. We realise that Baron Rothschild has said investors should "buy when there is blood on the streets", but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality business. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand Chin Well Holdings Berhad better, we need to consider many other factors. Case in point: We've spotted 3 warning signs for Chin Well Holdings Berhad you should be aware of. If you are like me, then you will not want to miss this free list of growing companies that insiders are buying. Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on 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. Despite the odds being stacked against Coactive AI Co-Founder Cody Coleman, he has prevailed. Humble Beginnings During Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2023, Coleman spoke with AFROTECH to detail his humble beginnings and his journey to launching a startup. He was born within the prison walls of Monmouth County Correctional Institution in Freehold, NJ, and was swiftly placed in foster care before being adopted by his maternal grandparents. Additionally, he has no knowledge of his father to this day. Colemans mother was released from prison after one year of being incarcerated and she moved into her parents home, living under the same roof as Coleman. My grandparents, they had a big heart. They wanted her to come live with us and the family, but we didnt really have anything. We just grew up on my grandparents social security, and then my biological mom got on welfare for me. It was starting from nothing, Coleman told AFROTECH. Spark For Computer Science What would become his compass was education. Coleman attended a public school in South Jersey in a low-income area where, he says, his schools ranking was 300 out of 322. However, he developed a keen interest in computers and gaming while in elementary school, which was supported by his half-brother, Shawn Clifton, who was 18 years older. As a freshman in high school, Coleman built his first computer. Even on my best days, my future looked really bleak. So, computers actually started out for me as an escape, Coleman explained. I was really interested in video games, and I could just lose myself in this completely other world. Then my oldest brother, he started at college, but he dropped out of college, and got a job working at the University of Pennsylvania. He helped me build my first computer and really showed me that I could go past playing video games and actually build and create things using a computer. Thats where the first spark for computer science ignited for me. Story continues Coleman recognized the power of computers as they had the ability to impact the masses, reaching billions globally with the click of a button. At his core, he says he has always been a builder, and this reckoning served as the blueprint for wanting to start his own company in the future. I was like addicted to legos and things like that. I was glued to the Science and Discovery channel. I just loved the idea of like building things, he said. After watching so much stuff, I wanted to go from an idea to actually creating something that was like tangible, that would have an impact on the world. And I thought the best way to do that would be to create a business. With his vision close to the sleeve, Coleman would aspire to attend Ivy League schools, such as Princeton University. He became salutatorian of his class and was accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a full ride in 2009. In 2013, Coleman graduated with a 4.9 GPA and obtained a bachelors degree in electrical engineering and computer science. Learning The Ropes Of Becoming A Founder However, Coleman was also looking to gain management experience because he wanted to become a founder. Rather than double major, he purchased several business books to acquire the knowledge necessary to start his business in 2021. One degree at MITs probably hard enough. So let me focus on electrical engineering, computer science, and get the management experience outside of class, Coleman detailed. So, I read a bunch of business books on everything, from books like Blue Ocean Strategy about category creation, books on marketing, and The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. I [used] my free time to get to a point where I could actually have that shot of doing it and actually be able to start a company. Starting Coactive AI is a dream come true to me. For me, this is something that I didnt think was possible. Coactive AI The company, created alongside MIT graduate William A. Gaviria Rojas, reflects a next wave of innovation in artificial intelligence (AI). According to its LinkedIn profile, the company helps data practitioners and data-driven teams extract information from unstructured image and video data, integrating it into the realm of Structured Query Language. When you think about how enterprises work with imaging video today, they have to tag the raw images and videos through either human or machine annotations, then load those annotations, which are nothing more than like a SEM file with a bunch of words into their systems, and then search based off those annotations, Coleman said. So its this, tag, load, search (TLS) process, but thats a super expensive and slow, and just error-prone process that really hinders companies abilities to execute on the problems that they can solve and the value that they can reach out of their data. He added, What Coactive does is we leverage AI to flip that process on its head with a load search tag (LST) approach, where were able to load and index the raw images and videos themselves, be able to process the pixel data, the pixels themselves, and make it searchable with no metadata, no tags whatsoever. Democratizing AI Drawing on his experiences from working with the DAWN Project (Data Analytics for Whats Next) during his Ph.D. studies at Stanford University, as well as his contributions at Pinterest, Meta, and Google, Coleman is now working to democratize AI with the startup, which he hopes will one day hit unicorn status. I could see this thing that I loved about computer science in comparison to any other form of engineering; [it] was the fact that you didnt need to have that much to get started and it was very accessible to anyone, he expressed. And I could see in 2016 that there was a path where AI, like the future of computer science and the future of kind of innovation, was going down a route where its only the most well-funded organizations and teams. Id be able to actually unlock the power of AI and be able to create this next wave of innovative applications that would impact our everyday life and generate tremendous amounts of wealth. He continued, So thats where kind of the inspiration of Coactive was, to take the infrastructure and emerging playbook around AI that I was fortunate enough to see through my work at Stanford and through my work at Pinterest, Meta, and collaborating with folks at Google and create that foundation for actually being able to leverage this trifecta that is happening now between the big data movement, large language models, and then just like high-performance systems, and do all the heavy lifting in terms of infrastructure and tooling so that you dont need to have a Ph.D., you dont need to have kind of any special expertise. We can enable people that see problems and experience problems to remain experts, to actually go out and tackle those challenges. $14M Series A Round Coactive AIs vision was emboldened by a $14 million Series A round in March 2023 backed by investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, SV Angel, AME Cloud Ventures, Fei-Fei Li, Jure Leskovec, Eli Collins, Cloud All Star Fund, Next Play Capital, and Exceptional Capital, a news release mentions. The funding has supported the startups operations, expansion, and development plans. Cole notes that he opted away from the traditional route of securing funding, which he describes as a shotgun wedding, and it ultimately paid off. We took that time up front to do more of a relationship raise than the traditional fundraising tour, Coleman told AFROTECH. So, it took a lot more time to do it. It wasnt one of these like intense like Shark Tank kind of moments in terms of fundraising. It took us time to do it, but the time, has just paid dividends as we continue to scale and grow the company. AWS Activate Coleman also adds the connections he made attending Standford were helpful as he was in the heart of Californias Silicon Valley, a breeding ground for various major technology companies. Additionally, he emphasizes the exposure he gained through AWS Activate in 2021. The company website mentions the program is designed to support startups by providing critical resources and expert guidance, with the aim of providing scalable and cost-effective infrastructure. With AWS weve never felt like we were alone, from the very beginning, Coleman reflected. They were offering services to help us build faster and like get up and run faster. That level of customer obsession and support as youre building a company is critical Weve built a multimodal asset platform that makes it easy to search, filter and analyze visual content. And now were going out into the market, and its just been amazing to have kind of the co-marketing and co-selling support. NEW DELHI, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The winners of the prestigious HR Asia Best Companies to Work for in Asia India 2023 awards have been announced by HR Asia, a leading publication in the human resources industry. In its third year, the 2023 India programme has recognised 14 outstanding organisations that have excelled in creating exemplary work environments for their employees. Congratulations to the Winners of 2023 Hong Kong HR Asia Best Companies to Work in Asia This year's theme is "Celebrate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion." HR Asia has taken a significant step forward in recognising and promoting workplaces that foster diversity, equity, and inclusion by placing these values at the forefront of the selection process. This year's nominations saw a significant increase, with 155 companies competing for the coveted title of Best Companies to Work for in Asia India 2023. Furthermore, a staggering 2,910 survey participants shared their insights and experiences, emphasising the region's extensive participation and engagement. "We are thrilled to witness such overwhelming enthusiasm and support for the HR Asia Best Companies to Work for in Asia India 2023 awards," said William Ng, Editor-in-Chief of HR Asia. "The increased number of nominations and survey participants demonstrates the commitment of organisations in India to prioritise employee satisfaction and well-being." Three new categories were added this year to reflect the organisation's commitment to recognising excellence and innovation in the human resources domain. The HR Asia Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Awards seek to recognise organisations that have made significant strides towards creating diverse and inclusive workplaces. The HR Asia Most Caring Company Awards recognise organisations that have demonstrated exceptional care for their employees, particularly during difficult times. Finally, the HR Asia Digital Transformation Awards recognise organisations that have successfully used technology to transform their human resource practices. Story continues The HR Asia Best Companies to Work for in Asia India 2023 award winners have shown an unwavering dedication to employee satisfaction, welfare, and development. These organisations have set the standard for others to follow by fostering a positive work environment that promotes growth and excellence. The award covers fourteen markets across the region including mainland China, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Japan, Korea, Macau, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam making this the largest recognition programme and survey in the region for employee engagement. For more information about the HR Asia Best Companies to Work for in Asia India 2023 awards and a complete list of winners, please visit https://hr.asia/awards/ LIST OF WINNERS OF HR ASIA BEST COMPANIES TO WORK FOR IN ASIA 2023 (INDIA EDITION) IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER: A. MENARINI INDIA PVT LTD APL LOGISTICS INDIA CARGILL INDIA PVT LTD CEVA LOGISTICS INDIA PVT LTD COLLIERS INDIA CONCENTRIX DAKSH SERVICES INDIA PVT LTD DSV AIR & SEA PVT LTD EY HERSHEY INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED KONE ELEVATOR MARSH INDIA INSURANCE BROKERS PRIVATE LIMITED SKODA AUTO VOLKSWAGEN INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED TITAN COMPANY LIMITED WTW INDIA GLOBAL DELIVERY CENTER WINNERS OF HR ASIA DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION AWARDS 2023 APL LOGISTICS INDIA CARGILL INDIA PVT LTD WINNERS OF HR ASIA MOST CARING COMPANY AWARDS 2023 A. MENARINI INDIA PVT. LTD CARGILL INDIA PVT LTD About BUSINESS MEDIA INTERNATIONAL Business Media International is a subsidiary of Audience Analytics Limited (1AZ.SG), a regional leader in promoting growth for companies in Asia through data-driven brands and initiatives. We own renowned media brands such as SME Magazine, HR Asia, Capital Asia, Energy Asia, Logistics Asia, TruthTV, and CXP Asia as well as business impact assessment brands such as SME100, HR Asia Best Companies to Work for in Asia, Golden Bull Awards and CXP Asia Best Customer Experience Awards. We organise various exhibitions and have the proprietary software-as-a-service Total Engagement Assessment Model in our portfolio. Adrian Cheng Marketing Manager Business Media International Mobile No.: 012-2692701 Email: adrian@businessmedia.asia Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/diversity-thrives-inclusion-prevails-hr-asia-best-companies-to-work-for-in-asia-india-2023-honors-14-champions-of-an-inclusive-workforce-302004139.html SOURCE Business Media International Elon Musk (left) and DeepMind cofounder and CEO, Demis Hassabis (right). Kirsty Wigglesworth/POOL/AFP via Getty Images; Toby Melville/WPA Pool via Getty Images Elon Musk once told DeepMind's Demis Hassabis about his plans to colonize Mars, per NYT. But Musk was left dumbfounded after Hassabis said that AI might destroy his colonies on Mars. Musk invested in DeepMind after that conversation with Hassabis, per The Times. DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis scored an investment from Elon Musk after he pointed out the shortcomings in Musk's plans to colonize Mars. Musk told Hassabis that he'd hoped humanity could avoid the threats from living on Earth by colonizing Mars, per a story by The New York Times published on Sunday. According to The Times, Musk was chatting with Hassabis after giving the latter a tour of the SpaceX headquarters in 2012. Hassabis told Musk that the plan would work if artificial intelligence didn't make the trip to Mars. According to Hassabis, AI being in the mix would lead to the human colony's destruction, too. Musk invested in Hassabis' AI company soon after along with Peter Thiel so he could find out more about the tech, per The Times. Google acquired DeepMind in 2014 for $500 million. Musk has since become a vocal critic of the dangers posed by AI. In March, Musk told a Tesla shareholder during the company's investor day that he was "a little worried about AI stuff." "I think it's something we should be concerned about. We should need some kind of regulatory authority or something, overseeing AI development and making sure it's operating within the public interest," Musk said then. Musk also has his own AI startup, xAI, which he announced in July. In November, Musk unveiled xAI's new chatbot, Grok, framed as a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT. According to the xAI website, the company aims to advance humanity's "collective understanding of the universe." Representatives for Musk and DeepMind did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours. Read the original article on Business Insider Renowned tech mogul and Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk opened up about his deep-seated personal struggles during a recent interview at the DealBook Summit 2023 with Aaron Ross Sorkin of The New York Times. Musks revelations offer a glimpse into the mental challenges he faced as a child and how they shaped his life and career. Dont Miss: The VC firm that backed Apple before its IPO in 1980 is focusing on AI Here's how you can do the same with $1,000. Funders on this alternative asset platform are earning more than 14% annualized consignment profit funding Pro consignment opportunities. Facing An Existential Crisis At A Young Age At age 12, Musk experienced what he describes as an existential crisis, leading him to contemplate the meaning of life and even suicide: It is all pointless? Why not just commit suicide? Why exist? Musks early readings, which delved into religious texts and German philosophy, played a significant role in shaping his thought process during his youth, potentially contributing to feelings of depression. These intellectual explorations, while enriching, may have also spurred deeper existential inquiries and challenges for him at that time. A shift occurred when Musk read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The book reshaped his outlook, steering him to a realization that lifes purpose isnt a black-and-white answer but an exploration of profound questions. My motivation then was, well, my life is really finite ... but if we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness then we are better able to figure out what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe and maybe we can find out what is the meaning of life, he said. Trending: With returns as high as 300%, its no wonder this asset is the investment choice of many billionaires. Uncover the secret. The Creative Storm Within Musk explained his mind is often engulfed in a very wild storm of relentless ideas, a constant surge of creativity and thought. He said these inherent traits were exacerbated by a challenging childhood marked by intense bullying, which shaped his mental landscape. Story continues His mother, Maye Musk, has also spoken about the difficult family dynamics during her son's upbringing, highlighting the alleged abuse by his father, Errol Musk. This tumultuous background profoundly influenced Musks early life, as shared by Maye during the promotion of her book A Woman Makes a Plan. Channeling The Inner Chaos Musk exhibited exceptional intellectual capabilities from a young age. He read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica by age 9 and taught himself programming in just three days, eventually selling a video game he created when he was 12. Despite facing significant personal challenges, Musk has harnessed his mental demons to fuel his extraordinary achievements. These demons of the mind are, for the most part, harnessed to productive ends, he said, acknowledging his significant contributions to technology and entrepreneurship. Once in a while, they, you know, go wrong. Read Next: The vodka market is set to soar at 5.6% CAGR to $40 billion by 2030. Join Lit Vodkas journey for a piece of the premium spirits pie. This brokerage offers custom rewards for users to switch the biggest reward so far for 1 user is $19,977.48. Will yours beat it? "ACTIVE INVESTORS' SECRET WEAPON" Supercharge Your Stock Market Game with the #1 "news & everything else" trading tool: Benzinga Pro - Click here to start Your 14-Day Trial Now! This article Elon Musk Reveals He Struggles With 'Demons Of The Mind' And Questioned His Existence: 'Is It All Pointless? Why Exist?' originally appeared on Benzinga.com . 2023 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Elon Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015 but left the company in 2018, citing a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla. Kirsty Wigglesworth/POOL/AFP via Getty Images; Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images Elon Musk said OpenAI needed to be quicker with its work before departing from the company, per NYT. Musk left OpenAI in 2018, citing a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla. He has since become a vocal advocate for a cautious approach toward AI innovation. Elon Musk had some choice parting words for OpenAI's staff before he left the company in 2018. The billionaire cofounded the AI company in 2015 but left in 2018, citing a conflict of interest with his work at Tesla. When Musk announced his departure to the company's employees, he told staff that OpenAI needed to hasten its progress, according to a Sunday report from The New York Times. Musk's suggestion that OpenAI speed things up was met with pushback from an OpenAI research, The Times reported, citing three anonymous sources who say they were at the meeting. The researcher told Musk that Musk's suggestion was impulsive and overhasty, per The Times. The billionaire left the meeting after calling the OpenAI researcher a "jackass," The Times reported. That Musk actually wanted OpenAI to move faster, not slower, is interesting in light of how he's styled himself as a vocal advocate for a cautious approach toward AI innovation. In March, Musk signed an open letter that called for a six-month pause on AI development. The letter, which was also signed by Steve Wozniak and Pinterest cofounder Evan Sharp, said that there was a need to step back "from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities." "AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production," Musk told Fox News in April, adding that the technology "has the potential of civilization destruction." Musk also announced his own AI startup, xAI in July. The company's website says it strives to "accelerate human scientific discovery" with AI technology. And in November, Musk revealed xAI's Chat-GPT rival, Grok. Musk claimed in a post on his social media platform X that Grok had "a massive advantage over other models" because it had real-time access to X. Representatives for Musk and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours. Read the original article on Business Insider Brian Roberts is taking the concept of Buying Black to new heights. Black Pantry According to Startland News in Kansas City, MO, the entrepreneur is looking to create a hub for Black-owned businesses through his company Black Pantry, which has expanded to a second location. The concept originated in 2020 while Roberts was on his honeymoon, per Kansas City Magazine. While preparing for a picnic, he hoped to support Black-owned businesses. Me and my wife were having a picnic and we wanted to support Black businesses, and we were talking about the lack of availability to support those businesses, Roberts told the magazine. You really had to drive the scope of the city. At the same time, there wasnt a large number of trendy Black businesses in up-and-coming areas. So I was like, Im going to try something crazy. Im going to get all these products I see online that are high-quality and that I know everyone is looking for right nowbecause everyone wants to support Black-owned businessesand Im going to bring it to people. Roberts put pen to action through Black Pantry, which launched in the fall of 2020 and debuted as a pop-up retail business in November, selling across Kansas City. By April 2021, the vision had scaled into a split retail shared with Made in KC. Black Business Hub Now, Roberts is taking Black Pantry to new heights after signing a five-year lease for a 1,500-square-foot retail space located on Troost, per Startland News. Weve become a trusted space, where it feels like home, Roberts told the outlet. The art on the walls looks like me, the books on the tables look like me, and the people who work here look like me. So now I have a sense of home, even outside of my home. Whats more, customers should expect additional Black-owned products from companies including The Prospect KC, Matties Foods, Vine Street Brewing, Rally Gin, and Kin Seltzer. The space will also feature a coffee shop, wine bar, and outside patio. Story continues I want to encourage businesses to take the next step. I know its scary, so heres a progressive in-between step so that they have their own sense of ownership, Roberts expressed to Startland News. Vision Looking ahead, Roberts still believes he can strengthen the work around Black Pantry even further. He hopes more Black-owned business will see the promise of the $162 million, mixed-use Troost Village development. This is the cornerstone, and the true foundation of the community. The challenge I have with this is getting the city to understand how big of a deal this could be, Roberts told the outlet. Because my thought is not just one space, my thought is to scale out multiple spaces. So economically, as I scale, all the entrepreneurs scale at the same time. SAN FRANCISCO, December 04, 2023--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Francisco Partners, a leading global investment firm that specializes in partnering with technology and media businesses, announced its growth investment and funding of the combination of Hal Leonard, the legendary sheet music publisher and music-learning provider, and Muse Group, an industry leader in music content and creation. The partnership of the two companies creates a leading global music learning content platform, solidifies its competitive position in the music creation industry, and allows for significant growth potential to lead content and education in both the traditional and digital form. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204141638/en/ Hal Leonards exclusively licensed, premium arrangements include the worlds most iconic artists and scores from Taylor Swift and The Beatles to John Williams and Disney soundtracks. Combined with over 3 million expert and community-created tabs and compositions, 300 million annual visitors and over 40 million accounts on Muse Groups Ultimate Guitar and MuseScore, the joint business now includes a content library of over 5.5 million scores, tabs, books, video courses, backing tracks, and presets. "This partnership will create more music makers worldwide and will lead to even more advances in music education technology, while also expanding ways creators and rights holders can make their musical works more widely available," said Larry Morton, Hal Leonards Chairman. "Hal Leonard and Muse have been working closely together in commercial partnerships for over fifteen years and have built trust and mutual respect over that time. Combining the strengths of both companies is a truly exciting prospect, full of potential ways to grow the music industry in new directions." "Our passion for improving the lives of all musicians has always been at the heart of Muse Group and were immensely excited to partner with the Hal Leonard team who share that passion," said Eugeny Naidenov, CEO of Muse Group. Story continues "We are excited to partner with Muse Group and Hal Leonard to help enable their combination and usher in the joint companys next stage of growth. The combined business will offer its customers unparalleled content and technology focused on music learning across digital, print, and educational channels," said Matt Spetzler, Partner & Co-Head of Europe at Francisco Partners. "We are thrilled to provide a tailored capital solution in support of this transaction and are excited to back the innovative growth strategy of the combined company," added Lee Rubenstein, Managing Director at Francisco Partners. While Hal Leonard will join Muse Group, both companies will retain their respective headquarters in the U.S. and Cyprus, respectively, and distinct operational expertise. The combined company will apply Francisco Partners investment to accelerate organic and inorganic growth and is actively looking to partner with innovators in the sector. Hal Leonard was advised by Lincoln International and JEGI CLARITY as its financial advisors, and O'Melveny & Myers LLP as its legal advisor. Muse Group was advised by Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C. as its legal advisor. Francisco Partners was advised by Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP as its legal advisor. About Muse Group: Muse Group is a visionary, international team of music lovers and audio obsessives, empowering millions of creatives to play, produce and compose every day. The company began life in 1998 as Ultimate Guitar, a tab sharing site that grew into the worlds most popular online musician community. Muse Group now includes products such as MuseScore, Audacity, StaffPad and more. About Hal Leonard: Hal Leonard is the world-leader in sheet music publishing, and boasts a storied history of providing music learners with the very best arrangements of popular music for over 70 years. With experienced teams based all over the globe, Hal Leonard also supplies books, instruments, gear and software to millions of educators and learners worldwide. About Francisco Partners Francisco Partners is a leading global investment firm that specializes in partnering with technology and technology-enabled businesses. Since its launch nearly 25 years ago, Francisco Partners has invested in more than 400 technology companies, making it one of the most active and longstanding investors in the technology industry. With approximately $45 billion in capital raised to date, the firm invests in opportunities where its deep sectoral knowledge and operational expertise can help companies realize their full potential. For more information on Francisco Partners, please visit www.franciscopartners.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204141638/en/ Contacts For Muse Group Jack Sutton, Head of Communications at Muse Group j.sutton@mu.se For Francisco Partners Whit Clay / Sarah Braunstein wclay@sloanepr.com / sbraunstein@sloanepr.com Straits Research - Market Research Strategy | Strategy Consulting | Business Research | Business Consulting | Market Research Asia Pacific accounted for the largest market share and is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 10.1% during the forecast period. Factors such as an increase in the middle- and upper-income classes and a growing number of senior citizens looking for skincare products are expected to boost the market growth. New York, United States, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Acne vulgaris is a prevalent skin disorder that affects around 85 percent of the world's population (aged 11 to 30). The significant prevalence of acne among adults and adolescents is expected to fuel market expansion. In addition, the negative social stigma associated with acne and the increased usage of cosmetics by both men and women, particularly in emerging nations, are anticipated to fuel the market's expansion. Download Free Sample Report PDF @ https://straitsresearch.com/report/anti-acne-cosmetics-market/request-sample High Psychological Burden Associated with Acne to Drive the Global Anti-Acne Cosmetics Market According to Straits Research, The global anti-acne cosmetics market size was worth USD 3,800 million in 2021 and is estimated to reach an expected value of USD 8460 million by 2030 at a CAGR of 9.3% over the forecast period (2022-2030). Acne is recognized to substantially impact a patient's mental health in addition to its effect on the individual's physical appearance. Acne is connected with depression, anxiety, poor self-image, low self-esteem, poor quality of life, and loneliness, among other psychological difficulties. According to a study released by Reuters, acne patients are 46% more likely to suffer from serious depressive illness than those without acne. Moreover, according to a study published in the International Journal of Women's Dermatology, almost 64% and approximately 89% of women with moderate and severe acne reported lower self-esteem and increased embarrassment. These psychological difficulties are projected to encourage patients to seek cosmetic solutions to enhance their appearance and self-esteem, ultimately boosting market expansion. Story continues In addition, adolescents with acne are known to avoid school/college due to low self-esteem, which has a negative impact on their academic performance. In contrast, adults avoid going to the office due to embarrassment and have fewer career options, as occupations that emphasize physical appearance, such as modeling, are unavailable to them. Consequently, the detrimental influence of acne on a person's employment is projected to motivate individuals to seek medical/cosmetic therapy, thereby driving market expansion. Increase in Middle-Class Population to Provide Opportunities for the Global Anti-Acne Cosmetics Market European Commission projects that by 2030, the global middle-class population will exceed 5 billion. India is expected to be the largest consumer market in the world, while more than 70 percent of the Chinese people would be middle class. In addition, it is anticipated that middle-class spending will increase from nearly USD 37 trillion in 2017 to USD 64 trillion in 2030, accounting for roughly a third of GDP growth. This is primarily attributable to the growing middle-class population in emerging economies. It is projected that the growth of the middle class will enhance purchasing power, consequently increasing spending on non-essential things, such as cosmetics and other luxury items. In addition, market participants are targeting Asian middle-class consumers to capitalize on the expanding consumer base. For example, Shiseido is expanding its production capacity to fulfill the rising demand caused by the expansion of the middle class in Southeast Asia and China. These actions by market participants are also projected to stimulate market expansion. Key Highlights By end-use, the global anti-acne cosmetics market is segmented into dermatology clinics and medspa. The medspa dominated the market and is estimated to register a CAGR of 9.6% during the forecast period. Regional Analysis of the Global Anti-Acne Cosmetics Market: By region, the global anti-acne cosmetics market is segmented into Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, Latin America, Middle East & Africa. Asia Pacific dominated the market and is estimated to register a CAGR of 10.1% during the forecast period. A rise in the middle- and upper-income classes and an increase in the number of senior individuals seeking skincare products are anticipated to stimulate market expansion. According to the company's annual report, Asia Pacific held the most significant proportion of L'Oreal's global cosmetics business and accounted for 57% of its skincare market in 2019. The growth of luxury skincare goods enriches the Asian demand for skincare products. Major skincare firms are attempting to enhance their sales distribution networks in populous nations with great market development potential, such as India and China. Europe Is the second largest region. It is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 9.6%. According to the British Medical Journal, around 3.5 million appointments with general practitioners in the UK are for acne each year. On the quality of life of acne sufferers, issues such as loss of confidence, impairment of everyday social and job function, and depression have been identified. News 18 reports that 92% of British women use facial cleansers, including face wash (55%), wipes (54%), micellar water, or toner (27%). Additionally, the percentage of women using day creams climbed from 59% in 2017 to 66% in 2018. According to the news, Korean beauty regimes may have a significant influence on British women's adoption of multi-step skincare procedures. This highlights the population's yearning for beautiful skin and the country's growing understanding of skincare. Popular face treatments for acne include lotions, masks, and serums containing various active substances, such as lotions, shows, and serums. Growing awareness of the significance of skin health and its long-term well-being in the United Kingdom is a significant factor propelling the anti-acne cosmetics market. Competitive Landscape Some of the key companies in the global anti-acne cosmetics market are Neutrogena, Clinique, Murad, Kose, LaRochPosay, Mentholatum, Glowbiotics, Beautyhealth Company, Perricone MD, Revision Skincare, Sente, Skinbetter Science, Skinmedica, L'Oreal, Proactiv, and Vichy. Market News September 2022 - LOreal signed an agreement to acquire Skinbetter Science, a physician-dispensed American skincare brand backed by cutting-edge, dermatological science, combining patented efficacious ingredients with luxurious sensorial textures. July 2022 - The North Asia Zone of L'Oreal Group is the first of the company's global zones to achieve carbon neutrality across all operating sites, plants, distribution centers, offices, and research & innovation centers throughout five geographic markets: Mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. This accomplishment represents a significant milestone in the company's efforts to combat the urgent issue of climate change. Global Anti-Acne Cosmetics Market: Segmentation Product Type Mask Creams & Lotions Cleansers & Toners Others Gender Women Men End-use Dermatology Clinics Medspa By Distribution channel Retail sales Direct tender Others By Region North America Europe Asia Pacific Latin America Middle East & Africa Get Detailed Market Segmentation @ https://straitsresearch.com/report/anti-acne-cosmetics-market/segmentation About Straits Research Pvt. Ltd. Straits Research is a market intelligence company providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision-makers. Straits Research Pvt. Ltd. provides actionable market research data, especially designed and presented for decision making and ROI. Whether you are looking at business sectors in the next town or crosswise over continents, we understand the significance of being acquainted with the clients purchase. We overcome our clients issues by recognizing and deciphering the target group and generating leads with utmost precision. We seek to collaborate with our clients to deliver a broad spectrum of results through a blend of market and business research approaches. For more information on your target market, please contact us below: Phone: +1 646 480 7505 (the U.S.) +91 8087085354 (APAC) +44 208 068 9665 (the U.K.) Email: sales@straitsresearch.com Follow Us: LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Speaker of Milli Majlis Sahiba Gafarova met with Chairman of the Senate of the Czech Parliament Milos Vystrcil. The Chairman of the Senate highlighted the inter-parliamentary ties in terms of the development of relations between the two countries, that Azerbaijan is a friendly country for the Czech Republic, Azernews reports. Milos Vystr?il noted the importance of energy issues in our time and said that they highly value the energy co-operation between Azerbaijan and his country. He also expressed intentions to increase trade turnover between the two countries. Sahiba Gafarova recalled that this visit is her first official visit to the Czech Republic as Chairman of the Milli Majlis of Azerbaijan, and expressed confidence that this visit will contribute to further strengthening and expansion of relations between the two countries. The Speaker noted that strengthening contacts between our parliamentarians will serve both to deepen co-operation between our legislative bodies, provide objective information to the public of the two countries, and prevent the spread of false information between our countries. At the meeting, Speaker Sahiba Gafarova informed about the current situation in the region, reconstruction and construction works carried out by our country in the region. Besides, the other side was informed about military and political provocations committed by Armenia against Azerbaijan, including mine threats, anti-terrorist measures implemented by Azerbaijan within 24 hours in September this year, Azerbaijan's initiatives on normalisation of relations and signing a peace treaty. Sahiba Ghafarova said that the resolutions based on biased and false information about the current situation have damaged the peace process. Porphyry & Skarn-Type System Discovery Confirmed with Extensive High-Grade Copper, Silver & Gold Mineralisation; Several Overlimit Analyses Underway LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Golden Metal Resources plc ('Golden Metal' or the 'Company') (LSE:GMET)(OTCQB:GMTLF), a strategic mineral exploration and development company focused on Nevada, USA, is pleased to announce extensive high-grade copper, silver and gold mineralisation from laboratory assay testing undertaken following the recently completed ground exploration at the Company's 100% owned Garfield project located within the prolific Walker Lane Mineral Belt in Nevada, USA ("Garfield" or the "Project"). HIGHLIGHTS Golden Metal previously announced the potential for both porphyry and skarn-type deposits at Garfield's 'High-Grade Zone' as detailed in the market announcement released on 27 September 2023 which may be viewed through the following link: https://www.londonstockexchange.com/news-article/GMET/garfield-project-update/16141093 As a result, Golden Metal launched an immediate follow up ground exploration programme and the findings from this work are considered by the Company to be very promising with mineralisation styles and lithologies confirming that Garfield hosts significant large-scale skarn and porphyry type copper, silver and gold mineralisation. The mineralisation now confirmed through the rock sample laboratory assay results extends over a large footprint which indicates the potential for Garfield to host a material copper deposit including: High-Grade Zone: >1% copper results returned over an area of approximately 1500 x 500m (open in multiple directions); and across the entire Project: >1% copper results returned over an area of approximately 3000 x 1500m (open in multiple directions). A total of 32 rock samples were taken from within the Garfield Project with laboratory assay testing confirming: 6 samples returning overlimit copper (Cu) (>10,000ppm or 1%) and 14 samples returning >3,000ppm Cu (0.3%); 2 samples returning overlimit gold (Au) (>1g/t) with six samples returning >0.3g/t Au, and; 9 samples returning >5g/t silver (Ag) with a peak of 37.1g/t Ag. Garfield is located within a north-south trending copper-gold porphyry/skarn belt which extends southward from Hawthorne. Porphyry deposits are characterised by lower grade but bulk tonnage deposits and are one of the worlds most important sources of copper and silver as well as gold. Based on this, the analytical method used had upper limits of 1% (or 10,000ppm) for copper and 1g/t for gold. As outlined above, several samples exceeded the upper limits therefore necessitating overlimit assays which are currently underway and a follow-on update is expected to the market shortly. Story continues Oliver Friesen, CEO of Golden Metal, commented: "Today's announcement demonstrates that our 100% owned Garfield Project has the potential to host a material copper deposit. Previous exploration work demonstrated an extensive copper footprint at Garfield, however the latest findings have far exceeded the Company's expectations. "To find extensive high-grade copper mineralisation across this footprint size points to the exceptional opportunity Garfield represents to Golden Metal Resources. "We will endeavour to get a further update out to the market as quickly as possible which I strongly believe will even better highlight the scale of the opportunity at Garfield." MEDIA Figure 1: Sample Number 723310. Fine-grained intermediate intrusive with stockwork quartz veining. Sample returned >1g/t Au, 29.9ppm Ag, along with overlimit copper >10,000ppm (1%). PROPERTY OWNERSHIP Golden Metal holds a 100% interest in the Garfield Project through its wholly-owned Nevada operating company, Golden Metal Resources LLC. A 2% Net Smelter Return Royalty ("NSR Royalty") Interest, of which 1% can be bought back at any time for US$1,000,000, is payable to Sunrise Resources plc (LON:SRES). The NSR Royalty covers the original Garfield Project claims as well as a 1 mile radius outside of those claims which covers roughly half of the current 'High-Grade Zone' footprint. COMPETENT PERSON STATEMENT The technical information contained in this disclosure has been read and approved by Mr Nick O'Reilly (MSc, DIC, MIMMM, MAusIMM, FGS), who is a qualified geologist and acts as the Competent Person under the AIM Rules - Note for Mining and Oil & Gas Companies. Mr O'Reilly is a Principal consultant working for Mining Analyst Consulting Ltd which has been retained by Golden Metal Resources plc to provide technical support. This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of EU Regulation 596/2014 (which forms part of domestic UK law pursuant to the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018). Forward Looking Statements This announcement contains forward-looking statements relating to expected or anticipated future events and anticipated results that are forward-looking in nature and, as a result, are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, such as general economic, market and business conditions, competition for qualified staff, the regulatory process and actions, technical issues, new legislation, uncertainties resulting from potential delays or changes in plans, uncertainties resulting from working in a new political jurisdiction, uncertainties regarding the results of exploration, uncertainties regarding the timing and granting of prospecting rights, uncertainties regarding the timing and granting of regulatory and other third party consents and approvals, uncertainties regarding the Company's or any third party's ability to execute and implement future plans, and the occurrence of unexpected events. Actual results achieved may vary from the information provided herein as a result of numerous known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors. For further information visit www.goldenmetalresources.comor contact the following: Golden Metal Resources plc Oliver Friesen (CEO) Tel:+44 (0) 20 7583 8304 Cairn Financial Advisers LLP Nominated Adviser Sandy Jamieson/Jo Turner/Louise O'Driscoll Tel: +44 20 7213 0880 First Equity Limited Broker Jonathan Brown/Jason Robertson Tel: +44 20 7374 2212 THE PROJECTS Pilot Mountain Project The Pilot Mountain project is an advanced exploration and mineral resource definition stage project located in Mineral County in western Nevada. The project covers an area of 14.80 km2 (3,656.1 acres) and is located 200km southeast of Reno and 18km east of Mina, Nevada. It is well situated for the supply of power, water and skilled labour and proximity to transport infrastructure in Mineral County and is centred around four existing mineral deposits: Garnet; Good Hope; Gunmetal and Desert Scheelite, all of which possess significant skarn-style tungsten-copper-silver-zinc mineralisation. The Pilot Mountain project consists of 176 active lode mining claims and 4 filed mill site claims. The four mill site claims filed at the former Dunham mill site have secure access to groundwater supply sufficient for the proposed project. Kibby Basin Lithium Project The Kibby Basin Project covers two claim packages which are prospective for lithium brine mineralisation. The southern claim package is less than 250m from a 2022 drillhole which returned a significant interval (169m) of lithium brine mineralisation which was determined to be open in all directions. The Project is less than 5km to the southeast of the Company's flagship Pilot Mountain Project. Golconda Summit Project Golden Metal is the operator of the Golconda Summit project, which is held under an earn-in right to acquire up to 100 per cent. of the project from the mineral claim owner pursuant to an option agreement. The Golconda Summit project is an exploration stage gold and silver project located in Humboldt County and situated at the confluence of the Getchell and Battle Mountain - Eureka metallogenic trends, and consists of 44 lode mining claims, covering a total area of approximately 3.22 km2 (795.4 acres) located approximately 27km east of Winnemucca. Garfield Project The Garfield Project is an exciting copper-gold-silver prospect consisting of 39 lode mining claims covering 3.23 km2 (797.9 acres) located in Mineral County, Nevada, approximately 14km due east of the town of Hawthorne and 120km due west-northwest of Tonopah. Exploration to date has included detailed geochemical sampling and follow up analysis which highlighted the presence of both skarn-type and porphyry style mineralisation and alteration at the 'High-Grade Zone'. Further mapping, prospecting and rock sampling was recently completed with results confirming presence of high-grade copper, silver and gold mineralisation. Stonewall Project The Stonewall project is an exploration stage gold-silver property prospective for epithermal gold-silver mineralisation. The property consists of 19 lode mining claims covering 1.59 km2 (392.5 acres) located on the northern flank of Stonewall Mountain, on the western edge of the Nellis Airforce Range Restricted Access Area, in Nye County, Nevada, approximately 24km south-east of the historic gold mining town of Goldfield and 60km due south of Tonopah. This information is provided by RNS, the news service of the London Stock Exchange. RNS is approved by the Financial Conduct Authority to act as a Primary Information Provider in the United Kingdom. Terms and conditions relating to the use and distribution of this information may apply. For further information, please contact rns@lseg.com or visit www.rns.com. SOURCE: Golden Metal Resources PLC View source version on accesswire.com: https://www.accesswire.com/812787/golden-metal-resources-plc--garfield-potential-for-tier-1-copper-deposit Victoria Hasselbring, left, All Faiths Food Bank; Bob Meade, CEO, HCA Florida Sarasota Doctors Hospital; Joe Rudisill, CEO, HCA Florida Englewood Hospital; Michael Ehrat, CEO, HCA Florida Fawcett Hospital; and Veronica Thames, board chair, Doctors Hospital. Leaders from HCA Florida Englewood Hospital, HCA Florida Fawcett Hospital and HCA Florida Sarasota Doctors Hospital recently toured All Faiths Food Bank in Sarasota to learn more about how the organization collects and provides food for the community. The CEOs from each hospital brought along more than 100 pounds of canned goods and a $10,000 donation. The money will be used to help provide food and assistance to residents in need, especially during the upcoming holiday season. Throughout November, caregivers at each local hospital donated canned food and nonperishable items as part of HCA Healthcares nationwide Healthy Foods for Healthier Tomorrows initiative. Last year, HCA Healthcare colleagues across the country provided 878,000 nutritious meals for local food banks by donating food or making financial contributions. This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Hospitals unite to collect food, donate money to All Faiths Food Bank Key Insights Using the 2 Stage Free Cash Flow to Equity, Adriatic Metals fair value estimate is AU$6.16 Adriatic Metals is estimated to be 49% undervalued based on current share price of AU$3.12 Analyst price target for ADT is US$4.08 which is 34% below our fair value estimate How far off is Adriatic Metals PLC (ASX:ADT) from its intrinsic value? Using the most recent financial data, we'll take a look at whether the stock is fairly priced by projecting its future cash flows and then discounting them to today's value. The Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model is the tool we will apply to do this. Models like these may appear beyond the comprehension of a lay person, but they're fairly easy to follow. We would caution that there are many ways of valuing a company and, like the DCF, each technique has advantages and disadvantages in certain scenarios. For those who are keen learners of equity analysis, the Simply Wall St analysis model here may be something of interest to you. Check out our latest analysis for Adriatic Metals Is Adriatic Metals Fairly Valued? We are going to use a two-stage DCF model, which, as the name states, takes into account two stages of growth. The first stage is generally a higher growth period which levels off heading towards the terminal value, captured in the second 'steady growth' period. To start off with, we need to estimate the next ten years of cash flows. Where possible we use analyst estimates, but when these aren't available we extrapolate the previous free cash flow (FCF) from the last estimate or reported value. We assume companies with shrinking free cash flow will slow their rate of shrinkage, and that companies with growing free cash flow will see their growth rate slow, over this period. We do this to reflect that growth tends to slow more in the early years than it does in later years. A DCF is all about the idea that a dollar in the future is less valuable than a dollar today, so we need to discount the sum of these future cash flows to arrive at a present value estimate: Story continues 10-year free cash flow (FCF) forecast 2024 2025 2026 2027 2028 2029 2030 2031 2032 2033 Levered FCF ($, Millions) US$99.3m US$207.8m US$168.6m US$125.7m US$102.8m US$90.3m US$83.2m US$79.2m US$77.0m US$76.0m Growth Rate Estimate Source Analyst x4 Analyst x3 Analyst x2 Analyst x1 Est @ -18.19% Est @ -12.11% Est @ -7.85% Est @ -4.87% Est @ -2.79% Est @ -1.33% Present Value ($, Millions) Discounted @ 9.2% US$90.9 US$174 US$129 US$88.4 US$66.2 US$53.3 US$44.9 US$39.2 US$34.9 US$31.5 ("Est" = FCF growth rate estimated by Simply Wall St) Present Value of 10-year Cash Flow (PVCF) = US$753m We now need to calculate the Terminal Value, which accounts for all the future cash flows after this ten year period. For a number of reasons a very conservative growth rate is used that cannot exceed that of a country's GDP growth. In this case we have used the 5-year average of the 10-year government bond yield (2.1%) 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 9.2%. Terminal Value (TV)= FCF 2033 (1 + g) (r g) = US$76m (1 + 2.1%) (9.2% 2.1%) = US$1.1b Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV)= TV / (1 + r)10= US$1.1b ( 1 + 9.2%)10= US$451m The total value, or equity value, is then the sum of the present value of the future cash flows, which in this case is US$1.2b. The last step is to then divide the equity value by the number of shares outstanding. Relative to the current share price of AU$3.1, the company appears quite good value at a 49% 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 The Assumptions The calculation above is very dependent on two assumptions. The first is the discount rate and the other is the 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 Adriatic Metals 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 9.2%, which is based on a levered beta of 1.205. 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 Adriatic Metals Strength Debt is well covered by earnings. Weakness Shareholders have been diluted in the past year. Opportunity Expected to breakeven next year. Trading below our estimate of fair value by more than 20%. Threat Debt is not well covered by operating cash flow. Has less than 3 years of cash runway based on current free cash flow. Moving On: Although the valuation of a company is important, it shouldn't be the only metric you look at when researching a company. It's not possible to obtain a foolproof valuation with a DCF model. Rather it should be seen as a guide to "what assumptions need to be true for this stock to be under/overvalued?" For example, changes in the company's cost of equity or the risk free rate can significantly impact the valuation. Can we work out why the company is trading at a discount to intrinsic value? For Adriatic Metals, we've compiled three fundamental factors you should consider: Risks: For instance, we've identified 3 warning signs for Adriatic Metals (1 is significant) you should be aware of. Future Earnings: How does ADT's growth rate compare to its peers and the wider market? Dig deeper into the analyst consensus number for the upcoming years by interacting with our free analyst growth expectation chart. Other High Quality Alternatives: Do you like a good all-rounder? Explore our interactive list of high quality stocks to get an idea of what else is out there you may be missing! PS. Simply Wall St updates its DCF calculation for every Australian 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. SUNRISE, Fla., December 04, 2023--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jazwares, a leading global toy company, today announced it has further expanded its global presence with the acquisition of Big Balloon, Australia's most innovative full-service toy distributor. Big Balloon has been a key player in the Australian toy industry for more than 12 years, championing big and small brands through to retail success via an extensive network of partnerships with major and independent players. "The Australian toy market is a $1.7B industry. The acquisition of Big Balloon is an investment in our future global growth with a solid partner in the Australian market," said Judd Zebersky, Founder and CEO of Jazwares. "Chris Loverso is an excellent manager and we are fortunate to have him and his entire team become a part of the Jazwares family." Zebersky continued, "Jazwares Australia will have a major impact on the toy industry in the long-term, with the teams laser focus on Jazwares brands and business, adding value to all retail partners and consumers." Arthur Ferreira, Senior Vice President of International Sales and Marketing added, "Jazwares has worked with Big Balloon for eight years now. We will build on that foundation to further strengthen local relationships with established global licensing partners, providing a closer connection to the end consumer. And we will continue to work closely with our third-party distribution partners around the world to consistently deliver results." Big Balloon Co-Founder Chris Loverso will serve as Managing Director of Jazwares Australia. "The companys leadership, combined with the cultural alignment and our mutual passion for brands, made this the natural evolution for both our businesses. As team members, not just partners, we will be able to add our extensive experience and expertise in the Australian marketplace to add value and continue to grow the market-leading Jazwares brands and the long-serving partners we proudly represent in Australia," said Loverso. Story continues About Jazwares Jazwares, a Berkshire Hathaway company, is a leading global toy manufacturer with an award-winning, robust portfolio of wholly owned and licensed brands. Founded in 1997, Jazwares celebrates imaginative play with a progressive focus on identifying new and relevant trends to transform into high-quality products for consumers of all ages. Jazwares engages consumers through innovative play experiences with popular brands such as Squishmallows, Pokemon, Star Wars, CoComelon, Fortnite, AEW, Adopt Me!, Hello Kitty, and many more. In addition to toys, offerings also include Metaverse gaming, costumes, and products for pets. Headquartered in Sunrise, Florida, Jazwares has offices worldwide and sells its products in over 100 countries. For more information, visit www.jazwares.com and follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204696201/en/ Contacts Sara Rosales Jazwares srosales@jazwares.com (Bloomberg) -- One of the chipmaking industrys small but indispensable suppliers is sinking deeper in debt because its refusing to raise prices to cover mounting capex costs. Most Read from Bloomberg Osaka-based Fuso Chemical Co. is bearing the cost to help churn out bigger volumes of sophisticated chips without asking customers for more. Thats despite holding a more than 90% share of the worlds silica used to polish silicon wafers and counting deep-pocketed heavyweights Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Samsung Electronics Co. and Intel Corp. as customers. At issue is a deep-seated fear among suppliers about risking years-long relationships with big clients and creating openings for new technological workarounds. In addition to that power dynamic, Japanese suppliers also contend with decades of deflation thats weighed down domestic customers end-prices. Fuso Chemical, which has a market value of roughly $1 billion, would need to double its prices to keep pace with capex plans, but such a move would be seen as a betrayal by customers, President Shinichi Sugita said in an interview. We would be called a traitor, the 68-year-old said. Shares slid as much as 3.4% in Tokyo on Monday, their biggest intraday drop in a month. The companys cash flow is deteriorating as it spends record sums on new factory lines to meet demand. Wider adoption of smart products and artificial intelligence is accelerating the need for ever-more powerful semiconductors, while US-China tensions are prompting chipmakers to build new production lines for geopolitical contingencies. With prices rising only enough to pay for higher materials costs, the company borrowed 20 billion ($136 million) from banks in April, the first time in years that it didnt have enough cash on hand to pay for a silica capacity ramp up. Story continues We used to make capital investments every four years or so, but now we need to spend every year to keep up, Sugita said. No matter how much we earn, it all goes to pay off debt. Founded in 1957, Fuso Chemical is one of a handful of Japanese companies controlling niche links in the global chipmaking supply chain but are unwilling to offend customers by asking for price increases. In an industry where relationships are built over decades, executives often cite the discomfort such negotiations cause. But theyre hitting the limits of cost cuts and their struggles to make capex targets are morphing into an unlikely risk for global chip production. After 10 years, 20 years of stagnant pricing, you lose the ability to raise prices, Toyo Securities analyst Hideki Yasuda said. Even bigger companies like Murata Manufacturing Co., the worlds biggest supplier of ceramic capacitors, and Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., the worlds largest supplier of silicon wafers, are struggling to raise prices, a stark contrast to overseas components and materials makers, he said. Best known for malic acid used in soft drinks and snacks, Fuso Chemicals real specialty is ultra-high purity colloidal silica, an ingredient in the slurry that chipmakers use to buff silicon wafers. For decades, the company has provided tailor-made silica for each customers unique blend of slurry, made up of nanoscale particles of specific textures, shapes and densities. In a business where the margin of error allowed is less than one nanometer, Fuso Chemical can make the delicate tweaks necessary to adjust to the days temperature and humidity, a knowhow thats difficult for competitors to replicate, Ichiyoshi Research Institute analyst Mitsuhiro Osawa said. Fuso Chemicals complete control of silica particles and its ability to make the chemical in mass quantities is unbeatable, he said. To meet demand, Fuso Chemical plans to beef up capacity by 50% in July 2025, compared with March 2023. Thats expected to cost 50 billion, about 2.5 times its annual operating profit. This business is growing unsustainable, Sugita said. We are living hand-to-mouth. Some respite is coming from Prime Minister Fumio Kishidas administration, which has pledged billions of dollars to bolster Japans chip sector. The countrys economy ministry has promised to pay for as much as half the cost of big domestic capex plans, and Fuso Chemical may be able to secure government support for roughly 30% of the 10 billion cost to expand its Kyoto facilities, a company spokesperson said. In another effort to address Japanese chemicals firms lack of price-negotiating clout, state-backed fund Japan Investment Corp. said in June it would buy out photoresist maker JSR Corp. That move may catalyze more consolidation among suppliers, Chief Executive Officer Eric Johnson said. But while acknowledging that government subsidies are not a long-term solution, Sugita said Fuso Chemical is not interested in selling itself or its silica business. We want to keep doing the silica business by ourselves, he said. Instead, the company wants to find new sources of revenue to help it keep pace with silica capital expenditures, although lower cash levels are hampering its ability to do so via an acquisition, he said. The recent post-pandemic slump in chip demand was a blessing, giving the company more time to accumulate revenue to finance its next phase of factory expansion, Sugita said. If our factory stops operating, no one would be able to make chips, he said. (Updates with share reaction in fifth paragraph) Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2023 Bloomberg L.P. (Bloomberg) -- South Korean battery stocks rose Monday after the US released guidelines designed to limit electric car makers from sourcing battery materials from China. Most Read from Bloomberg Ecopro BM Co., which produces cathode-active materials, surged as much as 26% in Seoul trading, while SK IE Technology Co., which makes separators used in EV batteries, rose 14%. L&F Co. jumped 8.3% and LG Energy Solution Ltd. the biggest battery maker outside China gained 1.8% in Seoul trading. In contrast, Chinas Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., the worlds largest battery maker, fell 2.6% to trade at its lowest since March 2021. The Biden administrations rules, announced Friday, aim to increase supply-chain security by blocking EV manufacturers from sourcing battery materials from China and other foreign adversaries. The guidelines, which were required as part of a deal to extend the $7,500 tax credit through Bidens signature climate law, establish a 25% ownership threshold for a company or group to be classified as a foreign entity of concern, government speak for businesses or groups owned or controlled by US geopolitical foes. Read More: US Sets Limits on Chinese Content to Receive EV Tax Credits Hana Securities said in a note that the restriction of licensing deals between US automakers and Chinese battery companies would be good for South Korean battery firms. For example, Ford Motor Co. had planned to license CATLs lithium iron phosphate battery technology for use in a planned $3.5 billion EV battery plant. Work on the controversial factory was suspended in September. Some Korean companies, however, have partnerships in which Chinese firms have stakes of more than the 25% threshold to be classified as a foreign entity of concern. They include LG Chem Ltd., Posco Holdings Inc. and Ecopro Materials Co., which have established, or are planning, joint ventures with Chinese companies to produce battery materials in South Korea. Vehicles containing any battery components manufactured or assembled by so-called foreign entity of concerns wont qualify for the tax credit. Story continues LG Chem shares dropped as much as 3.2% on Monday and Posco Holdings slid as much as 2.1%. Representatives from South Koreas trade ministry met with battery companies on Saturday and said they would help them diversify supply chains for key materials. Read More: Chinese Firms Are Seeking Korean Partners to Skirt US EV Rules Those ventures were set up as an attempt to skirt the restrictions, given that South Korea has a free-trade agreement with the US, and batteries made there and then installed in US-made electric cars may qualify for the tax breaks. South Korean companies may now look to restructure those deals to meet the new guidelines. Cathode maker Posco Future M Co. has clauses in contracts to change stakeholdings for future joint ventures with Chinese partners if neccesary, according to a text message from the company. Posco Future has two ventures with a Chinese firm to produce EV battery materials and may use them for regions outside US, it said. There are still unclear clauses in the guidelines, said James Oh, vice president at SNE Research. We cant technically say whether private companies in China, like CATL, are under effective control of the Chinese government or not. Chinese battery firm Gotions largest shareholder is Volkswagen how can we say they are under the Chinese Communist Partys control? --With assistance from Youkyung Lee. (Adds chart, updates share prices. An earlier version of this story erroneously said Ecopro Materials shares fell.) Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2023 Bloomberg L.P. dennisvdw / Getty Images/iStockphoto Think you can guess which places travelers with a high net worth are choosing not to visit in 2024? Some of these travel destinations might surprise you. GOBankingRates spoke with Janet Semenova, co-founder of luxury travel agency, Boutique Travel Advisors. Semenova, who manages travel for high-net-worth clients, shared where her luxury and concierge clients are not traveling next year and how her agency is working to reroute their travel plans. Read: 8 Tips to Fly Business Class for the Price of Economy Find Out: How To Get Cash Back on Your Everyday Purchases Check out these three surprising destinations wealthy clients arent booking for 2024 travel. Sponsored: Open a new checking account and earn early paycheck access; up to 2 days early with Discover Cashback Debit with Early Pay Egypt Initially, Egypt was one of the top luxury travel destinations for 2024. Semenova said this was because of the countrys alluring history, diverse landscapes, extraordinary resorts and warm hospitality. Travel in Egypt is nuanced and typically includes multiple destinations which require intra-country flights, transfers and boating experiences, said Semenova. The logistical complexity of Egyptian travel underscores the importance of ensuring travelers have highly vetted guides and ground suppliers with real-time knowledge. However, Semenova added Egypts emerging popularity began prior to the start of the conflict in Israel. Currently, she said the agency is shifting away from Egypt and revising its destination strategies. This is due to the rapidly evolving situation in Israel and along the Egyptian border with Gaza, where its impossible to predict the impact on travelers in the coming weeks or months ahead. Related: 4 Ways To Use ChatGPT To Find the Cheapest Airline Tickets Turkey For several years post-pandemic, Turkey has been on the rise as a highly sought after safe yet exotic travel destination among high-net-worth individuals. Semenova said many of her clients will spend 10 to 14 days exploring the countrys ancient cities and stunning coastlines during their summer holidays. Other luxury clients transit through Istanbul and spend several days in the city. They would then embark on a high-end cruise or continue onto other destinations, like Greece, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. Story continues Given the countrys current political climate, Semenova has advised travelers to avoid unnecessary travel to Turkey for the foreseeable future. Semenovas agency is also choosing not to wait for their clients to reach out or cancel upcoming Turkey or Egypt trips. Instead, they are proactively engaging travelers with bookings in these areas to discuss altering or postponing their travel. Japan, Bhutan, Greece and South Africa are some culturally enriching alternative destinations that are currently considered safer options worth exploring. Our focus is to provide journeys which are not only memorable but also instill a sense of security and relaxation, aligning with our luxury clients expectations and comfort levels, said Semenova. Paris Paris is typically a favored destination among luxury travelers, whether youre visiting for the first time or returning to Europe. So why arent high-net-worth travelers clamoring to visit the City of Love? Blame the 2024 Summer Olympics. Unless their clients are interested in attending the Olympic ceremonies or games, Semenovas agency is advising against summer 2024 travel to Paris. The event is expected to bring about highly inflated prices, limited availability, substantial crowds and heightened security, which could substantially alter the usual Parisian experience in the lead-up to, during, and immediately following the Olympics, she said. There are more than a few culturally rich cities worth visiting in lieu of Paris next year, Semenova said. Some alternatives worth exploring include Vienna, Prague and Amsterdam. These cities are excellent alternatives that offer the essence of European charm and sophistication without the complications expected in Paris during the Olympic period, said Semenova. These destinations present a unique blend of cultural heritage, stunning architecture and a vibrant cosmopolitan atmosphere, ensuring our discerning clients have a luxurious and memorable travel experience. More From GOBankingRates This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Im a Luxury Travel Agent: 3 Surprising Destinations My Wealthy Clients Are Not Booking for 2024 A Boeing 767-300 freighter in the Maersk Air Cargo livery is offloaded at Bournemouth Airport in the United Kingdom. (Photo: Bournemouth Airport) The air cargo unit of Maersk is conducting a two-month trial of a new route that would establish a gateway in the United Kingdom for receiving e-commerce goods from China as part of the ocean shipping companys transformation into a one-stop shop for logistics. Freighter operator Maersk Air Cargo is flying once a week through the end of the year between Hangzhou, China, and Bournemouth Airport using a Boeing 767-300 medium widebody freighter to test the trade lanes viability and suitability of an alternative airport outside London, the parties announced Tuesday. Aircraft tracking site Flightradar24 shows Maersk Air Cargo actually began operating the flights on Oct. 30 via its hub in Billund, Denmark, with a technical stop in Navoi, Uzbekistan. The temporary flight provides online sellers extra airlift during the peak shipping season that coincides with European holidays and could be continued in the future, according to Maersk. Bournemouth Airports in-house ground service company Cargo First is in charge of loading and unloading the Maersk aircraft. The destination adds to Maersk Air Cargos network connecting China, South Korea, Europe and the United States. Were delighted that Maersk has chosen Bournemouth for this new route as we grow our ambition to become the U.K.s number one entry and exit point for time critical cargo. We now have 500 metric tons of weekly import capacity operating between China and Bournemouth as more customers take advantage of our location, lack of slot constraints and One Team integrated approach across all airport and cargo handling operations, said Steve Gill, managing director of Bournemouth Airport. Ocean shipping giant Maersk incorporated air cargo to its integrated logistics strategy in early 2022 by expanding the scope of an existing cargo airline, beyond being a provider of dedicated transport for UPS and Royal Mail in Europe, to carry goods for its own customers. It acquired extra aircraft and Senator International, a large air forwarding company based in Germany, to give shippers an air option, in addition to ocean, trucking, rail, warehousing and import/export services. Maersk Air Freight, the agency within Maersk Logistics that arranges shipment itineraries for businesses, utilizes the capacity of Maersk Air Cargo, charter aircraft under its control and regular commercial airlift. Story continues Executives have set a goal of carrying about one-third of the companys annual air tonnage within its own controlled freight network through a combination of owned and leased aircraft. In March, Maersk introduced cargo service between Billund Airport and Hangzhou in response to increased demand and now offers six weekly flights. Maersk Air Cargo made its debut on Oct. 30, 2022, launching service between Seoul, South Korea, and Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport (GSP) in South Carolina. Since then the network has expanded to include multiple flights per week connecting Shenyang, China, and Greenville-Spartanburg, as well as Hangzhou and Maersks other U.S. hub at Chicago Rockford International Airport (RFD). The Shenyang and Hangzhou flights funnel through Seoul. Maersk Air Cargo Network Aircraft operations on the Asia-U.S. corridor are outsourced to Miami-based Amerijet, with Maersk Air Cargo connecting Frankfurt Airport in Germany to GSP and RFD. The U.S. hubs function as transfer points for shipments between Asia and Europe. In July, Maersks air forwarding unit opened a warehouse near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to facilitate transfers between customers and commercial airlines. And in early October, it debuted a 130,000 square foot import/export gateway near Los Angeles International Airport that offers direct planeside recovery of containers using certified trucks and triples Maersk Air Cargos access to capacity on the U.S. West Coast. Maersk has 22 Boeing 767-200 and -300 freighters in its fleet, although two have been out of service for several months, according to aircraft databases. Bournemouth Airport and Cargo First are part of the privately held Regional and City Airports (RCA) group, which also owns the neighboring Cargo First Logistics Park at Bournemouth Airport, with over 1 million square feet of warehousing development potential. Bournemouth two years ago began a campaign to become an alternative airfreight hub. The airport is located 90 minutes from London without the congestion of Heathrow and other major airports. It touts rapid customs clearance and transit of cargo to customer collection points at the Heathrow Cargo complex as an advantage for businesses. European Cargo, a startup carrier using partially modified Airbus A340 jets that can carry small units of freight on the main deck, launched service between China and Bournemouth earlier this year in support of a Chinese customer and now operates six flights per week. Cologne Bonn Airport In related news, Maersk Air Freight has awarded a multiyear contract to airport services firm dnata to provide cargo handling for its charter aircraft at Cologne Bonn Airport. Dnata said its team will process 6,600 tons of cargo annually for Maersk, which organizes weekly flights between Cologne Bonn and GSP with a Boeing 747-400 freighter operated by Magma Aviation. The air logistics provider plans to increase weekly frequencies in the coming months, significantly expanding cargo capacity on the route, dnata said on Thursday. Dnata is loading and unloading Boeing 747 freighters for Maersk Air Freight at Cologne Bonn airport. (Photo: dnata) Dubai-based dnata, part of the Emirates Group, entered the Germany cargo market in 2022 with the acquisition of Wisskirchen Handling Services, the exclusive operator of the 129,000-square-foot Cologne Bonn Cargo Center. Dnata currently serves 20 airline customers at the airport. MSC Air Cargo Meanwhile, another ocean carrier with a startup cargo airline has added a third freighter to the fleet. All-cargo operator Atlas Air said this week it has taken delivery of a 777 freighter from Boeing, the third of four it will operate on behalf of Mediterranean Shipping Co. under a long-term transportation services agreement. MSC Air Cargo, which sells the cargo space and determines routes, currently provides an around-the-world weekly service with stops in Mexico City; Indianapolis; Liege, Belgium; Seoul; and Xiamen, China. The new large freighter will enable MSC to add a route from Hong Kong to Dallas/Fort Worth. Atlas Air said Boeing is scheduled to deliver the fourth aircraft by the end of the year. Click here for more FreightWaves stories by Eric Kulisch. RECOMMENDED READING: Atlas Air to buy 2 new Boeing 777 freighters Maersk Air Cargo unveils Denmark-to-China freighter service Korean Air says Amerijet-Maersk cargo partnership violates trade agreement The post Maersk Air Cargo explores China-UK route appeared first on FreightWaves. DUBAI, UAE, Dec. 4, 2023 /CNW/ -- Markel, the insurance operation within Markel Group Inc. (NYSE: MKL), has hired Isaac Meek as a Cyber Senior Underwriter. Meek's arrival exemplifies Markel's long-term commitment to recruiting high-level underwriting talent, so that it can continue providing insurance solutions to meet customer demand in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), while supporting the businesses' overarching strategy of accelerating growth across Asia. Isaac Meek, Senior Cyber Underwriter, Markel Dubai In his new post, Meek will work closely with Priyesh Pradhan, Professional and Financial Risk (PFR) Senior Underwriter at Markel India, to drive the growth of Markel's cyber offering in MENA and the broader Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. Alongside those responsibilities, Meek will be involved in fostering broker relationships and identifying areas for further scalability within MENA. Markel Dubai's cyber offering provides broad first-party and third-party coverage, for a broad range of industries and clients including financial institutions, hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, professional service firms, and industrial companies, with line sizes up to USD $10m. Insureds taking out this policy will also have access to the organisation's global service providers, its 24/7 crisis management hotline, and specialist cyber support. Prior to joining Markel, Meek worked for the American Insurance Group (AIG) where he started out as an Assistant Underwriter, before being promoted to Underwriter in 2021. During his five-year stint at AIG, he was responsible for underwriting risks across various financial lines including professional indemnity (PI) and directors & officers (D&O), while focusing on blended cyber and tech PI risks for customers domiciled in Gulf Corporation Council (GCC) countries, North Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Meek will be situated at Markel's Dubai office, reporting to Max Robbie, Senior Executive Officer at Markel Dubai. Story continues Robbie commented: "We are delighted to welcome Isaac to the team here at Markel Dubai. Isaac joins us at an exciting time as we continue to build out our product offerings, particularly given the speed of growth and development of cyber in the region." "With his wealth of experience, Isaac will help us to identify new territories and geographies to drive profitable growth for the cyber portfolio, with the support of our established cyber underwriting teams in India and Singapore. I look forward working with him so that we can continue strengthening our business in the region, offering clients tailored and bespoke products across MENA." About Markel We are Markel, a leading global specialty insurer with a truly people-first approach. As the insurance operations within Markel Group Inc. (NYSE: MKL), we operate the Markel Specialty, Markel International, and Markel Global Reinsurance divisions, as well as State National, our portfolio protection and program services operations, and Nephila, our insurance-linked securities operations. Our broad array of capabilities and expertise allow us to create intelligent solutions for the most complex risk management needs. However, it is our people and the deep, valued relationships they develop with colleagues, brokers and clients that differentiates us worldwide. Markel logo (PRNewsfoto/Markel) Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/markel-hires-isaac-meek-to-lead-the-cyber-portfolio-in-middle-east-and-north-africa-302002045.html SOURCE Markel Cision View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/December2023/04/c2782.html SINGAPORE, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- On December 2, global lifestyle brand MINISO celebrated the opening of its fully refurbished VivoCity Mall store reopening as the brand's very first IP Collection Store in the country. The revamped store, which features MINISO's new upgraded store format, brings a splash of color and a vibrant shopping experience to Singapore's largest mall with a new storefront, bold interior, and a huge range of MINISO's trendy IP products. MINISO Opens First IP Collection Store in VivoCity, Singapore MINISO's VivoCity Mall store is the brand's largest store in Singapore. The store also has the largest number of IP product zones in the country, with 8 distinctive IP zones showcasing MINISO's collaborations with some of the world's biggest IP owners, including Disney, Snoopy, Care Bears and many more. The Barbie IP zone was of particular interest to shoppers on the store's reopening day, as the collaboration made its much-anticipated debut in Singapore. Shoppers take photos in MINISO's Barbie IP zone With a fresh new interior design, eye-catching pink color scheme, and thoughtful layout, the store creates an even more joyful atmosphere for shoppers to explore the brand's unique treasures. In line with MINISO's upgraded store format, the store is divided into distinct zones according to the brand's strategic categories, from toys and plushies, to fragrances and make-up accessories. "We're thrilled to be reopening our VivoCity store with an imaginative look and upgraded store format," said Bella Tu, General Manager of MINISO Overseas Operations at MINISO. "The exciting visual design is sure to make a big impression on consumers, while the new format delivers a curated experience, making it easier and more enjoyable for shoppers to find old favorites and discover new surprises." Spreading festive cheer and showcasing its uniquely creative approach to the blind box category, MINISO set up a giant blind box Christmas tree at the entrance of the VivoCity store. The first of its kind from MINISO anywhere in the world, it spread seasonal joy while shoppers took photos with iconic blind box favorites, such as Toy Story's Lotso Bear, Disney's Stitch, Winnie the Pooh, and lots more. Story continues Customers browsing and choosing products in the store. Besides the magical blind box Christmas tree, shoppers were also delighted with a range of entertaining activities to mark the event. In a nod to the store's dazzling pink design, the first 100 visitors to the store wearing pink clothes or accessories took photos and received goody bags worth $30. Meanwhile, lucky shoppers who shared their photos on social media also won gifts, and there were limited-time flash sales and prize drawers throughout the day. The refurbishment of MINISO's VivoCity store is part of MINISO's ongoing store upgrade occurring across stores around the world as part of the brand's goal to become a global lifestyle super brand. This ambition has also seen MINISO pursue rapid expansion in Asia and elsewhere. On the day of its reopening, the VivoCity store's sales broke the store's historical record, highlighting the success of its new concept and the strong appeal of the MINISO brand to local consumers. In Singapore, MINISO currently has stores all around the city, with plans to double the current number of stores in the coming year. About MINISO MINISO Group is a global lifestyle brand offering a variety of design-led lifestyle products. The Company serves consumers primarily through its large network of MINISO stores, and promotes a relaxing, treasure-hunting and engaging shopping experience full of delightful surprises that appeals to all demographics. Aesthetically pleasing design, quality and affordability are at the core of every product in MINISO's wide product portfolio, and the Company continually and frequently rolls out products with these qualities. Since the opening of its first store in China in 2013, the Company has built its flagship brand "MINISO" as a globally recognized retail brand and established a massive store network worldwide. Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/miniso-singapore-celebrates-opening-of-its-first-ip-collection-store-and-launch-of-barbie-collection-302004347.html SOURCE MINISO Western Azerbaijan Community has expressed its attitude to the statement of Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan accusing Azerbaijan of "aggression", "ethnic cleansing" and non-constructiveness, Azernews reports. The statement noted that there is no limit to the shameless behaviour of Armenian diplomacy. "Such a statement by an official of a country that has kept Azerbaijani territories under occupation for 30 years, carried out ethnic cleansing and continues to deny the right of Azerbaijanis to return to Armenia is politically immoral." "This is the same Ararat Mirzoyan who, during the Patriotic War, while in the sovereign territories of another country, Azerbaijan, exposed himself as a "brilliant commander" and declared, "We are strong. We will win. Long live the Armenian army". Probably, one of the reasons why the Armenian people took to the streets in anger after the signing of the surrender act on 10 November were the loud statements voiced by the likes of Ararat Mirzoyan during the Patriotic War. We would like to emphasise once again that one of the reasons why Armenia is a failed state lies in the Dashnak and caveman Armenian diplomacy. With regard to Armenia's recent "Crossroads of Peace" initiative, we would like to note first of all that most of the communications envisaged in the project pass through the territories where we once lived and from where we were subsequently deported. In addition, Armenia has long prevented the opening of communications in the region and, in order to change this narrative and supposedly weaken Azerbaijan's position in its own fantasies, has now put forward the utopian idea of the "Crossroads of Peace". Armenia has no means to realise this project. Armenia is still engaged in utopia." TORONTO, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Habitat for Humanity announced today that NewAge Products Inc., manufacturers of indoor and outdoor storage, appliance, furniture and accessory solutions for the home, has surpassed a $1 million donated product milestone with Habitat. Over the lifetime of the relationship, which began in 2018, NewAge Products Inc. has diverted more than 720,000 pounds of product from landfills by donating their products to Habitat ReStores throughout the U.S. and Canada. Habitat for Humanity logo. (PRNewsFoto/HABITAT FOR HUMANITY) "NewAge Products is proud to continue to support the incredible work of Habitat for Humanity throughout North America. Giving back is a core value at NewAge, and it's gratifying to know that our products for the home play a small role in helping to change the lives of Habitat recipients," NewAge Products Inc. Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer Frank Spano said. NewAge Products and Habitat are also celebrating the renewal of their seventh year of partnership to build strength, stability and hope through shelter in communities across the U.S. and Canada. "As we mark this significant milestone, we're tremendously grateful to NewAge Products for their generosity and thrilled to be renewing our partnership. Contributions from NewAge Products supports the creation of more housing for families in need of a safe and affordable place to call home," said Julia Deans, president and CEO Habitat for Humanity Canada. About Habitat for Humanity Driven by the vision that everyone needs a decent place to live, Habitat for Humanity began in 1976 as a grassroots effort on a community farm in southern Georgia. The Christian housing organization has since grown to become a leading global nonprofit working in local communities across all 50 states in the U.S. and in more than 70 countries. Families and individuals in need of a hand up partner with Habitat for Humanity to build or improve a place they can call home. Habitat homeowners help build their own homes alongside volunteers and pay an affordable mortgage. Through financial support, volunteering or adding a voice to support affordable housing, everyone can help families achieve the strength, stability and self-reliance they need to build better lives for themselves. Through shelter, we empower. To learn more, visit habitat.org. Story continues About Habitat for Humanity Canada Founded in 1985, Habitat for Humanity Canada is a national charitable organization working toward a world where everyone has a decent and affordable place to call home. Habitat for Humanity Canada brings communities together to help families build strength, stability and independence through affordable homeownership. With the help of volunteers, Habitat homeowners and 46 local Habitats working in every province and territory, we provide a solid foundation for better, healthier lives in Canada and around the world. Habitat for Humanity Canada is a member of Habitat for Humanity International, which was established in 1976 and has grown to become a leading global nonprofit working in more than 70 countries. For more information, please visit www.habitat.ca and follow on social @HabitatCanada. About NewAge Products Inc. Since 2008, NewAge Products has been engineering best-in-class solutions to organize and beautify living spaces. Our high-quality products are designed with functionality, precision and elegance in mind. NewAge Products is a trusted consumer brand and valued trade partner in the home improvement and DIY space. Known for offering unique garage, home and outdoor products, and excellent customer service, our talented team of problem solvers are passionate about helping customers live their best life. With award-winning leadership and designers, and with over 75 patents held, NewAge Products is re-imagining the home inside and out, and the overall customer shopping experience. www.newageproducts.com Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/newage-products-reaches-1m-giving-milestone-with-habitat-for-humanity-302004625.html SOURCE Habitat for Humanity International By Erwin Seba HOUSTON (Reuters) -Oil prices fell on Monday on concern about a drop in demand and on continued uncertainty about the depth and duration of OPEC+ supply cuts. Brent crude futures settled down 85 cents, or 1.08%, at $78.03 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures finished down $1.03, or 1.39%, at $73.04. Monday's fall adds to a 2% decline last week after the supply cuts announced on Thursday by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and allies including Russia, together known as OPEC+. "The market has decided (OPEC+ production plans) are not going to have that much of an impact. It's more style over substance," said Andrew Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates, said about crude traders on Monday. Saudi Arabia's energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said in a televised interview with Bloomberg on Monday that he expected OPEC and its allies to bring about the 2.2 million in crude oil production cuts announced last week. "I honestly believe that the delivery of the 2.2 will happen," Bin Salman said. "I honestly believe that will continue to happen (and the) 2 million will overcome even the huge inventory build that usually happens in the first quarter." OPEC+ last week announced production cuts that are voluntary in nature, raising doubts about whether or not producers would fully implement them. Investors were also unsure about how the cuts would be measured. Traders over the past five months have waited to see if cuts in production as well as predicted changes in demand would come to fruition, said Zane Curry, vice president of markets and research for Mobius Risk Group. "We've become Missouri, the Show-Me state," Curry said. Surveys on Friday showed global manufacturing activity remained weak in November on soft demand, with euro zone factory activity contracting, while there were mixed signs on the strength of China's economy. Story continues "The OPEC+ 'deal' last week was unconvincing to say the least," said Craig Erlam, analyst at brokerage OANDA. "And with markets seemingly anticipating more of an economic slowdown next year, the announcement simply doesn't go far enough." Elsewhere, Western countries have stepped up efforts to enforce the $60 a barrel price cap on seaborne shipments of Russian oil imposed to punish Moscow for its war in Ukraine. Washington on Friday imposed additional sanctions on three entities and three oil tankers. (Reporting by Erwin Seba; Additional reporting by Alex Lawler, Mohi Narayan and Florence Tan; Editing by David Goodman, Sharon Singleton, Susan Fenton, Bill Berkrot and Lincoln Feast) DUBAI, UAE, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Sultanate of Oman's Ministry of Energy and Minerals and Hydrogen Oman (Hydrom) have signed a Joint Study Agreement (JSA) with Port of Amsterdam, Zenith Energy Terminals and GasLog, to collaborate on the development of a liquid hydrogen route to market for green hydrogen produced in the Sultanate of Oman. Sultanate of Oman signs JSA for the development of a green hydrogen corridor between Oman and the Netherlands The Agreement underscores the clear ambitions of the partners to make the world's first commercial scale liquid hydrogen corridor a reality. The Agreement was signed at the Omani Pavilion during COP28 in Dubai, with His Excellency the Minister Eng. Salim bin Nasser Al Aufi and the Climate Envoy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Prince Jaime de Bourbon de Parme, as official witnesses of the ceremony. The Agreement entails conducting a detailed assessment of the requirements to develop an open-access hydrogen liquefaction, storage and export facility in the Sultanate of Oman, along with the provision of specialised vessels for the transportation of the liquid hydrogen, currently under development by GasLog. The primary aim of the Agreement is to establish a green hydrogen corridor between the Sultanate of Oman and the Netherlands, with the terminal of Zenith Energy as the destination for the import, regasification and further distribution of Oman-produced hydrogen to both local offtakers within the port of Amsterdam, as well as large industries in the European hinterland. The open-access liquefaction facility will also enable the government of the Sultanate of Oman to explore cost effective hydrogen export corridors to other global markets. Guided by Oman's Vision 2040, which is anchored on diversifying its economy away from oil and gas, as well as the country's long-term goal to reach Net-Zero by 2050, the government of the Sultanate of Oman has pursued a hydrogen strategy that seeks to capitalise on the country's abundant (wind and sun) natural resources and existing port and industrial infrastructures. Moreover, its geographical location puts Oman in a prime position to supply the European and the Asian markets. Hydrom is orchestrating the overall development of the Omani hydrogen sector and is responsible for master-planning, managing the allocation of government lands to hydrogen developers and overseeing the execution of projects. The open-access facility for liquefaction would unlock great potential for these projects, offering liquid hydrogen as a viable vector that can be utilised by individual projects for export. Story continues Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2291317/Hydrom.jpg Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/oman-announces-plans-for-common-infrastructure-for-green-hydrogen-liquefaction-and-export-302003951.html SOURCE The Sultanate of Omans Ministry of Energy and Minerals; Hydrogen Oman (Hydrom) Oryzon Genomics, S.A. To explore Oryzons clinical candidate ORY-4001 in ALS The ALS Association to provide 500,000 USD funding MADRID, Spain and BOSTON, Dec. 04, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Oryzon Genomics, S.A. (ISIN Code: ES0167733015, ORY), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company leveraging epigenetics to develop therapies in diseases with a strong unmet medical need, announced today the start of a preclinical collaboration with the ALS Association. The Association has awarded Oryzon a 498,690 USD grant through its Lawrence and Isabel Barnett Drug Development Program to support the regulatory preclinical development of ORY-4001, a highly selective HDAC6 inhibitor, for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). ALS is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that afflicts approximately 27,000 people in the United States and a comparable number of people in Europe. Approximately 6,300 new cases of ALS are diagnosed each year in the United States. The average life expectancy of a person with ALS is approximately two to five years after diagnosis, and only approximately 10% of people living with ALS survive for more than 10 years. Death is usually due to respiratory failure because of diminished strength in the skeletal muscles responsible for breathing. Few treatment options exist for people living with ALS, resulting in a high unmet need for new therapies to address functional deficits and disease progression. HDAC6 inhibition or depletion has been previously described as a potentially effective treatment for ALS, protecting against neurodegeneration in various ALS mouse and human iPSC models. Oryzon recently completed an HDAC6 discovery program, leading to the selection of ORY-4001, a clinical candidate with promising efficacy, selectivity, and safety. ORY-4001 has been shown to improve neuromuscular and neuromotor function, axonopathy, and demyelination in a mouse model of Charcot-Marie Tooth (CMT) type 1, the most common inherited peripheral neuropathy. Due to the key role altered axonal transport and proteostasis play in both CMT and ALS, Oryzon hopes to validate the benefits of inhibiting HDAC6 in ALS mouse models. ORY-4001 is currently advancing in its characterization in IND-enabling toxicology studies. Story continues Dr. Jordi Xaus, Oryzons CSO, said: It is an honor to have the support of the ALS Association. The rationale linking ORY-4001s mechanism of action to the disease is sound. If these preclinical results are positive, we plan to extend the clinical development of ORY-4001, now in CMT, to include ALS and explore its therapeutical potential for people living with this devastating disease. ORY-4001 would become our second epigenetic program in clinical development in nervous system diseases. This is proof of our capability to efficiently develop, and bring to the clinic, highly selective epigenetic molecules. We need more treatments as urgently as possible to help people living with ALS. We are proud to help drive the crucial transition from preclinical to clinical development for potential new ALS therapies like ORY-4001 through our Lawrence and Isabel Barnett Drug Development Program. Getting promising treatments out of the laboratory and into clinical testing as quickly as possible is key to making ALS a livable disease until we can cure it, said Kuldip Dave, Ph.D., senior vice president of research at the ALS Association. Established in 1985, the ALS Association is the largest philanthropic funder of ALS research in the world. The Association funds global research collaborations, assists people with ALS and their families through its nationwide network of certified clinical care centers, and advocates for better public policies for people with ALS. The Association is working to make ALS a livable disease while urgently searching for new treatments and a cure. For more information about the ALS Association, visit www.als.org. About Oryzon Founded in 2000 in Barcelona, Spain, Oryzon (ISIN Code: ES0167733015) is a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company and the European leader in epigenetics, with a strong focus on personalized medicine in CNS disorders and oncology. Oryzons team is composed of highly qualified professionals from the pharma industry located in Barcelona, Boston, and San Diego. Oryzon has an advanced clinical portfolio with two LSD1 inhibitors, vafidemstat in CNS and iadademstat in oncology, in several Phase II clinical trials. The company has other pipeline assets directed against other epigenetic targets. In addition, Oryzon has a strong platform for biomarker identification and target validation for a variety of malignant and neurological diseases. For more information, visit www.oryzon.com FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS This communication contains, or may contain, forward-looking information and statements about Oryzon, including financial projections and estimates and their underlying assumptions, statements regarding plans, objectives and expectations with respect to future operations, capital expenditures, synergies, products and services, and statements regarding future performance. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally identified by the words expects, anticipates, believes, intends, estimates and similar expressions. Although Oryzon believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, investors and holders of Oryzon shares are cautioned that forward-looking information and statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, many of which are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of Oryzon that could cause actual results and developments to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied or projected by, the forward-looking information and statements. These risks and uncertainties include those discussed or identified in the documents sent by Oryzon to the Spanish Comision Nacional del Mercado de Valores (CNMV), which are accessible to the public. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and have not been reviewed by the auditors of Oryzon. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date they were made. All subsequent oral or written forward-looking statements attributable to Oryzon or any of its members, directors, officers, employees, or any persons acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statement above. All forward-looking statements included herein are based on information available to Oryzon on the date hereof. Except as required by applicable law, Oryzon does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forwardlooking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. This press release is not an offer of securities for sale in the United States or any other jurisdiction. Oryzons securities may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an exemption from registration. Any public offering of Oryzons securities to be made in the United States will be made by means of a prospectus that may be obtained from Oryzon or the selling security holder, as applicable, that will contain detailed information about Oryzon and management, as well as financial statements. IR, US IR & Media, Europe Spain Oryzon Ashley R. Robinson Sandia von der Weid Patricia Cobo/Daniel Foley Emili Torrell LifeSci Advisors, LLC LifeSci Advisors, LLC Atrevia Chief Business Officer +1 617 430 7577 +41 78 680 05 38 +34 91 564 07 25 +34 672 447 094 +34 93 515 1313 arr@lifesciadvisors.com svonderweid@lifesciadvisors.com pcobo@atrevia.com dfoley@atrevia.com etorrell@oryzon.com The board of Panasonic Manufacturing Malaysia Berhad (KLSE:PANAMY) has announced that it will pay a dividend of MYR0.15 per share on the 19th of January. The dividend yield will be 6.8% based on this payment which is still above the industry average. Check out our latest analysis for Panasonic Manufacturing Malaysia Berhad Panasonic Manufacturing Malaysia Berhad's Earnings Easily Cover The Distributions We like to see robust dividend yields, but that doesn't matter if the payment isn't sustainable. Before making this announcement, Panasonic Manufacturing Malaysia Berhad was paying out quite a large proportion of both earnings and cash flow, with the dividend being 116% of cash flows. Paying out such a high proportion of cash flows certainly exposes the company to cutting the dividend if cash flows were to reduce. Over the next year, EPS is forecast to expand by 23.4%. If recent patterns in the dividend continues, the payout ratio in 12 months could be 82% which is a bit high but can definitely be sustainable. Dividend Volatility Although the company has a long dividend history, it has been cut at least once in the last 10 years. The annual payment during the last 10 years was MYR1.88 in 2013, and the most recent fiscal year payment was MYR1.22. The dividend has shrunk at around 4.2% a year during that period. Generally, we don't like to see a dividend that has been declining over time as this can degrade shareholders' returns and indicate that the company may be running into problems. Dividend Growth May Be Hard To Come By With a relatively unstable dividend, it's even more important to see if earnings per share is growing. Over the past five years, it looks as though Panasonic Manufacturing Malaysia Berhad's EPS has declined at around 8.9% a year. Declining earnings will inevitably lead to the company paying a lower dividend in line with lower profits. It's not all bad news though, as the earnings are predicted to rise over the next 12 months - we would just be a bit cautious until this can turn into a longer term trend. Story continues Panasonic Manufacturing Malaysia Berhad's Dividend Doesn't Look Sustainable Overall, we don't think this company makes a great dividend stock, even though the dividend wasn't cut this year. The track record isn't great, and the payments are a bit high to be considered sustainable. We would be a touch cautious of relying on this stock primarily for the dividend income. Investors generally tend to favour companies with a consistent, stable dividend policy as opposed to those operating an irregular one. Meanwhile, despite the importance of dividend payments, they are not the only factors our readers should know when assessing a company. For example, we've picked out 1 warning sign for Panasonic Manufacturing Malaysia Berhad that investors should know about before committing capital to this stock. Looking for more high-yielding dividend ideas? Try our collection of strong dividend payers. Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) simplywallst.com. This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned. An In-Depth Look at the Upcoming Dividend and Company's Financial Health Petronas Gas Bhd (PNAGF) recently announced a dividend of $0.18 per share, payable on 2023-12-15, with the ex-dividend date set for 2023-12-04. As investors look forward to this upcoming payment, the spotlight also shines on the company's dividend history, yield, and growth rates. Using the data from GuruFocus, let's look into Petronas Gas Bhds dividend performance and assess its sustainability. What Does Petronas Gas Bhd Do? Warning! GuruFocus has detected 5 Warning Signs with PNAGF. High Yield Dividend Stocks in Gurus' Portfolio This Powerful Chart Made Peter Lynch 29% A Year For 13 Years How to calculate the intrinsic value of a stock? Petronas Gas Bhd is a Malaysian gas infrastructure and utilities company of which Malaysia's nationalized oil corporation, PETRONAS, holds a majority interest. Petronas Gas segments its primary operations into Gas Processing, Gas Transportation, Utilities, and Regasification businesses. While each of these contributes significantly to the company's total revenue, its Utilities and Gas Processing units combine to generate the majority. In Gas Processing, Petronas Gas receives processing fees under multi-year contracts by processing natural gas piped offshore for its parent company, PETRONAS. The Gas Transportation business encompasses the transmission of offshore natural gas through pipelines to customers in Malaysia and Singapore under multi-year agreements with PETRONAS. Petronas Gas Bhd's Dividend Analysis A Glimpse at Petronas Gas Bhd's Dividend History Petronas Gas Bhd has maintained a consistent dividend payment record since 2018. Dividends are currently distributed on a quarterly basis. Below is a chart showing annual Dividends Per Share for tracking historical trends. Petronas Gas Bhd's Dividend Analysis Breaking Down Petronas Gas Bhd's Dividend Yield and Growth As of today, Petronas Gas Bhd currently has a 12-month trailing dividend yield of 4.38% and a 12-month forward dividend yield of 4.25%. This suggests an expectation of decreased dividend payments over the next 12 months. Extended to a five-year horizon, this rate increased to 1.60% per year. And over the past decade, Petronas Gas Bhd's annual dividends per share growth rate stands at 4.30%. Based on Petronas Gas Bhd's dividend yield and five-year growth rate, the 5-year yield on cost of Petronas Gas Bhd stock as of today is approximately 4.74%. Story continues Petronas Gas Bhd's Dividend Analysis The Sustainability Question: Payout Ratio and Profitability To assess the sustainability of the dividend, one needs to evaluate the company's payout ratio. The dividend payout ratio provides insights into the portion of earnings the company distributes as dividends. A lower ratio suggests that the company retains a significant part of its earnings, thereby ensuring the availability of funds for future growth and unexpected downturns. As of 2023-09-30, Petronas Gas Bhd's dividend payout ratio is 0.80, which may suggest that the company's dividend may not be sustainable. Petronas Gas Bhd's profitability rank, offers an understanding of the company's earnings prowess relative to its peers. GuruFocus ranks Petronas Gas Bhd's profitability 8 out of 10 as of 2023-09-30, suggesting good profitability prospects. The company has reported positive net income for each of year over the past decade, further solidifying its high profitability. Growth Metrics: The Future Outlook To ensure the sustainability of dividends, a company must have robust growth metrics. Petronas Gas Bhd's growth rank of 8 out of 10 suggests that the company's growth trajectory is good relative to its competitors. Revenue is the lifeblood of any company, and Petronas Gas Bhd's revenue per share, combined with the 3-year revenue growth rate, indicates a strong revenue model. Petronas Gas Bhd's revenue has increased by approximately 4.10% per year on average, a rate that underperforms approximately 68.58% of global competitors. The company's 3-year EPS growth rate showcases its capability to grow its earnings, a critical component for sustaining dividends in the long run. During the past three years, Petronas Gas Bhd's earnings increased by approximately -5.20% per year on average, a rate that underperforms approximately 69.7% of global competitors. Lastly, the company's 5-year EBITDA growth rate of -0.20%, which underperforms approximately 66.48% of global competitors. Engaging Conclusion: Dividend Outlook and Investment Considerations Considering Petronas Gas Bhd's consistent dividend history, current yield, and the factors influencing its sustainability, investors should weigh these against the backdrop of the company's payout ratio, profitability, and growth metrics. While the company exhibits strong profitability, the mixed signals from the growth metrics and payout ratio may warrant a closer examination for those prioritizing dividend stability. As the landscape of the energy sector continues to evolve, will Petronas Gas Bhd be able to maintain its dividend promise to shareholders? GuruFocus Premium users can screen for high-dividend yield stocks using the High Dividend Yield Screener. This article, generated by GuruFocus, is designed to provide general insights and is not tailored financial advice. Our commentary is rooted in historical data and analyst projections, utilizing an impartial methodology, and is not intended to serve as specific investment guidance. It does not formulate a recommendation to purchase or divest any stock and does not consider individual investment objectives or financial circumstances. Our objective is to deliver long-term, fundamental data-driven analysis. Be aware that our analysis might not incorporate the most recent, price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative information. GuruFocus holds no position in the stocks mentioned herein. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Optica Foundation Challenge provides grants for work on early-stage intervention in menopause and glaucoma Optica Foundation funds research to detect menopause and glaucoma more cost-effectively and efficiently Chip-integrated light sensor to uncover hormonal biomarkers of menopause Light-based system to detect undetectable glaucoma WASHINGTON, Dec. 4, 2023 /CNW/ -- The Optica Foundation today released more detailed information on new women's health and vision research funded by the 2023 Optica Foundation Challenge. Researchers Samantha Grist, The University of British Columbia, Canada, and Fernando Zvietcovich, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Peru, have proposed two separate light-based techniques to solve for challenges in diagnosing health-related concerns, specifically menopause and glaucoma. Optica Foundation donors believe that by attracting, supporting and retaining the most capable young scientists and engineers in optics, we can drive breakthroughs that shape our future. By investing in student and early-career professionals and fostering their interest, we ensure the continued advancement of our field. For over 20 years, the Optica Foundation has been dedicated to this endeavor. optica.org/foundation "As healthcare diagnostics advance, new opportunities for non-invasive, light-based techniques continue to emerge," said Alan Willner, chair of the Challenge Selection Committee. "Excitedly, both Dr. Grist and Dr. Zvietcovich are exploring novel, innovative ways of using light to address issues found in current modalitiesprecisely the kind of exemplary work the Optica Foundation Challenge strives to address." Each research effort is supported by a USD$100,000 grant from the Optica Foundation, and Grist and Zvietcovich will use these funds to advance their research in the following ways: Light-based sensor to identify menopause markers Samantha Grist, The University of British Columbia, Canada Silicon photonic biosensors for low-cost, portable, data-rich measurements of hormone biomarkers relevant to women's health and the menopausal transition Research Executive Summary According to the World Health Organization, the average onset of menopause is between 45 and 55, and the World Bank reports women aged 50 to 54 now make up 6% of the total female population. Yet, despite the potential prevalence of menopause and its precursor perimenopause, physicians have limited tools and data to understand and predict symptoms or improve treatment. Story continues That's partly because today's diagnostics include centralized lab-based assays that are expensive, slow, and inconvenient for daily testing, and point-of-need solutions do not provide the required quantitative accurate data from the multiple hormone markers needed to understand symptoms, improve treatment, and predict the onset of menopause. However, new work from Samantha Grist, The University of British Columbia, Canada, offers promise in the form of a silicon photonic integrated circuit (PIC) with biosensors. Grist's silicon PIC approach introduces the potential for quantitative, accurate, data-rich measurements of hormones, with tens to hundreds of biosensors integrated on a single millimeter-scale chip in the future. However, PIC-based biosensor analysis has required costly and bulky systems that limit their applicability in clinical environmentsuntil now. Grist and her team have invented a new sensor architecture that addresses this challenge by applying a tiny, inexpensive laser for readout. "Our work focuses on validating a portable, low-cost technology for decentralized, multiplexed monitoring of hormone markers in urine," explained Grist. "We will build a tool that has the potential to drastically improve health and quality of life during the menopausal transition." Grist points to a two-fold approach to advance this concept: 1. A rigorous exploration of the new sensor architecture to quantify and optimize its performance; and 2. Assay design to appropriately evaluate hormone biomarkers. In six months, Grist hopes to be at the stage to start actively measuring hormone markers and evaluating the full scope of the application with an interdisciplinary team. "I didn't realize there was such a profound lack of diagnostic and treatment options for perimenopause and menopause until I met with Herstasis Health, a Canadian nonprofit dedicated to addressing this issue," explained Grist. "Now, I'm really motivated to help people experiencing menopause diagnose and predict its stages and address its symptoms. This grant gives me the chance to do meaningful work and demonstrate how photonic innovation can address unmet needs." Detecting undetectable glaucoma Fernando Zvietcovich, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Peru Development of a clinical multi-excitation optical coherence elastography system to interrogate corneal biomechanics for the detection and staging of normotensive glaucoma Research Executive Summary Globally, glaucoma is a leading cause of vision impairment and blindness, with 7.7 million people impacted by the disease. Unfortunately, more than half of cases are undiagnosed. In part, that can be attributable to current diagnostic standards, which require the monitoring of corneal pressure. The issue is that in normotensive glaucoma (NTG), corneal pressure levels remain in the normal range, making early detection and intervention difficult, if not impossible. In addition, corneas with softer biomechanics and high astigmatism may also lead to inaccurate pressure readings. To address these concerns, Fernando Zvietcovich, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru, Peru, has proposed the development of a clinical multi-excitation optical coherence elastography system. This system will enable high-resolution structural images of the eye through optical coherence tomography (OCT). At the same time, the system will leverage air and ultrasonic pulses to excite the mechanical waves in the cornea, providing biomechanical information of the eye to help obtain corrected and adjusted intraocular pressure values, thus enabling the detection of NTG. "This field of applying OCT with other imaging modalities and excitation sources is really just emerging," Zvietcovich shared. "We're measuring properties in the human eye and changes in biomechanics that were not possible to measure before, and we have entered a new dimension with the information that we can now see. We're in the early stages of new ways to monitor and propose treatments for the eye." As a first step, Zvietcovich plans to finalize designs and build a prototype optical coherence elastography system. Once it's created, he will initiate modeling tests to refine the approach, and ultimately, will take the system into clinical settings. In six months, Zvietcovich expects to have the first expression of the prototype, and ultimately, he plans to hold a preliminary patient study with 20 control patients, 20 patients with NTG, and 20 patients with high-tension glaucoma to generate biomechanically inspired biomarkers of the cornea. "In the short term, the main benefit of this work will be that it enables researchers to apply these technologies and clinical studies will follow. In the long term, I can see this device in clinics, helping diagnose NTG and other eye diseases more efficiently and cost-effectively. Ultimately, I hope that patients will avoid vision loss because of this research," Zvietcovich summed up. Both research initiatives were made possible by grants awarded through the Optica Foundation Challenge. This challenge was designed to engage early-career professionals in out-of-the-box thinking and provide seed money to investigate hypotheses in the areas of environment, health and information. Each of the recipients received USD$100,000 to explore their ideas and take steps toward addressing critical global issues. Recipients have begun work on these projects and expect to report initial results later in 2024. For more information, visit optica.org/challenge . About Optica Optica (formerly OSA), Advancing Optics and Photonics Worldwide, is the society dedicated to promoting the generation, application, archiving and dissemination of knowledge in the field. Founded in 1916, it is the leading organization for scientists, engineers, business professionals, students and others interested in the science of light. Optica's renowned publications, meetings, online resources and in-person activities fuel discoveries, shape real-life applications and accelerate scientific, technical and educational achievement. Discover more at: Optica.org About Optica Foundation Optica Foundation donors believe that by attracting, supporting and retaining the most capable young scientists and engineers in optics, we can drive breakthroughs that shape our future. By investing in student and early-career professionals and fostering their interest, we ensure the continued advancement of our field. For over 20 years, the Optica Foundation has been dedicated to this endeavor. optica.org/foundation Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/photonic-technologies-introduce-new-ways-to-diagnose-menopause-and-glaucoma-302004779.html SOURCE Optica Foundation Cision View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/December2023/04/c8852.html LOS ANGELES, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- In a significant stride towards fortifying the cybersecurity landscape in the Middle East, Resecurity proudly introduced its state-of-the-art Digital Identity Protection (IDP) solution at the prestigious Future Tech 2023 conference scheduled for November 27-28, 2023, at the Oman Convention and Exhibition Centre in Muscat. This strategic move aligns with Resecurity's commitment to creating a safer digital society and empowering individuals and businesses in the region to counteract cyber threats effectively. Oman IDP Resecurity, a Los Angeles-based cybersecurity provider protecting Fortune 500 and governments globally, proudly announced its role as a Platinum Sponsor at the 3rd Edition of the Future Tech Event. The event, centered around the theme "Accelerating Digital Transformation," is under the distinguished patronage of H. E Said Hamood Said Al Maawali, Ministry of Transport, Communications and Information Technology. As a Platinum Sponsor, Resecurity is poised to play a pivotal role in propelling Oman's Vision 2040 Digital Transformation forward. This visionary initiative aims to nearly double the technology sector's value to OMR 2.2 billion (USD 5.6 billion) by 2024, perfectly aligning with the Future Tech Event's dedication to fostering collaboration between government entities and the private sector to deliver groundbreaking solutions. Recognizing the escalating cyber threats in the Middle East, Resecurity's IDP solution is poised to play a pivotal role in safeguarding the digital identities of Oman citizens. The IDP service provides a comprehensive defense mechanism, enabling individuals and enterprises to proactively monitor and receive early-warning notifications to protect their accounts and personal data. Oman's Vision 2040: A Digital Transformation Journey Oman's Vision 2040 outlines a comprehensive roadmap for building a Diversified and Sustainable Economy, grounded in Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation, all operating within Integrated Frameworks. The vision is strategically designed to ensure Competitiveness, embrace Industrial Revolutions, and achieve Fiscal Sustainability - pillars echoed in the theme of the Future Tech Event. Story continues Gene Yoo, CEO of Resecurity, expressed his excitement about the company's participation and commitment to Oman's digital evolution. "We are honored to be a Platinum Sponsor at the Future Tech Event, aligning our expertise with the transformative goals of Oman's Vision 2040. Resecurity is dedicated to playing a significant role in securing and advancing Oman technological landscape. By fostering collaboration and innovation, we aim to contribute to the realization of Oman's ambitious vision for the future.". Resecurity's Commitment to Oman's Vision 2040 Resecurity's role as a Platinum Sponsor underscores its commitment to advancing Oman's Vision 2040 Digital Transformation. The company's expertise in cybersecurity aligns seamlessly with the vision's emphasis on technology, knowledge, and innovation as drivers of economic diversification and sustainability. As part of its commitment, Resecurity aims to contribute insights, share knowledge, and engage in collaborative discussions during the Future Tech Event. By integration cutting-edge cybersecurity technologies and data science, Resecurity seeks to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of Oman's technology landscape. "Resecurity is honored to be a Platinum Sponsor at the Future Tech Event, an opportunity that aligns perfectly with our commitment to advancing Oman's Vision 2040. We believe in the power of cybersecurity to underpin digital transformation, and through our participation, we look forward to contributing to the secure and innovative future envisioned by Oman. The Future Tech Event provides a platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing, and we are excited about the potential for meaningful partnerships and advancements in technology that will benefit Oman and beyond." - said Christian Lees, CTO of Resecurity. About Resecurity Resecurity is a globally recognized leader in cybersecurity solutions, dedicated to safeguarding individuals and organizations from digital threats. With a commitment to innovation, Resecurity offers cutting-edge services, including Identity Protection (IDP), to address the evolving challenges of the digital landscape. The company aims to empower individuals and businesses to navigate the digital world securely. Resecurity is a cybersecurity company that delivers a unified platform for endpoint protection, risk management, and cyber threat intelligence. Known for providing best-of-breed data-driven intelligence solutions, Resecurity's services and platforms focus on early-warning identification of data breaches and comprehensive protection against cybersecurity risks. Founded in 2016, it has been globally recognized as one of the world's most innovative cybersecurity companies with the sole mission of enabling organizations to combat cyber threats regardless of how sophisticated they are. Most recently, Resecurity was named as one of the Top 10 fastest-growing private cybersecurity companies in Los Angeles, California by Inc. Magazine. An Official Member and a Gold Sponsor of InfraGard National Members Alliance (INMA), AFCEA, NDIA, SIA, FS-ISAC and the American Chamber of Commerce in Saudi Arabia (AmChamKSA), Singapore (AmChamSG), Korea (AmChamKorea), Mexico (AmChamMX), and UAE (AmChamDubai). To learn more about Resecurity, visit https://resecurity.com. Cision View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/resecurity-embarks-on-accelerating-omans-vision-2040-with-identity-protection-302004568.html SOURCE Resecurity Inc. Robert Kiyosaki, renowned for his bestselling book Rich Dad Poor Dad, advocates a provocative approach to wealth accumulation, stating, My rich dad always said only lazy people use their own money. This philosophy underpins Kiyosakis success in transforming negligible funds into substantial returns. Contrary to conventional wisdom, he emphasizes the importance of not using your own money for investments but instead leveraging other peoples money (OPM). Kiyosakis strategy involves innovative methods like crowdfunding and raising capital, allowing for significant returns without personal financial input. This approach requires skills in networking and building relationships with potential investors. Don't Miss: Investing in real estate just got a whole lot simpler. This Jeff Bezos-backed startup will allow you to become a landlord in just 10 minutes, and you only need $100. Elon Musk has reportedly bought 6,000 acres of land just outside of Austin. Heres how to invest in the citys growth before he floods it with new tech workers. The concept of OPM is not just theoretical for Kiyosaki. He started his investment journey with an $18,000 one-bedroom condo in Maui, Hawaii, financed not by his own money but through a mentor. His next venture, a surfer wallet company, faced initial setbacks but eventually became a success. This turnaround was possible because of Kiyosakis ability to rethink the products purpose, repurposing the wallets for runners, which led to a surge in sales after gaining media attention. These experiences highlight Kiyosakis core advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: the significance of identifying and investing in assets that hold more value than ones initial investment and the importance of innovating solutions to existing problems. His journey exemplifies how a combination of strategic investment, creativity and resourcefulness can lead to financial success without relying on personal funds. Arrived provides an excellent opportunity for people to explore real estate investment without the need for upfront capital, which is often a barrier for many aspiring investors. This aligns with his emphasis on leveraging other peoples money and finding assets that are worth more than your initial investment. By pooling resources from multiple investors, Arrived enables individuals to participate in the real estate market, which Kiyosaki often highlights as a key asset class for building wealth. Story continues Kiyosakis principles, while compelling, demand a comprehensive understanding of investment dynamics and risk management. They also require the ability to discern and seize appropriate opportunities, a skill that Kiyosaki has mastered and advocates for others to develop. This approach has been the foundation of his success and serves as a model for those looking to achieve financial growth through strategic and innovative means. Read Next: Collecting passive income from real estate just got a whole lot simpler. A new real estate fund backed by Jeff Bezos gives you instant access to a diversified portfolio of rental properties, and you only need $100 to get started. Passive income investments are one of the most trusted methods for riding out a recession, so it's no surprise that people are turning to high-yield real estate notes that pay a fixed 7.5% to 9%. Warren Buffett once said, "If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die." Here are 3 high-yield investments to add significant income to your portfolio. "ACTIVE INVESTORS' SECRET WEAPON" Supercharge Your Stock Market Game with the #1 "news & everything else" trading tool: Benzinga Pro - Click here to start Your 14-Day Trial Now! This article 'Rich Dad Poor Dad' Author Robert Kiyosaki Says 'Only Lazy People Use Their Own Money' Why You Should Use Other People's Money Instead originally appeared on Benzinga.com . 2023 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Rigged: Federal US court awards $1.8B in damages after major realtor firms found guilty of conspiring to inflate commissions on home sales and it turns out that was only the beginning The National Association of Realtors (NAR) legal woes have gone from bad to worse. A new federal class-action lawsuit has been filed in South Carolina, alleging the NAR and prominent real estate brokerage firm Keller Williams Realty colluded to artificially inflate agent commission rates, increasing costs for home sellers in the state. Dont miss The lawsuit, filed on Nov. 6, seeks class-action status for all home sellers in South Carolina who used a listing broker affiliated with Keller Williams and listed their home on one of the NARs Multiple Listing Services (MLS) since November 2019. It follows hot on the heels of a landmark ruling in Missouri, which found the NAR and some of the nations largest real estate brokerages including HomeServices of America (owned by Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A)) and two of its subsidiaries, and Keller Williams Realty guilty of conspiring to keep commissions artificially high. In the Missouri case, the federal court awarded $1.8 billion in damages, which could be tripled to more than $5.3 billion, according to Reuters, if the realtors are found to have breached U.S. antitrust law. Whats the deal with broker commissions? The lawsuits in Missouri and now in South Carolina are all about real estate broker commissions, which typically total around 5-6% of a propertys selling price in the U.S. and are often split 50-50 between the buyers agent and the sellers agent. At the heart of the complaint are several NAR policies deemed to have wrongfully impacted competition among real estate brokers including one rule that recommends multiple listing services (MLSs) conceal the total broker commission offered from prospective property buyers. Story continues The plaintiffs in the successful Missouri suit argued these policies have severe anticompetitive effects and make no economic sense, except for the buyer broker, who could technically steer homebuyers toward properties that offer a higher commission, which homebuyers ultimately have to shoulder. The new South Carolina lawsuit states: The effect of these rules is not simply that the seller must pay the buyer broker's compensation. These rules effectively take the compensation structure out of the view of the buyers and sellers, masking who pays the buyer broker's compensation. Indeed, a buyer broker may not even present an offer to a seller that is conditional on the seller reducing the buyer broker commission. Read more: Thanks to Jeff Bezos, you can now use $100 to cash in on prime real estate without the headache of being a landlord. Here's how According to a U.S. Department of Justice release on this issue, realtors have also been accused of misleading buyers into thinking that their broker services are free when, typically, they could be anything up to 3% of the home purchase price. That can equal quite a lot of money for those buying a home, which is all the more painful in this time of elevated house prices and mortgage rates. For a house selling at $500,000 with a 6% even-split broker commission, the home buyer would be paying $15,000 to the buyer agent a fee they could potentially negotiate down if the commissions were fairly disclosed. According to Zillow, the average home price in Missouri is $237,659 as of October 2023. This translates to approximately $7130 to the buyer agent, based on a 6% even-split broker commission. In the South Carolina, the average home price is $287,065, which equals about $8612 based on the same split. Realtors intend to appeal verdict The accused real estate groups and brokerages continue to deny wrongdoing. Two defendants Re/Max (RMAX) and Anywhere Real Estate (HOUS), whose brands include Century 21, Coldwell Banker and Corcoran settled before the trial for $55 million and $83.5 million, respectively, without admitting liability. Those involved in the Missouri court case have announced their intentions to appeal the verdict a process that could take several years. This matter is not close to being final, NAR president Tracy Kasper said in a statement after the verdict was announced. We will appeal the liability finding because we stand by the fact that NAR rules serve the best interests of consumers, support market-driven pricing and advance business competition. The NAR will tackle any future legal challenges under new leadership as the groups CEO Bob Goldberg just announced he will step down at the end of the month. Nykia Wright has been appointed as interim CEO and will assume the role effective Nov. 20. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for HomeServices expressed disappointment with the courts ruling and told CNN: Todays decision means that buyers will face even more obstacles in an already challenging real estate market and sellers will have a harder time realizing the value of their homes. Plaintiff attorney Ketchmark dismissed that statement after the ruling, accusing the realtors of being desperate to hang on to the system that they have rigged against everyone. He has since filed a new class-action lawsuit against other real estate giants, including Douglas Elliman, Compass and Redfin, alleging once again that they violated antitrust laws by conspiring to keep commissions high. What to read next This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind. Azerbaijani Prime Minister Ali Asadov sent a congratulatory letter to Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Emir of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum on 2 December on the occasion of the Independence Day of the United Arab Emirates, Azernews reports, citing the Cabinet of Ministers. The letter says that Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates are united by friendly relations based on mutual trust and support, as well as common religious and cultural values. It is noted that interstate relations built on this solid foundation are successfully developing today, emphasising the recent expansion of cooperation in the fields of investment, trade and economic, renewable energy, tourism. The letter also noted that Azerbaijan-UAE bilateral relations have good prospects in many directions, and expressed confidence that the expansion of mutually beneficial cooperation will contribute to the well-being of the peoples of the two countries. Aeroports de Paris FINANCIAL RELEASE December 4th, 2023 Aeroports de Paris SA ADP Ingenierie signed a Judicial Agreement of Public Interest, bringing to a close the preliminary investigation into the company ADP Ingenierie, a company of Groupe ADP, has agreed with the French National Financial Prosecutor's Office (Parquet National Financier - PNF) to terminate the investigations it was subject to and relating to past events relating to certain contracts concluded by ADP Ingenierie in Libya in 2007 and 2008, and in the Emirate of Fujairah in 2011. Investigations into these contracts began, in each case, following a spontaneous disclosure made by ADP ingenierie in 2013. This agreement, in the form of a Judicial Agreement of Public Interest (Convention judiciaire d'interet public - CJIP), was signed on November 29, 2023 and was validated by the President of the Paris Judicial Court on Monday December 4, 2023. Under this agreement, ADP Ingenierie has agreed to pay an immediate public interest fine of 14.6 million euros. This marks the end of the investigation and, in accordance with the law, does not imply any admission of guilt. Since the date of the facts investigated, Groupe ADP has taken significant steps to reform itself by implementing a very rigorous Ethics and Compliance program fitting to the most stringent requirements. Under the terms of the CJIP, ADP ingenierie will not be required to take any additional compliance measures. Investor Relations contacts: Cecile Combeau +33 6 32 35 01 46 and Eliott Roch +33 6 98 90 85 14 - invest@adp.fr Press contact: Justine Leger, Head of Medias and Reputation Department +33 1 74 25 23 23 Groupe ADP develops and manages airports, including Paris-Charles de Gaulle, Paris-Orly and Paris-Le Bourget. In 2022, the group handled through its brand Paris Aeroport 86.7 million passengers at Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly, and nearly 193.7 million passengers in airports abroad. Boasting an exceptional geographic location and a major catchment area, the Group is pursuing its strategy of adapting and modernizing its terminal facilities and upgrading quality of services; the group also intends to develop its retail and real estate businesses. In 2022, group revenue stood at 4,688 million and net income at 516million. Registered office: 1, rue de France, 93 290 Tremblay-en-France. Aeroports de Paris is a public limited company (Societe Anonyme) with share capital of 296,881,806. Registered in the Bobigny Trade and Company Register under no. 552 016 628. Story continues groupe-adp.com Attachment TEL AVIV, Israel, Dec. 4, 2023 /PRNewswire/ StickIt Technologies Inc. (the "Company" or "StickIt") (CSE: STKT), a parent company of the Israeli technology and cannabinoid company StickIt Ltd., the developer exclusivity and patent protected of "Cannabis Sticks" Technology, is pleased to provide an update with respect to its intellectual property portfolio. Stickit Logo Founded at 2019, StickIt Ltd. Developed a line of technologies of products as toothpick-sized products inserted into any cigarette to provide the smoker with a functional experience with CBD, CBG, HHC or other cannabinoids. StickIt can be tucked into any smokable including Hemp cigarettes, CBD cigarettes, tobacco cigarettes, pre-rolls, herb cigarettes, spice cigarettes and cannabis smokeballs. StickIt's product come in a wide range of tastes and flavors, as the StickIt technology allows for adding terpenes and to the finished product. Products can be adjusted and produced with different concentrations of cannabinoids like CBD, THC, and CBG according to any local regulation. Endless flavors and aromas can also be added to specifically appeal to local consumers and allow any commercial, cultural or marketing adjustments to be easily made at any destination country. During the 2023 the Company through its wholly owned Israeli subsidiary, received a US patent under registration US11,582,996 B2, a European patent under registration EP3826481 (in 38 European countries, including Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkey and United Kingdom), Canadian patent under registration 3,107,730 and an Israeli patent under registration 280409, in connection with the plant extracts and therapeutic compounds in smoking utensils. Story continues StickIt is currently in the process of developing other line of products for nonsmokers' industry. The Company develops a unique cold drinking straw containing cannabinoids a functional experience with CBD, CBG, HHC for non-smoking users. In addition, the Company is developing a hot drink shaker stick containing cannabinoids with functional experience with CBD, CBG, HHC for non-smoking users. "StickIt is a unique company in the cannabis industry, we are excited to share the important patents we achieved for the Canadian, European, Israeli, and US markets during 2023," said Eli Ben Haroosh, CEO of StickIt. "We plan to be at the forefront of the technological development of the global cannabis industry," concluded Mr. Ben Haroosh. StickIt primary assets consist of patents and patent applications related to plant extracts, therapeutic compounds in smoking utensils, and honey complexes. StickIt have already patents granted in USA, Europe, Israel and Canada. The Extra-C stick is created through a unique proprietary process, resulting in condensed cannabis oil presented in a toothpick-like matrix, allowing for the easy conversion of regular cigarettes into cannabis or hemp cigarettes. StickIt operates from key facilities situated in Dalton, Northern Israel, these facilities are central to the company's research, development, and manufacturing operations. StickIt's operating model is to establish joint ventures in countries around the world where recreational cannabis is permitted. Each licensee/joint venture partner will establish a production facility in which they will add the cannabis content to sticks produced and supplied by StickIt. As part of those arrangements StickIt is expected to provide the joint venture with the know-how required to manufacture the finished product. The licensee/joint venture partner will produce the finished product, adding cannabis to the raw materials provided by StickIt, and will sell them either directly to the points of sale or through distributors The licensee is expected to pay a setup fee by investing the funds necessary to set up the local production facility. Each licensee will have exclusive rights to produce and market StickIt products in their designated territory. On behalf of the Board of Directors Eli Ben-Haroosh, CEO For further information please contact Mr. Eli Ban-Haroosh at info@stickit-labs.com; 972-549671720 Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release. This press release should not be considered a comprehensive summary of the Company's listing and business operations. Additional information required by applicable securities laws and the Canadian Securities Exchange is included in the Company's non-offering prospectus dated October 24, 2023 and was included in the CSE Form 2A listing statement for the Company dated October 25, 2023. Trading in the securities of StickIt should be considered highly speculative and readers should refer to the listing statements of StickIt for further information. Forward Looking Statements This news release includes certain statements and information that constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. All statements in this news release, other than statements of historical facts, are forward-looking statements. The Company provides no assurance that forward-looking statements and information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements or information. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements, other than as required by law. More detailed information about potential factors that could affect financial results is included in the documents filed from time to time with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities by StickIt. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward looking statements. Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2258883/Stickit_Logo.jpg Cision View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/stickit-technologies-provides-an-update-on-its-intellectual-property-portfolio-302004598.html SOURCE StickIt Technologies Inc. DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, December 04, 2023--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Within the framework of COP28, VinFast Auto (Nasdaq: VFS) (VinFast) and the United States International Development Financial Corporation (DFC) have signed a letter of Interest (LOI) to consider a formal application by VinFast for a USD500 million loan to establish a lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility in Vietnam. The signing not only reaffirms both parties commitment to fostering sustainable transportation, but also marks a significant milestone in the Vietnam - U.S. Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204329471/en/ VinFast Global CEO Madame Le This Thuy and DFC CEO Scott Nathan (Photo: Business Wire) DFC and VinFast will further discuss and consider VinFasts formal application for a $500 million loan for the establishment of its lithium-ion battery manufacturing facilities in Vietnam, subject to DFCs comprehensive review and approval process. This is the first project in a series of sustainable transportation development initiatives in the Vietnamese and international markets being actively discussed by the two parties. The LOI stands in recognition of the transformational opportunity that VinFast is accelerating in the electrification of the Vietnamese transportation sector. VinFasts initiatives to support the electrification of the Vietnamese transportation sector in Vietnam and abroad are built on supporting a broader innovation ecosystem through research and development, electric vehicle manufacturing, lithium-ion battery manufacturing, developing charging infrastructure nationwide, and many others. By offering loans to global electric vehicle manufacturers, DFC can substantially contribute to promoting sustainable development initiatives and foster a greener future on a global scale. Madame Le Thi Thu Thuy, Global CEO of VinFast, said: "VinFast is proud to work with DFC to lead the way to future of sustainable transportation. DFC financing would set a path forward for VinFasts global expansion strategy and its journey toward a greener future for all." Story continues The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) is the U.S. Government's development finance institution. DFC partners with the private sector to finance solutions to the most critical challenges facing the developing world today. DFC invests across sectors including energy, healthcare, infrastructure, agriculture, and small business and financial services. DFC investments adhere to high standards and respect the environment, human rights, and worker rights. To date, DFC has provided support in the amount of $737 million to development projects in Vietnam, making the country its largest market in Southeast Asia. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20231204329471/en/ Contacts v.maint85@vingroup.net (Bloomberg) -- The US and two of its closest parters are set to test a new way to track Chinese submarines using artificial intelligence. Most Read from Bloomberg Crews flying Pacific missions on the US Navys top maritime surveillance and attack aircraft will be using AI algorithms to rapidly process sonar data gathered by underwater devices of the US, UK and Australia, the defense chiefs of the three nations announced Friday. The technology could enable the allies to track Chinese submarines with greater speed and accuracy as they search for ways to blunt the impact of Chinas rapid military modernization and growing global assertiveness. The tests are part of the three nations extensive technology-sharing agreement known as Aukus Pillar II. These joint advances will allow for timely high-volume data exploitation, improving our anti-submarine warfare capabilities, according to a joint statement from US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles and UK Secretary of State for Defense Grant Shapps during a meeting in California. The three powers said they would deploy advanced artificial intelligence algorithms on multiple systems, including the P-8A Poseidon aircraft to process data from each nations sonobuoys, underwater detection devices. All three nations fly the naval aircraft made by Boeing Co. The US version of the warplane flies regular patrols in the Pacific, including the South China Sea, where they are occasionally buzzed by Chinese fighters. The Poseidon carries torpedoes and cruise missiles to attack submarines and surface vessels. Read More: US Navy Chief Aims to Deter China With Indo-Pacific Allies Story continues The announcements are part of a broader security partnership among the three allies known as Aukus, one of a number of regional alliances the US has pursued to counter China. Pillar I of the partnership focused on building up Australias domestic nuclear-powered submarine capability, which will culminate in the joint development of a new submarine for fielding by 2040. Pillar II focuses on cooperation in eight technological areas, including quantum technologies, advanced cybersecurity and hypersonic weapons. The three defense chiefs announced plans to integrate their ability to launch and recover undersea drone vehicles from torpedo tubes on their current submarines for underwater attack and intelligence-gathering, according to the announcement. This capability increases the range and capability of our undersea forces and will also support Australias eventual new submarine called SSN-AUKUS, the announcement read. According to the Pentagons latest annual report on Chinas military, the country currently operates six nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, six nuclear-powered attack submarines, and 48 diesel powered/air-independent powered attack submarines. The Chinese navys submarine force is expected to grow to 65 units by 2025 and 80 units by 2035 despite the ongoing retirement of older hulls due to an expansion of submarine construction capacity, the report found. The three military leaders also announced plans to: Convene a standing Industry Forum with government and industry representatives to help inform policy, technical, and commercial frameworks to facilitate the development and delivery of advanced capabilities. The first meeting will occur by June 30; Expand private sector engagement by creating an Aukus Defense Investors Network to strengthen financing and facilitate industry connectivity; and Launch a series of Innovation Prize Challenges starting early next year with industries from the three countries competing on innovative solutions to complex military challenges. The first will focus on electronic warfare. --With assistance from Peter Martin. Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek 2023 Bloomberg L.P. 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. Firstly, we'd want to identify a growing return on capital employed (ROCE) and then alongside that, an ever-increasing base 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 UWC Berhad (KLSE:UWC) and its ROCE trend, we weren't exactly thrilled. What Is 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. The formula for this calculation on UWC Berhad is: Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT) (Total Assets - Current Liabilities) 0.16 = RM68m (RM464m - RM28m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to July 2023). Thus, UWC Berhad has an ROCE of 16%. On its own, that's a standard return, however it's much better than the 8.2% generated by the Machinery industry. View our latest analysis for UWC Berhad roce Above you can see how the current ROCE for UWC Berhad 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 UWC Berhad. How Are Returns Trending? In terms of UWC Berhad's historical ROCE movements, the trend isn't fantastic. Around five years ago the returns on capital were 30%, but since then they've fallen to 16%. And considering revenue has dropped while employing more capital, we'd be cautious. This could mean that the business is losing its competitive advantage or market share, because while more money is being put into ventures, it's actually producing a lower return - "less bang for their buck" per se. Story continues On a related note, UWC Berhad has decreased its current liabilities to 6.0% of total assets. So we could link some of this to the decrease in ROCE. Effectively this means their suppliers or short-term creditors are funding less of the business, which reduces some elements of risk. Some would claim this reduces the business' efficiency at generating ROCE since it is now funding more of the operations with its own money. What We Can Learn From UWC Berhad's ROCE We're a bit apprehensive about UWC Berhad because despite more capital being deployed in the business, returns on that capital and sales have both fallen. Long term shareholders who've owned the stock over the last three years have experienced a 12% depreciation in their investment, so it appears the market might not like these trends either. With underlying trends that aren't great in these areas, we'd consider looking elsewhere. UWC Berhad does have some risks though, and we've spotted 1 warning sign for UWC Berhad that you might be interested in. If you want to search for solid companies with great earnings, check out this free list of companies with good balance sheets and impressive 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. EBENE, MAURITIUS / ACCESSWIRE / December 4, 2023 / Virtual Pay Group (Virtual Pay'), a leading global payment and technology service provider, announces the formal establishment of its headquarters in Mauritius. This move marks a significant milestone in Virtual Pay's commitment to enhancing its global presence and strengthening its position as a key player in the payments industry. An official launching ceremony was held in the presence of Mr Dhanesswurnath Thakoor, Chief Executive of the Financial Services Commission (FSC), along with other distinguished guests, on Friday, November 17, at the Hennessy Park Hotel, Ebene. The decision to establish its global headquarters in Mauritius is driven by the country's robust regulatory framework, skilled workforce and proactive approach to fostering innovation and economic growth. Strategically located between Asia and Africa, Mauritius is a choice gateway for investment into Africa, and Virtual Pay aims to leverage this advantage to continue in its global growth strategy, entrenching itself as a key player in the global payment ecosystem. Mr David Morema, Virtual Pay Group CEO, shared his optimism, stating, "Mauritius presents a well-regulated and dynamic business landscape for financial technology innovation, and we are excited to establish our global headquarters in this vibrant market. Our primary goal is to empower businesses and their clients with seamless, secure, and efficient payment solutions." Mr Dhanesswurnath Thakoor, Chief Executive of the Financial Services Commission (FSC), expressed enthusiasm about Virtual Pay Group's choice of Mauritius as its Global Headquarters, stating, "We welcome Virtual Pay to Mauritius and commend their contribution to the growth and efficiency of the financial ecosystem. This strategic move is a testament to our country's sound strategy when it comes to developing our financial services sector. We are more than ever committed to fostering technological advancements in this industry, whose growth potential is immense." Story continues The Honourable Renganaden Padayachy, Minister of Finance, Planning, and Economic Development, Republic of Mauritius, said in a statement, "The Virtual Pay Group's decision to establish its head office in Mauritius is proof of the confidence that our international financial centre inspires. It demonstrates that the measures implemented in recent years to strengthen our regulatory environment and stimulate innovation are bearing fruit. Based on our positioning, we can expect other companies of this calibre to choose Mauritius to set up their headquarters and manage their operations throughout Africa and beyond." The launch marks another milestone for Virtual Pay Group which has consistently demonstrated its commitment to providing innovative payment solutions to merchants on a global scale. The company expresses gratitude to its employees, clients, and stakeholders for their continued support and looks forward to a sustained business growth. For media inquiries, please contact: Anthony Migui Head Of Strategic Alliances, and Growth, Virtual Pay Group sales@virtual-pay.io +254 756 441 826 | +230 525 36943 About Virtual Pay International: Virtual Pay Group is a leading payment and technology service provider with innovative payment solutions, offering a wide range of solutions that meet the evolving needs of businesses worldwide. The company is committed to expanding its global footprint and contributing to the evolution of the financial landscape. Virtual Pay is regulated in Mauritius by the Financial Services Commission, in Kenya by The Central Bank Of Kenya, in Rwanda by The National Bank of Rwanda, in Tanzania by the Bank of Tanzania and in Dubai by the Department of Economy and Tourism. SOURCE: Virtual Pay View source version on accesswire.com: https://www.accesswire.com/812994/virtual-pay-group-expands-its-global-presence-with-establishment-of-its-global-headquarters-in-mauritius XO x BRITTO In a first-ever private airport lounge takeover "Graffiti Collection" Exclusively debuted at the new XO Palm Beach lounge Artists "Graffiti Collection" debuts at the new XO Palm Beach lounge, in a first-ever private airport lounge takeover Palm Beach, Florida December 4, 2023: XO, the world's premier private aviation network, has announced an exclusive partnership with Romero Britto, considered to be the most licensed artist in the world, to celebrate innovation and creativity. In a first-ever private airport lounge takeover, Britto exclusively debuted his new "Graffiti Collection" at the new XO lounge at Palm Beach International Airport. The collection, inspired by the walls of Britto's very first studio in Miami where he had the opportunity to add his own spray-painted, graffiti, color splashes, and freehand messages of hope, happiness, and love showcases his signature vibrant and optimistic pop art style. Palm Beach was chosen as the ideal location for the debut of Britto's new collection as it reigns as one of the most popular destinations for XO Members; with New York and Palm Beach as one of the top city pairs booked through XO, nearly doubling year over year. Leona Qi, President U.S. at Vista: "We are incredibly excited to collaborate with Romero Britto, a valued XO Member and a global icon in the art world who embodies the spirit of XO. This partnership is a testament to our unwavering commitment to providing our Members with experiences that go beyond flying." Romero Britto, Artist and Founder of The Happy Art Movement: "XO has been my passport to seamless travel while connecting with a community of visionaries. I pour my heart and soul into my art, a passion that fuels my existence. I am thrilled to share my artistic journey with a global audience of art aficionados." The XO community is a dynamic and diverse group of individuals united by a passion for exceptional private travel. With every flight, XO connects visionaries, shaping the future and empowering them to make a lasting impact on the world. Story continues Britto's new "Graffiti Collection" will be on display throughout the month of December at the XO Lounge at Palm Beach International Airport. XO Members will also have the first opportunity to purchase his new work. ENDS Information XO | press@flyxo.com ABOUT XO XO is revolutionizing the private aviation industry by combining data intelligence with distinct, elevated service to allow you to reach anywhere in the world, anytime, just by reaching for a mobile device. XO has built an open future for private aviation with more transparency, efficiency, and accessibility than ever before. Members and clients have access to the Vista Members' fleet of 360+ aircraft and the safety-vetted XO alliance fleet of 2,100+ private aircraft, covering the full spectrum of cabin classes. Flyers can book an entire aircraft or individual seats through the XO mobile app, website, or an XO aviation advisor. XO is part of Vista the worlds first private aviation ecosystem, integrating a unique portfolio of companies offering asset free solutions to cover all key aspects of business aviation. More XO information and news at www.flyxo.com XO Global LLC is not a direct air carrier and does not operate any aircraft. All flights will be operated by properly licensed U.S. or foreign air carriers. All services are subject to the terms and conditions available at flyxo.com/legal. Fla. Seller of Travel Ref. No. ST42114. ABOUT Britto Romero Britto is a self-taught artist from Brazil who uses vibrant, bold and colorful patterns to reflect his optimistic view of the world. His work is influenced by Matisse and Picasso and has been exhibited in over 100 countries. He has also created public art installations for various events and collaborated with many international brands. His style is described as exuding warmth, optimism and love. For more information about the artist visit www.shopbritto.com Attachments "Today there is an anti-Azerbaijani and anti-Turkish climate in France. This is due to the internal political situation and the activities of the Armenian lobby. I reject the policy of the current French government," Azernews reports. Jean-Michel Brun, author of the book "Shusha - the Pearl of Caucasus", said during his speech in the format of videoconference at the Turan international conference on the future peace of the Centre for International Relations and Diplomatic Studies of Turks that, "Today there is an anti-Azerbaijani and anti-Turkish climate in France. This is due to the internal political situation and the activities of the Armenian lobby. I reject the policy of the current French government. Author noted the main issue is that Armenia has already recognised that Garabagh is the land of Azerbaijan: "Now Azerbaijan is trying to establish good relations with all countries of the world, including Armenia. Azerbaijan is also interested in good relations with France. I hope that our relations will become better in the future." According to Michel Brun, the current government in Paris clearly demonstrates Islamophobic tendencies: "It is directed not only against Azerbaijan, but also against the entire Islamic world. This policy should be changed and will be changed. This policy is unacceptable. We will send this government out next election". Award winning singer songwriter Jim Salestrom, who performed around the world with Dolly Parton, John Denver and a long list of big names in the music industry, died from cancer Nov. 22 in Arvada. He was 67. Salestrom also performed in the annual holiday show at The Broadmoor for almost two decades. Editor's note: This article has been updated to clarify the expected effect of a planned property tax cap in Colorado Springs next year, and to correct a statement about how much homeowners can expect to pay in city property taxes in 2024. Colorado Springs officials expect a planned temporary cap on the city's property tax rate will mitigate some financial effects from increased property taxes next year. The Colorado Springs City Council last week voted to cap the city's 2024 property tax rate, a credit city Chief Financial Officer Charae McDaniel expects will total about $6.2 million next year. Colorado Springs' 2023 property tax rate for taxes payable in 2024, called a mill levy, will be 3.579 mills composed of an operating mill levy of 4.279 mills and a temporary tax credit of 0.70 mills. This tax rate is down from the current 3.929 mills. [Click HERE to calculate estimated property taxes] [Click HERE to go to El Paso County assessor's site] The credit applies to all types of properties: residential, commercial and government. The council is scheduled to formally establish the new rate with a second vote at the board's regular meeting Dec. 12. Council's action this week came days before Gov. Jared Polis asked local governments to reduce their property tax rates to offer more relief to homeowners. Colorado legislators recently adopted in a special session new laws that reduce the assessment ratio and increase the amount homeowners can claim for exemption when calculating tax liability. The state reduction covers only residential properties. The legislation subtracts $55,000 per home from state property tax valuation and reduces the residential assessment rate to 6.7%, down from 6.765%. For a $500,000 home, state officials expect the savings will be on average $505 in 2023 property tax bills. Colorado Springs homeowners living in a $400,000 home can expect to pay $83 in city property taxes next year, McDaniel said Friday. For a $500,000 home, that amount is expected to be $107. Years before Polis called on Colorado municipalities this week to consider reducing their property tax rates, Colorado Springs had already reduced its mill levy to help mitigate the effect of increasing property taxes. Property tax assessments had been increasing over the last few years "at a pretty significant rate," McDaniel said. City officials first put in place a temporary property tax cap in 2022, and then extended that cap in 2023 and will again in 2024. Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, or TABOR, restricts the amount of overall property tax revenues local governments can collect each year, using a formula based on population growth. Colorado Springs officials saw the city would be collecting property tax revenues over the TABOR limit and had to decide between reducing the property tax rate or collecting the revenues and either refunding them or asking voters to let the city retain them, McDaniel said. When putting together the city's 2022 budget, "the decision was made: Let's go ahead and provide the credit on the property tax bill for all residents so it provides at least some relief from those values that are increasing at a pretty good rate there," she said. The city sized the property tax credit so it was estimated to collect only what the city could retain under TABOR, McDaniel said. Any revenues estimated to be over the cap were provided back to taxpayers through the credit. Residential property owners can calculate their residential assessed value by taking the actual value of their home, subtracting $55,000, and multiplying that number by .067. To calculate property taxes, multiply the assessed value by the overall mill levy rate, which should first be divided by 1,000. Overall mill levy rates include those from all taxing authorities including cities, counties, school districts and special districts, which set tax rates and levy the tax on a property. Colorado Springs property owners can find their property's market value and all of the respective taxing entities on the El Paso County assessor's website at property.spatialest.com/co/elpaso. Once the property is located on the website, scroll down the page to the "Tax Entity and Levy Information" section, which provides all the taxing entities and their levies for that specific property. The city expects to collect $27.7 million in property tax revenues in 2024, McDaniel said. Property taxes fund public schools, county and municipal governments, libraries and special districts. All property tax revenues stay within the county. The holiday shopping season is now in full swing, and with many people shopping online and sending gifts to loved ones, packages will be showing up by the truckload in our neighborhoods. These people work hard for this money to buy gifts for their kids or their family and these people that want to steal these packages are just ugh! said a frustrated Suzi Huntz, who has lived in her Colorado Springs neighborhood since 2006. She says complaints about stolen packages have only increased over the years. Colorado Springs Police Department crime prevention officers say they are getting more than 50 surveillance videos a day from neighborhood-watch groups of suspects stealing packages. Jonathan Liebert at the Better Business Bureau of Southern Colorado is concerned about these crimes, too. It could be a package. It could be money in a letter. All these things are just ripe for somebody to take advantage of, to steal it and rip you off, said Liebert. He says safeguarding your holiday package starts with how you pay for it. Buying something with a credit card is important, because if there is some type of theft, then you have a better chance of getting some of your money, or all of your money back. Its not guaranteed, warned Liebert. Where you send the package can make a difference, too. Sign up for free: Springs AM Update Your morning rundown of the latest news from Colorado Springs and around the country overnight and the stories to follow throughout the day delivered to your inbox each evening. Sign Up View all of our newsletters. Success! Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. View all of our newsletters. Amazon has these lockers. So you can send it to a locker where you have a code, and you can go and check that package out, said Liebert. Perhaps taking the time to pick it up at the local postal office, or maybe you ordered something, have it come to that store. Tracking that package can help, but be aware of scam text messages. Ultimately, if its a high-priced package, you can pay for insurance or to require a signature. Spending a little bit of extra money on the front end might help you a lot on the back end. If something happens to the package, if its stolen, and if its damaged, said Liebert. We do know, unfortunately, some of those packages are going to be stolen this year. So what do you do next? Verify the theft: Make sure the package wasnt delayed, misplaced, or picked up by a neighbor or family member. Notify all parties involved: Notify the seller and the shipper. Delivery companies often have claim instructions on their websites. Contact your credit card company: See if they can help stop payments. Notify law enforcement: Share any details and surveillance video. It documents your loss and can help investigators track crime trends. The Environmental Protection Agency will be tearing down the funeral home building in Penrose, where the bodies of 190 people were left. The Return to Nature funeral home at 31 Werner Road in Penrose, owned and operated by Jon and Carie Hallford of Colorado Springs, was searched by authorities in early October following repeated complaints by neighbors of a foul odor. The ensuing effort to remove the improperly stored individuals, some of whom had died as much as two years earlier, took more than a month, and required assistance from multiple county coroners' offices and the FBI. The ensuing arrest affidavits for the Hallfords described "abhorrent conditions," inside the Penrose facility, and that "human decomposition fluids and insects lined the floors." The Hallfords initially fled the state, but were arrested in Oklahoma and are currently facing more than 250 criminal charges in El Paso County. The body identification process is still ongoing. The Fremont County Board of Health voted to designate the Penrose building a public health risk, and issuance of a legal Public Health Order to have it demolished and the building materials to be properly disposed of. The Colorado Department of Public Health agreed, and the EPA was officially requested to conduct what is called a "removal action" to raze the building and remove the materials. EPA officials began evaluating the property on Nov. 15. This update appeared on the EPA's website on Nov. 29: Sign up for free: Springs AM Update Your morning rundown of the latest news from Colorado Springs and around the country overnight and the stories to follow throughout the day delivered to your inbox each evening. Sign Up View all of our newsletters. Success! Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. View all of our newsletters. Following the assessment, EPA has determined that demolition of the building is necessary to safely remove biological and hazardous materials found in the building. EPA is in the process of developing a workplan to conduct the demolition in January 2024. Details of the demolition process, safety measures, and timeframe will be shared publicly once procedures are finalized. According to the EPA website, removal actions are commonly used in response to oil spills, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear incidents. The federal agency "provides support when requested or when state and local first responder capabilities have been exceeded." At Jon Hallford's virtual advisement in late November, Judge Carissa Cruson informed him that she had found probable cause for 190 preliminary counts of abuse of a corpse, 61 counts of forgery and four counts of theft and money laundering. Jon and Carie Hallford are scheduled to be back in court Tuesday afternoon. The preliminary charges against Jon Hallford could change prior to his first appearance. Jon and Carie Hallford remain in custody at the El Paso County jail on a $2 million bond each. Of 93 applicants for the job of chancellor of the University of Colorado campus in Colorado Springs, two finalists toured the school last week and fielded probing questions from faculty, students and staff during three separate, hourlong onsite sessions. The two finalists are Susan Elrod, who is in her fifth year as chancellor of Indiana University in South Bend, Ind., and Mahyar Amouzegar, distinguished professor of logistics who recently stepped down as provost and senior vice president of academic affairs at The University of New Orleans in Louisiana. Elrod and Amouzegar cited their credentials and experience as making them good fits to lead the UCCS campus. UCCS Interim Chancellor Jennifer Sobanet had applied but was not named as a finalist. She has a contract as interim through June 2024, said UCCS spokesman Chris Valentine. Recruitment for the position began in September, with an 18-member search committee working with Greenwood Asher & Associates. The Miramar Beach, Fla.-based executive firm helped narrow applicants and is assembling feedback anonymously submitted by participants of last weeks campus meetings. CU system President Todd Saliman will decide who will fill the position. We anticipate an announcement prior to Dec. 15, said Jeff Howard, vice president for communication in the Office of the President. Though the search committee was charged with providing three to five candidates to Saliman for consideration, and slots for the campus interviews had been reserved for three candidates, just two finalists were selected. While we held time and space for up to three candidates, following an extensive interview and vetting process, and conversations among the search committee and the president, two candidates were selected as finalists and advanced for campus visits, Howard said in an email. According to the job profile, The chancellor is responsible for the leadership and direction of the campus and its strategic relationship with the broader Colorado Springs community. Among the qualifications, the chancellor should be aware of trends in higher education to provide dynamic leadership in the development, promotion of implementation of a vision for the campus that is consistent with its mission and the ongoing development of its central relationship with the community. The salary range is advertised at $395,000 to $435,000 annually plus housing and car allowances. Former Chancellor Venkat Reddy announced in mid-May that after six years he would vacate the position as of July 1. Hes an adviser for special projects to President Saliman this academic year and is scheduled to return to his previous job as tenured faculty next fall. UCCS, one of four locations in the CU system, has seen declining enrollment since 2018, this semester falling to 10,687 students, the lowest in a decade. That has resulted in budget reductions from revenue loss from tuition. Also noted as concerns at this years State of the University address in October, retention was 67.7% at the start of this semester, and expenses have exceeded income at two of four new academic and public-facing buildings since the university built them in recent years. While visiting UCCS, the finalists responded to questions ranging from why they want the job and their leadership style to their response to the charged political climate on college campuses today and how they would fix declining enrollment, weak retention and financial challenges. Elrod, a scientist, earned a doctoral degree in genetics from the University of California Davis and has patents for four inventions. In 2006-2007, she served as an American Council on Education fellow at Colorado College, where she said she learned about higher education in the Pikes Peak region. She previously worked in Washington, D.C., as the executive director of an Association of American Colleges & Universities project that advanced science, technology, engineering and math in higher education. Elrod also has been principal investigator on several projects, including a National Science Foundation study about building leadership capacity and a Sloan Foundation project that resulted in a Change Leadership Toolkit and associated curriculum thats being piloted this semester. Amouzegar, who holds a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from the University of California Los Angeles, previously worked as dean of engineering at California Polytechnic University in Pomona and at the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, a nonprofit think tank. He has also served as senior national security policy analyst there since 1998, working on research for the U.S. Air Force. Hes also an endowed professor at the New Orleans campus. Both candidates have spent years in different administrator positions at various universities and have taught and do research in their fields. Both also said they encourage open dialogue on tough issues, such as the Israeli-Hamas war. These are part of freedom of expression and academic freedom, Elrod said. One of the hallmarks of a public institution is to be the place where debate can occur, sides can come together to express their views in an environment where we can foster dialogue. Sign up for free: Springs AM Update Your morning rundown of the latest news from Colorado Springs and around the country overnight and the stories to follow throughout the day delivered to your inbox each evening. Sign Up View all of our newsletters. Success! Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. View all of our newsletters. We need to allow for those expressions and also make sure everyone understands their role, their rights. Academic freedom doesnt mean you can say whatever you want; there are parameters around this. An immigrant from Iran, Amouzegar said demonstrations and teach-ins on college campuses regarding the fighting in Israel and the Gaza Strip represent a transformation of American colleges and universities, and he believes that people have a right to say the things they need to say. Part of our job is to educate politicians, the mayors office, the community, the industry, about what the issues are, Amouzegar said. We need to have those difficult conversations about whats happening in the world. Our jobs should always be learning from each other and teaching each other. Amouzegar describes himself as pretty relaxed and open, and a people person who likes to assess a situation by talking with others, determining whats working, and whats not, figuring out whats needed, and working to fulfill that. Service matters we are here to serve and response time matters. That means you will get an answer, he said. He does not see mistakes or failure as a time for reprimand or punishment but rather learning opportunities. Amouzegar said he would continue a practice hes held for years of hosting small, weekly lunches to gauge the temperature of faculty, staff and students, which guide him in decision-making. He said he intends to use a team approach to figuring out whats the best way to address everything from crafting the budget to creating new academic programs. Elrod considers herself a leader scholar, modeled after the concept of teacher scholar. Im a problem solver, she said, who likes to use evidence-based solutions. Im not afraid to get into difficult topics and solve difficult problems. She said she uses transparency and engagement across decision-making when tackling problems, such as a campus budget. I see lots of alignment between not only my passions and who I am but also my experiences, and the challenges facing UCCS, Elrod said. Theres the opportunity to hit the ground running. She was one of three administrators to receive a resolution of no confidence from faculty leaders in 2015, while she was interim provost and vice president for academic affairs at her undergraduate alma mater, California State University Chico. That was two positions ago, Elrod said when a professor brought up the vote. She said it an unusual situation that she unknowingly walked into, essentially one of broken-down relationships. Since her responses were being recorded at the UCCS meeting, Elrod said she would not go into details about the matter. The real argument was between faculty and existing administration long before I arrived and had to do with longstanding challenges at the institution, she said. The resolution stated that the executive leadership has failed to effectively manage the development and implementation of policies and personnel processes that concern the faculty and staff. Elrod said shes since worked to build and nurture relationships and operate under a shared governance model, which the administrators at Cal State Chico were accused of not doing. The heart of shared governance is about relationships, understanding and listening, she said. A two-way communication needs to be built before theres a crisis. When asked about diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Amouzegar said he thinks colleges often get the diversity part right but stumble over equity and inclusion, the latter of which he would rather rename belonging. When I was growing up there was a sense of not belonging sometimes to my face, he said. Changing the culture and environment is an ongoing process that starts with the top echelon, who should take the same training as is required of everyone on campus, Amouzegar said. We put the president, provost, deans first, to signal that we just dont sit up there in our little offices telling people you should do this, but we actually impose it on ourselves, he said. If offered the job, Elrod said it would be her second university presidency and my last stop. She said shes looking for an opportunity to pour my experiences and passions into and to have an even bigger impact that I have now. Amouzegar said he recently stepped down as provost in New Orleans because he had accomplished the list of goals he set six years ago for the campus and wanted time to assess his successes and shortfalls. He said he wants to be the next chancellor of UCCS because his qualifications align with the seat, including his industry experience with the military, since 20% of UCCS students are either retired or active-duty, and hes helped other campuses overcome difficult challenges and flourish. Multiple businesses downtown remain closed Tuesday following a three-alarm fire at 15 Bijou Street in Colorado Springs Monday morning. The three-alarm fire at 15 Bijou Street closed an alleyway and East Bijou Street between Tejon Street and Cascade Avenue on for much of Monday. Colorado Springs Fire Department Spokesperson Ashley Franco told The Gazette that there were no injuries reported from the fire. The fire began some time before 10 a.m. in the building housing A Taste of Jerusalem, a UPS store, a women's clothing boutique and Icons nightclub. CSPD received the initial call at 9:48 a.m., crews began arriving at the scene three minutes later and had begun applying water to the fire by 10:01 a.m., Franco said. CSFD made a post on social media platform X that the fire was under control as of 11:09 a.m. Bijou Street reopened for traffic later in the afternoon. The dining area for Taste of Jerusalem showed some damage Tuesday morning, with soot darkening the front windows, debris on the floor and several ceiling tiles askew. According to social media, Icons and Shame and Regret (located just behind Taste of Jerusalem in the alleyway) remained closed Monday night due to smoke damage. Retail stores including Local Honey Co. and Yobel are closed until further notice due to smoke damage and lost inventory. "Unfortunately Local Honey has suffered from smoke damage due to the fire and most inventory is not salvageable at this point," Local Honey Co. wrote in a social media post, "The shop is closed until further notice." Sign up for free: Springs AM Update Your morning rundown of the latest news from Colorado Springs and around the country overnight and the stories to follow throughout the day delivered to your inbox each evening. Sign Up View all of our newsletters. Success! Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. View all of our newsletters. T. Paul, a general manager at Icons, was doing inventory inside the nightclub when they began to smell smoke at about 9:40 a.m. "The smoke was so bad, I thought the fire was coming from us," said Paul, who uses they/them pronouns. "I stepped outside and was just about to call 911 when I saw the first truck come in." About 65 CSFD firefighters were on scene at one point, Franco said. "We staff about 127 sworn firefighters every day, so the majority of our firefighters (were) on scene," she said. Investigators are working to determine the source of the fire, Franco said. "Azerbaijan hopes for further strengthening of cooperation with the United Arab Emirates (UAE)," This is stated in the publication of Azerbaijan Foreign Ministry in the social network "X" on the occasion of the UAE Independence Day, Azernews reports. We congratulate #UAE, its people and government on their #NationalDay! We look forward to further enhance our cooperation in the coming years. Happy National Day! ????????????????@mofauae pic.twitter.com/yIgLfqoepr MFA Azerbaijan ???????? (@AzerbaijanMFA) December 2, 2023 Powder day Monday for those lucky enough to have today off...or whom might play hooky...cough, cough, cough. Sunday brought heavy snow and lots of wind to the northern mountains. Some snow found its way into the central mountains, but Winter Park (15") and Steamboat (13") were the two big winners, with Breckenridge (11"), Vail (10") and Copper (10") rounding out the top five for most accumulation totals of opening resorts. The resulting northwest flow funneled snow up toward Berthoud Pass, dumping over a foot of snow at Winter Park. US Highway 40 was closed part of Sunday due to intense snow and wind. Heading into Monday, the powder will be in Grand, Clear Creek, Boulder and Summit counties closest to Denver and at Steamboat and Vail farther away from the city. Snow showers will lighten up throughout the day with the wind still gusting near the Continental Divide. Potential rope drops are also in the forecast for today. Today's 24 hour snow total, plus storm total, from Colorado resorts: Arapahoe Basin - 8" + (5" + 2") = 15" Aspen Mountain - 1" + (2" + 4") = 7" Aspen Highlands - 1" + (4" + 5") = 10", Opens Dec. 9 Beaver Creek - 5" + (3" + 3") = 11" Breckenridge - 11" + (4" + 5") = 20" Buttermilk - 1" + (1" + 5") = 7", Opens Dec. 9 Cooper - 7" + (5" + 3") = 15", Opens Dec 6. Copper Mountain - 10" + (4" + 6") = 20" Crested Butte - 6" + (9" + 5") = 20" Echo Mountain - 2" + (1" + 1") = 4", open weekends Sign up for free: Springs AM Update Your morning rundown of the latest news from Colorado Springs and around the country overnight and the stories to follow throughout the day delivered to your inbox each evening. Sign Up View all of our newsletters. Success! Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. View all of our newsletters. Eldora Mountain - 8" + (5" + 2") = 15" Granby Ranch - 8" + (5" + 3") = 16", Opens Dec. 8 Hesperus - 0" + (0" + 2") = 2", Opens early Dec. Howelsen Hill - 5" + (9" + 5") = 19" Kendall Mountain - 2" + (5" + 5") = 12", Opens Dec. 15 Keystone - 7" + (6" + 4") = 17" Loveland - 8.5" + (3" + 1") = 12.5" Monarch - 10" + (6" + 4") = 20", Open Dec. 6 Powderhorn - 0" + (3" + 8") = 11" Purgatory - 0" + (7" + 4") = 11" Silverton - 4" + (6" + 7") = 17" Snowmass - 1" + (3" + 6") = 10" Steamboat - 13" + (10" + 7") = 20" Sunlight - 3" + (3" + 4") = 10", Opens Dec. 8 Telluride - 2.5" + (1" + 15") = 18.5" Vail - 10" + (3" + 5") = 18" Winter Park - 15" + (2" + 7") = 24" Wolf Creek - 0" + (3" + 12") = 16" Dick Wadhams is a former Colorado Republican state chairman who worked for nine years for U.S. Sen. Bill Armstrong before managing campaigns for U.S. Sens. Hank Brown and Wayne Allard, and Gov. Bill Owens. As the end-of-year deadline to start Colorado's wolf reintroduction effort nears, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has issued an important announcement to help clarify the reintroduction timeline. Former Colorado Lt. Gov. Jane Norton on Monday endorsed fellow Republican Jeff Hurd, who is challenging U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert in next year's primary. Calling the Grand Junction attorney a "principled, conservative leader," Norton said that Hurd understands rural issues and stands to be an effective champion for the 3rd Congressional District. Boebert is seeking a third term representing the district, which covers most of the Western Slope and Southern Colorado. After surviving the closest congressional race in the country last year, she's facing challenges from two Republicans and two Democrats. Jeff Hurd will be a principled, conservative leader in the U.S. House," Norton said in a statement released by Hurd's campaign. "His experience working with issues of importance to rural Colorado and the way in which he conducts himself, demonstrates clearly that hell represent Colorados 3rd District well and will be a strong and serious advocate for his home state. As someone who was born and raised in Western Colorado, I deeply care about the future of rural Colorado. I am pleased to support him. Norton served one term as lieutenant governor starting in 2003 under Republican Gov. Bill Owens, who endorsed Hurd in October. Sign up for free: News Alerts Stay in the know on the stories that affect you the most. Sign Up For Free View all of our newsletters. Success! Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. View all of our newsletters. A former state lawmaker and federal official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administration's, Norton ran the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and later served as director of the Office of Intergovernmental and External Affairs for the Department of Health and Human Services under former President Donald Trump. Hurd said in a statement that he is "humbled" to get Norton's support. "She has been a leader on so many conservative fights and Im grateful for her support," he said. "As a native of Grand Junction and a fighter for western and southern Colorado, she understands that rural Colorado and our district are being left behind. I promise to deliver for the district and always conduct myself in a way that makes Colorado proud. Hurd, a first-time candidate, has won endorsements from multiple current and former Republican officials in addition to Owens in recent months, including four of the district's county commissioners, former U.S. Sen. Hank Brown, former Mesa State University President Tim Foster, former Colorado Attorney General John Suthers and former University of Colorado President Bruce Benson. Trump endorsed Boebert ahead of the 2020 general election and again last cycle. Democrat Adam Frisch, the former Aspen City Council member who came within fewer than 600 votes of unseating Boebert last year, is facing Grand Junction Mayor Anna Stout in the Democratic primary. Republican Russ Andrews, a largely self-funding candidate from Carbondale, is also also challenging Boebert in the GOP primary. A handful of third-party candidates are also running in the district. Euronews Business News Agency published an analysis on the United Nations Special Programme for the Economies of Central Asia (SPECA) that took place in Baku during the last week of SPECA, Azernews reports. SPECA: Central Asia reaffirms its key role in international transport In Baku, during SPECA week, the United Nations programme for Central Asian countries, the Member States signed new agreements to develop better international connections between Asia and Europe. Baku welcomed participants to SPECA week, a special UN programme designed for the countries of Central Asia. This year marks the programme's 25th anniversary and was the first time that a summit of leaders from SPECA states was organised. The main topic focused on transforming the region into a connectivity hub with global outreach. Sustainable transport, trade and energy are among the key areas for SPECA, which was established in 1998 to facilitate integration of these countries into the global economy and to become a platform for cooperation aimed at achieving UN Sustainable Development goals. Azerbaijan-Central Asia relations at 'record high' SPECA unites five Central Asian countries, along with Afghanistan, and Azerbaijan and two UN agencies. The summit supported the creation of the SPECA Multi Partner Trust Fund under the auspices of the UN. Azerbaijan, which is the chair of SPECA this year, will provide $3.5 million to this Fund. "This programme is based on economic relations between Central Asia and Azerbaijan; today we see the new dimension of that interaction," said Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev. "During the last two years, interaction between Azerbaijan and all Central Asian countries, and also among Central Asian countries, is at a record high. So this is a new reality and we need to capitalise on that. "We have excellent relations with all SPECA states. We have a lot of investment projects now: Azerbaijan invests in Central Asia, and Central Asian invests in Azerbaijan. We have projects such as the East-West Trans-Caspian Route, which is one the most attractive transport routes for Central Asia connecting to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean and then on to Europe through integrated connectivity projects. We see a lot of positive dynamics on the political track." A connectivity hub: Boosting the region's economic potential The Baku Declaration adopted at the summit emphasised a strong political willingness to jointly capitalise on the regions vast economic potential. "The analysis shows the opportunity to increase the mutual trade turnover of our countries from the current $52 billion to $100 billion by 2030," said the President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev. The SPECA Economic Forum, which took place ahead of the summit, discussed how the region can become a connectivity hub between Europe and Asia. "Its the most important platform that brings together one of the worlds biggest regions of landlocked countries," explained Samad Bashirli, Azerbaijan's Deputy Minister of Economy and Co-Chair of SPECA Economic Forum. "As landlocked countries we have to cooperate and increase our transport cooperation, which in turn will facilitate our trade and increase our integration into the world economy," he added. Improving the logistics capacity and performance index of trade corridors is crucial for the SPECA landlocked countries. "We see a big role for digital solutions, in making sure that goods can pass through the corridor between Europe and Asia much faster," said Dmitry Mariyasin, the Deputy Executive Secretary at UNECE and fellow Co-Chair of SPECA Economic Forum. "It is about adopting UN norms and standards in how member states clear customs, how freight documentation is exchanged. It is about making sure that the different parts of the ecosystem, the traders, the customs authorities and government officials can use similar approaches, and can literally use one language; and this is what we are focusing on from the UN side." Re-greening Uzbekistan's desertified Aral Sea region Uzbekistan makes strides towards a greener future through solar energy The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route The Trans-Caspian International Transport Route took centre stage at the forum. This multilateral, multimodal corridor connects China and Europe, passing through the region via ferry terminals, rail systems, and roads across various countries. To enhance the Middle Corridors efficiency a roadmap for the digitalisation of multimodal data and document exchange, in accordance with UN standards and documents, was endorsed in Baku. "The idea is to harmonise digitalisation along the whole supply chain using UN standards as well as UN semantic standards and reference data models, so that data can flow seamlessly along the whole supply chain, moving from one mode of transport to another, from one sector of the supply chain to another. The buzzword in all of that is interoperability," said Mario Apostolov, Regional Adviser at the UNECE's ECT Division. "This is a multimodal route that we are trying to develop; since the demand has grown, we expect that when the decisions and recommendations of SPECA are applied it will have a multiplier effect that will significantly increase freight traffic on our corridor," revealed Gaidar Abdikerimov, the Secretary General of the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route. Kazakhstan 'quite serious' about the green energy transition How SPECA can become a region of interconnected energy systems, moving towards lower carbon energy sources, was another major topic of discussions in Baku. "We are really encouraging member states to scale renewable energy resources, to integrate them in their energy mix through low and zero-carbon technologies, to strengthen the capacity of the grid to absorb the additional renewable energy capacity, because this will help the region to achieve energy resiliency and to achieve net zero," said Iva Brkic, the Economic Affairs Officer at UNECE. UN agencies are working with SPECA states, helping to develop tools and design energy policies to achieve resilient and carbon neutral energy systems. Euronews asked the President of Kazakhstan, Kasym Jomart Tokayev, how his country sees the net-zero transformation. "We are quite serious about decarbonising our economy, and about the diversification of our economy, making impetus on developing non-carbon sectors in Kazakhstan," he told Euronews. "Its a challenge. There needs to be a huge change in our mindsets first of all, and I do acknowledge that its a general trend in global economic development, and Kazakhstan wont lag behind, and at the same time we are very much committed to environmental protection. Yes, Kazakhstan still relies on coal in its energy mix, but I think that in the nearest future the situation will change positively." The regions energy potential is huge. SPECA states are working to diversify energy transit routes to global markets. "Energy resources are distributed unevenly. To ensure the energy security of countries, there is an objective need for cooperation and interconnection," said Samir Valiyev, Azerbaijan's Deputy Minister of Energy. "The SPECA program at the forum helps to foster this cooperation, as well as the organisation of ongoing discussions and the harmonisation of rules, and legislation in the support and organization of various infrastructure projects." Climate change and lack of water resources are among the regions crucial challenges. SPECA can, no doubt, play an important role in addressing these challenges. One of the first signs of trouble with Kenny and Ardith Lindquist's home in Rockrimmon was the porch the contractor couldn't believe how much cement it took to stabilize it. "He came three times with a cement truck," Kenny Lindquist recalled. While the porch still has signs of damage, the two now have much bigger worries because they believe their house is sinking backward into an abandoned coal mine that has collapsed. As a state-hired drilling crew took soil samples, the couple described years of damage, how a gray water pipe came apart and filled the basement with sewage and basement floors that have sunk several inches and in one place sound hollow. Along the front of their home, several inches of concrete is newly visible below the stucco that went on 10 years ago, which is evidence of the house shifting back, among other problems. Their next-door neighbor on Saddlemountain Road, Austin Rivenburg, has seen similar problems as the back of his house sinks, as well, causing numerous cracks in the foundation, walls and ceiling all new damage since he bought the house in 2018. Over a year ago, the homeowners asked the State Mine Subsidence Protection Program, a $4.9 million invested fund, to cover repairs because they believe the mine has collapsed and is causing the damage. "If they didn't think there was a problem with these mines, they wouldn't have started a program," Kenny Lindquist said. Colorado Springs is a hot spot for such requests, with residents filing 44 claims to the program between 2017 and 2022, with 22 of those in Rockrimmon, based on maps provided by the state. The state map shows that the areas at high and moderate risk for subsidence in Rockrimmon are roughly along south Rockrimmon Boulevard, southeast of its intersection with Vindicator Drive. Other areas of the subdivision are at low and very low risk of subsidence as depicted in the map below. Only two claims have been filed from another area of the state in the past five years, said Rachael Nickless, the program administrator. Over that period, the state determined three homeowners had problems caused by mines and they received payments totaling $270,058.30. No homeowners have appealed the program's decision not to fund damage repairs, the state said. For the Lindquists and Rivenburg, the process has been slow for determining whether the Pikeview Coal Mine located between 200 and 250 feet below their homes is causing all the damage. "It seems like they want to wait until you have this huge gigantic pit below your house and you are halfway down it before they will take action," said Ardith Lindquist. Investigative drilling Rivenburg asked for action in September 2022 when he emailed the state to inform officials he had heard a crack in the ceiling and the damage was worsening. "I would like to take the steps required to stabilize our home before the damage becomes severe and possibly dangerous to my family," he wrote. In November 2022, he pointed out to the state they misrepresented the findings of a technical report in a cover letter. The cover letter stated that mine subsidence was not the cause of the damage, while the underlying technical report said more data was required to make a determination. In a follow-up email, the state corrected the error in the cover letter at Rivenburg's request and stated investigative drilling could start within two months. State-hired contractors have done investigative drilling at the homes twice, most recently in September. Nickless said the timeline of the investigation has been affected by supply-chain issues, particularly the availability of drills. "The timeline really has not gone as we would have hoped," she told The Gazette. Sign up for free: News Alerts Stay in the know on the stories that affect you the most. Sign Up For Free View all of our newsletters. Success! Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter. View all of our newsletters. But neither household has yet received a final determination about the cause of their problems. Nickless said they should receive reports by the end of the year. To determine if problems are caused by mines or expansive soils, the contractors take soil samples that are then sent to a lab for analysis. Drilling that finds highly fractured bedrock with unusual fractured patterns and voids can be indicative of a mine collapse, the state said in a written statement. Expansive soils, such as clay, swell with water and contract with drought. The high number of claims from Colorado Springs is indicative of problems with both expansive soils in the area and the number of homes in the 1970s and 1980s with slab-on-grade foundations that are susceptible to damage from those soil types and mines, Nickless said. "There definitely are big problems in Colorado Springs, as far as geologic hazards are concerned, and swelling soils are a large part of that. They essentially wreak havoc when they're so close to the surface as they are in the Rockrimmon area." 'Houses don't heal' Homes often settle with time. If a house settles uniformly by 2 inches, you may not even notice. But if one area sinks more than others, a process known as differential settlement, it is similar to tooth decay and will get worse with time, explained Chadwick Miller, owner of Foundation Professionals of Colorado. "Houses dont heal from this," he said. Differential settlement can be amplified higher in the house, Miller said. What could be a slight difference in foundation can pull the roof shingles apart, he said. It is rare for houses to fail to the point where they fall or break in half, but it happens. In Rockrimmon, Miller has stabilized homes sinking into mines using steel piers. The weight of the house is transferred onto the piers and used to push them into the ground until they hit a section of underlying rock or soil that can hold them. In one case, Millet's team discovered a mine about 20 feet under a home because it was swallowing up sections of pier. The sections were nested together using gravity and force to hold them together, but as they reached the void of the mine, they fell off. Miller's team ended up welding sections of the pier together to keep it together as it descended through the emptiness. Putting down piers to stabilize a house can cost $30,000-$40,000, Miller said. Less dramatic bowing in foundation walls can be stabilized with carbon-fiber straps, which can cost $5,000-$6,000, he said. Severe problems requiring a new foundation and possibly a basement replacement can cost $100,000-$300,000. In Rockrimmon, he has seen more foundation problems caused from mines than clay swelling or contracting with moisture. Some homes in the area also can have problems because builders did not include foundation footers, he said. The builders at the time thought leaving off footers would prevent homes from being damaged if the clay swelled and pushed a portion of a house up, known as heaving. The theory was that without the footer, the outer foundation would slice through the swelling soil. It didn't work, because the homes in Rockrimmon were actually experiencing settlement, he said. Colorado's protection plan If the state's investigation determines a mine is causing a house to sink, the homeowners enrolled in the protection program can receive up to $100,000 for repairs or an amount that would equal the fair-market value of the property before damage from a collapsed mine, according to a state rule. The program is only open to those with homes built before 1989. While the protection program is similar to insurance, it is not insurance and not regulated by the Division of Insurance, agency spokesman Vincent Plymell said. Standard homeowner policies also do not cover mine subsidence, and no laws require insurance companies to cover it, he said. Some states with extensive coal mining, such as West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio, have required private companies to provide subsidence insurance. In some problematic areas, insurance for subsidence is mandatory. In the 2019-2020 fiscal year, Indiana saw 50 subsidence claims and insurance provided $2.9 million for repairs. The Colorado Division of Mining Reclamation and Safety said the state set up a trust fund because it was "considered preferable to any other legislatively enacted direct state involvement in the insurance business." However, Rivenburg pointed to a 1991 report from what is now the Government Accountability Office that said the federal government's intent for the $3 million grants to states was to set up insurance programs. Colorado's original grant has grown into a $4.9 million invested fund to cover subsidence. "This program has been flawed since inception," Rivenburg said. The state office that oversees emergency medical services in Virginia is tangled in a financial crisis, preventing rescue squads from buying new ambulances and threatening the jobs of EMS support personnel. In the spring, state government leaders discovered the Office of Emergency Medical Services had for years misspent millions of dollars. So far, no one has said exactly how much money is missing, how long it was misspent, where it went or why it was mishandled. State and federal investigators are now asking questions. The impact is far-reaching. EMS crews throughout the state can't apply for grants to buy ambulances, stretchers or automated external defibrillators, leaving them to deal with sometimes outdated equipment. A volunteer rescue squad in Winchester has to make do with a 14-year-old ambulance that often breaks down or raise more than $400,000 to buy a new one. And the nonprofit regional councils that coordinate and train EMS providers throughout the state are going unfunded. For now, they are surviving on reserve funds and other revenue, but some could be forced to cease operation at the end of the month, said Tracy McLaurin, who leads the Lord Fairfax EMS Council in the Winchester area. It's going to have far-reaching and long-lasting implications, unfortunately," McLaurin said in an interview. "We dont know what the futures going to hold. Office spent money it didn't have In the spring, the Virginia Department of Health conducted regular budget reviews of each of its 20 offices. During a routine review in May, leadership discovered "financial irregularities," at the Office of EMS, said R. Christopher Lindsay, the department's chief operating officer of the, according to prepared remarks from a November meeting. A significant portion of the money the Office of EMS was supposed to deliver to the general fund had disappeared. This led department leadership to open an audit, which is ongoing, and contact the Office of the State Inspector General, the Virginia State Police and federal prosecutors. "I cannot comment further on the specifics of these investigations," Lindsay said at the November meeting. What Lindsay would divulge is that for years, the Office of EMS created budgets that were not in line with available funding. The office spent significantly more money than it had, and overspent on contracts. "There have been years of moving of funds from one sources to another to cover shortfalls with little agency oversight or controls which has left a multi-million-dollar deficit within the Office of EMS that will take time and effort to correct," Lindsay said. It's unclear if the money was lost to negligence or if it was stolen. It's also unclear why there weren't systems in place to discover the problem earlier. The office's long-time director, Gary Brown, who was in charge there for 27 years, announced in October he would retire, WTVR reported. The health department named Cam Crittenden the office's acting director. There are roughly 38,000 EMS providers in the state both volunteer and paid and not including firefighters working at about 550 agencies. In Richmond, the Richmond Ambulance Authority is the city's primary EMS provider. In Henrico, volunteer rescue squads, including Tuckahoe and Lakeside, work alongside the county's fire department. The salaries of paid employees are generally funded at the local level and are not in danger of disappearing. But much of their equipment is paid for by the state or local fundraising. When a Virginia resident registers a vehicle with the Department of Motor Vehicles, the resident pays a tax between $30 and $35. From that total, about $6 goes toward the Virginia Office of Emergency Medical Services, which pays for the department's $56 million budget for fiscal 2024. The funding program is referred to as "4 for Life," because previously, $4 was allocated from vehicle registrations for emergency medical services. The budget is used to pay the office's nearly 50-person staff and the regional councils that train and coordinate EMS agencies. Other money is disbursed to localities, volunteer rescue squads, the Virginia State Police's emergency helicopter transport, trauma centers such as Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center and the state's general fund. Much of the funding is required by state law. One of the largest pieces of the pie, almost $10 million, is designated for the Rescue Squad Assistance Fund, in which rescue squads can apply for grant money to buy new ambulances or other equipment. But the state won't fund any grant applications in the next cycle. Replacing a 14-year-old ambulance In the city of Winchester, the Shawnee Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department owns two ambulances. One of them is 14 years old, frequently out of service and in dire need of replacement, said Jon Henschel, Winchester's Fire Chief, in an interview. The department has asked the state three times for the money to buy a new one, which costs more than $400,000. The first two times, the request was denied. Henschel thought the third time was the charm. In a normal period, the Office of EMS would award its next cycle of grant money around Jan. 1. Without that money, Shawnee likely will have to pay for the ambulance on its own. The department already fundraises it holds bingo nights twice a week but that money also goes toward fire engines and the fire station's building upkeep. And fundraising has become harder in recent years as the cost of ambulances has soared. Agencies can borrow ambulances from one another, but that causes a domino effect, inconveniencing more and more units. When the state will resume funding, Henschel doesn't know. "Were not getting a lot of answers," he said. "This is going to have a detrimental outcome statewide if they don't rectify this soon." While rescue squads themselves aren't in danger of shutting down, the bodies that coordinate EMS are. The Lord Fairfax EMS Council in Winchester is one of 11 throughout the state and are paid as contractors. They decide which trauma centers will receive ambulances from different localities and where ambulances will go if the first option is overwhelmed. The councils provide training for EMS providers, operate a program that allows them to carry blood for transfusions and distributed personal protective equipment to ambulances during the pandemic. The Lord Fairfax Council hasn't received payment from the state since March, McLaurin said. At the end of December, the state will owe the council about $175,000 for nine month's work. McLaurin has been able to pay her four other employees by collecting revenue from CPR training, the sale of defibrillators, certification testing and tapping into the nonprofit's rainy-day fund. But that money will only go so far, she said. If the council isn't paid by early next year, it might have to cease operations. Other councils depend more on the state for revenue and might be forced to shut down at the end of the month, she said. "It's putting everybody in a really difficult position right now," McLaurin said. Dr. Karen Shelton, the state health commissioner, said the health department is working to free up funds to pay the councils. To meet payroll, the health department will restructure the office and delay payments back to localities. During the pandemic, the health department lost much of its financial management workforce, Shelton said at the November meeting. Now it's working to rebuild. Kevin Dillard, chair of the state EMS advisory board, has been tasked with assembling a workgroup to begin fixing the office. The work will take time and effort, Dillard said in an interview. "They're taking drastic measures to stop the bleeding and get this under control," he added. Milli Majlis Speaker Sahiba Gafarova has met with Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky as part of her official visit to the Czech Republic, Azernews reports, citing Department of Press and Public Relations of the Parliament. Jan Lipavski said that the relations between the two countries are at a high level and noted that there are no open issues between the two countries. He expressed his opinion on strengthening co-operation in the economic and trade spheres and drew attention to the important role of Azerbaijan in energy supply of his country. It was emphasised that Azerbaijani oil is an important part of Czech consumption. The Foreign Minister expressed his intention to further expand cooperation in this field. Jan Lipavski drew attention to the Czech Republic's interest in further development of cooperation within international organisations. At the meeting the Chairman of the Milli Majlis emphasised the importance of continuation of visits and high-level meetings between the two countries. Speaker Sahiba Gafarova drew attention to the favourable investment environment in Azerbaijan, large-scale reconstruction works carried out in the territories liberated from occupation, modern transport infrastructure and Azerbaijan's important role as a transit country, work done in the field of renewable energy sources, and there are wide opportunities for further development of bilateral economic cooperation between the two countries. He noted that there are wide opportunities for further development of this co-operation, including in the field of renewable energy. At the meeting, the Speaker of Milli Majlis criticised the existing double standards in the system of international relations and said that although the decisions taken against some states are immediately implemented, sometimes we witness that the international law is ignored. Speakerrecalled that Azerbaijan had suffered from the occupation of Armenia for almost 30 years. As a result of that occupation, one million Azerbaijanis had been forced to leave their homeland. Armenia had destroyed and looted all our cities and regions under occupation. Although almost all international organisations, especially the UN Security Council, adopted various decisions and resolutions on the elimination of the occupation, these documents remained on paper for almost 30 years. Three years ago Azerbaijan liberated its lands from occupation, ensuring the implementation of these decisions at the cost of its own forces. Sahiba Gafarova noted that Azerbaijan is currently carrying out large-scale reconstruction and construction works in the territories liberated from occupation and emphasised that Azerbaijan is pursuing a peaceful policy. Azerbaijan wants to ensure permanent peace in the region. Therefore, despite the fact that it is an occupied country, it is Azerbaijan that has submitted its proposals to Armenia on the normalisation of relations and signing a peace treaty. Sahiba Gafarova noted that completely inadequate and unacceptable statements, distorting the realities in the region, cast a shadow and undermine the efforts of signing the peace agreement. The Speaker of the Azerbaijani Parliament stressed the need for fairness in mediation in the process of signing the peace agreement and normalisation of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The Czech Foreign Minister said that they are interested in ensuring stability in the region and support the peace process. He noted that the Czech Republic positively assesses Azerbaijan's efforts in this direction. At the meeting, the sides exchanged views on other issues of mutual interest. GREENSBORO A 22-year-old man died at the scene of a shooting early Saturday, Greensboro Police said in a news release. Tyree Jackson was found by police who responded at 3:50 a.m. to the 1800 block of Dodson Street. Police said all involved parties have been identified and that investigators are not looking for any suspects at this time. Jacksons death marks the citys 69th homicide in 2023. Also over the weekend, police said someone was seriously injured in a shooting shortly after 7:30 p.m. Sunday in the 5000 block of Turnbridge Circle. The person was taken by ambulance to a local hospital. Their condition was not immediately available. Its unclear what led to the shootings. Police are asking anyone with information to contact Greensboro/Guilford Crime Stoppers at 336-373-1000. Residents can also download the mobile P3tips app for Apple or Android phones to submit a mobile tip, or go to P3tips.com to submit a web tip. All tips to Crime Stoppers are anonymous. Its that time of year so lets get right to recommendations for the holiday table or party host. Some favorite Trader Joes wines during the gift-giving season and these wont break the bank: Hunting a last-minute gift for a wine lover? The Yadkin Valley Winter Wine passport gets you free tastings at 12 North Carolina wineries, four breweries and one distillery for $195 per couple. Each passport which includes discounts in wine country restaurants and lodgings is valued at $400. Information: www.yadkinvalleync.com/guides/winter-beer-wine-passport. has allocated Rs 100 crore for the establishment of new hospitals and the enhancement of existing infrastructure facilities in Kerala, as stated by a senior official. As part of their expansion strategy, the eye care provider has recently opened a new hospital in Kozhikode. "We are committed to transforming Kerala into a destination for. We are investing about Rs 100 crore in Kerala over the next two years". Dr Agarwal's Group of Eye Hospitals chief operating officer Rahul Agarwal said.The investment would be utilized for setting up new hospitals and to upgrade the existing facilities, he noted. "Our objective is to provide our patients with improved access to high-quality eye care and generate employment opportunities in the healthcare sector. The investment will go towards adding new hospitals and modernizing the existing four hospitals (in Kerala)", Agarwal said in a statement.The Group aims to inaugurate its second facility in Thiruvananthapuram by the conclusion of the upcoming financial year. Additionally, there are plans to establish a presence in Kannur, Thrissur, Palakkad, Kollam, Thalassery, and Malappuram by the end of the fiscal year 2025-26. The newly opened Calicut hospital, spanning 10,000 sq ft in Patteri, Pottammal, provides advanced facilities for the diagnosis and treatment of various eye conditions, including cornea, retina, refractive issues, and cataracts."With a legacy of excellence in eye care that spans several decades, we bring our wealth of expertise to Calicut to address a wide range of eye conditions and disorders", Dr. Agarwals Eye Hospital Regional Head-Clinical Services Dr. S Soundari said.The recently launched Calicut hospital is structured to provide a comprehensive array of services, encompassing routine eye examinations, advanced diagnostic procedures , and diverse surgical interventions, as highlighted by Soundari. In celebration of the new facility's inauguration, the hospital will extend free consultations to its patients until the end of the current month. Dr. Agarwal's Group presently manages more than 160 eye care facilities across India and 15 in Africa. A Peace in Palestine rally was held Sunday at the state Capitol, drawing about 150 people who called on federal officials to take action for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and end military aid to Israel. The Helena gathering - that brought in people from all over the state was organized by Montanans for Palestine, also known as Montanans in Solidarity with Palestine. Signs peppered the flag plaza in front of the Capitol, urging support for Palestine. There were a few signs expressing support for Israel as well. Organizers said earlier they want Democratic Sen. Jon Tester and Republican Sen. Steve Daines to vote against the sale of $14 billion of weapons to Israel. On Sunday they urged attendees to keep the event peaceful. Speeches were made on the Capitol steps and then attendees marched across the street to Testers Helena office. Brendan Work of Montanans in Solidarity with Palestine was happy with the turnout, saying he was proud of those who attended and showed support for Palestine. The Associated Press reported that the Israeli military said Sunday that its ground offensive had expanded to every part of Gaza. Heavy bombardment followed the evacuation orders, and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip said they were running out of places to go in the sealed-off territory that borders Israel and Egypt. Many of its 2.3 million people are crammed into the south after Israel ordered civilians to leave the north in the early days of the war, which was sparked by the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack in Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Hopes for another temporary truce are fading after Israel called its negotiators home. The United Nations estimates that 1.8 million Gazans have been displaced, AP stated. More on the rally will be in Tuesdays newspaper. A Peace in Palestine rally was held Sunday at the state Capitol, drawing about 150 people who called on federal officials to take action for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza and end military aid to Israel. The Helena gathering which brought in people from all over the state was organized by Montanans for Palestine, also known as Montanans in Solidarity with Palestine. Brendan Work of Montanans in Solidarity with Palestine said thousands of signatures have been gathered on petitions and hundreds of calls made to representatives seeking a cease-fire now. He mentioned other previous rallies in Butte, Bozeman and Missoula. We are the biggest anti-war movement in 30 years, Work said as he stood outside the state Capitol. We are growing every day and we will win. Israel has vowed to eliminate Gazas Hamas rulers, whose Oct. 7 attack into Israel killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and triggered the deadliest Israeli-Palestinian violence in decades, according to the Associated Press. Scores of hostages, including Americans, were taken by Palestinian militants. Organizers said earlier they want Democratic Sen. Jon Tester and Republican Sen. Steve Daines to vote against the sale of $14 billion of weapons to Israel. Work said he was able to speak to Tester but was unable to get a commitment to call for a cease-fire. "Jon Tester sees what is happening and all he can say is that is not a good situation," Work said. He urged people to join with others and keep fighting against genocide of Palestinians. Signs peppered the flag plaza in front of the Capitol, urging support for Palestine. There was at least one sign expressing support for Israel and harshly criticizing Palestine. Gail Asbury, of Helena, said I am a Christian and Christians support Jews, she said, while holding a flag of Israel. Speakers at the rally, some who asked to be identified by only their first names, continued on the theme of demanding Montana politicians support a cease-fire. We will not rest until Palestinians have the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, one said. One speaker named Lauren, who said she was Jewish, demanded a permanent cease-fire. She said Judaism has been a grounding force in her life and taught her the power of community and serves as the foundation of her moral compass. I can think of nothing less Jewish than what the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinian people right now, she said. Some read poetry. Tester's office Monday said he has met face-to-face with Montanans who "have a wide array of views on this difficult issue." "Senator Tester supported the recent pause in fighting that helped free hostages and save innocent lives and he believes the United States should continue to prioritize freeing the rest of the hostages, countering Hamas and getting to a position where the conflict can be de-escalated. they said. They noted that neither Israel nor Hamas currently support a permanent cease-fire and he believes the United States should continue to engage to free the rest of the hostages and get to a position where the conflict can be de-escalated. Daines' staff sent a comment from the senator regarding the current situation in Gaza. "Hamas is an Islamic terrorist organization funded by Iran and its attack on Israel was a horrific massacre where innocent Jewish families, including Americans, were murdered, burned alive and taken hostage," they said. They said Daines "believes Israel has the right to defend itself and supports sending aid to ensure its ability to do so. Senator Daines does not believe there should be a cease-fire as it would only give Hamas the opportunity to regroup, rearm and find more opportunities to use innocent civilians as human shields." Daines "firmly stands with the United States biggest ally in the Middle East, Israel," they said in an email. After the speeches, attendees marched across the street to Testers Helena office. Israeli warplanes heavily bombarded an area around Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Monday as the military ordered mass evacuations from the town in the face of a widening ground offensive that is pushing Palestinians into a progressively shrinking portion of the besieged territory, the Associated Press reported. The war has already killed thousands of Palestinians and displaced over three-fourths of the territorys population of 2.3 million people. Palestinian health officials say bombardment has killed several hundred civilians since a weeklong truce ended Friday. Already under mounting pressure from its top ally, the United States, Israel appears to be racing to strike a death blow against Hamas if thats possible, given the groups deep roots in Palestinian society before any new cease-fire. But the mounting toll is likely to further increase international pressure to return to the negotiating table. TOLEDO The attorney for a man charged in a Cumberland County murder case has reported that he is still seeking investigative report information from the Illinois State Police in preparation for a jury trial set for March 20. Public Defender Shon Park said during a pretrial hearing on Monday that the State Police has told him for a few weeks that the information will be sent to him soon digitally, but he is still waiting as he prepares his defense of Lance T. Newcomb, 25, of Robinson. After Park requested that the pretrial hearing for Newcomb be continued, Judge Jonathan Braden rescheduled this conference for Monday, Dec. 11 with no objection from State's Attorney Bryan Robbins. Newcomb is charged with first degree murder for the death of Ryan Waggoner, 55, of rural Lerna. The State Police has reported that evidence shows the fatal shooting took place at Waggoners home, where he was last seen on June 2. Newcomb is also charged with concealing a homicidal death. He and two co-defendants in this case have all pleaded not guilty to the charges against them. His mother, Angela S. Newcomb, 58, of Robinson is charged in Crawford County with concealment of homicidal death and obstruction of justice/destroying evidence. Family friend Hiley A. Schulte, 52, of Oblong is charged with concealment of homicidal death, plus unlawful possession of methamphetamine. The charges allege that Angela Newcomb helped transport Waggoner's remains to Crawford County and that Schulte allowed Lance Newcomb to attempt to dispose of the remains on her rural property there. Newcomb remains in the custody of the Cumberland County jail, while the two co-defendants were released on bond earlier this year. DECATUR Illinois taxpayers must pay more than $2.5 million in damages to the children of a Decatur mom who lost her life after her van was rammed by a speeding State Trooper responding to an emergency call. The decision was handed down by four judges in the states Court of Claims in response to a lawsuit filed by the family of the late 26-year-old Kelly E. Wilson. She suffered her fatal injuries on the night of May 7, 2016, in a collision at the intersection of West Harrison and Oakland avenues. But the court had initially awarded Wilsons family more than $4.7 million in damages. The judges cut the final payment by 45%, however, because they ruled that was how much Wilsons own negligence had contributed to the crash. The court said its ruling was based on blood tests that showed she had a blood alcohol level above 0.8% and an elevated level of cannabis that were both beyond the legal limit for driving. Paradoxically, the judges also concluded after hearing testimony from experts hired by the familys attorney, Timothy Shay there was actually no evidence Wilsons reactions had been any different from a sober driver at the time of the crash. She had been turning left from Harrison onto Oakland when she was rammed by Master Sgt. Jeffrey A. Dennings northbound squad car. It had its emergency lights activated as it flew up Oakland at 108 mph but wasnt continuously sounding its siren. Denning admitted his speed and intermittent siren use a breach of police rules had helped cause the accident. Expert analysis would show his squad car had slowed to 90 mph or less when it hit Wilsons van, the force of the impact sending the van airborne in a barrel roll. Wilson would die from injuries some two hours later. Denning also was badly hurt and the trooper, now aged 55, retired in the wake of the crash. In March of 2021 Denning had been sentenced to 24 months probation and ordered to perform 300 hours of community service after taking a plea deal that saw him admit a charge of reckless conduct, a Class A misdemeanor, in Macon County Circuit Court. A felony charge of reckless homicide had been dropped by special prosecutor Edwin Parkinson. Given all that, however, the judges still said they had to take into account Wilsons alcohol and drug use. One thing is clear. Wilson had no right whatsoever to be driving that night. It was illegal to do so, irrespective of whether she allegedly behaved as a non-impaired driver would have behaved, they said. Had Wilson not made the decision to drive in violation of Illinois law, the accident would not have occurred. As such, her violation of the vehicle code, by driving with illegal BAC levels, adds to the level of her contributory negligence. The courts final calculations left Denning bearing 55% of the negligence and Wilson 45%. If the judges had found Wilson had been 50% negligent, they said, her family would be barred from being paid any money. While a close call, the court concludes that, given the reckless conduct of Trooper Denning, the court does not believe the evidence justifies a conclusion that Ms. Wilson was more than 50% negligent, the judges said in their findings. Shay, the attorney who litigated the case, told the Herald & Review on Monday that he was surprised by the amount of comparative fault the court had found. He said the court had focused on Wilsons blood and drug levels even though there was no evidence of impairment. Shay added: The family has accepted the verdict. I think they want closure. After being reduced by 45%, the final award to be paid to Wilsons family adds up to $2,591,761.26. Of that, $1.1 million each goes to Wilsons daughters, now aged 14 and 8, for their grief, sorrow, mental suffering in the wake of their mothers untimely death. In addition, there were economic damages to make up for lost wages and income of totaling $336,761.26 and an additional pay-out of $55,000 for the pain and suffering of Wilson before she died. The money, however, will not be paid just yet. The Court of Claims says the Illinois General Assembly must pass a Special Awards Bill to authorize payment of the courts judgment. It is expected that legislation will be made law in the assemblys 2024 spring session. At the time of the fatal crash, Denning had been rushing to answer an emergency call after an officer had been shot and wounded in Mahomet. The criminal who shot the officer, Dracy Clint Pendleton, was thought to be fleeing along Interstate 72 and Denning had been racing to try and intercept him. Pendleton was later tracked down and cornered by police in a section of the Shawnee National Forest on May 15, 2016, and killed in a subsequent gun battle with officers. 32 unsolved crimes in Illinois December 23, 1975 - Carol Rofstad Carol Rofstad, who was 21 when she was killed, lived in Normal, IL while attending Illinois State University. She was found beaten unconscious about noon December 23, 1975, outside her sorority house at 602 S. Fell Street. The suspected murder weapon, an 18-inch piece of railroad tie, was found nearby. Rofstad wasn't found until roughly 12 hours after the attack. She died Christmas Eve as a result of head injuries. Two men, one of whom carried a club, were seen between 10 p.m. and 10:15 p.m. on December 22, 1975. Both were white males and between the ages of 18 and 25. At the time of the attack, most students had already left campus for the holiday break. Instead of returning to Elk Grove Village, though, Rofstad had stayed in the Twin Cities to work at a retail store. Money was found in her purse and there was no evidence of sexual assault. Two women, in the sorority house, neither saw nor heard anything unusual. Anyone with information in this case can call the Normal Police Department at (309) 454-9526, or Crime Stoppers of McLean County at (309) 828-1111. October 2,1976 - Unidentified Female On October 2, 1976, a local farmer in unincorporated Seneca, IL, discovered the victim in a ditch along U.S. Route 6, 1/4 mile east of the LaSalle County line. The victim had died from a gun shot wound. If anyone has any information, please contact Deputy Chief Coroner Brandon Johnson at The Grundy County Coroner's Office at 815-942-3792 or email: bjohnson@grundyco.org. May 26, 1980 - Diana K. Smith On May 26, 1980, Illinois State Police Investigations and the Rock Island County Sheriff's Office initiated a death investigation reference a white female (SMITH) found badly decomposed on the banks of the Rock River in Barstow, Illinois. Smith (Age 21) was last seen on May 20, 1980 leaving her house to go bowling in Rock Island. Any persons associated with Smith, or who may have knowledge of her murder are encouraged to contact the Illinois State Police, Zone 2 Investigations at 815-632-4010, ext. 232. March 30, 1984 - Lisa Ann Carnes Lisa Carnes' body was found on March 30, 1984 in a field in rural Massac County near Macedonia Church Road and US Highway 45. Anyone who has information that may be helpful in solving this crime is asked to contact Illinois State Police, Zone 7 Investigations at (618) 845-3740. April 9, 1985 - Unidentified Male On April 9, 1985, the Adams County Sheriff's Department was notified of the discovery of a deceased unidentified white male (approximately 20-30 years of age). The body was discovered by a private citizen. The body was located near an abandoned rock quarry on property rented by the Western IL Stone Company. This area is in the northwest portion of Adams County, IL (approximately 4 miles east of Meyer, IL) and is a rural area. The property was adjacent to County Road 0543E. Upon arrival officers of the ISP and Adams County Sheriff's Dept. observed the unidentified white male body which was partially covered. An autopsy was performed which concluded the cause of death was the result of multiple blunt trauma to the head and torso. The individual was found wearing "segefield" blue jeans, blue insulated underwear, gray socks (no shoes), a white printed t-shirt was located with the individual with the following printing "Captain Anderson's Restaurant Panama City Beach, FL." Investigators also noted a distinct tattoo on the victim's right forearm (a skeleton holding an inverted shotgun). If anyone has any information regarding this case they can contact Illinois State Police, Zone 4 Investigations (217-285-2034) or the Adams County Sheriff's Department (217-227-2200). May 20, 1986 - Kathleen A. Goebeler On May 20, 1986, Illinois State Police (ISP) District 01 responded to an area of abandoned railroad tracks located on the south side of I-88, milepost 28.5, wherein a citizen had discovered the decomposed skeletal remains of a white female now identified as Kathleen A. Goebeler, DOB: 11-12-1956, 5'01", 105 pounds. Kathleen's maiden name is Johnson. Her last known address was Mckees Rocks, Pennsylvania, which is a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Kathleen was last seen between April 11th and 18th, 1986, in Mckees Rocks, Pennsylvania. It is known that Goebeler would hitchhike as a means of transportation. Goebeler was known to have worked in strip clubs in the Pittsburgh, Pa. area, Atlantic City, New Jersey area and possibly the northwest West Virginia area. Geographic information regarding the area wherein the female was found: I-88 is an east/west toll way which connects the Quad Cities with Chicago, Illinois (very rural in nature). This location was approximately 120 miles west of Chicago. At the time of death, I-88 was still Illinois Route 5, a four lane highway. The body was found approximately 45' south of the roadway across a barbed wire fence in a sparsely wooded area. The photo included with this unsolved crime information is a reconstructed photo. If you have any information please contact Illinois State Police, Zone 2 Investigations at 815-632-4012 or call Crimestoppers at 309/762-9500. July 20, 1990 - Unidentified Female On July 20, 1990, at 1:25 p.m., an unidentified, white female body, approximately 5'4"-5'6" tall and 120-130lbs. in weight, was found in a bean field approximately 40 feet north of Lebanon Road, 1/10th of a mile west of the Troy and O'Fallon Road in Jarvis Township, Collinsville, Illinois. The victim's death resulted from multiple cutting and stab wounds to the neck and torso; her fallopian tubes, uterus and ovaries were missing. Evidence of surgical removal could not be determined. No defensive wounds were found on the victim. The body appeared to have been placed at the site two to three days prior to discovery. An image of a heart shaped turquoise ring she was wearing at the time of her discovery is attached, as well as a photograph of a reconstructive sculpture and artist interpretive sketch of her possible appearance before death. Anyone with any information regarding the identification of the unidentified victim is urged to contact Madison County Sheriff's Department at 618/692-0871 or call Crimestoppers at 1-866-371-TIPS(8477). October 4, 1990 - Robin Renea Abrams Robin Renea Abrams was reported missing on October 4, 1990. Abrams was last seen at approximately 4:00 PM, in the area of Goodenow Road, in Beecher, Illinois. At the time of her disappearance, Abrams was 28 years old and was believed to be wearing a black leather jacket, a white, long sleeved, knit pullover, black patent leather shoes and a gold pinky ring. Abrams was also possibly carrying a small, light beige, patterned clutch purse. Abrams was last seen driving a Red 1989 Dodge Daytona Hatchback that was later recovered in Harvey, Illinois. Anyone having information concerning the disappearance of Robin Renea Abrams should contact the Illinois State Police, Zone 3 Investigations Section at 815-726-6377 August 23, 1992 - Tammy J. Zywicki On August 23, 1992, Tammy J. Zywicki departed Evanston, Illinois, for college in Grinnell, Iowa, where she was expected to arrive that evening. Later that day, Zywicki's car was found by an Illinois State Trooper and ticketed as being abandoned. On August 24, 1992, the vehicle was towed by the Illinois State Police. On that same evening, Zywicki's mother contacted the Illinois State Police and advised them that her daughter had not arrived at college. On September 1, 1992, Zywicki's body was located along Interstate Highway 44 (I-44) in rural Lawrence County, Missouri, which is located between Springfield and Joplin, Missouri. She had been stabbed to death. Zywicki was reportedly last seen with her car, a 1985 Pontiac T100 with New Jersey license plates, on Interstate 80 at mile marker 83 in LaSalle County, Illinois, between 3:10 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. on August 23, 1992. It was also reported that a tractor/trailer was seen near Zywicki's vehicle during this time period. The driver of the tractor/trailer is described as a white male between 35 and 40 years of age, over six feet tall, with dark, bushy hair. Some of the victim's personal property is known to be missing, including a Cannon 35mm camera and a musical wrist watch with an umbrella on its face and it played a tune. Anyone with any information is urged to contact Illinois State Police, Zone 3 Investigations at (815) 726-6377. January 27, 1993 - Unidentified Female On January 27, 1993, the head of a white female was found in a wooded area in the Wayne Fitzgerald State Park in Jefferson County, Illinois. Postmortem examination revealed the victim had approximately shoulder length reddish-brown hair. Analysis by the University of Illinois, Anthropology Department indicated the victim's age ranged between 30 to 50 years. Unusual skeletal characteristics of the skull and upper front cervical vertebrae indicate the victim suffered from chronic spasmodic torticollis or wryneck, a condition which causes stress on the muscles which are responsible for maintaining upright head posture. Evidence of a healed traumatic lesion on the skull suggests this condition may have been preceded by head trauma; this would have resulted in the victim maintaining a leftward tilt of the head. Anyone with any information that would help identify this unidentified victim is urged to contact Illinois State Police, Zone 7 Investigations at 618-542-1137 or call Crimestoppers at 1-866-371-TIPS(8477). June 29, 1993 - Keith L Brown On Feb. 3, 1993, the wife of Keith L. Brown 34, of Buckner reported her husband was missing. Brown's blue 1989 Plymouth hatchback, (IL. Reg. KWA682) was located two days later in a remote area near Crab Orchard Lake in Williamson County. On June 29,1993, Brown's skeletal remains were found in a hay field near Crab Orchard Lake by a farmer. Brown had been shot several times. Anyone with information is urged to contact Illinois State Police, Zone 7 Investigations at (618)542-2171. July 24, 1993 - Carmen Charneco Carmen Charneco was found murdered on July 24, 1993 on Interstate 90 in Elgin, Illinois. The Illinois State Police is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of Edwin Acevedo Rodriguez, Male/Hispanic, 12/18/72. Rodriguez is a wanted fugitive who fled the Elgin area in July 1993 and is wanted for questioning in the death of Carmen Charneco. Rodriguez should be considered armed and dangerous. Rodriguez has a history of drugs and weapons and has been identified as a member of the street gang Maniac Latin Disciples." Warrants for Parole Violation, Public Peace/Damage to Property/Mob Action, and Unlawful Flight to Avoid Confinement, have been issued for Rodriguez. Before any law enforcement action is taken, agencies should confirm the status of the warrants. The Illinois State Police will coordinate extradition proceedings if Rodriguez is apprehended anywhere. Rodriguez has relatives in and has been sighted in Brooklyn, Bronx, New York, New York and the areas surrounding Aguada, Aguadilla Puerto Rico. He was also sighted in Hialeah, Florida. Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican male, approximately 5 feet, 3 - 5 inches tall, with black hair and brown eyes. When last seen, his weight was approximately 132-150 pounds, but this description is dated. Rodriguez has several tattoos including ones on his left and right thighs, right arm, forearm, and shoulder. The attached photograph shows Rodriguez as he looked in 1993. No more recent information is available. Anyone having information concerning this case should contact the Illinois State Police, Zone 1 Investigations at 847-294-4314. Any request for a tip to be from an anonymous source will be honored. August 5, 1994 - Sherry Lewis On August 5, 1994, 30-year-old Sherry L. Lewis, a Decatur realtor, was found deceased in a Macon County residence that was for sale which she had an appointment to show. Anyone with information regarding the Lewis murder should contact the Macon County Sheriff's Office at (217) 424-1337. The family of Sherry Lewis is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person(s) responsible for the murder. Contact the Illinois State Police, Zone 5 Investigations at 815/844-1500 or call Crimestoppers at 1-866-371-TIPS(8477). October 10, 1994 - Jeffery W. Archer Illinois State Police, District Chicago Investigations is seeking assistance regarding the death of Jeffery W. Archer. He was last seen leaving his 1990 Plymouth Voyager, Illinois Registration TU5880 on October 10, 1994, at approximately 5:00 p.m. in the area of 6900 South Wolf Road, Indian Head Park, Illinois. His body was recovered on October 16, 1994, from the Sanitary Shipping Canal, one mile east of Routes 83 and 171. Anyone with any information is urged to contact ISP Zone 1 Investigations at (847) 608-3200 to provide any additional information. August 13, 1995 - Phil Christensen Phillip Christensen was found deceased on August 13, 1995 on Stouffer Road in rural Sterling, IL. An autopsy revealed he died of gunshot wounds. Christensen was a life-long resident of the Sterling-Rock Falls area and known to frequent many of the bars in that area. Many of Christensen's associates were interviewed at the time of his murder and some may have more information to offer. Anyone with information regarding the murder of Phil Christensen is encouraged to contact the Illinois State police, Zone 2 Investigations at 815-632-4010, ext. 232. November 1, 1995 - Shana M Jaros The Illinois State Police, Montgomery County Sheriffs Office, and the Nokomis Police Department are seeking assistance regarding the homicide of Shana Marie Jaros, of Nokomis, Illinois. Just before 7:00 a.m., on November 1, 1995, Jaros' deceased body was discovered in her apartment of one week at 527 South Maple, Nokomis, Illinois. A neighbor reported she heard a scuffle in Jaros's apartment at approximately 4:46 a.m. on November 1, 1995. The neighbor did not observe anyone leaving the victim's apartment immediately thereafter. Jaros received more than 50 stab-cutting wounds from just above her breasts to her neck. Death resulted from massive blood loss. Anyone with any information is urged to contact Illinois State Police, Zone 6 Investigations at 217-324-2515, or Crimestoppers at 1-800-352-0136. April 22, 1998 - Unidentified Male On April 22, 1998, an unidentified male was found in a field near I-55 and Rt. 53 between the towns of Bolingbrook and Romeoville IL. He had been deceased for an estimated 2 to 5 years. He was wearing an extra large blue nylon Starter jacket, blue jeans and size 9 or 9 1/2 Nike shoes. This person had a distinct overbite. Dental records are available for comparison. DNA profile has been established at the Illinois State Police Crime lab in Joliet IL, and is on file in CODIS. The attached image is a facial/cranial reconstruction prepared by the FBI and is an approximation, not an exact replication, of the face and head. Please contact Will County Coroner's Office at 815-727-8455. April 25, 1998 - Jeremy "Chappy" Chappelear On Saturday, April 25, 1998, at approximately 5:25 a.m., the body of 20-year- old Jeremy "Chappy" Chappelear was found on Buckeye Trail, 200 feet south of 4th Avenue, approximately 2.5 miles northeast of Donnellson, Illinois, by a fisherman en route to Coffeen Lake. Jeremy apparently died from being struck and/or run over by a vehicle. Jeremy had last been seen around 2 a.m. (April 25, 1998) at a farmhouse party two miles away. Jeremy may have been making his 10-mile-walk home when killed. If you have any information please contact Illinois State Police, Crash Reconstruction Unit at 618-542-1116, or Crime Stoppers 800/352-0136. June 29, 1999 - Amy Warner Amy Warner, a 23-year-old single mother of two, was killed June 29, 1999, in her home at 17 7th St. in Charleston, Illinois. No one has ever been charged with her stabbing death. January 30, 2002 - Unidentified Female On Wednesday, January 30, 2002, at approximately 4:30 p.m., the Illinois State Police responded to a complaint concerning the discovery of skeletal remains near mile marker 22 on Interstate 64. The complaint originated from workers of the Illinois Department of Transportation who were working in the vicinity and discovered the remains. The skeletal remains were situated off the roadway on the east side of the Silver Creek overpass in rural Mascoutah, Illinois. At the direction of the St. Clair County Coroners office, the remains were transferred to St. Marys Hospital, East St. Louis, Illinois, where an autopsy was performed. The autopsy, performed by Dr. James Petterchak, revealed the following information: the deceased is believed to be an African-American female, approximately aged 20 to 30 years, with two rings on the left hand (one 14 ct. small gold band (size 7 1/4) and one costume style ring (size 6 ) with a light blue colored tear shaped stone), wearing a black colored sleeveless one-piece Jason Matthews brand jumpsuit. The autopsy could not determine the cause of the death and it is believed that the victim has been deceased for several months. Additional forensic examinations will be conducted to determine the identity of the woman. Anyone with information concerning the identity of the victim or the circumstances surrounding her death are urged to contact Illinois State Police, Zone 6 Investigations at 618/346-3782, or Crimestoppers at 1-866-371-TIPS(8477). March 11, 2002 - Unidentified Female On March 11, 2002, at approximately 1:57 p.m., the Illinois State Police responded to a complaint concerning the discovery of human skeletal remains near mile post 23 on Interstate 70 (eastbound) near Collinsville, Illinois. The complaint originated from workers of the Illinois Department of Transportation who were working in the vicinity and discovered the remains. The remains were removed from the scene and transported to the Madison County Morgue in Edwardsville, Illinois, where an autopsy was conducted on March 12, 2002. The autopsy did not determine a cause of death, however further examination by forensic anthropologists revealed the following information: The skeletal remains are of a black female, approximately 5'1" to 5'6" in height (5'3" believed to the most accurate). There is no estimate of weight, and the approximate age is between 24-30 years old. It is believed the remains have been at this location for approximately 4-6 months. The skeletal remains were almost completely intact and clad in a pair of gray colored Second Skins brand shorts (size: medium) with rhinestones and a red and white colored check flannel style Tommy Hilfiger button down man's style shirt (size: XL). In addition, a man's style "gold" nugget style ring with two glass stones was found with the remains. The ring originally held four stones in the setting. The ring was determined to be costume jewelry and is a size 7 1/4. Also found were two bracelets. The one bracelet is a metal hoop, approximately 3 inches in diameter, smooth on one side with a channel on the other side. A ring of black onyx beads on elastic string fits into the channel bracelet. The second bracelet is a combination of three separate bracelets. The second bracelet has numerous plastic beads (yellow, green, black, mauve, and brown) strung with thin elastic string that could be stretched. The three separate bracelets were gathered by a single, oval shaped metallic ring with a small hole at one end that appeared to be for the purpose of hanging a charm. On June 18, 2002, the Illinois State Police released computer recreation images of a black female victim that was originally discovered on March 11, 2002. The images reflect how the victim may have looked prior to her death. Anyone with information concerning the identity of the victim or the circumstances surrounding her death are urged to contact Illinois State Police, Zone 6 Investigations at 618/346-3782, or Crimestoppers at 1-866-371-TIPS(8477). March 28, 2002 - Unidentified Female On Thursday, March 28, 2002, the Columbia Police Department along with the Major Case Squad began investigating the skeletal remains found on a creek bed on Route 3 near Gall Road in Columbia. Investigators located a green shirt with a large "M" and the word "Mavericks", in orange or yellow lettering, across the front of the shirt. The shirt also had two buttons at the top similar to a softball jersey. The shirt is an adult XL. Also at the scene were a pair of khaki colored size 3 "Chazzz Credentials" shorts. A preliminary report by the Forensic Medical Investigator describes this person as a female, age 33 to 50, with African American ancestry, 5' 01" "give or take three inches", and believed to have children. The victim possibly had a scar across her forehead. Additional information will be available in the coming days. The Medical Investigator believed the person has been deceased at least six months but no more than one year. Anyone with information is asked to call the Columbia Police Department at 618-281-5151 or or call Crimestoppers at 1-866-371-TIPS(8477). October 1, 2002 - Unidentified Female The Illinois State Police, in cooperation with the Kankakee County Sheriffs Office and the Coroners Office, is seeking any information that may help identify the skeletal remains of a black female, which were found in October 2002 near the Will/Kankakee County Line, near Route 45. This reconstruction was done by a forensic artist, based on the remains. The woman was approximately 30-40 years old at the time of death and stood around 5 foot 3 inches tall. She is thought to have died in 2001. (The hairstyle and length is only an estimate.) If you can provide any information about the possible identity of this person, or the circumstances of her death, please contact Illinois State Police, Zone 3 Investigations at (815) 698-2672. All information will be treated as confidential upon request. March 26, 2003 - Dalton Mesarchik On March 26, 2003, seven-year-old Streator resident Dalton Mesarchik was reported missing from the front yard of his home. The following day, Dalton's body was located in the Vermillion River. An intense, multi jurisdictional investigation ensued. Agents from the Streator Police Department, Livingston County Sheriff's Department, and Illinois State Police interviewed dozens of people and followed up on hundreds of leads in an attempt to identify the person responsible for Dalton's murder. Physical evidence from Dalton's body and the body recovery site was sent to the ISP Crime Lab for processing. View the press release announcing the Dalton Mesarchik Task Force. Anyone with information of Daltons murder, the hammer used in the murder, or the location where Daltons body was found may contact: Illinois State Police - Dalton Mesarchik Task Force by telephone at 1-815-844-1500 (ext.2321) or email at daltonm@isp.state.il.us May 26, 2003 - Unidentified Male On May 30, 2003, the Illinois State Police began investigating a homicide in Brooklyn, IL. The vehicle and the victim were abandoned since Monday, May 26, 2003. Victim believed to be a male/Hispanic, 18-25 years old, between 5'11" and 6', weighing 200-230 lbs. Clothing victim was wearing was a light blue or light green and white striped button up shirt, black jeans, black cowboy boots, and a black belt with silver attachments that resemble Southwestern Indian style jewelry. Sizes of the clothing are available. The jewelry the victim was wearing appears to be a good quality gold bracelet with the letters "ONO" raised and studded in diamonds. There is a flower on each side of "ONO" consisting of eight petals that are diamonds surrounding a center diamond. The victim was also wearing what appears to be a good quality large man's gold ring with a cluster of six diamonds surrounding a center diamond. Victim was wearing a silver Casio brand watch with digital numbers. The unidentified victim has a tattoo on the back of his right shoulder. Victim was found in the trunk of a red 1988 Dodge Dynasty with Kansas temporary tag. Anyone with information concerning the identity of the victim or the circumstances surrounding his death are urged to contact Illinois State Police, Zone 6 Investigations at 618-346-3770 or call Crimestoppers at 1/800-371-TIPS(8477). July 6, 2003 - Jone Knapton On July 6, 2003, 47 year-old East Moline resident Jone Knapton was reported missing. Four days later, Jone's body was located in the Green River in rural Henry County. An intense, multi jurisdictional investigation ensued. Agents from the East Moline Police Department, Henry County Sheriff's Department, and Illinois State Police interviewed dozens of people and followed up on hundreds of leads in an attempt to identify the person responsible for Jone's murder. Anyone having information concerning this case is urged to contact the Illinois State, Zone 2 Investigations at (309) 752-4915 or the Quad Cities Crime Stoppers: (309) 762-9500. November 1, 2004 - LeAnne Taylor LeAnne Taylor was last seen alive Thanksgiving weekend 2004. Her body was later found by IDOT workers on December 4, 2004, along Bypass 20 outside of Rockford, Illinois. A group of individuals familiar to Taylor have been identified. Some may be responsible for her death, or may have knowledge of her murder. Not all these individuals are associated with each other. The Illinois State Police is looking for people who knew Taylor and may have provided information in the past, but now have more to offer. Additionally, any individuals who did not come forward at the time of her death, but have information to offer, are encouraged to come forward now and speak with investigators. Agents with the Illinois State Police, Zone 2 Investigations may be contacted at 815-632-4010, ext. 232. January 6, 2005 - Unidentified Male On January 6, 2005 at approximately 4 p.m., the body of a male white subject was recovered from the Illinois/Michigan Shipping Canal near Summit, Illinois. The subject is 5'9" in height, weighing 185 pounds between the ages of 50 and 60 years of age with balding brown hair and a mustache. At the time the subject was recovered, he was wearing a brown sweater, blue shirt, dark blue pants, a white t-shirt, and black size nine slip-on shoes. It is believed that the subject may have been homeless at the time. Any person having information or questions are asked to contact Illinois State Police, Zone 1 Investigations at 847-294-4600. (Case # 05-10145DP) April 5, 2007 - Barry Marcel Lowery On Thursday, April 5, 2007 at approximately 5:20 a.m., Barry Marcel Lowery, was found shot to death inside his residence at 640 North 53rd Street in East St. Louis, Illinois. Anyone with information about the murder of Lowery is asked to contact Illinois State Police, Zone 6 Investigations at (618) 346-3782 or St. Louis Regional CrimeStoppers (www.stlrcs.org) at (866) 371-TIPS (8477). CrimeStoppers will pay up to $1000 for anonymous information that leads to an arrest and conviction. January 28, 2008 - Mark Prasse Northwest of Paris, Illinois and southwest of Chrisman, Illinois, was the site of the double homicide of Mark Prasse of Chrisman and Ryan Riddell of Villa Grove, who were found by police on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2008. Police suspect the two friends, both 32 at the time of their deaths, may have been victims of a targeted killing. Story from jg-tc.com: https://jg-tc.com/news/double-murder-pair-apparently-shot-to-death-found-in-rural/article_1c1015a3-1e13-5e0f-809e-4d60dafae611.html The double homicide is being investigated by the Illinois State Polices crime scene services and investigations units, the Edgar County Sheriffs Department and the Edgar County Coroners office. Anyone with information relative to the incident is asked to contact the Edgar County Sheriffs Department at 465-4166. Janury 28, 2008 - Ryan Riddell Northwest of Paris, Illinois and southwest of Chrisman, Illinois, was the site of the double homicide of Mark Prasse of Chrisman and Ryan Riddell of Villa Grove, who were found by police on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2008. Police suspect the two friends, both 32 at the time of their deaths, may have been victims of a targeted killing. Story from jg-tc.com: https://jg-tc.com/news/double-murder-pair-apparently-shot-to-death-found-in-rural/article_1c1015a3-1e13-5e0f-809e-4d60dafae611.html The double homicide is being investigated by the Illinois State Polices crime scene services and investigations units, the Edgar County Sheriffs Department and the Edgar County Coroners office. Anyone with information relative to the incident is asked to contact the Edgar County Sheriffs Department at 465-4166. June 3, 2010 - Thomas Moore On Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at approximately 10:40 p.m., Thomas D. Moore, an O'Fallon, IL resident, was found shot to death in the roadway in the 5700 Block of Portland Place in Washington Park, Illinois. Two black males were observed fleeing the scene in Moore's vehicle, which was found burned a short time later in Washington Park. Anyone with information about Moore's murder should contact Illinois State Police, Zone 6 Investigations at (618) 346-3759 or call Crimestoppers at 1-866-371-TIPS(8477). CHICAGO When recently arrived migrants, mostly from Venezuela, began to show up at Juana Arreguins ice cream shop in Pilsen over the summer some begging for money, others asking for a job all she could do was feed them. Sometimes, she said, she would give them a few dollars or point them to someone who could maybe hire them. I wish I could help them, I know how it is to start from zero, said Arreguin, 52. With the help of her husband, she managed to open the shop after nearly 30 years in the U.S. The couple, both of whom entered the country illegally from Mexico, said they used all their savings from working without job permits in the Chicago area their entire adult lives to open the shop. They prayed the risk they were taking would be worth it. It hasnt been easy, Arreguin said, but shes grateful for the ice cream shop with a dozen colorful tables and even more flavors and Mexican snacks. Lately, however, shes felt a little disillusioned, perhaps frustrated. Some of those new migrants who shes been helping feed and guide in the city shes called home for decades can now apply for job permits after President Joe Biden expedited work permits for migrants from mostly Venezuela, as well as Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti. Though Arreguin celebrates the increased opportunities for newly arrived Venezuelans in Chicago, she feels abandoned. She couldnt hold back the tears as she implored government officials to expand the program to other immigrant groups, like herself. Please dont forget about us. We need job permits too, she said while sitting in one of the benches of the ice cream shop. Shes joining the voices of thousands of other immigrants who live in Chicago without legal authorization and are demanding the Biden administration give them the opportunity to work legally as well. Bipartisan advocates leading the Work Permits for All campaign say Biden could change the lives of workers like Arreguin through the existing federal parole program that he used to provide work authorization for the newly arrived migrants. Thousands of workers without permanent legal status mostly from Mexico traveled to Washington, D.C., last month along with community organizers, political leaders and even employers to push for the executive order. Though Arreguin couldnt go, she said she shared her story with the Tribune to empower other immigrants to speak up and bolster the movement that could materialize work permits for the estimated 7.8 million workers in the U.S. without legal permission. The work authorization, advocates say, would allow those immigrants to step out from the shadows and improve their lives exponentially. They would receive workplace protections and legally set wages that they may be too afraid to demand under the current circumstances. And they could visit their home countries without sacrificing the lives they have built in the United States. Many living in the country illegally go the rest of their lives without seeing family because they would be barred from reentering the U.S. if they left. For a long time, Arreguin who missed her fathers funeral in 2004 kept these hardships to herself. She was afraid to talk about her immigration status and lived in fear that she could be deported at any moment. It made her feel invisible. Not anymore. If I dont speak up and show people what were capable of doing even without government support, who will? she said. They (politicians) need to realize that were no different from the new migrants who are also coming here for a better life. The only difference is that we have been here for decades and they have not acknowledged us even though we pay millions in taxes. Working without authorization, reporting taxes In Illinois, there are more than 300,000 workers without permanent legal status, mostly Mexican and many now in mixed-status families, who have been working and paying taxes without a job permit, according to the most recent Pew Research data. Most use an individual taxpayer identification number provided by the federal government to report income instead of a Social Security number to file their taxes. Some people find work by using fake documents. Others use somebody elses Social Security number or work under the table to get paid in cash. The only legal way for those who dont have a job permit to work is to become contractors, like Arreguin. Regardless of how they pay into the system, most file their taxes using the ITIN number even if theyre not eligible for government entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicaid. Arreguin was able to get her business license with the ITIN number shes been using to pay her taxes since she arrived in the country in the early 90s. Last year, she paid more than $13,000 in taxes. Undocumented workers in Illinois pay an estimated $900 million in federal taxes and $700 million in state and local taxes, according to the latest report from the American Immigration Council. And in the past year, some have decided to make their presence known in more than just dollars and cents. At a recent rally in Pilsen, several of those workers took to the stage to share their stories and, for some, their heartache in hopes that officials recognize their economic contribution and put them back on the agenda. Many cried, holding signs with the number of years that they have been working in the country without a job permit: 17, 20, 29, 30, 33. We are being forgotten, Consuelo Martinez, a mother of two, said in Spanish when she took the stage as she held a sign with the number 27. Martinez isnt afraid anymore either. She is stepping out of the shadows on behalf of herself and the estimated 180,000 workers in Chicago without permanent legal status. Biden, listen to us, we want to work without fear, like our Venezuelan brothers and sisters, she said. It is only fair The song Mojado' by Ricardo Arjona played in the background of the Pilsen rally. An ode to the millions of people who have crossed the southern border into the United States through the Rio Grande, its title means Wetback in English. When Erendira Rendon heard the song, she couldnt hold back tears. She cried as she hugged some of the women who stood by her side telling their stories. They reminded her of her Mexican parents who made their journey north in 1987. As a young girl, Rendon was inspired to pursue advocacy work because of her own immigration status, living in the country without authorization, and the desire to help her family. In 2012, she got a job permit and protection from deportation through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-era policy for which she pushed hard. Now as the vice president of Immigrant Justice at Resurrection Project, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization that advocates for immigrant rights, Rendon has been at the forefront of addressing the needs of the migrants since the first group arrived on a bus sent from Texas by Gov. Greg Abbott in late August 2022. Rendon and her team are now organizing legal clinics across the city to help new migrants apply for expedited work permits. The group is also helping Venezuelan migrants apply for the extension of temporary protected status, a program that allows people whose home countries are considered unsafe the right to live and work in the United States. Though she has been making a difference in the lives of asylum-seekers, Rendon suddenly felt futile when the Biden administration announced it was granting work permits to recently arrived migrants. It is something she has wanted for her community all her life, she said. We deserve a job permit. It is only fair, Rendon said. But longtime unauthorized immigrants have little hope of ever fixing their status. Many of the Mexican immigrants who entered the country came with the understanding that they were crossing illegally and went into hiding, said Rendon. Some are still afraid to ask for community resources or apply for government resources for their U.S.-born children because they fear deportation, she added. Despite crossing without authorization, most immigrants reunited with family or friends and had a support network already in place. Venezuelans do not. Most new migrants are part of the first wave into the country, most of them seeking asylum. Without a safety net in place, the state of Illinois and city of Chicago have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the past year to provide shelter, food, permanent housing, health care and now legal aid to process work permits for the new migrants. Resentment and frustration That government help has raised feelings of resentment and frustration among some who arrived in the country decades ago from Mexico and other countries. Many say they also ran away from violence and poverty, but did not receive and will never receive that kind of public aid. It has been voiced in community meetings hosted by the city regarding the opening of new shelters and, more notably, in the number of protests against the erection of winterized tents to house the migrants from the cold in Brighton Park, a predominantly Latino immigrant neighborhood with a growing Asian population. Its a resentment stoked by the governments own tangled policies. It begins with a federal humanitarian program that allows migrants from certain countries to seek asylum but does not grant them automatic work authorization. Its further compounded by a system that regards some migration as forced and others as voluntary regardless of the similar hardships endured in their native countries. In each and every turn, longtime undocumented immigrants in the United States have seen other populations either move forward and have been told to take the back seat and to wait, said Angela Garcia, a sociologist and assistant professor at the University of Chicago whose work focuses on unauthorized immigrants from Mexico in Chicago. There is little hope that anything will change soon. Efforts to legalize the 11 million people living in the country without authorization have stalled for decades, with the last relief coming in 1986 through the Immigration Reform and Control Act, also called the Reagan Amnesty. Rendon predicts that the lack of action from political leaders will have an impact in the upcoming presidential elections. And even affect local politics. U.S.-born children of the longtime unauthorized workers who are eligible to vote are most likely keeping tabs on how their parents and elders are being treated by the leaders, Rendon said. A recent poll commissioned by the American Business Immigration Coalition showed that voters in seven key states support the expansion of work permits for immigrants living here illegally. The poll, by Lake Research Partners, found even deeper support among certain groups of voters. Eight in 10 Mexican American voters in these states and over eight in 10 Democrats support the policy. U.S. citizens in mixed-status families are essentially unanimously in support, with nearly nine in 10 strongly supportive. Arreguins daughter, Johanna Rangel, 23, said she is planning to vote in the upcoming elections. For my parents, she smiled as she looked at her mother. Everyone eager to work Arreguin knows that some people are angered by the amount and type of assistance that new migrants are getting. But she is not one of them. She remembers the day she crossed the southern border with her husband and the eldest of their three children, who was only 1 year old. Fleeing a world with high crime, organized crime and no access to education, the young family found refuge at her brothers home in the United States and lived with him until they could rent their own place. Arreguin easily sees herself in some of the Venezuelan mothers shes encountered, including a young migrant mother who recently came in with her child and asked for a job at the shop. I know that it is difficult for them, especially for the parents. I cant imagine living in a shelter, eating cold food or that your children are hungry, she said. It makes me sad but we can barely keep the business running on our own, said Arreguin. Her two young grandchildren, Rangels children, often play in the store while their mother works. One of the tables has their smiling faces painted on it. The shop is their second home, she said. Despite the significant efforts to push for the expansion of the policy, Arreguin doesnt expect the Biden administration to step in for them anytime soon. Either way, she says, making noise is worth the try. One day, God willing, well be recognized for all the work weve done, Arreguin said. Her faith in God is rooted in the hope that she will get to see her mother, 85, who still lives in Michoacan, Mexico, one last time. She still thinks about her late father every day. As autumn leaves fell on the ground, a customer entered and Arreguin stood up from the bench to walk behind the counter. Buenas tardes, she said. Como le puedo servir? Good afternoon. How can I help you? During the week of Diwali, students at Viewmont Elementary School learned about the five-day celebration through books, music and more. Diwali is a major religious holiday in Hinduism, Jainism and Sikhism according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Its name comes from the Sanskrit word dipavali, which means row of lights, and is symbolic of the victory of light over darkness, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Viewmont Elementary music teacher Glenda Stephens said the celebration lasted from Nov. 10-15 this year. Stephens said students celebrated shared family traditions with their classmates, such as giving gifts, lighting candles and making drawings out of chalk dust. All grades learned about the holiday, Stephens said. Kindergarten and first-grade students learned about spreading the light. Second- through fifth-grade students learned the four-step dandiya, which is a traditional Indian dance. Stephens said the four-step dandiya is used for many celebrations throughout the year and is not specific to Diwali. Students used sticks called dandi in the dance, Stephens said. The words to the song the students danced to are, Come my friends and celebrate; Were together now; Sing and dance and celebrate; Were together now; Shanti, shanti, Stephens said. Shanti means peace in Hindu. In the last part of the dance, each student created their own move to represent something that brings them peace, Stephens said. This was not the first time that students have experienced music from India in music class, but it was the first time that the experience coincided with Diwali, Stephens said. The Chief of the General Staff of Azerbaijan Army inspects combat readiness of military units stationed in high mountainous areas The First Deputy Minister of Defense Chief of the General Staff of the Azerbaijan Army, Colonel General Karim Valiyev and other officials of the Ministry attended military units stationed on the border with Armenia in Gadabay, Dashkasan and Kalbajar directions, Azernews reports, citing the Azerbaijan Defense Ministry. The Chief of the General Staff held meetings with servicemen in the units deployed in the mentioned directions, delivered the tasks set to the Azerbaijan Army by the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Mr. Ilham Aliyev, and gave specific instructions regarding their implementation. The organization of troops service and combat duty was inspected in the units stationed in the positions in high mountainous areas. It was reported that the service is conducted 24 hours a day in an intensive working mode according to the daily routine, combat duty is organized. Colonel General K. Valiyev also inspected combat readiness of the artillery, engineering and commando military units. He heard the reports of the commanders regarding the daily activities of the units and the taken measures. It was noted that the assigned tasks are conducted based on the plan, special attention is paid to the organization and conduct of combat training measures in accordance with the requirements. In the end, the Chief of General Staff watched training and exercises on combat readiness of one of the commando units, and set specific tasks for the command staff to further increase quality and intensity of exercises, as well as to improve the practical skills of the servicemen and develop the level of readiness. When the Rev. Larry Phillips of First Baptist Church approached congregation members about a mission trip to Ukraine, there was some skepticism among the members. First Baptist member Rob Featherstone recalled thinking it would be better for them to raise money. He said he wondered at one point: What kind of difference are we really going to be able to make? After learning about the number of men of all ages who were taken out of communities to fight the war against Russia, Featherstone said he came to appreciate the help they could offer. Featherstone was part of the six-member construction team that traveled to Berehove, a western Ukrainian town near the border with Hungary. The team was in Ukraine during the last week of October. Featherstone was joined by Phillips and fellow First Baptist members Jeff Moore, Robin Abbott, Keith Padgett and L.F. Miller. Half of the team members were 70 or older. Abbott turned 82 in Ukraine. Though they were nominally a construction team, team members noted their primary job was destructive. They were tasked with stripping a two-story building jointly owned by Baptist organizations in Hungary and North Carolina so that other workers could renovate the building. The building is planned as a center for worship and ministry, as well as distribution of supplies like food and clothing. Members of the construction team noted the building was 400 years old and had adobe below the plaster. Members of the team said they felt as safe in the small Ukranian town as they did at home, though there were some signs of the ongoing war. Featherstone recalled hearing an air raid siren once. Padgett noted that parts of some signs on buildings were blacked out in an effort to obscure addresses and other information about buildings from enemy surveillance. The group also had the opportunity to encounter Ukrainian people, including bilingual Ukranians with whom they worshipped and formed bonds. There were also hundreds of people in the city who were displaced from their homes in the east. Communication with many of these people was limited by lack of translators but the expressions on the faces of those displaced conveyed much to the members of the team. I mean, theyre almost void in their face, Moore said. You see them, theyre just hollow. Miller made the same observation, saying There was really no hope in their faces. He said many of them were professional people who seemed to avoid eye contact out of embarrassment over their circumstances. Prior to the arrival of the construction team, a medical team with a connection to First Baptist had gone to Berehove. The medical team had translators throughout their stay and Phillips recalled hearing about the traumatic experiences of those who fled. There were stories about children who were lost on the way out or a spouse surviving and another spouse not surviving, Phillips said. At the same time, they also spoke of the gratitude the people had for the assistance they were receiving. Moore said he was particularly touched when they would distribute food to those in need. You see these poor people who have nothing, Moore said. Their husband may be gone, called off to war. Their kids may have been killed and they dont have anything. And we were giving them (this) meager food, and they were so appreciative. Padgett said he was impressed by the resilience of the people. People were trying to carry on their lives the best they could with going out, eating, shopping, you name it. And while the strain is there and felt, theyre trying to carry on, Padgett said. Phillips said the church members would like to go back to offer additional help with the building, but they have not scheduled a time to return. Featherstone said the team had only scratched the surface when it came to working on the building and responding to the needs of the Ukrainian people. They need help, and we made a small dent in that, a teeny dent in that, but theres lots more opportunities available for people to help the Ukrainian people, Featherstone said. In an annual award banquet held at the Embassy Suites hotel in Amarillo, Gruver ISD Nurse Sahala Gaillard was the recipient of the prestigious award as a Top 25 Panhandle Nurse. Gaillard was nominated by her administrators to receive this award . "Sahala was among labor and delivery, trauma and surgical nurses, some who had 40 plus years of service which is quite an accomplishment for her, " said Hansford County Judge Tim Glass who attended the banquet. Sahala was the only school nurse receiving this award . Congratulations to Sahala Gaillard and Gruver ISD! Singtel says it will use the loan proceeds to refinance the borrowings and support the operations of DC West and DC Kim Chuan, and the two data centres must maintain at least a Green Mark GoldPlus certification from Singapores Building and Construction Authority as part of the green loan criteria. According to Singtel, both DC West and DC Kim Chuan have already attained the highest green building certification, Green Mark Platinum. Arthur Lang, Singtel Group Chief Financial Officer, said, Singtel is committed to aligning our borrowings with our environmental objectives, and we are pleased to work with DBS, OCBC, Standard Chartered Bank and UOB to invest in a more sustainable future for everyone. We will build on the success of our sustainability-linked loans, bonds and other efforts, to further expand our portfolio of green financing initiatives under Olives, Singtel Groups sustainable financing programme. We will also continue exploring ways to incorporate technologies such as liquid cooling and AI to further improve the efficiency of all our data centres, including our upcoming DC Tuas. Singtel, one of Singapores largest and most advanced data centre operators, says that in addition to DC Kim Chuan and DC West - which offer a combined 62MW of capacity - Singtel recently broke ground on its new hyper-connected 58MW green data centre, DC Tuas, in Singapore. In the region, Singtel has partnered Telkom and Medco Power in Indonesia and GULF and AIS in Thailand to develop data centres in Batam and Bangkok respectively, notes Singtel. Singtels data centre portfolio will offer a total combined capacity of over 155MW once the upcoming sites are operational in 2025, with room to scale up to more than 200MW. In September, leading global investment firm KKR agreed to invest up to S$1.1 billion for a 20% stake in Singtels regional data centre business. Canadian telecommunications company Telus has emerged as the biggest bidder in Canada's mid-band 3800MHz spectrum, securing 1,430 licenses for nearly C$619 million. Telco companies Bell won 939 licenses for around C$518 million and Rogers won 860 licenses for around C$474 million. The spectrum auction, which saw 22 Canadian carriers pay for a record of 4,099 licenses for more than C$2.1 billion, will bolster Canada's 5G services and rural connectivity, the Canadian government said. According to Canadian media, Telus, Bell, and Rogers, which are the big three carriers in the country, accounted for 76% of the total amount raised. According to IT World Canada, in 2021, during the 3500MHz auction, carriers paid over C$8.9 billion for 3,431 licenses, but the government only assigned a small amount of spectrum (200MHz), which limited spectrum access to only the biggest telco carriers, which drove valuation to record numbers. This time, according to the same report, the government now set up a 100MHz spectrum limit on how much combined 3500MHz and 3800MHz spectrum a provider could acquire. The limit would reserve spectrum for smaller competitors and lowering prices. "3800MHz and 3500MHz are complementary mid-band spectrum frequencies that provide speed and capacity. 600MHz is low-band 5G spectrum that carries wireless data across long distances and through dense urban buildings," explained Rogers in a press release. "The combination creates consistent and reliable 5G coverage in both urban and remote areas." The Department of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada, which is in charge of the new licensing framework, wants to "help smaller users access 5G spectrum in very localised areas." The agency noted that agriculture, mining, manufacturing, healthcare, public safety, and transportaion are candidate industries that can set up private and campus 5G networks with local spectrum. It added smaller internet providers in rural and remote communities will also leverage of the shared band too. CHEORWON, South Korea Not far from the big green mountains that stand along the worlds most heavily armed border, dozens of South Korean and U.S. combat engineers build a pontoon bridge to ferry tanks and armored vehicles across a lake, all within easy range of North Korean artillery. For seven decades, the allies have staged annual drills like this recent one to deter aggression from North Korea. The alliance with the United States has allowed South Korea to build a powerful democracy, its citizens confident that Washington would protect them if Pyongyang ever acted on its dream of unifying the Korean Peninsula under its own rule. Until now. North Koreas repeated threats to launch nuclear weapons at its enemies and its tests of missiles designed for pinpoint strikes on U.S. cities have made South Koreans lose faith in Americas vow to defend their country. The fear is that a U.S. president would hesitate to use nuclear weapons to defend South Korea while knowing North Korea could retaliate with a nuclear strike killing millions of Americans. Frequent polls show a strong majority of South Koreans between 70% and 80% in some surveys support their nation acquiring atomic weapons or urging Washington to bring back the tactical nuclear weapons it removed from the South in the early 1990s. I think one day they can abandon us and go their own way if that better serves their national interests, Kim Bang-rak, a security guard in Seoul, said of the United States. If North Korea bombs us, we should bomb them equally in retaliation, so it would be better for us to have nukes. How South Korea deals with the nuclear question could have major implications for Asias future, potentially jeopardizing the U.S.-South Korean alliance and threatening a delicate nuclear balance that has kept an uneasy peace in a dangerous region. U.S. officials are adamant any attack on Seoul by North Koreas 1.2 million-member military would be met with an overwhelming response. Asked about the South Korean publics support for creating its own nuclear force, Gen. Mark Milley, at the time the top U.S. military officer and now retired, said: The United States would prefer nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. We think theyre inherently dangerous, obviously. And we have extended our nuclear umbrella to both Japan and South Korea. That's not been enough to quell worry in South Korea. In January, conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol broke a longstanding taboo when he said that his nation could acquire our own nukes if the situation gets worse. At an April summit in Washington, Yoon and President Joe Biden agreed on the Washington Declaration, in which Seoul pledged to remain in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a nonnuclear weapons state, and the United States said it would strengthen consultations on nuclear planning with its ally. It also said it would send more nuclear assets to the Korean Peninsula as a show of force. Part of the worry in Seoul can be traced to the presidency of Donald Trump and to his possible reelection in 2024. Trump, as president, repeatedly suggested that the alliance, far from ironclad, was transactional. Even as he sought closer ties with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump demanded South Korea pay billions more to keep American troops on its soil and questioned the need for U.S. military exercises with South Korea, calling them very provocative and tremendously expensive. No one can tell 100% for sure whether a U.S. president would order nuclear strikes to defend Seoul if it meant the destruction of an American city, Wi Sung-lac, a former South Korean nuclear envoy who opposes indigenous nukes, said in an interview at his Seoul office. There's also fear in Seoul about North Koreas extraordinary weapons advancements. One of the poorest countries on Earth, North Korea may now have an arsenal of 60 nuclear weapons and has declared it is deploying tactical missiles along the Korean border, implying its intent to arm them with lower-yield nuclear weapons. Russias war against Ukraine may also be showing South Koreans that even friendly nations may hesitate to fully help a country battling a nuclear-armed enemy. We absolutely need nuclear weapons. Basically, peace can be maintained only when we have equal power to (our enemys), Kim Joung-hyun, an office worker in Seoul, said. If you look at the Russian-Ukraine war, Ukraine cant handle the Russian invasion on its own, other than begging for weapons from other countries. Opponents of a nuclear-armed South Korea point out that the strong public support for nukes likely doesnt calculate the high costs, nor the damage to ties with ally Washington and to crucial trade with neighbor China. The Washington Declaration, meanwhile, has reassured many in Seoul, according to Richard Lawless, a former senior U.S. State Department and Central Intelligence Agency official dealing with nuclear proliferation in Asia. Still, Lawless said, there remains the deeply felt conviction among some senior politicians and among many in the populace that the only real way to deter nuclear-armed North Korea is for South Korea to have its own nuclear weapons capability. 25 facts about nuclear weapons 25 facts about nuclear weapons Countries armed with nuclear weapons Trying to stop nuclear proliferation Refusing to agree to the accord Large arsenals of the late 1960s China's "modest" nuclear weapons stockpile Lost bombs and other missing nuclear devices To launch or not in 12 minutes Assassinating Iran's top nuclear scientists Blackout at Iran's nuclear fuel enrichment facility U.S., Iran negotiate nuclear deal Iran steps up uranium enrichment A weapon as large as a minivan Largest weapon in U.S. stockpile Billions for nuclear deterrent $600 billion to modernize nuclear arsenal U.N. tries to ban nuclear weapons U.S. offers a "nuclear umbrella" Withdrawing forward-deployed weapons in the Pacific Estimates on North Korea's nuclear capabilities North Korea unveils enormous new missile North Korea tests nuclear bombs Trump, Kim Jong-un meet in historic summit Second North Korea, U.S. summit held in Hanoi Trump crosses into DMZ separating two Koreas Russia-Ukraine War raises concerns about Russia's use of nuclear arsenal More local Black and Hispanic high school students are taking advanced placement courses, the result of a push from the state and local school district to improve access to the rigorous courses that may help students earn college credit. In addition, overall scores were higher among local students than in the previous two years, another indicator that students are rebounding from the learning loss brought on by the pandemic. Paula Wilkins, the chief academic officer for Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools, told a committee of the school board on Tuesday that the results are promising. One of the things I will say that has been proven expanding access has not diminished results and that has been exciting to see, Wilkins said. I think one of the big arguments was that if we give more kids access, our results will decrease, and that has not happened. While the number of white students taking one or more AP exams dropped 15% from 2019 to 2023, the number of Black students increased by 3% and the number of Hispanic students by 8% during that same time period. Students who take AP courses generally take an exam, which is graded on a five-point scale, with a score of three or above considered proficient. Many colleges give students credit for a score of three or above. Local students had a proficiency rate of 67% on their exams compared with 60% nationally and 59% in North Carolina in 2023. In 2021, the year most affected by the pandemic, the proficiency rate on local exams was 52%. We have not arrived. We have more work to do, Wilkins said. But we are beginning to see a positive trend and more opportunities for students to take AP exams. The school district has been actively encouraging kids who show academic potential to enroll in an AP class. This fall, it introduced pre-AP classes in biology, English I and English II, and it will offer more next year to high school students. School leaders are also reaching out to the parents of students with AP potential through mailings and meetings to answer their questions about what to expect in an AP class. School officials are also working with teachers and guidance counselors to change a mindset that some kids arent AP material, Wilkins said. Every student deserves access to rigor, she said. We want to invite them to the opportunity. You want to take one AP course? Great, lets try it. Lets see how you do. What supports do you need? Thats going to be important to help students in life and to show them that they can take on a rigorous opportunity and be successful, Wilkins said. This is the third column in a series about how to avoid many mishaps for which you may otherwise need to retain a lawyer. Do you prepare your own state and federal tax returns? Maybe you could use some help. Laws have changed and even though your tax returns are completed correctly, there may be additional ways to save. I know a lawyer who did his own taxes years ago, which he completed correctly, but found out there were additional steps he couldve taken to reduce his liability. Just because you can do something on your own does not mean you shouldnt ask a professional. Scams. The IRS does not call, text or email when youre behind on paying taxes. You will get a letter first. Watch for frauds on the internet. If it sounds too good to be true, thats probably true. This includes games on which you are told you cannot lose. Your chances of being made whole by a scammer? About zero. And never, ever, give out your social security number to ANYONE you do not know. If you are having financial challenges, it makes sense to contact this regarded United Way-supported agency: Financial Pathways of the Piedmont (336.896.1191). Many families will consult the agency on a confidential basis to learn how to budget their money better or work their way through a financial challenge. If you are dealing with a creditor, your chances of working out a reasonable solution go up dramatically when they learn you have a credible nonprofit organization assisting you. If you can avoid bankruptcy, often a last resort, you will be glad you did. It is noted on your credit record for several years. Home insurance. If you have a covered loss of property in your home, an insurance company will pay for the actual cash value of your personal property which is much lower than the replacement cost. Pay the extra premium to purchase replacement cost insurance. What about more valuable home assets, such as jewelry and antiques? Also, pay the extra premium for this coverage or your carrier will award $500 on a standard policy despite the stolen propertys value. You likely will have to get the items appraised, but it is not time-consuming and worth it. If your home is vandalized, these valuable jewelry items are the hard targets for thieves. Be sure you are fully covered. What if you move to North Carolina from another state and have estate planning documents executed from there? Should you have them reviewed by a North Carolina attorney? Yes. Take advantage of the North Carolina Bar Association service mentioned in the previous column. You can meet with a lawyer who handles estate planning for no more than $50. Remember: An informed choice is a smart choice. LEXINGTON Molly Corbett and her father Thomas Martens wont be released from custody this week after all, officials said, after reports circulated Monday that the pair charged in the death of Irish businessman Jason Corbett would be freed this week. The dates showing releases this week were listed on the website of the N.C. Department of Adult Correction. A spokesman for the department said Monday that a review found that the dates were incorrect. The current projected release date is June 27 for both Martens and Molly Corbett. The father and daughter were transferred to the Davidson County jail in preparation for what was believed to be their release. They will be now transferred back to state prisons to finish serving out their sentences, officials said. The mistaken information showed Martens would be released on Tuesday and Corbett on Wednesday. In a plea deal, the father and daughter were each sentenced in November to 7 to 30 months of remaining prison time with credit for 44 months served, after they entered pleas in the death of Jason Corbett. Martens pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and Molly Corbett pleaded no contest to an identical charge, but her plea was treated by the court as a guilty plea. Davidson County District Attorney Garry Frank had expressed surprise Monday on hearing that Martens and Corbett would be released so soon. I was surprised it was this soon, but it is totally the decision of (the North Carolina Department of Correction) based on the sentence imposed by Judge David Hall, Frank said, in an interview before the miscalculation was revealed. Frank said he had no role in the release decision after the two were sentenced. At the time of their convictions, an attorney for Corbett had said the father and daughter would serve only 7 months in prison because of factors including points for good behavior they earned during their initial 44-month sentences. The news of an impending release appeared to surprise defense lawyers as well on Monday. We respect the judgment of the court and the (sentencing) calculations by DOC, said attorney Jones Byrd, who represents Thomas Martens. Our client will look forward to being with his family as soon as he is able. Molly Martens Corbett and Thomas Martens were sentenced in November to between 51 and 74 months in prison in connection with the 2015 beating death of Jason Corbett. They had served 44 months in prison after a previous conviction, which was thrown out on appeal. Lawyers for each spent months negotiating separate pleas to a charge of involuntary manslaughter. The decision on how much additional prison time or whether to give any was left to Judge Hall of Forsyth Superior Court. Prosecutors and defense lawyers argued their case in a sentencing hearing that ran for a week. That became necessary after state appellate courts ordered a new trial after determining that errors had been made during their first trial in the summer of 2017. Martens and his daughter were each sentenced to between 20 and 25 years in prison after being found guilty of second-degree murder. Jason Corbett was bludgeoned to death in his Davidson County house on Aug. 2, 2015. Investigators said that Martens Corbett and Martens, a former FBI agent, used an aluminum baseball bat and a paver stone used in landscaping to fracture Corbetts skull and cause injuries to his arm, legs and torso. The defense contended that they were acting in self-defense and that Martens had intervened only after seeing Corbett choking his daughter. The couple met in 2008 when Molly Martens Corbett was working as an au pair caring for Corbetts two children from a previous marriage. Before handing down the new sentences in November, Hall said that every criminal case should be a search for the truth, but he doesnt know the truth in this case despite listening carefully to the evidence. He added that he did not understand why Martens or his wife Sharon who was also in the house didnt call 911 or how Martens and Molly Corbett were left basically unharmed when Jason Corbett was so badly beaten. In court, Martens took responsibility, apologized and told Hall he had great respect for the law. He said he had to act when he saw the 260-pound Corbett choking his daughter. I had no choice, Martens said. I did the best that I could. Jason Corbetts sister, Tracey Lynch Corbett, along with Corbetts children and other family members, came from Ireland to attend last months hearing. Turkish political scientist Esma Ozdashli during her speech at the Turan International Conference on the Future of the Turkic World of the Centre for International Relations and Diplomacy said that "With the establishment of the Armenian state in the region, terrorist activities also began", Azernews reports. Political scientist reminded that the current territory of Armenia is actually Turkish lands: "Therefore, we can say that the foundation of terrorism in the region was laid with the creation of this state. It is also noteworthy that Armenia is a mono-ethnic state." Expert noted that, if today there are no Turks in Irevan, which is a historical Turkish land, then genocide was committed by Armenia and the accusations against Turkiye are unfounded. Esma Ozdashli added that Armenian terrorists killed a large number of Azerbaijani and Turkish politicians, "The West has always defended Armenian terrorist organisations." Esma Ozdashli said that there are many PKK terrorists in Garabagh and they act against Azerbaijan. Ozdashli said that during the time of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, he played yallas with PKK terrorists in the Jydir Plain: "There are various terrorist organisations in Armenia. They have repeatedly attacked Azerbaijani embassies. This once again shows that the fight against terrorism must be strengthened." N.C. Sen. Joyce Krawiec, R-Forsyth, announced Monday that she is retiring at the end of her term next year and endorsed Dana Caudill Jones for her seat in the North Carolina Senate. Krawiec and Jones appeared together outside the offices of the Forsyth County Board of Elections Monday morning, as Jones prepared to file to run as a Republican for N.C. Senate District 31. Jones is the former chairwoman of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Board of Education. It is just time for me to retire, Krawiec said. Ive been there a long time, had a great run, had some great legislation that we passed. Krawiec said she is wholeheartedly behind Dana and looking forward to helping her transition. A member of the N.C. Senate since 2014, Krawiec has been elected by constituents in Forsyth, Davie, Stokes, and Yadkin counties, although her current district includes only Forsyth and Stokes counties. Republican leaders from Forsyth and Yadkin counties named Krawiec to fill the seat of Pete Brunstetter, who resigned in January 2014 to take a position with Novant Health. Krawiec is chairwoman of three Senate committees: Health Care, Pensions and Retirement and Aging; and Appropriations on Health and Human Services. N.C. Senate Republican officials said Krawiecs work in the General Assembly resulted in major reforms in health care and foster care, and that she spearheaded legislation to implement voter ID in the state. North Carolina is truly the best state in the country, in no small part because of the numerous reforms the General Assembly has pursued, Krawiec said. It has been an honor to play a role in that. Party officials said Krawiec championed Medicaid transformation, which moved the states Medicaid program from a fee-for-service program to managed care, resulting in more budget predictability. They also cited Krawiecs work in helping to pass reforms to the Certificate of Need procedures in health care. Party leaders said Krawiec consistently fought to protect the sanctity of life and was at the forefront of passing new pro-life measures in the General Assembly, including legislation to protect the lives of children who survive botched abortions and implementing new limits on abortions. Meanwhile, Jones released a statement that said her goals if, elected, would be to champion student achievement, parents rights and school choice; lower taxes for working families and small businesses; a culture of life that protects and provides for unborn babies, mothers and families; and our Second Amendment rights. Senate Leader Phil Berger (R-Rockingham) called Krawiec a conservative stalwart. Her influence can be felt throughout our caucus as a skilled legislator, trusted mentor, and well-respected colleague, Berger said. Joyces tenure in the Senate has been marked by an unwavering commitment to her constituents. I am thankful for her years of service in the Senate and look forward to working with her as she finishes her term. PHOTOS: Winston-Salem and Forsyth County candidates file for office for the 2024 election season Upon receiving the keys to his familys new home, Dionte Epps issued an open invitation to the police and firefighters who helped make it possible. And why wouldnt he? Epps and his wife Denise had just become homeowners after more than a year of sweat and study put in through Habitat for Humanity of Forsyth County. This particular project a five-bedroom, 2 bath house on East 14th Street had been partially built (and paid for) through a friendly competition between the Forsyth County Sheriffs Office and the Winston-Salem police and fire departments to see which one could raise the most money and put in the most hours helping to build it. Any time you see us cooking out, come on in, Epps told the first responders. Perhaps he should be careful what he wishes for. A hand up For anyone interested in who won, city cops came out on top, followed by sheriffs deputies and then firefighters. (Its not a stretch to think that police will lord it over the other two. At least the firefighters could take some solace in an old saw which has it that nobody is eager to see police roll up to their house but everyone welcomes fire trucks in a time of need.) Anyhow, the way Habitat works is time-tested and straightforward. It bills itself as a hand-up, not a hand-out agency and, as such, requires prospective homeowners to put in some 300-400 working hours sweat equity alongside volunteers and professionals who build houses. That work can be on their own house, other families homes or volunteering in other capacities for Habitat. They have to meet income and work history requirements, of course, and must complete classes on homeownership, maintenance and financial management. Its not easy, but the reward is tangible: a stake in the American dream that some believe to be foundering or completely out of reach. Qualified applicants buy houses through standard 30-year loans offered at affordable rates. Mortgage payments allow Habitat to plow money into other houses. Volunteer labor and donated building material helps keep costs down. The sweat equity concept works for volunteers, too. Theres nothing like seeing visible progress as a house rises from foundation to framing to the roof. For the Epps family Dionte, Denise and their five kids and others just like them, the result will be life-changing. Fate intervention Dionte and Denise met as high-school students in the Washington, D.C., area and married on July 20, 2011. Kids and the pressures that can come with them followed, and as happens with many other couples, they split up. But fate conspired to make that a temporary thing. Dionte Epps moved to the Baltimore area, and while there, he applied to a different home ownership program. Unlike Habitat, they didnt let you help build the home yourself, so there was nothing I could do, Epps told a Habitat representative. Still, things worked out for the good. The Baltimore house would have been too small for a big family, and life was about to turn. COVID-19 struck. Dionte and Denise both lost jobs, and they both wound up in Winston-Salem. Pandemic-related shutdowns brought them back together. In-person school was replaced by online learning, and that forced a lot of families to restructure. Taking care of five kids would be difficult for two people, much less one, so Dionte Epps, according to Habitat, began spending more time with Denise and the kids. The result was that the Epps decided they were better together than apart. A second wedding happened July 20, 2021, 10 years after their first. Not long afterward, in 2022, they were accepted by the local Habitat program. Dionte Epps drives a city bus and works long hours, so Denise Epps took on the financial and life-skills classes. Dionte Epps put in the sweat equity on his off days. Slowly they made progress. The payoff came last Wednesday afternoon in front of first responders and Habitat workers who helped make it all happen. A lot of things change, attitudes change, and sometimes you have to fall in love again to know its really worth it trying and not giving up, Dionte Epps told Habitat. Putting a roof over the heads of the family a roof they will own underscores the notion that good things come to those who wait. And those willing to help themselves. PHOTOS: Winston-Salem/Forsyth County First Responder-built Habitat House dedicated Sprawling commercial parking lots think Sams Club and Walmart and Gateway Mall could become a thing of the past under a city proposal to eliminate parking requirements in most commercial and industrial areas. The Lincoln-Lancaster County Planning Department is proposing a plan championed by City Councilman Tom Beckius to modernize city parking requirements that date back to 1951. Beckius, who has been talking to community groups and developers about the proposal, said updating those regulations will reduce costs for developers, which can be passed on to tenants and landlords; and it will make better use of existing city streets and sewers by creating denser commercial areas. Basically were just fitting more businesses in the same amount of space and not creating giant parking lots that, for the most part, go unused, he said. That greater density will be an incentive for more walkable neighborhoods and will encourage Lincolnites to use something other than their car to get where they need to go, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions, he said. Fewer giant parking lots will also help with runoff issues and will eliminate the heat islands they create during hot summer months. Those are long-term goals of the plan, which Beckius and city planner Andrew Thieroff anticipate happening incrementally. But over the long haul, it will make a significant difference in how Lincoln looks. But Thieroff said he expects small changes from year to year: reductions in parking space by five or six spots on a new development, perhaps existing businesses expanding into a portion of the parking area. The changes would affect 95% of the commercial and industrial areas, but existing parking requirements would remain in residential districts and commercial districts close to neighborhoods, Beckius said. The A Street Market at 33rd and A streets, for example, would not be included because its too close to residential areas. Other recent developments, such as the commercial area at 48th Street and Leighton Avenue or Bishop Heights near 27th Street and Nebraska Parkway would be included, Thieroff said. Developers of those areas sought, and received, reductions in the number of parking stalls they had to include but thats a time-consuming process that involves getting approval of the Planning Commission and the City Council. Most redevelopment projects are requesting reductions, and theyre approving them, Thieroff said. This change would eliminate those steps. If the proposal moves forward, Lincoln would be the first city in the state to eliminate parking requirements and the oversized and unused lots that go with them. But Thieroff said its a trend in planning, especially in Midwest cities of similar size to Lincoln, and many of those cities have seen a lot of success. Some cities have gone farther, creating maximum parking requirements to keep some large retailers from building oversized lots, Thieroff said. Lincoln's planners want to take a more incremental approach. Changes in the way retailers operate, especially since the pandemic, also are playing a part in the citys decision to move forward. More people are working remotely, reducing the need for office space parking, and more people are shopping online. Were in a transitional time, Beckius told a mayors roundtable he recently met with to discuss the proposal. Retailers are doing things differently. Of the $8 billion in Black Friday sales this year, Beckius said, $5 billion was done online. And local retailers are beginning to adjust to those changes. The Walmart at 84th Street and Nebraska Parkway, for example, transformed 40,000 square feet of its existing store to a fulfillment center for online orders, he said. Seeing the change in philosophy of how stores use and how they interact with their brands I think smart cities want to stay ahead of the curve while giving flexibility to retailers to meet them where they are, he said. The change would allow the market to determine how many parking spots a business needed, he said, rather than having the city dictate it. Planners began talking about the idea when they updated the city-county Comprehensive Plan and it became one of the plan's goals. Planners decided this was one goal they wanted to work on now, Thieroff said. Beckius said he plans to meet with community groups and developers through December and will likely bring the proposal to the Planning Commission in January. The existing parking requirements are based on old data that wasnt very accurate. Over time, what a lot of cities have done is create parking lots that go underutilized most of the time, Beckius said. As you drive around cities across the United States, you'll see a lot of this. Lincoln is not alone. Top Journal Star photos for November 2023 The University of Nebraska Medical Center and Columbus Community Hospital have signed an affiliation agreement that will send more health professions students in more health professions to the east-central Nebraska community for training. The master affiliation agreement is similar to one the university reached this summer with Great Plains Health in North Platte, said Nicole Carritt, UNMC director of rural initiatives and assistant vice chancellor for health workforce education relations. More will follow. UNMC, she said, is seeking new or updated agreements with health systems in Nebraska and beyond as it seeks to provide more training sites for the additional health professions students needed to help build the states health care workforce. The state continues to have shortages in many disciplines, particularly in rural areas. But the university has to partner in order to accomplish the goal of alleviating them, she said. We cant do it alone, Carritt said. Its a great opportunity to show we can collaborate and build the workforce. Students long have completed training rotations at the Columbus hospital, but the new agreement formalizes that partnership, she said. In the past, training opportunities have been arranged program by program. The new agreement covers all of UNMCs clinical and non-clinical programs. Not only will the new arrangement provide the opportunity for more students from more programs to gain the hands-on experience they need, it also will allow the hospital to recruit them down the road, Carritt said. Providing enough clinical training sites long has been a pinch point in training health professionals, she said. If there arent enough clinical training sites in the state, students may have to train out of state which makes it harder to recruit them back as providers. Students are more likely to practice within 100 miles of where they complete their training. If we want them to stay in Nebraska and practice, she said, we have to work with the community to do it. That includes providing a good experience for students at training sites so they can see themselves living and working in those communities, she said. Columbus Community Hospital has established relationships with groups in the community, including alumni and other practitioners, to work with students to meet their needs, including housing. Michael Hansen, the hospitals president and CEO, said the hospital staff enjoys the many students they host every year during their rural rotations. By signing the master affiliation agreement for both clinical and non-clinical students, he said in a statement, we streamline the process and ensure that our mutual interests are perfectly aligned. Dr. Jeffrey Gold, UNMCs chancellor, said strong educational experiences in the states communities, such as those provided at Columbus Community Hospital, are integral in growing the states rural health workforce. We are excited at the possibilities this new agreement opens up, he said in a statement. Carritt said UNMC has established an expectation that students complete a rural rotation as part of their education. Those experiences produce some of the most glowing evaluations the university receives from students, who may get to do more in community hospitals than they would in a more specialized setting. Establishing the new agreements, while aimed at an immediate need, also has a strategic element, she said. More training posts also will be needed to accommodate additional health professions students who will study at the University of Nebraska at Kearney under an expansion of a UNMC-UNK partnership and at UNMC under its proposed Project Health, which would include a new academic medical center in Omaha. Top Journal Star photos for November 2023 The woman refused to sell Captain Saleha Jabeen a hijab to don with her military uniform. While many civilian Muslims tell Jabeen she makes them proud, others are horrified by her decision to serve. Youre gonna go kill Muslims, the store owner told her that day. Major Rafael Lantigua Jr. has experienced the flip side of that struggle. Angered by an attack on U.S. troops in Iraq, a fellow service member once barked at Lantigua: Why cant you call your people and tell them to stop? The words stung. Just as Jabeen thought the woman saw her as a bad Muslim, Lantigua felt the implication of the outburst directed at him was: You dont belong. (The service member later apologized). In the years since, Jabeen and Lantigua have become part of the small group of Muslim military chaplains who tend to the souls and spirits of U.S. troops of all faiths and no faith their work highlighted in a new film that offers a peek into their worlds. Among other duties, they give talks on suicide prevention, provide counsel on relationships, and advise commanders on matters of religion and morale. When the going gets tough, they offer comfort, hope and companionship. They sometimes break barriers and celebrate milestones, like Jabeen becoming the first female Muslim military chaplain a few years ago. At other times, they navigate tensions stemming from the views some have of their faith or their service when those get questioned, scrutinized, debated. Were bridge builders, Lantigua said in an interview. Were trying our best in this tension to get like-minded individuals to see the humanity of the other. Jabeen and Lantigua are featured in Three Chaplains, a documentary that recently aired on PBS and is now available online. (The third is Army Col. Khallid Shabazz). In the film and in interviews, they provide a window into the struggles and victories of Muslim chaplains and service members in one of the most American of institutions. Lantigua said his familiarity with Islam has helped him maneuver through this tension that fraught space, squeezed between skepticism by some non-Muslims and dismay by some civilian Muslims, especially over U.S. wars in Muslim-majority countries. The friction, he said, ebbs and flows. It was heightened during such times as 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the aftermath of a 2009 deadly shooting rampage on a military base in Texas by a Muslim Army psychiatrist. These voices from both sides of the aisle start piling on upon Muslim service members, Lantigua said. That can be especially hard for new troops, said Lantigua, whos served for nearly three decades, including deployments in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. Born to a father from the Dominican Republic and an African American mother, he was raised as a Christian before becoming a Muslim. Lantigua said he reminds those with concerns over Muslim service members of the First Amendments guarantee of religious freedom. Similarly, he tells disapproving Muslims that there are Muslim-majority countries that have been part of military coalitions alongside the United States, that the U.S. military has rules of engagement that service members must abide by and that breaking these rules carries repercussions. Three Chaplains director David Washburn, who has done previous work on Muslims in the military, said he found that the chaplains occupied a space where all sorts of compelling story lines intersected: religious freedom, Islamophobia, interfaith dialogue, diversity in military today. BURLINGTON The job of managing Echo Lake restoration is drawing interest from contractors throughout Wisconsin, and as far away as Minneapolis. Ten companies turned out Wednesday to learn more about the project, which involves rebuilding an aging dam and dredging tons of pollutants from the lake. City officials held a mandatory meeting for any company considering seeking the contract for managing the estimated $9 million city project. Proposals for the contract are due Dec. 8. Peter Riggs, the citys public works director, said he was pleased to see so many firms showing an interest. It was a good turnout and should result in multiple proposals for us to review, Riggs said. The firms in attendance were Snyder & Associates of Madison; Michael Baker International of Minneapolis; Ayres Associates of Eau Claire; Barr Engineering of Minneapolis; Roth Professional Solutions of Portage; Saiki Design of Madison; GEI Consultants of Madison; Hey and Associates of Chicago; Lynch & Associates of Burlington; and Quorum Architects of Milwaukee. Company representatives met with city staff at Echo Lake to examine the job site and to ask questions about the project. Ken Saiki, owner of Saiki Design, said he has joined with GEI Consultants and would be focused on park improvements around the lake, while GEI would handle other management duties. Saiki said the city provided helpful information during the pre-proposal gathering. It was a really good meeting, he said. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources notified city officials in 2015 that the manmade dam at Echo Lake was no longer adequate to meet state flood-control standards. The city had to choose between rebuilding the dam, or removing the dam and allowing the impoundment to drain into the White River, which flows through the site. Engineers estimated that preserving the lake would cost about $5 million, while removing the dam and draining the lake could be achieved for $1.5 million. The Burlington City Council has chosen a lake restoration plan that includes optional amenities, putting the cost at $9.1 million. The city has included $10 million for the project in a long-term capital improvement plan. The council is scheduled in February to select a management firm, which then must submit a plan for DNR approval by June 1. Another round of bidding is planned in late 2024, with contracts awarded in January 2025 for construction work. 10 states where river flooding will cost US homeowners the most 10 states where river flooding will cost US homeowners the most States Where Riverine Flooding Costs Homeowners the Most Flooding Risks and Homeowners Insurance Protecting Your Home and Belongings from Flooding WATERFORD The would-be developer of a brewery in an old firehouse has told village officials that he must pull himself out of a hole before moving forward on the long-awaited project. Henry Schwartz, president of Mobcraft Beer Inc., told the village in August that the Waterford project announced two years ago was being slowed by the recent departure of his business partner. In an email to Village Administrator Zeke Jackson, Schwartz apologized for not the best update in the world about the firehouse development. I still really want to get this project done, the brewery developer wrote, but Ive put myself in a hole of being pretty understaffed trying to move everything forward. Ive got to find some more help to get things done. Village officials disclosed the August email as questions have grown about delays on the Mobcraft project. While the company has shown few signs of progress on the old fire station at 122 Second St., Mobcraft this fall opened a new brewery inside a remodeled courthouse in Woodstock, Illinois. On the companys Facebook page, an announcement on the grand opening in Woodstock was greeted with questions about the lack of progress in Waterford. Schwartz told The Journal Times he would disclose more about the Waterford brewery in mid-December. Jackson said the brewery developer and his attorney are scheduled to appear Dec. 11 at a Waterford Village Board meeting to discuss the status of the firehouse project, which faces a Dec. 31 deadline under a development deal with the village. Due process dictates that we allow him the next 39 days to fulfill the commitments he has made to the village, Jackson said. Village officials have been working for years to spur development of a brewery in the former fire station, which is alongside the Fox River. Milwaukee-based Mobcraft announced in August 2021 that would purchase the firehouse and transform it into a micro-brewery with a restaurant. Village officials agreed to sell the property to MobCraft for $400,000 in a deal that called for the village to rebate the sale amount to MobCraft over a period of three years, starting after the beer maker had occupied the site for a full year. The company also deposited $10,000 with the village as a show of good faith. While cost overruns were cited for some delays, after design updates, Schwartz earlier this year declared the project back on track, with a grand opening possible by the end of 2023. In his August email to the village, Schwartz wrote that utility work was taking place at the site and that village engineers were reviewing plans. He also indicated that a general contractor could be on the job soon. Best cities for beer drinkers Best cities for beer drinkers Pittsburgh takes the lead for most beer-friendly cities Data and Methodology 1. Yes. More than 70% of the downtown buildings are occupied; the area is thriving now. 2. Yes. With the new E-Center , a brewery and the county annex moving in, its on the rise. 3. No. There may be a lot of new businesses, but foot traffic is still slow on most days. 4. No. Its improving, but the issues of crime and homelessness are still major obstacles. 5. Unsure. The area seems to be rebounding, but its hard to say if the trend will continue. Vote View Results A representative of the Western Azerbaijan Community took part in the 3rd UNESCO Global Forum against Racism and Discrimination, Azernews reports, citing Western Azerbaijan Community. It was informed that chairwoman of the Women's Council of the community, MP of the Milli Majlis of the Republic of Azerbaijan Malahat Ibrahimgizi represented the Western Azerbaijan Community at the 3rd UNESCO Global Forum against Racism and Discrimination. The forum, held from 29 November to 1 December in Sao Paulo, Brazil, was attended by high-ranking officials of UNESCO Member States, representatives of non-governmental organisations and experts. MP addressed the event as a panellist and spoke about the deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia and its aspects of racial discrimination. MP Ibrahimgizi noted the importance of international efforts to combat racial discrimination, including the UNESCO forum. Noting that one of the most hateful forms of racial discrimination was attacks on cultural heritage, Mr IIbrahimgizi gave detailed information on the destruction of Azerbaijani cultural heritage in Armenia. In MP speech noted the role of UNESCO in the field of protection of cultural heritage and renewed the call of the Community to send a mission to Armenia for a comprehensive assessment of the situation of Azerbaijani cultural heritage in Armenia. The representative of the Community stated that she is ready to cooperate with UNESCO for the sake of a world where ethnic and cultural diversity is protected, where all people live in dignity and in a world where there is no place for racism and discrimination. Within the framework of the event, M.Ibrahimgizi held meetings with high-ranking representatives of Member States and international organisations. The participation of the Western Azerbaijan Community in the forum is an important step towards promoting its own human rights agenda in the international world. The Community will continue its efforts to represent the right to return of Azerbaijanis expelled from Armenia in relevant international formats. KEARNEY Health care providers are concerned about a disproportionate number of children in south-central Nebraska who are testing with high lead levels, said Aravind Menon, an epidemiologist with Two Rivers Public Health Department. Nationwide, weve done such a good job that lead levels are going down, Menon told the Buffalo County Board of Commissioners during their meeting Tuesday. Although national trends are encouraging, Menon said that high levels of lead are being reported in the seven counties served by Two Rivers: Buffalo, Dawson, Franklin, Gosper, Harlan, Kearney and Phelps. Of those seven counties, Buffalo and Dawson are reporting the largest number of lead cases. Children form a high proportion of cases in smaller counties like Gosper, Harlan, Franklin and Kearney, Menon said. The high rates of children detected with high blood lead levels in Dawson County is cause for concern. Districtwide, children accounted for 79% of high lead level reports from 2012 to 2023, Menon said; however, Dawsons rate was 92%, and worrisome statistics also emerged in Gosper County, where children comprised 100% of the high lead cases followed by Dawson and Harlan at 92% each and Kearney County at 89%. Of the remaining counties, children accounted for 88% of cases in Franklin County, 82% in Phelps County, and 65% in Buffalo County during the 10-year reporting period. During that span, Two Rivers conducted 251 surveillance investigations into high lead level cases. Menon said lead exposure can lead to serious health issues. All the hard stuff in your body is what lead attacks, Menon told the board about the correlation of high lead levels and dental problems. According to his statistics, detection of elevated lead levels in blood for adults has increased since 2019. Homes in which people live can be dangerous sources for lead exposure, especially in homes built before federal regulations enacted in 1986 banned unhealthy plumbing using lead or products with some lead in them. Two Rivers was formed in 2004. Its seven-county service area has a population of 97,706 and it stretches across 4,626 square miles. Menon showed the county board a map of Two Rivers seven counties and the percentage of homes built before 1978. Franklin County, with 87.8%, has the highest percentage of older homes that are most likely to have lead plumbing problems. Next in line with homes build before 1978 are Harlan, 81.6%; Dawson, 73.1%; Phelps, 71.5%; Kearney, 70.1%; Gosper, 58.7%; and Buffalo, 42%. Children with poor dental health have many problems, Menon said: They may not grow and develop as they should. They might have a hard time concentrating and learning because of pain. They might miss a lot of school. They might develop serious problems, such as infections. They might not smile because of the appearance of their teeth. They have a lower chance of doing well later in life, compared to children with good oral health. Dental problems are the No.1 chronic disease among children, Menon said. Detection is a good thing because it allows us to intervene, he said. More information about Two Rivers services is available online at www.trphd.ne.gov. LINCOLN The Rural Health Education Complex at the University of Nebraska at Kearney will be named for UNK Chancellor Douglas Kristensen. The University of Nebraska Board of Regents gave its approval during its meeting Friday. The complex was named in Kristensens honor in recognition of his role as an ardent champion for greater Nebraska, especially in building the health sciences workforce needed to keep communities across the state vibrant. The Douglas A. Kristensen Rural Health Education Complex on UNKs west campus includes an existing building, which opened in 2015, and the Rural Health Education Building currently under construction. University of Nebraska System President Ted Carter and University of Nebraska Medical Center Chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold recommended the complex be named for Kristensen following the wishes of the projects lead philanthropic supporter, the William and Ruth Scott Family Foundation. Doug Kristensen has dedicated his career to serving Nebraska citizens, and we believe the state is infinitely better due to his leadership, John Scott, vice president of the foundation, said. Kristensen has served as UNKs chancellor since July 1, 2002. He is the longest-serving chancellor in the history of the University of Nebraska. He was appointed to lead UNK following a career in the Nebraska Legislature. He represented the 37th Legislative District from 1988-2002. At the time he retired, he was the longest-serving speaker in the history of the Legislature. The Rural Health Education Building is targeted for occupancy in early 2026. The $95 million facility will be located directly to the north of the existing facility. The Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Italy Edmondo Cirielli in an interview with "Formiche" newspaper expressed the opinion that there is still a strong nationalist ruling class in Armenia, forces seeking to destabilise the Caucasus, strong Armenian communities living outside Armenia who are really unaware of the problems and the current situation, Azernews reports. "They are also among the causes that people accept more easily. Because they are children and descendants of the Armenian diaspora with strong nationalistic and chauvinistic views." said the minister The Deputy Minister emphasised that Azerbaijanis have nothing to do with what happened against Armenians at the beginning of the last century, so Azerbaijanis bear no responsibility. They cannot be held responsible for the sins of others just because they are Muslims. "Moreover, we know very well that Azerbaijan is one of the most secular and tolerant countries in the Muslim world. This is their distinctive feature. So let's try not to use religion as an element of conflict between nations," Cirielli added. There have always been those in Europe who foment Armenian revanchism and Armenian nationalism, confusing Iravan in issues not even envisaged by international law. Referring to the processes taking place in the South Caucasus, Cirielli emphasised that President Ilham Aliyev is a very pragmatic leader who has categorically ruled out any steps by Azerbaijan that contradict international law. The School District of La Crosse will host an informational meeting about the upcoming April election and available positions on the school board, according to a news release. Those interested in serving as a board member are encouraged to attend at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 6, at the Hogan Administrative Center in Room 209, 807 East Ave. S. Residents planning to attend the workshop are asked to RSVP by sending an email to lsteiger@lacrossesd.org or by calling 608-789-7659. An election will be held April 2, 2024, for three board of education seats. The terms of office for school board members include three-year terms. Incumbents are Annie Baumann, Brad Quarberg and Jeff Jackson. To be on the spring ballot, a campaign registration statement, declaration of candidacy and nomination papers must be filed no later than 5 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 2, in the office of the school district clerk, 807 East Av. S. The first day to circulate nomination papers was Dec. 1. Detailed information about the role of a board member is available in the Wisconsin Association of School Boards Guide for Candidates. Law enforcement officers are investigating the report of suspicious activity on Friday, Dec. 1, along U.S. Hwy. 14 in front of Cornerstone Christian Academy in rural Viroqua. According to a press release from Vernon County Sheriff Roy Torgerson, at about 12:30 p.m. during a school recess period, students saw a vehicle traveling north on U.S. Hwy. 14. The vehicle stopped in front of the school, the driver backed the vehicle south about 350 feet toward County Road Y, and stopped in the vicinity of the school. It was reported that a male, dressed in all black colors including gloves and a ski mask, exited the drivers side door, opened the left, rear door, stood by the rear bumper, and waved or motioned in the direction of a 5-year-old student. The student walked toward the vehicle until intercepted and returned safely to the school. As the school principal approached, the vehicle left traveling north on U.S. Hwy. 14. The vehicle was described as dark blue, possibly a 2019-2022 Chevrolet Equinox with chrome, star-shaped, wheels. The vehicle may have had dealer license plates or license plates from another state. Anyone with information about the incident or vehicle is encouraged to call the sheriffs office at 608-637-2123. People in the the Viroqua and Westby areas are asked to check their security camera footage between the hours of 12 and 1 p.m. on Dec. 1. Please call if you have any information, Torgerson said in the release. Deputies are working with Viroqua and Westby police to obtain video from businesses along Hwy. 14. Also, a vehicle extremely similar to the suspect vehicle reported to authorities was ruled out by the sheriffs office, Town of Campbell Police and the La Crosse County Sheriffs Office. Dane County plans to stop making unmarried fathers pay back the state Medicaid program for birth costs of their children in cases before 2020, a step the county took that year with new cases. Milwaukee County said last month it will end new birth cost recovery actions, another move to curtail a practice opponents say contributes to poor birth outcomes by requiring pregnant women to disclose the fathers of their children or lose Medicaid coverage after the babies are born. Shes the one forced to make a difficult choice about the relationship and the consequences, said Brynne McBride, a public interest attorney at ABC for Health, a Madison-based nonprofit law firm that helps people obtain health care. Stress caused by birth cost recovery, which particularly impacts Black and Native American families, can lead to preterm birth and infant death, problems that disproportionately affect such communities, McBride said. Wisconsin is believed to be among eight or fewer states that try to recoup some of the pregnancy and birth expenses covered by Medicaid from fathers who are not married to the mothers. Proponents say the practice helps keep Medicaid solvent and promotes paternal responsibility. County child support agencies collect the money through court orders. Unlike child support payments, the birth cost money doesnt directly help the child, McBride said. Counties keep 15% of it and return the rest to Medicaid. About half of Wisconsins nearly 60,000 annual births are covered by Medicaid, with 66% of the Medicaid deliveries in 2020 occurring among unmarried people, ABC for Health said in a report last year. Among Black deliveries, 88% were unmarried and subject to birth cost recovery. Among Native Americans, it was 85%. As of last year, Wisconsin counties were collecting on $106 million in birth cost judgments in more than 78,000 cases, ABC for Health said. Milwaukee County had $69.2 million and Dane County had $6.8 million. In 2018, the state told counties to stop birth cost recovery if the unmarried father was part of intact family, living with the mother and supporting the child. In the 2020 Dane County budget, County Executive Joe Parisi said he was ending the controversial practice of birth cost recovery, noting its stark racial disparities. We can forgo this revenue and give these parents one less expense while many of them struggle to make ends meet, Parisi said in his budget summary. However, the county continued to collect on judgments from before 2020. In fact, the collections increased to $2.2 million in 2020 from less than $1.2 million in 2019, as the county intercepted COVID-19 pandemic stimulus checks and unemployment bonuses, ABC for Health reported last year. The 2024 county budget, passed last month, said the county will ask the state to release prior birth cost recovery judgments so it can stop collecting on them. Of about 4,000 old judgments, the county can expunge about 3,000, the county said. The other 1,000 or so involve people who havent used state benefits or applied for county services, said Vue Yang, legal director of the countys child support agency. The budget includes funding for child support workers to work on eliminating the birth cost recovery debt, plus $41,000 to be awarded to an organization to educate affected families about the change. Milwaukee Countys 2024 budget, also passed last month, said the county will end birth cost recovery, resulting in a $200,000 reduction in revenue. The policy applies to new cases, but the county plans to work with courts to reduce prior case debt amounts, said Sup. Caroline Gomez-Tom, who pushed for the change. ABC for Health, which has long advocated for ending birth cost recovery, is pleased by the new policies in Dane and Milwaukee counties and vows to make sure they are promptly implemented, McBride said. The nonprofit would like Wisconsin to end the practice statewide a move Democratic Gov. Tony Evers included in his proposed budget in 2019 but the Republican-controlled Legislature removed. Absent state action, McBride said the group plans to focus on other counties with the most birth cost recovery debt: Racine, Kenosha, Brown, Waukesha and Outagamie. In Dane County, fathers were more likely to pay child support, and those payments increased, after the county stopped new birth cost recovery cases in 2020, according to a study this year by UW-Madison researchers. The study, by the universitys Institute for Research on Poverty, compared unmarried Medicaid deliveries in the county in 2020-2021 with those outside of the county in 2016-2021 and in the county before 2020. While fathers of Black children were more likely to pay child support and an increased amount of support after birth cost recovery ended, fathers of white children were less likely to pay child support and the amount declined, the study found. Overall, our findings suggest that birth cost recovery cessation may have narrowed racial inequities in child support outcomes, albeit in part due to declines in child support payments among white fathers, the researchers wrote. People living in Wisconsin through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program would be able to receive tax credits, in-state tuition and access to professional licenses under a bipartisan package of bills unveiled Monday. Proponents of the three bills, including Reps. John Macco, R-Ledgeview; Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, D-Milwaukee; and Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay; said the measures are intended to open up educational and employment opportunities for recipients of the program, which was created in 2012 and delays the deportation of individuals who came to the U.S. as children, and help address the states longstanding workforce shortage woes. Macco said its his goal to make Wisconsin a DACA magnet across the country. DACA recipients are here, what is the state of Wisconsin going to do about it? Macco said. Its time to get out of their way and let them get educated and contribute to the workforce. There were 5,790 DACA recipients in Wisconsin as of March, according to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. There were more than 578,000 so-called Dreamers, young people who were brought into the country as babies or children by their parents, nationwide in March. Under the federal program, immigrants who arrived here as children and who meet other criteria finishing high school, holding a job, not committing crimes can apply for protection from deportation every two years. Every person deserves a fair shot at their dreams, said Allison Jacobsmeier, director of college advising at St. Augustine Preparatory Academy in Milwaukee. Supporting DACA legislation isnt just a political choice, it is a moral and economic imperative. The first bill in the package would open up the opportunity for DACA recipients to obtain professional licenses in careers ranging from barbers to plumbers. Such professional licensing is currently unavailable to DACA recipients under state law. Another bill would make DACA recipients who have lived in the state for at least one year eligible for in-state tuition at the University of Wisconsin System, while another would provide a biannual, nonrefundable tax credit of $250 to help offset the roughly $500 fee DACA recipients must pay every two years to renew their status. Macco said about 16 states have passed similar professional licensing measures, while roughly 25 have adopted similar in-state tuition programs. As a state, we cannot afford to sit on the sidelines and make investments in our labor force, only to have someone else in another state utilize that talent that we need right here in the state of Wisconsin, Ortiz-Velez said. Macco said the bipartisan proposals are netting broad support across both the Assembly and Senate. The bills were put out for co-sponsors on Monday and are expected to come before committee later this month. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers proposed in the states current two-year spending plan measures to allow DACA recipients who wish to obtain professional licenses, have a path to licensure with appropriate departmental review. The proposal was ultimately removed by Republicans who control the Legislatures budget committee. Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieus spokesman Brian Radday said the bills will work their way through the normal legislative process. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. Today in history: Dec. 4 1918: Versailles 1956: Sun Records 1965: Gemini 7 1965: Sun Records 1978: Dianne Feinstein 1992: George H.W. Bush 2012: Duchess of Cambridge 2016: Comet Ping Pong 2018: George H.W. Bush 2021: James and Jennifer Crumbley, 2021: Chris Cuomo French journalist of Armenian origin Leo Nikolyan addressed French President Emmanuel Macron in X network with a demand to explain the corruption in the country's foreign policy department. In particular, he pointed out that the French Ambassador to Armenia Olivier Decottigny had embezzled 35 million euros through illegal sale of visas, Azernews reports. Probably, in this way the Ambassador enriched himself on the Armenians who voluntarily left Garabagh, as it is known that a very small part of them settled in Armenia, the majority of them went to Europe. On 3 December Venezuelans voted to assert their countrys sovereignty over the disputed Essequibo region in a referendum that Guyana has decried as a step towards annexing its territory. End of preview - This article contains approximately 604 words. Subscribers: Log in now to read the full article Not a Subscriber? Choose from one of the following options Tim Latimer is chief and co-founder of Fervo Energy based in Houston, Texas. His company is working with Google on its geothermal project. Latimer said that getting electricity on the grid from geothermal resources is an event many new energy companies never reach. He added that he believes geothermal energy will become more well-known than in the past. Geothermal partnership The International Energy Agency (IEA) has long suggested geothermal could be an answer to climate change. The IEA said in a 2011 document that geothermal could reach 3.5 percent of global electricity production each year by 2050. The Paris-based international group says geothermal energy could prevent almost 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year. Fervo Energy is using this first test to launch other projects that will provide more electricity to the grid. The company is currently completing some work in southwest Utah for a 400-megawatt project. Google and Fervo Energy started working together in 2021 to develop geothermal power. The plant near Winnemucca, Nevada, is now operating and is sending about 3.5 megawatts to the grid. There are three wells there. However, the data centers require more electricity than that. So, Google signed other agreements for solar energy and electricity storage too. The company has two plants in Nevada, one near Las Vegas and the other near Reno. Michael Terrell leads climate efforts at Google. He said the company is considering using geothermal energy for other data centers worldwide. Were really hoping that this could be a springboard to much, much more advanced geothermal power available to us and others around the world, he said. Google announced in 2020 that it would use what it calls carbon-free energy every hour of every day, wherever it operates, by 2030. Many energy experts believe huge companies like Google can play a part in increasing the use of clean energy. Terrell noted the company was also an early supporter of wind and solar projects, helping those markets grow to where they are today. Its a very similar situation. Now that weve set a goal to be 24/7 carbon-free energy, we have found it will take more than just wind, solar and storage, Terrell said. The path ahead The United States leads the world in using heat from the Earth for electricity production. But geothermal makes up less than half a percent of the nations total electricity production, says the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 2022, that geothermal power came from California, Nevada, Utah, Hawaii, Oregon, Idaho and New Mexico. Those are states thought to have geothermal possibilities because they have large amounts of steam or very hot water close to the surface. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said earlier this year that advances in new geothermal systems will help introduce this form of energy to areas where it has been thought to be impossible. Technologies Some geothermal companies, including Fervo, are now going deeper below ground. This makes it possible to find energy in more places. Latimer is a former drilling engineer in the oil and gas industry. Drilling technology got much better during the shale boom that turned the United States into a top oil and gas producer and exporter. But very little new technology has gone from the oil and gas industry to geothermal, said Fervo official Sarah Jewett. In October, Latimer gave a presentation at ClimateTech 2023, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Latimer told the conference about how Fervo is developing horizontal drilling in geothermal reservoirs. By drilling horizontally, Fervo can reach more of the hot reservoir, instead of drilling many wells straight down. Both Fervo and Google said geothermal is valuable as a clean energy technology that is always available. Fervos next project, in Beaver County, Utah, is to begin providing clean power to the grid in 2026 and reach full production in 2028. This is unlocking something deeply sought after in the market todayand that is, round-the-clock renewable energy, Jewett said. Im John Russell. Jennifer McDermott reported on this story for the Associated Press. John Russell adapted it for VOA Learning English. ______________________________________________ Words in This Story geothermal adj. of, relating to, or using the natural heat produced inside the Earth grid n. a network of equipment that supplies electricity to a large area carbon dioxide n. a gas that is produced when certain fuels are burned emission n. something sent out or given off springboard n. something that helps you start a process shale boom n. refers to the combination of technologies and drilling methods that greatly increased recovery of oil and natural gas in the U.S. horizontal adj. positioned from side to side rather than up and down (vertical) reservoir n. a place where something is stored in large amounts by design: for example, a man-made lake is a reservoir of water As the American space agency NASA continues to carry out tests of its Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, it is also testing a future aircraft design on Earth. NASAs Ingenuity has been making test flights on the Red Planet for the past two-and-a-half years. The experimental helicopter arrived on Mars along with NASAs Perseverance explorer, or rover, in February 2021. Both the rover and helicopter have been collecting images and data as they explore an area known as Jezero Crater. The goal of the exploration effort is to search for signs of ancient life on Mars. Ingenuity made history on Mars Ingenuity made history in April 2021 by becoming the first aircraft to complete a powered, controlled flight on another planet. NASA officials have said the helicopter has performed far above expectations. Agency engineers planned on Ingenuity completing just five experimental flights on Mars. But the helicopter has so far performed 66 flights. It has provided NASA with valuable data on building future aircraft to fly in space. Travis Brown is Ingenuitys chief engineer at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. He said in a statement that with nearly every flight, the helicopter has progressed in new ways. Brown noted that over the past nine months, Ingenuity had doubled its top speed and height records. In addition, the aircrafts operating speed and landings improved. Most Ingenuity flights only last two to three minutes. This is because the helicopter has energy and temperature limitations. NASA engineers say they have also been careful not to try to fly Ingenuity too fast because this can cause problems with its navigation system. The helicopter uses a camera to identify rocks and other things on the surface as it travels. If the aircraft goes too fast, it might not be able to navigate the best way forward. Controllers on the ground have said that to help with this issue, they have sent commands to Ingenuity to fly at higher levels. This way the aircraft has less chance of losing its way because surface objects stay in view longer. NASA says Ingenuity established a new height record, on flight 61, of 24 meters as it examined Martian wind conditions. On flight 62, the helicopter set a new speed record of 10 meters per second. During this flight Ingenuity also identified a new place for the Perseverance rover to carry out science experiments. Testing new helicopter design on Earth As that testing continues on Mars, teams on the ground have been experimenting with new rotor blades. These could be used in the future with a new generation of Mars helicopters. During the tests, engineers reported the rotor blades had reached speeds nearly equal to Mach 1, the speed of sound. The blades tested on Earth are made of carbon material and are more than 10 centimeters longer than Ingenuitys. The blades were designed to be both faster and stronger. NASA has said such rotor blades should be able to support bigger, more complex helicopters. The team said in a statement the helicopter design must reach the right balance. If the blades spin too fast, this causes control issues that can increase the risk of crashes. The Earth-based tests were carried out in September inside a space simulator at NASAs JPL. For these experiments, the simulator aimed to establish a Mars-like environment. The team was measuring tests of the rotor blades with sensors, cameras and other equipment. Many different speeds were tested and the blades were repeatedly repositioned to observe the best results. We spun our blades up to 3,500 rpm, which is 750 revolutions per minute faster than the Ingenuity blades have gone, said Tyler Del Sesto, a leader of the JPL testing. These more efficient blades are now more than a hypothetical exercise. They are ready to fly, he added. Im Bryan Lynn. Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English, based on reports from NASA. Quiz - NASA Continues Mars Helicopter Experiments, Tests New Design on Earth Start the Quiz to find out Start Quiz __________________________________________ Words in This Story navigate v. to find the right direction to travel in by using maps of other equipment rotor blade n. thin, flat pieces of material that spin to make aircraft lift off the ground and travel simulator n. a machine used to practice operating a vehicle or piece of equipment without having to actually use those things efficient adj. working well and not wasting time or energy hypothetical adj. a situation or idea has been suggested but does not yet really exist or has not been proven to be true Walter Banegas is a refugee from the Central American country of Honduras. He now lives in the northern Mexican city of Saltillo. There, he works in a factory, making aluminum parts for machines. But Mexico is not the first country Banegas, 28, has tried to call home. To avoid violent drug gangs in Honduras, he first fled to the United States as a teenager. But he was deported in 2014. Hoping to seek asylum, he re-entered the U.S. in 2020, only to be deported once again. So when Banegas fled Honduras once more in 2021, he aimed for Mexico instead of the U.S. He was granted refugee status and with help from a United Nations refugee program, moved to Saltillo. There, he was connected to a job at Pace Industries, a U.S.-based metal manufacturer with plants in the U.S. and Mexico. In the last five years, Mexico has seen an increase in the number of refugees choosing to stay in the country. There, the asylum system is less strict than in the U.S., and refugees can find jobs because companies in Mexico need more workers. Banegas said he is earning about $800 a month at Pace Industries. This is less than he thought he would make in the U.S. But it is enough to send at least $50 a month home to his family. He says he likes his Mexican co-workers and is proud his six-month-old son, David, is a Mexican citizen. "I feel at peace here," he said. "It's not necessary to go to the United States. You can also get ahead here, in Mexico." A good choice for some refugees About ten years ago, only a few hundred people received asylum in Mexico each year. By 2021, the number rose to 27,000, according to Mexico's refugee agency. Mexico will likely approve at least 20,000 asylum cases this year, with most of the arrivals coming from Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, El Salvador and Cuba. A large majority of migrants entering Mexico continue north toward the U.S. The U.S. had more than 700,000 individual asylum claims last year. But the head of the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) in Mexico, Giovanni Lepri, said Mexico is becoming a good choice for refugees, in part because of its high need for workers. Coparmex studies Mexicos economy and social issues. The organization says Mexico has more than one million job openings nationwide. In a recent study of more than 2,500 businesses in Mexico, it says 85 percent of employers in manufacturing report trouble finding workers, more than in any other employment area. U.S., Mexican and U.N. officials have called for cooperation to help migrants resettle in places such as Mexico, Costa Rica and Colombia, aiming to reduce illegal migration to the U.S. Arturo Rocha is the migration director for Mexico's foreign ministry. He said the government is trying to expand work visa programs and connect employers with migrants looking for jobs. Mexico is working with Guatemala's government to bring up to 20,000 workers to Mexico each year. Mexico also aims to expand the program to Honduras and El Salvador. Jose Medina Mora, the head of Coparmex, praised the U.N. program that helped Banegas relocate to Saltillo. He also urged the Mexican government to expand work visa programs so more migrants can be quickly matched with employers. The U.N. program helps refugees relocate from southern Mexico, where most complete their asylum process, to cities in central and northern Mexico. The program gives money and helps with finding jobs. It also helps refugees find childcare, schools and healthcare. It helped connect 5,500 refugees with a job in 2022, and nearly 3,000 so far this year. Couldnt ask for more Fernando Hernandez, 24, fled Honduras for southern Mexico last year with his partner and young daughter. He planned to cross the country as quickly as possible to reach the U.S. But then he saw social media posts of children drowning in the river at the U.S. border. He imagined his two-year-old daughter also dying in the water. And he thought about his mother, who migrated to the U.S. in 2017. She lives in a small mobile home in the state of Texas and uses most of her pay for housing. So, Hernandez decided to seek asylum in Mexico. After it was approved in February, the U.N. helped his family relocate to the northern industrial city of Monterrey. There, Hernandez began working at a small store that sells food, drink, and other things people need. Hernandez quickly learned that there were job openings everywhere, he said. He got a job in a factory, and then became a cook at P.F. Chang's, earning about $225 a week. "Here we have everything: a house, food and family," he said. "I couldn't ask for more." Im Andrew Smith. And I'm Anna Mateo. Laura Gottesdiener and Daina Beth Solomon wrote this story for Reuters News. Andrew Smith adapted it for VOA Learning English. __________________________________________________ Words in This Story gang -n. a group of criminals who work together to commit crimes teenager -n. a young person between 13 and 19 years old relocate -v. to move to a different city or country match -v. to connect with another in a way that works well Walmart, the worlds largest store, is importing more goods to the United States from India and reducing its dependence on China. Between January and August this year, Walmart shipped 25 percent of its U.S. imports from India. That compares to just 2 percent in 2018. Import Yeti, a data company, shared the information with Reuters. The same data shows that only 60 percent of Walmarts imports came from China during the same period, down from 80 percent in 2018. China is still Walmarts biggest country for importing goods. The shift shows how the rising cost of importing from China and increased tension between China and the U.S. are leading American companies to import from other countries. Those countries include India, Thailand, and Vietnam. Andrea Alright is Walmarts executive vice president of sourcing. She said, We want the best prices. She added that Walmart has to deal with natural disasters to shortages in materials and cannot be dependent on any one supplier or area for products. Walmart said the import information did not mean that it was reducing dependence on any of its markets. "We're a growth business and are working to source more manufacturing capacity," the company said in a statement. And Albright added that India has become an important part of Walmarts efforts to build that manufacturing capacity. Walmart has been increasing growth in India since 2018. It bought 77 percent of shares in the online company Flipkart. Two years later, it promised to import $10 billion worth of goods from India each year by 2027. That is a target it is on the way to meet, Albright said. It is currently importing around $3 billion worth of goods from India each year. Indias workforce and technology Walmart is importing goods including toys, electronics, sporting equipment, and medications from India. Foods like packaged food, dry grains, and pasta are also popular imports from India, Albright told Reuters. India, whose stock market has risen to record highs this year, is viewed as the country best equipped to outperform China in low-cost and large amounts of manufacturing. The South Asian country also has a growing workforce and increasing technological developments. China, however, recently reported its first population decrease in sixty years. Walmart started its sourcing operations in the Indian city of Bangalore in 2002. Now, the company employs more than 100,000 people, including temporary workers, around the country. Rising costs from China The rising cost of shopping goods from China has also added to the shift to India, supply chain experts say. Chris Rogers is a researcher at S&P Global Market Intelligences supply chain research group Panjiva. He said, Sourcing from mainland China has become less competitive because of rising labor costs versus other manufacturing centers. China's minimum wage ranges between $198.52 to $376.08 monthly. Meanwhile, average wages for unskilled and semi-skilled workers in India are between $108.04 and $180.06. The COVID-19 pandemic showed weaknesses in worldwide supply chains, showing U.S. importers were over-dependent on a small number of markets. Albright said planning for an event like the pandemic is like planning for a natural disaster. She said, What I can control is where my product is coming from and how do I make sure that Christmas still happens if something happens in our supply chain. Im Caty Weaver. Julie Steenhuysen reported this story for Reuters. Gregory Stachel adapted it for VOA Learning English. _________________________________________________ Words in This Story supply chain n. a network of businesses that supply the materials and parts needed to provide people with products and goods shift v. to move or to cause (something or someone) to move to a different place or position source v. to get something from a particular place capacity n. the amount of something that can be produced or managed by a factory or company draw n. someone or something that causes a lot of people to come to a place versus prep. used to indicate two different things or choices that are being compared or considered A Cozad man was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for possession of meth and carrying a gun during a trafficking crime. Christopher P. Twohig, 45, was sentenced to 120 months in prison by U.S. District Judge John M. Gerrard Friday, according to a press release from Acting United States Attorney Susan Lehrs office. He was convicted of possession with intent to distribute 5 grams or more methamphetamine and carrying a firearm during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime. There is no parole in the federal system. After Twohigs release from prison, he will begin a 5-year term of supervised release. On March 22, officers in Cozad attempted to arrest Twohig on a state arrest warrant, according to the release. Twohig was located and apprehended in a parking lot at a convenience store. Approximately 47 grams of meth was found in Twohigs coat, along with multiple empty baggies. A firearm was also found in his vehicle with over 100 rounds of ammunition. The suspected meth was sent to the lab, and the lab determined that there was about 45.24 grams of meth, of which at least 41 grams was actual meth. This case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Nebraska State Patrol and Dawson County Sheriffs Office. A 48-year-old Aurora man is dead and his 29-year-old stepson is in jail after a stabbing in Aurora that left two others injured, according to police. Police found Ross Nickolaus with significant injuries after they responded to a home on Fairview Drive in Aurora at about 1:20 a.m. Saturday on a report of a stabbing, Nebraska State Patrol spokesperson Cody Thomas said. Nickolaus was transported to the hospital, where he died, Thomas said. Two other victims were also found with stab wounds. Officers found a woman with significant injuries in a neighboring house's driveway. She was transported to Bergan Mercy Hospital in Omaha where she is being treated for serious injuries, Thomas said. The third victim, a teenage male, was found inside the same residence as Nickolaus with minor injuries consistent with stab wounds. He has since been released from the hospital, Thomas said. Police arrested Nickolaus' stepson, 29-year-old Caleb Arnett, also of Aurora, on suspicion of first-degree murder and two counts of first-degree assault. He was found at the scene and taken to the hospital to be treated for minor injuries he sustained prior to officers' arrival, according to police. It's unclear what led up to the stabbings and if the three victims and Arnett lived together at the home on Fairview Drive. The Nebraska State Patrol will lead the investigation at the request of the Aurora Police Department. The investigation is ongoing. Best public colleges in Nebraska Best public colleges in Nebraska #3. University of Nebraska at Kearney #2. University of Nebraska at Omaha #1. University of Nebraska - Lincoln The fourth meeting of political consultations between Azerbaijani Foreign Ministers and the Republic of Bulgaria was held in Sofia, Azernews reports. The delegation of the Republic of Azerbaijan was headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Yalchin Rafiyev and the delegation of the Republic of Bulgaria by Deputy Foreign Minister Tihomir Stoychev. During the consultations the current situation and prospects of development of bilateral relations in political, economic, energy, transport and humanitarian spheres, as well as cooperation within international organisations were discussed. The sides stressed the importance of the high-level reciprocal visits in the development of bilateral relations, noting that the visits expected next year will make an additional contribution to the current dynamics of cooperation. The mechanisms of strategic dialogue and political consultations between the two countries, as well as the activity of the Joint Commission on trade-economic and scientific-technical cooperation between the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Bulgaria were highlighted. The other side was informed about the situation in the region in the post-conflict period, the mine threat in the liberated territories of Azerbaijan, the large-scale reconstruction, restoration and urban development works carried out by our country, as well as the implementation of the State Programme "Great Return to the Liberated Territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan". Detailed exchange of views on other issues of mutual interest took place during the meeting. During the visit to the Republic of Bulgaria, Deputy Foreign Minister Yalchin Rafiyev, as well as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Bulgaria Mrs Maria Gabriel, Chairman of the Foreign Policy Committee of the National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria Mr Boyko Borisov and Advisor to the Prime Minister of the Republic of Bulgaria on Foreign and Security Policy Mr Dragomir Zakov held meetings. Women who wish to have oral contraception will now be able to get it on the National Health Service. The Health Minister, Enoch Powell, made an announcement in the House of Commons today but did not give any guidelines as to whom the pill should be given. It is not for me to indicate to doctors when they should decide for medical reasons to prescribe for their patients, he said. However some GPs are in a dilemma over whether they can prescribe the Pill, as it is commonly known, for social as well as medical reasons. Several companies are busy manufacturing the product in Britain which will cost the NHS just over one shilling a pill 17s a month. And some politicians are anxious that the drug could be a huge financial burden on the Treasury which currently spends 90m a year on drugs provided by the health service. The oral contraceptive is a combination of a synthetic hormones oestrogen and progestogen taken to prevent conception by hampering monthly release of an egg cell from the ovary. Pills have to be taken regularly in order to work and some physicians are concerned about the effects the drug could have on the bodys delicate balance of hormones. Sir Charles Dodds, Britains leading expert on the drugs contained in the Pill and who heads a research institute at Middlesex Hospital, has said the pills could have long-term side-effects. He compared a womans body with a clock mechanism. Even if you thoroughly understand the mechanism of a clock, provided it is going well it is very much better to leave it alone. To interfere with it if you do not understand it can be disastrous, he said. The Family Planning Association, which runs clinics all over Britain, is still deciding whether or not to gives the go-ahead to its physicians to issue the Pill to married women. Courtesy BBC News In context The rest of the decade saw a huge demand for what is an extremely effective form of birth control. It remains the most popular reversible contraceptive in the UK and the USA in spite of various health scares since its invention in the early 1950s. To prevent side-effects produced by combined hormone pills such as fluid retention, depression, weight gain, and in rare cases thrombosis progestogen-only pills were developed in the 1980s. They have fewer side-effects than the combined pill but are slightly less efficient. With Planet Earth running a fever, U.N. climate talks focused yesterday on the contagious effects on human health. Under a brown haze over Dubai, the COP28 summit moved past two days of lofty rhetoric and calls for unity from top leaders to concerns on health issues like the deaths of at least 7 million people globally from air pollution each year and the spread of diseases like cholera and malaria as global warming upends weather systems. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it was high time for the U.N. Conference of Parties on climate to hold its first health day in its 28th edition, saying the threats to health from climate change were immediate and present. Although the climate crisis is a health crisis, its well overdue that 27 COPs have been and gone without a serious discussion of health, he said. Undoubtedly, health stands as the most compelling reason for taking climate action. After two days of speeches by dozens of presidents, prime ministers, royals and other top leaders in the background and off-stage participants were also turning attention to tough negotiations over the next nine days to push for more agreement on ways to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. Saturday capped off with the COP28 presidency announcing that 50 oil and gas companies had agreed to reach near-zero methane emissions and end routine flaring in their operations by 2030. They also pledged to reach net zero for their operational emissions by 2050. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the promises made clearly fall short of what is required. In comments yesterday, Guterres called the methane emissions reductions a step in the right direction. But he criticized the net zero pledge for excluding emissions from fossil fuel consumption where the vast majority of the industrys greenhouse gases come from and said the announcement provided no clarity on how the companies planned to reach their goals. There must be no room for greenwashing, he said. Temperature rises caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal have worsened natural disasters like floods, heat waves and drought, and caused many people to migrate to more temperate zones in addition to the negative knock-on effects for human health. John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, said it was astonishing to him that its taken so long for health to become a centerpiece of the climate discussion. Our bodies are ecosystems, and the world is an ecosystem, Kerry said. If you poison our land and you poison our water and you poison our air, you poison our bodies. He said his daughter Vanessa, who works with Tedros, repeats to me frequently that we should not measure progress on the climate crisis just by the degrees averted, but by the lives saved. A COP28 declaration backed by some 120 countries stressed the link between health and climate change. It made no mention of phasing out planet-warming fossil fuels, but pledged to support efforts to curb health care sector pollution, which accounts for 5% of global emissions, according to the WHO head. Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, head of climate and health at WHO, said heat alone has put pressure on the body and led to higher rates of infectious disease. Climate change doesnt need to be on a death certificate for us to be confident that climate change is causing deaths, Diarmid Campbell-Lendrum, WHOs head of climate and health, said. Dubai, the largest city in oil-rich United Arab Emirates, often faces higher levels of air pollution than other places on Earth due to its location and haze is common. The city sits on the coast of the Persian Gulf, but further inland begins the Empty Quarter, the massive desert that takes up a third of the Arabian Peninsula. The citys boom has led to rapid construction, industrial areas and pollution from automobiles, adding to the impacts of sand and particulate churned by the desert winds. Some 3.5 million people now live in Dubai, up from 183,000 less than 50 years ago, and estimates suggest another million commute into the city-state each day for work. The Dubai government, on its web site devoted to the environment, listed its Air Quality Index level mostly at good. Switzerland-based IQAir, a technology company that sells air-quality monitoring products, listed Dubai as the city with the 18th-worst air quality in the world with moderate air quality levels as of noon local time on yesterday. It cited high levels of two types of particulate matter in the air, and recommended mask-wearing for sensitive groups and a reduction of outdoor exercise. JAMEY KEATEN, DUBAI, MDT/AP The branded event, Lets Hang Out Lusophone and Macao Products Bazaar, was held for the second time in Hengqin this year over the weekend. Like previous events in Macau, the Hengqin event featured products with Chinese and Lusophone characteristics, such as canned food, wines and spirits, coffee, seasonings, bakery and pastries, fragrances and jewelry, as well as cultural and innovative products. To elevate the mood, live performances, art workshops and games were also held. A total of 25 companies participated in the event. Related JIM GOMEZ, MANILA China has executed two Filipinos for drug trafficking despite high-level Philippine government appeals to commute their death sentences to life in prison, the Philippine government said Saturday. The Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila did not identify the two Filipinos, citing the wishes of their families for privacy. It added that it did not announce the Nov. 24 executions until the Philippine government was formally notified by China. No other details were immediately given by Chinese or Philippine authorities about the executions and the drug trafficking cases. The DFA said that from the time the two Filipinos were arrested in 2013 until their 2016 convictions by a Chinese court, it provided all possible help, including funding for their legal defense. The government of the Republic of the Philippines further exhausted all measures available to appeal to the relevant authorities of the Peoples Republic of China to commute their sentences to life imprisonment on humanitarian grounds, the DFA said. There were also high-level political representations in this regard. The Chinese government, citing their internal laws, upheld the conviction and the Philippines must respect Chinas criminal laws and legal processes, the DFA said. While the Philippine government will continue to exhaust all possible avenues to assist our overseas nationals, ultimately it is the laws and sovereign decisions of foreign countries, and not the Philippines, which will prevail in these cases. The executions came at a difficult point in the relations of China and the Philippines due to escalating territorial disputes in the South China Sea. The Philippines, through the DFA, has filed more than 100 diplomatic protests over actions by China in the disputed waters since President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. took power in June last year. The DFA said that while it was saddened by the executions of the Filipinos, their deaths strengthen the governments resolve to continue our relentless efforts to rid the country of drug syndicates that prey on the vulnerable, including those seeking better lives for themselves and their families. It renewed a reminder to Filipinos traveling abroad to be vigilant against drug syndicates, which recruit travelers to serve as drug mules or couriers, and to refuse to carry any uninspected package from other people. Two other death penalty cases involving Filipinos are on appeal and under final review in China, DFA spokesperson Teresita Daza said, without elaborating. One other Filipino, Mary Jabe Veloso, is facing execution in Indonesia after being convicted of drug trafficking. Marcos has said that he has appealed for a commutation of her death sentence or a pardon but it remains to be seen whether that will be granted. The Philippines is a major global source of labor and Filipino officials have been particularly concerned over the vulnerability of poor Filipinos to being exploited by drug syndicates. MDT/AP The Philippine president blamed foreign terrorists for a bomb blast that killed four people yesterday, wounded dozens of other Catholic worshippers in the south and sparked a security alarm, including in the capital, Manila, where state forces were put on alert. The suspected bomb, which the police said was made from a mortar round, went off and hit students and teachers who attended a Mass in a gymnasium at Mindanao State University in southern Marawi city, Taha Mandangan, the security chief of the state-run campus, told The Associated Press by telephone. Dozens of students and teachers dashed out of the gym and the wounded were taken to hospitals. Regional military commander Maj. Gen. Gabriel Viray III said four people were killed by the explosion, including three women, and 50 others were brought to two hospitals for treatment. Six of the wounded were fighting for their lives in a hospital, said Gov. Mamintal Adiong Jr. of the Islamic province of Lanao del Sur, which has Marawi as its capital. I condemn in the strongest possible terms the senseless and most heinous acts perpetrated by foreign terrorists upon the Mindanao State University, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said in a statement. Extremists who wield violence against the innocent will always be regarded as enemies to our society. Marcos did not explain why he immediately blamed foreign militants for the high-profile bombing. Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. later told a news conference without elaborating there was a strong indication of a foreign element in the bombing. Military chief of staff Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. said the bomb attack could be retaliation by Muslim militants for a series of battle setbacks. We are looking at possible angles, Brawner said. It could be a retaliatory attack, He cited the killing of 11 suspected Islamic militants in a military offensive backed by airstrikes and artillery fires on Friday near Datu Hoffer town in southern Maguindanao province. Regional police director Brig. Gen. Allan Nobleza said the slain militants belonged to Dawlah Islamiyah, an armed group that had aligned itself with the Islamic State group and still has a presence in Lanao del Sur province. Mosque-studded Marawi city came under attack from foreign and local Islamic militants who had associated themselves with the Islamic State group in 2017. The five-month siege left more than 1,100 dead, mostly militants, before it was quelled by Philippine forces backed by airstrikes and surveillance planes deployed by the United States and Australia. Army troops and police cordoned off the university shortly after the bombing and began an investigation, checking security cameras for any indication of who may have been responsible for the attack. Security checkpoints were set up around the city. Police Lt. Gen. Emmanuel Peralta told reporters that military and police bomb experts found fragments of a 60mm mortar round in the scene of the attack. Such explosives fashioned from mortar rounds had been used in past attacks by Islamic militants in the countrys south. The deadly blast set off a security alarm beyond Marawi city as the Christmas season ushered in a period of travel, shopping sprees and traffic jams across the country. Police and other state forces were put under heightened alert in metropolitan Manila, security officials said. The Philippine coast guard said it ordered all its personnel to intensify intelligence gathering, stricter inspections of passenger ferries and the deployment of bomb-sniffing dogs and sea marshals. Amid this barbaric act, best public service must prevail, coast guard chief Admiral Ronnie Gavan said. The southern Philippines is the homeland of minority Muslims in the predominantly Roman Catholic nation and the scene of decades-old separatist rebellions. The largest armed insurgent group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, signed a 2014 peace deal with the government, considerably easing decades of fighting. But a number of smaller armed groups rejected the peace pact and press on with bombings and other attacks while evading government offensives. JIM GOMEZ, MANILA, MDT/AP Lawmaker Ron Lam has raised concerns to the government regarding delays in reviewing and updating the Advertising Law. In a written inquiry submitted through the Legislative Assembly (AL), the lawmaker questioned the Secretary for Administration and Justice, Andre Cheong, asking why Law 7/89/M was absent from the governments legislative agenda. The lawmaker noted that this is probably one of the most outdated laws in Macau, not just because it has been in force for 34 years but also because it provides rules and regulations for an area that has undergone drastic changes over recent decades, with the rise of the internet, social media and related avenues. Regarding the current law, Lam said, Most of its content is outdated and cannot keep up with the pace of social and economic development. He recalled that back in 2015, several government officials acknowledged the need to review the law and announced that it was on the governments agenda for amendment. However, eight years later, there is still no explanation from the government on what happened to the bill to adjust and update this law. He also noted that earlier this year and in response to a spoken inquiry at the AL, Cheong also said that to protect the rights and interests of consumers, while allowing the industry to clarify rules and promote the healthy development of industry, it was necessary to comprehensively review of the current Advertising Law. An inter-departmental group was established to work on that revision. Still, Lam notes, the Policy Address for 2024 makes no reference to this project. He fears that it will again be overlooked. For instance, the lawmaker noted that many current forms of advertising and store signage are not considered under the prevailing law as they did not exist at the time it was enacted. Consequently, shop owners face untold hassles and the risk of fines due to the lack of clarity and absence of updates to the law. He also noted that no form of public consultation had been announced on the matter. For this reason, he believedthe government was not prioritizing amendment and review of this law and that it would potentially not be addressed over the next year. He also opposed the idea of the authorities prohibiting and penalizing modern advertising methods simply because they were not recognized under the existing law. He advocated instead for authorities to focus their attention on getting it right instead of fining already struggling small business owners. The World Portuguese Network, a non-profit organization founded in 2012 under the patronage of the President of the Portuguese Republic, has recently established an Asia and Oceania Regional Hub for the first time. The World Portuguese Network, which is represented through the Portuguese Diaspora Council, aims to strengthen relations between Portugal and its diaspora, particularly Portuguese individuals and those of Portuguese descent residing abroad. Through their merit and influence, the Council seeks to have its members contribute to the universal affirmation of Portuguese values and culture, the Council said. The Council has the Portuguese president as its honorary president and the Minister of Foreign Affairs as its honorary vice-president. According to the organizations information, the primary intervention tool of the World Portuguese Network involves a diverse group of influential Portuguese individuals in the fields of economy, science, culture and citizenship. Currently, this network is said to comprise 182 advisors spread across 35 countries on all five continents. Regarding the creation of the new regional hub, the president of the board of the World Portuguese Network said, It is with great enthusiasm that I celebrate the formation of the Regional Hub for Asia and Oceania of the Portuguese Diaspora. This initiative will not only strengthen our economic, cultural, scientific, and institutional ties but will also solidify the presence and influence of the Portuguese community in these fast-growing and dynamic regions. I am certain that the future activities developed by this regional hub will allow the global presence of the Portuguese Diaspora Council to be even more robust and collaborative. Congratulations to everyone involved in this significant step towards an increasingly global Portuguese Diaspora. Among the most notable members of this group are Mumbai-based Rahool Pai Panandiker, Senior Partner and General Manager at the Boston Consulting Group, with extensive experience in government regulation and policies, particularly in the energy sector across various countries such as Spain, Brazil, Portugal, India, Mozambique and the United States. Also part of this group is Luis Gandara da Silva, Managing Director of Sogrape Asia Pacific, who is currently based in Hong Kong. Gandara da Silvas main focus is on the Greater China region. In addition to his work in the wine and spirits sector, he was also vice president of the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce in New York for four years. Paulo Ramos and Pedro Rodeia are two of the members based in Japan. Ramos is president of the board of directors of the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Japan. He has a professional background in Biotechnology and Enology, having founded the company 1756 The Portuguese Wine Company, which specializes in exporting wines to Asia. Rodeia, a Senior Partner and Chairman of McKinsey & Company Japan, is engaged in its banking practice, having served as a member of McKinseys Global Board of Directors from 2017 to 2023 and as Chairman of the Technology, Knowledge and Capabilities Committee of the Board. He has over 30 years of banking experience in 28 countries, including China, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, India, Hong Kong, USA, Brazil, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Poland and several countries in Africa. Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, and Macau are also represented among the advisors of the Council, which, according to the official website, has only one member currently in Macau, Carlos Cid Alvares, executive vice-president and CEO of Banco Nacional Ultramarino, S.A. (BNU). Call it the Thanksgiving spirit or the prodding of a hungry SOS, but a pair of companies finally made good with a pair of heretofore disappointed customers in the days before Americas biggest feast of the year. Omie Baldwin, 85, of Madison, informed SOS on Nov. 14 that a stove she had purchased from Grand Appliance in Fitchburg on Oct. 4 had arrived on Oct. 18 damaged. Specifically, the lights on its front panel appeared to be permanently illuminated, but the oven light wouldnt turn on and the oven itself was not working. Baldwin had her son-in-law, an engineer, inspect the unit, she said, and he thought it might be a wiring issue. He had a repair technician come out on Oct. 27, she said, and he found a dent on the back of the stove and wires for the electrical panel that were frayed. From that techs notes, according to Baldwin: delivery damaged to rear of unit. Caused a break in DC Harness to user interface and comm port on rear of unit. Harness needs to be replaced. Initially, the person who sold her the stove said he would try to have the stove replaced, Baldwin said, but later informed me that his boss does not want it picked up but just to have it repaired. I explained the stove was damaged before delivery, she said. Thus, I expect a new stove. At that point the sales person told me that they would not take it back, and if they did, they would charge me a restocking fee. Dave Peterson, 69, of Madison, also was saddled with a faulty product; it just took a lot longer for the faults to reveal themselves. Taking advantage of the savings in buying in bulk, Peterson purchased a 48-pack of AA Rayovac batteries in 2018 for about $10. Four years later, some of the batteries had started to leak both unused ones still in their package and ones that had been installed in a clock and in a flashlight, the latter of which no longer worked as a result. The batteries came with a 10-year warranty, but warranties are only as good as the warranting companys willingness to fulfill them, and it appeared to Peterson that his attempt execute the warranty on his batteries was being stymied by a particularly obtuse Rayovac customer service bot. Peterson shared with SOS a series of messages last month between him and Rayovac in which Rayovac Consumer Services repeatedly asks him for detailed information about his defective batteries and the damage theyve caused, and Peterson repeatedly provides it before giving up. Among the companys demands: photos of the two batteries that where (sic) into the flashlight, lined up, showing the positive terminal, the two batteries that where (sic) into the flashlight, lined up, showing the negative terminal, the battery showing the magnification code, all the 2 batteries used inside the device all lined up side by side all showing the positive and negative terminals and the battery compartment of the device showing the tube from inside empty. Further, asked the possible bot: Please confirm when you have installed the batteries into the flashlight and when was the last time that yo (sic) have used the flashlight and it was operating. By Nov. 19, Peterson had had enough: OK you win, he responded. This is very frustrating and clearly more than what a reasonable person would expect to file a warranty claim. SOS emailed Grand Appliance Fitchburg manager Derek Nieman on Nov. 14 and representatives with Energizer Holdings, Rayovacs parent company, on Nov. 21, pleading Baldwins and Petersons cases. Nieman has yet to respond, but on Nov. 20, Baldwin informed SOS that on Nov. 15 shed received a call from Grand Appliance saying it would replace her stove, which it did three days later. A manager of communications from Energizer Holdings did respond to SOS inquiry, and while John J. Leiby said it was unfortunate he didnt have any additional information to provide, he did say hed forwarded the pictures and information to the Consumer Care team leader to have them review the situation. A little more than four hours later, Peterson received another email from Rayovac Consumer Services promising him two coupons worth a total of $30 to buy replacement Rayovac batteries. Send us an SOS Since September 2007, SOS has helped save Wisconsin State Journal readers more than $235,769.83 and solved hundreds of problems. You can send an SOS using any of these methods: Email: sos@madison.com Online form: http://go.madison.com/sendSOS Phone: 608-252-6198 Mail: SOS, Wisconsin State Journal, P.O. Box 8058, Madison, WI 53708 A Madison faces a third OWI after fleeing police from the Far East Side of Madison to Monona to Fitchburg early Friday morning, authorities reported. At about 3:45 a.m. Friday, the vehicle fled from Madison police during an attempted traffic stop near Highway 51 and East Washington Avenue, and Monona police were told it was last seen traveling south on Highway 51, Monona Police Chief Brian Chaney said in a statement. Monona police saw the vehicle speed through a red light at Highway 51 and Pflaum Road and attempted to stop the vehicle as it approached Monona, starting a pursuit, Chaney said. The vehicle went off Highway 51 and headed west on Broadway into the area of South Towne Drive and Moorland Road before eventually traveling toward Rimrock and East Badger Road in Fitchburg. Another agency successfully deployed a tire deflation device that forced the vehicle to slow as it made its way onto Highway MM, Chaney said. A Dane County deputy eventually helped Monona police conduct a tactical slowing maneuver that brought the vehicle to a full and safe stop in the 2600 block of Highway MM. The driver immediately displayed his hands to officers, indicating his intent to surrender and he was arrested without further incident, Chaney said. There were no injuries and the only known damage was to the suspects vehicle as a result of driving on a bare rim, Chaney said. The driver, Paul C. Washington Jr., 53, was booked into the Dane County Jail on tentative charges of felony attempted eluding, third offense OWI, and a state probation violation and hold. Washington was serving a sentence under extended supervision for criminal convictions that include felony eluding, Chaney said. A nonprofit that works to improve the quality of Madisons lakes is again asking residents to guess the date Lake Mendota will fully freeze over this year for a chance to win a $1,000 gift card from Lands End. More than 165 years of records from the State Climatology Office suggest that freeze date is likely to happen in the next three weeks, as the median freeze date over that period has been Dec. 20. Last year, Mendota was declared frozen over on Dec. 25. The earliest recorded freeze-over was Nov. 23, 1880, and the latest, Jan. 30, 1932. Lake Mendota has always frozen over, according to the Climatology Office, if only for a short period, although the median number of days its frozen is 102. Last year, the lake was solid until April 2, after 98 days. Entries to the Clean Lakes Alliance Mendota Freeze Contest can be made at mendotafreeze.org. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources does not provide specific guidance on how thick ice should be before a person can safely traverse it, but the Minnesota DNR does. It ranges from at least 4 inches for walking to at least 20 inches for a truck. In January, a woman walking her dog on Lake Mendotas Spring Harbor fell through a weak spot into 8-foot water, where she called for help and thrashed about for about five minutes until a man who was ice fishing nearby came to her rescue. Lake Monona also can be treacherous. An approximately 2,000-foot-long eastern section of the lake opened up last winter, for reasons experts couldnt quite pin down. Possible culprits were the effect of the Yahara River current, isolated areas of warmer water, and a crack that heaved against itself and allowed water to seep onto the ice and melt it. The UK, the US and Australia, as part of the AUKUS security pact, have agreed to build a network of powerful deep space surveillance radars. These radars, which are planned to be deployed in the UK, US and Australia, will track and identify objects up to 22,000 miles from Earth, Azernews reports. The UK radar is expected to be operational in Wales by 2030 and the Australian radar is expected to be ready by 2026. The network, known as the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC) programme, will provide global coverage and detect potential threats to defence and civilian space systems. The British radar will be built at Cawdor Barracks in Pembrokeshire, which is currently home to the British Army's communications regiment. The project is expected to bring economic benefits including construction work and up to 100 long-term jobs. UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps stressed the importance of the initiative in addressing the growing risk of space warfare, saying it will enable the UK to detect, track and identify objects in deep space with greater sensitivity and accuracy than existing systems. The woman refused to sell Captain Saleha Jabeen a hijab to don with her military uniform. While many civilian Muslims tell Jabeen she makes them proud, others are horrified by her decision to serve. Youre gonna go kill Muslims, the store owner told her that day. Major Rafael Lantigua Jr. has experienced the flip side of that struggle. Angered by an attack on U.S. troops in Iraq, a fellow service member once barked at Lantigua: Why cant you call your people and tell them to stop? The words stung. Just as Jabeen thought the woman saw her as a bad Muslim, Lantigua felt the implication of the outburst directed at him was: You dont belong. (The service member later apologized). In the years since, Jabeen and Lantigua have become part of the small group of Muslim military chaplains who tend to the souls and spirits of U.S. troops of all faiths and no faith their work highlighted in a new film that offers a peek into their worlds. Among other duties, they give talks on suicide prevention, provide counsel on relationships, and advise commanders on matters of religion and morale. When the going gets tough, they offer comfort, hope and companionship. They sometimes break barriers and celebrate milestones, like Jabeen becoming the first female Muslim military chaplain a few years ago. At other times, they navigate tensions stemming from the views some have of their faith or their service when those get questioned, scrutinized, debated. Were bridge builders, Lantigua said in an interview. Were trying our best in this tension to get like-minded individuals to see the humanity of the other. Jabeen and Lantigua are featured in Three Chaplains, a documentary that recently aired on PBS and is now available online. (The third is Army Col. Khallid Shabazz). In the film and in interviews, they provide a window into the struggles and victories of Muslim chaplains and service members in one of the most American of institutions. Lantigua said his familiarity with Islam has helped him maneuver through this tension that fraught space, squeezed between skepticism by some non-Muslims and dismay by some civilian Muslims, especially over U.S. wars in Muslim-majority countries. The friction, he said, ebbs and flows. It was heightened during such times as 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the aftermath of a 2009 deadly shooting rampage on a military base in Texas by a Muslim Army psychiatrist. These voices from both sides of the aisle start piling on upon Muslim service members, Lantigua said. That can be especially hard for new troops, said Lantigua, whos served for nearly three decades, including deployments in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. Born to a father from the Dominican Republic and an African American mother, he was raised as a Christian before becoming a Muslim. Lantigua said he reminds those with concerns over Muslim service members of the First Amendments guarantee of religious freedom. Similarly, he tells disapproving Muslims that there are Muslim-majority countries that have been part of military coalitions alongside the United States, that the U.S. military has rules of engagement that service members must abide by and that breaking these rules carries repercussions. Three Chaplains director David Washburn, who has done previous work on Muslims in the military, said he found that the chaplains occupied a space where all sorts of compelling story lines intersected: religious freedom, Islamophobia, interfaith dialogue, diversity in military today. Jabeen, who was born in India, sees the curiosity that comes with her being a Muslim female religious leader. Sometimes, questions follow, over lunch or chats, about the place of women in her faith. She shares stories about her life and strong Muslim women from the Prophet Muhammads wife, Khadija, to American Muslim politicians and community leaders today. Theyre like Thats interesting. We never thought, she said. We connect on a whole different level. Jabeen said shes also bringing Islam to the table, so when decisions are being made, Im a part of it. Recently, a Muslim service member sought her help. The woman was worried could her loyalty be questioned if she appeared sad or teary-eyed over the war in Gaza? You make us all proud, Jabeen told her. You belong here. Youre part of this military. The woman broke into tears of relief. We were cut out to bring hope to our people in the middle of madness, Jabeen said. We were like Were exactly where were supposed to be. Now is the time for us to go work. Not long ago, being a Muslim military chaplain was uncharted territory. Retired Lt. Col. Abdul Rasheed Muhammad said he became the first to hold that position in the 1990s. The 1991 Gulf War, in which U.S.-led forces expelled occupying Iraqi troops from Kuwait, highlighted the need for military Islamic chaplaincy, he said. Then and now, he said, the presence of Muslim military chaplains helps chip away at misunderstandings, fears and bias. They get to see you as a human being and they see your work, he said. Prejudice, racism, Islamophobia, all of those things, begin to dissipate because now they have to deal with the reality of things, not what they imagine. US Navy deploys more chaplains for suicide prevention SEATTLE Alaska Airlines said Sunday it agreed to buy Hawaiian Airlines in a $1.9 billion deal, including debt, putting it on track for a potential clash with a Biden administration that has shown wariness about higher fares in the industry. The combined company would keep both airlines' brands, rooted in the nation's 49th and 50th states. Alaska will pay $18 in cash for each share of Hawaiian, whose stock closed Friday at $4.86 after losing just over half its value in the year so far. The deal also includes $900 million in Hawaiian debt, which the airlines said brings the acquisition's total value to $1.9 billion. The combined airline would be based in Seattle, with Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci at its head. The companies forecast the acquisition will add to profits within two years of the deal closing. The combined airline would participate in the oneworld Alliance, which includes American Airlines, British Airways and Cathay Pacific. Alaska and Hawaiian are both smaller than the nations dominant carriers, but they said a combination would meld two complementary networks to offer more connectivity to 138 destinations for passengers traveling through the continental United States and across the Pacific, including nonstop service to 29 international destinations in the Americas, Asia, Australia and the South Pacific. Hawaiian has a deep and long history within the islands, stretching back to its incorporation in 1929 under the name Inter-Island Airways. The companies said they would keep Honolulu as a key hub and that they're committed to maintaining and growing a union-represented workforce in Hawaii. They also said the combination would triple the destinations that can be reached within one stop in North America for travelers from Hawaii. We have a longstanding and deep respect for Hawaiian Airlines, for their role as a top employer in Hawai'i, and for how their brand and people carry the warm culture of aloha around the globe, Minicucci said in a statement. The deal has been approved by the boards of both companies, but it still needs an OK from the shareholders of Hawaiian Holdings. It will also need the blessing of U.S. regulators, which have resisted more airline consolidation out of fear it could lead to higher fares. Both Hawaiian and Alaska are leading airlines flying between Hawaii and the U.S. mainland, which could raise concerns about lessened competition. The Biden administration is already trying to block JetBlues proposed $3.8 billion acquisition of Sprit Airlines, which would subsume the nations biggest budget carrier. The Justice Department also won a lawsuit that killed a partnership between JetBlue and American Airlines. The average domestic airline fare out of Seattle during the spring was $409.93. That was up from $293.08 two years earlier, according to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The average domestic airline fare out of Honolulu during the spring was $367.94, up from $329.93 two years earlier. The Alaska and Hawaii companies expect the deal to close in 12 to 18 months. Pet policies on the largest airlines in the US Pet policies on the largest airlines in the US Alaska Airlines United Airlines Southwest Delta American Airlines How confusing is the 2024 election season in Idaho? So much so that Secretary of State Phil McGrane, Republican Party of Idaho Chair Dorothy Moon, and Idaho Democratic Party Chair Lauren Necochea were compelled last week to issue a joint news release to attempt to clarify the distinction between party presidential nominating caucuses, the statewide May primaries, and affiliation deadlines for voters. They only stirred around the mud, despite their best efforts. The mud is deep. How else could you explain a joint news release from Dorothy Moon and Lauren Necochea, who likely couldnt come to agreement on the same order at a restaurant with one item on the menu? We wouldnt have believed it if we hadnt seen it. Theyre on opposite ends of the political rope, yanking and pulling and tugging while accusing the other of attempting to spiral Idaho into an abyss. What they do appear to share, though, is the feeling that Idahoans should make plans to exercise their right to vote. Quote Regardless of how you feel about the caucus system and we find it to be wholly non-representative were stuck with it for 2024. As one of our board members bluntly put it, And that sucks. As we gear up for the May 23rd caucus, we want to ensure every eligible voters voice is heard, Necochea said in the release. We encourage all residents to engage in the process by taking part in this important event. Added Moon, We encourage all eligible voters who wish to have a voice in the party caucus to ensure their party affiliation is up to date by the December 31st deadline. And then theres McGrane, who narrowly defeated Moon in the 2022 election for Secretary of State, urging Gem State voters to take part in the May 21 primary, which will include party races for state legislators and county sheriffs, commissioners and prosecutors. The primary election is a crucial step in shaping the future of our state, McGrane said in the release. We want to ensure that every eligible voter has the opportunity to participate, so its essential to be aware of the party affiliation deadlines. The deadline to change affiliation for the primary is March 15, though unaffiliated and newly registered voters may affiliate up to and including Election Day. But, if you want to have a say in the GOP presidential nominating caucus on March 2, you must affiliate by Dec. 31 but thats a Sunday, so plan accordingly. To take part in the Democrats caucus, you must be a registered Democrat or unaffiliated voter and affirm that you have not participated in any other 2024 presidential nominating contest. The nearly 500-word news release concludes: Idaho political parties are required to communicate with the Secretary of States office through written correspondence to identify the voters eligible to participate in the May 21st primary election by November 30th. Clear as mud, right? Lets try to clear it up, because Moon and Necochea are right: We must vote in 2024, and likely as if the future of our democracy depends on it. What days do we mark on the calendar? The Republican presidential nominating caucus is March 2, the Democratic presidential nominating caucus is May 23, the statewide primary is May 21, and the general election is Nov. 5. When are the deadlines to affiliate? Its Dec. 31 to participate in the Republican presidential nominating caucus, March 15 (to change party affiliation) or May 21 (to affiliate with a party if unaffiliated) to participate in the statewide primary, and May 23 to participate in the Democratic presidential nominating caucus. Want to know more? Regardless of how you feel about the caucus system and we find it to be wholly non-representative were stuck with it for 2024. As one of our board members bluntly put it, And that sucks. But, Idaho will caucus. So, stomp the mud off your boots and make plans to have your say next year. The future of our state is in your hands. Your news on your smartphone Your story lives in the Magic Valley, and our new mobile app is designed to make sure you dont miss breaking news, the latest scores, the weather forecast and more. From easy navigation with the swipe of a finger to personalized content based on your preferences to customized text sizes, the Times-News app is built for you and your life. Dont have the app? Download it today from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. In Idaho politics, the word freedom continues to be batted around a lot by people who seldom bother to explain what they mean by it. Your definition and someone elses may vary. One of the states most impactful political organizations is the Idaho Freedom Foundation, which purports to base its work around expanding freedom; but their conception of the idea is, to be generous, highly selective. Freedom for one person to do something can mean less freedom for someone else, if you arent careful which ideologues often arent. The meanings of some of the many flavors of freedom comes clear in a recent release of the libertarian Cato Institute, called Freedom in the 50 States: An index of personal and economic freedom. It is as flawed and cherry-picked as most such surveys, but a combination of two elements make it worth some pause and consideration. First, it breaks down types of freedom in 25 varied categories which do cover a lot of ground, under the umbrella categories of personal and economic freedom. Theres plenty of weighing going on within and among the various subcategories (Cato being what it is, the groups heart seems to be more on the economic side), but a look at the variations is worthwhile. Quote In Idaho politics, the word freedom continues to be batted around a lot by people who seldom bother to explain what they mean by it. Thats because, second, the survey also breaks down the various types of freedom by state. Overall, Idaho ranks 14th in the survey, out of 50. It follows New Hampshire, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Texas, among others. It does best on economic freedom, which you could translate to freedom to transact business activities unencumbered by regulation or taxes, coming in seventh. On personal freedom, Idahos ranking was not so hot: 49th, ahead only of Texas. The Cato survey gives Idaho some rankings you might not expect. On state taxation, Idaho ranks 38th, worse than Oregon (36th: it does not have a sales tax) and Washington (19th: it does not have an income tax). Idaho ranks fourth-best in the country on local taxation, a suggestion that local governments really are being squeezed by the state as much as they say. It also ranks second highest in the nation in government debt, though the highly technical approach used in measuring it may be hard to translate to practical impacts. Idaho ranked first in the nation on health insurance freedom, though the criteria are a little vague and certainly idiosyncratic. The key rational sentence seems to be, Community rating and the individual mandate get the highest weights because they represent a large transfer of wealth from the healthy to the unhealthy of approximately $10 billion a year. Try applying that to your personal freedom when it comes to obtaining and using health insurance. On the personal freedom side, where Nevada ranks on top in the nation (Arizona is second), Idaho scores less well. It ranks 46th on incarceration and arrests, 44th on gambling, 28th on marriage freedom (driven mostly by cousin marriage, which is more important in our rankings than covenant marriage and vastly more important than blood tests and waiting periods), 39th on cannabis and salvia, 49th on alcohol. And it comes in 24th on travel freedom. Much of that measure last relates to the use and retention of automated license plate reader data and the availability of drivers licenses to those without Social Security numbers (such as undocumented workers). You wonder how the ranking might have been affected if recent abortion laws had been considered. Abortion, generally, didnt appear to figure in the rankings, at least not substantially. Idaho does rank third highest, however, on gun freedom. That should come as no shock. So whos free? To do what? Whats important to you? Jose Rene Almendras, president and CEO of AC Logistics Holding Corp. and public affairs group head of Ayala Corp. (AC), was elected 76th president of the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) for 2024. Almendras, a former Cabinet and Energy secretary, has vast experience in the private and the public sectors. He also serves as senior managing director of AC. He is a board director of several companies within the Ayala Group such as AC Energy and Infrastructure, Light Rail Manila Holdings Inc., Entrego, Air 21 Holdings Inc. and its subsidiaries. He spent 13 years with the Citibank group where he started as a management trainee and landed his first CEO position as president of City Savings Bank of the Aboitiz Group at the age of 37. In 2011, he was recognized by the World Economic Forum (WEF) as a sustainability champion for his efforts as president of Manila Water Company Inc. (MWCI). During his stint as its president and COO, MWCI received multiple awards and was recognized as one of the Best Managed Companies in Asia, Best in Corporate Governance, one of the Greenest Companies in the Philippines, and hailed as the worlds Most Efficient Water Company. As a public servant, he served in various high-level positions such as Secretary of Energy, Cabinet Secretary and Secretary of Foreign Affairs. In June 2016, he was awarded the Order of Lakandula, Rank of Gold Cross Bayani, a presidential award and the highest honor given to a civilian by the Republic of the Philippines. The award was President Benigno Aquino IIIs recognition of his exemplary service during his administration. Joining Almendras on the MAP 2024 board of governors are KPMG R.G. Manabat & Co. vice chair and COO Emanuel Bonoan, as VP; HSBC Philippines treasurer and head of markets and securities services Ma. Corazon Purisima as treasurer; GCash/Mynt president and CEO Martha Sazon as assistant treasurer; and CEO Advisers Inc. partner Karen Batungbacal as secretary. The other MAP governors are Du-Baladad and Associates (BDB Law) founding partner and CEO and MAP immediate past president Benedicta Du-Baladad, Center for Excellence in Governance vice chair Rex Drilon II, PLDT and Smart president and CEO Alfredo Panlilio and P&A Grant Thornton founder Benjamin Punongbayan. Several countries including the United Kingdom, Japan and Sweden have witnessed a significant decline in smoking rates after embracing innovative smoke-free products like vapes, heated tobacco, and snus, according to international public health policy experts. The bottom line is that we have known for decades that the reason people die from smoking is because of inhaling smoke, not from nicotine, said Prof. David Sweanor during the virtual event hosted by Formiche and Healthcare Policy on Nov. 24, 2023. We know that the countries that have had the biggest declines in cigarette smoking in recent times are countries that are essentially ignoring the advice of the World Health Organizationplaces that have allowed substitutes to replace cigarettes, he said. Experts made this point in a virtual event following the postponement of the Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) in Panama in November. Describing the restrictive WHO tobacco control approach as ineffective, they called for a shift towards harm reduction strategies that allow smokers access to safer alternatives while promoting public health. Sweanor, chair of the Advisory Board of the Center for Health Law, Policy and Ethics at the University of Ottawa, said a number of countries opted to disregard the WHOs advice in favor of policies allowing safer alternatives to replace cigarettes. The virtual event focused on the WHO FCTC, whose COP meeting in Panama was abruptly postponed in November. Prof. Sweanor, one of the international experts who signed a letter to the WHO criticizing its opposition to tobacco harm reduction, spoke out about the organizations problematic stance. We know that we can eliminate or largely eliminate the smoking problem globally by substituting low-risk products, said Sweanor. Sweanor said many countries are now ignoring the WHOs advice because of the latters prohibitionist and extremist policies. Countries end up ignoring protocols that are anti-health, that are anti-consumer rights, he said. What happens is that people also lose faith in authorities. They stop believing the World Health Organization. And thats a huge cost. Sweanor emphasized that nations can implement policies that prioritize their citizens health, even if they contradict WHO dictates. Were seeing a growing trend of countries prioritizing what works for their people, he said. He criticized the WHO FCTC for its lack of transparency and scrutiny, with members meeting behind closed doors to come up with rules for its members. But many of what they were saying really didnt make sense on the basis of the science that already existed and the practicalities that we know work in public health, he said. Dr. Anders Milton, a physician and former president of the World Medical Association, highlighted the urgency of addressing the global smoking crisis involving a billion users. Fifty percent of them [smokers] will die unless we do something, he said. As you know, the World Health Organization wants to forbid everything but cigarettes, really, and I think thats the wrong way to go. I think we should use harm reduction instead. Dr. Riccardo Polosa, professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Catania and founder of the Center of Excellence for the Acceleration of Harm Reduction (CoEHAR) in Italy, emphasized the substantial evidence supporting the reduced toxicity of vapes and heated tobacco compared to combustible cigarettes. In our experience, we are producing excellent science that is completely snowed under by junk science that is constantly being produced, Polosa said. Tobacco control policies today need innovation, he said. Beyond advocating the actions like increasing tobacco taxes, implementing public smoking bans, promoting accessible cessation programs for all, these tobacco control policies should also take into account the integration of the principle of risk reduction through the promotion of non-combustible alternative products for adult smokers. Maria Alejandra Medina, coordinator of Corporacion Accion Tecnica Social in Colombia and Latin America, criticized the WHO FCTCs attempts to hide the truth. I want to say that the COP is not telling the difference between nicotine and tobacco and the alternatives that are potential solutions for too many people, Medina said. This sows misinformation and confuses users about the profile rates between different products. By not giving information about differentiation between various smoke-free nicotine products, this COP hides too many evidence of developments. We need to be very aware of the intensified discussion due to COP postponement, Medina said. Mogadishu, Somalia More than two million people across the Horn of Africa have been forced from their homes by torrential rains and floods, according to an AFP tally compiled Thursday from government and UN figures. Almost 300 people have also lost their lives in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia as the region grapples with its latest devastating climate disaster. The heavy rainfall, linked to the El Nino weather pattern, has struck just as the region is emerging from the worst drought in 40 years that drove millions into hunger. Its a dire situation, the charity Action Against Hunger said in a statement late Wednesday, on the eve of the start of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai. Regions that were struggling to recover from the economic and environmental impacts of prolonged drought are now doubly burdened with flooding, it said. The Horn of Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to climate change even though the continents contribution to global carbon emissions is a fraction of the total. Extreme weather events are occurring with increased frequency and intensity. The latest disaster has exacerbated a deep humanitarian crisis in Somalia, one of the poorest countries on the planet that has also been battling a bloody Islamist insurgency for the past decade and a half. Once in a century Flooding has cost the lives of more than 100 people, and displaced more than one million, according to a joint statement issued by the United Nations and Somali officials on Thursday. Authorities in Mogadishu declared a state of emergency earlier this month over what the United Nations has described as once in a century flooding, and have warned against the proliferation of disease. The deluge has engulfed homes and farmland and left many communities marooned, with roads and bridges damaged and hospitals and schools closed. An estimated 1.5 million children under the age of five are facing acute malnutrition over the period between August this year and July 2024, the joint UN-Somali statement warned. Recurrent climate shocks, widespread insecurity and rampant poverty have pushed the people of Somalia to breaking point, UN envoy George Conway said. The statement said that floodwaters could swamp more than 1.5 million hectares (3.7 million acres) of farmland in December. In a move that could help alleviate the situation for some, the Somalia government said it had received 25,000 tonnes of grain from Russia that would be distributed urgently to flood-affected people, with another 25,000 tonnes expected later in December. While the country narrowly avoided famine thanks to humanitarian aid, the UNs World Food Programme warned earlier this month that a quarter of its population - 4.3 million people - are forecast to face crisis-level hunger by the end of the year. Cholera outbreak In neighbouring Kenya, the interior ministry said Thursday the death toll from the flood disaster had risen to 136, with more than 460,000 people displaced. Another 57 people have perished in Ethiopia and more than 600,000 have been displaced, according to the UNs humanitarian response agency OCHA. In one of the hardest hit areas, the Somali region in eastern Ethiopia, cholera has claimed the lives of at least 23 people, with a total of 772 confirmed cases, Save the Children said Thursday. The cholera outbreak in Ethiopia and across the Horn of Africa could spiral out of control if swift action isnt taken by government and donors to provide clean drinking water and sanitation facilities for communities forced out of their homes by floodwaters, it warned. Sanaa, Yemen Yemens Iran-backed Huthi rebels on Sunday said they had attacked two ships off the Yemeni coast, adding the Israeli vessels were targeted over the war in Gaza. A US defence official told AFP that Washington was aware of reports regarding attacks in the Red Sea, and hours earlier a maritime security group said a UK-owned ship had reportedly been hit by rocket fire. In a statement posted on social media, the Huthis said they carried out an operation against two Israeli ships in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a strategic waterway connecting the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, targeting one with a missile and the second ship with a drone. The Huthis identified the vessels as Unity Explorer and Number Nine, saying the attack came after the two ships rejected warning messages from its forces. The Huthis said they would continue to target Israeli vessels until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops. A US defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said were aware of reports regarding attacks on the (US Navys) USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and will provide information as it becomes available. Earlier on Sunday, maritime security firm Ambrey said, citing reports, that an unnamed Bahamas-flagged vessel was struck by a rocket while sailing south around 35 nautical miles off Yemens western coast. The affected vessel was issuing distress calls relating to piracy/missile attack, the UK-based company added. It noted reports that an international naval asset in the vicinity of the incident was likely proceeding to the ships location. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency, run by Britains Royal Navy, said it had received a report of Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS) activity including a potential explosion originating from the direction of Yemen. It advised vessels in the area to exercise caution. Heightened tensions The latest incidents come amid heightened tensions in the Red Sea and surrounding waters after Iran-backed Huthi rebels seized an Israeli-linked cargo vessel, the Galaxy Leader, last month. Within days two ballistic missiles were also launched from an area controlled by the Yemeni rebels, landing around 10 nautical miles from a US destroyer, the USS Mason, according to the Pentagon. The Huthis have fired a series of drone and missile strikes targeting Israel since Hamas militants poured over the border into Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping about 240. In response, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas and began an air, sea and ground offensive that has killed more than 15,500 people, mostly women and children, according to Gazas Hamas-run health ministry. The spike in maritime incidents prompted G7 foreign ministers at a meeting earlier this week to urge the rebels to cease threats to international shipping and to release the Galaxy Leader. In the latest apparent attack, Ambrey said the targeted vessel en route from the United States to Singapore had transited the Suez Canal five days ago. The bulker was reportedly struck by a rocket and the crew retreated to the citadel, it added. Numerous vessels passed the incident location today but no unusual manoeuvres were observed. Ambrey said the attacked vessels ownership and management was linked to Dan David Ungar, a British citizen listed as an Israeli resident in Britains main companies directory. Kirkuk, Iraq An air strike in northern Iraq killed at least five pro-Iranian militants on Sunday, Iraqi security sources said, a day after Baghdad warned Washington against attacks on its territory. The raid targeted a site used by an armed group affiliated with Hashed al-Shaabi, a coalition of former paramilitary forces integrated into Iraqs regular military, a senior security official in Kirkuk province said, without saying who launched it. A defence official in Baghdad said a drone targeted a position of al-Nujaba group in the Dibis area near the border of Iraqs autonomous Kurdish region. The strike resulted in five dead and five wounded, the official said. Police reported finding debris apparently of a drone at the bombarded site. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. Late Sunday, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq a loose formation of armed groups affiliated with the Hashed al-Shaabi announced in a statement the deaths of five martyrs. It said they were killed during fighting with American occupation forces in Iraq. The US-led anti-jihadist coalition and the Pentagon did not immediately comment on the air strike. It came a day after Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said during a phone call with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that Baghdad rejected any attack on Iraqi territory, according to a statement from Sudanis office. Sudani also said the Iraqi government is committed to ensuring the safety of the international coalition advisers present in Iraq. Regional tensions War since October 7 between Israel and Palestinian armed group Hamas in the Gaza Strip has sent tensions soaring across the region, with attacks multiplying by pro-Iranian groups targeting US forces in Iraq as well as Syria. In Iraq, most were claimed by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq. Deadly US strikes in late November targeted pro-Iranian militants in response to repeated attacks by their groups on American troops in the region. US forces have also struck Iran-linked targets in Syria. The attacks on American soldiers largely stopped during the one-week truce in the Israel-Hamas war, but the abrupt end to the pause in fighting on Friday raised fears of regional escalation. Washington counted at least 76 attacks on its forces in Iraq and Syria since October 17 10 days after the start of the Israel-Hamas war according to an updated tally given by a US military official. The attacks included rocket fire and drone strikes, and have left at least 60 US personnel wounded, the Pentagon says. The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamass unprecedented attack on southern Israel which Israeli officials say killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Israel has responded with an intense air and ground campaign that the Hamas-run health ministry says has killed more than 15,500 people in the narrow Palestinian territory, also mostly civilians. Also on Sunday several rockets targeted US and coalition forces deployed on a base in eastern Syria, without causing any casualties or damages, according to a US military official. China on Monday said the United States was responsible for deliberate stirring up of tensions in the South China Sea, after a US warship navigated through waters claimed by Beijing. On December 4, littoral combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords illegally entered the waters adjacent to Renai Reef in the Nansha region of China without the approval of the Chinese government, Southern Theatre Command spokesman Tian Junli said. Ayungin Shoal referred to in Chinese as Renai Reef is about 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the western Philippine island of Palawan, and more than 1,000 kilometers from Chinas nearest major landmass, Hainan island. Chinas military on Monday followed the entire operation, said Tian, adding that the deliberate stirring up of the South China Sea by the United States is a serious infringement of Chinas sovereignty and security. Troops in the theater of command maintain a high state of alert at all times, resolutely defending national sovereignty and security. Also on Monday, Frances top diplomat urged Beijing to re-think its assertive behavior in the South China Sea, saying the world doesnt need a new crisis. Beijing has been ramping up military drills in the strategically crucial Taiwan Strait, while the Chinese coast guard has been accused of harassing Filipino fishing boats in disputed waters. Australia criticized Beijing last month for its unsafe and unprofessional conduct at sea, saying one of its navy divers was injured by sonar pulses from an approaching Chinese warship. French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, speaking at the Australian Press Club in Canberra, said China should play its part to reduce tensions in the Asia-Pacific region. We are of course concerned by what happened a few days ago to the Australian navy, as well as what happened to the Philippines a few weeks ago, she said. Calm and stability must prevail in the Taiwan Strait, and certainly the world doesnt need a new crisis, she added. Colonna stressed China should be free to pursue its economic rise, but that in exchange it needed to meet international expectations on issues such as human rights. For all these reasons we will keep engaging China constructively, and there are actually encouraging signs, she said. Our efforts are paying off somehow and creating positive trends of cooperation. Beijing claims most of the South China Sea, including waters and islands close to the shores of its neighbors. It has ignored a 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that its claims to almost the entire sea have no legal basis. The Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam have also staked claims to various islands and reefs in the sea, which is believed to contain rich petroleum reserves. AFP "Thanks to recent developments, we have all become convinced once again of the importance of establishing an independent, sovereign and territorially contiguous Palestinian state.... We are ready to assume full responsibility for its establishment," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28) in Dubai, Azernews reports. On 17 October, Turkish Foreign Minister Fidan said that Ankara is ready to become a guarantor country for Palestine in case a peace agreement is reached in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Vice President Sara Duterte cautioned President Marcos against reviving peace talks with communist rebels, which she likened to an agreement with the devil. Duterte also expressed her opposition to the amnesty proclamations issued by the President for various rebel groups, including the Communist Party of the Philippines-National Democratic Front-New Peoples Army. History has proven the communists are not serious and are insincere in peace talks. They will use the peace negotiation to betray the government and dupe our people, the Vice President said in a statement. We appeal to your power to review these proclamations and agreements, she added. Her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, terminated peace negotiations in 2017 and declaree the NPA a terrorist organization. I support efforts to pursue peace because the fight against terrorists is deeply personal to me, as it is deeply personal to the families of countless Filipinos whose lives were forever upended because of the madness of terrorists. But granting amnesty is not the way to peace, the Vice President said. Mr. President, we can negotiate for peace and reconciliation and pursue meaningful development efforts in the Philippines without capitulating to the enemies. We ask that you hear us out, Duterte added. The government and the CPP-NDF issued a joint communique last month in Oslo signaling the commitment of both parties to restart peace negotiations. WASHINGTON, DCAn American destroyer shot down multiple drones on Sunday while assisting commercial ships in the Red Sea that were targeted by attacks from Yemen, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said. Yemens Iran-backed Huthi rebels shipslaunched a series of drones and missiles toward Israel in recent weeks and seized a cargo vessel last month, but the latest attacks mark a significant escalation in the threat to shipping in the area. Today, there were four attacks against three separate commercial vessels operating in international waters in the southern Red Sea, CENTCOM said in a statement. The Arleigh-Burke Class destroyer USS Carney responded to the distress calls from the ships and provided assistance, and shot down three drones that were heading for the warship during the day, the statement said. The Carney detected a missile fired from a Huthi-controlled area of Yemen that landed near the Bahamas-flagged M/V Unity Explorer, while the cargo ship later reported minor damage from another missile from a rebel-held area. Panamanian-flagged M/V Number 9a bulk carrierreported damage but no casualties caused by a missile from Yemen, while the M/V Sophie II, which also flies Panamas flag, said it was struck as well but suffered no significant harm. CENTCOM said the attacks represent a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security. We also have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran. The United States will consider all appropriate responses in full coordination with its international allies and partners, it said. The Huthis claimed responsibility for attacks on the Unity Explorer and Number 9 in a statement on social media earlier in the day, saying the ships were Israeli and that attacks on the countrys vessels would continue until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops. A last-gasp legal attempt to slow the Mountain Valley Pipeline is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Last Wednesday, the owners of property that was taken by eminent domain for the divisive project filed an emergency injunction request, asking the Supreme Court to pause construction while their case is heard by a lower court. Although it may be too late to pose a significant setback for the nearly completed pipeline, the request frames the issue of eminent domain in a broader context that could affect future cases. From the Bronx to the Appalachians, from the inner cities to John Denvers country roads, these forced takings have been dismal failures, Roanoke attorney Mia Yugo wrote on behalf of the landowners. Filed just two days before the death of Sandra Day OConnor, the application quotes the former Supreme Court justice as saying that government-sanctioned seizures of private land for economic gain have resulted in abandoned malls and failed projects, all in the name of efficiency and progress. In a legal odyssey that began nearly four years ago, the owners of three pieces of property in Montgomery, Roanoke and Franklin counties contest Mountain Valleys use of eminent domain. Their lawsuit contends that Congress improperly delegated its power to seize private land to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the construction of natural gas pipelines. FERC then gave that eminent domain authority to Mountain Valley, after finding there was a public need for the gas it will transport. While eminent domain is often used by government agencies for public projects such as power lines and highways, it has more recently been expanded to include private ventures such as the one building the 303-mile pipeline. Mountain Valley was allowed to seize about 300 parcels of private land in Southwest Virginia in order to begin construction in early 2018. Landowners were paid after the fact, and in some cases the process of deciding just compensation has yet to be resolved. In asking the Supreme Court to pause construction on the three properties at issue, Yugo argued that Congress violated the Constitution when it passed the Natural Gas Act, which delegated the power of eminent domain to unelected government officials and private companies. The Constitution does not contort itself to achieve progress, pipelines or profit margins, the petition states. The Constitution does not account for such concerns. But it cares a great deal about individual liberty. The landowners Cletus and Beverly Bohon in Montgomery County, Robert and Aimee Hamm in Roanoke County and Wendell and Mary Flora in Franklin County would be irreparably harmed if construction continues on their property while their lawsuit is pending, the petition asserts. While acknowledging that the odds of winning an injunction were not good, Yugo emphasized that the underlying case, currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, will continue nonetheless. In general, such injunctions have been granted quite infrequently by the Supreme Court, according to Xiao Wang, a professor at the University of Virginia who heads the law schools Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. But Wang said there has been a shifting landscape in recent years in which the high court has been more willing to consider emergency litigation. Further, some of the current justices have shown an appetite for the kind of non-delegation questions raised by Yugo. It is thus possible that those factors would give these plaintiffs a greater prospect for relief, Wang wrote in an email. Eminent domain has long been a hot topic that can cross traditional political lines. OConnor, for example, often sided with the Supreme Courts conservative bloc while serving as its first female justice. But in one of her final cases, she dissented in a 5-4 ruling that allowed the taking of personal property to allow private developers to build shopping plazas, office buildings and other facilities warning that the majority had unwisely ceded yet more power to the powerful. The specter of condemnation hangs over all property, OConnor wrote at the time. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory. A Mountain Valley spokeswoman declined to comment last week on the injunction request, citing a policy of not talking about pending litigation. As the federal lawsuit continues to move slowly through the courts, construction crews have been at work since July. For years, work was delayed by legal challenges from environmental and community groups. The groups argued often successfully to a Richmond-based federal appeals court that government permits issued for the pipeline did not adequately protect the environment. In the early years of construction, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality cited Mountain Valley with more than 300 violations of erosion and sedimentation control regulations. But there have been no findings of non-compliance since work resumed this year, DEQ spokeswoman Irina Calos said Friday. After suffering rising costs and repeated delays, Mountain Valley had a turn of fate. In late May, Congress passed a law that fast-tracked a project it declared was in the national interest. The Supreme Court acting in a different case than the one now before it lifted a stay on construction two months later that had been issued by a lower court. When it resumed work, Mountain Valley still had a long way to go to meet its goal of completing the $7.2 billion project by the end of this year. In October, it pushed its target date for having natural gas flowing through the buried pipeline to the first quarter of 2024, the latest of many delays. A recent construction update posted to the companys website showed progress, however. As of Nov. 26, construction crews had completed 321 stream and wetland crossings one of the more time-consuming aspects of the job out of 428 that remained when work resumed over the summer. Just 92 of the crossings had been completed through Oct. 1. Meanwhile, Bloomberg Law News reported Friday that the lead partner in the joint project, Equitrans Midstream Corp., was in the early stages of considering a sale. Citing people familiar with the matter, the article said a potential sale would make sense, with the pipeline close to completion, and would likely attract interest from industry peers. Equitrans CEO and Chairman Thomas Karam, who will step down at the end of the year, has already received a huge financial windfall from the project. According to a September filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the companys board decided to award Karam a $7.5 million bonus. The filing cites Mr. Karams relentless efforts towards navigating legal and regulatory setbacks to the MVP project to a successful end. Just in time for Christmas, the Mountain Gateway Museum in Old Fort is selling reprints of vintage images from the museums historic photograph collection. Nearly 30 images of Old Forts people, homes, businesses and tourist attractions dating from the early 1900s to the 1980s will be available by special order through Friday, Dec. 15, according to a news release. Many of these images are featured in the museums current exhibit, A Peek into the Past: Old Fort at 150, which celebrates the towns sesquicentennial this year. Not all of the images in the exhibit can be reproduced, as some are privately owned, and others belong to other museums or archives. Thumbnails of the available images (most of them black and white) can be seen on the museums website at www.mgmnc.org. Order forms also can be found on the website, as well as at the museum at 24 Water St. in Old Fort. The high-resolution reprints will measure roughly 11 by 14 inches (the size of a standard photo frame). The cost of each print is $5. Payment either by check, cash or credit card must be made at the time of order. All orders must be received by 5 p.m. Friday, Dec. 15. All completed orders must be picked up in person on Thursday, Dec. 21. No prints will be delivered by mail, according to the news release. For more information, contact RoAnn Bishop at the Mountain Gateway Museum at 828-668-9259 or roann.bishop@dncr.nc.gov, or visit the museums website at www.mgmnc.org. A regional branch of the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, the Mountain Gateway Museum & Heritage Center is the westernmost facility in the N.C. Department of Natural & Cultural Resources Division of State History Museums. The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Sunday from 2-5 p.m. Admission is free. King Mohammed VI and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the United Arab Emirates signed on Monday in Abu Dhabi, a declaration Towards an innovative, renewed and solid partnership between the Kingdom of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, which aims to upgrade bilateral relations and cooperation to new heights. Before signing this landmark declaration, King Mohammed VI, who is paying as of this Monday a two-day official visit to the UAE, and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan held talks that were characterized by complete trust and complete harmony in visions about the opportunities and possibilities of integration and practical cooperation between the two countries within the framework of cooperation and solidarity, a joint statement said. The two leaders renewed their firm determination to urgently advance relations between the two countries and expand cooperation to broader horizons, through effective economic partnerships that serve the supreme interests of both sides and generate progress and prosperity for the two brotherly peoples. They stressed their shared ambition to establish pioneering joint strategic economic partnerships at the level of regional and international markets, especially within the African space. Banking on the balance of bilateral relations and the success of the UAE investment experience in Morocco, and in support of the economic and social development program for the years 2024-2029 and keeping pace with the development of the legislative and regulatory structure that guarantees promising investment opportunities and an attractive business climate, both leaders expressed determination to establish an innovative, renewed, and firm partnership between the two countries. In line with the objectives and principles set in the declaration, this renewed partnership seeks to translate the integration between the two countries into qualitative cooperation and sustainable investment, to advance their economic, trade, investment, and industrial relations to the level of their deep political ties, the aim being to serve the goals of shared development and prosperity. The renewed partnership also seeks to establish a comprehensive and balanced economic and investment cooperation model that is open to the private sector and brings benefit and development to everyone and activate practical and tangible cooperation, through structured projects that respond to the interests of both parties, especially in the socio-economic sectors, infrastructure, transportation, drinking water, agricultural, energy, tourism, real estate projects, as well as in the fields of training and employment. Likewise, the two parties are eager to give a strong and renewed impetus to economic and investment development, in accordance with the two countries legislation in force, as well as their international obligations and pledges, besides their desire to preserve their higher interests, shared concerns and mutual trust to achieve tangible cooperation that serves development and mutual interests in accordance with the principle of shared profit. The Declaration also highlights the two sides resolve to galvanize practical and innovative cooperation models, to support, finance, and implement specific projects through mobilizing funds, promoting partnerships between the public sector and the private sector, and boosting investment capital. The two parties agreed to give priority, under their partnership, to exploring investment opportunities in infrastructure projects, including the extension of railway lines, with priority being given to the Kenitra-Marrakesh high-speed train; developing airports, including those of Casablanca, Marrakesh, Dakhla Hub, and Nador; upgrading ports and investing in their management, especially the port of Nador/Western Mediterranean, and the Atlantic port of Dakhla. The two sides also agreed to explore investment opportunities in water, energy, renewable energies and green hydrogen, and sustainable development sectors, including the construction and exploitation of electricity transmission lines. They will likewise explore strategic cooperation opportunities in matters of food security, and the partnership possibilities with the Phosphates Group, OCP, in the field of fertilizers. Attention will be given to the development of joint projects in the tourism and real estate fields, especially on the Mediterranean coast and in the Dakhla and Tarfaya regions. At the level of development and implementation of socio-economic projects, the Declaration mentions opportunities to contribute to the reconstruction and rehabilitation of areas affected by the Al Haouz earthquake; exploring the completion and financing of educational, university and health institutions projects; implementing and financing projects in the field of communications and digital economy; fostering partnership between the public and private sectors to carry out projects having an economic dimension. Focus is also set on cooperation in the field of industry, agriculture and food industries, in a bid to increase these sectors contribution to improving economic and trade relations, as well as on cooperation in the financial field and capital markets and partnership between the sovereign and investment funds of both countries. The Declaration also mentions the two countries determination to cooperate to bolster economic partnership, infrastructure, and energy development in African countries, especially regarding the African-Atlantic Gas Pipeline Project; the development of the integrated project for Dakhla Dakhla Gateway to Africa; and creating and managing a commercial marine fleet. The two parties agreed to work through the relevant institutions to study the strategic projects outlined in this Declaration and to materialize their implementation in special memorandums of understanding, determining their specifications, forms of financing, and the time framework required for their implementation. These memorandums will be studied and concluded within a period not exceeding 3 months from the date of this Declaration. As to the financing of the investments stipulated in the Declaration, the two parties will agree on project financing methods in accordance with the visions specified between the two parties, with their potential partners when necessary. The two parties agreed that these investment financings will be a combination of capital; facilitating loans; competitive commercial loans; innovative financing tools; and donations. Thery likewise will set up implementation and follow-up mechanisms. The economy is emerging as a key issue in the campaign for Ghanas December 2024 presidential election, at a time when the country is facing one of the worst economic crises in its history. Mahamudu Bawumia, the candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), is striving to distance himself from the much-criticized record of current Head of State Nana Akufo-Addo, of whom he is Vice-President. Mr. Bawumia, a former deputy governor of the Central bank, will next year face John Mahama, a former President (20122017), who will once again run for his party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC). Mr. Bawumias camp recognizes that it will be difficult for him to dissociate himself completely from the record of Mr. Akufo-Addo, his long-standing ally, whose Vice-president he served for eight years. But his supporters are counting on his experience, his visibility as Vice-president, and his role in the digitization of the State to reveal him as a leader. In what promises to be a close duel, Mr. Mahamas supporters are hoping that the NPPs very mixed economic record will handicap the government and tip the balance in favor of their champion. The state of the economy will dominate next years campaign and will be John Mahamas key message, notes Professor Smart Sarpong, a political researcher at Kumasi Technical University. For the NPP, Ghana, like other sub-Saharan countries, has suffered greatly from the international context, notably the double shock of COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. But for its NDC rival, it is the NPP and its policies that are responsible for the countrys economic difficulties. We have been deceived by the Akufo-Addo government, and they are leaving us in the lurch, says Felix Kwakye Ofosu, Mr. Mahamas campaign spokesman. Bawumia didnt know how to manage the economy, and when everything collapsed, we ran to the IMF to get a bailout, he pointed out. The President of the Assembly of the Republic of Mozambique, Esperanca Bias, on Saturday December 2 called for exemplary punishment for perpetrators of domestic violence, characterizing this practice as intolerable. We must ensure greater vigilance and denunciation so that there is an exemplary penalty against those who do wrong, said Esperanca Bias during the Parliamentary Cabinets Annual Womens Forum. Government figures released at the event show that between January and September 2023, Mozambique recorded 3,923 cases of physical violence and 1,504 cases of psychological violence in the domestic context. These are worrying figures; even if there had only been one case, violence is and will always be intolerable, she said. Early unions and domestic violence are an evil that must be combated by everyone by raising awareness among families, religious and community leaders, and local authorities, added Esperanca Bias. For her part, the Minister of Gender, Children, and Social Action, Nyeleti Mondlane, defended the promotion of equal rights and duties for men and women, noting the approval of instruments that allow access to basic social and economic services for women and children. The President of Guinea-Bissau on Saturday December 2 denounced an attempted coup dEtat which will have heavy consequences after clashes between the Army and elements of the security forces left at least two people dead. I was in Dubai where I took part in COP 28. I couldnt go back because of the coup attempt. I want to tell you that this act will have serious consequences, declared President Umaro Sissoco Embalo on his return to Bissau. Guinea-Bissau suffers from chronic political instability, and since its independence from Portugal in 1974 has seen a string of coups, the most recent in February 2022. Since 2020, West Africa has also seen a proliferation of coups detat, in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Guinea, or attempted coups, as in Sierra Leone a week ago. Clashes between elements of the National Guard, entrenched in a barracks in the south of the capital Bissau, and special forces of the Presidential Guard broke out on Thursday night, leaving at least two people dead and six wounded. By mid-morning on Friday, calm had returned with the announcement of the capture or surrender of the National Guard commander, Colonel Victor Tchongo. There were clues, well show them to you. This coup detat was prepared before November 16 (date of the armed forces 50th anniversary celebrations), President Embalo, who has ruled the country since 2020, told the press in a lounge at Bissau airport. He announced that a commission of inquiry would be set up on Monday, and thanked the armed forces for their loyalty. Africa, although it is the most vulnerable to climate change, which requires adaptation efforts and financing, is also a continent of solutions, according to participants at a side-event organized by the Mohammed VI Foundation for the Protection of the Environment on Sunday in Dubai, as part of COP28. Africa needs adaptation and financing, but it can also be a continent of solutions, stressed several speakers at the meeting, held at Morocco Pavilion under the theme Tracking Africas Climate Action Journey: Successes and Opportunities. Participants at this event, co-organized with the Moroccan employers confederation, CGEM, and UNIDO, discussed the situation in Africa since the Paris Climate Agreement, while taking a forward-looking, solutions-oriented approach to the global situation. Regarding climate action, it is essential to highlight actions on the African continent, and to build on the positive momentum of success and opportunities in this respect, said Ayman Cherkaoui, director of the HASSAN II International Center for Environmental Education, who moderated the event. The meeting, which featured several high-profile officials including Minister of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development, Leila Benali, COP28 High-Level Climate Champion, Razan Al Mubarak (UAE), and CGEM chairman Chakib El Alj, showcased innovative, meaningful, and impactful climate solutions led by local authorities, the private sector and civil society to build more resilient communities for the good of Africa and the world. In her address, Razan Al Mubarak, COP28 High-Level Climate Champion, underlined that Morocco is leading the way for countries in the Middle East and Africa region in climate action, thanks to its leadership and pioneering commitment in the fight against climate change. The countries of our region and Africa should be incredibly proud of Moroccos inspiring vision, and take advantage of it as a way forward, she said. Al Mubarak stressed that speaking at an event organized by Morocco has, for her, many positive connotations, recalling the role of the Climate Change High-Level Champion, which was made operational in Marrakech at COP22 in 2016. There can be no transition, whether in the field of energy or food, without non-state actors, she emphasized, at this meeting. She underlined: We also recognize, from a regional perspective, how much we welcome and appreciate the work of the Moroccan government and people, who have truly embraced the climate action agenda, not by talking, but by leading the way. Morocco is one of the few countries that, according to climate data, was already compliant with the Goal of limiting temperature to 1.5 degrees C, when it submitted its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in 2016, added the Emirati High-Level Climate Champion, who was speaking alongside Minister of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development, Leila Benali. By holding this event, the Mohammed VI Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, chaired by Princess Lalla Hasnaa, is pursuing a vision of positive commitment to climate action, not only in Morocco, but also in Africa, the same vision that has been fostered by King Mohammed VI. This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Seeking the GOP nomination for president, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he plans on unveiling a health care proposal next year that would "supersede" Obamacare. DeSantis didn't outright say that he would repeal the Affordable Care Act, but the Republican hopeful said he wants to replace it with something that would lower health care costs and continue to guarantee coverage for people with preexisting conditions. "We want to make sure we have as many people covered as possible at the lowest possible price," the governor said. The fate of Obamacare is an important issue for many in the governor's state. In January, Florida led the way with the highest number of people in the country who signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, with more than 3.2 million people enrolling, or 20% of the country's totals. Miami-Dade easily led the country in Obamacare enrollments this year, according to data made available by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with just under 750,000 consumers with an Obamacare marketplace plan selection. Open enrollment for 2024 coverage under the Affordable Care Act is underway. To reduce prices, DeSantis said he plans to examine how the governmentas well as pharmaceutical and insurance companiesinflate prices. "More transparency. More consumer choice. More affordable options. Less red tape. Less bureaucracy weighing everybody down," DeSantis said of his plan, which he said he will detail in the springa timeline that would have him rolling out his proposal after the Florida presidential primary on March 19. During the segment, DeSantis also fired shots at former President Donald Trump, who's favored to win the GOP nomination, over the failed bids to repeal the Affordable Care Act under his term. Last week, Trump vowed to offer a "much better Health care than Obamacare," if reelected. Health care is bound to be a key political issue in Florida and around the country as voters head to the ballot box in 2024. Florida is one of 10 states that has declined to expand Medicaid eligibility under Obamacare. That has left about 425,000 Floridians without health insurance because they don't make enough money to qualify for coverage under the Affordable Care Act, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In a statement, the Democratic National Committee called out DeSantis and claimed that he aims to "rip away affordable health care and devastate millions of Americans." "If Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and MAGA Republicans have their way, they'd send premiums skyrocketing to line the pockets of greedy health care executives and their wealthy buddies," the DNC said. "Voters have rejected their extreme, unpopular agenda before and they'll do it again next November." 2023 Miami Herald. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. In November this year, Turkiye's exports increased by 5.2 percent compared to the same period last year and reached 23 bln 11 mln USD. The monthly export record in the country's history was thus updated, Turkish Trade Minister Omer Bolat said, Azernews reports. The Minister said that despite all the difficulties, the growth of exports in the country, which began in July, continued in August-November and reached a record level. In the last 11 months, Turkiye's exports totalled $232.9 bln. This represents an increase of 0.7 per cent compared to the same period last year. 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: This photomicrograph reveals Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria using acid-fast Ziehl-Neelsen stain; Magnified 1000 X. The acid-fast stains depend on the ability of mycobacteria to retain dye when treated with mineral acid or an acid-alcohol solution such as the Ziehl-Neelsen, or the Kinyoun stains that are carbolfuchsin methods specific for M. tuberculosis. Credit: public domain A proportion of patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) receive ineffective treatment due to misdiagnosis by rapid molecular tests, according to a genomic analysis carried out in southern Mozambique and co-led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a center supported by "la Caixa" Foundation, and the Institute of Biomedicine in Valencia (IBV), from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). The results indicate that new molecular tests must be developed to detect a broader range of mutations that confer resistance to first-line TB drugs. Mozambique is one of the countries with the highest burden of drug-resistant TB. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the use of the Xpert/Ultra molecular test to identify mutations that confer resistance to the first-line drug rifampicin. However, the test does not detect another mutation that also confers resistance to the drug, which was recently identified in Eswatini and South Africa, two countries that share a border with southern Mozambique. In addition, the test does not detect resistance to another first-line drug, isonoazid. In this study, the teams of Alberto Garcia-Basteiro, a researcher at ISGlobal and CISM, and Inaki Comas, from the IBV, joined forces to evaluate the presence of this and other mutations that confer resistance to anti-TB drugs in the region. To do so, they sequenced the entire genome of the bacterium (M. tuberculosis) from more than 600 patient samples collected during two studies (one in 2018 and the other in 2014) in southern Mozambique. Both researchers belong to the CIBER networks of the Health Institute Carlos III. Resistance to first-line anti-TB drugs but not to newer ones 12.7% of samples (78 out of 612) had one or more mutations conferring resistance to first-line and/or second-line drugs. Ten percent of the strains were resistant to isoniazid, and four percent were resistant to rifampicin, the main first-line drug. The mutation reported in Eswatini and South Africa was found in one strain but is likely to have arisen locally. The analysis found two additional mutations conferring rifampicin resistance, which also escaped the Xpert/Ultra test. In addition, a high number of isoniazid-resistant cases were detected, which were also missed by the test. The good news is that no mutations associated with resistance to two new MDR-TB drugs were found in the region, although a recently published study by another group did find increased resistance to bedaquiline. Increased surveillance needed "The strain circulating in Eswatini and South Africa does not appear to have spread significantly to the Manhica region, but we found evidence that strains with other mutations are being transmitted between Mozambique and other countries in the region," says Comas. "We observed the circulation of strains resistant to isoniazid but not to rifampicin, and which Xpert/Ultra does not detect," he adds. The authors, therefore, stress the need to increase surveillance and broaden the target mutations beyond those detected by the Xpert/Ultra test. "Our results provide the most recent figures on the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance by Mycobacterium tuberculosis in this region," says Garcia-Basteiro. The study is published in the journal Critical Infectious Diseases. More information: Inaki Comas et al, Monitoring of first-line drug resistance mutations outside the scope of Xpert MTB/RIF Ultra is needed for successful control of DR-TB in Southern Mozambique, Critical Infectious Diseases (2023). DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciad684 This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: CC0 Public Domain Having a hysterectomy, even if the ovaries are spared, may place women at greater risk for a constellation of cardiovascular risk factors known as metabolic syndrome, new research shows. The findings, presented last month at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions conference in Philadelphia, call into question the long-held belief that ovary-sparing hysterectomies could protect a woman from heart-related risks associated with removing the uterus. The research is considered preliminary until full findings are published in a peer-reviewed journal. "Women who get hysterectomies may not realize they are at cardiovascular risk," said senior researcher and cardiologist Dr. Erin Michos, director of women's cardiovascular health research and an associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. "They might need more attention getting their heart health checked out, even if the ovaries are preserved." An estimated 20 million women in the U.S. have had surgery to remove the uterus, a procedure known as a hysterectomy. It is the leading gynecological procedure in the nation and is done to treat a variety of conditions, such as ovarian, uterine or cervical cancer, fibroids, endometriosis, or heavy vaginal bleeding. Prior research has linked early menopause, brought on by a hysterectomy, to a higher risk for cardiovascular disease, especially strokes. In an effort to prevent that added risk, the uterus may be removed but not the ovaries, which can then continue to produce estrogen and other hormones. Preserving the ovaries if a hysterectomy is performed during childbearing years had been thought to offer some protection from cardiovascular disease by delaying menopause. But a growing body of research casts doubt on that premise. For example, a 2018 study in Menopause found women 35 or younger who had ovary-sparing hysterectomies nonetheless faced a 4.6-fold increased risk for heart failure and a 2.5-fold increased risk for heart disease. But there is little data about the relationship between ovary-sparing hysterectomies and metabolic syndrome, a cluster of conditions that raises a person's risk for heart disease and stroke. These include large waist circumference, high blood pressure, high blood glucose, high triglycerides and low "good" HDL cholesterol. Metabolic syndrome is diagnosed when someone has at least three of those. In the new study, researchers looked at an ethnically diverse group of women from six locations across the U.S.Baltimore; Chicago; Forsyth County, North Carolina; Los Angeles; St. Paul, Minnesota; and New York City. Just over half of the 3,367 women, who were an average 59 years old, said they either had the uterus or ovaries removed, or both. Over 10 years of follow-up, researchers compared the women's risk for developing metabolic syndrome to that of women who had not had their uterus or ovaries removed. Overall, women who had their uterus, ovaries or both removed were more likely to develop metabolic syndrome than those without such histories. Women who had only the uterus removed faced a 52% greater risk, compared to a 38% greater risk for women who had both the uterus and ovaries removed. Women who developed metabolic syndrome were older, more likely to be overweight, less physically active, more likely to have given birth to three or more children and more likely to be menopausal than those who did not develop metabolic syndrome. Those who had been on hormone therapy were less likely to develop metabolic syndrome. "There is a perception that ovary-sparing hysterectomies are safer for women's cardiovascular health," said cardiologist Dr. Laxmi Mehta, who holds the Sarah Ross Soter endowed chair for women's cardiovascular health research at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus. "Patients are told, 'We'll spare your ovaries to protect your heart.' But this study suggests that the idea that ovarian preservation is helping is not true. "Decisions are being made about a woman's body, and we need to make sure we have the right data to make those decisions," said Mehta, who was not involved in the research. Why ovary-sparing hysterectomies may be contributing to cardiovascular risk remains unclear. Michos said it could be that having a hysterectomy reduces blood flow to the ovaries, which can cause problems with their function. "It is also possible that it is not the isolated surgical procedure that predisposes a woman to the higher risk for metabolic syndrome," said lead researcher Dr. Eric Broni, a postdoctoral fellow in the division of maternal fetal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Rather, he said, it could be that a woman already had risk factors for metabolic syndrome that simply weren't showing signs or causing symptoms yet. "Probably, these risk factors were unmasked and aggravated by the surgical procedure." Whatever the reason, the findings suggest women who need hysterectomies should carefully consider their options and pay close attention to heart health risk factors, Mehta said. "Regardless of the type of hysterectomy a woman has, she needs to stay on top of her cardiovascular risk factors prior to her surgery, after her surgery and for the rest of her lifetime," she said. "Whether it's causal or as a result of shared risk factors, there is a link. These women should have a good cardiovascular screening, including having blood pressure, blood glucose and lipids checked, along with following a healthy lifestyle," Mehta said. More information: Associations Between Hysterectomy and Incident Metabolic Syndrome: The Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/?_ 1/presentation/11293 Journal information: Menopause 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: Patient preference for model of care at month 12. Credit: eClinicalMedicine (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2023.102346 A new study led by researchers at Peter Mac has found sharing follow-up care between a GP and hospital-based specialists was preferred by bowel cancer patients, was cheaper for the health care system and was just as effective as standard hospital-based care. The SCORE (Shared Care follow-up for colOREctal cancer survivors) trial was the largest study of shared care follow-up for cancer survivors, and the only study of shared care for people who have been treated for bowel cancer. The study has just published online in eClinicalMedicine and was previously presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the world's largest clinical cancer conference, held in Chicago in June. The trial enrolled 150 patients who had just completed their bowel cancer treatmentinvolving surgery and, for most, also chemotherapy and radiotherapyat Peter Mac or four other hospitals across Melbourne. For their follow-up appointments every three months, patients were randomized to have these either with hospital-based specialists (the current standard of care) or to a model where alternate visits were with the patient's usual GP. Professor Michael Jefford said the results supported a wider roll-out shared carea model used for managing pregnant women and people with asthma, diabetes and heart disease in the community, but not for recovery from cancer. "Shared care is a model where roles and responsibilities are shared between hospital specialists and GPs," says Prof Jefford, who led the study and is an oncologist and Director of the Australian Cancer Survivorship Center at Peter Mac. "Our study shows that shared care is acceptable, safe, preferred by bowel cancer patients, and is cheaper for the health care system. We now need to focus on widespread implementation of this effective model." Patients and GPs in the shared care arm received information about the post-treatment phase, and GPs received brief management guidelines. Patient "quality of life" was the same regardless of shared or hospital-based care, meeting the aim to the trial. Patient satisfaction and unmet needs were similar, and there was also no difference in cancer recurrence. GPs were more likely to do recommended tests, while Medicare data showed that shared care was cheaper. Patients who received shared care had a strong preference for this model, while those who received hospital-based care had an equal preference for either. Prof Jefford says the trial "responds to recommendations to investigate shared care models for cancer survivors," noting the recent Australian Cancer Plan highlighted this as a potential response to cost and capacity constraints. More information: Michael Jefford et al, SCORE: a randomised controlled trial evaluating shared care (general practitioner and oncologist) follow-up compared to usual oncologist follow-up for survivors of colorectal cancer, eClinicalMedicine (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2023.102346 Journal information: EClinicalMedicine Provided by Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre 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: Graphical illustration of a general role of ME1 in resilient CD8+ T cells. Credit: Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adi2414 When Joanina Gicobi began her Ph.D. degree five years ago at Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, she was interested in thinking creatively about ways to improve cancer treatment. In particular, she was curious about the body's natural ability to fight tumors: Could that process be improved? In the laboratory of Haidong Dong, M.D., Ph.D., she joined efforts to learn more about the T cells that are part of an inherent cancer-killing immune response. "From the beginning, she was asking impressive questions about an issue that's been a great challenge," says Dr. Dong, whose lab focuses on cancer immunology and immunotherapy. The inquisitive approach to problem-solving paid off. Dr. Gicobi, who recently completed her Ph.D. thesis, Dr. Dong and a team of Mayo Clinic researchers have provided a new understanding of the body's cancer-fighting T cells, known as CD8+ T cells. In an article published in Science Advances, the research team describes a previously unknown type of CD8+ T cell that can withstand the toxicity of treatments like chemotherapy and radiation therapy. The cells, which they call resilient T cells, remain functional, suggesting there may be additional opportunity after chemotherapy and radiotherapy to target the cancer via the immune system. What's more, the team identified a potential strategy to bolster the cancer-killing capabilities of these hardy cells. Scrutinizing cells that survive One detail that has baffled researchers about CD8+ T cells is their persistence, particularly in patients who seem to have run out of treatment options. Some people with advanced cancer undergo what's known as "salvage therapy" to ease late-stage symptoms. Salvage therapy may include chemotherapy and radiotherapy to shrink tumors that are not responding to immunotherapy or are too large to remove surgically, though the treatments are typically not expected to be a cure. However, researchers had noticed that even after several rounds of therapies that kill off immune cells along with the cancer, some patients sometimes still had cancer-killing CD8+ T cells circulating in their blood. And those cells, however beaten down, seemed capable of rallying an immune response. "But we didn't know the nature of these particular CD8+ T cells, how to identify them or what might make them unique," Dr. Dong says, adding that the lab hit numerous dead ends as they tried to characterize the cells. "It was not a straightforward route as we searched for answers." The team monitored a cohort of patients who underwent salvage radiotherapy and then examined those patients' T cells. People who responded better to radiotherapy had T cells that used cellular energy most efficiently and could still kill cancer cells. Somehow the cells were less "exhausted" than other T cells. However, the phenotype didn't fully distinguish what was special about the cells. Following the data In her research, Dr. Gicobi set out to look for molecular markers particular to the T cells that rebound after cancer treatment. Using RNA sequencing, which can provide a map of all potential gene expression in a cell, she came across interesting findings that pointed back to certain genes. Dr. Gicobi noted several genes that were slightly different from those in typical CD8+ T cells. Among them, she found a gene related to the cells' metabolic pathway, the process by which the cells produce and burn energy. This aligned with the earlier finding, and Dr. Gicobi felt encouraged to delve into the metabolism of the cells as a key differentiator. "Dr. Dong has told me through my training, 'Always follow the data,'" says Dr. Gicobi. As the team members looked further, they found the cells had heightened expression of the enzyme called malic enzyme 1, or ME1. "That was really interesting to us because ME1 is known to deal with molecules called reactive oxygen species, a metabolic byproduct that is important for the functions of immune cells but toxic when in excess. So we were looking at an enzyme that helps reduce the negative effects of metabolic pathways," she says. The finding helped confirm that the resilient T cells in people are a distinct subgroup of CD8+ T cells. Then, Dr. Gicobi had the idea that tinkering with ME1 to address the function and energy of immune cells might heighten their response to a tumor. She engineered the resilient T cells to overproduce ME1. The laboratory experiments found the increase of ME1 revived the cells and made them even better at killing off tumor cells. Importantly, Dr. Gicobi says, "We were able to increase their cancer-killing capacity without the accumulation of reactive oxygen species that induce cellular exhaustion." During her graduate training, Dr. Gicobi presented the findings at the annual meeting of the American Association of Immunologists. Says Dr. Dong, "The excitement and the questions from attendees were a sign that this work suggests new approaches and more options for improving T cell health, which is an important avenue for the field." He says further research is necessary to determine how resilient T cells affect patient outcomes and why some people have resilient T cells and others don't. He also hopes to learn more about the mechanisms underlying the function of resilient T cells and to explore the potential development of ME1 as a therapy. But an important first step has been the understanding that the presence of resilient T cells indicates the perseverance of the body's inherent immune response. "This is one milestone toward new discoveries that can hopefully be translated to help patients," he says. More information: Joanina K. Gicobi et al, Salvage therapy expands highly cytotoxic and metabolically fit resilient CD8 + T cells via ME1 up-regulation, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adi2414 Journal information: Science Advances 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: Survey Poll Results: How Much Do You Know About Thalassemia? Credit: BGI Genomics This article includes an interview with Dr. Androulla Eleftheriou, Executive Director at TIF, and Dr. Zhiyu Peng, Deputy GM at BGI Genomics, Head of the World Hemoglobinopathy Foundation Thalassemia, a hereditary hemoglobinopathy, occurs in 4.4 out of every 10,000 live births and is prevalent in Mediterranean coastal areas, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and southern China. Screening and antenatal diagnosis reduced the frequency of -thalassemia in many Mediterranean countries. Focusing on other regions with high thalassemia prevalence, BGI Genomics has launched the Global 2023 State of Thalassemia Awareness Report, covering 1,847 women from Azerbaijan, China, Indonesia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, to assess the level of knowledge and attitudes related to the associated health risks, thalassemia carrier screening, and genetic counseling for carriers. Dr. Androulla Eleftheriou, Executive Director at Thalassaemia International Federation (TIF), Dr. Zhiyu Peng, Deputy GM at BGI Genomics and Head of the World Hemoglobinopathy Foundation, shared their views on this report's findings to offer greater insight to improve thalassemia awareness. After reading this report's key findings, what are the top findings that surprised your team? Dr. Eleftheriou: This report offers insightful information on the degree of public knowledge and awareness of thalassemia in various affected countries. Surprisingly, a substantial number of surveyed individuals displayed a suboptimal understanding of the disease, which could impede effective prevention and control efforts. The report's findings correspond with TIF's Global Thalassemia Review 2022, highlighting the necessity to strengthen community awareness about thalassemia and its impact. Dr. Peng: Around 70 percent of respondents from these countries with high thalassemia prevalence indicate they do not know much about this disease. There's room for national thalassemia awareness programs to start earlier and remind people at milestones. For example, awareness programs could start in middle school and remind both men and women at milestones such as marriage, preparation for pregnancy, and birth. To ensure people know about the 'why' and 'how' of thalassemia screening, these programs should also cover carrier screening methods such as routine blood tests, hemoglobin electrophoresis, and genetic testing. In your view, how can we use this report's insights to strengthen preventative thalassemia measures? Dr. Eleftheriou: Awareness is crucial for prevention, early detection, targeted therapy, and effective treatment. Survey Poll Results: Factors Affecting Willingness to Undergo Thalassemia Gene Screening. Credit: BGI Genomics Understanding a disease and its symptoms encourages key preventative measures, such as screenings and regular check-ups. Identifying knowledge gaps contributes to tailoring hemoglobinopathy prevention strategies and control initiatives to suit each country's social, economic, and cultural characteristics. Dr. Peng: Enhancing awareness, accessibility, and affordability are critical first steps in thalassemia control programs. Hospitals or agencies nearby that provide screening services (43.1 percent) and the cost of screening services (38.1 percent) are the top factors affecting the willingness to undergo thalassemia screening. In Jiangxi, a Chinese province with a population of around 45 million, genetic testing is recommended for screening thalassemia carriers, further enhancing accessibility and reducing costs. Please briefly introduce your organization and some of your team's recent initiatives to enhance thalassemia awareness in surveyed countries, e.g., Azerbaijan, China, Indonesia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand. Dr. Eleftheriou: The TIF is a non-profit, non-governmental umbrella organization dedicated to improving the lives of patients with thalassemia and hemoglobin disorders globally. Collaborating with patient organizations, medical professionals, and international, regional, and national health authorities, TIF supports the development of new National Control Programmes and reinforces existing ones for the prevention and management of hemoglobinopathies worldwide. TIF has member associations in all the countries covered in this report (Azerbaijan, China, Indonesia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand). It continues strengthening its efforts and programs to safeguard patients' rights and improve their care and benefits. Dr. Peng: We have ongoing projects in most countries covered in this study, but we will cite examples from Azerbaijan and China. Azerbaijan is one of the countries with the highest prevalence rate of thalassemia. Recognizing these challenges, the Azerbaijan Thalassemia Center and BGI Genomics sealed a Collaboration Agreement in September 2022 to improve thalassemia screening through genetic technology. To enhance awareness of local medical professionals, we organized a satellite symposium at the Azerbaijan Laboratory Medicine Congress & Lab Expo in May 2023. Provided by BGI Genomics This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Credit: CC0 Public Domain As the international community observes World AIDS Day on Friday, doctors in South Florida confront a challenging reality: More women locally are getting HIV. A percentage of those women will become pregnant and give birth to babies who are infected. "We know how to prevent HIV in babies," said Dr. Lisa-Gaye Robinson, HIV medical director and principal investigator for clinical research at Broward County's Children's Diagnostic & Treatment Center. "We just need to find the pregnant women who are infected, get them into care, and on medications so the virus is undetectable." For women, the stigma prevents many from being tested and treated, Robinson says. At Broward's CDTC, 608 women, children and infants with HIV are being treated. Social workers encourage the pregnant women to attend prenatal care appointments and take their medications to prevent babies from being born with HIV. They also take the women to doctor's appointments and keep in contact with them throughout pregnancy. Robinson said the center's vigilance with its pregnant patients has led to a less than 1% transmission rate from mother to baby over the last five years. "It's supposed to be zero. Our goal is for every baby to be negative," she said. In 2021, more than 26% of new infections in Florida were women, however testing rates in women tend to be low. In addition, 436 babies had perinatal exposure to HIV in Florida in 2021: Four of them were born with HIV. For now, babies born with HIV must take a regimen of antiviral medications for their entire lives to keep their HIV levels undetectable. Robinson said a clinical trial in which her center is participating could put an end to that lifetime need. The center is enrolling babies in the "cure study" which involves giving early intensive treatment to HIV infected infants. with the goal of suppressing the virus to spare a newborn a lifetime of taking medication. "Once a baby is infected, a small reservoir of virus can lay dormant in the body," Robinson explains. "If we start the baby on medication within hours of birth, we hope it will decrease the size of the reservoir formed in the baby or eliminate it. Our hope is that five or 10 years from now we can wean the child off medications indefinitely." Compared to other states, Florida pediatric cases of HIV are relatively high. Florida makes up 13% of pediatric HIV infections in the U.S., according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over the last few years, advancements have offered hope to children with HIV. Rather than taking a combination of four or more prescribed pills two times per day, many patients can now take a combination of drugs in one tablet once a day with minimal negative side effects. Robinson said this helps with "pill fatigue" and improves regular adherence. Also, some patients now have the option to take long-acting shots where they are given two injections every eight weeks instead of daily pills. That means they only need shots six days in a year versus taking medications 365 days a year. Robinson said she anticipates the shots becoming more widely available in 2024. Robinson said the center's research helped generated data that allowed pediatric HIV drug formulations of HIV drugs to come to market. Younger children can now take liquid medication. Researchers say trends in HIV prevalence among young people show encouraging declines. CDC estimates show new HIV infections overall declined 12% from 2017 to 2021, driven by a 34% decrease in new infections among 13- to 24-year-olds. At the end of 2019, an estimated 950,000 children between the ages of 0 and 14 who were living with HIV were on antiretroviral therapy. Dr. Marcus Conant, chief medical officer at American Gene Technologies, oversees the clinical trials for a potential HIV cure therapy. Conant was one of the first physicians in San Francisco to diagnose and treat Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, in 1981. He says it has been challenging to enroll infants and children in national HIV drug trials because of weight limits. So the focus has to be on mothers, he said. "Over the last decade, as a result of ensuring more women of childbearing age with HIV are on medication and the virus is undetectable, the likelihood of children with HIV has significantly decreased," he said. "That has to continue." 2023 South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. 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: Bullying produced different effects on neurons in the hippocampus of adult micedepending on whether these mice had been exposed to stress in infancy (bottom) or not (top). The images reveal some of the most striking differences in gene expression (green) in the excitatory (red) neurons. Credit: Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj3793 The images of Israeli child hostages being freed from Hamas captivity are heartwarming, but for most of these children, the release is just the start of a long rehabilitation process. Countless studies have shown that exposure to warfare, abuse and other traumatic events at a young age significantly raises the risk of ill health, social problems and mental health issues later in life. Now, a new study by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science provides a reason for optimism. In research conducted on mice, published Dec. 1 in Science Advances, a team headed by Prof. Alon Chen discovered brain mechanisms that go awry as a result of exposure to trauma in infancy and showed that these changes may be reversible if treated early. Our brains have a wonderful quality known as plasticity, the ability to change throughout our lives. As may be expected, in our early years, when the brain is still developing, it is at peak plasticity. This manifests in, for example, the aptitude for learning languages, but this also entails a heightened sensitivity to traumatic events, which are liable to leave a scar that only intensifies with age. Many studies provide evidence for the latter effect, but very little is known about the way that exposure to trauma at a young age affects the different kinds of brain cells and the communication between them in adulthood. Chen's laboratory in Weizmann's Brain Sciences Department focuses on the molecular and behavioral aspects of the response to stress. In previous studies, Chen's team examined how stress during pregnancy affects mouse offspring when they reach maturity. In the current research, the scientists, led by Dr. Aron Kos, studied how trauma experienced shortly after birth affects mouse pups later in life. To advance the understanding of this topic, the researchers pulled together the strengths of Chen's lab: its expertise in exploring the brain's molecular processes at the highest possible resolution, using genetic sequencing on the level of individual cells; the ability to use cameras to track dozens of behavioral variables in a rich social environment intended to recreate natural living conditions; and the ability to process the massive quantities of data generated in this environment, using machine learning and artificial intelligence tools. This comprehensive behavioral mapping revealed that mice exposed after birth to a traumatic eventin the case of this study, being neglected by their mothersdisplayed a variety of behaviors indicating that they found themselves at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy. "Equivalent behaviors in humans might include high levels of introversion, social anxiety and having an avoidant personality, all known to be characteristic of posttrauma," says Dr. Juan Pablo Lopez, a former postdoctoral fellow in Chen's joint laboratory at Weizmann and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, and today head of a research group in the Department of Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. In the next stage of the study, the researchers exposed some of the adult mice that had experienced trauma in infancy to a stressful social situation: bullying by other mice. Ultimately, they created four groups of adult mice: those that had not been exposed to any trauma; those that had not been exposed to trauma in infancy but were subjected to bullying as adults; mice that were exposed to trauma only in infancy; and mice that were exposed to both trauma in infancy and bullying as adults. To find out how exposure to early trauma disrupts the brain and what happens as a result of this in adulthood, the researchers carried out a meticulous comparison of the four groups, using RNA sequencing at the single-cell level in the hippocampus, a brain area known to play an important role in social functioning. The comparison revealed that early trauma left a mark on different types of cells, primarily affecting gene expression in two subpopulations of neurons, those belonging to the glutamatergic excitatory system and those belonging to the GABA inhibitory system. This effect was especially strong in mice that had been exposed to both trauma in infancy and bullying as adults. Cells in the brain communicate with one another by means of electrical signals, which can be excitatory, that is, stimulating, or inhibitory. An excitatory signal encourages communication between brain cells, whereas an inhibitory signal represses it, like the gas and brake pedals in a car. Normal brain functioning requires a balance between the excitatory and inhibitory signals, which is lacking in many psychiatric disorders. One of the ways of assessing the brain's electrical activity and the balance between excitatory and inhibitory signals is through electrophysiological measurements. Such measurements, performed in the hippocampus of the mice by Dr. Julien Dine, a former staff scientist at the Weizmann Institute and currently a pharmaceutical electrophysiologist, supported the molecular findings: Exposure to trauma in early childhood disrupted the balance between excitatory and inhibitory signals in adulthood. Having discovered a brain mechanism that is disrupted in adulthood as a result of early traumaand having identified this disruption as an imbalance between the excitatory and inhibitory signalsthe researchers tried to find a way to fix it. During a brief treatment window shortly after the early trauma, they gave the mice a well-known antianxiety drugdiazepam, known commercially as Valiumwhich affects the GABA inhibitory system. This short course of treatment led to results that were nothing less than stunning: The treated mice were able to fully or almost fully avoid the behavioral future that awaited them and were no longer at the foot of the social ladder. "Understanding the molecular and functional mechanisms allowed us to neutralize the negative behavioral impact of trauma with a drug given shortly after exposure to traumatic incidents," Kos explains. "This certainly should not be seen as a recommendation to treat young trauma patients with drugs, but our findings do highlight the importance of early treatment for successful rehabilitation." Intense, ongoing stress can, at any age, contribute to disease, from psychiatric disorders to obesity and diabetes. But in the first years of lifeand also in the wombsuch stress can have dramatic ramifications. "The wars in Israel, Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere, and the unprecedented global refugee crisis that is caused, in part, by climate change, alongside an increased understanding of the long-term harm caused by exposure to war and violence at a young ageall these highlight the need for better rehabilitation capabilities," says Chen. "Our new study identifies a key brain mechanism that is especially sensitive to childhood trauma. But the most exciting part is the prospect of using the plasticity of the young brain to help it recover, avoiding the toll this trauma can exact in adulthood." More information: Aron Kos et al, Early life adversity shapes social subordination and cell typespecific transcriptomic patterning in the ventral hippocampus, Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj3793 I am very conscious of the pressure families are under particularly in the run up to Christmas. Child Benefit is one of the few tools within the Department of Social Protection that I can use to support working families. I know from my days working in the Credit Union how much families depend on the monthly Child Benefit payment and I am delighted to announce details of this double payment today which will support hundreds of thousands of hardworking families across the country. Housing policy changes at the state level are starting to bear fruit in Missoula. Last week, the Missoula Redevelopment Agency approved funding requests for the Scott Street/Ravara housing project on the Northside using new guidelines established in the last legislative session. MRA Deputy Director Annie Gorski explained some of the funding is allowed by utilizing recent changes to Montana Code Annotated, which add workforce housing to the definition of infrastructure. The MRA pending city council approval voted to authorize a $5.78 million bonding request for public infrastructure, with a 20% contingency, on the easternmost portion of a city-owned parcel along Scott Street. MRA board members additionally voted in favor of a $3.25 million funding request for workforce housing. The plan for that housing involves 46 income-restricted homes for sale, divided up between townhomes and condominiums. The proposed layouts range from studios to three-bedroom units. They would be reserved, on average, for Missoulians earning 105% of the Area Median Income. This project is considered the largest development of income-restricted for-sale units in Missoula, stated an MRA press release. In addition to the housing impacts of moving forward with the Scott Street/Ravara project, Gorski said the project is estimated to create 50 new permanent jobs, and the market-rate three-acre parcel is expected to generate $400,000 in annual property taxes. The next step will be city council review in committee on Wednesday. WEST LIBERTY The new Amplify Youth program culminated its first semester last week with a donation to Latinos Unidos West Liberty. Earlier this year, the Community Foundation of Greater Muscatine, in partnership with West Liberty Youth Dream Catchers, began Amplify Youth, its pilot youth philanthropy program for West Liberty middle and high school students. Looking back at the programs efforts over its eight-week run, the Community Foundation shared that it was able to successfully teach the participants various philanthropy skills through weekly sessions, educating them on how they can then use these skills to support the key issues, charities and nonprofits that they are interested in, thus creating positive change within their communities. The students were given the opportunity to do just that at the end of the course through inviting local nonprofits to participate in a Shark Tank-style grant opportunity, where the students had the chance to listen to various presentations and assess community needs in order to decide where they wanted their Amplify Youth grant to go. In the end, it was Latinos Unidos West Liberty that received the $5,000 grant, with the students wanting to support its mission of promoting Latin culture and civic spirit within West Libertys community through scholarships and an annual event. Participating students also had a chance to get out into the community itself during the eight weeks, such as with Simpson Memorial Home in West Liberty, where they interviewed residents about their lives and needs in order to learn what it meant to conduct a needs-based assessment. Several West Liberty Dream Catchers students also participated in the Iowa Youth Philanthropy Conference in August 3 as part of the programs big kick-off. Community Initiatives Coordinator Moriah Ellis said it had been a joy to teach these students the basics of philanthropy and inspire them to better their community. Empowering our youth to become philanthropic leaders not only benefits our community today but also lays a solid foundation for a more engaged generation in the future, Ellis said. The students, including West Liberty High School junior Eric Yao, shared similar sentiments. I enjoyed being in this program, as it enhanced me love of the community," Yao said. He also emphasized the programs main theme that everyone has potential to make a difference and no one is limited. Ellis has previously said she and her team were going to use Amplify Youths first year to focus on what did and didnt work with it in order to make whatever improvements necessary for the programs potential future, in the hopes of possibly doing it yearly with other Muscatine County schools. Funding for the Amplify Youth pilot program was provided jointly by the Community Foundation of Greater Muscatine and the Iowa Council of Foundations. The United States has pledged $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, Vice President Kamala Harris said on Saturday in Dubai at the U.N. COP28 climate summit, Azernews reports The fund, with more than $20 billion in pledges, is the largest international fund dedicated to supporting climate action in developing countries. The latest pledge, which Reuters was first to report, would be additional to another $2 bln previously delivered by the United States. Sources said the pledge was subject to the availability of funds. The politically divided U.S. Congress needs to authorize the funding. Harris announced the pledge in her address to the summit. "Today I am also proud to announce a new $3 billion pledge to the Green Climate Fund which helps developing countries invest in resilience, clean energy, and nature-based solutions," she said. The fund's facilitators said in October that the current second round of replenishments had brought in about $9.3 bln in pledges to fund projects in climate-vulnerable counties between 2024 and 2027. Even so, pledges so far represent a fraction of roughly $250 bln that developing countries would need every year by 2030 just to adapt to a warmer world, according to the United Nations. In addition to supporting climate adaptation, the fund also finances projects to help countries shift to clean energy. Harris, who is representing the United States at COP28 in place of President Joe Biden, is part of a U.S. delegation that also includes climate envoy John Kerry and dozens of senior administration officials and cabinet members. "It was important for both the president and vice president to ensure that a leader from the United States was at COP," an official said, adding that Harris wanted to make sure we are telling the world the story of progress that we have made in the U.S." Wilton FFA's Brian Graves was among the 4,400 FFA students who received their American FFA Degrees at this year's national convention. "To be awarded the American FFA Degree is truly an honor and has been a goal of mine since the early days of being a member of the Wilton FFA program," Graves said. "I am grateful to be recognized for all of the learning opportunities FFA has given me, from supervised agricultural experiences to exhibiting livestock at the county and state fair. According to the National FFA Association, the award is meant to recognize an FFA students abilities and achievements within agricultural business, production, processing, or service programs. Less than 0.5% of FFA members are able to achieve the American FFA Degree, with each recipient getting a gold American FFA Degree key and certificate. "Iowa FFA Members last year had a record membership at 19,200 members, and from the state of Iowa, 109 American FFA Degrees were awarded, said Joshua Day, Wilton FFA advisor. Each of the five levels of degrees takes additional steps and dedication to achieve. It takes commitment and a desire to become involved in chapter and state leadership events, keeping accurate time and financial records of activities and projects, and for Brian, it began in eighth grade." In order to receive his degree, Graves, who is a junior at Iowa State University majoring in Agricultural Business, had to complete several Supervised Agricultural Experience (SAE) projects from 2017 to 2022. Graves recorded over 3,600 hours worth of work on the projects. He also devoted 65 hours of volunteer service through 11 different organizations throughout the same time. "Brian has continued his pursuit of his goals as an FFA member into his post-secondary studies, and as advisors, we are proud of Brian and what he has accomplished by showing promise for the future and going above and beyond to achieve excellence, Day said. Frozen food or takeout? Americans are increasingly turning to ready-to-eat meals Frozen food or takeout? Americans are increasingly turning to ready-to-eat meals Americans are spending more on dining out But are buying more items at the grocery President William Ruto is scheduled to undertake a significant two-day State visit to India, starting on Monday, following an invitation from Indias President Murmu. Indias Ministry of External Affairs stated that President Rutos visit is intended to strengthen the enduring bilateral relationship between Kenya and India. A Presidential visit from Kenya is taking place after over six years and is expected to strengthen and invigorate the bilateral relations between the two countries, it said. This visit marks President Rutos maiden trip to India since assuming office as Kenyas fifth Head of State in September 2022. Throughout his sojourn, President Ruto will participate in crucial diplomatic engagements, including meetings with the Indian President. He is set to receive a ceremonial welcome at the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhawan on Tuesday. President Ruto has a scheduled agenda that involves detailed discussions with Prime Minister Modi and active participation in a business and investment-oriented event in New Delhi. This visit highlights the shared commitment of both nations to intensify their cooperation and enhance economic ties. ST. HELENA Diners at Charlies, St. Helenas newest restaurant, often remark on its homey, inviting atmosphere. A lot of the credit for that ambience goes to the interior designer Amelia Robison, a St. Helena native who worked closely with restaurateur Elliot Bell. We wanted it to feel like youre welcoming someone into your home, Robison said. Robisons interest in restaurant design was a product of growing up around here, surrounded by food and wine. I loved food from an early age, said Robison, who founded Amelia Sakiko Design. My parents made really good food and we had amazing friends who had restaurants here. Among those friends were Udo and Mei Nechutnys of Miramonte, a restaurant that occupied the Charlies space in the 1980s. Robison also remembers celebrating her 16th birthday in the space when it was Cindys Backstreet Kitchen. A dish can transport you to a place, a memory and a time, Robison said. I wanted to find a way to support that, so I chose interior design. Robison studied interior design at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland. A lot of people have a preconceived notion that interior design is decorating, she said. It is, in some regards, and there are some fabulous designers out there who focus mostly on decor. But California College of the Arts deep-dives you into conceptual thinking. How do you tell a story through a space? How do you relate everything together to create a package that embodies what youre trying to do with a space? Robison said her design work is informed by her travels and her love of learning. Im constantly inputting things I see and experience, she said. I glean details, store them in the Rolodex of my mind, and take them out when I need them. Robison worked for a design firm in Marin County, but the pandemic prompted her to rethink her career, return to St. Helena and start her own company, Amelia Sakiko Design. She met Bell through a mutual friend, Nikki Ballere Callnan of NBC Pottery, who was also contributing to Charlies. Elliot and I absolutely clicked, and I was very excited to have the privilege to design that space, Robison said. In the main dining room Bell wanted a bigger bar, and he wanted to reconfigure the space to emphasize the connection to the kitchen. Its fun when a client is willing to make big moves like that tear down a wall, pop up the ceiling, Robison said. Those are daring gestures that can sometimes be financially detrimental. When you peel back a layer, youre not sure what youre going to get. Robison helped Bell realize his vision of a family-owned and family-friendly restaurant where people could come any day of the week and celebrate good memories something that generations can experience. The double French doors at the entry were replaced with a more residential-style door meant to evoke the feeling of entering someones home. The slatted woods of the new bar suggest a wine barrel, but not too obviously. The decor reflects everything Robison loves about the Napa Valley, with warm textures and materials, leather, but bright and lively at the same time. Definitely modern, Robison said, but with a timeless, classic aspect. Robison's website is asakikodesign.com. Armenia ruling power lawmaker: Today there is no basis for war with Azerbaijan Armenia ruling force MP: Without guarantors, peace treaty with Azerbaijan is meaningless document Saudi Arabia issues $12 billion in bonds Maersk: Red Sea shipping disruption will hit global economy Ex-Deputy FM Vahe Gevorgyan replaces Sergey Manassarian as Armenia Ambassador to China Dollar falls, euro rises in Armenia Everything said by Azerbaijan president should be taken seriously, Armenia ruling force legislator states Armenia ruling power MP on signing peace treaty with Azerbaijan without mediators: Very tempting proposal Armenia will no longer be at war in any period of time, ruling force lawmaker says Nikol Pashinyan to new PM of France: I will be happy to host you in Armenia on official visit Iran envoy: What would be violation of Armenias territorial integrity is not acceptable to us Czech Rep. supplies first batch of mobile diesel generator sets to Armenia nuclear plant Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria sign memorandum on clearing floating mines in Black Sea Deputy defense minister on Armenia soldiers non-combat deaths: Such incidents have occurred, still exist today Ombudsperson on non-combat deaths in Armenia army: State should have proper prevention structures Armenia Security Council head to attend 4th meeting on Ukraine peace formula Ecuador security forces arrest 329 people, kill 5 criminals, says head of army Joint Command Armenia government to help those forcibly displaced from Karabakh to get training, jobs Moving Yeraskh village steel plant project to Ararat city costs Armenia government 3.5 billion drams Davit Khudatyan is appointed governor of Armenias Armavir Province Cigarette smuggling prevented at Georgia borders with Turkey, Armenia, Russia Newspaper: Ruling force MP speaks on EU's termination of European Peace Facility for Armenia Open-air exhibition on Karabakh being held in Paris (PHOTOS) Why most people cradle babies in left arm? Deputy PM Grigoryan chairs meeting of commission coordinating measures to ensure Armenia-EU CEPA implementation Greece FM statement after Armenia visit: Important to help our ally country on all international platforms Armenia ruling force legislator: Army is the sector where the more closed and secret, the better Central Bank governor: I can't say banks in Armenia make super profits Armenia Security Council chief, Greece FM discuss regional, extra-regional security Central Bank official: Banking services very accessible for Armenia citizens, businesses Dollar down, euro up in Armenia Suren Papikyan, Rory Domm discuss Armenia-EU cooperation prospects (PHOTOS) Gerapetritis to Pashinyan: Greece government ready to support Armenia in all possible directions FM: Greece clearly supports preservation of Christian sites in Karabakh George Gerapetritis: Armenia's prosperity is possible only with Europe Ararat Mirzoyan: Armenia should be able to make use of Azerbaijan railway Greece official on South Caucasus situation: We rule out use of force, aggression Sargis Khandanyan: Not aware of any arrangements for Armenia-Azerbaijan meeting in January Armenia lawmaker: Peace treaty can be signed when Azerbaijan accepts our principles About $70M allocated to programs for persons forcibly displaced from Karabakh to Armenia, minister says Armenia FM on relations with EU: There is long way to go Armenia ruling force MP: Azerbaijan statements about bilateral negotiations are just statements TASS: Germany offers Armenia financial assistance for anti-Russian steps, source says Gunmen take TV journalists hostage live on air in Ecuador, police manage to free them ARARATBANK attracts USD 5 million from EFSE to support MSMEs in Armenia Researchers discover ancient temple ruins thanks to Emperor Constantine's letter to group of Romans Armenia ex-ruling party: Court once again proved it is submissive tool of current authorities Armenia, Greece FMs' private conversation kicks off Volkswagen to equip Golf, Tiguan with artificial intelligence MFA: Armenia established diplomatic relations with 3 more countries in 2023 (VIDEO) Newspaper: Attacks on judges gaining new momentum in Armenia US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin treated for prostate cancer China recreational area breaks world record as largest temporary ice, snow theme park Copernicus: World dangerously close to global warming limit Greece FM arrives in Armenia on official visit Armenia army officer found dead with gunshot wound Crime gang leader escapes from Ecuador prison, state of emergency declared in country Indonesia police rescue 226 dogs sent to slaughter Lemkin Institute condemns recent attack on Armenian Quarter in East Jerusalem Armenia economy minister, businessmen discuss major investment programs planned for 2024 Dollar, euro gain value in Armenia Greece FM to arrive in Armenia Wednesday on official visit MFA: In 2023 Armenia was elected to all international organizations where it nominated its candidacy Azerbaijan ambassador to France confirms arrest of Frenchman Martin Ryan, suspected of espionage Armenia records 2% inflation in 2023 US Senior Advisor for Caucasus Negotiations visiting Yerevan, discusses efforts to bring peace, stability to region World of Buzz: Son didn't know for 20 years that his father was actually a millionaire Yerevan to host European Bank for Reconstruction and Development Annual Meeting, Business Forum in May Russia media report details about Armenian mans murder in Noginsk city ARARAT Museum Celebrates 100th Anniversary of Sergei Parajanov with "Uninterrupted Flight" Exhibition Ruben Rubinyan, Louis Bono discuss Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process Criminal investigation launched, Armenia serviceman detained in case into killing of fellow soldier at combat position Sergei Parajanov statue unveiled in Yerevan Protest being stage outside Armenia education ministry Bloomberg: Researchers find out waters nanoplastics content dangerous for humans MFA: Matter of Armenia driver's licenses recognition in Russia is on bilateral discussions agenda Armenia soldier found dead, with gunshot wound, in combat position Bitcoin exceeds $47,000 for first time since March 2022 China researchers develop electronic skin PM: Armenia foreign policys highest goal is to ensure country's sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity Newspaper: Yerevan mayor unaware that Karabakh has been de-Armenianized? US embassy in Baku: Louis Bono holds regular talks to support Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process Armenia economy minister to go on business trip to India Armenia Security Council chief: We have no expectations from CSTO any longer Armenia Security Council head: Contractual obligations with Russia regarding weapons not fulfilled Armen Grigoryan. There is agreement that Armenia-Azerbaijan border delimitation commissions will meet in late January Ararat Mirzoyan and Louis Bono discussed regional security issues Tourism Committee chair: 50% of tourists arriving in Armenia are from Russia Quake hits Turkey One of French spies arrested in Azerbaijan identified Armenia unemployment rate dropped sharply over last 3 years, economy minister says Economy minister: US is for first time on list of Armenia's largest trade partners Pope Francis expresses concern about Armenia-Azerbaijan disagreements Kanaani: Iran has clear positions regarding situation in South Caucasus Armenian National Committee member: Heavy equipment removed from Jerusalem Armenian Quarter Cows Garden Zangezur is crucial route for north-south and east-west directions, Thomas de Waal says Stratfor: Armenia will probably accept Azerbaijan's demands de Waal strongly doubts EU, NATO will invest in Armenia army Armenia Security Council chief meets with OSCE Minsk Group US co-chair Thomas de Waal: Karabakh de-Armenianization is price of Armenian politicians maximalism, wrong actions as well Bulgaria has permitted licensed imports of Ukrainian sunflower, rapeseed, corn, and wheat, the Bulgarian Agriculture and Food Ministry said in a statement on its website quoted by Ukrainian media, Azernews reports, citing Interfax. Bulgarian Agriculture Minister Kiril Vatev and Ukrainian Agrarian Policy and Food Minister Nikolai Solsky agreed on details of licensed exports of sunflower seeds, rapeseed, corn, and wheat from Ukraine to Bulgaria at an online meeting on December 1, the ministry said. "The Bulgarian Agriculture and Food Ministry has kept its promise to limit imports of these agricultural products as much as possible up to November 30, according to the memorandum concluded between the government and the farmers protesting committee," the ministry quoted Vatev as saying. Upon the expiration of this period, the two countries "will strictly monitor the market to make sure that there are no market distortions and the interests of Bulgarian producers, processors, and consumers are not undermined," he said. The two countries will continue to monitor imports and exchange data, the Bulgarian ministry said. Solsky anticipated in November that Bulgaria, which refrained from imposing unilateral national restrictions on Ukrainian imports after September 15, when the EU lifted its relevant restrictions, could be the first EU country neighboring Ukraine to lift the restrictions in trade in agrifood. Solsky suggested that Bulgaria would particularly wish to import sunflower from Ukraine. Bulgarian farmers and processing companies agreed in the fall of 2023 to open the domestic market to Ukrainian sunflower imports starting December 1. The Bulgarian government expected that local sunflower oil producers would buy up all sunflower seeds produced by local farmers by this date and would require another 1.5 million tonnes of them. According to the Ukrainian oil industry association Ukroliyaprom, Bulgaria has 16 oil extraction facilities, which considerably increased production in the 2022 season and plan to develop sunflower oil exports using sunflower seeds imported from Ukraine. The European Commission announced on September 15 that it would not extend restrictions on imports of agricultural produce from Ukraine to the five neighboring EU countries, i.e. Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia, based on certain conditions to avoid a new sharp hike in supplies. The EU had imposed restrictions on imports of Ukrainian wheat, rapeseed, sunflower, and corn to the five countries on May 2. Those countries insisted that duty-free shipments of Ukrainian agrifood to the EU flooded their markets and damaged their agricultural sector. After the EU lifted the restrictions, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia imposed unilateral bans. Moreover, Poland has added rapeseed cake and grist, corn bran, wheat flour, and their derivatives to the import ban list, and Hungary has extended its list to 24 items. Ukraine has filed a motion with the World Trade Organization accusing Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia of discriminating against its agricultural produce. Ukraine is currently in negotiations on licensing exports of its food products subject to their mandatory verification in each of the five countries. Ahmed Imteaj, assistant professor in the School of Computing, in January will start work on a project titled Education and Workforce Training for Artificial Intelligence in Criminal Activity Recognition: Computing and Criminology Perspectives. The one-year project is funded with a nearly $100,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under its Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis Center program. (Photo by Russell Bailey) SIU prof explores how to use AI to prevent and fight crime by Tim Crosby CARBONDALE, Ill. Even as artificial intelligence rises as a new technology, a Southern Illinois University Carbondale researcher is looking at how, when it comes to crime, some things never change. Ahmed Imteaj, assistant professor in the School of Computing, in January will start work on a project titled Education and Workforce Training for Artificial Intelligence in Criminal Activity Recognition: Computing and Criminology Perspectives. The one-year project is funded with a nearly $100,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under its Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis Center program. Imteajs work will explore how criminals might use burgeoning AI technology for nefarious purposes and how law enforcement might use it to detect and combat criminal behavior. The state-of-the-art training he intends to create is urgently needed, with AI becoming an ever-more common presence in the world. His work will develop educational modules and certificate programs covering topics related to analytics, computer vision and integrating criminology perspectives into AI investigations. The objective is to equip students, practitioners and law enforcement personnel with the knowledge and skills required to comprehend and confront AI-enabled criminal activities, Imteaj said. By leveraging technologies like GIS crime mapping and computer vision, law enforcement will be able to predict crime patterns and trends more effectively, ultimately enhancing public safety. A broad perspective Imteaj said there is a need for a comprehensive understanding of AIs potential in both criminal activities and crime prevention. Workforce educators will be able to integrate the educational modules he is building into related courses. His proposal also includes inviting expert speakers to provide real-world insights and use cases. The ultimate goal of the proposal is to narrow the gap in educating professionals and students in AI-based cybercriminal activities and their prevention mechanisms, Imteaj said. We want to foster a workforce that is well-prepared to address emerging threats, leverage AI for crime detection, and ensure the safety and security of communities. Two-pronged approach The proposal will delve into how people might use common AI devices, such as chatbots, to do things such as spread misinformation and automated threats on social media or to conduct AI-assisted stalking. By gaining this understanding, law enforcement and security professionals can stay ahead of cybercriminal tactics and develop strategies to counteract them. On the other side of the equation, Imteajs work will help empower law enforcement to predict, identify and respond to criminal activities more effectively. For instance, the research will explore the use of AI in analyzing video data, text or speech data, and geographic information systems crime mapping data to uncover patterns, trends and anomalies that could signify criminal behavior. This proactive approach would enable law enforcement to allocate resources efficiently and mitigate threats before they happen. Overall, our work bridges the gap between technological advancements and law enforcement practices, Imteaj said. By providing education, training and resources, we will empower law enforcement personnel, students and practitioners to understand the potential risks associated with AI-driven criminal activities and equip them with the tools needed to address these challenges. Grant pays for many aspects The grant will pay for the salaries, stipends and benefits of project team members, including researchers, educators, mentors and experts from different disciplines contributing to the work. It also will pay for educational modules, curricula, course materials and other resources related to AI for criminal activity recognition. Other aspects of the grant will pay for developing and promoting certificate programs offering specialized training and education in the field of AI and criminal activities, including curriculum development, program administration and marketing efforts. It also can support collaborations with external partners, law enforcement agencies and other organizations contributing to the project's success, including guest speakers, industry experts and training providers. According to a press release by the World Bank, with projections indicating at least 21 million additional deaths by 2050 due to climate-related health hazards, the program aims to fortify health systems, particularly in vulnerable regions of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The initiative involves comprehensive strategies, including assessing climate and health vulnerabilities, bolstering investments in resilient health systems, and mobilizing funds for immediate action. The World Bank emphasizes the urgency of addressing five key health risks--extreme heat, stunting, diarrhoea, malaria, and dengue--that could claim millions of lives within the next three decades. Mamta Murthi, Vice President for Human Development at the World Bank, highlighted the program's significance in breaking the cycle of ill health and poverty caused by climate change. Murthi said, "Climate change amplifies health risks, creating a cycle of ill health and poverty with far-reaching consequences for human capital development. Through the Climate and Health Program, the World Bank will use its knowledge and financing to help countries address health risks stemming from climate change, work across related sectors, and bring together partners to maximize financing and harmonize investments and actions." The Climate and Health Program seeks to generate evidence, increase financing for tailored solutions, and forge strong partnerships with entities such as the World Health Organization, Gavi, The Global Fund, and foundations. Notably, the World Bank will co-convene a Development Bank Working Group for Climate-Health Finance to align and maximize investments. The USD 34 billion health portfolio, active in over 100 countries, will focus on enhancing surveillance and early warning systems, climate-proofing health facilities, and strengthening the capacity of health workers. As the climate crisis continues to impact the well-being of global populations, the World Bank's commitment to addressing this paramount health challenge underscores the need for immediate, collective action. The success of the Climate and Health Program hinges on today's decisions, shaping the health outcomes of current and future generations. (ANI) According to ADB, this move comes as the region faces accelerated warming, with projections indicating that 75 per cent of glaciers in Bhutan and Nepal could melt by the end of the century if global temperatures rise by 3C. The initiative involves in-depth risk analysis of multi-hazard threats, including landslides, earthquakes, and floods, with a focus on Bhutan and Nepal. ADB's technical assistance aims to enhance the government's capacity for risk assessments in priority river basins, paving the way for early warning systems and risk management strategies for future infrastructure development. Home to the largest ice reserves outside the polar regions, the Hindu Kush Himalayas feed 10 major rivers, sustaining the livelihoods of 240 million mountain-dwellers and over 1.6 billion downstream. ADB President Masatsugu Asakawa emphasized the urgency of equipping Bhutan and Nepal with critical information for effective climate adaptation, crucial in managing escalating climate risks. Asakawa said, "The roof of the world is melting. The Hindu Kush Himalayas region is critical to the well-being and economic security of more than a billion people across our region. This initiative will help equip Bhutan and Nepal with essential information and enable them to invest in effective climate adaptation--which is now critical to managing climate risk." Economic losses from disasters in the region totalled USD 45 billion from 1985 to 2014, surpassing other mountain regions. The increasing frequency and intensity of disasters since then have heightened economic losses and the toll on human lives. ADB's assistance aims to facilitate understanding of risks, enabling decision-making on disaster risk reduction, adaptation measures, and risk transfer solutions, including insurance. Declan Magee, ADB Principal Economist, stressed the need for finance to flow into climate adaptation projects, emphasizing the importance of high-quality assessments accounting for multiple hazards. The technical assistance seeks to advance knowledge in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region on climate-resilient investment planning, development, and risk management. As Asia and the Pacific's climate bank, ADB has committed to providing USD 100 billion in climate financing from 2019 to 2030, with USD 34 billion earmarked for adaptation. In 2022 alone, ADB allocated USD 7.1 billion for climate finance, demonstrating its commitment to sustainable development and poverty eradication in the region. (ANI) Majid Al Futtaim, in its newly published whitepaper entitled 'Aligning Growth with Purpose', examines the significant increase in sustainable finance across the Mena region and the ways it can act as a catalyst for positive change. The Emirati group is recognised as a pioneer in sustainable financing for the region. It is the first privately-owned Dubai corporation to incorporate green Islamic financing into its funding structure, most recently raising $500 million through its fourth green capital markets issuance. Majid Al Futtaim also introduced innovative sustainability-linked loan financing with a 'penalty-only' loan structure. "The Mena region is currently witnessing a surge in interest from investors actively seeking opportunities to allocate capital to projects with a strong environmental, social and governance (ESG) focus," said Ahmed Galal Ismail, the CEO of Majid Al Futtaim - Holding. "Finance is a critical enabler of climate action, and by doubling down on developing the right structure and mechanisms, the MENA region is positioned to become a thriving hub for sustainable finance, leading the way toward a low-carbon and resilient future," stated Ismail. "Sustainable finance will play a fundamental role as we transition to a net zero carbon economy and collectively strive to meet the aims of the Paris Agreement and the SDGs. This progress, however, is only achievable if we work collectively to take action," he stated. "We are advocating for collaboration between both the public and private sectors, with governments taking responsibility for enabling favourable conditions and incentives for investment, and private sector leadership and finance to drive transformation," remarked Ismail. "This coordinated and determined commitment will build more resilient, equitable, and sustainable organisations, and has the capacity to future-proof the global economy," he added. In its whitepaper, Majid Al Futtaim has highlighted the importance of green finance in the pursuit of achieving ESG goals. It has also examined the region's adoption of green financing, and the potential barriers to success. It also puts spotlight on the crucial role of bodies such as the World Economic Forum, which is working to support this collaborative action by bringing together public and private actors to catalyse sustainable infrastructure investment.-TradeArabia News Service Actor Hrithik Roshan on Monday added some excitement to the lives of his fans by sharing a new poster of his look from his upcoming film 'Fighter'. The poster features him as Squadron Leader Shamsher Pathania aka Patty. In the introductory look, Hrithik looked fierce and handsome in uniform. "Squadron Leader Shamsher Pathania ...Call Sign: Patty...Designation: Squadron Pilot..Unit: Air Dragons..Fighter Forever ..#Fighter," he captioned the post. The post garnered loads of likes and comments. "Looking sharp ," actor Farhan Akhtar commented. "Looks a fighter pilot looking forward...," Hrithik's father and veteran director Rakesh Roshan commented. Hrithik's girlfriend Saba Azad also gave him a shoutout. "Go patty!!! ," she commented. 'Fighter' is being touted as India's first aerial action film. It is directed by Siddharth Anand. The motion poster of Fighter was released on Independence Day 2023, which provided the first glimpse at the three actors, who play Indian Air Force (IAF) officers in the movie. Sharing the motion poster featuring himself, Deepika Padukone as well as Anil Kapoor in the film. Hrithik wrote on Twitter or X, "Spirit of Fighter | Vande Mataram! See you in the theatres on the eve of India's 75th Republic Day. Fighter releases worldwide on 25th January 2024." Siddharth Anand announced the film in 2021. Taking to social media, he wrote, "This is definitely one of the most exciting moments of my life to bring together two of my favourite stars, Hrithik and Deepika, for the first time to the Indian and global audience. I am thrilled to begin the journey of MARFLIX, a production house dedicated to action film making in India. I start this journey of Marflix along with my life partner Mamta Anand. Starting MARFLIX with Hrithik is special as he is someone who has seen me even working as an AD, then as a director on two films and now I am not just his director but I'm also starting my production house with him." 'Fighter' will hit the theatres on January 25, 2024. (ANI) Parliamentary party leaders of the INDIA bloc will meet in the chamber Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge's chamber in Parliament on Monday ahead of the start of the winter session. The leaders of the block are expected to discuss their floor strategy in Parliament. Kharge is the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. The session is being held a day after the results of assembly polls in four states. BJP won Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Congress won Telangana. The winter session of Parliament is expected to be stormy with the Ethics Committee that probed the cash-for-query allegations against Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra slated to lay its report on the opening day in Lok Sabha and the opposition parties firm on opposing some bills on the agenda of the government including the Bill to regulate the appointments for the Chief Election Commission and Other Election Commissioners. The government held an all-party meeting on Saturday for the smooth functioning of the session that will have 15 sittings between December 4 and December 22. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh chaired the meeting of floor leaders of political parties in both houses of ParliamentParliamentary Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi later told reporters that the government is always ready to discuss on the floor of the House, any issue as permitted under rules by respective presiding officers. He also requested all party leaders for active cooperation and support for the smooth functioning of the two Houses of Parliament. "We have said that we are ready for discussion, but they will also have to follow the procedure for a structured debate. This is the last session of the 17th Lok Sabha. So there should be a structural debate. Our request is that the House should run smoothly," he said. The government has 21 bills on its agenda for the session including the bills to replace IPC, Indian Evidence Act and CrPC.Congress members said that they will raise issues concerning the people and demanded a discussion on the Ethics Committee report on allegations faced by Mahua Moitra. The winter session will conclude on December 22. (ANI) As soon as the information about the death was received, a team from Kalwa police reached the spot and took custody of the body before sending it for post-mortem. "We have registered a case in the matter and an investigation is underway," an official of Thane Municipal Corporation said. Further details are awaited. Earlier, on Saturday, a 62-year-old man was found dead at Retibandar Creek under the Mumbai-Nashik flyover near the Kalwa area of Thane. "The body of the deceased was recovered in Retibandar Creek under the Mumbai-Nashik flyover, near Kharegaon toll naka in the Kalwa area of Thane," an official of Thane Municipal Corporation said. The Narpoli police officers reached the spot, took custody of the body and sent it for post-mortem, the officials informed. (ANI) After the BJP exceeded all expectations in Rajasthan and defied exit-poll projections of a tight race in the state, storming back to power with a resounding mandate; the focus has now shifted to who will be the chief minister. According to sources, the BJP top brass would come together and brainstorm on the party's CM candidate for Rajasthan in the coming days. However, the BJP, which made a mockery of the exit-poll projections, winning 115 seats in the 200-member Rajasthan Assembly, has several rumoured frontrunners for the CM's post. Former chief minister Vasundhara Raje, Mahant Balak Nath, who emerged victorious from the Tijara assembly constituency on Sunday, Rajasthan BJP chief CP Joshi and Union Minister Gajendra Shekhawat are said to be among the top contenders for the chief minister's chair, according to sources. The party, which didn't project a CM face, fought the Rajasthan elections collectively under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The decision not to name a chief ministerial candidate came as a departure from the previous elections when the BJP had announced Raje as its CM face. Raje, a two-time former chief minister, secured a fresh term in the House from the Jhalrapatan constituency in Jhalawar, winning by a margin of 53,193 votes and garnering a total of 1,38,831 votes. She prevailed over Congress candidate Ramlal, who got 85,638 votes. Another rumoured CM candidate is spiritual leader and Alwar MP Mahant Balaknath, who defeated Congress candidate Imran Khan by a margin of 6,173 votes in the Tijara assembly constituency. Another rising leader Diya Kumari, who won the Vidhyadhar Nagar seat on a BJP ticket, trouncing Sitaram Agarwal of the Congress by a margin of 71,368 votes, is also seen as a strong CM contender. The Vidhyadhar Nagar constituency is situated in the Jaipur district of Rajasthan. Diya Kumari is the granddaughter of Man Singh II, the last ruling monarch of the princely state of Jaipur. She campaigned extensively, seeking votes as a "daughter of Jaipur" and the "princess who walks on the streets". Since joining the BJP in 2013, Diya Kumari won both the elections that she contested on the party's ticket. She became an elected Member of the legislative assembly from the Sawai Madhopur constituency in 2013. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, she was elected as an MP from Rajsamand. CP Joshi, a two-time Lok Sabha member from Chittorgarh since 2014, who heads the BJP's state unit currently, is also seen as a dark horse for the CM post. Union Jal Shakti Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, who was elected as a member of the Lok Sabha from Jodhpur, is also seen as a strong contender to become chief minister. Shekhawat has been representing Jodhpur in the Lower House since 2014. The Leader of the Opposition in the Rajasthan Assembly, Rajendra Rathore, was also seen as a probable CM contender going into the elections. However, he lost to Congress candidate Narendra Budania by a margin of 10,345 votes. Speaking to reporters after emerging a winner in the Assembly polls, BJP national general secretary Arun Singh said, "We fought the Rajasthan elections under the leadership of PM Modi and the people have voted us back to the state. I congratulate all party workers, who worked tirelessly over the last 5 years, and also thank the people of Rajasthan." He further informed that the BJP's highest decision-making body, the Parliamentary Board, will take the final call on the chief minister. Rajasthan went to polls for 199 of the 200 assembly seats on November 25. The majority mark in the state is 100. Polling for the Karanpur constituency was adjourned following the passing away of Congress candidate Gurmeet Singh Koonar. (ANI) Communist Party of India (CPI) MP Binoy Viswam on Monday submitted a notice under Rule 267 demanding suspension of business in the upper house to discuss the ecology of the Himalayas. In his notice, the CPI MP said that the issue must be addressed in the Rajya Sabha because it poses a severe threat to workers who are at the forefront of development projects in the Himalayan region. This came in the backdrop of Uttarakhand's Shilkyara tunnel collapse, wherein 41 workers got trapped and were rescued after a 17-long day. "It is learnt that Shilkyara tunnel incident is not an isolated one but bas occurred for over 30 times in the last 5 years underscoring the negligence of human safety. The lack of proper safety measures being followed including the lack of adequate insurance provided to these workers is a matter of grave significance and cannot be overlooked. The Himalayas are young and still evolving mountains with potential of great volatility," Viswam said. He further said that the climate of the entire South Asia is dependent on the Himalayas, and a risk to this region is a risk to the lifetime of the country. "The House must consider this alarming situation with urgency and allow deliberation to secure the rights of these nation-builders and concerns of nature. In light of this, the business of the house must be suspended and this issue taken up for discussion," he added. On November 12, a section of the tunnel between 205 and 260 metres from the Silkyara side collapsed. 41 workers who were beyond the 260-metre mark were trapped, with their exit blocked. After huge efforts by different rescue teams and 16 days of rescue operations, all 41 labourers were safely evacuated on November 28. Notably, the government held an all-party meeting on Saturday for the smooth functioning of the session, which will have 15 sittings between December 4 and December 22. (ANI) The eight former naval personnel were sentenced to death by the Court of First Instance of Qatar. The Court of First Instance of Qatar recently passed a verdict of death penalty for eight former naval officers who were detained in Doha, the Ministry of External Affairs said. The eight former Indian Navy personnel were employees of Dahra Global, a Doha-based private defence services provider. They were arrested in August 2022 for alleged espionage. India called the ruling 'deeply shocking' and deployed all diplomatic channels to engage with Qatar on this case. "The eight former Indian Navy personnel were employees of Dahra Global, a Doha-based private defence services provider. They were arrested in August 2022 for alleged espionage," the Ministry of External Affairs said. In November, the Qatari court had accepted the appeal document on the sentencing of eight former Indian naval personnel to death. An appeal was filed by India against the death penalty awarded to the eight Indian ex-Navy personnel in Qatar. India had been given a round of consular access to the detainees on November 7. The Qatar court judgment remains confidential, according to the Ministry of External Affairs. Earlier, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar also met the family members of the eight naval personnel, assuring them of full government support. New Delhi had been granted consular access to the eight Indians and had been working to secure their release. The Indian nationals had their first trial in late March. (ANI) The Supreme Court on Monday provided three options to the 284 students affected by the Manipur violence to avail their education at two central universities in Assam or Meghalaya, or through the online mode. A bench of Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud, Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra also asked the committee led by Justice Gita Mittal, which is overseeing the implementation of relief, rehabilitation and confidence-building measures in the state, to explore better administrative decisions to aid the situation of the students. The top court asked the students to either get admission to Assam University in Silchar or North Eastern Hill University in Shillong or attend classes online. It asked the students to contact the nodal officer appointed by the Registrar of Manipur University regarding the logistics of the admission process. For the students who are not willing to opt for the above options and continue to have issues, they could submit their grievances before the Justice Gita Mittal Committee, said the bench. "Any student desirous of admission in any of these two universities will be at liberty to approach the nodal officer, who shall take the necessary steps for admissions and relocations. Any other grievance can be raised before the committee led by Justice Gita Mittal. She will engage with the state administration regarding this and any other option submitted to us will be considered. The process of relocation shall be carried out in two weeks upon such requests. Manipur University Hall ensures that the above exercise does not impede the students from receiving a degree for their course of studies," the bench stated in its order. The apex court was hearing the plea filed by around 284 students from Manipur who sought admission in central universities across the country, saying they had relocated to different parts of the country due to violence in the state. During the hearing, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the centre and state governments, told the bench that nodal officers had been appointed to assess the availability of courses students wished to continue at the University of Manipur itself and facilitate arrangements for students to attend classes. He also suggested the option of online classes for those unable to relocate physically. (ANI) The officers received a 911 call reporting an assault at 22nd Street, a multi-family home, in the early morning at 5 am. As soon as the officers arrived, they found three dead people, according to the fire officials. Moreover, one of the responding officers was slashed in the face by a suspect and another was slashed in the neck, the law enforcement sources said, the New York Post reported. Following the attack, a police officer then shot the suspect, who is currently in critical condition, as per the sources. The injured NYPD officers were taken to Jamaica Hospital, according to the New York Post. Meanwhile, another three people were taken to local hospitals who were in a critical condition, the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) said. As the FDNY extinguished the fire, they found three additional dead victims who were stabbed, according to sources. The FDNY Marshals are investigating the fire, reported the New York Post. Earlier in September, in a mass stabbing at the Fulton County Jail, one detainee was killed and four other inmates were injured, CNN reported on Friday. CNN, quoting the Fulton County Sheriff's Office spokesperson Natalie Ammons, reported that the situation was under control by Thursday afternoon and an investigation is underway. (ANI) "The USS Carney has been involved in multiple engagements in the Red Sea involving Houthi attacks on commercial vessels today. In at least two circumstances, the Carney successfully shot down [unmanned aerial vehicles] headed in its direction," the official said. ABC News reported that one ballistic missile fired from Houthis in Yemen landed in the vicinity of a merchant vessel in the Red Sea and the USS Carney, which was nearby, responded to the ship's distress call. the official said, adding that there were no injuries. while heading to assist, the Carney shot down a Houthi drone, the official said, adding that the vessel had earlier shot down another drone. The Pentagon, in a statement to ABC News, said more information will be provided as it becomes available. "We're aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea," the Pentagon stated. (ANI) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a telephone assessment with his advisors amid the war against Hamas in the region on Monday. The Israel PMO shared about the telephonic meeting saying, "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, held an assessment of the situation this evening, via teleconference." "Participating in the call were the Defense Minister, Minister Gantz, Minister Eisenkot, the Strategic Affairs Minister, MK Aryeh Deri, Director of the National Security Council, the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, the IDF Chief-of-Staff, the Director of the Mossad, the Prime Minister's Military Secretary, the Head of the National Public Diplomacy Directorate, the Head of the IDF Operations Directorate, the Head of the IDF Planning Directorate, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories and the Head of Research at IDF Intelligence," it added. The Israel Defence Forces released footage of an airstrike in the Gaza Strip today, killing the commander of Hamas's Shati battalion, The Times of Israel reported. The IDF says Haitham Hawajri was responsible for sending Hamas terrorists into Israel during the October 7 massacre, and he led the fighting against troops in Gaza City's Shati camp during the ground offensive. According to the IDF, Hawajri, and his battalion, were responsible for securing Gaza City's Shifa Hospital, where the terror group is believed to have a base of operations underneath. "As part of his role, Hawajri was responsible for a lot of terror activity against the citizens of the State of Israel," the IDF adds in a statement, The Times of Israel reported. Meanwhile, Israel has started expanding its ground operations to the whole of the Gaza Strip, CNN reported quoting Israel Defence Forces (IDF) on Sunday. "The IDF is resuming and expanding the ground operation against Hamas' strongholds across the whole Gaza Strip," IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari said in a news conference on Sunday. The IDF spokesperson also underlined "the importance of air assistance provided by the Air Force to ground forces," saying airstrikes against terror headquarters, weapons manufacturing facilities, terror tunnels, and rocket launching sites limit the threats posed against the ground operation. (ANI) Abu Dhabi will host a pioneering Global Climate Finance Centre (GCFC), that will accelerate the development of climate finance frameworks and skills, and champion best practices in the UAE and globally. GCFC aims to address key barriers linked to financial frameworks that hinder investment flows, to help make climate finance available, affordable and accessible as a COP28 legacy for action. As an independent think-tank and research hub, GCFC aims to address the root causes currently preventing investment, bringing together cutting-edge research and leading experts to develop fit-for-purpose financial frameworks that are increasingly aligned internationally. By working with stakeholders across sectors, GCFC will help to create the enabling environment for investment into low-carbon, sustainable and resilient projects. Core functions GCFC, head-quartered in Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), was first announced by Dr Sultan Al Jaber, COP28 President during the Finance Session panel on December 1. The Chairman of Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development (ADDED) Ahmed Jasim Al Zaabi, addressed the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week (ADSW) Summit, part of the Special Edition of ADSW at COP28, where he gave more details of GCFCs three core functions: Research, Policy and Innovation: As an independent and private-sector-focused global climate finance think-tank, GCFC will conduct cutting-edge research and share best practices, principles and solutions to align frameworks and build financial markets, enabling greater investment to flow into low-carbon and sustainable investments. Advisory and stakeholder engagement: GCFC will convene private and public stakeholders who are directly facing impediments to develop recommendations and actions that are targeted to deploy funds and incentivise the creation of strong pipelines of bankable investment opportunities. Coalitions and partnerships of relevant actors will be at the core of the GCFCs work. Climate Finance Academy: GCFC will first and foremost develop a strong knowledge basis on the back of the Abu Dhabi experience on green finance markets, including providing training modules and tailored courses to build expertise and capacity in the UAE. This will establish the Academy as a global thought leader, in turn, opening opportunities to engage with other jurisdictions in supporting the development of tailored financial frameworks well aligned with Abu Dhabi. Building capacity Together these initiatives will build capacity in UAE and global financial institutions; scale up green finance market activity and ecosystems; and catalyse international investment into low and zero-carbon initiatives. The announcement of the GCFC coincides with another landmark climate finance development, the launch of ALTERRA, a $30 billion catalytic climate vehicle that will drive forward international efforts to create a fairer climate finance system with an emphasis on improving access to funding for the Global South. ALTERRA will aim to mobilise $250 billion globally by 2030, steering private markets towards climate investments with a focus on transforming emerging markets and developing economies where traditional investment has lacked due to the higher perceived risks across those geographies. By supporting the creation of climate financial markets, the GCFC will help enable ALTERRA to build a climate finance ecosystem in Abu Dhabi and unlock funds into climate investments around the world at a transformational scale. Dr Al Jaber said: The scale of the climate crisis demands urgent and game-changing solutions from every industry. Finance plays a critical role in turning our ambitions into action and is essential to eliminating emissions and keeping 1.5C within reach. COP28 must be an inflection point as we unite the world on how we bridge the gaps to 2030 identified in the Global Stocktake. To do this, we need an all-of-the-above approach that includes everyone because everyone is needed. That is why I greatly welcome this new GCFC which will catalyse the transformation of UAE financial markets and institutions towards a greener and more sustainable future. It will put Abu Dhabi and the UAE at the forefront of driving global change in sustainable finance, providing a positive legacy for years to come. Delivering rapid progress Al Zaabi commented at ADSW: Abu Dhabi knows how to deliver rapid progress, which is increasingly critical as we respond to global economic and environmental challenges. Just as we have built ADGM as a pioneering International Financial Centre in just eight years, it is now time for Abu Dhabi to build a new pioneer for global climate finance. This new GCFC will unlock new capital flows into the region as the Emirate becomes a key marketplace for sustainable finance, building upon ADGMs progressive Sustainable Finance Regulatory Framework. Our ambition is for the benefits of this world-leading facility to touch every corner of our planet. GCFC is a global institution. In addition to ADGM, the other Founding Members of the GCFC are ADQ, BlackRock, Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), HSBC, Masdar, Ninety One, and the World Bank Group. The Founding Members will provide strategic direction to GCFC, drawing on their deep expertise, experience, and networks. GCFC will seek to work with peer institutions and knowledge partners to build on sustainable finance leadership, develop expertise in-house and deliver maximum impact. Sustainable finance Mohamed Hassan Alsuwaidi, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of ADQ, said: As we work to accelerate economic transformation and sustainable growth, it is vital that we support innovation in sustainable finance. As a founding member of the GCFC, ADQ is committed to helping deliver lasting impact that will also increase the diversification of the Abu Dhabi economy and strengthen its growing sustainable finance sector. Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, said: "BlackRock is delighted to participate in the launch of the GCFC. The future focus of the think tank speaks directly to a number of areas of interest for many of our clients around the world, as they seek the best data, analytics and insights to navigate the risks and capture the investment opportunities of the transition to a low-carbon economy. As we do with many think tanks and organisations around the world, we look forward to contributing our insights and research to the GCFC. Kate Hampton, Chief Executive Officer of CIFF, said: "Scaling high-quality, low-cost climate finance for developing countries is essential to keep 1.5 degrees alive and to enable long-term, green, and resilient growth. CIFF is pleased to be partnering with GCFC, which can bring transparency and ambition to investors transition finance targets and delivery and align that capital with NDCs." Need for innovation Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance and Co-Chair, Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), said: Innovation is needed to accelerate the flow of climate finance and build a bridge to a more prosperous future. GFANZ is looking forward to supporting GCFC, to close the gaps in data, action, and investment we must address to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. We applaud the UAEs leadership in tackling the most pressing and difficult challenges and look forward to working together on our shared mission to scale transition finance and mobilise capital to the global south. Noel Quinn, Group Chief Executive at HSBC, said: For the world to achieve its climate goals, it is absolutely critical that thinking continues to evolve, markets continue to develop, and countries continue to collaborate. HSBC is pleased to be a founding member of the Global Climate Finance Centre, which underlines the COP28 Presidencys commitment to making this a COP of action while putting in place the tools needed to help deliver a net zero future. Mohamed Jameel Al Ramahi, Chief Executive Officer, Masdar, said: We welcome this important initiative, and Abu Dhabi is the perfect location to host the Global Climate Finance Center. Masdar looks forward to supporting this independent think-tank through our rich experience and pioneering legacy in financing and developing clean energy projects across the globe. Hendrik du Toit, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ninety One, said: Ninety One looks forward to supporting the GCFC in partnership with the UAE. Climate finance is a vital part of the battle against climate change. This launch represents decisive, ambitious action. Resources and ingenuity Ajay Banga, President of the World Bank Group, said: We need the resources and ingenuity of the private sector, we need all shoulders to the wheel. This partnership embodies that cooperation, helping scale up solutions for low-carbon, climate-smart investments. The GCFC will be led by Mercedes Vela Monserrate as its Chief Executive Officer. Being the sustainability lead for ADGM and a key advisor to COP28, Monserrate brings a wealth of experience and expertise to lead the centre in its mission to drive global change in sustainable finance. Monserrate said: "I am honoured to lead GCFC and contribute to the transformation of financial markets towards a greener and more sustainable future. Together with our global partners, we aim to create a positive legacy by making climate finance more accessible and facilitating the transition to a low-carbon economy."--TradeArabia News Service The report stated that Britain did not reveal when its military surveillance flights over the territory would start but stressed they would be unarmed and focused only on the captive recovery efforts. Israel, meanwhile, maintained that its military strikes targeted Hamas, not civilians. During the seven-day truce between Israel and Hamas which ended on Friday morning, 105 civilians were released from Hamas captivity in Gaza, including 81 Israelis, 23 Thai nationals and 1 Filipino, in exchange for 210 Palestinian prisoners, all of them women or minors. Israel also allowed an influx of humanitarian aid into the Strip, according to the Times of Israel. Still held hostage by Gaza terror groups when the truce collapsed were 136 people -- 114 men, 20 women and two children, a government spokesperson Eylon Levy said. Ten of the hostages are 75 and older, he said, adding that a vast majority of them, 125, are Israelis. Eleven are foreign nationals, including eight from Thailand, he added. Israel launched an offensive against Hamas in Gaza in the aftermath of the October 7 assault on southern Israel, which claimed about 1,200 lives, the majority of whom were civilians. Another 240 people were taken hostage, reports stated. (ANI) Different rallies were held in Karachi, Hyderabad, Kotri, Tando Jam, Kandiaro and Sehwan cities, according to a press release by JSFM. The participants were seen holding the national Sindhi flags, banners and posters. They were protesting against illegal immigration to Sindh and demanding the removal of all immigrants from Sindh; the release of all missing persons kidnapped by Pakistani forces. They also asked for the dismissal of the scheme of Bahria Town, to stop the forced conversion of Sindhi Hindu girls. The participants appealed to Amnesty International, Human Rights Organizations and other international forums to notice their demands. JSFM Chairman Sohail Abro and other Central office bearers Zubair Sindhi, Amar Azadi, Sodho Sindhi, Hafeez Deshi and Pirah Sindhu stated in their joint message that Sain G.M. Sayed (father of Sindhi nation and symbol of Sindhi freedom struggle) founded the base of cultural activities in 1966 by creating a cultural forum: Bazm i Sofya i Sindh. Sayed visited all over Sindh and held cultural conferences and the participants wore Sindhi Cultural dress to highlight their culture. G.M. Sayed introduced Sindh philosphy Paigham i Sindh in those cultural events and discussed the basis of Sindhi cultural though: love, non-violence, coexistence, non-alignment, and right of self-determination. Finally, the Jeay Sindh Freedom Movement revised their demands for the freedom of Sindhu Desh, (ANI) India got re-elected to the International Maritime Organisation's (IMO) Council for the 2024-2025 biennium with the highest-ever votes in its favour at the 33rd assembly of IMO late last night. India was elected under the category of "the largest interest in international seaborne trade" along with Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Speaking on the occasion, the Union Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways and Ayush, Sarbananda Sonowal, said, "It is wonderful news for all of India's maritime sector as we continue our pursuit to be among the top maritime powers in the world. "Under the dynamic leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has garnered immense diplomatic leverage from across the world. Our attempt at enhancing our international representation at the apex maritime body is met with exuberant and wide support from across the world, a dividend of PM Modi's doctrine of 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam'. We are humbled by this outpour of support in favour of India," Sonowal said. "This verdict is also a testament to India's resurgence as a top maritime player in the world under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. I must congratulate the team at the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways for this wonderful feat. With this opportunity, I firmly believe that India will further anchor its role in the maritime trade and in shaping the route for the future of the world's maritime development. The highest votes are indicative of the government's determination to strengthen India's varied contributions to international maritime operations." he added The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) is the leading authority that regulates the maritime industry, which supports global trade, transportation, and all marine operations. The Council is the executive organ of IMO and is responsible, under the Assembly, for supervising the work of the organisation. Between sessions of the Assembly, the Council performs the functions of the Assembly, except that of making recommendations to governments on maritime safety and pollution prevention. The newly elected Council will meet, following the conclusion of the 33rd Assembly, for its 131st Session (on December 7) and elect its Chair and Vice-Chair for the next biennium. The 33rd Assembly of IMO is meeting in London at IMO Headquarters from November 27 to December 6, 2023. All 175 Member States and three Associate Members are entitled to attend the Assembly, which is IMO's highest governing body. The intergovernmental organisations with which agreements of cooperation have been concluded and international non-governmental organisations in consultative status with IMO are also invited to attend. The Indian delegation was led by the Secretary, Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways (MoPSW), Govt. of India, TK Ramachandran, with members including DG Shipping Shyam Jagannathan, officers of DGS, High Commission of India at London and industry representatives. Under MIV 2030, to enhance representation at IMO, India aims to appoint permanent representatives at IMO London. With a view to enhancing and garnering maritime expertise for India, it is proposed that India nominate at least two qualified candidates for the Junior Professional Officer (JPO) Programme at the IMO. The JPO Programme is an established programme within the United Nations with the main objective of providing young professionals with an opportunity to gain hands-on experience in international cooperation under the supervision of specialists and to contribute to the advancement of their nation's mandate. The "Amrik Kaal Vision 2047" has also set goals to strengthen India's global maritime presence. There are 43 initiatives identified as part of Amrit Kaal Vision 2047 Action Plan, of which the key initiatives focus on strengthening our global maritime presence, which includes a dedicated IMO cell in India, the appointment of a permanent representative at IMO headquarters, London, implementation of BIMSTEC Master Plan, creating a robust BIMSTEC institutional structure to ensure implementation of regional projects in a coordinated and timely manner, etc. (ANI) UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday announced a series of new steps to crack down on soaring immigration in the country. Sunak described the new measures as the government''s ''radical action'' to bring down the immigration rate, adding the steps would ensure that immigration benefits the UK. As part of the new measures, the government would curb international students from bringing their families to UK unless they are pursuing postgraduate research degrees and hiking the minimum salary that skilled foreign workers will need to earn if they want a visa to work in the country. Taking to X, PM Sunak said, "Immigration is too high. Today we''re taking radical action to bring it down. These steps will make sure that immigration always benefits the UK." He posted, "IMMIGRATION ACTION, BANNING overseas students from bringing their families to the UK, unless they are on postgraduate research degrees, STOPPING immigration undercutting British workers, SCRAPPING the 20% going rate salary discounts offered for shortage occupations." Net migration to Britain reached record levels last year, official figures showed, putting pressure on the UK government that has made the issue a political touchstone, CNN reported in May. Britain saw a net migration of 606,000 people in 2022, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said, with 1.2 million people arriving in the country and about half that number leaving. CNN reported that despite pledges from successive Conservative governments to drastically reduce the numbers of people moving to the UK, particularly in the wake of Brexit - a rupture that was touted by its proponents as a necessary step for Britain to "take control" of its borders. The vast majority of people arriving - 925,000 - were non-EU nationals, and around one in 12 of those were asylum seekers, included for the first time in the ONS'' annual release. "The main drivers of the increase were people coming to the UK from non-EU countries for work, study and for humanitarian purposes," Jay Lindop, Director of the Centre for International Migration at the ONS, said, according to CNN. Last year, Indian nationals were issued the largest number of UK study, work and visitor visas, according to UK Immigration Statistics. More than 258,000 Indian nationals received visit visas in the year ending June 2022 -- a 630 per cent increase compared to the previous year (when travel restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic were still in place), read UK Immigration Statistics. (ANI) A suspect is in custody after a shooting in Boston early Monday morning left a person with life-threatening injuries. Officers responding to a report of a shooting in the area of 48 Clifford Street in the citys Roxbury section just before 4 a.m. found one victim suffering from life-threatening gunshot wounds, according to the Boston Police Department. The names of those involved in the shooting havent been released. Video from the scene showed part of the neighborhood near a school bus roped off with yellow crime tape. Police didnt release any additional information An investigation is ongoing. This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available. Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Boston 25 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch Boston 25 News NOW Eight experimental aircraft tested by NASA (one of which has made our listcan you guess which?). Eight experimental aircraft tested by NASA (one of which has made our listcan you guess which?). X-planes are a class of experimental aircraft designed to test and demonstrate new innovations in flightsome were created for NASA, others for DARPA or the U.S. military. The first X-plane, X-1, was flown by Chuck Yeager in the 1940s and was the first craft to fly faster than the speed of sound. Over the decades, these aircraft have pushed the boundaries of what humans can do in the air. Here are some of the more bizarre products of our taxpayer dollars, ones that confound our typical understandings of what a plane looks like. An earlier version of this story was published on January 21, 2022. Read more The Stiletto was the United States fledging aerospace agencys (then NACA) first foray into aircraft designed for sustained supersonic flights. NACA thus designed the craft to be extremely aerodynamic, with a long, tapered nose and a narrow fuselage. The plane was named for the /shoe/ dagger (thanks to commenter System Idle Process for pointing out that error), but it also looks a lot like a plague doctors mask. And you have to admit, the X-3' painted on its nose looks like a font well ahead of 1954. NACA hoped the X-3 would be able to reach speeds of Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound, though it never achieved that goal. McDonnell Douglas X-36 The X-36 in flight. The tailless X-36 in flight over California in 1997. Note the illustrated people in the cockpit. This plane looks like it was inspired by a prostrate frog. The X-36 was an unmanned craft built to showcase a sort of tailless fighter jet that would be especially maneuverable in the air. Without the tail typical on such speedy aircraft, from above the X-36 looks more like a chevron than the classic lowercase t. The X-plane was built at quarter-scale, weighing in at 1,245 poundsabout as much as a grizzly bear. Only two X-36s were ever built, and only one flew, according to the National Museum of the United States Air Force. The MUTT The X-56A The X-56A The X-56A, Multi-Utility Technology Testbed, also known as the MUTT, was a spunky uncrewed aircraft used to test the flexibility of wings and the suppression of flutter, or the phenomenon of airplane wings vibrating in flight. According to the MUTTs project page, The project plans to use these to fly the X-56A with a slender, flexible wing with a much higher aspect ratio than currently used on commercial airliners. The first flight tests of the system happened in 2013 and 2014. In January 2023, NASA and Boeing announced their plans for developing test aircraft for the Transonic Trussed-Braced Wing design, which could pave the way for passenger aircraft with longer, thinner wings than current jetliners, with the goal of improving fuel efficiency. X-57 Maxwell The Maxwell is NASA's first entirely electric plane design. Concept art of the electric X-57 in flight (released March 2020). At first glance, this plane design looks almost normal. Its got two wingsmore than can be said for some of the other aircraft in this slideshowand a cockpit for the pilot. Where the X-57 Maxwell splits is in how its powered. It is an entirely electric plane, with two lithium batteries tucked away in its cabin, a first for NASA and a hopeful portent of future energy shake-ups in flight. The Maxwell also has 14 propellers, which is probably at least 10 more than you normally think of a plane having. An aerospace engineer working on the electric plane told Gizmodo in 2021 that the X-57 could be the tide that lifts all boats...or all planes. With its first flight slated for 2022, well hopefully be learning more soon. Bell X-5 The Bell X-5 variable wing sweep in a composite image. The X-5 could sweep its wings. The Bell X-5 is a pretty neat oneit looks mostly normal, perhaps even more than the X-57 Maxwellbut when its in the air, things change. The plane was the first aircraft that could change the sweep of its wings mid-flight. In other words, the Bell X-5 is a Transformer, one that changes from a plane that flies fast into one that flies very fast. Designed in the mid-1950s, the X-5 paved the way for future aircraft with wing-sweep designs, like the F-111 and the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. In that way, the Bell X-5 really did what any successful experimental plane ought to: showcase the utility of a new design or technology well enough that it becomes incorporated in future aircraft. Grumman X-29 The Grumman X-29 is recognizable for its swept-wing configuration. The X-29 flying over California in 1990. This X-plane, 29th of its name, built on the swept-wing innovations of the X-5 but incorporated them into an aircraft 30 years more modern. First flown in 1984, the X-29 has forward-swept wings that seem counterintuitive. As it turns out, the forward sweep and the canardsthe little wings in front of the planes main wingsreduce drag, speeding transit through the air. Unfortunately, it also made the X-29 inherently unstableaccording to DARPA, the most aerodynamically unstable aircraft ever built. Whoops! The plane also brought along other breakthroughs, include a new digital flight-control system and carbon fiber wings, which allowed the relatively light plane to be more maneuverable. North American X-15 The X-15 was a rocket-powered plane. Here it is flying. The X-15 hurtling through the air in an undated NASA photo. In a list filled with superlative and record-breaking aircraft, many would argue the X-15 beats them all. The plane is basically a rocket with a cockpit, as it could achieve beyond-hypersonic (Mach 5, more than five times the speed of sound) speeds and had to be dropped out of a plane before landing on its own. Conceived in the 1950s and flown in the 1960s, the X-15 was built to test the boundaries of flight; its record height in flight was set at just over 350,000 feet (67 miles) above the ground. The X-15 advanced NASAs (and just before that, NACAs) understanding of how to build aircraft to deal with different pressures and temperatures as the plane moved at record-breaking speeds and glided down after its rocket stopped giving it thrust. The aircraft is evidence that a wacky design can be practical, too. X-24 The X-24B had no wings. Here it is flying over California. The X-24B in flight over NASAs Dryden Flight Research Center in 1975. The X-24 had no wings. Yet there it is, flying at dizzying heights above California. It was one of the last lifting bodies designed by NASA to demonstrate how pilots could cruise such wingless vehicles back to ground from space. The original X-24 was a bulbous teardrop shape, but the X-24B (photographed above) switched to a compressed flatiron shape. The design was aerodynamically sound, and the aircraft would glide unpowered to ground at speeds of over 1,000 miles per hour. If you just said gnarly out loud, youd be right. X-43 The jet-black Hyper-X in flight. An artists conception of the X-43 Hyper-X in flight. The Hyper-X was so called because it flew at over five times the speed of sound. The 43rd X-plane in the governments catalogues, the aircraft was the first to demonstrate scramjet propulsion, in which airflow through the vehicles engine remains at supersonic speeds. This allows the craft to keep moving at extremely fast speeds, as the X-43 exhibited twice; once in March 2004 when it flew at Mach 6.83, outpacing the record set by the rocket plane X-15, and again in November 2004 when it flew at an astonishing Mach 9.6almost 7,000 miles per hour. Now, the X-43's engine ran for only about 10 seconds, so sustaining flight at such speeds is another matter. X-33 An imagining of the X-33 in space. A NASA conception of the X-33 from 1997. The X-33 is an odd one, in that it was designed in the late 2000s for an idea that weve only begun to see the next stage of over the last few years. Lockheed Martin designed the wedge-shaped X-33 to be a reusable launch vehicle, one with commercial implications. (Sound familiar to any ideas youve heard floating around of late?) Though it never got far out of the conceptual stage (NASA did go as far as testing its thermal protection materials in 1998), the plan was for the X-33 to be an uncrewed spaceplane that launched vertically and landed back on Earth horizontally. The program was cancelled in the early 2000s after engineers couldnt resolve technical problems with the aircrafts liquid hydrogen fuel tank. X-48 The X-48B flying over Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base in August 2007. The X-48B flying over Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base in August 2007. The X-48 was made in the late 2000s to test a new shape of plane that could be quieter and more environmentally friendly than existing designs. Over the course of its six years of testing, it was deemed a resounding success by those involved with the project. Shaped like a chevron (or a manta ray, for the more aquatically inclined) X-48 showed off a design called hybrid wing body, in which the wings and the body of the plane are almost one and the same. In their testing, NASA found that the plane was able to fly with greater fuel efficiency and less noise than existing aircraft. While that doesnt mean well all be flying around in big metal manta rays, it could mean that future airplanes may have a slightly different shape than they have today. Lockheed Martin X-59 QueSST I want to fly in this thing so bad. Concept art of the supersonic X-59. From its initial cut of metal in 2018 to now, the production of the X-59 is still very much underway, but it lines up with the X-57 as one of the most exciting X-planes currently in development. The X-59 is basically what the X-3 Stiletto and the X-15 rocket plane were building toward: a supersonic plane that can fly without a sonic boom. Its nose alone is 30 feet long, and the sky in front of the cockpit is visualized on a 4K computer monitor that pulls visuals from cameras mounted on either side of the nose. (If the pilots were to look nakedly down the planes nose, they wouldnt be able to see the sky in front of them.) Ground tests were set to begin in Texas in early 2022, and NASA plans to fly the aircraft over communities in 2024 to see if the sonic booms can be heard on the ground. Even if supersonic flight doesnt take off againRIP Concordethis thing is wicked cool. More from Gizmodo Sign up for Gizmodo's Newsletter. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Click here to read the full article. Founder and CEO Dorothy Jeanius Tillman reintroduced herself as a doctor at 17. She received a Doctor of Behavioral Health from Arizona State Universitys College of Health Solutions during her dissertation defense. In May, she will participate in commencement as Dorothy Jean Tillman. In her research, Tillman focused on the impact of implementing an outreach and education program aimed at reducing the stigma associated with using campus mental health services among college-aged students, according to a press release. As part of her Dorothy Jeanius STEAM Leadership Institute, Tillman invests in the next generation of leaders. A STEAM education includes science, technology, engineering, art, and math. She plans to promote mental and behavioral health services within educational institutions and community-based organizations with her environmental science expertise. The STEAM-ulators are paving the way for a broader range of underrepresented groups to enter and succeed in STEAM-related fields. Counselors in a lot of schools arent really up to par with what those students need or even if the counselors are very competent, theres way too many students to help each one, Tillman previously told Black Enterprise. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dr. Dorothy Jean Tillman II (@dorothyjeanius) According to Black Enterprise, schools have seen a surge in demand for care that is far outpacing their capacity. There is also an overwhelming need for counseling centers in college since many students today meet the criteria for at least one mental health issue. A CDC report found nearly three out of five teen girls reported feeling hopeless or sad in 2021. This rate has almost doubled in the past decade, with boys nearly 60% higher than the previous rate. The CDC data determined that school-based activities can make a profound difference in the lives of teens with a relatively small infusion of support to schools. As a 10-year-old, Tillman attended the College of Lake County in Grayes Lake, Illinois, majoring in psychology, where she earned her masters degree at age 14. She earned her Master of Science from Unity College in Unity, Maine. Her associate degree was earned in 2016, and her bachelors in humanities degree was achieved in 2018 at Excelsior College. DP World has done a pioneering study assessing the impact of climate change on its global network of Ports and Terminals (P&Ts) to the end of the century, as it urges other supply chain players to map their own climate resilience status. In collaboration with climate analytics firm Jupiter Intelligence and consultants at Guidehouse, DP Worlds study examined three climate scenarios (low to high carbon) and assessed the potential impact of six hazards floods, rain, wind, heat, cold and hail -- across 50 ports and terminals around the world. A whitepaper Climate-Proofing the Supply Chain -- derived from the study underscores the importance of involving multiple stakeholders, including industry peers, governments, civil society, and local authorities, in addressing climate risks. Risks minimal The study revealed that DP Worlds current direct physical climate risk to its global P&T operations was minimal, less than 0.4% of its 2021 P&T revenue. The risk is expected to remain stable until around 2050 just as many countries hope to reach their net carbon zero targets. Beyond 2050, particularly under a high-carbon scenario, a more complex picture emerges, with increased risks as rising sea levels, flooding and extreme heat pose greater challenges. Although risks are projected to grow, even by the end of the century the impact of downtime in ports & terminals is still relatively small. The study confirms DP World is well-prepared to address future challenges, with the ability to mitigate a range of climate threats in its ports and terminals, demonstrating a commitment to resilience and operational excellence. DP Worlds existing P&Ts have already been designed to withstand certain climate related challenges. The company also takes climate into consideration during the design, master-planning and construction of new terminals or refurbishing existing terminals. Better investment decisions Armed with these new projections of climate impacts, DP World can now make better investment decisions, which will be critical for major projects such as the new 2.19 million TEU/year container terminal at Tuna Tekra in India. The data will help improve the understanding on a range of issues from how high to build quay walls all the way down to how much additional electrical load will be required to handle demand for air conditioning due to extreme heat episodes. Tiemen Meester, Group Chief Operating Officer, Ports & Terminals, DP World emphasised the importance of proactive risk identification, planning, and the need for industry-wide collaboration to enhance global trade's resilience. "Trade will be vital for the worlds continued economic success, so taking proactive steps today to evaluate and manage the risks associated with climate change is paramount. Advances in climate modelling can significantly enhance private sector involvement in building resilience, promoting a sustainable and strong future for global trade. Data-driven approach Given the long-term nature of our industry, we strongly support adopting a forward-looking, data-driven approach to tackle upcoming challenges while also being mindful that it is our collective responsibility to ensure that the carbon scenario is kept to the lowest possible level, Meester said. Maha AlQatan, Group Chief Sustainability Officer, DP World, added: As we decarbonise our operations and contribute to mitigating global temperature rise, we also understand the need to proactively prepare for climate risks that the trade sector may be susceptible to in the future. Our Global Asset Resilience Study offers a scalable first step to building collective resilience across the trade value chain; charting a path to mobilise considered, targeted and evidence-based action for climate adaptation. Andy Tam, Global Director of Energy Management, managed the DP World study and explained the insight gained. Proactive plan "This exercise revealed that while we stand strong in most of our operations, not all are equally resilient. Recognising potential risks now allows us ample time to proactively plan and implement mitigation and adaptation strategies, ensuring the continued success of our operations, Tam said. More importantly, our proactive risk identification has helped to ensure long-term resilience, even in our most vulnerable locations. While similar studies are yet to be widely adopted across the supply chain, we are optimistic that our initiative will inspire industry-wide action, leading to a united, data-driven effort to enhance the resilience of global trade.--TradeArabia News Service November brought Sacramento Countys first Burmese restaurant, a groundbreaking Mexican-Japanese oyster bar and the arrival of a hotly-anticipated midtown Sacramento dumpling hub. These 17 new restaurants opened across the Sacramento region in November 2023. Only three of the new restaurants opened in Sacramento proper one downtown, and two in midtown. Three more opened in Folsom, while two debuted in Elk Grove and Placerville and Roseville, El Dorado Hills, Davis, Camino, Lincoln, Granite Bay and Fair Oaks added one apiece. AT Thai Kitchen (711 E. Bidwell St., Suite 5, Folsom): Get your boat noodle soup, Triple S pompano (sweet, sour and spicy) or Gunthers Ice Cream fix at this new Thai restaurant in Commonwealth Square shopping center. Big Island Burritos (3600-B Carson Road, Camino): Owned by the same people as Hawaii-based Tropics Ale House, which has a nearby taproom and restaurant, Big Island Burritos stuffs its mega-burritos with kalua pork or huli-huli chicken. Blend (4357 Town Center Blvd., Suite 112, El Dorado Hills): Protein shakes and acai bowls rule at this neon-lit, health-conscious kava bar and cafe in the El Dorado Hills Town Center. Burma Light (703 E. Bidwell St., Folsom): Sacramento Countys first Burmese restaurant brought dishes such as a tea leaf salad, lamb curry and stir-fries called kebats to Commonwealth Square. DNA Wine Lounge (9719 Village Center Drive, Suite 100, Granite Bay): Doug and Audra Owens wine bar opened Nov. 16 with bites such as tinned fish, prosciutto-fig flatbreads and a family Caesar salad recipe. Flourless (451 Main St., Suite 5, Placerville): Richard Moore opened his gluten-free bakery in downtown Placervilles Creekside Place shopping center on Nov. 11 after running it out of his home for the past three years. Hometown Dumpling (7610 Folsom Auburn Road, Suite 190, Folsom): This Chinese restaurant specializing in xiaolongbao, or soup dumplings, replaced Poke & Boba in Folsoms Gold Rush Plaza. Jersey Mikes (3964 Missouri Flat Road, Placerville): The New Jersey-based sub sandwich chain added its newest location in Prospectors Plaza southwest from central Placerville along Highway 50. Journey to the Dumpling (1714 21st St., Sacramento): Elk Groves hottest restaurant brought its famous xiaolongbao, along with excellent chile wontons and noodle soups, to the ground floor of The Press at Midtown Quarter apartment building on Nov. 13. Omakase Por Favor (640 Twelve Bridges Drive, Lincoln): Jeana Marie Pechas high-end concept, which began as a pop-up, blends Japanese and coastal Mexican flavors for dishes such as caviar on sturgeon chicharrones or tuna tostadas with ponzu. Outpost Burger (330 G St., Davis): Oklahoma-style onion smashburgers are the main draw, along with loaded hot dogs and fries, at this downtown all-American food joint from the owners of The Burger Saloon in Woodland. Purple Kow (1821 Douglas Blvd., Suite C8, Roseville): This San Francisco-based boba shop opened Nov. 25 in Placer Center Plaza shopping center, with snacky bites such as sweet potato fries, chicken wings and spicy noodles tossed in housemade soy sauce. Sushi Go (9729 Fair Oaks Blvd., Suite A, Fair Oaks): A new Japanese restaurant in a Fair Oaks strip mall, Sushi Go has everything from karaage chicken and shrimp tempura to the $50 Go Boat Special, where customers select four rolls along with four pieces of nigiri. Streetzlan (9080 Laguna Main St., Elk Grove): Galts most eclectic restaurant expanded north to Elk Groves Main Street Plaza on Nov. 25, where itll continue serving Cali-Mex creations such as loaded carnitas fries or the avocado slayer (black bean puree, green apples, Serrano peppers and crushed wasabi on a tostada). The Lock & Key Tapas + Bar (2718 J St., Sacramento): Will Waltons Spanish-influenced New American restaurant and cocktail lounge replaced The Red Rabbit Kitchen & Bar with dishes small and large, from housemade empanadas to fideos champinones (fusilli pasta with beech mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes and spinach pesto). Wetzels Pretzels (414 K St., Sacramento): A salt-covered mall and airport staple, Wetzels Pretzels made its Downtown Commons debut thanks to franchisee Ben Elias. Z-Town Asian Gastro Bar (8409 Elk Grove Florin Road, Elk Grove): A neon-lit nightlife spot in Bel Air Village, Z-Town rolls out bites such as Korean fried chicken and hot pot to soak up boozy soju towers and hollowed-out watermelon fishbowls. Sacramento Eats: Recipes from the Capital Regions Favorite Restaurants and Bars Order your cookbook here to get recipes from 60 of the Sacramento regions top restaurants and bars, plus photos and descriptions of what makes each business so exceptional. Binyamin Needham is the second British national to have been killed while serving in the IDF - Twitter A British teenager has been killed in Gaza while fighting for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Binyamin Needham, 19, who was of dual nationality, moved to Israel with his family 10 years ago, Mail Online reported. He is believed to be the second British national after Nathanel Young to have been killed whilst serving in the IDF since the Oct 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The IDF confirmed that Mr Needham had died in a statement announcing the deaths of three soldiers in fighting against Hamas in the Gaza Strip on Sunday. He belonged to the Combat Engineering Corps 601st Battalion. The deaths bring the total number of IDF soldiers killed to 75 since Israel began its ground offensive in the Gaza Strip in late October, the Times of Israel reported. We are all very proud of what he did The IDF said it shared the familys grief and would continue to accompany them. Mr Needham will be buried at a military funeral in Haifa on Tuesday after his body was returned to his family. He was the youngest of six children and has a sister and brother in London, Mail Online reported. Orli Ferris, his sister, said: He was such a wonderful, wonderful brother and we loved him with all our hearts and we always will. He will be missed by all of us and so many others, but we will always make sure we remember him in our hearts. Nothing will be the same now, but we are all very proud of what he did and he was also proud of what he was doing. He had just finished his apprenticeship and was doing his professional training. We dont know the exact details of what happened, but he was only in Gaza for two days. He went in on Friday and died on Sunday. The two other IDF soldiers killed were 36-year-old Neriya Shaer and Ben Zussman, 22. Mr Shaer was killed in the central Gaza Strip, while Mr Zussman and Mr Needham were killed in the enclaves north. 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. Two shooting suspects who barricaded themselves in a North Sacramento neighborhood Monday surrendered after more than six hours of police negotiations. Sacramento police officers had gone to the 3400 block of Astoria Street in East Del Paso Heights just before 3:30 a.m. A man driving a tow truck went to the residential area to repossess a vehicle when two people sitting in a vehicle shot at him, according to radio dispatches. The tow-truck driver wasnt injured in the shooting, said Sacramento police spokesman Officer Cody Tapley. Officers closed Astoria Street between Dayton Street and South Avenue as SWAT and crisis negotiators went to the scene in the 7 a.m. hour. Four people eventually left the house, police said in announcing an end to the ordeal just before 10 a.m. Two of the men, identified as 58- and 60-year-old residents of Sacramento were arrested and face a charge of assault with a deadly weapon. Two bodies found on a military base Saturday likely belong to a missing couple whose tenant has been arrested in connection with their disappearance, authorities in Washington state say. Thurston County Sheriff Derek Sanders made the announcement during a Saturday news conference. Two civilians found one body on Joint Base Lewis-McChord, less than a mile away from a property the couple Karen Koep and her husband, Davido Koep owned, Lt. Mike Brooks of the sheriffs office told CNN. The second body was found close by after a further search, according to the sheriff. The base is about 17 miles southwest of Tacoma. At this point in time, we are reasonably certain that it is going to be the bodies of Karen and Davido, Sanders said. Confirmation will come from the coroners office, he said. Thurston County Coroner Gary Warnock told CNN autopsies would be conducted Tuesday. We understand that their families are struggling mightily, Sanders said. It was clear that they (the family) were hurting, but one thing that we did talk about was how important it was for the families that have the closure to be able to bury their loved ones. And so I hope we are one step closer to that. Detectives are still collecting evidence at the scene, the sheriff added. Karen and Davido Koep were discovered missing on November 13 when deputies were conducting a welfare check after Koep didnt show up for her job at a chiropractor clinic, CNN previously reported. Thurston County deputies arrested Timothy Burke in connection with the case, Brooks previously told CNN. Burke has been charged with first-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping and was denied bail. It is impossible to infer an intent at this point, however the relationship appears to be a landlord-tenant relationship, Sanders said Saturday. CNN has reached out to Burkes attorney for comment. Burke worked at the couples rental property in exchange for housing and was about to be evicted, Karen Koeps sister, Pauline Dutton, previously told CNN. For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com Dawn Downs (left) is running for 8th Judicial District Attorney against incumbent Gordon McLaughlin (right) in November 2024. Two candidates have announced plans to run for district attorney in Larimer County. Current District Attorney Gordon McLaughlin is running for reelection and faces challenger Dawn Downs, a former chief deputy district attorney for the district attorneys office and current attorney for the city of Fort Collins. The 8th Judicial District represents Larimer and Jackson counties. Downs is running as an unaffiliated candidate, while McLaughlin is running as a Democrat. McLaughlin said in a statement announcing his reelection campaign that he has received early endorsements from Democratic leaders including Fort Collins Mayor Jeni Arndt and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser. Downs said she has been endorsed by current and former Larimer County leaders, including the three prior district attorneys, former Larimer County Sheriff Justin Smith and current Sheriff John Feyen. In her campaign announcement, she said she is running because "our community deserves a district attorney motivated by public safety, not politics." Both candidates have prior experience working as prosecutors in the 8th Judicial District Attorneys Office. In 2020, McLaughlin beat out his Republican challenger by almost 14% of the vote to become the districts first Democratic district attorney in more than 80 years. Downs is the first woman and first unaffiliated candidate to ever run for 8th Judicial District Attorney, according to her campaign. McLaughlin is running for reelection to continue to build upon my first term success, and because there is more work to do and there is nothing more important than delivering a fair criminal justice system, McLaughlin said in a statement announcing his campaign. Some of the successes McLaughlin mentioned from his first term include: Over the last four years I have led the District Attorneys Office in a direction that seeks justice and drives reform and innovation to provide the best public service possible for our citizens in the 8th Judicial District, McLaughlin said in a statement. In a short and complex time we have delivered real results for our community by keeping it safer, increasing transparency, and bringing justice to victims of crime. Downs said her 14 years of experience with the district attorneys office has given her the experience, relationships and integrity to successfully take the reins at the district attorneys office. Downs said in a statement announcing her candidacy that she wants to strengthen the office to champion the rights of victims, to hold offenders accountable for the harm they have caused, and to offer paths to recovery. From the beginning of my legal career, my goal has been to serve my community as a prosecutor. I will work tirelessly to rebuild a solution-oriented culture in the D.A.s office that upholds laws, prosecutes crimes, and restores hope that justice is possible for everyone in Larimer and Jackson counties," Downs said in a statement. Downs said safety, justice and accountability are the foundation for the district attorneys office, which she hopes to achieve by gaining community trust by maintaining a high standard of accountability for all, including law enforcement agencies, and collaborating with local agencies, supporting those who protect the community while still holding high expectations of officer conduct. In her time with the district attorney's office, Downs said she helped create multiple multidisciplinary teams with local law enforcement agencies to more effectively prosecute crimes. She created the Criminal Impact Team in 2019 to investigation violent crimes, and she organized a multi-agency effort to streamline investigations into fentanyl-related overdose deaths, according to her campaign website. Downs left the district attorneys office in October 2022 and has been working as the public safety chief attorney for the city of Fort Collins, advising Fort Collins Police Services, city code enforcement and emergency management as well as supervising the municipal prosecution team, according to her campaign announcement. To read more about McLaughlin's campaign, visit mclaughlinforda.com. To read more about Downs' campaign, visit dawnforda.com. This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Here's who plans to run for 8th Judicial District Attorney in 2024 TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) Firefighters battled a two-alarm house fire in South Tampa early Monday. Tampa Fire Rescue said flames were shooting through the roof of a home near West Platt Street and South Gomez Street around 3:15 a.m. Crews said 75 percent of the house was involved in the fire and it took them 45 minutes to get it under control. Firefighters said no one was inside the home. No firefighters were hurt while battling the flames. Firefighters believe the blaze started in the garage but the fire is under investigation. (Tampa Fire Rescue) Crews shut down Platt and Gomez streets due to the fire. The house is located across from Mitchell Elementary School. Crews said the fire did not impact the school. If the fire rekindles, officials will have to shut down the nearby roads, which would affect student drop-offs. The fire is under investigation. This is a developing story. Stay up to date on the latest from News Channel 8 on-air and on the go with the free WFLA News Channel 8 mobile app. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WFLA. ASHEVILLE Following a weekend of humid weather with some showers, two fires burning in the McDowell County area of Pisgah National Forest have remained around the same size, while firefighters have made strides in containing the fires. U.S. Forest Service spokesperson Jenifer Bunty told the Citizen Times Dec. 4 that the Locust Cove Fire No. 2, burning in the Sunnyvale area of McDowell County, has remained at 165 acres since Dec. 2. Containment on the fire increased to 45%, up from 25% on Dec. 2. During this phase of operations, firefighters are working on containment lines along the ridgeline above Clear Creek Road, according to Bunty. The fire started Nov. 29 within the fire scar of a previous fire from March, and the ignition source is unknown. Last update: WNC wildfire update: What to know about fires in McDowell and Haywood counties Similarly, Clear Creek Fire near N.C. 80, south of Lake Tahoma in McDowell County, remains around 126 acres, Bunty said. Containment also went up about 20% since Dec. 2, currently sitting at 60%. Theyre sort of finalizing that direct line on the east side of the fire today, Bunty said. They did fly a drone and got some infrared imaging that said there is some heat on the interior of that fire. They think its mostly from those really heavy fuels like big, downed logs and tree stumps that are smoldering. No structures have been threatened or damaged by either fire, Bunty said, and there have been no injuries reported. There are no current closures in place. The Clear Creek Fire began on private land on Nov. 30. Burn ban canceled: Buncombe County to cancel burn ban, citing light winds, Great Smokies ban lifted These fires are being fought under a unified command, with 61 firefighters assigned to the Clear Creek Fire and 40 on the Locust Cove No. 2 Fire. We are hoping to get a little bit more rain here as we get into the end of the week, with a cold front coming in, Bunty said. Black Bear Fire While most of the larger fires that raged throughout Western North Carolina this fall have abated, the Black Bear Fire in the Haywood County region of Pisgah National Forest has grown 120 acres since Dec. 2 to about 2,008 acres. Containment remains at 90%, according to a news release from the U.S. Forest Service. Crews today are focused on cold trailing fire lines, working to extinguish any burning or smoldering materials near the fires edge, the release said. Treating those hotspots reduces the threat of fire crossing containment lines. About 36 firefighters are currently responding to the fire, according to the forest service. Statewide burn ban rescinded: State burn bans in 30 Western North Carolina counties to expire While a cold front arriving midweek may bring some rain to the fire area, this stretch of fire did not receive as much precipitation over the weekend as surrounding areas, the release said. Ridgetops remain particularly dry, with heavy fuels inside the fire continuing to hold heat. These fuels may spread the fire if pushed by strong winds, according to the release. Forest visitors, hikers on nearby sections of the Appalachian Trail, and anyone traveling through the I-40 corridor should proceed with caution, the forest service said. Smoke may drift throughout the area and may affect travel and nearby communities in North Carolina and Tennessee. The section of the Appalachian Trail between I-40 and Brown Gap Road remains closed, as well as Brown Gap Road. Buncombe County lifted its burn ban on Nov. 30, and the statewide burn ban was rescinded at 5 p.m. Nov. 22 for 30 Western North Carolina counties. For fire updates, visit ncforestservice.gov/fire_control/sit_report.htm or follow the N.C. Forest Service on Facebook at facebook.com/NCForestService. Ryley Ober is the Public Safety Reporter for Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. Email her at rober@gannett.com and follow her on Twitter @ryleyober This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Fires burn near NC 80 in WNC, Pisgah National Forest fire grows Over 7 million tonnes of cargo have been exported from the Pivdennyi (Southern), Odesa and Chornomorsk ports since 8 August, and out of them almost 5 million tonnes are the products of Ukrainian farmers. Source: Oleksandr Kubrakov, First Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine, on Facebook Details: Kubrakov reported that since 8 August, 200 vessels have left and 226 have entered the ports through the corridor arranged by the Ukrainian Navy. Quote: "Today, 31 vessels are being loaded in the Odesa, Chornomorsk and Pivdennyi ports, 30 more vessels are heading across the corridor in both directions." Background: Ukraine managed to resume the operation of the Greater Odesa ports without the help of third parties which was possible thanks to military conditions, mainly the attack on a Russian landing ship in August. Ukraine opened registration for merchant ships and their owners for taking temporary routes to or from the Odesa ports after Russia unilaterally quit the Black Sea Grain Initiative. The first vessel which used the Ukrainian Black Sea corridor after Russia quit the grain deal arrived in Istanbul, Turkiye, on 18 August. Support UP or become our patron! California-based Faraday Future (FF) Intelligent Electric is set to bring its generative AI and advanced intelligent electric vehicle capabilities to the UAE capitals Smart and Autonomous Vehicles Industry (SAVI) cluster. This will be done teaming up with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office (ADIO). FF, the global shared intelligent electric mobility ecosystem firm, which recently launched its limited-edition FF 91 2.0 Futurist aiFalcon model in the Middle East, joins a growing cohort of companies committing to establishing a presence in the SAVI cluster. Headquartered in Los Angeles, FF designs and engineers next-generation intelligent electric connected vehicles focused on Ultimate Intelligent TechLuxury. The company has developed a generative AI product stack for use in its cars. Next-gen EVs ADIO will work with FF as it looks to establish a regional headquarters, manufacturing facility and an advanced research and development (R&D) centre focusing on next-generation electric vehicle and AI technology in Abu Dhabi and exploring UAE capital markets activities. ADIO and FF will also deploy resources to develop leading regulatory frameworks that enhance the creation of advanced smart autonomous vehicle solutions and applications. Centred in Masdar City, Abu Dhabis fully integrated SAVI cluster provides state-of-the-art facilities, services, and regulatory enablement to support the design, testing, and manufacturing of applications for transportation and mobility on air, land and sea, as well as to service other sectors, such as logistics. Badr Al-Olama, Director General of ADIO, said: SAVI stands at the forefront of innovation across air, land and sea mobility. The cluster is attracting exceptional companies with both the ambition and the ability to disrupt and reshape the future of transportation. FF will deepen Abu Dhabis EV industry while bringing new expertise in generative AI and shared intelligent mobility. Technology transfer FFs Abu Dhabi R&D centre will look to accelerate the pace of AI and electric vehicle innovation for mobility applications. It will also explore collaborations and technology transfer initiatives with universities across Abu Dhabi. "This collaboration with ADIO to support SAVIs efforts helps to explore both joint brand product and partnership opportunities in the UAE and will build on the companys momentum, said Matthias Aydt, Global CEO of FF. In addition to our recently announced plans to enter the UAE market as early as 2024 with FF 91 2.0 Futurist aiFalcon model, this agreement is a strong first step toward realising that goal. We believe this development further validates FF's global strategy plans and our products and technology, given that the UAE is one of the top luxury markets in the global automotive industry. We are very excited to be able to support this collaboration. We really appreciate FFs strategic partners and FF Middle East board members, Sheikh Abdulla Al Qassimi, CEO of Master Investment Group and Ahmed Al Otaiba, Chairman of Siraj Holding LLC, for their great contributions. We look forward to a successful long-term partnership and bringing unique value to support SAVIs vision and development, said Jerry Wang, President of FF Global Partners LLC. Industrial base Abu Dhabis SAVI cluster builds on the strength of Abu Dhabis industrial base and supports the UAEs target of half of all cars on the roads being electric by 2050. SAVI leverages Abu Dhabis unparalleled access to established air corridors, road infrastructure and global seaports. The cluster houses academia, test zones, R&D labs, testing and certification facilities, large scale workshops, hangars and manufacturing facilities, connected through Abu Dhabis global logistics network. FFs limited-edition model FF 91 2.0 Futurist aiFalcon has been tailored to the Middle East market, with delivery targeted in 2024. It features 1-on-1 bespoke private AI, Super AP 5G connectivity, racing training, and premium identity features.--TradeArabia News Service For a real moment, it looked as if one of the greatest drivers in short-track racing history might actually do it this time that he might win the prestigious event that has eluded him for nearly two decades at a place hes long-considered home. But no Dale Earnhardt-winning-the-Daytona-500 moment came on Sunday evening at Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola, Florida. Bubba Pollard will have to wait another year for that. Instead, the 2023 Snowball Derby belonged to Ty Majeski, who won his second title. Ty Majeski celebrates after winning the 56th Annual Snowball Derby at Five Flags Speedway Sunday, December 3, 2023. They all have their own little feel to them, Majeski told reporters just outside the tech shed, a few moments before it was announced his car had cleared post-race inspection. This one feels just as special as the last one. He added: Just really, truly, living the dream right now. Majeski, who drives for ThorSport Racing in the NASCAR Truck Series, won his first Snowball Derby title in 2020. Hes now one of just 12 drivers to score multiple Derby victories in its 56-year history a history so special that the race has earned the moniker Super Bowl of short-track racing. Happened to be at the right place at the right time, Majeski said. Ive lost a couple Snowballs that way. But this year was my year. Gio Ruggiero finished second. Travis Braden finished third. For as much as this race was about Majeski and his conquering of Five Flags Speedway, it was also about the drivers who came so close but didnt. Majeski, Pollard and Stephen Nasse three of the best short-track drivers in the country were the ones who were battling it out in the races thrilling, heartbreaking, glorious end. The race will be remembered for what happened right near the end. Nasse had the lead. Pollard and Majeski were right behind him. Right before Turn 1, with eight laps to go, Pollard got on the inside of Nasse, who then crowded Pollard into the wall and prompted contact that eventually sent the two greats cars and their contending chances spiraling into oblivion. Racers make their way around the track during the 56th Annual Snowball Derby at Five Flags Speedway Sunday, December 3, 2023. Both drivers had similar recollections of what happened. I did crowd Bubba a little bit there, but he was kind of lifting me up down there, Nasse said. He knew what he was doing, and I knew what I was doing. We were racing hard. I think if Id really done him wrong, hed be way more upset and have a few words with me by now. But it was just hard racing. Its unfortunate. I hate it for the both of us. Weve both been trying to get this win for some time now. Said Pollard: It is what it is. I havent seen a replay or nothing, but I feel like he chopped me off pretty good. It knocked the wheel out of my hand he hit me so hard. ... Aint nothing else for me to say. Nasse and Pollard, in many ways, have a rivalry by proximity. Theyre good, and theyve been good for a long time, so they have a history of entangling with one another. It wasnt all that long ago when Nasse threw two middle fingers at Pollard in Cordele, Ga., for the whole racetrack to see. But that animosity didnt spill over into fists on Sunday evening. The reason? Anything goes for the Snowball Derby. Racers make their way around the track during the 56th Annual Snowball Derby at Five Flags Speedway Sunday, December 3, 2023. I was telling myself in the long red flag, Nasse said, that it was going to either be me wrecked, or me winning. The race delivered drama. It had a 15-car pileup that collected a whole bunch of the NASCAR Cup Series names, including Noah Gragson and Erik Jones and William Byron. It truly had everything. Including heartbreak. Pollard certainly felt that. A huge pile-up of cars near the end of the 56th Annual Snowball Derby at Five Flags Speedway Sunday, December 3, 2023. The all-time great the sure-fire Hall of Famer who has drawn the jealousy of Kyle Busch and the attention of Dale Jr. and has won pretty much everywhere hes been watched the final few laps alone by his truck, in utter disbelief that another winnable Snowball Derby had passed him by. The last time he felt that a Derby win was so within his reach was in 2017, when Kyle Busch somehow stole the show at the end after Pollard slowed. That was in the back of his mind all race, Pollard said. The same scenario was playing out, Pollard said. Back then, I ran too hard. I was leading. ... We ran too hard, and Busch saved his tires. And then the way this race was playing out, I thought about it the whole time. ... All that goes in the back of your mind for sure. Dale Earnhardt celebrates at Daytona International Speedway on Feb. 16, 1998, after winning the Daytona 500. It was the only major race Earnhardt hadnt won. An impeccably preserved No. 3 Dale Earnhardt race car tops the list of memorabilia his longtime friend and NASCAR team owner Richard Childress is auctioning off to benefit COVID-19 relief efforts. It took 20 years for Dale Earnhardt to win the Daytona 500. Pollard still has two more years til that comes. The comparisons have come for a while now nonetheless. The enduring image of Earnhardts victory of The Great American Race was the one of all the crew members lining up to give him high-fives to acknowledge what that great driver had finally done. On Sunday, after Pollards difficult ending in Pensacola, throngs of fans came up to Pollard and offered not a line of high-fives, but hugs and headshakes and meaningful greetings as if they were all acknowledging what this great driver will one day do. BEAR LAKE COUNTY, Idaho (ABC4) A 24-year-old woman was killed in a head-on crash in Bear Lake County, Idaho, near the Utah border Sunday night, according to Idaho State Police. On Dec. 3, at around 7:45 p.m., police responded to a crash on US-30 at milepost 417. Police said a Montpelier woman, 24, was driving a Chevrolet Impala with a juvenile passenger westbound on the highway. Infant allegedly abducted by Idaho man found dead At the same time, a Montpelier man, 44, was driving eastbound in a Toyota pickup truck with a female passenger, 42, and two juveniles. Police said the Impala crossed the center line into the eastbound lanes and crashed into the Toyota. The 24-year-old woman was taken by ambulance to a local hospital where she died from her injuries. She was reportedly not wearing a seatbelt during the crash. All other individuals involved were also taken by ambulance to the hospital. Their conditions are unknown, though police said they were all wearing their seatbelts. All lanes of US-30 were blocked for around four hours following the crash while responders worked to clear the scene. No further information is available at this time. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now ABC4 Daily News For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to ABC4 Utah. A 28-year-old man died following a traffic stop and arrest in New Berlin Saturday. The man, who was cooperative during the arrest, was taken to a hospital where he later became unresponsive, according to a news release from the Waukesha County Sheriffs Office. A City of Oconomowoc police officer was assisting New Berlin Officers with their investigation, according to the release. New Berlin Police have placed three officers on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation, as per policy. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: A 28-year-old man died following a traffic stop and arrest in New Berlin SAN DIEGO Another earthquake shook near eastern San Diego County Sunday night, several days after the U.S. Geological Survey reported a series of quakes in the region. The 3.1 magnitude earthquake struck near Ocotillo, a census-designated place in Imperial County, just before 11 p.m. The tremor had a depth of about 4.5 miles, according to USGS. As of 7:30 a.m. Monday, no residents reported feeling the quake to the USGSs Did You Feel It? survey. There were also no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The quake comes after four back-to-back shocks rattled the same area late Thursday to Friday in a likely event that scientists refer to as a swarm, which is a series of smaller earthquakes within the span of a few days to a couple weeks. The largest of the quakes recorded with the swarm reached a 4.8 magnitude at a depth of almost 6 miles in the area east of Ocotillo. This one was felt much farther than others in the series, with some feeling shaking as far west as the San Diego coast. Where will the next big one be in California? Seismologists name faults of top concern Areas east of San Diego County are particularly susceptible to these type of one-after-another events, San Diego State University professor of geology emeritus Dr. Pat Abbott told FOX 5 earlier this year after a few earthquake swarms struck the region. As Abbott explained, the frequent movement is caused by the geothermal energy in the 35-mile stretch of land between the tip of the San Andreas and Imperial faults in the area south of the Salton Sea. In the area, there is a lot of magma and warm volcanic rocks under the surface. That thermal energy under the surface pumps hot water that creates energy and movement, thus causing earthquake activity. Sundays quake could be a continuation of the earlier swarm, although it is unclear at this time. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to FOX 5 San Diego. Three men were arrested in Phoenix on Saturday and are facing first degree murder charges in connection with the killing of 30-year-old Bernardo Pantaleon, according to the Phoenix Police Department. Pantaleon's body was found dead with a gunshot wound in a north Phoenix park on Nov. 26. At about 12:30 p.m. on that day, police responded to Mountain View Park near Seventh and Cinnabar avenues. A passerby stated they found an unresponsive man. When police arrived they found a man, later identified as Pantaleon, on the ground with a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead. Detectives responded to investigate the shooting, process the area and speak to witnesses. Nearly a week later, detectives identified three men as suspects, police said in a news release. On Saturday, the three suspects were identified as Leonardo Santiago, 21; Manuel Carrasco Calderon, 21; and Jose Rodriguez, 20, and were taken into custody in connection with Pantaleon's homicide. The three suspects were interviewed at police headquarters by detectives, and all confessed to the murder of Pantaleon, police said in the news release. Police also booked Santiago, Calderon and Rodriguez on charges for crimes against the dead and assisting a street gang. This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 3 men face charges for homicide, assisting street gang in death of Phoenix man "Energy vampires" are everywhere at work, but you can protect yourself with proven strategies. This is my office, also known as the hunting ground, says energy vampire Colin Robinson in an episode of the satirical show What We Do in the Shadows. As he explains, Energy vampires drain peoples energy merely by talking to them. Robinson looks like an ordinary human, but he is a superpowered vampire who feeds off of bothering and boring his colleagues. He gets stronger the more he interrupts them as they type on their computers and distracts them with loud, prolonged pencil-sharpening. What We Do in the Shadows is a fictional show that uses humor to tell an emotional truth: A lot of us deal with energy vampires at our jobs. Energy vampire has become a pop culture term to describe someone who is exhausting and draining to deal with, but to be clear, its not a medical diagnosis. There is no official diagnosis or treatment approach specific to [energy vampires], no class on energy vampirism taught in graduate school, but weve all known them personally and professionally, said California-based clinical psychologist Ryan Howes. The challenge with energy vampires at work is that you cannot fully ignore them especially if they are on your team. But there are proven strategies to defeat them and regain your time and energy. Below, clinicians discuss the line between an annoying co-worker and an energy vampire, as well as tips on how to set boundaries with one at the office: The biggest sign that your co-worker is an energy vampire is how they make you feel. From their manner of speech to the topics they cover, energy vampires do not just exhaust their victims in one way they deploy different tactics to drain peoples physical and mental energies. They can take a wide variety of forms, from the person who asks way too many intrusive personal questions, to the person who always seems to have a horrible day and wants everyone to join them, to the person who tells long stories that never seem to have an end or a point. And on and on, Howes said. If you feel tired after interacting with them, and find yourself dreading the next time you bump into them, you may be dealing with an emotional vampire. It can be typical to occasionally have boring or socially awkward interactions with colleagues, but an interaction with an energy vampire is more intense, Howes said. Some of my clients talk about feeling like they have difficulty focusing and staying motivated after a meeting or conversation with an EV, he said. This can leave them feeling angry, frustrated or too depleted to even care. Because energy vampires can drain people in different ways, Nevada-based clinical psychologist Tanisha Ranger said you should focus on how you feel after interacting with a colleague to determine if they are an energy vampire. How you feel after you interact with them tends to be uniform, she said. [If] you dont feel like the conversations have been in any way productive or useful, and you feel like a lot of your time was just wasted for no real reason, those might be really good signs that youre dealing with an energy vampire. Another big sign is if they never want to hear a solution to their complaints. Ranger said energy vampires may also be help-rejecting complainers. Although they want to talk to you about all the problems, anything that you offer that might be a solution, or a way to manage, or a way to help, they have all the reasons in the world why that cannot and will not and shall not work, she said. And so it just becomes this hamster wheel. Oversharing and having consistently one-sided conversations are red flags, too. Energy vampires are people who are profoundly lonely, Ranger said. I think that they dont have a lot of real, positive reciprocal connections in their lives. Thats why you may hear them constantly talk about their personal life and problems without seeming awareness about how it makes others feel. Disclosure does not go both ways. You will notice that they dont necessarily ask a lot of questions about you. They dont necessarily give an indicator that they care too much about how youre doing, or whats going on with you, or anything of that nature, Ranger said, noting that you basically end up feeling used up. They have that loneliness, she explained. And they also dont have that awareness because your lack of interest in what theyre saying feels normal. Thats how everybody is when theyre talking. If youre worried that you might be the energy vampire, reflect on how much time you spend talking to a colleague versus how much they end up sharing in return. If its always lopsided in your favor, that could be a potential sign that youre draining your co-workers. If you walk away from a conversation, and you play it back in your head, and you cant remember a single thing that the other person says, that might be a problem, Ranger said. Pay attention to your conversation partners body language and tone. A pattern of one-word responses and a lack of engagement can be signs that they are not really listening to what you are saying, Ranger said. Do you feel listless, exhausted and distracted after talking with a co-worker? The biggest sign of an energy vampire is how you feel after interacting with them. Do you feel listless, exhausted and distracted after talking with a co-worker? The biggest sign of an energy vampire is how you feel after interacting with them. Setting boundaries with an energy vampire doesnt need to be hard. The advantage of dealing with an energy vampire at work is that you have a built-in excuse for why you need to bow out of a conversation. Its the easiest and most understandable boundary to set I need to get back to work, Howes said. Heres how to get that message across to an energy vampire: Understand where they are coming from. If youre building up resentment against your vampiric colleague, try to first feel compassion for their circumstances. One thing Ive learned through my work as a psychologist is that EVs are often people who have unmet needs for attention and approval that could stem from any number of difficult or even traumatic issues from their past, Howes said. Think about it: If they were totally emotionally healthy and had great self-esteem, would they need to coercively drain others of their attention and emotional support, inspiring resentment? No, he said, the energy vampire technique is probably something they learned to try to get their needs met when they were young, and they were never taught healthier ways to connect and maintain relationships. He continued, Thinking of them that way may help you see they are a person, just like you, but who had some speed bumps and poor guidance that resulted in this unfortunate interpersonal style, so knowing this may give you some more patience and compassion when interacting with them. Dont fake attention that you dont really feel. One simple way to limit the pull of an energy vampires attention is to just not ask questions that you dont want the answer to, Ranger said. I know so many people who are like, I dont know why I said that, because I did not care, she said. Ive really trained myself to not ask questions that I dont care about the answer to. Use the swivel to redirect unwanted conversations. If the conversation starts to turn to matters that are too personal or invasive, you can always try to turn it back to work-related issues and hold the focus there, Howes said. One proven way to do this is by swiveling the discussion away from overly personal topics and onto something that you actually want to talk about. As Rebecca Nellis, the executive director of Cancer and Careers, previously told HuffPost in 2019, a swivel is where you acknowledge what the person is saying with appreciation and empathy, before then using and statements, or while statements, or an implied and, and then a new topic. Be upfront about how much time you have to interact. If redirecting conversations back to a project isnt working, you may need to be more explicit, Howes noted, suggesting that you say something like: Hey, this is interesting, but I really need to focus on my work right now. Can we talk about this later? If you are dealing with an energy vampire you must closely work with on a project, it can also help to set explicit time boundaries on conversations that are not related to the task at hand. Yes, tell me about your weekend, but I need to send this email in three minutes, Howes suggested saying. He said that when those three minutes pass, you can say: Times up! Gotta send that email. You can fill me in on the rest tomorrow. Set a timer on vent sessions. A time-limited pity party can sometimes be a helpful release of tension and a way to bond with colleagues, Ranger said, but it helps to set a timer on a colleagues vent and complaining session. Im a big fan of having an inanimate object ringing loudly to let us know its time to stop, as opposed to me, she said. That takes a lot of the pressure off of you as the person who has to tell your co-worker to wrap it up. If the energy vampire is your boss, be explicit about priorities. Setting boundaries with vampiric bosses requires tact. One way to push back is to explicitly note when your bosss interactions are taking you away from your job. Ranger said she did this once with a boss who would interrupt her computer tasks by speaking thoughts out loud. When this happened, Ranger would ask her boss, Do you want to do this [while] pointing between me and her or do you want me to do this? [while] pointing at the computer. That way, her boss was clear about the choice Ranger was facing. And ultimately if your energy vampire boss is not listening to your requests, it may be time to ask: Is the price youre paying emotionally worthy of this paycheck and this job? Or is it time to ask for a transfer to another boss, or even start looking for another job? Howes said. There are many jobs, but only one you, and youre worth caring for. Related... The presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Pennsylvania will be called to the mat Tuesday after weeks of backlash over their schools responses to surging antisemitism. Over the past several weeks, weve seen countless examples of antisemitic demonstrators on college campuses, House Education Committee Chair Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said in a statement announcing the hearing titled Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism. The administrators, Foxx said, have largely stood by, allowing horrific rhetoric to fester and grow. The hearing will examine incidents of antisemitism on each of the campuses, with Republicans and probably Democrats chastising the presidents for their actions both before recent events and in response. GOP lawmakers have already called two other hearings to discuss the rise in antisemitism at American schools, bringing in experts who have said schools have not done enough and Jewish students who testified they did not feel safe on campus. Harvard and Pennsylvania both had billionaire donors cut their funding to the schools because of their responses. Harvard first came under criticism in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack after 30 student-led groups posted a letter that blamed the attack on Israel. University President Claudine Gay at first hesitated to condemn the letter, leading to anger and accusations the school did not care for its Jewish students. The Anti-Defamation League reported 312 antisemitic incidents from Oct. 7-23 in the U.S., which is up from 64 such incidents the group found in the same period in 2022. And antisemitism was on the rise even before the attack in October: The FBI found antisemitic hate crimes went up 25 percent from 2021 to 2022. In November, UPenn had to alert the FBI about emails that were sent to university staff that were threatening violence against members of our Jewish community, specifically naming Penn Hillel and Lauder College House, according to President Liz Magill. The MIT Israel Alliance wrote a letter to the university alleging that Jewish and Israeli students were at one point physically prevented from going to class by a pro-Hamas group. At the end of November, the Department of Education announced it was investigating Harvard after complaints it did not respond to reports of harassment against Jewish and Israeli students since Oct. 7. The department was already investigating complaints of antisemitism and Islamophobia against seven other schools, including UPenn. The Universitys silence in the face of reprehensible and historic Hamas evil against the people of Israel (when the only response should be outright condemnation) is a new low. Silence is antisemitism, and antisemitism is hate, the very thing higher ed was built to obviate, former U.S. Ambassador and longtime UPenn donor Jon Huntsman said in a letter to Magill. An MIT student recently told The Hill the schools administration has ignored the calls for more protection for students. You have administrators and people in power making students feel so scared and unsafe on campus, and the MIT administration is fully aware of every single one of these cases, said Talia Khan, a 25-year-old grad student. Republicans were on the offense at the previous hearings, saying administration leadership and diversity, equity and inclusion offices have made the situation on college campuses worse. College and university presidents have a responsibility to foster and uphold a safe learning environment for their students and staff. Now is not a time for indecision or milquetoast statements, Foxx said ahead of the Tuesday hearing. By holding this hearing, we are shining the spotlight on these campus leaders and demanding they take the appropriate action to stand strong against antisemitism. All the schools are likely to point toward the resources they have provided for students and statements they have released condemning antisemitism. MIT President Sally Kornbluth launched a Standing Together Against Hate commission to combat discrimination on campus and stepped up security. There has also been special outreach on campus, according to a university spokesperson. In addition, folks across a host of offices have been actively engaged, including the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life, which encompasses MIT Hillel; the campus police, and members of our committed faculty (including those with long-time ties to Israel and the region), among others, the spokesperson added. Democrats and Republicans have been united in the concerns of the rise of antisemitism but have split on how to fix it. In the last hearing on the subject, Education Committee ranking member Bobby Scott (D-Va.) went after Republicans for trying to cut funding from the Department of Education and Office for Civil Rights, which would handle cases of discrimination such as antisemitism. Democrats are also likely to highlight the rise in Islamophobia on campuses, especially after three Palestinian students were shot in Vermont over Thanksgiving weekend, leaving one of them paralyzed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. A crazed attacker fatally stabbed four relatives including an 11-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy and then wounded two NYPD cops before they shot him to death outside his familys burning Queens home on Sunday morning, according to police. Cops raced to the home on Beach 22nd St. near Elk Drive in Far Rockaway at around 5:10 a.m. after a young girl called 911 to say her cousin was killing her family members, NYPD Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey said. The cousin, identified by police as Courtney Gordon, 38, had moved into the home weeks earlier as he faced homelessness in the wake of a separation from his wife, his distraught sister told the Daily News. This scene was chaos, said Patrick Hendry, president of the Police Benevolent Association, the NYPDs largest union. Multiple victims, a house on fire and a madman on a rampage. When two uniformed cops arrived at the home, tucked behind a long driveway, they saw a man carrying luggage as he walked out. They engaged him in basically a casual conversation. Hey, did you hear anything, do you know whats going on?' Maddrey said. Within 10 seconds, the man nodded and pulled out a kitchen steak knife. He immediately attacked both officers, Maddrey said. He stabbed one of the cops in the neck and chest area and the other in the head before one of them, a 28-year NYPD veteran, identified by sources as Edmond Decio, opened fire and fatally shot him, Maddrey said. Both officers were hospitalized but expected to recover. A couple of millimeters one way or the other, it could have been a problem, a police source said of Decios injuries. Cops found an 11-year-old girl stabbed in front of the home. She died at Cohen Childrens Medical Center. Gordon lit a living room couch on fire as he left so police couldnt get into the residence until firefighters extinguished the blaze, cops said. Once inside, they found three more dead in two back bedrooms a 12-year-old boy, a 44-year-old woman and a man in his 30s, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said. Another victim, who Gordons sister identified as their 61-year-old aunt Christine Watson, was stabbed multiple times and was in critical condition at Mount Sinai Queens, Kenny said. My aunt took him in because she felt sorry for him because hes telling her hes trying to get his life together, said the sibling, who asked not to be named. I wanted to tell her, this is bigger than us, to let him go back to the shelter, but no one was listening to me. Watson invited Gordon into the home where she lived with the other victims in the hopes of helping him put his life back together after he separated from his wife, lost his home and his job. My aunt took him in because she felt sorry for him, his sister said. I knew it was going to be bad. Gordon, whom his sister described as suffering deeply deeply from depression and mental illness had been repeatedly hospitalized due to his deteriorating mental health. One neighbor, a 24-year-old man who declined to give his name, awoke to the sound of gunshots. About 45 minutes later the police came knocking that there was a fire and we need to go, he said. He hadnt seen any past trouble at the victims home. I watched those kids grow up. Its an open space and its a little community up the driveway, so all the kids would run around and play and stuff like that, he said. I guess you cant even trust family nowadays. Its wicked work, you turn on them like that. Its just evil what was done. Jose Cruz, 50, said he heard the shots while he was out walking his dog. I never seen anything like this. This neighborhood is quiet, he said. I saw the fire from my balcony. It was in the back and front of the house I saw the bodies. The victims names have not yet been released. The killer had just one prior arrest, for a strangulation domestic violence case in the Bronx, cops said. Cops said they had never been called to the Far Rockaway home for any incidents involving Gordon in the past. Cops were interviewing the quick-thinking girl who called 911 at the 101st Precinct stationhouse. They may be able to shed some light on what occurred, Kenny said. PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) Five members of a family were found shot to death inside a Vancouver home Sunday afternoon in what the Clark County Sheriffs Office said appears to be a murder-suicide. Deputies were sent to check on the family in the 11500 Block of NE 92nd Street in the Orchards neighborhood of Vancouver around 1 p.m. after getting a text message from a family member stating they had harmed others at the residence. Deputies werent able to contact anyone at the house when they arrived. 1 dead, 1 wounded, 1 hurt in Gresham shooting Backup resources were called, including a SWAT team and a drone, which spotted several people apparently dead inside the home. When the SWAT unit and medical teams went inside, they found the 5 people, including the suspect. While the investigation is in the early stage, this appears to be a murder-suicide involving a firearm. Five family members at the residence appeared to have been shot, including the suspect, the sheriffs office said in a release. The investigation remains active and ongoing, but authorities said there is no ongoing threat to the public. The names of those involved have not been released. There is help for those in crisis. In Clark County, the Clark County Crisis Line is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week by calling the Southwest Washington Crisis Line at: 800.626.8137 | TTY 866.835.2755 For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KOIN.com. The 17th Annual Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemicals Association (GPCA) Forum, hosted by QatarEnergy, got under way in Qatar National Convention Centre, Doha on December 3. Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, Minister of State for Energy Affairs and President and CEO, QatarEnergy, and Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman Al-Saud, Minister of Energy, Saudi Arabia, delivered a Ministerial address and inaugurated the GPCA Exhibition. Al-Kaabi welcomed holding the GPCA Forum in Qatar for the first time and said: Since its establishment in 2006, the Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemicals Association has worked diligently to build a strong GCC chemical industry. Today, with more than 250 member companies from the chemical and allied industries, GPCA is focused on dealing with the most important challenges and trends impacting the use of petrochemical products. Valuable platform Al-Kaabi also welcomed the events focus on energy transition issues saying: This years event provides a valuable platform to discuss strategic priorities such as driving operational excellence, advancing new technologies, and enhancing production efficiency. Al-Saud added: As the COP28 commences, it is important to recognise that the petrochemical sector is also a crucial element in the global campaign to reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG). The petrochemical industry is often under scrutiny for environmental concern, but it has emerged as a driving force in fostering positive changes in the fight against climate change. Salim bin Nasser bin Said Al Aufi, Minister of Energy and Minerals, Oman announced Oman as the official host of the 18th Annual GPCA Forum, set to take place in December 2024. He vowed to take the actions and learnings from this years forum edition as well as previous ones and address them at next years edition, which is going to be held for the first time in Muscat, Oman. Energy transition This industry has transformed the way we live and is going to contribute positively going forward towards the energy transition as we produce renewable energy from turbines, solar and other forms of renewables. The petrochemical industry is there to contribute and is going to be an extremely important pillar. The next forum should continue that journey and make the voice of the industry even stronger, Al Aufi told delegates. Eng Abdulrahman Al-Fageeh, CEO, Sabic and Chairman, GPCA, said: The GPCA Forum takes place at a crucial time for the chemical and petrochemical industry, as we contend with important challenges that will shape the industrys future for decades to come. As ever, the chemical industry needs to remain resilient in the face of ongoing challenges and invent new avenues for growth where chemistry is an essential solution provider to the challenges the world faces. Innovating for the future, catering to the growing demands of our customers, and successfully navigating a world thats more complex than ever before, will be a key imperative for the industry in 2024 and beyond. Held under the theme Mobilising Chemistry for Impactful Transformation, the Forum continues until December 6, featuring Dr Mohammed Al-Mulla, MD & CEO, QAPCO and Vice-Chairman, GPCA, and Dr Paul Gruenwald, Global Chief Economist, S&P Global Ratings, who delivered a Keynote session about macroeconomic outlook in 2024. Speaker lineup Karen McKee, President ExxonMobil Product Solutions, ExxonMobil; Adriano Alfani, CEO, Versalis; and Jean-Marc Gilson, President and CEO, Mitsubishi Chemicals, participated in a special CEO keynote session alongside Dr Fernando J. Gomez, Head, Resource Systems and Resilience; Member of the Executive Committee, World Economic Forum, who moderated the discussion and delivered a teaser presentation. Leading regional and global chemical CEOs, including Peter Vanacker, CEO, LyondellBasell, Nadia Al Hajji, CEO, PIC, Tom Crotty, Group Director, Ineos, Paul Smith, MD Global Head of Chemicals, Citi, and Mutlaq H. Al-Morished, CEO, Tasnee, are among the speakers who will share their insights throughout the event. The 5th GPCA Legacy Award Al-Rowad, the GPCA Procurement Symposium, the inaugural Solutions Xchange, Sustainability District, and the 2nd edition of the GPCA Youth Forum are some of the key features at the forum this year that delegates will have the opportunity to enjoy. Dr Abdulwahab Al-Sadoun, Secretary General, GPCA, commented: At this years Forum weve continued our focus on delivering unrivalled quality of networking, thought leadership and content for our delegates and members, and so far, attendees response has been overwhelmingly positive. I would like to thank our host QatarEnergy for their hospitality and support to make this happen. As the chemical industry continues to be faced with new challenges and opportunities, our aim has been to facilitate the partnerships and collaboration needed to mobilise the industry around alignment and concrete action on issues such as sustainability, trade, circular economy, plastics waste management and so much more. Now in its 17th year, the Annual GPCA Forum, GPCAs flagship event, has served as the ideal platform to deliver on this objective with confidence and I wish everyone a productive time during this years forum.--TradeArabia News Service Tokyo Divers from the U.S. military and Japan's Marine Self-Defense Forces located a significant portion of the fuselage of an Osprey aircraft that crashed last week in southwest Japan, the U.S. Air Force confirmed Monday. The submerged wreckage, which includes the cockpit of the tilt-rotor aircraft, contains the bodies of five of the eight crew members who were on board, the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command said in a statement. The statement said the "combined Japanese and United States teams" that have been scouring the waters around the small island of Yakushima "had a breakthrough when their surface ships and dive teams were able to locate remains along with the main fuselage of the aircraft wreckage. The dive teams were able to confirm five additional crew members from the original team of eight that were involved with the crash." It said two of the five crew members found in the fuselage Monday had been recovered and there was "an ongoing combined effort to recover the remaining crew members from the wreckage." The Air Force declined to identify the five people found inside the wreckage on Monday. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force's frigate JS Noshiro (FFM-3) conducts a search and rescue operation at the site where a U.S. military V-22 Osprey aircraft crashed into the sea off Yakushima Island, Kagoshima prefecture, Japan, Nov. 30, 2023. / Credit: Kyodo via REUTERS Only one of the total eight crew members' remains had been found before Monday. That person was identified last week by the Air Force as Staff Sgt. Jacob Galliher, 24. The young father from Massachusetts had been assigned to the 43rd Intelligence Squadron as a direct support operator. The Air Force said the U.S. aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, its air wing and other assets including unmanned vehicles had joined the search operation. Divers were also taking part in the huge search operation. Last week's crash of the U.S. Air Force CV-22 was the first-ever fatal Osprey accident in Japan. The aircraft, assigned to Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, had been on a training flight. It departed from Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Yamaguchi Prefecture but then requested an emergency landing on the tiny island of Yakushima just before crashing off of its shore. Eyewitnesses said the aircraft flipped over and burst into flame before plunging into the ocean. The aircraft had been headed for Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, the largest U.S. base in the region. Japan's Coast Guard, aided by local fishermen, have been conducting round-the-clock search and rescue operations off Yakushima, in Kagoshima Prefecture, since the crash. Some pieces of the wreckage found in the water have been handed over to the U.S. military, which has exclusive rights to investigate the accident under the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Japan. Wreckage believed to belong to the U.S. military V-22 Osprey that crashed into the sea is collected at Anbo port at Yakushima Island, Kagoshima prefecture, western Japan, Nov. 30, 2023. / Credit: Kyodo via REUTERS Japan was also forced to become a bystander during the investigation into a previous Osprey crash off Okinawa in 2016, which left two U.S. airmen injured. The new crash the latest in a series of accidents involving the Osprey around the world has triggered widespread anger and alarm in Japan, a vital U.S. ally. Tokyo formally asked the U.S. military to ground its Ospreys in the country until thorough inspections could be carried out to confirm their safety. U.S. forces have continued flying the aircraft, however, drawing warnings from some observers that the incident could damage bilateral ties between Washington and Tokyo. Japan, the only other nation whose military flies the aircraft, has temporarily grounded its Ospreys. Japan's Ministry of Defense said the U.S. has a total of six Ospreys based at Yokota and 24 at the Futenma base on Okinawa. The hybrid aircraft was first deployed in Japan over a decade ago, able to take off and land vertically like a helicopter, it can then change the angle of its rotors to fly like a plane, at high speed. A MV-22B Osprey is seen coming in to land on the USS America off the coast of Brisbane, Tuesday, June 20, 2023. / Credit: Darren England / AP If all of the crew members died on the Osprey that went down off Yakushima last week, it will be the deadliest accident involving the aircraft ever. There have been a spate of fatal U.S. Osprey crashes in recent years, however, most recently during a multinational training exercise on an Australian island in August, which killed three U.S. Marines and left eight others hospitalized. All five U.S. Marines on board an Osprey died the previous summer when their aircraft crashed in the California desert. Mainichi, a left-of-center newspaper, urged Tokyo to insist on participating in the investigation into last week's crash and said Japan's continued sidelining after serious military accidents underscored the need for revisions to the bilateral agreement under which Japan hosts tens of thousands of U.S. forces. A new $8.6 billion, five-year, host-nation support budget was agreed to by Japan just last year, to run through 2027. The incident is straining U.S.-Japan relations just as Tokyo rushes to fortify its southwest flank amid China's aggressive expansion in the region, and it could scuttle Japan's efforts to gain local support for a planned deployment of Ospreys in the southwest Saga Prefecture in 2025. A map of Japan shows the capital Tokyo, national borders and other important cities. / Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto What's next for Rush? Cary Grant: The man we thought we knew Companies, countries battle to develop quantum computers | 60 Minutes (FOX40.COM) A 54-year-old woman has been taken to the hospital with moderate injuries after she was attacked by dogs in Stockton, according to the Stockton Police Department. Police said the attack happened on Sunday around 10 a.m. in the area of San Joaquin Street and Hazelton Avenue. 800 pounds of marijuana, semi-automatic weapons seized by deputies When officers arrived at the scene, the woman was with medical personnel following the attack, police said. The woman was taken to a local hospital for treatment to her injuries, but police added that the injuries do not appear to be life-threatening. The dogs left the area prior to police arriving, the department said. At this time, it is unknown who the dogs belong to. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to FOX40. Over the past 24 hours, 61 combat clashes took place at the front, Russia launched 5 missile strikes and 44 airstrikes and fired 37 times from multiple-launch rocket systems. Source: General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on Facebook, information as of 18:00 on 4 December Details: On the Kupiansk front, Ukrainian defenders repelled 10 Russian attacks near Synkivka and Petropavlivka (Kharkiv Oblast). On the Lyman front, the defence forces repelled eight Russian attacks near Serebrianka Forest, Bilohorivka (Luhansk Oblast), and Terni (Donetsk Oblast), where Russians, with the support of aircraft, tried to push back Ukrainian troops from the positions they had gained. On the Bakhmut front, the defence forces repelled nine Russian attacks near Bohdanivka, Klishchiivka and Andriivka (Donetsk Oblast). On the Avdiivka front, Ukrainian soldiers repelled 15 Russian attacks east of Novobakhmutivka, Stepove, Avdiivka, and Sieverne (Donetsk Oblast). The Russians unsuccessfully tried to break through the defence of Ukrainian troops with the support of aircraft. On the Marinka front, the defence forces continue to hold back the Russian troops, who, with the support of aircraft, carried out 14 unsuccessful attacks on the positions of Ukrainian defenders near Marinka and Novomykhailivka (Donetsk Oblast). On the Shakhtarsk front, the Russians did not conduct offensive (assault) actions. On the Zaporizhzhia front, the defence forces repelled all Russian attacks near Robotyne in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, where the Russians tried to retake the lost position. Quote: "The defence forces continue to hold positions on the left bank of Dnipro in Kherson Oblast. They continue to inflict fire damage on the enemy. During the day, the aircraft of the defence forces made 10 strikes on the areas where Russian personnel, weapons and military equipment were concentrated, and 2 on the enemys anti-aircraft missile systems. Units of Rocket Forces and Artillery inflicted damage on three areas where Russian personnel, weapons and military equipment were concentrated, two on anti-aircraft missile systems and seven artillery assets of the enemy." Support UP or become our patron! Law enforcement agents in Italy and Spain investigated efforts to make counterfeit and inedible olive oil, leading to the seizure of over 68,000 gallons of contaminated oil and 11 arrests, officials said. Schemes to make fake extra virgin olive oil are a common practice, according to a Dec. 4 news release from Europol, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation. Police described these schemes as illegal and able to pose a public health risk. Italian and Spanish police investigated one such scheme in which extra virgin olive oil was diluted with lampante oil, the release said. Named after its use as fuel for oil lamps, lampante oil is described as a lower-quality variant of olive oil with higher acidity, a distinctly unpleasant smell and undesirable flavor. Lampante oil is made from bad olives and could be dangerous or not depending on the state of the olives it is produced from, Europol told McClatchy News via email. Europol spokesperson Ina Mihaylova said lampante oil is forbidden for direct human consumption in Spain, but not in other countries. The investigation into fake olive oil led to police raids in Ciudad Real in Spain and Tuscany and Sicily in Italy, the release said. Police in Spain seized about 68,680 gallons of fake olive oil, four vehicles, about $98,500 and other paper evidence, Europol said. In Italy, police said they inspected three factories suspected of making fake olive oil, took samples and gathered documents. One company was sanctioned for irregular labeling of products. Eleven suspects were arrested in connection with the counterfeit oil investigation, police said. Police did not release the identity of the suspects or the charges they were facing. 1,800 AirPods, luxury cars seized as part of $92 million fraud scheme, European cops say Family trafficked their children, forced them to beg, commit crimes, European cops say Minors drove stolen cars across Europe in large-scale theft scheme, police say (FOX40.COM) The Calaveras County Sheriffs Office said it has arrested a 40-year-old man in connection to the seizure of 800 pounds of marijuana, a shotgun, three semi-automatic handguns, and one rifle. Officials said the arrest was made on November 15 on the 400 block of Lakeview Drive in Mountain Ranch, which is about 13 miles east of San Andreas. Video Above: Calaveras High School students remember Lilly Butler According to CCSO, a search warrant was executed by the sheriffs Marijuana Enforcement Team as part of an ongoing investigation into illegal cultivation in the county. Woman from Michigan who went missing in Calaveras County found dead During the search, deputies found the marijuana and guns, which allegedly belonged to the 40-year-old man connected to the case. The Calaveras County Sheriffs Office would like to remind the public that while cannabis cultivation is legal in California under certain guidelines, it requires compliance with state and local regulations. Illegal cultivation and distribution activities will be thoroughly investigated and prosecuted, the agency said in a news release. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to FOX40. By Melanie Burton MELBOURNE (Reuters) -An Aboriginal group on Monday called for the chief executive of Sandfire to step down for the miner's failure to address heritage damage at a copper mine in Western Australia. Sandfire said last week it had discovered damage to an artefact scatter at its Monty copper mine that had occurred over 2017 and 2018, and that it had informed traditional owners and the state's heritage regulator. Chief Executive Brendan Harris, who took the top job in April, said in a statement to Reuters that he had only become aware of the issue in September and had informed relevant parties straight away. I unreservedly apologise personally and on behalf of Sandfire to the Yugunga-Nya," he said, adding that a review was under way to better understand process failures and the time taken to review and respond to the situation. The Yugunga-Nya group said Sandfire had waited a year to tell them about the damage, and called for a government inquiry. State Premier Roger Cook supported their demands, and on Monday called Sandfire's actions "egregious", local press reported. Investors are closely watching Australia's management of Aboriginal heritage after Rio Tinto destroyed historically significant rock shelters in 2020. Western Australia, which had beefed up its heritage protection in response to the incident, agreed to roll back those protections back earlier this year, in response to an outcry from farmers. In a statement, the Yugunga-Nya called on the Sandfire board to remove Harris and asked board chairperson John Richards to "take control of the situation and engage openly and meaningfully with the Yugunga-Nya". Sandfire had declined to offer compensation, said elder Andrew Gentle Snr in a statement. "If something of value is destroyed compensation should be paid. Sandfire's actions show they don't value our heritage," he said. Shares closed up 2.6% amid gains in the broader resource sector. Last week, Sandfire said its internal investigation was "significantly complicated" by staff departures after the mine was placed on care and maintenance. (Reporting by Melanie Burton; editing by Miral Fahmy and Sharon Singleton) Its completely blown me away, said Dylan Harris, founder of Lupine Travel. Its the last place I expected to sell so well. The destination: Afghanistan, a country that the UK Foreign Office warns is extremely dangerous. Mr Harris told The Independent: Unbelievably this year, Afghanistan is our most popular destination. The Wigan-based extreme travel firm previously operated to Afghanistan, but dropped the country when the Taliban took over in 2021. We expected it to be up to a decade or more before it would be safe enough to travel there, Mr Harris said. But it turned out in the end that its actually safer to travel there now than it was before, because the people who we were trying to avoid before are the people in charge. One of my staff members went over in September to do the initial research trip. That went well. Last month we put three trips on sale for next year. They sold out immediately. Now weve got eight trips next year and theyve all completely sold out. There was always demand for it prior to the Taliban [takeover], but I think a lot of people were worried about safety. Whereas now people arent as concerned about the safety issue. The only thing: theres a lot more red tape than there used to be. So every time we move from one city to the next, its a case of getting all the paperwork checked out. All eight tours for next year are sold out, with two tours available for 2025. The price of 2,250 covers 10 days of travel, taking in the capital, Kabul; the historic city of Herat; the Buddha niches in Bamiyan, where the Taliban destroyed the giant statues in 2001; Band-e-Amir National Park; through the Hindu Kush to Mazar-e-Sharif; religious sites in Balkh; and attending a traditional game of buzkashi a distant cousin of polo, in which horse riders attempt to score by propelling a calf or goat carcass into a goal. Flights are extra involving travel via Abu Dhabi, Dubai or Istanbul. The FCDO advises against all travel to Afghanistan. It specifically warns: There is an ongoing and high threat of terrorist attacks throughout Afghanistan, including around airports. Travel throughout Afghanistan is extremely dangerous. There is a significant risk of detention of British nationals. Our ability to provide consular assistance is severely limited and cannot be delivered in person within Afghanistan. The Foreign Office adds: If you choose to travel to Afghanistan against FCDO advice, monitor media reporting and make sure you have robust contingency plans in place. Be vigilant at all times, keep others informed including family and friends of your travel plans and consider your necessary routes in advance. Standard travel insurance policies issued in the UK are not valid in nations to which the Foreign Office advises against travel. Columbus, for example, says it will decline any claim arising as a result of your travel to a country ... to which the Travel Advice Unit of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office ... has advised the public not to travel. The Independent asked Mr Harris about the ethical issue of travel to Afghanistan: effectively providing financial support to a regime that is internationally vilified. Its always an ongoing issue with a lot of the destinations we work with. We dont work directly with the Taliban. Obviously the Afghan embassies need to issue the visas. But the most important thing is: we get over there, we meet the local people. We dont have any interaction with the Taliban. Were meeting people who are really happy to see foreign faces coming back over and supporting hotels, supporting the local economy. One problem specific to Afghanistan is the treatment of female visitors. During the research trip, the Taliban decided that women were not allowed to visit a National Park near Bamiyan. Mr Harris said the ban has now been revoked, but that alternative activities are being organised for some locations in case female travellers are excluded from parts of the main itinerary. Attorney General Ken Paxton, shown at a May news conference, filed a lawsuit Nov. 30 accusing Pfizer of misrepresenting the effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton couldve saved himself a lot of trouble by checking the states own numbers before he sued Pfizer. The Texas Department of State Health Services even put the figures into easy-to read charts: A soaring gray line depicting the higher rate of COVID-19-related deaths among unvaccinated Texans over the past two years, hovering well above the blue and orange lines for deaths among those who got vaccines and boosters. Unvaccinated Texans were 11x more likely to die of a COVID-19 associated illness than fully vaccinated Texans, a bright green box tells visitors to the state-run COVID-19 Deaths dashboard. But the COVID-19 dashboard doesnt make headlines. Paxton does. And his latest crusade, a lawsuit accusing Pfizer of misrepresenting the effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine, spins an anti-vax tale at odds with state data and Texans experience. Stacks and stacks of studies have demonstrated that COVID-19 vaccines were effective at reducing the chances of serious illness or death from the virus. Yet there was Paxton on Friday telling conservative radio host Chris Salcedo that Pfizers vaccine may have been, and it looks like it was, not effective at all. Worse, his lawsuit claims some areas saw higher rates of death among vaccinated people than unvaccinated ones. Paxtons office did not respond to my inquiries Friday. Paxtons lawsuit which Pfizer flatly says has no merit recycles misleading arguments that fact-checkers have roundly debunked. Lest there be any doubt this is a political stunt on behalf of an anti-vax base, Paxton did not file the case in Austin, where his office is headquartered; or Dallas, where Pfizers Texas agent is located. He filed in Lubbock, where the case is assured to reach a conservative judge. While politically charged lawsuits are Paxtons norm, this case is a vehicle for pushing a false narrative that undermines public health. The rhetoric behind this lawsuit does nothing to make us safer, Terri Burke, executive director of the Houston-based Immunization Partnership, told me via email. In fact, by casting doubts on a vaccine manufacturers credibility, it serves to further erode confidence in all vaccines. Paxtons lawsuit also exhibits curiously selective memory. He castigates Pfizer for the fact that its vaccine didnt swiftly end the pandemic. But he ignores other factors that surely prolonged it, such as Gov. Greg Abbotts decision to end mask mandates and lift all occupancy restrictions on businesses in March 2021, when less than 13% of Texans had received any shots, and only 6% were fully vaccinated. Paxtons lawsuit also blasts Pfizer for misleadingly casting itself and its vaccine as the champions of science that would bring about an end of the pandemic and return America to normal. Notably absent from the lawsuit: Similar comments by then-President Donald Trump, a Paxton pal who touted the COVID-19 vaccines as "amazing" and "a miracle." This will quickly and dramatically reduce deaths and hospitalizations, Trump said at a December 2020 event announcing the plans to roll out the first COVID-19 vaccines, with Abbott and other governors in attendance at the White House. And within a short period of time, I think we want to get back to normal. I recognize some people did not want to take a new vaccine, or any vaccine at all. That choice belongs to each person. (Ultimately, nearly two-thirds of Texans became fully vaccinated.) The big lie of the pandemic was the suggestion the coronavirus wasnt all that bad, that no safety measures masks, distancing efforts or optional vaccines were needed against a virus that killed 1.1 million Americans. Otherwise healthy people expired on ventilators. Overwhelmed morgues needed refrigerated trucks to hold the bodies. Downplaying the danger of COVID-19 was wishful thinking of the deadliest kind. Instead of leaving that difficult chapter in the past, Paxtons lawsuit reopens it and attempts to rewrite it. Paxton seeks more than $10 million in civil penalties against Pfizer, plus a judges ruling that the pharmaceutical giant cannot keep touting the effectiveness of its vaccine. But really Paxton seeks the courts imprimatur on an alternative reality, one where real medical breakthroughs that protected millions of lives are somehow fake, and dangerous misinformation is somehow true. Lets hope the facts prevail. Grumet is the Statesmans Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@statesman.com or via Twitter at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at statesman.com/news/columns. This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas AG Paxton's lawsuit against Pfizer pushes false COVID narrative Semafor Signals NEWS One of Hong Kongs most prominent pro-democracy activists, who was arrested as part of the citys broad crackdown on dissent, has announced that she has skipped bail and moved to Canada. In a letter published on Instagram on her 27th birthday, Agnes Chow wrote that she had moved to Toronto in September to pursue her masters. She said she would not be following the polices orders to return to Hong Kong in December as required to meet her bail conditions. Ive decided not to go back, and probably will never return for the rest of my life, Chow wrote. Her potentially permanent departure from Hong Kong symbolizes the silencing of dissent and ongoing crackdown on basic freedoms that has worsened since the imposition of Beijings national security law in 2020. SIGNALS Semafor Signals: Global insights on today's biggest stories. Chows announcement is likely an embarrassment to Hong Kong authorities who have ramped up threats towards dissidents living in exile, the New York Times reports. Chow wrote on Instagram that in order to get her passport back, she was required to visit Shenzhen where she was escorted to the headquarters of Chinese technology giant Tencent as well as attend an exhibition detailing the Communist Partys accomplishments. After the trip, she had to write a letter of thanks to the police for exposing her to the great developments of the motherland. In allowing Chow to travel to Canada and her apparent willingness to visit the mainland, Beijing authorities may have wanted to use the activist as an example of a compliant and reformed dissident who was repentant enough to be re-educated, Steve Tsang, the head of SOASs China Institute in London, told the Times. It may have worked, but authorities underestimate the spirit of the young people in Hong Kong, he added. Chows visit to the mainland is reflective of Chinas decades-long history of attempting to indoctrinate citizens through re-education. The most widely-known example is the governments crackdown on Uyghurs in Xinjiang many who have been forced into re-education camps which China has claimed helps combat extremism. Hong Kong, under Chinas influence, will introduce patriotic education in schools, including requiring elementary school students in 2025 to learn about national security and Chinas achievements under the Communist Partys rule. Secondary school textbooks will state that Hong Kong was not a British colony, and that there were external forces behind the 2019 pro-democracy protests, framing them as a national security threat. Chows announcement of self-exile and pressure from authorities shows Hong Kongs wholesale curtailment of basic freedoms, writes Quartz reporter Mary Hui on X. Chows announcement comes in the wake of reports that a South China Morning Post journalist has been unreachable for a month after a trip to Beijing to cover a defense forum stoking fears that she could have been detained by Chinese authorities. A statement from Minnie Chans family that was published in the Alibaba-owned newspaper stated that Chan was on personal leave in Beijing and needed time to handle a personal matter. The SCMP has not addressed concerns about her welfare, and has dismissed her disappearance as speculation. In 2022, Al Jazeera reported that another SCMP reporter who was not identified had returned after a 9-month disappearance with a new assignment to cover less politically-sensitive topics. stc Bahrain has announced the successful demonstration of its pioneering RedCap use cases demo showcasing the commercial readiness of RedCap technology and marking a milestone in the companys 5G and 5G-Advanced strategy. RedCap, short for Reduced Capability, is a groundbreaking technology that integrates seamlessly with 5G networks, enhancing reliability, efficiency, and scalability. By successfully demonstrating RedCap use cases on stc live network, this reaffirms stc Bahrains commitment to driving innovation and revolutionising the telecom landscape in line with Bahrain governments 2030 digital vision. First operator We are excited to be the first operator in Bahrain to enable RedCap Network Readiness for Commercialisation, said Eng Ahmed Al-Sharif, CTDO of stc Bahrain. We believe that RedCaps application in our 5G and 5G-advanced strategy has a huge potential; with moderate speeds, low latency and adaptability to IoT such as wearables, AR/VR, CCTV, it will provide reliable and efficient solutions across various sectors, making a positive impact on businesses and communities. Moreover, it will play a major role in the future of Energy efficient mobile communications and further digitise the development of Bahrain as a smart and connected society, added Al-Sharif. The trial is also a major step forward for the development of RedCap in the region where stc Bahrain is demonstrating its commitment to innovation and leadership in the deployment of next-generation wireless technologies.--TradeArabia News Service The Air Force is expanding its study of whether service members who worked with nuclear missiles have had unusually high rates of cancer after a preliminary review determined that a deeper examination is needed. The initial study was launched in response to reports that many who served are now ill. The Air Force isnt making its initial findings of cancer numbers public for a month or so, but released its initial assessment Monday that more review is necessary. Air Force investigating potential brain cancer cluster at Cannon AFB Weve determined that additional study is warranted based on preliminary analyses of the data, said Lt. Col. Keith Beam, one of several Air Force medical officers who updated reporters on the services missile community cancer review. The findings are part of a sweeping review undertaken by the Air Force earlier this year to determine if missileers the launch officers who work underground to operate the nations silo-launched nuclear missiles were exposed to unsafe contaminants. The review began after scores of those current or former missile launch officers came forward this year to report they have been diagnosed with cancer. In response, medical teams have conducted thousands of tests of the air, water, soil and surface areas inside and around each of the Air Forces three nuclear missile bases: Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. At a Dec. 1 briefing with reporters to discuss its findings ahead of the release, the Air Force said none of the more than 2,000 samples of air, water and soil at either the Montana or Wyoming bases came back showing harmful levels of contamination. The service has not yet published results from the North Dakota base. However, four locations in the underground launch control capsules where the missileers worked had unsafe levels of PCBs oily or waxy substances that have been identified as a likely carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency. Decontamination of those sites is underway. But while that data may show that the air, water and soil are safe now, it still raises questions as to what earlier missile launch officers may have breathed in or been exposed to in the past. The silos and underground control capsules were dug during the 1960s and much of that infrastructure hasnt been updated since. We cant go back and test to fully quantify what was there in the 90s or 2000s, or even the 50s and 60s, said Col. Tory Woodard, commander of the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine. But we can use this data to help us inform what those risks might have been. Fighter pilots at greater risk of certain cancers, study concludes The expanded Air Force study will look not just at missileers and maintainers, but at all who support the ICBM mission, from security forces to cyber defenders. Environmental sampling efforts are also slated to expand to Californias Vandenberg Space Force Base, which test-launches unarmed ICBMs throughout the year, in early 2024, the Air Force said. Woodard said between the sampling and further data review, it will help the Air Force build a risk profile of what past members may have been exposed to. To help with that, the Air Force is expanding its review of medical records to try to account for as many service members as possible. The initial dataset only goes back to 2001, when DOD began using electronic medical records. But the group they hope to capture includes any personnel who worked with military nuclear missiles going back to 1976, and will add Department of Veterans Affairs data and state cancer registries. The limitations that were discovered with this initial dataset is driving us to open the aperture to ensure that we are capturing as many cases as possible, particularly among those who previously served in missile-related career fields, the Air Force said in a statement. In all, the study hopes to capture data on all missile community members who served from 1976 to 2010. The study has also prompted the Air Force to track occupational hazards at missile bases differently than it has in the past. Previously, the School of Aerospace Medicine staffers who perform occupational safety checks at bases across the Air Force treated missile bases as administrative duty locations, meaning they werent as closely scrutinized for job safety as industrial shops were, Woodard said. As it finds evidence of hazardous materials at nuclear missile sites, the military will begin logging those potential exposures in airmens electronic health records. This process will change ... how we evaluate and treat those jobs in the future, Woodard said. Higher cancer rates found in military pilots, ground crews The Air Force response is far different this time than it has been in the past, when earlier generations of missile launch officers raised concerns about illnesses among their community. For years, the missileers were told in multiple Air Force reviews that there was no cause for concern. But the issue received significantly more attention this year as scores of current or former officers or their surviving family members joined forces and went public with self-reported data of their cancers. In particular, 41 of those launch officers self-reported diagnoses of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer. Those families have formed an organization, called the Torchlight Initiative, to heighten awareness on the issue. While the Air Force review is looking at a broader set of 14 common cancers, the number of self-reported non-Hodgkin lymphoma cases is striking because the community of missile launch officers is very small. Nationwide rates of the condition are 18.7 per 100,000 people, according to the National Cancer Institute. For comparison, there have only been about 21,000 who have served as missileers since the 1960s, according to the Torchlight Initiative. The entire missile community population to include maintainers to fix the warheads and security forces who patrolled the sites is likely about 84,000, the Air Force said. In a statement, the Torchlight Initiative said that despite the air, water, and soil findings, the PCB results are concerning. The missile community continues to struggle with disproportionate rates of cancer. The community is in desperate need of appropriate exposure documentation so they can get the care they need. The heightened response in the Air Force is part of an overall sea change within the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs to look more bluntly at the issue of exposure to toxic contaminants, such as exposure to radiation or harmful air particles in military occupations. It often still requires a grassroots effort, whether by the Torchlight Initiative, or by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who breathed in toxic fumes from trash-burning pits on base, or by individual pilots drawing attention to numbers of sickened aviators who all flew the same airframe, such as the Navys E-2 Hawkeye radar plane, to drive further action on military cancer clusters. Perhaps the biggest difference from years past in the Air Forces missileer community is that a number of those diagnosed officers are still serving, and many of the officers leading the missile community now have ties to former missileers who have been diagnosed with or have died of cancer. I personally know a number of the folks who are non-Hodgkin lymphoma survivors, so a lot of empathy and a lot of desire to understand better, said Col. Barry Little, commander of the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base. Were leaving no stone unturned. Air Force Times Editor Rachel S. Cohen contributed to this story. The Air Force said it is now examining whether 14 different cancers may be more prevalent among its active-duty and veteran missileers and expanding an ongoing study to see if service has put their health at increased risk. Carcinogens that likely cause cancer -- such as polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs -- were detected and cleaned up at three Air Force nuclear missile bases in the U.S. over the past year, the service said in an update Friday. But officials said they've only scratched the surface and are examining potential links for those who served at newer and older bases in an even larger health study expected to be finished in June 2024. The Air Force commissioned a study and environmental testing at the three missile bases after a Space Force Guardian and former missileer created a presentation in December 2022 asking, "Do missileers have increased cancer risk?" according to a slide from a town hall provided by Air Force Global Strike Command. Read Next: Dozens of Troops Suspected of Advocating Overthrow of US Government, New Pentagon Extremism Report Says "We want to reassure people that have served at those prior bases, that we're not just looking at people that served at the three active missile bases," Col. Tory Woodard, the commander of the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, said. "We know that some people that previously were missileers are now serving in other locations, many of them, you know, serve at the Pentagon ... Our data set is looking at people that served across the Air Force." The initial environmental studies conducted throughout this year included the three active-duty Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile bases -- Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana; Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota; and F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming. Other bases will now also be screened for environmental carcinogens. Air Force officials said Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, which does rocket launches and missile tests, is one of the sites that will receive additional environmental testing and could lead to others being examined. "We will use the environmental sampling results from Vandenberg, historical documentation and a review of current operations to help us define what, if any, environmental sampling should be done," Woodard told Military.com in a follow-up email. A third round of environmental sampling is scheduled for next spring, according to service officials. But in addition to examining air, water, soil and surface samples in and around missile alert facilities, a larger health study is also ongoing. A town hall presentation from Air Force Global Strike Command shared with Military.com on Friday showed the service is also looking at veterans who served at older Titan II and Minuteman II bases, including Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota; Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona; Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota; Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri; McConnell Air Force Base, Kansas; and Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas. While the Space Force Guardian's presentation a year ago looked primarily at rates of non-Hodgkin lymphoma among missileers who served, primarily, at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Air Force officials now acknowledge the problem could be more widespread than initially thought. "This is a large multi-phase study pulling from multiple DoD, VA, national and state databases to include electronic medical records, cancer rates, and cancer indexes and death indexes," Woodard said. "The study is not looking at only non-Hodgkin's lymphoma ... We want to make sure that we're not missing any other cancers. "So, we're really as we do this, we're looking for 14 common cancers, to make sure that we look at all those rates of cancers," he said. In the 36 cancer cases among missileers the Space Force officer detailed in January, 10 were diagnosed as non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Two developed Hodgkin lymphoma, and 24 developed another form of cancer. Overall, eight of the 36 missileers with cancer diagnoses, the majority of whom served at Malmstrom sometime between 1997 and 2007, have died. In 2001, the Air Force Institute for Operational Health -- now called the Defense Institute for Medical Operations -- did a site evaluation and sampled for potential chemical and biological contaminants at Malmstrom after cases of various cancers from missileers were reported -- including cervical, thyroid, Hodgkin lymphoma and two cases of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in which those patients died, according to a report issued in 2005. The Air Force said in 2005, following the release of the report, that "there is not sufficient evidence to consider the possibility of a cancer clustering to justify further investigation" and that "sometimes illnesses tend to occur by chance alone." But the Air Force Medical Service, which is conducting the new "Missile Community Cancer Study," now says those conclusions may be outdated. Under a frequently asked question section on the service's website, the office says that the findings from two decades ago may have changed. "The studies that were done in 2001 and 2005, the DoD did not have a large electronic medical record, there were just some data limitations," Woodard said. "So, we're in a much better position now to do this study." The large-scale missileer health study is scheduled to be complete by June 2024. Related: Elevated Levels of Carcinogens Found at 2nd Air Force Nuclear Missile Base The U.S. military said Monday it located five more bodies from last weeks fatal Osprey crash in southwestern Japan. Search teams, made up of ships and divers, located the five bodies along with the main fuselage of the CV-22 Osprey aircraft, which crashed near Yakushima, Japan, on Nov. 29. The discovery means six of the bodies of the Osprey crew have now been recovered from the aircraft, which took off with a team of eight. One body from the wreckage was recovered last week. The military identified that person over the weekend as Air Force Staff Sgt. Jacob Galliher, 24, of Massachusetts, who was assigned to the 43rd Intelligence Squadron based out of Yokota Air Base in Japan. Air Force Special Operations Command said teams were continuing to search for the remaining two bodies. The military has also turned to dispatching professional support for the care of the families, officials said in a statement. As efforts persist for the location and recovery of the entire crew, the privacy of the families and loved ones impacted by this tragic incident remains a great concern. The Osprey crash prompted Japan to suspend all nonemergency flights of the hybrid aircraft, but the U.S. is continuing to use them for the time being as crews search for the rest of the bodies. The Osprey, which takes off like a helicopter but can cruise at a faster rate, is typically used to transport special forces. The aircraft has faced persistent issues with crashes, including another one in Japan in 2016. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill. A small patch of snow on the ground in Douai, in Hauts de France French weather forecasters are going on strike over their ousting by algorithms that predicted a heatwave in freezing Strasbourg this week. Three unions at Meteo-France said they would down tools starting on Monday until Jan 7 because of the increasing reliance on a new forecast system called 3P that gives pride of place to automation according to Jerome Lartisant, the head of the FO union. The FO union, along with Solidaires-Meteo and SNM-CGT, said that, barring major weather warnings, automated bulletins and forecasts were no longer systematically supervised by humans, and could be published as they are. Since Nov 13, weather forecast data models have been crunched together via an algorithm and then directly sent to Meteo-Frances internet site or mobile application. The software that has led to the strike has predicted that the eastern city of Strasbourg will hit a baking 28C on Dec 9 despite it currently experiencing freezing temperatures. A whole load of failings The FO union published the error on X, formerly Twitter, to illustrate the errors of this forecasting chain, which is not yet complete but which has been declared operational because there are no forecasters to keep doing the job. There are far fewer human interventions and proofreaders, said Francois Giroux, the CGT national manager for regional channel France 3. Weve seen errors in the forecasts. We have customers who are not happy and who are calling us to tell us about it. He added: This data includes absurd mistakes, forecasts of temperatures of 28 degrees in Brittany in November, forecasts of snow when temperatures are at 10 degrees a whole load of failings that our organisation isnt able to correct. Unions have blamed staff cuts for the debacle. Mr Lartisant told Liberation that previously, seven people assessed supercomputer bulletins, one for each major region, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. With the new organisation, there is now just one person in charge of this. Lienor Feuga, of Solidaires-Meteo, told France Inter radio: In the past 15 years, Meteo-France has lost around a third of its staff and this shift (to the automated system) has taken place due to a lack of human resources when the tools were clearly not ready for this change. She added: Forecasters are suffering immensely and it sends a catastrophic image whereas we claim to be an organisation that is on the absolute cutting edge in the field of forecasting. Meteo-France management says it has entered talks with unions over the issue and that it is confident that any outstanding bugs will swiftly be ironed out. This is a hugely exciting technology The strike comes less than a month after reports that a new AI model created by Google DeepMind can produce precise forecasts in less than a minute, after being trained on 40 years of meteorological data from weather stations, satellite images and radar records. GraphCast has already shown it can identify extreme weather events much sooner, spotting Hurricane Lee would make landfall in Nova Scotia nine days before it hit in September three days earlier than traditional forecasts. Unlike traditional models which rely on running current conditions through physics equations and computer algorithms, the new programme uses a neural network to learn how the atmosphere evolves over time. Speaking to The Telegraph, Matthew Chantry, machine learning co-ordinator at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which is already using the program, said: In the last 18 months, weve seen the emergence of a new possibility for making weather forecasts directly with machine learning models. This is a hugely exciting technology. It is likely the beginning of a revolution in how our weather forecasts are created. 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 third edition of one of the worlds largest light art festivals, Noor Riyadh, has returned to the Saudi capital. Casting a glow over the capital, the festival showcases the talents of more than 100 globally acclaimed artists, exploring light as a force that brings people together. The festival is also supported by an array of workshops, artistic experiences, guided tours, family activities and talks for visitors of all backgrounds. While emerging artists will enjoy discussions on various creative mediums, families and children will have a chance to create music and generative art under the supervision of world-class talent. With Noor Riyadh now in its second week, here is a selection of not-to-miss 10 highlights. Noor Talks: The Young Arts Ecosystem: This panel discussion explores Saudi Arabias fast-growing arts ecosystem through the eyes of younger artists in the Riyadh Art programme. Nada Al Turki, Ibrahim Romman, Raghad Al Subaie and Maya Alathel will discuss the need to ensure sustainable and meaningful structures for future generations at the panel. 7pm on December 8 at JAX District The Art of Sound, Light and Architecture: Learn more about the artistic practices on show at Noor Riyadh with a workshop, exploring the use of sound, light and architecture. Led by artists Latifa Al Bokhari and Abdulrahman Taha. 7pm on December 7, 8, 9, 14 and 15 at JAX District Drawing Noor Riyadh: Experiment with a range of mark making tools and methodologies to reimagine some of the works on show at Noor Riyadh during a drawing workshop led by Muath Al Hazmi at. 7pm on December 5, 10, 11 and 12 at JAX District Urban Movement: Explore the relationships between people and places with an artist-led workshop by Bilal Allaf, where urban signals and signs are used to develop a set of collaborative movements and performances. 9pm on December 7, 8, 9, 14 and 15 at JAX District Legends of Lore: Immerse yourself in an enchanting storytelling session and compete for the title of 'Master Storyteller of Legends' with the participation of artist Hatem Al-Ahmad. Assisted by role-playing and props, visitors will guide one another through timeless legends and tales, connected to the works on show at Noor Riyadh. 9pm on December 8 and 15 at Wadi Hanifa The Art Trail Treasure Hunt: Embark on a playful treasure hunt and immerse yourself in rich visual and sensory experiences, offering deeper perspectives on the art installations on show at Noor Riyadh. 8pm on December 4, 9, 10 and 11 at Salam Park Architectural Art Walk: Explore the delicate relationship between architecture and public spaces on a guided walk. Along the way, visitors are invited to reflect on Riyadh's dynamic blend of culture and design, unearthing societal transitions and fresh perspectives. 9pm on December 8, 9, 13 and 14 at KAFD Generative Art: Give children a glimpse into the future of generative art with an immersive workshop exploring the relationship between art and technology. 7pm daily, until December 16 at Wadi Namar Guiding Hands: Teach your children to slow down, enhance their visual memory and collaborate better. During this workshop they will first wander through artworks, and then try to creatively recreate the work using different colours and mediums. 7pm daily, until December 16 at Salam Park Making Music: Give your children a chance to play and write music with a music theory workshop focused on developing natural sounds. TradeArabia News Service The J. Marvin Jones Federal Building and Mary Lou Robinson United States Courthouse in Amarillo. A 30-year-old man who admitted to distributing fentanyl and has been linked to violent crimes in Amarillo was sentenced Thursday to 20 years in federal prison. Johnny Evrick Johnson, Jr., appeared before U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk for a sentencing hearing after he pleaded guilty in June to a count of distribution and possession with intent to distribute fentanyl. Kacsmaryk handed Johnson the maximum sentence of 240 months in prison. Johnson's case stems from a joint FBI and Amarillo police investigation that began in June 2022. An undercover agent arranged to buy fentanyl pills from Johnson, who agreed to meet at a parking lot. Johnson admitted to selling 100 fentanyl pills to the undercover agent. During the hearing, the court heard evidence that Johnson used multiple trap houses for his drug trafficking enterprise and supplied firearms to several coconspirators to engage in drug trafficking and other violent acts, including robberies. Court records show Johnson initially faced additional charged of affecting commerce by robbery, discharging a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence, brandishing a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence. As part of his plea those counts were dismissed. Officials believe Johnson was involved in two July 2019 armed robberies. This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Amarillo man gets 20 years for trafficking fentanyl QAmazon In a surprise announcement last week, Amazon's cloud computing division announced a flashy new AI chatbot aimed at businesses called Amazon Q not to be confused with OpenAI's secretive Q*, pronounced Q star, which is rumored to be a separate and powerful new AI system. But according to leaked documents obtained by Platformer, Amazon's launch is off to a rocky start. Q is reportedly suffering from "severe hallucinations" and is actively "leaking confidential data." An Amazon spokesperson pushed back on that claim, saying that "Amazon Q has not leaked confidential information." The incident was marked "sev 2," according to Platformer, meaning an event serious enough to page engineers during the night. The tool reportedly gave up the locations of Amazon's Web Services data centers and leaked unreleased features. That doesn't bode well for Amazon, considering the chatbot is explicitly aimed at businesses, which have historically been careful not to leak sensitive information to chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT. Even Amazon's own corporate lawyers have warned employees not to leak company to AI. Worse yet, to many, Q represents Amazon's renewed efforts to establish itself in the ongoing AI race, which is largely being fought out by its competitors, most notably Microsoft and Google. Severe Hallucinations Of course, it's not the first time we've heard of large language models "hallucinating" factual claims that aren't true. OpenAI's popular ChatGPT chatbot, which is built on the company's GPT tech, still has plenty of trouble distinguishing between truth and fiction, and can easily be used to invent harmful narratives or spread misinformation. The stakes are also incredibly high for Amazon, a company that's trying to shake the perception it has fallen behind when it comes to AI. Unsurprisingly, an Amazon spokesperson tried to downplay the latest news in a statement to Platformer. "Some employees are sharing feedback through internal channels and ticketing systems, which is standard practice at Amazon," the spokesperson said. "No security issue was identified as a result of that feedback." So who's right, Platformer or Amazon? Amazon's head of Web Services Adam Selipsky told the New York Times last week that Q was developed in direct response to companies like Apple, Verizon, Samsung, and Northrop Grumman issuing policies earlier this year that forbid the use of ChatGPT over privacy concerns and the potential to leak confidential data. "Amazon built Q to be more secure and private than a consumer chatbot," Selipsky told the newspaper. But if confirmed, the latest reports indicate that companies face a real risk by adopting Amazon's enterprise AI. All eyes are on Amazon and the competition is as fierce as ever. Updated to clarify the nature of a "sev 2" incident at Amazon. More on Amazon Q: Amazon Launches Chatbot With Almost Same Name as OpenAI's Secret AI Kyiv and Warsaw reached some compromises during ongoing talks regarding the Ukrainian-Polish border blockade, Ukraine's Ambassador to Poland Vasyl Zvarych said in a comment for Ukrinform on Dec. 4. Polish truckers started blocking the movement of trucks at three border crossing points on Nov. 6 in protest of the liberalization of EU transport rules for Ukrainian trucks. Four checkpoints have been blocked so far, resulting in huge lines on both sides. Ukrainian authorities are doing everything in their power to unblock the border and restore the movement of traffic, the ambassador said. Ukraine continues negotiations with the Polish government, and some points of contact have been found, Zvarych commented. "And we really hope that these proposals, which we worked out together with the Polish government, will be enough for the protesters to stop the protest." According to the senior diplomat, "there is no reason to continue protests to restrict traffic at the border." Join our community Support independent journalism in Ukraine. Join us in this fight. Support Us Following a Dec. 1 meeting between Polish and Ukrainian representatives, the two parties agreed to open a crossing point for empty trucks at the Uhryniv-Dolhobychuv border crossing, create separate electronic passes for empty vehicles at the Yahodyn-Dorohusk and Krakivets-Korczowa crossing points and launch a pilot electronic queueing system. On the following day, the Polish government said that it would tighten controls on Ukrainian trucks crossing the Polish border, which was one of the demands of Poland's protesting haulers. Restoring permit requirements for Ukrainian truckers one of the key demands of Polish protesters is not an issue that needs to be addressed at the moment, Zvarych believes. He added that this matter is within the competency of the EU and should be discussed together with Brussels. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said earlier that his government would seek to restore the permits. "As long as Russian aggression is ongoing, we cannot return these permits, as this will hit Ukraine's economy even harder," Zvarych commented, pointing out the economic toll the blockade has already taken on Ukraine. The ambassador voiced hope that the proposals worked out between the two governments would be accepted by the protesters. Negotiations are further complicated by the instability of the current Polish government. Morawiecki's cabinet is expected to lose the parliament's vote of confidence next week and is likely to be replaced by a government made up of opposition parties under the leadership of Donald Tusk. Tusk has criticized the "inaction" of the current government and called for the restoration of friendly relations with Ukraine while also keeping Polish interests in mind. Trucker protests: Unraveling the standoff between Polish and Ukrainian haulers As Polish protests blocking three major Poland-Ukraine border crossings stretch into their third week, negotiations to bring an end to the blockade have all but failed. Exhausted drivers are stuck in massive lines on both sides of the border, with expected waiting times reaching over one month at t The Kyiv IndependentDominic Culverwell Weve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent. Mortuary services personnel transport the body of a female tourist after what police described as a fatal shark attack in waters near Sandals Royal Bahamian resort, in Nassau, Bahamas (REUTERS) An American newlywed was killed by a shark the day after her wedding while paddle boarding in the Bahamas, according to police in the country. The female victim, who is from Boston, tied the knot on Sunday and was attacked on Monday morning in waters less than a mile off the western end of New Providence Island, according to WCVB. Authorities say that the unidentified victim was in the water with a relative, who was not injured in the attack. The type of shark involved in the attack was not immediately clear. Shortly after 11.15am, police were notified that a female visitor from Boston, Massachusetts, USA, was subsequently attacked by a shark, Royal Bahamas Police Force said in a statement. According to initial reports, the female along with a male relative were paddleboarding just at the rear of a resort in western Providence, some 3/4 miles out from the shoreline, when she was bitten by the shark. Both of the paddle boarders were rescued by a lifeguard in a boat but the woman, who had serious injuries to the right side of her body, died at the scene. We extend our heartfelt condolencesfor this most unfortunate situation, said Police Sgt Desiree Ferguson. The attack took place near the Sandles resort on Cable Beach. People gather on the resort pier after the shark attack at Sandals Royal Bahamian resort (REUTERS) We are deeply saddened by the tragic passing of a guest while on a paddleboarding activity nearly a mile from the shore. We wish to express our heartfelt condolences to the guests family and loved ones. We remain in close contact with them and are providing all support possible during this difficult time, Sandals Resorts said in a statement. Gavin Naylor, director of the International Shark Attack File in Florida, told the Associated Press that there are between 30 and 40 species of sharks that live in the waters around the Bahamas He told the outlet that the Caribbean reef shark, the bull shark, the tiger shark and the black tip shark were the most likely to bite. Usually, its an accidental bite. They think its something else, he said. Once in a while, theyll actually single out people, and its very intentional. There were 57 unprovoked shark bites worldwide in 2022, with nine fatalities, according to the International Shark Attack File. The Bahamas has seen 33 unprovoked shark attacks since 1749, according to the data. Officials in the Bahamas are still searching for a German woman who went missing last month while diving in the region. And last year a female cruise ship passenger from Pennsylvania was attacked and killed by a shark while snorkeling near Green Cay. After hearing from people who've had loved ones die in jail and faced repeated delays getting basic information about what happened, Riverside County supervisors voted Tuesday to study making the county coroner and its death investigations independent of the elected sheriff who oversees the jails. The possible move would be a bid to increase public confidence that investigations of deaths in the sheriff's custody are conducted impartially. The Coroner's Bureau has been part of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department for 24 years. Although most other coroners in California are also consolidated with their county's sheriff's departments, the separation would follow a practice in place across the nation. Supervisors Manuel Perez and Kevin Jeffries authored a joint proposal, which passed unanimously without debate at the board meeting Tuesday, that tasks the county's Executive Office with studying the possibility of making the coroner and public administrator offices independent from the sheriff. "In recent discussions and public comment, a recurring theme has been the potential conflict of interest or even the perception of a conflict of interest involved in having the coroner and the sheriff as one entity," Jeffries and Perez wrote. More: Amid jail deaths and lawsuits, groups urge Riverside County supervisors to rein in sheriff The county has been dealing with a surge in jail deaths over the past two years, with 19 people dying in the county's custody in 2022, the most in more than 15 years. The Desert Sun reported last year that Sheriff Chad Bianco's department had blown legally-mandated deadlines to report some of those deaths to the California Department of Justice, and when it did it reported false information. In February 2023, California Attorney General Rob Bonta launched a civil rights investigation of the sheriff's department, citing a concerning increase in the county's in-custody deaths. The sheriff's department has announced another 10 in-custody deaths this year. Questions unanswered Among the relatives who spoke in support of the proposal Tuesday was Lisa Matus, mother of Richard Matus, who died at the Cois Byrd Detention Center in Murrieta in August 2022. "To not separate the two will continue to hinder closure for the families. It will allow a painful chapter to persist in my life and many others' lives," she said. "To not be able to view your loved one when they die is tragic. We were told, 'You cannot see Richard.'" Matus described the challenges she and her family faced trying to get access to Richard Matus' remains as a "tragic" pattern many other families of the deceased also experience. "They're really still in custody even in death," she said of her son and the other 18 who died in 2022. And the even longer process of getting autopsy reports and investigation details, many of which remain withheld, Matus said, makes the whole experience both more painful and more suspicious. "This is unacceptable," Matus said. "This causes undue stress for families who have lost their loved ones, including us. It's been over a year and some autopsy reports are still not given to families. Swift resolution is crucial for closure." Families of those who have fallen ill or died in the county's custody often face overwhelming challenges to obtaining basic information about the condition of their incarcerated relatives or their causes of death. Among the relatives of people who died last year, many are still awaiting coroner's bureau autopsy reports and the completion of the department's internal investigations of the deaths. The coroner's report provides analysis of the medical cause of death, while a death investigation focuses on the circumstances surrounding it, and could result in criminal charges. Naomi Bravo's son Esteban Viramontes died in jail on Feb. 5, 2023. She told the board how she is still trying to get information about his final moments from the coroner. Bravo said she was given in July an "incomplete coroner's report" which she described as containing many inconsistencies. "Still so many unanswered questions," she said, and no opportunity to ask them. "I have made multiple attempts with Riverside County Sheriff's Department to speak (about) or be provided a copy of an investigation report that has been officially completed," she said. "I have yet to hear back from them." Anthony Noriega of the League of United Latin American Citizens said while expressing his support for the motion that he has experienced repeated stonewalling since 2021 while attempting to obtain records about the death of Ernie Serrano in 2020. During several conversations with the department throughout 2021, Noriega said he was told the report would be available in two weeks, then in two months. But he never got it. "As we approach the three-year mark since Mr. Serrano's passing December 15, 2020, the report remains elusive, prompting the troubling question of when justice will prevail," he told the board. A loss of confidence And the deaths aren't the only scandal embroiling the department this year. One deputy, who has since resigned, was charged with an extortion scheme in which he is accused of pressuring women on the county's house arrest program to send him sexually explicit material in exchange for more lenient treatment. County lawyers are accused in several civil suits of compelling the women to sign release of liability agreements in exchange for small payouts. And another since-resigned deputy is accused of transporting 104 pounds of fentanyl, with the department saying he's suspected of cartel ties. Federal civil suits over the past two years' inmate deaths have been mounting this year against the department, with families alleging their relatives did not receive adequate medical care and that the department is not being forthcoming and transparent about its investigations of the deaths. Many of those families have persistently called for the separation of the coroner's bureau from the sheriff's department, a request the supervisors had largely ignored until now. None of the board members provided any comment about the motion before the unanimous vote of approval Tuesday. While acknowledging the requests of the bereaved, Perez and Jeffries' proposal took a more measured approach to the action, saying "a complete cost-benefit analysis of options should be performed," and adding that doing so is not an indication the department has done anything wrong. "While there is no evidence of any improprieties in Riverside County regarding the operations of the coroners office under the sheriff, the optics of a potential conflict of interest can lead to a loss of confidence in our institutions," the supervisors wrote. The move, if completed, would be a return to independence for the county's medical examiner. Coroners conduct autopsies to determine causes of death, certify death certificates, and transport and remove bodies, among other things. In Riverside County, the coroner's office was placed under the control of the sheriff's department in 1999, after having previously operated as a stand-alone department. California is among three states in the nation that do not mandate a separation of the coroner from the sheriff. Following Tuesday's vote by supervisors, a report should be returned to the board within 90 days. Christopher Damien covers public safety and the criminal justice system. He can be reached at christopher.damien@desertsun.com or follow him at @chris_a_damien. This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Amid jail deaths, Riverside County may separate coroner from sheriff FILE PHOTO: Logo and flags of Bayer AG are pictured outside a plant of the German pharmaceutical and chemical maker in Wuppertal By Brendan Pierson (Reuters) - With Bayer facing investor pressure to resolve thousands of lawsuits over its Roundup weedkiller after being hit with $2 billion in verdicts in recent weeks, all eyes are on a trial wrapping up in Philadelphia. Plaintiffs have won the last four trials over their claims that the product causes cancer, each time securing a larger verdict. Those losses ended a nine-trial winning streak for Bayer, shattering investor and company hopes that the worst of the Roundup litigation was over. In the ongoing case, which kicked off Nov. 6 in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, Pennsylvania resident Kelly Martel claims she developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma from using Roundup. Her case will help test whether plaintiffs' recent victories were an aberration, or the payoff from favorable court rulings and a shift in plaintiffs' strategy. Interviews with lawyers on both sides, and a review of trial transcripts, suggest several factors could explain the difference in outcomes. Those include judges' rulings allowing jurors to hear testimony about regulatory issues related to Roundup, which Bayer has called misleading, and a new emphasis by plaintiffs lawyers on chemicals in the product other than its active ingredient, glyphosate. Lawyers for Martel did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Bayer maintains that Roundup is safe and said in a statement that it would "continue to try Roundup cases as the science is strongly on our side." The German pharmaceutical conglomerate acquired Roundup as part of its $63 billion purchase of U.S. agrochemical giant Monsanto in 2018, amid opposition from some of its own shareholders. In 2020, the company agreed to pay up to $9.6 billion to settle then-existing Roundup lawsuits, but was not able to resolve claims that would be filed in the future. It is currently facing about 50,000 lawsuits. CHANGE IN FORTUNE Bayer's trial fortunes changed abruptly when plaintiffs began winning in October, most recently securing a $1.56 billion verdict for three people. Bayer said it will appeal the verdicts on numerous grounds. Every trial depends on specific facts in the case, and juries, which deliberate in secret, are inherently unpredictable. Both sides, however, point to factors they say are behind the shift. In court filings and public statements, Bayer has attributed its recent losses to judges allowing juries to hear what it considers to be improper evidence. Specifically, the company has said, jurors were allowed to hear of a ruling last year by a federal appeals court ordering the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reconsider its 2020 finding that glyphosate probably did not cause cancer. Bayer says plaintiffs' lawyers were allowed to imply that the ruling meant glyphosate was unsafe, when the court only found that the agency had not followed required procedure. The EPA still states that glyphosate is unlikely to be capable of causing cancer. The company also said plaintiffs' lawyers in recent trials used the failure of some European Union member states to re-approve glyphosate to suggest that its approval in Europe would soon expire. In fact, unanimity was not required for European regulators to re-approve the product, which they did last month. Plaintiffs' lawyers reject the notion that the evidence about regulators explains their wins. "That's just not true," Tom Kline, who along with co-counsel Jason Itkin represented Ernest Caranci, the second plaintiff to prevail at trial in October. He and others say that new studies in the last year supporting a cancer link are one reason for the wins, although those studies were used in some cases Bayer won as well. The World Health Organization's cancer research agency concluded in 2015 that glyphosate was likely capable of causing cancer, though it did not reach a conclusion about whether it posed a risk in real world use. Bart Rankin, a lawyer for plaintiffs in the $1.56 billion verdict, pointed to a more concrete shift in strategy. In recent trials, plaintiffs have placed greater emphasis on the theory that known toxins in Roundup other than glyphosate, including formaldehyde, arsenic and others, enhanced its cancer-causing potential. Bayer witnesses and lawyers have said these substances are present in only trace amounts. While plaintiffs' lawyers in earlier trials mentioned other chemicals, transcripts of recent closing arguments suggest they have become more prominent. Rankin devoted a section of his closing argument to what he called the "cocktail" of harmful chemicals in Roundup. "Ladies and gentlemen, they are carcinogens, and when you stack them one on top of the other, it makes an impact," he told the jury. Bayer said in early November it would remain very selective when considering settlements of Roundup cases and reassured investors in a call in late November that it has reserves to deal with the litigation. The company has set aside about $6.5 billion for that purpose. Nonetheless, if plaintiffs prove able to replicate recent wins, it will increase pressure on Bayer, which faces other significant setbacks, including stopping a late-stage study of what it hoped would be a blockbuster anti-clotting drug. More Roundup trials are expected in 2024. Martel's case could go to jurors later on Monday. (Reporting By Brendan Pierson in New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Bill Berkrot) Reputation House, a global leader in Online Reputation Management (ORM), has opened its Middle East and North Africa (Mena) Headquarters based in Dubai, marking a pivotal moment in the company's expansion strategy. The launch underscored Reputation House's deep-seated commitment to the Mena region. The company launch also introduced Check Reputation, a revolutionary product designed to transform the landscape of online reputation management. Check reputation data mining By collecting millions of gigabytes of data from diverse online sources, Check Reputation guarantees a thorough examination, leaving no crucial information overlooked. Utilising an in-house AI service, the collected data undergoes meticulous analysis. The results are then presented in a clear and accessible format, offering valuable research insights. Beyond mere reporting, Check Reputation takes a proactive approach, crafting targeted strategies to actively enhance and improve the online reputation of individuals and organisations. Dima Raketa, CEO, Reputation House, said: "Our journey in the region is a testament to our dedication to empowering individuals and organisations to shape their digital narrative positively. Choosing Dubai as Mena base to leverage citys advanced digital infrastructure. Critical aspect Providing insights into Reputation House's vision for the region and the substantial investment, Raketa said: "Revolutionary product Check Reputation allows access to gathered data about the object, making reputation management easier for the audience. Online reputation stands as the most critical aspect, where a brands exceptional products may go unnoticed, and the virtual image can diverge from reality. Reputation, rather than being elusive or beyond control, serves as a canvas for individuals and entities to vividly showcase what they bring to the table. He added: In the digital era, everyone possesses the ability to mold their online presence, bridging the gap between the real and virtual realms. At Reputation House, we believe in demystifying reputation and empowering clients to authentically shape their digital narrative." With a firm focus on becoming an industry leader in the Mena region, Reputation House's suite of products, including ORM, Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM), and the Reputation House App, empowers clients to take control of their online narrative. Looking ahead, Reputation House announced its next strategic move an expansion into Saudi Arabia in 2024. This decision aligns seamlessly with the company's strategy to cater to the growing demand for reputation management services in the region.--TradeArabia News Service By Jorgelina do Rosario BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Argentina's incoming government aims to strike a trade agreement between the European Union and Latin American economies, the country's future Foreign Minister Diana Mondino told Reuters, as a deal under the current administration looks increasingly unlikely. Mercosur members Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay are set to gather on Dec. 7 in Rio de Janeiro and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said late last month he hoped an agreement could be reached in time for the meeting. But officials and diplomats from Brazil, which will hand the rotating presidency of the trade bloc to Paraguay in December, said on Saturday that the trade deal is now postponed as Argentina's incoming government has to approve the outstanding issues. "The world doesn't end on December 7. If an agreement is not reached by that time, we will keep on negotiating," Mondino said in an interview with Reuters on Saturday in Buenos Aires. "And hopefully, someday, somehow, it will be done." A trade treaty was agreed in principle in 2019 after two decades of talks, but additional environmental commitments demanded by the EU led Brazil and Argentina to seek new concessions that prolonged negotiations. Mondino added that as President-elect Javier Milei will take office on Dec. 10, the incoming administration has only "scant information" on the current state of negotiations. "I hope we can bring a different perspective and reach an agreement," Mondino added. Argentine negotiators, who were due to travel to Brasilia for a final push to close the deal, canceled their trip, a Brazilian government trade official told Reuters. An Argentine source familiar with the talks said the outgoing government's negotiating team had "flipped the chessboard" before the handover to Milei. NO TO BRICS, YES TO OECD Argentina's Mondino said it was not a priority to join the BRICS grouping of developing nations, after the second largest South American economy was among six countries invited to become members at a summit in South Africa in August. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran are some of the other nations invited. "The invitation has been sent; there's no due date. We don't have to do anything, neither to decline or accept right now," Mondino said. "If we are wrong, of course, we will review our decision. But so far, we don't see much of a benefit in joining the BRICS." However, Mondino added, Milei's administration will "definitely" work towards the country's membership of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). "It's going to be an extremely lengthy procedure, it is going to be difficult. But we have to abide by the rules of countries that are far more developed than we are," Mondino said. "We also have an invitation letter there. And we hope that we can sign that invitation letter," she added. Argentina, Peru, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia were invited to start the process to join the OECD in January 2022. Brazil filed an initial memorandum of accession more than a year ago, a step forward that Argentina has not so far taken. (Reporting by Jorgelina do Rosario, editing by Adam Jourdan and Kirsten Donovan) LITTLE ROCK, Ark. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders led a group of 16 Republican governors in signing a letter asking for Biden administration action against China. The letter asks the administration, along with House and Senate leaders, to take steps to stop the Chinese Communist Party in its efforts to buy U.S. land. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Attorney General Griffin act to force Chinese seed company to divest Arkansas land holdings, issues fine For too long, we have allowed dangerous and adversarial governments to infiltrate our country, the letter states. Our States will tolerate such allowances no longer. The Biden Administration must reckon with the fact that such entities are plain threats to our national security, our farmers, and our citizenry. The letter continues by pointing out a Chinese law passed in 2017 requiring Chinese citizens abroad to collaborate with Chinese security officials, no questions asked. The letter cited the recent purchase of 270 acres of land in Michigan near the Grayling National Guard Facility by a subsidiary of a Chinese state company as a security concern. Unfortunately, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States declined to blockor even reviewthis plainly alarming transaction, the letter stated. Chinese seed company ordered to divest Arkansas land holdings pays $280,000 fine The letter stated that the Biden administration has failed to act, leaving states such as Arkansas to pass laws about foreign ownership. Arkansas was the first state in the nation to call for the divestiture of land owned by the Chinese government. In October, Sanders ordered a Chinese-owned seed company to divest its ownership of 160 acres in Craighead County. She acted under the authority of a law passed in the recent general session of the legislature. The same company recently paid a $280,000 fine to Arkansas for a late filing, violating a 2021 law. After the release of the letter Monday, Sanders took to X, formerly Twitter, to reinforce the position of Arkansas and her administration on land ownership by foreign entities. We simply cant trust those who pledge allegiance to a hostile foreign power, she said. Chinese state-owned company ordered to divest Arkansas agricultural land under new state law Governors joining with Sanders in signing the letter are Ron DeSantis of Florida, Brian Kemp of Georgia, Brad Little of Idaho, Kim Reynolds of Iowa, Greg Gianforte of Montana, Jim Pillen of Nebraska, Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, Henry McMaster of South Carolina, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Bill Lee of Tennessee, Greg Abbott of Texas, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, Jim Justice of West Virginia and Mark Gordon of Wyoming as well as Governor-elect Jeff Landry of Louisiana. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KARK. RUSSELLVILLE, Ark. Arkansas Tech University students, faculty, alumni and others in the community will have a chance to enjoy making holiday memories with Santa and Jerry the Bulldog Friday. The Arkansas Tech University Office of Alumni Relations will host Pictures with Santa and Jerry the Bulldog at the Hull Building Student Union Friday, Dec. 8. from 3:30 to 6 p.m. Third times a charm: Meet and greet Jerry III at Arkansas Tech University School officials said that the event is open to all ATU alumni, students, faculty, staff, community members and their families. Attendees will be able to take photos with Santa Claus and the campus latest ambassador, Jerry Charles Young III. Its a ruff job; Jerry Charles Young III takes over as Arkansas Tech campus ambassador Jerry Charles Young III became the schools ambassador in April, following the retirement of Jerry Charles Young II and the death of Jerry Charles Young I. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KARK. An armed and dangerous man accused of kidnapping a North Carolina woman was arrested in Georgia after days on the run, according to authorities. Jordan Hedden was arrested on Monday, Dec. 4, in Union County, near the Georgia-North Carolina line, after turning himself in, Cherokee County Sheriff Dustin Smith confirmed to McClatchy News. Deputies said Hedden and a woman, Stephanie Neace, were hitchhiking Nov. 30 when they abducted a driver who offered them a ride. They forced her into the back and took over driving the vehicle, authorities said. Neace was later arrested in Georgia. Hedden was still on the run after he reportedly broke into a home in Tennessee on Dec. 2, deputies said. Investigators said he then hitchhiked into Georgia, where he was arrested. Deputies said the kidnapped driver was shaken up, but she is expected to be OK. 1-year-old found at wine store after car is stolen with her inside, Delaware cops say Man kidnaps woman with dementia from hospital and steals thousands from her, feds say Baby found dead days after dad accused in kidnapping, Idaho cops say. Man arrested A search is on for a shooting suspect who may be armed and dangerous, Tennessee police said. A shooting at Arbor Place Apartments in Knoxville turned fatal Sunday morning, with police arriving to find a man shot dead inside one of the units, according to a Dec. 3 Knoxville Police Department news release. The victim, later identified as 35-year-old Howard Jordan, had at least one gunshot wound, police said in a Dec. 4 news release. The accused shooter, however, was not in the apartment when police arrived, according to officials. He had already fled the residence, police said, which began an investigation with strong leads into who the suspect was. There were two other people in the apartment aside from Jordan and the suspect, Knoxville Police Department communications manager Scott Erland told McClatchy News. They told police the suspect had also shot at them, but Erland said there were no other injuries reported. Police are now searching for Jesse Bailey Jr., 28, who is suspected of shooting Jordan. Arrest warrants were obtained by detectives, police said, which charges Bailey with first-degree murder, two counts of attempted first-degree murder and using a firearm during a dangerous felony. Officials are trying to locate Bailey Jr., who police warned could be a threat to Knoxville residents. Anyone who may have information about the shooting is asked to contact the East Tennessee Valley Crime Stoppers number at 865-215-7165. Homeowner fatally shoots man in group breaking into his home, California cops say Fight at drive-thru ends with 8-year-old, two others shot, North Carolina cops say Dog walker held at gunpoint as group of men steal his two bulldogs, Georgia police say Soldiers are currently expected to be clean-shaven like these officer cadets at Sandhurst - EDDIE MULHOLLAND FOR THE TELEGRAPH The British Army is considering overturning a 100-year-old beard ban to attract more recruits. Although the RAF and Royal Navy have already permitted full set beards, the Army has yet to relent on its stance. Current rules state that beards can only be grown with the commanding officers authorisation. Exceptions are usually only granted on medical or religious grounds, or where tradition permits. A decision on beards being allowed at the individuals discretion could be made as soon as this month, if it is debated at the executive committee of the Army Board next week, The Sun reported. The newspaper added that an insider said the ban on beards would need to be reconsidered if it was putting people off joining the military. A defence source insisted it was not unusual for the Armys stance on beards to be discussed as the force keeps dress and appearance under constant review. They added that men were generally expected to be clean-shaven. British Army soldiers may in future be able to grow a beard which is allowed for service personnel in the RAF and Royal Navy - SGT JONATHAN LEE VAN ZYL/UK Mini/PA In an open letter in 2018, an officer in the Royal Engineers warned that young fashion-conscious men might be put off joining. We are an organisation that needs to recruit and putting up artificial barriers because of an inability to change isnt what we are about, he wrote in Soldier magazine. While attending a recent recruiting event I couldnt help but notice that a large percentage of the potential soldiers were sporting facial hair. It made me wonder how many of them were put off joining up because they cant have a beard. As of Sept 1 2019, the RAF allowed personnel to grow a beard. However, they specified that a hipster beard was off limits and that the maximum acceptable length of a beard was grade 8 (25.5mm). The following year the Royal Navy changed its rules to allow Rastafarians to keep their long hair and beards. An Army spokesman said: There has been no change in Army policy regarding beards, which can only be grown with the commanding officers authority. Exceptions are usually only granted on medical or religious grounds, or where tradition permits. However, dress and appearance policy is under constant review. 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 Army is reviving its focus on professional writing, encouraging all ranks to contribute throughout their careers to the ongoing discourse on soldiering and how the service can adapt to changing times. As one of his priorities, in September Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George announced The Harding Project, which is aimed at reinvesting in professional military writing and fostering discussion and debate on a variety of military topics. Last week at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, senior leaders such as Gen. Gary Brito, head of Army Training and Doctrine Command, Lt. Gen. Milford Beagle, commander of the Armys Combined Arms Center, and dozens of experts in military writing and study, met to evaluate the state of professional writing in the service, lay out goals to improve the effort and determine what gaps exist between the two. Some of that will include filling out the editorial staff of the various branch magazines and journals, opening up online access to various publication archives and using websites such as The Harding Projects host, The Modern War Institute at West Point. In an article co-authored by George, Brito and Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Weimer that was published on MWI in September, they noted that the service needs a diversity of opinions during this current inter-war period. The inter-war period reference calls back to the namesake of the new project, Maj. Edwin Forrest Harding, who was selected as editor of the Infantry Journal in 1934. The major managed to more than double the journals circulation in four years, pushing critical debates over changing tactics and technology before America joined World War II, wrote Zachary Griffiths and Theo Lipsky on the MWI website. George and Brito noted the decline in articles and issues for the once-robust branch magazines in recent decades. Most of the publications have declined in output and readership and failed to adapt to modern demands of rapid online publishing, interactive tools and digital access to archives, Griffiths and Lipsky noted. Brito said he remembered learning about his own field, infantry, but also recalled reading articles and branch magazines covering other parts of the Army such as artillery. The general wrote early on as a captain but looks back on an article of his that was published in Infantry Magazine on managing combat stress as a battalion commander. The piece was published following his own combat deployment in the early 2000s as a battalion commander. Beagle told Army Times on Thursday that a crucible point in his Army career came when he was accepted to the School of Advanced Military Studies, which pushed him to improve his writing. And that served him far more than passing his classes, he said. Good writing is clear thinking, Beagle said. And clear thinking is also disciplined thinking. How disciplined can you be to get your thinking on paper in a succinct and precise way for others to digest and understand what youre saying? Brito offered a tip hes used over the years write down those ideas, problems and challenges as they happen. Keeping a notebook, smartphone or even a dry erase board near your workstation will help capture thoughts that could develop into solutions for problems a soldier faces in their day-to-day work. Capture that at the moment so you can come back and research it, Brito said. That kind of written discourse is about exchanging ideas, delivering new perspectives, and fundamentally, its about learning from your peers, Beagle said. There are some bragging rights involved, too. George and Brito highlighted recognition efforts in their September article. The project will recognize three impactful articles each month, awarding the authors with a pen, coin and personal note of congratulations. The first such soldiers honored in the initial rollout included 1st Lt. Mara Tazartus for her article Lessons Learned in Company Team Engagement Are Development in Armor Magazine and Sgt. 1st Class Leyton Summerlin for his article Standardizing Excellence in Infantry Magazine. Those examples, from a junior officer and enlisted soldiers, highlight the diversifying of opinions senior leaders are seeking, Beagle said. It is absolutely critical to have that diversity of thinking and perspectives, Beagle said. Good writing, good thinking, doesnt really have a rank. In the Chiefs December picks, Command Sgt. Maj. Jesse Clarks article Assessing the Climate in your Organization: A CSMs Perspective, in Infantry Magazine, Lt. Col. Jay Ireland and Maj. Ryan Van Wies article Task Organizing the Combined Arms Battalion for Success in Eastern Europe, in Military Review and Maj. Ryan Cornell-dEcherts Good Leaders Ask Better Questions in the Green Notebook, took home the monthly honors. Brito noted that it can be challenging, and he understands that some might be hesitant about sticking your chin out there. But if a budding writer is confident in the topic and can provide a relevant perspective that can help other soldiers learn, then its worth helping their peers and their profession. Beagle agreed that writing isnt easy. Its hard to put out ideas that might be shot down or challenged. But the feedback, even if critical, will absolutely make them better at the end of the day, he said. Writing is hard, we all know that, but you have to practice and continue to work at it, Beagle said. SIMI VALLEY, Calif. -- If Congress does not approve extra funding to cover the bulked-up U.S. troop presence in Europe and the Middle East, the Army could have to dip into funding meant for recruitment to cover costs of the deployments, a top service official warned this weekend. Speaking at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum on Saturday, Army Under Secretary Gabe Camarillo said efforts to solve the military recruiting crisis are "absolutely ... hamstrung" by funding fights in Congress. "Right now, without the supplemental for Ukraine and for support to Israel, we in the Army in our base budget, we are funding the operations costs to deploy our soldiers to provide that deterrence and reassurance mission in NATO and in CENTCOM," Camarillo said, referring to U.S. Central Command. Read Next: Air Force Expands Study of Cancer Among Missileers and Weighs Environmental Testing at Vandenberg Space Force Base "That is the same budget account that I need to use in order to place media buys months in advance for marketing and advertising, to surge events for recruiters in other parts of the country," continued Camarillo, who was speaking during a panel focused on the military's recent recruiting struggles. The accounts also are used to pay for recruiting incentives, such as bonuses for targeted skill sets in certain military occupational specialties, he said. Camarillo also suggested that Congress' passing of stopgap spending measures that extend last year's funding level, instead of passing a regular, full-year appropriations bill, hurts recruiting, echoing a letter Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Charles "C.Q." Brown sent to Congress last week. Camarillo's comments on Israel and Ukraine funding come as the Biden administration steps up efforts to persuade Congress to approve roughly $106 billion to support the wars in Ukraine and Israel, as well as for U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific region and to bolster security on the U.S.-Mexico border. The White House on Monday also warned that the U.S. is nearly out of money to send Ukraine weapons and that running out would "kneecap" the ability to fight against Russia's invasion. At the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. surged tens of thousands of troops to Europe to reassure NATO allies worried about the possibility of the war spilling into their countries. The increased presence is largely unchanged since then. In its supplemental funding request, the White House asked for about $212 million in personnel funding and about $6.6 billion in operations funding for the service branches to cover costs associated with the deployments. Of that, the Army would get about $184 million in personnel funding and about $4.6 billion in operations funding. Meanwhile, after Hamas' October terrorist attack against Israel, the subsequent war in the Gaza Strip and an increase in attacks on American troops in the Middle East suspected to be carried out by Iran-backed militias, the U.S. deployed thousands more troops to the region, including bolstering its naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and air defenses in undisclosed locations throughout Central Command's area of responsibility. Despite Camarillo pointing to the deployments causing cash problems, the White House's supplemental funding request does not include any service-specific operations or personnel funding for the Middle East. The $10.6 billion in the request for the Defense Department for Israel focuses on weapons buying. Ukraine funding has steadily lost support among House Republicans, but a bipartisan majority of lawmakers still supports funding for both Ukraine and Israel. Despite that, the prospect of approving the funding has dimmed because the debate has gotten caught up in a separate fight over U.S. border security. Republicans are demanding changes to U.S. immigration law be included in the funding package. "If the commander-in-chief or somebody or the secretary of defense would just say, 'as well as strong security at our southern border,' there'd be several hundred votes" for the supplemental, Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., who was speaking on the same panel as Camarillo during the Reagan forum in California, said in response to Camarillo's comments on how not passing the funding could hurt recruiting. Nearly every branch of the military has been struggling to make its recruiting goals in recent years. The Army, the largest branch, has been struggling the most, falling 10,000 active-duty recruits short in the fiscal year that ended in October. Military officials have attributed their woes to a number of factors, including a strong civilian job market and a shrinking pool of eligible young Americans because they can't meet fitness and academic standards. When pressed on solutions Saturday, Camarillo repeatedly pointed to the overhaul of recruiting operations Army officials announced earlier this year. He also echoed other officials who have pointed to the need for a "call to service across the country." "One of the things we can do is reemphasize that call to service," Camarillo said, adding that reinvigorating programs such as the Presidential Youth Fitness Program could help "address challenges that [the Army] can't control, like test standards and school performance, as well as physical fitness." Related: Military to Curtail Recruiting and Duty Station Moves if Congress Resorts to a Yearlong Stopgap Budget, Joint Chiefs Chairman Warns ASHEVILLE - In June 2022, Jon Wood and Danny Dillow opened Asheville Detox Center as the co-CEOs of the Asheville-based management firm Health Care Alliance North America. The location is one of the only private alcohol and drug detox centers in the region. A little over a year later, Wood is facing a lawsuit from former business associates including Dillow claiming misleading statements led to "unfair and deceptive" business practices after Wood and his business partner, David Glenwinkel, failed to pay over $15 million in promissory notes. As a result, over $46 million in damages are being sought from Wood CEO and President of Asheville-based Oasis Recovery and owner of HCANA and Glenwinkel. Both are now the primary owners of Health Care Alliance North America, or HCANA. Asheville Detox Center. Eastern Recovery Management LLC a group of former stakeholders in HCANA filed the lawsuit Nov. 9 in the Buncombe County Superior Court. HCANA is a management company for nine addiction and mental health treatment centers primarily across the Southeast. In Asheville, HCANA manages Oasis Recovery Center and Oasis Recovery II, along with Asheville Detox Center, employing roughly 180 people in the area, according to Wood. Oasis Recovery Center is located off at 191 Charlotte Street and Asheville Detox Center is located just around the corner at 25 Choctaw Street. Oasis Recovery Center in Asheville. "Defendants, through statements from Mr. Wood and Mr.Glenwinkel, were tricked into believing that Mr. Glenwinkel had sufficient resources in his individual capacity to pay at least the ($10 million) owed under the Short-Term Note," the lawsuit reads. "The misconduct and misrepresentations alleged above constitute unfair and deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce in violation of the North Carolina Unfair and Deceptive Business Practices Act codified in Chapter 75 of the North Carolina General Statutes," the suit continues. Wood spoke with the Citizen Times about the case, stating the suit was partially the result of a capital investor dropping out at the last minute just prior to two promissory notes being due leading those who were owed capital from the HCANA buyout to pursue legal action as they were not immediately capable of producing the over $15 million required. Wood and Glenwinkel operate the Wyoming-based companies Glenwood Enterprises LLC and Glenwood Real Estate LLC. Both companies are named in the suit. Julian Wright, a business litigation attorney representing Eastern Recovery LLC, said the $46 million is the result of "treble damages" which result from the violation of North Carolina law. "The roughly $46 million sought by our clients is the amount owed under the two notes, multiplied by a factor of three (or treble damages)," Wright said in an email with the Citizen Times. "In this case, our clients are seeking treble damages for a violation of NCs Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act." In communication with the Citizen Times, Wright could not comment on the misleading statements provided by Glenwinkel or on ongoing litigation. The Citizen Times reached out to Glenwinkel, but he was not available for comment by deadline. While not directly impacting patients or recovery services, Wood said the suit has placed the company in a "vulnerable spot," where the himself and Glenwinkel have "gotten creative in continuing to make payroll." 2 different management styles; 2 experiences Wood told the Citizen Times that the decision to buy out Eastern Recovery Management from HCANA came from a "difference in management styles." "It was very challenging having multiple chiefs trying to run the company in kind of different directions," Wood said. According to Wood, the conversations to buy out Health Care Alliance North America started after Eastern Recovery LLC decided against moving forward with capital requests that came along with 2023 being an "expansion year" for the company. The requests involved opening Oasis River Recovery in Oconee, Tennessee, and opening the second Oasis location in Asheville. Eastern Recovery was hesitant to put forth the capital after plans had been agreed on to open the centers, Wood said. "That's what triggered all the conversations that formed the buyout. Technically, in our operating agreement, there was not a specified buy-sell," Wood said. "But that's where really we asked them. We said: 'Look, either you guys have to put in the capital or we have to figure out a price that we could buy you out on.'" Eastern Recovery Management, LLC V. Glenwood Enterprises, LLC by whofmann on Scribd This embedded content is not available in your region. Wood had previously run the company alongside Danny Dillow, the registered CEO of Eastern Recovery Management LLC and former co-CEO of HCANA. Both say they were inspired to enter the industry after their experience in recovery. Dillow and Wood had worked together for several years as co-CEO's HCANA, even being jointly named on a $5,000 donation to the city of Asheville to open a Merrimon Avenue bus stop in 2021. In total, HCANA has served over 6,500 clients during the company's over 5 years of business, according to the HCANA website. Dillow's experience was similar, but came down to "pace of expansion." "We had different views on how potential expansion of the company would proceed," Dillow said of working in HCANA. "When we were an ownership group together, you know, one side had certain dreams and aspirations, and the other side had certain dreams and aspirations for what we wanted to do, and who we wanted to serve," he said. "And, unfortunately, those didn't match up." The disagreements led to the buy-out conversation, Wood said, which then led to the promissory notes. A strange investor disrupts promissory payment Because Glenwood Enterprises did not have the capital to purchase the shares from Eastern Recovery outright, the promissory purchased the shares using promissory notes to allow for a 90-day "fundraising period," where Wood and Glenwinkel would reach out to capital investors to help buy out Eastern Recovery's stake in the company. The two promissory notes were for $10 million and for $5.5 million, totaling around $15.5 million, according to court documents. The agreement for the promissory notes was followed with a 90-day fundraising period, Wood said. By the end of it, his company Glenwood Enterprises LLC, jointly managed by himself and Glenwinkel, had not gathered the capital in time for deadline, which triggered Eastern Recovery Management to file the suit. Wood said that the situation was not the result of misleading statements or misrepresentation, but was the result of a "really weird" situation with a private investor who suddenly dropped out not long before the Sept. 29 due date. Wood only addressed the investor by his first name: Todd. After pushing possible capital partners aside to bring Todd on-board to invest, wire transfers from the investors began to bounce, Wood said. Even after a background check came back clean, no money came through. "I confer those with my financial institutions. First Bank, along with Morgan Stanley, just to say: 'Is this stuff credible?'" he said of the situation. "Everyone said: 'Yes, it looks very credible.'" "I even went as far as to do a full background check on Todd to make sure there's no funny business," Wood continued. "Because throughout the process, there was about a three week span where he sent in three different wire confirmations, and none of them actually hit. And it turns out, he didn't have full access to his trust." Todd didn't actually have access to the final funds to invest, Wood said. Instead, they were locked up in a family trust, inaccessible for investment. "We didn't understand his angle," Wood said of the investor. "Why make three trips to Asheville? Why meet our team, talk about marketing, talk about the future, talk about growth and spend hours and hour and hours with us when you couldn't access the funds?" Neither Wright or Dillow could not provide comment to the Citizen Times on whether Eastern Recovery Management knew of the investor. A photo outside Asheville Recovery Center's offices at 9 Old Burnsville Hill Road in Asheville. What do recovery services look like in Asheville? Dillow, while being the primary manager of Eastern Recovery Management, is also involved in running Asheville Recovery Center a local non-HCANA managed addiction recovery center not involved in the suit. He opened the center with the belief his team "could do it better." The Asheville Recovery was modeled after the center he attended to get clean, prior to the time when it "became a factory, so to speak." "That's where our treatment center was born," Dillow said. "We modeled it very much after that other treatment program when it was great. You know intimate." Asheville Recovery Center has served "thousands" of those recovering in the area, according to Dillow. Looking forward, the goal is to continue to serving the community. "We are excited to continue to serve the community of Asheville, and keep bringing the latest technologies and the utmost level of care for our clientele," Dillow said. For Wood, the goal is to work with Eastern Recovery to resolve the suit by paying more capital upfront to expand the period for capital fundraising. After that, the goal is to refocus on HCANA. "The entire year of 2024 is going to be dedicated to normalizing all the new growth, to come up with some new marketing strategies, and to get the company back to a very, very healthy spot financially to where we can start to do more for our team," he said. The Kipton Hotel Arras is seen from Merrimon Avenue in Asheville, November 28, 2023. Court orders highlight bank accounts, property The lawsuit led to two bank accounts being seized by Eastern Recovery Management, according to court orders filed in November. Real estate owned by the companies was also included in the order. Real estate in the court order included a condo unit at 7 Patton Ave. or the Arras Hotel which is owned Glenwood Real Estate. Wood said his entry into recovery management came from his experience in recovery, along with his experience in real estate through Glenwood Real Estate which helped finance the venture into the recovery industry along with investments from Glenwinkel. The orders have not had any impact on recovery services but made the situation "very stressful," Wood said. However, he stated he had to "get creative" in order to make payroll amid a situation that has put the company into "a more vulnerable spot." "No employees were damaged as a result," Wood said. "We made sure of that." More: Answer Man: How can shoppers find spaces at Asheville Trader Joe's parking lot? More: 600,000 North Carolinians now have access to health insurance as expanded Medicaid begins Citizen Times County Issues and Health Care Reporter Mitchell Black contributed to this article. Will Hofmann is the Growth and Development Reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. Got a tip? Email him at WHofmann@citizentimes.com. This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Asheville recovery firm buy out leads to $46M suit; services impacted?